Month: June 2017

Revenge of the Lawn

Covet not thy neighbor’s grass. Just go hire the right organic lawn care specialist

 

By Wiley Cash

Iím standing on my lawn in Wilmington, North Carolina, recalling the time I heard a mindfulness teacher condense the many years of the Buddha’s teachings into one sentence: Cling to nothing as I, me, or mine. That’s good advice, life-making or life-changing advice depending on when you receive it, but it’s hard advice to follow in my neighborhood, especially as my gaze drifts from the weed-choked, shriveled brown grass at my feet to the lush, pampered golf course-green of my neighbors’ lawns. All around me are weeds I don’t understand, things I’ve never seen before, things I never could have imagined: monstrous tendrils that snake into the air in search of something to strangle; vines covered in thorns and bits of fluff that cling to the skin like the pink fiberglass insulation your dad always warned you not to touch in the attic; scrubby pines no taller than 6 inches with root systems as long as my legs and twice as strong.

Roughly 250 miles west sits the city of Gastonia, where I was raised in a wooded suburb that always felt to me as if the houses in the neighborhood of my youth had been forged from the landscape. In my memory, dense forests loom in our backyard, the smell of wood smoke curls through the air, grass looks like grass: thick blades that grow up toward the sun instead of clumping and crawling like desperate snakes wriggling toward prey.

Another 100 miles west, nestled in the cradle of the Blue Ridge Mountains, is the city of Asheville, where I grew into adulthood and made the decision to become a writer. This meant I worked odd jobs and lived in relative — if not romantic — poverty throughout my 20s. I inhabited a slew of rental houses with friends of similar ages and similar interests, each house having one thing in common: a wild expanse of unkempt lawn where nature grew in a heady, beautiful containment — variegated hostas, blue and pink and purple hydrangeas, English lavender and flame azalea. We didn’t water anything or spread fertilizer. The only people who ever cut the grass were the landlords, and that was done sporadically with the weather and season. Yet, it seemed that we could have dug our heels into the black earth and something beautiful would have sprung forth.

Down here on the coast my lawn is nothing but sand with a thin skin of sod draped over it. I live in a region where if you buy plants at the garden store, you’d better buy the soil to plant them in. Nothing but the most tenacious, native weeds can survive in this boggy, sandy soil. Some days I have doubts about my own survival. It too often feels like I don’t belong here, but then again, my lawn doesn’t belong here either. Just a few months before we moved in, this landscape was marked by piney swamps dotted with ferns, maples and the occasional live oak. Not long ago, bulldozers plowed through and pushed over all but a few of the pines. Then dump trucks flooded the wet spots with tons upon tons of fill dirt. The developer carved out streets, piled the dirt into 1/4 acre squares, and called them lots. The builder began constructing houses. Finally, landscapers rolled out strips of St. Augustine, punched holes in the ground and dropped cheap shrubs into the earth.

My wife and I bought one of the first lots, and there were only a handful of houses in the development when we built ours. We moved in just in time to watch nature attempt to reclaim its domain. We’ve been here almost four years. Now, the streets bubble where swamp water pulses through cracks in the asphalt. The drainage ponds are full of alligators that behave more like residents than those of us who have built homes. At dusk, tiny bloodthirsty flies, what the locals call “no-see-ums,” dance in the night like specters, biting your ears, eyeballs and neck.

And then there are the weeds. The canopy of trees is gone now, and the weeds have ample sunlight and plenty of room to spread.

I lie in bed at night pondering the use of industrial-strength fertilizers and weed killers, and I weigh their environmental destruction and the health risks they pose my children with the possibility of having a lawn of which I can be proud. I begin to empathize with companies responsible for accidental coal-ash spills (Everyone wants electricity!) and incidental pesticide contamination (Everyone wants bananas in January!).

Deciding to forgo potential carcinogens, at least for now, I appeal to someone who seems expert in all things related to lawns and manhood. Tim lives three houses down and has the most perfect yard in the neighborhood. He’s tan and tall and lean. He could be 40 or 65, the kind of guy who rides his road bike to the beach each day at dawn with his surfboard strapped to his back, the kind of guy who looks like Lance Armstrong or Laird Hamilton, depending on whether he’s wearing spandex or board shorts.

I find Tim watering his lawn with a garden hose. The rest of us turn on our irrigation systems and hope for the best. Not Tim; he waters like a surgeon. He’s barefoot, and I wonder what it feels like to be able to walk shoeless in one’s yard without feeling the sharp crinkling of dead grass blades beneath your feet. I explain my lawn problems to him, at least insofar as I understand them. He listens with patience, perhaps even sympathy.

“Fertilize,” he finally says. “Organic. Commercial. Whatever. It doesn’t matter. And then wait until it rains.” He turns off his garden hose and finds the one weed in his yard that’s apparent to the naked eye: a dandelion that looks more like a flower than any flowers I’ve planted in the past year. Tim reaches down and plucks the dandelion from the earth with the ease of lifting it from a vase. “They come up easier when the ground’s wet,” he said. “Roots and all.”

So, early in the spring, I fertilize the yard with liquid corn gluten meal. The air smells like a combination of popcorn and barnyard, but it seems to have enough nitrogen in it to green up the grass. And, after the next rain, I pull weeds. For hours. It works. By early summer my lawn is green and nearly weed-free, but I never get too comfortable.

I’m out of town one morning when I text my wife and ask for an update on our lawn. I receive a photo reply within a few minutes. I hesitate to open it the way young people hesitate to open report cards, the way old people hesitate to open medical tests: There’s nothing I can do about it now, I think. To my surprise the photo my wife sent shows a vibrant green lawn dappled with early morning dew. I can’t help but wonder if she’s walked up the street and snapped a picture of Tim’s grass. Regardless, I allow relief to wash over me: The C- I’d been expecting has become a B, the heart disease diagnosis I knew awaited me has ended up being indigestion. Life can go on as long as it rains — but not too much — and the sun keeps shining, but not on the west side of the lawn because there is no shade there, and if we don’t get enough rain the grass will crisp up pretty quick.

