Christmas on Providence Drive

When we are children, the world becomes a place of wonder at Christmas time. Everyone seems to be in on it. City and town councils have the streets specially decorated with lights and greenery. Seasonal music surrounds us in the stores and malls. Neighbors bake cookies and treats and leave them at each other’s doorsteps. People smile and wave at one another and exchange season’s greetings. Today I am letting go of my cynicism about Christmas. There are plenty of folks writing about that. I will choose today to remember with fondness the beauty and wonderment that I have experienced at Christmas. This is for my mother, Margaret Franklin, who loved and sometimes lived for all things Christmas. 

 My earliest memories are of Christmas on Providence Drive in Charlotte. There are only a few years that I recall when our entire family all lived in the same house. We lived in a cozy little cottage style home nestled between Cotswold and Eastover. My parents, two older brothers, and my big sister all shared one bathroom. Of course, as the baby of the family, I was always up first. I would race down from my attic room, before daylight, to wake my parents. They would say that I was too early, but they would let me wait at the foot of their bed until they were ready. Most likely, Randy was the next one up. This is when Mom and Dad would give the OK to start getting up. Mom would make us wait while she fixed coffee for her and Dad. Dad would knock on Hope’s door off the hallway where we waited. The door out to the living room would be closed. Just on the other side waited the tree surrounded by wrapped gifts from our parents and bigger unwrapped gifts from Santa. Mom would wake Tommy from his basement room and bring him through the dining room into the hall with us. Dad would crack the door to the living room just enough to go through and start the Christmas music on the old Zenith console stereo. Without fail, Mom would start saying in an excited tone, “Did Santa come?” over and over to get us extra revved up. Then Dad would open the door wide, and I would race in to see what Santa had brought. One year a new bicycle, another a Lionel train set. It was always something special and we were lucky that our parents saved and scrimped to be able to make this magic happen for four kids. We would shout out our excitement over the big gifts, and then Mom would remind us to check our stockings. The stockings were packed mostly with candy, but the toe was always rounded out nicely by a real Florida Orange or two. If it was the weather was cool enough, there would be a fire in the fireplace to warm us as we all took turns opening our gifts. Then it was time to take our gifts to our rooms and lay them all out on our beds so that we could show them to whoever might visit that day. 

At their house, Mamaw and Papaw would do the same in anticipation of our visit to see them a little later in the morning. They were prolific greeting card senders, so they also received more Christmas cards than anyone I knew. They had so many, that they would run strings across the room, near the ceiling and hang the cards for all to see. Then it was time to have Christmas dinner. On Christmas day, lunch is called dinner. This was one of the rare occasions that the grandchildren were allowed to go into the formal rooms at Mamaw and Papaws’ house. The food would be out buffet style on the fancy dining room table. I could see the virtually untouched and poshly furnished living room from here. We got a glimpse, which made the day a bit more magical, and then were shuffled back into the Den and breakfast area. Sometimes we were there at the same time as our cousins. We would have each brought along a special gift to show each other. We would all be allowed to go in my grandparents’ bedroom to see their gifts neatly arranged and displayed on their king-sized bed. They had the only king-sized bed I had ever seen. It seemed so luxurious. Mamaw and Papaw grew up on farms near small towns, but they enjoyed nice things. After the hoopla, we would say our farewells. Papaw would do his special double handed, thumb twirling wave at us as we drove away. Mamaw would blow kisses and occasionally hold up one foot and wave at us with it. We always honked the horn as we drove away. 

 The rest of the day would be up to each of us individually. I would hop on the new bike or run as fast as I could to the neighborhood kids houses and we would all compare the loot we hauled in that day. Supper would be leftovers from Christmas dinner, packed and sent home with us by Mamaw. It was a big day, and we were all exhausted but happily content as we got ready for bed. 

 My mother was happiest when family spent time together. She was so proud of us all and she made sure that we all felt special. Our happiness was her happiness. And on Christmas she always did all she could to make us the happiest kids on earth.

I miss the way Mom and Dad talked.

I miss the way my parents talked. I love accents. 

