Greenus Envious

Tips from the tried and failed

By Susan S. Kelly

So itís finally a warm weekend in spring, and you long to have something to pick, prune, pluck or even deadhead in your yard, garden, or the scorched-earth, weed-whacked plot that passes for it.  But you’re too busy or lazy to learn Latin names, and it’s embarrassing to go to the garden center and say, “I want those, you know, pink flowers that are tall,” or “ . . . that tree that looks pretty in the spring.”

Herewith, therefore, your tried-and-true primer, from someone whose personal dirt’s worth is incalculable due to all the tried-and-failed specimens I purchased, trucked in, planted, tended, and either rejoiced or mourned over. Or, alternatively, ripped out, chopped down, and consigned to the mulch pile. Because, in my yard, like professors seeking tenure, you either produce or perish.

Magnolia — Best climbing tree ever. But as a flower, forget it. The blooms are never low enough to cut, and besides, they only last a day. Leave it alone and just sniff the blooms big as plates. Come fall, your children can play army with the seedpods.

Gardenia — Only reliable if you live east of Raleigh. As for picked longevity, ditto the one-day warning above. Touch the vanilla petals and your invisible skin oils will brown them not invisibly. Heavenly aroma, though I rejected them in my wedding bouquet because the overpowering sweetness tends to provoke a gag reflex.  Still, nice in a teacup or that silver scallop shell your grandmother used as an ashtray.

Camellia —  Cannot be picked or arranged satisfactorily. For viewing only. Bonus: unlike azaleas, stay glossy green all year.

Orange daylilies — My neighbor calls them “privy lilies,” presumably because folks once planted them to beautify the outhouse. But they beat the heck out of the stubby gold hybrids planted in interstate medians. Go for it.

Queen Anne’s lace — Field and roadside freebies, but bring them inside and they proceed to shed fine white dust all over everything.

Marigolds — Often dumped upon as plebeian blooms, but for this commoner, nothing smells as good as one of their stems, broken.

Cleome — Pink, pretty, proliferous, and self-seeding. What else could you ask for in an airy weed that loves neglect, red clay, and 1,000-degree days? In late summer, take the seeds to the office, to a friend, or, for that matter, to another place in the yard. Strew with abandon.

Black-eyed Susans — As the Chatham Blanket tagline once boasted, they cover a multitude of sins. Require little effort and even less skill to stuff in a glass, metal or pottery container. Do not disparage that which can withstand full sun when you can’t. You call them invasive, I call them indispensable.

Knockout roses —  The Johnny-come-lately “it” flowering shrub. Utterly unpickable, but compensates for this shortcoming in sheer size and volume.

Peonies — The ultimate bloomer. Often disqualified for, as the farmers like to say, seasonality, but worth the wait, the space and the ants. Go ahead, gird your loins, and bring yourself to cut and enjoy them before a 20-minute thunderstorm causes irreparable loss and gnashing of teeth.

Hydrangeas — Bingo! Once upon a time, my mother referred to hydrangeas as “trash shrubs.” I love this. Or rather, I love reminding her of this now that no one can live without them.

Ivy — Just, no. You’ll be sorry. Plus, snakes like it. Use pachysandra instead.

There you have it. No more feeling humiliated by Biltmore with its perfect planters and borders and gardens featuring every floral texture and contrast and interest which nevertheless are superior to previously-envied Disney World’s planters and borders and gardens. Because Biltmore’s flowers actually grow, rather than simply get replaced by Snow White’s 426 dwarves every night.

Or, how not to waste your time or money on What Won’t Work Because We’re Not England.  OH

Susan Kelly is a blithe spirit, author of several novels, and proud new grandmother.

Behind the Music

Anne-Claire Niver travels at the speed of sound at Mitch Easter’s Fidelitorium

By Grant Britt

It’s a jungle in here. Wires and cords snake across the floor in a maze, ready to trip up interlopers or careless participants. Hulking shapes loom in the shadows, some shrouded in camouflage, others proudly displaying their steely visages. A soundtrack gradually fades in, some exotic species offering up snatches of melody. A coterie of humans slink in one at a time, moving soundlessly to the rhythms.

Local chanteuse at O.Henry Hotel’s jazz concerts Anne-Claire Niver and her band are ensconced in Mitch Easter’s Fidelitorium in Kernersville, working on their latest, album, I Still Look For You (for a sampling, visit www.youtube.com/watch?v=TsS-TtPLsEg).  Mitch Easter, owner/founder of the Drive-In Studio — which launched a number of indie-rock acts, R.E.M., Let’s Active, the Connells and Suzanne Vega in the 1980s and early ’90s — carries on  the tradition with another generation via Social Media.

“Three-hundred people donated, helped us out on Kickstarter, so everybody’s getting paid,” Niver says happily.

The studio is like a funky church with a fluid 1970s vibe that blurs at the edges, shape-shifting back and forth from past to present, a mix of technologies and trappings giving time a slippery feel. In a silent parody of the old RCA logo of a terrier with his nose in the bell of a gramophone, a huge, ancient trumpet-belled speaker sits high on a ledge next to a carved wooden peacock — or maybe it’s just a big duck with its bill in the bell. There are no clocks in evidence; time is suspended and fluid.

“Some of the stuff that’s in there is stuff that I bought when I first ever started doing this,” Easter says by phone from the road, where he’s playing guitar with Alejandro Escovedo on his A Man under The Influence tour. “Some of it is only used about once every two years. But when somebody comes in and wants to use that thing, then they use the hell out of it and really enjoy it,” he says, underscoring his  willingness to  blend past and future technology  to help musicians achieve their goals.

