The Miracle of Three Arms

This scene from Costco yesterday: A mother with three young children – one is a baby girl, perhaps two months old; the other two are boys, maybe four years and two years old. The older boy is sitting in the cart with bulk food items all around him, and he is managing the inventory with contentment. The two-year-old is having a meltdown and running beside his mother, crying and yelling to a pitch that grates all nerves – the mother repeating calmly but firmly the single directive, Stop, Stop . . . though it does no good. He is in meltdown mode, the kind of which my father and his generation used to say only a “good whack” could snap him out of – my mother called it “shock therapy” – and though I never tried it on my own children, it seemed to work for my parents.

Back to the scene – the baby lay in her “dish” in the the front of the cart looking up at the bright lights of this world to which she has been brought; chaos is swirling round her, the cart going faster as the noise gets louder, the lights big and bright. Her small mouth makes only the oo-shape, but no sound comes forth; her eyes are bigger than her oo-shaped mouth. I passed this group once in the aisles, going in the opposite direction, and I felt only irritation at the grating din of the two-year-old – though I admired the modulated Stop, Stop that never veered off course.

I had come to Costco for one dinner item, so my trip was quick, and I had no cart to wrangle with. I was surprised when I found myself in the checkout line beside hers only a few minutes later. My view was superb, for I lagged behind by only a fraction. My sentiments changed as I viewed this poor woman with children growing out of her – the food items toppling o’er and propped even in the baby’s seat – the two-year old still screaming inconsolably. Once parked in the checkout line, she picked him up to hold him closely, his croc-clad feet kicking her bellywise all the while. She had the facial expression of those cows or dogs you see when they are nursing calves or many pups and they cannot move for fear of disturbance to the rankling young – and the hurt it might cause her own body – and the screams of protest and hunger it might arouse – and the tiredness . . . it is an ultimate submission to a younger set. I saw all of that in her face – the history and evolution and universality of it all. I began to understand that her well-modulated Stop, Stop may have come from this level of submission and tiredness and personal need – and not from a good parenting book she had read. She could muster no more.

Then it came time for her to load the bulk food items onto the counter for check-out. I could blame none of those food items for the demise of the two-year-old’s nervous system – yogurt, cheerios, fruit snacks, bananas, orange juice. She tried hard to provide easy but nutritious foods to her young.

Continue:  She is unloading food with one hand while the two-year-old still squirms and kicks and cries in her arms – and just then the four-year-old abruptly stands up inside the cart, his head or shoulder bumping the baby’s dish so that baby shows shock on her placid face – where did that come from? – he reaches round to pat baby’s head and face with a firm open palm while she is trying to dodge his pats with her blinking eyes.

And somehow the mother manages to steady the baby’s dish with one hand while lending a lift out of the cart to the four-year-old with another arm – continuing to hold the two-year-old – somehow unloading bulk food items – reaching into her purse for the Costco membership card that someone has requested . . . all of that. And instead of jumping out of line to help her as I realize now I should have done, I thought of that miniature Russian icon I bought long ago when I was a young mother – it is called The Icon of the Mother of God of Three Arms – and its significance has to do with the miracle of restoring a prayerful man’s arm that had been cut off, but for me it has always represented the far more mysterious phenomenon of the woman who tends to many things . . .

. . . and I saw her bend over with that screaming two-year-old still on her hip to retrieve items from the bottom shelf of the cart – cases of things – and I saw pendulous breasts nearly reach to the floor – and that look of pale submission on her face. Her feet and arms and legs were pale as milk too – and this is the end of summer when we all have our summer tans if only by osmosis. I think, as she bends over, that it must be a hormone that does that, that makes a woman agree to all this – for I know it is not just this trip through Costco that she will endure, but the trip through the parking lot, the buckling-in of squirmy children, the loading of food into the van, the unloading once she’s home, the hunger and cries of children, the tired two-year-old, a nursling who will speak up in turn . . . it is 3:00; she will think about dinner, there will be no naps, no tea, no five-minute bathroom break. No impulse of hers will evolve into a complete thought. All thought will be snipped, cut short, formed halfway in the brain. I used to think about brain synapses when I was a young mother, those junctions or connective things that form in the brain when babies and children (adults too) are learning and thinking. I always felt that my own brain synapses were being snipped in half by a great orange scissors (as I imagined it) because I could never complete a thought or sentence. I am still amazed that the brain knows how to heal once the children are grown – it knows how to perform the miracle of restoring its own synapses of thought and learning, to re-connect and complete its own sentences in the brain – and even to write them!

I thought of the woman with many arms all the way home from Costco and on my way to yoga class that evening . . . all last night while I was falling asleep, and this morning when I woke up – and finally, while writing this snippet, I forgave myself for not writing that book of mine when the children were young and I was a mother not working.

