Tommy's Table

The Valentine's line of love

2012-02-14T16:36:00.004-05:00

It's 3 p.m. on Valentine's Day. There are 17 of us in line at the flower stand at Third and Tryon. The wind is freezing. But we are men. Romantic men. We are willing to suffer for love.

Yes, women walk by and snicker. Yes, some dude jogs by and yells out: "Waited a little late, didn't you, boys?" We hate that dude. But the hate subsides. Love endures.

Love, and pain.

"It's painful out here," one man says. "But if you come home empty-handed..."

He does not finish the sentence. He does not need to.

The man at the front of the line takes his bouquet and gets into a cab that has been waiting for him. How long did the meter run? How much did the ride cost? These things do not matter on Valentine's Day. The bouquets cost $20. They could cost $200 and we would pay. It is a testament to the fullness of our love.

The men in line do not want to give their names. It is understandable. Love does not boast. It is not proud.

But we are men of all kinds, young and old, in three-piece suits and washed-out jeans, and we will wait here forever for love, except for the two men who leave and decide to come back at 4.

The line is shorter. This is good.

A man gets to the front of the line and orders four bouquets. This is bad.

Love does not boast, it is not proud, but sometimes, at the back of the line, it grumbles. The man smiles. "We'll make a trade," he says. "You deal with my wife and daughters, and I'll deal with yours."

We meditate on this. Then we leave him to his four bouquets.

It takes about half an hour to get to the front of the line. The flowers are beautiful. There are roses, and daisies, and some smaller yellow flowers, and, you know, some lavender things.

The flower sellers have free Life Savers on the table. Other people might point out that the flowers are the real life savers. But they are not men, romantic men, suffering for love.

My bouquet is wrapped, my $20 gladly paid. There are 14 men behind me in line at 3:30 p.m. on Valentine's Day.

The flowers are almost gone.

Tonight, some men will truly suffer.

Whitney, joy, death, and pleasure

2012-02-13T13:27:00.000-05:00

New Orleans, 1987. A buddy had lucked into tickets to the Final Four and we spent a long boozy weekend on Bourbon Street. Late one night I went for a walk and came up on a sax player who had drawn a good-sized crowd. He was taking requests. Somebody hollered out, not a song, but a name: Whitney Houston.

The sax man started to play, and we locked arms and swayed, and at 4 in the morning we made the most beautiful alcohol choir, Syracuse basketball fans and Japanese tourists and maybe a hooker or two, singing one of those great pop songs that there's no point in resisting and why would you want to:

But each time I try, I just break down and cry
Cause I'd rather be home feeling blue
So I'm saving all my love for you...

Up until last weekend that was a memory of pleasure. Now I wonder who in that crowd was drunk for the eighth night in a row, who in the crowd had a worried spouse and a crying baby at home, who in the crowd was just starting to feel the addiction lock in like a grappling hook.

Whitney might be the last singer we could all agree on. When her first record came out in 1985, I was mostly listening to rap and indie rock -- I remember a summer of Run-D.M.C. and the Smithereens -- but I had the Whitney cassette, too, because no amount of street cred could deny that voice. It melted you.

For the next few years you could count on a good-to-great Whitney single every few months, "How Will I Know" to "So Emotional" to "All the Man That I Need." (Really, check out that last clip. It's from a concert she did in 1991 for troops coming home from the Gulf War. My favorite shot is at 3:23, where a group of guys in the front row stare up at her in unvarnished awe. As in, yeah, THIS is what we were fighting for.)

"I Will Always Love You" was the biggest hit of all, part of the "Bodyguard" movie with Kevin Costner, and right around here was where I jumped off the bandwagon. Part of it was that the song was everywhere, and even the best ice cream starts to lose something after 27 helpings. But also the song felt like a technical exercise, more a gymnastics routine set to soul than soul itself. It spent 14 weeks at Number One.

She had more hits after that, made a couple of movies, made a ton of money... but by my account we got eight years of great music from Whitney. That's a lot more than most singers give us. But that voice was built for more. That voice was made for comeback hits and sold-out tours and a jazz record in her 60s.

That voice made a hit record out of the national anthem. Twice. Look at her as she belts that last verse -- that power, that control, that confidence. She raises her arms at the end. Champion of the world.

Drugs suck. They suck for every too-young addict who ends up in the obits, everyone shivering in rehab or sitting on another folding chair in another meeting, fingernails dug in, trying to hold on. But imagine having more money than you could ever spend and unlimited free time. It's a junkie's dream.

We don't know yet, of course, if drugs killed Whitney Houston. But there's no doubt that drugs ruined her. The last 15 years added up to ashes: canceled concerts, odd interviews, disheveled tabloid photos, and that heartbreaking show with Bobby Brown where, apparently, they sat around and talked about poop. That's what I heard, anyway. I could never bring myself to watch it.

She fell so far that it soured me on the music. It was hard to listen to the songs I loved; all I could see was her coming out of some club dead-eyed and cackling. But now her death has cleansed her life, and you can choose to remember the parts you want to remember. She can't ruin herself any more.

It's a comforting thought, for about two seconds, until you remember that she died at 48.

You can reduce everything we do as human beings into two or three deep desires -- the need to chase pleasure, the longing to create, the search for something bigger than ourselves. Not many people in this world provided more pleasure than Whitney Houston. She built towers with her voice. That voice, in a lot of ways, was bigger than she was. Now I wonder if that was too hard for her to take.

It's cruel, isn't it, how so many things bring us joy right up to the point where they start killing us.

Teaching a workshop at Queens, jabbering about politics at Wingate

2012-01-26T14:13:00.002-05:00

A couple of things I'm doing over the next few weeks:

-- I'm teaching my "Writing In 3-D" workshop at Queens University on Feb. 18 and 25. More information and details about signing up are here on Queens' site. This is a good introduction to writing for people just starting out, but it also has some advanced tips for writers looking to get better.

-- On Feb. 9, I'll be part of an election roundtable at Wingate University -- it's free, and it starts at 6:30 p.m. at the McGee Theatre in the Batte Center. I'll be there along with Tony Nownes, a political-science professor at the University of Tennessee, and Scott Huffmon, a poli-sci professor at Winthrop University and director of the Winthrop Poll. So at least two of the people on stage will know what they're talking about.

Newt, Reagan and a Clemson joke: Notes from the campaign trail

2012-01-19T11:06:00.000-05:00

I'm down in South Carolina this week, talking to voters and following candidates as we head for the Republican primary on Saturday. Some odds and ends from the road:

-- Candidates generally don't announce their vice-presidential picks this early, but Newt Gingrich has already made his selection: Ronald Reagan. With the former president being deceased and all, I'm not sure what federal laws might apply here, but I'm pretty sure Gingrich wants the Gipper on the ticket.

In his commercials you see him sitting next to Reagan, deep in conversation. In his speeches this week he's referred time and again to "the Reagan-Gingrich textbook" for turning around the country. He shared a Reagan bit on Jimmy Carter: If your brother-in-law is unemployed, it's a recession. If you're unemployed, it's a depression. If Jimmy Carter is unemployed, that's a recovery.

When the laughter died down, Gingrich said: "I may change the name but keep the story."

It can't hurt a Republican to align himself with the most popular Republican of our lifetimes. Of course, Reagan also (for Republicans, at least) projected warmth. Gingrich is still working on that warmth part.

-- It's hard to talk about how candidate spouses look and dress without sounding weird. So let me be delicate here. In person, Callista Gingrich doesn't look as... lacquered... as she does on TV. She sounded interested and engaged talking to voters one-on-one. Maybe she should spend a little time at the microphone.

-- It's early, but today is already showing how absurd the primary process is -- and how fast things can change. Mitt Romney became the prohibitive front-runner based on wins in Iowa and New Hampshire. Except it turns out Romney didn't really win Iowa -- Rick Santorum did. And it also turns out that Rick Perry is dropping out of the race and throwing in with Gingrich. Perry didn't have a lot of support in South Carolina, but Gingrich doesn't need all that much to push out in front.

So basically, a few dozen votes in Iowa swung the race in one direction, and a couple thousand in South Carolina could swing it the opposite way.

Good thing that we don't have an ex-wife scandal to throw the whole race into a blender. Wait, what?

-- And in case you've missed it: Stephen Colbert wants to run in South Carolina but it's too late to get on the ballot. Herman Cain dropped out but it's too late to get his name OFF the ballot. So Colbert wants people to vote for Cain as a way to vote for Colbert. And to drive all this home, they're doing a rally together in Charleston on Friday.

Which is a long way of saying, I know where I'm going to be on Friday.

-- As important as this primary is, folks in South Carolina are still talking college football -- especially West Virginia's 70-33 beatdown of Clemson in the Orange Bowl.

Up in Pickens County, where Clemson is located, county GOP chairman Phillip Bowers is a Clemson grad. We were talking at Yank's Place in Liberty when his buddy Dan Crosby came over to chat. Crosby mentioned hearing that a friend was in Columbia the other day and remarked on how nice the weather was. "It's 70 here," Crosby said his friend told him. "But I hear it's 33 in Clemson."

Yeah, that bruise is gonna linger a while.

--

A couple of follow-ups on Foundation for the Carolinas

2011-12-09T14:39:00.000-05:00

Two quick notes following up on my story last Sunday on the Foundation for the Carolinas' new building:

-- In the story, I quoted from an essay by former Bank of America CEO Hugh McColl. The essay ran in the Observer, and our version noted that it originally ran (in a longer form) on the Charlotte Viewpoint website. I didn't notice that, and didn't give Charlotte Viewpoint proper credit in my story. Here's the original version on their site.

-- My story also mentioned the mystery of the wrought-iron letters "KB" over the entrance to the building, which used to be Montaldo's department store. Charlotte architect David Furman wrote in to say he thinks the "KB" stands for King Bostrom, a clothing store that occupied the building at 220 N. Tryon St. in the late '80s.

If anybody has more details -- or a different story -- holler and I'll update.

From the vault: Daisy and Violet Hilton

2011-12-01T15:03:00.000-05:00

I spent a little time with a documentary filmmaker Wednesday. Leslie Zemeckis was in town working on her new project, a film about Daisy and Violet Hilton.

If you lived here in the '60s you knew about the Hilton sisters. They were conjoined twins (what used to be called Siamese twins) who were well-known performers for a time -- among other things, they co-starred in the cult classic "Freaks." They spent the last years of their lives in Charlotte. I wrote about them back in 1997. I dug out that story and re-read it so I could at least attempt to make sense on camera with Zemeckis. So while I've got the story in front of me, I thought I'd share.

A story of 2 sisters, together, always
Dec. 7, 1997

Side by side the two sisters walked into the Park-N-Shop on Wilkinson Boulevard on a warm winter day in 1962.

Charles Reid owned the grocery store. He knew what the women wanted. It scared him half to death.

Daisy and Violet Hilton had troweled on the makeup. Red toenails poked out from their sandals. Their hair was dirty and their clothes looked like they had been slept in.

They wanted Charles Reid to give them a job.

They would both work, they said, but Reid would only have to pay for one.

Because of their situation.

They were fused at the hip.

Siamese twins.

They had been in the Park-N-Shop a couple of times that week, buying groceries, and the day before they had called Reid and asked if they could come in and talk to him.

At the time Reid didn't know about the history of Daisy and Violet Hilton.

How they were displayed in freak shows before they were old enough for school.

How they became vaudeville performers who once made thousands of dollars a week - nearly all of it snatched away by their managers.

How their show business career had faded, then crumbled just a few weeks before when their manager stranded them in Monroe, broke and desperate.

Reid didn't know any of that. All he could see was the need in their eyes.

After they called that day, he prayed that night.

Lord, I know you want me to do something with these people. What in the world would I do with them?

What he did was this: He gave them a job. (He paid them both.) He found them a house and showed them a church.

And the Hilton twins quietly spent the rest of their lives in Charlotte, no one but a few friends and co-workers ever knowing that Siamese twins lived in town.

Now, nearly 30 years after their deaths, the Hilton twins are stars again. A new Broadway musical called "Side Show" is based on the Hiltons' show-business careers.

But what the Broadway show doesn't tell is the story of the Hiltons' lives in Charlotte.

The only normal lives they ever had.

Stranded in North Carolina

As they faced you, Violet Hilton was on the left, Daisy on the right. Violet's left hip joined Daisy's right at a 45-degree angle; they moved in a permanent V, like a flock of geese.

They didn't share any organs, but their blood flowed through both bodies. Some people say they shared each other's thoughts. At the very least, they shared instincts.

"They never said Let's go over yonder' or anything like that, " says Charles Reid, who is now 76. "They just got up and started walking."

They were barely scraping out a living as 1961 bled into '62. They had given up show business once before, to run a snack bar in Miami, but the snack bar folded and they ended up back on the road.

They were over 50 years old when they swung through North Carolina in January 1962 to promote the horror movie "Freaks." The Hiltons had appeared in "Freaks" 30 years before, and now it was making a run through the drive-ins.

How they ended up in Monroe isn't clear - a lot about the Hiltons' lives isn't clear - but what is clear is that their manager, who had traveled with them, suddenly left them behind.

They stayed in a Monroe hotel for a couple of weeks, trying to find work. The hotel bill mounted. Finally some businesspeople raised enough money to send the Hiltons to Charlotte. Everybody figured they could blend in better in the city.

Daisy and Violet rented a place at Tanzy's Trailer Park on Wilkinson Boulevard. Soon after, they asked Charles Reid for a job.

They offered to scrub floors, but Reid couldn't imagine what his customers would do if they saw that. He had just one job he thought they could easily do together.

The Park-N-Shop had a long produce section at the back of the store. At the end of the section, there were two counters where people lined up to have their produce weighed and priced.

The two counters ran parallel, but it was easy enough to turn them into a V.

Reid had a couple of conditions. They had to get rid of the makeup and the long nails and the whole show-biz look. And their hair had to be the same color - Violet's was her natural brunet, but Daisy had dyed hers red.

Reid's wife, Larue, took the Hiltons to get their hair fixed and buy some new clothes. The twins bought three pair of skirts they could alter at home, ripping the seams apart and sewing two skirts into one.

Reid gave them two red-and-white checked shirts, just like everyone else at Park-N-Shop wore.

The next Monday they came to work. For the next seven years they worked the same shift, 8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.

Most of the people who came through the produce lines never knew their apples and potatoes were being weighed by Siamese twins.

Making a life in Charlotte

After a few months in Charlotte they asked Reid for another favor - help in finding a house.

Reid knew just the place. His church, Purcell United Methodist over on Weyland Avenue, had bought several pieces of land around the church to turn into parking lots. They didn't need all the land right then, and a couple of the lots still had houses on them. After getting the OK from the church elders, the Hiltons moved into a house kitty-corner from the church.

"It had two bedrooms, " Reid says, "but of course they only needed one."

They also needed furniture. Reid made a call to Archie Moore, who ran Clinton's Furniture Co. on Brevard Street uptown. He got them a couch and a bed and a dinette set.

They got a dog, a mixed breed with lots of Lab in him. Leo Wingate used to buy rubber rats - two dozen at a time - for the dog to chew on.

Wingate was a bread salesman for Merita who made deliveries to the Park-N-Shop and got to be friends with the Hiltons. Sometimes he'd be on his route and see them walking to work and pull over to give them a ride. They were tiny - 4 feet 10, about 90 pounds apiece - and they could slip in and out of a car just as easy as you please.

Wingate also went to Purcell United Methodist, where the twins attended from time to time. The church had a do-good box, where they collected money for charity projects, and the twins always put money in the do-good box on top of their regular tithe.

When they went to Sunday school they attended the men's class. Wingate thinks they were more comfortable around men, that women asked too many questions. The Rev. Ernest Fitzgerald, their pastor from 1962 to 1964, figures it was because the men's class was on ground level and the women's was down in the basement.

Either way, they kept to themselves.

"Daisy's the one that did most of the talking, " Wingate says. "The other one didn't have anything to say, except once in a while Daisy would be talking about somewhere she had been, and Violet would poke her in the ribs and say, I was there too!' "

They would chat with customers at the Park-N-Shop, but they refused to do interviews or have their picture taken for the paper. An Illinois doctor known as an expert on Siamese twins came to Charlotte in 1967 to talk to the Hiltons. They turned him down.

Daisy and Violet hated doctors.

"Every doctor that put their hands on them, the first thing they wanted to do was cut them apart, " Reid says. "They could have been separated, even back then. But they didn't want to.

"They said to me, Mr. Reid, we've been together our whole life. We don't ever want to be apart.' "

Taken by the Hong Kong flu

And so they lived, never making a fuss, until 1968 bled into '69. Then Violet caught the Hong Kong flu. And just as Violet got better, Daisy caught it.

They were gone from work for a couple of weeks. The Reids called every day to check on them. If Daisy and Violet didn't want to be bothered, they would take the phone off the hook.

But one day the phone rang and rang and nobody answered.

Reid waited until the next morning - Jan. 4, 1969 - and called every hour. Still no answer. So he and his wife drove to the little house across from the church. They banged on the door and nobody came. They called the police.

An officer came and asked Reid what he wanted to do. Reid asked the policeman to pry open the door.

The rooms in the house on Weyland Avenue were connected by a little hallway in the middle of the house. The house was heated through a grate in the hallway floor.

Daisy and Violet lay dead on the grate.

Reid figures they were trying to stay warm as the Hong Kong flu took them away.

Their death certificates estimated they were 60 years old.

There were 23 flower arrangements at the funeral at Hankins and Whittington funeral home on South Boulevard. The crowd was mostly friends and co-workers; Charles Reid saw only one family he didn't recognize.

They were buried at Forest Lawn Cemetery off Freedom Drive. "It was just like an ordinary funeral, " Leo Wingate says, "except for there being two in one casket and all."

The Hiltons share a tombstone with a Vietnam vet named Troy Thompson, and they have a simple marker in the ground:

Daisy and Violet Hilton

1908-1969

"Beloved Siamese Twins"

It was Charles Reid's job to clean out the house on Weyland Avenue.

The only thing out of the ordinary was a dresser, four or five drawers, and every drawer filled with pocketbooks. And every pocketbook had three or four dollars inside.

"The only thing I can figure, " Charles Reid says, "is that they took lots of taxicabs, and they could just grab a pocketbook on the way out and know there was cab fare in it."

Reid found a bunch of photos and newspaper clippings from the Hiltons' show-biz days. But they were all stowed away. None of their movie posters on the walls. None of their publicity photos on the dressers.

Just a normal little house where two sisters lived out their lives together.

Penn State and the infinite sadness

2011-11-10T12:17:00.003-05:00

This story from Penn State is a blood diamond. So many facets, so many different angles, all of them uncomfortable to think about.

There's the hold that big-time sports has on our culture. I say this as a fan: The games matter far too much to far too many. Coaches and stars are our secular gods. Nobody in the state of Pennsylvania was as loved or as powerful as Joe Paterno.

There's the idea of sins of omission. Jerry Sandusky, the former assistant coach now charged with molesting boys, is the worst villain here. But several people, including Paterno, could have done more to stop him, and didn't.

There's the part that's personal. Sportswriter Joe Posnanski, one of my best friends, has been at Penn State for the last few months, writing a book on Paterno. Now the work ahead of him is so different than he, or anyone else, could have imagined. (He tweeted this from the scene Wednesday night: "I saw a girl crying tonight. When I asked why she said: 'Because everybody lost.'")

But the longer I roll it around, the more this story keeps circling back to one thing: The impulse to protect institutions, even at the expense of people.

Our nature is to build grand things, and to be drawn to them. Giant banks hold our money, stadiums hold our passion, vast churches hold our mysteries. Part of life is the search for something bigger than ourselves, someplace where we fit. When we find that place -- a job, a team, a school -- we often defend it beyond all reason.

Now imagine if you had built one of those institutions. That's what Joe Paterno did at Penn State. He started as an assistant coach there in 1950 before becoming head coach in 1966. That's 61 years in one place, 45 years as the head man, creating a program known for both high academic standards and wins on the field. For decades, Penn State was the model of what college sports could do for its players and for a campus. Paterno did that.

It's easy to imagine that he would refuse to let anything ruin it.

We might never know what was in Paterno's mind, or the minds of all the other people who had information that Jerry Sandusky had molested a young boy in the locker-room showers. But two facts are daggers to their credibility. Not one of those adults called 911. And not one tried to find out who that boy was, and how to help him.

So often, this is where corruption starts. One mistake. One failure to follow up. One moment of fear that finding the whole truth, and telling it, would destroy this beautiful structure that so many believe in.

Good people do regrettable things all the time. You can rationalize almost anything when you believe there's something more important to protect. This is how police departments rot from the inside, and churches collapse, and banks end up bankrupt.

The thing is, those misguided people trying to save an institution end up being the ones who wreck it.

What if somebody had turned in Jerry Sandusky right away? It would've been a brief, ugly story with a short shelf life. But now Paterno is gone, and the university president has been fired, and people have to wonder what else Penn State might have covered up. Everything that took so long to build is wobbling at the beams.

And none of that is the worst of it.

The worst is this: All the sadness about Paterno, about Penn State, about all the students and alumni and fans who love the school, pales against the sadness of that 10-year-old boy in the shower. Not to mention all the other boys who were victims after the adults at Penn State knew what they knew, and did not do enough.

The story is not over. It will grow and change and we will see angles we hadn't thought of. But it seems to me we can come to one conclusion. No institution is worth what happened to those boys.

The cloth of memories

2011-10-31T13:24:00.001-04:00

The cotton’s coming in.

I saw it the other day driving up I-85, in the countryside around Kannapolis and Salisbury. We’re a top-10 cotton-producing state – nearly a million bales last year – but most of the farms are way out East. Around here you mostly see little patches off the side of the road, looking like snowfields.

This area has such a tangled history with thread and string and yarn. Our towns and cities grew because of the cotton mills – shoot, Kannapolis was created from scratch as a mill town. Hundreds of thousands of Carolinians made a living in the mills. Then synthetic fibers took out a lot of the farmers. Later on, most of the textile companies went off overseas. We got left with beautiful old brick buildings with broken windows.

To so many families around here, cotton was a personal thing. They got the lint in their hair and the dust in their lungs. They dried themselves with Carolina towels and clothed themselves in Carolina denim. As the mills died out, so did the idea that you could get on with one company and work there the rest of your life. People still love the mills, and hate them, often both at the same time.

Cotton was personal in my family, too.

My mom and dad grew up in Georgia as sharecroppers. Both their families picked cotton in fields other people owned. My mom had to quit school in fourth grade and my dad in sixth. They spent every dry day in the fields. They dragged the heavy sacks of cotton down the rows. They picked until dark.

To this day, when we drive by a cotton field, my mama turns her head away.

But my folks climbed the ladder like so many others. They made it off the cotton field and into factory work. My dad went out on his own as a carpenter. We have always had those possibilities in this country for people who work with their hands. You could make your way through ever-better blue-collar jobs. You could set things up so your children wouldn’t have to work so hard.

That progression is so much different now.

It’s a combination of the economy and evolution. The world is evolving toward more high-tech jobs – jobs that require skill in math, science, computers, electronics. At the same time, our sagging economy is hitting blue-collar workers hardest. Jobs have been washed out from under them like sand around a piling.

A cotton field is a beautiful sight on an October drive. These days, it’s good to see a crop that will help a farmer put food on the table. And cotton belongs here, as part of our history. They even have machines to strip the fields now.

