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.

A History of Dog Bites

Lumberton, North Carolina. Fall 1998.

I drive my Nissan truck up the driveway of a home in the countryside of Robeson County. I know the house belongs to my old school principal. He is probably at work, now.

A white German Shepherd sits on the front porch of the house, quietly watching me, its ears perked up and alert.

I have no fear of dogs. I like dogs better than I like people, for the most part, and I certainly understand dogs better than I understand people. So I get out of my truck with no hesitation, I can see that the German Shepherd does not know what to make of me, its “fight or flight” instincts teetering back and forth.

“It’s all right, buddy,” I say.

The principal’s wife opens the door and steps out of the house as I get out of the truck. I hold up my identification card.

“Hello ma’am,” I say. “I’m working for the Census Bureau. I just need to verify the address of the house here.”

She comes down off the steps, and the dog follows her. He sits by her side looking up at me. I make a clicking noise at him, and his ears flatten for a moment in response. I assume he is satisfied that I am not a threat, now, because he casually walks off behind me.

The principal’s wife tells me the address to the home. I ask her a few more questions off my clipboard.

Suddenly, I feel a pinch on my Achilles tendon.

I turn and look down. The white German Shepherd has sneaked up behind me, very low to the ground.

“You bit me!” I say to the dog in disbelief.

The dog slinks away.



I look at the woman, and I am sure that the expression on my face shows her that I want an explanation. She looks back at me, her own expression a combination of shock at what her dog has done and concern over what I am going to do.

I decide not to make a big deal of it. Later that day, I look at my heel. There is redness and a small bruise, but it does not appear that he broke the skin.

***

Rochester, New York. June 2004.

The company that I work for is behind on its security clearance investigations in Rochester. As I am one of the few investigators who is single and without kids, I volunteer for these month long “details” in other parts of the country.

Part of my job as investigator is to go out to the places where the subject lives or has lived and find neighbors who will talk to me about them.

I knock on the screen door of a middle class home in a neat little Rochester community. A cute girl walks up from inside the house. I show her my badge and explain who I am.

She smiles at me and pushes open the door, holding it open with her hand.

I hear a dog barking inside the house. Suddenly, it comes flying out from inside, launching into the air, and biting me square on the left quad muscle above the knee. He bounces of and lands on his feet on the concrete.

“Oh my gosh!” the girl exclaims.

I am too surprised to react much. The dog and I exchange looks with each other, me looking down at him, him looking up at me. Then the dog simply turns and casually walks off, as if to say, “That’s right, I did it.” He disappears back into the house.

I am more amused by the whole situation than anything else, and I have to crack a smile. The young girl is too cute and friendly for me to get irritated.

Still, when I get back to the Strathallen Hotel, I look at my leg and see a neat circle of teeth marks. He broke the skin in a couple of places. I call my boss about a worker’s comp claim.

“I doubt anything will happen,” I say, “but I want to put you on notice, just in case I start foaming at the mouth.”

***

Western Carolina University. Spring 2008.

“Your legs are so skinny. Is that why you never where shorts?” asks a girl whom I’ve taken out on a date a few times.

She has a talent for making these off-hand comments that cut me down. It is strange for her to say this in front of everyone. She has seen my legs before.

“Well, you should know that my legs are not my best feature,” I answer.

She blushes.

It is a beautiful day, sunny and warm. It is also one of the last events of the school year for the Graduate Student Association. I have made a number friends and had some of the best times of my life with the people in this group.

We have a cookout going in the picnic area at the lower end of campus.

I toss a Frisbee with my insult prone girl friend and a couple of other guys.

One of her tosses goes wide, up under the picnic pavilion. I sprint to catch it and stop short on the concrete.
A young dog, not much more than a puppy, is tied up on a leash to one of the picnic tables. I can tell immediately that I have frightened it, and I can see the fight instinct welling up in its face.

This dog is going to attack me, I think to myself. But I cannot back up fast enough out of the range of the leash length.

A split second later, it snarls and lunges at me. Just like the dog in Rochester, it bites me on the quad above my left knee. I step off the pavilion.

“Wow!” one of the guys exclaims. “Did he bite you?”

“Yeah, he sure did,” I respond.

A different girl, the one who owns the dog, comes running up, a shocked expression on her face from what her pet just did.

