Sweetea

I grew up in the south drinking sweetea. I never heard it called iced tea or just tea, never imagined that you could actually drink tea that hadn't been sweetened and for the longest time, frankly, I didn't realize that it was supposed to be two separate words.

I eventually went to college, married and moved away to the city and, at a time and for reasons I can no longer recall, I began to drink unsweetened iced tea. I soon found sweetened tea cloying. I wouldn't drink a cola (colas, cokes, pop, soda and RC Cola being a related topic for another day) with spaghetti or a steak and to me sweetened tea is no different. Yes, I could once drink sweetened iced tea, but then I could once drink Boone Farm Apple Wine.

Now, don't get me wrong. I'm not making a value judgment about those who prefer their tea with sugar or honey or bourbon, for that matter, but having just returned to the South, I've noticed that it is an important social issue here and I find the entire matter intriguing, though I quickly admit this may be an indication that I have far too much time on my hands.

I love barbecue, the quality of southern barbecue having been one of the major drivers of my decision to return to the South, and sweetea seems to be a particularly touchy issue in barbecue joints. One very popular barbecue joint in our new town will only serve sweetea or soda. There are no unsweetened drinks on the menu. At another, the waitress reserves a special look of disdain for anyone who orders unsweetened tea. Then she pretends that she didn't hear your order. One refused to leave our table until I changed my mind. She just stood there looking at me, the queen of passive-aggression, until I said, "Make that sweetea, please".

A column in a local newspaper addressed this thorny issue last week and unequivocally posited that ordering unsweetened tea in a barbecue joint is just plain wrong (and in doing so, by the way, confirmed that I am not the only person here with too much free time). Furthermore, according to the author, ordering unsweetened tea isn't even grammatically correct in the South-- one should order unsweet tea.

I have seen "unsweet tea" on menus here, though rarely, and as best I can tell, this is not the correct use of the word. According to Princeton University's Wordnet, unsweet is an adjective meaning moderately dry, as in champagne, resulting from the decomposition of sugar in the fermentation process, or it can mean distasteful, as in "he found life to be unsweet". Unsweetened is the adjective that means not made sweet. So, I can have my tea sweet or distasteful?

Grammar police notwithstanding, I don't understand the logic behind having someone else sweeten my drink. What if I want to sweeten my tea with honey or an artificial sweetener? Too bad for me-- if you drink tea in a southern barbecue joint it will be sweetened and it will be sweetened with sugar. I've never known a restaurant or cafe to offer me sweetened coffee. They put sugar on the table and allow the customer to sweeten to their individual preference. Why, then, should they pre-sweeten my tea? Because it isn't simply a question of whether or not tea should be sweetened, but how sweet it should be.

My father-in-law insists on putting four spoonfuls of sugar in his glass of iced tea, which leaves about two spoonfuls undissolved in the bottom of his glass no matter how long he stirs. I tried to explain that cold water can only absorb so much sugar and beyond that point adding more sugar doesn't make the drink sweeter. He could heat the water and it would dissolve a bit more sugar, but then it would be syrup, or at best hot tea, and not iced tea at all. He explained to me that he sweetened his iced tea "to his taste" and, rightly, that it was none of my damned business. I wisely dropped the subject, but my mother-in-law continued to complain bitterly about the inch of wet sugar and lemon she had to clean from the bottom of his glass after every meal.

My oldest son, Cary, grew up in the Northern Virginia suburbs of Washington, DC, which is decidedly not southern despite its location below the Mason-Dixon Line. Now, twenty minutes drive outside of the suburbs and the landscape becomes seriously southern with more pickups than cars, gun racks, drawls and roadside bars, but that isn't where he grew up. In the Northern Virginia suburbs he knew more Asians, for example, than Bubbas and more lacrosse players than NASCAR fans. In the Yankee stronghold of the Washington metropolitan area, waiters don't even ask if you want sweetened or unsweetened tea. They serve iced tea and assume that if you want it sweetened, you'll add sugar.

