Published September 2010.
Facebook is a strange and wondrous thing, isn’t it? As I write my Reflections column—the last puzzle piece required before we can ship the September Performing Arts issue off to the printer—it’s a Friday afternoon that has so far been long on rain and short on inspiration. So, having spent half an hour gazing at a blank computer screen without having any original ideas, I’ve just flipped over to Country Roads’ Facebook page and broadcast my dilemma to the world (or to the couple of thousand discerning Facebookers who have chosen to follow Country Roads magazine’s Facebook page, anyway). And here we are ten minutes later, with a handful of potential column topics large enough to make it likely that I will spend the rest of the afternoon messing around on Facebook rather than writing anything to fill this space. Based on responses, there seems to be a consensus that the world would be a better place for the addition of more bike lanes. Especially Louisiana. It’s mostly flat, after all, and more than one of you noted the irony that the Highway 61 widening project through West Feliciana Parish—arguably the finest cycling country in the state—has proceeded without any bike lanes to keep the thousands of cyclists who come here to ride out of the traffic flow. I’m a keen cyclist myself, so this was an easy point of view to identify with. But even if I wasn’t disposed towards spending my leisure time on a bike, I like to think I’d be supportive of the idea that any brand new, federally funded road construction ought to accommodate a cheap, non-polluting, healthy, alternative mode of transportation into its infrastructure. If such a lane existed, it would be possible to safely connect West Feliciana’s excellent school campus with its equally impressive sports park complex, without kids’ parents needing to contribute to the traffic congestion along the stretch of Highway 61 between the two. I remember once seeing a cartoon of a bunch of people in workout clothes, standing waiting for an elevator. Next to the elevator is a staircase, and on the wall between the two is a sign that reads “Stairmaster Classes—Second Floor.” To me, driving schoolkids one mile so they can go to a sports park seems to fall into the same category. Is it too late, I wonder?

While we’re on the subject of cycling, I’d like to note that, after half a lifetime spent enduring my fanaticism on the subject of bikes, my wife has finally broken down and joined me in the saddle. For her recent birthday she received a new road bike (and even had the grace to feign excitement about it). Since then we’ve tackled various St. Francisville-area byways, and despite having developed a healthy antipathy to a half-mile-long hill on Highway 421, Ashley’s taking to it like the proverbial duck to water. That said, our most enthusiastically received ride to date took place not in St. Francisville, but on the Northshore, on the marvelous Tammany Trace. Thousands make use of the Tammany Trace but for anyone new to it, or new to cycling, it is a superbly maintained, very safe, rails-to-trails conversion that connects Covington, Abita Springs, Mandeville, Lacombe and Slidell with thirty-one miles of smooth, flat asphalt trail open to any form of engineless transport. We trundled through downtown Covington, rubbernecked at Abita Springs’ pretty houses, considered stopping at the Abita Brew Pub for a pint (but sensibly decided not to, it being 10 am), and ultimately arrived at the bustling Trailhead—complete with farmer’s market—near the Lakefront in old Mandeville an hour later. Along the way we rode slow, spotted birds, heard crickets, waved to flocks of other riders, and genuinely saw a side of the Louisiana summertime that, from inside an air-conditioned car, somehow remains invisible. It was, quite simply, a perfect reintroduction to the simple pleasures of a bike ride. To roll down the Trace is to fall in love with cycling all over again. How nice to have someone special to share it with.

Ah, Facebook. I’ve got to admit to having something of a love/hate relationship with it. Call me old-fashioned, but there’s still something I find unnerving about the window Facebook opens into one’s life—and then how seductively it invites us to fill that window with personal information. But then again, the interactive conversation that Facebook facilitates brings so much to the journalistic endeavor. Writing an article becomes a far more interesting—and worthwhile—undertaking when the people who read it can talk back to you. It’s the difference between a journey taken alone, or experienced with a friend. Kind of like a bike ride on a summer Saturday morning, company makes the experience richer.

All of which is a long way of saying, we love to hear what you think—of us, of our magazine, and of what we have to say. Follow us, won’t you? And join the conversation. Thanks for reading.

