Tag: Life’s Funny

Life’s Funny

Life's Funny

The Fruit of the Spirit

The legacies of two nature-loving families intertwine

By Maria Johnson

The idea sprouted last year with a text sent in a fit of arboreal passion.

“Hey Ro-Ro,” the message said. “I need to talk to you about trees.”

Ro-Ro, aka Rosemary Kenerly, the communications manager at Greensboro College, was not surprised to hear from her friend and neighbor, David Craft.

She knew him as a devoted naturalist and one who shuns formality, a guy who likes to make things happen, especially when those things involve planting trees.

David’s dad, the late Bill Craft, was the Johnny Appleseed of Greensboro. He planted hundreds of trees across the community. David, the sixth of nine kids, followed in his father’s muddy footsteps, helping to run the family’s insurance agency while staying close to spade and earth.

Now 63, he supports land conservation efforts and rolls up his sleeves with a band of volunteers, sometimes playfully known as the Green Hill Billies, who help to maintain Green Hill Cemetery, a city-owned graveyard on the northern edge of downtown.

David’s pushing to have the 150-year-old cemetery, a jewel box of specimen trees and one of his dad’s favorite planting grounds, certified as an arboretum.

Knowing David’s love of latching onto leafy projects, Kenerly replied to his text with cautious curiosity. She invited him to her office.

There, David, who often turns out in Carhartt work clothes and Merrell boots, unfurled a story about a long-ago Greensboro College professor named Robert Dunstan.

He explained that Dunstan taught Romance languages at GC for more than 30 years, from the late 1920s to the early ’60s. A spry and dapper little man, he was a respected teacher who ambled about campus in a bow tie and beret. But, like Craft’s father, his greatest public legacy came from what he did outside of his official career.

Eaten up with horticulture, especially the cultivation of fruits and nuts, Dunstan pursued his hobby at his then-rural home off Pinecroft Road. Today that land is covered by a mall and convention center.

He tinkered, grafted, pollinated his way to becoming a legend among nursery folk. He came up with a disease-resistant hybrid grape that basically saved the French wine industry. He also developed a chestnut tree that was resistant to a blight that nearly wiped the tree — an important source of shade, food and lumber — from the Eastern U.S. in the early 20th century. The near-extinction is widely considered to be the biggest ecological disaster in this country’s history.

Dunstan’s breakthrough was to cross American chestnut trees that were genetically resistant to the blight, thanks to natural mutations, with Chinese chestnuts — also unruffled by blight — to form a new, hardier variety.

After retiring, Dunstan and his wife, Katherine, sold their hobby farm and relocated to northern Florida to be near their daughter and her plant-geneticist husband. Dunstan passed his secrets and his saplings on to his grandson, Robert “Bob” Wallace, and nudged him to turn the trees into a business, which he did.

Today, Bob Wallace’s sons, Iain and Robert II, run Chestnut Hill Nursery, which sells patented Dunstan Chestnut trees across the country, chiefly to hunters who rely on the nuts to attract deer. In the last 40 years, the nursery has sold enough trees to cover a quarter-million acres, according to Bob Wallace.

A couple of years ago, an ad for the nursery popped up on David Craft’s Facebook page. He remembered a 2016 O.Henry story about Dunstan (ohenrymag.com/the-nutty-professor/). He looked up the piece, refreshed his memory and mail-ordered four small Dunstan trees as a novelty for his Randolph County farm.

The following year, David learned that some Walmart garden centers stocked Dunstan trees seasonly. To save shipping costs and land bigger trees, he drove to Sanford and stuffed his wife’s Audi hatchback with four more Dunstan trees, this time 8-footers.

“They barely fit,” he says of the rolling forest.

He planted some of his Dunstan trees on his farm and some in Green Hill Cemetery. He persuaded a friend in Fisher Park to tuck in three trees around his home.

Now, sitting in Kenerly’s office, David appealed to GC to give Dunstan his due by planting his trees on campus and remembering him with a ceremony and plaque.

“It wasn’t really a hard sell,” remembers David, ever the insurance salesman. “They came back and said, ‘Yeah, we like this idea.’”

So, on Nov. 7, a home game and senior day for The Pride football team, the college will honor Dunstan. That morning, GC officials will oversee the planting of four Dunstan Chestnuts on campus: two in front of the admissions house at the corner of West Market and College Place and two more at the southwest corner of campus along McGee Street, skirting the newly opened Downtown Greenway.

Another pair of Dunstan trees will go in the Fisher Park front yard of the college president’s home on Bessemer Avenue.

For the occasion, Chestnut Hill Nursery will donate young trees to the college.

Planted in pairs for pollination, the trees should bear nuts in three to five years. At maturity, in 15 to 20 years, the trees could reach 50 to 70 feet tall with a spread of 40 feet — big enough to provide sustenance, shade, swings and stories for decades to come. A chestnut tree can live to be 100 years old.

The public is invited to witness the plantings and to dig their own holes. Homeowners can order Dunstan Chestnuts online from the locally-owned Guilford Garden Center.

Bob Wallace says his grandfather would be happy about the recognition and happier yet that his trees are being put in the ground generations after he developed them.

Professor Dunstan foresaw that his discovery would help to repopulate the country with chestnuts, which accounted for a quarter of all hardwoods before the blight. Born in 1901, he witnessed the die-off while visiting the North Carolina mountains as a young man, and he grieved the loss of beauty.

“The mountains were white with chestnut blossoms,” he told his grandson. David never met Dunstan, but he’s confident that his dad’s mom, Eva Phelps Craft, a local public health officer and well-connected naturalist, would have known Dunstan and his wife.

His grandmother would be proud, David says, that he carries on the family’s activist bent and their Earth-loving labors.

Bob Wallace says the same of Dunstan. Like his grandfather — and everyone who plants a tree that likely will outlive them— Wallace sees a day beyond his own horizon.

He trusts the fruit.

“The apple doesn’t fall very far from the tree,” the 70-year-old Wallace notes.

Or in this case, the chestnut. OH

Maria Johnson is a contributing editor of O.Henry. Email her at ohenrymaria@gmail.com.

Life’s Funny

Increasingly Relevant — and Revenant

Rising star Murphy Campbell channels the spirit and music of days gone by

By Maria Johnson

Photograph by Timothy Duffy

Murphy Campbell sits in a Greensboro coffeehouse, sips herbal iced tea, and laughs knowingly at a question about her Instagram handle, @murphydoesnotmatter.

Yeah, she explains with a grin, she created the account when she was 14, trying to be edgy and self-deprecating, hoping to fit in at Weaver Academy, Greensboro’s arts magnet high school.

She scrolls through her phone and finds a picture of herself from those days. Dark clothes and lots of eye make-up.

Now on the eve of her 20th birthday, she has ditched the somber look, and she favors high-neck, vintage clothes that hark to the era of her art. She carries herself with the confidence of who she is: a youthful force on the old-timey music scene.

So much has happened in the last year.

Last September, she turned loose her first recordings, a self-titled, four-track, extended-play release featuring well-known area musicians.

In April, she was quoted in Rolling Stone magazine after she kicked up a social media fuss about her voice and music being impersonated, poorly, by AI robots on major streaming services.

In May, the real Murphy finished her first full-length album, Revenant, based on newly-discovered ballads sung by her ancestors and others in the North Carolina mountains. The album and an accompanying documentary — shot by the same team that did My Music with Rhiannon Giddens for PBS in 2023 — are expected to debut soon.

The double-barreled project landed her on the cover of Down the Road, an annual journal for lovers of Western North Carolina music.

The same month, she climbed on stage at the Blue Ridge Music Center in Galax, Va., as a guest on WFDD-FM’s The Martha Bassett Show, a highly acclaimed roots music show with a worldwide following on YouTube.

The gigs just kept on coming.

Early this month, she will perform at the Earl Scruggs Music Festival in Mill Spring, a gathering headlined by The Avett Brothers, Del McCoury Band and banjo virtuoso Béla Fleck.

