Bookshelf

March Books

FICTION

The Yellow Bird Sings, by Jennifer Rosner

In Poland, as World War II rages, Róza and her daughter Shira are hiding from German soldiers in a barn loft. Having to be very quiet, Róza makes up a story about a yellow bird that is free to go out and sing and make noise while they must be quiet. Separated when they have to leave the barn, mother and daughter remain attached through their musical abilities and the story of the bird, but wonder if they will ever see each other again. A mesmerizing story.

The Pride of Eden, by Taylor Brown

Anse Caulfield is a life-toughened Vietnam veteran and former jockey who, for reasons of his own, uses an ill-gotten windfall to establish Little Eden, a wildlife sanctuary on the coast of Georgia. Here, a collection of unforgettable mavericks, living on the periphery of society, wage an unofficial war of their own to rescue exotic animals from the hands of greed and cruelty. Brown has the rare ability to place his readers into the minds of his characters, allowing them to inhabit their skin. We can tap into their senses, passions and motivations. Every page explodes, and every line is pure poetry. Pride of Eden is original, sensitive, and unsparing.

The New Life of Hugo Gardner, by Louis Begley

Hugo is in his 80s, his wife has just left him for a younger man, and he’s lonely. With a plan to end his life should it become necessary (he doesn’t want to be a burden), he tries to find a way to be happy. In the past this has always included sexual intimacy, so why should that change?

Blackwood, by Michael Farris Smith

The thing about the invasive kudzu vine is that it is unstoppable. Nearly impenetrable, it harbors and smothers its secrets. The countryside around the dead-end town of Red Bluff, Mississippi, is filled with the encroaching vine and the sad stories it keeps. That peace is shattered when a vagabond family lands in the town, along with an artist whose family met with tragedy there when he was a boy. A disturbing chain of events follows in this tense, breathtaking novel.

The Glass Hotel, by Emily St. John Mandel

A Ponzi scheme collapses, obliterating lives and fortunes, and a woman mysteriously disappears from the deck of a container ship at sea. These seemingly disparate events converge in a glass-fronted hotel on Vancouver Island in this story of crisis and survival. An exquisite, character-driven novel that will haunt the reader for days after the last page.

A Good Neighborhood, by Therese Anne Fowler

It began with a tree, a wonderful, massive oak in a modest, diverse neighborhood, with small, modest homes, and close-knit neighbors. The tree is a treasured part of a property owned by a widowed black college professor and her talented teenage son. The tree is put in peril and the serenity of the neighborhood is disrupted when a gargantuan home is built on a razed lot next door by a wealthy businessman who does little to hide his contempt for his neighbors. This man has a beautiful young daughter, and as fate would have it, the two teens fall in love, setting the course for heartbreak and disaster. This tale will provide fodder for book clubs and community discussions for years to come.

My Dark Vanessa, by Kate Elizabeth Russell

It was love. It was real. She may have been only 15 years old, and he was her teacher, but nobody understands the depth of their connection. Yes, it was love, because if it wasn’t love then it was something else, something ugly, something unspeakable. And now, 16 years later, she is still not ready to face that possibility, not ready to label him a monster and herself a victim. It’s not necessary for you to be the judge, just accept the journey through Vanessa’s memories as she tries to make peace with who she is today.

Writers and Lovers, by Lily King

Not since Edward St Aubyn’s Patrick Melrose novels has a character so vividly, brilliantly and quietly risen off the page as has Casey Peabody in Writers and Lovers. Seamlessly crafted by a master of literary fiction, King’s novel of fear, bravery, chance, silliness, disappointment and deep fortitude is absolutely impossible to put down.

The Operator, by Gretchen Berg

Vivian is a telephone operator in a small town in the 1950s and listens in on the conversations. One night she hears a secret about her family that upends her life and, of course, leads to other secrets coming to light. A humorous story of small-town life that is loosely based on the author’s grandmother.

Valentine, by Elizabeth Wetmore

In the early hours of the morning after Valentine’s Day, 14-year-old Gloria Ramírez appears on the front porch of Mary Rose Whitehead’s ranch house, broken and barely alive. The teenager has been viciously attacked in a nearby oil field — an act of brutality that is tried in the churches and barrooms of Odessa before it can reach a court of law. When justice is evasive, a local woman decides to take matters into her own hands, setting the stage for a showdown with potentially devastating consequences. Valentine is a haunting exploration of the intersections of violence and race, class and region in a story that plumbs the depths of darkness and fear, yet offers a window into beauty and hope.

NONFICTION

House Lessons, by Erica Bauermeister

This book is a joy to read. Be prepared to underline insights on every page. House Lessons is a meditation that takes place over two decades. This memoir in essay form fuses thoughtful perceptions with practical information about how we consider spaces and how people inhabit them. A quiet delight.

Pearls of Wisdom: Little Pieces of Advice (That Go a Long Way), by Barbara Bush

At the end of the day, she taught all of us some valuable lessons. As First Lady, she made a point of cuddling a baby with AIDS and hugging a young man who was HIV positive and whose family had rejected him, showing us by example the importance of compassion and the myth of fear. As a mother, she made sure we all knew that your children must come first, and one of the most important things you can do is to read to them. As a friend and mentor, she showed that you had to be true to yourself, and even at the end of her life, she taught us how to die with grace.

CHILDREN’S BOOKS

The Imaginaries: Little Scraps of Larger Stories, by Emily Winfield Martin

Beautiful, whimsical, and ethereal are the thoughts and illustrations that make up the “Imaginaries.” A book of story starters and idea encouragers, The Imaginaries could also serve as a most intriguing coffee table art book. Martin never disappoints! (Ages 6-10.)

