September Books

By Kimberly Daniels Taws

A Gentleman in Moscow, by Amor Towles.

This is an exceptional book, likely to be read over centuries, not just decades. The author of Rules of Civility returns with his sophomore novel about Count Alexander Rostov, sentenced in 1922 by a Bolshevik tribunal to spend the rest of his life in the posh Metropol Hotel, once a grand destination for dignitaries. While the circumstances of Russia change around the hotel, the count maintains his elegance through emotional trials, friendships and adventures that are a pure pleasure to read.

Darktown, by Thomas Mullen.

Follow two of Atlanta’s first black police officers as they investigate the death of a young black woman last seen in the company of a white man. Feel and experience the prejudice and hostility they face from their peers, and ride with the one officer who dared to reach across racial barriers for answers and justice.

The Orphan Mother, by Robert Hicks.

The New York Times best-selling author of The Widow of the South returns with another Southern epic story about Mariah Reddick, the former slave to Carrie McGavock who becomes a midwife in Franklin, Tennessee, following the Civil War. After her politically minded and ambitious grown son is murdered, Mariah seeks the truth and is forced to confront her own past. 

A House by the Sea, by Bunny Williams.

Designer Bunny Williams provides a peek into her Caribbean retreat in this wonderful coffee table book. The stunning photographs are punctuated with thoughtful essays by friends on the art of entertaining, gardens and much more. 

Bacon, by Fred Thompson.

The author of Fred Thompson’s Southern Sides joins the “Savor the South” cookbook series with a book on bacon that tracks the humble history and our region’s culinary history. The book includes 56 recipes and wonderful information about this popular treat.

Best. State. Ever. A Florida Man Defends His Homeland, by Dave Barry.

The talented Dave Berry applies his trademark humor to a celebration — and high-spirited defense — of the state he calls home, Florida. From Ponce de Leon to modern weirdness, Barry unmasks, as only he can, what makes Florida great. 

Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America, by Patrick Phillips.

Bill Maher writes that Blood at the Root is able to avoid the self-flagellation usually found in similar accounts and, while ugly things in our past history are certainly unpleasant to read about, stirring the dry bones reminds the living how far they have come and how far they have to go.

Enough Said: What’s Gone Wrong with the Language of Politics? by Mark Thompson.

After serving as a CEO of a major TV corporation, director-general of the BBC and now CEO of The New York Times, Thompson continues his career in writing with a deeply thought out examination of the distortion of the public language and new trends in public engagement. 

In Such Good Company: Eleven Years of Laughter, Mayhem, and Fun in the Sandbox, by Carol Burnett.

Learn about “The Carol Burnett Show” firsthand as Burnett reveals the show’s truths, from its inception to the many hilarious antics of her co-stars and guests, including Lucille Ball, Bing Crosby, Rita Hayworth and Steve Martin. A great read and a reminder that the great comedic talent still has her touch. 

Ingredient: Unveiling the Essential Elements of Food, by Ali Bouzari.

This well-done book is full of pictures and graphs that impart cooking information not widely known. The core of the book is about food in its elemental form. Divided into sections like “Lipids,” “Water” and “Proteins,” this book uses graphs and pictures to explain a seemingly complicated subject in very digestible terms.

Learn to Cook 25 Southern Classics 3 Ways: Traditional, Contemporary, International, by Jennifer Brule.

Brule brings her well-honed recipe testing skills and open, friendly writing to a Southern cookbook that adds modern twists to traditional recipes. 

Rancher, Farmer, Fisherman: Conservation Heroes of the American Heartland, by Mariam Horn.

This story looks at five very different professionals tied to the environmental movement. The stories from a Montana rancher, Kansas farmer, Mississippi riverman, Louisiana shrimper and Gulf fisherman all reveal the challenges and powerful myths about American environmental values. 

Ten Restaurants That Changed America, by Paul Freedman.

Photographs, images and original menus are not the only parts of this book that bring 10 restaurants and three centuries in America together. The stories of these restaurants provide a social and cultural history revealing ethnicity, class, immigration and assimilation through the shared experiences of food and dining. 

The Tide: The Science and Stories Behind the Greatest Force on Earth, by Hugh Aldersey-Williams.

Bringing together folklore, scientific thinking and literature, science writer Aldersey-Williams examines the tides and how we have sought to understand and manage them for centuries. 

CHILDREN’S BOOKS

By Angie Tally

Dory Fantasmagory: Dory Dory Black Sheep, by Abby Hanlon.

With best buddies, imaginary friends, a loving mother, a pet sheep from outer space and an imaginary evil nemesis, Dory Dory Black Sheep, the third installment in the Dory Fantasmagory series, really has it all. This is my favorite new chapter book series to recommend to young readers and is perfect for kids who love hearing the Ramona Quimby stories and want something similar to read on their own. Author Abby Hanlon will be at The Country Bookshop at 4 p.m. on Wednesday, Sept 21. Young readers are invited to bring their invisible friends or favorite stuffed farm animals for an afternoon of fun. (Ages 6-10)

Missy Piggle-Wiggle and the Whatever Cure, by Ann M. Martin and Annie Parnell. Missy Piggle-Wiggle arrived in Little Spring Valley on a warm spring morning, moved into the upside-down house owned by her great aunt Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle, was greeted by Wag the dog, Lightfoot the cat, Penelope the talking parrot and Lester the pig, and quickly took up her family responsibility by helping the neighbors, the Free-for-alls, with their (sometimes) lovely children. Written by the delightful Ann M. Martin and Annie Parnell, the great-granddaughter of Betty MacDonald, the author of the original Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle Books, Missy Piggle-Wiggle will delight a new generation of young readers. (Ages 8-12)

Framed, by James Ponti. After most 12-year-olds finish their homework, they play Minecraft or go to soccer practice, but 12-year-old Florian Bates spends his time in a very unusual way: He goes to work for the FBI. Using TOAST, a system of his own devising that stands for Theory Of All Small Things, Florian and his neighbor Margaret help the FBI uncover a foreign government spy ring, assist in the recovery of millions of dollars of stolen paintings, and still makes it home in time for curfew. Readers who love Stuart Gibbs’ Belly Up, E.L. Konigsburg’s Mixed Up Files or Elise Broach’s Masterpiece will love this first in what promises to be a delightful fun mystery series. (Ages 9-12)  PS

Updike Redux

A collection of 186 stories and a new biography are a chance to reexamine a remarkable literary life

By Stephen E. Smith

In his biography Updike, Adam Begley quotes from a letter John Updike wrote to his mother while he was a student at Harvard: “We need a writer who desires both to be great and to be popular, an author who can see America as clearly as Sinclair Lewis, but, unlike Lewis, is willing to take it to his bosom.”

