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Loafer's Glory

© Thomas James Martin

I loafe and invite my Soul;
I lean and loafe at my ease, observing a spear of summer grass.
~Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

I want to go back to Loafer's Glory and have another cup of coffee in the small diner there, look out the windows at the wooded hills, maybe while away some time "just sittin," as the mountain folk say. Watch the play of light and shadow on the mountains and perhaps discreetly observe the people as they come and go.

Loafer's Glory is a wide place in the road in the mountains of western North Carolina. At last count less than a hundred souls live in the community, but at least there is a caution light marking the spot on NC Highway 226 where it it intersects NC 80 of this "gloriously" named town near the Tennessee border perhaps 50 or 60 miles west of Asheville.

As the young editor of a weekly newspaper in Mitchell County, I quite often passed through Loafer's Glory on a country road that wound through the valley of the Estatoe River, and even in those tender years just after finishing college, I marveled at the name and stopped and had coffee at the diner several times. The diner along with a general store comprised the downtown of the village. At that time I certainly did not realize that the place name actually obliquely referred to one of the keys to the kingdom, to one of the key elements in caring for the soul.

As I have aged, married, divorced, remarried, careered, studied, re-careered, contemplated and meditated, I have come to a greater understanding of the idea of Whitman's invitation to the soul set forth in the epigram and emphasized in my consciousness by the metaphor of Loafer's Glory. A more familiar variation of Whitman's line is found in the King James Version of the Christian Bible where the Psalmist says in Chapter 46, Verse 10, "Be still and know that I am god."

I do not know about you, but sometimes I feel as if I am still really a teenager at heart; emotionally, I mean. Any day now I may turn seventeen. Like a teenager coming of age, I find that I still want to pour experiences into my soul. Too often I find my consciousness is turned outward. I am busy thinking about my job, my mate, our income, what's on at the movies, the latest electronic toy, the news or indulging that great pastime that I am sure that I share with you, since it is the ultimate pastime of the human race; meaning worry, of course.

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