The Girl and the Dinosaur, by Hollie Hughes

On a beach in a town not so very far from here, a girl and a dinosaur find each other and, with spirits wild and free, explore the night together. Dinosaur lovers and dreamers alike will adore this stunningly illustrated lyrical tale of fun, fantasy and flight. (Ages 3-6.)

No More Naps, by Chris Grabenstein

No kid ever wanted to take a nap, but what if, when that kid finally does get drowsy and cave, all the naps had been taken by everyone else in the neighborhood — even the dog! A cautionary tale with a little sleepy time silliness that will certainly stay on top of the “read it again” stack. (Ages 2-4.)

Nesting, by Henry Cole

From the first dry grass and small twigs gathered to build a perfect, comfortable nest, to the warm summer day when the independent babies fly away on their own, this simple sweet picture book chronicles a season in the life of a robin family. Young ornithologists and nature lovers will enjoy learning more about the wild, wonderful world. (Ages 3-6.)

American Royals, by Katharine McGee

If George Washington had been named king instead of president, America may very well have been naming a new queen instead of a new president in 2020. The author of The Thousandth Floor brings that scenario to life and, with Harry and Meghan stepping down from their royal duties and moving to North America, this fun book couldn’t be more timely. (Ages 14 and up.)  PS

Compiled by Kimberly Daniels Taws and Angie Tally

The Omnivorous Reader

Mystery of the Hunley

What killed the Confederacy’s submariners?

By Stephen E. Smith

With an estimated 60,000 to 100,000 Civil War—related titles published in the last 155 years, you might wonder if there’s anything left to write about. But science and technology have offered new methods of verifying the previously unverifiable, no matter how esoteric or insignificant the subject might be.

An April entry into the Civil War marketplace is Rachel Lance’s In the Waves: My Quest to Solve the Mystery of a Civil War Submarine. This 315-page semi-technical analysis of a single black-powder detonation that changed naval warfare forever should be of interest to anyone living in the Carolinas, taking place, by and large, at Duke University, and concerning an artifact that has, in recent years, attracted thousands of tourists to the city of Charleston.

Lance is a biomedical engineer and blast-injury researcher at Duke. She spent several years as an engineer developing specialized underwater equipment for the Navy and was working toward her Ph.D. when she took on, at the insistence of her dissertation advisor, the mysterious demise of the H.L. Hunley’s crew.

Any Civil War enthusiast (let’s dispense with the pejorative term “buff”; many Civil War readers are serious historians) will be happy to tell you that the Hunley was an experimental submarine developed by the Confederacy in hopes that it would break the Union blockade, and that it might have succeeded except that it disappeared along with the USS Housatonic, the first warship sunk by a submersible craft, and remained cloaked in mystery until 1995, when it was located 4 miles offshore in 30 feet of water. The sub was raised from the bottom in 2000 and has since become Charleston’s most popular attraction.

For those unfamiliar with the details of the Hunley’s story, Lance supplies a history of early submersibles and details the little sub’s short life, including the circumstances surrounding the first two Hunley crews, who perished when mechanical problems arose during testing. Even H.L. Hunley, the sub’s inventor, died when he accidently depressed the bow planes when surfacing following a test dive. After each sinking, the sub was raised and put back into service, even when it required that the bloated bodies of the dead be dismembered to facilitate removal, a decidedly unpleasant task relegated to slave labor.

For many years, it was assumed the Hunley had survived its attack on the Housatonic — it was reported that the crew signaled success by flashing a blue light — but there was no satisfactory explanation as to why the boat did not return to fight another day. Survivors of the Housatonic testified to seeing the Hunley shortly after the explosion, but no further evidence as to the fate of the sub and its crew was offered at the time.

Lance’s study focuses on the crew’s cause of death. Archaeologists found all eight men slumped at their stations in the submarine. Seven men were seated at the propeller crank, and the remains of the boat’s captain, Lt. George Dixon, were discovered in the forward conning tower. None showed signs of skeletal trauma, and there was no indication that the crew had attempted to escape the sinking craft. A careful examination of the boat’s skin revealed that the explosion had not breached its hull.

Since Lance is a blast-injury expert, readers might assume that she was seeking confirmation that the crew was killed by the shock wave from detonation of the Hunley’s torpedo, and not from suffocation or drowning. In fact, Southern newspapers speculated shortly after the sub’s disappearance that such a wave had sunk the little boat, and knowledgeable observers at the time of the sub’s testing warned that the Hunley would likely fall victim to its own torpedo, which was suspended on the end of a spar extending from the bow of the boat.

Lance’s objective was to prove beyond all doubt that a blast wave killed the Hunley’s crew, and In the Waves is a narrative history of her quest to gather evidence to that effect and to procure, in the process, her Ph.D. To do this she constructed a miniature Hunley-like craft (the CSS Tiny), procured black powder of the sort available during the Civil War, constructed a miniature facsimile of the torpedo, and conducted extensive testing in an appropriate body of water. Instruments to measure the true force of the blast had to be obtained from the Navy and made to function correctly under circumstances that were anything but ideal.

The development of testing criteria consumes most of Lance’s book, at times growing a trifle tedious and dauntingly technical. Failed test follows failed test, subjecting the reader to the same level of frustration suffered by Lance and her team of researchers. But she wisely couches much of the technical information in understandable terms and refers more punctilious readers to the open-access journal PLOs One. “This is a descriptive version of the math and physics,” she writes in a footnote, “and was written to be understandable for the general reader. It does not, therefore, go into all the complex details necessary to justify and complete the scientific analysis.”

While working to replicate the explosive force of the Hunley’s torpedo, Lance reveals the intriguing story of George Washington Rains. Born in Craven County, North Carolina, Rains almost singlehandedly supplied the Confederacy with black powder and torpedo technology. Southern soldiers may have run short of food and clothing, but they were never without powder and shot, a fact that no doubt prolonged the slaughter and destruction occasioned by the war.