Late in the summer the grass begins to turn brown in strange semicircles, and when I look closely I can see the individual blades stirring. I kneel down and spot a tiny worm at work. I look closer, spot hundreds, no, thousands more. Our neighborhood has been invaded by armyworms. Instead of spending my time on the novel that’s months overdue, I spend a small fortune coating the grass in organic neem oil. To make myself feel better about not writing I listen to podcasts about writing, but my attempt to stave off writer’s guilt is just as futile as my attempt to fight the armyworms. Our green grass is eaten away within a matter of days; my soul follows suit, and I can only hope both will re-emerge come spring.

But that spring, something else happens instead. In May, my father is diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor, and the lawn and its calendar of fertilizing and hydrating slips from my mind. He passes two short weeks later, and as I ease into grief the summer spins away from me, and I don’t even look around until August, when my yard comprises more weeds than grass. I’ve missed the opportunity to fertilize, and there’s no amount of safe weed killer that’s going to make a dent.

I wait for it to rain. Then I fall to my knees, and I pick weeds.

My 2-year-old daughter joins me. Sometimes she’ll yank up fistfuls of grass because it comes up easier than the weeds. I don’t have the heart to correct her, and I can’t help but wonder if she’s on to something. How long would it take us to tear out all this grass and start over? I look at my neighbors’ thriving lawns, and I assume that the pain of death or responsibilities for children or work-related obligations have not touched their lives in the ways they’ve touched mine. If only my life could be as clear and clean and healthy as their lawns appear to be. 

This year, I decide that I don’t have the patience, the faith, the head space, or the heart space to battle my lawn, and I call a local company that specializes in organic lawn care. I’m surveying the yard when the technician arrives. His name is Steve, and he’s actually the owner, which puts me at ease. He’s middle-aged, clean-shaven with glasses and silvery hair. He speaks quietly, confidently. I can’t help but think that he senses something about me. Perhaps he knows that I’m embarrassed to admit that I can’t do something as simple as grow grass, that I’ve put too much pressure on myself, that things have gone too far, that I’m clinging to something that does not deserve my clinging.

In my recollection, he puts a hand on my shoulder. Maybe he even takes my hand. He leads me around the yard, whispering the names of the weeds he finds, the ways in which he can stop them. He tells me it’s not my fault. It’s hard to grow grass in this environment, especially in new neighborhoods like mine where the sod hasn’t had time to take root or an existing organic structure to give it life. And my ground is too hard, he says. It needs to be aerated. It needs to be softened.

We agree on a treatment regimen. They’ll start next week, provided it doesn’t rain.

“You’re going to have a beautiful lawn,” he says. “You’ll be happy.”

“I appreciate that,” I say. “But it’s all yours now.”  OH

Wiley Cash lives in Wilmington, North Carolina, with his wife and their two daughters. His forthcoming novel The Last Ballad is available for pre-order wherever books are sold.

The Crazy Rib Man

How a helping of ribs becomes a helping hand

By Ross Howell Jr.

 

The first time I met the Crazy Rib Man was at a Zeto’s wine tasting about three years ago. His tent and cooker were set up at the popular downtown Greensboro wine shop, so I figured I’d take supper home after the event.

One of my buddies I’d invited didn’t show, so I used his tickets along with mine to sample wines. By the time I’d visited all the tasting stations and stepped outside, I was feeling very good about the cosmos and the space I was occupying within it.

In my elevated state, I saw there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. The sun was just setting behind the Grasshoppers’ stadium, and its light washed the sidewalks and buildings around me with gold. I stepped up to a folding table covered with a paper tablecloth and squeeze bottles of barbecue sauce, ketchup and mustard. I studied the posted menu a little unsteadily, then ordered a half rack of ribs.

White smoke purled from the cooker as a man sliced ribs and scattered them on the grill. I watched the ribs sizzle as he turned them occasionally. After a few minutes, he stepped back from the cooker and picked up a Styrofoam box. He put a thick piece of white bread in the bottom, then expertly lined up the ribs atop it. He closed the lid and handed me the box.
I handed him a twenty.

“Barbecue sauce is right there,” the man said. “The Rib Man makes it special.”

He stepped away from the table with the bill and walked toward a white Dodge pickup parked by the cooker. There were big propane bottles stacked in the bed of the pickup.

Maybe it was my elevated state, maybe it was the beautiful evening light, or maybe it was just my active imagination — whatever it was, the man sitting in the pickup, making change for my twenty grew larger than life.

He was large in life, mind you, his broad shoulders taking up half the width of the pickup cab. His hair and beard were cropped close, with a tint of gray and his black T-shirt was just slightly darker than the color of his skin.

I opened the Styrofoam box, shook the barbecue sauce bottle, and prepared to squeeze the contents all over the ribs.

“You might not need much barbecue sauce,” the Crazy Rib Man said. “Taste those ribs first.”

I sampled one. He was right. The tender meat evaporated in my mouth like smoke. I squirted a small swirl of sauce in the corner of the container, reclosed it, and took my change.

“Thanks,” I said. “Do you have a card?”

He draped his arm from the pickup cab with a business card between his fingers. I could see his bright smile in the shadows of the cab. The cook brought me the card and I headed for home.

I’m not even sure how I came to learn his name, but it was somewhere over the years of picking up his ribs for my birthday parties, or for gatherings of neighbors and friends, or for just whenever I had a hankering for them.

His name is Rex Durrett. Somehow it’s perfect — better than any name my novelist’s imagination could invent. I friended him on Facebook.

He’s from Memphis, Tennessee, and grew up in a family of 13 brothers and sisters. His mother was a cook and his father was a garbage collector. Durrett was a boy during the time of the Memphis Sanitation Workers strike, when African-American men marched downtown carrying “I Am a Man” placards, and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. joined them in a march just a day before he was shot dead on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel on Mulberry Street.

