October Books

FICTION

Virgil Wander, by Leif Enger

Step into the pages of Virgil Wander and walk with the quirky, charming citizens of Greenstone, Minnesota, where normal life is anything but and Hard Luck Days is actually a celebrated event. Vintage theater owner and city clerk Virgil Wander drove through a guardrail and into Lake Superior and lived to tell the tale, although he wasn’t quite the same. Fable-like happenings prevail — a local sports hero disappears into the wild blue yonder; an elderly kite flyer enchants all; a movie star with seemingly sinister motives returns; a massive sturgeon lurks near the shore; and who is that mysterious, silent man Virgil occasionally spies standing on the water? Readers will be captivated by the warmth, wit and whimsy infused in each line.

Scribe, by Alyson Hagy

Folkloric, tragic and surreal, you might have to sit in stillness long after the final page of Scribe just to absorb Hagy’s evocative and achingly beautiful prose. Deep in Appalachia following a civil war and a pandemic, there remains a society under authoritarian rule. A woman living alone in a farmhouse has the ability to write letters for others who barter with the goods she needs to survive. She is haunted by her own misdeeds and a violent past that raises its head when a strange man requires her services in crafting and delivering a fateful letter. Her journey is a dream-like odyssey in a dystopian landscape that’s lyrical, desolate and wonderfully strange.

Man with a Seagull on his Head, by Harriet Paige

Ray Eccles’ mother has died and he is on his knees at the shore when a seagull falls from the sky and lands on his head — a scene witnessed by a woman walking on the beach. When he gets home, all he can do is paint this woman over and over again, creating the exact same picture every time. Discovered by “Outsider Art” collectors, he moves in with them and continues to paint, becoming a celebrated artist. Paige’s novel is a quirky, interesting, original story of a life lived one foot in front of the other, when nothing else matters but what is in front of you.

Little, by Edward Carey

After the death of her parents, a tiny odd-looking girl named Marie is apprenticed to an eccentric wax sculptor and whisked off to the seamy streets of Paris, where they meet a domineering widow and her quiet, pale son. Together, they convert an abandoned monkey house into an exhibition hall for wax heads, and the spectacle becomes a sensation. As word of her artistic talent spreads, Marie is called to Versailles, where she tutors a princess and saves Marie Antoinette in childbirth. But outside the palace walls, Paris is roiling: The revolutionary mob is demanding heads, and . . . at the wax museum, heads are what they do. Book clubs will enjoy discussing this wry, at times macabre, read.

A Well-Behaved Woman, by Therese Anne Fowler

In this thought-provoking fictional account, Alva Smith — her Southern family destitute after the Civil War — marries into a Gilded Age dynasty: the illustrious, wealthy but socially shunned Vanderbilt family. Ignored by New York’s old-money circles and determined to win respect, Alva designed and built mansions, hosted grand balls, and arranged for her daughter to marry a duke. She also defied convention for women of her time, asserting power within her marriage and becoming a leader in the women’s suffrage movement.

The Dream Daughter, by Diane Chamberlain

In 1970, Caroline Sears receives the news that her unborn baby girl has a heart defect. She’s devastated until she learns that something can be done. Something that will shatter every preconceived notion Caroline has. Something that will require a kind of strength and courage that she never knew existed. Something that will mean a mind-bending leap of faith. A rich, breathtaking novel about a mother’s quest to save her child, unite her family, and believe in the unbelievable. Chamberlain pushes the boundaries of faith and science to deliver a novel you will never forget.

The Traveling Cat Chronicles, by Hiro Arikawa

Nana is a stray cat named for the spot on his tail that looks like the number seven (nana) in Japanese. His adoptive owner is Saturo, who nurses him after he’s been hit by a car. Saturo and the cat travel to distant towns to visit Saturo’s friends as he tries to find Nana a new home. Narrated in turns by Nana and by his owner, this funny, uplifting, heart-rending story of a cat is nothing if not profoundly human.

NONFICTION

In the Hurricane’s Eye: The Genius of George Washington and the Victory at Yorktown, by Nathaniel Philbrick

The thrilling story of the Revolutionary War’s decisive battle from The New York Times best-selling author of In the Heart of the Sea and Valiant Ambition. In the Battle of the Chesapeake, a French admiral foiled British attempts to rescue its army led by Lord Cornwallis. This naval battle, masterminded by Washington but fought without a single American ship, was largely responsible for the independence of the United States. A riveting and wide-ranging narrative, full of dramatic and unexpected turns, In the Hurricane’s Eye reveals that the fate of the American Revolution depended, in the end, on Washington and the sea.

The Ravenmaster: My Life with the Ravens at the Tower of London, by Christopher Skaife

The Yeoman Warder and Ravenmaster, Skaife lives at the Tower of London with his wife and writes the first behind-the-scenes account of the legendary ravens at one of the world’s eeriest monuments. He lets us in on his life as he feeds his birds raw meat and biscuits soaked in blood, buys their food at Smithfield Market, shines a light on the birds’ pecking order, social structure and the tricks they play on us. Skaife shows us who the Tower’s true guardians are.

CHILDREN’S BOOKS

Dreamers, by Yuyi Morales

Stunning mixed-media illustrations beautifully tell the story of a woman who journeys with her son to the United States to meet his grandfather. Her life is changed forever when she takes her child into a public library for the first time. Beautiful, simple and brilliantly told, Dreamers is a must read for anyone who has a story to tell. (Ages 4-6.)

My Dog Laughs, by Rachel Isadora

From the ever-amazing Isadora comes this perfect “getting a new dog” book. Simple lovely illustrations share the adventures of many different children and their new dogs as they choose a name, select a leash, train, care for, play, and laugh together. (Ages 3-6.)

