PICTURES FROM THE APRIL WINE TASTING

the crowd

muffet and todd

jeremy

ann, dudley, frank, barbara

selma and ann

dudley

muffet and dudley

Another wine tasting at Selma's Backwoods Bean Coffee Shop in Sparta. She has a wine tasting the last Friday of the month 6-9. Four different wines to taste, all of them red tonight. I'm not one to fuss over wine and go oo-ah about the bouquet and all the fruity flavor talk. It was good wine. It's all good. I go for the company, to see people I like to see in the coffee shop to visit with. I've not been to town much over the last month or so and don't get to see people like JoEllen and Todd, Dudley and Muffet, others and several not there tonight. The coffee shop has been for me a place where I have made new friends and where I go to see different ones I know who frequent the place. Joe Allen Delp is often there in the mornings. I enjoy conversation with Joe Allen, a mountain boy whose stories of past adventures make the people from Away look at him in wonderment that anyone could be so wild, and Joe Allen wasn't necessarily wild compared to what wild can be. The people that are really wild don't go into coffee shops.

I spent most of my time this evening with Todd Smith, the holistic chiropractor in town, and his wife, JoEllen, people I enjoy a great deal, both equally. And talked with Dudley a good bit and Muffet. Dudley has been a friend for about 10 years. When I started the radio show, I went to Dudley to teach me how to work the mechanics of putting on a radio show. He was a radio producer in Washington DC for his adult life. Retired to Alleghany. His wife, Caroline, had advanced MS and he took care of her like a mother with her baby up to the very last day. I can't say he's to be commended. He was doing what comes natural. Caroline went on last year after some time in the nursing home, and it wasn't much later Muffet turned up from Indiana. She and Dudley had been close years ago before either of them was married. Both are unmarried now and have come back together. They're setting out on a long driving tour of USA and Canada, keeping a blog during the trip to be viewed by invitation only.

I knew half the people in there, or less, and was comfortable, among friendly people, everyone open for conversation, and conversation flowing around the room free of blockage. It felt like the right number of people. Not too many and not too few. A lightness was in the air tonight. It seemed like everyone was in an even temperament, happy to be among the people they were with. The finger food was good, the bread especially. I was happy to see a clarity in the air, telling me the coffee shop has taken on a clear, happy energy, Selma's goddess energy. She is the soul of the place and the air in there is as clear as the air around Selma. It's her radiance that draws everyone there and keeps them returning often. The coffee shop is about the only thing happening in Sparta besides the Jubilee on Tuesday and Saturday nights. It continues to mesmerize me that the coffee shop in Sparta has the spirit inside of someplace in Europe or South America. It is a universal feeling in there. Races and nationalities figure as nothing, merely identity. Like Quan Yin, Selma is a goddess of compassion. I don't even need to expand on that. It's just how it is.







   selma



*

WOOLLY WORM, SUBURBANITE AND JUNKIE RAMBLE

     hillbilly sculpture by tj worthington



A very wet cloud sits on the mountain today. Earlier, when I stepped outside without putting on a jacket or sweater to walk to the mailbox, I stepped into the outdoor air anticipating getting top of head and shoulders dampened by slight sprinkles. Didn't get wet at all. The air is so damp it's just short of manifesting liquid form. I heard soft rumblings of thunder around noon. Second thunder in February. The first one was the 22nd. The country wisdom says the date of a thunder in February is the date in May of the last frost. Maybe the second one means a frost will come on the 29th, but not a damaging frost. I mark on the calendar in May to check it out. It used to be said the wooly worm predicts the winter by its color sections. One that is orange in front and back, with the black in the middle, translates into a hard winter in the middle and mild before and after.



If there were ever a time woolly worms were exactly alike, I've not been there to see it. I've paid attention to them since 1976 when I arrived in the mountains and Tom Pruitt told me his understanding of the woolly worm legend. He didn't believe there was anything to it, for the same reasons I've come to. Next question: what does it mean when no two woolly worms you see are alike? Over about the last 10 or more years I've seen more all-black woolly worms than ever before. The black ones I've seen come with the milder winters. Like snowflakes, it appears no two woolly worms are alike. I'm willing to suppose that in the olden days the woolly worms might have all been alike. Maybe the weather was more consistent in those times. If the nature of the winter does show up in the woolly worm, the only relationship I've seen is more black ones, more predominantly black as our winters are less cold every year. The old sayings about the weather don't apply anymore.



Fogs in August used to predict the snows of the winter. Think of the month of August as a 6-month winter. Each week in August would correspond to two months in the winter. If fog occurs on the 6th of August, snow could be expected around the 1st of December. If the 22nd, snow might happen on or around the beginning of March. I paid attention to fogs in August the first several years, and found them an accurate forecasting method. Gradually, we quit having fogs in August and we get little to no snow in the winter. Every winter is uniquely itself. It's difficult to hold the winters to a pattern. Looking at a span of 35 years, a general pattern does emerge, in waves, (close your eyes if you're a republican) global warming. Scientists say, scientists say. Real scientists, not the ones on corporate payroll, say global warming is obvious fact, not something to have an opinion about. It's absurd to be mentioning it. We've known it was global warming for the last 40+ years, but it's politically incorrect to admit to it. The problem I have with political correctness is you can't have a feeling or thought of your own without checking to see if it's ok. Kinda like in North Korea and China.