“I was just a boy, you know,” Durrett says. “I don’t remember much about all that.”

What he remembers clearly is the love both his mother and father had
for cooking.

“In those days there weren’t many restaurants in Memphis, especially outside of downtown,” he says. “So people in the black communities would cook, you know? And if people liked somebody’s cooking, they’d come and buy it.” Durret got started cooking while watching my mother and father, and working with them. “It was real on-the-job training,” he says. “I liked it. And I made a little money at it as a kid.”

After finishing high school in Memphis, Durrett lived in Texas for a while. That was followed by enlistment in the U.S. Army. Then he returned to Memphis.

“I was offered a scholarship to attend college at North Carolina A&T,” he says. “That’s how I first came to Greensboro. I was a little different, you know, since I was older than my classmates.”

Durrett studied under Professor H. D. Flowers II, head of the A&T professional theater department at the time. A tough taskmaster, Flowers was remembered as “Papa” by former students when he passed away in 2010.

Durrett admired Flowers, but found that college just wasn’t for him.

“I’ve always been a hands-on type of guy,” he says. “This idea of sitting back and listening, like you’re a vessel receiving information, it just wasn’t for me.”

Durrett found that he preferred independent study, working in the library, reading on his own. Though he left college, he is fully committed to higher education.

“This country needs minds,” he says. “But it’s insane what we have to pay for education. We wind up with young people saddled with all this debt.”

While at A&T, Durrett “met a lady,” and stayed on in Greensboro. He managed a Pizza Hut. He delivered pizzas for Domino’s.

“That was a ball,” Durrett says. “I enjoyed
the freedom, being out there, meeting all kinds of people.”

Then, about 10 years ago, he decided to start cooking ribs.

“I’m being honest,” Durrett says. “It was for revenge. A man I knew didn’t treat me right in business, and I thought, ‘You know, I’m going to mess in his business a little bit.’”

A little bit turned into quite a lot. He traveled widely, cooking ribs at automobile shows, motorcycle shows, music festivals and sports events.

“Football games are great,” Durrett says. “People are in a good mood, there’s camaraderie. It’s fun.”

He’s done all sorts of festivals.

“Wine festivals, cooking festivals, church festivals,” Durrett says. “Oh, there was this big Jamaican party in Asheville,” Durrett says. “And we did the Gullah Festival in South Carolina. That was a blast.”

According to the Original Gullah Festival website, the program in Beaufort, S.C., was established to honor a celebration first called Decoration Day — now Memorial Day. When United States Colored Troops (USCT) had arrived in Charleston after the Civil War, they discovered that fallen comrades had been buried in a mass grave. They dug up the remains and reinterred them in individual graves. The first parade and celebration honoring the dead is said to have had 10,000 participants.

While Durrett still drives his cooker to a variety of historic festivals, wine festivals, food festivals and beer festivals, he recently purchased a trailer emblazoned with the words, “Army Man.” These days, it’s often parked in the lot of the Fairway 21 convenience store on South Elm/Eugene Street at Florida Street.

It’s a good idea to call ahead, because Durrett’s schedule at that location is somewhat sporadic depending upon what festivals he may be attending. In addition to ribs, chicken, fish and shrimp are on the menu — along with coleslaw and French fries.

The last time we spoke, I commented that I’d never seen Durrett outside the cab of his pickup. He laughed.

“That goes back to my Army days,” he says. “I have this degenerative problem with my kneecaps. It’s hard for me to walk around.”

I figure that must make his business even
more difficult, always being on the move with
his operation.

“You know, I never wanted a restaurant,” Durrett says. “Things change. You can have this nice building, and competition pops up next to you. Or someplace builds a road or bypass, and there goes your drive-by business.”

I ask Durrett what his dream situation would be, after his rib-cooking and barbecue-sauce-making days are over.

“Oh, man!” he says. “When I was cooking at these festivals at the beach, I got to know this fellow. In his 50s. One of those Wall Street types. He’d stop by, all sun-tanned, wearing his shorts and flip-flops, headed to the Borders Bookstore, you know, before they closed them all. He’d say, ‘I worked hard, Rex, so I could live poor.’ He just hung out at the beach, you know, then went to the bookstore. That would be me.”

Then I ask Durrett about his employees, the men and women who set up the grill, lug around the big propane bottles, cook, serve customers.

“Employees?” he replies. “I don’t have employees. The people who work with me are volunteers.” They come from 18 different groups in Durrett’s community — church organizations, Boy Scout troops, service providers. They share in the financial benefits of the Crazy Rib Man’s cooking.

“One lady, she provides guidance for young black men looking for employment,” Durrett says. “She’s out there working alone, telling them to hitch up their pants, stop showing their butts and underwear, you know? What she does is important. And she needs help.”

Durrett nods slowly.

“You got to give back to the community,” he says quietly. “That’s a given.”

Maybe Rex Durrett doesn’t remember much about the historic events in Memphis when he was a boy there, but something left him with a belief in his responsibility to share with others the benefits of his work.

The Crazy Rib Man. Still larger than life. OH

Ross Howell Jr. recently celebrated his 67th birthday with ribs from the Crazy Rib Man.

Food For Thought

On the final night before graduation, a young waitress discovered the more important lessons learned in college

 

By Maggie Dodson   

The first and only time I cried as a waitress was the night before my college graduation. The restaurant was fully booked, I was late (procuring a last-minute graduation gown), and it had been days since I’d washed my uniform. Kathi, the owner’s wife with a meticulous eye for detail, noticed a smudge on my apron and made a note of it in my file. The evening, which was to be my last at the restaurant, didn’t look promising.

Almost 365 days had passed since I’d started my first shift at L’Amante: an entire year of balancing hot plates on my arm and learning about Italian wine, of taking orders alongside a complex cast of characters who’d teach me about intimacy and friendship.     

