Parents are the key to good education

This post was published in the Wilson Times on Sept. 21, 2019.

Tuesday’s headline in the Wilson Times proclaimed, “Parents are key to student success.” A proper response to this news might be, “well, duh!”

Recent studies have shown that it is not unskilled teachers, incapable students or poor school administration that cause failures in public schools. It’s the home environment that makes the difference between student success and student failure.

America has been trying at least since the 1983 “A Nation At Risk” report to tinker with curriculum, accountability, teacher training and motivation, teaching techniques and school governance in hopes of improving public education. But the problems cited by the Reagan administration report continue to plague public schools in America.

Recent studies have found that schools whose students come from homes with incomes in the top quartile of wealth have higher success scores than schools whose students come primarily from low-income or below-poverty-level homes. You can change teachers, change principals, change curriculum, change school spending and still find the same educational results based on income.

Students from homes with well-educated parents will do better than students with less-educated, lower-income parents. Beyond simple income, there are reasons for the disparity between high-achieving schools and low-scoring schools. Teachers, the focus of much of the educational reforms over the past quarter century, have about six hours a day to alter the lives of students. Their home environments have those students for the remaining 18 hours a day.

The low income of some families often comes with additional educational handicaps: uneducated or poorly educated parents, violence in the home, lack of reading resources (each class of kindergartners might include students who have never been read to), overwhelmed, under-employed parents and unstable family relations.

I’m glad to see Wilson County Schools is paying attention to students’ home environments. The school system is offering a Parents Academy to teach parents how to help their children be more successful in school. Some tips are quite simple: Be in school, be on time, set a routine for school days and ensure children follow the routine, make school a priority.

Unlike most possessions, children do not come with instruction manuals, and some parents have had little guidance or negative influences in how to care for children and help them grow into successful adults. A parent might have had a bad school experience and dropped out. Such a parent might transfer her distaste for education to her children, perpetuating an unfortunate experience to another generation.

A Parents Academy cannot compensate for poverty, a lack of reading materials in the home, absent fathers or other difficulties. The academy can teach parents how to improve their children’s behavior and help them be more successful in school. It can change attitudes, ambitions, goals and values. Children need to experience unconditional love and a stable home. A school system cannot provide that, but schools can show parents how to help their children succeed.

The rest is up to the parents — and the student.

The best way to spend a rainy, cold afternoon

The temperature is in the mid-40s and rainy outside this morning. It's a day — and maybe a week, according to the weather forecast — to spend inside. These wintry days are perfect for curling up with a good book, perhaps near the fireplace or in bed with a quilt covering me.

My wife and I had anticipated for years the many things we'd be able to do once we retired, once we were no longer tied down to a job and an office and responsibilities. Not the least of those anticipated things was the chance to read, not just at night just before falling asleep but at various times of the day.

About 30 years ago, a local retiree told me that the best thing about retirement could be summed up in one word: naps. He has been dead for years, but we share his retirement insight. We've adopted a modified siesta plan. Almost every day after lunch, we settle onto our bed or into a comfortable chair and read, sometimes for only 15 minutes, but sometimes for an hour. And sometimes, reading leads to napping, an unintentional but welcome goal for the afternoon.

While some people occupy their idle time by binge-watching television shows or movies; we prefer a good book that we can read for hours of put down and return to as needed. We have succumbed to a few of the multi-segment productions available on streaming services, including "The Staircase, "Downton Abbey," and a few others. The suspense that keeps viewers glued to these serials have a downside — heart-pounding confrontation and suspense are not relaxing. A good book is more satisfying and more comforting than any video production I can think of.

Later today, when the rain still falls from the overcast sky and the chill in the air makes it a challenge to feel sufficiently warm, I'll be absorbed in a book, oblivious to the chill or the rain, feeling instead the comfort of ink on paper, of descriptions that bring distant scenes to life, of events that happened only in an author's imagination.

It's the best way to spend a rainy, cold afternoon.

