The Names

 

I

've been listening to this band called The Names and their 1982 album, Swimming, the past couple of days. Since modern music is terrible, I find that there is plenty of good music from the past out there for me to discover. 

 

I found the band through a Christmas compilation disc called Ghosts of Christmas Past released by the Les Disques du Crepuscule label. I was looking for music by Winston Tong, who is also on that album and does a humorous version of The Twelve Days of Christmas.

 

I was nine when Swimming came out and there was no commercial Atlanta station who would have been playing this album then. I suppose it was possible that the Georgia State University station, WRAS, might have played them since that was the year the station became known as Album 88 or The Georgia Tech station, WREK, could have played them. 

 

At that age in 1982 I was listening to WZGC Z-93. The music I would have heard that was in any way similar would have been Human League's Dont You Want Me or anything by The Police.

Movies, Thoughts and Walks in May

 

A photo from a walk near home this past Monday. The landscapes are getting the late spring green as summer settles into place. Though I enjoy gardening and being out in nature in the warmer months, summer's heat and humidity is not as much fun as when I was a child.

I reread Tom Wolfe's Radical Chic from 1970 this week. It is relevant again in modern life among the poseurs of society.

Recent movies I watched:

The old mansion in Silent Night, Bloody Night

 

Silent Night, Bloody Night - I probably saw this on television in the seventies when old movies regularly played on the Atlanta independent stations. The movie is from 1972 and it captures how I remember the seventies as dark, rural and quiet. The 70s were not all about disco despite what people may think. I enjoyed the movie for what it was.

Westler -This is a 1985 West German gay movie about two lovers divided by the Berlin Wall. I'm obsessed with the GDR and Berlin so this movie appealed to me for it's footage shot on both sides of the wall. The plot and acting weren't the best, but it had enough appeal for me. The East German film, Coming Out, released in 1989 is a more complete and interesting film.

 

At My Most Fragile

 

It is late winter, the middle of February, but here in Georgia that means early Spring. We come by our global warming here naturally. The trees are budding and I sit here in my Keith Haring tee shirt, needing a haircut and wearing a fuzzy cardigan still living like it is 1994. Blueberry yogurt is digesting in my stomach and the morning sun is out. The birds, no Robins, are singing what sounds like Nirvana's Smells Like Teen Spirit. Needless to say, I'm feeling stupid and contagious.

Without further fanfare here is the promotional mock interview for my next novel due this summer.

 

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At times I didn't think I could write this book.

 

Let's talk about secrets.

Okay. You first. (laughs)

You have written extensively about family and personal secrets. Some of them have been quite tragic including sexual abuse, rape and suicide. Some of these secrets are related to growing up gay in a small town and others were more common to American families from the 70s and 80s such as infidelity, domestic violence and divorce. Having revealed all of this, how do you feel about it and what's left to tell?

I said something a month ago, it was that I found writing to be an emotionally abusive occupation. I had to go back during the writing process and relive all of it to some degree by reading my old journals, watching videos, looking at photos and talking with people that knew me then. I've cried over some of it, I've been angry about other parts and Shadow's Gravity put me into a serious depression last year. At times I didn't think I could write this book, but then it clicked for me and out it came every morning.
It comes with a price besides my mental health and there are some people who look at me or think of me differently after knowing, but I can't be worried about it. I wanted the truth to be known.

And it's not like domestic abuse, infidelity and some of these topics were exclusive to the American family only when I was growing up. Humans are still humans and there remains no cure for those problems within families, nor are these problems strictly American.

If growing up gay today is easier, I can't say. It might be a different time and on some level easier, but being different will always be a challenge. It might be new times, but with that possibly comes a new set of problems. If anything, it may be more confusing and embarrassing for children with some of the attention placed on it in school these days. I know that if I was a fourth grader and the teacher was discussing gay life in class I would have turned bright red and tried to crawl into a crack in the floor. I don't know if that perspective is taken into consideration. I knew what I was, but I didn't want others to know because I was taught what I am was shameful by society. Children today may be different though and if the shame associated with it can be minimized then that's a good development. It might save lives. It's difficult to find trustworthy current statistics on suicide rates because of how the numbers are clustered together under the umbrella of LGBT.

There are plenty of secrets left. I've never teased some of what is in this book. Also, I've never told all of the abusive stories that happened in New Hope at home or at school. There is one story in this novel which is about a complete emotional breakdown of mine in my teens. I finally came clean with it in therapy in the 2000s. I also come clean with readers that have followed my books about what I felt for someone that I wasn't completely forthright about before.

 

When does Shadow's Gravity take place?

Originally it was planned to span nine years. It ended up covering 1995 to 2005. I was a busy person, much happened and it made for a more complete circle from 1979 to end in 2005. This book sprawls and covers lots of territory in terms of themes, people and locations. During this time, there were also crucial events that still define our world today such as the widespread adoption of the internet and cell phones, Y2K, September 11 and the heinous murder of Matthew Shepard. This novel is my most ambitious. I'm excited about it and I feel the same about it as I did when I was writing Dweller On The Boundary.

There was another unplanned change. When I was writing this novel something happened in real life to one of the people behind one of the main characters of all my books. This development resulted in a drastic change in the course of the book.

I deeply loved him and considered him my twin brother.

What happened and to whom?

I can't say what exactly happened, but it was David The Bishop. I was shocked at what occurred involving him and it made me want to go back and delve further into that relationship in an attempt to find clues and offer an explanation. I haven't had any contact with him since the 1990s, but I was hurt by what recently happened with him. It made my head spin because I thought so highly of him, I deeply loved him and considered him my twin brother. It tainted my memories of us. As with any of my relationships, I've never spilled everything, just what I viewed as the most important aspects. I had to go back and examine that relationship and I did write more about it. My heart breaks for him that it came to this.

