The Halftime Ham

~ sanebishop ~ 2 Comments

That is Thomas hamming it up front and center. He ran onto the court and lined up with his classmates and got recognized for perfect attendance during halftime at a Gardner-Webb men’s basketball game. Gardner-Webb partners with local elementary schools, giving kids a free ticket who have perfect attendance for the month. It was Thomas’s first game in a “basketball stadium,” as he calls it, and he watched the game enthusiastically, leading cheers of “defense,” often when Gardner Webb had the ball–we’re still working on game fundamentals. 

Watching him, I couldn’t help but remember my own impassioned fanaticism when I was about his age. I have always been an NC State fan and my big brother was a Duke fan. It thrilled my heart whenever Duke lost, which in those days rarely happened because they had Grant Hill and Christian Laettner. My dad and I were in Houston, Texas, visiting his cousin, when Grant Hill hurled the basketball down the court with two seconds left, when Christian Laettner caught it and beat the buzzer, beating Kentucky and depriving me of my brother’s suffering. 

The stakes were not so high in this game between the Gardner-Webb Runnin’ Bulldogs and Brevard Tornadoes, and Thomas has no brother, whose suffering brings joy, but he quickly became invested in the outcome, even if he forgot, from time to time, which team he was cheering for. A cheerleader threw him a rally rag and he maniacally whirled it above his head, and it was his most prized possession until I brought back Air Heads and Nerd Clusters from the concession stand, which was admittedly a bad decision on my part but I had waited in line for a long time and they had just run out of popcorn. What can you do? 

Thomas chomped. He cheered. He danced. He had an all around good time, and afterwards we went to look at Christmas lights in town. 

And he fell asleep in the car. 

Semi-annual Small Talk

~ sanebishop ~ 6 Comments

No one has ever accused me of being talkative, but occasionally I do find verbalization pleasant, or at least not quite as painful as waterboarding. Semi-annual small talk is perhaps my specialty. When I see the maintenance light come on in my truck or car, I actually look forward to visiting Jim’s Tire and Auto Repair, not because I enjoy forking over hard-earned money, but because Jim is a hardcore Star Wars fan. You would never know it–he is gruff and rather taciturn himself, but if you ask him about Andor or the Mandalorian, watch out. 

The Razor Crest

“What did you think about the new trailer?” I asked Jim, walking into the tire shop lobby. I suspect if anybody else asked him this question, Jim would automatically assume they’re talking about a trailer with wheels, like a utility trailer, but Jim grinned and knew exactly what I was talking about without further clarification.

“It was great to see the Razor Crest again,” Jim said, and off we’re conversing about the intricacies of The Mandalorian and Grogu trailer, picking up our Star Wars small talk where we left off six months ago when I last had my tires rotated and oil changed. His son, who works the cash register, has the same stout and hulking stature of Jim, only with more hair. Jim the younger reached out and plopped his arm on the counter. He rolled up his sleeve to reveal a new tattoo of the Millennium Falcon. These are my people–tattooed stout mechanically-inclined men who love Star Wars. On second thought, I may just be a man who loves Star Wars, but the point is we have something in common, something to talk about. 

I have a similar repartee with my dental hygienist. I have been going to Faith for over ten years, and for the first five years our small talk was rather minimal, until she and her husband had their first and only child in the middle of the pandemic, a few months after we had Thomas.

We connect because we’re both older parents to an only child and mostly we compare notes on our children because we have no other children to compare notes on. Last I left her, six months ago, they were struggling with a similar conundrum.

“Which school did you go with?” I asked, and immediately we picked up the conversation where we left off, when they were struggling with whether to send their child to a local public or charter school, just like we were. Admittedly, the conversation is a bit one-sided–it’s hard to form complete sentences when you’re having tartar scraped off your teeth–but she explained their decision to send their child to their local public school, and I grunted that that’s what we decided, as well. 

“How does his school do sight words?” she asked, giving me a brief respite to form sentences. And soon we’re talking about the magical process of watching our children learn to read. 

Parenting is such a fleeting and elusive experience. When you’re in the middle of sleep deprivation or your toddler’s terrible tantrum, it feels as if this will be a scarring experience, seared in your memory forever, but how quickly those memories fade. Sometimes I find myself talking to new parents–trying to remember those sleepless nights just a few years ago–but the instant connection isn’t quite there because memories have a half-life and erode. The disconnect of time arises, when one person is talking of the past and one the present.

