Author Archives: Brent L. Kendrick

How a 300-Year-Old Voice Ended Up on a Listserv

Posted on by
2

“But this is not the final word on Alexander Gordon. In many ways, it is only the beginning.” —Brent L. Kendrick (b. 1947). Author/editor of Unmasking The Humourist: Alexander Gordon’s Lost Essays of Colonial Charleston, South Carolina (2025).

Sometimes scholarship moves quietly through archives, footnotes, and years of patient reading. And sometimes—if we are very lucky—it suddenly circles back into public conversation after centuries of silence.

Yesterday, I did something that felt equal parts scholarly, hopeful, and just a little audacious: I posted a Call for Papers to the Society of Early Americanists Listserv proposing a conference panel built around The Humourist essays of 1753–54—essays that circulated for nearly three centuries without a known author before I definitively identified Alexander Gordon as the writer behind them in Unmasking The Humourist: Alexander Gordon’s Lost Essays of Colonial Charleston, South Carolina (2025).

The panel proposal grows out of a question that has increasingly occupied my thinking since the book appeared: What happens when a substantial colonial voice—one hidden in plain sight for nearly 300 years—suddenly reenters the conversation?

Not simply the classroom conversation, though that matters too. I mean the larger conversation about early American literary history itself.

The more I have lived with these essays, the more convinced I have become that Gordon’s work has implications extending well beyond a solved literary mystery. The Humourist complicates familiar narratives centered primarily on New England and Philadelphia. It invites fresh consideration of the colonial South as a site of literary sophistication and intellectual exchange. And because Gordon himself moved so fluidly between Scotland, London, antiquarian scholarship, theater, and colonial Charleston, the essays also open intriguing transatlantic questions about literary identity, influence, and cultural circulation in mid-eighteenth-century British America.

Will the idea for the panel succeed? Honestly, I have no idea. Academic conferences are busy ecosystems, deadlines are tight, and assembling a thoughtful interdisciplinary panel in just a few weeks may prove wildly optimistic.

But some ideas are too interesting not to toss into the scholarly waters.

So yesterday, that is exactly what I did. Below is the call that went out to the Society of Early Americanists membership.

Call for Papers | Society of Early Americanists | March 18-20, 2027

Hidden in Plain Sight:

The Humourist and the Rewriting of Early American Literary History 

For nearly three centuries, the essays of The Humourist (1753–54), published in the South-Carolina Gazette, circulated pseudonymously without an author—admired but ultimately unclaimed and unstudied. That silence has now been broken. Unmasking The Humourist: Alexander Gordon’s Lost Essays of Colonial Charleston, South Carolina (2025) definitively establishes Alexander Gordon, Clerk of His Majesty’s Council in South Carolina, as the author of these essays, restoring to early American studies a substantial and long-missing colonial voice.

The implications are considerable.

The Humourist introduces into mid-eighteenth-century colonial literature a voice that is satirical, learned, rhetorically sophisticated, and deeply embedded in the intellectual and political life of Charleston. Written during the same years that Benjamin Franklin was shaping his public literary persona, these essays compel us to reconsider the contours of early American literary culture: its geography, its centers of influence, its relationship to British models, and its internal diversity.

This panel asks what follows from that recognition.

How does the presence of Gordon and The Humourist alter prevailing accounts of early American literary history? What happens to a canon long organized around New England and Philadelphia when a sustained, sophisticated essay tradition emerges from the colonial South? How might these essays reshape our understanding of authorship, anonymity, print culture, and the relationship between colonial and metropolitan literary forms? What new lines of inquiry—literary, historical, and transatlantic—open once this body of work is taken seriously?

At the same time, the recovery of The Humourist raises a second, equally pressing question: how does a newly established body of work move from archive into interpretation, and from interpretation into the classroom?

Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

  • the implications of Gordon’s authorship for early American literary history
  • The Humourist in relation to Franklin and the periodical essay tradition
  • regional imbalance and the place of the colonial South in the canon
  • transatlantic literary identity and British-American cultural exchange
  • satire, persona, and public discourse in colonial print culture
  • political knowledge and insider perspective in the essays
  • literary, historical, or rhetorical analysis of specific essays
  • future directions for research suggested by the recovery of this corpus
  • the movement from recovery to curriculum: teaching newly established texts

Panelists will be asked to engage with a shared selection of The Humourist essays in order to ground discussion in the texts themselves. The essays are included in Unmasking The Humourist (2025), accessible via Kindle; a PDF of the text can be shared with panel participants.

Please send a 250–300-word abstract and brief bio directly to Professor Brent L. Kendrick at brentlkendrick@gmail.com by May 16, 2026.

Questions and expressions of interest are warmly welcome.

Whether the panel materializes or not, the act of sending the call felt like its own small ceremony. It’s one more way of insisting that this voice, so long unheard, deserves a seat at the table. The deadline for panel submissions is May 16th. The conference is scheduled for March 2027. And Alexander Gordon has already waited nearly three hundred years. Sure, we can give him a little more time.

What Goes Unseen

Posted on by
Reply

“It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.”

Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862). American essayist, naturalist, and philosopher whose Walden made him a foundational voice in the tradition of contemplative attention to the natural world.

Not long ago—on a warm spring Saturday morning, I stopped weedwhacking just long enough to rewind the twine so that I could have at it again. While I was at it, I decided to clean the underside of the guard.

That’s when I saw it.

A small, flat blade, tucked along the inner rim of the guard. It was so unassuming it might as well have been part of the plastic. Rectangular. Steel. Fixed in place with a single screw, its edge squared off and purposeful. Not sharp in the dramatic sense, not gleaming, not new—but worn to a quiet efficiency.

It didn’t move. It didn’t need to.

Set at just the right angle, it waited where the spinning line would meet it—again and again—shearing it back to proper length with each pass. No noise of its own. No flourish. Just a precise cut, a limit imposed, a boundary kept.

What struck me wasn’t what it did, but that I had never noticed it doing it.

All that time—decades of weedwhacking—this little blade had been there, keeping things in check. Silently. Reliably. Without ever asking to be seen.

