Adluh-pated

I love me some stoneground grits.

And in "Famously Hot" Columbia, it's got to be Adluh grits, still ground with real stones.

They're made at the only remaining mill in South Carolina producing flour, cornmeal, grits, breading, specialty mixes, and feed.

The Adluh mill is an iconic sight in Columbia, what with its blinking neon sign that at night can be seen for at least a couple of miles if you know what to look for.

The plant itself is listed on the National Register of Historic Properties.

 

Erica asked me last night if I'd heard of having chicken with waffles.

As it turns out, only last Sunday TG squired (he says "squirreled" just to get a giggle) me to lunch at Harper's, my favorite restaurant in Columbia, and I ordered chicken and waffles from the brunch menu.

Consisting of several tenders of chicken treated to feather-light breading and fried to juicy perfection, snuggled on the warm plate alongside a softly fragrant belgian waffle.

For the asking you can get a complex Carolina-style barbecue sauce, dark and vinegary, for dredging your chicken just prior to eager consumption.

And naturally, syrup and butter are provided for the waffly part.

In case you're still not feeling the ecstasy, you are encouraged to pick two sides. Not like in politics. As in, side items.

For my sides I ordered fresh sweet potato fries and Adluh stoneground grits. The grits came in a ramekin so huge it could double for a toadfrog's bathtub.

In other words, they give you plenty.

There was also a tangy little berry muffin and copious amounts of hot black coffee, everything served by a female waitperson as congenial as she was efficient.

Yeah y'all. Come visit me. We'll go to Harper's and you'll soon see what I mean.

And don't say you don't like stoneground grits, or sweet potato fries! If you take that attitude we won't have nearly as much fun.

Out of the mouths of handsome gentlemen and babes of all ages

A couple weeks ago Audrey was home for a visit -- I told you about it! That was the day I looked like a Hallmark Card! -- and on our travels about town, in the interest of keeping body and soul together, we stopped for a snackie.

(We shared an order of Rip'n Chick'n at Popeyes Louisiana Kitchen, yeah y'all. Tore that biscuit right down the middle.)

Anyway, when Audrey reached the door of the restaurant to go inside, she held the it open for an older lady (no, not me) who was leaving.

Said lady, without stopping and hardly looking at Audrey, muttered in her direction: "Cute dress."

My lovely daughter gathers compliments like some people collect coupons. She's used to it. "Oh, thanks!" she said, looking down at the Daisy Fuentes frock she bought two years ago at Kohl's, on sale.

This happened mere moments after we'd been chatting with Becki at World Market, so as we munched our lunch Audrey and I marveled at the way practically everywhere we two birds go, together or separately, strangers seem compelled to converse with us.

(To be fair, in my case I am often the one to start the dialog. My mother has been known to declare that I would talk to a dressed-up dog. I take great umbrage at that because the truth is, no way does a dog have to be dressed up in order for me to engage him in convo. He can be stark naked. But many times the dog speaks to me first and what do you want me to do, be rude? To a pooch? Nevah.)

Goodness me. Now we know.

Fast forward to today. I was shopping at Stein Mart and on my way into the fitting room -- also known as wardrobial purgatory -- I stepped aside for a petite, attractive lady of about sixty to clear the door.

She was wearing a simple, plain black summer dress, a trifle gauzy, very flattering. Sort of fit and flare, if you know what I mean.

So naturally I complimented her. "What a pretty dress," I said in passing.

And you will not BELIEVE her reply.

(Gentlemen, please avert your eyes.)

Cool as a slice of refrigerated July watermelon she turned, looked right at me, and TMI'd: "Why thanks and guess what, all I've got on besides this is my underpants."

Mmmmkay.

(I am guessing she does not cotton to that old saying about reticence being the sine qua non of gentility.)

I don't remember what I stammered in reply to the step-ins-only revelation. Suffice it to say, within five seconds of the conclusion of that exchange I had locked myself into a fitting booth.

A love note to America.

Speaking of starting the dialog, or in this case the lyric, I must tell you what my darling TG did in church on Sunday. In order to appreciate the story you need to know that while by no means is my man shy, he is definitely the archetypal strong, silent male. Tall, dark and handsome too. Don't be jeal!

Anyway, an emotional Nine Eleven tenth anniversary service was just wrapping up and our pastor in closing mentioned that he felt like maybe we should sing God Bless America or something.

