Pack Ruthlessly

We have established that I use a small duffel bag with an outside pouch containing a sleep mask, foam earplugs, and an Apple AirTag tracker. This describes what goes inside the duffel.

The general rule is to be ruthless in answering the question: do I really need this item for this trip? For 40 years I have used three different dandruff shampoos, based on three different chemistries. I rotate the shampoos on a daily basis. But the ruthless packing rule requires me to leave all of them at home. I do not have room for all three, even in 100 mL bottles.

The same applies to technology. I prefer to carry a laptop, and if that is not possible, a tablet. But the ruthless packing rule tells me that both these occupy too much space in my duffel bag, so I travel with an iPhone.

Let’s see if we can approach this systematically.

The first stop is my shaving kit, otherwise known as a toiletry bag. I have the smallest shaving kit I have ever seen. It was a gift from Delta Airlines. They gave it to me one evening when my one day out-and-back trip turned into an overnight stay. The bag is about 6.5 inches long, 4 inches wide, and 2.5 inches tall. I use it in conjunction with a one-quart Ziplock bag containing a travel-sized bottle of Afta by Mennen After Shave Skin Conditioner, a travel-sized bottle of saline nasal spray, and a 100 mL bottle of Dr. Bronner’s Castile Soap.

I use the body wash and shampoo that hotels provide, but if they do not provide these, I use the Dr. Bronner’s as both body wash and shampoo. When I shave, I use the conditioner that the hotels provide as a shaving cream. If the hotel provides none, I use the Afta by Mennen as both shaving cream and after shave.

That takes care of the Ziplock bag of liquids. In the bottom of my shaving kit, protected by a small plastic bag, is a photocopy of my passport. I never leave my passport in my hotel room, not even in the little safes they provide. If I am mugged or lose my passport some other way, I can take the copy to an embassy or consular office and get the documentation I need to get back home.

The next item in the kit, also contained in a small plastic bag, is an emergency kit of sorts: a few band-aids, some Alka-Seltzer tablets, and a small sewing kit, courtesy of Hilton Hotels, which I have carried for 30 years or more and have never used. You never know . . .

I have a three-section flat pill box which contains the three things every traveler should carry: aspirin or ibuprofen, Benadryl, and Imodium AD. The rest of the bag is filled with a Bic disposable razor, styptic pencil, comb, stick deodorant, travel toothbrush, and small toothpaste tube. I used to put the toothpaste tube in the Ziplock bag of liquids, but security no longer seems to care about toothpaste.

As for technology, I carry a 10,000mAH rechargeable battery (nowadays called a “power bank”) and the cables necessary to recharge my iPhone and AirPods. The power bank is recharged using a converter cube that fits any electrical outlet, and has two USB outlets. I do not carry a transformer, as the USB outlets handle all my technology devices.

My iPhone is loaded with e-books and audio books. That helps with the long flight.

Now, my packing philosophy. To begin, every article of clothing in the bag is rolled into as tight a cylinder as I can manage, and secured with a rubber band. This seems to give me the maximum efficiency in packing. I carry one pair of slacks in the bag, also rolled into a cylinder. As this year’s trip was during a heat wave, I packed a pair of shorts. I pack one pair of socks and one pair of undershorts per day of the trip. These will be thrown away after they are worn, so I pack old socks and old undershorts. This means a trip to Walmart to buy replacement socks and undershorts before the trip; otherwise, I would have to go commando after a trip until I could get to Walmart.

I generally wear polo shirts, and when they show signs of wear, I put them on hangers in my workshop. They are perfect for vacations: who cares what strangers think of my worn collar or the pinhole in my shirt? I wear each shirt two days: the first day with an undershirt, the second day without the undershirt. After the first day, the undershirt goes into the trash, and after the second day, the shirt goes into the trash. This means that, at the end of the trip, my duffel has room for the souvenirs that Kathy buys that she cannot fit into her suitcase.

My recent trip was 17 days during a heat wave, so my packing of shirts was as follows: seven polo shirts, seven undershirts, and three tee shirts that were 30 or more years old. All ended up in the trash.

Believe it or not, all of these fit so neatly in my duffel that I was able to include a flannel shirt for the airline flight, and one of those neck pillows which helped with sleep during the long flight over the Atlantic.

There are other ways, of course, to pack for long trips. You can plan on doing laundry during the trip, or on having the hotel do laundry for you. The latter is not cheap, but it is an option.

Thus ends my discourse on what I have learned during my years as a road warrior. I hope it helps.

Do This, Don't Do That

Unlike those poor airmen who flew in B-17s during World War II, we travel in relative comfort. Our cabins are pressurized and the climate is controlled. But there are a couple of things about the cabin that demand our attention.

The first is the temperature. That is controlled by the flight crew. I always find the cabin a tad bit on the cool side, so I carry something to keep me warm. This summer, in the midst of a monstrous heat wave, I flew with a flannel shirt over my short-sleeved shirt.

The second item of note is the cabin pressure. The cabin is pressurized, but never to one atmosphere, the air pressure we experience at sea level. Instead, it is pressurized to between 75 to 82% of sea-level pressure. This corresponds to the pressure at an elevation of between 6,000 and 8,000 feet. The fact that cabin pressure is not one atmosphere leads to a few side effects.

If you want to get drunk fast, try drinking on an airplane at these reduced pressures. There is a lower blood oxygen level at reduced pressures, and this results in a quicker drunk. So, if you want to get drunk fast, and possibly make friends with an air marshal, drink alcoholic beverages on an airplane.

The other side effects that have been reported are ear popping or ear pain, sinus pressure, headache, fatigue, bloating, and a slightly higher heart rate. Cabins are pressurized to a lower pressure to ease metal fatigue on the air frame that repeated pressurizing and de-pressurizing causes. It is a trade-off, and not a very happy one.

Recirculated air on an airplane is also a problem. I am told that somewhere between 25 and 50% of the air on an airplane is recirculated, and that each airplane has HEPA filters that remove 99.97% of dust, bacteria, and viruses. That sounds like a pretty decent filtration system; however, one sneeze contains up to 200,000,000 individual virus particles. If the recirculation rate is low (25%) and the filters are working at 99.97% efficiency, then every sneeze produces 12,000 virus particles that are neither purged by fresh air nor removed by the filters. So, if you have ever returned from an airline trip feeling like you have a mild case of the flu, you probably did not imagine it.

Recirculated air is also dry air, which contributes to dehydration. This helps accentuate the problem with drinking alcoholic beverages on the airplane. It also dries out the mucous membranes. I carry a nasal saline spray to help with that. Many people spend the entire flight drinking water, which is fine if you plan to spend you trip in the lavatory. But whatever you choose to do, I strongly encourage you to drink fluids that come from a bottle or a can. Under no circumstances should you drink airplane “tap” water. It tastes awful!

I’ve heard some theories as to why this is so: the water tanks are not disinfected frequently enough; they are not flushed often enough; the water in the tank is a hodge-podge of water from every city the airplane visits. I don’t know if any of these theories are true, or not. I know only that the water, and anything made with that water (coffee, tea), tastes terrible.

Probably the most important rule for me involves checked baggage. My rule is: never check a bag.

I realize that rule cannot be followed at all times. You cannot put your kid on a plane for a semester at college with only carry-on luggage. I myself have check a bag or two in the last 20 years. But I avoid it if at all possible.

I will have more to say about checked bags and how to pack for a long trip. My previous record was 14 days in a small duffel bag and a briefcase. My current record is 17 days in a small duffel bag, no briefcase.

If I counted correctly, our recent vacation involved seven airports and four train stations. I have no idea how many travelers I crossed paths with during that time; a wild guess of 150,000 travelers seems to me to be a reasonable, probably low, estimate. If that is correct, then 149,999 of them were traveling with hard-sided suitcases on wheels. There were several sizes: tiny suitcases pushed by three-year-olds; suitcases sized for overnight trips; larger suitcases for a long weekend; suitcases about half the size of a U-Haul trailer.

The one traveler out of 150,000 who didn’t have a hard-sided suitcase on wheels? That would be me.

I travel with a duffel bag. It is not very large: about 20 inches long, 10 inches wide, and 12 inches tall. I prefer it because of its soft sides, which means it can fit under the seat in front of me, even on small commuter jets. Hard-sided bags generally cannot fit under the seat and have to be stored in the overhead bins. These bins fill up quickly, especially on commuter jets, and as a result, many of these bags get gate-checked, which usually means a trip to baggage claim, a fate I prefer to avoid.

As for navigation through airports, the wheeled cases cannot be beat. Still, I prefer the duffel bag. It has a shoulder strap, so I don’t always have to carry the bag by hand.

The duffel bag has an outside zipper pouch, which contains one of those sleep masks that in theory allows you to sleep on an airplane, a pair of foam earplugs, and an Apple AirTag tracker. What goes inside the duffel? I will cover that next week.

Air Travel

I took my first commercial airline flight in the summer of my 25th year, on a carrier that no longer exists. This was before the Airline Deregulation Act of 1978 was signed into law by President Carter. I was lucky: I was able to sample air travel before airplanes became the Greyhound buses of the sky.