A Long Line of Cakes, by Deborah Wiles

With five brothers in tow and a family who seems to move every time she makes a new friend, Emma Alabama Lane Cake is justifiably reluctant to make new friends when her family opens the Cake Cafe right between the post office and Miss Mattie’s Mercantile. But Emma has never met Ruby Lavender, and Ruby has a different plan. Sweet, silly and absolutely the most wholesome thing since the Little House on the Prairie series, A Long Line of Cakes is just the perfect thing for young readers or for families to share together. (Ages 8-12.)

Thundercluck! by Paul Tillery IV

A magic mishap grants the power of thunder to a chicken, who must face an evil chef in this debut novel from Tillery and co-illustrator Meg Wittwer. Thundercluck, the chicken of Thor, first appeared in an award-winning animation. The short film screened in over 50 festivals, including the San Diego Comic Con Film Festival, and the Con Carolinas Film Festival, where it won the 2015 Best Animation Award. “I wanted to tell the kind of story I would’ve loved at that age,” Tillery says. “It’s a quirky story, because I was a quirky kid.” Author/illustrator Tillery, who lives in Raleigh, North Carolina, and Savannah, Georgia, where he teaches animation at the Savannah College of Art and Design, will share his adventures in animation, illustration, writing and quirky comedy at The Country Bookshop on Monday, Nov., 5 at 4 p.m. (Ages 7-12.)  PS

Compiled by Kimberly Daniels Taws and Angie Tally

Golftown Journal

True Chip Off the Old Block

Passing along the lessons of the short game

By Jim Moriarty

Like a juvenile Jeeves-in-training, 10-year-old Doug Ford Jr. carried a folding chair around Meadowbrook Country Club in the staggering July heat of the 36-hole final match of the 1955 PGA Championship. Six decades and change down the road, he might occasionally need one for himself. It would come in handy.

Doug Ford Jr. moved to Pinehurst from South Florida a few months after the passing of his father, Doug Ford Sr., in May 2018. Having had his fifth vertebrae replaced with a piece of space-age plastic a little over a year ago, Doug Jr.’s sessions sharing short game wisdom at the practice area of Seven Lakes Country Club — a lot of that wisdom having trickled down from dad — can make finding a place to sit for a spell something of a necessity. In 1955, his father may have needed it even more.

That year two future members of the World Golf Hall of Fame were in the 36-hole final of the PGA Championship, conducted at match play in those days. Dr. Cary Middlecoff, who had dispatched Tommy Bolt in the semis, was set to play Doug Ford Sr., who had been the tournament’s qualifying medalist. Ford Sr.’s father was the one who rechristened the family name from the original Fortunato. Doug Sr. matriculated in the pool halls of the Inwood section of Manhattan. “I grew up in sort of a rough neighborhood,” he once told Golf Digest. “I ran with a gang of about 10 other guys, and it was funny how we all turned out. Of the 10, six became FBI agents, and the other four went with the mob. I was the only one who didn’t end up carrying a gun as an adult.”

If the fidgety Middlecoff, who trained to be a dentist but spent less time over a patient than Steve Martin did in Little Shop of Horrors, was inarguably the slowest player on tour, Ford was just as indisputably one of the fastest. The chair was the idea of Doug Jr.’s mother, Marilyn. “She didn’t want my dad pacing and waiting to hit. That was the strategy,” he says. “When it was Middlecoff’s turn, sit down. And he did.”

Played at Meadowbrook Country Club west of Detroit, Ford squared the tight match on the 26th hole, then birdied the 29th, 30th and 32nd holes to go 3 up. “On what became the last hole,” says Ford Jr., “the pin was tucked left. Middlecoff in the morning round had missed in the bunker left. He hit it out stiff, 6 inches from the hole. In the afternoon Middlecoff is down now. Going for the pin he hits it in the same bunker and my dad says to me, ‘Dougie, there’s no way he can get it up and down twice in the same day from that bunker. I’m going to the middle of the green.’ He hits a 4-iron about 40 feet and he’s away. He putts it down to 2 or 3 inches. Middlecoff gets in the bunker, takes a swing, the ball doesn’t come out. PGA’s over with.”

Ford won his second major championship in the 1957 Masters, overtaking Sam Snead with a final round of 66 to Snead’s even par 72. At the 18th Ford plugged his approach into the face of the bunker short and left of the green. Appearing about as apprehensive as Ted Williams staring at a hanging curveball, he strolled into the bunker and holed the shot. The next year, as the defending champion, he would finish tied for second and slip the green jacket onto first-time Masters champion Arnold Palmer.

That was the year Palmer was allowed to play a provisional ball on the 12th hole, a ruling that rankled Ken Venturi (who had been playing alongside Palmer) the rest of his life. Though Venturi never let it go, Ford never took it up. At the time, Fred Hawkins, who was second with Ford, was encouraged to protest the Palmer ruling. He sought out Ford, but the response he got was that Clifford Roberts and Bobby Jones had made the decision, and that was that. Ford already had a green jacket and with it came an added responsibility to the tournament. Besides, Ford reasoned, he’d missed birdie putts on both the 17th and 18th holes that, had he holed them, would have made the entire episode nothing more than a rules footnote. 

Years later, after Venturi wrote about Palmer’s plugged lie and the provisional ball, Ford was asked yet again for his opinion. “My dad just said, basically, he’d known and played with and against Arnold Palmer many years and he was an honorable man and he left it at that,” says Doug Jr.

