The Hunger Games

In spite of no-go zones, there are still some to-go eateries

By Billy Eye

 

In 1997, when I moved to the center of the city, downtown was a ghost town. The only things missing were the tumbleweeds. I remember taking friends visiting from Detroit on a tour of downtown Greensboro on a Friday at 5 p.m. They wondered if a nuclear bomb had gone off since there were no people walking around or cars passing by. When a car did finally appear, its occupants yelled obscenities at us; it was such an affront to see common people walking the streets, I’m guessing.

Downtown is again lacking in traffic, spiritless. Just in terms of restaurants, popular downtown eateries that gave to-go a go before shuttering in place include Liberty Oak, Bonchon, Grey’s Tavern, Europa Bar and Cafe, Chez Genèse, M’Coul’s Public House, Smith Street Diner, Poke Bowl, and Natty Greene’s.

Things are changing week to week but I was able to get takeout the other day from a couple of my fave eateries on South Elm, Cincy’s and Los Chico’s. Cincy’s has been around since 1986 and was unsure if they’ll continue takeout this week. Some days business is good I’m told, others dead.

I appreciate getting authentic Mexican food at Los Chico’s, despite the misplaced apostrophe in their name. They’ve only been open a few months and are offering their regular menu along with take-and-bake, family-sized meals. Smõhk’d, as the name suggests, serves up smoky meats in to-go manner after 3 p.m. Machete, another new startup, has adapted to changing times with sparkling plates of curbside global cuisine, I need to give them a try.

Pizzeria L’Italiano, Cheesecakes By Alex and Jerusalem Market are all keeping (somewhat) normal hours thank goodness, a glimmer of normality.

Outside of downtown, my regular spots for lunch have always been Saigon Cuisine on Gate City and Merritt, Freeman’s Grub & Pub and Jake’s Billiards on Spring Garden. All are operating, Jake’s and Freeman’s from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m.

Like a daisy blooming from a crack in the concrete, there’s new life in an overlooked corner of downtown. Over the last few weeks, I’ve noticed major excavation on a site along a side street that runs parallel to the 400 block of Spring Garden, behind the defunct Moorhead Foundry. It consists of what will likely be a large parking lot fronting an event space that I’m not familiar with called The Public that’s now been merged into a former office building. Could it be another brewery? I’ll drink to that!

 

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Billy Eye has his own Vlog, check out the latest episode here.

Chasing the Moon
By Jim Dodson

 

 

Like my father before me, it’s the rare morning I’m not up by four o’clock. The dark hours before dawn, I find, are the most peaceful and productive of the day, the time I read and write or sometimes just sit and drink my coffee and try to make sense of a world that often seems poised to come apart at the seams.

In her brilliant new book, Learning to Walk in the Dark, Barbara Brown Taylor sheds light on how vital the nighttime and darkness are to our physical and spiritual well-being, yet how most of us from childhood onward have been conditioned to fear the dark and associate our worst fears with it – boogeymen under the bed, burglars afoot, animals on the prowl, nightmares, insomnia, dark nights of the soul.

The Bible speaks of the forces of light and darkness throughout, and the light of a new day is always preferable to the mysterious darkness. Be home by dark, our parents warned us. We lock our doors at night just to be safe; we put on the light.

Evil is dark. Goodness is light – or so we are taught to believe.

In a world where intensely illuminated cities increasingly blot out the Earth’s natural darkness, blurring the lines between night and day, Barbara Brown laments the loss of darkness and notes how wrong it is to curse it.

“Darkness turns out to be as essential to our physical well-being as light,” she writes. “We not only need plenty of darkness to sleep well, we also need it to be well. The circadian rhythm of waking and sleeping matches the natural cycle of day and night, which affects everything from our body chemistry to our relationships.”

Wednesday morning was no exception. I rose at my usual time – quarter till four – made coffee and stepped outside to my back garden to look at the moon.

The full moon of October is known as the Hunter’s Moon because in ancient times native people hunted by its light, special because it’s typically up all night, rising at sunset and setting at dawn.

It’s also called the Blood Moon because in its setting phase an hour or so before dawn, eclipsed by the shadow of Earth as it passes directly between the sun and the moon, the sun’s returning light, refracted though earth’s atmosphere, casts it in a ruddy red glow on the surface of the moon – hence the reference to blood.

Wednesday’s Blood Moon was the second one this year, the first having occurred last April around Passover and Easter. In a rare celestial event that has reportedly only happened three other times in the past 500 years, Blood Moons will come again next year in April and late October.