We have a few things you might say would be bit squeaky because of their age, but people actually enjoy that now, as compared to the sort of predictability.”

But as he is quick to point out, it’s not just the equipment that makes the sound, but how you use it. “We don’t make any grand claims about superiority or state of the art or anything like that,” Easter says. “But what we think is that it works.”

And on this morning, it seems to be working for Niver and crew, as the playback rolls on one of their new songs, “Mosquitos,” while band members stroll in and out of the control room, bobbing to the beat. Producer/bassist Alex Bingham is playing air bass and conducting to an invisible audience as Angela Davis looks on from the back wall, her puffy Afro gleaming under a purple DayGlo light.

In the control room, lava lamps minus the lava flank a neon blue leather couch facing a mixing console that looks like the flight deck of the starship Enterprise. A ceramic Balinese dog with bundles of patch cords hanging from its open jaws guards one corner of the control room while Mabel, producer/bassist Bingham’s real-life dog, growls at anyone who dares cross the threshold.

From the outside, Fidelitorium certainly doesn’t look like a recording studio. A steel fence and a stand of bamboo help shield it from curious onlookers. The entrance to the long, winding driveway is flanked by gnarled wooden sentinels so grooved with vine scars and decades of hard living they look more like sculptures than living trees. It looks like concrete block, but more upscale, like something Frank Lloyd Wright might have envisioned.

The guiding force behind the design, Chapel Hill–based Studio designer Wes Lachot, is a Wright devotee, using some of architect’s design concepts blended with current sound innovations in building materials. Instead of concrete blocks, he implemented DiffusorBlox, concrete masonry blocks built for sound isolation. Wavy on one side, they stretch to the ceiling on the rear control room wall and side walls of the main live room. It’s a very warm-sounding space, the remaining area swathed in blonde birch.

It creates a womblike environment for Niver, ensconced in an isolation booth blocked off from the control room window with  several screens including an Asian panel screen. “Alex did it,” Niver says, “covered up the window so it wouldn’t psych me out.” It’s not that unusual for performers. Jimi Hendrix was also reportedly skittish about prying control room eyes and had access blocked, as well.

Having produced records for so many artists over the years, Easter understands the importance of a workspace conducive to the creative process. “Home office, work from your bedroom — that can be good, it can also sort of not work. It’s also important to get up in the morning, put on a coat and go somewhere. Then you’ll actually be in the right frame of mind to work,” he says.

Today, the band is working on overdubs for “Behind Me,” the last song Niver wrote for her yet-untitled second studio album. Niver is fist-pumping on the chorus, puttering softly with low key scat outbursts before sliding back into the upper register. The melody is shot through with flecks of soul, an upbeat chronicle of recovery from the loss of a loved one, her grandmother, Willa Bullock. “I don’t fight so hard/as I did/I don’t cry quite as much/ Like I did. . ./ I stand alone my doubts behind me,” she sings softly, but with a  steely resolve.

Inside the isolation/vocal booth, Niver has erected a small shrine. Atop a small black Roland amp, a candle flickers between two small framed pictures propped up against  the wall. One picture is of grandmother Bullock, who passed away about a year and half ago. (A single, “Willa,” from the new album, is about her grandmother, as well a couple of songs about that loss.  “She was very musical, always singing in the house,” Niver says.) The second photo is a postcard of Beethoven’s birthplace in Bonn, Germany. “I was in my second-grade classroom, we were having some sort of free time, and my teacher had the classical station on. I was playing and listening to the classical station and I turned to my teacher and I said, ‘This is Beethoven, by the way,’” Niver recalls. She was already familiar with the longhairs because her grandparents listened to Raleigh classic radio station WCPE. Ever since her second-grade music teacher sent it, the postcard has been a constant companion. “It’s traveled all over the world, been to Thailand and back.”

Niver and her band — lead guitarist Ryan Johnson, rhythm guitarist David Dollar, keyboardist Charles Cleaver, drummer Daniel Faust and bassist/producer Bingham — are leasing the studio for a week, then tinkering with the mix before and afterwards at their home studio in Durham, mirroring a trend among working musicians that Easter is willing to accommodate. “Some people that have worked in our place did record in their house and realized that it just didn’t suit them,” the producer notes. So he’s established another perk: providing a separate guesthouse for the bands to use. “I always loved the English residential studios,” he says. “England has always had the theme of studios in the same spirit of people liking to go to a dedicated place for work, to be at a compound or retreat. Even though we’re not in the Tuscan countryside, it still functions like that, and a lot of people just like to be on the premises. Also nobody’s got any money anymore, so that makes the whole thing more affordable. We don’t charge anything extra for the house.”

Easter’s low-key approach seems incongruous with the studio’s hifalutin name, a tongue-in-cheek throwback to some pretentious overachievers’ clumsy studio names of yore. “I think it was due to the owners’ total lack of knowledge of Latin, like audio phonics, which is like naming your studio ‘sound sound,’” Easter muses. Appreciating the gravitas of Latin as well as bland studio names “like Sound Recording Service,” Easter came up with the idea of using faux Latin, hence the name, Fidelitorium, an amalgam of the Latin root for “fidelity,” as in “high fidelity” and the tail end of “auditorium.” “[It] was like calling it Studio, a word for studio, so studio is for recording, so the name of the place is studio recording. Which is as generic as I could think of. Then I thought, I’ll make it Latin, because, why not?” Classical scholars may note that Easter’s  fractured Latin does not translate perfectly, but musicians  understand that while he may joke about the name, the studio is serious business.

