By Billy Eye

Every year, for at least the last 15 years, I’ve whipped up a massive Thanksgiving dinner at home — turkey, ham, oyster casserole, sweet-and-sour green beans à la my favorite recipe from the 1970s Junior League cookbook, and on and on — to feed friends who had no other arrangements or those who spent time with their families but needed an escape plan for later. Since that’s not going to happen this year, I’ve been shopping around for Gate City restaurants offering Thanksgiving supper with all the trimmings.

Sure, there are national chains like Ruth’s Chris Steak House, Fleming’s Prime Steakhouse & Wine Bar, Cracker Barrel and Harper’s, all with meals to go. But I prefer some locally owned options. Should you opt to go this route too: Make your reservations early so you don’t miss out.

Starmount Forest and Greensboro Country Club each offer a traditional dinner to-go or dine-in for their members. Lucky 32 and Green Valley Grill offer similar in-or-out options. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve spent Thanksgiving with family at Green Valley Grill, but it was always top flight. Lucky 32 never disappoints. Order by midnight on Monday, 11/23, for Thursday pick up at both locations.      

Although it’s a regional chain, K&W Cafeteria has always felt to me like a hometown place. It’s certainly a reliable standby with turkey, dressing and green bean and sweet potato casseroles, all prepared the way grandma fixed them. Individual meals include your choice of turkey and dressing or baked ham along with two hot sides, a soft roll and a slice of homemade pie ($9.99 per person or $69.99 for the Family Feast, which feeds 6). 

At Grandover Resort & Spa, dine-in seating is already sold out. But good news: You can still order your traditional Thanksgiving turkey and ham dinner to go (includes salad, sides and dessert). Order by Monday, 11/23, 5 p.m. Pick up on Tuesday, 11/24, or Wednesday, 11/25, at 19 & Timber Bar. 

Oakcrest Family Restaurant is another old-fashioned, last minute destination but, quite frankly, I’m craving something a bit different this year. Perhaps you are as well. 

Melt Kitchen & Bar on New Garden Road has an array of appetizers and savory side dishes such as Smoked Gouda Spinach Dip, Butternut Squash Spinach Salad, Whipped Garlic & Mascarpone Potatoes with Black Pepper Gravy and Cranberry-Orange Relish. Orders must be received by Sunday, 11/22, 2 p.m. for Wednesday pick up. 

I’m definitely going to avail myself of The Sage Mule’s ‘Sides ’n Pies’ menu, which includes Crab Stuffed Mushrooms, Onion Dip, Roasted Giblet Gravy, Cider Glazed Root Veggies, Squash & Corn Casserole, Au Gratin Potatoes and muffins stuffed with Neese’s Sausage and apple or oysters. They even have homemade vanilla ice cream to top their pumpkin, apple or chocolate cheesecake pies. Parking lot pick up for Sides ‘n Pies will be Wednesday, 11/25, from 10 a.m. — 2 p.m. 

Whatever and wherever your Thanksgiving culinary delights may originate from, Eye wish you and yours the best! 

The rewards of life’s upward climb 

By Jim Dodson 

Never lose the opportunity to see anything beautiful, Ralph Waldo Emerson once advised, for beauty is God’s handwriting, a wayside sacrament.

Because I rise well before dawn wherever I happen to be, I stepped outside to see what I could see from 4,000 feet. 

A fog bank was rolling silently down the side of the mountain like a curtain opening on the sleepy world, revealing fifty miles of forested hills in the light of a chilly quarter moon. 

The only other lights I saw were a few remaining stars flung somewhere over East Tennessee. The only sound I heard was the wind sighing over the western flank of Beech Mountain. 

An owl hooted on a distant ridge, saying goodbye to summer. 

In a world where it is almost impossible to get lost or find genuine silence and solitude, this moment was a rare thing of beauty. 

I stood there for probably half an hour, savoring the chill, an over-scheduled man of Earth watching the moon vanish and a pleated sky grow lighter by degrees, drinking in the mountain air like a tonic from the gods, savoring a silence that yielded only to the awakening of nature and first stirrings of birdsong.

After an endless summer that wilted both garden and spirit down in the flatlands, a road trip with three buddies to the highest mountain town east of the Rockies was exactly what I needed. 

A door opened behind me on the deck. 

My oldest friend, Patrick, stepped out, a mug of hot tea in hand, giving a faint shiver.

“Beautiful, isn’t it? “ he said. “Hard to believe we’re not the only ones up here.”

Such is the power of a mountain. The lovely house belonged to our friends Robert and Melanie Woodard and though there were hundreds of houses tucked into the mountain slopes all around us, from this particular vantage point none was visible or even apparent, providing the illusion of intimacy with a world unmarked by man. 

“So what does this make you think about?” my perceptive friend Patrick asked after we both stood for several silent minutes taking in the splendor of a chilly mountain dawn. 

For a few precious moments, I admitted, it felt as if I were standing on the deck of the rugged post and beam house I built for my family on a forested hilltop of beech and birch and hemlock near the coast of Maine, our family home for two decades, surrounded by miles of a protected forest. The skies, the views, even the smell of the forest were nearly identical. Sometimes I missed that place more than I cared to admit. 

“I remember,” said Patrick with a smile. “It sat on a hill.”

“The highest in our town. It felt like the top of the world. That was intentional. My sacred retreat for a transcendental Buddho-Episcopalian who has a keen fondness for good Methodist covered dish supper.”

Patrick laughed. 

He knew exactly what I meant. Old friends do. We’ve talked philosophy and gods and everything else sacred and profane for more than half a century. 

In every spiritual tradition, mountains are places where Heaven and Earth meet, symbolic of transcendence and a human desire to elevate mind, body and spirit. As long as our types have walked the earth, hilltops and mountains have provided a powerful means of escape and spiritual retreat, a way to literally rise above the demands and hustle of everyday life. 

Moses received the Ten Commandments on Mount Sinai, which translates to mean “The Mount of God.” In Greek lore, it was believed that a night spent alone on Mount Olympus would result in either madness or direct communication with the gods. Japan’s Mount Fuji is one of that nation’s three sacred mountains and a World Heritage site that has inspired artists and pilgrimages for centuries.

