Month: July 2023

Crossroads

Didion’s Masterpiece

Judson Theatre presents The Year of Magical Thinking

By Jim Moriarty

Above: Linda Purl and Henry Winkler starring in Happy Days

Right: Andy Griffith and Linda Purl in Matlock

When the late Joan Didion’s book The Year of Magical Thinking was published in 2005, it instantly became the indispensable handbook for grief and loss. The book, and the subsequent one-woman play that starred Vanessa Redgrave and debuted on Broadway in 2007, was published in October of ʼ05 and won that year’s National Book Award for Nonfiction. It recounts the year following the death of her husband, the writer John Gregory Dunne, from a sudden heart attack in 2003, and how that death and her ability, or inability, to process it transforms her reality. The book includes the illness of Didion and Dunne’s only child, their daughter, Quintana, and the play, a masterpiece of storytelling, expands to include Quintanaʼs death from pancreatitis in 2005.

The Year of Magical Thinking, starring Linda Purl, is the middle offering in Judson Theatre Company’s three-play summer festival, and will run from August 4-13 in the intimate McPherson Theater at the Bradshaw Performing Arts Center at Sandhills Community College.

Purl is likely best known to Sandhills audiences as Andy Griffith’s daughter, Charlene, in the long-running Matlock series, or as Steve Carell’s love interest in The Office, where she played the mother of Pam Beesly (Jenna Fischer). She also starred as Fonzieʼs (Henry Winkler) girlfriend from Happy Days.

Purl’s intimate relationship with The Year of Magical Thinking began 11 years ago when her close friend, Bonnie Franklin, was set to perform the one-woman monologue but had fallen ill. Franklin suggested Purl replace her and she agreed, but only if she could pass the role back to her friend when she recovered. “So, I started learning it, then my own mother was diagnosed with cancer, terminally,” says Purl. Her mother insisted she continue with the play, even running lines with her daughter quite literally from her deathbed. With her mother gravely ill, Purl decided she’d have to call the director and back out. “I opened my email in the morning and Bonnie had died,” says Purl. “So that was how I came to the role. Pretty intense.”

For Purl, her performances of the play have been a journey like no other. “Besides the fact that it’s a one-person play, you just feel like she (Didion) braved the rapids of how to negotiate some of the most difficult challenges one could ever face in life. It’s a template. It’s a map, and she gave it to us. I’m of an age where you lose people. Death is not a stranger.

“I did the play in Kansas and I was in the middle of the run and I was in the supermarket, and this woman came up to me and she said she’d seen the play the night before and she said, ‘My husband died three weeks ago. I thought I was going crazy and now I know I’m not.’ You want to feel that you’re doing something meaningful. If sharing her journey can be a comfort to someone else, then that’s a good day at work.”

While Purl has now done the play more times than she can recall, it’s never quite the same. “Every time I do it, it feels differently,” she says. “The play, its idea and its wisdom keep revealing itself to me. As an actress, it feeds you, too. It always feels like jumping off a cliff. But I never feel alone up there. I always feel like Joan is right there with me.”

That connection was revealed in her recent performance in London. In a review by Harry Bower for “All That Dazzles,” a theater website that popped up during the pandemic lockdown, Purl is described this way: “She knows every line of this script as if she and it are one. The inflection and delivery of each syllable is carefully measured and delivered with precision for maximum emotional impact. There is a vulnerability and sensitivity to her performance juxtaposed against a stoic bravery painted across her face in broad strokes. She is a force of nature, knowing the perfect moments to demonstrate restraint or let loose with her character’s truth. Her light-touch comic timing completes an extraordinary performance.”

The play’s passionate opening was crafted by Didion just days before its Broadway debut. Sitting and watching rehearsal, Didion looked at director David Hare and asked, “Wouldn’t this be better if it was less about me? And more about them?” And so it became about all of us. PS

Judson Theatre’s concluding play of its summer festival is The Last Five Years, running August 18-27. Tickets for either of the remaining plays are available at JudsonTheatre.com and ticketmesandhills.com.

Poem August 2023

Washington as Count Dracula

Tryon Place, 1791

Washington comes in. He is wearing

black velvet with gold buckles at the knee

and foot,

a sword with finely wrought

steel hilt, in scabbard

of white leather,

a cocked hat with a cockade and a feather,

also black. His powdered hair

is gathered in a black silk bag.

His hands in gloves of yellow

clasp extended hands.

Above his head medallions

of King and Queen

flicker beneath dripping wicks, the little flames

in circles on the chandeliers

surrounded by bits of glass, like worlds

in the sky, the telescopes of astronomers.

The crystals like Newton’s prisms split

the flames, blue, yellow, red, violet.

As in the “The Masque of the Red Death”

the dance goes on in rooms, where colors

glint from rubies in women’s ears.

He bows deeply, his corneas

refract ideas: science

dances from tiaras, bracelets, rings.

The battle of Alamance

was lost. The Regulators’

defeat had finished the rebellion,

or so Tryon thought.

Washington’s eyes grow red.

He leads the minuet.

— Paul Baker Newman

2023 Feature

Will Rogers In Old Pinehurst

The Cowboy Philosopher and American Legend

By David Sowell

In late March of 1928, a plane carrying one of the most popular and influential figures in America landed in Pinehurst. This gentleman had come to promote a sport. It wasn’t golf. In fact, he had once been at the forefront of those who held the game in disdain. Seemingly at every opportunity, he lampooned golf and those who played it. His name was Will Rogers.

Part Cherokee Indian, Rogers was born in Native American Territory in what is now the state of Oklahoma. His story was not a rags-to-riches one. It was more like riches to mega-riches. His father was a very successful rancher, but it appeared that Will was going to have a rough time equaling that success. He was a poor student and received a bare-bones education as he bounced from boarding school to boarding school.

His father hoped to give young Will a leg up by providing him with his own cattle ranch. Rogers soon sold it and went off to Argentina. He tried to make it as a rancher there, but in just five months, he was broke. Too embarrassed to write to his father for help, he took a job tending a load of livestock on a freighter bound for South Africa.

Once ashore, Rogers was hired by the ranch where the livestock were destined to go. The owner was a wealthy Englishman who was very demanding and boisterous, characteristics that didn’t match up well with Will’s laid-back attitude. Rogers quickly found himself on the move again. He hooked on with, of all things, a Wild West show. After a stint there, he moved to Australia, where he worked in a circus.

Rogers eventually returned to the United States and began appearing intermittently on the vaudeville circuit, doing rope tricks with his lariat and offering his humorous observations on the American scene. In 1904, he was one of the performers at a Wild West show at Madison Square Garden in New York City when a huge steer broke loose. The steer jumped over the guard rail and into the stands. Pandemonium ensued. The audience scattered. With his lariat in hand, Will and several of the show’s other performers were in hot pursuit. The steer reached the upstairs balcony where Rogers was able to rope it and guide it back onto the arena floor.

His heroic actions made the front page of The New York Times, and Rogers’ career skyrocketed, eventually turning him into an early 20th century multi-media darling. He made motion pictures and wrote one of the most successful newspaper columns in that medium’s history. He toured the country doing live shows that sold out wherever he appeared.

Through his folksy commentary in his newspaper column, Rogers captured the hearts of ordinary Americans. The same could hardly be said for the game of golf. It had the look of an activity for those who also yachted as they summered. Two of the country’s most talked about golf zealots were Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller, the nation’s two richest citizens. Carnegie’s name was bandied about as a potential president of the United States Golf Association, a nascent organization born three days before Christmas in 1894.

Golf’s deep connection to the nation’s upper crust resulted in much of the country’s rank and file looking at the game with contempt, if they looked on it at all. This contempt was fueled by the stance taken by one of America’s most popular presidents — Theodore Roosevelt.

Roosevelt was the quintessential man’s man. While president, he hunted. He boxed. He chopped down trees. On more than one occasion, he took winter swims across the Potomac. Roosevelt let it be known widely and often that he viewed golf with scorn. He called it a game for dudes and snobs.