But I still get a little shudder when I look at a cotton field. It’s part of my inheritance.

Cotton is deceptive. It looks like you can just pluck the bolls like flowers. But the plants are low, and cotton hulls are as sharp as thorns. My folks, like so many others who picked cotton by hand, ended up with torn-up hands and bent-over backs.

It was awful work. The only thing worse would have been not having it.

Music Wednesday: The Black Keys

2011-10-26T11:44:00.000-04:00

Here's a new song by one of my favorite bands, the Black Keys. This dude is not the band's real lead singer. But I think he should be EVERY band's lead singer.

So what are y'all listening to? Send links, reviews, etc.

A candidate for Worst Movie Ever?

2011-10-24T11:01:00.000-04:00

If you've watched the NFL or the baseball playoffs lately, you've seen the trailer for this new Adam Sandler movie called "Jack and Jill." If you haven't, stop for a second and watch. You really need to see this.

Let's start with the possibility that any movie could be a five-star movie, but various aspects of the movie could cause it to lose stars. So, based on the trailer:

-- It's an Adam Sandler movie. (Minus 1 star.)

-- It's an Adam Sandler movie where he dresses in drag to play his own twin sister. (Minus 3 stars.)

-- It's an Adam Sandler movie where he dresses in drag to play his own twin sister, and Al Pacino (playing himself) has the hots for the twin sister. (Minus 37 stars, and Pacino has to give back his Oscar.)

Somehow poor sweet Katie Holmes ends up in the middle of it all. We can only assume that Tom Cruise was at home jumping around on the couches, and she said yes just to get away for a few weeks.

Now... it's possible that the rest of the movie could be full of uproarious gags and tender reflections on the duality of the human spirit. But you'd think that if they had any of that, they would have put some in the trailer. Maybe in place of the "Twister with your sister" line.

The truth is, this trailer leaves me a little giddy. Because we might have a new candidate for Worst Movie of All Time.

There are lots of bad movies out there, of course. But to make a run at Worst Movie of All Time, you have to be special. B-movies don't count. Some of them are good, some are terrible*, but they're playing under different rules -- you can't count Arena League records in the NFL.

*I worked at a drive-in theater in high school and a couple of summers in college... we specialized in three types of movies: first-run movies after the indoor theaters got tired of them; X-rated movies with all the X-rated parts cut out; and random B-movies. Having seen hundreds of B-movies, I can state without a doubt that the best bad movie of all time is "Gymkata." A spy is sent to a distant country to run through the woods in a game to the death. His special survival skill? Gymnastics. Which comes in handy when he arrives in a village of crazed killers -- and there, in the middle of the town square, is a pommel horse. All I can say about this clip is, well, you're welcome.

So, to have a shot at Worst Movie of All Time, you have to have the money and stars to make a good movie; you have to be trying to make a good movie; and you have to fail totally, utterly, miserably.

About 20 years ago, my friend Matt Brunson had a couple of extra passes for a screening. So I went with Matt and our buddy Joe Posnanski to see a comedy called "Hudson Hawk." It starred Bruce Willis (coming off the first two "Die Hard" movies), Danny Aiello (so good in "Moonstruck" and "Do the Right Thing") and Andie MacDowell (not long after "Sex, Lies & Videotape"). Willis and Aiello were master burglars, MacDowell the love interest... we figured it had a chance to be good.

Instead, for the next two hours, we watched a trainwreck on the screen. What was this movie not? Let me count the ways: Not funny, not smart, not clever, not well-acted, not interesting, not compelling, did I mention not funny? The main thing I remember, 20 years down the road, is that the villainous mobsters were called the Mario Brothers. Like the video games. I had forgotten, until I read the Wikipedia entry, that the other bad guys (there were lots of bad guys) were named for candy bars. Here's part of the plot synopsis:

Kit Kat and Butterfinger take Anna to the castle. Tommy trips Snickers, causing his bomb launcher to shoot a bomb onto his head. Hudson and Tommy escape while Snickers and Almond Joy are killed when the bomb goes off.

Sorry for the spoilers.

Afterward we stood outside in the parking lot, and we could barely talk about it -- it was like trying to review somebody belching the national anthem. To this day no bad movie I've seen has topped it, by which I mean, bottomed it.

But "Jack and Jill" has real potential. There's a moment in the trailer when you see Adam Sandler, in drag, wearing a trenchcoat. I'm guessing, at some point, the trenchcoat comes off. And when it does, Worst Movie of All Time might be in play.

Wednesday tunes -- a little Zeppelin, a little Alabama

2011-10-19T14:42:00.003-04:00

I'm a little bummed out that the Civil Wars show scheduled for tonight got postponed... so I went looking for some music. Maybe I'll just post a couple of things up here every Wednesday. I'm always running across new stuff.

Neither of these clips are new, exactly -- they're old tunes done in new ways. First up is Michael Winslow, who you might remember as Sound Effects Guy from the "Police Academy" movies and various commercials during the '80s and '90s. I have no idea what he's been up to, but apparently it involves learning the Led Zeppelin catalog. This is pretty amazing.

(Thanks to kottke.org for putting this out there.)

This other YouTube clip isn't much of a video at all -- it was shot from so far away you can barely see the musicians. But the audio is enough. Here's Ryan Adams (formerly of the great N.C. band Whiskeytown) and Jason Isbell (formerly of the Drive-By Truckers) covering Alabama's "Love in the First Degree." If you look closely enough, you can see Adams sporting a Buck Owens guitar.

So what are y'all listening to these days?

A day at the fair

2011-10-17T10:17:00.000-04:00

We went to the N.C. State Fair on Saturday, along with (and this is an unofficial crowd estimate) 42 million other people. The state fair is one of the great sensory feasts in all of America -- so much to see, hear, smell, taste and touch. Here are a few of the sights -- and a couple of little stories I imagined along the way.

It's a blast to just check out the artwork on the rides... they pay great attention to detail on the art (I hope they pay as much attention to making sure the rides don't fling people halfway to Durham). If we knew aliens would be this comely, I think we'd all welcome our new alien overlords.

Gilding the Lily Dept.: They had deep-fried Oreos, deep-fried Snickers, deep-fried Twinkies, deep-fried cheesecake, deep-fried butter, deep-fried Kool-Aid... which, it turns out, is just Kool-Aid mixed into funnel-cake batter. We tried the deep-fried Reese's Cups. I'm ashamed to say, they were really good.

We found the Great Pumpkin.

"Do not feed your fingers to the donkeys" is such an odd way to say "Don't stick your fingers through the donkey cage, dunce." Maybe somebody was inspired by the first-ever "Saturday Night Live" sketch.

It goes without saying that "Toggenburg Goats" would be a great name for a rock band.

What a downer -- to get all the way to the state fair and find out you're only the second-best meat goat.

We ended up outside one of the livestock buildings as they brought lambs in and out. I'm not sure how you get a coat that shiny. Fried Kool-Aid, maybe.

The crab shrimp were better than I expected -- even though you had to devein them AND crack the claws.

My wife tried to cleanse her palate with vegetables. Yeah, those were fried too.

"The World's Largest Gummi Bear sat still and silent. Those puny ropes would never hold it. It waited for the right time. And then it would punish all those people who ate all his little chewy friends..."

"Angie knew her child was... different. He insisted on that Batman costume. And he always rode upside-down in the stroller. But he was a happy boy, as long as she caught him enough mosquitoes to eat."

Observer, Sovacool

2011-09-16T11:51:00.003-04:00

Joe Sovacool looked like Jesus and talked like jazz. I had no idea how old he was. Maybe 42, maybe 62. All I knew was that he was the coolest guy in the room. Our newsroom.

Thousands of you heard his voice over the years. If you called the paper looking for somebody, or just to rant at the state of the world, Joe was more often than not the guy who picked up the phone. Charlotte Observer, Sovacool. Or just Observer, Sovacool. We joked that thousands of years from now, when robots ran the earth, Joe would still be there at his desk, soothing the angry robot callers in his soft and low late-night-DJ voice.

Observer, Sovacool.

Joe went and died on us Thursday. (His sister posted the news on Facebook, and I finally learned -- Joseph William Sovacool was 53.) He had been battling lung cancer for a couple of years and then the tumors spread to his brain. He was a little stick of a guy even before he got sick, and the cancer thinned him even more. He lost his Jesus hair. He had trouble with his balance. But he kept working up until a few weeks ago.

Sometimes the place you work becomes home. I'd see Joe outside the office now and then, usually at Thomas Street Tavern, where he'd drink a beer and read a book at the corner of the bar. I know the paper wasn't where he slept. But in my mind, it was always where he lived.

In every office there are one or two people who keep the whole operation from veering into the ditch. They are never the highest-paid people. For years Joe was in charge of the clerks who answered phones, ordered supplies, took obits from funeral homes, kept the copiers running, doled out the mail, and did a hundred other things to make our office go. If you were a panicked reporter in the field (and I've often been a panicked reporter in the field), when you heard Joe's voice on the phone you knew things would be all right. He'd find the editor who had run off to the john. He'd dig out the fax that was buried in the stack. He'd take care of you.

We bonded over Steely Dan. Joe was one of those fans who had heard the Japanese bootleg and the seventh alternate take of the album track. I covered one of their concerts when I was music writer in the mid-90s, and after that he'd send YouTube videos or blog posts he'd run across on the Web. To this day I can't listen to the Dan without hearing Joe talk about them in his hipster patter, man those cats were so tight that night, they laid it out and brought it all the way back...

We've had a lot of heartbreak in our newsroom these last couple of years. Like most companies in this economy, we've let go a lot of good people, and others have let go of us. Every one of those people was a big part of the paper. But no one else was as much a part of our place as Joe. His desk was right there as you walked in the newsroom, and it was so odd these last few weeks to walk in and not see him there. I don't know what it's going to feel like now. I'd just love to hear that voice one more time.

Observer, Sovacool.

Two words. One and the same.

Guest book: Post thoughts, condolences

A few extras for Saturday's 9/11 column

2011-09-10T09:50:00.000-04:00

Here's some links and such related to Flight 93:

Reader Tim Collie points out that Sandy Bradshaw, a flight attendant from Greensboro, died on Flight 93. Here's a little more about her.

Frank and Linda Guerra, the subjects of my column this morning, work with a nonprofit called 93 Cents for Flight 93. It's raising money for the permanent memorial that opens in Shanksville today, and it also brings together young kids and senior citizens to talk about Flight 93 and 9/11.

Finally, a quick travel note.

Because this trip is taking me to several different places -- Washington, Shanksville, New York -- I'm driving instead of flying. Which means that after I left Shanksville on Friday, I needed to drive to my hotel in Lower Manhattan.

I'm sure there are places in Jersey where I could've left my car for three days and taken the train into the city. But I didn't get my act together enough to figure that out... plus I sort of liked the challenge of driving in New York City.

I didn't have a GPS. My cell phone mapped out the route, but it didn't follow along like a GPS does; I had to punch a button to figure out where to turn next. Just as I got into the Holland Tunnel, I got the low-battery warning on my cell. And within two minutes after coming out of the tunnel, I had taken a wrong turn.

Pretty soon I had no idea where I was. The optimist part of me said: It's OK, Manhattan is an island, you can't really get THAT lost. The pessimist said: Dude, you are so screwed.

It turns out that, as far as the biggest city in America goes, traffic on Friday night is not that bad. After 15 minutes of rambling around I found a place to pull over and get my bearings. (For the NYC-savvy among you, I was trying to get to the Battery Park area and ended up going the wrong way on West Boulevard.) The phone battery was way down in the red zone now, but at least I had a new route. I got onto Broadway, curved around toward the street I needed... and didn't see a street sign.

My new rule of New York driving: If you come up on a street, and it doesn't have a sign, that's where you should turn.

Instead I hesitated, then kept going straight. Missing your turn in Lower Manhattan is not just a matter of circling the block. I think I made 11 turns before I finally got back to the street with no sign, turned left... and there was my hotel.

I looked down as I pulled in and my phone had just died.

To answer your questions: I did stop and ask a cop. He said "Hmm, I think your street is over that way," pointing directly behind me.

And I probably don't need to drive in Manhattan again. Although, I have to say, by the time I got there I felt a little like Indiana Jones.

Some extras for today's 9/11 story

2011-09-09T09:21:00.000-04:00

(Photo: fragments of the wreckage from Flight 93, part of the 9/11 exhibit at the National Museum of American History)

As always, any one piece I write is only a small part of the story, and that's never been more true than this week. My first column on this 9/11 journey came out this morning. Here are a few little extras to fill out the frame.

Here's the 9/11 collection at the National Museum of American History. This includes items that aren't part of the exhibit I saw Thursday. One thing I didn't mention: The artifacts in the exhibit aren't behind glass -- they're simply set down on tables, out in the open. You can't touch them. But somehow the lack of barriers makes the exhibit more intimate.

For another take on objects from 9/11, here's a New York Times slideshow on things people kept from the World Trade Center wreckage.

And here's one more photo I took at the museum. People who went through the exhibit were able to write a note about what they thought and post it on a bulletin board.

Sorry for the blurry photo. Here's what it says above the heart: "I will pray 4 these families even though I am very young I understand what happened. I hope you continue to do this to help people understand what happened now. I'M SO SORRY."

A 9/11 journey

2011-09-07T09:47:00.000-04:00

I'm heading out on the road this morning to tell some stories on the 10th anniversary of Sept. 11. Maybe you can help.

Our plan is for me to write for Friday's paper from Washington, D.C., where terrorists attacked the Pentagon; for Saturday from Shanksville, Pa., where Flight 93 crashed in a field after passengers fought the hijackers; and for Sunday and Monday from New York, where at the World Trade Center site, they are rebuilding.

If you know of 9/11-related things I should see in those cities, or people I should meet, drop me a line in the comments or email ttomlinson@charlotteobserver.com. (You'll get an automated reply that says I'm out of the office, but I can still read your emails.)

I'm looking for people with connections to both Sept. 11 and North Carolina, especially the Charlotte area.

And if there's anything 9/11-related along the way that I need to see or do, let me know. I hope to post here from time to time in between the bigger stories. Would love to hear any thoughts or ideas... even if it's just what you're thinking about now, 10 years down the road.

Sad days for 'Nature Boy' Ric Flair

2011-08-29T14:30:00.001-04:00

So here's my Ric Flair story. Back in 2004, when his autobiography came out, I wrote a column about it. (I've pasted it to the end of this post.) The column described a lot of the wild parties Flair wrote about in the book. The next morning, my phone rang, and it was Ric Flair. He was very nice. Our conversation went something like this:

"So, Tommy, I've got a little problem with your column. You put a lot about my partying in there."

"Well, Ric, you wrote a lot about it in your book. I took all that from the book."

"Yeah, I understand... but I'm in a little bit of hot water with my wife about it."

"OK... but I'm not sure why she should be mad. Everything I wrote about is in the book."

"Well... I didn't actually show her the book before we published it."

They got divorced not long after.

Aside from family, Ric Flair was one of the most important people in my life growing up -- if you had made me create a personal Mount Rushmore when I was 13, it would've been Flair, Hank Aaron, Sherlock Holmes and Peter Frampton. (Yeah, I didn't get too far with girls.) The Ric Flair I saw on Mid-Atlantic Wrestling was always the coolest guy in the room -- a playboy who talked trash but could always back it up.

But of course that's just TV.

Shane Ryan of Grantland.com wrote a devastating piece last week that details (mostly through courthouse records) Flair's personal and financial decline. We'd written most of it in the paper, one story at a time over the years, but seeing all of it together, it hit like a hammer. I had a hard time reading it.

Flair "retired" three years ago after one last great match with Shawn Michaels. But now he's on TNA wrestling, with a bunch of other used-to-bes and wish-they-weres. He's 62. He might miss the action. He probably needs the money.

Today the news is that he's making noise about suing Grantland... for information that the writer got from Flair's book.

Even with all that, I wish the guy the best. I've never met him, but he's brought me a lot of joy over the years. I hope he finds some of his own.

Here's my column from 2004:

I've just read Ric Flair's new book, "To Be the Man." It's now clear that North Carolina needs some new historical markers.
Here lies the spot where Ric Flair fell down drunk on his kitchen floor while fellow wrestler Terry Funk crawled around the back yard naked, trying to start a fight with a pit bull.

Or: At this hotel bar, Ric Flair wooed a woman by boasting that he had just posed for Playgirl. He hadn't. She married him anyway.

Or: This is the traffic court where Ric Flair discovered that he had committed 82 moving violations in four years.

The problem with most people who write books about themselves is that they haven't done enough to write about.

Ric Flair does not have this problem.

"To Be the Man" came out Tuesday and spent the day in the top 75 at amazon.com. It's written mostly for wrestling geeks (like me).

But there's another layer if you read the book as a Charlottean.

Ric Flair moved here in 1974, spending his first night in an $8 hotel. In the 30 years since, he made it big and so did our town.

Read the book and you realize that Flair's life is the perfect comeback to the gripes people have about Charlotte.

Charlotte, not a party town? You should've been with Flair the night Andre the Giant drank 106 beers.

Charlotte, strait-laced and bland? Our most famous resident has spent the last three decades wearing custom-made robes and slashing his own forehead with a razor blade.

Charlotte, careful with its money? Our guy has personally kept half the IRS in business, racking up $1 million in fines on his taxes.

If you've lived here long, you'll love the local color - Flair runs up a tab at Valentino's, buys his first fancy car at Arnold Palmer Cadillac, hires Bill Diehl as his lawyer.

(His current wife, Beth, gets off one of the best lines, describing their first meeting in Raleigh: "I thought Ric was a pimp. There were about seven women with him, and he didn't look like a normal person.")

He also takes steroids, chugs kamikazes like they're Gatorade, fools around until his first wife leaves him, sells shares in himself to pay off bills, and invites every woman in Baltimore between 18 and 28 to a party at his penthouse.

Dozens show up.

He spends a good portion of the book apologizing for all this - mainly to his wives and four kids. (He doesn't get into his most recent trouble - a lawsuit filed in March by two flight attendants. They say Flair and other wrestlers sexually assaulted and harassed them on a charter flight two years ago.)

But you get the feeling that even though he's sorry that he hurt people, he's not sorry enough to give up all those wild nights.

If you haven't followed wrestling for a while, it's the most real it has ever been.

Yes, the wrestlers still know who's going to win before they get in the ring. But wrestling has lifted its own curtain - everybody admits it's a show, fans know performers' real names, the inner workings of the business are laid out on the table.

Flair (real name: Richard Fliehr) puts a good bit of that in his book. If you want to know what he thinks about why World Championship Wrestling went down, it's here. If you want to know the wrestlers he respects and the ones he can't stand, it's here.

But whether Flair intended it or not, his book is about psychology - and not the kind that makes the fans boo or cheer.

It's about how a guy can do all the wrong things and somehow make you like him. It's about how a performer can get so deep into a character that even he can't tell the difference anymore.

And it's about how you can't sum up any person - much less any city - with a few quick words.

Yep, in many ways this is a pinstriped, tight-collared, Old Testament town.

But sometimes the pinstripes come off. The sequined robe comes on. And our inner Flair comes out.

REM in CLT in 1981

2011-08-25T13:47:00.000-04:00

Canadian music guy Eric Alper posted this on Twitter (he's @ThatEricAlper) today. It's a poster from an R.E.M. show in Charlotte 30 years ago today.

I love that R.E.M. was considered sort of a disco band with an "irresistible dance beat."

Two questions: Does anybody out there remember this show? And is Scorpio still around? I remember hearing about it when I got to town, but it's been years since I've heard anybody mention the place.

Say something nice

2011-08-22T15:21:00.000-04:00

From the brilliant folks at Improv Everywhere. I think we should put one of these on every street corner in Charlotte.

Here's the backstory and some more details.

And here's a similar idea we did on this blog a year ago.

Waaaaaaaay overdue

2011-08-05T13:10:00.000-04:00

I took a book back to the library this week. My wife had read it for her book group and thought I might like it. "Love Walked In" by Marisa de los Santos -- "exquisite and stylish," blurbed Sarah Jessica Parker. "I read a few pages and put it aside," says me. We got a robo-call from the library saying it was overdue; I listened to it and promptly forgot.

The book sat on our coffee table for a while, and then on the end table. We stacked other books and magazines on top of it. Every so often I'd see a corner peeking out of the pile and say man, we've had that a long time, we should take it back soon.

Charlotte libraries don't stamp the due date in books anymore -- you get it on the receipt, and that was long gone.

"So when was it due?" I asked the librarian.

She smiled.

"March."

Some days inertia feels like the most powerful force in the world, stronger than gravity or anger or love.

How many of our problems would vanish if we just quit doing the same stupid things we do every day? Or started doing the things we keep putting off?

I read "The Family Circus" every morning on the comics page. A lot of people love "The Family Circus" -- we find that out at the paper every time we try to get rid of it. In all the years I've read it, I don't think it's ever given me an honest laugh. But it just takes three seconds. Maybe this time Jeffy will be funny. OK, maybe next time.

Routines become habits, and habits become ruts that run so deep it's hard to see out. When inertia kicks in, your mind clicks over to autopilot. You could live your life blindfolded. You know exactly where to go.

That's why one of the best ways to get out of a funk is to change your routine. It can be as simple as driving a different route to work, or turning left instead of right on your morning walk, or sitting on the couch instead of in the easy chair. Those little changes alert your brain that something new is going on. It makes you more aware. You see the world instead of just passing through.

I teach that idea in workshops. But sometimes you forget your own lessons.

The other night I was on the phone with a friend I hadn't heard from in months, and he apologized -- he said he'd been in "hermit mode." Hermit mode can be a comforting place, especially in times like these. If you're not trying to find a job, you're trying to keep one. And if you're not worried about keeping your job, you're worried that whatever you have won't turn out to be enough.

Sometimes all that worry drags you into a dark place. Other times it just picks at the edges of your life. You let a few things slide. You wander around the upper reaches of your TV channels. You make a list of the stuff you need to do. Wow, that's a long list. Maybe tomorrow.

Inertia is a hand on your back, pushing gently. Sometimes it feels good. But you'll never grow unless you push back.

The book went into the car and the car went to the library. I stopped at the ATM on the way, just in case.

The charge was 10 bucks. Our contribution to the library fund. I tried to explain what happened. The librarian just laughed.

"Happens all the time," she said. "We're all a little overdue these days."

The gifts of Gene Wilson

2011-06-22T18:04:00.000-04:00

Another book from Gene Wilson arrived this week. It’s the best mail I ever get at work.

This time it was an 1884 edition of Aesop’s Fables. The cover is peeling off, and the whole thing crackles when you open it up, but the illustrations are beautiful and you can still learn from the morals: Cure a boaster by putting his words to the test. In quarreling about the shadow, we often lose the substance.

Over the past year or so, Gene has sent me half a dozen books. The first couple were on grammar and composition. I thought he was trying to tell me something. But he followed up with an email saying he thought a writer would enjoy books on writing. (He was right.)

After that he sent me a cookbook from colonial Williamsburg – if you ever need to make sweetmeat pudding, I’ve got the recipe – and then a book on English usage, and a self-help book on word mastery, and now the fables. The newest book in the bunch dates to 1957. The rest are much older. James M. Hanna, an early owner of “Parker’s Progressive Exercises in English Composition,” penciled his name inside the front cover in 1878.

I’ve never met Gene. He’s a secret pen pal sending me treasures from the past. When I got the book this week, I spread out the whole collection on my desk. I figured it was time to call him.

