Winner! Winner!

It’s OK to spoil your dinner

By Billy Eye

Perhaps you’ve seen Veneé Pawlowski of Black Magnolia Southern Patisserie on a local news program or read about her in the News & Record or Yes! Weekly recently. The reason: Veneé’s Bourbon Banoffee Cinnamon Roll recipe is one of twenty winners in General Mills Foodservice’s 2020 Neighborhood to Nation Recipe Contest — the only winner in our state.

A year ago, Eye was the first to write about Black Magnolia’s sinfully delicious concoctions here in the Sazerac and later in a print edition of O.Henry. It’s been a wild ride for Veneé since last March, when she found herself unemployed and with a new baby.  

First, Veneé began baking for family and friends, transforming a hundred-year-old home on Summit Avenue into her own personal cottage bakery in Greensboro’s Dunleath neighborhood. There, using locally sourced ingredients, she created scratch-made sweets and treats for every occasion. Thanks to good old-fashioned word of mouth advertising (aka, the best kind), her business took off fast.

She’s since moved to temporary digs in College Hill, fulfilling special orders from Monday through Saturday (don’t forget Beignet Sundays once a month) and supplying cinnamon rolls and Bacon Garlic Cheddar Biscuits (are their four more perfect words?) for purchase at The Green Bean downtown. Plans are afoot for other establishments to carry her baked goods. And be sure to look for her delectable goodies at the Greensboro Farmers Curb Market this spring. 

Veneé tells me she submitted her recipe into the contest last September. “They chose 20 winners from across the country to win $5000 each, in addition to help with launching a promotional and marketing campaign.” 

Veneé Pawlowski embodies the American entrepreneurial spirit. When facing a challenging situation in a most confusing time, she spun it into pure, unadulterated success. And you heard it here first.

Craving one of those award-winning Bourbon Banoffee Cinnamon Rolls? Find them at the Green Bean this Sunday. Or visit Black Magnolia Southern Patisserie on Facebook to order the most sumptuous looking and tasting cakes and desserts in town.

 

My Rubber Soul

By Jim Dodson

It was a moment that would change America forever. A cute girl named Trudy McGivern in Miss Esther Christianson’s Sunday School class leaned over, bit her lower lip and whispered excitedly: “Are you going to watch them?” 

She clearly wasn’t paying attention to Miss Esther’s Bible story. The date was February 9, 1964, a cold and rainy Sunday morning in Greensboro. Exactly one week before, on Groundhog’s Day, I turned 11. Cute girls were suddenly of great interest to me, Trudy in particular. 

“Who do you mean?” I whispered back.  

“The Beatles, silly . . .” she said, weirdly blushing. “Haven’t you heard? They’re on the Ed Sullivan Show tonight.” 

I remember wondering why just saying “the Beatles” could make Trudy  McGivern blush. I’d heard of the Beatles, of course, had just read about how  “Beatlemania” was sweeping Great Britain and soon headed to America. A  couple of their hit songs — “I Want to Hold Your Hand” and “She Loves You” — had zoomed to the top of the pop music charts and were suddenly all over my favorite radio station in town. I liked both songs, though they certainly wouldn’t make me blush. 

I liked the the Ed Sullivan Show, too, which I’d watched faithfully on our black and white Philco TV along with Walter Cronkite’s popular history  documentary show, The Twentieth Century, for years. Sunday night, in fact, was America’s best night for TV, or at least my favorite, probably because it was the only night of the week I was permitted to watch our new RCA Colortrak TV past my usual 9 p.m. bedtime. Bonanza and Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color never looked so good.  

Admittedly, I was mildly intrigued to hear that the Beatles were going to appear live on TV that very evening, but frankly, still in the clouds from an even bigger event earlier that week. After receiving a new Stella Concertmaster guitar for my birthday on Groundhog’s Day, my father arranged for two friends and me to go backstage and meet Peter, Paul and Mary, America’s greatest folk singing trio, after their concert at the Greensboro Coliseum. As it worked out, Mary Travers vanished quickly, but Paul Stookey and Peter Yarrow stuck around to chat with a cluster of wide-eyed kids and even allowed me to briefly play one of Paul’s guitars. He was amused when I strummed the chords of “Puff, the Magic Dragon,” their own hit song on the charts that faraway winter half a century ago. He then took the guitar and played the song leaving us in silent awe. Peter, Paul and Mary had my heart. 

