The Sandbox, Issue No. 2: Absence & Plenty
The losses we don't want can reveal an agency we didn’t know we needed. Plus, the UNC players and coaches who called Ye Olde Waffle Shoppe home.
Hi there—whether you were one of the first subscribers or are new this week to Other People’s Parents, thank you so much for reading. It means more than I can say (or write).
Once a month, I consider what I’ve learned from the people I’ve interviewed for recent newsletters. That’s what you’re seeing in this post. Next week, I’ll begin publishing a new round of interviews featuring folks who have come into my life for a little or a long while, making it better and deeper for their presence.
The silver-haired man at the table in front of me swiveled in his chair to face me.
I was attending my first writer’s conference, in the spring of 2022, and the Andy Griffith lookalike and I were waiting for a concurrent session to begin. We made small talk: names, how far we had traveled to be there, etc.
Then he got down to business.
“So,” he said, “what’s your book about?”
“Oh, I’m not working on anything,” I told him with naive cheerfulness. “I’m just here to learn.”
His face fell and twisted into a mix of confusion and repulsion. Not working on anything? Why, then, was I there?
I had skipped the sessions about how to get an agent and how to market myself on social media. Instead, I had soaked in the keynote speaker’s inspiration, listened to faculty read from their works, signed up for classes on the craft of writing, and traipsed about the city by myself at lunch, looking for a bookstore or a museum, thinking my thoughts, wondering my wonders.
I was in my happy place—or rather, I was trying to find it again, trying to make a comeback, trying to be whoever I was before I had been expelled from my family of origin and left in broken bits on my bedroom floor. Maybe, with a little luck, I could be better than whoever I had once been.
More open-hearted. More fearless. More me.
But one woman’s happy place is another man’s oblivion. Sheriff Taylor spun his chair ever so slowly away from me, maintaining eye contact the whole time, as though one false move on my part would bring a contagion of irrelevance to every writer in the room.
It was one of the funniest things I’ve ever experienced.
[You can read more about it and the day I snapped out of my writing funk in “Heirlooms,” my first Intrepid Post installment, next week. Intrepid Posts are for paid subscribers, but everything else in this newsletter remains public and free.1]
I’ve been a character in this setting before—many times, in fact. It’s a place that expects my absence and is perplexed, if not downright galled, when I go ahead and show up, anyway.
This will happen when you are a woman who works in sports, as I once did. This will happen when you are from a small town in West Virginia and attempt to plant yourself in places like New York, Chicago, and Washington, D.C. (It will especially happen when you are a combo of those two things.) It will happen when you are a little offbeat, a little naive, or when you pursue a skill that some group believes you should not possess because of your gender or your background or the general aura you emit as you go about the world.
But when you know who you are and what you seek, there is tremendous agency to be found in the places where your absence is predicted. You can make something of yourself—for yourself—on your own terms. There is power in that space if you own it. It builds an uncommon resiliency that will carry you through the inevitable confidence-toppling storms.
It turns absence into plenty.
That truth was reinforced for me over the past month by Other People’s Parents.
When a guidance counselor told DeVetta Holman-Copeland—she of the straight As—that she was not college material, “Dr. D.” begged to differ. A young Black woman from a recently integrated small town, her absence in higher learning may have been expected by some, but not by her, and not by the father who passed away soon after she told Howard University she was coming to join it in the 1970s. She accepted a full scholarship to UNC-Chapel Hill instead so she could stay closer to home and help her mother and siblings. And now, she helps students of color understand that being one of the few does not make them less.
Linda Chris of Ye Olde Waffle Shoppe also faced the challenges of absence at a young age. She lost her mother to breast cancer while she was in college. An only child, she had been accepted to Duke and UNC—her top choices—but like Dr. D., she had stayed close to home and enrolled at Wake Forest in Winston-Salem so she could help with her mother’s care after the diagnosis.
Linda continued to run the household for her father while going to classes. Peers were breaking away from their families at a time when she was drawn deeper into the loss and change that suddenly existed in her own. She was accustomed to running all her decisions by her family—“I was really spoiled with love,” she said, a lovely description—but she had entered new territory.
By the time she met her husband, Ye Olde founder Jimmy Chris, “I had already learned some very harsh lessons, very quickly. What I learned was an independence.”
These stories helped me realize something about myself—something that I suspect many women overlook and that my family of origin certainly hoped I would forget: I have a strong independence streak, a gumption wrongly framed.
Growing up in a household where sexism was espoused regularly, I came to view many of my unfavorable outcomes as missteps. As poor choices. In fact, they were often declarations of independence in disguise, a running toward what I needed, a ferreting out of what I didn’t. Not failure, but alignment.
As Dr. D. would say: “Do you allow yourself to be drawn into that madness? Or do you take control of who you are and what you want to be and who you want to become?”
An honest look at my history—a kinder look at my history—shows that I have always found small, plucky ways to defibrillate my life after a heartbreak. This newsletter is an example of that steady rhythm returning once more.
