About Time

By Jim Dodson

A while back, my beloved wristwatch of many years mysteriously disappeared.

On one level, the loss wasn’t such a big a deal. It was, after all, an inexpensive wristwatch – some might even say cheap – a Timex “Expedition” model that set me back only about fifty bucks during a two-for-one Black Friday sale at Belk department store many years back.

At that time I kept one Expedition and gave the other to my college-boy son, who as it happens had just broken the fine Swiss Army watch I’d owned for several years but passed along to him for safe keeping.

My history of watch-ownership, you see, is a fairly checkered affair, littered with various costly broken or missing timepieces, beginning with the beautiful engraved Seiko chronometer my parents gave me for college graduation that somehow abandoned my wrist on a pilgrimage across Europe, never to be seen again. Over the next few decades it was followed by a succession of fine watches including several Swiss Army numbers I either managed to break or lose in ever creative ways.

Then there was the perilous close call that happened on a beautiful Saturday morning at London’s famous Portobello Road marketplace when I happened across a vendor of antique watches who showed me a beautiful, fully-restored “wartime” Rolex bearing the emblem of the U.S Eighth Army Air Corps in which my old man served during the war. It was an exquisite watch and a bargain at only one hundred quid or so.

In a rare burst of common sense, however, recalling my history of unintentionally losing or destroying innocent timepieces, I concluded in the nick of time that the Rolex of my dreams might well have survived a world war but probably wouldn’t last long on the arm of yours truly. And so, reluctantly, I passed it up.

That’s why the first Timex Expedition I happened upon over a decade ago was such nice discovery: simple, handsome, rugged, reliable and – best of all — cheap to replace when the inevitable happened. As the company’s famous slogan promised: “It takes a licking and keeps on ticking.”

It was also a nostalgic window into my childhood, conjuring memories of the iconic Timex TV spots I always found so entertaining during which John Cameron Swayze – former news broadcaster and game show panelist — subjected Timex watches to various creative “torture tests” like being sent over Niagara Falls in a barrel, attached to the churning blades of a speeding boat motor, put through a washing machine or worn by slugger Mickey Mantle in batting practice.

Once upon a time, Timex was the flagship of American-made affordable watches. Such colorful theatrics made it America’s bestselling watch brand in the dawning space age before digital everything, bargain-priced between $9.95 and $16.99.

The first Timex Expedition I purchased lasted five years but vanished during a research trip to Africa. While wading across a shallow river where crocodiles were rumored to circulate, the pin holding the watch to the strap slipped out of the socket and I found only a bare arm by the other side of the river. Picturing the wily old croc from Peter Pan with the clock ticking in his stomach, I chose not to go back and hunt for my lost Expedition on the river’s bottom.

Back home in America, I set off one afternoon to various shops and department store looking for the same model, figuring that any watch that gave me such loyal service for less than fifty bucks a year was a small price to pay for being on time.

At Belk, I was dismayed to learn the store no longer carries Timex. “I think it’s gone a little down-market,” was how the watch counter clerk politely termed it with a gentle sniff, offering to show me several higher-priced Bulovas and Seiko models, also something called a Fossil watch that looked like something that would require platform heels and a pair of glittery oversized Elton John eyeglasses to complete the ensemble. The only watch that even remotely resembled my beloved lost Expedition was a handsome but pricey Citizen timepiece three times the price tag, though with a ten-year warranty.

I thanked the clerk for her time and said I had my heart set on another Timex Expedition.

“You might try Wal-Mart,” she said.

So I did, discouraged to think how far mighty Timex must have fallen. But even Wal-Mart was a no-go. The clerk there said a drug store was probably my best option. If that failed, I pictured America’s formerly favorite wrist watch being sold from suitcases on the street corner by vendors with heavy foreign accents.

By now you are probably saying to yourself, “What a silly waste of time – all this hoo-ha over a cheap wrist watch!” And you may well be right.

But on the other hand, a modestly-priced, rugged-looking watch that can take a licking and keep on ticking strikes me as something of true value in a world where nothing is all that permanent, regardless of the price.

