Author: pinestrawmag

Poolside

Where one hears the darnedest things

 

By Renee Phile

I remember watching my boys swim at a local pool a few summers ago. David, then 10, is wearing his big honkin’ green goggles that cover his entire face, well, at least his eyes and his nose. His mouth is still exposed. He reminds me of a huge green bug. Kevin, then 5, still won’t put his face all the way under the water. “Blow bubbles!” I say. He won’t. He whimpers a bit, then shoots other people with his water gun. Kids squeal. Adults express mixed reactions. Some smile and splash back. Others look annoyed. Some glare. Kevin does not have his water gun etiquette down yet. I make a note to work on that with him.

The coconutty smell of sunscreen wafts through the humid North Carolina air. Heads bob up and down in the clear water. The sun scorches my shoulders. I mentally calculate the last time I sprayed my boys down with SPF 50. It is time again, probably. Sweat beads on my forehead and drops down on the pages of my David Baldacci novel. I think of how refreshing it will be to jump into the water.

The lifeguards gaze lazily over their sunglasses, every now and then glancing down at the phones in their laps. Texting, playing Candy Crush (yes, I know Candy Crush is sooooo five years ago . . .)

A dad with his two girls, probably ages 3 and 4, sit to my left underneath their own umbrella. He coerces them to eat strawberries, or how about a banana?

“No, you can’t have a cookie until you eat your fruit. Don’t make me call your mom.”

He takes a swig of his beer, stands up, hands on his waist.

“But daddy! Strawberries make me feew sick!” One wails. He takes another drink. Sighs.

Stay consistent, I think. You can do it. I send him mental energy. Words are unnecessary. You are the adult. Don’t be manipulated by their adorableness.

I smirk to myself as if I am always consistent with my own kids. As if I didn’t just give in earlier today when they begged me for leftover pizza and Sunkist for breakfast. Then doughnuts on the way to pool. As if I don’t say things like, “Fine! Eat the cookie! Eat all the cookies! Make yourself sick! I don’t care!”

“Whatever, eat the cookies. Just don’t tell your mom you didn’t eat your fruit.” The dad sighs. The girls jump up and do some kind of happy sister cookie dance. Then the next thing I know their faces are smeared with chocolate. Dad tells them to go jump into the water to clean their faces, and he settles down in his pool chair with a magazine.

At this point David is playing sharks and minnows in the deep end —  basically a game of tag — and Kevin is still shooting people with his water gun, turning around quickly as if the victim will have absolutely no idea what happened.

I stand up, stretch, and walk on the hot pavement to the deep end to watch the game. Two boys, probably around David’s age, are playing. They may have been brothers or friends, or neither, or both. The boys climb out of the water, dripping, panting, among a dozen other kids.

Boy 1: “Oh man! We’re screwed!”

Boy 2: “Dude, I think you can come up with a more appropriate description of our situation. How about, ‘We’re currently disadvantaged’?”

My English teacher heart grins so big I quickly skip back to my pool bag. I pull out my little notebook and jot down the dialogue I just heard that simply locks this pool experience into the books.

“Hey! No running ma’am!” the lifeguard shouts from across the pool, Candy Crush on pause.

I give him the thumbs up sign.  PS

Renee Phile loves being a mom, even if it doesn’t show at certain moments.

The Landing

An innovative outdoor learning environment launches on a local farm

 

By Jan Leitschuh

A tiny girl in a charming red, white and blue dress toddles over to a raised vegetable bed, green bucket in hand. There, magically, a ripening tomato spills over the side, conveniently at “wee-one” hand-height. To us, it’s a green tomato with a slight blush.

To her, it’s a moment of wonder.

Other children navigate the nearby obstacle course or balance beams, ask questions about cucumbers or basil, eat green beans off the bush. They shriek and run and play in the tepee village, cook wood-chip “cookies” in the outdoor kitchen, navigate the tires or construct towers in the  “workshop,” plant seeds and smell marigolds planted to keep the deer away.

Welcome to the opening of The Landing, a new outdoor learning environment for children at Eagles Nest Berry Farm in Jackson Springs.

“We’re attempting to get more families out and away from electronics, and enjoying the outdoors, to see how food is grown,” said Elaina Williams, the driving force behind The Landing. “We have raised beds with vegetables. We have a tepee and a noise room. We have outdoor and active things for children to do and use their imagination.”

Situated a dozen or so miles west of Pinehurst, lovely Eagles Nest Berry Farm is a family farm project that began with blueberry bushes. Owned by Williams, Karyn and Todd Ring, Chuck Richardson and Martha Richardson, that simple beginning was plotted by their father, carefully matched to the farm’s soils best suited to a delicious and fruitful blueberry crop.  Though their father died before his thoughtful plan got planted, the children decided to enact his vision. Now, many years later, that legacy of four beautiful acres of pick-your-own blueberries, and an acre of blackberries draws fruit lovers, buckets and appetites in hand.

The farm also grows some vegetable produce, such as basil, tons of tomatoes, potatoes, onions, cucumbers, okra, kale, Swiss chard and more, after sister Karyn got a grant to implement low tunnels to further lengthen the Sandhills’ long growing season.

All that N.C. growing goodness draws families away from the air conditioning and into the outdoors.

And with them come their children.

“We have kids come out with their parents to pick, all the time,” says Williams. “They usually come back out of the field covered in blackberry and blueberry juice. It is cute.”

But youthful attention spans often wander. Enter The Landing.

“We wanted to get more families outside, and out here on the farm,” says Williams. “To do that, we needed an area for the children, something that would engage them. It’s kind of a no-brainer.” She had an ally in Brittany Martin Mays, a friend from Jackson Springs, who works at Partners for Children and Families. “She does this kind of thing, helps set up playgrounds at child-care centers, that sort of thing. She gave us lots of great ideas, really encouraged us because there isn’t a lot of that right around here.”

Writing up her vision, Williams was awarded a Golden Leaf Tobacco Fund grant last fall, through the University of Mount Olive, to help farmers transition out of tobacco and into something else. 

Another friend, David Shannon, helped set up the master plan, constructing the play elements. “He’s been a big help on setting this up,” says Williams. “He’s going to stay on and help with the farm, especially since we discovered he has a green thumb.”

