Shem Creek and Sydni

Update: Okay, the original post is still below, but I find I need to apologize to those who know me and know my dog.  I am so sorry for scaring everyone.  Especially both my oldest daughters, my sister, and my former spouse.  Sydni is still with us and doing great for a 13+ year old dog.  But she's slowing down, can't climb the stairs by herself, is deaf as a post, and can't make it further than around the block before she's ready to be done with the walk.  Not that she isn't as excited as ever to get out the door--she's just done by the time you turn the second corner.  Still, she's as beautiful as ever (really, she looks better than she has in five years), and fuzzy and loving and she smiles.  Especially when she's sleeping, which is most of the time.  (I find I'm back to that stage I was in right after my girls were born, when I checked on them during naps and in the middle of the night to be sure they were still breathing.)  And all of that is why I said I'm going to miss her.  Both of Laura's old dogs passed this past year, and so I'm just hyper-conscious of Sydni's age and more grateful than ever for every day that begins and ends with nuzzles and husky-hugs from her.  That's all.  My bad.  So sorry.  Truly I am.  I expect better of myself when it comes to proofing my own work from a reader's perspective, but clearly I skipped that step entirely with this quick little post whipped off during the workday to capture a nostalgic moment.  Clearly.  When my ex called tonight she'd been crying, as I expect I would to think I was hearing similar news of her dog.  By the time she was laughing, after my profuse apologies, she summed up the gaff pretty well.  "That's the last thing I would expect from you, the Wizard of Words."  More like the Scrivener's Apprentice today.  Again, sorry.

For some reason, the smell of the ocean is strong to me today--possibly not a good thing, it being about 100 miles away.  But what has been nice is the flashback to all those morning and evening walks with Sydni in Charleston that usually ended on the pier jutting into the tidal marsh of Shem Creek, back in those days when the tide charts were part of my daily crosscheck.  I am going to miss my dog.

On the Road Again

I'll be on the road this weekend, in Richmond, Virginia, looking for a new place to live, beginning another new adventure. Blogging will likely be light as I explore firsthand, yet again, the old saying that, "North Carolina is a vale of humility between two mountains of conceit."

Snow Day, Inside and Out

Life is about choices, about balancing what we want with what we need, what and whom we will be near with what and whom we will miss.

Missing my daughter in Colorado is a constant ache, a dull throb like that of a tooth that you walk around with your tongue over to protect. It might be different if she had reached the age to fly the nest and left for college, but instead, the nest disintegrated around her, and with all the other changes in the world last year, her father retired from one job and came to South Carolina to take another. Being apart was a given. Where I would be was the choice--somewhere in this country, or in another land, half a globe away.

But there is balance. That throb of missing one daughter is constant, but on the other side of the scale, I am in the same time zone with almost everyone else that I so dearly love. I see her older sister every few weeks, one way or another. I even see the younger every six weeks or so, sometimes more often, sometimes a little less. There is Facebook and MySpace and text and e-mail and video messaging, but bear hugs and butterfly kisses don't quite translate through those things.

What brought all this on today was seeing photos in The Salisbury Post of the snow in the neighborhood of my childhood home. Those photos reminded me how glad I am to be here, in the South, on this side of the world where most of my heart resides. Originally, that had been the topic I intended to post. Funny how the truth outs itself. The joy is pure and transporting, and instantly balanced by the throb of an absence that will never completely fade, for either of us I expect. I look at the scenes of snow, think of the gray skies covering a world that seems to light itself from the bottom up, and think, "She'd like this . . . but her head would be awfully cold today." (That would be because she took part in a benefit for cancer at her school, and is now sporting the hairstyle of Natalie Portman in V for Vendetta.)

I drove back from Georgia through that snow on Sunday night and into Monday morning. It's the first time the Jeep has been in 4WD since Colorado, but it was in that mode for well over an hour during that trip. I chose to come the southern route, through Athens and Augusta on US-78 rather than through Greenville on I-85 and I-26. It was, so far as I could tell from the news yesterday, a good decision. Though the major shutdown of the interstate appears to have occurred slightly north of my route, it could just as easily have been me out there stuck for seven hours. Surface roads don't have that problem. You can always go around. But stuck on an interstate is stuck. And by driving late that night, I avoided the only real obstacle a 4WD Jeep Grand Cherokee outfitted with fresh, new tires would face: other drivers. In all, the alternate route and snow together added less than an hour to the trip, and was, actually, rather beautiful.

As for what inspired this post, you can see a gallery of photos from readers of The Charlotte Observer here. (The Salisbury Post is closer to home and has better photos, but is too worried about their copyright to post images of sufficient quality to even be enjoyable on the gallery. "Buy this photo" teases one button on their site. Well, if I could see it, I might be tempted, but . . .)

