Simple Life

Hat Trick

Donning — and Doffing — the Right Topper

By Jim Dodson

The other afternoon, as the skies darkened and the winds sharpened their bite, I slipped into Belk in search of a belt and came out with a new hat.

“Ah,” said the clerk with a kind of knowing chuckle. “Hat man, eh? Very hip.”

“Not really,” I said. “I just needed a new belt to hold my pants up. But then I saw this hat and it spoke to me.”

“Still, very sporty,” she said, ringing me up.

“No, Ma’am,” I said. “Not sporty. Or hip. Just getting old enough to justify a hat. Plus it was half price.”

I’m aware how silly that sounds — a hat speaking to me. What could be crazier, right? Everyone knows hats don’t speak.

But this one did.

There I was, innocently making for the belt department to find something to keep my pants from falling down, when I happened past a large table full of fine hats on sale: classic felted fedoras, flat wool caps, vintage trilby styles, Indiana Jones adventure hats, even hipster porkpies and a Holmesian tweed deerstalker.

“Hey, dear boy,” I distinctly heard a voice in my head say. (It sounded a little like my late mom.) “It’s cold outside. You need a good hat. Your father used to say that every man of a certain age needs a good hat.”

I stopped, turned, looked at the hat table and there it was: a green corduroy Stetson trilby, exactly like my dad used to wear. Talk about a moment that tops them all of late.

I picked it up and put it on. It felt good. My head approved. My wife did, too.

“That hat just looks like you,” she said. “Very dapper.”

Truthfully, I’m not sure what she means by this. How can a grown man possibly look like a hat or vice versa? Philosophers have puzzled on this conundrum across the ages, I suspect, in the same vein as whether there’s another word for “thesaurus” and why, when you think about the past, it brings back so many memories.

How can a hat possibly look like someone, you might well ask. Did John Adams resemble his tri-corner hat? Davy Crockett his coonskin? The King of England his crown? I think not.

On the other hand, all my early heroes of life — movie cowboys mostly — wore distinctive hats, which in those days was how you told the good guys from the bad. Now the good guys tend to wear black hats, or at least the bad country music singers do.

There was a time in America when every grown man wore a good hat of some kind or another. A hat defined the man. Lincoln wore a hat. So did Teddy Roosevelt. Bogart looked positively naked without his gray fedora, which added a couple inches of much-needed height. Ditto Big John Wayne, General Eisenhower and Mr. Green Jeans. Not to mention the Cat in the Hat. Hat men, all.

All politicians, said Carl Sandberg, ought to have three good hats, in fact — one to toss in the ring, another to talk through, a third to pull rabbits out of if elected. What does it say about the sorry state of American politics that nobody wears a good hat on the hustings nowadays? What America probably needs at this point in its evolution (besides a good six-year presidency in order to cut down the hateful attack ads that numb our brains every fourth year) are men and women of proven character who freely reveal their true natures and higher ambitions through the simple choice of headware, allowing them to come to us hat-in-hand every election cycle.

Were we fortunate enough to have such a clause enshrined in our most sacred document — “ We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal (some more than others and not all dudes, by the way); that they are endowed with certain inalienable rights (whatever that means — go look it up); that among these are life, liberty and the importance of choosing of a decent, age-appropriate hat, and so forth” — I can just picture how Hillary would look as she tries to convince us she’s the real McCoy in a Betsy Ross bonnet or Ran Paul a true swashbuckling populist in his fancy Three Musketeer hat with purple ostrich plume.

As it turns out, I might be more of a legitimate hat man than anyone, including me, ever knew — or, at the very least, a man on the threshold of mature and respectable hatdom.

Yes, indisputably, I’ve collected dozens of golf caps over the decades, though principally to mark my long passage through the world of golf. In point of fact, I’ve honestly never felt a moment’s comfort wearing a golf cap of any sort. They make my head look like a pimple with a bill.

For what it’s worth, real golf should be played with an ancient wool flat cap you preferably found on a stool in a Dublin pub or inherited from a dead sporty uncle from the blessed Isles. It should be well-lived in and have seen its better days, but can still stand up to a briny gale off the Irish Sea, or repel a little sheep dung thrown your way by an unhappy rival.

Such hats are in my DNA, after all, hailing as I do from a long line of seriously dedicated hat wearers. This late-in-life hat thing was probably inevitable and bound to eventually show up, like an IRS audit or unexpected relatives on Christmas eve.

My farmer grandfather, Walter, for instance, wore a floppy old wide-brimmed felt hat in winter and a fancy Sam Snead like straw fedora in summer — wouldn’t be caught hatless and out in the world for anything. He always removed his hat in the presence of a lady or whenever he entered a house, habits he passed along the gene pool to his son and me. Whenever I see some fool wearing his golf cap indoors at the bar — or, worse, backwards and indoors at the bar — I’m sorely tempted to yank it off his head and remind him our forefathers in triangular hats fought by Concord’s rude bridge to provide him the freedom he enjoys today to offend people just like me.

My dad, for what it’s worth, looked mighty fine in a wide-brimmed fedora with a gray silk band, a genuinely dapper man in charge of his own destiny. I could show you my favorite photograph from his early days as a reporter, pointing to a burned outhouse where some kind of monkey business involving homemade whiskey, local elected officials and women of questionable virtue had gone down. He looks downright dashing with his fedora tilted just so, a bit rakishly, like actor Alan Ladd in one of his bad gangster flicks, which is probably the reason my beauty queen mama dumped her rich-guy fiancé Earl, (who owned the Stutz Bearcat), and ran off with an underpaid newspaper reporter in his used Studebaker. But that’s another story entirely.

Point being, dear hatless friends, a fond tip of the cap to my old man and his papa for upholding a strong tradition of hat-wearing through the decades. Once I ditched cowboy hats around the second grade, I was pretty much a hatless young hombre myself until I adopted wearing an old wool flat cap I picked up outside a sheep barn in northern Scotland and still don from time to time when the cold wind blows and no one can object to the barnyard smell.

That’s why the serendipitous discovery of a stylish corduroy Trilby at Belk was such a nice surprise as the cold winds returned to the Sandhills this week.

In his 60s, my old man began wearing a simple, stylish green corduroy hat with leather band almost identical to the Stetson number I picked up for a song.

For the record, I wore it out the door and over to Walmart to pick up some potting soil and garden manure thinking about good old Henry David Thoreau who advised men of a certain age, “Live your life, do your work, then take your hat for when the wind blows.”

Good advice for these darkening times, I think. Besides, my wife thinks I’m very dapper, whatever that means.

Now, if only the dapper me can find a way to keep his pants from falling down.