On my first day, Sarah, a staff veteran, told me that making mistakes was a part of life, but not a part of L’Amante. She also warned me not to cry. “No one likes a crier,” she said, “especially not Kevin,” the owner and head chef.

As I trailed her around the dining room, learning her duties, I thought about my upcoming, final year of school. One more year of classes. One more year of nurturing the friendships I was told would last a lifetime. One more year to discover who I was.

Relatives, pop culture and guidance counselors all promise that you will not just find your calling in college, but your people. The sheer number of individuals makes it easier to find others with the same interests, passions and affinity for Hawaiian pizza. By the end of my junior year, I realized that though I had made some friends on campus, most were in the kitchen at L’Amante, sneaking bites of focaccia between rushing food out to hungry customers. 

Dena was the most memorable. She talked while she worked, often speaking of the difficulties of being a young mom, the fears she had for her son and how her body had changed with age. And she never held her tongue when it came to politics or sex. She talked openly about her mistakes and I was eager to listen; her attitude, a blueprint for unflappability. Her laugh was soft but full, like her blue eyeliner. I loved her.

As I quickly learned from Dena, working in a restaurant is inherently intimate. The chemistry between employees is palpable, mostly due to the proximity the job demands, and less because of actual attraction. Hands brush as plates are passed. Bodies press against each other while navigating space. Cheeks flush, brows sweat, and revealing stories are shared because there’s nothing better to do than talk.

After a year, I knew everyone’s story: how Kevin had worked in Tuscany and Kathi had followed him there, uneasy on her own but happy with him. That Sarah was a real estate agent who didn’t need a second job, but craved human connection. I knew Casey longed to reconnect with his daughter, but something in his past — maybe his temper or his drinking — had gotten in the way. I watched as Ian and his girlfriend broke up, got back together, and broke up again, each parting and subsequent reunion more explosive than the last. And I spent many nights, post-shift, dancing with Anna, each of us navigating the confusing world of male text messages.

What I remember most about my final night had nothing to do with the food or the mistakes I made during service. As I ate chicken liver pâté out of a tin ramekin (strictly forbidden), Dena told me she’d just found out that her son didn’t qualify for financial aid. Her dream of sending him to college was in danger of being deferred or broken altogether — and she wasn’t sure if she could shoulder the cost of tuition and make ends meet. She cried softly and wondered aloud about his future. I stood there, silent. The only thing left for me to do was to get my degree and to walk across a stage.

The evening ended with goodbyes, some tears and a promise to stay in touch. On my walk home, I marveled at the city’s atmosphere: the streetlights illuminating soon-to-be-graduates, drinking happily on patios and swaying to music.

As I got to the front porch of my house, I received a text from my dad. “Proud of you,” it read. My mind strayed to Dena, her son and their future.

Before bed, I ironed the fancy graduation dress I’d bought with my tips, and thought about the people I’d just left. They were my family. They were my college memories. They were my people, my close-knit group. Over the past year, we’d shared stories, meals, jokes, innuendo, sadness, cabs and that night, tears. College had shaped my intellectual world, but my nights as a waitress gave me a framework for the real one.  OH

Maggie Dodson is a wroter who lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Back at the Pound

Reflections on the Fourth

 

By Clyde Edgerton

Dog 1: What was all that shooting last night?

Dog 2: Wasn’t shooting, it was fireworks. July 4th.

It was going until after midnight.

I know.

What is July 4th?

Independence Day.

What does that mean?

It means that America got its freedom from England on July 4th, 1776 — and citizens have been celebrating ever since. Once a year.

Gosh, that was a long time ago.

You bet.

Did anything change for dogs after 1776?

Naw. Same old stuff. Good owners; bad owners; some in-between.

What was wrong with England?

They had a king — and since we were part of England, he was our king.

What was wrong with that?

Well, nothing as long as the king was a good king. If he was a bad one, like the 1776 one was — I think his name was Louis the 15th — then bad things happened to people and dogs because they didn’t have a chance to say what they wanted or needed. See, with a bad king, somebody could come into your owner’s house and shoot you and the king wouldn’t do anything about it.

Really?

That’s right, but then when America got free, Americans, under the Founding Fathers, made a lot of rules that were better than the rules in England.

Like what?

Well, if somebody goes into somebody’s house in America and shoots a dog then the police goes and gets the shooter, arrests him and then the justice system makes things right.

Really?

Oh, yes.

Who pays for that?

Well, the dog owner pays for that, of course. The dog owner has to buy property insurance to protect against the unwarranted and surprising destruction of a citizen’s property — like if somebody breaks in a human being’s house or steals a car, all that.

Really?

Oh yes. It’s done with something called “insurance.” Since nobody makes humans buy property they have to pay the policeman — on each policeman visit — a “co-pay.” Somewhere between 15 and 90 dollars. Then insurance, bought by the citizen, pays the rest. Sometimes an employee might pay part of it somehow, something called Propertycaid. But the protection of a human’s property is a human’s responsibility in the end, so they pay for that protection out of their own pocket — it’s not a “right.”

But wouldn’t everybody want to pitch in and help everybody else take care of their property? Like a big community where everybody looks out for everybody else. So that the police could be free? Maybe paid by taxes?

Oh no. Protection of property is not a right, it’s privilege that people must pay for individually — or in groups.

I don’t get it. What about when a germ invades a human’s body — why shouldn’t people have to buy their insurance for that? Something like health insurance.

Humans can’t predict if a germ is going to ruin their health or if cancer will invade their body.  They pay taxes to take care of that kind of stuff — we band together as a community to take care of that since health is more important than property. That’s why health care is free and police protection is not. Or is it the other way around? Hmmmm. Let me think. Surely property is not considered more protectable than health. Oh well, just be happy that since July 4th is over we don’t have to worry about all that human noise until next year. And we don’t have to worry about bad kings anymore either, thank goodness.  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.