Just now got an image of recollection. A woman I knew in the late 1980s, not well, but well acquainted. We were friendly. A few months ago she came into the coffee shop while I was there. We sat down together to talk. The talk amounted to her talking without drawing a breath, sentences starting you needta, you gotta, you oughta, you better, you should. Sounded like a gospel song to me---you better, you better, you better, or else. I was looking at her, someone I'd not seen in a quarter century, trying to imagine how she could divine all that I, of all people, needta-gotta-oughta-better-should do or have. The nature of the list she was spelling out for me, I didn't have the heart to tell her, had nothing to do with me. Running out of needta's and gotta's, she started a sentence, You're supposed to....



I broke into her monologue and said, "I don't do s'posed-to." She jumped from her seat like a firecracker went off in it, hugging her laptop, and speed-walked out the door in a bee-line. She wasn't suffering from colony collapse disorder, either. She went straight through the door with conviction that it was not a plate glass window. I don't like to laugh at people I like, and I do like her quite a lot. But when what you have to say starts with you needta, you needta be talking to somebody else. That's not conversation, it's giving orders. Sorry, baby, I'm not a waiter. I dismissed it as unconscious white middle-class American chatter, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. Another theater of the absurd in everyday life moment.



Sometimes, not very often, somebody makes me wonder if they're out of their league in a human form. Maybe they're not ready to make it without a tail. Maybe they missed a chimpanzee lifetime in a hurry to get to human. For what? Meth addiction? Just as well go back to swinging in the trees some more and try the leap to human form again after you've learned something. Maybe meth addiction is a way of learning something. Surely major cities have young evangelists that testify to Jesus helping them get off the track to self destruction. Alcoholism and drug addictions have served a large number people spiritually in the long run. A way is a way. It seems like churches would want to put rehab places in every city, conducted with the authenticity and working reality of AA. Every junkie is at his or her own bottom. The only way from there is up. Free rehab centers operated with integrity of purpose would go a long way toward bringing urban crime way down. Like everybody blazes their own trail up the mountain. This is where the Master comes in handy. He knows the way of each one's own particular path. Without the Master's help, it's like being in a sailboat at sea in a fog, or in a maze that goes this way and that without clues. We've had a serious hard drug problem in USA for almost half a century, and still, rehab as a possibility is so rare it's next to nothing toward addressing the problem.

*  

COFFEE SHOP FRIENDS

        andrea galvani, balloons

         

It was another good day to drive. The trip I wrote about in LOST IN AN EXURBAN SUBDIVISION last week turned out to be in vain anyway. The Sunday I was to be there was this Sunday, not last Sunday. The friends I went to see were in Minneapolis last Sunday. The gathering was a bunch of friends who hang at Selma's Backwoods Bean Coffee Shop. I always enjoy being among these people, at the coffee shop and at the parties that are springing up now among the people who go there. Today I knew where the house was and how to get there. Had a good learning last week. It's a nice place for a subdivision. Somebody made a big bundle of money selling the lots. The road is not state maintained. In places it is awfully steep, the kind of steep that when you start down the hill you feel alarm right away if you go at it like a regular downhill grade, because there are a few places it's like going over the top of the first hill on a rollercoaster and starting down that first slope that looks like it's straight down.



I feel like I'm in a new phase of the life, which I already know, entering a new 7-year cycle starting a couple years ago. It's like the coffee shop is the hub of my social world now. It's not like I've ever had a social world besides just the people I know. And that's what it amounts to at the coffee shop. Some of my friends there are people I've known several years, an awful lot of years, about 30 years in one case, and some just a few years and some since going to the coffee shop. I think we all feel like we've found the people in the county we resonate with like tuning forks. We tend to be people who like to know individual other people well instead a lot of people superficially. I've an idea this trend for knowing a lot of people superficially led to such social phenomena as political correctness, a Roberts Rules of Order for social intercourse with people you don't know and will never know. We sit on the stools at the bar talking with animation, sometimes much animation---meaning motion not agitation.



It's becoming a very beautiful social energy happening in there. First Cuban Celebration party the Cubans were on one side and the Anglos on the other. We chatted some, and the Anglos watched the Cubans dance, hypnotized by the beauty and the music of it. We didn't know each other. By the end of that night we were acquainted. This Friday night's Cuban Celebration was much freer in interchanges between Cubans and Anglos. Much conversational and even dancing interactions. The Cubans and the Anglos flowed freely together. We, the Anglos, are learning that just because they talk English with an accent, they can still understand spoken English. We really can talk with each other. We have a doctor in town who went to medical school and became a doctor in Columbia. The degree did not transfer to USA, so now she has a doctorate degree in Chinese medicine, acupuncture, and is practicing in Sparta. Dr Sandra Mora-Viera can make castanets sing. Her husband, Dr Pablo deVincenzo, plays accordion like a professional showman you'd see in LA or New York.



