Georgia on Our Minds

The Madcap Cottage gents scamper off to Savannah

 

By Jason Oliver Nixon

I hadn’t been to Savannah in years, and John had never visited.

Pre-pandemic, Savannah was often bandied about as a possible Madcap weekend away destination, but somehow we always wound up in places like London or, closer to home, Charleston instead. And we do love Charleston, but sometimes the Holy City can be a tad too polished.

“Savannah is like Charleston’s wild child,” noted a friend with deep ties to the Georgia coast. “We aren’t as uptight and formal, and we really like to kick up our heels and throw a good party. After all, our nickname is the ‘Hostess City.’ And remember that we are an open-container city, so always get your cocktail to go!”

Meanwhile, our next-door neighbors in High Point spend most of their time in Savannah, where they have a second home and run a ghost tour company, Savannah History & Haunts. The pair has been urging us to visit for years.

“You will love it,” said Bridgette, one half of the powerhouse behind the couple’s multi-city tour company. “There are great hotels and restaurants, and the history is off the charts. Plus, you can take one of our tours!”

John and I re-read Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil and, yes, screened Forrest Gump late one night to get into a Savannah state of mind.

Weekend away, here we come!

We decided to take George, our pound-rescue Boston terrier, along for the adventure and left the pug posse back home in the capable hands of the dog sitter.

For the five-hour drive from the Triad, John and I meandered through Cheraw and Florence, S.C., instead of facing — or more like being smoked by — Charlotte’s notorious speed demons. Still, after a few hours on the I-95 leg, John and I were ready for a strong libation as we pulled up at our weekend roost: the recently opened and absolutely stunning, dog-friendly Drayton Hotel.

George trotted in like he owned the place, and we all settled into The Drayton’s colorful Living Room, aka the lobby, where masterfully crafted, medicinal martinis were quickly rustled up. George perched happily atop a poof and preened.

Housed within the historic American Trust and Bank, The Drayton calls to mind an intimate, London-style hotel that mixes colors and patterns, giving a nod to the past with modern flourishes and understated — but beautifully presented — service. Smack on the corner of busy East Bay and Drayton streets, The Drayton offers the perfect location but feels worlds away from nearby River Street with its tourist hustle-bustle. The five-story hostelry boasts a terrific restaurant, St. Neo’s Brasserie, a chic, high-ceilinged dining room and first-rate service (our server, Libbie, was a gem). The rooftop bar wasn’t open for the season, but there is a slick, tucked-away bar in the basement and a coffee outpost just off the lobby that didn’t disappoint. Our intimate suite was equally cool with knockout views of the container ships plying the Savannah River (Savannah is the third largest container port in the nation) and a truly inspired bathroom with a wet room that paired a shower and clawfoot soaking tub.

With refreshed to-go cocktails in hand and George happily tucked away, we decided it was time to hit the town.

Savannah is the perfect walking city. Of course, the city celebrates its 22 signature squares, verdant and dripping with Spanish moss, which span one square-mile of its downtown. You will probably pick a favorite over the course of your visit. For us, it was Lafayette, but be sure to visit Chippewa, the site of Forrest’s iconic bench (his actual bench was a prop, now found at the Savannah History Museum). The squares are surrounded by historic residences with gated gardens, many of which you can tour, including the Davenport House and the Mercer-Williams home, site of the murder detailed in Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. There’s also dreamy Forsyth Park and museums aplenty.

“SCAD seems to be gobbling up the city,” noted John as we found our Savannah sea legs and looked around for more gin to accompany lonely olives. SCAD, of course, refers to the Savannah College of Art and Design, and the institution does, indeed, seem to have kudzued here, there and everywhere in between.

We passed the famed Olde Pink House eatery (too crowded!) and questioned whether we had to wear masks outdoors — you’re supposed to.

Geographically and pandemically situated, John and I decided to follow our friend’s lead, and we truly kicked up our slip-on Converse-clad heels.

We dined at The Fat Radish (bliss!), the farm-to-table Cha Bella, The Collins Quarter and The Fitzroy. We sipped cocktails on the roof of the glamorous Perry Lane Hotel and brunched at Clary’s Cafe, the Little Duck Diner and B. Matthews Eatery. And then, we shopped.