So the Beatles, as you might imagine, weren’t the top of my chart. Even so, out of simple curiosity, I plunked down cross-legged in front of our TV set at 8 p.m. that dreary February night and watched the Beatles impressively perform three different songs on the show amid orgiastic screams from hundreds of teenage girls packed into the CBS studio from which the show was broadcast. They were weeping and climbing out of the seats, pulling at their hair and even attempting to climb over balcony railings just to get at the “Fab Four,” making Trudy McGivern’s blush look like child’s play. 

“The thing is,” John Lennon reflected on Beatlemania some years later, “in America, it just seemed ridiculous — I mean, the idea of having a hit record over there. It was just something you could never do.” But somehow, they did — registering nine songs, in fact, in the Billboard Top 100 for 1964, an unprecedented five hits alone in the top 20 for the year. Within weeks, Beatlemania had hit America full force. Celebrities began wearing Beatles wigs and “The Beatles Are Coming” bumper stickers sprouted everywhere, including on my own mother’s Buick LeSabre. She loved the Beatles, in particular Paul McCartney.  

Paul made every girl swoon, or so it seemed, from cute Trudy McGivern to my own Southern mama — who even purchased my bald-headed father his own Beatles wig for fun. He wore it to cocktail parties for years. 

The same Capital Records company that had rejected three Beatles songs in 1963 poured an unprecedented $50,00 into a national publicity blitz, resulting in a commercial avalanche of Beatles souvenirs. At my elementary school, Beatle magazines and bubble-gum filled Beatle cards proliferated almost overnight — and were promptly banned from playground commerce by our dark-hearted principal.  

Another British Invasion group was also pretty popular that February, charting five pop hits in Billboard’s Top 100. Their name was the Dave Clark Five and they would have 17 Top 40 hits before they fizzled out three years later, appearing on the Ed Sullivan Show a record 18 times. 

Truthfully, in the beginning, I liked them more than the Beatles, which explains why when the DC5 came to the Greensboro Coliseum during the first national tour of a British pop band, I once again snagged a backstage pass to meet the band before their performance.  

Sadly, I recall very little from the encounter save for exchanging a brief few words with a visibly bored Lenny, the lead guitarist, whose accent was so thick I didn’t understand a word he said. Their music quickly lost its appeal.  

Coming just three months on the heels of the tragic assassination of a president, more than one ’60s historian has concluded, the frenzied, landmark debut of the Beatles on Ed Sullivan proved to be perhaps the other most significant and far-reaching event of the decade.  

They argue, and I don’t disagree, that the Beatles were initially the lift America needed in order to get over the protracted nightmare of John Kennedy’s murder —  a Valentine to America in the form of young, mop-headed troubadours purveying catchy guitar tunes about love and holding hands — but in a broader context ultimately a powerful agent of transformation that reshaped American society and set the stage for the racial and anti-war tumults that soon followed, a vast cultural gestalt that woke up the nation from its sleepy suburban prosperity.

By the time my guitar lessons at Moore Music Company allowed me to teach myself basically every song off Rubber Soul, the sixth studio album the Beatles released in late 1965, I was fully onboard with those who believed The Beatles were the musical voice of my generation. George Harrison’s introduction of the sitar in “Norwegian Wood” took popular music far out of its normal boundaries and established a new frontier for rock experimentation, while the band’s use of  American R&B and soul influences matched with conventional orchestral influences marked it as their most daring and influential album yet — shaping my own rubber soul. Not surprisingly, Harrison became my favorite Beatle.

Over the span of just seven short years, the brilliance of McCartney and Lennon’s songwriting skills, Harrison’s extraordinary guitar, and the band’s revolutionary ever-changing musicality — evolving from the smiling lads who caused a near riot on Ed Sullivan to the existential flower-power poets and members of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band whose Magical Mystery Tour redefined pop culture before they finally “Let it Be” and broke apart in 1970 —  would never be matched or equaled.  

