The trip to Nashville to visit old friends and to heal the wounds of departed loved ones that Duffy and I had planned for months got cut short.  We were already in Tennessee, almost into Nashville when we got the first clue that things were going to get rough. We heard that the memorial for our friend Dave Olney at the Springwater on Sunday was cancelled due to the Coronavirus. We got into town Friday night and spent the night with our old friends Gael and Susan who live outside of Nashville. I love going there and seeing my art hanging all over the place. They had been early supporters of my work. We went to the Springwater the next afternoon where we found the owner Terry at the bar. Duffy was running the bar when the owner bought the place decades ago. Duffy used to sleep on the pool table. Driving around he would point out places he slept. “See that church courtyard? I slept there for a week once.”  Duffy has a million great stories about the old days in Nashville back when it was just an international small town. He hung around with some of the greats. I left Duffy at the bar to reminisce with Terry and went over to Marathon Village to touch base with Barry Walker. Marshall Chapman played the Springwater that afternoon. The place was almost empty and they shut down the next day but we got to see her show. I also finally got to meet the legendary Chris Gantry who also played a couple of songs. Marshall Chapman continues to do weekly live feed shows there that in part supports the employees of the Springwater. Check her out! That night we got to see our friends The Limitations play at Browns Diner. I hope to get them to play the cobblestone sometime in the future. They are a fun band. Some of the friends I had hoped to see did show up there so we did get to see a few friends. It shut down the next day.  Duffy’s main goal of the trip was to perform his new poem about Charlie Fenton turning him Irish for Charlie. We did get to do that and I mended the fence that I made for Charlie that had sustained only minor damage from the tornado that ripped up the neighborhood next to him. In our travels we got to see some of the damage done by that terrible tornado. Just as Nashville was on the verge of recovery the pandemic hit. The pandemic which would soon take the life of Nashville’s greatest treasure….John Prine. Sad times in Tennessee these days. We left the next morning for Duffy’s home in Virginia. Before I headed back to New York from there we went to his favorite bar for a couple of drinks. They closed down the next day too. I guess we made the best of our trip. Took it to the limit. We have been home a month now without any symptoms so it looks like we dodged some bullets.