First came the raised beds. Built from rough-cut, untreated 2x10s, the beds topped out at a low 20-inches tall.  “We wanted to make sure the kids could see everything. We put sand in the bottom for drainage, then we mixed together good compost, garden soil and eggshell compost,” she says.

The rich beds were planted with appealing produce, as well as a drift of marigolds to keep the deer away. 

“The kids especially like the purple bumble bee and chocolate cherry tomatoes. We have customers that eat them like candy,” says Williams. “We also had quite a few children interested in eating the green beans right off the bush.  We planted larger tomatoes and cucumbers too, so one week kids could see the bloom, the next they could come and see the fruit.

“They showed a lot of interest, asking questions. We hope that they keep coming out and checking things out. I think we might have encouraged the next generation of farmers, with the questions they were asking. They wanted to pick everything that was on there. If there was even a little bit of color on it, they wanted to pick it.”

Besides the raised beds, a few pear trees, wild flowers and blueberry bushes were planted just for children.

Next, Shannon built a little obstacle/balance beam course with logs, stumps, tires and sand-filled structures. Big tractor tires, donated by T.H. Blue, stick halfway in the ground for roughhousing and climbing.  Carolina Car Care donated some other tires of the right size. “We stacked and filled them in with pure white sand, for climbing. The kids love it. We put mulch all around it for soft landings. My grandsons tried it out first,” giving it their seal of approval.  A 10×10 hole was dug down a foot for a sandpit. Convenient log stumps surround the build for people to sit on and watch the action.

Shade was another consideration. A neighbor with bamboo in his yard donated some long poles for a tepee. Brittany helped set up a village — three tepees with bamboo poles lashed together with wire. The crew put painters cloth around the poles and during the grand opening on June 20, children dipped their hands in washable paint and made prints on the cloth for decoration. “We will probably try some half-runners up the poles next year,” says Williams.

Other outdoor play spots seeing big action were a play kitchen, an architectural center and a music room.

Full of cookware, the play kitchen is a fenced 10×10 foot area with a tin roof. The floor is a soft wood chip mulch. “We made it kid-sized. David built a little kitchen counter, painted burners on it, put in a little sink and we stocked it with old pots and pans,” says Williams. “They like to cook with those. Wood chip cookies. They pretended really well.  Even the boys were in there.”

An additional kingdom for the imagination, the architectural center, forms another 10×10 foot area, this one with an orange builders fence around it called the TPT Construction Area, in honor of Ty Parker Tindell, a brother who passed away 10 years ago. “It’s stocked with blocks, 2×4 chunks, cylinders, pieces of wood, plywood, a few PVC pieces. They are going to have to use their imagination. And they did. Girls and boys. They built huge structures, towers, other items. No hammers. Just imagination,” says Williams.

Finally, the music room. “We also call it the noise zone,” says Williams with a chuckle.  “We made a xylophone out of bamboo. Then we made a wall and took old aluminum cake pans, pots and pans, and we hung wooden spoons so the kids can beat on them. The kids love that. We did hang them on the side of the wall away from the berry pickers. “Kids can bang away to their hearts’ content, working off their energy and disturbing no one on the spacious farm.

Though only open four days during the harvest weeks, The Landing will offer engaging projects and events.  “We have a cousin that’s a retired science teacher,” says Williams.  “We have several activities she’s going to do, like building a worm farm and an ant farm. She has all kinds of snakeskins and bird nests that she’s going to tell us about. She’s going to do a weather day, and there’s a tornado thing she wants to do.”

Future plans include a larger wildflower patch, more fruit trees and permanent deer fencing. An expanded garden is on the agenda. As a bonus, Mom and Dad get to pick their blueberries and blackberries in peace in the main field while the kids play with new friends nearby.

“We’re trying to give back to the community,” says Williams. “We’ve had such great customers over the years. And we’re hoping to inspire some young farmers. And I think we inspired a few at our opening, especially the girls.”  PS

Want to visit? Call first to check, at (910) 639-3966. Normally open Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday, from 7:30 a.m. to 1 p.m., same hours as the adjacent Eagles Nest Berry Farm. 

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

An Honest Day’s Pay

And a friendship for the ages

 

By Jan Wheaton

My first summer job was the brainstorm of my best friend, Sheila. She came up with it as we were lying on the deck of her parents’ house, catching some rays before a trip to Ocean City with my mother, a friend of hers and her kids.

“We need to make some money,” Sheila said, drumming her fingers.

“Money for what?”

“For the beach — we might want to buy some stuff.”

“OK. How?”

We were too young to get real jobs and had long ago made a pact never
to babysit.

“We’ll wash cars,” she said and frowned back at my frown.

I had met Sheila the previous September on the first day of our freshman year in high school. We were both new, military kids, and we knew how to pick and make friends fast. Sheila flounced into English class two minutes late, her yellow-blond hair flipped at her shoulders and her cat-green eyes lined like Brigitte Bardot’s. “Sorry,” she said in a low, breathy voice. “I couldn’t get the combination on my locker to work.”

She ducked her chin over the pile of books she clutched to her chest, hiding her face behind her cascade of hair as she headed for the back of the room, the heels of her white boots clicking on the linoleum floor. As she slid into a seat next to mine she dropped her purse. Two pens and a package of peppermints skidded across the floor, a lipstick rolled under my desk. There was a titter of laughter and two boys jumped to the rescue. I picked up her lipstick and set it on her desk.

Sheila shot me a sideways glance of gratitude that invited complicity. A few minutes later she passed a note to me that read, “You have the greenest eyes!”

I wrote back to her: “Contacts.”

After class I helped her with her locker, which turned out to be at the opposite end of the building. By the time we got there and opened it I had decided she was going to be my new best friend and invited her to come over to my house Saturday afternoon. We sat on the floor of my bedroom and exchanged critical teenage information. Favorite bands (hers was the Doors, mine was the Monkees). Most revered top models (hers, Veruschka, mine, Jean Shrimpton). Historical trivia (she’d been a cheerleader at her last school; I’d been sergeant of the School Safety Patrol.) She taught me to apply eyeliner. I introduced her to the poetry of Dorothy Parker.

We became inseparable at school, except for the rare class we didn’t share, and spent much of our weekend afternoons at shopping malls trying on cool clothes our mothers would never buy us, taking black and white pictures of ourselves in photo booths and shopping for albums at the record store, which we would later play in her basement rec room while we go-go danced on a piano bench. On days when we couldn’t get a ride somewhere, we took walks in the Virginia woods adjacent to our neighborhood and talked about all the really heavy stuff, like what a drag our parents were and what a downer the suburbs were.

