Month: April 2020

Daily strolls provide us with a much-needed escape from these four walls. Along the path, we’ve found inspiring artwork that has us all feeling like kids again. Send us your photos, and we’ll add them here!

What’s Enough?
A sage reveals the trick to a contented life

By Jim Dodson

A few weeks ago I read in The New Yorker about a group of Silicon Valley billionaires who’ve built luxury retreats in some of the remotest parts of the planet, safe houses designed to allow their owners to survive a global catastrophe — stocked with enough good French white wine and military hardware to hold out indefinitely.

A short time later, I read about a second group of young Silicon Valley billionaires funding a top-secret scheme to bio-engineer a “God Pill” that can cure everything from cancer to flat feet and make human mortality as obsolete as the typewriter.

According to Newsweek, this latter group of “visionaries” includes the billionaire co-founder of PayPal who is making plans to live for at least 120 years. A fellow described as the “godfather of the Russian Internet,” meanwhile, says his goal is to live to 10,000 years of age, while a wealthy co-founder of Oracle finds the notion of accepting mortality “incomprehensible.” Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google, meantime, simply hopes to someday “cure death.”

As Newsweek points out, “The human quest for immortality is both ancient and littered with catastrophic failures. Around 200 B.C., the first emperor of China, Qin Shi Huang, accidentally killed himself trying to live forever; he poisoned himself by eating supposedly mortality-preventing mercury pills.”

Centuries later, the answer to eternal life appeared no no closer at hand. “In 1492, Pope Innocent VIII died after blood transfusions from three healthy boys whose youth he believed could be absorbed.

A little closer to modern times, in 1868 America, Kentucky politician Leonard Jones ran for the U.S. presidency on the platform that he’d achieved immortality through prayer and fasting — and could give his secrets for cheating death to the public. Later that year, Jones died of pneumonia.”

Dreams of immortality have beguiled and eluded human beings for as long as we’ve walked upright on the Earth, immune to the wisdom of every spiritual tradition that reminded mortal man that life’s bittersweet impermanence — and one’s perspective on the matter — determines whether every day is regarded as a gift to be savored or a good reason to pack up and head for the hills.

As I read about these lavish billionaire retreats and quest to make human mortality irrelevant, in any case, I couldn’t help but think about the summer I realized I was a mortal pipsqueak who wouldn’t be around forever.

It was 1962 and school was just out for the summer. Third grade was in my rearview mirror and I had a new neighborhood in Greensboro plus a Black Racer bike upon which to go adventuring.

Even better, my new neighborhood pals were talking about the bomb shelter that “creepy Mr. Freeman” had constructed beneath a shed in his backyard in our new subdivision. I’d read in Life Magazine that bomb shelters were the latest suburban passion, being constructed in backyards all across America amidst widespread fears of a “nuclear apocalypse.”

About that same time, an episode of The Twilight Zone depicted a group of folks having a birthday dinner party with neighbors when they learn that America is, in fact, under nuclear attack. The hosts flee to their new bomb shelter in their basement, which is only large enough to accommodate the family. Tempers explode, panic ensues. The neighbors batter down the bomb shelter door only to learn that the report of a pending nuclear extinction was simply a human error, a false apocalypse.

For the balance of that summer, however, I became obsessed with the notion of an “Apocalypse” and Mr. Freeman’s homemade bomb shelter.

I even suggested to my father that we build one in our yard, helpfully offering an original sketch of what my ideal bomb shelter might look like — the Flintstone family cave meets Jules Verne’s Nautilus submarine equipped with a storeroom full of hotdogs and Lorna Doone cookies.

My sketch even depicted the wasteland above ground ― a cindered moonscape inspired by photographs of Hiroshima I’d seen in an Associated Press photo book of the Second World War.

“How many people can fit in your bomb shelter?” the old man casually wondered.
I explained it would be a bomb shelter for four, with room for our dog.

“I see. Well, how would you feel knowing all your new buddies and schoolmates who didn’t have bomb shelters were left up top and gone?”

This was a wrinkle I hadn’t foreseen, a horrible prospect that led to pose the more essential question? Did he think there was going to be an apocalypse anytime soon?
His reply surprised me.

