The First of The Few

Jacksonville, North Carolina. 2002.

The Cracker Barrel Restaurant in Jacksonville is one of my favorite places to eat. Though in my job as a security clearance investigator, my assigned city is Wilmington, which is well south of Jacksonville, the back log of cases at Camp Lejeune Marine Corps Base means that I often make the trip there to help out with the load.



The water in Jacksonville and on the Marine Corps Base tastes different. It also has a slick texture to it when I wash my hands. I have noticed that the sinks at the Onslow County Courthouse and in the restrooms of buildings on the base are stained a dingy grey at the parts where water has washed over the porcelain for a period of years.

It makes me wary of drinking it. Still, all the soft drinks that I have been consuming at lunch and dinner are beginning to affect me as well. I can feel my system being loaded with too much sugar.

Normally, at the Cracker Barrel Restaurant in Jacksonville, I order a country dinner plate and a glass of root beer.

Root beer is what I order today, but the drink just tastes too sweet. From now on, I am going to have only water to drink when I go out to eat, even if the water in Jacksonville tastes a little strange. Hopefully, it is not as harmful as all that sugar and other chemicals from the root beer and soft drinks.

The waitress brings me the plate of sugar cured ham, mashed potatoes and corn, along with a smaller plate of biscuits and jelly.

I am wearing my light grey suit- one of the few days when I actually put on a suit. Normally, it is khaki pants, a sport coat and a shirt and tie.

I look at my hands as I un-wrap the white cloth from the silverware and lay it across my lap. I watch my hands as I reach for the glass of root beer, bring the glass to my mouth, take a swallow, and set it back down. I observe my hands as I pick up the knife and fork and begin cutting the ham into smaller pieces.

It occurs to me that I am eating alone. Unless the pattern changes, most of my meals from now on are going to be alone. I work alone in this job. My home in Wilmington where I live alone and type up my reports is my office. My boss is in Norfolk, Virginia.

Just recently, I have started venturing out to bars on Friday nights in downtown Wilmington. It is the first time I have ever done this in my life. I have never been intoxicated before. I order no more than two drinks- always Bud Light bottles- and then carefully drive home. Beer and alcohol taste terrible to me, and I am really going out to the bars to try to meet a girl. But I always find myself sitting alone, looking at my hands, watching them grab the bottle and pull it up to my face for a sip when I feel awkward or am trying to get up the courage to say something to a girl.

***

Live Oak, Florida. Present Day.

It is an amazing fact to me that Olivia de Havilland, the actress who played Melanie Wilkes in 1939’s Gone With the Wind is still alive today, but that Leslie Howard, the actor who played her husband, Ashley Wilkes, died during World War II.

Turner Classic Movies is one of my favorite channels, and recently I watched a film starring and directed by Leslie Howard called The First of the Few.



Released in 1942, it is about the man who designed the British fighter plane, the Spitfire. I enjoy movies about aviation and pilots, from Top Gun, to The Right Stuff, Twelve O’Clock High, Catch-22, The Dawn Patrol, The Best Years of Our Lives, and the television show The Black Sheep Squadron. If I was any good at math, I would have tried to become a military pilot. But I could not come close to comprehending the math and science that the future pilots my age at the military academies and in ROTC in college were studying.

Anyway, what interested me as well about The First of the Few was that it is a movie about World War II, made during the war itself when the outcome for England was anything but certain. I am guessing that most of it was filmed in 1941, before Pearl Harbor was bombed and America had even entered the war.

I also already knew about the fate of Leslie Howard- that he was working on films to boost morale for England when a plane he was in was shot down by Germans over the Bay of Biscay in 1943. The First of the Few had to be one of his last works.

The character Leslie Howard plays, R.J. Mitchell, the man who designed the Spitfire, dies in the movie. This is the most dramatic scene of the film. The focus in that scene is actually on Mitchell’s wife, who is carrying his tray of food back inside the house at the moment he dies from illness. Her back is to him and, sensing he is gone, she gives a gasp. The volume on the audio of the movie is turned way up for those few seconds, so that her gasp is startlingly loud. Mitchell is way in the background of the shot, out on the lawn, and I had to watch closely to see his hand fall from his chair at the same moment she gasps.