On Saturday nights, we often went to hear bands at the Legion hall — dropped off and picked up by a parent. Boys lined up to dance with Sheila, and while they waited, they danced with me. But many a Saturday night there was no dance, and not being allowed to date, we hung out in her parents’ rec room, creating fictitious boyfriends we gave code names like Babe Blue and Tall Slim, and spinning long, complicated stories full of intrigue and heartache.

After being friends for almost a year, I knew if Sheila said something would be cool, it would be cool. So the following Saturday, wearing two-piece swimsuits under our shorts and T-shirts, we set off down the street, dragging a red wagon laden with soaps, glass cleaners, chrome polishers, upholstery cleaner, paper towels and rags, a cooler with snacks and drinks, and a transistor radio. The first two doors we knocked on were answered by housewives, who turned us down flat. The third woman assured us her husband washed the cars. When she closed the door, Sheila and I exchanged a nod and headed off down the sidewalk, looking for signs of a husband at home.

“Bingo,” Sheila said as we approached a house with a dusty, white 1965 Ford Mustang in the driveway and a man in the open garage pouring gasoline into a lawnmower. He appeared to be about 40 and came out into the sunlight, wiping his hands on a rag, as we wheeled up our wagon. He had nice eyes, somewhat creased and shadowy, and his belted blue jeans hung just below a still definable waistline. He smiled as Sheila described our special deluxe treatment, and it occurred to me that he could have once been a Babe Blue.

“Five bucks, huh? And I guess you girls are working for a good cause?” he asked.

“Yes, sir. We’re going to the beach,” Sheila said, flashing her wide smile.

He pushed out his lower lip, dimpling his chin.

“I think I can support that.”

Just sitting in the shade watching us wash his car could’ve alone been worth $5 to this guy, but Sheila and I took our jobs seriously. We pulled our hair back with rubber bands, turned on our radio and went to work. Sheila climbed in the front with Babe Blue’s vacuum cleaner and I took the back — emptying ashtrays, wiping down the red vinyl seats and cleaning the hand-crank windows.

By the time we got the interior done, we were sweating pretty good in the early afternoon sun, so when we got out to do the exterior, we peeled down to our swimsuits and sudsed, sprayed and scrubbed every square inch of that little car. We sang “Summer in the City” with The Lovin’ Spoonful and belted out “It Ain’t Me, Babe” with The Turtles over the roof, trunk and hood as we wiped and buffed till our arms felt like they were going to fall off. We didn’t toss our rags in the wagon until every inch of that car was pristine. The paint glistened, the chrome sparkled, and the white walls would glow in the dark. Our client, who had continued to putter in his garage most of the time we worked, gave his white Mustang a close inspection and blew a satisfied whistle through his teeth. “Nice work,” he said and handed us a $10 bill.

Word spread, and we had no trouble finding cars to wash for the next three days.

On our first evening at the beach, Sheila and I ditched the adults and headed down to the water in front of our hotel. We kicked off our sandals and sat cross-legged in the sand. A trio of boys wandered down from the boardwalk and tried to join us, but we waved them off. Sheila was in one of her existential moods, talking about the ocean, its primordial energy, the eternal rhythm of the waves and inevitability of the tides. I pulled up my knees and locked my hands around them. Listening to the sound of those waves and her low, breathy voice, I felt a degree of contentedness I’ve found hard to replicate in life. I was 15, tanned and at the beach with the coolest best friend in the world. A new pair of silver earrings, purchased with car-wash money, dangled from my pierced ears.

A fresh wave swirled up under us and left a pool of froth where we sat. I felt the sand slip away as the water retreated, and I dug my toes in, trying to hold back the grains. Sheila looked over her shoulder. “Those guys are coming back,” she said.  PS

Jan Wheaton is a Pinehurst resident, native North Carolinian, unpublished novelist, and the compiler of PineStraw’s calendar.

By Tony Cross

Every now and then, I’m asked to create a drink for a special occasion, whether it be someone’s birthday, anniversary, or a corporate event/fundraiser that has a theme. The challenge of inventing something unique for someone, or a lot of people, has always been fun. One of the first drinks that I made for a large number of people was requested from this very magazine, back before I started this column. I was excited and very nervous and, though the drink came out great, I would definitely go back to the drawing board now to make the cocktail a bit simpler. Finding inspiration for a cocktail can come in many ways, e.g., a particular ingredient or spirit, the season, a color, or even a song or movie. This month I’ll discuss a few that I’ve done over the past year.

Half-Jack
For Fair Game Beverage Company in the Abundance.org Bereavement Ball

So, if you didn’t know, I’ve got a huge crush on this distillery. I’ve done a few events with the folks from Fair Game, and I’ve always had a blast. This time, distiller Chris Jude hit me up to create a cocktail with one of his spirits for this “interesting little themed party.” He wasn’t kidding. On their Facebook page The Bereavement Ball (Dead Pets & Onions) is, “An Evening of Exquisite Misery. Under the full moon, we gather to wallow in collective melancholy, celebrate our impermanence and revel in life’s slow unraveling.” What? I dug further into the theme of the event and found that it’s based on a play, The Onion Cellar. The play debuted in 2006, and was written by Amanda Palmer. She “based the title of the production on a chapter from Gunter Grass’s The Tin Drum. In the novel, The Onion Cellar is a bar in post-war Germany where people go to share painful memories and cry. While drinking and talking, the clients peel onions, both to make crying easier and to lessen the shame for those afraid to express their feelings openly.” Thank you, Wikipedia. OK, so maybe something with onions? Eh. I wasn’t really thrilled about that. Then, through more digging, I found out that Palmer is one half of the band The Dresden Dolls, and she used one of the band’s songs, “Half-Jack,” in the play. There we go. I decided to use Fair Game Apple Brandy. Apple brandy is sometimes referred to as “applejack.” Both are made with apples, but true applejack is blended with neutral grain spirit, and must be aged four years in used bourbon barrels. The cocktail I came up with has 2 1/2 ounces of liquid, half of it apple brandy.

Half-Jack

1 1/4 ounces Fair Game Beverage Company’s Apple Brandy

3/4 ounce Cynar

1/2 ounce Dolin Dry Vermouth

1 dash celery bitters

Combine and build ingredients in a rocks glass with ice. Stir until desired dilution. Express the oils of a lemon peel over the cocktail before placing it in the glass.

