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Sage Gardener

Drive down any country road as fall approaches, and you are likely to see a lot more Jerusalem artichokes than you could ever eat. The golden, daisy-like flowers gloriously polkadot almost every verge in Piedmont North Carolina. And, yes, they are native, though some label them invasive, but more about that later.

My introduction to Helianthus tuberosus was at my mother’s table, where my dad heaped Braswell’s sensational, bright-yellow artichoke relish on his pinto beans as I still do. The turmeric-spiked relish probably originated in the South Carolina Lowcountry, where Mrs. Sassard’s version, like a lot of things in Charleston, “is world famous.”

Jerusalem artichokes themselves are world famous, exported as a delicacy from the New World to France in the 1600s, where they were initially hailed, like so many novelties from the New World, as “dainties fit for queens” — but likely before the queen and her court actually tried them. By 1621, one writer complained, “which way soever they be dressed and eaten, they stir and cause a filthy loathsome stinking wind . . . and are a meat more fit for swine than men.” Not surprisingly, their popularity in Europe dimmed, and it wasn’t until recently that chefs, searching for tasty and unusual local produce, rediscovered them. They were quickly dubbed a superfood because of their nutritional value and their containing — keto alert! — inulin instead of starch. (Inulin is a carb related to the sugar fructose, but is largely indigestible, making sunchokes, as some marketing guru relabeled them, a good choice for diabetics.)

Soon, upscale eateries were featuring Jerusalem artichoke orzotto graced with parsley-and-peanut pesto or truffled sunchokes with brie and honey.

If you’ve never had them, they are slightly sweet with notes of peanut, potato and water chestnut. Not, in fact, much like an artichoke, despite the name. “Jerusalem” purportedly arose when some half-witted Brit tried to pronounce the Italian word for sunflower, girasole. “They can take the form of velvety purees, soups, hearty gratins, crunch crisps (French fries), stew fillings, creamy mash and even ice cream!” enthused one gourmet.

They are so prolific that Master Gardeners issue warnings. Like crabgrass — and every bit as aggressive — they spread underground by rhizomes. I’ve seen them take over not one but several adjacent raised beds in a community garden. One gardener reported transplanting two plants and ending up with 70 pounds. With each plant producing as many as 20 tubers, “as potatoes were requisitioned for World War II,” one writer says, “Jerusalem artichokes saved millions from starvation,” providing food for humans and livestock.

Harvested from October to March, they are available from time to time in farmers markets and grocery stores. Worried about the gastric distress? Through the miracles of modern science, some home economics scientist discovered that cooking them with lemon juice transforms them through something called acid hydrolysis, rendering them gone with the wind.

Just One Thing

“A camera lies,” says Greensboro artist James Celano, who graduated from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts more than 40 years ago. Known for his oil paintings of still life, figures and landscapes, Celano says he prefers to paint from life and can tell when an artist is working from a camera image. There are giveaways, he says, such as an exaggerated foreground that disrupts the scale. But the biggest reason he avoids it? “I find that work very flat emotionally.” A born-and-raised northerner, Celano and his wife, Diane, made the Gate City home over 30 years ago, bringing with them their toddler son and their own textile design business, Diane Celano Studios, which serviced clients such as Burlington Industries. “That’s how we paid the bills and kept me independent and free from having to depend on galleries.” Celano converted their home’s two-car garage into a studio space. It’s there that he sets up objects and paints his still life oils. Dollface, seen here, is part of a birds-eye view series and will be part of an exhibition at Ambleside Gallery. “It’s been about 15 years since I’ve exhibited in Greensboro,” says Celano. While he’s participated in GreenHill’s Winter Show, this is his first solo exhibition here in a long time. He’s gathered 26 new paintings, most of them still life, that will be on display from October 4–31, with an opening reception from 6–9 p.m. on October 4.

Window to the Past

Feeling witch-crafty? Go homemade with your Halloween costume this year. Give it a whirl — just as these Grimsley Whirlies once did back in 1949.

Water Color Talk

If you’ve walked into The Art Gallery (TAG) at Congdon Yards in High Point recently, you may have already spied the Watercolor Society of North Carolina Exhibition, a juried show featuring 69 paintings created by its members. On September 29 — ahem, before we went to press — the best in show was selected by this year’s juror, renowned watercolor artist Lana Privitera. Originally from Spain, Privitera is a signature member of both the National and American Watercolor Societies. Since we couldn’t yet share the show’s winner, we’re showing off what this judge is capable of. Some Cups and Polka Dots is not a photograph. Despite what your eyes may tell you, it’s a watercolor on paper. Frankly, her painting of dishware looks more realistic than the photos our iPhone 13 snaps — obviously a result of considerable talent combined with epic patience. It “went through many stages and many weeks of work before I felt that the composition and the balance of colors, values and texture were cohesive and interesting,” she reflects. Plus, there’s a lot of behind-the-scenes work before the paintbrush tip ever hits the paper. “Coming up with a unique composition and theme that might also appeal to other people is not easy,” says Privitera, “so the planning stage of any of my watercolors often takes more time than applying the many layers of paint themselves.” So, what was Privitera looking for in a winner? Someone who, like her, “takes their time creating unique and well-balanced compositions.” As for her selection, you’ll just have to head over to TAG to see the piece she thought brushed with greatness. The exhibit ends Oct. 31. Info: tagart.org/exhibits/watercolor-society-of-north-carolina-exhibition.

Unsolicited Advice

With the holidays just a couple months away, and the cooler, shorter days creeping in, October is the ideal time to begin a new crafty hobby — one that results in homemade gifts for everyone on your gift-giving list.

Cross Stitch: Start with the basic “X” and grow from there. Soon, you’ll be whipping out adorable pieces with charming sayings like our personal fav: “What doesn’t kill you gives you a set of unhealthy coping mechanisms and a dark sense of humor.” Bonus, you can tell your dentist you do, in fact, floss every day.

Canning: How about them apples? Turn ‘em into jam, jelly or applesauce. FYI, stock up. Because no matter what Baby Boom had you believe, 2,537 apples = 3 jars of applesauce (approximately). Apples not your jam? Try pickled beets or pumpkin butter. Yes, you can.