Much of the interest in these Blood Moons centers around Biblical prophecy that holds these rare celestial events – four blood moons in back-to-back years, also called a tetrad by astronomers — herald significant changes for the Jewish people, meaning tragedy that leads to triumph.

In 1492-93, as part of a royal decree that ordered Jews to convert to Catholicism or leave their country, Spain expelled thousands of Jews. That same year, however, Columbus discovered America, which eventually became the world’s safe haven for the Jewish people.
In 1948, following the Holocaust, after 2,000 years of struggle, the state of Israel came into being under Blood Moons.

In 1967, Israel’s triumph in a brutal Six Day War with its Arab neighbors resulted in Jerusalem becoming part of Israel along with the Sinai, Golan Heights and West Bank of the Jordan River.

As I sat on my garden bench in the darkness drinking my coffee and enjoying the sound of the last crickets of summer, waiting for the celestial moon show to start around 5:30, it was natural to remember something I learned way back in my childhood Sunday School days — that whatever name you chose to give the divine force of love that shapes our universe, celestial “signs” are simply one way a loving God communicates with anxious humans trembling in the darkness.

Who can consider the unsettling events of late and not feel in their gut that something is shaking up the planet, urging us to wake up and shake off our indifference. As the Middle East unravels into chaos and the ISIS reign of terror expands with apparent impunity, Ebola is on the march out of Africa and America seems to be sleep-walking into the unknown.

Last week, the Wall Street Journal reported that 40 percent of the world’s wildlife has vanished in just the past forty years, but few seem to notice. Another respected wildlife monitor raises the alarm that a third of the world’s songbirds have vanished. A number of reasons why are cited, including rampant global warming, deforestation, air and water pollution and loss of natural habitat.

As I sat thinking about these terrestrial signs of change and whatever they may portend – a new Black Plague or the mother of all earthquakes — waiting for the rare lunar eclipse to start, old Rufus the cat came waddling back from his night time travels just as the back door opened and my wife appeared in her bathrobe, clutching her own cup of coffee.

What a nice surprise – to see her up so early, something that also happens only four times every 500 years.

We sat together on the bench in silence for a bit, almost like people at prayer, surrounded by the serenity of darkness and the music of the early birds. We talked about our children and watched through the pines as the moon slipped beautifully into the Earth’s shadow. The stars were out and we picked out the planet Uranus and Little dipper pouring its light directly over our house.

“There is one cure for me on nights like this,” writes Barbara Brown Taylor. “If I can summon the energy to put on my bathrobe and go outside , the night sky will heal me – not by reassuring me that I will be just fine, but by reminding me of my place in the universe. Looking up at the same stars that human beings have been looking at for millennia, I find my place near the end of the long, long line of stargazers who stood here before me.”

As we watched, Old Rufus, the wife and me, the moon slipped into the umbra, the darkest part of the Earth’s shadow, producing a reddish glow that bloomed like a blushing Japanese lantern.

“Isn’t that beautiful?” Dame Wendy was moved to remark – at least as much to the heavens as to Old Rufus and me.

As the moon moved lower in the pines and the first light of a new day brightened the sky to the east, we did something purely for the fun of it. Mama in her fuzzy bathrobe, Papa in his tattered Indian moccasins, we hopped in the car and chased the ancient Blood Moon toward the western horizon.

Like children following an untethered balloon, we followed the vanishing moon from darkness to light, all the way out Highway 211 to Samarkand, at which point, somewhere over a peach orchard that has given up its fruit for another year, the Blood Moon melted into the golden light of dawn.

It was a lovely sunrise, I must say, driving home. We held hands with the car windows down, enjoying the rush of cool morning air.

The moment made me wish – hope to believe – that the darkness before dawn is healing and America might also soon be waking up.

 

This “Simple Life” story first appeared in October 2014 in O.Henry magazine.

Remembrances of Things Daft

By Annie Gray Sprunt

 

First and foremost, I would like to thank God, Buddha and Mister Rogers that I do not have school-aged children home who I am responsible for educating…it would not have been pretty. During this coronavirus pandemic, I am desperately trying to embrace my inner introvert, but it’s not going well. Gwyneth Paltrow renamed her divorce “conscious uncoupling.” Well, that’s what I need to do with the news and the refrigerator. I watch my hair color becoming more “distinguished” and listen as my faux eyelashes hit the floor, one by one, like the needles on a Christmas tree. I have arranged the canned goods alphabetically, but I might go back and rearrange them by color. I have cleaned every nook of my house, including the cleaning supplies. I’ve ironed everything except the pets. I have read so many books, it feels like the last week of summer when I used to binge-read my summer reading list.