Midmonth, she will play for the first time at the N.C. Folk Festival in Greensboro, a few miles from her home in the northwest corner of Guilford County.

She will appear — as the last act, on the last day — in the Jan Van Dyke Performance Space, a cozy cavern in the Greensboro Cultural Center.

She asked the organizers for a slot because she believes that more local artists should be included in the festival.

Murphy has never been one to shy away from what she wants.

As a grade-schooler, she changed her name after learning that her mother almost named her for a relative who died after being attacked by a pet spider monkey.

Undeterred by the monkey-borne legacy, the youngster announced that henceforth she would be known as Murphy.

“I just resonated with that,” she says.

A few years later, she moseyed into her older brother’s room — he’d just left for college — picked up his banjo and started noodling. She was inspired to do more after visiting her mother’s family in mountainous Bakersville, where she saw an older woman playing a banjo on the street.

“I’d never seen a woman playing clawhammer,” she says, referring to a technique of picking. “I really wanted to do that.”

Murphy taught herself clawhammer and became a regular at rural house jams and flat-footing meet-ups in North Carolina and Virginia, where people gathered to pick, stomp and trill the night away.

She had found her music and her people in a world very different from what she encountered in school, where she studied recording engineering.

“I got so sick of the concept of digital media and digital recording, how easy it is to alter it,” she says. “It just felt so disingenuous in a lot of ways . . . how much we lie to people’s ears. You can’t do that with old-timey music. It is what it is.”

To get herself through school days, she clamped on headphones as big as biscuits and listened to recordings of Walkertown banjoist and guitarist Riley Baugus, whose picking was featured in Cold Mountain, a 2003 movie based on Charles Frazier’s best-selling novel set in North Carolina.

Later, a mutual friend introduced her to the burly, bearded Baugus, who favors bib overalls.

“I told him, ‘You’re like my Taylor Swift,’” she says, laughing. “He references that a lot.”

Baugus and his longtime friend, Stokes County singer-songwriter Laurelyn Dossett, took the youngster under their wings.

“Without them, nothing I’ve done in this past year would have happened,” she says.

Dossett and Baugus encouraged Murphy to run with her latest project, which she stumbled upon a year ago. As Murphy tells it, she was at home, celebrating her birthday in her own way — by taking a hike then reading a PDF of southern Appalachian ballads collected more than a century ago.

The author, an English folklorist named Cecil Sharp, scoured the mountains from 1916 to 1918, collecting ballads that he cataloged by date. For fun, Murphy turned to her birthdate in 1918 to see what Sharp had unearthed that day.

She was shocked to see that he had harvested songs from Mitchell County, some coming from her kin four or five generations back. One distant relative, Julie Boone, contributed 40 ballads.

Murphy’s creative senses tingled.

What if she resurrected some of those long-forgotten ballads, many of which were bluesy tunes passed along by formerly enslaved people in the community known locally as Egypt Town.

A week later, Murphy drove to her maternal great-grandparents’ graves, sat on their plots and pondered what to do next. They had been part of a gospel quartet, and Murphy thought about recording in their spiritual home, Rebels Creek Baptist Church, but the church had been damaged by Hurricane Helene’s flooding.

A nearby house of worship, Kona Church, was high and dry, however. Murphy decided that could work.

On the drive home, a word came to her: revenant.

She swears over her herbal iced tea that she didn’t know what “revenant” meant. She looked it up when she got home; it’s a ghost who comes back to deliver a warning to the living.

Murphy took that to mean that she’d better high tail it to a microphone and record the ballads once sung by Julie Boone and her contemporaries.

“This is for Julie,” she says. “She, ultimately, is the revenant.”

A few phone calls later, Murphy secured Kona Church.

After being rejected by potential investors, who balked at recording in an old church with no acoustic updates, Murphy launched a Kickstarter campaign. She asked for $15,000. She got $30,000.

She drafted five guys — four musicians and a sound engineer who knows his way around traditional music — to help her record. Then she rented an Airbnb near Kona Church and cooked for everyone for a week, until the project was done.

Experienced filmmakers Will and Deni McIntyre, of Hendersonville, chronicled the album-making. Murphy says the plan is to trickle out singles this fall. The full album and doc will be released in tandem, she says, hopefully before she leaves for a European tour in the spring.

She’s not sure yet which recording label will handle the album, but she promises it’ll be an outfit dedicated to preserving of old music.

The documentary distributor? That’s undecided, too.

What about the Instagram handle? Does she plan to keep that?

Definitely, she says, adding that it’s not self-deprecating any more; it’s ironic.

“I know I’m doing things that do matter,” she says. OH

Maria Johnson is a contributing editor of O.Henry. Email her at ohenrymaria@gmail.com.

2026 Department Life's Funny

Life’s Funny

Once Upon a Time

An adult finds a secret garden in children’s books

By Maria Johnson

Left to Right: Michelle Osborne, Cary Jackson-Adams, Jill Hare

Sometimes, when I’m looking for a soft and easy peace on a sleepless night, I’ll crook a finger and hook the spine of a children’s book, sweet shelved reminders of my boys’ younger years.

Maybe I’ll sink into the touching and funny Charlotte’s Web by the great E.B. White.

Or loll in the witty wordplay of Where the Sidewalk Ends by Shel Silverstein.

Or delight in A Child’s Calendar by John Updike, who was acclaimed — as in, he won two Pulitzer Prizes — for his serious adult fiction but clearly enjoyed tickling himself and his readers with simple reflections on every month of the year.

Here’s how he begins his ode to August:

The sprinkler twirls.

The summer wanes.

The pavement wears popsicle stains.

Popsicle stains. Can’t you just see the red blotches on asphalt? He ends with this:

The trees are bored

With being green.

Some people leave the local scene

And go to seaside

Bungalows

And take off nearly

All their clothes.

The verse is paired with an illustration of a bare-butt, pale-cheeked child on the beach. Every time I see that, I smile because, you know, butts.

I felt so validated when I read recently that another of my favorite writers, Ann Patchett, recommended reading young-adult books — the non-upsetting kind— if you want to fall asleep and stay asleep.

You bet your sweet Life of Pi.

And I’ll go even further down the literary food chain. I’ve been known to seek the soothing, mantra-like effect of word and rhythm in a toddler’s board book. And I swear on a stack of Dr. Seuss, if you say one word against the brilliant Margaret Wise Brown, author of Goodnight Moon, I will barge into your great green room and personally pop your red balloon.

So I surprised myself the first time I watched the YouTube video of Wonder Together: You & Me, the singalong version of a children’s story published a few months ago by three Greensboro Day School teachers.

One of them, lower-school music teacher Jill Hare, performs the song over a tinkly keyboard tune. She sings the lyrics that upper-school art teacher Carey Jackson-Adams originally wrote as a poem. Illustrations by lower-school art teacher Michelle Osborne flash in the background.

Have you ever counted all the drops in the sea?

Or climbed to the top of a redwood tree?

Have you seen the sky after a cool summer rain?

Or felt the roar of a mighty freight train?

Have you ever tasted a sun-sweetened fruit?

Or pet a new kitten, all fuzzy and cute?

Have you felt someone’s love when they hug you so tight?

Or smelled cookies baking and just wanted a bite?

My grown-up brain had questions — I mean who, really, has ever climbed to the top of a redwood tree? And shouldn’t it be “petted” a new kitten? — but at the same time, my kid brain smelled those cookies and cradled that fuzzy kitten.

I felt the pinpricks of tiny claws, the cool wetness of a small, pink nose, and the rasp of a sandpaper tongue licking my hand. I heard a scratchy little mew.

I felt myself smile and relax. It was just a whisker of relief, but it was as real as the spray of white bristles on a kitten’s face.

What the Responsible Adult Heck?

These teachers were onto something. A few conversations later, the story of the book emerged.

