Deep South

Growing up in the deep south cultivates a memory torn between tragedy and liberty.Nine decades after Lincoln’s Emancipation, Justice demanded a Supreme Court decision to open the gates of public education for four children in Little Rock. Racist whackos were still hiding in the hedges, waiting for Medgar Evers to get out of a car in his own driveway across the street. . . so they could shoot him dead. Years later, when Martin Luther King Jr. addressed a church gathering, on a fateful night in Memphis, he told them that he had received a phone call, from “an ugly voice”, It was a warning. But Martin was a brave American; he understood his rights as a citizen of these United States. The next day, a racist gunman shot him dead. Martin was only following the example of his ancient predecessor, Moses, when he said: “I’ve been to the mountaintop; and I’ve seen the promised land. . . I may not get there with you.” The next day, a racist gunman shot him dead. After that, after the Freedom Riders. . . after federal marshals enforcing admittance for black students, an alert Canadian, Neil Young, recorded a song, “Southern Man”, with an admonition: “Southern man, don’t forget what your Good Book says!” Not too long after that, a rock group from Alabama wrote a song with this line: “I hope Neil Young will remember, southern man don’t need him around anyhow.” Not to worry, Neil. . . there’s a bright spot shining from east Tennessee. Heaven had birthed a songbird maiden in the hills of east Tennessee, to brighten the dark deep south. . . to gently guide southerners toward a tolerant, gospelistic renovation of their obsolete redneck racism. The saving grace of southern culture on the skids emerged from a river valley in East Tennessee, when a princess was born. Dolly went over to Nashville and initiated a regal recovery of southern decency. Her bold, melodic voice inspired folks to get out of their ruts, out of their riots, rise and shine, and redirect their attention to the mellow tranquility of the deep south. . . relax in a rocker. . . the songbird from Sevierville sang: Sittin’ on the front porch on a summer afternoon. . . june bugs, fireflies in the cooling evening. . . in her Tennessee Mountain Home.

Dolly rescued the ole South, redirecting our attention to the finer things in life. Dolly lit up the grand ole opry and the southern airwaves like a cool mountain breeze, with rocollections of sitting in a rocker on the front porch on a summer afternoon. . . then in the fall, puttin’ on that coat of many colors that mama made, moments of the good life so that workin’ 9 to 5 to make a living wouldn’t be such an ordeal. And yes, Johnny Reb, the deep south did indeed rise again. . . born again into a new identity of equality, generosity, humility and joy, with a little help from Abraham, Martin, John, and Dolly. Now, while peckin’ out messages from my Appalachian mountainside home, we will remember, yes, we will remember the Deep South. Yes, indeed, we sho’nuff did rise again! King of Soul

Labor

Put on your clothes. Tie your shoes. Make the bed. Eat breakfast. Prepare lunch. Go to school. Read. Write. Do mathematics. Ride to the burger chef. Flip burgers. Bag french fries. Switch jobs. Bag groceries. Operate a cash register. Graduate. Go to college. Study. Sell shoes. Wash dishes. Sell books door to door. Stock shelves in drug store. Graduate. Move to another state. Sell insurance. Sell advertising. Live in a jail for two days. Move to another state. Sell printing. Operate a paper-cutting machine. Get saved.Get married. Move into a house. Raise children. Read the ancient scriptures every morning. Operate a paper-folding machine. Assemble furniture in a factory. Move into another house. Tie rebar for bridge construction. Pour concrete. Build houses. Nail boards together.

Move to another city. Manage a church renovation. Paint houses.

Move into a new house. Fix plumbing. Maintain apartments. Write books. Publish books. Set the dinner table. Entertain guests. Load the dishwasher. Then. . . Sleep that knits the raveled sleeve of care. . . sleep, perchance to dream. . . dreams you can never remember. Pack luggage. Drive to the coast. Jump in the ocean. Drive home. Write. Blog. Cook dinner. Rinse dishes. Sweep the floor. Vacuum the floors. Paint the house. Clear the gutters. Take a vacation. Fly across the continent. Fly across the ocean. Vacation. Return home. Unpack luggage. Go back to work. . . busy as. bees.

