Wretched February -- A Permanent Solution

Pardner, I don’t want to cause you overmuch distress, but February – that most wretched of months -- is bearing down on us like a runaway buckboard, and this year, I am taking defensive action.  I am circulating petitions to get rid of the month.  Yes, wipe it from the calendar, as it deserves.

January is statistically the coldest month of the year, but for the most part, that’s all it is: cold.  If you have a warm coat, earmuffs and a good battery, you can survive January just fine.  But February?  A depressing abomination of snow, ice, freezing rain, and presidential primaries.  Enough to drive a strong person to drink, and that, in fact, is one of the best antidotes I know for February.

So let’s just do away with it.  I got the idea from a character in my novel The Governor’s Lady.  It’s January.  Mickey Spainhour’s daughter Cooper has taken office as Governor of her southern state, while her son-in-law Pickett is running for President.  Mickey’s in poor shape in the hospital, crotchety because nobody will bring her a cigarette.  She says to Cooper, “I hope I make it to March.  I would hate to die in February.  It’s a miserable month.  If Pickett gets to be President, I want him to outlaw February.”  The minute it came out of Mickey’s mouth, I said to myself, “Huzzah!”

Now, you ask, how would we outlaw February?  Simply change the calendar to go directly from January 31 to March 1.  February no longer exists.  But, you protest, what about Valentine’s Day, the only redeeming feature of February.  Move it to January, when the cold weather invites you to stay inside snuggling with your honey-bunch and roasting chestnuts on an open fire.  The details can be worked out.  We’ll form committees.

My friend Delbert Earle is in total agreement with me.  He hates the dismal drearies as much as anybody.  And here, in January, the gloom has already set in at his house.  Old Shep the Wonder Dog is holed up under the house with his head between his paws, refusing to come out even to chase the garbage truck.  His boy Elrod broke up with his girlfriend and spends all evening in his room playing Everly Brothers records: Teen angel, teen angel, woooooahhhhh.  And Delbert Earle’s wife has that wild look in her eyes that says, “Time to shop!”

Delbert Earle, even before hearing of my petition campaign, has taken matters in his own hands.  He has written to the President, urging him to work for a new treaty called the “I-F-B” which stands for International February Ban.  Make it worldwide and total.  Delbert Earle imagines that it’s just as cold and dreary in Russia in February, and Putin might just as well skip the month too.

I’m afraid to tell Delbert Earle about the rumor that the President will take February off and spend it in Hawaii, leaving weighty matters in the hands of Congress.  And that doesn’t bode well either, does it.  Somehow, February and Congress just seem to go hand in hand.

So, we may be out of luck this year, but if enough of us get fed up enough next month and our petition drive gains steam, a February ban might be a good prospect for 2017.  We’ll have a new President and new Presidents like to make a splash.  That would be a goodie.

Now, about your question of whether Mickey Spainhour makes it to March?  In a gesture of crass commercialism in the true spirit of February, I say, “Read the book.”

Making Peace With The Kitchen Appliances

The dishwasher went out awhile back, and in the week it took to diagnose the problem, order a part, and get it back in service – a week of washing dishes the old-fashioned way – I realized how far I’ve come in making peace with modern kitchen technology.  It was not always so.

When I was growing up, we had four dishwashers in our household: my three siblings and me.  With all that free labor around, my parents washed no dishes and mowed no grass.  We kids were given to understand that they were involved with weightier matters, such as whether to admit China into the United Nations.  (I suppose they supported the notion, because China got in.)  So the kids washed and dried dishes by hand – morning, noon and night.  I should also report there was no toaster oven, electric can opener, Mr. Coffee, or microwave in the house.  If those exotic items existed in the 1950’s, we had no clue.

The first automatic dishwasher I encountered was in 1970 when my wife, small daughter and I moved into a house in Charlotte.  There it was, hulking under the kitchen counter, with an ugly green door that swung open to reveal a cavernous interior into which one put all manner of dishes, pots and pans, fresh from the stove or table.  You scrubbed off the worst of the leftover food by hand before you loaded the contraption, but still…  Could a machine do as good a job of cleaning as my siblings and I had done?  Would it, in the course of cleaning, reduce its load to shards of glass and crockery?

For a while, I continued to wash stuff by hand, enduring the snickers of my wife, a home economist.  Then she and the daughter spent a week with her folks in Alabama, leaving me to fend for myself in Charlotte.  I was lazy.  Dishes piled up in the sink, to the point where I could have been cited by the Health Department.  So on the eve of wife and child’s return, I gave up, loaded everything in the dishwasher, added soap, and turned it on.  I busied myself about the house, cleaning up the other evidence of my temporary bachelorhood, and returned an hour later.  I opened the dishwasher door to find that a miracle had taken place.  Everything inside was clean and whole.

Since that eye-opening experience, I have come over time to embrace all manner of kitchen machinery.  I happily use the toaster oven, pop leftovers in the microwave, and cherish a refrigerator that makes ice the modern way.  I am, to put it simply, a convert to domestic technology.

If course the dang things do sometimes break, as in the recent case with the dishwasher.  The trick is to be on good terms with an excellent technician who can size up a problem in a wink, knows how to order parts, and can get the things back in working order.  We have a really good one – patient, wise, and possessed of a truck full of the right tools.  He is our appliance guru.

What you don’t want is a Clayton.  I was working in a TV newsroom in Charlotte in the 1980’s when we installed a computer system on which we could write, edit and print stories.  Clayton had helped design the system, and he was smart enough NOT to have an office in the newsroom.  Instead, when the system crashed – as it frequently did in its infancy – you had to reach Clayton by phone.  Invariably, you would describe what the computer had done (or not done) and he would say, “It’s not supposed to do that.”  So while we waited for Clayton to arrive and figure out why the system had done what it was not supposed to do, we hauled our old manual typewriters out of the closet (we were smart enough to not get rid of them) and continued with our work.

But our repair guy is no Clayton.  I’ve never heard him say, “It’s not supposed to do that.”  He keeps us humming right along.  We have a happy kitchen.  And I do not have dishpan hands.

Christmas is Worth a Tear or Two

A friend passed along a list of quotes from children, including a sixth grader who said, “I like my teacher because she always cries when we sing ‘Silent Night’”  Well, good for her.  So do I, unashamedly.

I can’t put my finger on exactly why, but it probably has something to do with the lovely, simple words and melody.  “Silent Night” is sung slowly, with feeling, best done in a dim sanctuary with a lighted candle in hand.  There is something about the song that invokes the bittersweetness of the season – of joy and sorrow, things present and things past, of people cherished and people mourned.

I remember the first time I ever cried over “Silent Night.”  I was a teenager, a member of the church youth group in my small southern hometown.  On the Sunday night before Christmas, it was tradition for us to go caroling about the community.  Some of us could sing and some couldn’t, but we all made a joyful noise, and when we finished our rounds and went back to the church for brownies and hot chocolate, we were richly warmed with the spirit of the season.

This one Christmas I remember so vividly, my grandmother, my beloved Mama Cooper, was on our caroling list.  She had been down with a cold and unable to attend services that weekend, so we showed up on her doorstep Sunday night.  She bundled herself in scarf and overcoat and stood in her open doorway while we sang a carol.  And then she requested “Silent Night.”