Updike was describing the writer he’d become. For more than 50 years his novels, essays, poems and short stories filled America’s bookshelves, and the upper middle class, the culturati from which he drew his characters and themes, received each new volume with enthusiasm.

When Updike died of lung cancer in 2009 (addiction trumped intellect), we were left with 30 novels, 15 short story collections and umpteen books of poetry and assorted prose to appreciate anew. With the publication of Library of America’s quality two-volume edition (a boxed set) and Begley’s biography, Updike, readers have an opportunity to read or reread 186 stories (the Bech and Maples stories are published in separate volumes) arranged in order of publication. Astute readers can correlate the stories with Begley’s exposition of Updike’s richly complex life as an observer and participant in the subculture about which he wrote with extravagance and often shocking excess. Best remembered for his “Rabbit” novels, it’s Updike’s short stories, most of which were published in The New Yorker, that most closely parallel the life he lived.

Begley is quick to point out that few American fiction writers were more autobiographical than Updike — so obsessively so as to raise questions about Updike’s capacity for rational detachment. Readers unfamiliar with his short fiction are forewarned that his dominant theme is betrayal and its resultant complexities. His characters are white, usually Protestant members of the American upper middle class living in southeastern Pennsylvania or New England. His subject is adultery. The operative emotion is guilt, as explained in his 1977 story “Guilt-Gems”: “A guilt-gem is a piece of the world that has volunteered for compression. Those souls around us, living our lives with us, are gaseous clouds of being awaiting a condensation and preservation — faces, lights that glimmer out, somehow not seized, saved in the gesture and remorse.”

Updike is the master of The New Yorker short story, carefully wrought prose narratives with lengthy passages of description and meticulously rendered characters who find themselves unhappy in a world of affluence that encourages the guilty pleasures of adultery. So pervasive is this mindset that in “The Women Who Got Away” the narrator is touched with exquisite regret for potential affairs he failed to consummate: “There were women you failed ever to sleep with; these, in retrospect, have a perverse vividness, perhaps because the contacts, in the slithering ball of snakes, were so few that they have stayed distinct.”    

For all of his literary sophistication, Updike is the most parochial of writers. With a few possible exceptions — most especially his story “Varieties of Religious Experience” (a real clunker) — he wisely sticks to what he knows. Southern readers won’t discover tobacco worms, hogs and banjo-picking rednecks in his fiction (although there’s an occasional working-class hero), and his characters are, after the similitude of their re-embodiment in story after story, possessed of a mildly annoying self-indulgence and an irritating dissatisfaction with bourgeois abundance.

Moreover, the focus on the purely carnal is likely to wear thin when the stories are read without interruption. Even the most voyeuristic of readers are likely to experience a vague unease. Certainly sex has much to do with our lives, but at what point is the committed imagination overwhelmed by irrational obsession? Guilt experienced vicariously may have a temporary exhilarating effect on the reader, but it’s accompanied by a sense of sorrow at having benefited emotionally at the expense of others. This becomes especially apparent when Begley reveals Updike’s serial adultery, a philandering so obsessive that Updike was immensely proud of having made love to three women in one day, all the while living a life in which he remained a civic luminary and held responsible stations in various Protestant churches.

In the final analysis, however, Updike is more than a horndog with a thesaurus. In conveying memorable life moments, true and full of empathy, and producing examples of sense experience used to good effect, he is unsurpassed. The poignant, knifing nuances of life permeate his fiction, as with this typical passage from a pedantically sexual visit to a dental hygienist in “Tristan and Iseult”: “Sometimes his roving eyes flicked into her own, then leaped away, overwhelmed by their glory, their — as the deconstructionists say — presence. His glance didn’t dare linger even long enough to register the color of these eyes; he gathered only the spiritual, starlike afterimage of their living gel, simultaneously crystalline and watery, behind the double barrier of her glasses and safety goggles, above the shield-shaped paper mask hiding her mouth, her chin, her nostrils. So much of her was enwrapped, protected. Only her essentials were allowed to emerge, like a barnacle’s feathery appendages, her touch and her steadfast, humorless gaze.” Updike is tirelessly observant, and any careful reader of his fiction is bound to wonder if there’s an emotion, gesture or technical detail that’s gone unexplored.

Updike’s early stories are a study in the evolution of the great writer he would become, and the later stories are often burdened with excess detail and Jamesian syntactical constructs that leave the reader yearning for a misplaced comma or a dangling modifier. The less ambitious middle stories — most notably those included in the collections “Museums and Women” and “Trust Me” — are varied in subject matter  and more experimental in structure and execution. “The Orphaned Swimming Pool,” “Invention of the Horse Collar,” “Poker Night,” “Under the Microscope,” “Museums and Women,” “During the Jurassic,” “The Baluchitherium,” “The Slump” and “Still of Some Use” are departures from Updike’s formulaic adultery fiction. They’re overlooked gems that avoid the quirky, distracting The New Yorker ending and are more immediately appreciated.

Updike became the writer he described in that long ago letter to his mother. A large segment of the American public took him to their bosom, convinced that his vision of America was correct — or at least sufficiently believable. Whether his literary reputation will eclipse that of Sinclair Lewis’, well, that remains to be seen.  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.

Docs Making House Calls

By Cos Barnes

My grandmother was always visited at home by her physician. I suppose doctors called on the elderly in their homes for the patient’s convenience.

One frosty cold morning when no traffic was stirring because of snow, we called a neighboring physician because my mother was wretchedly ill with a headache. It did not matter that he was an orthopedic surgeon, or a bone doctor, as many called them in those days. He gave her a shot and she never had another headache. This is a true story.

Now there are more than 75 clinicians who provide on-site, state-of-the-art medical care to residents in senior living communities, as well as patients in private homes. Their staff includes specialists in geriatrics, internal and family medicine, neurology, infectious disease, pulmonary medicine, palliative care, podiatry and ophthalmology.

DMHC, as they label themselves, Doctors Making House Calls, serve as the primary care provider as well as urgent care clinician for all DMHC patients. Their clinicians are available 24/7 for urgent care telephone consultation. They see patients seven days a week.

They accept and directly bill Medicare and Medicaid as well as all supplemental insurance care plans.

Gone are the days of appointments that are delayed, canceled or terribly detained, the days when schoolchildren had to miss class days because of appointments.

These doctors like seeing patients in their home setting with familiar surroundings.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.  PS

Cos Barnes is a longtime contributor to PineStraw magazine. She can be contacted at cosbarnes@nc.rr.com.