There are pluses and minuses to deregulation. On the plus side, deregulation resulted in lower air fares. I doubt that I could have afforded to fly my family of six around the country at the fare levels that existed before deregulation. No longer is air travel reserved only for the wealthy.

Now, the minuses.

Most airlines have a “pack ‘em in” mentality. The distance between seats has been shrinking steadily since 1979. At six feet one inch (at least, before gravity began to work on me) I find the distance between the seat back in front of me and my kneecaps to be vanishingly small, so much so that if the person in the seat in front of me reclines, I am trapped, and quite possibly in need of orthopedic surgery.

Then there is the “yoga pants” problem.

Back when airfares were dear, and air travel was a treat, we dressed accordingly. For many years I was a “coat and tie” traveler. The dress code certainly has changed. I no longer travel in coat and tie, but I do take care to be fully dressed. I do not show skin: I don’t want to scare the children. Alas, many men and women seem not to follow Batten’s rule.

As I am not yet dead, I have no objection to women who dress alluringly when traveling. My objection is to both men and women who, because of their body types or BMIs, are dressing the very opposite of alluringly. There probably should be a law that allows airlines to remove men and women dressed in such a manner as to cause nightmares for any rugrats on the plane. Yoga pants are not for everybody.

Airport security is a major reason why I despise flying. The airports are packed, and the lines to clear security are excruciatingly long. Worse, the TSA is retroactive, not proactive. Years ago, some nitwit decided to pack a bomb in his shoe, and for years thereafter we ended up taking our shoes off before going through security. I am glad that has finally changed, but it should have changed eons ago.

Another retroactive rule has to do with liquids: each liquid has to be less than 100 mL in volume (roughly 3.5 fluid ounces), and all liquids must fit in a one liter (roughly one quart) Ziplock bag. We used to have to take the Ziplock bag out of our luggage and run it separately through security, but that appears to have changed. I haven’t had to pull the old Ziplock out during my past several flights, but the rule that all liquids must fit in the one liter bag remains. It really does seem to be observed in the breach. On my last seven flights I had two Ziplock bags filled with liquids or pastes. The second bag contained the liquids I could do without if security asked me to throw away one of the bags. No one in the three countries I visited said a word about the second bag.

I have reached the point in life where I will avoid flying if at all possible. Put me behind the wheel of my F-150, point me in the direction of the open road, and let me go. But I can’t drive to Europe, and I don’t always have the time to drive long distances, so flying does become inevitable at times.

That is enough complaining for now. In my next discourse I will reveal what I have learned not to do from my 48 years as an airline passenger.

McHale’s Navy, Season Four

Back in the pre-streaming, pre-DVR, pre-DVD, pre-VHS, pre-Betamax days, if you wanted to see a television show, you had to be sitting in front of the television set at the appointed hour. If you missed the show, your only hope was that the missing episode would be aired as a summer re-run. The odds for that were not good. Take, for example, the comedy show McHale’s Navy, which ran from October of 1962 through April of 1966. There were 36 shows for each of the first three seasons, 30 for the last season. There are only 52 weeks in the year, meaning that only 16 of the 36 shows for seasons one through three, or 22 of the 30 shows for season four, could show up as a re-run. That assumes that the show was not replaced during the summer with some other show. Man, were those primitive days!

It was a very funny show, one of ABC’s best. It introduced me to Ernest Borgnine, who was a well-known serious actor before then (Marty, From Here to Eternity). I don’t know if he did any comedy before McHale’s Navy, but he was excellent in his role as Lt. Cmdr. Quinton McHale. (It seems that he was a funny guy even into his nineties!) The show also introduced me to Tim Conway, possibly the funniest man who ever lived. During season one of that show I saw a very young (20 or 21 years old), lovely Claudine Longet for the first time. There were several other actors who advanced their careers with that show, Gavin MacLeod being one.

The premise was simple. Set during World War II, McHale was a hale-fellow-well-met who had trouble with authority. His PT boat was stationed on a Pacific island away from the main base, where his crew members made booze and partied, usually with nurses from the base. Strictly verboten, mind you. They even had a POW, Fuji Kobiaji, who didn’t appear on any list of POWs that the navy kept. Their nemesis was played perfectly by Joe Flynn as Captain Wallace Binghamton, aka, Old Leadbottom.

The show managed to be topical, in a funny way. In one episode, McHale was up for a transfer back in the States to raise money for the war, when he lost out to another PT boat commander, LTJG John F. Kennedy. The episode was entitled “Send Us A Hero” and aired in January of 1963.

I loved the first 108 episodes of that show, but season four was a disaster. While PT boats were used in the European theater of World War II, the idea that McHale and his band of rowdies had to be transferred to the Mediterranean stretched my imagination. Why did they do that? I enjoyed the South Pacific setting (even if was only California), and if I wanted to see some European theater action, I could, and did, watch Combat! Or 12 O’Clock High. I know that PT boats were used in the European theater: the fellow who captained the PT boat that evacuated MacArthur from the Philippines to Australia did serve on a PT boat in the European theater. But this change didn’t make any sense. Because of the change in location, the plots seemed a little forced. They should have killed the show after three successful seasons, so that the show would end on an upbeat note.

To this day, we have a shorthand in our house for a show that has gone on too long: Season Four, McHale’s Navy. Recently I have seen two shows that earned the epithet of Season Four, McHale’s Navy. They are Grantchester and Call The Midwife.

When I first saw Call The Midwife I really enjoyed it. It was based on the memoirs of Jennifer Worth, who worked in London’s East End as a midwife with an Anglican nursing order. The actress who played her, as Jenny Lee, stayed with the show for three seasons, then called it quits. The show did not go downhill immediately thereafter, but the quality did decline, seemingly a little bit each year. Although I have not read any of Worth’s three memoirs, I had the feeling that they ran out of her material fairly quickly, and began improvising. Characters came and went, but the show soldiered on, year after year, with decreasing quality or interest on my part. The show that started in the 1950s is now in the 1970s, and I can’t take it any more.

I suffered through this year’s episode, completing season 15 begrudgingly, to learn the good news that the show is taking a break. They will do a movie (made for TV?) that is a prequel, and then pick the show back up in a couple of years. I will not be watching. Season Four, McHale’s Navy.

Kathy and I spend most of our television viewing time watching murder mysteries, so when we learned of a “new” murder mystery (2014) called Grantchester we were intrigued. The premise of the show was that an Anglican priest in the town of Grantchester (near Cambridge, UK), a deeply flawed man, teamed up with an atheist detective inspector to solve murders in the 1950s. The priest, played by James Norton, suffered from PTSD (he served in World War II), alcoholism, and terrible luck with his love life. I know that a detective priest is stretching the imagination a bit (sorry, Father Brown), but it worked, at least for almost four seasons. The fourth season became a bit preachy (why can’t we just be entertained without lecturing?) and Norton left the role for an improbable reason at the end of season four.

Did the show end then? No! We were given another priest who, defying all rules of logic, picked up where the first priest left off. How many priests are actually amateur detectives? Well, according to this show, there are at least three. By the time the third priest-turned-detective showed up, I was over it. The current season, season 11, is the final season. I say, HALLELUJAH! McHale’s Navy, Season Four.

There are other examples (Shetland is one) but you get the idea. Too many shows go on for too long.

And by now you have surely concluded that I watch too many murder mysteries. To which I say, I’m always looking for new ideas. I believe I have the perfect murder method, and have held on to that belief for years. I have yet to see it show up in any detective show, but if you ever see a drowning in an aeration basin, you will know that the idea was stolen from me.

Honey Got A Booty Like Pow Pow Pow

The radio hosts were interviewing Robert Matthew Van Winkle. I did not know the name, but I guessed he was a relative of Rip Van Winkle. Wrong. Van Winkle is actually quite famous, but under his stage name, Vanilla Ice. That name I had heard. The hosts were apparently about the same age as my children, teenagers in the 1990s, and they recounted just how rapturous they became when they heard the opening bars to Ice Ice Baby. While I knew the name, it occurred to me that I had never actually heard the song. Spotify helped me correct that lapse in my education. It was, to my surprise, a rap or hip-hop tune (to this day I do not know the difference between the two) and apparently it was one of the first of that genre to become a big hit. 

I quickly decided that this tune, no matter how famous, was not my cup of tea. My music is jazz from the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, and samba and bossa nova from the 1960s. But it did start me thinking about why different generations have such vastly different tastes in music.  

As best I can tell, we become bonded to the music we hear in our pre-teen through teenage years. The quality of that music seems not to matter at all. It is our music because it is of our time. So, for me, it is the big band music I listened to at night as I fell asleep. Of course, during the day, I listened to the Raleigh rock and roll radio station, and some of that music resonates with me today. But my real love is big band music.  

I associate that music with a very happy time in my life. My parents would see to it that no harm came to me, which gave me a feeling of security that vanished the moment I became an adult on my own in the world. A happy childhood, a feeling of security, and warm memories associated with particular music on the radio fused in my brain in such a way that the first few bars of Take The A-Train never fail to make me smile. Something similar is probably operating in the brains of the younger generations, the ones who apparently think that rap is actually music. 

