11 June 2024

Is’t possible I take up my 3G&1F tale a full month after granddaughter Olivia’s graduation? Tempus fugit.

After the Furman 50^th reunion/graduation commotion, the quiet intermezzo former roommate Leta and Larry provided me was most welcome, a chance to get acquainted with and admire lives full of civic responsibility and family.  When she is not attending ceremonies for the many new citizens naturalized in Charlotte—70 a day, from 40 different countries, 5 days a week—and then expediting their voter registration, doting “Grandmommy Leta,” retired operations project manager for Sompo Japan Insurance, knits and crochets, inspired by the arrival of grandson Grayson.  Clever autodidact that she is, she managed to knit a strawberry hat for the lad as only her second project.

“Grand Dude Larry,” retired Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools (CMS) history teacher and soccer coach, spent part of the day organizing another of his Civil Rights tours for the Charlotte Teachers Institute.  Starting with the somberly stunning Monument for Peace and Justice in Montgomery (aka the Lynching Museum), Larry’s seminars lead CMS teachers through Selma, Jackson, the Mississippi Delta, and Birmingham to experience essential American history to pass along to their students.  Wish I could attend.

Leta let me ride along to UPTOWN Charlotte (correcting my use of “downtown” to describe those high-rises) as she ran her mailing and delivering errands on behalf of our newest citizens. 

When Larry wasn’t hammering out details of his coming trip, he was cooking us breakfast, lunch, and dinner.  That evening I treated them to The Fall Guy with Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt, an enjoyable romp of cinematic intertexuality and action not nearly sufficient to the hospitality they showed me. 

Following Leta’s blueberry muffins and a group search in my AAA atlas for my upcoming destinations of Cullowhee and Whittier NC, Leta gifted me her knitted spring green pot holder and I headed 93 miles northeast for a visit to my good friend Cameron and a classic Carolina lunch of egg salad and pimento cheese.  What followed was delightfully low-key:  we ran errands together, compared age-related bothers, visited the Delicious Bakery where one can buy layer cakes by the slice (wonderful innovation), had a fine Thai dinner out, and watched the new Tracker series with the handsome Justin Harley of This Is Us fame in the lead.

That relaxed pace continued the next day, and I very much enjoyed an extended version of the wide-ranging chats Cameron and I have each Thursday; she shared her Skeptics Credo, and I confessed that getting out of a bathtub was not as easy as it used to be.  We sat for a while in her church’s garden near her late husband Russell’s memorial stone and discussed finalities.

Later that night while watching the New York Times’s  “Best of Late Night” post on my computer, I noticed it paired with a guide to cremation costs.  Pegged by algorithms.  Jeez.

The next morning after a fine swim with Cameron at the downtown Greensboro Y, this restored traveler drove 227 miles west to 165 Sunset Ridge in a gated community of Whittier NC and a lovely mountainside Airbnb that proud parents Susan and Mark had rented to house all of us celebrating their daughter Olivia’s graduation from Western Carolina. 

Susan and Mark did a spectacular job of organizing and provisioning our party of 8 over three days:  middle eastern night (falafel, tzatziki, tabouli, and nan) was followed by enchilada night, and then by lasagna night, with Mark’s wisecracking brother Paul pouring a bountiful supply of wine.

I shared a bedroom and immediately bonded with Mark’s sister Gina, retired English and forensics teacher, and found being folded into the family along with granddaughters Olivia and Isabel and their lovely cousin Brooke a real treat:  family stories were a gas.

Even the cosmos chipped in:  on the Friday night before graduation day, 10 May 2024, that rare solar storm gave me my very first glimpse of the Northern Lights—from a valley in Whittier NC! We drove down in the bed of Paul’s brand new and weirdly silent fire-engine-red electric truck.  Though the phenomenon was ghostly to the naked eye, the girls’ iPhones revealed a spectacular show of colors we would have otherwise missed, a fine astronomical launch for the nearly graduated Olivia.

Graduation day was lovely, and Olivia ended up in the front row of the vast auditorium where we could clearly see her.  Inevitably nostalgic about so many graduations both marched in and attended (the WCU auditorium was about the same size as the Bayfront Center in St. Pete where I once addressed the Boca Ciega High School Class of 1970), I kept wondering what lies ahead for the Class of 2024.  “What’s to come is still unsure,” as Feste sings in Twelfth Night.

We lunched in Sylva (on a good Cuban sandwich; who’d have thunk it?), took photos back on campus, and returned to our temporary mountain home for dinner and The Last of the Mohicans (or, as my mother Virginia always called it, “The Last of the Moccasins”).  That film was a nod to my next day’s assignment:  checking out Chimney Rock as a possible site for fulfilling my late sister’s wish to return her ashes to the mountains, and then driving on to my rendezvous with her husband Richard and son Daniel at our own Airbnb in Mill Spring NC. 

A fine and memorable interlude, this graduation.  Godspeed, Class of ’24!