“Ask Garden Guru”

Advice stinks — but only when unsolicited

By Jim Dodson

Spring is here. Garden Guru will now take your important gardening questions.

Dear Garden Guru,

I’m new to gardening this year and eager to learn all I can in a hurry. What would you suggest as a starting point? A bit worryingly, I hear hobby gardening can be kind of expensive. Is that true?

Signed,

A Frugal Beginner from Biscoe

Dear Frugal,

Like keeping a mistress or owning a vintage British sports car, gardening is not for the faint of heart or weak of wallet. The proper handcrafted English tools, the glamorous plant seminars, the costly trips abroad simply to study the Great Gardens of the World — well, it all adds up so quickly. Pretty soon you’ll be dropping the mortgage money on rare fruit trees at the garden center, hopelessly addicted to spring catalogs (a somewhat philistine friend refers to these as “porn for gardeners”) or blowing through the kids’ college fund to turn your backyard into a Southern Gardens of Versailles. GG suggests you start small to determine if your interest is genuine or just a passing fancy, maybe with an inoffensive African violet in your kitchen window?

Dear Garden Guru,

A few years ago, following a dream golf vacation to New Zealand, my hubby Ralph and I met an intriguing couple, who shared their love of golf and gardening. Ralph fell hard for the concept of “natural gardening” they practiced and, in a nutshell, has taken it up with gusto. The guiding tenet of the NG movement, as I understand it, is for proponents to become “one with nature.” In his effort to get “closer to the source,” as Ralph puts it, he has quit playing golf with his buddies, refers to himself as “The Green Man,” and has taken to gardening fully in the nude save for a ratty old golf cap he wears on rainy days. We’re both grandparents in our mid 60s and happen to reside in a classy, gated golf community where everyone is beginning to avoid us at parties. This is so embarrassing. My golf handicap is in tatters. Any suggestions?

Signed,

Worried (and still fully clothed) Wilma in Wilmington

Dear Worried Wilma,

Ralph’s unnatural attraction to the natural world simply reflects the addictive dangers of gardening. Clearly he’s gone “native” on you. Have you considered divorcing him and marrying one of his golf buddies? It could make dinner at the club so much nicer.

Dear Garden Guru,

My wife Brenda is an award-winning flower gardener. I’m a serious vegetable grower who has won numerous ribbons at our county fair. Every March we have the same argument over space allocation in the raised beds of our rather smallish condominium terrace. Her zinnias are always encroaching on my heirloom snap beans, and don’t get me started on the times she’s heartlessly flattened my tender artisan squash plants trying to prune her Sugar Moon hybrid teas. A reproachful war of silence has developed between us. We rarely speak between my first decent tomato crop and her final lace cap hydrangea bloom in late summer. Is this any way to grow a garden or keep a marriage?

A Brooding Veggie Dude in Durham

Dear Veggie Dude,

Botanically speaking, you’re a classic mixed marriage, a tale as old as Adam and Eve and their famous domestic squabble over the proper use of fig leaves. (Are they good in a stew or simply wearable?) Have you pondered getting a larger terrace or, even better, finding separate garden plots in adjoining counties? You might try moseying down to Pittsboro to find a patch where your Tuscan zucchini can roam free and easy. The happiest gardening couples, Garden Guru finds, are those who insist on separate bathrooms and growing spaces where cosmos and cucumbers never meet.

Dear Garden Guru,

I recently accompanied my son’s fourth grade class on a field trip to the White House and was pleased to see gorgeous camellias blooming in the East Room — until, to my horror, I discovered they were completely FAKE! A week or so later, I attended my great aunt Sissy’s funeral in Burgaw only to discover that the lovely spray of Easter lilies adorning her coffin were — you guessed it — FAKE! Honestly, how do you feel about FAKE flowers at important public events? I feel like our president and the dearly departed deserve SO much better than FAKE flowers!!! Don’t you agree?

Signed,

Still Fuming in Fountain

Dear Fuming,

Sadly, we live in an age where many things are FAKE — news from the internet, bridges to nowhere and half the hairpieces in Congress. For all I know yours could be a FAKE letter, too. But assuming it isn’t, Dear Lady, one suspects neither your grade-schooler nor your expired great auntie gives a FAKE fig about the flowers in the East Room or silk lilies on her goodbye box. By the way, gardening is all about “faking” out Mother Nature — bending her wilder inclinations to your domestic desires. As a rule, a little fakery never hurts unless elected to Congress or performing a Super Bowl halftime show.

Dear Garden Guru,

Why do I keep managing to kill every fragile Bonsai plant I ever buy? I water them religiously every morning. Any interesting thoughts?

Signed,

Herbicidal in Ahoskie

Dear Herbicidal,

GG has lots of interesting thoughts. But none he would care to share with you. Two possibilities occur, however. A) Always read up on proper maintenance, for every Bonsai plant has unique characteristics and needs, and/or B) You’re indeed an herbicidal maniac who has no business gardening.

Dear Garden Guru,

Remember the lady who found the face of Jesus in a taco and so went on TV? Well, my husband Bobby Ray has an incredible gardening talent. He grows fruit and leafy greens that look amazingly like all kinds of famous Americans! I can show you a Vidalia onion, for instance, that looks uncannily like the late Yul Brynner, and a head of curly endive that could be little Shirley Temple’s twin sister! (See enclosed Polaroids.) My question is, given America’s dual love of gardening and celebrities, do you think there might be a profitable business in growing celebrity look-alike fruit and veggies? I phoned up America’s Got Talent but they thought I might be some garden-variety crackpot. Whom should I contact next?

Signed, Betty from Browns Summit

P.S. Bobby Ray won’t reveal his growing secret but I think it may have something to do with the load of rhino poo he obtained from the state zoo last year. Also, I am not a crackpot!

Dear Betty,

Gardening is full of great surprises. A few years back, I grew a dozen Yukon Gold potatoes that looked uncannily like the Founding Fathers. They were a big hit at our cookout on Independence Day. The truth is, celebrity fruit and vegetables are far more commonplace than you might think. Just the other day at Harris Teeter I saw a head of organic cauliflower that was a dead ringer for Justin Timberlake. That being said, there’s also rumor that HGTV plans to replace decamped rehab goddess Joanna Gaines with a new show on — wait for it — celebrity fruits and veggies! So they may have some interest in Bobby Ray’s talents. Failing that, the Garden Guru thinks a much surer bet is his secret rhino poo. Any chance I can get a load of that for my spring garden?  PS

Contact Editor Jim Dodson at jim@thepilot.com.

Walter’s Saw

Cutting through time

By Jim Dodson

Save for a handsaw, an old pocket wallet and quiet memories, they are all that I have left of him.

The wallet is a fine piece of work, a gentleman’s pebble grain leather breast wallet, beautifully stitched and bearing my grandfather’s initials in gilt lettering: W.W.D.

William Walter Dodson was a skilled carpenter and electrician who helped raise this region’s first electrical transmission towers and worked on the crew that wired Greensboro’s Jefferson Standard Building. During the Second World War, he also made cabinets for PT boats and built bookshelves for local public libraries.

The wallet is in mint condition, lined with fine silk, its state of preservation suggesting it was scarcely used. I think my dad brought it to my grandfather upon returning from military service in England and Normandy, in 1945. My guess is, Walter rarely used it because he was a workingman who rarely, if ever, dressed up. As I remember him, he was a preternaturally quiet but gentle man in rumpled cotton pants who was either fishing or in his woodshop or massive vegetable garden — the three places I spent most of my time with him. There was always the stump of a King Edward cigar in his mouth.

Walter’s handsaw, on the other hand, shows years of steady use, well worn and rusted in places near its simple wooden handle. I suppose it must be 80 years old if a day.

Both wallet and saw came my way decades ago and traveled with me to Georgia and Maine and back to Carolina in order to complete the sacred circle old elephants and most Southerners observe before they translate to a gentler, kinder place.

I inherited the items from my father, who never used the wallet either — too nice, he claimed — but did use that old handsaw for years until power saws showed up in his own woodworking workshop. He made bookshelves and tables for friends and family.

Not surprisingly, I picked up the woodworking bug too, clearly something in the bloodline.  We hail, after all, from a long line of Carolina woodworkers, at least one of whom was a celebrated cabinetmaker.

Walter’s grandfather — my great-great-granddad — was one George Washington Tate, a prominent citizen of Alamance County who helped survey the boundaries of the state’s central counties following the Civil War, but was best known for his grist mill on the Haw River and his skill at crafting fine furniture.

Last summer, while attending a seminar at the Museum of Early Decorative Art (commonly known as MESDA) on the Scots-Irish furniture makers who filtered into the Carolina back country during the 18th century, I heard G.W. Tate’s name mentioned in a tone of near reverence by an expert on Piedmont furniture making, who noted that one of his most notable surviving pieces is a handmade wardrobe displayed in a Williamburg museum of early American furniture. Tate Street in Greensboro is named for this man.

