Moomin Light

"Southern Serves the South" - "I Am A Town" by Mary Chapin Carpenter (also again)

I have spent countless hours over many years wandering the back roads of North Carolina.  Mary Chapin Carpenter's song, I Am A Town, is amazing in the way that she captures Carolina small towns:

I'm a town in Carolina, I'm a detour on a ride
For a phone call and a soda, I'm a blur from the driver's side
I'm the last gas for an hour, if you're going 25
I am Texaco and tobacco, I am dust you leave behind
I am peaches in September and corn from a roadside stall
I'm the language of the natives, I'm a cadence and a drawl
I'm the pines behind the graveyard and the cool beneath their shade
Where the boys have left their beer cans, I am weeds between the graves
My porches sag and lean with old black men and children
My sleep is filled with dreams, I never can fulfill them
I am a town

I'm a church beside the highway where the ditches never drain
I'm a Baptist like my daddy, Jesus knows my name
I am memory and stillness, I am lonely in old age
I am not your destination, I am clinging to my ways
I am a town

I'm a town in Carolina, I am billboards in the fields
I'm an old truck up on cinderblocks, missing all my wheels
I am Pabst Blue Ribbon, American, and "Southern Serves the South"
I am tucked behind a Jaycees sign on the rural route
I am a town
I am a town
I am a town

Southbound

I had I Am A Town in my head all of yesterday (older son and I sang it at one point). 

We spent the day at the NC Transportation Museum.  One of the first things you pass on the way in to the museum, is a silo with "The Southern Serves the South" painted on it.   

"The Southern Serves the South" was the slogan for The Southern Railway (merged, in 1982, into Norfolk Southern).  In southern trains, you can still see boxcars painted with the slogan. The museum (more on that later this week) has one of The Southern Railway's diesel engines in the roundhouse. 

For this post, I tried to find out anything about how Mary Chapin Carpenter wrote this song so I Googled "I am a town" and "writing."  Along with posts about her, I found that a number of writers like to listen to this song while they write.  I also found an interview where she said:

...a song that I wrote years ago that started out as a poem.  It's called I am a Town.  And I had the complete lyric for that for months and months and months and I never could find the right music to go with it and then one day, just kind of stumbled on this very circular kind of moody thing and I knew that I had it.  But it was constructed, you know, very separately.  Music and lyrics very different times but then they found their way together.

More on I Am A Town:

• Mary Chapin Carpenter:  Voice of Humanity
• Soul Enlarging Songs:

...A song that, for whatever reason, at the end of the final fade, allows you to somehow be more ready than you were before to face the next moment, the next day?     It’s a miracle that we ever find one...

•   Four years ago, I also posted about this song after taking an eastern NC road trip.

 

 

One of my favorite photos from our fall vacation

  Rime ice on Mountain Ash at the Craggy Dome Overlook

 

[Previous post on that wintery fall day here]

Vacation: Blowing Rock, NC & the Blue Ridge Parkway

No internet, except for, every evening, laboriously checking Ray's Weather Center on my stupid not-smart* phone. 

No computer for most of it (I did bring the netbook along so I could look at the photos on my camera, but gave that up after one try.  I didn't want to look at a screen). 

No TV. 

No ads of any kind except for those in the two issues of the Mountain Times and the one issue of Our State that I read. 

Lots of outdoors, hiking, and weather (more on that later).  Lots of time with family and long conversations after meals, or on mountaintops, or by lakes.  Younger son and I did two puzzles and played numerous games of Blokus and Carcassonne - all of which he won.  This is a new development. 

I read His Majesty's Dragon, which older son had recommended.  I heavily recommended it to dear husband.  He read it in a few days, and then he turned around and read it out loud to younger son.  I listened to it also - that's how good a book it is.  It's kind of like Master and Commander but with dragons. We're still quoting from it. 

Older son and daughter were both there for a few days on their fall breaks (you know how HAPPY that made me). We did their favorite hikes those days.  We repeated the Rough Ridge hike (below) again later.

I took over 1200 pictures.  I got some new filters for the camera so I was experimenting with them.  That's why I thought of looking at photos on the netbook.  Instead, I'll be looking at the results over the next few days. 

With the new filters, this sunset photo over Price Lake turned out better than it usually would.

