fivecats journal

Bonn & Ben @ Tupelo Honey
October 2007, Asheville, NC
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A quick posting for bardcat.

bardcat will be in the mountains of North Carolina over the next many days attending a writer's conference. While there he's going to be in many of the places I've been lately, including Black Mountain and Asheville. In particular, he may be eating at the Asheville restaurant Tupelo Honey.

We were in Asheville a few weekends ago visiting our daughter and her fiance. While there we had an unexpected Sunday brunch with Ben's aunt and uncle who had driven in from Tennessee for the day just so they could meet us. (Ben's mother died a year or two ago and they're his closest living relatives. It was something of a Meet The In-Laws brunch, sprung on us at the last minute for [well-founded] fear that Bonn would obsess about the meeting so thoroughly that she might cancel our trip)

The six of us had a grand time at Tupelo Honey. I've always found the food to be so-so, but Bonn really liked her blackened fish (salmon? I can't remember now). I had the most amazing Shrimp Grits in Chapel Hill when I first started at my job and I simply must stop trying to find it again elsewhere. (It was disappointing at best at Tupelo Honey)

Still, any restaurant named for a Van Morrison song can't be all bad. Besides, the wait staff, mostly women, have more tatoos than most guys I know.

The mountains of western North Carolina are known for their brilliant, blazing colour shows in October. The Blue Ridge Parkway suddenly gets congested to a crawl with driving sight-seers desperate for a glimpse of the vistas of leaves changing colors all the way from green to yellow to orange to red.

We saw the merest of splotches of colours during our drives to the mountains last weekend. My theory ("ahem -- my theory...") is that the leaves will all go from green to brilliant colours to dead and on the ground within ten days this year.

This means bardcat should be in for the Nature's Colour Display of his life this week.

Write from the heart, write well and write truth, bardcat.

And enjoy every minute of it.

(and then share what you've learned with the rest of us!)

...

Maddie
July 2005 Asheville, NC
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Last Wednesday evening I made the horrible mistake of taking a shower. Somewhere after the washing of the still-too-short hair and the final rinse-off, it happened. Standing still, knees bent slightly, facing forward -- WHACK!!!

A simple falling down in a wet shower, cracking my skull open and having to deal with the hoards of zombies that would, undoubtedly, start appearing on our doorstep due to the charming aroma such an event would cause would have been mere child's play. A baseball bat being swung into the shower cracking my ribcage into splinters? I wish...

No, this WHACK was the sound of two of my vertibrea attempting to make sudden contact with each other twarted only by that pesky nerve that runs in between them getting in the way.

At least, if there were any justice in this world, such a life-altering event would be accompanied by a similarly massive sound effect to give the events that were going to, ineveitably, follow for days and days their proper perspective and due. As well, the soundtrack to the entire shower would have been accompanied by that ominous, shark-in-the-water music that always preceeds such bone-crushing scenes.

In reality, there was nothing but the sound of the shower and me feeling my back seize up as my pinched nerve slammed all of it's bags down on the floor of my spine and, looking around, said, "You know, things haven't changed around here much in 15 years! It's good to be back for a visit!"

( Of course it's long. Click on through to the other side if you're up for it... )

...