She was delighted when I informed her afterwards that I knew of a second splendid handwork of Tate’s. My second cousin Roger Dodson and his wife, Polly, had recently had us to supper and showed us a handsome old walnut corner cupboard that bore his distinctive mark “G.W. Tate.”

It was his grandson Walter, however, for whom I’m partially named, who first placed a saw in my hand. One Christmas when I was about 6 or 7 years of age, visiting my grandparents in Florida, he gave me a miniature tool box with a small hammer, screw drivers and handsaw.

In his modest workshop, he also showed me how to saw a straight line and hammer a nail — small tasks that seemed almost magical at the time.

Somehow that kid’s toolbox disappeared over the years, probably because I used its tools constantly to build forts in the woods around our house. I recall using them to build my entry for the annual Cub Scout Pinewood Derby. My car got eliminated early, which was perfectly fine with me. I much preferred building forts and crude furniture.

It wasn’t until I was over 30 and living on the coast of Maine that two abiding passions hit me with a vengeance, both of which I trace to a quiet carpenter and gardener in rumpled pants.

The first struck when my wife and I built a post and beam house on a forested hill in Maine. I helped the housewrights place the structural beams, but did most of the interior finish work myself, learning as I went.

Not only did I lay and peg the 16-inch ancient pine flooring boards salvaged from a 19th-century barn in New Hampshire, I also designed and built the kitchen’s counter and cabinetry from scratch. Ditto the adjoining walls of pine bookshelves in the living room. My distinctly Southern mama, when she first walked into our home, smiled and remarked, “Honey, all this wood is very pretty. But when are you going to finish this house?”

The Canadian hemlock beams and pine floors and cabinets cast a golden glow over everything, especially as the sun shone through our tall south-facing windows. Over nearly two decades that followed, I loved the subtle creaks and moans the beams and floors made as the house settled and the wood aged, especially in the dead of winter when the sun struck the beams and the house emitted out a lovely scent of the forest. I thought of this as the house exhaling in a contented way that my late grandfather would likely have approved.

Walter probably would have liked the rustic farm table and occasional table I made for the living room, too. The table we gave away when my second wife and I moved home to North Carolina. The occasional table went to my first wife’s house, where it’s still in use and quite loved today.

Walter Dodson passed on when he was 64. I was 11, my first funeral, and it was really sad to see him go. He looked remarkably peaceful in his big wooden coffin, dressed in the only suit I ever saw him wear. My grandmother was a serious Southern Baptist, though Walter rarely darkened the doorway of any church. Time on the water or in his workshop or garden were his idea of worship, his way celebrating the gift of life.  Anyone who works intimately with wood or tends a garden through the seasons would completely understand.

As I write, this Walter is also 64 years old and preparing to build a set of ambitious bookshelves for the cozy room my wife and I have decided would make a splendid library in the old house we’ve been slowly redoing over the past 20 or so months.

I have my eye on a fancy new power saw that will do just about anything from the finest trim work to cutting a rough plank flooring. It costs more than my gifted, gentle grandfather probably made in a year.

Proof that you can take the boy out of the woodshop but not the other way around, however, resides in the fact that Walter’s handsaw will be hung somewhere in my new woodshop where those bookshelves will be born, a sweet reminder that the hand that shapes the cut was created long before the saw ever touched wood.

Contact Editor Jim Dodson at jim@thepilot.com.

The Road to Greatness

Along a historic American highway, the heart and soul of a nation is revealed

By Jim Dodson

Over the past few months I’ve been traveling the Great Wagon Road, researching a book about the 18th-century route that brought generations of Scotch-Irish, English and German immigrants to the American South, including both branches of my family.

Roughly following the so-called Great Warrior’s Path that lay along the eastern slopes of the Appalachian mountains from Pennsylvania to Georgia, used for millennia by native American peoples for hunting and warfare, the Great Wagon Road stretched more than 800 miles from Philadelphia to Augusta, Georgia, and was said to be the most traveled road in Colonial America.

Thomas Jefferson’s daddy mapped and named it, and a young George Washington cut his teeth scouting and fighting Indians along it. Dan’l Boone traveled the Road from North Carolina to the unexplored frontiers of Kentucky and Ohio, while three major wars that shaped our national identity were conducted along it: the French and Indian War followed by the American Revolution, and a dozen critical battles of the American Civil War, most notably the bloodbaths at Antietam and Gettysburg.

By my rough count at least three presidents and more than a dozen colleges and universities grew up along the Great Road, as I first heard a Salem College history professor call it 40 years ago, not to mention a dozen of Eastern America’s most important towns and cities, home to social visionaries and inventors who created everything from the Conestoga wagon to Texas Pete hot sauce and Krispy Kreme Doughnuts

Most of the early Quakers who populated Guilford and Alamance counties also made their way to a new life in these parts by traveling the Great Wagon Road, a branch of which was called the Carolina Road that took others (including my English and Scottish forebears) to Hillsborough and the coast.

Though I’m not yet halfway on my travels from Philadelphia to Georgia, thus far it has been a trip full of rewarding surprises, unexpected turns, fresh insights and inspiring encounters. In my quest to know more about where we collectively came from — and how this remarkable road shaped the nation we inhabit today — I’ve already traversed a dozen major battlefields and museums, attended lectures and church services, hung at the elbows of area historians and academic scholars, spent hours in local archives, historical associations and historic sites, investigated iconic forefathers and forgotten heroes, unapologetically played tourist everywhere I could, checked out the hokiest roadside attractions and sampled local cooking every chance I got. 

What a simple pleasure this project has been — not to mention a refresher course on the power of American democracy during one of the most divisive years in memory.   

For perspective, try Googling  “What Americans Know About Their Own History” and you may be deeply alarmed to learn what we collectively don’t know about our past and how our democracy was designed to work. Various polls over the past decade have shown, for example, that 67 percent of Americans have no idea what the purpose of the U.S. Constitution is for — or what exactly an “amendment” means. Another recent poll indicated more than half of high school graduates thought the 4th of July celebrated the end of the Civil War, another that the majority of Americans couldn’t simply name the three main branches of American government. 

The estimated half million frontier settlers who came down America’s first great “highway” beginning in the early 18th century — Ulster Scots, German Lutherans, Moravian bretheren, Amish and Menonite farmers, Presbyterian and Anglican preachers, and Eastern Jews — had no prescient awareness of the diverse nation they were collectively creating. The vast majority were simply ordinary folks who’d crossed oceans to seek a fresh start, religious freedom and a piece of the New World they could claim as home.

In the process, the native peoples of North America were largely marginalized and exterminated, a tale as old as the hills, and an entire race was enslaved — mistakes we are still struggling to come to terms with and compensate for today. 

For this and other reasons, my desire to travel the “Road that made America,” as a prominent Pennsylvania historian called it during a long lunch conversation, has been building in me for at least two decades.

That’s why my travels along the Great Wagon Road have been such a soul-stirring pleasure — a much-needed reminder of why America has always been great and simply needs to get back in touch with the values and principles that drew our forebears to a wilderness in the first place.

In Philadelphia, I dined at the historic City Tavern where the Sons of Liberty plotted the birth of a nation. I sat for a golden hour in a sunlit pew at Christ Church where Washington, Franklin and Betsy Ross worshipped, chatting with a fellow who lives and breathes the values of Benjamin Franklin, American’s first true Renaissance man

At Lancaster, I dove deep into Amish culture and found myself trying to eat my way through the nation’s oldest farmers’ market and discovering the origins of the revolutionary Conestoga wagon that carried pioneer Americans across the continent. Just down the road in York, where in 1778 the Second Continental Congress signed the Articles of Confederation (a prelude to our Constitution), I sat in on a delightful night of local historians spinning tales about a town where the American Industrial Revolution essentially began.

On a cold morning in late November, I attended the 154th reading of Abe Lincoln’s extraordinary Gettysburg Address with a distinguished Lincoln biographer, standing on the very spot in the National Cemetery where Lincoln gave the most inspiring speech in American history. Afterwards, I lunched with the nation’s leading Lincoln impersonator — a biology teacher from Illinois — who told me that “playing Lincoln” had profoundly changed his life in a dozen different ways. The next morning, I walked the famous battlefield at dawn where the course of the Civil War changed over three days in July of 1983. I could swear I heard drums.

Two weekends later, my wife and I joined a slow-moving line of cars inching across five miles of soulful Potomac countryside simply to drive — sans headlights — through the annual illumination of the Antietam National Battlefield, the 29th year that more than 1,500 area Scouts and volunteers have placed 23,000 luminaries on the tranquil killing ground where more Americans died on a single day than in any other battle. The next morning, we attended services at the oldest Episcopal church in West Virginia, just across the river in Shepherdstown, a gorgeous little Potomac town where the wounded of Antietam shared Trinity Church on alternate weeks going forward — the Union wounded one week, the wounded boys in butternut and gray the next. 