That year, I was a junior at Grimsley High, playing my gently weeping guitar in a popular quartet from the school choir called the “Queensmen” and teaching guitar at Lawndale Music Company — wooing my girlfriend, Kristin, with my  favorite song from Rubber Soul, Lennon’s and McCartney’s incomparable “In My Life,” which I sang and played solo at a final choir performance for the year.  

Even today, when I hear this haunting song, it stops me cold in my tracks, probably because my sweet girl Kristin died less than four years later in a manner every bit as senseless and world-changing as the deranged fan who shot and killed John Lennon.  

There are places I remember 

All my life, though some have changed 

Some forever not for better, 

Some have gone and some remain 

All these places have their moments, 

With lovers and friends I still can recall 

Some are dead and some are living 

In my life I’ve loved them all. 

As illogical as it may sound, I never played the song again. But this month I fully expect to hear it and many others owing to the new wave of Beatlemania that will hit every conceivable TV, internet music and radio outlet within days — all in celebration of, and stemming from, that historic February night in 1964 when the Beatles debuted on Ed Sullivan. There are even two documentaries and a film set, too.  

For those of us who grew up with the Beatles and their music, much time has passed and healed many things, leaving only the bittersweet memories of people and places we loved, a world before now. 

Ironically, several years ago, a friend phoned me excitedly one afternoon and insisted I pick up USA Today, which had published a feature in its Thursday book section about the favorite books of celebrities.  

One of those listed was Paul Stookey of Peter, Paul and Mary fame, a resident of Blue Hill, Maine, which was just up the highway from our village on the coast.  The book he cited was Final Rounds, of all things, the book in which I told the tale of Kristin’s murder and how it changed my life. Save for that backstage encounter 50 years ago, I never got to meet Paul Stookey again. But if I ever get that privilege,  I plan to thank him for his kind words about my book and — more importantly — being my first musical hero, even before The Beatles shook up the world and made Trudy McGivern blush.

Baskin’ in the Past

By Billy Eye

 

Ice cream is exquisite. What a pity it isn’t illegal.

—Voltaire

You may know by now that the Baskin-Robbins on Battleground has closed for good. It happened right before Christmas, just shy of the ice creamery’s 50th anniversary at that location. That simple cinderblock hut, formerly a Lane’s Laundry, was the site of my first job in 1973. I still have the old B-R pay stubs — $1.40 an hour back when a single-scoop cone cost around 30 cents.

You wouldn’t know it today, but that Baskin-Robbins was a really jumping spot in the 1970s and 80s. There was always a trickle of folks stopping by after leaving nearby Cellar Anton’s, and when movies at the Janus Theaters across the street let out, waves of teens and college kids would flood through the door, spilling out into the parking lot. With six screens at the Janus, there was pretty much a continual churn of warm bodies cast into the night, inexorably drawn to the allure of Mint Chocolate Chip — a new flavor in 1973 that quickly became a Baskin-Robbins best-seller.

There were always three or four of us behind the counter scooping furiously. Customers took a number from a pink dispenser to be waited on. I shot the above photo on a hot August night in the mid-1970s. 

Packing pints from a granite hard tub of Quarterback Crunch just out of the freezer was grueling, especially for this skinny kid. And the unshakable scent of spoiled cream wasn’t exactly the sweet smell of success you might imagine. But making ice-cream cakes was enjoyable, and my friends thought it was a cool job to have.

In the early 1980s, when Skate Station One Roller Rink and the Sandwich Construction Company were also major attractions in the vicinity, it’s my understanding that B-R remained a social hotspot. By the time Janus closed in 2000, young people had found other places to hang out, and business dropped off considerably.

Last time I wandered into Baskin-Robbins was almost a year ago. It was rather sweetly nostalgic. Not much had changed since the I worked there. My fav item, their Jamoca milkshake, still tasted exactly the same. But now, for the first time in half a century, there is no Baskin-Robbins to be found in Greensboro (the Four Seasons outlet closed some time ago).

