Light Blue Tears on a Sunday

I spent most of Sunday morning crying.

Now, that’s not something many men would readily confess, but the tears were streaming down my face as I read about the death of Dean Smith. It has been nearly 18 years since Dean retired as head basketball coach of my alma mater, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and he had been in declining health in recent years. So, it wasn’t much of a shocker that he died Saturday night. In fact, this was something all us faithful Tar Heels had come to expect.

My tears began flowing because it hit me very hard how Dean had been a very integral part of my life growing up and in many ways defined who I am today. Passions always run deep, and none run deeper for me than my love for UNC and the Tar Heels. And with Dean’s death, that lighter blue part of my heart and soul now grieves.

This grief is so palpable to me, because I know that I will never again experience the passion, the love and excitement I had for the Tar Heels during the 36 years Dean was head coach. Some of the longest and most enduring friendships of my life are completely intertwined with those years, and my mind is filled with so many memories of those years that are still vivid and filled with joy. And that’s why I cried, because in many ways Dean had always been at the core of it all, and the constant denominator that I came to depend upon, and sadly, I now admit took for granted too.

When Dean retired in 1997, I have to say that my passion for the Tar Heels began to flag and has continued to fade a bit through the years. Now, I don’t exult in every win or mope with each loss as I once did. I don’t even watch every game, which 25 years ago, I would’ve considered blasphemy. Lately, I have attributed my ebbing passion to age. I was “maturing,” and my diminished interest was just a natural result of being more removed from my youth and years in Chapel Hill.

That is until I read of Dean’s passing. My tears quickly formed as the passion once again welled up within me. I was reminded that for 36 years I had been a small part of something that transcended the sport of basketball and went to the very core of what it means to live with passion, respect, integrity, determination and above all love. I can only hope in some small way Dean knew what he meant to me and meant to so many of my very best and lifelong friends. And as I write these thoughts down, the tears have just begun to flow a little bit harder.

On the Road to Charlotte

Lately, the highway between Asheville and Charlotte has become deeply ingrained into my psyche, much like, the road from Charlotte to Chapel Hill once did. I can picture every turn, every landmark, every twist in the road.

I’ve been burning up the road between Asheville and Charlotte lately because my mother has fallen ill—a ‘minor’ stroke is the culprit. She’s 92 but quick to tell you that she’s going on 93. She’s done exceedingly well for all these years, but it’s growing much harder for her to regain her balance after each health care stumble—no matter how minor. Her latest setback is going to be a very long haul, I fear.

Most of my trips are down and back in one day. The drive to Charlotte from my house is just a touch over two hours—depending on where you’re going in the greater Charlotte-Mecklenburg area. The trip is very lovely too, through some of the prettiest scenery on the east coast. Just 15 miles east of my house you descend the Blue Ridge Escarpment on I-40. At Swannanoa Gap, the interstate bursts through the ridgeline, and I-40’s path down the escarpment is memorable, almost monumental in its scope.

The highway swoops up and down the ridge in a serpentine series of broad three-laned s-curves. The elevation change is fairly severe, and my ears tend to pop at least twice often three times on the drive up or down the Black Mountain grade. The six-mile grade is the steepest climb that the highway makes in its 2,400-mile journey from Wilmington, N.C. to Barstow, Calif.

In I-40’s eastbound lanes, semi-trucks lunge and shudder down the hill as their diesel engines strain with high-pitched whines in a struggle against gravity and to keep the trucks from careening down hill at a maddening jackknife pace. The smell of overheated brake drums often wafts through the car’s air vents. In the westbound lanes, 18-wheelers struggle and crawl up the 6 percent grade. Usually one or two tractors have lost the battle, sitting stranded and smoking in the emergency lane.

On clear days from the top of Swannanoa Gap, you can clearly see where the mountains end, dwindling into the Piedmont and seeming reluctant to surrender to the flatlands. The final gasps of elevated landscape extend eastward for another 40 miles flanking the interstate with the foothill ranges of the Brushy and South Mountains.