During this unprecedented time of uncertainty, I could sit around, sans proper foundation garments, wringing my hands, feet and earlobes, or I could turn to what helps me cope (other than sauvignon blanc and Jamoca Almond Fudge ice cream)…..humor. As my gift of distraction to you, please turn off the news, sit back and enjoy some random nuggets of ridiculousness.

Growing up in the Episcopal church, a young person couldn’t receive Communion until they completed confirmation class. Pre-confirmed children would remain in the pew while their parents went up to the altar to receive Communion. Years before I understood what Communion meant—the minister offers a wafer symbolizing the body of the Lord and wine symbolizing the blood of the Lord—I (loudly) whispered to my friend in the neighboring pew….”It’s not blood, it’s only ketchup!”

In the third grade I wanted to have a birthday party, and I insisted on writing my own invitations. On the invitation, I wrote, “Please bring your sleeping bag and a present.” Luckily, my mother intercepted and deleted my audacious present request.

Twenty-four years ago, when my son was about two years old, I actually called my pediatrician, Dr. Charles Brett, on the after-hours office emergency line. I left a message: “Dr. Brett, I think something is terribly wrong with my son (remember, he was two years old)….he won’t do anything I tell him to do.” You know that receptionist replayed that message to the staff every day as confirmation that I qualified for the Dingbat Mother of the Year award!

In my wayward youth, I developed a love of pranks—surprising, I know! (That durn caller ID has cramped my style.) I went to a tiny school with no more than 25 people per class. It rarely snowed but when it did, we were all thrilled because school would be cancelled. The local television weatherman suggested that perhaps there might be an itty-bitty hint of a possibility for snow. So what did I do? I called the local television station and identify myself as Margaret Higgins from the school and cancelled school. And they did. And guess what? It did not snow, but we had a free snow day! (Since then, there is a security code word to ward off bored middle- school pranksters.)

And for those of you who could not get enough of my Boston adventures in last month’s issue, here are a few more grisly details. During my investment boutique interview, I was offered the job and my boss-to-be explained the particulars. Then he said a phrase that was unfamiliar to me. He said, “After a year, you can have a week off.” Clearly, he had not seen my calendar for the upcoming year and didn’t understand. I told him that I had to go home for at least a week for Thanksgiving and at least a week for Christmas, and that my uncle always had a 4th of July party that I just couldn’t miss. And I also told him that I was scheduled to be a bridesmaid in 12 upcoming weddings and I would probably have to take off Wednesday afternoons before each wedding weekend so I wouldn’t miss any of the festivities. Dear reader, I got that job because he thought that if he didn’t hire me, he had no faith that anyone else would. I was a charity hire. He didn’t understand that I wasn’t working because I wanted to be an award-winning secretary, I was working to have something to do between weddings.

Helpful hint for these trying times: think of your martini glass as half-full!

 

Annie Gray Sprunt is a Wilmingtonian, award-winning mother, and self-deprecating bon vivant.

The King of Everyman

By James Dodson

Global Golf

Originally published in October 2016

 

 

Around five o’clock last Sunday afternoon my wife Wendy and I were watching a late afternoon football game when I was suddenly felt overcome by a chill and uncommon queasiness and needed to go upstairs to lie down for an hour before friends came for supper.

I’m rarely sick and assumed this peculiar spell was simply brought on by fatigue from working since four in the morning on a golf book I’ve been writing for almost two years, a personal tale called the Range Bucket List.

The first chapter and the last one are about my friend, collaborator and boyhood hero Arnold Palmer.

The first chapter explains that he was the first name on what I called my Things to Do in Golf List around1966 after falling hard for my father’s game and reading somewhere that my Arnold Palmer started out in golf by keeping a similar list of things he intended to do in the game. Many decades later, while interviewing him one morning early in his workshop in Latrobe, I confirmed this fact with the King of Golf.

The final chapter details the emotional visit I made to see him at home in Latrobe about a month before his 87th birthday. I knew he wasn’t doing particularly well. When I walked into his rustic house on Legends Drive in the unincorporated Village of Youngstown on the outskirts of Latrobe, I found the King of Golf watching an episode of Gunsmoke, the number one American TV show about the time Arnold Palmer was the world’s number one golfer.

He greeted me warmly without getting up. A walker was standing nearby. His second wife, Kitt, brought me a cold drink. He turned down the sound and we had a nice time catching up, almost — but not quite — like many intimate conversations we’d over over the past two decades. Arnold’s once seemingly invincible blacksmith body had finally given out yet his mind and spirit were strong. He insisted on joining Doc Giffin, his longtime assistant, Kitt and me for an early supper that evening across the vale at Latrobe Country Club.