 

Paulding County has been the epicenter of your books, how much Paulding County is in this book?

The story picks up with life at the factory in Atlanta when I worked at Turner Broadcasting. It surprised me when writing this book, how much Paulding County is in it. I look back on life in that period and I don’t automatically think about Paulding County, but I realized it was still an important part of my life and I was often there. I lived there twice. Even when I was living elsewhere it seemed like there was a chain tied around my feet connected to the bumper of a van with one of those murals painted on the side that was popular when I was a kid and it was dragging me back out there for events. Years after I had graduated I was at Paulding County High School three times, talk about being surrounded by ghosts. My mindset then was, one day I will say goodbye to Paulding County once and for all, but it seemed impossible. I suppose I'll never say goodbye to it now.

 

What's your relationship with Paulding County these days?

I was there this past January, but I don't have a relationship with it besides the cemeteries. I don't live that close to it anymore, about an hour and a half away and with traffic it's a miserable drive. I pass through there a couple of times a year and it's less recognizable each time. I'm proud to be born and raised there, but we aren't compatible. If I haven't made that case yet then I hope it is obvious in Shadow's Gravity after I disclose what happened at my last house there in 2002. In the last few years, writing these books I have walked down Main Street in Dallas, the cemetery in New Hope, the Silver Comet Trail a couple of times and have been a few other places. I feel like maybe I've conquered the past, but then being there still makes me a little jittery. Also, I doubt I'll ever be asked to come out and speak at a Chamber of Commerce luncheon or at the main branch of the library where I met David The Bishop at a chess tournament. My experiences there are probably not something they would want to promote.

 

My belief is that if you wanted me to say something nice about you then you should've treated me better when you had the chance.

 

Are you saying you've presented Paulding County in a negative light?

Not entirely and I haven't been unfair to it by any stretch. My belief is that if you wanted me to say something nice about you then you should've treated me better when you had the chance. I loved growing up there, but I have to be honest. The Paulding County educational system was great to me at the time with some failings, but the community as a whole wasn't too kind. It was a pretty place though. As an adult, I don't have much in common with it and that's a sign that one, or in this case, both have changed.

 

Does Decatur County, Tennessee figure into this book?

Yes, I was there frequently in the 2000s. I don't even know if my family knew how often I was there then. My mother didn't know. It was the beginning of something new with my father. There may never have been any of the books in this series without those times in Decatur County. My relationship with my father may not have been as cut and dried as readers may suspect. We were close for fourteen years, with twice weekly phone conversations, regular visits and we traveled together.

 

You mentioned ghosts earlier, are there ghost stories in this book?
Yes, there are three ghost stories and another type of supernatural experience in this novel. The one ghost that my character experienced terrified me in real life. You can think what you want about ghosts, but I believe they are a genuine phenomenon. Whatever they are I cannot say, maybe they are a form of hallucination or maybe they are something that is not a creation of our mind. I'm open to either possibility. Most people will not believe in them, but unless you've experienced it then I suggest keeping an open mind about them. I've experienced way too many shocks in my life, but the experience I had in this book was the most shocking experience I've ever had and I have no explanation for it.

 

Who is your favorite character in this book?

Everett. I loved getting to finally write about this wonderful person that was locked away in my past. He was a transplant like me to Louisville, but had lived there longer and had a family connection to the city. He was a significant part of my Louisville life. He came from New York, was private schooled and was very much from a WASPY background. He was a polished person in areas that I was more rough around the edges. He was someone that I would have considered unattainable, he was extremely beautiful, sophisticated and intelligent. He was the kind of person that I did not think I would ever know or become involved. He came into my life in an unusual way and I'll leave it at that.

 

What made Louisville so special for you that you mention it on a frequent basis?

It was a city that gave me everything I ever dreamed and experiences I didn't know that I wanted. No place has ever embraced me the way that city did in the nineties. It was beautiful, historic, interesting, charming at every step and it had zero connection to my past. It was everything Atlanta was not for me, a chance to live a fresh new life. It was also fun trying to figure out what the mystery odor was that wafted around the city on certain mornings.

 

It feels like I'm losing them all over again and that hurts.

 

Since this is the end of the series, readers will expect resolution to the storylines that have been featured in your books. Is that going to happen?

Yes. It will not be neat and tidy though and requires an epilogue which is something I've not included before. I will resolve everything from my grandmother, to the search for Oliver, coming out to family, my relationship with Dylan, David The Bishop, Elliot, other people and places too like Aviary Hill.

Now this is coming to end, I am both happy and sad that this is the last book in the Aviary Hill series. I am happy to finally finish what I set out to do since I was a child and can move on to new writing territory. I am sad because I fell in love with some of these characters and I am unhappy about letting them go. I've spent years with them and trying my best to convey how meaningful to me these people were. It feels like I'm losing them all over again and that hurts.

No mention of Robin.

I'll be honest and say that there hasn't been a resolution with him, I don't believe it will ever be possible and that's for the best. He's not a major character in this novel as I never communicated with him during this period, though his presence and influences are heavily there as there was no way to deny the lasting impacts he had on me. Readers might think the sound of the crickets story and its effect on me in Uncivil X was fiction, but that was one example of the very real influence he had on me. He was a major figure in my young life and you don't ever shake someone like that.

 

Any plans to write another book about your family or your life?

