Southwords

Reprieve at the Ryder Cup

When a hug is worth a thousand words

By Jim Moriarty

When the United States
Senior Women’s Open begins at Pine Needles Lodge & Golf Club this month, I’m going to be pulling hard for Helen Alfredsson. The Swedish star has had a stellar LPGA career statistically similar to our local major champion, Donna Andrews. In fact, Alfredsson was the defending champion in the Nabisco Dinah Shore the year Andrews won it. Reporters aren’t supposed to have a rooting interest in such things, but I do. And there’s a reason why.

Eons ago I was taking Alfredsson’s portrait for Golf Digest. In those days Helen had a reputation for running hot on the golf course. She was also into yoga. The conceit of the photograph was simple enough. She was to pose seated on a box draped in black cloth against a black background. With the help of a couple of clear tubes, some talcum powder and a bit of forced air, Alfredsson would appear to be floating in air, sitting in the lotus position in peaceful meditation, with smoke coming out of her ears. What could go wrong?

Me.

What started innocently enough turned out to be, without exception, the worst day of my 35 years in golf.

In order to make the photo look just right, it was necessary to hide the plastic tubes behind Helen’s ears. For some reason, I lit on the notion of Silly Putty. (Moms and dads, don’t try this at home.) I tested it on myself. Put a wad behind each ear. Anchored the tubes. Squeezed the talcum powder. Voilá. It worked.

I rented a conference room. Got all set up. Helen arrived. She got in position. I secured the tubes behind her ears, hidden in her lovely, long, strawberry blonde hair. As it turned out, there was one little problem I hadn’t taken into account. The warmth of her skin and the heat of the modeling lights melted the Silly Putty. It oozed into that gorgeous hair. There was no getting it out. The picture was terrific. Helen, not so much. When it became apparent what I’d done, I turned as pale as skim milk. She left in tears.

We called the Silly Putty company and asked them what to do. Surely, rubbing alcohol or hydrogen peroxide, something, would get the damn stuff out. Nope, they said. The only thing you can do is cut it out. Oh, and they advised against doing it in the first place.

Now, you can’t write about golfers for 35 years without pissing off a few, but I’d never, ever, physically harmed one before. Awful doesn’t begin to describe how terrible I felt. The magazine sent her flowers. I sent her flowers. We offered to pay for a hairstylist. I wrote her a letter apologizing. No matter. Given what I’d so foolishly done, any gesture seemed woefully inadequate.

Well, months passed, maybe a year or two, before I saw Helen again. It was at the Ryder Cup at The Country Club.  I was in Boston taking pictures for Golf Digest. Unknown to me, Helen was also there doing color commentary — if memory serves — for Swedish radio. The media center was located in the curling rink. It was early in the week. I was coming out of the building and who should I see walking straight toward me but Helen Alfredsson.

I looked at her. She looked me. I didn’t know if she’d cuss me or walk right past me, but I knew I had to say something to her.

Before I could get a single word out of my mouth, Helen came straight up, threw her arms around me and gave me a big hug.

Since that moment, Helen Alfredsson has been my all-time favorite professional golfer. There isn’t even a close second.  PS

Southwords

Georgia on My Mind

Fond flashbacks from Augusta

By Jim Moriarty

In April, every golfer’s fancy turns to the Masters. In 1979 Fuzzy Zoeller and I were both rookies. Fuzzy won the Masters. I got to meet Dan Jenkins. The late, legendary Jenkins, hisownself, spent well over a year of his 90, in Augusta, Georgia, one week at a time, writing about everyone from Ben Hogan to Jordan Spieth.

Dan’s Mount Everest of attendance is well beyond anything I could contemplate but I was there for some big moments: Jack Nicklaus in ’86; Ben Crenshaw in ’95; all of Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson. Toss in a Ballesteros, a Spieth and a Faldo or two and it was a good run. As precious as those memories are, there is something equally satisfying about the little moments, away from the fist pumping and Mickelson jumping.

There was no microphone to record Justin Leonard on the par 5 second hole — the exact year escapes me — when he went for the back left pin placement in two, landed on the green and watched as his ball finished up on the embankment among the patrons, Augusta’s oh so civilized word for badge-wielding spectator. When a ball skitters in amongst the punters at the Masters everyone knows exactly what to do. They stand, fold their chairs ever so politely and back away to form a perfect semi-circle around the player, ball and caddie.

When the pin is in the back left on the second green at Augusta National, being on the bank behind and above it is about as appetizing a spot as being in the starting gate at the top of an Olympic ski jump. If Leonard’s chip didn’t hit the pin and go in the hole it was destined to race all the way down the green, maybe off it entirely. He might as well have been Galileo trying to get his head around the effect of gravity on a free falling object.