I mean, he didn't say, "Now folks, before we go home let's just haul off and sing God Bless America." It was more like he was thinking out loud that maybe singing it would be a good idea at that juncture.

For a space of about two seconds nobody did much of anything. We were thinking. Then, plenty loud, clear as can be and right on pitch, TG began singing in his very respectable baritone.

He got out the word "God" by himself and everyone else joined in on the word "bless" and we sang the song as a congregation, and it was awfully nice.

TG. One of the good guys. They broke the mold et cetera.

When life gives you lemons, do the math.

On the way to church that same morning, TG pointed to a street corner near our house. He then regaled me with a story about a couple of little girls who, the day before, had set themselves up a lemonade stand in that spot.

Their father was sitting with them, keeping watch. I don't think they had a permit. The hand-lettered sign read 50 cents a glass.

TG, out in his truck running errands, pulled up and gestured to the kids that he'd like to buy some of that lemonade.

One of the girls dispensed the refreshment and trotted over to the truck. She handed TG the cup and he held out a dollar.

She stared, then asked: "Do you want two glasses?"

TG chuckled. "No, honey. You can keep the change."

Told you. Does Jenny know how to pick 'em or what?

No sub for cake.

Last story. For now.

Stephanie had a birthday last week. Since she's eating for two and it shows, she was looking forward to showing up at Firehouse Subs, where if you show them your driver's license (or long-form birth certificate, I presume), you get a free medium celebratory sub.

On my birthday I go to Frank's Car Wash and get free deluxe auto ablutions. Perhaps it's time I changed my strategy.

At any rate, as lunchtime approached and Allissa became antsy for vittles (Melanie was at school where she gets two squares a day), Stephanie assured her that very soon they would go to Firehouse and get a sub.

"Why?" said Allissa.

"Because it's Mommy's birthday and I'll get a free sub," Steph explained. More than once.

Allissa remained perplexed. Finally she said what was on her mind: "But aren't you having a cake?"

That's right, baby girl. Don't ever hesitate to ask where the next piece of cake is coming from.

You only get to live this one time.

Celebrate.

Have a sweet day!

Nine Thirteen

Pilot Bob Bear (L) and my father, his co-pilot

Robert E. Bear ~ July 13, 1920 - September 13, 1968

Blanchard Guy McManus ~ October 16, 1930 - September 13, 1968

Mary Renick ~ February 26, 1908 - September 13, 1968

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Have you had enough gut-wrenchingly graphic rememberings, at least for the present moment, of carnage originating in the sky on flawless early September mornings?

Yeah. Me too.

But we can't let this day pass without paying our respects to these.

Three souls were lost in horrific wreckage and fire in North Hollywood, California, forty-three years ago today. It was a Friday.

One of them was my father, whom I never knew. He spent the last minutes of his life with his friend, fellow pilot Bob Bear.

The third life to end in the calamitous event was that of Mary Renick, a lady who was in her garage when parts of the crashed plane rained fiery destruction upon her head.

Although I was eleven years old when my father died, I had not been in his presence since 1959, when I was a wee tot of two. But I was thirteen before I learned of my father's death.

It's complicated. You'll have to read the book.

So enough of elevens and thirteens! There is no luck, good or bad; there is only God our Creator, who loves us and wants us to trust Him with everything, up to and including our never-dying souls.

And there is the Son of God, Jesus Christ our Savior, and the blessed Holy Spirit, our Comforter. Together and as One these three entreat you to repent and be saved today.

Whereas ye know not what shall be on the morrow. For what is your life? It is even a vapour, that appeareth for a little time, and then vanisheth away. (James 4:14)

As for me, I trusted Christ at the age of fourteen. And because I know whom I have believed, and am persuaded that he is able to keep that which I have committed unto him against that day (2 Timothy 1:12), I'm determined to enjoy my life on this beautiful September Tuesday.

Even though, like last Sunday, I'll do it through some stubborn tears.

Who am I kidding? That's the way I roll most days: I laugh then I cry. Rinse, repeat. C'est la vie.

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Not in a silver casket cool with pearls

Or rich with red corundum or with blue,

Locked, and the key withheld, as other girls

Have given their loves, I give my love to you;

Not in a lovers'-knot, not in a ring

Worked in such fashion, and the legend plain --

Semper fidelis, where a secret spring

Kennels a drop of mischief for the brain:

Love in the open hand, no thing but that,

Ungemmed, unhidden, wishing not to hurt,

As one should bring you cowslips in a hat

Swung from the hand, or apples in her skirt,

I bring you, calling out as children do:

"Look what I have! --And these are all for you."