After Roosevelt’s passing in 1919, Rogers took the point for the anti-golf crowd, drawing huge laughs about the game in his stage act and his writing. Some of his more notable barbs included:

Golf is good for the soul. You get so mad at yourself you forget to hate your enemies.

Long ago when men cursed and beat the ground with sticks, it was called witchcraft. Today it’s called golf.

Rail-splitting produced an immortal president in Lincoln, but golf hasn’t produced even a good Congressman.

Golf antipathy even spilled over into the 1920 presidential election. During the Republican Party convention in Chicago, a deal was cut by the party’s bosses that gave the 1920 nomination for president to Warren G. Harding, a United States senator from Marion, Ohio.

Harding’s team decided that for the general election, they would utilize a “front porch” campaign. Instead of barnstorming the country, their candidate would remain close to home and let supporters and the press come to him.

This homey approach was augmented by a well-orchestrated use of print media and a thorough stroking of the newsreel distributors. (Newsreels were shown in movie houses before the main feature.) One of the first newsreels featuring their candidate showed Harding, adorned in fancy knickers, teeing off and putting at a golf course near his home.

As soon as the golf newsreel began to roll in movie houses around the country, the Harding campaign was inundated with negative reactions to it. One United States senator who was backing Harding said he’d been in a packed theater where the newsreel was shown and there was not one applauding set of hands in the entire place.

It was clear to the Harding team that they had ingested a huge dose of political poison. Desperate to get back on track, they hatched a plan involving baseball that would show the country their man was as mainstream as it gets.

In late August, the Chicago Cubs were on their way to another lackluster finish in the National League pennant race. Sticking to their front porch strategy, the Harding campaign’s plan was to bring the Cubs — whose owner was a Harding backer — to Marion, on one of their off days for an exhibition game.

The Cubs took on a team of locals and a crowd of 7,000 showed up at the rickety Marion ballpark to watch the game. The campaign sent out press releases a few days before chronicling Harding’s playing days as a bare-handed first baseman in his youth and detailed how he was once a major stockholder in a professional team in the Ohio State League.

Harding arrived at the game with the newsreel cameras rolling and received a rousing welcome from the crowd. He then warmed up the Cubs starting pitcher, future Hall of Famer Grover Cleveland Alexander. After the warm-up session, Harding threw out the first pitch and then whooped it up in the stands for the benefit of the cameras the rest of the afternoon. When the game’s newsreel footage reached the movie houses, the favorable reaction it received more than canceled out Harding’s golfing blunder. He won the election, handily defeating his Democratic opponent, James M. Cox.

Harding’s frequent golfing and the criticism he received about it would dog him all through his presidency. It started the first Sunday he was in the White House, when he skipped church and headed to the course. By 1922, it was a public relations nightmare, and it was about to get even worse because Will Rogers had rolled into town.

When Rogers arrived, he was extended an invitation to the White House to meet the president. His visit was cordial and friendly. Harding even expressed an interest in seeing Will’s show. Rogers’ golf and political jibes quickly became the talk of the town. After just a few shows, one of Harding’s aides went to see Rogers and asked that he not do so many golf jokes about the president because the newspapers were making too much of it.

Although surprised at the request, Rogers agreed to it and eliminated several golf jokes from his act. A couple of nights later, it was announced that Harding was going out to the theater — there were only two shows in town — and Rogers took this to mean he was coming to see him. When the curtain rose, Harding was nowhere to be seen. He had gone to the other show. The following night, Rogers turned the heat back up, putting the previous jokes about Harding’s golf back in his routine and adding more.

One turned out to be quite prophetic. There had been a fire that damaged the Treasury Department building, and Rogers used it for comedic effect. “The fire started on the roof and burned down to where the money was supposed to be and there it stopped. The Harding Administration had beat the fire to it,” Rogers said.

Soon after Rogers’ show left Washington the biggest and most sensational scandal to hit American politics, to that point, broke: Tea Pot Dome.

In 1923, an effort was made to bring Rogers to Pinehurst for a show at the recently opened Theater Building. Due to other contractual obligations, Rogers doubted he could work Pinehurst into his schedule and, on the Pinehurst end, it was felt that Rogers’ fee of $500 was too mercenary.

Five years later, in the spring of 1928, Leonard Tufts, the owner of the Pinehurst Resort, footed the bill for Rogers to make an appearance, and the entertainer was more than happy to make the trip. It would involve two things he had become very passionate about: aviation and polo.

Rogers’ affection for aviation had turned him into the country’s first frequent flyer. Air travel was just what he needed to accommodate his demanding schedule. Paying by the pound, Rogers flew in mail planes to destinations across the country. He became good friends with aviators Charles Lindbergh and Billy Mitchell, regarded as the father of the United States Air Force. Rogers was flown to Pinehurst from Atlanta, where he was performing, by Pinehurst’s Lloyd Yost, a well-known aviator and the manager of the local airfield.

Rogers’ second passion, polo, was a sport every bit as highbrow as golf, the game he had mocked and made fun of for so many years. A fellow performer with Rogers in the Wild West show that fateful day at Madison Square Garden had a decade later begun training horses for polo in New Jersey. Rogers visited him and became hooked on a sport that allowed him to saddle up and get back to his cowboy roots. He became so “all-in” for polo that when he purchased the property for his ranch in Santa Monica, California, a polo field was laid out before the design for the ranch’s house.

Rogers hosted matches on the weekends whenever his travel schedule permitted. The regular participants were some of Hollywood’s biggest names: Clark Gable, Spencer Tracy, Hal Roach, Walt Disney.

Rogers played polo with reckless abandon and had the broken bones to show for it. He once said of the sport, “They call it a gentlemen’s game for the same reason they call a tall man Shorty.” Los Angeles Times sportswriter Frank Finch wrote of Rogers, “He erased the tea-drinking, ‘High Society’ ideas about the mallet sport by appearing at swank polo clubs donned in overalls, cowboy boots, hatless and coatless, his $1.98 shirt open at the throat.”

The polo match in Pinehurst that Rogers saddled up for took place on the grounds of the harness track. The contest featured two local teams. Rogers took part as a member of the “The Yellows.” The match ended in a 3-3 tie with Rogers scoring all three of the Yellow team’s goals.

That evening Rogers put on his one-man show in the Theater Building. His appearance had been highly promoted with ads appearing in local newspapers since early February and was a sold-out performance.

Well before his trip to Pinehurst, Rogers’ jokes about golf seemed to be tapering off. The sport had turned something of a popularity corner. Another icon who, like Rogers, was a hero to the common man had become the country’s most high-profile golf fanatic — Babe Ruth. The baseball slugger’s exploits on the golf course flooded newspapers during the off-season.

And, two years prior to Rogers’ appearance in Pinehurst, Bobby Jones had been celebrated with a ticker-tape parade in New York City when he returned from winning the British Open and British Amateur. In 1930 Jones would collect all four championships in a calendar year — the U.S. Open and U.S. Amateur, British Open and British Amateur — to complete his Grand Slam, earning a second ticker-tape celebration. Jones and John Glenn, the fighter pilot, astronaut and senator from Ohio, are the only people to have been so honored twice.

Over the next few years, Rogers developed a friendship with Jones. When Jones was in Hollywood to make a series of short films titled How I Play Golf, he spent time at Rogers’ ranch. Jones would hit golf balls around the ranch’s vast open spaces while Rogers accompanied him on horseback.

Rogers’ career continued to reach new heights. In 1935, he signed a movie contract with Fox Studios that would pay him $8,000 a week — the equivalent $176,000 in 2023. By late July of 1935, he had made four movies that were playing across the country and had just wrapped up the production of a fifth, titled In Old Kentucky. After that stretch of moviemaking, he was ready to get back to traveling.

Two weeks later, near Point Barrow, Alaska, an Eskimo man made a rapid trek on foot, covering 15 miles over rugged terrain in three hours to reach the Army Signal Corps station. So exhausted he could hardly speak, he told the personnel that a plane had crashed and its two occupants were dead. The pilot of the plane was renowned aviator Wiley Post. His passenger was Will Rogers. PS

David Sowell writes about golf history. He has written for the USGA’s Golf Journal and he is the author of the book The Masters: a Hole-by-Hole History of America’s Golf Classic. He moved to Pinehurst in 2020.

