Southwords

Don’t Forget to Write

For our family, the mailman was more than just a welcome sight — he was a lifeline

By Ruth Moose

As a child during World War II, I lived with my grandparents on a farm near Cottonville in Stanly County, North Carolina. With gas rationing, there was no traffic and so quiet we could hear the mailman long before we could see the cloud of dust his car made on the unpaved road. In a world turned upside down and torn apart, mail was the only thing we could count on.

We lived for the mail. It meant the world to us. We had the radio and a weekly newspaper, also delivered by the mailman. But letters told us the people we loved were safe.  At least for the time being.  My grandparents’ four children were in four corners of the world: my father stationed in France; my Uncle Tom a navigator with the Army Air Corps in London; my Aunt Pearl, an Army nurse, was with MacArthur’s troops in the Philippines; and my Uncle Edgar, who had just graduated from UNC-Chapel Hill with a masters in physics was in Washington, D.C., and alternately, Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Each of them wrote a letter home every week. You could depend on it.  And my grandparents wrote back.

When two weeks went by without a letter from her daughter, my grandmother was more than worried, fearing the worst. She sent inquiries. Discovered my aunt was in this country, hospitalized with a mental and physical breakdown. But she was alive and recovered.

The mail not only brought letters each week but also a brand new, fresh copy of my grandmother’s favorite reading, The Saturday Evening Post. That was her recreation, her relaxation, her reward at the end of each long, worried day. On special occasions the mailman might bring a box of Whitman’s Sampler, picked up from a PX somewhere I’m sure. We rationed a single chocolate a day as long as it lasted.

The mailman also brought books! My aunt in D.C. was a librarian and regularly mailed me books, books that were read aloud to me until I taught myself to read. Poems from A Child’s Garden of Verses, The Adventures of Peter Rabbit and others. Books were magic doors to a larger world and gave me a lifelong love of the printed word, of learning, of no greater pleasure than reading.

When the war was over, they all came home, wounded in body, mind and spirit, but thankfully alive. They continued the weekly letters home and to each other the rest of their lives.

After my grandfather died, the farm was sold and my grandmother lived three months at a time with her four children: my aunt a school nurse in New Jersey; my uncle on the faculty at N.C. State in Raleigh; Uncle Edgar teaching at Georgia State; and my family in Albemarle. Always letters back and forth, specialty cards for all the occasions. Cards to be kept and displayed on mantels and dressers. Cards to be re-enjoyed for days and weeks following. Not the same as today’s emails, a blink here and gone forever. I remember getting an e-condolence card after my husband’s death and crying in frustration. If the sender really wanted to send some sympathy, they could have bought a card, or written a note, signed, addressed, stamped and mailed it. An e-condolence was a quick click and no more thought than that. Obligation over.

Sadly none of the old letters survived. Tossed in the purging of estates after a death; nieces, nephews, cousins, grandchildren who saw them as only pieces of paper, not family history.

During the pandemic, I’ve being purging files, boxes from storage and attics. Deep in one box I was amazed to find my letters to my husband, who was then my boyfriend during our four college years. He had somehow, somewhere, kept them and they had survived many moves, packing and unpacking. Don’t tell me emails could do that. Not in a million years. Yellowed and with three-cent stamps, the letters tell the story of a summer romance that lasted over 50 years. I’ve been reading, alternately laughing and crying. We were so young.  So 1950s crazy and scared. The question is: Will my sons want these letters? My grandchildren? I can only hope.  PS

Ruth Moose taught Introduction to Writing Short Fiction at UNC-Chapel Hill for 15 years. Her students have since published New York Times Bestsellers and are getting Netflixed. She recently returned to her roots in the Uwharrie Mountains. 

Southwords

The Inconsequential Comic

All alone with a microphone

By Traci Loper

“Shine bright like a diamond,” I began in the dullest way imaginable.

“Shine bright like a diamond.” I looked around at the audience flatly. I hear a few chuckles.

“Shine bright like a diamond,” I sing blandly, followed by a long, deep sigh.

The crowd lost it. More or less. I committed to the most cynical version of Rhianna’s then-popular song to kick off my first ever stand-up comedy show at an off-off-off Sunset comedy club in Los Angeles. It was so “off” kids colored with Crayons there during the day. That may have been the only big laugh I got during my five minutes of rocking the mic that night, but honestly I can’t remember. It’s a pretty big blur, and not because it was five minutes of bliss. It was five minutes of dread, regret, embarrassment, effort, and carefully planned talking points with jokes mixed in that crashed and burned.

OK, fine . . . looking back, the topics I chose for my first night of stand-up weren’t that great, but they were mine.

