Penn-ultimate Pleasures

North Carolina’s first family of swing is still going strong

By Maria Johnson

After 60 years, how do Dixie and George Penn keep the sparkle in their music and marriage?

Dixie, 77, whips out a small battery-powered device — her iPhone.

“We go to bed with this every night,” she says. “He has his, and I have mine.”

“Sometimes she says, ‘Turn it down,’ “ he says softly.

Sharing YouTube music videos is a guilty pleasure, far different from the days when they embarked on the entertainment and romance business. Back then, in the mid-1950s, they were teenagers. Dixie ran to the radio and jotted down the lyrics of songs she wanted to learn. George, a saxophonist, drove his arrangements of popular tunes over to her house on the pretense that he just happened to be passing through Gretna, Virginia, a speck of a town 30 miles from where he lived in Danville, a slightly bigger speck.

“That’s kinda how you . . .” Dixie starts.

“Snowed your mother,” George says.

Sixty years will do that to you. You finish each other’s sentences, know each other’s paths, pitfalls and punch lines.

Dixie and George anticipate each other, whether they’re sitting in the formal living room of the home they’ve shared in Madison since 1968, or performing for the thousandth time — no exaggeration — in front of an audience that laps up their jazzy, swingy, big-bandy sounds.

These days, their performances happen mostly in the lobby of Greensboro’s O.Henry Hotel.

The Penn family — either the full gang of six or some permutation of Dixie, George and their four daughters — play the hotel’s free jazz series regularly.

On December 8, all of them will convene at the hotel for a special concert celebrating the couple’s 60 years of marriage and 62 years of making music together.

“Music is the heartbeat of that household, for sure,” says Victoria Clegg, who curates the jazz series. “It’s just remarkable to me that that’s how George and Dixie met, and then that they had four daughters who are so incredibly talented.”

The best way to see the arc of their lives, Dixie says, is by decade. She hands over an outline written in her flowing hand. Here’s a fleshed-out version:

1940s: She’s Got Talent

Nine-year-old George Penn sees 7-year-old Dixie Hendrix in a talent show at the Belk-Leggett department store in Danville, Virginia.

Dixie wears a pinafore and belts out “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah,” from the Disney film Song of the South.

She wins first prize. Perhaps blinded by her success, she does not see George.

1950s: The Spark

Dixie is 16 and somewhat of a celebrity in the Greater Gretna area because a) she has her own weekly radio show, a 15-minute segment sponsored by her home-builder father, b) she is the drum major at Gretna High School and c) she gives free baton twirling lessons to local kids.

“You know how people love it when you do things for their children,” she will say later.

One day, she gets a letter from Charlie Price, leader of the Russ Carlton Orchestra in Danville, who heard about her singing ability. He invites her to audition. George is a saxophonist in the band. This time, Dixie sees him. He is 18 and headed to Virginia Tech. He has a girlfriend. She has a boyfriend.

Not for long.

They marry while George is in college, on January 3, 1959, during Christmas break.

They travel to gigs on weekends and see a variety of behavior: fights, frat boys licking beer off the floor, audience members unplugging the band’s speakers and plucking the drumsticks from a drummer’s hands.

They play on because audiences are generally respectful. Appreciative. Fun-loving.

The Penns are having fun, too.

They are in love. With music. With each other.

1960s: New York, New York

George graduates, mothballs the horn, and takes a job in the New York City office of Gem-Dandy Inc., maker of belts, suspenders and sleeve garters.

They live in the suburbs. Dixie joins the Larchmont Junior League and its a cappella group, The Soundettes. She also sings in the community chorus, which is directed by bandleader Lew Anderson, formerly Clarabell the clown on the Howdy Doody television show.

Anderson knows Doc Severinsen, a trumpeter and future bandleader on Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show. Severinsen does a concert with the chorus. Dixie solos with “Lullaby of Broadway.”

George dusts off the saxophone and jams with local musicians.

Their daughters inherit the entertainment gene. Baby Vaughan wails in perfect pitch.

The next two girls, Elaine and Elizabeth, possess angelic voices, too.

One day, George announces they’re moving to Madison, the company headquarters in Rockingham County, north of Greensboro.

Dixie is dumfounded. She doesn’t want to go.

But Madison grows on her.

1970s: Children, children and more children

Georgianna is the fourth and final package of perfect pitch.

Dixie and George gig from time to time with the Red Vests, a Dixieland band in Eden, or with the Dave Cook Combo from Danville.

Mostly, they herd children in a swirl of school, church, sports and song. They provide musical instruments. Piano lessons. Turntables and tape decks. The basement becomes a rehearsal space. When the rhythm picks up, the floor shakes under the linoleum in the kitchen above.

1980s: Politics as Usual

Dixie graduates from UNCG in 1983 with a degree in therapeutic education and a minor in recreation. She becomes director of the Madison-Mayodan Recreation Department, a joint effort of the side-by-side cities. She juggles playgrounds and small-town politics.

She also manages La Vogue, the family band. Hey, it’s the ’80s.

Here’s the rule: If you are in the family, you are in the band. Most of the time, it works well. Except when it doesn’t because . . . four teenage girls.

They fight over clothes, jewelry, and everything else. But something happens when the band kicks in. The girls sing and smile and focus on the music. You can’t sing upbeat songs and be angry. Music breaks the circuit.

Every gig confirms what George and Dixie know: they are happiest while performing.

Taking big vacations? Bleck. Spinning around the dance floor as consumers of music, not creators? Boring.

“We tried doing what other people did and it didn’t work,” Dixie will reflect later. “We went back to doing what we wanted to do, and we were so happy.”

1990s: Empty Nest

The girls, now young women, scatter. Vaughan goes to Los Angeles to write music for TV and movies. She will share the stage with Emmylou Harris, Darius Rucker and Huey Lewis and others.

Elaine, who was an All-American basketball player at Greensboro College, moves to Wilmington, where she makes environmental documentaries and continues to perform.

Elizabeth jumps into entertainment production at Busch Gardens in Williamsburg, Virginia.

