Waiting Beneath a Clock

By Jim Dodson

And so the waiting continues, or maybe it’s just beginning. 

We’re waiting for the old year to run out — or down — like a dear old mantle clock whose springs simply need winding. Simultaneously, we’re waiting for a new year to arrive like a Sunday morning paper on the porch steps, bearing welcome news that Congress has either collectively jumped over a cliff or solved the nations fiscal crisis by coming to its collective good sense. 

Waiting is delicious, painful, often necessary and always inevitable, OK if you just don’t dwell upon it, a nimble trick of time, a conjurer’s act, a cosmic inconvenience, something that heals all wounds, an artificial construct meant to mark our personal human passage through life — even something holy if you only know how surrender to it. 

“Do you remember when we were kids?” a colleague remarked wistfully at lunch the other day. “Waiting for Christmas to arrive was sheer torture — blissful, glorious torture.”

She mentioned how in her family a kid spent weeks if not months, an entire lifetime it seemed, anticipating Christmas and flipping through the Sears Wonder Book searching for the perfect toy. “You only got one, so you changed your mind a million times. And once you figured out what that one toy was, well, the anticipation and wait somehow made it only better. When it finally arrived, it meant so much more.”

She quietly mourns, as many of us do, the loss of this exquisite anticipation, an enforced moment of deeper reflection, the victim of a mass culture that prizes speed and instant gratification over a good and thoughtful wait. The Internet has turned periodical rooms into mausoleums because a simple touch of a key can bring a scholar whole libraries and sources in a nanosecond. Buying a new car once took days to pull off — a Kabuki dance between the dealer’s showroom and the local bank — but that’s gone the way of the helpful gas station attendant and learning to read a road map. Now we “sign and drive” and simply consult the plummy-voiced GPS who reduces travel time by a factor of two. 

In the western Christian tradition, Advent marks the beginning of the church’s calendar year and a time of waiting expectantly for Jesus Christ’s nativity, a savior who will be born unto us, a prince of peace, a king upon whose shoulders the world will finally reside. 

December is, metaphorically and otherwise, a time of waiting in the dark for the light of the world to appear. Likewise, coinciding with the Christian observance of Christmas, Judaism’s beautiful observance of Chanukah — a festival of lights commemorating a successful revolt against oppression and the rededication of its holy temple — spreads the light of a miraculous menorah over eight days of gift-giving that amounts, as a Jewish pal of mine likes to say, to “a wait with benefits.” 

Other believers are quietly waiting, too, in some cases for a ruder ending — either a blaze of glory or a chance to jump-start an ailing universe. The Internet and Blogosphere and mainstream TV media, in any case, have been buzzing for more than a year over an ancient Mayan prophecy of doom predicted to have happened on or around our recent winter solstice. 

A couple weeks ago, hoping to get a decent long-range forecast for that night, I dialed up a TV evangelist dismissing the Mayan apocalypse as “shameful, spiritual trash” and offering, instead, his “bestselling Bible prophecy,” said to reveal the actual date and hour of the impending Rapture. “The wait is about over, don’t get left behind!” he chirped, shooting his fancy cuff links and evidently somehow missing Matthew 24 and the bit about not knowing “the day or the hour the Lord is coming.” Instead, for a one-time “love offering” of $100, he extended a free bottle of “sanctified anointing Holy Land palm oil,” guaranteed to bring about good health and financial well-being in the year ahead. 

I’ll be honest, that left me a tad confused. Was he suggesting Heaven can actually wait — or was he simply withholding important Rapture planning info until he received my Visa payment?

Truthfully, meaning no disrespect to modern Mayans, I’m not sure that heaven waits for any man or woman — and may, in fact, already be here, as I heard a famous Christian mystic once observe, separated from us only by the thinnest membrane of limited perception. 

Heaven, like beauty, may simply lie in the eye or spiritual imagination of the beholder. For the record, since we have a few moments to kill, mine is where all my old dogs will be present and fully accounted for, restored to their youthful vigor, and I can take them for long walks in the snowy woods any old time I choose (even the Fourth of July!); a quiet place where my favorite fountain pen never runs out of ink and real handwritten letters from old friends arrive in the mail every day, and my favorite books are finally reunited on one big wall; where my garden is huge and my worries are small and I get to have my mom’s famous Sunday pot roast any time I want. “No one’s lost and no one’s missing,” echoes Mary Chapin Carpenter in her brilliant song on this very subject, “No more parting, just hugs and kissing. And all these stars are just for wishing . . .”

Speaking of the stars, science has its own waiting game going, of course — awaiting hard data that heralds a major breakthrough, a final cure, a perfect pill. Recently a NASA spokesman set off a firestorm of speculation in the Geekosphere by hinting that organic material collected by the Mars rover Curiosity might prove irrefutably the presence of life on another planet, something science has waited for, well, forever. In the end, it just turned out to be a puff of Martian natural gas but, hey, you have to ask yourself, can a little green flatulent uncle be far away? 