Whatever you call it, for Niver and her band as well as scores of local regional and national artists, the Fidelitorium is the place to put the polish on your sound or build it from the ground up.

“Our place is really practical,” Easter affirms. “It’s not meant to be cute or anything. Some people think the old equipment is kind of kitsch whimsy, but it’s really not, it’s part of what you use to make recordings these days, along with some more predictable and modern things. That’s what we try to do, we try to just have stuff that will truly help people make their records.”  OH

From his home studio across from the graveyard, Grant Britt  makes sounds only dogs can hear, a rare courtesy for which his neighbors are eternally grateful.

Say What?

How to talk your 87-year-old uncle through opening a text message, in 44 simple steps

By Jane Borden

Only when I embarked on this endeavor — over the phone and without visual aids — did I realize how many aspects of smartphone design I take for granted. 

“Tap the icon that’s green and has a little speech bubble on it, like in the comics,” I said, convinced I was nailing it.

“What do you mean, icon?” he replied.

“Like a button,” I said. “Do you see a bunch of buttons all over the screen?“

“There’s one button,” he said. 

“Hmm. What color is it?“ I asked. 

“Black. Hold on. I pushed it, and a red bar appeared at the bottom of the screen.”

“I see,” I responded. “You haven’t opened the phone yet.”

This was the summer of 2015, after my daughter was born. I live on the other side of the country and wanted to send photos quickly and easily to my aunt and uncle, Jane and Lucius Pullen. He had an iPhone — for the same reason my father does, i.e. his wife told him he needed one — so I began texting him pictures. 

He called to say that a tiny image of a baby had appeared on the screen, but when he tried to open it on the phone, it disappeared. 

“It’s in your text messages,” I said. 

“All right,” he said. “What are those?”

I realized we’d need to start from scratch. But I figured it wouldn’t take long. After all, he’s a brilliant and accomplished man. Just a few years after graduating with honors from law school at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he was on the law review, Lucius became assistant attorney general for the state of North Carolina. In the 1950s, he wrote safety provisions for the motor vehicles department, including the law that made wearing seatbelts mandatory in our state. So I knew he could learn to text, and also that he would never do so while driving.

Anyway, he already had an email account! He wasn’t a total Luddite. Then again, when my aunt once requested to read an article of mine that only appeared online, and I sent the link to his email account, she called to explain that there must have been a mistake: “You wrote, ‘Here it is,’ but I don’t see it. There’s just a long, string of letters and numbers.” 

“Are they blue?” I asked. 

“Yes!!!”

That was Jane, though. Lucius definitely knew what a link was. In fact, he is familiar with a variety of long and seemingly random collections of numbers, letters and codes — he wrote tax laws for Governor Luther Hodges and for Terry Sanford. But no man is master of all.

Once the phone was on and open, I asked again. “Do you see a green icon with a speech bubble on it?”  

“Yes.”

“Great! Touch it.” 

“OK,” he said. “The page got darker.” 

“Darker? It should be white. And you should see my telephone number in black characters.” 

Long story short, he had tapped with enough force to swipe the entire screen to the right, bringing up the phone’s search function. Since neither of us could see what the other was doing, it took us several minutes to figure it out.

“When you tap the icon, don’t move your finger,” I said next. 

“All right.”

After a moment of silence, I asked, “Did it work? Do you see my telephone number?”

“I’m still on the main screen,” he said. “The icons are dancing around.”

After momentarily assuming he’d lost his mind — or that I had — I put it together. “Ah, I see, that’s what happens when you leave your finger on the icon for too long. Push the home button to make it stop.” 

“What’s the home button?” he asked.

Right. Of course. I’m speaking a new language. “The button you used to turn it on when we started.” 

And then the screen went black again because he pushed the power button at the top of the phone, which turned it off. That one was my fault — there are two ways to turn on an iPhone. We were like Abbott and Costello, but both playing Costello. 

Lucius remained in good spirits throughout. According to Arch T. Allen, who worked with Lucius during the ’70s, when Lucius was a partner at Allen, Steed & Pullen (along with Arch’s father), “He was an excellent lawyer, no question about that. But he was also really fun to work with. Gregarious. Good sense of humor.” Frankly, if I were an expert on insurance regulatory matters and insurance rate making, I would also find a sense of humor helpful. 

After the power-button setback, we defined some terms, including “home button.” I explained that it lives at the bottom of the screen and is different from the icons in that it actually compresses when pushed. We started using the home button to fix every mistake. The next time he swiped instead of tapped, or made the icons dance: push the home button. It became a safe space for us. 

No surprise, he was a quick study. Later, he said “Uh oh.” 

“What?” I asked nervously.

“Well, never mind,“ he replied.

“What happened?“

“I don’t know, but I pushed the home button and it’s gone,“ he explained.

Progress! He is a man able to exercise judgment on the fly. When my aunt Jane arrived an hour and a day late for a secretarial position at Allen, Steed & Pullen, he made the astute decision to date her instead of hire her. 

I believed we would eventually win. Lucius is a winner — or at least he was when he represented the North Carolina Firemen’s Association in a case that went all the way to the state supreme court. He could learn to open a text message. It had been 22 minutes so far.

“All right,” I said. “You want to touch the green-speech-bubble icon lightly and only once.“ 

“Ho!” he shouted in triumph. “Look at that. There’s your phone number.”

“Great! Now tap that.”

I held my breath until he exclaimed, “Look at that! I see a picture of a beautiful baby girl.” 

“Hooray!” I said. “Now, touch the picture and it will get bigger.” 