Georgianna takes a turn at Busch Gardens, too, then joins Vaughan in Los Angeles. They appear as extras on shows including Bay Watch and the medical drama E.R.

Dixie and George visit them on the set and meet an actor, a nice fellow also named George . . . Clooney.

Back home, Dixie and George play with a combo called “50s Plus,” a nod to 1950s music.

The Penns are in their 50s, too. Family life is changing, but all is not lost. Lyrics.com and cell phones small enough to carry to bed are on the horizon.

2000–2018 (condensed): The Flock Returns

Slowly, the far-flung family coalesces back in North Carolina. Vaughan, a writer, singer and producer, lives near Charlotte.

Elaine, who does motivational speaking, music and marketing, lives in Madison.

Elizabeth lives in Greensboro. A physical therapist, she directs rehabilitation at the UNC Hospital in Eden. She continues to do musical production.

Georgianna lives in Greensboro, too. She is a freelance writer and does marketing for Charlie’s Soap, the Madison-based company that George went to work for when he retired from Gem-Dandy.

Dixie retired from the parks and rec job, for the third time, last year.

The flock flies loosely under the banner of Penn Family Music, which means at least two people named Penn will show up.

Getting everyone together is rare, but the reunions often happen around a show.

“It’s the highlight of our music, having them all together,” says George.

“I can’t tell you what joy it brings,” says Dixie.

Sometimes, they team up with the Greensboro Big Band, directed by Mike Day. The whole crew will play for the Piedmont Swing Dance Society on the Saturday after Thanksgiving.

The anniversary show at the O.Henry Hotel will happen a few weeks later. Dixie and George probably will sing a duet.

They sang together for the first time last October. They trilled another love song for church seniors this past September.

This tickled Dixie — but not in the way you might expect.

“His mouth goes so funny, I cannot watch him,” she says. “I thought I would die. I laughed halfway through the song, waiting for it. Then, I started crying because when he came in, it was so beautiful. His harmony was so beautiful.”

Did she feel he was singing to her?

“No,” she says flatly.

“I gotta find a third song,” he says softly.

Celebrating five years of O.Henry Jazz

By Georgianna Penn

Sergio Ward, of WQFS 90.9’s Jet Set Jazz Radio, often refers to O.Henry Jazz as “the gift that keeps on giving.” It certainly is for me and my family. I’ve been performing with my sisters and parents, George and Dixie Penn, for several decades in the Triad and we are blessed to be a part of the O.Henry Jazz Series.

Picking up the mantle of earlier jazz clubs — Sammy’s, Green’s, Plantation Club, Sam’s Canterbury Inn — Thursday Cocktails & Jazz at 5:30 p.m. and Select Saturdays at 6:30 p.m. feature practically every subgenre — Dixieland, Swing, Blues, Bossa Nova, Cole Porter, a little Gershwin and whole lot of the Great American Songbook — all of it originating from the magical space of the Social Lobby of the O.Henry Hotel.

It’s a favorite spot for CEO and chief design officer Dennis Quaintance, who often makes it a point of stopping by on Thursday evenings. “It’s just very meaningful when you see this sort of joy emanating from this room,” he says, explaining that the thriving O.Henry Jazz Series is an affirmation of his vision and that of his friend and guiding spirit for the hotel’s design, the late Don Rives.

With the Algonquin Hotel as inspiration, Rives made sure the high-ceiling space was welcoming with rich paneling, warm lighting and plush furniture arranged for easy conversation.

“Even the moldings break up the sound differently than if that was just a flat ceiling, so it ends up being acoustically warm and not acoustically hot,” Quaintance notes. But it’s the musicians who conjure the magic.

Five years ago, at the recommendation of well-known musician Jessica Mashburn, who was working at the Green Valley Grill, Quaintance hired Neill Clegg (sax, flute, clarinet), husband of series curator Victoria Clegg. She suggested his colleague at Greensboro College, pianist Dave Fox. A few years later “first call” bassist Matt Kendrick, came aboard. The O.Henry Trio was born. “It’s about the intention and this sort of love and passion by Victoria, by Neill, by Dave and by Matt . . . their energy is palpable,” Quaintance observes.

Perhaps because each of them is “a singer’s musician,” as Victoria Clegg puts it. My own experience working with the Trio is like attending a master class, though Neill Clegg will tell you that jazz should be a conversation between the singer and musician. The creativity is in the conversation and that’s what makes it intimate for the listener.

“One of the nicest things that happens at the O.Henry is when you see the musicians and the vocalists take someone back in time,” says Victoria Clegg.

Little wonder the first show drew 130 people, many of them still regulars. For the musicians, “It’s a big community sandbox,” Victoria Clegg continues. “You now have this great place to show your wares in the fashion in which they should be displayed.” Steve Haines, a bassist and professor of music in UNCG’s Miles Davis Jazz Studies program, appreciates the cultural significance of the series: “Victoria and her friends at Quaintance-Weaver have put a feather in the cap for music in Greensboro.”

Tapping local talent instead of musicians from elsewhere is the cornerstone of the program. “The foundation is that we’re people who live here . . . and so, it ought to be sort of neighbors being gracious to neighbors,” Quaintance says. “It’s astonishing to me the musical talent that exists, not just in the jazz genre, but in general.”

Victoria Clegg considers each performance a gift “and every week it’s wrapped differently depending upon who the artist is, a different package,” she says. “I always think if O.Henry could speak he would say, ‘job well done, job well done’ with this little grin on his face.”  OH

For schedule of shows visit ohenryhotel.com.

Family Dinners

The more they change over time, the more we need them

By Susan S. Kelly

Sure, sure, it’s turkey time, but how about the other 364 dinners someone needs to dream up, whip up, order up, serve up, and clean up for the hungry hordes? It’s been said that every family has a 10-meal rotation that they unconsciously stick to. Chicken, pork chops, spaghetti. Tacos, brats, pasta. Then it’s leftover night, or pizza night, and the rotation begins again.