Farther north, the situation is even more bizarre. I ordered iced tea in a Boston restaurant one autumn and was informed by the waitress that iced tea is a summer drink. I could order a cold beer in a snowstorm, a soda in a glass of ice, or even a milkshake, but there was apparently something about iced tea that made it undrinkable in the cooler seasons of New England. Maybe it was somehow tied to that revolutionary thing regarding tea and Boston Harbor, I don't know, but when she called the milkshake a frappe, I decided to just shut up and eat my lobsta'.

Since we recently moved to North Carolina, Cary has decided that he wants to out-southern his dad, even though I have a twenty-year headstart. He orders sweetea and shakes his head in disgust when I don't. He's an English major, though, and struggles mightily to justify unsweet as an adjective to describe tea. At least he's getting into the southern thing and I should be pleased that he isn't asking why the hell I moved him here. I should be happy that he considers my southern heritage worthy of emulation and, in fact, I am.

I suppose that, in the end, drinking sweetea is a requirement for membership in a club of which everyone who knows me already believes I was a founding member. I look, sound, think and act southern right up to the point when I say, "Unsweetened tea, please", the waitress drops her jaw and tray, and the other patrons give me that "he's an impostor!" glance.

Before my twenty-five years in Washington, I grew up hunting and fishing, riding in the bed of my grandpa's pickup truck, saying "yes ma'm", and knowing that the plural form of you is y'all, but I fear that my inability to reacquire a taste for sweetea may be the undoing of my re-initiation as a southerner.

And that would be unsweet.

109

June 13, 2006

We went to town to buy ice cream. The summer evening was stifling hot and we cooled down after dinner by driving in my grandfather’s car with the windows rolled down. Then we cruised back out highway 109 to “the cabin”, as my grandfather called his small house in the country, at about twelve miles an hour. Dad-dad and Bonnie Cox sat in the front seat of their white 1960 Rambler American and I rode in the back eating an ice cream cone with a warm, twelve mile per hour breeze in my face from the two front windows. I was ten.

We pulled up behind another car, old and rusted, driven by a young couple. She sat close beside him and he wrapped his arm around her shoulder. They were doing maybe eleven. Life passes at a slower pace in rural Kentucky.

After a while, we reached a brief straight section of road and my grandfather pulled into the left lane to pass. As we sped by, my grandmother stuck her head out the window and yelled, “Get a room if you want to do that!”

My grandfather laughed. So, did I.

“Aw, Mother,” he teased, “You shouldn’t have said that. You’ll embarrass them!”

“Oh, they just smiled and waved.” she replied. Then she smiled, clearly proud of her misbehavior.

My grandmother died last week. I flew to the funeral in western Kentucky where she lived all her life and where I was raised. I expected much wailing and slow, grimacing, head shaking like I experienced at my grandfather’s funeral in the same place six years earlier, but for reasons I still don’t completely understand, there was precious little of that. It was surprisingly upbeat.

She may have been my grandmother, but in terms of parenting she was a second mom. My grandparents always lived close by and I remember spending almost as much time with them as I did my parents when I was little. After my father was killed in a car accident when I was twelve, my mother, two younger sisters and two younger brothers moved in with my grandparents. My mother enrolled in college and my grandparents pretty much raised my siblings and me for those four years.

To the rest of our family, the woman some of us grandchildren called “Bonnie Cox” was our matriarch. My aunt felt that calling her “Bonnie Cox” was disrespectful, and rightly so, so she became “Meemee” to my cousins.

As the oldest grandchild, I suppose I am to blame for calling her by her formal name. I don’t know how that began. I was told that I did it to avoid confusion with my younger sister, Bonny. Kids come up with unusual nicknames for grandparents, but any way you look at it “Bonnie Cox” is a strange nickname for a grandparent, even one named Bonnie Cox.

As we left the young couple in our proverbial dust, Dad-dad held a cigarette between the first two fingers of his left hand, occasionally flicking ashes out the open window as he steered with his right hand, which also held his milk shake. Occasionally, he would hold the wheel and the cigarette with his left hand while he took a sip from the cup with his right. The near total absence of traffic on 109 and our twelve-mile per hour top speed made this maneuver less dangerous than one might at first assume.

Directly, as he liked to say, meaning “not long thereafter”, he interrupted the silence with a serious thought.

“Bonnie?” he reflected.