Gene is 77. He and his wife, Marcia, live in a house they built 10 years ago out in Rutherford County, between Caroleen and Forest City. It’s old family property. He grew up in the area, spent a couple years in the Army, went off to college. He ended up spending more than 40 years as a professor of psychology, mostly in the university system of Pennsylvania.

He and Marcia have eight cats and five dogs. A sixth dog is living with a neighbor. It got ahold of some of the cats.

When he and his wife were living south of Pittsburgh, he started going to auctions. He found out you could sometimes get a whole cardboard box of books for five bucks. That’s a deal no matter what books are inside. He didn’t look for rare books or first editions. It didn’t matter if the binding was ragged. What mattered were the words.

“I have never written for publication,” Gene says. “I used to enjoy writing letters of recommendation for students. But I love reading good writing, economical writing. That’s one reason I enjoy cookbooks. You find very few adjectives in a cookbook.”

Now Gene haunts flea markets. There’s one in Danieltown, outside Forest City, and a big one in Chesnee, S.C., just over the border. Most times he can get a book for 50 cents. He never pays more than $2. He buys damaged paintings, too. He takes them back home and gets out his paints and fixes them up.

It has been a little grim around the Wilson house. Gene has diverticulitis and has been on a feeding tube; he’s not supposed to eat or drink anything, although he has sneaked in a couple servings of ice cream. Marcia found out last November that she has lung cancer. But they keep running around and talking and reading their books.

Gene knows he’ll never read all the ones he’s bought. He likes the idea of being surrounded by all those beautiful sentences.

Online, we pass good stuff around through links. But there are links in the real world, too – the kind of links you can hold in your hands, the ones that connect you with other people from long ago who burned to get their words out into the world.

There’s a guy over in Rutherford County who has a house full of links. And every so often, he sends one out.

LeBron's loss

2011-06-13T11:38:00.001-04:00

I watched the Dallas-Miami game with my buddy Joe Posnanski last night. He, of course, was so elequent about it that I'm probably not going to add much to the discussion. And we both saw what everybody else saw: LeBron James, creator of the Miami dream team, focal point of the whole NBA season, on the floor in the fourth quarter with millions of people watching and a title up for grabs, desperately trying to hide.

He could not give up the ball fast enough. He could not have guarded more passively. (Dirk Nowitzki blew by him on a key basket late in the game and LeBron let him go like it was the lunchtime run at the Y.) In the biggest moments, the man with the tools to be the greatest player in history was the worst player on the court.

I'll admit, I was rooting against LeBron. He dumped Cleveland in a cruel way and started counting off trophies for his new team before they had won anything. The word "comeuppance" was meant for what happened to him in this series.

But it shouldn't have happened this way.

If you're going to lose, LOSE. Shoot 2-for-20. Foul out. There's no shame in failure built on effort. But to shrink from the moment, to so clearly deflate under pressure... that's a different kind of stain. It won't wash out.

Since LeBron was 16 years old, people have told him he was going to be the greatest basketball player on Earth. For the last four or five years, at least, a lot of people have said he already is. When he's great -- making outrageous jumpers, locking down the other team's best scorer, streaking down the court like a cross between a defensive end and a ballet dancer -- there's never been anyone better.

He is King James, the anointed. As he told the Miami fans before the season, the Heat would win "not one, not two, not three..." championships. They would have a roomful of trophies. And he would be the best player on the best team.

But where you truly discover yourself in life is when it goes off-script. The Mavericks were not ready to grant LeBron his destiny. Miami lost a game they should have won, then another and another.

I don't know what's in LeBron James' head. But I suspect he had already played out the movie in his mind. He had already seen the ending, where he held up the trophy in front of his adoring fans. And in the real world, where that was not happening, he simply could not understand.

Dwyane Wade and the rest of the Heat players kept trying. They knew that you can write your own script on the fly. LeBron acted as if the game were already over. He seemed to decide it was not his time.

And so, instead of playing like a king, he was just another witness.

David Pearson on video

2011-05-20T21:09:00.003-04:00

I've got a story on David Pearson in Saturday's special section for Race Week. A lot of modern NASCAR fans don't know much about him, because his peak as a driver was in the '60s and '70s, but many longtime fans consider him the best driver in the history of stock-car racing. (He's second in wins all-time to Richard Petty.)

I watched these clips as part of reporting the story and thought you might like them.

Here's one of the most famous finishes in NASCAR history, as Pearson and Petty battle on the last lap of the 1976 Daytona 500.

Here's the end of the '74 Firecracker 400 in Darlington, where Pearson puts a tremendous deke on Petty at the end.

And here's a two-part interview with some classic photos and footage... check out the smooch he lays on some young lass about 4:45 into part 1.

What it means to be a pro

2011-05-19T14:10:00.000-04:00

At first I felt sorry for the guy. Edwin McCain was the entertainment at the NASCAR Hall of Fame induction dinner Wednesday night, and by "entertainment," I mean "somebody to sing a few songs while everybody else digests dessert."

It could not have been less of a rock and roll event. Most of the men wore ties and most of the women wore dresses. The whole point was to welcome the new Hall of Fame class and tell a few stories before the formal induction on Monday. It was a nice time, but the average age of the crowd was somewhere north of 50. Maybe 60.

Edwin McCain grew up in Greenville, S.C., and hit it fairly big not long after his friends in Hootie and the Blowfish hit it really big. You've probably heard him if you've been to a wedding in the last 10 or 12 years -- his songs "I'll Be" and "I Could Not Ask For More" are now just about as standard as the Electric Slide. For me, he has always fallen in that vast middle of the stuff I hear on the radio -- not bad enough to change the station, not great enough to turn it up.

So he comes out at the Hall of Fame dinner and I thought, OK, at least this is a pleasant way to make the next 10 minutes pass.

"I love coming to events like this. I get called Mr. McCain all day," he said. "The only other time I get called Mr. McCain is, 'Please get out of the car...'"

We laughed. And he had us.

One thing I think we forget, because we have access to so much greatness, is how much it takes just to be good. I remember going to the gym at the University of Georgia one day in the '80s and watching Gerald Crosby, who was starting for the Georgia basketball team back then but never played a minute in the NBA. He was shooting jumpers, 20 feet or more from the basket. It was half an hour before he missed.

On Wednesday night it took about 30 seconds to figure out that Edwin McCain is better than anybody you know, anybody you've ever seen busking on the street or playing at open mike night.

He played "I Could Not Ask For More," and "I'll Be," and an Anders Osborne song called "Lucky One." It was just him and his guitar, but that was enough to fill the big ballroom. Somewhere in there he strung out one long note with his voice, then floated to another without taking a breath, and his back bowed with the effort.

I'm pretty sure not a single person in the room came to see Edwin McCain. But at the end of the last song he got a big ovation, and as it died down it suddenly swelled again, as if the crowd decided they hadn't appreciated him enough.

He could've put 80 percent into those songs and nobody would've minded. The check would've cleared. People would've moved right on past him in their minds, and maybe when they heard "I'll Be" at the grocery store they would've thought, I saw that guy somewhere, he was pretty good.

So many people wake up every day wanting to be professional musicians, or professional writers, or professional athletes, or professional anything. Here's the secret: Talent is part of it, but it's not nearly all. What makes a professional, more than anything, is the will to do your best and the guts to keep showing up.

Edwin McCain's got talent. But what I'll remember about him is that, on a night that had nothing to do with him, he gave the crowd 10 minutes of everything he had. He showed up, and he was a pro. That's a lot more rare than you think.

World's greatest rain delay

2011-05-19T10:55:00.000-04:00

Clemson and Davidson were supposed to play baseball Tuesday. Instead there was a long rain delay. And so the two teams decided to make their own entertainment. I can't imagine the game itself would have been this good.

Hang in at least to the 3:00 mark for the curling.

Dorothy is free

2011-05-18T10:31:00.000-04:00

Sometimes the universe keeps you awake for a reason. At 1:07 this morning I was on the computer, piddling around with a couple of projects, when this message arrived on Twitter:

YEAH! DOROTHY HAS BEEN FREED!!!!

It turned out to be true, and joyous.

Dorothy is my friend Dorothy Parvaz, who had been detained in Syria, then deported to Iran, and was held for 18 days. I wrote about her when it first happened -- how brave and tough she is, how strong I knew she'd be. But when you don't hear anything, you start to think the worst. A bunch of us who knew Dorothy happened to be gathering last weekend, and though we were there to reunite and celebrate, her absence left a hole we couldn't quite fill.

This is the first time someone I know has gone missing. I can't imagine what it's like for a parent whose child has disappeared, or a military spouse whose other half vanishes halfway across the world.

Dorothy was lucky. She had lots of friends -- journalists with connections, people with social media skills, colleagues all around the world. I don't know if any of that made a difference. But it felt good to try.

There's a lot of catching up to be done. Her fiance comes first, and then the rest of her family, and somewhere along the line those of us who count Dorothy as a friend will get to hug her neck. There's also some explaining to do. Dorothy hated having her photo taken, and I'm not sure who draws the duty of telling her that a gigantic photo of her appeared on a video board in Times Square. Maybe it's good that we have a little lead time.

This whole episode got me thinking about friends. I've never been good at keeping up with mine. I've collected a few good friends in every town and every job, and we love it when we see one another. But I've never been good at picking up the phone and calling, and I always seem too busy to visit. Facebook helps. But it's not a friend's voice in your ear, and it's not a friend's smile in your eyes.

Dorothy was in a crisis, and her friends stepped up. But our friends need us in the moments in between troubles, too. And we need them.

Thanks for all your thoughts and prayers for Dorothy. And thanks for giving me this space to worry and celebrate. We'll get back to our previously scheduled local news, I promise.

Now: call somebody. Or make plans to stop by.

Don't wait.

Miracle on the Hudson survivor, plus some Monday links

2011-05-16T12:49:00.001-04:00

Happy Monday, everybody. I'm back at work after a few days off... got a few good pieces in the works, including one related to Race Week, one for the end of the school year, plus a few to be announced. Holler with other ideas.

In the meantime, here's some good stuff I ran across in the last week or so:

Ric Elias of Charlotte was one of the survivors of the Miracle on the Hudson flight two years ago. He recently spoke at a TED conference about how the experience changed his life. It's a short talk -- about 5 minutes -- and worth watching.

A new workshop at Queens

2011-05-10T16:29:00.000-04:00

I've been doing writing workshops at Queens University for a while now. They're a lot of fun, at least from my end -- we've had lots of good conversations, and I haven't talked anyone into a deep sleep yet.

(I spoke to a big class at the University of Georgia a few years ago, and about 10 seconds after I started talking, two girls in the front row fell asleep. I apologized to the professor afterward. "Not your fault," he said. "They fall asleep every class.")

I've got a new workshop next month on the personal essay -- we'll talk about how to discover what you ought to be writing about, and how to go about writing it. It's a two-session workshop on June 4 and 11. Here's how to sign up. If you have any questions, drop me a line.

Here's a short video clip from an earlier class. It features my dulcet voice, which my friends have described as "obscene phone caller in training."

Cindy Thomson in concert

2011-05-10T14:19:00.000-04:00

One of my favorite stories of the last couple of years was about Cindy Thomson. Cindy got laid off and decided to chase her dream -- she wanted to be a jazz singer. So she set out to do it, and I got to write about it.

Now Cindy has a concert coming up on Saturday, and you should go.

It's an intimate show, in a cabin on Mandarin Boulevard (near Monroe and Sharon Amity roads). Cindy says there's room for 50 people. She'll be singing with Jim Riley (guitar) and Ron Brendle (bass).

The show starts at 7:30. Tickets are $15 (free for children under 12). Reservations are required. If you're interested, email Cindy at cindythomson@att.net and she'll set you up.

You can sample or buy Cindy's CD, "The Sweet Things in Life," here at CD Baby. But music is better live. Go check it out.

My friend Dorothy

2011-05-05T12:15:00.003-04:00

It's strange to see a friend turn up in the news. I've done this for a living long enough to know that no story completely captures a person -- it's a snapshot, and all you can hope is that you framed it right and the colors are true.

So let me share a few snapshots of my friend Dorothy Parvaz, a great journalist who was taken into custody by the Syrian government last Friday.

My wife and I met Dorothy while we were at Harvard University in 2008-09 on a Nieman journalism fellowship. Dorothy came from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, where she wrote editorials.

Dorothy hates having her picture taken. We put together a little yearbook for our group, and all our photos are in it -- except for hers. So she's going to be really ticked that there's a whole slideshow of her out there on the web.

Dorothy's a citizen of the world -- her mom is American, her dad is Iranian-Canadian, and she holds citizenship in all three countries.

She likes a good cocktail. She's always stylish, usually in various shades of black. Her eyes can throw daggers. But when you make her laugh you feel like you own the world.

During the year we were in Cambridge, Dorothy's paper up and died on her. The Post-Intelligencer went from a print edition to online-only. Because the printed paper still brings in most of the money, the P-I laid off almost all its staff, including her. So in the middle of what was supposed to be a glorious break, she was set adrift. We sought her out and hugged her neck. She was strong and tough that day. Still is.

After our year was over she went to Europe to be with the man who is now her fiancé. She got a job with Al Jazeera English and had recently covered the earthquake and tsunami in Japan. It's not clear why Syria detained Dorothy. But as another friend of hers put it:

"Protestors are standing up to a violent authoritarian leadership. Troops are rounding up hundreds of people and taking them away. Innocent people are being killed. These are the things conscientious journalists care about. These are the things Dorothy cares about."

In my field, the best of the best head into trouble as everyone else is heading out. Two combat photographers -- including one who grew up in Fayetteville -- were killed in Libya just two weeks ago. The worst I get on an average day is a nasty email, but many in our tribe are truly brave.

You can keep track of the situation on a Facebook page set up for Dorothy, or on the Twitter hashtag #FreeDorothy. The Committee to Protect Journalists is also on the case.

I don't talk too much about other journalists or the job of journalism on here. Thanks for indulging me this one. We love Dorothy, and miss her, and hope she comes home soon.

Sept. 11 and Deborah Tourloukis -- then and now

2011-05-02T17:41:00.001-04:00

This is a three-part post. The first part is a new piece that I'm posting online now and will be in the paper Tuesday morning. The two parts that follow are my original stories on Deborah Tourloukis from 2001 and '02.

Deborah Tourloukis was about to go to bed when the news came on TV. Osama bin Laden had been killed. She couldn’t watch. And she didn’t sleep.

She couldn’t watch because she knew they’d show footage of the World Trade Center collapsing on Sept. 11. And she didn’t sleep because she was in the north tower when the first plane hit.

“Last night I just sat there and cried,” she said Monday. “It was tears of joy. It was tears of sorrow. It was a real mixed bag.”

In 2001, Deborah was working in accounting for First Union Bank in Charlotte. She was in New York to train other bank employees. She was on the 47th floor of the north tower when she felt the impact and the building swayed. She called her daughter and said I love you over and over into the phone. She thought it would be her last chance.

Deborah and a co-worker went down all those stairs together, passing firemen going up. They had just made it out of the building when the south tower crumbled. They huddled as huge chunks of debris barely missed them. They staggered to their feet and kept walking. They were two blocks away when the north tower fell.

(That co-worker’s name is Dzavid Kahari. He’s Muslim.)

I wrote about Deborah back then, and again a year later. I checked in with her Monday to see what she thought about bin Laden’s death, and to see how she’s doing now.

The great thing, after all these years, is to hear her laughter. She didn’t laugh about bin Laden, although she’s entitled. She laughs because so many things in her life are going well.

Long divorced, she’s engaged again at age 51 – she and her fiancé, Gene Rash, plan to get married in 2012. Or maybe 2013. There’s no hurry. It’ll be her second marriage and his third. He calls her Trip. She calls him Sequel.

Her daughter, Demetria, had Deborah’s first grandchild – a girl named Persephonie – on April 21. Her son, Brian, took a job in her honor. He’s been working for the New York City Fire Department since 2005.

She still lives in Mount Holly. She still works for the bank, although First Union morphed over the years into Wells Fargo. She’s in the auditing department. Her co-workers know about her and Sept. 11. They came to her desk Monday morning to check on her. She was fine.

Mostly.

Two things still give her problems. One is fire alarms. When Wells Fargo runs a fire drill, she has a buddy to help her get up and out.

The other thing is sudden storms. She was in St. Louis on Good Friday when weather sirens went off all over town. Deborah had what she called “a post-traumatic stress moment.” She called her hotel’s front desk in a panic.

“Are we being attacked?”

“What?” the clerk said. “No, it’s a tornado.”

Deborah might have been the only person in St. Louis relieved that it was just a tornado.

Back in 2002, she was scratching herself raw in her sleep. She doesn’t do that now. Back then she thought or dreamed about Sept. 11 every day. Now it just crosses her mind once in a while. She goes to New York three or four times a year to see friends – she grew up in Brooklyn – but she hasn’t visited Ground Zero in five or six years.

Every Sept. 11, she goes to a memorial service early in the morning, by herself. A few years ago she decided to buy herself a little something on that day, to mark another year of survival. Most years it’s something cheap. But last year she needed a car, so she bought a Honda CR-V.

She did spend a little time in her sleepless Sunday night finding out how bin Laden died. She noticed that U.S. officials carried out his funeral according to Islamic traditions.

“The U.S. still respected the Muslim beliefs and customs that he claimed to live by,” she said. “And yet he showed no compassion for others’ lives or beliefs.”

She used to speak to churches and social groups. Getting up in front of those people and telling her story helped her heal. Talking to a therapist helped her heal in different ways. She doesn’t feel the need to talk about Sept. 11 all the time anymore. But she doesn’t mind when people ask her about it.

“It will always be a part of my life,” she said. “I respect that. I don’t want anyone to forget.”

Story #1 from the archives:

OUT OF THE DARK ON A HERO'S ARM
Published 9/21/01

Deborah Tourloukis is afraid of the dark.

Ten days ago she kneeled on the floor under a co-worker's coat as the World Trade Center crumbled around her, turning the whole world into a blackness she can't describe.

Now she's back home in Charlotte, uninjured, alive. But four of her co-workers at First Union are missing. Two of them were just ahead of her. Another was right behind.

She sleeps with the light on.

And when she is awake, every so often something trembles at her core.

"It's almost like my brain is defrosting, " she says, "like it's remembering the things I can't remember yet. My hands start to shake. I cry and can't stop.

"I've only had one bad episode today. I allow myself one a day."

Deborah does accounting for First Union - she checks stock and bond accounts to make sure what customers spend matches what they trade for.

She went to First Union's New York office last week to train employees. She flew up Sunday, a day early, to see family - she grew up in Brooklyn, and her son lives in New York.

Anyone visiting the World Trade Center on business had to have a temporary ID card made. Deborah still has hers from Sept. 11. In a way, her story is frozen on that card:

Her picture.

The designation 1WTC, for Building 1, the north tower.

The number 47, for the 47th floor.

That's where she was at 8:48 a.m., when the first jet hit the other side of her building. The impact made the tower sway. She looked up, out the window, and saw the strangest things in the air above her. Blankets. Briefcases. A notebook, fluttering.

She thought it was an earthquake.

She called her boss in Charlotte. He told her a plane had hit the tower. She called her daughter, Demetria, a student at Belmont Abbey.

Deborah could think of only one thing to say. I love you. I love you. I love you.

One stairway was already jammed with people. Somebody found another. The stairs were only wide enough for two people at a time.

Soon they had to go single-file - the firemen were coming up.

Deborah and the others moved aside as the firemen brought down the injured, the burned, a blind man.

Somewhere around the 17th floor, one of Deborah's co-workers stopped. She said she needed a fireman. Deborah doesn't know what was wrong. That was the last they saw of her.

Finally they came through a doorway where a fireman stood. "Make sure you have a buddy!" he shouted. Deborah grabbed onto a co-worker: Dzavid, pronounced like David.

She remembers going through a turnstile and a revolving door, then turning left and walking down a shopping corridor between the two towers.

That's when the south tower collapsed.

"We looked back, and there's no other way I can say this - the debris chased us, " she says. "The smoke came in and rolled over us. All the lights went out."

Steel, stone, glass crashed around them. So many pieces big enough to kill.

Deborah slipped and fell. Dzavid huddled beside her and held his coat over both of their heads.

A plate glass window from the Gap store in the corridor shook loose and fell on top of them. Somehow, it didn't break.

Before they left the 47th floor, they had wet some paper towels and stuffed them in their pockets. Now they put the towels over their mouths. Deborah didn't want to move. She thought she'd fall in a hole. But Dzavid made her get up and walk.

Out of nowhere, someone appeared with a flashlight. They went down another level, everyone linking hands, until Deborah smelled fresh air.

They had made it two blocks down the street when the north tower fell.

Deborah says two co-workers were just up ahead when the first tower collapsed. A third was just behind.

All three are missing, along with the woman who stayed on the 17th floor.

Another nearby co-worker, Tom Canavan, dug his way out. A photo of him, his head covered in blood, appeared in People magazine.

Deborah got home Saturday night. She wants people to know that not all her heroes are in New York.

First Union got her and other survivors everything they needed. Friends keep her on the phone eight hours a day.

She hasn't felt like going out, but Thursday morning she went and had her nails done. A tiny flag ribbon is painted on each ring finger.

She'll try to go back to work Monday. She's a little nervous about it. But she has so many people to talk to, so many people to thank.

First on the list is the co-worker who covered her with his coat and led her out of the darkness.

Deborah says he saved her life. And she wants people to know who he is.

Dzavid.

Dzavid Kahari.

He's Muslim.

Story #2 from the archives:

SHE ESCAPED TERROR, FOUND NEW COURAGE

MOUNT HOLLY WOMAN SHARES LIFE-CHANGING EVENT TO HELP OTHERS COME TO TERMS WITH ATTACKS

Published 9/11/02

Some mornings, Deborah Tourloukis still wakes up rubbed raw.

She dreams about the World Trade Center and she scratches herself. Always the same spots. The inside of her right knee. The back of her calf. She doesn't know why she scrapes those spots. But they stay sore and bruised.

In her dream, it is dark and she is stuck and she is clawing to get out. In her sleep she reopens the old wounds.

At 8:46 a.m., exactly one year ago, the first plane hit the World Trade Center. To this day it's still not clear how many people were inside the twin towers. Some recent studies estimate as few as 10,000 - plus the firefighters, police and rescue workers who went in the buildings to help.

Roughly 2,800 died.

The rest are in a club whose enrollment will never grow.

The survivors club.

Deborah Tourloukis of Mount Holly still has her membership card. It is a day pass to the World Trade Center's north tower, marked Sept. 11, 2001.

She was on one of her regular trips to train employees at First Union Corp.'s office. At a farmers market outside the building, she bought a ham-and-cheese quiche and a loaf of banana bread to share with her co-workers.

She joked with the security guard, took the elevator to the 47th floor.

And then history happened.

In the months since, she has told her story to a line of strangers on the front porch of her childhood home.

She has told her story to a flight attendant who started to weep when he discovered who she was.

She has told her story in an empty bar because the owner wanted to hear, because he lost a son in the terror she survived.

She's 42, divorced with three grown kids. She still works her same job in accounting, although First Union has now merged with Wachovia. She never imagined a life where so many people would want to hear her story.

But with each telling she feels the story's power. The power to help others feel what it was like. The power to heal her raw places.

This morning, Wachovia will hold a Sept. 11 memorial service. Deborah put it together. She has worked extra hours, gone in on her days off, to make it right.