No. I feel like I'm still living in the period that follows Shadow's Gravity and I want to keep my privacy. I might find some inspiration from parts of it, but I would not wish to do more than that. My day to day life isn't all that interesting anyway. Writing, hiking, gardening, photography, travel, work around the house and loafing in antique shops or wherever is what my life is these days. People on my Facebook can tell you that it's terribly lame like watching old music videos on YouTube or bad photos of stuff I see alongside the road or where I walk. I collect postcards and maybe I should start sharing that hobby on Facebook. I'm not all that interested in social media. I'm still a shy person no matter how much I have written about the past parts of my life. I won't say never, I learned that lesson a long time ago, but it is very, very, unlikely that I would ever do it. I still maintain a journal, but that's for my eyes only.

All that remains of the past that I want to publish is my poetry book from the 1990s and much of that is subject matter about family and growing up. I'd like to do that this year, but I don't know if it's the right time. It's me at my most fragile. 

 

A Chris Jr. running around out there? Hmm.

 

You shared a few details about the possibility of you having a child. Do you?

A Chris Jr. running around out there? Hmm. Well, it would spoil a few things to answer that here. I answer that in Shadow's Gravity and the circumstances about that very possibility. I'm a good secret keeper, I've proven that. I'm not one to share everything about my current life on social media and I have serious concerns about the detrimental effects of what social media does to children's mental health.

 

What's one weird story in this novel?

There would have to be several or it wouldn't be my life, but I'll mention hanging out late one night at Charlie Dick's house in Nashville. Okay maybe two, how I was dragged onto the film set of Remember The Titans, which I've still not seen. I did leave out the story of  my being at 99X and how it involved a thrift store album of my favorite, Barry Manilow.

 

There are a lot of music references in your books, from names of songs that were pivotal to the stories or playing in the background of scenes. It's obvious music is important to you, so what are some of the bands or songs mentioned in this book?

 

There are several music references in this book, but hopefully fewer as I was aware of it and trying to get away from that, but since I was in radio for much of this book it was kind of unavoidable. Also, it's kind of an interactive experience for a reader. I enjoy exposing people to music that they may not have heard and may enjoy if they look it up when they read a book of mine. Did people go listen to Robbie Dupree's Steal Away after reading about it in Dweller On The Boundary? I don't know, but they should. It was one of those songs bouncing around in my little brain in the evenings when I was out running around with Robin in the twilight. Or maybe readers my age were reminded just how great the Cure's Lullaby was by having it playing while Tavin and I fumbled around in my car in a church parking lot. People could go study the lyrics to songs by The Police and see the similarities to my life.
As for Shadow's Gravity, Joni Mitchell's Court and Spark album is part of a scene with Everett in Louisville. Her songs Free Man in Paris, People's Parties and The Same Situation from that time with him capture the mood. Another band mentioned would be Pansy Division, a San Francisco gay punk band, who I got into in the mid 90s when I was going through this period of finally being comfortable in my skin for the first time ever. By the way, the guy on the album cover is from Georgia and was the last lover of William S. Burroughs and was involved with Allen Ginsberg too.

 

What is one random object like a toy that you still have from your childhood?

This toy gun. It shot those red paper caps. I used to play with it with Robin. I may have mentioned it in Dweller On The Boundary. I lost it for a time, but as a teenager I found it sticking out of the mud one day walking around the front yard.

What is something random from your childhood that you have not written about?

I loved train sets. My first train set was the Golden Eagle. There was always something with birds, wasn't there? I had a few train sets and would buy extra cars and buildings for my town at the Kessler's at Cobb Center. That store had one of the best toy departments except for the Lionel Playworld on Windy Hill Road.

 

Since I can't ever say who he was or share a photo, that is the closest I can come.

Any final secrets you care to share?

Okay, why not? When Robin left me a music video came out that June and it was like this gift to me. It was Bonnie Tyler's mega hit, Total Eclipse of the Heart, and one of the best videos ever made at the height of the MTV era. The video is set at a boy's school. One of the boys looked to my ten year old eyes like Robin. I fantasized that it was him in the video and I never moved when it came on television. I was pitifully heartbroken. He appears at the very end of the video and runs up to the group of boys already assembled. Since I can't ever say who he was or share a photo, that is the closest I can come to ever sharing what he looked like. I loved that video and took comfort in it. You can cross your heart on that. This video was also released near the time my gifted teacher wanted to send me away to private school and it shaped my idea of what it would've been like. It might be the most homoerotic video ever made too.

What is next after all of this?

I have piles of research on a Georgia murder from the 1970s that I may use for a book. I recently went by one of the locations for it and some time ago I hiked out to where the bodies were dumped. It was a spooky place. I have other ideas in various stages of development too. I am tempted to write something that is pure fiction and stretch myself. Part of me wants to write a book with 80s Atlanta punks as the main characters. People probably don't realize that there were punk clubs like 688 or the Metroplex in the eighties because that facet of Atlanta never seems to be talked about. I'm not certain what comes next, but whatever story is next it will be set in the American South, one of the most complicated and beautiful places on the planet. It has bothered me for most of my life how people get the South wrong, even people born here. There's a lot of lazy propaganda produced in the news and entertainment industry about what the imperfect South is from attitudes to culture. Without being an apologist for the South and the history before I was born, I want to try and change some of the misconceptions about what the South is.

 

Last question. What is the biggest challenge for indie writers?

Finding a book I wrote on the shelves of a Barnes & Noble bookstore was an incredible feeling. November 2020.

A lack of a promotional budget and a big publisher behind you when it comes to publicity. I'm grateful for the audience I have who took a chance on me, but of course I'd love to sell more books. Every writer wants to be read. I don't care anything about being famous or culturally important, but I do want to be read more widely and not be a niche writer. I willingly chose to be an indie knowing the challenges that come with it so I'm not complaining, but I'm mentioning it as a challenge to the business side of writing. I try not to promote myself all that much because there is something unseemly about that. Much of my promotion comes via word of mouth on social media and I'm dependent on ratings and reviews from readers on services like Amazon to help coax the the algorithms into favoring me. I wish more people that read my books would take the two minutes to rate or review me there with their genuine feedback. I have far more readers than ratings and reviews on my books and more feedback would definitely help me.

