How sweet silence after kindergarten goodbyes!

“Because I Said So” column for The Commercial Appeal

Sept. 1, 2011

The school year began in earnest a couple of weeks ago when my 5-year-old daughter, Genevieve, began kindergarten. For the past year, her excitement has grown with the anticipation of going to Richland Elementary — the “big kids’ school.” That anticipation grew into a frenzy as we readied her backpack and lunchbox, and she picked out her first day’s uniform.

It had been several years since I had left a child at kindergarten. It’s time that helps a parent forget the tears and clinging. The buffer of years became mental solace as I had forgotten the sadness, the separation and the anxiety. Goodbyes that first morning were long and drawn out with one last hug, one last kiss, one last assurance. Finally, though, most of the parents were able to pull it together enough to leave. These were parents who’d been here before, professionals like me, and rookies who had never been away from their babies.

I walked back home that day with the thought of Genevieve’s tear-streaked face in my mind. I was surprised by how far out of my mind I’d put such scenes since the first time I ever had to be a part of it 13 years ago when my oldest began school. It’s something that comes crashing back like posttraumatic stress.

Another thing I’d forgotten? The quiet. The sheer nothingness that happens in a house when nobody is around. Back at home, I sat in my office and was blanketed in this nothingness. I walked to the back of the house where there were no children. Quiet. I stood in the kitchen where there were no children. More of that sweet, sweet silence. Even the living room, with its television in repose for the first time in months, was hushed. The whole day was like that. Every day since has been this way … (read more)

‘The Help’ hits home for those who lived each side of complicated relationship

Feature story for The Commercial Appeal

Sept. 1, 2011

Calvin Turley and Addie Carr reflected on the themes explored in ”The Help,” the No. 1 box office movie in America.

Turley is white. Carr is black.

A movie and book of the same name, “The Help” explores the relationship between white families and African-American maids in the 1960s, when America’s views on civil rights had begun to change.

“The Help” tugs and pulls at the contrasts between the helpers, who often are considered part of a family, and the sometimes exploitive relationship in white households that employed the low-wage black maids.

“The Help” has become a national phenomenon and remains the top-grossing movie in the country this week. And in Memphis, the Malco Paradiso ranks as the top-grossing theater in the nation for the movie, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

But for Turley and Carr it was just the way things were back then.

Turley, 61, is president of Turley Cotton Co. He has seen the movie and hopes to take Carr, who works for him and worked for his family before that, to see it soon.

His parents employed domestic help to work in the family’s Central Gardens home.

“I think pretty much everybody in that

neighborhood had family help, and it added a lot of texture to the neighborhood,” Turley said.

A long list of women did the cooking and cleaning and tending to the children. Turley ticks them off like naming old friends: Pearl cooked the best soul food he’s ever had, Crystal was the nurse, and Maggie Steele worked for three generations of Turleys … (read more)

Station brings Memphis tunes to virtual airwaves

Feature story for The Memphis Daily News

Aug. 30, 2011

At first glance, it looks like any home office anywhere: two flat screen computer monitors with towers beneath the desk, a coffee pot to one side and a black-and-white cat that desperately wants to be let out.

But then the microphone is noticed, and the rack of CD cases and the posters touting rock ‘n’ roll bands. Suddenly it seems like a 17-year-old’s home office.

This is the broadcast studio of the brand new Radio Memphis, an Internet-only, original-music-only, Memphis-only radio station.

“It’s a radio station that is not like any other, that’s for sure,” said founder Ric Chetter. “We’ve broken the corporate mold by getting away from trying to just please our shareholders. Not that we have any, it’s just me and the people that have stepped in to help put this thing together and make this thing a reality.”

Chetter knows corporate too. He has spent most of his life in the corporate environment, most recently with media mastodon Clear Channel Communications (WEGR/Rock 103), where he held various positions including morning drive time host with the late John “Bad Dog” McCormick. Chetter was laid off from Clear Channel in February … (read more)

Who knew garbage can such a tricky mark to hit?