Savannah boasts a glorious assortment of design outposts such as Courtland & Co., PW Short General Store (incredible!), Alex Raskin Antiques (the crumbling building alone is worth the visit) and minimalist favorite Asher + Rye (too Scandi spare for Madcap maximalists!). We were in home design heaven.

Our neighbors’ 90-minute 9 p.m. candlelit ghost tour was an especial highlight of the weekend. Throughout, we explored dark byways and atmospheric squares and learned about the ghosts and cemeteries that haunt and dot Savannah. Dan, our High Point neighbor, guided the tour. Decked in historic-styled garb, he was a font of knowledge paired with heaps of charisma and a true spirit of fun.

John and I trotted George out for long walks (Savannah is super dog friendly), sampled ice cream at fabled Leopold’s, sipped more potent potables at Artillery and the Lone Wolf Lounge, nibbled treats from Byrd Cookie Company and explored the refurbished Plant Riverside District with its power-station-meets-pure-glitz JW Marriott Hotel and river-facing sushi and biergarten eateries.

And, whew, there went the weekend . . .

But there is so much more to see and experience in Savannah. We will most certainly be back — with cool Chatham Artillery Punch cocktails in hand, of course.  OH

For more information about The Drayton Hotel, visit thedraytonhotel.com.

The Madcap Cottage gents, John Loecke and Jason Oliver Nixon, embrace the new reality of COVID-friendly travel — heaps of road trips.

Apropos

A bevy of February releases fit for any month of the year

 

Compiled by Brian Lampkin

A good argument can be made that when you designate a month as belonging to someone or some group (Women’s History Month, Poetry Month, etc.), you thereby diminish the importance of women’s history or poetry in the other eleven months. It’s not likely the intended effect, but perhaps it plays out that way on occasion. The better use of, say, Black History Month, is to highlight (in this case) books that will inform your reading for the entire year. And I don’t really think that the fact that we celebrate my birthday but once a year diminishes my personhood for the other 364 days. In any case, publishers recognize Black History Month and use it to put out a bevy of related books. Let’s take advantage of the largesse and talk about the best of these new releases for February.

Feb 2: The Three Mothers: How the Mothers of Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and James Baldwin Shaped a Nation, by Anna Malaika Tubbs (Flatiron Books, $28.99). Berdis Baldwin, Alberta King and Louise Little were all born at the beginning of the 20th century and forced to contend with the prejudices of Jim Crow as Black women. These three extraordinary women passed their knowledge to their children with the hope of helping them survive in a society that would deny their humanity from the very beginning. They each taught resistance and a fundamental belief in the worth of Black people to their sons, even when these beliefs flew in the face of America’s racist practices and led to ramifications for all three families’ safety.

Feb. 2: The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks (Young Readers Edition), by Jeanne Theoharis (Beacon Press, $18.95). Because Rosa Parks was active for 60 years, in the North as well as the South, her story provides a broader and more accurate view of the Black freedom struggle across the 20th century. Theoharis shows young readers how the national fable of Parks and the civil rights movement — celebrated in schools during Black History Month — has warped what we know about Parks and stripped away the power and substance of the movement. This book illustrates how the movement radically sought to expose and eradicate racism in jobs, housing, schools and public services. It also highlights police brutality and the over-incarceration of Black people — and how Rosa Parks was a key player throughout. Rosa Parks placed her greatest hope in young people — in their vision, resolve and boldness to take the struggle forward. As a young adult, she discovered Black history, and it sustained her across her life. The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks will help do that for a new generation.

Feb. 2: Blood Grove (Easy Rawlins, 15), by Walter Mosley. Let’s not leave history to the historians! Mosley has always been a sly chronicler of Black life and history in his fiction, and this new mystery puts private detective Rawlins in the heart of the social upheaval of 1969, California. No need to have read the other 14 Easy Rawlins books — you can jump in here without missing a beat.

