Tag: Southwords

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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.

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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!”

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Live in the Meow

Curiosity didn’t kill this cat

By Emilee Phillips

Cats having nine lives is a cliché. Orange cats being a menace is another. But my childhood cat, Simba, fits the bill for both.

He was trouble from Day One. We found him abandoned under an azalea bush and roaring his little kitten head off. I had never heard such a small animal make so much noise. After capturing the terrified little guy, I discovered he also had six toes, like the Hemingway cats. Trouble.

Simba has always preferred the jungle — er, pine trees — to the cushy indoors. He roamed and picked fights, holding his own in the wild kingdom (our neighborhood). The cat was a scrapper through and through but always came when his name was called. He had a soft spot for family. Or so we thought.

When we moved to horse country Simba went along for the ride. It’s not uncommon for animals to run off after a move. They may get confused and try to find their way back to their former abode.

Shortly after we relocated, Simba disappeared. I imagined him weaving in and out of briars, riling up goats, scurrying around towering horses like a night bandit. I hollered for him daily, nightly. Not a meow was heard in response. The family searched for him but the new house was out where coyotes regularly lurked. We feared the worst.

After a couple of months, we accepted that our family cat was gone. We honored him with a framed picture that read “Forever in Our Hearts,” with the years of his life inscribed on the back.

But we were wrong. He hadn’t used up all those lives just yet.

My mother and I were shopping in Raleigh one day the next summer when she got a call. “Hi there. I’m a security guard at Penick Village. I, um, think I have your cat.”

We exchanged looks of confusion. “Is it black?” asked my mother, thinking perhaps our second cat, Zelda, had decided to visit some distant, unknown aging relative.

“No, ma’am, it’s orange.”

“Orange!” we exclaimed in unison.

“Yes, ma’am, I’ve seen him out here every night for the last few months. I figured it was a stray. He finally let me get close enough to grab him and he had a collar. Thought I would try calling.”

We zoomed back. It was dark by the time we got there, and the cat was nowhere to be seen. I stalked the retirement community for the next three days.

I asked anyone I saw outside on the street, “Have you seen an orange cat?” To my amazement, nearly all of them said, “Yes.” Great, I thought, my cat has been family shopping. No doubt capitalizing on extra rations from multiple residents. I handed out my phone number like I was passing out Junior Mints.

On the third day, I got a call. A sighting!

I rushed to Penick Village and jumped out of the car. “Simbaaaa!” I yelled. Next thing I knew I hear a “bwrrr” and out popped my cat from the bushes. I half expected it to be some lookalike, some faux Simba, but it was my very own six-toed little feline. He rolled on his back and purred, seemingly indifferent to the fact that he had been missing for 10 months.

I coaxed him with treats and, after a moment of deliberation, he sauntered over with an accusatory look as if to say, “Yo, where you been?” Once in the car, he jumped into my lap as though this was just another chapter in his great escape.

A wave of emotions rushed over me: happiness, bewilderment . . . and annoyance that my cat decided he wanted to experience an easier pace of living. Well, I was taking him out of early retirement.

The reasons for Simba’s disappearance remain a mystery, having chosen assisted living even over our previous residence. Once I got him home, he didn’t bother with the cat bed we’d set up for the return of the prodigal tabby. Instead, he flopped down on the windowsill, resuming his rightful place with a lazy stretch.

We knew at that moment he wasn’t just returning from his brief sabbatical. He was back, all the way back, ready to once again rule over his empire of pillows and food bowls, with no intention of going missing again, except perhaps to a particularly sunny patch of grass somewhere nearby.

As for us, we crossed out the dates on the back of Simba’s frame and updated the picture — mug shots, front and side.

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Wanna Bet?