At their website: http://www.traditionalacupunctureservices.com/, you can see their pictures and read of all their degrees and medical experience. They have brought a new mind for medicine to Sparta. It's called holistic what they do, meaning the whole, takes in everything, works with the relationship between spirit, mind and body. What they do is not simplistic. Almost makes me wish I had something wrong so I could utilize their services. I'd guess it would be a very educational experience in important ways, and surely healing. Both of them have a healing energy about them. They are part of the life at the Cuban parties. Dr Pablo's accordion blows everybody's minds that an accordion can sound so good. Our Anglo association with the accordion is Lawrence Welk. I feel like I've found what it is about what he's doing that makes it so special, he plays music. He plays music that makes you move, makes dancers dance. Like Jr Maxwell said of making mountain music, if th'aint no music in it, it aint nothin. Pablo playing the music is definitely something. It's not "the accordion" any more when he makes the music flow. It's like: Wow, he can make an accordion do that? The two times I've heard him play I listened in awe. And then Sandra gets to crankin up the castanets when she's feeling it and they take us closer to the equator.



Selma and I spoke today of noticing the Anglos and the Latins interacting more the second go round. Becoming acquainted is important and it's happening. I can't call them Cubans, really, given that Sandra is from Columbia and Pablo from Venezuela and Italy. And Selma was talking today of how she's learned that all Spanish speaking people here are Mexicans. Doesn't matter if they're from El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, they're Mexicans. She's given up explaining she's not Mexican and consents to it. It's the mountain form of brevity. Like if it flies and stings, it's a bee. Wasp, hornet, yellow jacket, bumble bee, honey bee; they're all bees. Everybody from south of the border is a Mexican. I told Selma I believe there is at least one Mexican in the county who plays guitar. I suspect there are several Mexican musicians here. We were both thinking it would be fun to bring them into the wine-tasting parties. We're all about inclusion. Have a Mexican Celebration. Chile today, hot tamale.



This afternoon we stood around eating finger food JoEllen prepared that was from another league delicious. She is wife of Todd Smith, new holistic chiropractor here on Main St across from the new county office building. They are healthy people. I feel like a trashbag full of water that sits down about like Jabba the Hutt and spreads out like a water balloon. They're trim and sharp and pay attention to their own health in such a way it's ongoing and keeps them in good shape. I'd take it from that his chiropractic work is valid. Our other chiropractor, Klingensmith, is another example of good health, somebody who pays attention. Todd has only been here several months. He and JoEllen came here from Winston-Salem. We of the gathering this afternoon were all here from other places. We're people who respect each other and are becoming friends as time passes and we dance together more. It's a beautiful energy generating on Main St across from the courthouse. I won't go so far as to say it's a new Sparta. It's not that. It's a new experience in Sparta.  

*

COFFEE SHOP CONVERSATIONS

     trickle trickle we're in a pickle



Over the last year or so, Selma's coffee shop, Backwoods Bean, has been my pit stop when I go to town. I have to do everything that needs doing before going to Selma's, because an hour or so in there visiting with friends puts me in a spirit such that I don't want to go from there to walk through a grocery store for half an hour. I always go home in a good spirit when Selma's is my last stop. It's not just the coffee. Coffee can be got at Burger King. I know for a certainty if it weren't for the company in Selma's shop, I wouldn't be going in there. I have the coffee I like at home. It's the people that go in there that gives the place its spirit. Selma's spirit attracted all of us, and when we who were initially attracted to Selma found each other, we are now friends with each other. It's like an oasis for us. I like to go in at any time of day and see who's there. Someone I know is always in there.



Joe Allen Delp might go to Selma's every morning. Every morning I go in, he's there. He's one to listen more than to talk. And when he talks, he entertains everybody. He came up in the county in the time of redneck alcoholics. The generation before the first drug generation. Joe Allen came up in the time of V-8 hotrods, night racing, the Pool Room, beer drinkers and hell raisers. When he tells a memory from his hard drinking days, to me it's just another bunch of mountain boys, but to everybody else it's from the same as outer space. They can't believe anybody did like that. For Joe Allen, it was just what a man did. Joe Allen has his place at the bar where he stands that is his own. From there, he can see and hear everybody and not be in anybody's way. Except when somebody comes in from outside and wants to buy a bottle of wine or a cup of coffee to go. He steps aside and lets the transaction take place and he's back in his place. I've been told he visits people in the nursing home.



Joe Bunting was talking yesterday of getting a job teaching someplace else and finding somebody to rent his house. That was a shock. Joe is one of my favorite people in there to talk with. He's from West Virginia and teaches at the local community college extension branch from Wilkes. I think he's teaching history there, or something to do with passing the high school equivalency exam. I believe he'd be a good history teacher. A very good one. He reads serious books, history largely. He pays attention to what's going on around him. Joe will be a sore loss at Selma's. Everyone will miss him. Genuinely miss him, simply for who he is. I don't know that it could be said he's a lively conversationalist. It almost seems like that, but he's more a mindful conversationalist. He thinks as he speaks, or before he speaks. I think of Hazel Dickens singing West Virginia My Home. Beautiful song and she sings it right. You can hear her sing it on YouTube. It's so hillbilly, it makes Flatt & Scruggs' theme of Beverly Hillbillies sound city.



Cynthia, another WCC Alleghany extension branch teacher, is teaching Southern History and Appalachian History, as well as Western Civ. She's a small, wren-like woman, whose hair happens to be wren color, and she seems like she couldn't hold a class's attention more than a minute. That's just the seeming. The woman knows what she's doing. I sat in on one of her Appalachian classes and was impressed by the Cynthia I already knew, but didn't know could be so inspiring in an actually intellectual way. She's the kind of teacher you sign up for at a university hoping the class isn't full by the time you register. She can think up a test question too. She makes the kind of test question that requires some thought to answer. Cynthia sometimes works the coffee bar to give Selma a break or some time off. She, too, is part of the place, part of the spirit of the place. 