In Hagerstown, Maryland, where the German wing of my family got off the GWR to head west to a new life in Cumberland and West Virginia, we attended a wonderful German Christmas market and spent an hour learning about the Colonial origins of Christmas in America during a walking tour of town-founder Jonathan Hager’s original stone house. Our guide was a retired career military man named Max Gross whose love of local history was flat-out contagious. “We are a blend of so many diverse cultures and people in America,” he said, explaining how various aspects of Christmas traditions really came from a dozen different cultures ranging from Poland to Turkey. “We think of these traditions as uniquely ours, but we are the splendid sum of so many cultures and people who came together in a wilderness to form the greatest democracy in history.”

I could go on indefinitely about the diverse and lovely Americans I’ve met on my little odyssey through time and history, the sacred places I’ve walked, the many surprising things I’ve managed to learn, and even the hokey tourist traps I’ve explored with boyish glee.

For this correspondent, the year ahead holds the promise of more spiritually enriching encounters with people from all walks of American life,  a lesson of civic renewal  among people who love their towns and communities with a passion that is palpable, a devotion that is true. Despite our present differences, their Great Road ancestors, I suspect, would be proud of how far they — and we — have come.  PS

Contact Editor Jim Dodson at jim@thepilot.com.

My Pre-Geezer Christmas List

Wishing for the intangible

By Jim Dodson

Earlier this month, my lovely grown-up daughter living in faraway Chicago phoned to ask what I want for Christmas.

“Can’t think of a thing, Honey,” I replied, then said what I say every December when we do this routine. “I don’t need a thing, Mugs. Just seeing all of you kids come home is my Christmas present. Oh, wait, I know — a pair of new white socks and a pen that doesn’t run out of ink.”

“Dad, be serious.”

I was being serious. For better or worse, come winter I go through white socks like tissues, and there’s nothing worse than a pen that runs out of ink when you’ve had a sudden brilliant thought.

The trick of living, I’ve discovered over three score years plus four is to know what’s enough and to need (and better yet desire) less and less of this world’s material stuff, whittling down life until you’re traveling light enough to someday join the dust from whence you came.

On this same note, it was a shock to discover the other day that I own 23 very nice sports coats. Where on Earth did they all come from? And more to the point, do I really need 23 sports coats in my life, only two or three of which I might wear over the course of a year? Ditto neckties, golf clubs, various hats and caps, even books I used to think I would someday read but never got around to.

So I had a brilliant idea. For the first time in decades, I made out a Christmas list, putting “give away at least half your very nice sports coats for Christmas” at the top of it. 

Like my working hero Thomas Jefferson — who claimed to be an “old man but a new gardener” —  I tend to make lists of things I mean to do on any given day. As any pre-geezer knows, the older you get, the better it is to write stuff down before you forget it. Unfortunately, I’m always finding old lists of things I meant to do stuffed in the pockets of my sports coats and gardening pants, things I somehow forgot to do. This is just another good reason to get rid of half my very nice sports coats. That way, I’ll probably only forget to do half the tasks I put on my daily list of things to do.

In this spirit, I decided to revisit making a Christmas list since I was about 11. That year my buddies and I used to ride our bikes to the downtown Sears and Roebuck store to check out toys we wanted to see under the Christmas tree. I wanted a new Alamo set that year and a Redskins football jersey. Also to kiss Della Hockaday who rode my bus and lived just around the corner. She wouldn’t give me the time of day. But that’s an old story of youthful yearning and unrequited love.

Back to my current pre-geezer Christmas List:

Time. Don’t tell anyone, least of all my literary agent, but I have at least three novels half-written that I just can’t find the time to finish. I don’t know if the world needs to read my unfinished novels or not. I just know I need to someday finish writing them — though “someday” really has a scary way of creeping up on you. Time is the one thing that always seems to be in short supply, running out like the ink in your pen when you least expect it. I’d also like enough time to see my children settled down and happy with how their lives are working out. While I’m on the subject, wouldn’t  mind being in the Grandpa Club some day. But no rush, Kids. Hopefully I still have a little time yet. Those new grandpas seem to have all the fun, though.

Something spicy and blue. Thanks to several careers in writing, I’ve been fortunate enough to travel abroard a great deal, exploring faraway places I only dreamed or read about as a kid. Most of my wanderlust has been spent. But there still are a few places I’d like to go before I’m scattered among the wildflowers. One is the spice market and Blue Mosque of Istanbul. I can’t really tell you why — maybe because on an attempt to see the wonders of the ancient world with my 10-year-old son many years ago, we failed to reach Constantinople or explore the Holy Land. In a nice development, next summer that grown-up son — now a reporter for a famous newspaper in northern Maine — plans to marry a beautiful Palestinian Christian girl from Jaffa, Israel. The sacred sights of the Holy Land await. And just maybe, on the return leg, something spicy and blue in old Constantinople.

Another rescue dog. Please don’t share this with my wife, but I’d love another rescue dog or two. Rescue dogs make the world a better place. They’re all about love and joy at finally having a home to call their own. Mine found me. Her name is Mulligan. Best dog ever. I’ll cry like a baby when she’s gone. Then I’ll go get myself another rescue dog or two.

A politician to admire. Frankly, I’m tired of the ones we have. All they do is bicker, call names and point nasty fingers at each other. If my mother were running this country, she’d send them all to their bedrooms without dessert until they could learn to speak with a civil tongue in their mouths.  If you can’t tweet something nice, she would add, don’t tweet anything at all. We could sure use a guy like Thomas Jefferson or my mom for president.

Tickle the ivories. Sure wish I could play the piano. Actually, I can play the piano. It just doesn’t sound like it. Looking back, I should have taken more than two weeks of lessons. You can probably put the blame directly on Della Hockaday. She was all I could think about the year my mom (see above) suggested I take piano lessons. The teacher smelled like moth balls so I quit and took up playing guitar, planning to become the next George Harrison. Sadly, Della wasn’t impressed.   

More Saturday mornings. Look, I could really use an extra Saturday morning.  That’s when I get my errands and garden work done. While the world sleeps in, I get down and dirty. Thus I hereby propose a constitutional amendment introducing the four-day work week and renaming Friday “First Saturday.” Just imagine what we could all do if we had two Saturday mornings! An extra day for golf, gardening, sleeping in, reading a book, meeting a friend for lunch, writing a letter by hand, taking a walk with the dogs in the park, or just doing nothing but noticing what a beautiful world we’re briefly inhabiting.

What’s Up, Doc? And since we’re on the subject, would someone please bring back those classic Bugs Bunny cartoons that once made Saturday mornings so sublime – Elmer Fudd, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig,  Foghorn Leghorn, Tweety and Sylvester, Yosemite Sam, Pepé Le Pew, the whole Looney Tunes gang. Sure loved those guys. They made the world a better place — or at least a whole lot funnier. We should all lighten up, especially the cartoon characters we’ve elected to public office. Besides, I have it on good authority that Tom Jefferson was a huge Rocky and Bullwinkle fan.

A Revised Eleventh Commandment. Here’s a final thing I wish we could do: learn to listen to each other with a closed mouth and an open mind. During the years I wrote about life in Washington, D.C., Ronald Reagan publicly embraced an Eleventh Commandment: “Thou shalt not speak ill of another Republican.” I propose we update that to “Never speak ill of another American, even if they look or sound different from you.” We’re the most diverse nation on Earth, after all, made up of a polyglot of souls who mostly came from someplace else far, far away — yet a country constitutionally founded on the timeless principle of free exchange of ideas, civil discourse and respect for a neighbor’s opinions, even if we don’t agree. If we get to know that neighbor, we just might be reminded that far more unites than divides us.

So there it is, neighbors, eight modest items on my pre-geezer Christmas Wish List.  I can almost hear what you’re thinking — What a dreamer, pal. You must have sugar-plums dancing in your head.

I suppose that’s true. But the older I get, the more I dream about such things, not unlike the way, long ago and far away, I wished for a new Alamo set and a kiss from Della Hockaday. One of those things, I can safely report, Santa delivered.

In the mean time, can anyone use a very nice sports coat or two?  PS

Contact Editor Jim Dodson at jim@thepilot.com.

The Most Revealing Month

Savoring the bittersweet fruits of November

By Jim Dodson

For a number of reasons, I call November the Most Revealing Month.

To start, the gardener in me likes to see my gardens nicely mulched and tucked in for a decent winter snooze. This is when I step back and take stock of my brilliant and bonehead gardening maneuvers conducted over the long hot summer, while awaiting the post-holiday avalanche of spring gardening catalogs, which a fellow gardener pal calls “porn for plant people.”

The outdoorsman in me loves the soulful sight of November’s bare hardwoods stripped clean of leaves, revealing nature in all her naked glory, “That time of year thou mayst in me behold,” as my fellow autumn-lover Will Shakespeare described in his 73rd sonnet, “When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang/ Upon those boughs which shake against the cold /Bare ruin’d choirs where late the sweet birds sang.”