“Probably so. Someone is always having an apocalypse — waiting beneath a clock for a loved one to die or a baby to be born; for the fever to break or the crisis to end,” he added, pointing out that the original Greek translation for Apocalypse – as mentioned in the Bible — simply meant a revelation of something not yet known, perhaps the awakening of a new and better world.

He even had an answer to creepy Mr. Freeman’s bomb shelter.

“Rather than burying yourself in the backyard, maybe you should just grow up and help create that new and better world. Our time on this Earth is brief. The trick is to use that time wisely ― and learn what’s enough.”

It took me many years before I realized what he was telling me.

By the time my older brother and I were teenage wise guys under the influence of classic American “fumes” – i.e. gasoline and perfume – this sort of Aesopian wisdom prompted us to nickname our uncommonly upbeat old man “Opti the Mystic,” owing his unshakable good cheer and embarrassing habit of quoting long-dead philosophers and spiritual sages to our impressionable dates when they least expected it.

Decades later, when we reminisced about my bomb shelter summer, Opti and I happened to be sitting together in a crowded pub on the rainy Lancashire coast of England, sharing pints of warm beer following a rained-off round of golf. Though you wouldn’t have guessed it to look at him, my father was dying of cancer, and this was our final golf trip together, a long-talked-about odyssey to see the places where he fell in love with golf as a homesick Air Force sergeant just prior to D-Day.

Among other revelations on this trip, I’d learned that my father had been through his own versions of an apocalypse — first a tragic plane crash that killed dozens of people including children he knew in the village where he was stationed; a second one when his dream of owning his own newspaper in Mississippi went up in smoke after is silent partner cleaned out the company bank accounts and headed for parts unknown. That same week, unimaginably, my mother suffered a late-term miscarriage and my dad’s only sister died in a car wreck outside Washington, D.C.

“How does one survive a week like that?” I asked my father,

He smiled, shrugged. “I suppose it was because I’ve learned that it’s not what you get from this life that really matters — but what you give and leave behind. Whatever you give comes back to you many times over in the form of unexpected blessings.”

My father was 80 years old that rainy afternoon in western England. Not only could I suddenly appreciate why he was the perfect fellow to moderate the men’s Sunday morning discussion group at our church in Greensboro for more that two decades, but how fortunate I was to have him, if only for a precious few weeks and months.

I was 41 years old that evening, a father with two small children back home in Maine; a son already in grief over the thought of losing my life’s original mentor and hero, wishing my young ones could somehow have their own years with this wise and funny grandfather.
I must have said this out loud.

My father simply smiled and sipped his beer.

“Don’t waste time regretting what you don’t have. Every moment is a gift that can feel like eternity if you pay close attention. Focus on the now.”

And with this, he laughed. “Maybe you can put this in a book someday. In the meantime, it’s your turn to buy the beer.”

It was Vintage Opti. One year later, I did put this moment in a book.

Reading about the wealthy Silicon Valley billionaires who crave more time and “plan” to live forever, avoiding a catastrophe they fear may occur at any moment, reminded me about my Bomb Shelter summer and the calming wisdom of my funny, philosophical father.
Not for the first time – and in light of a world that always teetering on Apocalypse of one kind or another – this got me thinking about of “what’s enough?”

I jotted a few things down.

Enough for me is an old house where every creak or groan underfoot sounds like a sigh of contentment, the music of home.

Long walks around Paris are the stuff of everyday magic. I miss them. But walking the dogs with my wife around the block in the evening is even better.

The Japanese garden I’m building will probably take years to finish – though a garden can never truly be finished, anyway.

I hope to write at least four or five more books, have many more suppers with friends and see my old dog Mulligan live at least that long. This would make her 24 years old.

That’s enough for now, a gift Opti the Mystic gave me long ago.

“This is why we are in the world,” advised the Sufi mystic Bawa, one of his favorites. “Within your heart is a space smaller even than an atom. There, dear ones, God has placed 18,000 universes.”

