non-fiction

The Candy House: Meta Fiction in the Digital Age

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Like its older sibling A Visit from the Goon Squad, Jennifer Egan’s 2022 novel The Candy House consists of a series of interlinked short stories written in various voices featuring a host of characters we meet and reencounter at various unchronological stages of their lives. Its narrative structure is in a sense digitalized, modeled on various Internet modes such as Facebook, email, texting, and constructs a sort of narrative labyrinth of mirrors where the virtual is privileged over the corporeal. 

Or to paraphrase the abstract of my son’s PhD dissertation[1], The Candy House (and other contemporary novels of its ilk) explore how new media technologies affect psychological and sociological structures and blur the boundaries “between history and fiction, physical and virtual spaces, as well as public and private notions of the self.” 

The novel demonstrates that not only has the richness of raw “undigitalized” reality been diminished by our habit of staring into screens, but also that “authenticity” becomes incredibly problematic as we scroll through the filtered sunsets captured by our Facebook friends whose profile pictures have also been filtered. 

A plot summary is virtually (pun intended) impossible. But here’s a stick figure drawing. 

Miranda Kline, an anthropologist and the ex-wife of a famous record producer Lou Kline, writes a book called Patterns of Affinity that creates an algorithm that explains what makes people like and trust one another. Based on Kline’s theory, Bix Bouton creates a technology that allows humans to upload their consciousnesses to a cloud and starts a company called Mandala where you can pay to have your consciousness uploaded and then tap into it to relive your past. Also, you can pay to have access to anyone else’s consciousness who has agreed to buy a subscription to Collective Consciousness.[2]

As far as point-of-view is concerned, now even first person narrators can be omniscient. For instance, Lou Kline’s eldest daughter Charlene, after accessing Collective Consciousness, relates her father’s introduction to cannabis during an expedition into a forest, which took place when she was only six.

Other characters, often interrelated by kinship or friendship, find themselves attempting to experience authenticity.  One character works at a startup where his job is to reduce possible events in fiction to algebraic equations, e.g. “(a (+ drink) x (action of throwing drink) = a (- drink) + i/2.”

Another chapter is narrated in the second person by a chip implanted in a spy’s brain to provide instructions during a dangerous mission:

Spread apart your toes and

gently reinsert the plug, now

magnetically fused to 

your subject’s phone, into your

Universal Port.

Yet another chapter consists of texts featuring a medley of characters attempting to set up an interview with a famous fading movie star.

The Candy House is quite a tour de force.

I wonder, though – despite its brilliant polyphonic orchestration of narrators’ voices, its imaginative story telling techniques, and its construction of an all too real Brave New World – if the novel itself abstracts itself from the corporeal richness of the very best of literary fiction. 

It’s a bit of a paradox: the fragmentation of its narrative mode, which reflects the shattered lives of its characters, makes reading the novel a mental exercise of sorts, something akin to solving a puzzle, which abstracts the reader from the characters. But then again, this may be Egan’s point: people have become, to riff on my main man Will Shakespeare, walking shadows, or better yet, walking holograms. 

Here’s a character cloud created by someone who goes by u/astroloveuz on Reddit.

[1] Wesley Edward Moore

[2] Bix owns a copy of Joyce’s Ulysses that he treats as a sort of talisman.

What’s in a Name, Um, Could You Spell That?

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In the last twenty or so years, parents have been opting for phonetic spellings for their children’s names, which often increases the number of letters needed to convey the sound of the name. The other day in the obituaries I ran across a survivor, a grandchild, whose first name was Kennidee. (I’m not sure of the pronunciation: Is it Kennedy or Ken-a-DEE?). I’m assuming Kennidee’s a girl because these cutesy spellings almost invariably are assigned to female names – Ashlee, Emmalee, Brandee, etc.  Also, sometimes parents invert the vowels E and A to create a sort of Celtic look, rendering Haley as Haeley, for example.