Still, one would think that at some time the quality of the music would come to the forefront. There are some wonderful lyrics to my big band music. Not all are winners, but you can hardly go wrong with a Hoagy Carmichael tune with lyrics by Mitchell Parrish or Ned Washington, or just about anything by Cole Porter. The tendency to write quality lyrics tended to fade a bit in the 1950s (“You ain’t nothing but a hound dog, cryin’ all the time”), but there were some winners even in that decade (“Darling, you send me”). And, yes, even the 1960s had its star lyricists, such as George Harrison (“Something in the way she moves attracts me like no other lover”).  

Compare those lyrics with “Honey got a booty like pow pow pow”. 

Brad Upton does a comedy skit about children and their music, which he calls the worst music he has ever heard in his life. You should watch it on YouTube. He did ask his son to listen to Harrison’s Something and describe what he heard. What his son heard was “Honey got a booty like pow pow pow”. 

Upton did all fathers a favor, though, in teaching us how to convince the kiddies to change radio stations: just sing along. 

“Honey got a booty like pow pow pow.” 

“Dad!” 

“You can call me Flintstone ‘cause I can make your Bedrock.” 

“Dad! STOP!!” 

The Dark and Dismal Days

Biltmore Village is a collection of historic buildings that housed the workers who constructed George Vanderbilt’s Biltmore Estate. Those Tudor-style buildings now house a hodge-podge of artsy fartsy businesses: boutiques, art galleries, restaurants, and a high-end hotel. On the outskirts of Biltmore there were five businesses on the west side of the main thoroughfare through the village: MacDonalds, Moe’s Southwest Grill, Asaka Japanese restaurant, Long John Silver, and a Shell gasoline station. These were spread out on both sides of the Swannanoa River.

Hurricane Helene damaged all five businesses in late September of 2024. The MacDonalds was leveled and rebuilt, and the Shell station was damaged but not so badly that it had to be demolished. Both are now back in business. The Long John Silver fish joint, which shares a driveway with the Shell station, suffered a similar fate as the Shell station: damaged but repairable. The folks who owned that business decided to close it down. As for Moe’s and Asaka, their buildings were gutted by the flood waters. Moe’s has relocated to higher ground. I have heard no news about Asaka. It is probably gone for good.

I never darkened the doors of three of those restaurants. I was, though, a frequent visitor to the MacDonalds and the Shell station. My interest in the Shell station was simple: it housed the Dunkin’ Donuts nearest to my house.

When the Shell station reopened, it was without the Dunkin’ franchise. They substituted instead something called the Citi Grill. I’ve never eaten there. Nothing personal: I just miss the Dunkin’.

For a bit more than a year and a half Kathy and I have been frequenting the Dunkin’ franchise on Hendersonville Road. This, for me, is a real inconvenience. The Shell station Dunkin’ was a mere one mile (as the crow flies) from my house. The Dunkin’ on Hendersonville Road is a good six miles away, again, as the crow flies. Worse, it is past my school, so I cannot stop by on my way to work to pick up sustenance.

But then came good news. The Long John Silver building was to be repurposed as a Dunkin’! Oh, happy day! And so began The Wait for the remodeling to be completed and the store to open.

Thursday’s email from Newsbreak informed me that the Dunkin’ would open on the next day, Friday the 17th. Kathy and I hit the place at 6:30 AM, only to find it closed. Apparently, there was one inspection that did not get completed in time. I saw that it was open on my way home from school, so I made a note to stop by Saturday morning and indulge my appetite for Bavarian Kreme donuts. And so, this morning, I made my inaugural visit to this brand-new Dunkin’.

It is also, most likely, my last visit. They do not make Bavarian Kreme donuts. In fact, they told me, they do not make any donuts that are covered in powdered sugar.

Let that thought ricochet around in your brain for a minute or two: no donuts covered in powdered sugar.

It’s un-American, I tell you!

$110?!?!?!?!

When we bought the house in Asheville, we knew that, sooner or later, we would move there. Thus, Kathy did not furnish the house with the same cheap stuff we used to furnish the other rental properties. I agreed with this philosophy, but in retrospect I find one exception: the kitchen trash can.

Back in 2006 I bought a house in Madison, Georgia. I had spent five years living in apartments, so I needed lots and lots of items for the house, such as a lawn mower, trash cans, beds, sofas, etc. I bought a Rubbermaid kitchen trash can for the kitchen. It was a standard 13-gallon container. I still have it: it resides in my basement office, semi-retired, as it no longer receives the workout it did when it was in the kitchen. I have no idea how much I paid for it, but I am willing to bet that the cost was less than $20. And here it is, still functional after 20 years. In fact, it could pass for new.

Somewhere in the past Kathy became familiar with the Simplehuman brand of trash cans. She had a bathroom Simplehuman, very small, operated with a foot pedal, and she really liked it. They do look nice and modern, with their sleek, stainless-steel construction. At any rate, she decided that nothing less than a Simplehuman trash can would do for the Asheville kitchen. Ever mindful of the slogan (probably created by a never-married fellow, or a vengeful wife) “Happy wife, happy life,” I took myself off to Lowes in order to make Kathy happy.

I found her trash can, but it did not make me happy. Not at all! The sticker price for that trash can was $110. One hundred ten dollars for a kitchen trash can! True, it did have a foot pedal that opened the top of the container, whereas my Rubbermaid did not. Still, it seemed to me that $110 was an exorbitant price to pay for a can that will end up holding stinking kitchen garbage.

It got worse. This trash can uses 11-gallon trash bags, not the standard 13-gallon bags that you can find everywhere, occasionally on sale. Take a guess as to the only manufacturer I found who made 11-gallon trash bags. If you guessed Simplehuman, you are correct.

Nonetheless, I bought the damned thing. I now special-order Simplehuman trash bags from Amazon. And as you might have guessed by virtue of the fact that I am writing about it, at the four-year mark it began to malfunction.

Our dog Lucy was having a sleepover with her cousin, Coco. Kathy and I went out to dinner, and when we returned, we found the kitchen trash can lid open, and garbage strewn all over the floor. Coco is a clever pup who figured out how to open the lid by stepping on the foot pedal. But the lid had stopped returning to its closed position, giving Coco time to retrieve her treasure, as I am told that is what one man’s trash is. Our expensive trash can no longer worked properly.

(All the while I am remembering my 20-year-old Rubbermaid, which still works.)

I took the trash can apart and found the guilty party: a piston that was supposed to slowly close the lid was now frozen in the “up” position. On the Simplehuman website I looked for the link to order replacement parts. I searched in vain. Simplehuman apparently does not want you to repair their products. Next stop: Amazon. I found many replacement pistons, but none that fit the Simplehuman exactly. I took my best guess at a piston that might work. They sent me a packet of five pistons. None worked.

I removed the old piston completely, and now the lid slams shut, instead of gently lowering itself. That will probably be a good thing for when Coco does another sleepover.

I am quite sure that Kathy would like a new Simplehuman for the kitchen, but she will have to make do with the current one for the next, say, 16 years. Simplehuman trash cans look great, but they are not simple enough, and this human is frustrated with them.

Book of the Year

Those of you who have followed my ramblings over the years know that somewhere near the end of the year I note the best book I have read that year. And if you have followed my ramblings closely, you will know that my book of the year is seldom a book that was published that year. In fact, I think the only time that happened was in 2021, when a book commemorating Yuri Gagarin’s space flight, published 60 years after the fact, was my choice for book of the year. A handful of the books I read this year were actually published this year, but none made the cutoff for my coveted award.

Now the numbers. I read 25 books this year (not counting the three meditation books I read each year, one page per day). I have six books in progress, but with absolutely no chance of finishing any of them before the first of January. (Two are by the chemist Linus Pauling: I may not have those finished by this time next year. Sheesh!)

The first book I read this year was a tome by Peter Zeihan, entitled The End of the World is Just the Beginning. I read it because it was a free ebook from the Wall Street Journal. The WSJ subscription is ridiculously expensive, and I believe they gave these free ebooks (one per month) to help with the pain of paying the annual subscription. That did not work for me, and apparently it did not work for other subscribers, as they have stopped giving away these books. At any rate, the only reason I even mention this book is that I have to start this article somewhere. Don’t waste your time with this one.

I read a fair amount about local lore and my new/old home state of North Carolina. (I was born in the state, and lived here until almost my 26th birthday. I spent the next 44 years in other states: Maryland, Virginia, and Georgia. We have been back in the state for the last four years.) Three of the local lore books were Forgotten Tales of North Carolina (Tom Painter and Roger Kammerer), Spooky North Carolina and Spooky Great Smokies (both by S. E. Schlosser). These were light-hearted, fun reads. Two of the books took place primarily in my home county of Johnston, which for some unknown reason is now known as JoCo. See what happens to a place when you move away? These two books involved the moonshiner Percy Flowers. The first book I reviewed earlier, and I do not recommend it at all. The second book, Lost Flowers, by Perry D. Sullivan, was much better. If you have any interest in the life of that legendary moonshiner, you should read the Sullivan book.