As we began to sing, I looked into Mama Cooper’s aging face and confronted, for the very first time, her mortality.  She was a powerfully sweet influence on my young life – mentor, cheerleader, protector, confidant, friend – all those things only a grandmother can be.  I suppose I had assumed she would always be there.  But in that instant I realized she wouldn’t, and I was devastated.  So I stood there on the back row with tears rolling down my cheeks, my voice caught in my throat, and – purely and simply – grieved.

Mama Cooper lived for another thirty years or so, and I had the continued blessing of her companionship right up to the end.  I know I appreciated her even more after that December Sunday night when I was a mere, half-formed lad.  At her funeral, when her other grandsons and I bore her to her gravesite, I silently sang “Silent Night.”  And I cried, not so much because she was gone, but because of what she had left in my heart.

I think it’s perfectly okay for a guy to cry.  Some think not and make a superhuman effort not to.  But I believe allowing yourself to cry is an act of courage: admitting that you have the capacity to be deeply affected by something or someone, to be vulnerable to the whole range of human emotions.  Tears are worth shedding for all sorts of reasons, many of them perfectly happy ones.  During these holidays, we cry because of the people we miss and we shed tears of joy for those we cling to.  We cry over precious memories and over the gift of days to come when can say the things we need to say, do the things we need to do, for those who are still with us.

I try to take a moment during the week before each Christmas, right by myself, to light a candle in a darkened room and sing “Silent Night.”  I launch out bravely, but there’s no way I’ll get all the way through.  No matter.  It’s a special thing to take into the new year.

And That Reminds Me...

The ultimate payoff for a writer is when a reader says, “That reminds me…”  meaning that something you wrote – a character, a place, a situation, an emotion – triggered something from the reader’s own experience.  Sure, a check in the mailbox is nice, especially when it arrives in the nick of time, but checks get cashed and money gets spent.  What connects with a reader is more likely to last.

I thought about that when I got a note from a friend who had read my recent blog “Among The Graves At Thiacourt,” about my visit to an American cemetery in France, the final resting place of 4,000 of our soldiers from World War One.  For my friend, it brought back the memory and emotion of his visit to the cemetery at Omaha Beach, where American casualties from World War Two are buried.  And that’s the magic of writing and reading: two imaginations intersect through the telling of a story.  What I wrote resonated with my friend.  I couldn’t ask for more.

I get a fair number of similar responses from folks who read my stories.  My first novel, Home Fires Burning, is set in a small town somewhere in the South.  It bears a pretty good resemblance to the small southern town where I grew up.  I set the story there because it was familiar territory.  I populated my fictional town with the kinds of people I knew growing up.  After the book was published, I got a letter from a reader who said, “You wrote about my hometown in Iowa.”  That told me there was a good measure of universality about the characters and the story, and that’s why it resonated with a reader from another part of the country.

Setting and plot can trigger something in a reader’s imagination, but the part of a story that’s most likely to connect is character.  For that to happen, a writer has to be honest and authentic with the characters he or she imagines.  The writer is asking a reader to take a leap of faith into the story, and to do that, the leap has to start from solid ground.  You have to be able to believe the character is plausible – someone you might know – and the character has to be presented warts and all.  We human beings are combinations of dark and light, and if, in presenting a character’s story I omit the dark places, you know right away the character isn’t authentic.  The same goes if something the character says or does doesn’t ring true.  And that probably means you aren’t ready to take the leap of faith.

The central character in Home Fires Burning is a crusty curmudgeon of a small-town newspaper editor named Jake Tibbetts.  I knew I had presented Jake honestly and authentically when a reader called me and said, “I stayed up all night with that book, and if I could have gotten my hands on Jake Tibbetts at three o’clock this morning, I’da wrung his neck.”  But then he went on to say that Jake had a fiercely independent streak and a willingness to speak his mind, good traits for a newspaper editor.  My reader and I had connected through Jake.

A story is a meeting place between two imaginations – the writer’s and the reader’s.  Every reader brings his or her own knowledge, experiences, beliefs and emotions to the reading of the story and finds things in it the writer might never have suspected were there.  It’s a kind of alchemy, a magic that exists nowhere else, and it makes each reader’s experience with the story unique.  When a reader tells me it worked, I’m satisfied.

But…I’m also happy to find a check in the mailbox.

Delbert Earle's Halloween Obsession

Here, another Halloween has come and gone, and my friend Delbert Earle still doesn’t have a workable definition for a goblin.  The dictionary says a goblin is a “grotesque, elfin creature of folklore, thought to work mischief.  But Delbert Earle says that sounds a little too much like his mother-in-law.  He’s looking for something a bit more specific, and has been, in fact, since childhood.

When Delbert Earle was seven, he announced to his big sister Imogene that he wanted to be a wooly booger for Halloween.  Delbert Earle didn’t know any more about wooly boogers than he did about goblins, but he had it in his mind that anything like “wooly booger” must be a fearsome creature.  And at seven, he wanted more than anything in the world to be fearsome.  So Imogene made him a coat out of a burlap sack and a hat out of a gourd.  She covered the whole business with Spanish moss and then, for good measure, spray painted it purple and green.  From all accounts, Delbert Earle looked like something that might emerge at midnight from your local waste treatment plant.

Thusly attired as a fearsome wooly booger, Delbert Earle went trick-or-treating.  He would go up to a house and knock on the door and a lady would come to the door and invariably say, “Why here’s a cute little goblin.”

Delbert Earle would get hopping mad.  “Naw lady,” he would snort fearsomely, “I ain’t no goblin, I’m a wooly booger.”

“Well, do you want some candy?” the lady would ask.

“Naw, I don’t want nothing from nobody that don’t know a wooly booger from a goblin.”  And he would stomp off.  After about an hour of this, he gave up and went home, his trick-or-treat sack empty and his fearsomeness in disarray.  That was, in fact, the very last year Delbert Earle went trick-or-treating on Halloween.  After that, he just stayed home and made fearsome faces at himself in the mirror.

Ever since, Delbert Earle has been trying to pin down this business of goblins, and he’s having no luck.  Folks just don’t seem to know much about goblins, no matter how freely they use the word.  He conducted an informal poll at Cheap Ernie’s Pool Hall and Microbrewery, but none of the guys or gals had a clue.  Sure, they’ve heard the word, but ask for details and you get blank looks.  Now ghosts, they know.  Ghosts wear sheets, moan a lot, and disappear through the wall.  Some of the folks at Cheap Ernie’s could probably qualify as ghosts, but there’s not a goblin expert in the bunch.

Last Halloween, Delbert Earle hit upon the idea of bringing Old Shep the Wonder Dog into the business.  He found his long-ago wooly booger costume in a trunk in the attic, got his uncle Fitzwaller in Louisiana to send some fresh Spanish moss, decorated Old Shep, and put him on the front porch with a sign that said, “Goblin Dog.”  He figured he would at least get some opinions from the kids that came up trick-or-treating.  Problem was, Old Shep – normally the gentlest of dogs -- got it in his mind that he was fearsome, and remained so after Halloween was over.  Neighbors began to complain about Old Shep’s rude and obnoxious behavior, and the postman threatened to stop home delivery.  It took six weeks of watching soap operas to get Old Shep back to normal.