The sky is bluer with the filters, and the distant mountains are much more apparent (Blue Ridge Parkway viaduct around Grandfather Mountain). 

The weather ranged from tank-top-and-shorts hiking weather (in the 70s near the Bass Lake at the Cone Manor)... 

...to freezing temperatures while wandering through a fairyland of rime ice on Mt. Mitchell...

 

...and these were only two days apart!

Dear husband says that I'm not ready to come back from any of our October vacations, but, to me, it felt like it was even harder this year.  I've been running for months, and it took me most of the two weeks of vacation to slow down and relax.  I found it much harder at first to really focus on reading like I usually do on vacation, although, by the end, I was back to my usual rate of one book a day.

Now that I've slowed down, I don't want things to go back the way they were.

Of course, the first few days back have to be focused on getting cleaned up, organized, and going through mail and e-mail (Note to self:  Turn off Freecycle e-mails next year.  They were half of the 700 e-mails I had).  After I get settled in, I have to rethink how I do things.

Even though we had a wonderful walk around Hillsborough last weekend and good conversations with neighbors, I still wasn't ready to get back to our regular schedule.  I didn't really get used to that until Monday evening when I drove to Broadway dance.  I headed past Duke's East Campus and all the joggers & walkers on the trail that dear husband and I like to walk in the winter.  Then I passed the spot on Broad Street where we watched the parade last month.  I turned on to Ninth Street and parked in front of Francesca's - where we've gotten ice cream since before I was pregnant with older son. That's when I was happy to be back where I... belong?

We danced All That Jazz** in class, and I sang along. 

 

* Said with great affection.  I don't want a phone that sends me e-mail, or effortlessly gives me the internet.  

** 1:40 to 2:40.

.

.

.

....yes, I like what the filters do with the colors...

Flat Top Mountain trail, Cone Manor

A love letter to the NC Aquarium: Part 1

We've been to a number of aquariums including the ones in Boston, Baltimore, Camden, and Charleston, and we've enjoyed them all.  I'm a sucker for sea turtles, puffer fish, sharks, and lobsters.   We've been to two out of the three NC Aquariums, and I'm still trying to find time to go to the one at Roanoke Island - particularly since that's the one with the river otters.

One friend recently mentioned on Facebook that she's been told that the NC Aquariums aren't that great.  I don't argue on friends' Facebook walls, but I couldn't totally let that pass. Over the years, we've had lots of fun at the NC Aquariums - starting back in the early 80's when the one near Atlantic Beach was just a large room with small tanks around the walls and a touch pool in the center.  It's lots larger now.

I'll admit, the NC Aquariums aren't as big as some of the large northern aquariums, and they focus on North Carolina aquatic life rather than more exotic species (although they do have some of the exotic aquatic species).  That actually makes them seem more personal to me.

We spent last weekend in the Carolina Beach/Wilmington, NC area.  The Aquarium at Fort Fisher is relatively uncrowded on a Sunday morning:

You're greeted at the entrance.  This is how I feel when people criticize our aquariums. ;)

 I love the way this exhibit is put together.

The salamanders are so cute.

Luna, their albino alligator, is sitting under a heat lamp.  In the wild, albino alligators don't survive long because they have no protection from the sun and they don't have camouflage (more about albino alligators here).

The bobwhite quail run around freely outside Luna's enclosure.

The Eastern box turtle wanders around his area - behind a low wall.  The creatures don't feel as distant as they can in the larger aquariums.

I haven't mastered taking pictures through glass yet.  This alligator was right up next to the glass.  In this section of the aquarium, just about all of the exhibits go down almost to the ground.  Overall, I'd say at least 2/3 of the exhibits can be viewed by a mobile toddler or preschooler.  Both of the times we went to the Baltimore aquarium (a must-see if you like aquariums) we had a preschooler.  A large number of the exhibits are at older kid/adult height, which meant that my arms were about to fall off by the time we were done.  If you have a child who likes to talk about each fish, name them, and discuss their families, an aquarium where the child can do this on their own two feet is a wonderful experience. 

Now, of course, all three kids are taller than I am so this hasn't been an issue for years.  I did have some difficulty this time because, to get some of the photos I wanted, like this one, I had to do a lot of squatting.  On its own, that wouldn't have been a problem.  However, after also playing for a long time in the ocean the day before and going to Broadway dance yesterday evening, my good knee wasn't happy today!

