Tools of the Trade

Some gone but none forgotten

By Deborah Salomon

In my eight years at PineStraw I’ve observed how writers like to reminisce over objects representing a time or place. To be kinda corny, these are mileposts on life’s highway, more Route 66 than I-95. Most of mine belong in the kitchen — relics exhibiting a patina, a glow, when viewed beside microwaves, food processors, Keurigs, blenders and non-stick Bundt pans.

Some have gone to pots-and-pans heaven; others I cling to for dear life since they outperform successors. Let’s look beyond the here and now to way back when:

The eldest is my Greensboro granny’s “stew pot,” a wobbly aluminum WearEver vessel with a clip-on lid and two small grab handles rather than one long. Nanny was born in 1875, married in 1899. In this pot, easily a centenarian with another 100 years possible, she boiled beef with a cut-up onion and a jar of home-canned tomatoes. This simmered on the back gas burner or the woodstove all afternoon until the chuck roast fell apart and the liquid almost evaporated. If I close my eyes and take a deep breath, I can smell it now. I also have her biscuit cutter and wood bread tray, its bottom worn to splinters, worth hundreds to Southern antique collectors.

The jewels in a Jewish cook’s crown are matzo ball soup and chopped liver. My mother-in-law made divine chopped chicken liver (with hard-boiled eggs and caramelized onions) in a Hamilton Beach electric meat grinder that weighed a ton. It must have been 20 years old when she relinquished the chore to me in the 1960s. Chopped liver perfected, I discovered superb hamburgers made from home-ground meat. The upper part is made of a metal which, on assembly, sounds a strange clunk. When our basset hound heard this he came running, anticipating scraps. Presently, my countertop behemoth stands, statuesque, rather like a headstone, on a storeroom shelf.

The only item from my mother’s kitchen is an odd-sized brownie pan made from dark embossed metal. She talked a good game, but made her “famous brownies” about once a year, for bridge club.

My wedding gifts included an enamel-on-cast-iron oval Dutch oven from Royal Dru in, where else, Holland. Oh, the briskets this friend has simmered, the coq au vin. Its green exterior is chipped, the white interior stained. Yet 57 years later the stalwart outperforms any replacement.

You wouldn’t want to see my two warped aluminum cookie sheets. With blackened bottoms and curled edges, they are beyond disreputable. No matter; after more than 50,000 cookies, I cannot remember one burned batch. Humbug to the dark non-stick kind. I keep the top side bright with Brillo and will use them as long as I can find cookie lovers. Which is never a problem.

Two percolators have followed me from apartment to duplex, four houses, a condo and back to an apartment. One is stovetop — a tall, stainless steel number memorable because my toddlers used to take it apart and put it together like a puzzle, causing a happy clatter. The other (both Farberware) is electric. Drip coffee cannot compare in flavor, aroma or temperature. I see that both are again available in retro catalogs.

As for ordinary pots, I’ve always preferred copper-bottomed. They never wear out but do become aesthetically challenged. Time to replace. I bought just one, same brand, except it weighed so much less that I returned it. After all, only the contents matter.

One cherished icon that got away was Nanny’s iron skillet with an iron lid that doubled as a shallow frying pan. She fried chicken (raised “free-range” in the yard, terminated and cleaned on the back porch, soaked in salt water overnight) and cooked it the pre-deep fryer way: dredged in seasoned flour, browned in Crisco, covered with the lid and into the oven for 45 minutes. When tender she removed the lid and crisped the skin over a burner. Other times, the lid-skillet turned out perfect free-range sunny-side ups.

Another gone-but-not-forgotten relic: an aluminum cauldron with tall lid and basket for sterilizing baby bottles. I tried it on soup but the metal was too thin, resulting in burned split peas.

No, I don’t have a kitchen clock with a cord; the electric skillet and wok (always red, never hot enough) have gone with the wind, as have the wood-handled knives with blades worn down by sharpening against a stone, something my father insisted on doing.

What will become of this trove? My grandsons are more interested in eating than cooking. I have no granddaughter.

Sounds rather maudlin, but not really. My kitchen tools were friends — dependable, capable and, unlike their newer counterparts, long-lasting. I salute them, with thanks.  PS

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

March Books

By Romey Petite

Eveningland: Stories, by Michael Knight

An American treasure, Michael Knight’s Eveningland is not so much a compilation of short fiction as it is a multi-part portrait of Mobile Bay and the lives of its people. It chronicles the days, from mundane to mythic, leading up to the arrival of a hurricane — a storm that will tear their private worlds asunder. With place as the framing device, the Alabama Gulf Coast inlet hosts a total of seven interlocking stories (like the Vietnam War in Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried). Throughout Knight’s prose one hears the voice of a raconteur’s playful spirit — alternatively honest and abashed. His characters are memorable, familiar and genuine. Still, in crafting their private fancies, Knight never fails to incorporate another essential element in Southern fiction — what Flannery O’Connor (to whom the author gives thanks in the acknowledgments) called the grotesque. While the individual stories certainly invite themselves to be anthologized and the format invites each delicacy to be digested a tale at a time, think of it as celebrated storyteller Daniel Wallace of Big Fish meets the format of Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction (1994). The author will be signing copies of his upcoming collection at The Country Bookshop on Thursday, March 9, at 5 p.m. — an event you’ll want to make sure to mark on your calendar

The One Eyed Man, by Ron Currie

The author of Everything Matters! and Flimsy Little Plastic Miracles returns with this lampoon of literalism. K. is a widower who has awoken one day to find himself unable to accept metaphorical language — preferring only simple, blunt, even crude explanations. In seeking someone who will be honest with him, he finds a confidant in Claire, a grocery clerk (at a thinly veiled Whole Foods parody), when he argues with her over incorrect fruit labels. Slogan by slogan he rejects the comfortable padding of the world that surrounds him, even quibbling over the semantics of a bumper sticker. K. becomes an unlikely hero when he’s thrust into a delicate situation, choosing between being a bystander or foiling a robbery in progress, and is turned into the object of society’s fascination — the star of a reality show — and eventually a target of the brutality that asking the wrong questions may beget.

