Tag: Southwords

Southwords

SOUTHWORDS

Blue Light Special

By Ruth Moose

Spooked. She, who had never had a single mark on her driving record, was now full of nerves anytime she was on the road. OK, maybe the first ticket was funny.

The little, sort of Barney Fife-scrawny highway patrolman even apologized when he gave it to her. He was so young and looked younger. Maybe it was his first day. “Ma’am,” he said after she handed him her vehicle registration, “did you know you were speeding?”

“No,” Lucy said. “I truly was not aware I was speeding.”

She’d never been a fast driver. Just the opposite. Maybe she was enjoying her double espresso milkshake too much. She’d never had an espresso milkshake before, much less a double. But it was so cold and sweet and creamy and yummy.

“You were doing 70 . . . in a 55-mile zone.”

“Oh, dear,” she said. “I know I had to pass that gravel truck.” She’d already had one windshield replaced.

“The date on the ticket is when you go to court,” the kid said. His hand shook when he wrote out her ticket. “You drive safe now.” He tipped his hat.

“Why honey, you were only doing your job,” she said.

Well, it was her fault, or maybe the espresso milkshake.

Later her son said, “You’re going to get points and your car insurance is going to skyrocket.” Her grandson laughed. He couldn’t wait to tell his friends his grandmother got a speeding ticket. His grandmother!

“Maybe there’s a lawyer who can take your money and make it disappear,” her son said.

“How much?” Lucy asked. “Do I still get points?”

“I’ll check,” her son said, “but it’s not going to be cheap”

Her grandson just kept laughing.

She ended up writing a hefty check to the secretary of some lawyer she never saw in a dark, backstreet office.

“I hope this teaches you a lesson,” her son said. “You are too old to be driving that fast.”

Espresso. She thought. Double espresso. It had been the best milkshake she’d ever had. And the most expensive.

She couldn’t believe her second ticket! Not again, she sighed when she saw flashing blue lights in her rearview mirror. She pulled over, shaking her head. Surely there had to be some mistake. She had been so careful, she thought.

This officer wasn’t anything like the first. He almost yelled. “Lady, do you have any idea how fast you were going?”

“No,” she said. “I thought I was being careful.”

“Don’t you know how to read signs? They’re there for a purpose,” he motioned for her license and registration.

By now she knew the routine.

He went back to his patrol car, icing her.

She waited. “I can’t believe this,” she kept saying. Two tickets in two weeks. Damn, damn, damn.

“Seventy,” he said when he came back, writing. “Seventy. You shouldn’t even be on the road.”

“Twice in two weeks,” she said.

His pen stopped moving. “What did you say?”

“I said this is my second ticket in two weeks.”

“Stay here.” He went back to his patrol car.

“This one . . . the one I’m writing you right now is the only one I saw.”

Well, at least she knew the money she paid the backstreet lawyer had been well spent.

When she told her son about the blue lights, he groaned. “This one is really going to cost you. Your lawyer might not even handle it.”

Wrong. It cost her $500.

Then, six weeks later, on the very same road, really reading and watching all the traffic signs — and driving like an old lady, which she was — the blue lights, flashing, flashing, flashing pulled her over again.

This time the trooper was tall, lean, graying at the temples.

They danced the dance of the documents.

“Lady,” he said handing them back. “How old are you?”

“I am 82 years old last week,” she said, pulling on the steering wheel to draw herself up an inch or two.

“Eighty-two,” he started laughing. “OK. I’m going to give you a late birthday present.”

He put his ticket book back in his breast pocket, patted it and started toward his patrol car.

No ticket!!!! No ticket!!!

She pulled out slowly and drove on.

Happy birthday to me. Maybe, she thought, she would treat herself to a double espresso milkshake.

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SOUTHWORDS

Auld Lang…Humbug

By Jim Moriarty

I confess to being a New Year’s Scrooge. To those of us whose passing will be marked by the screwing of a brass plate into a particular spot at the end of a bar, the shenanigans and tomfoolery of the evening was commonly dismissed as “amateur night.” There is, however, one New Year’s Eve that I’ll not soon forget, and I’ve forgotten a lot of them.

I was married in an honest-to-God church during the fertile days between Christmas and New Year’s. Contrary to rumors, widespread at the time, this was not entirely done because the Methodist church was already decorated to the rafters, thus sparing the happy couple, i.e., me, any expense sprucing the joint up. Not entirely, that is.