Sea turtle

Puffer fish

One sea turtle came out (older son took this one).

More puffer fish

"Up a steep and very narrow stairway/To the voice like a metronome"

That line from A Chorus Line* always goes through my head when I go up the stairs to the new dance studio (right).

[Note the lines from The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock going up the stairs.]**

The line particularly went through my head tonight as I rushed up the stairs - 45 minutes late for class.

Maybe I should back up.***

I had the beginning of this week all figured out.  Today, younger son had a science class from 3:30 to 4:30 in Chapel Hill.  Then I would drive home, drop him off, and head off to the 6:30 dance class in Durham.****  Tomorrow, after a fairly peaceful day, I would do a nice, relaxed vocal warmup, go to the audition for the summer musical at 6, and go to choir at 7:30.  I certainly wouldn't want to do something crazy like stick the audition between the two classes today!

However, I came down with a sore throat last night.  It's a very mild sore throat, and, as you'll see, it's not the sort of thing to slow me down.  It has really affected my voice, though.  I was slightly hoarse yesterday evening and more hoarse this afternoon.  By the time we got home from the science class, my throat felt all gummy, and I realized that I needed to audition today because I wasn't sure how much voice I'd have by tomorrow!*****

I quickly changed in to my dance clothes, did a five minute vocal warmup, and headed off to the audition.  I was the second one in line. 

As I wrote previously, I was intending to sing No Way to Stop It from The Sound of Music.  If I felt I couldn't sing that, I had chosen Eidelweiss as a backup.  I decided to go with No Way, though, and really throw myself into it.

The singing part of the audition didn't go as well as I wanted.  I hit all the notes, but they sounded more harsh than they did on Saturday before my throat started going.  At least my voice didn't crack like it did when I was warming up at home.  I wanted to try for the part of the Minstrel (they're doing Once Upon a Mattress) so I had to wait until more people were ready to do that part of the audition. 

After reading a scene with some of the other people auditioning, I read one of the Minstrel's speeches, where he/she (can be either) tells the story to the audience.  I decided to do it the same way I would if I were reading it to one of my kids when they were little - which is more expressive than most things I say!  I had so much fun doing that. 

By the time I was done, dance class had been going for 20 minutes, and I still had to drive to Durham.  I still decided to go and do at least the end of it because I thought we'd be doing more of The Music and the Mirror (from A Chorus Line) which we started last week. There would just be a bit of the dance to catch up on.

I found a parking place half a block away and rushed up those stairs.  Looking through the window on the classroom door, I realized that the dance they were doing didn't look familiar at all.  I had a totally new dance, in a different style, to learn - this one to Dancing Is Not A Crime from the Broadway soundtrack to Footloose.

My brain was still racing from the audition, and I don't think I ever picked up choreography that quickly (the teacher remarked on how much I picked up in a short time!). 

I've always believed that you have to challenge yourself - you can't wait for others to do so.  However, I love it when someone else comes up with a wonderful challenge.  Acting is a really big challenge for me because it is so foreign (but also so fun), and dancing is always a challenge.

Driving home into the sunset,****** I was, emotionally, flying high.  I love challenges, and I love performing, and I got a bit of both this evening. 

 

* From the chorus of At the Ballet

** By the way, this is the sort of thing I love about Durham.

*** But not on the stairs.

**** I still miss my old dance class and studio, but I'm enjoying this new one.

***** The amount of voice needed for an audition is much larger than the amount needed for choir.

****** Really.  The top half of the sun was disappearing behind the Durham Freeway as I headed west.*******

******* One of my favorite fantasy authors is Robin McKinley.  She has a blog - and, on her blog (not in her fiction), she uses more footnotes than I do! 

"A waterfall of happiness"

The next few days, it's supposed to be cloudy and sometimes rainy.  This morning, OTOH, was beautifully sunny and in the mid-60's - a good day to wander around outside!  I gave younger son the choice, and he decided that he'd like to wander in downtown Chapel Hill.  All the early flowering trees (cherries, etc.) were in full bloom, and it was beautiful.

[No photos.  We were too busy talking.  I only brought my small camera, and I never got it out.] 