For whatever reason, that scene of Leslie Howard’s hand falling as his character died, coupled with the knowledge that he died in dramatic fashion in real life just a short time later, triggered the memory of studying my own hands at The Cracker Barrel in Jacksonville, NC back in 2002.

I thought about all that again after another evening out on Friday night…

Live Oak, Florida. May 23, 2014.

I look at my hands as I sit at the bar, enjoying a rum and coke. It occurs to me that though I am at a bar where others sit, I am drinking alone. I have had multiple of these beverages. But I am not driving, and this is a holiday weekend, so there is no harm in it. The same beautiful girls, that I see week in and week out here, walk back and forth in front of me- showing no interest as usual. I smile. The haze of the alcohol dulls the pain of that realization, and I am actually feeling pretty good at the present, just watching them.

But that is enough for tonight.

I ask for the check, which is brought to me very quickly. I watch as my hands pull my wallet out, open it, slide out the credit card that I wish to use, and hand it to the bartender. In short order, I observe my hands write in the tip amount and then sign the receipt, and put the credit card and wallet back in my pocket. Now I have left the bar and I am walking down the street.

As I key into my house and flip on the lights, I know that this has been my pattern for years, now, and will continue to be the pattern for years, barring any unforeseen incidents.

Barring any unforeseen incidents… I think about that scene in The First of the Few where Leslie Howard’s hand falls from his chair. I wonder what he was thinking when just a few months later, his plane plummeted into the ocean. I wonder if he knew works like The First of the Few and especially Gone With The Wind would make him immortal in some ways.

I look at my own hands again and smile. It is all right. I am actually pretty happy. My life is happier than most people, and I am happier now than I have been at other times in my life.

Still feeling the effects of the alcohol, of course, I look at the pillows on my bed. Not bothering to undress, I collapse face first into them and go to sleep.

The Places to Be in Live Oak, Part II

Live Oak, Florida. Present Day.

Another nice place for lunch is El Mezcal, a Mexican restaurant right beside the courthouse. They have a great $4.99 lunch special, and depending on what you order, you can get a large portion of food for that price. The chicken or steak fajitas, served with sautéed vegetables rice and refried beans is one example. Another is the pollo fundido, which is slices of chicken served with rice, sautéed vegetables, mushrooms and topped with melted cheese. El Mezcal also serves margarita specials, though I have yet to try any of those.



The Dixie Grill is probably the oldest restaurant in Live Oak, established in 1959. My colleagues and I often eat lunch here as well. The food at this restaurant is good southern or country cooking. Their pies, in particular the coconut pie and the chocolate pie, are made from scratch.



The Gathering is a restaurant worthy of our office lunch rotation as well. They have a fairly large menu serving burgers, sandwiches, chicken, fish and shrimp in a variety of ways. Their soups are also very good, though they do not have the selection of soup that the Downtown Café does. Both the Dixie Grill and The Gathering have a great breakfast. I usually do not eat breakfast in general, as I will almost always trade food for sleep in the mornings. A couple of times, though, I have gone to The Gathering after early Saturday morning court duty. The omelets that I had there were delicious.



The Spirit of the Suwannee Music Park is a great place to hang out on the weekends. Most Friday and Saturday nights, they have live music, and many people utilize the campground for the weekends or for vacations. The park is set along the eastern bank of the Suwannee River, just north of town.

The music on the weekends is typically country or Southern rock. But the park is known for the festivals it hosts at numerous times throughout the year. These festivals usually last from Thursday through Sunday and attract thousands of people from all over the country.



I admit that I am not the biggest fan of music and huge concerts, but I recognize some of the names that came to play this year, including The Allman Brothers’ Band and Willie Nelson. The concerts are outdoors, rain or shine, often with multiple stages featuring different bands playing at the same time at different points in the park…

Thunder Alley is the place to go bowling in town. Across the tops of the lanes, painted on the walls, are scenes and buildings from Live Oak. The artist is John Rice, who has a frame and portrait shop right beside my office. Some of his paintings of Live Oak hang on the walls in our office. I see him outside at various spots in town, working with his easel, canvas and paints. He has a neat sign on his front door that reads: “We do three types of jobs here: Good, Fast, and Cheap. You may choose any two.”