“What, Bradley?”

“You know, when you’re driving down the road trying to steer the car with a cigarette in one hand and a milkshake in the other?” He spoke the next part slowly for emphasis. “Your ass will itch every time.”

The three of us howled.

My grandmother was funny, happy, likable and loveable. Maybe that’s a reason her services were more a celebration of her life than a funeral. For many years, Bonnie and Bradley lived in that small cabin with aluminum siding that he built on Niles Row Road, then a dirt and gravel road a few miles north of Dawson Springs off state highway 109. Before reaching Niles Row Road, 109 quickly passes Dunn Cemetery and then winds a couple of miles farther past another cabin my grandfather built long ago. The cabin on 109, built of logs and still inhabited, is where my mother was born. Dunn Cemetery is where both of my maternal grandparents now rest.

They had a concrete block foundation laid for the Niles Row Road cabin and then took me to see it. My grandfather lifted me onto the top of the block walls and I walked the perimeter while he told me what the finished cabin would look like.

“The living room and dining area will run all across the front of the house with a fireplace in the middle of the front wall,” he pointed out. The foundation wall formed a small rectangle, a little narrower than it was deep, and a smaller box jutted out of the front wall to support the planned fireplace.

“The bedroom will be on the back left side and Bonnie’s kitchen will be on the right. She says she doesn’t need a big kitchen. She wants everything to be handy.”

I had to stop when I reached the gap in the foundation wall where the door to the crawl space would eventually be and he helped me down. They lived in the cabin for a while with just a plank sub floor and in the winter cold air would filter up through half-inch gaps between the boards. After a few years, they had hardwood floors installed. The exterior was black tar paper for a long time, but was eventually covered with aluminum siding, white on the top half and red on the bottom. They lived most of their years in nicer, larger houses, but they loved that cabin and would occasionally move back to it “for a spell”.

They spent a lot of time over the years, as did I, cruising 109 to and from Dawson Springs. There were deer crossing signs on that stretch of two-lane blacktop that my grandmother must have passed a million times and ignored for the most part, until one summer evening’s after-dinner drive.

“Bradley?”

“What, Honey?” he asked.

“How do the deer know to cross here?”

We lauged at the inanity of the question, but she wasn’t offended. She laughed hardest. Being able to laugh at one’s self is a skill I wish she had taught me.

I also wish she had taught me to bake pies as well as she could. Though she gave me her recipes and countless pointers, no one could bake like my grandmother. Her chess and pecan pies were unbelievable. My father-in-law, Burton, whose wife Lidabel I believe to be the finest cook who ever approached a southern stove, says that no one could bake a biscuit like Bonnie Cox.

When my grandmother was in high school she had a male friend who had a truck and a job delivering something or other around the countryside. My grandfather’s parents had moved from their farm into town so he could go to school. That was unusual for his generation and he would eventually become not only the first in our family to go to college, but also the first to obtain a masters degree.

One day she asked her friend if he ever delivered in Charleston and if he knew Bradley Cox.

“Yes,” he said, “I see Bradley sometimes.”

“Next time you see him,” she instructed, “tell him that I wouldn’t mind going out on a date with him sometime.”

The rest, as they say, is history.

Bonnie Cox was always concerned with her appearance. She worked at staying thin, always had her hair done, and always wore attractive clothes. I remember her most often in shorts, sometimes slacks, because she was too active and worked too hard for dresses and skirts, but they were always nice looking outfits. The mortuary did an amazing job with her. She looked thirty years younger.

“If she were here right now,” I told my sister, “she’d say, ‘Damn, I look good, don’t I!’”

“She looks fantastic,” her daughter-in-law, Judy added. “The only part of her that doesn’t look perfectly natural is right around her mouth.”

“That’s because it’s closed,” her son, Tom chuckled.

Actually, it’s Tom and I have reputations in our family for never, ever shutting up. We have that in common with Bonnie Cox. And telling jokes. Our family laughs a lot, even at funerals. I think that's a good thing.

