Tag: State of Mind

State of Mind

STATE OF MIND

Batter Up!

It's our game, the American game

By Tommy Tomlinson

Illustration by Gary Palmer

My wife and I had our first date at a Hickory Crawdads game.

Well, OK, I already need to backtrack. Alix says to this day that it was not a date. At the time I didn’t think it was a date, either. But somewhere between the first inning and the ninth, I started to feel that tug of attraction. A little more than a year after that night, we got married. Nearly 28 years of marriage later, we’re still together.

The point here is not to settle the question of whether it was or was not a date. The point is to make our way, eventually, to Brad Pitt’s question from Moneyball: “How can you not be romantic about baseball?”

North Carolina gives baseball romantics so many places to fall in love.

Best I can tell, there are 22 professional baseball teams playing in North Carolina this summer. Nine are farm clubs of Major League Baseball teams. Eleven teams play in summer leagues for college players — they use wooden bats instead of the aluminum bats in college games. Two more teams play in the independent Atlantic League. You could drive around the state and see a different game in a different park every night for three weeks straight, with a game left over.

Minor league team names are sports poetry. Here in North Carolina we have the Gastonia Ghost Peppers and the Edenton Steamers, the Greensboro Grasshoppers and the Holly Springs Salamanders, the Forest City Owls and the Fayetteville Woodpeckers, the Boone Bigfoots and the Greenville Yard Gnomes. (Should it be the Boone Bigfeet? Sounds like a discussion for the ballpark, between innings.)

Some teams choose names with a local angle. The Kannapolis Cannon Ballers name-check the Cannon Mills textile company that basically built the town. (The Cannon Ballers’ logo also features a mustachioed figure who looks suspiciously like Kannapolis-born Dale Earnhardt.) Asheboro has the North Carolina Zoo, so their team is the Zookeepers. My favorite, along these lines, is the Winston-Salem Dash. I’ll let you figure that one out — although if you’re strict about grammar, you might not like the answer.

Alix and I have been to minor league games all over the state. Every park has its own quirks and charms. A few years ago, as part of a baseball vacation, we went to see an Asheville Tourists game. I hadn’t been feeling great that week. We had to park at the bottom of a hill, and the stadium was at the top. I was dreading that climb. But then a guy rolled up in an extra-long golf cart. It turns out the Tourists will give fans a lift up to the stadium if they need one. That day, I needed one. I felt like a VIP as the cart zoomed us to the gate.

By the way, if you ever take a book to the ballpark — lots of people do! — my suggestion is Ryan McGee’s Welcome to the Circus of Baseball. It’s about the summer he spent as an intern with the Tourists, and it is jam-packed with stories. I will never forget his tale of the mountain man the team sent into the woods behind the outfield fence to retrieve batting practice homers. He always returned with a bagful of balls — and another bag full of squirrels and such for his supper.

Speaking of supper, the range of what qualifies as ballpark food is so much wider than it used to be. The Durham Bulls, for example, offer pretzels with hummus, gourmet popcorn, Impossible Foods veggie dogs and a ton of local brews. Even the smallest parks often have fancy burgers and IPAs. They still have the classics, too. Nothing says the eighth inning at a minor league park like ice cream in a little batting helmet.

In Greensboro, we cheered one of the team’s bat dogs who retrieve bats tossed aside when players get a hit. In High Point, we spotted former World Series MVP Frank Viola serving as pitching coach for the Rockers. In Wilson, years ago, we happened to show up on Pint Glass Night and brought home a Wilson Tobs glass we use to this day.

The Tobs (a nod to Eastern North Carolina’s tobacco roots) have moved to Smithfield, where they’ll start playing in 2027. Wilson’s team is now the Warbirds — they’re a farm team for the Milwaukee Brewers. They replaced the Carolina Mudcats. The old Mudcats’ stadium in Zebulon is now home to the Zebulon Devil Dogz, which will feature Australian players. As they say in baseball, it’s hard to keep track without a scorecard.

The truth is, it doesn’t matter what the teams are called or who’s playing. I’ve been to dozens — hundreds? — of minor league games over the years. The only surefire star I remember watching is Jim Thome, who mashed baseballs for the Charlotte Knights and went on to hit 612 home runs in the majors. I’m sure there have been other all-stars somewhere in all those games, mixed in with the guys who made it to the bigs for a bit, and the ones who never made it at all. But I don’t remember the players. What I remember are the warm nights and the cold beer and the good company.