We hadn't been to the Coker Arboretum in a while so he really wanted to go there.  The daffodils and many of the early wildflowers were in bloom.  We walked into the middle of a tall group of lonicera fragrantissima bushes.  The smell was so sweet in there! The Coker Arboretum isn't all that large (5.3 acres), and, since we stayed there for quite a while, we ended up on the same paths again while we were talking. 

We headed down Franklin St., and ended up at the new (okay, it's been there for a few months, but it's new to us) Krispy Kreme store.  Younger son had never been interested in doughnuts until about five years ago when we went to the Krispy Kreme store near the science museum in Raleigh.*  He was a quick convert, and he's been wanting to go try the Chapel Hill store. 

In the Raleigh store, if you get there at the right time, you can watch the whole process of making doughnuts.  The day we were there, they were making doughnut holes, which have a tendency to get caught in parts of the machinery. 

At the Chapel Hill store, you just watch the end part of the process.  They took some mostly-made doughnuts, and put them on the conveyor belt through the machine for three minutes.  Younger son joked that it was very suspenseful.  As the doughnuts were coming towards the curtain of falling glaze, one of the two college students behind us said, "It's a waterfall of happiness!"

Here's a video of how they make them.  The whole video shows what they do at the Raleigh store.  The part we saw in Chapel Hill starts at about 40 seconds.

Younger son had a hot doughnut off the belt.  I had a chocolate glazed doughnut from the case.  I don't care for boxed doughnuts in the grocery store - they're too stiff.  OTOH, it's just as well that I don't usually end up near the Chapel Hill store where they're fresh and smooth.

We wandered on down Franklin St., and it was starting to get rather toasty compared to the weather we've had lately.  We ended up at Chapel Hill Comics which is one of my favorite stores.  I never know what I'm going to find there.  They mostly have graphic novels (which I like) and comics (which I'm not so interested in), but there are other things here and there - e.g. other books, interesting stuffed animals, and Piperoids (pipe robots to put together) (right) (which were a hit last Christmas).  They were having a buy two books get one free sale.  We got two free books!

By the time we got back to the car and headed to the Carr Mill mall (a converted cotton mill) to get groceries, it was starting to feel hot.  I'm not ready for that yet; I still feel like winter just ended (:::she writes while sitting in a tank top and shorts:::).

We stopped at the Ali Cat toy store to browse (because you can't go to the Carr Mill mall with a 12 yo boy and not go there) before getting groceries, and we stopped at Southern States to get seeds and some plants (snapdragons and thrift) after (because you can't go to Carrboro with me and not stop there...).

By the time we got home, I was done being outside for a while.  The high this afternoon was somewhere in the low to mid-80's, which is too hot for March!  I did head back outside in the early evening to talk to neighbors, and, after dinner, we watched the new Wallace and Gromit DVD, A Matter of Loaf and Death:

I don't usually just write a post about how the day went, but I had the title, "A waterfall of happiness," and I had to write something to go with it!

I'm also glad that, currently, our schedule is such that we can take a day like this and wander around!

 

*  Person St., just north of Peace St. 

 

Hanging Rock: January 29, 2011, Part 2

Hanging Rock from the trail

Closer

When I was in college, you could climb up the crack between the cliffs.  Since then, they've fenced that off and the trees have taken over.

 View from the top towards Cooks Wall.  It was a beautiful, clear, afternoon.  It was fairly warm in the rest of the park, and I had taken my jacket off at other times.  At the top, however, the wind was roaring by and I was very glad for my winter jacket.  People who didn't dress as warmly generally didn't stay long.  We stayed on top for over half an hour. 

Winston-Salem in the distance

This is the crack that people used to climb up through.  There's a round boulder in the way now.

Moore's Wall in the distance

One more view

• A previous Hanging Rock post

[When we were hiking up to the top, I started getting a very intense cough.  I though it was just because of the wind.  On the way home that evening, I couldn't get warm even if I put picnic blankets over my winter jacket and turned the heat all the way up.  It wasn't until later that I realized that was the beginning of my bout with the flu.  I didn't have a chance to get back to these photos until this week.]