Waiting, in a real-world sort of way, is curiosity’s first cousin — a useful tool when, say, wooing a gal, fiddling with a recipe, writing a song, learning to dance, building a house or searching for life on other planets. 

“Someone, dear, is always waiting beneath a clock.”

This is what my late Grandmother Taylor used to say to me whenever I was fidgeting in church, or the supper table or a gathering involving relatives. 

I hated to wait and I hated this phrase, but really had no earthly idea what she meant by it. “Don’t hate anything, child,” she also counseled, a one-woman Poor Richard’s Almanack. “Hate only hurts the hater. Love and you’ll learn patience and be glad you did.” 

Not surprisingly, I couldn’t wait to grow up and shake the dust of home off my feet. The first time I saw It’s a Wonderful Life I was 20 years old and startled to realize I was George Bailey, a young buck ready to run like crazy from the place that made me. The end of the movie — where an unlikely angel gets his wings and George Bailey discovers he actually helped create heaven for countless others — is, in fact, a lovely meditation on the art of patience and waiting, the quintessential holiday movie. 

By now I’ve been there and back and think I know exactly what my cagey old Baptist grandma meant. She meant somebody is always waiting beneath the clock of personal expectations for a baby to arrive or a loved one to go, for rain to save the crops, for true love to finally come, for old wounds to heal, for new life to start, for a final diagnosis, a job at long last, the jury’s verdict, the judgment of time. 

We’re all waiting beneath a clock. 

In my grandmother’s girlhood, whenever someone passed away — and what a lovely phrase, by the way, a schooner made of clouds drifting to the horizon, a friend walking over a leafy hill — someone in the attending family would still the arm of the ticking clock in the hallway in order to mark the moment of their loved-one’s departure. The wait was over. The fever of living abated. 

I thought of this the other afternoon as I was waiting impatiently in heavy Christmas traffic at a stoplight and heard on the radio that the world’s oldest woman had passed away down in Georgia. Besse Cooper was 116 when she slipped the bonds of earth and flew away, a few hours after having had her hair done and watching a Christmas video at a rest home in Monroe. She was a school teacher who participated in the suffrage movement, registering women to vote after passage of the 19th Amendment. Remarkably, she voted in every election since 1920 save for this year and 1948, when she figured erroneously that Thomas Dewey was a shoo-in.

Besse lived through a lot in her life — the first automobile, two world wars and a host of disasters and conflicts, more scientific breakthroughs and innovations than any period in human history, a man on the moon and the rise of women she long envisioned.

Somewhere in her heaven I do hope she’s enjoying herself, maybe catching another good holiday video. 

Me? I’m still a little impatient with the holiday traffic, waiting beneath a ticking clock and racing to reach the shop before it closes. But more and more I’m thinking, Congress and magic palm oil notwithstanding, this really might be Heaven. 

The Great New Year’s Dirt Clod War

By Jim Dodson

This was the year my father’s cousins, a horde of aunts and uncles plus a Bible-quoting grandmother and three girl cousins from the heart of the country came to our house for a New Year’s visit.

I barely knew them. I was almost 13, my brother, Dick, was 14. We were informed by our mother in no uncertain terms that we had to be good hosts and proper young gentlemen for the duration of their visit. She had that look in her eye that indicated she meant business.

Imagine three girl cousins in one house during an otherwise unblemished holiday week. Frankly, I couldn’t. It amounted to a serious challenge to the mental stability and character formation of any 12-year-old boy. 

My brother at least had a Life Scout project to work on, which took him out of the house most of the week. I wasn’t so lucky. 

It was 1965. America was still buzzing about the Beatles. I was smitten with George Harrison and taking Wednesday afternoon guitar lessons at Harvey West Music downtown. 

Upon their noisy arrival, I attempted to hide out in my bedroom, playing along with Rubber Soul, but one of the girl cousins kept coming into my bedroom without knocking and sitting cross-legged on the floor just to stare unnervingly at me. My mother said, “She really likes you, it won’t kill you to be nice to her,” which was clearly untrue.

Her name was Cindy. She was one year younger than me, the oldest girl cousin who scarcely said a word. She just sat there, staring at me with huge puppy eyes as I fumbled my way through “In My Life.” At one point she asked me if could play “Downtown” by Petula Clark, and I gave her a firm “No” hoping she would just leave me alone. But she didn’t. 

Her younger sisters, meanwhile, occupied my tree house and turned it into a tea house for their dolls. They played board games and poured imaginary tea. I came home from my Wednesday afternoon guitar lesson and found them pretending my tree house was Buckingham Palace and that they were visiting the Queen. I wondered how I could possibly survive the weekend. 