The bad luck of the draw

By Jim Moriarty

Games of chance have never been profitable for me. I’m convinced there is a genetic component to the deficiency. My father, who I did not know well, was a non-professional gambler. By this I mean he bet on the horses lavishly but was very bad at it. From what I gather, a lot of bettors study the racing sheet like they’re preparing to take the law boards. My father, on the other hand, was one of those gamblers who bet on a horse because he thought its name was cute or the jockey had just the right shade of blue in his silks. It wasn’t a method that held great promise, and he derived exactly the amount of success from it that you would anticipate.

This carried over to my lone experience betting at the Stoneybrook Steeplechase, that springtime Moore County tradition that was like no other. Since Stoneybrook frequently happened the same week as the Masters, work most often called me to Augusta, Georgia, instead of to the Walsh family farm off Youngs Road. One year, however, the two events diverged, and I was able to attend the races with what seemed like half the state of North Carolina. It was a springtime extravaganza in ways I cannot begin to explain.

Naturally, our tailgating group organized a pool to bet on the races, a practice as common as big hats and cold beer. Given my background, I harbored no illusions of either win, place or show. My expectations were low but were, somehow, exceeded. We drew our numbers from a hat. This alleviated any chance of my putting my father’s methodology to use, which, to be candid, I viewed as something of a plus. I don’t remember what number I drew but, like everyone else, I bellied up to the rail to watch the start of the race.

Just like that, they were off. A thundering herd. I searched among them for my horse. He must be hidden in the pack, I thought. The earth shook as they pounded past. I double-checked the number on the slip of paper in my hand. My horse had gone missing.

Confused, I looked back toward the starting line. My horse wasn’t there, either. In fact, he had never gotten beyond it. When the flag went up and the rope dropped, my trusty steed had wheeled in the opposite direction and put a surprising amount of distance between himself and the rest of the horses, until he found a likely spot to jump the fence into the infield, where, presumably, he was meeting friends for a mint julep. My father would have been so proud.

As poor as this wager might have been, it wasn’t my worst gambling faux pas. That came in a Ladbrokes bet shop in the town of St. Andrews, Scotland. The Open Championship was there in 1990. By then Tom Watson was in his 40s and, to be bluntly honest, his championship game had gone to seed. Still, he had very nearly beaten Seve Ballesteros on the old links six years before.

The odds on Watson were 50-1. I thought, how could this not be worth a few quid?

And so I stepped to the window and put down £20 pounds on my sentimental favorite, the eight-time major championship winner. I walked out of the shop in one of St. Andrews’ back alleys into the bright July sunshine, dreaming of what I would buy when my aging ship came in. As luck would have it, at that very moment a sea gull the size of a nuclear submarine flew directly overhead and dropped a load of sewage on me that could have put out a forest fire. Without hesitation, I tore my ticket in half and tossed it into the nearest trash bin.

Watson and I both missed the cut.

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Culture Shock

Experience This

By Ron Green Jr.

It was July 11, 1967, and I was walking into the Charlotte Coliseum — the original one with the silver dome that still hosts events on Independence Boulevard — with my mother, my brother and all of the pre-teen excitement that came with the promise of seeing The Monkees, live, in person, and in concert.

I knew The Monkees like they were my best friends. Mickey Dolenz. Michael Nesmith. Peter Tork. Davy Jones. (Full disclosure, my buddies and I didn’t like Davy that much because the girls thought he was heartbreakingly cute.)

The Monkees were a made-for-television quartet, patterned very loosely after The Beatles in as much as there were four of them and music was involved. They burned white-hot for a time, starred in a top-rated television show that gets credit, or blame, for spawning music videos years later, and they left us with “Daydream Believer” and “I’m A Believer” to put smiles on our faces even now.

What I didn’t know that July evening — the temperature had topped out at 87 degrees that day in the pre-global warming era — was that Jimi Hendrix was performing before our generation’s Fad Four.

The Jimi Hendrix Experience, all loud guitars and evolutionary rock music, was on stage after Lynne Randell, followed by The Sundowners and, as the late great guitarist would lament, immediately before the four guys everyone had come to see and hear. It was a curious cultural moment, a concert pairing as unlikely as anchovies and ice cream at the dinner table, and it only lasted for eight shows.

