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.

Sunday Man

’twixt Heaven and Earth

By Jim Dodson

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

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

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

I am a butler to cats.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“if it can come

Only in silent shadows and in dreams?

Shall she not find in comforts of the sun,

In pungent fruit and bright, green wings, or else

In any balm or beauty of the earth,

Things to be cherished like the thought of heaven?

Divinity must live within herself:

Passions of rain, or moods in falling snow;

Grievings in loneliness, or unsubdued

Elations when the forest blooms; gusty

Emotions on wet roads on autumn nights;

All pleasures and all pains, remembering

The bough of summer and the winter branch,

These are the measures destined for her soul.”

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

Funny how I only recently noticed this.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Contact Editor Jim Dodson at jim@thepilot.com

The Path Home

Finding roots among the brambles

By Jim Dodson

Not long after dawn on New Year’s Day, my wife, Wendy, and I picked our way through a patch of misty briar-choked woods to the base of an Interstate bridge that spans the Haw River in
Alamance County.

One hundred fifty years ago, my father’s great-grandfather operated a gristmill on the banks of the Haw, one of the state’s most important rivers. His name was George Washington Tate. As a kid, I’d seen the remains of the long-abandoned mill sitting at the river’s edge below the railings of the bridge, overgrown with weeds but clearly visible.

Half a century later, I was curious to see if the ruins of the mill might still be there.

George Washington Tate was something of gentrified Jack-of-all-trades — accomplished land surveyor, cabinetmaker, gristmill owner and prominent figure in the affairs of his church and economic development of neighboring Alamance and Orange counties. I grew up hearing that he was the man who officially established the legal boundaries of the state’s central counties following the Civil War. Greensboro’s Tate Street, which borders the campus of UNCG, is reportedly named for him.

Bits of family lore hold that old GWT was a circuit-riding deacon or lay minister who helped establish several Methodist churches across the western Piedmont, another that he forged the original bell in the Hillsborough courthouse.

The tale that has long fascinated me, however — first told to me by a pair of elderly spinster great-aunts named Josie and Ida, who lived into their 90s on Buckhorn Road east of Mebane — was that my father’s grandmother (Tate’s youngest daughter, Emma) was actually an orphaned Cherokee infant Tate “adopted” and brought home from a circuit ride out West, adding to a family that already included three sons and three daughters.

My dad soon confirmed this. As a kid, he’d spent many of his happiest summers as a kid staying with Aunt Emma at her farm off Buckhorn Road near Dodson’s Corners, and often talked about his grandmother’s closeness to the land and keen knowledge of natural medicines made from native plants he had sometimes helped her gather. “To a lot of her friends and neighbors, Aunt Emma was the community’s healer,” he explained to my older brother and me one Christmastime when we went to shoot mistletoe out of the huge red oaks that grew around her abandoned home place. “In those days the only doctor around was over in Hillsborough, 20 miles away.” He added, almost as a wistful afterthought: “She was happiest out in the woods and fields and knew the names of every plant. Local people loved and depended on her.”

Aunt Emma died in 1928, when my father was just 13. Aunt Emma was 70.

“She was an old lady,” he told me many years later, “but her death was shocking — the way she died. For years it was our family’s darkest secret, the thing nobody spoke about. No one saw it coming.”

Aunt Emma reportedly hanged herself from a beam of the house she shared with her husband, Jimmy. Years later, my father’s take on this was that she was challenged living with a foot in two worlds.

A grieving Uncle Jimmy soon gave up his farm and went to live with relatives in Greensboro, abandoning the family property. He lived another 14 years, passing away in 1942, the year my father enlisted in the Army Air Corps and trained to be a glider pilot for D-Day.

Because I heard this part of the story late in life — during a final trip to Scotland with my dad in 1994, when he was dying of cancer — I became more or less obsessed with Aunt Emma’s mysterious death and the colorful stories I’d grown up hearing about her important papa, George Washington Tate.

To some in our family — those who never heard this part of the story — my father’s grandmother is simply a tiny name on perhaps the largest family tree anyone has ever seen. I own a copy of this massive genealogical document, boasting a thousand or more family names branching off the taproot of one Thomas Squires and wife, Elizabeth, English settlers who arrived in the state in the late 1760s.

Most likely, they were part of the massive migration of Europeans along the so-called Great Wagon Road that brought an estimated half a million Scots, Irish, English and German settlers from Pennsylvania to Virginia and the Carolinas about that time. The Great Wagon Road, which began in Philadelphia and roamed out toward Lancaster and Harrisburg before turning south through Maryland and the valley of Virginia, crossing the Carolinas before terminating at the Savannah River in Augusta, Georgia, at 800 miles, was the most heavily traveled road in Colonial America.

Built over ancient Indian hunting routes, it’s the trading road that populated the South and served to open the Western frontier beyond the mountains. Thomas Jefferson’s daddy surveyed and named it. A young George Washington served as a scout along it, and no less than three wars were contested along it — including several key battles during the French and Indian, American Revolutionary and Civil Wars.