Contact Editor Jim Dodson at Jwdauthor@gmail.com

As important members of our editorial staff, the pets of O.Henry magazine are proud to finally have their moment in the spotlight. Meet the team:

To see a garden in your dreams, filled with evergreen and flowers, according to experts on the subject, denotes great peace of mind and comfort. If you dream of walking on a well-kept lawn, you are in for an occasion of joy and prosperity. Raking and weeding suggests work still to be done, while to dream of using a lawn mower means you may soon be engaged in a tedious social function — after you finish up the lawn first, of course. To dream of seeing flowers in bloom and color signifies pleasure and gain, while dreaming of walking through a park with your lover simply means you will be happily married for a very long time.

Scraps that Speak

By Jim Dodson

 

Not long ago, I sent out an old club chair from my office to be recovered.
Some of my colleagues at the magazine were greatly amused by this act, pointing out that the town dump was a more fitting destination than a fine reupholstery shop.
For years they’d made high sport of my uncommon devotion to this old chair, you see, though probably not for no good reason.

Half its springs were shot and its cushion sagged almost to the floor in places, prompting me to lovingly nickname it “the Chair of No Return,” warning any unwary sitters of injuries that could occur from attempting to rise from it. My wiseacre Art Director, Andie Rose, insensitively took to calling it “Chairy” after Pee Wee Herman’s peculiar talking arm chair. The CNR and I were both wounded by this.
Still, how I loved that old armchair, secretly hoping the magician upholsterer might return with a new lease on life.

Crusty Mildred Horseman, after all, gave me this chair the summer before my junior year in college, my first piece of actual grown-up furniture. She lived across the street from my parents in Greensboro. Even then the old thing was something of an antique, the chair I mean to say, having belonged to her late husband Clyde from his college days in Michigan, his favorite reading chair she explained, evidenced by its original faded green leather worn by decades of service.

I carted it off to my first big job in Atlanta, where it received its first reupholstering job, a nice updated green hunter plaid like the one I’d recently seen in a sitting room of the swanky Piedmont Driving club. I thought it looked terribly sophisticated, even if I wasn’t.

Seven years later the CNR accompanied me to a new life and job in a rented U-Haul truck to a solar house by the Green River in Vermont, followed a year later to a cottage in a New Hampshire apple orchard thence to a weathered bungalow in the salt marsh of Essex, Massachusetts — and finally, to the rugged post-and-beam house my young bride and I built on a forested hilltop near the coast of Maine.

By then the CNR had seen its better days, with a seat cushion woefully sagging, soon to be relegated to my upstairs home office in the barn, safely out of view. Still, the old thing was my seat of choice, the place where I preferred to sit when I wrote essays or read books to my small children.
I thought that might be the final resting place for us both, that hilltop in Maine.
But life had other plans for both of us. A decade later, following divorce and remarriage, the old armchair came home with me to the South and wound up in my magazine office, the source of great mirth to my staff.
Still, what is it about a few old things that have a way of wrapping their vines around the human heart, invested with a deep personal meaning?
Maybe it’s the fact that their bittersweet impermanence mirrors our own, and they may outlive us in our race to the boneyard.

Artists and poets seem to understand this intuitively. Not long ago I saw a magnificent iron elk made from rusted auto parts standing beside the highway. What a thing of salvaged beauty it was, a mythic tribute to nature and General Motors. I stopped and snapped a photo, wishing I could somehow cart it home to my front lawn.
Such acts are in our national DNA. In the days before every rural family possessed a camera, handmade quilts were made from worn-out clothing and dish rags for warmth, utility and economy – effectively a way to record a family’s passage through time, scraps that speak, as my late Grandmother Taylor liked to say of her own cherished quilts. They reminded her of people she’d known in her life, how far she’d journeyed, a story behind each square of cloth. If you love it enough, said George Washington Carver, anything will speak to you.

Tony Avent, the nationally known horticultural guru and owner of Plants Delight Nursery, uses old bathroom fixtures and other household items that have outlived their usefulness as stage props along the paths of his magnificent botanical garden built in an old tobacco farm outside of Raleigh, perhaps reminding us how nature will have the last word in a throwaway consumer culture. Somehow, though, those fixtures make the garden look like an enchanted Lost World of treasures both natural and man-made.
Though I’m not much of a collector of anything save pocket lint, golf caps and old books, my home office has become a kind of accidental collection center for old things that speak to me and probably nobody else. On my desk stands a handsome Colonial blue-coat soldier, a ceramic lamp from the 1950s, exactly the one I had as a little kid but disappeared many years ago.