 

Thank you for reading. 

 

Season's Greetings And Christmas Cards

Some 1980s Christmas cards from WXIA-TV Atlanta that I received during my time affiliated with them from 1985 to 1990. Signed by Johnny Beckman, Guy Sharpe and other meteorologists and staff.

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 Growing up in the 1970s and 80s, it was common to see the phrase “Season's Greetings” on Christmas cards, advertisements and other decorations, but the phrase dating back to Victorian times seems to have fallen out of usage or I seldom seem to encounter it any longer. My mother seemed to favor it for our family Christmas cards and I remember as a child seeing it the most often compared to other popular phrases like Merry Christmas or Happy Holidays. 

 

Without fail and with enjoyment, my mother sent out Christmas cards every December. Revco, Zayre, K-Mart, Richway, Rich's or from wherever she got them that year. I was there with her, going through the boxes in the aisle next to the wrapping paper, until she asked me what I thought and she decided on just the right one. Some years it was a reindeer, a sleigh, a bird or barn in the snow or Santa with a bag of toys slung over his shoulder that she chose. Sometimes we agreed and sometimes we did not.

Christmas cards from my childhood home in the 1980s.

 

The tradition was for her to retrieve the red address book from the telephone table in the living room and sit down to write out a stack of cards intended for friends and relatives. People got them even if she had not seen or spoken to them during the year; she was going to think of them for the moment it took to write their name.

 

The addresses rarely changed as people did not hop from house to house like the nomads of today seeking an upgraded kitchen and twenty car garage, except for a crazy aunt of mine who was constantly marrying, divorcing and moving. Houses are no longer homes, but investments and there are more people in Georgia than I ever would have imagined as a child. You could write my name and Route 5 Dallas, Georgia without any other numbers or a road and the mail carrier would have known exactly who I was and where I lived thirty or forty years ago. Not so today.

 

Christmas cards on a fireplace mantle in my former Louisville home. Photo by me, December 1996.

I sat next to my mother on the sofa and watched and waited for my turn in our conveyor belt Christmas card operation. Her handwriting was much prettier than mine; I am a left-hander and she was a righty, so she did the writing. My job was to stamp and seal the envelopes after she had signed the cards and filled in the address. Some television show would be on the background that neither of us cared for or in the seventies, she would have the Elvis Christmas LP from 1970 playing on the wood cabinet stereo.

No one interfered with us, as it was likely there was no one else around. When the writing, stamping and licking were done, we would drive to the post office in Dallas and I would run inside and drop them through the slots marked "Dallas Only" or "Out of Town."

A 1970s Christmas card from my great grandmother and great uncle in Visetown, Tennessee.

I do not imagine a scene such as that often plays out in contemporary life. Children have little interest in anything that is not on a phone screen and the same could be said of adults too. Christmas cards have been replaced by social media posts that sound like they were written by public relations firms and accompany an over stylized family photo in front of a Christmas tree or a summer beach vacation at Destin or Panama City at sunset with everyone dressed in white. The smiles will be wide, the hair will be blown, the sand will fill every wrinkle and the sunburn serious. Were these people stranded in the desert? After all, there are appearances to keep up and as I said to someone recently, everyone on social media appears to be happy and living the best life. Much show must be made of every moment at that very moment.

Most people of my generation and older will think of the Christmas card as an artifact of our past lives. Younger generations likely do not think of Christmas cards at all because they have probably never signed one. The Christmas card can be considered The Ghost of Christmas Past warning Scrooge to remember the innocent Christmas spirit that he possessed in his youth, lest he die miserably and sentenced to become a ghost chained up like old Jacob Marley. It might be Dickensian to hold the antiquated Christmas card in high regard or give it such powers of sentimentality. As a fan of Dickens, I fondly remember the cards as much as the parties more than I do any G.I. Joe or Star Wars action figures that I received as a present under the tree. Receiving a Christmas card meant that you mattered or were thought of, even if it was only for a moment. There was a human connection in the handwriting, the brief words written, the tearing open of the envelope and the licking of the stamp.

There is no human connection in the 'like' button or the heart icon underneath the thumb holding a screen. You might as well keep scrolling for the next video or selfie or time-wasting piece of content.

Half of the enjoyment of Christmas cards was receiving them in the mail. I liked to see the variety of cards that people chose and the handwriting styles. After opening the cards, they would be placed on the mantle above the fireplace, where they would sit until after the new year, when the decorations came down and were boxed up. While they were there for a month, I would look at them and be reminded of that person and imagine our card sitting on their mantle. The lifespan of the Christmas card was another part of the tradition. The unsatisfactory modern equivalent of social media posts cannot be perched on a mantle or satisfy my need to tear open an envelope. Their lifespan is less than a second, as it is scrolled by and never seen or thought of again. Such is contemporary digital life, where nothing endures.

 

The Lenox Square tree in 2007. Photo by me.

Similarly, Macy's killed off the Rich's Christmas tree tradition after seventy-four years in Atlanta. I have been to Lenox Square twice since Thanksgiving this year and the Christmas spirit was lacking and some of that was not seeing a Christmas tree atop the Rich's (it'll never be Macy's to me) store. It was a tradition I grew up with, even in years I did not see the tree in person at the Rich's flagship downtown store on the crystal bridge or when it moved to Buckhead, as the night of the lighting was always broadcast on television. In my lifetime until now, it has always existed and so from my perspective, it should always continue to exist. Tradition is something humans grasp onto when other aspects of life shift with the times and become unrecognizable. They are reassurances on cold, windy nights that some things still matter and are constant when little else behaves in that manner.

