Simple Life

Letter From an Enchanted Hill

And life-changing leaps of faith

By Jim Dodson

For Christmas, my clever wife gave me a pair of expensive boxer shorts that claimed to be “nothing short of life-changing.”

The gift was the result of a running joke between us. During the consumer melee that is the holiday shopping season, you see, she was amused by my reaction to half a dozen TV spots and radio commercials that claimed their products were “life-changing.”

My short list of disbelief included a magical face cream that can allegedly make you look 30 years younger in less than two minutes, an expensive brain supplement that can supposedly restore failing memory to youthful vigor, and a luxury mattress so “smart” it can cure snoring and calculate your annual earned income credit.

Funny how times have changed. And here I thought it took things like falling in love, surviving a crisis, awakening to nature, taking the cure, making a friend, finding faith or discovering a mentor to change a life. Anytime I hear an ambulance or happy news of a baby being born, I think “someone’s life is changing.”

Looking back, my life has been changed — I prefer to say shaped — by a host of people, events and moments both large and small.

One example that stands out early was my old man’s passion for history and the lessons of nature, which probably explains why both my older brother and I became history nuts as well as Eagle scouts. History and nature, Dad believed, were life’s finest teachers, the reason he brought along a small satchel of classic books on our early camping and fishing trips in order to share bits of timeless wisdom from his favorite poets and philosophers by a blazing fire. This was his version of the Athens School, a campfire Chautauqua. It’s also why I took to calling him “Opti the Mystic.”

“All history is personal,” Opti liked to say, “because someone’s life is being changed. We grow by learning to pay attention because everything in nature is connected — including people and events.”

He illustrated both points powerfully on a cold February day in 1960 when Opti unexpectedly turned up at our new elementary school to spring my brother and me from class. We’d only been in town since the week before Christmas, barely enough time to acquire public library cards and reconnoiter the neighborhood on bikes. But we sensed that one of his entertaining field trips was in the offing, possibly a romp through the nearby battlefield where General Greene’s ragtag army gave Lord Cornwallis and his redcoat army all they could handle.

Instead, a short time later, we wound up standing near the “colored” entrance of the Center Theatre across the street from the F.W. Woolworth building in downtown Greensboro, where four brave young men from A&T State University were attempting to peacefully integrate the all-white lunch counter, an event regarded today as a defining moment in the birth of the nonviolent American Civil Rights movement.

“Boys,” he told us, “this is living history. This isn’t just going to change the South. It’s going to change America.”

The date was February 2, my seventh birthday as it happens, and Opti was right — though that change has yet to be fully realized more than half a century later.

A few days before my birthday this month, my daughter Maggie turned 30. She’s a senior copywriter for a major Chicago advertising firm and a gem of a writer with a bright future, a chip off her granddaddy’s block.

The summer after Mugs (as I call her) turned 7 in the aftermath of a divorce neither of us had seen coming, she and I and our elderly golden retriever took a two-month road trip around America, a fly-fishing and camping odyssey to the great trout rivers of the West. We rode horses, frightened a few stunning cutthroat trout, met a host of colorful oddballs and characters, lost the dog briefly in Yellowstone, blew up the truck in Oklahoma and generally had the time of our lives. I eventually put these adventures in a little book called Faithful Travelers that is still in print two decades later and closest of my books to my heart.

One night, sitting by a campfire on a remote mesa near Chaco Canyon, in a state that calls itself the Land of Enchantment, my precocious companion wondered why her old man had never bothered to write her a letter offering thoughts and advice the way she knew Opti had done for me many times in life. Just days before, she’d written me a letter thanking me for taking her on the trip.

When she and Amos the dog turned in, I tossed another log on our signal fire, sending up a spiral of embers to the gods of Enchantment, reached for a pen and paper bag and jotted the following letter from the heart to my wise and faithful fellow traveler. Every year around our shared birthdays, I take out that letter and read it just to remind myself how all history is personal and everything really is connected in nature.

Dear Maggie,

I’m sorry I’ve never written you a letter before. Guess I goofed, parents do that from time to time. I know you’re sad about the divorce. Your mom and I are sad too. But I have faith that with God’s help and a little patience and understanding on our parts, we’ll all come through this just fine. Being with you like this has helped me laugh again and figure out some important things. That’s what families do, you know — help each other laugh and figure out problems that sometimes seem to have no answer.

Perhaps I should give you some free advice. That’s what fathers are supposed to do in letters to their children. Always remember that free advice is usually worth about as much as the paper it’s written on and this is written on a used paper bag. Even so, I thought I would tell you a few things I’ve learned since I was about your age. Some food for thought, as your grandfather would say.

Anyway, Mugs, here goes:

Always be kind to your brother and never hit. The good news is, he’ll always be younger and look up to you. The bad news is, he’ll probably be bigger.

Travel a lot. Some wise person said travel broadens the mind. Someone wiser said TV broadens the butt.

Listen to your head but follow your heart. Trust your own judgment. Vote early. Change your oil regularly. Always say thank you. Look both ways before crossing. When in doubt, wash your hands.

Remember you are what you eat, say, think, do. Put good things in your mind and your stomach and you won’t have to worry about what comes out.

Learn to love weeding, waiting in line, ignoring jerks like Randy Farmer.

Always take the scenic route. You’Il get there soon enough. You’ll get old soon enough, too. Enjoy being a kid. Learn patience, which comes in handy when you’re weeding, waiting in line, or trying to ignore a jerk like Randy Farmer.

Play hard but fair. When you fall, get up and brush yourself off. When you fail, and you will, don’t blame anyone else. When you succeed, and you will, don’t take all the credit.

On both counts, you’ll be wiser.

By the way, do other things that make you happy as well. Only you will know what they are. Take pleasure in small things. Keep writing letters — the world needs more letters. Smile a lot. Your smile makes angels dance.

Memorize the lyrics to as many Beatles songs as possible in case life’s one big Beatle challenge. Be flexible. Your favorite Beatles song will probably always change.

Never stop believing in Santa or the tooth fairy. They really do exist. God does too. A poet I like says God is always waiting for us in the darkness and you’ll find God when it’s time. Or God will find you.

Pray. I can’t tell you why praying works any more than I can tell you why breathing works. Praying won’t make God feel any better, but you will. Trust me. Better yet, trust God. Breathe and pray.

Always leave your campsite better than you found it. Measure twice, cut once. If all else fails, put Duct tape on it.

Don’t lie. Your memory isn’t good enough. Don’t cheat. Because you’ll remember.

Save the world if you want to. At least turn it upside down a bit if you can’t. While you’re at it, save the penny, too.

When you get to college, call your mother every Sunday night.

Realize it’s okay to cry but better to laugh. Especially at yourself. If and when you get married, realize it’s okay if I cry.

Read everything you can get your hands on and listen to what people tell you. Count on having to figure it out for yourself, though.

Never bungee-jump. If you do, don’t tell your father.

Make a major fool of yourself at least once in life, preferably several times. Being a fool is good for what ails you. We live in a serious time. Don’t take yourself’ too seriously. Always wear your seat belt even if I don’t.

Remember that what you choose to forget may be at least as important as what you choose to remember. Someone very wise once said this to me — but I can’t remember who it was or exactly what it means.

Admit your mistakes. Forgive everybody else’s.

Notice the stars but don’t try to be one. Always paint the underside first. Be kind to old people and creatures great and small.

Learn to fight but don’t fight unless the other guy throws the first punch.

Don’t tell your mother about this last piece of advice.

Learn when it’s time to open your mind and close your mouth. (I’m still working on this one.) Lose your heart. But keep your wits.

Be at least as grateful for your life as I am.

Despite what you hear, no mistake is permanent, and nothing goes unforgiven. God grades on a curve.

One more thing: Take care of your teeth and don’t worry about how you look. You 1ook just fine. That’s two things, I guess.

Finally, there’s a story I like about an Indian boy at his time of initiation. “As you climb to the mountaintop,” the old chief tells his son, “you’ll come to a great chasm — a deep split in the Earth. It will frighten you. Your heart will pause.

“Jump,” says the chief. “It’s not as far as you think.”

This is excellent advice for girls, too. Life is wonderful, but it will frighten you deeply at times.

Jump, my love.

You’ll make it.

Love, Dad

For the record, my fancy new boxers didn’t change my life. They are quite comfortable, in fact.  PS

Contact Editor Jim Dodson at jim@thepilot.com.

Simple Life

Kid Up a Tree

Because of a father who loved the Old North State

By Jim Dodson

Half a century ago, my dad was on a creative team from a High Point–based ad agency that produced perhaps the state of North Carolina’s most iconic travel and tourism campaign. 

It declared the Old North State to be “Variety Vacationland” and featured beauty shots of our blessed land from the Outer Banks to the Blue Ridge Mountains, along with a catchy theme song that sounded like a college fight song sung by the Fred Waring Singers. 

It was called the “North Carolina Vacation Song.” 

North Car-o-lina, friendly mountain breezes,

North Car-o-lina, with its sandy beaches,

Wonderland of Variety . . .

Coast to mountains it’s great to be 

Right here in North Car-o-lina 

Love the pines around in North Car-o-lina,

Get your cares behind you

Livin’ is right in ho-li-day bright 

NORTH CARO-O-LINA! 