Feb. 9: Crossing the Line: A Fearless Team of Brothers and the Sport That Changed Their Lives Forever, by Kareem Rosser (St. Martin’s Press, $28.99). Born and raised in West Philadelphia, Kareem thought he and his siblings would always be stuck in “The Bottom,” a community and neighborhood devastated by poverty and violence. Riding their bicycles through Philly’s Fairmount Park, Kareem’s brothers discover a barn full of horses. What starts as an accidental discovery turns into a love for horseback riding that leads the Rossers to discovering their passion for polo. Pursuing the sport with determination and discipline, Kareem earns his place among the typically exclusive players in college, becoming part of the first all-Black national interscholastic polo championship team.

Feb. 16: No More Lies: The Myth and Reality of American History, by Dick Gregory (Amistad Press, $17.99). This republishing of No More Lies offers an incomparable satirist’s intellectual, conspiratorial and humorous spin on the facts. The late Dick Gregory examines numerous aspects of culture and history, from the slave trade, police brutality, the wretchedness of working-class life and labor unions to the 1968 Civil Rights Act, the Founding Fathers, “happy slaves” and entrepreneurs. No subject is off limits to his critical eye. Gregory was a comedian, civil rights activist and cultural icon who first performed in public in the 1950s. And it will come as no surprise to learn that he was on Comedy Central’s list of “100 Greatest Stand-Ups.”

Feb. 16: The Black Church: This Is Our Story, This Is Our Song, by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (Penguin Press, $30). For the young Henry Louis Gates Jr., growing up in a small, segregated West Virginia town, the church was his family and his community’s true center of gravity. Within those walls, voices were lifted up in song to call forth the best in each other, and to comfort each other when times were at their worst. In this book — his reckoning with the meaning of the Black church in American history — Gates takes us from his own experience onto a journey across more than 400 years and spanning the entire country. At road’s end, we emerge with a new understanding of the centrality of the Black church to the American story — as a cultural and political force, as the center of resistance to slavery and White supremacy, as an unparalleled incubator of talent and as a crucible for working through the community’s most important issues. This is the companion book to the upcoming PBS series.

Public Service Announcement: In response to the ongoing COVID crisis in Guilford County, Scuppernong Books has returned to appointment-only browsing with an emphasis on curbside pickup. We continue to encourage everyone to keep the health of our friends, families and community in mind as we mask up, stay home when possible and keep social distance. With our freedom, we choose care, compassion and community well-being.  OH

Brian Lampkin is one of the proprietors of Scuppernong Books

Waiting for Gurganus

And savoring his short fiction

 

By D.G. Martin

Like two other important North Carolina authors’ debut novels, Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel in 1929 and Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain in 1997, Allan Gurganus’ Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All in 1989 caught the nation’s attention and stayed at the top of the bestseller lists for months. It has sold over 4 million copies and become an American classic.

Set in the 1980s, the book is narrated by 99-year-old Lucy Marsden, who married 50-year-old Col. William Marsden when she was 15. She tells of her marriage to the Confederate veteran, his wartime experiences and the entertaining and poignant routine of her daily life in the fictional town of Falls, located somewhere near Rocky Mount.

Widow was followed in 1997 by Plays Well with Others. Sandwiched between the two novels are a couple of collections of short fiction, White People and The Practical Heart, the last published in 1993.

So, what had he been doing in the years afterward? “Writing, every day,” he says, “and getting up at 6 a.m. to do it.” Finally, in 2013 Gurganus published Local Souls, taking us back to Falls, where Widow and many of his short stories are set.

Local Souls is neither a novel nor a collection of short stories, but three separate novellas. All are set in Falls, but the characters and stories are independent and quite different. Susan, the main character in the first novella, “Fear Not,” is a 14-year-old all-American girl growing up in Falls when her father dies in a boating accident. Seduced and made pregnant by her godfather, she gives up her baby, pulls her life together, later marries, has two children, and leads a normal life until she is reunited with the child she gave up. Then her life is transformed in a surprising and puzzling way, one that only Gurganus could conjure up.