Today, if you ever travel Interstate 81 north of Roanoke, you’re traveling the path of the Great Wagon Road. The original road veered southeast from there and crossed into the Yadkin Valley, bringing the Moravians to Old Salem and the Quakers to Guilford County, before moseying along rivers toward Salisbury and the city named in honor of Queen Charlotte. After that, it split into two routes as it crossed South Carolina until meeting again in Georgia.

Last summer, my dad’s first cousin Roger Dodson, a retired missionary and wise family elder who grew up hearing many of the same stories I did about Aunt Emma, provided me with the only known photograph of the family mystery woman and shared his memories of having Uncle Jimmy live with his family for a time after Emma Dodson’s death. Roger also showed me a magnificent corner cabinet made by George Washington Tate, who operated a carpentry shop at his gristmill on the Haw. The cabinet is a one-piece work of art.

George Washington Tate was laid to rest beside his wife, Rachel, in the cemetery behind the Lebanon United Methodist Church in the country above Mebane.

Aunt Emma rests beside her husband, Jimmy, in the smaller burying ground at Chestnut Ridge Methodist Church, not far from Dodson’s Crossroads in Orange County.

Which brings us back to the edge of the historic Haw River on a cold and misty New Year’s morning a month or so ago.

Almost every American’s ancestors hailed from someplace else. But an old road, as the saying in the country goes, always brings someone home.

At a time when polls show many Americans are thinking anxiously about what direction our frontier democracy may go, I’m planning to spend the next year traveling and researching a book on the Great Wagon Road — the road that brought my people, and quite possibly yours, to this part of North Carolina.

It’s a book I’ve been keen to research and write for over a decade and a quest to try to find old George Washington Tate’s lost gristmill seemed like the ideal way to begin such a journey.

Unfortunately, time and progress stand still for no man. And part of me feared that the site where I first laid eyes on the foundation of my ancestor’s mill in the late 1960s — a popular river ford dating from the earliest days of the colony — had most likely been subsumed beneath an interstate highway that has doubled in size since I last visited.

As we stood on the banks of the river, we saw old trees and a handful of boulders in the slowly swirling eddies but, alas, no trace of the mill’s foundation.

I decided to take a couple of photos just the same, as my wife wandered over to a thick patch of brambles and pushed through to a small wooden maintenance bridge that crosses a gully to the base of the bridge.

“Oh, my gosh,” she said moments later, quietly adding, “Come here and look.”

Below the bridge was the old millrace, the sluice that once turned the wooden water wheel, half hidden beneath a curtain of old vines. The race was deep and still running with water, and we knew it belonged to the mill because foundation stones were also visible where time and water had exposed them.

As an expert I’ve been talking to about America’s “lost” roads once said to me, our past lies right before our eyes if we only know what we’re looking at — and where.

For this son of the ancient Haw, Aunt Emma and old George Washington Tate, this moment was like finding the start of a long path home.

We took a picture and went to find a robust country breakfast to celebrate our discovery, the start of a promising new year.  PS

If your family came down the Great Wagon Road, Editor Jim Dodson would be pleased to hear about it. Contact him at jim@thepilot.com.

Saving George

An anchor of enchantment in the front yard

By Jim Dodson

His name is George. That’s what we’ve taken to calling him, at any rate. George is old and bent, weathered by age. We think he might be pushing 100 years old.

I’ve known George most of my life. Grew up just two doors from down from where he lived but I never paid him much notice until recently.

That’s because George is an old tree, Crataegus phaenopyrum, we think, based purely by his leaf pattern and bark. His common name is a Washington hawthorn — hence the nickname we’ve bestowed on him.

But here’s where the sweet mystery deepens.

According to my tree identification book, Washington hawthorns are relatively small flowering trees — in some cases, shrubs — that produce early and abundant white flowers in the spring and vivid red berries that last into winter, a bounty for winter birds, especially cedar waxwings. They’re also reportedly poisonous to dogs, which could be a problem, since Ajax, our shameless golden retriever, will eat anything put before him. On the other hand, he’s one lazy brute, unlike his Greek namesake, and not much for climbing trees. So Ajax is probably safe.

We moved into the neighborhood just before Thanksgiving. On our first day in the Corry house, I stopped to admire George. He was magnificently arrayed with gold and crimson leaves, like Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. The neighborhood is famous for its old graceful hardwoods, many of them well over a century old. George is clearly one of the neighborhood patriarchs. That’s why I paused to admire him the afternoon we moved in, suddenly remembering him from my childhood, making a mental note to free him from the tangle of English ivy vines that had grown around him like something from a fairy tale.

In a year of small wonders, it seemed wonderfully providential that we were moving into the Corry house, 100 feet from where I grew up. The Corry boys were my pals growing up. Their parents, Al and Mama Merle, were my parents’ good friends. Big Al was one of Greensboro’s leading builders, and the house he built for his wife and four kids — a gorgeous wooden bungalow with flowing rooms, parquet floors and host of innovative design touches — was one of the first houses built in Starmount Forest after the war.