And so is this: I ventured back this spring to the writer’s conference where I had disappointed Not Andy Griffith, and, on a whim, signed up for a class on narrative poetry with Steve Cushman. I had written only one poem in the past 30 years (which, coincidentally, is embedded in “Heirlooms”), but I took a chance. From the beginning, the vibe in the room was different in a way I could not place. Halfway through the class, Cushman, who is also a novelist, described it in four words.
“Poets,” he said, “are just nicer.”
Over our laughter, he insisted: “No, it’s true. They just are. Listen, there’s money to be made in fiction. Real money. So there’s competition. Poetry, on the other hand …”
More laughter. But he was correct. Competition creates division, whether it exists in your head or sits down next to you at a conference wearing a sports coat and a scowl. Community creates connection. Community lets you flow.
I walked to my car at the end of the day with a young woman I had sat with in Cushman’s class. She told me that she had swallowed her fear and taken a turn at the conference’s open mic to read an original poem. She had found her gumption. I was thrilled for her.
I understood why she was able to declare her independence at that mic. Cushman had given us several writing prompts, and I had written without concern for the gods of the literary world because he had created the space for it to happen. I wrote from my happy place and channeled my fellow students’ happy places, too. I entered new territory, and I wound up writing a poem in that class that was accepted for a small poetry/prose anthology.
I just wrote one poem. I’m not Ted Kooser or Mary Oliver or Amanda Gorman or Steve Cushman over here. But I also know that Linda Chris would gently scold me for that framing. This is what she said to me within the first few minutes of our meeting:
“Don’t say just. You are not just anything. You are a freelance writer,” she corrected me. “You are publishing a newsletter. Do not minimize who you are and what you do.”
She knows absence can be painful. And she also knows it can be powerful when applied with gumption.
We get to decide how we will counter-shock the gaps in our understanding, the breaks in our relationships, and the missing pieces of our lives. We get to decide how to regain our rhythm—and who will be there when we do.
Revisiting Ye Olde Times
Linda Chris and Melissa Peng have so many memories of their time at Ye Olde Waffle Shoppe that I could not fit them all into last week’s newsletter. Because Ye Olde, which closed in 2020 after 48 years on Franklin Street in Chapel Hill, was so beloved and had such a deep connection and history with those who frequented it, I wanted to share a few more of those moments. Here’s a little digest:
[Ed. note: Eric Montross was an All-America center at UNC who helped lead Carolina over Michigan in the 1993 NCAA national championship. He played in the NBA for eight seasons and was later the color commentator for Tar Heel basketball radio broadcasts. In 2023, Montross revealed he was battling cancer. He died later that year at age 52.]
Linda: The last moment for me that was bittersweet [in the months before we closed] was when Eric Montross’ wife had arranged for his friends to come to Ye Olde for his birthday. We never reserved tables, but we told them to come in early, around 8:30, and we would do our best. They said, “This would really make his birthday.”
Eric was the last one of the group to come in. I remember him sitting there, and I walked by and tapped him on the shoulder. We were very busy that day, and I didn’t have time to converse with him. But just seeing that last breakfast at Ye Olde in my mind and thinking about it today … it was very, very special.
Linda: We would not engage in conversation, unless asked, with the basketball or football players or coaches because they came in for their moment of privacy. Our rule was that people were allowed their moments at Ye Olde to just be human. Most of the time, diners were very accommodating. But my last negative moment was when I had to ask an autograph-seeker to take it outside when she approached [All-America Tar Heel guard RJ Davis]. And she literally did. She waited outside the door for him to finish eating.
Melissa: [Photojournalist, author, and journalism senior lecturer] Jock Lauterer would come in and always sit in the same booth up front, always have his coffee right away. And a biscuit. It was funny because it eventually changed when he was working on his health, what he wanted to eat. But he would always meet with students or he would be writing; he would ask us how we were doing. He saw me grow up in that space over the years.
Linda: Roy Williams loved his pancakes. The last time he came in with his wife, Wanda, they sat in the back booth, and I was hostessing that day. One day he said, “Why don’t you sit down?” So I did, which I usually do not do.
He and I began to talk about how Duke used to not be our rival. The big rival was N.C. State. He said, “You are absolutely right.” And State happened to be having a particularly strong year. While we were talking, I noticed that Wanda was moving his pancake plate closer to her. And all of a sudden, Roy turned and said, “Wanda, if you’d like your own pancakes, please get them. Those are my pancakes!” ♣
NEXT WEDNESDAY: ESPN editor, producer, and mentor extraordinaire Sandy Rosenbush breaks down the biggest reasons we avoid asking for help when we need it most.
Apparently putting anything behind a paywall this early into one’s Substack foray is frowned upon. But here I am, being a rebel, doing it anyway. Intrepid Post content will have a more creative writing bent and often will be lengthier. A free trial offer/free paid post link will pop up if you are not already a paid subscriber. I’d love your support, of course, but message me if you’d really like to read a particular post but aren’t ready for all this paying nonsense. Unlike my friend, Not-Andy-Griffith, I will not be offended.