Month: April 2017

A Rarity Nevermore

The common raven is appearing more frequently in these parts

By Susan Campbell

Although the raven has, for centuries, been one of the most widely recognized and intriguing birds in the Northern Hemisphere, it is uncommon to see one in Piedmont North Carolina. And in the Sandhills, the common raven is a real rarity — a situation that is likely to change in the not-too-distant future.

By contrast, the raven’s close cousin, the crow, loves calling Piedmont North Carolina home. Distinguishing between ravens and crows is really pretty easy. To begin with, ravens are massive, jet-black birds half again as large as our crows. And unlike the constant and abrasive “cawing” that comes from crows, the raven’s call is a shorter, harsh or gurgling croak that, not surprisingly, carries a long way. It is, in fact, this distinctive vocalization that often gives them away, especially in remote areas.

Ravens also have heavy, serrated bills and long wedge-shaped tails. And while crows can be seen swooping from tree to tree in gangs, ravens seem specifically designed for altitude. Since they typically range across both large forests and open expanses, you will often see them soaring effortlessly high in the sky.

In our state, common ravens breed in the Appalachians and can be found roaming the mountains for miles around. But for several decades now the species has been moving farther east across the foothills, no doubt a range expansion facilitated by human activity. Ravens, as well as their other corvid cousin, are opportunistic feeders. Roadkill is certainly a major and easy source of food — as are landfills, parks and campgrounds. Even pet food bowls and bird feeders attract their attention. Some clever birds have learned that gunshots during hunting season may mean a meal in the not too distant future. And farmers have learned that ravens aren’t reluctant to go after eggs, chicks and even newborn small animals such as lambs.

These birds are exceptionally intelligent and are, arguably, the smartest of all birds found in North America. Not only do they readily figure out where to find their next meal, they will work in pairs to acquire certain types of food. One individual will divert the attention of a nesting adult bird while its mate steals an egg or nestling. Common ravens can be destructive in their search for food, tearing into campers’ tents and other manmade structures, and, in numbers, can foul sensitive equipment. In fact, ravens have a predilection for causing power outages by pulling the insulation off wire and picking electrical insulators. They inevitably become a nuisance if they linger too often or too long around any human habitation, a problem given how long-lived the birds are and that they are also nonmigratory.

It is both a surprise and a treat when I spot one of these impressive birds
in the Piedmont. One conspicuous individual ranges around the
Red Oak Brewery in Whitsett where I’m part of a project to encourage hummingbirds. I have also seen ravens flying high above U.S. Route 1 around Sanford and one sitting on a guardrail along N.C. Highway 54. I would not be surprised if a pair is breeding in the area along the Deep River. At these lower elevations, riverside bluffs resemble the cliff habitats where common ravens usually nest. They make ledges on tall buildings their home as well. Ravens are clearly adaptable and perfectly happy to live alongside us — more and more of them all of the time.  OH

Susan would love to receive your wildlife sightings and photos at susan@ncaves.com.

The Things We Keep

From a pair of unforgettable grandmothers

By Maggie Dodson

Last year, in the oppressive heat of a Brooklyn summer, I moved into a new apartment with my boyfriend. Prior to this move, we both agreed to go through the contents of our respective lives, discarding items we didn’t need in order have a fresh start; a blank slate on which to build a life together. Expecting to find an ungodly amount of junk, I opened a bottle of wine, put on Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours and got out the trash bags.

If our lives are made up of the things we keep, my life was looking a bit neglected and moth-eaten. Old receipts, expired debit cards, parking tickets, to-do lists. In my 28 years, it would seem as if I hadn’t collected anything of substance. How had I come this far with so little to show for it? I sipped more wine and continued the search for things to keep. I was sure I had a few lying around, somewhere.

An hour or two later I found them: a pack of used and worn mechanical pencils and an elegant black, beaded clutch. The pencils belonged to my Scottish grandmother, the clutch, to my Southern Gammy. I placed them delicately in the “to keep” pile. They were coming with me to the new apartment.

On paper, my grandmothers couldn’t have been less alike. One was an industrial chemist from Scotland, the other a beauty queen from Maryland. Their experiences were so different, their lives and passions rarely, if ever, overlapping. They grew up at a similar time but in different parts of the world. Perhaps the one thing they had in common was how fiercely they loved their families and me.

Finding these intimate items that belonged to them opened the floodgates of my memory. I felt inspired to ask questions and to think about what my grandmothers were like as young women, how their lives took shape and how they shaped mine.

My father’s mother, Janet Dodson, was a generous woman. She’d give you the shirt off her own back, without question. My father describes her as a feisty woman who charmed all those she met, a lady who never hid her feelings about her core values, a true believer in God, and a loving mother and wife.

She was the youngest of 11 children, the daughter of a coal miner and, according to my family, after high school she won the Miss Western Maryland Pageant and was offered a studio contract to perform with a stalwart of the nightclub circuit, singer Tony Martin. She turned it down to marry my grandfather, an ad salesman from North Carolina. My Gammy was a breast cancer survivor, ever the social butterfly, and driven by a desire to give back to those in need. She lived for her garden, her five grandchildren and her volunteer work at her church in Greensboro.

My mother’s mother, Kathleen, was a pioneer. An only child who’d lost both of her parents by the age of 22, she began her career in Glasgow as an industrial chemist, first at Rolls-Royce and then at IBM. She met my scientist grandfather while walking to catch the bus to work, and later, followed him to Canada, Alaska, and finally to a farm in Maine, where they’d settle down, buy two of nearly every animal and start a life with their three children.

She was a voracious reader, a stickler for manners and a lover of classical music. She was fond of sharp cheese, good gin, quiet nights, her family and animals, particularly cats. She had a knack for enduring hardships, even if they threatened to upend her life. She loved to laugh and was revered as a practical, brave person with an enviable book collection, the matriarch of her tiny village in the highlands of Maine.