In the Waves’ entertainment value is mostly a matter of scientific revelation. As a narrative it is made less successful by the inclusion of unnecessary details regarding the author’s personal life, and the occasional irrelevant sidebar and annoying digression. Is it worth reading? Certainly. If you have an abiding interest in Civil War history, you’ll no doubt find a place for In the Waves in your already overburdened bookshelves.  PS

Stephen E. Smith is a retired professor and the author of seven 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.

The Art Beat

Very Odd Indeed

Judson Theatre produces Neil Simon classic

By Jim Moriarty

What happens when two divorced women move in together? You could go to Netflix and watch Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau to get an inkling or, if you want to really know, you can go to the Judson Theatre Company’s production of Neil Simon’s female version of The Odd Couple March 26-29 at the Bradshaw Performing Arts Center at Sandhills Community College.

Simon’s female version of his timeless comedy debuted on Broadway in 1985 with the lead characters transformed into Olive Madison and Florence Unger. When Florence is unceremoniously ditched by her husband, she shows up at Olive’s rather untidy apartment, where the girls are engaged in a rousing game of Trivial Pursuit. Concerned that Florence might be suicidal, Olive takes her in. But these are two women with very, very different personalities. The rest is classic Neil Simon, not recycled but reimagined.

Olive is being played by Amanda Bearse, best known for her portrayal of Marcy D’Arcy in over 250 episodes of Married . . . with Children. Bearse was most recently the director of an off-Broadway play, Party Face, produced by Judson’s founder, Morgan Sills. “We had Hayley Mills dedicated to this final week when we lost not only our standby, which is the word for understudy now, but one of the actresses, too,” Bearse says. “Long story short, I ended up on stage. I hadn’t been on stage in decades. I quit acting after Married . . . with Children in order to be taken seriously in Hollywood as a director. I got this little opportunity with six or seven performances. I had a blast and was reminded how much fun it is. So, I kind of put the energy out there to Morgan. ‘When are you going to ask me to come down there?’ You have to be careful what you ask for. So, I guess I have to get new headshots. I’m an actor again.”

Bearse, who is back in Southern California, had been teaching at the Seattle Film Institute. “The female version of Odd Couple is something that I came to just in the last few years. So, when Morgan brought it up, I said I’m familiar with that play,” she says. “Florence is wound up pretty tight, a lot like the character I did on Married . . . with Children. That might be the most expected way to see me. I like to shake things up a little bit, and I said I would love to play Olive.”

Teresa Ganzel, who has appeared with actors like Jackie Gleason, Richard Pryor, Lynn Redgrave, Carol Burnett, Jean Smart, Jim Carrey, Bob Newhart and on and on, performed previously in Pinehurst as Truvy in Judson Theatre’s production of Steel Magnolias. “I was doing Viagra Falls — yes, it’s a comedy — and Morgan told me he’d seen the show and that he was doing Steel Magnolias, and he thought I’d be great in the Dolly Parton part,” she says. “I said, ‘Are you kidding? I’d love to do that part.’ So, that’s how it happened. I loved Pinehurst, too, so that whole experience, I just really enjoyed it. Now, here it is, six years later and he asked if I’d like to do the female Odd Couple and I said, of course. The weird thing, too, is I’d never seen a production of the Odd Couple, male or female. I see a lot of theater and it’s such a classic play, you would have thought I would have. I’m loving the fact that it’s sort of new to me.”

Sills, the executive producer, is joined once again by artistic director Daniel Haley. “We had done so well with Plaza Suite with Eve Plumb and Rex Smith, and with The Sunshine Boys with Robert Wuhl and Don Most, that we wanted to do another Neil Simon. Our audiences love it,” says Sills. “The female Odd Couple seemed to be the next logical progression because Love, Loss and What I Wore by Nora Ephron had done so well.

“Also, we knew we could cast it really well. To have Teresa come back and have Amanda come down to North Carolina, they’re both friends. They’re wonderful on stage and off. I knew it would be an unbeatable combination, that they’ll be hysterically funny in this show. No laughs get by these two.”

Performances at BPAC are Thursday, March 26, at 7 p.m.; Friday, March 27, at 8 p.m.; Saturday, March 28, at 2 p.m. and 8 p.m.; and a final matinee on Sunday, March 29, at 3 p.m. Tickets are $38 in advance or $45 at the door ($25 for military or students) and are available online at Judsontheatre.com. All seating is general admission.  PS

Jim Moriarty is the senior editor of PineStraw and can be reached at jjmpinestraw@gmail.com.

Sporting Life

A Hitchhiker’s Guide

Finding the universe in bluebirds

By Tom Bryant

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life and to see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, to discover that I had not lived.”  — Henry David Thoreau

I haven’t met that many people who marched to Thoreau’s drummer. My father for sure, my grandfather without a doubt, and there was a gentleman I had the opportunity to meet for only about an hour, but that fellow was a walking example of what Thoreau had in mind when he penciled his famous Walden.

I’ve talked about it some and have written about the unusual experience I had that hot August afternoon when I met “Hank,” as he said he liked his friends to call him.

It was the week before dove season, and I was as busy as the proverbial one-armed paperhanger trying to get everything done on my newly leased little farm to be ready for opening day. I had invited several friends to help usher in the season, and was running back and forth from our home in Southern Pines to the field located close to Drowning Creek.

It was just before lunch, and the sun was really bearing down when I noticed a hitchhiker right outside of Aberdeen on U.S. 1. He had a sign made from a piece of cardboard with the message:

HEADING SOUTH . . . NO HURRY

The little cardboard sign got my attention, because back in my early days, I used to move around the country hitchhiking, using the same method, a hand-lettered sign with my destination scribbled across the cardboard. It worked.

