Blogging Ahoskie

My father-in-law grew up in Ahoskie, North Carolina, a little town in the northeastern part of the state. The landscape is flat, big on farming and hunting. Because I have no cell phone signal here, I can't take a picture of the place, send it to my email, download, upload, etc. I did an Internet search of pictures for this place, and many of the pictures that came up involved either rows of tobacco and cotton or men in camouflage beside the bodies of animals they'd just killed, holding their heads up so that they seem to be looking into the camera along with their killers.

Anyway, I'm hanging out in the Tomahawk Motel here, reading and writing in the quiet before the weekend reunion chaos kicks in. This evening my granddaughters will arrive, and tomorrow I'll take them to see the new Toy Story movie, an entertaining escape from the heat, I hope. Tomorrow evening we'll have the big pig-picking. The beast will be on the cooker from early tomorrow morning. Eastern North Carolina barbeque is my favorite—not a tomato based sauce but a spicy combination of vinegar and Tabasco. Love it!

I've been away from this blog for too long (and hope not to be so again), so here's the bullet list of events, some of which I might write up in more details:

• at work, finished up spring class, grading and honors recruiting . . . but enough about work
  


• okay, sort of about work, my annual trip with the sophomores to Washington, DC, in the second week of May
  


• a research trip to Kent, Ohio, to work with a typescript biography of Charles Brockden Brown, in preparation for writing a chapter about his early biographers for an Oxford University Press publication
  


• rehearsals for and the performance of a rock-and-roll show for the Mermaids in Marshall celebration in the French Broad Friday series of summer celebrations in Marshall, NC; I got to hang out and play with Sugardaddy from Bakersville, NC, which was a lot of fun; the show itself was a blast, and Marshall seemed to love it
  


• an extraordinary meeting of the 4 O'clock Club on June 12, Next Door at the Acoustic Coffeehouse; I played some music, we had some good beer and good cake in celebration of the event, which also included a celebration of my wife's birthday
  


• a trip with my wife to Washington, DC, where I was reunited with a group of people with which I toured Europe 31 years ago
  

And now I'm in Ahoskie!