Candle Making: Hit up your local thrift shops for unique vintage glass vessels. Fill ‘em with soy wax and your own custom scent. Hints of bourbon, leather and cuban cigar? We call that one “Grandpa’s recliner.”

Witchcraft: Heck, it is October, after all.

Eye on GSO

Flight of the Gooney Bird

The N.C. Transportation Museum works to restore the Potomac Peacemaker

By Billy Ingram

In January’s O.Henry magazine, there’s a brief oral history of the glory days of Piedmont Airlines, including interviews with former flight attendants and pilots who flew for the airline back when air travel was a pleasure.

There’a an exciting project underway at the N.C. Transportation Museum, where specialists are restoring one of Piedmont’s DC-3s, the most versatile airliner ever built, with attention to every detail, right down to the fabric on the seats.

“Most of Piedmont’s DC-3s were converted pax DC-3s,” says museum spokesperson Savannah Bess, part of the Potomac Pacemaker project. “Most of them started their lives off as C-47 and C-53 variants. Our airplane, the Potomac Pacemaker, was one such plane.” After service during WWII, these planes were sold off for very little money by the Reconstruction Finance Corp. Piedmont Airlines got off the ground with a fleet of these so-called Gooney Birds, as they were affectionately known.

“Our plane, the Potomac Pacemaker, rolled off the assembly line in Santa Monica, California, in 1942,” Bess says. That plane was initially leased and then sold to Western Airlines where it served from 1945-55.

“However, Western was phasing out the old threes and replacing them with more efficient Convairs,” Bess told me. “Piedmont relied on the DC-3 religiously. It was the only airplane at the time that could not only be reliable and easy to repair for a small airline, but manage to land in the most out-of-the-way airports, sometimes nothing more than a tobacco field in Goldsboro or a strip shaved into a mountain top in West Virginia.”

Piedmont snatched up every DC-3 it could get. “When they learned Western was divesting their Gooney fleet, Piedmont decided to drop them a line,” Bess says. “Piedmont named its Pacemakers after various geographical or cultural reference points on their route system. The Potomac Pacemaker plied Piedmont’s route faithfully until the DC-3’s retirement in 1963.” The airplane was saved by Durham’s Museum of Life and Science, which gave it a cosmetic makeover. By the time the N.C. Transportation Museum purchased her in 2002, she was in poor condition. The DC-3 was taken apart and shipped to Spencer in 2004. “It was an emotional moment for some of us,” Bess notes. “I was there the day the fuselage was taken away. I’m a native and resident of Durham. I grew up literally underneath that airplane, and she fostered my love of aviation. I had no idea how involved I would be years later.

“Things really started snowballing into action until our old team leader, Capt. Bill Wilkerson, lit a fire and volunteers started to come twice a month, putting in more than eight hours a shift. That was only several years back. Not just Piedmont people started to join the project; students from Guilford Tech, aircraft mechanics and enthusiasts from different walks of life all started to pitch in. I joined the project in 2016. Our goal is to restore, as perfectly as possible, an airplane you can step into circa 1962.” That’s right, one day you’ll be able to walk into this fully refurbished airliner.

There’s no timeline on exactly when that will be as the uncertainty of our current circumstance has had a pausing effect on museums everywhere. “What I can tell you,” Bess says, “is that the project has had some fresh attention and gotten new interest excited, thanks to our social media presence on Facebook detailing the restoration as it goes along, and our joining the DC-3 Society, formerly known as the D-Day Squadron. We have had massive success rebuilding the airframe, namely the fuselage, which was rotting from underneath. Now it’s brand new aluminum. Our engines and landing gear are complete. Furthermore, our plans for the future building include, not just Piedmont artifacts, but our plane’s military history and tribute to the American Theater, and work the DC-3 tirelessly engaged in, bringing us to victory. From training young pilots on how to deliver troops into enemy territory, or carrying pilots who would toss peanuts and Coke to poor Southern children, our plane did it all.”

Simple Life

A New Year, A New Me

By Jim Dodson

Reprinted from the January 2013 edition of PineStraw magazine.

Two winters ago, while visiting for the holidays, my daughter, Maggie, made a point of asking me to get her up at the crack of dawn so she could go off to hot yoga class.

At that time I’d only vaguely heard the phrase “hot yoga class” around town. It conjured a charming picture in my mind of thoughtful people concerned about declining yak populations and freeing Tibet and other such noble enterprises, sitting peacefully après group meditation in a peace circle on a warehouse floor or a redwood log in the forest, drinking organic hot cocoa or maybe green tea, sharing cleansing quiet.

Then again, I’m a 60-year-old broken-down golfer with a dodgy right knee from football donkey years ago who still limps around the golf course carrying his own bag for exercise and sometimes, weather permitting, walks to work.

“Happy to get you up,” I said. “Hot yoga sounds like fun, especially if they give you hot cocoa.”

She stared at me incredulously, as if I’d made an impolite yak mating noise. “Dad, they don’t give you hot cocoa. And I wouldn’t exactly call hot yoga fun, though it is fabulous. I’m totally addicted to it — go twice a week back in New York. It’s what keeps me sane.”

“No hot cocoa?”

“No. But you really should try it. Seriously. The stretching alone would be great for that old athlete’s body of yours. You’ll feel so wonderful after you finish a session. And the place I’m going to here is such a beautiful space. They play gorgeous meditation music and place a lavender-scented cloth on your head and massage your neck with relaxing oils at the end.”

“Sounds great,” I agreed. “I guess I can always buy my own hot cocoa afterward.”

“So you’ll go?”

“Absolutely.”

“Wonderful. You’ll thank me!”

But, alas, I didn’t go. Over the next year, in the interest of exercising more and improving my health, I limped around the golf course a little more than usual and steadfastly avoided setting foot in the Taj Mahal of a health club where we belonged, simply because the multitudes of people exercising there — especially the old ones — were so frightening in their dedication to physical fitness.

They wore headphones and huffed along on computerized treadmills and other machines that required a basic engineering degree to operate until they looked half-dead, at which point they mopped their brows and sauntered past flabby sometimers like me wearing a look of pure Teutonic smugness. And this was just the old ladies!