Books are made for reading

I have difficulty understanding or even conceiving of someone who doesn't read books. Our house is filled with books, books in every room, some neatly decorating bookshelves, some stacked in baskets beside comfortable seats, some lying patiently on bedside tables — books ready to be picked up and read. I read every day, and almost every day from books. On days when I don't read a book, I read magazines, which are also prevalent around our house.

So when the president of the United States says boastfully that he doesn't read, my mind is flummoxed. It's inconceivable. I'll admit that I'm not a great reader. I can't check out 10 books from the library and return them all in a week or two, fully consumed, as some people I have known can. I am a slow reader, perhaps in part because of the years I spent editing newspapers, parsing each word and punctuation mark for misuse or error. And my reading tends to be at night, an effective sleeping pill that allows me to put aside the tensions and worries of the day and relax until my eyelids fall closed and I lose my grip on the book I've been reading. Many nights I've awakened, the lamp still on, my book in the floor, my stopping place a mystery. The next night, I hunt for my stopping place and pick up the narrative again.

I also tend to feel obligated once I've begun a book to stay with it to the end, whether it is a novel with a beginning, a plot (or two) and an ending, or nonfiction that may only be a series of facts or arguments. I recently finished a book that I found engulfing. I could not get William Kent Krueger's "Ordinary Grace" off my mind and kept the novel close by my side to snatch a few minutes to dive back into the immersing plot.

But now I'm reading a novel (I won't mention any names) that I find a bit plodding and confusing. There are time shifts and new characters and plot shifts that fail to keep me interested. But I've devoted the time to get more than 100 pages into the book, and I won't give up yet. Still, that non-fiction book that is next on my bedside table keeps enticing me. Surely it's better than this bland and skip-about novel.

Even when I hit the inevitable bumps in the literary road, I cherish my books and my time to read. Even not-so-good books are better than not reading. With all due respect, you should try it, Mr. President.

A time for purging books

The day has come at our house to purge the books. There are too many of them, more than we can read during our brief quiet evenings of reading time. There are books we'll never read, or will never re-read, having read them once and judged them not worth a second or third reading. There are books that once seemed important, but their importance has faded in the decades since they appeared on our shelves. There are books that fueled our interests in things like bicycling and running or supplemented our knowledge in matters such as child rearing, breastfeeding or home repairs.

We have books that seemed intriguing but weren't and books that seemed like such a bargain at the yard sale or library book sale but never rose to the top of the stack of books to read next. There are novels that were well-written and suspenseful and that we would recommend to other readers, but they weren't worth a second read and now no longer are worth the space they consume on the bookshelf.

Early in our marriage, I tried to convince my wife that we should not buy novels or other fiction because, well, libraries can supply you with all the novels you'll ever need in a lifetime. Nonfiction is different, I tried to tell her, because they deal in facts. They serve as reference material, a fact-checking resource when questions of science or history arise.

Despite the logic of my argument, we have managed to collect dozens, if not hundreds, of novels. We were lured into Book of the Month Club more than once and accumulated some books in that way. The new novels always sounded so compelling, so worth the read and the price of a book, especially when you found the book at a library book sale or yard sale. Now we are separating the novels that are worth keeping and reading again and again — novels like "Cold Mountain" or "To Kill a Mockingbird" or "A Farewell to Arms" — from the novels that once were fresh and new but now seem formulaic and ephemeral.

As for the nonfiction books that I once contended would always be useful resources, all of their facts can be found instantly in a Google search, neatly organized, usually with multiple references. Encyclopedia, which once got middle schoolers through their first research papers, are now as obsolete as slide rules. Resource books, from encyclopedia to World Almanacs to dictionaries are now conveniently accessible on the web.

We've decided to keep, at least for now, a few reference books — a few authoritative volumes on grammar and word usage, a print dictionary, and a copy of Bartlett's Familiar Quotations that her mother used in college and that bears her signature. I will keep a book given to my father when he was a boy, a do-it-yourself text for making toys and things from scraps.

We'll get rid of the couple of dozen journalism textbooks, newspaper memoirs and journalistic histories I had collected in three decades of editing newspapers and teaching journalism. That door has closed behind me, and I have no reason to think I'll ever need those books again. I will give them to someone who has use for them.