Doug Ford Sr. was underrated as a ball-striker mostly because his short game was so profoundly admired. “The swing was three-quarter but it was very wide,” says Doug Jr. “My dad was very strong. He had great lower body motion, similar to what Hogan did. His ball-striking was never recognized as much because he was so good around the greens. He would laugh today when they talk about short-siding. He would go right at the pin, no matter what. He was so good because he had pure roll on the ball. When he would be around the green before a round, chipping, the guys would be watching him hit shots.”

Following his one-day stint as his father’s chair Sherpa, Doug Jr. spent most of his golf life in South Florida. He played the PGA Tour briefly in the middle ’70s, prior to the all-exempt days. “I wasn’t good enough to stick out there. I was a rabbit,” he says of the Monday qualifiers days. “One year I went to the Canadian Open they had about 120 guys for four spots. That was the way it was.” He taught at Sherbrooke Golf and CC and Harder Hall Golf Resort, both in South Florida. Later, with his father and younger brother, Mike, he was part owner of Lacuna Golf Club from 1991 to 2004 in Lake Worth. After that he taught at Deer Creek Golf Club in Deerfield Beach before moving to Pinehurst. Doug’s brother owns Jack O’Lantern Resort and Golf Course in Woodstock, New Hampshire, and his son, Scott, is also a golf pro.

After back surgery and hip replacement, Ford pretty much confines his teaching to the short game. And if you don’t think the knowledge of the father can be passed to the son, here are two words to remember: Butch Harmon. If you have trouble convincing yourself that there isn’t much to learn from someone who has a cane in their hand from time to time, try Googling pictures of Harvey Penick. “What I learned from my dad, just watching and playing, was club selection,” says Doug Jr. “You don’t always grab the sand iron when you miss the green. He believed in not changing the swinging motion but changing the club to fit the shot. The more green you have to work with, the less loft you use. You want to get the ball on the green and get it rolling. As far as the execution of the shot, you’ve got a short shot so you shorten the grip on the club. You have to get in position so your body is still. Things like that. Obviously, everybody’s a little different.”

Almost any teacher will tell almost any golfer that the quickest route to better scores is through the art of the short game, Ford’s specialty. “I’m going to give it a shot,” he says. “See if I can develop a clientele.” PS

Jim Moriarty is PineStraw’s Senior Editor and a former writer for Golf Digest.

Southwords

The Crazy Family

It could just be you . . .

By Beth MacDonald

It’s a safe assumption that most neighborhoods have at least one crazy family. If you look around and don’t know which family that is, it might be yours. That’s absolutely the case with us.

When I look around my peaceful section of town, I see smiling children playing in their yards and well-behaved dogs on leashes, all properly pooper-scooped. People are well dressed, having civil conversations. Every Thursday night their trash is out and the recycling bins are neatly stacked for Friday pickup. I envy these people. They seem to pull off the illusion of having it sooo together.

We, too, have a lovely, well-appointed home. We are well traveled. We have diplomas, in a box someplace. I do try my best to maintain the appearance of social acceptability in public; it just never happens to come off that way. You can’t really start a conversation with your neighbor about your exciting trip to Cuba while your googly-eyed mixed-breed dog is trying to mate with a holly bush.

My husband says he doesn’t yell. He is a “motivational speaker to those who won’t listen.” You can hear him any given day giving several motivational speeches to our dogs while listening to bluegrass music. It is no coincidence that he is shouting orders to barking maniacs with banjo music playing.

Our dogs get way too excited with every leaf that blows by our glass front door. Any neighbor who walks by is met with barking and jumping. When one of our three dogs recently journeyed to the Great Beyond, a neighbor commented in exasperation, “Finally.” I wasn’t even offended. I just shrugged, knowing how hard it is for people to pass our home.

Our son, a successful young man who lives on his own, likes to put Band-Aids on his car to cover any scratches it incurs. It has now incurred approximately 150 scratches. When he comes to visit on weekends, his car looks like it’s a mobile first aid kit.

My fellow moms seem to live such color-coordinated lives. Oh, I’m sure they have their own struggles; we all do. They just seem to do it all while maintaining the look of supermodels. They each have three or more children in tow, clean and happy, while I drag yard waste to the curb in mismatched clothes, bleeding from weeding. I wonder how I ended up in dishwashing gloves, my husband’s camouflage Crocs (questioning why my husband even has camouflage Crocs), looking like I’m trying to bury a body, and somehow surrounded by way more plastic than I can explain.

My friend Janine says I’m the “garden variety crazy.” She told me when she comes over I’m at least dressed, and she’s never eaten out of the dog bowls — so there’s that to be proud of.

Any given Friday at eight in the morning the rumble of the trash trucks disrupts my peaceful ritual. Scrambling to put my coffee down, I furiously begin to look for clothes. Anyone’s clothes will do; they never match. I begin the mad dash from the house to the curb in what looks like a ridiculous live version of the old ’90s Nickelodeon network game show Double Dare where the prize is getting slimed with my own week-old garbage.

One particular Friday I was finished doing my morning cardio/trash dash and came back to find a very large and intimidating spider on the kitchen door window. This spider had a neatly woven, well-organized and fashionable zigzag web. It was clearly mocking me. I grabbed a can of Raid (to save my life, certainly not my dignity). Spraying poison on one spider really upset a wasp’s nest that was apparently hidden behind a flowerpot.

Wasps began to swarm me. I began to scream and do an ancient, interpretive dance of terror. None of my neighbors were the least bit disturbed, concerned, or even surprised by this. Not one.  PS

Beth MacDonald is a Southern Pines suburban misadventurer that likes to make words up. She loves to travel with her family and read everything she can.