At one point, she thought the service might give her closure. But there is too much blocking the door.

So, instead, she has swung it open.

She tells her story.

Glad for the darkness

"I've got two props - my water and my tissue, " she says. "I just may cry."

She is talking to the Gaston County Extension and Community Association, which used to be a homemakers group but now discusses all sorts of issues, usually over coffee and brownies.

Deborah wears a dark suit and a Mickey Mouse American-flag pin. On the table next to her is a display case with a shard of glass and a hunk of stone. Her brother, a New York City firefighter, got the glass and stone from ground zero.

Deborah is new to public speaking. She doesn't build to dramatic pauses. She doesn't pull her words into a theme. It just spills out.

"I called my boss in Charlotte and told her I thought there was an earthquake. She said, 'Get out; a plane has hit your building.' I made a call to my daughter Demetria. She was ironing her clothing. I said, 'Demetria, a plane has hit. I don't know if I'm gonna come home.' "

But she did. She went down 46 flights of stairs and then under the building. She passed burned bodies, exhausted people who decided to stop, firefighters heading up.

The rescue workers told her to buddy up with someone. She found a co-worker, Dzavid Kahari, a Muslim.

When the south tower fell, they huddled on the floor and Dzavid covered her with his coat. A plate-glass window fell on them. Somehow, it didn't break.

They made it outside.

Two blocks from the north tower, a photographer was trying to fit the awful scene into her camera. She snapped a picture of Deborah and Dzavid as they walked by. Deborah's hair is thick with dust. Her eyes are cast in shock.

Minutes later, the north tower perished.

Five of her co-workers died. Two had been just ahead of her. One had been not far behind.

Deborah thanks God for all the smoke that day.

"The darkness was a gift, " she says. "It was hard enough to hear it as we came through the building, but it's a gift that we didn't have to see. It made it hard to breathe at the time. But I believe it made it easier for us to live today."

The women in the crowd are dabbing their eyes with paper napkins. Deborah has already had to stop three times. But she doesn't want to leave everybody sad.

"I'm from Brooklyn, and most of my family is still up in New York, " she says. "But I've been down here eight years and it's been a wonderful thing for me. Thank you so much for listening. Sharing it with other people makes it lighter."

She likes to share inspirational quotes, like this one from Mary Gardiner Brainard: I would rather walk with God in the dark than go alone in the light.

She believes in it.

She also carries a flashlight in her pocketbook. And another in her car.

A story told over and over

Word got around the old neighborhood. Debbie's here. The one who was in the tower.

Deborah sat on the front porch of her childhood home on East 34th Street in Brooklyn. Her sister Denise owns the house now. Deborah had come to see family. Now she saw half the neighborhood, lining up down the street.

"Just about everybody there had lost someone, or knew somebody in the neighborhood that did, " she says. "It always started off with, 'How are you doing? How's North Carolina?' And then they would come in with the other questions. The ones about 9/11."

Every so often, something like that happens. Denise called after visiting a Sept. 11 exhibit at a museum on the USS Intrepid. She was looking at a strip of photos when one stopped her cold. It was the picture of Deborah and Dzavid. No one had known the picture even existed.

And so in January, Deborah found herself looking at an exhibit where she was one of the featured characters. A stranger, a visitor from France, stood next to her. "That's me, " Deborah said. And she told her story again.

She went back to New York to look for a place for her daughter's bridal shower. She stopped at a bar they had thought about. The owner's son had died at the World Trade Center. "I was there, " Deborah said. "Are you sure you want to hear this?" He was. And they cried as she told her story again.

Once in a while, someone is rude or creepy, wanting to know if she saw any severed heads. Deborah just cuts the conversation off.

But most of the questions are simple. Most of them aren't even questions. They're pleas. Tell us where you were. Tell us who you saw. Tell us what it was like.

The more she tells the story, the more she remembers. The quiche and banana bread came back to her just the other day.

It's like vacation pictures, she says. You can show them to people all you want. But it's not the same as having been there.

Not the same at all.

Making gradual progress

For the first couple of weeks afterward, she slept in a spare room with the TV on for company. She turned it to Nickelodeon because she knew it wouldn't show any horror movies.

She took Ambien to help her sleep, saw a doctor about the nightmares. As she talked to him, she scratched her left shoulder without even knowing it.

She can look at photos from Sept. 11, but not TV footage. She can't take the sound.

She has been back to ground zero four times - most recently, last week for a Wachovia ceremony. When she gets near, she smells the smell from that day. An acid smell. None of her friends can smell it.

And still, every day, she gets better.

She has decided not to put up with people who make her unhappy. This has led to a couple of hard conversations, one with a family member, one with a co-worker. But she came away refreshed.

She calls and tries to cheer up Dzavid, who has a hard time talking about that day. She goes home from work at a decent hour.

She will speak at the Wachovia service this morning. But there also will be a choir, and people reading poetry, and a slide show, and a toll of a bell for those who died.

All over this country, in places all over the world, people will stop for a few minutes to remember that Sept. 11 belongs to all of us, that all the stories of pain and fear and hope blend into one big story.

Everyone's story.

And tonight Deborah Tourloukis will go home, and maybe she will scratch herself raw in her sleep, and she will get up tomorrow morning and put on some skin cream and start a new day.

Her story.

Waiting bin Laden out

2011-05-02T09:08:00.000-04:00

Late last night, as we stayed up late soaking up the details of the death of Osama bin Laden, I started thinking about the value of waiting.

One thing I've learned in my job is that the key to understanding someone isn't fancy writing or clever questions. It's watching and waiting. Most people aren't real when they first talk to a reporter -- they want to please, or they want to put up a front of some kind. But if you hang around long enough, eventually the mask drops. At some point people go back to being themselves.

I'm sure the people who lead our military and intelligence operations have a much more profound understanding of that. They are used to waiting.

Osama bin Laden was born into a billionaire family that owned the largest construction company in Saudi Arabia. He transformed himself into an Islamic radical and terrorist, but his roots were among the elite. By age 15 he had his own stable of horses. He grew up living in mansions, not caves.

A cave is where most of us figured we'd find him someday, maybe already dead -- there had been reports for years that he was suffering from kidney disease. But it has been nine and a half years since the 9/11 bombings he was responsible for. Think about running for nine and a half years. Think about knowing that the most powerful country on Earth would never stop trying to catch you.

So bin Laden ended up back in a mansion, this time in a wealthy section of a Pakistani city. Based on the pictures this morning, it wasn't an especially elegant home. It's also a place that was bound to draw attention -- the compound is several times bigger than any other homestead in the area, and it's surrounded by a high wall and barbed wire. It's almost like a sign: SOMEBODY BAD LIVES HERE.

But it's the kind of place you might live if you're used to being the richest man in town.

We had to wait nine and a half years. But Osama bin Laden finally came out of the cave. He had to go back to being himself. And that's when we killed him.

A reader makes a good point

2011-04-28T14:36:00.000-04:00

Yeah, that Obama birth-certificate column this morning touched a nerve... 595 comments and counting, not to mention a few dozen emails and phone calls. The debate in the comments has actually been fairly civil -- a lot of disagreement, and some anger, but more like a boxing match than a back-alley brawl.

One of the emailers, a reader named David, said this:

Out of curiosity were you asleep during the Bush years when it was advanced by “the left” that Bush knew and was somehow involved in 9/11? Did you just miss that a poll in 2007 found that fully 35% of Democrats believed Bush had advance knowledge that 9/11 was going to occur?... I mean, after all, isn’t believing that a sitting President had advance knowledge that the slaughter of thousands of innocent Americans was going to take place just a touch more disgusting than thinking another wasn’t born in the U.S. or is a socialist?

I vaguely remembered some polls along those lines, but asked David to send me a couple of links, which he did. You can find the details here and here.

Now... I'm not sure we're talking apples and apples here. What I remember, from when these came out, is that some people interpreted those questions based on the briefing a month before 9/11 that said Osama bin Laden was determined to attack the United States. Some people might have considered that "advance knowledge" -- not of a specific attack, but that something was about to happen.

One other thing: I don't remember any major voice on the left -- certainly no one who was contemplating a run for president -- pushing that idea. There wasn't a Donald Trump out there in front of the cameras.

On the whole, though, I think David makes a fair point. I should've done that column back then. Politics can make us all crazy from time to time. I hope this current brand of crazy fades fast.

What's in a (Southern) name?

2011-04-06T17:41:00.000-04:00

My uncle Ottis died last week. I put his obit on Facebook. A friend who grew up in Ohio read it and said “Man, I love those names.”

Mr. Yarbrough was born in Odum, Georgia, a son of the late Elmer Emerson and Fannie Pearl Tripp Yarbrough…

Most names fade over generations. It might not seem like it now, but one day parents will stop naming their boys Brandon and their girls Caitlin or Katelyn or Qateleyne or however the mom demands to spell it before the epidural. Someday those names will sound as odd to our ears as Ezra and Myrtice do now.

My mama, Virginia, is one of seven: her, Junior, Hazel, Ernest, Ada Mae, Ottis and Buddy. My mom and Aunt Mae are the only ones left.

My daddy was officially L.M., for Leonard Milton, even though everybody called him Tommy. (To a few members of my family, I’m still Little Tommy. I know.)

His sisters were Estelle and Lizzie Mae.

There are lots of people named Otis, one T, from Otis Redding to Otis the drunk on "The Andy Griffith Show." But an Ottis, two T’s, is rare.

I’ve met just two: Uncle Ottis and his son, Ottis Jr. The only other one I’ve heard of is the former NFL running back Ottis Anderson. My uncle pronounced it AH-tis. His son and the running back say it OH-tis.

There’s a great Web toy called the NameVoyager. Type in a name and it shows you how popular it’s been over time. Ottis was never popular. It peaked in the 1910s. Since the 1950s, it hasn’t appeared enough to measure. Uncle Ottis was born in 1940.

Both sides of my family were country people. My mom and dad picked cotton from the time they were little.

When my grandmother got sick, my mom ended up in charge of the household chores. She was 12. She made two pans of biscuits every single morning for years. She made them once in a while for my dad as a treat. After he died, that was it for the biscuits. She’s never made another one.

They all had hard lives, but Ottis might have had the hardest. His wife left him while he was in Vietnam. He raised his boy as a single dad and took care of my grandmother in her later years. Then he had a stroke and spent his last few years in assisted living. He liked tangerines because he could peel them with his one good hand.

Most of my mom’s people settled around Florence, S.C., and when my grandmother was alive we’d drive up there every year. I remember Uncle Ottis chain-smoking Chesterfields and falling asleep on the couch, his little black-and-white TV playing “The Twilight Zone.”

They have a national military cemetery in Florence – it’s a smaller version of the one in Arlington. All those rows of white headstones. A dozen of us came to Uncle Ottis’ service. A recording played taps. Two men in uniform folded the flag on his casket and gave it to his son.

Some people long for the good old days. But for a lot of people who grew up like my parents, the days weren’t so good. They’re grateful for air conditioning and washing machines and something other than biscuits every day of the week.

But with every gain comes some loss. A fine old Southern name. A good man who had a tough life.

We stop and pay attention for a moment, so we can remember. Things pass.

A Loomis Fargo heist movie? Please make it so

2011-03-28T09:54:00.000-04:00

The latest issue of GQ magazine has an interview with the great Danny McBride, star of locally-made cult classic "The Foot Fist Way" and HBO's "Eastbound and Down," co-star of the new movie "Your Highness," and graduate of the N.C. School of the Arts.

The interview's not online far as I can tell, but one quote near the end made me really happy. The interviewer asked McBride what he might do next:

"He mentions a movie he and (writing partner) Jody Hill wrote a year after 'The Foot Fist Way,' based on a 1997 robbery of a bank in Charlotte, North Carolina. 'These rednecks robbed Loomis Fargo for over $17 million,' McBride says. 'And they would have gotten away with it, except they stayed in the town they were living in. They literally moved from trailers into the richest neighborhoods in town, lived like kings, bought their wives t-- jobs. Jody wants to make it like a southern 'Godfather.'"

The Loomis Fargo heist is the craziest story I've ever covered, and the one that felt the most like a movie. If you're not familiar with it, this Wikipedia article has the basics, although as always with Wikipedia, buyer beware on some of the facts. If that tweaks your interest, my former colleague Jeff Diamant wrote a great book about the whole thing.

The memory that stands out the most for me came when the suspects were first hauled into court. One of them was the man who was supposedly hired to kill David Ghantt, the Loomis Fargo employee who actually stole the money. When the guy walked by me I noticed something strange about him, but I couldn't quite believe my eyes. At a break I went up to one of the marshals.

"Um, could you check something for me?" I said.

"What is it?"

"I think that tall guy had a tattoo on his neck of a Klansman riding a horse."

"Aw, come on."

He went into the holding area to check. He came back out with both eyebrows as high as they could go.

"You're right," he said. "God almighty."

That would be some amazing movie.

March Madness picks

2011-03-17T11:10:00.000-04:00

Somehow I forgot to take today off -- an unforgivable mistake on my part. But we do have TVs around the newsroom. And driving around uptown this morning, I saw a couple of fans in Michigan gear wandering around. They're in the right place.

By the way, there's a post from a couple days back on how we'll know when your team is in town... still time to drop in a comment.

After all that, I have to subject you to my picks. If you want to see them in bracket form, they're in the Observer's bracket contest (my username is "tomlinson"). But here's a list, by region, with a few comments. Asterisks = upsets.

EAST
Ohio St. over San Antonio
George Mason over Villanova
West Va. over Clemson
Kentucky over Princeton
Marquette over Xavier*
Syracuse over Indiana St.
UGA over Washington* -- Look, I went to UGA. You have to ride with your guys at least one round.
UNC over Long Island

Ohio St. over George Mason
Kentucky over West Va.
Syracuse over Marquette
UNC over UGA -- a rematch of the 1983 regional final, which UGA won after Sam Perkins admitted he didn't know which conference the Dawgs were in. I doubt that'll happen this time. And if it does, it won't matter.

Ohio St. over Kentucky
Syracuse over UNC -- this was the hardest pick in the tournament. Carolina has come so far, and on talent alone they're Final Four-ready. But sometimes they fall into a mass coma on court... they were down double digits in every ACC tournament game, and never got close to coming back against Duke. Three straight big wins seems too much for them at this point.

Ohio St. over Syracuse and into the Final Four.

WEST
Duke over Hampton
Tennessee over Michigan*
Arizona over Memphis
Texas over Oakland
Missouri over Cincinnati*
UConn over Bucknell
Temple over Penn St.
San Diego St. over N. Colorado

Duke over UT
Arizona over Texas*
UConn over Missouri
San Diego St. over Temple

Duke over Arizona
San Diego St. over UConn

San Diego St. over Duke and on to the Final Four* -- They're not much fun to watch, but San Diego State is REALLY good. They lost just twice all year, both times to BYU, and then they killed the Cougars in the Mountain West final. They can grind even a good team into dust. Duke is a good team, and with Kyrie Irving they might be great. If he's at full strength, Duke could easily win the whole thing. But I think it ends for the Blue Devils here.

SOUTHWEST
Kansas over Boston U.
Illinois over UNLV*
Vandy over Richmond
Louisville over Morehead St.
Georgetown over VCU
Purdue over St. Peter's
FSU over Texas A&M*
Notre Dame over Akron -- the Gerry Faust bowl!

Kansas over Illinois
Louisville over Vandy
Purdue over Georgetown
Notre Dame over FSU

Louisville over Kansas* -- Kansas always breaks my brackets. Might as well get rid of them now.
Purdue over Notre Dame*

Purdue over Louisville and on to the Final Four.
SOUTHEAST
Pitt over UNC-Asheville
Old Dominion over Butler*
Utah St. over Kansas St.*
Belmont over Wisconsin* -- yeah, going a little crazy on the upsets here. But Belmont lost just four times this year -- twice to Tennessee, once to Vandy and once to Lipscomb. And Lipscomb doesn't really count. There is a Lipscomb in all our lives, just waiting to trip us up.
St. John's over Gonzaga
BYU over Wofford -- although if Wofford wins, alum Jerry Richardson might be giddy enough to broker a deal between NFL players and owners. Yeah, probably not.
Michigan St. over UCLA*
Florida over UC-Santa Barbara

Pitt over ODU
Utah St. over Belmont
St. John's over BYU*
Florida over Michigan St.

Pitt over Utah St.
St. John's over Florida*

Pitt over St. John's and on to the Final Four.

FINAL FOUR
Ohio St. over San Diego St.
Pitt over Purdue

Ohio St. over Pitt, 71-67, for the title.

So that's 16 upsets overall, but just one real sleeper in the Sweet 16 (Utah State). Two #1 seeds, a #2 and a #3 in the Final Four. Not as risky as I'd like. And surely not as wise as your picks. Tell me where I went wrong.

How do we know your team's in town?

2011-03-15T09:40:00.002-04:00

Long Island University is the Blackbirds. I had no idea. Hampton's the Pirates, and if you follow March Madness, you might remember their big upset over Iowa State back in 2001, which led to the wonderful image of their coach impersonating a dead bug. But other than that, I don't know much.

So here's the question, for fans of the eight schools playing here in the NCAA regionals this weekend: How will we know your team's in town?

Here are the teams coming to Charlotte, by the way -- I'm going to put them in alphabetical order to eliminate any bias: Georgia, Duke, Hampton, Long Island, Michigan, North Carolina, Tennessee, Washington.

OK, see, I'm biased already.

Georgia is my team. I went to school there. I left several million brain cells scattered around campus. I still daydream about going back and becoming a perpetual grad student. These are my people.

Here's how you know Dawg fans are in town:

-- ABC stores suddenly low on Jim Beam; CVS stores suddenly low on BC powders.

-- Hotel-lobby debates about whether Herschel Walker could play college basketball (yes), and how many points he would score (164 a game).

-- Lots of body-painting going on... but not as erotic as it sounds.

Now then... both Duke and North Carolina are also headed this way. I could say that you know Duke fans are in town when the parking lot is full of Jersey plates. I could say that you know Carolina fans are in town when you see people counting the Jersey plates in the parking lot. But I would never say such things, because I know you Blue Devil and Tar Heel fans will step up.

(Of course, it's possible that you might actually say something about the other team, rather than your own. There's no way we can stop that. But of course none of you would do such a thing. Hint. Hint.)

But we're looking to hear from all of you. Michigan, Tennessee, Washington, Hampton: What should we look for from y'all? And you Long Island Blackbirds... is anybody coming? Because we need to talk. Clearly, the Long Island Expressway would be a much cooler name.

Have at it in the comments...

It just so happens that MY team is in town, so I'll go first.

Last call for Queens workshop

2011-03-03T09:56:00.000-05:00

Just a reminder, y'all, that my workshop "A Writer's Life: Building a Career as a Professional Writer" begins Saturday at Queens University. It's a two-part class -- half on Saturday and the other half March 12.

We'll be talking about the essentials of turning pro, how to figure out what to write about, how to sharpen your writing, how to get noticed, and 25 ways (at least!) to make a living with words.

If all that sounds good to you, here's where you can sign up.

Here's one last video that Queens produced for the workshop... this was in front of one of those green screens where you can project anything as a backdrop, and it looks like they went with the '70s talk-show motif. Next time I'm going to ask for flying dragons.

Two cops, two lives, two endings

2011-03-02T18:30:00.000-05:00

Charlie Walker’s 30 years on the job ended at a visitation. He met up with some buddies. They all waited in line two-and-a-half hours at First Baptist Church. Then he was at the front of the line, standing across from Fred Thornton’s widow.

This is Charlie Walker, somebody told her. This is his last day.

He dreaded what those words might do to her.

Two cops, two careers. One ended just the way you’d want it to. The other ended the way you hope it never does.

A couple of Sundays ago, I wrote a story about Charlie. He spent the last 15 years of his career as a police officer at The Square, one of the last in town who still walked the beat. He got to know millionaire bankers and barefooted homeless women. He treated people with respect. On his last day at The Square, dozens of friends showed up to send him off.

Last Friday, Thornton died when a flash-bang grenade – part of his gear as a member of the SWAT team – exploded in his garage. Police say it was an accident. Thornton was due to retire this summer. He injured his knee last year, and instead of running out the clock at his desk, he rehabbed so he could go back to SWAT. At his funeral Tuesday, hundreds of officers mourned.

Walker remembers working with Thornton once, years ago. Police had spotted a robbery suspect. Thornton arrived from one direction, Walker from the other. They caught the guy and found the loot.

Besides that, all Walker knew about Thornton was his good reputation. But he has spent the last few days thinking about Thornton a lot.

“I felt guilty that I made it,” Walker says. “It’s not always your training or everything like that. It’s a crapshoot sometimes… Forget all the times over 30 years that I know about, when I knew I might be in danger. How many occasions were there that I didn’t know about? How many times was it close to being bad and I never saw it coming?”

Online, the stories about Walker and Thornton had some grumbling in the comments. A few folks griped about Walker drawing a pension even though he retired at 52. Others said Thornton’s service cost too much money. In these times, the complaints are understandable. People worry over every dollar.

But police work is different. Every day might bring a simple traffic stop that goes south, or a domestic dispute that blows up, or a career criminal who decides he doesn’t want to go to jail anymore. Now multiply that by thousands of days.

Cops aren’t gods. Former Charlotte officer Marcus Jackson pleaded guilty back in December to sexually assaulting women while on duty. And even good cops make mistakes that get magnified when you carry handcuffs and a gun.

The goal is to do a good job and make it to 30 years. Charlie Walker made it. Fred Thornton got so close.

Walker’s last day on the street was Feb. 11, but he had a couple weeks of desk work. Monday was his official last day. He finished his shift and went to the visitation. And he ended up in front of Thornton’s wife, Linda.

He thought she might break down.

She looked at him.

Thank you for all your years of service, she said.

And the long procession moved on.

How R.E.M. changed my life

2011-03-01T10:00:00.003-05:00

I'm not sure that writing 1,500 words about R.E.M. is in my official job description... then again, they recorded their first two full-length albums at Reflection Studios in Charlotte, so there's a bit of a local angle. But the main reason is, this just started coming out, so here it is.

I did not come from a land of musical adventure.

At home my mom and dad listened to country. It was the best kind of country -- Hank, George Jones, Loretta Lynn -- but back then that's what the country stations played. At some point I drifted over to the pop station, and for a while I taped Casey Kasem's Top 40 every week and wrote down the charts in a notebook. By high school my tastes had broadened a little -- I liked the Molly Hatchet the potheads played at the ball park across from my house, and the R&B I heard at dances and parties. There was one party, at a condo complex with a pond, where ducks came waddling through the living room while "Let It Whip" thumped on the stereo. I'll always associate "Let It Whip" with ducks.

But all that music was in the middle of the mainstream -- even if kids didn't like all of it, they knew about all of it. I went to a summer program before my senior year of high school; at a dance the first night, they played "Rock Lobster." All the kids from Atlanta knew it by heart. I'd never heard it, or anything like it.

The day I arrived at the University of Georgia, in 1982, somebody was blasting Atlanta Rhythm Section from speakers in a dorm window. There was a guy everybody called The Nuge because he worshiped Ted Nugent. Most days you could hear somebody playing Rick James or the Police or Ronnie Milsap -- the same stuff I heard back home.