“Being up here,” I added, “reminds me of an experience Jack had that I would like to have.”

Jack is my only son, a documentary filmmaker and journalist living and working in the Middle East. He and his sister, Maggie, grew up with Patrick’s daughter, Emily. The three of them are all grown up now, birds that have successfully flown the next. We are proud papas.

In January of 2011, though, as part of Elon University’s outstanding Periclean Scholars program, Jack and a few of his chums joined thousands of spiritual pilgrims for the five-hour night climb up Sri Pada — also known as Adam’s Peak — to see the sunrise from an ancient temple on Sri Lanka’s most holy mountain, an annual pilgrimage of 5,000 steps traveled by thousands of Hindus, Buddhists, Christians and Muslims. It’s a tradition dating back 1,700 years. 

 Jack had been asked by his advisor to go to Sri Lanka to make a film about the service work of the Periclean class ahead of his own class’ project with a rural health organization in India. The resulting 45-minute film, The Elephant in the Room, examined the environmental issues facing Sri Lanka using the fate of the nation’s endangered elephants to tell a broader story about how the world’s natural system are under severe stress. Jack wrote, filmed, edited and narrated most of the film in partnership with two of his Periclean colleagues.

As he reminded me the other day on one of our weekly phone conversations from Israel, his unexpected pilgrimage to the mountaintop came at a critical moment during his junior year in college when he burned out from too much work and not enough rest. In addition to his studies, he was burning the candle at both ends, teaching himself to make films and working as the senior editor of the school newspaper.

“When I look back, I realize I was getting pretty discouraged about both school and journalism at that moment,” he explains. “But the trip to Sri Lanka came at a good moment because it was the first time I got to make a film my own way about the things that struck me as important, just using my instincts about things we were seeing in our travels. It was a moment of real clarity and freedom.”

The climb up Sri Pada in the pre-dawn winter darkness was one of the highlights of his Sri Lankan film odyssey, a surprisingly challenging climb even for a fit outdoor-loving kid from Maine who grew up climbing mighty Mount Katahdin with his mates. Jack and his fellow Pericleans paused on the ancient steps several times to catch their breath before pushing on to the summit. On the way up, they passed — or were passed by — the young and old, the healthy and feeble, men and women of all ages, shapes and sizes, rich and poor, trudging ever upward. He told me he saw young men carrying their grandmothers on their backs, others carrying torches, bundles and food — couples, families and pilgrims from the Earth’s four major faiths all seeking a common holy mountain top.

“We arrived about ten minutes after the sunrise,” he remembers. “But the whole mountaintop was bathed in this perfect golden light. We stood in the courtyard of that temple sweaty and tired but also incredibly happy and at peace. It was very moving. I caught some of it on film. The view was incredible. We were so glad we made the climb. It was just what I needed.”

Though he’s gone on to make more than a dozen timely films about everything from debtor’s prison in Mississippi to the opioid crisis across America, my son’s earnest and charming little film about the fate of elephants in Sri Lanka — his first long-form effort — is probably his old man’s favorite, full of simple images that reveal his budding talents, poignant fleeting encounters with ordinary people and moments that have become familiar hallmarks of Jack’s home-grown filmmaking style. 

A year after he made The Elephants in the Room, his more ambitious and technically refined film about a pioneering rural health care organization in India was shown at a World Health Organization gathering in Paris and ultimately landed him a job at one of the top documentary houses in New York. Then he went on to graduate school at Columbia, met his wife and began a promising career as an independent filmmaker. 

Though I spoke it out loud, I saw a nice change in my son after he came down from that sacred mountain — a fresh resolve, a clearer mind. During our recent phone chat from Israel, I asked if he ever thinks about his climb to the mountaintop on that winter morning in Sri Lanka.

“I do,” he replied. “When I got back to Elon, I started to learn about meditation and developed a different attitude about what I was doing. I still think about that climb from time to time. It was an experience that stays with you.” 

We also talked about the last hike we took together, a grueling hike up Mount Katahdin with his Scout troop. I was 50 at the time. Jack was 13. 

Truthfully, I’d convinced myself that I was in excellent shape for a 50-year-old Eagle Scout with dodgy knees. But I never made it to the summit. My knees gave out 1,000 feet below the peak, prompting me to rest my weary legs at the Ranger Station beside Chimney Pond while Jack and his teenage buddies scampered up Cathedral Trail to the summit.  

As I contentedly waited, a passage from James Salter’s beautiful novel Light Years came to mind.  

“Children are our crop, our fields, our earth. They are birds let loose into darkness. They are errors renewed. Still, they are the only source from which may be drawn a life more successful, more knowing than our own. Somehow they will do one thing, take one step further, they will see the summit. We believe in it, the radiance that streams from the future, from days we will not see.”

Above it all, as we watched the chilly sunrise from the top of Beech Mountain, my old friend Patrick simply smiled and nodded when I mentioned this.  

You can see Jack’s work at www.JackDodson.net  and The Elephant in the Room at: https://vimeo.com/30460629

Jim Dodson is the founding editor of O.Henry. 

 

By Billy Eye

Like yourself, no doubt, I’m searching for places to eat and drink where I can feel relatively safe while attempting to reemerge as that bon vivant, debonaire individual the world demands. 

Many well-known bars and restaurants circling the center of town are back to normal — or at least some semblance of it. Open at a somewhat limited capacity, crowds at these eateries and watering holes are a fraction of what they were before the co(vid)llapse.

College Hill Sundries, Westerwood Tavern, Walker’s Bar and Old Town Draught House all reopened a few weeks ago. These joints have outdoor seating, the safest option if you’re socializing with proper distance. Flat Iron was rocking into the new year with touring and local music acts before being shuttered. Rumor was, during the shutdown, it had become a speakeasy, wink-wink, nudge-nudge. No real outdoor area but it’s a big room.

Chez Genèse, where I’ve missed eating the most, is a small bistro, so dining in isn’t an option. You don’t understand. Not having my favorite spot for a late breakfast or early lunch has been a major disruption to my day-to-day life. Thankfully, the restaurant is offering family dinner and Sunday brunch with contactless pickup. Order at chezgenese.com. It’s the next best thing to eating there.