As a progeny of both women, I hear the stories of their lives and search for a glimpse of myself. Am I a charming spitfire, too? Would I be bold enough to lead a group of government wives into the Alaskan frontier? Was my smile just as enigmatic? Could I record an album? How does one run a 250-acre farm, earn her master’s and essentially a Ph.D, with three mouths to feed at home?

These questions are vital when I think about how I will take on the world, how I will ultimately make my mark and what I will leave behind. My beloved grandmothers have both passed on, and these questions are more important than ever, if yet unanswered. But in some ways, having these intensely personal items — a box of well-used pencils, a glittery black clutch and the memories they evoke — is enough for now.

I use the pencils when working on a new essay or underlining a striking sentence in a book. Pencil in hand, I’m reminded of how my Scottish Grandmother passionately stressed the importance of knowing and developing your own unique voice.

Meanwhile, I carry my Gammy’s beaded clutch on special occasions. Its glamor makes me feel fancy, feminine, and socially brave in a way I’m sure Southern Gammy would have appreciated and wanted.

Perhaps some day I’ll move again and have to sort through the contents of my own cluttered closets, dressers, and drawers. Maybe by then I’ll know what to keep and what to pass along.

But for now, these things from my grandmothers?

These are the things I will keep.  OH

Maggie Dodson is the daughter of Jim Dodson and lives in New York

Kitchen Confidential

Recipes from a fin-de-siècle Irving Park Tween

By Jane Bordain

In 1931, amateur cook Irma von Starkloff
Rombauer self-published The Joy of Cooking and reinvented a genre that had been stymied by what the legendary cultural critic H.L. Mencken called “cooking-school marms.” In 1961, Julia Child followed in her footsteps with Mastering the Art of French Cooking, which decoded classical techniques for the American masses. And in the late 1980s, a 10-year-old Jane Borden made “cooking” the easiest yet, by improvising concoctions that invariably made her friends say, “No thanks, that’s gross.” Below, a collection of her most, er, famous recipes.

“Bologna Curl Ups”

Best served right after school or when trying to impress a play date.

• Remove a slice of Oscar Mayer bologna from the package in the fridge drawer. Mind the drips. Place slice on a salad plate.

• Remove a Kraft Singles from same drawer and peel away cellophane; tear it into pieces and stack them in the center of the bologna circle.

• Turn on CBS. It’s almost time for Guiding Light

• Microwave the plate for 10 to 15 seconds, or until edges of meat product curl up on the sides creating a bowl filled with melted processed cheese.

Optional: Crumble nacho-cheese flavored Doritos into the “bowl” for added crunch.

• Cut into pieces that are exactly the same size — exactly the same.

“Mashed Cake”

Best served a couple of days after someone had a birthday and there’s cake in the fridge.

• With a sturdy fork, mush the cake and icing together until a singular consistency is achieved. It should resemble a swampy brownie.

• Change the channel. DuckTales is on.

• Roll the swamp brownie into a ball, eat it like an apple, and ignore your sister telling you that it looks disgusting because, in 20 years, the same thing will be called Cake Pops and will sell for $3 a piece at fancy bakeries everywhere, so y’all can all STFU.

“What’s in the Fridge on Cheese and Rice”

If you have leftover rice, you have a canvas. The fridge door is your palette.

• Prep work: The night before, when your mother tries to toss the leftover rice from dinner — “there’s almost none left. . . it will dry out . . . no one will eat it” — remind her that you are a someone, you are an artist in search of a medium, and you can fit the entire world on a single grain of rice. Do not let her silence your voice. Resist!

• Hooray, it’s time for Tiny Toons! “They’re tiny. They’re toony. They’re altogether looney.” This show isn’t that great, but if the TV is on, it means you can keep eating.

• Fill a microwavable bowl halfway with rice. Run your fingers under the sink and flick water onto the rice, since it is seriously dry.

• Chop up cheese and mix it with the rice. Pro tip: Skip the knife and cutting board by biting off hunks and spitting them into the bowl.

• Add mustard. Or chow chow. Maybe today it’s ketchup and pickles. You get it. Cheesy rice rules and you can’t screw it up.

Pro tip: Chopped cherry tomatoes add moisture to the rice and cut the stringent flavors of your jarred items. But do use a knife and cutting board, or you’ll spray tomato juice all over your face.

“Fancy Cocktail Sandwiches for One”

These are just Lunchables.

• Grab a box of Lunchables from the fridge. They’re for school, but maybe your mom won’t notice.

Pro tip: The cheese slices are square and the weird meat is round. So if you want every bite to have the exact same amount of cheese and weird meat — exactly the same — you’ll need to pick off the corners of the cheese and carefully place them on the sides.

“A Parade of Oranges”

If you have neighbors who attend Greensboro Day School, they will knock once a year, while selling citrus as part of a school fundraiser.

• Open one of the several boxes of oranges stacked on the kitchen porch.

• Eat one after another until you get a stomach ache from the acid. You have a lot of fruit to get through.

“Ruin Your Dinner”

• When your mom starts cooking for the evening meal, she will forbid any more snacking before supper and kick you out of the kitchen. Watch television in the den.

• Once you hear that she is on the phone with Nancy, head back to the kitchen. Stand by the door until she faces the sink and then scurry, fast and silent as a mouse, into the pantry.

• Grab a bag of Doritos.

• Peer around the folding door and wait until she’s facing the sink again. Scurry back out with your contraband.

Pro tip: Mind the phone cord. If it has already wrapped itself around her body more than once, you are in danger: She could spin around without notice, to untangle herself, and see you.

• Eat your Doritos in the den. Bathe in the comfort of every chip being the same size. Then hide the empty bag under the sofa. You are a genius.

Actually, you’re a dingdong. Go outside and play.  OH

Jane Borden now lives in Los Angeles, where she continues to ruin perfectly good food items by “preparing” them. Fortunately, she married a cook.

