Category: My life

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Smithfield, North Carolina

I reckoned wrong about how traffic and time. Had I figured right, I would have gone all the way to Emporia. As it was, I stopped off at Smithfield, NC and saw the sights.

Smithfield is the home of the Ava Garner Museum and the Smithfield Ham shop. I visited both.

Ava Garner was a local girl born in nearby Grabtown. Yes, that was the name. Her father was a poor tobacco farmer. Ava get her break when a New York photographer took her picture & put it in the window of his shop. A producer saw it and set up a screen test. When Ava got there and started to talk, nobody could understand her thick accent, so they asked her to just do a silent one. That was the start of her successful career.

The museum has some sort of endowment, which is good since I don’t think that they could support the place based on the traffic. The docent told me that they get around 6000 visitors a year, but the numbers are dropping off, maybe because the people familiar with Ava Garner are dropping off, or maybe shuffling off the mortal coil.

The docent asked me why I came. I tried to imply more knowledge of Ava Garner than I had. I vaguely remembered her from movies I saw as a kid, like “On the Beach” or “55 Days at Peking.” The museum is worth seeing, if not necessarily worth going to see. Ava Garner was strikingly beautiful and seemed a nice person, but she was born the year before my mother and I think her fan base is dwindling.

The Smithfield Ham Store, as the name implies, sells locally produced ham. They also have a variety of jams and products like ginger ale. The woman at the counter told me that the ginger ale was spicy. I discounted this, but she was right. It was too spicy to enjoy, IMO.
I bought some jam and the local equivalent of Prosciutto ham. Alex likes this. He is coming home from his training in Alabama. He will now be Lieutenant Alex Matel, so I figure that he at least deserves some of the food he likes. We will also do a little more. Proud of my boy serving our country.  

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Gullah-Geechee

I learned about the language at a lecture about thirty years ago. It is a dialect of English, but with lots of forms and words from various west African languages and languages like Portuguese or Spanish.

Gullah is still spoken along the coast from Florida to Southern Virginia. There are lots of variations among speakers. A native speaker of standard American English can understand Gullah, but not all of it. Some of the misunderstanding comes from colorful idioms and phrases, not the language itself.

The Gullah language has penetrated American English & culture in many ways. George Gershwin went to South Carolina to study Gullah to write “Porgy & Bess.” But Gullah developed generally separate from standard English and English dialects spoken by some African-Americans.

Traditional Gullah is dying out. All languages are dynamic, always becoming something else. I read that Virginia once had seven distinctive dialects. Now they are mixed and matched. You have to talk to old people to hear the old languages, or even listen to audio recordings.
We listened to a presentations on Gullah at Boone Hall plantation. I wish that it had been more about language itself, but Chrissy pointed out that it might bore most everybody except me.

The New Testament has been translated into Gullah. The woman talking about the Gullah language read the Lord’s Prayer in Gullah. You can see it below written phonetically.
We Fada wa dey een heaben, leh everybody honor your name. We pray that soon ya gwine rule over de world. Wasoneba ting ya wahn, leh um be so in dis world, same like dey in heaven. Give we the food what we need dis day, yah, an eb’ry(every)day. Forgive we for we sin, cause we da’ forgive dey what do bad to we. Let we don’t hard tests wen Satan try we. Keep we from evil.

For comparison, this is the same thing in Middle English, the kind of Chaucer would have heard, from which our standard English & Gullah evolved.

Oure fadir that art in heuenes, halewid be thi name; thi kyngdoom come to; be thi wille don, in erthe as in heuene. Yyue to vs this dai oure breed ouer othir substaunce, and foryyue to vs oure dettis, as we foryyuen to oure dettouris; and lede vs not in to temptacioun, but delyuere vs fro yuel. Amen.

Notice it is NOT simply ungrammatical English. It is a dialect with its own rules and rich heritage.

When I worked at Smithsonian I came in contact with research by Lorenzo Dow Turner, a linguist who studied the Gullah language of the South Carolina lowlands. At that time, most people thought Gullah was just bad English. Turner demonstrated the connections between Gullah and West African languages in some grammar and many words. He then went to Brazil and found similar connections in the Brazilian Portuguese of the African diaspora in the Brazil, especially in Bahia and Pernambuco.

My first picture shows the woman speaking about Gullah. Next is the row of slave cabins. These were for the better off among them. Following is a reconstructed slave church. After that is the oak alley, with live oaks planted around 1840. This has been featured on many pictures and movies. Last is a view from the church window.

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Richmond 1

I always assumed that we would sometime move to Arizona. Chrissy’s sisters live there and it seems like a good place to retire.