In the second novella, “Saints Have Mothers,” a divorced woman, smart and ambitious enough to have published a poem in The Atlantic magazine, has two sons and a 17-year-old daughter. The daughter is more committed to serving those in need than she is to her mother, whose life is wrapped up in hopes for her daughter’s future. When the daughter announces that she plans to go to Africa on a service project, the mother objects. But the daughter still goes. Communication with her daughter is spotty until a middle-of-the-night phone call brings word of the daughter’s death. As the mother and the Falls community prepare for a memorial service, Gurganus brings the story to a shocking and touching conclusion.

The third novella, “Decoy,” is the history of a relationship between two men. One is a beloved family doctor, part of an established Falls family. The other is a newcomer, who came from the poverty of struggling farm life, but has achieved modest financial success and near acceptance by Falls’ elite. When the doctor retires, their friendship is disturbed and then swept away by a “Fran-like” flood that destroys both men’s homes and much of Falls.

With its complex characters and plot, “Decoy” deserved to be a separate book. In 2015 that happened, and it sold well as a stand-alone.

In his latest book, The Uncollected Stories of Allan Gurganus (January 2021), several stories take readers back to Falls.

In one story, “The Deluxe $19.95 Walking Tour of Historic Falls (NC),” a tour guide narrates and takes a hard look at the town. She begins: “Moving along nicely. No stragglers, please. Incorporated in 1824, almost immediately made the county seat, Falls still boasts five thousand local souls. We’re down from our peak seven thousand during the commercial boom of ’98, 18 – 98. See that arched bridge? Some say that yonder River Lithium accounts for both our citizens’ soothed temperaments and for how hard we find leaving home. Few local students, matriculating up north, last long there.”

Longtime fans of Gurganus will appreciate the inside look at his favorite town. Newcomers will find that the tour of Falls forms the basis for another engaging Gurganus tale.

The new book includes one of my favorites. In “A Fool for Christmas,” Vernon Ricketts, a pet store manager in a mall near Falls, is the lead character and narrator. He is the fool for Christmas who cannot resist a call to take care of a homeless teenager, keep her warm, and help her hide from the security officer, who is dedicated to getting such undesirables out of the mall. The teenager is pregnant, and Gurganus’ story draws on the Biblical account of Christ’s birth in a way that brings out the same sort of deep feelings.

Gurganus wrote this story for NPR’s All Things Considered in 2004 and read it on the program. He has rewritten it regularly. Last year it made its way into print in a limited edition that sold out quickly. The story’s inclusion assures that the new book will be a family treasure.

Perhaps the book’s most timely story is “The Wish for a Good Young Country Doctor,” which was published first in The New Yorker in April last year. It is set in a rural village in the Midwest during a cholera epidemic in 1850, where a young doctor does his best to save its citizens. But when many die, the doctor is blamed.

How did Gurganus manage to time his story to coincide with the current pandemic? He says he finished the story early in 2020, “on the day that coronavirus appeared for the first time in The New York Times. And the context was completely changed. I sent it to my agent, who sent it to The New Yorker, which bought it in a day, and it appeared two weeks later.”

These stories and six more in the new book will remind us of the talented North Carolinian’s ability to make us laugh painfully at ourselves and our neighbors while we wait for his long-promised, long-delayed opus, An Erotic History of a Southern Baptist Church.

When I pushed him to tell us when it would be finished, Gurganus smiled and said, “I’ve got a lot of material. Every time I think I’ve finished the book, somebody tells me another story about a corrupt preacher and the choir director. And I add another chapter. So I think it might be a trilogy instead of a single volume.”

I am waiting hopefully.

But I am not holding my breath.  OH

D.G. Martin hosts North Carolina Bookwatch Sunday at 3:30 p.m. and Tuesday at 5 p.m. on UNC-TV.

A Walk in the Woods

In writing and in life, Belle Boggs explores a sense of place and belonging

By Wiley Cash   •   Photographs by Mallory Cash

As they do most days, especially since the coronavirus pandemic began, writer Belle Boggs and her 7-year-old daughter, Bea, are walking through the woods near their home in Pittsboro to the banks of the Eno River. Boggs, whose most recent novel, The Gulf (2019), tells the humorous yet complicated story of a struggling writer and teacher, is a teacher herself. Her inclination to educate is evident as she pauses now and then to point out varieties of mushrooms, species of birds and the best places to ford the various creeks that criss-cross the landscape on the way to the river.