In direct opposition to this menu stasis theory is the fact that, like everything else on the planet, family dinners change and evolve. At first, they’re wild, untamed things, with high chairs and thrown food. In time, bibs are replaced with napkins, and manners. The toddler turns 6, and learns to set the table. Actual conversation takes place during a family dinner, unless you make the mistake of asking a 7-year-old about the movie he saw, because a 7-year-old’s synopsis tends to last through dessert.

Then comes school. School, school, school. Tired of hearing about school, my mother decided to select a topic for discussion during our family dinners. “Tonight we’re going to talk about art,” she said one memorable table time. Muteness ensued. Cornbread was consumed. The experiment was an abject failure. Family dinners cannot bear that burden. Like nature itself, they have to wander all over the place and sprout in different directions. Also like nature, there’s an exception to every absolute: My children had friends whose parents, over Sunday dinner, would pay their kids a dollar if they could summarize the sermon at church. Their dinner table topic stayed on point. My sister handled the nightly kitchen table convos by asking everyone what the worst and best parts of their day had been. Her husband’s answer never varied: worst — getting out of bed; best — getting into bed.

Every family dinner has its accoutrements other than food. On television shows, families had sodas at dinner; only milk was served at our table. I longed for a spinning lazy Susan in the center of the table, bearing ketchup and Texas Pete bottles on its swiftly appointed rounds. I’d have settled for an upright napkin holder, so you could fish another out when yours fell out of your lap, or got sticky or shredded — a yearning that probably explains why I tend toward cloth napkins now for family dinners. Still, I hid those cloth ones away one Christmas so we could use holiday-themed ones, and didn’t find them until the following September. And still, family dinners had proceeded right on, with the one-ply paper ones.

Happy is the day when evolution gets ’round to when children can cook, rather than complain, about the unfamiliar vegetable, or the texture of the meatloaf. Then, each family member can “take a night” on a vacation, or a Wednesday. They delightedly pick the menu, proceed to shop, prepare, serve and wash up, while you contentedly enjoy the sunset, or the news. As long as you’re also content to foot the bill for tenderloin filets, or dine cheerfully on boiled hot dogs. A new era of family dinners is ushered in when girlfriends and boyfriends arrive on the scene. No more dishing out from pots and pans on the stovetop; time to up the game and make an impression with actual serving dishes. Flowers in a vase. Not candlelight, though: too much of a statement. Where there once was a clamor over who gets to say the blessing grows the nervousness of who gets picked to say the blessing.

Every family experiences years when organizing a dinner together centers around sports, meetings, babysitting and jobs, a task on a par with planning the invasion of Normandy. I wrote a novel whose plot included a family member who’d died unexpectedly. Of the grief-stricken moments of daily minutiae that followed, the most sorrowful was the evening the mother opened a kitchen drawer and gazed at the placemats. She realized that the rotating stack of four — checkered, straw, quilted — would now resume as three. The pattern of family dinners had been forever altered, hammered home by a detail as devastatingly simple as a pattern of placemats. Still, families consist of only two, too. My husband and I light candles every night. After 60, low lights are beneficial. Even the food looks better.

Fifty in a field for a reunion, four for chicken tetrazzini, a pair on stools at the counter with a bowl of soup. Breakfast for dinner. The Sunday steak. Take-out. A USPS delivery from a specialty service with every ingredient, plus recipes, included. Or just the specialty of the house — one of those 10 meals. In the end, only three ingredients truly define a family dinner: Food. Conversation. People.  OH

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

Ladies of Literature

Celebrating women writers among November’s releases

Compiled by Brian Lampkin

It’s November 2018. A month of real meaning for the future. This is also a month full of great new books by women. Let’s celebrate women writers as we anticipate a future with more and more women in places of power.

November 6: Beyond the Call: Three Women on the Front Lines in Afghanistan, by Eileen Rivers. A riveting account of three women who fought shoulder-to-shoulder with men in Afghanistan and worked with local women to restore their lives and village communities. They marched under the heat with 40-pound rucksacks on their backs. They fired M16s out of the windows of military vehicles, defending their units in deadly firefights. And they did things that their male counterparts could never do — gather intelligence on the Taliban from the women of Afghanistan.

November 6: Monument: Poems New and Selected, by Natasha Trethewey. Two-time U.S. Poet Laureate and Pulitzer Prize winner Natasha Trethewey’s new and selected poems, drawing upon Domestic Work, Bellocq’s Ophelia, Native Guard, Congregation, and Thrall, while also including new work written over the last decade.

November 6: Grits: A Cultural and Culinary Journey Through the South, by Erin Byers Murray. For food writer Erin Byers Murray, grits had always been one of those basic, bland Southern table necessities — something to stick to your ribs or dollop the butter and salt onto. But after hearing a famous chef wax poetic about the terroir of grits, her whole view changed. Suddenly the boring side dish of her youth held importance, nuance and flavor. She decided to do some digging to better understand the fascinating and evolving role of grits in Southern cuisine and culture as well as her own Southern identity.

November 13: Bringing Down the Colonel: A Sex Scandal of the Gilded Age, and the “powerless” Woman Who Took on Washington, by Patricia Miller. In Bringing Down the Colonel, the journalist Patricia Miller tells the story of Madeline Pollard, an unlikely 19th-century women’s rights crusader. After an affair with a prominent politician left her “ruined,” Pollard brought the man — and the hypocrisy of America’s control of women’s sexuality — to trial. And, surprisingly, she won.

November 13. Becoming, by Michelle Obama. In a life filled with meaning and accomplishment, Michelle Obama has emerged as one of the most iconic and compelling women of our era. As First Lady of the United States of America — the first African American to serve in that role — she helped create the most welcoming and inclusive White House in history, while also establishing herself as a powerful advocate for women and girls in the United States and around the world, dramatically changing the ways that families pursue healthier and more active lives, and standing with her husband as he led America through some of its most harrowing moments. Along the way, she showed us a few dance moves, crushed Carpool Karaoke and raised two down-to-earth daughters under an unforgiving media glare.