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by Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950)

In old New York

I like pastoral scenes and the occasional bucolic experience but at heart I'm a city girl.

When I was a kid we spent a fair amount of time living on the lam in Chicago.

We would briefly occupy this tiny apartment and that tenement walkup before moving on. Good times. And I mean that.

Mostly our windows looked out onto drab alleyways that always seemed empty except for metastasizing garbage and melting snow.

But I loved the city, and then we left the city.

Many years later I returned to the metropolitan Chicago area and ended up living there for seventeen years.

I will never forget the September day in 1974 when I first saw the Sears Tower from the Dan Ryan Expressway.

As you well know I'm not often without words but I doubt I eked out a syllable for a whole thirty seconds.

The immensity of that building! It has never failed to impress me throughout all these years.

As a rule I have not been as intimately acquainted with the New York City skyline as I've always tried to be with that of Chicago, but I can identify the well-known buildings.

While on a family vacation during the summer of 1996 I saw the twin towers of the World Trade Center for the first time, live and in person.

Naturally I snapped pictures of the towers from the ferry on that chilly gray fourth of July, but they're packed away and I cannot find them.

The best I can do is give you Andrew with a funny expression on his face, posing with Lady Liberty in the background. He was seven; she was a hundred ten.

And then there's Audrey with Andrew, getting ready to board the ferry. She was thirteen. Audrey, I mean. I don't know how old the ferry was.

Although I cannot remember my exact thought process upon seeing the towers from the harbor, I do recall being gobsmacked by the sheer imposing brilliance and symmetry of them. How could one not?

They were certainly beautiful.

After seeing the interior pictures posted a few days ago by my friend Angel of Woman Honor Thyself, I wish we'd made time to visit the towers. They would stand for only five years more.

And it is still unthinkable to me that they are gone forever.

On our trip to New York this past May, I was anxious to see Ground Zero. 

When we finally reached it I thought there must be some mistake. How could that massively horrible thing have happened in so small a space?

But it did. I saw it on television. I watched as the towers collapsed and I waited for TG to arrive home from Washington DC where he'd gone that morning.

Across the street from Ground Zero is St. Paul's Chapel, Manhattan's oldest public building in continuous use.

George Washington prayed there on the day of his inauguration. You can gawk at the pew he occupied.

The cemetery that fills the space between the church and the street, just a few hundred yards from where the towers once soared, is like a rapt and breathless vacuum.

Near the church portico there is a bell mounted on a pedestal. The topmost surface of the pedestal, just inches below the bell's clapper, is imprinted with a schematic of the World Trade Center.

The bell was cast at The Whitechapel Bell Foundry in London on July 26, 2002. It was dedicated at Trinity Church Wall Street on September 11, 2002. Embossed on the bell are these words:

TO THE GREATER GLORY OF GOD

AND IN RECOGNITION OF

THE ENDURING LINKS BETWEEN

THE CITY OF LONDON

AND

THE CITY OF NEW YORK

FORGED IN ADVERSITY ~ 11 SEPTEMBER 2001

I was so moved by the bell and its message that I reached underneath, grabbed the iron tongue, and rang it. I will never forget its one-note song of poignant memories, still ripe and full down all the years.

The Millenium Hilton scrapes the sky directly across from Ground Zero as well. I shudder to think what those who occupied rooms and suites on the upper floors of that hotel witnessed on Nine Eleven, before they were evacuated.

At the 9/11 Memorial Preview Site there was a flag bearing in its red and white ribbons the names of all those killed by Islamic terrorists on American soil ten years ago today.

A day like any other. Except it wasn't.

There was also a to-scale model of the Statue of Liberty encased in glass. She's covered -- all but her pretty face, which seems to wear a worried expression -- from torch to sandal sole in pictures and badges and notes and buttons and other Nine Eleven mementoes.

Later that day, walking through Battery Park to the Staten Island Ferry, I saw Fritz Koenig's sculpture The Sphere, now ruined, which once sat burnished and smooth, impervious to the elements, between the twin towers of the World Trade Center.

Its head is bloodied but unbowed, just like New York's.

Then to pass beneath the massive American flag starkly suspended above the escalator I rode to the Staten Island Ferry embarkation lobby, was a privilege.