Obviously, it’s none of my business what parents name their progeny, and I’m not claiming that my family’s names are particularly stellar. My maternal great grandparents, David and Minnie Fairey Hunt, named their daughters Ruby and Pearl, and Aunt Ruby named her daughter Zilla. Sister Pearl christened one of her sons Fairey, so his name ended up being Fairey Goodman, which sounds like a character in a nursery rhyme fantasy.[1] My own grandmother, the younger sister of Ruby and Pearl, was named Hazelwood Ursula Hunt, a mouthful, if you ask me, which became even more of a mouthful after she wed Jerome Kistler Blanton and became Hazelwood Ursula Hunt Blanton.[2]

Lewis David Hunt, born 1863; Minnie Anna Fairey Hunt, born 1873

Given that I’m a fiction writer, I’m in the business of naming characters, and for me it’s a lot of fun because I try to imbue my characters’ names with symbolic meaning. For example, I tagged the protagonists of a break-up story Abby Huffington and Ashton Gray, she quick to take offense, he as drab as sackcloth. In Today, Oh Boy, the main character’s Rusty Boykin’s name weds incompetence and immaturity, and conveniently Boykin is a traditional South Carolina surname. 

His foil and eventual friend’s name is Ollie Wyborn, a transplant from Minnesota with Nordic roots. Ollie is an intellectual, a questioner, so I chose Wyborn to suggest that Ollie possessed a philosophical bent. 

Anyway, it must be nice to have a distinctive name. For example, if you google Wesley Moore you get hundreds of thousands of hits, from the current governor of Maryland to Wesley Charles Moore serving 30 years in Michigan for child molestation. Wes Moore is about as distinctive a name as John Smith when you get down to it. 

But I’m not complaining. I grew up around the corner from a girl named April Lynn Paris.

[1] I have a copy of the Fairey family tree. The first American Fairey’s name was John, born in Ireland in 1720 and killed at the Battle of Hanging Rock in 1780 during the American Revolution. When I first visited Ireland, I told the proprietor of the B&B where we were staying that some of my ancestors came from Ireland, the Faireys, and he looked at me as if I were daft and said, “Now, there’s a name I’ve not heard of.”

[2] Grandmama Hazel wanted to name my mother Barbara Ursula, but the doctor talked her into shortening it to Bobbi Sue, a name my mother detested because she considered it way too country cute.

Random Thoughts: Late Empire/Peggy Lee/ Bette Midler/ Tom Waits Edition

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Today in Manhattan in a dingy 14th floor courthouse with inadequate heating, lawyers will present their opening arguments in Donald Trump’s first trial of 2024. He’s accused, of course, of falsifying business records to hide $130,000 paid to a porn actress so that the American people would not find out that he and she had engaged in adulterous sex during his first run for the presidency. 

Pundits speculate that the prosecution’s first witness will be David Pecker.

David Pecker was then the publisher of the National Enquirer. When I was a child, I used to peek at the Enquirer at the magazine rack at Kramer’s Pharmacy in segregated Summerville, South Carolina. Back then, it published photographs of splattered suicides who had leapt from high rise windows and other violent images. I confess I’ve always had a morbid imagination.

This dark memory has engaged in the jukebox of my subconscious Peggy Lee’s rendition of “Is That All There Is,” a sad, decadent tune that sounds as if originated in a cabaret in Berlin during the Weimer Republic. I suspect that Tom Waits loves this song. 

To exorcise the tune, I’ve gone to YouTube and discovered this wonderful video of Bette Midler covering the song.  Here it is.

And also dig this: Tom and Bette doing a duet in which virtually every line of the song is a cliche.

I’d call this a successful exorcism.

The Age of Miracles Rambling Redux Blues

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Years ago I saw Barbara Walters interview Jack Nicholson on one of her specials. The British actor Hugh Grant had just been busted for solicitation, so Barbara asked Jack why someone as goodlooking and famous and rich as Hugh Grant would require the services of prostitutes.