Dudley is indeed a lively conversationalist. He gets totally engaged, that includes physically, hands going, moving around, getting lost in a digression, all of it simply Dudley's form of speech. He's a professional radio voice, who made his living in broadcasting. When WCOK here was crippling along, he made commercials for the station. He taught me what I needed to know back when I started the radio show. He taught me a lot more than I needed to know, but it informed what I needed to know, gave it context. What I wanted to do with the radio show was live-on-air and not planning ahead the songs to be played. I found that what I thought I'd like to start the show with at home will often be different from what I'd choose at the station. At the station, I was in touch with my listeners. I liked to select the next song while a song was playing. Dudley helped me get comfortable talking into microphones and watching the clock in relation to songs played. Selma's is always lively when Dudley is in there. He's been away for a few weeks and people were asking, "Where's Dudley?" Now it's, "Dudley's back."



I don't think it's stretching imagination to say we're all open minded. When somebody comes in who is not open minded and some of us are talking as we do, they call us liberals. Eeek! A Liberal! All liberal means is somewhat open minded. I'd rather be a liberal than a blockhead. By blockhead I mean a block of wood carved to look like a head with a face. I'm so damn tired of hearing the republican propaganda about liberals! A liberal is also someone who likes democracy. Of course, now democracy is Left wing to the extreme of nihilism and has little more meaning than the word Peace on a Christmas card. These are the sorts of things we talk about when we talk politics. I doubt if half the people in there regularly would identify themselves politically a liberal, but about all would identify themselves open minded. By open minded, I don't mean open so everything that's in it falls out, the Reaganista definition of an open mind. I mean people who allow that there is something to equality among us human beings.



*

COFFEE SHOP WINE TASTING

selma ready to go



Another wine tasting at Selma's coffee shop, the Backwoods Bean on Main St in Sparta. Robin Cater played guitar and sang. I anticipated she'd be awfully good, but she went way beyond what I might have expected. She has a good singing voice and accompanies herself well with guitar. She was with a guy from Florida, Will Fernandez, who played a small conga drum. Good music. Good finger food. Good wine. Good company, nearly all familiar faces. As always, I pick a seat at the bar when I go in and that's my roost the whole time. I don't get up and circulate and talk and laugh carrying a wine glass without a stem. Would you call that unstemmed? Like tea without sugar is unsweet. I'm something of a stump at social events. It might be my country grandparents in me. My grandmother Worthington more than once stressed to me, You get on a merry-go-round and go round and round. When you're done, where you been? It is the country in me that's rubbed off from 35 years among country people. Country people don't run their mouths so much. City people light up when they get in a crowd of other people. Country people look for the cat hole, the exit.

cynthia in chberspace

Here is Cynthia in conversation. Talk with Cynthia and she googles subjects you're talking about, comes up with facts, pictures and web pages. Her blackberry, or whatever it's called, is the focus of her life these days. I think of Dick Tracy with his wrist watch version of what Cynthia is doing with her blackberry. Maybe she thinks it makes her look young. I think she looks fine as she is. She has a mind that runs so fast she needs to multi-task to keep all her mind engaged where she is. I think of her something like a ship anchored in a stormy sea; it takes 3 and sometimes 4 anchors to hold the ship in place. She came here to curate the Teapot Museum, but it went away as soon as she started. She wanted to stay here. I'm one of the people glad she chose to stay. She has a community of friends, mostly in the coffee shop, happy to have her around. She's a good addition to the ex-pat crowd in the county. By ex-pat I mean ex-patriated from the Flatland, repatriated in the mountains. No one misses urban traffic.

mr moxley talking with woman from scotland

Moxley retired from teaching high school social studies somewhere in Ohio, Cleveland area, I think. He's from here and returned to the family farm. He keeps cattle, does the farm work himself. Something to occupy his time and mind. He is one of the "regulars" in Selma's, one of the ones that go there regularly. There is about a dozen of us. We all like each other. When one goes in, there is most often another in there. Good conversations take place in there. I don't mean scholarly and erudite, rather nobody trying to impress anybody. We just talk about whatever comes up. If there's any posturing among any of us, I haven't seen it. That's one of the wonderful attributes about Selma's place is the absence of posturing inside the door. If somebody comes in posturing, nobody even pays attention. 



 the entertainment: robin cater and will fernandez



Robin is one of our county's potters. She and her husband, Daniel, both work with clay, take their wares to shows all over the place, and work at it like a job. They give it their all. I didn't know she sang so well or played guitar so well. Robin is a special soul. She is a bright light. I think sincerity is what stands out about Robin. It's a sincerity that is true. It's not an affectation. She's present wherever she is. Will Fernandez is an artist and potter, evidently singer and musician too. He's here from Key West. Last I heard he intended to stay here. He's still here. He does interesting work with clay and painting.



Had pleasant conversation with Rob Mangum, the potter and musician, guitar and vocal. I've known Rob the entire time I've been here. He and his wife Bet came here from southern Alabama a year or two before I came here from coastal South Carolina. Rob was robbed of Bet last year or more. She was a superb woman in all the best ways. Rob is something like Major Tom in David Bowie's song about the astronaut in the space capsule cut off from earth to float freely in space. Planet earth is blue and there's nothing I  can do. Rob has taken good care of himself, allowing himself to mourn, but also getting on with his life, letting it fall back into place as it will. Rob is someone I'd call, without hesitation or fear of contradiction, a true human being. He's a good guitar picker. Picks a Martin and deserves it. And he sings a good song. He is good at entertaining an audience with folksong, often taking the volume out of a rock song, singing it for the words in it.



