That would be my brother Tom, Tom Cairns, who lives in Noaf-ka-lyna and can whip up the best breakfast you ever et this side of the Mason-Dixon Line. If yer settin' down ta Tom's breakfast, yer in high cotton.
What's in Tom's Famous Breakfast?
• Eggs prepared to taste; we usually do scrambled.
• Bacon and/or sausage prepared to taste.
• Quick grits and anything and everything you want to put into it. Tom starts with cheese, that's what adds the orange color. These are called "cheese grits" or "cheesy grits." You can then add sausage, bacon, pork, beef, salt, etc. Grits by itself is fairly tasteless.[1]
• Biscuits (fresh are great, frozen is fine)[2]
• Sausage gravy (quality pouch gravy with loads of you own sausage is fine)
• Variety of toast; up north this usually includes a hearty nutty/multi-grain, pumpernickel, and rye.
Here are some videos and pictures from 2004 and 2011 of Tom preparing his famous breakfast:
2004 in Norlina, NC Unfortunately, I have only pictures.
2011 in Erie, PA
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[1]
A linguistic curiosity regarding "grits" usage: these sentences sound right to me, but I defer to my brother to comment from personal experience:
* I like grits and anything you want to put in it.
* Gritsare good for you.
Wikipedia maintains plural agreement (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grits ➚), but does say:
The word "grits" is one of the few words that may properly be used as either singular or plural in writing or speech and can be used with a singular or plural verb.
I suspect there are regions in the South that would take sides on this.
[2]
Did you know that down south, a bag of Pillsbury frozen biscuits has 20 biscuits in it? The same size up north has only 12. Lawso'mercy, don't let me commence!
It’s strange how at one time we want to run away from everything that represents rules and propriety and consequences. Then gradually, as if influenced by a mollifying infection or an abject ennui, we slowly grow to treasure the people and places that provided those things, people and places that are no more.
It’s not so strange after all, is it? It’s the Prodigal’s Son writ across a lifetime.
[1] I know the PDF is named 736 E 26th Street, but as you can see, by the time this directory was made, that church had been sold and were were meeting at 1781 W 38th, where the church remains today. I don’t know, but I suspect this directory inaugurated the new building and body. It was a difficult transition and many families left. I don’t remember any photo family directories from the old building.
… to write even a paragraph that isn’t related to work or the grocery list or paying bills, how can he call himself a writer that day?
I do find a few minutes at night to listen to OTR.
This one kept me up. The scariest episode of CBSRMT (CBS Radio Mystery Theater) yet, “The Crack in the Wall.” Listen alone, at night, in the dark. Chilling.
Regarding what I wrote earlier: "The Santa I knew looked a lot like the one illustrated by Coca-Cola. Not precisely, but nearly so."
We fully enjoyed secular traditions in our house. I never sensed any conflict or sidestepping around secular celebrations. Children are sensitive creatures, they know when parents have difficulty accommodating or reconciling something; if my parents had had issues with Santa or the Easter Bunny or the Tooth Fairy or anything else, I'd have known it, yet those were real to me and still are in a visceral way that only childhood beliefs can be.
We didn't bake Jesus a birthday cake on Christmas or have a fall festival at church on Halloween. I'm sure my parents wouldn't have objected to those things, but they weren't needed to reinforce the meaning of Christmas or avert the sinister aspects of Halloween. Conscientious Christian parents of my generation did that in the same way they guided children in all things.
Alternatives to secular celebrations arise out of fear, and not the fear you might initially think - not the fear of the other as wrong, but a fear of losing our beliefs and practices in a quagmire of competing beliefs and practices, not the beliefs and practices themselves, but the time they consume and take away from what we consider the truth and center. The distinction between "The other is wrong" and "the other is interfering with me" is very real, but we often conflate the two.
Nevertheless, each generation adopts old ways in their own way. Sometimes it's a reverent attempt to refine, sometimes an irreverent one to change.
Christmas to me (aside from Jesus) is Bing Crosby, Percy Faith, Nat King Cole, and modern interpretations of the songs from that era, such as those by Toby Keith, Vince Gill and Mannheim Steamroller. (I'm not a big country music fan, but no genre does classic Christmas better.) Those songs were old when I was a child. I was introduced to them by a generation that was recalling their childhood, and I embraced them as my own, along with the TV images that the previous generation didn't have.
As much as I dislike holiday change, I know that each generation that modifies old ways doesn't realize what they are doing, they are just getting closer to the meaning of the season, polishing off a little patina to reveal the ever-never-changing magic underneath.
