Hello from the depths of Panacea Coffee Company in the Historic Frog Level District of Waynesville. At the moment, I’m sitting at the prized table. If you’ve ever been to Panacea, you know which one I’m talking about, the one on the second tier, next to the big window looking down upon Richland Creek.  

Legendary North Carolina storyteller Donald Davis will hit the stage at 7 p.m. Monday, May 18, at the Wells Event Center in Waynesville.

Growing up in Waynesville, Davis has fond memories of spending time with his relatives and running around the hills of Western North Carolina. 

Hello from Room 323 at the Hyatt Place in downtown Athens, Georgia. A quiet Monday morning here in “Bulldog Country” with the hotel right on the edge of the campus of the University of Georgia. Lots of thoughts are ricocheting around my mind, especially with the Boston Marathon currently on the TV. 

It was watching my father putt on Hole #14 at the Maggie Valley Country Club last Monday afternoon when a vivid thought appeared across my field of vision — don’t forget this moment of spending quality time with the old man. 

A few feet from my 84-year-old father was my mother, age 77, and also one of my best friends, age 66.

Hello from “The Ice Chalet,” a hockey rink just west of downtown Knoxville, Tennessee, along Kingston Pike. It’s Thursday evening and I find myself one of only three spectators in the bleachers watching some of the finest amateur skaters in this city go at it mere hours after clocking out of their day job. 

Hello from Room 322 at the Fairfield Inn, located in Binghamton, New York. Exactly one year ago, I stayed in this same room. No joke, this is where I was placed. And, oh, how much has changed and, well, come to pass in this last calendar year since I laid down in this bed, since I opened up the drapes and looked out the same window onto the interstate traffic below. 

I only met Bob Weir once. It was backstage at the long gone Gathering of the Vibes music festival located on the shoreline of the Long Island Sound in Bridgeport, Connecticut. It was the summer of 2009 and I was 24 years old, myself an aspiring journalist for a now-defunct music magazine. 

It was 40 years ago this month that I first heard the name of the small creek in Jackson County that would eventually become our home, Moses Creek. Becky and I had been renting a house in Cullowhee in 1984 from a landlady who kept threatening to up the rent on us, even though we’d told her at the get-go that we, newlyweds from eastern North Carolina, had no more ”up” to give. But a year in, after still another monthly phone call from her, I turned to Becky and said, “Let’s see if there’s something we can afford to buy.” 

In the 1970s, Grand Funk Railroad was one of the bestselling American rock bands on the planet. To that, in 1971, the Flint, Michigan, trio broke the Beatles ticket sales record at New York’s Shea Stadium, a feat coinciding with GFR having six platinum albums and seven gold within the original lineup’s short tenure (1969-1976). Oh, and another thing — the songs still rock, too. 

Late Monday morning. While taking a sip of my coffee at the Main Street Diner in Waynesville, I scanned the room at the tables filled with faces enjoying warm meals and hearty conversation. It was at that very moment when I started thinking about this anonymous postcard I received several years ago.