During the two decades we lived in a house I built on a forested hill near the coast of Maine, surrounded by 600 acres of old-growth birch, maple and hemlock, November was prime time for topping up my woodpile and erecting my elaborate Rube Goldberg plant protectors that never failed to amuse the FedEx guy when he found his way up our lonely road into the forest. More than once he asked me why I went to all the trouble to build an elaborate garden deep in a wood that only family, friends, occasional lost strangers, the odd moose and the FedEx Guy himself would ever see.

“Summer’s lease is brief. And bittersweet November simply reveals how far I’ve progressed on this earth,” I continued, though I don’t think he cared a fig for either bare ruin’d choirs or boughs shaking against the cold.

Owing to the angle of the retreating sun, that said, the November sunlight always seemed deeper and richer on late autumn afternoons, a benediction through stained glass, throwing the contours of my wooded patch of earth into stunning relief, while the rocky soil underfoot offered spicy scents of decaying leaves and the garden’s last gasp as my private world turned inward. As a bonus in the department of sidereal affairs, the stars on any clear November night tended to glitter like diamonds splashed across black velvet — ideal for catching the Milky Way, the year’s final meteor showers and in some years the rare treat of the Northern Lights.

To my November-loving way of thinking, blazing fires, the earlier darkness and the annual gathering of the tribe for the slower, unrushed Thanksgiving rituals  —  cook, eat, watch football, doze in an armchair, take a walk in the woods, eat again, doze again, have a final slice of pumpkin pie before bed —  made the holiday my top designated feasting day of the year. (Though I’m thankful it comes but once a year. Otherwise I’d resemble either Shakespeare’s Falstaff or at the very least Clifford the Big Red Dog balloon from the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.)

Not surprisingly, November is the keeper of many of my favorite memories.

Three decades ago, having uprooted my life and moved from Atlanta to a bend in the Green River outside of West Brattleboro, Vermont, I found myself unexpectedly renewed owing to the charms of the eleventh month.

Having taken possession of a small wooden “solar cabin” owned by a pair of  delightful aging hippies who’d grown wealthy selling chemical toilets to fellow urban escapees, I heated the place with apple wood I split by hand, falling asleep most nights under a down quilt, warmed by the glow of my Intrepid woodstove and a young golden retriever from the local Humane Society who believed two-dog nights were better than one.

Before month’s end, I’d taken up fly fishing and playing golf again on a 9-hole course in town. An old-timer informed me Rudyard Kipling played there during the time he lived in Brattleboro, allegedly not long after he published The Jungle Book. I never managed to confirm this story but the very idea of it helped me rediscover my favorite boyhood game.

That November, my neighbors along the river road invited me to a community “alternative” Thanksgiving supper at a local hay barn. There was a fiddle band and lots of covered dishes made from local organic gardens, “all natural” dishes that to my traditional Southern palate tasted suspiciously like sautéed boxwood, including something that looked just like turkey but turned out to be my first encounter with tofu.

To a slightly homesick Southern boy far from home, missing his mama’s famous collard greens, cornbread and fried okra, this constituted a walk on the wild side of American counter-culture that I cherish to this day. That evening, I danced with a beautiful gal named Snowflake who ran a mushroom farm and had more underarm hair than me and innocently inquired if — my being from “The deep South” — I’d ever met anyone who was “actually in the Ku Klux Klan.” I replied with a tongue firmly planted in cheek that my daddy his own self was once in “our local Klan – until his klaxon switched from wearing all-natural cotton sheets to perma-press.” For some reason, she did not find this amusing. The dance ended quickly and I never did get to try one of her gourmet mushrooms.

The next time November rolled round, however, I went on a first date with a beautiful dark-haired girl who’d just graduated from Harvard and had come to work at the magazine where I was not only the senior writer but also the first Southerner in Yankee Magazine’s 75-year history. By then I was living in the middle of a New Hampshire apple orchard just outside Peterborough and having the time of my life writing about life in every cozy corner of rural New England — working at a legendary magazine where I learned most of what I know about the power of great storytelling.

That next autumn, that beautiful girl and I got married in a salt marsh north of Boston, days after a hurricane swept up the coast from Carolina. Our colorful Yankee neighbors in the village of Essex brought covered dishes — baked beans, turnip pie, Indian pudding and homemade wine. The dancing went on until well after midnight, about the time the dance floor began to sink in the mud.

I’d come far and my romance with November continued — and grew — over the next two decades. It was the month I most loved for working in my large faux English garden at summer’s end in Maine, topping up my woodpile for the winter, cleaning my tools, tucking in plants, drinking hot cider, watching fires and changeable skies and the southward flight of birds, savoring the solitude and beauty of nature’s most revealing month.

Between us, I thought I would never part with that house I designed and built on that beautiful forested hill of birch and hemlock; I had always imagined my ashes someday being spread over a garden I spent almost a third of my life building and tearing apart, fussing over and planning, digging into the soil and delving into its soul.

But as Truman Capote once pointed out, every Southern boy comes home again — if only in a box.

In time, after my children had grown and headed off on their own life journeys, I succumbed to a quiet longing for home that had to be answered.

It was a decision I’ve never fully regretted, for memories are like glowing coals in winter and life is full of lovely compensations. One is this magazine and the circle I’ve somehow closed.

Another is November in North Carolina where I can grow roses almost to December, a month just as sweet and revealing as it ever was on my soulful Maine hilltop . . . though I do miss the naked forest, that lonely moose and the mystified FedEx Guy from time to time. PS

Contact Editor Jim Dodson at jim@thepilot.com.

Simple Life

Old No. 7

Two aging road warriors strike out in search of the American past

By Jim Dodson

As summer’s end approached, I hit the road for research on a new book, though I wasn’t sure how far I might get — or where I might end up.

The start of any book project brings with it a humbling sense of vertigo, a feeling that the road ahead will be challenging and possibly full of wrong turns and maddening dead ends. But this particular project held special meaning because it’s a book I’ve been thinking about, in one form or another, for almost 40 years.

It’s a book about a road.

But not just any road — the Great Wagon Road.

You may or may not have heard of it. But if you happen to be a Southerner with deep roots in the region, you may well be here because of it.

The Great Philadelphia Wagon Road, as it was called early on, became the most traveled road in Colonial America. It ran from Philadelphia to Augusta, Georgia, and was the road that opened the American South to exploration and settlement and pushed back the western frontier.

During the 18th and early 19th centuries, the road was the way to a new life for tens of thousands of Scots-Irish, German and English settlers — Amish, Moravians, Quakers and Presbyterians — who landed on our shores seeking a fresh start in a new world. Daniel Boone hunted along the road, and Thomas Jefferson’s daddy named and surveyed it. A young captain named George Washington served as an Indian scout along the GWR and no less than three major wars, the French and Indian, American Revolution and Civil War — four if you care to count the Whiskey Rebellion — were fought along it’s meandering way. Fittingly, the ingenious Conestoga wagon that carried later generations of settlers across the Great Plains to settle the Far West was created by German artisans by the Conestoga River near Lancaster, Pennsylvania.

Both wings of my family came down the GWR in the mid-18th and early 19th centuries respectively. My pretty blond mama’s sprawling German clan (the Kessells), hopped off around Hagerstown, Maryland and settled along the south branch of the Potomac River on the West Virginia side in the early 1800s. Half a century earlier, my daddy’s Scottish and English forebears (the Tates and the Dodsons ) filtered down the road over the Dan River through Walnut Cove before settling in the Hawfields near Mebane, where they formed churches and grist mills and made furniture. A few of them even went on down to Wilmington and the Cape Fear region.

I first heard about the Great Wagon Road four decades ago when a pretty girl named Rebecca Robinson and I stayed out all night on a date and wound up attending the sunrise service at God’s Acre in Old Salem. The Moravians originated the service in 1732 in Saxony. While standing among the ancient gravestones of that famous Moravian — men separated from women, a democracy of death, as has been described — we struck up a conversation with an older gent who turned out to be a professor of history at nearby Salem College. When I happened to mention my family name, he smiled and commented that my forbears, like his, probably  came down the Great Wagon Road about the same time” in the late 1700s.

He explained that the GWR subsumed the remains of the so-called Great Indian Warrior Trading Path used by the Iroquois tribes such as the Cherokee, and other nations, including the Catawba and Tuscarora Indians until the Treaty of Lancaster in 1744 opened the western frontier to European settlement, pushing the native peoples farther into the mountains.

Cities such as Lancaster and York in Pennsylvania; Winchester, Roanoke and Lexington in Virginia; (Winston-)Salem, Salisbury, and Charlotte in North Carolina, and Camden in South Carolina, began either as trading post river fords or market towns that owe their origins directly to the Great Wagon Road.

