Camellia days

Lessons in blooming, plus my weekly shareables: An astounding scam, an audacious theft, and Beyoncé goes country

Note #1: A reminder for Charlotte-area readers: My first SouthBound Live panel on the future of Charlotte is THIS THURSDAY at WFAE’s Center for Community and Civic Engagement on Seventh Street uptown. This event features Charlotte-Mecklenburg school Superintendent Crystal Hill; Sil Ganzó, founder of the OurBridge program for immigrant and refugee children; and John Searby, CEO of the Catawba Riverkeeper and Daniel Stowe Botanical Garden. We’ll be talking about the challenges and opportunities Charlotte is facing in this early part of a new millennium.

We do still have some tickets available, but hurry. Grab ‘em now!

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Note #2: This is your weekly reminder that DOGLAND is available for preorder everywhere, including your local independent bookstore, but it is especially available at MY local independent bookstore, Park Road Books in Charlotte, where I will inscribe a copy however you like if you preorder there. We're about two months out from publication day (April 23) and the publisher is making decisions about marketing and a book tour and that sort of thing … preorder numbers are vital in making those decisions. If you’ve already ordered a copy of DOGLAND, I’m deeply grateful. If you’ve been thinking about it, now is the perfect time. As Kirkus Reviews says: “This book wants to lick your face. Let it.”

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We went away for a long weekend to see family and when we came back the camellia bush was exploding in blooms.

It’s a highlight of every February, a movie trailer for the coming spring. This bush is a hybrid so the flowers are all shades of red and pink and white. We can see the back side of it from our dining room table and it brightens even the grayest morning.

It was not always this way.

We moved into our house nearly 20 years ago. For the first I don’t know how many years—eight or nine, maybe?—the bush did nothing all year but block our view of the street. We didn’t know what kind of plant it was. We just knew it was in the way. I can’t tell you how many times we thought about digging it out by the roots.

But it turns out Charlotte had been in the midst of an extended drought. And when we finally got a wet winter, we came out one morning to find unexpected beauty right there at the corner of the porch.

It has bloomed every year since. And now it’s my favorite plant in the yard.

You might see a metaphor here. It’s possible that the things you think are dead inside you are only dormant … maybe they just need some water and care. Maybe there are even parts of you that you didn’t even know were there, and they just need the right conditions to bloom.

Every year around this time, as we marvel at the camellia, I think about how close we came to cutting it down, because we didn’t understand how to take care of it. In the end, our procrastination turned out to pay off for once. That’s not a winning play in the long term. We should’ve been more intentional to figure out what that old bush was and why someone might have put it there in the first place. There’s almost always a reason. There’s almost always something hiding in the background, waiting to flourish if we let it.

10 things I wanted to share this week:

1. My guest on SOUTHBOUND this week is Jason Kirk, who wrote a clever novel called HELL IS A WORLD WITHOUT YOU about life as an evangelical teenager—something Jason knows a lot about. He’s also a co-host of the Shutdown Fullcast, the absurd and beautiful college football podcast. We talk about the similarities between hardcore religion and college football (spoiler alert: they’re basically the same).

2. Terrifying read of the week: The story of a woman who got scammed so thoroughly she gave a shoebox full of $50,000 in cash to a stranger. The kicker: She is New York magazine’s financial columnist. (The Cut)

3. Somebody stole the entire 190-foot tower from a small-town radio station in Alabama. Quote of the week: “Bill and Mary Cain, who have lived in Jasper for decades, said they had not seen such an outlandish crime in the city since two inmates used peanut butter to escape from a jail in 2017.” (NYT)

4. I loved this episode of the podcast PABLO TORRE FINDS OUT with superstar athlete couple Sue Bird and Megan Rapinoe—they talk about coming out, speaking out, and what it’s like to be retired at an age when most people are in the middle of their careers. They’re funny and so smart.

5. DOG NEWS: From now until DOGLAND comes out, I’m devoting this slot to dog stories. This week: Remember that dog I mentioned last week from Budweiser’s Super Bowl commercial? Turns out he belongs to Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell. (People)

6. RIP Dexter Romweber, leader of the Flat Duo Jets—one of the great party bands from my college days in Athens. When I first heard the White Stripes, I thought: Oh, somebody updated Flat Duo Jets.
   

7. The one Super Bowl commercial that made me laugh was Ben Affleck’s transformation into a rapper to impress Jennifer Lopez (and sell some donuts). It turns out there’s an extended cut!
   

8. Finished Philip Norman’s bio GEORGE HARRISON: THE RELUCTANT BEATLE, which is deeply reported and dishy and kept me going back to Spotify again and again.

9. You might have heard that Beyoncé has released a couple of new songs in advance of a new album that will supposedly be her full dive into country music. This of course got many country traditionalists all kerfuffled, including one Oklahoma radio station that refused to play her single “Texas Hold ‘Em” until there was a flood of protests. The funny thing is that “Texas Hold ‘Em” is more country than about 90 percent of the songs currently on country radio. Plus: it features the great Rhiannon Giddens on banjo and viola. Plus plus: Beyoncé is from HOUSTON, the countriest big city in America. Do people really think she doesn’t have some country soul in her back pocket?
   
   Anyway, the song’s really good.
   

10. One last quick thought: Country music belongs to black folks as much as it does to white folks. DeFord Bailey was one of the first Grand Ole Opry performers. Charley Pride had 30 years of hits. Darius Rucker is all over the charts now. The freaking banjo itself is an African instrument. And country music has deep roots in the blues. All of this is more than obvious unless you want to just wish it away.
    
    Or you could just listen to Ray Charles sing “I Can’t Stop Loving You.”
    
    

    Have a great week, everybody.