One Good Turn

I completed a four-day trip to my hometown in North Carolina, and back – and, as usual, there is so much material to write about that I mysteriously can write nothing at all. Just as when a tree bears more fruit than a busy, satiated person can consume – I feel glutted by the incidents and want to turn away from writing for a while. The most insignificant of them, however, is the thing that elbows me . . .

It’s the Waffle House experience. There was a retired sort of fellow who had been hired to be a “greeter” there; he was thin and dark around the gills, but full of energy and the seriousness of his job – he jumped to open the door for me in salutations of Good Morning! and Welcome to Waffle House! as I approached the door with my newspaper before the last 100-mile run of a 500-mile journey. He hurried to the only remaining table – a booth – where he cleared away plates and wiped the table clean, beckoned me to sit down while placing the plastic menu on the wet Formica top. I knew what I wanted as soon as the buxom woman with the raspy voice came over with the coffee pot and the honey moniker which she gave to everyone. She yelled out the well-rehearsed codes and equations that represented my order to the cook – and though he never acknowledged hearing her, she never doubted that he did.

I felt my kingdom undeservedly rally round me as I spread out the newspaper and she placed my drinks of coffee on one side and orange juice on the other – and I noticed the 6 people crammed into the 4-person booth in back of me and the 5 people crowded into the other booth in front of me. It was later, when my food was almost ready, that she apologetically leaned over and said, “Honey, now don’t feel ye need to do this, but would ye mind if we moved ye to a spot at the table o’er yonder so those four men might have a seat – but now honey, ye don’t need to 'cause it’s yer booth and ye was here b’for ‘em – don’t feel ye need to, honey.” And I saw four burly men standing outside the Waffle House talking to the friendly greeter because there wasn’t room for four such big men to stand inside the doorway while waiting for a seat . . .

So I said that I already felt guilty for having so much space to myself and that it would be fine to move – “Honey, ye don’t hafta . . . “ she repeated.  I want to, and I was already trying to manage the coffee and newspaper when the friendly greeter came inside to help me with my orange juice and to escort me to my new, made-for-one, cozy seat in the back – and he gave me his profuse thanks all the while we walked – my generosity and such . . . No, not at all, I’m happy to . . . that sort of thing, back and forth.

My kind waitress brought the food and continued to care for me, even though this wasn’t her station, and she gave me thanks each time so that my new neighbors began to understand the story. That’s when I took notice of the corner where I was sitting – which had at one time been the "smoker’s section" of Waffle House, I presume – that is, before the laws in NC were changed last year to prohibit all that smoking indoors.  But the smokers still remained – but without their "fix" – for they all had the eyes of withdrawal and trauma and reproof – eyes that had settled into sockets like sludge in a pond – suspended – eyes that reposed and fixed upon me – perhaps because of the animation I gave to eating and turning pages while they sat with fingers rendered motionless by the Law.

My waitress came back frequently to refill coffee and ask how I was doing. One of those times she swooped up the check and said, “Honey, ye don’t hafta pay this – they insist – now don’t ye say a word about’t ‘cause they insist” – and she was gone with my check and the coffee pot before I comprehended what she had meant by “they” and “insist” – that the four men had insisted on paying for my breakfast because I had given up my spacious booth for them . . . and what would I have said anyway?

I sat finishing my meal and drinking my coffee, all the while contemplating what I ought to do next – and all the while sensing that the smokers without their smokes were thinking the same thing – what’ll she do next? And then I came up with the plan to leave a nice tip for the friendly waitress since I felt the need to pass it on – this generosity of spirit. But I was not sitting in her station but rather in the smokers’ waitress’s station – and she had not yet acknowledged me. I think she had somehow taken on the demeanor or outlook of the smokers in her care – for she had large, dark pools around her eyes and a fishlike emptiness in her mouth, and she moved very slowly too. And so, after much thought, and as my perpetual onlookers waited in anticipation, I decided that when I left I would thank the table of four men and give them the tip large enough to cover the cost of my meal so they could “add it to the tip” for our waitress – and so I did, thanked them, and left the tip for our waitress with them – and of course they said they were more grateful than I was for having the booth to sit in, and that they would gratefully give her the tip – but then she passed by to refill their cups, and then she became grateful – and the booths full of people to either side noticed the exchange and, like ripples spreading in a pond, they too began to smile. I was feeling in the center of things too much, and so I began to back out of the door, but ran into the friendly greeter who in turn began the gratefulness cycle once again – and I said, No, you are the one who started this whole wheel turning with your friendliness at the door – and he just smiled as though already understanding the seriousness of his job – and it seemed the whole place became abuzz with gratefulness. When I looked over to the smoking section, I saw a different kind of trans-fixation in the eyes – they were still transfixed, but it was almost like someone had budged them loose from their orbit just a little bit and they had been able to move their eyes to a place outside their own realm for just that instant.

I emerged from the magical Waffle House and got into my car, feeling that I had just left some swirling tunnel of light – a kaleidoscope where various colors will mix and match, one upon another, to form patterns of hearts or clovers, stars, rings or golden links – the more you turn it . . .