The original Battleground franchisee, Lois McManus (my boss), also owned three other nearby businesses: a converted church that served as The Chase restaurant, an upscale ladies’ boutique called House of the Dove and The Perfect Poppy dress shop.

How she found time and energy for all of those ventures along with the enormous amount of community service she performed remains a mystery to me. She was president of the YWCA Board, PTA President, chairperson of Mobile Meals, president of the Eastern Music Festival, founding member of the Interactive Resource Center — and this barely scratches the surface of her accomplishments. Lois McManus passed away in 2016. Toward the end of her life, she was one of my mother’s neighbors at The Hampshire.

But it was providing a wholesome place for young people to hang at night during my not-at-all misspent youth that I’ll remember most about her. That and getting fired for giving Sammy Prefontaine a free ice cream cone.

The Heart’s Memory

By Jim Dodson

As a surprise New Year’s gift — or an  early February birthday gift — my wife Wendy gave us both  Fitbit activity trackers. 

These are nifty digital fitness bracelets that calculate everything from your heart beat to nightly sleep patterns. Linked to your smart phone, they can also  measure your daily number of steps and average caloric intake; calculate your  proper age and weight targets; balance your checkbook and determine your likely Oscar picks. For all I know, they may even be able to explain Donald Trump’s  continued popularity in the polls and maybe why anyone really needs to keep up with the Kardashians.  

They reveal, in short, lots of information about your human biology and general state of health in hard numbers, revealing who you are, moment to moment, in this physical world.  

I like my new Fitbit. With the diet and exercise routines my bride has carefully plotted out for us both in 2016, our hearts ought to be in pretty good shape by summer. 

This month, I suddenly find myself at the age of my father when he and I began to have deep and thoughtful conversations about life, faith and the complex affairs of the world.  

Not everybody is fortunate to have the kind of extraordinary father I had, though in truth it took me almost three full decades to appreciate his grace and elegant wisdom. Owing to his unsinkable optimism and love of quoting long dead sages and poets when you least expected it, I gave him the nickname “Opti the Mystic.” 

By the time I began to realize what a true gift he was to us, Opti was a youthful 62 and I was an anxious, overworked 29. He was the Southern contractor for the  largest industrial advertising firm in the world, beloved by his half-dozen employees, an adman with a poet’s heart; I was the senior writer for the largest magazine in the South, the Atlanta Journal Constitution Sunday Magazine, trying to earn my way to the Boston Globe or the Washington Post and not look back. 

We shared a love of books, especially history, poetry and philosophy. That winter of 1983 he was reading MacKinlay Kantor and Joaquin Miller, the colorful frontier poet of the Sierras; I was reading Fear and Loathing On the Campaign Trail and Robert Frost, wondering what it might be like to live in real snow country.  

Opti was moderating the Men’s Sunday morning class at First Lutheran  Church in Greensboro and helping organize an ecumenical feeding program called Urban Ministry. When I wasn’t writing about sensational murders in  Atlanta — designated as the nation’s “Murder Capital” that year — I was chasing after New South conmen and empire builders, drug lords and repo kings, unrepentant Alabama grand dragons and presidential candidates.  

Suddenly, though, I’d lived long enough and written about enough disturbing things to realize that I was actually more interested in what my funny old father Opti the Mystic had to say about the state of the world than my aspirations in it.  

“The world is always coming apart at the seams. Be sure you don’t do the same,” he once calmly counseled me over the phone on a sleety afternoon in March of 1981.  

I was standing in a mob scene of frightened commuters at LaGuardia Airport, returning from an interview at the Yale Club with a remarkable man named  Morris Abram, a small-town boy from Georgia who grew up to become a leading  civil rights lawyer who argued the constitutional guarantee of one-man, one vote  before the Supreme Court and went on to serve as the first president of Brandeis University and work for five presidents in the realm of human rights.  

The day I met him, Abram was suffering from acute myeloid leukemia, which had prompted him to begin working on his memoirs. The doctors weren’t terribly hopeful, he explained with an almost stoic shrug, the winter light falling on his handsome face from a nearby window. Snow was in the forecast for the city that day. 

