The Poetry, Essays and Personal Journals of Larry L. Dill
A traffic light with audible signals has been added, too.
I’m watching a young Latino man and an old white man who looks and walks like the aging Henry Fonda did in On Golden Pond. They’re shoveling dark red sand into wheel barrows and dumping it a few feet away in front of the new police station to build the new sidewalk. The white spire of the red brick Baptist Church stands just down the block behind them. It is late July, 81 degrees and breezy. In my home town of Austin, it is 103.
The tourists up from Florida and Georgia are numerous, all white and mostly all wearing shorts. Its hot down there, too. But not here. The shorts are like signs that say “I’m not from around here.”
I’ve been walking around downtown Waynesville today for the first time in more than 2 years. I used to walk the dog down here five days a week, winter and summer. It is about a two mile round trip from Marshall Street to the public library and back. But I got so bored of that first quarter mile of mostly unremarkable suburban houses with their well groomed yards that I eventually started short cutting the whole daily ritual and just drove the car to the City Park at the end of Marshall Street 5 blocks away.
Everything seemed to fall apart about that time. I developed a hernia, and kidney stones (see The Philosopher’s Stone elsewhere on this web site) and then depression and then an undefined anxiety. Something like I imagined Kierkegaard’s “sickness unto death” to be. A kind of spiritual despair. Or to be less dramatic, perhaps only “ennui.” A kind of spiritual lassitude. Even the dog has developed a chronic case of arthritis in his hindquarters. He’s only good now for about a half mile walk. I had to buy a special ramp just to load him into the car. And as I’ve watched his painful movements I’ve had my own bouts with gout, another painful form of arthritis often brought on by a combination of anxiety and the ill advised use of alcohol to cope with it.
I watch the Latino and the Fonda look a like shoveling in the sun. The old man moves at half the pace of the younger one. I’m sitting under a shade tree on an oaken park bench across the street. It is two o’clock and the old man looks worn out. They disappear when I look away. Their long handled shovels standing upright in the pile of dirt, their wheel barrows idle. Almost all the buildings in view at this corner are two story red brick. There is a traffic light at the corner of Main and Church. City Hall on one corner, a gourmet kitchen shop on the other. A gift shop and bakery (celebrating its 50th anniversary this year) next to me. And the almost completed police station with its red brick “modernized” by the addition of natural stone and exposed timbers that give it that popular “contemporary rustic” look.
You might call this the official center of Waynesville. Electronic birds chirp when the lights change so that blind people know when and where to cross. I’ve never seen a blind person on the streets of Waynesville. And though I’m sure there are many blind people in this aging demographic, as far as I know this is the only intersection in town with an audible signal. Main Street sounds like a cukoo. Church Street a little like a cardinal. the Church on Church Street is Catholic. Like the “contemporary rustic” touches in the architecture of the new police station, these prominent audible symbols are no doubt meant to signal the progressive intentions of the city fathers (and perhaps the chamber of commerce).
In the window of the kitchen shop is a large puffy statue of the Pillsbury doughboy holding a sign whose message changes periodically. When Martha Stewart went to jail for insider trading, the sign read “Free Martha Stewart” for the duration of her prison term. It was an earnest and stubborn tribute by the shop's German owner to two of America's icons of the domestic arts.
I have eaten my lunch now on the park bench and move a block east up Main Street past the Optical Shop and Mast General Store which sells mountain clothing, shoes, hiking gear, cast iron cookware, stuffed animals and candy. I find another shaded wooden bench. On the next bench over a man with a big cigar (there is a cigar store just across the street) is wheeling and dealing on a cell phone. He sounds like a lawyer or a real estate broker. Maybe both. He is clearly a tourist, though, having done all the shopping he needed once he bought the cigar. But he has conceded to local custom by wearing pre-faded levis instead of shorts. Nearby, other tourists are taking pictures of their children sitting on a large welded metal sculpture of 2 cartoon like characters who make up a bluegrass mountain band. One with a banjo. One with a one string washtub base fiddle.
The cigar man stops talking on the phone long enough to chat briefly with his Asian female companion as she checks in on her way from one shop to another. She is wearing jeans, too. He talks to her in peevish, condescending tones and she bounces off again, seemingly oblivious to his mood. The traffic is heavy but moves slowly through this crowded pedestrian mall that looks for all the world like a model for a Main Street in Disneyland. A bright white Smart Car passes by, rare among the SUVs, Mustangs and silly looking crew cab diesel pickup trucks. Across the street the Town Square Antique Store is up for lease. Next to it the Jeweler’s Workbench is thriving. The Arts Council Gallery, its doors wide open, stands empty of people, its local artists works languishing on the walls as the short pants folk meander by with yawns and dull gazes. The Christian Bookstore next door to it isn’t doing any better.