Once all the stammering (me again) and vowing was over and done with, the War Department and I lit off on our honeymoon adventure like the giddy misfits we were. We actually had not intended on having a honeymoon. The ceremony fell smack in the middle of the Arab oil embargo. Lines at the gas pump resembled particularly slow-moving queues for particularly boring Disney rides, and the national posted speed limit might just as well have featured a drawing of a slug as the number 55.

My mother, however, had seen an advertisement for a steeply discounted weekend at a posh Indiana resort hotel. She tore it out of the newspaper and booked it for us as a wedding present. We were off to French Lick — the honeymoon destination that launched a thousand jokes. It should be pointed out that French Lick’s most famous citizen, Larry Bird, was a teenager at the time.

We were driving in the first automobile I ever owned outright, a severely oxidized white Volkswagen Beetle that may well have rolled off the production line the same year Khrushchev threw up the Berlin wall. As was typical of the model in those days, nothing functioned quite the way it was supposed to. The heater worked, for example, but only in the summer. It was definitely not summer.

When we pulled up to the grand hotel in our coach (rust bucket), we were met by a sharply dressed valet attendant. To my everlasting regret, it was years too soon to be able to quote Eddie Murphy from Beverly Hills Cop. If ever there was an opportunity to utter the line “Can you put this in a good spot ’cause all of this shit happened the last time I parked here,” this was it.

Our glorious weekend began with bowling in the hotel’s basement and finished in a New Year’s Eve celebration that, much to the War Department’s indifference, revolved almost entirely around the Sugar Bowl, which was the national championship game between undefeated and No. 1-ranked Alabama and unbeaten and No. 3-ranked Notre Dame, the university that was a mile or two north on Eddy Street from our apartment. We had found ourselves in South Bend that fall because she was a highly employable teacher and I was a decidedly unemployable English major and a kept man — which, come to think of it, hasn’t changed all that much in the last 52 years.

Be that as it may, that particular New Year’s Eve was not so much memorable because on a third and 10 from their own 1-yard line, Notre Dame quarterback Tom Clements hit back-up tight end Robin Weber for a 35-yard gain that allowed the Irish to run out the clock and win an 11th national championship. No, no. It was memorable because the War Department had developed an abscessed tooth, and while I had one eye on Ara Parseghian and Bear Bryant, the other eye could only sit there and watch as her face and jaw swelled like a Jiffy Pop aluminum balloon. Oh, my God, I thought, her father is going to kill me when he sees her.

The next morning, New Year’s Day, we drove home in a snowstorm as the War Department, cradling her throbbing jaw in a gloved hand, stuffed dirty socks into the heating vents to stem the polar vortex blasting through them, whilst riding with her feet propped against the dash because of the two inches of watery slush that had been strained through the Swiss cheese wheel well behind the right front tire.

So, yes, I’m no fan of the ghost of New Year’s past.

2026 Department Southwords

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SOUTHWORDS

Santa’s Coming, Regardless

By Robert Inman

It starts every year, without fail, the day after Thanksgiving. Grownups begin to threaten young people over Santa Claus. The air is full of dire predictions about what might happen Christmas Eve if children aren’t something close to saintly. It is the bludgeon used to produce clean plates at mealtime, tidy rooms, impeccable manners and timely homework.

Of course, adults have been putting the evil eye on children’s behavior since time immemorial. My grandmother, for example, had a special word of terror for young folks who trampled her flowers, tracked mud on her rug, or swung too high in her porch swing. “Nasty stinkin’ young’uns,” she’d bark, “I’m gonna pinch your heads off.” Mama Cooper was a sweet and kind person who never would have pinched the head off a radish, much less a child, but she could strike fear into her grandchildren. We were careful around her flowers, her rug and her porch swing.

So the grownup weapon of fear is a time-honored tradition. But the direst predictions of ruin and misfortune, it seems, are always saved for the Christmas season. “If you don’t clean up your plate, Santa Claus won’t come.” “Act ugly one more time, buster, and you’ll find a bag of switches under the tree for you on Christmas morning.” Well, baloney.

I came to my senses about the Santa Claus business when I met Jake Tibbetts, a crotchety old newspaper editor who appeared in my imagination one day and then took over the pages of my first novel, Home Fires Burning. Jake had a built-in bull-hockey detector, and he could spot nonsense a mile away. Jake’s grandson Lonnie lived with Jake and his wife, Pastine, and when Christmas rolled around, Mama Pastine put the pox on Lonnie about Santa’s upcoming visit.