This bite has broken the skin as well, and I have to wash it out in the picnic area restrooms.

It does not ruin the day or my mood, however.

The day is one of the best of my life, actually, and I am aware of that fact at that time.

***

Miami, Florida. Early 2013.

I walk between the buildings of my apartment complex, on my way to the Dadeland Mall next door and the food court to buy some dinner.

A young woman has a miniature Doberman Pinscher out for a walk. It must be a female dog, as it is in a cute little pink harness. They both have their back to me, and it is getting dark quickly in these winter shortened days.

“Don’t let me scare you,” I say as I get close.

The girl turns and smiles at me.

The little dog, though, snaps around and snarls. It runs at me, pulling hard at the harness and the leash.

“Trixie!” the girl scolds.

Then the dog manages to wiggle and slip free of the harness.

Uh-oh.

“Trixie!” the girl gasps.

I could punt Trixie over a nearby fence if I wanted, but I decide not to. Instead, I attempt to hop over the dog as she rushes up to me, but it is no good.

Determined to get me, the dog keeps jumping until she bites me hard on the left thigh right below my buttocks. Then she runs over into the grass a few yards away and hunkers down.



“Trixie! Bad dog!” the girl says as she goes over to the MinPin.

Trixie cowers in front of her as she pops the dog on the behind. Then she picks up the dog. I see one of its eyes is blue with no pupil.

“Ah, it’s blind in one eye,” I say.

“Yeah…I am so sorry,” the girl says.

I reach out my hand part way as I consider trying to pet the dog, but then I think better of it.

The girl wants to get away, and I let her. She goes back to her ground level apartment, quickly shutting the door behind her.

I continue on to the mall and get a to-go plate. Once I get back to my apartment, I examine the injury. Yep, this one broke the skin in several places through my blue jeans. Over the next few days, a nasty bruise develops as well.

I tell my parents the story, and they keep telling me to go see a doctor. I never do, though, and it eventually heals up with no problems.

***

Live Oak, Florida. December 2013.

One of the best places to eat in town is the Brown Lantern Restaurant.

My coworkers and I arrive there for lunch, not long before the Christmas holiday. Lots of trucks are parked outside, far more trucks than cars.

In the back of a white truck is a black Labrador Retriever. I can tell when the five of us get out of the car that this is not a friendly dog. It wants to be left alone. This is rare. The breed is normally very friendly.

Nevertheless, one of my coworkers, an avid hunter, goes up to the animal.

“Hey, what nice looking dog you are,” he says.

He too, can sense the dog. “You’re not very sociable, are you?” he asks it.

He reaches out and lightly touches the dog on the back of the head. When that is okay, he begins petting the dog on the ears.
The Lab enjoys this immensely, closing it eyes and leaning into the man’s hand.

After a few moments, my coworker lets go and everyone continues walking toward the restaurant entrance.

Well, I want to pet the dog, too.

“Hey, buddy,” I say to it.

I stick my left hand into the bed of the truck for the dog to smell my scent. It does not sniff it, but stands with its head askance, which should have been another warning.

Keeping my hand low, I move to pet him in his side. Suddenly the dog snaps at my hand, putting a puncture wound in the top and an even larger puncture wound into my palm.

Two of my coworkers see this happen. One grimaces, the other bursts out laughing.

I have to laugh, too, at my own stupidity.

My hand is bleeding pretty well. The dog just stares at me, now, a determined “Take that” look on its face.



What else is there to do? We go inside and I wash my hand in the restroom sink. I can tell this is the worst dog bite that I have had. It is hard to get it to stop bleeding, and it hurts to move my fingers.

I go out and ask one of the waitresses if they have a bandage. She believes that they do.

I go and sit down with my coworkers, holding my hand in some napkins, trying not to ruin their appetite. My own appetite is gone.

One of the waitresses comes to our table with some band aids.

“I was told there is a guy in a suit who is bleeding,” she says.

“That’s me,” I say.

She gives me the band aids.

The Brown Lantern is my usual Friday night hangout, and I have settled into the bar numerous times since moving to Live Oak in June.

After the waitress leaves, I remark, “As many times as I’ve been here and as many conversations as I’ve had with these waitresses, I’m still just ‘a guy in a suit.’”

This draws a laugh from my coworkers.

“You know, dogs are supposed to be pretty good judges of character,” one of them says.