But then I started seeing fliers on telephone poles for bands with names like Love Tractor. I'd never heard of ANY of these bands. I wondered if the posters were some kind of prank -- we'd get there for the show, and the seniors would come out and laugh at us. "Love Tractor?" they'd say. "You thought that was a REAL band?"

I made some friends right away, and we went to football games and stayed up late drinking beer and eating popcorn. But I didn't feel comfortable on that big campus. Not handsome enough, not smart enough, most definitely not cool enough.

I had a bizarre roommate, a junior named Matt. The legend was that he had never changed his bedsheet in three years on campus. You could see the outline of his body on the sheet. We called it the Shroud of Matt. He would have loud fights with his girlfriend, and louder makeup sex. I stayed out of my dorm room as much as possible.

But one day when I was there, he put a record on the turntable. It had been out only a couple of weeks. He said "Listen to this," and handed me the sleeve.

This is what I heard:

It sounded even weirder than "Rock Lobster." The recording felt homemade. The guitar line careened like a wagon about to run into the ditch. And that singer... I couldn't make out the words, but it didn't matter. There were five songs on the album, all dark and murky and incomprehensible. Which was perfect, because my life felt dark and murky and incomprehensible. This band I had never heard of was saying what I never knew I needed to hear.

They were a local band. Back home, "local band" meant some guys who played at the talent show once they learned "Free Bird." But these four guys wrote their own stuff. They were right there in Athens among us. We saw Michael Stipe, the singer, at the Gyro Wrap downtown. We saw Bill Berry, the drummer, and Mike Mills, the bass player, in a guitar shop. I took a leak next to Pete Buck, the guitarist, at a Jason and the Scorchers show.

They played a free concert on campus and a couple of thousand people showed up. But when I went home for Christmas, no one had heard of them. They were still listening to Molly Hatchet and "Let It Whip."

For the first time in my life, I was on the front edge of something cool. R.E.M. was playing clubs all over the country by that point, and picking up fans a roomful at a time, but they were still this little musical cult. And I belonged.

That spring, they put out their first full-length album, "Murmur." Rolling Stone reviewed it -- Rolling Stone? Reviewing our guys? -- and gave it four out of five stars. A re-recording of their first single, "Radio Free Europe," made the Billboard pop chart. And driving home on break, a couple of months later, I flipped to a Savannah rock station -- the kind of station that played Skynyrd and Styx -- and they were playing R.E.M. on the radio.

That summer, staying up late one night, I saw the video on MTV.

It was the most bittersweet feeling. I was thrilled for my guys. But I knew they weren't really mine anymore.

I can track those years by R.E.M. records. My sophomore year, clearer and happier -- that was "Reckoning." A lost summer in Jacksonville -- "Fables of the Reconstruction." A road trip, the tape deck cranked up as loud as it would go -- that's "Lifes Rich Pageant."

But by then we didn't see them around town as much. They still lived in Athens, and sometimes they'd play there under a fake name -- one gig I remember, they were Hornets Attack Victor Mature. But word spreads fast in a college town, and Hornets Attack Victor Mature packed the club.

By the time I left school and got my first newspaper job, everybody knew about R.E.M. "The One I Love" was a hit single, "Losing My Religion" was an even bigger hit, Rolling Stone called them the best band in the world, they went from clubs to theaters to arenas. They made lots of money. Bill Berry had a brain aneurysm onstage and later retired. The other three played on.

I don't buy the new R.E.M. record the first day it comes out anymore. The last couple I've only listened to a little. They've changed and I've changed. In one sense, music is just a business transaction -- play me something I like, I'll drop some money in the hat. But if you really love a certain band you know it's more than that. Every new song feels like a letter from a friend. If the song doesn't move you, you wonder if you should keep trying, or just move on. But you keep hoping -- at least I keep hoping -- for that moment that reminds you why you reached out in the first place.

R.E.M. has a new album coming out next week. You can hear it streamed on NPR Tuesday. I like what I've heard. I'm going to buy it, let it roll around in my head awhile. I don't expect it to hit me the way that first record hit me almost 30 years ago. But one thing R.E.M. taught me is to keep reaching out, hoping for that connection, because you can't predict where it'll come from.

I'm still not cool. But every so often, mostly because of this incredible job, I'll end up knowing about a great band or a moving film or a gifted young writer before most other people find out. There's no longer that bittersweet feeling, though. I want them all to find the right kind of fame, to make a good living and then some, because when you get to do the work that makes you happy, it adds beauty to the world.

Now I live right down the road from the studio where R.E.M. recorded "Murmur" and "Reckoning." Lately I've started to feel dark and murky and incomprehensible again, and so I've been listening to a lot of that early R.E.M., and remembering how that murkiness can bring forth something cool and beautiful. That's part of the power of music. Another part is that a great record can sell millions, but it can still feel like a secret among you and your friends. Or between you and your bizarre roommate. Or just between you and the music.

Have photo, need story: The Mounted Bear

2011-02-28T14:21:00.005-05:00

I found this at Caribou Coffee in Matthews. Why is this bear mounted? Isn't being mounted AND stuffed sort of unfair? What's the story here? You tell me. Come up with a story (cap it at a couple hundred words) and leave it in the comments. Life is such a mystery sometimes.

Gerald Wallace and the Bobcats' special need

2011-02-25T15:01:00.000-05:00

I'm not an expert on the NBA. You probably know by now that I'm not an expert on ANYTHING -- the old line goes, journalists don't know anything, they just know how to find out.

If you want expertise on the Gerald Wallace trade you should to go to Rick Bonnell or Tom Sorensen or Scott Fowler, or pretty much anybody else. I'm just a casual Bobcats fan -- I watch on TV every once in a while and go to one or two games a year. So understand that going in.

Here are a few things about the Bobcats that seem obvious to me.

1. They weren't going anywhere this year. Even with Wallace they were 25-32, a game and a half out of the playoffs. Even if they did make the playoffs they'd get killed by Boston or Miami or Orlando.

2. Not many people were coming to the games anyway. Against Toronto the other night, scads of seats in the lower bowl were empty. People who want to come see the Lakers or Celtics are going to come regardless of the Bobcats' roster. I'm not sure how many people bought tickets because Gerald Wallace played here.

(I should stop here and say that Wallace was my favorite Bobcat -- he was good at a dozen different little things and always hustled. I'm just talking about him as a ticket draw.)

3. The Bobcats need stars -- not just to draw fans, but to win titles. My buddy Joe talked about this the other day in the context of Carmelo Anthony going to the Knicks. It's been more than 30 years since a team won an NBA title without one or two of the top players in the league. Wallace was one of our two best players. Stephen Jackson is the other. I'm not sure either one would start for any of the six or seven best teams in the league. It's not 100% clear that Wallace is even going to start for Portland, which is 32-25 and seventh in the West.

4. No top free agents are going to come here. This might be the hardest to swallow for the diehard Bobcats fan, who dreams of seeing Dwight Howard or Chris Paul in the home team's uniform. But the Bobcats play in one of the smallest markets in the NBA, with one of the quietest home crowds, and no history of winning. Even a maximum contract wouldn't lure a truly great player here.

Those four points naturally lead to a fifth: The only chance the Bobcats have is to build through the draft. That's why the Wallace deal makes sense -- it brings two first-round picks in return. No question the Bobcats will be worse in the short term. But the absolute ceiling of the current team -- even with Wallace -- was winning a game or two in the first round of the playoffs.
That team wasn't worth saving.

But I think there's more to it than just taking the best players in the draft. The Bobcats have to be looking for a certain kind of player -- someone with the talent to be a star, but the personality to be happy in Charlotte.

Their role model should be the Utah Jazz. The Jazz have been a relevant NBA team for the last 25 years because of two draft picks: John Stockton and Karl Malone. Neither was a high pick -- Stockton went 16th in 1984, Malone went 13th in '85. But together they created one of the greatest two-man combos in NBA history.

They became stars who commanded huge salaries and could have played anywhere they wanted. But at the core, both were small-town guys -- Malone played college ball at Louisiana Tech, Stockton at Gonzaga. They knew they had a good thing in Salt Lake City. The Jazz kept their core, and filled in around them with role players. That Jazz team never won a title -- thank the Bobcats' owner for that -- but they went to the Finals twice, and Utah has kept winning even after Stockton and Malone retired.

San Antonio took Tim Duncan -- from Wake Forest, via the Virgin Islands -- with the first pick in 1997. He was immediately a star and could have gone anywhere. He stayed and the Spurs have won four titles.

That's why the worst moment in Bobcats history was taking Adam Morrison with the third pick in 2006. He was the right kind of guy, I think -- a quiet kid from Gonzaga (Stockton's old school). Only problem was, he couldn't play. A team like the Bobcats can't afford for any first-round pick to flame out.

The team has drafted better recently -- D.J. Augustin is a solid NBA starter, and with Wallace gone, we're about to find out if Gerald Henderson is, too. Michael Jordan, as owner of the Bobcats, has so far been all about saving money -- the Nazr Mohammed deal shows that. But it makes sense for now. Who's he going to spend it on? A couple more players who will get the Bobcats from average to decent? The big free agents who don't stay home are going to Miami or Boston or L.A. -- places with warm weather or free-spending owners or lots of history.

But you can still win in the NBA from the bottom up. The Bobcats' only chance is to keep adding picks, and keep drafting the right kind of guys, and hope. It seems like a mess right now. But there's a pony in there somewhere. And the Bobcats have to find it.

Time running out for Queens workshop

2011-02-23T11:11:00.000-05:00

So I'm teaching this workshop at Queens University on how to be a professional writer, and it turns out the seats are filling up fast. The workshop is March 5 and 12 (that's all one workshop -- we do half the first Saturday and the other half the next Saturday). If you're interested, go sign up now.

I've been doing workshops at Queens for a while now, and they're designed to be low-pressure -- I'm not grading papers or giving exams or anything. (Although there might be some homework.) I'm still learning this teaching stuff, but I think you'll come out of it having learned something too.

Here's a video clip from an earlier class, about submitting your work for publication. We'll be talking about this in a lot more detail in the upcoming workshop.

Come hang out with us. It'll be fun.

Tonight -- storytelling WITHOUT A NET

2011-02-22T10:28:00.000-05:00

You can't possibly come up with a better deal than this... tonight from 7 to 9, at Central Coffee (corner of 10th and Louise), I'll be joining several other folks for a storytelling event called The Cankerworm.

Did I mention it's free?

And did I mention you get a free coffee or tea just for showing up?

That's a winner before you ever hear a story, and I'm guessing there will be some good stories. The theme for the night is Trust, and each person who comes to the mike will be telling a 5-minute story based on that theme. This is not a reading -- we're going up there with no notes. Which, frankly, scares the crap out of me.

My story will touch on Ric Flair, TV antennas, the Fu Manchu mustache, family dynamics and maybe one or two other things. That's assuming I don't just go blank onstage and collapse in a puddle of flop sweat.

The Cankerworm name is a nod to The Moth, the storytelling series that started in New York and has spread around the country. Here's a Moth performance from Philly to give you a little idea of what it's like.

Byline of the century

2011-02-18T13:08:00.001-05:00

The great Chris Jones of Esquire magazine wrote the other day about some of his favorite bylines -- not so much for the writing (although they're all fine writers), but just for the sound of the names.

Being a Tommy (it's Tommy on my birth certificate) has caused the occasional problem in print. At my first paper in Augusta, Ga., I wrote a story a reader didn't like, so she wrote a letter to the editor saying it was obvious you couldn't trust a story from a reporter with a "childish euphemism" for a name.

My nickname was Childish Euphemism around the newsroom for a while.

When I applied to the Observer back in 1989, they sent me some papers to critique, and the first thing I noticed was all the tremendous bylines. I fell in love with three right away: John Wildman, Lolo Pendergrast, and the best of them all, Tex O'Neill.

After I got hired I found out that John Wildman was a mellow guy -- he left the paper to become a mailman (I imagined a series of adventure novels: "John Wildman, Mailman.") Lolo Pendergrast turned out to be even wilder than her name. And Tex O'Neill in the flesh didn't look like a Tex or an O'Neill, but he was a brave reporter who kept a huge aquarium and collected arrowheads.

All of which leads me to this.

Last night a bunch of us from the paper went to the North Carolina Press Association awards, where we brought home some bling. As part of the ceremony, they read off the names of everyone who won an award. The contest is split into six divisions, from the smallest papers to the largest, so it adds up to hundreds of names.

Well, there's a little paper up in the mountains called the Cherokee One Feather -- I believe it covers the members of the Cherokee tribe up there. One of its staffers won an award. His name:

Scott M. Brings Plenty.

I submit that as the Greatest Byline of All Time. And I don't even want to know what the M. stands for.

From the vault: At the National Spelling Bee

2011-02-15T15:33:00.001-05:00

A little ping of memory rang in my head this morning when I saw the results of the Observer's Regional Spelling Bee.

The third-place finisher was Tanner Winchester, a home-schooled kid from Waxhaw. I haven't seen Tanner in a few years, but I know him. His older brother is Marshall Winchester -- the best speller from these parts in recent history.

In 2004, Marshall tied for fourth at the National Spelling Bee in Washington. I've covered a bunch of competitive events -- the Panthers' Super Bowl, a few Final Fours, the ACC Tournament -- but that spelling bee was more dramatic than any of those. I was standing about 25 feet away when this happened to Akshay Buddiga, one of the other contestants:

I can't tell you how much I love that he got up and SPELLED THE WORD RIGHT.

Here's the story from Marshall's final day at the Bee that year. Some days -- most days -- I feel really lucky to have this job. This was one of those days.

A SPELLBINDING RUN
MINERAL SPRINGS BOY TIES FOR 4TH AT NATIONAL SPELLING BEE

June 4, 2004

WASHINGTON -- Marshall Winchester had planned a graceful exit.

A couple of days ago he went to his friend Nupur Lala, who won the 1999 National Spelling Bee. He asked if she would escort him offstage when he got knocked out of this year's bee.

She said: "Marshall, I don't think you're going out anytime soon."

Smart girl.

Ten million spellers entered local bees this year. Of those, 265 made it to the national bee.

And on Thursday, Marshall Winchester of Mineral Springs tied for fourth.

Marshall, who's 12 and home-schooled, won $1,625, a prime seat at tonight's banquet, and newfound celebrity.

Kids lined up for his autograph. A parent came up to him and called him a hall-of-famer: "If there was a Cooperstown for spelling, you oughta be in it."

An N.C. blogger named Mr. Sun rooted for him online, posting a picture of Mel Gibson in "Braveheart" as inspiration.

Still, the thing that made Marshall the happiest all day was the word "zarzuela."

Zarzuela is the musical theater or light opera of Spain. More important, it's a word Marshall knows, and it got him past the seventh round. He had missed in that round last year and ended up tied for 12th. Marshall's only goal this year was to finish better than that.

When the pronouncer said "zarzuela, " Marshall's reply was: "Really?"

And when he spelled it right, he screamed "YES!", threw up his arms, and ran two rows past his seat before he circled back and found it.

By then the spelling bee had turned into a miniseries, full of joy, humor, agony, and a moment you'll probably see on ESPN's "SportsCenter" for the rest of your life.

At the start of Round 6 - on live TV - Akshay Buddiga of Colorado Springs tried to tackle "alopecoid." As he stood there thinking, apparently the word caught him flush on the jaw - he reeled for a couple of steps and then fell flat on his back across the feet of the spellers behind him.

Everybody thought he was out cold. Some of the grown-ups rushed toward the stage. But after a moment he got up, wobbled to the mike - and spelled the word right.

From then on they brought a chair to the mike every time it was his turn. And somehow he lasted all the way to the end, finishing second when he missed "schwarmerei" in Round 14.

By then, his opponent - David Tidmarsh of South Bend, Ind. - could barely breathe. But he spelled "gaminerie" to clear that round, and then "autochthonous" to win the bee.

After "zarzuela" in Round 7, Marshall nailed "vendaval" (an autumnal storm on the Mexican coast) in Round 8. He raised his arms again and ran "Rocky"-style back to his chair.

By the end of that round there were five spellers left. The families of the remaining spellers had been invited to sit at the side of the stage. Marshall's dad, Eric, and mom, Grindl, squeezed close. Marshall's little brother, Tanner, scrunched down in his mom's lap. It was cold in the Grand Hyatt ballroom but Eric kept wiping sweat.

Round 9.

Two spellers got words right. One missed. Then Marshall walked to the front of the stage, grabbed the mike in his right hand, leaned so close you could hear him breathe through the speakers.

Jacques Bailly, the official pronouncer, said the word: "vimineous."

Marshall stared. "Definition, please?"

"Of or producing long, slender twigs or shoots."

Marshall usually asks lots of questions, loud and rapid-fire.

This time he just touched his forehead to the mike.

After a second he raised up, asked about the part of speech, the alternate definition, the main definition one more time.

Then he leaned in.

"V-E-M-I-N-O-U-S."

The head judge nods if you get a word right. She rings a bell if you get it wrong. Marshall watched as she reached for the bell.

The crowd applauded in respect as he went over to the side of the stage and into his mother's arms. For a few minutes he stared at the big screen that showed his word, and the way he had spelled it, and a red E beside, for error.

But soon enough he was laughing with his family. And when the bee was over it seemed like half the audience wanted to meet him.

Yes, he told everybody, he wants to come back. (He's a seventh-grader, and you can qualify through eighth grade.) Yes, he had a great time. And yes, he knew the word that David Tidmarsh spelled to win the bee.

"Maybe I can win next time, " he said. "But I don't know. Fourth is amazing."

About that time his friend Nupur came over. It turned out that he needn't have worried her about escorting him off the stage. He stayed on all the way to the end.

"Congratulations, " she said, wrapping her arms around him, and the kid who was so cool under pressure stood there in full blush.

For the first time all week, he couldn't say a word.

Some Grammy thoughts

2011-02-14T11:39:00.001-05:00

We have friends in town so I missed a few chunks of the Grammys... didn't see Lady Gaga hatch for an egg and sing Madonna's "Express Yourself," for example. (That song IS basically "Express Yourself," right?) But I did see a lot of good stuff:

-- Our local boys, the Avett Brothers, looked good in the stage time they shared with Mumford and Sons, and then Bob Dylan. Fans must have enjoyed it, too -- last night, Mumford and the Avetts were #1 and #2 on the iTunes album sales chart. (As of this morning, Justin Bieber had wedged himself in between.)

It was an interesting moment if you've followed the Avetts for a while... Mumford and Sons looked and sounded like the early Avetts, to the point where I saw some people on Twitter asking if they WERE the Avetts. Then the Avetts followed with "Head Full of Doubt, Road Full of Promise," part of the new direction they took on their last album. Made me think a Mumford/Avetts tour would be a lot of fun.

And then Bob Dylan came out.

Yes, he's one of the most important musicians of all time. Yes, his music made it possible for guys like the Avetts to succeed. But as he started croaking his way through "Maggie's Farm," it reminded me of a bunch of kids playing pickup hoops who let Grandpa on the court to try a few set shots. Grandpa was a three-time All-American. But maybe he should just let the kids play.

-- My man Cee-Lo Green went for the full Elton John in his performance of "Forget You," which many of us know in a different (and better) version. Muppets! A Cee-Lo rocket! Gwyneth Paltrow! And it turns out Gwyneth can sing! This was fun all the way around.

(For a little more Cee-Lo, here's him doing "Crazy" with Prince at Madison Square Garden a few nights ago.)

-- Lady Antebellum's "Need You Now" won the two biggest single-song awards: Song of the Year (for songwriters) and Record of the Year (for artists/producers). I do love the song, but I can't help but wonder if Alan Parsons feels like he's finally won a couple of Grammys.

-- Good to see our own General Johnson make it into the People Who Died montage.

-- And finally, Arcade Fire, who beat out Eminem, Gaga, Lady Antebellum and Katy Perry for Album of the Year. It was a night of big production numbers -- Justin Bieber danced with ninjas, and Rihanna did a duet with Drake around a giant version of one of those backyard fire pits. Arcade Fire started out doing their part -- "Month of May" featured seizure-inducing strobe lights and kids with helmet-cams riding bikes around the stage. (I couldn't find it on YouTube.)

But then, going back out to accept the big Grammy, frontman Win Butler said: "We're gonna go play another song, because we like music." And then they played the great "Ready To Start" straight ahead, with no fancy lights or special effects. Just a fine band playing their hearts out on the biggest stage of their lives.

We're gonna go play another song, because we like music. Isn't that all you hope for, as a fan?

A storytelling event, and a new class at Queens

2011-02-09T13:28:00.000-05:00

Some news about a couple of cool things coming up in the next few weeks:

-- I've signed up to be part of a storytelling night called The Cankerworm, Feb. 22 at Central Coffee at the corner of Central and Louise. (Click the link for details, including how to sign up if you'd like to tell a story.) Why is it The Cankerworm? It's a tribute to The Moth, the great storytelling series that started in New York and has spread across the country.

We'll be telling stories of no longer than five minutes, centered on the theme of trust. This is not a reading -- no notes, we have to go up there and wing it. I think I want to tell a story about me, my dad and professional wrestling. But you'll have to come see to find out.

-- I'm also teaching another class at Queens University on March 5 and 12. (That's one class, spread over two sessions.) It's called "A Writer's Life: Building a Career as a Professional Writer." You can sign up here. There's also a handy page Queens was nice enough to build for all my workshops.

Here's a short clip from an earlier class, "Writing in 3-D":

The reviews are in: "brilliant," "groundbreaking," "the best depiction of Mob life since the Godfather movies." Wait... these appear to be reviews of "The Sopranos." Not sure how they got in there. But these classes have been a lot of fun, definitely for me and I think for everybody else, too. Come join in.

What would Charlotte's Super Bowl ad look like?

2011-02-08T10:05:00.000-05:00

The commercial that has the most lingering buzz from the Super Bowl seems to be this Chrysler ad featuring Eminem. The thing is, it's not an ad for Chrysler as much as it is an ad for Detroit. Everybody has this image of Detroit as a burned-out, bankrupt city, and a lot of that is justified. But there's another side, of course, and this Detroit looks pretty great.

WCNC producer Jeremy Markovich, who's on Twitter as @deftlyinane, had some interesting thoughts after seeing the ad. I'm combining a few of his tweets here:

The Chrysler ad makes me wonder, could you do a two minute spot with this much soul about Charlotte? What would it say? Who would it show? How would it make you feel? What would it sell? Is this a corporate town? Could you do a Charlotte ad that doesn't feel like a tourism video? Cause the Detroit ad sure ain't. Who would get out of this car in Charlotte? Mayor Pat? John P. Kee? Dale Jr.? Hugh McColl? K-Ci and JoJo? Steve Smith?

Good questions from Jeremy... so now I turn those questions to you. If you did a commercial for Charlotte, what would be in it?

I'm sure we'll get our fair share of sarcasm in the comments, and that's fine. But I'd like to see some of y'all take it seriously. Sometimes it seems like the only two views we hear of Charlotte are the shiny-corporate view, or the everything-sucks view. But there's a real city here, with its own story. I'm wondering how you'd tell it.

And if you've got some ideas and a video camera, go ahead and make a version of your own! We're not looking for commercial-grade here... a Flip cam and a good idea is enough. Email me the results at ttomlinson@charlotteobserver.com.

Super Bowl ads, with the Panthers' new biggest fan

2011-02-07T09:48:00.003-05:00

This was as close as the Panthers got to the Super Bowl this year. (From this commercial.)