For more than a year, my wife, Wendy, and I had quietly scouted houses throughout Greensboro. Then one Sunday after I heard the Corry house was for sale, we went for a look. I didn’t let on that the Corry house was always my favorite in the neighborhood. But after she walked through it, on the drive home to the Sandhills, Wendy quietly announced, “I think that’s the house. It just feels like us.”

The Corry kids, all four of them, were thrilled to hear their homeplace was being purchased by a Dodson.

Each quickly got in touch to offer their enthusiastic congratulations. The  Corrys were the most self-sufficient clan I ever knew, natural builders and people full of life. Chris, the oldest boy, actually lived in a tepee with his bride as they built their own dream home west of Greensboro. The Corry boys hunted, fished and could build anything with their hands. They were also crazily musical, playing stringed instruments of every sort. In 1969, son Craig and I made the Greensboro Teenage Talent Show playing guitars and singing Bob Dylan’s “Don’t Think Twice.” We called ourselves Alfred and James.

Big Al informed us that Alfred and James needed something “extra” to win. “You boys need a shtick to impress the judges,” he said.

I asked him why we needed a stick on stage.

Big Al laughed. He hailed from Buffalo, New York. “That’s a Yiddish word,” he explained. “It means a comic gimmick, something to make people laugh. First rule of vaudeville — always leave ’em laughing.”

He suggested that we add kazoos to the act. We thought that was the silliest thing we’d ever heard, but Mama Merle bought us a couple anyway.

The director of the show asked us to play a second song while the judges made up their minds. So we did an encore — with guitars and kazoos. The audience gave us a standing ovation. We wound up in third place. I still have the program. TV host Lee Kinard invited Alfred and James to come on his Good Morning Show at Christmas. We worked up a couple of Christmas carols and did the second one with kazoos. The shtick worked wonders.

Craig grew up to marry Marcy Madden, his first girlfriend from just down the block. He became a veterinarian. Britt, his little brother, was a musical prodigy who became a music teacher and recently signed on to direct the music for Horn in the West. Ginger, the oldest and only girl, became a lawyer.

Like his papa, Chris was a jack-of-all-trades, a born builder of almost anything. He now sports a full-grown gray beard and knows his late mama’s house better than anyone alive because he built much of it with his father and took care of the place until Merle passed away a year or so ago. His wife, Fenna, told me in an email that Mama Merle and Big Al would both be so happy that a Dodson kid had come home again to purchase their house. From faraway California, Ginger wrote that she hoped we would have many happy years living there.

Which brings me back to George.

A week after we got settled, we took ladders, handsaws and a hatchet and liberated George from those wretched English ivy vines. The job took two afternoons, but George looked considerably more at ease, maybe even grateful. My nephew came and helped me clean out the area around his base, where I’ll soon plant Spanish bluebells and English daffodils for the spring.

I also planted six young trees, three Japanese maples I’d raised from sprouts and a trio of river birches like the three I planted once in Maine.

They stood in front of the post and beam house I built on a forested hilltop surrounded by birch and hemlock. The beams were rough-sawn Northern fir, with pegged heartwood pine flooring salvaged from a 200-year-old New Hampshire barn. On cold but sunny winter days, whenever the sun streamlining through that house’s large south-facing windows warmed the beams, you could hear gentle sighs and faint cracking sounds as the wood relaxed, expanded, exhaled.

That peaceful sound told me something I guess I’ve always known. That wood — trees — are something more than just fellow living and breathing organisms.

They are enchanted.

Maybe this explains why one of my first memories of life is of sitting on a low limb in a sprawling live oak next to our house by Greenfield Lake, in Wilmington, waiting for my father to come home from the newspaper where he worked. I was forever climbing trees, much to my mother’s chagrin, and sometimes falling out of them. My dad liked to call me Mowgli, the orphaned boy from Kipling’s Jungle Book, one of the first books I ever read on my own.

Come to think of it, the books I loved early on all seemed to have extraordinary trees in them — Greek and Roman mythology, the Tarzan books, almost every fairy tale I ever read contained forests that were either forbidden or simply enchanted, home to magic creatures, wizards, evil queens and noble woodsmen.

And why not? Plato and the ancient Greeks believed souls resided in sacred groves of trees, and the Buddha found enlightenment sitting beneath a fig. The Egyptian Book of the Dead mentions groves of sycamores where the departed find eternal bliss, and the Bible speaks of a Tree of Knowledge that altered paradise. The Irish word “druid” derives simply from a Celtic word for oak, while in India to this day people seeking miracles hang family rags on trees to make shrines to the gods. My Baptist grandmother always insisted that the dogwood tree with its perfect white petals and crimson heart was a symbol for Christ’s resurrection, and showed me the old Appalachian story to prove it.

The Glastonbury thorn, holds English lore, is a hawthorn tree that is said to have sprouted miraculously from the staff of Joseph of Arimathea when he traveled to Britain after Jesus’ crucifixion. The hawthorn blooms at Christmas, and the queen is traditionally brought one of its blooms with her tea on Christmas morning. In broader English lore, wherever hawthorns and oaks reside together, kindly fairies supposedly live as well.