But the dental hygienist and I have something major in common. Our only children have both started kindergarten, are both learning to read and write, and are both growing up before our eyes, in similar ways and at the same time. Small talk flows freely, even if my mouth is immobilized. 

Helping Hands

~ sanebishop ~ 1 Comment

A few years ago, at a beekeeper’s meeting, we had a medical emergency in which a speaker from out-of-town fainted. We had to call the ambulance. Turns out, it was an issue with low blood sugar, but at the time we didn’t know exactly what was happening. Luckily, there were several doctors and nurses in attendance who rushed to the speaker’s aid and cared for him until the ambulance arrived. While waiting, it took several minutes for us to track down a sugary substance to help him get his blood sugar back up—yes, in a room full of beekeepers no one had any honey. That got me thinking how important it is to know where emergency items are located in our meeting spaces. First aid kits, fire extinguishers, and defibrillators do no good if we can’t find them fast.  Even something as simple as a piece of candy could save a life, at least if we can find it in time. The whole event reminded me that sometimes in life we’ve got to depend on the benevolence of strangers.

Depending on others doesn’t always come easy, especially for self-reliant types. Personally, I relish my farming and beekeeping pursuits because they do provide alone time—just me, myself, and the machinations of my mind. Granted, there may be nothing more dangerous than an idealist farmer who is the throes of agrarian reverie. Even Thoreau himself, the prophet of self-reliance, accidentally started a major forest fire, and in so doing, he depended on the townspeople of Concord to extinguish the blaze. It was definitely a blow to his ego, and afterwards some townsfolk bestowed him with the moniker “the fool who burnt down the woods.” It happens to the best of us.

Unlike Thoreau, who was merely trying to cook lentils on his campfire, I started a conflagration with the intended purpose of burning the vegetation in a field ditch that was encroaching on my line of bee hives. Over the years, the vegetation rooted in the ditch had expanded and grown unruly with antagonistic plants: briars, wild blackberry canes, poison ivy, etc. I dare not bush hog the ditch for fear of puncturing a tractor tire due to the spikes protruded from the wild Bradford pear trees. So I waited for a bright fall morning, dropped a match and watched as a wall of flames arose and traveled down the ditch, like a sizzling spark flowing down a line of gunpowder. Eventually, with the help of a major wind guest, my quaint little ditch fire detonated itself at the end of the ditch into a small grass fire, racing down the roadside.

Between the time concerned neighbors called 911 and the fire department arrived, my wife’s grandpa Lowry, who had been watching the proceedings from afar, jumped on a tractor, pursued the fire down the roadside, and smothered it with the repeated downward pressure of the front-end loader.

“Nothing to see here,” I assured the fire fighters a few minutes later when they arrived sirens blazing, but it was good to know they were there if I needed them. No man is an island.

In Defense of Compartmentalization

~ sanebishop ~ 4 Comments

One drawback of the modern Sports Utility Vehicle is the fact that the trunk has been truncated into non-existence. Owning a SUV is like owning a house with an open floor plan. Sure, there is more space, but it is shared space, shared with all your cargo tumbling around in the back. Sometimes you hear the cargo tumbling, sometimes you smell it wafting, and sometimes you see it levitating in the rearview mirror (depending on how much air you got going over a speed bump). With a SUV, you have to live, or at least drive, in the presence of your possessions. You can’t just stuff boots in the back of your trunk and forget about them. With an SUV,  your wife would eventually smell them.

With a car, however, your options are endless. I have been riding around with a pair of old muddy manure-caked rubber boots in the trunk of my Camry for at least four weeks–and my wife has never even detected a whiff. Nor can she smell the contents of my tackle box in the trunk. I don’t go fishing much anymore, but that is exactly the point. There is fish grime and scented power baits in that tackle box that date back to the previous century. Sometimes it is nice to have a hermetically sealed trunk. 