While Boggs is clearly not in the classroom at North Carolina State University, where she has taught Creative Writing since 2014, the classroom never seems very far from her mind. The names and stories of her students — both past and present — find their way into conversation easily, as does her interest in the broader implications of education in rural North Carolina, especially Alamance County, where she is at work on a book-length study of the public schools there.

Boggs and her husband, Richard, settled in North Carolina after a stint in New York City, where Boggs taught first grade in Brooklyn while simultaneously earning an education degree from Pace University. Before that, she lived in California, where she earned an M.F.A. from UC Irvine. She knew she wanted to come back to the South, and she and her husband chose North Carolina because they had friends here from his years as an undergraduate in Chapel Hill. But there was something else that brought her back: the sense of place and the benefits and challenges that come along with it. “I’m interested in the challenge of being an artist when you’re from the South,” she says.

But while Belle Boggs has lived in North Carolina since 2005, one of the greatest challenges she faced was that of focusing her literary eye on her adopted state. “It took a long time for me to identify as a North Carolinian because I’d always identified as someone from a very particular place in Virginia,” she says. Her first book, the story collection Mattaponi Queen (2010), is set on the Mattaponi River in the tidewater region of Boggs’ youth and reflects her deep appreciation for place, which must have rung true to native Virginians as the book won the Library of Virginia Literary Award. It was also a finalist for the 2010 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, proving that the most powerful regional writing often resonates far outside the region of its birth.

Although Tidewater Virginia certainly informed Boggs’ earlier writing, rural Chatham County is clearly full of marvels for her, and she talks about them with an infectious sense of wonder. Across the river, she points to the spot where eagles are nesting in an impossibly tall tree; in the summer, she says that the waters of the Eno are often low enough that one can sit in a beach chair midstream and read a book; and she follows a path to an oak tree with a hole in its trunk that is large enough for young Bea to climb inside of and nearly disappear. But, for Belle Boggs, life outside of the woods is approached with these same investigatory powers. Along with the environment, other themes that have long held her interest — specifically race, class, education and motherhood — are rendered with the same precise detail that she uses to describe the world that she chronicles on these daily walks.

The issues of race, class, education and motherhood — instead of competing — have found a way of intertwining in Boggs’ recent work, especially once she became a mother. Her 2016 essay collection, The Art of Waiting: On Fertility, Motherhood, and Medicine, chronicles her use of in vitro fertilization after years of confronting the possibility of being childless. And while IVF led to the birth to her daughter, Bea, followed a few years later with the surprise birth of her daughter, Harriet, the process was not without its financial burdens. “As I was waiting for the medication for my IVF cycle, which is like $3,000, our well failed,” she says, “and we had to drill a new one. Both of those things were big stretches for us to pay for, and there was so much uncertainty behind them both. They became a natural metaphor for one another.” This radical honesty, both the struggle to conceive a life and the struggle to keep her own afloat, is the kind of honesty that readers appreciate in Boggs’ writing, something which she finds surprising. “I think in general I’m a pretty reserved writer,” she says, “and I try to let the facts and the details speak for what I’m describing.”

Never were the facts and details more important to undergirding the radical honesty of an experience than when Boggs recently published an essay about her and Bea and a group of people being pepper-sprayed during a peaceful march to the polls in Graham, on the last day of early voting. Boggs had taken her daughter to the march to give her an education in democracy, but what she got instead was a lesson in power: who has it, who does not and how it is used. These same issues of power are what led her to undertake her current project on public education in Alamance County, especially as it pertains to race, class and the issues of regional segregation. It is clear that Boggs’ time some years ago in the first grade classroom fuels both her current work and her deep emotional connection to primary education. “I’m lucky to be teaching in a program like the one at N.C. State,” she says. “But sometimes I feel guilty that I’m not still a first grade teacher, because I think that may be some of the most good you can do in the world.”

But while Boggs teaches undergraduates and graduate students, she has found a way to keep one foot in primary education. Over the course of the pandemic, she and Bea created a Zoom-based writing club for children in kindergarten through second grade, and, perhaps following Boggs’ lead, several of her graduate students have begun working on writing projects with school-age children.