November 20: Tony’s Wife, by Adriana Trigiani. From the Jersey shore to Hollywood, New York City to Las Vegas, the hills of northern Italy and the exuberant hayride of the big band circuit in between: Tony’s Wife tells the story of the 20th century in song. Adriana Trigiani is the bestselling author of seventeen books, and is cofounder of the Origin Project, an in-school writing program that serves more than one thousand students in Appalachia.

November 27: The Collector’s Apprentice, by B. A. Shapiro. Shapiro has made the historical art thriller her own: “B.A. Shapiro is back with a platinum potion of art, love and scandal, set against the big backdrop of Paris between the wars. If you can put The Collector’s Apprentice down, you’re made of stronger stuff than I am. I read it in one sumptuous sitting. This is a big story, from a big talent.” — Jacquelyn Mitchard, author of The Deep End of the Ocean.  OH

Brian Lampkin is one of the proprietors of Scuppernong Books.

Lost Cause

Doing battle with the autumn winds,

the fragile leaves present their colors.

They shake their pointed fingers

in a wild dance, then regroup.

In the end, there is no reprieve;

strength overcomes determination.

The forlorn maple tree shivers,

gives up all pretense of modesty.

I’ve watched this drama unfold

for days now as though I were

at a sporting event — rooting for

the underdog, though I realize

it’s truly a lopsided contest.

In the autumn of my years,

I too am buffeted willy-nilly

by the winds of inexorable change.

— Martha Golensky

To Screech His Own

The spine-tingling call of the Eastern screech owl belies its size and appeal

By Susan Campbell

Listen! An eerie trill or spooky shriek from out of the darkness at this time of year just might indicate the presence of an Eastern screech owl. Territorial adults readily use a mix of screams, tremolos on different pitches and long trills to advertise the boundaries of their home range. And their vocalizations are remarkably loud for a bird that stands only about 8 inches high. They are commonly found in forests all over North
Carolina, but they particularly thrive in thick pine stands, so much of our Piedmont habitat is ideal for them. Furthermore, they are with us year-round.

Eastern screech owls can be either a dull gray or a rich rufous color, with tufts of feathers on the head giving them an eared or horned appearance. But don’t expect to spot them easily, even though they roost during daylight hours. Their dark splotches and vertical striping along the breast and belly provide excellent camouflage against their favored roosting spot, trees, where they may be sitting close to the trunk or peering out of a cavity.

As is the case with most raptors, males are larger than females. Nonetheless, females have higher pitched calls. Your best bet for spotting one is to watch for belligerent crows or flocks of songbirds signaling their presence by frenzied flight and raucous calling.

This species is found throughout the Eastern United States, as well as along the Canadian border and in easternmost Mexico. Although they may wander somewhat outside the breeding season, Eastern screech owls are not migratory. These diminutive owls breed in the springtime. A female simply lays up to six white eggs on the substrate at the bottom of the cavity. Incubation takes about a month and then the young birds take another month to develop before they fledge. All this time, while the female remains on the nest, her mate will hunt nightly for the growing family. Pairs, who usually stay together for life, favor old squirrel or woodpecker holes, as well as purple martin houses and the occasional wood-duck boxes. Pairs of screech owls will readily take to boxes made to their exact specifications, not surprisingly.

Eastern screech owls eat a wide variety of prey. Rodents make up a large portion of their diet, but they also readily catch frogs, large insects and other invertebrates including crayfish and even earthworms. They have been known to also feed on roosting birds and the occasional bat. Screech owls are very much at home feeding on mice, rats or voles that can be found around bird feeders at night — as well as moths and beetles attracted to outside lights. Screech owls are patient, adopting a sit-and-wait strategy before pouncing on their prey and swallowing them whole. Owl gizzards are specially adapted to digesting the soft parts of the creatures they eat and then balling up the bones, fur and other indigestible bits into an oval mass that is regurgitated each day. Favored roost sites or nest cavities can be found by locating piles of these masses (or pellets, as they are referred to) on the forest floor. Unfortunately screech owls often hunt along roadsides and are prone to being hit by cars as they swoop low over the pavement to grab a meal.

But overall Eastern screech owls are a successful species that has adapted well to the changes humans have made to the landscape. So spend some time outside after dark and train your ears for the trill or tremolos of our Eastern screech owl. These cute little birds are anything but scary once you get to know them!  OH

Susan would love to receive your wildlife sightings and photos. She can be contacted by email at susan@ncaves.com.

The Wisdom of Stars

When in doubt, look up . . . and within

By Jim Dodson

“When I have a terrible need of — dare I say, ‘religion’? — then I go outside at night and paint the stars.” — Vincent Van Gogh

Most mornings when I’m home, several hours before sunrise, rain or shine, you can find me sitting in an old wooden chair in my front yard, the day’s first cup of Joe in hand, soaking in the deep silence and looking at the sky.

I don’t paint the stars but I sure enjoy gazing on them with the aid of my iPhone’s nifty Star Guide, allowing this Earthling to identify constellations and the seasonal movement of planets. Even on cloudy or rainy mornings, Star Guide — like Superman’s X-ray vision — can penetrate the clouds, a reminder that a glorious universe and a lovely mystery await just beyond, always there.

As spiritual practices go, my predawn ritual was born on a forested hilltop near the Maine coast 30 years ago. A serious early riser since boyhood, I began stepping outside simply to see how my neighbors fared overnight, especially on November’s sharply colder nights, heralding another hard winter on the doorstep.

The “neighbors” I speak of were the woodland creatures that surrounded our peaceful kingdom off the long-abandoned Old Town Road that ran through a 500-acre forest of birch and virgin hemlock pocked with kettle holes from the receding Ice Age, woods dense with fiddlehead and cinnamon ferns, laurel hells and wild vernal springs.