Looking back at my list of books, I am shocked at the number of books I read on the topic of the War for Southern Independence and the Reconstruction Era that followed that war. As for the war, I can recommend The Civil War: A Narrative – Fort Sumter to Perryville, by Shelby Foote. This is the first of three volumes and it was clearly written by a novelist. I am working on the second volume at present. Honorable mention goes to Glory Road (Bruce Catton), A Southern View of the Invasion of the Southern States and War of 1861-1865 (Captain Samuel A’Court Ashe), War in the Mountains (J. L. Askew), and North Carolina as a Civil War Battleground: 1861 – 1865 (John Gilchrist Barrett).

As for Reconstruction, there is no finer work than a book by Claude Bowers, published some 50 years or so after the end of Reconstruction, entitled The Tragic Era: The Revolution After Lincoln. If you believe that Reconstruction was a net positive for the country, this book will change your mind. I nearly chose it as book of the year, even though it came out in 1930. Honorable mention goes to Reconstruction: Destroying a Republic and Creating an Empire, by James Ronald Kennedy.

Another book that deals very loosely with the War for Southern Independence and Reconstruction was actually published years before the war. A View of the Constitution of the United States of America (William Rawle) was a textbook used at West Point during Robert E. Lee’s days there. Rawle’s view is that secession is a right reserved to the States under our Constitution. Revisionist historians tend to overlook this detail. And recall that Rawle was writing at a time when some of the framers of the Constitution were still alive. Who has a better purchase on the truth: a contemporary of the framers, or a revisionist writing two centuries after the fact?

The rest of my reading is a hodge podge. I reviewed Triggernometry: A Gallery of Gunfighters (Eugene Cunnigham) earlier this year. It nearly became my book of the year. It is a swell read. Seven Wonders of the World (Lowell Thomas) was published in the mid-1950s, and has been sitting on my bookshelf since the late 1950s. I finally got around to reading it. I give it positive marks, but it is far from book of the year material. The Wrong Stuff: How the Soviet Space Program Crashed and Burned (John Strausbaugh) reinforced the opinion I had of the Soviet space program after reading the Gagarin book a few years ago. My wife suggested I read Orbital (Samantha Harvey) which was a novel about 24 hours on the International Space Station. No. No. No. Don’t bother. We agreed on that one.

Flashman: A Novel, by George MacDonald Fraser, was a good read, as was Shooter: The Autobiography of the Top-Ranked Marine Sniper, by Gunnery Sgt. Jack Coughlin and Capt. Casey Kuhlman, with Donald A Davis. Clearly ghost written, but entertaining. Another biography I enjoyed was Hollywood or Bust! By June Wilkinson. The word “bust” in that title definitely is a double entendre. Wilkinson was one of the most popular models in Playboy magazine during the ‘50s and ‘60s. I found the book entertaining, but I was saddened to learn that she died just a few weeks after I finished her book.

I am not happy with the Boy Scouts (or whatever they are called these days). I gave away my 1963 Boy Scout Handbook a few years ago, and replaced it with Deep-river Jim’s Wilderness Trail Book: Outdoor Life and Sports (written by Deep-river Jim, who I believe to be Clayton Holt Ernst). I recommend Of Boys and Men, by Richard V. Reeves. My personal opinion is that we are doing a poor job of encouraging boys to assume the manly virtues. You are welcomed to your own opinion. I also read The Politics of Prudence by Russell Kirk. I should try to read a book by the late Dr. Kirk every year. He was a sage.

So, we have covered 24 of the 25 books. It is time for the book of the year, written in 1998 by Steven Pressfield. Who doesn’t enjoy a ripping good historical fiction, and what better event is there than the Battle of Thermopylae? I enjoyed Gates of Fire tremendously and heartily recommend it to you.

Happy reading in 2026!

And A 'Possum In A Pear Tree

I am getting soft in my old age. My Christmas shopping used to begin on December the 24th. This year I did my shopping on the 22nd.

Let’s begin with the one thing you should know about me: I hate crowds. For that reason, I have avoided shopping malls. My recollections from the dark and dismal days of my youth tell me that shopping malls are crowded places. But this year, what I wanted to buy was to be had in a shopping mall named, remarkably, the Asheville Mall. So, I girded my loins and entered into the pit.

I have lived in Asheville four years and change. In that time, I have been in the Asheville Mall perhaps three or four times, if we discount my trips to Barnes and Noble, which has its own outdoor entrance. Those three or four trips did not prepare me for what I found at 10:00 AM on the Monday before Christmas.

The place was empty.

I had heard rumors regarding the death of the shopping mall. Here in Asheville, there was news earlier this year about the departure of the J. C. Penny store from the mall, an event that followed the departure of the Sears store some years ago. Still, it was shocking to see so little foot traffic just three days before Christmas. I wondered just how long a mall can stay in business this way.

At any rate, the shopping experience was wonderful: no crowds, plenty of store personnel to help me with my purchases, no jostling by frantic Christmas shoppers.

The experience was slightly less pleasant at my next stop, Wal Mart.

I had asked a clerk at one of the mall stores about a gift I wanted to buy, and she suggested that my best bet would be Wally World. Thus I found myself at Wally World at about 11:00, and the traffic that I had expected at the mall materialized there.

Even with the increase in traffic, there was no jostling. All but one of the employees I interacted with were pleasant. I found my items, bought them, then faced the real challenge of the day: finding my pickup in the vast acreage of the Wally World parking lot.

At noon I took Lucy for her bath and mani-pedi. The trip to the dog beauty parlor was uneventful, but the trip home was less so. My return trip brought me to the intersection of Swannanoa River Road and South Tunnel Road (the road to the Asheville Mall). The traffic there was a mess. People turning left from Swannanoa to South Tunnel were blocking the intersection, thanks to a traffic engineer who didn’t sync the traffic lights on these two roads. Apparently the Asheville Mall is not dying: I just did my shopping before the Christmas rush. When I picked Lucy up three hours later, I used a different route home.

What about the title of this screed?

On Sunday night, Lucy wanted to go into the backyard. The moment I opened the back door, she caught a scent, and streaked out of the house, growling and barking. The times I had seen her do this in the past were associated with a nearby bear. Such was not the case Sunday evening: I had not seen a bear for maybe a month. They should be taking their winter naps now. I grabbed an old four-D-cell mag light, an excellent cudgel, and sprinted out the door after her.

The offending animal was an opossum. It was clearly scared of Lucy, for it found a scrawny sapling on the east side of the house and climbed halfway up it before pretending to be dead. Lucy looked confused as to what to do next. I intervened, and as far as I know, the opossum eventually came down the tree and beat a retreat.

From these observations I draw no conclusions regarding the state of the economy, the presence or absence of aliens in the comet that may or may not hit us, or the chances of dear old Wake Forest in the Duke’s Mayo Bowl (yes, there is such a bowl game). I simply wish you all a very merry Christmas, and the happiest of new years.

Day Two

I enjoy a wide variety of comedians. One of my current favorites is Nate Bargatze. He does a skit in which he talks about how much he enjoys processed foods. He refers to it as “farm to factory to table” food, as opposed to “farm to table” food. I agree with him.

Another favorite comedian is, or was (as he has now passed on), James Gregory. He was, especially in his later years, rather portly. He did a skit in which he made fun of the people who gave him grief about his diet of fried southern foods, always served with gravy. He said something to effect that he ate the way he did because he needed to keep up his strength, as he spent a fair amount of time as a pall bearer for his friends who dropped dead in the gym.

We have tried just about every one of those “farm to table” meal packages: Blue Apron, Green Chef, Factor, you name it. I hate them. Why, I hear you asking? Well, aside from the sameness (16 meals in a row with kale as a vegetable – don’t get me started on kale – followed by 16 meals in a row with purple cabbage as a vegetable), the time it takes to prepare a meal is ridiculously long, and the dish washing burden is large. Consider this: you spend 45 minutes preparing the meal, use two cutting boards, two frying pans, 4 mixing bowls, a variety of utensils, and at the end of it all, what have you made? Two hamburgers and a few French fries. Ridiculous. Give me some good old “pop it in the microwave” or “peel back the plastic layer and bake in the oven for 35 minutes” processed food.

Maybe my appreciation, nay, craving, of processed food explains why, from time to time, I just have to make a trip to McDonald’s. At times, nothing can take the place of a Number 1 Combo meal with a large Coke. And when I am a bit worried about my weight, I will skip the fries and just go with two Big Macs and a medium Coke. Yum yum. That’s good eatin’.

Of course, we have no shortage of McDonald’s in this town. There is one near my work, which is convenient for those times when I have to supplement the lunch Kathy packs for me with a Big Mac or two. Until Hurricane Helene came to visit us in the fall of 2024, we were within one mile or so of two McDonald’s. One could be accessed by turning right on Kenilworth Road, the other by turning left. I used the one on the right in the evenings, and the one on the left on Saturday or Sunday mornings. It is the one on the left that was destroyed by the storm.

