Groceries in the Round: Daily Groceries has made the move to the round, ‘60s building on Prince Avenue, across from the hospital—more room and more parking, though the beer drinkers down the hill are taking up the few spaces alongside Daily, and on Saturday, a neighboring business had its big pickup truck parked there, too. Here’s hoping Daily can figure out some way to reserve those spaces. Making the driveway one-way might help.
The new digs are indeed a clean, well-lighted place, though they’re still filling shelves. Bread hadn’t caught up by last Saturday, and some of the coolers remained to be stocked. Here’s hoping the move proves a great step forward for our local co-op.
The Mind at Play: It’s not fair to say you shoulda seen it. I hope you did catch Town & Gown’s production of A God in the House last weekend. Flagpole tried to get you there with a Calendar Pick. But you know, T&G mounts plays all the time, and as this one reminded us, there’s just something about a live play. A God in the House—directed by Leland Downs and written by Georgia College and University English professor Peter Selgin, who was present opening night—is about Alzheimer’s and a woman who wants to kill herself because of it, and her husband who agrees, reluctantly, and the doctor who makes it possible, even as his feelings for his patient change. The thing about theater is that this play was full of laughs, even though you knew it was not going to end well for anybody. Steve Elliott-Gower was the doctor, Julia Roessing the patient and Will Riley her husband. They were outstanding. They were real. They made their characters come alive, and then one of them, well…
The stage crew were stars, too. The set was a character ever changing right before our eyes. Who needs a curtain?
Town & Gown is always up to something. Keep an eye out in Flagpole and elsewhere. There’s a lot more coming.
Modern Dentistry: As a child in Greensboro, my dentist was Dr. Slaughter, and his assistant was Mrs. Killam. Dr. Raper, a University of North Carolina sociologist, was living there, too, and writing a book about Greene County, but he didn’t figure into my fears.
Later, Dr. Slaughter was replaced by Dr. Easley, calming our medical nomenclature. But between Dr. Slaughter and Dr. Easley, my mother brought me over here for the ministrations of Dr. Sumlin, up in what was still the Southern Mutual Building downtown.
Dentistry during that epoch was characterized by slow drills that ground and ground while the Novacaine of the time just didn’t deaden all the pain. Torture, in spite of the best intentions of all concerned. Dr. Sumlin, experienced with children, wore a metal finger guard on the one he poked into my mouth to hold me steady while he was grinding. I bit his finger above the guard, and he lashed out at my mother. He assured her that I would become a juvenile delinquent. She cried all the way home, and then had to restrain my father from coming back over here and adding insult to Sumlin’s injury.
Unfortunately, this background haunts me every time I have to sit in a dentist’s chair. My old friend and longtime dentist Dr. Barry Simmons has been great at understanding my fears and taking care of my teeth with little pain, while I sit there rigid and tense.
Recently, Barry discovered that one of my molars had split, and he referred me to Dr. Brett Gray on Prince Avenue, for an extraction. For a month, I lived in fear and dread, and then, with only local anesthetic, it was painless. Thanks, Dr. Gray.
“See, Pete,” Barry told me. “You just need to acknowledge modern dentistry.”
Vote Early and Often: The recent U.S. Election Assistance Commission report shows that Georgia had the second-highest early voting turnout in the country in the 2022 election won by those Trump deniers Raphael Warnock and Brian Kemp. You remember what happened after the 2020 election, when mail-in voting was blamed for stealing Trump’s count in Georgia. The Republican Trumpsters in the legislature made it much more difficult to vote by mail and did away with the convenient drop boxes that saved a trip to the post office. Don’t be surprised if early voting opportunities start shrinking. Convenience only encourages people to vote.
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