America’s First Family of Art

America’s First Family of Art

Victoria Browning Wyeth gives an intimate look at a legacy of genius

By Ray Owen

Art is in Victoria Wyeth’s blood. Her family has produced three generations of such highly regarded artists that they have become part of the national consciousness. She is the grandchild of iconic artist Andrew Wyeth, the great-granddaughter of illustrator N.C. Wyeth, and the niece of contemporary realist Jamie Wyeth. Her father, Nicholas, is a private art dealer, and her mother, Jane, is an art adviser who was trained as an art historian.

“The biggest myth is that my family paints from photos,” says Victoria, a gifted photographer whose images have been exhibited nationwide. She credits a high school teacher for pushing her into a medium that was previously unexplored by her relatives. “It’s tough to come from a famous family when everyone is so talented,” she says. “I can’t paint, I have no talent, and I can’t draw a circle.”

As the designated family historian, Victoria gives lectures on all things Wyeth when not working as a therapist in the Pennsylvania state hospital system. Her insider’s knowledge of the painters has been the subject of numerous articles, and she has given talks throughout the United States and abroad, offering the public a more intimate view of her family than can be gained simply from the perspective of an art historian. She has a story for everyone of her lineage — including ties to North Carolina and Southern Pines.

The patriarch of Victoria’s artistic legacy was her great grandfather, N.C. Wyeth (1882-1945). The town of Southern Pines owns three significant paintings by the artist that are on public display in the Utility Billing Office, located at 180 SW Broad Street, formerly the public library. The paintings, created as illustrations for James Boyd’s novel Drums, were gifted to the town by his wife, Katharine Boyd.

N.C. Wyeth was one of America’s greatest illustrators. During his lifetime, he created over 3,000 paintings and illustrated 112 books, 25 of them for Charles Scribner’s Sons publishing. A swashbuckler of a man whose works fired the imaginations of generations of readers, N.C. Wyeth was a household name during the first quarter of the 20th century for the art he provided for classic titles like Treasure Island, The Last of the Mohicans and The Yearling.

Standing larger than life, N.C. Wyeth was a realist painter whose dramatic canvases could be understood quickly. He only painted from experience, sympathetic to his subjects, showing them at one with their environment. It was this interest that brought him to Southern Pines in 1927, in preparation for his illustrations for Drums. Boyd was making a name for himself in literary circles, his Weymouth mansion a favorite retreat for such figures as William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Thomas Wolfe.

There was a wonderful exchange of letters between Wyeth and Boyd included in an early 1928 edition of Drums. Boyd provided a car and driver for Wyeth for a side trip to Edenton, North Carolina, so that he could get the look and feel of the Colonial town, the setting for the book:

N.C. Wyeth, Edenton, NC, December 1927

My dear Boyd,

This afternoon was spent wandering in and about these relics of 1770. My heart went out to them, because you, Boyd, have made them alive for me. The oak timbers, whose adze-marked surfaces are still crisp on their protected sides and smoothed to gentle undulations where the sun and rain for years have touched them, thrilled me like music.

Cordially, Wyeth

And the reply:

James Boyd, Southern Pines, NC, December 1927

Dear NCW,

Your letter just come from Edenton disturbs me. It is an injustice of nature that a man who can paint like you should also be able to write like that. Everything you say stirs me mightily. It is only the way you say it that makes me uneasy. A little tactfully assumed illiteracy would be more becoming when addressing a man in my business. Otherwise I might be obliged to ask myself why I am in this business at all.

 

In its day, Drums was considered the finest novel of the American Revolution that had ever been written, with more than 50,000 copies sold in its first year. Since that time, generations of Southern Pines residents have cherished the Wyeth paintings as an important aspect of the cultural heritage of the town.

Victoria Wyeth’s personal connection to Southern Pines is through her acquaintance with artist Jeffrey Mims, founder and director of the Academy of Classical Design. As a painter and educator, Mims has been at the forefront of the revival of the classical tradition for the past 30 years.

For Victoria, her Uncle Jamie (b.1946) is the keeper of her family’s tradition, with his paintings more varied than his predecessors. “Jamie is the future of our family,” says Victoria. “And he’s so different. He’s managed to do his own thing in his own style, and he’s painted everything from pigs to presidents. The whole family has a wonderful sense of humor, and Jamie’s the one who paints with it.”

Jamie’s father, Andrew Wyeth, holds a very special place in Victoria’s heart. As his only grandchild, she was one of the few people he ever allowed to watch him paint. The first photograph she took of her grandfather was a kind of epiphany. “I always saw him as this adorable, smiling older man,” she says of that day. “For the first time in my life, Andrew Wyeth was standing before me. Not Grandpa, but the artist, and he had the most earnest look I had ever seen in my life.”

Andrew Wyeth (1917-2009) is recognized as one of the most important American artists of the 20th century. For more than seven decades he painted the regions of Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, where he was born, and mid-coast Maine, where he spent most of his summer months.   

The youngest of N.C. Wyeth’s five children, at age 15 Andrew began several years of intensive artistic training under his father, who encouraged him to work as both an illustrator and painter. His career launched in 1937 with a sold-out exhibition of his watercolors in New York. On the occasion of the young artist’s debut, his father wrote him a congratulatory letter prophesying, “You are headed in the direction that should finally reach the pinnacle in American art.”

An austere poet laureate of rural life, Andrew once noted that meaning “is hiding behind the mask of truth” in his work. He freely manipulated his subjects, transforming them in order to evoke memories, ideas and emotions. Through a process of reduction and selection, he created mysterious undercurrents in his landscapes, interiors and portraits.

Victoria adored him, called him “Andy,” and spent all her childhood summers with him and Grandma Betsy in Cushing, Maine, where she vividly remembers long boat trips to family-owned islands for picnics. As a child, Victoria began to realize that “all the people in the paintings were the folks I’d been hanging out with,” and she fondly recalls that, “on Andrew’s birthday the president would always call.”