The trip was like a homecoming for me – and something I feared would be a farewell.

For two full years from early 1997 to late 1999 I had the privilege of serving as Arnold Palmer’s collaborator on his autobiography A Golfer’s Life. I was deeply honored to have been chosen by Arnold and wife Winnie for the project, and touched that he insisted that my name share the cover and title page of the work. I always called the book his book. He always called the book our book.

Not long after we began working it – both being unusually early risers who often chatted in his home workshops before official business hours — Winnie was diagnosed with a form of ovarian cancer and Arnie – which is what he insisted I call him, though I never could quite make myself do so – withdrew from his busy public life so we could get the book completed and published before time took its toll, narrowing the horizon of what was supposed to be a three year project to just under two.

We brought the book out in time to celebrate Arnold’s 70th birthday in September 1999 and the opening of a beautiful restored red barn that Winnie had always loved just off the 14th fairway at the same club where Arnold grew up under the firm watch of his demanding papa, Deacon Palmer, whom Arnold simply called “Pap.”

Rather than a conventional autobiography of facts and figures and tournament highlights, my objective with Arnold’s book was to create an unusually warm and intimate reminiscence or memoir that read as if Arnold and his fans were simply sharing a drink after a day of golf and he was quietly relating the 15 or so key moments of his life, revealing how these moments shaped the most influential golfer in history and arguably America’s greatest sportsman ever.

Both the Winnie’s barn and Arnold’s book were a hit. The book was on the bestseller list for almost half a year. The handsome red barn stands in quiet tribute to them both. Winnie passed away less than two months after that special evening Arnold turned 70.

After lying down and lightly dozing for an hour, I heard our guests arriving and got up to go downstairs. The cold and queasiness had passed and I felt much better — only to find my wife waiting at the bottom of the steps holding out my mobile phone with a very sad look on her face.

A nice person named Molly from NBC News in New York was on the other end, wanting to know if I could confirm a report that Arnold Palmer had passed away.

We spoke for an hour as my incoming call alert continued to light up from news organization around the world. By midnight I’d spoken with reporters from all the major networks, several cable news organizations, CNN International, a pair of wire services, the Canadian Broadcasting System and Australia’s leading sports call-in show – all of it testament to the drawing power of Arnold Daniel Palmer.

The conversations about his unprecedented life and times and seismic impact on popular culture and the world of sports went well into the early morning hours.

Was the cold and queasiness coincidence or something more sympathetic in nature?

That’s impossible to say. This much is certainly true: As Winnie commented early in our collaboration, Arnold and I enjoyed unusually strong chemistry and an uncommon connection that is instinctively felt and shared by his millions of adoring fans — and was still apparent last month when I visited with him at home.

The morning after our dinner at the club, I also visited with Doc Giffin and Arnold’s amazing staff at Arnold Palmer Enterprises and even saw his younger brother Jerry when he popped in to say hello.

Finally the boss showed up for work around 10 o’clock, trailed by a couple cheerful young therapists from the local hospital who were planning to do a stretching and exercise session at the Palmers’ home gym aimed at restoring Arnold’s ability to swing a golf club again.

As he signed books and the usual stack of photos and personal artifacts from fans that are always waiting for his immaculate signature every morning of his life, we chatted about various family matters and other things large and small. With Doc and his therapists we even watched a recently colorized CD release of the historic 1960 Masters where Arnold closed from two shots back to claim his second Green Jacket, setting off a national frenzy in the process.

At one point as we watched him teeing off on the 72nd hole of the tournament, needing a clutch birdie to secure the win, Arnold declared excited – “There, girls! There’s my golf swing!”

The therapy girls were standing directly behind the King of Golf. They were beaming, part of a new generation that never had the pleasure of experiencing the game’s most compelling star in his prime.

Arnold’s eyes was alive with pure joy. There were tears pooling in his eyes.

And even bigger tears pooling in mine.

Doc Giffin, a legend in his own right, just smiled from a few feet away.

A little while later, I did something I’d meant to do for many years.

I handed him my first hardbound copy of A Golfer’s Life and asked him to autograph it.

He accepted the book but gave me what I fondly call The Look – a cross between the scowl of a disapproving school master and a slightly constipated eagle, one way he loves to needle his friends.

I watched as he took his own sweet time writing something on the title page. He handed me back the book and said, “Don’t open this until you’re safely home.”

Facing a nine hour drive home to North Carolina, I somehow managed to wait until I reached my driveway just as the summer day was expiring, at which point I opened the book. He could have written it to 100 million people around the world, all of whom share the same kind of connection with the King of Everyman – and women.