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Published August 2010.
When I first came to live in rural Louisiana, it took awhile to adjust my understanding as to who should properly be described as a “neighbor.” We live at the end of a road ten miles from the nearest place you can buy milk, in a part of West Feliciana parish where describing the population density as “sparse” would be a bit like describing winter in Antarctica as “chilly.” For the most part, there’s a fair bit of space that separates us from those that live in the vicinity so when, in the early years, my wife would say “James; come and meet our neighbor Mister So-and-So,” my first impulse was to look wildly around for the house next door that I’d somehow failed to notice. I moved from an environment that was mostly urban, so for me neighbors were the people with whom you shared a fence if you were lucky, or a wall or possibly a bathroom if you were less lucky, and it took me awhile to adjust to the the idea that a neighbor could be someone who lives fourteen miles away by road. But after having lived out here for fifteen years, it’s all started to make sense. We humans are social creatures first, so in the absence of any near neighbors, we’ll just expand the geographic boundaries of what we consider “neighborhood” until it involves enough people to fill up a dinner table, or ensure there’s someone we can borrow a cup of sugar or a ladder from, or call when we get our tractor stuck in the creek.

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Published July 2010.
There comes a point after, oh, fifteen years of editing a monthly magazine, when it’s easy to convince yourself that you’ve developed at least a passing acquaintance with most of the words in the English language. Once you’ve found excuses to work words like ‘obeophone,’ ‘cacodemomania,’ and ‘prestidigitation’ into the things that you publish, you develop a conceit that you’re not leaving many linguistic stones unturned. So it was with interest that I learned a new word last week. It’s an acronym, can be used as a noun and a verb and, although a relatively new addition to our landscape of language, it relates to an activity as old as human civilization itself.

It’s WWOOF.

‘Wwoof’ stands for “Worldwide Opportunities on Organic Farms,” a name that pretty much says it all. It is an organization begun in Britain in 1971, that has since developed into an international exchange program for people interested in sharing sustainable ways of living. Basically, the network connects organic farmers—who are perennially in need of extra pairs of hands—with folks willing to volunteer their time in return for food, accommodation, and opportunities to learn about organic lifestyles. Therefore, to volunteer on an organic farm is described as “Wwoofing,” while the act of being engaged as a volunteer on said farm makes one a “Wwoof-er.”

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Published June 2010.
I’m not sure that the phrase “When the cat’s away the mice will play” is quite right to apply to this topic, but it’s the only one I can think of to describe the landscape at our house the first Wednesday of each month. That’s the evening when our children run amok, dress as wild animals, chase chickens, frolic in mud puddles, bathe in the pool, eat nutritionally precarious meals, and generally behave as if they’ve been raised by wolves. Why? Because on the first Wednesday of every month their mother briefly abandons the family in favor of a cerebral combination of wine, women, and words, and I become, temporarily at least, a Book Club Widow.

It all started thirteen years ago—long before we ever became parents—when Ashley got invited to join a new book club started in Baton Rouge by transplanted Ohioan, Carolyn Pione. The rules (Carolyn was keen on rules) were simple enough: Members could pitch books but actual selections would be decided by majority vote; the club would focus on “books of consequence;” meetings would take place on the first Wednesday of each month; you could only get in if Carolyn thought you were interesting; and, oh yes: “No Boys Allowed.”

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Published May 2010.
A week or two ago, WHYY’s Fresh Air radio program had a terrific interview with Barbara Strauch, health and medical science editor for the New York Times, whose recently published book The Secret Life of the Grown-Up Brain provides all sorts of interesting insight into why the middle-aged brain behaves the way it does. Besides discussing the usual complaints we have about our middle-age mental faculties—forgetting people’s names, getting distracted easily, not remembering what we had for breakfast—Strauch pointed to a variety of things that the middle-aged brain actually does better than its twenty-something self was ever capable of. Apparently we tend to get better at problem solving as we enter middle age. There’s an improvement in our ability to recognize categories and patterns, Strauch reported, and to get the gist of arguments, too. It’ll come as no surprise to most middle-aged folks that we become better judges of character as we age. And then there’s financial decision-making …

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Published April 2010.
In the March issue of Country Roads, I offered some thoughts about sustainable agriculture and eating local that had come to mind after meeting Adam Aucoin and Cassy Kelly, a young couple who have moved to St. Francisville to offer locally-raised, pastured chicken to folks keen to try an alternative to eating industrially-raised poultry. Last week, having learned that the couple's first batch of several hundred chickens was now ready for the table, I got hold of a plump, whole hen, and brought it home keen to test it out for Sunday dinner.