“So what keeps you going?” I asked. 

Abram smiled. “Life. Family. Lots of interesting friends. Also work I believe in, good jokes, a sense of humor and a keen curiosity about what I may find on the other side.”  

We talked about the Other Side. He meant “life after death.” He wasn’t sure what awaited him — awaits all of us — but he was curious to finally find out what, eager to discover what has obsessed sages, poets and philosophers across the ages.  

We talked for almost three hours in a beautiful room with tall windows  overlooking a garden and he was kind enough to send me off to catch my flight home to Atlanta with a finished chapter about his Georgia youth under my wing, explaining that he planned to call his book The Day is Short, from a quote in the Torah that goes: “The day is short, the work is great.”  

Morris Abram reminded me of my own funny, philosophical father. That’s what I was thinking, at any rate, when I stepped out of the cab into the sudden sleet and mayhem waiting at LaGuardia Airport. 

Ronald Reagan, it emerged, had been shot that afternoon, 61 days into his presidency, and the airport was locked down, all flights grounded. Queues were huge. People were frantically milling about. Stepping into a crowded bar where every face was aimed at the TV screen over the bar, I heard a couple of scotch sippers murmur something about a coup. So I called my dad to say hello and just hear another calming voice. 

He assured me Reagan would be OK and so would America — suggested I go grab another cab back into the city, find a nice warm hotel room, have a nice dinner and maybe take in a play. 

I took his advice and did just that. I found a room at the University Club and called a friend named Larry Ashmead on the spur of the moment to see if he might be free for supper. Ashmead was the executive editor at Harper & Row, a gracious, witty legend who gave dozens of best-selling authors their start. Susan Isaacs and Tony Hillerman are two of the literary giants Larry launched.  

He was famous for spotting literary talent and for taking photos with the Instamatic camera he carried everywhere.  

He took me to a crowded restaurant in Midtown where, he said, we were sure to see someone famous. Sure enough, right over Larry’s left shoulder sat Carly Simon, dining with some guy who looked like Al Pacino in Scarface. We also saw, as I recall, a young Donald Trump, all hair even then. Larry asked the waiter to take our picture. Somewhere I have the photo of us smiling like truant school boys. That’s Carly Simon’s fluffy head behind us.  

Larry offered me a small contract to write a novel about the South. The next day, he even arranged for me to meet a top agent. Her name was Virginia Barber. She took me on based entirely on Larry’s recommendation and became my agent until she retired and moved home to Virginia a decade ago, passing me off to her gifted protégé, a young Duke-educated fellow named Jay Mandel, my agent at  William Morris Entertainment to this day.  

The book I wrote for Larry was called Union Grove, a novel about a struggling farm family in deep South Georgia. It was a disaster. I rewrote it twice but it never worked and Larry was kind enough to let me out of my contract. It gave me pleasure to burn the manuscript at our annual New Year’s Eve bonfire on our snowy hill in Maine many years later. 

“You’ll write the novel you should have written someday,” he told me. “Just hope I’m still around to publish it.”  

A short time after this, Larry introduced me to Jud Hale, the beloved editor of Yankee Magazine, and I moved to a small solar cabin on the Green River in Vermont to become the first Senior Writer in that magazine’s illustrious 80-year history.  

It’s funny how this life works, connecting one soul to another. Had I not gone to New York to see Morris Abram and gotten stuck at the airport, I probably wouldn’t have phoned my dad to see if the world was going to end and been urged by him to spend another night in the city, whereupon I wouldn’t have been taken to dinner by a lovely literary giant and seen Carly Simon and her new boyfriend (and maybe young Donnie Trump) and eventually wound up finding my spiritual equilibrium and true calling on a beautiful river in Vermont, about to meet the beautiful woman who would become the mother of  my children. 

In Vermont, I got myself a yellow dog and a second-hand fly rod and resumed playing golf again after almost eight years of too much work and not enough play. My heartbeat slowed and my life seemed to find its proper direction. 

Gratitude, Opti used to say, is the heart’s memory. It’s an old French saying, one of his favorites. 