The couple nearest Justin was an elderly man and, presumably, his wife. The gentleman had the mien of a British colonel of the 1st Bombay Grenadiers recently returned from the Second Opium War, who just happened to be married to Scarlett O’Hara. They stood at attention, more or less directly behind Leonard’s ball, clutching their folding metal and canvas chairs to their chests like gladiator shields.

As Justin and his caddie were discussing his dismal prospects, the elderly gent turned to his wife and whispered in a voice — as elderly gents are sometimes wont to do — that was a notch or two or three above your garden-variety whisper. “This is a very difficult shot,” he cautioned Scarlett.

Justin turned his head ever so slightly in their direction and, in a pitch perfect whisper of his own, said to the colonel and his wife, “I know.”

Then, there was 1987. That was the year Seve Ballesteros, Greg Norman and Larry Mize went into sudden death as a threesome. Ballesteros dropped out on the 10th hole, the first in the playoff, when he three-putted from the back fringe and trudged up the steep hill to the clubhouse, an inconsolable figure. Norman and Mize advanced to the 11th where Mize missed the green miles right with a hopelessly awful second while Norman safely found the right edge of the green, being careful not to flirt with the pond. It looked as though Greg was about to slay the white whale of his green jacket. But, as Norman later said of Mize’s position, “I didn’t think Larry would get down in two . . . and I was right.”

Having a penchant during my photography career for finding myself consistently in the wrong place at the right time, I was positioned not down with my compatriots in the photo stand but further up the hill on the side of the 11th fairway. Folks aren’t supposed to get inside the ropes at the Masters but, with a wary eye for Pinkertons and green jacketed members, I inched my way underneath, trying to be as inconspicuous as someone who’d been running around all day and no doubt smelled like a musk ox could be. Who should I pop out next to but Larry Mize’s wife, Bonnie, and their one-year-old son, David.

With Norman standing next to the green looking on, Mize — the hometown boy — prepared to play his nearly impossible pitch. All of Amen Corner went as quiet as a mausoleum. CBS even hushed up the fake bird noises. Well, it seemed that quiet. Mize, of course, pitched the ball into the hole from a spot that looked to be about halfway to the Bojangles on Washington Road and commenced to leaping and running about, all of which I missed.

When the ball went in, the valley exploded.  Shocked and scared by the sudden noise, David began to wail. Bonnie, held him close, rocked him back and forth and said, “It’s OK. It’s OK. It’s just daddy.”

I wouldn’t have traded places with anyone for all the pictures in the world.  PS

Southwords

PSD

Poor squirrel decision

By Beth MacDonald

My neighbor across the street is a pleasant woman, friendly, funny, the likeable sort you’d want to have as a neighbor. Her husband went away on a business trip, so she was going to take the kids to go see family for a few days. She asked me to grab her mail and packages while she was gone. My husband parked his truck in her driveway to make it look like someone was home. The day she got back, I didn’t expect to look out my kitchen window and see her storming, angrily, toward my house. I went outside to greet her, but before I could say anything, she screamed, “Something trashed my house!”

“Let me get my shoes.” Maybe some of those slip-on footies the Terminix man wears when he comes in the house. And, of course, my phone. For posterity.

It was a “squirrelapocalypse.” I stood there with my mouth open, taking in the destruction. Every single windowsill on the first floor was chewed up — not just a little, almost clean though. The teeth marks stretched edge-to-edge like it was eating corn on the cob. There were bloody paw prints and droppings from the terrified creature everywhere, windows, the sofa, the blinds. Table lamps were turned over, smashed on the floor. I felt like a detective in CSI-Woodland Creature Edition. This squirrel knew how to party.

We looked all over for the dear departed, but came up empty so we began to clean up. She ordered a pizza. I went home and a few minutes later got a videotext message with the words, “What the bleep do I do now?” In the video, a squirrel was trapped in her fireplace, caged by the screen.

Naturally, I sent my husband over. 

Mason was only too happy to help. His friend Win, who was over for dinner, eagerly begged to go, too. Hemingway didn’t fancy a bullfight this much. The two men took a large Tupperware storage container from the basement and proceeded across the street like giddy children. I hollered after them to take video. This reeked of viral potential. The pizza delivery lady met them in the driveway.

“There’s a squirrel in there,” they warned her.

“They love peanut butter,” she said. “Make it a sandwich.”

Mason and Win cocked their heads and thanked her. They knew good advice when they heard it.

As they prepared to enter the house, the pizza lady drove off screaming out her car window, “CRUNCHY, SQUIRRELS LOVE CRUNCHY!”

Armed with this knowledge, they entered my neighbor’s house. They put a peanut butter sandwich in the Tupperware bin and tried to lure the squirrel into it. The rodent took the bait, literally, and scooted back up the chimney.

Plan B.

Mason came back to our house to grab a wire dog crate and a Duraflame log. I didn’t want to know the new plan.

