Deerfield

 On Thursday evening Trish and I were at the beautiful Deerfield Episcopal Retirement Community in Asheville.

I got to tell stories in the evening to a full house of wonderful and supportive listeners.

One of the nice things about being there was meeting so many people who are happy about where they live.

They had had Bil Lepp earlier in the year and also many of the people we met go to Jonesborough each year to the National Festival.  This is an audience that loves and appreciates storytelling.

We even got to spend the night there and eat with the residents.  Trish and I both hope to come to Deerfield again.

Best of Our State

 Our first event of the New Year was  The Best of Our  State event put on by our wonderful North Carolina definitive magazine, OUR STATE.

This event is held once each year at the historic Carolina Hotel Resort in Pinehurst, North Carolina.  It features speakers, authors, musicians, all from the state of North Carolina.  It has been my privilege to tell stories at four of these events and to be invited back for 2024.

It is a special treat to be at the Carolina Hotel and Resort because my daddy used to come to this same place each year during my childhood to the State Bankers’ Convention. He would tell us all about it and  I’m sure he loved coming here.

Elizabeth Hudson, the brilliant Editor in Chief of OUR STATE, opened the event following a two year hiatus due to COVID.  She explained the editorial decision to keep the positive tenor of the magazine going through the pandemic by never using the word “COVID” in an article and by never showing a photograph of a person wearing a mask.  She is so upbeat in every way.

I then opened the full event with a fun hour of stories for me with a wonderful audience.

Other presenters for the weekend included Eliot Engel with Edgar Allen Poe and bluegrass music with Balsam Range.

The event next year will be back in Pinehurst the first full weekend of the New Year.  Among others, I will be joined there by dear friends, The Chatham Rabbits, with their original music.

If you are not an OUR STATE subscriber, you must not be a real North Carolinian.  They have been publishing North Carolina since 1933.

My Aunt Nancy

 My mother was the oldest of nine children, seven girls and two boys.  Only two of those aunts and uncles of mine are still living: my Uncle Steve (Mama’a baby brother), and my Aunt Nancy.

Today my Aunt Nancy is ninety-five years old!

Her adult life was spent in Morristown, Tennessee, near where her husband, my Uncle Jim, was a chemist for the American Enka Company.

In the past couple of years two things changed for her: Uncle Jim died, and her daughter, my cousin Nancy Carol, retired from teaching in Texas. Nancy Carol and her husband, Gordon, moved back near home to Lake Junaluska, North Carolina.  With Uncle Jim gone and Nancy Carol nearby, a lot of rethinking was done.  The result was that in recent months Aunt Nancy gave up her house and moved to the Brooks-Howell United Methodist Retirement home in Asheville.

This puts her on the route we frequently travel and so Trish and I get to stop off there and see her.  A big treat for us was for me to get to tell Christmas stories to the residents there back in December.

Happy New Year and Happy Birthday to Aunt Nancy!

It is so much fun for us to spend time with her!

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.