Thirty-five years after that sunrise service, during the year I served as the Writer in Residence at Hollins University (which happened to lie along the GWR in a vale just north called “Big Lick,” now Roanoke), my fascination with the road was powerfully rekindled. I began moseying along Virginia’s winding and beautiful U.S. Route 11 and found all sorts of surviving references to the Great Wagon Road in various forms — place names of inns, family farms, townships, churches, battlefields and no shortage historical roadside standards.

On my trips home to Maine up Interstate 81, I realized that I was, in fact, traveling the same path my forebears had followed once upon a time in America, on the Great Wagon Road.

By the end of my time at Hollins, I’d resolved to someday drive the Great Wagon Road’s 700 miles in order to investigate how a young nation was born and how my native South grew up along what may be the most historic road in the land.

_

Someday finally arrived when I loaded up my own Great Wagon and set off for Philadelphia just after dawn one morning in late July.

My Great Wagon happens to be a vintage 1996 Buick Roadmaster Estate wagon, an iconic American road car that automotive historians consider the last true production American station wagon built before Detroit switched to making SUVs.

Almost on a lark — or was it the sweet hand of Providence? — I bought it a decade ago from a nice lady in Pinehurst whose widowed papa had recently given up driving and had to “let go of his baby.”

Well-maintained Roadmasters, I soon learned, can fetch a tidy sum and are greatly in demand among collectors of vintage automobiles.

This one turned out to be a gem.

Its odometer had only 59,000 miles on it. The lovely fellow who’d owned it actually kept velvet on the dash. The seats were comfy and roomy, like leather La-Z-Boy recliners. It’s famous Dynaride suspension system made the vehicle glide over the road like a dream, and a 350-horsepower V-8 engine was the same one Chevy put in its Corvettes. The air conditioning system could have cooled a deli meat locker and the killer cassette audio system had the acoustics of a concert hall.

True, there were a few tiny dents and peeling paint in its fake wood grain side panels — but hey, there were in mine, too. We were perfect for each other.

I bought the car an hour after driving it.

Our four kids were amused and maybe a little embarrassed when they laid eyes on my newly acquired land yacht that Christmas.

“It’s so, well . . . big,” said one son with a
wary chuckle.

You should give it a nickname,” suggested another, the family comedian. “How about The Beast?”

I didn’t care for The Beast. The car was nothing if not an iconic work of American automotive art, an aged beauty whose name said it all — Master of the Road.

One ride in it, however, and they all changed their tunes. Three of the four asked to take the car to college. Not on your life, I said, though I did consent to let them drive it whenever they were in residence.

My work colleagues were also amused.

The publisher of this magazine suggested I call her the “Dirty Pearl,” as if my beloved land yacht were an old pirate ship.

That nickname was cute but never seemed quite right to me.

While researching the Roadmaster’s distinguished automotive history — it’s the car that basically helped Buick survive the Great Depression and became the symbol of 1950s suburban America — I discovered a website that listed the Roadmaster Estate wagon among “Top Ten Best Vehicles for the End of the World,” capable of handling “nuclear winter, economic collapse or a zombie takeover.”

My 1996 Roadmaster was No. 7 on the list. The photograph was even identical to my Great Wagon — “The Modern American Power Wagon Exemplar,” noted the editor of Popular Mechanics, in effect the Conestoga Wagon of Vacationing America.

I finally had the perfect nickname.

My Great Wagon, after all, had survived the lives of two large and rambunctious American families, three teen drivers and decades of moving everything from entire households to countless garden shrubs, not to mention made dozens of beach trips and backcountry camping expeditions with a large canoe lashed on her roof. My Great Wagon was nothing if not a proven survivor.

So this summer, after 21 years of life and 159,000 miles, following a tune-up from Clark the mechanic who has faithfully looked after the old gal for years, we set off together up the Great Wagon Road to begin the first leg of our long journey from Market Square in Colonial Philadelphia to Augusta, Georgia.

Old No. 7 handled Philly’s congested tourist traffic like a summer breeze off the Delaware and cruised west on the Lincoln Highway as if she were right off of the showroom floor.

After Philadelphia, where I walked in the footsteps of our founders and boned up on my heroes Jefferson and Franklin, the Old No. 7 led me to an expert on Colonial furniture making and allowed me to dine with a historian of Amish life. Among other things, I dropped by America’s oldest farmer’s market (1745), explored four famous battlefields, hiked in a state park, visited the nation’s first commercial pretzel maker, learned about the birth of the Conestoga wagon and watched the sun rise on Cemetery Hill where Lincoln gave his deeply moving Gettsyburg Address on a November afternoon in 1863. My notebook runneth over.

After five days out, we came home to rest a bit before resuming the next leg of the long road from Winchester to Old Salem later this autumn. The Road’s original travelers sometimes took four or five months to reach their new homes in the Southern Wilderness. Old No. 7 and I hoped to finish our travels in about the same amount of time.

According to her odometer, we covered 179 miles of the Great Wagon Road, which by my reckoning means there are many more miles of great discoveries to come.

Contact Editor Jim Dodson at jim@thepilot.com.

Supper on the Porch

Old friends, a well-traveled table, a summer evening to remember

By Jim Dodson

On a fine summer night not long ago, seven friends came to supper on the porch.

They arrived bearing good wine, eager to see what we’d done with the old house we purchased six months ago. Since five of the seven guests were also serious wine buffs, bottles were quickly opened and the party moved out to our huge screened porch where my wife had set our antique English wedding table for supper.

The porch is a large screened affair that spans almost the entire back portion of the house. It features a floor and foundation made from antique brick and exposed beams with large old-style ceiling fans overhead.

Quite honestly, when we first saw it, we weren’t sure what to do with such a large empty space. The screens were old and dusty and the floor was uneven in places. Moreover, off the west end of the porch was a terrace with brick planters overgrown with English ivy set beneath a large pergola that had clearly seen better days. Since I knew this house as a boy — it sits two doors from the house where I grew up and was my favorite house in the neighborhood as a kid — I remembered how the Corry family seemed to live on this porch way back when, in part because it sat beneath hundred-year-old white oaks and a lower canopy of dogwoods and silver bell trees, providing deep shade and a cool retreat on the hottest of summer days. I remembered Mama Merle loving her big sprawling porch. 

One early thought we had was to replace the screens with oversized weather-tight windows and create a four-season family room that could function as a small ballroom in a pinch. We also contemplated halving the porch in size and adding an outdoor fireplace — or even removing the rambling old extension altogether to expand a yard that resembled an urban jungle.

“Let’s live with it a while,” proposed my ever-practical bride. “The porch may grow on us — and tell us what we should do.”

In the meantime, over the winter and early spring, I knocked apart the aging pergola and opened up the terrace, cleaning out the overgrown planter beds and filling them with young hosta plants. I also removed a dozen wicked Mahonia plants and a small acre of English ivy and runaway wisteria, and began creating a Japanese shade garden beneath the dogwoods and silver bells.

By the time true spring arrived my back garden was looking rather promising, but the big old porch remained empty until my wife had an interesting idea.

“Let’s move our wedding table out there and make this our three-season dining room,” she said, pointing out that the size of the porch made it essentially indifferent to weather.

Our dining table is a beautiful old thing I spotted in a Portland, Maine, English antique shop and purchased for my fiancée as a wedding present two decades ago. It’s an early 19th-century English farm table from Oxfordshire that came with its own documenting papers listing at least a dozen a family names that had allegedly owned it before us. Beyond its impressive strength and workmanship, the thing I most love about it are the nicks and dents and discolorations of time that mark the table’s long journey through this world. Our family has gathered around it for every holiday meal since the day it arrived in our household, and sometimes as I listen to the eddies of conversations that take place around it, I can’t help but think about the voices that table has heard over the past century and a half, the intimate stories, the debates and conversations, fiery oaths and whispers of love.

Before moving it out to Miss Merle’s porch, however, my wife set about cleaning every surface of the porch including the elegant ceiling fans and screens while I got to work on the floor, leveling the bricks and using a distressing technique to paint the brick floor a faded woodland green.

That’s when a kind of alchemy began to take place.

The big room suddenly seemed to come alive with a human charm all its own. Soon we added plants and an antique sideboard that had never fit the in the main house even found a destined spot on the porch. I hung the custom-made iron candelabra from our old house in Maine and my bride strung small clear white lights along the roofline as a finishing touch. We suddenly had the perfect place for a pair of fine old wicker chairs we’d kept in storage forever, and an antique iron table and reading lamp that had never quite found their place. A large sisal rug Wendy found online was the final piece of the puzzle.

By the time our first supper on the porch was well underway, our guests were all commenting on the beauty of the room beneath the trees.

“I don’t think I’ve seen a more beautiful porch,” said my childhood friend, Susan, who lived in Charleston, South Carolina for years and has a designer’s eye for everything. “It’s so rustic and simple.”

