Between the Lines

A short article buried in section/page B-5 of our local newspaper caught my attention to a greater degree than any newspaper editor might have imagined. This was news out of Philadelphia – stating that one of only seven executives to know all three parts of the secret to making Thomas’ English muffins is leaving his post to take a lesser-paying job with Hostess, maker of Wonder Bread and Twinkies.

This is not bread – the English muffin – it is a product defined and given signature by its presence of nooks and crannies – those empty places within the structure of toasted gluten where butter and jam might be cradled and crunched.

I know about the English muffin – which is to say I have not succeeded in producing these hallmark repositories for butter and jam. The unobtrusive English muffin seems to me the pinnacle of bread baker’s art – not even sourdoughs have daunted me as much, for at least the sourdough is glad to be alive and will tell me what it needs. But the English muffin is stalwart and guarded of its clues. I have all the equipment and many recipes that promise to yield the authentic result – but this persistent baker/writer has met her match. The English muffin is the place where smooth texture and consistent crumb are not the advents of success. As they say in many forms of martial arts or Eastern practices, the true Master leaves behind all rules. During my very brief teaching career, when challenged by students who wanted to know why they had to follow the “five paragraph rule” of writing an essay, I would say, “So you can throw it out once you’ve mastered it.” So it is with the English muffin – one must know the rules of bread baking so well that one can break them and thus produce a superior product. Paradoxically, the rules do apply – only they are no longer written rules – they are unspoken, as those seven masters at Thomas’ know. The secret is transferred via one great mind to another.

The company that makes Thomas’ English muffins has successfully protected their secret for more than 75 years. According to the article, there are three parts to the winning formulae – and this is more than I’ve heretofore known about the English muffin. Every recipe I have admits there is a secret, and then proceeds to tell you the secret: use of carbonated water in the dough, a bit of baking soda to the yeast, a bit of baking powder to the yeast, baking soda to the carbonated water, a pinch of pure ascorbic acid to the water . . . definitely no milk . . . and none of those secrets is the real thing.

The owners of the Thomas’ English muffin brand are suing back-stabber Chris Botticella because they say they have “good reason” to believe he will expose the secrets to Hostess who doesn’t make an English muffin at this time. Botticella says that his confidentiality agreement is valid “only during his employment” – and does not bar him from working elsewhere. But there are only four biggies in the English muffin industry – and this possible fifth could have major impacts on profits, makers of Thomas’ brand say. Plus, there are other secrets – for new products – which he knows. That said, I think "Bays" brand makes a far superior English muffin to Thomas’ – those Bays’ repositories will accommodate a swallow of good tea along with butter and jam.

The nook and cranny is really just empty space. This reminds me of the pinnacle of writing in which the most important words are really those that exist between the lines – open space for the reader to say for himself. I think of all those great writers of literature who have devoted their lives to lining the bookshelves of libraries for generations to come so that silent parties might walk the aisles with their own thoughts – and that aisle is a cranny.

Author John Gardner has said that the best writing  leaves much un- said so that the reader has to come up with connections and conclusions that make him or her feel smarter than the writer. And when a reader feels smarter than the writer, it makes that reader want to sit down with the writer in order to share dialogue – sitting and talking together. The nook is an open space formed by two adjoining walls; a place larger, at least wider, than the cranny. It’s a place large enough for two people to sit and talk.

The hardest thing to put in writing is the thing you can’t put there at all. You have to create the structure – that is, glutenous strands – then provide temperature, time, and humidity – and a good dose of patience – till the reader sees between the lines.

Nooks and crannies must come of themselves, and in their own time – that’s what I’ve learned about writing – I mean, about English muffins . . .

The Long and Short of it

While reading an article recently about the 10 best book stores in the nation, I wasn’t surprised to see these supersized descriptions – “20,000 square feet and more than 500,000 books;” “One entire city block and 650,000 used books;” “1.5 million books in stock;” “1 million volumes in 3 convenient locations.”  My favorite description is the slogan from Strand Bookstore in NYC: “18 miles of books!”

My first memory of too many books to fathom comes from my student days at UNC-Chapel Hill where the Wilson Library famously housed 10 stories of books – five stories above ground and five underground. The collectible and rare books were housed underground, and I would often descend to the bottommost floor on a Sunday afternoon where I would stroll through the cramped, dark aisles, and smell the books. This was before the time of super security and hidden cameras – and so I truly felt alone with all those centuries of knowledge and my own private thoughts.

A more recent exper- ience came last year when my family and I went to the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. for the 200th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln's birth. They say that a copy of every book that has ever been copyrighted is housed there and at various undisclosed sites in Maryland. The architecture and feeling of the building is worth the trip, but you can’t actually see all those books – nor can you check them out.  But we must believe they are there.

At the other end of the spectrum, I can’t stop thinking about the tiny bookshop which opened about 18 months ago in the old auto repair shop on Main Street in my hometown in North Carolina – what might be considered one of the 10 smallest bookstores in the nation. I spent many-a-morning, a few weeks ago, perusing the “Local Literature” section which occupies about four feet of space on each of three shelves beside the checkout desk. I recognized many of the authors’ names – my high school English teacher, a guy who played football with my older brothers in high school, a woman who attended church with my mother, and a “stranger” who wrote a book about terrorist Eric Rudolph who was captured in a dumpster behind the local Sav-A-Lot store where my mother often shopped. There were other books about Cherokee Indian folklore and medicine, maps and guides for hiking the local trails, that sort of thing. But why two books about Abraham Lincoln?

