A moment with Sam Nunn

 The press party at the Democratic National Convention in 1988 was a big deal. Someone told me 2,200 people were there: politicians, lobbyists, pollsters and people with influence. The press was badly outnumbered.

My job required an appearance. I made it and fled. I was congratulating myself on finding a quiet place in a noisy convention center when I noticed I wasn’t alone.

Another lover of quiet had beaten me to the spot. He stuck out a hand and said, “I’m Sam Nunn.”

But everybody knew who he was.

American politicians do so many idiotic things it’s easy to forget that there are people in Washington who know what they’re doing. Nunn was then a U.S. senator from Georgia. He had a reputation for knowing the details and being patient enough to look for reasonable solutions to thorny problems. Even back then, people were urging him to run for president.

The memory of that brief conversation came back because Nunn was in the paper the other day. He’s 87 and was attending an event at the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs at Georgia Tech.

The discussion of American foreign policy was typical of Nunn. He talked about details — why 60 percent is an important number when you’re talking about uranium enrichment and why it’s not a bad benchmark in considering when to go to war. But he also gave reasons why he thought the United States had better ways, using diplomacy, to get what it wanted.

His remarks were bipartisan. He said he could understand the sentiment for regime change. He knew how those in power in Tehran had handled protesters. But he cautioned that the world is full of bad leaders, and the United States simply can’t get rid of them all. He quietly, by example, helped us put our sentiments aside and do some thinking.

As he talked, you could get a sense of what a reasonable approach to Iran would have been. It’s quite a contrast to what this county did: try to form a plan after the bombing started.

Patricia Murphy, the newspaper’s senior political columnist, pointed out that every time the country got into trouble people would urge Nunn to run. She asked him why he never did. He replied:

 

I’ve never looked back and regretted it. I did think about it for a while, but I looked in the mirror several times and I did not see a president staring back.

 

Sadly, I think he’s right. The country should want someone like Nunn as president. But the country I know always looks for something else.

I hope one day it grows up.

• Source: Patricia Murphy, “Sam Nunn on Iran, Congress and why he never ran for president”;  The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, March 18, 2026. It’s here:

https://www.ajc.com/politics/2026/03/president-sam-nunn-it-would-have-had-a-ring-to-it/

After the equinox

 On St. Patrick’s Day, we had a freeze, and the handyman called and said it was too cold to work. Three days later, the equinox, we were doing the delayed chore and sweating.

We’re in that part of spring that makes us think that it arrives all at once. The Wise Woman and I went for a hike in the woods at Tucker for a closer look.

The beeches are shedding last year’s leaves, while just about everything else is putting on new growth. Caterpillars and other insects are everywhere, feasting on the tender plants and providing feasts for birds.

The pollen is so heavy in the pines that the male cones look like yellow Christmas tree ornaments.

The buckeyes, in genus Aesculus, have complicated flowers the color of peaches. Violets are everywhere. But most of the blooms were from species that had escaped from the garden. I saw azalea blossoms and hoped they were wild. But they were in the Tsutsusi section of genus Rhododendron, evergreen azaleas from China and Japan.

Then there are the puzzles, the things I don’t know what to call. Leatherleaf mahonia, Berberis bealei, is putting out green fruit, while thorny olive, Elaeagnus pungens, putting out red. Leatherleaf mahonia has been here so long it’s considered naturalized, while thorny olive is still considered invasive. Both came from China.

A pileated woodpecker worked over a dead tree for insects. They’re enormous compared to the other woodpeckers. This one was oblivious to us, and we spent 10 minutes just watching.

Crows are usually wary, but we ran into one who perched on a limb 25 feet away and just watched. The Wise Woman feeds crows around our homestead. They like peanuts, and I wondered whether a walker in Tucker keeps peanuts in a pocket.

‘The Warrior Princess Ozimba’

 Reynolds Price’s story is about Aunt Zimby, who owes precious little to white folks. She is old — she has memories of General Lee. No one marked her birthday when she was born, so she chose the Fourth of July for herself. Her name was given to her by the narrator’s great-grandfather, who was reading a novel at the time.

By tradition, Zimby received a new pair of blue tennis shoes on her birthday. Blue because it was her favorite color. She asked about the color even after she lost her sight.

Grandfather Buddy brought the shoes to her, then father Phil, and then Ed, the narrator. Zimby sometimes confuses Ed for Phil, who died two years ago.

One of the patterns in Southern stories is a story within a story. A character, particularly a wise old character like Zimby, will tell a story about another character.

In a lot of Southern stories, a white character will tell a story about a Black character. The level of skill crossing cultures varies, which is why a lot of Southern literature is unreadable.

Zimby’s story about a little white boy named Phil is a wonder.

Some things about Southern culture don’t resolve into a reasonable explanation. There’s nothing reasonable about much of Southern culture. Price has the sense to state the case without trying to explain the inexplicable.

• Source: Reynolds Price’s “The Warrior Princess Ozimba” is in Stories of the Modern South, edited by Benjamin Forkner and Patrick Samway, S.J.; New York, Bantam Books, 1978, pp. 293-8.

The story close to home

 Maybe you can be too close to a story. Hunter Kay’s “The Fifth Generation” was set in East Texas.