2023 Feature

In the Spirit

Three’s Company

Have liquor, will travel

By Tony Cross

On a lovely trip to Wrightsville Beach I had my fair share of margaritas and Mexican lagers from Tower 7 restaurant and Lagerheads Tavern. I also brought rum and liqueurs — as well as syrups and bitters — for my travel bar at the Airbnb. Naturally, I brought way too much. I definitely should have scaled it back. Lesson learned. With that in mind, here are some suggestions for those of you who would like to make a few quick and easy cocktails while on vacation but don’t want to lug around any more stuff than absolutely necessary. I’ll keep them in mind for my September trip, too.

Ti’ Punch

With the exception of a vodka and soda, this might be the easiest drink a beach-loving vacationer can make. Rum, lime and sugar are the only ingredients you’ll need. You may be asking yourself, “Isn’t that the recipe for a daquiri?” Well, sort of. You’ll need the end of a lime, not the juice, and this cocktail will not be shaken, only stirred, without ice. A quick history of the national drink of Martinique, per rum bartender, enthusiast and author Shannon Mustipher: “There is no real ‘recipe.’ It is meant to be built and enjoyed according to one’s own personal taste, and it is reflected in the local saying, Chacun prepare sa propre mort, which roughly translates as ‘Each prepares his own death.’”

Rhum agricole is recommended; these are usually 50 ABV or higher in spirit. I’ve used Clairin before (a Haitian rum) and thoroughly enjoyed the results. This is a spirit-forward drink and great sipper.

2 ounces rhum agricole (50 percent ABV)

1 bar spoon cane sugar or cane sugar simple syrup

1 lime

Cut a disc of skin from a lime, about the size of a silver dollar, taking as little of the pith and actual flesh of the lime as possible. In a rocks glass, muddle the lime disk with sugar or simple syrup. Top with rhum. Stir well to mix.

Gold Rush

I don’t drink a lot of whiskey during North Carolina summers, but if you do, the Gold Rush might be intriguing. It’s basically a whiskey sour, but with honey syrup for the sweetening agent. You might call it a Bee’s Knees with gin instead of whiskey. No matter how you look at it, it’s an easy cocktail to make. Use a younger bourbon, or one without a lot of oak present. As for the honey, you’ll want to make a syrup out of it, so it mixes easier when shaking the cocktail. You can do a 1:1 ratio with water, but a 2 or 3:1 ratio of honey to water will make the syrup richer and, in my opinion, a better mouthfeel.

2 ounces bourbon

3/4 ounce fresh lemon juice

1/2 ounce honey syrup (3:1). If using a smaller ratio of honey to water, use 3/4 ounce

Add all ingredients to cocktail shaker, add ice, and shake hard for 10-15 seconds. Strain into cocktail glass over a large cube. Add lemon peel for garnish.

Tommy’s Margarita

Be warned. If you haven’t had this margarita, you are going to be hooked. There’s no orange curaçao, no simple syrup, no fruit. I’m in love with this simple three-ingredient margarita that’s courtesy of Julio Bermejo of Tommy’s Mexican Restaurant in San Francisco. From Robert Simonson’s book Modern Classic Cocktails, he writes: “The seeds of the drink were planted when Bermejo was not yet of drinking age. Like many teenagers, he experimented with booze. Beer, rum and brandy left him with bad hangovers. But he found that tequila — filched from Tommy’s, his family’s restaurant in the Richmond District — didn’t do as much damage. And Herradura tequila in particular, made from 100 percent agave, left his brain largely unscathed.” Once Bermejo was of age to bartend, he began experimenting with higher quality tequila, fresh juices, and ultimately 86-ing any orange liqueur. By the mid-’90s, his margaritas began to turn heads, including well-known bartenders and newspapers like The Wall Street Journal.

For this margarita, you’ll need to make an agave syrup. A 2:1 ratio (2 parts agave and 1 part water) works great. Add agave and water into a saucepan and put over medium heat, stirring until agave is dissolved — should take less than a minute. A quality tequila is strongly recommended. Don’t even go through the trouble making your own agave syrup if you’re going to end up using inferior tequila. Though blanco tequilas work great in margs, a good reposado tequila really shines through in this one. Herradura reposado is still a great choice. These are addicting — don’t say I didn’t warn you.

2 ounces reposado tequila

1 ounce fresh lime juice

1/2 ounce agave syrup

Take a rocks glass and use a lime wedge to rim 1/4 to 1/2 of glass. Roll that part of the rim into a small plate containing kosher salt (Celtic salt is yum). Add a large ice cube into the glass. In a cocktail shaker, add tequila, lime juice, agave syrup, and ice. Shake hard for 10-15 seconds. Strain into a rocks glass and toast the beach. PS

Tony Cross owns and operates Reverie Cocktails, a cocktail delivery service that delivers kegged cocktails for businesses to pour on tap — but once a bartender, always a bartender.

2023 Department In the Spirit

Hometown

The Best Laid Plans

The resort that almost was

By Bill Fields

On childhood visits to sleepy Jackson Springs, where my parents grew up and my maternal grandmother still lived — across the street from the Presbyterian church — the stories told of the community’s bustling days were hard to believe.

As I tried to catch minnows in Jackson Creek or filled jars of mineral water from a spigot for Ma-Ma’s kitchen, few cars drove by on Highway 73. Inside the gas station once owned by my grandfather, B.L. Henderson, there was never a line to get to the penny candy or hoop cheese.

It was hard to imagine tourists in the 1890s and early 20th century having flocked to Jackson Springs, most traveling by train on the 4-mile spur line from West End, to take the water and take a load off, lodging at the 100-room hotel on a bluff above the springs. The guests went swimming and boating in a nearby lake. They played tennis, bowled and went quail hunting. Where I spent those solitary Sunday afternoons dangling a tiny hook baited with a morsel of bread, there had been a pavilion with music and dancing.

Why didn’t Jackson Springs endure as a resort, the way Pinehurst did?

There wasn’t any golf, for one thing, although in perhaps Jackson Springs’s most intriguing chapter, in the mid-1920s, there was talk of a course — designed by Donald Ross — among other big plans that never came to fruition.

News broke in 1925 that a “Northern syndicate” was purchasing the Jackson Springs Hotel from a local owner with intentions to invest $1 million in upgrades and expansion. The New Yorkers talked about building a new, larger hotel, converting the existing structure into a sanitarium and maternity hospital, and aggressively marketing the mineral water, lauded for its curative power.

The organization incorporated in early 1926. Its president was Dr. Joseph Darwin Nagel, a physician. Born in Hungary in 1867, Nagel immigrated to the United States in the 1880s and attended the Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York City. An author of medical textbooks, Nagel was affiliated with the Hotel Pennsylvania, then the world’s largest hotel, as medical director.

“A man of sterling worth and whose name carries confidence and assurance wherever it is known,” The Sandhill Citizen noted of Dr. Nagel.

The corporation’s general manager, Henry Stockbridge, told The Pilot in February 1926: “As soon as Donald Ross can get to it, we intend to have him establish an eighteen-hole golf course. We will enlarge the dam and raise the height of it to supply ample water power as well as to the advantages of the lake. We have other plans in view which will be unfolded when the time is ripe and which will make Jackson Springs a more prominent influence in Moore County than it is at present.”

Stockbridge’s boast turned out to be a fiction. In the late summer of 1928, Nagel wrote to Pinehurst owner Leonard Tufts, explaining that he hadn’t been able to devote the necessary time to make development in Jackson Springs a reality. “The thought occurred to me,” Nagel wrote, “that possibly you or some of your friends, might be interested in the property . . . ”

Richard Tufts, responding for his father, told Nagel that the family had operated the Jackson Springs Hotel “for several seasons” and knew full well what it would take “to put the place on a paying basis.”