Simple Life

Walter’s Wallet

By Jim Dodson

Not long ago, while cleaning out a desk drawer I should have cleaned out years ago, I found a simple but beautifully made full-grain leather breast pocket wallet with the initials “W.W.D.” embossed in gold leaf just inside.  

It looks brand-new and essentially is — though it was made sometime in the early 1940s. 

My father gave me this wallet in 1995 while we were on a golf trip to England and Scotland to play the golf courses where he learned to play the game while serving on the Lancashire coast as a trained glider pilot during the Second World War.  

The wallet originally belonged to my grandfather, William Walter Dodson. It was a gift from my father in the early summer of 1945, when my grandparents took a train from their farm in North Carolina to meet him at the New York Harbor, where the Queen Elizabeth had carried him home from the war.  

As far as I know, it was the only visit they — Walter and Beatrice Dodson — ever made to New York City. My mother, dolled up to look like Veronica Lake, met them there, fresh from her job working for an admiral in Annapolis — being chased around the desk by a “brass admiral,” as my old man always ribbed her. She was indeed a beauty, the youngest of eleven children from the hills of West Virginia and a former Miss Western Maryland who up and ditched a rich guy named Earl who drove a Stutz Bearcat before the war in order to marry my father shortly before he enlisted. While my dad was away, the singer Tony Martin offered her a job singing with his orchestra, but my strong-willed Southern Baptist grandmother quickly put the clamps on that. 

My dad purchased this handsome wallet for his father somewhere in London’s Covent Garden, I learned decades later, and a dozen bottles of French perfume for his Liberty Bride after the liberation of Paris, and hid them in the bottom of his military footlocker to get past customs officials. I have no idea what he brought his mother. Real English tea, perhaps.

The story I always heard was that they all went to Toots Shor’s on 51st Street for supper that night but couldn’t get in for all the jubilant GIs and their gals — settling, in the end, for pastrami sandwiches at the Carnegie Delicatessen. My grandparents, farm people, reportedly turned in early at their modest hotel, and my dad took his bride to a Broadway show.  

My dad tried to give me this wallet for the first time on the day of my grandfather’s funeral in 1966. I suppose he reasoned that because I was named for both my grandfathers — Walter is my middle name — I might wish to have it as a keepsake of its quiet-spoken owner. 

But he was wrong about that — at least then. 

I was 13 and didn’t see the point of carrying around a dead man’s unused wallet, even one I was named for, though even then I recognized its fine craftsmanship, hand-sewn from Moroccan leather, with a fine brass zippered compartment and even an ingenious little slot containing a leather square marked “stamps,” a relic from a time when a letter home really meant the world. Then there were the three beautiful initials in gold leaf. 

I did love my grandfather, you must understand, even if I didn’t fully grasp his peculiar ways, his calm and protracted silences and natural simplicity of motion. By the time I really got to know him, Walter Dodson had given up his farm in Guilford County and moved with my grandmother to a small cinderblock house surrounded by rose bushes and dusty tangerine trees on the shores of Lake Eustis in central Florida.  

I hated going there for Christmas. No place on Earth could possibly have been slower and more boring to my churning pre-teen brain. And yet . . . Walter took me bass fishing in his skiff and showed me how to cast a spinning lure and, later, in his modest carport, taught me how to cut a proper straight line with a hand saw and hammer a nail without smashing my thumb or finger. 

He smoked cheap King Edward cigars and sometimes hummed what sounded to me like church hymns, though he never went to church when my Baptist grandmother did. William Walter Dodson headed straight for his garden. 

Mind you, I was never uncomfortable in my grandfather’s presence — in fact, quite the opposite. Though I couldn’t have begun to put it into words at those moments on those silent bayou waters, he struck me as a man who loved being outdoors all the time, either tying his tackle lines or snipping his roses or hoeing in his large vegetable garden or just sitting in his shaky carport chair listening to what my older brother Dickie and I mockingly called “redneck string music” on his Philco radio as the crickets sang on his lawn and fireflies danced in the tangerine trees. Astonishingly to us, our grandparents didn’t even own a TV set. 

After Walter’s sudden death, and after I declined to accept the gift of his wallet, my father placed his father’s wallet in his office desk, where it stayed for the next thirty years. He brought it along with us to Britain for what would turn out to be our final golf trip and offered it to me, almost off-handedly, one evening as we were having supper in a pub in St. Andrews.  

By then I had a very different understanding and appreciation of my “simple” Southern grandfather.  

He was a rural polymath and carpenter who never got beyond the third grade but had a gift for making anything with his hands. During the 1920s, he worked on crews erecting the state’s first rural electrification towers, for instance, and returned to Greensboro just in time to serve as a foreman on the crew wiring the Jefferson Standard Building, the state’s first “skyscraper.” 

Walter’s famously calm silence suddenly made sense. His mother, Emma,  my father’s grandmother, was a full-blooded Cherokee woman who was known for her natural remedies along Buckhorn Road between Hillsborough and Carrboro. My father spent his earliest summer days on Aunt Emma’s farm, accompanying this gentle Native American woman on her daily plant-gathering walks over the fields of the original Dodson home place. Walter, the oldest of her four sons and two daughters, clearly identified with his lost Indian ancestry — as did, to some extent, my own father. Today, the old family homestead is an upscale housing development. 

But like Walter’s surviving wallet, nothing important is really ever lost. 

One of the first adventures our father took my  brother and me on as small boys was to hunt for buried arrowheads at the Town Creek Indian Mound in the ancient Uwharrie Hills. When we began camping and fishing in the Blue Ridge Mountains, he always took a bag of useful books along to read —  a hodgepodge of titles ranging from Kipling’s Just So Stories to the works of Sir Walter Scott — which he called, tellingly, his “Medicine Bag.”  

William Walter Dodson, I came to learn, was a man from another time and place who knew the simple pleasures and abiding peace of the natural world. His own kindness wasn’t showy but genuine.

During the Great Depression, whenever someone down on their luck showed up at his back door seeking help, according to my father and other family members, Walter would feed him and provide a bed in a spare but clean room behind his barn. Skin color was irrelevant. My Southern Baptist grandmother, though something of a social butterfly who preached the value of book-learning, wasn’t nearly so naturally generous of spirit. 

Somewhere in our voluminous family scrapbooks is a faded snapshot of Walter standing beside a Black man I only knew as “Old Joe” who lived  in that room and helped out on the farm for years.  No one knows his real name, but it hardly matters. Reportedly, Walter and “Old Joe” were close friends for years. 