If you grow up with it, you know no different.
Oh, why do Baptists avoid premarital sex? Answer: Because it can lead to dancing.
When I was young enough to still anticipate Santa, yet old enough to remember, Mom and Dad put up our Christmas tree at the back of the house, at the end of the dining room, next to the back door, a heavy old door with nine window panes that frosted around the edges in winter; I would reach up and carve through the rime with a fingernail and wonder at the snowscape in the backyard, the limits of my world, a world even smaller in deepest winter because it was seen only from the inside.
That door faced the east; some mornings the frost was so thick you couldn't see out, but the low rising sun exploded each pane as though it were mere inches away, and the frost would melt, and the room would warm as nine sunbeams inched across the dining room floor. The sun said goodbye in the same fashion on the other side of the house, though the front door with six frosted window panes and six sunbeams retreating across the living room floor.[1]
Holiday decorating started on the outside and worked in - spotlights on the lawn and strings of lights along the eaves, a wreath on the door, electric candles in the windows, a holiday table cloth and an angel centerpiece.
Our tree ornaments were simple, the tinsel thin, the tree topper a red aluminum star that accepted the last light of the string to illuminate it; the lights were multicolored, incandescent, hot to the touch; around the trunk Dad wrapped a white bed sheet to look like snow.[2]
Christmas music played daily on the console radio as soon as local stations started to play it; this began after Thanksgiving in small doses; not until Christmas Eve day could you hear Christmas music all day, and then it was only one station, and then only for 24 hours, ending promptly at 6pm Christmas Day.
In our home, Santa arrived Christmas Eve after we'd all gone to bed (he visited some houses the day before so those families could open their presents on Christmas Eve; I always thought that was nice of him to accommodate their schedules). We put cookies and milk out for him and hurried to bed early, because he wouldn't come until we were asleep. NORAD would report seeing a strange red light over the North Pole and this report was broadcast on the radio; this was a real report from a government agency about Santa. (NORAD still does this to this day, http://www.noradsanta.org/➚.)
The Santa I remember smoked a pipe, had a long flowing white beard, ruddy chubby cheeks, a fur-trimmed red suit and tasseled cap. He was always jolly, could be stern (he had a naughty list, after all), but had a short memory.[3]
One present I remember in particular quite well: a blue vinyl Disney wallet with Mickey Mouse embossed on it and a snap change pocket inside; actually, I think Mickey was a puffy vinyl patch glued on. Brother Tom received one just like it, but it was red with Pluto.[4]
Another present I remember well, around that time, perhaps the same year: my Dad took us all to his company Christmas party, which (as Mom and Dad recall) was held at the Boston Store downtown. Santa was there, and he gave me and brother Tom each a gift. I don't remember what Tom got, but I got a gold plastic trumpet. It had no moving parts; it was just a single piece of molded plastic. I treasured it and took it to bed with me that night, knowing very soon Santa would leave even more presents under our tree.[5]
The earliest memories are the sweetest, the simplest, the most enduring; we cling to them without judgment, without even the capacity to judge; memories like these, and the capacity to create them again, is what we pass on to our children. Santa is a beautiful mechanism for transmitting innocence and magic from one generation to the next, entirely apart from whether he is real or not.
[1] This was before we added the family room to the back of the house. You don't see doors like this in new homes. It was an old solid wood door with nine single pane windows occupying the top half, and there was a storm door on the outside that held a window in winter and a screen in summer. The reason the frost formed was because the house was losing heat. Our house was often cold in the very old days, but since then Mom and Dad have done what most families do to old homes over years - replaced the furnace, the windows, insulated; I'm sure they don't share the fond memories for icy windows and cold floors that I do.
Sometimes our strongest memories are the most most mundane: falling asleep to a TV test pattern; waiting all day to hear one song on the radio; waiting a year to see last year's big theatrical release on TV; dirty magazines in every grocery store; grownups smoking in every grocery store; real butter, real gravy, real meat, real sugar, real salt, strong coffee, black toast, eggs deviled and fried and poached and boiled and chopped and mixed with real mayonnaise made with real oil; Saturday cartoons on three channels until 11am; good-guy wrestlers like Chief Jay Strongbow and Ivan Putski; sports heroes like Johnny Bench, Pete Rose, Joe Morgan, Tony Perez, Dave Concepcion, George Foster, Ken Griffey, Cesar Geronimo, Sparky Anderson; writers like Michael Crichton and Alistair MacLean; movies like The Dirty Dozen and The Jungle Book (which starred Phil Harris voicing Baloo); music by Three Dog Night, Neil Young, America; TV shows like The Andy Griffith Show (which we called "Andy Barney") and My Three Sons and Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C. and Family Affair and so on and so on and so on, depending on where and when you lived and how late you could stay up and what your parents let you read.
