He was the salesman from whom I ordered all the medical supplies for my office, the only medical supply salesman I ever did business with. Our relationship was purely business related at the start, with our conversations centered on the products he sold and I used and our only non-business remarks limited to the occasional, “How’s your family?” and “Just fine, thank you.”
He came by the office every few months to check in, and as our conversations were limited I did not know him well. I knew he was from Tennessee, primarily because he gifted me salt water taffy from Gatlinburg each Christmas and spoke with an accent. I knew he was a man of faith because of conversations around the holidays, and I knew he was honest and reliable, which is one of the reasons I continued our business relationship.
Our relationship changed a few years after I moved my practice into its current home in a converted home on Beach Blvd. He dropped by the office one day for a sales call just as I was finishing up my work for the morning. We exchanged greetings, and I then surprised him by asking if I could buy him lunch. He laughed and said it was the first time a doctor had ever offered to buy him anything, but he readily accepted. That lunch was the beginning of our close friendship. We went out to lunch nearly every other month, trading responsibility for the check each time. It wasn’t too long after that first lunch that he invited me to stay at his cabin in the Smoky Mountains.
“We gotta get you y’all out to the cabin. You need to go to Tennessee. Y’all will love it,” He would tell me, repeating the invitation almost every time I saw him. I conveyed the invitation to my wife, and Lisa responded in the fashion I have come to realize is typical for people from Southern California.
“Why would we want to go to Tennessee? What would we do there?” she said.
After a few years of politely declining his invitations, in 2007 I told Lisa we might as well go, as Jim’s vacation cabin was near the national park and the lodging would be his treat. Our first trip to Tennessee was in June of that year and we enjoyed it so much we traded our timeshare week and went back the following summer. We loved the beauty of the park and the frequent wildlife sightings (especially black bears!), our visits to Dollywood, and the kindness of the people. We loved the ability to create a different vacation each morning, choosing whether we want to spend the day exploring nature, floating down a river, visiting a historical site, going to a theme park, or sitting on the porch. A surprising highlight of our second trip was a visit to a cemetery in Maryville (pronounced Mare-ville, as if there is no “y”). Lisa had begun doing genealogy, and to her surprise discovered she had ancestors from the region, some of whom had been buried just 45 minutes away. There was something incredibly moving about standing on the exact spot your ancestors had stood generations earlier.
We told ourselves we would return to the area soon, but life got in the way. Our son started college and became engaged, then got married in 2012, and family vacations became harder to organize and pull off. The one thing that didn’t change was Jim, who continued to invite us to return. When he retired in 2017, I told Lisa I wanted to return to the Smokies, in no small part because it meant I would be able to visit my friend, who had moved back to the area in which he had grown up. Jim had often raved about the beauty of the Smokies in autumn, so we booked a trip for October 2018 so we could see the fall colors.
That year was an incredibly stressful one for me, as I had become the chairman of the ethics committee at Hoag Hospital and as a result was responsible for performing every end-of-life consult. When October rolled around I was physically, emotionally, and spiritually drained. That week in Tennessee restored my soul. Not only were the colorful leaves spectacular, Dollywood was hosting a southern gospel music festival! All over the park, from open to close, Christian artists were singing songs of the faith. At the end of the week I told Lisa, “This is the most healing, restorative vacation of my life. I want to come back here every year at this time!”
When we got back to the cabin that night I started looking on Zillow, curious to see how much a vacation cabin would cost. I talked to Jim and learned how much rental income he was able to generate on VRBO. Lisa and I talked about it, and it seemed like it might be a worthwhile investment. Even if we didn’t turn much of a profit there was a pretty good chance we could cover the costs of upkeep and maintenance. In addition, though it was a sad and morbid thought, I knew Lisa’s mother, who was on hospice at the time, would likely leave her an inheritance that could help pay for a cabin.
We signed on with a realtor soon thereafter, and began reviewing cabin listings in earnest. When we saw one that seemed promising the realtor would visit the property and take us on a video tour. I limited my search to properties of at least two bedrooms, hoping to find a place large enough for our whole family to be able to visit together. Two weeks before Christmas I accidentally stumbled across a cabin that seemed perfect. Although it was over 2200 square feet, it was listed as a one bedroom! I had forgotten to limit the search to 2 BR or more, and it popped up right away. I was so excited I woke Lisa up to tell her about it. (She did not share my excitement at that moment!) I flew out to Tennessee the following week for a one-day trip, and after seeing the property and taking Lisa on a Facetime tour of it, we made an offer. When I landed back home in Orange County, I learned our offer had been accepted. Escrow closed in January, three days after my mother-in-law passed away. Lisa and I often say, “Mom bought the cabin for us.”
The cabin has been my place of refuge ever since, in ways I never could have imagined. A year after buying the cabin I came down with a painful nerve disease that beats me down on a daily basis. Our cabin in the Smokies is a place where I can rest, a place where the beauty of God’s creation restores my soul and gives me the strength I need to go on.
The cabin has been an unexpected blessing in other ways as well. Two of Lisa’s adult nieces and one of her cousins have fallen in love with the Smokies as well, staying at the cabin her mother bought for us. The cabin has forged a bond between us and kept us connected in ways we know would make mom happy.