I’ve been entertaining for as long as I can remember. From the moment I could string sentences together, my mom would usher me into the center of a room and I’d just ramble. People would laugh and laugh, I’m guessing mostly because I was a child, I wasn’t shy, and nothing I said made much sense. (So, what’s changed, you ask.)

It was mostly at family gatherings, but she would occasionally take me to work with her at the Hammond Nursing Home. It was there where I found my most captive audiences. Surprising, I know.

I’d chat with the elderly through my mom’s entire shift. I’d go room to room doling out hugs and humor. Maybe that was the first sign of my desire to entertain. I think it’s fair to say, I didn’t really know what I was doing or what they were laughing at — but I haven’t stopped since.

When I finally made the move to L.A. in my mid-20s to pursue an acting career, I naturally gravitated toward comedy. Perhaps that was a mistake. My friends didn’t help. They were constantly on me to do some funny voice, or character I had come up with.

And every time they asked, I delivered. “OMG, Trace, you should be on SNL.” I, of course, thought this was ridiculous. Making your friends laugh was easy, bringing laughter to the world, not so much.

As a kid, I loved SNL and was in awe of Steve Martin, Gilda Radner, Jane Curtin and so many more. If I could follow in their footsteps, sign me up.

And sign up I did . . . at the Groundlings — that famous improv school that has churned out many comedic celebrities, like Will Ferrell and Kristen Wiig. I enrolled in regular acting classes for TV and film. I even joined a local sketch group that some of my theater friends started. I had a sharp wit, but now I had finally — and I suppose mistakenly — accepted that I was seriously funny. Look, if everyone around you is telling you the same thing, you eventually start to believe it. And confidence is never bad. Especially for an entertainer. Especially in Los Angeles.

The first rule of improv is to “Yes, and . . . ” everything. You have to agree to what your scene partner says, no matter what. If they say, “I see your pants are on fire,” then your pants are on fire and you better start jumping around like crazy. The moment you say “No,” the scene is over. The most important person in the scene is the person playing opposite you, not yourself.

But with stand-up, it’s just you. And your solitary goal is to make the audience laugh. That’s pressure of a different magnitude. Even though diamonds are formed under pressure, it takes a ton of polishing to make them shine. I’ve learned I sparkle best with spontaneity. I’ll leave stand-up to the pros.  PS

Traci Loper is an actor, writer and dreamer. After 20 years she ditched the Hollwood Hills for the Sandhill in search of less traffic, off-street parking and a slower pace of life.

Southwords

Relevance Is Relative

Put that in your pipe and smoke it

By Susan S. Kelly

If nothing else, these times have taught us that every 15 minutes everything changes: statistics, rules of (social) engagement, open restaurants. Staying relevant has gotten harder than ever. But I try. I do (is “do” the relevant verb?).

Venmo and Snapchat and Twitter. I was an early-adopter of email back in the dinosaur ages of dial-up. Facebook isn’t relevant anymore, ICYMI. I try to keep up with acronyms. LOL and OMG are way, way passé, ICYMI. They’ve been demoted to crossword puzzle clues. I admit to being less than a pop culture maven — I tried Game of Thrones, I really did, but there were just So. Many. Bad. Guys. But the degree of my deficit really hit home in a recent New Yorker cartoon by Roz Chast. She’d drawn a character whose dreams were compartmentalized and labeled with words like “existential threats,” “angst,” “unspecified anxiety,” and “fantods.”

Fantods? What the heck are fantods? Some New Yorker-y thing, I comforted myself, an acronym for uber-cool Manhattanites. But no, fantod is right there in Merriam-Webster: a state of extreme nervousness or restlessness. And just like that, my vocabulary relevance has been downgraded.

It’s hardly the first time my relevance has come into question. When my daughter looked at my country songs playlist, she rolled her eyes. “What?” I asked.

“The Dixie Chicks’ Wide Open Spaces,” she said with a sniff. “So predictable.”

Well, we all know how that turned out. The Dixie Chicks don’t even have a relevant name anymore.

A few years back I went to a performance of Thornton Wilder’s Pulitzer-prize winning play Our Town. Along with the cast biographies, the playbill listed a helpful glossary of terms used in the production. “To string some beans,” was one entry. “A process by which green beans are stripped of their ‘string’ seam by breaking the tip, usually with a fingernail, and pulling it down the length of the bean.” Hello? The audience needs a definition for stringing beans?

“Catch 40 winks” read another. “To take a short nap.” I mean, as if the play were in Russian. Who knew the expression “40 winks” was no longer relevant? Though to be honest, at our house we refer to 40 winks as a drop-down. I began to understand why as teenagers, my children looked strangely at me when I’d end an argument with the phrase my father always used: “Put that in your pipe and smoke it.” To their credit, and relevance, most things they associated with pipes are illegal substances.