The protagonist, a recent high school graduate named Charles, is from Palestine, a small town about 30 miles from my grandfather’s farm. A spectacular fight takes place in the pool hall in Jacksonville. The pool hall was about 3 miles from grandfather’s farm.

I read the story seeing places that I know. I’m not sure it would be the same for you.

Charles is a rich kid who doesn’t know what to do with his life and so he goes to a bar, where he gets gloriously drunk and falls in with Gary, a young worker on a drilling rig. The two become partners, hauling pipe for the rig operator, and doing things that young men do when they are just intent on living life, rather than thinking about it.

 

What has been bred out of us? “Takes five generations to make a gentleman,” my grandmother used to say.

 

Charles finds himself changing — in some ways for the good. But life on the rig is a vacation for him. It’s not for Gary.

It’s a troubling, haunting story. Kay wrote it when he was in his 20s, working on a master’s thesis at Vanderbilt. The story was admired and anthologized. I never saw another story from him, and I’d have liked to have read more.

He was the kind of fellow I tend to like. He did a bit of gardening and liked to talk about literature. I was glad to hear that had hadn’t stopped writing and was working on a book when he died. I hope someone publishes it.

• Sources: Hunter Kay’s “The Fifth Generation” is in Stories of the Modern South, edited by Benjamin Forkner and Patrick Samway, S.J.; New York, Bantam Books, 1978, pp. 183-206. The quotation is on p. 183.

E. Thomas Wood, “Hunter Kay, 1948-2020”; Medium, June 20, 2020. It’s here:

https://medium.com/@ethomaswood/hunter-kay-1948-2020-e3b833bbcdf2

John Aubrey, notetaker

 Peter Davidson reminds us that this month is the 400^th anniversary of John Aubrey’s birth.

In Davidson’s telling, Aubrey was a patron saint of observers, collectors and notetakers. If you’ve read Aubrey and visit a place he wrote about, you think about what he saw and how he saw it. Davidson says that Aubrey’s writings “enchant the township.”

A writer who does that is a good writer.

I’ve read little of Aubrey’s Brief Lives. Davidson convinced me that I’ve not read nearly enough.

I caught Aubrey’s love of gossip and anecdote. I missed his interest in archeology, antiquities and what we’d now call anthropology.

Davidson paints him as a fellow of endless curiosity. If Aubrey were alive today, he’d probably be collecting notes in notebooks and publishing a few online.

• Source: Peter Davidson, “Speaking Through the Ages: John Aubrey at four hundred”; The Literary Review, March 2026. It’s here:
https://literaryreview.co.uk/speaking-through-the-ages

Aubrey was born March 12, 1626, in Wiltshire. I don’t know him well as a writer and missed marking the day. The month will have to do.

A chronic state of mind

 Edith Wharton, describing American and British expatriates, said: 

they lived in a chronic state of mental inaccuracy, excitement and inertia, which made it vaguely exhilarating to lie and definitely fatiguing to be truthful.

 

That’s from The Mother’s Recompense, published in 1925. Though it’s more than 100 years old, I think that “a chronic state of mental inaccuracy” is a phrase for our times.

• Source: I found the quotation when I stumbled across the engaging blog Old Geezer Re-Reading. It’s here: 

https://oldgeezerrereadingblog.wordpress.com/2025/10/21/reading-an-edith-wharton-from-1925/

You sometimes find astonishing things while looking for something else.

A demanding writer

 Ernest Gaines’s “The Sky Is Gray” reminds me of a Tolstoy story.

You could say that it’s about a little boy going to the dentist or that it’s about a little boy growing to be a man. Maybe it’s a retelling of one of the parables found in the gospels.

With Gaines, as with Tolstoy, you can’t rush through the story and get to a point. You have to take your time, read slowly, go on a journey. Along the way, it’s necessary for you to feel cold and hunger. It won’t do to just note that cold and hunger are features of the world. You must take time to feel them.

Gaines is a demanding writer in that way.

There’s a story within a story about the little boy, James, who is 8, having to kill red birds so the family will have something to eat. His father is in the Army, and his mother is doing farm work, trying to feed the children.

James traps and kills game, but he can’t bring himself to kill the red birds. He cries and pleads. His mother beats him. In exasperation, she kills one of the red birds in the trap before making him kill the other. 

 

Suppose she had to go away? That’s why I had to do it. Suppose she had to go away like Daddy went away? Then who was go’n look after us? They had to be somebody to carry on. I didn’t know it then, but I know it now. Auntie and Monsieur Bayonne talked to me and made me see.

 

Relatives and neighbors socialize little boys in the hard lessons they must learn. You might wonder about some of the lessons that we, as a society, make some children learn. 

The story has many wonders.

I had never realized the spiritual significance of the word “Stop!”

It can be the first word spoken by someone who is paying attention to the plight of a poor woman and her son when everyone else is distracted or indifferent. It’s what you say when you want people to slow down enough to let you help. It can be a wonderful word.

• Source: Ernest Gaines’s “The Sky Is Gray” is in Stories of the Modern South, edited by Benjamin Forkner and Patrick Samway, S.J.; New York, Bantam Books, 1978, pp. 103-31. The quotation is on p. 109.