I-40 is filled with a typical traffic mix of trucks, SUVs, RVs and sedans. A fair smattering of out-of-state plate mingle with ubiquitous N.C. plates and the “First in Flight” slogan. Once off the Black Mountain grade, traffic nudges up above the 70 mph speed limit, and the small foothill towns of Old Fort, Marion, Dysartville and Nebo pass by almost unnoticed.

Often to break the monotony and sterility of the interstate, I will bolt down N.C. 226 heading southeast out of Marion through the heart of the South Mountains and into Shelby. If you drew a straight line between Asheville and Charlotte, it would trend more toward the route of I-40/N.C. 226/U.S. 74. It’s maybe 20 miles shorter going that way, but takes at least 15 minutes longer to drive. Shelby is a series of stoplights every half mile or so for about 10 miles, which are sequenced to bedevil and frustrate the most patient driver.

Shelby is just another in a line of foothill towns that all look and feel so similar--it's almost eerie. If I was blindfolded, thrown in a trunk and then set loose in the middle of Shelby, Marion, Morganton, Wilkesboro, Lenoir, Rutherfordton or Forest City, I'd have a damned hard time telling them apart and knowing exactly where I was, and I know all these towns--so lord help, a foothills neophyte.

The quickest route to Charlotte follows I-40 on through the larger foothill town of Morganton. Morganton is a nice place fairly unremarkable though except for Broughton Hospital—which for years was a state mental institution. Broughton and its heavy brick Victorian facades loom over the southeast side of Morganton, cresting a bluff that sits not far off the Catawba River. When I was a kid, the hospital’s shadow cast a gloom over Morganton because that was the town where crazy people went. Through the years, the town’s reputation has brightened though and is now a gateway to the high country of Avery, Yancey and Watauga counties.

Still, driving I-40 through Morganton can conjure some sad memories for me. My grandmother died along that highway in the fall of 1970. A careless pick-up truck driver cut off my grandparents’ car clipping it on the left front fender. The impact sent the AMC Rambler careening down an embankment where it hit a tree smashing the passenger side. My grandfather who was driving survived with two broken arms, which were most likely snapped from the impact with the tree as he gripped the wheel tightly.

I know the spot, and there’s a guardrail there now just a few yards off the emergency lane. I try not to look as I speed by but usually catch myself glancing down the embankment into that fatal line of trees. I often wonder: How odd is it to have an emotional connection with a road—especially on a highway specifically designed to detach you from the landscape. Maybe it’s this connection that has led me to know every mile marker and every exit on this highway.

The familiarity feels good though, like I’m cruising with an old friend. And right now, with all the challenges my mother and in turn my family now face, I need as many friends as I can get.

Damp in Downtown Nashville

There’s a lot of neon along Broadway in downtown Nashville. From Ernest Tubbs’ record shop along the four or five blocks to the Cumberland River, neon shines like some sort of mini-Las Vegas. Some is garish and some fairly tasteful, and not totally unexpected for the capital of country music.

The rainy night seemed to make the neon glow that much brighter as vivid reds, greens and purples reflected off the wet asphalt and puddles that rippled haphazardly along the curbs and street corners. My feet slipped across the sidewalk grates slick with rain and whatever amalgam of grease and dirt had been knocked loose from the concrete by steady downpours.

The rain let up long enough for me to take a walk around the Ryman Theater where some of the best country music stars shone their brightest. I’ve been lucky enough to see a show or two at the Ryman but have never darkened the door of the new and oh so completely faux home to the Grand Ole Opry.

The new theater is stuck out in characterless suburban Nashville and surrounded by the most butt-ugly expanse of parking lot filled with buses that routinely disgorge masses of tour groups. No doubt these people will be entertained, since the Opry still is a wonderful showcase of musical talent. But for me, I prefer the feel and tradition of the Ryman. Several years back, I expressed these opinions to the group sales manager from Opryland, and his reply to me: “You and Roy Acuff would get along famously.” High praise indeed.