There is pain in remembering just as there is that bone-jarring ache common to all irreparable loss. But remember we must.

The song says I'm gonna make a brand new start of it in old New York.

In this new New York as in that old New York, there abounds one thing the terrorists never counted on. It may be something as prosaic as garden-variety hope but I suspect it is something more profound: the vision that is born after all hope is gone.

Whatever it is, I felt it there. I sensed it on the wide streets and in the warm air and I saw it in the avid faces of all those who had come to be part of the spectacle, if only for a day.

I tasted it in the delectable food served by gracious people in restaurants such as La Parisienne Diner and Junior's.

I marveled at it in the relentless insanity and industry of Times Square.

I listened for it in the crack of the bat and the roar of the crowd at Yankee Stadium.

My bones rattled with it in the screeching, lurching crush of the madly careening subway cars.

It was the passion and humor and enthusiasm and never-say-die gutsiness of a spectacular American city.

The greatest city in the greatest country there ever was, or ever will be. Forged in adversity.

God bless America.

Zero at the bone

In a recent speech on Wall Street, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg decreed that the site of the September 11, 2001, islamic terrorist attack that destroyed the World Trade Center will no longer be called Ground Zero.

Ten whole years. I can just hear him: Oy! Enough already!

This is the same elected official who, Grand-Poobah style, has banned both the first responders (those who survived) and clergy from attending the commemoration ceremonies on Sunday.

Supposedly there's not enough room to accommodate the first responders.

Sound familiar? 

What is this anyway, Bethlehem on the Hudson?

There's room enough for the remains of those responders who died in the godless heathen terrorist-induced carnage. Room enough for their tears and sweat and blood and ashes. Nobody can ever change that. 

As for the clergy, and formal public prayers being offered up on the ten-year anniversary of the brutal attack on our homeland?

Well, that's just unthinkable. We simply cannot allow any reference to that sticky wicket of faith in God to skew our perspective.

Because we all know religion had nothing to do with the reason there's a Ground Zero in the first place.

I'm not sure Mayor Bloomberg deserves that dollar-per-year salary he takes from the good citizens of the greatest city in the world.

I would like to give him the benefit of the doubt but where this distinctly un-American mayor is concerned, I'm fresh out of benefits of doubts.

In striving to be oh so politically correct (a term I despise nearly as much as the concept it represents), Mayor Bloomberg has become unforgivably patriotically disconnected.

Not to mention a dhimmi-witted embarrassment to God and country.

Sir, you're no Rudy Giuliani. Not even close, my friend. He will always be the Mayor of Nine Eleven New York.

And to Americans, the site of that day's terror and agony will always be Ground Zero. Mayor, schmayor. Nobody gets to tell us what to call the hallowed spot.

So with all due respect, Hizzoner can take a flying leap into the East River. And wear a towel on his head while doing so.

With mind-numbing predictability, President Obama is front and center on the Always Forget bandwagon too. Dear Leader wants us to stop referring to Nine Eleven as a day of remembrance and instead, begin thinking of it as a day of service.

The usual blah, blah, blah from someone who's secretly glad Nine Eleven happened in the first place.

And yes, I do believe that and no, I am not sorry I said it.

However it would be unseemly for me to suggest what our traitorous blathering TOTUS should do, so I won't.

In 2008, with little fanfare, a memorial entitled Fallen But Not Forgotten was installed near the courthouse in Lexington, South Carolina, about five miles from my house.

One evening last week TG drove me over there to take pictures. The sky was pretty; it was getting towards dusk and I knew the light would be good.

I suspected the mosquitoes would be in a munchy mood too -- and they were -- but oh well. A girl's gotta do.

(Mosquitoes regard my person as haute cuisine. Or at least a happy meal.)

As I got out of the car I noticed a lady sitting in her vehicle a few spots away.

Soon enough she joined us at the memorial. Turned out she was Val Zaba, a commercial artist who collaborated on both the monument's design and its eventual realization.

Serendipity strikes again! I was honored to meet Val and to take her picture. She even showed us some of her original watercolors of the project.

She told us she had to fight city hall in order to keep the cross placed prominently on one side of the structure.

I'm glad Val had the wherewithal to win that battle. God bless her.

And God bless America.

May He preserve her glorious freedoms and confound her enemies both foreign and domestic. Especially domestic.

Never, ever forget.