Because I Said So column for The Commercial Appeal

Aug. 18, 2011

We have a garbage can in our kitchen. It’s 18 inches tall and 12 by 18 inches wide. A typical Rubbermaid in an off-white tone. It holds a plastic bag with a drawstring and is encased in such a way that it glides out from a cabinet under the counter on casters. It’s right there by the sink; you can’t miss it.

Yet my kids do. The most extraordinary feature of this incredibly ordinary can is that it repels garbage. It refuses refuse. The children in this house put as little effort as humanly possible into throwing trash away. It is all they can do to lay the Pop-Tart wrapper on the top. There is no attempt at pushing the wrapper — or the paper plate on top of it, or the paper towels on top of all of that — deeper into the can where their half-eaten snack from earlier in the day dwells.

Around the can and within that cabinet is more evidence of their laziness, a wasteland of cheese-by-the-slice wrappers, tissue, a chicken bone and homework mistakes. It’s like the climbers’ base camp in Nepal. Cleanliness is these kids’ Everest.

Trash can? Try trash can’t … (read more)

Living on the edge

Small business story for The Memphis Daily News

Aug. 18, 2011

In 2008, something was brewing in the area near Cleveland and Watkins streets south of Poplar Avenue in Midtown.

A developer, Tom Marsh, working with Florida-based WSG Development, had unveiled plans for a mixed-use development to include small and large retail, including a Target store, condominiums, apartments and medical offices, along with all-around improvements to the neighborhood known as Crosstown.

Those plans, along with the eventual renovation of the old Sears Crosstown tower everyone saw as inevitable, was enough of a hook for entrepreneur Frank James to hang his dreams on.

James is a Memphis businessman who has run his Edge Coffee House out of several Midtown locations. He first opened in 1994 in the phone company building that was on Madison Avenue next door to the P&H Café before moving to Cooper Street at Peabody Avenue that same year; he moved to Poplar in what is now the Hi-Tone Café in 1997, and into his current location off of Cleveland in 2008 … (read more)

Main Street beckoned as stylish destination for shopping, key market for designers

Hidden Memphis feature for The Commercial Appeal

Aug. 14, 2011

In the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s, if a Mid-Southerner wanted to see a movie, dine out or shop, she would visit Downtown Memphis. There, she would have her choice of the Warner Theatre, Loews Palace Theater or Majestic; lunch at Anderton’s or Britling Cafeteria. And she would want to look her best — Downtown was as much an ideal of sophistication as a destination — and for that, she would shop at Goldsmith’s, Levy’s, Lowenstein’s, Gerber’s, Bry’s or Julius Lewis.

Babbie Lovett was typical of the era, a small-town girl from Arkansas whose father had business to be taken care of in Memphis. The trip to the city — three hours to travel 60 miles — was like journeying a world away.

“When Daddy would bring us to town to sell cotton, he would say to Mother, ‘Do you want to get out on big heaven or little heaven?’ Big heaven was Goldsmith’s, and little heaven was Levy’s,” Lovett explained.

As a young woman, Lovett came back to Memphis for college. Main Street, the main artery for fashion and shopping, never lost its luster. The evolution and cycles of couture became a focal point of her life and career, beginning with modeling for Goldsmith’s.

“I came to Southwestern to go to school, and when we would go Downtown, we’d put on high heels and wear gloves, but that was a different era, and I’ve seen it (fashion cycles) happen about every 10 or 20 years: Lifestyle dictates fashion,” Lovett said. “But Memphis was such a melting pot for people from Mississippi, Missouri, Arkansas and Middle Tennessee, which was totally different from Memphis.” … (read more)

River Times magazine

A publication of The Mississippi River Corridor – Tennessee

Summer 2011

Project writer responsible for all editorial content of this 32-page magazine. Stories written include: Reelfoot Lake: Facts & Folklore; Victorian Village; Farmers Markets & Local Farm Tours; Dyersburg River Center & Park; Dr. Peter Brown & the Dyersburg State Community College Ornithology & Fauna Collection; The Civil War Trail; Harahan Bridge Project; Historic Town Squares.