The relevance of graphic novels escapes me too. Comics belong in a twirling rack and portray Richie Rich in a 14-karat gold swimming pool, or Archie and Veronica at Riverdale High, not in an adult-reading genre. (Although I do vaguely recall reading a comic-book version of A Tale of Two Cities at some low point in summer-reading requirements . . . ).

But I’m glad to see Bless Your Heart lose all relevance. Anyone possessed of authentic Southern snark knew about Bless Your Heart long, long before it appeared on cocktail napkins. You’ll have to find another way to criticize and patronize what flies so low it’s undetectable by radar.

No one’s required to stay relevant, of course. My husband gets along just fine without knowing who Pharrell is. When I try to tell him what “meta” means, he nods and goes right back to The Wall Street Journal. The thing is, not being relevant is the same thing as not being at a party. No one notices if you’re not at a party. Think about it. They only notice if you are.

You know what else doesn’t care about relevance? College essay prompts. Year in, year out, the prompts are the same boring choices. What changes are the relevant words you have to use: Cooperation. Collaboration. Global. They’re the vocab biggies right now. But who am I to talk? If I had my way, we’d all speak in old English. “Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote/The droghte of March hath perced to the roote . . . ”

Why else was I made to memorize the opening lines of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales if not as a safeguard against the fearsome state of complete and utter irrelevance?  PS

Susan S. Kelly is a blithe spirit, author of several novels, and a proud grandmother.

Southwords

False Starts

And now for something completely different

By Jim Moriarty

Not all beginnings are that great. And I can prove it. Consider this a kind of public service announcement, providing a stark contrast to the lyrical work of some of North Carolina’s best writers who appear on pages 70 to 79.

Exhibit A: The first line of Same Circus, Different Clowns, a man-made disaster of an unfinished book I wrote (or tried to) about a female blogger following the professional golf tour. The opening went something — no, it went exactly — like this: “Her name was Vampadelle Summer and she wasn’t to be trusted.”

Exhibit B: Another crippled project on my desktop is called The Objectors, and the first paragraph goes like this: “The screech made him turn away from the empty patio behind the house on Cuba Street. Lyle Sullivan’s eyes adjusted to the dark and he watched the steam gushing from the teakettle. The whistle was loud, annoying. He’d lived in this one bedroom adobe for close to a year but this was the day he’d been waiting for. If it all went to plan, in a week, a month at the most, he could go home to Tulsa knowing he’d done everything he’d set out to do. At 61, he was too old to kill the bastards himself but he could help someone else do it.”

Exhibit C: And then there’s this from The Mogul, another laptop orphan that barely managed to escape the delete button: “David Lord came into the world with his pockets full of house money. And, like anyone who got everything he has from someone else, he desperately wanted the world to think he could have done it himself.”

Exhibit D: From the doomed Paparazzi Beach: “Polk Street runs north and south between the Tri-State and the Skyway, though it doesn’t go anywhere. It’s broken up like match sticks every few blocks and doesn’t pass all the way through. One end of Tommy Flowers’ block ran smack into 2nd Avenue where all the houses faced the empty steel mills.”

Every author (and, if I’m any indication, some more than others) has stories that, for one reason or another, just didn’t work. Frequently the kindest, most merciful thing to do is put the little ragamuffins out of their misery.

While Lee Smith, whose lovely short novel Blue Marlin came out earlier this year, wasn’t able to send a contribution for the aforementioned summer reading section, as one of North Carolina’s most elegant voices, she was able to offer the following:

“I have scoured my office but just cannot find the best (WORST) beginnings of stories I ever tried to write. I probably just put them in the trash where they richly deserved to be, but I sure do remember . . .

“This was my attempt at writing a mystery, in order to make some money . . . or so I thought. A novel named ‘Children of Cronus’ — or Kronos, the Greek god who ate his own children. The story was set at an experimental boarding school (well, it was more like a camp) out in the woods someplace during the late ’60s, and involved a gang of wild, wonderful, brilliant kids who had to turn against their erstwhile headmaster who started dressing in animal skins and got weirder and weirder until he got REALLY weird and then somebody had to kill him . . . but I never could decide who actually did it. I mean EVERYBODY had a motive! So I just left it a mystery, which I thought was brilliant but, unfortunately, nobody else did. One rejection slip just said, ‘Are you kidding???’”