Opti the Mystic passed away in March of 1995; I was by his side in Greensboro at the time. He was 80 years old. 

Morris Abram lived far longer than his doctor expected and published his beautiful memoir in 1982. He passed away in March of 2000 at age 81. I hope he found what he was looking for on the Other Side. 

Larry Ashmead passed away in September that same year; he was 78. I’m sure he took his famous Instamatic with him.  

And now, I’m the same age as Opti when all of these things began to happen. I don’t need a Fitbit to tell me what a lucky fellow I’ve been.

For the Time Being

By Jim Dodson

My office over the garage, which I fondly call the “Tree House,” is a place where time stands still, in a manner of speaking. It’s also something of a museum for dusty artifacts and funky souvenirs that followed me home from six decades of traveling journalism, including a collection of wrist watches that accompanied me most of the way. They’re part of what I call Uncle Jimmy Bob’s Museum of Genuine & Truly Unremarkable Stuff.

 Most unremarkably (if you know me), many of the watches are broken or simply worn out from the misfortune of being attached to my person. Suffice it to say, I have a history of being tough on timepieces, having cracked more watch crystals than I can count and either lost or damaged half a dozen of these loyal beauties by various means. 

I’ll suspect that a good shrink could have a field day with the fact that all of these defunct watches are the same model and brand — the famous Timex Expedition models, an outdoors icon known for its durability and rustic beauty. 

You can blame black-and-white television for this unholy devotion.

See, when I was a little kid and the TV world was not yet in living color — I was a highly impressionable son of a successful advertising executive, it should be noted — my favorite commercial was a spot for Timex watches in which suave company pitchman John Cameron Swayze subjected Timex watches to a series of live “torture tests” in order to prove that the durable timepiece could “take a licking and keep on ticking.”

To this day I remember slugger Mickey Mantle wearing his Timex during batting practice, seeing watches freed from solid blocks of ice by a wielded hammer, also dropped to the bottom of fish tanks for hours or put through the washing machine cycle, even attached to the bow of a roaring speedboat!

In fifth grade, I actually wrote a research paper on Timex watches, learning that the company started in 1854 in Waterbury, Connecticut, producing an affordable six-dollar clock using an assembly line process that may have inspired Henry Ford to do the same with cars half a century later. The company made its name by selling durable pocket watches for one dollar. Even Mark Twain carried one. During the Great Depression, they also introduced the first Mickey Mouse watch.

I received my first Timex watch for Christmas in 1966 and wore it faithfully everywhere — to bed, to baseball practice, even to Scout Camp where I took it off to do the mile swim and never saw it again, the start of a tradition.  

The next one I owned was an Expedition model purchased with lawn-mowing money for about $25 bucks. I wore that sucker all the way through high school, occasionally losing and finding it in unexpected places while putting it through the kind of personal abuse that would have made me a natural for Timex TV spots.

For high school graduation, my folks gave me an elegant Seiko watch, a sleek Japanese quartz model that never needed winding and kept perfect time but never felt right on my wrist.  

I have no idea what happened to that lovely timepiece. Or at least I ain’t telling.

By the end of college, I was safely back to Timex Expeditions, the cheap and durable watch that would accompany me — one lost or broken model at a time—  across the next four decades.

I mention this because a month or so ago, during a particularly busy month of work, I misplaced my longest running Expedition and, feeling it might be the end of time or at least civilization as we know it, impetuously ordered a replacement model from the Internet with guaranteed 24-hour delivery . . . only to discover, the very day the new watch arrived, that the missing watch was under my car seat all along, keeping perfect time.

God only knows how it got there. 

But the message wasn’t lost on me. 

Why do I need anything delivered within 24 hours? Instead, perhaps it’s time to slow down and pay attention to what is already happening here and now, to pause and take notice of the simple things that give my life its greatest purpose and meaning.  

The the start of a new year is a time when many of us pause to take stock of how far we’ve come this year and may be headed in the year to come. After a certain age, the question of how to make use of whatever time we have left to do the things we still hope — or need — to do is also on our minds. 