Colloquial pronunciations, phrases, and speech patterns seem to be disappearing. I believe that mass communication like radio and TV have played a part in watering down our familiar ways of speaking. When I was a kid in the 70’s, I watched The Brady Bunch and The Partridge family. The actors spoke as if they had no accent at all. Some of it rubbed off on my generation. Migration played a role in softening our accents as well. During my elementary school years, there was only one family that I knew that was from somewhere besides Charlotte. It was a place called New York City. The Carney’s were our next-door neighbors and they spoke very differently from us. When their nephew, Jerry, would visit from New York, it was like some exotic foreigner had come to town. We asked him about the Statue of Liberty and the Empire State Building. We were astonished that Jerry had been to neither of them. I wish that I had managed to hang on more to the gentile and lyrical way my parents spoke. I mean, I still pronounce many words just like my parents did, but it does not sing and flow or follow the same cadence. The way they waxed poetic about the pinkness of the sky as we took a sunset boat ride up the main channel of Lake Norman. The sun would disappear just beyond the tree-lined shore. Their words sauntered like a walk along a meandering path. My parents were both born and raised in Charlotte, North Carolina in the 40s and 50s. People from other parts of the United States probably thought that all southerners sounded the same. They could not discern a Piedmont accent from an Appalachian or Coastal accent. To some we just all sounded southern, which is fine, but do not confuse southern with Country. Country is not just in the south. North Carolina is blessed with three distinct geographical regions. For most of our history, geography kept Carolinians somewhat isolated. Our coastal areas were difficult to navigate due to treacherous shoals and shallow sounds. Before modern highways, the Appalachian Mountains were only reached by those who had previously resided hilly country in some other part of the world. Charlotte sits squarely in the Piedmont. Charlotteans, and residents of the other mid-size cities in the Piedmont developed a style of elocution that was Charleston elegant, without the haughtiness. My parents spoke in an elegant, yet humble tone. I find that a difficult line to walk the talk, but it was second nature to them. I can hear a Charlotte accent a mile away. Several months ago, an elderly gentleman came into a store where I was working. His accent was exactly like my fathers. I asked if he happened to grow up in Eastover or Myers Park, both are old Charlotte areas where my father had spent his childhood. The man seemed happy I noticed and said that he had indeed grown up in Eastover. He even shared a memory of having a grade school crush on my father’s sister Mary Josephine! My Aunt Jo. When I hear someone from Charlotte speak in that old Charlotte way, it melts my heart. Sometimes I hear my parents in the voices of their friends that are still with us, like Nancy Thomas and Catherine Barnhardt Browning. I hear the warmth of my mother’s tone in the natural drawl spoken by my cousins Marimac and Suzanne. They managed to hang on to more than I did. My siblings and I sound like each other. We certainly use phrases that came directly from our parents. Yet, Charlotte has grown so much that most folks are from somewhere else. All those new bits and pieces of language work their way in to and meld with our own and create something new. I guess that is the way language works. But I would give the world to hear Mom to say that something is, “just wuhndehrful,” once more. I want to hear her kind, soft southern voice say, “It’ll be bettahr in the morning. Ev’rything seems worse at night. I want to hear my Dad say that he can’t talk on the phone right now because, “I’m holdin’ court on the patio.” Oh to hear him say any of these things one more time! “I’m watching the Golf Toonament.” “Pass the Wooster, please.” “These pi-tachios are great”. I want him to tell me how much he always loved my “muhther.”

Sweet Treats at the 7-11

When I was ten years old, I was filled with delicious anticipation whenever I took a little spin on my bike to the 7-11.  The pockets of my camp pants would be heavily weighted down change that I had scrounged around for. It was amazing how careless adults were with their money!  Pennies, Nickels, dimes, and an occasional Quarter or two were everywhere in our house. In junk drawers, under cushions, in little knick-knack dishes, and old beer steins. Once I was satisfied that I had found all the dough I could, I was off to purchase as much candy as my newly found treasure would buy. But, it could not be just any candy. It had to be a carefully chosen mix of good candy that also offered a high return on investment. My profit was sweetness and the goal was to buy an assortment that would last a very long time. It was the 1970s, and the candy racks were filled with varieties that have mostly disappeared from the shelves today.

There was logic behind each selection I made. My pocket change would only go so far. I knew that to get my money's worth, I would have to purchase a certain amount of what the old folks called penny candy. These were more like nickel or dime candy in my day. My go-to for this category were called bb-bats!  bb-bats were basically a kind of flavored taffy on a paper stick. They came in fruit flavors that had that off-kilter, uncanny, artificial taste to them. Banana was my favorite. Strawberry was a distant second. I would get about four or five of these and still have plenty of coins remaining.