The onset of the Great Depression in 1929 was a hammer to the Jackson Springs Hotel’s by-now tenuous existence. The resort chapter came to an end in April 1932, when a fire destroyed the hotel weeks before a new owner, Frank Welch of Southern Pines, planned to open it for the late spring and summer seasons. By the following summer, instead of tourists, Jackson Springs was filled with young men working at a Civilian Conservation Corps camp, one of dozens of CCC installations in North Carolina.

In 1961, by which time the heyday of my parents’ hometown was a distant memory, Dr. Nagel died at age 93 in Winter Haven, Florida, where he had long wintered and later retired. His brief and ultimately aborted involvement with Jackson Springs didn’t make his obituary. PS

Southern Pines native Bill Fields, who writes about golf and other things, moved north in 1986 but hasn’t lost his accent.

2023 Department Hometown

Bookshelf

August Books

FICTION

Tom Lake, by Ann Patchett

In the spring of 2020, Lara’s three daughters return to the family’s orchard in Northern Michigan. While picking cherries, they beg their mother to tell them the story of Peter Duke, a famous actor with whom she shared both a stage and a romance years before at a theater company called Tom Lake. As Lara recalls the past, her daughters examine their own lives and relationship with their mother, and are forced to reconsider the world and everything they thought they knew. Both hopeful and elegiac, Tom Lake explores what it means to be happy even when the world is falling apart. As in all of her novels, Patchett combines compelling narrative artistry with piercing insights into family dynamics. The result is a rich and luminous story, told with profound intelligence and emotional subtlety.

The Night Ship, by Jess Kidd

Based on a true story, this epic historical novel illuminates the lives of two characters: a girl shipwrecked on an island off Western Australia and, 300 years later, a boy finding a home with his grandfather on the very same island. 1629: A newly orphaned young girl named Mayken is bound for the Dutch East Indies on the Batavia, one of the greatest ships of the Dutch Golden Age. Curious and mischievous, Mayken spends the long journey going on misadventures above and below the deck, searching for a mythical monster. But the true monsters might be closer than she thinks. 1989: A lonely boy named Gil is sent to live off the coast of Western Australia among the seasonal fishing community where his late mother once resided. There, on the tiny reef-shrouded island, he discovers the story of an infamous shipwreck. With her trademark storytelling, Kidd weaves a true work of magic about friendship, sacrifice, brutality and forgiveness.

My Name Is Iris, by Brando Skyhorse

Iris Prince is starting over. After years of drifting apart, she and her husband are going through a surprisingly drama-free divorce. She’s moved to a new house in a new neighborhood, and has plans for gardening, coffee clubs and spending more time with her 9-year-old daughter, Melanie. It feels like her life is finally exactly what she wants it to be. Then, one beautiful morning, she looks outside her kitchen window — and sees that a wall has appeared in her front yard overnight. Where did it come from? What does it mean? And why does it seem to keep growing? Meanwhile, a Silicon Valley startup has launched a high-tech wrist wearable called “the Band.” Pitched as a convenient, eco-friendly tool to help track local utilities and replace driver’s licenses and IDs, the Band is available only to those who can prove parental citizenship. Suddenly, Iris, a proud second-generation Mexican American, is now of “unverifiable origin,” unable to prove who she is, or where she, and her undocumented loved ones, belong. Amid a climate of fear and hate-fueled violence, Iris must confront how far she’ll go to protect what matters to her most.

NONFICTION

The Slip: The New York City Street That Changed Art Forever, by Prudence Peiffer

In this exquisite biography, an art historian and critic captures a singular moment of community and creativity in mid-20th century New York City, bringing to life a group of struggling artists and the place they all called home, an obscure little street at the lower tip of Manhattan, Coenties Slip. For just over a decade, from 1956 to 1967, a collection of dilapidated former sail-making warehouses clustered at the lower edge of Manhattan became the quiet epicenter of the art world. Coenties Slip, a dead-end street near the water, was home to a circle of wildly talented and varied artists that included Robert Indiana, Ellsworth Kelly, Agnes Martin, James Rosenquist, Delphine Seyrig, Lenore Tawney and Jack Youngerman. As friends and inspirations to one another, they created a unique community for unbridled creative expression and experimentation, and the works they made at the Slip would go on to change the course of American art. Despite Coenties Slip’s obscurity, the entire history of Manhattan was inscribed into its cobblestones — one of the first streets and central markets of the new colony, built by enslaved people, with revolutionary meetings at the tavern just down Pearl Street. It was named by Herman Melville in Moby Dick, and the site of the boom and bust of the city’s maritime industry. The Slip’s history is entwined with that of the artists and their art — eclectic and varied — exploring how we are shaped by our environment, and how it in turn shapes our work.

CHILDREN’S BOOKS

When Rubin Plays, by Gracey Zhang

Beautiful music is in the ear of the beholder, and in this stunning picture book from the author/illustrator of Lala’s Words, that ear is a chorus of cats! Both a celebration of music and of new musicians, this one is sure to become a storytime favorite. (Ages 3-7.)

You Can’t Be a Pterodactyl!, by James Breakwell

Veterinarian, garbage truck driver or nurse – kids want to grow up to be all kinds of things. But Tommy? Tommy wants to be a pterodactyl. This super-silly picture book shows that determination can go a long, long way. (Ages 3-7.)

A Shell Is Cozy, by Diana Hutts Aston

A shell is a cozy, bony shelter that keeps the delicate parts of the animal tucked safely inside, but it’s also an anatomical wonder and a beautiful treasure for the patient beachcomber. This lyrical nonfiction title is chock-full of information, yet is lovely enough to be a coffee table book. Check out the entire series, which includes A Butterfly Is Patient, An Egg Is Quiet, A Rock Is Lively, A Nest Is Noisy and A Seed Is Sleepy. (Ages 3-10.)

All That’s Left to Say, by Emery Lord

Her prom night and her dress are ruined, and maybe her whole life, but Hannah absolutely believes that it was all worth it if she can find out the truth about what happened to Sophie. A beautiful exploration of grief, a friends-to-lovers romance and an emotional thriller, All That’s Left to Say will devastate you in the best kind of way. (Ages 14 and up.) PS

Compiled by Kimberly Daniels Taws and Angie Tally.

2023 Bookshelf Department

Butterfly Highway

A neighborhood creates a pollinator pitstop

By Jan Leitschuh

Left: Dez MacSorley

If you have lived five or six or seven decades, you remember the abundant orange and black monarch butterflies of your childhood. Hardly a summer day would pass without seeing one, if not scores of them.

Today, if you see one, it’s Facebook- or Instagram-worthy because of the butterfly’s rarity. There are a number of reasons the population has crashed in the last couple decades, but crash it has.

One neighborhood in Southern Pines is fighting back. A dedicated group of neighbors is working to transform their long street into a connected and welcoming pollinator paradise, not just for monarchs but all declining butterflies, birds and native insects.

This month, the fall monarch migration begins winging its perilous journey to Mexico, laying eggs on milkweed, exclusively, along the way. An extensive stretch of Sheldon Road will be waiting with open arms with milkweed for eggs and nectar plants for sustenance — all pollinators welcome.

“Pollinators continue to make global headlines as native bees and migrating species such as monarch butterflies decline,” writes the North Carolina Wildlife Federation. “Habitat loss from development is the primary cause of population decline, followed by pesticide and fungicide use, as well as parasites and diseases.”

In response, the federation developed the concept of a North Carolina “Butterfly Highway,” a statewide conservation initiative aimed at restoring pollinator habitat, from citizen-driven, backyard “Pollinator Pitstops” to large-scale habitat rejuvenation of roadsides, agricultural margins and development.

Individuals answered the call. Homeowners and garden clubs began taking up the torch to raise awareness and create inviting habitat for these vulnerable and iconic lovelies. Some farms planted long strips of pollinator plants.

Threatened monarchs are at the forefront of the public awareness, as these butterflies only lay their eggs on milkweed species. As milkweed declined due to abundant agricultural use of glysophate weed killers versus mowing (which allows the plant to regenerate from the roots) and general habitat loss, so did the monarchs. Fifteen years ago, I read about the precipitous drop in the monarch populations. Conservation organizations were sounding the alarm and pleading with anyone who would listen to plant milkweed.

