In September we left our Bubble of nearly eighteen months and ventured to Durham, North Carolina where our daughter, Willa, had relocated. To overstate the obvious, flying is not what it used to be. Our Dallas connection was delayed. This gave us a front row seat into state of the union, which was neither hopeful nor impressive.
Mask requirements were en force and the airline we chose had stopped serving alcohol in Economy on domestic flights. In addition to Covid, there is an epidemic of belligerent passengers. Some of them might even be stone cold sober. As a result, beleaguered airline employees must now serve as public health officers and onboard police.
This is just the tip of the iceberg. A report released last fall by the world’s top climate scientists warns that we have just ten years until we turn things around or reach a critical Point of No Return. Their grim announcement, along with a vaccine booster, figured into our decision to venture out. We know all too well that air travel directly contributes to planetary warming. We also do our best to limit our flying and use it only for destinations where we can’t drive or take a train. However, this type of rationalization is probably why we are doomed as a species.
Durham is a pretty cool city with vibrant neighborhoods, lots of street art, and a thriving local food scene. Vaccine cards were required to enter a bar on our first night, which was also the first bar we’d visited in nearly two years, except for the one in the Dallas Airport. (We had vowed not to spend a single dime in Texas because of recent political developments. Then our flight was delayed, which rapidly shattered that commitment, on my end at least.)
On 9th Street we found an amazing store called Regulator Books. It’s housed in an old building with glass bricks in the facade. Regulator rivals some of my favorite haunts like The Country Bookshelf in Bozeman, Montana and Point Reyes Books in northern California and Green Apple in San Francisco’s Richmond District. A great book store is like a spa for the brain. I can spend hours looking at titles, admiring covers, reading staff reviews, skimming pages and browsing the collective literary output of humanity knowing I will never read a sliver of the 50,000 titles published in a single year. I had no business buying any more books but I chose an illustrated biography of the Norwegian painter Edward Munch which they mailed home for my return. On the plane I had started The Wild Trees, a 2009 book about California’s redwood ecosystems and a group of misfits dedicated to climbing and measuring the tallest tree. I dare you to not finish that book. Regulator had a paperback copy in stock, which said a lot.
We visited the North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh. This is situated in a rambling park with open fields, walking trails, outdoor sculpture gardens and a reflecting pool. The exhibition buildings and an amphitheater are nestled in the landscape. Among my favorite pieces was a painting by Georgia O’Keefe of rural New Mexico (“Cebolla Church”) dazzling with simplicity and primitive color.
One afternoon before sunset we strolled with Willa and her girlfriend, Emma, through the Sarah Duke Botanical Gardens admiring the ambitious mashup of trees and plants from Japan and North America, seeing only a fraction of the grounds. Stunning barely describes this place.
Earlier that Saturday morning the four of us had gone to Durham’s Central Park to see the farmers market. This is a cultural hub just as it is for tens of thousands of communities across the country and the world. It’s one of the first places we go in a new place to find Our People. There we met our very first farmers market poet. He was sitting at a small folding table with a portable antique typewriter and a sign: “Poems Your Topic Your Price.” The typewriter case sat at his feet overflowing with titles and topics written in Sharpie on white slips of paper.
I asked if he was a creative writing student and he said no he taught poetry in a public high school. He could not have been more pleasant. Lots of people were purchasing poems and he clicked away with the hypnotic look of a jazz musician in mid solo. We put $10 in the tip jar and took a spin around the market.
After Durham we were driving to Pennsylvania to visit my 91-year old mother. She had recently adopted a dog that she renamed after her mother who had passed away a few years ago. Polly had already bitten a number of people who stopped by the house to meet her, including two of my brothers and my sister-in-law. This was on my mind when I picked up the felt tipped pen to jot down a topic for our poet. We received:
Rescue Dog
I think you are called that
as you so often rescue those that are worthy
of your smile ..
how dare anyone think we are helping you ..
when the help that you so easily give
is so often effortless and willing
I hope .. we can always be what you give us ..
peace
Rescuing a dog is a bold leap of faith and something I have never undertaken. The poet had no idea about Polly’s history of misbehavior but he intuitively had a sense of my mother’s extremely kind heart and soft spot for troubled beings. The rescue dog’s aggressive outbursts continued for some months and then almost miraculously reversed. I assume it was a combination of unconditional and tough love—along with a lot of patience—on my mom’s part.
On a sunny Sunday we drove the back roads to my childhood hometown in southern Pennsylvania. A perfectly cold but creamy vanilla and chocolate soft serve ice cream in Virginia was the most memorable event of that route.