But in the last few years I have become very much more attached to Virginia. It is where my forests are and it is where I have developed a network of people interested in forestry and improving the environment.

I am not saying that I could not leave Virginia, but it has become MY place more than I ever thought possible. This is not something I expected.

So looking for a retirement home, We are more interested in the Old Dominion. But it is expensive to live in Northern Virginia. Real estate taxes are high and property values are too.

Our friend and neighbor Steve Barch suggested that we might like the Fan District in Richmond, so we are down here to look around. Richmond also is one of the top brewery cities in the world. This means something.

We came down today and will look around tomorrow. There is no urgency in the decision, but good to think about it in advance.

Chrissy & I went to the Champion Brewery. We had a flight of beers. CJ kept the little one, but I got a regular sized St. Vitus Dance. It was really good.

We had supper at the Third Street Diner. Penultimate picture is Grace Street in Richmond and last is my usual Love’s photo.

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Richmond Fan District

Looked around Richmond today. The Fan District reminds us of Mariza’s area of Baltimore or maybe some parts of Madison when we were going to school there. Seems to have lots of young people – students or recent graduates. We would have loved the place some decades ago, but maybe not now.

Monument Boulevard features statues of old rebels like Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson & JEB Stuart. The houses along the road look pretty expensive. Nice place to visit, but I would not want to live there.

The part that would likely best fit our needs would be the Bellevue, but it is still a long ways off before we get very seriously. We maybe will look around down near Williamsburg. Lots of nice places around.

We are also thinking about a peripatetic existence. Neither of us much likes the idea of traveling in an RV, but it would be possible to drive around & stay at hotels part of the year, following the good weather in various places. There is so much of America to see. We would still want a home, but it would not need to be for all things or all seasons. Who knows?

I have come to believe that there is not THE place for us. We have contradictory desires. We both grew up in very stable circumstance. Chrissy’s family occupied that farm since 1859. My parents bought their house in 1946. Both of us came into an established place and stayed there. On the other hand, in the FS we moved to whole different countries every few years. On the third hand, we bought the house we still own in 1997 and kept it when we left. We got used to having change on top of permanence. On the fourth hand, I have become very attached to Virginia. I have plans for my tree farms that go until 2045. I want to be near my trees, at least part of the time. Maybe the most important thing is unknown and unknowable. Where will the kids end up living? We want to be near them, but will that even be possible if they choose to live in different places. Confused and unlikely to become less so and will need to live with the ambiguity.

My pictures are from around Richmond. We have J.E.B. Stuart & Robert E. Lee. We had lunch at Starlite Cafe in the second picture. The only one that requires explanation is that last one. Look closely. There are big statues of the M&M characters, as well as Mr and Mrs Potato Head. It is kind of a traditional area. I wonder how the neighbors feel about that place.

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Washington Winter Shades & Sun

Sunlight is special this time of year, especially near the end of the day when the shadows are long and the sunlight hits the sides instead of the tops of the buildings.

The pictures are from my walk to the Metro today. American elm trees are common around the Mall. They are their bare branches are particularly interesting this time of year.

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Gentleman of Leisure & the WAE

My Gentleman of Leisure job description included episodic work as WAE (I will include my GoL plan in the comments.) Unfortunately, by the time I got up to speed, the President froze hiring.

Now I have the opportunity as part of the “FOIA Surge,” State Department’s attempt to get through a backlog of FOIA requests, some going back years. My top secret clearance is still good for another year, so I thought I should make hay while the sun is still shining.

FOIA adjudication is one of the least favorite things I would do. On the plus side, hours are very flexible and it is not very hard. It is sort of like paying dues. I have a year long appointment. I wanted to get “on the roster.” What I really want to do is go overseas on TDY, ideally someplace where I can use my Portuguese. The thing I liked about the Foreign Service was the foreign part.

The first thing you need do to achieve any goal is to get over the wall. Once inside, you can take advantage of inside opportunities.

I also have a couple very prosaic considerations. I like to have the State ID so that I can get in to use the shower and locker room in SA 5 and get into lectures at Wilson Center w/o having to pass through the usual security. And I like to be in Washington. When it gets a little warmer, I can ride my bike. In the meantime, I walk from HST to the Metro at Federal Center SW. It is a nice walk. My pictures are from that.

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Washington (mild) winter day

Went down to Washington today. We got lots of cold rain yesterday, but today was gloriously sunny, if a little cold.

My first photo is the Washington Monument looking good in the winter sun. Next is a pond cypress. The “knees” look like little animals trying to climb up. Last is a big oak tree near Dept of Agriculture. It looks stark w/o the leaves, but you can more easily see the beauty of the old wood.