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By Roger Barbee

One advantage for me during the pandemic is that there is more time for reading. While it is true that I, as a retired person, did  not have the pressures of a job and young family before the pandemic, there was time for outside activities, such as church and meals in restaurants. The pandemic has caused those activities and others to be curtailed, so more reading has filled the slot.

One day this past week, I decided to re-read A Month in the Country, the delightful and powerful novel by J.L. Carr. The author states in the foreword that he was trying to write  “a rural idyll along the lines of Thomas Hardy’s Under the Greenwood Tree.” Carr accomplishes that and more in his story of Tom Birkin’s brief time in a remote Yorkshire village after the Great War as he restores a church painting depicting the apocalypse and his own re-healing seen through his eyes years hence.

In 2000 or so a fellow teacher recommended Carr’s short novel, and since then I have read it several times, given copies as gifts to fellow teachers and friends, and even owned a signed first edition. However, I gave that copy to my friend Druin who lives near Oxford, England. I had introduced Druin to Carr one summer while working in Pembroke College, and he is the one who pilfered my copy of The First Saturday in May, Carr’s nostalgic remembrance of a cricket match in 1936. Over the years, every time I mentioned First Saturday, Druin admitted his taking of the book while refusing to return it; so when my wife and I visited him and his family in 2010, I decided since he had one he might as well have the other, so I gave him my signed first edition of Month-one pilfered, one gifted.

Another friend that I shared Carr with was Joy, a lady and poet who I worked with at NCS for ten years. She was quite a literary person who enjoyed a strong poem, a well-crafted story, and chocolate. She was my best editor until her death, at age 90, in January 2020. (I often think that her death from heart failure was a foretelling of the dreadful year to follow.) Years ago I had introduced Joy and Druin via email and read many of their literary discussions with awe. One, a writer in Northwest DC and the other in Oxford, England, both sharing their delight in writers such as Carr and many more. Druin and I enjoyed Joy’s pleasure when she received, unannounced, a copy of Druin’s latest book, The Shape of Things to Come.

Now here I was removing the thin paperback from a bookshelf before I settled in to read a bit before the urge to nap took control. But I quickly became puzzled  by what I saw on the insider page when I opened the book,  However, the puzzlement soon evolved into a pleasing appreciation for life’s unannounced moments.  In the upper right-hand corner was a pasted label with Joy’s full name and address. A neat, diagonal line crossed through the label and below it in Joy’s neat hand was written: “From Roger B. 2/14/01” but below that line was written: “To Roger B. 9/23/15.” I had given her this copy of Month not long after I had “discovered” it, and she returned it for some reason fourteen years later. I flipped through the book and noticed pencil highlights that I had made during some reading but stuck between pages 22 and 23 was a bright colored piece of paper on which Joy had written these words from the novel: “And, at such a time, for a few of us there will always be a tugging at the heart, knowing a precious moment gone and we not there.”

I am writing this on Christmas Eve afternoon and wondering at how good literature and good friends intertwine in our lives. This past year, such a difficult one that has been full of toil and trouble and death, is also the one of Joy’s death. But the lines she copied onto that sheet of paper tell much about her and all of us. James, the brother of Jesus,  writes, “For what is your life? It is even a vapour, that appeareth for a little time, and then vanisheth away.”

I did not nap, but instead placed Joy’s copy of Month beside my signed copy of Carr’s What Hetty Did in the class bookcase.. No longer will the small paperback sit on the shelf for reading copies.  Once in her last year, Joy told me that she was having too much fun living to die. That was all! No fear of death. No tugs of her heart.  Just a recognition and appreciation for life’s “precious moments.”

By Roger Barbee

Soon following our move to Lake Norman almost five years ago, my wife Mary Ann looked for a representative for a particular beauty product she used. Scanning a long list of saleswomen, she randomly chose one and called her. After their long conversation had finished, Mary Ann came to the library to tell me how pleasant Terri the saleswoman was and how much she looked forward to working with her. It was then that her phone rang, and Terri asked, “Did you say your husband’s name was Roger?”

In 1823 the English Romantic poet, Lord Byron, wrote his poem, Don Juan, in which he writes: “‘ Tis strange – but true; for truth is always strange; /Stranger than fiction; if it could be told,…” Over the years many other writers have expressed the same idea in various words, but no matter what version is written, all readers eventually learn the truth of Byron’s words.

There it was for me: Strange but True;  Life not Fiction.  The husband of Terri and I had wrestled against each other in high school. Mike wrestled for Mooresville High School, and I for A.L. Brown in Kannapolis. We competed in the same weight class for two years over fifty years ago and now we meet again, just not on a wrestling mat.

We four had the obligatory lunch to meet and talk and explore. Mike and I then continued sharing lunches, coffee in my shop, and he guided me around our new home, Lake Norman, which he knew well because his career was with the power company that built the Lake.  We soon discovered that we had much in common.: Both of our hometowns had been textile towns when we were wrestling against each other; our parents had worked in the mills; we lived in mill houses, and both of those houses are still family occupied. So much, besides wrestling, shared.

Each week he would call and ask, “Want a coffee?” then in a few minutes he would appear with a soda for himself and the promised coffee for me. Each weekly visit found Mike helping me with some project in the yard or my shop. He is most responsible for the deck that expanded my small shop– giving me much needed work space. A trained engineer, he made certain it was correct and safe. Exact, even. He would rake the abundant pine needles fallen from the 42 pine trees in our yard to use for mulch in his gardens.  Our weekly visit often included lunch, and when we ate at his favorite fast-food eatery, he would pull a rash of coupons from a pocket before paying and say, “A poor man spends money like he is rich, but a rich man spends it like he is poor.”  Then as we ate, some finer points of theology or politics would be discussed. I will always remember how he once looked at me during one of these “discussions” and asked, “Are you that naïve?”

When I work with a project on the deck that Mike more or less built or move in my wheelchair around the yard gleaning pine cones, I see his presence. The bluebird nesting-box with the red roof still graces the pine tree where he fastened it after I “mentioned” to him how it needed to be there. When I admired a long row of irises in a neighbor’s yard, I asked Mike one day as we returned from a road trip to knock on the unreachable (for my wheelchair) door to inquire if I could have some. The kind, elderly lady must of approved of Mike because she gave me permission to take any irises I wanted, and now next to the back garden gate is a small, varied-colored growth of purple irises that Mike and I planted; and, like our friendship, it grows and thickens and blooms.

Both our lives, like all lives, have had their dips and twists and failures and mountaintops. But for two boys from the mill hills of small, textile towns, we have been blessed and have done well. And as I share life with Mike long after our competitive days, I appreciate more and more the odd, interesting, and fulfilling paths that we all travel, whether planned or not. Mary Ann and I moved to Lake Norman not knowing that the “Stranger than fiction” of Byron would happen, and that a friendship would be forged out of a time long ago when two scrappy, mill-hill boys competed against each other. Byron also writes that “…truth is always strange.”  He’s right, of course, but not always in the way it may appear. It’s not strange that Mike and I respected each other as wrestlers. Nor is it strange that there is something deeper now.