Spaceman of Bohemia, by Jaroslav Kalfar

When a mysterious comet passes within the vicinity of Earth it turns the night sky strange swatches of purple. Jakub Prochazka, the orphaned son of a Communist Party informer, becomes the country’s first astronaut when he undertakes a dangerous mission offering a chance at both heroism and atonement. What he doesn’t anticipate is that while encased on the eight-month journey into deep space, he will long greatly for his wife, Lenka. There, pining for his beloved, and floating in the unknown, he encounters an eloquent spiderlike entity. Kalfar’s debut novel, evoking a Homeric epic, is an exceedingly pensive odyssey.

Exit West, by Mohsin Hamid

Mohsin Hamid, international best-selling author of The Reluctant Fundamentalist and a PEN/Hemingway finalist for Moth Smoke, returns with a love story verging on magical realism. Against the backdrop of a fractious unnamed country on the fault line of an impending civil war, Exit West tells the tale of the romance between Saeed and Nadia. In a land of escalating violence, they hear rumors of doors that will allow them to escape, making a dangerous and costly journey into an uncertain future. They leave their old world behind and struggle to hold on to each other and their sense of who they are.

One of the Boys, by Daniel Magariel

Though a short read, One of the Boys is no small feat, nor a novel for the faint of heart. A confessional, deep-cutting debut novel told from the perspective of the younger of two sons, it grapples with the grim subject of abuse. Two boys leave their mother behind, siding with their father, the parent they consider the lesser of two evils. The youngest boy even conspires to fabricate evidence against his mother to permanently ensure she will never receive custody. In being manipulated into crafting such a scheme, he finds himself culpable in his father’s crimes. As both boys begin to see a different side to their dad — his negligence, addictions and violent temper — they realize they are obeying him not only because they love him but fearing for their lives. Once you’ve glimpsed past the shuttered windows of this broken family, it will be impossible to look away.

Born Both, by Hida Viloria

The upcoming Born Both is a memoir detailing Hida Viloria’s experience of gradually coming to the realization she is intersex — and subsequent endeavors to spread awareness of it as an individual identity. It’s also about trust, consent and what happens when it is betrayed. Growing up, Viloria struggled with a hyper-masculine father and this book is very much an exorcism of that toxic figure. Being an activist in LGBTQIA rights, Viloria has appeared and been interviewed on The Oprah Winfrey Show, The Tyra Banks Show, ABC News, and has also penned articles for The New York Times, CNN.com and The American Journal of BioEthics. Her book’s publication is timely, considering that Hanne Gaby Odiele, a runway model, recently revealed that she was intersex in hopes of spreading awareness and doing away with taboos regarding non-binary bodies. Fans of Jeffrey Eugenides’s novel Middlesex may find that this intimate and jolting account speaks to them in ways fiction, perhaps, cannot.

Sonora, by Hannah Lillith Assadi

Hannah Lillith Assadi’s coming-of-age story, Sonora, is a noteworthy, dreamlike debut. Ahlam, a late bloomer, is the daughter of one world in the Middle East, but two separate visions. Her parents come from both sides of a fault line — Ahlam’s mother is from Israel and her father is a refugee from Palestine. Raised on the barren outskirts of Phoenix, Arizona, Ahlam has known little of the conflict, save for the news her father blasts during dinnertime and the stories he tells to remind her of how lucky she is. Unpopular in school, Ahlam finds a friend and kindred spirit in Laura, a maverick whose mother is from a local reservation. Laura awakens the dormant and shy Ahlam to her womanhood — encouraging her to experiment with drugs, boys and witchcraft. Together, they form a pact, eventually fleeing to New York, where they find there are certain troubles you cannot run from — those you take with you.

CHILDREN’S BOOKS By Angie Tally

Birds, by Kevin Henkes

Just in time for spring comes this lovely new edition of Birds, called the “Perfect book for young readers” by the New York Times Book Review. A little girl watches birds from her window and observes their sizes, colors, shapes, and the way they appear and disappear. She wishes she could fly as they do, but celebrates the one big thing they have in common: singing. Ages 2-4.

This House, Once, by Deborah Freedman

A picture book artist/author and one-time architect, Deborah Freedman presents this absolutely stunning portrait of a house from the ground up. A door that was once a tree; a foundation built of rocks once underground; windows once blowing sand — this a perfect coffee-table-type gift for families moving into a new home or budding architects everywhere. Ages 3-6.

Magic Tree House: World at War, by Mary Pope Osborne

The Magic Tree House books, long staples on beginning readers’ shelves, have gotten a new look and are now presented in three divisions: Magic Tree House titles for beginning chapter book readers; Merlin Missions for more advanced readers; and Fact Trackers for nonfiction fans. Additionally, this newest title in the series World at War is the first Super Edition and is Jack and Annie’s most dangerous mission in the scariest time the world has ever known, World War II. No reader will want to miss this longer story with additional facts and photographs. Ages 7-10.