After splashing and slipping a bit around the Ryman, I wandered over to Printers’ Alley—home to Nashville’s most famous and in some cases infamous honky tonks. Outside one joint, a sandwich board advertised “Nude Karaoke.” While intriguing to say the least, I hurried past while a street barker did his best to entice me to step inside. I’ve learned through the years that when someone tries so hard to get you to spend money that it’s definitely not worth it.

I hurried past, ignoring the barker’s hard sell and went into the bar a few doors down. It was much more my speed, dark and dank. A faded wooden bar with brass rails lined one side of the barroom. A mismatched assortment of barstools most with torn leather seats were scattered about. The black paint on the walls and ceiling was faded, worn and infused with 40-plus years of dust. I ordered bourbon on the rocks and settled in to observe the clientele. The bar’s house band was setting up, and I figured that a bar band in Nashville might be pretty damned good—I was not disappointed.

The bar was filled with mostly local types. You can tell a tourist in a situation like that from miles away—they positively glow with naïveté. Plus everyone in the bar seemed to know each other. I was definitely the odd man out, and I hoped that my own naïve glow wasn’t too obvious.

Most of the patrons had a hard and sun-faded look to them—pale and tan at the same time with tobacco drenched wrinkles lining their foreheads and crinkling around their eyes. Tattoos of skulls, snakes, lizards entwined with flowers covered arms, necks and legs, and it was the first time I ever saw someone actually hobbling along using an orthopedic cane fully festooned with skull and crossbones.

The crowd grew larger as the band took an inordinately long time to tune up. “Check-check one-two, one-two” blaring for 15 minutes can be a bit tedious. Still, the band was excellent once they got all the checking out of their system. In most towns other than Nashville, these guys would’ve filled the bar to capacity.

The audience listened some, but mostly they just talked over the music. It was all so familiar to me. While I had never been there before, the cast of characters was the same. Barmaids looking bit a tired and much older than their 20-something years. An assortment of guys some with ponytails and hairstyles most men left behind in the 1970s. An attractive young blonde with knee-high leather boots, tight jeans and a flowing lacy top flitted among the men with mullets and shoulder-length hair. Before the band started, the lead singer gave her a hug and climbed back on stage.

I couldn’t help but wonder how many like her had stood in the same spot and dreamed of a big break in the Nashville music scene. Some people can stomach a lifetime of that kind of scene, and many in the bar obviously had.

Glimpses of this kind of life play out every day in thousands of bars scattered about the country. Still, Nashville might be a bit tougher with the level of talent drawn to its promises of fame and fortune, and this thought depressed me a bit. I was ready to leave and outside the rain let up. I stepped out and hurried past the strip club barker. However intriguing it might sound, Nude Karaoke can only be the bottom-most rung of Nashville’s musical ladder

Bottle Rockets and Bears

OK, like any red-blooded American boy, I keep a stash of fireworks, and today that paid off pretty well. First let me start off by explaining, we keep our garbage can in the garage with the door always closed. Although we don’t see them very often, bears do wander our neighborhood, and their favorite past-time is overturning garbage cans. If bears held the Olympic Games, the events would revolve around lifting up, flipping over or prying open trash receptacles.

Today, I planned to do some touch-up paint work on the back of the house. I opened up the garage and found the paint can I wanted and stirred the paint a bit and grabbed a paint brush. As I walked around to the back of my house, I heard this huge crash emanating from the garage. I thought the ladder that I had propped up near the door had fallen over, which would be bad thing since it most likely would’ve landed on my car. What I found was worse, much worse.

I walked out to the edge of our deck where I can see down into the garage, and the ladder hadn’t fallen but instead a black bear had overturned our rolling garbage can and was nosing through the contents. I shouted and clapped my hands, which by the way is what you’re supposed to do to startle a bear. The bear looked up at me, gave me a look of disdain as if to say, “You pale-skinned hairless fool, what are you going to do about it?”