A visit to a remote Virginia meadow that fall yielded several ripe pods of the common milkweed variety. I tucked the seeds in my cottage garden here and forgot them. Next spring, I had milkweed, and have ever since. Thus began my butterfly journey, near the southern end of Sheldon Road.

About the same time, interest in native plants and pollinator-friendly gardens ripened into the public awareness too. Nearly a mile away from me, on a horse farm at the far northern, sand-road end of Sheldon, retired landscape architect and beekeeper Dez MacSorley designed her farm and decided to have a pesticide-free, non-manicured, tufted grass lawn. “Aside from the horse pastures, I turned all the other bits of land into a continuous meadow devoted to pollinator-friendly perennials and native grasses,” she says. This is the third year for the meadow and its beneficiaries.

“Come they have, “ MacSorley says. “Butterflies, bees, wasps, birds, moths — all come to feed on, find shelter in and enjoy my little meadow.”

She says her nearby Sheldon neighbors inspired her from the beginning, including avid gardeners Lynn McGugan, Cameron Sadler, Tayloe Moye and Carol Phillips, who has since passed away, all with different, complementary styles, and a passion for supporting and extending the natural environment.

In April 2021, Molly Thompson-Hopton, Cameron and Lincoln Sadler’s niece, started a Facebook garden group for her plant-loving friends, and the photo-sharing, education and awareness caught fire. “I guess you could say a love of wildlife and plants runs in our family,” she says.

“We started trading plants and knowledge,” MacSorley says. One of her neighbors, Sara Hoover, started a milkweed patch on her property adjacent to the Walthour Moss Foundation.

Thompson-Hopton, though living 8 miles away, caught the conservation bug. “After I moved to the family farm in Aberdeen, I got busy planting,” she said. “I knew I wanted to attract pollinators. I stumbled across some clasping milkweed and brought it home. I have four varieties of milkweed now and hope to add more.”

Through the plant trading on Thompson-Hopton’s social media page, I shared some milkweed plants with Lynn McGugan several years ago. She tucked them in near her other pollinator plants. McGugan, a force of nature, does nothing by half-measures. Before long, armed with information, she was out preaching the benefits of milkweed, pollinators and native plantings.

“Pollinator plantings add beauty to any landscape,” says McGugan, “and serve a purpose.”

A skilled photographer, McGugan posted gorgeous, envy-creating photos of various butterflies, caterpillars, moths and native bees feasting on her nectar banquet. Then McGugan and MacSorely hatched a plan to share the plant love even further.

“We intend to extend our pollinator-friendly native plantings down the natural edges of Sheldon Road,” says MacSorley, “creating a natural environmental corridor between all our properties, the Walthour Moss Foundation land and, who knows, maybe including some of the new houses further up Sheldon and along Youngs Road. This is truly the ‘butterfly effect’ at work.”

As tall pines came down and new houses went up this summer on Sheldon and just off it, McGugan walked up to a job site and grabbed a number off the sign, then started a conversation with Chris Styne of Homes by Dickerson. She found a willing ear in Styne. In a recent email he wrote: “Homes by Dickerson is excited to . . . be a part of such a unique and necessary organization such as this. We are committed to planting flowers at each of our eight new homes being built on Braden and Sheldon Road.”

Encouraged, McGugan has reached out to other builders. She engaged Seth Mabus of Mabus Farm & General Contracting and came away with a commitment for all new builds to include pollinator gardens. “They have the potential for such impact by just including a few beneficial shrubs and trees,” she said. “It all adds up.”

Across the road, farm owner Tricia Greenleaf and John Robertson started their own patch of milkweed this year, right next to a massive, nectar-rich Miss Huff lantana. McGugan offered them rooted cuttings in pots from some of her own flowering shrubs.

McGugan’s near neighbors in horse country, Sadler and Moye, have cultivated stunning gardens too, sisters inheriting their mother Carol’s love of plants.

“Initially,” says Moye, “I bought a milkweed plant because I was interested in having butterflies. It got covered with caterpillars and they were eating the leaves so I used a pesticide and killed all of them. When I told Lincoln what happened, he said, ‘You just killed all the butterflies.’ That was 14 or 15 years ago.” Moye was heartsick, but soon made up for her pesticide error.

“I have been gardening since a child, continuously throughout my life,” she says, “and I believe it saved me in the worst of times. I have become more interested in native plants over the last 10 years. I’m pretty sure Lynn McGugan was my initial inspiration. I saw what she was doing and over the last three years ordered every type of milkweed I could find on the internet along with other native plants.”

On a long stretch of Sheldon Road, from Foundation-adjacent horse farms to suburban new construction and out the other end to Weymouth Woods, a butterfly-friendly corridor is shaping up, thanks to enthusiastic neighbors.

“Nature fills me with joy and I feel like I’m contributing to the greater good by being an active participant,” says Moye.

Sometimes, it takes a village. PS

Jan Leitschuh is a local gardener, equestrian, avid eater of fresh produce and co-founder of Sandhills Farm to Table.

GREAT PLANTS FOR CATERPILLARS

Butterflies get all the love, and they sip energy-rich nectar from many pollinator-friendly plants. But no caterpillars, no butterflies. Often, when their host plants decline, so does the species. Witness monarchs, who only lay their eggs on milkweed.

As habitat is destroyed, we can help by including a few friendlies for North Carolina butterflies to lay their eggs on, such as:

For monarchs: the milkweed family — common, tuberosa, swamp, clasping and more — offers exclusive food for the monarch caterpillars. These plants tolerate poor soil and never need fertilizing. All milkweeds contain cardiac glycosides in their sap that monarchs consume and store in their bodies. Potential predators learn to steer clear of this bitter, stored substance.

For swallowtail: Dill, fennel, parsley, common rue, carrot greens, tulip tree, wild black cherry.

For fritillaries: passion vine, maypops, violets.

For American painted lady: thistles, mallows, yellow fiddleneck.

For common buckeye: aster, peppermint, tickseed sunflower, chicory.

2023 Feature

It Slices. It Dices.

Memoir by Stephen E. Smith • Illustration by Harry Blair

“Get up! Get up! Get up, up, up!” my mother blurted.

It was at 6:30 a.m., the first day of Christmas break, and as always she felt compelled to rouse her children at the most ungodly hour. I lifted my head from the pillow and stared bleary-eyed at her figure in the bedroom doorway. Wrapped to her chin in a blue terrycloth robe, her fists were planted firmly on her hips. She meant business. “You’re to march yourself down to the Safeway and ask Mr. Short if he’ll give you a job for the holidays,” she ordered. “You can earn enough money to pay for your books next semester. And next time I see Mr. Short, I’ll find out if you asked him for a job.”

“Can’t you even say, ‘Welcome home’?” I asked.

“Sure. Welcome home, Mr. Big Shot College Guy. Now get out of that bed and get yourself down to the Safeway.”

I was suffering from severe sleep deprivation. I’d caught an all-night ride home from North Carolina and had dragged into the house on Janice Drive at 3:15 a.m. But my mother was not to be denied, so I managed to pull on the wrinkled clothes I’d worn the day before and stumbled downstairs to eat a bowl of my brother’s Froot Loops. At 8:30 a.m. I scuffled up Bayridge Avenue to the Eastport Shopping Center, where I found Mr. Short on the dock, supervising the unloading of pallets of dog food from a tractor-trailer. He shook my hand and asked how college was going.

“It’s fine,” I answered. “I was hoping you might have an opening for a cashier during the holidays. I’m not looking to work eight hours a day, but, you know, something part time.”

“If I had an opening, I’d hire you,” he said. “But right now I have all the cashiers I need. I’d have to cut someone else’s hours, and that wouldn’t be fair, especially at Christmas.” My spirits soared. If he didn’t have an opening, I could pass the holidays stretched out on my bed reading P.G. Wodehouse.

“I’ll tell you what,” he continued, “I’ve got a friend who’s the manager at the Drug Fair in Parole. Go see him and tell him I sent you. He’s looking for holiday help.”