Man works from sun to sun; Woman’s work is never done. Lend a helping hand. Watch the seasons pass. Remember the years past. Then one fateful day, your labors are over. . . slip into the eternal room, to join ancestors, to greet the Son of Man who conquered death itself, stepping into eternity, treading streets of gold. . . a great way to conclude this life of love, labor and looking back on it all. . . Life, a labor of Love. Glass Chimera

Water

In the beginning, . . . Creator combined His first element, hydrogen, with his eighth element, oxygen. . . Spirit 0f God was moving over the surface of the waters, spreading in waves and ripples, streams and waterfalls. . .

mists and clouds. . .

. . . even rainbows.

When Creator created man and woman, they found themselves in a garden of earthly delights, what must have been a very special project. Later, when Adam and Eve made a bad choice, Creator sent them out into the real world, where all the evolving neanderthals and homo sapiens were contending for for food, shelter, power and just about everything. Survival of the fittest. . . the strongest, the powermongering magamaniacs. . . evolved into a situation that was friggin’ ridiculous, cruel, unjust . . . a far cry from what Creator had originally intended. So much for free will! Creator decided to wipe the slate and the surface of the earth clean. He chose water as his judgement medium. . . the old H2O compound, , , useful in so many applications. Creator doused the earth so thoroughly that the flood destroyed every living thing, except Noah’s ark and Noah and his family and creatures great and small that he had so judiciously loaded unto the ark. “Old Noah; he led a quiet life. . . always tried to do right. He heard about the ones who rambled and strayed from the path. He never thought he’d live to see the freedom, never thought he’d live to see the day. . . ’til he turned around one day and had to say: It ain’t gonna rain no more!” After the flood, the earth and Noah made a good recovery. Hundreds of thousands of years went by. In 1923, poet Robert Frost froze fifty words into a classic poem; his musing about how the next worldwide disaster would happen. . . whether by extreme cold or extreme heat. But we know from the testimony of the Jesus’ closest companion, John, that the next apocalypse will be by fire. . . maybe something like the Hiroshima bomb, but with maga-MEGAton destructability. It won’t be a hurricane, or a Noah-era flood. It won’t be a water ending, because the Judge of mankind promised Noah that the worldwide flood would not happen again. Whatever happens. . . we know that the enemy, the one who screwed up Adam and Eve’s condo in the beginning is still, and always, trying to topple our efforts to do the right thing!

People get ready; there’s a train a’coming, picking up passengers who are bound for heaven! You don’t need no ticket; you just get on board the Gospel train. Believe in the Man who came and proved to the whole world, past and present, that He IS One with the Creator who was moving across the waters. . . and has kept them moving ever since His Son to walk on the water! And if you believe that, I’ve got some real estate in heaven I’ll share with you when I sail into that heavenly realm. Glass half-Full

North Carolina

When I was a teenager in the 1960’s, I had a record player that would spin black vinyl 33 rpm disks, sending musical waves like magic into my room so I could listen to Peter, Paul and Mary, or Judy Collins, or the Beatles, or Joan Baez. Joan, as an authentic folk singer, before folk was later merged into rock, sang a song called “East Virginia”, which included these words, “I was born in East Virginia; North Carolina I did roam; there I met a fair, pretty maiden; her name and age I never did know.” Later, much later, that’s exactly what I did, except I did know her name, and she has shared my name, Rowland, for 45 years. We passed that family name onto our son and two daughters. But anyway, getting back to my North Carolina memories. . . James Taylor came along at some moment in time with his song “Carolina on my mind”. That must have been the genesis of my decision to move there in 1974. Later, much later, our two daughters studied Journalism and University of North Carolina, Chapel. That was a year after our son joined the Duke blue devil brigade in Durham in the 1990’s. So, why North Carolina? While living on the gulf coast of Florida, back in ‘75, I saw a movie one night, “Where the Lilies Bloom”, about a family living in the mountains of North Carolina. I decided to move to that place, although I didn’t know much about it. One thing I did know, however, was that, back in the 1930’s, Thomas Wolfe had written the great American novel, Look Homeward Angel., a fictionalized autobiographical book about growing up in Asheville. So. . . long story short. . . that’s where I went, and stayed there until 1979. While working as a salesman for a printing company, I met the love of my life. Pat was a student at UNCAsheville. Her parents were living in Charlotte. Our frequent visits there provided an opportunity to become intimately familiar with the Queen City, named after the wife of King George III, the British monarch whose soldiers we had had to eject from America during our Revelation.