Save for my own fading memories and a rusted  twenty-two rifle and this handsome wallet from Covent Garden — still looking almost as new as that day my father gave it to his father in New York City half a century ago — that’s about all I have left of my paternal grandfather, the dignified fellow who taught me to fish in a bayou and saw a straight line and — more importantly — savor the healing quiet of nature.  

I tell myself Walter never had enough money to really need such a fine wallet, which may explain its excellent condition. But that’s only speculation on my part.  

The older I get, the more I appreciate the rhythms of W.W.D.’s simple life. 

By contrast, my modern life seems anything  but simple.  

Which explains why, going forward in this column space, I plan to write about the simple life I aspire to — the small things, people and moments that need to be observed and learned from  simply for the grace they provide. Hence the new column title. 

This week I’m driving up to New York City to see my son, Jack, a recent college graduate working for a documentary film company. Making films is his dream. We’re going to play golf together for the first time in many years.  

Afterward, maybe even over cheap cigars, I think it may be time I offered Jack his great-grandfather’s wallet, which I recently found in the back of my own office desk, where it’s been since that final trip in 1995. 

If he’s not quite ready to have it, well, I’ll naturally understand.  

I’ll be more than happy to hold onto it until he feels the need to have it.

Eye on GSO

Let the Good Times Roll

Music and other delights you ought to know about

By Billy Eye

With downtown rebounding, here are some good times Eye wanted to share with you.

Local musical legend Matty Sheets has resurrected his long-running Open Mic Night (still on Tuesdays), this time at The Green Bean on South Elm. Sign up starts at 6:30 p.m., performances begin at 7 p.m. Two decades ago, this weekly happening started at Flat Iron, where it was held for 12 years before relocating to NYP (New York Pizza, obviously) and, six years ago, to Westerwood Tavern. 

“There’s something cool about The Green Bean,” Sheets tells me. “I’m psyched not to be in a bar. I love that they have wine and craft beers, of course, but it’s just a more mellow vibe.” The Green Bean has undergone a transformation after new owners Amy and Galen Foresman reopened the place in February. Musical performances are happening again, art is on the walls, and they offer baked good creations from Veneé Pawlowski’s Black Magnolia Southern Patisserie. (You read about Pawlowski in an earlier issue of Sazerac, semi-famous after placing first in a Taste of America recipe contest.)

Many local luminaries got their first taste of audience appreciation or took advantage of the opportunity to try out new material at Matty Sheets’ Tuesday open mic, including the likes of Kasey Horton, Jennifer Millis, Laurelyn Dossett, Sam Frazier and the late, great Taylor Bays, who is dearly missed by so many.

***

On Saturday evening, wandered into Lao — located in the 300 block of South Elm — to hang with my good friend, Robert (such a “good friend” that I don’t even know his last name!). He bartends there on weekends. This guy is so popular, patrons will ask the front of house if Robert’s slinging that night, then turn around and leave if he isn’t.  

Lao serves superior Laotian cuisine and features a spacious bar, where I enjoyed Nam Khao, wonderfully zestful lettuce wraps filled with a mixture of crispy rice, grated coconut, in-house cured pork, cilantro and green onions. Oh boy, was that great. It’ll make you forget P.F. Chang’s. For real.

As delicious as that Nam Khoa was, I was just as eager to sample Robert’s mixology skills, asking him to “surprise me.” The initial cocktail he prepared was a bourbon concoction called Crime of Passion that I can only describe as transcendent. Served in a highball glass, Old Forester Signature Bourbon (100 proof), Plantation Original Dark Rum, Luxardo, Licor 43, passion fruit, lime juice, pineapple juice and sugar are blended and served on ice.

Lao’s specialty is a margarita that is in such high demand they have to juice dozens upon dozens of lemons and limes before the in-crowd arrives. The twist here, alongside the lemon and lime juice, is the blanco tequila, which is shaken with agave nectar and coconut then finished with a Thai chili for an added kick.

For those of you that imbibe, Robert is on the scene Friday and Saturday nights at Lao and other times at Dram & Draft, a watering hole that prides itself on its far-out cocktails. Another acquaintance, musician /songwriter David Lavey (who’s last name I do know!) is a member of the wait staff. Just a few weeks ago he released a new solo album, PROXY, available on iTunes, Spotify and Amazon Music. Check it out. 

Billy Eye is OG — Original Greensboro.

 

Life’s Funny

Real Talk with Nurse Jaekle

Chasing science with a shot of art

By Maria Johnson

Until earlier this year, it had been about 15 years since registered nurse Beth Jaekle had stuck a needle in anyone’s arm, but when the Guilford County Health Department set up mass vaccination centers, Jaekle, a supervisor of the agency’s school nurses, was ready to give it a shot.

Er, shots.

Mask-to-mask with hundreds of folks who sat at her station at the Greensboro Coliseum, she skipped the part about not having jabbed anyone in years. Instead, she promised her charges that she would take good care of them.

“I feel like I have the ability to make things calm,” says the 40-year nursing veteran. “That’s one of my strengths. I didn’t rush. I had conversations with people.”

She heard all kinds of stories.

Many people couldn’t wait to be immunized. Some said they were motivated to protect a family member, often an elderly person.

“They knew if their loved one got it, they could lose them,” Jaekle says.

Other people were nervous about being injected with a vaccine that had been developed in record time.

A few confided they were there only because a family member had insisted.

She listened to people of all ages and stripes. In the eyes above the masks, she saw a grab bag of emotions — fear, excitement, relief, joy. She geared her responses accordingly.

“If you treat people with respect and compassion . . .” she says.

In the end, everyone said “Yes,” when Jaekle asked the last question on her checklist: “Do you give me permission to give you this shot?”

Some of them looked away as she gently pinched their muscles and pricked the skin.

Others snapped pictures with their cell phones or had friends take videos to preserve the historic moment.

Jaekle’s last act was to cover the injection site with a bandage and pat it with a gloved hand.

“I’d say, ‘That’s my love pat as a nurse,’” she says.

What kind of feedback did she get about the experience?

“So many times, they’d say, ‘I didn’t feel a thing.’”