Getting rid of books is a sad, almost reprehensible act that makes us question our actions. One wall of our living room is covered in built-in bookcases, and I love to sit in that room and read, looking up occasionally at the comforting view of all those books, which together promise years of quiet leisure time and enjoyment. By our bed are stacks of books, one on my nightstand and one on my wife's; another stack covers the trunk at the foot of our bed. The other bedrooms have bookshelves filled with books, and another packed bookcase is on the stair landing. A closet contains children's books that had been our children's and now are reserved for their children when they visit. Boxes in the attic have more books.

Books are the most glorious things, a whole world in your hands, a fresh aroma of paper and ink that every book lover finds invigorating. Electronic books are cheaper, more up-to-date and more compact, but print books feel so good in your hands and look so good on a bookshelf.

My wife and I face the necessity of this purging of the books, but we take no joy in it and feel no certainty at the judgments we make, that one book is worth keeping and another is not. We know that the books will remain when we are no longer here, and it will fall to someone else to purge them. We know what that task is like, and we prefer to make an easier task for someone on that future date.

A book every month, delivered to your door

The Book of the Month Club is still around. I just checked. It has merged, it looks like, with the Literary Guild, a former low-rent competitor, and both are, let us say, not as ostentatious a they once were.

My wife and/or I had belonged to BOMC and to Literary Guild a few times in the now-distant past. We would take advantage of the special invitation, pick out five books (or however many it was they were offering) (histories for me, novels for her), try to remember to send back the card saying no thanks to 10 or 11 of the next 12 offerings and eventually either get dismissed from the club for lack of participation or leave voluntarily. Then we'd see another enticing offer and pick out a few books for a measly dollar, and we'd be back in it again.

We still have some of those books on our shelves, but we probably have ten times as many books that we had purchased in book stores. As intriguing as the book club summaries were, they were never as enticing as finding a book in a book store, where you can hold it, smell, flip through it, and get pulled into the excitement. Of course, now we live in a town that does not have a book store. (What kind of self-respecting town is that?) But we're still not tempted to join another book club.

In its day, Book of the Month Club was a literary status symbol, proof that you were a bibliophile, a book lover, a reader, a supporter of great writing and great authors — or even of so-so writers who struck it rich when their novels were picked as a BOMC monthly selection. The Literary Guild was founded as lower-class BOMC. Same procedure, same strategy, just not quite as many big-name authors, and the book club editions were not as substantial as the publisher's main run. Big ads featuring great books kept the excitement going. We subscribed to magazines that included long reads, and the book clubs ran their ads there, keeping the membership afloat.

There must have been huge "churn," in membership. Churn is the term used in the newspaper business to describe folks who subscribe for the special 90-day cut rate but then drop the paper. Six months later, they might sign up again, but they never stay for the long haul. Newspapers spent fortunes trying to reduce churn and keep readers. Book club memberships were like that. We were among the churn. We'd join, leave and join again.

Now my wife reads books on her Kindle and we order books from Amazon occasionally when we see one that sounds intriguing, but it's not in the public library. All that expense of mailing monthly newsletters and selection forms and then mailing the books made for a huge overhead in the book clubs. It's a wonder to me that they are still in business — barely. Most of the big chain bookstores, which had run the small-town book shops out of business 20 years ago, are gone now, too. They just couldn't compete with the unending selection and the overnight delivery of the online stores.

And what has replaced the prestige and savoir-faire of Book of the Month Club? Maybe a library card? A Friends of the Library membership? An e-reader? A Netflix subscription?

None of the above.

Job applicant shows why unemployment remains high

The hefty young man approached me as I rounded the corner in the hallway to my office.

"That hiring place, they not here no more?" he asked.

"You mean The Budd Group (a human resources agency with an office next to mine)?" I answered. He was standing beside the door with the sign noting "The Budd Group." He nodded.

"They closed?" he asked.

"Their schedule is on the door," I said, pointing to the sign about four feet away. I looked at the sign. "It says they're closed today."

"When they gonna be open?" he asked.

The schedule on the door gave hours for the next day. I pointed it out to him, and he walked away.

