Take No Chances: Eat Your Black-Eyed Peas and Collard Greens

By RAHN ADAMS

Yes, 2016 has sucked out loud, and I won’t even try to list all the celebrity deaths that have scarred the past year for our celebrity-driven culture. I also won’t note the death of civility in public and political discourse, thanks in large part to social media’s prominence in our nascent “post-truth” civilization.

And I won’t say anything disrespectful about Donald J. Trump, except that he is the perfect president-elect for the glass-half-empty class of people we have become. He’s our latest model American, I guess, until we’re at least half full again and can take more pleasurable roads than the expressway to perdition.

Yeah, I’m just trumpin’ with you.

That particular metaphor works with either water glasses or automobile gas tanks, since we’ll soon be able to measure our satisfaction with Trump’s presidency by how high or low gas prices go. Isn’t that how we decide how good the President is—by how fat or thin our wallets are? It’s the economy, right?

I’m wondering, though, if we’ll also judge Trump’s leadership by the availability of .22-caliber long rifle cartridges at Walmart. Gun people know what I mean. Once President Obama is gone, wascally wabbits and even mockingbirds better watch out because we won’t have to keep hoarding ammo.

No, at our house, 2016 was a bad year for reasons altogether unrelated to losing famous entertainers and infamous political campaigns. This circuit around the sun, which we complete Saturday night at the stroke of 12 o’clock, will go down as one of my worst years so far—and I’ve had some pretty bad ones.

Twelve months ago Timberley and I celebrated the start of 2016 in Charlotte. We attended a nostalgic Spongetones concert and New Year’s Eve party at the venerable Double Door Inn and then shared an incomparable soul food brunch the next morning at Mert’s Heart & Soul uptown. Great music. Great meal.

But from what had happened in between, we should have seen the bad year coming. As it turned out, all the ham hocks, collard greens, cooked cabbage, black-eyed peas and cornbread we ate at Mert’s that day had no apparent effect on the year ahead—unless, I guess, they kept it from being even worse.

Whenever we visit a big city—and, yes, that includes Charlotte in my book—we try to leave our car parked and then either walk or use public transportation. So last New Year’s Eve we took the LYNX light rail and Gold Line trolley from our hotel uptown to the Double Door on Charlottetowne Avenue.

Even though the trolley crosses Charlottetowne as it rattles toward its terminus three blocks away near Presbyterian Hospital, we’d had to disembark earlier at the stop in the middle of the Central Piedmont Community College campus. It was the closest stop to the legendary bar, maybe two blocks away.

Getting to the party was easy enough. Getting back home—to our uptown hotel—was the problem. But not for the reason you might suspect. We both were as sober as, if not judges, then two old high school teachers who didn’t want alcohol-related charges on their permanent records before they could retire.

To make a long story short, we had been assured—twice, by different LYNX employees—that the trolley would run until 1 a.m. that night. We left the music hall just after midnight and reached our trolley stop after our 10-minute hike. But did the trolley ever come? Or the taxi we called? Nope.

So we started walking in the cold, just like a couple of other folks we’d met that night—two homeless people, not another pair of stranded New Year’s Eve revelers like us. About halfway back, we managed to hail a CATS bus. The driver let us board even though we were nowhere near a regular stop.

I won’t suggest that our transit hiccup in Charlotte on January 1, 2016, compared in any way with the homelessness we saw that same night or with the dire troubles that Charlotteans endured in September. On a 10-point pain scale, our situation barely moved the needle past “2 – Minor Annoyance.”

I certainly won’t pretend that our problem that night—or, for that matter, any difficulty I experienced in 2016—in any way compared to the serious illnesses or untimely deaths this year of several old friends and family members, none of whom were or are celebrities, except to those of us who love them.

And I won’t act like missing the uptown trolley after midnight on not-yet-mean streets said anything about the impending derailment of the political process that we all gawked at this past year. Why not? Because missing the trolley wasn’t that bad, really. Neither was getting snubbed by the taxi service.

Now, if we had missed the bus, too … that could have been a problem. But maybe that’s the lesson to be learned—that we all can recover from just about anything as long as we’re left with life and relative good health. Just don’t miss the bus when it shows up unexpectedly at that intersection. Pay attention.

If you’ve read this far, Timberley and I wish you a happy, healthy, safe and prosperous 2017. We’ll be staying at home this year—on New Year’s Eve, that is. And to be on the safe side, please remember to eat your black-eyed peas and collard greens. We certainly will, whether it actually helps or not.