Hobo Bags

My self-education in the stock market comes at a time when there is no winning that can’t be snatched away like a red cape from the bull’s pathway. Each time the caboodle goes up, it comes down too – as though not one stock could think independently, but rather must follow the herd. Either all arrows are red, or all arrows are green. We all go up, we all go down. The vicissitudes of the market, as the saying goes.

I’m really tired of watching things go up and down – while never funding what I really want, which is a trip to somewhere I’ve never been. What use are those graphs in vivid movement if I never leave the house? I stay put, a graph in flat line.

The end of summer – and August, my least favorite of all the months. August is when tolerance is pushed past the limit, when nothing more can be done for summer and nothing much can be started for fall. It’s a seedy month – when all the flowering has been done, but the dead and drying leaves refuse to let go. It’s a time of suspension – in the air, in our actions, even in the way the insects drone without end. I walk outside at night or early in the morning, hear those herds of cicada that can’t be seen, and I think, they are flat lined too. Waiting.

I won’t be able to tolerate seeing that movie that promises to be all the rage – “Eat, Pray, Love.” I won’t even read the book. All I know is that it’s about a woman who takes off from the responsibilities of life for one year to travel the world and experience Life. She divides her year between three countries, Italy, India, and Indonesia. It’s a spiritual quest too. And of course she falls in love at the end. It is written in part or in whole from the real life experience of the author. She came home to write the book, and it was an instant success.

Yesterday, while waiting to get my hair trimmed, I flipped through a magazine and saw a page of “gear” that we must own now that the movie is coming out – it’s called “The Eat, Pray, Love image.” For example, there is a canvas striped hobo bag that you could buy for $190; a blue chambray shirt with a nehru neckline, $112; bright pink canvas espadrilles for walking the markets of New Delhi and tasting new delights from the hands of another – at $100 or so. It’s the gear, the look, the lifestyle – though few of us could replicate the Julia Roberts toothy grin and thick hair that piles atop her head in Bohemian fashion. We should all run out to adopt the look of the middle aged woman (who doesn’t look middle aged) who has fortuitously taken a year to travel the world and experience all that few of us can even imagine.

Women at middle age, realizing that they have maybe 20 years left before they are immobile or at least compromised – they wake from the instinct of giving life to others and they crave to experience life for themselves. They want to have Fun, as our contemporary Cyndi Lauper told us when we were young – that is, we want to travel, eat foods we have not cooked ourselves, see people and places for no good reason other than to experience Life. Women are the natural born keepers of life – which is why they give birth – and, after childbearing years are done, they still have the impulse to live life which is really just the continuum of giving life.  That’s why the marketeers think they can peddle this book and movie to us, that we'll latch onto it like life itself.  It’s odd, however, that in the course of my own “travels” – to the bank, grocery store, yoga class – I’ve heard women say, “No, I don’t want to see that movie, “ or, “I can’t bear to see that.” One woman said, “I got to New Delhi with her and I tossed the book in the trash.” I think most women know the difference between real Life and the improbable one that is sold on the screen or in a book. The first question everyone has is, how'd she get the money? This particular subject of wanting to experience our lives while still mobile is too treasured and touchy for most of us to face in facsimile form.

I looked for a long time at that striped hobo bag in the magazine, knowing I had one similar to that (for much less money) when my children were young and diapers were kept there. And the blue chambray shirt – to this day I call it my uniform -- I had several.  Julia Roberts is smiling . . . that familiar hobo bag slung o'er her blue shoulder . . . you too can have this life, she seems to say.

I think most women by the August of their lives know the difference between marketing, the stock market, and the markets of New Delhi.  Let the real one stand up.

A Taste for Books

“Then old Mrs. Rabbit took a basket and her umbrella and went through the wood to the baker’s. She bought a loaf of bread and five currant buns.”

This is a line from one of my favorite books, “The Tale of Peter Rabbit,” and I can’t help but quote it to myself, or to anyone who cares to listen, every time I bake a batch of sourdough rye currant buns.

During my very brief career as a high school English teacher, I was advised by a veteran teacher that any assigned project would gain students’ cooperation and maybe even excitement so long as food was involved.

That bit of advice comes back to me as I sort through the nearly-empty bedrooms of my grown children and an attic of clutter that includes boxes and bags of children’s books. The great number of food-themed books is suddenly before me – “The Gingerbread Boy,” “Stone Soup,” “Jamie O’Rourke and The Big Potato,” “Rain Makes Applesauce” – to name a few. The entire “Strega Nona” series by Tomie dePaola seems to be based on the love of pasta and bread – and the term “never ending pasta pot” and the baking of an Italian panettone at Christmastime have become both a friendly phrase and an annual tradition in our house because of his books. Some book purchases were made after my children were grown, such as the complete collection of Winnie the Pooh tales – whose enduring quest can be boiled down to two things: honey and friendship. That veteran teacher was right – children (of all ages) have a natural affinity for food.