PinePitch

Steal the Show

First Friday Southern Pines presents The Ballroom Thieves on Friday, Sept.2, from 5–8:30 p.m. Trio Martin Earley, Calin Peters and Devin Mauch create a captivating mélange of acoustic styles, blending folk conventions with modern hymnals, Delta blues grit with rich harmonies, and exploring the basic constructions of pop music while simultaneously rejecting its restrictions. Rain or shine, First Friday concerts are free and open to the public. Food and beverages available for purchase. The Preservation Green (grassy lot) adjacent to the Sunrise Theater, 250 NW Broad St. , Southern Pines. Info: (910) 692-8501 or firstfridaysouthernpines.com.

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Old Cars, New Tricks

On Saturday, Sept. 17, dozens of old cars will shine like new pennies on the campus of Sandhills Community College, 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. The car show, organized by the Sandhills Chapter of the Antique Automobile Club of America (AACA) and hosted by the SCC Automotive Technologies program, features live music by the Sandhills Community College Jazz Band, guided tours of the renowned Horticultural Gardens, on-site food, 50/50 and silent auctions, and awards presented by Miss Moore County. Car entry registration prior to Sept. 13 is $15 (includes food voucher and special door prizes). Registration on day of show is $20. Show is free and open to the public. Sirotek Hall, Sandhills Community College, 3395 Airport Road, Pinehurst. Info: www.ncregionaaca.com/sandhills.

Coneheads

This year, celebrate the Ice Cream Parlor’s 40th anniversary by registering for a chance to win free ice cream for life. Repeat: Free ice cream for life. Drop in for lunch or a cone before Sunday, Sept. 25, when one lucky participant will have reason to flash their sweet-toothed grin. Ice Cream Parlor, 176 NW Broad Street, Southern Pines. Info: (910) 692-7273.

Hicks in Town

Robert Hicks, New York Times best—selling author of The Widow of the South and A Separate Country, will be at The Country Bookshop on Monday, September 26, at 5 p.m. Hicks’ new novel, The Orphan Mother, tells the story of midwife and former slave Mariah Reddick, who, in the wake of tragedy, embarks on an epic quest for justice. Free and open to the public. The Country Bookshop, 140 NW Broad St., Southern Pines. Info: (910) 692-3211.

Gone Vogue

The United Way of Moore County will host a fashion extravaganza on Thursday, Oct. 6, at 6 p.m. Featured merchants include Apricot Lane, Cottage of Hope, Eloise & Co., Eve Avery, Morgan Miller, and Patricia. Eat, drink and be dazzled. Tickets: $40. Proceeds benefit United Way of Moore County partner agencies. Grand Hall at Penick Village, 500 E. Rhode Island Ave., Southern Pines Info: (910) 692-2413 or unitedwaymoore.com.

Crème de la Crème

You won’t want to miss Judson Theatre Company’s production of “Twelve Angry Men,” the electrifying Reginald Rose classic about a jury forced to decide one boy’s fate. Emmy-winning Broadway and TV star John Wesley Shipp (“The Flash,” “Dawson’s Creek,” “As the World Turns,” “Guiding Light”) headlines a cast from New York and North Carolina, which includes Broadway actor Mike Boland and local pros Rick McDermott, Chris Thomas (from Star 102.5), and Adam W. Faw.  Show runs Thursday, Sept. 22, at 7 p.m., Friday, Sept. 23, at 8 p.m., Saturday, Sept. 24, at 2 and 8 p.m., and Sunday, Sept. 25, at 3 p.m. Tickets: $38 (advance); $43 (day of show); $20 (students, military, SCC faculty and staff). Owens Auditorium, Sandhills Community College. Tickets/Info: (800) 514-3849 or judsontheatre.com.

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The Hot Spot

Best thing about a Rooster’s Wife show at Poplar Knight Spot? There isn’t a bad seat in the house. You’ll just want to make sure you snag one. Here’s what’s hot at the Spot this month:

Sept. 2 – Classical/nuevo flamenco guitarist Ed Stephenson. One word: virtuoso. Tickets: $15. Listen: edwardstephenson.com.

Sept. 11 – Scythian, Celtic rock band with strains of Gypsy and klezmer. Sure to make the walls and floor shake. Tickets: $20 (advance); $25. Listen: www.scythianmusic.com

Sept. 16 –  Award-winning singer/songwriter Liz Longley breathes soul into country pop. Tickets: $15. Listen: www.lizlongley.com.

Sept. 18  – Will Overman Band delivers Southern fried rock with Americana fixin’s.  Locust Honey String Band opens. Tickets: $15 (advance); $20. Listen: willovermanband.com.

Sept. 22  – Guy Davis Trio spells American Blues. Tickets: $20 (advance); $25. Listen: guydavis.com.

Sept. 29  – Frank Solivan & Dirty Kitchen are a bluegrass festival attraction. Tickets: 20 (advance); $25. Listen: dirtykitchenband.com.

Doors open at 6 p.m. All shows start at 6:46 p.m. The Rooster’s Wife, 114 Knight St., Aberdeen. Info: (910) 944-7502 or www.theroosterswife.org.

Trikes Are for Kids

The Tour de Trike makes a kid out of everyone. On Thursday, Sept. 8, at 5:30 p.m., come watch your neighbors cruise down West New Hampshire Avenue in a tricycle race to benefit area nonprofits. Or, better yet, pedal alongside them. If you’re lucky, the giant pink gorilla will catch a ride on the back of somebody else’s bike. Entry: $100 donation. Costumes encouraged. Info: United Way of Moore County, (910) 692-2413.

The Real Dealers

Serious collectors already know what’s happening in Cameron on Saturday, Oct.1. The Annual Fall Antiques Street Fair, of course. Rain or shine, 250 dealers will display their antiques and collectibles in the shops and streets along the Historic District on Carthage Street from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. The old smells are free. Info: (910) 245-7001, (910) 245-3020, or www.antiquesofcameron.com.

Gone to Temple

Director/cGavan Pamer is traveling from Pittsburgh, to direct Temple Theatre’s production of “Anything Goes,” the classic Cole Porter musical about a st  ble cast features Broadway veteran Peggy Taphorn, 2013 Miss North Carolina, Hailey Best, and regional stars Lynda Clark and Sean Powell. Pamer and Taphorn, now in her ninth season at the helm of the Temple, toured nationally with the show and are delighted to be reunited. Says Taphorn, “Our audiences have come to expect lavish musical extravaganzas. They won’t be disappointed.” Show times for are Thursdays at 2 p.m., Fridays at 2 and 8 p.m., Saturdays at 8 p.m., and Sundays at 2 p.m. Tickets: $14–25. Temple Theatre, 120 Carthage St., Sanford. Box office: (919) 774-4155. Info: templeshows.com.