My late grandfather’s squirrel rifle stands over in the corner — unfired for decades — next to a shelf of old books that belonged to my late father, including a first editions of Kipling’s Phantom Rickshaw, James Hilton’s Lost Horizon and Markings by Dag Hammarsköld, three two of his favorite books. And now mine. I also have my dad’s old Wilson golf clubs and the green cap he purchased on his last trip to St. Andrews, relics only a golfing son could find priceless.

The oldest bed in our house is a handsome pineapple four-poster made from solid cherry hardwood that reportedly belonged to my great-grandmother, quite possibly the bed was born in. For a time my daughter had it in her Brooklyn apartment until a side rail split and I drove all the way to Brooklyn just to haul it home. I fully intended to find a craftsman who can repair it.

My wife cherishes several antique china cups and saucers, the only items her immigrant grandmother brought with her on the boat from Ireland a century ago. In her bathroom sits a large glass ginger jar filled with beautiful sea shells she’s collected from every beach she’s visited since girlhood, a spiritual record of her footprints in the sand.
The actual oldest object in our possession is a long farm table I gave my second wife on the occasion of our marriage. It came from England with papers certifying it to be more than 200 years old. Oh, the life that simple dented and scarred table has seen, outliving kings and empires, made smooth by unknown hands and time – including two decades of rowdy Dodson family dinners, comprising just a tenth of its life. We’re mere caretakers before its onward journey continues.

Not long ago that table accompanied us back to a rambling old house where we previously lived for six years. It’s a relic from the Gilded Age, at least a century old, with foot-thick plaster walls and ancient plumbing, windows that leak cold like a sieve and peculiar half-sized doors and back passageways meant for servants that disappeared half a century ago.

For what it’s worth, I wrote three books in an upper bedroom of this old place. The room has superb light and a powerful serenity I can feel in my bones. Moving back to it after a year away was like coming home to an old friend, a deep comfort in the wake of an unsettling year.

During the move, in an effort to begin downsizing our possessions, we made stacks of clothes for Goodwill and set aside household items we have no further need of and even went through several dusty boxes containing old kids’ toys and books, scores of dolls and once-beloved stuffed animals, broken train sets, Matchbox cars, photos and other sweet artifacts of a family all grown up, deciding to fill one large foot locker for each of our grown children to go through when they come for the holidays.
As for my old friend the Chair of No Return, it eventually returned from a talented Mexican upholsterer with new springs and a firm seat cushion and a voluptuous houndstooth fabric that had made it look fresh from the furniture showroom. My formerly amused colleagues were all a bit stunned by the transformation, eager to take a turn resting their bottoms in it.

Truthfully, they seemed a trifle put out with me for taking Chairy home to the upper bedroom where I do my best work. But I’m no fool. Time is passing quickly and a good reading chair belongs in a peaceful old room where it can do the most good.
That old chair and the table downstairs will likely outlive us all. Ditto my bride’s Irish china and her collection from the sea.
But therein lies a powerful message for those of us who choose to love a few old things in a perishable universe. Eternity resides in every moment with the people and objects we hold most dear.

Best to take notice and love them before we all have to go.

Editor’s Note: This Simple Life essay appeared in the October 2015 issue of O.Henry Magazine. Dodson’s beloved chair now reposes in his home library, where he’s trying hard to stay in place.

To our greatly valued readers and advertisers,

Perhaps the most common feedback we get from readers and advertisers alike is how grateful they are to have award-winning O.Henry Magazine telling the remarkable stories of our community every month, exploring the art and soul of what makes Greensboro so unique and beloved.

In our view, this is the very definition of Home.

At this challenging moment in our national life, while we’re all sheltering at home and doing our part in quest of better days, rest assured that our talented staff of writers, editors and designers is as committed as ever to bringing you the distinctive magazine you love to read, share and hold in your hands.

We’ll keep publishing and distributing O.Henry in its printed form – and hope you will keep reading and saying thanks to our wonderful advertisers.

In the meantime, Godspeed and be safe.

Jim Dodson, Editor