Dublin, Georgia

 Natalie and Will Curry are some of our best friends.  I have known Natalie since she was about eight years old in LaGrange, Georgia, where I worked with her mother in the school system.

I performed Natalie and Will’s wedding ceremony and they come to Ocracoke to vacation each summer.

Natalie and Will live in Will’s home town of Dublin, Georgia, where Natalie is the owner of Smith’s Jewelers in Dublin, an old store that has been in business more than 100 years and to which she has given new life under her ownership.

Most years I travel to Dublin for a storytelling performance sponsored by Smith’s.  The tickets are free but they have to be picked up at the jewelry store!

One of the most outstanding things about Natalie’s business is that she shares a significant amount of profit with non-profit agencies in the Dublin area. Their is sharing at the end of each quarter and the last quarter of each year the profit sharing is devoted to the Salvation Army for family Christmas needs.

My performance this year was the presentation time for this gift and an additional occasion for people to donate to the Salvation Army.

My performance is always in the old Carnegie Library building in downtown Dublin, a lovely historic building now used for events.

At the end of the Christmas Story performance, Natalie presented the store’s check to Charika Todd of the Salvation Army.  The great surprise was the amount of $5,000.00, more than doubling last year’s gift.

We are very proud of Natalie for the wonderful example of kind generosity her business sets for everyone.

The Alamo

 Just a block off the Riverwalk is the Alamo. Of course the former mission church is the site of the 1836 last stand battle with the forces of Santa Anna in which the entire defending US forces were killed.  This was the death battle of Davy Crockett, Jim Bowie, and more than sixty other fighters.  The reaction led to the final defeat of Santa Anna and the independence of Texas as a country. 

It was later that Texas became a state, but, they still mark 1836 as their year of independence.

We took an audio tour of the whole Alamo site, going through the small-feeling building for its holding so much history.  Our tour included the barracks and other outbuildings as well as gardens.  Everyone around us seemed quiet, as were we, as we walked around.

As we departed the site, we saw this huge live oak tree.  Living on an island where we have some big live oaks, we were astounded by the spread of this giant. It made a good departure point for our visit.

San Antonio Riverwalk

 The gushing springs that form the headwaters of the San Antonio River are just four miles from downtown San Antonio.  Since earliest native settlement the river has been the lifeblood and center of life in this part of Texas.

In 1921 a huge flood lifted waters as high as twelve feet above normal causing terrible flooding all over the city.  It was proposed, and then carried out, that a flood canal be built to bypass the large horseshoe bend that now forms the Riverwalk.  With both the original river’s route and the flood canal filled with water, a circular waterway became open with the now lazy river ready for creative development.

The biggest boost in Riverwalk development came in preparation for the 1968 World’s Fair as hotels and restaurants, as well as the “walk” itself, being built for the coming tourists.  People fell in love with this part of San Antonio, and the rest is history.  The Riverwalk is the top tourist attraction in the entire state of Texas.

Trish and I had three extra days between the Midland Festival and my next engagement in LaGrange, Georgia, so, we decided to have a little pre-Christmas mini-vacation on the Riverwalk.

We slept and ate and walked and rode the boats on the river for those days.  We rode twice in the daytime, the trips being very different with one another because our guides were so different.  Then we took the City Lights ride at night on a night when the near-full moon added to the multitude of strands of colored lights.  We had a great time and rested up for the last weeks of this trip.

Midland Storytelling Festival

 We just finished the 31st year of the Midland, Texas, Storytelling Festival.

Rex Ellis and I were the starters of this Festival organized by Lucinda Windsor and the late Patty Smith after meeting both of us at Winter Tales in Oklahoma City all those years ago.

This year I joined with Motoko, Bil Lepp, Laura Pershin Raynor, Barbara-McBride Smith, Antonio Rocha, Charlotte Blake Alston, and Willy Claflin for the Festival.

We all did school and community programs on Friday and then started the Festival itself with a live broadcast on Basin PBS television that evening.  The two hour show featured student tellers along with    Motoko, Antonio, Barbara, and me and was emceed by Charlotte.

On Saturday we did three live shows that were also live-streamed for those who could not or chose not to leave their homes.

Next year the Festival will return for heat 32 on November 30 and December 1.

Lexington Memories

 In 1969 I was graduated from Duke University Divinity School and, after spending a year as Associate Minister at First United Methodist Church in High Point, was given my own first church. It was called, in Methodist terminology, a “two point charge,” meaning that I actually had two churches.

This was in Lexington, North Carolina, and the churches were Wesley Heights and St. Timothy’s United Methodist Churches.  Both of these churches were founded on 1959 in a period of active church expansion and when I got them they were very much adolescents.  When I arrived both were in the middle of their second stage building programs.

We lived on the west side of town in the parsonage that was beside Wesley Heights.  It was the “big” church that had worship at 11:00 on Sundays.  St. Timothy’s was the “little” church across town and they had worship at 9:30 on Sundays.  Each Sunday I would drive across town for the 9:30 service and then back across for 11:00.  

I was there for three years before being appointed as Director of the Cherokee County Parish in far west North Carolina.  It was a good time and our first son, Doug, was born there.

As Trish and I started out on this trip to Texas, our first-day route took us right by Lexington.  I knew that St. Timothy’s had to be right off of I-85 and so we drove over the hill to have a look.  

On our first pass we missed seeing the church as the trees had grown so much in the last fifty years it was partially obscured.  We turned around and, there it was!  We drove up and discovered that it looked just like it did all that time ago but the sign now said it was a Free Will Baptist Church.  Well, things change, don’t they?  I had heard that St. Timothy’s closed, but had no idea what had happened since.  Here before our eyes we saw the answer.