Stone Mountain, February

 It’s chilly in the morning as I turn over the garden beds with a spade, clearing out weeds and last year’s stubble. I also rousted a green anole, sleepy but alive, and dug up a DeKay’s brown snake that died underground during the winter. The spade turns up insects and earthworms with every turn.

Another freeze is expected, but it warms up during the day. Red-tail hawks have been soaring when the earth warms up enough to generate thermal currents. Last week, I’d hear them around 11 a.m. This week, they’re usually aloft just after 10. The earth is getting warmer.

Atlanta, 1988

 Few things are uglier than the press corps covering a presidential campaign. I know because I was part of a mob at the Democratic National Convention in 1988 in Atlanta.

At newspapers, the traffic cop is the news editor, who rules the copy desk and thus rules on all disputes involving good English. He or she reads everything. I found the news editor of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and asked what story he’d like to read that the mob was not likely to cover.

He told me about Big Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church, just down Auburn Avenue from Ebenezer Baptist Church, where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had preached. Ebenezer is a smaller church. Big Bethel is enormous. All the political stars and the press corps would be at Ebenezer. For better or worse, Dr. King’s church had become a prestigious place, and, in a way, an exclusive place. Big Bethel would be where people who drove buses and cleaned hotel rooms for a living would be. If I went to church on the Sunday before the convention began, I might learn something.

It was a long service, and I was among those standing so that others could sit. Minister after minister spoke about why people who claim to be religious can’t turn away from questions of justice. They were not concerned with arcane policy. They asked whether it’s OK to have two people doing the same job for different wages. Whether it’s OK, when you are hiring workers or admitting students to college, to exclude people because of race. The ministers asked whether someone who claims to believe in a just God could see all that and not do anything at all.

The ministers did not speak of Democrats and Republicans. In 1988, David Duke, a former grand dragon of the Ku Klux Klan, was seeking the Republican nomination. Instead, the ministers at Big Bethel were looking to the Democratic Party for some kind of sign. How important was it to the party that people be treated unjustly?

Jesse Jackson was seeking the nomination, but it was clear from what the ministers and church members said that people were watching the party, not the candidate. How would the party treat the issues Jackson raised? Would the party give the agenda of equal treatment lip service or would it offer voters a sign that it was serious, perhaps by nominating Jackson for vice president?

I left the church with the impression that one segment of one community had clearly stated its hopes and expectations.

I spent the week looking for evidence that the party’s delegates understood those hopes and expectations and took them seriously.

By the end of the week, I thought the Democratic Party was in trouble.

Domestic dialog

 I said that I could think of few novels that had been turned into successful films.

The Wise Woman said that a person who had, as a boy, promised his parents he’d be good if they didn’t make him go to the movies really shouldn’t venture into film criticism. She mentioned several films, including “The Maltese Falcon.”

Stung, I replied that I was thinking about the kinds of novels she’d taught in literature classes.

She queued up “Far from the Madding Crowd,” the 2015 version. I had to admit I enjoyed it.

Thomas Hardy’s novel was published, in monthly installments, in The Cornhill Magazine in 1874. I wondered whether novels written and published as serials were easier to adapt to film. I said that at least the screenwriter had parts to work with — installments, if not scenes.

The Wise Woman is not sure which is worse: to have a husband who is not interested in film or to have one who is newly interested in film.

Wolfe: ‘The Far and the Near’

 Thomas Wolfe’s “The Far and the Near” is so short and so simple I wondered whether my high school English teacher would have counted it as a short story.

The problem is with the plot. If it has one, it amounts to this: A railroad engineer passes a farm just after 2 p.m. on his daily run and always blows the whistle. A woman always waves back. The woman has a little girl who waves too. During the story, the little girl grows into a woman. Both women always wave.

When the engineer retires, he decides that he must visit the farm. Instead of finding two women, smiling and waving, he sees two women, suspicious and fearful.