Like the stars overhead, they were always there, palely loitering at the edge of the yard in the moonshine and starlight: the small clan of whitetail deer that fed off the sorghum pellets I provided through the harshest nights of winter; a flock of wild turkeys that displayed absolutely no fear of our dogs; the massive lady porcupine who waddled through the backyard from time to time (I nicknamed her Madame Defarge after Charles Dickens’ infamous revolutionary knitter), pausing to feed on my frost-wilted hostas; not to mention a young bull moose that hung around our neck of the woods for almost two years, apparently looking for a girlfriend, an age-old story.

Perhaps the toughest creatures by far were the tiny black-and-white chickadees that showed up at our side-yard feeders after the coldest Arctic nights imaginable, day-after-day, season-after-season, year-upon-year, no more than a handful of feathers and a tiny beating heart, teaching me something about the divine force at play.

Our house was a simple post-and-beam affair, a classic Yankee saltbox that I designed and helped build with my own hands, made of rugged beams hewn from Canadian hemlock. Those beams spoke to me at night, especially as we both aged, cracking and sighing and settling year after year. The surrounding gardens took me almost two decades (and most of my kids’ college funds) to build, beginning with the ancient stone walls of the farmstead that once existed on our hilltop more than a hundred years before us. Our predecessors grew corn and pole beans. I grew English roses, lush hydrangeas and heavenly lilacs, not to mention hostas as big as Volkswagens. Part of my annual November ritual after topping up my woodpile was to erect my Rube Goldberg plant protectors that could withstand being buried for months in the coming snow.

Back then, I believed this was my little piece of heaven, the rugged homestead I’d made for my family on a star-swept hill in Maine; the place I would quietly spend the balance of my days on Earth, writing and woolgathering, walking the spring and autumn woods and the Old Town Road with the dogs, forever revising my ever-changing garden, feeding the locals and memorizing the stars of the northern firmament in frosty autumn darkness. Over those two decades, I saw super moons and dozens of shooting stars — and once even the shimmering Northern Lights.

I loved that life and held it against my bones as long as I could. And then I let it go, have never been back, though I still have dreams about that house, those woods, those deep snows and frozen stars, not to mention my former woodland neighbors.

But home — this home, Carolina — unexpectedly called and I couldn’t ignore the summons. My late Southern grandmother, a grand old Baptist lady who knew the Scriptures cold, loved to say — like Thoreau, like the poet T.S. Eliot, like her husband Walter’s own grandmother, a gentle natural healer her neighbors called Aunt Emma — that life is simply a great hoop, a sacred circle, that the end of our explorations is to discover the place where we began and know it for the first time.

For better or worse, I have followed this cosmic script with the faith of a mustard seed, and now I am blessed to have beautiful Southern stars and an old forest of a different kind sheltering overhead, the towering oaks of my boyhood neighborhood, guardians of different early morning companions that are just as wild in their own suburban ways.

In place of Madame Defarge and a lovesick moose, we are visited before dawn by feeding rabbits and an owl that dolefully hoots like clockwork down the block as I sit back and study the stars, sipping my coffee, marveling at the scene overhead, as glorious as any medieval cathedral or walled City of God.

Spiritually speaking, I suppose I am what a dear friend calls a cosmic wanderer, a religious mongrel in love with the writings of the Sufi poet Hafiz, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, the Upanishads, a little Ralph Waldo Emerson, a lot of Billy Collins and Mary Oliver, a dash of Joe Campbell and Charles Wesley’s hymns, spiced by the Bhagavad Gita and the mystic Meister Eckhart, all nicely summarized by the wisdom of my old friend Katrina Kenison, who wrote in her splendid book Magical Journey, An Apprenticeship in Contentment: “We are all one. We need only look more deeply into the nature of who we really are to see that our sense of isolation is an illusion and to have our separateness ameliorated by union. I might be but one small thread in a vast fabric, but there’s comfort in imagining the eternal interplay between my own small, temporal life and all there is.”

They’re all with me in the starry darkness, this merry band of voices.

With luck, if there is a wind in the darkness, the large Canterbury chimes I gave to my bride for our 15th anniversary — that took me the better part of an entire spring afternoon to hoist and secure in the massive white oak out back — may play three or four notes, sometimes sounding like a Buddhist bell calling one to mindfulness, other times — and I swear on my worn-out copy of Walden that this is gospel truth — the first five notes of Amazing Grace.

I cannot explain how or why this happens, but I’ve heard it with my own ears and believe it with my own heart. Likewise, I can’t explain or justify why most things happen in this passing life — joy, sorrow, tragedy, redemption — but grace certainly helps one face the day, whatever it brings.

November brings forth the two brightest planets in the Southern sky, Mars and Venus, gracing dusk and dawn like a blessing and benediction respectively while Orion, lord of our coming winter’s nights, rises below Taurus and the Pleiades in the East as Summer’s Triangle fades in the West.

The clear autumn sky never fails to make me feel both puny and thrilled by the knowledge that this same unchanging sky shone over Plato and Aristotle as they taught their students, Galileo on his balcony peering at the clockwork heavens, Marcus Aurelius penning his soulful Meditations on a lonely Roman frontier, Jesus praying in the wilderness, English lords signing the Magna Carta, Jefferson jotting notes about human independence, Lincoln speaking at Gettysburg, women marching for the vote, four brave college students sitting down at a whites-only lunch counter, the discovery of the God Particle and a phone that can see through clouds like Superman.

Beneath November’s clear and changing skies, as the soul leans inward, I use my iPhone’s wondrous Star Guide to identify the stunning moons of Jupiter, suddenly remembering C.S. Lewis’ observation that, contrary to our collective belief, we are not the center to the universe because “the center of the universe is actually everywhere.” Jesus’ version of this ancient truth may be the greatest metaphor of all for describing the potential transformation of human consciousness yet to come — that the “Kingdom of Heaven” is not somewhere up or out there — but patiently waiting for discovery deep inside us.

Perhaps human consciousness is beginning to understand that the force we call “God” is simply a streaming river of light and unconditional love that flows everywhere and through everything, as true and present as the stars that literally surround our small fragile planet wreathed in clouds or hidden by the brightest light of day, reassuringly there though we can’t — or choose not to — see it.