There were a lot of hard-working people in my family when I was growing up, miners, teachers, farmers, coaches, sawmill workers, but I got my work ethic from my grandmother. She worked every day in a factory sewing the same damn stitches over and over, a pocket for a pair of trousers or an inseam, perhaps, and I never once heard her complain. She would brag that she made “production” nearly every day, meaning that she had completed enough pieces to get paid a bit more. The factories were never air-conditioned and they were stifling in the summer. Still, she went to work every weekday looking nice and feeling happy.

One of the factories was nearly two miles from our home when I was in high school. My grandfather picked her up at work after he left the school where he taught political science and history and I attended, but occasionally he couldn’t for some reason or other or the car was in the shop and she would walk home. I had a friend near the factory so a few times in the summer I would play tennis with him and then walk home with my grandmother. She would work all day in a factory, walk two miles, cook supper for six of us and then wash the dishes. And she never complained. I never knew anyone who worked harder.

If I were asked to describe what it was like in my home during my high school years in a single scene, it would have to be around the dinner table. My grandfather would sit at one end of the table and I at the other, with my brothers and sisters on either side. One evening, I had finished eating and was about to push my chair back from the table when Bonnie Cox asked if I’d like some dessert. Given her baking prowess, this was not a question one dismissed lightly.

“Sure,” I said. “What do we have?”

“Well, what would you like?” she proposed.

“I’d like some cake.”

“Well, we don’t have any cake.”

“Well, what do we have?”

“Well, what would you like?”

“How about some ice cream?”

“I think we’re out of ice cream,” she informed me.

“What do we have?” I tried again.

“Well, what would you like?”

At this point, my grandfather, who was sitting at the opposite end of the dinner table and was not widely known as a patient man, laid down his fork and jumped in.

“Dammit, Bonnie! Will you just tell the boy what we have? He’s been guessing for half an hour now.”

In her eighties, Bonnie Cox’ driving skills diminished and she had a few minor accidents. Then a bigger one. Finally, the children decided they needed to intervene so they took her for a driving test. She failed and had her license taken away. Still, she insisted on owning a car and promised that a neighbor would drive her wherever she needed to go. She had a red car at the time and told them that she needed a white one that wouldn’t draw the attention of the police. This stipulation apparently went unnoticed by her children.

A few weeks later, of course, they learned that she had driven herself to Madisonville, thirty miles away, to do some shopping and they went to her home to confront her. She told them that there was nothing to worry about. “I got up early,” she explained. “I drove the back roads, got my shopping done, and was back home before the cops even got up.”

Bonnie Cox had a long history of skirting the motor vehicle laws of Kentucky. She taught me to drive when I was fourteen, which was nice except that the legal driving age was sixteen. By the time I got a learner’s permit and could legally sit behind the wheel, I had been driving for two years and could already drive better than the state policeman who administered my driving test. In fact, she taught several of the grandchildren to drive, all long before legal driving age. She was a great driving teacher, low keyed, unflappable. We learned in large parking lots before we went out on the road. The only rule was that Bradley couldn’t know. Nor, presumably, could his insurance company.

Once, my underage cousin Mark asked Bonnie Cox to take him somewhere after dinner. Bradley grabbed his keys and offered to drive him right then. Mark explained that it would be much better if his grandmother drove him and that he didn’t mind waiting. When the two of them returned an hour later, my grandfather was sitting in a chair reading. He lowered the newspaper and said, “Well, Mark, how does she drive?”

We could never be sure how much he really knew.

Both of my grandparents quit smoking at the same time about twenty years ago. At least that’s what he thought. He’d tell us that they hadn’t smoked for years and we’d smile and nod approvingly, knowing well that she smoked in their small bathroom by opening the window and rolling up a towel to seal the crack under the door.

After he retired, she wanted to buy some new dishes, but didn’t want to ask his approval so she waited each day until he took a nap. As soon as he dozed off, she walked to town and bought a dish. By the end of summer she had the full set. Their marriage wasn’t perfect, but it was good enough and they made it work.

After my grandfather retired, Bonnie Cox volunteered to help at the local nursing home. I’m not certain what she did there, but I believe she helped them sew and knit for recreation. She spent the last three years of her life living in that same home.