Walkin’ Man

By Jim Dodson

After two years of being sidelined from a severe injury, I recently underwent knee surgery and began walking to work in the mornings again and with our dogs in the evenings.

Frankly I’d forgotten how good it feels — how walking through a busy world at a neighborly pace provides useful time to think and helps one notice important small things right in front of your nose. 

“I tell people that I walk for sanity, not vanity,” says my friend Dennis Quaintance, the Greensboro hotelier who has been a dedicated daily walker in historic Green Hill Cemetery for years. “A walk helps me make sense of the world.”

The health benefits of a daily walk are also amply documented, and I’ve even managed to drop a dozen pounds since I resumed my regular walks three or four weeks ago. Soon I hope to be up to walking a complete golf course again, just in time for my wife and me to slip away to Scotland later this month.

In some ways my involuntary removal from golf prompted a true awakening. I probably took the ability to walk for granted and am both relieved and resolved to be back cruising the world on two feet.

Ditto my new friend and fellow golfer Kevin Reinert.

We met last Father’s Day at a family golf event I host annually for the Pinehurst Resort, a gathering of like-minded souls created around a surprise best-selling book of mine called Final Rounds, a story about taking my father back to England and Scotland, where he learned to play golf during the Second World War.

On the first night of the event I typically welcome 125 or so folks from around the country and give a little talk aimed at setting a lighthearted tone for golf and fellowship.

After this year’s opening dinner, a fit-looking fellow about my age came up to say hello with his wife, Jean.

“This is my first year here,” explained Reinert, offering me his hand.  “I just want to say thank you for saving my life.”

I smiled, waiting for the punch line.

But there wasn’t one.

“No, seriously,” he said, “your book on Ben Hogan inspired me to get up and teach myself to walk again.”

And with that, he told me an absolutely extraordinary story of courage and one man’s resolve to put his shattered world — and legs — back together.

It was a beautiful evening a year ago this October when Kevin Reinert put his golf bag on a trolley at Greensboro’s Starmount Forest Country Club, hoping to get in a quick 18 before meeting Jean at a special fundraiser at the club. “It had been raining for days,” he remembers, “but the weather had suddenly cleared. It was a beautiful evening.”

Reinert, 62, is a retired Air Force colonel who spent almost 30 years working in recruiting and public affairs for the Air Force and Air Force Reserve. He was the administrator responsible for overseeing public affairs for 35 different Reserve units around the United States and the men who helped transform the Reserve’s recruiting profile.

Eleven years ago, Kevin and Jean, who met and married while both were captains on active duty in 1985, relocated from Georgia to Greensboro, where Kevin went to work for The Brooks Group, a leading sales management consulting firm. Before being deployed to Ramstein Air Base in Germany, Jean Reinert taught nursing at UNCG and returned from active duty to become nursing administrator for Cone Health.

“Greensboro was a place we fell for in an instant,” Reinert explained. “It has everything, great restaurants, theaters, wonderful people and a location that was perfect for us — the mountains in one direction, the coast in another. Our kids were grown and doing their thing, and North Carolina really felt like home.”

But all of that changed in an instant as Reinert pushed his golf trolley toward Starmount’s beautiful finishing tee.

“There was a group ahead of me, just out in the fairway, when my phone went off alerting me to incoming messages. I looked down, thinking it might be Jean, as I walked toward the tee. That’s when I heard this ferocious sound. I looked up but I didn’t quite register what I was seeing.”

What he saw was a Kia Rio with smashed side mirrors barreling directly toward him over the course’s cart path.

“I had just enough time to try and jump out of its way. So I jumped, hoping — I don’t know — that maybe I’d land on the hood and roll over the top like you see guys do in the movies. I didn’t get high enough,” he notes with a laugh.

The car struck him at the knees and knocked him over the hood and roof before barreling on. Reinert was tossed 30 feet from the site of impact, landing on the tee. The car was estimated to have been traveling anywhere from 35 to 45 mph, driven by a man who was on a violent robbery and mugging spree, trying to outrun the police. He managed to get one hole farther before the car went out of control and wound up in one of Starmount’s meandering creeks. The driver set off on foot, commandeered another car and was later apprehended.

“My first thought, as I lay there, was a kind of stunned disbelief. I saw that one leg was lying at a 90 degree angle from my body, and when I tried to lift myself up, my arm wouldn’t function.”

Workmen from a nearby residence hurried over, calling 911. The group ahead also rushed back. Reinert asked one of the golfers, a fellow member named Mike Corbett, to find his phone and call his wife. “Jean was over at UNCG and thought I said I’d been hit by a golf cart. She hurried over and actually got there before the ambulance did.”

Owing to heavy rains, the EMS unit couldn’t reach the spot on the course where Reinert lay, but head professional Bill Hall hurried out with a flatbed cart just as a fire unit arrived with a rescue board.

“They got me on the board and Bill drove me back to the parking lot, where the ambulance was waiting. It was a bumpy ride and he kept apologizing. I was probably close to being in shock but joked to him that he’d better not charge me for a cart because I’d walked the course. He thought that was funny. I also told him that if I’d parred the hole, I probably would have shot 87. He couldn’t believe I was conscious and making jokes. But I knew I was in pretty bad shape.”

Both Reinert’s knees were crushed. He’d suffered a shattered femur, a broken tibia, a broken right ankle and a fractured right humerus bone, the upper bone of the arm. “There was a deep cut on my face but, amazingly, no head injuries,” he said. “I was conscious the whole way, already wondering if I would be able to walk again.”

The next morning he underwent six hours of surgery. This was followed by four more surgeries over the ensuing weeks. “The doctors couldn’t give me a clear prognosis or even tell me if I would ever be able to walk or referee or even play golf again.” Besides golf, one of Kevin Reinert’s other pleasures was a budding avocation as a college-level lacrosse official.

After 18 days in the hospital, he was sent home.

He began therapy three days a week that continues to this day.

“The hardest part was just not knowing what was ahead. I sat and tried to watch TV, but the news was so discouraging I decided to turn it off and read books instead.”

An old pal from Long Island who taught him to play golf during their college years together at Adelphi University sent him a box of books, one of which was Ben Hogan: An American Life, my biography of professional golf’s most elusive superstar.

At the height of his success, while returning home from a golf tournament in Arizona, Hogan and his wife, Valerie, were struck head-on by a Greyhound bus that shattered Hogan’s legs and nearly killed the star golfer. His obituary, in fact, went out over the Associated Press wires before it was learned that he was actually hanging on in a rural Texas hospital. Doctors advised Hogan he would likely never walk again, much less play championship golf.

“Frankly I was really down before those books arrived, worried that I might not even be able to walk and play golf,” Reinert admits. “There were real similarities in our stories. I was so moved by his determination to somehow get back to the game — to simply walking — I vowed to myself that I would do the same.”