It started about two years ago, when Jackson-Adams, a veteran art teacher, woke up thinking about the sights, sounds, smells and feelings that surround us every day — a veritable banquet of beauty.

She doesn’t think of herself as a writer, but she picked up a pencil and jotted down some small wonders.

“With so many weird things going on in our world, people arguing, so much negativity and divisiveness everywhere, I think it’s important for everybody to take a deep breath,” she says. “Smell the roses, walk your dog, pet a cozy, little kitten, smell cookies baking and, you know, just take time to be grateful.”

As she wrote, a cadence emerged. She showed the words to her friend, Hare, an experienced composer.

A few months later, Hare shared a couple of tunes that she thought would hook the 4-to-8-year-old crowd. She suggested that their mutual friend, Osborne, illustrate the poem and that they turn it into a book.

“Kids do best when they’re engaged with multiple senses,” Hare says. “So having something visual to pair with the tune helps their longterm memory and overall engagement.”

Hare was recalling the book-song combos — especially Sandra Boynton’s works — that she’d shared with her daughters, now 16 and 18.

“I just gave Boynton’s book Ooo, Baby Baby! to my oldest for her high school graduation,” says Hare, 49. “Children’s books, good ones, often seem simple but can have a very personal and deep meaning.”

Osborne, 43, was a fan of Sandra Boynton, too. She smiles at the thought of Your Personal Penguin; she used to sing the book’s companion song — by Davy Jones, formerly of The Monkees — to her daughter.

She still entertains her daughter, now 19, with silly songs. “She doesn’t enjoy it as much as she used to,” Osborne admits with a laugh.

The artwork and messages in children’s books always impressed Jackson-Adams, 63. Her childhood favorites included Homer Price by Robert McCloskey, A Pickle for a Nickel by Lilian Moore and The Tar Beach by Faith Ringgold.

“There’s a lightness about them, you know?” she says.

Osborne created eye-catching illustrations for Wonder Together with watercolors and paper collages. She dug out wallpaper sample books, given to her by an interior designer friend, and started snipping. She used her orange cat, Daniel, as a model for the kitten page.

Jackson-Adams’ niece, the graphic designer Anna Landewe of Saugerties, N.Y., joined the team, contributing her layout and design skills, along with guidance on how to line up an International Standard Book Number (ISBN) and other book-selling minutiae.

To market the book and music, Osborne created an Instagram page and website for the group, who call themselves The Wonder Collective. She included free, downloadable coloring pages and matching games.

As much as the book leans on technology and social media, the GDS teachers hope the upshot will be more screen-free interactions between adults and children — and between children and the real world.

“In my early days of teaching, we didn’t have screens,” says Osborne. “Kids might have played Nintendo or whatever when they got home, but it wasn’t as . . . ”

Jackson-Adams finishes the thought: “Every day, all day.”

So far, the project hasn’t turned a profit for the creators, who paid production costs out of their own pockets. But they have been rewarded in other ways. The day school’s first and second graders performed the song at their end-of-year concert for their families.

“I just sat there crying the whole time,” says Jackson-Adams.

“There were lots of people crying,” says Osborne.

I wondered how that must’ve sounded, an auditorium illuminated by little voices asking people if they had noticed other small things in life, too.

“Their young voices perfectly captured the essence of the song,” says Hare. OH

Maria Johnson is a contributing editor of O.Henry. Email her at ohenrymaria@gmail.com.

2026 Department Life's Funny

Life’s Funny

Begin the Begats

A longstanding Greensboro church makes room for an up-and-coming flock

By Maria Johnson

Photograph by Lynn Donovan

You might remember my January 2023 column about a venerable, old Greensboro church’s plan to sell their property and downsize, a sort of spiritual and physical transformation.

Well, the 120-year-old Presbyterian Church of the Covenant — worshippers affectionately call the place “peacock,” the phonetic version of PCOC — finally has a reason to flash its feathers.

The small congregation has sold their massive complex and found a more suitable space that’s literally across the street.

At the same time, the old church property has been assumed by a younger, up-and-coming congregation, the Citadel of Praise Church & Campus Ministries, which has occupied different rental spaces around Greensboro since its founding 23 years ago. Finally, the nondenominational, charismatic congregation has a home of its own.

In many ways, it’s a story of generational and societal change written on the back of a church program.

“It feels like a torch is being passed,” says Joyce Powers, an 83-year-old PCOC member and self-described “catalyst” of the hand-off.

First, a little history.

PCOC, then called the Walker Avenue Presbyterian Church, started in 1906 as an offshoot of First Presbyterian Church and Westminster Presbyterian, both on the edges of downtown Greensboro.

The upstart church, which changed its name a few years later, focused on serving young people around Greensboro College and the state-run school that would later become UNCG.

For years, the congregation worshipped in a small, wooden church. Then, backed by several prominent families, they hired notable architect Harry Barton — who also drew plans for the Guilford County courthouse, as well as UNCG’s auditorium and chancellor’s house — to design a stately house of worship.

Done in the Neoclassical Revival style, the 1919 building hunkers at the corner of Mendenhall Street and Walker Avenue. Additions eventually covered much of that block.

From the beginning, PCOC was an activist church.

Members nursed the sick during the recurring flu pandemic of the late 1910s.

They fed soldiers who paused at Greensboro’s Overseas Replacement Depot in World War II.

They housed programs that provided child care, counseling, a preschool for blind children, and enrichment for disabled adults.

More recently, as their numbers dwindled, they leased out worship space to different denominations and nondenominational groups, as well as to artists and musicians.

In 2019, Greensboro native and Grammy-winning musician Rhiannon Giddens, who once attended PCOC, joined other local musicians at the church for a concert benefitting the Experiential School of Greensboro.

By the time the COVID pandemic hit — nearly 100 years after the flu pandemic — the congregation, which numbered 30 on a good Sunday, knew they had to make a change. As with many mainline U.S. churches, shrinking membership made it difficult to keep the physical plant going.

They had a grand vision.

They would sell their sprawling complex to a developer who would keep the property largely intact, rehab it into an affordable live-work-play space and, hopefully, rent back a space to PCOC so the congregation could continue to worship there.

The church entertained potential buyers starting in 2023.

Several developers looked at the fixer-upper.

And passed.

“There was hope. Then there was not. Then there was hope. Then there was not. We went through a roller coaster,” Powers says.

Finally, the church hired an agency that specializes in selling churches nationwide, and the property was listed for sale “as is.”

That’s how the Rev. Greg Drumwright, who started his church in 2003, just before graduating from N.C. A&T, found out about the property. Someone else had filled out an online contact form using his name, and an agent followed up.

Drumwright — who had indeed been searching for a permanent home for his flock but had no idea PCOC was up for grabs — went with the flow.

A showing was arranged.

Drumwright met PCOC’s minister, Rev. Mark Sandlin, and common threads quickly emerged. Both had attended divinity school at Wake Forest University.

Drumwright also learned that PCOC was once pastored by the Rev. Z. Holler, a well-known civil and labor rights activist. A social justice advocate in the same vein, Drumwright — who received national attention for ministering to George Floyd’s family during the 2021 trial of Floyd’s killer, a former Minneapolis police officer — felt a kinship between the churches.

“It felt like we were meeting our aunts and uncles and grandparents,” he says. “I would call that providential.”

Like the PCOC of yore, the Citadel is known for its outreach to college students and for its hands-on involvement in social and political issues. Drumwright walks his talk; he’s the Democratic candidate for an at-large seat on the Guilford County Board of Commissioners, and Powers says PCOC members back him.

“This is a guy who makes things happen,” she says.

In December, PCOC members, most of whom are white, worshipped in their old home for the last time, alongside the Citadel’s mostly Black congregation.

PCOC mustered most of its 40 members, many of them silver-haired.

The Citadel, which boasts a congregation of more than 250 people, most in their 20s, 30s and 40s, filled the rest of the pews. The Citadel choir belted out hymns of praise.

“They shook the dust off the chandeliers,” says Powers. “It was wonderful.”