So Halloween comes and goes, and Delbert Earle remains on goblin quest.  Next year…well, he’s written to Uncle Fitzwaller for more Spanish moss, and he’s mentioned to his mother-in-law that he has an idea about her Halloween costume.  Given the experience with Old Shep, I shudder to think what could happen.

The Man Who Knew A Briar-Eating Mule

It’s interesting the things you remember about people when they’re gone.  Example: Doug Mayes, the longtime Charlotte newscaster who passed away a few days ago at the age of 93.  When the tributes poured in for Doug, and there was an avalanche of them, folks talked about what a calm, reassuring presence he was on the evening newscast and what a gentleman he was, both on-air and in person.

I remember and honor all of that, because Doug was a friend, colleague and mentor.  But I will also never forget his imitation of a mule eating briars.

Doug was a Tennessee country boy who never forgot where he was from.  He went off to serve in the Navy in World War Two, already an accomplished musician, and came home to play string bass on the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville before he began a many-decades career as a broadcaster.  Doug retained throughout his life the qualities he was raised with – honesty and forthrightness, homespun wisdom, loyalty to friends and family.  They are qualities that serve any person well, and he was richly endowed with them.

But Doug Mayes also brought from his Tennessee roots the knowledge of the sound a mule makes when it’s eating briars.  I’m sure he observed it first-hand, following a mule around a field during Spring plowing when he was a boy.  There’s no sound quite like it in the world – hard to describe, but when you heard it, you knew right away it was authentic.  It was a mule saying, As a mule, I’m bound to eat briars, but it’s a bother, and I’d have just as soon not done it.

Doug never did the imitation on the air that I know of, but sitting beside him on the news set at Charlotte’s WBTV many an evening, I came to know the imitation well.  He would always come forth with it when things were tight – when news was breaking fast and the air was filled with tension, when all hell was breaking loose back in the control room because a piece of film or videotape wasn’t ready.  Our motto was, “Don’t ever let ‘em see you sweat.”  The audience could care less if you were tense or the film wasn’t ready.  You were there to give them a calm, accurate, balanced view of the world at that moment.  But that didn’t mean we weren’t sweating underneath our makeup.  So Doug would do the mule bit while we were in a commercial break and that would ease the tension and we could get on with things.

I arrived at WBTV in 1970, a wet-behind-the-ears youngster out of Alabama, going to work for a station full of the giants of Carolina broadcasting, Doug among them.  They – Doug especially – made me feel at home, made me feel valued, made me want to do my best to uphold the standards he and the others had set.  They made me feel part of their family and gave me a home I didn’t want to leave during the 25 years I worked there.

I was proud to be among them.  And I was proud to know and work with a man with roots deep in the good, solid things about America.  A man who knew first-hand what a mule sounds like when he’s eating briars.

Among The Graves At Thiaucourt

Among the sacred places on this earth, none are more so to me than a military cemetery, as I was reminded a few days ago on a visit to the American cemetery at Thiacourt, France.  There are more than 4,000 graves at Thiacourt, marked by soldierly rows of white marble markers and an impressive monument.  It is a place of peace, quiet, and sober reflection on the lives of the young men and women who rest there.

The graves at Thiacourt hold the remains of the dead from World War One, many of them killed in the nearby Battle of St. Mihiel.  It lasted for four violent days in September, 1918, near the end of the war, and marked the first major battle test of the American Expeditionary Force under the command of General John “Black Jack” Pershing.

It had been a European struggle since 1914, and by the time of St. Mihiel, the two warring sides were exhausted with the killing.  Their soldiers lived in filth and terror in their trenches, under constant artillery bombardment, and occasionally their generals would order them to attack across the ravaged landscape of No Man’s Land.  It accomplished little except slaughter.  Hundreds of thousands died in battles whose names are etched in history – The Somme, The Marne, Ypres, Gallipoli, Belleau Wood, Chateau Thierry – cut down by machine guns, blasted by cannons.  Thousands of others died from accidents and disease.  When the first American troops arrived in 1917, the war was a stalemate.

British and French generals had grave doubts about how the raw, untested American boys would perform in battle.  Their fears were unfounded.  More than 600,000 Doughboys attacked the German lines at St. Mihiel, and in that fierce fight and the ones than came after in the nearby Argonne Forest, they tipped the balance of the war.  Less than two months after St. Mihiel, Germany surrendered.  By then, 26,000 Americans had died.

The names on those granite markers at Thiaucourt tell moving stories about who those Americans were, and about the America they had left behind.  They are from every state, from cities and small towns, villages and farms – North Carolinians and Michiganders, Alabamians and New Yorkers.  I would love to know about their individual lives, and how they came together to cross an ocean and fight in America’s first foreign war.  As I walked among them, I remembered the words of a grizzled basic training sergeant in my own military experience.  He said, “When you’re in combat, you aren’t fighting for your parents or sweethearts back home, you aren’t fighting for national honor.  You’re fighting for the guy next to you in the foxhole, and you want more than anything not to let him down.”  In that respect, war – for all its unspeakable obscenity – is personal and intimate.

World War One was tragically unnecessary.  Europe stumbled into conflict in a series of bizarre and often pig-headed decisions by a few of the continent’s princes who then sent vast numbers of their young men and women to kill each other.  By the time it was over, 37 million people had died.  Even more tragically, the world was again engulfed by war only 20 years later. 

But I didn’t think about all that in the cemetery at Thiaucourt.  I thought about the people in those graves, who they were, where they came from, the all-too-short lives they lived.  And I thought about the ones who survived, who brought the scars of war –mental and physical – home with them to a nation that couldn’t begin to understand what they had been through.  A hundred years later, I hope that many of them, in their own individual ways, found some of the peace and quiet of Thiaucourt. 

The Wind Comes Sweepin' Down The Plain

Do you ever get a song in your head and can’t get it out?  It happened to me the other day -- not just a song, but an entire soundtrack.  I was doing a little yard work and stopped for a moment to appreciate what a nice day it was: a hint of Fall in the air, a cloudless blue sky, the sweet smell of newly-mown grass.  And there it was, that fine song from the Broadway musical Oklahoma!  Oh, what a beautiful morning, Oh what a beautiful day.  So I went about my chores with a light heart and a quick step and all of those wonderful Rodgers and Hammerstein songs from the musical bouncing around in my brain, like a ride in a surrey with the fringe on top.

I especially like the title song, which has the line, Ooooklahoma, where the wind comes sweepin’ down the plain.  Hearing that, I could picture myself on a wind-swept stretch of prairie where you could see forever, as far as your imagination could take you.  The song goes on to say, We know we belong to the land, and the land we belong to is grand!  It occurred to me what a great sense of pride the song conveys – the pride of living in a good place where you can put down roots and put your heart and soul into making a good life.  If the musical got it right, Oklahoma is a good place to live and a good state to be from.

When I get a train of thought going, it’s apt to take me all sorts of places, and this one took me to Dorsey Bascombe.  He’s a character in my novel Old Dogs and Children – a successful businessman and mayor of his small southern town.  On a business trip to New Orleans, he meets, falls in love with, woos, and eventually marries the lovely Elise.  It is a far cry from New Orleans society to small town life, and Elise never fits in, never feels at home.  Elise’s young daughter Bright – the heroine of my story – observes, She doesn’t belong here.