Then, to my aunt, he said, “Jane, com’ere! Have I got something for you.” He had been providing for her handsomely throughout their marriage. Hell, he provided for half of Beaufort County when he helped bring the phosphate mine to Aurora in the late ’80s, while he was general counsel for, and a vice president of, Texasgulf Inc. 

I listened to them ooh and ahh, feeling my own sense of triumph. Then he said, “But isn’t there a way to see them bigger?”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“We could barely see her,” he said. 

They had raved over thumbnails. I again explained how to enlarge the photo. 

“All right,” he said. But then he added, “I’ve pushed the home button.”

We decided to try again another time. Even the sun grows tired of day. 

He had better things to do and he knew I did too. Lucius is also an expert at clearing people’s plates, as witnessed by his last career move into arbitration and mediation, during which he was so successful at settling cases before trial, 70 percent of them never burdened the courts. 

Mediator and litigator, yes — but I think of Lucius as a delegator. When I gained the strength to call back and again talk him through opening the photos, he said that wouldn’t be necessary because he had taken the phone to Walgreens, handed it to a woman, and asked her to find the photos and print them. It was a different kind of winning. To wit, Lucius has now made it to 90. That iPhone didn’t make it another six months.  OH

Jane Borden grew up in Greensboro and lives in Los Angeles, but you can find her on www.janeborden.com provided you’re not a Luddite.

Mysteries of the Swamp

A supernatural risk for John Hart

By D.G. Martin

John Hart, who grew up in Salisbury, is the author of five New York Times best-sellers, The King of Lies (2006), Down River (2007), The Last Child (2009), Iron House (2011) and Redemption Road (2016).

Both The King of Lies and Down River won Edgar Awards, making Hart the only author to win this prestigious award for consecutive novels. He has a bag full of other honors, including the Barry Award, the Southern Independent Bookseller’s Award for Fiction, the Ian Fleming Steel Dagger Award, the Southern Book Prize, and the North Carolina Award for Literature.

Hart declares his favorite of all these successes is the The Last Child. So it should come as no surprise that his latest, The Hush, is a sequel to that book.

Readers of The Last Child met Johnny Merriman as a 13-year-old, followed his search for his missing sister and his traumatic childhood, and came to know his troubled friend Jack. In The Hush, as Hart explained to me recently, Johnny “is living alone in the wilds of this swampy area called the Hush, which is an abbreviation for Hush Arbor, an area of 6,000 acres of rough, mostly swampland. Johnny is the owner. It is the remnant of a 40,000-acre tract that his family owned in the 1800s.

“He is withdrawn from society and lives in the swamp, by himself. His only connection to humanity really is his buddy Jack, from The Last Child. Jack is now a young attorney in town in his first week in practice when the book opens. It’s what he’s always wanted to do, to take control of his tumultuous life and get that kind of logic and reason, wrap his hands around that and live by those standards.

“But it becomes very difficult for him because the more time he spends with Johnny in the Hush, the more he begins to fear that things are not as they should be. There are mysterious things afoot in the swamp, terrifying things, dangerous things that Johnny is unwilling to talk about.

“Jack pushes, Johnny is recalcitrant, so part of the tension in the story is what grows between these two best friends as Johnny clearly is guarding some sort of secret that terrifies his best friend, and he flat out refuses to discuss it. That’s a big part of the book, what’s going on in the Hush.”

Hart introduces existence of the supernatural powers in the Hush gently. After a terrible fall from a rocky cliff on the property, Johnny is cut, bruised and bloody. Back in town for a quick visit, Johnny allows his stepfather, Clyde, to bind up these serious wounds, and then hurries to leave and go back to the Hush.

Clyde says, “You want to go, I know. I can see that, too. It’s always Hush Arbor, always the land. Just tell me one thing before you leave. Help me understand. Why do you love it so much?”

Hart writes, “He meant the silence and the swamp, the lonely hills and endless trees. On the surface it was a simple question, but Johnny’s past had branded him in a way few could ignore: the things he’d believed and leaned upon, the way he’d searched so long for his sister. If Johnny spoke now, of magic, they’d think him confused or insane or trapped, somehow, in the delusions of a difficult past. Without living it, no one could grasp the truth of Hush Arbor. Johnny wouldn’t want them to if they could.”

But some part of that magic is revealed to Jack when he visits Johnny in the Hush a few days later. Although Clyde had described Johnny’s horrible wounds, they were not apparent to Jack. Johnny “was shirtless and still and flawless. There wasn’t a mark on him.”

The reader who might have expected the usual John Hart thriller is on alert. Magic and the supernatural are going to play a big role in this saga.

Unraveling and understanding the source and the reasons for this magical power on the land provide the spine on which Hart builds this book.

But as the book begins, Johnny faces another serious challenge, a non-magical one. His title to his land is being challenged by a member of an African-American family who lived on the land for many years and whose claim is based on a deed from 1853. Johnny’s legal claim is sound, but he used all his money to pay prior legal fees. Now, although he owns thousands of acres of land, cash-wise he is broke. So he wants his friend, the brand-new attorney Jack, to represent him.

He tries to persuade Jack to fight his legal battles. But Jack’s law firm forbids him from taking on Johnny as a client. Instead, the firm hopes to represent a wealthy out-of-town money manager and hunter who wants to force Johnny to sell his land, or failing that, find another way to acquire it. Why? The hunting in and near the Hush is dangerous, exciting, and promises the possibility of extraordinary game. When that man is mysteriously killed while hunting in the Hush, Johnny becomes a prime murder suspect. Meanwhile, some members of the African-American family that lived on the land show magical powers, especially while they are in the Hush. Traumatic events in 1853 involving Johnny’s slave-owning ancestors and those of the African-American enslaved family still cause trouble on the land.

