Timberley before our appointment last week in Charlotte
What you’re about to read certainly wasn’t what Timberley and I had envisioned for this column last September when I started writing it. We wanted it to be about the ordinary lives of two recent retirees from public education—our own attempt at “half-fast living” after years of watching our working lives fly by largely out of our control.
That was our intent. Instead, there is nothing half-fast about what’s been happening to us for the past eight weeks. For the foreseeable future, this space will be used hopefully—and I use that adverb there deliberately—to keep our friends and extended family members as informed as they wish to be about a serious situation involving Timberley’s health. Continue reading Weekend Update: Sunday, May 20, 2017
Another return letter from Sen. Tillis — ironically, more proof that he isn’t responsive to his constituents
By RAHN ADAMS
Maybe you’ve noticed, maybe you haven’t, that I’ve been quiet for the past few weeks. Timberley and I have been busy with some other pursuits and, frankly, I’m also reassessing my own personal use of the Internet in general and social media in particular.
Maybe a better way of expressing my dilemma is, just how much information of any kind do we really need, whether we’re consuming it or producing it? And if we can live happily and safely without all that is the Internet, good and bad, then why do we as a society continue to use and abuse it?
Before out-patient surgery and after two failed attempts to start her IV
I’m certainly not a Luddite opposed to all technology. Thanks to technological advances in medicine, for example, Timberley’s recent out-patient surgery to remove a large kidney stone from her bladder was successful, safer and much less complicated than it might have been even 10 years ago. For that, we are thankful.
Even a pansy can be scary depending upon how one looks at it.
By RAHN ADAMS
Life has been anything but “half fast” over the past couple of weeks. Since it hasn’t slowed down yet, I’ll try to catch you up in short order on what’s happening with us these days.
In addition to helping extended family members with their medical situations, we’ve been dealing with one of our own. Last week we were less than thrilled to view the ultrasound image of the Baby Huey of kidney stones. He wasn’t bouncing, either, which could make his birth somewhat difficult. Please keep Timberley in mind this week as she undergoes whatever procedure is necessary to remove the stone and relieve the pain she has been experiencing.
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My two-page response from Rep. Foxx
I finally received U.S. Representative Virginia Foxx’s response to the letter I mailed to her on January 23rd, the Monday after President Donald J. Trump’s inauguration. Though her letter was dated March 8th, I didn’t receive it until the last week of the month. I had expressed concern over growing support for charter schools at the expense of public schools since Mrs. Foxx is, in fact, chairwoman of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce. I had also stated my concern about Mr. Trump’s ill treatment of the news media and about his dishonesty, as I encouraged Mrs. Foxx to support our First Amendment freedom of the press, and “to hold Mr. Trump and his staff to the truth, and to demand that he stop lying to the American people.”
“For as the body without the spirit is dead, so faith without works also is dead.”
—James 2:26 (KJV)
As part of our Lenten observance, my wife and I decided to bolster our faith by studying devotionals from The Upper Room each day. I’m used to daily devotions because I grew up as the son of a Southern Baptist minister, and my family used Our Daily Bread religiously between breakfast and whatever else we did every day of the week. Timberley and her parents were United Methodists but infrequently sat down together at home to read the Bible and a brief devotional. At my house, the readings were followed by a familiar hymn and then a closing prayer, with each family member taking his or her turn praying out loud. In Timberley’s family, talks with God were private, as they should be.
With a nod to Charles Dickens, the past week held the best of times and came close to including the worst of times for Timberley and me as we managed to keep living in two western North Carolina towns at once—one, our hometown; the other, the college town where we worked for two decades before retiring as public school teachers last summer.
Blowing Rock VFD at the Green Mountain Overlook on Friday
This arrangement makes our answers to the questions “Where do you live?” and “What’s your home address?” difficult to answer, especially when they’re being asked by 9-1-1 operators, firemen, tow-truck drivers and auto dealership service managers. Thank goodness for cell phones and one number that fits all situations (I mean that in a couple of respects)—unless you’re on a mountain in one county and the nearest cell tower that your emergency call can hit is off the mountain in the next county.
Yes, it was an eventful week—so much to share, so little time to share it. So, with another nod, this time to Saturday Night Live’s team of crack newscasters, here’s our Weekend Update:
RAHN – Good evening, everyone. This is Weekend Update for Saturday, March 11, 2017, the end of yet another week in the Post-Truth Era of modern American life. Here’s Timberley with our lead story.
TIMBERLEY – Thanks, Rahn. A carefree drive on the Blue Ridge Parkway almost ended in disaster Friday afternoon for two, uh, Burke, no, two Watauga—yeah, we’ll go with that—two, Watauga County residents, as the gas tank of their 2004 Jeep Liberty broke loose and spilled its contents at an overlook halfway up the Grandfather Mountain escarpment. No one was injured, and no fire resulted. Blowing Rock volunteer firemen answered the call to spread oil-drying compound on the spill. Back to you, Rahn.
A late winter day at Forest Hill Cemetery in Morganton
By RAHN ADAMS
For various reasons I’ve been thinking about mortality lately—you know, about life and death.