Natty Greene’s Brewpub and Crafted The Art of the Taco are attracting the majority of downtown’s suppers and sippers. Natty’s daily menu is most excellent with plenty of sunshine seating. Crafted also offers spacious open-air dining — and the best chicken wings I’ve ever tasted. 

I frequently find myself lunching outside at Liberty Oak with 12 for $12 entrees and daily specials like Tuesday’s meatloaf or shrimp and grits on Mondays and Fridays. Freeman’s Grub & Pub and Jake’s Billiards are also solid options, although pool tables are off limits last I heard. In the evenings, find ample outdoor seating at M’Coul’s Public House, Jerusalem Market, White and Wood and Sage Mule. 

New York Pizza never stopped delivering pizzas and sandwiches, but the bar just reopened a little over a week ago. The building was completely remodeled right before the hammer came down, so to speak, so co-owner Leo Gramisci’s toddlers were using the bar as an enormous playpen. Boy were those kids miffed when it became an adult playpen overnight! And that’s not the only change for the better. One of NYP’s two original owners, Ray Mascali (he was there when NYP was located beside the ice rink at Carolina Circle Mall in 1977), is once again at the helm. Gramisci is the brother of one of NYP’s former owners. The pizza is excellent once again, and new menu items are crazy delish. The bar, no longer a hangout for grunge lovers and punkers, is much more family friendly. For myself, it’s a bit of a shame that NYP will likely no longer be a stopover for skateboarders between the skatepark and wherever they were eventually headed after playing pool, downing Fireball, scarfing steak and cheese sandwiches. Thoughtful, hyper-aware young folk. I’ll miss their energy and idealistic world views.

Sadly, one of the city’s coziest spots, Jack’s Corner, truly a Greensboro institution, has closed for good after 28 years of superlative Greek entrees and a uniquely casual atmosphere thanks to its proximity to the UNCG. It speaks volumes that the quality of the food never diminished over the decades. Jack’s sister, Ginah, operates WallStreet Deli on West Friendly. I’ve heard great things about it. Can’t wait to give it a try, but I’ll always miss Jack’s.

– – – –

Billy Eye is an urban sophisticate, but you would never imagine that if you met him.

They Only Come out at Night

by Jim Dodson

 

They came out of the darkness the other night, devouring everything in their path.

I simply opened the front door to feed the cat his supper and there they were, maybe forty or fifty strong, creeping ever closer, waving their little doo-dad tentacles. 

No, it wasn’t the Walking Dead, seriously early Trick-or-treaters or even yet another pesky campaign poll worker getting a last-minute word in before the presidential election. 

It was, in fact, Helix Aspersa, better known as the common American brown snail, a veritable army of ravenous garden slugs on the move. There must have been a dozen already tooling around our front porch, sluggishly speaking, with maybe 30 or 40 more scaling the porch steps while a Seal Team Six of snails ruthlessly swarmed our innocent Jack-o-lantern. 

Rufus the cat looked strangely oblivious to this mayhem, I should add, waiting calmly by his outdoor bowl which, I hasten to mention, was half full of snails finishing up his evening leftovers. 

I quickly shut the door, trying to decide what to do, wondering if our cat had begun herding homeless snails in his free time. It’s not every day one’s home, family and holiday decorations fall brazenly under siege by common garden slugs.

Following her long day at work, my bride was 20 feet away in the kitchen calmly listening to relaxing New Age piano stylings and making adorable ghost cookies for her staff and to mail our grown-up children who can explain the theory of relativity but never learned to check a bank balance or bake. 

“What’s, up?” she casually wondered, noticing my suddenly pale countenance. “You look as if you’ve seen a real ghost.”

“Remember the snake?”

She shuddered. “Thank God I wasn’t here to see the snake!”

Earlier in the week, while she was off at a conference sorting out the state of higher education, I blithely opened the kitchen cabinet to fetch my morning Quaker Oats and discovered a small, brown snake with an exotically banded black head curled up gazing curiously at me, more or less at eye level. He or she looked almost as surprised to see me as I was to see he or she. 

What does one do when one finds an exotic snake with designs on one’s preferred oatmeal?

I calmly put the small snake in a large juice glass and carried it upstairs to my computer to see if it might be the rare Black-headed Amazonian Fruit Tree Snake that, if bitten by it, gives victims hallucinations in which one appears to be on tropical vacation with a Hollywood movie starlet. Victims are frequently known to awaken feverishly calling out a young and fetching Kim Bassinger’s name, pre-Alex Baldwin, but in this case there was no such luck. It was just something called a Southeastern Crowned Brown Snake, a small and harmless little dude with a big name that likes to eat bugs and probably decided to come in from the cold and see what bugs we had on offer. 

My wife’s response to news of a snake in our kitchen cabinet was immediate and quite emphatic, even though I pointed out that I carried it out to a nice rotten log in the adjacent woods and sent it on its way. 

“Eew, eew, eeeewwwww,” she said, more or less direct quote. 

“Did the snake come back?” she demanded to know now, setting aside her cookie cutters. 

“Nope. But we have other visitors from the wild,” I was forced to tell her. “I think Rufus may be inviting them home. By my count, at least 60 or 70 are out there. Come see for yourself. Prepare yourself for a shock.”

She poked her head anxiously out the door and her floury hands flew to her mouth reminiscent of Tuesday Weld in Psycho. Come to think of it, maybe it was Janet Leigh who actually starred in Psycho, though whoever it was she was as crazy with fear as Kim Bassinger was after years of marriage to Alex Baldwin. 

“Eew, eew, eeeewww!” wife exclaimed. “What should we do with them? No trick or treaters will get near our porch with 500 garden slugs on it.”

I quickly looked up garden snails and discovered that in many countries the common terrestrial gastropod mollusk – which is in the same family as abalone and whelks – are regarded as a culinary delicacy. The Helix pomatia, in fact, is the famous garden snail favored by millions of French diners, an actual cousin of the very slugs devouring our Jack-o-lantern. 

“Maybe we could eat them,” I suggested, wondering if perhaps this was what Rufus had in mind when he invited them home. “We could harvest and deep fry them and serve Southern-style escargot to our friends this weekend.”