Andrew drew and painted Victoria many times. She was 6 years old for the first sitting and remembers very little about the experience, except how hard it was to keep still. “We had made a deal the third time that I’d only pose if I could take notes, and so I just sat there taking notes the entire time.” The artist often chuckled at her precociousness, but he gamely tried to answer every query.

The last question logged in her “Andy Journals” was about how to create the color black. He said that he didn’t start by squeezing inky paint from a tube. “You build in the excitement before adding black, you slowly build it up with blues and reds and greens.”

One of Andrew Wyeth’s most powerful works is in the permanent collection of the North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh. The painting, titled “Winter 1946,” depicts a boy running fast and recklessly down a hill, casting a long shadow on the grass behind him. The figure with furrowed brow, gazing down and forward, is dressed in a heavy winter coat, his mind elsewhere, lost in the golden earth, and the vast, breathtaking landscape.

Andrew created this painting after the horrific death of his father in 1945. The tragedy occurred at a railroad crossing on a hill in Chadds Ford, when an oncoming train hit the car carrying N.C. Wyeth and his young grandson, killing them both. The hill became a source of inspiration for Andrew’s paintings over the next 30 years, as he rendered the memory of the place into something strangely beautiful.

Victoria Wyeth’s most enduring memory of her grandfather is not paint and canvas, but “his hugs — he gave the best long hugs. He made me feel so special all the time.” During his lifetime Andrew said, “Your art goes as far as your love goes.”  PS

Ray Owen is a local historian, who works for the Arts Council of Moore County.

Hometown

Up and Away

Revisiting the first rung of a long climb

By Bill Fields

Someone asked me not long ago the number of states I had visited, and my answer got me thinking.

For work or pleasure, I have at least set foot in 48 of the 50. Alaska and North Dakota are the places I haven’t gone, my travels having been much broader than I could have imagined growing up as the youngest child of parents who had stayed put in their home county.

But well before I ventured out of state — before I ever consulted one of those road maps that seemed impossible to fold up neatly once you had opened it — I went up to get away.

It was a dogwood located within a boy’s best forward pass from our house, yet climbing up to sit on its lowest branch was my first adventure.

I was back at that tree recently, during a season of change that had me thinking. The limb still looks like an arm bending toward the sky, its distinctively textured bark peeling from age. My old perch is at eye level now, still only 6 feet or so from the ground, a height that allowed me to touch it without strain.

Decades ago, when I was close to 6 instead of 60, it took real effort to reach. But it sure was worth it. 

That crook was sanctuary and observatory, but mostly it was mine. It was a place to think, laugh or pout, a vantage point from which I could look down upon our cats, the occasional passing car, neighbors raking leaves. It gave me a different perspective on our horseshoe pit, basketball goal and swimming pool, which sat upon the yard like a large yellow can that had been sawed in half.

My getaway place was neither secret nor far away, although it felt as if it was both of those things, particularly the latter the one time I chickened out on my descent and summoned help to get down. Hattie, who cared for me while my parents were at work, could only laugh as she came to my rescue but kindly coaxed me back to Earth.

That day notwithstanding, I came to feel quite comfortable in that dogwood, my tree house without walls. Traveling to that space, even though a very short journey, made me feel like I was part of a larger world that, with effort, might be within reach.

I never explored the heights of another tree. About the time I had gotten old enough to consider climbing higher, a friend and neighbor much more adventuresome than I was took an awful tumble from a large sycamore and broke her leg. It was a severe injury that had her in a cast and on crutches for a long time. But given how far she fell, the outcome might well have been much worse. Even so, her mishap was a cautionary tale.

When I studied my old climbing tree recently, I considered who I had been when I sat in that spot — how much I didn’t know and how many places I hadn’t been, that the borders of my world then were school, church, the grocery store and my grandmother’s house on Sunday afternoons.

In those hot summer days when I retreated to my space in that tree, my world wasn’t much bigger than the globe on my desk. I hadn’t yet ridden on a train or flown in a jet.

I stood by that dogwood this August and touched the limb that used to be my summit and wondered how many times I have been tens of thousands of feet in the air on the way to somewhere and, as we all have, taken it for granted. I thought of the paper airplanes I tossed from that branch all those years ago, their journeys as uncertain as my own.   PS

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

Out of the Blue

Boo, Humbug

Wearing green for Halloween

By Deborah Salomon

October, glorious October! If only not marred by Halloween. Or, rather, Halloween frenzy.

Late in life I’ve become analytical, training my untrained eye on likes and dislikes, preferences and fears, most cemented during childhood when, in this case, I was Halloween-deprived. Back then, kids didn’t dress up and go trick-or-treating in an apartment building occupied by cranky grown-ups. Nothing at school, either. The all-girls school I attended K-5 was for learning, not exchanging Valentines or dressing up as witches. (More about that later.) The only activity I remember was bobbing for apples at the risk of drowning in the wide galvanized metal tub.

Even after moving to a house in a family neighborhood Halloween wasn’t big, probably because my parents, I’m ashamed to admit, refused to buy candy, turned off the porch lights and ignored the few brave kids who didn’t get the message.

A costume for me, by then 12? No way. (More about that later, too.)

Of course back then Halloween wasn’t a mega-holiday that started five minutes after July 4th, saturating stores with made-in-China paraphernalia. What must those Chinese factory workers think, given they don’t celebrate this spin-off of a Christian event?  Sure, stores carried paper napkins, jack-o’-lanterns and spooky masks, but no toilet paper, socks and orange crème-themed Oreos.

