Stressed? Have an Angel Burger. I mean a Dixie Burger.

So on Sunday afternoon TG and I headed out for Asheville, North Carolina, where I had it in my mind to soak in the local color and take some angel pictures.

The stone kind. (Angels, not pictures. I don't pack a hammer and chisel ... yet.)

I was after two angels in particular. It's a long story but suffice it to say, one is in Asheville and one is in Bryson City, about an hour's drive from Asheville.

There have been two previous attempts by me to photograph these particular angels.

The angels are perfectly cooperative; both endeavors have been thwarted by inclement weather.

When I made the (ironclad) hotel reservation for the twenty-four hours we'd be in Asheville, the local forecast was ideal: sunny with a daytime high just below sixty.

At the point I clicked "confirm your reservation" a telepathic signal was transmitted to all Western North Carolina meteorologists to immediately alter said forecast.

Which they dutifully did. And what did WNC weather end up being on Sunday and Monday?

Rain.

But I didn't let it stop me! After a sopping Sunday, on Monday morning it wasn't actually raining, but only threatening to do so. 

And I am not easily threatened.

Audrey had met us in Asheville because I invited her and she likes the cemetery scene almost as much as I. But I was ready first on Monday, and a trifle anxious to get going, so TG drove me to Riverside Cemetery and dropped me off.

He promised to come back! And because I didn't have a pocket, my cell phone was tucked into the top of my Christmas knee sock (which coordinated with my Christmas sweatshirt).

That way I didn't have to juggle my cell phone and a camera. I had no umbrella; no way was I going to try that.

If it rained for real, I'd head for the little office. Surely they'd let me wait it out for a bit.

As previously established, I'd tried to find this angel before. I knew she decorated the top of a single-family mausoleum and that she was known to often be covered in ivy.

Last time I was at Riverside it was raining in earnest and although I realize now I saw the mausoleum in question, it was from the roadpath and I was in the car and couldn't get up close to see the name: McElveen.

If that name is engraved across the top of the mausoleum, it cannot be seen either because y'all, if they don't trim the foliage back soon, that mausie will never be seen by anyone again.

"They" being any one of the four big, strong, healthy men who, when I went into the cemetery office to check on the exact coordinates of the McElveen mausoleum, were sitting around talking, enjoying morning coffee.

Their work trucks were so attractively arranged outside!

At any rate I located the McElveen six-plex (half of which is mysteriously open and empty) and as I feared, the angel topper is presently shrouded in enough verdant vinery to choke an elephant.

A nearby angel ponders the whole thing from her impressive pedestal.

Ivy leave my sought-after angel is under the greenery. TG says I must lobby the indolent cemetery workers to get up there and exfoliate her so that I can come back a third time and take her picture. 

He even said if the "workmen" would loan him a ladder, he'd get up there and do it himself! Now that is love.

It did not escape my notice that one of the three McElveens who remain interred in the mausoleum lived to the age of forty-two and shared a birthday with my grandson.

It didn't take me long to get the photos of the ivy swamping the angel and it still wasn't raining, so I decided to wander.

The terrain of Riverside is wild and often steep, and I was alone which is just the way I like it.

I clambered like a mountain goat -- never fell on my face a single time, you would've been so proud -- over several wooded acres and only once had to seek shelter from rain on the porch of a beefy-columned mausoleum with very elaborate bronze doors.

But in due time I realized my leg was ringing and after allowing that to give me pause for a moment, so absorbed was I in my haunted hike, I retrieved my phone from my sock and answered it.

TG was there and wanted to know where I was. I told him, way over on the left.

We drove the hour to Bryson City where, as the afternoon waned, it was considerably colder.

Our destination was Hillside Cemetery where an angel adorns the grave of Mrs. Fannie Everett Clancy who, before her demise on June 4, 1904, achieved the tender age of twenty.

Because the weather was truly awful at that point and there was very little light to speak of and what there was, was a dark sort of light that is of no use to photographers, this is what I got.