I still have my ticket stub from that Hickory Crawdads game back in 1997. I have no idea who won that game. I just remember the fireworks that almost set the woods on fire beyond the outfield fence, and the slow dawning, as I talked to my seatmate, that this might not be just another night at the ballpark.

We still don’t count that night as our first date. But we’ve spent a lot of nights at baseball games since then. And you can bet every one of those counts.

State of Mind

STATE OF MIND

The High Ground

Finding ways to thrive

By Tommy Tomlinson

Recently we spent a fine Saturday afternoon in Mount Pleasant. I should specify that it was the Mount Pleasant in North Carolina. It turns out there are dozens of Mount Pleasants all over the country, sometimes more than one in the same state. You can see the appeal. Names can be destiny. Name yourself Mount Pleasant and you’re halfway to pleasantness itself.

The “Mount” part is trickier. I grew up near a Mount Pleasant in south Georgia that was as flat as a shuffleboard table. The North Carolina version doesn’t exactly require hiking poles either. Then again, the Piedmont is known for puffing itself up when it comes to height. One of the reasons Charlotte calls its downtown “uptown” is that there’s a slight rise from the edge of the center city to the main intersection of Trade and Tryon streets. You might not even notice if you’re driving. But it is, technically, “up,” so “uptown” it is. And if Mount Pleasant, out on the eastern edge of Cabarrus County, sits on a patch of relative high ground . . . well, a mountain can be a state of mind.

It’s not far from where we live — less than an hour’s drive — but neither my wife, Alix, nor I had spent time there. Our loss. This time we made it there for a literary festival at the Mount Pleasant library, which is bright and clean and beautiful. It doubles as a rec center. Kids were out on the fields playing baseball, and there was a line at a food truck. It was a busy spot in a busy town.

Not all small towns are like that. You’ve probably taken the back roads through some towns where you wonder if you wandered into the zombie apocalypse. Small towns have been hit hard over the last 50 or 60 years by everything from interstate highways to chain stores to the slow death of local manufacturing. Sometimes all you see is a bunch of boarded-up buildings and a Dollar General. It can make more sense to move, either into the city or out to the country. Sometimes the worst place to be is in between.

But other small towns figure out ways to thrive. Mount Pleasant has a crisp little downtown, old houses in good shape, a distillery housed in an old prison. (They make a bourbon called Conviction.) We met a guy who researches town history, a woman who worked in PR all over the country, and a flock of librarians I would follow into the deep stacks anywhere. Every time we drive through a small town, my wife glances around at the houses and I can see her daydreaming. If Alix likes what she sees, sometimes she’ll say, “What would you think about buying a house and moving somewhere like here?”

She said that about Mount Pleasant.

I grew up in a midsized town — about 30,000 people — and got most of my perspective on small towns from watching TV. For the longest time I thought of small towns as being on either end of a wide range. One end was Mayberry, where almost nothing bad ever happened, except when Aunt Bee made pickles. The other end was Cabot Cove, Maine, where somebody got poisoned, stabbed or shot to death every damn week on Murder, She Wrote. (I still can’t believe nobody figured out that Jessica Fletcher was the most prolific serial killer in human history. None of that happened before she got to town!)

Modern life has flattened a lot of the differences between small towns and everywhere else. Streaming services bring the most obscure movies and shows to anyone with Wi-Fi. Worldwide delivery can put pretty much anything you want on your doorstep by tomorrow morning. A small town might not have a fancy ramen place, but Amazon can send you the ingredients and YouTube can show you the instructions.

The truth, though, is that small towns have never been that different than everywhere else. The settings might be different, but our hearts are the same: We all need to love and be loved, to find pursuits that fulfill us, to grieve when life hands us losses, to reach for something bigger than ourselves.

Those things are true no matter whether you live in a hamlet of 200 or a city of 2 million.

Every person is complicated and so every collection of people is more complicated still. It’s easy to write off a place for thinking or acting a certain way, but remember, that might be a majority, but it’s not a monolith. I’m not sure I could get a two-thirds vote in my own family on any subject except banana pudding. Our love for one another brings us together, but our differences are what makes life interesting.

It took me a long time to learn that you can make your own Mount Pleasant, wherever you are. You can just decide to live on higher ground. You can just decide to be decent to others. You can just decide to make a small town out of your friends and loved ones, even if you live in the middle of the city.