Mudd in Yer Eye

Permaculture takes root in Greensboro

By Grant Britt

Once upon a time, public grazing was a no-no. Many of us older earthdwellers remember dire consequences for chowing down on public shrubbery and the fruits thereof. To do otherwise — picking berries, or digging up anything with roots and leaves in public parks would likely earn you a firm swat across your bottom. But lately, freethinking, food-for-the-masses agriculturalists have untightened the rules against free-range munchables, and public grazing is getting a second look.

The rise of permaculutre is the culprit, creating edible landscapes. Former UNCG adjunct professor Charlie Headington is responsible for introducing Greensboro to permaculture 25 years ago after attending a lecture on the system. “I listened for about 15 minutes, realized this was something I wanted to do,” Headington says. He and his wife, Deborah, were avid gardeners, the kind who grow fruit in the front yard. “Permaculture gave us a bigger picture strategy, how to integrate fruit trees into it, capture your rainwater.”

“In permaculture, some spaces are left wild, others are restored, and still others are highly developed, as in an urban context,” Headington writes on the Greensboro Permaculture website, https://greensboropermacultureguild.wordpress.com/about/what-is-permaculture/. “Nutrient cycles, water storage, soil quality, and plant diversity are enhanced, while the resources flowing through the system are slowed down, stored, recycled and used sparingly,” he continues. “Small spaces can yield big harvests; human intervention, inputs, and maintenance are kept to a minimum. The aesthetic is pleasingly natural. Eighty percent of the work is in the initial installation, and 20 percent in its maintenance, the reverse of normal gardening, (devoting) less time to weeding and fighting insects and more to designing, harvesting, and learning.”

Headington was hooked: “I took a 72-hour course, learned more about it, from then on started doing workshops and introducing it to schools.”

It couldn’t have come at a better time for the professor, who was associated with the religious studies department and continual learning center at the university. “When you’re adjunct faculty, they should call them the agile faculty [since] you have to wear several hats. You have to be opportunistic,” Headington says.

“Permaculture became one of my hats that I wore, and it turned out to be a very happy endeavor,” he says. Although he continues to teach part-time on a graduate level online, he became the Gate City’s Johnny Appleseed of permaculture, introducing it to schools and churches. When the legendary chef and food activist Alice Waters came to town, he joined forces with her, touting the newly opened Edible Schoolyard at the Greensboro Children’s Museum.

“Permaculture gardens, farms and landscapes are organic, edible and diverse,” Headington writes on his website. “They are practical, low-maintenance and productive. Each element of the landscape, whether, plant, animal, or structural, is placed by the designer in a mutually beneficial relationship to its neighbor, the yields of one supporting the needs of the other. Permaculture designs and builds communities.”

It also attracts new converts who try to improve on the original model. Freelance writer David Mudd, who had just moved to Greensboro from a farm he was living on in Kentucky, took Headington’s course in 2013. Missing the rural life, Mudd wanted to connect with people with similar interests. He took the 72-hour course that is offered on weekends over a period of six months. “We’d go two days a week, amble around downtown, travel to farms in Summerfield,” Mudd recalls. They also visited abandoned lots that seemed as if they could be reclaimed and repurposed.

Mudd started the Greensboro Permaculture Guild because he says when he finished the course he wanted to just keep doing it. “I wanted to learn more, didn’t want to walk away from the people I had enjoyed hanging out with,” he says. “So I and a couple of others proposed us continuing to get together to teach and help one another, have lunch one day a week, and bring to one another what we wanted to do in our own yards, and what we might do to help other people interested in edible landscaping, urban gardening.”

Their first major project was at Elsewhere, Greensboro’s unconventional museum that collaborates with resident artists. Headington says he had been talking to co-founder and director George Sheer for a long time about reworking the weed-and junk-filled empty lot out back. When downtown developer and entrepreneur Andy Zimmerman started buying up adjacent property, Mudd enlisted his aid to work with him on landscaping the area. But Headington says the Guild tries to think beyond landscaping. “We’re not not only concerned with natural landscaping, but people landscaping,” he says. “You have to provide walkways and interesting venues along the way and plants play a part.” But there’s also a social aspect to it: “Urban design is really challenging,” Headington says, “because you have to think as much about people as you do about nature.”

The people/nature aspect has come together with an informal partnership with Habitat For Humanity.

We design edible landscapes for each house they bring online now,” Mudd says. “We make every effort to meet with the family/individuals targeted to own the house before the landscaping takes place” He says his team tries to “learn where they’re coming from, see what plants they know and make an edible landscape if that’s what they want.”
Habitat is a registered nonprofit, which enables the Guild to get nonprofit pricing from some area nurseries on trees and plants. “On the day of installation, one or two or three of us will be there to implement the plan we’ve come up with,” Mudd says. “But mostly it Habitat’s regular crew of volunteers who actually put the plants in the ground.”

In addition, there’s a Design Studio made up of people with good graphic and design skills. They work with homeowners and others on formulating landscape designs.

The Design Studio is made up of Guild members, some of whom have a degree in architecture, like lead designer Tay Hallas. “But we basically go by word of mouth, by what people like about what we do, and people seeking alternative designs themselves,” he says. “We certainly would love to add some landscape architects, but we’re kind of just growing now, we’re fledglings, so we’ll see what happens.”

Headington and the Guild are involved in a number of permaculture installations throughout town, working with Action Greensboro, an economic development group, and the Greensboro Parks and Recreation Department’s trail division on greenways and other projects. “I was just communicating with Parks and Rec the other day about refurbishing a park that had fallen on hard times,” Headington says. “They liked my ideas about bringing in native woodland plants that would also attract birds, butterflies, a variety of healthy insect life, so there’s just a growing interest in this.”
The Guild is particularly proud of their installation called the Meeting Place on the corner of Prescott and Smith. “It’s the first public orchard, was just a gas station at one point and now a popular little park on the triangular lot, with a gazebo,” Headington says. “We’re growing about 20 kinds of fruit there, have a big strawberry production, have peaches, pears.”