Not long ago, I read somewhere that the late astronomer Carl Sagan — a confirmed agnostic — believed there may be as many stars as there are grains of sand on Earth, billions of stars in hundreds of universes bearing untold numbers of unimaginable gifts. The November star child in me sure hopes this proves true.

God only knows what adventures await us.  OH

Contact Editor Jim Dodson at jim@thepilot.com.

It’s a Sign

A conversation with two small friends

By Clyde Edgerton

In a recent Star News letter to the editor, the writer suggested that the presence of a “Thank You, Jesus!” sign in a certain front yard was the reason that every tree in that yard stood tall after Hurricane Florence passed through — while many trees elsewhere had been blown down.

I was walking through my neighborhood with a couple of moles. They are blind of course, but they have smart phones that warn them if they are about to walk into something. Their names are Willy and Scottie. Smart moles — schooled in religion. They live under different yards in my neighborhood. They were talking about the issue.

Willy: What about somebody who wanted to buy a “Thank You, Jesus!” sign, but couldn’t find one because they were all sold out?

Scottie: Their trees would be saved because they thought about it in their mind.

Willy: Are you sure?

Scottie: Well . . . I don’t know for sure. Maybe the leaves would have just got blown off, but the trees would have stayed stood up, I’ll betcha. Or something like that.

Willy: Do you think the people over at your yard will get a “Thank you, Jesus!” sign?

Scottie: Oh, they already did — because they lost some trees, then read that letter to the editor. They got six signs. They put one in the trunk of their car, and one in their truck, one on their boat, and one in front of the dog house.

Willy: That’s just four.

Scottie: Oh, and one in the backyard. And one on top of the house.

Willy: On top of the house?

Scottie: Lightning.

Willy: And I’ll bet you if you take care of poor people and do unto others as you would have them do unto you, like Jesus said, then that means your trees won’t get blowed down, too.

Scottie: No. No. No. It just matters that they got that sign in your yard
. . . or in their car or back pocket. It don’t matter what you do. It’s like churches. No church trees got blowed down during the hurricane because of all those signs that churches put in their front yards.

Willy: Oh . . . you sure?

Scottie: Yep. God didn’t let any trees get blowed down in any church yards.

Willy: What if they did get blowed down?

Scottie: It’d be because they didn’t have the right sign up. The only thing that matters is if you got the right sign up. It’s all about signs. It’s like that in everything in the world. If you got the right sign and a fence around you, everything is okay. I even heard about a family who had a “Thank You, Jesus!” sign, and half of it was in their yard, and half was in their neighbor’s yard. One little prong thing was in one yard, and one little prong thing was in the yard next door. And the family next door had every one of their trees left standing after the storm — just like the family that owned the sign, and nobody could understand. You know why nobody could understand?

Willy: Why?

Scottie: Because that family next door drank wine and beer and were Democrats.

Willy: Whoa. But didn’t Jesus drink wine?

Scottie: No, no. He drank grape juice.

Willy: How do you know?

Scottie: It’s simple. He turned the water into wine but when him and all the others at that wedding started drinking it, it hadn’t had time to ferment.

Willy: Oh. That makes sense.

Scottie: It all make sense . . . if you know enough about religion. 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.

A Tale of Two Firehouses

The glory days — and blazes — of Fire Station No. 5

By Billy Eye

“A house is not a home unless it contains food and fire for the mind as well as the body.” — Benjamin Franklin

A couple of months ago, I was meandering down South Mendenhall when I came across the detritus of a life one might expect to find after someone passes away — mounds of clothing, bed sheets, tableware, coat hangers, curtains, appliances — all crowding the sidewalk. Over the next few weeks, I watched as that home on the corner of Walker and Mendenhall underwent a facelift for the next tenant.

This old house has a storied background, having served as the second home to Greensboro Fire Station 5 beginning in 1919, erected to house one of the city’s new, motorized fire trucks first put into service in 1913.

Fire Station 5 moved to a new, much larger facility at 1618 West Friendly Avenue in 1964 (now home to 1618 Seafood Grille and Leon’s Style Salon). That’s when the place at 442 Mendenhall became UNCG’s first men’s dorm. Or so rumor has it.

I’d always wondered, however, if that were actually true. I could find no evidence of it, so I contacted the University’s archivist Erin Lawrimore who told me: “That’s a bit of a trick question, because while a number of the male students in 1964 did live in the former firehouse at Mendenhall and Walker, it wasn’t considered a dorm. It was private housing and considered ‘off campus.’ But because that was where the men students were living, people have referred to it as the first men’s dorm. Technically, the first men’s dormitory on campus was Phillips Residence Hall, which was completed in 1967.”

That this former firehouse is a single-floor, three-bedroom residence should give you some idea how few men attended UNCG’s first class in 1964 after it made the transition from Woman’s College of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.

A bit of fire department lore: Greensboro’s first major blaze occurred in 1849, wiping out our entire business district, which was being established around the corner of Market and Elm. That incident spurred officials to purchase a hand-drawn pumping engine equipped with two cisterns of water.

In 1871, our all-volunteer department was equipped with its first hook-and-ladder truck, one that had to be dragged into action by the very men charged with putting out the fires. That proved insufficient when, only a year later, flames once again tore through the middle of town, wiping out the courthouse, a hotel, a bank, some law offices and W.C. Porter’s drugstore. Porter rebuilt his drugstore and it was there that a teenage William Sydney Porter (aka O.Henry) worked.

The city built its first official firehouse in 1888 at 109 West Gaston, now Friendly Avenue, to shelter a newly purchased horse-drawn steam engine nicknamed the General Greene.

Fire Station 5, originally West End Hose Company No. 1, was established near the corner of Mendenhall and Spring Garden around 1897 to serve the developing College Hill neighborhood. By that time, Greensboro possessed a small fleet of horse-drawn hook-and-ladder trucks, so firefighters no longer had to exhaust themselves pulling their rigs behind them.