Juvenile July

New summer releases to occupy young readers’ time and imagination

 

By Brian Lampkin

Admit it. It’s only July and already, the kids have driven you to serious thoughts of how good it would be for them to have extended summer camp in the Arctic. They could help feed the polar bears. At the very least you’ve moved cocktail hour several clicks closer to noon. Don’t worry, your case of frayed nerves is nothing a good book won’t help. Your sprouts will stay happily immersed in these great new children’s and young adult books and won’t bother you again until August. Here’s the highlights of kids literature released this month:

July 4: The Unicorn in the Barn, by Jacqueline Ogburn (Houghton Mifflin, $16.99).  The Story of Doctor Dolittle meets The Last Unicorn in this tender and illustrated middle-grade fantasy about a boy and the unicorn that changes his worldview. Ms. Ogburn lives in Durham.

July 4: You Can Fly: The Tuskegee Airmen, by Carole Boston Weatherford (Atheneum, $16.99). This is the paperback release for High Point’s own Ms. Weatherford. This history in verse celebrates the story of the Tuskegee Airmen: pioneering African-American pilots who triumphed in the skies and soared past the color barrier.

July 4: Who Was Andrew Jackson? by Douglas Yacka (Penguin, $5.99). In which we learn that Mr. Jackson died before he could have prevented the Civil War. Another in the long line of great Who Was books from Penguin.

July 11: 75 Years of Little Golden Books: 1942-2017: A Commemorative Set of 12 Best-Loved Books (Golden Books, $59.88). This beautiful, celebratory boxed set of 12 iconic Little Golden Books honors Golden Books 75th anniversary in 2017. Gold foil and beautiful cloth adorn this special package containing the following titles: The Poky Little Puppy, I Can Fly, The Sailor Dog, Scuffy the Tugboat, Wonders of Nature, The Three Bears, A Day at the Seashore, The Blue Book of Fairy Tales, I’m a Truck, I Am a Bunny, The Whispering Rabbit, and Katie the Kitten, a newly reissued 1949 title available only in this box.

July 11: The Land of Stories: Worlds Collide, by Chris Colfer (Little Brown, $19.99). In the highly anticipated conclusion to The Land of Stories series, Conner and Alex must brave the impossible. All of The Land of Stories fairy tale characters — heroes and villains — are no longer confined within their world!

July 18: Fragile Like Us, by Sara Barnard (Simon Pulse, $17.99). In the tradition of Sarah Dessen and Morgan Matson comes a pitch perfect YA novel about friendship and what it takes to break the bonds between friends.

July 25: Steven Universe Original Graphic Novel: Anti-Gravity (Kaboom, $14.99). Electromagentic disturbances cause objects and people around Beach City to hover off the ground, and the gang goes to the Gem Temple
to figure out what’s happening. Beach City has always been proudly weird, and this trip to the moon and
back is no different.

July 25: Far from the Tree: Young Adult Edition — How Children and Their Parents Learn to Accept One Another (Simon & Schuster, $18.99). When all else fails, perhaps we can live together after all. Elegantly reported by a spectacularly original and compassionate thinker, Far From the Tree explores how people who love each other must struggle to accept each other — a theme in every family’s life.  OH

Brian Lampkin is one of the proprietors of Scuppernong Books.

The Wickedest Town in the West

An OK place to visit, but you wouldn’t want to live there

 

By Stephen E. Smith

In the mid-1980s, actor Robert Mitchum appeared on a late-night talk show to promote his latest film. The host asked if the movie was worth the price of admission and Mitchum replied: “If it’s a hot afternoon, the theater is air conditioned, and you’ve got nothing else to do, what the hell, buy a ticket.”

Readers should adopt a similar attitude toward Tom Clavin’s Dodge City: Wyatt Earp, Bat Masterson, and the Wickedest Town in the American West. If you’re not doing anything on one of these hot summer afternoons, what the heck, give it a read.

Dodge City is a 20-year history of the Kansas military post turned cow town that has come down in popular culture as the Sodom of the make-believe Wild West. No doubt Dodge had its share of infamous gunfighters, brothels and saloons, including the Long Branch Saloon of Gunsmoke fame, and there were myriad minor dustups, but nix the Hollywood hyperbole, and Dodge City’s official history is straightforward: Following the Civil War, the Great Western Cattle Trail branched off from the Chisholm Trail and ran smack into Dodge, creating a transitory economic boom. The town grew rapidly in 1883 and 1884 and was a convergence for buffalo hunters and cowboys, and a distribution center for buffalo hides and cattle. But the buffalo were soon gone, and Dodge City had a competitor in the cattle business, the border town of Caldwell. Later cattle drives converged on the railheads at Abilene and Wichita, and by 1890, the cattle business had moved on, and Dodge City’s glory days were over.

Clavin focuses on the city’s rough-and-tumble years from 1870 through the 1880s, explicating pivotal events through the lives and times of the usual suspects — Bat Masterson, the Earp brothers, Doc Holliday et al. He fleshes out his narrative by including notorious personages not directly linked to Dodge City — Billy the Kid, John Wesley Hardin, Wild Bill Hickok, “Big Nose” Kate, Buffalo Bill Cody, Sitting Bull, the Younger brothers, and a slew of lesser characters such as “Dirty Sock” Jack, “Cold Chuck” Johnny and “Dynamite” Sam, all of whom cross paths much in the manner characters interact in Doctorow’s Ragtime. Also included are abbreviated histories of Tombstone — will we ever lose our fascination with the 30-second shootout at the O.K. Corral? — and Deadwood.

If all of this sounds annoyingly familiar, it is. There’s no telling how many Wild West biographies, histories, novels, feature films, TV series, documentaries, etc., have been cranked out in the last 140 years, transforming us all into cowboy junkies. Our brief Western epoch has so permeated world ethea that blue jean-clad dudes in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, might be heard to say, “I’m getting the hell out of Dodge,” in Uzbek, of course.