So be of good cheer all you scribblers, typists and word processors out there, as Sinclair Lewis once observed, “Writers have a rare power not given to anyone else; we can bore people long after we are dead.”  PS

Jim Moriarty is the senior editor of PineStraw and can be reached at jjmpinestraw@gmail.com.

Southwords

What’s in a Name?

A tradition like no other

By Jim Moriarty

When the eldest of the grandprincesses was a wee thing, saying “grandpa” was something of a challenge. What came out, to the everlasting delight of my wife, the War Department, was a word that sounded a lot like “crappy.” This prompted a dispiritingly large number of family members to engage in an inter-generational cabal for reasons that don’t need to be discussed in polite company. Let’s just say that the War Department did everything in her power to encourage the widespread use of the term and thus, from that moment on, whenever I’m in the presence of the grandprincesses — there are two now and one will be driving a car before long — my name is Crappy. That’s with a “y,” not an “ie.” The latter is a fish, for God’s sake.

It can be awkward. For a school assignment, one of the grandprincesses had to write a letter which she dutifully addressed: “Dear Grandma and Crappy.” Her teacher was, if not outright appalled, nonplussed. She attempted to correct my granddaughter, who quite calmly informed her, “That’s what we call him.”

“You call your grandfather Crappy?” the teacher asked.

“Well,” the grandprincess paused to mull the whole thing over, “sometimes I just call him Craps.”

July would ordinarily be the month our family gathers in a beach rental with not enough bathrooms and too many wasps to eat ribs, play goofy golf and pay homage to our expanding list of family traditions. Unfortunately, the current circumstances make it impossible this summer. One of the traditions we’ll miss is the card game Spite and Malice. It was introduced to me by my grandmother, a bridge grandmaster who taught that far more complicated game to guests in fancy resorts like the Belleview Biltmore in Florida and the Carolina Hotel in Pinehurst. Once she tried to teach one of my brothers to play bridge. He made an opening bid. She said, no, you should say xyz because you have this, this, this and this in your hand, correctly identifying nearly every card he was holding. My brother looked at her as if she was possessed by the devil, put his cards down on the table and never came back.

Playing cards with my grandmother was strictly a cash proposition. In the case of Spite and Malice, the stake was a handful of pennies. Grandmother taught the game to me. My mother taught the game to my children. I’ve passed it on to the grandprincesses. It’s a ruthless game whose finest redeeming feature is that it’s almost entirely serendipitous, meaning even the rankest beginner can slam dunk the rest of the table like Michael Jordan soaring over Moses Malone. It can be seriously good for a 5-year-old’s psyche. So can learning how to behave if you’re the dunkee, not the dunker.

However, the tradition that I, personally, will miss the most comes in the kitchen. I’m not well known for my culinary gifts. On those rare occasions when I’m called upon at home to cook something on the back deck, once the deed is done the War Department usually encircles the gas grill with crime scene tape. But, like the blind pig, there is one particular item for which I am justly, and I don’t mind saying, universally renowned — Crappy French toast.

Ah, the sheer cherubic joy of those tender young faces when, on our first full day of our beach rental, I begin morning reveille by rattling pots and pans. I can almost hear the Pavlovian groans now. The ritualistic breaking of the eggs, retaining just the right amount of jagged pieces of shell. The glup-glup of out-of-date milk. The whiff of vanilla and a whisking vigorous enough to give a man the forearms of a slugging third baseman.

The signature feature of Crappy French toast is how it manages to retain such significant amounts of what appear to be flaps of egg white. I confess that over the years I’ve seen some large enough that, if two pieces were to be placed one upon the other, the short stack could have stayed airborne at Kitty Hawk at least as long as the Wright Brothers.

Crappy French toast should not, under any circumstances, be served al dente. This was pointed out to me one July by my son-in-law, whose first piece arguably should have spent a bit more time on the griddle; either that or it could have been used to culture flu vaccine.

In the fullness of time, the grandprincesses have convinced me that Crappy French toast is really nothing more than a vehicle for powdered sugar. Tradition, edible or not, is always rich.  PS

Jim Moriarty is the senior editor of PineStraw and can be reached at jjmpinestraw@gmail.com.

Southwords

Lost in Translation

And an accidental kidnapping

By Beth MacDonald

Speaking languages other than English has always been a dream of mine. It’s also always been a strong point of failure. I’ve tried. I’d love to put a language other than “Pig Latin” on my LinkedIn profile. I’m curious and love to travel. I’d also love to join the ranks of those people at parties who brag about being fluent in seven actual languages or at least one good dead one like Coptic (not something sarcastic like “Sailor Talk,” “Toddler” or “Dog Whisperer”).

