I sometimes wonder if this blog has any use, much less any readers. I don’t write here regularly enough and tend not to keep resolutions to change for the better. Yesterday, though, I had a note in the mail from a chance reader in Germany inquiring about the inspiration for my poem “Flatbush Waltz.” I was flattered and answered quickly. I wrote the poem because I had fallen in love with Itzhak Perlman’s recording of that Andy Statmen tune. You can hear it here on YouTube.

Writing that poem also gave me occasion to search out a copy of a book I loved back in the 1970s, Thad Stem’s First Reader. Thad was one of a group of writers I knew in North Carolina in those years, who practiced their craft in the state’s network of newspapers, many of them small weeklies, an informal fraternity that that included Sam Ragan, Cliff Blue and others. The Late Tom Wicker got his start among them, writing for The Sandhill Citizen.

Over spring break, my beloved and I made a fast trip to Texas. On our way home we stopped off in Marshall for a few hours. Marshall is in Harrison County; my mother’s people settled there in 1834, hoping, I think, to escape the abolition of slavery in the United States by migrating to the fledgling Republic of Texas. They claimed large tracts of land adjoining Caddo Lake and eventually named the place Scottsville.

We found a few remnants of Scottsville on our visit: a cemetery dedicated to the memory of the Confederacy, and the Scott house, where My Grandfather was born in 1879. The old dwelling was originally built by W. T. Scott in 1840, according to a pamphlet kindly provided to us by Beverly Smith, whom we met at the Scott cemetery chapel. I grew up with a wealth of stories about the Scotts, some of them lurid; and I told a few of those stories in a piece I published back in 1992. I am thinking of telling them again, more thoroughly and at greater length.