Grandpa’s Great Escape, by David Walliams
and Tony Ross

Grandpa is Jack’s favorite person in the world, but has become confused and believes he is back in World War II where he was an ace fighter pilot. Jack is the only one who understands him anymore, so when Grandpa is sent to an old folks home, it’s up to Jack to help Grandpa plot a daring escape. As their adventure spins out of control, they will need Grandpa’s fighter pilot know-how and Jack’s real world common sense to get home. Ages 8-12.

Genius, by Leopoldo Gout

Three international teenage coding and hacking geniuses who have created an online presence called the “Lodge” find themselves involved in a high stakes competition arranged by a computer genius who may have more than a game in mind. With detailed illustrations and STEM connections, this book is unlike any other for science-minded fiction readers. Ages 12-16.  PS

Surprise! Surprise!

Forget the turnips, Pisces, because life’s about to turn around

By Astrid Stellanova

Time for March Madness and Gladness, Star Children! St. Paddy’s Day on the 17th, and then we give Ole Man Winter the boot on the 20th. Get green. Thaw out. Get on down. Shake the winter funk off and get your good time groove on, Wild Things. Ad Astra — Astrid

Pisces (February 19–March 20)

Honey, times ain’t so bad. Don’t go all Scarlet O’Hara, scrounging in the dirt for turnips and cutting up the living room drapes. For your birthday, you have a consolation prize you are going to like. Oh, it’s a gen-u-ine humdinger, and faster than you can say twiddle-dee-dee, you get the biggest surprise in the tee-nine-siest package.

Aries (March 21–April 19)

You’ve outdone yourself recently, getting yourself prime placement in the Pissing-People-Off Hall of Fame. Have you lost your ever-loving marbles? Don’t try and blame all your woes on Jesus, carbohydrates and the mean girls on the cheerleading squad! This is a great year to come clean about the fact that you pitched a fast-ball that was just damn lucky and stop pretending it wasn’t a fluke. Go work on your game, Child.

Taurus (April 20–May 20)

Remember, class is subjective. Even paper towel can be called common white trash. But not only is that white trash useful, it absorbs a whole lot of other people’s spills. Don’t try and keep up with the Joneses, because, honestly, they are not all that and a pack of Nabs anyway. Your past does not define you.

Gemini (May 21–June 20)

Your self-mastery has taken a back seat to your need to know what all your closest friends are doing, where, and whoever they are doing it with. Throw it in reverse my Twin, and resist the urge to track your nearest and dearest like a bloodhound. You may feel insecure, but in the coming months you will get a boost that will make you wonder why that was ever true.

Cancer (June 21–July 22)

You have been laid up nursing a bad case of the poor pitifuls. Unsure how to get some perspective and back up on your feet? Here’s what you need to know. Honey, life hits us all hard. But you think you fall from some kind of a greater height than the rest of us, right? Not. At. All. The sun is about to break through the clouds, Sunshine.

Leo (July 23–August 22)

Sugar, everybody’s dee-lighted you are feeling in fine fettle. But, honestly, spell “overconfident.” A pack of dogs can chase a car and a fast one will dang nearly catch it, but not many of them can change gears and drive the thing. You have got a learning curve before you slide behind the wheel. Hit the books.

Virgo (August 23–September 22)

It’s been a dry spell for you in the social department. Don’t worry, dishes, no one did me either. But actually, you are about to have a good times breakthrough and you will be irresistible to somebody that used to give you the coldest of cold shoulders. Meantime, Poor Thing, you finally get credit long overdue.

Libra (September 23–October 22)

You’ve been working hard on an image that you privately consider to be artsy. There ain’t much distance between eccentric and crazy. And I don’t think anybody believes that wearing a beret makes you an artiste. In the meantime, be careful about leaning too much on a confidant that happens to have a very big mouth and a weak backbone.

Scorpio (October 23–November 21)

You share everything lately, dontcha? Especially the check. The road to frugality started out as a good thing and then you took a turn toward Crazy Town. Relax, Sugar. You have savings in the bank and more sense than most when it comes to turning a dollar. This month, splurge a little and live a lot.

Sagittarius (November 22–December 21)

You have the wattage of a very big star, but your lights went on low dim due to some mean-spirited body who always makes you feel a little foolish and a lot outclassed. Snap out of it, Sugar. They are envious of your God-given talents, and they wouldn’t bother to throw shade at you if they weren’t.

Capricorn (December 22–January 19)

Put that Sapphire-Chase-Supreme-Big-Spenders-Club plastic in the safe, put it under the floorboard, or just get the scissors out and cut it up. You know you didn’t need that new credit card, and nobody cares if it’s the same one that the Spending Hall of Famers pack in their wallets. You know it is a royal temptation, so skip the coronation.

Aquarius (January 20–February 18)

When Twain quipped that cauliflower is cabbage with a college education, Darling, he was thinking of your chief critic. Maybe this uppity someone is an alum of Cabbage College and now they think this makes them better than you. They can think again, Honey. You’ve got big talent and all they have got is a big head — of cabbage. So skip the Tom Dooley act and don’t go hanging down your (much nicer) head. PS

For years, Astrid Stellanova owned and operated Curl Up and Dye Beauty Salon in the boondocks of North Carolina until arthritic fingers and her popular astrological readings provoked a new career path.

World on a Shelf

An encyclopedia of adventure

By Bill Fields

I pulled a volume off a shelf in a spare room and placed it on a table in front of my mother. Red with blue, gold and gray accents and fraying corners, it is seven years older than I am.

The World Book Encyclopedia, 1952 edition. I didn’t go to kindergarten, but I had our World Books, 18 volumes of information and entertainment, early childhood education without realizing it.   

