The Pleasures of Life Dept.

Be Prepared

Malevolent Mercury will strike again

By Beth MacDonald

I never gave any credence to things like virtual chain letters, ghost stories, urban legends, or certain celestial events that are credited with affecting our wellbeing. The dire consequences if we should fail to pass them along, conjure them through a mirror, or change our travel plans never fazed me. All of that changed when Mercury went into retrograde last March.

When Mercury goes into retrograde it’s like a fortune cookie telling you to hide under your bed in the fetal position until that pesky planet goes back into prograde, whatever that is. But, make no mistake, Mercury was out to get us. The Old Farmer’s Almanac practically said so directly. Prograde may sound like a cherry flavored sports drink crammed full of electrolytes, but according to Google it’s a real live astrological term. And we were in desperate need of it.

After having a series of impossibly negative days during this mystical Mercury interlude — the kind that makes you want to eat a pint of ice cream and cry into a bag of Doritos — I called my friend Sara. Everything was wrong. Whah, whah, whah. Her reply, “Mercury’s in retrograde.” Oh, fine. Would I be protected from it if I passed that message through Facebook to 10 friends?

I had to go to a legitimate, reputable, scholarly source to research this phenomenon. I went back to Google. Of course, my studies at the University of Google taught me to go to the first link that popped up. The Old Farmer’s Almanac: the preeminent source on all things astronomy. Indeed, Mercury was in retrograde.

That meant I could blame everything on that fact and that fact alone. Potential disasters included, but were not limited to, electronics going on the fritz; travel plans being disrupted; a state of confusion (how this differs from my every day life I’m not sure); and a preoccupation with the past. I’d also be blaming any future weight gain on Mercury. It still sounded like nonsense. I wasn’t a true believer until the Ides of March confirmed the credibility of my Doctorate in Googling.

On a brisk morning, after my usual Friday Trash Dash/Cardio HIIT, I was energized and up for the day, ready to do some work. I needed a pen from my car. How all the pens in my home ended up in my locked car is not relevant to this story but if you were to imagine the magic brooms in The Sorcerer’s Apprentice that’s not far wrong. I unlocked the car from the kitchen, proceeded outside, only to find the car door was still locked. I must have hit the wrong button. It was early. I’m blind. I went back in, looked at the correct button, watched the car unlock, went back out to the car, and it was still locked. Dang. Back outside with the keys. This time, I got a pen. Mission accomplished. Call me Ethan Hunt.

I continued on with business as usual. An old friend from 20 years ago messaged me about some people we used to hang around with and how she ran into one of them. We reminisced for a little while over that. Ah, the good ‘ol days. Was I preoccupied with the past? I decided to switch gears and do some writing on the back porch. I left my phone inside.

The second I closed the door I heard the wireless lock click. My eyeballs bulged. I checked my pockets for my phone. The only way to lock the door from the outside was with my phone paired near the lock. I pressed my face to the glass door; my phone was nowhere to be seen. How could this be? Now the dogs were barking at me from inside, like a chorus of lunatics. Fantastic. Surely, Mercury was to blame for this howling opera, too.

Why does Mercury have to be so singularly unpleasant? Why can’t it make my hair soft, my hands surgically precise with eyeliner, or my bank account swell? It should have enough power to, at the very least, make my TV work for me and not against me — the volume is either too loud or too soft; I hit the wrong application button every time, and never know where to find which program on whatever media it’s streaming on. Mercury must have dug in for the long haul. Maybe Skynet could take over Alexa and play elevator music 24/7 or Siri could reply to a simple question with a stream of four-letter words or Google Maps could give me directions to places I don’t want to go, like Detroit. 

According to “The Never Wrong Old Farmer’s Almanac,” Mercury was in retrograde for almost the entire month of March. I believe it. Worse yet, it would be back in this bothersome position in July. So, in preparation, I’m cleaning out the dust balls, abandoned dog toys and unpaired socks from under my bed. I plan to be there with a bag of Doritos, writing chain letters on the 4th.  PS

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

The Pleasures of Life Dept.

Foraging for Fabergé

An Easter egg hunt worth a czar’s ransom

By Michael Smith

Here comes Peter Cottontail,

Hoppin’ down the bunny trail,

Hippity, hoppity, Easter’s on its way.

Five will get you 10 that you remember that little composition by Steve Nelson and Jack Rollins, the same guys who gave us “Frosty the Snowman.” It was popularized by cowboy crooner Gene Autry, who hippity hopped all the way into the ownership of Major League Baseball’s California Angels.

Many symbols attach to Easter — the holy holiday observed by Christians the world over on a spring Sunday between March 21 and April 25 — and “Peter Cottontail” mentions plenty of them, including but not limited to, jelly beans, rabbits and eggs. Sixteen billion (not a typo) jelly beans are made in this country for Easter. President Reagan ate ’em all year long. He got hooked on the things when he gave up smoking. He had jelly bean canisters on his desk and on Air Force One. He even sent jelly beans on the first successful Challenger space shuttle flight, to treat the crew. Raise your hand if you’d rather wash a cat than eat those things.

How did rabbits and eggs get into what is otherwise a deeply religious picture? Many historians think the Easter bunny might have more to do with paganism than Christianity. It may have been adopted from the pagan celebration of the festival of Eostre, goddess of fertility, who was symbolized by a bunny. Rabbits, notoriously fecund, are all about bringing new life. Legend, mainly from ancient Germany, is that the Easter bunny lays and hides colored eggs, which are, as much as rabbits, redolent of new life.