Back at ground zero, the men set a fire, and placed the crate so they would catch the fleeing rodent, no doubt coughing and wheezing. Smoking the culprit out worked too well. Rather than depriving it of air, they filled it with adrenaline. The squirrel shot into the crate, with the sandwich, out the back of the crate, and into the kitchen presumably on a quest for a crunchier variety of peanut butter.

Screams could be heard for miles.

My neighbor started tossing her kids out of the house like luggage, except for the one clapping. That one wanted to stay.

“Fine! You can get rabies. I’m saving the others.” She no longer cared. With three  children saved, she was in good shape. She could spare one.

The guys were now trying to trap the terrified squirrel raging through the kitchen. Now would be a good time to describe a small, well-appointed kitchen, with two men, both bodybuilders, one standing 6-feet-2-inches and one 6-feet-6-inches, knocking everything over, doing a great deal more damage than the squirrel, who stood 10 inches tall, tail not included, and never lifted anything heavier than a crunchy peanut butter sandwich.

Finally, the two managed to get the squirrel into the Tupperware container and close the lid. The plan was to bring it outside. My neighbor wanted it exiled.

They took it down the street to the yard of another neighbor, who appeared to have picked the wrong time to go to the grocery store. As soon as the lid opened the squirrel, shot out like it was in a potato cannon.

“He’s your problem now!” Win shouted to no one on the other side of the fence.

“Did you take video?” I asked.

“No. Even if we did it would look like the Blair Witch Project but with a squirrel.”

It would have killed at the Sundance.  PS

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

Southwords

Be My Valentine ‒ for Life

You may get a good laugh out of it

By Susan S. Kelly

I don’t know how you’re spending Valentine’s Day, but if you’re feeling blue, hie yourself to the Harris Teeter around 5 p.m. and hang out around the flower counter. Just watching the clerks pumping out last-minute arrangements for all those lost men scrambling to purchase posies is bound to make you laugh. If that fails, call a single friend to regale you with fun facts about dating after 40. A favorite is my pal who has a “guillotine realization” for blind dates. As in, “He was wearing a necklace.” Chop. Another has a Jesus clause in her marriage: If he ever gets religion, she’s excused. And for those of you eyeing that 10-years-younger mate, remember this: You’ll have to take on all their 10-years-younger enthusiasms too, for organic food and exhaustively researching kindergartens. Ugh. Makes reaching the point in a marriage where you get up every morning, ask each other how you slept, and actually answer each other seem far preferable.

Valentine’s is an industry now, but then so are weddings, and if you don’t believe me, ask my friend who went around at his daughter’s reception offering $20 bills to people if they’d just go home. Now, even “the ask” is elaborately planned for some mountain top or sunset beach scenario. As opposed to, say, the way my husband asked me to marry him, in the parking lot of the SAE house, where we’d gone with the rest of a frat friend’s reception carousers because we’d broken every glass at Hope Valley Country Club in Durham. It just doesn’t get any more romantic than that, unless you count my son’s friend who let everyone know he’d gotten engaged by sending a mass email with “Man Overboard” in the subject line. My husband and I — well, OK, my mother — set my wedding date depending not on weather or venue availability, but by asking the folks at Tiffany’s how long it would take to get the invitations printed and counting backward from there. My sister was so jealous of my getting married. She said, “Just think. Now you can do anything to your hair and he still has to love you.”

And then, happily ever after. Or as my other sister put it, “I’ve loved him ever since he had that awful The Price Is Right furniture.” Forty years on, I’m still wondering if I get marital points for putting on mascara for my husband just for dinner. But I gave up on wishing for a What Now? day many anniversaries ago. A What Now? day is a Saturday when your husband just follows you around all day and says, “What needs doing now?” Although I once read the lips of a new bride dancing that first dance with her new husband. “Turn me now,” she instructed him. Wonder how that’s going.

Ah, the nuptial valleys and peaks. Not the toothpaste caps, or shirts put inside out in the laundry basket, rather, the day my father came home for lunch, as he did every day, and it wasn’t ready.  “What have you been doing all morning?” he asked my mother. For the first and last time, I bet. Or my sister, who once proclaimed, “All we talk about are calendars.” Yes, at one stage, marital conversation gets pared down to timetables.

And while toothpaste tops may be a cliché, the bathroom does seem to be the locale for many a Grrr moment. Take this direct quote from an email: “This amazes me. We’ve had the rug on our bathroom floor for 10 years. D (name withheld to protect the guilty) steps on it when he gets out of the shower, stands on it while brushing his teeth, ponders on it while on the commode. Today when I asked him to bring the rug up from the dryer, he asked what bathroom it belonged in.”

Still, the bathroom moment I recall most fondly took place not in a bathroom, but in an aisle at Lowe’s. It’s a weeknight in a nearly vacant, fluorescently lit, concrete-floored, utterly charmless big box store. My husband and I are debating a new shower door for a bathroom renovation. Most decisions are easy: a towel bar on the outside, a grab bar on the inside. Small house and aging issues we’re used to, and don’t even blink.