Finders Keepers
For Patrica (located at 280 NW Broad St.)

Trish Deerwester, owner of Patricia, has been a staunch supporter of Reverie Cocktails from the get-go. Trish’s business, as well as a few others (I’m looking at you, Louise and Betsy of Eloise), really helped get the word out about my new venture. I’ve been asked to do a couple of pop-ups at Patricia, and this drink is the first one that I did last spring. Talking with Trish, I discovered that in addition to our shared love for the classic Manhattan cocktail, she also is a big fan of tequila. We agreed that we wanted to keep the cocktail simple, but with a spin. A few weeks prior, I messed around with an apricot liqueur when making margaritas. I poured them over crushed ice, and they tasted amazing. Apricot it was, sans the apricot liqueur. Instead, I set out to make an apricot jam. I ordered apricots through Nature’s Own, and gave it a whirl. I got lucky, and the jam came out great. Now, for the name: Patricia’s website is www.patriciafinds.com. I joked with Trish that this drink came out so well, that she wouldn’t want to share it with anyone else . . . and there it was, “Finders Keepers.”

1 1/2 ounces Don Julio Blanco Tequila

Scant 1/2 ounce Del Maguey Vida Mezcal

3/4 ounce lime juice

Heaping teaspoon apricot jam

Combine all ingredients in a cocktail shaker and add ice. Shake vigorously for 10 seconds and pour everything into a rocks glass. No garnish.

Apricot Jam

1/2 pound dried apricots

3 cups water

1 pound sugar

Zest and juice of 1 lemon

1 ounce cognac

Dice apricots, and place in a pot with water. Refrigerate and leave overnight. The next day, bring the water to a boil, then simmer for 30 minutes. Keep the heat on low, add sugar and lemon zest/juice. Stir until the sugar is dissolved completely. Bring back to a boil and start to test the jam after the 15-minute mark. When it starts to stick ever so slightly to the spoon, turn off the heat. Be careful, this can go from “jam” to “adhesive” in a minute’s time. Add cognac when heat is off.

Zero F#%$
For Me, Myself, and I

Sometimes what inspires can be found right under your nose. That says a lot for me, since I have a big schnoz. One night I came home tired and aggravated. I wanted some of my favorite spirits mixed together. I grabbed a few bottles, juxtaposing them on my counter. I wasn’t sure it would work but luck was on my side. It came out way better than I expected. I liked it enough to write down the specs in my little black book.

1 ounce Mezcal Alipús Santa Ana

1 ounce Flor de Caña Extra Dry

1/4 ounce Campari

1 ounce lime juice

1/2 ounce simple syrup (2:1)

2 dashes Angostura Orange Bitters

Combine all ingredients in a shaker, add ice,
and shake it like it owes you money. Double strain into a chilled coupe glass. Express the oils of an orange peel before placing it in the glass. Now chill out.  PS

Tony Cross is a bartender who runs cocktail catering
company Reverie Cocktails
in Southern Pines.

Drink Naked

The unoaked revolution

 

By Robyn James

When ancient Rome first started making wine, their preferred vessels were clay pots. Breakage during shipping became a problem, and they experimented using big wooden barrels and vats. Not only was this a sturdier method, but they discovered that the porous wood imparted some favorable qualities to the wine, and it also allowed it to age gracefully.

It became particularly popular to use oak influence on the noble grape, chardonnay, and by the 1990s winemakers were making the heavy, oaky, buttered-toast, style that in many cases was used to mask inferior fruit. Some wineries, in an effort to save money, would just dump oak chips into cheap chardonnay, stir it up and soak it, then filter them out.

Although it is the most widely planted white grape in the U.S., Europe, Australia and South America, consumers revolted and adopted the battle cry of ABC — “Anything But Chardonnay.” Winemakers listened and the movement began to improve the quality of chardonnay fruit and back off on the oak influence. The always-irreverent Australian winemakers coined the phrase “Drinking Naked” for chardonnay minus oak.

This past decade efforts have been made to produce chardonnay that is balanced between fruit and acidity. Planting in cooler areas and giving the grapes less hang time produce crisper, more refreshing versions of this versatile grape.

All wines go through a primary fermentation that converts the sugars into alcohol, but winemakers have the option of inducing or spontaneously allowing the wine to go through a secondary, malolactic fermentation. Tart tasting, green apple-like, malic acid is naturally present in wine, and this process turns it into lactic acid, the same acid in butter. Thus the wine takes on a richer, creamy, buttery character.

Kim Crawford Unoaked Chardonnay from New Zealand is a tasty example of this process. Their fruit comes from vineyards in Marlborough and Hawke’s Bay, where the canopies of the vines are managed to allow the fruit to ripen slowly. Completely devoid of oak, this chardonnay has gone through malolactic fermentation, and the winery describes their wine as “ripe tropical fruit — pineapple and ripe melon — with hints of butterscotch. Shows great length uncluttered by oak. Secondary malolactic fermentation gives nuttiness and generous mouthfeel.” You can usually find this gem in the market for around $16.

Louis Jadot, one of Burgundy’s largest producers, makes a delicious chardonnay from the Maconnais region cleverly branded “Steel Chardonnay” that sells for about $17. Like Crawford’s chardonnay, this wine is completely unoaked, aged in steel vats. But, unlike Crawford’s, it does not go through any part of malolactic fermentation. Described by the winery as having “high toned aromas of citrus, mandarin orange, white flower, pear and apple, with flinty minerality. Retains a fresh, crisp character.” A perfect match for summertime fish and shellfish dishes.

The Donati Estate, the only winery located in the Paicines wine-growing region of California, produces a tasty unoaked chardonnay for about $13. Branded “Sisters Forever” by winemaker Briana Heywood, this sustainably farmed wine is a tribute to women.

Winery tasting notes claim that the wine has “tropical aromas of melon, pineapple, banana and apricot. Lush mouthfeel with crisp and marvelous acidity on the finish.”

These wines are prefect warm weather selections, so go ahead — drink naked!  PS

Robyn James is a certified sommelier and proprietor of The Wine Cellar and Tasting Room in Southern Pines. Contact her at robynajames@gmail.com.