Selma's is my social life in this cycle I'm in. I like it. I like the people that go there. It's a comfortable place. It brings to mind a preWW2 neighborhood bar where everybody knows everybody. Selma is the hub everyone revolves around. The wines, of course, were good, each one a treat.


*

TWO WOMEN

whitehead sunset



People I see at Selma's coffee shop make a moment of good spirit in the day, mentally connecting with other humans, real communication going on, person to person, not just idea to idea. Even a lesser kind of communion, but a communion nonetheless, sipping an enjoyable drink during conversation with other people at the bar and Selma, friendly talk that's not binding in one way or another. It's a free-floating atmosphere where spirit hovers in the air like cigarette smoke in a bar late in the night. It's a nurturing, welcoming, friendly spirit I step into when I walk through the door. Like a bar has a certain feeling when you step inside from outside, Selma's has it's own certain feeling, a friendly neighborhood bar where people go just to talk with whoever's in there. But it's a coffee bar where everybody is sober and fights don't erupt. There's no jukebox. Selma gets XM radio, a station that plays music just right for the feeling in her place. They play Tracy Chapman, James Taylor, their kinds of sounds, not too loud, and not so quiet that if one connects with your mind you can hear it listening closely.



When I've done whatever I went to Sparta to do, an hour or 2 or more at Selma's is time spent in what I think of as a good energy zone. There's nothing in this world quite like making a mental, psychic, emotional connection with another human being. We humans have a strong need to interact through our minds back and forth. Periodic good conversation with friends or even people we don't know, is a relaxing event for me. It feels like our inner spirits connect and interact, get to know each other. Like dogs do, sniff, bump, let's play chase and they're off running after each other in circles, taking turns being the chased and the chaser. We kind of verbally play chase, running in circles to release the energy to run and play in a spirit of fun. Kids play, adults talk. That's what we do. In Selma's coffee shop, it's a great place to enjoy word play with other humans, to interact mentally through language.



Anything goes conversationally, though we keep it decent because we're all the kind of people that do anyway. It's not like there is a world of self-censoring going on. This is what I mean by free-flowing. It's whatever comes up. People with agendas keep them to themselves. No emotional bondage going on. It's what you want a place like that to be. It's Latin in that way. Selma's energy field would be at least partially Latin as she grew up in Cuban culture, first in Cuba, then Miami. The place has a Latin flavor in the way people talk with one another, sometimes 5 talking on a given subject, like when Ken is there. He introduces subjects to see what different people will say and get conversation going. One day he presented a question, is a ghost, a spectre, cold or warm? We talked a good bit on that one. No opinions were expressed, because no one had ever thought about it or even knew it was something to be thought about.



Bertie Dickens is picking Chicken Reel, I think with her brother Joe Caudill playing fiddle. It's a "field recording" of some people recording Bertie Dickens. She was an old-time banjo picker, clawhammer, from Alleghany County, Ennice township, northeastern part of the county. Bertie was a plain woman of the hills who did her hair up like women her age, the beauty shop look, and wear polyester pants suits like mountain women of her generation. Not many recordings of her, though she's on the 2cd set of NC banjo pickers called THE NORTH CAROLINA BANJO COLLECTION. Bertie is on there with Ola Belle Reed, Kyle Creed, Fred Cockerham, Doc Watson, Gaither Carlton, Tommy Jarrell and 2cds full of others.



Bertie had a banjo pickin brother Clell Caudill, and a fiddle playing brother Joe Caudill, and another fiddler brother Huston Caudill. I'd say she grew up making music in the family band at home. Her picking is not like anybody else's picking, not even like her brother Clell's. It's old-timey as it can be. She learned it the mountain way, figured it out. And whatever you figure out and how you figure it out becomes your style. Doesn't matter that it doesn't sound like anyone else. You don't want it to sound like anybody but you. Bertie don't sound like nobody but Bertie. She and her brothers are all treasures of this county's music, like Art Wooten and Tim Smith.



Kilby Spencer made these 2 cds for me of Bertie Dickens from some tapes he'd found somewhere. He knew I'd want to hear them and sent them along. Thank You Kilby. I did want to hear her music. I have a little bit that Kilby put on cd for me from his computer a few years back. Now these are from a tape someone made evidently at her house with somebody on fiddle. Beautiful music to have in the air inside the house. She's playing Going Down The Road Feeling Bad. The bluegrass title for the same song is Lonesome Road Blues. Good fiddle playing with her banjo.



Bertie sat straight up and never moved while she played, face straight and plain, the music coming out of the banjo the only part that mattered. This tradition was pre MTV. It makes me want to play it on the radio with a great unsatisfied longing in the heart region. Every time I find music from this county or nearby I suffer this longing to play it on the air to my listeners who listened every week for mountain music they loved. Everything changes, it is what it is, I tell myself. It helps. Her music a treasure I have the extraordinary privilege to be able to listen to.