From there, it’s a short hop (please forgive that) to chocolate bunnies (of which the National Confectioners Association says 90 million pounds were sold in 2017); to Easter egg rolls (like those at the White House, started in 1878 by POTUS Rutherford B. Hayes and conducted almost continuously since); and to Easter egg hunts (like the largest ever in 2007 in Florida, where 501,000 eggs were searched for by 9,753 kids).

But forget jelly beans, chocolate bunnies and your everyday Easter eggs. Instead, let’s delve into an egg hunt that’s anything but everyday — a multi-million-dollar hunt for six (perhaps seven) Russian imperial Fabergé Easter eggs. The Las Vegas of Easter egg hunts.

This hunt can be said to have started the very moment the Russian royal family, the Romanovs, ended. It was July 17, 1918, when the Russian Bolshevik revolutionaries executed the entire family — all those rumors of Anastasia’s survival now discredited. Comrade Lenin had the family’s Fabergé eggs transported to Moscow. When Comrade Stalin appeared on the scene, he saw dollar signs, not eggs, and began selling the things to the West, particularly in America, probably through Lenin’s old acquaintance, Armand Hammer.

Fifty eggs had been presented to the royals. The whereabouts of 43 (and possibly 44) of the eggs are known. So the hunt is all about the ones that have gone missing.

The world’s largest collection of Peter Carl Fabergé’s jewelry artworks — including nine of the 50 imperial Fabergé Easter eggs — is in the Fabergé Museum, in the Shuvalov Palace in Saint Petersburg, Russia. The museum, privately owned by Russian Viktor Vekselberg, was established to restore to Russia as many of its lost cultural artifacts as possible.

Vekselberg, a Ukrainian-born, Russian-reared billionaire, bought the palace in 2004, restored it, furnished it with thousands of items, and opened it to the public in 2013. He purchased the museum’s nine imperial Fabergé eggs from heirs of American financial magazine magnate and news publisher Malcolm Forbes for something just north of $100 million. Vekselberg’s Fabergé museum, the Shuvalov Palace, presents a brief but interesting side trip.

The palace was built in the late 1700s, then in 1799 was purchased from its original owners by Maria Naryshkin. Maria lived there with her husband, Dmitry Naryshkin. She was a princess of Polish nobility, described in her day as impossibly beautiful. Maria and Dmitry unabashedly flaunted her status as mistress of Alexander I, who was, simultaneously, czar of Russia and king of Poland. Some say her affair with the czar lasted 13 years, some say 15, but none say why it abruptly ended. Nobody seems to know.

At any rate, Maria’s husband countenanced the affair, beginning-to-end. Whether the czar’s wife, Elizabeth, also agreed to the liaison is academic, as she, herself, is reported to have engaged in affairs with both women and men. All of these goings-on may appear a bit unseemly, but the truth is, Czar Alexander’s court was a hotbed of adulterous affairs, so no one ever raised an eyebrow.

But, back to the hunt — the whereabouts of both extant and lost multi-million-dollar Fabergé imperial Easter eggs.

Of the missing eggs, with no dispute, one was found in a scrap metal-type flea market in America, narrowly escaping a meltdown to retrieve its gold. That egg was sold and is now in a private collection, though there is no public record of its owner or where the egg is located. With considerable dispute, another of the missing eggs was found in 2015 and is located in a private collection in New York.

Russians have long been big on Easter, and exchanging gifts at that time of year is a long-standing tradition. So, a couple of Alexanders down the road we find Peter Carl Fabergé, the most renowned jewelry artist of his time (and perhaps of all time) crafting the first of the imperial Easter eggs for Czar Alexander III. The czar desired a unique gift for his wife, Empress Feodorovna, for Easter, 1885.

Fabergé’s creation was called “The Hen.” It was presented as a 2.5-inch high solid-white enamel egg shell, with a gold yolk inside the shell and a gold hen with ruby eyes inside the yolk, with a miniature gold and diamond royal crown plus a ruby pendant inside the hen. The czar’s own creation was the beginning of the tradition of turning Fabergé loose on a new egg for the empress each Easter.

It was a tradition that lasted through 10 eggs during Alexander III’s reign and through 40 more during the reign of his son, Nicholas II. Nicholas ordered two eggs annually, one for his wife and one for his mother. The eggs were increasingly ornate, opulent, intricate, and increasingly shrouded in secrecy. Most contained a surprise like The Hen’s treasures, which was known only to Fabergé. Not even the czar himself knew of an imperial egg’s surprise till Easter.

Following the Russian revolution, The Hen, together with the other eggs, was sent to Moscow. There, The Hen was sold and sold again, and though its surprise was lost (or is privately hoarded), the egg is now in the Fabergé Museum in the Shuvalov Palace in Saint Petersburg.

Not surprisingly, many of the surprises were lost or sold separately, as were many of the eggs. The times were a-changing, tumultuous and chaotic during the Russian Revolution and later during the Stalin years. As to the hungry revolutionaries, sadly, their tastes were pedestrian. So really, the surprise is that any of the imperial eggs and/or their surprises survived at all. But they did.

Here is where the 44 or 43 (depending on who’s counting) extant eggs are: Fabergé Museum, Shuvalov Palace — nine with one surprise; Kremlin Armoury, Moscow — 10; private collections in the U.S. with known owners — 15; private collection in the U.S. with anonymous owner(s) — 1; Royal Collection, London — 3; Monte Carlo, Monaco — 1; Switzerland — 2; Qatar — 1; anonymous collection where the country is also unknown — 2 (where one of these two, presented in 1902, has since 2015 been in a private collection in New York). Some experts dispute this egg’s provenance and regard it as still lost.