I know, right? Let's go ahead and P'shop the picture beyond all recognition. But I happen to like her against a stark backdrop of bare branches and a rain-white sky on a chilly day near Christmas.

At least she's visible.

Having accomplished what I came there to do I became seized by violent hunger so we descended the bleak hillside and found a place to have a late lunch.

Audrey had about an hour before she needed to head home and I was craving the warmth of my own hearthside.

We stumbled into a place we weren't sure of, being out-of-towners.

The owner greeted us cordially and said he'd once operated thirty-seven restaurants in Tampa, Florida, and that Southern Living had awarded him a "Best Burger in the South" designation.

Turns out that was in 1996 and it wasn't in Bryson City, North Carolina, but as it also turns out, it doesn't matter because since then they've been given an award for Best Burger in North Carolina.

The upshot: If you are ever anywhere near Bryson City, North Carolina, and you are in need of a meal and you like your food delicious, go to Main Street and look for Jimmy Mac's.

Sit yourself down in a window booth. If you're lucky you'll get one like the one we occupied, with the sill all decorated in old dusty moonshine jugs and a black-and-Day-Glo-orange "OPEN/CLOSED" sign shoved in front of them.

The burger menu is diverse and exciting. There is a Cajun Burger, a Hawaiian Burger, a Pizza Burger, an Angel Burger ... wait. There is no Angel Burger! Perhaps they should change that.

TG had the European Burger (cheddar and bacon) and pronounced it delightfully continental. Audrey chose the Soul Burger (barbecue sauce and bacon) and certainly looked soulful as she consumed it.

But take it from me: if you go, order the Dixie Burger. It's thick and juicy and made to order and topped with sauteed onions, perfectly cooked bacon, American cheese, and barbecue sauce. On a massive soft bun.

The steak fries are the model after which all steak fries should be created. Fresh. Piping hot. Slightly crunchy on the outside and soft on the inside.

Our server was adorable and efficient. She is expecting a wee bairn in early February and I wish you could have seen her sweet glowing smile.

Maybe I should just move to Asheville! Now there is a thought. I know where there's space available in a gated community. It's small and unfurnished. It needs some work but is not without charm and the neighbors are very quiet.

That is all! Merry Christmas!

Black swan song

Yesterday was my big sister Kay's birthday and also the birthday of her youngest child, a daughter, our beloved niece Joanna, who turned eighteen.

Joanna was born on her mother's thirty-ninth birthday.

They live in Greenville, as does Kay's and my mother, so naturally I drove up there, bearing gifts and anticipating a good lunch at Mom's table.

She did not disappoint!

The menu: cool crunchy garden salad and tender pork loin and steaming baked potatoes and fresh green beans and comforting corn pudding and soothing sweet tea.

For dessert there was scratch-made cream cheese pound cake topped with strawberry coulis, Blue Bell vanilla ice cream, and hot coffee.

Don't be jeal!

Having recently seen and been impressed and inspired by the excellent documentary Genius Within: The Inner Life of Glenn Gould, I bought my sister and her daughter (who is an accomplished pianist and who, like the late Gould, was born in Canada) a joint present for their joint birthdays: the compact disc recording A State of Wonder: The Complete Goldberg Variations (1955 & 1981).

Bach! I am jeal! Something tells me I'll be asking for a copy of that CD for my own birthday.

When the flurry of feasting and gift-giving had subsided, Kay and Joanna were away to a piano lesson.

Before I was obliged to head for home, Mother and Henry and I drove a mile to the campus of Furman University for a semi-impromptu late-day photo shoot.

But not before my son called to ask me if I'd heard about the tragedy in Connecticut.

As I am sure you did, I thought of little else for the rest of the day besides the dying agonies of defenseless schoolchildren at the hands of a psychotic murderer.

I thought about their mommies and daddies and grandparents and sisters and brothers and aunts and uncles and cousins and friends and neighbors and teachers, and I grieved some and I prayed some and I wondered how much more of this kind of thing we can take.