Next, I had to decide what my major purchase would be. Which candy bar or two would I spend up to 35 cents on? This was a make or break decision. I could have gone for a classic like a Snickers, but that would be a mistake. It would be at the top end of the price range and it was shorter than some other bars to boot. My decision usually boiled down to this: 

Choice A: I could go with a Marathon bar. It was 8 inches long!  And we knew that because they printed a ruler right on the package.  We had been taught in school that the metric system was coming to America any day then. So, the good folks at the Marathon bar company had included centimeters on the ruler as well. I now knew that 8 inches equaled twenty centimeters.

 I believe that is the only metric conversion that I still know today.

Choice B:  The less obvious, but equally compelling option of the enigmatic
Nestle's Choco-Lite bar. Was it a weird texture? Was there something a little off with the flavoring? The answer was yes, on both counts. It was described as being filled with crispy chips. I do not know what chips they are talking about. In my experience there was nothing but little air holes dispersed throughout the whole candy bar. The wrapper boasted that it would give me a special chocolaty feeling. Notice they said chocolaty, not chocolate. But, it had a couple of things going for it.  First, it was usually priced a bit lower than the other bars. And second, I have to admit that there was something to that bit about a special chocolaty feeling. It seemed to make the sweetness linger a little longer on my tongue.

Usually, I had enough to purchase both bars, as long as I bypassed some of the other similarly priced non-bar candy.  So, my other option might be to get the Marathon bar. It would take a long time to chew through 8 inches of the chocolate coated and extra-chewy caramel filling. Instead of the chocolaty air-hole bar, I could go with something much more sugary. I often went for the Fun Dip. Whoever invented this was a genius! It was basically a laminated foil pouch filled with flavored sugar crystals. The brilliance was in the method that the good folks at fun dip invented for eating the sugary powder. In a separate compartment in the pouch was a little stick made of compressed sugar. So, you would lick the sweet stick to wet it with your saliva, and then dip the sticky-stick into the flavored sugar. It was like magic the way the colorful sugar crystals would then cling to the stick. Then you return the coated, sugary utensil back to your mouth to suck the flavored crystal right off of it. This process was then repeated over and over until all the fun dip was gone. You had no choice at this point then but to finish off the much diminished stick.

There were other choices that could be made. Some of my other options included a candy that offered more than just a sweet flavor. Zotz were little hard candies with a wicked surprise. Soon after you popped it in your mouth, you would feel a little bit of some fizzy, sweet and sour, substance begin to leak from inside the hard shell. Not long after that, the candy shell would give way to a complete release of its fizzy center. It virtually exploded in your mouth, and soon you would feel like a rabid dog foaming at the mouth.  Everyone raves about Pop-Rocks, but they had nothing on Zotz. 

Some others that might make it in my mix were candies like Now & Laters, which we called something that sounded like Ni-ar-laters. They were basically little, sour blocks of taffy. I also enjoyed Sugar Daddy's. Not the most politically sensitive name for a candy. Speaking of politically incorrect, I occasionally bought candy cigarettes. They were a clear attempt to normalize smoking, but back then I just thought they made me look cool. They tasted like sweet chalk, but flavor was not really the point.

The candy that disappointed me the most were called Bottle Caps. They were shaped like the caps on soda bottles. They were supposed to have soda flavorings. They were  flavors like cola or root beer,  and orange or grape soda. They tasted awful. It was a great concept, but can you imagine if they had done this right? What if they had combined efforts with one of the major soda makers. You could have had more genuine flavors. They could have capitalized on the name recognition of Coca-Cola or Pepsi-Cola. A real missed opportunity.

These days I can not eat candy in the kind of quantities I did as a kid. I believe it would be the end of me if I did. 

I still have a sweet tooth though. 

And I still get that delicious anticipatory feeling when I drive my car to  the 7-11 to grab a zero-sugar Monster drink and a one dollar  pack of two freshly baked cookies, no bag please. 

Check out Marathon bar commercial here.

I Remember Places

“There are places I remember 

in my life, though some have changed 

Some forever not for better 

Some have gone and some remain.”

John Lennon

There are places that I remember in clear detail.  In my life, hardly any places remain as they were. However, I can call them up from the files in my brain and magically transport myself to them as they existed before. My mother re-entered the workforce when I was about ten years old. I had lots of time to explore and roam free, by myself. We lived in Charlotte on a street of small cottages between Eastover and Cotswold. These neighborhoods were divided by, Briar Creek, one of Charlotte’s main waterways. On our side of Briar Creek, there was a pocket of woods with trails, a tributary creek, four small lakes, and a real waterfall.