The best comment came from @JamesWillamor on Twitter: Alf in a Panthers jersey?! Sue Myrick and Bill James seen launching probe into this illegal alien's ties to Charlotte.

If you don't know who Alf is, count yourself lucky, but go here if you must. UPDATE: As a couple of astute readers have pointed out, Alf ATE CATS. Which adds a whole new layer of... something... to the whole thing.

Most of the Super Bowl commercials are gathered in one place on YouTube. My favorites were the Doritos resurrection ad ("Grandpa?"), the Eminem/Chrysler ad (although it would be nice if Chrysler made cars as good as the ad), and the Snickers ad with Richard Lewis and Roseanne Barr. It turns out that watching Roseanne get hit with a log never gets old.

Did anybody else notice that the NASCAR ad (I can't find it online) was all about the crashes? And didn't that feel a little off, seeing that we're coming up on the 10th anniversary of Dale Earnhardt's death at Daytona?

And poor Groupon... I'm trying to picture that meeting where they took a vote and said "OK, let's use the troubles in Tibet for a cheap joke to sell our stupid coupons." What I always think when I see an ad like that: How bad was the one they DIDN'T use?

I'd say something about the halftime show, but somebody apparently slipped LSD into my beer, because I hallucinated that the Black-Eyed Peas sang the theme from "Dirty Dancing" while a bunch of dancers acted out a scene from "Tron."

Oh, and the game was pretty good, too.

Challenger

2011-01-28T10:34:00.000-05:00

Now we would all know within seconds. Thousands of people would tweet it at once. Your cell phone would pick up that insistent buzz that never means good news. But this was before all that, and I made it out of class and across campus and almost all the way to work before somebody on the street said that Challenger had broken in the sky.

I laughed. It had to be the punch line to some absurd joke, and I had just missed the setup. I kept walking, toward the college newspaper where I worked, and then I saw another one of the editors. As soon as I saw her eyes, I knew. She grabbed my arm and said: "Call everybody."

College can be a wonderful bubble. Tragedy is getting dumped by your girlfriend. Terror is a test you didn't study for. On Jan. 28, 1986, I was a senior at the University of Georgia and nothing really bad had ever happened to me. I was 22 but I was still a boy.

We had to put out a paper. I remember ripping updates off the old wire machine, thinking maybe this version would say it was all a mistake. The photos showed a corkscrew of smoke, like something a pilot would do to show off. But at the top of the plume, where the space shuttle was supposed to be, there was nothing.

It's weird, the things that turn you from boy to man, from girl to woman. By the time my 20s were over I was on my fourth town in my third job, had gone through a couple of hard breakups, my dad had died, and I got cancer and got rid of it. I was a grown man.

And when I trace it back I think I started feeling grown on that day 25 years ago, when all of a sudden my little college newspaper job was important, because something terrible had happened, and people were expecting us to help make sense of it, and give them something to hold on to and remember it by.

That's still, basically, my job today.

All of this is really just a way to open the door for you. If you remember that day, step in and tell your story.

Have Photo, Need Story

2011-01-20T13:15:00.001-05:00

Here's the latest installment in an occasional feature we're going to call Have Photo, Need Story. The message below was in a box I got recently from McSweeney's, which produces all sorts of strange and interesting things. It would take to long to explain WHY this message was in the box... but it made sense at the time.

Here's what I want you to do: Assume that this sentence is the first sentence of a story, and take it from there. This blogging software doesn't give you a whole lot of space in the comments -- something like 4,000 characters, including spaces -- so we're not looking for "War and Peace" here. But see where your mind takes you. My head feels more sifted already.

Beauty in timelapse

2011-01-19T10:55:00.004-05:00

The great Chris Jones of Esquire magazine shared this on Twitter yesterday... I doubt you'll see anything more beautiful all day. It's done by Josh Owens -- according to his Facebook page, he's originally from Columbia, S.C.

I've seen lots of timelapse photography, but I don't remember seeing any this gorgeous. Maybe it's the slow pans and scrolls within each timelapse. I wonder what a Charlotte version of this would look like.

NYC - Mindrelic Timelapse from Mindrelic on Vimeo.

By the way... does anybody know this song? UPDATE: It's "Down in the Cellar" by Dredg. Great tune.

The Friday Wrap

2011-01-14T16:10:00.000-05:00

An icy week. Let's go straight to the videotape.

On the blog and in the paper

We walked around in the snow.

There's a great undiscovered artist, finally being discovered in Chicago.

The snow (and ice) put us in two worlds. (Note the spirited discussion in the comments. To be honest, this piece was a little too similar to the first snow piece this week. The great thing about this job is, there's always another deadline coming up. Fail better next time!)

A guy delivered his old paper route.

Stuff in other places

Forgot to mention this over the holidays, but I've got a piece in the latest issue of Our State magazine. It's on a great breakfast place in Maggie Valley.

Links on Twitter

Here's the latest from my Twitter feed, @tommytomlinson:

Bill Murray with one of the all-time great speeches. (A little raw language, but worth it.) http://bit.ly/fadzpy (via @kottke)

You might recognize the guys on the cover of the latest Garden & Gun. http://fb.me/Ns6RtzQh @AvettNation

The crowd in Tucson tonight reminded me of VaTech 4 years ago. Here's my piece from back then. http://bit.ly/i1QFhT

She won by clogging to "Soul Man." http://bit.ly/i1ZVMG via @AddThis

Been thinking about what to say on Arizona shootings. Found out Tom Junod already said it. http://bit.ly/giXzHl

Charlotte Hornets fans remember Larry Johnson as Grandmama. Now there's Grandmama sweet tea. http://bit.ly/g1cMLP (via @chrislittmann)

Please, somebody in Alabama, create a photo gallery from this. http://bit.ly/hd4AS5 (via @annargriff)

The rapture's coming in May. Not that you can do much about it. http://bit.ly/f2GG8L (via @michaelkruse)

Just realized that CLT's first 2011 murder victim is a guy I knew a little: Chris Radok. Damn. http://bit.ly/gZwJtJ

Used to run into Radok when I was music writer (93-97). Interesting guy. Here's a Facebook page: http://on.fb.me/dP7s7h

Coming up

Off Monday. Back Tuesday, completely thawed out, to tell some more stories. Have a great weekend, everyone.

Paper route

2011-01-13T10:32:00.001-05:00

I found this on the amazing Gangrey. It's a video of a San Francisco Chronicle reporter going back to the paper route he had when he was a kid.

(I had that "Ice Cream Castles" cassette, too. Still got the CD somewhere.)

A few years ago, when the Observer's power went out and the backup power failed, the paper came out late. Most of our carriers work other jobs and they couldn't deliver the paper that day, so some of us volunteered to run the routes. I went out with our sports editor, Gary Schwab, to a couple of neighborhoods in University City. Gary rolled the papers, I drove, and along the way we met a bunch of people who cared deeply about the paper, the news, and the city. There are a lot worse ways to learn about a place than by delivering the paper every day.

The original Gangrey post has a few comments from writers who had paper routes. If any of y'all had routes, in Charlotte or elsewhere, I'd love to hear your stories.

One day, two worlds

2011-01-12T18:23:00.001-05:00

We live in two worlds right now. The world of sunshine. The world of shade.

In the world of sunshine, it hit the mid-30s. In the world of shade, it felt like the teens.

In the world of sunshine, the ice and snow have melted away. In the world of shade, it's still thick and crusted.

In the world of sunshine, you can walk around in sneakers. In the world of shade, you need waterproof boots.

In the world of sunshine, you can take long strides. In the world of shade, every step is a nibble.

In the world of sunshine, your windshield just needs a quick brush. In the world of shade, it needs a scraper and two strong hands.

In the world of sunshine, you can hit the gas on the highway. In the world of shade, your car crawls down the side streets.

In the world of sunshine, fresh water drains down the gutters. In the world of shade, icicles hang from the eaves.

In the world of sunshine, tree branches sling snow like catapults. In the world of shade, limbs hang low and heavy.

In the world of sunshine, you can go with the light jacket. In the world of shade, you still need gloves.

In the world of sunshine, birds peck for fresh meals in the grass. In the world of shade, they huddle tight and live on yesterday's seed.

In the world of sunshine, it's Kodachrome. In the world of shade, it's monochrome.

In the world of sunshine, you hang around and talk to the neighbors. In the world of shade, you give a quick wave and duck inside.

In the world of sunshine, you stay out late. In the world of shade, you try to get home before dark.

In the world of sunshine, you think about baseball. In the world of shade, you think about luge.

In the world of sunshine, you hear dripping. In the world of shade, you hear crashing.

In the world of sunshine, the wind is brisk. In the world of shade, the wind is biting.

In the world of sunshine, there's a southern exposure. In the world of shade, there's a north face.

In the world of sunshine, you jog for exercise. In the world of shade, you might have to walk to work.

In the world of sunshine, it's time to fertilize the daffodils. In the world of shade, it's time to de-ice the sidewalk.

In the world of sunshine, skateboards. In the world of shade, skates.

Six months from now, the sun will beat us down and the shade will be our rescue. But we're used to that. Snow days like this are still rare enough to be special.

And now, as it thaws, you can witness how the world can change in just a few steps. Warm's not far from cold. Light's right next to dark. And the balance shifts and swirls, every day, every moment, as we spin around in space.

A nanny, a photog, a genius

2011-01-12T10:47:00.000-05:00

This story was bouncing around Facebook last night... It originally aired a couple of weeks ago on WTTW-TV in Chicago. I watched it and can't stop thinking about it. Makes me wonder how much undiscovered brilliance is all around us.

Enjoy.

Let's hear your ice stories

2011-01-11T10:34:00.001-05:00

Hey everybody, today we're looking to collect a bunch of stories about how people are dealing with the ice.

We're looking for neighborhood heroes, street scenes, any kind of little vignette that would help tell the story of this day.

You can drop the story in the comments to this post, email me at ttomlinson@charlotteobserver.com, or call 704-358-5227. We might have some follow-up questions, so leave some way we can get in touch.

Thanks for the help. Stay safe and stay warm.

t.

A stroll in the snow

2011-01-10T14:03:00.002-05:00

We wake up to a changed world. Then we go outside and walk in it.

Here's the old Christmas tree, lying at the curb, redecorated in white.

Here's a set of fresh animal tracks, a pair of little feet side by side, something with a hop instead of a stride.

Here's the neighbor's toddler, bundled up and waddling down the driveway. You wonder if she'll remember.

Here's the old snow shovel, up from the basement, brought out of retirement.

Here's a woman in her yard, measuring with a T-square. "It says 2 (inches)," she says, "but I think it's wrong. I think it must be 12."

Here's a giant magnolia, wide green leaves cupping the snow like a handful of sugar.

Here's a single woodpecker, thock-thocking at a tree, echoing in the soft silence.

Here's a streetlight, lit up, confused.

Here's the dog, having the best day ever, prancing down the street, plowing his nose into the drifts, panting and pulling and chasing down every stray scent with jets of steam coming from his mouth.

Here's our boots, every step scrunching in the powder, and all of a sudden here's a memory of flip-flops in the white Gulf sand down at Panama City Beach.

Here's a flock of birds, holed up in a tree, sending out sentries to bring back a weather report.

Here's a woman on a bike, eyes lit like stars, wishing us good morning and leaving a wobbly track down the sidewalk.

Here's the snow itself, the drifts flat as a tabletop on unbroken front lawns, the clumps plunging from branches like cliff divers, the flakes brushing your jacket with a soft psssh like a lover's lips.

Here's gray slush going down the storm drain, a reminder that all things must pass.

And here's a statue in a front yard, a concrete goddess holding up one of those shiny gazing balls, glowing blue and gold. The gazing ball is covered with snow, and so is the fence, and so are the roofs of the houses and the tops of the trees and everything we can see.

Here's an amazing day, a world changed overnight, a moment that whispers: Look at this.

---------------

Photo by Alix Felsing

My talk with Jerry Richardson

2011-01-06T16:48:00.000-05:00

Jerry Richardson called Thursday to apologize.

“It was not my intention to be rude, or disrespectful, or not answer questions,” he said.

He was referring to his uncomfortable-to-watch news conference back on Tuesday. But the Panthers’ owner ended up talking about a lot more – including a new direction for the team, and how he plans to reach out more to fans.

I had a column in Thursday’s paper saying that in the news conference, Richardson came off as “irritable, cheap, confused, obstinate and a bit of a bully.” He called to respond. He wasn’t mad. We ended up talking three separate times – he had to hang up twice to take calls from other NFL owners (Jerry Jones in Dallas and Robert Kraft in New England).

All of this happened a couple hours before Stanford quarterback Andrew Luck – the Panthers’ likely choice with the no. 1 pick in the draft – announced he’s staying in school. I’m not sure Richardson would’ve been so calm then.

He’s planning to change the Panthers’ philosophy. For years the team leaned on a tough defense. But now he says the NFL is so offense-oriented that offensive coordinators and quarterback coaches are nearly as important as head coaches. Richardson said the Panthers will hire a new head coach first, but then go hard at offensive assistants. And no matter the coaches, he says the Panthers are going to open up.

“The NFL has changed, in the last five years, dramatically,” he said. “We would be foolish not to stay in sync with that… We didn’t score enough points. First thing, they (fans) want us to win. But after that, they want us to score points and they want excitement.”

I asked Richardson if he heard from fans after the news conference. This was his answer: “I had 11 e-mails this morning, and 10 were glowing.”

(Clearly his e-mail address is not well-publicized. Either that or he’s got an extremely effective Glow Filter.)

He said he understands fans are frustrated with the Panthers’ 2-14 season: “When they drive up here from Wilmington and Georgetown and Myrtle Beach (and the Panthers lose), that’s a long ride home.”

But he also said fans should take a longer view.

“We’ve only been in (the NFL) a short while,” he said. “We haven’t been in the league 75 years like the Pittsburgh Steelers. Our fan base is young. They don’t know the up-and-down cycles.”

Fans also complained about ticket prices. The Panthers won’t raise prices next season, but last season prices went up between $1 and $9 per seat. It was the team’s eighth price hike in 11 years.

“They’re ticked off about the ticket price,” Richardson said. “The ticket price increase was so modest, it surprised me.”

I mentioned in the column Thursday that we get our hair cut at the same place. Richardson compared the ticket hike to the hairspray he buys when he gets his trim. For years it was $10 a can. Now it’s $12. He doesn’t like it, but he understands the cost of business.

Two years ago, in a business decision, Richardson fired his sons, Jon and Mark. I asked him about that as part of a question about general turnover with the Panthers.

“Sometimes it’s difficult for families to operate well in business together,” he said. “I have other partners. I can’t run the business the way I’d run it if it was a father-and-son business.”

Richardson said that, despite last season, he thinks the Panthers are in “an exceptional place.” He listed a dozen of the Panthers’ “good young players,” and said other teams constantly call him trying to get them in trades. He’s got the first pick in the draft (even if it’s not Andrew Luck). He’s got a new head coach coming. And he says he’s got a lot of energy, despite a heart transplant not quite two years ago.

He sounded a lot sharper on the telephone than he did on the microphone a couple days ago. He also sounded sincere in his apology – although it’s clearly a smart thing to do when your image takes a hit.

At the end, we were talking about communicating with fans, and he asked me for suggestions. I didn’t have anything brilliant, but I said it might be good to have a news conference more often than every nine years.

He says it’s not his style to step out in public, but he knows he needs to let fans know what he’s thinking and what the team is up to.

We talked about being a sports fan, and how upset you get when your team’s going bad.

“That’s good!” he said – the point being, at least they care. And then he added this:

“I can tell you… I will care.”

The Big Cat, acting small

2011-01-05T19:11:00.000-05:00

(Hey everybody, I know I'm a little late on this... you can see other smart comments on this from Cedar Posts, The Meck Deck, and our Rick Bonnell.)

In 1993, on the day NFL owners voted to bring the Carolina Panthers into the league, Jerry Richardson stood on the stage in Chicago and looked for a camera from back home.

The man who worked so hard to get the team here stared straight into the lens said he had a message for the fans: “Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you!”

Now it sounds like he has a couple other words in mind.

The Panthers’ owner had a news conference Tuesday – his first in nine years – where he simultaneously came off as irritable, cheap, confused, obstinate and a bit of a creep.

Here’s part of his opening statement. Take a deep breath before you dive in.

“I think if we think about a number of things, and we look back over time – and time for me is a long time – I guess I would want to start by saying that, I think it was the Meineke Bowl that we went to… What’s your name? Young lady. Nicole? Who are you with? OK. Welcome, Nicole, I don’t know you. In fact, I don’t know a lot of people. It has been awhile since I’ve been here.”

It didn’t improve after that.

He directed Fox reporter Morgan Fogarty – who happens to be blond and beautiful – to come sit right in front of him. He batted away legitimate questions like blowflies.

But those are misdemeanors. The bigger problem is that what he said about his team made no sense.

Try to square these ideas:

1. Richardson said it was a positive that the Panthers let go several key veterans, because young players need to be on the field.

2. He said he knew John Fox preferred to play veterans.

3. He kept Fox as coach anyway.

The only logical explanation is financial. The Panthers saved money on players this season and might save money on coaches next season, especially if there’s a players’ strike or lockout. (Richardson is one of the key owners in those negotiations.)

Sometimes it does make sense to start over. Nobody expected the Panthers to go 2-14, but it’s clear that the team hit some version of the reset button. Then why not fire a coach who didn’t want to start over? Because he was still under contract, and you’d have to pay the old coach and the new one.

Other owners, in all sports, have been willing to take that hit to get better. Richardson wasn’t.

Look, I admire Jerry Richardson. He made himself a rich man, then willed the Panthers into existence when few others believed. We get our hair cut at the same place. It’s not a fancy place. We’ve crossed paths a couple of times, and he’s always been nice.

But he’s not the only one with a stake in the Panthers.

Part of the reason this team is here is because tens of thousands of fans bought personal seat licenses, giving the Panthers millions in upfront money before they ever sold a ticket. That’s a risky investment. The deal with sports is that you never know what value you’re going to get. You pay the same whether your team wins by three or loses by 30.

As a fan, in the end, you can ask only a couple of things of your team. They ought to do their best. And they need to have some kind of plan.

I don’t think Richardson did his best for the Panthers this year. And after watching him, it’s still not clear if he has much of a plan -- or much concern for what anybody else thinks.

Richardson had a heart transplant not quite two years ago. Nobody should expect him to be the same man he was on that great day back in 1993. But back then, he acted like we were in this together.

On Tuesday, he acted like we all work for him.

47

2011-01-04T15:37:00.002-05:00

Today's my 47th birthday. Isaac Newton was born on Jan. 4, and so was Louis Braille. It's a good birthday for music -- R.E.M.'s Michael Stipe, and Deana "Strawberry Wine" Carter, and the great soul singer Arthur Conley, who was born in McIntosh County, Ga., one county north of where I grew up.

A couple of years ago I wrote about turning 45 -- to me, that was the year I figured I was at least halfway done with this long and winding road. I've promised myself again to lose weight and get in shape -- I have a lot more I want to say about that later on, once I've had a little streak of success. Like everyone else, I see lots of flaws in myself that I'd like to correct on this trip around the sun.

But really, what I'd like to do this year is fail more.

The other day I was listening to an NPR show on video games. They were talking about the lessons that games teach us, and one of those lessons is how to fail. In any new game you might die 100 times before you reach the next level, but every time you learn a little more about the game, and you adapt, and finally you break through. Failure is a natural byproduct of trying something hard.

This year I plan to try harder things, and fail at them, until I don't.

So, right in the middle of writing all this, my friend Joe called with birthday wishes, and we started talking about what years are the BEST birthdays.

Ages 1-3: Meh. You don't really know what's going on.

4-5: It's mostly about cake.

6-10: The prime birthday years. As Joe said, when you're a little kid your birthday is better than Christmas because it's ALL ABOUT YOU -- all the presents are for you, and maybe your friends come over, and you get the biggest slice of cake. We decided that 9 is the prime birthday age -- old enough to enjoy everything, young enough to not be cynical about it.

11-15: Not that big a deal. You probably just want to stay in your room.

16: BIG deal. Drivin' time.

18: You can't drink at 18 anymore (at least in most states). But you can vote, and you're probably getting out of high school and starting the next part of your life. Big year.

21: You can drink legally now. At which point, for most of us, drinking becomes not as much fun.

25: Joe thought 25 was a big year -- he felt grown up then. I was 25 when I came to the Observer, and still felt like a kid in a lot of ways.

29: This was the year I became an adult -- came to the Observer's main office, moved to Charlotte, survived throat cancer.

30, 40, 50, 60: Taking-stock years.

65: Retirement (maybe).

75: For some people, this is when birthdays start to get exciting again. At some point, maybe you start to feel like you're stealing years: Ha! Made it to 82! Bite me, Grim Reaper!

The terrifying, and wonderful, thing is that none of us know until we get there.

Today I'm 47. Some days I feel a lot older, and some days I feel like a little kid. Time bends and stretches, sometimes by our own hands, sometimes by hands we never see.

My Favorite Things of 2010

2010-12-21T12:58:00.000-05:00

So here's the stuff I liked the most this year. I wanted a little more than a top-10 list -- I had 20 things on here at one point -- but I settled on 11, because 11 is my favorite number, beautiful and symmetrical. Also, of course, 11 is one louder.

You have your own favorite things of the year, right? Drop 'em in the comments.

11. Hungover Owls (Warning: foul language. Also: fowl language.)

It turns out that owls, when you take their picture in the daytime, all look like they're coming off a three-day bender in Vegas. The photos are spectacular. The captions are almost as good. It's one joke, but the joke never gets old.

(Honorable mention: Kim Jong-Il Looking at Things.)

10. "Toy Story 3"

How good is Pixar? This ranks fourth on my list of favorite Pixar movies -- behind "Wall-E," "The Incredibles" and "Up" -- but it probably also makes my list of the top 50 movies of all time. This kids' movie about a bunch of talking toys ends up really being about life, loss, sacrifice, and the pain and joy of growing up. You forget about the skill of the technology because you're so caught up in the story.

9. Super Bowl 44

We watched this year's Super Bowl with a couple of lifelong New Orleans Saints fans. Being a Saints fan has meant the occasional island of hope surrounded by swamps of misery. When you compare histories, Panthers fans have lived like kings compared to Saints fans. Not to mention that Katrina almost destroyed the Superdome and left fans wondering if the team would ever come back.

But last year the Saints had their best team ever, and they made to the Super Bowl for the first time, against Peyton Manning and the Indianapolis Colts. The Saints sprung an onside kick to start the second half, and led by a touchdown late, but the Colts got the ball and started driving. You could almost feel all that history rising up like a raw tide, waiting to drown the Saints one more time.

And then this happened.

I wish I could replicate the sound in our friend Greg's living room right at that moment, as he and his buddies all of a sudden realized that this time fate broke their way, and the freaking New Orleans Saints -- the Saints! -- were about to be world champions.

That sound still rolls around in my bones.

8. Richard Thompson / Loudon Wainwright III (Knight Theater, April 19)

Two of the best singer-songwriters on the planet, in a beautiful new theater with a top-shelf sound system. I saw some other fine shows this year -- Drive-By Truckers, John Hiatt, Marshall Crenshaw -- but this show reminded me why live music moves me more than any other art. And Thompson played "1952 Vincent Black Lightning," maybe the greatest story song of the last 30 years.

(I wrote a longer review of the show over on my personal site.)

