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

Southwords

Four-Alarm Coffee

Breakfast with fire and rescue

By Beth MacDonald

I’d really like to be one of those calm, put-together people when a crisis strikes, someone who’s graceful and elegant. Someone who can keep their wits about them when everyone else is losing theirs. My husband, Mason, somehow pulls it off. I am more like Kevin from Home Alone, slapping my face and screaming. Catastrophe never seems to have the decency to strike after I’ve gotten dressed and applied fresh makeup.

Generally speaking, I wake up early, drink my coffee on my back porch in my pajamas and admire my garden. My hair looks Einstein-crazy and I’ve got the previous night’s makeup smudged on my face. Entertaining the Fire and Rescue Squad is not part of my normal routine.

One morning, coffee mug in hand, my dog was barking at what I naturally assumed was the usual — nothing.

“Shhh! Stop. Stop. Don’t bark. There are only deer out there.”

“Bark. Bark. Barkbarkbark.”

I rolled my eyes. I needed to engage the two useful brain cells that had awakened. I looked toward our garage and saw plumes of smoke rising above two trucks parked on the side of the detached building. I ran over, saw flames a few inches from the vehicles, rushed inside to wake Mason, and called 911.

Exactly two breathless seconds into the call, I wished I hadn’t skipped Pilates for, let’s say, the last month. Between wheezing gasps stating my name and address, I tried to express the potential urgency of the fire. I had to repeat myself three times. The 911 operator couldn’t understand me. I sounded like Darth Vader trying to make an emergency call that the Death Star was about to blow up. Heaving, hunched over, I was finally able to get out the basic details.

Mason calmly got out of bed, went directly to the source of the problem, took a shovel, and began to put the fire out at its base. I supervised. “Maybe you should get away from the gas tanks. They’re exactly six inches from the flames,” I said. He ignored me. He had on matching sweats, sneakers, his hair looked combed, and he was easily extinguishing a potential disaster. I looked like Garth from Wayne’s World.

I was still trying to catch my breath when the firetruck pulled up. I looked down at myself, and bolted inside (they probably thought I was in search of my oxygen tank). I tried to put my hair in a ponytail so I looked somewhat presentable, but my low pony only made me look like a young man in Colonial America eager to start his woodworking apprenticeship.

I went back outside. Vanity is useless when you’re at the mercy of others. Why was I even trying? The fire marshal was now on the scene and looking directly at our chimney, asking if we knew anyone who would have put hot ashes in the pine needles. Wait, what?

I looked at Mason, my eyes bulging. “YOU did this?”

“Yeah, I’m the dummy.” He said it so matter of fact, without shame.

“You took the ashes out of the galvanized bucket and put them IN the pine needles?”

“Yeah, uh huh, that happened.” He stood there, nodding, arms crossed, shoulders shrugging.

I put my hoodie over my head and pulled the strings shut. I slowly started backing away toward my neighbor’s house like I lived there and was just an innocent bystander. My neighbor was taking pictures of the firetrucks in front of my house so I tried to hide in the bushes instead.

Mason thanked everyone that came by to put the fire out. The town’s fire and rescue team was accommodating and kind, even though I knew we’d be the topic of a social media, public service announcement later. I could see it now, “Smokey Says Don’t Be a Moron.” I’m sure they wouldn’t use the word “moron,” they are much more professional than that. My internal monologue is not. Sometimes I think our lives serve as a living, breathing Public Service Announcement, a bold kind of volunteerism.

While we were very aware of the danger we put ourselves in, we were even more grateful that we had a capable and amiable Fire and Rescue Squad. Later, Mason dropped off a thank you note with some cookies our daughter made. He apologized and promised not to be left unsupervised again — a promise he’s not capable of keeping considering I have no idea where he is at this very moment, and I can hear the not so distant buzz of power tools.  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

Dispelling Darkness

A candle for every season, every reason

By Tom Allen

Candles go with Christmas like eggs with Easter; turkey with Thanksgiving. Choose tapers or tea lights, votives or pillars, from hundreds in stores or online. Some burn a flame, others need batteries. Dripless or scented, there’s a candle for every occasion.

Candles, although not high-tech like cars or computers, remain a billion dollar industry, fueled by wellness and self-care trends. Cocooning requires candles. Staying in has become the new going out. Open the Hello Fresh box, pour a glass from wine-of-the-month delivery, and light a seasonal scent from Bath and Body Works. “Alexa, play some Diana Krall.”

