Looking for your next great read? Find recommendations from your favorite O.Henry writers and staff sure to get you through these dog days of summer.

David Woronoff, Publisher:

Camino Winds

by John Grisham

Interview of John Grisham by David Woronoff

GoodReads

The Unwilling

by John Hart

Not yet published. Coming February 2021

GoodReads

A Gentleman in Moscow

by Amor Towles

GoodReads

Andie Rose, Creative Director:

The Book of Longings

by Sue Monk Kidd

GoodReads

Nancy Oakley, Senior Editor:

The Splendid and the Vile

by Erik Larson

GoodReads

Hattie Aderholdt, Sales Manager:

Chances Are…

by Richard Russo

GoodReads

Cynthia Adams, Contributing Editor

The Accidental

by Ali Smith

GoodReads

David Claude Bailey, Contributing Editor

The Crossing

by Andrew Miller

NY Times Review

GoodReads

Billy Ingram, Contributor

Raised Eyebrows: My Years Inside Groucho’s House

by Steve Stoliar

Billy’s Review

GoodReads

Ross Howell Jr., Contributor

Atomic Love

by Jennie Fields

GoodReads

Silence that Speaks

By Jim Dodson

Every year, a dear friend slips away for a three-week retreat into silence and stillness, holing up in a seaside motel somewhere on the Florida coast where he doesn’t know a soul. There he fasts, walks the beach morning and evening, reads nourishing books and practices the art of silence learned years ago from a stay at the Kentucky monastery where mystic Thomas Merton lived and worked. He returns thinner, happier and spiritually refreshed by his “trip to nowhere” as I’ve heard him describe this annual ritual.

The wise among us have long known the value of such a disappearing act, a journey within that clarifies mind, body and soul.
In a world that’s indisputably louder and more distracting than ever, something is always competing for our attention – bills to pay, jobs to finish, candidates hurling insults, terrorists hurling bombs, shouting car salesmen, an Internet that never sleeps, even in the background cacophony of music in restaurants and lawn mowers on Sunday morning…all rob us of something essential.

That essential is what an ancient Sufi poet called “the silence that speaks” and the Book of Common Prayer calls “the peace that passeth understanding.”

To be still and silent, advises the Psalms, is to know God. Chinese sage Lao Tzu insists that stillness reveals eternity. In his recent lovely little book The Art of Stillness, veteran travel writer Pico Iyer relates how a three-day stay at a Benedictine retreat changed his life. “It was a little bit like being called back to somewhere I knew, though I’d never seen the place before,” he writes. “Spending time in silence gave everything else in my days fresh value. It felt as if I was slipping outside my life and ascending a small hill from which I could make out a wider landscape. It was pure joy.”

Before Coronavirus came along to upend all our lives, I sometimes wished that I could find the time and discipline of Pico Iyer and my contemplative friend to escape into self-imposed silence. Now that I have plenty of quiet time at home to work and think about the uncertain days ahead, I realize that it is almost always in the silent moments that accompany stark change that we find new insights and ways of enriching our lives as we move forward. For what it’s worth, I owe this valuable insight to a remarkable winter thirty years ago, a time of stillness and silence that upended and transformed my life for the better.

Here’s my silent winter’s tale, my version of Christmas in July.

On the heels of seven fast-paced years of working for the oldest Sunday magazine in the nation, covering politics and social mayhem across my native New South and never pausing to take a vacation or even a few days off, something made me turn down the important journalism job in Washington D.C. I’d long dreamed of having and – to the shock of my friends and colleagues — uproot to a bend in Vermont’s Green River, where I got myself a golden pup from the local Humane Society and set up housekeeping in a tiny solar cabin heated by only a woodstove and the light of the northern sun.

I swapped chasing politicians and prosecutors for the sound of my boots crunching on a silent snow-covered road with my young dog, or snow-shoeing across the fields to my landlords’ house for weekend suppers and conversation. They were aging hippies who’d grown wealthy by selling chemical toilets to summering New Yorkers. Every supper they served tasted a little bit like sautéd boxwood shrubbery though I’m pretty sure it was healthy eating and they were, in any case, lovely people fully committed to making a better world while matching up their young tenant with suitable female companionship. That winter I went out with women who had more enlightened views and underarm hair than me.

With no TV, phone or radio, however, I spent a lot of time reading and thinking about the point of being alive, marveling how I’d dropped into such a peaceful winter wonderland that allowed me to feel in charge of my own life for the first time in years. My journalism friends were all but certain that I’d “dropped out” to become a hermit.

I probably read or reread at least fifty books that snowy winter of 1984 – The collected works of Yeats and Frost, all of John Updike’s novels, plenty of Shakespeare, the Bagavhad Gita, probably too much LeCarre and Graham Greene, even George Orwell’s 1984 just to see how the world he envisioned worked out. Though I spent my days working as the senior writer for a legendary New England magazine called Yankee, it was the silence and stillness that filled most of my days that changed my life and perhaps even saved it.