A job at Drug Fair was the last thing I wanted, but I had to make an inquiry. My mother was as good as her word, and I knew she’d buttonhole Mr. Short the next time she visited the Safeway. If she found out I hadn’t applied for the Drug Fair job, she’d make my Christmas break miserable, which she had already begun to do by wakening me before sunup.

Among cashiers, there existed a hierarchy, and working a register at Safeway carried with it a degree of status and a wage that was at least $1.75 an hour. Drug Fair was a discount pharmacy, emporium and grocery store, a low-rent warehouse for plastic crap and wilted vegetables, where the discount prices were clearly marked on each item — work for the dimwitted — and the pay was $1.25 an hour.

I caught the bus to Parole and found the Drug Fair manager, a rumpled, balding, ectomorphic fellow with thick wire spectacles and a long pointy nose, puzzling over paperwork in an elevated office that overlooked a line of disheveled employees who were pounding away at their cash registers. He appeared to be in emotional distress, his mouth screwed into a grotesque snarl.

“Excuse me,” I said. He looked up, snatched the glasses from his face and tossed them on the countertop in a display of frustration. “Mr. Short over at Safeway said I should talk with you about working as a cashier for the holidays. I don’t need a full-time job, just some part-time work if you’ve got it.”

Sweet relief swept over his face, his lips stretching into a half smile. “Mr. Short sent you?” he asked.

“He said you might need an experienced cashier.”

“You used to work at the Safeway?”

“For two years, until I went off to college.”

He grinned fully. I was apparently the man he’d been waiting for. He stepped out of his office, planted both feet flat on the linoleum and looked me up and down. “Can you work a register?” he asked.

“Yes, sir.”

“And you’ve worked stock?”

“Yes, sir.”

My God, he was going to hire me! I was going to pass the next two weeks checking out Christmas junk at the Drug Fair for minimum wage! This was not good.

The manager handed me a pen and an application clamped to a clipboard, and I took a couple of minutes to fill in the information.

“Follow me,” he said, and we walked quickly down aisle four toward the back of the crowded store. “I can use you to relieve my regular cashiers for their lunch and supper breaks, and you can help keep the shelves stocked, especially this display. We’re selling the hell out of these things.” He pointed to a chest-high pyramid of black, orange and beige boxes crowned with an unboxed white plastic kitchen device known to every American who owned a TV. “We’ve had to restock this display three times this morning. You know anything about Veg-O-Matics?” he asked.

What happened next was probably brought on by fatigue — or maybe I needed an excuse to get fired before I got hired. Whatever the cause, a synaptic misfire propelled me into the past. I picked up the display device, held it out in front of me and began to deliver the requisite spiel:

“Imagine slicing a whole potato into uniform slices with one motion. Bulk cheese costs less. Look how easy Veg-O-Matic makes many slices at once. Imagine slicing all these radishes in seconds. This is the only appliance in the world that slices whole firm tomatoes in one stroke with every seed in place. Hamburger lovers, feed whole onions into Veg-O-Matic and make these tempting thin slices. Simply turn the dial and change from thin to thick slices. You can slice a whole can of prepared meat at one time. Isn’t that amazing? Like magic, change from slicing to dicing. That’s right, it slices, it dices, it juliennes, perfect every time!”

By the time I’d finished yammering, the manager’s eyes were wide and his jaw slack.

“How’d you learn that?” he asked.

“I used to watch the commercial on TV, and it just sort of stuck in my head.”

My fascination with the Veg-O-Matic stretched back to my junior year in high school. Strung out on testosterone and teenage angst, I suffered insomnia for about six months. On those long, restless nights, I’d roll out of bed after everyone else in the house was asleep, slink down to the “rec” room and turn on the black and white TV. WJZ, the local CBS affiliate, was the only station out of Baltimore that aired anything other than an Indian Chief test pattern in the early a.m., so I’d tune in channel 13 in time to catch Father Callahan of St. Francis Xavier House of Prayer bestowing his benediction. Then I’d settle in for a three-hour run of continuous raise-your-own-chinchillas commercials.

My clandestine obsession with Father Callahan and chinchillas continued for two or three months — until the fateful night when the good Father delivered his usual homily and the chinchilla commercials failed to materialize. Instead, a plastic guillotine-like device appeared on the TV screen, contrasted against a background map of the world, below which were printed the words “World Famous Veg-O-Matic.” Then a disembodied voice said: “Imagine slicing a whole potato into uniform slices with one motion. Bulk cheese costs less. Look how easy Veg-O-Matic makes many slices at once. . . . ”

I’d spent my Father Callahan/chinchilla nights dozing fitfully on the couch and sneaking back to my room before the rest of the family awakened, but on that memorable evening — I’ve come to think of it as Night of the Veg-O-Matic — I sat there stupefied, watching the commercial over and over. I couldn’t take my eyes off the screen, and by morning I had the narration memorized — every nuance, modulation and inflection — to which I could add hand gestures, including the graceful, upturned palm that beckoned, “Buy me, buy me, buy me. . . .”

Later that day, I was eating lunch in the high school cafeteria with my regular buds when freckle-faced Ronnie Wheeler produced a sliced tomato his mother had wrapped in wax paper to keep it from saturating the white bread he needed to construct his BLT. I jumped up, grabbed the tomato slices and ran through the entire Veg-O-Matic routine, spreading the segments across the Formica tabletop and finishing with the obligatory “. . . perfect every time!”

My friends were speechless, especially Ronnie, whose sandwich was ruined. They stared blankly before bursting into hysterics. The vice-principal, Mr. Wetherhold, a stern disciplinarian who abhorred any form of frivolity, hurried over to our table to discern the source of the disturbance. “What’s going on here?” he asked sternly.

“Do it!” my friends begged. “Do the Veg-O-Matic thing!” They didn’t have to ask twice. When I finished my second run-through, it was Mr. Wetherhold who was howling with laughter. Suffice it to say I spent a good deal of my time in high school doing “the Veg-O-Matic thing” for my friends. They never tired of it.

Now the Drug Fair manager’s face glowed with approval, and I could see that he’d suffered an epiphany. He rushed into the stockroom and reappeared with a folding table. He extended the legs, positioned the table in front of the pyramid of boxes and covered the top with a square of red cheesecloth. He grabbed an onion from the produce aisle, peeled away the skin, and ordered me to deliver my recitation again, this time with the unboxed Veg-O-Matic at my fingertips.

Despite my long and intimate history with the kitchen device, this was the first time I’d worked with one. But I muddled through the presentation by recalling the images I’d watched hundreds of times on TV, each motion transmitted from memory to physical articulation. I made quick work of the onion, repeating the entire monologue. My demonstration, although clumsy, went well enough to instantly earn me the title: 1965 Parole Drug Fair Veg-O-Matic Man.

“You’re hired!” the manager said. “I want you to do a demonstration at the top of every hour. Use all the tomatoes and onions you want, but stay away from the cheese and Spam. That stuff costs money.”

“Yes, sir,” I said dutifully.

“The rest of the time you can restock these Veg-O-Matics and relieve the cashiers who are going on break. Can you start tomorrow?”

“Yeah,” I said, “I guess.”

“Be here at 8 o’clock, and wear a white shirt.”

Crestfallen, I dragged myself into the parking lot and caught the bus back to Eastport. When I stumbled into our living room, it was 11:30 a.m., and I was whipped.

“Did Mr. Short hire you?” my mother yelled from the kitchen.

“He didn’t have any openings, but I got a job at Drug Fair in Parole.”

“Excellent,” she said.

When I turned up at Drug Fair on Saturday morning ready to begin my new career, the manager had anticipated my every need. The folding table was set up in aisle four, which was stocked with kitchen junk — Melmac dishes, spatulas, plastic forks, spoons and knives, etc. — and beside the table waited a freshly replenished pyramid of multicolored boxes containing the Veg-O-Matics. The tabletop was covered with the red cheesecloth from the day before, and a white apron of the style that loops around the neck and ties in the back was folded neatly on the table. An unopened can of Spam and a brick of Kraft Velveeta cheese were stacked beside the gleaming white Veg-O-Matic display model I’d used in my earlier demonstration, and a bag of assorted vegetables — tomatoes, onions, carrots and potatoes — awaited their fate. As a touch of class, the manager had placed a roll of paper towels on the table, and a beige commercial dome-topped trash can sat directly behind my workspace.