“They were a good investment,” said Mom, who couldn’t remember how much they cost on an installment plan those many years ago.

Whatever my parents paid for them, it was a fair price, and I think my mother has long forgiven me for the stray crayon marks and torn pages in the “Farm” and “Fire” entries.

For my older sisters and me, the World Books were a window to the world far beyond our neighborhood, our school, our community, our state — although once I could read and not just look at the pictures, I did get a charge out of the “North Carolina” entry and seeing Southern Pines, population 4,772, among the rundown of the Old North State’s cities and towns.

But the real joy was in discovering things I didn’t know — that would have been almost everything in elementary school and earlier — and there was something on nearly every page. Thanks to the World Books, a housefly wasn’t just a pest to swat but a creature whose body parts were diagrammed. “Thorax” remains one of my favorite words. Before I saw a live tadpole, I’d seen “Life Story Of The Frog” in the encyclopedia.

Much of the set was in black and white, which made the bright four-color maps of American states and foreign countries stand out and seem special. When I flew to Great Britain for the first time, in 1988, it was to a country I initially had seen in Volume 7 of our World Books, when the longest trip was in a car for a couple of hours to the beach. The encyclopedia’s maps triggered an early interest in geography. At filling stations in the days when they gave away highway maps, if one was on a shelf I could reach, I took it for my collection.

Some of the World Book maps look silly more than six decades later, freeze-dried coffee in a Keurig Cup era. There is no Soviet Union, and many countries in Africa have different names. To see the “French Indochina” entry that was published years before the Vietnam War is a jarring reminder of history.

Being fascinated by balls and games from the time I was a toddler, I pored over the sporting entries. The football helmets shown were leather and without facemasks in 1952, which had drastically changed by the early 1960s when I first started poking through the World Books. A football field, however, was 100 yards long then and now.

The same can’t be said for the “Golf” entry. The diagram showing “distances a very good player should get with various iron clubs” indicates a 5-iron going 150 yards, something that hasn’t been so for decades, thanks mostly to the construction of balls and clubs.

That golf chart was only one example of how the World Books presented information. A country would be superimposed on a map of the United States to show its relative size. A pie chart displayed the food elements in a grape. The leading tobacco states were denoted by illustrated rankings, North Carolina at the top of the heap! There was a two-page spread highlighting “French Literature” from the 1400s to the 1900s, something I bet my sisters looked at more than I did.

Along with school texts and library books, The Pilot and The Greensboro Daily News, the 1952 World Books were what I read until I was in the fourth grade and it was decided our encyclopedias needed to be updated. There was debate over whether we would stick with World Books or switch to Encyclopedia Britannica, sort of a Ford or Chevy thing.

I remember a saleslady coming to the house one night extolling the virtues of the 1968 World Books, handsomely covered in white and green. She was a good closer, and before long the original set had been retired. But never forgotten.  PS

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

Trail of Tears

The sorrowful history of Western expansion

By Stephen E. Smith

During the early-to mid-19th century, an unknown Native American warrior documented his life in pictographs on a buffalo hide. His early years were happy. He owned horses, took two wives, fathered children. Then white-faced figures appear pointing sticks that spit fire. Later, he painted his family dying of smallpox. His last pictograph illustrates the arrival of Jesuits in their black cassocks. There the narrative ends, suggesting, perhaps, that Jesuits are deadlier than smallpox.

Whatever the cause of the warrior’s demise, there’s no denying that the 19th-century collision between Native Americans and westward migrating peoples of European descent was one of the most shameful and tragic chapters in the history of the continent. Peter Cozzens’ meticulously written and thoroughly documented The Earth Is Weeping: The Epic Story of the Indian Wars for the American West is the latest offering in a spate of recent books that graphically detail how shameful and tragic the winning of the West truly was. (An American Genocide by Benjamin Madley and Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States, both published in the last year, are also well worth reading.)

Most of these recent Indian histories owe their perspective, at least in part, to Dee Brown’s 1970 Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, a best-seller that transformed the attitude with which Americans regard indigenous people. Published three years after the founding of the American Indian Movement, Brown portrays the government’s dealings with Native Americans as an ongoing effort to eradicate their culture and religion. Cozzens adopts a slightly more balanced and analytical view of the Indian wars, taking into account the misjudgments and barbarism prevalent on both sides of the conflict.

From the opening chapter, it’s obvious the story Cozzens has chosen to tell is ghastly beyond the power of words. Government policy dictated that indigenous people be concentrated on reservations of ever decreasing size until their will to fight was broken and their cultural cohesion destroyed. The wholesale slaughter of the buffalo was intended to deny food and livelihood to the tribes, and with the arrival of the railroads, the hunting grounds native people had occupied for millennia were opened to white settlement. What resulted was a fight to the death in which the tribes had no chance of prevailing. For white politicians, soldiers and settlers, the primary motivations were greed and racism. Native Americans stood in the way of wealth and progress, and they were perceived as a subhuman species to be dealt with as quickly and as expediently as possible. Even generally peaceable tribes such as the Modoc and Nez Perce were treated ruthlessly.

“The whites were coming now, in numbers incomprehensible to Indians,” Cozzens writes. “They assaulted the Indian lands from every direction. Settlers rolled in from the east, while miners poked at the periphery of the Indian country from the west, north and south and simply overran it when new mineral strikes were made. In Westerners’ parlance, Indians who resisted the onslaught were to be ‘rounded up’ and rendered harmless on reservation land too miserable to interest the whites.” But Cozzens also notes that whites were not solely to blame for the dissolute loss of life and property. “. . . tribes had long battled one another over hunting grounds or horses. Indeed, fighting was a cultural imperative, and men owed their place in society to their prowess as warriors.”