7. "Next," James Hynes

I can't remember how I heard about this novel -- a review in Entertainment Weekly, maybe? -- but I picked it up and read it in two long nights. An academic type flies to Texas for a job interview, but becomes obsessed with the beautiful woman next to him on the plane. He follows her around Austin. He remembers old girlfriends. And while all this is happening, something else is happening, just at the edge of the frame.

I won't spoil it any more than that, except to say that once you figure out what's going on, and you ask yourself Is this what I think it is?, you're already hurtling toward the finish, and one of the best last lines you'll ever read.

6. "Oceans"

Nature films have to do one of two things: Tell a compelling story (as in "March of the Penguins"), or show me something I've never seen before. "Oceans" showed me so many things I'd never seen, it was like looking at the sea for the first time. We saw this on a weeknight, and there weren't 10 people in the whole theater, but you could hear all of us gasping, over and over, at the beauty and drama. The scene with the circling dolphins and dive-bombing birds alone is worth the DVD rental. See this with the family, on a hi-def TV, and prepare to be awed.

5. "The House That Built Me," Miranda Lambert
Country radio was better than any other radio this year, and this was the best song on country radio. (Lady Antebellum's "Need You Now" is almost as good -- if Fleetwood Mac made a country album, this would be the first single, even though the melody cribs from the Alan Parsons Project.)

"House That Built Me" has got all the pieces: A beautiful lyric built around a play on words, a simple and powerful story, a singer who knows that sometimes pulling back is better. I can hang in there pretty well through most of it, but my bottom lip starts to quiver on the bridge:

You leave home, you move on / And you do the best you can / I got lost in this old world /And forgot who I am...

Sing it, Miranda.

4. "Lonely, stressed and frustrated: Inside the mind of the Pinellas monkey," Michael Kruse (St. Petersburg Times, May 16)

I did a post a couple of weeks ago listing my five favorite stories of the year, but I saved this one for this list, because it stuck with me in a different way. It's not the writing that moves me so much (although the writing is fine). It's the thought behind the writing, and the feeling behind the thought.

A young rhesus macaque monkey has been on the loose in the Tampa-St. Pete area for the better part of two years now. On one level, it's fun -- the monkey has a Web page, and apparently it's now running for mayor of Tampa. But Kruse gets to the universal truth of the monkey on the loose: He's lonely, and we're not meant to be lonely. That idea, and this story, is going to stay with me a long time.

3. The sports-bar videos on Landon Donovan's goal

All of us -- OK, nearly all of us -- fell in love with soccer a little this summer when Landon Donovan netted a last-minute goal to beat Algeria in the World Cup. Just as a sports moment, it was brilliant enough -- goalie Tim Howard's outlet pass, Donovan's shot off a rebound, the USA dogpile in the corner. If you like sports at all, you have to enjoy this.

But in some ways that wasn't the best part. Later that day and into the night, videos started popping up on YouTube of fans reacting to the goal in sports bars around the country. In most of the videos you can't see the TV; you just see the fans going wide-eyed as the USA races down the field, then the agony as the first shot misses, then the screams as Donovan's follow goes in. I posted some of the videos back then, and I'm sure there are plenty more by now. As a sports fan there's no better moment: Your team does something amazing and wonderful, and you're right in the middle of a bunch of people who feel the same way.

Go watch them all, really, but for now, here's Seattle:

2. "(Bleep) You," Cee-Lo Green (WARNING WARNING PROFANITY ALERT... I'll just link this one instead of embedding)

This is the first song in years that made me feel like when I was 12, and a GREAT new song came on the radio, and I would beg my mama to take me to J.M. Fields the next day so I could buy the 45 because even when the radio played it every hour, that wasn't enough. At one point early on the video hit 2 million views on YouTube, and I'm pretty sure that 1.8 million were just me and my friend Joe Posnanski.

You can knock the language, I guess (and there's a clean version if you can't get past the bad words). But this song is so funny, so sweet, so full of joy -- from the guitar lick to the background Ooo-ooo-ooos to that amazing high note Cee-Lo hits coming out of the bridge -- that every time I play it, it makes me laugh, and dance, and try to hit that high note. And when it's done I play it over again.

1. The last shot in Butler-Duke

Sports highlights tend to land in two categories: A brilliant success, or a miserable failure. What you don't see much, as highlights linger over the years, is the near-miss. But the near-miss is the most human thing in sports. All of us have so many moments when we try hard, give our best, but don't quite get there. Those moments stick in our personal highlight reels. Sometimes I think our lives play out based on our near-misses, and what we decided to make of them.

This was one of the best sports years I can remember, from the Super Bowl, to Landon Donovan's goal, to Zenyatta flying from the back of the pack, to the John Isner-Nicolas Mahut ultramarathon at Wimbledon. But the best moment for me was the last 3.6 seconds of the last game of the college basketball season.

Duke -- the best college program of the last 20 years -- played Butler in the final. Butler is a small school from Indianapolis that has beaten some good teams over the past few years, but never got close to a title. But this time they made it to the Final Four (which also happened to be in Indianapolis), then beat Michigan State to make the title game, then played Duke close all the way to the end.

With 3.6 seconds left, and Duke up one, Duke's Brian Zoubek made one free throw but deliberately missed the second, so Butler would have to eat up time to take a shot. Butler's star player, Gordon Heyward, grabbed the rebound. Four dribbles and three seconds later he was at halfcourt. And then he let the shot go.

You can see the CBS broadcast of the last two minutes -- the whole thing is great drama, but you can skip ahead to about 5:00 if you want to see those last few seconds. But somehow a fan video, even though it's blurry and shaky, is what touches me the most.

ESPN did a scientific study of the shot a few days after the game, calculating the angle of release and the speed of the ball, and if I remember right, three inches to the left and it would have gone in. Because of the two teams, and because of the moment, it clearly would've been the greatest shot in basketball history, and probably one of the all-time sports highlights.

Three inches away.

But I've noticed something. They're playing the highlight anyway. I've seen it at least two dozen times in this new basketball season, and when March Madness comes back around we'll see it a lot more. I think we're going to end up holding onto that 3.6 seconds for years and years, because what we saw there was the greatest near-miss in sports history.

Not all of us get to raise the trophy. But all of us have a time when we just missed. Those last few seconds of Butler-Duke were some of the most human moments of 2010. And when I'm too old to remember who won the Super Bowl this year, or what books I loved, I think I'm going to remember that last shot.

Coming to Terms, Ornamentation, and you

2010-12-20T10:55:00.000-05:00

Just a quick note to remind y'all about a couple of reader projects I'll be wrapping up this week:

-- For Ornamentation, I'm looking for stories about an object that resonates with you at the holidays. The deadline on this one is Tuesday night.

-- For Coming To Terms, I'm looking for stories from those of you who have lost your job recently... I'm interested in whether you've taken the moment to think about the things you've always dreamed of doing. The deadline on this one is Thursday night.

(This project is linked my story "The Accountant's Song," which ran online and in the paper Saturday.)

We've already got some great stories for these projects but I'm always looking for more. Please add yours.

Project #9: Coming to Terms

2010-12-18T00:01:00.003-05:00

Today I've got a story about Cindy Thomson, who got laid off at age 62 and decided to pursue her dream -- becoming a jazz singer.

In some ways, Cindy is lucky. She didn't have quite the same financial pressures as other people who have lost their jobs in this economy. She has a spouse who works. She was able to borrow money from her mother to cut a CD.

But what drew me to her story was the choice she faced, the same choice so many others have faced over these past few years: You've lost your job. Now what do you do with your life?

That's the idea behind my latest reader project, Coming to Terms.

I want to hear from those of you who have lost your job in the past couple of years. Have you been able to find work again? Is it the kind of work you hoped for? Do you dream of doing something else with your life? Have you ever reached out and tried to do it?

Tell your stories in the comments below, or e-mail them to me at ttomlinson@charlotteobserver.com. If pictures or video help tell your story, send those along, too.

The Friday Wrap

2010-12-17T13:54:00.000-05:00

First of all, thanks to everyone who sent kind words on my column in today's paper about the young couple in love. Go down in the comments and you'll find a lot of people predicting that the marriage won't last. Maybe so. But I also heard from the other side... here's an e-mail from a reader named Carolyn:

When my future husband and I began dating, I was a senior at Carolina. He graduated three years earlier, through the Navy ROTC program, and lived in Pensacola. We dated for two years, while he was in Pensacola, in Washington State, and during an 8-month overseas deployment. He was overseas for our entire engagement, returning just in time for our rehearsal and wedding. During the two years we dated and were engaged, we’d guess we spent about a month and a half together, in total. It was mentioned more than once by well-meaning relatives that we barely knew each other when we married.

Our wedding was twenty years ago this past October. We have two beautiful little boys and have built a wonderful life together. You have to make it work, but it can, and it does – we’re living proof.

"You have to make it work." True of every marriage, no?

On to the wrapup:

On the blog and in the paper

We started a new reader project. There's still time to tell your story -- I'll put together the stories early next week sometime.

They played bagpipes for the copy desk.

Links from Twitter

Here's some stuff I flagged on my Twitter feed, @tommytomlinson:

I haven't had a chance to see any of "The Sing-Off." But this is just great. http://bit.ly/feQo84

Want to know how to be a writer? This interview with the great @MySecondEmpire (a/k/a Esquire's Chris Jones) tells you about all you need. http://www.rrj.ca/m11742/

My bud @jposnanski on Bob Feller, and believing. http://bit.ly/ghcq3T

I'd love to know what Michael and Dean said to each other on this little walk. http://on.nba.com/h5YYhc

Mama says it's a rainy night in Georgia. Just so happens I've been listening to this a lot lately. http://bit.ly/gfnQUe

Coming up

My story on the woman who got laid off and decided to become a singer is running... sometime soon. I'll also have a piece wrapping up all our Gift of Giving stories from the past few weeks. And on Tuesday (I think) I'll be unveiling my picks for the Best Stuff of 2010. Be thinking of yours, for the comments.

Have a great weekend, everybody.

Bagpipes for the copy desk

2010-12-14T09:32:00.000-05:00

(A quick reminder: Take a minute to contribute to my latest reader project, Ornamentation. And there's a new poll over to the right... pick your most annoying person of 2010. Probably should've been a longer list.)

Copy editors are the umpires of the newsroom -- they've done a great job if you barely notice they've been there.

Most everything that goes into our paper is edited at least twice. The first editor is what we call a "line" editor -- usually the reporter's boss. The second layer is the copy editor. The copy editor usually writes the headline, and always does the fine-tooth-comb editing to make sure street names are spelled right, dates match up, we're not saying DUI when we mean DWI. Copy editors know more about the city, state, region and world than anyone else in the newsroom. Copy editors have saved me so many times I lost count long ago. All reporters make mistakes -- it's inevitable on a constant deadline -- but a good copy editor is an All-Star catcher, snagging every wild pitch.

See, that's two baseball metaphors already. A copy editor would say we should cut it to one.

I say all this to set up this video from the Winston-Salem Journal. As newsrooms (like a lot of other businesses) have cut staff, copy editors at many papers -- including the Observer -- have taken the hardest hit. (Full disclosure: My wife works on our copy desk, which we call the universal desk -- our folks also design and lay out pages.)

Last Friday was to be the last day of work for the 18 people on the Journal's copy desk. So they brought in the funeral pipes.

As you see from the video, the reality in Winston-Salem turned out to be more complicated. The reality is complicated these days for every newspaper -- and every other business trying to survive and thrive in these strange times. That's not news anymore, I guess.

Mainly I just wanted to let you know about the greatness of copy editors. We don't notice them much. They deserve to be noticed.

Project #8: Ornamentation

2010-12-13T10:31:00.000-05:00

This week's reader project -- called Ornamentation -- is simple. Maybe, as you and your family have built up holiday traditions over the years, some object from those traditions has built up a special meaning.

It might be a Christmas ornament, but it doesn't have to be. I find myself thinking of my dad's old pocketknife, and how he'd get it out to cut open the tape on his presents so we could use the boxes over again.

Whatever it is, I'd like you to tell the story of that one special object that you think of at the holidays.

If you have a photo that helps the story, even better.

Send whatever you've got to ttomlinson@charlotteobserver.com, or you can just tell your story in the comments.

The Friday Wrap

2010-12-10T15:06:00.001-05:00

It was a busy week around here... put a lot of words through the old paragraph factory (although you won't see all of them until this weekend). Here's what I've been up to:

On the blog and in the paper

There's still a couple of days to take the poll there to the right... looks like the top three choices for Movie of the Year are "Inception," "Toy Story 3" and Other.

I came up with a reader project on the Panthers that turned out to be a total dud (not unlike the Panthers, I guess). Didn't get a single question, and you can see in the comments that several readers weren't fond of the whole idea. That happens sometimes! Failure is good! And either way, I'm glad to see Jerry Richardson speak to fans, at least a little.

Louis C.K. brought the funny.

Elizabeth Edwards led a fascinating life. (Note the anonymous comment at 7:35 a.m., and the discussion that followed... we deal with sketchy comments all the time, and I've always felt the best way to deal with it is to let commenters police themselves.)

I picked my reads of the year.

What's the deal with that photo? Y'all had some ideas.

Links from Twitter

Here's some stuff I flagged on my Twitter feed, @tommytomlinson:

Via many others: Unbelievably powerful WashPost story, told through Facebook updates. http://wapo.st/eOCLnm

This story has pretty much everything: Meth, a GED, mac and cheese. http://bit.ly/dMHMIt (via @MeckDeck)

Casting call in CLT for pilot of possible Showtime series starring Claire Danes. http://bit.ly/fhKkpb via @AddThis

Your thoughts to the Queen. Aretha reportedly has pancreatic cancer. http://bit.ly/emNOB9 (via @editormarilyn)

Sarah Palin, a fake hunter? Say it ain't so! http://bit.ly/gX9Moo

The great @gangrey comes through again: Jimmy Breslin on John Lennon. http://bit.ly/h2v4ej

Yep, Urban's gone. Wow. http://bit.ly/hbvsL8 #Florida #SEC

The great @edsbs (a Gator fan) has the proper, measured response: http://sbn.to/dRKYpO

Mr. @BenFolds said this was great stuff from the "Sing-Off." Always listen to Mr. @BenFolds. http://bit.ly/fjvkKS

Zombie killing is philosophically similar to reading and deleting 400 work e-mails on a Monday morning. @CKlosterman. http://nyti.ms/gI8Dpy

Coming up

Lord willing and the creek don't rise, I'll have a story in the paper on Sunday about a woman who got laid off and decided to chase her dream. It'll have a reader project attached to it so some of you can tell your own stories. Holler and let me know what you think. UPDATE: I should always wait until the Friday-afternoon meeting to post this thing. The story's holding, probably until next Sunday. I'm hoping it'll age like a fine wine, as opposed to, you know, skim milk or something.

Other stuff in the pipeline: A Christmas story from the vault, maybe something on Billy Graham, and my favorite stuff of the year. That started out as a top-10 list, but now I'm thinking it's going to be a top-20. It's been an interesting year.

Photo in need of a story

2010-12-09T13:12:00.000-05:00

I took this photo at the Plaza-Midwood post office.

What's going on here? I have no idea. That's your job. Write a little story to go with this photo and drop it in the comments.

Reads of the year

2010-12-08T09:55:00.000-05:00

Sometime in the next couple of weeks I'll post a list of my favorite things of 2010 -- a mix of sports, music, books, movies and other stuff. But for now I want to break out a separate category -- magazine and newspaper stories, the work dearest to my heart.

Those of us who care about the well-done newspaper or magazine story have fallen in love with a Web site called Longreads. It takes great work from around the world and gathers it in one place. You can even search by how much time you have to read. I could stroll around in there forever.

A bunch of people in the writing field have been posting their favorite long reads of the year, so I thought I'd add mine to the stack. These stories aren't all beautifully written or doggedly reported. They're just the pieces that have stuck with me long after I read the last word.

5. "Please Allow Me To Correct a Few Things," by Bill Wyman (Slate, Nov. 5). This fooled some people -- including me -- when it came out. It's supposedly a letter from Mick Jagger responding to Keith Richards' autobiography, sent to Stones bassist Bill Wyman, but accidentally arriving at the home of the rock writer with the same name. It's a fake -- the writer Wyman made the whole thing up. But it's so good -- so spot-on in every detail we know about the tension between Mick and Keith, the waste, the compromises, the musical miracles that got made anyway -- that I can believe it's what Mick WOULD write, if he had the guts.

4. "The Mess He Made," by Michael S. Rosenwald (Washington Post, June 13). A first-person piece from a hoarder trying to understand what he does, why he does it and why he can't stop. So raw and true and painful that I can't Google him to see what happened next, because I'm afraid to find out.

3. "It Happens," by David Fleming (ESPN the Magazine, Oct. 7). The degree of difficulty on this one was incredible -- write a funny, humane, moving story about athletes who defecated on themselves during competition. Fleming (who lives in Davidson) pulls it off -- even if you think you can't possibly enjoy this story, you will. Although the headline really should've been "The Tao of Poo."

2. "Bill Murray Is Ready To See You Now," by Dan Fierman (GQ, August). This is normally my least-favorite type of story -- the celebrity Q&A. But this time the Q's are insightful, the A's are brilliant, and by the end I felt like I knew Bill Murray 10 times better than I did before. The sequence about the "Garfield" movie alone is worth it. God, would I love to have a drink with that guy.

1. "Roger Ebert: The Essential Man," by Chris Jones (Esquire, March). Many others have this story on their lists, and as much as I wanted to do something different, keeping this off is like leaving Cam Newton off your Heisman ballot. A profile tries to answer two questions: What is this person's life like? And what does it mean? A great profile does both. A brilliant profile adds rich detail, beautiful writing and a universal message. A transcendent profile has something else on top of all that -- something that reaches in and shakes your bones. That's this story right here.

Elizabeth Edwards and the rebuilt life

2010-12-07T18:47:00.003-05:00

What pops to mind first, strangely enough, is Elizabeth Edwards playing with her kids.

It was at some campaign event back in 2004, when her husband was trying to be vice president, and Elizabeth was out there playing the good wife, even though everybody involved, including John and Elizabeth, knew she was the smart one, the one who in a just world might have been the face on the ticket.

Instead she stood a little off to the side and a little in back, and her two small children were crawling all over her. She tried to keep them still but after a while she gave in and turned all her attention to them. She clapped for John when everybody else did. But her eyes stayed on the kids.

She died Tuesday at age 61.

From one angle this is perfect evidence that life is not fair. The husband cheated. The mistress had his baby. The aide told their secrets. And the one person worth rooting for in the whole depressing story suffered the most.

Before we drape her in white, we must be honest. She knew about the cheating husband by the time he ran for president in 2008 and still asked people to vote for him. She wrote a book that profited from the whole mess. And if another book on the ’08 campaign is to be believed, she was hard to deal with and sometimes a little nuts.

Balance that against these two facts:

1. Her husband humiliated her in front of the entire world.

2. She was living with cancer, and dying from it.

The cancer came first in 2004, at the tail end of that losing campaign. It returned in 2007, this time digging into her bones, and the doctors said they could treat it but not stop it. Imagine knowing that, on top of all the other things she knew.

More unfairness. In their wedding photos she’s as good-looking as he is. But as often happens, over the years his good looks hung on a little longer, and hers rounded and wrinkled.

But her eyes still glowed and she could still crack a joke, and there was no question who’d be better company over drinks.

They met at the UNC law school, and she became a bankruptcy lawyer while he went after personal-injury cases. Early in their marriage, they had two children, Wade and Cate. But in 1996, Wade died in a one-car wreck on the way to the family’s beach house. He was 16. After that John and Elizabeth quit life for a while.

Then they got up and faced the sun. They decided they wanted more children. And so she took fertility drugs, and she had Emma Claire when she was 48, and Jack when she was 50.

It happened over and over. Her life crumbled, and she made herself a new one. When you do that enough times, the pieces don’t all fit right anymore. But she pressed them together and moved on.

What does someone like Elizabeth Edwards live for? She must have thought she’d be First Lady, even though she knew she could’ve been more. Later she must have felt like a fool, even though she knew how many people still loved her.

Life is not fair, and Elizabeth Edwards is dead at 61. But she had four children, and she lived a fascinating life, and in the end she rose higher than the small people around her. If she had a chance to live that life again, I bet she’d take it.

What's so funny about Louis C.K.

2010-12-07T10:17:00.000-05:00

One thing that changes as we get older is the idea of what makes us laugh. The only thing I laughed at when I was a kid that I still laugh at now is Warner Bros. cartoons. I didn't know back then that the opera singer in "Long-Haired Hare" is rehearsing a part from "The Barber of Seville." Or that Bugs Bunny does a spot-on impression of the conductor Leopold Stokowski. All I knew is that Bugs drives that fat opera singer crazy*, and the opera singer beats him up, and Bugs gets his revenge by making the guy sing one long note until he turns purple.

*What do they do in Mississippi... when skies are drippy...

That was funny when I was 6, and it's even funnier now, knowing what I know, understanding the little details as an adult. But most of the time, what's funny changes. You grow up, and you go through things, and you learn a few hard lessons, and maybe you start to understand Dave Barry's definition of a sense of humor: "A measurement of the extent to which we realize that we are trapped in a world almost totally devoid of reason. Laughter is how we express the anxiety we feel at this knowledge."

Which brings me to Louis C.K., who, at the moment, is the funniest person on the planet.

Last week he was on with Jay Leno. Here are three clips. They get better as they go.

If you go on YouTube you can find dozens of Louis C.K. clips. You should be warned of two things: One, they're full of extremely bad language, and two, if you start watching it might be hours before you stop.

Louis loves his kids but a lot of the time he doesn't like them. He understands exactly how lucky he is but he still complains. He longs for just a little real human connection but he's too awkward, or too lazy, or too numb, to make it.

Of course, in one sense, it's an act*. I don't know if any of the stories are true. It felt a little weird when I read an interview with him about this clip that went viral last year, and it turned out the guy complaining about wi-fi on the airplane wasn't another passenger -- it was Louis himself. That's a small thing, and I'm sure there's a good comedic reason for telling the story that way, but it makes him feel a touch less authentic.

*Speaking of an act -- go back and watch Jay Leno in those clips. Part of his job, of course, is to make the guest look good. But Jay is so awkward here -- he's got a really funny guy right next to him and he barely knows how to have a conversation. "So, hey, you're out on the road, right?" Jay Leno, when he was a regular guest on Letterman, was a great comedian. I don't know what part of himself he sold to get the Tonight Show and hold onto it. But it was too big a price.

The older I get, the more honesty matters. I don't want to get schmoozed by somebody who just wants to sell me something. I don't want people to tiptoe around what they're trying to say. I don't want melodrama or artifice. Just be real. What strikes me the most about Louis C.K. is that I'd still want to hang out with him even if he wasn't funny. He seems like a regular guy, in dumpy clothes, who has some interesting things to say about his life, and maybe yours.

What's funny as you get older, I think, depends on what you need. We watched "The Hangover" last night. Parts of it were really funny. But it wasn't as great as I'd heard. Probably because it wasn't the kind of funny I needed. Maybe you need something over-the-top and outrageous if you need to forget yourself awhile.

And maybe you need something like Louis C.K. if you need to remember -- remember that life sometimes sucks at the same time it's great, and everybody struggles with love and family and figuring out your place in the world, and it's OK to be honest about that, and laugh about it.