We look at those doors a long time, slide them back and forth, compare, dither.  I’m leaning toward the clear, see-through panel — contemporary, clean, trendy — and a significant departure from our old frosted one. My husband nods, thinks, and finally says, “You know, I just don’t think I can go there.” 

I laugh. “Who do you think is going to be looking at us besides each other?”

He laughs too, then, admitting to an idiotic objection, after 28 years. Never mind that both of us had nine years of two to four roommates before we got married, and have experienced countless shared-bathrooms oops moments on family vacations.

But then, I lift my shoulders and say, “You know, I can’t go there, either.”

And there, in the middle of Lowe’s, on a weekday evening, under fluorescent lights, the pair of us double over, giggling at our ridiculous, bogus-modest, long-married selves. If that ain’t the essence of romance, I don’t know what is.

And they’ve lived happily ever after. With the clear shower door.  PS

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

Southwords

Puppy Prison

Life on the night shift

By Beth MacDonald

My husband, Mason, volunteered to build a new shelter for animals at a county facility occupied by a particularly adorable, needy shepherd mix. Every day he’d show up, “Adorable” would playfully beg him for attention. He sent pictures via text message to our daughter and me that, when opened, played that Sarah McLaughlin song “In the Arms of the Angels.” Our daughter took one look and said, “Bleeding hearts unite!” I wanted to know more.

Her adoption ad read like this: “This cutie-pie loves long walks, playing tug of war, ‘Dungeons & Dragons,’ and other games like ‘Drop My Shoe.’ She eats everything she sees; rocks are her favorite snack. She’s definitely the type of dog that will get her head stuck in a banister. Her best friends are the worms and parasites that infest her. Her favorite color is white to match the contamination suits you’ll be getting if you take this lovable, good-natured heartbreaker home!”

Welcome to the family!

The newest member of the Mac Pack needed a name. We figured we’d wait a few days to see what her personality was like, and how she interacted with our other dogs, before committing to some boring name that had to do with her coloring. The first few hours alone with her produced some good front-runners such as Nononononooooo, Wheresmyshoe, and Yougottapeeoutside (which sounds French if you say it fast with the accent on the last two syllables). By our second visit to the vet for her bi-weekly checkup, I was so exhausted from “puppy watch” that when they asked to confirm her coloring was black and tan I said, “Yes, please. And hurry.” I thought they were offering me a drink. We almost named her Stout.

Like our other two dogs, we decided to crate train her to help with housebreaking. The older dogs have been out of their crates and managing the house for years. They do most of the cooking, cleaning and handle the bills, thanks to the trusty crate. House training the first week became “a thing,” as Mason says. We all agreed to shifts watching the dog — actively, not passively — to keep the house and yard clean, given her best friend infestation. I had first shift; Mason took the late shift.

The first night in her crate the puppy sang the song of its people all night long. We tried our best to ignore it, but even our oldest dog barked a harsh, “Silence! We sleep at night!” a few times. At 3:33 a.m. (I checked the clock to validate my self-pity), I gave up and let her out. She wasn’t interested in going to the bathroom outside. She much preferred the hardwood floor toilet. I took her outside anyway, but she only wanted to play with all the horrors lurking in the dark. Great! Me too!

I started brewing my coffee once I got back inside. I was up for the day. My oldest dog sat at my feet and asked for a light roast. Before 5:00 a.m. we covered several training modules such as “Appropriate Chew Toy Replacement,” “The Meaning of the Word No,” “No Means No,” “No Really Means No,” “Down,” “Drop My Shoe,” “How About You Eat Dad’s Camouflage Crocs,” “How to Properly Disinfect a House Before Consuming Coffee,” “Land Navigation for Dog Poo Deep in the Bushes Sans Flashlight,” and we completed 30 minutes of cardio doing laps around the living and dining rooms trying to get my shoes back.

By the end of the first week we realized we were just night shift jailhouse guards. The puppy had begun her set of auditions for her career as a blues singer the minute we put her to bed. The oldest dog asked me to put on some PBS programming to drown her out until her voice coach could get her on par with Etta James. I started to Google life hacks for keeping your eyes open when sleep deprived. Mason chimed in with his Ranger school advice and suggested a Copenhagen dip or toothpicks in my eyelids.

After a few weeks she settled into a nightly routine doing a 30-minute set of her favorite prison songs before finally letting us sleep. Most days she was up by 3:30 a.m. trying for her own Shawshank Redemption. After removing a poster of Raquel Welch and a worn-out bone fashioned into a hammer, I began the shuffle to get her outside before she had an accident. One night it was raining. I put her down, looked at the sky, and wondered whether the real Andy Dufresne was Tim Robbins or me  and when I’d be free from the first shift.  PS

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

Southwords

Holiday Fantasies

Get on board or get out of the way

By Susan S. Kelly

My mother was having a Christmas cull one year and asked if I wanted the toilet lid cover. As one does.