It’s more than something pretty to look at. “It’s part of that whole movement of people to not only be closer to nature, it’s not so much a romantic vision, it’s useful,” Headington says. “ It’s something we get food from, we gather rainwater, we lower our energy costs, and we have all this fresh food and, of course, kids love it, they’re very involved in it.” And best of all, the wee ones these days don’t get smacked when they dive in for grazing.  OH

Grant Britt now grazes free rangily wherever nature catches his eye — without fear of retribution.

Keeping Faith

How a true daughter of the South found her place beneath a rose-colored sky

By Caroline Hamilton Langerman

It wasn’t easy being the daughter of a Southern WASP in Boston. As a kid, I fumbled to find the right words when my Catholic, Jewish and agnostic friends asked “what I was.”

“I’m a Piscopal,” I announced uneasily. This seemed to get me off the hook when my best friend’s dad invited me to say the rosary.

My mother, a Colonial Dame, explained that Protestants had broken away from the Catholics for more freedom. But when I saw what fun the Catholics were having at church every Wednesday evening, the frilly white dresses they wore to their First Communions and the romantic names of saints they adopted at their confirmations, I resented that I had been freed against my will. Being a Piscopal offered no perks.

My Jewish friends got bar and bat mitzvahs. Every weekend during seventh grade, I listened to them recite passages from the Torah and slow-danced with their handsome cousins from New York under the shimmering light of a disco ball. Once, I watched with fascination as the parents of my newly initiated-friend kissed with their tongues. I was sure French-kissing was one of the 95 indulgences Martin Luther had pinned to the church wall. Could I protest my Protestantism?

On Sundays, I wriggled into itchy white tights and sat on the velvet pews of our church. The only brightness in the stained glass sanctuary was my brother lip-synching the minister’s words.

“Do this for the remembrance of me,” he mouthed with his eyes crossed.

In high school, I fell for a Catholic boy like a wrecking ball against brick. There were fire-hot days spent with his 11 siblings on an estate in Woods Hole, and snowy Christmas Eves spent waiting up for his phone call after Midnight Mass. From my early-19th-century twin bed (if Protestants didn’t keep idols, why did Mom worship antiques?), I watched the snow fall on our pilgrim roof. Oh, how I would have loved to light candles with JFK as the clock struck 12!

Sitting on the bleachers of Harvard’s hockey stadium, I regarded my boyfriend’s mother, a former WASP who had converted to Catholicism, with sideways longing. She was tall, brunette, and kept an angelic distance from her offspring, smiling gently when they scraped their knees, frowning slightly when they broke the rules, and whispering amusedly, “Excuse me,” when she caught us kissing in the living room. Even as our love was dying in the early days of college, my boyfriend’s religion lingered on me like my freckles from our Cape Cod weekends. On a required freshman demographic survey, I checked the box “I believe in the sanctity of human life,” feeling the tiniest thrill of rebellion towards my parents, who had on many occasions trapped me in our station wagon to explain the benevolence of Planned Parenthood.

My Southern university did contain Protestants, but they seemed to be speaking a different language from the one I had learned. They mentioned Jesus so often that I started to think I might bump into him at the next fraternity party. They highlighted the Bible with yellow markers and sang praises with a rock band. On Friday nights, they hopped into SUVs with clean-cut boys who were genuinely happy to just hold hands. I was so envious of their clarity. I kept clicking “refresh” in my soul, hoping there might be a Paperless Post from God. 

Meanwhile, back in Boston, my brother toyed with agnosticism. His deepest faith was in Tom Brady; his chapel was Fenway Park; his prayer of Thanksgiving was when the golf ball sank — by grace alone — into the 18th hole. “This one’s worth watching,” he wrote, emailing me links to TED Talks in which geniuses argued for community without communion. During a 10-year stint when I lived in New York City, this philosophy was more compelling than ever.

But I sensed there was magic in this world, and didn’t that necessitate magic outside of this world? It was in the never-ending silence after my son was lifted from me and I waited for him to cry. It was in innocence. In my body’s gut-wrenching reaction to violence. When I moved to my mother’s home state of North Carolina with my husband, it was in the rose-colored sky at 8 o’clock on summer evenings and its reflection on the house next door. “The bricks are glowing again,” I said, and some tiny creature inside me felt awed. I was aware of a quiet, lower case rapture.

If Boston had been the muddy water in which I was ineligible for Holy Communion and matzoh ball soup, Charlotte was like the Baskin Robbins of Protestantism. I now qualified for countless parishes and all of their perks.

Like the Bachelorette dizzied by an “amazing group of contestants,” I began seeing all of them. I dressed up to meet the handsome Episcopal Church and recite poetry from his eloquent Book of Common Prayer. Just around the corner, the Methodists had an infamous Kids Carnival and a charming minister who, it was exclaimed by beautiful women at cocktail parties, had been nominated for bishop! I joined the gym at the Presbyterian Church and enrolled my son in its Kindermusik classes.
On Tuesday mornings, we sang “Jesus Loves Me,” and played with a marvelous selection of silk peekaboo scarves. From our backyard, morning and evening, we heard the enchanting bells of the Baptists.

Suddenly, like a herd of elephants who’ve caught wind of an oasis, my family and friends submitted their opinions on which church I should join. Methodism was too new; never mind that Catholicism was too old. Episcopalians were too superior, never mind that Baptists were too humble.

My mother seemed keenest on the Presbyterian Church, with its Scottish roots.

“But I’m Episcopal. We went there every week. I was confirmed.”

She laughed. “Oh, the Episcopal Church was more convenient. Our friends went there.”

I hung up the phone and laughed, thinking how arbitrary the aspects of our identity can turn out to be. I looked out the window of my new house. Here was my new street. In my new city. I put a hand on my belly, where there was another new life. After 32 years, I would have to make my own choice about a church for my family.