Back at the office after lunch, the secretaries hook me up with hydrogen peroxide and Neosporin.

The wounds heal with no problems and I can move my digits like normal, though the scars are still present as I type this blog entry.

Sky Toys and the Global Positioning System

Lumberton, North Carolina. 1986.

Today is a field trip for my third grade class to the Robeson County Planetarium.

The planetarium is one of the most fascinating buildings that I have ever been inside in my young life. As we sit in our theater styled chairs, the lights go out and the domed ceiling becomes the night sky. A narrator tells stories behind the history of the constellations. The Egyptian Pyramids, Greek and Roman gods appear overhead as we hear what the ancients thought about the heavens. I crane my neck, looking all around the ceiling and trying to take in everything that is going on. But it is too much.



When the program ends, the lights come back up and the man who runs the planetarium gives us a talk about Halley’s comet. It only comes by Earth once every 75 years, and this is the year. I really would like to see the comet. The lights dim slightly and he explains to us how to find it in the night sky, using a flashlight and pointing to certain grouping of stars that appear on the ceiling. He has lost me, though, and I feel the frustration welling in the back of my throat.

“So now, this may very well be a once in a lifetime chance for you to see the comet,” the man says. “Does everyone understand how to find it in the sky?”

All of my classmates shout, “Yeeeessss!”

I alone say, “Noooooo!”

“Does everyone promise me that they will go out on the first night it is clear and take a look at Halley’s comet?” the man asks.

“Yeeeesss!” the class responds.

“Nooooo!” I say at the same time.

The man either does not hear me or chooses to ignore my response.

In looking up at the night sky, I never do see what I know to be Halley’s comet. I later learn that 1986 was the worst viewing of the comet in thousands of years for people in the northern hemisphere, due to its positioning with the sun. It is difficult to spot with the naked eye in 1986. The next time it comes around, if I am still alive, will be in the year 2061, when I am 84 years old.

Western Carolina University. Spring Semester, 1996.

My favorite college course that I ever take at Western Carolina University is Astronomy 101. I enroll for honors credit, and I also take the night lab, which means it is a four credit course.

As part of the honors extra assignment, I have to write a research paper. The professor lets me compose a short story on an asteroid striking the earth. After I submit it, he tells me it is a “good read” and gives me an “A” for the course.

During the night lab, we set up enormous and expensive telescopes, and I see some pretty amazing stuff- the moon up close, Venus, the Orion star nebula, and the remnants of a supernova to name a few things. I also learn some constellations. As part of our assignments, we have to track the setting sun on the horizon each week throughout the semester. I go to a hill just above Graham Infirmary and watch some beautiful sunsets against the Great Smoky Mountains. My drawings of those mountains and where the sun disappears behind them each week is not the greatest work of art, however.

Unlike the fascination but then frustration that I felt at the planetarium, the class ignites a curiosity in me about the stars and the universe. If I could major in astronomy , I would. There is no such degree, however. What is more, after the basic 101 course, astronomy becomes the study of physics. The astronomy professor has a Ph.D. in physics, and his graduate student assistant, Ben, is a nice guy pursuing a degree in physics. I do not have the mind to comprehend the mathematical concepts of that subject.

Still, I always think back with fondness on that time in my life, the professor, the assistant, and a girl whom I knew in the class, Amy.

“Stop referring to what you are talking about as those three stars that form a triangle!” Ben tells Amy during the night lab. “Any three stars form a triangle!”

Amy and I laugh.

Wilmington, North Carolina. 2004.

I have just rented a place at Carolina Beach, one row back from the ocean. On the balcony outside, I can see many stars out over the water as I listen to the sound of the waves… I think I want to buy a telescope to get a better look at the celestial objects just outside my door.

After a trip to a hobby store and a $350 payment, I am the proud owner of an Orion refractor telescope with a German equatorial mount.

The scope is strong enough for me to see the color bands of Jupiter, along with four of that planet’s moons. I can also clearly see the rings of Saturn. The Orion nebula is a beautiful sight in my scope as well.



***

“Aaaahhhh!”

I hear the woman’s shriek and look up from my eyepiece. One of my neighbors in the beachfront condominium across the street sees me as she climbs the exterior stairs.

It takes me a moment to realize that she is shrieking at me. I am on the balcony in the complete darkness, and evidently, she believes that I am spying on her with my telescope.

