Driving to Carolina
Last weekend I visited my grandmother in rural North Carolina. It was a great lesson in zen. We watched the finches and cardinals on the birdfeeders; we drank coffee and we talked. That’s all. She kept saying I must be bored. I kept insisting she had no idea; this was bliss.
The drive up was the start of the low external stimulation: I-20 and I-95 aren’t much but flat fields and billboards for South of the Border. Listened to music from college and entertained the caffeine-inspired delusion that I could get everyone from those days back together again.
In South Carolina, every car looks like a cop car. And there are lots of cop cars, but there are also a lot of big shiny sedans that contain only pissed-off old people wondering why this gal in front of them just slowed down from 85 to 65 for no reason.

Fishfry
The only night of excitement ended up being Night One. I arrived at my grandma’s house tired; it had been eight hours in the car. But I was hours earlier than I’d told her, and so she whisked me off to a neighborhood fish-fry with a
“C’moan!”
And I say okay, though really, I just want a beeeeeer. (Yes, a petulant beer.) And a naaaap. And I’m just standing there picturing this group of people from her town. Whom I kind of think of as nondrinkers. Also Christian. Also over 70.
But then we get into the car and indeed it’s loaded down with older folks, but the woman next to me is sporting a cocktail she’s taken to go. This is not a usual sight in my prior experience of my grandma’s town. And the woman’s making joke after joke. And the night ends up not so bad. I consume pounds of fried fish and hush puppies and drink cranberry juice with vodka in someone’s garage. Just like college.
And near the end of the evening, when one man chides my grandma for voting for Kerry, the cocktail-toting woman grabs my arm.
“Alice. It’s like I say: Politics is like assholes. Everyone has one. It’s just, some people’s stink.”