Those were different days when I used my thumb to get back and forth to college. They were simpler, more peaceful times, and a lot of youngsters got about by hitching rides. But this guy had no destination listed, just south, and he said he was in no hurry. Unheard of, I thought, as I rode by the gentleman standing on the side of the road. Everybody is supposed to be in a hurry.

On my second trip to the farm, the hitchhiker was still in about the same location, walking toward Pinebluff. What the heck, I thought. It’s too hot for the old guy. I decided to pick him up and pulled over to the side.

He hurried up to the Bronco, looked in and said, “Thanks for stopping, mister. It’s getting dang hot out here.” The gentleman looked to be anywhere between 60 and 70. He was dressed neatly in well worn but clean clothes. He had a small backpack, and I could tell he wasn’t your run-of-the-mill loafer. He climbed in the Bronco, and I drove on south.

“Hot day to be out here, fellow,” I said. “Where you headed?”

“You know, I haven’t made my mind up yet. I might visit my sister in Florida or travel to Texas. Texas is supposed to be pretty this time of year.”

And so I met Hank. In our short conversation, I learned that, at one time, he had his own very successful business as a financial consultant and evidently had retired with a bucket full of money. Just when he and his wife were getting ready to enjoy the good life, she came down with a debilitating illness and passed away.

“I started drinking too much,” he said. “Things were on the downhill slide. Nothing meant much to me anymore until one morning I looked out the kitchen window and saw the most beautiful sunrise, and my life turned around. I sold the house, gave everything to the kids, and decided to see the world from the ground up, as it were. I realized I’d never be able to spend all the money I had acquired, and it’s amazing how simply a person can live.

“You know what I did this spring? Watched a pair of bluebirds build a nest and have babies. That’s all I did. I had a part-time job on a horse farm in Virginia, and when I wasn’t cleaning stables, I watched those two little birds. It was wonderful.”

I dropped Hank off a short way from Rockingham, where he said he was going to spend a couple days in a motel, resting and escaping the current heat wave.

I never saw this truly contented man again.

My grandfather, a farmer, spent his life in and made his livelihood from his fields in the low country of South Carolina. He was dedicated to the outdoors, not just for the esoteric aspect but because that’s where he made his living and supported a family of eight children. I spent many days as a youngster following him through freshly planted fields and riding in his pickup as he checked on how his crops were growing. Those drives usually occurred on Sunday, when my grandmother would be at the little Baptist country church located close to the farm. She played the piano for the choir and was a huge supporter of the small house of worship. Me? I stuck close to Granddaddy’s side.

One Sunday as we were checking crops down close to the creek, I asked him, “Granddad, you don’t go to church with Grandma. Why is that?”

He pulled the pickup under a giant live oak and said, “Come on, son, I want to show you something.”

We walked down toward the creek, and he said, “Now, what do you see?”

I was kind of mystified as to where the conversation was going. “Well, I see the creek and the swamp and those giant cypress trees. That’s about it.”

“What do you hear? Listen good. Close your eyes and listen.”

“Crows. Sounds like they’re down the creek around the bend. And the creek water current is burbling, sort of like a whispering noise. And, oh yeah, a blue jay calling from across the creek, and a woodpecker is pecking somewhere close.”

I opened my eyes and we stood there silently on the bank of the little fast moving stream. “Son, this is my church. I figure the outdoors, this creek, our fields, anywhere I am in the woods is about as close to the good Lord as I’m gonna get, until He calls me and wants to talk on a more personal basis. No time soon, I hope,” he said, laughing.

The other person in my litany of outdoor champions is my dad, the finest man I’ve known. An orphan whose parents died in the 1918 flu epidemic, he was placed in the local boys’ home, and that’s where he lived until graduating from high school. A fantastic high school athlete, he won numerous scholarships to several colleges but decided on Clemson. He met Mother, and as they say, the rest is history.

My dad always lived close to the natural world. Growing up in the boys’ home, he was responsible for the garden that helped feed the residents, and that everyday closeness to nature as a boy never went away. He had a morning habit that was a real mystery to me until one morning I asked Mother what he was he doing.

My siblings and I would be around the breakfast table, chowing down, getting ready for school, and Dad would make a cup of coffee and go outside. He would stand there under an ancient longleaf pine, drinking coffee, looking toward the woods that led down to the lake. He followed that same routine every day.

“Tommy,” my mom said, “I believe that’s how your dad communicates with the Almighty.” Dad was outside standing in about the same spot drinking his coffee and looking toward the woodland.

“I think it’s as simple as he’s planning his day and praying for good things for his family.”

Thoreau, if he had had the opportunity to meet my dad, my granddad and Hank, would have been proud to include them in his small circle of friends.  PS

Tom Bryant, a Southern Pines resident, is a lifelong outdoorsman and PineStraw’s Sporting Life columnist.

Southwords

Chicken Delight

You can’t stop them. You can only hope to contain them

By Beth MacDonald

Sometimes my husband
and I will bird watch from our porch while we enjoy our coffee. We let the dogs run around their self-made Tough Mudder obstacle course — the remnants of what used to be the lawn.

One particularly fine morning I sighed contentedly. “Ah, I hear the cardinals.” I looked around to see if I could spot them on the blooming camellia bush.

“Wait . . . shhh!” Mason sputtered. I heard it, too. It was a clucking sound. “That’s a chicken!” Spinning around so fast the G-forces almost threw him out of his chair, Mason’s bewilderment made me laugh. “Why is there a chicken in our yard?” He wanted answers, damn it.

“Because it’s our yard. I don’t know why you’re surprised.”

Snapping a picture, I sent my neighbor a text asking if she’d lost something. About yay high. Four toes. Skinny legs. She quickly replied that she wasn’t home and if I simply walk toward it, the beast should return to her yard. Mystery solved.