The day is ending. The woods are growing dark. Boggs and her daughter walk back uphill away from the river toward home, where 3-year-old Harriet and Boggs’ husband are waiting. Bea walks ahead of her mother on a trail toward the house, but Boggs stops, calls her daughter back. Boggs has spotted a mushroom, and while she cannot remember the name of it, she believes her daughter may know. The two of them kneel on the forest floor to get a better look. The light is fading, but there is still enough light to see, and there is still so much to learn.  OH

Wiley Cash is the writer-in-residence at the University of North Carolina-Asheville. His new novel, When Ghosts Come Home, will be released this year.

Age of Aquarius

Is it really coming? This mystical era of peace, love and liberation? Because we’re ready for it. And those born under the sign of Aquarius are already living it. Take Oprah, for example, benevolent queen of good vibes and grand gestures. Or Shakira, whose hypnotic dance moves must surely echo her inner freedom. (The hips don’t lie.) One thing all water bearers have in common is their complete and utter inability to fit any kind of mold. They’re rebellious. Fiercely independent. Sometimes resistant to a fault. But don’t mistake their cold, distant stare for aloofness. They’re just thinking about the future, mumbling a little tune about sunshine and crystal revelations. This month, our favorite eccentrics are hurling logic to the wind and letting their emotions (yes, they’ve got them) make the calls. It’s going to be a wild ride. Over the top. You just might get a car.

 

Last Call!

If you haven’t seen GreenHill’s extended WINTER SHOW (and sale), time’s ticking. But you can safely view it from the comfort of your own home — or at the gallery — through February 7. Featuring over 400 works from emerging and established artists across the state, the digital catalog boasts an exquisite collection of paintings, drawings, soda-fired stoneware, blown glass, fiber arts, mixed media, photography, relief prints, cooking spoons and coffee mugs and everything but a forged steel kitchen sink. Show is free and open to the public. GreenHill Gallery and Shop, 200 N. Davie St., are open Wednesday through Saturday from 12–5 p.m. or by appointment. Info: (336) 937-3051 or greenhillnc.org.

Branches and (Jewish) Roots

Bust out the Whirley Pop. Triad Jewish Film Festival’s Global Diversity of Judaism is coming to a screen near you. Your own screen, as a matter of fact. This virtual festival runs February 25 through March 14 and includes seven powerful films that collectively showcase the “diverse fabric that makes up the global Jewish people.” Hence the festival’s name. Check out the extraordinary lineup online (mytjff.com), where the trailers alone will take you on a sensory-rich journey sure to hit you with all the feels. One such film, the award-winning documentary Breaking Bread, follows a group of Arab and Jewish chefs bridging worlds together through the art of food. Unlike the other six films, which you can stream at your convenience, Breaking Bread is only available March 11–13 and is exclusive to North Carolina viewers. Tickets are $5–8 per film. Reel Deal passes ($25–50) allow access to all seven films. Or snag a Friend of the Festival membership as a way of giving back to the Triad Jewish Film Festival. Prepare to get lifted.

Paintings are Red,
Paintings are Blue . . .

Winter is gray. But with yet another new exhibit opening at WAM this month, it’s feeling a bit brighter indeed. Vibrant: Artists Engage with Color, a kaleidoscopic array of dynamic works from the Weatherspoon’s collection, opens on Wednesday, January 27. Explore the drama, moods and meanings evoked by colors from the whole, glorious spectrum. Exhibit on display through August 14, when, once again, the world is a lush and wild tangle of green. Open Tuesday through Saturday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Free admission. Weatherspoon Art Museum is located at UNCG on the corner of Spring Garden and Tate. Info: weatherspoonart.org.

Let There Be Light

From planets, people and all that glitters in this clockwork universe

By Jim Dodson

 

Shortly before sunset on the winter solstice, my wife and an old friend and I walked up a grassy hilltop west of town hoping to view a rare celestial event called the Great Conjunction, which last took place not long after the invention of the telescope in the 17th century.