Writing My Way Home

Finding one’s place in a wide literary landscape

 

By Wiley Cash

It’s not easy to know what is true for you or me

at twenty-two, my age. But I guess I’m what

I feel and see and hear, Harlem, I hear you.

Langston Hughes wrote these lines and the poem “Theme for English B,” from which they’re taken, in 1951, when he was nearing 50 years old. I first read the poem as a 20-year-old college sophomore. I’ll turn 40 in a few months, and I can honestly say I’ve thought about this poem almost every day since I read it.

In the poem, the speaker’s college composition teacher has asked the students to go home tonight and compose a page about themselves, and whatever results from this assignment will speak to something about who the students are, where they’re from, and what they’re made of. The idea is that what comes from you speaks to what there is of you.

As I mentioned, I was a college sophomore when I encountered “Theme for English B.” I had enrolled at the University of North Carolina-Asheville because the English major featured a track in creative writing, and a writer was what I had decided to be. I was a little unclear as to how this would be accomplished, but I was there to learn, and learn I did. But looking back, the best thing I learned about writing was that I wasn’t the kind of writer I wanted to be, meaning I wasn’t someone who wrote like Raymond Carver, Anton Chekhov or Toni Morrison, nor did I write about the things these authors wrote about. I had never visited Carver’s Great Northwest. I couldn’t imagine the lives of Chekhov’s peasants. I couldn’t speak to the African-American experience in Morrison’s Ohio. These people lived interesting lives of conflict and history and culture, and they hailed from interesting places.

I was from Gastonia, North Carolina, raised Southern Baptist, loved basketball with all my heart, and spent my summers lifeguarding and my free time reading the masterworks of authors whose lives were more curious than mine, and whose literary voices were more distinct and powerful as a result. But I kept writing. In my little campus dorm room I locked my eyes on the monitor while my fingers pecked away at the keyboard of an enormous, ancient computer. Not once did I lift my gaze to look at the world around me, not once did I dare look back at the world from which I’d come. As a result, the stories that spun from my fingers were regionless, devoid of place, meaning they were almost wholly devoid of life. I refused to acknowledge that any place I was from could be interesting enough to warrant representation, and I also refused to acknowledge the fact that I couldn’t write well enough to make up for the “placelessness” of my fiction.

In the fall of 2003, I left North Carolina at the age of 25 and lived outside the state for the first time in my life. I had enrolled in a Ph.D. program in English and creative writing at the University of Louisiana-Lafayette, which is in the heart of Acadiana, more commonly known as Cajun country. Soon, I found that I missed fresh water. I missed the gentle swell of the Piedmont hills as they rose toward the Blue Ridge Mountains. I missed cold winters and mild summers. I missed the good, clean smell of mud that wafts up from a trickling stream as you draw closer to the water. I missed ferns. I missed the music, accents and cuisine I’d always known as comforts without ever realizing the emotional tether they had on my heart. In short, I missed home.

I had chosen this particular graduate program in this particular state because a particular author served as the university’s writer-in-residence. Ernest J. Gaines had long been my literary hero, and I still believe he’s one of the finest writers our nation has ever produced. He’d grown up on a plantation just west of Baton Rouge, the same plantation on which his ancestors had been slaves and later sharecroppers, but he hadn’t begun to write about the place he knew until he joined his mother and stepfather in California when he was 15 years old. He wrote about southwest Louisiana because it was inside him largely because it was no longer outside him, and he longed for it. He began writing about Louisiana while he lived in California, and it led to some of the most important literature in American history: The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, A Gathering of Old Men and A Lesson Before Dying.

Ernest J. Gaines and Thomas Wolfe are perhaps the greatest influences on my writing life, and I took a page from each. From Gaines I learned to write about what I know and where I’ve been, and from Thomas Wolfe, especially Wolfe’s autobiographical hero Eugene Gant in Look Homeward, Angel, I decided to turn my eyes “to the distant, soaring ranges.” My first novel is set in the mountains of western North Carolina, where I’d made the decision to become a writer. My second is set in my hometown of Gastonia, as is my third novel, The Last Ballad, which will be released this fall.

A few months ago I returned to Louisiana to spend a few days with Gaines and his wife, Dianne, where they purchased land and built a home on part of the plantation where Gaines was born and raised. One evening around dusk, I was standing on the banks of the False River across the street from the Gaineses’ home when I recalled a line from Hughes’ poem: I guess I’m what I feel and see and hear. I could feel the old dock beneath my boots, every creak as the water lapped against it. I could see the sun fading in the trees across the river, could see the lights winking on at homes on the other side of the water. I could hear the trucks and cars pass on the road behind me, the occasional motor of a boat that passed along the darkening water, the flip of a fish as it broke the surface and then fell beneath it. At that moment, I had no doubt that what I was feeling and seeing and hearing had turned me toward the writer I’ve become, but the things that surrounded me at that moment were not the things that made me the writer I am. Those things rested farther north in the hills and mountains of the Old North State, hidden along creek beds and gurgling streams. Shaded beneath towering maples and sweet gums. Pressed into the rich earth beneath a blanket of ferns.

I often wonder about the things that will make up my daughters’ lives, as they will not be the things that have made up my own. They were both born only a few miles from the ocean, and they will both be raised in a landscape that is flat and in air that is humid and tinged with salt. Will they know the magic of the place from which they’ve come? Or, like me, will they have to leave home to find it?  PS

Wiley Cash lives in Wilmington with his wife and their two daughters. His forthcoming novel The Last Ballad is available for pre-order wherever books are sold.

By Bill Fields

For decades, any time I came home, I went out to the street on a scouting mission. At 10 o’clock opposite the end of our driveway, “RICKY 67” was written on the curb in white paint. That bit of Sherwin-Williams graffiti was a stubborn remnant of childhood, and when the sun and the rain eventually erased it like chalk off a blackboard, its absence saddened me.

The boy who scrawled his name 50 years ago was one of Chuck’s older brothers. To see his mark was to be reminded of Chuck, my first best friend, who from kindergarten — if we had gone to kindergarten in that less structured period — through middle school was a frequent companion and valued confidante.

I don’t remember when Chuck and I met, only that he was always there, the boy my age in a family across the street whose ranch house had a basement and a gloriously large backyard where we played until we were tuckered out.

