St. Mary's

The gorgeous weather and our having such a good time stretched our two night stay at the beach into four, and had Jimmy not had an appointment tomorrow, we'd probably still be there. On our way home, we detoured through St. Mary's to see our friends Micky and Cathy Bright, who recently built a home in Cumberland Harbour.

We love their house. It's perfect, with wide plank pine floors and light-painted tongue and groove walls and great cottage detailing, and beautiful old oriental rugs and wonderful antique furniture and paintings: very Micky and Cathy.

They had lunch waiting for us, and it was divine. Micky has a crab trap on the St. Mary's River, and he had caught all the crabs, picked the crabmeat, and made crabmeat au gratin. Jimmy said that Micky probably had to pick a dozen crabs to get enough meat for that one dish, but it was well worth the effort.

Cumberland Harbour is a beautiful area with huge ancient oaks towering over stands of palmettos, and gorgeous coastal views of the river. It's easy to see why Micky and Cathy fell in love with it.

But on the other side...

Our place in Amelia Plantation is a third floor condominium overlooking the beach, and because we find the water so irresistible, the other side, the "street side," is largely ignored. But today Andy and I chose that route for our early morning constitutional. (Jimmy was still in bed, sleeping off a "book binge"; he's re-reading Herman Wouk's War and Remembrance, and was thus engrossed until the wee hours. Not that he needs an excuse: he always has been a world class sleeper.)

Shady green paths under a thick sinuous canopy of wind-pruned branches, and songbirds trilling their little hearts out made the other side almost as fun as the beach. Andy was beside himself, and it's a wonder he didn't break his neck, pulling so hard on his leash when tantalized by a provocative squirrel or someone riding by on a bicycle. Twice he had to be jerked back, to keep him from rolling in something delightfully (to him) foul-smelling. Such are the joys of dogdom.

Beauty and the Beach

A sunrise stroll

The Beach Boys

Andy: So proud and so brave

Andy loves the beach almost as much as Jimmy does. Today when there were no gulls around for him to terrorize, he entertained himself by trotting alongside us with a seashell in his mouth, tossing it into the air and jumping up to catch it: showing off, and quite proud of himself.

"I'm surprised he'll have anything to do with a shell," Jimmy remarked, reminding me of an encounter Andy'd had when he was about six months old, and was with us in the Bahamas. He had picked up a shell inhabited by a hermit crab which, annoyed by being so rudely molested, grabbed Andy's upper lip with its pincer, and refused to let go.

The creature was finally prised off the howling, thrashing puppy, who had suffered only a slightly bloodied lip. He seemed more embarrassed than anything else, and apparently was not too badly traumatized by his mishap.

Driving to Amelia

Jimmy and Andy and I drove to Amelia Island yesterday afternoon, to spend a few days at the beach. The trip only takes a couple of hours, with much of it spent on deserted back roads in south Georgia. Springtime in Valdosta still comes as a surprise: you forget from one year to the next how brightly the azaleas can paint the town, so it takes a while for the soft, subdued hues along the highway to have an effect.

Long miles and minutes passed without our seeing any other cars or houses or signs: only the empty road ahead of us, and lots and lots of trees. As we traveled along, a thousand variations of green began to emerge, and I tried mixing their colors in my mind; whereas the showy azaleas only require a simple palette, the complicated subtleties of the budding foliage could never come straight from a tube. Exquisite care and finesse were needed to get just the right shades, and when we rounded a bend, a sudden dusting of purple and yellow wildflowers sang out to be noticed.

Fortune cookies

Several years ago, Joe Singletary, gift-giver par excellence, gave Jimmy an atomic clock for Christmas, and it has sat by Jimmy's bathroom sink ever since. Sometimes, when we get Chinese food delivered, and Jimmy finds a message that I consider particularly apropos inside of his fortune cookie, I tape it to his atomic clock.

One of these little white slips of paper says "You are known as a snappy dresser." Jimmy loves beautiful clothes, and wears them with an elegance and a savoir-faire that occasionally rivals his buddy Converse Bright.

"People find it difficult to resist your persuasive manner" certainly applies, as does "Pray for what you want, but work for what you need." My favorite, though, is "A tentative life is full of regrets"; never a timorous J. Alfred Prufrock, Jimmy Dewar is the least tentative person I've ever known.

Happy Easter

And little Caroline Rose isn't even due for another MONTH!

The quarantine is easing a bit

Jimmy is with his cousin Fann Dewar Greer and her husband Billy Greer. Fann and Billy, who live in Norfolk, Virginia, where Billy is President of Virginia Wesleyan College, are often in Valdosta, to see about Fann's mother, Mary Lois Dewar, who is very ill, and Billy's mother in Tifton.

Wade and Geri Coleman with Jimmy, and Anne and Jack Sineath

A call from Gables Rock Springs

Yesterday while at Steel's Jewelry, my soon-to-be daughter-in-law Elizabeth Steel, and Maxwell's soon-to-be mother-in-law, Susan Steel and I were having a fine time talking wedding talk, and looking at bridesmaids dresses, and discussing the reasonable goals we are setting for ourselves, in order to be the perfect size for the perfect dress in time for the wedding. Fun girl stuff. In the middle of all the gaiety, my cell phone rang; actually it played Fur Elise. I answered the phone: it was a young man with an unfamiliar voice.

"Is this Mrs. DEE-War?"

"Yes, this is Ellen Dewar."

"Oh. Well, Mrs. Dewar, this is Brett at Gables Rock Springs, and we have a package for you up at the office. The delivery man tried to deliver it several times, and he left notices for you to pick it up, and it's been sitting here for over three weeks."