“Where would you like to go to church?” I asked my toddling son, and he looked at me, trying so hard to understand the question. I picked him up and held him tight, realizing that whatever SWASP’s nest I began weaving for him now, he would spend the rest of his life unraveling.  OH

Caroline Hamilton Langerman has published in The New York Times, Elle, Town & Country, Southern Living and more. She hails from an old Concord family.

Mom’s The Word

Here’s to the woman who loved us. No matter what

By Susan Kelly

Our first grandchild was recently born, and as the paternal grandmother, I’m aware that my job is to zip my lips, use a lot of hand sanitizer and stock up on organic foods so he doesn’t go into puberty at age 4. Whenever today’s baby and child-raising issues (read: rules) come up, my mother always says, “I don’t know what we did when y’all were growing up. We just . . . lived.”

I don’t know what she did either, while we were locking ourselves in the bathroom, breaking thermometers and playing with the mercury. It’s a shame about mercury being so deadly and all, because you haven’t lived until you’ve chased not-quite-liquid, not-quite solid skittering silver beads across floor tiles. When that activity paled, we headed outside and dared each other to grab the electric fence, seeing who could paralyze themselves the longest before the shock got the best of you. Dry ice was a favorite toy, too — to burn your fingers, or throw in the toilet and watch it steam and billow — but it was only available once a year, for the school carnival witches’ kettle on Halloween.

Back then, teachers didn’t ask you to write essays on what your parents “did.” Thus, they were spared the humiliation of one friend, whose son wrote, “She picks her teeth until they bleed” (that’ll teach you rabid flossers!), or another, whose child said, “They like to relax.” My own son didn’t even have to write down his answer; he announced it in carpool one day when he saw my knuckles whitening on the steering wheel as his friends competed to see who could blat the biggest imitation fart noises inside their elbows. “Y’all be quiet,” he commanded. “My mother doesn’t like children.” Which is only slightly less mortifying than the drawing my daughter recently unearthed, of herself crying in bed, sick, and the mother standing by with a cartoon balloon saying, “There’s nothing I can do.” A tattered, handwritten note from first grade reads, “I’m sorry I got on your nerves.” What I’m sorry about is that I saved it, to torture me all these years hence.

For absolution, I take comfort in my old-school pediatrician. “My child has a rash,” I worried when he returned my call. His succinct advice: “So what?” His prescription on the endless night of a child’s coughing and coughing? “Just move into another bedroom so you can get some sleep. You’re a mother, not a martyr.” I’m also grateful to the elementary school that kept a gross of ramen packages on hand, so my middlest didn’t starve all those days I refused to deliver his lunch bag when he forgot it.

Yes, yes, guilty as charged. I also failed, like some other mothers, to make up the dorm room bed with five fitted sheets, one on top of the other, so the child could merely strip one off, week after week, instead of doing laundry. But listen, when you asked that I please not fold your underpants on the counter, where everyone could see that you still wore eyelet bloomers instead of bikinis? I did that, I did. And I want you to know that now, when I glimpse those Kraft-paper lunch bags, unused and undisturbed after two decades, or come upon a long-expired coupon for frozen yogurt for good behavior at the dentist, a treat I failed to cash in for you, I cry a little. I’m sorry. I love you so very much. But you’ll have to find your own money for the therapist.  OH

Susan Kelly is a blithe spirit, author of several novels, and proud new grandmother.

Dark Night

A simple boat trip can test a man’s pride and his night vision

By Clyde Edgerton

One evening a few weeks ago, I left Gibby’s Dock and Dine in Carolina Beach, just off the Intracoastal Waterway. It was 7 p.m., dark, and I was in a motorboat alone, heading 15 miles north to a friend’s dock on Wrightsville Beach. My wife and daughter had just left Gibby’s in an automobile and would be waiting for me at my destination. I was hoping to impress my wife (and myself) with how quickly I could get to Wrightsville Beach. I’d planned to leave before dark but time had slipped away.

Well, yes, we could have left the boat and come back for it the next day. But . . . come on, a little night trip up the waterway? What could be difficult about that? (Not being able to see, for one thing, Captain Ahab.)

I’d be heading north, right? With land to my right and left? And surely there’d be enough light to see ahead in the dark — not far, but far enough. It’s a straight shot. I’d simply stay in the middle of the waterway and thus avoid the crab pot buoys. The channel markers would all have red and green lights, right? It wouldn’t be that dark.

Before I know it, I’m disoriented. Yes, there are house lights off to my left, to the west along the waterway, and I’m confident that there is an eastern bank to my right — somewhere — but the rest of the world is inked over. Inked in, inked out. Then I see a green light far ahead — a channel marker. It seems extraordinarily far away. The water is less calm than I’d remembered on the trip down that afternoon in full, bright, beautiful daylight.

And coming toward me, from way far up north, is a light brighter than any train headlight I’ve ever seen. Or is it stationary? And it’s not just one bright light — it’s a cluster of lights together like a sunflower, like a white, nighttime sun. It has killed any night vision I might have. I put my hand up to block it out.

I calmly think about the worst thing that can happen.

I can die. But worse: I may have to confess stupidity.

Boat owners know about the safety cord running from near the throttle that you can clip to a belt loop so that if you fall overboard the attached cord will pull a small button off a small knob and cause the boat engine to cut off so that the boat will not run away. I’ve never hooked it up.

I hook it up.

Where the hell am I? . . . I mean, in reference to the shoreline?

I turn loose the wheel, pull out my phone, keeping a hand up to block the bright light. I touch to open the Maps app with GPS but my screen is blocked by a white box asking if I want to join any of several Wi-Fi servers. I cancel that, worried again about my night vision, then I see the waterway on the iPhone screen and a small blue dot that is my position. Aha. I look up. What? At my one o’clock position is a string of lights sitting on the water. . . is that a very long, low boat? How could that be?

It’s a boat dock! How can it be ahead and to my right on the barrier island side? The shore with houses is to my left. There are no boat docks on the back side of Masonboro Island. I turn the boat to get around this phantom dock. I’ve drifted way left it seems. How? What’s going on?