I was sure I’d found the perfect hilltop for viewing what some think is the astronomical origin of the Star of Bethlehem — a summit far away from madding crowds and city lights.

Silly me. A crowd of upwards of 30 turned out to bear witness as a pair of giant gassy planets — Saturn and Jupiter, the solar system’s twin heavyweights — verged so close they appeared to shine as one blazing star in the Southwest sky just after sunset, intensifying their light as the darkness deepened.

Before this evening, their closest alignment was July 16, 1623. Before that, the last viewing was March 6, 1226, the year Saint Francis of Assisi died.

The 2020 light show was a pretty brief one, lasting just over an hour before the planets slipped below the horizon.

But the unexpected pleasure for this starwatcher was witnessing the lovely effect this phenomenon of rare light had upon the assembly of earthlings on the hill.

As they patiently waited, couples young and old stood arm-in-arm like star-crossed lovers, silently silhouetted by the afterglow of the sunset.

Old timers sat on lawn chairs with binoculars.

A family with six kids spread out a large quilt on the hill and shared a thermos of hot chocolate, chattering like excited starlings in the grass. One wee girl wrapped in a plaid Scottish blanket kept asking her mother where, exactly, the baby Jesus was sleeping.

Dogs and their owners mingled joyfully in the dusk, while neighbors greeted neighbors they hadn’t seen in a small eternity.

An amateur astronomer set up a large electronic telescope and drew a crowd of kids and parents eager to get a rare glimpse of the rings of Saturn and the four moons of Jupiter. 

We humans, it hit me, are like the planets that shine above us. The closer we come to each other, the more light we project, the brighter our shared humanity grows, enriching our collective orbit through a clockwork universe.

This was no small solstice revelation during a year of viral darkness and enforced isolation that won’t be forgotten anytime soon.

In the crowd, an older lady swaddled in a red Wolf Pack sweatshirt and a ball cap that simply urged Love Thy Neighbor Y’all, wondered out loud if the shining object might not be an omen of good news to come for 2021. Murmurs of agreement erupted.

Light and hope, of course, go hand in hand, and have since the very beginning, whenever that was — Big Bang or Garden of Eden.

A thousand years before the Bible said as much, the Upanishads advised that consciousness is the light of the divine.

The third verse of Genesis 1 agreed: “God said Let there be light and there was light. And God saw the light and it was good.”

The Gospel of John called Jesus the light of the world. Matthew urged his followers to let their light shine before others and pointed out the folly of keeping our light beneath a basket.

Scriptures of every faith tradition, in fact, bear lavish witness to the power of celestial light. Buddha advised human beings to become a light unto themselves, while Chapter 13 of the Bhagavad Gita notes that the Supreme Lord Krishna is the “light of all lights, the illuminator of even the sun and stars . . . By his light all creation is full of light.”

In his captain’s log, Christopher Columbus wrote that he followed the light of the sun to leave the Old World behind — and thereby found a new one.

In our darkest moments, Aristotle advised, we must focus to see the light — both outward and inward.

With the dawning of the Age of Reason, science celebrated the power of light to illuminate vast unimagined worlds, to heal disease and grow the future. Light turned out to be the engine of photosynthesis and all life biological, confirming what gardeners and country folk have understood for millennia as they planted by the cycles of the seasons or danced by the light of the moon.

A good idea is symbolized by a blazing light bulb — which only took Thomas Edison a thousand or so failed efforts to invent.

To “lighten up” means to let things go.

Whereas to “see the light” implies a sudden change in perception or awakened consciousness, to “enlighten” is to furnish knowledge and slowly deepen one’s spiritual insight, to see the truth of the matter and make one a fraction wiser.

The rising sun may be a living metaphor for a new beginning, but however we find the light, it’s also bound to find us.

There’s a crack in everything, reminds the late Leonard Cohen. That’s how the light gets in.

Artists spend their lives chasing light for the simple reason that in light there is revelation, an unveiling and inspiration.

Falling sunlight makes stained glass windows come alive, Hudson River landscapes unforgettable, fields of sunflowers explode, butterflies dance, afternoons utterly peaceful.