Used to be candles served practical purposes, though occasionally, decorative. My mother, pragmatic and minimalist when it came to Christmas decor, stationed two red tapers at each end of our mantel, with cellophane intact. The tapers remained unlit despite the manger scene, even on Christmas Eve. When the power went out during a January storm she might remove the cellophane and light the candles, but ambience had nothing to do with kindling a flame.

Electric candles, with opaque, orange bulbs from the 1950s and ’60s, illuminated front windows; by the ’70s, Colonial Williamsburg’s influence reached small-town N.C. White lights replaced colored. Clear lights glowed in our windows, lit our tree, and twined around the lamppost. But red tapers, cellophane intact, still stood on the mantel. I’m not sure Mom ever bought into the scented candle craze. French Vanilla? Frosted Cranberry? If the power goes out, who needs aromatherapy? Gimme some light so I can see how to brush my teeth.

Today, chandlers (the fancy name for folks who make candles) market to our olfactory receptors and life situations. Tough day at the office? How ’bout a Stress Relief 3-Wick Eucalyptus + Spearmint or a soy-based Lime Basil Mandarin? Snowed in without a good read? Light a Frostbeard Studio brand favorite — Bookstore, a blend of “driftwood, mahogany, coffee, and the subtle scent of leather.” Missing your homeland? Homesick specializes in candles that “tap into your sensory memory through nostalgic scents that remind you of the place you grew up.” For 30 bucks you can take North Carolina on the road over the holidays and “breathe in memories . . . recalling blackberries, peaches, and notes of smoky barbecue. Spicy hints of cinnamon and clove are balanced with mild and sweet tonka bean and amber.” Tonka bean? What’s a tonka bean? 

I confess, my wife and I bought into the seasonal scents — Bahama Breeze, Clean Cotton, Apple Spice. And for the holidays, Balsam and Cedar, Christmas Cookie, Home for the Holidays. Our favorite, from locally owned Seagrove Candles: Yuletide, our answer to “Candle of the Month” for December.

No electric candles in our windows. Only traditional red tapers, sans wrappers, line our mantel — three on each end, with brass holders of varying heights. Tea lights for my grandmother’s buffet, pillars rest on our dining room table, and votives cast a glow on departed loved ones’ photos.

An Advent wreath, with three purple candles and one pink, lit weekly to remind us of the season’s significance, sits beside a Hummel Nativity. Last Christmas, thanks to my wife, after 27 years, the remaining two Wise Men found their way to the creche, illuminated by the wreath’s “Christ Candle,” reserved for Christmas Eve.

Christmas and Hanukkah, the Festival of Lights, fall during the darkest days of the year. Light plays an important role in those narratives. Angelic light surrounds frightened shepherds; a star guides Magi to a newborn king; a tiny bit of oil miraculously burned for eight days in a temple candelabrum. Perhaps that’s why we light Advent wreaths, menorahs, and Yankee Candles during light-starved December — to remind us that light dispels darkness, whether inside our cocoons or deep within our souls.

So strike a match, light up the mantel, kindle your own flame. Create light. Be light. Illuminate your corner of the world. What a wonderful, priceless gift. PS

Tom Allen is minister of education at First Baptist Church, Southern Pines.

Southwords

Fare and Fowl

Not all feasts are created equal

By Jim Moriarty

To be perfectly honest, my mother, gone some years now, was a terrible — though determined — cook. I’ve been given to understand that many children develop a near Pavlovian fondness for some dish or other of their mother’s creation. This was as likely to happen in our house as acquiring an appetite for ptomaine.

In fairness, there may have been a genetic marker involved. My mother’s mother would never have been mistaken for Emeril Lagasse. Her signature dish was a chocolate cake with vanilla frosting. The distinctive feature of this dessert was its shape. It collapsed so utterly in the middle it looked like the entrance to a coalmine. This depression was then camouflaged with a generous application of frosting, which meant that the middle piece was 90 percent vanilla frosting and 10 percent chocolate cake. One morning I beat my older brothers to the kitchen, sliced off an entire side of the cake and helped myself to the middle. When they awoke, well, let’s just say had the FBI offered me relocation in its witness protection program I’d have gladly accepted.

As for our mother, while her repertoire of favorites may have lacked a certain palatability, her sweet devotion to them was heartfelt and unwavering. In the kitchen she was a juggernaut of dietary don’ts and never more devoted to them than during the holidays. It was almost an endearing trait. Almost.