Back in the late 1960s and early ’70s, when I blew out my right knee from idiotically stepping on a kicking tee while playing football, nobody except guys who pissed off the coach by sitting on their helmets during games or lonely aces who couldn’t get a date if their own sisters invited them out went to the gym to actually exercise. The gymnasium wasn’t at all cool except with bodybuilder types who shaved their armpits and actually dated their sisters.

In the ’80s, I played a great deal of pick-up basketball with college dudes 10 years my junior, plus shortstop on two different fast-pitch softball teams. I also hiked in the mountains and ran a couple of 10K road races with a crazy girlfriend who ate tofu by the crate and planned to live forever. Trying to keep up with a skinny girlfriend with the approximate body fat of a Serengeti cheetah, I learned, is no fun at all. She literally left me somewhere around mile five and that was that — for romance and road racing.

In the ’90s, I built my own house on a hilltop in coastal Maine, rebuilt old stone walls, planted stuff, chopped and stacked wood endlessly, and shoveled more snow than one man should probably have to shovel unless he’s in a Soviet gulag in Siberia.

I walked a golf course twice a week and even joined my first gym, which I belonged to for about three weeks, until I realized the people reading “The Bridges of Madison County” on the Stairmaster machine and taking their own pulses actually liked going to the gym. Also, I didn’t like being naked with strangers who loved to admire their toned bodies in full-length mirrors. Had the strangers been female, well, that might have been a different story.

Anyway, flash ahead 20 years — lots of chopping and walking and working like a convict in a garden, keeping me more or less in what I called “farmer shape” — to the winter day I finally took my daughter’s advice and showed up at the yoga studio for something called “Warm Flow Yoga.”

I was the first to arrive for class on the appointed Saturday morning and discovered the instructor was an attractive young gal named Lisa, who was so charming and blessedly fit, I was tempted to turn and bolt for the nearest Dunkin’ Donuts.

Lisa quickly put my qualms to rest, placed me on a rented yoga mat, and explained that the purpose of yoga is to achieve a proper balance between the body and the spirit through various timeless meditational poses meant to exercise the body and liberate the dude within.

Being a yoga rookie, I was advised to watch others as they performed the various traditional asanas (postures) and warm-ups and to “listen to my body” by doing only what I felt my old body could handle.

“There’s no right or wrong here,” she emphasized. “Yoga is a learning process, you must do at your own speed.”

Seven women and one guy joined the class and immediately began stretching out. I started stretching out too, pretending I knew what I was doing, which I didn’t, but rather liked doing anyway, greatly enjoyed in fact, especially watching all these fit middle-aged women in skimpy outfits warming up all around me in the candle-lit room with serene flute music coming from a Tibetan mountaintop.

I vaguely wondered if this might be why they call it “hot yoga,” but then the class started and all such worldly distractions disappeared as Lisa led the class though a host of flowing postures and breathing exercises meant to still the monkey in the mind, to free our spirits from past and present concerns, to find peace and sacredness of the moment, the simple act of being.

Truthfully, Warm Yoga nearly killed me at several points, especially when my dodgy right knee refused to cooperate on a difficult one-legged pose. But somehow, with Lisa’s gentle guidance, I even got through most of the challenging poses. By the time I was lying flat on my back during the final recovery period, breathing deeply and covered with sweat and relaxed as a steamed lasagna noodle, I truly realized why Maggie and 30 million other Americans find this ancient form of exercise so completely and utterly beguiling.

I’d completely forgotten about that final glorious touch — a soothing cool cloth smelling like my old lavender garden back in Maine, placed over the eyes. For a few lovely moments I was back in my old Maine garden, and in a bit of heaven.

I left the studio feeling like a new man with an old body that was eager to return as soon as possible. With or without the hot cocoa at the end.

Eye on GSO

We Believe in Greensboro

Remembering a radio icon of Christmas past

By Billy Eye

He said slip on anything and come on down. So she slipped on the top stair. — Bob Poole

Like most everyone in Greensboro in the 1960s, my family tuned in weekday mornings to WBIG 1470 AM to listen to Bob Poole, the number one morning radio personality in this city from the time he debuted in 1952 until his death in 1977.

Bob and his glamorous wife Gloria were friends with my parents, and anytime they visited gales of gregarious laughter spontaneously erupted from the living room. The four of them were naturally funny folks. An absolutely brilliant mind, Bob was far funnier off-mic than he was on the air.

One of my fondest memories growing up in Greensboro was having WBIG – ‘We Believe in Greensboro’ – on the radio Christmas mornings. For as long as I can remember, it served as our commercial-free soundtrack to present opening.

Bob Poole, aka ‘The Duke of Stoneville,’ would be enjoying time with his family while his engineer and sidekick Willie (Dailey) was spinning holiday platters for those of us at home, starting around 5 a.m. until noon: all the hits of the day by Andy Williams, Frank Sinatra, Alvin & the Chipmunks, Bing Crosby, Doris Day, Mitch Miller, Johnny Mathis, Perry Como and Ella Fitzgerald. Many of the classics that you hear every season were just getting their first spins in the sixties.

Every December on his weekday morning program Poole’s Paradise, leading up to the big day, Bob played a medley of different artists performing Jingle Bells, a manic mashup stitched together for his nationwide audience in 1949 when he was heard over the Mutual Broadcasting System.

If you grew up listening to Poole’s Paradise you’ll likely remember this blast from the past…

Click here for more on Bob Poole and his amazing career from the December 2014 issue of O.Henry magazine.

Listen to more Bob Poole radio clips here. Sadly, not a single Poole’s Paradise broadcast exists from his 25-year run in Greensboro.

Simple Life

Saying Goodbye, for Now

By Jim Dodson

Reprinted with permission by PineStraw Magazine.

When I was young, the only thing harder than the coming of Christmas was saying goodbye to it.

After weeks of anticipation and suspense, savoring the agonizing build-up to the big morning and everything that went with it — food, carols, festive lights, crowded stores, nights that held the prospect of snow — everything seemed to wind up in the twinkling of an ancient elfin eye, literally overnight.

Suddenly, Christmas magic was over: There were no presents left to unwrap, a fine dinner was reduced to tin-foiled leftovers in the fridge, favorite cousins were heading home, leaving behind a kind of postpartum lethargy that carried through the week to New Year’s, a finale that felt anticlimactic compared to the assorted glories of Christmas. As the ball was dropping on New Year’s Eve, it was the rare first night when I was even awake.