At one point Dorsey says, “When you choose a place, choose to live in it, you take from it and then you give part of yourself back.”  Dorsey does that.  He invests himself, his person and his resources, into the place where he lives, and does what he can to make it a better place.  Elise, tragically, cannot.

Place is important to me, both as a person and as a writer.  In the course of my life I have lived in a fair number of places, and I’ve tried to think of each of them as my home, to look for the things about them that make them unique and worth valuing, to invest some of myself in each of them.  That translates to my storytelling, where place is crucial.  My characters exist in a certain time and place and the where of their existence exerts a powerful influence on who they are and how they think and act.  Some, like Dorsey, belong there.  Others, like Elise, don’t.  The way they fit in, or don’t, is central to their story.

I’m embarked on a new story, and again, place is essential.  I have to understand the physicality and culture of it before I can truly get to know the people I have imagined to put there.  How they deal with the where says a lot about who they are and where they’re likely to lead me.

I’m grateful for that beautiful morning I experienced a few days ago, the words and music from Oklahoma! it triggered in my heart and soul, and for the reminder of what the whole concept of home should be and how it impacts our lives.  I’ll tell a better story because of it.

EVERYTHING I NEED TO KNOW, I LEARNED IN ELBA

Some of the best advice for writers I’ve heard in a long time comes from the renowned playwright Israel Horovitz, writing in The Dramatist magazine.  Horvitz says, “Try staying at home.”  He doesn’t mean staying around the house all the time, he means using the life close at hand as the heart and soul of your stories.

Horvitz writes, “The language you grew up speaking in your hometown or homecity neighborhood is the language you know best….And the people around you growing up are probably the people you know best.  So your point of difference from all other writers is probably found in your ability to re-create those people you know so well, speaking a language you know so well.”

When I read that, I thought about the place where I grew up, the people I grew up around, and how I’ve used them over and over in my own storytelling.  Elba, Alabama is a small town by any standard – around 4,000 souls today, and about the same number when I was a child and youth in the 1950’s.  For me, it was just the right size – small enough that you could know just about everybody who lived there, and large enough that it had a variety of kinds of people, including enough oddballs to make it interesting.

Somewhere in my youth I became an observer.  I figured out that if I kept my eyes and ears open and my mouth shut (except for asking a lot of questions about people and place) I could get a pretty good notion of what makes human beings tick.  It was a small stage on which the same characters played out their lives over time, bumping up against each other, making sparks, making stories.  I worked at the local weekly newspaper, and one of my jobs was to write a column called “25 Years Ago In Elba,” in which I went through the back issues of the paper and pulled out items of interest.  It gave me a keen sense of the history of the place, how Elba and its folks got to where they were in the present day.

Years later, when I wrote my first novel, Home Fires Burning, I set it in a small southern town that physically looked a lot like Elba, clustered around a courthouse square, and peopled it with characters who were inspired by people I knew – a crusty old newspaper editor, his grandson with an overactive imagination.  I even used a couple of incidents from Elba’s history to flavor the business.  The colorful, colloquial language my characters used came right from the rhythm and indiosyncracies of speech I heard as a youth.  If I write good dialogue, it’s because I heard good dialogue.

Over time, as I’ve written other stories, I’ve gone back again and again to Elba’s well.  No matter the setting, no matter the characters, I’ve used and re-used those things about the human condition – warts and all – that I absorbed growing up, being a part of and observer of that small stage.  I am a simple fellow, a small-town kid and a storyteller, and most of who I am is a product of that dear small town.  In many ways, I never left.

I would say to young writers, as Israel Horovitz does, to try staying home.  In imagining characters and putting them in compelling situations, use what you know best.  It is rich and fertile ground, worth cultivating and nurturing to produce those crops we call good tales.

First, you have to be an observer.  You have to watch and listen, absorb the life around you, the way people move and talk, the rhythms and patterns of their lives.  And then use all of that in creating characters of your own who are unique because they are yours.

Just change the names to avoid litigation.

TWO GREAT MUSICIANS AND WHAT THEY SAW

I doubt that Andrea Bocelli and Doc Watson ever met each other, but they sure had a lot in common, and not just blindness.  Both men saw things the rest of us don’t, and turned them into great music.

Arthel “Doc” Watson lost his sight before the age of one from an eye infection.  His parents taught him to work hard and take care of himself – and all of his life, he did.  He bought his first guitar with money he earned helping his brother chop down trees, and then he taught himself to play it.  By the time of his death at the age of the age of 89, he had won 7 Grammy awards and a Grammy lifetime achievement award.

And what a lifetime it was.  He not only wrote and played and sang songs, he created a whole new style of guitar picking.  He had a world-wide legion of devoted fans who listened to his music and went to his concerts and were dazzled by his artistry and captivated by his genuine warmth.  He was a fine musician and a fine human being.

Andrea Bocelli, the superb Italian tenor, was born with poor eyesight and lost it entirely after an accident on a soccer field at age 12.  By then he had already fallen in love with music, learned to play the piano and other instruments, and at age 7 decided that his voice was the best of them.  At last count, his recordings have sold more than 150 million copies worldwide.  Bocelli, like Doc Watson, has a devoted following who appreciate not only the quality of his voice, but the passion he brings to the interpretation of great music.

I once heard Doc Watson say that losing his sight made his develop and rely on his other senses, especially his hearing.  He told of playing hide-and-seek with his brother, and being able to tell where the brother was by listening for the tiny sound of his movements and breathing.  He developed a keen ear for voices, and if he heard you once, he knew who you were.  Unquestionably, he brought all of that to his music.  He listened to fiddlers, took apart their technique in his head, and adapted it to his guitar.  It was unlike anything guitarists had ever heard, and the best of them adapted and built on his unique style.

Bocelli, with his keen ear, finds and uses the subtle nuances of his songs.  In an interview a couple of years ago, he talked about the value of silence.  “Even in the most beautiful music there are some silences, which are there so we can witness the importance of silence.  Silence is more important than ever, as life today is full of noise.”  Listen carefully to Bocelli sing, and you hear how beautifully he uses silence.  He appreciates that even more because his life is consumed with sound, not sight.

I thought of Doc Watson and Andrea Bocelli when I was speaking to a group of children about reading and imagination.  “Imagination,” I told them, “is what you see when your eyes are closed.”  It’s the pictures in your mind that are triggered by everything else in your world – what you see, hear, taste, feel.   And if we don’t have use of our eyes – like Bocelli and Watson – our imaginations are even more exquisitely cultivated by the senses we do have.  I believe those two wonderful musicians give something unique and special to those of us who admire them because they are using their imaginations to the fullest.  In this way, they see things others miss.

When I write my stories, I’m in a sense writing with my eyes closed.  I’ve entered the world of the characters I’ve imagined.  I can see and hear and touch them, watch them move about and bump up against each other and make sparks and a story.  My job then is to give them free rein, to be honest and faithful with them, and to trust them to lead me through the underbrush and find the path.

If I do that, things turn out fine.  And in a very small way, I get fleeting glimpses of what artists like Andrea Bocelli and Doc Watson see.  It’s beautiful.