Where to begin? Mother never saw a piece of meat that wasn’t a delivery vehicle for trichinosis. In her zeal to cook all things through and through, even flapjacks were suspect. Joan of Arc would have been considered medium rare in our house. Thanksgiving turkey didn’t need carving, it needed sweeping. On other occasions, should she be inclined to tackle a leg of lamb, she proclaimed — as if the advice had been passed down on a stone tablet — that it simply must be put in a cold oven. In practice, this was a bit like saying you ought to have a sip of cool water before hiking through Death Valley in August. One would have been inclined to accept the cold oven gambit as Gospel had the lamb not come out the other end the color and consistency of a Tootsie Roll.

And, of course, there were the complementary dishes. On one occasion my wife and I took our children to her house for dinner. This, in and of itself, could have been reason to alert Social Services. Nonetheless, we went. One of the sides she served was jellied beef consommé. Now, what child doesn’t crave this? I’m only surprised it doesn’t come in Popsicle form. On the ride home our son, who had been politely quiet all evening, piped up:

“Mom,” he said, “meat Jell-O?”

Say no more.

At a Thanksgiving of my youth, one of my brothers, home from college, seemed determined to get to the bottom of one of the great mysteries of each and every holiday meal. “Mother,” says he, “exactly who was it in our family who liked Harvard beets?” He assumed  there was some distant provenance, as murky as the crimson sauce, which was as viscous as 10W-30. No holiday was ever considered complete without them, though I feel safe in saying no piece of beet was ever in danger of meeting a fork. She didn’t even like them.

Friday nights were simplicity itself. A small plate, a Mrs. Paul’s fish stick and a fruit-shaped squeeze bottle of lemon juice. I was in high school before I discovered fish weren’t rectangular.

And there were the New Year’s Eve celebrations which routinely required oyster stew. Not just any oyster stew, mind you, but cold oyster stew garnished with an oil slick of butter on the surface. The thought of it gives me the shivers still. This was frequently paired with creamed onions, though the onions (Was the word ‘pearl’ ever more miscast?) in question appeared to have been scooped out of someone’s Gibson martini.

Mother was not unaware that her culinary skills were considered, shall we say, suspect. She tolerated the eye rolling and, I think, took a certain pleasure in delivering her own traditions with droll satisfaction. And I confess there are times when a parched piece of white meat and some lumpy gravy still seem like the finest meal ever made.  PS

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

Southwords

The State of Mystery

Across North Carolina, tales of unexplained happenings abound — and delight — come October

By Tom Allen

If ghosts and graveyards peak curiosity, October is your month. Check local listings for all things haunted or headless. Since Washington Irving penned his scary legend in 1820, “Sleepy Hollows” abound. I recall a couple of childhood nightmares, courtesy of Ichabod Crane.

Now that I’m grown up, lions and tigers and bears are a piece-a-cake. But vampires and zombies? Jeepers creepers! I likewise recoil from chainsaw murderers and psychotic clowns. Social media and 24/7 breaking news merge reality with fiction. I don’t need another autopsy on NCIS or Criminal Minds to remind me how palpable sadness and tragedy can be.

But I do love a good mystery. What happened to Amelia Earhart? Does the Loch Ness Monster exist? Did a college classmate (who’s sure the 1969 moon landing was staged) really encounter Bigfoot on a camping trek to Oregon?

From Murphy to Manteo, North Carolina mysteries and legends thrive. Growing up, I heard of a spot in a Chatham County forest: the Devil’s Tramping Ground, a 40-foot ring where nothing has grown for a century and anything left in the ring disappears overnight. I haven’t visited and don’t plan to.

However, I am curious about mermaid sightings, again in Chatham County, where the Haw and Deep rivers merge to form the Cape Fear. An Irishman and Revolutionary War commander, Ambrose Ramsey, opened a tavern near the bonnie banks in the late 1700s. Chaps making their way home after the tavern closed claimed to see mermaids singing, laughing and splashing about off a river sandbar. Stories of sightings continued for more than a hundred years. When flooding destroyed the tavern, those stories disappeared as well.

Oddly, tales of mermaid revelry never originated with fellows headed to the tavern, just after leaving. Ale tales or actual sightings? Who knows? The famous and infamous, from Christopher Columbus to the pirate Blackbeard, reported seeing the mythical creatures at sea. By all accounts, whether far out in the Atlantic or on a Cape Fear sandbar, the encounters — sporadic and brief — were always friendly.