The subjugation of Western indigenous people took place during the 30 years from 1861 to 1891, as the U.S. Army, acting under orders from Eastern politicians, pursued the policy of “mollification and eradication.” Beginning with the Dakota uprising in Minnesota and ending with the tragedy at Wounded Knee and the 1891 surrender of the Oglala Lakotas at Pine Ridge Agency in South Dakota, the story is one of unremitting atrocity, suffering and death.

Former Civil War generals found themselves incapable of adapting to erratic and uncoordinated tribal uprisings. No less a national figure than William Tecumseh Sherman was inept at managing Indian affairs, and Winfield Scott Hancock, the hero of Gettysburg, found himself unable to negotiate with the Cheyenne and burned their villages in central Kansas. Phil Sheridan, who had swept the Shenandoah Valley clear of Confederate troops, found himself incapable of placating the tribes and conducted the Red River War, the Ute War, and the Great Sioux War of 1876-77, which resulted in the death of Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer and a sizable portion of his command. (For all his faithful service during the Civil War, Sheridan is best remembered for having said: “The only good Indian is a dead Indian.”) President Ulysses S. Grant, whom biographers portray as a friend to Indian people, convened a secret White House meeting to plan strategy for provoking a war with the Lakotas. In the late 19th century, the government, in an effort to eliminate further uprisings, outlawed Native American religious ceremonies, and altruistic white civilians established boarding schools where Indian children were required to speak English, study math and religion, and where they were punished for use of their native language and the exercise of their tribal beliefs.

Insofar as it’s possible to condense a 30-year period of national misadventure into 460 pages of carefully crafted text, Cozzens has produced an exemplary history that’s commendably objective, a reference book for the Indian wars. Beyond the intrinsic value of acquiring historical knowledge for its own sake, thoughtful readers may well gain a perspective on contemporary Native American issues — public health, education, gambling, discrimination and racism, the use of sports mascots, and the desecration of tribal lands. More than 100 years after the surrender of the last Indian tribe, suicide, alcoholism and crime remain serious problems on reservations.

Positive edifications notwithstanding, The Land Is Weeping, for all its detachment, allows for only one conclusion: The 19th-century sweep of “civilization” across the territories west of the Mississippi created for the Native American tribes who inhabited the region the cultural wasteland we now call peace.  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 Right Words

The art of talking, or not

By Renee Phile

Lately I have been trying to keep my boys talking, you know, to keep the conversations going. With Kevin, who is 8, it’s absolutely no problem, but the older one, the 13-year-old, well, his word count has decreased in the past year. Sometimes he will excitedly chat about wrestling or football, or a teacher who he thinks is funny, but all too often his answers are just a few words.

“My day was fine.”

“I learned about prepositions.”

“Yes, I ate the lunch you sent. Yes, the carrots, too.”

Fair enough, but sometimes I just really want a conversation, so I ask the question, “Do either of you have anything you want to talk about?” Most of the time a topic is not given, but comments are.

“We need to get Chinese food.”

“Can we get Little Caesars tonight?”

“Did you get a video of me pinning that guy at my wrestling match?”

Sometimes conversations begin about 5-7 minutes after the boys are supposed to be in bed for the night. Ironically, this is the time frame when suddenly more meaningful topics emerge.

“Mom, do you know what I’ve been thinking about? God. Is He real or not?”

“Mom, you know. I have been wondering. How did I get here? Like, really?”

“Mom, there is a kid at school who is mean to me.”

Yes, of course there will also be the occasional urgent, “Mom, I forgot to tell you that you need to sign this permission slip before tomorrow. Yes, I know I have had it in my book bag for two weeks, but I just remembered. At least I remembered before tomorrow!”

“Mom, I forgot to tell you about the solar system project due tomorrow. I have everything I need except I need help painting Neptune. We didn’t have the shade of green I need for the rings. Can we run to Walmart real quick?

Sometime, though, mornings are when I like to talk. After all, we have a 15-minute drive to school and yesterday morning I asked a question, and here is what I got.

“Does anyone want to talk about anything while we’re driving to school?”

David: “NO.”

Kevin: “Oh! I do!”

David: “No, Kevin, I can’t handle it.”

Kevin: “But I need to tell you something!”

Me: “Go ahead, Kevin.”

David: “UGH!”

Kevin: “David, stop with your attitude!”

David: “Be quiet.”

Me: “What do you need to tell us, Kevin?”

David: (makes disapproving grunts, sighs, and other 13-year-old noises.)

Kevin: “I really want to talk about why quesadillas are better than tacos.”

I mean, what else is there to say? Best topic ever.  PS

Renee Phile teaches English composition at Sandhills Community College.

The Santini Brothers Gene

If you have to ask, you probably don’t have it

By Joyce Reehling

Most people will look at a space, say a living room, and either like it or not. If they like it the way it is, it stays that way . . . forever or nearly forever. I, however, come from a line of women on both sides of my family who have what I call the Santini Brothers gene. When we were growing up there was a moving company called the Santini Brothers, so my dad used that name to refer to my mother’s never-ending desire to change things around in the house. One day the living room was arranged in one way, come home from school and it was another way altogether. The dining room became the den and then flipped back again. Don’t even get me started on curtains.

Science has not been able to isolate this gene but the anecdotal evidence supplied almost entirely by wives, mothers or female lab partners is overwhelming. Though not unheard of, men seldom have it unless they are very lucky and very arts minded. Those of us with the Santini Brothers gene walk through a space and just “feel” something is off, something is not right. Could it be the placement of the lamp? The chair? Maybe if I just switch those two paintings. Most men walk through a space and see the kitchen door.