The Astronaut Who Wouldn't Go Away

On the way to another tale, I found Ronald McNair.  I was doing some background work for a post on explorers and exploration when I read his compelling story, and it warrants its own treatment.

McNair, you may recall, was one of the 7 crew members who were killed when the rocket carrying the space shuttle Challenger blew up just after liftoff in January, 1986.  He was on the shuttle as what NASA called a “mission specialist,” in charge of several scientific experiments that were to be performed on the trip.  He never got to do that job, but when he died, he left an incredible and inspiring legacy of accomplishment.

Ron McNair was a true pioneer, and he started young.  He grew up in the 50’s in Lake City, South Carolina – a place and an era when racial segregation were both law and practice.  In the summer of 1959, when he was 9 years old, he went to the Lake City public library to borrow books.  The librarian refused to serve him, and young Ron refused to leave.  The police and his mother were called, and when the dust had settled, the librarian relented and he went home with the books.  The Lake City library is now named for him.

McNair was, in so many respects, an uncommon man and a brilliant student.  He earned a degree in engineering physics from North Carolina A&T University, then went on to a PhD in physics from MIT and a job as a physicist at a California research lab.  He became nationally recognized for his work in laser physics.

In 1978, NASA opened a competition for its astronaut program.  10,000 applied, and McNair was one of 35 selected.  He flew on Challenger in 1984, the second African-American to go into space.

But McNair’s passions went far beyond physics and space flight.  He played the saxophone and played it well, and he wanted to take his music into space.  He worked with a composer on a saxophone solo which was to become part of the composer’s upcoming album, and planned to record the solo during the 1986 Challenger mission.  The shuttle disaster prevented that, but I have to believe there’s a haunting saxophone solo somewhere out there amid all the cluttered noise of space.

If McNair were here to be interviewed today, looking back on a brilliant life in science, leavened with a love of music, I think he might harken back to that summer day in 1959 when he refused to leave the Lake City library without the books he wanted.  When I read about that, I thought about the college president I interviewed not long ago who told his students, “Don’t let anybody steal your dream.”  Ron McNair wouldn’t let anybody steal his.  He combined intelligence, curiosity and creativity with stubborn persistence.  It’s a pretty good recipe for success.

A host of posthumous honors have been heaped on McNair since his death – buildings named for him, scholarships established in his honor.  But I believe the one he would be proudest of is that Lake City library.  It stands as a simple but proud monument to – and a shining example of -- a kid who just wouldn’t go away.

Mike, Ron, Ferdinand and the Quest

With a good bit of attention focused on space in recent weeks – mainly about the New Horizons probe that has given us a new appreciation for the planet Pluto – I’ve been thinking about the broader idea of exploration, of mankind’s timeless yearning to find out what’s beyond the horizon.

My thoughts keep turning to two of my fellow Carolinians whose lives were cut short by that quest for the unknown, and to an historical figure whose name will be forever linked to the notion of exploration.

Mike Smith and Ron McNair were among the 7 crew members killed when the Challenger space shuttle blew up 73 seconds after launch on January 28, 1986.  Smith was the shuttle pilot, McNair was a mission specialist, in charge of scientific experiments on the craft. 

The shuttle disaster is seared in our memory.  There was a huge television audience for the launch because one of those on board was Christa McAuliffe, the first teacher in space.  If you weren’t watching at the time, you’ve seen the video -- the horrific dawning realization that something was going wrong, and then the explosion that scattered flaming debris across the Atlantic.

The space shuttle program was put on hold for almost 3 years after Challenger while investigators pieced together what happened and NASA corrected design flaws.  In September, 1988 the shuttle Discovery lifted off on a successful mission.  There were some who thought the shuttle program should be scrapped, that human beings should stop trying to explore the hostile environment of space.  But the quest for the unknown prevailed, even through another shuttle accident in 2003 that took the lives of the Columbia crew.

Not long after Challenger, NASA launched an unmanned space probe to study Venus, the place in our solar system the most like earth.  They named it Magellan, after the 16th century explorer, and I thought it was a fitting name for a venture into uncharted territory.

The original Magellan left Spain with a small fleet in 1519, determined to reach the East Indies by sailing west.  That meant he had to find a route around the tip of South America.  He did, and it’s named the Strait of Magellan in his honor.  Magellan sailed on across the Pacific, becoming the first to navigate it from east to west.  It was a perilous voyage.  Magellan battled starvation, disease, mutiny, and warfare.  In the Philppines, he was killed in a battle with natives.  But his second-in-command sailed on, back to Spain, proving conclusively that the earth is round.

Ferdinand Magellan was a resourceful man, determined and often ruthless.  In the mold of all great explorers, he was consumed by curiosity – the insatiable hunger to know what’s beyond what we can see.  It’s an essential part of being human.  Were it not, we would all still be living, elbow-to-elbow, in the place where humanity began.  It is an essential part of people like Mike Smith and Ron McNair and Christa McAuliffe.  And it will go on, disasters or not, as long as we are unwilling to sit still.  We explore earth and sea and sky and space – and the mysterious inner worlds of subatomic particles and nanotechnology -- no matter what the risk, because it is there, beckoning to us.

There are impressive memorials to Mike Smith, in his hometown of Beaufort, North Carolina, and to Ron McNair, in Lake City, South Carolina.  But the most fitting memorial to people like them and Ferdinand Magellan, is that we carry on their work.  We just won’t give up.

We yearn to know the unknown, even when we put ourselves in peril.  Part of the thrill is in the discovery, but maybe the best part is the journey itself.

Be Careful With Ancestors

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about my forebears.  We’ve just finished our first summer production of my Revolutionary War drama Liberty Mountain, a story about the settling of the southern colonies and their part in the winning of American independence.  Our 15 performances played to large and enthusiastic audiences in Kings Mountain, North Carolina, and we’re already at work on the 2016 summer production.

The centerpiece of Liberty Mountain is the 1780 Battle of Kings Mountain, where a fierce and determined band of Patriot frontiersmen defeated a larger, better-trained force of Loyalist militia.  Until that battle, the British were winning the war in the south.  But Kings Mountain turned the tide and led directly to the British surrender at Yorktown a year later.

I’ve long been interested in the Kings Mountain battle because one of my ancestors, Col. James Williams, was killed there.  He was, by reliable accounts, a brave warrior who led Patriot militia forces at a series of battles across Georgia and both Carolinas.  At Kings Mountain, his horse was shot out from under him as he led his troops up the mountainside, so he continued on foot until he was struck by a musket ball at the summit.  One account says that as he fell, he cried out, “For God’s sake, don’t give up the hill, boys!”  They did not.

Col. Williams and his exploits have long been part of my family’s lore, but until I got involved with Liberty Mountain, I didn’t know the details of the connection.   With the help of my friend Greg Payseur of the Broad River Genealogical Association, I’ve been able to trace the lineage back to Williams and several other ancestors who fought in the Revolution.

They’re all on my mother’s side of the family, the Coopers, some of whom migrated from England in the 1630’s to help found Philadelphia, then drifted south into the new frontier.  One of them, Fleet Cooper, set up shop in Sampson County, North Carolina where he became a committed rebel and a signer of the Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence.  There are historians who doubt the “Meck Dec” actually existed, but Cooper family lore insists it did – that it preceded the better-known Declaration and was the first time colonists put pen to paper and declared independence from England.  It’s also known that the Crown put a price on Fleet Cooper’s head, so he must have done something audacious to rile up the King.