This piece of church bazaar finery was my first claim as a child when the box of decorations came out every Christmas: a forest green, glitter-glued felt oval adorned with a ho-ho-hoing Santa face of pink, white and red felt with sequin eyes, a tufted cotton beard, and a clever drawstring to tighten the cover just so around the commode lid. I thought it was divine. I have it still, the outlined shapes of eyebrows becoming visible as it disintegrates, revealing the crafts-by-numbers kit it originally was. In the attic, Santa’s slowly getting de-flocked and de-felted somewhere under the Advent wreath candles that became a waxy purple unicandle during the 100-degree days of August.

The good news about Christmas, besides the obvious Good News, is that tastemakers and arbiters of Tacky are banished, or at the very least, muffled. That’s the bad news as well. Everyone is permitted his or her holiday indulgences and eccentricities. Last year my neighbor had an egg-shaped wreath on her door, and I have no idea whether it was accidental or intentional.

Flannery O’Connor famously said of William Faulkner, “Nobody wants his mule and wagon stalled on the same track the Dixie Limited is roaring down.” This sentiment applies to Christmas as well. Either get with it, or get mowed over by it. But we can agree on this sentiment: Without women, there would be no Christmas as we know it. Females are out there in the trenches, responsible for every holiday fantasy promulgated in mags and ads — caroling, cookies, gingerbread houses, the works. “I see more of the Salvation Army ringers than I do my husband,” a friend once remarked to me. Another friend drew the line in the sand, er, carpet. “I shopped, wrapped, mailed, decorated, planned, cooked, cleaned and organized,” she told her husband and two sons. “You guys have to take down the tree.” They took down the tree all right. They took it down at Easter. Another friend buys herself an additional piece of her Christmas china every time her ex-husband mentions his new wife’s name in her presence.  I suspect she’s on finger bowls by now.

As for that gingerbread house fantasy, here’s what I have to say about doing that with your children: Go for the pre-fab kits. I actually made gingerbread from scratch, spread it thinly on parchment-paper-lined baking trays, then cut it into wall shapes. Like many activities, it was cuter in the planning than the execution, never mind unappreciated. I’m still digging peppermint candy slivers out of the kitchen heating vents. Instead, keep an illustrated Hansel and Gretel book, complete with candy-covered fantasy gingerbread house, on the coffee table along with ’Twas the Night Before Christmas. Point out what really happens to bad little boys and girls, not getting switches in stockings.

I don’t understand the Fairness Doctrine of today, when couples routinely alternate Christmas between families. I get Christmas Eve, you get Christmas morning, they get Christmas Day dinner . . . logistics alone are on a par with the Normandy invasion, not to mention the emotions, prompting my next-door neighbor to wryly refer to the comings, goings and schedules as “the prisoner exchange.” To counter this trend, I had a third child after two boys — fully aware that the baby would likely be another boy — just to increase the odds that someone, someone, would come home to me at Christmas. Still, the in-laws have a powerful draw, in part because my sister-in-law concocts eggnog with five kinds of liquor, which she totes around during the holidays in a wheeled cooler. I don’t mean that the cooler holds containers of eggnog. I mean that the cooler actually holds the eggnog itself, sloshing around. Open the lid, and enticing clumps of a substance I’m afraid to ask about — Ice cream? Whipped cream? Egg whites? Butter? — float whitely on the surface. Five kinds of liquor soften, not to mention blur, the blow of absent family. And it was my mother-in-law who taught me the value of smilax at Christmas. I wrap the supple stems all through my (so-called) chandelier, and suspend papier-mâché angels from that green and leafy heaven. Ivy will not do that for you. I’ve also nurtured two smilax shrubs for years, for no other reason than to use their bright berries at Christmas, and have concluded I have two males or gender-neutral plants. Whatever their sexual preferences, they aren’t producing and I’m still using fake red berries.

Still, if I haven’t been able to fulfill every Christmas fantasy, I’ve managed to produce a few of the Christmas food fantasies out there. Clove-studded oranges: Check. Apples dipped in egg whites, then coated with granulated sugar so they appear to glisten: Check. On my friend Ginny’s birthdays, her mother would hand her some cash and say, “Run uptown and buy yourself a bathing suit for your birthday.” It’s not surprising, then, that Ginny’s ongoing fantasy for her own daughter was that she’d dash downstairs on Christmas morning, see wall-to-wall presents, and fall over in a dead faint at Santa’s largesse. If this is your fantasy, point your compass toward the North Pole of IKEA. Last I checked, a cloth tepee that covers 10 square feet of living room space was $5.99. Same for the fabric playhouse you drape over a card table. Never mind their two-hour shelf life; they come in desert browns and beiges, and jungle browns and greens. Because nothing says Christmas like camo.  PS

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

Southwords

Bucket o’ Wings

What happens in the bathtub stays in the bathtub

By Beth MacDonald

Having been a military family for so long, we’ve often been away from our families at Thanksgiving. Apart from the obvious inconveniences, we were thus spared the torture of what should be a day of familial gratitude devolving into one of competition, tears and regrettable comments. That is, until my husband, Mason, now retired, suggested we schlep our blended, extended family to my parents’ home for a holiday feast. I initially said no. Mason was convinced this was a good idea as much as Arthur Carlson was convinced that turkeys could fly in WKRP in Cincinnati.