Good InTENtions

10 Things to Tell the Graduates

By Cassie Bustamante

  1. Stay out of the sun. Although a golden glow might make you feel sportier, shinier, sexier, you are not a car. You’ll thank me when you’re not rubbing Lexol on your face in 20 years.
  2. Write down the little moments that make you laugh, cry, smile or just take your soul by surprise. Sure, when they happen, you’ll be certain you’ll never forget them. But you will. Unless you write them down.
  3. Get to know – and fall in love with – who you are when no one is looking. Try new things and discover what sparks curiosity. What lights your heart on fire? Follow that. The world needs more fierce passion and authenticity. Let your weirdo flag fly.
  4. Choose friends carefully and make time for those who feel like sunshine. Remember that you are the sum of the five people you hang around most, so consider who embodies the qualities you most want to see in yourself. A wise father once said, “You can pick your friends, you can pick your nose, but you can’t pick your friend’s nose.” Just stick with the picking of the friends and leave noses out of it.
  5. Remember that it’s never too late to start something new. Getting to that chocolatey chewy center of a Tootsie Pop might take you three licks, or it might take you 1,374. No matter how long it takes to get there, it will still taste just as sweet. Just don’t give it to the damn owl.
  6. There are few things in life that a long walk or run in fresh air can’t cure.
  7. General rule: If you wouldn’t want your mother to know about it, don’t do it. Because you know, if it’s at all embarrassing, someone is going to post it on social media for all the world – including future employers and in-laws – to see.  
  8. Eat your veggies, but also eat the damn cake. Your body is a temple. Food is meant to nourish you, but it’s also a gift to be savored.
  9. Master the art of saying no. Protecting your time and honoring your limits is a gift to yourself and the world. Say no to what doesn’t feel aligned with who you are, or what you know is going to require more than you’re able to give. Start practicing now and it will get easier with each, “No, thank you.” Think you can handle it? (The answer here is YES!)
  10. Trust yourself above all. According to author Bronnie Ware, the biggest regret of the dying is this: “I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.” Don’t be that person. Listen to the whispers from within and live life fully on your own terms. Make your choices based on hopes and dreams rather than fear. And when it’s your turn to name your biggest regret, let your answer be, “I have none. I came, I saw and I lived the life I imagined.”

 

Cassie Bustamante is O.Henry’s digital content manager. 

Eye on GSO

Mommie Dearest

Joan Crawford in Greensboro . . . near Mother’s Day, of course 

By Billy Eye

It began innocently enough. Eleven-year old Chester Arnold Jr. was gifted 5 shares of Pepsi common stock in 1957 but, after watching the financial world spoof The Solid Gold Cadillac, he suddenly grew concerned about his investment. He fired off a letter to Pepsi’s chairman, Alfred Steele, to ask if his board of directors was, “crooked like those people in the movie.” No, really. He did.

The answer he received was something the youngster couldn’t possibly have predicted.

Perhaps at the insistence of Steele’s wife, who understood more than anyone the power of publicity, the boy and his parents were flown to New York and put up at the Waldorf Astoria, where Alfred Steele and his new bride, one of Hollywood’s most glamorous stars, Joan Crawford, were staying while their fabulous two-story Fifth Avenue penthouse was undergoing major renovations. The Steele’s planned trip to Greensboro later in the week would provide the perfect Hollywood ending to a real life fairy tale come true — plucky small town boy meets glamorous movie queen with the lights of Manhattan as their backdrop.

Her best work mostly behind her, Crawford was experiencing moderate box office success during the late-50s with a run of campy B-movies that included Johnny Guitar, Queen Bee and The Story of Esther Costello. Upcoming was her seminal (yet supporting) role in The Best of Everything as ball-breaking business executive Amanda Farrow.

Miss Crawford imbrued herself with a regal air of royalty. She was America’s ideal Hollywood star — the one by which all others were measured. The haute couture fashions, ersatz British accent . . . she was always made up and ‘on’ in public, a personification every bit as (un)real as her screen roles.

For three days in 1957, the Arnold family were treated to all the bread and circuses the Big Apple had to offer while Joan’s name was back in the newspapers, this time in a positive light. Weeks earlier, her downstairs neighbor made the gossip columns by suing the Steeles over the noise associated with the heavy construction taking place in their penthouse. It was while she was entertaining the Arnolds that Crawford, through whatever means, convinced her neighbor to drop that lawsuit. Perceiving this purely as an attempt to attract attention — after all, they had offered the her a hotel suite or trip around the world while work was underway — Joan bluntly told a friend, “If that bitch thinks I’m inviting her up here for tea, she has another thing coming!”

After being feted in New York, the Arnold family jetted with the Steeles to Wilmington, Delaware, where a photo was snapped and dispatched to newspapers around the world of young Chester, flanked by Crawford and her husband, entering a Pepsi board meeting. 

The next morning, on Thursday, May 2, Joan Crawford, her husband, Alfred, and entourage emerged from the 9:50 train at the Southern Railway depot in Greensboro, where they were presented with keys to the city by mayor Archie Cannon before crossing the street to the King Cotton Hotel to freshen up. Joan wore a simple white sleeveless dress with an enormous matching hat (as was the style of the day) for a 2 p.m. press conference announcing Pepsi’s newest, most modern bottling plant on Spring Garden Street, near Holden Road — a 32,000 square foot facility that was being christened that afternoon.

At 4 p.m., Joan, Alfred, Pepsi executives and the Arnolds departed the King Cotton Hotel, escorted west down Spring Garden across Holden by a police motorcade. With sirens blaring, they roared up on a crowd numbering into the hundreds, some having waited for hours for the most elaborate ribbon cutting ceremony Pepsi had ever hosted.

After a presentation of colors, representatives of the Army, Marines and Navy fired rifles into the air while the National Guard manned a line of howitzers meant to add to the decibel level, although the blank mortars failed to arrive in time. Rather than raining munitions down on Summerfield, the big guns sat silently. But Greensboro High’s marching band belted out The Star Spangled Banner until just after 4:30, when Crawford and the plant’s president, Mrs. Zella Melchor, snipped the 150-foot ribbon that ringed the front of the building. The crowd flowed into the building for free bottles of Pepsi while Crawford and company returned to the hotel for a private reception.

Joan Crawford’s travels brought her back to the Cardinal State numerous times since that day in May. Only natural, as Pepsi was concocted by a New Bern pharmacist in the 1890s, although the soft drink only gained marketplace traction when it was marketed to African-Americans down South in the 1940s. Crawford’s circling the globe as Pepsi’s goodwill ambassador continued unabated even after the unexpected death of her husband in 1959, but it would be another decade — almost to the day — before the actress returned to our region. By that time, Pepsi had grown from a niche soda with little market presence outside of the South to the ubiquitous brand name it is today. So much so that Madison Avenue would dub the ‘60s, “The Pepsi Generation.”

ACT TWO

In 1967, an older and more jaded Joan Crawford, now in career freefall, waved to scattered fans from the window of her corporate jet as it taxied down the PTI runway. Alfred Steele had been under the mistaken impression that their extravagantly appointed New York penthouse facelift would be paid for by the soft drink company. Consequently, his death a year after the project was completed left the film star with a huge debt load at a time when fewer job offers were coming her way. Crawford had just returned from England from filming what would be her penultimate motion picture, Berserk, one of a string of preposterous potboilers (dubbed “hagsploitation”) with budgets so low the star had to provide her own wardrobe.