Yet in modern America, “where time is money,” most of us live by the silent tyranny of the ticking clock, obsessed with achieving deadlines and keeping schedules. With no time to waste, we put everything on the clock or at least mark in down in the Day-Timer, making helpful “To-Do” lists and dinner reservations, planning holidays a year in advance, booking flights to warmer seas, appointments with the decorator or therapist, paying the mortgage on time, picking up the kids at 3 — all of it shaped by, and subject to, the hopeless idea of saving time.

Someone, my late Grandmother Taylor liked to say, is always waiting beneath the clock for a child to be born, a life to pass on, a decision to be made or a verdict to be rendered. A proper Southern Baptist lady who knew the Scriptures cold but enjoyed her evening toddy, she often told me, “Child, for the time being, you’re on God’s time. This is heaven.” 

A nice thought, but just to complicate matters on the planetary scale, there’s the shadow of the infamous Doomsday Clock to contend with, the symbolic timepiece created by the world’s concerned scientists that chillingly charts the steady devolvement of the planet’s environmental and nuclear climates. In 2019, the minute hand was moved forward to two minutes to midnight.

So what happens next? 

Presumably, God only knows that, too. 

When it comes to contemplating the passing of time, I often think about the month “out of time” my wife and young son and I spent following our noses through rural Italy and the Greek Islands with no firm travel agenda or even hotel reservations. We met an extraordinary range of unforgettable characters and ate like gypsy kings. We swam in ancient seas, probed temple ruins and disappeared into another time, discovering a race of people who happily ignore the clock if it involves the chance for an interesting conversation about life, food or family. For the time being, it really was heaven. Somewhere along the way, I managed to lose yet another Expedition watch — but failed to notice for several days. 

To us, a siesta between noon and 3 p.m. would be unthinkable in the heart of an ordinary work day, generally viewed as either a costly indulgence or colossal waste of time. Yet in Italy, Spain and many Arab cultures, the idea of pausing to take rest and recharge batteries in the midst of a busy day is viewed as a sensible and restorative act, a way to slow down and keep perspective in a world forever speeding up.   

From the mystical East, my Buddhist friends perceive time as an endless cycle of beginnings and ending, life and death and rebirth, time that is fluid and forever moving toward some greater articulation of what it means to be human. Native American spirituality embraces a similar idea of the sacred hoop of life, a cycle of rebirth that prompted Chief Seattle to remark that we humans struggle with life not because we’re human beings trying to be spiritual, but the other way around. A version of this quote is also attributed to French Christian Philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, proving great souls think alike, even in different languages.

How ironic, in any case, that a booming West Coast city that is home to time-saving megaliths of commerce like Amazon, Starbucks, Costco and Microsoft is named for a man who lovingly presaged, decades ahead of his time, that we humans essentially belong to the earth and not the other way around, and that, in time when the last tree falls and final river is poisoned, we will finally learn that we cannot eat money or replace whatever is forever lost in time.  

Fearing his own time brief on this planet, Transcendentalist Henry Thoreau went to live by Walden Pond in order “to confront only the essential facts in life and not discover, when it comes time to die, that I’ve never lived,” as he put it.

I hold a similar desire close to my own aging heart, though in the short term I sure would like to finish a trio of half-written novels I’ve been cobbling on for years, write a few more books about subjects that greatly interest me, and maybe — if there’s any time leftover — build a cabin in the Blue Ridge like the one my late papa and I always talked about “someday” building together. 

For the record, just for fun, I’d also like to learn to speak Italian, play the piano and spend a full summer exploring the fjords and forests of Scandinavia with my wife.  

So much to do. So little time to do it. 

That seems to be our fate. At least mine. 

On golden autumn afternoons and quiet winter days, however, I swear I can almost hear Chief Seattle, Father Chardin and Grandma Taylor whispering to me that we are all living on God’s Time, wise to wake up and slow down and live fully in the now as we journey into a brave new decade, hopefully appreciating the many gifts of time and it’s precious brevity.  

For the time being, I now have two fine Expedition watches that can take a licking and keep on ticking.

Though how long I can do the same, goodness me, only time will tell. 

  

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.