I visited her there as often as I could, but living six hundred miles away I could only manage a couple of visits or so a year. At first she was completely lucid, but her mental capacity slowly declined until our conversations would include stories from when she was my grandmother and stories from when she and I were in high school together. We would talk for hours and leaving her was one of the hardest things I ever did. I told myself that she wouldn’t miss me long because she wouldn’t remember that I had been there. That was probably true but it never really made feel any better about leaving.

One night last week, the nursing home called to say that her time was near. My mother and Tom rushed down to find her unconscious and, not knowing whether she would wake up, my mother sat next to her and spoke quietly near her ear, sharing feelings that she hoped her mother could somehow hear. Mom told me that she had been doing this for nearly a half hour when Bonnie Cox opened her eyes, looked at her daughter and very deliberately said in her best maternal voice, “Shut up!”

Then she told her daughter that it was past her bedtime. Apparently, she thought my mother was a teenager and was keeping her awake with all the talking.

My grandmother was born in 1914 and lived nearly 92 years. That means that she not only rocked, but at various times she was cool, neat, groovy, hip and the bee’s knees. Bonnie Cox always kept up with the latest thing.

We finished dinner and I went to my bedroom one Sunday evening when I was twelve. Bonnie and Bradley had come to our house in Madisonville to visit. It was February 9, 1964, a little after 8 pm CDT, to be exact. She came back to my bedroom to hurry me into the living room.

“Dirk, aren’t you going to watch the Ed Sullivan Show? Don’t you want to watch the Beatles?” she asked.

“What are the beagles?”

My dog, Lady, was a beagle and I thought she was pretty cool, so we started walking toward the living room’s enormous black-and-white TV set.

“The Beatles,” she corrected. “They have long hair and they sing really loud. They’re from England and they’re really the latest thing. Haven’t you heard about them from the kids at school?”

From the next room I heard, “She loves you and you know that can’t be bad. . .”. I had missed All My Loving and Till There Was You, but had made it in time for She Loves You, I Saw Her Standing There, and I Want To Hold Your Hand. My life was never the same. I suspect that makes me one of a handful of people from my generation who can say that his grandmother turned him on to the Beatles.

I’m glad my grandmother is no longer living in a nursing home. Maybe that’s another reason we were upbeat. During the funeral, I kept imagining her walking around in a pair of knee-length shorts looking like she did when I was in high school, free from her frail body and weakening mind.

She was married at age fifteen, gave birth to my mother in a log cabin when she was sixteen, was married to her childhood sweetheart for seventy years, had eight grandchildren, twenty-two great-grandchildren and four great-great-grandchildren, all who loved her dearly, lived to nearly 92 and was in good health for nearly all of it.

We should all be so blessed.

The Walk-Off

On June 9, 2007, the Tar Heels traveled to Tuscaloosa, Alabama to play the University of Alabama Crimson Tide, the winners of the Atlanta Regional in a “Super Regional” best of three series. Bama had beaten Troy twice to advance and would host the Super Regional against the Heels, and the winner would move on to the NCAA College World Series in Omaha.

Unlike North Carolina, Alabama is a traditional baseball powerhouse as evidenced by the comparative seating capacities of their baseball stadiums. Alabama’s Sewell-Thomas Stadium seats 6,118, while “The Bosh” holds about half that many spectators in Chapel Hill. I watched the game on ESPN and noticed maybe two hundred Carolina blue shirts and caps sitting together, as if on a lifeboat, in a sea of crimson. I wished for a moment that I had gone to Tuscaloosa to see the game in person, but with my recent fishing trips and an entire weekend of regional tournament games at The Bosh fresh in my history, I was pushing Vicki’s consideration of her husband’s sports addictions to its rightful limits. In fact, just watching the game on TV as she read on the bed next to me was pretty risky. We had been married for thirty-two years and I really wanted to see thirty-three.

Before the game, there was much discussion of Carolina’s highly vaunted pitching staff. Andrew Miller had just been selected with the sixth pick in the first round of the draft by the Detroit Tigers. There had been much speculation that he would go first overall. Andrew would start the first game on Friday night. Daniel Bard was the 28th pick overall by the Boston Red Sox and would start the second game.