We are not likely to move to the actual Mount Pleasant, even though we enjoyed it. What we hope to do, though, is keep the little bits of it that we brought home with us — the warm feelings, the new friendships, the sense of discovery. I’m sitting here looking at a North Carolina map right now. I’ve been all over this state but there are so many places I still haven’t been. Time to gas up the car.

2026 Department State of Mind

State of Mind

STATE OF MIND

Sweet Spot

A place to watch the world

By Tommy Tomlinson

Every year I mark it on the calendar when it arrives: porch season.

This year we got a dose in the middle of February. We always get a brief false spring right around then. You know winter is coming back for another round so you get outside while you can.

It was 74 degrees one day, 83 the next, and my wife and I took to the porch in the afternoons. The porch was one of the main reasons we bought this old house. It was built in 1929, ancient in a modern city of teardowns. When we got the place the porch was half caved in — it had a big crack in the concrete, running down the middle. We got it resurfaced, and over the last 22 years, and two sets of porch furniture, we’ve spent untold thousands of hours out here.

There are some neighbors we see only when we’re on the porch. They stop by and chat on their way to get a beer down the street, or just on their evening walk. Sometimes they come to browse the books in our Little Free Library. Not long after we put the library in, a young couple with a little girl would stop by a few times a week. An older neighbor noticed, found out the girl’s name, and started leaving books in there with notes for her. Then the couple discovered that the older woman had a dog and started leaving treats for the dog. I’m not sure that couple and that woman ever met. But those little gifts meant the world to them. And to us.

A year or two ago, a waterlogged branch fell off our oak tree in a storm and knocked out the library. We had it rebuilt. You can’t let go of a thing that gives you a story like that.

The porch is our party line, our message board, the place we catch up on news and gossip. It’s where we learn who moved out and who moved in, who got sick and who’s doing better. We have watched children grow from here, and watched other neighbors age.

This winter was a hard one. We had an ice storm one weekend and 11 inches of snow the next. Other parts of the state got it even worse. We got lucky at our house — the power never went out and the pipes didn’t freeze. But man, a winter storm in the South can be lonely. We went entire days without seeing another soul. My wife is from Wisconsin and cheerfully tells stories about having to shovel the driveway every hour when they had one of their regular blizzards. Some people down here — mostly transplants — take to the snow like golden retrievers. The rest of us just hunker.

A week or so after the last snow melted, I saw the shoots of one of our daffodils poking through the dirt. And I knew porch weather was coming.

I have spent some time over the years developing a theory about why the South is believed to be, let’s say, more eccentric than other parts of the country. I call it the Crazy Aunt Theory. In colder places, if you have a crazy aunt, you can just stick her in the attic. But our summers are too hot for that. So we put our crazy aunts on the porch where they can talk to God and everybody.

The porch takes us back to those looser, closer times. You don’t have to text anybody from the porch. You don’t need to look up their socials to see what they’ve been doing. They are voice and flesh, standing right in front of you, having real conversations. Sometimes, if somebody has a few minutes, they’ll come up on the porch and actually sit with us. Crazy, right? Spending time together, in person? And we will sit there with glasses of sweet tea, or possibly bourbon, and talk about — well, maybe, nothing. Some days nothing is the best thing to talk about.

And sometimes we are silent because there is so much to see.

There’s a movie from the ’90s called Smoke that features a character named Augie who runs a little tobacco shop in Brooklyn. Every morning at 8, he takes a single photo of the street corner outside. One of the other characters thinks this is the dumbest thing he’s ever heard . . . until he looks through an album of Augie’s photos. Slowly he notices the little differences, the way the light changes, the weather, the people walking through the frame. He is deeply moved.

That’s the way I think about our porch.

In my mind, I can flip through the album and watch the magnolia on the corner bloom and fade. I can see the wrens who show up every year to build a nest under one of the eaves, making a warm space for their babies: first eggs, then hatchlings, then gone. I can see the lizards who slink out from under the house to sun themselves on the warm concrete. I can turn around the camera and see Alix sitting next to me. We who moved here in our 40s and are now in our 60s and hope to still be around in our 80s.

That second warm day in February, two bluebirds floated into the branches of the ornamental cherry tree in our front yard. Our neighborhood is full of cardinals and robins and swallows. Hawks watch over us from the tops of the trees, and owls call to one another at night. But we don’t get many bluebirds. They felt like a promise. The hard winter was coming to an end. Soon it would be porch season for real. We could live out here again — not virtually, not digitally, but through the rich and beautiful panorama of real life.

2026 Department State of Mind