Another possibility related to snail mucous, I added, which has been shown to cure everything from acne to gunshot wounds. Moreover, in certain places in rural Italy, live garden snails are swallowed whole as a remedy for ulcers – which would make a decent Halloween movie if nothing else.

This idea – and the one that preceded it – got about as much traction as a slug on roller skates, I’m afraid.

“I don’t care what we could do with them,” she protested. “Just make them go away the way you did the snake. Just look at our poor pumpkin!”

She was sadly correct, of course. Slugs eat everything organic in their paths, leaving behind only a silvery sheen once their mucous trails dry. In ancient times, according to Pliny the Younger, seers read the silvery residue for accurate clues of coming plagues and social upheaval. I’ll confess I wondered if slug mucous might actually predict who would win the presidential election, which seemed at least as accurate as most polls in swing states.

Okay, in the interest of not frightening the children, a brief pause here for some much-needed levity: the world’s only known Halloween joke actually involving a garden slug! Fully appropriate for all ages!

So this old guy who hates everything about Halloween – the annoyingly cute kids, the absurdly over-priced candy, the over-bearing parents who roam the neighborhood in chatty packs armed with flashlights and hip-flasks – hears his doorbell and opens the door to find a tiny princess holding out her pumpkin candy bucket.

“Trick or treat!” the princess chirps sweetly. 

The old guy grumbles and gives the child a quarter, slamming the door, hoping that’s the end of it.

A few moments later, though, the bell rings again.

This time he finds a small garden slug standing there holding out its own cute candy bucket.

“Trick or treat,” says the garden slug.

“Are you kidding me!” explodes the old guy, who in a fit of fury snatches up the slug and hurls it as far as he can into the darkness, shutting the door and turning off his lights.

Three years later the doorbell rings again and he opens the door to find the same garden slug standing there. The slug is not amused.

“Hey, pal,” he says, “what was that about? It took me three years to be back here. Forget the quarter. You owe me a buck!”

A common way to eliminate garden slugs, I learned in the midst of our pre-Halloween ordeal, is to put out a cup of beer and let the snails drink themselves to death. Another approach is to put salt on them, which causes their little bodies to shed water and shrivel up in agony.

In truth, I couldn’t bear the thought of having the painful deaths of 75 garden snails on my conscience, so I shut the door and decided to sleep on it. That night I dreamed that Kim Bassinger had invited me on a trip down the Amazon, but that’s quite another story and not appropriate for all trick or treaters. 

In the morning, the slugs were gone – vanished back to their little snail beds with tummies full of our fresh pumpkin. I carried our decimated Jack-o-lantern to the same woods where I let the snake go and tossed it into a place where other wild critters might enjoy it. 

Rufus the cat tagged along. I’m still convinced he’s somehow at the center of this little drama.

Then I went back and spread a little salt on our porch and put out a nice new pumpkin for any trick-or-treaters – or presidential poll workers – brave or foolish enough to knock on our door.

For the record, the silver slime said the presidential election, alas, was too close to call. 

 

This Simple Life was originally published in October 2016. 

Some years back, I wrote this in tribute to a beloved colleague at the magazine who was preparing to move home to England. We share a love of beautiful English slang.

Bob’s the Word

By Jim Dodson 

 

A beloved English friend named Serena returned from a lengthy visit home and popped into the office the other day.

Naturally I asked how her trip to England went. 

“It was lovely,” she said. “Though the weather was perfectly awful. As usual, lots of whinging about that.”

She wondered why I was smiling.

I explained that I hadn’t heard that word since the days of Sid Vicious.

She smiled. “What word?”

“Whinging.” 

The English have given us many fine things across the Ages, from Magna Carta to mushy green peas, from the Beatles to Rumpole of the Bailey. But for my money their slang is without peer on the planet, almost Shakespearean in descriptive scope, probably the reason the Bard used so much of it in his own writing.

To “whinge,” it should be perfectly obvious, simply means to complain to the point of being such a nuisance someone is likely to advise you to “stuff it.”

That’s also a nifty phrase I picked up on my first trip to England in 1977. To set the stage, Elvis had recently toppled off a toilet in Memphis and the Queen was celebrating her big Jubilee party, 25 years of sitting on a throne of her own. 

I rolled into town on a stormy night, a day earlier than friends of my folks were expecting me to arrive, and found that every hotel was filled to overflowing  with  Jubilee revelers.  A grim youth hostel on the Belgrade Road agreed to take me in for five quid, however, providing a mattress in a basement full of Bulgarian teenagers on holiday who’d never heard of deodorant. At least in the morning the establishment sent you on your way with a free bowl of corn flakes.

As it happened, I had a date in the country that beautiful Sunday morning, catching an early train out of London to the ancient Roman spa town of Bath (which properly rhymes with “moth”] to have Sunday lunch with the family of one of my dad’s old Army chums. All I knew of the Turner family was that they resided on a “estate farm” outside of town and had two daughters about my age. What followed was nothing shy of a bloody crash course in British slang.

As rain clouds gathered outside Bath’s ornate train station, the tiniest car I’d ever seen wheeled up with the most beautiful girl I’d laid eyes on behind the wheel. Her name was Claire. She had violet eyes like Elizabeth Taylor, a face that could have made Heathcliff leap into the sea. The car was a wheezing mustard-colored Austin Mini. I could barely get both legs and my backpack inside. 

“Looks like it’s about to start raining stair-rods,” she declared, slamming the Austin in gear and zooming off. “Mum fancies a walk to the Black Swan after lunch so you can see a real English pub. Do you have your Wellies?”

I had no idea what she meant and was too tongue-tied – or simply terrified by her driving – to ask as we banged along frightfully narrow hedgerow lanes. 

“Cool car,” I managed to say as a giant truck loaded with hay ran us partially into the ditch. Claire barely flinched.

“Bugger these lorries,” she swore. “Yeah, it’s a bit of an old clanger, this. My dad restores them. This one belonged to him and mum.” She glanced at me and grinned. “I believe they shagged in it like bloody rabbits.”

Here was a word I knew thanks to my Southern exposure to Beach Music.

“I can shag,” I volunteered. “My brother’s girlfriend showed me how.”

Claire gave me a disturbed look. 