If and should are words that automatically mean to me that things are about to go the exact opposite of how they should go — especially since I was in my mismatched Spaceman Spiff pajamas.

I pulled my boots on and walked to the side yard with Mason. He is always dressed. He was born dressed. He knows that bad things always happen before coffee. I should have learned as much by now.

When I walked toward the chicken, it chose to exercise its free will prerogative as one of God’s creatures and went in the direction opposite of where it was supposed to go. It walked in circles. As I kept trying to herd the bird home, Mason stood there, arms crossed, advising me on the proper technique for catching a chicken. I didn’t realize he was Chicken Dundee.

Squatting low and assuming the stance of a Sumo wrestler — because in my mind these creatures must surely understand the Japanese sport — I stared at the ground, pounded my feet and followed the fowl straight into a prickly holly bush. Chicken Dundee stood there glaring at me.

“You’re doing it wrong.”

“We’ll I’ve never hunted chickens before!”

“What you need to do is blah blah blah,” he preached from the sidelines.

Mimicking the walk of a chicken and chasing it seemed like a much better idea than whatever it was Mason was saying. So, that was my new plan.

Untangling myself from the holly bush, I made a “bawk bawk” noise and, wearing Spaceman Spiff instead of a Sumo belt, I charged. It ran toward my husband for safety. He calmly wrapped his hands around its wings and gently placed it over our neighbor’s fence. Poultry crisis averted. Temporarily.

The problem is that we recently adopted another dog. She’s a 2-year-old Cane Corso, obedience trained and raised for breeding. That didn’t work out for her. Unwanted, she joined our ragtag bunch of misfits. Before we got her, however, her diet had consisted mainly of raw chicken. Exactly.

Two days after we adopted New Dog, on another bucolic, porch-sitting morning we settled in with a lovely light roast. Before we could get the first sip down, we heard the wild jungle screams of Jumanji from the backyard. A slow-motion scene of chaos played out in front of us.

There were seven chickens running, squawking in panic, three dogs barking, galloping with delight toward the disarray, and a hawk swooping down, screaming toward pretty much anything with the potential of transitioning into carrion. Mason lurched forward, his coffee a still frame of liquid suspended in air, yelling in deep-throated slow-mo, “Nooooooooo!”

It was my turn to advise from the sidelines. My inner monologue said, “Why are there shenanigans before coffee?”

Then it hit me. New Dog eats chicken. Raw chicken. I called her and yelled, “Stop!” My inner monologue scoffed. The dog did not stop. I started calling for all the dogs to stop. Like any good mother, none of their names came to mind. I started spewing out random bits and pieces of names, including the names of my children, followed by, “Whatever your name is, SIT!” while clapping like a schoolmarm.

My neighbor scared the hawk off with a pellet gun. It flew away like someone leaving the McDonald’s drive-thru with the wrong order. As quickly as this old-fashioned melee started it was over.

I met my neighbor at the absolutely useless fence line, both of us breathless. I asked her if she needed help rounding up her chickens. I am a pro now. She declined but wondered out loud, “Why did all of this happen before coffee?” Because, well, us. PS

Beth MacDonald is a Southern Pines suburban misadventurer who likes to make words up. She loves to travel with her family, read everything she can, and shop locally for her socks.

Golftown Journal

Whip It

Discovering tempo at the end of a stick

By Lee Pace

Jim Hackenburg punches a few keys into his cellphone and waits for a video clip on YouTube to pop up. Seconds later, he’s showing John Candy in the movie The Blues Brothers sitting down in a bar with two prison guards and ordering drinks. He points at his two companions and asks: “Orange Whip? Orange Whip?” Then he looks at the waiter: “Three Orange Whips.”

Hackenburg smiles.

“That very instant, I knew I had the name,” he says. “Orange is a vibrant color. There was a whipping motion to the device. It was perfect.”

That was in 2007, when Hackenberg, a former collegiate golfer, mini-tour player, PGA Tour caddie and at the time a club pro and swing coach, was trying to generate some momentum for a new golf training aid he was launching — a rubber ball on the end of a flexible shaft that was designed to help golfers feel the proper motion, sequence and tempo of the golf swing.

Hackenberg looks around him at the massive PGA Merchandise Show in Orlando in late January 2020 and reflects back to the beginning.

“My first show 12 years ago, it was just me in a 5- by 10-foot booth, 10 hours a day for three straight days,” he says. “It was tough.”

A dozen years later, the Easley, South Carolina-based company brought a dozen people to Orlando and rented six times the exhibit space over his initial foray into the trade show business. The Golf Channel dropped by and did a spot with anchor personality Kira Dixon demonstrating an Orange Whip device. And in addition to peddling and promoting the original Orange Whip trainer and knock-offs developed for putting and wedge play, Hackenberg has partnered with golf fitness specialist Brian Newman of Elk River Club in Banner Elk, North Carolina, on a new product line and streaming training service for golf fitness. There is a shorter, heavier version of the Orange Whip called the LightSpeed, designed for “speed training”; and a series of resistance bands and a concave hitting platform that addresses the basic swing skills of posture, rotation, weight shift and balance and swing plane.

“The Orange Whip has always been about tempo and feel with a small physical component to it,” Hackenberg says. “But I never really had a fitness program. There are certain parts of the swing that can’t be taught unless you have flexibility, balance and mobility. Brian has brought those puzzle pieces to complete the Orange Whip.”

Hackenberg grew up in North Dakota, played college golf at Arizona State and Oregon State, and by the 2003-05 era was spending his winters and springs caddying on the PGA Tour and his summers teaching at a club on Martha’s Vineyard. The contrasts struck him between the fluid, athletic swings of players like Geoff Ogilvy and Ernie Els, and the lunging and jabbing motions of many middle-aged club golfers.