It is the distinctive light of a Rembrandt — The Night Watch or The Return of the Prodigal Son come to mind — which makes the figures appear so fragile and real, humans cloaked by the mystery of darkness, the hidden unknown.

In the meantime, it is better to light a candle than to curse the darkness — or so advised everyone from Confucius to Eleanor Roosevelt.

Every morning of my life, almost without exception, I light a lone candle on my desk in the darkest hour of morning, a small act of respect for the darkness. This little ritual of desktop fire-making may be far more symbolic than I fathomed, an ancestral memory of awakening to the possibilities of daily rebirth, a fresh start, a friendly summons to any thoughtful angels or muses who happen to be passing through the neighborhood.

After a year that no one will ever forget, news of COVID vaccines coming our way has been hailed as “light at the end of the tunnel.”

We can only hope — and pray — this is true.

For as those souls who gathered like ancient shepherds on a starry solstice hilltop intuited, we all need more light in the darkness and delight in our lives.

Wherever it comes from. OH

Jim Dodson is the founding editor of O.Henry magazine.

The Wave

The god of wonder is among us

By Ashley Wahl

 

If Cupid is the god of love, then the god of wonder must also be an impish child. Surely you’ve seen him. No, he doesn’t always strike with a golden bow.

Late last fall, driving somewhere between Greensboro and Raleigh on a busy stretch of 1-40, something caught my eye as I came upon a pedestrian bridge spanning the highway.

A father was walking across the bridge with his two children. The smallest, a little boy, was waving at the world below as if he were his own parade, cars flashing by like meteors on the blacktop beneath him. It reminded me of how my brother and I used to pump our arms at truckers on the highway — the glee we felt when they blasted their horns; the disappointment when they didn’t. I gave the boy a quick wave back, sure he wouldn’t notice.

What happened next surprised me. All those passing cars and yet, somehow, he did notice.

And I noticed that he noticed.

And within this simple and unexpected moment of acknowledgement — this silent “I see you” — the little boy jumped up and down as if he’d just made contact with an alien species.

His joy struck me like an ocean wave. Whatever transpired in those three timeless seconds was somehow bigger than us. It felt like a quantum shift. Like a glimpse of an alternate reality where we weren’t so different, that child and this writer. Like we had both tapped into the same current of wonder.

I shared this little story on social media and was further amazed by the comments that followed.

“The people on passing ferries always wave,” one friend offered.

Others shared childhood memories of waving at planes.

Many noted similar experiences — mundane yet sacred — that had moved them to tears.

Scrolling the thread, it occurred to me that this universal current of wonder had more to do with awareness than it did with age. Everyday miracles abound. Children are just better at noticing them.

“Remind me to tell you about the deer I waved at,” was one friend’s response. 

“I know that feeling,” wrote another. “Every time I see a leaf fall, I remember a child becoming ecstatic over this simple act of a tree releasing a leaf.”

Which brings me to a recent winter’s day and a leaf littered trail along the edge of Lake Brandt. On a crisp and sunny afternoon, my valentine and I walked among a quiet sea of bare-branched hardwoods, taking in sweeping views of vibrant blue skies and shimmering waters.

We passed one hiker with an elderly dog. Otherwise, the trail was ours. That is, until we came upon a boardwalk where Horse Pen Creek feeds into the lake.

There, a mother was standing in a patch of sunlight by the water’s edge. Although we didn’t yet see him, her son was quietly waiting beneath the boardwalk a few feet in front of us, his little fingers sticking out between the wooden planks. When I saw his tiny hand just below our feet, I gasped in surprise. It reminded me of E.T. peeking through the slats of the closet door.

“Hello up there!” the god of wonder sang out, gently wiggling his fingers.

His mother chided him for startling us, but we offered smiles.

“Well, hello down there!” we sang back.

And in that moment, his joy was our joy. And our joy was his joy. And, when it all boiled down, that joy was one and the same.

All of this to say that, if children are our future, there is hope for us yet. They are watching us closely, ready to remind us that we aren’t so different, that wonder is always accessible, that our waves, too, create oceans.  OH

Contact editor Ashley Wahl at awahl@ohenrymag.com.