But as I sat there seeing it for the first time, I was drawn—in a moment that seemed mysteriously magical—to a rhododendron in full bloom, its entire orb covered with flowers.

A burst of color rising from the green—full, rounded, almost extravagant—each cluster pressing outward as if the whole shrub could hardly contain what it was doing.
Then a single flower—open and inviting, its petals soft and flared, a quiet architecture of color and form, drawing the eye inward without insisting.

Then a blossom—closer now—where the curves deepen, the colors gather, and something more intricate begins to reveal itself.

And then—at the center—the pistil and stamen. Slender. Reaching. Dusted and deliberate.
It’s the latter I had never quite seen before—stamens bearing pollen, a pistil poised to receive it—the quiet exchange that makes the next bloom possible.

And as I sat there, momentarily mesmerized, I heard the sonorous buzzing of a bee—
thick-bodied and deliberate, its wings a blur against the stillness, its black-and-gold frame pressing into the bloom as if it belonged there, as if it knew exactly where to go and what to do.

It moved without hesitation—dipping, turning, pushing past petal and filament—gathering as it went, brushing against what needed to be brushed, carrying what needed to be carried.
Not for beauty. Not for show. But for the work.

And there, along its legs, dusted and clinging—
pollen.

A thing so small, yet so bold as to carry the world to its foretold future.

How many other things go unseen in life that keep the engines running—

The tightening at the corners of the eyes—subtle at first, almost imperceptible, until something gathers there, waiting.

A glance held a fraction longer than needed—just beyond the ordinary exchange, between two people.

The tug to say less—a quiet restraint, felt rather than reasoned, that keeps a word from tipping.

The faint sense of standing there before—a recognition unannounced.

The deep inhale that comes—slowly, almost deliberately, as if the body knows.

Ounce of Prevention. Pound of Cure.

Posted on by
2

“Never mistake the season for the signal.”

—Poor Brentford Lee (b. 1947.) He reads the signs, trusts the seasons, studies the soil—and is not above reminding others when they’ve mistaken one for the other.

“Absolutely not!”

“You must! Please, help.”

“This time, young man, you’ve gotten yourself in so deep that I can’t help.”

“Yes, you can. I know you can. You know everything.”

I was certain my pitiful entreaties would soften Poor Brentford’s heart and move him to help.

But no. He would not be moved.

“You got yourself into this mess all by yourself.”

“And just how did I do that? Come on, Brentford Lee. Help me.”

“I can’t. Why on earth did you think you could read Mother Nature—in April, no less? Don’t you know that’s the cruelest month of all, especially in the Shenandoah Valley?”

I knew that, of course. It’s the time of year when the world seems to be coming alive again—only to have Mother Nature step in and kill that vibrant new growth with a harsh, chilling frost.

That’s why Valley folks rarely plant tender crops until mid-May, after the danger of frost has passed.

So. There. I do know those precautions.

But last year, we found ourselves in a new gardening zone. Our old Zone 6 became Zone 7, with the danger of frost ending around mid-April.

I was cautiously thrilled—but I still waited until early May, when the ground was warm and the forest fully leafed.

This year, though, my mountaintop felt different. The soil warmed sooner. The forest leafed sooner. Sooner, it turned out, was early April.

“Wait and see,” I kept telling Gary. “When the mountaintop turns green, we’re past the danger of frost.”

“Are you sure?”

“Of course, I am. Mother Nature knows what she’s doing. She’s telling us Spring has overtaken Winter.”

And so it was. I had convinced myself. I managed to convince Gary. Together, we planted—and rejoiced in the head start.

Just as we beamed our widest smiles, we checked the weather.

Mother Nature was pulling a switcheroo.

Frost. April 22. 2:00 a.m. to 10:00 a.m.

27°? 30°?

The forecasts varied, but we knew: our plants were doomed unless we intervened—and maybe even then.

Poor Brentford was no help whatsoever. He had the nerve to smirk:

“An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”

I know. I know. We should not have planted.

But we did.

And there we were, scrambling to invent a pound of cure for our poor, tender, pitiful plants—deck, patio, yard—everywhere. Pots filled with blooms that had no business showing off this early.

What followed was less a plan than an emergency deployment.

Tarps emerged from the basement. Towels defected from bathrooms. A festive tablecloth—clearly never intended for agricultural duty—was reassigned to frost prevention. Gary moved with operational urgency.

Clay pots became heat traps. Chairs became scaffolding. We hurried bewildered begonias to safer quarters. We draped. We pinned. We tucked. We hoped.

By dusk, the deck resembled an archaeological dig disguised as a linen sale. Shapes rose under fabric—domes, humps, improbable ridgelines of cotton and optimism. Each tender plant huddled beneath its improvised shelter, awaiting judgment from a sky that had seemed so kind only hours before.

Poor Brentford Surveys the Scene.

Judgment came in the early morning hours.

Harsher than expected.
Colder than predicted.
Twenty-four degrees.

Poor Brentford surveyed the scene.

“Your pound of cure was heroic,” he observed. “But was it enough?”

I looked out at the mountains and smiled. The trees, in all their green fullness, had been spared.

We began uncovering our plants.

One by one.

Here a bloom lifted.
There a stem held.
Elsewhere, leaves—cold, but alive.

We kept going.

More life.
More holding on.
More quiet insistence.

In the end, we lost only one.

And that one? To be honest, I had not been covered it very well at all.

I stood there a moment longer than necessary.

I had been prepared to blame the frost.

This time, I didn’t.

And I let that be enough.

To Mend or Not to Mend, that Is the Question | Poor Brentford Has His Notions

Posted on by
2

“Some things serve us best by finishing well.”
— Poor Brentford Lee (b. 1947. Advisor on matters requiring both thread and judgment. Maintains that things well used are best released with gratitude.)

Poor thing. It was just hanging there in the closet.

My favorite purple linen shirt. It was freshly ironed, as it always is, because Gary cares and continues faithfully to press it into presentability even though we both know the collar has grown thin, the threads worn nearly bare, the fabric softened beyond persuasion by years of loyal service at the neckline.