The last Christmas card my mother sent me four months before she died.

The season's greetings are not mailed anymore, but are more likely Instagrammed and forgotten. Traditions require too much time, thought and effort in the age of instant and constant gratification. This is how traditions fade out little by little with the passage of time and people. I still send Christmas cards and I will keep sending them until I can no longer find them in the stores or have no one to send them to.

 

Trains, Towers and Time

 

A leaning oak tree questions its existence in the fog. Photo by me, March 2023.

Some people are spring and summer people and others, like me, are fall and winter people. I will gladly accept a gloomy, cool to cold day over a blazing hot and humid day that can occur here in the northern third of Georgia anywhere from April through early October. I compare it to music: I would rather listen to the Cocteau Twins, The Cure, Echo & The Bunnymen, Nirvana or Joy Division than Aerosmith, Poison, Britney Spears, Lady Gaga or whatever passes for the computer-generated pop music these days. Do not get me wrong; I can relish a hot July day dipping my toes into a lake or squeezing hot white Florida sand between my toes, but I love the gray, damp and cozy winters of home much more.

This past March, I experienced the perfect weather day, if such is possible, like it was one of the scenes from my novel Dweller On The Boundary when I lost my dog Raven in the fog. It was an early March day as I went north into the higher elevations of the mountains. The temperatures dropped into the upper forties and drizzle made everything dripping wet. It was the type of weather that makes me want to walk forever or rest my bones by a fireplace and look at old photos.

Better times in Clarkesville, Ga. Photo by me, March 2023.

Take the last train to Clarksville
And I'll meet you at the station
You can be here by four thirty (Train)
'Cause I made your reservation
Don't be slow
Oh, no, no, no
And I don't know if I'm ever coming home.
-The Last Train To Clarksville by The Monkees.

 

The first town I loafed into was Clarkesville, no connection to that 1960s Monkees song Last Train To Clarksville. The Habersham County town of nineteen hundred residents has been bypassed by newer and bigger highways, pinching it off from the eyes and dollars of passing motorists. The last passenger train service, via the Tallulah Falls Railway, ended in 1946. The isolated situation might not make for a thriving economy, but it has preserved the town's character and identity from the newer and more cheaply built development that is devouring much of northern Georgia like a fatal disease.

 

My thoughts are not original on this topic; I share them with the late writer and Atlanta newspaper columnist Celestine Sibley, who lamented the changes during her lifetime in her beloved Sweet Apple in what was then rural North Fulton County. I, like many longtime residents of Georgia, have watched the rolling wooded hills and mountains become parking lots and cul-de-sacs with names that only remind us of the natural landscape that existed before. This is a concern that I have also written about in my novels.

 

Progress only seems to come in one shade and which is newness and not in another, which is better. The zealots of progress would likely disagree, but I could never be convinced that a metal building is more attractive than one made of brick or stone. A patch of kudzu is more attractive to my eyes than most of that ghastly and inhumane plastic-looking crap that is built today for people to live, work and play. In modern design, beauty has been sacrificed for cheap progress.

I might be wrong and overly sentimental too, so think for yourself. Those who are most certain in their opinions are most certainly wrong.

My childhood cookie jar. Photo by me, March 2023.

I poked around a couple of antique/junk shops located in a former textile mill without buying anything. I am now of the age where these kinds of shops are museums of my childhood, filled with objects I grew up with. Sometimes people from the past show up too, but that is another story for another time.

 

The blue/green glass canister above was the exact same one my mother had in my childhood home since the 1970s. My grubby little hands were always prying it open and sneaking cookies before bedtime. I was tempted to open this one and see if it smelled like the homemade oatmeal cookies she made. 

 

It is tempting to buy these unnecessary items and recreate the past. These objects set off a physical tingle and produce a smile, but it would feel wrong to have them again, like reconciling with an ex - you just know it is not going to work out no matter how good they make you feel. It is a fight sometimes to avoid succumbing to nostalgia for objects that were once a part of my life. I do not want to slip on a permanent pair of rose-colored shades that block out the negative realities of the past. Also, I do not bake cookies and have no need for a cookie jar.

 

I touched the smooth glass of the jar but did not open it. I feared disappointment that it would not release the aroma that my mind and heart hoped. My memory was more important to keep intact than to potentially spoil it. I exited the temporary haze of nostalgia and then I left Clarkesville. Stephen King's town of Castle Rock, Maine and that novel of his that I read as a teenager, Needful Things, were on my mind.

The Big Red Apple outside the old Cornelia train station. Photo by me, March 2023.

Cornelia, Ga. Photo by me, March 2023.

 

A stopover in nearby Cornelia had me standing next to a monument of a big red apple and the old train station. I do not associate Cornelia with apples in Georgia, but apparently they grow them and required a large monument to them, maybe to appease the apple gods. Who knows and I am not sure? Since the nineteen eighties, I have associated Georgia's apple industry with Ellijay and Blue Ridge where my family would buy them in the fall and I still do today. 

 

The plaza was empty in Cornelia, as I imagine it is most days; the flags flapped in the breeze, a pink magnolia showed off and the daffodils entertained themselves. No one waited for a train that does not stop there anymore, though Amtrak does make stops in nearby Toccoa and Gainesville. The passenger train that once ran through here went to Clarkesville, Tallulah Falls and into North Carolina. The leftover caboose was a prop for when or if the Instagrammers of the world find Cornelia or for an older person to explain to a child what the big red relic was. 

 

What a fine day it was to stand in the mist as my hands grew cold around my camera. I knew of a place outside Cornelia that I wanted to visit and this seemed like the ideal day to make the detour up there. I had found my destination and no train could take me there.