Project #7: Question the Panthers

2010-12-06T11:16:00.000-05:00

(FYI: There's a new poll over there to the right about the best movie of 2010. The list is sort of off the top of my head, and I have the memory of a sand gnat, so your favorite might not be on there... drop a comment if there's one I missed.)

This probably makes me a bad fan, but I'll admit it: I haven't watched the Panthers since Week 1. Most weeks, by the time we get home from church and maybe lunch with friends, they're already down 28-3, and I can find something better to do. But this week was the Panthers' only West Coast start -- 4:15 -- and so I checked in just before halftime. Miracle of miracles, the good guys were up 14-0. I settled in to watch.

So yeah, this was my fault.

One of the many frustrating things about the Panthers this year is that the team isn't responsive to fans. Coach John Fox's favorite answer is "It is what it is." But at least he says something. Owner Jerry Richardson hasn't said a word all year, except for a brief phone call with our Tom Sorensen.

Fans might not get any answers this year. But at least they should get a chance to ask some questions. So here's a reader project I call Question the Panthers.

Here's what I want you to do:

1. Make a sign with a question you'd like to ask about the team. It should look like one of those signs people hold up at games:

(I don't know how long ago that photo was taken... but a beat-up, 41-year-old Brett Favre might still be our best QB. Sigh.)

The idea, for these signs, is to make it in the form of a question -- something the team might legitimately answer if they ever get in the mood again. So be tough if you want, but make it something you're honestly curious about.

2. Take a photo of yourself with the sign.

3. E-mail it to me, ttomlinson@charlotteobserver.com, and ID yourself (or whoever's in the photo).

Send them in by midnight Thursday, and if we end up with a good gallery, we'll put some online Friday, and then maybe in the paper this weekend.

In the meantime, let's end on a good note. This, I think, was the Panthers' play of the year, and I don't mean that with any sarcasm:

That's the punter, on a 1-10 team, giving every bit of effort to stop a touchdown. It was worth watching another loss just to see that.

The Friday Wrap

2010-12-03T15:42:00.000-05:00

As most of you did over Thanksgiving, we'll use this Wrap to cover some leftovers -- I wasn't here last Friday, so we'll catch up on the last couple of weeks this time.

On the blog and in the paper

Thanksgiving as a security blanket.

Come write with me at Queens University. (There's still time to sign up!)

Life is a WikiLeak, old friend. (Here's a letter of objection.)

On SEC Expats: We recapped the Auburn-Alabama epic. We noted that Cam Newton is still eligible. And we picked the winner of the SEC title game.

Links from Twitter

Here's some stuff I flagged on my Twitter feed, @tommytomlinson:

An Economist writer says what I was trying to say about @wikileaks, but much better. http://econ.st/i4n0Wp

Sad, beautiful, moving story on "Seabiscuit" author Laura Hillenbrand's chronic fatigue. http://wapo.st/gqWEHY

Never seen these words in a high-school football story: "Chekhov wouldn't be pleased." First-rate work from @reesenews. http://bit.ly/ifgVCN

Do you need a laugh? I need a laugh. Here's Kim Jong-Il looking at things. http://bit.ly/ez56MC

Halfway down in this piece is a Leslie Nielsen fart story... set in Charlotte. http://bit.ly/gyvCvA #shirley

TSA ALERT: Dave Barry has a blurred groin. http://n.pr/bTs093

Craziest weather photo in, well, forever. http://on.natgeo.com/bt8laO (via @richardlake)

Mark Packer (Billy's son) leaves CLT sports talk radio. http://bit.ly/fS0m8x via @AddThis

NYT's @kimseverson, new to the ATL, making me want to drive over for a Ghetto Burger. http://nyti.ms/gaKJlW

Sort of embarrassed @theobserver didn't think to do this. http://huff.to/g78Wy8

This Jordan/LeBron mashup is wonderful, and 100% accurate. http://kottke.org/x/4p9a (via @kottke)

Etc.

I've also got a story in the new issue of Our State magazine -- it's about a Western Carolina University production of "A Christmas Carol."

Next week

If things go as scheduled, I'll have a story running next weekend on a woman who lost her job and decided to follow her dream. I think I'm going to launch a reader project involving the Panthers. Plus whatever else comes up! Have a great weekend, everybody.

Come write with me at Queens

2010-11-30T11:07:00.000-05:00

A quick reminder: I'm teaching another session of my "Writing in 3-D" class starting Saturday at Queens University. It's broken up into two 3-hour sessions, one this Saturday and one on Dec. 11. Here's some more details. (If you want to sign up, click the "Availability/Register" button on that page.)

I've taught this class a few times now; nobody has fallen asleep, and everybody seems to have had fun. It's designed for people at all levels of writing skill, so if you're a beginner or you're trying to finish up that masterpiece, I think you'll learn a little something.

Holler if you have any questions, and I hope to see you Saturday.

On Thanksgiving, a moment of security

2010-11-24T16:48:00.000-05:00

We live in an insecure time.

At the airport we submit to full-body scans or humiliating pat-downs because we're scared to death of terrorists.

In our city we struggle with how to get things going again. Charlotte has always been based on people moving money around -- banks making loans, businesses expanding, new residents buying new houses. Now the money has stopped moving, and our city is in a rare standstill moment, not sure what to do next.

And at home we worry about losing our jobs, or finding jobs to replace the ones we've lost.

We're anxious and frazzled and worn out. We need time off and a safe house.

Thanksgiving is here at just the right moment.

I should say right here that not everyone finds solace in Thanksgiving. Some families spend the holidays picking at old scabs. Other people find it a lonely time. One of the nicest things you can do at Thanksgiving is to find room at the table for folks who don't have a place to go.

But for most of us, home and family are the two most secure things in our lives, and Thanksgiving draws us back their way.

Nobody I know has a Norman Rockwell Thanksgiving, with a white tablecloth and a turkey on a silver dish. Lots of families don't have Thanksgiving on Thanksgiving -- everybody's so scattered, and people have to work, and you end up having the big meal on Friday or Saturday. Even on the proper day, people sprawl on the couch or sit on the floor or perch in front of the TV watching the Detroit Lions lose. When my family gathers at my mama's house down in Georgia, we eat off paper plates. If nobody feels like cooking, we hit the buffet at the Western Sizzler.

None of that matters in the least.

What matters is seeing how big the kids have grown. What matters is catching up with the ones who went off to college. What matters is retelling the family stories, and laughing in the same old places. What matters is that quiet moment when everyone is together and we hold hands and say grace.

Thanksgiving isn't about the good china. It's about gathering under one roof, the survivors of another year, safe in one another.

Sometimes I think we overrate security. If you live your life to minimize risk, you're never going to get much of a reward. We have to get out in the world, mix it up a little, pick up a few scars, squeeze the full joy out of this short life.

But in hard times we all need something to lean up against. And if you're lucky, the people you love and the home you treasure are strong enough to hold you.

On Thanksgiving morning, people across this country wake up in their childhood bedrooms. They hug cousins they see only once a year. Maybe they go out on the porch to have a quiet chat with a family member, to get some advice on a problem, to figure out life.

If you're one of those people, give thanks for that.

Give thanks for safe travel, even though it might have been irritating. Give thanks for the food, even though you might not like cranberries. Give thanks for your family, even though some of them drive you crazy. If nothing else, give thanks for the day off.

There is security in thankfulness, if only to remind us that the world is not all bad, and there are some safe places left. Be thankful for yours.

Back in the saddle

2010-11-22T14:22:00.000-05:00

Real working people come back from vacation and start turning wrenches or toting trays or whatever it is they do to make a living. Guys like me come back and delete e-mails.

There were more than 800 waiting for me when I got to work this morning, including about 100 automatically generated e-mails telling me my e-mail basket was too full. Of course it would not be quite as full if I didn't have A HUNDRED FREAKING E-MAILS TELLING ME I HAVE TOO MANY E-MAILS.

The good news is, killing 800 e-mails (minus the three or four I actually want to read) has a wonderful... cleansing... effect, along the lines of eating a bushel of prunes.

So let's catch up. Since the last day I was at work:

-- The Panthers have lost three times with four different quarterbacks.
-- The American Music Award for artist of the year went to Justin Bieber.
-- And it appears that if you want to fly on an airplane now, you have to be inspected in a way formerly reserved for new inmates in federal prison.

Clearly, I should never take vacation again.

I'll see if I can get all this stuff fixed before Thanksgiving. In the meantime, it's good to be back. What's up with you? And have you seen the Harry Potter movie yet?

The Friday Wrap

2010-11-05T16:36:00.000-04:00

I'm headed out the door soon for two weeks off -- one of those stay-at-home, don't-spend-much-money vacations. Much walking, reading and DVD-watching ahead... if there's a recent book or movie you really liked, drop me a tip in the comments.

A quick reminder before we get to the wrapup: I'm teaching a class in December at Queens University and doing a reading next Friday at StorySlam! Here's more info on both.

So here's what I was up to this week:

On the paper and in the blog

A hawk rode the wind.

We had some great responses to the Why I Vote project.

I wrote an early column on the John Spratt v. Mick Mulvaney congressional race...

Then a later version as the votes came in.

A chance meeting on that story brought out one from the vault.

Finally, we talked a little SEC football.

Links from Twitter

Here's some stuff I flagged on my Twitter feed, @tommytomlinson:

Jagger responds to Keith Richards' book. Almost can't believe this is true. But what a piece of writing. http://slate.me/9vR0BT
I think my Spidey Sense was right... that Mick Jagger letter is (probably) fake. http://exm.nr/aHyeTs

RIP Catfish Collins: James Brown guitarist, player of the lick on "Flash Light," and brother of Bootsy. http://ind.pn/ctDGNS

There's only one guy you need to read on Sparky Anderson. Here's @JPosnanski. http://bit.ly/9skBxb

From @DanWetzel: "29 TDs, nine victories and zero losses is worth a great deal more than tuition, room and board." http://bit.ly/cqYvnU

My buddy Dan Huntley cooking 'cue today at Ellis Island (!) as part of this: http://bit.ly/cQu9ZD

Borders, Joseph-Beth closing in CLT. charlotteobserver.com/2010/11/04/181… They were near each other AND Barnes/Noble. Never understood how all 3 wd survive.

I was thinking this same thing, but the NYT's Ross Douthat said it better. http://nyti.ms/clUQby

Outside polling place in York, SC. Never noticed one of these before. #elections http://yfrog.com/ndcsuhj

A paper in 3 parts: Debes Saber (What you must know); Debes Leer (What you must read); Debes Hacer (What you must do). http://bit.ly/cgyuug

A musical interlude

From the great kottke.org, here's AC/DC's "Thunderstruck" -- on bagpipes.

Coming up

After my time off, I'm going to make some tweaks in this storytelling gig... one thing I'm definitely going to do is put things on more of a schedule, so it'll be easier to know when I'm writing and what it's going to be on a particular day. Holler, as always, with thoughts, questions and ideas. Have a great weekend, everybody.

From the archives: The promise of Thi Le

2010-11-03T10:25:00.001-04:00

On election night I ran into an old friend, the subject of one of my favorite stories.

Thi Le was catering John Spratt's election-night party. If you've ever been to a social event in Rock Hill, chances are Thi cooked for it. Her food is great. Her story -- and the story of her children -- is even better. I was honored to get to tell it in a piece that ran five years ago. Here's the story... I'll add a little update at the end.

The promise of Thi Le
Oct. 29, 2005

SOUTH BEND, Ind. — She twisted in her chair on the floor of the arena, looking at the others in the seats above. She had been through this four times now but she still worried.

Had she done enough?

A lot of these other parents, they drove BMWs and belonged to country clubs. They sent their kids to Europe.

Thi Le sent her kids to work.

Thi (say it tee ) marked the results with the pennants on the wall. At Pho 98, her restaurant in Charlotte, she pinned the pennants right up front.

Harvard.

Notre Dame.

Duke.

Her first three children — Chau ( choh ), Michael and Linh ( leeng ) — had graduated from three of America’s finest universities.

And now her youngest, VyVy ( vee-vee ), was about to start Notre Dame as a freshman. Thi had come along to help VyVy move into her dorm. She was living downstairs from football legend Joe Montana’s daughter.

Customers back in Charlotte saw the pennants on the wall. But they did not see Thi and VyVy waking early that last day at home, driving to Thi’s new restaurant in Rock Hill, doing prep work for lunch because Notre Dame was gaining a student but Thi was losing a waitress.

At 7:30 on her last morning in town, VyVy made five gallons of sweet tea.

Now they sat together in Notre Dame’s basketball arena, waiting with other students and parents gathered for freshman orientation. Thi felt that empty feeling coming, the feeling of a child leaving home.

Four times now. This time the last.

Had she done enough?

Thi remembered a time — not that long ago — when she had never heard of Notre Dame, or Harvard, or Duke.

She had not understood what her kids would have to do to get there. She had not known what she would have to do to make it happen.

But she had known one thing.

She had promised.

Taking chances

They were riding home from a family trip. Chau was maybe 12 and Michael was maybe 9 and they had picked at each other the whole way.They were bragging about their favorite schools. Chau said Harvard was the best. Michael said Notre Dame was better.

Bet you a thousand dollars you don’t go to Notre Dame, Chau said. Bet you a thousand dollars YOU don’t go to Harvard, Michael said.

Later, Chau came to her mother and asked: Can I go to Harvard one day?

And Thi said: Honey, you come up with the grades and I come up with the dough.

Thi had learned as a child to do what she promised.

She grew up Thi Nguyen ( wen ) in a village in South Vietnam. Eight children in all. Thi and four sisters sleeping in one bed.

Her father gambled and so her mother supported the family. Every morning Thi’s mom woke at 4 a.m. and walked two miles to the trucks unloading produce. She bought bananas and cabbage and sweet potatoes to resell at the village market.

Thi’s mother counted on her to help. But one morning Thi wanted to stay in bed. Her mom pulled on her leg but Thi didn’t budge. Her mother went to the market alone. Only so many vegetables she could carry. Only so much money she could make.

Her mother came back with hurt in her eyes and Thi never slept late again.

In 1975, with the Vietnam War grinding to its end, Thi’s aunt came to the family with an offer. She worked for the U.S. government and could get Thi’s family to America.

But Thi’s oldest brother — a soldier — had been captured by the North Vietnamese. Thi’s parents would not leave until he was released. And her brothers and sisters didn’t want to leave home.

Thi took the chance. She boarded a plane out of Vietnam with her aunt, her grandparents and a cousin. She was 16.

A connection in America found them a sponsor in Lawndale, near Shelby. They worked on a farm. Thi cut grass and fed cattle. She carried a dictionary and asked people to show her every new word she heard.

Sometimes Thi went to Charlotte to shop at an Asian market. One day she met another South Vietnamese refugee, a man named Xuan ( swon ) Le. In Vietnam he had been on a special military police force; now he was a janitor at the Celanese plant in Rock Hill.

There were not many Vietnamese in the Charlotte area then. Xuan and Thi married in February 1978. Xuan’s family had one request before the wedding — they were Catholic and asked Thi to convert.

She soaked up her new faith. She came to believe you could do anything with God’s help and hard work.

Thi and Xuan had studied America. No matter where you came from, you could get ahead. All you needed was an education.

“Some people, they invest money in the bank, they invest money in the stock,” Xuan says. “We invest our money into our children.”

By 1987, they had four.

Thi and a partner had started a company that made furniture for restaurants. The partner knew the business. Thi knew how to work.

She did office jobs in Charlotte until it was time to pick the kids up from school. She got them home and got them fed and then got back on the road at night, driving as far as Winston-Salem, trying to make a sale.

They took in other family members who needed help. Sometimes there were nine or 10 people in their little trailer.

But still they paid hundreds of dollars a month for tuition at St. Anne Catholic School in Rock Hill. Thi had decided it was the best school for the kids.

And she had promised that her kids would get the best.

Working harder

The children were succeeding. The marriage was failing.

The kids almost never brought home a B. They moved to public schools (St. Anne only goes up to eighth grade) and fit right in. They lived rounded-out lives — soccer and basketball and track and student council.

They studied for hours but they shared a goofy streak. They watched pro wrestling and practiced the moves. Thi kept having to tell Michael not to put the “torture rack” on his sisters.

Thi and Xuan worked. In the moments in between, they no longer got along. She left twice and came back. The third time she stayed gone.

It was 1992. She was a single mom with three kids in private school and a fourth about to start.

The five of them moved into a 700-square-foot house. They had no beds. Two slept on couches and three slept on the floor.

She worked harder, calling on restaurants to buy her furniture. She bought a Volvo station wagon with 170,000 miles on it. She put on 180,000 more.

She pushed herself and she pushed the kids. Over and over she told them: If you stop and rest, you’ll never be the best.

When they rebelled, she made them kneel in the corner for an hour.

When they fought each other, she hit them on the arms with sticks she made them gather from the yard.

That was how it was done in Vietnam. That was the only way Thi knew. It seemed to work. Her kids excelled in school. They stayed out of trouble.

Thi knew other parents in town. They disciplined their kids in similar ways. But Thi noticed something. When their kids went off to college, they never came back.

Chau would be ready for college soon.

Thi had been in Rock Hill long enough to make friends she could trust. They helped her find family counselors.

She learned how to discipline her kids without hitting them. She learned that some children grow faster when you don’t hold on so tight.

As she loosened her grip, the kids bloomed even more. Chau got a perfect score on the verbal part of the SAT; Michael got a perfect score on the math part. Linh was senior class president at Northwestern High. VyVy was student of the year at Rawlinson Road Middle.

Still, Thi worried.

Had she done enough?

Most parents swallowed their darkest thoughts. Thi blurted them out.

When Chau ran cross-country for Northwestern High School, she threw up during a tough race. Thi ran up, panic in her eyes, and said: Are you expecting?

Chau sneaked off to a movie with a boy, and Thi grounded her on the night of a big dance. Michael roughhoused with his sisters, and Thi took away his New Year’s money.

Two years ago she got a bad feeling about VyVy. She was making good grades, she had done nothing wrong, but Thi watched her friends and thought they might get her in trouble.

So Thi sent her youngest child to Massachusetts for boarding school.

Milton Academy cost $30,000 a year. The school took care of some of it, but Thi was already paying off Michael’s loans from Notre Dame and Linh’s tuition at Duke. Her children had gone to some of the most expensive universities in the nation with little financial aid. Thi paid nearly all the expenses herself. She had spent hundreds of thousands of dollars already.

She would work harder.

By now she had three businesses. She was still a partner in Laminated Industries, the furniture business. She owned Windsor Cleaners, a dry cleaner in Rock Hill. And she had opened Pho 98 on South Boulevard in Charlotte. (Pho is a traditional Vietnamese noodle soup; the restaurant opened in 1998.)

She went to bed at 2 a.m. and woke up at 6. It was amazing how much time you had when you didn’t sleep. She served on half the boards in Rock Hill — the Red Cross, the Human Relations Committee, the Cultural Heritage Commission, the hospice advisory board. She built custom furniture for St. Anne. She flew to Missouri to cook for 500 priests who worked with Vietnamese families.

This summer she opened her new restaurant, Thi’s Place on Main in Rock Hill.

Along the way she went to soccer practice and basketball camp and all the other things her kids were involved in.

She banned TV and junk food for Lent. But when Lent was over they gorged at Denny’s and watched the tube all night and laughed until they fell asleep.

She had raised four children who worked nearly as hard as she did. But she had also backed off just enough to let them be themselves.

Michael had bet that Chau wouldn’t make it to Harvard. Chau had bet that Michael wouldn’t make it to Notre Dame.

They both lost.

The pennants went up on the wall.

Letting go

The kids’ faces say Vietnam. Their lives say South Carolina.

Linh won this year’s Miss Lancaster pageant — contestants aren’t required to live there — and at the Miss South Carolina pageant, she got out her guitar and played a Creedence Clearwater Revival medley.

VyVy still talks about the time she touched country singer Kenny Chesney.

Michael works in finance in Chicago but dreams of Bojangles’ chicken. He wrote a letter to the CEO of Bojangles’, begging him to open a franchise in the Windy City.

They keep in touch with their father, who is now a production planner at a corporate offshoot of Celanese. He goes to the kids’ graduations, takes them deep-sea fishing.

They come home to their mom all the time.

“No matter what we kids accomplish, her journey was so much harder,” says Chau, who works in Tanzania at a radio station for African refugees. “We’ll probably never understand all that she did for us.”

Still, the kids have perfected the Le eyeroll — that look they give their mom when she gives them a lecture.

Look, here comes the eyeroll now. It is Thi’s last day at Notre Dame. They sit at a table outside VyVy’s dorm. Michael has come down to visit. He lives two hours away. This means it is his job to watch VyVy.

“If she’s drinking, she ain’t my daughter anymore,” Thi says. “If she’s drinking, she’s your sister.”

Eyeroll.

“Your little girl’s in good hands,” Michael says. Then he slips in the needle: “… But I guess we’ll see. This is college. You’re supposed to have fun.”

Thi punches his knee: “You’re not supposed to tell her things like that!”

Thi has told Michael to look out for VyVy. She has told VyVy’s roommates to look out for VyVy. She called VyVy’s room at 8 in the morning to make sure she would be ready for orientation.

“How did you know the number?” VyVy says. " I don’t even know the number!"

“I memorize it last night,” Thi says. “I’m telling you, I know things.”

All weekend VyVy has gravitated to her roommates, her new friends, away from her mom. Thi has tried not to hover. As a Catholic, Notre Dame is Thi’s favorite university. But it is also a place where the child stays and the parent goes home.

Just the day before, the dean of first-year students gave a speech and asked parents not to linger on campus:

“You will become your children’s first college professor by modeling for them the great power, the tremendous love, in the act of letting go.”

The Grotto is Thi’s favorite place at Notre Dame. It’s a small cave filled with candles, modeled after the famous grotto at Lourdes. People come all day long to light the candles and say quiet prayers.

Thi knows that VyVy will cry when she leaves. She tries not to think about that. She tries to remember that this is a happy day.

She raised four good kids.

She kept her promise.

Thi has many things to thank God for. The Grotto is not far from VyVy’s dorm. Thi still has a little time, before she has to go.

She gets up from the table and turns to her daughter and points down the path.

“Come on,” she says. “One last walk, baby girl.”

She rode from South Bend through the Chicago traffic to the airport. She had hauled VyVy’s extra luggage on the trip to Notre Dame. Now all she had was her own.

It was after midnight by the time she got in her car in Charlotte. She had another half-hour to Rock Hill. But she could not go straight home. There were things left undone at Pho 98. Papers she had to deal with so the place would run smoothly that day.

One day, maybe after VyVy graduated, she would take a vacation. She would love to see Hawaii. But not now.

She had not yet done enough.

She drove through the sleeping city to the shopping center on South Boulevard. She pulled into the empty parking lot and stopped in front of the restaurant door. It was almost 1 in the morning.

She unlocked the door and went to work.

******

OK, that's the story. Now here's the update:

Chau is a lawyer in Boston. Michael is still in finance in Chicago. Linh works with the National Geographic Channel. VyVy graduated from Notre Dame, got her master's, and is now an accountant with Price Waterhouse.

Yeah, they're doing OK.

"They're all coming home for Chau's engagement party," Thi says.

"Chau's engaged?" I say.

"Yes! The young man called to ask me for permission to propose. I told him no. I said they were too young."

"How old is Chau again?"

Thi dips her head. "Thirty-two."

(She called him back and gave her blessing. That's Thi.)