I spent countless hours exploring every inch of these woods without supervision. I could never become bored in these woods. There were always things to do. I could build little boats made of twigs and send them sailing down the creek. Would my small vessels make it past the boulders, through the rapids, to land safely in a large and calm pool that beavers had created by building a dam? It was a perilous journey for a boat made of twigs. Some made it, some did not.

I look back on the woods now with reverence. For me, it is a sacred place. It may not exist now as it did then, but it remains the same in my mind. I can go back anytime I want and traverse the trails that my feet took so many steps along. I can close my eyes and step into the Morrison’s yard where I would cut across to make my way to the foot of the waterfall. In my mind, I can hear the water spilling over the concrete dam and crashing over the rocks that have been unearthed by the current. I can visualize the old split rail fence that had collapsed in places making it easy to cross into the woods. 

There was an easy spot to rock-hop across the creek to get to the main part of the woods. This was where the trail began. Then it went up a steep hill beside the waterfall, past the first lake which was created by the dam. This is where the trail turned back in the opposite direction and leveled off. From there I made my way to the second lake; an old, abandoned rock quarry. There were two huge boulders that served as a kind of overlook. Sometimes, I might just sit there for a while. If the water was clear, you could sometimes spot an old cart that was used to haul rocks deep beneath the surface. A little further down the trail was a spot known as “Skipper’s Island.” This is where the older kids would hang out when they skipped school, hence the name. Skipper’s Island was really a peninsula that jutted out into the third lake, which was more of a wetland than a lake. It was not deep, and the ground was always soggy around it. Neither the rock quarry nor the lake at Skipper’s Island were connected to the creek.

From Skippers Island, I could backtrack down the trail which then continued to follow the bends in the creek. This part of the trail was high above the creek. The water had cut deep into the earth creating two opposing red-clay walled cliffs. From the trail, you could look over the cliff's edge and see the deep pool built by  beavers.  The water was green and murky. I once saw some sort of giant lizard leap from the top of the cliff and land right in the pool. No one believed me when I told them about it.

Moving along, the trail made its way down a slope and through a wide gulley. The gulley opened to an old wood and rope bridge that connected back to the other edge of the Morrisons yard. Sometimes I might cross the bridge and head back home. Sometimes I would continue following the creek. The trail was not as reliable the rest of the way, but it was easy rock hopping once I was this far downstream of the waterfall. Near the bridge was an area called, “Sand Circle.” A sandy spot encircled by trees that had fallen during a tornado that touched down there. The sand was yellow and flecked with shiny mica. There were freshwater clam shells everywhere. I liked to dig through the sand to find large pieces of mica. For me, it was like finding gold.

At this point, the creek was shallow enough to ford. Once on the opposite side of the creek, the trail was narrow and uneven. This was where I was most likely to slip and would end up getting soaked in creek water. But the last leg of the trail was worth the risk. As I rounded the last bend, lake number four would come into view. It was the largest lake. The trail side of the lake was wooded. The other side was not. There was a large and lush lawn that gently sloped upwards to a stately two-story brick home. To me, it was a mansion. There were mansions on the trail side as well, but they were hidden by the dense woods. I would make my way along the shoreline, wondering what would happen if someone saw me. Would they yell at me to get off their property? No one ever saw me though.

Stonebridge was the final stop and it was at the far end of the lake. Just in front of the bridge was a dam built from stones that matched the bridge. The water did not cascade over this dam like the one at the waterfall. Instead, it trickled out of old pipes that jutted out of the dam. The bridge crossed over the creek and was adjacent to the dam. I would make my way across the road and down the embankment to stand under the bridge. In my memory, it was always cooler under that bridge than anywhere else. I felt safe there. I felt safe in the these woods. I can’t imagine my childhood without them. 

I usually followed Stonebridge Lane back to Vernon Drive. It was an easy walk from there to our cottage on Providence Drive. Remnants of the woods remain, but most of my woods are gone. For some people, the woods were just an opportunity for development and profit. For me, they were so much more. The woods were my refuge. The time I spent in the woods gave me confidence to be self-reliant. 

The woods were my friend.

There are places we remember. I remember the woods.