First order of business on the morning of May 5, 1967, was a Burlington press conference for which La Crawford arrived fashionably late (a popular Hollywood euphemism widely adopted in the South, referring to some undefined moment that existed between Bette Davis’ promptness and “Miss Garland’s not coming out of her dressing room”).

Smartly dressed in a silk-lined, cinnamon colored linen jacket and matching shift, her upswept red hair tucked into an oversized fedora, Joan confessed in a Southern drawl straight out of central casting: “Please excuse my appearance. This cool weather made me resort to the dress I traveled in last night.” There wasn’t just a nip in the air that Friday morning. Miss Crawford was sipping 100 proof Smirnoff throughout the day to help her embody that increasingly campy, old-school Hollywood stereotype she played to the hilt. “Last week at a housewarming for Donna Reed, several people asked me where I was going next, and when I said, ‘North Carolina,’ they said, ‘She already packed her Southern accent!’” 

Crushing a spent Alpine cigarette under ankle-strapped high heels, the Academy Award-winner took great pains to portray herself as Just Plain Joan, who entertained guests with home-cooked meals of breaded pork chops with fried apple rings then scrubbed the floors of her humble two-story penthouse shanty overlooking Central Park. It was Mildred Pierce redux with a side of corn pone, only now her precious Veda was a cold — but refreshing — Pepsi. “Every time you drink a Pepsi, I want you to think of Joan Crawford,” she was quoted as saying. “If you drink Coke, you can think of those polar bears.” 

Afterward, Joan was interviewed by Lee Kinard for a Good Morning Show segment. When asked about the current crop of stars, she remarked, “Overexposure has removed much of the mystique. The public knows too much about them.”

The next year, while attending a May 18, 1968, Pepsi-Cola function in Charlotte, Joan posed for a photo with two Greensboro folks, 11-year old Teresa Staley and kiddie show star George (Old Rebel) Perry, to promote the Muscular Dystrophy Association’s backyard carnival fundraisers. As the Association’s poster child, Teresa recalls being escorted into Crawford’s hotel suite in the Queen City on that Saturday afternoon. “The Old Rebel was super nervous and super excited about meeting her, but I was so young I didn’t have a clue. I was just excited about taking a road trip.” 

“Quite a character,” is how Teresa remembers the movie star. “Instead of pronouncing my name ‘Teresa’ she called me ‘Teraaaaasa.’ It was very funny to me. We spent a significant amount of time there, everything had to be just right to allow her picture to be taken.” Four or five photographs were snapped with George Perry, as instructed, gazing adoringly at the movie icon while Joan’s eyes remained fixed on a point somewhere in a galaxy far, far away. “She had just injured her ankle, I think she had sprained it or something. She was wearing an Ace bandage but would not allow any pictures to be taken below her knees. I’ve worn glasses since I was 8, but she wouldn’t allow me to wear glasses in the picture because she was afraid it would cause a glare.” 

The thing that most impressed Teresa was that “her bedroom door was open and her whole bed was covered with hats. I thought it was pretty cool that she traveled with all of her hats. And she carried her own ice on airplanes because she didn’t trust airplane water. Now I really can’t blame her for it . . .” 

No seminal Joan Crawford role would be complete without a randomly cruel, no-good-deed-goes-unpunished ending. In this case, the motion picture legend was unceremoniously dumped by Veda — er, Pepsi — on her 65th birthday. More recently, in a preposterous publicity attempt, daughter Christina claimed Joan murdered husband Alfred Steele. And it’s anyone’s guess how Crawford would have greeted the hit TV series Feud in 2017, based on her over-inflated rivalry with Bette Davis.

Joan Crawford was a wildly successful, widely admired businesswoman at a time when that was a genuine rarity. She not only conquered the insidious labyrinth known as show business, but also, by sheer force of will, helped establish Pepsi-Cola as a multibillion-dollar global powerhouse. 

Joan Crawford passed away two days after Mother’s Day, 1977. She was 72 years old.

Simple Life

The Queen Mum and the Hogmanay Ace

By Jim Dodson

The first heavy frost of the season lay on neighborhood lawns as I walked to work at dawn the other morning, a sign of a rapidly vanishing autumn. A gray cat returning from his nighttime travels paused at the end of my neighbor’s driveway to watch me pass just as my neighbor stepped out on his porch in a green plaid bathrobe, stooping to pick up his morning paper. He straightened and waved.

“How was the trip up north?” he called.

“Very well. I went to see a dear friend who isn’t feeling well.”

“You went all the way to Maine — just for a weekend?”

“And back.”

“You’re crazy.”

“Actually, it was over four days. I like to drive.”

“I repeat. You’re crazy. Welcome home.”

He laughed and hurried back inside, and I walked on.

Two thousand miles over four days is probably a crazy thing to contemplate by anyone’s standards to travel. Yet over the past 30 years I’ve made the drive from North Carolina to Maine — or there to here and back — close to a hundred times, I suppose, the curse of having a heart planted in two places.

For more than two decades of that time we lived on a forested coastal hill in Maine. My road trips home to Carolina were increasingly complicated by the urban congestion and endless road construction of the mid-Atlantic Gothams but invariably solitary and highly productive hours I looked forward to with an almost greedy pleasure that came from being briefly off the clock of the world. I was free to drive for hours upon hours with my phone silenced and Bonnie Rait or Antonin Dvorak on the stereo, working out various trivial and important and whimsical matters in my head, noting this and that on my familiar short-cuts through the country, a small notebook and a tape recorder invariably close at hand, a truck stop coffee strong enough to strip paint somewhere within reach.

For better or worse, major portions of at least six of my books were written in this manner, a road warrior’s rolling meditation, along with various poems that will hopefully never see print, road details, peculiar names, bits of overheard conversation, sudden inspirations and various to-do lists, plus the odd brilliant thought that seemed, upon further reflection, not so shiny bright after all.

This trip had a different flavor, a valedictory tone — to say hello to an old friend from my early years as a journalist in Atlanta and a chance to see the ailing Queen Mum.

The Queen Mum, as I call her, is my former mother-in-law, the grandmother of my children and one of my closest friends. A tough and tender daughter of Glasgow’s Netherlee neighborhood, she lost her own parents after the war and migrated to America with her brilliant scientist husband, Sam, in the early 1960s.