“It felt transitional and transformational,” says Drumwright.

The churches closed the sale on the last day of 2025.

Knowing that the property went to a growing church, PCOC members leased another space right across Walker Avenue, inside the Victorian home known as the Holderness House, which was built for the current owner, the Presbyterian Campus Ministry.

The resettled congregation will hold an open house with music, lemonade and watermelon from 5–7:30 p.m., Saturday, July 18, with a rain date of Sunday, July 19.

Drumwright says the Citadel, too, plans an open house, probably in the late summer or early fall, once they’ve spruced up the sanctuary and fellowship hall.

Like elderly homeowners who sell their property to younger families, Powers says PCOC members delight in watching from across the street as the Citadel’s energetic members plant flowers and work to restore the aging church home.

And who knows? Maybe someday PCOC members will move back in with their spiritual children.

“We’ve told them: ‘You can always come home,’” says Drumwright. OH

Maria Johnson is a contributing editor of O.Henry. Email her at ohenrymaria@gmail.com.

2026 Department Life's Funny

Life’s Funny

Life's Funny

Cycles of Life

To everything, turn, turn, turn

Story & Photograph by Maria Johnson

She’s in the fifth grade.

She wears braces.

She loves math.

And dance.

And if you want to learn how to ride a bicycle, 11-year-old A’laa Boufenouche is your girl.

Half-hearted pedal pushers need not apply.

“You have to have a will to do it,” the brown-eyed, ponytailed A’laa says calmly. “You have to have patience.”

She is folded into a camp chair under a pop-up canopy on an early spring day when the warm sunshine evens out the cool breeze.

Almost every Sunday afternoon, from 1–4 p.m. when the weather is nice, you’ll find A’laa and her family volunteering at the Greensboro Community Bike Shop in Barber Park.

Part walk-in repair garage, part picnic, part bicycle library — all free — the shop is run by volunteers with the Transit Alliance of the Piedmont, a nonprofit group that pushes the power of cycling to boost transportation, health and personal connection.

“People relate to you on a different level when you’re on a bike,” says Treva Whitmoyer, a retired nurse and alliance volunteer.

This month, the alliance plans to open a repair-only bike shop on West Market Street, alongside the Downtown Greenway. The Barber Park site will remain open through this month, longer if the city renews the lease for the bike library where A’laa gives free instruction to beginning cyclists. She works with people of all ages, but the young ones pick up skills the fastest, she says. They’re more open to instruction, less bogged down by ideas of what they can and can’t do, and less afraid of falling.

You wanna learn to ride? You gotta be ready to fall, according to A’laa (pronounced Ah-LAH).

Most important, you gotta be willing to get up and go again.

She knows this from experience.

Back when she was 3 and her family lived in Algeria in Northern Africa, she rode bikes with her mom, dad and older brother. She had a balance bike with no pedals. As long as her feet touched the ground, she was good to go.

Then her family entered an immigration lottery, a chance to come to the United States. Her mom, Fawzia Moussouni, who taught several languages and American civilization to high school and college students, applied on the last day possible.

“I said, ‘OK, I will take this chance,’” says Fawzia.

A few months later, her husband, Mohammed Boufenouche, called her. She was in class, testing students. He told her to leave class for a minute.

“We won!” he exulted.

A friend vouched for Greensboro as a good place to raise a family, so Mohammed, Fawzia and their kids settled here in 2019.

“I wanted a quiet place,” says Fawzia, who works as a teaching assistant in a middle school. “I love it here.”

A’laa got a new bicycle here, one with training wheels. Her brother, Omar, helped her to get the hang of it. Then Omar took off the training wheels, and they went to a sidewalk near their apartment. A’laa fell. A lot.

“I got mad because I couldn’t do it,” she says.

Her mom put Band-Aids on her scraped knees and elbows.

Her brother told her it would take time and practice.

“I went right back,” A’laa remembers. “If you don’t have patience, you’re probably going to be angry all the time.”

One day, A’laa found her balance. She was riding a bike. By herself.

“I was happy and excited and proud,” she says, beaming from her camp chair. “I felt really optimistic in that moment.”

She wants other people to know that feeling, so when 9-year-old Asher Warfield walks up with his grandmother, Mary Pettway, asking if someone can teach him how to ride a bike, she hops up, gets Asher a helmet and picks out a three-wheel bike for him.

They start on a stretch of asphalt beside the Simkins Indoor Sports Pavilion. The narrow lane leads to the bike shop, a small, brick building that used to house the controls of a sewage treatment plant before Barber Park took its place.

Asher stares at his feet as he pedals.

A’laa encourages him to look up and fix his eyes on where he wants to go.

He turns around, cruises past the shop.

“Grandma, look!” he says.

Other people trickle in. Cars weighed down with bike racks pull in to donate cycles, which the Transit Alliance reconditions and gives to people who need transportation.

Visitors dig into the chicken and rice dish that Fawzia has set on a table; she always brings food and snacks.

Two young women walk by.

“You wanna ride bikes?” says Sheldon “Shel” Herman, who calls himself the “chief bicyclist” of the Transit Alliance.

“Where?” one of the women asks.

“Here,” says Shel.

“How much?”

“Free.”

The women sign release forms, grab helmets and go.

A young man, an engineering student at N.C. A&T, brings his bike by for repair. One tire has a slow leak. Shel shows him how to replace a tube.

Others watch and learn from Shel and the other volunteer bike mechanics. Ten-year-old Nuwaib Farooqui’s father, Shadab, brings him to the bike shop to learn new skills, interact with people and get away from electronic screens.

“Any excuse to take him outside, I’m game for,” says Shadab, who develops apps for mobile phones and admits to a love-hate relationship with technology.

“I want him to know what’s real and what’s not,” he says.

That’s fine with Nuwaib, who just wants to know how to fix his bicycle when it breaks down.

“It’s the closest thing I have to a car until I’m 16,” he says.

It doesn’t take long for Nuwaib and A’laa to connect. They take off on the park loop. As they pedal away, I’m watching more than bicycle wheels turn. I’m watching time turn.

I remember the moment I caught my balance and my dad, who was running beside me, turned loose of the seat of the little red bike that I learned to ride on.

I remember swooping down a hill at Country Park on a Peugeot bike at breakneck speed about 40 years ago and feeling a wave of happiness and freedom.

I remember my first date with the guy who’s now my husband, a bike ride through southeast Guilford County.

I rode, for fun, for almost 60 years.

I stopped a few years ago, after a wreck left me counting my lucky stars and reckoning with the hard truth that I don’t bounce like I used to.

Recently, my husband and I gave our mountain bikes to the Transit Alliance. That’s how I found out about the bike shop and met A’laa.

Now, as I watch her and Nuwaib pedal away, eyes fixed on where they want to go, I feel no regret.

Instead, as A’laa would say, I feel really optimistic in this moment. OH

Maria Johnson is a contributing editor of O.Henry. Email her at ohenrymaria@gmail.com.

2026 Department Life's Funny

Life’s Funny

LIFE'S FUNNY

My Two Cents

The changing nature of cool

By Maria Johnson

I really wanted those penny loafers.

They were displayed near the oxfords in the children’s shoe store where my mom took us for “good shoes” when I was growing up.

The place smelled like new leather and Sunday school. Stiff and uncomfortable, in both cases.

Which brings us back to the loafers.

I had flat feet, and someone — maybe my mom, maybe a doctor — decided that I needed to wear “orthopedic shoes,” which meant lace-up oxfords with built-in arch support.

They might as well have said, “Shoes that are ugly as all get-out, not to mention uncool,” because they were both.

I was around kindergarten age, old enough to have a budding idea of what was considered desirable outside of my family. Orthopedic shoes from Howard Curry Shoes in Lexington, Kentucky, were not on the list.

The only good thing about that store, in my mind, was The Talking Tree.

You don’t know about The Talking Tree?

