Memorial

I took Natalie to NC Girls' State at Catawba College in Salisbury today. On the way we stopped at the rest area at Exit 100 to do what one does in such places, while there we noticed it was the home of the North Carolina Vietnam Veterans' Memorial, which we duly checked out. It was a nice enough memorial, and will get nicer as the trees grow taller over time, but I had to wonder, "what the heck is it doing out here at a rest stop?" It's not really a destination kind of place.

I tried to take a picture, but my phone was being sketchy, I need to create some room on it, so it balked.

Then we proceeded on to Salisbury, the home of Cheerwine, to check it out and have lunch. Salisbury is a nice old town, the county seat of Rowan County, with a significant physical downtown. They are doing all the things municipalities do to bring people back downtown, but with limited success. There were a number of places open serving food, we ate at one of them (Sweet Meadows Cafe, I'm 90% sure we made the right choice). The place has tons of potential.

So if you're going to spend a couple of million dollars building a memorial, why not put it in a place where it might serve as a destination? Where you could have a little center that educates people about the war?  Where there could be some synergies with the local economy.

As it is, it just seems like a waste. The only people who benefit from the memorial, month in month out, are the landscapers who cut the grass and trim the hedges. Really, it's not particularly memorable.

Salisbury

On the drive back from Athens on Thursday I was cruising along, listening to my book (Felix Salmon's The Phoenix Economy -- pretty good) when out of the corner of my eye I chanced to see a billboard for an independent bookstore in Salisbury, NC (which we last visited together, gentle reader, about six years ago). I had been thinking about Salisbury recently when my friend Brad took a job there running a center on environmental stuff at Catawba College.

Mostly I was impressed that an indie bookstore would pay for a billboard on an interstate, so I decided to stop in and have a look. It helped that it was coffee time anyway. The store in question is the South Main Bookstore, and it was a very pleasant place with a solid collection. Amongst the items on the shelves. As I scanned the shelves, what should poke its spine out at me but Maybe Esther, written by my friend Katya Petrovskaya, briefly noted here. This attests to pretty solid collection curation by the owner. I shared thiw photo of her book with Katya via WhatsApp, and she informed me that she has moved back from Tbilisi to her native Kiev, or at least that she is visiting. No shrinking violet she. Fuck Putin.

I was also very happy to see that the beautiful old hotel down the block which I had mentally noted back in 2017 is getting a major capital infusion and renovation, and that the streetscape looks pretty good, albeit with a number of vacant storefronts. Could be worse. There were a couple of good indie coffee shops, a very intriguing little hole in the wall burger place with no seating and barely any signage (sure signs of a local institution) and even a weird shop that seemed to specialize in hand-made hunting knives. Sadly, the main street guitar emporium is closing at the end of the month. Much Cheerwine paraphernalia was, of course, in evidence in store windows.  It is safe to say that I will be back.