But we were walking into one of them.

This was the summer of love, and the distance between Charlotte and the Haight-Ashbury district in San Francisco in 1967 was greater than the 2,700 miles stretching between the two. The world was changing, more dramatically than any of us probably realized, but Charlotte was still a small Southern city, connected to the rest of the country by what we saw on television and heard on the radio.

That summer, at least in my comfortable world, it meant The Monkees.

As the son of a sportswriter, I was introduced early to what were then called press gates. That’s where sportswriters, television cameramen and other muckety-mucks with connections to the building’s manager could enter without mixing with the masses.

That meant walking halfway around the outside of the big round building, which also meant walking past the elephant doors, the giant entryway built to accommodate the annual visit from the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus as well as the occasional load-in for concerts, usually country music shows featuring Loretta Lynn, Johnny Cash or a new artist named Dolly Parton.

And Elvis. Always Elvis.

As we were heading to the press gate, our mother was telling us what to expect at our first real-life concert. Among her nuggets of wisdom was this: The Monkees are going to look different in person than they do on television.

Admittedly, this was long before anyone imagined HD television, but how different could they look? We were young, impressionable, and we figured anyone who could fry chicken as well as our mother did must know what she was talking about.

A moment after she told us about what television can do to a person’s appearance, a black limousine pulled up to the elephant doors as we were walking past. There they were, about to get out of the car, just a few feet away.

Out stepped Jimi Hendrix.

My 10-year-old mind tried to make sense of what and who I was seeing.

Mickey Dolenz really does look different, I thought. He has an Afro.

It wasn’t until an hour or so later that I realized why Mickey didn’t look like himself. While it may have caused me to doubt some things my mother said as I grew older, it’s a moment that still brings a little smile when I hear “Hey Joe” or “I’m Not Your Steppin’ Stone.”

And when Mickey and his mates took the stage that night — after Hendrix had stomped off with the echo of the guitar he tossed to the floor reverberating through the arena — they looked just like they did on television.

Had we been able to hear them over the screaming, they probably sounded the same, too.

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Snowblind

Go South, young man

By Jim Moriarty

When Golf World magazine, the publication birthed in Pinehurst in 1947 by Bob Harlow, had a vacancy in 1979, I was asked to leave my job as a sportswriter at the South Bend Tribune in northern Indiana to join the staff. In those days GW and its printing presses were housed in what is now one of Southern Pines’ municipal buildings along U.S. 1. Dick Taylor, the editor in chief, offered me the exalted position of the No. 3 person on a staff of, well, three. My official title was associate editor only because I don’t believe Dick thought it kind to use the term peon.

It was, however, a job that any self-respecting golf-obsessed journalist would have fallen all over themselves to get. And I took a cut in pay — which, by the way, was none too generous to begin with — to accept it. I did not, however, make this brilliant career move out of an unbridled love of golf. My wife, the War Department, our 3-year-old little girl, Jennifer, our cat, Tang, and I were driven out of South Bend by far more powerful forces — the Blizzard of ’78.

It began snowing on a Thursday. The Tribune was an afternoon paper, and I was doing the layout of the sports section that morning. I went in at 6 a.m., though to be honest this schedule often featured a phone call from the sports editor, Joe Doyle, who wanted to know where the hell I was. On that particular day, after discharging my office duties, I was set to travel with the Notre Dame hockey team to cover their Friday and Saturday night games against the University of North Dakota in Grand Forks. This would never happen. You try explaining to some people in North Dakota that you couldn’t make it because it snowed.

Anyway, at roughly 10 a.m. I left the office and attempted to go home. It had already snowed 20 inches or so. In fact, it wouldn’t stop snowing until Sunday, piling up something in the neighborhood of 35 inches altogether with drifts much, much higher. Trust me, that’s a rough neighborhood.