“Dear Jim,” he simply wrote. “Thanks for all your wonderful works. You are the greatest friend I could have – Arnold”

That’s when my waterworks really let loose a gusher.

Over the days and week to come, we’ll all be reminded of Arnold Palmer’s extraordinary impact on golf and American life in general and the mammoth-hearted legacy he leaves behind:

How his 62 PGA Tours wins, 90 tournament victories worldwide and seven major championships defined the life of a man from the rural heartland of Western Pennsylvania who almost singly pioneered the concept of modern sports marketing, created a business model that turned into an empire stretching from golf tees to sweet tea, and grew to be golf’s most visible and charismatic force, its greatest philanthropist and most beloved ambassador.

During his half century reign, and largely because of him, in my view and that of many fellow historians, golf enjoyed the largest and longest sustained period of growth in history, a remarkable period that included the formal creation of no less than six professional tours, witnessed television’s incomparable impact, saw the rebirth of the Ryder Cup and revival of European golf, the rise of international stars and nothing less than a scientific revolution in the realms of instruction, equipment technology and golf course design – all of which Arnold played some kind of role.

How much of this cultural Renaissance was due to this kind, genuine, fun-loving and passionately competitive family man who grew up showing off for the ladies of Latrobe Country Club and earning nickels from them by knocking their tee shots safely over a creek on his papa’s golf course?

Impossible to fully quantify, I suppose. Though I would be inclined to say just about everything.

Golf is the most personal game of all, a solitary walk through gardens of nature. And Arnold Palmer was the most personal superstar in the history of any sport, a true blue son of small town America, the kid next door who grew up to become a living legend, a homegrown monarch for the Everyman in each of us, a King with a common touch.

His charm and hearty laugh and extraordinary undying love of the ancient game he was meant by Providence to elevate like nobody before him, will surely live on as long as people young and old tee up the ball and give chase to the game.

But he will be missed.

Oh, how Arnold Palmer will be missed by each and every one of us in a truly personal way.

Daily strolls provide us with a much-needed escape from these four walls. Along the path, we’ve found inspiring artwork that has us all feeling like kids again. Send us your photos, and we’ll add them here!

What’s Enough?
A sage reveals the trick to a contented life

By Jim Dodson

A few weeks ago I read in The New Yorker about a group of Silicon Valley billionaires who’ve built luxury retreats in some of the remotest parts of the planet, safe houses designed to allow their owners to survive a global catastrophe — stocked with enough good French white wine and military hardware to hold out indefinitely.

A short time later, I read about a second group of young Silicon Valley billionaires funding a top-secret scheme to bio-engineer a “God Pill” that can cure everything from cancer to flat feet and make human mortality as obsolete as the typewriter.

According to Newsweek, this latter group of “visionaries” includes the billionaire co-founder of PayPal who is making plans to live for at least 120 years. A fellow described as the “godfather of the Russian Internet,” meanwhile, says his goal is to live to 10,000 years of age, while a wealthy co-founder of Oracle finds the notion of accepting mortality “incomprehensible.” Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google, meantime, simply hopes to someday “cure death.”

As Newsweek points out, “The human quest for immortality is both ancient and littered with catastrophic failures. Around 200 B.C., the first emperor of China, Qin Shi Huang, accidentally killed himself trying to live forever; he poisoned himself by eating supposedly mortality-preventing mercury pills.”

Centuries later, the answer to eternal life appeared no no closer at hand. “In 1492, Pope Innocent VIII died after blood transfusions from three healthy boys whose youth he believed could be absorbed.

A little closer to modern times, in 1868 America, Kentucky politician Leonard Jones ran for the U.S. presidency on the platform that he’d achieved immortality through prayer and fasting — and could give his secrets for cheating death to the public. Later that year, Jones died of pneumonia.”

Dreams of immortality have beguiled and eluded human beings for as long as we’ve walked upright on the Earth, immune to the wisdom of every spiritual tradition that reminded mortal man that life’s bittersweet impermanence — and one’s perspective on the matter — determines whether every day is regarded as a gift to be savored or a good reason to pack up and head for the hills.

As I read about these lavish billionaire retreats and quest to make human mortality irrelevant, in any case, I couldn’t help but think about the summer I realized I was a mortal pipsqueak who wouldn’t be around forever.

It was 1962 and school was just out for the summer. Third grade was in my rearview mirror and I had a new neighborhood in Greensboro plus a Black Racer bike upon which to go adventuring.

