“Whatever you do, don’t lick the snow shovel,” was usually the last thing I heard as I went outdoors as a kid in winter. We grew up on a Vermont college campus where snow was a way of life. My parents say one of their memories is clipping my mittens and hats onto my parkas […]
News
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Out Loud
There’s a geological definition of obsidian: a dark igneous rock with a glassy exterior. Then there’s the literary one: Obsidian II is a semi-annual journal that reviews the works of black writers and cultivates discussion of cultural and racial issues. Like its namesake rock, it’s black, often sharp, forged from fire and it reflects life. […]
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Welfare in mind
It’s a weekday morning in a grocery store in upscale, overwhelmingly white Cary. I’m buying milk, bread, cereal, peanut butter–the stuff that runs out midweek in most any house. The white clerk who starts to scan my purchases asks sweetly, “Is this WIC?” “Excuse me?” “WIC,” she repeats, “Do you have WIC?” “No,” I reply. […]
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Time capsule
Next month, I’ll be able to say that I’ve lived in Raleigh for 10 years. I am a North Carolina native, but it was 10 years ago this February that I set up house in my first apartment on Hillsborough Street. A year earlier, I’d graduated from college in Connecticut. I had an English degree […]
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In new year’s celebrations
To all those cynics who keep whining that the millennium doesn’t begin until 2001, y’all need to check in with the Chinese before you begin predicting doom and gloom for this December 31. The Chinese have kept on keeping on with their own calendar for more than 5,000 years without a hitch. That’s not to […]
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Who CAREs?
Remember the CARE ads from this fall’s Cary municipal elections? Is there any doubt what they were all about? A group calling itself the “Community Alliance for Responsible Environment” ran a negative political campaign against Glen Lang meant to cost him votes in the mayor’s race. Lang won anyway, but the odor of CARE’s work […]
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Report cards
War is back, by popular demand. How else do you explain the fact that in 1999, North Carolina’s senior senator, Republican Jesse Helms, was considered no more of a hawk than the likes of Democratic congressmen David Price and Bob Etheridge? Sad, but true. According to the 1999 Congressional Report Card released last week by […]