Clavin offers what amounts to a caveat in his Author’s Note: “. . . Dodge City is an attempt to spin a yarn as entertaining as tales that have been told before but one that is based on the most reliable research. I attempted to follow the example of the Western Writers of America, whose members over the years have found the unique formula of combining strong scholarship with entertaining writing.”

So what we have is a hybrid, a quasi-history not quite up to the standards of popular history, integrated into a series of underdeveloped episodic adventure tales that ultimately fail to entertain. If Doris Kearns Goodwin and David McCullough are your historians of choice, you’ll find that Dodge City falls with a predictable thud. It’s simply more of the same Western hokum. The writing isn’t exceptional, the research is perfunctory, most of the pivotal events are common knowledge, and the characters are so familiar as to breed contempt.

If you have a liking for yarns by writers such as Louis L’Amour, Luke Short and Larry McMurtry, Dodge City isn’t going to make your list of favorite Westerns. Without embellishment, the narrative loses its oomph, and the episodic structure diminishes any possibility of a thematic continuity, which is, of course, that the lawlessness that marked Dodge City’s formative years is a metaphor for the country as a whole, that violence and corruption are a fundamental component of American life.

On a positive note, readers of every persuasion will likely find the book’s final chapter intriguing. Clavin follows his principal characters to the grave. Wyatt, the last surviving Earp brother, ended his days in Los Angeles at the age of 80. Doc Holliday died in Colorado of tuberculosis at 36, his boots off. “Big Nose” Kate, Doc’s paramour, lived until 1940 at the Arizona Pioneers’ Home, dying at the age of 89.

Of particular interest is Bartholomew William Barclay “Bat” Masterson, Wyatt Earp’s dapper buddy in the “lawing” business. Whereas Earp’s claim to fame ended with his exploits as a Western peace officer and cow town ruffian, Masterson went on to a life of greater achievement. He became an authority on prizefighting and was in attendance at almost every important match fought during his later years. He was friends with John L. Sullivan, Jack Johnson and Jack Dempsey. In 1902, he moved to New York City and worked as a columnist for the New York Morning Telegraph. His columns covered boxing and other sporting events, and he produced op-ed pieces on crime, war, politics, and often wrote of his personal life. He became a close friend of President Theodore Roosevelt and remained a celebrity until his death in 1921.

It promises to be a long, hot, unsettling summer. If you’ve got nothing better to do, turn off cable news, slap down $29.99 and give Dodge City a read. It’s little enough to pay for a few hours of blessed escapism.  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.

Apron String Music

Josie Kite makes the ties that bind

 

By Maria Johnson

I’d been looking for a gardener’s vest or apron — something I could use to carry a trowel, pruning shears, gloves, wire, sunscreen, bug spray, water — and maybe a cell phone to call for help when I collapsed under the weight of my beautification equipment.

So when I zipped through the Greensboro Farmers Curb Market on a recent Wednesday morning, a stall with a sign that said “Angel Apron, Etc.” caught my eye.

Actually, the mannequin under the sign got my attention first. It was a torso wearing a string of pearls and an apron made from a snazzy cotton print with an ice cream motif. It was whimsical enough for me to hit the brakes and notice a rack of other boisterous aprons hanging behind it.

“Do you have any gardening aprons? Short ones?” I asked a twinkle-eyed lady in the stall. She was dressed in all shades of purple: lavender hat, grape blouse, amethyst scarf, lilac fingernails.

“Sure, come in here,” she said, inviting me behind the counter.

She reached up to a row of hangers and grabbed two candidates, both of them vinyl numbers not much bigger than mini-skirts.

“See, they have the pockets in front, and you can wash them off.  Try them on.”

She offered a mirror.

A few minutes later, I was writing Josie Kite a check for an apron blaring with a bright tropical design.

“That’s a happy one,” she said. “It makes you happy to put it on, doesn’t it?”

“Yeah, it does,” I said.

“They all give you a different feeling,” she went on. “Sometimes when I buy these fabrics, I think, I wonder who I’m making this for? Then they find you, and I know.”

There are no random aprons, customers, or meetings to Josie, who first came to Greensboro in 1973. She came from her hometown of Jacksonville, Florida, to visit her sisters, who were then students at N.C. A&T State University.

Josie stayed. She raised her son, Craig Brooks, here. She ran a limousine service. Later, she did marketing for a cigarette company. She traveled a lot, and the stress wore on her. She played tennis to relax.

“If I was stressed out, whoever had stressed me out was that ball. Bam! You understand? That made me feel a whole lot better,” she remembered.

Around 1998, her cousin Ervin Butler asked her to make him an apron. He was 6-3 or 6-4, a tall drink of water, as Josie likes to say. He was also a fisherman, so Josie found some material with fish on it. She made a big apron for Ervin and a tiny one for his grandson E.J.

“I got back to that sewing machine, and it was like I was home,” she said.

Sewing soothed her. She toyed with the idea of leaving her job. Then she met a lady, a numerologist in California, and their conversation tipped the scale.

“You’re supposed to be doing something creative,” the numerologist said.

Josie told her that she’d been making aprons and that she’d dreamed of a name for a business: Angel Aprons.

“‘Take the ‘s’ off, and you’ll be OK,” the woman suggested. “Each apron represents one person.”

Josie took it to heart, the bond between an apron and the person who wears it. She sews a label inside every waistband: “My angel apron.”

“I always say, ‘Thank you for coming in to pick up your apron,’ because that’s what it is,” she said, “There’s a spirit there. Like when you came in here, you had a certain feeling, and that apron chose you. That was your apron.”

Josie makes other items, too, on her retro-colored turquoise sewing machine: tea cozies, pot grabbers, yoga mat bags, and T-shirt quilts among them.

Half of her business comes from special orders.

One customer, an eye surgeon, wanted a custom-made skullcap.

“She said, ‘Can you find me some fabric with eyeballs on it?’ Well, I put it in Google — ‘cotton fabric with eyeballs’— and I found it,” Josie said.