“I was attracted to the pros’ balance and rhythm,” says Hackenberg, a PGA Class A pro since 2003. “These guys made it look almost too easy, like they can do it in their sleep. Their motion was so effortless. It was like they’d been holding the club their whole life.

“Then I’d be giving a lesson, and people were so tense and their only goal was to hit the ball, and when you try to hit at something it’s much different than swinging through it. I had a difficult time conveying that message. I couldn’t get them to feel the motion that came so naturally to the tour guys. I got tired of watching people chop at the ball.”

It occurred to Hackenberg that the proper visual was to swing a ball on the end of a rope or a chain. Any motion at all herky-jerky was doomed to failure.

“The concept that slowly evolved to me was that the golf club was no longer a golf club, but it was a ball on the end of a chain,” he says. “If you hold that chain and move the ball slowly back and forth on the end of the chain, your hands and arms and body would develop a more fluid motion, an athletic motion.”

Hackenberg dusted off his club-making skills in 2006 and concocted a crude apparatus out of a fiberglass rod with a metal weight at the end.

“There was a lot of trial-and-error and trips to Home Depot,” he says. He soon refined it with an orange rubber ball at one end and a golf club grip at the other. The key element is a patented steel weight at the grip end that “counterbalances” the device and works in tandem with the ball at the opposite end to promote good rhythm. Hackenberg took the device to the lesson tee on Martha’s Vineyard and demonstrated the motion to a golfer named Burke Ross, and then put the device in Ross’ hands.

“Within five minutes, you could see the light bulb go off in his head,” Hackenberg says. “He wanted to buy my prototype. Sadly, it was the only one I had. He had to wait another month until I made another quality one. That was my ‘ah-ha’ moment that maybe I can start a business around this idea.”

Hackenberg figured that since the device helped one golfer, maybe it would work magic for others. Within two years the idea had morphed from his garage on Martha’s Vineyard to a manufacturing facility near Greenville, South Carolina. Hackenberg’s brother lived in Greenville, so he hoped that cheap labor from nieces and nephews might come in handy, but more important was the location — within a half-day’s drive from Greenville you can find a lot of golfers.

“I knew the job would involve going around in my Toyota 4Runner carrying Orange Whips as a traveling salesman,” he says. “Within a 300-mile radius of Greenville, there are a ton of golfers. I can get to the coast easily, up to Virginia, Georgia, north Florida, to Pinehurst. Greenville gave me good proximity to a lot of golfers.”

The company sold 4,000 Orange Whips in 2008, quadrupled that to 16,000 in 2010, and had more than doubled that by 2014 with 36,000 devices sold. That growth continued with more than 60,000 units sold in 2019. Orange Whip has moved twice into bigger manufacturing and fulfillment facilities and now has 16 full-time employees.

You can see the orange ball protruding from the bags of hundreds of touring pros if you count the PGA Tour, Champions Tour and LPGA Tour. Hackenberg remembers one early seminal moment when TV cameras showed Retief Goosen getting a ruling and multiple camera shots showing that orange orb protruding from his bag. Graeme McDowell is a big fan, and Greg Norman insisted on paying for his Orange Whip despite Hackenberg’s efforts to give him one, saying the Whip was the “best thing for timing and release” he’d ever seen.

Hackenberg also touts the Whip’s value in improving flexibility and strength, and serving as an anchor for off-season practice.

“I grew up in North Dakota and had to re-learn my golf swing every year,” he says. “If you swing this club regularly through the winter, this athletic motion will become second nature, and you’ll be in playing shape for spring.”

By sheer coincidence, Hackenberg was paired with Newman in a Carolinas PGA competition at Hilton Head in 2018. Newman is director of golf and fitness at Elk River, and over the course of 18 holes the two men found common ground with Newman’s ability to teach golf fitness and Hackenberg’s manufacturing and technology expertise.

Over the next 18 months, they developed an online workout/drill program, teaching pro certification and physical tools to help golfers develop their strength, flexibility, balance and swing skills. They were heartened at the PGA Show not only from the response from rank-and-file attendees, but by the fact some of the top instructors in golf sought them out to see what they were doing.

“Golf fitness is now mainstream,” says Newman. “PGA Tour players look super-buffed. Guys today are pure athletes. They work really hard on their bodies, not only to hit the ball farther and swing harder, but for longevity and overall well-being.”

“I think this is going to be a big hit,” Hackenberg says. “It’s the next step in the evolution of the Orange Whip. And to think, this all came about because I was tired of watching people chop at the ball and was desperate to find a way to help them.”  PS

PineStraw golf columnist Lee Pace acknowledged having to move up a set of tees in the October 2014 issue (“Travails of a Short-Knocker”) and welcomes any life preserver from The Orange Whip.

 

Simple Life

The Stuffed Potatoes

Sustaining power of wise friends — and a good lunch

By Jim Dodson

Two or three times a month, we meet for lunch at a quiet bar of a local restaurant.

We catch up on news and work, talk about books we are reading and swap tales about the adventurous lives of our wives, grown children and grandbabies. Sometimes it’s history and politics that dominate the conversation. More often than not we share thoughts on life, love and matters philosophical. In a nutshell, we attempt to solve most of the world’s problems in the span of time it approximately takes to consume a couple of stuffed baked potatoes.

That seems about right since the three of us always order the same items off the bar menu. Joe and I routinely order fully loaded stuffed baked potatoes while our worldly friend Pat — who prefers to be called Patrick — gets a fancy club sandwich. There’s always one in every crowd.

Some time ago, I began calling our gathering The Stuffed Potatoes Lunch and Philosophy Club.

Spud Buds for short.

You see, we’ve known each other for more than half a century. Pat (as I call him) is my oldest pal; we grew up a block from each other and have spent years chasing golf balls and trout in each other’s company. Pat and Joe grew up attending the same Catholic church. But I got to know and like Joe in high school.