For many North Carolinians, no unsolved mystery has consumed our imaginations, from elementary school years through adulthood, like that of the Lost Colony. In 1587, 117 settlers arrived at Roanoke Island, hoping to establish the first English-speaking colony in the New World. Three years later, delayed because of England’s war with Spain, the colony’s leader, English governor John White, returned with supplies. The colonists were nowhere to be found. A rescue party saw the letters CRO carved into a tree, and later, CROATAN, whittled on a fencepost.

Perhaps Croatan, an island south of Roanoke, inhabited by a Native American tribe of the same name, became the colonists’ new home. Were the settlers welcomed by friendly natives, or was their presence a source of hostility? Were they abducted, killed? Or, did they live out their lives assimilated among the Croatan, or some other native tribe more inland? Did they marry, have children, merge the New World with the Old? In recent years, DNA from locals failed to produce evidence of descendants.

Bad weather forced John White to end his search, a search that failed to locate his daughter, son-in-law and granddaughter, Virginia Dare, the first English child born in this New World. With few clues and lots of bad luck, the lost colonists vanished from history. Archeologists and amateur sleuths continue to ponder the mystery and mystique of what really happened, what might have been.

My theory? Google “Hattadare Indian Nation,” found in my hometown of Bunnlevel. James Lowery, a kind gentleman, also known as Chief Little Beaver, posited that some of the colonists survived, including Virginia, and intermarried with his coastal Native American ancestors, hence the name “Hattadare.” Mystery solved. Or not. But it makes sense to me.

Come Oct. 31, trick-or-treaters of all ages will remind us how much some folks enjoy dressing up and being someone they’re not, especially when fiction, at least for one night, is far from reality. Some may wonder about mermaids or lost people and worlds. Others, like myself, will ponder another mystery, still unsolved — How did a headless horseman find his way through that dark Sleepy Hollow? A horse with a great sense of direction?

Happy All Hallows Eve!  PS

Tom Allen is minister of education at First Baptist Church, Southern Pines.

Southwords

Mark Twain and Me

A fascinating seat at the table

By Gayvin Powers

As far as American writers go, Mark Twain is as iconic as Halley’s comet. That’s why I jumped faster than Huckleberry Finn onto a river raft when given the opportunity to have dinner with this immortal being.

Now, I know that Mark Twain isn’t immortal. However, he certainly has been eternal for over a century due to his writing and for 63 years after that, thanks to Hal Holbrook, who created the touring show “Mark Twain Tonight!” before he hung up his white suit for good in 2017.

When I was an aspiring writer in my 20s and madly in love, my boyfriend was putting on “Mark Twain Tonight!” at Stanford University. From the moment Hal sauntered across the stage, I didn’t see him, I saw Twain. I was captivated as Twain came back to life with his white handlebar mustache and stylistic speech, monologuing about subjects of race and equality.

After the performance, a private dining table was set for us with a single yellow rose on it.

“Like my grandfather’s roses,” I thought, waiting for Hal to de-Twain himself. Throughout my life, my grandfather gave me roses from his garden when they were in season. When Hal arrived, he was looking like himself again and accompanied by a bald man with a serious face.

They were clearly not expecting company. Our first interactions could be described as excited on my part, and reserved and guarded on theirs.

Hal’s eyes looked tired, and I couldn’t blame him. He’d just given his Tony award-winning performance under the hot lights for two hours. The most relaxing thing he did on stage was sit in a winged back chair and smoke a cigar — he probably wanted more of that and a glass of whiskey. Instead, he got a plucky Gen-X-er who looked like apple pie but was more like a Red Bull.

I introduced myself. Hal was courteous while the short man grumbled his name.

“That’s my manager,” Hal said. They were quite a pair: Hal was tall with mischievous, curious eyes, and his manager was like a stout boxer.

The four of us ate steak and potatoes while Hal and I talked between bites. I wondered if he had been to the Clifford Powers’ grandchild training academy because every time I asked him a question, he asked one back. Growing up, I was accustomed to talking with my grandfather, which was more like an interview. Hal was just shy of achieving this level of interrogation.

“You enjoyed the show?” he asked me.

“It was amazing! How did you come up with the idea to perform Mark Twain?” I asked. He took a bite, letting the question hang in the air. “Did you write it too?” I added.

“Do your parents live near here?” he replied.

“No. My mother passed away a few years ago,” I said, fluttering my eyelashes to force the tears back down. “And I’m closer with my grandfather than my dad.”

“I was an actor,” he said, giving me the version that one gives a youngster. “I wanted to act. Making the show let me to do that.”

