Ambrosia

Childhood memories, even of important events like Christmas are remarkably selective. Sometimes the clearest memories are of the smallest events.

We always visited my grandparents in rural Holmes County, Mississippi. They lived in a rambling house made of rough-sawn, unpainted cypress. I thought of it as the house that jack built, because of the add-ons it had accumulated over the years.

The house was nestled among enormous native trees, in the alluvial plain of the Yazoo River. Just a few miles east was the beginning of the hill country. We would take a truck to the hills, where my grandfather picked out a suitable cedar tree (they grew like weeds on the hillsides) and had it cut down. Back at the house, we would saw the bottom of the trunk square, nail on a couple of supporting boards, stand it up and start decorating.

We made varicolored chains out of construction paper, strung popcorn and cranberries together with needle and thread, and hung Christmas tree lights, foil icicles and a few antique glass ball ornaments.

The real work of Christmas took place in the kitchen. On Christmas day, my grandmother and a servant cooked turkey, ham (slaughtered and smoked in October), mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, green beans, cornbread dressing (for the turkey), and a passel of other vegetables on an enormous wood-fired cook stove.

The piece de resistance was prepared by my great aunts, who had come up from Yazoo City. Late in the morning, they disappeared into a room and closed the door. When I asked what they were doing, Aunt Mary informed me they were making Ambrosia.

My grandmother and my great aunts grew up on a plantation along the Yazoo River. It had a suitably grandiose name, which I don't remember. But the young ladies of the family were sent off to finishing school. Aunt Mary and Aunt 'Stelle, in particular, had an elegant, soft pronunciation that has largely disappeared from the South, along with the graceful cursive writing they used.

When Aunt Mary said "ambrosia," the syllables flowed like honey. It sounded like the most delicious, heavenly food that one could imagine. It was easy to understand why, when making such a marvelous food, it was necessary to do so in secret, with the doors closed. Otherwise the magical recipe might escape.

After the rest of the food was on the table, a weight sufficient that the table's legs creaked and groaned, my great aunts emerged from their secret workshop and placed a dish of ambrosia at each place.

Imagine my surprise that such an elegant name referred to fruit salad sprinkled with coconut.

Service during Christmas

Sometimes there is no explanation for good fortune.

I served in the US Navy twenty-five years, including service on five ships deployed for as long as nine months at a time. In all that time, it always worked out that I was at home or in my home port for Christmas. I didn't plan it that way - it just happened. I know how fortunate this was for me and my family.

Others in our military service aren't so fortunate.

Please remember our deployed military servicemen and women and the families from whom they are separated this holiday season.

Texting, e-mail, Government Employees

Anyone interested in issues surrounding electronic communication by government employees might want to follow a new Supreme Court case.

The United States Supreme Court agreed last Monday to decide whether the Ontario, California police department violated the constitutional privacy rights of a police sergeant on the town's SWAT team when it inspected personal text messages sent and received on a town-owned pager. This is a Fourth Amendment case expected to hinge on whether the sergeant should have had a "reasonable expectation" of privacy.

There is a long and somewhat confusing history of Supreme court decisions on Fourth Amendment issues relating to government workplaces and expectation of privacy. This appears to be the first time the Court has addressed privacy of government employees in the context of data networks.

North Carolina law and regulations are clear on this point. Government employees using government owned equipment for private communications have no expectation of privacy. This principle is similar to that of any other employee using equipment owned by the employer. It means that supervisors get to read your e-mail.

If the Court decides that the sergeant had no "reasonable expectation" of privacy, does that mean his text messages become public records? No. That's a completely separate issue. In North Carolina, under Department of Cultural Resources E-mail Policy (Revised July 2009), if an e-mail message is not created or received as part of the business of government, it is considered non-record material. This includes personal messages, defined as those received from family, friends or work colleagues which have nothing to do with conducting daily government business.

A third issue with e-mails is whether exchanging e-mails between or among public elected or appointed officials violates open meetings law. Under NC law, it is a violation for a quorum of a governing body to discuss public business by electronic means if it is a simultaneous communication, such as a conference phone call. This would seem to apply to a chat room, for example, but not necessarily to sequential telephone conversations or sequential e-mails. Other states have far more restrictive laws. In at least one state, it is a violation to have a simultaneous communication among the majority of a quorum. If this principle were applied to Oriental, that would mean that no Town Commissioner could discuss town business with any other commissioner except in an open meeting. I can't imagine a scheme better calculated to bring government to a screaming halt.