I do hope that much holds true even if, come springtime, the old tree I liberated turns out to be something quite different.

There’s an old saying that an optimist is someone who plants a tree he may never live long enough to sit under.

That’s probably true for the six young trees I planted around George.

But come spring, home at last, I plan to sit under George when those bluebells and daffodils bloom.  PS

Contact editor Jim Dodson at jim@thepilot.com.

The Great New Year’s Dirt Clod War

By Jim Dodson

This was the year my dad’s rural relatives, several distant aunts and uncles, a Bible-quoting grandmother and five girl cousins from the country came to our house between Christmas and New Year’s Day. I barely knew them. I was almost 13, my brother Dickie was 15. We were informed by our mom in no uncertain terms that we had to be good hosts and proper young gentlemen for the duration of their visit. She had that look in her eye that said she meant business.

Five girl cousins in one house, if only for a couple days during an otherwise unblemished holiday week, is a serious challenge to the mental stability and character formation of any boy approaching teenagehood.

Dickie at least had a Life Scout project to work on, which took him out of the house most of the week. I wasn’t so lucky. It was 1965. America was still buzzing about the Beatles. I was smitten with George Harrison and taking Wednesday afternoon guitar lessons at Harvey West Music downtown. I tried sticking to my bedroom to play along with “Rubber Soul” but the oldest girl cousin kept coming in without knocking and sitting cross-legged on the floor just to stare at me. It was unnerving. My mother said she “just really likes you, it won’t kill you to be nice to her.” Her name was Cindy. She was about my age — the oldest girl cousin — but she scarcely spoke, just sat and stared at me with her huge round eyes as I fumbled my way through “In My Life.”

The other country girl cousins, meanwhile, occupied my tree house and turned it into a teahouse for their dolls. They played board games and poured imaginary tea. I came home from my Wednesday afternoon guitar lesson and found them there acting like my tree house was Buckingham Palace and they were visiting the Queen. I wondered how I could survive the week.

By Saturday morning I had to get out of the house, so I grabbed my baseball glove and bat and prepared to head for the park to play roll-the-bat with my buddies Bobby, Chris and Brad. I hoped Della Marie Hockaday might be there, too. I’d just given her a genuine imitation sapphire dimestore ring that meant we were kind of an unofficial thing.

My friends and I played roll-the-bat most Saturday mornings, but the country cousins weren’t leaving until later that afternoon.

“Listen,” said my mom, “maybe you should take the girls to the park with you. They’re a little bored. They might like to play baseball with you guys.”

I wondered if my mother had lost her mind from having all those rural uncles and aunts and a Bible-quoting grandmother under the same roof. She clearly wanted them out from underfoot while she prepared the big lunch that would send them all home.

“Come on, sweetie,” she said. “Do this and I’ll make you a chocolate pie and you can stay up and watch ‘Bonanza’ tomorrow night.” Sunday night was a school night and her chocolate pie was the ultimate bribe. We made the deal.

As agreed, I led the girl cousins and their dolls to the park, hoping with every ounce of my being that Della Marie Hockaday wouldn’t be there to witness my complete humiliation.

The park was across the creek from a new housing development where the earth had been churned up into mounds of fresh, angry red clay. Some other kids from another part of the neighborhood were over there messing around one of the new houses. I recognized Randy Fulp. He was the spawn of the devil, the meanest kid at my junior high school, always trying to intimidate younger kids.

The school we attended was a tough school full of scrappy white mill kids and a large number of black kids. This was years before public schools in North Carolina officially desegregated. You learned to survive by keeping your mouth shut and avoiding trouble. Fortunately, I played JV football that year for the Jackson Junior High Trojans and earned enough street cred so that Randy Fulp wouldn’t mess with me. I had a couple of oversized teammates who would happily have pounded him into the red clay of South Greensboro.

Not long after the girl cousins found spots on the hill to watch and my buddies and I began playing roll-the-bat, a large red dirt clod landed at my feet as I was preparing to hit a ball. I kicked it aside and looked across the creek, where Randy Fulp was grinning like a jackass with his friends. He threw another dirt clod that I had to step out of the way to avoid being hit.

There is almost nothing as deadly as a dirt clod made from authentic sticky red clay earth from the upper Piedmont region of North Carolina. It can blind, maim or simply wound for life.

Naturally, I picked up the dirt clod and threw it back at Randy Fulp.

I missed. He laughed.

All hell broke loose.

Suddenly dirt clods were raining down on us and we were throwing them back.

I turned to see the girl cousins and their dolls fleeing the scene of mayhem.

All but one, that is.

Cindy was standing beside me in the creek bed, grinning as she formed hard clay clods with her bare hands. She turned and winged one with stunning accuracy at our attackers. It splattered on the windshield of a bulldozer where they were crouching. They scattered like frightened birds.

