I'm very sad to report the death of an old friend, Tim McLaurin, author of Keeper of the Moon, The Acorn Plan, Woodrow's Trumpet and five other books. He was a Fayetteville boy, a Marine, a carnival snake-handler, a Peace Corps volunteer, a father, a husband, a writer, and one of the wisest men I've ever known. He lived more in 48 years than anyone I've ever met has managed in threescore and ten.

Tim and I met in the fall of 1984, when the two of us took English 99 from the team of Daphne Athas and Doris Betts. ENGL 99 was the senior writing seminar, a weekly gathering that spanned both semesters and became far and away my favorite class. I don't say that just because my wife and I first started dating while taking that class, but because the whole group of talents and personalities were so enjoyable. Daphne was kind, spacy, witty and utterly brilliant, to the point where her criticisms of a student's work would be either stunningly clear or couched in terms so theoretical that they might have been written on an Enigma machine; Doris was sharp and generous and steely-eyed and droll and cut through bullshit like a chainsaw through Jello. The students were also quite a combination; in addition to me, Kelly, and Tim, future writers like Randall Kenan, Sharlene Baker, Mimi Herman, & David Nelson were there reading each other's work, as well as future editors like Alane Mason and Sally Pont.

Most of us were barely in our twenties, but Tim was past thirty--which at the time seemed ancient--and had just come to UNC after several years in Tunisia with the Peace Corps. Before that he'd been a snake-handler in a traveling carnival, and before that a Marine. He was from Fayetteville, Kelly's home town, so the two of them hit it off; he also got along well with Sharlene Baker, who was also coming to school later in her life. During the year, Tim turned in a variety of potent and honest stories, some pretty clearly autobiographical, and some of them made their way into his books, particularly his first novel, The Acorn Plan. His comments on my own work were always kind and encouraging, even if he sometimes didn't know what the hell I was trying to do--but he always did me the courtesy of assuming that I knew. (I often didn't, but I appreciated the courtesy.)

One day Tim gave us a glimpse of his past life by bringing a pillowcase to class. He tucked it under his chair and we forgot about it, but eventually we finished discussing the day's story and Tim pulled the case up onto the table and reached into it.

And pulled out a three-foot corn snake.

Kelly was fascinated and petted it. Sharlene didn't seem quite so comfortable. Randall was decidedly un-comfortable and backed away to the farthest corner of the room. Daphne and Doris, as always, seemed bemused. I still wonder if they were in on it.

After we'd graduated, Tim was the first of our class to get a book published, but he didn't seem to change a whole lot; I'd still see him around Chapel Hill every so often, and he never looked as if being paid to write was swelling his head. Kelly and I ran into him one evening at the Flying Burrito restaurant and he told us he'd just sold his second novel, Woodrow's Trumpet. Needless to say, we were thrilled for him. He nodded absently and said, "But y'know, they only gave me an $8000 advance. I can make that much doin' carpentry." To him, being a writer was work--good honest work, mind you--but the idea that a novelist had a special calling or unusual worth would have made him laugh. Or maybe spit.

Because of the combination of illness, distance, and the press of family life, I only saw Tim once in the last decade; back in 1997, he agreed to drive up from North Carolina to sit on a panel at a colloquium our school was hosting. Michael Dirda and a couple of other writers & critics were on that same panel, and all showed up in coat and tie, looking very literary. Tim arrived in a pickup truck with one door that was tied shut with an old piece of hemp rope, and his only luggage was the toothbrush sticking out of the back pocket of his jeans. And let me tell you, he had the kids eating out of his hand--I think every student at this school must have gotten a copy of Keeper of the Moon signed.

Before he left campus the next morning, he told me to keep trying to get my bird book published; I told him I would, and I did. Because it seemed like the only way to finish the work, to see the job done. Soon it'll be in print for everyone to see. I wish like hell Tim could be here to see it, too.
7:06 PM

.................................

Not much to say today, save to note one important fact:

As of today, my marriage is old enough to drive.

(Happy anniversary, hon.)
10:41 AM

.................................

There's excitement afoot as the football season approaches. It's not so much that I'm a rabid football fan, though I certainly enjoy watching it, but that our fantasy football league is preparing to get under way again.

Last year a group of my far-flung Chapel Hill friends got together at the urging of Dan Sipp, improv performer supreme, who's now based in Chicago. Dan's thinking was that since we don't have many chances for face-to-face encounters, we need a pretext for online interactions, and thus was born the Fantasy League of Gentlemen/Gentlewomen, better known as FLOGG. Roughly half of the ten participants still live in North Carolina, but the rest of us were chiming in from Chicago, San Francisco, and of course Virginia, and we had a high old time. Part of the fun was that we chose to roleplay--not surprising, given that many in this group were also players during my Dungeons & Dragons days--and create personas for our online owner/coaches. One team, the Frumious Bandersnatchi, was coached by the Rev. Charles L. Dodgson, whose every pronouncement on the subject of American football was as full of Victorian propriety as one might expect. Another team, the Mighty Burners, was run by Daniel X. Blodgett, the Philadelphia-based cheesesteak magnate and Legitimate Businessman. My own squad, the Fighting Coelacanths, was coached by Perry Shoat Cooper, a native of Garland, North Carolina, whose interests include (and are limited to) fishing, football, and hog farming, which meant that most of his game strategies were explained in terms of plugging for bass or noodling catfish.