If you’ve reached a certain threshold of age, you probably know this classic and clever jingle word for word. In fact, you probably can’t get the dang thing out of your head six decades later. It’s stuck in there playing on an endless loop with Speedy Alka-Seltzer (“Plop, plop, fizz, fizz, Oh what a relief it is . . .”) and Mighty Mouse pitching Colgate toothpaste as he battles Mr. Tooth Decay.

My old man couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket, but he was a whiz at writing witty light verse, clever limericks and jingles in the style of Ogden Nash, the poet laureate of Light Verse, one of his literary heroes, the author of such timeless gems as:

My garden will never make me famous,

I’m a horticultural ignoramus,

I can’t tell a string bean from a soybean,

Or even a girl bean from a boy bean.

Or for you First Amendment Fans:

Senator Smoot is an institute

Not to be bribed with pelf;

He guards our homes from erotic tomes

By reading them all himself.

And lastly, a reassuring post-holiday ditty for those anxious about the post-nuclear age in which we reside:

At Christmas in olden times,

The sky was full of happy chimes.

But now the skies above us whistle,

With supersonic guided missiles.

This Christmas I’ll be modern, so

Here comes my guided mistletoe.

I suspect my clever papa had something to do with the lyrics of North Carolina’s wickedly infectious “Vacation Song” because he wrote lots of other memorable copy and commercials — print and television — that prompted large agencies in Chicago and Atlanta to try to lure him their way. 

He always politely listened to their pitches, but in the end stayed at home, his home, in North Carolina. Some of his favorite subjects, in fact, were rural counties he promoted with spots that illustrated their timeless qualities of life. My brother and I both wound up being models for a couple of these promotions. Brother Richard, circa 1964, is shown bird hunting with his “father” in a harvested cornfield on a beautiful autumn afternoon, revealing the rustic charms of Stanly County.

Yours truly, roundabout age 10, wearing jeans, sneakers and a buzz worthy of a Parris Island recruit, is shown sitting on a large tree limb staring dreamily off into the firmament over the green hills of Old Catawba, an ad for Olin Paper Company that found its way into several national magazines. I worked cheap; the sneakers were brand new, though I’m still waiting for my residuals. 

Most of all, our ditty-loving daddy, a product of the Great Depression who never finished college but went off to war and steeped himself in poetry and literature and history for the rest of his days, believed that effective advertising had to be both honest and true, which are not always the same thing. He worked on Terry Sanford’s gubernatorial campaign, for example, largely because of Sanford’s strong commitment to higher education, but turned down several other politicians he sensed were “too smooth to be believable,” as he liked to say.

I spent much of this past year thinking about (and sorely missing) my old man’s infectious good humor and belief in the power of humility, honest words and decent language — something that seems quaintly out of fashion in the time of a President who tweets insults on the hour, grades himself superior to Abe Lincoln and seems to have only a passing acquaintance with the truth. 

As a new and hopeful year dawns, and I wish my dad were still around to pick me up with one of his funny verses about the worrisome state of affairs, perhaps his muse Ogden Nash will have to suffice:

The American people,

With grins jocose, 

Always survive the fatal dose.

And though our systems are slightly wobbly,

We’ll fool the doctor this time, probly.

But wait — stop the presses! 

On an even brighter note, my daughter Maggie, who turns 30 this month and actually works as a senior copywriter for one of those large ad agencies that tried to lure her grandfather to the big city half a century ago, just sent her old man the pick-me-up he needed — three clever video spots she wrote for, of all things, Keebler Crackers.

Her “other” life is writing beautiful short stories, screenplays and a witty newsletter for her Book Drunk Book Club. But as her cracker videos clearly prove, genius skips a generation. 

Judge for yourself.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jupoZctbUJs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8w_gQsiXevA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CUs2437pRS4

Somewhere off in the firmament over the state he dearly loved, I’m guessing my old man might be grinning. Maybe his friend Ogden Nash is, too.

In any case, so you’ll never get it out of your head, I shall leave you with the rest of the famous vacation song. You can Google it, too.

North Car-o-lina, would you like to roll along scenic highways?

Let your travels bring you,

Face to face with history,

For new excitement . . . you’ll agree!

It’s all in North Car-o-lina

Bigger land of pleasure,

Life can be fine-er,

You’ll discover treasure 

Where the moon shines through tall green pines in . . .

NORTH-CAR-O-LINA!   PS

Contact Editor Jim Dodson at jim@thepilot.com. 

Simple Life

Silent Nights

Holding infinity in the palms of our hands

By Jim Dodson

When I was a kid, Christmas Eve couldn’t get here fast enough, the night I eagerly awaited all year. Mine was a visceral excitement fueled in part by the happy torture of unopened gifts beneath a heavily tinseled fir tree, and the crazy notion that if and when I somehow dropped off to sleep, a jolly bearded housebreaker would enter our premises and leave behind fantastic things I’d coveted from the pages of America’s holiest book — the Sears Catalog.

My excitement was also fueled by the other mythic theme of that singular night — the enchantment of a candlelight church service that always ended with congregants passing a small flame hand-to-hand as everyone sang “Silent Night” before filing out into a cold and silent night.

The flickering candles, the mingling scents of burning wax and well-worn hymnals, the ancient readings from Isaiah and St. Luke of a savior babe born in a barnyard stable, the sight of whole families bundled into creaking pews with squirming kids and yawning grandpas, O Magnum Mysterium — somehow it blended together into a delicious stew of magic and wonder that I felt — nay, believed — in my very bones. To this day, it’s the only time I intentionally stay up past midnight, stepping outside with a wee nightcap of bourbon or aged port to savor what may be the truest of silent nights.

Biblical scholars have long debated (and most disputed) the commonly assigned date of the historical Jesus’ birth (neither Luke nor Matthew makes mention of it happening in winter), leaving believers to accept the early Roman Church’s artful grafting of the birth of Jesus Christ onto pagan Rome’s popular feast of Saturnalia, a major holiday that coincided with the winter solstice that was known for its feasting and gift-giving in celebration of the returning of the sun god, Sol Invictus. For what it’s worth, ancient Persians assigned that same day, December 25, to be the birthday of their own returning sun god, Mithra. While in the Hebrew Calendar, the celebration of Hanukkah — the “Festival of Lights” that memorializes the restoration of the Second Temple of Jerusalem following a revolt by the Maccabeans and the miracle of a menorah that burned for eight days — begins on the 25th day of Kislev, which happens to fall anywhere from late November to late December in the Gregorian calendar. Just to make things more interesting, the Eastern Orthodox Christian Church accepts January 7 as the true birth date of Jesus Christ, the proper date of “Old Christmas.” Some leading Biblical scholars even maintain that the birthdate of Christ was in March, the start of spring.

Whatever else might be true, the Christmas-loving kid in me has never required a proof-of-authenticity label or even an official “start” date in order to believe in the transformative magic of the holiday season — whether it’s the lights of Hanukkah or lovely myth of Father Christmas or even lovelier myth of a virgin birth in a barn.

I embrace the true meaning of the word “myth,” by the way, an ancient word that has been stripped of its spiritual power by modern misuse, originally denoting a traditional story meant to convey an important message, often based on historical events, revealing an important belief, practice or phenomenon — all of which perfectly explains why we human seek the light in whatever form on the longest nights of the year.

Here’s my own favorite Christmas story.

During the years we lived on a wooded hill in Maine — deep in a forest of birch and hemlock that almost always had a dusting of snow by Christmas Eve — the Episcopal church we attended put special emphasis on its annual Christmas Eve pageant, an ambitious staging of the Nativity complete with angels, wise men and watchful shepherds guarding their flocks by night.

One year our prodigies, Maggie and Jack, snagged important roles as attending sheep, while my good friend and regular lunch pal, Colonel Robert Day, debuted as the archangel Gabriel. Colonel Bob was an ideal Gabriel, a lovely giant of a gent who’d lost two sons through tragedy and disease but somehow turned his unspeakable grief into counseling families grappling with their own personal tragedies.

In his former life, Bob had been one of the first to lead his unit of army engineers across the Rhine into Nazi Germany during the closing days of the Second World War and was on his way to lead a similar invasion into Japan when the Japanese capitulated. The rest of his military career was spent at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, where he served as admissions director for many years, laying the foundation for the admission of women to the Academy.

Someone kitted out Colonel Bob with a massive pair of papier mâché wings for the pageant, which he sported with the dignity of Laurence Olivier until one wing detached and conked one of the baby cows on the head, bowling over the poor little creature. For a moment, the glory of Jesus’ birth was upstaged by anxious gasps as the little cow was righted and Bossie’s head removed. Beneath was a laughing kid. The audience broke into spontaneous applause. The kid-cow beamed. “Now that’s a small miracle,” one of the sheep-moms whispered to me with relief. And onward we went to the big finale of gifts from the Magi.

That particular year, the Christmas Eve family service that followed was held at the Settlemeyer family’s barn in the hills west of town. The Settlemeyers had real sheep and cows and a horse or two that were undoubtedly amused by the dozens of shivering families that crowded into their freezing barn to light candles and hear about a savior being born on a Midnight Clear. It was my job, as it happened, to provide the musical accompaniment on my guitar, fingers stiff with cold. Fortunately Colonel Bob showed up with a flask of good Irish whiskey. As a live chorus of sheep bleated, I plucked out a respectable “First Noel” followed by “Hark, the Herald Angels Sing!” and “Silent Night” as candlelight passed from hand to hand, illuminating one face at a time.