I have always assumed that any e-mails I sent or received concerning town business qualified as public records. Accordingly, I established an e-mail account that I used for town business, separate from my private e-mail account that I had used for more than a decade. I recommended to the town manager more than three years ago that the town establish e-mail accounts for elected and appointed officials. I thought this would improve the management of e-mails that qualified as public records. Even doing this wouldn't prevent the accounts being used for personal messages, spam or unsolicited e-mails, but would allow coordinated administration and preservation of this category of public records. No action was taken on my suggestion until the new manager arrived.

I have now forwarded all of my e-mails concerning town business to my former account: davidcox@townoforiental.com. I no longer have access to the account. It is now the town's responsibility to determine which of the e-mails is a public record and to manage their retention and disposition.

Valentina Lisitsa

What an afternoon of music!

We are certainly fortunate in Oriental to have a venue like the Old Theater and a Music Society able to recruit top notch musicians like Valentina Lisitsa. It probably helps that she has made her home in North Carolina.

This afternoon she announced each piece, giving a short lecture tinged with humor and insight. Then she sat at the piano, wearing high heeled pumps and played away, her long fingers moving so fast they seemed a blur, but extracting every last ounce of passion from the music.

The highlight: a magic performance of Rachmaninoff's Concerto Number 3 for Piano and Orchestra, without the orchestra. She explained that it would sound fine without the orchestra, since the orchestra "just hums along," anyhow. She invited the audience to hum along, too, if they felt the need. No one did.

When she comes back to Oriental, don't miss the chance to hear her perform.

Spirit of Christmas Parade

Four years ago, with our boat laid up in Portsmouth Virginia awaiting a rebuilt transmission, my wife and I drove into Oriental to find a parade about to start. We found a vantage point at the corner of Broad and Hodges and thoroughly enjoyed the show.

We spent the night at Oriental Inn, had coffee and bagels at The Bean the next morning and met many residents. By the time we left to drive back to our boat, we knew we would spend more time in Oriental. We're still here.

Yesterday evening was our fifth Spirit of Christmas parade. The crowd was much smaller than in the past, and the parade seemed smaller as well. Maybe it was the cold weather.

Perfection

About twenty-five years ago, a neighbor of mine took clippers to every bush and tree in his yard and trimmed them to what he thought was a perfect shape. Among his trees was a dogwood that he trimmed into a perfect sphere on top of a straight trunk. Why would anyone do that to a dogwood?

The yard looked like illustrations we have all seen in children's books, wherein the trees and most of the animals assumed perfect geometric shapes.

Reflecting on this phenomenon, it occurred to me that what makes life interesting is not perfection, but imperfection. It is deviation from perfection - the asymmetries rather than the symmetries of life that make other persons recognizable. It is variations in thought and opinion that make other people intellectually interesting. If we were all perfect, by definition we would all be alike. And boring.

Vive le difference.

Planning for Oriental's Future

Last Friday I met with a graduate student working on a dissertation about land use planning in coastal communities. She asked an interesting question: "to what extent, if any, is sea level rise or flood risk incorporated into land use planning?"

That seems like a good question. In the past four years, the sea level datum for Pamlico County has been raised a foot. How many more feet will it take for us to have a serious problem?

Estimates vary as to how much sea level is expected to rise in the next century: from one to seven meters. One meter would bring the water over Hodges Street most of the time. Seven meters might leave some of my roof exposed. No one estimates that sea level will go down.

It wouldn't hurt to give this some thought.

A Day that Lives in Infamy

Sixty-eight years ago today (Dec. 7, 2009) the landlord pounded on the door of our upstairs apartment in Tallahassee and announced: "the Japs have bombed Pearl Harbor." I was only four and a half years old, but I understood everything he said.

My dad was a Tech Sergeant in the Army Air Corps. Just two days before, he had returned from the Carolina Maneuvers. Earlier in the summer, while my dad was away at the Louisiana Maneuvers, my brother was born in Yazoo City, Mississippi. Later, when my grandmother drove us back to Tallahassee, we were caught in an endless military convoy poking along at about thirty-five miles an hour along two-lane highways, through small southern towns, around courthouse squares.

Three months after Pearl Harbor, my dad left for Mobile, Alabama to prepare for overseas movement. We stayed with my grandparents in Holmes County, Mississippi and didn't see my dad again for more than three years.

During those three years, we received one five-word Western Union telegram from him and occasional letters. We had no telephone. So the normal means of communication was by hand-written "V-Mail" letters reviewed (and often redacted) by censors.

No e-mails. No twitter. No digital photos. No satellite communications.

It was another time. And New Guinea was far, far away.