MY NEW PEN PAL sent me this thank-you card and a “gratuity” for doing her a simple favor a few weeks ago.
By RAHN ADAMS
BOONE, N.C. (July 4, 2025) — Isn’t it great when someone — maybe even a complete stranger — does something that exceeds your expectations? That’s how I felt yesterday when I picked up the mail at the post office.
In last month’s column, I wrote about receiving someone else’s mail in error and deciding to do more than just dropping the envelope back in the outgoing mail slot. I’ve done that before and then have received the same piece of errant mail again and again.
But this appeared to be a birthday card or an invitation, and so I put it in another, larger envelope, addressed it legibly without the abbreviation that had confused the post office mail scanner, and sent it back across the state to Elizabethtown in Bladen County, not far from where Timberley and I used to live.
MAYBE MY NEW PEN PAL will get her greeting card without too much more delay, no thanks to the havoc Donald Trump has wreaked on the U.S. Post Office.
By RAHN ADAMS
MORGANTON, N.C. (June 10, 2025) — As we watch 79-year-old Donald Trump prepare to celebrate his own birthday with a taxpayer-funded, multimillion-dollar military parade in D.C. and a manufactured declaration of martial law in L.A., let’s take stock of where we’ve been and where we’re going.
Remember the old campaign question: Are you better off now than you were four years ago?
Well, how about this: Are you better off now than you were six months ago — you know, before Trump took office again?
By any objective and reasonable measure — egg prices, inflation rates, constitutional rights and freedoms — an honest American’s answer to both questions would be Oh, hell no.
WAITING FOR A TABLE to celebrate a good doctor’s visit, we traveled back in time this afternoon in the lobby of an old favorite restaurant in Charlotte.
By RAHN ADAMS
MORGANTON, N.C. (May 28, 2025) — Since May 2017, my sweetheart and I have spent considerable time at Levine Cancer Institute in Charlotte—our stays thankfully less extended and less frequent as the years have passed. We were there today for what has become an annual visit for tests and consultations. We are truly thankful.
At the start of this journey, Timberley had to endure multiple scans and painfully relentless blood testing and radical surgery that would have made even the patient Job cuss. This morning, however, she had three quick and relatively painless tests done. Later she met again briefly with the surgeon who had saved her life eight years ago. Though inconvenient, today’s trip back to the huge medical center was a tolerable and not entirely unpleasant reunion of sorts.
My job all along has been to provide support services for our shared endeavor—driving us from Boone or Morganton to Charlotte, often in the predawn hours; sitting patiently in waiting rooms while appointments are met, usually masked to keep from catching others’ viruses (which has happened, anyway); and driving us back home through summer heat, winter cold, and any type of traffic, without cursing the transportation gods (the auto pilot?) too often or too loudly.
Admittedly, I’ve had the easier job. I hope I haven’t fallen short of expectations—or at least not too much.
When I was a school teacher, I had the misfortune of being harassed by a student who spent several days and nights placing dozens of prank telephone calls to our home.
This was before we had Caller ID, so I had to dial a certain code after each call so that it could later be traced. As a result, the prankster was eventually arrested and prosecuted.
And we signed up for Caller ID and Call Blocking on our home telephone — a landline phone back then, of course. That was that — but not the whole story.
Soon after the kid was arrested, the pressure on me from his parents, their attorney, my principal and even our school resource officer to be forgiving of the poor, misunderstood teenager began.
At the time, I corresponded with novelist and poet Reynolds Price, who was also a professor at Duke University. Mr. Price told me about being harassed himself by a student, and he encouraged me to stay strong and not give in to the pressure tactics of those who didn’t want me to hold the boy accountable for his crimes against me and my wife.
In one email, Mr. Price also noted that “my friend Eudora Welty” had been victimized by telephone harassment and that she had made sure her harasser was prosecuted. Maybe you know, maybe you don’t that Eudora Welty, author of great short stories like “Why I Live at the P.O.,” was a kind, sweet lady. But even she was harassed by a jerk over the phone.
Which leads me to why I went to the P.O. today and what happened while I was there…
THIS WAS THE STANDING HEAD of my weekly column in my first full-time newspaper job. It was in the early 1980s at The Valdese News, owned by The News Herald of Morganton and Park Communications.
By RAHN ADAMS
Cutting to the chase, I’m not a fan — of social media, that is. Never have been.
I know that “social media” can be broadly defined and include platforms other than the three or four that most smartphone owners and tablet users prefer. I’m referring primarily to Twitter/X, Facebook, and Instagram, the ones I’m most familiar with.
I’ve never used Snapchat or TikTok, and I don’t intend to. I’ve used YouTube for years, but I go there for the how-to and music videos, not for the inane comments from viewers. I recently logged onto Bluesky, but I know little about it, as in whether I like using it or not.
In mid-November, Timberley shows off a proof copy of “Trouble Shooters” before she and Rahn begin final editing of the young adult novel.
BOONE, N.C. (Nov. 26, 2024) – Local authors Rahn and Timberley Adams have released the second book in their series of young adult novels focusing on teen living and high school sports.
Published by Gaillardia Press, this second installment is entitled Tales of the Barf Table, Book Two: Trouble Shooters, about girls’ basketball and boys’ wrestling. The uplifting and often humorous story also explores teenage issues such as learning whom to trust and whom to love.
“We’re really pleased with this story,” said Timberley Adams. “It offers positive alternatives for dealing with tough situations that many young people face. That’s what we want readers to see in all these books—good role models.”