Jack donned his patented devilish grin and said, “Peculiarities. Peculiarities.”

Which brings us to Louis CK.

I first caught Louis on the Letterman Show back in the days of VCRs when I prerecorded Dave for civilized midmorning viewing. If I remember correctly, Louis didn’t do standup that night but walked over and took a seat next to Dave. Louis started riffing on the entitlement of whiny airline passengers who carp about minor inconveniences while soaring o’er the plains of Nebraska where wagon trains once rambled through “Injun” territory in months-long treks. 

“You’re sitting in a seat in the air, for Christsakes!”

[c.f. Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian.]

Earlier this evening, perched on a barstool at Chico Feo, I almost texted my wife Caroline, who is in New York City, to complain that my boredom was approaching John Berryman red alert levels:

Dream Song 14

Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so.
After all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns,
we ourselves flash and yearn,
and moreover my mother told me as a boy
(repeatedly) ‘Ever to confess you’re bored
means you have no

Inner Resources.’ I conclude now I have no
inner resources, because I am heavy bored.
Peoples bore me,
literature bores me, especially great literature,
Henry bores me, with his plights & gripes
as bad as achilles,

Who loves people and valiant art, which bores me.
And the tranquil hills, and gin, look like a drag
and somehow a dog
has taken itself and its tail considerably away
into mountains or sea or sky, leaving
behind: me, wag.

John Berryman

But I didn’t want to darkcloud any fun Caroline was having, and anyway, I got into a conversation with a travelling nurse named Elise who is doing preop duty for a couple of months at Roper Hospital where my late wife Judy Birdsong stayed every other two weeks getting 96 hours of continuous chemo during the first stint of her cancer. Yet, the thing is, I don’t have a negative feeling about Roper. I told Elise how I had come to appreciate the nurses there. They were absolutely wonderful. They knew/know life from a perspective of pain. They are brothers and sisters of mercy. 

I asked her what she was reading. She said she didn’t enjoy reading, had never enjoyed reading, that she would rather “watch things,” so of course I told her I was novelist, which elicited headshaking and a rueful chuckle. 

We continued to make small talk. I asked her superficial questions about her life, thinking I might create a character like her for a minor role in some future fiction, maybe a confidant. I appreciated her forthrightness.[1]

On my walk home, Bob Dylan’s “Just Like Tom Thumbs Blues” got stuck in my head, so I started singing it, walking along singing, checking out the afternoon’s fading, shimmering, almost nervous sunlight. When I-and-I am afflicted by these songs looping in my head, the only cure is to listen to the song as a form of exorcism.

Like Louis CK’s disgruntled flier, I had forgotten that I live in an age of miracles. Now I am sitting in front of my computer listening to Bob sing “Tom Thumb’s Blues” and reading the lyrics against the static background of the iconic Highway 61 Revisited album cover that – look – I’ve conjured from a Cloud and presented below.

But now I realize that for fifty years I have misheard the lyrics. For example, the first line isn’t “When you’re down in Wallace”; it’s “When you’re down in Juarez,” which makes a lot more since given that “Sweet Melinda speaks good English” and “the authorities just sit around and boasts.” In other words, the song is about being down and out in Mexico. I also mistook “Rue Morgue Avenue” for “Remark Avenue,” which I sort of like better. My favorite line from the song is “Well, I started off on burgundy but soon hit the harder stuff,” which I always thought was “hardest,” which definitely would be better, going from burgundy to heroin, instead of going from burgundy to Jim Beam. 

Anyway, I’ve exiled my boredom to an ice floe in Antarctica. “It’s all good,” as the young people say after you’ve bumped into them and apologized.

[1] “Forthrightfulness” ought to be a word. 