The one that was destroyed was unique. It sat near the entrance of the Biltmore Estate, and was architecturally similar to the other buildings in Biltmore Village. It had a player piano in the dining room. It was a real pleasure to sit there on a Saturday morning, consuming hot cakes with sausage, the hot cakes slathered with butter and artificially colored and flavored corn syrup, while listening to the player piano play tunes from the Great American Songbook. I have missed it.

Construction of the new McDonald’s in Biltmore Village took a long time, a bit more than 14 months. To be fair, not much was done to the flood-damaged structure for the first few months, other than the placement of a chain link fence around the property, and eventually, demolition of the old building. But when the construction crew finally got down to brass tacks, the building rose fairly quickly, as did my anticipation of its grand reopening.

The grand reopening was yesterday, December 12, at 5 AM. I saw the cars in the parking lot as I drove to work. I made plans to have breakfast there this morning, on day two of its new life.

We arrived around 8 in the morning, and the place was packed. I had to wait for a parking space. The inside dining area looks to be about 75% of its previous size. Everyone was ordering at the kiosk (of which I am not a fan). The new player piano was playing, fortunately not Christmas tunes. Oh, and there were approximately one zillion kids there. As it happens, day two was also “Breakfast with Santa Claus Day” at the new Mickey D’s. There was a most genial Santa, sitting at a large table surrounded by kids, working on coloring those kiddie menus that magically appear at every restaurant. Santa’s helper was someone in a Grinch costume.

I hated the destruction that the flood caused in the fall of 2024, but at least two good things came from it. The first is the new McDonald’s, with its cozy dining area and wonderful piano. The second has to do with the Long John Silver’s that was on the other side of the Swannanoa River from McDonald’s. That building, under reconstruction now, will no longer house the purveyor of fish. Saints be praised! It will become a full service Dunkin’ Donuts joint!!

It's A Small World After All

The figure above is a photograph of the smallest post office in the United States. The Grimshawes post office, located some 6 miles or so from Cashiers, NC, measures a mere 6 feet by 6 feet 5 inches: less than 39 square feet. The post office was named for the first postmasters, Thomas and Elizabeth Grimshawe, who served in that position for 33 years, from 1878 until 1911. In 1911 the building was sold to Warren and Lena Alexander, who served as postmasters for 36 years, until 1947. In 1947 the building was purchased by the Alexanders’ daughter, Mae Alexander Passmore, who served as postmaster for the last six years of the building’s active life. President Eisenhower closed this post office, and all other third class post offices, in 1953.

There isn’t much left to say about the Grimshawes post office. It is small. And so is this post. Enjoy the photos.

A closer view of the front of the post office.

I knew I had found the post office when I saw the flag.

As seen from the street, this is the right corner of the back room. The total 38.5 square feet includes this back room and the “porch” seen in the photos above.

The door to the front porch. This photo was taken from the right back corner of the back room, the corner shown in the photo prior to this one.

The exterior siding was fairly easy to make and install.

Kathy was happy to be out and about, less than two weeks after knee replacement surgery. Thanks to her, I was able to visit Talbots and J. McLaughlin, instead of winging my way home to post these pictures.

Movies

When I was a child we did not go to the movie theater very frequently. The fact that there was not a movie theater in my hometown might have had some bearing on the issue. (I was told that the town once had a movie theater, but that it was converted into a skating rink, or some such thing. I do not remember that.) This meant that movies involved a trip out of town, either to Raleigh or to Smithfield.

This does not mean that I never saw movies, just that I usually had to wait for the movies to appear on television. And I saw some great movies that way: No Time for Sergeants and Mister Roberts, for example.

My first movie in a real theater was Old Yeller, a Disney flick that came out in 1957. We were visiting my maternal grandmother on a Sunday afternoon in Kenly, NC, my cousin, Donald Wayne, was not there, and I was bored. At that time, my grandmother lived next door to a movie theater. My father gave me a quarter and told me to go next door to watch a movie. I came in midway through the show, but stayed for the next showing. After seeing the movie all the way through, I stayed for a third showing until I was bored again. I haven’t seen the movie since.

Old Yeller had the imprimatur of old Walt Disney. The next movie I saw in a theater definitely did not. Tormented was a black and white thriller that came out in 1960. I was seven or eight years old at that time, and it made quite an impression on me, so much so that 65 years later I still remember the gist of the plot, and the dramatic last scene. There were no movie ratings at that time, but I hazard a guess that the movie was not appropriate for a seven or eight year old child. You can still find this movie on the streaming channels.

Watching a favorite dog get shot because of the possibility of rabies and watching a man attempt to kill a young child on the apron of a lighthouse, while being chased off the apron and onto the rocks below by an apparition, may be reasons why baby boomers are generally tough cookies, not given to emotional weakness. On the other hand, they may be why we have produced so many serial killers.

The remainder of my family movie-going experience as a child is limited to more Disney flicks: The Absent-Minded Professor (1961) and That Darn Cat! (1965). In 1965 I saw my first James Bond movie with a friend’s family. It was Thunderball, the fourth Bond movie produced by Cubby Broccoli. Sean Connery was, of course, great, but Claudine Auger? Ooh La La! The movies played a role in my dating life. (Teresa, I apologize for taking you to see Barbarella!) I think I saw the movie Patton eight times when it came out, with five different dates. Taking a date to see Patton is not a good idea, and may explain why I had dates with five different young ladies. Nevertheless, it is the greatest movie ever made.

I don’t make it to the theater all that often these days. Kathy and I would go every now and again when we lived in Georgia. The last theater movie I saw there was Chappaquiddick in 2017. Since moving to North Carolina, we have seen a Fantastic Four movie, and maybe one or two others, in the theater. But, for the most part, we watch movies at home. I bought Wicked from Amazon streaming service for Kathy’s birthday. We had friends over. They stopped by the local theater to get a couple of buckets of popcorn. It was great, except for the movie. It was the weirdest remake of The Wizard of Oz I have ever seen, and it was a musical, to boot. I hate musicals. I own it, but plan never to see it again. The worst part of the movie was the ending. After nearly three hours of torture, I learned that we had seen only part I. I do not plan to see part II.

Although I am a curmudgeon, I must say that the invention of streaming television channels is the second-best invention ever, second only to the invention of root beer. I have seen some great movies on these channels, but they tend not to be recent movies. A couple of weekends ago, I saw a Hitchcock movie from the early 1950s that was absolutely excellent. If you get the chance, take a look at I Confess. It has a great storyline, excellent performances by Montgomery Clift, Anne Baxter, and Karl Malden, and beautiful scenes from Quebec City. We sat before the television, pointing at the screen, and saying “I remember that building!” The lobby of the Chateau Frontenac hasn’t changed in 70 years.

The fact that I do not see very many new movies means I no longer need to watch the Oscars. That saves a few hours every year but leaves me out of the Monday morning water cooler gossip about the host, the speeches, and whether or not the right movie won.

I have a few thousand movies on my external movie hard drive. Most are from the $5 bin at Walmart, movies that are old but still unseen by me. It is easy enough to collect these movies, but making the time to see them is another matter. That is why I have a few thousand on my hard drive. I have gravitated recently to film noir, an example of which is I Confess. If you are looking for a classic movie, check the dozens of decent film noir.

On the other hand, there is always Patton. At ease!

Odds and Ends from the Miscellaneous File

Nine Inch Nails

Hurricane Helene dropped a tulip poplar tree on our two vehicles and a trailer owned by Kathy’s company on September 27, 2024. The tree stayed on top of those vehicles until October 12, just a bit more than two weeks. At that time, a group of volunteers from a Mormon church in Salisbury attacked the tree with chainsaws and heavy tree-moving equipment.

We were grateful that these kind, hard-working volunteers were willing to give up their free time to help us out, and we pitched in to help where we could. That is when I discovered that I am not a lumberjack. While moving a sawed segment of tree, I managed to drop the damned thing on the big toe of my right foot. History repeats itself: I dropped a piece of railroad rail on that same toe when I was a five-year-old. Mamas, don’t let your babies play unsupervised near a railroad track. Back then I lost the nail: not so this time. I ended up with an ugly pool of blood under the nail at the cuticle. It hurt pretty badly for a couple of days, but after a while, all I had to remind me of the accident was this bit of dried blood under the nail.

Eleven months later, that patch of dried blood is up near the tip of the nail. I measured the distance from the cuticle to the trailing edge of the blood stain: 5/8th of an inch (16 mm for those of you outside the United States). Is that really how much a toenail grows in eleven months? Or is the dried blood being pulled along the nail bed at a slower rate? Why would that be so? Is there a mathematical model to describe the migration of dried blood on a nail bed? Questions, questions . . .

Hey BooBoo!

I’ve written a few posts, and posted more than a few videos on social media, about the bears here in Asheville. We see them fairly frequently. I have two animal cameras that periodically catch the bears on their journeys through our yard, or on their side trips up to the front porch, where they feast on birdseed and hummingbird syrup. In reviewing these videos, I conclude that we see the bears most frequently in October.

