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By RAHN ADAMS

Next Tuesday night it’ll all be over but the shouting, as they say. I ain’t talking about the thrilling World Series, of course, because it ended early this morning in Cleveland, and everybody there was a winner for sure. I wish I could say the same about the presidential race that may also be decided in Ohio.

I’m going to keep this essay short because, Lord knows, I’ve been sick and tired of the 2016 presidential election for weeks now. Maybe I should use capital letters with that phrase—2016 presidential election—but it’s been a lower-case kind of campaign on both sides, so I’ll go with that.

No matter what any poll or pundit says, no matter how many votes, like mine, have already been cast, I’m afraid this election is a toss-up. It could go either way—like last night’s Game 7 of the World Series—partly because election night coverage of a landslide really doesn’t keep viewers glued to the screen the way a good nail-biter does. Be prepared to stay up late again. It, too, could go extra innings.

Continue reading E Pluribus Unum Means ‘Out of Many, One’

By RAHN ADAMS

If you’re a sports fan, you must be in heaven this weekend. All three major American spectator sports—baseball, football and basketball—are underway right now. Even if you can’t attend in person, you can watch the games on TV without too much trouble.

Meanwhile, if you’re an old NASCAR Winston Cup fan like me—one who doesn’t have access to all the sports channels on cable or satellite TV, that is—you may as well be sitting out in the middle of an Iowa cornfield, in a Field of Dreams sort of way. “Is this heaven?” the ghost of Dale Earnhardt might ask as he plops down into my recliner.

“No,” I’d say. “It’s pure hell. We don’t have cable.”

Continue reading Except for NASCAR, It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year for Sports TV Viewers

By RAHN ADAMS

He has orange hair. He sniffs too much. He can’t keep his tiny paws off the girls. He’s a lurker, always peering over one particular female’s shoulder. And we don’t think he’s very smart—at least, he isn’t going out of his way to show his intelligence. But the orange-haired guy is entertaining. He really is.

She is small and fiesty. But she’s smart, really smart. And she is so very determined—when she wants something, she never gives up until she gets it. She’s been ill lately. At first, we didn’t think we’d like her because she was always in trouble, especially with computers, but we’ve come to like her.

The two of them are vying to succeed the coolest cat to ever reside in our white house. He was larger than life. He was unlike any other—the first of his kind—but it was part of the reason we liked him. He was easy-going most of the time but assertive when he had to be. He was our favorite of all time.

Continue reading He Has Orange Hair; She Is Small and Feisty

By RAHN ADAMS

I don’t know about you, but I’m disappointed in Franklin Graham these days. He certainly isn’t his father, who has been a spiritual advisor to every Democratic President since Truman.

I’ll pause a second to let that sink in—a spiritual advisor to every Democrat in the White House from Harry S “The Buck Stops Here” Truman to Barack H. “Yes We Can!” Obama. And that even includes William J. “I Did Not Have Sexual Relations With That Woman” Clinton.

But did you notice what I just did? Yeah, it was kind of sneaky. If I were reading this, and I didn’t know any better, or if I weren’t reading carefully, or if I were easily confused by the English language—like, say, by the subjunctive mood or by pesky subordinate clauses, intercalary phrases, and obscure words or even catch phrases that a writer can throw at a reader—then I might think that the sneaky ol’ writer of this essay is saying that the Rev. Billy Graham, Franklin’s daddy, has been playing partisan politics and has favored Democrats over Republicans. But that’s not true.

Continue reading About Franklin Graham and the Unchained Elephant, With Respect to Both Man and Beast

By RAHN ADAMS

I don’t say this often—because prayer should be private, not publicized—but my thoughts tonight are with my old friends on the N.C. coast. I hope to God that Hurricane Matthew loops out to sea before hitting my favorite place on earth.

In the fall of 1981, I visited the Wilmington, N.C., area for the first time and fell in love with it. My best friend then, who was a student at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, had been telling me for a couple of years that “God is alive and well, and lives at Wrightsville Beach.” He was right.

After returning home from that weekend trip, I wrote a column about it for The Valdese News. The article was later reprinted by my favorite “big-city” newspaper, the Wilmington Morning Star. I love that name—Morning Star—partly because my favorite philosopher used it in the final sentence of Walden, my favorite book.

Continue reading God Is Alive and Well on the N.C. Coast

By RAHN ADAMS

You’ll forgive me, I hope, if this column isn’t funny. After last week’s serious essay, I wanted to write something lighthearted and entertaining this week—and I did, I think. But as the preacher of Ecclesiastes says, “There’s a time and place for everything, and then there’s not,” or something to that effect. Or maybe that was my old senior English teacher.