I have been able to observe some ships out on the horizon with my instrument, but even if I wanted to be a “Peeping Tom,” her place is way too close for the telescope to be useful. From hers and other’s reactions, I learn that people are often leery of a single fellow, living alone, when they see that I own a telescope.

August 2005.

Some things have happened with my job that are beyond my control, and I have to move away from the beach. Unknown to me, I will not live in a place conducive to setting up a telescope for another eight years. I disassemble it, along with the equatorial mount, and pack it away at my parents’ house.

Tallahassee, Florida. November 2010.

I am winded and sweaty from having just run a 5k about as hard as I can go. One of my friends ran the race with me. She has recently become interested in the sport and trains for marathons. She crossed the finish line well ahead of me.

3.1 miles is not enough exercise for her, though, and she asks if I am interested in running longer.

“Sure,” I respond. She is cute and smarter than me, and I enjoy her company.

We proceed to run another five miles after the race is over and everyone has cleared out. Eight miles is the most that I have run since high school when I was on the cross country team, and I am pleased that I keep up with her pretty well.
During the run, she seems to know precisely how far we have gone and where to stop for the total of eight miles.

I ask her about that.

On her wrist, no larger than a watch, is a Global Positioning System device. Designed specifically for runners, I suppose, it lets her know exactly where she is on the planet and keeps track of the mileage she covers.



It is a rather amazing device. I have seen the Christmas television commercials for the “Garmin,” a GPS system for cars, and GPS navigators were built into some of the vehicles at the dealerships where I worked, but this is the first one I have come across for individuals to wear on their wrists.

She looks at me a little strangely. Perhaps the wristwatch GPS has been around for a while and I am behind the times.

Miami, Florida. June 2012.

I just bought a Garmin GPS to help me locate some apartment complexes in Miami, where I will move later this month to start a new job. My cell phone rings, and I see it is the lady I am replacing here in Miami calling me. I need to talk with her and set up place to meet. Sitting at a stop sign at a busy intersection is not where I should take her call, though. I glance behind me. There are no cars, so I will simply back off the road onto the grass. I answer the phone.

“Hey April, can you hold on a minute? I’m going to back off the road so we can talk.”

As I move the car in reverse, I hear an awful crunching sound. My Garmin guided me to this street, but it could not warn me about a low concrete pole protecting a fire hydrant.

Sure enough, I get out of my car to find the rear tail light is busted and the bumper is crushed inward. The pole was below my line of sight, which irritates me. I had no chance. It was just bad luck that I got the call right at that moment.

As much as I do not want to acknowledge it, this incident feels like an omen of what is to come in Miami.

The GPS will prove very valuable too me in navigating this city, though printed maps give me a better feel for exactly where I am and where other things are in relation to me.

Live Oak, Florida. Present Day.

The anxiety and stresses of my experience in Miami are behind me, now.

I rent a house with a fairly large backyard here in Suwannee County. For the first time in eight years, I can use my telescope again. Mom and Dad bring it from North Carolina, and to my pleasant surprise, no parts are missing when I assemble it.

The Orion nebula, along with the colorful bands of Jupiter, are back for me to view. I use a red lens flashlight to study my star charts in the backyard.

***

Browsing the internet, looking for some possible new eyepieces for the scope, I stumble across something called “The Celestron Personal Planetarium Sky Scout.” After watching a video on how the device works, I am sold. I order it immediately.

When it arrives a few days later, it is even better than what I hoped for. The Sky Scout uses a GPS system to identify my location on the globe. Once that is locked, I can point it at any object in the sky and it will tell me what I am looking at, often through audio narration. What is more, I can punch in the object that I want to observe, and arrows will light up on the device to guide me to where the object is in the sky.



It has made my backyard astronomy experience much more enjoyable. Often I do not use the telescope at all, as the Sky Scout can educate me about plenty of things in the night sky visible to the naked eye.

“Have the knowledge of a professional astronomer in the palm of your hand,” is one of the advertising slogans. It is true. The device brings back memories of some of the things that I learned in Astronomy 101.

I am a bit of a Luddite. I admit that. But I also have to acknowledge that GPS systems can be pretty cool. The Sky Scout in particular has given me access to a lot of information that I never would have been able to figure out on my own.