Besides, who knows when I might get washed over Niagara Falls in a barrel, hauled by a speeding motorboat or accidentally put through the wash cycle?

In time, I found an excellent source for my beloved Expedition watches: the Timex company itself, which hosts an impressive selection of Expedition models and even fancier watches for aging Timex –ers like me.

Soon I had a new Expedition strapped to my wrist, an updated “indiglo” model featuring a nifty illuminated face that will come in handy if I ever find myself trapped in a dark cave miles below the earth or invading space aliens knock out the nation’s electrical grid and plunge America into complete and total darkness.

Who knows what sort of monkey business may happen in time?

In the meantime, it’s times like these — a killer pandemic, civil unrest, sweeping social change, not to mention a world economy struggling to get off its knees – that really make you take time to think.

According to some, it’s either later than we think – or not time for a change just yet.

Ancient sages advised that time is our most precious commodity, something that flies but a sin to waste, a fleeting resource, tomorrow’s memory, something that heals all wounds and sometimes wounds all heels.

Time stays, we go – or so said H.L. Mencken.

It’s possible, Emerson countered, to kill time without injuring eternity.

The Book of Ecclesiastes insists that there is a time in heaven for everything, but my late grandmother Taylor – who knew her Bible cold — used to tell me “Sugar pie, someone is always waiting beneath a clock.”

What she meant was that time – at the end of the day — is highly personal, all about the here and now.

Someone is always waiting beneath an unseen clock for a baby to be born or an elder to pass on, a first date to arrive, the train to leave the station, the weather to change, spring to return, a new life to begin.

Tomorrow is simply an unspent yesterday, an abstract concept for something that’s gone the instant it arrives, whereas real time is always here and now, which explains why we fragile human beings felt the need to come up with so many mechanical devises – Stonehenge, sun dials, planting cycles, moon phases, hourglasses, various kinds of calendars, latitude and longitude, and every sort of time-keeping piece from ancient Babylonian water clocks to modern Tag Heuer chronometers – simply to measure our days and mark our passages through the veil of existence.

Some years back, I developed the habit of removing my wristwatch whenever I was doing something I draw true pleasure from – working in my garden, taking a swim, dining with friends or even playing golf. I would unstrap my watch and toss it in a pocket, a symbolic act of suspending time or at least removing my spirit for a blissful moment from the gravitational pull of a world that would have me doing more responsible and important things with my time.

The older I’ve gotten – time being an excellent source of wisdom – I’ve come to believe the most valuable use of time is whatever our heart chooses to make of it.

With the passage of time, alas, I’ve evidently also become a bit more forgetful.

Not long ago, when restrictions on staying in place due to the Coronavirus began to ease a bit, I transferred my golf clubs to a small canvas “walking” bag I hadn’t used since last summer and set off to play nine holes in the fading afternoon light.

Somewhere near the end of the round, I lost a golf ball and opened the side pouch hoping there might be another ball inside.

There wasn’t.

But I found my missing Expedition watch.

It was a lovely surprise to suddenly have it back. I strapped it to my wrist for the walk home in a beautiful summer dusk, almost hearing Grandma Taylor speaking to me from the shadows of the evening trees.

If you’ve lost something of value, best to quit looking for it, sugar pie, and give it time. It will find its way back to you.

This struck me as a useful thought for the challenging times we are living through.

In a world that is waiting for things we value to return, to begin again or change for the better, it’s nice to have a pair of Expedition watches to tell me what time it really is – or isn’t.

Will to Drink

by David Bailey

Will Porter, I’m convinced, would love this magazine, and not only for its superb poetry and fiction and the inside scoop on his native Greensboro. No, I can think of three other topics that would interest him – our incisive coverage of wine, spirits and beer. O.Henry loved all three to access and lead what come to be known as a drinking life – just as his father did and grandfather before him. The stories about his taste in, and capacity for, all things alcoholic are legion and have been well-documented in David Stewart poignant O.Henry: A Biography of William Sydney Porter. In fact, Stewart’s primary theme is how the short-story master created a “surrogate character, the author known as O.Henry…so that William Sydney Porter could live in the shadows of New York and slowly drink himself to death.”

