Some of our favorites …
What are your favorite ornaments? Write about them in the comments.
Friday
14
Dec 12
Our last day, a travel day, a tragic day
If you have never been to Savannah — or if you’re only now planning a trip because you’ve read about it in this space or if you’ve never been to this particular place — do yourself a favor and go to lunch at Mrs. Wilkes. Go early in your trip, because you will want to go back.
Don’t even worry about Paula Deen’s place. This is better and you’re welcome.
Under our tree, where we always spend our last afternoon before leaving town. We spent a day under this tree on our first trip here in 2005. We got engaged under this tree a few years later. This is the view I had while working up the nerve:
A guy walked by, one of the panhandling welcome committee members, and offered to take our picture:
The Yankee composes a terrific photograph similar to the view I shared above:
On River Street, where few tourists are to be found even on this beautiful Friday, there was a busker:
Who doesn’t love a good busker? This guy sang a capella all weekend. Just him, his hands, his money bucket and a bottle of water. You could hear him a block away. Sounded great, too.
And back home we drove. We’d been reading all day about all of the terrible senselessness that had taken place in Newtown, just 20 miles from where The Yankee grew up.
Meanwhile, police found the bodies of a woman and two kids in a small apartment just a few miles from my campus. So there I am, middle of the night, driving through the countryside and calling media relations people, editors, police departments and the campus safety office, trying to make sure that this had no Samford ties. Seems it did not.
Covering that during the semester break would be a challenge. I’m sure our students would have done a respectful job. Wish you saw more of that from Connecticut out of cable television today. There’s been far too much misinformation and misidentification (problems originating with overwhelmed law enforcement agencies) alongside conjecture and quacks that have been shuffled in front of the cameras (strictly the media’s fault). But all of that belongs in a different rant.
As of this writing they are up to 26 fatalities there. It is hard to all of this, so sweeping and terrible in its scope and consequence. There’s precious little peace and even less understanding, I’m sure.
I think of the voids, the big hole in the community that stands out for years in a wide tragedy. I think of all of the little empty places found in all of those families when someone is so unexpectedly pulled away. That lasts for generations.
Found this on one of our local merchant’s Facebook page:
If you would like to mail sympathy cards or letters of support to the school, the address is:
Sandy Hook Elementary School
12 Dickenson Drive
Sandy Hook, CT 06482Please copy/paste/share widely. Sending a card is something small but it’s the least we can do!
Here’s their website.
7
Dec 12
I wrote a review
Dave Brubeck, who invented the notes that landed between the things that you don’t play that mean you’re making jazz, recently died. Everyone that is knowledgeable about his importance to music can talk far more about this than I can.
But someone found footage of a concert he performed at Samford in the 1980s. Not sure why it is in black and white. Just enjoy the show:
Since I mentioned Bo Jackson yesterday … The War Eagle Reader asked me to write a little preview of the 30 for 30 on him, which debuts tomorrow. I had the chance to watch it last night:
The first story is from retired baseball coach Hal Baird, “I saw Bo jump over a Volkswagon.”
The second story, the one about Jackson standing in thigh-high water and doing a standing back flip, is from one of his coaches at McAdory High School. I’ve heard that one from a few different people that fit in that period of Jackson’s young life.
There’s the story about Jackson throwing a football up to the scoreboard before the Sugar Bowl. Randy Campbell told me that one himself.
Dickie Atcheson, his high school football coach, talks about Jackson using a pole vault pole designed for 180-pounders. Bo cleared 13 feet at 215 pounds.
There’s another story where he literally destroyed a batting cage in front of the top scout for the New York Yankees. In high school. With one hit.
Baird didn’t mention the story about hitting three home runs into the lights at Georgia as a freshman. No one told the story about the home run he hit that carried halfway over the football field. The one about when he came back to the high school after his hip replacement. He was still faster than everyone, including the kid that would capture most of his high school records.
Bo Jackson was amazing:
Bo Jackson is amazing. Always will be.
I only wish the documentary covered Bo Bikes Bama. Because HE SCARED TORNADOES OUT OF THE STATE.
You Don’t Know Bo was directed by Michael Bonfiglio (you can read TWER’s interview with him here). It premieres on ESPN on Dec. 8th at 9 p.m.
30
Nov 12
My kind of Friday
Some days you spend all day locked away in your office trying to get things done. And when you finally come out you find it is just the perfect time of day.
The Christmas season is now fully on campus:
The moment I began to see my great-grandmother as a poet: “I never know what the day may bring – it might even bring my favorite dreams.”
That was from her memoir, which she wrote in 1980, at around 75 years old. Some of it is prosaic. Some of it is art. I’m just reading it again, because I haven’t read it in several years and then I only skimmed it.
She was a neat lady. She became a rural teacher at a young age. Her first year in the classroom she had students older than she was. She went to school, taught school, brought in the crops. By 1925, was being courted by two young men. One she liked, of whom her father didn’t approve, and one that really liked her that she “really didn’t care for.”
She decided to write them each a loving letter and mail them in the wrong envelopes to see which one of the boys quit visiting first.
Her conscience, she wrote in her memoirs, got the better of her.
“I could never endure seeing Kelsie with some other girl.”
That story is in her memoir. They got married in 1927, had three kids and eight grandkids. She said she never found out why her father disproved. But life moved on. She became a mother, a grandmother, a sales manager, she ran an electronics store and became a secretary, which was work she wrote that she always wanted to do.
Her husband died in the 1970s, and she buried her son soon after. She turned to crafts and hobbies. She learned to paint, practiced all of her many sewing techniques, returned to her poetry. (Everyone in her family was a poet, it seems.) When her mind still turned to her grief she focused for a while on her memoirs, which she finished in 1981, in her mid-70s.
In 1996 she called me and asked me to come to her graduation. She’d been secretly taking classes again, picking up her education where she left it off when it was time to raise a family. Now, decades later, she became the oldest graduate of the University of North Alabama. (One of her daughters is believed to be the youngest graduate at UNA.) I made a phone call and had the governor declare it Flavil Q. Rogers day.
She made the section front in the Times Daily, her local paper:
And the state’s largest daily, The Birmingham News. Click to embiggen:
I think this is the last photograph I have of her:
“I never know what the day may bring – it might even bring my favorite dreams.”
I’ll have to reprint large swaths of her memoir now, I think. She’d probably get a kick out of that.
23
Nov 12
Just a photo Friday
Tomorrow you get filled:
Rough day today. Woke up sore, felt it spreading into my neck again. Felt it threaten my head — how muscle spasms can get in your brain pan I’ve no idea — and said “Nyet.”
So I took a painkiller, which somehow stayed with me all day in a way that they did not when I was using them every day. It made for a fairly listless and uncomfortable afternoon.
But the leftovers were good!