That spring, after ice out, I bought myself a secondhand Orvis flyrod and learned the basics of fly-casting from a crusty retired minister I nicknamed “Saint Cecil” who lived down the road and was mad for fishing. I also picked up a used set of good golf clubs and began knocking the rust off my long-neglected golf game at an old club in Brattleboro where Rudyard Kipling reportedly played while finishing his work on the The Jungle Book. Most of these self-tutorials were done solo or with my dog Amos for companionship, a volume of Yeats poetry or E.B. White’s essays tucked neatly into my fishing vest or golf bag.

The sounds I heard were those I made, for the most part — crackling fires, water running over stones, songbirds and wind, the soft crunch of my boots on a snowy road at dusk.

Even the excitement of the quadrennial New Hampshire primary failed to knock a dent in my newfound love of stillness and silence. A string of leading candidates all passed through Yankee’s colorful red barn in Dublin (N.H) that winter but only served to remind the old political junkie in me how grateful I was to have found a very different kind of life in the nick of time.

One quiet morning that autumn, a beautiful young woman wearing well-worn saddle shoes brought the mail to my office. She was the new intern, a recent Wellesley grad, a country girl who grew up in Maine.

On our first date on election night, she asked who I voted for and I told her Walter Mondale. This was untrue. Owing to my quiet life, I’d actually forgotten to register and vote but probably would have voted for Ronald Reagan in those days. I never told her this until after we were married. By then, smart gal, she’d guessed as much.

The next spring, we moved to the end of a road in the salt marsh north of Boston. It was peaceful there too, a world shaped by sea wind, time and tides, a great place to think and write and even get married. There was an older gentleman who lived across the tidal creek. I often saw him at his easel overlooking the marsh. He would wave and I waved back. We never actually met. But we knew each other just the same, befriended by sea wind and silence.

As newlyweds, we moved to Maine and bought land for a house on a hilltop of birch and hemlock, just off the abandoned town road, surrounded by a deep and silent forest. Our first born arrived during a January blizzard. We were living in a cottage on Bailey Island at that time, waiting for spring to start building. The cottage had a 30-mile view of the Maine coast. The only sounds one heard at night were the restless tides, the ceaseless wind and the ping of sailboat masts under the star-studded sky.

The house we built on the hill was a simple salt box affair. I did most of the interior work myself, putting up walls, laying plank floors from a New Hampshire barn and building the kitchen cabinets. My grandfather was a master cabinetmaker, the quietest man I ever met. I felt as though I was channeling his spirit.

It was the absolute stillness of that house I loved most, especially on a frigid winter days as sunlight flooded its rooms and made the golden hemlock beams gently crack as if sighing. The silence was deep, a living presence. It grounded my soul like a spear, as the poet Sidney Lanier once described it.

That house produced plenty of other great sounds over the next two decades – laughter from children and dinner guests, guitars being played, the soft scratch as a pencil marked the growth spurts of our children on the door frame of the utility room, our annual Solstice party that lasted for two decades on the longest night of the year.

I built a massive English garden around that happy house, assuming we would live there forever. I even made a special Philosopher’s garden with a wooden bench where, after yard work, I loved to simply sit and listen to absolutely nothing but the birds and the sounds of the forest around us.

Sometimes I still dream about that house, that garden, that quiet place in the forest – wishing, I suppose, that I could go back and hear those sounds again, feel that golden winter silence, simply be there for a while.

But as Pico Iyer reminds me in his fine little book, the greatest gifts of silence and stillness remind us that “what feels like finding real life, that changeless and inarguable something behind all our shifting thoughts, is less a discovery than a recollection.”

A few years ago, after taking my daughter and her buddies out to supper in their busy but charming Brooklyn neighborhood, I commented to my wife that even a former hermit like me might be able to live in that part of Brooklyn, given its small town feel. Wendy grew up just outside New York City, attended college and worked there for years.

She patted my arm. “I’m sure you could, babe. For at least three or four days.”

The woman knows me well, ruined by the quiet of other worlds. Last autumn she and I went to the mountains two weekends in a row just for the solitude and November light. This summer, we’re headed back to those same mountains so I can frighten a few trout and listen to the silence of the forest.

It’s a voice I never get weary of hearing.

Blanking Out

How to live a storied life amid a pandemic

By Maria Johnson

For the entertainment of our Covid-weary readers, we’ve concocted a fill-in-the-blank game in the spirit of Mad Libs. To play, just supply a word for every blank space, using the prompts below. Remember, the wackier and saucier the answer, the better. Hit Submit, and then read the story aloud. Enjoy!

Dishing with Dmitry

by Nancy Oakley

As any musician these days will attest, the pandemic has been nothing if not challenging, with the myriad restrictions that have come on its heels. In spite of them, Greensboro Symphony Orchestra Director, violinist Dmitry Sitkovetsky, hasn’t missed a . . . beat. Like so many music programs, his signature “Sitkovetsky & Friends” series, with the help of local sponsor Rice Toyota, has gone virtual. In many ways, it demystifies the perceived exclusivity the fine arts seem to acquire with age.

Posted on the Symphony’s Facebook page, the conductor’s casual interviews with fellow musicians reveal a human side of the profession seldom seen on the concert stage. Traveling the world from Verbier, Switzerland to London to an Alpine funicular, Sitkovetsky sits down with fellow musicians in warm, broad-ranging conversations interspersed with concert footage from past performances. Who knew, for example, that pianist Evgeny Kissin, in addition to being a child prodigy, has a fondness for reciting poetry? Or that Royal Opera House Director Antonio Pappano felt actual stage fright on the eve of his 35th high school reunion? Or that Mischa Maisky was more interested in football (soccer) and chess before he ever picked up a cello? Or that Sitkovetsky himself never finished reading Tolstoy’s overly long War and Peace?