At the breakfast table one morning, Lonnie let a mild oath slip from his 10-year-old lips. Mama Pastine pounced. “Santa Claus has no truck with blasphemers,” she said.

“Hogwash,” Daddy Jake snorted. “Santa Claus makes no moral judgments. His sole responsibility is to make young folks happy. Even bad ones. Even TERRIBLE ones.”

“Then why,” Lonnie asked, “does he bring switches to some kids?”

Jake replied, “This business about switches is pure folklore. Did you ever know anybody who really got switches for Christmas? Even one?”

Lonnie couldn’t think of a single one.

“Right,” said Daddy Jake. “I have been on this Earth for 64 years, and I have encountered some of the meanest, vilest, smelliest, most undeserving creatures the Good Lord ever allowed to creep and crawl. And not one of them ever got switches for Christmas. Lots of ’em were told they’d get switches. Lots of ’em laid in their beds trembling through Christmas Eve, just knowing they’d find a stocking full of hickory branches come morning. But you know what they found? Goodies. Even the worst of ’em got some kind of goodies. And for one small instant, every child who lives and breathes is happy and good, even if he is as mean as a snake every other instant. That’s what Santa Claus is for, anyhow.”

Well, Daddy Jake said it better than I ever could. I believe with all my heart that he is right, just as I have always believed fervently in Santa Claus and still do.

I believed in Santa Claus even through the Great Fort Bragg Misbehavior of 1953. My father was stationed at Fort Bragg with the Army, and I was in the fourth grade at the post elementary school. The day before school let out for the Christmas holidays, Santa Claus landed on the playground in an Army helicopter. It was, to me and my classmates, something akin to the Second Coming. When we went out to welcome Santa, the teachers stationed the first- through fourth-graders on one side of the playground and the fifth- and sixth-graders on the other. When Santa’s chopper landed, I learned why. We little kids were yelling our heads off for Santa to leave us some goodies under the tree a few nights hence. Across the way, the fifth- and sixth-graders were yelling, “Fake! Fake!”

Some of my classmates were crestfallen. It never fazed me. I figured those big kids were wrong then, and still do. Santa Claus is for real. Just look in a kid’s eyes and you’ll see him.

(By the way, I’m sure the fifth- and sixth-graders didn’t get switches for Christmas. Maybe they should have, but they didn’t.)

Grownups are wrong, too, when they threaten kids with the loss of Santa. Daddy Jake was right. We adult types need to grant the kids their unfettered moment of magic. If they act up, threaten to pinch their heads off. But leave Santa out of it.

2025 Department Southwords

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SOUTHWORDS

Gee, I Really Love You

Car ride after car ride, song after song

By Jenna Biter

I peer into the rearview while the Dixie Cups keep singing.

Goin’ to the chapel, and we’re, gonna get ma-a-a-rried. Goin’ to the chapel, and we’re, gonna get ma-a-a-rried. . .

I drop an octave.

Gee, I really love you, and we’re . . .

I go back up.

. . . gonna get ma-a-a-rried. Goin’ to the chapel of love, oh, baby.

She’s staring blankly into space. The 1,000-yard stare, I call it. And the song loops.

Goin’ to the chapel, and we’re, gonna get ma-a-a-rried.

OK. I’m paying attention the whole time this time, all two minutes and 50 seconds. I reposition my hands on the steering wheel and focus on the double yellows.

Spring is here. The-uh-uh sky is blue. Whoah-oh-oh.

I waggle my head back and forth.

Birds will sing, as if they knew, today’s the day, we’ll say, ‘I do,’ and we’ll ne-ver be lonely any more. Because we’re . . .

Hard stomp, jazz hands, move toward the camera. That’d be perfect, I think. Costuming would be, hmmm, I don’t know, hard shoes? For sure, to emphasize the “hard stomp.”

. . . goin’ to the chapel of love.

Ugh. I stopped listening again. I glance in the rearview; still awake.

Bells will ring. The-uh-uh sun will shine. Whoah-oh-oh. I’ll be his, and he’ll be . . .

I used to wonder why music apps have a repeat mode. Actually that’s not true. I didn’t wonder. I just never used it.