As a parent, I particularly enjoyed quoting a guilt-instilling passage from my personal favorite, “The Little Red Hen.” This is about a hardworking hen who lives with others who enjoy the fruits of her efforts but none of the hard work. This is what she says, a quote I have memorized from repeated usage: “’All by myself I planted the wheat, I cut the wheat, I took the wheat to the mill to be ground into flour. All by myself I gathered the sticks, I built the fire, I mixed the cake. And all by myself I am going to eat it!’ And so she did, to the very last crumb.”

All children are prone to eating too much of a good thing – as is Peter Rabbit who got carried away in Mr. McGregor’s garden by all the tempting radishes, lettuce, French beans . . . “And feeling rather sick, he went to look for some parsley.” At nighttime, he was put to bed by his mother and given a tablespoon of chamomile tea – “But Flopsy, Mopsy, and Cottontail had bread and milk and blackberries for supper.”  I enjoyed quoting this when one child felt sick (or had tonsils out) and couldn't eat dinner.

“Children are the best readers of genuine literature,” says Isaac Bashevis Singer, one of my favorite writers of both children’s and adult literatures -- categories he frequently blurs or ignores according to his publisher. Singer continues, “The child is still the independent reader who relies on nothing but his own taste (my italics).  Names and authorities mean nothing to him. Long after literature for adults has gone to pieces, books for children will constitute the last vestige of storytelling, logic, faith in the family, in God, and in real humanism . . . "

My children are technically grown, and these tattered childhood books have one by one been moved from the attic and bedrooms to my own personal library – and some, to their rightful place in the kitchen. I have never stopped loving them. I find myself quoting those timeless classics much as a scholar might quote Blake or Keats – if only to myself as I bake the traditional panettone or the occasional batch of currant buns, always to be enjoyed alongside a cup of tea.

Some Mother's Bird

The baby bluebirds are eating on their own today, not perched on the feeder helplessly waiting for mother or father to place food in their mouths – though if a parent shows up they will suspiciously open needy beaks to let out infantile squeals of helplessness as though they’d been left to starve – it’s easier that way, they might think. Their mother must be watching them from high branches, observing as they feed themselves like grown-ups, before she comes down to share the feeder with them as equals – for she is hungry too. That’s when her babies remind her, we shall never be equals; you shall always be our mother.

I saw her, the mother, look at one of these splotchy blue fledglings at the birdfeeder the other day – the same old response came from the baby – that is, an open, begging beak – and she perched herself face to face against this fledgling as though sitting him down for a lesson. She braced her body – and how can I say I saw this, a bracing? She looked stiff, astute, statue-like, and she stared straight into the open beak of the bird. She leaned slightly forward as though readying herself to make an attack – and against her own baby! She held the most statue-like presence of an angry bird that I had ever seen. The baby, clueless and impervious – for this mother had always been kind – kept opening its beak and squealing – didn’t you hear me, mother? Won’t you feed me? Why are you acting that way? But mother remained resolute . . .

This is the same mother who, along with her mate, had worked tirelessly to hatch and feed babies all through June. Each morning mother and father seemed to anticipate my emergence from the front door to put out a few tablespoons of store-bought worms to supplement the diet of their growing family in the birdhouse out back. She must have been watching me from above, for before I could get back into the house to look out the kitchen window, she and her mate would be working in tandem to peck up as many wiggly things into their beaks as possible for delivery to their little house out back. They’d work one at the feeder, one at the birdhouse, back and forth, till all the harvesting was done – and I would run from kitchen window to back room window, trying to keep pace with each, but sometimes missing one or the other along the way. Humorously, I’d catch the male bird lingering at the feeder to sample a few tasty treats for himself before filling his beak for the family – why not? – while mother bird never showed anything but drive in her eyes – the drive to satisfy the hunger of noisy babies. I’ve seen that look before. I understand now why Disney chose merry bluebirds to ready Cinderella for the ball – to sew her dress, tie her bows, and carry her train – for they are active, hardworking, vigilant, and driven birds.

Once I saw a noisome squirrel – they’re all noisome – get too close to the hatchlings’ house, and out of nowhere came diving a sapphire male bluebird toward the squirrel’s head. As soon as the squirrel went running, this furious bluebird chased him across the backyard while flying not four inches from the ground.

Flying lessons began over Fourth of July weekend – watchful parents sat perched in high branches while their twin fledglings made awkward hops and leaps into the unknown, at one time landing like dropped eggs onto this back doorstep where they looked up to me for guidance as to what should be done next. I had already seen what happened to that noisome squirrel, so I kept my distance other than to click a few photos – they grow up so fast . . .