She turned out to be the Turner family’s spirited youngest daughter, 17, in her sixth form and about to take her A-levels, whatever that meant. She had plans to soon go off to college in Bristol and become a pre-school teacher. She asked how old I was.

“Twenty-three,” I replied, feeling like a babe in the woods.

“Ah,” said Lady Claire with a knowing nod. “Almost a gaffer, I reckon.”

Her older sister Kat came out from the city in her own elderly Austin.  She was my age exactly, a resident of the South side of London – the “grotty end of Clapham,” she explained over a lunch that included bangers and mash and a baked aubergine that turned out to taste a lot like my mom’s eggplant parmesan. 

 Kat of Clapham had florescent pink hair and a safety pin through her right earlobe. She’d moved to London hoping to become a news presenter for the BBC but was studying international relations at the University of London. In the meantime she was working as a hostess at a punk rock club in Chelsea.

“Couldn’t stand this bloody boring place when I was growing up here,” she confided to me during our after-lunch hike to the Black Swan for a pint with Claire and their folks, Jack and Silvia. “ All rich toffs and blue hair pensioners in Nike trainers round these parts nowadays. Know what I mean, Bob?”

I simply nodded, wondering who Bob was. 

Silvia and Jack, parents of Kit and Claire, couldn’t have been more welcoming. Jack was retired from IBM and restored Austin minis for fun. Silvia worked for a local solicitor, which sounded like dodgy work. What exactly was this  most attractive mother of two, I wondered, soliciting? Mum and Dad were both dedicated ramblers, I learned from Silvia as we drank warm beer at the Black Swan.

This turned out to mean that Silvia and Jack were active in Britain’s charitable walking society, an organization that had nothing to do with my brother’s first car. Silvia and Jack believed it was every walker in the nation’s God-given right to enjoy complete legal access to every piece of property in the realm, including the Queen’s.   

“Oh, bollocks,” grumbled Kat. “Here comes Tom the yob.”

“Oh stuff it, Kat,” her younger sister told her.

Tom was Claire’s boyfriend, a strapping lad who looked like a young Albert Finney. He’d just gotten off work from a local stable. Claire wished me well and went off with Tom, breaking my heart.

“You must stay the night,” Silvia insisted. “Kat can show you the baths and drive you back to London tomorrow.”

I was in no hurry to sleep with the Bulgarians again so I happily agreed.

The next day Kat showed me the town of Bath’s famous Roman baths then she drove me back to London, inviting me to “crash” at her “flat.” My modest Southern nature prevents me from telling what happened next. Let’s just say it was a fine example of international relations. I’ve never been able to look at florescent pink hair the same way ever again.

 On the plus side, Kat turned out to be a great tour guide, walking me all over the city of Shakespeare and Sid Vicious. She even took me to her punk rock club where I stood out like a pork chop at a bar mitzvah. I showed her how Americans “shagged,” which caused her to punch me and dissolve with laughter. We had a fine week in each other’s company, swapping native slang and hitting museums and pubs.  Kat was fascinated by the American South and wondered if my daddy might be a member of the Ku Klux Klan.  I almost hated to have to tell her he was just an ordinary advertising executive.

“I love how y’all talk down there,” she declared with the worst Southern accent ever attempted by an English-speaking human being. “It’s so bloody primitive.” 

Finally, she drove me to Kings Cross Station to catch the Flying Scotsman to Edinburgh. Or maybe it was the Caledonian Express. I forget which.

Truthfully, I hated to go.  Kat and London had charmed and cheered up my primitive soul. I think I fell a little bit in love with both sisters that week.  Eat your bloody heart out, Mr. Dorsey. 

“Righto, Bob,” she declared, giving me a firm peck. “On you go. Watch out for Scottish blighters in wooly skirts! No soppy whinging now. Stay in touch.”

We did, too – at least for a time. 

 I later learned Kat got married and went to work for John Major. Someday I half expect to see Britain has elected its first prime minister with pink hair.

This is why I thanked my lovely English friend Serena for unexpectedly bringing back some nice memories from my first trip to her homeland. 

Looking back, I can’t whinge too much about how things worked out. 

Know what I mean, Bob?

 

October’s Surprises

By Jim Dodson

 

As sure as October nights arrive cooler and earlier, stories about dark clowns may soon begin circulating again, as they did four years ago when I posted this frightful ditty for my Simple Life column.

 

I first heard about dark clowns on the radio several weeks ago while driving home from the country at twilight. The BBC presenter sounded skeptical, even amused by reports out of Greenville, South Carolina, where people dressed as dark clowns were reportedly trying to lure children into the woods with candy and money.

“So …is this just a silly hoax or something people there are really concerned about?” the host asked a local reporter covering the story.

“I can’t say it’s a hoax,” she replied with a note of unease in her voice, “because the police are taking this very seriously. They have warned parents and doubled patrols. This really has a lot of people in South Carolina really freaked out.”

So-called “dark clowns” have been spooking America quite a bit lately, it turns out, most recently in Green Bay, Wisconsin, where a photograph of a dark clown roaming early morning streets carrying black balloons set the Internet ablaze. Not long ago, moreover, residents of Bakersfield, California, were also spooked by photographs of “evil after-dark clowns” roaming their streets after hours, showing up under lamp posts and on idle kiddie rides. Since then, reports of dark clowns have cropped up in a dozen other places around the country.

“The police don’t know whether the stories are coming from the imaginations of children or something sinister is afoot, but panicked residents seem to be taking the law into their own hands,” The New York Times noted about this latest outbreak of menacing clowns in upcountry South Carolina, adding that shots had been fired into wooded areas where the sightings occurred.

Whatever else may be true, clowns occupy a peculiar space in American popular culture, somewhere between perfectly innocent and deeply disturbing.

Just in time to either fuel or inform the mania, my September issue of Smithsonian notes that clowns have been with us since man’s earliest days in the guise of everything from mythologized tricksters to painted medicine men. Pygmy clowns entertained bored Egyptian pharaohs and Medieval court jesters were entitled to thumb their warty noses at the king without fear of losing their heads. Ancient Rome had professional clowns whose job it was to pacify unruly crowds at festivals, bumbling peacekeepers who kept an eye out for troublemakers. “Well into the 18th and 19th century,” writes Smithsonian’s Linda Rodriguez McRobbie, “the prevailing clown figure of Western Europe and Britain was the pantomime clown, who was sort of a bumbling buffoon.”