A colleague at work noted the other day that the bears are currently in a period of hyperphagia. Yes, I had to look that up, too. Here is what some guy who goes by the initials “A. I.” said on the internet: “Hyperphagia is the extreme and continuous hunger that bears experience in late summer and fall to prepare for winter hibernation. During this period, a bear's biological clock drives a feeding frenzy to consume and store enough fat to survive for months without food or water. The term combines hyper (over) and phagia (eating) to describe this critical survival mechanism.” My colleague at work says that during this time the bears will feed up to 20 hours per day, and put on an additional 20 – 100% of their body weight. (She added, “I can relate.”)

Because of Kathy’s knee, I have inherited the task of taking Lucy on a daily walk, but because I am still working, I take that walk around six in the morning, while it is still dark. (There are a lot of commas in that sentence. Should I have broken it into two sentences? Inquiring minds want to know.) The other morning, while walking Lucy, I heard a loud “pop” near a house on my right, the sound of a small limb snapping. I fished a tactical flashlight out of my pocket and swept the general area. Sure enough, there he was: a pretty good-sized bear up near a neighbor’s house, giving me the evil eye. We kept on trucking.

I always thought, like Mr. A. I., that bears hibernate in the winter. Recently, however, I was introduced to “torpor,” a word indicating reduced body temperature and reduced metabolic activity. A long period of torpor is often referred to as “hibernation” if it occurs in the winter. I wonder, though, if our bears here actually hibernate. A few years ago, in a nicely wooded portion of the UNC-Asheville campus, the campus police fenced off a section of the wood because a bear was sitting there, upright and motionless. The bear was there all winter, an attraction for curious humans. I think of hibernation as a bear curled up in a cave, not sitting upright and motionless out in the open. To my mind, that bear was in torpor.

It may have something to do with temperature. Back in the ‘80s, when I lived in the mountains of Virginia, the locals gave me a rule of thumb regarding when it was safe to assume that the poisonous snakes were hibernating: there had to be five consecutive days of temperatures below 20 degrees Fahrenheit. I think we had such a stretch of weather in December of 2022, but I don’t think we’ve had a stretch of weather like that since then. Maybe temperature creates the difference between hibernation and torpor.

At any rate, I look forward to new bear videos next month.

Crickets

Even though I walk Lucy in the dark, I am aware of the animals around me. Yesterday morning I was serenaded by an owl. It might have been an Eastern Screech Owl. On the other hand, it might not have been so. I mentioned the bear. I cannot identify all the small creatures that cause the bushes and hedges to move when I walk past. And occasionally a human engaged in the torturous habit of running will cross my path.

The leaves have been falling for awhile, but these are not the colorful leaves. They remind me of the premature falling leaves I used to see in Georgia when the summer was dry. Our summer was anything but dry, so I do not know why these leaves are falling now. They haven’t changed colors yet.

But a sure sign, an even more sure sign than falling leaves, that summer is over and fall is here, is the sound of crickets invading the garage, and ultimately, the house. The crickets have been making an unholy racket for a couple of weeks now. I am sure that, at present, they have only invaded the garage. I am also sure that they will eventually make their way into the house. At that point I will engage in chemical warfare. I can’t take that noise year round.

I am writing this about three days before the autumnal equinox, the official beginning of the fall season. Most people I know wax poetic about fall, claiming it is their favorite season. I disagree. Give me summer anytime. In fact, the reason why I enjoy summer so much is immortalized in one of the few poems I remember:

Spring has sprung,

Fall has fell,

Summer’s here

And it’s hot as hell!

Happy fall, y’all!

The Musical Fruit

I began to feel out of sorts on the Thursday evening before Labor Day. At first, I thought it was something I ate, but I had my normal French Fryz meal that evening: two chili dogs with mustard, bottomless root beer, and a killer dessert. I forget what the restaurant calls the dessert, but I call it Diabetes in a Bowl. It consists of two fried apple pies inserted into a bowl of vanilla ice cream and topped with whipped cream and a maraschino cherry. At any rate, I wasn’t feeling quite right by bedtime.

Friday morning I awoke to a full-blown end-of-summer cold. I was sneezing and coughing. Fortunately, that day at school was a ceremonial half-day, Convocation, and I was not required to teach at all. Afterwards, I repaired to my home, and suffered, though perhaps not in silence.

I stayed in bed all day Saturday. That is how Kathy knew that something was seriously wrong with me. I cannot remember the last time I stayed in bed a whole day. I didn’t even do that three years ago when I came down with the China virus.

By Sunday I was feeling well enough to take Lucy on her extended weekend walk, but that was all I was capable of doing. On Monday, Labor Day, I was only the slightest bit better, but capable of taking Kathy out to dinner at the Corner Kitchen, only recently re-opened after the fall flood of last year.

Tuesday began a shortened school week, and I made it through the week. The sniffles were gone by Friday, with only a hacking cough to remind me of my misery. But the cough was bad. It was worse when I was a smoker: the after-cold cough would last six weeks. I was just past one week, and the cough remained. It is greatly to be hoped that it goes away in a considerably shorter time than six weeks.

I have heard thousands of jokes over the years, but I remember almost none of them. I wish I could remember the one I heard recently, about how to get a wife to talk to her husband when she was giving him the cold shoulder. It had something to do with the husband sitting on the sofa, watching a football game, while looking satisfied. The fragment of that joke came to me on Saturday, the day I was looking forward to as a day to do nothing but recover from the cold. That was when Kathy declared that we needed to go to Sevierville to buy shoes for me.

I bought three pairs of shoes in Sevierville maybe three years ago. I have worn one of those pairs, the blue suede shoes, nearly daily since then. I don’t need new shoes. When the blue suedes finally give up the ghost, I have the other two pairs to fall back on. So Kathy didn’t really want to go to Sevierville to buy shoes for me. She wanted to eat at The Chop House, and to do a little shopping in the outlet mall there.

Normally, the drive to Sevierville is a simple 70 minutes down Interstate 40, but Interstate 40 is still recovering from the flood last fall. It is down to one lane near the Tennessee/North Carolina state line, and the DOT recommends a detour: west on I-26 from Asheville to past Johnson City, then south on I-81 to Beech Springs, where you pick up a Tennessee highway for the straight shot down into Sevierville. That detour has to add one and a half hours to the trip each way, and as you can imagine, it did not appeal to me.

So we took the back way, a route we have used before, a nice leisurely ride through some beautiful countryside, through Marshall, Hot Springs, Newport, and Chestnut Hill. Once again we passed the Bush Beans factory in Chestnut Hill, and vowed that one day we must stop at the visitors’ center there.

The Chop House was a disappointment, for the first time. Lunch was nothing fancy: two French dips, Coca-Cola, and coffee, which with the tip came to $61. The shopping seemed to make Kathy happy. I was fine, as the outlet mall provides several benches for the less-than-enthusiastic shopper.

We stopped at the Bush Beans visitors’ center on the way back, and it was lovely. Not only do they have a very nice center (where I managed to buy 13 cans of various beans), but they have a cafe there that serves home cooked food at a reasonable price. Our next visit to Sevierville will include lunch there, instead of at The Chop House.

I was completely bushed (pardon the pun) when we returned home, so much so that I slept through dinner. By Sunday morning, I was starving, so I had a can of baked beans for breakfast.

Kathy tells me I will be sleeping in the guest room.

Onan the Barbarian

Kathy is due for another knee replacement. The doctor has advised her to keep pressure off that knee as much as possible until he can get her to the operating table. One of the ways Kathy is following the doctor’s orders involves sitting in a recliner, feet up, ice pack in place, while watching the birds trash our front porch. The greedy little rascals have made such a mess of the birdseed in the feeders that I was reminded of Dorothy Parker’s pet bird. She named her bird Onan, because he scattered his seed on the ground. I mentioned this to Kathy.

She failed to see the humor in Parker’s witticism.

I suppose the Book of Genesis isn’t very high on anyone’s reading list today. I re-read it a few years ago in conjunction with an online course offered by Hillsdale College. Hillsdale offers a variety of free courses online, and I have taken several: one on mathematics and logic, one on chemistry, one on the Second World War. I was at loose ends one weekend, saw the course on the Book of Genesis, and decided to give it a try. It is in this book that we find the story of Onan.

It is actually the story of Onan’s father, Judah, and Tamar, the widow of his eldest son Er. Onan makes a very brief appearance in the tale. It is a strange story, for two reasons. First, it deals with an ancient custom, the levirate marriage: the compulsory marriage of a widow to the brother of her dead husband. The second aspect of this story that is a bit strange is the fact that the author plops this story down smack dab in the middle of the story of Joseph. It has absolutely nothing to do with Joseph. It is a distraction.

Back to the tale. Judah had three sons: Er, Onan, and Shelah. Judah arranged a marriage between Er and a Canaanite woman named Tamar. But Er was, well, let’s take it from the source: “And Er, Judah’s firstborn, was wicked in the sight of the Lord; and the Lord slew him.” At this point Judah directed Onan, the second son, to engage in a levirate marriage. It was his job to marry Tamar and produce children that would not be his heirs, but would, instead, be the lawful heirs of the dead brother, Er. This did not tickle Onan’s fancy. If he produced children, he wanted them to be his heirs, not his brother’s. Apparently he did not object to playing “hide the zakila” with Tamar: he just refused to produce and rear children that legally would not be his. Let us go again to the source: “And Onan knew that the seed should not be his; and it came to pass, when he went in unto his brother’s wife, that he spilled it on the ground, lest that he should give seed to his brother.” There it is: a biblical reference to coitus interruptus.