The bowling alley does not have black light bowling, as I was used to in college. They do have a good sound system for music, though, a pool table, and a full service bar. It is an enjoyable experience to go there with friends, have a few drinks, and bowl or shoot pool. I have ordered food there once- a chicken cheese steak sandwich with a Pepsi, which was very good. My conversation with the older lady who owns the place amused me.

I ordered water, at first, and she opened a cooler and gave me a small bottle of brand name water.

“Do you guys have cups of free ice water?” I asked.

She rolled her eyes at me and laughed. “No the water isn’t free here,” she said.

When I learned that the Pepsi was actually less expensive and came in a larger cup, I ordered that.

She had to fire up the grill just for me, as I was the only one eating anything at that point. When she brought out my order, I handed her a credit card.

She rolled her eyes at me again. “You’re going to pay with that?” she asked.

“You guys take credit cards, right?” I responded.

“We do,” she said begrudgingly. “But do you realize the amount of money I lose because of what I have to pay those companies?”…

The Suwannee River Library is a small but neat little public library that is across the street from the bowling alley. They often have programs such as “The History of Suwannee County” or a movie for children. I went to one program on migrating birds, taught by some local experts, and found it very informative. From the program, I learned of a great bird guide book, which I bought and have used to identify some birds in this area…



As I type this blog, I get a text message on my phone that we are having our first softball practice of the year tomorrow.

When I first moved to Live Oak last June, joining a softball team was a highlight of my summer. I am glad that I have been invited back for a second season. I am also looking forward to a vacation with my parents and my brother this year, but I have made the point that I would like the vacation to be in September, when kids are back in school and, most importantly, softball season is over. The games are only played in June, July and August, and I do not want to miss any of them. First Federal Sports Complex will be the place for me to be on weeknights during those months.

Mother's Day

Augusta, Georgia. 1983.

“Blue,” I say.

Mom smiles and nods. The index card is colored with blue crayon on one side. She turns the card over and shows me the word “blue,” written in ink in all lower case letters. Then she sets the card down in a stack and picks up another card.

“Green,” I say…

In the nursery of the church where Dad is a preacher, we continue this exercise of learning colors. It is at this time that blue becomes my favorite color.

***

Wake Forest, North Carolina. 1983.

At Grandma Carter’s house, the exercises have become more complicated. Rather than going to kindergarten, Mom is teaching me to read at home. I will begin school in first grade in the coming months.

She holds up a large card with a series of words that form a sentence. Each word is marked with pronunciation indications for me.

“No, it is the a sound,” Mom says. “Short a, not long a. A. Say that.”

My TV time is limited while I work with Mom during the day on these sorts of activities. I can only watch for an hour.

After we finish the day’s schooling, my brother wants to use his allotment of TV time to watch a re-run broadcast of BJ and the Bear.

I lay down on the floor, with one of the green pillows from the couch over my face while he sits in front of the television.
I peek out from underneath the pillow and also watch the show. I think that Mom does not notice this.

When the show finishes, my brother obediently turns off the television, but I protest that it is my turn for an hour.

“No,” mom says. “You weren’t fooling me with the pillow. That counts as your time.”

“But I couldn’t see anything,” I argue.

It does no good.

After I become an adult, Mom tells me that during the time when she taught me at home, she would often get frustrated with herself and worry that she was not doing a good job with me.

But the memories that I have of her and that part of my life are much more pleasant than my memories of when I began first grade at Millbrook K-12 school. I would have preferred to stay at home with her to continue my education.

***

Lumberton, North Carolina. Mid 1980s.

Many evenings after mom has spent a day teaching school and then come home, cooked and served supper, she stands at the sink washing dishes. The sink has a window to the yard and fields outside, and Mom is content with that.

We do not have a dishwasher in the house out in the country where we live at Route 7, Box 568B.

I watch her sometimes, looking at the back of her head as she gazes out the window and scrubs dishes without looking down at them.

“As long as I have a window, that is enough. I don’t need a dishwasher or want one.”