"Get my swan costume ready." ~Pavlova

It makes me so mad when politicians (and others) talk about "gun control" being the answer to the problem. No it isn't. Anywhere in the world where gun laws are loosest, there is the least crime.

For obvious reasons. Criminals who hide behind guns are the biggest cowards of all.

But the liberal media won't tell you that and evil Mr. Crocodile Tears sitting in the Oval Office of our White House plotting to separate us from our Second Amendment (and other) rights won't tell you that either.

At any rate, while I was arranging Mom and Henry near the edge of the man-made lake on the campus of Furman University, who should glide up to join us but the black swan.

I know he cannot be the same black swan I've been seeing at Furman University for nearly twenty-five years, but he looks the same, as they tend to do.

He's black. And he has round red eyes to match his beak that's red like the tip of a matchstick.

"But calm, white calm, was born into a swan." ~Coatsworth

Just like the iconic and proverbial white swan, he swishes blackly and noiselessly around, occasionally arching his neck to skim the water's surface with his flame of a beak, and frequently going all the way under, coming back up to fling sparkling droplets around his slender throat.

Then, clunky webbed feet spread wde, he circles and swims and paddles and points and next thing you know, he's heading off toward a myriad of other less splendid feathered lake-floaters that you know he'll never quite join.

Mom and Henry were still posing but my attention was all on the swan, which is why I inadvertently cut off the top of Henry's head.

All of swandom was blissfully oblivious to the massacre in Connecticut on my sister's fifty-seventh birthday. It made me wish that just for a moment I could be a swan and if I could, I'd certainly be a black one.

Black is beautiful. Black is dramatic and graceful and classic and timeless.

Black is infinite and bottomless, like the wasted innocence of those little slain children and like the incomprehensible pain of those who loved them.

"A rare bird on earth, and very like a black swan." ~Juvenal 

Black is remorseless like the empty babbling of those who deny the sovereignty of God and the deity of His Son, Jesus, especially at Christmastime.

What comforts me is no matter how many times men turn from the truth, and for a time seem to succeed in evading it, in the end we will none of us escape it.

Eventually we all hear the music and know the words by heart. Unfortunately for some, the song is not always a happy one.

I imagine you are grieving just like me, both for this and for other burdens, deep and personal, of recent vintage and of achingly long duration.

In spite -- or maybe because -- of all this, I wish you an even merrier Christmas and an even happier New Year.

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This saying good-by on the edge of the dark

And the cold to an orchard so young in the bark

Reminds me of all that can happen to harm

An orchard away at the end of the farm

All winter, cut off by a hill from the house.

I don't want it girdled by rabbit and mouse,

I don't want it dreamily nibbled for browse

By deer, and I don't want it budded by grouse.

(If certain it wouldn't be idle to call

I'd summon grouse, rabbit, and deer to the wall

And warn them away with a stick for a gun.)

I don't want it stirred by the heat of the sun.

(We made it secure against being, I hope,

By setting it out on a northerly slope.)

No orchard's the worse for the wintriest storm;

But one thing about it, it mustn't get warm.

"How often already you've had to be told,

Keep cold, young orchard. Good-by and keep cold.

Dread fifty above more than fifty below."

I have to be gone for a season or so.

My business awhile is with different trees,

Less carefully nurtured, less fruitful than these,

And such as is done to their wood with an ax --

Maples and birches and tamaracks.

I wish I could promise to lie in the night

And think of an orchard's arboreal plight

When slowly (and nobody comes with a light)

Its heart sinks lower under the sod.

But something has to be left to God.

~Robert Frost~

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I love this

Especially the part after the lull, where everyone is dancing.

And the kissing. I love all the kissing.

And Cary Grant as Dudley the Angel.

Merry Christmas!

It's Twelve Twelve Twelve ... only twelve more days!

Refurbished

Within our immediate family I am legendary for a number of things, not all of them good. 