And sometimes it’s nice to have compartments in life as well. One of my laments about modern society is that we can no longer compartmentalize. Everything is always open, always on, always accessible, always wafting into our heads, always vying for our attention. Through the conduits of wires and wifi comes an onslaught of electrons–emails, notifications, texts, videos, and social media posts–that bombard and erode the walls that protect our attention, focus, and sanity. Sometimes I think we’d all be better off if we found an old sedan somewhere, popped the trunk, and tossed our cell phones in there and forgot about them for four weeks. At the very least, we wouldn’t have to live with the manure wafting up from the screens. 

According to statistics, the average American checks their phones 144 times a day, and the average American checks their email every 37 minutes. I suppose I’m an above average American because I check my email every 37 seconds. I’m not sure what I’m checking it for, but I’m checking it nonetheless. Companies are now selling containers, basically lockboxes with a timer on them, so families can incarcerate electronic devices and reduce screen time for both parent and child. In other words, they are literally selling compartments so we can recompartmentalize our lives. 

Schools are also doing this. I guess educators realized that it’s probably not a good idea for students to be snapchatting with friends in English class when they’re supposed to be focusing in math class. In the past, such interdisciplinary communication was simply limited by classroom walls. Sure kids once passed notes in the hallway, but notes are a lot easier to police than electrons. 

All this is to say, sometimes technological progress is a synonym for societal regress. Let’s bring back the sedan, with a nice hermetically sealed trunk. 

Southerners and Soft Drinks

~ sanebishop ~ 6 Comments

Forget the rural-urban divide, college allegiances, or barbecue preferences, what splits North Carolinians into warring tribal camps has long been our tastes in carbonated sucrose. We have the mainstream, Coke versus Pepsi, divide, but two other soft drinks in North Carolina also have fervent followings: Cheerwine and Sundrop. The former was invented in North Carolina, in Salisbury, and the latter has been adopted as a native son, or native soda, and is certainly the soda of choice here in the foothills region. Some locals proselytize more than others. For instance, one farmer here often buys his temporary employees Sundrop. “When you buy Sundrop, excellent,” said a worker, who was from Mexico. “When I buy Sundrop, so-so.”

One thing that is somewhat confusing about the south is that coke can be both a specific and generic term. It could very well refer to a Coca-Cola, or it could refer to any Coca-Cola like alternative like Pepsi, or it could refer to any caffeinated and carbonated sugary beverage, like Sundrop or Cheerwine or Mountain Dew. Most likely, if someone tells you that they want a coke, they either want a Coca-Cola or, if that is not available, a Pepsi. But, if someone asks if you want a coke, they are likely using it in the general sense of any soft drink. If you respond  “yes,” they will likely respond, “What kind?”

My wife’s grandpa, who died last year at the age of eighty four, always used the term dope as a generic term for soft drink. “Let me get a dope,” he would tell the waitress. The waitress, likely being born in a different millenia, would just smile nervously at him, as if he was senile. “He means a coke,” I would translate.

“Oh, ok, what kind?” she would ask, relieved.

“A Sundrop, if you have it,” he would say.

Apparently, dope was once the customary term for soft drink in western North Carolina. That usage, however, is becoming archaic, as evidenced by those puzzled looks on waitresses’ faces, and due to the fact that the people who used the term are dying off. My wife’s grandpa had an extra refrigerator in his utility room that he kept stocked with 2-liter bottles of Sundrop. He called it his “dope refrigerator.” He didn’t drink alcohol, but by golly he had a dope refrigerator, and he faithfully imbibed Sundrop till the day his very last days. Possibly, his heavy consumption of Sundrop over the years hastened his demise due to kidney failure. His doctor told him to “go easy on the stuff” but as far as I know that’s all he ever drank.

Before he died, my wife’s grandpa basically weaned our son, his great-grandson, on Sundrop. Thomas would toddle next door to visit, clamber up on a bar stool, and gulp down “tasty drink,” as he still calls it to this day. I’m not sure what the generic term for soft drink is in heaven, but hopefully some sort of tasty drink springs eternal there. Back here on earth, where time is limited, it’s likely less about what you drink or what you call it, but more about the time spent with the folks sipping dopes or cokes or tasty drinks. In his latter years, that’s something my wife’s grandpa seemed to know well–life is too short not to sit down and have a Sundrop with someone, even if it’s against the doctor’s orders.