I found out later that Hal had invented his celebrated performance out of necessity. He was out of work, his wife had postpartum depression, his parents were gone, and he was alone. Prior to “Mark Twain Tonight!” he had never read any of Twain’s books. His manager recommended he create the one-man show, and Hal did it to feed his family.

Later he asked, “Did you know, Mark Twain created the Angel Fish and Aquarium Club for girls after his wife and daughter died?”

I had no idea. Hal clearly admired Twain. He shared how Samuel Clemens, Twain’s real name, went on tour when his fortune ran dry — even though he hated touring.

“So, both of you were on the road, leading similar lives,” I said.

“In a way.”

With the last of the crème brûlée devoured, Hal said, “You should take the rose.”

“Thank you,” I said. “I think you should have it.” He looked puzzled. “Then you can take it home to your wife, and she’ll know that you thought of her while you were on the road.”

As if seeing me for the first time, his eyes softened as he said, “Why, thank you. I’ll do that.”

He put the flower in his lapel.

“Gayvin, what do you want to do?” Hal asked me.

“I want to be a writer.”

“Then you need to write. Write your own material. Don’t wait for someone else.”

With that, he gave me a hug goodbye, and for a brief moment I felt like one of Twain’s Angel Fish.  PS

Gayvin Powers is author of The Adventure of Iona Fay series and writing coach at Soul Sisters Write. She can be reached at hello@gayvinpowers.com.

 

Southwords

Mama’s Cookin’

Sweet memories of the most creative home chef who ever lived

By David C. Bailey

I was 16 by the time I appreciated what an incredible cook my mother was — thanks to the woman who would become my own personal chef.

“Duck sandwiches?” Anne responded incredulously when I told her what we were having for our picnic lunch, which also happened to be our first date.

“Yeah, and deviled eggs with watermelon-rind pickles and Mom’s chocolate chess pie for dessert,” I went on. In truth, I worried the repast might be a bit scant. Mom often fried chicken for picnics and packed her signature country ham biscuits, plus, if you were really lucky, homemade pimiento cheese sandwiches. Not to worry. My mother’s sister, Rachel, had also packed a picnic for our double-date, my cousin Bill and his girlfriend, Mary. She’d rustled up some of her tangy sweet-and-sour German potato salad laced with smoked side meat. Like Mom, Rachel blended lessons learned from her Pennsylvania Dutch upbringing with what she knew we Southerners loved. Add some of her simple but simply delicious sugar cookies, and our picnic made a pretty decent feed. (And yet, I remember the sweetest treat of all was that kiss I stole underneath the cotton blanket we tented over our heads against the rain.)

I now realize that my mother — and excuse me for expressing what may be a painful truth to you — was a way better cook than anyone else’s.

Look back on your own youth. Did your mom ever cook you duck à l’orange or Indian curry served with homemade chutney? OK, so maybe she did, but was she also able to Southern-fry chicken so crisp that it was a shame to smother it in milk gravy? And did your mom also wrap quail in bacon and stuff them with chestnuts and mushrooms? Was every single meal she served accompanied by some form of hot bread, plus a homemade dessert? Did you — and do you still — regularly dream about your mom’s cooking?

Other cooks may shine at the holidays — and Mother’s sweet potatoes with black walnuts, her shoo-fly pie and her whole baked country ham or goose were by no means shabby. But what my mother excelled at was cooking every dish day-after-day with the utmost creativity and care. Greek meatloaf she’d seen in a magazine. Deep-fat-fried zucchini or okra. Exotic specialties like borscht that she’d plucked from her beloved 12-volume Woman’s Day Encyclopedia (a set I still cherish and use frequently).

As my wife once remarked with amazement after experiencing a typical fresh-from-the-garden summer lunch of freshly picked corn on the cob, green beans tangled with bacon, fresh sliced tomatoes, cracklin’ cornbread, plus some leftover pork chops, “Every meal at your house is an event.”

My parents were foodies way before that word had any currency. My cousins would come and peer in wonder into our cupboard containing olives, pâté, anchovies, capers, four or five types of mustard, even caviar on occasion. Dad was a Belk store manager who traveled to New York City regularly and brought home shopping bags of pastrami, pickles and smoked fish, along with epic tales of lobster dinners and elaborate, multicourse Chinese feasts, which Mom would replicate, like his favorite, angels-on-horseback (oysters wrapped with bacon and broiled with onions and hoisin sauce). She fully embraced the ’50s hot trend of cooking what was then termed international or gourmet food, but she never abandoned the comfort food she — and Daddy — grew up eating on the farms they were raised on during the Depression — chicken-fried steak, sauerbraten, buckwheat cakes, chicken and dumplings, cider-braised rabbit and apples, all served with a heaping helping of their tradition, passed on from her mother and grandmother.