Yes, it’s a grim storyline, and Stuart relentlessly draws it out, but I don’t think I’ve ever read about anyone who had as much fun as O.Henry did as he pickled his liver. Stuart, however, doesn’t answer a basic question I keep asking. Would today’s drinkers recognize the brews he quaffed? As I read the book I kept asking myself, “What would O.Henry drink?”

O.Henry’s “love of liquor,” Stuart says, began in Texas, where the 20-year-old Porter signed on as a ranch hand down by the Rio Grande, hoping fresh air and hard work would improve his health. What it did for sure was give him a powerful thirst, which he would periodically quench in Cotulla, where he and the other cowboys “stopped at the saloon for a little liquid refreshment.” Lager, rather than ale, would most likely have been on tap as Germans had been immigrating to Texas—and setting up breweries—since the 1840s. But there’s an even bigger reason why they would have been drinking lager in the 1880s. It had been officially judged nonintoxicating.

Porter, born in 1862, was 3 when the Civil War ended. Along with a maelstrom of other social changes, the end of the Civil War brought about a radical change in what Americans drank: “Lager beer replaced whiskey as the national beverage of the working man,” says Iain Gately, in Drink: A Cultural History of Alcohol. The primary reason was that the Union commanders, staging much of the war from the wharves and railheads of St. Louis, “banned intoxicants from camp and field, leaving lager — officially nonintoxicating — as the troops’ choice of drink,” writes Maureen Ogle in Ambitious Brew: The Story of American Beer. Whoa, there! Did she say “nonintoxicating”? Yes, as she explains earlier in the book, lawyers—in a number of precedent-setting court cases brought against saloons that served German-style lager on Sundays — had produced a parade of expert witnesses who testified, among other things, “that, when consumed in moderate quantities, lager could not and did not intoxicate.” One expert testified “he had watched men imbibe as many as sixty glasses of lager without any evidence of intoxication.”

So the troops came home from the war loving lager, while the more potent English ale came increasingly to be considered “a rank broth with the taste and texture of muddy water,” according to Ogle.

In 1884, Porter gave up ranching, moved to Austin and returned to what he’d done in Greensboro, clerking in a drugstore. Hating the work, he spent his evenings carousing with other bachelors and his weekends sharing kegs of beer with his buddies on fishing trips.

After courting some of Austin’s fairest beauties, Porter, at 25, eloped with Athol Estes. The next two years were “undoubtedly the two happiest years of Will Porter’s life,” says Stuart, but the birth of their daughter, Margaret, was followed by the mother’s collapse and a diagnosis of tuberculosis, a disease that ultimately took her life. Though Porter doted on his daughter and was, according to Stuart, a good husband, “sometimes Will came home in a highly liquefied condition.” After going to work for the First National Bank of Austin, “Will Porter continued to enjoy the companionship of his old friends of bachelorhood and liked to stop off at a saloon.” When he came staggering home, “sometimes [Athol] lay on the floor and screamed at him,” Stuart continues.

As humiliating as that might have been, it did not stop Porter’s drinking, which slowly became intertwined with his budding career as a writer: “You can’t write a story that’s got life in it by sitting at a work table and thinking,” O.Henry told a New York Times reporter. “You got to get out in the streets, into the crowds, talk with people, and feel the rush and throb of real life.” It was an argument O.Henry used throughout his career to justify his heavy drinking. “How much of it all was for pure research, and how much for entertainment of a lonely writer was another of the questions that O.Henry never answered,” Stuart concludes.

Before serving three years for embezzling funds from the bank, Porter jumped bail and fled to New Orleans, where he discovered a new love — the Sazerac cocktail, which competed for his affections with the mint julep. The Sazerac, made with rye whiskey or cognac, is amped up with absinthe. Even France made absinthe illegal because of its narcotic effects. Add sugar, a lemon peel and some orange bitter, and you’re ready to dance with the green fairy, as some have described the experience.