And then there is the advanced case of the gene when nothing will do but everything in the room must go. No, not out and buy more, but out of this space and into another. I recently switched my living room for the dinning room. No longer as young as I once was, I hired two wonderful guys to come and help me — my Southern Santinis, gentlemen who have a keen eye for how to move things and how to place them correctly. These were no “wham-bam-you’re-moved-ma’am” laborers. Rugs were centered. A 200-year-old dining table from my husband’s grandfather — with six heavy chairs and a sideboard — all got shifted seamlessly and safely, proof that there is art in all trades.

For the cost of a glass of wine, two pals came over that night and we re-hung all the art from the picture molding. We had to restring some of the paintings to adjust for different hanging heights but we accomplished in a little under two bottles what would normally take one person three days.

The odd little tweak here and there can make your space seem new without all the bother of picking up and moving to a new house. Our eyes get so used to what we have that we stop seeing our own world. By switching a few things around we start to see all of it in a new light.

Moving the paintings highlighted what I loved but no longer really saw. Some of them were not hung to their best advantage. Others just needed a little more space around them or to be paired with an aesthetic pal, something that highlighted both.

The next part is where my husband comes home from a trip and sees the change. We had discussed the possibility of trying this but I know he needs to see the deed done before he can relax with it. My husband would hot glue the world in place if left unsupervised. He has no Santini Brothers gene at all.

Many years ago, I devised a rule that saves our sanity in the face of change. It is called the Three Day Rule. Either of us can change anything we want and the other person has to live with it for three days before saying, “put it back.” It has saved us from icy glances, bitten tongues and ill humor and to tell you the truth the “put it back” option has yet to be exercised.

The Santini Brothers gene can give everyone a new lease on life. Change. Try it.  PS

Joyce Reehling is a frequent contributor and good friend of PineStraw.

Sunday Man

’twixt Heaven and Earth

By Jim Dodson

It’s Sunday morning in the
kitchen, two hours before the sunrise.

A welcome silence fills the house, and at this hour I often hear a still, small voice that may indeed belong to God but is more often than not the mewing of young Boo Radley, eager to be let out in order to roam the neighboring yards.

On the other side of the door sits old Rufus, balancing a universe, home from his nighttime prowlings, the crankiest cat of the known world, complaining to be let in and fed. The noisy one comes in, the quiet one slips out.

I am a butler to cats.

On the plus side, Sunday morning lies like a starry quilt over the neighborhood at this hour. A thin quarter moon hangs on the western horizon like a paper moon in a school play and Venus shines like a jewel in an Ethiop’s ear. Somewhere, miles away, a train rumbles by, a reminder of a world that is always going somewhere. But luckily I am here on Earth, a Sunday man beneath a hooked moon, for the moment going nowhere except the end of his driveway to fetch the Sunday paper for reading over the week.

Back inside, I sit for spell with my first coffee, reading one of what I call my Sunday morning books that run the gamut from the sonnets of Shakespeare to the essays of Wendell Berry, from Barbara Brown Taylor to Pierre Teilhard De Chardin — with a dash of Billy Collins and Mary Oliver for proper spiritual seasoning.

This particular Sunday is a gem long out of print, one man’s memoir of spiritual rejuvenation first published the year I was born, the story of a successful big-city writer who was forced by reasons of health and age to return to the small Wisconsin town of his birth. There he built a big house on ancestral land but initially struggled to find his place on the ground.

“A man, faced with the peculiar loneliness of where he doesn’t want to be,” writes Edward Harris Heth in My Life on Earth, “is apt to find himself driving along the narrow, twisting country roads, day or night, alone, brooding about the tricks life can play.”

Life is lived by degrees. Little by little, the author’s lonely drives along country roads yield a remarkable transformation of the angry city man. Heth gets to know — and admire — the eccentric carpenter who builds his house. He drops by a church supper and meets his neighbors, including the quirky Litten sisters “who play a mean game of canasta,” know all the village pump gossip “and have an Old Testament talent for disaster.” The ancient Litten girls both feed and inspire him to broader exploration.

His neighbor Bud Devere, a young and burly farmer who always shows up uninvited just to chat, insists that Heth see the Willow Road.

“I did not want to see what Bud saw. But the reluctance began fading away in me, that first time we went down the Willow Road. It covers scarcely more than a mile, but in that mile you can cover a thousand miles.” Traveling along it, the author sees spring wildflowers, undisturbed forests, a charming farmhouse with narcissus and hyacinth in bloom. He feels his pulse slow, and something akin to simple pleasure takes root.

“Bud kept silent. He wanted me to open my own eyes. . . . Since then, I’ve learned how many country people know and enjoy this art of the small scene and event, the birth of a calf, a remembered spot, the tumultuous labor and excitement of feeding the threshers, who come like locusts and swarm for a day over your farm and disappear again at night, the annual Welsh singing competition in the village — these are the great and proper events of a lifetime.”

Funny thing is, I have no idea how this little book, something of a surprise bestseller when it first appeared in 1953, got into my bookshelf, and now into my soul. It just magically appeared, a gift from the gods or perhaps a wise friend who knew I might discover it

Now the sun is up and so are the dogs. I am a butler to them, too. Despite a late frost, birds are singing and there is a new angle to the light — not to mention the first green tufts of daffodils rising like green fingers from the Earth.