The Gap

My favorite place on the planet is Cullowhee, North Carolina.

That small town is home to Western Carolina University, where I spent five of the most important years of my life. I attended WCU from August 1995 through May of 1998, or three academic years. Then I dropped out of college for a year, before returning in August of 1999 and earning my degree in May of 2000.

In August of 2007, I came back to WCU as a student in the Master of Arts History program. After assessing the job market for people with history degrees, however, I decided to leave after a year and enroll in law school. That appears to have been a wise decision, though I had a blast in Cullowhee.

Western Carolina University and the surrounding towns- Cullowhee, Sylva and Dillsboro have a wonderful, magical place in my mind. My undergraduate years at WCU were the most important in forming who I am as an adult. A decade after that, the lone year in graduate school is still the happiest year I have had in my life so far.

Even now as I type these words, though, I do not want to write about my experiences at Western. The memories are too intense, and I think that frankly I have suppressed most of them just so that I can focus on getting through my days in the present.

I would not do the memories or the magic justice, sitting here at a desk in Florida. If I ever get the chance to spend a significant amount of time in Cullowhee again, then I am sure the old emotions will come flooding back and I will want to record them.

But for now the memories are just too happy, too sad... too "raw" for me to put myself through such an exercise. I said August 2007 through the summer 2008 was the happiest span of my life. I lived life like I wish I had done as an undergraduate. So I do not want to try and revisit that extreme high. It would be too painful to come back down.

In turn, September 1997 through the spring 1998 in Cullowhee was the most painful year of my life. I grew my hair out, got an ear ring and tried to grow a beard. One of my best friends from WCU refers to it as the year that I decided to be a pirate. It was the year before I dropped out. I remember going to a hockey game in Fayetteville over the Christmas break in 1997 with my dad, brother, and my uncle. I overheard my uncle comment to dad about me, "He looks wiped out."

That was the year I lost faith in a god that loved us, and I truly began to understand what loneliness meant. I do not care to revisit my discovery of those dark places, either.

So there is a gap in this blog about my experiences- a very significant gap. The first blog I ever wrote was for the Graduate Student Association at WCU, when I was there in 2007 and 2008. That captures some of what the happiest year was like for me, but only a small portion.

I could spend an eternity exploring that time. The smell of the buildings at Western, the way the trees and plants looked in different seasons of the year, the heat of the summer and the cold of the winter there, the extreme beauty of how young we all were then, how I changed in that place, and so much more. And so much more. But there is no going back, unless a heaven exists. It makes my chest feel like it is going to explode as I type this draft on a Saturday evening.

I have to stop. There will just be a gap. It was a total of five years of my life. Five years now, in the present, will pass by very quickly, I believe, without nearly the significance. Those five years at Western, though, were the most important and most treasured years of my life. It is too hard to write about them.

The Day Chance Escaped

Petersburg, Virginia. The Summer of 1999.

As it is my second summer working on the cannon crew at Petersburg National Battlefield, I have been given more responsibilities. Very often, now, rather than saddling and putting the equipment on the horses in the mornings, the supervisor asks me to make the black powder rounds for the day.

We perform four shows each day. During the first part of the show, we ride into battle and deploy a bronze Napoleon cannon, using blank shots for this demonstration. I make an aluminum foil round based on a cardboard mold, and fill the bottom of the round with the black powder. The tighter I am able to pack the foil around the powder, the louder the boom. When we fire the cannon, it never fails to set off car alarms some distance away, which in turn draws “Oohs and Ahhs” from the crowd.

For the mortar demonstration, we lob an eight pound iron ball about 300 yards down range. The ball is designed to be an exploding shell that would rain shrapnel on enemy soldiers, but we do not detonate the ball. Lately, my supervisor has told me to add a few more grains of black powder for the mortar demonstration, as for fun we are trying to hit a tree just beyond the end of the range.

When preparing the rounds, I work in an enclosed and cool room. I also have to wear fire resistant gloves and an apron, though I am quite aware that if the black powder blows up, there is no protection for my face. The gloves are pretty pointless, too, as they are too bulky and lack the fine touch for me to make a good, tight round with the aluminum foil. I usually do not wear them.

There are a total of seven of us on the cannon crew, including the supervisor who acts as the gunner, and the horse trainer, who is a female. She dresses as a male Confederate soldier for the show, complete with a wig and mustache.