Hart’s imaginative resolution of these troubles brings the book to a powerful and violent conclusion.

But there is a risk here for Hart. His prior books have, with only one minor exception, held to the standard rules for thriller writers. Those rules call for the mysteries to be solved without the aid of magic or the supernatural.

Hart is betting that the richness of his characters, his compelling storytelling, and the story’s supernatural landscape will hold his thriller fans despite breaking his old rules. Taking this risk, he hopes, will expand his appeal and share his storytelling talent with an even wider audience.

Taking risks, even those with high stakes, is not a new activity for Hart.

In fact, he seems to thrive on risk. For instance, he gave up his job as a stockbroker about 15 years ago to complete his first novel. That risk-taking paid off when The King of Lies became a best-seller in 2006.

Then Hart, after a string of three more successful books, risked upsetting his working routine by moving with his wife and two young children from Greensboro to Charlottesville, Virginia. Although the move disrupted his writing program for several years, it finally led to Redemption Road, which became a critical and commercial success. His completion of  The Hush shows that Hart is fully back on his game.

Now, will the risk of making the supernatural an integral part of his work pay off for him?

Nothing is for sure.

However, the complex and rich stories in The Hush and the book’s supernatural but satisfying conclusion suggest that he is again on the right track.  OH

D.G. Martin hosts North Carolina Bookwatch, which airs Sundays at noon and Thursdays at 5 p.m. on UNC-TV.

Ask Garden Guru

Advice stinks — but only when unsolicited

By Jim Dodson

Spring is here. Garden Guru will now take your important gardening questions.

Dear Garden Guru,

I’m new to gardening this year and eager to learn all I can in a hurry. What would you suggest as a starting point? A bit worryingly, I hear hobby gardening can be kind of expensive. Is that true?

Signed,

A Frugal Beginner from Biscoe

Dear Frugal,

Like keeping a mistress or owning a vintage British sports car, gardening is not for the faint of heart or weak of wallet. The proper handcrafted English tools, the glamorous plant seminars, the costly trips abroad simply to study the Great Gardens of the World — well, it all adds up so quickly. Pretty soon you’ll be dropping the mortgage money on rare fruit trees at the garden center, hopelessly addicted to spring catalogs (a somewhat philistine friend refers to these as “porn for gardeners”) or blowing through the kids’ college fund to turn your backyard into a Southern Gardens of Versailles. GG suggests you start small to determine if your interest is genuine or just a passing fancy, maybe with an inoffensive African violet in your kitchen window?

Dear Garden Guru,

A few years ago, following a dream golf vacation to New Zealand, my hubby Ralph and I met an intriguing couple, who shared their love of golf and gardening. Ralph fell hard for the concept of “natural gardening” they practiced and, in a nutshell, has taken it up with gusto. The guiding tenet of the NG movement, as I understand it, is for proponents to become “one with nature.” In his effort to get “closer to the source,” as Ralph puts it, he has quit playing golf with his buddies, refers to himself as “The Green Man,” and has taken to gardening fully in the nude save for a ratty old golf cap he wears on rainy days. We’re both grandparents in our mid 60s and happen to reside in a classy, gated golf community where everyone is beginning to avoid us at parties. This is so embarrassing. My golf handicap is in tatters. Any suggestions?

Signed,

Worried (and still fully clothed) Wilma in Wilmington

Dear Worried Wilma,

Ralph’s unnatural attraction to the natural world simply reflects the addictive dangers of gardening. Clearly he’s gone “native” on you. Have you considered divorcing him and marrying one of his golf buddies? It could make dinner at the club so much nicer.

Dear Garden Guru,

My wife Brenda is an award-winning flower gardener. I’m a serious vegetable grower who has won numerous ribbons at our county fair. Every March we have the same argument over space allocation in the raised beds of our rather smallish condominium terrace. Her zinnias are always encroaching on my heirloom snap beans, and don’t get me started on the times she’s heartlessly flattened my tender artisan squash plants trying to prune her Sugar Moon hybrid teas. A reproachful war of silence has developed between us. We rarely speak between my first decent tomato crop and her final lace cap hydrangea bloom in late summer. Is this any way to grow a garden or keep a marriage?

A Brooding Veggie Dude in Durham

Dear Veggie Dude,

Botanically speaking, you’re a classic mixed marriage, a tale as old as Adam and Eve and their famous domestic squabble over the proper use of fig leaves. (Are they good in a stew or simply wearable?) Have you pondered getting a larger terrace or, even better, finding separate garden plots in adjoining counties? You might try moseying down to Pittsboro to find a patch where your Tuscan zucchini can roam free and easy. The happiest gardening couples, Garden Guru finds, are those who insist on separate bathrooms and growing spaces where cosmos and cucumbers never meet.

Dear Garden Guru,

I recently accompanied my son’s fourth grade class on a field trip to the White House and was pleased to see gorgeous camellias blooming in the East Room — until, to my horror, I discovered they were completely FAKE! A week or so later, I attended my great aunt Sissy’s funeral in Burgaw only to discover that the lovely spray of Easter lilies adorning her coffin were — you guessed it — FAKE! Honestly, how do you feel about FAKE flowers at important public events? I feel like our president and the dearly departed deserve SO much better than FAKE flowers!!! Don’t you agree?

Signed,

Still Fuming in Fountain

Dear Fuming,

Sadly, we live in an age where many things are FAKE — news from the internet, bridges to nowhere and half the hairpieces in Congress. For all I know yours could be a FAKE letter, too. But assuming it isn’t, Dear Lady, one suspects neither your grade-schooler nor your expired great auntie gives a FAKE fig about the flowers in the East Room or silk lilies on her goodbye box. By the way, gardening is all about “faking” out Mother Nature — bending her wilder inclinations to your domestic desires. As a rule, a little fakery never hurts unless elected to Congress or performing a Super Bowl halftime show.