Well, on the right wall as you walked in, there was a sculpted tree with a human face, like the trees in The Wizard of Oz, only this one was smiling.

Near The Talking Tree, there was a small wooden bridge that you walked over. It was all very storybook-y. The most enchanting thing was that when you walked out with your new shoes, The Talking Tree would call you by name, saying something like, “Enjoy your pretty new shoes, Maria.”

Even in my 5-year-old mind, as I carried out my dorky shoes, I’d be thinking, “Yeah, right.”

Which means I believed in The Talking Tree somewhat, even though I thought it was full of sap.

It took me a few years to figure out that The Talking Tree never called my name on the way in, only on the way out, after my mom had dropped a wad on my supposedly pretty shoes.

I remember the first time The Talking Tree bade me farewell, and I turned and waved at the sales lady who was talking into a microphone at the counter behind me.

Busted.

Never again did I think seriously about owning a pair of real-deal penny loafers until recently, when I read a glowing review of some “affordable Italian penny loafers,” which is a little like saying an “affordable Italian sports car”.

Something in me was rekindled.

I had to have penny loafers. Not the pricey Italian model, mind you. Rather, a supple (sorry, Bass Weejuns) and reasonably priced version. With actual pennies stuck in the slots because, to go all Honest Abe on you, I’m mourning the penny.

Unless you’ve been living under a Coinstar machine, you probably know that the U.S. penny went out of production last November. I get why. It cost 4 cents to make a 1-cent piece of currency.

But like many people, I have pockets full of memories associated with pennies, which were made with 95 percent copper when I was a kid.

That’s why they weathered to a green patina.

That’s why some people used them to “fix” a glitchy lightbulb or replace a blown fuse. Don’t ask these people for snapshots to document the practices; their photographs likely burned in house fires.

In my own childhood home, one electrical outlet was fried by a child — there were only two of us, and neither will cop to this — who wondered what would happen if you stuck a penny, vertically, into an outlet, as if you were playing the slots in Vegas.

Answer: ZZZZZTTT!!!

I can only surmise that whoever tried this dangerous (in retrospect) stunt was gripping the penny with a pair of rubber-handled pliers, or only one of us would be left with any credible deniability.

A more common practice of the time was putting pennies on railroad tracks, waiting for a train to go by, then marveling that a locomotive weighing more than 100 tons, could flatten a penny into a faceless disc.

This, too, was treacherous, not only because it brought kids into close proximity with diesel locomotives, but because apparently — and I learned this only recently — a train’s fast-moving wheels can spit out a penny as a deadly projectile.

On a lighter, less lethal note, pennies had wholesome uses, too.

We could toss a penny into a public fountain and make a wish.

We could pick up a found penny — something I still do without thinking — for good luck, especially if it were heads-up.

We could slip a couple of new pennies into our loafers. Looking at you, Talking Tree.

We could feed a penny into a bubble-headed candy machine, twist the crank and get a handful of awful chewing gum or those godforsaken Boston Baked Beans.

Sensible people collected pennies. My maternal grandmother was a well-known penny pincher who turned loose only for a good cause. She tied a couple of pennies into the corners of handkerchiefs for my mom and my aunt to take to Sunday school as their offering during the Great Depression.

Later, when I was a kid, my grandmother coached us to be on the lookout for what she called “wheat pennies,” which had two wheat stalks, pictured like parentheses, on the backside.

The proper name was Lincoln wheat pennies. They were made from 1901 to 1958, and my grandmother seemed to think they were valuable post-production.

She was somewhat correct.

Today, a 1933-D (“D” for the Denver mint) wheat penny is worth more than $2.

A 1931-S (“S” for the San Francisco mint) is worth more than $40.

Put that in your loafers and stroll it.

Pennies also became an emblem: a symbol for the least among us that nevertheless held worth, especially when amassed.

This principle was foundational to the most basic form of childhood fundraising: Dump a coffee can full of coins on the floor and get to sorting.

It took forever to assemble a decent chunk of change in paper wrappers. But it added up. That was the beauty of the penny. It was little, but it mattered. A lot of them mattered a lot.

On May 7, Sanctuary House, a Greensboro nonprofit serving people who experience mental health issues, will hold a weekday lunchtime event called Mile of Pennies.

Why pennies? Because Abe Lincoln, who is pictured on every cent, suffered from depression. He certainly wasn’t the last president to struggle with mental health problems, but he was open about it, referring to his melancholy as his “black dog.”

Plastic cup by plastic cup, event organizers will hand out a mile’s worth of pennies — 84,480 to be exact — and invite people to use the coins to create designs and messages on the steps, pavers, sidewalks and stone walls around the group’s “clubhouse” at 518 N. Elm St.

The goal — other than providing a place for people to be artistic, eat a food-truck lunch, and enjoy live music — is to get folks talking about mental health; about 1 in 5 people will experience a diagnosable mental health challenge in any given year, according to Terri Jackson, Sanctuary House’s chief philanthropy officer.

She stresses that every person, every conversation and every donation matters.

There’s that idea again: The power of one.

It’s a reassuring message, a different kind of cool, some 60 years after my first crush on penny loafers. Incidentally, my feet aren’t as flat as they used to be, thanks partly to decades of exercise in supportive, lace-up tennis shoes. That’s why I’m willing to spend some shoe leather tracking down the right pair of loafers, size 8 or 8.5, if you happen to trip over a pair.

I can hear the tinny voice of The Talking Tree now.

“Enjoy your pretty shoes, Maria.”

I will.

I think I’ve finally grown into them.

2026 Department Life's Funny

Life’s Funny

LIFE'S FUNNY

Holy Mole-y

Coping with tunnel vision

By Maria Johnson

A woman dressed in gardening boots, jeans and a hoodie, her hair stuffed under a ball cap, walks across her backyard gingerly, dousing the grass with the sudsy contents of a gallon sprayer.

Her cell phone rings in her pocket.

She puts down the sprayer and checks her phone. It’s her mom. She answers.

“What are you doing?” her mom asks brightly.

“Do you really want to know?” Gardening Woman asks.

“Mmhmm,” her mom says.

“I’m spraying the yard with castor oil,” Gardening Woman says.

Silence.

“For moles,” Gardening Woman adds, for context.

“I’ll talk to you later,” her mom says.

It’s late winter. The snow has melted.

The Gardening Couple’s backyard is bursting with promise.

The grass they sowed last fall is coming on, bright green, even in the shady spots.

The maples tease them with ruddy buds.

The crocuses are croaking. Not in a morbid way. No, rather in the tree frog way: cheerfully chirping notes of yellow and purple on the fringes of the natural area, which is landscape-talk for “places they don’t even try to grow things any more.”

Finally, the Gardening Couple has almost finished renovating their raised-bed garden, which had fallen prey to a cycle that many gardeners will recognize: wood rot, which draws bugs, which draw bug-eating critters, which draws a Gardening Dog, who tears the ever-living snot out of the frames.

Board by board, the couple’s Gardening Dog dismantles the frames so thoroughly and so quickly, the Gardening Couple conjectures later, that she must have a YouTube channel on the subject.

“Hi, everyone,” she would say merrily. “Gardening Dog here. Today, we’re gonna take down these raised beds in just a few hours.”

All this happens while the Gardening Couple “works” inside.

“Where is Gardening Dog?” one of them asks blithely.

“Oh, she’s dogging around in the backyard,” the other says.

“Oh, good,” comes the reply.

Lalalala.

This is how society crumbles. Good people tend to their daily lives while the paws of destruction dig away under their noses.

This is also why the Gardening Couple is very familiar with people who work at Lowe’s.

“How’s the family?” the Gardening Woman asks someone in a red vest.

“Good. You back for more cedar boards?” her vested friend asks.

“Yep. Hey, can we have some of these doughnuts meant for contractors?” Gardening Woman asks.

“Sure! You paid for them!”

Hahaha.

Like that.