. . . goin’ to the chapel of love.

OK. Now I’m really going to listen.

Goin’ to the chapel, and we’re, gonna get ma-a-a-rried.

I drum my fingers on the leather.

Goin’ to the chapel, and we’re, gonna get ma-a-a-rried. Gee, I really love you, and we’re, gonna get ma-a-a-rried. Goin’ to the chapel . . .

I wonder, when the Dixie Cups recorded “Chapel of Love” in 1964, did they think anyone would loop the song for hours on end? Doubt it, though they might’ve dreamed it.

I take another look.

“Yes!” I exclaim — in my head, not out loud.

She’s “reading labels.” That’s what I’ve named it, when she turns her head to the side, middle through pinky fingers in her mouth, lolling eyes trained on the labels on the sidewall of her car seat.

To give proper credit, my dad was the first to ponder whether the Dixie Cups could have imagined the staying power of their pop love song. My parents originally sang the tune to my older brother 30-plus years ago. We don’t know why it puts babies to sleep; we just know it does. And you don’t mess with success.

I turn down the volume.

Goin’ to the chapel, and we’re . . .

I look in the mirror. Out like a light.

The Dixie Cups strike again.

2025 Department Southwords

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SOUTHWORDS

The Monster

And other commonsense solutions

By Ashley Harris

It was a delicate operation. The patient sat dejected on the floor, his “arm” dangling uselessly by his side. Just five minutes earlier, I had innocently slid the hose of my precious vacuum along the floor under the nightstand to suck up loose tumbleweeds of dog hair. Suddenly, the comforting whir of the motor was replaced by a death rattle.

“Help!” I screamed to my husband, J.P. But when I ran into the living room, I saw that he had on headphones, the protective gear worn by any baseball fan whose wife was doing loud chores. “I need you!”

“The Dodgers are playing the Padres.”

“This is an emergency!” I clenched my teeth.

Of all the vacuums I have ever owned, my 7-year-old, swivel-headed model is my favorite. We move together like Nureyev and Fonteyn, sweeping across the floor in artistic harmony.

I hauled the victim into the kitchen for triage. We peered down the dark hole of the hose and, even with the flashlight, couldn’t see anything.

“Can you think of something you might have vacuumed up that could be clear?”

Aha! I hadn’t seen the cap to my hairspray in weeks and, I confessed, it was clear.

“Congratulations,” J.P. said. “You have managed to vacuum up something that perfectly matches the diameter of the hose. That takes finesse.”

I had no time for clever remarks. “Let’s try this,” I said, handing over a steak knife. This tool remains one of my favorite commonsense solutions, useful for tasks well beyond its intended purpose. Never mind the scar I still bear on my left hand from the time, at 6 years old, I used one to pry a hardened collar of glue from my Elmer’s.

I held the hose steady while J.P. tried to jiggle the cap free, but the trusty knife did not work. We had no more luck with the screwdriver or the pliers, and the situation grew more dire with every attempt. Each tool we poked into the hose only pushed the cap even farther down, along with my heart.

“Why don’t we try the drill?” asked J.P.

For a normal person, the space between a crazy idea and better judgment is at least 30 seconds. Not for me. In my mind, this was pure genius. Why didn’t I think of it myself?

The cordless drill is J.P.’s most cherished tool, the equivalent of my vacuum. “Now, I don’t know how safe this is,” he warned. “You’re going to have to hold the hose perfectly still while I drill into the cap. If you move, the drill could damage the hose or worse, hit you. You sure you want to do this?”

I dismissed the pesky notion that most deadly accidents happen in the home because I was as desperate as I was stupid. I held the hose, standing at arm’s length, in case J.P. slipped. And he drilled and drilled, rattling my bones with every thrust and parry. Still, the cap would not yield.

“This is going to take forever,” he said, glancing back at the Dodgers in the bottom of the seventh.

“What about The Monster?” I asked, in a wave of inspiration.

The Monster, a three-quarter inch drill bit, emerges from the toolbox only for special occasions, like when we needed to drill drainage holes in the discarded satellite dish we use for the seat in the swing we made for Tulsi, our bossy corgi.

“That could work,” J.P. said. “But we have to be very careful. You have to hold the hose, and you cannot move a muscle.”

I held on with both hands, shaking like an apprentice snake wrangler holding her first python. With one shove, that pesky cap shattered, spewing plastic shrapnel all over the kitchen. Hallelujah! We did it!