To look at us, you might think we’re just three old geezers telling war stories in a booth.

Technically speaking, I suppose we are “old” guys, though none of us thinks of ourselves that way in the slightest.

We were born weeks apart in 1953 — Joe in January, me in February, Pat in March.

What a banner year it was: Dwight Eisenhower became president and the Korean War ended. Hillary — the mountaineer — reached the summit of Everest. Elizabeth II was crowned Queen of England. Gas cost 20 cents per gallon. The first Corvette went on sale. Albert Schweitzer won the Nobel Prize. From Here to Eternity was the top Hollywood movie. Ian Fleming published his first James Bond novel, Casino Royale. Mickey Spillane was the king of crime fiction.

Our mothers, bless their hearts — suburban housewives of the 1950s — knew what they were doing giving us simple 1950s names like Joe, Pat and Jimmy, names that fit us like a pair of Buster Brown shoes, names from a Mickey Spillane novel or a Burt Lancaster movie.

I’m guessing nobody these days names their kid Joe, Pat or Jimmy. Not when you’ve got so many exotic choices like Brendan, Rupert or Hamish floating around in the Millennial baby pool. Just to be sure what I’m talking about, I looked up the most popular male names for millennial babies in 2020.

Michael, Christopher, Matthew and Joshua are actually the top Millennial male names for 2020. Daniel comes in fifth.

That’s four Biblical names shy of a Christian baseball team. With a starting lineup like that, you could almost write your own New Testament — if Millennials bothered to go to church anymore.

Joe’s the only one of us who has achieved exalted granddad stature. He and wife Liz have two, in fact. One’s in Durham, the other, Asheville. They go see them all the time and who can blame them for that? If I had grandbabies somewhere within shouting distance I’d burn up the highway just to make a proud and happy fool of myself every dang weekend.

As of this month, we’ve all turned 67 years old. No applause necessary.

Truthfully, it’s rather amazing how quickly this happened. Once upon a time, 67 sounded positively ancient to our youthful ears — one bus stop shy of the boneyard, as Mickey Spillane might say.

The funny thing is, none of us feels at all ancient or even looks terribly old, according to our thoughtful wives and daughters. Then again, they might need new glasses.

With age, however, comes a number of often unadvertised benefits.

We’ve each buried family and friends, suffered setbacks and experienced comebacks, seen enough of life and sudden death — not to mention the drama of our own aging bodies — to know that bittersweet impermanence is what makes living fully so important and precious. To laugh is to gain a taste of immortality.

Failed projects and busted business deals have taught us that there’s really no failure in this life — only reasons to get up, dust off our britches and try a different path. A new summit always awaits.

Our faith has been tested and found to be alive and kicking, after all these years.

We’ve learned that joy and optimism are spiritual rocket fuel, that divine mystery is real and the unseen world holds much more intriguing possibilities than anything we read about in the news, or watch on Netflix, Hulu or Amazon.

Ditto the natural world of woods and fields and streams.

It’s no coincidence that we share a profound love of nature, drawing comfort and wisdom from its many lessons.

Joe, a forester by training, spends his days helping clients find and set aside wild lands for future generations to enjoy. He and Liz are dedicated wilderness hikers, walking encyclopedias of botany and flora, forever in search of new trails and unspoiled vistas when they’re not slipping off to see those beautiful grandbabies of theirs.

Pat is a top businessman whose real love is the spiritual solitude of remote trout streams and the joy of chasing a golf ball around the highlands of Scotland with his oldest pal. He’s also a skilled bird-hunter but these days shoots only clays with Joe some Wednesday afternoons.

Several years ago, Pat and Joe built a cabin on Pat’s land up in Meadows of Dan, Virginia. They set up cameras just to film any wildlife that happened by, cleared roads and got to know the locals. Since both are still working and have no plans to retire, that cabin became a way, as Joe puts it, “to reset our clocks — inside and out.” We take from nature, said Theodore Roethke, what we cannot see.

As for me — a veteran journalist and writer who is busier than ever and shares their view of the dreaded R-word — I’m an “old” Eagle Scout, fly-fishing nut, bird-watcher and gardener who once spent six glorious weeks in the remote bush of South Africa with a trio of crazed plant hunters dodging black mambas and spitting cobras just to see the world’s smallest hyacinth and other exotic plants in the ancestral birthplace of the world’s flowers. The baboons, birds, springboks and elephants weren’t bad, either. I felt like a kid in a Rudyard Kipling tale.

At that time, I also lived in a house I built with my own hands, on a forested hill near the coast of Maine. I also rebuilt the stone walls of a long abandoned 18th-century farmstead and created a vast English garden in the woods that nobody but family, friends, the FedEx guy and local wildlife ever saw. My late Scots mother-in-law, cheeky women, suggested I name my woodland retreat “Slightly Off in the Woods.”

I called it my Holy Hill, my little piece of Heaven.

My two children grew up there watching the seasons come and go, learning to look and listen to the quiet voices of nature. Today, one is a documentary journalist living and working in the Middle East, the other a top copywriter and screenwriter in New York City. Both claim they carry the peace of that Holy Hill with them in their hearts, and I believe them. I do, too.

Maybe that’s what I love most about lunches with the Stuffed Potatoes.

At a time of life when a lot of men our age lose their curiosity and zest for living, spending their days grumbling about sports, politics or the weather, we take genuine pleasure in each other’s company, swapping tales of life’s natural ups and downs while sharing wisdom for the road ahead.

Joe has stories galore and the most infectious laugh you’ve ever heard. He was the fifth of nine kids, has 53 cousins and an uncle who became the voice of the American environmental movement. He’s always coming out with pearls of wisdom that I promptly write down. We call them “Joeisms.”

Everybody has to be somewhere, he once observed about an a certain disagreeable fellow. I just don’t have to be there with him.