Miller was unstoppable in the first game. Cavvy led off with the perfect at-bat, fighting off Bama’s previously undefeated starting pitcher for nine straight pitches, ending with a single. After Shelton flied out, Josh Horton, my favorite Tar Heel, batted third in the top of the first inning and drove the first pitch deep over the right field fence for a two-run lead and the Heels never looked back.

Josh was a sophomore All American shortstop batting over .400. That’s an amazing achievement at any level of baseball. Josh, Chad Flack and about a half dozen other baseball players rent a house across the street from my home. He’s an extremely polite and well-mannered young man who waves to me as he drives through the neighborhood and called me “Sir” on those rare occasions we have spoken.

In addition to winning my respect with his character and play, I probably root for Josh because I once played shortstop, too. It was Little League in Dawson Springs, Kentucky. After much begging, the coach, my best friend’s dad, moved me to short. I believe I was there for about an inning before he moved me back to the outfield. If I could have been a baseball player, though, I would have wanted to play shortstop.

“Fedex”, Mike Federowicz, also homered that inning and the team put up a total of seventeen hits. Carolina won the game 11-5, with Bama only able to make it look respectable by scoring a few runs in the late innings, well after the game had been decided.

Seventeen hits and a 95 mile-per-hour fastball are a deadly combination and the Alabama crowd spent a subdued evening in the stands. The crowd was still quiet at the start of game two on Saturday evening and they faced another top draft pick in Bard.

Cary’s girlfriend joined us for dinner. We grilled steaks and ate on the deck, enjoying the fabulous Chapel Hill weather that was partially responsible for our decision to move here. We sat under a perfect blue sky with the temperature in the low eighties and no humidity, just the kind of dinner I envisioned when I thought about how my retirement would be.

After dinner, I washed dishes and cleaned up the kitchen. By seven o’clock, I folded the damp dish towel, dropped it onto my clean kitchen counter and wandered up the stairs to find Vicki already settled on the bed with her book and a curled up ball of orange tabby lying beside her. Marco was well into his early evening nap.

When penguins find a hole in the ice, they line up single file and push the penguin at the head of the line into the hole. Then they wait, so the story goes. If the penguin returns to the surface soon, they assume that the area is free of leopard seals and other predators and they all dive in to feed. If the first penguin doesn’t return, they go looking for another hole in the ice.

I pushed a penguin into a hole in the ice.

“Honey, I may watch a few minutes of the Carolina game.”

“OK.” She didn’t even look up.

The first penguin had returned to the surface unscathed, so I turned on the TV, honestly planning to watch only an inning or so.

Daniel Bard’s start was disastrous and the laugher twenty-four hours earlier seemed like it was ages ago. Bard hit three batters in a row, loading the bases, and then walked in a runner. I have never seen a worse start. I felt terrible for the kid, having just become a millionaire with all the glory and glitz of the major league draft, only to fall on his face on ESPN. He got out of the inning without major damage, but Bama was able to score a run without a single hit.

Bard’s pitching woes continued until Coach Fox pulled him with two outs in the third inning. It was not the kind of night anyone had imagined for the usually outstanding young pitcher. Alabama led 2-1.

Bama had base runners every inning and the bases loaded on several occasions, but they were unable to score more than a single run each time. The Tide led 4-2 at the end of the fourth inning when Vicki laid down her book and looked at the TV.

“Sounds like they’re having a tough night,” she said.

“You know, they are. Nothing is going right for Carolina, but they only trail by two runs. That really isn’t bad, all things considered.”

Vicki went back to her book and I continued to watch in quiet pain through the middle innings. Then in the eighth inning, all hell broke loose.

Trailing 4-2, Carolina’s Reid Fronk was hit by a pitch to lead off the inning. Josh followed with a single. With two men on, Chad Flack crushed a three-run homer over the scoreboard in left field to put Carolina in the lead for the first time all evening. As usual, the entire Carolina team met Flack behind home plate for a round of high-fives after he touched ‘em all.

The small Carolina contingent cheered wildly in the stands, and so did I. I jumped off the bed, threw my fist in the air as the camera tracked the ball’s flight into the night and screamed, “Yes! It’s gone!” Vicki looked at me like I had lost my mind, a look I had seen thousands of time while watching my beloved Kentucky Wildcats play basketball on TV. Her look no longer fazed me.