You have to live it when your brain is young and soft in order to unreservedly love a memory; if you're old enough to question it, you're too old to look back without a subtly destructive judgment. If you're young enough, you regard the memories like a deep love, the object of which can do no wrong, because she is perfect, and perfectly beautiful, and ever will be.
Of course, the generation that preceded mine has similar memories that I do not have and can never fully appreciate - coal furnaces, ration cards, liberty cabbage, nickel matinee movies, Fibber McGee and Molly, sandlot baseball, Casablanca and It's a Wonderful Life, Superman and Captain America, Slo Pokes and Necco Wafers, Bing Crosby and Glenn Miller and Les Brown and The Andrews Sisters and so on and so on and so on, depending on where and when you lived and how late you could stay up and what your parents let you read.
This is our front door, it's the same door that's been there since I was a child. Outside that door, behind the homes across the street and up a slight incline, grow wild grape vines and many sorts of bushes and trees; the sun sets over those bushes and trees, into the back yards of those homes across the street. I played there often, and ate wild grapes and apples and pears from our neighbors' yards.
[2] Dad has talked a lot about his own childhood Christmases. I will blog separately about that.
[3] The Santa I knew looked a lot like the one illustrated by Coca-Cola. Not precisely, but nearly so. Different aspects of Santa have of course originated in different places, but they came together most fully in the last century in Coke ads. http://www.thecoca-colacompany.com/heritage/cokelore_santa.html ➚
[4] It looked a little like this, except with Mickey and Pluto, of course.
[5] My Mom and Dad say that they think they brought those gifts and gave them to Santa to give to us, but I didn't know that until only recently.
I once had a pastor at a small church[1] that gave a sermon on taking off your mask. He believed we were something different down deep and should reveal that in church. He was quite insistent on this point.[2]
I felt he was talking directly to me. The church was small enough and the rest of the congregation sufficiently transparent that he certainly could have been.
That sermon has bothered me for years. Here are my thoughts:
1. He may or may not have been talking directly to me; it may have been an old sermon he dug out of his files, there may have been someone else near me that he was addressing, who knows.
2. Folks from the tradition I come out of might say I was being convicted by the Holy Spirit. Well, I was responding to aural and visual queues; in any other context, there'd be no question what the body language and verbal language were intimating.
3. Outside of places where certain behaviors are practical considerations (office, court room, bedroom), it's my prerogative to be who I want or need to be when I want or need to be. That is not someone else's decision, and it's presumptuous under most pretenses (especially religious or social) to expect one to behave the way we want them to behave because it suits us.
4. Except, of course, when the religious context is the only context, ie, when church is the core and extent and boundary of our social world and validates our relationships; then the rules are just as important inside the church as they are outside.
5. In fact, church is as much a socio-political dance as any other human activity, perhaps even more so, and perhaps why there is such a keen recognition that our dance partners are wearing masks.
6. I don't want to know what's behind every mask in church. I like masks. They are like hats and ties and shiny shoes. We have an assortment that appeal to us and to others.
[1] I don't remember the name, it may have been Faith Baptist at the time; it was located at 4915 Eastern Ave, SE Grand Rapids, MI 49508; it's now called South Eastern Bible Church. The pastor I'm recalling is from a previous series of pastors and has no relation to South Eastern Bible Church. This pastor was not named Bob or Jerry.
[2] I don't care for insistent pastors, pastors that pound the pulpit, or shout at unexpected moments in their delivery, or claim to have special insight, or pastors that put their mouth up close to the microphone so you can hear their lips closing and parting while they lower their voice and say things like "Now, I'm gonna get serious with you, brother, and you better listen, this is God talking, not me," etc.
Don't tell me you care. Show me you care. Embrace the people your congregants won't tolerate: homosexuals, alcoholics, the dirty and smelly and toothless indigents, adulterers and lusters and fornicators and average people that think just like the rest of us, the misguided and wayward and sinful and helpless. Take a stand for what's right and those that need you. They're the reason you're there. Let God take care of the enrollment and the budget and your reputation and career. Grow some fire-and-brimstone cojones and show some good old-fashioned Jesus indignation.