The bear, however, was ignorant of my fireworks arsenal so I ran around to a cabinet where I keep a stash of bottle rockets for such bear incursions. I grabbed a bundle of them, the finest of course Black Cat, which rarely ever have a dud. I found a lighter and considered myself ready for a bear hunt.

By the time, I ran back around the house and peered down from the safety of the deck, which is about 10 feet above the driveway, the bear had pulled some of the garbage to the edge of the garage and was preparing for a feast. I lit a rocket and lobbed it at the bear like a small hand grenade. It hit the pavement and skipped into the garage. The ensuing explosion reverberated out and the bear beat a hasty retreat. I decided to harass the bear further and circled around the back of the house and as I came around to the front, I lobbed another rocket, which forced the bear to retreat back toward the driveway.

 I walked cautiously around the corner of the house and there the bear stood maybe 10 feet away. He was good sized boar maybe weighing in at 300 lbs. I shouted and he retreated, but he stopped after about 30 feet and began to stare me down—not a good thing because he wasn’t giving ground—which is the first sign he’s thinking of charging.

 Of course, I had no intention of letting him turn the tables on me, so I lit another rocket and tossed it. It flew wide by a good 15 feet, but the rocket's report panicked the bear, and he bolted for the safety of the woods. I threw another for good measure ... ka-boom! And he disappeared into the forest, gone—hopefully for good. Bears are smart and have excellent memories, they usually don't like to return to places that have caused them some consternation in the past. Here’s hoping this bear learned his lesson.

The Deadman's Hand

Two pair, black aces and eights, is the dead man’s hand for those who don’t know. James Butler Hickok, better known as Wild Bill, supposedly held those cards when he was shot in the back of the head playing poker at Nutall & Mann’s Number 10 Saloon in Deadwood, South Dakota.

More than 120 years later, the shooting of Wild Bill is still re-enacted daily in the saloon every few hours in the afternoons and evenings during the summer tourist season. I wasn’t aware of  this fact until Wild Bill himself asked if I’d like to be the dealer while he got his head blowed off. Of course, I agreed. Who in their right mind would ever pass up a chance to play poker with the Old West’s most famous gunman and then watch him die a gruesome and violent death?

When Wild Bill requested my assistance, I was sitting at the bar imbibing in a cold beer after doing a bit of gambling myself. It was late afternoon and the bat-wing doors of saloon cast elongated shadows across the uneven and worn wooden floor. Nutall & Mann’s is a fairly authentic western saloon, and dates back to the mid-1880s. However, the existing stone and brick building was built after a fire swept through Deadwood Gulch and leveled most of the town’s rickety wood structures.

The current saloon was completed about 10 years after Wild Bill was gunned down by a teenage boy named Jack McCall. After sneaking up and blasting Hickok in the back of the head from point blank range, McCall told the shocked bystanders that his mother had killed herself because of Wild Bill’s misdeeds.

Turns out that was a lie, and McCall’s mother was some two-bit whore in Cheyenne who had met Hickok maybe once and died either of a drug overdose or syphilis, probably both. McCall was actually the worst kind of murderous villain since he only craved fame. McCall thought he’d be famous for killing Wild Bill and that people would pay to hear his story. Lucky for him, he wasn’t strung up immediately. A kangaroo court of prospectors and gamblers acquitted McCall of murder. The “court” seemed to buy the avenging his dead mother defense. Most historians believe the jurors were actually very pissed at Wild Bill for consistently beating them at poker and taking their money.

McCall left Deadwood a day or two after his “acquittal” and was later arrested and tried in Cheyenne by a real court. The second trial didn’t turn out very well for McCall, and he was found guilty of homicide. His fame was pretty short lived and was hanged a few weeks before his 20^th birthday.