Now we come to the hunt for the seven (or six) still missing Russian imperial Easter eggs. Until 2014 Fabergé aficionados feared that eight of the eggs were lost. While it’s never too late to hunt for a Fabergé Easter egg, it actually is too late to hunt for egg No. 3. Some dude in America found it, his discovery underlining the utility of hunting for them.

When Fabergé presented the third imperial egg to the czar in 1887, he had aptly named it “Third Imperial.” Five years after Russian revolutionaries killed the Romanovs, the egg was sold to a dealer in London to help finance Russia’s “Treasures into Tractors” program. (How mundane does it get?)

No one knows how the egg arrived in America, but in 2011, Fabergé researchers dug up a 1964 catalog that showed the third egg and noted that it had been sold to a lady from the southern United States for $2,450. When the lady died her estate sold the egg for peanuts and it languished in roadside market venues till an anonymous American Midwest scrap metal dealer purchased it for $14,000.

The buyer’s thinking was that he could melt the thing down for its gold, then sell the gold for a small profit. Thankfully, nobody wanted to give him more for the gold than he had paid for the egg. Resigned to his “bad deal,” he sat the egg on a shelf in his kitchen. And there it sat till 2013 when, out of frustration, he Googled “egg” and the name inscribed on a timepiece inside the egg.

This bit of bird-dogging led him to an article in a British publication titled: “Is this £20 million nest-egg on your mantelpiece?” There it was! Our guy hotfooted to London, pictures of his egg in hand, to show the expert, Kieran McCarthy, mentioned in the article he found on Google.

McCarthy, a Wartski jewelry dealer, says, “He brought pictures of the egg and I knew instantaneously that was it. I was flabbergasted.”  McCarthy and the still anonymous buyer made the trip across the Atlantic to the buyer’s home, modest digs across the street from a Dunkin’ Donuts. Says McCarthy, “There was the egg, next to some cupcakes on the kitchen counter.”

McCarthy described the guy like this: “He’s from another world entirely. It’s a world of diners and pickup trucks, real blue-collar America.” Blue-collar no more.

There is no public record of the amount Wartski paid the Midwesterner on behalf of an anonymous buyer, but it easily could have been the $33 million mentioned in the 2011 article.

If you’re a bird dog, you need not be dissuaded by discovery of the “Third Imperial” egg; rather, take heart, as the following six and/or seven are still missing: second egg (1886 — “Egg with Hen in Basket”); fourth egg (1888 — “Cherub with Chariot”); fifth egg (1889 — “Necessaire Egg”); 16th egg (1897 — “Mauve Egg”); 26th egg (1902 — “Empire Nephrite Egg,” potentially already in a private collection in New York); 28th egg (1903 — “Royal Danish Egg”); and 36th egg (1909 — “Alexander Commemorative”).

Of those missing, the two that experts think are most likely to be found are the fourth and fifth, in that they have been seen more recently than the others. So get hopping. Who knows, old “Peter Cottontail” may just have something for your Easter basket.  PS

Michael Smith lives in Talamore, Southern Pines, with his wife, Judee. They moved here in 2017 and wish they had moved here years earlier.

The Pleasures of Life Dept.

The Black Hat

Happy returns and small kindnesses

By Janet Wheaton

I have always liked to wear hats, not only to keep the sun out of my eyes and off my face, but because I don’t have good hair — it’s too fine to provide much warmth for my head and too flat to hold a nice style. A good hat, however, must be more than serviceable, it should define you. Such a hat is not easy to find.

I don’t remember exactly when I got the black hat, a soft, felted wool fedora with a 2.5-inch brim and a ribbon around the crown (no feather). I ordered it online and knew as soon as I pulled it out of the box and set it on my head, tilted the brim and dimpled the crown that it was my hat. Worn with a tan trench coat from early fall through late spring, it was met frequently with approving glances and elicited comments such as “nice hat.”

I have always kept it close when I took it off in restaurants, kept my hand over it in gusty weather, and double-checked hotel rooms and overhead bins when traveling. But last spring my husband and I flew to Ireland, where a friend would join us. The trip over was fraught with delayed flights and missed connections; and upon arrival, we were met with excruciating lines, first at customs and then the rental car agency. I could hardly keep my eyes open on our drive to our first destination in the Wicklow Mountains, south of Dublin. Exhausted from lack of sleep and addled by jet lag, I went into town and had dinner with my companions. Back in the cozy B&B, I fell into bed and had one of the best night’s sleep ever. The next morning I awoke refreshed and excited to be in this land I loved so well.

After a delightful breakfast and chat with our host and hostess, Mike and Margaret, we piled into our rental car and headed across Ireland. You are certainly guessing what I have to tell you. Yes, when we arrived at our next destination and got out of the car, I realized my hat was missing. The day before was something of a blur, and I couldn’t even begin to think where I might have left it. On the plane? In the restaurant? At the B&B? My husband and our friend could not remember when they last saw the hat on my head.

I bought an Aran wool knit hat to keep my head warm and soldiered on, silently mourning the black hat. Uncertain of where I had lost it and who might have found it, I held out slim hope of ever seeing my hat again.

Upon returning home, I emailed the hosts of the B&B where we stayed in Wicklow and asked: Could they have found my hat in our room, the breakfast room or the lobby? If not, would they be so kind as to check with the restaurant where we ate dinner that night? The next day I heard back from Mike that our waitress at the restaurant had picked up a hat matching the description I gave him and brought it to the office in case someone came back to claim it. Mike was going to fetch it that day and put it in the mail to me. I shed tears of joy, but remained fearful over the next week. Would it get lost in the mail? Would it be crushed and ruined from the shipping?