Up to that moment, worth noting, it had been a snowless winter in Maine — always an anxious thing for the locals (and yours truly) who counted on decent snows to insulate their foundations and garden beds and provide a pristine landscape for their favorite wintertime activities.

But as we blew out candles and stepped out of the Settlemeyers’ barn, a second small miracle took place — or maybe just good theatrical timing by the universe.

“Look, everybody,” someone cried, “it’s snowing!”

Indeed it was — a curtain of beautiful silent snow falling like an answered prayer over the darkened landscape. During the short drive home, my ever-wise lamb of a daughter wondered if the sudden appearance of snow might really be a miracle.

“Absolutely,” I assured her with the faith of a mustard seed, recalling Albert Einstein’s quote that there are two ways to live your life — as if there’s no such thing as miracles, or that everything is a miracle.

For the record, a third miracle occurred that silent night, one involving her proud papa and brilliant Scottish grandmother, Kate, a professed agnostic who cried once when I took her to Evensong at King’s College in Cambridge. I nicknamed her our “Queen Mum.” Together, we managed to put together a German dollhouse that looked more like a Rhine river castle and came in 4,000 pieces with a dozen pages of instructions in medieval German. In truth, I abandoned the quest around 2 a.m. leaving Mum to her third pot of tea, the rest of the Drambuie and a dying fire. I was certain the task was beyond us both.

In the morning, however, Maggie’s dollhouse looked worthy of a Fifth Avenue toy shop window.

“How’d you do that?” I discreetly quizzed the Queen Mum.

“The power of faith, James,” she came back with a prim smile. “And good Scottish tea.”

Sadly, I think the town fire marshal may have put the kibosh on any more Christmas candlelight services in a livestock barn, that old spoilsport. But I carry the sweetest memories of many such Silent Nights in my heart, that one above the rest.

Like Einstein, you see, I’ve come to believe everything is a small miracle — the oil that lighted lamps for eight days, a prince of peace born in a freezing stable, an angel with a broken wing who mended broken hearts, an agnostic’s tears and people of every race and creed who gather on the darkest night to celebrate the return of the light.

Besides, as Mother Theresa reportedly pointed out, nothing is small to God — only infinite. PS

Contact Editor Jim Dodson at jim@thepilot.com.

Simple Life

The Wisdom of Stars

When in doubt, look up . . . and within

By Jim Dodson

“When I have a terrible need of — dare I say, ‘religion’? — then I go outside at night and paint the stars.” — Vincent Van Gogh

Most mornings when I’m home, several hours before sunrise, rain or shine, you can find me sitting in an old wooden chair in my front yard, the day’s first cup of Joe in hand, soaking in the deep silence and looking at the sky.

I don’t paint the stars but I sure enjoy gazing on them with the aid of my iPhone’s nifty Star Guide, allowing this Earthling to identify constellations and the seasonal movement of planets. Even on cloudy or rainy mornings, Star Guide — like Superman’s X-ray vision — can penetrate the clouds, a reminder that a glorious universe and a lovely mystery await just beyond, always there.

As spiritual practices go, my predawn ritual was born on a forested hilltop near the Maine coast 30 years ago. A serious early riser since boyhood, I began stepping outside simply to see how my neighbors fared overnight, especially on November’s sharply colder nights, heralding another hard winter on the doorstep.

The “neighbors” I speak of were the woodland creatures that surrounded our peaceful kingdom off the long-abandoned Old Town Road that ran through a 500-acre forest of birch and virgin hemlock pocked with kettle holes from the receding Ice Age, woods dense with fiddlehead and cinnamon ferns, laurel hells and wild vernal springs.

Like the stars overhead, they were always there, palely loitering at the edge of the yard in the moonshine and starlight: the small clan of whitetail deer that fed off the sorghum pellets I provided through the harshest nights of winter; a flock of wild turkeys that displayed absolutely no fear of our dogs; the massive lady porcupine who waddled through the backyard from time to time (I nicknamed her Madame Defarge after Charles Dickens’ infamous revolutionary knitter), pausing to feed on my frost-wilted hostas; not to mention a young bull moose that hung around our neck of the woods for almost two years, apparently looking for a girlfriend, an age-old story.

Perhaps the toughest creatures by far were the tiny black-and-white chickadees that showed up at our side-yard feeders after the coldest Arctic nights imaginable, day-after-day, season-after-season, year-upon-year, no more than a handful of feathers and a tiny beating heart, teaching me something about the divine force at play.

Our house was a simple post-and-beam affair, a classic Yankee saltbox that I designed and helped build with my own hands, made of rugged beams hewn from Canadian hemlock. Those beams spoke to me at night, especially as we both aged, cracking and sighing and settling year after year. The surrounding gardens took me almost two decades (and most of my kids’ college funds) to build, beginning with the ancient stone walls of the farmstead that once existed on our hilltop more than a hundred years before us. Our predecessors grew corn and pole beans. I grew English roses, lush hydrangeas and heavenly lilacs, not to mention hostas as big as Volkswagens. Part of my annual November ritual after topping up my woodpile was to erect my Rube Goldberg plant protectors that could withstand being buried for months in the coming snow.

Back then, I believed this was my little piece of heaven, the rugged homestead I’d made for my family on a star-swept hill in Maine; the place I would quietly spend the balance of my days on Earth, writing and woolgathering, walking the spring and autumn woods and the Old Town Road with the dogs, forever revising my ever-changing garden, feeding the locals and memorizing the stars of the northern firmament in frosty autumn darkness. Over those two decades, I saw super moons and dozens of shooting stars — and once even the shimmering Northern Lights.

I loved that life and held it against my bones as long as I could. And then I let it go, have never been back, though I still have dreams about that house, those woods, those deep snows and frozen stars, not to mention my former woodland neighbors.

But home — this home, Carolina — unexpectedly called and I couldn’t ignore the summons. My late Southern grandmother, a grand old Baptist lady who knew the Scriptures cold, loved to say — like Thoreau, like the poet T.S. Eliot, like her husband Walter’s own grandmother, a gentle natural healer her neighbors called Aunt Emma — that life is simply a great hoop, a sacred circle, that the end of our explorations is to discover the place where we began and know it for the first time.

For better or worse, I have followed this cosmic script with the faith of a mustard seed, and now I am blessed to have beautiful Southern stars and an old forest of a different kind sheltering overhead, the towering oaks of my boyhood neighborhood, guardians of different early morning companions that are just as wild in their own suburban ways.

In place of Madame Defarge and a lovesick moose, we are visited before dawn by feeding rabbits and an owl that dolefully hoots like clockwork down the block as I sit back and study the stars, sipping my coffee, marveling at the scene overhead, as glorious as any medieval cathedral or walled City of God.

Spiritually speaking, I suppose I am what a dear friend calls a cosmic wanderer, a religious mongrel in love with the writings of the Sufi poet Hafiz, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, the Upanishads, a little Ralph Waldo Emerson, a lot of Billy Collins and Mary Oliver, a dash of Joe Campbell and Charles Wesley’s hymns, spiced by the Bhagavad Gita and the mystic Meister Eckhart, all nicely summarized by the wisdom of my old friend Katrina Kenison, who wrote in her splendid book Magical Journey, An Apprenticeship in Contentment: “We are all one. We need only look more deeply into the nature of who we really are to see that our sense of isolation is an illusion and to have our separateness ameliorated by union. I might be but one small thread in a vast fabric, but there’s comfort in imagining the eternal interplay between my own small, temporal life and all there is.”

They’re all with me in the starry darkness, this merry band of voices.

With luck, if there is a wind in the darkness, the large Canterbury chimes I gave to my bride for our 15th anniversary — that took me the better part of an entire spring afternoon to hoist and secure in the massive white oak out back — may play three or four notes, sometimes sounding like a Buddhist bell calling one to mindfulness, other times — and I swear on my worn-out copy of Walden that this is gospel truth — the first five notes of Amazing Grace.

I cannot explain how or why this happens, but I’ve heard it with my own ears and believe it with my own heart. Likewise, I can’t explain or justify why most things happen in this passing life — joy, sorrow, tragedy, redemption — but grace certainly helps one face the day, whatever it brings.

November brings forth the two brightest planets in the Southern sky, Mars and Venus, gracing dusk and dawn like a blessing and benediction respectively while Orion, lord of our coming winter’s nights, rises below Taurus and the Pleiades in the East as Summer’s Triangle fades in the West.

The clear autumn sky never fails to make me feel both puny and thrilled by the knowledge that this same unchanging sky shone over Plato and Aristotle as they taught their students, Galileo on his balcony peering at the clockwork heavens, Marcus Aurelius penning his soulful Meditations on a lonely Roman frontier, Jesus praying in the wilderness, English lords signing the Magna Carta, Jefferson jotting notes about human independence, Lincoln speaking at Gettysburg, women marching for the vote, four brave college students sitting down at a whites-only lunch counter, the discovery of the God Particle and a phone that can see through clouds like Superman.