Needless to say, this did not please the Lord, who gave Onan the same fate as Er.

Judah didn’t know why his two older sons had been killed. He thought that Tamar was up to no good. He was required to give his third and final son, Shelah, to Tamar in marriage, but he was afraid that Tamar would kill Shelah, so he stalled.

Tamar tired of waiting. Some time after the death of Judah’s wife, Tamar approached him, disguised as a prostitute, and convinced him to sleep with her, for a price: his signet, bracelets, and staff. He did, and as a result, she conceived twins. When Tamar began to show, she was saved from death when she produced the signet, bracelets, and staff that Judah gave her. Thus the old man did the job his two elder sons could not do, and in sleeping with his daughter-in-law, produced sons that under normal circumstances would have been his grandsons.

Back to Onan. His name is now enshrined in the term “Onanism”. The original definition was, of course, coitus interruptus, but over time the term has picked up an additional definition or two. My 1979 Webster’s lists the second and third definitions as “2: MASTURBATION 3: SELF-GRATIFICATION”. (I have no idea why Webster put these two definitions in capital letters, while the first definition is not.)

The name “Onan” is not a name to give to your son, nor is it a name to give to a company. And yet there is a company named Onan that produces electrical generators. I remember seeing the name on a building next to a runway at some airport and thinking to myself that were I the CEO of that outfit, I would surely change the name.

The thing I find most interesting is how the punishment for onanism has changed over the generations. For Onan’s generation, the punishment was death. For my generation, the punishment was blindness!

All Hail The .32!!

Once upon a time, I bought a semi-automatic pistol. I was so enamored of it that I wrote a glowing review of the pistol. I should have waited before writing the review. Not too long after that, I got rid of the pistol. I am back to owning only revolvers.

I have a few revolvers in various calibers, ranging from a five-shot .22 Magnum derringer to a five-shot .45 Long Colt/.410 bore, with a few calibers in between. The pistol that is the most fun is the Smith and Wesson Model 29, the .44 Magnum pistol featured in the Dirty Harry movies. To avoid shaking myself to death, I train with .44 Special rounds. However, at the end of the training session, I fire off six rounds of .44 Magnum. When I finish, I almost always find at least two people looking over my shoulder and asking “What the hell was that?”

The big bores are pretty uncomfortable as everyday carry (EDC) weapons. My big bores are scattered around the house, hidden in locations that might prove useful in the event of an attempted home invasion. My EDC weapons are the .38 Specials. But that changed just this month.

Some years ago, we were looking for a pistol for Kathy, one that packed more punch than the .22 Magnum but didn’t provide the recoil of a .38 Special. After a considerable amount of research, we settled on a .32 H&R Magnum produced by Charter Arms. This pistol can handle a .32 S&W Short, a .32 S&W Long, or a .32 H&R Magnum. The Short is a useless cartridge, as it is underpowered compared with the other two. But the other two cartridges pass the James Bond Test.

What is the James Bond Test, you ask? In the early Bond novels, our hero carried a Beretta 418, which chambered a .25 ACP (Automatic Colt Pistol) round. Quite a few readers wrote to Ian Fleming to let him know that a manly, sophisticated agent like 007 would not be caught dead with such a wimpy handgun. (In the bad old days of misogyny, it was referred to as a “lady’s gun”.) As a result, Fleming upgraded Bond to the Walther PPK 7.65mm (.32 ACP). Now the .32 S&W Long is a more powerful cartridge than the .32 ACP, and the .32 H&R Magnum is more powerful than both of the others. Thus the little revolver outperforms James Bond’s iconic semi-automatic pistol with either cartridge, and passes the test. Take that, Jimmy boy!

Kathy prefers the .32 S&W Long, because it has very little recoil. I have fired her pistol with the H&R Magnum load, and I find the recoil to be less than that of a .38 Special. So I finally convinced myself to buy the same revolver Kathy carries.

It was easy to adjust from a .38 Special to the .32 H&R Magnum. It is very comfortable to carry. I use an outside-the-waistband holster, covered in the summer by a Hawaiian shirt. Comfort is key: if it is not comfortable, you will not wear it, which means you will not have it when you need it. My guess is that when it is no longer Hawaiian shirt weather, I will wear a jacket, or go for an inside-the-waistband holster.

If you are thinking about an EDC pistol, you might want to consider the .32 H&R Magnum.

PTSD

You expect certain types of weather depending upon where you live. If you live in parts of Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, or Nebraska you are not surprised when tornadoes pop up. If you live in a desert area you expect boiling hot days and freezing nights. If you live in the Rockies you expect snow in the winter, and in eastern North Carolina you expect hot and humid days during the summer.

If you live in the mountains, the one thing you do not expect is damage from a hurricane.

This is my second sojourn in the mountains. I lived in the Allegheny Mountains of Virginia from 1982 to 1989, and have lived in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina since 2022. Both times I experienced the wrath of a hurricane’s remnant. Once, I could understand; twice seems absurd.

In 1985 we experienced a very wet two weeks in the Virginia mountains. We lived within sight of the Jackson River (which, a few miles to our east, joined with the Cowpasture River to form the headwaters of the James River). About ten miles upstream a dam had been built for the purpose of flood control. The two weeks of rain filled the lake behind the dam to full pool. So when the remnants of Hurricane Juan decided to stall over us and drop an excessive quantity of rain on our waterlogged land, we experienced a flood. The folks in charge of the dam had no choice but to release water, which exacerbated an already dangerous situation.

Our house, though only a few yards from the Jackson River, was up on a hill, and so we did not experience any damage. Many of our friends were not so lucky. I saw very little damage from downed trees, but I did see quite a few hunting camps floating down the Jackson. The trees that did come down did so because of soggy ground. Wind was not a problem. The one thing I remember most of all was the major inconvenience caused by bridges that were hit by debris. These bridges had to be closed until they were inspected and pronounced structurally sound. Bridges are the lifelines in mountain communities. I relearned that lesson last year.

On September 25, 2024, the rain began, and continued through the 26th. The 27th brought us the remnants of Hurricane Helene, which was more rain, and a surprisingly high level of wind. I wrote about our experience with this storm last year. The wind brought down hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of trees. The Forest Service estimates that Buncombe County (excluding the city of Asheville) lost 40% of its tree cover, or some 89,440 acres of tree cover. And Kathy and I did experience damage from a downed tree. But despite the loss of all those trees, and the roads blocked by them and bridges damaged by them, I consider the major damage to be due to the flooding. In fact, Kathy and I never refer to “the hurricane”: for us, it is “the flood”.

Bridge damage was a major problem for us. I work south of the Swannanoa River but live north of it. There are five ways I can cross that river, but for quite some time, only one way, the one most out-of-the-way, was available.

Again, we live far enough up the side of the mountain so that the flooding of the Swannanoa River (27.33 feet above flood stage) did not affect us. Many people, though, were not so lucky. Our River Arts district is a bit below the point where the Swannanoa River joins the French Broad River, and at that point the river was 24.67 feet above flood stage. You can imagine the damage.

I have focused on the flood, because that is what impressed me most about the storm. The wind, however, has given many of my friends a case of post traumatic stress disorder. I can understand why, just by looking at the number of houses that were damaged by falling trees. I know a family that packs up and decamps to a hotel downtown whenever the National Weather Service issues a wind advisory. Others (including me) lose sleep at night if the wind howls.

Why am I dredging up old news that I have already chronicled in the past? June first marked the official beginning of Hurricane Season. Coincidentally, it marked the official beginning of PTSD Season.

Water, Water, Everywhere!

I had planned on writing about the return of the cicadas, but upon reflection, I decided against it. We are at ground zero for the hatching of this brood, and they have been aggravating my tinnitus for the past couple of weeks. But, so what? The nymphs sleep in the ground for about 17 years, come to life, exchange genetic material with their mates, deposit the eggs, then die. A few weeks later the eggs hatch and the nymphs drop to the ground to begin their 17 year dirt nap. When Kathy asked me what purpose they served, I had no answer. This convinced me that the cicadas really weren’t worthy of more than a paragraph.

So let’s talk about my recent Medicare check-up.

I go to MAHEC, the Mountain Area Health and Education Center. It is staffed primarily by residents, supervised by fully qualified doctors. The doctor I have visited for three years now, Dr. Dizon, is finishing his residency this summer and will be employed after that by our local hospital, Mission Hospital. He told me that, because my health is good and my visits are uncomplicated, I will probably be assigned to a brand new resident. That doesn’t bother me at all. These guys and gals are learning the trade, and tend to spend a good bit of time with their patients. I have certainly been very pleased with Dr. Dizon.

I was less than pleased with the results of two blood tests, tests that measured kidney function. I was borderline on each test. Dr. Dizon noted that these test results were not terribly bad, given my age. Still, he said, we should try a little experiment. The most common cause for these low test results is dehydration. Let’s try a little re-hydration, then repeat the tests.