But a week later, the black hat came back to me, carefully packed and protected. I danced to the mirror and gave the brim an affectionate little tug. Several times that day and even the following, I had to go to the closet and take a peek, like a pinch to remind myself I hadn’t dreamed its return. I wrote to both the waitress and Mike, effusing my gratitude and appreciation, especially to the waitress, who had found — hers for the taking — a valuable item, a fine hat that might have looked quite smart on her own head, but instead had done what she could to get it back to its owner.

I felt that gratitude afresh when I packed my old friend away for the season. It reminded me of a time years ago when I admired a gold necklace worn around the neck of a co-worker. When I complimented it, she had responded: “I found it in the ladies room at a restaurant over the weekend.” And no, she said, she had not turned it in. Its owner would probably not have a clue where her necklace had fallen, would never go back to the restaurant to check, and some waitress or other patron would have wound up pocketing it. This was my colleague’s rationale for keeping the necklace. I thought about that girl who lost the necklace, what special meaning it might have held for her, what a bitter loss it must have been, how she might be missing it still. I thought about the smugness of my erstwhile co-worker over her “find” — an exquisite piece that had cost her nothing. Or so she thought. PS

Janet Wheaton is a Pinehurst resident, frequent contributor to PineStraw, and a recent writer-in-residence at Weymouth Center for the Arts & Humanities.

Pleasures of Life

The Look

With a little help from my friends

By Beth MacDonald

You know those characters on the TV show Alien Nation? You know how, at first, you can’t quite put your finger on what’s missing, but then you realize they have no eyebrows? I, too, have several rather invisible features that throw off the aesthetics of a face. Since I have a fair complexion and very blonde hair, my eyebrows and eyelashes are imperceptible without a little AA, artificial assistance. When I apply even a light layer of makeup I often find myself narrating the process like a National Geographic documentary. “Here we see the one-eyed morning sloth searching for light hairs to shade in for others to see. The furrowed brow means the female of the species is frustrated, unable to locate any indigenous hairs.” If I don’t go through the process of trying to make these features evident to other humans, I am frequently mistaken for a 19th century influenza patient that won’t make it through the winter.

That’s just the beginning. My hair is unruly in its natural state, with so many irregular curls that it serves as a near-perfect hair hygrometer. Scientific tools aren’t required anywhere within my ZIP code since my head produces uncannily accurate relative humidity readings. I often try to soften the look by essentially destroying it with a straightening iron set on “nuclear power” mode. 

A friend invited me to one of those parties most of us have reluctantly supported where you are gathered for a demonstration of the best cookware, makeup, leggings, and home/car organization kits that will all simplify and improve your life and looks. This particular party was an amalgam of all of those salespeople selling their cutting-edge wares, turning my friend’s home into a virtual department store. I didn’t want to go because I already have four of most these items. I just wanted to sit at home in my buttery leggings, eating 5-minute fondue from my state of the art, personalized pot, while wearing the only vegan-organic-coconut-volcano-cherry-seaweed face mask on the market that would get rid of my wrinkles-lift my eyelids-plump my lips-strengthen my marriage, while I binge watch Netflix.

I tried to stick to the snack table, where I’m most comfortable, for long periods of time, but the makeup lady found me.  She must have taken one look at my sickly face and thought she should rescue me from “the ugly.” I relented and followed her to the other side of the living room/department store. I observed a moment of insanity, when I considered the necessity of a 137th finely woven pair of leggings.

I sat down in her chair as she read off an extensive list of makeover options ending with “natural bronze goddess.” I chose that one. Who doesn’t want that look? I’m pretty sure no one walks up for a makeover and says, “I’ll have the ‘pale haunted house clown face’ please.”

After an eternity (measured by increasing back pain in the uncomfortable chair, not actual real time) she was finished. She handed me a mirror to see my new, improved look. I tried to keep a straight face. I politely thanked her, hoping she couldn’t hear the horrified squeak in my voice. Blue eye shadow, bright pink cheeks, and red lipstick were not what I imagined a “natural bronzed goddess” looked like unless she was named Chuckie.

I made a mistake by going with a friend who drove, leaving me no easy escape option. I was waiting outside, hiding behind her car when she came out eons later, measured in beauty chair-time. On the way home she decided it would be a good idea to chain smoke with her windows shut. I opened my window to catch some fresh air approximately 15 seconds before a torrential downpour hit. I couldn’t close the window fast enough. I was in a lose-lose situation. Failure was not an option; it was a certainty.

At home, I realized I had forgotten my keys, and had to ring the doorbell. As I waited for my husband, Mason, to answer the door, I felt around my now sticky, wet face and knotted hair. Eau d’Ashtray was overpowering the Chanel No. 5 I had put on earlier. I looked like Dee Snider from Twisted Sister getting off his party bus. My husband opened the door and stared at me, wide-eyed.

“Sir, do you have a moment to hear my testimony of the greatest poet of our time, Alice Cooper?” I asked.  PS

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

The Pleasures of Life Dept.

Midlife Mulligan

One duffer considers pulling his sticks out of storage

By Tom Allen

“So you’re movin’ to the Sandhills? What’s your handicap?”

“Uh, eyesight’s not great.”

A golfer friend raised the question, when a job move brought the family to Moore County in 1998. He joked. I was serious. But perhaps a new job in a new town called for embracing the favorite pastime.  

I played that first 18 holes, 20 years ago, at the Southern Pines Golf Club. A gracious hacker from my new congregation invited me to join a church charity foursome.

“I’ve never played,” I warned.