I plugged my vacuum back into the electrical outlet, and a quick flip of the on button confirmed that suction was fully restored. J.P. donned his headphones and planted himself in front of the television and I was happily vacuuming again, sucking up the shards of my sin.

2025 Department Southwords

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SOUTHWORDS

The Cup Runneth Over

By Jim Moriarty

Fall is always football, but every other September, it’s the Ryder Cup, too.

My first Ryder Cup was 1983 at PGA National in Palm Beach Gardens. With a nod to the South Florida heat index, that one was played in mid-October, though since then, every Ryder Cup on this side of the pond has — at the very least — begun in September. The Ryder Cup wasn’t always the spectacle it is today and surely will be at Bethpage Black on New York’s Long Island, where the Americans will try to reclaim the trophy they lost two years ago in Italy.

When it was in Pinehurst in ’51, they paused the matches (in those days between the U.S. and Great Britain & Ireland) to go to the UNC-Tennessee football game in Chapel Hill. Sam Snead, a man often governed by pocketbook issues, took advantage of the day off to do a paid exhibition. At PGA National in ’83 there were probably more people scurrying off in their golf carts to play the other courses than there were watching the matches. Rory McIlroy once described the Ryder Cup as an “exhibition” until he played in one. “Hell of an exhibition, isn’t it?” his teammate Graeme McDowell asked McIlroy as the victorious Europeans sprayed each other with Champagne in 2010, as if Wales wasn’t already soggy enough.

Jack Nicklaus and Tony Jacklin were the captains in ’83. The U.S. had won 11 of the previous 12 Ryder Cups, the lone exception coming in 1969, when the teams tied with the U.S. retaining the cup. That was the year Nicklaus set the sportsmanship bar, conceding Jacklin’s putt on the 18th. The putt was long enough to engage the nerves but short enough that neither thought Jacklin would miss it. Nicklaus believed the tie was a fitting end. Why even take the chance? He picked up Jacklin’s coin.

At PGA National, the two sides went into the Sunday singles tied 8-8. The first match out that day was Seve Ballesteros, the Masters champion, against Fuzzy Zoeller, who had a green jacket of his own and a back brace to ease his pain. When the hobbled Zoeller won four straight holes from the 12th to the 15th, the match came to 18 all square. Both players drove into thick Florida rough. Zoeller’s second found the fairway. Ballesteros could barely advance his ball, hacking it forward 20 yards into a deep fairway bunker 250 yards from the green. Advantage America. Zoeller might squeeze a whole point from Europe’s most dominant figure. I was a few yards away when Seve pulled out his 3-wood. My first thought was that he was certifiably insane. No way was he clearing the lip with a 3-wood. Then he hit one of the greatest single golf shots ever struck in these biennial matches, a high cut to the front edge of the green. Zoeller hit a 2-iron to 10-feet. Fuzzy missed and Seve got up and down to give each team a half point. Nicklaus called Ballesteros’ 3-wood “the finest shot I’ve ever seen.”

The Americans defeated the Europeans 14 1/2 – 13 1/2 as lightning flashed on the horizon. One of Seve’s teammates on the ’83 side was Nick Faldo, who just happens to do one of the finest Seve impressions in the civilized world. The European locker room was a somber place after the narrow loss. They’d given it all and come up short. In bursts Seve. “We must celebrate!” Faldo says in his best Ballesteros lilt. “This is a victory for us!” Seve was right, of course.

The next year Europe broke the string of losses by winning at The Belfry. At the team celebration afterward, the wives began singing their own version of “America,” from West Side Story. “We’re going to win in America! We’re going to win in America!” And all the boys joined in. “That was a great moment,” says Sir Nick. And win they did, at Jack’s place in Ohio.

Since losing in Palm Beach, Europe has won 12, lost 6 and tied one, good enough that year to retain the cup. The U.S. will be favored at brutish Bethpage. The New York fans will be obnoxious; the traffic on the Long Island Expressway will be horrendous; but don’t underestimate the defenders. They still know how to sing.

2025 Department Southwords

Southwords

SOUTHWORDS

Sleeping It Off

When in doubt, hit snooze

By Emilee Phillips

“What did I miss?” I ask through a yawn and a stretch. This is a common refrain from me. I can sleep on any and every mode of transportation. From the outside it may look like sleeping just about anywhere, just about any time, is my superpower. In some ways, that isn’t untrue.