I will go down in familial history for my mashed potatoes and my barbecue, and that at least is not a bad legacy.

A girl could do much worse.

Another thing -- neither good nor bad in my estimation -- is that when my kids were little, I had an ironclad rule regarding toys.

As in, if the market began buzzing with a popular, sought-after plaything that every parent wanted under the tree on Christmas morning even more than their kid wanted to discover it there, I ran in the other direction as fast as I could go.

For example, my children never owned a Cabbage Patch Kid.

Not only did I consider them creepy (the smashy-faced dolls; not my kids), but no way was I ever going to stand in a line to get my hands on a toy just because twenty million other parents kids had an aching desire to acquire it.

In the dawn of the nineties, nearly a decade after Hasbro's My Little Pony became the toy to beat, I finally picked one up and held it in my hand while shopping. 

Finding the diminutive plasti-rubber fantasy pastel equine units -- no longer galloping off the shelves like in 1983 -- would set me back only five bucks apiece, I decided to get one for each of my girls.

I can't remember whether they were all nauseatingly scented (a revolting idea, come to think of it), but I do know the one I chose for Audrey had a disgusting built-in treacly aroma.

Audrey was seven or eight years old. She unwrapped her My Little Pony on Christmas morning and carried it around all day.

That evening she remembers beginning to feel a trifle unwell. Too many Christmas cookies? she wondered.

The memory is vivid. Audrey describes putting her head down on the kitchen table at Grandma's house, the sugary effluvia of her turquoise sparkly-maned My Little Pony still wafting up her nose.

Not long after, in order to be more comfortable, she moved to the couch. That's when it happened.

Audrey, having gotten one whiff too many of chemical-infused MLP, pitched her cookies onto the polyester-panted leg of an elderly relative.

(If I'm not mistaken I finally caved on buying Care Bears too ... but not till years after they were so hot an item, people were known to uncaringly maim or kill for them. And unscented ... always unscented.)

Fast forward to 1998. Audrey, by then fifteen, had recovered nicely from the MLP debacle and still consumed at least as many Christmas cookies annually as the number of the calendar year.

As I recall, she became enamored of the toy craze of that era: Furby.

Possibly because of commercials like this one, clearly aimed at younger females but finding their mark with teenaged girls as well:

As we have previously established, rules were made to be broken.

Audrey made her wishes known to me and for reasons I cannot explain -- guilt, perhaps? -- I went on a Furby-finding frenzy.

Christmas of 1998 I was working at a law firm in downtown Columbus, Ohio. Several blocks away loomed the massive City Center high-rise shopping mall.

(I understand Columbus City Center was torn down in 2009. Fine by me!)

At any rate there was a big toy store there and I found out they had Furbys.

Only, no sooner did the Furbys arrive on the truck from the faraway Furby factory than they were filched by fast, furious, fervent Furby-fanciers.

I'm not sure if you've figured this out yet -- paying attention, are we? -- but I have an obsessive personality.

I HAD TO HAVE A FURBY FOR AUDREY FOR CHRISTMAS.

One day, from my padded cubicle, I called the toy store where I knew they were attempting to keep Furbys in stock. Not only did I want a Furby but I had my heart set on one of a certain color.

(This would have been one of those times to ask oneself the acid-test query: In ten years, will this matter? But I didn't. I never ask that question because if I did, I would accomplish nothing.)

Learning that they had the Furby about which I fantasized, I took an early lunch and ran the blocks between work and the mall.

Arriving at the store sucking wind and with a stitch in my side, I found dozens of greedy, potentially evil consumers already queued up to purchase the scant available Furbys.

Let's cut to the chase: I got one. As I remember it, I paid about thirty dollars.

Outrageous! That is an outrageous amount to pay for a stupid toy that looks like a demented owl and has trouble waking up and when it does, only rolls its bulging eyes and makes unintelligible bleating noises!