They settled in a rambling 200-year-old farmhouse on a beautiful 500-acre farm above Moosehead Pond. Not surprisingly, Kate, who holds degrees from Glasgow University and has read every work of any significance in Western literature at least twice, became the local superintendent of schools, raising three great kids, and becoming something of the village matriarch.

She was the first reader — and tough proofreader — of my early books, and even after her daughter and I separated and amicably divorced when our two children were still very young, Kate remained a treasured friend and advisor whose friendship, support and wisdom never wavered — the spiritual center of all our lives.

All pretty funny when you consider the way we began.

It was December 1984 and I was making my first visit to the Bennie family farm to meet my future in-laws. Generally speaking, Christmas isn’t such a big deal to native Scots, but Hogmanay — the celebration of the Scottish new year — is an annual rite accompanied by much dancing and drinking, fueled by great food and excellent Scotch whisky.

In honor of the occasion, fires were banked high in the wood stoves, and the BBC was dialed up on the shortwave radio at 7 p.m. sharp EST in order to hear London’s Ben Ben officially toll the arrival of the New Year five hours away on the Scottish borders.

On the final stroke of the bell, glasses were touched and toasts made. The fiddle music resumed, and the house filled up with all sorts of buzzing folks, family and local friends who came out of the winter night to be part of the year’s best gathering.

A polite Southerner far from home, I wondered if I’d perhaps wandered into a real Brigadoon, the mythical Scottish village that appeared just one night a year. Sam Bennie, my fiancée Alison’s brilliant world-traveling papa (who uncannily resembled and sounded like the late actor Peter O’Toole), thoughtfully topped up my Scotch, and his daughter — soon to be my wife — even coaxed me into the dance.

The next day, a bright, sunny New Year’s Day, frigid as an Arctic ice floe, things settled down considerably after a big lunch of ’neeps and roast mutton. My fiancée’s siblings packed up and headed back to work and school while Ali and Mum — as everyone called her — cleaned up the kitchen and put the house back in order. Kate filled up the wood stove, made herself a cup of tea, and sat down in her favorite wing chair by the front window to read.

Truthfully, I was a little bored, homesick and not a little hung-over from my first Hogmanay celebration. But as a kid growing up in North Carolina, I had a strange annual little New Year ritual of my own: trying to hit a golf ball over my parents’ house with one cold swing. Success or failure was a fine indicator of the year ahead.

Silly, I know. But I’d recently taken up playing golf again after an eight-year hiatus in Atlanta on a golf course in Vermont where Rudyard Kipling had supposedly played the game. So while Alison leafed through old family photos, I fetched my sand wedge and a couple of balls and wandered out to a patch of exposed, frozen grass beyond the farm pond in front of the house.

The winter’s big snows had yet to come, and I thought I’d amuse myself by seeing if I could indeed fly a ball over the handsome old farmhouse of my future in-laws with one extra-cold swing. It was nearly zero outside. As dumb ideas go, this one was in a class by itself.

I took dead aim at the chimney where wood smoke swirled in an Arctic breeze and, under the circumstances, made an outstanding golf swing worthy of Old Tom Morris himself on Hogmanay. Happily I watched the ball soar upward and head for the peak of the house, clearly going to clear the roofline by several feet.

Unhappily, it didn’t.

The ball came down well shy of the target and passed through a pane of ancient wavy glass of the window where my future mother-in-law was quietly reading her book and enjoying a pot of tea.

My heart stopped. My feet froze. I didn’t know whether to turn and flee to certain death in the frozen wilderness of Northern Maine or trudge in and face the music of an unhappy Scottish matriarch who didn’t seem particularly pleased that her pretty Harvard-educated daughter was planning to marry a Southern rube who didn’t know how to hit a decent wedge or do a Scottish reel.

I hurried around the pond and opened the door, and there she sat, still holding her book, giving me a look that said I would be banished from the clan before I was ever invited in. Glass was everywhere, but the offending golf ball strangely nowhere to be seen.

Amazingly, it had flown through the window, bounced once on the side table, and landed neatly in the Queen Mum’s teacup.

“Do you know what you said to me?” I asked her on a beautiful Sunday morning in late October, just 29 years later.

“Oh, I remember,” she said, smiling coyly.

“James, I seriously doubt if you could hit that shot again if your very life depended on it.”

“You know,” I added, “I’ve never had a hole-in-one. That was my only ace — my Hogmanay ace.”

This made her smile. She pointed to a high shelf behind me where all my books were standing between bookends.

She was resting in a beautiful front room of her cute little house over a dark-water cove in the Maine college town where my kids — her grandchildren — grew up, with all of her favorite books neatly arranged on handsome dark-wood shelves by her attentive daughters, Alison and Fiona.

The walls of the bedroom were painted a cheerful butter yellow, and there there were photos of her nine grandchildren placed all around the room. Squirrels and chickadees fed at the window feeders, beyond which the woods were golden and red with the last of autumn’s northern glory.

So far as I know, Kathleen Bennie never played golf, though her Uncle Eddie, who raised her, was mad for the game back in Scotland.

We became good friends quickly after the Hogmanay Ace, sharing a passion for books and gardens and all things Scottish, and even traveled together to the Holy Land of golf where I once looked up a trio of Glaswegian gents who’d known her uncle — the club champion of Netherlee Golf Club — back in the late 1930s.

They welcomed me warmly one late summer afternoon, telling me stories with such dense Glaswegian brogues I could only make out every fourth or fifth word. A memory I treasure.

The Queen Mum also once gave me her best recipe for haggis, the largely inedible Scottish dish I’ve grown unaccountably fond of:

“Make the haggis from whatever you happen to find lying about in the kitchen. Then make a special Drambuie sauce to go with it. Cook the haggis well and feed it to the dog. Then drink the Drambuie sauce.”

We sat and talked for a lovely hour. I told her about my latest book project and about taking my wife, Wendy, on her first trip to Scotland. She wanted to hear all about the magazines I helped start and now edit down in North Carolina. We talked briefly about some of the same things we’ve spent nigh on three decades talking about — books we were reading, family episodes, politics, children, golf and gardens — and then I kissed her cheek and thanked her for being the Queen Mum, my Queen Mum, the best friend a Southern boy far from home and family could ever have found.

On Sunday night, heading home to North Carolina, I stopped off to see my grown children in the new apartment in Brooklyn they are sharing with childhood pals from back home in Maine. My son Jack brought his new girlfriend, Bridgette, and daughter Maggie cooked a lovely late supper, and her boyfriend Dave opened a very good wine and we stayed up insanely late (for me), talking about everything from their busy careers to the great Christmas trees their mother and I always hunted and cut on Kate Bennie’s farm.

I was pleased that they each phone their grandmother like clockwork and were both heading up to Maine to see her that very next weekend.