Today, I am about halfway through making the rounds when I walk outside to take a break. The building where we store our gear and ammunition and where I also make the rounds is beside the corral of horses. It is tucked into a private, employees only part of the park. An asphalt road circles the building, and except for a narrow opening where the road empties out onto the main drive through the park, we are enclosed by trees.

As I walk out on the grass, to my amazement, Chance, our fastest horse, gallops past me, loose and free.

“What the he--!” I exclaim out loud.

Well behind Chance is Mark, another member of the cannon crew. Mark is a nice guy and very knowledgeable about the Civil War, but he is a fellow who is probably a bit too pudgy to look like an authentic Confederate artilleryman.

Mark is running as fast as he can, which is not very fast, behind Chance.

Chance makes a break for the clearing in the trees leading out to the wide open spaces of the park.

At that moment, Joanne, the horse trainer, comes zipping in through the same clearing on the asphalt road in her small white sports car. She has to slam on the brakes to avoid hitting Chance, but it forces Chance to circle back toward me and the building.

Joanne rolls down her window and begins shouting instructions. I cannot understand what she is saying, and no one is paying attention to her. I do remember her telling us at the beginning of the season, though, that if a horse ever got free, to not bother running behind it to try to catch it- there is no point.

Mark seems to think he can defy the odds, though, and chase down our race horse.

Chance makes a lap around the building and runs along the wooden fence of the corral.

This event has excited all of the other horses, and they have run up to the fence to watch. Hobson, probably the smartest horse we have, runs along the inside of the fence parallel to Chance on the outside, kicking up his hind legs and shouting encouragement with loud neighs.

The other guys on the crew see what is happening and try to surround Chance. He is much too fast for that, though. Joanne is out of the car trying to do the same thing. She leaves her vehicle parked in the road to block Chance’s escape out into the main part of the battlefield.

I run to the barn further back from the corral. We have hay and buckets of sweet feed there, and all the horses love the sweet feed. A mixture of corn, barley and oats, Joanne told me the horses will literally eat themselves to death on sweet feed if we left them alone with it. I grab a bucket out of the barn, hold it up in the air and call to Chance as he runs by for another lap.

Chance stops on a dime and gives me a curious look. I shake the bucket, and he knows what it is. He slowly walks up to me, and I let him begin eating out of the bucket. He calms down. Now, I have him by the nose band, and I take him to a post with a rope and attach it to the bottom of the band, like we normally do to begin fitting the horses with the gear.

Joanne seems a little surprised that this trick actually worked, or perhaps she has just never thought of it before.

We ask Mark what happened. He explains that he made the mistake of trying to open the gate to the corral and take Chance through it at the same time.

While the other horses remain calm as they walk through, Chance always gets spooked by the swinging gate.

Chance bolted on Mark and ripped free of his grip. The gate was not open quite wide enough yet, either, and Chance got a bad scrape along his rib cage as he ran through.

Later, after all our shows are done for the day, we tease Mark about how he tried to chase down the horse.

Mark smokes a cigarette. He takes a drag, and as he exhales he says quietly but most seriously, “I told you guys I could run.”

We all burst out laughing, to his confusion.

Bob and Bo

Petersburg, Virginia. The summer of 1998.

You would think that the Amish might treat their animals better.

The National Park Service, specifically Petersburg National Battlefield, purchased several horses for our show. Among them are two large Belgian Quarter Horses bought from the Amish, “Bob” and “Bo.” Their bodies are covered with marks and scars- clear signs of abuse. They both have bad spots of what looks to be black skin, smooth to the touch, where no hair has grown back after they suffered a nasty wound. My supervisor tells me that they were in much worse shape when the Park Service first acquired them a few years ago.

Anyway, in this job I get to work with horses, and I wear suspenders every morning.

I am studying history at Western Carolina University, and my academic advisor and mentor at the school has taken a special interest in me. He is fast becoming one of the foremost authors and historians on the Civil War, and he knows just about everyone in the Park Service at the Civil War battlefields in Virginia. Thanks to him, I have a summer job in Petersburg as a Park Ranger, complete with housing provided by the Park Service.

I work on the cannon crew at the battlefield. We dress as a Confederate artillery soldiers, and hook a Napoleon cannon and caisson to a team of horses, ride into battle for the crowd, and fire a blank black power round. We then perform a mortar demonstration, where we fire a live round that lands down range about 300 yards. After the show is over, we answer questions from the crowd.