Five thousand Tide supporters couldn’t believe it. With one swing of the bat, Alabama’s star freshman pitcher, Tommy Hunter, who had put on a beautiful performance for seven innings left the game with the potential to go into the record book as the losing pitcher. The crimson-clad fans sat in silence as the team escorted Flack back to the dugout. Jay Cox singled and Benji Johnson doubled him home for a 6-4 Tar Heel lead.

The Tide fans weren’t quiet for long. A few minutes later, in the bottom of the eighth, the Tide’s Alex Avila, who had recently gone something like oh-for-2006, hit a three-run homer to put Bama back on top 7-6.

I felt deflated, but apparently Chad Flack did not. Carolina got a runner into scoring position, but Josh struck out swinging and Carolina was down to its last three strikes. The Tide fans stood and cheered for their team to get the final out and force a game three on Sunday.

Meanwhile, Flack walked over to an assistant coach and said, “We’re not going to lose this game.” (An assistant coach later confirmed this story, according to the local newspaper.) He then stepped up to the plate and drove a walk-off two-run homer over the fence, the right field fence this time, for the second consecutive inning.

As the ball sailed into the night and Bama’s right fielder turned and ran backwards toward the fence, I again jumped off the bed, waved my fist in the air and screamed, “Is it going? Is it going? Yes!”

Cary and Eric had joined us in the bedroom after my eighth inning screaming episode and had decided to watch the end of the game. Cary and I exchanged high fives and the two of them laughed at my inanity.

Vicki smiled. “Dirk, please. You’re scaring the cat.”

Again, the Carolina team waited for Flack to round the bases and touch home, but this time, instead of a round of high-fives and an escort back to the dugout, the entire team devolved into a huge human pile of screaming college baseball players on top of home plate, celebrating their upcoming trip to the College World Series in Omaha.

I believe the last Alabama game was one of the most amazing baseball games I have ever watched. I have watched many over the years and Chad Flack’s personal performance was among the very best I have ever seen.

I watched Bucky Dent, a fellow Kentuckian by the way, hit his game-winning homer for the Yankees in Fenway Park. I watched Tony Perez of my beloved Big Red Machine do the same thing in the same park for an eventual World Series win for Cincinnati. Probably the most heroic at-bat I ever saw, maybe anyone ever saw, was Kirk Gibson limping to the plate for the Dodgers to hit a come-from-behind home run to beat Oakland in the World Series.

Now, granted, these were in the Majors, not college. But they only did it once. Chad Flack did it twice in consecutive innings. His three-run blast in the eighth should have won the game, but when it didn’t, he just walked up to the plate and did it again in the ninth.

The New

“Are you snagged?”

It looked that way to Cary, standing in the next pool downstream and waiting for me to fish the proverbial “one last spot” before calling it a day. He had decided to rest his sore wrist (too much wrist and not enough forearm in his fly rod casting motion) and just watch me for the last few minutes.

My rod was bent nearly in half and the line appeared to be snagged on something next to a fallen log, or perhaps on the log itself. In fact, he was witnessing a momentary stalemate between me and a rather large smallmouth bass that had just swallowed my fly and was trying its best to swim under that log to break off my leader. Maybe he had gotten word from the only bass I had hooked the day before that had successfully broken off my tippet at the fly knot and had disappeared downstream, jumping two more times on the way in attempts to dislodge my now untethered fly. I was trying to horse this latest fish into open water without repeating yesterday's broken tippet heartbreak, but for a moment the tug-of-war was a draw and I suppose it did appear that I was simply snagged on something.

Another minute and I worked him away from the log and then landed him by grabbing his lower jaw firmly with my thumb and forefinger and lifting him out of the water. After two days of fishing, I had finally landed a nice fish minutes before giving up. One’s perception of a fishing trip can improve dramatically with the landing of a single, nice fish, as Cary had also learned about fifteen minutes earlier when he caught his only fish of the day. I had been fishing the pool downstream from where Cary now stood (we leap-frog pools when we fish together) when I glanced upstream to check on my son and found him grinning broadly and holding a large smallmouth by the lower jaw.

