According to ABC News (the site that rose to the top on my little Google search):

“The referendum- North Carolina Amendment One- goes a step beyond outlawing same-sex marriage, which was already illegal in the state. The law decrees that ‘marriage between one man and one woman is the only domestic legal union that shall be valid or recognized in this State’- meaning that civil unions and potentially other types of domestic partnerships will no longer be legally recognized.”

Here’s my opinion (based on zero knowledge of the data):

Regardless of the impact, which will affect a lot of people, this outcome says very little about what people actually want.

It only indicates the generational divide in voting; old people like to vote young people don’t take the time. Period.

In the overall scheme of things, human rights flows in one direction, from slavery to freedom.

There are setbacks on the way, but they are reactions — little historical blips on the path to more freedom.

And this is one of those setbacks.

In a couple of decades, most of the people who voted for this will either be dead or too feeble to get to the polls — and the younger generations will vote to allow this freedom. They will laugh at us.

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Tapi

Tapi is an American citizen now — and he’s proud of it!

He came here as an AFS exchange student, from Finland, in July of 1972. He brought corduroy pants and thick flannel shirts.

He was my AFS brother. He had had years of English in school, but it was limited in those early weeks. It was my job, in those first weeks after his arrival, to figure out what he was saying and teach him some American customs and wait for his English to kick in.

I got to name ordinary things as if they were new and discover my world. He would point at something and say, “How do you say?” Learning to enunciate slowly with perfect diction, I’d say “hot fudge sundae” or “touchdown” or “flat tire” or whatever it was, and he would repeat it a few times, inviting me to correct his pronunciation. Naming old things anew. It was like being a real time poet.

I was 16 and had had my driver’s license a whole week, so I showed him around. And he taught me quite a bit also — like what it was like to discover my own life and surroundings newly, through another’s eyes. The world was actually a much bigger place back then, before cable and VCRs and internet.

The second week he was here, he played in a tennis tournament in Wilmington, NC. The mid-summer heat and humidity was a shock to his Finnish system.

He graduated from Salisbury High School, returned to Finland for another year of high school, and then returned the following year on a tennis scholarship at Wake Forest. I also went to Wake Forest, so we roomed together most of those years. He returned to Finland mid-college for one year to serve a year in the Finnish army.

After graduating, he got an awesome job as tennis director for the City of Winston-Salem, but he wasn’t able to work out the legal stuff and stay in this country. He returned to Europe taught tennis in Austria and Germany for 20 years, and then came here again.

He’s now married, living on Hilton Head, and teaching a lot of tennis.

And a few days ago he became an American citizen.

He called me, proud and excited.

He had aced the exam and won praise for his answers.

Having come from a small country that had to play its cards exactly right to stay neutral and make its way in the world anyway, Tapi had an interest in politics (Finns don’t have much of a choice) — and he had a bit of an American civics lesson many years ago.

He arrived in time to witness the Nixon-McGovern campaign. In fact, I remember the two of us standing at a strip mall in the heart of Kannapolis, the Saturday before that election, handing out brochures for McGovern. Imagine that. Long hair. Foreign accents (mine from Salisbury, his from Finland). I doubt we did good Senator McGovern any favors.

He had Marie Miller, the queen of political talk at Salisbury High in those days, for two classes a day (as I did), and rode to school each morning with me and another save-the-world guy, Boyd Gilman.

Because he was an exchange student, Sonny Allen, our mayor, invited us to go with him to the inauguration of Governor Jim Holshouser in Raleigh.

And Earl Ruth, our Congressman, got us excellent tickets for Nixon’s inauguration and had us into his office beforehand.

All of those gracious folks were Republicans, and we were way left Democrats.  And yet, back in those days, Democrats and Republicans were not enemies. They were not objects to be scorned and ridiculed. They were still human beings who could vote and think differently — publicly — and be friends with each other.

So the citizenship questions had been so easy for Tapi that he requested from the examiner something more challenging.

“Ask me another question,” he said.

She asked if he could name the original 13 colonies.

He could — and she told him he was the first to do that.

My grandparents — all four of them — were immigrants who achieved citizenship. It was automatic for me, and most of us, and isn’t really something I think about enough to be proud of — but for many people it takes something — and it’s a profound blessing. My parents had soft spots in their hearts for immigrants and what their parents had gone through to be here. They were Tapi’s American parents and would have been so proud to know about this.

Congratulations, Tapi.

So am I.

But she’s too hot and tired to go to her dish for water.

Same here.

We both came and sat down. I sat on the couch. She likes to sit next to me on the couch and snuggle — but she didn’t do that.

She’s so hot and tired that she went straight for the floor, sprawled on the hardwood at my feet, taking those deep breaths. A lesson in breathing from the diaphragm.

Dogs are such a reflection of our own lives. First they’re babies. Then they are grown babies. Then they are old babies.

Years ago, when Steve Bouser was editor of the Salisbury Post, he wrote a column about Salisbury’s most this and most that. He listed Paul as Salisbury’s most compassionate man. He was. He spent the days of his life taking care of people, beginning with his wife and Paul Jr., and extending out to those with special needs anywhere and everywhere. If he saw a chance to make a difference in the life of a cat, a homeless guy, a friend, a neighborhood, or a city, he sprang into action. My mom was like that also. She and Paul were like two peas in a pod.

(L to R) Leon Zimmerman, Phyllis Zimmerman, Naomi Berhnardt, Paul Bernhardt, Rose Post, Billy Burke

He was a southern gentleman, a master in the art of conversation, and I am richly blessed to have participated in many of them with him. He was a good Democrat who started veering to the right just a bit in the past few years. He was a former mayor who never stopped coming up with ideas that would benefit the city.

He liked to talk. He liked to listen. He liked to think. He enjoyed ideas. And he loved to reminiscence.