Once, standing in a crowd of camera-wielding tourists next to my young daughter on Jackson Hole’s main drag in Wyoming, awaiting a parade of local rodeo riders, I spotted a mime working the crowd in our direction. My daughter was delighted. Her father not so much.

Mimes have always made me uncomfortable, a modest phobia I trace to a powerful moment in my early childhood in South Carolina where my father worked for a local newspaper. One evening in the late fall, he took my brother and me to a political rally in a corn field just outside of town where politicians made speeches and a group of people showed up in a neighboring field wearing white robes and hoods and stood around a bonfire. We didn’t stay long, just long enough for the hooded figures to frighten the bug juice out of yours truly. On the drive home, I asked my dad why those men wore white hoods. “Because people who wear masks are weak people often up to no good,” he replied. Our mother gave him holy hell when she found out where he’d taken me.

Forty years later, picking up on my post-Klan jitters, the mime paused right in front of us and attempted to make me smile. He made a huge happy face followed by a manically tragic sad one, rubbing away imaginary tears when I wouldn’t yield. The crowd ate it up.

“Thanks,” I said through gritted teeth. “Feel free to move along now.”

Clowns were everywhere in the America where I grew up.

Most were fun-loving and perfectly innocent in those faraway days of Ozzie and Harriet and “Father Knows Best” – Clarabelle the clown on “Howdy Doody” and Bozo the Clown with his internationally syndicated show – which according to Smithsonian had a ten-year waiting list for tickets.

There was even a clown I liked on my favorite weeknight TV show, Red Skelton’s eponymous Clem Kadiddlehopper, a bumbling painted-up fool who was tolerable because he often broke up halfway through his skits. In my bedroom, I even had a harlequin desk lamp, sitting astride a miniature world. The first chapter books I ever read – almost all were adventure tales featuring unexpected heroes and dark characters up to no good – I read by the light of the harlequin’s lamp.

The first time I attended a performance of the Ringing Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus, on the other hand, I felt badly for the animals and truly bothered by the antics of clowns. Only the acrobats appealed to me.

“So the question is,” Smithsonian’s McRobbie wonders, “when did the clown, supposedly a jolly figure of innocuous, kid-friendly entertainment, become so weighed down by fear and sadness? When did clowns become so dark?”

The truest answer is, long ago and far away.

Classical operas and Shakespearean dramas, after all, have long used clown figures as sinister messengers of mystery and intrigue. But in the modern American context it may well have been an evil clown named Pogo who established the motif of the dark clown haunting the streets of heartland America.

His real name was John Wayne Gacy, a friendly chap who entertained children in the Chicago suburbs for years during the middle 1970s before he was arrested, tried and convicted of killing 33 young men. “You know,” Gacy reportedly told investigators with chilling ease, “a clown can get away with murder.” Before he faced execution in 1994, America’s Crown Prince of Killer Clowns spent his time in his jail cell painting pictures of clowns and self-portraits of himself as Pogo the clown.

In the mid 1980s, I officially swore off watching horror films after writing a piece for Boston Magazine about a reclusive teen in western Massachusetts whose mother allowed her son to gorge himself on the Friday the 13th films only to have her troubled son don a hockey mask one Halloween night and slash several kids before hanging himself in the woods. The psychologist who’d been treating him for years told me that “his identification with Jason seemed pretty harmless.”

A toxic flood of even more ghastly films continues to flow into your local Cineplex, feeding our insatiable desire to terrify ourselves. Heath Ledger’s brilliant if disquieting Joker in the 2008 Batman remake The Dark Knight seemed almost too real and sadly prefigured the gifted actor’s own demons rising to the surface shortly before he died of an accidental drug and alcohol overdose.

I sometimes wonder if we aren’t simply hardwired to value a good harmless scare in a world that appears full of very real dangers, providing life to whatever bogeyman has always lurked beneath the bed. In another age, after all, fairy tales and fables of trolls loitering beneath bridges and witches in the woods were meant to instruct children on the dangers of straying too far beyond the light or down the road of ruin, real or imagined. “Always hold tight to hand of nurse,” went a famous British ditty, “for fear of finding something worse.”

Perhaps this explains why Americans can’t seem to get enough of Halloween’s faux gore and fright wigs, projected to shell out a record $7 billion or $75 per ghoul among those celebrating the holiday this year – second only Christmas retail spending.

It’s all part of the funhouse ride that thankfully isn’t real, and every town larger than the hips on a snake seems eager to cash in on the phenomenon with its own haunted corn maze or “woods or terror” peopled by chainsaw-wielding psychos and evil clowns, bless their dark little hearts.

According to Smithsonian, only two percent of grown-ups suffer from excessive fear of clowns, technically a phobia called coulrophobia.

Indeed, maybe the way to fight back against this intense fear of clowns is to simply make light of such darkness the way John Candy did in the 1989 John Hughes classic Uncle Buck. It’s one of the great moments of Hollywood comedy.

When a stumbling clown shows up at the door from an all-night bachelorette party to entertain children at a birthday party where Uncle Buck Russell, good-natured loser – played to perfection by the late great Candy – is babysitting for his nephew and two nieces, Uncle Buck discovers that the clown is drunk, refusing to let him enter.

The offended clown declares, “Don’t you know who I am? In the field of local live home entertainment, I’m a god!”

Uncle Buck calmly points to his rodent-themed VW bug and calmly tells him, “Now get in your mouse and get out of here.”

The clown snarls violently at him, “Hey, you! Don’t you know who I am? Let me tell you something you low-life, lying, four-flushing sack of sh…”

He never gets the words out. Uncle Buck flattens his big fat rubber nose. Twice.

I cannot speak for the anxious parents of Green Bay, Bakersfield and Greenville, but – between us — I’m more worried about some of the dark clowns we’ll have to decide about in the voting booth a few days after Halloween.

Talk about a scary October surprise.