“Those are because of Lincoln’s real father being buried here – you never heard that?”  That came from Linda who is the bookstore owner and former schoolmate of my older brothers.

After a few questions to reorient my mind to – and against – everything I had learned in elementary school about Abraham Lincoln, Linda proceeded to explain that no local person ever believed that Abraham Lincoln was born in Kentucky. I was 10 years old when my family moved south from Upstate New York, so I guess that’s why I hadn’t been made privy to what everyone knew . . . and so Linda proceeded to tell me the “real story” of Abraham Lincoln:

His real father was Abraham Enloe, a wealthy Western North Carolina plantation owner. Our future President was born, not in Kentucky as the history books tell us, but illegitimately in Rutherford County of Western North Carolina. He was moved to Kentucky in a wagon when he was about one month old by his mother, Nancy Hanks, and a man named Thomas Lincoln who had been hired by the real father to marry her . . .

I'll back up.  As legend goes, Mr. Abraham Enloe’s wife was visiting relatives in South Carolina when Nancy Hanks, a maidservant at the Enloe family estate, became pregnant. Upon her return, Mrs. Enloe promptly fired Nancy for being pregnant out of wedlock – she didn’t know who the father was – but then, once the baby was born, Nancy had the nerve to bring little Abraham Enloe Junior – yes, she named him that on the birth certificate – to the Enloe household to show him off. They say Mrs. Enloe took one look at the baby and went into a screaming fit because he looked just like all her other babies. Reportedly, Mr. Enloe gave a local kid, Thomas Lincoln, $500 in gold and a wagon to take Nancy and the baby to Kentucky and to marry her there. That’s how our future President came to be in Kentucky and came to be named Abraham Lincoln instead of Abraham Enloe. They say Mr. Enloe visited Kentucky – and Nancy – until Abe was six years old. That’s when Thomas Lincoln “found them together,” and decided to move his family to Indiana.

A man in Eastern North Carolina has written a persuasive and well documented book about the local legend that flies in the face of history: “Abraham Enloe of Western North Carolina.” Linda said the author, Don Norris, has come to her store for book signings on several occasions.

“I’ve got three signed copies at home. I’ll bring you one tomorrow,” she promised.

In the meantime, Linda gave me directions to the old gravesite where Lincoln’s supposed natural father is buried. But she warned me that the grave was marked “Abram” Enloe because people wrote things as they sounded back then – Abram.

This one Abraham Enloe had sired 16 children by his own wife – all tall and lanky like himself – and it is believed he has sired many others through the Carolinas and Georgia.

Linda told me that a man drove up from Atlanta last summer and went into the local Chamber of Commerce by the rail tracks and said he needed some help finding the gravesite of a possible relative of his. The woman in charge of the Chamber said to him, “And I know just where he’s buried” – and the man said, “How did you know?” And the woman replied, “Because you look like all the rest of the Enloes.” Linda said the man was tall, lanky, and dark featured.

Unlike today, no one during Abe’s lifetime would have written a book or tabloid article about such a “shameful” past. The locals of the time knew all about it, according to Linda – and that was shame enough. The Enloes were good people, and Enloe is still a good family name in the region; they were landowners and they employed a lot of people in Western North Carolina. No one would have been fool enough to bite the hand that feeds them.  But everyone knew . . . and Mildred verified this.

Mildred was the 93-year old woman who walked into the book shop the next morning while I was there to pick up my signed copy of “Abraham Enloe of Western North Carolina” and to report on the gravesite I had visited. Mildred said her grandparents owned much land in the area and they also kept indentured servants.  Oh, honey, everyone knew . . . and she shook my arm in earnest.

And I can’t stop thinking:  There’s no bookstore in this nation big enough to hold the kind of thing that everyone knows . . .

A Time for Prose

I read something noteworthy last night in the WWII-era travel memoir, Seven Years in Tibet – two starving,  frostbitten, coinless, and tired men take a look at the splendorous beauty of the Forbidden City of Lhasa, Tibet which has taken them 18 months of death defying ordeals and prison escapes to reach – a vision and height which no European before them had ever attained – and one says to the other, “After poetry, prose!”  That’s all he said.  And what he meant by that was, that’s beautiful – but so much for poetry, what can we eat and drink and where can we bathe and sleep – the prose of life.

When it comes down to it, the prose of life takes priority over “poetry “no matter how much, or for how long, we have waited to see the Forbidden City.  I can see an outline of the "Forbidden City" in my own writing these past months, and I know the trials it has taken to get this far – and how much further I have to go – but the prose of life is upon me as my college-age children arrive home for the summer.  Due to varying schedules, it will be a miracle to find a few quiet hours to myself.

Once finally admitted to the Forbidden City of Lhasa, the author and his comrade stayed for seven years – keeping journals, befriending the current Dalai Lama who was only a teenager at the time, and generally soaking up the atmosphere of Tibet. The author, Heinrich Harrer, returned to Austria as the Chinese invaded Tibet in 1950, and so wrote this memoir from his journal recollections.  But first he had to live it.  He wrote many other books, but none had the impact or success of the one he actually lived through.

When my children return to their respective lives next August 24th (or so), and the house is clean and quiet once again, and my own belly is full, and the body is exercised and rested – the conditions necessary to appreciate the beauty of the "Forbidden City" – that is when my mind can return to writing my book. In the meantime, I’ll keep the journal, pen some notes, and perhaps finish an occasional blog . . .

“The once-longed-for sight could not shake us out of our apathy. The climb through the rarified air had left us breathless, and the prospect of an ascent to nearly 20,000 feet was paralyzing.”   (Seven Years in Tibet)