In high school I took French, dreaming of the day I would visit Paris and chicly order a croissant with the perfect accent: “Un qua-san, see-voo-play.” I envisioned myself at a café table looking mysterious, without spilling any crumbs on my haute couture, looking like Brigitte Bardot. I’d elegantly smoke a cigarette with a fashionable long black opera holder. When I eventually made it to Paris I almost sent my high school teacher a postcard that said, “Thanks for nothing.” I couldn’t even order water. I tried. I couldn’t get the accent right or the article in front of it. Desperate, I even tried saying “agua,” remembering an old episode of Sesame Street when I saw a man crawling through a desert repeating that word over and over.

After standing at a café counter/desert for what seemed like an eternity, without a result, the woman waiting on me finally asked me, in English, if I wanted a bottle of sparkling or plain. Le sigh.

I moved to Italy in my 20s. I took some college-level Italian courses so I could communicate effectively with my counterparts in country for a job I’d accepted. I went to the same gas station every week, for four years, confidently asking for a pen to sign my NATO gas rations. One day a friend pointed out I wasn’t asking for a pen. I had been asking for an appendage. L’oops! I had to find another gas station after that horrific blunder.

Before my first business trip to Guatemala I tried to learn some basic phrases. Thankfully, I already knew how to ask for agua. My husband, Mason, had taken Spanish in high school and was much more successful with his knowledge of that language than mine of French (or Italian, for that matter). He’d also been to Central America on several occasions. We even had a fluent Spanish speaker on our team going with us; we should have been linguistically set.

Two days into our trip we found ourselves hopelessly lost trying to find a meeting point with colleagues. We stopped and asked a woman on the street for directions. Our interpreter couldn’t understand her; Mason was saying a few words in Spanish that sounded convincing. They even included some interpretive dance moves to help emphasize our urgency. I sat in the van with the rest of our crew, useless and confused.

Finally, after much deliberation regarding the fact that we needed to get to point A, someone said, “Get her in the van!” The woman somehow understood that and jumped in. I frantically checked my purse for candy. To me, that made sense. We had just kidnapped someone — in a van! Aren’t you supposed to give them free candy? We didn’t have an airbrushed wizard and unicorn on the side panel. I didn’t want her experience diminished. 

She sat in the back with me, smiling and pointing, speaking words I didn’t understand at all. The totality of my Spanish equaled “water, bathroom, please, and thank you.” It didn’t include, “Sorry for kidnapping you. We come in peace. Have a lollipop.” She was very good at designating turns and other various recommendations that we all assumed meant “straight” or “bear right.”

After several miles and many more turns I began to suspect we might have been kidnapped. I started nervously eating my own hard candy, chewing loudly to drown out the sound of my inner monologue going over numerous urban legends.

One of our team members was on her GPS app. “Is this right? I think we’re going the wrong way.” 

My wild imagination was overrun by the very real fact that all of this anxiety caused my deodorant to quit working in a warm van full of people. It was only a matter of time until I made that automobile smell like a bus in Bangladesh in July. Dios mio!

Finally we stopped at a mini-mall parking lot. The woman opened the van door, hopped out, and with a grateful and friendly, “Gracias!” held up her candy and waved goodbye. 

Silence shrouded the vehicle. Mason understood what happened. We dropped her off at the grocery store closest to her house, gave her candy, and saved her a bus fare. With a collective sigh of relief that we hadn’t caused an international incident, we looked at each other, looked at the grocery store, and went in. I needed deodorant.  PS

Beth MacDonald is a Southern Pines suburban misadventurer that likes to make words up. She loves to travel with her family, read everything she can, and shop locally for her socks.

Southwords

What’s a Drop Cloth?

(And why on earth would you ever want one?)

By Jim Moriarty

In 6 Jimmy Breslin, the famous New York columnist and author, ran for the president of the city council with his buddy, Norman Mailer, who was campaigning for the office of mayor. Their insurgent platform — hey, it was still the ’60s — was that the boroughs of the Big Apple should secede from the remainder of the state. As it turned out, this proposition was not looked upon favorably by the general population and the Mailer/Breslin ticket was crushed at the polls. In a rather terse concession speech Breslin said that his everlasting regret was that he was “mortified to have taken part in a process that required bars to be closed.”

In our most recent — or, God forbid, current — situation, I find myself in complete agreement. My own pub, which I affectionately refer to as the Bitter and Twisted, was long ago deemed nonessential. While the finer points of that opinion may be a personal matter of some dispute, there is no getting around the fact that I’d have been better off if the governor had extended his catalog of places to avoid to include Lowe’s Home Improvement.