In 1950, at Merion Golf Club outside Philadelphia, Ben Hogan did indeed come back, capturing the U.S Open on a pair of legs that had little circulation — widely regarded as one of the most heroic comebacks in sports history.

Kevin Reinert made his own big comeback, too. One evening last May, family and 60 or so friends turned out to watch him finish playing Starmount’s 18th hole. “I was blown away so many folk came out to watch,” he said. “Everyone had been so encouraging. I’d made so many new good friends. The support I got from complete strangers was incredible. I simply wouldn’t have made it without them — especially my wife and children. My daughter LeeAnne, who is also a nurse, really pushed me at times.”

Son Phillip, an Air Force flight engineer working at the Boeing factory in Seattle, was also present to play that final hole with his father. He’d flown home the day after the accident on air miles donated by Mike Corbett.

Reinert was wearing a cap given to him by a friend that cleverly read: I Was Run Over By A Car On The Golf Course. What’s Your Excuse?

Another gifted cap read Starmount 18: The Toughest Hole in Golf.

“It was very emotional for us all,” he says. “Made even more amazing by what happened before we teed off.”

On the facing hill, a Scottish bagpiper strolled out in full ceremonial regalia and began playing “Amazing Grace.” Another new friend offered to be Reinert’s caddie.

“Somehow I made bogey on the hole, which allowing for my handicap let me write a par on the card,” he explained to me as we played Pinehurst No. 4 on the first day of the Father’s Day golf fest.

It was his first full round of golf since the accident and he did very well indeed, shooting in the low 90s with both legs wrapped in athletic supports, just like Hogan.

The next day, he even walked mighty Pinehurst No. 2 with a caddie.

“This was one of the greatest weekends of my life,” he told me later. “It feels good to be back.”  PS

Contact editor Jim Dodson at jim@thepilot.com.

Summer Well

Must reading for your craft cocktail enjoyment

By Tony Cross

The craft cocktail movement has been in full effect for well over a decade now, yet a Moscow Mule is still foreign to a majority of locals in the Sandhills. I’ll admit that we’re slow to catch up on what’s happening in bigger cities; I had no clue about such cocktails until three years ago. When I started to delve into the world of balancing drinks, there was already so much information out there to give me a head start: I would watch videos on YouTube, check out menus from bars and restaurants across the globe, and, of course, study books from respected and famous bartenders. There are so many great reads, but I’ve picked three that have inspired me when I’ve prepared menus and drinks for events, and friends.

Speakeasy, by Jason Kosmas and Dushan Zaric

Written by the guys that started up Employees Only, one of the first craft cocktail joints that started the movement at the beginning of the millennium, Speakeasy was the first book I read when I became serious about making drinks. I first discovered Employees Only in a small New York Times article about a bar that sold their homemade grenadine and other syrups to guests and surrounding bars. Needless to say, that article piqued my interest and got the ball rolling on my curiosity for cocktails and the fancy establishments that perfected them. Ice is discussed in one of the first chapters; this may seem pretentious at first, but ice is a crucial ingredient to any good cocktail. Classics are covered, as well as many signature drinks that found their way onto the EO menu over the years.

Billionaire Cocktail

2 oz Baker’s 7 Year Old Bourbon

1 oz lemon juice

½ 1/2 oz simple syrup

½ 1/2 oz grenadine

¼ 1/4 oz absinthe bitters (or substitute Pernod)

1 lemon wheel

Combine bourbon, lemon juice, syrup, grenadine and bitters into a mixing glass. Add ice and shake like hell for 10 seconds. Double strain into a chilled cocktail glass. Garnish with lemon wheel.

Bitterman’s Field Guide to Bitters and Amari, by Mark Bitterman

This one isn’t even a year old yet, but has been a staple at my home. Mark Bitterman has two shops (New York City, and Portland, Oregon) called The Meadow, which sells salts, chocolates and bitters. I was lucky enough to step into The Meadow a few years ago, and I was quickly overwhelmed by the large selection of tonics and bitters. Having this book on hand would’ve been a godsend. It’s only fitting that Bitterman’s passion is also part of his last name; his attention to detail goes above and beyond when describing amari and bitters. When breaking down the various brands of bitters, Bitterman uses a rating system from 1 (least) to 5 (most) on aromatics, bitterness and sweetness levels. There are also tasting notes to describe each product, along with the types of drinks that each one pairs with well. The same rating system and descriptions are used in his “Amari” section. In addition to describing practically every bitters on the planet, there are also recipes for making your own bitters (with a sitting time of less than a week!), cooking with bitters, and, of course, making cocktails with bitters. Bitterman gives plenty of examples of how switching up your bitters arsenal puts a great twist on the classics.

This recipe comes from Kirk Estopinal, bartender at Cure in New Orleans, and his now nowhere to be found Rogue Cocktails book (I borrowed it from a friend last year). Bitterman published this in his Field Guide, and it’s absolutely delicious.

Angostura Sour

3/4 oz lemon juice

1 egg white*

1 1/2 oz Angostura bitters

1 oz simple syrup (1:1)

Dry-shake the lemon juice and the egg white. (Put both ingredients into a shaker, and shake without ice. We do this to break up the protein bonds in the egg white; the result is a frothy, velvety texture in your cocktail.) Add the bitters, syrup, and ice and shake hard for 30 seconds. Strain into a chilled cocktail coupe.

*Largely misunderstood, using egg whites in cocktails has been common practice since cocktails were created way back when. Many people are concerned about the risk of salmonella, but as long as you’re using organic/cage-free eggs (with the combination of high-proof alcohol), you’ll be good to go.

Death & Co. Modern Classic Cocktails, by David Kaplan, Nick Fauchald, Alex Day

The hype behind this book before it came out was all over the internet. I ordered it as soon as it became available, and was blown away on my first read. This is definitely, IMO, the best cocktail book out there. Death & Company opened in 2006 in New York City, making its mark in the craft cocktail movement. They’ve won awards at the annual Tales of the Cocktail convention in NOLA (Best Cocktail Menu, and Best American Bar), and with 500 cocktails to look over, it’s easy to see what a creative force this bar has been with bartenders from past and present. Death & Co. has a section on every spirit, including brand recommendations; sections on juicing, ice and tools; how to taste-evaluate cocktails, and even pages here and there devoted to their regulars telling fond stories about their first or favorite times at the bar with their favorite cocktail and its recipe on the side page. Too much to say about this work of art.