I see quite a few job seekers coming down the hallway, looking for a job. Sometimes, they will stick their head in my office to ask about jobs when the HR folks next door are not in. Many of them, but not all, are in the same classification as the young man with all the questions — clad in baggy shorts and a T-shirt, a classic "dress for success" style — and lacking in basic grammar and speaking skills.

In a city with chronic unemployment that often runs nearly double the statewide jobless rate but with vacancies that can't be filled at major high-tech industries, my hallway conversationalist is an example of why so many are jobless and so many quality jobs go unfilled.

Education is the key, politicians keep saying, and it's true. But education begins long before kindergarten. Learning to speak clearly with correct grammar begins early in life, and so does the habit of ungrammatical, slurred half-sentences. Reading — such as reading that sign on the office door — is an essential skill that too many dropouts never developed. It's obvious that reading is not a talent many of these job seekers have. And that human resource agency now takes applications only online. If you can't find your way from power-on to double-click to QWERTY, you won't get a job.

And there's little anyone can do to make up for what you should have learned 10 or 20 years before.

North Carolina's Literary Festival

The North Carolina Literary Festival was too tempting to pass up, despite the beckoning of long-postponed chores in the house and yard and the beauty of the bright day of new spring. Who wants to sit inside a crowded library when there is a glorious spring day outside?

Well, we do. My wife and I shunned our household obligations and hit the road for Raleigh, to experience the N.C. Literary Festival again and to see the new Hunt Library at N.C. State University for the first time. Despite some misleading directions, we managed to find State's Centennial Campus and the Hunt Library.

A word about the library: I was told that the ultra-modern structure is worth the drive from Wilson, and it's true. I watched in awe as the "book bot" located and retrieved requested books from the new-age stacks — near-infinite rows of metal trays filled with books, which are retrievable by the automated device that paces along the rows and reaches up several stories to find the right bin for the requested book and transports it to the circulation desk. Amazing! The rest of the library is just as modern — no imposing Doric or Corinthian columns, no frieze above the entrance, no brass chandeliers. Instead, there are banks of computers, quiet rooms for reading/study and a coffee and ice cream bar. The library gives the feeling of more of a public space than most university or college libraries do.

As a venue for the Literary Festival, the library offered the advantage of having all the events in one location. It also had that advantage as a disadvantage. Moving from place to place, as we had done when the festival was at UNC-Chapel Hill, has its own advantages, especially on a bright spring day. Finding the session you wanted to attend wasn't always easy in the Hunt Library. The session we especially wanted to attend wasn't where it was supposed to be. But the festival provided a number of clearly old-school human guides who graciously pointed us in the right direction and even escorted us, too.

Any time you can get hundreds of people together — some of them legendary North Carolina authors — to discuss literature, it's a good day. The first session we attended featured Wilton Barnhardt and Jill McCorkle, who bandied about their handling of redeemable and unredeemable characters. The session could have focused on humor in N.C. literature because they provided the audience with frequent laughs as they read from their novels and commented on writing, characters and books.

We slipped out early for a session featuring Drew Perry, another novelist whose writing is as full of humor as a Johnny Carson monologue. Perry, a Greensboro resident, humorously discussed his own and his characters' angst over life's big decisions, such as marrying and having a child.

We then skipped the first novel session, which was about to be played before a packed room of wannabe novelists, opting instead for the display of books for sale downstairs. My wife bought a couple of books; I decided against buying the bourbon cookbook. Then, examining our options, we went home after a quick visit to Trader Joe's.

The state Literary Festival has been a hit-and-miss affair since the first one a dozen years ago. Intended to rotate among UNC, State and Duke, the festival hasn't always happened. We've attended two at UNC and found both events in Chapel Hill marvelously packed with great authors and interesting sessions. This year's event included fewer writers we knew and therefore was less than an all-day event for us.

In an age when it seems the written word, or at least ink-on-paper, is dying, a literary festival is a particularly ambitious undertaking. Readers love their books, which offer a satisfaction that neither live performance nor film can provide. To see and talk to the authors of good books is a thrill for every serious reader. That thrill lured us from work that needed to be done to an enjoyable interlude in Raleigh, an afternoon surrounded by books and book lovers. It is a feeling as beautiful as a spring day. 