My parents, of course, were probably to blame for this phenomenon, for I was merely the product of their own unbounded enthusiasm for everything about the Christmas season.

Beginning with Thanksgiving, my mom became a baking fool and commenced decorating the house at the crack of the first December dawn. My dad, meanwhile, spent hours untangling and repairing strings of outdoor Christmas lights and lived for our annual trip down to the abandoned family home place deep in the woods near Hillsborough to shoot mistletoe out of the towering oaks that grew there. Our December trek to Ashe County to cut a live Christmas tree was a given, as was his Christmas office party, a lively afternoon affair conducted in the spirit of Dickens’ Fezziwig, a man whose love of commerce was only topped by his personal generosity to the people around him. In its own way, our mom’s annual open house before church service on Christmas Eve — the finale of her cooking and baking season — was equally festive, and something friends and neighbors counted upon every year to seal their own holiday spirit in a nimbus of love.

It was the goodbye part that always got to me.

The most exciting time of year — something I waited eagerly for eleven months of the year, a small eternity to a 10-year-old — seemed to suddenly arrive and disappear like the Christmas goose on the Cratchit family table.

To compound matters, in our neighborhood, several folks actually took down their Christmas trees the day after Christmas and hustled them out to the curb for collection like a disreputable uncle who’d overstayed his welcome.

I remember once taking a spin on a new Christmas bike and being startled to discover several of these sadly discarded Christmas trees, stripped bare save for a few straggling pieces of tinsel, discarded symbols of the season awaiting the coming of the trash man. To this day, that sight always saddens me.

Looking back, though I didn’t begin to comprehend it at the time, I learned a valuable life lesson from the slow coming and quick going of such happy Christmas seasons, this seductive blending of Christian tradition and Father Christmas — namely, that saying goodbye to people and things you love is, indeed, all about the wise use of time and simply one of life’s bittersweet inevitabilities, a fact of life that varies only by degrees of intensity and one’s own perception of what’s really important.

In the spirit of Old Fezziwig, human generosity never goes out of season.

Leavetaking of one kind or another happens every day in our lives, so commonplace and cordial it’s easy not to notice because such moments are so tightly woven into the fabric of the ordinary.

The perfect evening ends. Guests say goodnight. You kiss your spouse goodbye in the morning without a passing concern about the day ahead. We operate on an unseen principle that goodbye is never really goodbye — just a temporary parting.

And yet, in ancient times, given the brevity of ordinary life, goodbye really meant something. Roads were perilous and dangers rampant. The word “goodbye” was simply shorthand for “God be with you,” an acknowledgement of life’s fragile impermanence. By the same token, the word “farewell” comes from middle English and meant quite literally “fare thee well” on your onward journey, wherever it leads you and whatever rises up to meet you. Fare thee well on the road of this uncertain life.

Daily rituals aside, sometimes the act of saying goodbye does penetrate to the heart muscle and strikes a deeper chord, causing us to pause and think, the throat to constrict, the eyes to burn.

It happens unexpectedly when your child goes off to college or your favorite neighbors move. The job changes. Your daughter gets married. Illness comes. The dog must be put down.

The effect of these goodbyes can alter your perception of everything.

Following the death of his dog, the poet Pablo Neruda had nothing shy of a spiritual awakening. “I, the materialist,” he wrote, “who never believed in any promised heaven in the sky for any human being, I believe in a heaven I’ll never enter. Yes, I believe in a heaven for all dogdom where my dog waits for my arrival waving his fan-like tail in friendship.”

Death — believed to be the ultimate leavetaking by some, a mere hidden doorway to the onward adventure by others — makes everyone a believer in something, if only the value of a saying a heartfelt goodbye, for now.

Twenty years ago, though it was quite painful at the time, the smartest thing I ever did was leave my own young family behind to come home to be my old man’s caretaker as he was slipping the bonds of this world. With the help of a kindly hospice worker, I sat with him in my boyhood bedroom and tended his daily needs, talking about things both inconsequential and profound, just being with Mr. Fezziwig through the last hours of his life.

The night before he died, he politely asked me to help him into bed with my mother just down the hall. I remember how my eyes stung at the sound of them talking quietly beneath the quilt like the old lovers they were. They were saying goodbye. He passed serenely the next night, a goodbye that enriched my life immeasurably.

Five years later, I was sitting with my mother at her favorite restaurant on the water near our house in Maine where she suddenly admitted how powerfully she missed my father — and life in North Carolina. When I apologized for moving her to the nice assisted care residence near our house, she simply smiled, patted my hand and sipped her wine. “Don’t worry, sugar. That’s just life. I’ll see your father soon.”

Less than a week later, she suffered a stroke and was hospitalized. When I took my children to see their grandmother, she was lying in bed smiling at them. They kissed her and she seemed — crazy, I know — almost radiantly happy. I came back to sit with her that night and we held hands and talked of the smallest sorts of things — her love of peonies, her growing grandchildren and the pride she felt in all of us. Nothing was left unsaid.

She passed away peacefully the next morning.

Not too long afterward came another passing.

We — well, I — said a painful goodbye to the rugged post-and-beam house I built with my own hands on a forested hilltop, the place where my own children were born and where I grew an ambitious garden in the woods.

Handing over the keys to a couple from Massachusetts who had matching Doberman Pinschers was a moment that bruised my heart more than I care to admit. The house was my so-called “dream house,” the place I’d fully planned to spend the rest of my days digging in the garden and watching the seasons pass until some thoughtful person spread my ashes among the giant hosta plants and daylilies of my Redneck Philosopher’s Garden.

But dreams have a funny way of changing shape. Instead of forever, one bright sunny May afternoon I bid the place a reluctant “fare thee well” with a lump the size of a tulip bulb in my throat, choosing to take writer Beryl Markham’s good advice on such moments:

“I have learned that if you must leave a place that you have lived in and loved and where all your yesteryears are buried deep, leave it any way except a slow way, leave it the fastest way you can. Never turn back and never believe that an hour you remember is a better hour because it is dead. Passed years seem safe ones, vanquished ones, while the future lives in a cloud, formidable from a distance.”

I closed the door and didn’t look back. I’ve never been back. Though that house still shows up in my dreams from time to time.