The other day Audrey sent me a YouTube of an old Furby commercial similar to the one posted above. In a flurry of emails we were both virtually howling at memories of 1998, a/k/a the Infamous Furby Christmas.

For awhile there we cyber-partied like it was the Twentieth Century.

Well. Word on the street is, Furbys are hot again this year.

And if you thought the old Furbys were weird, wait till you see the new ones! 

With huge plastic ears and glowing LED screens for eyes, they're positively diabolical.

And they cost upwards of sixty-five dollars.

In preparation for this post I opened an upstairs closet and hauled out a laundry basket overflowing with old-but-still-good stuffed animals, to include beanie babies and the odd novelty toy.

A few favorites still talk when you press their bellies! Like the fierce-faced karate bear that makes karate-chop type noises, and the Taco Bell Chihuahua that orders: Yes! Drop the chalupa!

On Allissa's recent overnight visit, among other things she and I went to Wal-Mart.

I asked her what she wanted for Christmas. Without hesitation she began describing a stuffed animal that doubles as a handy pillow and as the coup de grace, makes stars appear on the ceiling of your room.

Five minutes (or less) later, Allissa's toy-dar led us directly to a convenient display of said costly but clever kid attention-catchers.

Turns out the item in question was the new Pillow Pets Dream Lites: The Night Lite That Turns Your Room Into A Starry Sky! 

She'd seen it in a TV commercial. It's printed right on the box: As Seen On TV.

Lissy was dazzled by the Fluttery Butterfly, and she found one and showed it to me. To keep my heart from breaking, I asked her which species of Pillow Pets Dream Lites she thought her sister Melanie would enjoy having.

Allissa is accustomed to talking for Melanie, who cannot tell us (in so many words) what she wants.

I wish you could have seen my granddaughter's face as she studied the display and chose the one she thought would suit Melly's taste.

Passing over the Perky Penguin and Snuggly Puppy, she settled on the Rainbow Unicorn.

"This one for Melanie," she told me.

"Okay, well, that's interesting," I said, pulling her away. I didn't want her to see the tears in my eyes. As we shoved off I took note of the asking price.

Only twenty-nine eighty-eight! Isn't that reasonable!

I put the word out and in due course, Aunts Audrey and Erica pledged to pool their racehorses and purchase the PPDL in Fluttery Butterfly for Allissa.

TG and I decided we'd like to get the PPDL in Rainbow Unicorn for Melanie's Christmas.

Finding a bargain on this particular piece of treasure proved difficult so we paid twenty-nine ninety-nine plus tax at Best Buy*.

Here's hoping Melly loves her soft confetti-colored Rainbow Unicorn with its furry pink horn and curved-plate back of cutout star shapes, and that she squeezes it until softly-glowing stars just fill up her little sky to bursting.

Lissy too, with her Fluttery Butterfly.

And I hope they both wish on every last one of those stars, and that all their wishes come true, and then some.

I hope you get what you're looking for, hoping for, wishing for, and dreaming of this Christmas too. Even if what you've got your heart set on is a next-gen Furby.

If I were there I'd give you a big hug and say I love you. Because I do.

That is all.

*You found a Pillow Pets Dream Lites in the animal you were after, at another store, or online, for less than twenty-nine eighty-eight? Good for you! Keep it to yourself, 'k?

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Merry Christmas! Two more weeks!

Saturday Snapshot: Here

Let the stable still astonish:
Straw-dirt floor, dull eyes,
Dusty flanks of donkeys, oxen;
Crumbling, crooked walls;
No bed to carry that pain.
And then, the child,
Rag-wrapped, laid to cry
In a trough.
Who would have chosen this?
Who would have said: "Yes.
Let the God of all the heavens and earth
Be born here, in this place."?
Who but the same God
Who stands in the darker, fouler rooms
of our hearts and says, "Yes.
Let the God of Heaven and Earth
be born here --
in this place."

~ Leslie Leyland Fields ~

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Happy Weekend! Merry Christmas!

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