Dear Garden Guru,

Why do I keep managing to kill every fragile Bonsai plant I ever buy? I water them religiously every morning. Any interesting thoughts?

Signed,

Herbicidal in Ahoskie

Dear Herbicidal,

GG has lots of interesting thoughts. But none he would care to share with you. Two possibilities occur, however. A) Always read up on proper maintenance, for every Bonsai plant has unique characteristics and needs, and/or B) You’re indeed an herbicidal maniac who has no business gardening.

Dear Garden Guru,

Remember the lady who found the face of Jesus in a taco and so went on TV? Well, my husband Bobby Ray has an incredible gardening talent. He grows fruit and leafy greens that look amazingly like all kinds of famous Americans! I can show you a Vidalia onion, for instance, that looks uncannily like the late Yul Brynner, and a head of curly endive that could be little Shirley Temple’s twin sister! (See enclosed Polaroids.) My question is, given America’s dual love of gardening and celebrities, do you think there might be a profitable business in growing celebrity look-alike fruit and veggies? I phoned up America’s Got Talent but they thought I might be some garden-variety crackpot. Whom should I contact next?

Signed, Betty from Browns Summit

P.S. Bobby Ray won’t reveal his growing secret but I think it may have something to do with the load of rhino poo he obtained from the state zoo last year. Also, I am not a crackpot!

Dear Betty,

Gardening is full of great surprises. A few years back, I grew a dozen Yukon Gold potatoes that looked uncannily like the Founding Fathers. They were a big hit at our cookout on Independence Day. The truth is, celebrity fruit and vegetables are far more commonplace than you might think. Just the other day at Harris Teeter I saw a head of organic cauliflower that was a dead ringer for Justin Timberlake. That being said, there’s also rumor that HGTV plans to replace decamped rehab goddess Joanna Gaines with a new show on — wait for it — celebrity fruits and veggies! So they may have some interest in Bobby Ray’s talents. Failing that, the Garden Guru thinks a much surer bet is his secret rhino poo. Any chance I can get a load of that for my spring garden?  OH

Contact Editor Jim Dodson at jim@thepilot.com.

A Moveable Feast

From crispy duck to carne asada tacos, Greensboro’s cuisine has gone global

By Billy Eye

“Going to a restaurant is one of my keenest pleasures. Meeting someplace with old and new friends, ordering wine, eating food, surrounded by strangers, I think is the core of what it means to live a civilized life.” — Adam Gopnik

My 35-year long search for Crispy Duck has ended!

In the early 1980s, I regularly dined at a Chinese restaurant on Lankershim Boulevard in North Hollywood where, on a whim, I ordered something called crispy fried duck. I found myself going back for it time and again, it became my culinary crush. Well, more like an unrequited love. After that eatery closed, I never again saw crispy duck on any menu.

Brined duck cutlets bathed in sesame and cilantro, roasted so most of the fat is burned off, was first served in London just a few years before I tasted it. Crispy duck is somewhat similar to Peking duck but there’s no sauce and it’s a more time-consuming recipe that results in a very distinctive smoky taste. The fare we come to expect at a typical Asian buffet is Chinese in name only, much too sweet for beautiful downtown Hong Kong. Just recently, restaurants have been popping up in China offering General Tso’s chicken, sweet-and-sour pork and the like, and they’re quite the novelty.

I’m pleased to note that Greensboro is now home to an authentic Chinese restaurant, Captain Chen’s Gourmet China on Battleground in the Brassfield Shopping Center (remember that place?) under a sign reading “Go China.” On the Friday night my friends and I wandered into this unlikely destination, it was packed with young sophisticates, and I’m pretty sure we were the only folks speaking English. The décor was essentially nonexistent, and to handle the crowd overflow, we were seated at a collapsible plastic table, but the aroma alone suggested we were in for a rare treat  . . . and we were.

So much to sample, from exotic to simple — pork intestines stir-fried with red chili peppers; fish in black bean sauce and onion oil; sliced pork ears in red chili oil; cumin stir-fried beef with onion and green peppers; shredded pork in home-style garlic sauce. When a ten-top  behind us finished eating, I found myself gazing longingly at their leftovers. Every dish that passed us by looked smashingly delicious.

In addition there are numerous noodle dishes, soups and . . . that elusive crispy fried duck, tasting just as I remembered it from more than 35 years ago, if a bit more charred. The stir-fried spicy vermicelli with minced pork was wonderful as well; piled high, light, savory, with a tangy afterglow and just the right amount of heat.

This was a very enjoyable dinner out, the wait staff was friendly and, as is traditional, chefs could be seen dining in an adjacent room. You may want to give Captain Chen’s a try for lunch or on a weekday night when, presumably, it won’t be so crowded, but I rather enjoyed the energy in the room on a weekend evening, the result of everyone enjoying their meals as much as we were.

***

Speakin’ of eatin,’ I’ve been feasting on the tacos at El Mercadito for almost two decades now, since even back when they were located across the street from what is now Hops Burger Bar. In the 1990s, it was the only place in the city for authentic Mexican. Situated nowadays near the corner of Spring Garden and West Market, until around five years ago you had to be able to speak enough Spanish to place an order. No problemo for a Continental guy like myself (¡Hola, Señora Lupo, mi maestra de Español en la biblioteca!).