Functional Allusions

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I’ve always been a big fan of allusions because they infuse whatever the writer is conveying with even more meaning, offering subtext or cross references that deepen. If you don’t pick up on the references, no harm done. If you do, God is in his heaven, and all’s right with the world.[1]

Here’s what I’m talking about: in the Richard Wilbur ‘s poem “A Late Aubade,” the speaker is trying to talk his lover into cutting class so they can continue to lie in bed in what I’m assuming is an interlude between another session of lovemaking.

Here’s, as the vulgar say, the money shot:

It’s almost noon, you say? If so,
Time flies, and I need not rehearse
The rosebuds-theme of centuries of verse.


If you must go,Wait for a while, then slip downstairs
And bring us up some chilled white wine,
And some blue cheese, and crackers, and some fine
Ruddy-skinned pears.

Rehearse, as in re-hearse, as in death mobiles, black limousines, but then – BAM – the allusion to Robert Herrick’s, “To the Virgins to Make Much of Time”:

Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,
   Old Time is still a-flying;
And this same flower that smiles today
   Tomorrow will be dying.

Carpe Diem!  

Or, as Andrew Marvell put it:

The grave’s a fine and private place, 

But none, I think, do there embrace.

ILLUSTRATION: YAO XIAO

[1] BTW, I wish I did, but I don’t believe in anthropomorphic Semitic deities. “God is in his heaven” is an allusion, albeit an ironic one, to the Victorian poet Robert Browning. 

Episode 3 of “My Boys Were Back in Town, Backroads Edition Featuring Joel Chandler Harris

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Episode 3 – Eatonton’s Rural Literary Legacy

[In episode 2, My ex-pat son Ned and I wended our way through backroads headed to Reynolds, formally known as Reynolds Plantation, just outside of Greensboro, Georgia, to reunite with his Aunt Becky at Uncle Dave].

Around four-thirty on Thursday, Ned and I arrived at Reynolds where we negotiated the security gate rigamarole. At the house, Becky and Dave greeted us warmly, plied us with drinks after our long (well, six hour) journey, and we did some catching up. It turns out that Becky and Dave had recently suffered a hair-raising flight from New Jersey to Atlanta, the inside of the plane perpetually rocked by turbulence for the entire time they were airborne. As she was exiting the plane, Becky found it especially disconcerting to see the pilot and copilot exchanging high fives. She informed Ned if she were going to visit him in Nuremberg, she was likely to take an ocean liner.

On Friday, Dave, who is overseeing the construction of one of the houses his son Scott is building in Reynolds, headed off to work, and Becky drove Ned and me to Eatonton so we could check out the Georgia Writer’s Museum, home of the Georgia Writer’s Hall of Fame. 

Eatonton is a lovely, sleepy verdant town that reminds me of the Summerville of my youth. It seems like a pleasant place to retire, that is, if you’re not a Folly Beach hedonist hellbent on cha-cha-cha-ing yourself to death.

The museum itself, located in a coffeeshop, struck me as the literary equivalent of a science fair, consisted of tables lined up with poster board information. Eatonton and its environs have produced a remarkable number of noteworthy writers including Alice Walker, Jean Toomer of Harlem Renaissance fame, and Joel Chandler Harris, who adapted African folk tales in book form, creating the Uncle Remus stories. Milledgeville, the home of Flannery O’Connor, is a mere twenty miles south.

The museum houses both Joel Chandler Harris’s and Flannery O’Connor’s typewriters, plus an exhibit delineating the evolution of machines of writing, starting with primitive typewriters and ending with a progression of computers getting smaller and sleeker through the decades.

As I slowly strolled along the exhibits, The fact that Joel Chandler Harris had been born in the Barnes Inn and Tavern caught my eye. Being born in a tavern seemed odd, colorful, so I read on. 

Here’s a short version of his life:

The year of his birth is uncertain, either 1845 or 1848. His mother Mary, an Irish immigrant who worked at the inn, was impregnated by a cad who abandoned his infant son and Mary.  She named the baby Joel Chandler Harris after her attending physician.