Here are a couple of the better ones from the Observer. Enjoy.

Skydive Carolina

[I publish this with a disclaimer of sorts. I wrote it early this morning, first thing after my perusal of the eight front pages I scan on a daily basis. But rather than publish it immediately, I sent it to the DZ manager of Skydive Carolina to fact check. Unfortunately, I'm pretty sure he's gone to the Parachute Industry Association Symposium, so I may not hear from him for a while. If I've gotten any details wrong, I'll publish corrections. Meanwhile, I'm confident enough about the principles involved to go with what I've written.]

Some things are newsworthy only by proxy. If a man has a heart attack on the neighborhood basketball court and dies doing what he loved and among friends, it'll make the news. But if a man simply gets a bloody nose charging the lane during a game, it's hardly newsworthy, unless it happens on the same court the very next weekend.

This article from the Charlotte Observer this morning is like that, only worse--its sloppy use of language does the finest drop zone (DZ) in the Carolinas, and all the Observer's readers a disservice:

For the second time in slightly more than a week, a skydiver suffered a mishap while landing at the Chester County Airport. This time, the jump ended without tragedy. A skydiver suffered minor injuries Sunday afternoon after a hard landing at the end of a solo jump, said James LaBarrie, general manager of Skydive Carolina. The man might have suffered a sprained ankle, LaBarrie said.

Eight days ago, a first-time skydiver steered safely to the ground after his instructor suffered an apparent midair fatal heart attack. Both incidents involved Skydive Carolina, a skydiving company that operates out of the Chester County Airport.

First, the incident itself is analogous to that basketball game in that a new solo skydiver landing hard and spraining an ankle isn't something that happens every day, but when it does, it's hardly more newsworthy than a bloody nose or a twisted ankle on the neighborhood basketball court. It made the news today only because of the prior weekend's much more newsworthy event. Unfortunately, even that event is misrepresented here.

In addition to being a skydiving instructor with years of experience, I'm also an English professor. While skydiving is my love, teaching literature and writing pays the bills. I stress to my students, on a daily basis, that above all, they should be careful that the things they write are true. To say, "For the second time in slightly more than a week, a skydiver suffered a mishap while landing," is wrong, untrue, misrepresentative, and downright lazy. In the incident the previous weekend, the tandem instructor, after safely deploying the main canopy and even exchanging a few words with his student, suffered a heart attack before reaching the ground. The student, a young soldier with the kind of situational awareness and initiative that makes our armed forces the finest in the world, then steered the canopy to a safe landing and even attempted CPR on the instructor. That's not a "mishap while landing." That's not even really a skydiving mishap. It may be arguable that it's even a "mishap." Everyone is saddened by the loss of a good man and fine instructor, and yet most of us, at least most people I know, harbor a very real hope that when our time comes, we'll have the good fortune to go so peacefully in the middle of doing something we love, rather than wasting away in a hospital bed with some form of cancer or living long enough for dementia to set in and no longer being able to find our way to the DZ. Thus, even the word "tragedy" may be a misnomer. That same heart attack suffered on the road on the way home could have been a far worse tragedy. (And for those wondering, had it come earlier, before deployment of the canopy, yes, there is a backup system that would have deployed the main canopy at a set emergency altitude.)

But I'm allowing myself to become distracted. My point is this. A sprained ankle at a DZ is not news. Barring the previous weekend's events, it would never have reached the threshold of public awareness, and to report it as if it were a part of some ominous trend is sensationalism at its worst. I can only guess it was a slow news day in that corner of the Carolinas.

For what it's worth, I've skydived over much of this country, from Maryland to California and from Florida to Washington, either for pleasure, or in demonstrations with one military team or another. Every DZ has a certain character, an ambiance, and a reputation within the skydiving community. I made my first jump at Skydive Carolina back in 2003, and I made my last attempt to jump there this past Saturday. It was an attempt because the winds were a little high. Not so high that many of the places I've jumped wouldn't have pressed right on. (The United States Parachute Association's (USPA's) Basic Safety Requirements (BSRs) are really more "recommendations" than "requirements." The Skydiver's Information Manual refers to them as "risk-reduction procedures," an unblushing acknowledgment that ours is a sport in which risk is only reducable, never capable of full elimination.) At other DZs I've patronized, those winds, sporty without doubt, might easily have lost out to the interplay of testosterone, adrenaline, and the fact that an aircraft on the ground earns no lift fees. Not at Chester. Skydive Carolina, after waiting the winds out for a while on the ground, called it a day rather than risk an off-DZ landing or injury should enthusiasm get the upper hand of good sense. I cannot stress enough the difficulty and cost of borderline calls like that and just how much they say about the character of a DZ's owners and manager.