In the meantime, if some dark clown is foolish enough to show up at my door on Halloween night, don’t be surprised if I give him a shot of John Candy just to remember me by.

 

 

This Simple Life was first published in October 2016.

The Dash of Life

by Jim Dodson

In an early episode from one my favorite British dramas, a charming program called “Delicious,” a roguish head chef, speaking from his grave in a Cornwall churchyard, muses on the symbolism of markings in stone.

“On a gravestone you see two dates – a beginning and an end, with a tiny dash in between. That dash represents everything you’ve ever done. Everywhere you’ve ever been. Every breath, kiss or meal between birth and death. It all boils down to just one little dash…”

As a veteran wanderer of ancient burying grounds and longtime collector of clever epitaphs, I decided years ago that gravestones “speak” about the lives contained therein, telling tales and offering wisdom to those who will listen.

Or sometimes just a much needed smile.

Here’s one I fancy from a Wolverhampton churchyard dated 1690:

Here lies the bones of Joseph Jones
Who ate whilst he was able;
But once o’er fed,
He drop’t down dead
And fell beneath the table.
When from the tomb,
To meet his doom,
He rises amidst sinners;
Since he must dwell
In heav’n or hell,
Take him – which gives best dinners!

At a moment when more than 200,000 of our fellow citizens have succumbed to the Covid virus, the subject of death is hardly a laughing matter. For most of us, in fact, the question of one’s mortality is one we would politely defer …indefinitely.

Yet when the end comes – delivered by a killer pandemic or a slowly ebbing pulse from natural causes — the meaning of the dash may suddenly become clear.

Life is brief, as an Irish friend likes to say – and subject to change without notice.

Out west over the past few weeks, more than 150 wildfires incinerated thousands of homes and property, burned up lives and landscape roughly the size of New Hampshire, forcing half a million people to flee for their lives. At last count, more than 100 people perished and dozens more are unaccounted for from the apocalyptic inferno, which is already in the books as one of North America’s worst natural disasters.

Some say it’s merely a preview of things to come.

Every credible environmental scientist – an endangered species in their own right – agrees that we have reached a perilous breaking point in terms of protecting the life of the planet from our own ecological abuses. As California and Oregon burned, a report all but overlooked from the International Wildlife Foundation noted that since 1970 more than 70 percent of the planet’s wildlife has vanished, including dozens of species that have gone extinct. Moreover, man’s invasion of remaining wild places threatens to see more exotic killer viruses jump between species.

Meanwhile, down on the Gulf Coast, a series of hurricanes have battered the Alabama and Florida coastlines this month, flooding streets with biblical-sized rainfall and destroying untold numbers of lives and property, with more death and destruction on the way from a deadly conga line of tropical cyclones coming off the west coast of Africa. According to the NOAA, barely halfway through the tropical cyclone season, for only the second time in recorded history, authorities have run out of assigned names and turned to the Greek alphabet to identify further storms this season, the Alpha and Omega of natural disasters.

I have a hunch Bill Buynak would have been fascinated.

Bill was my father-in-law.

Earlier this month, quietly and without much fanfare, in the midst of all this cinematic death and destruction, he passed away from a lengthy heart ailment. He was 85.

Though we disagreed on global warming, Bill and I enjoyed talking about the drama of weather and debating sports, two subjects where we found comfortable common ground. For that matter, we could also talk history and even religion since Bill was a well-read man who fiercely embraced his Catholic faith.

Of the three dining room table taboos guaranteed to ruin any holiday gathering – sex, religion and politics – only politics was the true buzz killer, especially at Thanksgiving when big Bill occupied the head of the table.

I learned this several years ago when I made a lame joke about Sarah Palin and watched Bill simply rise and leave the room. We heard the front door open and shut. He walked home.

A long life may not be good enough, Benjamin Franklin was supposed to have said. But a good life is long enough.
Joseph William “Bill” Buynak certainly had a good life.

I knew him for more than 20 years. But it took his passing, I regret to say, for me to learn who he really was – the dash of his life, if you will, between his birth and passing.

Bill grew up in a working-class neighborhood of Bridgeport, Connecticut, the son of Czech and Lithuanian immigrants, joining the army after high school to become a top instructor at the army’s famous Fort Dix Radio School.

Electronics and computers were his career passions. He went on to become a computer engineer and worked for one of the country’s pioneering computer firms, earning several key patents on a mobile sports graphic program still in use today.

Music was his deeper passion. As teenager, he played accordion in a polka band and apparently could dance like nobody’s business. That may be how he wooed and won the hand of his bride of 55 years, Jeannette Ward, a spunky Irish lass.

His oldest daughter, my wife Wendy, remembers how after she and her two sisters Karen and Amy had had their evening baths, they would come downstairs in their nightgowns and dance to Russian folks dances their papa played on his state-of-the-art stereo. His record collection was vast, more than 500 LPs from every genre — Bach to the Beatles, ZZ Top to Gustav Mahler.

On Sunday mornings, big Bill would slip out to get The New York Times and fresh baked Kaiser rolls from the local deli, putting on an opera called Peter Grimes – a tale about a fisherman who gets lost at sea – to awaken the household.

As teenagers, Bill taught his girls how to play tennis and drove them to Vermont to properly learn skiing. “He was surrounded by strong-willed women,” Wendy points out. “We had him out-numbered four to one. But he never complained. He also documented everything.”

Being a true tech geek (Star Trek was naturally his favorite TV show) Bill was filming the life of his young family years before video cameras became the rage of suburban America. Not long before his passing, Wendy and her papa transposed some of his early 8-millimeter films of family gatherings, anniversaries and birthdays to digital.

“Everyone looks so young. What a handsome guy he was,” Jan Buynak murmured wistfully as she watched her husband’s restored film. True to form, Big Bill Buynak makes only brief and momentary appearances in the watery film. For in more ways than one, he was always the man quietly behind the scenes.

Due to Covid-19, Bill’s memorial service has been postponed to sometime next year back home in Connecticut.

Given this upside-down year in which weddings and funerals and every thing between have been delayed, postponed or simply cancelled, it’s uncertain if an actual grave stone will someday mark Bill’s final resting place in a veteran’s cemetery in Virginia, with a pair of dates and a dash in stone to speak of his well-lived life.