Anticipating their Sunday walk, of course, the dogs think every day is the first day of spring. Mulligan, a black, flat-haired retriever I found as a pup a decade ago running wild along a busy highway, trots ahead off the lead, our tiny pack’s alpha girl, while Ajax — whom I call Junior — a golden retriever far too good-looking for his own good — lumbers along toting his own lead, deeply impressed with himself.

The neighborhood is old, with massive hardwoods arching like cathedral beams overhead. A man in his bathrobe steps out and shuffles hurriedly to the end of his sidewalk to fetch his Sunday morning paper. He gives a quick wave, bobbing a neighborly head, and hurries back inside to read.

The news of the world can wait. Because it never really changes, a story as old as cabbages and kings. Besides, we are briefly off the clock of the world all of Sunday, footloose upon the Earth, officially out of range, in search of an earthier divinity. Truthfully, I’m a bit sad to see winter’s cold and prospects of snow give way to the advance of daffodils. I am a winter’s boy, after all, but happy for a wife who is an endless summer girl dreaming of white lilacs in bloom.

“What is divinity,” asked Wallace Stevens in his lovely poem Sunday Morning

“if it can come

Only in silent shadows and in dreams?

Shall she not find in comforts of the sun,

In pungent fruit and bright, green wings, or else

In any balm or beauty of the earth,

Things to be cherished like the thought of heaven?

Divinity must live within herself:

Passions of rain, or moods in falling snow;

Grievings in loneliness, or unsubdued

Elations when the forest blooms; gusty

Emotions on wet roads on autumn nights;

All pleasures and all pains, remembering

The bough of summer and the winter branch,

These are the measures destined for her soul.”

By the time we reach the park, Lady Summer Bough and Lord Winter Branch, the strengthening sun has melted away the year’s final frost. Across the way stands an ancient oak I peddled by a half a million times as a kid on his way to the ball field; it looks like a lighted candelabra, limned with golden morning sun.

Funny how I only recently noticed this.

It is middle Sunday morning at church, our usual pew back right. The young preacher is named Greg. Not long ago we attended his ordination as a priest. My cheeky wife thinks Greg is almost too good-looking to be a priest. Lots of women in the parish seem to share this view.

The gist of his Sunday sermon is the need to look with fresh eyes upon Matthew’s Beatitudes. But the true strength of his Sunday morning message lies in the suggestion that we all should aspire to become our true selves and Christian mystics: “Don’t be scared by that word mystic. It simply means someone who has gone from an intellectual belief system to actual inner experience.” The journey from head to the heart, Greg says, means we are called to be mystics — to chuck rules-based, belief-system Christianity in favor of something far more intimate and organic as the Earth around us.

To coax the point home, he mentions Franciscan friar Richard Rohr’s observation that religion is largely filled with people who are afraid of Hell, and spirituality is for people who have gone through hell.

And with spring on the Sunday doorstep, Father Greg provides the perfect metaphor directly from renewing nature — the mystery of how a caterpillar becomes a butterfly, how becoming our true selves is not unlike the chrysalis that must crack open in order for the butterfly’s wings to gain strength and allow it to fly.

“And as we struggle,” notes the bright new associate rector, “it breeds compassion within our hearts. Just as the butterfly pressed fluid into its wings, our struggle enables compassion to flow through our bodies, a compassion that allows us to empathize with the suffering of others.”

I’ll admit I am a Sunday man who digs a good sermon. And this was a mighty thoughtful one. Young Greg is off to an excellent start, even if — like Junior — he is a tad too good-looking.

Speaking of digging, after a Chicago-style hotdog, I’m home for full Sunday afternoon working in my new garden, digging in the soil and delving in the soul.

Having pulled down an old pergola and cleaned out a handsome brick planter long overgrown with ivy, I lose complete track of time in the backyard planting Blue Angel hostas and a pair of broadleaf hydrangeas, repairing and raising a much-loved birdfeeder, hanging chimes high in a red oak and transplanting ostrich ferns. If one is closer to God’s heart in a garden, then perhaps I am a backyard mystic with dirty hands.

By Sunday sundown, my knees are aching but the healing is real. Renewed for a week of cabbages and kings, we settle down with the Sunday paper and a bit of Netflix before bed, though I tend to doze off halfway through the program.

Old Rufus goes out; Boo Radley comes in. The dogs follow us to bed. For some reason I seem to sleep so well on Sunday nights.  PS

Contact Editor Jim Dodson at jim@thepilot.com

Shadow Market

A fanciful dealer in dark wares

By D.G. Martin

When Fred Chappell writes, multitudes of fans stop and read. Now retired, he was for more than 40 years a beloved teacher of writers at UNCG, where he helped establish its much-admired Master of Fine Arts in Writing program. He served as North Carolina poet laureate from 1997 until 2002. He is revered by many for his fiction, especially his early works based on his years growing up in the mountains. But his 30 some-odd books show his determination not to be limited to any genre, geography or time.

His latest book, A Shadow All of Light, demonstrates the wide scope of his imagination and talent. It is a magical, speculative story set in an Italianate country hundreds of years ago. Chappell asks his readers to believe that shadows are something more than the images people cast by interrupting a light source. These shadows are an important, integral part of a person’s being. They can be stolen or given up. When lost, the person is never the same.

In Chappell’s tale, an ambitious young rural man, Falco, comes to a big port city (think Venice), where he attaches himself to a successful shadow merchant, Maestro Astolfo. Over time Falco learns the trade of acquiring and selling shadows detached from their original owners. The business is a “shady” one because the acquisition of human shadows often involves underhanded, even illegal methods, something like today’s markets in exotic animal parts or pilfered art.