It was clear that getting home was going to be a challenge. Our modest house on Fox Street was more or less in the middle of the city, and while I managed to slalom, slip and swerve to within roughly four blocks of home, that was as close as I was going to get.

Up North, there are unwritten rules covering these things. One is that you don’t, under any circumstances, abandon your car in the middle of the road. One sunny day, the snowplow will come, and snowplows don’t give a damn about your car. So, when I’d gone about as far as I could go, I backed up, turned the wheel hard left, stomped on the accelerator and lurched into someone’s front yard. I came back to dig it out five days later.

That evening on the local news — please explain to me how we could get three feet of snow and not lose electricity in South Bend, but if a squirrel walks across a power line on Indiana Avenue seven blocks of Southern Pines goes dark for two days — the local sheriff gave a Knute Rockne-esque pep talk. It went something like this: “Now listen everyone, we’re going to get the emergency routes cleared as fast as we can, but the side streets are going to take some time. My advice to you is, if you really need to go somewhere, start digging.”

And we did. The whole neighborhood. We dug an elaborate network of paths to each other’s houses. The snow was two Jennifers high on both sides. The shoveling brigade dug out the alley behind our row of houses — no plow was ever going back there — so people could get their cars out of their garages. The War Department’s sister had left her copper-colored Hornet parked next to our garage in the backyard while she was off to college. We didn’t see it again until April.

True to the sheriff’s word, the emergency routes were cleared with reasonable dispatch. People attached little orange flags on sticks (the kind you see on some bicycles) to their cars so they could see one another at intersections.

Nothing came down our street for seven days, and then it was a front-end loader. So, when Dick Taylor called, North Carolina seemed like a very good idea indeed. I could figure out all that pesky golf stuff later.

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Holiday Hotline

The Christmas letter that wasn’t

Dear Friends,

In the words of Michael Scott at Dunder Mifflin, over the lips and through the gums, look out stomach, here it comes! Well, it was quite a year. Hottest on record! Yay us! It got off to a great start when the War Department dropped her reckless endangerment charges. As I tried to explain to her at the time, it was only a suggestion. Live and learn.

As you may know, the Carolina Panthers did not win the Super Bowl. Aaaaagain. Turns out they’re worse than their record would indicate. Maybe they should take a page from the convention and visitors bureau in Kentucky that used an infrared laser to send an invitation into deep space attempting to attract extraterrestrials from planets in the TRAPPIST-1 solar system. They can’t do any worse than they do in the NFL draft or making trades. Am I right?

It was a leap year, of course, and that meant the War Department and I had the opportunity to enjoy an additional 24 hours in each other’s company. As it turned out, she was booked on Feb, 29, explaining that it’s not unusual for her to plan years ahead. That’s my girl!

Instead, I read that Finland is the happiest country in the whole wide world, a distinction it has held for seven straight years, which has got to be one of those records that can never be broken — like DiMaggio’s 56-game hitting streak or the Portuguese dog that lived to be 31 — and it wasn’t even in assisted living! So, you tell me, are the Finns sending out deep space laser messages, too? At least they don’t have a football team!

And it goes without saying that we all got fabulous news when McDonald’s announced its intention to sell Krispy Kreme doughnuts fresh daily. This revelation happened around the time cicada broods XIX and XII stuck their little heads out of the ground to rub wings together and party like it was 2024. The last time they did that fandango in the back yard was 221 years ago. Coincidence?

Of course, in June we had the U.S. Open right up the street. Bryson DeChambeau expressed no interest whatsoever in renting our doublewide for the week. Worse luck for him! On the plus side, Scottie Scheffler managed to get through the week without being hauled off in handcuffs. WWGD. What would Gomer do? Citizen’s arrest! Citizen’s arrest!

That’s about when we discovered that, in its latest update, the Oxford English Dictionary added (among other words and expressions) “Chekhov’s gun” to its lexicon. Chekhov, of course, was the Russian playwright who described the literary principle that says unnecessary elements should never be introduced into a story. If you have a gun in the play, someone needs to use it. Which brings me to Rory McIlroy. Ha-ha.