Chuck’s mom, a kind person who never tired of my presence, fueled us with two food groups, Kool-Aid and grilled cheese sandwiches, the sugar in the pitcher and butter in the pan in amounts still probably best not to know. We would gulp and wolf down our sustenance so we could get back to whatever we were doing. When Chuck was called in to sit down for a proper supper, he returned with the speed of an Olympic sprinter, as eager as I was for more play.

I hated sunset because that meant having to retreat to our respective homes for a night of sleep until we could reconvene. This was a year-round angst but particularly acute in summer, when the days were long and we spent so much time together it was as if I had a brother to go with my two older sisters.

Chuck was taller and more athletic than me, although when I was late in learning to ride a bicycle, he patiently let me apprentice behind his house, where I could fail in private and fall on sand instead of the shin-scraping asphalt of our avenue. He was tougher, too, owing in part to having three older brothers, and bounced back quickly from a baseball to the head after a little witch hazel. Chuck’s composure contrasted with my dramatics when his family’s dachshund bit me on the hand.

Before sports filled our time together, we spent hours in Chuck’s backyard playing in the dirt with Tonka trucks and toy soldiers under the shade of a large sycamore tree — later from which a subsequent occupant of the house fell and broke a leg — and I don’t think coal miners were more ready for a bath than we were after an afternoon of scale-model construction and maneuvers.

We shared Archie comics, Super Balls and an urge to swing an old Jimmie Fox signature bat — too heavy, but made you feel like a big-leaguer — among the sports gear stashed on Chuck’s back porch. As with any boys born in the 1950s, baseball occupied much of our time. We loved clipping out box scores (if pressed, I can probably still recite the Giants vs. Cardinals, circa 1968) and pitching a tennis ball at a garden cart propped up by the steps, the length and quality of the carom dictating hit or out.

There was plenty of batting practice as well. Only because I faced him so often in the neighborhood and he had excellent control, Chuck was the only Little League pitcher I came close to figuring out. My command wasn’t as good, and during one Braves-Dodgers game in which I was hapless on the mound, I plunked him in the back.

Chuck forgave me for that wild pitch, but before long my fast friend was my past friend — at least in terms of the tight relationship that proximity had helped nurture. Before we entered high school, circumstances caused Chuck’s family to move to another part of Moore County. We began to move in different circles and developed new buddies. I know little about Chuck’s life beyond the boyhood we shared so happily in my memory and I hope in his.  PS

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

August Books

Turning up the heat

 

By Romey Petite

The Doll Funeral, by Kate Hamer

The author of The Girl in the Red Coat, an Amazon Best Book of the Year (2016), returns with a new novel continuing themes of mothers and daughters and missing children. On Ruby’s 13th birthday, her dream comes true — she discovers that the loathsome Mick and his placating wife, Barbara, are only her adoptive parents. Packing a suitcase, she sets out in search of her real mother and father, venturing into the Forest of Dean with her intangible friend, the Shadow boy. There, Ruby finds a new family among three siblings — Tom, Elizabeth and Crispin. Told through the perspectives of Ruby, her mother and the Shadow boy, Hamer’s languid, yet delicious prose will be a delight for any adult who grew up reading Roald Dahl’s Matilda or Neil Gaiman’s Coraline. Overall, The Doll Funeral is a triumph of the uncanny and a voyage back into the strange, shifting threshold between childhood and adolescence.   

The Half-Drowned King, by Linnea Hartsuyker 

Young Ragnvald has come of age and looks forward to assuming his rightful role in Viking-era Norway after returning from Solvi’s raids in Ireland. He’ll reign as chieftain of his late father’s lands — and set about finding a good and kind husband for his beloved sister Svanhild. There is just one problem; the siblings’ stepfather, Olaf, has no intention of surrendering the property. Olaf arranges to have Ragnvald betrayed by his fellow raiders and is left to drown among sea goddesses and mermaids. Rescued by a fisherman, Ragnvald makes an alliance with Harald of Vestfold — a prophesized king. Meanwhile, Svanhild contemplates an expedient marriage to escape her stepfather’s selfish treachery. Blending elements of the plots of Homer’s Odyssey and Shakespeare’s Hamlet while being motivated by her own family’s rich history, debut novelist Linnea Hartsuyker has crafted a thrilling tale perfect for lovers of history, myth or George R.R. Martin’s Game of Thrones.

The Readymade Thief, by Augustus Rose 

Lee Cuddy, an elfin girl of 17, is an expert shoplifter and member of a network of homeless kids inhabiting an abandoned structure in Philadelphia known as the Crystal Castle. Operating under the protection of an organization dubbed the Société Anonyme, Lee and Tomi, a boy with an encyclopedic knowledge of hacking and postmodern art, are prompted by the mysterious disappearance of kids from the collective to investigate their shadowy benefactors.  Finding themselves on the run, The Readymade Thief is the opening of a doorway as Lee hurtles into a wonderland of ciphers, puzzles, alchemy, and the subtle genius of Marcel Duchamp. The Readymade Thief is screenwriter Augustus Rose’s first novel — bending genre by straddling the wide worlds between literary fiction and the pulse-pounding thriller. Fans of Marisha Pessl’s Night Film and Robin Sloan’s Mr. Penumbra’s 24 Hour Bookshop will want to watch out for this one.

See What I Have Done, by Sarah Schmidt

On Aug. 4 of 1892 in Fall River, Massachusetts, the Bordens’ family home becomes the scene of the grisly massacre of the patriarch, Andrew, and his second wife, Abby. According to the old rhyme, “Lizzie Borden took an axe and gave her mother forty whacks. When she saw what she had done, she gave her father forty-one.” Through See What I Have Done, Sarah Schmidt focuses not on what seems rational but on each character’s rationale regarding the interlocking events leading up to the murders and their aftermath. Whatever really happened that day, it’s clear there is much more to the Borden family than the details the sensationalist press and police fixate on. Setting before the reader via four distinct points of view, those of the family maid (Bridget), Lizzie’s sister (Emma), the mysterious jack of trades (Benjamin), and Lizzie herself, Schmidt weaves together a chilling, transfixing tale from start to finish. 