Shattered Glasser by phil Ward, 2008

“I love it when one of our regulars asks us to create a cocktail on the spot based on crazy criteria — and it’s even better when we can pull off a decent drink on the first try. One night Avery Glasser, the man behind Bittermens bitters (no relation to Mark Bitterman) and one of the bar’s original regulars, asked me to make him a drink that contained all of his favorite ingredients. The problem was that he likes a lot of weird shit. But, I gave it a shot, splitting both the base spirit and its modifiers, and it resulted in a surprisingly balanced drink.” — PW

1 oz El Tesoro Reposado Tequila

½1/2 oz Los Amantes Mezcal Joven

3/4 oz Carpano Antica Formula Vermouth

1/2 oz Van Oosten Batavia Arrack

1/4 oz St. Elizabeth Allspice Dram

1/4 oz Benedictine

2 dashes Bittermens Xocolatl Mole Bitters

Stir all ingredients over ice, then strain into a coupe. No garnish. PS

Tony Cross is a bartender who runs cocktail catering company Reverie Cocktails in Southern pines. He can also recommend a vitamin supplement for the morning after at Nature’s Own.

Kidding Around

How U.S. Kids Golf conquered the world

By Lee Pace

Dan Van Horn was coaching his sons’ youth league baseball teams in the mid-1990s when he noticed the quality and variety of baseball bats being manufactured to address the youth market. Versions in aluminum and carbon fiber polymers with narrow barrels, lighter weights and nuanced weight distribution helped kids take a healthy cut and develop their form without being burdened with weights their small limbs and core couldn’t handle.

It occurred to Van Horn, a lifelong golfer, former mini-tour player and a father with an interest in his children learning the game, that the golf industry did a poor job addressing adolescent golfers in a similar fashion.

“You could find junior sets with a 3-wood, 5-, 7- and 9-irons that were essentially adult clubs, sawed off and a ‘junior’ label slapped on,” the Atlanta businessman says of his 1995 “ah-ha” moment. “The clubs were too heavy, the kids didn’t hit many good shots, and they didn’t have any fun. I sensed there was an opportunity there.”

The first domino fell one year later when he incorporated U.S. Kids Golf with the idea of manufacturing “ultra-light” clubs for kids based on their body heights with shaft flexes and swing weights geared to each length. The next domino fell in 1997 when the first club rolled off the assembly line.

“It was all about having fun,” Van Horn says. “If you play well, you’ll have fun. If you’re having fun, you might buy in for a lifetime.”

The dominoes kept falling through the years — establishing competitions for kids on local, regional, national and worldwide stages; setting junior-oriented tee markers so a 9-year-old could hit a driver and 6-iron on a par-4 like his dad does; coming to Pinehurst in 2006 for world championships that have become staples in the local golf scene; and creating coaching programs to help PGA of America members learn how to better teach and connect with kids and sell their memberships on the value of drawing children into golf.

In 2015 one of the most interesting dominoes yet fell: the purchase of a struggling club in the Sandhills, and the establishment of a working “golf laboratory” with a mission of teaching and growing the game among juniors and families. U.S. Kids Golf Foundation, established in 2000 as a supplement to the U.S. Kids equipment business, bought Longleaf Golf & Country Club in April 2015 and renamed it Longleaf Golf & Family Club.

“We’d been coming here for ten years and kept seeing Longleaf slide a little bit,” Van Horn says. “We wanted to have a presence in the community. We felt very welcome here, very supported by the community. The synergies around the Pinehurst/Southern Pines area as a golf capital, a golf mecca, have been important to us. It seemed like a great place to layer in more of the idea of kids golf, family golf.”

Van Horn and his Atlanta-based company knew what it was like to be a vendor to the golf industry. They understood managing and running tournaments. But there was one key perspective they lacked in the daunting task of expanding a game that is difficult to learn, time-consuming to play, requires considerable financial investment and is fraught with timeless traditions and oftentime stodgy attitudes.

“We wanted to experience the ‘other side of the track,’” Van Horn says. “We wanted to see the challenges in the golf shop on a real-time basis, understand the hindrances in running kids’ golf. We wanted a working laboratory where we could practice our vision of growing the game among kids and families while not disrupting traditional men’s play and club play.”

Van Horn smiles and acknowledges there is a certain dog-catches-the-car-now-what element to the foundation’s fourteen months running Longleaf, a Dan Maples-designed course that opened in the late-1980s golf boom but has struggled amid the early 2000s recession and 2008 financial collapse. Eighty of the course’s sprinklers quit working last summer, and the new owners invested in a new computerized switching and monitoring system to better manage the flow of water around the course. But the sprinklers still didn’t work properly.

“We eventually figured out the original lines ran under Midland Road, and over time the road sank and collapsed the pipes,” Van Horn says. “We wanted to learn the golf operations business. And we’re getting a full education.”

The club facility at Longleaf is teeming this July morning with kids, parents, volunteers and U.S. Kids staff descending here and at Pinehurst Resort & Country Club three miles away for the Red White & Blue Invitational, one of a series of regional competitions leading to the U.S. Kids World Championships spread across ten Sandhills area clubs in early August. This year’s competition is expected to bring nearly 1,600 golfers from more than fifty nations.

The Sandhills wasn’t quite sure what to expect in 2005 when the first U.S. Kids event was held and thousands of visitors from three dozen counties staged a parade through the middle of Pinehurst. All of a sudden, 8-year-olds were playing hide-and-seek in the halls of the venerable Carolina Hotel. Kids hit shots from sand traps by day, sneaked back in to build sand castles by twilight. Kitchen staffs learned to make pigs-in-a-blanket and were ready for French toast orders en masse in the breakfast buffet lines. The 2012 championship was the subject of a 100-minute documentary, The Short Game, that still runs on Netflix and profiles eight youngsters from around the world and their quest to win a world championship.

“I have never seen anything like these kids,” says lifelong Pinehurst resident Marty McKenzie. “These are the highest quality youth on the planet participating in the greatest sport on the planet, and it all takes place in our beloved Pinehurst.”

One initiative from Van Horn and his company that affects not only kids but women, seniors and men whose egos will allow them to stray from the traditional blue-white-red tee system is the implementation of a seven-tee configuration that puts golfers at the correct length of course based on their average driving distance. The practice ground at Longleaf is arrayed with a series of brightly colored stakes numbered one through seven, the closest stake colored blue and located 100 yards away, the middle stake orange at 175 yards and the farthest colored red and set 250 yards off.

A golfer’s average carry dictates which of the seven sets of tees he uses when he gets to the first tee of the course, with the tees at Longleaf ranging from 3,200 to 6,600 yards. The system is clearly explained in colorful signage on the practice tee and first tee. U.S. Kids is working with the American Golf Course Architects Society to educate the industry on setting up courses in this fashion, and the Longleaf staff has entertained emissaries from clubs such as Medinah in Chicago who are interested in making their clubs more welcoming to juniors and newcomers.