The next morning, I dropped my son off at work on Manhattan’s Lower West Side and headed down the highway toward home, my head so full of details and tender emotions it will probably take until Hogmanay for me to grasp what a wonderful, heart-breaking road trip it really was.

Reprinted with permission from PineStraw magazine

Eye on GSO

A Tale of Two Tornados

One recent, another from 85 years ago

By Billy Eye

On April 15, 2018, a 135 MPH, EF2 tornado ripped through east Greensboro, devastating properties and upending lives at each point it touched down. One person was killed. (Remarkably, there weren’t more fatalities.) Today, the area that was hit is still attempting a return to normal. There are empty lots where homes used to stand and wrecked elementary schools and churches. Blue tarps cover damaged roofs.

Greensboro Community Television producer and firefighter Brian Dunphy recently filmed and edited a documentary that takes viewers into neighborhoods that, even after 3 years, remain in a state of flux. For a bit of history and perspective, Dunphy interviews two O.Henry contributors, Jim Schlosser and Billy Ingram, about a “freak twister” that roared down South Elm Street in April of 1936. That disaster left more than 12 dead and dozens more injured across its path of destruction, which devastated an industrial and residential zone that was just beginning to flourish.

The 1936 storm left behind 1.5 million dollars ($28 million today) worth of damage. Just as it would be 85 years later, the African American community was hardest hit. The Blue Bell overall plant (located where Mellow Mushroom is today) was completely destroyed, leaving 700 temporarily unemployed. Dillard Paper Company as well as Glascock Stove & Manufacturing Co were also severely impacted. All three businesses managed to regroup and thrive. 

In recent weeks, there’s been a flurry of activity related to the 2018 Eastside tornado with Habitat for Humanity of Greater Greensboro building five new homes for the displaced.

You can find Brian Dunphy’s Tale of Two Tornadoes on Youtube here. 

Simple Life

Life on the Wing

Simpler is Always Better

By Jim Dodson

It’s funny to think something so simple could give so many years of uncomplicated pleasure.

Then again, maybe that’s one of life’s truest messages: Simpler is always better.

I’m speaking, of course, of the crumbling bird feeder that graces my backyard garden. It’s is a well-loved and well-traveled friend.

My old high school English teacher, Miss Emily Dickinson — her real name, by the way, and a red-lipped spinster to boot — would be horrified by such poor usage. She would firmly note that it’s grammatically impossible to have an inanimate object as a “friend,” because friends are living and breathing entities, equally impossible to “love” anything except other human beings, though I’m not sure there were many of those in Miss Emily’s grammatically pristine life.

At risk of earning her wrath from beyond the grave, I hereby repeat my oath of love for my aging friend the bird feeder because it is absolutely alive and breathing with birds of all sorts and has been for nearly two decades, even though it’s beginning to fall apart at the seams, not unlike its owner these days.

I bought it on the side of a coast road in Maine one late autumn afternoon not long after my wife and I moved into the post-and-beam house we built upon a forested hill. This was the year my daughter, Maggie, was born, 1989.

An old man was selling a dozen or so of his homemade birdhouses and feeders from the flatbed of his pickup truck. The houses were beautiful affairs, painted white with elegant gables and fancy copper roofs. The feeders, which came in three sizes, were unpainted models of pure functional simplicity — basic affairs open on all four sides, with ample room for birds to gather beneath a gable roof.

I bought one of the fancy birdhouses and took it home for my newly laid out “Southern” garden that was protected from the north wind and received the most sun. It looked great standing in the garden, a luxury home for some lucky bird.

Curiously, though, after two weeks, not a single bird showed up to claim the house. A month passed and not one bird even poked its head in to investigate.

By then the weather was closing fast. In Maine, winter hits like the bite of an ax.

I happened to be taking that same coast road when I saw the old man and his pickup truck parked by the side of the road. The fancy copper-roofed birdhouses were all gone. But there were still a few of the large, simple, unpainted feeders left.

Against my better judgment, I pulled over and bought one.

He didn’t seem to recognize me, and I didn’t bother telling him his fancy birdhouse had no interested takers.

He sold me the feeder for half price.

I took it home and  mounted it on a post in the rapidly hardening ground outside our den window, just as the first snowflakes began to fill the air. I drove to the feed store in town and asked the clerk what seed would work best in my simple open feeder. She told me a 50-pound bag of sunflower seeds. I went home and filled up the feeder.

Early the next morning, there was a foot of snow on the roof of the bird feeder — and maybe half a dozen black and white chickadees feeding like crazy. I remember getting the first cup of coffee and just sitting down in my favorite wing chair to watch them go at it. I was transfixed. The thermometer outside read 12 degrees.

I think I went through two 50-pound bags that winter. No matter the temperature, the chickadees were always there, flitting in, flitting out, remarkable creatures, an ounce of feathers on the wing, ounce for ounce the toughest creature in the Maine woods.

In spring, returning robins showed up at the feeder,  followed by noisy jays and even a pesky red squirrel that caused Riley the dog to park himself by the window and growl menacingly at the intruder. To the delight of our infant daughter, who loved to watch the birds along with her old man, a favorite daily excitement was to let Riley out the kitchen door in order to tear around the house and chase off the squirrel, who only once dawdled long enough to nearly get caught.

The lady at the feed store advised me to upgrade to a swanky squirrel-proof feeder with an inverted plexiglass bowl beneath the feeding area and slotted glass vents that regulated the amount of seed consumed, preventing costly spillage. The rig she showed me cost nearly a hundred dollars.

But there was, I confess, something beautiful and primal about the wide-open feathered mayhem that happened at any moment in my wide-open democratic bird feeder. Life in the wilds of Maine — anywhere,  really — is a balancing act between here and now, life and death, survival and extinction.

A bird never ponders any of this, of course. Only we devoted bird watchers marvel at such faith on the wing. “Consider the birds of the air,” said St. Matthew. “They neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them.”

Gorgeous gray and red-striped finches along with handsome yellow-throated evening grosbeaks the size of a lady’s evening shoe dropped by to eat their fill, and even a pair of Baltimore orioles visited for a solid week in late Yankee spring. I had a silly mental image in my head of word passing among the birds that an avian soup kitchen had opened up and all were welcome, come as you are.

I soon bought a small book to try to identify the many new visitors — grackles, starlings, wrens and waxwings. Barn swallows, towhees and several kinds of sparrow. Once I looked out and saw a magnificent red-tailed hawk trying to muscle in on the dining action, too big to shelter under the feeder’s roof.