His one wish was to make it to this year’s Thanksgiving table.

We plan to honor that wish, placing his boxed ashes at the head of the table.

 

Parts of this “Simple Life” were adapted from a previous publication in May 2018.

Brief Notes from a Transcendental Trout Stream

By Jim Dodson

 

Essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson noted that life comes with compensations.

I’ve long believed this to be true, and this week did nothing to dispel this ancient wisdom.

We’d planned to spend the early part of this week hiking with our dogs and tossing a fly line into a tumbling stream deep in the Pisgah National Forest.

It seemed like the perfect getaway.

Because of the heavy rains that followed us to the mountains for our much-needed four-day break, however, fly-fishing proved to be an elusive hope. The Edenic pool 40 feet below our rustic cabin, fed by a roaring waterfall, was the perfect place for our dogs to take a swim and their masters to cool their weary urban feet and appreciate the awesome power of gravity and water.

The beautiful hand-made dry flies I picked up at a local outfitters shop, alas, never touched the stream. Though the shop’s owner did warn me that, given conditions, little more than the mosquitoes might be biting. Instead, we played like children in the water.

Our other ambition to hike to the top of Mt Mitchell also proved problematic. Our cabin by Bolens Creek sat at the end of dirt road and the head of a trail that ascended to the top of the east’s highest peak. It all sounded divine until we discovered that the trail on offer turned out to be rated the most “difficult” on the mountain, requiring a “hard ten-hour hike one way to the top,” i.e. a full day and night to make it up and back. We settled each morning for a quarter of a mile hike up the steep and stony trail to a serene spot where a moss-wreathed footbridge crossed a quieter stream pool beyond which the ascent became even more daunting.

It was a good place to pause and rest in a living cathedral of trees, water and stone, elements that are vastly older than any human footprints.

So what were the compensations?

Pretty simple, really.

Rain on a tin roof was one. Sleeping with open windows and nature’s air conditioning was another, conducive to deep sleep without dreams.

Beneath these natural sounds of stream and rain lay an understory of silence that felt almost holy. The philosopher Paschal said that most of our problems arise from our inability to sit still in a room. Meister Eckhart observed that nothing in the universe resembles God more than silence.

My wife Wendy took four books into this healing silence – a novel about a muralist, a book of culinary secrets, a wine atlas and a book about race – and read parts of them all. She cooked some wonderful meals as well.

I took two books but read only one from cover to cover, naturalist Douglas Tallamy’s Nature’s Best Hope, a bestselling exegesis on how we can save our endangered planet from a sixth mass-extinction by transforming our suburban yards into natural habitats for native plants and wildlife, natural corridors where eco-diversity can not only survive but thrive in the face of development that is systematically destroying our last wild places. When native plants and animals disappear from our landscapes, he argues, our lives won’t be long to follow.

The other book was Irish poet John O’Donohue’s Walking in Wonder, a beautiful little book I turn to whenever the world down in the flatlands of America seems riven with fear and loathing. The Year of Our Lord 2020 seems a banner year for that.

“One of the reasons our post-modern mind is so packed and tight is that we have lost touch with our wildness,” O’Donohue writes. “One of the most natural ways of coming home to your wildness is to go out into a wild place.”

I happened to be reading this very paragraph when the sun came out and something quite wonder-filled happened.

An Eastern Blue-Tailed butterfly settled on my page-turning hand and stayed there for at least ten minutes, checking out my book and maybe its reader. After a bit, the beautiful creature flew away but soon returned and stayed even longer, taking inventory of my bare knee and the end of my stream-soaked sneaker for almost an hour. I briefly dozed off in the sun, and when I awoke, to my amazement, he or she was still there.

The afternoon was sunny and warm and suddenly the water meadow below the cabin was full of butterflies – magnificent Swallowtails, Cabbage Whites and Cloudless Sulphurs. At one point, a squadron of stunning Monarchs swarmed around the meadow, pausing to dine on milkweed for their long flight to Mexico.

The message was clear.

In this same meadow, the wild phlox and larkspur were barely hanging onto their colors and the Joe Pye Weed and yarrow were fading fast. Ditto the last of the Indian pinks and toad flowers, fading to rust and bowing their heads to summer’s end.

All in all, though I never tossed a line at a trout, I found exactly what I’d hoped for in that cabin by a wild mountain stream – a reminder that all life is fleeting and beautiful, a winged thing that feels as miraculous as an answered prayer.

It was the perfect getaway after all.

 

Last Laughs

By Nancy Oakley

 

It’s no joke: In recent years comedians have been bemoaning the slow death of comedy, owing to the trend of public shaming or outright cancellation of material deemed offensive. Excuse us (or perhaps not), but comedy is meant to offend. Which is why, to borrow a phrase from standup comic Rodney Dangerfield, it don’t get no respect — and never has, since Aristophanes’ day. Comedy is inherently subversive, holding up a mirror to the human condition, so rife with foibles. It’s pathos in disguise, really, but when artfully done makes us double over with laughter.

There are far too many masters of the medium to illustrate our point, but since we trade in words, we’ll pick a comedic legend whose signature was a facility with language. More than any persnickety editor, the inimitable George Carlin examined the uses, abuses and idiosyncrasies of 20^th-century American English, notoriously breaking ground with his 1972 monologue, “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television.” A radio broadcast of the routine ultimately led to a Supreme Court decision, FCC v. Pacifica Foundation, addressing the extent to which the federal government could regulate speech on radio and TV.

But Carlin didn’t stop with vulgarities. He also targeted “advertising b.s,” mundane expressions and sayings, such as “have a nice day,” and what he called “soft language,” euphemisms that disguise direct, honest speech that also shield us from life’s realities. Combining his razor-sharp wit with slapstick and the exaggerated facial expressions of a clown, while moderating the tone of is voice, Carlin gleefully savages the banality of modern verbiage, noting how “toilet paper” has become “bath tissue;” how “shell shock,” has evolved into the eight syllable, “Post Traumatic Stress Disorder” and how anyone who’s been fired, is simply the result of how “management wanted to curtail redundancies in the human resources area.” None of them laughing matters in and of themselves, but in Carlin’s deft hands? Hilarious.