I originally wrote a long, waggish column about that—not about old English teachers like me, but about my old days at Hibriten High School in Lenoir. After all, it’s homecoming there this Friday night—Hibriten’s 50th homecoming, in fact—and I thought it would be fun to write about what defined me as a high school student in the mid-1970s—you know, the noun that filled in the blank in the old Q-and-A, “Oh, him? He’s a(n) _____.”

Me? I was a band member.

Continue reading A Band Member’s Second Thoughts on Homecomings

By RAHN ADAMS

Something happened last Sunday night for the first time—for me, anyway. No, not making one bag of pork rinds last the whole Sunday Night Football game. I got myself blocked on Facebook for arguing about Colin Kaepernick.

Now, the person who blocked me was a perfect stranger before we started exchanging opinions last weekend, even though he or she apparently was a friend of several friends of mine—and, of course, by friend, I’m talking about Facebook friends, which is often a dubious term at best.

Also, this individual must have been so tightly wound on Sunday evening—there was a full moon last weekend, after all—that when I said, basically, that I disagreed with his or her position and that I found absolutely no validity in it—in almost those very words—he or she blocked me, then went on about his or her socially-mediated business.

I guess ignorance can be bliss, even on Facebook. Or, maybe, especially on Facebook. Continue reading ​The Kaepernick Question: Where Do I Stand?

By RAHN ADAMS

After last weekend’s Historic Morganton Festival, Timberley and I had to watch our step on our evening walks downtown. For a couple of days, gobs of gum, shards of glass and doggy IEDs littered some of the sidewalks on our usual route.

If you’re wondering, that’s Impromptu Excremental Doo. And, yes, I hate getting it on my shoes worse than anything. So now I carry a tactical flashlight on our zero-dark-thirty patrols around the Historic District—just for self-defense, mind you.

Last weekend our schedule didn’t allow us to attend the Friday and Saturday evening concerts that attracted the largest crowds downtown, but we did manage to walk through the festival booths on the courthouse square and on Union, Sterling and Green Streets around noon on Saturday. It was gratifying to see so many folks downtown, even though attendance seemed down somewhat.

Continue reading Leave the Gum, Take the Funnel Cake

By RAHN ADAMS

Last week Timberley and I celebrated Labor Day right, by attending the Hickory (N.C.) Crawdads’ season-ending game at L.P. Frans Stadium with friends. Thanks to my month-old low-carb, low-sugar diet, I couldn’t enjoy a dog and a beer like many baseball fans, but the salad and water that I had at the Crawdad Café was just what the doctor ordered, literally.

The older I get, the more I love baseball. Now, before you quit reading because you need to go finish painting your “Keep Pounding, Panthers!” banner for our regional NFL team’s first home game, rest assured that I like most sports, played several in my youth on organized squads—football, baseball, basketball—and even coached high school tennis and basketball teams, earning conference tennis coach-of-the-year honors four times.

Admittedly, I myself wasn’t a star athlete—relatively few individuals are—and, in fact, I got cut from more teams than I made in high school. But that’s another essay for another day. As a child who would eventually grow to a towering 5-foot-9, my favorite sport was basketball, and I attended every home game at Salem High School in Morganton, N.C. Back then, my single goal in life was to be a Salem Tiger and play for coach Wilton Daves. As far as I was concerned, he was Dean Smith.

I loved those silky white jerseys with black numbers and gold trim, and the matching mid-thigh length shorts. My heroes were high school cagers Steve Garrison, Dickie Burnette, Al Steiner, Bobby Miller and Kent Poteat, among others. I celebrated when they won—like when Salem beat Oak Hill for the Skyline Conference tournament title—and I cried when they lost. It was a big deal for the nine-year-old me. Continue reading Where Have You Gone, Slats Ledbetter?

By RAHN ADAMS

Back when Timberley and I worked together in the newspaper business, one of our all-time favorite bosses was an affable man who still managed to get under our skins now and then.
In paying us every two weeks, our boss also printed memos on our paystubs, whether it was to wish an employee happy birthday, to encourage us to have fun at some local event that weekend, or, my favorite, to remind us, “The eagle flies today!”

That phrase has stuck with me for a quarter century even though I’m now receiving pension checks at the end of each month.  The eagle still flies, just not quite as high or as far.

But even our old boss would have to admit that some of his tongue-in-cheek paycheck notations could be just a bit irksome to hard-working employees, especially after a long week.  The best one in that category always showed up on the payday before Labor Day, a holiday that our newspaper did not observe, at least as far as we laborers were concerned.

“Celebrate Labor Day!” the memo exclaimed, before ending with the zinger, “Work hard.”

Yeah, we chuckled about it—the first year that our payday fell on the Friday before Labor Day.  It wasn’t quite so amusing the second and third years.

Continue reading Celebrate Labor Day But Don’t Work Too Hard