Remember, also, that Halloween launches the pumpkin-flavored everything season, which lasts until Christmas. Read the small print; many labels read “pumpkin spice” and contain no pumpkin whatsoever.

Scariest of all, my father’s birthday was Nov. 1. He joked that his mother had a terrible fright on Halloween and he was the result.

Every action provokes a reaction. Once I was in charge our pumpkin had to be jumbo with a fat candle inside.  My kids went nuts for trick-or-treating, in a neighborhood bursting with children.  We divided duties: Daddy chaperoned them house to house (those known for “good” candy had line-ups) while I and a very excitable Airedale manned the front door. Besides loot, we handed out coins for UNICEF. Afterwards each princess and Superman emptied his/her bag into a box which fit under the beds. Easier to protect, I guess, although insider trading flourished for desirable candies — meaning the stickiest, messiest, most cavity-provoking.

For a while, I attempted a Halloween theme dinner. But how can “ghost” mashed potatoes, bat wings and a chocolate pudding graveyard with vanilla wafer tombstones compete with Charleston Chews? 

Inevitably, grown-ups inched into the act. Beginning in 1993 with Coors’ buxom witch Elvira, brewers outdid themselves with cute names and labels. Bars hosted costume bashes. Bank tellers and school teachers dressed up. Politics influenced adult costumes — remember the Nixon fright mask and, more recently, Hillary and Trump?

Halloween never fully recovered after sickos hid dangerous objects in treats. Parents began bussing little Halloweenies into happier hunting grounds. Door-to-door became trunk-or-treat and parties in a school gym even after, in 2005, legislation extended daylight saving time to include Halloween, for safety. I still carve a small pumpkin and buy a few bags of “good” candy, which means Hershey Miniatures and Reese’s bite-sized peanut butter cups. But where are the hordes of ghosts and goblins, with parents hovering on the sidewalk? Replaced by teenagers dolled up as zombies. Bah, humbug. Go away. Do your homework.

As for porch decorations, I have created only one — simple but edgy, for folks who remember the wicked witch’s demise in Wizard of Oz, with a nod to Macbeth. I drape a black cape and witch’s hat over a broom, with lace-up granny boots beside it, along with a sign that says “Stirring the brew. Back in a few minutes . . . ”

Conclusion: Halloween is — like riding a bike and speaking French — best learned in childhood. Otherwise, color me green and call me the Grinch who stole the Tootsie Pops.  PS

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

Drinking with Writers

Well-Behaved Women

Zelda with a twist

By Wiley Cash   •   Photographs by Mallory Cash

For anyone who knows Therese Anne Fowler, it is no surprise that she writes about women like Zelda Fitzgerald and Alva Vanderbilt, women who were artistic, brilliant, and outspoken. Therese’s friends would describe her much the same way. I first met Therese at the South Carolina Book Festival, where we spoke on the same panel in the spring of 2012. We made fast friends, telling stories about book tours and life in North Carolina, where she and her husband, novelist John Kessel, live in Raleigh. I saw Therese several times over the next few months at various conferences and festivals. I knew she had a new book coming out, but she never said much about it. And then Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald was published in March 2013. It blew the doors off every preconceived notion readers had about the woman who had always been known simply as Mrs. F. Scott Fitzgerald. A few months after the novel came out, I saw Therese again at the Southern Festival of Books in Nashville. By that time both Z and Therese had experienced incredible success: The novel had appeared on The New York Times best-seller list, and a television show based on the novel and starring Christina Ricci as Zelda Fitzgerald was in production at Amazon. I told Therese how thrilled I was for her, and I asked her how it felt. She smiled, turned her head, and revealed the tiny “Z” she had tattooed behind her left ear. She planned to keep Zelda with her forever, and people who have read the novel and have seen the series understand why.

With her new novel, A Well-Behaved Woman: A Novel of the Vanderbilts — which tells the story of Alva Vanderbilt, a woman who went from being a member of the fallen Southern aristocracy to a Gilded Age socialite and, eventually, a leader in the women’s suffrage movement — Therese has once again given life to a heroine that readers will not soon forget. It seems that critics feel the same way. Publishers Weekly and Kirkus Reviews both gave the novel starred reviews, and People magazine named it a Best Book of the Fall. Sony Pictures believed in Therese’s take on Vanderbilt’s life so much that they optioned the novel for a television series before she had even finished writing it.

Over Labor Day weekend I met Therese at The Haymaker in downtown Raleigh to talk about writing about historical women, the thrill of seeing her work on the screen, and how she is feeling about her new book, which is scheduled for release on Oct. 16.

“I’m excited,” she says. “But I’m cautious. You can’t predict the book business.”

We are sitting at a small table by the huge windows where the late-day light barely reaches the high ceiling. On my right, a gorgeous flower mural spans an entire wall. The bar behind Therese features leather-covered stools and industrial lighting. To my left is a sitting area where a comfortable Victorian-styled sofa and leather armchairs invite patrons to sip cocktails and chat. The interior of The Haymaker is the perfect combination of clean lines and lush decadence. When our drinks are delivered, I offer a toast to well-behaved women. Therese laughs and lifts her cocktail, the cachaca/Campari-based Agua-Benta, which is infused with jalapeno and features hints of lime and pineapple, and clinks it against my pint of Peacemaker Pale Ale. She takes a sip and looks around.

“Alva would have been very comfortable in a place like this,” she says. “Zelda would have been, too.”

“What was it like to see Zelda come to life on the screen?” I ask.

“Wonderful,” Therese says. “I loved it, and I think Christina Ricci was perfect. My only regret is that Amazon didn’t renew it for a second season. Viewers learned all about the beginning of Zelda’s life and her relationship with Scott Fitzgerald, but we never saw them get to Paris, where the writers of the Lost Generation all come together. It would have been fascinating to see that.”