In roughly a ten square block radius of where I am sitting, there are 3 bars , a dozen restaurants, 3 banks, 5 real estate offices, 2 local newspaper companies, 4 bookstores, a wine seller, a toy store, a chocolate store called The Chocolate Bear (which was broken into in the middle of the night last year by a real bear last seen by police hot footing it into the cemetery at the top of the hill), a motel (across the street from the cemetery), 5 churches (Baptist, Methodist, Episcopalian, Presbyterian, Roman Catholic), 2 funeral homes, at least a dozen lawyer’s offices, at least 2 dozen gift shops and art galleries, at least 3 furniture stores, dozens of rentable apartments above these stores, a wild bird supply store, a pet store, a health food store, a paint store, numerous beauty shops, a lumber yard, an auto parts store, a vacuum cleaner repair shop, a veterinary clinic, a dentists office an auto repair shop and metal sculpture store (in the same space), A post office, the County Court House, the County Jail, a dry cleaners, a video store, a fly fishing store, a musical instrument store and my favorite, The Haywood Christian Ministry’s Thrift Store where I go a least once a week and have purchased such jewels as a complete, like new, tuxedo ($6) which I wore in my daughter’s wedding, a priceless hand made Cherokee ceremonial Drum ($50) a claw foot dining table (reproduction) with chairs (like the one Charlie Rose uses) ($50), a rare collection of Charles Bukowski’s short stories (50 cents)(see Ode to Bukowski below), and just last week a brand new pair of high top quick lace up woodsman’s work boots made especially to the standards of forest fire fighting safety regulations. A similar boot is advertised on Cabellas.com for $265. I paid $20.
There is of course much more to this little town than the ten square blocks I've been surveying. Still within walking distance we have a community theater, a community college, a movie house, chain grocery stores, pharmacies, clinics, doctors and a regional hospital. We have Latino bodegas, Mexican, Chinese and Italian Restaurants and every brand of American fast food. We have Country Clubs, Bed and Breakfasts and Hotels. we have tatoo parlors, farmer's markets, acupuncture clinics, sporting goods stores, body shops, shoe repair shops, and a Salvation Army.
I’m always eager to get out of Waynesville every chance I can. I really don't know why. It is about as close to home as I will ever again be in this life.
The clouds are rolling in now and the afternoon showers may soon be falling. The red brick sidewalks beckon me back to the Library where I parked my car. It is too early for a beer. Too late to do anything serious today.
I read a book this month called “Healing Spaces: The Science of Place and Well-being,” written by Esther Sternberg, M.D., and published by Harvard University Press. She interviewed everybody from the architect, Frank Gehry, to the Dali Lama, about the relationship between where you are and how you feel and the fine line between your emotions and your physical well-being. She documents the scientific evidence supporting the idea that feeling comfortable in the place where you live is as important as feeling comfortable in your own skin. She discusses in detail that the movie set versions of America’s bygone main streets that are found in Disneyland and other theme parks are evidence that Walt Disney who invented the concept of 3 dimensional walks down memory lane was more than just an entertainer and entrepreneur. He believed that the fast disappearing architecture of the American small town was not only worth being nostalgic about, but worth preserving, and where lost, worth re-inventing. He would have liked downtown Waynesville. Legend has it that it was here that John Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe felt comfortable enough to have had at least one of their clandestine trysts.
I’ll go up to Rabbit Rock this weekend where every structure on the place was designed and hand built by me. It is never enough to make me quite whole. But it goes a long way. And frequent visits to the Haywood County Public Library and the Haywood Christian Ministry’s Thrift Store are the closest thing I have to a prayer rug or even a church I can call my own.
As I walk back down the street and turn the corner at Main and Church, I look into the window of the Home Tech Kitchen Shop to see the sign the Pillsbury doughboy is holding now: “Why not stay another day.”
I guess I will.
--Larry L. Dill
Waynesville, North Carolina
August 1, 2009
Pillsbury doughboy in the diagonal window of the Kitchen Store at left. New Justice Center and Chambers Mountain in the background. Rabbit Rock is 12 miles south of the Parking sign lower right.
Related Essays and Photographs:
The Zen of Personal Architecture March 2004
For Photographic Essays of Rabbit Rock see The Rabbit Rock Collection
The Philosopher's Stone December 2006
See Ode to Bukowski in the March 2008 New hope Journal
July 2009 New Hope Journal
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copyright 2009 by Larry L. Dill