New Year’s Eve fell on Friday that week. The country cousins were supposed to go home after a big New Year’s lunch on Saturday. My favorite Friday night TV shows were “The Wild Wild West”, “Hogan’s Heroes” and “The Smothers Brothers”, but we only had one TV set and the girls cousins insisted on watching some stupid holiday special that involved talking reindeer and an elf.  

On Saturday morning, as I was heading out the door with my baseball glove and bat to play roll-the-bat with my buddies, secretly hoping Della Jane Hockaday might also be in the park, my mother — already in lunch-making mode — stopped me. 

“I have a great idea, honey. Why don’t you take the girls to the park with you? They’re a little bored. They might like to play baseball with you boys.”

It was a horrifying thought. Had my mother lost her mind?  

She clearly wanted the girl cousins out from underfoot while she prepared the big lunch before they all headed for home. 

“Come on, sweetie,” she said. “Do this and I’ll make you a chocolate pie and you can stay up and watch all of ‘Bonanza’ tomorrow night.” Sunday night was a school night and her chocolate pie was the ultimate bribe. I reluctantly cut a deal.

And so, with visible reluctance, I led the girl cousins and their dolls to the park that morning, hoping with every ounce of my being that Della Jane Hockaday wouldn’t show up to witness my complete humiliation.

The park was across the creek from a new housing development where the earth had been churned up into fresh mounds of angry red clay. Some other kids from another part of the neighborhood were over there messing around one of the new houses. I recognized Randy Fulp, spawn of the devil, the meanest kid at my junior high school.

That was some achievement in a public school that was full of scrappy white mill kids and a large number of black kids. This was years before public schools of North Carolina officially desegregated. You learned to survive by keeping your mouth shut and avoiding trouble. Fortunately, I played on the football team that year and earned enough street cred so that Randy Fulp wouldn’t mess with me, aware that I had a couple black friends on the team who would happily have pounded him into the red clay of South Greensboro.

Speaking of clay, not long after the girl cousins found spots on the hill to watch us play roll-the-bat, a large red dirt clod landed at my feet as I was preparing to hit a ball. 

Across the creek, Randy Fulp was grinning like a jackass.

As any kid from this part of the world knows, there is almost nothing as deadly as a dirt clod made from authentic sticky red clay earth from the upper Piedmont region of North Carolina. It can blind, maim or simply scar its victim for life.  

Naturally, I picked up the dirt clod and threw it back at Randy Fulp. I missed. He laughed like the spawn of Satan.

That’s when all hell broke loose. 

Suddenly dirt clods were raining down on us and we were throwing them back. 

As our side advanced into the creek for shelter and fresh clay ammunition, I heard the girl cousins shriek and watched them bolt with their dolls. That’s when I took a dirt clod to the back of the head that knocked me over. Man, does a dirt clod to the back of the head really hurt. I saw stars.

That’s when I witnessed a kind of miracle.   

The person standing next to me making perfect clods from the soft goo and winging them back at the enemy with surprising accuracy was none other than my silent country cousin, Cindy. She grinned and let go a throw that struck the windshield of the bulldozer where our opponents were hiding. They scattered like frightened birds.

Cindy had an unbelievable arm, it turned out, far more accurate than any of the boys on our side. Her finest moment came when she caught Randy Fulp with a fireball to his throwing arm and he let out a yelp, turned and led the retreat around the corner of the unfinished house.

By the time we climbed out of the creek, both of us were soaking wet and streaked with red clay mud. 

We walked home together. I was pleased to learn she played softball on her junior high school softball team back home in Seagrove. She was also her class president. 

My mother was not happy by the sight of us. She made me strip down to my orange-red underwear before she would let me back into the house. Cindy’s dress was equally filthy but she got to go inside and change.

The Great New Year’s Dirt Clod War was the topic of lunch that day. My grandmother was particularly amused, finding some relevant verse from Corinthians to justify such earthy violence. 

Cindy and I sat together and, afterwards, watched the Rose Bowl on TV. I almost hated to see the country girl cousins —  one at least — go home.

More than a decade passed before I saw Cindy again. We met at the last family reunion I attended before heading off to college. Cindy was playing softball on an all-star team that summer, already being recruited by several colleges in the state.

She had a boyfriend and was much prettier than I remembered. Not quite Della Jane Hockaday, mind you, but pretty close.

At one point she asked if I remembered the New Year’s Day we beat some kids across the creek in a dirt clod fight.

“Yes I do,” I replied. “My head is still ringing.”

She laughed. “At least we kicked their butts.”

I heard from Cindy a few years back. She was a new grandmother living in Indiana and had just finished reading a book I’d written about taking my young daughter and our elderly golden retriever on a 6,000-mile cross-country fly fishing and camping trip one summer. The book had just been made into a film. She asked me to autograph her copy of Faithful Travelers and mentioned that it was her favorite book. 