Hickok was buried in Deadwood, and people seem to think it was his home. Truth is, Hickok had come to town about three weeks before he was shot. He came to gamble because stories had spread of easy pickings from prospectors who had flocked to South Dakota’s Black Hills. They came in a gold rush that started when an U.S. Army expedition led by Lt. Col. George Custer discovered gold. It was a rich strike, and the Homestake Gold Mine, just a couple miles up Whitewood Creek from Deadwood, eventually became the deepest gold mine in the United States and was still producing gold until it shut down in 2004.

Custer’s gold discovery indirectly led to his own death. As mining boom towns like Deadwood began to spring up in the Black Hills, which was sacred land to the Lakota and Cheyenne, hundreds of Indians bolted from their reservations. White men had once again broached a treaty that guaranteed the Black Hills would remain Indian territory in perpetuity. The renegade Indians eventually banded together in a huge encampment along the Greasy Grass River (known to whites as the Little Bighorn). Custer found them there in late June 1876 … and that’s a whole other story.

When I arrived in Deadwood almost 120 years to the day that Custer met his end, the town had made a rousing rebound. For years, you couldn’t gamble or find an open saloon in Deadwood—which was strangling the town slowly to death. Finally the town’s leaders realized they had to revel in Deadwood’s rough-and-rowdy past and barter that reputation into tourism dollars.

Saloons and gambling returned to Deadwood Gulch and so did the tourists—and that was good thing for me because when I hit town, I had about 10 bucks cash in my pocket and for some reason my bank card had stopped working. The card’s magnetic strip might’ve been compromised by a slip and fall into the plunge pool at the base of a waterfall in the Big Horn Mountains of Wyoming.

Still, I was able to acquire a room and buy dinner in downtown Deadwood using my Amex card, but I had no access to easy cash from an ATM. After a truly western style dinner of steak, baked beans and beer, I set off down Deadwood’s main street and stepped into one of the saloons advertising black jack and poker. The “casino” so to speak was a back room of another “authentic” western saloon.

I laid down all the cash I had for $10 in chips and within an hour had won about $150—which is quite a bit better than an ATM. I tend to be a sensible gambler and knew that my luck wouldn’t hold out much longer—so I left while the getting was still good.

I had passed Nutall & Mann’s on my way to the gambling hall … for some strange reason there’s no gambling allowed in probably the most famous Deadwood saloon. Still I wanted to soak in the history, and I took a seat at the end of the bar and ordered a long-necked bottle of Bud. And that’s when Wild Bill stepped up and asked if I would help recreate his assassination.

I’ve never been one to turn down an offer to participate in a bit of weirdness, so I readily agreed. The Wild Bill who approached me bore no resemblance to the actual James Butler Hickok. He had curly medium-length hair and a goatee. He wore jeans and a western style red and blue shirt with white piping on the collar and cuffs and a black leather waistcoat. He had a leather gunbelt and holster that held a single ivory-handled peacemaker – aka the Colt .45. His hat was a black Stetson with a braided silver hatband.

The real Wild Bill had long light-brown hair that cascaded over his shoulders and a mustache that drooped below his jawline. He wore a sombero type hat with a very wide brim and low crown with the brim tilted down to one side. Wild Bill was a bit of a clothes horse and liked to wear a red and white houndstooth checkered silk vest with a black wool frock coat. He never once wore a gun belt or holster and tucked his two Navy .44 Colts into a red sash he tied around his waist.

Still I was happy to comply with this errant Wild Bill, as he told me that I would be the dealer for the fatal hand of poker. I shook hands with the other re-enactors as we sat at a poker table in the middle of the saloon. A narration of Wild Bill’s demise played over the bar’s sound system as I dealt the Deadman’s hand to the pretend Bill. The faux Wild Bill jumped up from the table a couple of times and drew his six-shooter and pointed it at the faux Jack McCall. But then he holstered his gun and sat back down—allowing “Jack” to stand behind him. When Jack fired the gun, I admit I jumped. It was loud … a blank of course but still loud. I could see that Wild Bill had ear plugs—I wish he would’ve shared.