The release of Trouble Shooters follows the January 2024 publication of the first book in the series, From the Gridiron to the Fire, mainly about high school football. Both novels feature a group of misfits who sit together in their school cafeteria at what other kids call the Barf Table.
From the book’s back cover: “Ninth grader Leah Russo has finally found her place at preppy Arbor High—not as a cheerleader or basketball player, but as a sportswriter and photographer for the school newspaper. Still dealing with the death of her big brother, everybody’s hero, Leah accepts help from her diverse circle of friends….”
Trouble Shooters begins at Thanksgiving and ends on Valentine’s Day, and follows the wins and losses of Leah and the Barf Table gang in the school lunchroom, on the basketball court and on the wrestling mat.
“We’re already working on Book Three,” said Rahn Adams. “It’ll close out the three-part series but also the school year at Arbor High, covering boys’ baseball and girls’ softball, as well as other spring sports and events.”
The Tales of the Barf Table series and two other children’s titles written solely by Timberley Adams are all published by the couple’s imprint, Gaillardia Press. Timberley’s two children’s books are Turtle Beach (2019) and Henry Heron Finds His Home (2022).
The Adamses also are working on a 20th-anniversary edition of their first novel, Night Lights; or, Golf, the Blues, and the Brown Mountain Light, first published in December 2004 by Parkway Publishers, Inc.
Both Rahn and Timberley Adams retired as teachers in Watauga County, after also teaching in Brunswick County. They also coached athletics in both counties. Rahn won tennis coach-of-the-year honors in both the Northwestern and Waccamaw Conferences.
In addition, the couple have extensive experience in radio and newspaper journalism, having won awards from the North Carolina Press Association, Radio-Television News Directors Association of the Carolinas, and the North Carolina Association of Educators (for outstanding education coverage).
Tales of the Barf Table, Book Two: Trouble Shooters is available from online booksellers and by request from local bookstores. For more information, contact the authors at P.O. Box 1382, Boone, NC 28607.
The above image is from a short video I’ve never released of the last time I heard my mother play her piano, the one I’m working on now in my 3-Minute Vespers series. The song she worked hard to play was her own tune, “The Lost Sheep.”
I’ve never shared the video of Mom because she fumbled with the chords and messed up some of the fingerings — that is, she didn’t play with the confidence and skill she’d always had at the keyboard as a church pianist. I’ve never been that good, so I don’t mind showing a video of myself hitting some sour notes.
In comments elsewhere, I’ve noted that this song is kind of odd. The verses and the chorus are in different time signatures, for one thing. By the time I learned to play the song and noticed the time change, Mom couldn’t explain why she’d written the tune that way. When I included “The Lost Sheep” in a medley of gospel songs and arranged it for guitar, I played the song in 4/4 time from start to finish. I think it sounds better my way — but I know it’s still Mom’s song.
Also, the lyrics don’t make sense, especially in the repetitive lines of the chorus. I won’t go into detail with that criticism. However, it’s probably the main reason that Stamps-Baxter Music rejected it. I suspect the song was also too long, with the aforementioned time change and its overall faulty construction to blame (each verse contains a “bridge” to the chorus).
But I enjoyed playing it, and Mom liked hearing it. Here’s the link to “The Lost Sheep.”
I FINALLY GOT INSIDE the old K&C and learned something about it that gave me a different outlook on my efforts to service and tune this piano — especially after doing some reading online. In the end, this project is yet another learning experience, and that’s how I plan to continue approaching it.
This weekend’s featured hymn is James C. Moore’s “Where We’ll Never Grow Old” in The Broadman Hymnal, another of the tunes that I used to play whenever I visited my late mother. I’ve always loved this song’s melody and the arrangement’s simple harmonies, but the feeling it evokes grows stronger with the passage of time.
BESIDES THE FACT that I misuse the term “incidental” and “incidentals” throughout this video, I’m happy with it. My piano playing is improving — I hit only one wrong note — and I’m learning how to use the video editor more efficiently.
Something I should explain further from the video is that I’d play this song for my late mom when I wanted to see if she was awake, as she often listened with her eyes closed (in last week’s video, you heard a possible reason why she couldn’t bear to watch me play).
If I didn’t play a particular embellishment that she liked in a particular place in the song, she’d hum the flourish as she would have played it herself. Maybe she thought she was teaching me to play it. Anyway, sometimes I purposely didn’t play the frill until my last time through the song, just to see if she was alert enough to hum her part, and she always did, though sometimes I had to hesitate at that spot before moving on.
AS THE SERIES TITLE INDICATES, these videos—and their explanations—will be brief. The series itself, however, may take me a long time to complete, depending on how good I become at piano tuning and service.
I’m not worried about how well (or not) I play, because I’m not the star of this show; rather, it’s my late mother’s 1964 Kohler & Campbell console piano. This isn’t the first piano that I learned to play, but it’s the one I’ve played the longest and the one I grew to love after Mom quit forcing me to take piano lessons.
In later episodes, I’ll talk about the Kohler & Campbell brand—which was local, by the way—and about this specific piano’s history in my family. Also, I’ll feature a different hymn or sacred song in each episode to help measure my progress repairing the instrument. I’m not sure, though, how I’ll play a song if I take something apart and can’t get it back together right away. It’ll be a challenge.
Here’s a link to the first episode, “Trust and Obey” (click on the song title). Happy Mother’s Day weekend.