But that was June . . . then the Holiday . . . and now, mid-July, this mother holds firm at feeding time. Unmoved by the gaping mouth, I saw her make one straight pecking attack at her baby’s open beak. She did not touch the young bird, but I think had calculated the move only to make her point – I will not be feeding you again.

The baby bird did not pull back, was not afraid of the simulated attack, and did not flinch a feather. Then the mother flew away, having stated her purpose firmly. She didn’t feed her baby – but interestingly, she also didn’t partake of the worms I had put out to feed the whole family. She had shown her fledglings this easy hunting ground; she would find her own food elsewhere.

I saw her come back later after the babies had had their fill and flown away to some higher branches. She came up to the feeder alone, hopped around to look full circle for her fledglings – realizing, I think, that she was alone at last – then poked around half-heartedly into the leftover meal to see if any worms had been left for her. None!  I think that made her happy. She stayed perched there a few minutes longer – her stature relaxed now, the drive gone from her eyes, the readiness gone from her wings. She looked out over a world still waiting for her. In all of June, I had never seen her rest upon the feeder so contentedly.

Dreams of our mothers
Lived in younger hosts;
A safe passage, is all for now
She prays.

Canful of Pens

I have so many stray pens strewn through the house and in my purse from places I have been, businesses I have frequented – some I have not . . . there is one which recurrently comes into my hand from a place I have not been – “Studley Chiropractic Clinic.” That’s the inscription on just one of a can full of pens I poured into a box of miscellanea to bring home with me when my sister and I cleaned out my mother’s house after her death. The can of pens was on the hutch cabinet near the phone – a large soup can that she had covered with a yellow-and-orange floral design contact paper. She began to stand pens in the can, one at a time – I imagine – as she was given them over many years from such places as the chiropractor’s or dentist’s or doctor’s offices where she went; from the hardware store, bank, pharmacy, or hearing aid center – the trail left by a widow who had learned to take care of herself.


Some of the pens must have been mailed to my mother from Medicare, for they tout advertisements for drugs that I’m sure she never took – Lexipro, Namenda, Maxalt-MLT. She was noted for curing all ills with an aspirin and a good nap, though in later years I suspect she let a prescription-trigger-happy doctor make those choices for her – this will help, he most likely said too often. Maybe her pharmacist put one such pen in each bag of refilled prescription – another pen – and she placed the pen upright in the tin can by the phone.

It’s been more than a year since I spilled the can of pens into the box and brought them home with me and placed them in a small clay pot near my own phone. And in this past year many of those pens have been pitched, one by one, into the large trash can – that is, if they didn’t work when I needed them to. I’m always careful to read the pen just one last time to see what piece of the trail just ended.

That’s why most of my mother’s pens are gone now. Only a dozen or 15 remain, like this one that keeps coming into my hand from Studley Chiropractic Clinic. She must have gone there a lot – and he often gave her a pen – for I think I have 5 or 6 of these pens in various colors. I don’t remember ever tossing out a pen from Studley Chiropractic – and my mother quit going to him at least 10 years ago because she thought he had cracked a bone in her osteoporotic spine – and I think she was right – for she was in so much pain after a visit – and an x-ray showed there was a hairline fracture in the lumbar spine.  Looking back, I would say that was the beginning of her slow decline, for she stopped her decades-long daily walking routine after that – a hairline crack that would become the great divide between a healthy lifestyle without drugs and – the other side – though of course no one could see it at the time. I’ll bet that’s when the town’s prescription-zealous doctor began saying things like, this will help – and so a pain medication began, and then the refills cycled in – and maybe that’s how the pens advertising odd drugs got into her home.

Before the hairline crack in her spine, she would joke to us about her chiropractor and dentist sharing the same small office building on Main Street – only one dentist in town and one chiropractor in town – an unlikely partnership of two diverse professions, but one that made sense with so few professionals in town. The partnership was called “Studley and Dickie” – for the dentist’s name was Dr. Dickie.

She thought that was so funny – as did all the women, mostly widows, in her quilting group.

“I’ve got my appointments with Drs. Studley and Dickie today,” one woman might say.

“Two in one day?” another might be obliged to say before the whole quilting group cackled at the old joke. We – her children and grandchildren – never got tired of the joke, the way she said it anyway. It’s funny to me how Fate (another word for Humor, I suspect at times), has an easier time of creating such odd bedfellows in small towns than in the biggest of cities. I wonder if either of these dignified older men ever suspected how much fun the town’s elderly women were having with their names . . .

So my mother would schedule her dentist appointment . . . and since she was going into the building anyway, she would make a chiropractic appointment . . . and the quilting group would have met the day before or the day after – all as I imagine.

I suppose she picked up one pen from each appointment, for I have several of each that stand upright and alongside each other in the clay pot – and they have been the most humorous reminder of the trail she left.

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 . . .