Anyway, the Gardening Couple’s new, improved raised beds, made with slotted concrete blocks at the joints — burrow into that, critters — is almost finished and ready for the planting of cool-weather greens, flowers and veggies.

Proudly, the Gardening Couple walks outside laden with shovels and dreams. They anticipate the spring day, just a couple of months away, when they will host a small gathering to celebrate the marriage of their older son and his wife. Guests will stroll through the yard, marveling at the peacefulness of their little Eden, the beauty of springtime in the Piedmont, the craftsmanship of the raised beds.

“Did you see the slotted blocks on the corners?” they’ll whisper over their plates.

“And the way they chiseled the cedar planks — which were a tad too wide — to fit the slots snugly?”

“In all my days, I’ve never seen such arugula.”

“Breathtaking.”

These are the thoughts that fill the heads of the Gardening Couple as they walk outside one sunny afternoon to finish their project.

Suddenly, the reverie is shattered.

[CLANK] “OOOOOHHHHH-NOOOOOOOOO!!! ARGGGHHHHHHH!”

The Gardening Woman drops her shovel, grips her head in her hands, falls to her knees, and screams to the heavens.

Half the yard looks like a munitions-testing ground.

Craters yawn with freshly churned dirt.

Patches of new turf lie asunder.

Muddy trenches meander like . . . molehills.

Gardening Dog bounds up, tongue lolling, tail wagging, nose crusted with dirt.

“Yo, family, check it out!” she seems to say. “I took care of those moles for ya!”

Gardening Man looks crestfallen. According to his telling, his life has been one protracted battle with moles.

He retells his war stories: how, as a kid, he helped the maintenance man at his Catholic grade school dispense of moles in the lawn with poisoned peanuts, smoke bombs and pitchforks.

Gardening Woman frowns. She is not a poisoned peanuts, smoke bombs and pitchfork sort of person. Gardening Man knows this.

He continues his epic poem, telling how the moles found him again, early in his marriage to Gardening Woman.

Fortunately, their dog at the time turned out to be a “moler” who brought family members dead moles as gifts. Gardening Man rewarded the dog with bites of steak to reinforce the habit.

Soon, the tunnels and trenches disappeared.

If the current Gardening Dog has ever unearthed a mole, which she must have, she has never shared the bounty.

The thought occurs to Gardening Woman that the mole might have gone into another dark tunnel — Gardening Dog’s digestive system — only to be reintroduced to the yard as fertilizer.

Gardening Woman thinks of mole holes, in every sense of the term. She thinks of how Gardening Dog loves to lick people’s arms and legs.

Ew, she thinks.

There must be a better way.

Gardening Woman reads up on moles. They eat grubs and worms.

Yuck.

But OK.

She looks at galleries of mole pics, absorbing the details of their faces. They have bright red button noses, which sounds cute except the rest of them look like Freddie Krueger plushies, with knife-like fingernails and scrunched-up eyes.

Mole huggers says they’re helpful creatures that aerate your lawn.

Mole haters says they’re destructive pests that ruin lawns.

Gardening Woman thinks they are both.

She is fine with moles being moles, just not where she wants people to mingle, on level ground, and praise her arugula.

She is willing to coexist.

She reads about battery-powered lawn spikes that emit a low-frequency hum, supposedly repelling moles. The problem is, they don’t work very well. Like parents who don’t love, but get used to, their children’s music rattling the walls, it appears that moles don’t love, but learn to live with, vibrating ground.

The safest and most effective way to discourage them — moles, not children — seems to be by soaking the lawn with a solution of castor oil, liquid soap and water.

Like many creatures, it seems, moles do not like the taste of castor oil.

Gardening Woman wonders why any animal that eats grubs would be put off by castor oil, but she accepts the premise and orders a gallon of pure castor oil, enough to purge the city in preparation for a world-record attempt at Most Colonoscopies in a Metro Area in a 24-hour Period. But no. According to Amazon, this is “landscaping” castor oil, a mole and vole deterrent.

Whatevs, Gardening Woman decides. Either way, we’re talking mole runs.

She mixes the oil with lavender-scented Castile soap and water and applies the concoction to the tilled up earth. Never has so much laxative smelled so lovely.

It rains for two days.

On the third day, Gardening Woman ventures out. Gardening Dog follows her to inspect the moonscape.

No new hills.

No new trenches.

Gardening Dog seems uninterested in the wasteland.

Gardening Woman makes a note to buy top soil and grass seed and start over at ground zero. There’s just enough time for grass to sprout before the gathering.

She goes to the “natural area” to check on spring buds.

When she turns around, Gardening Dog is digging again, this time in the un-oiled part of the yard.

What’s that sound? A muffled, maniacal Freddie Krueger laugh coming from under the sod?

The castor oil has worked. Sort of.

Gardening Woman scolds Gardening Dog, marches inside, finds the sprayer and silences her phone.

2026 Department Life's Funny

Life’s Funny

LIFE'S FUNNY

Try It! You’ll Like It?

Nibbling around our differences

By Maria Johnson

I stumble over his Kryptonite.

On a recent visit home, my younger son — the one I used to challenge in driveway basketball, the one who now dunks the ball, guaranteeing no more mother-son pick-up games — hangs around the kitchen as I make a quick lunch for myself.

I slap together my go-to sammie of late: natural peanut butter, chunky, of course, with bread-and-butter pickles, topped with a squiggle or three of sriracha.

On pumpernickel.

Toasted.

Yes, really.

“What. Are. You. Doing?” he asks, looking over my shoulder.

“Making a sandwich,” I answer. “Want one?”

“No.”

“It’s good. Try it.”

“No way.”

I take a bite, issue a loud mmmm and hold out a cross-section of gleaming earth tones for him to examine.

“It’s pretty, too. C’mon, take a bite.”

“Nope,” he says, taking a few steps back.

“The recipe came from The New York Times cooking app,” I say, offering a pedigree.

“I don’t care,” he protests through a budding smile.

I do what any loving mother would do. I hold out the sandwich at arm’s length, wave it like a light saber, and chase him around this house with it.

“Tryyyy it! You’ll liiiike it!” I urge, echoing a 1970s Alka-Seltzer commercial in which a bistro customer recounts being pressured by a waiter to sample a new dish.

Obviously, my baby, who was born in 1997, has not seen this TV ad.

“Get away from me with that thing!” he insists, weaving and bobbing as if the sandwich might bite him.

We’re both about to fall over with laughter when he finds a door.

“I’m going to the gym,” he calls out over his shoulder.

“Saving you half, kiddo!” I holler after him.

This passes for love — and maybe motivation to exercise — in my family.

Later, as I eat his half of the sandwich, I wonder: How could he, or anyone, not like this creation? To me, it’s the perfect union of flavors and textures: warm and tangy pumpernickel slathered with the subtle sweetness of peanut butter, spiked with the sweet-tart crunch of pickles, and swaddled by an after-burn that’s relatively mild on the Scoville scale.

What more could your taste buds want than to be pleasantly surprised by an unexpected combo?

Of course, every person’s idea of “pleasant” is different.

I poll a few friends on favorite food pairings that make others cringe.

Bee likes a peanut butter sandwich with fresh tomatoes and Miracle Whip.

Trish reports that, as a child, she enjoyed post-Thanksgiving dark-meat turkey smeared with peanut butter on a saltine cracker.

“My family looked at me like I was crazy,” she says, laughing at the memory. “I wouldn’t be afraid to try it again.”

I would hop on that crazy train with her. In peanut butter we trust.

In pickles, too, though I pause when Donna reports that her late father-in-law, whom everyone called J.E., used to eat homemade cocoa pound cake with home-canned dill pickles.

How did that occur to him?

No one in the family seems to know the origin story, so Donna asks Google AI: Is eating dill pickles with cocoa pound cake a thing?

The answer: “Eating dill pickles with chocolate cake is a recognized, albeit niche and often surprising, flavor combination that has gained traction as a ‘sweet and savory’ pairing.”

J.E. was ahead of his time.