The reality is slightly more complicated. I’m prone to motion sickness. Not a little bit prone. More like projectile . . . you know what . . . prone. If I’m not in the driver’s seat or, at the very least, in the passenger’s seat — with a cautious driver — you can forget about it. Even being still and looking at something at the wrong angle can make my head spin. State fairs and Tilt-a-Whirls are sworn enemies. The very thought brings on waves of nausea.

The trouble is that I love to travel. So what’s a girl to do?

Dramamine has been a normal part of my life since long before I was able to spell it. Road trips, plane rides, boat rides, they’re brutal without it. Those tiny little pills worked wonders keeping me from losing my breakfast, lunch and dinner. The only downside is that they make me groggy.

I say downside because, to be honest, in my altered state I’m not the best traveling companion. My sister dubbed my car-induced sleeping “carcalepsy.”

The last big trip I went on was to Guatemala with my boyfriend, Nate. The country was beautiful to look at . . . absolute chaos to drive through.

So, naturally, we ditched the idea of renting a car and opted for “efficient and cost-effective” public transportation: a bus. That’s how we ended up on what I can only describe as a rollercoaster on wheels, careening through the jungles on a journey from Panajachel to Guatemala City. We were advised the trip could take anywhere from three to six hours depending on potholes, washouts, traffic and whether or not a rogue cow decided to stand in the middle of the road like a crossing guard.

I knew the only way for me to get through this was to sleep. I took an extra bit of my medicine, found a neck angle that wouldn’t paralyze me, and willed myself into a bus-induced slumber.

The roads were winding, bumpy and full of holes big enough to swallow a Volkswagen whole. Slamming on the brakes was a frequent occurrence. Passing slower vehicles, I’ve been told, was like an Indiana Jones sequel, causing even Nate to hold his breath.

During a rest stop, I barely opened one eye when I saw Nate hop off for a snack. For a moment I considered following him but realized that food might give me energy, and energy meant awareness, and awareness meant I’d have to experience the ride. No thank you.

After six hours we pulled into Guatemala City, and I woke up dazed, victorious and the opposite of nauseous, whatever that is. As we de-bussed, Nate gave a little wave to a couple that had been sitting a few rows up from us. Apparently, the three of them had bonded over our mutual survival.

After we were out of earshot from our fellow travelers and walking toward our hotel, Nate started chuckling.

“What?” I asked, rubbing my eyelids and trying to remember what continent I was on.

He scratched his head and said, “So, uh, that couple I waved to? They’re from Germany. Super cool. Thought the ride was nuts.” I nodded. Of course they did. Who wouldn’t?

“Yeah, well,” Nate continued, barely containing his laughter, “they also asked me if I drugged you.”

I blinked. “WHAT?” I had apparently slept through my own kidnapping.

“At first I thought it was a joke but they seemed serious. They couldn’t believe you slept through all of that,” he said motioning behind us. “ I had to tell them I didn’t drug my girlfriend. She drugged herself . . . with Dramamine.”

Poor Nate having to plead his innocence to complete strangers. Worst case of carcalepsy ever.

2025 Department Southwords

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The Hot Dog Rule

Cutting food down to size

By Jim Moriarty

Some years ago I tried to convince the editor of Coastal Living to do a story on the search for the ultimate beach hot dog. He looked at me as if I’d suggested he commit hari-kari with a shucking knife. If Coastal Living was going to talk about food, he said, that food was going to come out of the ocean one way or the other. I felt like a one-eyed king in the land of the blind.

This is not uncommon for those of us who consider the hot dog to be the most highly evolved of all God’s consumables. I came by this understanding as a mere child when dinner on humid summer nights often consisted of a hot dog and a refreshing pint of cold root beer at the B&K drive-in. Slather on the mustard. Dish on the relish. Sprinkle on the onion. No ketchup, please. We weren’t heathens, after all.

Later, as I matured, hot dogs purchased on sweltering afternoons at Wrigley Field from ballpark vendors singing “red hots, get yer red hots” as if it was Verdi’s Rigoletto only served to enhance my belief in the lofty place occupied by the hot dog in the hierarchy of all food. Passing hot dogs, slathered in mustard and chased by an Old Style, down a row of Cubs fans like a bucket brigade putting out a four alarm fire was its own rite of passage. No ketchup, of course. We weren’t savages, you know.