After a long day doing battle with uncooperative words or simply trying to keep up with my young, rambunctious family, the parade of birds and constantly changing variety at my feeder were a tonic to the soul, a living metaphor for these transient moments of life — a reminder to pause and take notice of the beauty right before my nose.

I often sat with my  daughter, and soon her little brother, watching the birds feed and finding a strange and welcome stillness in the end of my day. On the hardest winter days, those dive-bombing chickadees were nothing shy of an inspiration.

When we moved home to North Carolina, I left behind the fancy birdhouse but dug up several of my prize hosta plants and — my very last act before driving away without looking back — took down my democratic bird feeder and placed it in the trunk of my car.

By then it was really showing its age and wear. Before I raised it again by a pair of trained Savannah hollies leaning over our backyard terrace, I replaced rotted pieces of the framing and tacked on a new roof, then gave the whole thing its first coat of paint.

Almost eight years later, that old feeder is busier than ever, a Grand Central Station of Southern feeding birds — robins and Carolina wrens, nuthatches and mourning doves, swifts, fly-catchers, kingbirds, barn swallows and what seems to be a large and ever-expanding clan of cardinals. I’ve seen one bluebird but maybe half a dozen pileated woodpeckers. Towhees and juncos are frequent visitors.

Seated in my favorite Adirondack chair with a cold Sam Adams and my well-worn bird guide in hand, I’ve identified everything from pine siskins and a rare saltmarsh sparrow. One unforgettable evening I stepped out and surprised a dozen beautiful American gold finches perched on the edges, feeding. They flew off like a burst of gold in the still evening air. I even tolerate a pair of pesky gray squirrels who love to sneak along the top of the fence and gorge themselves when they think nobody is watching. My dog Mulligan lives to chase them off, a game she picked up from old Riley, who died a few years ago.

Life hasn’t gotten any simpler since I bought my beloved bird feeder by the side of a lonely coastal road. My children have now grown up and flown the coop, and I’m still wrestling with uncooperative words.

Yet the time I spend in my wooden chair just watching birds feed and the seasons come and go is still like a tonic to the soul — somehow feels more important than ever, a simple pleasure that reminds me to keep still and somehow keep the faith. These birds neither reap nor sow nor gather into barns, after all. But as long as this earthbound father is around, they’ll be welcome to eat at my old feeder.

Reprinted with permission from PineStraw magazine

Life’s Funny

On Skunk Watch

By Maria Johnson

OK, you know  how sometimes your  husband is out in the backyard in his sweat pants at 5:30 a.m. because one of your dogs was going crazy at the window, and you let him (your dog) out, and he ran behind the trees, and now you can’t see him, but he’s still going nuts, and you decide that he (your husband) needs to go see what the matter is … ? 

And he (your husband) says, “Oh, for gawdsakes,” but he’s a good guy, so he goes outside and looks around, and says he doesn’t see anything, but you — who are standing at the door flapping your hands to urge him on — say, “Go look behind the trees.” And he says, “It’s dark! I don’t want to get sprayed by a skunk or something.” … ? 

And you, say, “SKUNK?! There are no SKUNKS around here!” because, sure, you’ve seen dead ones on the road, but you’ve never seen a live one … ? And then a week later, you’re coming down the stairs at about 11 at night, and you happen to glance out the window on the stair landing, and you go, “EEEEEEE!,” and your teenage son goes, “WHAT?” and you point at the street light, and your son rushes to the window to see what you see, which is a skunk ambling from the street into your front yard … ? 

And your son starts laughing … ? 

And the skunk keeps waddling like, “La-dee-da-da-da just another night in Skunkland.” … ? 

And you go, “EEEE!” again because the nonchalant skunk is getting closer to your house … ? 

And you run to the side windows and you see the nonchalant skunk walking along the fence like he’s done this before, many times in fact, and he’s looking for the opening, and you go, “Eeeee!” again … ? 

And your son goes, “He’s through!” … ? 

And it bothers you that your son is enjoying this so much, but now is not the time to discuss it because a nonchalant skunk is RIGHT BELOW YOUR WINDOW … ? 

And then you realize the air-conditioning unit is right below your window, too, and the last thing you want to do is alarm a nonchalant skunk that’s right beside the air-conditioning unit … ?And you whisper, “Don’t move! He’s right beside the air-conditioning unit.” … ? 

And your son is laughing so hard, it’s really getting on your nerves.… ? And you say, “Go outside and follow him!” … ? 

And he says, “YOU go outside and follow him.” … ? 

And you regret buying your son all those brain-building puzzles when he was little, and you think about waking up your husband, but you don’t want to have to admit he was right about the skunk thing, so you stand there frozen in skunk fear … ? 

Paralyzed because you realize that you are powerless because you can’t order a skunk off your property, and you can’t trap it, and even if you wanted to, you couldn’t shoot it without making a huge stink. … ? And then you think, “Wait a minute. Maybe that’s not a skunk after all because he doesn’t have white stripes down his back. He has a white crown, but  the rest of him is all-black, like some badass arch villain.” … ? 

And you do an emergency online search for “skunks without stripes,” which sounds a little like a humanitarian organization, and you see that there is such a thing, but it’s a freak occurrence, which means there’s a  MUTANT, BADASS, NONCHALANT SKUNK BESIDE YOUR AIR CONDITIONING UNIT … ? 

And an hour later, your dogs want out, so you put them on leashes, and walk them into the dark backyard, but you are tiptoeing in a crouch, lest you come face to face with anal glands. … ? 

And the next morning, you wake up thinking about your mutant, badass, nonchalant skunk, and you want to give him a name. …? 

You want to call him Stinky, but you think maybe that’s not fair because that’s just one aspect of his personality, but then you think, “We’re talking about  a damn skunk here.” … ? 

And you’re sipping your coffee, and your husband is leaving for work, and as he’s going out the door you say, “Make-it-a-good-day-there-was-a-skunk-in-our yard-last-night-bye.” … ? 

And then you’re online again, because you’re wondering why Stinky the BadAss, Nonchalant Skunk was on your suburban street, and you learn that skunks like chicken eggs, and you think of your chicken-keeping neighbors  across the street. … ? 

And you walk across the street later and ask your neighbor if he’s missing  any eggs, and he says no, but he almost stumbled over a skunk when he was out walking one night. … ? 

And you say, “What did you do?” and he says, “I got out of there. It was a skunk.” … ? 

And you think how skunks rule the world.… ? 

And that night, you sit by the front window and keep a StinkWatch. And  you ask yourself why, but deep down you know the answer — because his power fascinates you. … ? 

And just one more time, you’d like to see him swagger across your front yard  like he owns it — because he does. … ? 

Don’t you just hate it when that happens?