It hangs. Right beside the better ones, right beside the best ones. It still looks handsome at a distance. The color holds its dignity. The linen remembers its authority.

But up close, the collar tells the truth.

There I stood, looking at it, wondering whether I might wear it out in public one more time.

“Dare I?”

I suspected not.

Still, the idea would not entirely leave me. Gary has shown more than once that he knows his way around a needle. I have seen evidence of his skill. A careful stitch here, a thoughtful repair there. Nothing dramatic. Simply competent and reliable.

I couldn’t help but wonder:

“Could Gary save my collar? Could he perform one more act of restoration that would allow me to parade around in public in my old faithful shirt?”

I stood there longer than any sensible person should reasonably devote to a worn piece of linen, quietly debating whether dignity required retirement or reinforcement.

And that was when Poor Brentford arrived.

He did not offer advice immediately. Poor Brentford rarely rushes. He prefers to ask me questions that seem innocent until I attempt to answer them.

“Are you quite certain,” he asked mildly, “that this is a path you wish to explore?”

I did not answer because I knew what direction he was about to take.

Poor Brentford’s memory is longer than I care to admit, even when it comes to fabric.

“Don’t you recall other occasions,” he continued, “when well-intended mending produced unintended outcomes?”

He did not need to specify.

I knew. But I chose to give him that blank stare that always works for me when I feign innocence.

“Remember your sister’s dress?”

Of course, I did. Judy needed something special for an important high school occasion. She had a lovely white dress–a hand-me-down from an older sister. Elegant, well made, perfectly respectable. But what teenage lady wants to wear a dress that has made its public debut already?

“Surely you remember the persuasive talk your resourceful mother gave her?”

“‘Judy,’ she whimpered with soft confidence, “I can transform that dress into something so stunning it will look brand new. A packet of Rit dye is all I need. Pink will be breathtaking on you.'”

Poor Brentford need not have refreshed my memory further. I remembered all.

My mother prepared the dye, immersed the dress, and waited the appointed time.

Judy and I walked out into the back yard with my mother as she hung the dress on the clothesline.

“Oh, Judy. It’s stunning!”

Judy looked, not terribly convinced, even less so when she walked around to inspect the back of the dress.

“Mama! Look! The back doesn’t match. It’s a much deeper pink.”

She was right. The front embraced a gentle pink, while the back pursued a darker vision of the same dream.

Judy was crying. I was laughing. And Poor Brentford? He had the nerve to offer encouragement.

“Listen here, girl. Two shades of pink simply mean twice the fashion. People admire originality.”

They did not. But Poor Brentford was not to be undone. To this day I can still hear him applauding my mother’s sincerity all the while admitting that a new dress was what the day—and Judy’s event—needed.

“Stop pining away over your purple shirt,” he ordered as I continued to stand and stare. “Sometimes, some things are best left alone. Have you forgotten Audrey’s sewing machine?”

How could I not remember. My sister had talked about it often.

As a newlywed, she was proud of her sewing skills but lacked the mechanical companion she believed her talents deserved. Rather than come right out and ask for a sewing machine, she mentioned casually that if she had one, she could mend his tattered garments while frugally extending their wearability.

Poor Brentford understood her plight and reminded her:

“A sewing machine is never an extravagance. It is an investment in continuity.”

And so it was. Repairs followed. Patches appeared. Shirts and trousers acquired energetic embellishments that coworkers described—not entirely unfairly—as reminiscent of a coat of many colors.

But the decisive test came when a funeral required that Audrey shorten Bobby’s dress pants. She took careful measurements and made her sewing machine sing. She was certain that she had completed the alteration with seamstress precision. When her husband tried on the trousers, one side was several inches shorter than the other.

Poor Brentford, never inclined toward alarm, regarded the matter calmly.

“Length,” he observed, “is sometimes a matter of perspective.”

Audrey made every effort to restore balance. She even added fabric at the bottom, but she could not hide the seam that was required to extend the length. Her husband never made it to the funeral, but he never forgot the trousers that he never wore.

By resurrecting these two historical family moments, I knew what Poor Brentford was doing. He was reminding me of the disappointment I would face if I insisted on saving what time had already altered.

“Well-intended mending,” he whispered gently, “does not always restore what we hope it will restore.”

We stood there together, looking at the collar Gary had pressed with such quiet care.

“Surely you’re not thinking that the collar could be reversed?”

It was as if he had read my mind.

“Don’t even go there,” he continued. “Allow the shirt to go down dignified.”

Poor Brentford has always understood something I am still learning. Mending is not always accomplished with needle and thread. The dress was altered beyond harmony. The trousers were improved beyond wearability. The collar had been laundered into truth, its edge now softened to the point of surrender.

“Some things serve us best by finishing well.”

Poor Brentford said nothing more. He did not need to. He has always known that mending takes many forms.

We mend by stitching.
We mend by adapting.
We mend by honoring.
We mend by remembering.

But, sometimes, we mend best by releasing.

And How Shall I Begin? A Moral Compass in an Age of Headlines.

Posted on by
2

“I felt my standpoint shaken
In the universal crisis.
But with one step backward taken
I saved myself from going.
A world torn loose went by me.
Then the rain stopped and the blowing,
And the sun came out to dry me.”

— Robert Frost (1874–1963). Four-time Pulitzer Prize winner and one of the most influential American poets of the 20th century. The quote is from his “One Step Backward Taken.”)

I’m not a genius. But I’m smart enough.

I’m not ancient. But I’ve lived long enough.

I’m focused on silver linings. But I’m realistic enough.

And yet, these days, I find myself asking:

“And how shall I begin?”

I’m mouthing that lament every day as I process the news, trying to understand what’s true. And what isn’t.

Don’t be alarmed. I haven’t fallen for the “Fake News” malady that plagues the House that should be the Whitest and most transparent in the land. But isn’t.

I’m simply responding to the struggle of grappling day after day with headlines that cause major whiplash.

My pain was most severe on April 8, 2026, the morning after the President of the United States had threatened to annihilate an entire civilization—an outcome forestalled, for now, by a tenuous two-week ceasefire agreement with Iran.