Even better, my new neighborhood pals were talking about the bomb shelter that “creepy Mr. Freeman” had constructed beneath a shed in his backyard in our new subdivision. I’d read in Life Magazine that bomb shelters were the latest suburban passion, being constructed in backyards all across America amidst widespread fears of a “nuclear apocalypse.”

About that same time, an episode of The Twilight Zone depicted a group of folks having a birthday dinner party with neighbors when they learn that America is, in fact, under nuclear attack. The hosts flee to their new bomb shelter in their basement, which is only large enough to accommodate the family. Tempers explode, panic ensues. The neighbors batter down the bomb shelter door only to learn that the report of a pending nuclear extinction was simply a human error, a false apocalypse.

For the balance of that summer, however, I became obsessed with the notion of an “Apocalypse” and Mr. Freeman’s homemade bomb shelter.

I even suggested to my father that we build one in our yard, helpfully offering an original sketch of what my ideal bomb shelter might look like — the Flintstone family cave meets Jules Verne’s Nautilus submarine equipped with a storeroom full of hotdogs and Lorna Doone cookies.

My sketch even depicted the wasteland above ground ― a cindered moonscape inspired by photographs of Hiroshima I’d seen in an Associated Press photo book of the Second World War.

“How many people can fit in your bomb shelter?” the old man casually wondered.
I explained it would be a bomb shelter for four, with room for our dog.

“I see. Well, how would you feel knowing all your new buddies and schoolmates who didn’t have bomb shelters were left up top and gone?”

This was a wrinkle I hadn’t foreseen, a horrible prospect that led to pose the more essential question? Did he think there was going to be an apocalypse anytime soon?
His reply surprised me.

“Probably so. Someone is always having an apocalypse — waiting beneath a clock for a loved one to die or a baby to be born; for the fever to break or the crisis to end,” he added, pointing out that the original Greek translation for Apocalypse – as mentioned in the Bible — simply meant a revelation of something not yet known, perhaps the awakening of a new and better world.

He even had an answer to creepy Mr. Freeman’s bomb shelter.

“Rather than burying yourself in the backyard, maybe you should just grow up and help create that new and better world. Our time on this Earth is brief. The trick is to use that time wisely ― and learn what’s enough.”

It took me many years before I realized what he was telling me.

By the time my older brother and I were teenage wise guys under the influence of classic American “fumes” – i.e. gasoline and perfume – this sort of Aesopian wisdom prompted us to nickname our uncommonly upbeat old man “Opti the Mystic,” owing his unshakable good cheer and embarrassing habit of quoting long-dead philosophers and spiritual sages to our impressionable dates when they least expected it.

Decades later, when we reminisced about my bomb shelter summer, Opti and I happened to be sitting together in a crowded pub on the rainy Lancashire coast of England, sharing pints of warm beer following a rained-off round of golf. Though you wouldn’t have guessed it to look at him, my father was dying of cancer, and this was our final golf trip together, a long-talked-about odyssey to see the places where he fell in love with golf as a homesick Air Force sergeant just prior to D-Day.

Among other revelations on this trip, I’d learned that my father had been through his own versions of an apocalypse — first a tragic plane crash that killed dozens of people including children he knew in the village where he was stationed; a second one when his dream of owning his own newspaper in Mississippi went up in smoke after is silent partner cleaned out the company bank accounts and headed for parts unknown. That same week, unimaginably, my mother suffered a late-term miscarriage and my dad’s only sister died in a car wreck outside Washington, D.C.

“How does one survive a week like that?” I asked my father,

He smiled, shrugged. “I suppose it was because I’ve learned that it’s not what you get from this life that really matters — but what you give and leave behind. Whatever you give comes back to you many times over in the form of unexpected blessings.”

My father was 80 years old that rainy afternoon in western England. Not only could I suddenly appreciate why he was the perfect fellow to moderate the men’s Sunday morning discussion group at our church in Greensboro for more that two decades, but how fortunate I was to have him, if only for a precious few weeks and months.

I was 41 years old that evening, a father with two small children back home in Maine; a son already in grief over the thought of losing my life’s original mentor and hero, wishing my young ones could somehow have their own years with this wise and funny grandfather.
I must have said this out loud.

My father simply smiled and sipped his beer.

“Don’t waste time regretting what you don’t have. Every moment is a gift that can feel like eternity if you pay close attention. Focus on the now.”

And with this, he laughed. “Maybe you can put this in a book someday. In the meantime, it’s your turn to buy the beer.”

It was Vintage Opti. One year later, I did put this moment in a book.

Reading about the wealthy Silicon Valley billionaires who crave more time and “plan” to live forever, avoiding a catastrophe they fear may occur at any moment, reminded me about my Bomb Shelter summer and the calming wisdom of my funny, philosophical father.
Not for the first time – and in light of a world that always teetering on Apocalypse of one kind or another – this got me thinking about of “what’s enough?”