 

On the edge of the Lake Russell Wildlife Management Area stands a stone tower built in 1937 by the Works Progress Administration for the National Forest Service. To reach it, you drive a narrow paved road through a residential neighborhood planted on the side of Chenocetah Mountain. The tower is fifty-four feet high at an elevation of one thousand eight hundred and thirty feet above sea level. On a clear day, from the top of the tower, you could see for miles. It served the same original purpose as the metal fire tower atop Elsberry Mountain that was behind my childhood home: spotting forest fires.

This was not a clear day; this was a perfect weather day.

The fog on Chenocetah Mountain. Photo by, March 2023.

A tree indicated the way. Photo by me, March 2023.

I parked on the side of the road and could not see the tower further up the mountain through the fog. The crunch of gravel underfoot was the only sound as I went uphill. The atmosphere was eerie and the experience thrilling that I came on the perfect day. I was a boy again in the woods. There was no other world except where I was at that moment, which blurred with the past. It happens every time I set foot on a wooded trail: I am inspired. Dweller On The Boundary was born on a trail lined with Chinese privet on a hot summer's day.

Photo by me, March 2023.

Chenocetah Tower emerged in a clearing at the top, behind the gray sentinels, awaiting orders for when to begin to grow leaves again. The tower appeared like a sweet memory among the often mundane and trivial thoughts of the everyday that populate Facebook and the television news. Tell me what you really think or what is important and not some politically inspired pose for attention.

Photo by me, March 2023.

A pleasing land of drowsy-hed it was,
Of dreams that wave before the half-shut eye;
And of gay castles in the clouds that pass,
Forever flushing round a summer-sky.
The Castle of Indolence, Canto I, VI by James Thomson in 1748. Also quoted at the opening of Washington Irving's The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.

The fog dressed the landscape in a cloak that distorted time. A person could have stood in that spot for almost the last one hundred years and it would have looked similar. In that distortion, I imagined myself calling out for my lost childhood dog, Raven, into the wall of gray. The conditions were the same as that 1980s day that I sank into the ground of Rabbit Tobacco Field. This was not a nostalgic trance, but history rattling my bones as if I needed to remember.

Photo by me, March 2023.

 

This was like walking through one of my stories or how I imagined the landscapes to be in The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. If the Headless Horseman rode past, I could not see him in the dense water droplets suspended in the air. Raven could have been out there too with her jingling vet tag, but I would not know; all sound was muffled.

Photo by me, March 2023.

 

Photo by me, March 2023.

Photo by me, March 2023.

I could not climb the tower as much as I wanted to do just that. The blue door was locked tight to keep the vandals from having their way with it. The wood and stone were spared from high school sweethearts pledging eternal love and devotion on it. The tower is only open to the public one weekend a year, during the Cornelia apple festival. 

 

I admired the tower at ground level and thought about how structures of this quality are not commonly built anymore and have not been during all of my fifty years. I like the older architecture and craftsmanship, but do not confuse that with my liking older times better. My admiration for old buildings probably was spawned when I first saw the stone house of my great-grandparents in Tennessee as a child or visiting the Biltmore Estate in Asheville in the 1980s. I simply saw that when it came to buildings, the older ones appealed to me.

 

When my twenties arrived, I chose to live in some old places: a former Atlanta Ford Factory built in the 1920s and a Victorian mansion from the 1880s in Louisville, Kentucky. Living in places that old is living inside history and sharing them with the unseen past, which is kind of similar to living in an eternal fog. Sometimes in those places I caught a whiff of the scent of the past or a glimpse of it darting around a corner, but I never came face to face with it as I did as a young boy in my backyard underneath an oak tree or again much later in life.

Whatever ghosts are, I believe in them. They can exist in foggy woods and fields, creaking mansions, antique stores, words in a book, in a mind and in a heart. I carry them around with me, write about them, sometimes encounter them and try not to be haunted by them.

Photo by me, March 2023.

 

Photo by me, March 2023.

There on the foggy mountaintop, the time distortion was strong and I traveled on the perfect weather day. Despite my possible resemblance to Ichabod Crane, no pumpkins were hurled my way as I stood next to the tower with cold cheeks and damp hair. Raven still ran through my memories as black as her namesake. Time travel is not only an H.G. Wells story or that television show I loved as a kid, Voyagers!, but a real phenomenon and that can be achieved by closing one's eyes. The keys are imagination and memories. A person can go to any place or time that they can imagine or remember, but there are reservations to be considered. The past is as set as the stone in the tower and cannot be changed, as some might want. However, time travel can influence the present and future if you allow it, so be wise in making those choices.

Weather Be Damned

The Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Photo by me, December 1985.

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This was originally published elsewhere on March 9, 2019. This is an updated and edited version.

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D

ecember of 1985 my parents and I were driving through the Appalachian Mountains of North Carolina and made periodic stops to admire the scenery and stretch our legs. The weather was cold and wet and it was not far from freezing as the rain drops were slow to fall like thick tears from the nude limbs of the trees. I spent so much time outdoors in this type of weather as a child either in Georgia or North Carolina or Tennessee that I thrived in it. Perhaps this is partly the reason why, besides being born in the wettest month in Georgia, I harbor a fondness for cold, foggy and rainy weather. Put me in a jacket, a wool sweater, thick socks and a pair of boots and I am ready to charge into the foulest and most miserable weather.

 
It was around this time that I became more interested in photography. I had my third camera by then, a point and shoot Kodak 35 mm, it was nothing terribly special as far as cameras go, but I bought it with my own money. My first camera was a Polaroid OneStep that I inherited from my parents and my second was a beautiful Polaroid SX-70 Land Camera given to me by an uncle. I liked taking pictures of everything around me except people. Most of my allowance in those years was spent on film and film developing. This was when the hobby of photography bit me hard and deep.