“Don’t change a thing about this porch,” urged Joe, a buddy from high school who is an exceptional builder and expert on wood. He made some excellent small suggestions about replacing the vinyl soffits with wooden panels with inset lighting that would make the room even more dramatic.

The lively dinner went on much longer than expected. The stories flew, the candles flickered, the wine flowed, and the earthy scent of my restored garden drifted through the screens. At their end of the table, the wine buffs had a fine time swapping tales of their intricate journeys toward grape enlightenment.

Sipping my French sparkling water, it was enough for me to simply sit and listen to my friends go on about life and wine in ways I suspect that old wedding table had heard before over the years, taking its own pleasure in our screen porch fellowship. Don and Cindy talked about their extensive wine tours out West. Susan told a charming tale about being whisked away by a friend to Europe where she was put up and feted at a pair of the most elite vineyards in France and Italy. “It was like something from a fairy tale,” she admitted. 

Somewhere about the time the strawberry and whipped cream cake was being served, my closest table companion leaned over and mentioned to me that she was thinking of walking home. It wasn’t far, only a few blocks, and the night was gorgeously moonlit. “They won’t even notice I’m gone,” Terry said with a coy smile, finishing her own glass of white wine.

Terry is my oldest friend Patrick’s wife. I’ve known her since we sat near each other in high school choir 45 years ago. A few years back Terry and Patrick sold their big house on the north side of town and moved back to the old neighborhood, a move that in part inspired my wife and me to do the same. We now lived just three long blocks apart.

“Mulligan and I will walk with you,” I proposed, prompting my favorite dog to dutifully bolt for the kitchen door.

So off we went beneath a nearly full moon that displayed one exceptionally bright planet just beneath its southern rim. Terry asked me if I knew the planet’s name but I couldn’t be sure — I guessed Mercury, incorrectly.  Still, it was lovely strolling along our darkened street with its ancient trees making the darkness seem even deeper, the neighborhood even quieter. As it happened, Terry and I both had recently undergone similar kinds of surgeries. We made little jokes about that fact — at least I did — and Terry, who is one year older and many years wiser, admonished me that I would feel fatigued for many weeks yet to come, not to push myself back into my usual 15-hour work routine.

“The world will still be there after you take time to rest and heal,” she pointed out.

“Suppers like tonight may help,” I said.

“That porch is wonderful,” she came back “I’m so glad you didn’t change it.”

“I think it changed us,” I agreed, kissing her cheek goodnight. 

On the walk back to our house, I was thinking how all it took was a little time and Wifely creativity, a well-traveled table and a circle of close friends breaking bread and drinking wine to transform a big empty space into something intimate and special. Objects, like people, respond to love, and since that first night of supper and fellowship, the big old porch has become my favorite spot where I do everything, from writing before dawn to reading at night. It is my sanctuary where I just sit and plot my garden or simply daydream and maybe even heal.

Halfway home, something else wonderful happened. A large night bird swooped low over my head and rose to an arching limb 20 feet above Old Man Dodson and his dog. I shined my light upward and discovered, rather startlingly, a large snowy owl staring down at me with an imperturbable calmness. The only one I’d ever seen was back home in Maine. I knew that snowy owls nested in the Arctic tundra and wondered how far this old fellow had come — or had yet to go.

Back in our driveway, the departing wine buffs were looking up at the moon with celestial-reading apps on their I-phones. What an age of wonders, I thought. An ancient owl and phones that could decipher the night sky — all within the same block.

I told them about the snowy owl visiting just down the street.

“There’s a sign of some kind,” said Susan with a husky laugh.

Joe the naturalist pointed out that eagles and northern species of owls had been returning to the city’s northern lakes of late, adopting new habitats in an ever-changing world.

He also pointed out that the bright planet was, in fact, Jupiter, and that at least three of Jupiter’s four moons were visible at that moment, a rare celestial event.

“That makes two in one night,” I heard myself say, thinking how far we’ve all come, how far we’ve yet to go.  PS

Contact Editor Jim Dodson at jim@thepilot.com. Read more about Opti the Mystic and Mulligan in The Range Bucket List, Dodson’s new book, available everywhere.

What’s Enough?

Timeless advice from a modern sage

By Jim Dodson

A few weeks ago I read in The New Yorker about a group of Silicon Valley billionaires who’ve built luxury retreats in some of the remotest parts of the planet, safe houses designed to allow their owners to survive a global catastrophe — and stocked with enough good white wine and military hardware to hold out indefinitely. 

A short time later, I read about a second group of young Silicon Valley billionaires funding a top-secret scheme to bioengineer a so-called “God Pill” that can cure everything from cancer to flat feet and make human mortality as obsolete as your trusty old Osborne computer.

According to Newsweek magazine, this latter group of “visionaries” includes Peter Thiel, the billionaire co-founder of PayPal, who is making plans to live for at least 120 years. Dmitry Itskov, the “godfather” of the Russian Internet, says his goal is to live to 10,000 years of age, while Larry Ellison, co-founder of Oracle, finds the notion of accepting mortality “incomprehensible.” Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google, meantime, simply hopes to someday “cure death.”

As Newsweek notes,  “The human quest for immortality is both ancient and littered with catastrophic failures. Around 200 B.C., the first emperor of China, Qin Shi Huang, accidentally killed himself trying to live forever, poisoning himself by eating supposedly mortality-preventing mercury pills.”

Centuries later, the answer to eternal life appears no closer at hand. “In 1492, Pope Innocent VIII died after blood transfusions from three healthy boys whose youth he believed he could absorb. A little closer to modern times, in 1868 America, Kentucky politician Leonard Jones ran for the U.S. presidency on the platform that he’d achieved immortality through prayer and fasting — and could give his secrets for cheating death to the public. Later that year, Jones died of pneumonia.”

For better or worse, as the ancients of every spiritual tradition remind us, it is life’s bittersweet impermanence — and one’s perspective on the matter — that determines whether every day is regarded as a gift to be savored or a good reason to pack up and head for the hills. 

As I read about Silicon Valley’s lavish End Time retreats and quest to make human mortality irrelevant, in any case, I couldn’t help but think about the summer I realized I was mortal and probably wouldn’t be around forever.

It was June of 1962 and school was just out. Third grade was in my rearview mirror and I had both a new neighborhood plus a shiny new Black Racer bike upon which to go adventuring.

My new neighborhood gang was buzzing about the bomb shelter “creepy Mr. Freeman” had reportedly built beneath a shed in his backyard in the raw new subdivision south of the city. The Russians were coming, and bomb shelters were all the rage on TV and in magazines. About this same time I watched an episode of The Twilight Zone that tells the story of neighbors at a dinner party when word comes that a nuclear missile has been launched at America. The host and his family flee to their bomb shelter only to have their terrified neighbors batter down the door — just as the word comes that the report was a mistake. But panic has brought its own devastation to the neighborhood. 

I freely admit becoming obsessed with Mr. Freeman’s bomb shelter. My brother and I were sons of an itinerate newspaperman, after all, who’d witnessed Klan rallies and floods during our family odyssey through several newspapers across the deep South before coming home to Greensboro for good. There’d been stops in Wilmington and Florence, South Carolina, and our dad had even owned his own paper in Mississippi for a while. But the misfortunes and tragedies we’d witnessed or heard about in the context of newspaper reporting always belonged to someone else. 

To my over-stimulated 9-year-old brain, the prospect of a sneaky, thermonuclear attack by the Russians was in a class of disaster by itself. It made the rickety wooden desks we practiced huddling beneath during civil defense drills at school seem laughably insufficient compared to the allure of an Oreo-filled, TV-equipped bomb shelter in one’s own backyard.

I even asked my dad if we could build one, helpfully providing a preliminary sketch of what ours might look like. My bomb shelter was one classy affair, resembling a cross between the Flintstones’ cave and a Jules Verne wondrous Nautilus submarine.

My old man smiled when I showed him my bomb shelter design, which also depicted a wasteland where our new subdivision previously existed — a cindered moonscape inspired by photographs of Hiroshima I’d seen in an Associated Press photo book of the Second World War.

“How many people can fit in your bomb shelter?” he casually wondered.

“Just the four of us and Herky,” I said. Herky was my dog, short for “Hercules,” named for the mythological Greek strongman featured in cheesy Steve Reeves movies.

“I see. Well, Sport, would you really want to live in a world like that? How are you going to feel knowing all your friends and schoolmates who didn’t have bomb shelters were left up top where everything is gone — all the birds and trees and animals you seem to love so much?”

This was a point I’d not considered.

“Do you think the world will end anytime soon?” I asked him.

“In some fashion or another, the world is always ending for someone somewhere,” he calmly explained.

He even had an answer to the nuclear appeal of creepy Mr. Freeman’s bomb shelter.

“You can’t run away from the world,” he said. “You can only try to improve it. Rather than bury yourself in the backyard, I suggest you grow up and help create a better world. You have a brief time on this Earth. The trick is to use it wisely — and to learn what’s enough.”