Right after the Open came the Olympics in France. Incroyable! Turns out Simone Biles is tiny. I’m talking Keebler cookie tiny. But that’s OK. As the great Dan Jenkins once said of a famous gymnast, “She can do everything my cat can do.”

I don’t know about you, but the Paris Olympics were a smash hit in our house, and I think it’s safe to say there are some things we can keep in mind for when we host the Open again in 2029. How about those opening ceremonies floating down the Seine? Think Drowning Creek. Am I wrong?

When it comes to mano a mano competition, however, the U.S. Open had nothing on Joey Chestnut, who had to forgo competing for Nathan’s Mustard Belt after he sold his soul to a rival food company. You know what Hunter S. Thompson said, “When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.” In a counter programing one-on-one match Chestnut downed 83 dogs — not the Portuguese kind, ha-ha — to beat his sworn rival, someone named Kobayashi, who I don’t think has had steady work since The Usual Suspects. Who is Keyser Soze?

It was an election year, and I decided not to run again. Those background checks! Who needs them?

The whole family was here for Thanksgiving, and the War Department made her traditional beef aspic. Lily, the almost 4-year-old, looked at me with those big, wide eyes and said, “Craps.” That’s what she calls me. “Meat Jell-O?” From the mouths of babes!

On to 2025!

Toodles,

The Maury Arties

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Sticky Fingers

Confessions of a cookie dough thief

By Emilee Phillips

Around the holidays, my mother is known for baking her days away. Even with all of her kids grown and (mostly) gone she still churns out the sugary treats as if Bobby Flay were going to walk in at any moment to pass judgment on the selection.

Like most master chefs, she had specific dishware for specific things. Regular plates versus fancy plates, plastic cups versus glassware, and a collection of mixing bowls as stackable as Russian nesting dolls. There was one item, however, that came with spoonfuls of family chronicles — the granddaddy of them all — the cookie dough bowl.

When that heavy beige and blue ceramic bowl came out, we knew a spread of precisely shaped and elegantly frosted sugar cookies was on its way. But that wasn’t the best part. Oh, no. The best part was the dough.

All of us — and by us I mean her feral children — stuck our grubby fingers in that dough at least once a day, for as long as it sat in the fridge, before any of it ever landed on a cookie sheet. We weren’t afraid of salmonella, we were afraid of not seeing the bowl in time. It’s a good thing we didn’t have many guests during the holidays — it’s doubtful their constitutions would have been as hardy as ours.

My mother always wondered why her recipes never produced quite the cookie count she thought they should yield. We did our best to be discreet but eventually, my mom put two and two together and came up with three — children, that is. In the end we were betrayed by the aluminum foil that never seemed to go back as snugly as it went on and, of course, the fistful of finger divots.

Not that my brother and I were entirely innocent, but my sister, Megan, was the main culprit. And yes, that matters. The year Megan came home from college on Thanksgiving break is the year “the incident” happened. Whether or not it was on purpose has yet to be discovered.

It was late in the evening and Megan was loitering in the light of the fridge in search of a midnight snack. I can only imagine her delight when she saw the bowl. Not that I was on a cookie dough prowl myself — I have always been something of a night owl — but when I walked into the kitchen, my timing couldn’t have been better. I witnessed Megan popping a dough-laden finger into her mouth. Or so we both thought.

“Blech!” she exclaimed. Her head shook and her body shivered as she stuck out her tongue in disgust. I could see her mentally wrestling the urge to summon our mother at the top of her lungs to get to bottom of this vile pile. But of course, that would have given her up as the main cookie dough thief. Hoisted on her own petard, she couldn’t say a word.

Megan looked at me, confused. I calmly, and innocently, surveyed the scene. The cookie cutters weren’t out on the counter. Conspicuous by their absence, I knew what had happened. I reached past my sister and peeled back the foil. The bowl — not just any bowl but THE bowl — was full of potato salad.