I awakened. I inhaled. I sighed.

Then news processing began. The headlines seemed to argue with one another.

● Trump Warns Iran ‘Whole Civilization Will Die’

● Trump Threatens ‘Power Plant Day’ and ‘Bridge Day’ for Iran

● Trump Sets 8 p.m. Deadline for Tehran

● Ceasefire Reached After Two Weeks of Escalating Threats

● Hegseth Declares ‘Decisive’ Victory Over Iran as Ceasefire Holds

Each headline carried its own emotional voltage. Each belonged to a different reality. Each demanded interpretation before the mind had time to absorb the implications of the last.

I moved back and forth between them, as though scanning the horizon for bearings that refused to hold still.

What I am experiencing is not ignorance but overload. The difficulty lies in the troubling acceleration of interpretation in a profession once defined by the discipline of waiting long enough to get things right.

Consider libraries. At their best, they do not merely gather books. They impose order. They create sequence. They distinguish catalog from commentary, reference from rumor, scholarship from speculation. They allow ideas to ripen because they provide intellectual space in which ripening can occur.

Headlines, by contrast, now arrive like weather systems colliding over open water—pressure against pressure, temperature against temperature, narrative against narrative–producing turbulence before the mind has even had time to locate north.

I am not longing for a simpler past. The past was never as simple as memory sometimes pretends. Newspapers got things wrong. Governments obscured truth. Voices were excluded. Perspectives were limited. The so-called consensus often reflected who had access to presses, pulpits, and broadcast towers.

But there was, nonetheless, a sense that information moved in a sequence that allowed thought to follow. Now information and interpretation appear simultaneously, each insisting on priority. The result is not merely disagreement. Disagreement can be healthy. Disagreement sharpens thought.

The result, instead, is compression. Compression of time. Compression of context. Compression of reflection. We’re asked to conclude before understanding has had the opportunity to unfold.

And then we have the words themselves. Not paraphrased. Not filtered. Not softened by summary.

Right now, words published by a sitting President of the United States appeared in the public stream as casually as any other post competing for attention:

“A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will…”

Those words burn on my brain.

And what about his words a few days earlier on Easter morn:

“Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell — JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah.”

Those words burn, too.

What startled me was not only the language itself, but also the velocity with which language of this magnitude seemed to be absorbed into the ordinary churn of the news cycle.

A threat invoking the destruction of a civilization. A deadline—8 p.m. Eastern Standard Time—as though annihilation could be scheduled between dinner and the evening weather. Profanity directed at a sovereign nation. Religious language pressed into rhetorical service. Exclamation points doing the work once reserved for deliberation.

Then the headlines moved on. Analysis fractured into familiar alignments. Interpretations multiplied. The moment was processed, categorized, debated, defended, reframed, condemned, contextualized, and gradually folded into the ongoing river of competing urgencies.

But I could not quite fold it away. Some language does not dissipate simply because the news cycle advances. Some language lingers. Some language tests the boundaries of what we are willing to normalize simply because normalization has become the adaptive response to informational overload.

What’s gnawing at me right now is this. More and more, I find myself falling back on something older than any alert that lights up my phone.

My moral compass.

I’m landing there not because I distrust journalism. Not because I imagine that complex geopolitical realities can be reduced to tidy conclusions. Not because I believe that every headline must conform to my preferences.

I’m landing there simply because, even in a world of incomplete information, some things remain legible.

I know that truth matters.

I know that language matters.

I know that threats—especially those uttered from positions of immense power—matter.

I know that rhetoric capable of conjuring the annihilation of entire peoples is not merely strategic vocabulary to be shrugged off between weather reports and stock updates.

I know this not because a headline tells me so, but because a lifetime of reading, thinking, teaching, and living has taught me that words shape worlds.

Facts help us understand events. Conscience helps us understand consequences. Evidence tells us what is unfolding. Moral proportion tells us what should give us pause.

My moral compass is not a substitute for evidence. But neither is evidence meaningful without some internal measure capable of recognizing when rhetoric crosses thresholds that once would have prompted gasps of disbelief around the world, followed by sustained collective stillness.

I know that complex geopolitical realities rarely yield simple judgments.

I know that leaders sometimes speak forcefully for strategic reasons.

I know that journalists, working in real time, must report language even when its implications remain uncertain.

But I also know this. The casual invocation of civilizational destruction should not feel ordinary. The language of annihilation should not feel routine. Deadlines for devastation should not feel like programming notes in the daily schedule of global life.

Even in a fractured informational environment, some lines remain visible. Even in a world of interpretive disagreement, some language retains moral weight independent of partisan affiliation. Even in an age of competing narratives, conscience still recognizes disproportion.

The compass may tremble, but it need not spin.

And so I return again to the question with which I began:

How shall I begin?

Perhaps I’ll begin:

● By trusting that the habits of mind formed over decades—habits shaped in libraries, classrooms, conversations, and careful reading—remain capable of distinguishing urgency from alarmism, disagreement from distortion, complexity from confusion.

● By trusting that patience remains a form of intelligence.

● By trusting that moral proportion is not an antiquated instrument, but a necessary one.

I am not a genius. But I am smart enough to know that understanding rarely arrives prepackaged in a headline.

I am not ancient. But I have lived long enough to know that normalization can occur gradually enough that we scarcely notice the shift until the boundary has already moved.

I am focused on silver linings. But I am realistic enough to know that clarity sometimes requires effort equal to the confusion that obscures it.

I will continue. Reading. Comparing. Pausing. Listening for what rings true beneath what merely rings loud.

I will begin again each morning with the quiet but stubborn conviction that truth and responsibility do not cease to exist simply because their presentation has grown more chaotic or their interpretation more divided.

The world may move quickly, but the compass, if we are willing to hold it steady, still points True North.

Keeping Up with the Evidence

Posted on by
3

“Language is fossil poetry.”
— Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882). American essayist and philosopher, leading voice of the Transcendentalist movement.

