"We went there for everything we needed." The Quote of the Week

"We went there for everything we needed. We went there when thirsty, of course, and when hungry, and when dead tired. We went there when happy, to celebrate, and when sad, to sulk. We went there after weddings and funerals, for something to settle our nerves, and always for a shot of courage just before. We went there when we didn't know what we needed, hoping someone might tell us. We went there when looking for love, or sex, or trouble, or for someone who had gone missing, because sooner or later everyone turned up there. Most of all we went there when we needed to be found."

--the opening paragraph of J. R. Moehringer's marvelous 2006 memoir, The Tender Bar.

Shop Local! We couldn't have said it better ourselves..

Column: Dynamic local business scene a Durham hallmark

By Bob Ashely, Herald-Sun, 16 March 2014

The other day, waiting to pick up a lunch order at a quintessentially Durham establishment – a taqueria adorned with a large cow atop its roof, legacy of its days as dairy bar – it occurred to me how during my time in Durham the lure of buying local has grown year by year.

In part that’s because Durham in the early part of the 21^stcentury has perhaps the most vibrant, varied and engaged local business operations of any place I can recall in my adult life.

And in part it is because I’ve been educated over time by many friends in the local business community about the unique importance they hold in the community’s social and economic fabric.

That is not to dismiss the importance of major national retailers, restaurants and service providers. I happily benefit from the rich variety and availability of merchandise and culinary options brought to us by our landscape of national retailers. A  newspaper colleague and I were talking the other day about the fact there is scarcely a major national retailer not represented in this market – something that would not have been true a couple of decades ago.

But there is something special about the contribution of local businesses, and making extra effort to sustain them is worthwhile. And it’s important to realize the benefits that accrue.

If you need some examples, look no further than another wonderful Durham fixture – the website of Sustain-a-Bull. The organization, inspired by Ninth Street merchants and curated by Amy Campbell, daughter of Regulator Bookshop co-owner Tom Campbell, exists to encourage people to “Shop independent Durham.” 

And the website offers several arguments for “Why Local Matters:”

-- “In a 2012 national poll, respondents said that having locally owned businesses nearby is the #1 factor in creating an ideal community.

-- “A 2011 study found that ‘counties with a vibrant small-business sector have lower rates of mortality and a lower prevalence of obesity and diabetes’ than counties without one.

-- “Studies of both agricultural and manufacturing communities found that places with a diversity of small-scale enterprises had higher levels of civic participation and better social outcomes than those dominated by a few outside corporations.

-- “Each dollar spent at a local, independent merchant generates up to four times as much wealth in the local economy as a dollar spent at a chain-owned business, due to the local multiplier effect.

“ --Farmers who sell items locally tend to be smaller scale and can more feasibly adopt environmentally beneficial practices such as growing diverse crops, planting cover crops, leaving habitat buffers for native biodiversity, and integrating crop and livestock production.”

That last bullet point underscores the contributions of our increasingly popular and extensive farmers’ markets – another example of Durham’s embrace of buying local.

More than 100 local businesses are members of Sustain-A-Bull (many advertise in this newspaper, for which I and my colleagues are especially grateful). They no doubt are encouraged by statistics such as this, again from the website:

“Independent businesses in communities with an active ‘buy local first’ initiative, such as Sustain-a-Bull, reported almost 3 times more revenue growth in 2012 compared with those in areas without such an initiative in a recent survey from the Institute for Local Self Reliance.”

Farmers’ markets, ethnic restaurants, coffee shops with eclectic and funky décor, hardware stores without blister packs where clerks will call around to find an item they don’t have in stock, boutiques with unique merchandise, fair-trade-focused import shops – Durham is alive with lively local businesses.

That is yet another affirmation “great things are happening in Durham.”

(Bob Ashley is the editor of the Durham Herald-Sun)

Source: heraldsun.com

"Pearl divers in training..." The Quote of the Week

“The little boy had wandered away from his mother, tacking across the grass to the play structure. His mother watched him go, proud, tickled, unaware that every time they toddled away from you, they came back a little different, ten seconds older and nearer to the day when they left you for good. Pearl divers in training, staying under a few seconds longer every time.”
―Michael Chabon, Telegraph Avenue. 

Don't be a shrew--The Quote of the Week

This from a wonderful book called The Forest Unseen: A Year's Watch in Nature by a biologist named David George Haskell. The book is filled with scientific/poetic details on the marvels and interconnectedness to be found in a patch of old growth Tennessee forest.

But nature has its nasty bits as well, and they can make for some pretty riveting reading. Catching a glimpse of a shrew on an early spring morning, Haskell tells us a bit about the little mammal that Shakespeare made famous:

"Shrews live short, violent lives. Only one on ten survives longer than a year; the rest get burned out by their furious metabolism. Shrews breathe so frantically that they cannot survive long aboveground. Their outrageously rapid breathing would dessicate and kill them in the dry air.

Shrews feed by snapping at prey then chewing poisonous saliva into their victims, sometimes killing the animal they have caught, sometimes paralyzing it for storage in a dungeon of horrors, a larder of living but incapacitated prey...

The soil's food web reaches its zenith in the shrew. Only owls will eat shrews; everything else gives them a wide berth, fearing their vicious teeth or the acrid taste of their scent glands.

There is kinship with humans here. The first mammals were shrew-like creatures terrorizing the snails and centipedes of the Mesozoic. Our ancestors were shrill and vicious, leading a caffeinated existence in dark corridors. An analogy with our current state of being is tempting. Thankfully we've lost the poison fangs and pungent glands."

And people think vampires are scary?

The Quote of the Week

"The difference between the Parthenon and the World Trade Center, between a French wine glass and a German beer mug, between Bach and John Philip Sousa, between Sophocles and Shakespeare, between a bicycle and a horse, though explicable by historical moment, necessity, and destiny, is before all else a difference of imagination."

"The imagination is like a drunk man who has lost his watch, and must get drunk to find it. It is an intimate as speech and custom, and to trace its ways we need to re-educate our eyes."

--From The Guy Davenport Reader, one of Wander's current staff picks.

A Quote for Snow

"A few light taps on the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark, mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead."

--the final paragraph of James Joyce's short story "The Dead," which is the final story in his 1914 collection, Dubliners.

Quote of the Week

"I love the predictions of a man right before his first child is born," Flowers said. "They're like little snowflakes. Right before the sun comes blazing out the clouds and melts those happy dreams away."

"Living in a dreamland," Bankwell suggested.

"Indeed," said Flowers. "But the rent is coming due."

...............

"...Late afternoon in late August, the sky limited only by the hills and the imminent wall of night. Palm tree, sycamore trees, soaked in shadow. Slouch-hat bungalows blazing sunshine at their crowns. Archy (the soon to be a father guy above) took it all in with the ardor of a doomed man. Not that he believed himself to be in any danger or was dying in any but the slowest and most conventional of ways. The clarity and sweetness of the evening, the light and the way it made his chest ache, were only the effects of mild panic, panic both moral and practical.

When he got out of his car, the evening laid its cool palm against his weary brow as if feeling for a temperature. He stood on the sidewalk in front of his house. The El Camino's engine sighed and muttered to itself, settling. A toddler archeologist searched the sandbox with a red shovel...."

From pages 210 and 211 in Michael Chabon's latest novel, Telegraph Avenue.