On the surface of . . .

At some point when I was in high school, I started keeping a journal in a three-ring notebook. It contained newspaper clippings as well as things I wrote myself. That project lasted for several years before dying of embarrassment. I decided to start this blog because it seems like something that would be good to do, and people I know and mostly respect are doing it too. Usually, however, I find that I have nothing to say except when I don’t have time to write it down.

Anyhow, I’m a North Carolina-born Virginia native living in Black Mountain, N.C. I have a wife, a cat, two parents, a sister, two nephews, and a variety of other relatives and ancestors, several of whom fought in the Civil War (including one who, according to the genealogy chart, was “blown up at Petersburg”) and one of whom went to the Western Front, eating pickles all the way across the Atlantic.

Over the years I’ve been a paperboy, a burger flipper, a Republican (I voted for Gerald Ford in the 1976 Linkhorn Park Elementary School mock election), a camp counselor, a teacher, a hotel manager, a procrastinator, an editor, a lawn mower, a freelance writer, a minister, and a poor schmuck whose job it was to call other poor schmucks who were late on their payments. (That job lasted two weeks.) I was also a good-field, no-hit little league baseball player. I’ve not been a private detective, a railroad engineer, or a farmer, though I think I’d like being a farmer.

—Dwight

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By the way, the picture at the top of this page is a view of the Black Mountains, just north of Mount Mitchell, in western North Carolina.