It was as though our mother had defied the laws of nature that night. “It was even on the right shelf,” Megan whispered as she wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and trudged up to her room. I was just glad it wasn’t me.

The next morning at the breakfast table, Mom asked no one in particular, “So, how was the cookie dough?”

My sister lifted her gaze from her plate of pancakes with the look and sting of betrayal. To this day she swears I gave her up, but I think Mom saw the once smooth foil rumpled and decided to run with it, regardless of who the actual victim was. They exchanged a quick look full of mental gymnastics.

“That was cold,” said Megan, eyes narrowing. I was holding my breath waiting for Mom’s comeback — a lecture, or perhaps a revenge story.

Instead, the corners of her mouth turned upward as she stood to clear the breakfast plates. “Well, yeah,” she said on her way out of the room, “it was in the fridge.”

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CSI Veggies

There’s a fine for that

By Beth MacDonald

I’m usually the person others make an example of. So when I nervously moved to a very public apartment building in bucolic Pinehurst, I was anxious about all the rules I would accidentally break. If the complex had a yearbook, I’d surely be voted most likely to get fined.

Someone once told me to be less obvious about being awkward. “Don’t just throw it out there. Be more subtle,” they cautioned, as if opening my mouth didn’t give me away. I trip while standing still. I own being weird. I have tea towels that say “Don’t Trust Anyone Who Can Spell Gonorrhea On The First Try.” That’s gotta be a fine.

I adopted a sweet dog who is as clumsy as I am. It has already tried to clothesline me with the leash at least 6,475 times and pooped on the sidewalk. I wasn’t about to get fined for that so I found a new talent in scrubbing concrete.

I learned that my precious large dog is afraid of tiny dogs. Very afraid. One evening a very small dog activated my dog’s Power Ranger mode. He took off, knocked me down, dragged me a few feet at the end of the leash (I mean, who’s leashed to who here?), and then disappeared. I got to my feet and proceeded to canvas the 745 witnesses. Which way did he go? Everyone pointed in a different direction. He had run straight home, jumped the patio fence, and was tapping his paw and wagging his tail impatiently waiting for me after my 30-minute search.

My lovely new complex (living, not psychological) has a putting green, dog park, pool, playground and courtyard. It also has a gardening spot. I didn’t know if it was a community gardening spot open to all or if it was specific to one or two tenants. I just knew that I passed it on my way to my concrete scrubbing job.

I do know I didn’t plant anything there. Much like a cornfield or cotton field one sees on a country road, I didn’t plant it, so I don’t pick it. I do have a few herbs on my patio. Legal herbs. I carefully planted them in little pots that say “Plant Coffin” and “Pray for Me.” Some people have a green thumb, I have the kiss of death. Often, it’s a quick end. Sometimes they linger, suffering a slow and painful demise after an overwatering torture ritual.

Today I passed the garden and there was a giant sign posted that said, “Food is not free, farmers tend to these gardens.” Apparently I am no longer the frontrunner in the neighborhood crime wave. Someone is going to pay a hefty fine for this, and it won’t be me. Yes! I decided to investigate, CSI Apartment-style.

By the looks of the hastily scrawled writing on the sign, the victim is very angry. Perhaps someone had absconded with a prize tomato destined for a promising caprese. You don’t just let something like that go. I even began to worry about the exposed basil on my patio. Was that in danger too? The sign is by the sidewalk. Was it a drive-by? A random act? I don’t think so. I think it was deliberate. I think it was an inside-the-courtyard job; this didn’t come from beyond the sidewalk. The perp knows what they’re doing. Have they been driven underground, maybe started smuggling their veggies out of Harris Teeter? Was this a hate crime? No. There aren’t any smashed tomatoes.

I know one thing: I need to find a hobby. I thought about writing something on the bottom of the sign:

Dog Walker Seeks Hobby

(Vegetable perp interested in socially constructive activities should contact woman conducting garden investigation for more details.)