In addition to her regular State job of teaching children with mental handicaps, she is now also going to teach blind children with mental handicaps. She spends many days over the summer in between school sessions teaching herself Braille.

I listen to the sound of the heavy metal Braille typing machine. Mom has to mash down the keys very hard to create the raised dots on the special paper. It is a loud machine, and she has to lug it around wherever she goes.

***

Lumberton, North Carolina. 1990s. Saturdays.

We live in town, now, in a middleclass community called Lakewood Estates.

After cooking us a breakfast of scrambled eggs, grits, bacon, and biscuit toast with butter and jelly, Mom sets about the task of cleaning the house.

The chemicals that Mom is using in the bathrooms are too strong for me. I step outside onto the front porch and get some air.

After Mom finishes making the showers and sinks and toilets spotless, she starts on cleaning the hardwood floors. She goes over the whole house with a broom, and then a mop sprayed with another cleaning chemical of some sort.

When that task is finished, she does everyone’s laundry. Dad, hers, my brother’s and mine.

In between these activities, she stops to make us sandwiches for lunch. Then in the early afternoon, she cooks dinner for us. After dinner, she cleans up the kitchen and washes the dishes.

We now have a dishwasher, thank goodness, but Mom spends about as much time pre-washing the dishes, pots and pans before putting them in the machine as she did before when she stood looking out the window over the sink at the old country house.

Sundays.

While I am still sleeping, Mom gets up at 5am to study her Sunday school lesson and work on the lunchtime meal.

After church, the family sits down to a feast of barbecued chicken, or fried chicken, or roast beef, or ham, or sometimes all of this. There are green beans, mashed potatoes or white rice with gravy, corn, sweet potatoes, black eyed peas, green peas, and biscuits.

When we have finished stuffing ourselves on the tremendous food with a certain taste that only my Mom knows how to make, I go to the living room with Dad and my brother, and we turn on the television to watch the NFL games or baseball games or college basketball games.

Mom continues to work in the kitchen, cleaning up everything and packaging the leftovers that will be dinner tonight.

Monday morning, it will up again early for her to deal with the kids at school, followed by cooking dinner and cleaning the dishes afterward in the evening.

Dad, my brother and I dominate the television set, watching whatever we want- usually sports if it is on.

Mom does not like watching television. When Mom has finished the dishes, she goes back to the bedroom and reads a novel until she falls asleep on top of the covers of the bed. Many times I walk to the back bedroom and see that she is asleep with an open book on her lap, across her stomach or even across her face. It is not even nine o’clock yet.

***

Present Day.

Mom has Parkinson’s disease, now. It is slowly increasing on her left side. Unless she concentrates on it, her left hand trembles. She notices other people noticing this, though of course it is not something she chooses to dwell on.

“I do the best I can with it, each day,” she says.

Mom has not had a sense of smell for years, and I have all ideas that it was destroyed from all those chemicals she used time after time in cleaning the bathrooms for our family.

I wonder as well if the Parkinson’s disease could come from that. No one knows what causes Parkinson’s, but all those years of working with difficult children in the State school system, all those years of also making meals for us, constantly cleaning the house and our clothes and the dishes, a never ending cycle of exhaustion- that did nothing to help her body and immune system fight off the beginnings of the disease.

“A man works from sun to sun, while a woman’s work is never done,” I have heard my Dad say often.

Mom deserves so much more credit than that- a pithy rhyming expression or a blog entry.

I will never be able to repay all that she has done for Dad, my brother and me, and the love that she has given us.

The Places to Be in Live Oak

Live Oak, Florida. Present Day.

My favorite meal in all of Live Oak, and one of the best meals that I have ever had in my life, is the Rainbow Trout Special from the Dowling House, usually served on the weekends.

The Dowling House itself is a restaurant that has only been open for a little over six months. I was one of its first customers back in October when a colleague from work joined me for lunch outside on the back deck. The restaurant gets its name from Thomas Dowling, one of Live Oak’s most prominent citizens who made a fortune in the lumber business in the early 1900s. The house was his residence during that era. After his death, the property has been used for numerous things.