Rabbit: The Autobiography of Ms. Pat, by Patricia William and Jeannine Amber 

Born to a single mother on the west end of Atlanta, Patricia Williams, a comedian known by the stage name “Ms. Pat,” was 8 years old the first time she learned to steal, encouraged to pinch wallets from drunken houseguests in her granddaddy’s living room, a space that doubled as a bootleg house. Nicknamed “Rabbit” by her mother’s then-boyfriend, by 16 she was selling drugs to support two children of her own. Endowed with a comedian’s gift for creative hindsight, Patricia discovered her penchant for telling funny stories at an open mic night and would go on to make appearances on Nickelodeon’s Mom’s Night Out, the syndicated Bob & Tom radio show, and NBC’s Last Comic Standing. Co-written with Jeannine Amber, an award winning journalist and writer for Essence magazine, Rabbit: The Autobiography of Ms. Pat is a riveting escape story in which tragedy is transmuted to humor and harnessed as a tool for survival.

Yesterday, by Felicia Yap

Claire and Mark Evans are an unlikely couple. Both have married outside of their class in a society divided not only by familiar hegemonies, but also by what they are able to remember. Mark, a Duo, can remember up to two days at a time, whereas Claire, a Mono, is only capable of recalling the previous 24 hours. For the rest, each has to navigate a crawlspace of memos by relying on careful notes made in their respective iDiaries. After observing Mark reacting strangely to a news report regarding a body found in the River Cam, and subsequently learning the woman was Mark’s mistress, Claire begins to suspect she is being manipulated and sets about attempting to retrieve what she may have conveniently forgotten. Told from the perspectives of Claire, Mark, Detective Hans and the iDiary entries of the victim, Sophia, Yap’s debut novel is part Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and part Jonathan and Christopher Nolan’s Memento (2000).

Reincarnation Blues, by Michael Poore 

Milo has lived approximately 9,994 lives and, as such, fancies himself an easygoing, spiritual wiseguy. In his 9,995th incarnation he has reached 50 years of age and is content to have little more to his name than a dog named Burt and a fishing boat christened the Jenny Ann Loudermilk. While swimming in the moonlight along the Florida shore, a healthy dose of the absurd intervenes in Milo’s paradise as the guru is devoured by a shark, and he is immediately spirited once again into the Afterlife that lies between one existence and the next. It is there he is reunited with the acerbic Suzie, the anthropomorphic embodiment of Death and Milo’s one true love. Realizing that he only has four lives left — everyone gets 10,000 chances to achieve cosmic bliss — Milo becomes determined to use his remaining time to find the secret to immortal life so that he and Suzie can be together at last. Michael Poore’s first novel, Up Jumps the Devil, was praised by The New York Review of Books as “an elegiac masterpiece.” Reincarnation Blues is full of the profound, existential, and sublime world-weary wisdom, meandering in tone between Roger Zelazny’s Lord of Light and the darkly comic stories of Kurt Vonnegut.

CHILDREN’S BOOKS

By Angie Talley

TheMermaid, by
Jan Brett

The beloved author/illustrator of such classic children’s books The Mitten and Gingerbread Baby will publish The Mermaid on Aug. 22.  A stunningly beautiful undersea version of The Three Bears, Brett’s latest tale is sure to be the  book for the fall.  The author will visit Southern Pines on Thursday, Nov. 29, at 5 p.m.  Call or stop by The Country Bookshop for more information on this not-to-be-missed event. All ages.

Motor Goose, by Rebecca Colby

“There Was an Old Tire that Parked in a Shed,” “Bumpty Dumpty,” “Tow Tow Tow the Car.” Young readers are sure to delight in these and other classic fairy tales in Motor Goose, a delightful collection of nursery rhymes retold with cars, trucks and trains as the main characters.  Pair with your favorite version of Mother Goose for a great afternoon of reading fun with a little one. Ages 3-6.

Dogosaurus Rex, by Anna Staniszewski

When Ben and his mom go to the shelter to adopt a dog, they bring home a most unusual pet.  Instead of saying “ruff,” Sadie says, “roar.” Instead of taking a bath in the tub, Sadie takes up the whole lake. And instead of being a dog . . . Sadie is a dinosaur!  When she’s let loose in the town, she shows everyone just how helpful dinosaurs can be. Ages 3-6.

How to Get Your Teacher Ready, by Jean Reagan

In a world brimming with “the first day of school is scary” titles, How To Get You Teacher Ready is a welcome treat.  New kindergartners will love seeing how the students welcome the teacher, making sure she knows where to put her things, how to get extra spaghetti in the cafeteria and especially where to find the bathroom.  Finally, the perfect first-day-of-school book. Ages 4-7.

The List, by Patricia Forde

“Speak your mind.”  Not words to be taken lightly nor taken for granted for the citizens of Ark. In an attempt to control actions, thought and communication through the regimenting of language, their leader, John Noa, has decreed language will be limited to 500 specific words.  The List is a powerful, absorbing book reminiscent of The Giver and The Girl Who Drank the Moon. Ages 12-15.  PS

Change of Place

How the king of the legal thriller became an adopted son of Carolina

 

By D.G. Martin

When John Grisham’s latest novel, Camino Island, hit bookstore shelves in June, it immediately rose to number one on The New York Times best-seller list and stayed there for weeks.

No surprise there. That is what John Grisham’s books do.

But Camino Island is different from most of Grisham’s previous 30 novels. It is not his usual legal thriller in which crimes and mystery intersect with the lives of lawyers and judges.  Lawyers make only cameo appearances in the new book.

Instead, the action is set in the literary world — the world of writing, publishing and selling books. There is also a literary underworld of criminals who steal and sell valuable manuscripts. Grisham still gives us a crime story. But this time writers, readers and booksellers, as well as thieves, take center stage. 

One of the book’s central characters gives it a strong North Carolina connection. Mercer Mann, a writing instructor at UNC-Chapel Hill, is losing her job. She suffers writer’s block as she tries to complete her second novel to follow up her first mildly successful one. Carrying a burden of tens of thousands of dollars in student debt, she is at loose ends. Her desperate situation and some other personal connections make her a prime target to be recruited for an undercover assignment to help recover a stash of valuable stolen papers.

Earlier, a group of clever thieves has broken into the Princeton University library and walked away with the original manuscripts of The Great Gatsby and four other novels written by F. Scott Fitzgerald. The papers were insured for $25 million. The insurance company suspects that Bruce Cable, a rare book dealer and bookstore owner, has possession of the Fitzgerald papers. He is the center of a group of writers, fans and book collectors on Camino Island, a small resort community near Jacksonville, Florida.