I jotted a few things down.

Enough for me is an old house where every creak or groan underfoot sounds like a sigh of contentment, the music of home.

Long walks around Paris are the stuff of everyday magic. I miss them. But walking the dogs with my wife around the block in the evening is even better.

The Japanese garden I’m building will probably take years to finish – though a garden can never truly be finished, anyway.

I hope to write at least four or five more books, have many more suppers with friends and see my old dog Mulligan live at least that long. This would make her 24 years old.

That’s enough for now, a gift Opti the Mystic gave me long ago.

“This is why we are in the world,” advised the Sufi mystic Bawa, one of his favorites. “Within your heart is a space smaller even than an atom. There, dear ones, God has placed 18,000 universes.”

Contact Editor Jim Dodson at Jwdauthor@gmail.com

As important members of our editorial staff, the pets of O.Henry magazine are proud to finally have their moment in the spotlight. Meet the team:

To see a garden in your dreams, filled with evergreen and flowers, according to experts on the subject, denotes great peace of mind and comfort. If you dream of walking on a well-kept lawn, you are in for an occasion of joy and prosperity. Raking and weeding suggests work still to be done, while to dream of using a lawn mower means you may soon be engaged in a tedious social function — after you finish up the lawn first, of course. To dream of seeing flowers in bloom and color signifies pleasure and gain, while dreaming of walking through a park with your lover simply means you will be happily married for a very long time.

Scraps that Speak

By Jim Dodson

 

Not long ago, I sent out an old club chair from my office to be recovered.
Some of my colleagues at the magazine were greatly amused by this act, pointing out that the town dump was a more fitting destination than a fine reupholstery shop.
For years they’d made high sport of my uncommon devotion to this old chair, you see, though probably not for no good reason.

Half its springs were shot and its cushion sagged almost to the floor in places, prompting me to lovingly nickname it “the Chair of No Return,” warning any unwary sitters of injuries that could occur from attempting to rise from it. My wiseacre Art Director, Andie Rose, insensitively took to calling it “Chairy” after Pee Wee Herman’s peculiar talking arm chair. The CNR and I were both wounded by this.
Still, how I loved that old armchair, secretly hoping the magician upholsterer might return with a new lease on life.

Crusty Mildred Horseman, after all, gave me this chair the summer before my junior year in college, my first piece of actual grown-up furniture. She lived across the street from my parents in Greensboro. Even then the old thing was something of an antique, the chair I mean to say, having belonged to her late husband Clyde from his college days in Michigan, his favorite reading chair she explained, evidenced by its original faded green leather worn by decades of service.

I carted it off to my first big job in Atlanta, where it received its first reupholstering job, a nice updated green hunter plaid like the one I’d recently seen in a sitting room of the swanky Piedmont Driving club. I thought it looked terribly sophisticated, even if I wasn’t.

Seven years later the CNR accompanied me to a new life and job in a rented U-Haul truck to a solar house by the Green River in Vermont, followed a year later to a cottage in a New Hampshire apple orchard thence to a weathered bungalow in the salt marsh of Essex, Massachusetts — and finally, to the rugged post-and-beam house my young bride and I built on a forested hilltop near the coast of Maine.

By then the CNR had seen its better days, with a seat cushion woefully sagging, soon to be relegated to my upstairs home office in the barn, safely out of view. Still, the old thing was my seat of choice, the place where I preferred to sit when I wrote essays or read books to my small children.
I thought that might be the final resting place for us both, that hilltop in Maine.
But life had other plans for both of us. A decade later, following divorce and remarriage, the old armchair came home with me to the South and wound up in my magazine office, the source of great mirth to my staff.
Still, what is it about a few old things that have a way of wrapping their vines around the human heart, invested with a deep personal meaning?
Maybe it’s the fact that their bittersweet impermanence mirrors our own, and they may outlive us in our race to the boneyard.

Artists and poets seem to understand this intuitively. Not long ago I saw a magnificent iron elk made from rusted auto parts standing beside the highway. What a thing of salvaged beauty it was, a mythic tribute to nature and General Motors. I stopped and snapped a photo, wishing I could somehow cart it home to my front lawn.
Such acts are in our national DNA. In the days before every rural family possessed a camera, handmade quilts were made from worn-out clothing and dish rags for warmth, utility and economy – effectively a way to record a family’s passage through time, scraps that speak, as my late Grandmother Taylor liked to say of her own cherished quilts. They reminded her of people she’d known in her life, how far she’d journeyed, a story behind each square of cloth. If you love it enough, said George Washington Carver, anything will speak to you.