“To live in this world,” echoes the poet Mary Oliver, “you must be able to do three things: to love what is mortal; to hold it against your bones knowing your own life depends on it; and, when the time comes to let it go, to let it go.”

Good advice for saying goodbye, I’ve learned, to anything you love from an old dog to a favorite holiday.

A decade ago we moved home to North Carolina and brought a beloved holiday ritual that started in that house on a snowy hilltop more than twenty-five years ago.

Our annual winter solstice party invites friends and neighbors to come share great homemade soup and my bride’s amazing desserts on the longest night of the year, illuminating the darkness with bawdy skits, Medieval songs, favorite poems, magic tricks — whatever moves the spirit — providing much laughter and Fezziwigian fellowship in a world that is forever passing away, an ancient celebration of our own fragile impermanence.

For our ever-widening circle of friends and family, it must be said, the winter solstice has become a valuable part of the Christmas season, the perfect prelude to the day that always came so slowly and passed too quickly.

When all the gifts are opened and the house has fallen quiet late on Christmas Day, I confess, I will stir the fire and pour myself a glass of good aged port and drink a little toast to all that’s passed through my life, still feeling a touch of the old sadness at saying goodbye — for now — to people and things I’ve loved, a bittersweet hollowness that is only filled by the hope that things don’t really end, that goodbye is really just another kind of beginning.

Simple Life

Limp Excuse

Finding a Good Story for a Bad Knee

By Jim Dodson

I’ve been limping along with a bum knee for exactly six months. One thing I’ve discovered — the painful way — is that I’m not a natural limper.

There are some people who are born to limp and look darn good doing it. Forest Gump, Ben Franklin and Dr. Strangelove all limped, and just look what it did for their careers. Ditto Grandpa on The Real McCoys, Napoleon Bonaparte and James Arness of Gunsmoke fame, who limped from a leg wound that won him a bronze star during the Second World War.

Then there are the athletes who limp. One of the greatest moments in the history of baseball — the best performance by a limping athlete, if you will — happened in the World Series of 1988 when an injured Kirk Gibson, nursing a bum left knee exactly like mine, startled fans by limping out of the dugout to pinch hit for the L.A. Dodgers, down 4-3 with two out in the bottom of the ninth in the first game of the series against the mighty Oakland A’s. Ace Dennis Eckersley was on the mound throwing smoke. Gibson somehow worked a full count and then swatted a home run to win the game over the right field fence.

My limping, on the other hand, is downright embarrassing. I look nothing like Kirk Gibson limping around the bases while the crowd in L.A. loses their minds and the great Curt Gowdy hollers in disbelief, “It’s a miracle, I tell you! A miracle.”

A bum knee, in short, needs a dramatic narrative. But my limp looks like a grocery cart missing a front wheel or an old pirate who lost part of his peg leg in a tavern brawl.

People who see me limping along like an old pirate pushing a broken grocery cart feel so sorry for me. I can see it in their faces — pure, undisguised limping pity.

“Oh, dear, are you all right?” a tender-hearted granny-sort asked me the other evening as I limped through Harris Teeter to buy my first quart of seasonal egg nog.

“Yes ma’am,” I said truthfully. “It only hurts when I walk.”

“Oh, sweetie, how did you injure it?” she wondered, the picture of deep granny-type concern.

I told her the truth. “If you must know, I recently leapt out of a helicopter into a raging flooded river to save a litter of golden retriever puppies about to go over a waterfall in a washtub.”

She was so moved she could hardly speak.

“That is so brave,” she finally managed, wiping a tear and hugging me.

“Yes ma’am. The best thing is, every one of the puppies survived. Now I’m finding them all good homes for Christmas.”

True, I lied. You probably guessed that by now. But having a bum knee and a sorry limp with no narrative at Christmas can change you in ways that make Dr. Strangelove look like a Boy Scout selling homemade brownies.

How could I possibly tell that sweet little granny-like person with an honest face that I simply hurt it while playing golf on a rainy afternoon back in May? That all I did was make a sorry swing with a sand wedge and feel the sand shift beneath my left foot and something in my knee twist. What kind of silly injury is that?

Back in my early teens and twenties, after all, my own mother used to call me Hurricane Jimmy because I displayed a talent for injuring myself in all kinds of interesting ways: falling off my bike or out of trees, tripping into open holes, coming home with a bloody nose or flesh wound after every sort of neighborhood game. I never cried and healed fast. Getting injured was my thing.

For example, I nearly put out my right eye by sliding home in a Little League baseball game and colliding with the catcher, a moment that briefly gained me the admiration of classmates and the attention of the elusive Della Hockaday. I got to wear an eye patch to school for a week and was thus encouraged to present Della a mood ring from Woolworths, which she wore for almost two whole weeks before giving it back in order to go steady with Woody C. Ham, who had a more interesting injury than mine, having broken his arm by falling down the bus steps. He had a big honking cast on his arm that the whole school got to sign, making him an instant celebrity. By then my eye patch was gone, my heroic baseball injury forgotten, and so was any hope of romance with Della Hockaday —my first hard lesson in love and personal injury.

That next winter, while skiing in western Maryland, I crashed through a snow fence and wound up spending New Year’s Eve with my right leg in a sling at a Catholic hospital where the nuns made a big fuss over me. I believe this might be where I had my first sip of eggnog — straight nog, of course. So I owe the nuns that. But it just wasn’t the same as Della Hockaday.

Rather disappointingly, I played two years of organized football but never had a decent injury to speak of until college, where I foolishly attempted to make the university’s team as an invited walk on and tore apart my dodgy ski bum knee and required surgery. I spent a month hobbling on crutches with a leg cast that made Woody C. Ham’s look like a cheap trick just to get Della Hockaday in the mood.

Later, I crashed gloriously headlong into the bleachers during a heated intramural basketball game that required a dozen stitches in my forehead, but made me look more like a son of Frankenstein than Hurricane Jimmy. On the plus side, that very next summer, working on a crew putting up lightning rods on barns, I drove a steel rod threw my hand and wound up being the head usher at my college roomie’s wedding with a right hand swaddled up like baby Jesus. I was a big hit with the bridesmaids.