Before the first show each morning, though, we have to feed the horses and get them harnessed up. I wear my wool pants and my white shirt with suspenders, along with the authentic shoes of the era. But in what is often 100 degree heat, I of course wait until it is time to ride to put on my wool coat and red cap of the artillery.

Bob and Bo are the biggest horses we have, and they do the brunt of the work pulling the cannon and gear. In front of them on the team are “Hobson” and “Chance.” Chance is built like a race horse, but he suffers from asthma and we can only feed him a limited amount of hay. He needs to eat green grass. Hobson basically just lived in a lady’s back yard his whole life before the Park Service bought him, and he has the most personality of any horse I have ever seen.

Bob and Bo know the drill. We put their saddle blankets across their backs, then the saddle itself, followed by the collar, the hames, the breech straps, and then the traces. For the breech straps, I actually have to lift up their tail and loop the leather strap around it. Before I do this, I always touch the horse on his side and rub down to his back, so that he can feel where I am and I do not surprise him when I lift up his tail. Usually, the horse tenses his muscles to make it hard for me work the leather strap around its tail, but who can blame him? The skin underneath the tail is a common area where the leather strap will rub a sore.

The last thing we put on is the bit, which lodges against the horse’s upper gum.

Bo in particular has this trick where he will inflate his belly with air when I am attaching the saddle. You will think that the saddle is tight enough, but then the rider might slide right off once we get going. What I have to do is tighten the saddle, then come back and few minutes later and tighten it again, to catch him by surprise.

On this morning, we are running a little late getting the horses ready. I put on Bo’s saddle and tighten the girth strap. Bo has his stomach extended as far as he can, and he is also moving around to make things harder for me.

I lose my patience with him, and I give him a quick pop on the cheek of his mouth.

I have never seen an animal react in such a way. Bo audibly gasps, his eyes go wide with fear, and his body becomes rigid. I can see in his eyes the flashback to the beatings he took at the hands of the Amish.

“Bo, I am sorry,” I say. I pet him on his neck and rub his side to try to get him to calm down. “I will never hit you again.”

He eventually relaxes a little, but I can tell that the psychological damage to him is worse than it is for Bob. Bo will never trust people after the Amish, no matter how well he is treated. Bob, on the other hand, still has some curiosity and will give me amusing looks from time to time.

After watching Bo’s reaction to my tiny slap, though, I always make it a point to be the one who dresses Bo in the mornings, to go a little gentler with him than the other guys might be in putting the gear on the horses.

Tennis

As a boy, I was not the greatest of athletes. I lettered for the cross country team in high school, but that was the height of my accomplishments in organized sports.

My two favorite sports have always been baseball and tennis. Dad taught me baseball as soon as I was old enough to swing a bat and throw a ball.

It was Mom, though, who taught the game of tennis to both my brother and me during the summer vacations in between school years.

My brother, Adam, learned the game fast, but it took me a while. When I first started playing, I literally could not keep the ball inside the court. Almost every time I swung, I launched the ball over the fence. Mom was very patient with me, though. We actually learned to play using her and Dad's old wooden rackets. Eventually, I was able to keep the ball inside the fence and inside the lines, but it was a couple of years before I began putting topspin into my swings.

Adam, after Mom bought us our own metal rackets, used Mom's wooden racket to hit rocks from our driveway out into the corn fields surrounding our house. He played whole imaginary baseball games hitting those rocks, the New York Mets versus the Baltimore Orioles in the World Series, sometimes. The rocks gradually busted the strings and chewed up the wood. He later said that he hated he messed up Mom's racket, as it really was a nice vintage wooden piece.

Adam and I played a lot against each other while growing up. He beat me most of the time, but my peak came when I was 19 years old. That was my freshman year of college, and I was in perhaps the best shape of my whole life. I took tennis as an elective course at Western Carolina University. The instructor was one of the football coaches, an old man.

He really did not teach us that much. I remember him telling jokes to the class like, "Do you know what the students cheer at Furman University games?...FU!"

Or "Do you know what the students cheer at Austin Peay University?... Let's go Peay!"

He gave us written instructions on how the game is played and how to keep score, but the only teaching of how to play was when he told us and demonstrated, "Remember, bend your knees when you swing, bend your knees."