FUMC of Morganton
Maybe it was from sitting in the sound booth last week during my church’s Ash Wednesday service and listening to our minister murmur, “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return,” time after time after time through my headphones as he marked gray X’s on congregants’ foreheads. Each of them heard that mantra only once; I heard it about a hundred times—over and over and over. But I’m OK.
Ash Wednesday—or, more popularly in some circles, the day after Mardi Gras—is the start of Lent, the 40 days not counting Sundays when many Christians including us Methodists observe the last days of Jesus’ life before his death and resurrection on the first Easter Sunday morning 2,000 years ago. What Did Jesus Do? He lived. He died. He lives again. It’s a good story, maybe even the greatest ever told.
Yes, yes. I see your hand raised and hear your, “But … but …,” and I know that everything is debatable nowadays, that we even argue about the price of butter in Japan, and that now we have to worry about fake news and alternative facts, and about what he tweeted and what she said and what they posted, and about who really believes anything anymore. And then there’s Hollywood. Don’t get me started.
Until President Donald J. Trump called journalists “the enemy of the American people” earlier this week, I had forgotten just how adversarial the news media, the press, could—and should—be.
‘Standing head’ of my Brunswick Beacon column in the late 1980s
Well, no, I hadn’t really forgotten. It’s been around 27 years since I was last paid to report the news, and as time has passed I’ve tended to mentally downplay the more stressful aspects of being a small-town newsman and have focused on mainly the more enjoyable duties, the more fun or more adventurous assignments, and the many positive relationships I experienced as a newspaper sports stringer, staff writer and photographer, and as a radio reporter and news director—a career that encompassed most of the 1980s, basically Ronald Reagan’s two terms and George H.W. Bush’s first couple of years. But I remember those days well.
It was one thing to hear Trump’s self-serving and unconstitutional indictment of the press reported on TV; it was something else to then be attacked on Facebook by an ignorant Trump troll simply because I had posted a comment supporting the Federal Communication Commission’s now-defunct Fairness Doctrine, a policy that Reagan ended in 1987 around the time that I transitioned, shall we say, from radio news back to newspapers. (If you’ve worked in radio and haven’t been fired at least once, then you really didn’t work in radio—or didn’t get the full monty, at least. But that’s another column for another week.)
My response from U.S. Sen. Thom Tillis, winner of my recent letter-writing derby
By RAHN ADAMS
I’ve got to give our junior U.S. Senator Thom Tillis credit. When it comes to answering letters from constituents, his Washington office will certainly get back to you in short order. Well, sort of.
That’s more than I can say for senior U.S. Senator Richard Burr and 5th District Congresswoman Virginia Foxx. I’m still waiting to hear back from them. On Jan. 23rd, I mailed four first-class letters to Washington—two letters to Mrs. Foxx, one from me and the other from my wife Timberley; and a letter each to Mr. Burr and Mr. Tillis. I also had mailed a letter to President Donald J. Trump three days earlier on Inauguration Day, and I haven’t gotten his response, either. I guess his staff has been busy.
Please stare at this comfort food for a minute or two before reading the attached column. It certainly raised my mood on Tuesday (as well as my cholesterol level).
By RAHN ADAMS
When North Carolina’s U.S. senators—Richard Burr and Thom Tillis—both voted Tuesday to confirm the highly-unqualified Betsy DeVos as America’s next education secretary, even I could see that the fix was in and that all this political foolishness will continue at least until the next election in two years.
You can define that term—political foolishness—however you please. There’s plenty of madness and plenty of blame to go around, whether we’re talking about people in Washington, D.C., or Raleigh, N.C., or on our own Facebook pages. Most of us can’t help but watch this absurd reality show—Survivor: America—and then participate either by playing in person at political rallies and protest marches, or by endlessly critiquing the winners and losers on social media from the comfort of home.
Yes, I plead guilty. Sometimes I just can’t help myself, for all the good doing anything does nowadays. Right is wrong, and left is right. Or the left isn’t right because the right isn’t wrong, and ne’er the twain shall meet. Confused? Yes? No? Well, then, can we just agree to disagree? How ’bout that? Feel better?
Public libraries are the ‘great equalizers of knowledge.’
By RAHN ADAMS
I don’t know about you, but I’m starting to hate my smart phone. And my tablet computer. Come to think of it, I don’t like this laptop I’m using right now too much, either.
What’s my problem? Well, for one, I think I’m addicted to the Internet—not just to social media, but to the virtual rabbit hole that is the World Wide Web. I used to spend hours at a time at a computer back when I was a newspaper reporter and later a technical writer. On my time off all those years ago, I’d even work on that novel that was going to win a Pulitzer Prize (in my dreams) and stare at a computer screen a few hours longer just to make sure I was near-sighted.
“Those glasses make you look smart,” Timberley said as I modeled the various styles of eyewear in the showroom mirrors—thick safety rims, thin wire rims, no rims, horned rims. “Well, kind of.”
“Really?” I asked, then turned to the white-coated optician. “I’ll take this pair.” I need all the help I can get when it comes to appearing intelligent.
But as it turns out, I’ve been getting too much help from the Internet with looking and feeling stupid. It was an evil plot. Now I get very little writing done because it’s too easy for my truncated attention span to be hijacked by cyberspace or waylaid by the Web. Damn you, Al Gore.