In my twenties I played on three different softball teams in Atlanta and wound up having that same bum right knee seriously operated on twice more, each time milking my injury for all it was worth.

Then something strange and totally out of character happened. I moved to New England, got married, became a father, built my own a house on a forested hill and became a crazed landscape gardener. During those two decades I traveled the world walking golf courses and rebuilt the ancient stone walls that surrounded our property, with plenty of cuts and bruises, but no major injuries worth mentioning. I even spent six weeks in Africa chasing crazy plant hunters though some of the scariest terrains on earth with nothing more to show than a bad tick bite and a few gouges. I was informed by our guide that the tick bite might cause a terrible case of jungle fever and I might wake up in the dead of night shouting out for Kim Bassinger or at least Della Hockaday. But sadly, it just never happened.

Where had Hurricane Jimmy gone? Life is so bittersweet and short when you’re living from one injury to the next.

All of which makes the silly little injury to my “good” knee in a sand trap last May so embarrassing — maybe even a true sign of age and creeping decrepitude. All it took was a little twist in the sand and I’ve been limping like Chester on Gunsmoke ever since.

The orthopedic specialist who examined the pathetic knee in question pointed out that I’m too young for new artificial knees and suggested I simply shut up and give my sissified injury time to heal on its own, which I more or less have — except for the shutting up part.

At the risk of sounding like that sixth grade Lothario Woody C. Ham, since every other person you meet here in the Sandhills can boast of either a new artificial hip or pair of new knees and is more than happy to show off with a brief tango or tell you about their advanced aerobics class at First Health, I’ve created my own dramatic narrative to explain my pathetic limp in grocery stores.

True, six months has officially come and gone and — yes — the sissy knee feels better and my limp seems to be finally fading a bit. But this ordeal is so unworthy of my happy Hurricane Jimmy days, I’ve had to resort to bold narrative measures.

Which explains why I’m drinking straight egg nog with both hands this Christmas and telling myself (and anyone else who will listen) that at least I saved those adorable puppies in the nick of time and found them a warm safe home for the holidays.

Wherever she’s gone, I hope Della — depending on her mood — might be proud.

Simple Life

Saying Grace is Our Saving Grace

By Jim Dodson

In our house, saying grace at Thanksgiving — anytime, really — is something of a cosmic adventure. Like Forest Gump’s box of chocolate, you never quite know what you’ll get.

I suppose this is because we’re a fairly diverse lot as blended modern families go, a spiritually mixed tribe that includes everything from Catholic elders to Jewish young people, with a liberal sprinkling of Protestants in the middle. My wife grew up Roman Catholic but her college-boy sons, who were reared in a reformed Jewish tradition, now see themselves as broad-minded, multi-faith guardians of a fragile planet, enviro-crusaders. My own children, who grew up stout little Episcopalians singing in the Chapel Choir, now seem more inclined toward the meditational power of Buddhism seasoned with a smidge of the enlightened agnosticism from their late Scottish grandmother.

If there is fault to be assigned for this hot-house society of homegrown free-thinkers who gather round our supper table only a few times a year now, typically only at the holidays, it probably falls on the heads of my wife and me who dutifully instructed our children in the spiritual traditions of their forebears but strongly encouraged them to make up their own minds about matters of the spirit, for life has a way of road testing endurance and faith in a variety of unexpected ways.

Still, under my roof, I have certain practices and beliefs that aren’t fully negotiable and saying grace — offering a simple blessing of thanks over a shared evening meal — is one of them. Maybe it’s the force of tradition that perpetuates this ritual of gathering or possibly the simple grace that comes with the wisdom of saying thank-you.

Gratitude, goes an old French proverb, is the heart’s memory. “The mouth gives voice to what fills the heart,” points out Luke’s gospel.

Whatever it is, and regardless of their true feelings about the practice, our diverse band of cosmic travelers is pretty good-humored about humoring the old man’s old-fashioned desire to join hands, bow heads, and thank whatever kindly force of the universe allowed us to gather and break bread.

Perhaps they sense, as I certainly do, that in a world that’s moving as swiftly and unpredictably as the one around us does, the act of pausing to merely express a timeless form of gratitude to whatever divine and mysterious power shapes and illumines our lives is not only a healthy social exercise but a way of getting in touch with each other’s heart.

But there are always nice surprises, like the time my young daughter Maggie, then about age 4, pointedly asked to say her first grace at Thanksgiving and came out with: “Dear God, thanks for this nice food Mom made. And, oh, by the way, Christmas is coming up and I’d really like to have that doll house. And please stop Jack from whistling at bedtime. He’s so annoying.”

As far as this patriarch is concerned, all thanks are welcome. Blessings come in every form, as diverse and surprising as life itself.

My own faith journey, after all, is a pretty mixed affair of the heart. My great great grandfather was an itinerate Methodist preacher who founded churches across the state after the Civil War but I grew up in a skinny-legged Lutheran in Greensboro surrounded by two large and robust food-loving Methodist and Southern Baptist clans for whom sharing a homemade meal – and saying grace over it – was central to their exercise of faith. But this was just the foundation of my own magical mystery tour of grace. My first memorized blessing was the classic: “God is great. God is good. Let us thank him for our Food,” though some years later I raised more than a few shocked aunty eyebrows by declaring, “Good gravy. Good meat. Good God, let’s eat!”

By attending a Scout troop at a Quaker church, I grew fascinated by the idea of an inner light of God in every soul and the simplicity of Quaker ways. In high school, meanwhile, I fell hard for the transcendental writings of Henry Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson, which naturally led me on to the sages of the East who heavily influenced them and a deepening love affair with the beautiful writings of ancient Hindu, Buddhist and Sufi poets whose grasp of the beloved seemed to eclipse and inform my own evolving understanding of a loving force that can’t be defined or contained by any particular religion or rigid doctrine.

To this day, as a result, wherever work or pleasure travels take me, I love turning up at a local cathedral, church, temple or synagogue simply to sit and soak up the music and prayers of the faithful. I even dig sitting in empty churches — recalling Emerson’s famous remark that the silence before the service is often more powerful than any sermon.