We were driving through Swain County, North Carolina on U.S. Highway 19/ U.S. 74 which parallels portions of the Nantahala River in the Nantahala National Forest. This was an area we had spent lots of time in during the latter half of the 1980s. We would sight-see, take walks, raft the Nantahala River a couple of times and sometimes just drive up for the day from Georgia to loaf in the North Carolina mountains. As a teenager in high school and in college in my early twenties, I returned here several times alone to think about life and make decisions.

The rugged landscape of western North Carolina on a topography map.

Coming back south, in December 1985, along the highway we stopped at a roadside picnic area, the Ferebee Memorial picnic area and launch site, next to the river. We stopped to look at the water and stretch our legs before heading home. In the cold and rain I snapped a few photos of the scenery.

This spot is at a bend in the Nantahala River wedged narrowly between two sharp ridges of mountains. One ridge ascends to 3,600 feet in elevation and the other ridge is more steep reaching to over 5,000 feet in elevation. These two ridges form the Nantahala Gorge and on the highest ridge is the Appalachian Trail as it runs from Georgia to Maine.

The Nantahala River in North Carolina. Photo be my, December 1985.

Of the two remaining photos from that moment, one is taken from the banks of the Nantahala River. I feel cold just looking at all those dark colors of the drenched terrain.

We were the only people around and the mountains were all ours. There were no houses around, no cars passing as the tourists had better places to be on a dreary December day. What I recall most from that moment was not the numbing cold but the heavy silence disturbed only by the sound of the river.

The Nantahala Gorge. Photo by me, December 1985.

I snapped one photo of a mountain towering over the hardwood trees in the foreground. I was probably thinking at the time that I would have loved to have been up there exploring the endless woods, weather be damned. It was difficult to keep me out of the woods as kid and had it been just me that day I would have wandered around more than I did. My parents were ready to travel on in the warmth of the car.

For twenty years I did not have most of the photos I shot as a child or teenager. When I left home in 1995, I left my photography at my childhood house in the care of my father. I should not use "care" because he would throw away much of what I shot or lose them in moving them between his various houses in three states. What I did manage to rescue from him in 2015 was found in a plastic storage bin in the top of his barn in Alabama. My photos had been exposed to the damaging elements to heat and moisture and many were stuck together or not salvageable. The negatives I had kept were gone too. Fortunately,  some were saved, perhaps a few hundred photos. Many were scratched or faded like the scar on my left wrist that is always hidden by my watch band.
 

My juvenile photography consisted mostly of landscapes. I seldom shot photos of people. There was a good reason that I did not often turn my camera on people. I remember saying to my mother that I did not like photographing people when she asked. I did not like photographing people because I would not have liked what I would have seen, such as the misery of my parents. The storms of my family were too miserable even for me to set to film.

 

I wish I had shot more photos of the people in my life then,  especially my friends and the people close to me. Photographs of the people that were a part of my secrets would be nice to see later in life, but if I had photographed them then maybe I would not have hid those secrets for so long.

It was not until some time in the 1990s that I began to enjoy photographing people along with nature. By the mid 90s, I was photographing cities. In the 2000s it was nightlife, nature, cities and people. After almost forty years of putting a camera to my eye and pressing a button to record a millisecond of time, I would give my mother a different answer if I could. I would answer that the storms were so significant that my mind could not forget what the camera did not see. Weather be damned.

The Christmas of 1983

My family in 1983 at a Christmas party on my mother's side of the family held before the cold arrived. I'm wearing a Levi Garrett hat that a certain “bird” gave me. We were good at pretending for the cameras.

The cold outbreak this Christmas is eerily similar to the one during Christmas 1983 when I was ten years old. It is near certain 1983 will remain colder than the Christmas of 2022. We survived then without the fear mongering and media hype and we will survive again.

 

When the media misleads, hypes, uses hyperbole or blatantly lies then we end up with a populace that lives in fear, believes everything or believes nothing. The lack of trust that the media suffers is of their own doing for their fictions. Facts matter in news and weather reporting.

 

From the NOAA Library. The weather map for December 24, 1983.

The cold came on Christmas Eve in 1983 and I vividly remember it. The front passed through on the 24th with snow flurries, it was nothing more than car topping snow. The high in Dallas (Paulding County) National Weather Service Station was forty-once degrees and dropped steadily throughout the day to a low by midnight of thirteen degrees. 

 

My family was at the annual Vise Christmas party at my grandparents that evening and night. We went in my father's Cadillac, which was a diesel and the fuel had water in it. The fuel froze and it would not turn over from the frozen water so we walked home in the bitter cold. My father was irate and this messed up his plans for the holidays. He had to spend Christmas with his family, instead of doing what he had rather be doing.

 

From the NOAA Library. The weather map Christmas Day 1983.

On Christmas Day, it was colder as is the standard that the second day after a cold front is colder. Cold air is more dense and the molecules move at a slower rate than warm air. Also, as is standard on day two the wind relaxes allowing the atmosphere to stop mixing so the air molecules slow and cool. 

 

The high on Christmas day was sixteen degrees after a low of two degrees below zero. Our dogs, which were outside dogs, were brought into the house and stayed in our laundry room – so it was damn cold for that happen. My father still could not thaw out the Cadillac and fumed all day. He remained stuck with us. My house was on well water and the pump froze. My father thawed it with a hair dryer.

On December 26^th, the high again was sixteen degrees after a low of one below zero. For the first time ever, the creek behind our house froze solid. We jumped on it, slid across it, tried to bust it with rocks, sticks and a shovel, but no luck – that thing was concrete. I was a kid and had to find a way to enjoy the unique weather. My father remained stranded with us.