Speaking of sweet and savory, David, perhaps the most adventurous eater I know, says one of his daughters recently gave him some artisanal chocolate with anchovies.

“The salt and umami against the dark chocolate was a fortunate combination,” he says.

Full disclosure: David also likes what he describes as an old Southern favorite: liver mush topped with artificial maple syrup.

Artificial maple syrup? Because real maple syrup would ruin the experience?

“Yeah, it needs to be Log Cabin,” he explains. “Made with corn syrup, of course, and a lot of artificial maple flavoring. Real maple syrup is way too mild to counter the funky mildew flavor of liver mush.”

Take that, funky mildew flavor of an optional dish.

This reminds me of a meal I once shared with a friend at a Japanese restaurant in Pinehurst. Miso soup came with dinner.

“What is this?” she asked, not enthusiastically, after sipping from a long, plastic spoon.

“Miso,” I answered. “Made with fermented soybeans”

“Me-so-no like this,” she said.

Honestly, the soup tasted a little gym-socky to me, too, but it was nicely balanced by a salty broth garnished with scallions and puffed rice.

I slurped away.

There’s no accounting for taste, as the old saying goes, but scientists do know a lot about what makes certain foods attractive to some people while others cringe at the thought.

Roberta Claro da Silva, an associate professor in the College of Agriculture and Environmental Sciences at N.C. A&T State, says several variables — culture, psychology, genetics and age — go into the experience of flavor.

For example, when Silva was growing up in Brazil, she ate sugar on avocados. Salted avocado was a no-go.

“There was no guacamole,” she says. “It didn’t exist.”

However, salted lemons, limes and green mangos were common treats.

“Salt breaks the astringency and makes it more sweet,” she explains.

So food culture — what’s available and eaten in your area — influences your idea of what’s appetizing. But there’s more to the recipe: memories and associations, the psychological aspects.

“If you have a very good memory of your grandma cooking food with specific spices, you will relate this with comforting food,” Silva says.

By the same token, if you’ve ever gotten sick after eating a particular food, you’ll probably avoid it because of the negative association.

Visual biases creep in, as well. People generally like foods that are aesthetically pleasing. That’s why plating is a big deal in fancy restaurants.

Some parts of flavor are not as malleable. Genes partly determine the number of taste buds a person has, as well as their sensitivity. So-called “super-tasters” detect bitterness at lower thresholds than others. Often, they cannot tolerate dark chocolate and strong coffee.

Genes also influence our sense of smell, a huge contributor to what we call flavor. One genetic variation, which affects chemical receptors in the nose, determines whether a person finds the flavor of cilantro pleasantly herby or disgustingly soapy.

Age figures into the stew, too. Taste buds decline, in quality and number, as the years go by. That’s why older people often lean toward stronger flavors and saltier food.

The upshot: Yummy and yucky are moving targets over a lifetime.

I ask Silva an academic question: Is it possible that my son will try a peanut butter-pickle-and-sriracha sandwich one day, despite, you know, the possibly negative experience of having been chased around the house with one?

“I believe so,” she says kindly.

Saving you half, kiddo.

2026 Department Life's Funny

Life’s Funny

LIFE'S FUNNY

Phone Home?

No problem — if I can find it

By Maria Johnson

Because my husband, Jeff, and I are happily in a phase of life when we’re done with climbing ladders — both the corporate and the gutter-cleaning kinds — people will sometimes ask us, “How do spend your time?”

That’s easy: We look for our cell phones.

A lot.

So much so that we’re considering getting a landline again just so we can call our misplaced mobile phones.

Either that, or I’m gonna tape an oversized silk flower to my phone, like they do with pens at a bank.

Side note: If you still enjoy walking into a bank, pouring a jar of pennies into a coin-counting machine and feeling rich when you walk out with $12 in paper money, we could be friends.

More on this later. Back to the phone story.

Thank goodness, Jeff and I usually lose our cell phones one at a time, often while the other person is home.

Take the other day.

There we were, sitting in his upstairs office, sipping coffee and talking about our plans for the day, which, at that idyllic point, did not include spending a good chunk of the morning looking for my phone.

Mainly because I was holding my phone, glancing at my texts.

Then I decided to be more “present.”

Sigh.

See, we sometimes get on each other’s nerves by looking at our phones while the other one is talking. I know. It sucks. Especially when you’re the one who’s doing the talking.

Not so much when you’re “listening.”

Anyway, I realized that I was paying more attention to my friend’s text recommending a podcast called Dogs of Chernobyl than to what Jeff was saying, so I set my phone aside to focus on his words.

“Mmmm-hmmm,” I affirmed.

“I seeeee,” I validated.

“Gotcha,” I mirrored.

The next thing I know, I’m getting ready for the day, and I can’t find my phone.

Here, I would like to say that I don’t spend anywhere near the amount of time that the average American woman my age spends on her phone, which is . . . standby while I look this up on my (spoiler alert) phone … five hours and 17 minutes a week.

My weekly screen time is . . . hold on while I look this up, too.

Hmm.

Never mind. Not important.

What’s important is that I had a busy day ahead of me, but I couldn’t tell exactly how I was going to be busy without consulting the calendar on my phone.

Plus, how was I going to listen to Dogs of Chernobyl in the gym?

So, I did the most common-sense thing: I remembered the last time I had my phone — in Jeff’s office — and I returned to the scene.

Jeff was sitting at his desk, calmly working away, as if no crisis were unfolding.

I looked at the couch. No phone.

I felt between the cushions.

No phone.

I crawled around on the floor, looking under the couch.

No phone.

“Have you seen my phone?” I asked.

“No,” he said.

I retraced my steps. Office to bedroom to bathroom.

Bathroom to bedroom to office.

I closed the loop.

No phone.

“I’ll call it,” Jeff offered.

I appreciated his help, but I knew it wouldn’t do any good. My ringer was turned off, mainly because during the daytime I’m swamped with audio alerts from my Mom’s indoor security cameras.

In case you don’t know, these wireless contraptions are truly miraculous, and very helpful in keeping aging parents safe. But they tend to overshare. The cameras, that is.

Hence the silent phone.

But no worries. We had a backup plan for my phone.

“Could you use your Find My app to look it up?” I asked Jeff.

He did.

Twice before, this feature — which allows you to track another device — had helped us locate my phone, which I had dropped while hiking in the woods.

Fact: It’s fairly easy to spot a large lavender phone lying on top of leaves beside a trail.

But this time, on Find My, the gray dot representing my phone covered half the outline of our house.

Which meant a lot more potential hiding places.

For the sake of space, I will condense the next hour of our lives into a cartoon. You know the Family Circle comic where the mom asks Billy to go next door to tell Dolly it’s time for dinner, and the next frame shows Billy’s footprints all over the neighborhood, through swing sets and see-saws and hopscotch grids, before landing at the neighbor’s house?

Well, that was us.

Like tourists in a big city, following GPS “walking directions” by turning this way and that, waiting for the satellite to catch up and move their arrow in the right direction, we wandered through the house, delicately holding Jeff’s phone in front of us, following it like a magical beacon.

“I feel like a water witch with a divining rod,” Jeff said.

“Shhh!” I whispered, as if my iPhone might hear us and scurry away. “Look! We’re moving.”

My phone’s gray dot hovered near a wall that separated two rooms.

We searched both rooms.

Even though I was fairly certain I had not gone downstairs, we searched there, too, because the gray dot did not indicate which floor it was on.

Times like this, you realize how far you will go, trying to make a story make sense.

I found myself looking in my sock drawer.

In my nightstand.

In the laundry basket.

Inside the flippin’ dog food bin, for gawd sakes.

“Well, I don’t remember stirring the salmon and rice kibble with my iPhone, but you never know. I mean, the dot says you’re right here.”

Finally, I gave up and announced that I was going to the gym without my phone.

“If you find it . . . don’t call me,” I said, forlorn. “I’ll be in the gym, watching Stephen A. Smith with no sound.”