A DAY IN THE COFFEE SHOP

ken davis at selma's


This afternoon at Selma's Backwoods Bean coffee shop was a social time like I don't recall having in a very long time. The wine tasting she had on the 17th was a very social time, but I felt somewhat reluctant that night without any need to be. I just don't do things like this. I dropped in a little after 12 for morning coffee. Went to bed last night at 8 and woke this morning at 11 to the phone ringing. Haven't slept that long in quite a while. I wanted to go to Selma's for coffee this morning, take some prescription canisters to drugstore for refilling and needed a few items from grocery store, none of which I ended up doing. At the coffee shop, I started on my regular Kenyan coffee at the counter, talking with Ken, pictured above. Different people come and go, conversation hopping around with the people who drop in. Mostly, people feel free to converse in there with people they don't know. That's not totally the case, but so mostly as to be almost a rule.


The nice thing about the place is it's like a no-fire zone like they have in wars, places where there is no shooting. It isn't like anybody is looking to pick somebody up or look for a soul mate or any kind of flirtation. Of course, there is subtle, even unconscious flirtation, but not serious. Like today I spent several hours talking with a man's wife and he had no problem with it at all. She is an artist, I am too, Selma has told her about me and me about her and we finally met today. Turns out we had a great deal to say. It was free-wheeling, free-flowing conversation, the kind I like the best where we're wide open talking about art and experiences associated with our art. She paints skyscapes and I paint musicians. I don't know how many hours we talked, but it was probably 3 hours at least. And we never got tired. Different people joined us along the way, and another artist settled in with us. I find her and her husband wide awake people, the kind of people I enjoy immensely.


I love the freedom in the place to be wide open, within reasonable bounds, with friendly people and no game playing going on. I get the impression that people I've seen in there who are gamers don't return, because it's no fun. In Selma's place everyone has smooth edges, no sharp edges going around. Selma steps out from behind the bar to hug somebody when they walk in or are leaving. Everyone in the place is a guest in Selma's home. We have a collection now of what we call the regulars. It's a good bunch of people. I enjoy every one of them. My spirit is light in there.


Ken Davis, pictured above, I struggled in my mind with for a time. He dressed like a Latin man, not at all like an anglo, though he looked anglo and had an anglo name. I said to Selma one day, he is Latin, has to be. She said he's Mexican, came from Texas, knows 6 languages. Turns out he's an interesting character who likes to talk about all kinds of possibilities. Today he was talking about ghosts like nobody had a problem talking about them. And nobody did. Of 5 of us involved in the conversation, all of us had some kind of experience that indicated a consciousness was nearby. Todd the new chiropractor in town is a lively conversationalist in there. He has a sharp mind, a quick wit and we were all dancing the dance of free-flowing conversation that meandered the way a flock of birds or a school of fish suddenly veer off this direction, then that, going wherever the spirit leads.


Spirit is a good word for the feeling in there. It's a free-flowing spirit notable by the absence of speed bumps and forces to obstruct the flow. As we're moving into the Age of Aquarius, I can't help but think this flow in the world around us is obstructed, even log jammed, by so many belief systems, shoulds, shouldn'ts, fears, traditions, and so on to infinity. Perhaps, gradually the fears we have of one another will fade, unarticulated as they are, and we can flow as freely as in Selma's. That's getting into utopian nonsense, like in hippie times, I want everybody to be free. Freedom turned into overdosing on heroin in an abandoned building at the edge of nowhere.


I attempt not to be sucked into believing the future will be the way I want it to be. The future will be just like now. Changing architecture, changing value of money, material changes go along with changes in consciousness. I do see our collective consciousness going through some major changes, even advances toward a freer flow in our involvements with self and others. In Selma's it's never a matter of somebody can't speak to you because they know somebody who doesn't like you. None of that thinking applies in Selma's. It's not the future, but very much the present.


All the free-flowing conversations I've fallen into there have been free of all the objectionable games people play, like one-upmanship, hipper than thou, roosters in the chicken house. None of that is going on. I believe it's the energy of Selma, energy being the closest word I can find to that which is nameless, her presence, her vibes. I'm seeing in my attempts to describe the feeling between people in there, the openness, the air, the unguarded friendliness, I'm describing Selma. She is cause for a celebration of Fidel Castro in Sparta for Selma's mother leaving with her when she was 7. But for Fidel, Selma would not have come to Sparta. Thank you, Fidel. We can tell Jesse Helms that Fidel was good for something. Her place has become an oasis for people passing through Sparta, people new here, people who have been here awhile, people from here. One day I met a woman in there from Krakow, Poland, here from Raleigh for choose-n-cut. We talked about Roman Polanski and his film The Pianist.


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SELMA'S WINE TASTING

I apologize for putting up so many pictures if your computer takes a long time to run them up. First intent was to put up one, then 3, then 5, and by the time there were 5, I wanted everybody who was there represented in the pictures, so 6 was added. Still am missing one or two. I'm absent, but that's to the good. I got 35 pictures, most of them blurred too much, or just bad shots. My camera's clicker has a pause in it, so I push down on the button and it makes the picture when it feels like it. While people are in motion, I have to anticipate the next gesture, because that's what I'll get the picture of. I don't have a great deal of control over the blur either. Yes, of course I do, but I don't want to. I keep the camera on automatic and don't use a flash. The slow shutter speed makes blurs. I like the blurs sometimes. A lot of the time it's just a blur. Then there are the times a blur catches motion, like getting Robin Cater's hand in motion like in an Italian Futurist painting of the 1920s.