“Here, wear this,” he said, handing me a handsome black clip-on bowtie. I donned my apron and attached the bowtie to the wrinkled collar of my white shirt. “Now show me your stuff. Just use vegetables. The Spam and cheese are for show.”

I launched into my Veg-O-Matic dance at a measured pace, slicing up a small potato and allowing my hands to gracefully execute a lilting swirl at the conclusion of the shtick.

“That was even better than yesterday,” the manager beamed, “although I’d take it a little slower if I were you.” He looked up and down aisle four. “I’ll make an announcement at the top of every hour. You get yourself set up. Sell the hell out of these Veg-O-Matics. If you don’t, you’ll be in a checkout stand all day.” And he left me on my own.

I peeled an onion, and trimmed it to the proper size and shape. I was ready. Or as ready as I was ever going to be.

“We are pleased to direct your attention to aisle four,” I heard the manager announce over the PA system, “where you can view a demonstration of the miracle Veg-O-Matic, the 20th century’s greatest kitchen appliance. It makes an economical and useful Christmas gift! Do all your Christmas shopping in five minutes and have your Veg-O-Matics gift wrapped right here in the store. Christmas cards are available on aisle six.”

After my first two demonstrations, I discovered that operating the Veg-O-Matic wasn’t quite the effortless exercise I’d observed on TV. I directed my attention to the tomato, which I positioned perfectly between the upper and lower blades. “This is the only appliance in the world that slices whole firm tomatoes in one stroke with every seed in place,” I said, as I slammed down the top of the Veg-O-Matic. The tomato exploded like a water balloon, splattering juice and seeds all over my apron and the tabletop. The two customers who had gathered for my demonstration jumped back and bolted for the exit.

I’d created a huge mess. I mopped the tomato slop off my hands with a paper towel and brushed the seeds from my apron, but pulp continued to dribble from the bottom of the Veg-O-Matic, and I had to retreat to the stockroom to wash the blades. So tomatoes were out. Ripe ones, at least. After mopping the splatter from the tabletop, I attempted to slice an onion I’d peeled earlier. I gave a forceful downward thrust and the device worked perfectly, sending a cascade of onion slivers onto the cheesecloth. Still, it was a messy business; pieces of onion got stuck in the blades and had to be pried out. I had the same experience with carrots, stubborn chunks of which had to be worked free with my fingertips.

I settled, finally, on a peeled Idaho Russet potato. I cut the spud into four pieces, which I fed individually into the chopper. And the device worked as intended — neat and clean. The Veg-O-Matic was, after all, meant to transform a time-consuming, chaotic operation into a simple, wholesome procedure. And that’s what it did.

The secret, as with many physical actions, was in the wrist. It was all finesse. I’d place a piece of potato on the bottom blades and apply a sharp downward whack with the top. And voila! the potato was julienned, perfect for hash browns. If I spoke slowly, worked methodically and was meticulous with my cleanup, I could kill the better part of a half hour on each demonstration, thus allowing for only 30 minutes of working at a cash register before my next demonstration.

At first, I was worried that I wouldn’t sell enough Veg-O-Matics to keep my new job, but the pile of boxes diminished at an ever-increasing rate as Christmas approached and the manager was a happy man. I’d sold six to eight Veg-O-Matics with each demonstration, and I noticed that many customers who didn’t make an immediate purchase returned later to snatch up two or three Veg-O-Matics, having chosen convenience over thoughtful reflection. Usually these return customers felt compelled to offer an explanation for their delayed purchase. “You know,” they’d say, “I was thinking about your demonstration, and you’re right, this will make an excellent gift for my mother.”

Every day I’d work straight through until 10 p.m., taking an hour each for lunch and dinner, and then I’d catch the bus home in the dark. I’d shower and collapse into my bed to read for a few seconds in Pigs Have Wings, my latest Wodehouse novel, before falling asleep.

And that’s how it went for seven straight days. I’d turn up at Drug Fair at 8 a.m., an hour before the store opened, to prepare the potatoes for my demonstration. I’d restock the Veg-O-Matic display, piling the boxes high in an ergonomically conical construct of my own contrivance, and check out a register tray so that I could relieve cashiers who went on break.

If my schedule was exhausting, it also had its advantages. I slept like a stone, and the days flew by. At home, I didn’t have a conversation with my mother, father or sister that lasted more than 10 seconds. “Hi, how ya doing?” was as intimate as it got, which suited me. My father was asleep when I left in the morning and when I came in at night, I didn’t have to listen to my mother and sister bicker. Only my brother Mike, with whom I shared a room, was around when I staggered in whacked out from 12 hours of working with the public. He’d fill me in on the day’s drama with my sister, which made me glad I’d be headed back to college soon.

When the store closed at 9 p.m. on Christmas Eve, I used my humongous 5 percent employee discount to purchase gifts for the family — a cheap cotton bathrobe for my mother, which turned out to fit her like a circus tent, a simulated leather wallet for my father, a 45 of Donovan’s “Catch the Wind” for my brother, and the Beatles’ Help! for my sister. I was headed out the door with my packages when the manager stopped me.

“You’ve done a good job,” he said, a genuine smile on his pasty face. “And I’m hoping you’ll consider coming back to work through New Year’s Eve. You won’t be selling Veg-O-Matics, but I need experienced help to run the registers and handle returns. I could use you for at least 12 hours a day.”

Normally I would have responded with an emphatic “No,” but fresh in my memory were the money problems I’d experienced during my first four months at college and the hours I spent in McEwen Dining Hall scraping greasy dishes and scrubbing pots. With my paltry allowance, there was no hope of establishing a relationship with any of the girls I found myself drooling over as they roamed the campus. It was essential I screw up my courage and get myself an on-campus date. I’d have to double with an upperclassman who had a car, and to make that happen, I needed enough money to cover my share of the gas.

“All right,” I answered. “Can I get some overtime?”

“I’ll give you all the overtime you want. You can work 14 hours a day if you skip lunch and dinner.”

“All right,” I answered, “I’ll be glad to help out.”

So on December 27, I was standing behind a cash register refunding money for the Veg-O-Matics I’d sold the week before. “I’d like to get the money back for this thing,” the customer would say, handing me the orange and black box. They occasionally offered excuses such as “I already have one of these” or “I have no use for this piece of junk,” but what they wanted was cash. In almost every case the customer returning the Veg-O-Matic was not the person who’d bought it, so I didn’t consider the returns a criticism of my performance. I handed them the money and stuck the boxes and signed receipts under the register. At the end of the day, I toted the returned Veg-O-Matics to the storeroom and piled them up in the same space they’d occupied when they were new.

To compound this irony, the manager handed me a hammer at closing time on my first post-Christmas day as a cashier and sent me to the stockroom to smash the Veg-O-Matics the store had taken back. “Just bash those veggie things into little bits and put them back in the boxes,” he directed. “And while you’re at it, smash up these toys that didn’t get sold.” The manager didn’t explain why I needed to destroy so much perfectly good merchandise, and I didn’t ask. But I laid into my new task with gusto, obliterating hundreds of Veg-O-Matics along with Chatty Cathy dolls, Etch-A-Sketches, tin airliners, space guns, trains, battery-powered James Bond Aston Martin cars, Rock ’em Sock ’em Robots, Easy-Bake Ovens, electric football games, G.I. Joes, and the occasional Barbie doll, perfectly good toys that might have gone to poor children who’d suffered a sad Christmas. But it was exhilarating work — and strangely gratifying — an anti-capitalistic binge that assuaged the guilt I’d suffered from selling plastic crap to poor people.

But the days were long, and there was no time to hang out with my friends. When I got off work at 9 p.m., I was too worn out to go to parties or ride around with high school buds. I’d catch the bus back to Eastport and fall into bed. The following morning, I’d get up and do it again.