Side note: Watching ESPN’s First Take commentator Stephen A. Smith with no sound is almost as much fun as watching him with sound. Almost.

While I was out, I announced, I would run a few errands, including picking up some brackets to mount a wall hanging. I walked into a bedroom at the other end of the house to double-check the size of the wall hanging.

Yep.

There it was.

On the bed.

Next to the wall hanging.

My iPhone.

Obviously I had gone in there, at some point, after talking to Jeff that morning. I probably needed to lie down because I was so exhausted from being “present.”

Anyway, that’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.

“AHA!” I shouted from our older son’s childhood room. “Found it!”

“Where?” Jeff called from his office.

“In John’s room,” I hollered.

A few seconds passed. I knew Jeff was calculating.

“That app is not accurate inside of 30 or 40 feet,” he said.

“Mmm-hmmm,” I said absentmindedly, following my friend’s link to Dogs of Chernobyl.

A few more seconds ticked by.

Any second, I thought, he would walk into the room with his iPhone to test his theory.

Instead, I heard a plea.

“Do me a favor?” he said.

“Sure,” I replied.

“Call my iPhone?”

2026 Department Life's Funny

Life’s Funny

LIFE'S FUNNY

Not-So-Mad Scientist

Get ready for a dose of Doktor Kaboom!

By Maria Johnson

The energy level in the room rises as an effusive man sporting a spiky, bleached-blond hairdo, bug-eyed welder’s goggles and a bright-orange lab coat tromps around stage, whipping up the crowd.

“YAH???” he hollers to the assembly.

“YAH!!!” the audience roars back.

It’s the kind of joyful call-and-response you might expect to hear at a tent revival, but the leader is not a pastor; he’s Doktor Kaboom, the kooky-looking scientist character created by Charlotte native and UNCG alum David Epley.

This month, Epley — who haunted the area around Tate Street as a student in the ’80s — will bring Kaboom to Greensboro’s Carolina Theatre.

Alexandra Arpajian, who is relatively new as the theater’s executive director, booked Epley’s act because she thought it would fit Greensboro’s family-friendly vibe. The show also matches her plan for the historic venue.

“Part of the mission of being a nonprofit is to develop the next generation, not just as theater goers, but as empathetic children who are ready to go into society,” says Arpajian, who also happens to be the mom of a 4-year-old daughter.

Her goal jibes with Epley’s knack for wrapping important life lessons in a veneer of playfulness. He instructs audiences to yell “Kaboom!” back at him whenever he bellows the word. The result is a chain reaction of silliness.

“KABOOM!”

“It’s a verbal explosion of the character’s passion,” says Epley, a thoughtful and articulate guy who explains his alter ego in a telephone interview as he drives between gigs in Colorado.

“It’s really fun because, half the time, someone in the audience yells, ‘Kaboom!’ before I do.”

At 59, Epley is glad to return to the state where he was born, never mind that his Wikipedia page says he was born in Germany. That error is a testament to the believability of his character, who speaks with a German accent and assures the audience that he hails from the Rhineland.

In fact, Epley, whose heritage is mostly English and Scottish, was born into a middle-class family in Charlotte. His mom was the personnel manager of a large printing company. His dad was a photographer.

Meanwhile, Epley was in the basement, fiddling with chemistry sets, taking apart mechanical devices and putting them back together. In high school, he was one of the “smart kids.” Teachers flagged him as a prospect for the then-new North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics in Durham.

Epley spent his junior and senior years at the school for advanced students. There, he took rigorous classes from Ph.D.-level teachers.

“It was a wonderful, magical gift from the state of North Carolina to the students who went there,” Epley says, noting that many of the school’s alumni have gone on to prestigious careers in the arts and sciences.

Bored by one class, he and some classmates made up funny personas and attended class as their characters. Afterward, they roamed campus, still in character. Some teachers did not appreciate the comic relief. Others loved it.

“A lot of people just wanted to support whatever artistic expression these weird little kids were coming up with,” he says. “That’s where I found out that I really loved performing.”

After graduating and logging a stint in the Army Reserve, he headed to UNCG to study chemistry with the idea of transferring to Duke University or N.C. State for biomedical engineering.

A funny thing happened on the way to the lab.

Epley took some acting classes in UNCG’s renowned drama department.

“I knew nothing about acting I just knew that I was enjoying it,” says Epley, whose after-class memories include eating at New York Pizza, hanging out at a bar called The Last Act and working at Crocodile’s Cafe, all along Tate Street.

He switched majors and graduated with a bachelor’s degree in fine arts. Then and now, he scoffs at the idea that people who are good scientists can’t be good artists and vice versa.

That belief, he says, has made programs devoted to STEM — science, technology, engineering and math — fall short of their potential over the last 20 years because the best scientists are also creative thinkers.

“STEM is a lovely thing to focus on, but we’ll end up with a nation of lab technicians,” he says. “If we support creativity, then we become a nation of innovators.”

It took Epley a while to figure out how to blend art and science into a career.

For nearly 20 years, he and a troupe of comic actors known as Theater in the Ground traveled the country performing at Renaissance festivals.

“Imagine the Marx Brothers doing Beowulf,” he says.

He grew more serious about comedy when he became a father in his late 30s. He needed more income, a show he could manage by himself and a shtick that would fill performance halls.

That’s when he invented Kaboom, the embodiment of his first love, science, combined with his second love, stagecraft.

To prepare, Epley listened to hours of native German speakers on compact discs. He honed his character on the streets of Oswego, N.Y., during the Sterling Renaissance Festival.

After one performance, an older lady stayed to talk with Epley, who remained in character.

“After about 40 minutes, she goes, ‘I’m talking to you because my father was German, and he passed away when I was in my 30s, and I hadn’t heard his voice again until today.’”

The thought of that encounter still gives Epley goosebumps today. But the interaction that really hit home happened a few years into Kaboom’s road show.

He brought a kid on stage and began his usual patter.

“You’re a smart kid, yah?!” He asked.

The kid replied no, that he wasn’t smart.

Epley dropped to his knees and looked directly at the boy.

“I said, ‘You are smart. That’s why I picked you. I can see it in your eyes.’” he recalls.

Then Epley turned to the crowd: “Listen, if anyone ever asks you if you’re smart or creative or clever, don’t say no. Look them right in the eye and say, “YAH!” I worked with that boy until he was saying that and meant it . . . That’s when I learned I could do more than science and humor. I could teach empowerment. If I hadn’t found that, I probably wouldn’t still be doing this. That’s the aspect that brings me the most joy.”

Of course, there’s a strong dose of education in Epley’s show.

Kaboom talks about the importance of the scientific method, of testing hypotheses, of getting repeatable results. He uses everyday chemicals and oversized props to make things fizz, whiz, foam and pop. He uses a slingshot and a banana to great effect. A demonstration with dry ice yields a “controlled explosion.”

Inspired by the challenges that students faced during COVID, Epley’s latest show, which is titled Under Pressure, demonstrates how pressure can be channeled — both physically and emotionally — to make positive things happen in science and life.

Commissioned by the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, where Epley took the stage as Kaboom last year, the production is being pitched to streaming apps as a family-centered comedy special.

His shows are aimed at students in grades three through eight, but his comedy has drawn kudos as entertainment for all ages.

Comedian Dave Chappelle, who was once a neighbor of Epley’s young family in Yellow Springs, Ohio, took his children to Kaboom shows, and he supplied a glowing blurb before Epley’s first appearance at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in Scotland.

“We watched our neighbor transform into this incredible character,” writes Chappelle. “He was funny! And fun for the whole family.”

Epley believes his current show represents his best work, which comes at the right moment in U.S. history.

“I think science is being disregarded,” he says. “Television and talking heads have created doubt in people’s minds about expertise, which I think is absolutely damaging the country . . . So I really think what I do is timely and important. We’re all in this boat together, so let’s paddle in the same direction.”

Yah?

Yah.

2026 Department Life's Funny