Decades later, when we talked about this funny moment, my philosopher-father remembered it almost exactly the way I did.

We happened to be sitting in a pub on the rainy Lancashire coast of England, sharing a pint following a rained-off round of golf. Though you wouldn’t have guessed it, my dad was dying of cancer, and this was our final golf trip together, a long-talked-about trip to see the places where he fell in love with golf as an Air Force sergeant just prior to D-Day.

Among other things on this trip, I’d learned that my father had been through his own versions of an Apocalypse — first a tragic plane crash that killed dozens of people including children in the village where he was stationed; and a second time when his dream of owning his own newspaper in Mississippi went up in smoke after his silent partner cleaned out the company bank accounts and headed for parts unknown. That same week, unimaginably, my mother suffered a late-term miscarriage and my dad’s only sister died in a car wreck outside Washington, D.C. Talk about the End of the World.

“How on Earth does one survive a week like that?” I asked him over my warm beer.

I remember how he smiled. “Because I’ve learned that it’s not what you get from this life that really matters — but what you give and leave behind.  Knowing what’s enough is the key to a meaningful life.”

My dad was 79 years old that rainy afternoon in England. I could suddenly see why he was the perfect fellow to moderate the men’s Sunday morning discussion group at First Lutheran Church in Greensboro for more that two decades.

I was 42 years old with two small children back home in Maine and already in grief over his approaching absence from my life.

And I remember something else he said with a wry smile, draining his beer.

“There are no endings, Sport, only beginnings. Make each day count.”

Reading about the wealthy Silicon Valley billionaires who crave more time and seek to live forever simply reminded me of these lessons I learned very early in life, from that faraway bomb shelter summer and the mouth of a modern sage. Later in life, I actually took to calling my wise old father, an adman with a poet’s heart, “Opti the Mystic.”

All these years later, I think about how blessed I was to have such a funny, philosophical father and his essential message about knowing “What’s enough?”

Mine really is a pretty simple life, it turns out. I even jotted down a few things that at the end of the day (or even the world) are more than enough for me.

Enough for me is an old house I love where every creak or groan underfoot sounds like a sigh of contentment.

Long walks around Paris  — or just the neighborhood at dawn or evening — with my wife, Wendy, is the stuff of everyday magic.

Ditto a Japanese garden that will probably take at least a decade more to complete, new friends who come to supper on weekends, old friends who get in touch, Sunday evening phone calls from our four grown children, good books, rainy Sundays, our screened porch, and the night skies over our terrace. 

For the record, I’d like to write five or six more books of my own and maybe hobble off someday to find the world’s most sacred places, purely for spiritual kicks.

Also, like a worried 9-year-old boy I remember being, I wish my dog Mulligan could live forever — or at least until I’m ready to push on to God knows where.

Point being, I guess I don’t fear the end of this world, a gift Opti the Mystic gave me long ago. 

“This is why we are in the world,” advised the Sufi mystic Bawa. “Within your heart is a space smaller even than an atom. There, dear ones, God has placed 18,000 universes.”

A good reason to make every day count.  PS

Contact Editor Jim Dodson at jim@thepilot.com. Read more about Opti the Mystic and Mulligan in The Range Bucket List, Dodson’s new book, available everywhere.

Going Home

By Jim Dodson

Half a century ago this month, I was chased off the golf course of my dad’s club in Greensboro for losing my cool and burying a putter in the flesh of an innocent green during my first 18 holes ever on a regulation course. To compound the crime, I was playing with my dad and his two regular golf pals at the time, Bill Mims and Alex the Englishman.

After being shown how to properly repair the damaged green, my straight-arrow old man calmly insisted that I walk all the way back to the clubhouse in order to report my crime to Green Valley’s famously profane and colorfully terrifying head professional, who upon hearing what I’d done removed the eternally smoldering stogie from the right-hand corner of his mouth long enough to banish me from the golf course until midsummer.

This felt like a death sentence because I had been preparing for this day for well over a year, wearing out local par-3 courses and modest public courses in preparation for stepping up to a “real” golf course with my dad and his buddies. The idea was that I should become reasonably proficient at playing but — more important — learn the rules and proper etiquette of the ancient game.

Painful as it was, this day, it changed my life.

The next afternoon after church, a postcard Sunday in early May, my dad drove me 90 minutes south from the Piedmont to the Sandhills to show me famed Pinehurst No. 2, Donald Ross’ masterpiece, where I saw golfers walking along perfect fairways and actually heard a hymn being chimed through the stately longleaf pines.

True to form, my upbeat old man — whom I called “Opti the Mystic” owing to his relentless good cheer and penchant for quoting long-dead sages when you least expected it — calmly pointed out: “That golf course, Sport, is one of the most famous in the world. But you’ll never get to play there until you learn to properly behave on the golf course.”  He added, “If you ever do, you’ll be surprised how far this wonderful game can take you.”

I was crestfallen as we drove on past the famous course. But a few miles down Midland Road we turned into a small hotel that had its own golf course, the Mid Pines Inn and Golf Club. “Let’s step inside,” my dad casually suggested. “I’ll introduce you to an old friend.”

His old friend was a man named Ernie Boros, the brother of Julius Boros, the U.S. Open winner I’d recently tagged along after at the Greater Greensboro Open whenever I wasn’t shadowing my hero, Arnold Palmer.

Ernie Boros couldn’t have been nicer, offering me a free visor along with the news that his famous brother Julius happened to be having lunch at that moment in the dining room. He graciously offered to introduce us.

The encounter was brief but warm. The great man asked me how I liked golf and commented that if I continued to grow in the game, the odds were good that I would meet the most amazing people on Earth and play some incredible golf courses. Then he offered to sign my new visor.

“Wasn’t that something?” said Opti as we wandered out to look at the 18th hole of Mid Pines, which that day, wreathed with dogwoods and banks of azalea just past bloom stage, looked every bit as magical as Augusta National did on television. “You just never know who you’ll meet in golf. Tell you what,” he added almost as an afterthought, “if you think you can knock off the shenanigans, maybe we can play the golf course here today.”

And with that, I finally got to play my first full championship golf course.

It only took another two decades (and my mom fessing up) for me to realize that the whole affair was simply a sweet setup by my funny and philosophical old man — a classic Opti the Mystic exercise to illustrate the point of learning how to live life with joy, gratitude and optimism, not to mention respect for a game older than the U.S.  Constitution.

And here’s the most amazing thing of all. Both men were correct in their assessments of golf’s social and metaphysical properties. If I’d been less awestruck and a little more tuned into the universe, perhaps I’d have heard echoes of the same message coming from Opti and Julius Boros  — that the ancient game could take you amazing places and introduce you to some of the finest people on Earth.

A fuller account of this teenage epiphany opens the pages of The Range Bucket List, my new — and possibly final — golf book that reaches bookstores May 9. Fittingly, the memoir appears almost 50 years to the day after that life-altering weekend.

In a nutshell, the book is simply my love letter to an old game that, true to my old man’s words, took me much farther than I could ever have imagined it could, deeply enriched — and possibly even saved — my life.

It even eventually brought me home again to North Carolina.

Not long after turning 30, taking the advice of Opti to “write about things you love,” I withdrew from consideration for a long-hoped-for journalism job in Washington to relocate to a trout stream in Vermont where I went to work for Yankee magazine as that iconic publication’s first senior writer (and Southerner), a move which helped shape the values of this magazine and opened an unexpected door to the world of golf.

This move in turn led to Final Rounds, a surprise bestseller about taking Opti back to England and Scotland to play the golf courses where he fell hard for the game as a homesick soldier prior to D-Day. My dad was dying of cancer at the time. It was indeed our final golf trip.

Among other surprises, the book prompted Arnold and Winnie Palmer to get in touch, inviting me to spend two years living and traveling with them as we crafted Arnold’s own best-selling memoir, A Golfer’s Life.  An enduring friendship and nine books followed, four of which were golf-related, including the authorized biography of Ben Hogan and a biography of America’s own great triumvirate of Sam Snead, Ben Hogan and Byron Nelson.

A few years back, while looking through an a trunk full of my boyhood stuff from my late mother’s house, I found my first three golf books and a small notebook that listed 11 items on my “Things To Do In Golf” list.

Here’s the list:

1.     Meet Arnold Palmer and Mr. Bobby Jones

2.     Play the Old Course at St Andrews

3.     Make a Hole in One

4.     Play on the PGA Tour

5.     Get new clubs

6.     Break 80 (Soon!)

7.     Live in Pinehurst

8.     Find Golf Buddies like Bill, Alex and Richard (my dad’s regular               Saturday group)

9.     Caddie at the GGO

10.  Have a girlfriend who plays golf

11.  Play golf in Brazil

That was it, short and sweet. If you’d have informed me when I cobbled this list together (probably the year before I got the boot from Green Valley) — the predecessor of what decades later I came to call my Range Bucket List — that I would accomplish in some form or another everything on this list and then some over the next half century, I probably would have laughed out loud in disbelief — or simply keeled over from pure glandular teenage joy.

