I had known women who wanted children, who had spooked me. One in particular was a candidate for marriage and motherhood not far behind me: Betsy had moved in, and then out, over the course of six months, living with me in the North Carolina mountains, in a cabin on a white water river. She […]
My loneliness had reached a point where I no longer acknowledged the dull pain of it in the present moment. I feared the future, if to go there meant going alone. I desired to end that fear immediately, to fall in love again. I was always ready for whatever you call it when desire finds […]
THE ROMANCE OF PARENTHOOD AWAKENS The impulse hit me like remembering something you forgot when you’re already on the highway. Like love at first sight. Suddenly I wanted children. Not just wanted, I thought I needed a baby, like you need your own pillow when you go far away, else when you arrive, you can’t […]
The best part of me will always live for the rhythms of summer, in the Land of Shag, where the tunes on the jukeboxes never change. That old gold music invites me to dance, to laugh and remember. It reminds me of lifeguards and pretty girls in the heat of youth’s eternal summer. All day long […]
In Myrtle Beach, the first really big idea was the Ocean Forest Hotel. When I was a kid, six or eight years old, every time Daddy took us to the Dunes Club for Sunday lunch—past the Ocean Forest, the grand hotel— it completely altered my perception of Myrtle Beach. Suddenly my hometown was no longer […]
Come the summer 2015, seventy-two years ago, new music that would mesmerize teenagers worldwide was heard first on the beaches of North and South Carolina. Southern kids called it Beach Music. Because in 1943, at the beach was the only place white kids heard the big city rhythms of the ghetto, Race Music, later renamed […]
Myrtle Beach was always a gold-rush territory. Big ideas and risky ventures have ever-permeated the atmosphere. It started back with the turpentine industry and commercial agriculture before the turn of the century; hence the original name of the biggest business in town, Myrtle Beach Farms, now called Burroughs and Chapin. Myrtle Beach Farms used to […]
My daddy used to say that hard times in Myrtle Beach would never last as long as in the rest of the country because all year, working people would save their money, and in the summer, flock to the Beach and spend it. Having the ocean for a tourist-trap was almost like cheating in a […]
Come the summer of 2015, the Shag, the legendary dance of the South, will celebrate its 72nd anniversary of conception. In June of 1943, it came to pass that Race Music, gut-level Rhythm and Blues, the sound later labeled Rock-n-Roll found its way onto jukeboxes along the Carolina coast. The Southern teenagers called it Beach […]