The city was proud of their equine teams. According to a 1984 history of the Greensboro Fire Department, “One horse in particular seems to have stood the test of time and is still remembered. ‘Prince’ was the most photographed and talked about horse of the times. It was reported in the Raleigh Post in 1901 that the horse was given liquor after each fire call. The money was contributed by men who hung around the station. It was stated that he drank the ‘very best rye that was available . . . one pint at a time’.”

After the company moved a block north in 1919, to that aforementioned house on Walker and Mendenhall, the original Firehouse 5 was converted into a car repair shop and remained so into the 1960s when it was known as Ben’s Garage before becoming the second location of Monnett Carpets in the 1970s.

In 1979, The Browsery used bookstore opened on the bottom floor, an ideal complement to Schoolkids Records next door. Ben Matthews, proprietor of The Browsery, remained in business at 547 Mendenhall until the late 1990s. It’s been a convenience store since the turn of this century with the upstairs serving as a residential loft that’s been the site of some awesome parties over the decades.

Our first professional (paid) firefighters took up residence at 319 North Greene in 1926, in a six-bay firehouse designed by Charles C. Hartmann with a dramatic Italianate exterior featuring gray granite window trims and columns. That magnificent building still stands, attached at the hip to the Marriott Hotel downtown.

One modern day Guilford County firefighter, Brian Dunphy, has a terrific idea — convert that palace, long unused, into a museum dedicated to the Greensboro Fire Department, long considered one of the finest in the nation.

***

Looking for a unique, out of the way place to take friends and family visiting for the holidays, a casual, cozy spot to enjoy some sui generis–infused cocktails along with amazing, yet inexpensive, light meals? Check out Freeman’s Pub and Grub on Spring Garden and Elam, located in a one-time grocery store of the same name from the 1920s. Eye never fails to have an enjoyable time there, whether for lunch, dinner, or a little afternoon delight.

On the other side of town, Gibb’s Hundred Brewing Company has brought much-needed excitement back to State Street with a huge selection of beers, some of the finest brewed right there on site, attracting a lively crowd. Some fantastic entertainers have performed there including one of my favorite bands, Grand Ole Uproar.  OH

Billy Eye is O.G. — Old Greensboro.

Thanksgiving in Hell’s Half Acre

Praise be to the Butterball Talk Line

By Cynthia Adams

Just like Babs Streisand sang, “Memories may be beautiful and yet/ What’s too painful to remember/ We simply choose to forget.”

Yet I cannot forget the damn turkey and start having flashbacks in October.

Come Thanksgiving, as I bow my head in submission to those elders who refuse to break with a deadly culinary tradition, I always remember my friends at the Butterball Talk Line. I keep them on speed dial.

These noble women (and one man) stand by to save us from “last-minute snafus, flubs, and foul-ups.”

Our annual family flirtation with salmonella is definitely the latter: a colossal fowl-up.

These noble Butterball people save lives and field 100,000 calls. Every. Single. Year.

So, while the experts at Butterball side with me, they could not solve our ancient culinary conundrum.

My grandmother and mother determinedly baked a lethal Thanksgiving turkey each year due to the ancestral recipe.

A great-great-great-great grandma, one who was rumored to have killed a tax collector with a fire poker, was banished to the colonies. It is unclear if she did or did not flee Ireland with a copy tucked under her skirts of Grandma’s Most Foul Recipes.

Remember, great-great-great-great grandma was an accused murderess.

Fast-forward to her descendant Pat McClellan Tucker, my grandmother, a heckuva cook. This scrappy lady could have written Ted Nugent’s Kill It & Grill It. Call it cell memory of the tragic starvation in Ireland, but she ate anything with feet and a face.

And, she perpetrated our Irish exile’s dangerous practice that should have killed us all. Keep a stuffed bird juicy by this method:

Warm the oven, put the turkey in for a few hours, then turn off the oven and let the bird sit in solitary overnight. Thereafter, the bird idles in a toxic salmonella stew.

Somehow, some way, nobody died at the table. (Well, except my grandfather.) Actually, most of the menfolk on my paternal side fell dead prematurely. But those of us descended on the maternal line prevail.

We have developed salmonella-resistant genes.

Go ahead, 23 & Me! Test us! We are the missing link when it comes to eating partially cooked fowl and surviving!

We developed adaptive survival, especially when eating undercooked turkey.

There was little irony in this. Vegetables, on the other hand, were cooked until they turned gray in surrender, then drowned and dredged them in yellow margarine.

The women made green-bean-and-mushroom-soup casserole, topped with a pile of French’s fried onions. Also, mashed potatoes, of course, and creamed corn that became a surreal, sallow yellow. They baked sweet potato casserole, swimming in margarine and brown sugar, smothered with toasted marshmallow.

You could hear arteries clogging at the Thanksgiving table . . . a sort of strangled, muted congestion in the lower register of human sound.

In Hell’s Half Acre, the idea that excess is best prevailed. My mother and grandmother began baking pound cake, along with pumpkin, sweet potato and pecan pies after Halloween.

They worked themselves into a fever, assembling dishes from educational TV’s Forgotten Foods documentary.

You know what these are — dishes that have fallen from fashion. Like pear salad, stuffed with cream cheese, dolloped with twee bits of green pepper for garnish. Congealed salads, too, which meant, Jell-O with floating bits of shredded carrot and canned pineapple. Occasionally (“for color”) my mother veered off into a green Jell-O concoction with cream cheese, whipped cream and nuts. Or tomato aspic.

They stuffed celery with pimento cheese and piped whipped egg into egg halves, garnished everything with pimento bits, then dusted that off with paprika.

They assembled relish trays, with watermelon pickles, beet pickles, and bread-and-butter pickles. Olives and pickled onion were also dotted around.

Also, like N.C. chef Vivian Howard’s family, mine also lacked the self-control for appetizers, so my grandmother and mother served everything all at once.

At the very last, the night before T-Day, they prepared the dressing and stuffed the turkey . . . oh dear God, the stuffed turkey.

Because a WBTV cooking show host once extolled the value of adding apple to the sausage dressing, my mother altered her recipe, with tragic results.