Savannahians have long dubbed their city the Hostess of the South. Many also claim that Jones Street is the most beautiful street in the city. Maybe so. Brick by brick, it unfurls like a quiet benediction: a ribbon of warm red paving stones softened by time, shaded by live oaks whose arms stretch overhead, heavy with Spanish moss filtering the light into a perpetual late-afternoon glow. Federal and Greek Revival townhouses stand shoulder to shoulder, dignified but never aloof, their brick façades punctuated by deep green shutters, wrought-iron balconies, and stoops that rise just enough to suggest ceremony without pretension. Lantern-lit doors—some painted a daring lacquered red—open onto iron urns spilling over with ferns and flowering vines, blurring the line between garden and street. Even the street’s history seems layered into the view, so that walking Jones Street feels less like moving through space than through time, where elegance lingers and beauty is not announced but assumed.

Some Savannahians even maintain that the expression “keeping up with the Joneses” began because of the luxurious homes built along Jones Street. I had never heard that claim until friends visited Savannah and later shared it—along with a stream of photographs—on Facebook. I knew the expression, of course, but I had never heard it tethered to a specific place, much less to a famous street down South.

The claim fueled the researcher in me, leading me to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). If the phrase is anchored to Jones Street in Savannah, the OED editors are unaware of it. They credit the expression instead to Arthur Ragland “Pop” Momand, who in 1913 launched his New York Globe comic strip, Keeping Up with the Joneses. The strip drew on Momand’s experiences in Nassau County, New York, rather than on any known connection to Savannah’s storied street.

I could have let the matter rest there. OED consulted. Myth gently dispelled. Case closed. But curiosity and further digging—beyond the OED and into archival material, historical accounts, and even the occasionally useful corridors of YouTube—clarified the matter. Since Momand’s comic strip emerged from New York, the Joneses in question were almost certainly New York Joneses. And in the late nineteenth century, that name carried weight. The Livingstons, the Schermerhorns, the Masons, and the Jones family were counted among New York’s old-money elite. Mason and Jones controlled what was then the third-largest bank in the country—Chemical Bank—and their combined wealth ranked among the most formidable in New York’s financial world.

Within that circle, Elizabeth Schermerhorn Jones stood at the center of social gravity. She did not merely inhabit high society; she defined it. Her standards of dress, decorum, and domestic display shaped the expectations of an entire class. Others did not simply admire—they imitated. To be fashionable was to approximate her taste. To be modern was to anticipate it. Her Newport summer residence, constructed in 1853, became a symbol of that authority—an architectural declaration of wealth and refinement that drew attention and, inevitably, comparison.

After her death in 1886, the house passed through multiple owners, declined, and was eventually sold at foreclosure in 1934. Today only the reinforced shell remains, its walls braced in a quiet act of preservation—as if even the structure itself were still attempting, in some small way, to keep up the Joneses.

English is full of such borrowed names, reminders that language often preserves the reputations—and sometimes the accidents—of the people who once carried them.

A few examples may surprise you. Others will feel as familiar as the words themselves.

Did you know that the Earl of Sandwich, pressed by appetite and convenience at the gaming table, is said to have solved his dilemma by placing meat between slices of bread, allowing him to eat without interrupting play. Whether the story is embroidered or not, the word sandwich endured. What began as a practical solution became a culinary staple, and the man himself receded into the background, leaving behind a word now spoken far more often than his title ever was.

Then we have Captain Charles Boycott, an English land agent in nineteenth-century Ireland, who found himself the target of organized social and economic resistance from protesting tenants. Rather than confront him directly, the community withdrew—refusing to work his land, speak his name, or acknowledge his presence. The strategy proved so effective that his surname—boycott—entered the language as a verb, now used globally to describe collective refusal. The man was resisted; the name persisted.

Or what about Étienne de Silhouette? An eighteenth-century French finance minister known for his austerity measures lent his name—somewhat unfairly—to a form of portraiture defined by its simplicity. The inexpensive shadow profiles that became fashionable during his tenure were mockingly associated with his economic policies. Over time, the satire softened, and the word silhouette came to describe not frugality but form itself: an outline, a presence reduced to its essential shape.

The word dunce offers an even stranger reversal. It derives from the medieval philosopher John Duns Scotus, whose followers were once regarded as careful and rigorous thinkers. They wore distinctive pointed caps as a mark of their intellectual tradition. Yet in time, critics of scholasticism turned the name into an insult. The scholar became a fool, and the cap a symbol of ignorance—a reminder that language does not always preserve reputation so much as it repurposes it.

Then we have Amelia Bloomer. She did not invent the garment that bears her name, but she did something perhaps more enduring: she advocated for its adoption. A nineteenth-century reformer, she promoted a style of dress that allowed women greater freedom of movement—looser trousers gathered at the ankle, worn beneath a shortened skirt. The look was practical, even liberating, but it was also controversial. Her name became attached to the style, and with it, to the broader idea that clothing could signal change. What was once a subject of ridicule now reads as an early gesture toward autonomy.

And let’s not forget James Brudenell, the 7th Earl of Cardigan, who is remembered for leading the ill-fated Charge of the Light Brigade during the Crimean War. Less dramatically, though perhaps more enduringly, his name came to be associated with the knitted wool jacket worn by British officers under their uniforms. The cardigan, as it is now known, has long since shed its military associations. It remains, instead, as a quiet example of how even the most turbulent histories can soften into something familiar, worn close, and almost entirely detached from their origins.

So the more I explore borrowed names that have crept into our language, perhaps Savannah can keep its story. Jones Street may not have given us the phrase “keeping up with the Joneses,” but it hardly needs the credit to justify the legend.

Language often works this way. A person’s name slips quietly into common speech, the individual gradually fading while the word remains, carrying only the echo of its origin. And when a story is told often enough—beautifully enough, and in just the right light—its beginning can begin to matter less than its appeal. In the end, what we are really keeping up with may not be the Joneses at all, but the enduring human habit of turning beauty, memory, and rumor into something that feels like truth—and is repeated as if it were true.

Crystal Clear

Posted on by
1

“How much money is enough? Just a little bit more.”
—John D. Rockefeller (1839–1937). American industrialist and founder of Standard Oil.