“We’re awful. You’ll fit right in.”

“Let’s do it.”

One guy secured a set of clubs and provided tees and balls. Another loaned a pair of shoes. Wife, Beverly, recalled her college P.E. elective. “You’ll need a glove.”

“A glove? Why? For what hand?” Novice is an understatement.

My heart rate doubled on the first tee. Had I missed the club selection chapter of Golf for Dummies? At least I grabbed a driver. A par-4 loomed. The ghost of a weekend hacker whispered, “Hit it straight down the middle. Head down, knees bent, eyes on the ball. Grip, squeeze, swing.” I topped my first shot, then sliced a mulligan. On the green in four, or maybe six. Two-putt. Or was it three? I shot 118. Or was it 128? No matter. I had a blast. After 18 holes of whiffs, lost balls and unplayable lies, I was hooked. Maybe captivated is a better word.

My first set of sticks cost $120, at Sam’s Club. On to Walmart for gloves, tees and sleeves of Titleists. I owned plenty of khakis and short-sleeved polos. A church member left a couple of caps in my office cubbie. FootJoys completed the ensemble. At least this duffer looked the part.

My first par was memorable — the sixth hole of then Pinehurst No. 5, a par-3. I topped my tee shot. On in two. Inches from the hole. Tap, plop, sweet. I hollered. Friends shushed me, with something between a smile and a frown. Is exuberance bad etiquette or just not cool?

Over the years, I hit the driving range after work, even took a few lessons. I gradually lowered my score, nearly breaking 100 on a perfect spring day at Mid Pines. If you’ll allow a couple of mulligans and a gimme putt or two, my scorecard would read 95.

I shot a 46 on nine holes at Knollwood, once. Double that (which I’m sure would have happened had we played another round) for 92. A fudge, for sure, but I can dream.

With time, club selection and reading lies came easier. With help, I grasped the lingo. “It’s a bunker, not a sand trap,” a low-handicap friend once chided. I even had a “most incredible shot” story. The 18th hole, old Pinehurst No. 1, a par-3 that concluded the round. My tee shot was short of the green, second shot in the bunker and a really bad lie. I pulled out my sand wedge, a Christmas gift from Beverly (that cost more than my set of clubs). A perfect out, and into the hole. I yelled. My buddies yelled. Fist pumps and high fives. Yes, sweet.

My worst day? The summer of 2002, Pinehurst No. 6. I was playing the best ever. My friend trustingly pulled forward, anticipating another hit down the middle of the fairway. I shanked a shot off the sixth tee, popped my cart buddy above his left eye. Eight stitches and he was fine. Me? Sick the rest of the day. Just pull the pin and let me crawl into the hole.

The most fun round? When I turned 50. Three buddies and I played what was then National Golf Club. We were probably the only ones on the rain-drenched course. Talk about mulligans. By the 18th hole, we were putting with our drivers. Soaked and humbled, we laughed and made memories.

I haven’t played in five years, but three Pinehurst U.S. Opens, a trip to the Masters, up close with Tiger, Phil, Fred Couples and Davis Love III remain highlights. My clubs rest in a storage unit, next to my grandmother’s mahogany four-poster bed. Life intervenes — caring for parents at the end of their lives, raising two daughters, seeing them off to college, walking one down the aisle. Between work and marriage, family and friendships, golf’s allure faded. But who knows? Maybe I’ll take another swing this year, when I turn 60.

Because sometimes, on that perfect fall day, when the temps are cool and the fairways green, a voice whispers through the towering pines, “Head down, knees bent, eyes on the ball.” I grip my 3-wood, squeeze and swing. Straight down the middle. On in two. Tap, plop. Sweet. Very sweet.  PS

Tom Allen is minister of education at First Baptist Church, Southern Pines.

Cafeteria Girls

Soaking in the songs of heartbreak

By Janet Wheaton

“Allen, Cole, Cunningham, Englehart,” the teacher read off the first four names from her alphabetized class list. We four girls filed out the door of our classroom and headed for the school cafeteria, where we would be the cafeteria ladies’ helpers for September. The next month it was supposed to be the next four, and so on down the list, but we proved too darned good to give up. We got to keep our plum assignments — not only getting out of class half an hour before lunch and half an hour after, but also getting to keep our lunch money: 25 cents a day, $1.25 a week, $10 a month. Not to be sneezed at by a sixth-grader in 1962.

We were 11 years old, not quite children, but not quite anything else. Donning hairnets and calling each other by our last names, we found a new kind of camaraderie in our work, setting out the big stainless steel bins with the day’s hot lunch, lining up the milk cartons and filling the silverware trays. After lunch, before washing up and wiping everything down, we’d take a break behind the kitchen with the cafeteria ladies and sit in the shade of a white oak tree, eat our Fudgsicles and listen to country music on their transistor radio.

The tales of heartbreak and longing and missing other places struck a chord in me. A child of the military, I had already learned the sorrow of parting with friends and family. I was still missing my fifth grade class in Alabama, and the boy who was, I guess, my first boyfriend. Donnie Smith and I sat next to each other in class each day. We were square dance partners on the rainy days when we couldn’t go out for recess or lunch break. He was my leading man in a play I wrote for our class on another of those rainy/no recess days. We talked about everything together, and though we had never even held hands, we pledged to write to each other forever when my father’s transfer to Virginia separated us. So I thought I knew what Hank Williams meant when he sang, “I’m so lonesome I could cry.”