Thereafter, chopped apple was in the mix.

The dressing the women in my family made required crumbled biscuits, sausage (“with fresh sage!” my grandmother would trill) onion and other dried spices.

The unfortunate modification to this was the chopped apple. “It keeps things moist,” my mother would say, well satisfied.

Moist was a watchword, mind you . . . only part of what scared me stiff about the stuffed turkey.

The next day when my mother would pull the cooled-down turkey out of the oven, only a slight bit of the poor creature looked cooked, at least to my eye, as my father would heartily prepare to slice and dice the bird.

I couldn’t look, as spoons full of the grayish dressing with a pound of chopped apple bits were placed around the platter. The turkey, which did appear brown on the outside, was admittedly very, very moist.

(Wait — was it perhaps raw? I wondered)

Yeast rolls, which had been patiently rising, awaiting the turkey’s exodus from the oven, were popped in last.

At the table, I pushed the obligatory piece of turkey aside and ate some of the hundreds of other items that abounded.

“She’s always been a picky eater,” my mother would say, eyes narrowing.

Once I grasped the perils of the lukewarm baked turkey method, which was as soon as I could spell salmonella, I’ve battled my mother. She was apoplectic when she watched me prepare a bird during a Thanksgiving visit years later.

“That is not how we make a turkey in this family,” she muttered, tight lipped.

We crossed swords. “It’s dangerous, Mom.”

“Nobody died!” my mother shouted, clutching her pearls. “I never killed any of you!” her face reddened, looking the image of Shirley MacLaine in Terms of Endearment.

“Not for lack of trying,” I muttered.

My mother stood up as if to jump in her Lincoln Town Car and head home to Norwood.

“It isn’t safe, Mom!” I bleated.

To make my point, I called the Butterball hotline as she watched, her jaw set, arms crossed like she was General Patton. There was no one, nada, who would endorse the ancestral method.

Afterward, Mom didn’t exactly clutch her heart but she looked ashen. To keep the peace, I did as she insisted, but refused to stuff the damned thing and baked the dressing separately. (She stood up again at this rebellion, clearly upset.)

And I further refused to add apple, which makes the dressing a sodden mass.

I now call the ancestral recipe, Trussed Up Tragedy, which you can read in my book, Jim Jones’ Greatest Hits: How to Prepare Turkey for a Mass Suicide. Luckily, thanks to that aforementioned genetic mutation, we did not die en masse at the Thanksgiving table. We had the good graces to die elsewhere.

(Just think: Had Thanksgiving originated in Ireland, my murderous great-great-great-great could have innocently offered that tax collector a leftover turkey sandwich, and nobody would have been the wiser.)

The preparation of turkey appears to be a mystery for the ages, however. Over time, Butterball has expanded from 11 helpful helpers in the 1980s to more than 50 today, and they will take a staggering number of desperate calls straight through December.

The Butterball reports are tragicomical: callers who discover an ancient turkey in the bottom of a rusty freezer and hope it’s edible, or wonder if they can fast-thaw a stone-cold bird in the dishwasher. Or, the multi-tasker who questioned if they can thaw the turkey in the bathwater with baby. The Butterball people listen, give counsel, and wish you well. They even text.

Count the good people at Butterball among your blessings this November.

That number, dear readers, is 1-800-BUTTERBALL (1-800-288-8372).  OH

Cynthia Adams, now vegetarian, is volunteering for the tofurkey hotline this year.

The Other Woman

Despite cracks and wrinkles, love blooms eternal

By Sandra Redding

Every November, the Craftsmen’s Christmas Classic lures hundreds through the doors of the Greensboro Coliseum. Most shoppers discover that chatting with talented artisans while selecting unique treasures adds to the thrill of the hunt.

Several years ago during my own annual spree, I selected two pillows embroidered with sprigs of lavender, a signed print of a rooster painted by Bob Timberlake and a pine-scented Christmas wreath to brighten my front door.

Deciding I’d surpassed my budget, I headed for the exit, then stopped when I spotted a group of healthy plants, each one anchored in a piece of pottery. The face of a woman was etched onto one. The potter, a dark-haired woman, smiled and made her pitch: “This one is magic,” she said. “If you look after her, she’ll keep you well.”

“I have a husband,” I answered. “We look after one another.”

Despite my protest, good sense (or was it my heart?) convinced me to hand her the required $20. As she placed the pot, as well as the other items I’d purchased, in a box, she promised I’d never regret my decision. That windy afternoon, while placing the items in the back seat of my convertible, I took a closer look at the countenance adorning the pot. Tiny white bird feathers surrounded her face. Noticing her enigmatic smile brought to mind the Mona Lisa.

At home, when I shared my unique purchase with my husband, Joe, he grinned as he touched the green leaves cascading from the pot. I wasn’t surprised. He’s always been fond of plants, even ones that didn’t produce tomatoes and cucumbers. “What we have here,” he explained, “is an Asparagus Fern. With sufficient water and occasional sun, it should do well.”

“No, what we have is another woman,” I teased. “The potter who sold her to me promised I’d remain healthy as long as I took care of her.”

Though I don’t approve of polygamy, the other woman has happily remained with Joe and me for nearly 14 years. I named her Virginia after my mother, whom I still miss though she died three decades ago. Most of the tiny feathers that once surrounded her face have disappeared, but the fern stretching out of her still remains as vibrant green as the day I purchased her.

As for me? Despite being diagnosed with osteoporosis three years ago, I still do Yoga, Tai Chi and walk at least 5,000 steps daily. I have more than a few wrinkles now, but I’ve earned them, and though Virginia has sustained a crack or two, her cheeks still remain rosy.

Both of us are fortunate. In addition to having one another, we also have Joe.  OH

Sandra Redding, a retired Greensboro writer and teacher, now enjoys practicing yoga and creating scrapbooks that display her grandkids’ excellence. Every afternoon, she watches a movie with her husband. The Craftsmen’s Christmas Classic’s next visit to the Greensboro’s Coliseum will be November 23.