On December 27^th, the high was twenty-six degrees after a low of one below zero. The creek remained solid and even my father's temper could not thaw the Cadillac.

 

As with most severe cold outbreaks in The South, the cold can only sustain for two or three days before it warms. On December 28^th, the high climbed to thirty-six degrees after a low of twenty-three degrees. The warming brought a mixed bag of weather with sleet, snow and rain. It was mostly rain, over two inches in Dallas. My father sensed freedom from his family, had the Cadillac running by noon and was gone faster than you can say Rudolph The Red-nosed Reindeer.

It will be a cold Christmas and I am not complaining about that. However, this is not "once in a generation cold." As I write this, it is sunny and sixteen degrees outside Whisper Hall. The wind is howling with gusts near thirty miles per hour and the windchill is at times, two below zero. It is cold, but what can be done about it? You can stay warm indoors and read a book or you can embrace it and go out and live life.

Stranger

The Silver Comet Trail west of Dallas. May 2020. Photo by me.

 
A

s much as we my try and unless we are born somewhere and grow up there we are unlikely to fully understand a place or know it. It is also possible to unlearn or misunderstand a place if we leave it for decades and both the place and us change. I would like to think I know the county where I grew up, Paulding County, Georgia, but I do not know it anymore. It changed dramatically since I left and I cannot claim to know it today. I knew it for what it was. It is an old lover that broke up with me or vice versa and has undergone a significant transformation. I see the scars and few landmarks that I remember like an age faded birthmark on a thigh that my hand rested on a time long ago. It is familiar and foreign. It is a stranger and I am a stranger too. 

 

On Saturday I was on my way to Alabama and I stopped to use my phone for a few minutes in Paulding County. I was at a shopping center on the old U.S. 278 at Georgia Highway 120. It was the second shopping center I remember as a child and was called Paulding Place. It was built after the Paulding Plaza further up the road that had the only theater in the county, the Ace Hardware, Fotomat, Ben Franklin's and Jack's. 

 

Paulding Place was smaller and newer. It originally had a Winn-Dixie grocery store and a Revco drugstore as the main anchors. The shopping center is a setting for a few scenes in my books, Dweller On The Boundary and Terminal Wake. My mother bought groceries there for several years, I would have film developed at Revco and I would ride there with my grandfather to pick up an Atlanta newspaper from the machine on the sidewalk. My mother and I bought a Christmas tree one year in the parking lot. It was a place of commerce and not a lovable place with its asphalt parking lot devoid of trees and at times impossible to get into or out when the road out front was the main road in the county. In the 1980s, how much time had my mother lost waiting to turn right out of the parking lot and then turn left on 120 years ago when the roads were different?

I remembered standing in the checkout line on a Friday evening with my mother as a boy of twelve. I watched a boy I knew from school getting something from one of the gumball machines near the door. He was the real life boy behind the character of David The Bishop. I remember hoping that he would not see me, but he did and came over. He was eager to talk with my mother and tried to convince her that I should spend the weekend at his house. I was not in the mood for it and wiggled my way out of it with an excuse. He and I were so intellectually similar that it scared me sometimes. We were not physical mirrors of each other, he with his blonde hair and me with my dark brown or his brown eyes to my blue ones. It was our thoughts, thought processes and desires that ran on the same tracks. He understood better than I did that we were not strangers.

Today, the shopping center is rundown like most modern disposable buildings become and a discount furniture store is in the old Winn-Dixie building. A common reaction might be to say that it is sad to see it that way, but it was not the place that I missed. I cannot shed a tear or become sentimental over a declining shopping center. It was the people from decades ago that meant something to me doing the simple, everyday routines of life that I missed. 

Paulding County was so rural then that it was difficult to avoid classmates away from school in the few places we had to shop for food, basic supplies or clothes. That was not always a problem, but it was not always welcome either.

 

The population of Paulding County in my lifetime:
1970 population 17,520
1980 population 26,110
1990 population 41,611
2020 population 168,661

 

I was born in 1973 and graduated high school in 1991. During that span there was small, incremental growth, but it remained a rural place. By 1990 it began to feel less so as more fast food restaurants sprouted and shopping centers spread over the pastures and woodlands. It was discomforting to watch the slow motion disintegration of what I knew. The boosters of progress and growth would disagree, but I loved the county as it was. I did not want it to change and that was an impossibility. I am thankful to have missed the explosive growth that forever changed the place in the last twenty years.

 

I think about the people that I knew then that never left the county. How do they feel about it? Are they the frogs in the pot of water that has the temperature slowly raised over time until it boils? Do they not notice or mind it?

 

I have lived too many places and too many cities to become too attached like I was to Paulding County as a child. Where I live now was once a plantation that was later divided into smaller farms and then finally became a subdivision in the 1990s. The barn for the old farm sat on some of my property. It is unlikely that I will come to know this place or understand it like I once did my old home. As my first year here closes out, I know few of the names of the roads in this area and I am not too concerned about it. I realize that there are few places or people that we can ever truly know as life is only so long and the world is so big despite what the internet would have you believe as it warps your sense of time and scale. Perhaps today people are too busy promoting themselves and navel gazing for the superficial likes and comments of social currency to look at the world around them. They see the reflection of their own eyes staring back at them in the shiny glass and nothing more. Our cell phone cameras are often pointed in the wrong direction and we miss what we were supposed to see - the chance encounter in a checkout line or the similarities that hide behind the obvious differences. David The Bishop, like Paulding County, might now be a stranger too.

I did not stop for long in Paulding County or I would have felt as though I might not escape it again, if I ever have. 

The Beatles - I, Me, Mine