Years later in New York City, O.Henry would enjoy “long liquid lunches of the publishing trade,” Stuart says, where he’d “order Sazerac cocktails before a meal and was known to consume a number of them.” Fish and white wine followed, then red wine with the meat, “and perhaps some champagne with dessert and fruit, and then a brandy or two.” And that was lunch, mind you.

Evenings often consisted of “O.Henry’s favorite pursuits, which were drinking, dining and observing the people of the city, especially young women.” In some of New York’s sleaziest saloons, where Stuart says the profits came more from larceny than lager, beer would have been the beverage of choice. But for our high-living author, not just any beer would do. O.Henry favored Pilsner, a Bohemian lager that had originated in the town of Budweis in the Puls region of Bohemia and had stolen the show at the 1873 Vienna Exposition.

Determined to come up with an American version, Busch and others had worked to produce a beer as light, as bright and as sparkling as the Bohemian Pilsner. But beer made with American protein-rich, “six-row” barley proved heavy and thick—until corn and/or rice were added. For instance, Busch’s brew master added eight pounds of rice to his mash for every five bushels of barley. Using Saaz hops, Bohemian yeast, beechwood strips in the aging, Budweiser was born, sparkling and light. The King of Beers (rather than the Beer of Kings) originally sold at a premium, just the sort of beer that a big spender like O.Henry would have gone for.

Asked by a reporter once whether he was Bohemian by “nature or extraction,” obviously referring to the author’s Bohemian lifestyle, O.Henry quipped, “By extraction. Never like to drain kegs. Prefer the bottles.” O.Henry was letting the reporter know that keg beer that could be had for five cents a mug was below his notice. “Writing is my business,” he once said, explaining it’s the only way he could afford Pilsner. Although it might seem to the modern reader that O.Henry was using Pilsner as a synonym for beer, he was really referring to the price of the Bohemian brew—about a dollar a bottle then or $17 in today’s dough.

That’s not to say he didn’t like his whiskey: A friend noted after O.Henry’s death that “O.Henry drank and drank hard. He was a two-bottle man.” Stuart writes that one bartender could always tell “when O.Henry was going back to his digs for a long session of writing, because the writer asked that a bottle of Scotch be sent to the room.”

But his muse eventually became his nemesis. By 1906, at the age of 44, O.Henry “found himself too often unable to concentrate long enough to turn out a story,” Stuart says. Although he promised to change his ways after marrying Sara Lindsay Coleman and even spent some time drying out at the Battery Park Hotel in Asheville, he backslid. After months of trying to reform her husband, Sara observed, “No one could manage that man. He was a law unto himself and had a deep dislike for anything that resembled nagging or fussing.” Once his wife moved back to North Carolina in 1909 to live with her mother, O.Henry returned to his old haunts. “He had to be in the streets…dancing with the bar girls in the tourist traps and boozing with the hoi polloi in the saloons,” Stuart says. “This was his chosen life.”

Of course O.Henry knew where this life would lead. Only months before his death on June 3, 1910, at the age of 47, his doctor found his heart enlarged, his kidneys shot and his liver in a sad state. The doctor asked what on earth he had been doing. “I know I smoke too much, keep late hours, and drink too much,” O.Henry admitted. Then, unable to resist one of his classic twists, he added, “but that’s about all.”

This story first appeared in O.Henry magazine in August 2012. David Bailey’s first “real” beer was in a pub in Oxford, England, while hitchhiking across Europe. The beer was warm and bitter. “I’ve never looked back,” he says.

Last Days of the Yard King

By Jim Dodson

That July I owned the neighborhood. Or at least my block in Starmount Forest.

It was 1968. I was 15, towing an aging Lawnboy push mower behind a well-traveled Schwinn Deluxe Racer with chrome-plated fenders and dual side baskets. My mother called me Jimmy the Yard King.

Actually, I had several jobs that summer. One was mowing half a dozen lawns up and down our street for five bucks a yard. Another was planting Christmas trees at a farm overlooking Lake Jeanette. I also snagged a weekend job as an usher at the newly opened Terrace Theater, one in which I was required to wear a tangerine orange double knit sports jacket that matched the theater’s innovative “rocking chair” seats. My job was to keep kids from violently rocking their brains out and disturbing other customers by banging their knees.