And that is what this post is really about. The contrast between a good DZ and poor news reporting. With great power comes great responsibility. Our media these days are heady with power, and more than a little short on responsibility. By saying anything at all about a non-event and by saying it in language that can be described most charitably as "inprecise," the Observer does all of us, jumpers and readers alike, a disservice. Either more was needed to put the report in proper perspective, or nothing at all should have been said. All that is unspoken has the effect of suggesting too much that is untrue.

I've recently moved back home to the South after 31 years wearing Air Force blue. I expect to spend a lot of time at Chester. It's friendly, it's clean, it has amenities other DZ's only dream of, and above all, it's safe. When she's of age, Skydive Carolina will likely be the DZ where my youngest daughter makes her first jump, and perhaps, if we can get off the golf course long enough, even my dad.

And that, for what it's worth, is my two cents on today's skydiving "news."

Reunion

I'm writing this quickly on Thursday night, because my life is about to pick up pace for the next few days. My daughter arrives in Charleston from Colorado Springs on Saturday (the day this should post, if I get this right).

We have cars to look at, movies to see, colleges to tour, siblings, aunts, uncles, grandparents, and cousins to visit, feasts to enjoy, tattoos to discuss, beaches to walk, and general catching up to do. If I could, I would stop time on Saturday and just bask for a while in her presence. Our sons and daughters grow up way too fast. And you can tell a young parent, "You're gonna miss this," until you're blue in the face. Until that time comes, they really have no idea. So, rather than missing anything, I plan to enjoy every second of the next week, until I put her on a plane back to Colorado the Saturday after Thanksgiving.

I've been good lately about posting something every day. If I'm not so good this coming week, I hope you'll come back. With luck, I'll have plenty stories to tell by then. Just in case I don't make the time between now and then, I say up front, I hope everyone out there has a grand Thanksgiving in the company of the people they love most.

So I raise a toast to family
Put thanks in my glass
In the arms of your loved ones
It's the only home that lasts
--Edwin McCain

Peace ya'll.

Snapshot: Marsh in Fog, Evening

Shem Creek. Short fishing pier, unfrequented. 6 p.m. The dark comes early now. Quiet but for the soft whrrr of heat pumps, the faraway sound of traffic, but all that muffled tonight by a light, warm fog. Someone's streetlamp visible half a mile away over pier or boathouse, but beyond that, the condos and hotel normally visible are shrouded. A tall crystal glass of some Aussie Cab/Merlot silhouetted against the grey. A conversation of canines across the creek. Mine rests silent at my feet. She likes the pier, I think--accustomed now to coming here, sometimes only to look out across the water and marsh grass and retreat, and sometimes, like tonight, to pause for a while. To listen to the occasional splash of something alive in the marsh. To allow the breeze, heavy with the weight of the fog to caress us. The crickets to stroke our ears.

I'm learning this place. Tides. So high this morning that I could almost reach down and touch the surface. So, to the chart: +6.9 feet, it says. Then +7.0 tomorrow, before a steady regression to more normal depths. Pull of the full moon.

Fog horn this morning on waking and again now. Took a while to believe it was what it sounded like. No idea where. Something else to learn. Less than three miles to the harbor from here.

Cigar tonight perhaps. Later. After dinner, some Addison, some Steele, a little Swift, and the ever pressing paperwork. Mentally recapping the day leading up to this quiet. Solitary office hours this morning. The afternoon at the Air Force base. Retiree ID card, finally. Register for TriCare Prime. Learn what it is to pay for my health care--a pittance really, compared to anyone else, but after so long at no cost, one more reality check. Ready to be done with that life, but not ready for this.

Walking back in, a conversation of fog horns in differing pitch, like a hearing test for the wide wet world. I press the button.

Snapshot: "I'm Not Dead"

A day at home, dedicated to the paperwork that ends a marriage. Funeral rites.

Coffee on the pier. Gray day. Sluggish backward flow of an incoming tide near high. Quiet trickle of leftover stormwater from a pipe hidden by pier planks. Brown pelican passing at medium height, winging lumberous down the upstream toward open water. Sound of slow wings. The egret beneath ingresses between marsh walls, stark white against muddy banks and brown reeds.

All the while a wake of buzzards holds congress, lining the siderails of the pier reaching from across the way, stacked on roofline and chimney next door, and nearest and thickest perched by the dozen in a dead tree stretched over dead water. All this under overcast sky. Darkly hopeful watch they keep. Fit weather and fit fowl for this day's labors.

And when one circles close to see what sits so long without movement, taking it all in, a flashback. Dark bird to bring such a light thought and true. Not dead. Not yet. Not hardly.