“Were you surprised when Hollywood came calling a second time when Sony optioned A Well-Behaved Woman?”

“Very surprised,” she says. “I was in New York with my agent, pitching the novel to editors and sending the book to auction. We were standing on the subway platform when my agent got a call that Sony wanted to option it. The book was still at auction and hadn’t even been purchased yet.”

I have a feeling that many people will be hearing about Alva Vanderbilt when A Well-Behaved Woman is published, some perhaps for the first time. After a life that spanned the Civil War, World War I, the Gilded Age and the Great Depression, Alva Vanderbilt would die in Paris in 1933. Perhaps, if Therese and Sony have their way, both readers and viewers will make it to Paris even though Amazon did not get us there with Zelda. And who knows? The next time I see Therese she might show me a fresh “A” that has been tattooed behind her other ear. You never know what a well-behaved woman is going to do next.  PS

Wiley Cash lives in Wilmington with his wife and their two daughters. His latest novel, The Last Ballad, is available wherever books are sold.

In The Spirit

Syrup, Salt and Jigger

Keeping it simple and delicious

By Tony Cross

Last month I touched on a few drinks that can be made with only three ingredients. I’m carrying the theme over into October with three tips that can help improve your cocktail game. A lot of people have a fantastic collection of spirits and are super creative with their drinks. Others love trying new drinks, but when it comes to making them, would rather keep the ingredient list short and simple. Here’s something for both groups.

Your Simple Syrup

I don’t know how many times I’ve harped on this and I’m too lazy to check. Let’s just say this definitely isn’t my first rodeo when it comes to explaining why I think a 2-to-1 ratio with simple syrups is the way to go. When I first got into making everything from scratch behind the bar, simple syrup was first in line. Equal parts sugar and water. Easy enough. I’d take a measuring cup of baker’s sugar and then use the same cup to add water, throw them both in a pot over medium heat and stir the combo until the sugar disappeared. But then one night I saw a video clip of bartender Jaime Boudreau explaining how he makes a rich syrup for his cocktails. Rich syrup consists of two parts sugar and one part water. Boudreau explained that a richer syrup gives a cocktail more body. I’ll explain. If you’re using a 1:1 ratio, you have to use more of that syrup in each cocktail. Because the syrup is equal parts, and you’re using more, that means you’re adding more water to the drink as well. You’re over-diluting the cocktail. More so if you don’t weigh your sugar. If you use a measuring cup, it’s not going to be exactly one cup — it’s going to be under. In reality, your syrup ratio is 1-to-.80. I can’t stress the importance of weighing out the sugar (and water too).  It’s going to make a huge difference in your next sour cocktail. Finally, please don’t think that having a richer syrup is going to mean your end product will be sweeter. If measured correctly (see below), you’ll have a more velvety feel on your palate from your perfectly balanced drink. Try this:

Whiskey Sour

2 ounces Rittenhouse Rye

3/4 ounce lemon juice

1/2 ounce rich simple syrup

Add ingredients in a shaker with ice. Shake hard until proper dilution has occurred. Strain into a rocks glass over ice. Garnish with oils from a lemon peel. Taste the difference.

Salt + Citrus = Damn!

I can’t remember when I first heard about adding salt to sour-style cocktails. I believe there was a cocktail competition out West, and the guy who won added saline to all of his drinks. It was definitely a duh! moment. Here’s the thing, though — you don’t have to just add them to shaken drinks. A small pinch of salt can go a long way in stirred drinks as well. Mess around with it to get the right balance. I’ve done a pinch of salt in drinks before. I’ve also made a saline solution. My preference? Saline. I like knowing that I’m going to get the same result when measuring out the drops. In the past when I’m busy, I know I’ve pinched a bit too much salt at times. So, what I’ll normally do now is make a solution of 3 parts salt to 1 part water. I’ve always used Himalayan pink salt, so I’d recommend starting there. I will say, I don’t think it’s necessary to use salt for every citrus cocktail, but it definitely helps, especially when your fresh pressed juice has been sitting for half a day. Lemon and lime juice start losing their pop in around five hours, so a dash of salt could bring it back to life. Another way it helps is with consistency. The juice from one case of lemons may differ in taste from the next. The same goes for limes and grapefruit.

Daiquiri

2 ounces Flor de Caña dry rum

3/4 ounce lime juice

1/2 ounce rich simple syrup

3 drops saline (3:1)

Combine all ingredients into a shaker with ice. Shake hard until your vessel is frosty cold. Double strain into a chilled cocktail coupe. No garnish.

Measure, Measure, Measure

This is another one that I’m sure I’ve beaten to death, but it’s so important — more so than the first two tips above. When I first got into bartending, I was obsessed with a bar in New York City that was one of the first bars in the new millennium’s surging cocktail trend. These guys made (and sold to other bars) their own syrups, bitters and cordials. Their drinks looked amazing, their uniforms were cool, and the bar itself was gorgeous. They did not measure. They eyed all of their cocktails. The risk factor in throwing a drink off balance made it even cooler in my eyes. So, that’s what I started doing. I would eye all of my drinks. I got decent at it, but do you know how hard it is to eye 1/8 an ounce for a cocktail when you’re slammed? It can be done . . . if you’re a bartending guru, which I was not and am not. I’m not sure why I got back into measuring. It was probably some David Wondrich article I read that stressed the importance of it. If so, he was right. Understatement. Consistency is key. I do remember that the month I got back on the jigger train, more compliments were directed at our waitstaff about the drinks. It means a lot when your guests return for another cocktail because they know it’s going to be just like it was the last 30-something times they imbibed there.