There are jokes and gossip about famous composers revealing for example, Richard Strauss’ penchant for playing cards (to quell the unceasing strains of music coursing through his brain), and of course, poignant, even sublime observations, such as Kissin’s admission that Chopin had always been his favorite composer — something his audiences intuited before he did. Or how Pappano’s lack of formal conservatory training led to a revelation: that seasoned musicians oughtn’t become jaded or lose the “original love” of a piece of music. “That’s what art is about. It’s love. It fills your heart,” he asserts.

So be filled — and inspired — by this most universal of art forms that transcends time and space, and pandemics, too, by tuning into Sitkovetsky & Friends Virtual.

An Ode to Nature’s Air Conditioning

By Jim Dodson

Some years ago, we moved into a historic house loaded with charm and only one thing missing – air conditioning.

To be fair, the old place actually came with an antiquated air conditioning system that shorted out the first hot night I attempted to switch it on.

A “climate control” technician arrived the next day to replace a malfunctioning compressor motor and several parts in the outside unit, then climbed up into the cobwebbed attic to have a look at the indoor compressor whose job it was to convey chilled air through second floor ceiling vents, in theory cooling the place from top to bottom.

The elegant old house was a dowager from America’s Gilded Age whose elderly owners in Pennsylvania hoped my wife and I might take off their hands and restore.

“Wow,” the tech said as we stood together in the dim, hot, cloistered air beneath the rafters, “this system is older than I am.”

He dated it from 1969, the year of Woodstock and the moon walk, then glanced around the dusty attic and pointed to a disassembled attic fan leaning against a wall near the peak vent. “I’ll bet that thing sucked a ton of hot air straight out of this place back in the old days. Those guys knew what they were doing when they built this house. That was nature’s air conditioning.”

“I wouldn’t mind having those old days back – or at least that attic fan,” I said, explaining how I’d grown up before air conditioning was commonplace and my family relied upon an attic fan to draw fresh air from the yard and adjacent woods into the house all night long, cooling things down and soothing fevered dreams.

“Bet it was nice, huh?” he said. “I’ve never slept in anything but air conditioning.”

“It’s nice to have,” I agreed. “But sometimes I feel like I’m sleeping in a beer cooler.”

He laughed. “I’ll bet you won’t say that come July and August.”

Following his repairs and check-over, he cranked up the jerry-rigged system, producing a few faint cool breaths of air from the upstairs ceiling vents. “I’m afraid 77 degrees is about the coolest it will ever get,” he reported a bit sheepishly, taking a final reading. “And it may be lucky to break eighty when August gets here.”

I thanked him for his efforts, switched off the system, and promptly drove to Lowe’s to purchase a couple large pedestal fans.

If it’s true what poets and child psychologists say – namely that our world views are shaped by the first ten years of life – then perhaps I’m simply a product of a distant, slower and un-air-conditioned world.

The first air conditioned building I can recall was a Piggly Wiggly grocery store in the small South Carolina town where we lived for one year after my father lost his newspaper in Mississippi. That was the summer of 1959. I was six.

By the store’s entrance a cute penguin on the window who looked like Chilly Willy of cartoon fame invited patrons to “Come inside where it’s cooooooool! Enjoy our lovely air conditioning! It’s free!”

This clearly made a big impression. For the first thing I did in the store when my mother disappeared around the end of the aisle was unhook my sandals and walk barefoot over the cool tiled floor.

I wound up in the baking aisle where I cleverly fashioned several large sacks of Martha White Self-Rising Flour into a place where I could sit and enjoy the the air conditioning and the cool tile floor. My brother and I had done this before, calling them “king seats.”

There I sat, pondering life and soaking up the refrigerated coolness when my mother wheeled around the corner with her cart and came to a stop.

She was clearly not pleased.

“What do you think you are doing?” she said.

I replied that I’d made myself a king seat and was enjoying the air-conditioning. I even quoted Chilly Willy.

“It’s free!”

She demanded to know where I’d left my sandals.

I couldn’t tell her.

“In that case, your highness, I think you should get your royal hiney off other people’s flour and go find those sandals and put them on as fast as you can.”

To this day, I can’t pass stacks of flour in the store without remembering my first encounter with air-conditioning. Marcel Proust, methinks, would understand completely.

Most Southerners of my generation experienced their first air-conditioning at a movie house or public building around 1960, but according to the comprehensive Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, air conditioning first appeared in the South at a cotton mill in Belmont, North Carolina, in 1906. By 1920, the device was being used to cool fabric mills, tobacco stemming rooms, and bakeries across the South.

Use in department stores, cafes, libraries and private homes, however, didn’t broadly develop until after World War II, at which point “air conditioning became an immutable part of Southern life,” according to the bible of Southern culture. “In varying degrees,” the authors note, “virtually all southerners have been affected, directly or indirectly, by the technology of climate control. Air conditioning has influenced everything from architecture to sleeping habits and has contributed to the erosion of several traditions, most notably cultural isolation, agrarianism, romanticism, poverty, neighborliness, a strong sense of place, and a relatively slow pace of life.”