Beneath November’s clear and changing skies, as the soul leans inward, I use my iPhone’s wondrous Star Guide to identify the stunning moons of Jupiter, suddenly remembering C.S. Lewis’ observation that, contrary to our collective belief, we are not the center to the universe because “the center of the universe is actually everywhere.” Jesus’ version of this ancient truth may be the greatest metaphor of all for describing the potential transformation of human consciousness yet to come — that the “Kingdom of Heaven” is not somewhere up or out there — but patiently waiting for discovery deep inside us.

Perhaps human consciousness is beginning to understand that the force we call “God” is simply a streaming river of light and unconditional love that flows everywhere and through everything, as true and present as the stars that literally surround our small fragile planet wreathed in clouds or hidden by the brightest light of day, reassuringly there though we can’t — or choose not to — see it.

Not long ago, I read somewhere that the late astronomer Carl Sagan — a confirmed agnostic — believed there may be as many stars as there are grains of sand on Earth, billions of stars in hundreds of universes bearing untold numbers of unimaginable gifts. The November star child in me sure hopes this proves true.

God only knows what adventures await us.  PS

Contact Editor Jim Dodson at jim@thepilot.com.

Simple Life

Ancient Roads

Wherever in the world they happen to be, all of them lead home

By Jim Dodson

Over a year ago I began traveling the route of the Great Philadelphia Wagon Road, said to be the most traveled road of Colonial America, the frontier highway that brought a quarter of a million
European immigrants to the Southern wilderness during the first two-thirds of the 18th century.

From 1700 to the outbreak of the Revolutionary War, successive waves of German, Scotch-Irish, English, Welsh and Swiss immigrants — many of them refugees fleeing their war-ravaged homelands — found their way to the Southern backcountry following an ancient trading path used by Native American tribes for millennia.

The Great Road, as I prefer to call it, stretched from Philadelphia’s Market Street to Augusta, Georgia, traversing the western portions of half a dozen colonies before crossing the Savannah River in Georgia.

Both wings of my family (and quite possibly yours) came down it — my father’s English and Scottish forebears who settled around Mebane and Hillsborough in the mid-1700s followed by my mother’s German ancestors, who hopped off the road in Hagerstown and migrated into the hills of what would later become West Virginia.

In one way or another, much of my life has been spent traveling major sections of this old road from the Carolinas to western Pennsylvania, for either work or pleasure or when I left my native South for two decades to live on the coast of Maine.

The route of the original road is buried beneath modern highways, towns and cities, suburbs and shopping centers, but it is still with us — a pathway fully determined by extensive research by scholars, state archivists, local historians and organizations that specialize in finding historic lost roads. As one leading old road researcher put it bluntly to me, “The Great Wagon Road is the granddaddy of America’s lost roads — the reason we’re all here.” 

I first heard about it on a winter day in 1966 when my father took my brother, Richard, and me to shoot mistletoe out of the oak forest that grew around our grandmother’s long abandoned home place off Buckhorn Road near Chapel Hill. On the way home, he showed us the site of his great-grandfather’s gristmill and furniture shop where I-40/85 now crosses the historic Haw River. That man’s name was George Washington Tate. A street in Greensboro is named for this rural polymath who helped establish Methodist churches toward the foothills and made such beautiful cabinetry. Surviving pieces are displayed in important decorative art museums across the South.

From that day forward, I’ll admit, I was quietly obsessed with the Great Road, germinating a plan to someday travel the road of my ancestors just to see what they had seen of early America’s landscape.

It only took me a half-century to finally get around to making the journey.

My original thought — silly me — was to drive the full 800-plus miles of the Great Road over several unhurried weeks beginning in late summer of 2017, stopping to investigate the historic towns and villages along the way, checking out the important battlefields and burying grounds, equal parts listening tour and journalistic inquiry, learning whatever I could about the most important road of early America. After years of preparation — reading everything from colonial histories to the biographies of Founding Fathers, academic monographs to personal journals, and building a network of experts and contacts along the way — my larger hope was to meet people for whom the Great Road is a living passion and see how the culture of the Great Road had shaped their lives — and mine.

In theory, it was a nice approach. With the exception of one problem.

By my fifth day out, I’d only reached Amish country east of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, just 60 or so miles from the start of my journey in Philadelphia, when I realized something. There was so much unique history and culture arrayed along this pioneer pathway — to say nothing of colorful characters, great local food, quirky hometown events and tacky roadside attractions that appealed to my inner coonskin-capped kid — there was simply no way three weeks could possibly do the old road justice.

No less than seven American presidents, after all, were either born on or near the Great Road and at least a dozen key military engagements from our country’s two primary wars happened on it — Kings Mountain and Guilford Courthouse during the American Revolution, Antietam and Gettysburg during the Civil War.

After 10 days out in my own vintage “wagon” — a 1996 Buick Roadmaster Grand Estate, the last true station wagon built by Detroit — I rolled home with a full notebook and a revised plan to travel and research the road in segments of three or four days at a time.

If this realistic approach did little to benefit my (neglected) garden, the people I met and stories I heard along the way were nothing shy of eye-opening and even healing at a moment when America at large was bitterly divided over the presidency of Donald J. Trump. For what it’s worth, the Great Wagon Road bisected the heart of Trump Country from Pennsylvania to Georgia.

As this October dawns, I’ve clocked more than 1,200 miles researching the past and present of this great American road and plan to settle in to write my interaction with it over the coming winter months. I just hope I can keep the book under 900 or so pages.

Ironically, this has been a year of dramatic travels along other notable historic and ancient pathways.

In late June, my son Jack married a fellow journalist and beautiful Palestinian gal named Henriette that he met during graduate school at Columbia University. Their wedding was a charming five-day affair in Old Jaffa on the coast of Israel. On the morning of the wedding at an ancient church where legend held that St. Peter received the vision to take Christianity to the wider world, I was tasked with calling upon the Chacar family’s 84-year-old patriarch to ask permission for my son to marry his granddaughter.

Tennuce Chacar smiled, grasped my hands and kissed my cheeks. We shared a glass of very fine whiskey over the matter. The party lasted way after midnight.

On our last day in the Middle East, we followed an Israeli archeologist through the crowded streets of old Jerusalem, following the path Christ took, carrying the cross. We also stood at the Wailing Wall and walked the outer walls of the most besieged and contested city in human history. Soldiers and pilgrims were everywhere, armed, respectively, with Uzis and icons. Between us, I felt little in the way of peace in the old city of Jerusalem, a place that seems captive to blood and tears.

Finally, as summer ended, my wife and I joined 60 souls from our Episcopal church for an 80-mile pilgrimage along an ancient road called the Via Francigena, the medieval pathway that connected Canterbury to Rome.

For a week we trekked through the glorious Tuscan countryside, through breathtaking hills of ripening vineyards and olive orchards, through dense forests and sleepy villages, exploring hill towns and ancient abbeys, sharing good wine and great pasta, thunderstorms and theology, sore feet and simple meals and a few unexpected thin moments between earth and sky.

For this sore-footed pilgrim, exploring walled Lucca (where we honeymooned 17 years ago) and Siena with its proud family flags and bustling central piazza was a deeply rewarding experiences. Farther along the pilgrim’s path in teeming Roma, I loved seeing the statue of my hero Marcus Aurelius and poking around the ruins of the Pantheon and Cicero’s Forum, places I’ve hungered to see since I was a knee-high to toga.

But on the opposite end of town, quite unexpectedly, I found myself spiritually suffocated by the over-the-top art and power of Vatican City with its soaring heights and monumental treasures, a gilded city on a hill full of tourists, pilgrims, polizia and pickpockets. Thus, I skipped the Sistine Chapel altogether in favor of a quiet compline service at a Greek Orthodox church on a neighboring hill.

In the nick of time, the message seemed to be that it was high time to end my year of traveling ancient roads and turn for home — arriving just as a historic hurricane swept ashore to wreak death and devastation on the Old North State and finish off whatever was left of my unfinished garden.

Looking back, what a curious and unforgettable year it has been. The beauty of any road, ancient or otherwise, is that it takes you somewhere you’ve never been and provides a useful new perspective.

Old Roads tell fascinating stories, I’ve been reminded anew.

But being home for a quiet October is a story I never get weary of hearing.   PS

Contact Editor Jim Dodson at jim@thepilot.com.

A Beautiful Blue Marble

Finding meaning in the universe, however large or small

By Jim Dodson

While digging out an old flower bed this summer I found, of all things, a beautiful blue marble buried more than a foot deep in the earth.

I decided it was either evidence of a lost race of marble-playing pioneers or simply belonged to a kid who lost it in the dirt when our house was built. That kid would now be over 75 years old.

Either way, this beautiful blue marble, resting in the palm of my soiled palm, reminded me of an image of the planet taken by the crew of the final Apollo mission as they made their way to the Moon. The photograph was dubbed The Blue Marble because it revealed a fragile blue world that is home to “billions of creatures, a beautiful orb capable of fitting into the pocket of the universe,” as NASA elegantly put it.

Some experts say marbles are the oldest toys on Earth, found by archeologists in the tombs of ancient Egypt and the ashes of Pompeii, mentioned in Homer’s Odyssey and Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. Even America’s Founding Fathers were known to play a mean game of marbles when they weren’t busy forming a nation.