On my last day of work, a Friday, the manager shook my hand. “You’re a lifesaver,” he said, pumping my weary arm. “If you need a job next Christmas, just let me know.”

I smiled, gave him my college post office box number and asked him to send my check there rather than to my home address.

“You should get it before the 10th,” he said.

During the two-and-a-half weeks I’d toiled at Drug Fair, my parents hardly noticed my absence. I was a shadow who flitted in and out at odd hours. And I wanted it that way. I didn’t have to listen to them argue, which was their habitual method of communication during any holiday season when they were forced to remain in each other’s company for more than five continuous minutes. And if my parents didn’t realize the hours I was working, they’d have no idea how much money I was making. Had they an inkling of the cash I was likely to pocket, they would have given me that much less for tuition, room and board, and the endless hours I’d spent slaving at Drug Fair would have been for naught.

On the evening before my return to Elon, in honor of my having been invisible during the holiday season, my mother prepared lasagna, my favorite dish.

“You headed back tomorrow?” my father asked.

“First thing in the morning,” I answered, “I’m going to catch the bus.”

My mother looked puzzled. “It seems like you just got here,” she said.

“I’ve been working the whole time.”

“Good,” she said. “How much money did you make?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t gotten paid yet — and the wage at Drug Fair isn’t as much as it is at the Safeway. I’ll let you know when the check arrives.” I was lying, of course. I had no intention of telling anyone how much money I’d earned. It was nobody’s business but mine. PS

Stephen E. Smith is a retired professor and the author of eight books of poetry and prose. He’s the recipient of the Poetry Northwest Young Poet’s Prize, the Zoe Kincaid Brockman Prize for poetry and four North Carolina Press Awards. This is an excerpt from his forthcoming book The Year We Danced: A Memoir.

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2023 Feature

Out of the Blue

Fashion Goes Far and Wide

What goes around comes around — again

By Deborah Salomon

I gasped, in shock. That woman is wearing bell-bottoms! But wait. Not only are the bottoms flared. The whole leg has been widened!

Are those pants . . . or pontoons?

About once every decade I need to unload on fashion. You might think that with the world in such rough shape people wouldn’t care what they wear. Then, again, maybe during hard times fashion provides a diversion — anything to get the mind off The Indictment, Meghan & Harry, Ukraine and graham crackers at $2 a box.

But we mustn’t knock a multi-billion-dollar industry (employing hundreds of thousands) too hard, even though obsolescence keeps it alive.

Nothing works like what’s happening now: Return of the bell-bottoms, even more revolutionary since pants have become the default for women.

This happened gradually, as I recall. What used to be called “slacks” and “dungarees” became pants and jeans. But a businesswoman in pants? Impossible! So the designers added a matching jacket, creating a pantsuit, worn with a girly blouse . . . er, top.

Women liked this, especially the tall, long-legged ones.

This popular trend for women survived the gender divide. Men adopted flares in casual pants and “leisure suits.” I can practically date a movie by its pants, especially the high-waisted, wide-leg ones that became Katharine Hepburn’s trademark.

The ladies soon learned that pants/pantsuits were practical, comfortable, versatile. Pantyhose wasn’t required, nor were shoes as important. The same pants could bottom a multitude of tops. Denim came out of the closet and into the spotlight — dress jeans, they were called, the quintessential oxymoron.

I’ve felt a change looming for several seasons, like elephants sense a tsunami and run for the hills. It began with gauzy wide-leg “palazzo” pants — OK if you’ve got a palazzo in Tuscany, not OK for the height-challenged, who seemed to sink into their volume. Then, this spring, fashion-forward TV anchorettes debuted pants that began flaring at the knee, got wider as they approached the ankle, then swallowed the foot like a whale swallows a school of fish. To further exacerbate the situation, CNN made them stand instead of hiding their pant legs under a desk.

Despite fostering flares the ladies retained the hairstyle best achieved when a power outage happens during a blow-dry. Or locks get caught in a woodchipper.

Remember that scene from Fargo?

Now I’m seeing baggy pants previewed in fall merchandise. More fabric means higher prices. My prediction: DOA, unless John Travolta exhumes “Stayin’ Alive” for his fellow senior citizens.

As for the guys, my shock turned to giggles watching them strut skinny suit pants, usually dark colors, paired with brownish-orange shoes which elongate, not minimize, big feet. What do you call a male fashionista? Fashionisti? Sorry, guys, but nothing looks better than a classic well-tailored suit, a fine shirt, maybe oxford-cloth, in the proper neck size (no gaps), with a paisley tie.

My last arrow is aimed at women’s shoe designers who lag behind the pantspeople. Boo-hoo, Jimmy Choo. Skinny stilettos don’t marry well with wide-leg bell-bottoms. They require slightly chunky footwear, with stacked heels, don’t you agree?

Agree or not, I’m betting that by December stovepipe pants will look as dated as penny loafers and pleated skirts.

Fashion is a complex element of civilization. Think of the ancient Egyptians, the Romans, the Elizabethans. Chinese women wore pants while colonists still sported bustles and hoop skirts. These days, Kate Middleton and Meghan Markle call the shots. Because if clothes really do make a man, imagine their power over poor women like us. PS

Deborah Salomon is a contributing writer for PineStraw and The Pilot. She can be reached at debsalomon@nc.rr.com.

2023 Department Out of the Blue

Birdwatch

A Case of Mistaken Identity

It’s not a baby hummingbird at all

By Susan Campbell

I am waiting, just waiting, for the first call to come in from someone who has seen a “baby hummingbird.” Although this is the time when young ruby-throateds are appearing at feeders and flowers across the state, the first report of the year is usually from a very puzzled observer. Not only has he or she spotted a very small hummer, but it looks to be of another species: The color pattern is very different. So, what is it?

The answer is always the same: It’s not a hummingbird at all, but a moth. Indeed, these insects hover to feed from brightly colored flowers and appear to have a long bill, but they are insects. The giveaway is the long antennae but, on such a small, fast flier, the antennae and three pairs of legs are easily overlooked. The odd behavior and body coloration are what grab one’s attention. The confusion is so common that many bird identification guides depict these moths on the same page alongside the details for ruby-throated hummingbirds.

Here in the North Carolina Piedmont and Sandhills, we have at least three kinds of so-called hummingbird moths, all of which are in the Sphingidae family. Two are “clearwing” moths: the hummingbird clearwing and the hummingbird hawk-moth. We have white-lined sphinx moths in late summer as well. They are all exclusively nectivorous, feeding from many of the same blooms frequented by hummingbirds. With their long proboscis, they can reach down into the tubular flowers of impatiens, fuchsias and assorted salvias, to name a few.

The clearwings are named for the transparent midsection of their wings. The rest of the body is frequently reddish but may be a shade of blue. They are active during the day, flitting from plant to plant in search of a sweet meal. Typically clearwings are not intimidated by human activity, probably because four-legged mammals do not prey on moths in our area. That means one can usually approach these beautiful creatures very closely. If you have the patience as well as a fast shutter speed, you may be able to get some excellent shots of these very photogenic insects.

Sphinx moths are large, striking and interesting. Unlike the clearwings, they are creatures of the night. They can be abundant at the same flowers hummingbirds use during the day, but most people are totally unaware of their existence given their nocturnal habits. It’s the caterpillar of this group that is more familiar. Typically called a hornworm (given the yellowy head projections), they are voracious pests on a variety of plants such as tomatoes, peppers, eggplant and tobacco. However, not only are the adult sphinx moths eaten by bats and small owls but, as caterpillars, hornworms are sought out by tiny braconid wasps. The eggs of the wasp develop under the skin of the caterpillar. Once they pupate, they attach themselves externally and are mistakenly thought to be the eggs of yet more caterpillars. When the caterpillars are in this state, they have very little time to live and are no longer a threat to the plants.

Keep your eyes peeled around the yard this summer. You may be lucky enough to spot one of these “baby hummers” hovering among the blooms. PS

Susan Campbell would love to receive your wildlife sightings and photographs at susan@ncaves.com.

2023 Birdwatch Department