In Charleston, More Than Elsewhere, You Get

Music Could Ache And Hurt, That Beautiful Music Was A Place A Suffering Man Could Hide.

To Describe Our Growing Up In The Lowcountry Of South Carolina, I Would Have To Take You To The Marsh On A Spring Day, Flush The Great Blue Heron From Its Silent Occupation, Scatter Marsh Hens As We Sink To Our Knees In Mud, Open An Oyster With A Pocketknife And Feed It To You From The Shell And Say, 'there. That Taste. That's The Taste Of My Childhood.'

I Think I Learned About The Relationship Between Books And Life From Margaret Mitchell.

I Was Born Into The Century In Which Novels Lost Their Stories, Poems Their Rhymes, Paintings Their Form, And Music Its Beauty, But That Does Not Mean I Have To Like That Trend Or Go Along With It.

It Enclosed Us In Its Laceries As We Watched The Moon Spill Across The Atlantic Like Wine From An Overturned Glass. With The Light All Around Us, We Felt Secret In That Moon-infused Water Like Pearls Forming In The Soft Tissues Of Oysters.