The earliest marbles were made of dried, molded clay. In the mid-19th century, however, a German glassblower invented a pair of special scissors that could cut and shape molten glass, making glass marbles affordable for the first time. Glass marbles quickly dominated the market, particularly after industrial machines made them more efficiently, further lowering their price. “Valued as much for their beauty as the games played with them,” the National Toy Hall of Fame notes, “marbles inspired one 19th-century enthusiast to describe the twisted spiral of colored filament in glass marbles as ‘thin music translated into colored glass.’”

Because my family was always on the move during my first seven years of life — following my father’s newspaper career across the Deep South — I had few if any regular playmates and plenty of time to fill up on my own come endless Southern summers. Books and marbles and painted Roman armies filled those quiet hours when the air sounded roasted by cicadas. Everywhere we lived from Mississippi to South Carolina, I found myself a cool and comfortable patch of earth beneath a porch or a large tree where I played out the Pelopennesian War or shot marbles in a large ring scratched into the dirt.

I excelled at shooting marbles, often whipping my dad when he came home from work. His necktie loosened, he would come outside with a cold beer to see if I had any interest in coming to supper, squatting to play me a quick game before we went in to eat. The object of the game we played was to knock as many marbles outside the ring without having your “shooter” wind up outside as well. I forget who told me that it was good luck to play with a marble that matched the color of your eyes. Accordingly, my shooter was always blue.

I could spin and skip marbles like nobody’s business in those days, and even carried a small sack of my favorites with me whenever my family went on vacation or visited elderly relatives. Politely excused, advised not to wander far, I could slip outside and find the nearest patch of earth for a little marble- shooting practice.

Then along came the spring of 1964. I watched Arnold Palmer win his final Masters green jacket on TV and began swinging a golf club in the yard, making a list of 11 things I intended to do in golf. At the top I hoped to someday meet the new King of the game.

That summer I made the Pet Dairy Little League and began reading about Brooks Robinson, the “Human Vacuum Cleaner” in the sports pages. Robinson played third base for the Baltimore Orioles. I laid hands on an official Brooks Robinson fielder’s glove, vowing that in the unlikely event that I didn’t grow up to be the next Arnold Palmer I might become the next “Mr. Hoover,” as Robinson was also called.

In effect, I lost my marbles that summer of ’64 — or at least put them away forever.

Arnie won the Masters, and Robinson had his best season offensively, hitting for a .318 batting average with 28 home runs. He also led the league with 118 runs batted in, capturing the American League’s MVP Award and his fifth Gold Glove. In the American League MVP voting, Robinson received 18 of the 20 first-place votes, with Mickey Mantle of the Yankees finishing second, much to the delight of my colorful uncle Carson.

He took me to my first Major League ballgame when I got sent up in late summer to spend a week with my uncles and their German wives in Baltimore. Uncle Carson was a big Irishman who worked at a tire factory and had season tickets to “the Birds,” as he fondly called them. He couldn’t abide Mickey Mantle. “I’d like to knock that smug smile off that overpaid showboat’s kisser,” he said to me during the pre-game warm-ups as both teams took the field in Memorial Stadium.

Uncle Carson’s seats were a dozen rows back along the third base line. He encouraged me to bring my new Brooks Robinson fielder’s glove along because he was confident I could get it autographed by “the greatest third baseman ever.”

Sure enough, when Robinson appeared on the field, stretching and chatting with other players, including several on the detested Yankees team, Uncle Carson sent me scurrying down to the dugout where a crowd of kids clustered, seeking autographs.

When Robinson ambled over, I asked him for his autograph and he smiled and said “Sure, Kid. Where you from?” At least I like to remember it this way. Honestly, I was too tongue-tied and in the throes of awe to remember what he actually said.

Up in the stands, however, as Mickey Mantle sauntered past, Uncle Carson cupped his massive hands to his mouth and hollered, “Hey, Mantle! You’re a stinking bum! You couldn’t hit the side of a barn if they pitched underhand to you!”

For the record, I’m not sure this is precisely what Uncle Carson yelled at Mickey Mantle, either. But it’s certainly within the ballpark, as they say, because Uncle Carson was a world-class heckler, a one-man leather lung, the ultimate obnoxious Oriole. Mickey Mantle just laughed and kept walking.

When I got back to our seats, Uncle C was buying a couple of cold beers.

“How old are you now?” He asked as the vendor moved along. He was holding two large cups of beer.

“Eleven,” I answered truthfully.

“That’s old enough.” He handed me a National Bohemian beer, my first ballpark beer. A moment later, facing the field of play, he calmly remarked, “Just so you know, Squire, some things need to stay at the ballpark.”’

I knew exactly what he meant.

Funny thing about life on a beautiful blue marble. 

I failed to become the next Arnold Palmer. But at least I grew up to collaborate on his memoirs, becoming a good friend of the game’s most charismatic figure.

Some years ago, I even had the chance to tell Brooks Robinson about Uncle Carson at a dinner where I was the guest of honor for my sports journalism and books. The event’s hosts had secretly invited the greatest third baseman of all time to sit beside the honoree, who was nearly as tongue-tied and in awe as he was in 1964.

“I think I remember your Uncle Carson,” Robinson told me with a laugh. “Or at least a few hundred others like him — especially up in Yankee Stadium. They made your uncle look like a minor league heckler, I’m afraid.”

We had a fine time chatting about the Oriole’s golden seasons and lamented their cellar-dwelling ways these days. In 1966, Robinson was voted the All-Star Game Most Valuable Player and finished second to teammate Frank Robinson in the American League Most Valuable Player Award voting, and the Orioles went on to win their first World Series against the Los Angeles Dodgers.

In the 1970 post-season, Robinson hit for an average of .583 in the American League Championship and tagged the Cincinnati Reds for a pair of homers on their way to a 4–1 shellacking and their second World Series title. It was Robinson’s defensive prowess that snagged the Series MVP, however, and prompted Reds manager Sparky Anderson to quip, “I’m beginning to see Brooks in my sleep. If I dropped this paper plate, he’d pick it up on one hop and throw me out at first.”

At the end of his final season in 1977, having collected 16 Golden Gloves, Robinson’s No. 5 jersey was retired. Six years later, he was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame on the first ballot. “It all seemed to pass so quickly,” Brooks Robinson told me that night we ate supper together. “But what amazing memories.”

As another hot summer ends, as overdue rain and cooler nights heal my withered garden and herald the post-seasons of golf and baseball, my friend Arnold Palmer is gone and this month the Birds — per usual — are dwelling deep in the American League cellar, their glory years just a pleasant memory.

Having lost all my marbles but having found a blue one buried in the earth of my own garden, I’m probably where I should be at this moment and time on this fragile blue planet, lucky to have a quieter world I can hold in the palm of my hand.  PS

Contact Editor Jim Dodson at jim@thepilot.com.

Last Days of the Yard King

A final summer of innocence is shelter from the storm

By Jim Dodson

That July I owned the neighborhood. Or at least my block.

It was 1968. I was 15, towing a wheezing Lawn-Boy push mower behind a well-traveled Schwinn Deluxe Racer with chrome-plated fenders and dual side baskets. My mother called me Jimmy the Yard King.

Actually, I had three jobs that summer. One was mowing half a dozen lawns in the neighborhood at a time before lawn crews were commonplace and customers could phone your parents if they didn’t like the job you did.

The second was a weekend job as an usher at the newly opened Terrace Theatre, where I was required to wear a snazzy tangerine orange, double-knit sports jacket with a black, clip-on bow tie. The jacket matched the theater’s innovative “rocking chair” seats. My job was to keep kids from violently rocking their brains out and disturbing other customers by banging their knees. This often resulted in my giving chase to truants hopped up on candy.

That summer I also had my first job teaching guitar two mornings a week at Mr. Weinstein’s music shop — for five dollars an hour, no less.

Given my combined income, my mom joked that she might have to someday ask me for a loan. I was saving up for either an Alvarez guitar or a Camaro, which ever came first.

The year 1968 has been called “The Year that Shattered America.”

Looking back, it was the year we both began to lose our innocence.

Being a son of the newspaper world, I paid close attention to the news, read the paper daily and never missed Uncle Walter on his evening broadcast.

That year, for the first time, the Tet Offensive by the Viet Cong brought the horrors of the war in Southeast Asia home to 56 million American TV sets. On my birthday that February, I saw the iconic photograph of a South Vietnamese general publically executing a Viet Cong prisoner. The picture shocked Americans, stoked the anti-war movement and turned millions of Americans against the war. One month later, the My Lai massacre that killed more than 500 civilians but wasn’t revealed and investigated for another year — all but finished off public support for the war.

That spring I taught myself how to play every song on the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and started performing around town with my buddy Craig Corry who lived two doors away on Dogwood Drive. We wound up placing third in the city’s teenage talent show that next fall and made an appearance on Lee Kinard’s Good Morning Show, our first and last TV appearance.

On a breezy afternoon that April, I was playing golf with my dad when we heard that Martin Luther King Jr. had been assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee. We watched riots break out in Detroit and the Poor People’s March on Washington, D.C. happen on TV. Commentators wondered if America was coming apart at the seams, heading for revolution in the streets.

I was more interested that the Broadway smash musical, Hair, featured live and fully naked people on stage. I couldn’t fathom it but sure wished I could see it.

