On a sunny day in May I drive out to Grayson, GA to have a look at a vintage motorcycle for sale. It’s a 1976 Honda Goldwing GL1000, an old school 70’s superbike, candy apple red. I bring my son along in case there’s any heavy lifting involved, and if I buy it, he can drive my truck back home and I'll ride the bike. Plus he’s good company and might learn something. And on a further positive note, there’s always the possibility I might learn something myself. It’s been known to happen.
The bike’s owner, let’s call him Jeff, has a nice spread out in the country, with acres of lawn, and an eight car garage for his car and bike collection. The garage is as big as his house. My kind of guy. He’s a baby boomer, in his late seventies now, and bought the bike about ten years ago from the estate of his best friend and riding buddy. He’s ridden it on and off since then but these bikes are big and heavy, and it’s gotten to be a little too much for him to handle. He’s still riding, but on a trike now.
We open up the doors of the garage, and take the cover off the Goldwing. I’ve been looking for one for a while, watching as collectors are rediscovering them, driving prices up. Looking over this one and talking to Jeff, it’s obvious it has a lot of sentimental value for him, that he and his friend had spent many a day riding it together. Sharing that thing that serious motorcyclists all have in common, the love of the form and function of motorcycles, the purposeful beauty. And then the riding experience itself, the organic pleasure of the ride, wind in the hair, of really being out in the world, at speed, on a beautiful day. This is a bike that calls for that certain vintage gear, the worn leather jacket, the goggles, the look of a WWI ace fighter pilot, climbing from the cockpit of his Sopwith Camel.
While I inspect the motorcycle, Jeff and Jack are bonding over engineering. Jack is in school studying construction and facilities Read more [...]
Frederick Buechner as photographed in 1950 by Carl Van Vechten
I've written about Frederick Beuchner (BEEK-ner) before. An American writer, novelist, poet, and theologian, he has published more than thirty books, been a National Book Award finalist and nominee for a Pulitzer Prize. He lives in Vermont and is still writing at the age of ninety five. Born in New York City in 1926, his family moved frequently as Beuchner’s father searched for work. In The Sacred Journey, Beuchner wrote, “Virtually every year of my life until I was fourteen, I lived in a different place, had different people take care of me, went to a different school…Home was not a place to me when I was a child. It was people.”
Then, even this changed in 1936 when Beuchner was ten. His father committed suicide, a result of his conviction that he had been a failure.
But the young Beuchner persevered and, after high school, was admitted to Princeton University. In the middle of his tenure there, he was drafted into the army. This particular piece came from a remembrance of that time, 1944-1946.
The Need to Praise
THE NEXT WINTER I sat in Army fatigues somewhere near Anniston, Alabama, eating my supper out of a mess kit. The infantry training battalion that I had been assigned to was on bivouac. There was a cold drizzle of rain, and everything was mud. The sun had gone down. I was still hungry when I finished and noticed that a man nearby had something left over that he was not going to eat. It was a turnip, and when I asked him if I could have it, he tossed it over to me. I missed the catch, the turnip fell to the ground, but I wanted it so badly that I picked it up and started eating it anyway, mud and all. And then, as I ate it, time deepened and slowed down again. With a lurch of the heart that is real to me still, I saw suddenly, almost as if from beyond time altogether, that not only was the turnip good, but Read more [...]
I’m up in Brevard, NC for a couple of days visiting friends. The mountain weather is just about perfect, seventy five degrees with a nice breeze. Walking is such a great way to see a small town like Brevard. It’s known as the home of the white squirrel, a rare animal found in only a few places in the US. Allegedly they were brought here when a traveling circus came through town and a pair escaped. The circus was unable to find the two fugitives, and when the circus left town, the squirrels stayed.
Years passed, and the amorous couple began to produce offspring. There is a healthy population here now I hear, but in several visits, I have never actually seen one.
My walking takes me through the campus of Brevard college. It’s Spring and everything is blooming, multi-colored azaleas, daffodils, and dogwoods. Students are out and about, heading to class, lounging in the sun, throwing a frisbee. Everyone is happy, including the birds, who are singing to each other like nobody’s business. But still no white squirrel. Maybe a little too busy for them here.
I continue walking down Broad Street and come upon the Veterans Museum of the Carolinas, right next to the historic old brick courthouse.
I really have a soft spot for museums and military history so I can’t pass it up.
The museum is run by volunteer veterans, and (let’s call him) Bob, is on duty today. He’s super friendly, and when he sees I’m from Atlanta, tells me he was just there last week for a vet reunion. Shows me on his phone an Italian restaurant I have to try when I get back home. He’s very proud, and rightfully so, of the museum itself. There are different rooms for every theater, World War I, World War II, Korean War, Cold War, Vietnam, and the Gulf War.
I didn’t serve in the military, but lost two great uncles in WWII. The older, my namesake James, was wounded in the Pacific and brought home where he died from his wounds. The younger one, Read more [...]