Cindy had an unbelievable arm, far more accurate than any of the boys in the fight. Her finest moment came when she caught Randy Fulp with a fireball to his throwing arm and he let out a yelp, turned and led the retreat around the corner of the unfinished house.

By the time we climbed out of the creek, both of us were soaking wet and streaked with red clay mud. Even more amazing, everyone else had vanished, including my friends.

Cindy and I walked home together. I wasn’t surprised to learn that she played softball on her junior high school softball team back home. She was also her class president.

My mom was so put out at me, however, she made me strip down to my orange-red underwear before she would let me back into the house. Cindy’s dress was equally filthy, but she got to go inside and change.

The Great New Year’s Dirt Clod War was the topic of lunch that day and many years thereafter.

Cindy and I sat together and watched the Rose Bowl on TV. I almost hated to see the country girl cousins — one at least — go home.

More than a decade passed before I saw Cindy again. We met at the last family reunion I attended before heading off to college. She was going to N.C. State hoping to become a small animal vet, but not planning to play softball.

She had a boyfriend and was much prettier than I recalled.

At one point she asked me if I remembered the New Year’s Day when we got into a dirt clod fight with some boys across the creek, getting so filthy my mother made me strip off before I could come into the house.

“Yes, I do,” I replied. “That scarred me for life. Worse than any dirt clod.”

She laughed. “It was kind of unfair. I was dirtier than you were. But wasn’t that fun?”

I heard from Cindy a few years ago. She was a new grandmother living in Indiana. She’d read a book I’d written about taking my young daughter and aging golden retriever on a 6,000-mile cross-country fly-fishing and camping trip across America one summer. The book had just been made into a feature film. She asked me to autograph her copy of the book. She said Faithful Travelers was her favorite read.

I happily signed her book and sent it back, thanking her for saving my skin during the Great New Year’s Dirt Clod War.  PS

Contact editor Jim Dodson at jim@thepilot.com.

The King of Everyman

By Jim Dodson

November’s arrival never fails to put me in a grateful mood, even before the far-flung clan assembles around a Thanksgiving table worthy of a king.

Speaking of kings, in the spirit of giving thanks for the people who have touched our lives, past and present, here’s a grateful little ditty I wrote in the hours after my boyhood sports hero — and quite possibly yours, given his strong connections to this state — passed away.

Around five o’clock on a Sunday afternoon, Sept. 25, my wife, Wendy, and I were watching a late afternoon football game when I suddenly felt overcome by a chill and went upstairs to lie down for an hour before friends arrived for supper.

I’m rarely sick and assumed this peculiar spell was simply brought on by fatigue from working since four in the morning on a golf book I’ve been writing for almost two years, a personal tale called the Range Bucket List.

The first chapter and the last are about my friend, collaborator and boyhood hero Arnold Palmer.

The prologue explains that he was the first name on what I called my Things to Do in Golf List around 1966 after falling hard for my father’s game and reading somewhere that Arnold Palmer started out in golf by keeping a similar list of things he intended to do. Many decades later, while interviewing him early one morning in his workshop in Latrobe, I confirmed this fact with the King of Golf.

The final chapter details an emotional visit I made to see Arnold at home in Latrobe in late summer, about a month before his 87th birthday. I knew he wasn’t doing particularly well. When I walked into his pretty, rustic house sitting on quiet Legends Drive in the unincorporated Village of Youngstown on the outskirts of Latrobe, I found the King of Golf watching an episode of “Gunsmoke,” the No. 1 American TV show about the time Arnold Palmer ruled the world of golf.

He greeted me warmly without getting up. A walker was standing nearby. His wife Kit brought me a cold drink. He turned down the sound and we had a nice time catching up, almost but not quite like many we’ve enjoyed over the past two decades. Arnold’s once seemingly invincible blacksmith body had finally given out, yet his mind and spirit were strong. He insisted on joining Doc Giffin, his longtime assistant, Kit and me for an early supper that evening across the vale at Latrobe Country Club.

The trip was like a homecoming for me — and something I feared would be a farewell.

For two full years, from early 1997 to late 1999, I had the privilege of serving as Arnold Palmer’s collaborator on his autobiography, A Golfer’s Life. I was deeply honored to have been chosen by Arnold and wife Winnie for the project, and touched that he insisted that my name share the cover and title page of the work. I always called the book his book. He always called the book our book.

Not long after we began working on it — both being unusually early risers who often chatted in his home workshop before official business hours — Winnie was diagnosed with a form of ovarian cancer. Arnie, which is what he insisted I call him though I never could quite make myself do so, withdrew from his busy public life so we could get the book completed and published before time took its toll, narrowing the horizon of what was supposed to be a three year project to just under two.

We brought the book out in time to celebrate Arnold’s 70th birthday in September 1999 and the opening of a beautiful, restored red barn that Winnie had always loved just off the 14th fairway at the same club where Arnold grew up under the firm watch of his demanding papa, Deacon Palmer, whom Arnold simply called “Pap.”