A weekend for readiing

Every weekend comes with a to-do list. At this time of year, most of my to-do's are related to exterior maintenance of the house or yard. Some weekends there are trips to take, places to go, appointments to keep.

This past one was a weekend of altered plans. I had planned to be at work early Saturday on a new work project, beginning the construction of a house. But raindrops pounding the roof awakened me during the night, and I heard the rain falling as I awoke a second and a third time, when I got up, got dressed and looked at the weather forecast on the computer. The rain would last all day, with the chance of precipitation never dropping below 70%. My outdoor plans — not only the house construction but also the lawn maintenance and more ambitious projects such as sealing the wooden deck — would have to change.

I did some things I could do in the rainy weather, and then I settled down with a thick book and transported my mind back to 1943 and immersed myself in the Allies' invasion of Fascist Italy. I had been reading Rick Atkinson's three-volume history of World War II and was about halfway through the second volume. But my reading time was limited to a few minutes in the evening as I lay in bed and waited for fatigue to blur the words on the page and to loosen my grip on the book. To have an hour to sit and read was both a luxury and a therapy. To absorb the details of the Italian campaign without nodding off or losing my place was a gift that enlivened my mind. To read at length at a time of day when my energy level kept me engrossed in what I was reading was a rejuvenating tonic.

A day-long rain ruined my weekend. And rescued it.

Old books bring back memories

The rows of tables stretched the length of the convention center, row upon row like a parading army of troops, and the straight rows added into the dozens filling the space that could accommodate an ice hockey rink with bleachers. On each table books stood neatly vertical, their titles easily legible to the scores of people walking, reading, pausing and remembering.

I spent only a short time walking the rows of books, never even venturing into the fiction, helpfully alphabetized by author's last names. Instead, I perused the several tables labeled "History" and "Biography." As in a high school reunion, I recognized many old friends and paused at the memory. There were Watergate books, and I marveled at how long ago it had been since the nation was absorbed with Dean, Haldeman, Erlichman, Sirica, and all the rest. There were books chronicling the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. And memoirs, like John Dean's "Blind Ambition" and Henry Kissinger's advice on diplomacy or Russell Baker's "Growing Up," and historical biographies on Churchill, Andrew Jackson, and so many others.

When they were new and the reviewers praised them and they made the New York Times bestseller list, these books were conversation starters and opinion shapers. Now they stand on end, going out the door for a dollar or two because the library has declared them surplus, and most of the people who read the reviews, as I had, and wanted to read the books everyone was talking about had done so. So many books; so little time, as the bibliophile's aphorism goes. But others among us had wanted to read these books, had read or listened to quotes from the authors and compared reviewers' comments, but had never added to the bookseller's figures by actually purchasing the books when they were listed in the top 10 lists.

Now they are relegated to the indignity of jutting their binding faces into the eyes of strolling shoppers, their page ends against plastic table tops, with no hint that once these books were the topics of national conversations and the objects of popular praise. Some of the authors are dead. Some of their characters have disappeared from the news and are forgotten.

Even the medium, printed books, words on paper, has slipped behind digital media in popularity. Our books are now no more than binary code, a language that goes unspoken and unheard. Even the weightiest tome has no heft in its digital format, a format that lacks the feel of printed pages between stiff covers and the intoxicating aroma of paper pulp and ink.

After spending far longer than we had intended at the library book sale, my wife and I left with an armful of books on paper, their heft weighing down my arms. We add them to the scores of books lining the living room bookcases, the bookcases upstairs, the pile of books lying beside the bed and the books stashed in the attic because we couldn't bear to send them away. Someday, we think, we will take down these books and re-read them or share them with friends, offer them to grandchildren, or simply hold them happily again.

The books in the long rows at the convention center struck me as one more affirmation that life is short, and moments, even heartfelt moments launching national conversations, are fleeting. One moment's greatness devolves to the hard-luck indignity of a one-dollar sale.