Somehow investigators for the insurance company learn that Mercer’s grandparents had lived on Camino Island, that their house is still in the family, and that Mercer has been a frequent visitor. The company sends the case’s lead investigator, Elaine Shelby, to Chapel Hill to recruit Mercer. She wants Mercer to go to Camino Island, where she can infiltrate Bruce’s group, make friends with him, and try to learn whether he has the Fitzgerald papers.

In Chapel Hill, Elaine wines and dines Mercer at Spanky’s and the Lantern restaurants, two of the town’s favorites, and, incidentally, not far from the house where Grisham and his wife, Renee, live when they visit their daughter and her family, who live in Raleigh.

Mercer is a reluctant recruit, but Elaine is persistent and persuasive. Elaine’s promise to pay Mercer’s student debt is a clincher. She tells Elaine, “I have sixty-one thousand dollars in student debt that I can’t get rid of. It’s a burden that consumes every waking hour and it’s making me crazy.”

Elaine promises, “We’ll take care of the student loans.” Plus, she offers another $100,000.

Later, when Mercer has doubts, Elaine continues to persuade, “You’re a writer living at the beach for a few months in the family cottage. You’re hard at work on a novel. It’s the perfect story, Mercer, because it’s true. And you have the perfect personality because you’re genuine. If we needed a con artist we wouldn’t be talking right now.”

Sure enough, Mercer becomes part of the group of writers who gather around Bruce and his bookstore. Some of them, Mercer discovers, “are seasoned raconteurs with an endless supply of stories and quips and one-liners. Others are reclusive and introverted souls who labor in their solitary worlds and struggle to mix and mingle.”

As she mingles and mixes, she learns that the popular authors whose books have sold well “longed for critical acclaim, while the literary ones . . . longed for greater royalties.”

Getting to know the writers leads to Mercer getting to know Bruce, the smart and charming owner of Bay Books. He owns a dozen seersucker suits and wears a different color each day. He has persuaded 100 customers to collect signed first editions and to put in a standing order to buy signed copies of the latest book by every visiting author. Bay Books makes big money on the sales, and those sales attract book tour visits by America’s most popular authors.

Bruce does well as an independent bookseller. He does even better collecting and selling rare books and signed first editions.

Is he also making even more money dealing in the dark world of stolen books and papers?

Mercer’s assignment is to get to know Bruce well enough to learn whether he has possession of Princeton’s Fitzgerald papers. By courting and charming him, she ultimately finds the answer.

Meanwhile, he is courting and charming her, too. While she is finding out about his dark world, he prepares defenses to turn the tables on her and the investigators’ plot to prove that Bruce has his hands on the Fitzgerald papers.

So, as the story moves toward an expected ending, Grisham does his usual. He twists the expected into a set of cascading surprises that will fool, entertain and delight his readers, just as he does in his legal thrillers.

Is there more than an entertaining story here? Does Grisham, for instance, want to highlight our country’s growing problem with the student debt that is affecting so many young Americans? He says not. The student debt burden on Mercer, he says, is just a small plot point in the Camino Island story. But, according to Grisham, his next legal thriller, coming out in October, will have overwhelming student debt as a central feature of the new novel’s plot.

North Carolinians love their authors. They love for North Carolina authors to have the kind of success Grisham enjoys. Some North Carolina Grisham fans argue that his growing connections to our state give us grounds to say that he is one of us.

Grisham himself says his farm near Charlottesville, Virginia, is his home and that he is very happy there.

However, his North Carolina contacts are substantial. In addition to his house in Chapel Hill, his daughter’s family in Raleigh, and the Chapel Hill scenes in the latest book, he is a Carolina basketball fan. Grisham and popular television host Charlie Rose have an ongoing $100 bet on every Carolina-Duke basketball game.  Rose supports his alma mater, Duke. Grisham bets on Carolina.

On his recent book tour to promote Camino Island, he made only 11 stops. Four were in North Carolina, twice as many as in any other state. Along the way he invited other North Carolina literary giants — Randall Kenan, Jill McCorkle, John Hart, Ron Rash, Wiley Cash and Clyde Edgerton — to discuss their work.

Even if Grisham and his wife are still proud Virginians, we can declare them honorary North Carolinians.

Grisham dedicated Camino Island to Renee. He gives her credit for helping develop the new book’s plot as they were driving to Florida for vacation. They collect rare books and signed first editions. When they heard a radio report about a stolen rare book, they were off and running and had the outline of the book developed before they got out of the car.

I bet they were driving through North Carolina when the idea hit.

John Grisham’s Do’s and Don’ts for Writing Popular Fiction*

1. DO — WRITE A PAGE EVERY DAY

That’s about 200 words, or 1,000 words a week. Do that for two years and you’ll have a novel that’s long enough. Nothing will happen until you are producing at least one page per day.

2. DON’T — WRITE THE FIRST SCENE UNTIL YOU KNOW THE LAST

This necessitates the use of a dreaded device commonly called an outline. Virtually all writers hate that word. I have yet to meet one who admits to using an outline. Plotting takes careful planning. Writers waste years pursuing stories that eventually don’t work.

3. DO — WRITE YOUR ONE PAGE EACH DAY AT THE SAME PLACE AND TIME

Early morning, lunch break, on the train, late at night — it doesn’t matter. Find the extra hour, go to the same place, shut the door. No exceptions, no excuses.

4. DON’T — WRITE A PROLOGUE

Prologues are usually gimmicks to hook the reader. Avoid them. Plan your story (see No. 2) and start with Chapter 1.

5. DO — USE QUOTATION MARKS WITH DIALOGUE

Please do this. It’s rather basic.

6. DON’T — KEEP A THESAURUS WITHIN REACHING DISTANCE

I know, I know, there’s one at your fingertips.

There are three types of words: (1) words we know; (2) words we should know; (3) words nobody knows. Forget those in the third category and use restraint with those in the second.

A common mistake by fledgling authors is using jaw-breaking vocabulary. It’s frustrating and phony.

7. DO — READ EACH SENTENCE AT LEAST THREE TIMES IN SEARCH OF WORDS TO CUT

Most writers use too many words, and why not? We have unlimited space and few constraints.

8. DON’T — INTRODUCE 20 CHARACTERS IN THE FIRST CHAPTER

Another rookie mistake. Your readers are eager to get started. Don’t bombard them with a barrage of names from four generations of the same family. Five names are enough to get started.

*Shared first in The New York Times, May 31, 2017. PS

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