I happily signed her book and sent it back, thanking her for saving my skin during the Great New Year’s Dirt Clod War.

 

 

 

 

 

 

By Billy Eye

The limited ability to enjoy eating out at my favorite restaurants with family and friends has me nostalgic for those grand supper clubs of old that, for several decades, flourished in Greensboro. Especially Green’s Supper Club, last of the city’s casually elegant nightclubs.

During World War II, dance halls like The Green Lantern, The Silver Moon, Southern Comfort and The Casino Club (located at the fairgrounds, where the Greensboro Coliseum is now) were the epicenters of the city’s nightlife. It wasn’t until Fred Koury’s Plantation Supper Club opened in 1943 that nightlife took a more dignified turn. 

The Plantation on High Point Road (now Gate City Blvd) was booking top tier acts like Louis Armstrong, Fats Domino, Jayne Mansfield, Brenda Lee, The Righteous Brothers, Duke Ellington and Jerry Lee Lewis. The joint was so fashionable that, within a few years, the Supper Club concept took off in other areas of town. While they all offered excellent Southern cuisine, due to state ABC restrictions, alcohol could not be served.

Green’s Supper Club on U.S. 29 opened in 1952, the same year “brown bagging” became legal. This arcane system allowed patrons to discreetly bring in their own booze for cocktails for a small service fee. (Direct liquor sales in Greensboro bars and restaurants didn’t become a reality until the 1980s.)

Green’s 15,000-square-foot complex was famous for its stand-alone oyster bar, tender Kansas City steaks and perfectly roasted prime rib. Universally revered for his kindness and generosity toward his employees, owner George Green famously purchased only the finest cuts of meat for his appreciative diners.

Long after The Plantation became Dadio’s disco in the mid-1970s, Green’s dance floor was packed with the World War II generation on weekends. Couples swang and swayed to the dulcet tones of local musicians Tom McDonald and the Scotsman, Dick Wells and Burt Massengale, plus big name AOR touring acts like Tommy Dorsey, Guy Lombardo, Benny Goodman and Count Basie bands, all slow jamming there well into the 1990s. 

In 2016, I conducted an interview with Marvel Comics artist Randy Green. His father, Frank, took over the iconic eatery following his brother, George’s, death in 1992. “It was always fun to watch people dance,” Randy recalled about going there as a youngster. “It was darkly lit with candles on the tables, everybody dressed up for the most part. They had a big band playing so it was something you didn’t get anywhere else when you went out.” Some say the place was never the same after George Green passed away, but the quality of the food and conviviality never wavered.

Despite being a popular spot for holiday parties and class reunions, Green’s Supper Club closed in 2012 after 60 years, the oyster bar and prime rib station remaining open up to the very last hour. The building and property are being well maintained, perhaps in the hope that Greensboro will once again embrace a more sophisticated nightclub experience. 

Billy Eye was so into Santa he wrote and starred in five hours of Christmas specials for the Bravo network in 2005–06 and portrayed Father Tobias in A Killer Christmas Carol film. He has an extensive tribute to Christmases of old at TVparty.com.

Bridging the Gap

By Billy Eye

The downtown underpass at Spring Garden and Edgeworth is getting a colorful makeover following the yearlong, painstaking refurbishing of its rusting bridges.

A decade ago, the pylons were boldly adorned with primary colored geometric shapes. While it was a nice effect, my beef with the project was that artists from Miami were commissioned to do job. Why? Because we don’t have artists here in Greensboro who can create murals? We all know that isn’t true!

This time around, I’m thrilled to discover, a local team of artists led by Darlene McClinton are slinging paint. I happen to catch one of the artists in action: James Raleigh Jr. of Victorious Visions, a Greensboro native and graduate of North Carolina A&T State University who went on to teach art at Ben L. Smith High School.

Previously in the downtown area, James lent his talents to the LeBauer Park stage for National Dance Day; the historically accurate, weathered lettering atop the Christman Company building; and the “Black Lives Matter” and “Say It Loud” street murals on South Elm Street and Lindsay Street, respectively.

After 11 days, the mural was completed last week. James describes the artistic approach as abstract and colorful. “Something that can be interpreted in many ways, as art is.” 

Local artist Darlene McClinton was commissioned for this privately funded project, “Bridging the Gap,” which she designed and installed. Other members of the “Creative Minds” mural team that Darlene assembled include Neidy Perdomo, Jennifer Meanley and Marsharee Neely, who were joined by volunteers from A&T and UNCG.

Eye have to say that, as a central hub of The Greenway, these groovy graphics on Spring Garden are a major upgrade from the previous incarnation. 

For more information about the Downtown Greenway, visit downtowngreenway.org.