Of course, illegitimacy, as it was called in my youth, was especially problematic in the antebellum South.[1] In addition to that disadvantage, Joel was redheaded and stammered, which made him a target for bullies.[2]  The stigma of his “lowly” birth haunted him throughout his youth and early adulthood.

Fortunately, Dr. Andrew Reid, a prominent Eatonton physician, provided Mary and Joel with a small house behind his mansion. He also paid for Joel’s tuition (in those days public education didn’t exist in the South). Mother Mary fostered Joel’s future literary prowess by reading to him out loud, which helped him to develop the remarkable memory he would utilize in assembling the Uncle Remus tales. She read him Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield so often that he could recite lengthy passages by heart.

At fourteen, Harris dropped out of school and went to work for a newspaper, Joseph Addison Turner’s The Countrymanwith a circulation around 2,000. There Harris mastered the basics, including typesetting. Addison allowed Harris to publish his own stories and poems. Eventually, Harris moved into Turnwold Plantation, Addison’s home, located nine miles outside of Eatonton. Here Harris had access to a voluminous library and where he began devouring the classics and contemporary authors such as Dickens, Thackery, and Poe.

At Turnwold, Harris spent hundreds of hours in the slave quarters. Wikipedia claims that Harris’s “humble background as an illegitimate, red-headed son of an Irish immigrant helped foster an intimate connection with the slaves. He absorbed the stories, language, and inflections of people like Uncle George Terrell, Old Harbert, and Aunt Crissy,” who in amalgam became the narrator of the Brer Rabbit Tales, Uncle Remus.

I was unfamiliar with Harris’s biography, but what strikes me as truly remarkable is that he replicated these stories in dialect without any written sources. He essentially gave voice to and preserved these tales that had been stored in the brains of Africans, transported across the Atlantic in slave ships, and told and retold in slave cabins throughout dark nights of captivity.

Because of the Disney movie, Song of the South, Harris has been tarred (pun intended) as being a racist, which is unfortunate. What Harris did was preserve a rich trove of folklore featuring an African trickster who used his wiles to outfox foxes, tales where the underdog prevails. Of course, you can accuse Harris of cultural appropriation, but to my mind, the dialect enriches the tales, making them much more linguistically interesting. 

After the war, Harris moved up in the world of journalism, working at the Atlanta Constitution for nearly a quarter century, and addition to the Remus tales, he published novels, short stories, and humorous pieces. Luminaries such as Theodore Roosevelt and Mark Twain were among his admirers. Alas, he was an alcoholic, and died from complications from cirrhosis of the liver at 59.

After our visit to the museum, Becky gave us a driving tour of the area, which includes a dilapidated chapel where Alice Walker’s ancestors are buried. We arrived back at Reynolds in the early afternoon, looking forward to Cousin Scott’s arrival the next day. At the museum, Ned had bought me Jean Toomer’s Cane, a literary mosaic of poems and short stories that brings to life a subculture, which reminds me of my work-in-progress Long Ago Last Summer, an up close and personal exploration of real life Sothern Gothic.

In short, it was a very meaningful morning and afternoon for Ned and me. 

Alice Walker’s Childhood Home around 1910

[1] Of course, “bastard” was the preferred 19th Century nomenclature. 

[2] As a former redhead, I can emphasize. If interested, check this LINK out.

My Boys Are Back in Town, Episode 2: Blind Willie’s Gravesite

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EPISODE 1 of “My Boys Are Back in Town: Joel Chandler Harris Backroads Edition” ended with my son Ned, who lives in Germany, and I-and-I embarking on a backroads trip to northern Georgia. It was Ned’s idea to see his mother’s sister Becky and her husband Dave during Ned’s two weeks in the States, and I volunteered to come along. My sister-in-law Becky is a Birdsong, and growing up, my boys were much closer to the Birdsongs than the Moores. The Birdsongs resembled the Brady Bunch, a prosperous blended family of non-smokers and non-alcoholics/drug addicts. The Moores, on the other hand, more or less resembled a mashup of the Addams Family and Tennessee Williams. For example, Becky had never vomited on Ned in a station wagon after picking her up from a halfway house to celebrate Christmas in dysfunctional Snopesville. Alas, the same can’t be said of his chain-smoking bipolar Aunt Virginia. 