And clearly, I need to replace that lost camera.

Cheerwine: "The Nectar of North Carolina"

I managed, in a 27-yr Air Force career, to be stationed in or next door to North Carolina for ten of those years. The other 17 were split between Colorado and California. During the 10 years in Colorado, I used to get my "southern fix" in a couple of different ways, largely with the help of my Dad. Sometimes he just made sure when I was packing up to drive back from a visit that I wasn't forgetting essentials. Other times, he would ship those essentials to me. Essentials, in this case, translates to cases of Cheerwine and gallon jars of Duke's mayonnaise--two of the first things to enter my fridge in the new place here on the SC coast.

So, I thought it worth noting that there were two articles in the hometown paper Thursday about the soft drink I grew up considering a natural part of the world. The first regards "a new branding, packaging and marketing campaign" and the second tells us that, "Cheerwine has taken a foothold in New York City."

I couldn't help but smile at both of these. I could smile because it doesn't sound, for now at least, as if the company is trying to make itself into anything new. Rather, it sounds as though they're wisely attempting to do a better job of marketing what Cheerwine has always been. The article's quote from the company's CEO pretty much nails it: "Those who know and love Cheerwine have always connected the brand to simple and relaxed times, hanging out, eating Southern barbecue and being laid back." So long as they don't mess with that, I don't expect too many people will get bent out of shape about new packaging. It's changed before.

And that image of what Cheerwine is really all about is why I also had to smile at the second article. I recently had a series of conversations with several friends about the difference between Yankees and damned Yankees. You can't really fault a person for the geography of his or her birth. But you can sure fault them for their attitude, blue and grey alike. I have good friends who are Yankees; damned Yankees give me a fairly wide berth.

Here's why. Throughout my sojourns into over a dozen foreign countries through the years, I've tried, everywhere I've gone, not to be the obnoxious American (I'd have said Yankee here, but it might have muddied my point, despite the upsetting behavior being pretty much the same in either case). I've tried to make it clear that I've been interested in learning about the culture of the place I was visiting, in occasionally immersing myself in that culture, in appreciating it for its own values and pace. I have tried, studiously, to avoid giving any impression that I expected that culture to conform to my values, my pace, my concept of the shape the world should hold. I have tried, tried consciously, carefully, consistently, not to be a "damned Yankee."

I've noticed, especially now that I'm back here in the land of y'all somewhat permanently I hope, that some of these people are noticeable before they say a word. They wear an expression much as if someone had just waved a teenager's unwashed sneaker under their nose a good month into gym class. They hate it here. The pace irritates them. The culture we treasure, they revile. They cannot understand why, if the North won the war over a century ago, the South should remain so utterly foreign a place to them. They want quick service, they don't want to know how you're doing, and would rather you didn't ask about them. Their desire, their expectation even, is that we should have been just like them by now. On the whole, they are a good example of the very things that make the stereotypical obnoxious American abroad obnoxious. They are, if you think about it, a good example of some of the most misguided features of American policy abroad: the inappropriate drive, not to thoroughly understand a foreign culture and work within it to emphasize the better qualities, but to reshape it wholesale toward an American model. I'm well aware that we don't always get it this wrong, but on the whole, I think we far too frequently do.

But, I digress. My point is simple. The war goes on folks, never doubt it. It's not for real estate now though. It's for hearts and minds. The culture is both the battleground and the prize. And in that war, food is one of our main weapons. So when I read in that second article:

Brother Jimmy's Barbecue, which has six restaurants in New York, has begun offering Cheerwine with its traditional North Carolina-style barbecue and hush puppies. 'We have finally brought the nectar of Carolina to New York City,' said Jim Goldman, an owner and founder of Brother Jimmy's BBQ.

I couldn't help but smile. I had to smile at Brother Jimmy's slogan too: "Put Some South in Yo Mouth." Yeah! Take that ya'll.

Striving for Second Worst

Yesterday's blog post and the news story that spawned it reminded me of a story published in the Raleigh News & Observer back when I was a grad student at Chapel Hill.

Seems North Carolina had had the distinction of sporting the second worst SAT scores in the nation, then SC, who had been worst, moved up a notch, knocking us to the very bottom of the list. Comment from the state's education head? Not that we needed to look at the programs of the states near the top of the list and see what we could apply to The Old North State. No. In a remark that really revealed more about the roots of the problem than it was probably meant to, the person in charge of educating our Tarheel children remarked (and I may paraphrase here, after 19 years or so, but not much, if at all): "We clearly need to find out what South Carolina is doing, and do more of that."

Yeah. Second worst is so much better than the bottom.

If you get ambitious (I have the ambition, but not the time) and look up the original story (sometime between summer 89 and summer 91), I'd love to have a link.