I was fascinated by the adult stories that I found in the lyrics of songs like “El Paso,” by Marty Robbins, and Johnny Cash’s “Don’t Take Your Guns to Town.” Patsy Cline, Conway Twitty and George Jones told tales that caught my imagination and lifted me up. I listened carefully to their lyrics of love and loss, of woe and glory; and I understood that adulthood was fraught with danger, regret and missteps, but also with romance and adventure.

I watched the faces of the cafeteria ladies, etched with lines that told me they had made a few of those missteps, had a few of those regrets. But the hard lines softened when they would hear a certain song and laugh or sigh knowingly at one another. I guessed they’d had some adventures, too. At the end of our break, we went back in the kitchen to clean up. I remember Johnny Cash singing “I Walk the Line,” as we girls sang along, not having a clue as to what that line was.

The next year I would start junior high and succumb to Beatlemania, but I never lost my love of country music. Fifty years later when I hear one of those songs, the lyrics still roll off my tongue — and in the back of my head I hear Allen, Cole, Cunningham and Englehart chiming in.

And Donnie Smith and I still write to each other.  PS

Janet Wheaton is a Pinehurst resident, native North Carolinian, unpublished novelist and a frequent contributor to PineStraw.

Summer Flurries

Some old memories never melt

By Joyce Reehling

I knew the very minute when it was over. We were at a smoky bar in the West Village, piled into a booth with friends, talking about the state of the world as one does in one’s late 20s. It was Saturday night and the jukebox howled with Bee Gees.

Snow. I remember the loveliness of the falling snow and how it tamped down the sound of the traffic. It was late but the streets are timeless, flowing like the Mississippi past the islands of bars and parks and people who float by, arm-in-arm. I remember the snow so clearly because it was big, fluffy flakes falling in what seemed like slow, elastic time. Instead of being pure white they took on the almost amber color of the streetlights. It was beautiful.

It wasn’t that we had argued or had a bad day, no. It was his slight lingering look at the waitress, not a beautiful girl but known to all of us. And there was that glance as she put down his beer. The warmth of his arm around my shoulder was still there but the chill began in his eyes. My time was up.

My eyes kept going to the huge window watching this flutter, this drifting down, and I began the dance of questioning my own instincts.

We ordered our usual burgers and fries. We continued our conversations and laughter but beneath my feet, unfelt by anyone else, a chasm was opening, a huge sinkhole that was about to swallow me whole. He was my first real love and he was making a decision. In front of me.

The chasm was only big enough for one. It would not swallow him. He would probably say he was merely making a choice, moving on, traveling light through life. He would say, and days later did, “I never lied about who I am.” It was the cloak of a rascal who wraps the hurt they inflict around themselves like a scarf.

The night went on, my tea-reading mind trying to dispel the widening hole just beneath me. He, as he always seemed to do, ran roughshod on the topics. Though others pushed back on his hyperbole, he felt just the way he always liked to feel, smart and just that little bit ahead of everyone else’s curve. It was not really so but the illusion was enough.

The lateness of the dinner and the night was not unusual, but when the time came for the nightbirds to fly home, we gathered our things and walked to the street. He whistled up a cab and opened the door, saying, “I think I will come up to your place a little later.” It was as obvious as a neon glance. As loud as a lingering look.

“Not like this.” It was all I could muster. “Can we not end like this?”

I am polite now and was polite then and did not scream or cry or wail or go punch that girl’s lights out. It wasn’t her fault. She told me over drinks years and years later that though she shared part of her life with him, it was often a misery. That was the night she reached out to apologize. He never did.

This was long ago and far away, and yet the feeling of the impending coldness, of being left, hovers just over my shoulder. There is no burn as painful as the first time the world goes up in flames right in front of you while everyone else keeps laughing. I don’t think about all of that very much, but sometimes when the night is late and the snow is falling and I walk under a street lamp or see that slightly yellow tinge as the snow slices through the spot of light, the pain of dying love bubbles up.

And the snow, the lovely and peaceful snow, did not help me at all that night as I waited for footsteps up the stairs that never came.  PS

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

Pleasures of Life

Hail the Tomato

The indispensible veggie/fruit/berry

By Michael Smith

Garden-fresh tomatoes will soon play center stage at Sandhills farmers markets. The things purporting to be tomatoes that we’ve endured all winter look like a picture. But then they also taste like a picture.

You say “tumahtoe,” I say “toomaydo,” the French and Spanish say “tomate,” Dutch say “tomaat,” and Italians say “pomodoro.” Whatever, those luscious little veggies soon will find their way onto our plates and delight our palates. Tomatoes are not just good, nay, they’re good for you. They’re chock-full of vitamins and stuff like lycopene, an antioxidant that is good for the heart and effective against certain cancers.

Americans love tomatoes. According to the USDA, the average American eats 23 pounds of tomatoes each year. And a Google search reveals that 93 percent of American gardeners grow tomatoes in their yards.

Did I say luscious “little veggies?” Should I have said luscious little fruits? Doesn’t matter to me and probably not to you. But back in the day, it did matter to the United States Supreme Court.

On May 10, 1893, the Supreme Court decided that tomatoes are vegetables. Case closed. That, despite the fact that, botanically, fruits — say, tomatoes, for example — surround their seed(s) with fleshy material. Vegetables don’t. (Bet you’re already wondering about seedless grapes, seedless watermelons, and seedless oranges.) The Supremes found that dictionaries did not sufficiently settle the question so, as it’s wont to do, the court decided the issue using the “common language of the people.” Most folks say tomatoes are vegetables.

Phytologists might have a word or two to contribute to that. They study plants and to them, tomatoes are more nearly a berry. New Jersey sides with the Supremes. There, the tomato is the state vegetable. In Ohio it’s the state fruit. Arkansas covers all bases. There the tomato is both the state fruit and state vegetable.