On the plus side that summer that America was going to hell in a hand basket, as Mr. Huff down the street always grumbled when I showed up to collect my $8 for mowing his lawn, I took Ginny Silkworth to the Cinema Theater to see Franco Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet. It was great. I fell in love with Shakespeare and, in a way, Ginny Silkworth. She was my first date ever. We grew up attending the same church group. Unfortunately my dad had to drive us to the theater, under strict orders not to say anything embarrassing.

After the movie, Ginny, a deep thinker with a warm and horsy laugh, wondered what I planned to do with my life. I told her I planned to write books, probably travel the world, play my guitar, mow lawns and maybe move to England. She punched me on the arm and laughed adorably. Ginny and I stayed in touch for decades. She went on to become a gifted schoolteacher in Philadelphia and passed away from breast cancer many years ago. I miss her still, especially her wonderful laugh. 

Earlier that summer, Robert Kennedy was gunned down after winning the California Democratic primary. My mother really liked Bobby Kennedy. We watched his funeral train together and she actually cried. My dad was a half-hearted Nixon guy. My mom used to joke that she did her patriotic duty by cancelling out his vote in the voting booth.

By July I was deep into my lawn-mowing life, guitar-playing, trying to forget what was going on in America. I hated the usher job at the Terrace so much I handed in my elegant orange usher’s jacket in early August, blaming my family’s annual beach trip to the Hanover Seaside Club at Wrightsville Beach.

We went there every year for at least half a dozen years, though this would be the final time. I loved the Seaside’s unfancy dining room, its cool wooden floors and big porches where I could sit for hours in a real rocking chair and read. I read Graham Greene’s The Heart of the Matter and The End of the Affair that summer, getting hopelessly addicted to his storytelling. I also finished John LeCarré’s The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, picturing myself mowing a lawn in some far-flung, sun-mused outpost of the British Empire, a spy in short pants, enjoying a gin and tonic with some sultry blond who looked like Tuesday Weld.

That week a family from southern Ohio was visiting the Seaside Club. A pretty girl named Sandy was reading Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire, bare feet tucked up in the rocker just down the porch. We struck up a conversation and took a walk on Johnny Mercer’s Pier. Sandy told me that we humans were destroying the world, killing the oceans with our garbage and fighting an unwinnable war. She told me she was going to become an “environmental activist” like her aunt who was attending the Democratic National Convention in Chicago as a delegate from Ohio. The Seaside Club didn’t have a TV set, so there was no way to see what was happening in Chicago. We heard, however, that there were police riots and lots of injuries at the convention when Chicago’s mayor turned the police loose on Yippies and the Students for a Democratic Society who tried to crash the party.

For the rest of the week we were pretty much inseparable. Sandy was a year older and half a head taller than me. She was no Tuesday Weld but I liked her a lot. Like me, she was crazy about books and movies.

The Graduate was playing at the Crest Theater in Wrightsville Beach. She suggested we go see it. That year the Motion Picture Association of America instituted its film rating service, serving as a guideline for parents anxious about a movie’s content. I was worried about getting in. You were supposed to be at least 16 but the lady working the box office took one look at Sandy, then me, and let us in for a buck and a quarter each. Sandy didn’t care for the movie but I loved it.

The night before her family headed home to Ohio, we talked until midnight while seated on a stack of canvas rafts stacked beneath the Seaside Club. My family was staying through the Labor Day weekend, our final days there. The next night, I gigged a huge flounder in the tidal flats off Bald Head Island and wondered if I would ever hear from Sandy again. She actually wrote me a couple of times and I wrote her back. In 1974, a F5 tornado flattened her hometown of Xenia, Ohio, killing something like 100 people and leaving 10,000 homeless. I never heard from Sandy again. I like to think she’s somewhere in the world saving the planet.

Back home, with school starting, I still had a few weeks of decent lawn-mowing income to count on, plus teaching guitar for Mr. Weinstein. I knew all the dogs in the neighborhood, those which were friendly and those that weren’t. I knew the better-looking moms, too. When you’re 15 and King of Yards, you notice such things.

Looking back from half a century, life seems deceptively simpler then, so far away from the anti-war protests, the burning cities, the murder of visionary leaders, the riots, the raised fists at the summer Olympics, Nixon winning the White House, O.J. winning the Heisman.

“And stones in the road/Flew out beneath our bicycle tires. . . ” as my favorite singer Mary Chapin Carpenter remembers in her beautiful anthem to that moment in America’s life. “Worlds removed from all those fires/ As we raced each other home. . . ”

I rode my bike everywhere that summer, pretty much for the last time.

I mowed lawns, ate my first Big Mac, kissed Ginny Silkworth and had part of me awakened by a spirited girl named Sandy. I taught myself to play every song on Revolver. I went to Scout camp for the final time, did the Mile Swim twice, finished off my Life Scout award, built a nature walk at my elementary school for my Eagle project. My Yard King days came to an end.

Fifty years later, I can remember these things like they happened yesterday, and wonder what a 15-year-old in America thinks about in 2018.

History, I’ve learned, may not repeat itself, but it certainly rhymes like a Mary Chapin song.

“And the stones in the road/Leave a mark from whence they came/A thousand points of light or shame/Baby, I don’t know.”  PS

Contact Editor Jim Dodson at jim@thepilot.com.

Simple Life

Lulu and The Mull

By Jim Dodson

This is a story about two beautiful dogs, one that I’ve known for a decade, the other for less than an hour.

One is my canine soul mate — my God Dog, as I think of her.

The other briefly touched my soul.

So here’s the tale: It was rush hour and I was running late for an afternoon speaking event. On the horizon, the sky was black,  the first fierce thunderstorm of the season was breaking.

The traffic was heavy. Everyone was hurrying home before the tumult broke.

That’s when I saw the dog.

Approaching one of the busiest intersections in the city, traffic zooming in all four directions, a dog bolted across the road two cars ahead of me. Both cars swerved and the driver directly in front slammed on brakes, allowing the dog to barely make the landscaped traffic island.  As I watched, the animal started to cross the oncoming lane, causing a blast of horns and automotive mayhem. One car just missed her, another swerved. the dog jumped back onto the island.

Some things are pretty simple. I stopped my car in traffic and got out, opening a back door, hoping the terrified dog would jump in. She didn’t. She merely stared at me, frightened, panting and exhausted.

Over the decades, traveling hundreds of roads large and small, including in at least two foreign countries, I’ve pulled off busy highways to try and help dogs in distress, not to mention at least one chicken and probably half a dozen snapping turtles.

In almost every case, a good outcome resulted. 

That was certainly the case 10 years ago when I pulled into a park to give a talk at a festival  and saw a skinny black dog  bolt across busy US Highway 1 in Aberdeen, narrowly avoiding the wheels of a FedEx truck. 

Moments later,  as I parked the car, the same skinny dog — a black pup with a white star on her chest — streaked past me, headed for some kids playing near the woods. An hour later, as I was leaving the park, the same black streak passed again, heading straight back to the busy highway.

I squatted and called out, “Hey, black dog! Stop! Come here.”

To this day, I don’t know why the dog stopped. But she did, whipped around and looked directly at me. We were maybe half a football field apart. 

Then she did something amazing. It may have even changed my life. It certainly improved it.

The dog ran straight to me and jumped into my arms, like she’d known me forever. She was filthy, a wiggly pup with liquid brown eyes, a runaway or a stray, the happiest dog I’d ever seen.

I asked some park maintenance men if they knew where she came from or who she might belong to. There was no collar.   

“That dog don’t belong to nobody. She’s been around here a week or more,” one of the workmen said. “I think she lives in the woods and eats from the garbage cans. We can’t catch her. How did you?”

“She just came to me when I called.”

He laughed. “Guess that means she’s your dog now.”

I asked the kids by the woods, too. “She lives in the woods,” one told me. “You should see her run. She catches squirrels and birds and stuff. Fast as lightning.”

So I took her to three different shelters in the county. Two were full occupancy. By the time we reached the no-kill shelter in a neighboring county, the dusty pup was sitting on the center console between the front leather seats of my new car, making herself at home. She was actually leaning against me.

The women who ran the shelter gave her a shot of worming medication, a small biscuit and said to me with a smile,  “That dog really seems to like you.”

So I took her home to my cottage and phoned my wife in Maine to let her know I’d found a pup running wild and might need to keep her until I could find her owner.

My wife laughed.  We already had two dogs, a pair of aging golden retrievers.

“Of course you will.”

“Just until I find her owner.”

“Sure. If you say so.”

I bathed the pup.  She hated it but came out shiny as a baby sea lion.

Next I fed her a can of Alpo. She ate the food in three gulps and threw it up with several small animal bones. The girl was obviously a hunter.  I thought of calling her Diana, Greek goddess of the hunt.

That night I heard snoring and rolled over to find the pup lying on her back next to me in bed, head on the pillow, snoring to beat the band. When I spoke to her, she looked at me with the most soulful brown eyes I’d ever seen and thumped her tail.

I ran an ad in the newspaper but never found an owner.

Looking back, I’m certain the universe never intended me to find an owner. The pup had found me.