2011 River Times magazine

Sleeping in soon to be just a fond memory

Because I Said So column for The Commercial Appeal

Aug. 4, 2011

We’ve come to the end of another summer. The very words stick in my throat like hot tar considering the thermometer still reads 101 degrees. Yet here we are trying to grind the gears of vacation backward and calibrate ourselves to the school year’s hours.

During summer break, my family enjoys later bedtimes and sleeping in, breakfast and lunch eaten when we’re hungry, not necessarily when the clock summons us to eat. Dinner is grilled while the children play nearby, unconcerned with homework or tomorrow’s quizzes.

At summer’s end, we find ourselves trying once again to fit our circular summer selves into the square peg holes of school days.

Alarm clocks will sound, sleepy heads will be rousted, and the days will begin several hours earlier than what my kids have grown used to. To facilitate this difference in time, I’ve been trying to wear these kids out with swimming all day and forced marches to the neighborhood playground for climbing and timed races in the evenings. The desired effect of them dropping earlier and easier into bed, and naturally rising earlier, has been mixed; it’s a hard-headed crew whose stubbornness has only deepened along with their tans these past months.

Changing their biological clocks is not a science, but more like Superman flying backward around the Earth to make time reverse and remind them, after eight weeks off, what 6 a.m. looks like. I have assured my kids that, like it or not (they do not), they will come to know the darkness of morning again … (read more)

Baptist enhances cancer treatment with CyberKnife

Medical feature story for The Memphis Daily News

Aug. 3, 2011

Baptist Memorial Health Care Corp. is on the cutting edge of cancer treatment, especially where that treatment may not involve any cutting at all.

The radiation oncology department at Baptist is in the final stages of installing the nonsurgical CyberKnife Robotic Radiosurgery System to increase the effectiveness of treatment and decrease the time needed for tumor radiation. The new technology and hardware, costing more than $5 million including construction, is expected to be up and running by September.

CyberKnife is the newest weapon in the fight against cancer, and it’s the first of its kind in Memphis and the surrounding area, delivering high doses of radiation with sub-millimeter accuracy.

It is a massive piece of equipment at more than eight feet tall, yet moves with the nimbleness and agility of a surgeon. The sleek, white body is adapted from the robots used to build cars, and the technology is seen in commercials and film. Those machines, however, are incredibly fast while the CyberKnife has been scaled back to move at only 3 percent of its possible speed. The administration of radiation need not be rushed … (read more)

Silence of spirit: Quaker worship focuses on listening to inner voice

Feature story for Faith Matters in The Commercial Appeal

July 30, 2011

On a recent Sunday morning, as was happening all over Memphis, a group of like-minded people came together to celebrate their spirituality. This was no typical house of worship, however, with hymns and high praise, or a robed priest’s hint at Latin. At the Friends Meeting House — a small house on Walnut Grove in East Memphis, only a stone’s throw from a Kroger, popular restaurants, dollar stores and a post office — nearly 30 Friends, or Quakers, gathered, as they do every Sunday, for a morning of thought-provoking spiritual silence.

At the appointed time, as if on cue, the chit-chat ceased, and silence prevailed. But there was no cue. It was as if a switch had been flipped, perhaps the spiritual call of Sunday morning that is instinctive within so many of us. Silence filled the room, and even the sounds of the light Sunday-morning traffic on Walnut Grove seemed to fall away.

“That’s what we call Quaker practice,” said Carol Ciscel, the clerk of the Memphis Friends. “All of us who stay with Quaker meetings stay with Quaker meeting because that discipline of silence really helps us in our lives and dealing with the anxieties and conflicts and difficulties of being human in this physical world. We don’t pray to God, we don’t talk to God — we listen to God.”

It is this aspect that may be the most difficult for the converted, those referred to as “convinced friends,” to grasp. Unlike most Christian ideologies, Quakerism has no dogma, no creed at its base. Rather, adherents practice what Ron McDonald of Memphis, a Quaker since 1985, terms “upside-down theology.” … (read more)