I’m enjoying getting to know more about those folks who preceded me – something of how they lived, the ideals they believed in.  And in writing Liberty Mountain and seeing a talented and committed cast and crew bring it to life on stage, I’m in a way re-creating those people and their time.

Now, anybody who’s delved into personal history knows that every family has its abundant share of rogues, renegades and black sheep.  I’m sure the Coopers are no exception, but I’ve also come across a passel of them on my father’s side, the Inmans. 

Those folks hail from upstate South Carolina.  There were Inmans who fought bravely in the Revolution, but then there was the other bunch.  Years ago I met a judge in Alabama who had been doing some genealogical research on his South Carolina ancestors, who came from the same area as mine.  He said, with something of a twinkle in his eye, “The records show that some of the Inmans were chased out of Spartanburg County in the early 1800’s for horse thievery.”  Oh well, you take the bitter with the sweet.

Where did the horse thieves go?  Into Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi and beyond.  It was a wild and lawless frontier in those days, and it probably took folks like my renegades to tame it.

I relish both sides of my family tree, and find a checkered past quite useful.  When I act uprightly, I attribute some of it to the Coopers.  When I need to be ornery, I lean on the Inmans.  They both serve me well.

So yes, you have to be careful with ancestors.  They can be a source of pride or a darn good excuse.  I’m glad I have some of both.

For information on Liberty Mountain, visit www.kmlibertymountain.com.

Resurrecting Pluto

I was on a plane 16 years ago, headed for Florida, when I read about the downsizing of Pluto, its demotion by pointy-headed astronomers to “minor planet” status.  Pluto was my favorite planet because it had a neat name, one that Walt Disney appropriated for the world’s most lovable cartoon dog.  And these science types wanted to say it wasn’t a planet at all, just a big ball of ice out there on the edge of our solar system?  How dare they.

So you can imagine how excited I and millions of other Pluto-lovers are by having our special planet (we don’t give up just because some pointy-heads say we should) in the spotlight these days, as NASA’s New Horizons space probe arrives at Pluto after a 9-year, 3-billion-mile journey.  Snapping pictures and collecting data.  Putting dear old Pluto in the spotlight, giving even the pointy-heads a new appreciation for this remote, intriguing piece of our universe.

When I think about Pluto these days, I also think about my seatmate on that flight to Florida years ago.  She was about 75, I guessed – petite, lively of eye and pleasant of manner, traveling from her home in Connecticut to visit friends in Florida.  It was January and she was happy to leave the snow and ice of Connecticut behind, as she had done for a month the last dozen years.

But this year, the trip was different.  It was the first time she had made it alone, because she had buried her husband a month before.  She was handling it well, and the friends in Florida were a big help.  They had told her, “You’ll never be homeless,” and I realized that meant a lot more than a place of physical shelter, especially now.  She would spend a few days with each of her Florida friends and then fly back to Connecticut, knowing that it was not her only home.

We talked for awhile, and I remember hoping that one day, if faced with similar circumstances, I could handle a loss with as much grace and that I would have friends somewhere who would make sure I was never homeless.

Across the aisle from me was a man about the same age as my seatmate, a woman seated next to him that appeared to be his wife.  He was impatient with her, grumpy and out of sorts in a sour, scrunched-faced way.  He had two Bloody Marys and drifted off to sleep, and she looked relieved.  I wished I could introduce her to my seatmate and they could steal away together for a month of Florida sun.

But of course the wife would never do such a thing.  Somehow she had put up with his grumpiness all these years and here in the twilight she wasn’t likely to exchange the known for the unknown.  So she would probably keep putting up with him, but maybe kick him in the shins every once in awhile.  Someday, odds were, she would lose him, and miss him, grumpiness and all.

I went back to my newspaper and re-read the story about the downsizing of Pluto and pondered for awhile on the nature of loss and its aftermath.  I decided that I could never again think of our solar system in the same way, and it made me sad that poor little Pluto didn’t have anything like friends in Florida to ease the pain.  I thought of those astronomers downsizing Pluto as a bunch of old grumps, too – in need of a kick in the shins.

But now, 16 years later, with New Horizons putting my favorite planet in the news again, I’m happy.  For me and lots of other folks, Pluto will always be a planet – maybe the runt of the litter, but part of the litter, nonetheless.  I’ve always had a soft spot in my heart for runts.

The 100 Funniest Movies Ever

The Writers Guild of America, the organization that represents screen and television writers, is putting together a poll of the 100 funniest movies of all time.  They’ve asked their members to each submit a list of 15 films, and they’ll tally the votes to come up with the list of 100.

My nominees (in no particular order):

The Pink Panther

A Shot In The Dark

The Graduate

The Producers

Caddy Shack

Weekend At Bernie’s

Ferris Bueller’s Day Off

Broadcast News

Driving Miss Daisy

The Long, Long Trailer

Home Alone

My Cousin Vinny

Mrs. Doubtfire

The Birdcage

Shrek

What makes a movie funny?  To me, the bottom line is great comedic acting.  I love watching a talented actor who can take a mildly-funny line of dialogue and make it into something uproarious, using facial expression, body language, voice inflection, and – most importantly – timing.

The great comedians all share the quality of having an exquisite sense of when to speak and when to shut up.  A great comedian know that a moment of silence, in exactly the right place, speaks volumes.  Peter Sellers, the star of those wildly funny Inspector Clouseau films (including the two on my list) was a master of all of the comedic qualities, but especially timing.

What kind of funny movies are not on my list?  Those that are mean-spirited in their making fun, and those in which the only ingredient is stupid people doing truly stupid things.  If I laugh, and then immediately feel guilty about laughing, I know I’ve just witnessed bad humor.

The movies on my list aren’t unreservedly funny.  They contain elements of drama, conflict, even sorrow.  But the dark places make the humorous ones stand out and give the characters depth and texture.  One of my favorites, Driving Miss Daisy, is a perfect example.  Daisy Werthen is pushing back hard against the ravages of advancing age, and the humor in her combat touches something deep in us.

You’ll have your own list of funny movies, and your list is as good as mine.  We’ll see what my fellow Writers Guild members come up with, and then I’ll share the poll of the 100 funniest.

In Harm's Way In Faraway Places

Leslie Williams passed away a few days ago.  He was 95 years old, and one of the few living members of a famous World War Two command known as the Tuskegee Airmen.

It was a bold and controversial experiment the American military embarked on in 1939.  With war clouds gathering, in a day when the military and most of American society was racially segregated, Congress approved funds to recruit and train African-Americans as pilots.  Leslie Williams was among the first to join.  He and his fellow cadets learned to fly while they attended classes at nearby Tuskegee Institute.  The best-known unit that came out of Tuskegee was the 332nd Fighter Group.  They painted the tails of their P47’s and P51’s red and gained fame as the “Red Tails,” distinguishing themselves in combat in the skies over Europe.   Their exploits have been chronicled in books and movies.