As a bonus, when Becky and Dave’s son Scott heard we were coming, he decided to drive over from Atlanta to share the weekend with us.

With my bonus daughter Brooks in school, she and my wife Caroline couldn’t make the trip. Caroline, cognizant of Ned and my spaciness, made sure were had packed the essentials – tangles of electronic chargers, sufficient socks and underwear, gifts for the hosts, and a cooler of various malted beverages.

We took off on Thursday morning around ten, but there was a problem: when I punched Google maps, my phone informed me that I was not connected to the internet. Since Ned’s German phone was dataless, we turned around and retraced the block or two we had traveled on Hudson Avenue, Folly Beach, SC.  I climbed the stairs to my wifi-rich drafty garret to troubleshoot. No sooner than I had fired up the iMac, Ned called from below, “It’s ATT, dad. ATT’s down.” So I retrieved a venerable relic of a roadmap, and we were off.

Caroline and I had made this trip a couple of years earlier when I had introduced her to Becky and Dave, so I was somewhat familiar with the first leg of that took us to the fringes of Walterboro. On the previous trip, Caroline and I had made a pilgrimage to Blind Willie McTell’s grave outside of Thomson, Georgia, and headed back towards the Savannah River, Caroline caught sight of a truly weird roadside attraction, a junkyard turned art installation that included a crashed helicopter and a sexy mannikin in a telephone booth[1]. Ned was eager to see it in person and share it with his friend Claudia, who is a prominent German artist.

This is what had caught Caroline’s eye

We headed down 17 South and stopped in the Red Top community to fill Caroline’s Prius with the cheapest gas in South Carolina. We were about a mile or so from Ned’s first childhood home in Rantowles, so we made a brief detour, noted the changes (or at least I did; Ned was yet not walking when we moved to the Isle of Palms). I noticed that the shrubs Judy and I had planted were still going strong, had, in fact, outlived her. Her ghost accompanied us throughout the trip, a pleasant though somewhat melancholy companion. 

At Jacksonboro, right past the now defunct Edisto Motel Restaurant, which had in the day conjured the best fried seafood I’ve ever eaten, we took highway 64 West towards the heart of murderous Murdaugh country, Colleton County. That’s where we discovered that ATT was back, and we need no longer rely on yesteryear’s technology to get us to Allendale, before we crossed the Savannah River into Georgia. 

Allendale is a lovely word, harkens back to Merry Old England, Robinhood and all that jazz, but the city nowadays is a decaying corpselike town of abandoned motels, convenience stores, and restaurants.[2] Ned has perhaps inherited from the Moore side of his genetic heritage a morbid sensibility. Rather than getting the hell out of there, we tooled slowly, taking it all in, taking what used to be called photographs.

We decided to visit Blind Willie’s grave on this trip, and the art installation on the way back, since we had left late because of the ATT snafu. 

The grave is located in the yard of a small, red-bricked Baptist Church outside of Thomson. By the way, not only was Blind Willie a great bluesman, but he’s also the eponymous source of one of Dylan’s underappreciated masterpieces.

Here’s a snippet from “Blind Willie McTell”:

See them big plantations burning
Hear the cracking of the whips
Smell that sweet magnolia blooming
See the ghosts of slavery ships
I can hear them tribes a moaning
Hear that undertaker’s bell
And I know no one can sing the blues
Like Blind Willie McTell

Ned and stood by the grave, Ned tossed some German Euros on the slab, and with that mission accomplished, we made our way to Becky and Dave’s.[3]

In the next episode, Becky introduces us to the Georgia Writer’s Hall of Fame in Eatonton where I learn some stuff and Ned buys me a book after I buy Becky a book.