The great thing about Mason is that he is forgetful. I can throw away things that clutter up the house that he doesn’t even know he misses. Sometimes he’ll ask for them three years later. I’ll pretend they are around somewhere. This time he had conveniently forgotten my family is mostly made up of “well-meaning” people. You know the sort.

My sister lives as far north as she could stand to go without needing an Eskimo passport, while I chose to live in the loveliest part of the South. The epicenter of chaos is Pennsylvania, home of my mother, a generally clinical and, not to put too kind a face on it, harsh woman. When I was a senior in high school and told her I had been accepted into an Ivy League school, her response was, “You should probably just stick with community college.” I haven’t heard my father speak since 1972. He is capable, he just doesn’t. My brother is a bit of a genius, but he speaks like Napoleon Dynamite. I never hear what he’s actually saying. All I hear is what I think he would say, which is never what he does say.

My mother isn’t known for her culinary abilities. My sister, an excellent cook, thought it would be a great idea for us to brine an organic, ethically bred, farm fresh turkey and bring it with us. I was not about to drive 10 hours with a sloshing bird in my trunk, nor was I inclined to spend however long it would take to find a turkey with just the right CV. Thinking we were smarter than we are, we decided to make the trip up, stop at a hotel, and brine the bird there. We equipped ourselves with a 5-gallon bucket from the hardware store, a frozen grocery store turkey and the gourmet brine my sister sent that came with very specific directions, which we immediately threw out.

We filled the hotel bathtub with water and brine, dumped the turkey in, and let it sit overnight. The next day we looked at the scene we created like it was from a TV crime show drama and we’re standing over the deceased with the murder weapon in our hands. Oh, my God, what have we done? We left the housekeeper a note of apology and the kind of tip that would pay for her kid’s college textbooks. We put the bird in the bucket and left the hotel, going down in the elevator and through the lobby looking like we had three-day old bait fish in a covered pail. Our mission: convince the assembled dinner guests that a bathroom-brined Butterball was, in reality, a gourmet high-class fowl.

Two gin and tonics into dinner my eyes glazed over and a courageous indifference took hold. My mother was comparing my sister and brother. My sister was pointing out my mother’s faults, my in-laws looked extremely uncomfortable, and I finally noticed there were strangers at the table. Mason’s regret set in.

Everyone did agree on one thing. The turkey was amazing. Mason’s terror was palpable. Knowing that gin is the equivalent of truth serum, he squeezed my hand a bit too firmly as if to say, “Don’t!” I started laughing into my napkin. Mason grew more alarmed. My sister looked at me suspiciously.

“What have you done?”

You could see Mason’s mind doing complex calculations.

“We changed the brine,” he blurted.

“Well it worked! I love it.” It was my mute father, piling more turkey on his plate, his decades of silence broken by a bird. I looked at him, stunned.

That, however, didn’t faze my sister. Like Nancy Drew, she wanted answers. What was the secret ingredient?

Mason leaned over his plate, “I could tell you, but I’d have to take you to this hotel where I know a maid who can keep a secret.”  PS

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

Southwords

The Crazy Family

It could just be you . . .

By Beth MacDonald

It’s a safe assumption that most neighborhoods have at least one crazy family. If you look around and don’t know which family that is, it might be yours. That’s absolutely the case with us.

When I look around my peaceful section of town, I see smiling children playing in their yards and well-behaved dogs on leashes, all properly pooper-scooped. People are well dressed, having civil conversations. Every Thursday night their trash is out and the recycling bins are neatly stacked for Friday pickup. I envy these people. They seem to pull off the illusion of having it sooo together.

We, too, have a lovely, well-appointed home. We are well traveled. We have diplomas, in a box someplace. I do try my best to maintain the appearance of social acceptability in public; it just never happens to come off that way. You can’t really start a conversation with your neighbor about your exciting trip to Cuba while your googly-eyed mixed-breed dog is trying to mate with a holly bush.

My husband says he doesn’t yell. He is a “motivational speaker to those who won’t listen.” You can hear him any given day giving several motivational speeches to our dogs while listening to bluegrass music. It is no coincidence that he is shouting orders to barking maniacs with banjo music playing.