I’ve long been fascinated by the story of the Tuskegee Airmen – partly because of their distinguished military record, partly because of the racial discrimination they had to overcome, and deal with constantly, to earn the right to get in those cockpits.  Leslie Williams, in an interview a few years ago, said, “In those days, no one had to salute blacks, but we could be court-martialed if we didn’t salute a white officer.  The discrimination was bad.”  But Williams and his fellow officers endured all that and prevailed. 

In a much broader sense, I’m intrigued by that entire generation of young American men and women who lived through Depression and brought their nation through a conflict of staggering proportions.  After World War Two, everything was different.  Those young Americans changed the world, and the world changed them.

I knew some of them intimately.  My father and three uncles served – two pilots, a soldier, a sailor.  In the post-war years, when I was a child and youth, they spoke sometimes in passing of their experiences – never of the moments in combats when they were in grave peril, but of the experience of being uprooted from a small Alabama town and sent to the ends of the globe.  In what they said, the memorabilia they brought back, in the letters to and from wives and girlfriends, I could feel their homesickness, their wonder at the places where they were stationed – England, France, Germany, Burma, China.  I came to realize that the war had altered them irrevocably in ways I could only glimpse and suspect.

I have taken liberally from those men’s war experience in my writing.  My first novel, Home Fires Burning, is set in a small southern town during the last year of the war – a story of the folks who stayed behind and supported the war effort, and the young men who came back, profoundly changed, to try to bring some order to their lives – to settle into jobs and raising families and being part of a community.

More importantly, what I sensed about my father and uncles and their time at war let me know that in all of us, there are things below the surface, rarely revealed, secrets of the heart, that nevertheless shape who we are and how we look at the world in vital ways.  It’s that life-below-the-surface thing, the subtext, the rough edges, that interests me most when I imagine characters.  As a writer, I can peer into my characters’ souls and feel things that are not obvious, but which are essential.

Leslie Williams survived the war and returned to his native California to become a successful businessman, and at age 60, finish law school and begin a 20-year legal career.  My father and uncles settled in my southern town and made lives in business and public service.  They were quiet lives, but they were meaningful lives.  They had gone in harm’s way in faraway places and come home to shape my own life.  I am forever in their debt.

Keeping An Open Mind

            My young friend will be going off to college this Fall, and I have but one piece of advice for him: Keep An Open Mind.

            Starting college is an exciting time, and I well remember that experience of my own in 1961.  I grew up in a small Alabama town of 4,000, and when I began my college career at the University of Alabama, the student body was double that.  My high school graduating class had 61 members; my freshman Psychology class had four times that many students.  Once I got used to the sheer size of things, it dawned on me that size was the least of the differences from my high school  years.  The big difference was in ideas.

            Take that Psychology class.  What I knew of human nature at that point, I had learned from observing the people around me in that small town – mostly good folks, a few not-so-good, a handful of oddballs.  But a semester of Psychology boggled my mind with the complexity of human experience, behavior, emotion.  Good golly, we were this incredible stew of creation, nature and nurture, pulled and tugged on by inner and outer forces that even so-called experts only vaguely understood.

            I believe I made a decent grade in that class, but the grade wasn’t the important thing.  It was the experience of having my young, unformed mind opened to ideas about the human enigma.  That, as much as anything, started me on a path toward becoming a storyteller, imagining characters with texture and complexities and rough edges, setting them loose in a time and place, confronting them with dilemmas to see what they would do, say and think.  It opened me to the notion of human possibility – and that, more than anything, is the essence of fiction writing.

            That notion of possibility served me well as a journalist, where I spent most of my years after college.  A character in one of my novels gives his definition of a conservative and a liberal.  “A conservative,” he says, “is a fellow who has made up his mind about almost everything.  And a liberal is a fellow who has made up his mind about almost nothing.”  A journalist, in order to be a fair and balanced and accurate as possible, has to keep an open mind.  If you approach a story with a lot of preconceived ideas, you’ve got blinders on.  You don’t ask the right questions, you don’t give people a fair shake.  So by this definition, a journalist has to be a liberal, and that has absolutely nothing to do with political persuasion.

            I thought about this business of keeping an open mind when I read a piece by John F. Burns, who recently retired after 44 years as a Pulitzer Prize-winning foreign correspondent for the New York Times.  Burns went just about everywhere, reporting on the beauty and bestiality of our chaotic world.  What he brought back from those years, he writes, “was an abiding revulsion for ideology.  In all its guises.”  Those guises included Mao’s China and Stalin’s Russia on the left, apartheid South Africa and Afghanistan’s Taliban on the right.  What made them alike was a brutal insistence on rigid ideology of one stripe or another.  Think and act like I insist, or I will kill you.  And they killed people by the millions.

            What disturbs Burns about coming home after 44 years is seeing and hearing the loyalists of particular political creeds – left or right – insisting on the same kind of rigid, lock-step thinking that he witnessed in other parts of the world.  “Our rights to think and speak freely have been won at great cost,” he writes, “and we abuse them at our peril.

            So back to my young friend going to college.  He will be exposed to a far wider world of people and thought than I was in 1961.  My university wasn’t even integrated until 1963.  Today’s colleges (most of them) are great melting pots of people from all over the world, with a rich stew of cultures and customs and ideas.  I hope my young friend will reach out to all that.  It will enrich his life in ways he may not realize until later, but it will make him a better man, a more rigorous thinker, a better citizen of the world.  I envy him.

Attack of the Wild Golfs

My friend John and I are thinking about writing a book entitled “Golf As Insanity.”  The subtitle would be either “That Elegantly Maddening Game” or “That Maddeningly Elegant Game.”  Either would be appropriate.  There are few games we know of that are both as elegant and maddening as golf, and that’s why we look upon the playing of said game as a form of insanity.

I say elegant, because there are few things more pristinely beautiful than the flight of a small white ball as it cleaves laser-straight through a Carolina blue sky and settles exquisitely on a green next to the pin.  And I say maddening because there are few things that will try one’s soul more profoundly than one’s repeated failed attempts to extract a little white ball from a sand trap.

Let me tell you about sand traps.  Golf instructors, who make good livings pretending that we amateur golfers actually have a glimmer of hope of playing the game decently, admonish us to refer to those bottomless pits of white misery as bunkers.  But the way my friend John and I play bunkers, they are sand traps.

My friend John is a woeful example of what can go wrong in a sand trap.  He once wagered on a round of golf with a good friend – no money involved, but whoever lost would mow the other guy’s lawn.  John was leading by 14 strokes as he approached the 17th hole, a par 3.  He put his tee shot in a small, unassuming sand trap next to the green.  17 strokes later, he coaxed the ball out of the sand trap.  The other guy’s lawn got a nice grooming, and the owners of the golf course presented my friend John with a nice plaque naming the sand trap in his honor.  John and I will repeat this story in our book about golf as insanity.

But sand traps are not the most insidious hazard my friend John and I encounter on a golf course.  Sand traps are insignificant compared to the wild golf, a rodent-like animal that lurks on the edges of fairways and greens.  A wild golf is lightning fast, so fast that one has never been photographed, and can only be seen as a blur of motion out of the corner of a golfer’s eye.  If a golfer hits a slightly-errant tee shot that lands somewhere near the edge of a wooded area, a wild golf will race out, grab the ball, and fling it into deep woods.  The same applies to balls that land near a body of water.  You can hear the faint cry of the miserable creature: “Errant!  Errant!”  My friend John and I have experienced this many times.