Everything on the menu is so freshly prepared. I love their carne asada tacos, finely chopped steak right off the grill, topped with shredded onion and cilantro, crumbled cheese and an avocado slice. The tortillas are made in-house; it’s obvious why most of the city’s finest restaurateurs get their taco shells from El Mercadito.

Steak, chicken and pork are being grilled constantly, all butchered inside the extensive meat market on site. Rolls for their exquisite sandwiches are baked every morning on the premises, the torta Cubana with chorizo, ham, chicken, jalapenos and queso comes highly recommended. I glanced over at a steak torta with grilled red and green peppers that looked heavenly. (What is this sudden bout of food envy?!?) Seating is limited, arrive early or late for lunch if you want to dine in.

Rows and rows of delectable pastries and vibrantly colorful cookies await you in the bakery portion of the market, sure to impress party guests if you’re entertaining this month.

***

Greensboro Beautiful is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year with a number of exciting events. For instance, on April 29th, they’ll be Groovin’ in the Garden, a family-friendly event taking place at the spectacular Gateway Gardens at the corner of East Gate City Boulevard and Florida Street. It’s an opportunity to enjoy a Sunday afternoon of music on two stages, food trucks, an instrument “petting zoo” and lawn games. Loads of fun and relaxation amongst the sumptuous variety of plant life you’ll discover there. Greensboro Beautiful’s Mebane Ham is excited that “Groovin’ in the Garden’ is changing the beat this year.  “We’ve decided to go with a Latin Groove!” she enthuses. “Joining us will be West End Mambo, with salsa dancing.  We’ll have the usual Garden Quest, wonderful food vendors and lots of great music.” See you there!

***

Billy Baites took to the podium in the back of Scuppernong Books recently, reading his hilarious short story published in the prestigious Catamaran Literary Reader. Taken from a harrowing childhood experience, it’s a Southern-fried tale that would have made a great sketch on The Carol Burnett Show if it hadn’t happened in real life.

***

If I gave anyone the wrong impression last month that Higgins Bicycle Shop had gone out of business, please forgive. I only wished to point out that they, like Tex & Shirley’s, will no longer be operating out of their longtime digs. In the case of Higgins, while they vacated the showroom, Mary Higgins Lawing points out, “We have just moved into the connecting building on 2418 Battleground. We are still in business going strong, selling used bikes/vintage and still offering our $30 Tune-Up special.”  OH

For someone who enjoys eating as much as he does, it’s odd that Billy Eye still weighs the same as he did in high school.

Auto-Filled

Rolling with Humanity in the Age of Apps

By Maria Johnson

It’s cold, dark and rainy when we land in New York. An airport bus trundles us to a distant lot where ride-sharing cars pass through a one-way chute looking for the travelers who’ve hailed them with cell phone apps.

We’ve missed one car already; the driver got there before we did and picked up another rider. Shivering, we tap the Uber icon again as we huddle under a temporary covered walkway, all galvanized pipe and logo-plastered vinyl.

Tonya will be driving a dark Honda. We watch her oval blue dot creep across a map of the surrounding streets. We hang on the dot as she inches closer and — wait, what? — the dot is backing up.

Tonya, don’t do it! You can’t back up in this traffic! Have you lost your mind? Where are you going?

The dot stops. For a long time. Is she broken down? Did she get a better offer?

We’re sorry, Tonya! We love you, Tonya!

The dot moves again. Cue Twilight Zone music. Dee-dee-dee-dee, dee-dee-dee-dee. The blue oval turns, by jerky degrees, onto a side street. Ah-ha! She knows a short cut. Smart girl.

We relax as it creeps closer.

All right, Tahnnnn-ya!

The blue dot is on top of us. We raise our gazes to look for the car. The app says we’re pooling with someone named Trey. More riders make for a cheaper ride, right?

An athletic young guy sprints for the Honda at the same time we do.

The trunk pops open. He throws in his duffel. We telescope down the handles of our carry-ons and heave them in.

You Trey?

Yeah.

Nice to see you.

You, too.

We settle into the Honda. Tonya’s playing her music. Rappy, soulful, feminine. She turns it down a little. Conversation kindles slowly, then catches. Trey’s from Dallas, but he’s not a Mavs fan. He’s a Pistons fella from way back.

We like the Cavs, we say.

Ah, LeBron, says Trey.

Yep.

What brings you to New York? he says.

Visiting our son. You?

I live here, but I travel a lot.

What do you do?

Recycle precious metals. From teeth crowns. We collect them from dental offices.

Get out of here. Seriously? Like gold and silver?

Yeah, it’s big money. Sometimes people in the offices keep the crowns. One place, they waited until the dentist was away, then they had a big party.

You’re lying.

He laughs. No, I swear.

Tonya turns down a narrow street, slows. It’s Trey’s destination, but it’s obviously not his home. We look for 19. No one sees 19. It’s dark. We roll down the Honda’s water-beaded windows. There’s 23. It’s the only visible number on the short block. The buildings are plain. Not residential, at least to my where’s-the-front-porch way of thinking. Trey seems unsure of what he’s looking for. That’s OK, he says. I’ll get out here. He thanks Tonya, hops out, fetches his bag, slams the trunk lid.

Tonya drives on.

The car is silent until I speak. OK, I’ll say it. That was weird. Tonya arches her brows, squelches a smile. She sees a lot, but she doesn’t say a lot. She’s putting herself through nursing school. Wants to be an RN.

We pick up another rider, a young woman dressed for a night out. She doesn’t go far. At least we can find the address. We’ve been with Tonya for a good 40 minutes. Revised thought on pool cars: The fare won’t be cheaper if you ride around for an hour, picking up and dropping off.