Mississippi writer Eudora Welty was once asked by a northern journalist why the South produced so many excellent writers. “Porches,” she gave a famous one-word reply. In an age before mechanical air conditioning, she explained, porches were where Southerners gathered to cool off and spin tales after a long hot summer day.

My own view, shaped by a childhood cooled by a lazily turning fan blade of some sort, is that there’s no finer sleep to be found than by an open window with a fan pulling the smell of the outdoors into your bedroom – the mingling scents of newly mown grass and August honeysuckle in bloom or simply the cool musk of the nearby woods.

Sleeping by an open window permits a body to feel connected to the natural world rather than sealed inside a climate-controlled box. Some of my happiest summer nights were spent lying in my bed listening to approaching thunderstorms and feeling the rising wind of the approaching storm through a gently rippling screen.

The year I went off to college in 1971 with a suitcase and portable fan in hand, my parents installed central air conditioning in their home, rendering obsolete the attic fan that cooled the nighttime house during my teenage years.

My old bedroom was never quite the same, save for those nights when I shut my bedroom door, closed the air conditioning vents, and cranked open the windows to feel nature’s air conditioning. It was about that time I noticed that fewer and fewer people, including my parents, sat on the porch to catch the evening breeze and talk.

“The unnecessary refrigeration of America has become a chronic disease,” political pundit Joe Klein, obviously a kindred spirit, wrote in Time Magazine a few summers ago, noting how as summers grow warmer many Americans have simply grown accustomed to keeping their houses cooler in summer than in winter, using up more British Thermal Units annually than the total energy consumption of all but 21 countries.

Quoting an energy expert who claims Americans could save four percent in energy costs for every degree warmer they set their central air thermostats, Klein proposed that we all set our air conditioning units at 75-degrees – “a comfortable, if slightly chilly number to my mind” – and thereby do the right thing to preserve energy and stay cool on the hottest summer day.

Several years ago when my wife and I were house hunting in Greensboro, every house we checked out came with state-of-the-art central air conditioning.

One, however, also had an attic fan the size of an airplane engine.

“Does that fan still work?” I asked the sales agent with excitement.

“I believe it does,” she answered.

I turned it on and grinned like a kid on a king seat. It works magnificently.

We purchased the house a few days later. I won’t tell you the attic fan was the primary reason. But it certainly was a cool factor in our decision.

Given the growing intensity of Carolina summers, to be honest, I’m often grateful to have an air conditioned house to return to at the end of a long, hot day.

But let the evening temperatures dip below 70 degrees and I become a different creature, flinging open windows like a kid who’s ditched his sandals, cranking up the attic fan to bring nature’s glorious air conditioning into the house.

Some things never change, I suppose.

Besides, it’s still free.

This Simple Life originally appeared in O.Henry in August 2013.

Life on Earth

This story by Jim Dodson originally appeared in O.Henry magazine in March 2017.

Sunday morning in the kitchen, two hours before sunrise.

A deep silence fills the house. At this hour, I often hear a still, small voice that possibly belongs to the Almighty but – more often than not — is just Boo Radley the cat demanding to be let in and fed after his nighttime prowl through the neighborhood.

I am a butler to a roaming tomcat.

On the plus side, though, when I step outside, Sunday morning still lies like a starry quilt over the world, with a thin quarter moon hanging on the western horizon like a theatrical prop in a school play. Somewhere, miles away, a train rumbles by, reminder of a world that is always going somewhere without me. Happily, I am going nowhere except the end of the driveway to fetch the morning newspaper I probably won’t get to for days, a Sunday man beneath a gorgeous hooked moon. As I pick it up, the first bird raises its voice, a beautiful threnody to fellow early-risers. Within minutes, birdsong emanates across the neighborhood.

Back inside, I sit for a spell with my first coffee, putting the Sunday paper aside to read my Sunday Essentials, favorite books that run the gamut from the sonnets of Shakespeare to the essays of Wendell Berry, with a dash of Billy Collins and Mary Oliver for proper spiritual seasoning.

This particular Sunday is a book long out of print, a memoir of spiritual rejuvenation first published the year I was born, the story of a successful big-city writer who was forced by reasons of health and age to return to the small Wisconsin town of his birth. There he built a big house on family land but initially struggled to find his place on ancestral earth.

“A man, faced with the peculiar loneliness of where he doesn’t want to be,” writes Edward Harris Heth in My Life on Earth, “is apt to find himself driving along the narrow, twisting country roads, day or night, alone, brooding about the tricks life can play.”

Life, he discovers, is lived by degrees and open eyes. Little by little, the author’s lonely drives yield a remarkable transformation of the angry city man. Heth gets to know – and admire — the eccentric carpenter who is building his house, fussing over every detail, and the astrologer who picks and prunes her apple orchard by the light of the moon.

He drops by a church supper and meets his neighbors, including the quirky Litten sisters “who play a mean game of canasta and have an Old Testament talent for disaster.” The ancient Litten girls both feed and inspire Heth to broader exploration.