In simplest terms, that’s what The Range bucket List is, a grateful Everyman’s love poem to the finest game on Earth, tales I’ve never been able to tell until now about Arnold and Winnie Palmer, John Updike, Glenna Vare, amateur great Bill Campbell, LPGA icon Jackie Pung, the greatest Scottish woman on Earth, the power of a best friend and the ultimate mulligan at marriage, low Old Course comedy and how — true to Opti’s words — the game deeply enriched my life and even brought me safely home to North Carolina again. There’s even an oddly revealing account about a peculiar afternoon of golf with a guy named Trump.

I hope those who enjoy my books find this tale amusingly human, perhaps even reminding them of their own travels through the game of life and their love affair with a grand old game. Every golfer worth his salt, after all, keeps a Range Bucket List. And everyone’s list is different.

I’ll be making the rounds in the state throughout the spring and summer, spinning some of these tales and others I’ve never told, meeting like-minded sons and daughters of the game who share my passion for its many unexpected gifts.

Perhaps we’ll meet at one of these gatherings.

Maybe by then I’ll have even figured out why I was so hot to play golf
in Brazil, the only item from that list from so long ago, still waiting for a check mark.

The List, like life itself, goes on. That’s part of the fun, and the sweet mystery of golf.  PS

The book debut! Jim Dodson will be reading from and discussing The Range Bucket List at 5 p.m. on May 23 at The Country Bookshop at 140 NW Broad Street, Southern Pines. For mor information visit www.thecountrybookshop.biz.

Contact Editor Jim Dodson at jim@thepilot.com.

My Big Spring Makeover

Confessions of a Second hand Joe

By Jim Dodson

On a fine spring afternoon recently, I dropped by the office on the way home from a local garden center — part of a rare day off that I was spending at work in my garden.

The stylish Miz Bobbitt, chief social arbiter and majordomo of our crack magazine staff, took one look at me and smiled, making a wry comment on my “rustic” appearance.

To briefly review: I was wearing my favorite clothes, including my oldest gardening pants and most comfortable canvas shoes, both soiled from years of loyal service in the dirt; also my favorite flannel shirt (the tattered one with all the useful flap pockets), and my beloved — if somewhat faded and grimy — Pennsylvania Horticultural Society ball cap that once accompanied me through the wilds of South Africa with a group of crazy plants nerds in search of exotic species.

“This is how I dress when I work in the garden, my choice attire. I’m giving my garden a complete spring makeover,” I foolishly remarked.

“Well,” Bobbitt came back with perfect timing, “Maybe it’s time for you to have a big spring makeover, too!” She wrinkled her cute button nose. “And what is that smell?”

I pointed out that it was probably just the freshly composted horse manure I’d spent the morning hours working into my new perennial beds. Nothing like the smell of fresh, composted pony poop, I find, to get the blood moving and the spade digging!

Bobbitt, alas, didn’t seem overly persuaded by my argument.

“I know gardeners who at least look stylish when they work in their gardens,” she pointed out.

“My garden doesn’t care how I look,” I felt compelled to note. “Frankly, I could garden buck nekkid and my Ficus carica wouldn’t care a fig leaf.”

“Oh, please don’t,” came a second unseen female voice from deep in the office.

A third voice politely spoke up as well, also female, also quite clever and naturally stylish, also suggesting that the editor’s garden attire might do with a “nice tweak if not a complete spring makeover.”

A pattern seemed to be emerging. Was my late mom speaking to them from the grave? This was perhaps the only disadvantage of working in an office full of bright, savvy, stylish females.

“What sort of tweak?” I asked guardedly.

“Hard to know where to start,” said Bobbitt with a sigh.

“I’d start with the pants,” said coworker No. Two, shaking her head. “Those things look pretty frumpy.”

“And I think the shoes really have to go,” said my third impromptu style advisor. “They look like you found them in someone’s recycling bin.”

Actually, our man of the garden did find his favorite garden shoes in the recycling bin  — or, more accurately, saved them from his own recycling bin, where his wife placed them without prior consent from their owner. 

“For your information, these garden shoes are incredibly comfortable,” I pointed out. “Comfort is key when one is hard at work in the garden.”

“And what’s with the old flannel shirt?” posed yet another Voice of Spring Improvement. “It looks like it was made from one of my grandmother’s old flannel nighties. She died 20 years ago. That thing has more baggy pockets than an Elks Club billiards table.”

The women of our office all enjoyed a good chuckle at this witty barb. But Mr. Frumpy Pants kept his cool, more or less, by reminding his bright and stylish colleagues that some famous philosopher once remarked that pockets are a sign of a noble mind and truly civilized man at work — or at least a dude who can’t remember where he left his favorite Phillips-head screwdriver.

“Young men may prefer shirts with polo players stitched on them,” I spoke up in behalf of shabbily dressed male gardeners (who smell of manure) everywhere. “But people who toil in the earth prefer shirts with roomy pockets in which to put valuable stuff.”

“What kind of stuff?” one of my newly appointed makeover consultants asked warily.

“Lots of things — chewing gum, Gorilla Glue, tape measures, interesting stuff found in the dirt. ”

“I’ll bet you also enjoy doing your own laundry,” put in one of his immaculate inquisitors.

This brought another round of giddy laughs from my wise and well-dressed colleagues.

At which point, I picked up my wounded gardener’s pride and fled for the safety of my composted manure pile.

Truthfully, one glance in my direction (with or without a telltale whiff of horse) will tell you that I’m not much for new and stylish clothes — and certainly not a good candidate for a big spring makeover.

Not to place too fine a point on the matter, I prefer old clothes and well-worn shoes that could soon be on their way out to the rubbish bin unless I keep an eagle eye out for my wife’s eternal discreet efforts to update my clothing tastes without my even noticing the change. 

She would firmly deny this characterization, of course.

The love of my life rather artfully pretends that I’m actually a snappy dresser like my father before me.  But every time she catches me painting in my only good pair of “church khakis” or digging up a shrub in the yard before an evening out at a formal event — as I did just weeks ago, in a (somewhat old but loyal) soup-and-fish — the impulse to makeover her somewhat 19th-century husband is simply too strong to remain politely disguised for long. 

Dad really was a snappy dresser, subscribing to the notion that a well-dressed fellow is a man in charge of his own sweet destiny. As a very successful man of the advertising trade, he believed in the power of a well-fitted suit and highly polished shoes. “Look right and feel right, ready to conquer the day’s challenges,” he liked to say with an infectious cheerfulness. His generation wasn’t called the “Greatest Generation” for no good reason — including the way they dressed.

My older brother Richard clearly caught dad’s drift. He might have been the best-dressed dude who ever attended Grimsley High School in Greensboro. To this day, Good Old Dicky Boy looks like “a million bucks” even in his most casual of attire. He never needs a Big Spring Makeover. His life is a perpetual spring makeover.

Not so, alas, his kid brother. 

My favorite sports coat is a classic herringbone Harris Tweed jacket I bought for three dollars at the Emanuel Episcopal Church Thrift Shop on Northeast Broad Street in Southern Pines seven years ago. It fits perfectly save for the genuine leather button that always falls off. I gained possession of this keepsake from some anonymous but pleasant fellow who is now only a memory to his loved ones, yet held in highest esteem — and abiding gratitude — by the man who inherited his favorite sports coat.

I have several other sports coats, mind you; many of them have been mended over the years and reflect my own personal “style” of dressing for personal comfort rather than cosmetic effect. Even when I play golf, which next to gardening is my idea of a true return of spring, I wear old, two-button polo shirts (white preferred) and my oldest and most comfortable khaki pants.

Still, I’m not entirely close-minded on the subject of how I look. I suppose every man can do with a spring makeover of some kind, give or take a saucy colleague.

To this end, the weekend after I caused a mild disturbance at the office owing to my rustic clothes and horsey smell, I picked up The New York Times’s popular “Men’s Fashions of The Times” just to see if anything caught my fancy — or, as it were, what I might have missed since my last spring makeover two or three decades ago.

I saw lots of underfed young men wearing suits that appeared to be three sizes too small for them, dudes proffering moody frowns, vacant stares, saddle buckles, dog chains, violent stripes, zany plaids, jackets that look as if they’d been made from the drapes in a Mafia-owned motel, formal wear with sneakers, undershorts that cost $420, guys who looked like young girls with bad facial hair, and on and on.

In a word, it was terrifying — but also kind of comforting. There was nothing for an old second-hand, tweed-loving fellow like me in the exciting world of men’s spring style for 2017, not one blessed thing even remotely suitable for spreading composted manure in one’s garden.

Greatly relieved and no April Fool, I went to get an old-fashioned haircut, my idea of a big spring makeover.  PS

Contact Editor Jim Dodson at jim@thepilot.com.