I told the nice young woman who cut my hair that I went to school in Fredericksburg. She said she thought I might have gone to high school with her dad.
For some reason, that made me feel SO old.
Update — people on Facebook have now informed me that the phrase “nice young woman” is employed only by old people.
Fredericksburg, Virginia.
Multiple people in my life have informed me (with no small amount of gravity) that I need to learn how to cook. So I am at least trying something new and super easy.
These are what I’ve heard referred to as “hobo eggs” — eggs fried right within a hole in the bread. (You can add cheese as they cook.) I only learned their name recently — a child character asks for them on incredibly underrated (and inscrutably named) horror show, “From” (2022). (Seriously, this series will scare the hell out of you.)
Believe it or not, this simple dish goes back at least as far as colonial America. I worked as a character interpreter/tour guide for The Rising Sun Tavern in Fredericksburg, Virginia, as a college student just about … 29 years ago. (Sigh.) And the recipe was in a “Colonial American Cookbook” that we sold in the gift shop. (No, I have no idea why I remember the strange things that I do.)
But there it was named “toad-in-the-hole” — which was kind of an odd choice, if you wanted to make something sound appetizing.
My letter to the editor about conspiracy theories was also published by The Free Lance-Star. You can find it right here.
The Free Lance-Star is a leading regional news source with more than 65,000 weekday readers. I’m always especially pleased to see something I’ve written appear here, because Fredericksburg, Virginia is my college town. 🙂
Thanks yet again to the newspaper’s editorial staff for allowing me to share through this important source of news and commentary in northeast Virginia.
So I’m a little bit of a weird guy. I had this absolutely vivid dream the night before last that I was a world-famous singer-songwriter. And I stopped into my old college town of Fredericksburg, Virginia, where all of my school’s deans and professors came out to greet me and invite me over for coffee. I was a celebrity.
The reason I was in Fredericksburg was to record a new version of my latest big hit at a local church — this time it would be a gospel version of the song. (Think of U2’s Rattle and Hum album.) This song, which had been my most popular ever, was called “My Girlfriend Got Eaten by a Gator.”
Here’s the thing — I SWEAR I can remember it perfectly. It’s stuck in my head. I was humming it all day yesterday. If only I knew how to write music, I’d write it down and go all the way to the Grammys.
Update — sorry for not posting a trigger warning for any unfortunate souls whose girlfriends were, tragically, eaten by gators. My bad.
Photo credit: The Howard Gospel Choir performs at Kulturama in Stockholm. US Embassy Sweden, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
I’m so happy today to see my latest letter to the editor (about mandatory prayer in the public school classroom) appear in the pages of The Free Lance-Star. You can read it online right here.
In addition to being the newspaper for my college town of Fredericksburg, Virginia, The Free Lance-Star is a leading regional news source with more than 65,000 weekday readers. I’m quite grateful to its editorial staff for allowing me to share my perspective there.
This was a present from an old friend from Fredericksburg — a colonial stoneware candleholder. I used to sell these from time to time from the gift shop of The Rising Sun Tavern living history museum there. (Yes, I was indeed one of those character-interpreting tour guides — I was “the tavernkeeper’s son” and I was better at it than you’d guess.)
This thing is really damned neat. I love it. It brings back memories of working summers and weekends as a college student at a job that was a lot more fun than most others.
So I found a historical photo that was too good not to share. What you see here is the grave of Mary Washington, George Washington’s mother, in my college town of Fredericksburg, VA.
It ought to look a bit strange to my college friends who remember the site. What is now known (officially, anyway) as Kenmore Park/Memorial Park was a popular walking destination for students at Mary Washington College. (This is the site of “Mary’s Rock.” And if you partied downtown and walked back to campus, chances are you walked past it.) This site is just off Washington Avenue. The Gordon Family Cemetery was behind the obelisk. (The cemetery is pictured at left here — see the low wall — as this picture is looking northwest.)
Look at how small and sparse then trees were in 1912. (They were pretty big by the 1990’s.) This is part of a group of public domain images here at Project Gutenberg. They vary in quality, but some of them are pretty neat.
A little Fredericksburg, VA, side street with a used bookstore, and indie comic shop, and a diner where you could get tons of coffee and omelettes.
The diner would have wifi. The comic shop owner would be a chill, affable local dude you could shoot the breeze with about the medium, or about current events. The used bookstore would sell a worn, dog-eared pocket dictionary so that you could learn to finally spell the word “omelette” correctly the first time. (I might just tear out that page and carry it in my wallet, along with the page containing “Pennsylvania.”)
And the entire street would be a block from the Rappahannock River, so you could take a stroll afterward.
Eric Robert Nolan, Author 