A little known fact about Mecklenburg County (greater Charlotte) is that the patriots there were the first Americans to write a declaration of Independence, even before we Americans all got together in Philadelphia to write the official, historic Declaration of Independence. Soon after Pat graduated from UNCA, we moved to Boone, where we’ve been ever since, except for a short two year experiment with coastal living in Wilmington in the mid ’80’s, which was very nice, but I guess we were born to be mountaineers, even though she was raised in New Jersey and I had emigrated from Louisiana. Boone is a town in the northwest corner, a few miles from Grandfather Mountain. I landed a job working with a crew of rodbusters to complete the Linn Cove Viaduct, the missing link of the Blue Ridge Parkway, which had not been completed back in the 1930’s.

One thing this is sure. The state of North Carolina is serious about literacy and education; that’s why we have campuses all over the state. . . Chapel Hill, Charlotte, Wilmington, including one in Boone named for our chosen region, Appalachian State University. Today we are relaxing on an Atlantic beach, on Oak Island, 322 miles from our home in the Blue Ridge.

Listen to the song I sang about putting on my Murphy-to-Manteo shoes: careyrowland

Beer

When I was a teen, I spoke as a teen and acted as a teen; but when I became a man . . . . . I think that was long-about 1965, when I started high school. But by the time I was a senior in high school, 1969, I was 18 and I decided to start acting like a man . . . My friend Ronnie had an old blue Ford sedan. On those Friday nights when we didn’t have dates, Ronnie and Keith and I would go cruising around town, visiting the local bars. Since we were old enough, we’d visit the bars to sit around and act like grownups, swigging glasses of Budweiser or Schlitz, maybe a Falstaff . . . listening to the sound track. There were a lot of popular songs to be heard on those occasions. Where I come from, Louisiana, soul music was the preferred sound trick most of the time. . . Sam Cooke, Otis Redding, Bobby “Blue” Bland, The Supremes. the Four Tops, Elvis, Ray Charles, Marvin Gaye. Then the music scene changed. It was the era when the Beatles and Gerry and Pacemakers, Dave Clark Five started working their way into the bars’ soundtracks. But for some reason, my memory of those Friday adventures always brings to mind Creedence Clearwater Revival. . . on the sound track of whatever bar we happened to be visiting. . . Proud Mary, Born on the Bayou, Green River, Bad Moon Rising, Down on the Corner, Fortunate Son , etc. Today, August 18, 2026, I was having Deja Vu, while my friend Rick was giving me a tour of his Topsail Island Brewery . . . because the tavern sound track featured a playlist for our boomer generation, which was refreshing for an old guy like me to hear. So who shows up on the sound track (wouldn’t you know it?) . . . Creedence Clearwater Revival! Of course. So I comprehend that not much has changed in the bar scene since 1969—at least for old geezers like me and Rick. Even though Rick’s Topsail. Island Brewery was established in 2024. I’m here to tell you that they are true to the authentic bar scene of our generation. When my old friend Rick wheeled his orange Jeep into the back door entrance this morning, Rick was just checking on a few things. We walked in the back door, and I was able to see the guts—the heart and soul innards— of a real brewery

Then we traipsed through to the bar itself, and out the front entrance, onto a large outdoor deck, where, in the evening, customers would be tipping a few mugs, perhaps bringing in some take-out food from Rick’s Restaurant, which is on the other end of the parking lot.

Walking out of the bar area, traipsing along the outside, we looked down into the duck pond. . . a pleasant site for visitors to watch as they’re imbibing a pint of Rick’s brew hometown brew.

Later, in the evening, we visited the brewery again, to enjoy a brew or two. But my brew choice would not be the old standards of Bud or Schlitz. Nosirree. The beer of choice is the hometown favorite, “Topsail Island Brew” brewed and bottled in Sneads Ferry, North Carolina, just a mile or two up the road from Topsail Island and the the Atlantic coast. And then we traipsed on over to Rick’s Restaurant and enjoy the evening meal, where the Topsail brews are included on the menu. Glass half-Full

Heat

In the beginning of all things great and small, Creator flung stars and planets into the universe. The stars provided light and heat; and so our planet was lit up by a star which we call the sun. Along with the light, heat followed. As life developed on earth, men and women found great benefits in the heat and the light. But we learned, early on, that there must be limits to the heat and light. Light was nice for awhile, but after about twelve hours or so, it was better to take a break from the light, by living, moving and having our being in the cool of the eventing and the restful dark of the night. And fire is very useful, but we have to be careful with it, so it doesn’t go hog wild!