Rather than a conventional autobiography of facts and figures and tournament highlights, my objective with Arnold’s book was to create an unusually warm and intimate reminiscence or memoir that read as if Arnold and his fans were simply sharing a drink after a day of golf, and he was quietly relating the 15 or so key moments of his life, revealing how these moments shaped the most influential golfer in history and arguably America’s greatest sportsman.

Both Winnie’s barn and Arnold’s book were a hit. The book was on the bestseller list for almost half a year. The handsome red barn stands in quiet tribute to them both. Winnie passed away less than two months after that special evening Arnold turned 70.

After lying down and lightly dozing for an hour, I heard our guests arriving and got up to go downstairs. The cold and queasiness had passed and I felt much better —  only to find my wife waiting at the bottom of the steps holding out my mobile phone with a very sad look on her face.

A nice person named Molly from NBC News in New York was on the other end, wanting to know if I could confirm a report that Arnold Palmer had passed away.

We spoke for an hour as my incoming call alert continued to light up from news organizations around the world. By midnight I’d spoken with reporters from all the major networks, several cable news organizations, CNN International, a pair of wire services, the Canadian Broadcasting System and Australia’s leading sports call-in show — all of it testament to the drawing power of Arnold Daniel Palmer.

The conversations about his incomparable life and times and seismic impact on popular culture and the world of sports went well into the early morning hours.

Was the chill and queasiness a coincidence, or something more sympathetic in nature?

That’s impossible to say. This much is certainly true: As Winnie commented early in our collaboration, Arnold and I enjoyed unusually strong chemistry and an uncommon connection that is instinctively felt and shared by his millions of adoring fans — and was still apparent in late summer when I visited with him at home.

The morning after our dinner at the club, I also visited with Doc Giffin and Arnold’s amazing staff at Arnold Palmer Enterprises and even saw his younger brother Jerry when he popped in to say hello.

Finally the boss showed up for work around 10 o’clock, trailed by a couple of cheerful young therapists from the local hospital who were planning to do a stretching and exercise session at the Palmers’ home gym aimed at restoring Arnold’s ability to swing a golf club again.

As he signed books and the usual stack of photos and personal artifacts from fans that are always waiting for his immaculate signature every morning of his life, we chatted about various family matters and other things large and small. With Doc and his therapists we even watched a recently colorized CD release of the historic 1960 Masters, where Arnold closed from two shots back to claim his second green jacket, setting off a national frenzy in the process.

At one point as we watched him teeing off on the 72nd hole of the tournament, needing a clutch birdie to secure the win, Arnold declared excitedly — “There, girls! There’s my golf swing!”

The therapy girls were standing directly behind the King of Golf. They were beaming, part of a new generation that never had the pleasure of experiencing the game’s most compelling star in his prime.

Arnold’s eyes were alive with pure joy. There were tears pooling in them.

And even bigger tears pooling in mine.

Doc Giffin, a legend in his own right, just smiled from a few feet away.

A little while later, I did something I’d meant to do for many years.

I handed him my first hardbound copy of A Golfer’s Life and asked him to autograph it.

He accepted the book but gave me what I fondly call The Look — a cross between the scowl of a disapproving schoolmaster and a slightly constipated eagle, one way he loves to needle his friends.

I watched as he took his own sweet time writing something on the title page.

He handed me back the book and said, “Don’t open this until you’re safely home.”

Facing a 9-hour drive home to North Carolina, I somehow managed to wait until I reached my driveway just as the summer day was expiring, at which point I opened the book. He could have written it to 100 million people around the world, all of whom share the same kind of connection with the King of Everyman.

“Dear Jim,” he simply wrote. “Thanks for all your wonderful works. You are the greatest friend I could have — Arnold”

That’s when my waterworks really let loose.

Over the days and week to come, we’ll all be reminded of Arnold Palmer’s extraordinary impact on golf and American life in general, and the mammoth-hearted legacy he leaves behind, especially here in Pinehurst, where his father brought him as a teen to experience the “higher game,” Wilmington, where he won his seventh PGA Tournament, and Greensboro, where he had so many friends but always came up just short of winning the Greater Greensboro Open.   

Still, Arnold’s 62 PGA Tour wins, 90 tournament victories worldwide and seven major championships only partially defined the life of a man from the rural heartland of western Pennsylvania who almost single-handedly pioneered the concept of modern sports marketing, created a business model that turned into an empire stretching from golf tees to sweet tea, and grew to be golf’s most visible and charismatic force, its greatest philanthropist and most beloved ambassador.

During his half-century reign, and largely because of him, in my view and that of many fellow historians, golf enjoyed the largest and longest sustained period of growth in history, a remarkable period that included the formal creation of no less than six professional tours, witnessed television’s incomparable impact, saw the rebirth of the Ryder Cup and revival of European golf, the rise of international stars, and nothing less than a scientific revolution in the realms of instruction, equipment technology and golf course design — all of which Arnold played some kind of role.