Our dogs get way too excited with every leaf that blows by our glass front door. Any neighbor who walks by is met with barking and jumping. When one of our three dogs recently journeyed to the Great Beyond, a neighbor commented in exasperation, “Finally.” I wasn’t even offended. I just shrugged, knowing how hard it is for people to pass our home.

Our son, a successful young man who lives on his own, likes to put Band-Aids on his car to cover any scratches it incurs. It has now incurred approximately 150 scratches. When he comes to visit on weekends, his car looks like it’s a mobile first aid kit.

My fellow moms seem to live such color-coordinated lives. Oh, I’m sure they have their own struggles; we all do. They just seem to do it all while maintaining the look of supermodels. They each have three or more children in tow, clean and happy, while I drag yard waste to the curb in mismatched clothes, bleeding from weeding. I wonder how I ended up in dishwashing gloves, my husband’s camouflage Crocs (questioning why my husband even has camouflage Crocs), looking like I’m trying to bury a body, and somehow surrounded by way more plastic than I can explain.

My friend Janine says I’m the “garden variety crazy.” She told me when she comes over I’m at least dressed, and she’s never eaten out of the dog bowls — so there’s that to be proud of.

Any given Friday at eight in the morning the rumble of the trash trucks disrupts my peaceful ritual. Scrambling to put my coffee down, I furiously begin to look for clothes. Anyone’s clothes will do; they never match. I begin the mad dash from the house to the curb in what looks like a ridiculous live version of the old ’90s Nickelodeon network game show Double Dare where the prize is getting slimed with my own week-old garbage.

One particular Friday I was finished doing my morning cardio/trash dash and came back to find a very large and intimidating spider on the kitchen door window. This spider had a neatly woven, well-organized and fashionable zigzag web. It was clearly mocking me. I grabbed a can of Raid (to save my life, certainly not my dignity). Spraying poison on one spider really upset a wasp’s nest that was apparently hidden behind a flowerpot.

Wasps began to swarm me. I began to scream and do an ancient, interpretive dance of terror. None of my neighbors were the least bit disturbed, concerned, or even surprised by this. Not one.  PS

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

And the Winner Is

Sports gambling, coming to a state near you

By Jim Moriarty

It’s that time of year when, at long last, the heat breaks. Geese check out of their quaint Vermont inns and follow their GPS to Currituck Sound. Hordes of unruly monarch butterflies make a thunderous racket flapping off to Mexico. And, inevitably, the mind turns to the gimlet-eyed assessment of point spreads.

Thanks to a 6-to-3 United States Supreme Court ruling last May, the legality of sports wagering has devolved to the states, as the Founders no doubt intended. It was George Washington, after all, who covered the spread against Lord Cornwallis at Yorktown.

Though hard evidence is scant, rumors of gambling in our part of the world predate the Supremes. There is some suggestion that games of chance took place at the infamous Dunes Club and that, in that bygone era, the local constabulary was in the habit of placing phone calls to various establishments around the county to give advance warning of police raids. A few decades ago there was a private club on Broad Street in Southern Pines where it was possible to get those old-timey, pre-internet football betting cards. I know this only because my wife got them every week, inexplicably circling the exact opposite of my own picks while looking over my shoulder. Her winning streak remains unparalleled in the annals of wagering.

Charles Price, the great golf writer, spent his final years in Pinehurst and brought with him the memory of his father, who had been something of a professional at it. “He was acquainted with every notorious hood, cheat and racketeer on the East Coast, and he was afraid of none of them,” wrote Charley. “He was accustomed to being entrusted with large amounts of other people’s money. He always kept his mouth shut about other people’s affairs. And he was scrupulously honest. These were the qualities which set him apart from ordinary gamblers and which enabled him to walk the underworld, if need be, with no more armor than his pin-striped suit and the incongruously flamboyant neckties he always wore.”

When it came to gambling Price’s father played off scratch. We are not all so genetically favored. I, myself, inherited what can only be described as the chump gene, a marker of utter futility in anything involving wagering. I once bet on a horse at the Stoneybrook Steeplechase that decided, rather than gallop along with the crowd, to take off in the exact opposite direction, settling peacefully in the infield as if he was a late-arriving guest delivering Swedish meatballs to a tailgate party.

The worst of it is that there is an element of contagion associated with my particular affliction, a fact that became glaringly obvious to Dick Altman. When I met Alty he was one of the instructors in the Golf Digest Schools. He’d also been one of the magazine’s editors in its early days. It was more than hearsay that Dick enjoyed placing the occasional bet. Sometimes using bills of impressive denominations.

In 1989, in addition to taking photographs and writing stories for Golf Digest, I shot home football games for Clemson University. One of the games that year was Clemson vs. N.C. State. I remember that Saturday as a sunny day. Certainly it was sunnier for me than for Dick Altman.