For some reason my wife, the War Department, got it in her mind that since the hours previously occupied by the Bitter and Twisted had now been “freed up” — her words, I’m afraid — this would be a grand time to paint the living room. To my untrained eye the living room looked just fine. In fact, I was just getting used to it. A cobweb here and there. Maybe a nick or two from the time she thought it was a good idea for me to move the furniture about like a game of shuffleboard. And, I’ll grant you, there are the extra holes — generally falling into the three-to-seven range — required for me to hang any picture. They’re hidden, of course, though we all know where they are. More obvious are the scratches where the Alaskan malamute, owned by some boy my daughter dated for 15 minutes in high school (she’s now 43), carved out of the side door like Freddy Krueger. It’s not that I’m opposed to change, per se. But why fix something that’s not broken or that, at the very least, is bound to require a great deal of, well, doing something?

And I’m not handy. I’m not just not handy, I’m religiously so. I’ve spent a lifetime taking every precaution to ensure that I know virtually nothing about anything that could reasonably be considered useful. If I actually had to fix a toilet, it would only be a matter of days before we had to move. And, having once attained a reputation for a high degree of ignorance around the house, you don’t want to throw that sort of thing away willy-nilly on something as mundane as a living room that really wasn’t all that bad, as long as you sort of keep the lights dimmed.

She, on the other hand, seemed convinced that new paint jobs ought not be a once in a generation phenomenon. So, off to Lowe’s we go. According to the War Department, buried somewhere in what I’ve been told is a utility shed, we did have some old brushes and whatnot that had last been used to make cave paintings, so it wasn’t as though we were in the market for the whole kit.

I’m not saying there are a lot of people who know as little as I do, but it did seem as though there were an awful lot of folks who had the same idea my wife did, vis-à-vis idle time. Myself, I’d have been perfectly happy to socially distance my ass right back home. Instead, we looked at chips. Color, not potato. “Which do you like,” she asked, “the Drizzled Berry Hibiscus or the Uggs Mocha?” People can hold very strong opinions about such things, so I looked off toward the hardware lubricants and mumbled, “Ugh.” And she said, “Uggs it is.”

And that’s how the living room, using a technique that can best be described as Jackson Pollock Meets The Three Stooges, turned brown. On the plus side, as all fans of Ocean’s Eleven know well, taupe is very soothing.  PS

Jim Moriarty is the Senior Editor of PineStraw and can be reached at jjmpinestraw@gmail.com.

Southwords

Delightful Din

Gathering of the Clan

By Eileen Phelps

Cleaning bathrooms, changing beds and vacuuming the dust bunnies — not to mention the clusters of spiders that adopt our Southern home every spring — were my tasks. Expecting guests? Not exactly. The preparations were for the children’s arrival.

Well, that is not accurate either. No longer were our four rambunctious offspring merely children. Somewhere along the way they had morphed into four college-educated, successful, gainfully employed adults. (My husband frequently reminds me that they don’t live in our basement.) They had also multiplied from four to 11. That math is as old as the human race.

Their arrival coincided with the celebration of our 40th wedding anniversary. Since my husband and I had not provided all with an invitation to an around-the-world cruise to celebrate the occasion — their request — our children decided to create a family party for which they would be chief cooks, sharing the workload equally. Of course, all of this camaraderie would require the “four plus” to move back home for a week to ensure the festivities would be worthy of our 40 years of marital bliss. Oh, and did I mention the dog? Yes, he joined us, anticipating some extra morsels on the floor from the throng of munchers. That makes a party of 13 . . . plus the dog . . . for seven days . . . in the same house.

The first two offspring, living locally, arrived bag and baggage a night early to claim the best beds. Their spouses would arrive two days later, however, because of previous commitments. Most of us know this as a job.

Next was the long-distance son whose 12-hour drive meant a midnight arrival with three excited young ones who were wide awake and ready to play as if it were dawn. The dog accompanied them. Daughter number three sauntered in rather early the following morning. (Did we even go to bed?) Hubby works remotely and needed to be situated at the computer and logged on by business hours. Good luck with that.

The day of the feast arrived with each daughter and our sole daughter-in-law prepping their assigned part of the meal. The men decided to take the grandchildren to the park, assuming five adult males could handle three young children. Consensus among the men was that the outdoors was considerably safer than the kitchen.

My job was to bathe in the glow of my four favorite girls giddily executing the steps toward a fabulous meal. The sum total of my participation was pointing out the location of this spoon or that dish. They chopped, baked, mixed, frosted, wrapped, poured and measured the ingredients to a four-course meal while howling at their own mistakes and cheering on each other’s success.