He’d met the old man when he worked one summer baling hay on a neighbor’s cattle farm. On summer break from high school, it was his first real job, and hard work, out in the field loading the freshly baled hay onto a flatbed trailer, pulled behind a John Deere tractor. Then, when the trailer was full, the hay was stacked up into the barn loft, where it was at least a hundred and twenty degrees. Even showering after work, he could still feel the prickly hay itch on his skin.
The old man pretty much ran the operation, sometimes driving the baler, sometimes the tractor, and he could do any job on the farm that needed doing. He didn’t say much, but when he did the kid paid attention, and so learned to drive a tractor himself, plant fence posts, string barbed wire. Herd cattle.
After the hay was cut and put up, they cleared a wood lot together and he learned to use a chainsaw, keep the blade sharp, and split the straight oak logs into fence rails. The beauty of the fence they built along the driveway made all the hard work worthwhile.
Foot and mouth disease got into the herd that August, and every morning three or four more cows had died. The kid had to hook the bodies to a chain and use the tractor to pull them down to a big hole and bury them. This went on for weeks until the vet got the sickness under control. He didn’t eat beef for a good while after that, and the whole experience kind of turned him off of farming in general, and raising cattle in particular.
The neighbor had two daughters about his age, and he learned to ride a horse when they invited him out after work one afternoon. It was a big place, the farm, and that summer they rode horses all over the pastures and wooded trails, down to a stream where they swam and jumped off a rope swing hung out over the water. It was some of the best times he had had so far in his life. Being young, the company of women, and after a good ride, unsaddling and brushing the horses down Read more [...]
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Ces bonus sont souvent utilisés pour attirer de nouveaux clients et les inciter à essayer les jeux disponibles sur le site. Les casinos fiables avec bonus les utilisent comme un moyen efficace pour promouvoir leurs plateformes. Vous l'avez sans doute compris, les sites de jeux proposent des offres de bienvenue variées. Ces dernières prennent en compte les bonus sans dépôt et sur dépôt Read more [...]
I have been reading a collection of works by Frederick Buechner called Listening to Your Life: Daily Meditations (Harper San Francisco), really good stuff. Buechner, an American novelist and theologian, has a deeply empathetic view of life and its citizens. This particular piece really resonated and seemed it needed to be read by a few more of us. So I'm passing it along.
A Memorable Woman
AND PART OF ME will always be homesick, too, for a person I came to know, also in Manchester, during those same years. When the Baptist church, of which she was a member, was without a minister one winter, I took the services every Sunday for a few months, and that was how we met. She was a woman well on into her seventies, very thin, very stooped. She had been married a number of times, and for years, as a widow, had been living alone, on welfare, in the one small apartment left inhabitable in a house that had been gutted by fire a few years earlier. Shaking hands at the church door after the service one Sunday morning, I had said to her—neither expecting nor much caring about an answer—“How are you?” and she looked up at me out of her wry, beleaguered old face and said, “As well as can be expected.” Just that and no more, then made her way down the steps and out into the cold.
I am as deaf as the next one and usually deafer when it comes to calls for help, but I was all she had by way of a minister just then, after all, and I was not so literary and detached and specialized as not to know that every once in a while, if only to keep their hands in, Christians are supposed to be Christs to each other for Christ’s sweet sake, so I steeled myself and went to call on her one winter afternoon. I expected the worst, of course, because that is my nature. I expected a long, dreary monologue. I expected plenty of complaints with some tears to go with them. I expected to feel awkward and inadequate. I expected to be bored and hoped to get away as soon as I decently could. Read more [...]
For a brief shining year a while back I ran a music venue in Atlanta, The Royal Peacock. The building had been built in the 1920s, opening as Top Hat Club in 1938. Rechristened The Royal Peacock in the 1940s, it became a legendary club for music. Cab Calloway and Louis Armstrong played there, as did Ray Charles, Little Richard, and Marvin Gaye. Into the 1960s, it was the place to see and be seen by Auburn Avenue Atlanta royalty, everyone from Muhammad Ali to Martin Luther King, Jr., whose church was just up the street.
The club had fallen on hard times when we moved in, but all the original bones were there. The red upholstered booths, the Moorish design touches, the long hand-carved corner bar. The history was palpable.
We cleaned it up, added some high quality sound and lighting, stocked the bar, and started booking bands.
Everyone we could afford played there. And it was a mix, kind of like America. Classic R&B artists from the ’50s like Bobby “Blue” Bland, Jerry Butler, and Little Milton played alongside War, Indigo Girls, and Black Crowes. All the Athens bands of the day, Guadalcanal Diary, Love Tractor, B-52s.
One night as blues guitar legend Buddy Guy performed his signature guitar wailing walk out through the audience, he made a quick stop at the bar, where I happened to be stationed. The band paused, holding one long note, and he leaned my way.
“Bartender, give me a cognac.”
I obliged, and he downed three fingers of France’s best in one swallow. Impressive. Like his guitar playing.
Billy Preston needed a ride and I picked him up at the Hilton in my Jeep. Top-down, graying afro flowing in the summer breeze, the Beatles keyboardist was the consummate gentleman, soft-spoken and gracious.
