He was tall, maybe 6 feet 8 inches or taller, and was standing at an intersection studying a map. My wife, Lori, and I had just dumped out from a favorite trail at Bent Creek in Asheville onto the well-used Forest Service Road 491, jogging along as we enjoyed the warm early spring afternoon.

We gave him some directions, and he asked if he could just follow along for a while so as not to get lost. His strong French accent made it obvious he wasn’t a local.

Dozing in and out of sleep on the flight home from Leon, Nicaragua, I was thinking about circles. More to the point, I was contemplating the work of my father-in-law, Bill Sullivan, at the hospital in Leon, the Hospital Escuela Oscar Danilo Rosales Arguello.

I had read something recently about people who lead meaningful lives and how they move in circles, how as they circle back to relationships, places, or important work they add layers of emotional depth to their existence. Returning again and again to those touchstones, everything becomes more relevant and worthwhile as all those interactions add up over days, months and years.

Harris Regional Hospital and Swain Community Hospital have embarked on exciting futures for our hospitals and communities.  

Early this month, we unveiled new names and logos for our hospitals that highlight our connection to Duke LifePoint Healthcare. While this was the first visual representation of our relationship with Duke LifePoint, the benefits of our becoming part of its system began several months ago.

Sixth grade was not so kind to my daughter. She did better than she expected on the social part — and that was the part that really worried her, since she had heard so many frightening rumors about the chamber of horrors otherwise known as middle school. But the academic part proved to be much tougher than she had anticipated, and she struggled.

She would come limping in from school every afternoon around 4 p.m. with her enormous backpack full of heavy textbooks slung over one shoulder, causing her to list on one side. It was as if every burden of the earth was stuffed into that backpack, and she did not bear it lightly, oh no, dumping it with a thunderous thud on the kitchen floor and then stomping like Godzilla to the refrigerator, where she seized a pint of cherry vanilla yogurt as if it were a small car, ripped the top off, and then stabbed at the occupants with her shiny monster spoon until every last one of them was gobbled up completely. Tourists, probably.

“You bet I’m happy. I feel this was only right. My goal is to improve Waynesville and set it apart as a first-class mountain community.” 

— Former Waynesville Mayor Henry Foy in May 2003, upon receiving notification from DOT about the roundabout and other modifications to the Old Asheville Highway plan.

The passing of former Waynesville Mayor Henry Foy on April 15 brought back a flood of memories for me. Foy’s tenure as mayor of Waynesville (he was elected in 1991) was closely aligned with my move to Haywood County (1992) and my introduction to mountain politicians and their motivations.

It is just mid-April and already too hot to sleep, but too early in the year to resort to air conditioning. For years, I managed to do without any air conditioning at all, even in my car — partly out of some last remaining strand of stubborn resistance to being overly pampered, but mostly because when I bought my first car and my first house, I didn’t have enough money for such modern conveniences. It is much easier to maintain excellent principles when you lack the funds to compromise them. My car had a radio and floor mats and my house had doorknobs and a kitchen. In the summers, I kept the windows down and drank a lot of ice water.

Nothing would reflect better on this country than to have a rational, reasoned debate on gun violence and what steps could be taken to curb it while still adhering to the Second Amendment. One look at the statistics shows how badly this needs to take place. 

But we aren’t getting close. In face, a recent law introduced in the North Carolina General Assembly would be a step in the wrong direction.

“Many of us are not living our dreams because we are living in fear.” Not sure where I came across that line, but I pasted it into my folder for column ideas and then came across it last week when it suddenly seemed appropriate.

My daughter had just skyped us from the airport in Amman, Jordan. Amman is just a few hundred miles from where some of the most horrific violence in the Middle East is taking place. And there Megan was, smiling and laughing, on her way to Istanbul, Turkey, for a 10-day vacation from her teaching job in Dubai.

“She can wiggle her toes.”

This text message — a simple statement of fact pertaining to my mother — would have seemed absurd just a week ago. It would have meant next to nothing, the punchline to some silly joke maybe.

(“And now, for her next trick ….”)

My cousin has always been an inspiration. Wilton Collins Jones Jr. — he’s always been called “Corky” — is one year younger than me (54) and has been a lifelong professional musician. We were raised in Fayetteville, our mothers were sisters who both ended up divorced and raising sons as single moms. We had that single mom bond and that of family, and so we were close. 

As I headed off to college, he was getting schooled in music, playing in rock bands, jazz fusion bands, duos, trios, sometimes groups that toured the country and kept him gone for long periods of time.