Easter weekend

Friday afternoon I took off from work a bit early to drive to Asheville and go to Good Friday services with my dad, although my dad and I loosely defined Good Friday services as a Greg Brown concert. If you are my boss and you have happened to find this, and you have an issue with how I defined Good Friday services in my request to leave early, then let me know and I’ll play you some Greg Brown songs. I think the case can be made that I got about the same amount of religion as if I’d been in a church.

Greg Brown is a folk singer who never met a t-shirt that he liked (there are lots of photographs of him in wife beaters or with no shirt at all), and he was one of my first concerts back in the day. He sings songs that make Iowa sound like a great place to live, but to get back to my first paragraph, he sings some songs that are about growing up with a pentacostal preacher father who spoke in tongues. An interesting thing about Greg Brown is that he is married to folk singer Iris Dement. Perhaps this is not interesting to you, but in the folk music world, this is huge. I can still remember when my dad emailed me to tell me this gossip. For folk music fans, there’s not a lot of juicy gossip, but this is sort of the equivalent of a Jay-Z/Beyonce hookup in our world.

I was also particularly excited about the opening act, Sarah Lee Guthrie and Johnny Irion. If Sarah Lee’s last name looks familiar, she is the granddaughter of Woody Guthrie and the daughter of Arlo. Sarah Lee Guthrie and Johnny Irion are married, which is interesting, but not as much as the Greg Brown/Iris Dement thing. Anyways, Sarah Lee and Johnny are a great little duo with wonderful songs. They also sang a new Woody Guthrie song, one of the thousands that he left with lyrics but no music. Greg Brown brought Sarah Lee and Johnny back out to sing on his encores but it was pretty clear he wasn’t telling them what songs he was going to play. It was a great concert.

I am happy to report that the Easter bunny made it to our house this morning. The whole family went to the early Easter service. It was my first time having Easter with my family in years which was nice. I would have to say that my favorite moment was right after the offertory, when my mom leaned over and whispered how one time, when she was a little girl, she took a new doll with her to church. And she folded up the dollar that she was going to give for the offering into her doll’s hand, so the doll could give the offering. But then the whole doll fell into the collection plate. Luckily God gave it back to her.

For our Easter meal, we had homemade macaroni and cheese. I mean, we had other things as well, including ham, green beans and biscuits, but from the way my dad carried on about it, you would have thought the only thing we had was macaroni and cheese. Basically, a few weeks ago, my dad requested macaroni for Easter. But Mom said that if he wanted it, he had to make it. So today Dad set to work cooking and just went on and on about how great this macaroni was going to be, and how it was made from this old recipe that he found when he was serving in the army in Korea. They don’t have macaroni and cheese in Korea, and he really wanted some. So he went to a Korean fortune teller and the fortune teller gave him this recipe, and that’s what he made for us today.

Actually, the recipe just came from a magazine. My dad has never actually been to Korea, nor did he serve in the army. We just decided that the recipe needed a more interesting back story than coming from a magazine.

Then this evening I drove back to Atlanta. About an hour into the trip, I pass this gold mining place; I went there once on a field trip in elementary school. If there’s a tip I can give you about going to a gold mining place, it’s don’t wear white. But anyways, the gold mining place is the kind of place where you pay some money and they give you a bucket of dirt and you look for rocks and then the appraiser will tell you if you found anything worth any money. It’s a really big place. But today, I noticed that they have some land for sale behind the gold mining place. So if anyone is looking to buy any land in the mountains of North Carolina, I would recommend buying there. Because you might be buying a land filled with gold! Gold, I tell you!