I named her Mulligan, a second chance dog, or “The Mull” or “Mully” for short. Some people have a God Parent or God Child. I have a God Dog, an animal divinely sent to keep an eye on me.  Dog, after all, is simply God spelled backwards.

She and I have been together over a decade now, traveling pals through life, best friends who have gone down many roads in each other’s company. Wherever I go, she goes – to the garden, to the store, ever watchful, always waiting, ready to ride. The Mull sleeps beside my side of the bed. And when I leave bed well before dawn, my God Dog follows me and my cup of coffee outside to sit beneath the morning stars to reconnect with the universe.

When Ajax, our big retriever that I call “Junior,” finally lumbers out for our morning walk around the neighborhood, The Mull is ready to lead the pack.  Junior is young, spoiled, far too good looking for his own good. He knows four or five good words like “walk” and “Cookie.” But the The Mull hasn’t given up on him, thinks there’s hope for him yet. Mully has the vocabulary of a gifted middle-schooler – or at least telepathic powers. 

In any case, she roams ahead off the lead, scouting the world where she once ran wild, seeing everything that moves around us, smiling the entire time. Junior lumbers behind, basically oblivious save for the grazing rabbits in yards, carrying his own lead, impressed with himself, following the family alpha dog.

Ironically, I didn’t have the God Dog with me the afternoon I stopped rush-hour traffic in two directions for half a dozen blocks while trying to coax the terrified dog on the island into my car. Fortunately a woman driving the other way stopped traffic on her side of the island and got out to lend a hand. And a second driver appeared with a cup of water, hoping the dog would pause to drink so we could grab her.

For several minutes — a small eternity it seemed rather hopeless. She ran circles around my car, was visibly tempted to jump in, but eluded our efforts. Finally,  as she rounded the corner for the umpteenth time, I dove and grabbed her by the back leg.

People applauded and tooted their horns supportively.

I thanked the two guardian angels who stopped to help but only caught their first names – Laura and Sean

I took the dog straight home.  Mulligan and Ajax warmly welcomed her. But the newcomer was so skittish, she raced behind my den chair and refused to move until The Mull, my wise old foundling, went and sat with her for a spell. It was like watching a family counselor at work, the God Dog doing her thing.

The dog eventually calmed down enough to come out from behind the chair to drink some water and take a biscuit from my hand. I saw a faded tag with a phone number on her narrow collar. Her name was Lulu. The phone number was a Los Angeles number. I called it anyway.

After several rings a woman answered. “Do you have a dog named Lulu?” I asked.

“I sure do,” she said. “You found her? I’ve been so worried. She ran away a when the thunderstorm broke. Lightning struck and she was gone.”

Lulu lived more than 4 miles away. She’d had never stopped running until she’d reached the traffic island.

“Well, she’s safe now at our house.” I gave her our address.

She pulled up 20 minutes later, expressed deep gratitude and informed me that she and Lulu were about to relocate to France.

“I can’t believe she let you get near her. She’s terrified of lightning and people. It’s a miracle you could catch her.”

“I had some help.” I mentioned the two angels on the road and the help of Junior and The Mull.

She scratched Mulligan’s head.  The God Dog smiled, As always, her brown eyes shined, her tail wagged.

“What a sweet dog. How long have you had her?” she asked.

“Not long enough. Just 10 years.” I told her about saving Mully from a busy highway, joking how it was she who really saved me.  PS

Contact Editor Jim Dodson at jim@thepilot.com.

Letting Go

Until then, hang on to dear, sweet life

By Jim Dodson

On a glorious end-of-spring afternoon, my friend Keith Bowman took me to see his farm, 15 miles southeast of town, a forested  tract of land to which he has devoted the last 35 years so as to turn it into a peaceable kingdom for people who love nature.

We met when I wrote about Keith and three college buddies who’ve attended every Masters Tournament together since 1960, a friendship still going strong 60 years later. During our conversations about Augusta National, Keith let on that he once took a sprig of the famous Augusta azaleas hoping to root and grow the same plant here in North Carolina on his farm where he and a cousin cultivated more than 600 azaleas and rhododendron.

When he learned I was an addicted gardener, he invited me to ride out someday and see his “garden that’s gone a little wild.”

Before that, however, was the matter of an old tree.

“There it is,” he said, pulling to the side on a quiet lane that turned off the Company Mill Road. “What do you think of that?”

The tree was an ancient poplar, rising from a small forested vale below the road bed, massive and very mystical-looking, knotted and gnarly as a giant’s index finger rising to a deep blue sky, at least 13 feet or so in circumference. The monster looked like something out of a children’s story, the home of a Druid king or hermit wizard.

“One day when I was about 13, my father brought me here to see this tree and told me how his grandfather hid in it to avoid being conscripted by the Confederate army.” On his next birthday, Keith Bowman will be 85. “The tree was probably close to 100 years old back then.”

“What amazes me is how it has survived everything from rough weather to changes here in the countryside,” said Keith. “Its top was sheared off long ago but it’s still putting out limbs and leaves. It just won’t let go, comes back year after year.”

Keith’s farm, which is named Ironwood and sits near the village of Climax, was pretty amazing in its own right. Though there are fields he leases to neighbors for raising crops, most of the 120-acre property is covered by a gorgeous forest of hardwoods. There is a handsome unpainted farmhouse and a large barn well off the road, both of which suffered significant damage from the great ice storm of 2014, when large trees toppled onto their roofs.  Other trees fell onto the spectacular octagonal gazebo built by Keith and his late father, Ross, beside the acre-and-a-half pond Keith had built at the heart of his earthly paradise.

The gazebo and pond were designed for swimming and fishing. The structure features hand-cut wooden shingles from the mountains and is bunkered by the aforementioned red and white azaleas.

“Because of the ice storms, the place doesn’t look as nice as it used to,” Keith needlessly apologized. “But this has certainly been a source of a lot of joy to me, friends and neighbors,” he allowed as we walked through the woods to see the remains of a large nursery where rhododendron and large azaleas were returning to a wild state. 

In the farm’s glory days, Keith invited school groups and neighbors from nearby Climax to use the property for “a getaway in nature,” and once threw a party for neighbors from the crossroads with barbecue and a bluegrass band.

Ironwood visitors fished, had picnics, hiked and swam. There is even a fancy paneled outhouse with a cathedral roof, skylight, electric lights, running water and a chandelier.  “It’s kind of the Cadillac of outhouses,” Keith joked.

Across the pond, he installed an orchard with 81 fruit trees and a large grape arbor of Concord, scuppernong and muscadine varieties. “For years I had so much fruit I couldn’t give it away,” he told me as we strolled around the pond.

It was late in the day and the surrounding woods were stirring with life, full of birdsong. The light was almost ethereal, the serenity complete in the seclusion of Keith Bowman’s Peaceable Kingdom.   

“You wouldn’t believe all the wildlife around us,” he was moved to say as we walked, pausing to marvel as a trio of honking Canada geese zoomed over the pond and our heads, heading north with spring. “That’s why it means so much to me to keep this place the way it is — to pass it along to someone who will properly care for it and allow others to use it for relaxation and spiritual renewal.”

As a kid, Keith dreamed of becoming a test pilot, and nearly achieved that dream by training as a fighter pilot during the Cold War. After that he worked as an engineer on the Nike missile for Western Electric in Burlington. A long career with the Small Business Administration followed — he was in charge of both Carolinas for a time — introducing him to good friends he keeps up with this day. For a decade he performed with a traveling gospel group. Though he never married  (“a couple of near-misses,” he says with a wistful laugh, “that just didn’t work out”) he has enjoyed a full life of faith and friendship, belonging to several different churches.

It’s the uncertain fate of Ironwood that chews at him. Since the death of a neighbor who did most of the heavy maintenance work on the property, Keith can’t possibly keep up with all that needs to be done.

“I don’t have any relations left to give it to,” he admitted, as we started back to his car. “That’s a problem I think a lot of older Americans face these days. As we get older out in the country, younger folks aren’t replacing us. They want to live in the city. You can’t blame them. But connections will be lost.”

For this reason, Keith has spent decades photographing nature and creating documents to show what was done, filling several meticulously organized scrapbooks.

When I suggested that he might consider giving the farm to a local church for a retreat or youth camp, given his strong connections to local congregations, he smiled and shook his head. “I know people who have done just that. Most churches would sell the property for other purposes.”

On the drive back to town, he showed me the historic Tabernacle Methodist Church where generations of his family are buried. The interior of the church was a handmade gem. Keith has photographed all of its stained glass windows.

“I think about a line I heard from the film Life of Pi,” he mused as we drove back into town. “All of life seems to be about letting go of things you love. Truthfully, I’m the worst person in the world at letting things go,” he said with a laugh. “But you’ve got to eventually let it go. I know that.”

Keith and his personal nature preserve were still on my mind a few days later when I phoned my friend Joe who is an experienced forester who helps people just like Keith figure out what to do with their land when the time arrives to let it go. Joe, as I knew he would, agreed to give his perspective and advice.

I even looked up the quote from Life of Pi, which goes, “I suppose in the end, the whole of life becomes an act of letting go, but what always hurts the most is not taking a moment to say goodbye.”

Keith, at least, is taking his own sweet time to say goodbye. 

Out in my half-finished Japanese garden, meanwhile, which has shown great improvement over the course of a cool and rainy spring, I couldn’t help but think about the things of this world I treasure but will someday have to let go.