That summer I also had my first job teaching guitar on Saturday afternoons at Mr. Weinstein’s music shop, another glorious five-dollar-per-hour gig.

I was rolling in dough. Or thought I was. My mom joked that she might someday ask Jimmy the Yard King for a loan. But I was saving up for either a new Alvarez guitar like Graham Nash played or a new Chevy Camaro, whichever came first.

That year, 1968, has been called the “Year that Shattered America.”

Looking back, it was the year we both began to lose our innocence.

Being a son of the newspaper world, I paid close attention to the news, read the paper daily and never missed Uncle Walter’s CBS evening newscast.

For the first time, television news brought the horrors of the war in Southeast Asia home to 56 million American TV sets. On my birthday that February, in Time Magazine, I saw the iconic photograph of a South Vietnamese general publicly executing a Viet Cong prisoner. That photo shocked Americans, stoked the anti-war movement and sharply turned millions of everyday citizens against the war. One month later, the Mai Lai massacre that killed 500 civilians, though the atrocity wasn’t revealed and investigated for another year. These events finished off public support for the undeclared war.

That spring I taught myself how to play every song on the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Harts Club Band and started performing around town with my buddy Craig Corry who lived two doors away on Dogwood Drive. We wound up placing third in the City’s Teenage Talent Show that next fall and made an appearance on Lee Kinard’s “Good Morning Show,” our first and last moment in the spotlight.

On a breezy afternoon that April, I was playing golf with my dad when we heard that Martin Luther King had been assassinated In Memphis. We watched riots break out in Detroit and coverage of the Poor People’s March on Washington. Commentators wondered if America was coming apart at the seams, heading for revolution in the streets.

Barely a week after he announced that he wouldn’t run for re-election, President Johnson signed the historic Civil Rights Act. The musical Hair opened on Broadway featuring live naked people on stage singing about the “Age of Aquarius, An anthem for a dawning age of peace, tolerance and brotherhood. I started growing my own hair long that summer.

On the plus side of the summer America was going to hell in a hand basket, I took Ginny Silkworth to the Cinema Theater to see Franco Zefferelli’s Romeo and Juliet. Since this was a first date for us both, my dad had to drive us to the theater under strict orders not to say anything embarrassing. Because of that movie, I fell in love with the language of Shakespeare and, in a way, with Ginny Silkworth, too.

She hailed from somewhere up north and had the Yankee accent and direct manner to prove it, a deep thinker with a warm and horsy laugh. After the movie, as we waited for my old man to pick us up, Ginny wondered what I planned to do with my life. She was always asking questions like that.

I mentioned that I hoped to write spy novels and adventure books, travel to the ends of the Earth, compose country music songs, mow lawns and possibly move to either Nashville or England. She punched me on the arm and gave her horsy up-north laugh, pointing out that she intended to keep tabs on me to see if I did any of the above.

“If you want,” she suddenly declared, direct as ever and completely out of the blue, “you can kiss me.”

So I did. Another first.

In fact, Ginny and I stayed in touch for decades. She went on to become a gifted school teacher in Philadelphia and lived a very full and rewarding life, passing away from breast cancer a few years back. I still miss her, my Shakespearean first date, my first kiss, her warm and wonderful up-north laugh.

That same summer Robert Kennedy was gunned down after winning the California presidential primary. My mom had a thing for Bobby Kennedy. We watched his funeral train together and she cried. My dad was a half-hearted Nixon guy. My mom used to joke that she did her patriotic duty by cancelling out his vote every four years at the polls.

By July I was deep into my lawn mowing life, guitar-playing, writing bad country music songs and reading spy novels, trying to forget what was going on in America. I hated the usher job at the terrace so much that I handed in my elegant orange usher’s jacket in early August, blaming my family’s annual beach trip to the Hannover Seaside Club at Wrightsville Beach.