“You hear jokes in the industry about three million golfers a year in, three million out,” Van Horn says. “No one has done anything to help people get over what it’s like to be a newcomer in golf. That’s what Longleaf is all about.

“Now we have women playing a course 3,200 yards. It’s faster and more fun. They’re making pars and some birdies. Now they can actually reach a par-4 in regulation. Before they didn’t stand a chance.”

When Pinehurst hosted the 2014 U.S. Open and Women’s Open, Van Horn and his staff counted 26 competitors in the two fields combined who were U.S. Kids alumni, among them Justin Thomas, Patrick Reed, Lexi Thompson, Beau Hossler, Smylie Kaufman and Mariah Stackhouse.

Van Horn is asked if he could ever have envisioned the empire he’s created over two decades when he wanted better junior clubs for his kids.

“I have a lot of dreams, but I try to be faithful to the vision,” he says. “I take dreams one day at a time and try to be the best every day with it. You always can hope and have grandiose plans. I’m honestly frustrated that it’s not bigger than it is. I didn’t get into this for financial gain. I am doing it because I felt called spiritually and I feel like it’s my life’s mission. Maybe my entire life, I didn’t know what I was supposed to be doing. Now I do and here I am.”  PS

Chapel Hill-based writer Lee Pace is the author of a dozen books on golf history, including The Golden Age of Pinehurst—The Story of the Rebirth of No. 2.

Travels With My Plant

Wherever I’ve lived, a geranium in a pot welcomes me home

By Deborah Salomon

One geranium, pink or red, in a clay pot.

Wherever I have lived, for more than fifty years, this has stood near the front door — a symbol, but of what? Geraniums in pots or window boxes remind me of photos and paintings of the French countryside I long to visit. The look is simple, elemental, classic, right.

When giving directions, I’d say, “The house with the geranium on the stoop.” This worked since neighbors chose pre-planted urns or hanging baskets.

My geranium owns a backstory.

The first I positioned by the door of an ugly house on an even uglier street where for fifteen summers I kept my eyes on the pot when walking up the front steps, to soften the blow. Those geraniums were always red, never salmon. My mother preferred concrete urns overflowing with salmon-colored geraniums; my dislike for the color was complicated, mirroring our relationship.

Several moves later found me in an adorable cottage, in a small but perfect Vermont city overlooking mountains and lake. The front stoop barely had room for the pot, but we managed.

Geraniums are annuals; they don’t overwinter indoors. In September I would bid farewell to the bloomed-out plant, dump the soil, wash the pot and, come spring, start anew.

I can’t remember why I brought this one inside, sometime in the early 1990s. My cottage was built against a hill, which allowed an above-ground basement. A previous owner had made the basement into a studio apartment with kitchen area and bathroom — convenient when the kids and their friends visited, otherwise unused.

The apartment door opened onto a wooded backyard. Beside the door was a covered area where I kept lawn furniture and planters. Except something about this clay pot with its spent stem made me set it on a basement windowsill.

I closed the café curtains — and forgot.

Those years are still a blur. My daughter, Wendy, died in 1991, changing everything; sunlight looked different, food had no taste, I couldn’t bear music, especially the folk songs she played on her guitar. I craved invisibility. Except I had an exhausting (and visible) job as features/food reporter at a good newspaper. Work must continue.

Winters are long in Vermont — long, cold and dark. Snow covers the ground from Thanksgiving until late March. That first winter without her was especially cold and snowy, which reminded me how much Wendy loved fresh powder. An accomplished ski racer, at 14 she trained with the Canadian National Junior Ski Team at their summer camp, in Argentina.

By April the sun was higher, stronger, illuminating winter dirt. I lugged the mop and vacuum to the basement, pulled aside the café curtains to open the window and let in fresh air.

There, on the sill, shrouded with dust, stood the forgotten clay pot. Miracle of miracles, from the withered stem erupted a green shoot, with two tiny leaves. From bone-dry soil a germ of life, sensing spring, had burst forth.

Neglected, against all odds . . . survival.

“It happens, sometimes,” a gardener friend told me.

My feelings were intense. I wanted to document the experience. The short column — barely 400 words — was the first in a weekly series on life’s vagaries that ran for more than a decade.

I have endured other losses and moved three times since that spring. In the Sandhills, with sun, heat and rain aplenty, geraniums grow into bushes. This year, mine — purchased at the farmers’ market — is a stunning purplish-pink, quite an Impressionist image with Lucky, my velvet-black cat, lying beside it.

This desire for a solo geranium in a basic clay pot remains strong. Was the tiny green shoot a sign that life survives circumstance? That a single flower can mitigate ugliness? I’m not a believer in mysteries or miracles. But I do know this: When I drive up and see that bloom, no matter locale or climate, house or apartment, I’m home. PS

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

Rediscovering a North Carolina Treasure

The works of John Ehle

By Gwenyfar Rohler

“We’re bringing John Ehle’s books back into print,” explained Kevin Morgan Watson, gesturing to Press 53’s display at the North Carolina Writer’s Conference. I nodded knowingly and inwardly hoped that my confusion didn’t show on my face. I was too embarrassed to admit that I wasn’t familiar with John Ehle or his work. To remedy my chagrin, I sought out Ehle’s The Land Breakers, and I was stunned that it had taken me until the age of 36 to discover his work.

The Land Breakers begins Ehle’s seven-book series exploring the settlement and development of the Appalachian Mountains in North Carolina. It opens in 1779 and primarily traces the journey of Mooney Wright, a Scots-Irish orphan who has recently completed his indentured servitude in the New World. Wright buys a piece of land, 640 acres of good, “bottom land.” When he and his young wife finally arrive after a perilous journey to this promised, much-dreamed-of prize, Ehle captures their rapturous disbelief and elation with honest realism. Reading it doesn’t so much remind one of being young, in love and filled with dreams and wonder, but actually takes one back to inhabiting that space in a way few writers can.

Ehle’s family history on his mother’s side can be traced to one of the first three families to settle Appalachian North Carolina, the frontier that The Land Breakers and its six companion novels chronicle. Throughout his adult life, he continued to live in the western part of the state (when not in New York or London for his wife, Rosemary Harris’, acting career), with homes near both Penland and Winston-Salem. From his author’s bio: “His interest in the folkways of the past . . . is an interest in the present, in where we are all going, what we are leaving, and what we will need to find replacements for.” Perhaps that is part of what makes The Land Breakers so compelling. On the surface, it appears to be a book about man versus nature and the insurmountable opportunities around him, but it is so much more.