As it happened, I was planting a pair of Red Slipper azaleas and a Christmas fern mixed with the ashes of the three well-loved golden retrievers that brought our family incalculable joy over the years. My garden will be the final resting places for dear old Amos, Bailey and Riley the Rooster, as we called him — and, with a little luck, perhaps the head gardener as well.

A rusted iron sign that stood forever in the peonies of my late mother’s garden read: Dig in the soil, delve in the soul. No place better than one’s garden to do that. Thomas Jefferson always made lists that he kept in his back pocket, especially when in his garden.

Keith and his farm were still on my mind, and I couldn’t help but make my own mental list of the people and things of this world I shall someday have to let go.

Naturally, my adorable wife and four great kids top the list — though with luck they’ll have to let go of me first.

As I dug, my simple list grew: my dog Mulligan, old friends, golf with buddies, quiet time in my garden, a house that finally feels like home, early church, arboretums, old hymns, my wife’s caramel cake, histories and spy novels, birds at the feeder, the glory of spring, the spice of autumn, the silence of snowy nights, film scores, dawn walks, rainy Sundays, supper on the porch, the blue of dusk, garden catalogs, my new rubber boots, my old guitar, blue limericks, roses in June, freshly baked bread, driving back roads, all of Scotland, half of England, the poems of Billy Collins and Mary Oliver, and a few other things I shall surely miss and think of later.

Leave it to Mary Oliver to offer the best advice to Keith and me and others like us.

“To live in this world,” she said, “you must be able to do three things. To love what is mortal and hold it against your bones knowing your own life depends on it; and then, when the time comes to let it go, to let it go.”  PS

Contact Editor Jim Dodson at jim@thepilot.com.

The Dash of Life

Savoring time between the beginning and the inevitable

By Jim Dodson

At the beginning of Episode Two of my favorite British TV program of the moment, a charming series called Delicious, the central character, a roguish head chef, speaking from his grave in a Cornwall churchyard, recalls a famous poet’s observation about the symbolism of markings in stone.

“On a gravestone you see two dates — a beginning and an end, with a tiny dash in between. That dash represents everything you’ve ever done. Everywhere you’ve ever been. Every breath kiss or meal. It all boils down to just one little dash. . .”

As a chronic wanderer of old burying grounds and admirer of witty epitaphs, I learned years ago that burying stones “speak,” telling tales and offering nuggets of wisdom to those willing to listen. 

Most of us, however, are living in a time when daily life seems like a frantic dash from one place to the next. With work ruled by the tyranny of deadlines and calendar books, and private time invaded by social media and the clamors of an info-addicted world, it is often not until one reaches a certain age or experiences some kind of unexpected drama that the need to pause and reflect upon one’s own mortality — the meaning of the dash — becomes clear.

One year ago this month, I had my dodgy gall bladder removed. Frankly, I wasn’t sorry to see it go. The blessed little thing had been bugging me for years. At the same time, I owe that mysterious little organ a genuine debt of gratitude because in the course of a common preparatory scan, a small growth near my lower intestines was detected. It was nipped out by artful surgical procedure, revealing itself upon analysis to be a slow-growing tumor. Fortunately, the prognosis is excellent. There is only a four-percent probability of recurrence, which means no follow-up therapy is required for the time being.

Life is full of verdicts, large and small. Needless to say, I was relieved by this one and, to be blunt, awakened by it. But for a chance discovery, things could easily have gone a very different direction, as I’d enjoyed the kind of good health one might easily take for granted. In short, I was lucky to have had that aching gall bladder.   

But mortality is full of wake-up calls and epiphanies. Wise souls take notice of the changing landscape around them, and sometimes within.   

On one hand, I was powerfully reminded of the brevity of my time on this Earth, and on the other, comforted by the fact that I had excellent role models for aging smartly and — begging to differ with poet Dylan Thomas — going gently into that good night. Both my parents had their own run-ins with the dreaded C-word at about my age but never complained and went on to live astonishingly full and happy lives for the next two decades.

Their dashes, in other words, were both robust and well-lived till the end, full of gardens and grandkids, travel and exploration, making new memories and doing good work, making friends and keeping faith in the sustaining power of human and divine love. My old man worked until he was 80 and moderated the men’s Sunday School class at our church for almost a quarter of a century. My Southern mama cooked every week for the church feeding program and worked with homeless families. During the last two decades of their lives, they went to movies and took walks like old lovers, and snuck off to the hills for private weekends away. I took to kidding them that they were behaving like irresponsible teenagers.

More important, when their “Time” finally arrived, their “dash” expired its length — I was fortunate to sit with both at their bedsides as they slipped the bonds of this Earth. Nothing was left unspoken, and they displayed no fear whatsoever about the end of their days or the adventure that lay ahead. Sages of every faith tradition hold that human beings tend to pass away as they have lived their lives.

My father’s final words on a sleety March evening were, “Don’t worry. It will be fine in the morning. Go kiss your babies.”  Sure enough, the sun came out at dawn, birthing a beautiful spring day. And I did as instructed.

On a summer afternoon four years later, while sharing a glass of wine on the terrace of her favorite seaside restaurant in Maine, I remarked to my mom that she must really miss my father. She simply smiled. “Of course I do, Honey. But don’t worry. I’ll see him very soon.”

A week or so later, she suffered a stroke and was talking about her grandchildren as her nurse in the ICU changed her sheets moments after I left her. “Your mom’s heart monitor suddenly went flat and I looked over at her,” she told me later. “Her eyes were closed and she was smiling. I’ve never seen a more peaceful passing.”

Every now and then I stop by the simply dated gravestones of my folks in a beautiful cemetery not far from our house, just to say hello  — and thanks for the guidance. 

That said, a surprising number of friends my age — I recently turned 65, though I don’t feel anywhere close to that — confess amazement over how rapidly their lives are passing, how quickly their days seem to have vanished down the rabbit hole of time. Perhaps they hear the clock of the world in their inner ear. “Is it already Monday again?” quips our dear old pal Susan with a husky laugh. She walks with my wife and me every morning at five, as nature and the neighborhood are both just stirring.

Susan’s question is more of an amused observation about the speed of life than a complaint about its brevity. She teaches special-needs minority kids in one of the most disadvantaged neighborhoods of the city. And though she herself cracked 65 a few month ahead of me, her bounteous enthusiasm, creativity and passion for doing good work and making a difference in a small person’s life are flat-out palpable. She radiates joy and an infectious curiosity about what lies ahead — proof of Poor Richard’s admonition that a long life may not be good enough, but a good life is long enough.

As for my part, the older I get, the slower I plan to walk. Part of the reason is creaky knees. As the tortoise proved, slow and steady wins the race — if this life is a race at all. 

The other reason for slowing down my dashing life is to see more of the passing landscape. Not long ago, my wife and I began “training” for a walk across Italy from Lucca to Rome this coming September with 50 or so other pilgrims from our church.

During the weekly “practice” hikes around the city at dusk, which are really just a lovely excuse to socialize and drink good wine afterwards, I am invariably somewhere at the rear of the pack, ambling along at my own pace, the aforementioned knees gently complaining with every step, but happy to follow where the others lead. This is a trick I learned early in life, for I’ve long been something of a solitary traveler, taking my own sweet time to get wherever I’m going.

As the second son of an itinerate newspaperman who hauled his family all over the deep South during some of the region’s most turbulent years, I experienced a decidedly solitary boyhood, exploring the woods and fields largely on my own or reading books on a rainy porch. Occasionally I’d check out historic graveyards, battlegrounds and Indian burial mounds with my older brother and father. Dick and I both became Eagle Scouts but were never too keen on the group dynamic. We preferred going our own ways at our own rhythm.

As we passed through one of the city’s older neighborhoods on our practice hike the other evening, my bride — chatting pleasantly with other pilgrims as she motored by her slow-footed husband — glanced around and remarked, “You know, I’ve never seen the city from this angle before. It’s quite beautiful, isn’t it?”

Indeed it was, and is.

As the sun set, her comment made me think about how slowly I plan
to walk across Tuscany this summer, taking in all I can before my “dash” runs out.

Emily Webb Gibb’s ’s haunting farewell speech from Thornton Wilder’s poignant play Our Town was also suddenly in my head.

Gibbs is the young heroine who passes away in childbirth and looks tearfully back on a wonderful life and family she fears she may have taken for granted, as the stage manager leads her to join the other spirits in the village cemetery.

“. . . They’re so young and beautiful. Why did they ever have to get old? . . . I love you all, everything. I can’t look at everything hard enough. It goes so fast. . . . We don’t have time to look at one another. I didn’t realize. All that was going on in life and we never noticed. Take me back — up the hill — to my grave. But first: Wait! One more look. Good-bye, Good-bye, world. . . Good-bye, Mama and Papa. Good-bye to clocks ticking and Mama’s sunflowers. And food and coffee. And new-ironed dresses and hot baths and sleeping and waking up. Oh, Earth, you’re too wonderful for anybody to realize you. Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it?”

May is a lovely time to wander a churchyard, I find. The Earth is in bloom and old stones speak of the need not to dash too quickly through the journey.

Contact Editor Jim Dodson at jim@thepilot.com.