I don't like using a flash. They are disconcerting to the eyes, it's an unnatural light and the shadows are eliminated. I like shadows of facial features to define the shape of the face. I don't set out with anything in mind, just catching as well as I'm able the feeling between the people and the feeling in the place. When I take a lot of pictures, it allows for all the ones that are too blurred, or off a little bit because everything changed between the time I pushed the button and the time it took. That's ok. I like getting gestures in motion and sometimes a blur that shows the motion. I'm a believer in the aesthetics of chance. Letting the camera focus as it does, choose its own shutter speed, and especially the pause between pressing the button and the click that allows chance to change whatever it is I thought I saw in the camera, allowing it to alter what I was consciously looking at in the viewer. In a way I can't name, I like for my pictures to have an element in them free of my aesthetic eye.

Selma's wine tasting was a happy social event. All the regulars were there. We all enjoyed being there together. That seemed to be the highlight of the gathering, all the regulars there, and we all set about talking like we do when it's only 2, 3 or 4. Everyone was comfortable with each other; there was no one-upmanship going on. The atmosphere was festive. Selma was effervescent, happy everyone was there, serving everyone, individually, one bottle at a time, explaining each wine before she served it. Good cheeses, good breads, grapes, pear slices to cleanse the taste buds before each serving of wine. It was a European atmosphere in the place. All different kinds of people mixing together, friendly, lively conversation going all over the place. I even thought of attempting a video walking through the crowd overhearing different conversations and seeing if I could catch the festive spirit. I didn't think I could do it without giving it some thought first. The whole evening felt like a special moment for all concerned.

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A MOMENT

backwoods bean coffee shop



Went into Selma's coffee shop, Backwoods Bean, on Main Street, also known as Hwy 21---there are no signs on Hwy 21 calling it Main St---it's just understood, like it's understood in Sparta that it's safer to jaywalk than to cross at the intersection the lawyers call Suicide Corner, because the intersection is 4x more dangerous than jaywalking. The middle lane assists jaywalking in that the walker can wait for the second lane to clear instead of having to make the whole stretch in one go. One can jaywalk casually in Sparta, but walking across at the intersection is an anxious time all the way, looking at every possible direction a car can come at you, from behind and in front at the same time, right turns and left turns. At the intersection, it's best to run.



Heading into Selma's coffee shop, I saw Wendell Rowell and his wife Sue, who are here from South Carolina and have a weekend / holiday piece of land in Pine Swamp that was once a part of Sherman Scott's farm. Sherman's parents lived on the next farm up Waterfall Road and sold it back in, I suspect, the early 60s and moved to Pine Swamp. Sherman died possibly 25 years ago, and the farm was cut up into lots. The parade I'd forgotten about had just ended. They were walking back to their car after stopping in the art gallery store between the Jubilee and the library's used bookstore. They passed in front of me as I stepped onto the sidewalk from the parked car. I said, Wendell. He stopped on a dime and turned around. It really was him. I hadn't seen him in a year and several months and he had a fur-lined hat on for the cold and a big coat. I figured if I spoke his name and he turned, it would be him. If it wasn't him, he'd keep on walking and think I was talking to someone else.



It was good to see him, and I'd not yet met Sue. Only met Wendell once, maybe twice. He has a blog, Bear Bottom, which is what they call the mountain place. The website for it is: http://bearbottomsparta.blogspot.com . He started it with intent to keep an irregular journal of times in the mountains, pictures of the baby, and pictures as the baby grows, telling the story of family good times in the mountains. Part of the point is to give his grandson something tangible along the lines of a journal that tells him about his grandparents as well as his own growing up. Too few of us know our grandparents as humans instead of demi-gods we look up so highly to they lose their humanity.



Remembering when one of my grandmothers was in her 80s telling me about a rather major event in her life in her 20s I'd never heard of and certainly never imagined. It turned out she quit loving grandpa about 20 years before I was born. While she was visiting with me, talking about it, thinking about it, she concluded, after thinking it over and talking about it at length, "I think I really do love him." It was spoken from within, like thinking out loud. I've been happy for that moment with grandmother ever since. It was one of our best of many moments. It rounded her out like a Shakespearean character whose nature and ways you feel you know, instead of a flat, cardboard character like they're putting up in stores to make you think you're seeing somebody, then you see it's a photographic image on cardboard, and you can't miss what it's advertising. Effective, advanced advertising. Puts you through a subliminal mental maze, albeit very simple, where the product becomes the center of attention in a way you can't miss it.



I believe I got in touch with Wendell, curious to find out where these people live and who they are. We corresponded for several months by email, on and off. One day while I was staying at Jr's and they were up here the weekend, Wendell took a few minutes and came over. We sat on the porch at Jr's watching the cars and trucks go by on Hwy 18 in Whitehead, and the crows. I felt like either one of us could have talked the whole time nonstop, though we divided it rather evenly, giving each other a chance to get something said too, maybe an hour. Jr's porch was a great place to visit, a very comfortable place. I've spent many an hour sitting out there with Jr hearing him tell me his life.