Moreover, as I age, like my own father and his father before him, I find myself less inclined toward the social politics and endless theological squabbles of modern church life in favor of the simple splendor of nature and changing seasons, seeing more of God’s presence in the smallest movements of the natural world, the silence of a vernal pool in spring, a walk along a leaf-strewn dirt road in fall, hungry birds at a winter feeder or my own growing garden. The path to heaven, as good and cheerful Buddhist friend of mine likes to say, is heaven itself.

During the two decades we lived on a forested hill in Maine, I claimed a granite rock looming over a hidden stream in the woods behind my house where the dogs and I used to go sit for a hour or so once a week, my private woodland cathedral, my personal philosopher’s stone where I retreated to just sit and think or not think, to simply observe and be observed by sovereigns of the forest. Invariably, I wound up counting my blessings.

Once, on a book tour, a radio interviewer asked me what religion I practiced.

Without thinking, I joked that I was probably unfit for any religion that would have me, per se, but was essentially a “Southern Transcendentalist and practicing Quaking Buddho-Episcotarian with a strong fondness for old timey Baptist hymns and a good Methodist covered dish homecoming supper on the lawn.”

“Is that, like, a real religion?” she wondered.

“Yes ma’am. With only one known practicing member, I’m afraid.”

When one of our own spiritual wayfaring progeny agrees to say grace over a holiday meal and comes out with a rambling exhortation about the shrinking Arctic shelf or the perils to the planet of an unchecked military industrial complex, I simply thank God for their own growing awareness the world they are inheriting.

Saying grace is, after all, simply a form of prayer — a conversation between Heaven and human beings as diverse as human society itself, dating back thousands of years before any single religion got itself organized. “Pray,” wrote the blind poet Homer, “for all men need the aid of the gods.”

Not surprisingly, prayers of gratitude or thanksgiving are among the oldest hymns of man, recorded as far back as ancient Mesopotamia. In every society the act of giving thanks to a higher power for the abundance of field and table is one of the most commonly defining elements of human civilization.

America’s first Thanksgiving celebration at Plymouth, Massachusetts, in 1621, was essentially a communal prayer of thanks to God for providing the food that sustained their fledgling colony in a dangerous new world. Saying grace from that day forward invariably took the form of thanking God as well as the hands who made the meal.

For more than two decades, even my Scottish mother-in-law, a wise old agnostic with a deeply tender heart, grasped the power of this idea and loved to lead us all in her favorite childhood grace – “Some hae meat and canna eat / Some hae meat and want it. But we hae meat and we can eat and so the Lord be thankit!”

Lately I’ve been researching potential new blessings and graces for our New Age Turkey Day table where the Southern-fried Transcendental patriarch always gets to say a few words of thanks as the candles are lot and hands joined. Lately, I find, the fewer the better.

A sampling of this year’s leading contenders:

“Do good and don’t look back.” – Dutch proverb

“He prayeth best who loveth best; all things both great and small.” – from “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” By Samuel Taylor Coleridge

“If your only prayer was thank you – that would be enough.” – Meister Eckhart

“A table is not blessed if it has fed no scholars.” – Yiddish proverb

“Blessed are we who can laugh at ourselves, for we shall never cease to be amused.” – Anonymous

“Grub first, then ethics.” – Bertholt Brecht

“Eat your bread with joy, drink your wine with a merry heart.” – Book of Ecclesiastes

“May the love that’s in my heart pass from my love to yours.” – Traditional American blessing

“Thou hast given me much. Give me one more thing – a grateful heart.” – George Herbert, English poet and pastor

Somehow, hands joined, this just says Thanksgiving to me.

Embracing Juno

The tarot reading — and tattoo — that changed my life

By Corrinne Rosquillo

In 2018, I visited New Orleans for the first time. It’s a magical city, full of history and an old energy that cannot be described, only felt. It was where I received my first professional tarot reading — not from some Creole witch (missed opportunity, I know), but from an elderly white man with a calming presence.

I don’t remember his name now. I wish I did. I’m sure it was something like John or Mark. Ordinary, simple — fitting. He did a standard reading with twelve cards. The first eleven of them are a blur, but the final card — the card meant to represent me — still appears in my mind’s eye with crystal clarity: Juno, Queen of the Gods, a force to be reckoned with. That, and the reader’s parting words: “You are your own worst enemy. You can accomplish anything if you get out of your own way.”

I cried because I knew it was true. His words resonated, touching something deep within me that had been there all along, a continuing theme throughout my life. That’s what tarot does — it doesn’t tell you your future or some hidden secret of the universe. It points out what has been sitting in front of you that you were too busy, too distracted to notice.

At the time, I struggled with anxiety and depression. I still do; I probably always will. But I got the message loud and clear.

I paid him via Venmo and left.

Fast forward to 2019, where a knee surgery plunged me into the deepest depression of my life, a depression that almost killed me. Key word: almost. I’m still here, winning battles against myself.

Those words, spoken to me years ago, still resonate. I knew in 2019 that I wanted to create a permanent reminder for when my depression would inevitably rear its ugly head again. Yesterday, I finished that reminder with the help of Gene Cash at Seven Sagas Tattoo Studio.

I took the classic Roman Juno and made her mine. I have a woodblock style crane on my right shoulder that represents my first triumph over depression, so I thought, why not a Japanese Juno? Some of her classic symbols are still there: the peacock feathers, the spear, the moon, the lotus. The words beside her, written in Japanese, are purely for me to know: watashi no kataki wa jibun. My enemy is me.

But my favorite element of the whole piece? If you look carefully, the top line of the moon isn’t finished. It’s intentional, an aesthetic called “wabi sabi” in Japanese. It’s about appreciating beauty that is “imperfect, impermanent and incomplete” in nature. Fitting.

Juno is on my right arm to remind me that I am a goddess, capable of overcoming anything. So long as I believe it, I know I will.

To that tarot reader, wherever you are, thank you for awakening the divine in me.

Corrinne Rosquillo is a contributor of O.Henry — yes, the goddess with the gorgeous tattoo of Juno on her arm.

Eye on GSO

Once in a Lullaby

Tales from the real Land of Oz

By Billy Eye

Last month, when Wicked blew through town, I was reminded of my own trip over the rainbow to the actual Land of Oz.

Perhaps you recall that fabled but star-crossed 1970s amusement park nestled atop Beech Mountain? You entered the attraction through Dorothy’s Kansas farmhouse, where you would “experience” the tornado and then, once the dust settled, exit the home to find two legs in striped stockings sticking out from under the frame.