I visited him last night, in his hospital room, just a few hours before he passed away, just in time to wish him an easy exit from this life.  His breathing was calm. He was comfortable and peaceful.

This is a link to a blog I wrote a little over two years ago about having dinner with the gang pictured here…

My, how quickly life surges forward. What a difference two years can make in who is here and who is not.

That was Mr. Hurley.

I didn’t know him well, but I knew him all of my life and heard my mom talk about him a lot. Many people (including me) have a habit of complaining about their boss. My mom worked for Mr. Hurley for decades and everything she ever said about him revealed profound gratitude and respect and loyalty. A certain kind of bond happens in a working, creative relationship over many, many years. It’s love.

She told me many times of the secret things he did for people anonymously in order to solve a problem or make a difference.

When my father’s business closed and Dad was able to actually leave town for a couple of weeks, Mr. Hurley offered to send my parents on a trip so that Mom could write about it for the Salisbury Post readers. Mom picked a place that, I’m sure, she never would have thought she would ever go. China. Imagine that.

There’s a room in the journalism department at UNC named for my mother. The NC Writer’s Network annual Creative Nonfiction Competition is named in her honor. Both honors, and others, are well-deserved, but there’s no doubt in my mind that Mr. Hurley had something to do with making that happen.

Mom told me once that when the Post building was newly renovated, that she stood with Mr. Hurley at the window on the top floor, looking out onto Innes Street.

“It’s a dinky little town,” he told her. “But it’s mine.”

And that was how he used his life — being responsible for improving the lives of people in Salisbury. Some of the things he built bear his name. Most do not.

I remember when Catawba got new tennis courts. They had not had them for a few years and had no team. I had never seen Mr. Hurley watch a tennis match before, but he was watching that new team’s first match that day. He had had something to do with those new tennis courts being there.

“I think having a tennis team says something about being a good school,” he said.

That first day the new Y opened (the J.F. Hurley Family YMCA), I walked a few laps on the new track upstairs. He was there, walking.

“We looked around the country at Y’s,” he said. “This is the best in the country for a town this size.”

Jimmy Hurley was amazing. He passed away yesterday. And it is a dinky little town. And it is his.

I read about this a few years ago and have been thinking about it for awhile, but never had the guts to really do it. Then, this week, I’ve got so many emails!

I’ve always had folders, filters, etc… and still thousands of emails in my inbox.

I read them on my phone. Read them on my laptop. Read them on my desktop. Most days, I read them during the day and act on them at night.

Yesterday I had stuff to do and so many emails — with a compulsion to read them all and respond to those that required a response — that it occurred to me that my day was being consumed by email!

So I watched this Merlin Mann video (not the whole hour, but a good bit of it), and I read a few blogs on the topic.

And I did the dirty deed. My inbox is now empty.

I’ve kept it empty all day. After Day One, I’m here to report that… well… it’s pretty cool. An email comes in, and it goes out. So far so good.

It’s so inspiring that I shared with my wife that I think I’ve had a major breakthrough in email. Uh, well, no big deal for her.

If you have any thoughts about this, please leave a comment. No need to email.

Ted Corners

Who is Ted Corners?

Well…Ted Corners is, of course, a writer.

He has no fear of being disliked or criticized or embarrassed.

He got his name one cold winter night  in the mid ’80′s, while Sam Post sat in his office on the 4th floor of the Wallace Building in downtown Salisbury (now known as the Plaza).

Sam had just been to the convenience store for a cup of coffee and the National Examiner caught his eye. He bought a copy and read a few articles and realized that this stuff was not true.

So Sam wrote a story about a woman who got so mad at her husband that she killed his dog and fed it to him in spaghetti sauce for dinner.

Before sending it to the publisher, Sam needed a name for the author of this trash. So he looked around the room and noticed something. The walls of the room met at the ceiling, and that was a “corner.”  The name “Ted” was, well, short and quick to type.

Years later, Sam got the idea to pull some (not all) of those old, rejected novels out of the dusty disk drive and publish them on Kindle. Sell them cheap and if anybody bought them make a few bucks. He knew that in the world of literature, these novels were pure crap. He wanted them to enjoy life anyway and make a few bucks. He did not want the name Sam Post on them.

Ted had died in the late 80′s. He came back to life in the fall of 2011.

And that’s who Ted Corners is.

I had a fear (what else is new?) that the dog and chickens can’t be friends. I was wrong. They play and have lots of fun together.

It’s not like I live on a farm. These are urban chickens.

And I’ve had fresh eggs for breakfast every day.

I won’t say that I’ve mastered omelette making, but I’m getting there. Nor have I mastered the frying of an egg over light with Pam spray without it ever breaking — but I do okay.

One of big treats growing up was when Mom made scrambled eggs with salami. So yesterday I got some salami and revisited my past, scambling eggs with salami. It wasn’t quite as good as Mom’s. I think she might have used real butter in addition to the grease that’s already in the salami (there was no talk of cholesterol back then). But it was a pretty  great breakfast.

This morning, we had no bread in the house. That’s a good thing. Bread is my weakness. Every time I take action to lose weight, no matter what system I use, it always amounts to the same thing: I love bread and eat way too much of it.

I reacted to our bread shortage by going on a bit of a search through the kitchen cabinets. I noticed, in our cupboard, two large containers of oats — leftover from the days before we got the chickens. All these months with daily eggs has given me a one-dimensional view of breakfast.

Can oats sit around for six months and still be okay?

Absolutely!

This reminded me of my father. He loved oatmeal and I have a childhood memory of him teaching me how to fix it.

Oats are filling — perfect if you’re hungry. Just a smattering in the bottom of the pot renders a huge bowl once cooked.

So today was a departure. Maybe we’ll have eggs and salami for dinner…