For our final grade, he started a tournament pitting everyone in the class against each other. I easily won my first two matches. The coach stopped the tournament after that, as it was pretty clear that I was the best player in the class. I'm not sure that he liked me that much, as I think I acted pretty cocky on the court. He challenged me to game of ping pong, and it was closely contested. The old ball coach eventually won, though, and he seemed to take a good deal of satisfaction in that.

My freshman year, I met a guy named Thomas who was also a very good tennis player for someone who never played it in an organized setting. We spent many evenings competing against each other. It was about 50/50, who would win. My strength, he said, was that I could run everything down and get every shot back across the net.

Thomas was a nice guy. He and I were both from the eastern part of the state, and he gave me a ride home during the Christmas break of my freshman year- over six hours of driving. I was pretty naive during college, and it took me all year to realize that Thomas was gay. This sort of blew my mind, given my conservative Christian upbringing. I immediately cut off all contact with him. It is one of the regrets that I have from my life that I was such a homophobe in those years and that I cruelly abandoned a friend who had done nothing wrong.

My brother joined me at Western during my sophomore year, and we continued our matches against each other on the courts beside Reid Gym (courts that now no longer exist due to building expansion on campus). I remember that these courts played slower, and the ball bounced higher than on the courts beside the high school where Adam and I attended. The slower court helped my game against him, and I went on a long winning streak. Eventually, he stopped playing against me because I was trash talking too much.

One night we were playing against each other and got into a heated argument over whether a ball was in or out. Some guys playing on the court beside us stopped to watch in awkward silence.

Finally, I yelled at Adam, "I'm going to beat your butt! I'm going to beat your butt tonight!"

At that exact instant, the lights went out.

I think it was probably someone from campus security who was watching and was able to shut the lights down before things escalated even further. I never knew the lights to just suddenly cut off like that at any time before or after when I played tennis at night.

When Adam stopped playing against me, I would go to those same courts and hit a ball against a brick wall until I got blisters on my hand.

During my sophomore year, I took racquetball as an elective course. The course was fun and was taught by the quarterbacks coach of the football team. He would later become the head coach. He also started a tournament in the class matching the students against each other. I finished second.

Taking the course was a mistake, though, as it completely ruined my tennis swing. In racquetball, you break your wrist when you swing. In tennis, you should keep the wrist stiff.

Adam eventually started playing tennis with me again, but it was a pathetic show. I began launching the ball over the fence once more. It was like I had forgotten how to play, like I was picking up a racket for the first time. It was not enjoyable for either of us, and he could not understand what had happened to me.

In college, I had a pretty strong crush on a girl, and I remember her walking by the court one night and seeing me play. I hated that I looked so pitiful out there as she went by- if only she could have seen me before I took that darn racquetball course, maybe things would things would have turned out differently between us. But probably not. In my head, it was a very important thing at that time, though.

I never did get my swing back. Instead, I developed a method of basically just punching the ball flatly back across the net, without topspin, and using the other player's velocity. Adam said it was very frustrating to play against me and that he could not get better himself with me playing in that style. I never was able to get back to the level when I was 19 and playing almost every day against Thomas, taking full swings and hitting with topspin.

Now, in my 30s, I have not played in years.

On the professional level, tennis has arguably changed more than any other major sport in the past 30 years. This is due to the rapid increase in racquet technology, the change from wooden racquets to graphite composites to whatever material is used today.

It is really a power game, now. No one serves and volleys any more, and you do not see the strategy in building points like you used to. I quit keeping up with all the changes, but I remember when Goran Ivanisevic won Wimbledon in 2001, that was a turning point. Ivanisevic, 6'4", had a big serve, but that was about it. Since his win, tennis has increased the size of the ball by 6% and changed the type of grass grown at Wimbledon to try and slow the game down. The real solution is to just go back to wooden rackets, but that will probably never happen.

Now, the men's game is two guys standing at the baseline and just hitting the ball as hard as they can. The best players are over six feet tall, whereas before shorter guys had a chance. To me, the game is not that interesting to watch anymore.

Enough about how things used to be, though.

Tennis, like baseball, has given me a lot of joy. I can write more blog entries about individual matches that I watched or played. I can write about specific shots, even. Perhaps in the future I will do so.