Joining Dorothy’s journey down the Yellow Brick Road, park guests encountered the Scarecrow, Tin Man, Cowardly Lion and the Wicked Witch of the West. The adventure culminated with a big stage extravaganza at the Wizard’s Emerald City castle, then visitors were whisked back to the parking lot in a gondola lift retrofitted to look like a hot-air balloon.

Land of Oz opened in 1970 as a sister attraction to Tweetsie Railroad. After a successful first year, attendance grew spotty even before a fire badly damaged the premises in 1975. New owners pumped major money into the venture in 1977. That summer I was hired to play the Scarecrow for a promotional shopping mall tour across a three-state region.

At the Carolina Circle in Greensboro, Dorothy and I entertained children with a musical puppet show created by Jerry Halliday (a Vegas mainstay with a risqué show you wouldn’t dream of taking your kids to, although his Oz puppets were adorable). I only visited the Land of Oz theme park once on a VIP tour meant to give us a sense of what the attraction was all about.

Neglected for decades but mostly intact (except for the Emerald City, which was raised for a housing development), Oz has been open to the public summer weekends since 2019 as more of a theatrical experience. In fact, their Autumn at Oz event is the largest Wizard of Oz-themed festival in the world. (Eye attempted to get tickets in 2016 when they were booking limited monthly tours, but the demand was so high that it crashed their computer system.)

After 30 years of slow but ongoing restorations, the Yellow Brick Road is once again the pathway to a magical place from a long ago past, one you may have heard of once in a lullaby.

Next summer, a somewhat truncated but magnificently restored Land of Oz will once again open their gates for visitors and private parties. Visit landofoznc.com for more details.

Simple Life

The View From a Begrudging Service Human

By Jim Dodson

Someone once told me the key to a long and happy life is understanding why you’re on this earth.

I used to think it was to write books and harmless essays, edit magazines and enjoy an occasional bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwich with extra mayo and not too much guilt.

Ha! What a laugh. Turns out my real purpose in life is to serve as personal valet — fulltime butler, if you prefer — to a pack of demanding domestic animals.

The aforementioned animals live in our house. Or rather I live in theirs.

They number five in all: three dogs, two cats. Three are rescues, two are purebreds. Two are old and whiny, two are young and pushy, one is a little of both. All are as demanding as spoiled Saudi princes.

Old Ella, a golden retriever, hails from a barn in rural Maine. She’s 13 and basically dumb as a rusted pump handle and twice as stubborn. She can be sweet as long as it serves her purposes. Over the years she has survived every affliction known to doghood and boasts the vet bills to prove it. Our vet faithfully sends Old Ella birthday greetings thanking her for another year of generously underwriting their new wing. All Old Ella cares about, frankly, is eating until she blows up and rubbing her butt on the most expensive rug in the house.

No one knows exactly how old Old Rufus is. A fluffy yellow tomcat, he was old and cranky as hell when my soft-hearted wife brought him home from SCC campus seven years ago. God only knows his true age now, the George Hamilton of tabby cats. He boasts an impressive vet bill too because he can’t — how shall I delicately put this? — poop. But like his canine partner-in-crime Old Ella, Old Roof never misses a meal — his or anyone else’s — and is unfailingly sweet to perfect strangers and the staff at the vet’s. So cute and cuddly. Me, however, he treats like his Mongolian servant, following me everywhere demanding food and carping like an old man who can’t get his plumbing unstuck. He stays out all night, complains all day. A Romeo who can’t poop.

Mulligan is my dog, dang near perfect, a Carolina black dog I found as a mere pup living wild and free eight years ago. She is as smart as our current sitting governor (actually, smarter) and better behaved unless you try to steal her food, at which point she will take you down and you won’t get up. Wherever I go, she goes. Her tail is always wagging, her soulful brown eyes always shining with gratitude. She cannot believe she has to put up with a household full of such complaining, pooping and non-pooping dogs and cats.

Next comes Ajax, aged three, a purebred golden aptly named for the giant warrior of Greek mythology — I tend to call him Junior simply because he’s the most spoiled loveable lug on four legs. Junior was a surprise 10th wedding anniversary gift to my bride a few years back, worryingly smart and far too handsome. Not surprisingly, my wife has completely ruined him. I call him the “Worst Dog on Earth” because he pays absolutely no attention to anything I say to him, steals my shoes and takes himself for unauthorized moonlight swims in the pool.

Our newest resident is Boo Radley, a handsome year-old gray tiger cat our college-boy lad Conner found wandering the streets of The Pines as a kitten. His original name was Nico but somehow Boo Radley suited him better, probably because he looks scary but turns out to be a true pussy cat with questionable friends. One morning not long ago I looked out and saw him sauntering along the driveway with a young gray fox a neighbor feeds. The two are evidently pals. Who can figure. Boo’s preferred way of coming in from a fine night out with foxes is to bang on my office window and demand entry.

Keeping up with the needs and complaints of this bunch, let me tell you, ain’t no picnic at Downton Abbey.

I rise around four each morning to write, put on the coffee and shuffle off to my office to try and work. Silly me.

Soon comes Boo Radley’s insistent rap at the window. Old Rufus, meanwhile, waits at the back door, annoyed and constipated beyond belief. The two meet in the utility room where they hiss and snarl at each other until the butler separates and feeds them both.

At this point Mulligan is out the back door, eager to scour the property for any unauthorized critters that may need to be killed. She detests the expensive organic gourmet dog food we provide and would much prefer, say, freshly killed antelope for breakfast.

Old Ella is up, too, faithfully tagging after Mulligan, the alpha dog on her appointed rounds. Eventually Junior and his mistress make a sleepy appearance, she with a yawn, he with a shoe, and he lumbers out for a pee and perhaps a quick morning dip in the pool.

Soon everyone is back, eating, demanding more, squabbling over who got more of the good stuff. After this everyone goes their separate ways for the day until the process is repeated in the evening.

Not long ago I read that the average dog costs its owner eight grand over the course of its life, the average cat about a third less.

By this math I project we’ll have laid out close to forty grand before my days as a butler to domestic animals wind down.

It’s a good thing they let me live here for free.