But Maestro Astolfo and Falco, notwithstanding public attitudes, strive to conduct their business in a highly moral manner. Although losing one’s shadow could be devastating, the situation is mollified if a similar replacement can be secured from shadow dealers like Astolfo or Falco.

Chappell, in the voice of Falco, explains, “No one likes to lose his shadow. It is not a mortal blow, but it is a wearying trouble. If it is stolen or damaged, a man will seek out a dealer in umbrae supply and the difficulty is got around in the hobbledehoy fashion. The fellow is the same as before, so he fancies, with a new shadow that so closely resembles his true one, no one would take note.

“That is not the case. His new shadow never quite fits him so trimly, so comfortably, so sweetly as did his original. There is a certain discrepancy of contour, a minor raggedness not easy to mark but plainly evident to one versed in the materials. The wearer never completely grows to his new shadow and goes about with it rather as if wearing an older brother’s hand-me-down cloak.

“Another change occurs also, not in the fitting or wearing, but in the character of the person. To lose a shadow is to lose something of oneself. The loss is slight and generally unnoticeable, yet an alert observer might see some diminishing in the confidence of bearing, in the certitude of handclasp, in the authority of tread upon a stone stairway.”

After introducing his readers to the complexities of shadow theft, storage and trade, Chappell takes Falco, Astolfo and their colleague Mutano through a series of encounters with bandits, pirates and a host of other shady characters. Mutano loses his voice to a cat. Bandits challenge Falco’s efforts to collect rare plants that eat human shadows. Pirates led by a beautiful and evil woman battle the port city’s residents for control.

Similar to Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, Chappell’s A Shadow All of Light is fast-paced, mythic, and unbelievably entertaining.  PS

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

Walking with Dinosaurs

A winter beach is just the thing for soothing the shock of the new

By Serena Kenyon Brown

Here we are in February. It has been one shipping container, seven months, 3,843 miles and 88,632 still-unpacked boxes since the Sandhills of North Carolina.

It is 2 o’clock in the afternoon. The dogs, who normally eat at about 4 o’clock, have climbed into my lap as I sit down to write in order to remind me of their dinner time every minute for the next two hours. They are not lapdog sized and they are inconvenient to work around. Please forgive any resulting errors.

They’ve been somewhat unhinged, the dogs, since we left the pine-scented breezes of Moore County for the salty air of England’s south coast last summer. They’ve never much liked suitcases, and the rearrangement of our entire household on May Street into plastic boxes was a bridge too far. Or so they thought until they were driven to Atlanta, bundled into crates and wheeled onto an aeroplane bound for Heathrow.

As we took our seats on the same plane we asked the air hostess if she would tell the captain that there were dogs on board, so that the hold could be kept at a reasonable temperature.

“Yes,” replied the stewardess, with all the tact of one blissfully unaware of how it feels to have put a pet on a trans-Atlantic flight, “We know. We can hear them. One’s barking, the other’s howling.”

Oh.

It was rather a long journey.

Have you ever had a dream where everything’s completely normal but for one thing that’s starkly out of place? That’s how it felt when the dogs joined us at our friends’ house in London. And there they were again, popping up unexpectedly at my parents’ house, in the back of our old car, which had been mothballed in a barn for nearly five years, as we set out for our new home. (Shortly before the car broke down and we had to be towed the remaining 140 miles. Not quite the first impression we had hoped to make as we rolled in at 10 o’clock at night on the back of a tow truck like the Beverly Hillbillies.)

Our current residence, a red brick villa of elegant Georgian proportions, is resolutely bearing the indignity of having been reduced to a confluence. Here it’s not just the spaniels’ presence that is jolting. It’s everything. Southern family life meets big city youth meets classical art school. Paintings are jostling for space with bicycles and laundry baskets, resting three deep against desks overflowing with anatomical studies and much-put-off paperwork.

A grill that looks like Stephenson’s Rocket dominates the English garden. The red toddler car is cheek by jowl with a Victorian kitchen table piled high with wine bottles, silk peonies, board games, teapots and Ordnance Survey maps, all crowned by a set of red deer antlers and overseen by an effigy of Dewi Sri, the Balinese goddess of rice and home, who is looking very stern in the face of such domestic disharmony.

We have learnt that we are in possession of a vast library of much splashed and scribbled-in cookery books and another of tomes on art history. The downstairs loo is stuffed to the gunwales with fishing tackle. There’s a 1950s Power Trac in what was once the dining room. A bat is hanging off the chandelier.

But for clearing the mind, if not the sitting room, there’s nothing like a bracing winter march along a beach. Known as the Jurassic Coast, 185 million years of history lie in the black and golden cliffs that lour over the beaches here. Ammonite imprints stand out clearly in the rocks. Ten minutes of searching will yield a handful of fossils. We’ve found veins of wood and sea creatures galore, even a very happy clam.

The dogs and I walked along the bay this morning. As often happens, the wind dropped once we reached the shelter of the cliffs. The waves tipped gently onto the shore and retreated with a gravelly ssshhhhhhh. The sun seared through the bitter cold and sent long shadows dancing behind us. Herring gulls soared and socialised. Or perhaps they were pterodactyls.

Back in the States the spaniels would scent deer and flush wild turkeys. Now they’re startling seagulls and turning up Plesiosaurs. Quite an adjustment, and it feels like it’s taking a long time. But on a bright winter’s morning, when the stick the dogs are tussling over is 140 million years old, the turnover of a season or two fits perfectly into perspective.  PS

Serena Kenyon Brown is missing the PineStraw magazine deadline milkshakes. Even in the winter.