Now that’s what I call a “cliffhanger” or maybe a “coat hanger.”

Here’s Dylan himself singing the above-quoted verse:

[1] Here’s a LINK if interested.

[2] It makes the Trenchtown of the Jimmy Cliff’s The Harder They Fall look like Beverly Hills. It’s the opposite of Reynolds, where Becky and Dave live, a picturesque golf community of rolling hills and million dollar houses on and adjacent to Lake Oconee. 

[3] Note to those who read episode 1. No, we didn’t pick up a blind hitchhiker, complete with red-tipped white cane. Never trust a teaser.

My Boys Are Back in Town: Joel Chandler Harris Backroads Edition

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On the main drag through Allendale, SC.

Episode 1

Family Time

My far flung sons, Harrison up in Chevy Chase. and Ned over in Nuremburg, came for a visit in mid-February. It’s rare to be together in one place; however, Ned decided to come down for two-plus weeks during an academic break, and Harry took a couple of days off to join Caroline, Brooks, and me with his wife Taryn and their boy, Julian Levi Moore, the mighty mini-mensch, my grandson.

Harry and Taryn rented a bright yellow cottage around the corner, something you might encounter in a Winslow Homer watercolor, one of the many spiffed-up two-bedroom houses on Folly that in rental brochures affect a Key West vibe.

Julian, who is two-and-a-half, is as verbal – as his late grandma Judy would say – “as all get out.” Though he conflated our house with the state of South Carolina, and would say when he was in the rental, “I wanna go to South Carolina, I wanna go to South Carolina.” [1]

the mighty mini-mensch

We all had a great time, and the boys and I got to hang in a bar reminiscing about days of yore – surfing on the Isle of Palms, playing wiffle ball in our backyard, bedtime readings, and  movies in theaters we’d seen together, starting off with Snow White and ending up with David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive.

Harrison (left) and Ned at Lowlife

We also got to celebrate Brooks’ 15th birthday, a festive occasion for sure!

Brooks

But, alas, Harrison had to get back to work, so we sad our sad goodbyes, sad for me anyway, because of the limited number of these encounters left as my twilight continues its necessary progression. 

[Hello, sorry to interrupt, but I’m Marcus Aurelius, and I do not approve of that previous paragraph.]

You’re right, Marcus, that sounded whiny. And, sure, we can FaceTime. It’s not like when we depended on handwritten letters for communication. I remember my uncle Jerry’s infrequent missives to my grandmother when he was in the service. That had to be tough.

Uncle Jerry (standing) at my grandparents’ service station in Summerville

Back Roads Road Trip

Abandoning Caroline and bonus daughter Brooks, Ned and I took off to see his Aunt Becky, Uncle Dave, and Cousin Scott in Reynolds, nee Reynolds Plantation, a golfing development on Lake Oconee between Greensboro and Eatonton, Georgia. 

I almost always go on the back roads because you don’t see shit like this on the Interstate. 

Or curiosities like this.

We had a problem, though. ATT had crashed, Ned’s German phone was dataless, so [gasp], we’d have to negotiate the labyrinthian lefts and rights, rights and lefts, four way stop signs on Highways 17 South, 64 West, etc. etc. with an anachronistic road map, a document incapable of saying out loud in a soothing yet robotic tone, “At the light, take a right, Stonewall’s Calvary Road.”

How does the trip go? Do we pick up a blind hitchhiker complete with red tipped white cane?

Find out next time to Episode 2, “Allendale Ain’t Looking So Good, Though Come to Think of it, Neither Am I.”

[1] When hearing our waitress Jaime at Jack of Cups Saloon list food kids might like, before she was finished, he looked her in the eye, and said, “Grilled cheese please.”