Amanda Cockrell

One of the joys of having an office at Hollins is its location along Route 11, the old mother road from north to south that, bypassed by Interstate 81, is now the road trip highway for anyone looking for antiques, junk, food, and a foam copy of Stonehenge.

Go right out of the Hollins gates and you will find the wonders of Williamson Road, beginning with Happy’s Flea Market, a warren of shops and outdoor stands selling everything from biker jackets to live ducks. Farther down there are multiple middle eastern and Latino markets tucked among the used car lots, pawn shops, and other dicier establishments.



If you go the other way, turning left, you will find Kelly’s Real Deals antiques, marked by a lifesize horse on the roof. So far I have bought a sombrero and a headless doll (with really good clothes) there. Farther along is Foamhenge, really. A somewhat smaller scale reproduction, pieces occasionally blow over in the wind, but it is usually repaired promptly.



A little farther still is the Pink Cadillac Diner with pink Cadillac and better yet, a giant gorilla holding a biplane. I recommend the Happy Waitress grilled cheese sandwich, and not looking too closely at the truly frightening Humpty Dumpty statue.
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Garden catalogs come in the mail in the dead of winter, full of seductive, expensive things that you have to dig a hole for. Or that somebody does, my husband observes, looking over my shoulder as I contemplate a white rhododendron with a pink center, like a lace valentine. I am easily seduced by things like that, although I have learned that I am not a good gardener to plants that are fussy, as the rhododendrons that we already tried proved to be. Ranunculus, for instance, do not like it here; I don’t know why. I lose patience, ask them why they can’t be more like the iris, and if they don’t shape up, am not inclined to take them for therapy.

And then there is asparagus. Asparagus is a commitment, like getting married. You have to really mean it. An asparagus bed takes digging, and amending with much compost, and then you can’t even eat it for several years if you want it to get a good start. Asparagus is delayed gratification, a marriage to someone who will be overseas for the next three years.

Into the bargain, we always long for the things that won’t grow where we are. In California I spent much time babying honeysuckle along, and yearned for lilac, a lost cause because you have to dig it up and pack its roots in ice to make it bloom, and I am not that crazy. In Virginia there is so much lilac I am bored, and honeysuckle is something that eats your garage if you don’t whack it back with a machete every two days. On the other hand, bougainvillea, which actually did eat my garage in California, won’t take a freeze out here, and has to be grown in pots and then spitefully refuses to bloom the second year, sickening slowly with some kind of white flossy stuff on its branches until it succumbs and I am dumb enough to buy another hothouse pot from the nursery.

Lately I have been trying to get artichokes to grow, which while they make a lovely hedge in coastal California, out here is like trying to train your cat to do housework. They don’t like summer heat and they don’t like winter freezes. But my favorite nursery had them last year (the same one that sold me the bougainvillea) in their greenhouse, which unfortunately I don’t own. So of course I bought them anyway. We got two apricot-size artichokes from them before they wilted in July.

I am trying to decide that all this means. Am I just pig-headed and/or in denial about climate? Do I think I can convince them that it’s not really that cold in the winter, that a little 95 degree heat never hurt anyone? Is it a form of faith? Do I believe that if I try enough times there will be an Artichoke Miracle? I’m not sure.

I’m also not sure where I’ve put some things. I can find my car keys but probably not the agapanthus. This makes spring and summer a kind of revelation, a garden miracle on their own. Daffodils are reliable and spider lilies are out there somewhere. Maybe that’s enough.
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An email from a pal this week asks me if I want a book by Richard Wormser that she spotted at a second hand store. Oh yes, send it on.

I always thought of him as my ex-Uncle Dick, my aunt’s former husband who left the family before I was born, but remained in touch with my parents and a source of story and legend. I only met him once but he was a figure in my adolescent imagination. He was a writer of pulp fiction and short stories, like nearly everyone else in my father’s family back then. During the Depression, he drove my aunt, the only one with an actual job, to the train station every day in a horse and buggy, and when a woman in a chauffeured car pulled up to ask, “My good man, who do you drive for?” he tipped his hat and told her, “For Richard Wormser, the noted author.”

He wrote short stories for pulp magazines, and a slew of the Nick Carter adventures. He was hired and fired twice by Columbia Pictures, and he wrote B movies at Republic and Universal. In World War II he was a forest ranger, and patrolled the Southern California coast on horseback, a job I would have considered pure heaven.

He claimed that his grandfather had Southern sympathies during the Civil War, and so hired a substitute to fight for him when drafted by the North, while he slipped away to battle for the Lost Cause. Of course (you knew it was coming) they subsequently met upon the field of battle, whereupon Dick’s grandfather said sternly to the substitute pointing a bayonet at his midsection, “So much as touch me with that instrument, my good man, and I will cut your pay in half!”

I didn’t believe that for a minute, even at thirteen, but he remained a man of mystery and story — maybe not as interesting as I imagined him or maybe more so. Rooting in the paperbacks in our bookcase routinely turned up one of Dick’s books, the cover splendid with a half-clothed dame or a steely-eyed sheriff.


When my mother and I were setting out to drive me to college in Virginia for my senior year, I insisted that we stop on the way in Santa Fe where Dick was living with his current wife, because I had never met him and was longing to. He seemed reasonably pleased with the idea when my mother called him, and so we arrived at his house, which was fronted by a sign that said WORMSER’S DRY GOODS. I remember a wonderful Southwestern dinner, and a lot of stories about other people I had only heard of. I fell asleep at midnight but he and my mother sat up all night reminiscing and in the morning Mama had an awful hangover.

You need people like that in the family, the storytellers, the subjects themselves of stories told and re-told, apocryphal or solid, even if you just get to meet them once. They people family myth, that expanding landscape of bright color and dim truthfulness where everyone is wild or mad or heroic or all three. Read More 

In the post-Christmas packing away, while looking for something else (which I still haven’t found, of course) I came upon three cassette tapes in a chest in the living room. One contains folk songs and train wreck ballads sung by husband and sent to me as many years ago as a cassette tape implies, while we were courting from opposite sides of the country. He knows I am a sucker for hearing him sing (I have always, alas, been easily seduced by boys who sing, although not lately and not since him). The other side has a selection of love poems.

The second tape is poetry from me, to him. No songs, as I cannot carry a tune in a bucket, possibly why I am so susceptible to those who can.

The third is an interview with my mother, conducted by me before her death, sometime in the late nineties, about family history. It isn’t just the history and family tales I value that tape for, although the description of how to kite a check, an emergency banking technique impossible now due to instant communication, was worth the time in itself. It’s the voices. There is a carnal, earthly sense to the human voice that you can’t get from a sheet of paper. When it tells you a story or sings you a song, it is there, in your head, not outside you on the page.

My ex-husband’s widow kept his voice on their answering machine for years after he died. It may be there still and I know, oh I know, why she did it. They come back to us in those old recordings. If you close your eyes, they are here, next to you. The human voice says things that print cannot. We keep them, transferring them to each new technology lest they slip away. Each time they have something new to say to us. I have mined my mother’s stories for endless fictional details but the stories are always better when she tells them.

Sit your relatives down while you have them, and find out the family secrets. The older they get and the older you get, the more likely they are to spill the beans. Give them a glass of wine and sit at their feet. Turn the microphone on. Read More