His closest neighbor, Bud Devere, is a genial young farmer who always shows up uninvited just to chat about the most mundane topics – weather, farm prices, a new hat — boring the author to tears, though it is he who invites the author for a drive along Willow Road.

“I did not want to see what Bud saw. But the reluctance began fading away in me that first time we went down the Willow Road. It covers scarcely more than a mile, but in that mile you can cover a thousand miles.” Along it the author sees spring wildflowers in bloom, undisturbed forests, a charming farmhouse riotous with narcissus and hyacinth. He feels his own pulse begin to slow down and something akin to pleasure take root.

“Bud kept silent. He wanted me to open my own eyes…Since then, I’ve learned how many country people know and enjoy this art of the small scene and event, the birth of a calf, a remembered spot, the tumultuous labor and excitement of feeding the threshers, who come like locusts and swarm for a day over your farm and disappear again at night, the annual Welsh singing competition in the village – these are the great and proper events of a lifetime.”

Funny thing is, I haven’t the foggiest idea how this gem of a little book came into my possession, a surprise bestseller when it first appeared in 1953. But somehow it got on my book shelf and found its way into my soul.

Now the sun is up and so are the dogs. I am a butler to them, too. They eat like hounds after the chase, gulping their food in anticipation of the early morning walk.

The neighborhood is old, with massive hardwoods that soar like cathedral arches overhead. When the light of dawn or end of day reaches them, no manmade structure on earth can rival their majesty. Down the block, a man in his bathrobe steps out and shuffles hurriedly to the end of his sidewalk to fetch his Sunday morning paper. He gives a perfunctory wave, bobs his head and hurries back inside with a gentle slam of the door, eager to read what calamities have fallen overnight.

The news of the world can wait. For it never really changes, a story as old as cabbages and kings. Besides, we are briefly off the clock on Sundays, free to wander as we please and footloose upon the earth, not taking phone calls, officially out of range, in search of a more private divinity.

Truthfully, I sometimes feel the heaviness of midsummer. I am a winter’s boy, you see, though my wife is an endless summer girl who dreams of white lilacs in bloom.

“What is divinity?” asked Wallace Steven in his poem Sunday Morning,

“If it can come only in silent shadows and in dreams?

Shall she not find in comforts of the sun,

In pungent fruit and bright, green wings, or else

In any balm or beauty of the earth,

Things to be cherished like the thought of heaven?

Divinity must live within herself:

Passions of rain, or moods in falling snow;

Grievings in loneliness, or unsubdued

Elations when the forest blooms; gusty

Emotions on wet roads on autumn nights;

All pleasures and all pains, remembering

The bough of summer and the winter branch.

These are the measures destined for her soul.”

By the time Lady Summer Bough and Lord Winter Branch reach the park, the strengthening sun has filled the trees with even more birdsong. Across the way stands the site of a spectacular ancient oak I must have peddled by a half a million times as a kid on his way to the ball field; it looked like a lighted candelabra, a sentinel of the passing seasons limned with golden light at the edges of the day.

Sad how I needed to live sixty summers before I noticed what a magnificent creature it was.

Only deepening the grief I felt upon discovering that the city, for no clear reason, cut it down.

It is middle Sunday morning at church, our usual pew, back right. The young preacher is named Greg. Not long ago we attended his ordination as a priest. My cheeky wife thinks Greg is almost too good looking to be a priest. Lots of women in the parish seem to share this view.

The gist of his Sunday sermon is the need to look with fresh eyes upon Matthew’s Beatitudes. But the true strength of his Sunday morning message lies in the suggestion that we all should aspire to become our truest selves and possibly Christian mystics. “Don’t be scared by that word mystic,” he urges. “It simply means someone who has gone from an intellectual belief system to actual inner experience.” The journey from head to the heart, he says, means we are all called to be mystics.

Back home, Sunday afternoon passes quietly in the garden, pulling weeds and praying for rain. Having pulled down an old pergola and cleaned out a handsome brick planter long overgrown by English ivy, I lose complete track of time transplanting Blue Angel hostas and a pair of broadleaf hydrangeas, repairing a much-loved birdfeeder, hanging anniversary chimes high in an ancient white oak and watering the ostrich ferns. If one is closer to God’s heart in a garden, then perhaps I am a backyard mystic with dirty hands after all.

By Sunday sundown, my knees are aching but the healing is real. Renewed for a week of cabbages and kings, we settle down for a quiet supper and to catch our current British import on Netflix before bed, though I tend to doze off half way through the program, still thinking about the mystery book that found its way to me.

Happy to report that Edward Heth finally found his place on earth. It took a new neighbor named Jane who relocated from Chicago to the country, a widowed city woman who learned to see the simple pleasures of life in the slow lanes through his eyes. They decide to marry. “Then, in time,” he writes, “our last days together will be as rich as our youth. We can do helpful things, quiet a fear, sustain an illusion, sit by each other’s sickbeds, hunt each other’s lost cows. And what more can any man ask than to know he will not die alone?”

Sunday ends as Boo Radley goes out for another night on the town and the dogs follow us to bed. For some reason I can’t quite explain, I seem to sleep so well on Sunday nights.

At Greensboro’s United House Of Prayer for All People, the Madison Heavenly Sounds Trombone Shout band lifts the spirit and feeds the soul

This story originally appeared in O.Henry magazine in March 2016.