Another woman ordered a stack of pot grabbers covered with moose. She was taking them to a family reunion of her mother’s people, the Mooses.

A carpenter asked Josie to make a denim apron embedded with rare-earth magnets so he could stick screwdrivers, nails and such to the outside. Done.

A woman who welds jewelry brought Josie some purple leather, and Josie fixed her up with a long, protective sheath.

Josie has lots of repeat customers.

Terry Ball, a Greensboro accountant, bought an apron for her granddaughter, Anna Katharine, before she was born. Anna Katharine, now 15, is in her fourth Josie apron. Her second apron is being used as a thunder jacket for the family’s dog.

“People tell me about all kinds of unintended uses,” Josie said, laughing.

“Every apron has a story because every person has a story.”

We talked about the memories tied up in aprons. Josie, who’s the youngest-looking 71-year- old woman you’ll ever see, remembered her mother and grandmother having two aprons: one for cooking and another, fancier one, for putting on after the cooking was done, but before company arrived.

I recalled my grandmother’s apron, which kept dumpling flour off her church dresses and doubled as a hammock for shelled lima beans, pecans and sun-warmed tomatoes.

Josie smiled with recognition. “One day,” she said, “someone might remember me gardening in my funky hibiscus apron.”

“It’s so much more than a piece of fabric wrapped around you. It’s just magical, don’t you think?”  OH

Maria Johnson is hardy in USDA to Zones 7 to 13. You can reach her at ohenrymaria@gmail.com.

They Only Come Out at Night

The Grove Street People’s Market is
open to evening shoppers

 

At 6:15 on a hot Thursday night in May, about 10 vendors have set up at the Grove Street People’s Market inside the boundaries of the parking lot at the corner of Glenwood Avenue and Grove Street.

Fermentologist Amy Peddie says the market promotes fellowship and entrepreneurship. Anybody in the community can set up and sell — there are no vendor fees. In addition, the market partners with Cone Health and runs a community garden where gardening classes are taught.

Instead of craft beer, Peddie’s fermented items are of the kimchi variety, using the lowly cabbage as a base. Tonight she’s featuring five kinds of the pickled, savory cabbage, including Green Kraut, Beetiful Cutrido (made with beets), Red (from Korean hot peppers) Kimchi and the white version (made from Korean radish. With a B.S. in Chemistry, she is a skilled lacto-fermentation-ator and teaches courses in pickling (fermentologyfoods@gmail .com for details).

A short jaunt across the parking lot, the lady with the beatific smile behind the African Sister and Catering banner introduces herself as Nsona. Featuring chicken, beignets, greens and pintos, her spread reaches from Brazil to Jamaica, from New Orleans to Africa.

Sister Nsona got her start in the food business nine years ago when she ran a small restaurant and catering business out of a building on the corner of Glenwood and Grove, across the street. Her African greens stew is a one-of-a-kind dish and her Jamaican jerk chicken, though spicy, does the set fire to the roof of your mouth.

In another interesting cultural juxtaposition, an old-time string band featuring dulcimer, banjo, fiddle and guitar releases Appalachian arias into the night air.

A couple of vendors are selling small plants — eggplant, cukes, parsley, basil and cabbage sprouts. “A dollar or two, or we just give ’em away,” one young lady says of her wares from a community garden just around the corner.

Diarra and Elizabeth Legget’s Boomerang Bookshop Nomad Chapter bookstore on wheels is on its maiden voyage. Founded just two weeks ago, the Leggets’ self-described “foray into entrepreneurship” grew out of Diarra’s work history in a brick-and-mortar bookstore.

Mama J’s Goodness Cookies began as a healthy snack for her kids. Made with “wholesome ingredients and a whole lotta love,” her spicy popcorn seasoned with curry, chile and garlic powder really kicks your tastes buds around.

The Grove Street People’s Market is open every Thursday, from 6–8 p.m. and every third Saturday from 5–8 p.m. Info: www.facebook.com/grovestpeoplesmarket/

–Grant Britt

Supper on the Porch

Old friends, a well-traveled table,
a summer evening to remember

 

By Jim Dodson

On a fine summer night not long ago, seven friends came to supper on the porch.

They arrived bearing good wine, eager to see what we’d done with the old house we purchased six months ago. Since five of the seven guests were also serious wine buffs, bottles were quickly opened and the party moved out to our huge screened porch where my wife had set our antique English wedding table for supper.

The porch is a large screened affair that spans almost the entire back portion of the house. It features a floor and foundation made from antique brick and exposed beams with large old-style ceiling fans overhead.

Quite honestly, when we first saw it, we weren’t sure what to do with such a large empty space. The screens were old and dusty and the floor was uneven in places. Moreover, off the west end of the porch was a terrace with brick planters overgrown with English ivy set beneath a large pergola that had clearly seen better days. Since I knew this house as a boy — it sits two doors from the house where I grew up and was my favorite house in the neighborhood as a kid — I remembered how the Corry family seemed to live on this porch way back when, in part because it sat beneath hundred-year-old white oaks and a lower canopy of dogwoods and silver bell trees, providing deep shade and a cool retreat on the hottest of summer days. I remembered Mama Merle loving her big sprawling porch. 

One early thought we had was to replace the screens with oversized weather-tight windows and create a four-season family room that could function as a small ballroom in a pinch. We also contemplated halving the porch in size and adding an outdoor fireplace — or even removing the rambling old extension altogether to expand a yard that resembled an urban jungle.

“Let’s live with it a while,” proposed my ever-practical bride. “The porch may grow on us — and tell us what we should do.”

In the meantime, over the winter and early spring, I knocked apart the aging pergola and opened up the terrace, cleaning out the overgrown planter beds and filling them with young hosta plants. I also removed a dozen wicked Mahonia plants and a small acre of English ivy and runaway wisteria, and began creating a Japanese shade garden beneath the dogwoods and silver bells.