Wild Bill sprawled on the floor, and every one at the poker table jumped up and scattered. My ears were ringing a bit, and I got up to run, which seemed the prudent thing to do. But Jack pointed his six-shooter at me and shouted “Sit the hell down.”

Then I remembered, my primary duty in all this was to turn the cards over and show all the tourists standing about in their t-shirts, shorts and flip flops … black aces and eights, the Deadman’s hand.

A Musical Time Machine

OK, I time-traveled a bit on Friday night. Well, my attitude did at least. My longtime friend Mr. Chip and his wife Anna coaxed me out of my normal Friday routines to go to Pisgah Brewing and check out a Dead/Phish cover band that I had never heard of—but then again, I don’t hear about many touring bands nowadays. It’s just not part of my radar, and my attentions are happily focused elsewhere … like scanning doggie DNA reports. You know important stuff.

I’m not a huge Dead cover band kind of follower or listener either. I preferred the real deal, and I admit from the late 1970s until Jerry’s passing in 1995, it was a minor obsession. Well maybe a major obsession, I saw 40-plus shows all over the U.S. and nearly a dozen Jerry Garcia Band shows through those years.

So I'm kind of jaded when it comes to bands attempting to mimick the Grateful Dead, and my expectations were nil when I chauffeured my friends over to Pisgah. Now, if you’ve never been to Pisgah Brewing, it can be a tough place to find. The brewery is housed in an old furniture factory on the western edge of Black Mountain. It takes a few turns and unexpected twists to get there, and you can easily miss the turn just past a small Free Will Baptist church and into a parking lot that can be described in one word … industrial.

The old guard shack still sits at the edge of the property, decrepit and shiny with crystals of broken glass. I’ve known the guys who run Pisgah for a few years now, and they have upgraded the place considerably. They expanded their brew house by knocking down walls and replacing the aging dairy equipment they used for brewing vats to much larger stainless steel tanks and kettles. I was there when they first started construction on the tasting room—where the bands now play. The large bay doors in the tasting room now open to a graveled courtyard, fire pit and Quonset hut game room. Simply put, it is a very funky place.

The guys who run Pisgah are all Deadhead types, so it surprises me none that they knew about this band Hyryder from Indianapolis. These guys were good, and their music is what set me to time traveling a bit. Often nostalgia can be a double-edged sword, and reminiscing can leave you at loss pining for things that once were.

I didn’t experience that though, this was much different. The band played the music that I was so familiar with, but it sounded and felt different. It was alive and in the present, and I think that’s no easy task when you cover an iconic band like the Grateful Dead. I think the music woke me up a bit and to start thinking about how to embrace the past and make it work for us in the present and the future.

Mystery Solved ... Sort Of

I  just received the DNA analysis of Beau, and drum roll please … he’s a Soft-Coated Wheaten Terrier, Keeshond, Shih Tzu mix. Of those three breeds, I was familiar only with Shih Tzus.

Shih Tzus, I know are fairly common, I’ve seen many of them before. One named Tripod lived just up the street from us on Sunset Drive in Alexandria. Tripod as you might guess was missing a leg, I think from a bout of cancer or maybe it was an unfortunate automotive encounter. I never really knew.

But he was a happy pleasant dog who had no idea he was missing a limb. I like to think Beau has similar traits from his ancestry. The other two breeds mentioned in the report, I have no clue about and had never heard of them until I opened the analysis report.

These just aren’t two breeds that roll off the tongue or you point out on the street and say, “Ahhh, yes there goes a Soft-Coated Wheaten, such lovely dogs don’t you think?” or encounter an owner by saying, “Well I see you have Keeshond there, I hear they're pleasant dogs but just a bit barky.”

So, how did these, what I believe to be, relatively obscure dog breeds find each other in the rough-and-tumble world of doggie dating and mingle together to become Beau? This is the new mystery of Beau, and one that will probably never been solved.

 

I’ve always thought he was a pretty unique dog, and this definitely confirms it.