By Grant Britt • Photography By Sam Froelich

The music hits you with a punch to the heart. Like a gospel freight train thrumming down the rails, it makes everything in the surrounding area vibrate with the brassy rhythm. Band members and audience alike bounce to the beat. You can’t keep still — the sound permeates your body as it vibrates up your breastbone, tickling your spine. As trombone slides reach for the heavens, Greensboro’s United House of Prayer for All People swells to the strains of the Madison Heavenly Sounds Trombone Shout band, and all heaven is breaking loose.

Under the leadership of House Of Prayer founder Charles Manuel “Sweet Daddy” Grace, switching out the organ in church services for brass instruments first came into vogue in the late 1920s. The Cape Verde native, whose first church was founded in Charlotte in 1926, had a lone trombonist with him at first. But as Grace sought a way to attract people to his services, he added brass bands. These were originally driven through town on a flatbed truck to attract crowds to hear Grace’s message

The bands also created another House of Prayer tradition: The kitchens found in every HOP today. “Daddy Grace started this because in the ’20s people didn’t have jobs or food; there was no welfare, no food stamps, no Social Security, so he started a
food program,” says Apostle H.M. Swaringer, who presides over the Greensboro church. “He would have soup kitchens, and people would line up and come in and get their bowl of soup and their bread. His ideology was a hungry man doesn’t want to hear about the word of God. Feed a man’s belly and you can talk to his soul.”

At a recent HOP service, there did seem to be a lot of well-fed souls in attendance. The spirit was being heard, and it moved your heart, your soul and your feet. There’s no mystery as to why they call these horn-wielding praise bearers a shout band. When this music starts to swell, it lifts you up, encouraging you to shout and dance.

Leader Andrew Kittrell fronts this brass furnace, blasting high-pitched praise to the heavens. As the band swells behind him, the congregation is buoyed up on pulsating waves of worship. The band currently has as many as seventeen members. I witnessed seven ’bones, a tuba, sousaphone and two drummers, snare and a kick making a joyful noise no one could ignore. You feel the floor vibrating beneath your feet as the band takes it up a notch. Kittrell hollers “Thank you, Daddy,” as the spirit moves him, and many members of the congregation at the Cathedral on Dudley Street join him, dancing and shouting in the spirit.

The service is truly an all-ages event. Even the smallest kids in the congregation are fully engaged in the proceedings, many already in training for future musical service. The church takes a unique approach to getting children interested in the music with what they call fist bands. The children emulate the instruments with their hands, arms and lips. “They ball up one fist, and since we use tubas and trombones, they turn their arm up over their head as the bass horn, and that’s how they learn how to play their instrument,” Swaringer says.

Children as young as 3 blow into their fists at first, making the sounds of the horn while pumping an arm like a trombone slide or pressing imaginary tuba keys. As they get older, kids are given a mouthpiece from a ’bone or tuba to practice on before graduating to an actual instrument. “They hear the sounds, and that sound is embedded in them, until by the time they are seven or eight they can play an instrument as good as a person who has been taking music all their lives,” Swaringer adds. Reading music is not a requirement, and few band members do, playing entirely by ear. “Reading music is phenomenal,” Kittrell says, “but to have the gift of playing by ear is unbelievable. It’s a gift from God.”

“Run man” Khari Mincey, who also plays an important role in the band, doesn’t read music either. “It’s an extension of your voice,” he says of his instrument. “My dad used to tell me all the time, ‘If you can sing a note, you can play a note.’” Born and raised in the church, Mincey started playing when he was age 4. “When you play, you’re projecting yourself,” Mincey says. “That’s you, through an instrument.” His “run man” duties include playing three- or four-part harmony, being in the background and keeping everything under control. Swaringer, who played in New York City’s HOP shout band, says the run man’s main duty is to keep the band moving as the bass element.

“The bass does all the turning,” Swaringer says. “Bass — he calls, and he carries ’em into it, and the rest follow . . . and that’s the way it is.” The band is a family tradition for many members. Kittrell’s grandfather, Preston Kittrell, was told by Daddy Grace to come back from Virginia to Greensboro to start a band. “When he was told to go back to Greensboro in the ’30s to start a band, he came back as one trombone player,” Swaringer says. “And out of that one birth of trombone they got a band.”

It’s a unique sound. Swaringer says some folks compare it to New Orleans brass bands, but he says HOP has a more upscale, African beat. Crescent City brass bands make you want to strut, the shout bands have a swooping glide, the horns slithering around underneath the melody with a slippery rhythm dominated by bass and drums that makes you jump and shout. The leader and most of the players play the trombone like a trumpet, like an entire choir of Fred Wesleys, James Brown’s former bandleader who pioneered high-pitched funk trombone. It’s for edification, jubilation, for people to respond, and it lifts a burden off them,” the Apostle says. “It’s a spiritual thing that lifts you up rather than puts you down.”

And because the members play by ear, there’s no sheet music to go by, so no performance is ever the same. They can’t play the same thing twice because they’re taught it’s not about what you hear, it’s about what you feel. Swaringer contends that aspect confounded some of the greats of jazz who saw the bands perform.