When a town's bookstore closes

Wilson's Books-A-Million, the only bookstore in a town of nearly 50,000, is closing, the victim of a lingering economic downturn and a changed business environment for booksellers. First, it was the big-box bookstores that ran the little independents out of business. Now, it's the online retailers (Amazon, etc.) and the switch to e-readers (e.g., Kindle) that is forcing the big-box bookstores out of business.

Economic changes aside, can a small city claim any intellectual ranking without a bookstore? A bookstore is not just a place to buy books; it's a place to discover books, to talk to fellow readers and to luxuriate in the aroma and feel of freshly printed books. Bookstores are places where I can spend hours without realizing any time has elapsed.

When we moved to Wilson 31 years ago, a B. Dalton bookstore lured us out of Parkwood Mall's wide corridor into its cramped aisles. Now the store (part of a chain but with some helpful local clerks) is gone, and the mall is pretty much kaput, too. We mourned the demise of B. Dalton but were encouraged by BAM's opening. We could, at last, shop through thousands of books along wide aisles and refresh ourselves at the coffee bar without leaving town. Every Christmas season, we would hunt through the selections for books for young nieces and nephews because we knew there's no better gift than a good book, and we wanted to have a role in sparking these children's love of reading. Other gift-giving occasions for older relatives or friends also would bring us to the bookstore. On other occasions, we would simply drop by the bookstore to spend a half hour or so just looking to see what's new and to treat ourselves to a cup of coffee.

Now, we won't be able to do any of those things without going out of town. We can order books online, but it's not the same, especially when it comes to children's books. Without a bookstore, Wilson will be a lesser place.

BAM's closing will be an opportunity for an enterprising bibliophile to open an independent bookstore, perhaps combining used books with a few new printings. The business plan will depend on one's ability to get a business loan in this economic climate — and on local shoppers' willingness to support that increasingly rarity, an independent bookstore.

E-readers won't save newspapers

Cover stories in The Atlantic and Newsweek tout the new Apple iPad, which went on sale Saturday. I've written before about the iPad, but that was before Apple's latest product went on sale and before it got such great exposure in the mainstream press. Like other Apple products, the iPad is a great leap ahead of the competition. Other manufacturers have tried their hand at slate computers, but none have caught on. The iPad might catch on as a platform for Web browsing, but the Apple iPhone and other "smart" phones also do a pretty good job of Web browsing, albeit on a much smaller screen.

What intrigues many analysts is the iPad's potential as an electronic reader to compete with Amazon's Kindle. Each product has its advantages and disadvantages — the Kindle is better in sunlight, but the iPad allows full-color illustrations. Some magazines and newspapers have signed up subscribers to their iPad versions of their publications. In this sense, the iPad is the fulfillment of that pie-in-the-sky dream from when I was in journalism school 40 years ago — a device that would automatically deliver the day's news to subscribers without the expense of massive presses and newspaper carriers. (What many of these dreamers had in mind at that time was closer to a fax machine than to an electronic reader.) That pipe dream from long ago is now possible and practical with the iPad or the Kindle — you can get your complete newspaper each day on a small, portable electronic device.

But, as analysts have pointed out, it will take a lot of online subscriptions to make up for the print industry's loss of advertising. Traditionally in the newspaper business, circulation revenue barely covered the costs of delivery. Eighty percent or more of a newspaper's revenue came from print advertising. Even if consumers are willing to pay premium rates for the convenience of electronic delivery of news, their e-circulation payments will not replace the lost ad revenues. If newspapers are going to survive in some form, then some way must be found to lure advertisers back into the newspaper format. Subscription revenue, whether print or online, cannot replace ad sales, which provide the overwhelming bulk of total newspaper revenue. So it's unlikely the iPad, no matter how wonderful it is, will be the savior of the newspaper business.

Besides, a majority of readers say they prefer he experience of reading a book in print, the old fashioned way. This is a process — ink on paper — that has survived in some form for thousands of years. Many people enjoy reading a book who will not enjoy reading items, including this blog post, off of a computer screen. No matter how ingenious the technology is (iPad readers "flip" the pages with a brush of a finger, just as they do with a book), no electronic device can fully replicate the experience of holding a book, carrying it to secret hiding places and immersing one's self inside the cover of that book. Just as movies did not eliminate the novel, and television did not eliminate radio or the movies, e-readers will not eliminate traditional books, magazines and newspapers. If print publications die, it will because they could not generate enough advertising revenue to support news reporting, not because of the new e-readers.