"I'm sorry, but we vacated our apartment a month ago, and we're back in Valdosta now.'

"Mrs. Dewar, this package - it smells awful. For several days , we've been smelling something and it just gets worse and worse - we at first thought a rat or something had died in the walls, then one of the secretaries figured out it was coming from the mail room, and specifically from your package."

"Throw it out. It's a chicken pot pie."

"A chicken pot pie?"

"Yes, a very old and rancid and moldy chicken pot pie. My brother William had some sent to us from Dean & Deluca, but a couple were back ordered, and weren't delivered until after we'd left. Throw it out."

"Yes, Ma'am. I surely will. That'll be a whole lot easier than trying to get a dead rat out of the wall."

Forever young

Today is Mama's birthday, but I cannot (will not) say how old she would be. Her adamant refusal to reveal her age persisted to the end, and to this day, we are not absolutely certain that the information on her death certificate is correct; at her insistence, her birth year is not on her cemetery marker. Though we always accepted this little subterfuge as an endearing peccadillo, it could, at times, be exasperating. Even just months before she died, when we would take her to the doctor, and she was asked to sign in with her name and date of birth, she'd refuse, saying that her age was no one's business but her own.

She did always look much younger than she was, which she enjoyed, but it went deeper than that. She had an eternally youthful spirit and outlook on life, and could communicate with young people more as a contemporary than as a grandmother. Her stubborn rejection of her physical years was not so much vanity as it was an unwillingness to be categorized as older than she felt.

More bloodwork

We spent the afternoon at the Pearlman Cancer Center in Valdosta today, where Jimmy had routine blood tests to make sure everything is on track, and his blood counts look very good. While we were there, he also got a Zometa infusion, which strengthens his bones. We've become quite fond of the staff there, and were happy to see them again.

Jimmy spoke to Dr. Lonial at Emory yesterday, and although we won't know anything definitive for six to eight weeks, Dr. Lonial is pleased with the results of the bone marrow biopsy done shortly after the transplant. Early indications appear very positive.

Leona Strickland Hudson 1920-2008

A rather extraordinary woman died last Thursday: Leona Strickland Hudson. After growing up in Valdosta, she and her husband Dugald lived all over the world before settling in Atlanta. Leona moved back to Valdosta in 2006 after Dugald died.

A lively and gifted raconteur, Leona was a treasure trove of information with a photographic memory, and could vividly recount the smallest details from more than half a century ago. She loved globetrotting, and my brother William, also an avid traveller, liked to ask her advice on restaurants around the world. If he was going to, for example, Prague, she would not only tell him the best places to eat, but could practically recite the menu.

One of the reasons Leona did not move back sooner was because of the problem of moving all of her papers and memorabilia; she saved everything and her house is like the National Archives. It'll be a shame if it all just gets tossed out. Maybe the Historical Society will take some of it on.

I'm sorry she's gone. There are still a lot of things I wanted to talk with her about.

Strategizing with KDY

Here it is, March 8th: football season is over, it's too soon for baseball, nothing's on television but the Wyoming caucuses, and Jimmy's bored. My days as warden are numbered, and unless I hide the car keys or chain him to a chair, he's going to bust out of this joint.

He spent the better part of a hour this afternoon on the phone with his buddy Kenny Youmans from Orlando, plotting and planning for the upcoming Georgia football season. The way they were critiquing spring training, you'd have thought that all they needed was Mark Richt and Mike Bobo on a conference call to solidify the game plan.

Rush hour mayhem

Get the picture: North Druid Hills near Peachtree in rush hour traffic, with cars threading their way around each other like maniacs on the four-laned road, and right in the middle of it all, in the left lane, is a little old lady motoring along in her power chair. It was one of those things you see in grocery stores or at Walmart, and that they advertise on TV, called Power Scooters, or something. Their top speed couldn't be over five miles per hour.

It's a miracle she hadn't been squashed like a bug, or at the very least caused a ten car pile-up. Jimmy said she'd probably just broken out of a nearby nursing home, and was headed for the hills. He said the nurses were probably looking around, saying, "Has anybody seen Mrs. Jones?" as a posse of orderlies took off in hot pursuit.

Speaking of hot pursuit, Jimmy turned the television on a couple of afternoons ago, and some nut had stolen a white SUV, and a dozen police cars and a whole fleet of helicopters were chasing him all over Los Angeles. I think it was on Headline News, and after staring at it for about fifteen minutes with our eyes glazed over and our mouths hanging open, we turned to each other and asked,"WHY are we watching this?" There must be something intrinsically fascinating about car chases, with the chasees barely averting cement-mixers, and barrelling the wrong way up exit ramps.

It's a good thing the hot-rodder Los Angeles SUV thief and the joyriding Mrs. Jones on her Power Scooter didn't cross paths this afternoon.

Back at the Ritz

We're back in Atlanta for Jimmy to get some cortisone shots in his spine tomorrow, and will return home Friday. The apartment is a thing of the past, and we toyed with whether to use Priceline to book a hotel room : that's always exciting, submitting a lowball offer and waiting to see what you get. But in the end, we chose the Ritz again; it's convenient and comfortable, and it's like home, so here we are. Deja vu.

On the trip up, noticing that we were running low on gas, we stopped in Perry to fill up. The old blue Buick van doesn't hold much, and it uses regular unleaded, so we were shocked when it took $70.01 for a tankful. We've never paid anywhere close to that for a tank of gas before. What a revoltin' development.

Cute old Jimmy & Ellen pictures