Moving right along, Americans grow tomatoes as annual plants, but they are actually perennials. They still grow wild in the Andes mountains. Actually, you can nurse the plants through the winter and plant them again next spring.

Tomatoes have an interesting history. One source traces them to the early Aztecs, circa 700 A.D. But by the time Spanish explorers began ripping off South America, tomatoes were pervasive and enjoyed by natives there as a food staple. They grew wild and they were also cultivated for food. In addition, they were regarded as an aphrodisiac, which probably had most to do with why tomatoes were sent back to Europe, along with everything else of value.

Once there, the French apparently took the aphrodisiac business to heart. They called the tomato pomme d’ amore or “apple of love.” Tomatoes were also embraced as part of the Spanish diet. Upper-class Brits took a pass on the things while lower-class Brits ate tomatoes with gusto. One theory about that is that the rich folks ate off pewter flatware with a high lead content. Tomato acid caused the lead to mix into the food and lead poisoning led to bad results. Poor people used wooden plates.

A more probable explanation for literate rich Brits eschewing tomatoes is that the tomato plant closely resembles the nightshade plant which is, in fact, poison and can even be fatal. Fast-forward to America’s Colonies. Tomatoes got off to a very slow start. Apparently, the nightshade/poison fiction came over with the Pilgrims. And the apple of love business was definitely not a hit with the Puritans. None of that “hot tomato” stuff.

High-profile dudes like Thomas Jefferson, Col. Robert Gibbon Johnson, and Joseph Campbell popularized tomatoes and ensured their place in our culture. Jefferson grew them in his garden and promoted their use in cooking. Johnson, as late as 1830, had the temerity to eat the things on the steps of a local courthouse, where folks lined up to watch him die. And in 1897, Campbell began marketing condensed tomato soup. Now, would Campbell Soup do you wrong?

Given the popularity of the tomato, a body might think America would be the largest tomato producer. Not so, it’s China. America’s second. In America, Florida grows the most fresh tomatoes, while California processes the most tomatoes used in soups, sauces, salsas, salads, ketchup and multitudes of similar commodities.

Tomatoes are not just garden-variety, either. In fact, there are a whopping 10,000 varieties of the vegetables, uh, fruits, uh, berries. And they come in red, pink, purple, black, yellow and even white. So there’s something for everybody.

Tomatoes are spacey. That’s right,  according to NASA.gov, 600,000 tomato seeds traveled to the International Space Station and back. As part of the “Tomatosphere Project,” students in Canadian classrooms are using the seeds to grow plants and compare them with plants from seeds that didn’t get to go to space.

Here’s one for the books: The Guinness Book of World Records says between May 2005 and April 2006, a tomato “tree” grown in the Walt Disney World Resort greenhouse produced over 32,000 tomatoes in the first 16 months after it was planted. That scored the record for the most tomatoes in a single year. And here’s another: The heaviest tomato on record was produced in 2013 in Oklahoma. Weight — 7 pounds and 12 ounces. Put that in perspective by considering that the average tomato weighs a mere 4 ounces. Finally, Guinness says the world’s tallest tomato plant was 65 feet, grown in 2000 in Lancashire, United Kingdom.

All right, I promise this is the last one. There’s this little place called Buñol, which is a province of Valencia, Spain. Each year on the last Wednesday of August between 11 a.m. and 1 p.m., as many as 50,000 visitors from everywhere on Earth gather in Buñol for the “La Tomatina” food fight festival. On average, those nuts unleash 243,000 pounds of tomatoes at everything that moves and everything that doesn’t move. Hey, whatever rings your bell.  PS

Michael Smith lives in Talamore, Southern Pines, with his wife, Judee. They moved here in 2017 and wish they had moved here years earlier.

A Perfect Match

Don’t judge a foot by its cover

By Beth MacDonald

One of life’s goals should be to make friends whose stories are more interesting than your own. Kate is one of mine. She’s a rock star, not a figurative one, a literal one. She has traveled the world, partied with amazing people. She is a beautiful soul, a singer, songwriter, insanely funny and has the kind of looks most women dream of having. One day at lunch over Bloody Marys, we heard her on the radio. “Can you believe they are playing this garbage?” she said. I feel blessed beyond belief to be surrounded by compelling and intelligent people who brighten my days and color my world with their wisdom and grace. So, when Kate told me I was an interesting friend, I almost choked on my frittata.

Some days I think the most interesting thing about me is my sock collection. I have socks with artwork on them. I wore them to the Louvre thinking I was “dressing for the occasion.” I have socks with a monorail on them that I wear to Walt Disney World. Some of my socks depict women at work and have pithy, feminist quips. Some socks are more vulgar. I wear those to meetings with people I find less, let’s say, agreeable. I have found that my socks are a way to recognize the world’s kinder souls, odd as that may be.

I think I have an interesting life. I am a lucky woman. Mason, my husband, is kind, and one of the smartest people I know. He never talks about himself, but has far more interesting stories than I ever will. Most people don’t give him the chance to tell them. They look at his tattoos and beard and probably think he’s not much for intellect. He doesn’t mind being underestimated. We have been friends for almost two decades, and married for four years. Both of our previous marriages ended at “Till death do us part,” making us an unusual pair — young, remarried, widow and widower. We have an unbreakable trust in each other, having been through “the worst.” 