By the time the men and their charges ambled in, dinner was served. Sitting at the table, all 13 of us, I was speechless. As with most parents, it had never occurred to either my husband or myself that our kids would ever grow up. It was not a quiet, romantic meal. Placid is not a word to describe our family. There is always a smidgen of sarcasm, in addition to at least one sibling finishing the sentence of another, all while multiple conversations float in the air simultaneously. Somehow everyone knows the gist of all the other conversations and jumps in accordingly. Quiet is not in our family vocabulary.

Days flew by with visits to the playground, eating, swimming at the lake, snacking, tripping over toys, eating more, fishing at the pond, running laundry, eating. You get the picture. Between chasing the little ones during the day, and trying to stay up at night with the adults playing dominoes, I was exhausted. But I never stopped smiling. You see, that is what family is all about — sharing special occasions, listening to each other’s successes, sympathizing with our losses, laughing together. Our four children, grown now but still kids to us, all get along. Sure they argue and squabble like all siblings, but despite the separate lives they live, our kids always end up together. Sometimes at our house.

Cleaning bathrooms, changing beds, vacuuming the dust bunnies . . . the cleanup is complete. It’s pretty calm here now. I smile at the memories. Peace and quiet is overrated.  PS

Eileen Phelps is a retired Pinehurst Elementary fifth grade teacher who loves reading, gardening, and spending time with her grandchildren.

Southwords

Chicken Delight

You can’t stop them. You can only hope to contain them

By Beth MacDonald

Sometimes my husband
and I will bird watch from our porch while we enjoy our coffee. We let the dogs run around their self-made Tough Mudder obstacle course — the remnants of what used to be the lawn.

One particularly fine morning I sighed contentedly. “Ah, I hear the cardinals.” I looked around to see if I could spot them on the blooming camellia bush.

“Wait . . . shhh!” Mason sputtered. I heard it, too. It was a clucking sound. “That’s a chicken!” Spinning around so fast the G-forces almost threw him out of his chair, Mason’s bewilderment made me laugh. “Why is there a chicken in our yard?” He wanted answers, damn it.

“Because it’s our yard. I don’t know why you’re surprised.”

Snapping a picture, I sent my neighbor a text asking if she’d lost something. About yay high. Four toes. Skinny legs. She quickly replied that she wasn’t home and if I simply walk toward it, the beast should return to her yard. Mystery solved.

If and should are words that automatically mean to me that things are about to go the exact opposite of how they should go — especially since I was in my mismatched Spaceman Spiff pajamas.

I pulled my boots on and walked to the side yard with Mason. He is always dressed. He was born dressed. He knows that bad things always happen before coffee. I should have learned as much by now.

When I walked toward the chicken, it chose to exercise its free will prerogative as one of God’s creatures and went in the direction opposite of where it was supposed to go. It walked in circles. As I kept trying to herd the bird home, Mason stood there, arms crossed, advising me on the proper technique for catching a chicken. I didn’t realize he was Chicken Dundee.

Squatting low and assuming the stance of a Sumo wrestler — because in my mind these creatures must surely understand the Japanese sport — I stared at the ground, pounded my feet and followed the fowl straight into a prickly holly bush. Chicken Dundee stood there glaring at me.

“You’re doing it wrong.”

“We’ll I’ve never hunted chickens before!”

“What you need to do is blah blah blah,” he preached from the sidelines.

Mimicking the walk of a chicken and chasing it seemed like a much better idea than whatever it was Mason was saying. So, that was my new plan.

Untangling myself from the holly bush, I made a “bawk bawk” noise and, wearing Spaceman Spiff instead of a Sumo belt, I charged. It ran toward my husband for safety. He calmly wrapped his hands around its wings and gently placed it over our neighbor’s fence. Poultry crisis averted. Temporarily.

The problem is that we recently adopted another dog. She’s a 2-year-old Cane Corso, obedience trained and raised for breeding. That didn’t work out for her. Unwanted, she joined our ragtag bunch of misfits. Before we got her, however, her diet had consisted mainly of raw chicken. Exactly.

Two days after we adopted New Dog, on another bucolic, porch-sitting morning we settled in with a lovely light roast. Before we could get the first sip down, we heard the wild jungle screams of Jumanji from the backyard. A slow-motion scene of chaos played out in front of us.

There were seven chickens running, squawking in panic, three dogs barking, galloping with delight toward the disarray, and a hawk swooping down, screaming toward pretty much anything with the potential of transitioning into carrion. Mason lurched forward, his coffee a still frame of liquid suspended in air, yelling in deep-throated slow-mo, “Nooooooooo!”

It was my turn to advise from the sidelines. My inner monologue said, “Why are there shenanigans before coffee?”