Is that too obvious a trap?

I met the gardener in the natural course of my investigation. He is such a kind man! He didn’t deserve this. I also found out it was a pepper. He didn’t have a recent photo. The description was “green and shiny.” My basil might be safe.

It turns out this vegetable thievery is a recurring problem. Hooligans live among us. I have since started my own Neighborhood Garden Watch Program from my patio. I bought a pair of binoculars and some night vision goggles.

Between my dog fines and the CSI Garden crimes, I have gotten to know several neighbors. All of them are so kind. They have even forgiven me my tea towels.

2024 Department Southwords

Southwords

SOUTHWORDS

Have a Good Day

Even if you’re in the slow lane

BY JENNA BITER

I point out the windshield as it closes in fast and whirs past.

“Cement trucks are pretty cool,” I say to my husband, who’s in the passenger seat. The vehicle technically mixes and delivers concrete, but “concrete truck” just doesn’t sing.

“They are,” Drew replies with a grin. Five years into marriage, he’s accustomed to my childlike musings. He may even enjoy them, or pretend to, particularly on road trips that beg the universally hated question: How much longer?

I watch the fat barrel spin round and round as it recedes into the rearview mirror.

“Isn’t it amazing, though?” My eyebrows lift. “If I collected all the necessary ingredients — the sugar, the cream, the milk, some chocolate for sure, whatever — and throw them into the belly of a cement truck, do you think it would make ice cream?”

My eyebrows hit their ceiling. Drew, being the problem-solver he is, inverts my expression.

“What if they’re already doing it?” I blurt out before he can work through the physics, the mechanics, the logistics.

Maybe some of the trucks swirling around out there aren’t actually hauling concrete. Maybe they’re actually hauling ice cream, and it’s just that nobody knows, unless they’re among the very few people who do. The insiders. Maybe the whole operation is run by a do-gooding cabal of gelatieres with some well-intended but misbegotten plan for world softserve domination.

I snap out of Candyland and back into reality. Even if the trucks aren’t secretly transporting sweets, it’s incredible enough that they carry concrete. I remind myself that the invention of the cement truck, like the light bulb, air conditioning and so much else, is a testament to human ingenuity. We’ve come a long way since Richard Bodlaender of Breslau, Germany, patented the horse-drawn “mortar mixer” in 1904.

“It would need refrigeration,” Drew says, still half a conversation behind, spitballing the ice cream hypothetical.

Somewhere between that conversation and our destination, wherever it was, cement trucks morphed into a good omen. I can’t quite recall the exact moment this transformation occurred, and neither can Drew, but the chain of logic probably went something like this: Innovation is incredible; think of all the wondrous things that exist today; we hardly ever take notice; let’s start. From that day forward, for us, spotting a cement truck is like plucking a four-leaf clover.

“Cement truck,” I text my husband after an early-morning sighting. I send our catchphrase follow-up. “It’s going to be a good day.”

With all the construction in Moore County, we see at least one truck a day, which makes for a lot of good days.

“x2,” I hit send after seeing another.

Around here, the mixing trucks are usually white with red stripes, and they’re fairly slender for vehicles that have a gut. Others are matte gray, on the tubbier side, with electric teal writing. Most days they’re driving in the opposite direction, but sometimes we get stuck behind one. Even when they slow us down, it’s a happy day.

“x3,” Drew texts me back.

“It’s going to be a good day,” he writes, affi rming his membership in the club.

Every once in a while, maybe once or twice a month, we see a cement truck in action, its chute down, actively building the concrete jungle. That’s a great day, mostly because it’s rare, and there has to be a hierarchy with these types of things.

Some may disagree. They’ll say we’re witnessing the endless drone of modernity, and my country upbringing inclines me to agree, but cement truck I Spy is about choosing the glass half full.

“Another,” Drew sends.

I think our record is seven. And that’s a very good week.

2024 Department Southwords