I have a friend at my pub, the Bitter and Twisted, who is as committed to the noble hot dog as anyone I’ve ever known. He is widely traveled, worldly beyond my comprehension, and he claims, with apologies to his West Texas roots, that the very best hot dog he’s ever had was in Reykjavik, Iceland, at Bæjarins Beztu Pylsur, which translates to “The Town’s Best Hot Dogs.” People line up down the block and around the corner to get them, he says. They sell 1,000 a day. If it’s not the town’s best dog I can’t imagine what is.

Hot dogs are beyond utilitarian. They are civilized — yet another reason why they reign supreme — which brings me to The Hot Dog Rule. I don’t mean to cast aspersions at Michelin and all its fancy-schmancy stars, but The Hot Dog Rule is as basic to the laws governing human behavior as not wearing a white shirt when you eat spaghetti. In sum, no sandwich should be more difficult to eat than a hot dog.

When it becomes necessary to deconstruct a sandwich as tall and as vertical on the plate as the leaning tower of Pisa, layered with slabs of tomato, piles of pickles, heads of lettuce, pounds of processed deli meats, mountains of kale, all held together with plastic picks the size of the Excalibur, such a sandwich must be found to be in violation of The Hot Dog Rule. If you have to break your sandwich down into all its component parts as though you’re rebuilding an automobile transmission before you can think about managing a bite, such a sandwich must be found to be in violation of The Hot Dog Rule.

I admit, there are gray areas. For one thing, there is the matter of spillage. But to be perfectly honest, a snippet or two of diced onion or a soupçon of relish falling overboard is hardly the same thing as needing a forceps to pry your jaw open wide enough to take a bite of a sandwich the size of a MINI Cooper.

As for chili dogs, I’m going to have to plead the fifth.

2025 Department Southwords

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SOUTHWORDS

Magazine Magic

A glossy ticket to other worlds

By Ruth Moose

I LOVE magazines. Always have, always will.

A new magazine is like a gift box to open and unwrap its surprises, goodies, dreams. Even the feel of them: not too heavy, not too bulky. Just right to tuck in your carry-on, under your arm as you go out the door, hold upright in the good light as you read. Perfect for the beach. Who wants to add the weight of War and Peace to the towels, snacks, blankets, chairs, umbrella . . . all to heft and carry? It’s a vacation, not powerlifting.

Magazines are color, inspiration, ideas. They may not weigh much, but they open doors to other worlds.

I grew up in a house with few books: a big Bible (my grandfather was a Baptist preacher); a child’s storybook Bible; a dictionary; some cookbooks (including the red and white gingham covered Original Better Homes & Gardens); and books my wonderful aunt (who was a librarian) sent me for birthdays and Christmas. Mary Poppins, Little Women, Black Beauty and, of course, Robert Louis Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses. I cherished them all.

What was new and different and fresh every month, though, were our magazines. Good Housekeeping, McCall’s, Ladies’ Home Journal, Redbook and more. Reader’s Digest always. When a new issue came, my father would pick it up after supper and read out loud to my mother while she stood at the ironing board. “Life in These United States.” They would laugh together at the silly, harmless foibles of our common humanity. I did the vocabulary quiz after I browsed the articles. Sometimes, we’d get a Guidepost or Progressive Farmer. Though we lived in the city of Albemarle, both my parents had grown up on large farms. Our house was in the middle of some vacant lots where we raised vegetables for our table all summer, canning and freezing some for the winter.

Summers were long and hot and boring with little to occupy our days after Bible school’s two weeks ended. My mother had a daily rule: After lunch, which we called dinner, we had to observe “quiet time.” My brothers and I went to our rooms, closed the doors and were absolutely silent. No TV. No phones (of course). No talking. We didn’t have to nap, though sometimes we did.

What we had were our magazines. My brothers got copies of Boy’s Life and Wee Wisdom, maybe Ranger Rick. I got Seventeen for a few important years and felt very sophisticated. One of our neighbor girls, Jodie, was 5 years older than me and oh, so worldly. She loaned us True Story but my mother would never let me read it. That didn’t keep me from thinking up excuses to visit across the street and snatch some browsing time in Jodie’s under-the-mattress stash.