In other observations, it was also obvious that, with the light, came heat, which was also quite beneficial, most of the time. But there were limits to what men and women could tolerate. We’ve learned in thousands of years of life on this planet that all things are good in moderation, This principle certainly applies to our life routines and habits. For instance, Florida is nice, but it’s awfully hot down there, and Alaska is nice, but it gets very cold in winter. So plan your travels and your visits accordingly. Minnesota is nice, but so is Louisiana, So plan your vacations and visits accordingly. This hot/cold dichotomy applies in any household. Maybe we have air conditioning in summer, but long about October, we switch to the heaters. In human society, we also have similar dynamics. Some guys are hotheads, getting all worked up with madness over stuff that just happens. Other people are cool, taking everything in stride, like, “no problemo.” When I mention hotheads, I can think of a few hotheads I have known, but mainly, what comes to mind are a few leaders in world history who made life miserable for a lot of people—or even worse—they killed a lot of folks for no good reason. For example, hitler and stalin, both of them cruel and destructive. . . and then, if that weren’t bad enough, along come whacko gunmen who start blowing people away in some public place for no good reason, like a murderous marksman in a high tower. . . or vlad the mad putin in Ukraine. . . or jack the ripper or the Boston stranger… all of them hot-headed whackos! The ancient prophets spoke and wrote about this tendency of some men to get very destructive in their depraved attempt to rule, and then destroy the world and its people. I don’t know, but I been told—and I read it in the book— that in the future time, some self-obsessed whacko may take hold of some nukes and blow the world to smithereens. What’s really strange about that is that the scientists who understand that complex nuclear weaponry theorize that the destruction will come in widespread super-heat. But here’s the weird thing about it; they say that after it blows over (however the hell long that takes!) the ultimate result will be a “nuclear winter”! Say what? No sh**!

Not to worry, though. Worry is a rocking chair; you rock and rock, but get nowhere. I think the poet Frost had this world figured out, to a certain point: “Some say the world will end in fire, some say ice.” But I say fughedaboudit! Whatever! If it come, it do, either way. . . nothing I can do about it. However, when it all pans out, or even if none of that terrible stuff happens in my lifetime, I’m placing my faith and hope in the Son of Man who was creating with Father and Spirit, back in the day. . . the very first day. You know “In the beginning. . .” Look it up in the old book. Then turn to the gospels where he conquers death itself, and reveals the divine purpose for all that hot and cold throughout history. Then turn to the final chapters. Read about the fire that will conclude the history of this planet. This hot and cold on earth has been going on, for a long, long, long time. . .ever since Creator moved across the waters and proclaimed Light into existence, and then gave Man permission to take charge of this earth. Glass half-full.

Life and Death

Wandering lonely as a cloud . . . through the ravines and the peaks of this amazing life. . .pausing . looking more carefully into the forest, . . as leaves begin falling in August, the first volunteers in a wave of seasonal rearrangement. . . stooping to examine veins in the leaf, feeling the breeze that separates another leaf from its life-branch. The leaf drifts to forest floor, joining the multitude of last year’s leaves. . . bowing to their destiny of dirt, which nourished the tree from which it fell, and will serve to nourish the neighboring trees. . . we discern the balance between death and life.

We become aware of evidence of processes we do not fully understand; we reach out to touch the substance of eternal LIfe that we hope for. Changing direction, adjusting focus, the aging human frame considers the veins in his arm, performing their bloody duty, standing more pronounced, at age 75, beneath the skin, carrying precious fluid to the micro-universe of a mortal body, a human reaching and hoping for an immortal destiny. . . wandering, wondering, we discover evidence of ongoing life; we encounter in our soul evidence of eternal life hoped for, but not yet seen, sustained by a faith that there was one Christ who conquered death itself. . . you gotta believe.

To make a connection between what we see, hear, smell and . . . eternity, we comprehend . . . every moment of life is precious. . . every day presents new possibility for rejoicing in the new day, the present day, anticipating days ahead, whether here in the forest, or . . .

Look up at the sky. Prepare to ascend with the clouds, as the rain ascends to the clouds before it returns to earth again. Milk every moment of life before the silver cord is broken, before the golden bowl is broken, before your trunk is taken. Live life to the fullest. . .(s)he not busy being born is busy dyin’. Glass half-Full