 

He walked away down the path and then along the road toward town, and suddenly he knew that he was an old man. His heart, which had been brave and confident when it looked along the familiar vista of the rails, was now sick with doubt and horror as it saw the strange and unsuspected visage of the earth which had always been within a stone’s throw of him, and which he had never seen or known.

 

A lot of what we experience about a place depends on context. When the context changes, we feel lost — we feel that we have looked without seeing, that we’ve studied a place and somehow don’t know it at all.

• Source: I found a copy of the story at the Thomas Wolfe Memorial:
https://wolfememorial.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/The-Far-and-the-Near.pdf

They way they prayed back then

 Each Sunday when I was a boy, a couple of men would lead the congregation in prayer. An unlettered farmer might lead the opening prayer, and a college professor might lead us as the service ended. In 1960, most of those fellows still prayed using the language of King James: thee, thou, thy and thine. Thou hast, but he hath.

The old language was especially common in country churches. But the times they were a’changin’, and the changes seemed to occur first in the cities and university towns. Language that sounded fine in the Eisenhower years sounded strange in the day of Jimi Hendrix.

The language I heard changed, and I now have to make an effort to recall it. Similarly, the technology I grew up with is gone. I can’t remember when the party line was replaced at Grandmother’s house or when the last rotary phone disappeared. I could look it up online.

With all the change, it seems odd to me that so many bad ideas survived. It’s hard to convey to young people how grateful parents were when they stood in lines to get their children vaccinated against polio. It’s hard to imagine how many men who had fought in Europe wanted their country to have some continuing presence there, to be a voice for peace and stability and a world that was prone to war and trouble.

In the time and place where I grew up, you could hear a lot of bigoted language against people who shouldn’t have had to endure it. For a while, it seemed that we were all growing up or dying off — that all that bigotry might gradually disappear in the way that language changes, so gradually you have to be paying attention to notice it.

Sounds of the season

 Some folks in Tennessee plant sweet peas on Valentine’s Day, even if they have to brush the snow away. I spent the week digging out the garden beds, just so they’ll be ready whenever the Wise Woman decides to plant.

When the week began, the garden was quiet. I listened mostly to the song of my shovel. As the week progressed, the birds started singing. By the weekend, the birds were jamming. We had three species of woodpeckers in the rhythm section.

Thoreau, hearing a nuthatch in early spring, noticed that much of the nuthatch’s music sounded like the drumming of a woodpecker. It was as if the nuthatch, as a fledgling, had learned part of the score from the woodpecker. Thoreau got lost in that line of thought and said:

 

It was the handle by which my thoughts took firmly hold on spring.

 

I imagine we’ll have another cold snap. But I also found the handle.

• Source: The quotation is from Henry David Thoreau’s Journal, March 5, 1859. I found it in Thoreau’s Animals, edited by Geoff Wisner; New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017, p. 6.

McCullers: ‘A Tree. A Rock. A Cloud.’

 What do people say about love?

Is it like math, which comes with prerequisites? Should a person learn how to care for a cat or dog before you presume to care for a person?

Is love systematic? Is there a science to it?

A friend and I have been exchanging notes on Carson McCuller’s story “A Tree. A Rock. A Cloud.” 

The story is about love. It’s also about the kinds of things we say in public, and whether people think we’re drunk or crazy when we say things that are important to us.

The conversation started because The New York Times published a story about a class at Harvard where students choose a tree at the university’s arboretum for a semester. McCullers’s story is on the syllabus.

Can you learn to love a tree?

It’s an interesting question if you’re prone to thinking about place — and how a place becomes a place.

• Sources: Carson McCullers’s story was published in 1942. It was one of six stories collected with the novella The Ballad of the Sad Café in 1951. A copy is here:

https://homepage.ntu.edu.tw/~karchung/A_Tree.pdf

Margaret Roach, “Starting at Harvard and Falling for Your First Tree”; The New York Times, Feb. 10, 2026. It’s here:

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/10/realestate/starting-at-harvard-and-falling-for-your-first-tree.html