Meanwhile, Mother took her fresh copies of Better Homes & Gardens, McCall’s and Redbook to the front porch, where it was cooler, and she could browse at a leisurely pace all the new recipes, window treatments, and biographies of the rich and famous we all thought we knew. After devouring our magazines cover to cover, we’d pass them along to friends, family, neighbors.

They were what kept us current with the world, our vocabularies refreshed, our reading skills practiced. They made us feel richer in dreams, our universe widened with words and colors even when that universe didn’t extend much farther than the block we lived on.

2025 Department Southwords

Southwords

SOUTHWORDS

Ah, the PGA

A good time was had by all

By Jim Moriarty

I’ve had a fondness in my heart for the PGA Championship since 1979 when I wrote what we used to call the “gamer” for Golf World magazine, the little engine that could, founded by Bob Harlow in Pinehurst in 1947. Often regarded as the least of golf’s four majors, it was my first time writing about any of them, and I remain deeply and profoundly in like with it. What I produced doesn’t belong in the journalism hall of fame but there is enough persiflage in it to suggest the troublesome wiseass I would become. Besides, anything that can be won five times each by Walter Hagen and Jack Nicklaus is good by me. The 107th running of the club pros (the PGA of America is, after all, their organization) will be conducted this month on the magnificent Quail Hollow Club in Charlotte, which makes me wish it was 1979 all over again.

That championship was played at Oakland Hills Country Club in suburban Detroit, not far from the Red Fox, an upscale restaurant on Telegraph Road where, four years earlier, Jimmy Hoffa was supposed to meet with a couple of Tonys and was never seen again. If memory serves — and these days it rarely does — the media was lodged in a Holiday Inn also not far from the Red Fox. The hotel was in the midst of renovations, which meant the rooms were cheap. The lone non-negotiable requirement of any media hotel was (and I’m guessing still is) that the bar be functional and the hours generous. In this regard it was tiptop. In others, not so much.

One day when I returned from the course, tired and sweaty, I pushed the button to get on the elevator and was greeted by half a dozen enthusiastic policemen with sidearms, bulletproof vests and a battering ram. They were headed for the same floor my room was on to make a drug bust. One of them politely offered to squeeze me in but I told them, “Naw, you all go on, I’ll catch the next one” — a minor subterfuge that, of course, required a timely visit to the hotel bar.

That year a journeyman pro named Rex Caldwell, nicknamed Sexy Rexy, held the 54-hole lead by two shots over Ben Crenshaw, four clear of David Graham, Jerry Pate and Tom Watson. Tall and thin, Caldwell was flashy in his flared trousers and made good copy. A bit too good. He was quoted guaranteeing a victory. “You can make book on it,” he supposedly said. What Rex actually said was, “Hell, I’ll be nervous. You can make book on that.”

After dinner on Saturday night, when I got back to the hotel I ducked into the bar. There was Rex in a corner booth with a woman under each arm. For all I knew they were his cousins but I, for one, wasn’t going to make book on Caldwell winning the PGA.

David Graham, the Australian, wound up beating Ben Crenshaw, the crowd darling, in sudden death but only after David choked away a two-shot lead with a double bogey on the 18th. Graham has never claimed it was anything other than the pressure of the moment. What was remarkable is that he was able to walk off that last green — “I felt like I was 6 inches tall,” he said — and gather himself enough to win a playoff. He had to make a 25-foot putt on the first extra hole and a 10-footer on the second, just to stay alive.

Graham came up hard. He quit school at 13 and left home at 16. He has described his father as “a nasty guy” and, as far as I know, from the day he left they never spoke to each other again. David had an edge to him but if you were his friend, he was the kindest, most loyal man you could ever know.

Dick Taylor, the editor of Golf World who sent me to cover the ’79 PGA, considered David a dear friend. Two years after Oakland Hills, Graham won the U.S. Open at Merion Golf Club producing what I still consider the finest exhibition of ball-striking ever in the last round of our Open. He hit 17 greens. The one he missed was on the collar of No. 17. An inveterate club tinkerer and designer — Graham fashioned the irons Crenshaw used at Oakland Hills — on the Monday after Merion, Taylor called Graham’s home to congratulate his friend privately, not in the public of a media mash up. David’s wife, Maureen, answered the phone. Dick said, “For God’s sake, tell him to leave those clubs alone.”

Maureen relayed the message. From his shop, Graham yelled back, “Tell him I’m regripping them right now!”

2025 Department Southwords