Farmers market conjures delicious memories

My wife and I came home from the Wilson County farmers market Saturday morning with tomatoes, peas, peaches, blueberries and one more thing — okra. We would share the tomatoes, peas, peaches and blueberries. The okra was for me alone. She doesn't like okra. Never did. Never will. Whenever the matter is raised, she uses the S-word to describe it — slimy.

I, on the other hand, grew up in a household where okra was on the table several times a week and where a row or two of okra spread their broad, notched leaves and upright, fuzz-covered pods in our garden each year. My mother would hand me a bucket and a kitchen knife when I came home from school and tell me to cut her a mess of okra for dinner. She would clean the seed pods and slice them into half-inch cylinders, which were dipped into flour and fried in an iron skillet coated with bacon grease. Fried okra is a delicacy, crispy on the outside and soft and moist inside — not slimy. Mother's fried okra was battered with flour, not the corn meal I find at the few restaurants serving fried okra. I think the flour presents more of the okra's flavor.

In my mother's kitchen, okra could also be used for flavoring vegetables. Three or four pods of okra cook in a four-quart pot full of Crowder peas gave the peas a fresh, spicy flavor more vibrant than the usual fatback or ham seasoning. Okra was an integral ingredient in my mother's incomparable vegetable soup, a soup that, defying conventional culinary theories, contained no meat stock, consisted entirely of tomatoes, white corn, butterbeans, okra and a flour-based thickening. It was so good, I used to eat leftovers cold and congealed right out of the refrigerator. I have tried to duplicate that soup, but I cannot match its flavor.

Saturday afternoon, I shelled the peas we had bought, and on Sunday I cleaned and sliced the okra, rolled the slices in all-purpose flower and fried it in a small skillet. The result was a dinner that, while not perfect, was delicious, and not at all slimy.

On Sunday afternoon, with the temperature above 90, my wife and I decided to avoid the heat and lie down and read in our bedroom. Each of us, side by side, absorbed in a novel, lost track of the time until we realized the afternoon was gone and the shadows had stretched across the back yard. The afternoon was a reward for having caught up on household and gardening chores, and it obeyed that commandment about a day of rest. If there is a better, more relaxing or more economical way to spend a hot summer afternoon, or a cold winter winter Sunday or a rainy afternoon any time of the year than lying in bed with a book and a companion with her own book, I haven't found it.

Icy morning emphasizes print's shortcoming

This morning, which dawned with bright sunshine and clear blue skies looking down on a landscape painted white by soft snowfall overnight, offered a reminder of the shortcomings of a printed newspaper. When I walked out in the brightening dawn to pick up my morning paper, my newspaper was not at the end of the driveway. As I do in this situation, I stood and surveyed the area, checking the shrubs by the street and the curb on either side of the driveway cut. No newspaper. I walked back to the house, quickening my step to get out of the 17-degree chill and into the warmth of the kitchen.

At the kitchen table, I sipped my coffee but felt unfulfilled. I needed to be reading, concentrating on something more complex than raising the mug to my lips and sipping the dark, hot liquid. Our household computer sits on a desk near the kitchen table, and I didn't have far to move to call up the News & Observer's Web page. I loaded the page and skimmed through the headlines, finding nothing surprising or unexpected but decided not to sit and read through the stories online.

Normally, I'd spend more 45 minutes or more reading through the print edition, sometimes leaving a section or two to read later in the day. But the online news doesn't hold my attention nearly so long. What some online advocates don't seem to understand (or choose to ignore) is that not every article in the print edition is online. And the print ads, which are often interesting and informative in themselves, are not online either.

So give me the print edition. Even on a day like today, when treacherous roads in Raleigh make my morning paper a mid-morning or later edition. The sun is up; Wilson roads are mostly clear and safe, but there's still no newspaper at the end of my driveway. I think I'll stroll out into the cold and check once more.