The blinding bright light is getting larger. And higher. Yep, it’s coming for me. I need to be to the right of that dock, and to the right of the blinding bright light headed my way, but how? And what about the crab pot buoys? No way I can see one of those. I should be out in the middle. I check the blue dot on my map. Confirmed. I’m too far left, or west. I change my heading significantly to the right, east.

Suddenly, I remember that the satellite choice on the GPS should show photos of the boat docks. The plain map doesn’t. Another Wi-Fi request blocks my screen. My left hand blocks the blinding bright light. I have no night vision. I grab the wheel and find the satellite map. I press it and wait. The screen slowly fills in.

Ah, there’s my little blue dot in the Intracoastal Waterway. The satellite map shows shallow and deep areas in the water. Cool. It shows boat docks. Cool. If I just had a flashlight to see ahead in the water. Is there one on the boat somewhere?

Or on the iPhone? Yes. I turn it on. Better to have an iPhone than a Swiss Army knife right now. I hold the phone high overhead to try to light the water over the bow and watch the map. My left hand is back up, blocking the bright ship headlight. I lean against the wheel to steer with my body somehow. Lo and behold about 50 feet straight ahead is a green reflecting square — a channel marker! The iPhone flashlight is not lighting the water ahead but is reflecting off a channel marker.

I see on the satellite map that I’ve drifted right — far right.

Most boats have what’s called a whisky compass, an erratic compass that floats in liquid, and is only roughly accurate, especially if there are waves. By this compass, I see that I’m heading almost north and need a 10-degree correction or so to the west.

That blinding light. It’s closer. And closer. I can see it’s a very large boat. Will it miss me? I maneuver to the right. It passes to my left. It’s gigantic. It has no thoughts of slowing down. The wake tosses me way up and way down. I’m in idle, waiting for the wake to pass. I say ugly things.

The wake recedes, and I slowly crawl north — checking satellite map, flashlight up, watching for channel markers, etc.

Nearing my destination, I realize I have no clear landmarks for my friend’s dock. My friend’s pier is one among many exactly like it. I’ve never docked there (or anywhere else) at night.

My wife and daughter are supposed to be waiting at that dock. They’ve probably been there a while. I phone them. My daughter answers. “What’s taking you so long, Daddy?”

“Oh, nothing. Just taking my time. No need to rush. Nice night. Is Mama there?”

“Sure. Here she is.”

My wife asks, “What’s taking so long, Honey?”

“Oh, nothing. Just taking my time. Nice night out here. Need to be careful, though. Would you do me a favor?”

“Sure.”

“Are you on the dock?”

“Yes.”

“Would you turn on your phone flashlight and wave it over your head? With the light shining out toward me?”

“Sure. Where are you?”

“I’m not altogether sure . . . would you turn on the flashlight and wave it over your head?”

“OK.”

“Oh, good,” I say. “I see you.” Then I realize she can’t hear me because her phone is over her head, going back and forth in the air.

In a few minutes, I dock safely, step off the boat, and my wife asks, “How was the trip?”

“Fine,” I say, holding onto a single sliver of pride deep in my soul. I don’t know where to start.

“Wasn’t it pretty dark out there?”

“Damn dark.”  OH

Clyde Edgerton is the author of 10 novels, a memoir and most recently, Papadaddy’s Book for New Fathers. He is the Thomas S. Kenan III Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing at UNCW.

May-lange

New reads for spring

By Brian Lampkin

The highlights of this month’s newly released books include timely books on the potential fall of democracy and the lessons of the Russian Revolution. But don’t worry, it all ends with some North Carolina humor of the best kind.

May 2: You’re the Only One I Can Tell: Inside the Language of Women’s Friendships, by Deborah Tannen. (Ballantine Books. $27). New York Times bestselling author Deborah Tannen deconstructs the ways women friends talk and how those ways can bring friends closer or pull them apart. From casual chatting to intimate confiding, from talking about problems to telling what you had for dinner, Tannen uncovers the patterns of communication and miscommunication that affect friendships at different points in our lives. She shows how even the best of friends — with the best intentions — can say the wrong thing, and how words can repair the damage done by words.

May 2: Into the Water, by Paula Hawkins (Riverhead, $28). With the same propulsive writing and acute understanding of human instincts that captivated millions of readers around the world in her explosive debut thriller The Girl on the Train, Paula Hawkins delivers an urgent, twisting, deeply satisfying read that hinges on the deceptiveness of emotion and memory, as well as the devastating ways that the past can reach a long arm into the present. Beware a calm surface — you never know what lies beneath.

May 9: Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band: The Album, the Beatles, and the World in 1967, by Brian Southall (Imagine, $30). A carefully crafted and collectible volume celebrations the 50th anniversary of a legendary and groundbreaking Beatles album. The “A-side” of this coolly curated title is all about the Beatles, the music on the album, the recording process, how the disc was received at the time and how it has been acknowledged as one of the greatest albums ever recorded. The “B-side” looks at the state of the world in 1967, from the Summer of Love to antiwar protests to the launch of Rolling Stone magazine to Jimi Hendrix’s first U.K. tour as a solo artist.

May 9: October: The Story of the Russian Revolution, by China Mieville (Verso, $26.95). The renowned fantasy and science fiction writer China Mieville has long been inspired by the ideals of the Russian Revolution and here, on the centenary of the revolution, he provides his own distinctive take on its history.

May 9: The Range Bucket List: The Golf Adventure of a Lifetime, by James Dodson (Simon & Schuster, $27). A teenage boy’s wish list was just the beginning of a career that included several bestsellers, including the beloved Final Rounds, Arnold Palmer’s autobiography and a history of three of golf’s greats. The editor of this magazine reviews his Range Bucket List, proving that dreams have a way of coming true. (For more see “Simple Life,” page 17). 