Massive, floor-to-ceiling plate glass windows were on my left, as if welcoming me into the waiting room. I was surprised by how clean and shiny they were, allowing me to see clearly the vehicles–all makes and sizes and colors on the other side–as they made their way past a small crew, working with assembly-line precision as they cleaned and detailed the interior.

I took a seat near the exit so that I could keep an eye on my Jeep as it edged its way along.

To my right, on a stand, was a lucite box, perhaps a foot square and nearly two feet tall. Its hard, clear sides and top revealed everything inside. Above, a simple sign:

TIPS

I was impressed. It was nearly full. Not loose change, mind you. Bills. Ones. Fives. Tens.

I struck up a conversation with the man across from me.

“Impressive tips.”

“Yeah, but I doubt it’s just for today.”

It was a Tuesday morning, so no doubt he was correct.

“It’s probably from the weekend.”

Another customer chimed in.

“I hear they empty it at the end of the month.”

“Hmmm,” I said. “Maybe that’s why it’s chock-full.”

It was the 22nd.

“I suspect so. Anyway, they empty it and always divide the tips among the employees.”

Several people ahead of me deposited more bills as they walked out to their vehicles.

I smiled:

“Not a bad system. Not bad at all.”

I smiled even more as my Jeep came through, looking as new as it must have looked when it first rolled off the assembly line.

The grill, a dark geometry of openings and shadows, each precise angle rinsed clean.

The wheel rims and tires, the rubber deep and purposeful, the metal darkened to a soft sheen, every groove, ready for the road again.

Rubicon standing in deliberate red against the deep Army green, the letters steady and assured.

The trim, black and firm along the edges, the lines gathering light and holding it.

The windows, so clear they seemed hardly there at all, bouncing the faint movement of the world beyond them.

I stood up, discreetly folded a Jackson, and added it to the box.

As soon as one of the workers opened my Jeep’s door, the new-car fragrance and the buffed leather interior made me realize that this crew had earned all the tips growing inside.

“Wow! I’m impressed! I left a nice tip in the box.”

“Thank you.”

“You all divide the tips?”

“No, not exactly.”

“Why not?”

“They say they add the tips to our pay.”

“Does it make your check much larger?”

“Nah, we don’t see any difference.”

I pulled another bill from my pocket and gave it to him.

“I thought you all divided the tips. Please share this with your team.”

I shook his hand, stepped into the Jeep, and headed home. I kept replaying the conversation at the exit, about where the tips actually went, and who, in the end, did not receive them. Nothing about the Jeep had changed, and yet everything about it had. The Army green that had moments earlier seemed to hold the light now appeared flatter and more ordinary. The bold red of Rubicon no longer declared quite so confidently. Even the glass, so recently transparent, now reflected more than it revealed. The careful geometry of the grill, the purposeful weight of the tires, the clean lines of the trim—all remained exactly as they were, yet seemed subtly altered.

The tip box had become crystal clear.

Poor Brentford Gives a Knuckle Rap. A Guest Column.

Posted on by
1

“Never mistake the undone for the unworthy.
The desk may be cluttered.
The life is not.”

—Poor Brentford Lee (b. 1947. Altar ego—with an alter ego, too, of course. He ministers and he meddles. Life coach without credentials. Available for lectures, upbraidings, and unsolicited reminders of everything you’ve already accomplished.)

Sometimes we’re our own worst enemies. Maybe, all times. I know I am.

It doesn’t matter how much I get done, it’s always the undone that grabs hold of me in my waking hours and throws me into a tiff.

Just the other day—just as dawn was breaking—I sprang up in bed, asking myself:

“Where did it go? Where did it all go?”

Not my life, mind you. That’s still very much in progress.

I meant January and February—two months that often keep me snowed in on my mountaintop here in the Shenandoah Valley. And this year—once and for all—they were supposed to be the two perfect months to bring order to chaos. To organize my office.

Boxes. Amazon boxes, to be precise—a small mountain of them, stacked near the woodstove like a cardboard monument to every good intention I’ve ever had. Some are open. Some are not. All of them smile at me. That relentless Amazon smile, curved and cheerful and absolutely unbothered by my shame. I have begun to suspect they are multiplying when I’m not looking.

Desk and worktable. Buried. Buried under manila envelopes, unopened mail, a box of highlighters, a coffee mug that may or may not still contain coffee, and enough paper to reforest a modest hillside. The lamp burns bravely through the chaos like a lighthouse in a nor’easter.

Even the plants have opinions. Two magnificent specimens—sprawling dramatically across their ornate iron stands—have taken matters into their own fronds. One has sent a long, accusatory leaf directly toward my leather chair. As if pointing.

Pointing. Yes, pointing. The same way the ghost of my gray-haired grade school history teacher would point and declare with the wrath of an angry God:

“A cluttered desk is the devil’s workshop.”

And between Mrs. Snyder’s admonitions and my lament—”Where did it go? Where did it all go?”—Poor Brentford appeared as if in a vision rising up from nowhere in particular and everywhere at once.

“Where did it all go, you ask? Where did it all go? I’ll tell you exactly where it went. Pull up a chair if you can find one in that brain of yours, all cluttered now with nonsense.”

I thought I knew for sure where his harangue was headed. But for once he surprised. He did not stoop so low as to rap knuckles with any of the cliches from his repertoire of wisdom.

Not once did I hear,

“Time and tide wait for no one.”

Not once did I hear,

“Make hay while the sun shines.”

I didn’t even hear the one I was certain he would speak with calm certainty,

“Lost time is never found again.”

He didn’t recite any of those things.

Instead, he cleared his throat with great ceremony and delivered his first knuckle rap with the precision of a surgeon and the satisfaction of a man who has been waiting a very long time.

“Only handle it once.”

He let it hang there. Just those four words. Floating in the air above the Amazon boxes and the buried desk and the manila envelopes and the coffee mug of uncertain vintage.

“Your words. Well, Grace Reed’s words, if we’re being precise. Your Copyright Office colleague. The woman whose office was lean, mean, and sparse. The woman whose wisdom you borrowed, researched, published, celebrated, and then—apparently—left to ride around in the Jeep with the junk mail.”