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Published April 2010.
Talking with my father on the phone recently, I listened with sympathy while he recounted having been pulled over by the Victoria police for failing to come to a complete stop at a stop sign. Apparently Dad had slowed to a crawl and, seeing the road was clear in both directions, he trundled into the intersection, only to be pounced upon by a zealous patrolman and directed to the shoulder. Now, based on my observations of road-rule enforcement in this part of the world, such an infraction, if it garnered any attention at all, might possibly earn you a good-natured warning. Especially if you were, say, a silver-haired retired family doctor behind the wheel of a twenty-something-year-old Jaguar. But in Dad’s case, by the time he was allowed to go on his way, he was the not-very-proud owner of six driver demerit points, and owed the Victoria Police around six hundred bucks. Admittedly things wouldn’t have been so bad if the gimlet-eyed officer hadn’t noted the absence of a seatbelt—Dad having forgotten to buckle his. But his experience reminded me that the rose-tinted glasses through which I recall my Australian youth, tend to obscure certain things from the picture. Like the displeasure and expense that accompanies most law-abiding Australians’ encounters with traffic cops. Merciless in their pursuit of the minor infraction, the Aussie police will cheerfully pull you over and fine you hundreds of dollars for the smallest offense, and most normal folks meet the sight of flashing blue lights in the rearview mirror with a kind of helpless frustration. I remember standing on a street corner in Melbourne one night, watching with amusement while a furious woman pulled over for some small transgression, noisily demanded to know why the cop writing the ticket wasn’t out doing something useful, “like catching burglars or something.”

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Published March 2010.
Last Sunday night Ashley and I were invited to come around to a neighbor’s house for a bowl of chicken soup that could be described as inspirational. Nothing odd about the soup being spectacular: our neighbor Susan is a marvelous, instinctual cook whose food is always unforgettable. But this was a Sunday night and, like lots of people with small kids and big commutes, we have learned the hard way that going out on Sunday night tends to have a deleterious effect on Monday morning. Somewhere during the parenting journey we’ve learned the importance of balancing the pleasures of Sunday night socializing with the stigma of being the kinds of people who drop their half-asleep kids to school with their school uniforms on backwards and clutching pillows instead of booksacks. So as a rule we reserve Sunday evenings for home, early supper, school-uniform-ironing, booksack-finding, and generally planning a strategic assault on the week ahead. But since this invitation had come from Susan, a neighbor whose facility for living beautifully makes even the most slapdash of gatherings a memorable thing, we couldn’t say no. Susan lives ten miles away, so calling her a “neighbor” is less a description of proximity than it is a measure of relationship quality. She is the kind of neighbor you turn to for gardening advice, for the loan of breadmaking books, and information on how best to preserve fresh figs. Hers is the kind of garden that makes you come home convinced that living off the land is possible after all; that country living can be wholesome and tranquil and sophisticated and rewarding all at the same time. Each time we go to her house we return filled with renewed idealism for garden projects large and small. It’s a great place for big ideas and discussion of things like sustainable farming and preservation of the rural idyll. So it was the perfect place to meet Adam Aucoin—the “Chicken Man.”

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Published February 2010.
From the lunch table to labor/delivery in 24 short hours.

The last time my wife and I had lunch at The Grapevine Café was April the sixteenth, 2003. I remember this clearly because it was the day before our first child was born. Or put another way: it was the last meal we shared as nobody’s parents. Pregnancy hadn’t particularly agreed with Ashley and the doctor had banished her to bed for the last three weeks of it. There she had dutifully remained, making lists and being bored while the little one inside showed no more inclination to move than an Englishman who lives next door to a fish ‘n chip shop. Eventually my cooking, and daydreaming about Grapevine’s owner Cynthia Schneider’s menu, prevailed and Ashley fled the bed in favor of a window table, a disposable bib and a large order (or was it two?) of barbecue shrimp. She returned home completely content, and while I’m not sure Cynthia would appreciate my equating the effects of her barbecue shrimp with those of pitocin, Ashley went into labor the following morning.

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Published January 2010.
New year’s resolutions are as much about looking back as they are about looking forward. After all, before you can resolve to do things differently or better during the year to come, you’ve got to look back at the one just gone to identify some things to improve upon. As a rule I haven’t had much of a record where new year’s resolutions are concerned. It’s not that there isn’t plenty to improve upon; more that there’s too much. Having lots of raw material in the “needs improvement” column makes narrowing the list to a manageable length exhausting though, and ends up counting as a resolution in itself.

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