Wild golfs also burrow deep into sand traps.  If a golfer hits a shot that lands anywhere near the sand trap, the wild golf will dash from its hiding place, grab the ball, and drag it into the sand trap, burying it deep enough that only a dime-sized portion of the ball peeks out.  My friend John and I have also experienced this many times.

And then there are the wild golfs that lurk just under the seemingly-benign surface of greens.  The unsuspecting golfer lines up his putt and strokes the ball toward the hole.  The lurking wild golf, upon hearing the ball rolling overhead, will arch his back just enough to make a tiny alteration to the surface of the green that will cause the ball to veer slightly off-line and miss the cup by a sixteenth of an inch.  My friend John and I have lost count of the times we have experienced this.

John and I were heartened not long ago to read of the 103-year-old golfer in Florida who recorded the eighth hole-in-one of his career.  His first ace came 75 years ago, in 1939.  That he is still playing golf at the age of 103 is remarkable, but that’s not why my friend John and I are hoping to interview him for our book.  This guy either plays golf courses with no sand traps, or he has discovered a way to tame the wild golf.  Either makes him a hero, and when we reveal his secrets, we will all get rich and build our own golf course.  Guess what it will not have. 

Writers Are Dull People, And For Good Reason

Back a few years ago, I quit my job, a speaking role on television.  It was a great job and I worked with great people, but I had started scribbling stories, and I thought I might be able to make a living at what  I had discovered was my passion.  So I quit.

When I was doing that television job, I had a routine.  I worked at the station from 3:00pm until midnight.  So every morning I would rise, eat a bite of breakfast, and go to my computer.  It worked.  I found that if I could manage an hour or two of quiet, focused work every morning, the pages of my scribbling piled up and before long, I had a story. 

Without a regular job to go to five days a week, I had a great deal of extra time.  I thought, “Gee, I can do all of those things that I didn’t have time to do when I had a regular job!”  And for the first year, I tried.  It was an embarrassment of riches.  I dashed here and there, willy and nilly.  And at the end of that first year I realized that I had made myself a bit nuts.  My routine had collapsed.  I was so busy doing all the other stuff, I wasn’t doing what I quit my job to do.  Since then, I’ve worked hard to re-establish my routine.

I thought about all that the other day when I read about Mason Currey’s new book, Daily Rituals: How Artists Work.  Currey believes that having a routine is crucial to any kind of creativity, and he gives some good examples:

There is my favorite artist, Georgia O’Keefe.  She would rise every day at dawn and take a brisk stroll.  She always carried a sturdy walking stick because there were rattlesnakes in her New Mexico neighborhood.  I suppose keeping an eye out for rattlesnakes will do wonders to keep you focused while you stride along.  After the walk and a bit of breakfast, she would head to her studio.  She didn’t let the other details of her life get in the way of her painting.  She managed it all with an unwavering routine.

It would be hard to imagine a more successful classical composer than Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky.  His routine was similar to O’Keefe’s.  He rose early, ate breakfast, and went to his creative work.  He would take his lunch, then a walk, and finally another session with his music.

For those two successful creators, and many others, routine is key.  And it’s interesting to me that O’Keefe and Tchaikovsky included a daily walk.  Ideas can sneak up on us when we least expect them, often when we’re engaged in some relatively mindless activity such as putting one foot in front of the other, being quiet, enjoying the outdoors.

I think kids benefit from routine.  Our household lives are often chaotic, with young and old dashing in and out, the home just a momentary waystation enroute to the next activity.  But parents find that when they establish routines, and get the young folks to settle into them, things get calmer for everybody.  Okay, darlings: you can count on this thing happening at this time every day.  Kids don’t do well with uncertainty, and routine works against that.

We grownups would benefit from more routine.  What are the things that are really important in our lives?  And how can we arrange the rest so that we can get at the important stuff?  Routine helps separate wheat from chaff.

I’ve heard it said that successful writers, at heart, are incredibly dull people because they want to do the same thing at the same time every day.  But that’s the way the work gets done.  A good writer arranges life so that creative time is carved out of the day and it’s sacrosanct.  If having a routine makes you dull, maybe we should all be a little more dull.

William Faulkner once said, “If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the ’Ode On A Grecian Urn’ is worth any number of old ladies.”  It was a crude way of putting it, but Faulkner had his priorities straight.  He didn’t let old ladies or anything else get in the way of his writing.  And I’ll bet money he had a good routine.

What Is Winter For, Anyway?

In my novel The Governor’s Lady, Mickey Spainhour is suffering from congestive heart failure and figures she’s not long for this world.  Her son-in-law Pickett is running for President.  In January Mickey says, “I hope I make it to March.  I would hate to die in February.  It’s a miserable month.  If Pickett gets to be President, I want him to outlaw February.”  Mickey’s daughter Cooper, who has just taken office as Governor of the state, says, “I doubt Pickett will waste a minute on February.”

Well, he should.  Let me hasten to associate myself with Mickey’s opinion of February.  It can be, often is, a miserable – nay, a wretched – month.  Just ask Boston.  If I get to be President, I will outlaw February by Executive Order.

But…fair-minded fellow that I am, I admit that February does have one redeeming characteristic: Valentine’s Day, when my heart is full to bursting with thoughts of my own true love.  So I would move Valentine’s Day to March.  February also has the Chinese New Year, but the Chinese can deal with February as they please.

One thing about winter in the Carolinas, where I live, is that it may grab you by the throat, but not for long.  Even in abominable February, we always have a mild and pleasant day when winter loosens its grip and gives us some hope that cold and gloom are not a permanent state of affairs.  Most of our winters here are mild, and maybe we don’t appreciate them enough.  Even February.

What is winter for, anyway?  It makes us hunker down, gives us grim looks and sniffles and a bad outlook on life.  On the surface, winter seems to have little redeeming social value.  But perhaps Mother Nature knows what she is doing when she gives us winter.  Maybe she intends it as a time to just be quiet and wait and listen to the secrets locked deep in our hearts, to discover anew who we are and where we’re bound.

We modern humans are unaccustomed to silence.  We surround ourselves with recorded noise and idle chatter.  Much of our daily existence is filled, as the Bard said, “with sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

But Nature is smart enough to spend the winter in quiet contemplation.  Deep in the icy ground, or under the awesome silence of snow, animal and seed are locked in winter’s thrall, listening to the secret ticking of the great clock of the universe.  The hands move slowly, as nature’s creations regenerate and replenish, gathering strength for the noisy explosion of spring.  Nature knows when to dash about madly and when to bide her time, waiting and listening.

As I write this, the wind is howling outside, rattling the shutters and shaking the bare limbs of the trees.  The temperature will dip to 20 degrees tonight, even colder tomorrow.  But I am hunkered down inside – some peaceful hours at my desk working on a new book.  Soft music on the stereo, a cup of hot tea, my imagination.  A time of discovery, possibility, serendipity.  And Valentine’s Day is just ahead, hearts and flowers, my own true love.

Okay, maybe February is okay.  But just.  Still, like Mickey Spainhour, I hope I make it to March.  I’ll leave it to you to figure out if she does.