Sunday, July 20, 2003

One day it started raining lima beans in rural North Carolina. The one-pound can exploded with a satisfying whomp, and then lima beans were rustling through the leaves of the tall trees above the campsite, pelting canvas tents and plopping onto the sandy dirt. Boy Scout camp, circa 1975, was turning out to be a lot of fun.   Do not try this at home.   We were damn lucky that no member of Troop 216 was eviscerated by the top of the can as it whirled away from the blast, or burned by a coal flung from the stove in which we’d heated the can. The stove was a half section of a barrel, cut lengthwise and set up on two three-foot posts; now it had been driven several inches into the dirt by the violent release of highly pressurized lima-bean-water steam desperate to escape its canned confinement.   But such luck seems your due when you’re a kid -- hey, your WD-40 flamethrower never blew up in your hands -- and our troop was still laughing when the camp director stormed into our site, the whomp produced by an exploding one-pound can of lima beans being loud enough to carry all the way to his command post some distance away.   The man in green shorts demanded to know who the adult in charge was. As luck would have it, that was Dr. Cone’s night at Scout camp, and he sheepishly promised that there would be no more explosions on his watch.   Although he would never have let us do something so dangerous, the fact was that my father really liked explosions. As a youth he had introduced a sizable quantity of sodium to the Greensboro Country Club pond, creating a fireball he remembered with pleasure to the end of his life (which was not caused by an explosion), so he didn’t come down on us any harder than the lima beans had.   Tonight, I’m the dad on duty at Scout camp. There will be no explosions. It is Elijah’s twelfth birthday, which we celebrated last night by watching Johnny Depp channel Keith Richards in “Pirates of the Caribbean,” so there will be some candles, but that had better be the extent of the fireworks. (July 20 is the feast day of Elijah in the Catholic and Orthodox churches, which we did not know when we gave our firstborn the name.)   Back Monday night. Be good. 10:58:01 AM    comment []

The Independent has a long piece on John Cohen, the musician and artist (and inspiration for the Grateful Dead’s “Uncle John’s Band”) who has a show up at the Weatherspoon. The Indy is based in the Triangle -- it would be nice if the N&R or its entertainment freebie ran this kind of feature on our local arts scene, or if we had an independent paper of our own to do the job. 10:45:23 AM    comment []