Patrick is gifted with what the Irish call the craic — an ancient Irish word that means he can talk to anyone and entertain them royally while he’s doing it. He’s a master at solving complex problems and has quietly done more things that help teenagers and homeless folks than anyone I know. He’s also the only guy I know who’s probably read more books than me, which is really saying something. At least he hasn’t started writing them — yet.

So we are three for lunch — the forester, the fisherman and the gardener.

A fictional Forrest Gump got famous for saying that his mother once said that life is like a box of chocolates because you never know what you’ll get. I beg to disagree, believing a happy life is actually more like a gloriously stuffed baked potato because, the more you put in, the better it tastes.

My Spud Buds, I suspect, would agree — even if one of them prefers the club sandwich.

There’s always one in every crowd.  PS

Contact Editor Jim Dodson at jim@thepilot.com.

Crossroads

Up

The wonder that’s above

By Jenna Biter

I haven’t studied Latin, so I often have to consult the internet gods when it comes to etymology. When I thought about the word equinox and contemplated its roots, I looked to Google, and it told me that the word derives from the Latin for equal and night, which makes sense because the equinox occurs biannually when the sun crosses the celestial equator, and day and night are nearly equal in length. In the spring this happens around March 20 and, in the fall, Sept. 22.

This year the vernal equinox takes place on the eve of March 20 at 11:50 p.m. I did not know that off the top of my head; I only started researching the equinox when I couldn’t recall why it’s cold in the winter and hot in the summer. I looked that up, things spiraled and, four hours later, I’m onto the equinox, Lagrange points and protoplanetary disks. Most of what I learned I’ve now forgotten, but, forgive my tangential nature — it’s March, and the spring equinox is near. What a good reason to pause and look up.

I’ve long been fascinated by the cosmos but, until recently, only in a passive way. (I’ve mistaken Orion’s lower half for the Little Dipper my entire life, so I couldn’t have been that interested.) Still, my husband, Drew, and I drove 56 miles through the towering cacti of Saguaro National Park and the open ranges of the Tohono O’odham Reservation up 6,880 feet to participate in the dark sky discovery program at Kitt Peak National Observatory last December.

When we arrived at the peak, it was a little after 4 p.m. and only 30 degrees outside. We parked our Toyota rental and trotted toward the visitor’s center with beanies, neck warmers and an assortment of sweatshirts and coats piled high in our arms. After an hour of check-ins, tour guide introductions, an average turkey sandwich and a documentary I don’t quite remember, it was time to watch the sunset.

Escorted by one of the guides — a shorter woman with dark hair and fuchsia ski pants, Tanya, I think her name was — we weaved through the observatories that dotted the mountain, including one flanked by a garden flamingo. The mascot was a nod to the subtropical universities from which its scientists hailed. Not that the astronomers were physically in the dome. Professional astronomers watch the skies from the comfort of heated offices far away . . . unlike us.

A gap appeared between observatories, and we stopped. The sun, massive on the horizon, was about to dip out of sight and take with it the day. Meanwhile, Tanya explained the nature of light waves and why sunsets are mostly red. An audience member volunteered for a demonstration, and Tanya’s voice reached high and then low as she over enthused about the topic. She was like a lone actress playing all of the characters in a children’s puppet show.

The sun vanished, and we hurried down the hill toward a quieter guide, a middle-aged man of taller stature. He handed us and our six companions red flashlights to navigate the darkened slopes that led to our designated observatory. “No headlights, no phones, no white light of any kind,” he lectured. “It pollutes the viewing experience and scientific results.” (Of course, I was confused when he later shot a commercial grade laser pointer thousands of feet into the sky to circle constellations and planets. When asked about it, he said, “No one has complained.”)

After a five-minute walk, we arrived at our two-story observatory. The top floor housed the telescope and sat directly under the metal dome with a section that rolled back to reveal the night sky; it was unheated. Like white light, heat waves interfere with viewing. The bottom floor was unimpressive (I can’t remember exactly how it looked), but it was lit with red café lights and had a space heater for those who needed to escape the chill of the upper level. Drew and I refused to seek reprieve downstairs — partly because we’re competitive and, in unspoken agreement, wanted to “beat” the other viewers by withstanding the cold but, mostly, because we were mesmerized. I stole Drew’s neck warmer, wrapped it around my right foot and shoved it back into my sneaker. I wouldn’t leave the view from the dome.

Wide and untainted by manmade light, the weight of the heavens pressed down on us with all of its vastness. The stars were a net of twinkling lights cast into the black sea of deep space with the silvery mist of the Milky Way a swordfish tangled in its strands. I tilted my head back, and my lips parted in awe. The telescope purred on and located the first celestial object our guide wanted us to see, Venus. Then, it swung to Cygnus the Swan and binary stars that orbit one another and the Pleiades, an open cluster of stars that are gravitationally bound in Taurus the Bull.

At times, I struggled with the eyepiece — it was more difficult to use than I thought it would be — but Drew had a knack for it, and he helped me reposition so I wouldn’t miss a single sight. We saw the Andromeda galaxy, the farthest celestial body that can be seen without a telescope, Cassiopeia and 10 or 15 other objects before our tour of the universe neared its end.

With only time enough left for one more object, we studied Orion the Hunter. His right shoulder was flickering and warm, a dying star named Betelgeuse. It resembled a candle about to burn out, only it burns trillions of light years away. Finally, we shifted our eyes to Orion’s Nebula, a stellar nursery, in the middle of his sword. Stars being born into the universe with existences to unfold. I felt so small, so wonderfully small, staring up at the lives of titans. The birth and death of the cosmos, I thought, what a good reason to pause and look up.  PS

Jenna Biter is a fashion designer, entrepreneur and military wife in the Sandhills. She can be reached at jenna.l.knouse@gmail.com.