May 16: Chuck Klosterman X: A Highly Specific, Defiantly Incomplete History of the Early 21st Century (Blue Rider, $27). Chuck Klosterman’s tenth book collects his most intriguing articles in their original form, featuring previously unpublished passages and digressions. Subjects include Breaking Bad, Lou Reed, zombies, KISS, Jimmy Page, Stephen Malkmus, steroids, Mountain Dew, Chinese Democracy, The Beatles, Jonathan Franzen, Taylor Swift, Tim Tebow, Kobe Bryant, Usain Bolt, Eddie Van Halen, Charlie Brown, the Cleveland Browns, and many more cultural figures and pop phenomena.

May 16: Since We Fell, by Dennis Lehane (Ecco Press, $27). Gillian Flynn says that “Lehane is the master of complex human characters thrust into suspenseful, page-turning situations.” Since We Fell is a novel of profound psychological insight and tension. It is Dennis Lehane at his very best.

May 23: Geek Girl Rising: Inside the Sisterhood Shaking Up Tech, by Heather Cabot and Samantha Walravens (St Martins, $26.99). Meet the women who aren’t asking permission from Silicon Valley to chase their dreams. They are going for it —building cutting-edge tech startups, investing in each other’s ventures, crushing male hacker stereotypes and rallying the next generation of women in tech. 

May 23: Churchill and Orwell: The Fight for Freedom, by Thomas Ricks (Penguin, $28). By the late 1930s, democracy was discredited in many circles, and authoritarian rulers were everywhere in the ascent. There were some who decried the scourge of communism, but saw in Hitler and Mussolini “men we could do business with,” if not in fact saviors. And there were others who saw the Nazi and fascist threat as malign, but tended to view communism as the path to salvation. Churchill and Orwell, on the other hand, had the foresight to see clearly that the issue was human freedom — that whatever its coloration, a government that denied its people basic freedoms was a totalitarian menace and had to be resisted. 

May 30: Theft by Finding: Diaries (1977–2002), by David Sedaris (Little Brown, $28). Written with a sharp eye and ear for the bizarre, the beautiful, and the uncomfortable, and with a generosity of spirit that even a misanthropic sense of humor can’t fully disguise, Theft By Finding proves that Sedaris is one of our great modern observers. It’s a potent reminder that there’s no such thing as a boring day-when you’re as perceptive and curious as Sedaris.  OH

Brian Lampkin is one of the proprietors of Scuppernong Books.

True Masterpiece

The joy of rediscovering True Grit

By Stephen E. Smith

In the late 1960s, a friend who’s an avid reader of popular fiction plowed through the novel True Grit and saw the John Wayne/Kim Darby movie on the same day, immersing himself in Charles Portis’ yarn set in Indian Territory in the late 1800s and acquiring what must have been a disconcerting insight into Hollywood’s inherent ability to mangle art (at the very least, the movie moguls could have spared us the sorry acting of Glen Campbell). About the same time, I read True Grit and concluded that the novel was chockfull of memorable characters and the quirkiest dialogue ever uttered by fictional beings who aren’t working overtime at being funny. 

My friend and I have been quoting lines from the novel for almost 50 years — not constantly, of course, but when our conversation happens onto a subject that might be illuminated or made humorous by a sentence or two attributable to Rooster Cogburn or Mattie Ross, we’ve never hesitated to employ Portis’ superbly crafted dialogue. I’m particularly fond of quoting from the exchange between the horse trader Stonehill (played in the original film by the inimitable Strother Martin) and Mattie as she attempts to wrangle a refund for the ponies her late father had purchased. Stonehill threatens to go to a lawyer and Mattie responds, “And I will take it up with mine . . . He will make money and I will make money and your lawyer will make money and you, Mr. Licensed Auctioneer, will foot the bill.” Who hasn’t wanted to utter that sentence when dealing with a litigious tormentor?

My friend is fond of quoting passages from Rooster’s hilarious, self-serving explication of his checkered past, as when he alludes to the wife and the son he abandoned: “She said, ‘Goodbye, Reuben, a love of decency does not abide in you.’ There is your divorced woman talking about decency . . . She took my boy with her too . . . You would not want to see a clumsier child than Horace. I bet he broke forty cups.”

But enough. You can quote almost any passage from the novel, including sections of Mattie’s deadpan first-person narration, and you’ll likely set the table on a roar.

I’m not in the habit of rereading novels, but that’s exactly what I did after seeing the Coen brothers’ adaptation of True Grit. I decided to give Portis’ novel a thorough reassessment almost a half century after my first encounter with Mattie Ross. After all, America was a very different place in 1968: the women’s movement, the war in Vietnam, the counterculture. Would the novel hold up to changes in mores and tastes? Is it as well-written as I remembered?

I completed the reread, taking my time and occasionally re-evaluating scenes I judged particularly memorable, and here’s what I concluded: True Grit is great American fiction — not a great American Western — but great American fiction period, worthy of study as a literary masterwork and occupying a station commensurate with
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and To Kill a Mockingbird.

Unfortunately, True Grit has never attracted the academic attention that Twain’s masterpiece and Harper Lee’s sentimental story of the South have garnered. It is a genre Western, and what self-respecting academic would publish a monograph titled “Repression, Revision, and Psychoanalysis in the Soliloquies of Rooster Cogburn”? But from the novel’s opening sentence — “People do not give it credence that a fourteen-year-old girl could leave home and go off in the wintertime to avenge her father’s blood but it did not seem so strange then, although I will say it did not happen every day” — Mattie Ross establishes herself as the archetypal American hero, an individual so self-possessed that she’s capable of rejecting collective wisdom. In that one sentence, Portis establishes a form and voice that embodies an entire sensibility, a collection of manners, mores, thoughts and feelings, faithful to the spectrum of American experience and emblematic of a rich inner and outer life. As Clarence Darrow wrote: “. . . he (an American) is never sure that he is right unless the great majority is against him.” That’s Mattie Ross, and the reader is instantly smitten.