In The Land Breakers, as each new family moves into the valley Mooney Wright has settled, Ehle introduces their strengths and weaknesses and the impact they will each have on the collective survival of the settlement. None of the characters are merely two-dimensional parodies of an idea; rather, they are all flawed yet desirable human beings struggling with their own mortality against a wilderness far more powerful than they are. The journey the characters make toward understanding what is essential for their survival and success is so captivating I could not put the book down. Ehle explores both life’s beauty and horror. Spoiler alert! The scene involving the snake attacks at night might be the most frightening three pages I have read in years. Forget the bogeyman and the phantoms of Stephen King — these snakes left me white-knuckled and twitching.

In 1967, John Ehle married Tony Award–winning English actress Rosemary Harris. With a film résumé that includes Beau Brummell, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, George Sand in Notorious Woman, Desdemona in Othello, Tom & Viv, and even Spider-Man, Harris has a career of legend built on a solid foundation of craft. Perhaps inspired partly by witnessing Harris’ film experiences, in 1974 Ehle released The Changing of the Guard, a book that chronicles the production of a big-budget biopic of Louis XVI. Were it not for the intensity of the writing and skillful use of metaphor that slowly overtakes the action of the book, it would be hard to believe the same man wrote both novels.

The Changing of the Guard is a prismatic display of storytelling. On the surface it tells the story of an aging British actor who sees himself as a contemporary of Richard Burton and Laurence Olivier, making his last big picture: a beautiful, sweeping costume drama of the last days of Louis XVI during the French Revolution. His real-life wife is cast to play his mistress, and her best friend is to be Marie Antoinette. From the outset the power struggle appears to be between the actor and the brash young director that the studio insisted upon. But slowly, the book evolves into Ehle’s retelling of the private life of Louis during the revolution, serving as both a metaphor for the war waged on set and the changes in the actor’s private life. The line between art and reality is crossed so frequently and subtly — almost a form of magical realism — that, in the hands of a lesser writer, the story line and conceit would be hokey and hard to follow. But from Ehle’s pen, it is completely believable. The part that makes the book painful to stomach is the needless human cruelty we are capable of inflicting upon each other — which Ehle demonstrates in broad strokes through the French Revolution and very pointedly with exquisite, tearing saber thrusts in the personal interactions between the actors and director.

Where The Land Breakers is about man versus nature and forces greater than man could comprehend, The Changing of the Guard takes on the inevitable autumn of life that comes to all of us and the painful battle with a world that no longer needs us. At their core both books explore the experience of giving yourself wholly to something bigger, greater than yourself. Be it art or the development of a farm, both are about legacies and leaving some sign that you passed through this world.

Similarly, Kevin Morgan Watson has dedicated himself to the enterprise of publishing and creating an outlet for work he believes in (and I am forever grateful to him for bringing Ehle’s books back into print). Ehle manages to look at very specific stories: the settlement and growth of the Appalachians, the transition in the film world from beautiful, bright costume dramas with stylized performances to dark, realistic depictions of life before electricity, a world of people who talk to each other like real people instead of caricatures. Ehle finds the universal struggle that speaks to readers, even if you have never built a log cabin or operated a guillotine.

Many people are preoccupied with their legacy; few people understand that legacy is something we begin creating every morning when we wake up, before we understand our own mortality. Perhaps Mooney Wright put it best: “A person becomes part of what he does . . . grows into what grows around him, and if he works the land, he comes to be the land, an owner of and slave to it.”  PS

Gwenyfar Rohler spends her days managing her family’s bookstore on Front Street.

Small Town Talk

There’s meaning beneath and beyond the words we speak. And something in the silence between them

By Clyde Edgerton

When I was growing up, most of the men in my family — a dozen or so uncles and older cousins — didn’t talk much. A conversation on the porch on a Sunday afternoon among, say, a couple of older cousin men, my daddy, Big Clyde (my namesake uncle) and Uncle Clem would go something like this:

“I’ll tell you one thing . . . that was a big tree they cut down over there.”

Silence. Maybe four, five seconds. “Yeah . . . sure was.”

More silence. A full minute.

“Did Benny buy that sitting lawnmower?”

“Don’t think so.”

Three minutes of silence. A car comes by.

Uncle Clyde sucks on one end of a toothpick while holding the other end, making a little noise between his teeth. Then he lowers the toothpick. “I don’t think I’d want one.”

“One what — big tree?”

“Sitting lawnmower.”

Somebody yawns.

“Me neither.”

More silence.  A car comes by.

That’s pretty much it, folks.

It was different with my mother and a couple of her sisters at the grocery store or during lunch at the Golden Corral. But here’s the deal: Not only did they talk to each other, it seemed like they talked to everybody else — mostly about family, people known in common, maybe what was on the news, but also about cooking, flowers, furniture refinishing, family history, family stories, gardening, misbehavior and more family stories. I think they automatically saw strangers as interesting.

That talk from the women in my family gave me a grounding I didn’t recognize, a grounding I didn’t feel in full until adulthood. Recently, I have realized that this talk was, in a sense, important and precious.

With them, I’d walk up to a young man tending the vegetable section at the grocery store. “Oh, my goodness,” my mother or an aunt would say to the young man, “these tomatoes look almost good enough to buy. What’s your name?”

“Robert.”

“Robert what?”

“Robert Wright.”

“The Lowe’s Grove Wrights or the Oak Grove Wrights?”

“Oak Grove.”

“I’ll bet you know Harvey, Dudley’s son.”

“Yes, ma’am. He’s my uncle.”

“No! Really? I haven’t seen him in six or eight years. Did his eyes ever get OK?”

“Oh, yes ma’am. They’re all healed up now.”

“[To another aunt] Didn’t Mildred used to date him?”

“No. She dated Simon. Robert, you have an Uncle Simon?”

“Yes, ma’am. He was in here yesterday.”

And so on.

I’d be standing there. “Clyde,” my mother would say, “this nice man takes care of the vegetables.”

I grew up believing that it was OK to approach people and ask them questions, to have faith that people would more likely answer than turn back to the tomatoes.

I’m glad that as a child I spent a lot of time with these women in my family and that I wasn’t raised mainly by men who didn’t talk much. Because as in so many things, how you start out eventually comes back to either comfort or haunt you. And more and more I see the advantages of looking into another person’s face, say, sitting or standing across from me, and surfing the channels of info behind their eyes, info that’s likely to come to me in words. It’s great research for writing novels, for learning about how things work — whatever the topic might be. There is meaning in such talk. Meaning found beneath and beyond the words. Such talk is somehow connected to the way we ought to be — approaching each other, without fear, just to talk a little bit.  PS

Clyde Edgerton is the author of ten novels, a memoir and a new work, Papadaddy’s Book for New Fathers. He is the Thomas S. Kenan III Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing at UNCW.