Wading a river to fly fish is physically demanding. Fishing upstream to avoid spooking the fish in clear, low water, every step is against the current. You fight to maintain your balance while stepping on underwater rocks that you can barely see and you sometimes guess wrong and fall. In fast-moving water, just looking down at your feet is disorienting. You can stand perfectly still and yet sense that you are being swept downstream. I am more exhausted by a day of wading than by weight lifting or mountain biking.

We left the river early the night before to set up our camp and to get dinner started and as it turned out we needed the extra time. Cary is an excellent cook so I offered to set up the tent and build a fire while he grilled a couple of filets on the disposable grill I had brought along. The charcoal that came with the grill wouldn’t light so he decided to cook them on the Coleman. A critical piece of the stove had been left at home, though, so we considered cooking them over the fire.

You need hot coals to cook over a campfire and it can take hours for logs to burn down that far. Finally, I decided to drive to a nearby country store for better charcoal and ice and in no time at all Cary was grilling the filets.
If anything tastes better than an ice-cold beer out of the cooler, ice water dripping from its sides, with a grilled filet after a day of fishing I am yet to find it. It brought out the Iron Chef in Cary. He cooked some sliced onions in a frying pan over the remaining coals with a beer reduction and drizzled the onions over the steaks. We are talking some serious campfire eating here.

The entire trip had gotten off to a dubious start before we even left Greensboro. I picked Cary up at his apartment near campus and as we started to leave for the river, I noticed a screw in the outer edge of the Jeep’s tire tread and the depressing bulge of the sidewalls that tells you the tire is going flat. The tire store found another screw in the center of the tread, remnants from our recent home roofing job. I find that when you have that kind of work done you need to plan on about six months worth of flat tires until you find all of the stray nails. The first screw appeared to be too close to the sidewall to permit a repair and I began to think about where I might find a matching tire to purchase. The repair looked workable once the mechanic saw the inside of the tire, though, and he had us back on the road in half an hour.

Now, you might think that getting a flat, losing a fish to a broken leader and encountering multiple difficulties with our cooking apparatus were signs of a fishing trip gone awry, but you would be mistaken. In fact we were having a blast. It takes a lot more than that, a hurricane perhaps, to spoil two days of fly fishing and camping with your son or daughter. We still hadn’t landed any fish at that point, but the fishing was fun, the river was beautiful and we’d had a great meal and couple of cold ones. We sat around the campfire and talked about everything and nothing until ten o'clock, then decided to pack it in and get an early start.

The temperatures had been cool during the day for August and a slight but constant breeze on the river made it even sweeter. The evening low was in the mid sixties, ideal for sleeping, a bit warm for the sleeping bags at times. I kept rotating into the bag when I got cool, out when I felt hot. We could hear geese honking and flying over the nearby river all night. The sound was pleasant until a flight flew right over our tent about 3:00 a.m. Those suckers are loud up close enough to hear their wings flapping. I asked Cary if they had awakened him the night before and he said yes, and that during those first confusing moments of honking after he awoke he feared that he was driving the wrong way on the Goose Expressway.

After a quick breakfast of pecan rolls, plums and orange juice (my coffee maker was useless without the Coleman), we briefly debated whether to bike part of the New River Park Bike Trail that ran right through our camp or to wade back into the river for round two with the smallmouth. The bikes seemed like a better use of the cool, early part of the morning, so we pulled them off the back of the Jeep and headed out on a trail that follows the river with great views around every turn. We passed two older ladies walking the trail and I asked them to take our picture with my point-and-shoot camera. It would have been a great picture, too, if she had pushed the shutter release instead of the power on button.

We struck camp and got back on the road to Greensboro and Chapel Hill, exhausted and exhilarated. We talked a little, but mostly we both just watched the center line of the interstate zip by. As a friend told me years ago, sitting around after an hour of full court basketball, you're damned near at peace with the world when you're exhausted. I could nap for a week. Then it hit me.

“Want to shoot a round of sporting clays?” I asked.

He stared intently at the road ahead and thought for a few seconds. “I don’t have any classes next Friday”.