If you're like me, you sometimes sit on bits and pieces of blogs for days, even weeks, crafting or refining. You need a place to compose and hone.[1] And the less time you spend worrying about how it looks, the more time you can focus on the words.
I needed a toolkit that was portable, allowed rich text formatting, was quick, and didn't run in the cloud (because you can't depend on the Internet to write; it had to be as reliable as a typewriter[2]). I've used a ton of apps and have finally found a collection that works well for me. I'm sure this list will grow, but here's a snapshot, and they are all free and easy.
1. AllMyNotes http://allmynotes.vladonai.com/ ➚ • Free portable or desktop outliner • Drag and drop files into AllMyNotes to store while you're composing and save them out later when you need them (that's a paid feature). Embedded office files show as icons and use less space than a lot of apps that do this; embedded images show as images; you can reduce them to thumbnail size and store them in the body of your blog as a reminder of where you plan to place them. They're still full size when you save them out. • Very attractive; love the colors and soft edges • Fast saves • If you're pasting straight to Blogger, links automatically are coded to open in a new window; I link out to other sites a lot, this is very helpful. • Spell check • Very friendly and helpful author! I got AllMyNotes free on a the daily site Giveaway of the Day ( http://www.giveawayoftheday.com/ ➚) and the author had no obligation to help me, but he did. I will use this probably until v3 and then purchase the next iteration. • (Minor complaint: Pasting directly into blogger pulls in a lot of code from AllMyNotes, which must be using it for its own text handling. You can't see the difference as a reader, but the source Blogger interprets is cluttered, and all your changes, new images, etc compound the clutter.... which leads me to #2...)
(I composed this blog entry in AllMyNotes, then copy/pasted into Live Writer, images and all. All I did was tweak formatting and some link syntax.)
2. Windows Live Writer Portable • Get Live Writer here: http://explore.live.com/windows-live-writer ➚ • Make it portable here: http://www.online-tech-tips.com/blogging/run-windows-live-writer-from-usb-drive/ ➚ • If you aren't using it, you don't know what you're missing; frequently appears at the top of the list for blogging software; easy as Word to operate and publishes straight to a variety of blogs, though IMHO it could add some contextual shortcuts and a caption option. It probably can be used to some extent to create and organize, but it's not an outliner.
3. keynote-nf http://code.google.com/p/keynote-nf/ ➚ • Free outliner, being developed by Daniel Velasco and based on the excellent work of Marek Jedlinski who created the base feature set; it's in active development and is open source; although I found a new favorite in AllMyNotes, I have a fondness for the raw power of KeyNote-NF. • You can drag files both in and out; in AllMyNotes you can drag in, but need to right-click and save out. • Search pane is full featured and very robust; every occurrence of your search is shown for you, just click through each and you see them in context. • I still use it for large projects that store a lot of data and require a lot of searching.
[1] If you're the type to open up a post, write it and hit the publish button, you're not like me and this isn't for you.
[2] I’m also wary of cloud security and long-term storage; no service is immune to hacking, hardware failure, bankruptcy, etc, and if you rely on a cloud service, there is a risk that goes along with it. I do use Google Docs for many things, and I use Gmail; I tolerate some risk for some things, but I archive most of what I write, whether that’s Gmail, Comcast email, Twitter or Google Docs; and I religiously back it up where I know it’s protected and secure.
Both these men died on the same day. Who changed the world more?
Depends on your age, the popular culture that molded your perceptions, your budget, what you think "more" means, if "more" of anything can be judged to be better than less of it, and ultimately if the question is important to you, and if you can value the influence of one life over another.
My recollections of Charles Napier are fonder, deeper, fixed in prepubescent years festooned with hippies and drugs and rebellion and war and sexual liberation. Napier’s Adam was a TV representation of a generation's search for something every generation searches for, but never quite as colorfully as mine did.
Our value is collective. None of us have meaning apart from each other. The reason we hurt each other is because we don't understand that (or each other).
Headin' out to Eden
A sidebar on the difference between Mac people and PC people: there is a general trend, by no means always true, that Mac people are visually oriented and PC people are aurally/orally oriented.
Good writers and artists and musicians of all types find both platforms helpful, but if you're in a digital industry, you know how the personalities usually divide. If you must have the best design tools and feel like you are working with the best (that is important), you use a Mac. If you like to look under the hood and move things around and see what breaks, you use a PC.
In my experience, writers that are more concerned with presentation use Macs. Those that care more about the words use PCs. (It's it's a sliding scale, of course; it's not about creative and noncreative, it's about the type of creativity.)