At least Tonya will make decent money. She’s in school, and her car won’t last much longer. The engine rattles like an old sewing machine. I see concern skip across my husband’s face every time she accelerates.

I know this makes me a real mom, I say, but I worry about the safety of women drivers. Have you ever had a problem?

Only with a woman, Tonya says. We laugh. Normally, she doesn’t drive late, when the drunks are out, but that one time, it was fairly early and the lady was smashed. When they got to the destination, the lady said it was the wrong place, but she didn’t have another address. She cursed Tonya.

If the lady had been sober, and it had been daylight, Tonya would have kicked her out of the car. But it was neither of those things.

So Tonya kept driving, talking, giving up other riders, waiting for the fog of alcohol to lift. I don’t think I could have done it, she says, without my nurse’s training, dealing with people not in their right minds. I couldn’t put her out. She said some bad stuff. But no way could I put her out.

Here we are.

Good luck with school, I say. Take care of yourself.

You, too, she says.

We step into the chill. The air is a sea of vertical dashes. It’s hard to see, but all around us water clings to water, the source of life, and tiny pools glisten in the dark.

We watch the little blue dot pull away.  OH

Maria Johnson can be reached at ohenrymaria@gmail.com

Breaking Bad

It’s Aries’ time to shine . . . and go their own way

By Astrid Stellanova

Star Children, don’t expect a description of the first sign in the horoscope. Aries folks kick over the traces, when anyone dares apply adjectives to them. Lady Gaga. Leonardo da Vinci. Maya Angelou. All Aries, and all tending to have the kind of force field that others notice. Aries don’t take kindly to boredom, following the pack or tradition. They do take kindly to impulse, hacking a trail straight into the thicket and breaking norms right over your head if they have to, all in the name of the Aries fierce individuality. Diamonds, daisies and sweet peas are hallmarks of Aries, which sounds nice, right? Well, diamonds are the hardest substance on Earth — from the Greek word for “unbreakable” — just right for this fire sign. Ad Astra — Astrid

Aries (March 21–April 19)

Nobody would believe it, Ram. But your birthday most always knocks you sideways. What’s in a little ole number, Sugar? You can’t accept your age because you: Don’t feel it, look it and sure don’t act it. However, here you are — and that birth certificate don’t lie. As an actual fact, embracing that scary new number is the first step towards discovering that it may be your luckiest one. Honey, do remember that you are the lucky one until your number is, well, up? (And when did you ever care what somebody else thought, anyhoo?)

Taurus (April 20–May 20)

You, being an unusually mellow and chill Taurus this month, have everybody thrown for a little ole loop. Your newfound self-restraint is about as unexpected as a fainting goat at the petting zoo. Call it age. Call it wisdom. Call it about time. Your friends and family are cheering you on and loving it.

Gemini (May 21–June 20)

The heart wants what it wants. And then, well, snap, it doesn’t. You set out to get what you thought you wanted, made sure you got it, then threw it out the window of a moving car. Now you are going back and forth down that lonesome road hoping to find it and retrieve it. Sugar, it is too late for that, but you’re not too old to learn from it.

Cancer (June 21–July 22)

You remind me of that tea towel that reads: “Loose women tightened up here.” You’ve found a whole new sense of humor, new ways to enjoy yourself and break free, and the road to more discovery is straight ahead. Don’t listen to your critics. If they insist you get tight, do it with a cocktail.

Leo (July 23–August 22)

Some people are like poison ivy, flourishing on shade. That’s the problem with one of your closest confidants. Resist the urge to overshare. As irresistible as the gossip is, it is also toxic and some of that poison will spill onto you if you don’t watch it.

Virgo (August 23–September 22)

Trying to be all things to all people is like trying to teach sex education and driver’s education in the same car! That’s a lot like what you’ve been doing lately — straddling two very different goals and managing neither one. What is your true intention? What do you really want, Honey?

Libra (September 23–October 22)

A recent family fracas left you smarting from a little rope-a-dope. Shake it off, Sugar. Then get yourself a new attitude and close your lips. There is nothing you can say that will make things resolve, and it is not your destiny to leave every family feud with rope burns. It will play out and you can make an exit.

Scorpio (October 23–November 21)

You’re a secret intellectual. You like crossword puzzles and mind games. So, what are you doing joining a book club that only reads beer labels? Why are you hiding yourself when you are smarter than you want to admit? Fess up and step up.

Sagittarius (November 22–December 21)

You didn’t just shoot yourself in the foot. You speared yourself. Lucky for you, this is not a fatal wound. In the future, you will laugh about the way you bumbled your way into a storm of epic proportions, but Honey, right now what you need most is a bandage.

Capricorn (December 22–January 19)

If the good guys really did wear white hats and sit tall in the saddle, life would be easier on all of us. But life ain’t a Western. And, frankly, you have a little secret of your own. If you could unburden yourself and make amends, you might stop picking fights with the bad guys.

Aquarius (January 20–February 18)

Three times. That’s how often an opportunity is going to knock. After that, it may be a dry spell. Opening the door won’t be all that scary, Honey Bun. But letting a good opportunity walk away might be a thing to regret.

Pisces (February 19–March 20)

In the shoulda-coulda-woulda competition, you took first prize. Now try walking the path moving forward, instead of walking it backward. If we got it right the first time, we would all graduate from the big school of life. But nobody does. Second-guessing is not a goal to pursue.  OH

For years, Astrid Stellanova owned and operated Curl Up and Dye Beauty Salon in the boondocks of North Carolina until arthritic fingers and her popular astrological readings provoked a new career path.