I took great glee in this part of the project, affecting a dialect during almost every online conversation, and also wound up contributing "news" stories to our home page on a weekly basis. (My favorite, written after the Bears won two games in a row on interception returns during overtime, concerned Chicago coach Dick Jauron, now revealed as the younger brother of Sauron, the Dark Lord of Mordor, who'd had his name changed and was using magical rings to win games.) It was also highly amusing to watch the others playing their roles.

It was good that the roleplaying was so much fun, because when it came to the games, I got stomped. Thanks to a variety of bad draft choices, injuries, and garden-variety bad luck, I ended up in ninth place, though I was able to win the three-game playoff to determine the last-place team. I don't hold any grudges about it, but I think it's safe to say that I won't be drafting Isaac Bruce or Jamal Anderson again...

The games themselves are a bizarre collection of statistical manipulations. Each coach selects a group of real NFL players to form his team; each week, his team is set against another FLOGG team, and the outcome is determined by the statistics earned by the players in the real games. For every 20 yards gained, the player earns one FLOGG point; for every touchdown he scores, he earns six FLOGG points; for every fumble, he loses two FLOGG points, and so on. The FLOGG team with the most points wins. The easiest way to win, obviously, is to have all the best players, but with ten coaches drafting them, you often have to settle for merely competent players. Moreover, you must pay attention to the schedule; if your starting quarterback's NFL team is meeting a powerful opponent, he may not score as many fantasy points that week, so it may be a good idea to play a substitute QB instead.

It can make watching the games interesting in a whole new way. Even if your favorite NFL team is hopelessly behind, you can still be happy as long as the defense that's beating up on them belongs to your FLOGG team. Moreover, Monday night games become a matter of great concern, since it's not uncommon on Sunday evening to find yourself down by ten FLOGG points with your last player still needing to play his game on ABC. The outcome of the game is no more important than the presence of Dennis Miller in the booth; all you care about is your guy--can he get the necessary points and bring you back from the jaws of defeat?

In any case, I'm once again poring over the fantasy draft reports, looking for players who seem as though they'd look good in the black, orange-yellow, and sky blue of the Coelacanths. I'm sure there must be some out there. After all, the incidence of color blindness in American men is pretty high.

8:10 AM

.................................

Yesterday my eight-year-old son and I accompanied the summer school's Civil War History class to Gettysburg. It was my first trip to the site of the continent's biggest battle, and only my second trip to a Civil War battlefield (the first being the considerably less built-up Wilderness site). It was strange to be wandering safely over dry ground that was, 139 years before to the day, still stained with the blood of the dead and wounded. I also hadn't realized the place was so liberally covered with monuments. When you stand down near the Confederate lines on Seminary Ridge, you realize that even today, the statues of Lee and his men are staring up at those of Meade and his men across the fields; it's as if the sculptors are refighting the war in bronze.

We first visited the museum, then wandered along the top of Cemetery Ridge to the Angle and the Copse of Trees, then circled around town to the observation tower near the Southern lines, and finally strolled around the summit of Little Round Top. I left 26 cents atop the monument of the 26th North Carolina on Cemetery Ridge and climbed to the battlements of the small castle built on Little Round Top in memory of the 44th New York. I wish I'd had time to visit the monument of the 20th Maine, Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain's men. At the end of the day, though, here's what I had learned:

1) Cemetery Ridge ain't much of a ridge. It's high enough to shoot down, but it's not a particularly elevated piece of ground. Maybe that's why Lee thought he could charge it.

2) Union General Dan Sickles was a fuckin' loon. He pulled his troops out of the Union line, without orders, and advanced them a good 3/4 of a mile ahead of his support--without orders--and set up in the Peach Orchard. If ever a man deserved to have his leg blown off, it was Sickles.

3) The men in Pickett's charge had to know they were going to die. Crossing that mile of field, without any cover higher than a tall grass stalk, and climbing over two or three post-and-rail fences en route to boot, was sheer suicide. The astonishing thing is that they went, and some of them almost breached the Union line.

4) Little Round Top is so tall, so steep and so broken that taking it seems like a near impossibility, and yet it was taken five times by the Rebels and retaken five times by the Union. The hilltop also provided a clear shot down the Union line; if Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain hadn't rallied the 20th Maine on Day Two, Southern guns would have blasted the Federal lines apart, and Pickett would have swept up the ridge like a tsunami on Day Three.

5) It is a very odd thing to be firmly of the opinion that the South was wrong and deserved to lose, and yet to find yourself moved most strongly by the small monument to Lewis Armistead. Armistead was the North Carolinian general who led a small group of Virginians over the wall and up to the "high tide mark" of the Confederacy; he was the only Southern officer to cross the Union lines, and he was shot down while urging his men forward. Before his wounds claimed him, he entrusted his watch to the care of his old friend Winfield Scott Hancock, a Union General. In some ways, that story is the whole war at once.

Gettysburg is a strange, beautiful and contradictory place. It may be the most American place I've ever been.

6:30 AM

.................................