We’d gone there every year for half a dozen years, though this would be our final time. I loved the Seaside’s simple unfancy dining room, its cool wooden floors and big porches where I could sit for hours in a real rocking chair reading Graham Greene’s The Heart of the Matter or John LeCarre’s The Spy who came in from the Cold, picturing myself mowing a lawn in some far-flung, sun-mused outpost of the British Empire, a spy in short-pants and boat shoes, enjoying a gin and tonic with some sultry blond who looked like Tuesday Weld or at least Ginny Silkworth.

That week a family from Southern Ohio showed up at the Seaside Club. A pretty girl named Sandy was reading Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire, bare feet tucked up in the rocker just down the porch. We struck up a conversation and took a walk to the end of Bobby Mercer’s pier. Sandy told me that we human beings were destroying the natural world, killing the oceans with our garbage and fighting an unwinnable war. She told me she was going to become an “environmental activist” like her aunt who was presently attending the Democratic Party Convention in Chicago as a delegate from Ohio.

The Seaside Club didn’t have a TV set, so there was no way to see what was happening up in Chicago. We heard, however, that there were police riots and lots of injuries at the convention after Chicago’s mayor turned the police loose on protesters and Students for a Democratic Society who attempted to crash the party.

For the rest of the week we were pretty much inseparable. Sandy was a year older and half a head taller than me. She was no Tuesday Weld or Ginny Silkworth but I liked her a lot. She was crazy about books and movies.

The Graduate was playing at the Crest Theater in Wrightsville Beach. She suggested that we go see it. This was the year that the Motion Picture Association of America instituted its film rating service, serving as a guideline for parents anxious about a movie’s questionable content. I secretly worried about getting in. You were supposed to be at least 16 but the old lady working the box office took one look at Sandy, then me, and let us in for a buck and a quarter each.

The night before Sandy’s family headed home to Ohio, we talked until midnight while seated on a stack of canvas rafts stacked beneath the Seaside Club. I don’t remember what we talked about, probably her plan to save the world or mine to travel it. We promised to keep in touch.

My family was staying through the Labor Day weekend. The next evening, I gigged a huge flounder in the tidal flats off Bald Head Island and wondered if I would ever hear from Sandy again. She actually wrote me a couple times and I wrote her back. Some years later an F5 tornado flattened her hometown of Xenia, Ohio, killing hundreds of people and leaving 10,000 homeless. I never heard from Sandy again. I like to think she’s somewhere out there in the world doing her best to save the planet.

Back home, with school starting, I still had a few weeks of decent lawn-mowing income to count on, plus teaching guitar for Mr. Weinstein. That summer had clearly changed me. By then I knew all the dogs in the neighborhood, for example, those which were friendly and those that weren’t. I also knew the friendlier and better-looking moms, too. When you’re 15 and have begun dating smart and pretty girls, you notice such things.

Looking back from half a century, however, I realize how deceptively simple my life was that extraordinary summer safely removed from the anti-war protests, the burning cities, the murder of visionary politicians and Civil Rights leaders, the raised fists at the summer Olympics, Nixon winning the White House, O.J. winning the Heisman. Without realizing it at the time, these things changed me as well.

The singer Mary Chapin Carpenter has a poignant song about that fevered summer in the changing life of America. It’s called “Stones in the Road.” Every time I play it – which is fairly often these days – I think of that faraway year when America and I both lost our innocence.

“And stones in the road, flew out beneath our bicycle tires…Worlds removed from all those fires as we raced each other home…”

I rode my bike everywhere that summer, pretty much for the last time.

I mowed lawns, ate my first Big Mac, kissed Ginny Silkworth and had something awakened in me by a spirited girl named Sandy. I taught myself to play every song on “Revolver” and went to Scout camp for the final time, did the Mile Swim twice, finished off my Life Scout award, and built a nature walk at my elementary school for my Eagle project.

The Yard King’s days came to an end.

Since then, one thing I’ve learned is that history may not repeat but itself but certainly rhymes like a Mary Chapin song.

“And the stones in the road, leave a mark from whence they came / A thousand points of light or shame – baby, I don’t know.”

This edition of Simple Life first appeared in August 2018.