He fixed me with a look that left no room for argument.

“Don’t bemoan where it all went. You know fully well. And you know exactly what to do.”

Then Poor Brentford’s voice softened. Just slightly. Just enough.

“Do you remember what you wrote on January 15th, 2024? You raised your Bunnahabhain to all the tarriers, the delayers, and the occasional shelver. You said, and I quote, ‘Here’s to the to-morrowers, the champions of It can wait until tomorrow, because sometimes tomorrow is just a delay away from today.'”

He smiled. For the first time.

“And do you remember Scarlett?

“She understood something you sometimes forget. Tomorrow is not surrender. Tomorrow is strategy.”

Poor Brentford gestured grandly at the Amazon boxes.

“Your Tara is a little more cardboard than hers. But the principle holds.”

He straightened his jacket.

“The office will get cleaned. One day. Tomorrow, perhaps. Or the day after. Or sometime before the Amazon boxes learn to walk.”

“Scarlett managed. So will you.”

But Poor Brentford wasn’t finished. He stood there, poised to deliver his final and most devastating knuckle rap. Quietly. Almost tenderly.

“Forget the cluttered office for now. I want you to remember something you wrote, something about a young professor who stopped you in a hallway and handed you an offprint with four words inscribed on the front.”

He paused.

“This is life everlasting.”

Another pause. Longer this time.

“You asked whether he was suggesting that we live on forever through what we share with others: ideas immortalized in print. You answered your own question. Here you are, nearly fifty years later, speaking his name. Professor Myerson continues to live.”

He leaned in close.

“And so will you. Through every word you have ever written. Eight books. More than a million words. Scholarship and essays that will outlast every Amazon box in that corner.”

“THAT is your life everlastin’. Now act like it.”

Just when my chair started getting uncomfortable, Poor Brentford had the nerve to tell me to shout out:

“Get behind me, Satan.”

I sprang up at once because in that command I recognized my own mother’s voice. Over and over again I had heard her rebuke the Devil whenever she faced her own pole of proverbial chaos.

Only then did I realize what Poor Brentford had done.

He had serenaded me with snippets of my own advice—counsel I had been publishing right here in this column for years.

I could hardly be offended.

I looked again at the Amazon boxes. The buried desk. The pointing plant.

They were all still there.

But the panic was gone.

The office could wait.

After all, tomorrow is strategy.

What We Know. What We Believe.

Posted on by
3

“Death is not extinguishing the light;
it is putting out the lamp because the dawn has come.”

—Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941). Bengali poet, philosopher, and Nobel laureate.

“Dead? She died?”

“Yesterday.”

“Well, she suffered a lot. Now maybe she’s with her mother and father and relatives.”

“Is that what you believe?”

“I don’t really know. I don’t think we’ll recognize people the way we do here, now. But I don’t know.”

“I believe she understands the mysteries … of life and death. She knows all.”

The conversation was getting too heavy, so we drifted to other topics.

Somehow, though, it struck a nerve. How can you not know what you believe about death, especially as you get closer and closer to that unknown journey.

Afterward, I started thinking about how we come to know what we know. What we believe.

After all, we know some things with certainty. Right?

Some because the results never vary. Two plus two always equals four. The distance between two fixed points remains the same no matter when we measure it. Water boils at a predictable temperature. Gravity pulls downward. Cause produces effect with reassuring regularity.

These certainties are grounded in repeatable outcomes. Test them once or a thousand times—the answer holds. They do not depend on belief, mood, or memory. The world behaves, and we trust it to keep behaving.

Then there are the certainties born of lived experience. Morning follows night. Habits steady us. The familiar route gets us home. What worked yesterday will probably work again today. These truths may not be written as formulas, but repetition grants them authority. Experience becomes evidence. Pattern becomes trust.

Together, these forms of knowing shape our confidence in the world. Whether derived from calculation or habit, they rest on the same foundation: consistency. When outcomes repeat, doubt quiets. We stop testing. We accept and move on.

Other things we know but with less certainty.

The weather forecast offers likelihoods, not guarantees. A medication helps one person and fails another. A conversation unfolds as expected or veers off course for reasons we cannot quite name. We plant the same seeds in the same soil, and one season flourishes while the next disappoints.

Here, knowledge comes through probability rather than proof. We notice tendencies, not laws. We have seen enough to believe, but not enough to relax. Patterns appear, then break. This kind of knowing asks something different of us. Not trust, but attentiveness. Not certainty, but judgment. We proceed carefully, aware that what often happens is not the same as what must happen.

Now comes the third kind of knowing: knowing what we believe.

This one does not submit to proof or probability. It rises instead from lived moments that resist explanation. Experiences that arrive uninvited and linger long after analysis ends. The sense that someone who has died is still, somehow, present. The calm that sometimes settles in a room at the moment of death, unmistakable and unearned. The feeling that something matters even when nothing practical is at stake.

These are not conclusions we reach. They are recognitions we undergo.

Here, certainty takes a different form. Not the certainty of answers, but the certainty of encounter. We may disagree about what these moments mean, but we rarely deny that they occur. They are woven into our lives—in hospitals and bedrooms, at gravesides and kitchen tables, in silences that feel fuller than speech.

This is where death stands apart.

Death is neither a hypothesis nor a forecast or a probability curve. It is the one certainty that admits no exception, the one experience every one of us, without fail, will face. Whatever else we debate, revise, or relinquish, this much is fixed.

What matters is that we cannot face death—our own or another’s—without believing something. Belief, in this sense, is not doctrine. It is orientation. It is how we stand in the presence of loss, how we love without guarantees, how we make sense of endings that refuse to be tidy.

I have always lived in awe of what has come my way. I have bowed, again and again, to the belief that life is good and meaningful and mysterious. I see no reason to abandon that posture now. I am confident that death will be a continuation of that vision—for me.

Shaped by faith traditions throughout the world, by experience, and by nearly eighty years of living, I can say what I believe.

I may be wrong. Others will stand elsewhere, with different convictions or none at all. But belief, for me, is not certainty. It is the posture I choose in the presence of mystery.