The Temptations David Ruffin wasn’t quite ready to leave one night and we kept the bar open until the wee morning hours while he regaled us with stories of Motown, and the nightmare recording of the sublime “My Girl.” Only forty-nine Read more [...]
He was a five-year-old first-year Cub Scout, and today was the day of the Pinewood Derby. Pretty exciting. He and his Dad had built his car from the seven-inch long pine block that came in the mail from the Scout shop. Just a plain piece of wood with a couple of grooves cut for the axles. They had sawed, shaved, and sanded it into a beauty, painted red and black with lightning decals on the sides. He named her Red Lightning, and she was the most beautiful thing he thought he had ever seen.
His Dad knew a few things about cars and a little bit about physics. They had added some graphite to the wheels for lubrication. Cut out all possible friction, his Dad had said. And then, maybe most importantly, taped quarters and nickels to the car to add weight. He never would have figured that heavy cars go faster than light cars. But they did and again, that was science.
The race was held that evening in Fellowship Hall, in the back of the church. There were hot dogs and pizza, his favorite foods, and plenty of cookies to get all the kids juiced up for the festivities. They weighed Red Lightning when he arrived and she weighed almost right at the maximum allowed weight. Not even room for one more taped penny. She was ready to race.
The kid lived in a small town, which meant their scout pack was small, only sixteen scouts total. All the scouts raced each other, no matter what their ages. One of the big kids had won the Derby three years in a row and now he was ten, his last year as a cub scout. He was defending his title and seemed pretty confident to the little kid. In the history of their small town Derby, no five-year-old had ever won.
The track was thirty-two feet long and sloped down from four feet high at the top to the floor. He wasn’t four feet tall so there was a step to stand on. Gently he eased Red Lightning onto the starting gate, alongside another scout’s blue car, and then they were off. Any doubts about Red Lightning’s speed were quickly put Read more [...]
It was a big day. The kid, ten years old, was going crappie fishing with his grandfather and uncle. His grandmother had woken him up early to biscuits and gravy for breakfast, his favorite. It was still dark outside. While the men sat with their coffee, his grandmother made peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and packed them into bags with Wise potato chips and fried apple pies. Any day with fried apple pies was a good day.
They hooked the Ford up to the boat trailer and drove to the lake, the boy in the middle, on the bench seat. Got to the boat ramp as the sun was turning the dark sky to light grey. When the boat started it smelled like Castrol and gasoline, just like the dirt bikes he lusted for. Soon enough...
The men dropped him off on a sandbar with his fishing tackle, some crickets for bait, and his lunch in a brown paper bag. Then they headed off around the bend, out of sight. He rigged up his rod and looked out across the green water. The lake was so wide here you could almost see the curve of the earth.
Almost immediately, and unexpectedly, he hooked a large crappie. It took him three or four minutes to get it to the sand, where he gently unhooked it and admired its beauty. All silvery and sleek, the morning sun reflected off its scales. He put it on the stringer and cast again. And immediately caught another, reeling it in slowly to avoid tearing their delicate mouths, playing it closer and closer to the graveled sand, tiring it out enough to land.
And this went on. He had never had fishing like this. It was the perfect storm of schools of Spring crappie swimming the channel, right off his sandbar. By lunch, he had twenty shimmering crappies on the stringer and was excited enough to about burst wide open. He sat down on a pine log and ate his lunch, savoring the day, and his silver treasure, finning in the current.
After a while, he heard a boat in the distance, and when it came around the point he could see his grandfather and uncle. Before Read more [...]
Boulder, Colorado 1980. I had moved there from a small town in Georgia to attend school at the University of Colorado. CU. Buffalo country. In the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, it was like no place I had ever seen before. A hippie college town on the edge of a massive mountain range. Snow-capped peaks stretched off into the distance.
Late that summer, my parents had given me their blessings, $500, and a one-way plane ticket to Denver. Everything I owned or needed was in the pack on my back. And it turned out I needed the camping gear and sleeping bag immediately. The dorms were full, so the first few nights I slept under the stars, tucked back into the shrubbery along the chapel wall. Nobody bothered me or even seemed to notice. Just another long haired kid with a backpack.
Through a friend of a friend, I got a job working the night shift at Hanson ski boot factory. I’d go in at 10 PM, running a big injection molding machine, pouring the plastic boot shells. Nobody there was over twenty-five years old and just about everyone was in Colorado for one reason. To ski. So that’s what we did. Get off work at 6 AM, pile into someone’s car, and head up into the mountains for a morning of fresh powder. The first ones there when the lifts opened, the only tracks before us were ski patrol, policing the morning runs. Skiing well took practice, but also a positive mindset, the confidence to stay out in front of your skis, pushing but in control. Proactive courage. I skipped a lot of classes but became proficient on moguls, adding to my belief that adventure trumped trigonometry.
I also found a place to live. Six of us in a three-bedroom house. Jerry and Cecil were a black belt in Taekwondo, and an ex-college football lineman, respectively, and doormen/bouncers in the local discotheque at the Sheraton Hotel. Not my music of choice, but disco ruled the airwaves, and Saturday Night Fever was everywhere. Housemates Sam and Jenny were from Chicago and competitive Read more [...]