How much of this cultural Renaissance was due to this kind, genuine, fun-loving and passionately competitive family man who grew up showing off for the ladies of Latrobe Country Club and earning nickels from them by knocking their tee shots safely over a creek on his papa’s golf course?

Impossible to fully quantify, I suppose. Though I would be inclined to say just about everything.

Golf is the most personal game of all, a solitary walk through the beautiful vagaries of nature. And Arnold Palmer was the most personal superstar in the history of any sport, a true blue son of small town America, the kid next door who grew up to become a living legend, a homegrown monarch for the Everyman in each of us, a King with a common touch.

His charm and hearty laugh and extraordinary undying love of the ancient game he was meant by Providence to elevate like nobody before him will surely live on as long as people young and old tee up the ball and give chase to the game.

His beautiful memorial service at Saint Vincent’s Basilica in Latrobe on Oct. 2 brought out the golf world in force along with hundreds of ordinary folks — the foot soldiers of Arnie’s fabled Army — who in some cases drove all night just to stand and pay homage to their hero on a gorgeous Indian summer afternoon, holding signs that read “Long Live the King of Golf” and “Thank You, Arnie!”

Outside, immediately following the service, as a Scottish bagpiper played “Amazing Grace,” Arnold’s longtime co-pilot Pete Luster made a pair of low passes over the spires of the Basilica in Arnold’s beloved Citation 10 with its signature N1AP registration number, turning sharply toward heaven and flying almost straight up until the airplane was a mere glint in the blue autumn sky.

The woman standing beside me in the silent crowd actually took my arm to steady herself and burst out crying. I hugged her and she kissed me on the cheek like we were old friends saying goodbye.

I’d never seen her in my life but we were friends, as everyone is in Arnie’s Army.  PS

Contact editor Jim Dodson at jim@thepilot.com.

Dark Clowns

By Jim Dodson

I was deep in the country at twilight, heading home with the radio on when I heard about the dark clowns. The BBC presenter sounded skeptical, even amused by reports out of Greenville, South Carolina, where people dressed as clowns were reportedly trying to lure children into the woods with candy and money.

“So . . . is this just a hoax or something people there are really concerned about?” the host asked a local reporter covering the story, his tongue half in cheek.

“I can’t say it’s a hoax,” she replied, “because the police are taking this very seriously. They have warned parents and doubled patrols. This really has a lot of people freaked out.”

So-called “after-dark clowns” have been spooking America quite a bit lately, it turns out, most recently in Winston-Salem and Green Bay, Wisconsin, where a photograph of a dark clown roaming early morning streets carrying black balloons set the Internet on fire. Two Octobers ago residents of Bakersfield, California, were spooked by photographs of “evil after-dark clowns” roaming their streets after hours, showing up under lampposts and frequenting kiddie rides. Since then, reports of dark clowns have cropped up in a dozen other places around the country.

“The police don’t know whether the stories are coming from the imaginations of children or something sinister is afoot, but panicked residents seem to be taking the law into their own hands,” The New York Times noted about this latest outbreak of clowns in South Carolina, adding that shots had been fired into wooded areas where the sightings occurred.

Whatever else may be true, clowns occupy a peculiar space in American popular culture, somewhere between what’s perfectly innocent and downright terrifying. My September issue of Smithsonian notes that clowns have been with us since man’s earliest days in the guise of everything from mythologized tricksters to painted medicine men. Pygmy clowns entertained bored Egyptian pharaohs, and medieval court jesters were entitled to thumb their oversized noses at the king without fear of losing their heads. Ancient Rome had professional clowns whose job it was to pacify unruly crowds at festivals, peacekeepers who kept an eye out for troublemakers. “Well into the 18th and 19th century,” writes Smithsonian’s Linda Rodriguez McRobbie, “the prevailing clown figure of Western Europe and Britain was the pantomime clown, who was sort of a bumbling buffoon.”

Once, standing in a crowd of camera-wielding tourists next to my young daughter on the main drag in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, awaiting a parade of local rodeo riders, I spotted a mime working the crowd and approaching us. My daughter was delighted. But I wasn’t.

Mimes have always made me uncomfortable, a modest phobia I trace to a powerful moment in my early childhood in Mississippi, where my father briefly owned a small newspaper. One evening in the late fall he took my brother and me to a political rally in a cornfield just outside town where a group of strange people showed up wearing white robes and hoods and stood around a bonfire. We didn’t stay long, just long enough for our father to get a quote or two from the mayor and the hooded figures and to frighten the bug juice out of his sons. We asked our dad why those men wore hoods. “Because people who wear masks are weak people often up to no good,” he replied. Our mother gave him holy hell when she found out where he’d taken us just to harvest a quote.

Forty years later, picking up on my post-Klan jitters, the mime paused right in front of us and attempted to make me smile. He made a huge happy face followed by a tragic sad one, rubbing away imaginary tears when I wouldn’t yield. The crowd ate it up.

“Thanks,” I said through gritted teeth. “Feel free to move along now.”