The Rainbow Trout is not on the normal menu. Most weekends, but not all, they get the fish in from Colorado and serve it as a special for as long as it lasts. The white meat is very tender and has an excellent combination of seasoning. There is no “fishy” taste to it. One does not need tartar or cocktail sauce with it, though I usually get a little tartar sauce because I like the taste of tartar sauce in general.

The meal comes with two sides. One that I recommend and almost always order is the green bean almondine. The beans are steamed, I believe, and also prepared with a delicious seasoning of sliced almonds and onions. I usually take a small bite of the trout, and then eat all of the green beans and almonds before going back to the trout. The other side dishes I have tasted are good, too. I have not tried them all- only the house salad, baked potato, or garlic mashed potatoes.

The Dowling House has a full service bar. On Friday or Saturday nights, it is a highlight of my week to settle in, order a drink from the cute blonde bartender, and then after about half an hour, put in my order for the rainbow trout special.

Sometimes the Dowling House has live music or karaoke outside on the back deck.

***

The most popular restaurant and bar in all of Live Oak is the Brown Lantern.

There is almost always a line out the door on Friday nights of people waiting for a table, but I can usually squeeze in ahead of the crowd and find an empty chair at the bar.

This was the first place I went to socialize when I moved to Live Oak back in June. Unfortunately, I tried to do it on a Saturday night. To my dismay, the Brown Lantern is closed on Saturdays and Sundays.

Established in 1977, they obviously do enough business during the week to be able to give their staff the weekends off.



The bar area is decorated to look a bit like a Margaritaville, with parrots and pelicans painted on the sky-blue walls and ceiling.

The owner of the Brown Lantern is a graduate of Florida State University, and the main dining rooms are full of FSU memorabilia, though he has also put up a fair amount of Florida Gator things. The owner told me that the town is pretty evenly split between Seminole fans and Gator fans, and there are also a number of Georgia Bulldog fans here, so part of a wall is dedicated to them.

I remember in June when I moved to Live Oak and met with the failed attempt to gain entry to the Brown Lantern on Saturday, I went back the following Thursday. I sat down at the bar and had a nice conversation with a beautiful waitress, who served me draft beer in a Mason jar.

“Yep,” I told her. “I think I’ve found my Friday night hangout.”

She smiled warmly at me, a smile I will probably always remember.



The food at the Brown Lantern is delicious, too. One of my favorite dishes is the shrimp sandwich. They also have great steak and on certain nights, barbecue and ribs. The hamburger steak is another tasty option, and I have not had anything yet off their menu that I disliked.

Even having lived here less than a year, I see many people whom I know when I go to the Brown Lantern on Friday nights.

***

A great place for lunch is the Downtown Café, just a short walk from the courthouse. They make the best sandwiches in town from all the places that I have been thus far. It is a large selection, from tuna to chicken and turkey, served with various toppings and styles from New York and Italy.

Typically only open from 10am to 2pm and closed on Saturdays, I believe, they also serve breakfast food during those hours.



The Downtown Café gave me the second best meal that I have had in Live Oak, and again one of the best that I have ever had in my life. It was the open faced turkey sandwich with red mashed potatoes. The turkey had gravy and was so tender that I did not need a knife. Unfortunately, the open faced turkey sandwich is not a regular part of the menu. They offer it as a special on certain days only, and I have not seen it on the dry erase board as an option since Christmas. The next time they serve it, I will order two.

The Downtown Café also has the best soups in town. In addition to everyday soups like traditional vegetable or potato and bacon, they have a “Soup of the Day.” Chicken and Wild Rice, Shrimp and Corn Chowder, Red Pepper and Gouda Cheese, and Lentil soup are some of what they will offer at times.

One of my coworkers really enjoys soup, and so he is always agreeable to eating here.

The Downtown Café also has the best milkshakes in town. They serve vanilla, chocolate or strawberry ice cream for the shake, and then you can add delicious flavoring from glass bottles that look like wine bottles. I have tried caramel, almond, hazelnut, and Irish cream thus far for the flavoring on a vanilla milkshake with whipped cream. That is less than half of the flavors they offer, so I look forward to trying the rest.

There are other great places to be in Live Oak. If I do not write about them next week, I will do it soon.