That made perfect sense. At that time, my daily intake of fluids was two cups of coffee in the morning, and two soft drinks in the afternoon or evening. Kathy has been bugging me for a long time about my liquid intake. This is the same Kathy who has a glass of water in every room of the house, and who has every cup holder in her car filled with cups of water.

I love coffee, but I limit my intake, and not because the caffeine keeps me awake. I could drink a cup of coffee at 11:00 PM, and be sound asleep by 11:10 PM. I limit my intake because that 11:00 PM cup of coffee would wake me up at 1:00 AM for a head call. As a friend once told me, you never buy a cup of coffee, you just rent it.

The soft drink I prefer is root beer, which has no caffeine in it. The local restaurants generally do not have root beer, and my alternative, Coca Cola, does contain caffeine. The problem with caffeine and, for that matter, alcohol, is that both turn off the production of vasopressin, our anti-diuretic hormone. Do you remember those days of our youth, when you could go to a bar and knock back three or four beers before needing to hit the head? And after that, we would make two head calls for every beer? That is the interaction of alcohol and vasopressin. Without vasopressin, liquids just go through you.

I don’t sleep that many hours every night, and I prefer not to have those few hours interrupted by the need to tap a kidney. And so I limited my intake of fluids, especially those containing caffeine.

I decided to follow Dr. Dizon’s advice. I still have only two cups of coffee in the morning, but I’ve nearly tripled my intake of root beer. (Kathy suggested I cut back on the root beer and use water instead, but I prefer the taste of root beer to water.) After a month of this new liquid diet, the vampires at MAHEC drew another blood sample. And it worked. My kidney function tests have returned to normal.

There is a downside to this new diet of mine. I make a minimum of two head calls during my sleeping hours. And my first head call upon awakening? Well, Kathy now refers to me as Austin Powers.

Triggernometry

The parcel arrived this March. It contained a book and a hand-written, undated note. It was confusing: a date really would have helped. The note was from parents of former students of mine, thanking me for teaching their kids and offering me a book that they found in a bookstore in St. Louis this summer. This summer? I received the book in March!

I began piecing together clues: a reference to the fact that they will miss me at school next year (I left that school three years ago), and an oblique reference to Covid-19. The return address on the parcel was in their daughter’s name, but her last name was different. When did she graduate? Has she had enough time to finish college and get married?

My detective work led me to believe that the parents wrote the note five years ago, and handed both book and note to their daughter to mail to me. She graduated from college, was married, and moved to another state. In unpacking at her new digs she found the book and note, searched the internet for my new address, and mailed it to me.

Well, that puzzle kept boredom at bay yet one more day.

I have just finished reading the book, and it is the best book I have read thus far this year. The book is Triggernometry: A Gallery of Gunfighters, by Eugene Cunningham. Published by the University of Oklahoma Press, it carried a copyright date of 1934. I was not familiar with the author (born 1896, died 1957), but I could tell he had a sense of humor. The extended subtitle of the book is “with Technical Notes on Leather Slapping as a Fine Art, gathered from many a Loose Holstered Expert over the Years”.

Cunningham was a writer of westerns, but he did publish three works of nonfiction, one of which is Triggernometry. He was fortunate in that he was able to meet several of the gunslingers that he wrote about, and for some of those who were no longer with us, he was able to interview people who knew them. Of course, some of the profiles are based purely on the research he conducted. Most of the gunslingers he profiled were Texans, either folks who were born elsewhere but eventually settled in Texas, or native Texans, or those who spent the bulk of their lives in Texas. I forgive him his parochialism: he lived in El Paso for a long time.

I recognized many of the names: Wild Bill Hickok, Bat Masterson, Butch Cassidy, Billy the Kid. I learned about new heroes: John R. Hughes, James B. Gillett, Captain Bill McDonald, and others. I read about a miscarriage of justice (Tom Horn). And this just scratches the surface.

Throughout the book Cunningham presents the facts. Every now and again you read his opinion as to what the facts mean, but his main goal is to present fact, not rumor, not inflated reputation.

He confirms what I have come to believe about the Earps: they, and in particular Wyatt, were not as portrayed in the 1950s television series, the theme song of which I can still remember. For one thing, the television show never mentioned that Wyatt Earp was at times a pimp and at one time ran a house of ill repute. The clan seemed to walk the line of legality, spending time on both sides of it. While Cunningham describes the Earps’ participation in the shootout at the OK Corral, it is in a chapter on Billy Breakenridge, “Tombstone’s Deputy”. The Earps did not merit a chapter of their own. As for Wyatt, Cunningham describes him as an “efficient killer”.

Maybe I’m just getting old. Maybe I long for the westerns of my youth. Try to find a good old shoot-’em-up western on television these days. And maybe I’m just tired of living in a world where the only alpha males are street thugs and gang members. But for whatever reason, I enjoyed the hell out of this book.

New Car Fever

After driving two hand-me-downs and one used car (which I purchased for a whopping $600), I decided it was time for a brand-spanking-new-off-the-showroom-floor car. So it happened that in 1976 I bought a new Fiat 128. That boxy little car was a delight to drive when it was running well, which was some of the time. We traded it in six years later, when it was in need of its third valve job. One good thing about that car: it cured me of any desire to own a European sports car.

My second new car was a 1980 Chevy Citation. We were expecting our first child and we figured that the two-door 1972 Mercury Capri would be too inconvenient for dealing with a car seat. We had good luck with the Citation, so much good luck that, when it was time to get rid of the Fiat, we decided on another Chevy Citation. The count stands at three new cars.

In the spring of 1987 we were driving back to the mountains of Virginia after a couple of weeks at North Myrtle Beach. We lived in the mountains: who needs air conditioning in a car in the mountains? I guess we didn’t think that one through because two weeks at the beach, even in the spring, really required A/C. The two girls were in car seats in the back seat of the 1980 Citation, my wife was quite pregnant with our third child in the front seat, and every square inch of the Citation was packed with the detritus associated with two kiddies. All of them were asleep, leaving me with my own thoughts: a dangerous proposition. I was ruminating on the two weeks without air conditioning, the fact that the car that once seemed so spacious would simply not do for two children, much less three, and that I had to do something about it. We were about 65 miles from our home, passing through the southern part of Roanoke, Virginia, when I saw a sign for a GM dealership. I hit the turn signal, which awakened my spouse. “What are you doing?” she asked. “I’m buying a new car.” I pulled into the dealership, and a pleasant fellow came over to the car and said, “How can I help you today?” I replied, “I want the biggest G** d***ed car you have.” Without missing a beat he said “That would be the station wagon.”

And so it came to pass that I bought a brand new 1987 Oldsmobile Custom Cruiser station wagon. It was a glorious vehicle: eight gas-guzzling cylinders, and a Holley four-barrel carburetor. Nine miles per gallon in town. I never complained about the mileage. When I was T-boned in 1995 by a 1989 Ford Mustang doing 45 miles per hour, my only damage was a subdural hematoma in my left leg. The wagon was totaled, of course, but all that steel in the door saved me.

That was the last brand-spanking-new-off-the-showroom-floor car that I owned, until late last year.

My ex-wife convinced me that a brand new car was a bad deal. They depreciate significantly when you drive them off the dealer’s lot. Why not let someone else take the depreciation hit? That made perfectly good sense, and was my philosophy for decades.

Given my experience with the 1995 accident, I tended to buy vehicles with safety in mind. Eventually I ended up with a used 1999 Ford Ranger, which began my love affair with pick-up trucks. I traded that one in for a used 2013 Ford F-150. I owned that truck for nine years. It had maybe 40,000 miles on it when I bought it. It died last year, courtesy of a tulip poplar tree that could not withstand the winds associated with Hurricane Helene. It had 275,000 miles on it, and was just getting broken in.

Hurricane Helene hit us at the end of September, and thanks to a son-in-law, I was able to borrow a Prius for awhile. I am not complaining: a free loaner is a wonderful thing. But that is not a car for a tall person. Kathy ended up buying another car first (she lost her car to the same tulip poplar tree), so I inherited her rented Jeep. Another fun car to drive, but not enough steel to suit me. By late November or early December I began to get serious about car shopping. It was pretty easy for me: I wanted another truck, and if possible, I wanted another F-150.

We were down to the wire at Ford of Spartanburg. The choice was simple: a used F-150 that looked a good bit like the truck that died on September 27, or a brand new sporty version of the F-150. I was ready to buy the used one, when Kathy suggested that a new car warranty would be nice. And with that, nearly four decades of buying used cars came to an end.

I am still getting used to the new truck. It has too much computer to suit me. The first time I tried to change lanes quickly, without a turn signal, the truck fought me. It took awhile to figure out how to disable that alleged safety feature. Ditto for the front collision assist. Ditto for the rear collision assist. I keep finding features I don’t want. Whatever happened to the skill requirement for driving a motor vehicle? Oh, well, just count me as one old curmudgeon who isn’t happy with all the change in the world.

But also count me as one old curmudgeon who enjoys his new F-150.