It seems like such a small experience – and I really have more important ones to write about, ones that could add to the book I’m working on but can’t settle into this morning. I felt a curiosity as to whether the place really existed or was just a figment of my imagination – and so I got online to find it – and there it is – The Waffle House at 164 Tunnel Road – really – in Asheville, North Carolina.

Willa Cather Comes Home

If it were possible, I would buy the Willa Cather birthplace – and I would renovate it – but . . . then, what would I do? Would it be possible to live and write in the birth home of my favorite American author? That is an unbelievable thought – and one I imagined as I stood outside the Cather homestead in Gore, Virginia last week and watched as the high-powered, 18-wheel trucks roared past the property. I looked across the street at the old motel with the “day traders” coming and going from parking lot to doorway – and saw them look back at me as though I, the one taking pictures of an author’s birthplace, were the one out of place in that picture. Something has to be done, but I don’t know what . . .

The abandoned birthplace of my favorite American author, Willa Cather, distresses me each time I go there – which has been only twice – but I feel I’ve been there many more times because it weighs so heavily on my mind. The first visit, a year ago, I drove two hours from my home on a sunny spring day, expecting to see a pristine home where a young tour guide might escort me through upstairs bedrooms and provide facts and nuances about the life of a young Willa Cather. Instead, I found a condemned shack that could barely support the little metal plaque declaring it a Virginia Historic Landmark. Thinking there was some mistake, I went to a nearby gas station where the regulars sat along a stoop just inside the door and told me, unofficially, far more than I had asked for. The current owner seemed to be waiting for the termites to finish the job, one man told me while the others concurred – so he could legally clear away the mess and sell the property located on the only highway through town. Since the house is a registered historic landmark, however, the owner’s hands are tied for the time being – until the termites finish their job. He is under no obligation to preserve the home at his expense – and neither is the State of Virginia, I suppose.  For now, the house is in waiting. The men in their overalls thought I had come to buy the house – or write a story about it – or do something to bring attention to their town’s only legacy.  No, I just wanted to visit it. “We sure could use the tourism here, right on the highway like it is,” said one man. “Look on the website and see what they’ve done to her in Nebraska!” shouted a woman from behind the counter. “And we’re only 80 miles from D.C.,” said another.

I, like many others I suppose, have always assumed that Willa Cather came from Nebraska. The subject matter of her most popular books is about German and Czech immigrants who came to settle and tame the unforgiving prairie lands of Nebraska. Many died of starvation. Cather experienced their stories firsthand because her own family had moved there from Virginia in 1883 when she was only nine years old. But she left Nebraska when she was 18 to pursue a college degree and subsequent journalism career in Pittsburg.

The small town of Red Cloud, Nebraska has made a sweeping claim to their author, as noted on the official website of the Willa Cather Foundation – http://www.willacather.org/  Red Cloud is host to house tours, walking tours, parades, annual conferences, and writing contests. Grandaughters of people who knew the Cather family give speeches at various literary functions. There are bed-and-breakfast homes and restaurants in her honor. Willa Cather is big business in Red Cloud.

Cather’s first nine years of life, however – and six generations of Cathers before her – were lived in a tiny town in the Shenandoah Valley called Gore, VA.

I was only 15 years old when I read my first Willa Cather novel, "My Antonia" – soon followed by anything else I could get my hands on. I’ve never forgotten her description of the old Bohemian, Mr. Shimerda, and his violin . . . and what happened to him. It wouldn’t be a far fetch to say that she is a primary reason I came to love literature and to hold high hopes of someday writing even one short story with the impact she gave to writing.

Willa Cather has said this: “Most of the basic material a writer works with is acquired before the age of fifteen.”  Why would she have said that if her first nine years in Virginia meant nothing to her? The last book of her life, "Sapphira and the Slave Girl," takes place in Gore,Virginia and was written in 1940 before her sudden death of a cerebral hemorrhage at age 74.  It's as though she had come full circle -- back to Virginia in her writing.

I stood in her front yard thinking that Willa Cather may have returned to this very site before writing her last book. It is said she spent nine years visiting and researching the missions of New Mexico before she sat down to write "Death Comes for the Archbishop" – the actual writing took only three months. That’s how she worked. She would spend many years visiting, thinking, and absorbing a place before putting it to paper. I contend – though the guys at the gas station didn’t tell me this – that she came to her birth home many times before writing her final novel.  She may have stayed in the house – for I was told that Cather family members owned and lived in the house until a few decades ago. Maybe she sketched an outline of her final book in an upstairs bedroom. Perhaps she walked along Back Creek, only a trickle now, and remembered the days when she played or tended her six younger siblings there. She may have planned more books about her birthplace . . .

I’m sorry that the State of Virginia has neglected this landmark and legacy of yours, Ms. Cather. Thank you – your books have meant the world to me. That’s what I said aloud to the spirit of Willa Cather as I stood in her front yard amid the din of a passing truck.

"Men travel faster now, but I do not know if they go to better things,” she has said.