Then it hit me. New Dog eats chicken. Raw chicken. I called her and yelled, “Stop!” My inner monologue scoffed. The dog did not stop. I started calling for all the dogs to stop. Like any good mother, none of their names came to mind. I started spewing out random bits and pieces of names, including the names of my children, followed by, “Whatever your name is, SIT!” while clapping like a schoolmarm.

My neighbor scared the hawk off with a pellet gun. It flew away like someone leaving the McDonald’s drive-thru with the wrong order. As quickly as this old-fashioned melee started it was over.

I met my neighbor at the absolutely useless fence line, both of us breathless. I asked her if she needed help rounding up her chickens. I am a pro now. She declined but wondered out loud, “Why did all of this happen before coffee?” Because, well, us. PS

Beth MacDonald is a Southern Pines suburban misadventurer who likes to make words up. She loves to travel with her family, read everything she can, and shop locally for her socks.

Southwords

Party Animals

The surprise of a lifetime

By Jim Moriarty

When one grows so old that wedding anniversaries might as well be counted with Roman numerals like Super Bowls, there are a few curious rubberneckers who wonder exactly how the disgraceful business got going in the first place. In my case it’s simple: It began on her 21st birthday.

It should be noted that it was the ’70s, which excuses nothing but explains more than one would care to admit, and the occasion was a surprise party. Invitations to the gala were issued in the customary fashion of the day: “Hey, I hear Robin’s having a party Friday night.” Robin was the rarest of all birds, someone who had his own apartment. This meant that his forehead was stamped with the words Event Venue.

She for whom the surprise gala was arranged was scheduled to arrive at, oh, let’s say 8 o’clock. The hour came and went with no sign of the featured dish. As the years have trickled past, I’ve come to realize that time is not a subject she deals with on an even playing field. But I digress. The issue at hand was the ’70s, and barely half an hour after the clock chimed 8, it rang out Bong:30.

Those who know me well know that my own proclivities in recreational consumables are confined almost entirely to barley and hops. Yet here I was surrounded by people staring at a red lava lamp. I resorted to the only thing I felt truly comfortable doing. I began twanging my Ozark harp. Now, my teeth — then as now — are to modern orthodontics what a 1952 set of World Book encyclopedias is to the internet. The uppers are arranged in such a way that, while not totally random, bring to mind the punting formation of a peewee football team. Like Houdini being double jointed, however, it was precisely these irregularities that allowed me — someone with the musical ability of a sugar beet — to so bewitch the assembled partygoers with my virtuosic twanging they were as enthralled as if they were listening to Muddy Waters.

At precisely this point, when I had the navel gazers eating out of the palm of my hand — musically speaking, of course — she for whom the surprise gala was arranged came through the front door. Two things happened. Well, one thing. The thing that didn’t happen was for anyone to summon the wherewithal to yell, as one does at a surprise party, “Surprise!” That nugget was apparently lost in the fog of the ’70s. The thing that did happen was for the celebrant to lock her gaze firmly upon my own (I’d paused the musical interlude, though I was quite prepared to accompany any birthday serenading) and say, “What is he doing here?”

Granted, it didn’t seem as though we’d gotten off on the surest footing but, since she for whom the surprise gala was arranged and I were the only two people at the party who actually seemed to remember it was her birthday, one thing led to another and I eventually suggested we go, pas de deux, for a cup of coffee at the local Dunkin’ Donuts. This she agreed to do even though I now know she detests coffee. Had I known that at the time I would have felt a bit spiffier than I actually did.

It was a rainy, unseasonably chilly night, and we spent some time hobnobbing over warm liquids. Then, in an act of selfless generosity that would have made Mother Teresa blush like a schoolgirl, she suggested we take an extra large bag of doughnuts back to the party, stuffing it full of powdered, glazed and chocolate-covered with sprinkles as if she was packing the muzzle of a howitzer.

When we parked at the curb outside Robin’s apartment, she for whom the surprise gala was arranged exited the car with the bag o’ doughnuts in hand. Unfortunately, she’d seized the bag at the bottom, not the top, and the doughnuts tumbled into the rainy gutter. I can say without fear of contradiction that not even Brooks Robinson at the height of his Gold Glove prowess could have barehanded the slow-rolling grounders with the speed and agility she displayed that night. Having crammed the slightly baptized doughnuts back into the bag from which they’d fallen, she for whom the surprise gala was arranged burst through the door, held the bag high over her head and yelled, “Doughnuts!”

A three-legged antelope on the Serengeti Plain would have had a greater chance of survival than those doughnuts did that night. I said to myself, then and there, this is the lass for me. After all, in every gutter a few sprinkles must fall.  PS