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Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
American Cheese
American cheese on white bread. Dry and joyless. Wholly unsatisfying yet, as a bus station refreshment, wholly appropriate. The bread is without flavor or soul, edible foam rubber, hardly the staff of life. The cheese is mostly chemical. But we are far from the farm.
October 1974Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
The Politics Of Food
It’s very difficult for me to write about food — so many trips and so much worry, joy, and compulsion. My first impulse is to go into a Yiddish tragic-comedy about the whole thing, but not now. My second impulse is to go into a long talk about all the changes in my own feelings and habits surrounding food, but that doesn’t seem right either.
October 1974
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
The Chapel Hill Syndrome
I’m not down on Chapel Hill. With me it’s a matter of finding out that I don’t have to live there in order to be up. I have not always felt this way. In fact, I had a bad case of what I call the Chapel Hill Syndrome.
September 1974
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
The Traveler Returns: Home, More Or Less, At Last
Going home, as if home were still a possibility, or, like those other shadowy and relative values of our age — love, honesty, rationality — nothing more than a momentary echo of something past, and nearly forgotten, a smudge on the map, a torn page from the history book, when families stayed put, when the heart was forever, when politicians were statesmen, when faith was an arbiter at the edge of learning rather than a substitute for reason.
September 1974
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
The Music And The Masses
And so it was pronounced: there would be a gathering of the multitude, and musicians would play and fireworks would light the sky. The people were joyous, for they had just beheld the resignation of a powerful leader who had sought to rule through discrediting these free people. A note of justice was to be heard through the festival.
September 1974Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
Dear Charlotte, It’s Hard To Know What To Say . . .
I think I’d rather talk about Charlotte. North Carolina, that is. I really can’t be objective about Chapel Hill, and my subjectivity is too complex to put into words. But Charlotte! There’s a town I can write about cause I really don’t like that city. I can’t quite put my finger on it, you know, because it would take half my hand to really cover it all.
September 1974
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
On The Other Hand
So many people have so many good things to say about Chapel Hill, we thought we’d ask some folks what they don’t like about it. A sample of public opinion:
“The casual village atmosphere has become a casual rip-off atmosphere.”
“I don’t like the cars on Franklin Street. Close it off and plant flower gardens on the asphalt.”
September 1974Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
All The Smiling Faces
It’s not just that this is a small town where everybody knows you. Even on my first day in Chapel Hill I was greeted by many smiling faces and hellos as I walked down Franklin Street. Believe me, after Buffalo, NY, and Washington, D.C., it was an overwhelming feeling that made me say, “Yes, I think I’ll stay here,” as I know many other travelers have done.
September 1974
Fiction
Welcome To The Fish Tank
Three A.M. on East Franklin Street and there were just these three things moving. A battered green one-ton pickup truck with a hanging muffler and two kids from New Jersey; an old guy who told them how to get to Manns Chapel Road; and the cop car that made a quick u-turn and followed them out of town.
September 1974
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