The Apollo Theater was right across 125th Street in Harlem from the House of Prayer Swaringer attended, and he says it wasn’t unusual for performers to stop in and listen to the band after their gigs at the famed venue. Swaringer claims the band even impressed the likes of Dizzy Gillespie and Miles Davis. “They would try to write down what they were hearing, but they could never get it,” he recalls. “And they would talk about it: ‘How do you guys do that? And they would come back the next night, and the band would play, and they wouldn’t play nothing they had played the night before, and they’d be going, ‘Where did that come from?’”

The Apostle says it was more than the music that drew them: “One reason they would come to the House of Prayer was that they couldn’t eat in the places they were playing,” Swaringer says. “The HOP had food, and they would come up there to eat their dinners cause the HOP’s service wouldn’t get out till 2 or 3 o’clock in the morning.”

But at the House of Prayer, both belly and soul are catered to equally. “The band in the church plays the most important part,”
Swaringer says. “They’re in the beginning of the service, the middle, at the end. If the choir sings a song, when they finish, to enhance that, they are the sugar in the coffee, they are the sweetness in the tea, they enhance the meal. I’ve given them the bread, now here comes the dessert, the music that comes afterward.”

But the Apostle wants folks to know the band is much more than musical caterers. “The philosophy and the doctrine of this church is to save our young men. We use our musicians to teach our kids, and as a way of keeping our children out of harm’s way,” he says. “When you have a band, twenty or thirty young black men and they are serving God, that shows people in the community that all our black men are not thugs and gangstas.”

Although the band’s venue is in the sanctuary, they do occasionally play in public, as well. The shout band Swaringer was a member of in New York toured the world, playing Spain, Belgium and the Opera House in Sydney, Australia. “Those people had never heard of gospel, period,” he says of the aria-loving Aussie audience. “They’d never heard anything like that. We turned that place out. We just took ’em to church.”

The New York–based shout band also played the White House, The Smithsonian and Kennedy Center. His dad’s shout band played Carnegie Hall.

The Madison Heavenly Sounds have played out-of-town gigs at other churches as well as the local Festival of Lights, and are in negotiations to join the lineup for both The National Folk Festival and 17Days. Anyone is welcome to attend the Sunday morning services, but if you want a taste of what the shouting is all about in a more casual setting, the Apostle has a surprise in store — for the band as well as the public.

“They don’t know they’re doing rehearsals on Fridays, yet,” the pastor says slyly, as Kittrell and Mincey receive this new blessing, heads bowed. “When the weather breaks, they’re going to be across the street [in the church parking lot] doing barbecues.” Meanwhile, the band will host some open-air rehearsals. That way those who come will not only be entertained, “They’ll also get the barbecue and the fish.” Now that’s truly a blessing worth shouting about.

In a future edition of O.Henry, writer Grant Britt will recall his own days of reaching for the heavens with his horn in the Key West Funeral Band. In the meantime, he rumbles about music from his memento-crammed Greensboro abode, tooting his own horn for various and sundry publications.

About Time

By Jim Dodson

A while back, my beloved wristwatch of many years mysteriously disappeared.

On one level, the loss wasn’t such a big a deal. It was, after all, an inexpensive wristwatch – some might even say cheap – a Timex “Expedition” model that set me back only about fifty bucks during a two-for-one Black Friday sale at Belk department store many years back.

At that time I kept one Expedition and gave the other to my college-boy son, who as it happens had just broken the fine Swiss Army watch I’d owned for several years but passed along to him for safe keeping.

My history of watch-ownership, you see, is a fairly checkered affair, littered with various costly broken or missing timepieces, beginning with the beautiful engraved Seiko chronometer my parents gave me for college graduation that somehow abandoned my wrist on a pilgrimage across Europe, never to be seen again. Over the next few decades it was followed by a succession of fine watches including several Swiss Army numbers I either managed to break or lose in ever creative ways.

Then there was the perilous close call that happened on a beautiful Saturday morning at London’s famous Portobello Road marketplace when I happened across a vendor of antique watches who showed me a beautiful, fully-restored “wartime” Rolex bearing the emblem of the U.S Eighth Army Air Corps in which my old man served during the war. It was an exquisite watch and a bargain at only one hundred quid or so.

In a rare burst of common sense, however, recalling my history of unintentionally losing or destroying innocent timepieces, I concluded in the nick of time that the Rolex of my dreams might well have survived a world war but probably wouldn’t last long on the arm of yours truly. And so, reluctantly, I passed it up.

That’s why the first Timex Expedition I happened upon over a decade ago was such nice discovery: simple, handsome, rugged, reliable and – best of all — cheap to replace when the inevitable happened. As the company’s famous slogan promised: “It takes a licking and keeps on ticking.”

It was also a nostalgic window into my childhood, conjuring memories of the iconic Timex TV spots I always found so entertaining during which John Cameron Swayze – former news broadcaster and game show panelist — subjected Timex watches to various creative “torture tests” like being sent over Niagara Falls in a barrel, attached to the churning blades of a speeding boat motor, put through a washing machine or worn by slugger Mickey Mantle in batting practice.

Once upon a time, Timex was the flagship of American-made affordable watches. Such colorful theatrics made it America’s bestselling watch brand in the dawning space age before digital everything, bargain-priced between $9.95 and $16.99.