Put your pride aside and pick up a jigger. That is, unless you’re a guru. And if you are, please show me your ways.   PS

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

The Kitchen Garden

Indian Corn

More than just an autumn decoration

By Jan Leitschuh

Frost on the pumpkin? Maybe in a few weeks. Maybe.

Collards? Next month they will be sweeter.

Fall decor? Check. Change of seasons? Yes, please!

After surviving the sultry swelter that is a Sandhills summer, we can get giddy with the first bite of crispness in the air. It might be but a faint promise — just a mere coolness at night and a whole lot of dew in the morning — that drives us to decorate our households and doorsteps with the earthy items of fall in anticipation of cooler weather. We love our orange, white and blue pumpkins, rainbow assortments of mums, gourds, leaves, hay bales — and colorful Indian corn, America’s native grain.

You can see Indian corn gracing Sandhills doors and tables, with an autumnal color display to excite heat-dulled senses. It’s a fall decoration that can take us from mid-September through Halloween, then right into the harvest cornucopias of Thanksgiving. The lovely October palette of rusts, purples, golds, reds, steely blues, pinks and browns in nature finds an echo in Indian corn.

It’s not hard to grow, if you are so inclined. If not, grocery stores, Co-op boxes and farmers markets also offer a selection of parti-colored ears with wonderful names like Painted Mountain, Indian Fingers, Calico and Bloody Butcher.

There are many colors and kinds of Indian corn. We are familiar, of course, with modern sweet corn with yellow or white kernels. The sweet corn we devour in summer is wholly different from Indian corn. We took the hard, dry native strains and over time, selectively bred for a tender, modern, juicy ear with an abundance of natural sugars. Sweet corn is also harvested at a juicy point in its life, called the “milk” stage.

Unlike sweet corn, Indian corn, or “flint” corn, has a low water content that, when dried, makes it easy to preserve and store — and display. Some ears of Indian corn are pastel multi-colored, or yellow and rust-red, or grey, white and gold.  Other types are one solid color like a deep mahogany or an eye-catching grey-blue.

The common treatment is to shuck three to five ears to expose the colored kernels, then bind together with wire to make a door hanging. A bright fall-colored bow tops off the display. Others affix their ears to a fall wreath. One can actually make an eye-catching wreath of the cobs, attaching them to a wire frame with the shucks aimed outward in a papery flair. Google “Indian Corn Wreath DIY.” Another wreath alternates 10 ears with the shucks. I’ve also seen baskets of cobs mixed in with gourds and miniature pumpkins as table decorations, or cobs used in florist displays.

The kernel colors are based on genetics. Like puppies, each kernel can have a different “father.”

A single grain of pollen from the tassels at the top of the corn stalk drops onto a “silk,” an elongated stigma on the cob. Many tassels in a field, and many silks, contribute to the genetics of a kernel. Indian corn has widely varied genetics for color, so the eye-catching, multi-colored cobs can result.

As a species, corn — or maize, Zea mays — was domesticated by the indigenous peoples of Mesoamerica, then grown for thousands of years. The plants adapted to unique local conditions, spreading widely throughout the Americas and were often traded. When early explorers carried this new grain back to Europe, it spread rapidly there, too, as a new cereal grain that could thrive in varied climates.

There are many types of what we call Indian corn. The colors and genetics are as diverse as the tribes that grew and saved the seeds. These so-called “land races” are important reservoirs now for unique genetic material for future plant breeding, a veritable gene bank of potentially useful traits. 

Recently in the news we learned of the discovery of an older corn strain with a gene for fixing nitrogen in the soil, as soybeans do, that grows well in poor soil. This is promising, since corn is a nitrogen-hungry crop and nitrogen production is expensive, energy intensive, and its runoff can pollute ground waters. Marry that gene to higher-producing strains, and a revolution in grain production could possibly result.

Can you eat your Indian corn display? That depends.

You can but . . . please . . . not if it has been sprayed with shellac by crafters to preserve the ears — an unlikely prospect if you purchased your corn still in its protective sheath, or corn shuck. It’s possible to grind unsprayed ears, and the resulting flour can be used for masa, tamales or polenta. The Thanksgiving dish “Indian Pudding,” rich with cornmeal, milk, molasses and maple syrup, is another use.

The corn seeds first need to be “popped” from the cob, usually over a bowl or bag. Then the kernels are ground in a coffee grinder or Magic Bullet (guessing here that the stone mortar and pestle doesn’t appeal). A coarse setting on your grinder can give you the makings of fresh grits.

If you do decide to grow some Indian corn at the back of your garden next fall, you don’t have to buy special seeds; you can just shuck some kernels from your favorite ears of Indian corn (again, assuming it’s shellac-free). Store seeds out of the reach of rodents in an airtight bag in a cool, dry area for the winter. The freezer is a good idea.

When the soil warms strongly next spring, plant in rich soil — as a type of grass, corn is nitrogen-hungry. Plant in a block or multiple rows so the corn is easily pollinated by the wind. Single rows give you poor pollination, and the ears will not fill with kernels. Water well, and offer a little fertilizer when the sprouts emerge.

Don’t plant your Indian corn near your sweet corn, because the two will happily cross-pollinate, and your sweet corn will not be very sweet. Keep the plots a minimum of 250 feet apart, or else separate your plantings by two weeks so they don’t tassel at the same time. Allow corn to dry somewhat on the stalk, then harvest in mid-September or so. Bundle the cornstalks for a further fall display.

If you can rodent-proof your Indian corn wreath or display, and you can keep it dry, you can use it again next year. But I tend to complete the seasonal cycle, sharing our pretty bounty at Thanksgiving with the local squirrels, and moving on to Christmas.  PS

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