Hanging Rock: January 29, 2011, Part 1

Inspired by a blog post at Two Heel Drive, dear husband, younger son, and I went hiking at Hanging Rock at the end of January.  Years ago, when we used to live in Winston-Salem, we often went hiking there on a Saturday afternoon.  From Winston-Salem, it's only a 45 minute drive.  After we moved to the Triangle, we went less often because, since we have to drive further, we make it an all day trip and do more than one hike.

It's one of the most beautiful places to hike in North Carolina - besides the mountains.

View of Hanging Rock through the car window.

 
The window at Window Falls.  The hiking trail used to go up to the window, but they've rerouted it to prevent erosion.

 

Ice further down the trail at Window Falls

Ice at the falls further down.

Close-up

Dear husband took this photo of me taking photos.

The ice on the lake went almost up to the boathouse.

 

It was a lovely place to eat lunch - visually.  However, the wind roaring across the half-frozen lake kept us pretty cold as we sat on the bank.

Part 2 to come

Happy place #3: Choir

Last week, every time I sang, my sore throat came back.  After a lesson and choir rehearsal on Wednesday, it took two days to go away.  I practiced for 15 minutes on Saturday evening, and it hurt again Sunday morning.  I was not happy to have to skip church and choir. 

I'll be honest, particularly choir.

Choir kept me going after my two knee surgeries.  When I couldn't exercise or get out much, singing and socializing there really helped cheer me up.  I love working on something big - choir, orchestra, musicals.  There's nothing else quite like it.  I'm not really a solo person (though I enjoy them). 

We have a wonderful choir director, who also composes some really interesting (and fun) music.  I enjoy the other choir members.  The music is challenging enough, but not overwhelming.  I'm amazed at the balance. 

This evening?  My voice did pretty well.  I still can't get all the high notes, but I sang better than I've been able to since I got sick six weeks ago.  The music was fun, the choir room was relatively full, and the energy was contagious.

Happy!

Happy Places, Part 2: Dance

As I said in my introductory post, there probably won't be any surprises in this series - and this post is certainly no surprise. 

Like many girls, I took dance classes when I was little.  I quit dance in junior high because I wasn't skinny and therefore didn't belong in dance.  I took one dance class (and loved it) in college because you needed three PE classes, and dance was a whole lot better than team sports.  The dance teacher said I was good at it and I should take more dance.  Even though I was in my "eat every other day" dieting stage, I still wasn't skinny enough so I thought she was crazy. 

She wasn't talking about skinny, though.  She was talking about dance. 

Even though I taught aerobics for sixteen years, demonstrating my non-thinness to classes up to four times a week, I never considered dance.  Dance was not only just for thin people, it was for young people.

Daughter started taking a theater dance class five summers ago because her regular dance studio didn't have any summer classes.  She loved the class. 

I have loved musicals, particularly onstage, for decades.  Did it start with seeing the movie of The Sound of Music when I was five or with seeing Showboat onstage when I was a preteen?  It doesn't really matter. 

Still, she really had to twist my arm to get me to go try this class.  "There are other women who aren't skinny!"  

True.

"There are other women around your age!"  Actually, they were at least ten years younger, but, by the time I found this out, I was hooked.  I loved the class.  I ran through the dances at home, and I can still do some of the choreography I learned then.  I was sad that it would be over at the end of the summer.

The last day of class, however, our teacher told us he would be starting his own dance school!  Daughter and I started taking classes there - more and more as time went on.  I've taken theater dance and jazz.  She's taken theater dance, jazz, ballet, and hip hop.  It was a major focus of her high school years. 

It's always been a high point of my week!

Are most of the people in the dance classes skinnier than I am?

Pretty much.

Younger?

Mostly, but not always.

It doesn't matter.  I've always felt welcome there.  The one winter where the teen/adult Broadway class consisted of me and four teens felt strange occasionally, but they're all nice (and friends of daughter's) so it wasn't really a problem. 

I love talking to people there.

The last few weeks, we've been learning the Finale from "One" from A Chorus Line - the music and choreography from the original, 1970's production (unfortunately, it's a blurry video):*

So far, we've learned from 0:6 to 0:47.  The hardest part for me has been the step flick, turn/hat down, turn kick, turn/hat up at 0:13 to 0:15.  It's very fast!

I finally got that part today, and it's so fun!

 

* The 2006 video of the revival version is easier to see, and almost the same. 

[Photo taken this evening after class]