Clowns were everywhere in the America where I grew up. Most were fun-loving and perfectly innocent in those faraway days — Clarabell the Clown on Howdy Doody and Bozo the Clown with his internationally syndicated show — which according to Smithsonian had a 10-year waiting list for tickets.

There was even a clown I liked on my favorite weeknight TV show, Red Skelton’s alter ego Clem Kadiddlehopper, a bumbling painted-up fool who was tolerable only because he often broke up halfway through his skits. In my bedroom I even had a harlequin desk lamp. I attended Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus about that time, exactly once, on the other hand, feeling bad for the animals and truly bothered by the clowns. Only the acrobats appealed to me.

“So the question is,” Smithsonian’s McRobbie wonders, “when did the clown, supposedly a jolly figure of innocuous, kid-friendly entertainment, become so weighed down by fear and sadness? When did clowns become so dark?”

The truest answer is, long ago and far away.

Classical operas and Shakespearean dramas, after all, have long used clown figures as sinister messengers of mystery and intrigue. But in the modern American context it may well have been an evil clown named Pogo who established the motif of the dark clown around town.

His real name was John Wayne Gacy Jr., a friendly chap who entertained children in the Chicago suburbs for years during the middle 1970s before he was arrested, tried and convicted of killing 33 young men. “You know,” he reportedly told investigators, “a clown can get away with murder.” Before Gacy faced execution in 1994, America’s Crown Prince of Killer Clowns spent his time in his cell painting pictures of clowns and self-portraits of himself as Pogo the clown.

After seven years of writing about dark things for my magazine in Atlanta, I officially swore off watching horror films after writing a piece for Boston magazine about a reclusive teen in western Massachusetts whose mother allowed her son to gorge himself on the Friday the 13th films only to have her troubled son don a hockey mask one Halloween night and slash several kids before hanging himself in the woods. The psychologist who’d been treating him for years told me “his identification with Jason seemed pretty harmless.”

A toxic flood of even more ghastly films continues to flow into your local Cineplex, feeding our insatiable desire to terrify ourselves. Heath Ledger’s brilliant if disquieting Joker in the 2008 Batman remake The Dark Knight seemed almost too real and sadly prefigured the gifted actor’s own demons rising to the surface when he shortly died of an accidental drug and alcohol overdose.

I sometimes wonder if we aren’t simply hardwired to value a good harmless scare in a world that appears damaged beyond repair and full of very real dangers, providing new purpose to whatever bogeyman has always lurked beneath the bed. In another age, after all, fairy tales and fables of trolls loitering beneath bridges and witches in the woods were meant to instruct children on the dangers of straying too far beyond the light or down a road of ruin, real or imagined. “Always keep a-hold of Nurse,” goes a famous ditty by a French writer, Hilaire Belloc, “for fear of finding something worse.”

Once upon a time, Madge the beautician and Speedy Alka-Seltzer were icons of commercial television spots. They’ve given way to pharmaceutical companies peddling expensive drugs for maladies whose side effects may kill you, security firms eager to surveil your home against intruders who are just waiting to pounce, identity theft, and internet investment firms that torched your 401-K plan a few years back while reminding you that you haven’t put aside nearly enough for a “happy” retirement.

Perhaps this explains why Americans can’t seem to get enough of Halloween’s faux gore and fright wigs, projected to shell out a record $7 billion or $75 per ghoul among those celebrating the holiday this year — rivaling Christmas retail.

It’s all part of the funhouse ride that thankfully isn’t real, and every town larger than the hips on a snake seems eager to cash in on the phenomenon with its own haunted corn maze or woods of terror peopled by chain saw–wielding psychos and evil clowns, bless their dark little hearts.

In a broader context, all our lives are challenged by Dark Clowns of one kind or another and things that go bump in the night — a sick child, a worrying diagnosis, a lost job. The worry list is endless.

Maybe the way to fight back is to simply make light of such darkness the way John Candy did in the 1989 John Hughes’ classic Uncle Buck. In one of my favorite scenes in the movie, a drunken clown shows up to entertain at a children’s birthday party where Uncle Buck Russell, good-natured loser — played to perfection by the late great Candy — is babysitting his nephew and two nieces. Upon discovering that the clown is drunk from an all-night bachelorette party, Uncle Buck suggests the clown’s behavior is inappropriate for children. Offended, the clown snarls, “In the field of local live home entertainment, I’m a god.” At which Uncle Buck points to the clown’s rodent-eared VW and firmly says, “Get in your mouse and get out of here,” and proceeds to flattens the clown’s big fat rubber nose to drive home the point.

According to Smithsonian, only 2 percent of grown-ups suffer from excessive fear of clowns, technically a phobia called coulrophobia.

But don’t try telling that to the anxious parents of Green Bay, Bakersfield and Greenville anytime soon.

Truthfully, I’m more worried about some of the dark clowns we’ll have to decide between in the voting booth a few days after Halloween. Bottom line, if a dark clown is foolish enough to show up at my door on Halloween night, don’t be surprised if I give him a shot of John Candy to remember me by.  PS

Contact editor Jim Dodson at jim@thepilot.com.