And it’s Mattie’s steady voice and an unwavering determination — as profoundly established as that of Scout Finch and Huck Finn — that propel the reader through the multiplicity of experience that confronts her. Rooster Cogburn is Mattie’s antithesis — alcoholic, vulgar, pragmatic, possessed of almost every human weakness but redeemed by fortitude and a strained, awkward sense of loyalty and a disarming honesty. “I found myself one pretty spring day in Las Vegas, New Mexico, in need of a road stake and I robbed one of them little high-interest banks there. Thought I was doing a good service. You can’t rob a thief, can you? I never robbed no citizens. I never taken a man’s watch.”

When it comes to the major themes around which literature teachers construct their lessons, True Grit touches subtlety on each and every one — the frontier, the American dream, East vs. West/North vs. South, the journey from innocence into knowledge, sense of community, sophistication vs. a lack thereof, etc. — and it does so without a trace of burdensome preachiness. But mostly, the novel is a story that suspends time, freezes the reader in a moment in our history that evolves finally into the present, giving us a sure knowledge of who we are and how we came to be here. What more can we ask of an American novel?

The John Wayne and Coen brothers’ cinematic interpretations of True Grit are entertaining and reasonably faithful to the original work, but it’s Portis’ novel that’s the real deal, a solid piece of Americana that deserves to be read and studied for generations.

It occurs to me, finally, that I should have said all of this 50 years ago — True Grit was as deserving of praise then as now — but as Mattie Ross articulates succinctly in the novel’s conclusion: “Time just gets away from us.”  OH

Stephen E. Smith is a retired professor and the author of seven books of poetry and prose. He’s the recipient of the Poetry Northwest Young Poet’s Prize, the Zoe Kincaid Brockman Prize for poetry and four North Carolina Press awards.

The Best Medicine

Chillin’ with Mom and old mags

By Maria Johnson

So there I was, hanging with my 84-year-old mom in a doctor’s office because, you know, that’s what you do when you’re 84 and upright: You spend days in doctors’ offices reading old magazines, waiting for doctors to refer you to other waiting rooms, where you can read more old magazines.

It’s very therapeutic, this reading of old magazines. You can rip out recipes with impunity. You feel like you’re still in style. And you learn relatively new things.

For example, while sitting in a doctor’s office a few years ago, I learned that Kim Kardashian had married a guy named Kris Humphries in a $2 million “fairy tale wedding” — as if they would have spent $2 million on a fake-ivy trellis and 12-pack of Yuengling at the Elks Club.

Anyway, later in the day, it occurred to me that I’d seen pictures of Kardashian and rapper Kanye West out on the town with, you know, their daughter, and I was thinking, “I wonder if Kris Humphries knows about this.”

Which led me to Google something like, “Kris Humphries fool or what,” which led me to find out that Kardashian and Humphries got married in 2011 and divorced 72 days later.

But hey, I never knew this in the first place, and without that tattered old magazine, Kris-what’s-his-name might have been lost to history.

Mmm . . . where was I? Oh yeah, the doctor’s office.

So the nurse calls my mom in and says, “Let’s get your height and weight,” which causes my mom to shed her coat, shoes, sweater, socks and earrings, spit out her gum and blow her nose.

I exaggerate, of course. But not much.

For the height part, mi madre draws her shoulders back, lifts her head and rivets her arms to her sides. It appears that she has just reported to Parris Island for boot camp.

I recognize this because I do it, too. Everyone does. You’re trying to stretch your weight over more height, hoping to appear thinner. It’s kind of the opposite of trying to make yourself look bigger when you see a bear. You’re thinking, “Maybe if I look skinny, he’ll leave me alone.”

The nurse moves on. She reports that my mom’s blood pressure is good and her temperature is “perfect.”

So now my mom is getting the Big Head because she’s still warm, which is OK because, as we all know, half of feeling good physically is feeling good mentally, which makes me wonder why we all don’t just stay home and watch old Pinky and The Brain cartoons.

But I digress.

So the doctor — who hung the moon, in my humble opinion — examines my mom and declares her to be in tip-top shape. Fantastic. There’s just one thing. A bone density test has shown that my mom basically has no bones. It seems that she has been standing up on the strength of
her moisturizer.

Hmm. Could be a problem.

So the doctor prescribes a bone-building drug called Boniva. Bonnnnn-eeeeee-vahhhhhhh.

Lots of women her age take it. And who wouldn’t? It sounds so restful. Like a resort.

“Welcome to Boniva. Room service is available 24-7. The pool is right over there. The bar is over there. The fake-ivy trellis is over there. (Waves to couple by the pool). That’s Kim Kardashian and Kris what’s-his-name-is. Wave while you can.”

Well, the whole Boniva thing gets me to thinking about how prescription drugs sound so alluring these days. Like Lunesta, the sleep-inducing drug that sounds like a cross between a beautiful moon, a siesta and maybe a high-end moth. Or Abilify, the antipsychotic drug that sounds like the 8th habit of highly effective people. Or Levitra, which sounds like “levitate,” which I’m sure is magical experience for dudes with erectile dysfunctional until maybe four hours later, when the rabbit won’t go back in the hat, so to speak.

WE INTERRUPT THIS DRUG-INDUCED REVERIE TO BRING YOU BACK TO MARIA’S MOTHER’S APPOINTMENT.

OK. Right. So, technically speaking, the reason I’m here, as a
Good Daughter, is to be listening and asking questions on my mom’s behalf. So I ask about the drug that the doctor has just prescribed.

Me: “So, ummm, does this stuff work?”

Doc: “Yes.”

Me: “I see.”

Good thing I’m used to asking those tough journalistic questions.

What? The appointment is over? We can go? Just take a left, a left, a right, a left, go past the break room, through the janitor’s closet, and down the laundry chute to the appointment desk?

Wheeeeee! Here we are.

Are we available at 2:45 p.m. six months from now?

Wait, that’s not Columbus Day, is it? OK, good. Then I guess we’ll be free.

Until then, salud!  OH

Maria Johnson is open to receiving free lunches from drug reps. Contact her at ohenrymaria@gmail.com