N.C. State was coached in those years by Dick Sheridan. The Wolfpack was unbeaten, 6-0, and Sheridan’s teams had defeated Clemson three straight times. Clemson was 5-2 at that point. They’d been shellacked at home by Georgia Tech the previous week. Their other loss was to Duke. Yes, that Duke. Can you see where this is going?

Terry Allen was Clemson’s star running back. He may be the toughest running back I ever watched up close. I once saw him get hit high, low and in-between, simultaneously, by three guys near the Clemson sideline, crawl off the field on his hands and knees, puking his guts out, and come back in the game two plays later. For other unrelated reasons, it looked very much like Allen was going to be sitting out the N.C. State game.

Here’s the kicker: State was the underdog. I forget the actual point spread but it wasn’t insignificant. Five or six. “Alty,” says I, “it’s the lock of the century.”

Well, Clemson came bounding down the hill that sunny day in all orange, top of the helmet to tip of the toe, and ran N.C. State right out of the other end of Death Valley. It felt like the Tigers were ahead 56-0 by the end of the first quarter. In reality, they won 30-10 but the game wasn’t remotely as close as even that lopsided score would indicate.

It’s fair to say that if Facebook had existed in 1989, I’d have been on the fast track to a fuming unfriending. Had Alty been able to take our case all the way to the Supreme Court, I’m pretty sure I would have ended up on death row.  PS

Jim Moriarty is the Senior Editor at PineStraw and can be reached at jjmpinestraw@gmail.com for anything except gambling advice.

Roughing It

Objects may be closer than they appear

By Beth MacDonald

I love camping. I love the smell of fresh, early morning air. I love the quiet, the darkness easing into light, the birds beginning a morning conversation. I love the deep woods, a lake, an ocean, any place to explore. My preferred method was to pitch a tent until we bought an RV last year.

Fortunately, we have friends, Drew and Rollie, who are RV veterans. Drew’s go-to line is, “Something will always go wrong.” I hear it in the voice of Jud Crandall, the character in the movie, Pet Sematary when he says, “The ground is sour.” Drew’s right. I could write an entire book based on last summer alone. Each chapter title would be a mishap. “That Smell Is Your RV,” “You Can’t Make a U-Turn in Trenton, New Jersey,” “You Can Eat Six Muddy Kraft Singles.”

My husband, Mason, is a quick study. Learning the ins and outs of the RV, however, has challenged him. Flushing our plumbing, without fail, puts us in the category of those people — a classification, according to Rollie, that’s viewed suspiciously by the veteran RV community. No matter how diligently he tries to thoroughly complete all the steps, there is an inevitable calamity that requires a HAZMAT suit. Embarrassment ensues, and one can’t face-palm with the “plumbing gloves” on.

The camping community is full of kind and helpful people. Children speed through the parks on bikes, laughing. People stop by your campfire to say hello, pet your dogs, and talk about trucks. Soft sounds of music drift over from other campsites. The transition from tent camping to RV camping has been entirely too easy with all the comforts of home rolling along with you.

Our son is working down by the coast, so we decided to take a trip to visit him last month. I didn’t do much research on the camping resort, forgoing my due diligence and booking the site closest to him. It proved to be a desolate parking lot with the ambience of a place where you’d be murdered in your sleep. There was no shade, a swimming pool that Mason referred to as “marinade for victims,” no laughing children, no drifting music and, worst of all, no trash service.

The day we left, Mason decided to clean the toilets from the inside. He handed me this large wand, attached to a hose that, like a robotic colonoscopy, I had to insert deeply into the interior plumbing. The hose filled up with water faster than fear could fill my heart. Water did not go down, it went up. Potentially blinded by backwash, I doused myself with our daughter’s hand sanitizer. Luckily it also had glitter in it, a lovely accessory to pathogens.

Twenty minutes into our drive home from Camp Creepy, Mason started yelling.

“Oh no! NOOO!”

“What?” I began to think the RV was breaking up like the Enterprise on Star Trek.

He looked at me, eyes wide with fear.

“The trash just got sucked out! ZOOP! It’s gone!” He looked behind him in the side mirror. “OH NO! It just exploded like a hot garbage bomb on that Toyota!” Mason’s voice was cracking with frenzy.

I have an inappropriate response to stress. I laugh hysterically.

Mason pulled over. I tried to speak through the staccato breaths of laughter, tears streaming down my face.

“Is the driver OK? Is the car OK?”

“He didn’t even have time to brake! That man is going to need therapy and a car wash.”

“I’ve never even littered. I pick up trash,” our daughter said from the backseat, as if our steaming trash controversy was going to appear on her permanent record.

“Who doesn’t have trash service? This poor guy is going to be picking my trash out of his grill wondering who drinks Hamm’s beer! We are never coming back here again!” Mason was yelling from across the road as we picked up our trash shrapnel.

I texted Rollie. You’ll never guess what we did this time.

The reply came back instantly. You’re those people!  PS

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