Tony Avent, the nationally known horticultural guru and owner of Plants Delight Nursery, uses old bathroom fixtures and other household items that have outlived their usefulness as stage props along the paths of his magnificent botanical garden built in an old tobacco farm outside of Raleigh, perhaps reminding us how nature will have the last word in a throwaway consumer culture. Somehow, though, those fixtures make the garden look like an enchanted Lost World of treasures both natural and man-made.
Though I’m not much of a collector of anything save pocket lint, golf caps and old books, my home office has become a kind of accidental collection center for old things that speak to me and probably nobody else. On my desk stands a handsome Colonial blue-coat soldier, a ceramic lamp from the 1950s, exactly the one I had as a little kid but disappeared many years ago.

My late grandfather’s squirrel rifle stands over in the corner — unfired for decades — next to a shelf of old books that belonged to my late father, including a first editions of Kipling’s Phantom Rickshaw, James Hilton’s Lost Horizon and Markings by Dag Hammarsköld, three two of his favorite books. And now mine. I also have my dad’s old Wilson golf clubs and the green cap he purchased on his last trip to St. Andrews, relics only a golfing son could find priceless.

The oldest bed in our house is a handsome pineapple four-poster made from solid cherry hardwood that reportedly belonged to my great-grandmother, quite possibly the bed was born in. For a time my daughter had it in her Brooklyn apartment until a side rail split and I drove all the way to Brooklyn just to haul it home. I fully intended to find a craftsman who can repair it.

My wife cherishes several antique china cups and saucers, the only items her immigrant grandmother brought with her on the boat from Ireland a century ago. In her bathroom sits a large glass ginger jar filled with beautiful sea shells she’s collected from every beach she’s visited since girlhood, a spiritual record of her footprints in the sand.
The actual oldest object in our possession is a long farm table I gave my second wife on the occasion of our marriage. It came from England with papers certifying it to be more than 200 years old. Oh, the life that simple dented and scarred table has seen, outliving kings and empires, made smooth by unknown hands and time – including two decades of rowdy Dodson family dinners, comprising just a tenth of its life. We’re mere caretakers before its onward journey continues.

Not long ago that table accompanied us back to a rambling old house where we previously lived for six years. It’s a relic from the Gilded Age, at least a century old, with foot-thick plaster walls and ancient plumbing, windows that leak cold like a sieve and peculiar half-sized doors and back passageways meant for servants that disappeared half a century ago.

For what it’s worth, I wrote three books in an upper bedroom of this old place. The room has superb light and a powerful serenity I can feel in my bones. Moving back to it after a year away was like coming home to an old friend, a deep comfort in the wake of an unsettling year.

During the move, in an effort to begin downsizing our possessions, we made stacks of clothes for Goodwill and set aside household items we have no further need of and even went through several dusty boxes containing old kids’ toys and books, scores of dolls and once-beloved stuffed animals, broken train sets, Matchbox cars, photos and other sweet artifacts of a family all grown up, deciding to fill one large foot locker for each of our grown children to go through when they come for the holidays.
As for my old friend the Chair of No Return, it eventually returned from a talented Mexican upholsterer with new springs and a firm seat cushion and a voluptuous houndstooth fabric that had made it look fresh from the furniture showroom. My formerly amused colleagues were all a bit stunned by the transformation, eager to take a turn resting their bottoms in it.

Truthfully, they seemed a trifle put out with me for taking Chairy home to the upper bedroom where I do my best work. But I’m no fool. Time is passing quickly and a good reading chair belongs in a peaceful old room where it can do the most good.
That old chair and the table downstairs will likely outlive us all. Ditto my bride’s Irish china and her collection from the sea.
But therein lies a powerful message for those of us who choose to love a few old things in a perishable universe. Eternity resides in every moment with the people and objects we hold most dear.

Best to take notice and love them before we all have to go.

Editor’s Note: This Simple Life essay appeared in the October 2015 issue of O.Henry Magazine. Dodson’s beloved chair now reposes in his home library, where he’s trying hard to stay in place.

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Perhaps the most common feedback we get from readers and advertisers alike is how grateful they are to have award-winning O.Henry Magazine telling the remarkable stories of our community every month, exploring the art and soul of what makes Greensboro so unique and beloved.

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At this challenging moment in our national life, while we’re all sheltering at home and doing our part in quest of better days, rest assured that our talented staff of writers, editors and designers is as committed as ever to bringing you the distinctive magazine you love to read, share and hold in your hands.

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