By the time true spring arrived my back garden was looking rather promising, but the big old porch remained empty until my wife had an interesting idea.

“Let’s move our wedding table out there and make this our three-season dining room,” she said, pointing out that the size of the porch made it essentially indifferent to weather.

Our dining table is a beautiful old thing I spotted in a Portland, Maine, English antique shop and purchased for my fiancée as a wedding present two decades ago. It’s an early 19th-century English farm table from Oxfordshire that came with its own documenting papers listing at least a dozen a family names that had allegedly owned it before us. Beyond its impressive strength and workmanship, the thing I most love about it are the nicks and dents and discolorations of time that mark the table’s long journey through this world. Our family has gathered around it for every holiday meal since the day it arrived in our household, and sometimes as I listen to the eddies of conversations that take place around it, I can’t help but think about the voices that table has heard over the past century and a half, the intimate stories, the debates and conversations, fiery oaths and whispers of love.

Before moving it out to Miss Merle’s porch, however, my wife set about cleaning every surface of the porch including the elegant ceiling fans and screens while I got to work on the floor, leveling the bricks and using a distressing technique to paint the brick floor a faded woodland green.

That’s when a kind of alchemy began to take place.

The big room suddenly seemed to come alive with a human charm all its own. Soon we added plants and an antique sideboard that had never fit in the main house even found a destined spot on the porch. I hung the custom-made iron candelabra from our old house in Maine and my bride strung small clear white lights along the roofline as a finishing touch. We suddenly had the perfect place for a pair of fine old wicker chairs we’d kept in storage forever, and an antique iron table and reading lamp that had never quite found their place. A large sisal rug Wendy found online was the final piece of the puzzle.

By the time our first supper on the porch was well underway, our guests were all commenting on the beauty of the room beneath the trees.

“I don’t think I’ve seen a more beautiful porch,” said my childhood friend, Susan, who lived in Charleston, South Carolina for years and has a designer’s eye for everything. “It’s so rustic and simple.”

“Don’t change a thing about this porch,” urged Joe, a buddy from high school who is an exceptional builder and expert on wood. He made some excellent small suggestions about replacing the vinyl soffits with wooden panels with inset lighting that would make the room even more dramatic.

The lively dinner went on much longer than expected. The stories flew, the candles flickered, the wine flowed, and the earthy scent of my restored garden drifted through the screens. At their end of the table, the wine buffs had a fine time swapping tales of their intricate journeys toward grape enlightenment.

Sipping my French sparkling water, it was enough for me to simply sit and listen to my friends go on about life and wine in ways I suspect that old wedding table had heard before over the years, taking its own pleasure in our screen porch fellowship. Don and Cindy talked about their extensive wine tours out West. Susan told a charming tale about being whisked away by a friend to Europe where she was put up and feted at a pair of the most elite vineyards in France and Italy. “It was like something from a fairy tale,” she admitted. 

Somewhere about the time the strawberry and whipped cream cake was being served, my closest table companion leaned over and mentioned to me that she was thinking of walking home. It wasn’t far, only a few blocks, and the night was gorgeously moonlit. “They won’t even notice I’m gone,” Terry said with a coy smile, finishing her own glass of white wine.

Terry is my oldest friend Patrick’s wife. I’ve known her since we sat near each other in high school choir 45 years ago. A few years back Terry and Patrick sold their big house on the north side of town and moved back to the old neighborhood, a move that in part inspired my wife and me to do the same. We now lived just three long blocks apart.

“Mulligan and I will walk with you,” I proposed, prompting my favorite dog to dutifully bolt for the kitchen door.

So off we went beneath a nearly full moon that displayed one exceptionally bright planet just beneath its southern rim. Terry asked me if I knew the planet’s name but I couldn’t be sure — I guessed Mercury, incorrectly.  Still, it was lovely strolling along our darkened street with its ancient trees making the darkness seem even deeper, the neighborhood even quieter. As it happened, Terry and I both had recently undergone similar kinds of surgeries. We made little jokes about that fact — at least I did — and Terry, who is one year older and many years wiser, admonished me that I would feel fatigued for many weeks yet to come, not to push myself back into my usual 15-hour work routine.

“The world will still be there after you take time to rest and heal,” she pointed out.

“Suppers like tonight may help,” I said.

“That porch is wonderful,” she came back. “I’m so glad you didn’t change it.”

“I think it changed us,” I agreed, kissing her cheek goodnight. 

On the walk back to our house, I was thinking how all it took was a little time and Wifely creativity, a well-traveled table and a circle of close friends breaking bread and drinking wine to transform a big empty space into something intimate and special. Objects, like people, respond to love, and since that first night of supper and fellowship, the big old porch has become my favorite spot where I do everything, from writing before dawn to reading at night. It is my sanctuary where I just sit and plot my garden or simply daydream and maybe even heal.

Halfway home, something else wonderful happened. A large night bird swooped low over my head and rose to an arching limb 20 feet above Old Man Dodson and his dog. I shined my light upward and discovered, rather startlingly, a large snowy owl staring down at me with an imperturbable calmness. The only one I’d ever seen was back home in Maine. I knew that snowy owls nested in the Arctic tundra and wondered how far this old fellow had come — or had yet to go.

Back in our driveway, the departing wine buffs were looking up at the moon with celestial-reading apps on their I-phones. What an age of wonders, I thought. An ancient owl and phones that could decipher the night sky — all within the same block.

I told them about the snowy owl visiting just down the street.

“There’s a sign of some kind,” said Susan with a husky laugh.

Joe the naturalist pointed out that eagles and northern species of owls had been returning to the city’s northern lakes of late, adopting new habitats in an ever-changing world.

He also pointed out that the bright planet was, in fact, Jupiter, and that at least three of Jupiter’s four moons were visible at that moment, a rare celestial event.

“That makes two in one night,” I heard myself say, thinking how far we’ve all come, how far we’ve yet to go.  OH

Contact Editor Jim Dodson at jim@thepilot.com.