@teastain What a shitshow! First my Arduino IDE got really funky and wasn't able to connect to Serial. I didn't realize I had upgraded the ESP32 board module and TFT_eSPI lib to the latest, neither of which work. I backed out of the newest TFT_eSPI lib and then twice downgraded the Expressif module to 2.0.4. And lastly, I put the pinMode for SDA and SCL in the setup() function, but that somehow borked the pinouts.
I have everything running smoothly now and was able to just reassign SCL to 44 and SDA to 43 without have to cross the wires.
I'm am greatly appreciative of your help. You got me on the right tack with your code and pinmodes. THANK YOU!