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Letter from the editor

Posted on December 31, 2009 by Staff

Two thousand ten, thankfully, is just on the horizon. It’s a year that for me will mark a quarter-century since I traveled east across the mountains with nary a nickel to my name (it was $137 as I recall) to make a new life in this place I now with great fondness call home.

If you are new here and staying through the holidays, one piece of advice I can offer is to get out and about. Wander the downtowns, stroll through campus, the museums and galleries. Then grab a seat and take in the pub life.

It’s in the lulls, particularly around the holidays, that the little towns of this corner of the Piedmont reveal their hearts and souls and hidden histories.

This is when some of those bright young minds we’ve set loose upon the world find their way back home, and all over the place little reunions dot the sidewalks and nightlife with the kind of sparks that happen between people after long separations of time and space. Listen in to those homecomings as the locals share their memories and catch up and you’ll learn more about this place than all the guides you’ll ever buy.

As for the Mrs. and me, for the first time in quite awhile we are heading west across the mountains in late December and back to the other place we call home. Normally, right about now, we are on the coast, a ritual we have relished and one blessed and coveted by our landlocked Midwestern relatives. We prefer our holidays calm and vacations near motionless, and there is something about the beach in winter, as the year comes to an end, that is soothing.
This year, though, we’ve had a loss – her mom – and we need to be there. I know many others are missing someone right about now, too.

When you lose someone who led a big life, someone with strong beliefs and convictions, the void is pronounced and profound. Big Sal was such a person. She would tell you what she thought. She didn’t spend her life on the sidelines either. When you’re close to someone like that, you forget how extraordinary that is.

Her independence was legendary. I witnessed some of it in the way that, despite excruciating arthritis, she refused to give up trying to walk and stand and get around on her own.

And yet, though possessed of such a strong will, she made her way through this world with a gentleness few can match. Everyone she encountered, especially the people working in the restaurants and stores she frequented, was important. At the funeral home in the little town where she lived pretty much her whole life, her visitation was populated not just by the many family and close friends she had but by waitresses and shop clerks who saw her obituary in the paper and needed to come by to say so long to the lady they’d talked to all these years. Some didn’t even know her last name. They just knew she cared.

Most people have friends, a family member or two or at least some old dog that will miss ’em a bunch. It takes a special person to make complete strangers feel that way.

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