If I remember correctly, and I probably don't, I think I found his blog one day surfing for Alleghany and/or Sparta blogs. Bear Bottom came up. Reading in it I got the impression the place was somewhere nearby, going by his descriptions of driving from there to someplace, or the landscape in a picture. I became curious where this place was; plus, I liked what he was saying, sounded like someone level headed. I tend toward level headed people. They're easy to keep peace with. They tend to like peace, like I do. When somebody takes out their emotional twists on me, I tend to start playing with the car keys in my pocket.



Or, if I misremembered, another possibility is that he read my blog first and wrote me about something I'd said. That feels a bit more like the way it happened. From there, I checked out his blog to see who this person was. One or the other. Let's say it happened both ways at once. As in life. I was happy to meet Sue today. Now it's like I know them, instead of just him, curious all the while to meet her. These are people I feel comfortable and happy with. They're not playing mind games, such as one upmanship, and he doesn't scratch around like a rooster in the company of another rooster looking for a chance to fight, translated play masculinity games, I'm-a-bigger-man-than-you, or among the better educated, I-know-more-than-you-do. None of that. I feel so at peace when I meet people who aren't up to some kind of game, positioning themselves into the superior role. That's when the keys go to rattling and yelling to me in their language only I understand: Let's get outta here now!



We were standing in front of Selma's window talking. After awhile, Sue noted the perfect mirror image of the courthouse on the glass. We looked at it a moment in awe, actually, of the beautiful image it made of the courthouse. In the mirror image the wires that run across the front of it were nearly invisible, enhancing the beauty of the courthouse. Wendell and Sue needed to get going before they froze into ice statues, being from a warmer clime, and this the coldest day so far and windy. I went to the car and picked up the camera. Hence, the image above. Went into Selma's and had some coffee from Kenya with more good company and good conversation.

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SELMA'S PLACE

selma saying, no, no, you're not paying for that



This is Selma of the Backwoods Bean Coffee Shop on Main St between Kermit's barbershop and the Jubilee. She's relatively new to the community, here from Miami. She's a good one to have here. She's the kind of people that come here from outside that we want among us. She contributes to the well being of the county and town with her pleasant disposition, the good desserts she makes, the good coffee, the good tea. Coffee from all over the world. I'm not much of an adventurer when I've found what I like. When I first tasted Kenyan coffee, that was it. I don't want any coffee but Kenyan now. I love it. I told Selma it's like honey to my palate. It's not quite as thick and doesn't taste anything like it, but it gives me the same taste sensation I get from a taste of honey. A taste much sweeter than wine.



I've tried Ethiopian, which I like almost as much as Kenyan, Indian, which is good too with a little high pitched flavor that puts me in mind of a sitar played really fast, Sumatran, which is also good. Like the Indian and Ethiopian, the Sumatran tastes like Kenyan is its base, each a variation perhaps due to climate and soil composition. Vietnam is growing coffee. Evidently, at the equator or near it is where coffee trees grow. It's kind of like Kenyan coffee is the base of the coffees of Africa and the east. South America grows Columbian, a very different flavor from Kenyan, the base flavor of South American coffees. Isak Dinesen's memoir of a European woman living on a coffee plantation as owner and manager in Kenya, Out of Africa, is what piqued my curiosity about Kenyan coffee when my friend Lucas Pasley started grinding coffee beans and selling the coffee in bags. I like to support my friends, so I took an interest in Kenyan right away and remain satisfied.



5 stools at the bar make for conversation when 2 or more people are in there. Selma talks with everyone, listens like a good bartender who doesn't ever have to deal with drunks. Chairs all around and a couple of tables. She keeps a public computer going online every day. The place has air connection to internet, making it a good place for people with laptops to spend time in a private corner. Selma's presence in the place gives it a good spirit that welcomes everyone who walks in the door. The air you breathe in the place is welcoming. People who don't know each other talk freely like they have known each other a long time, and listen when somebody else is speaking.



Selma identified her customers the other day an eclectic collection of people. People from everywhere stop in there. It's a place people passing through Sparta stop, come in and sit for awhile and have some coffee and/or dessert. It's friendly in there too. People who live here frequent the place, both people from here and people from someplace else. Selma likes the people who come in there, she welcomes every one as to her own table at home. She doesn't welcome gossip and doesn't tell any. If you go in there, you feel like Selma is your friend who could be counted on in a time of trouble. She's an honest woman with a very real personal integrity she lives by. It's Selma's integrity I feel in the space inside the walls. She treats everyone who enters the door with respect and in turn she's regarded with respect.



On a day when I have to go to town for however many reasons, I'll not drink coffee at home that morning, will stop at Selma's for some good brew and spend a half hour or so sipping it and enjoying conversation with whoever is in the place. Four years in my store eased my inhibitions talking with people I don't know. Now I can jump right in and start talking with somebody I've never seen before. Where you from? is usually my first question. I like to know where people came here from.



Somebody actually asked me a couple days ago if I'm local. I had to hold back laughing. It was somebody who was here a short time and hadn't enough experience to tell on sight and accent I'm not from here. Nobody from here has ever asked that question. I'll always remember Clinton DeBord looking at me, kind of upward and sideways with curiosity in his eyes, saying, "I don't know you." I could see he had a good humor about him, so I said, "I don't know you either." I shook his hand and told him my name, how long I'd been here, where I came here from. From then on, it was like we'd known each other for years. Selma's coffee shop brings to mind the song about Basin Street where a wide variety of people meet. Selma is the hub in her international cafe.



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