I believe that death is not an ending but an unveiling, a beginning—a stepping into shared sacredness.

I believe that I will understand fully, see clearly, and grasp truth without distortion.

I believe that I will know others as completely as I have been known.

I believe that all confusion will clear and all mysteries resolve.

I believe that the questions of life and death, justice and suffering, will be answered.

I believe that I will be gathered into a collective consciousness—united with all who have gone before and present with all who have yet to go.

I believe that every life is known clearly, held equally, and belongs fully.

I believe that love stands unveiled—clear, complete, and free from all that once obscured it.

I believe that fear has no place in death, because the journey continues as it always has—guided by goodness, shaped by beauty, and sustained by love.

I believe that I will go on.

Oh, No! No Sourdough!

Posted on by
4

“Convince me that you have a seed there, and I am prepared to expect wonders.”

—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862). American essayist, naturalist, and author of Walden, whose writings celebrated attentive living and the quiet wisdom of nature.

Superstitions surrounding Friday the 13th do not concern me. If my middle name weren’t Lee, it would be Lucky. I walk under ladders, ignore black cats, shop, travel and do all the things others won’t do. I will keep right on doing what I’ve always done. But this year, my luck may have run out. Or not.

The day started out on as good a note as possible. I fed my sourdough starter in my usual fashion even though the kitchen was a tad cooler than usual. A slow rise never kept me from planning ahead for scrumptious sourdough pancakes.

After our usual morning routines, Gary and I went out for lunch and returned home. In the afternoon, I preheated the oven to 350° so that it would be ready for whatever it was that I planned to cook for dinner.

Then I went about my affairs as usual. That is until I smelled a wonderful aroma wafting out from the kitchen. Bread? Cake? I was fascinated because I hadn’t started dinner. What could it possibly be?

Just as I walked into the kitchen to see what had lured me there, I exclaimed,

“Oh. No. My sourdough!”

When I turned the oven to preheat after lunch, I forgot that hours earlier I had put my sourdough starter in there on “proof” to get a faster rise.

What I saw when I opened the oven door was not fermentation. It was transformation.

The jar no longer held a living starter. It held evidence of my carelessness. The sides were lacquered in amber and gold, as if the sourdough had tried to climb out and been stopped mid-escape. A caramelized tide line marked how high it had risen before heat overtook it. What had once been soft and elastic was now fixed in place, streaked and hardened like candle wax after a long vigil.

Inside, the starter had transformed into something strangely geological. A pale, spongy dome baked solid at the edges, its surface torn open in small craters where trapped gases had burst and frozen in time. The smell was unmistakable: toasted flour, faint sweetness, a whisper of bread that almost existed.

I stood there looking at a crime scene, fully aware that the culprit and the witness were one and the same.

I had been the one who coaxed these mountain spores into life years ago, watching their first tentative bubbles gather and rise as if they had somewhere important to be. I had fed them, talked about them, and trusted them to do their quiet work while I went about mine.

They had made their way into breads and cakes and cookies and scones and cinnamon rolls, earning praise far beyond my mountaintop kitchen. And yet, on this particular Friday the 13th, I had forgotten them entirely, leaving a small natural wonder behind, unnoticed, to the fate of an oven I had set to preheat.

For a time, I did nothing but stand there, laughing at my stupidity while absorbing the lesson. There seemed little left to do but clean the jar and move on.

But just when I was feeling the depth of loss, I remembered. Flakes. Sourdough flakes.

A year or so ago I had dried some starter and set it aside, more as an experiment than anything else. I never imagined needing them. They sat unnoticed in a small jar, ordinary and still, offering no hint that they might hold anything alive.

I weighed a small portion and put it in a bowl with an equal amount of warm water. I watched as they softened and disappeared into a cloudy mixture. Then I added an equal amount of flour, creating a pasty potential. It felt more like a laboratory ritual than a kitchen rescue. Truthfully, I wasn’t certain anything would happen. But I held on to hope, realizing that those flakes were the only thing left for me to try.

At first, nothing happened.

The mixture sat on the counter looking exactly as one might expect flour and water to look when stirred together: pale, still, and entirely unremarkable. I told myself not to expect too much. After all, these were only dried remnants, fragments of something that had once been alive. Whatever vitality they possessed had long since faded.

But some time later–hours, perhaps less–I noticed a change so small it might easily have been missed. A tiny bubble appeared along the edge of the bowl. Then another. The surface loosened almost imperceptibly, as if taking a slow breath after a long sleep.

By the next morning, there was no denying it. The mixture had awakened. Fine bubbles traced delicate pathways through the paste, and a faint, familiar aroma rose to meet me—not flour, not water, but something living. Something remembering what it had been.

What astonished me most was not simply that the sourdough culture had returned, but how quickly it did so. Years ago, when I first coaxed those mountain spores into existence, I waited days for signs of life, peering into the jar with the anxious patience of a novice. This time, revival came with confidence, as though the culture already knew what it was meant to do.

Up from the flakes it arose.

What had seemed lifeless only hours earlier now stretched upward, gathering strength from invisible work. I found myself watching it the way one watches a garden after rain—not interfering, not hurrying, simply witnessing growth. A living culture once again, carrying within it all the strength and possibility of its ancestral spores.

And standing there, I realized that nothing about it felt accidental. Life, given the smallest chance, had simply resumed its work.

Watching it rise again, I began to understand that what I had witnessed was more than a small kitchen recovery. I had baked the starter, yes. But I had not baked the possibility.

Something essential had been preserved long before the mistake was made. Tucked away almost absentmindedly, those flakes had carried forward what mattered most. Given warmth, patience, and a little attention, the sourdough culture simply resumed its work, as though interruption were only a pause and not an ending.

It struck me then how stubbornly life finds its way back, even after neglect, even after carelessness. What appears lost may only be waiting for the right conditions to begin again.

Perhaps that is the real lesson Friday the 13th had to offer me this year. Not bad luck. Not superstition confirmed. Just a moment of carelessness and a jar of forgotten flakes, both filled with truth. We measure our mistakes with finality, and we assume that one moment of inattention defines the whole story.

Nature does not agree.