I recently made the mistake of leaving Mason unsupervised with my socks. I don’t pair my socks when I do the laundry; they stay in a pile in the laundry room. That drives Mason to the brink of insanity. He likes to have a certain order to socks. He actually numbers his. When I need my socks I just go to “the pile” and pick out what I need and go about my business. If I’m in a hurry, I don’t even match them. I just grab and go. That makes Mason even crazier. While I was gone, he seriously contemplated getting rid of “the pile.” I’m still shocked he confessed this to me. My socks are as sacred as his OCD.

“I didn’t throw them away,” he said as if that somehow made the conspiracy less brazen. “It’s proof of my love.” I was still in shock, trying to keep from plotting revenge for a crime that wasn’t even committed. My poor precious endangered socks.

“You wanted to!”

“I have your name tattooed on my hand, in a rose. I’m not throwing your socks away.”

“My name should be tattooed in a sock, not a rose,” I said, my voice still an octave above calm.

Mason sighed. “There are no cool songs about sock tattoos.”

“Kate will write me one.” The whole scene played out in my head. I would call Kate and ask her to write me a raspy-voiced rock ballad about a sock tattoo and how no one should ever look down on socks with disdain. Brilliant!

Mason was saying something but I wasn’t listening. I think it was about his OCD and suggestions about how to organize my socks properly. He didn’t get it. My socks were organized. I knew that my right monorail sock was in the bottom drawer upstairs and the left one was in the basket hanging over the edge, near the handle.

Since even the kind can backslide, soon he may be able to find a reminder on iTunes.  PS

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

Well-Spoken

At the English-Speaking Union, learning is a lifelong mission

By Joyce Reehling

Sometimes I am lucky enough to stumble into a very good thing. Upon leaving Connecticut we knew that one of the things we would miss most would be the exceptional speakers we went to hear at Fairfield University Open Visions Forum.

The proximity to New York and even Washington, D.C., plus very healthy funding by donors and businesses brought truly great personalities from every possible walk of life. Nothing quite like it was here, or so I thought.

Then I saw that one of my favorite people, Thomas Jefferson, would be speaking in Pinehurst (in the guise of Bill Barker from Colonial Williamsburg), and off I went to get tickets-except that he was coming to the English-Speaking Union, members only. Who the heck were they?

I first feared that it would be folks who thought only English should be spoken in our country, but that is not the case. Nor is it a “dining club for the elite,” as some have said, even though they dine together.

No, E-SU has a history, and a deep and abiding set of principles and purposes.

Sir Evelyn Wrench founded this international education charity in 1918 with the aim of bringing together people from different cultures and languages to find a way to build skills, confidence and communication. The intention was to use a common language, English, to further knowledge, understanding and peace and to provide these skills in a non-political and non-sectarian way.

In 1957, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II became the royal patron and E-SU received a royal charter. Princess Ann took over from Prince Phillip and serves as the present patron.

All very nice as far as that goes for those of us in “the Colonies,” but the real job of our E-SU here in the States and around the world is to foster the learning of English as a tool for those who come from elsewhere, as well as our own students.

I came for the speakers and have stayed for the real work of E-SU, helping middle school teachers and students thrive in debate training throughout their school years as E-SU has fostered — along with their schools — strong teams in several schools across Moore County. They enter our annual competition and may go on to further debates nationally.

We also sponsor and present the annual Shakespeare competition, where high school students study Shakespeare and perform a sonnet and a monologue from his plays.

These skills give young students insight, skill and the ability to study, listen well and present themselves in a public format. No matter what technology does for us, everyone needs to garner these skills, find like-minded folks and continue our learning path all through our lives.

At its headquarters in New York City, English in Action puts people together who can assist new learners in both language and cultural understanding, helping them find the assets they need to turn their lives into productive and exciting ones here while learning to speak English. Whether by choice or fleeing war, whether young or old, these people need help learning English and American culture. E-SU in NYC does that because we believe that common language is essential.

Learning skills to become an American with English are not vastly different from the skills children need to leave home and find their way in the world. Language, listening, communicating clearly and being able to define what you believe and who you are are the things I think E-SU does for new arrivals and for our kids right here at home.

The Luard Morse Scholarships help students from Historically Black Colleges and Universities study at a British university for a semester. The Walter Hines Page Scholarship offers British and Argentine teachers a chance to explore and exchange educational ideas in America.

E-SU also offers extra training in the UK for an array of courses to help bolster teachers and their constant need to be refreshed and reinvigorated for the task of teaching.

As to the “dinner club” thing, yes, it is true that we gather for dinner or lunch, but the real purpose is for us to learn from a series of speakers we bring to Pinehurst or have on our own front door step. In the past, we have hosted some gifted writers like Lynne Olson, who wrote the New York Times best-seller Citizens of London, and Craig Johnson, who writes the wonderful Longmire series of stories of law in the wilds of present day Wyoming.

We gather for international speakers as well, like Dieter Dettke, an expert on European security and Euro-Russian relations; Hodding Carter, journalist and a former spokesman for the U.S. State Department during our hostage crisis in the 1970s; and Capt. Carl Newman (now retired), National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Deputy Director for Aircraft Operations, who did 14 years of hurricane hunter flights in one of the world’s premiere research aircraft. These are a sampling, a very few, of the men and women who come to help us be lifelong learners.

A charity that focuses on making learning a keystone of life, keeping English as a gateway to knowledge and communication without destroying other languages or cultures, and above all supporting our teachers and students, that is what the English-Speaking Union turns out to be.

And now, many months of the year Darling Husband and I hear fine speakers while we support our devotion to learning. The funds raised by our Sandhills branch plant deep roots right here and in the world.  PS

Learn more about E-SU and its programs for students and teachers by emailing sandhills@esuusa.org. 

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