The first Timex Expedition I purchased lasted five years but vanished during a research trip to Africa. While wading across a shallow river where crocodiles were rumored to circulate, the pin holding the watch to the strap slipped out of the socket and I found only a bare arm by the other side of the river. Picturing the wily old croc from Peter Pan with the clock ticking in his stomach, I chose not to go back and hunt for my lost Expedition on the river’s bottom.

Back home in America, I set off one afternoon to various shops and department store looking for the same model, figuring that any watch that gave me such loyal service for less than fifty bucks a year was a small price to pay for being on time.

At Belk, I was dismayed to learn the store no longer carries Timex. “I think it’s gone a little down-market,” was how the watch counter clerk politely termed it with a gentle sniff, offering to show me several higher-priced Bulovas and Seiko models, also something called a Fossil watch that looked like something that would require platform heels and a pair of glittery oversized Elton John eyeglasses to complete the ensemble. The only watch that even remotely resembled my beloved lost Expedition was a handsome but pricey Citizen timepiece three times the price tag, though with a ten-year warranty.

I thanked the clerk for her time and said I had my heart set on another Timex Expedition.

“You might try Wal-Mart,” she said.

So I did, discouraged to think how far mighty Timex must have fallen. But even Wal-Mart was a no-go. The clerk there said a drug store was probably my best option. If that failed, I pictured America’s formerly favorite wrist watch being sold from suitcases on the street corner by vendors with heavy foreign accents.

By now you are probably saying to yourself, “What a silly waste of time – all this hoo-ha over a cheap wrist watch!” And you may well be right.

But on the other hand, a modestly-priced, rugged-looking watch that can take a licking and keep on ticking strikes me as something of true value in a world where nothing is all that permanent, regardless of the price.

Besides, who knows when I might get washed over Niagara Falls in a barrel, hauled by a speeding motorboat or accidentally put through the wash cycle?

In time, I found an excellent source for my beloved Expedition watches: the Timex company itself, which hosts an impressive selection of Expedition models and even fancier watches for aging Timex –ers like me.

Soon I had a new Expedition strapped to my wrist, an updated “indiglo” model featuring a nifty illuminated face that will come in handy if I ever find myself trapped in a dark cave miles below the earth or invading space aliens knock out the nation’s electrical grid and plunge America into complete and total darkness.

Who knows what sort of monkey business may happen in time?

In the meantime, it’s times like these — a killer pandemic, civil unrest, sweeping social change, not to mention a world economy struggling to get off its knees – that really make you take time to think.

According to some, it’s either later than we think – or not time for a change just yet.

Ancient sages advised that time is our most precious commodity, something that flies but a sin to waste, a fleeting resource, tomorrow’s memory, something that heals all wounds and sometimes wounds all heels.

Time stays, we go – or so said H.L. Mencken.

It’s possible, Emerson countered, to kill time without injuring eternity.

The Book of Ecclesiastes insists that there is a time in heaven for everything, but my late grandmother Taylor – who knew her Bible cold — used to tell me “Sugar pie, someone is always waiting beneath a clock.”

What she meant was that time – at the end of the day — is highly personal, all about the here and now.

Someone is always waiting beneath an unseen clock for a baby to be born or an elder to pass on, a first date to arrive, the train to leave the station, the weather to change, spring to return, a new life to begin.

Tomorrow is simply an unspent yesterday, an abstract concept for something that’s gone the instant it arrives, whereas real time is always here and now, which explains why we fragile human beings felt the need to come up with so many mechanical devises – Stonehenge, sun dials, planting cycles, moon phases, hourglasses, various kinds of calendars, latitude and longitude, and every sort of time-keeping piece from ancient Babylonian water clocks to modern Tag Heuer chronometers – simply to measure our days and mark our passages through the veil of existence.

Some years back, I developed the habit of removing my wristwatch whenever I was doing something I draw true pleasure from – working in my garden, taking a swim, dining with friends or even playing golf. I would unstrap my watch and toss it in a pocket, a symbolic act of suspending time or at least removing my spirit for a blissful moment from the gravitational pull of a world that would have me doing more responsible and important things with my time.

The older I’ve gotten – time being an excellent source of wisdom – I’ve come to believe the most valuable use of time is whatever our heart chooses to make of it.

With the passage of time, alas, I’ve evidently also become a bit more forgetful.

Not long ago, when restrictions on staying in place due to the Coronavirus began to ease a bit, I transferred my golf clubs to a small canvas “walking” bag I hadn’t used since last summer and set off to play nine holes in the fading afternoon light.

Somewhere near the end of the round, I lost a golf ball and opened the side pouch hoping there might be another ball inside.

There wasn’t.

But I found my missing Expedition watch.

It was a lovely surprise to suddenly have it back. I strapped it to my wrist for the walk home in a beautiful summer dusk, almost hearing Grandma Taylor speaking to me from the shadows of the evening trees.

If you’ve lost something of value, best to quit looking for it, sugar pie, and give it time. It will find its way back to you.

This struck me as a useful thought for the challenging times we are living through.

In a world that is waiting for things we value to return, to begin again or change for the better, it’s nice to have a pair of Expedition watches to tell me what time it really is – or isn’t.