But her real creativity came into play with leftovers. As she would be piling bowls from the fridge onto the counter, my sister would say, “Uh oh, time for must-go soup.” Quoting my grandmother, Mom would counter,  “Better bad belly burst than good food waste.” Roast beef hash. Spicy gumbo from leftover okra and other vegetables. Stuffed baked potatoes or green peppers. And her pièce de résistance: schnitz un knepp from leftover ham paired with apples and dumplings.

Mom was not a demonstrative person. She wasn’t huggy, and even her filial kisses might be termed polite and correct. She said, “I love you” to each of us regularly, but with just a tad of awkwardness. This despite the fact that she was a hopeless romantic who gobbled up Hemingway, Fitzgerald and massive Russian novels one after another.

Dad would finish his favorite dessert, mopping up one of Mom’s fluffy biscuits in a slurry of molasses, give a satisfied groan, push his chair away from the table and say, “Aren’t we glad we married her,” maybe the most affectionate thing I ever heard him say to Mom.

“Nothing says lovin’ like something from the oven,” the Pillsbury Doughboy used to say, and Mom’s cooking said it best.  PS

O.Henry’s Contributing Editor David Claude Bailey learned to cook late in life at Print Works Bistro after working his way up from dishwasher to backline chef.

Southwords

Father’s Day

A note for a quiet man

By Jim Moriarty

Traditionally, the U.S. Open is designed to finish on Father’s Day, and since I covered golf, I was always in Pennsylvania or California or New York or somewhere other than home on that particular Sunday. The occasion, for me, was a string of construction paper cards drawn by little hands and a package or two tucked into a suitcase.

Having grown up in a household with two brothers and a single mother who was tougher than beef jerky, that particular day had never been circled on our kitchen calendar anyway. That doesn’t mean I didn’t feel the tug when Rory McIlroy came walking down the hill on the 18th hole of Congressional Country Club on a stroll to a championship, scanning the crowd, joyously looking for one face and one face alone, his dad’s.

I married into a family of five children, two girls on either side of a boy stuck in the middle. One summer a bunch of us — not all, but more than a quorum — came together for a week at a beach house. In the evening we’d sit on the deck with a cold beer in our hands, stare at the Atlantic and talk about pretty much anything that popped into our heads. I mentioned the beer, didn’t I?

We got to talking about fathers because, by then, we all were, and somehow or other I got to talking about my wife’s father.

He’d grown up on a dairy farm, and when high school kids would come around to date his daughters, they’d sometimes ask him how he got those big forearms, and he’d just look at them and hold out two big fists and start to move them up and down like he was milking an invisible cow suspended in the air.

He was in the Navy in World War II and served on a ship in the Pacific. When his ship was anchored off New Zealand and the crew got liberty, he stayed on board because he was the only sailor who knew how to weld, and there were repairs that needed doing. For him, the war was more like Mr. Roberts than PT-109. He never made any more — or any less — of it than what it was. His country needed him. He served.

He worked heavy construction most of his life. He knew where every sewer and water line was in the city where he grew up and where his children grew up. If someone needed to find out where a line ran and what the hell it tied into, the first stop wasn’t to the office of the city engineer; they came to him. After decades of climbing in and out of ditches, his knees don’t work so well now, but if he walked out into his backyard and whistled, a backhoe would probably show up.

He built his house with his own hands. Big and thick, they feel more of the past now than they do the present. He sent five children to college, four of them girls, when there were plenty of folks he grew up around who thought that spending a lot of money educating a girl was a waste. He got teachers and librarians and engineers out of it.

Rain or shine, in the winter cold or the summer heat, he went to a job every day that he didn’t much like, but he went because there were people who depended on him. Black or white, if you worked hard and were honest, you were welcome in his living room. When his wife, the partner of a lifetime, got Alzheimer’s, she couldn’t recognize him but he never stopped seeing her.

And, it has occurred to me, after all these years, that he’s as much a father as I’ve ever had and that, profoundly late though it may be, I don’t think I’ve ever told him how much I love him.

Happy Father’s Day, Don. I wish it was on a hand-drawn card.  PS

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