North Street is burning!

More from the guy next door. There was a FIRE on their lawn one recent spring afternoon, and if not for the intervention of one of Chapel Hill's trusty Carolina blue fire trucks, the Pink House could have burned down. So nearly seventeen years later, Raj's bad fire feeling came to pass. And on the star-crossed date of Friday the 13th, no less.

"Flames!? On the front bank, 50 feet away and moving towards our house?! Ah!!! I shoved an empty bucket underneath the bathtub spigot. As it filled I could hear the fire truck approaching. I ran outside and dumped the water on flames closest to the house..."

- Further Musings, "Fire!"

Here's a whole bunch of his posts about life on North Street.

The view from next door...

Next door lived a very nice old couple (the Sommerfelds), whose bedroom faced my upstairs room. I was constantly afraid the techno, disco, jazz, hip hop, house, funk, and all the rest of the records I played until late hours of the night were going to give them seizures. This wasn't the little blue house where Phi Mu's sorority mother lived, but the white house on the opposite side. The Sommerfelds kept a beautiful backyard garden. Like ours, it stretched all the way back to the chain link fence that separated North Street properties from Rosemary Street parking lots.

The Sommerfelds both passed away several years ago, and now there's a young married couple who live in their house. He and his wife are huge gardeners, so they've kept the backyard garden thriving. And the guy, when he's not attending grad school at UNC, keeps a blog. Since June of 2008 he's watched the Pink House sit vacant, grumbled at Sylvia's failure to maintain the place, and occasionally written about it.

Like in this post:

"This afternoon, under the warm sunlight of these first days of another Chapel Hill spring, I cut behind the empty pink house next door on my way home..."

- Further Musings, "The Beauty of Spring"

Mini-reunion '09 at Weathervane Cafe

On a sunny Saturday afternoon in February, a few Pink House alums' paths crossed in Chapel Hill. The Tar Heels were playing UVa, and Caroline Philson swung through from ATL to go to the game with Susan Comfort, in town from D.C. Meanwhile, another epic sports battle was about to go down, as Dana Lumsden drove up from Charlotte with his kids Alec and Kyle for the first annual Mardi Gras bowling invitational.


Kyle, Alec, Erik, Dana, C-line & Mani, 2-7-09

"We were sitting around having brunch at the Weathervane Cafe inside A Southern Season (the first time I've actually eaten at that overpriced joint since it moved to U-Mall a few years ago). Caroline's former roommate Donna Bell was there, too, along with her new baby who's a few months old. Turns out Donna is married to Jason James, who used to run the Carolina Critic. But he saw the light and converted to the Democratic Party at some point.

When I found all this out, I thought of piping up, "Be sure to tell Jason that the reason his office supplies kept disappearing was thanks to me." But I didn't. Mostly because Caroline had just told a story about watching me pee into the can-I-take-your-order speaker outside a Dunkin Donuts on our Fall Break '92 roadtrip because they wouldn't let me use their bathroom without buying something, and Mani wasn't feeling it.

Dana and his kids showed up, and were deciding on the perfect flavor of pancakes, when who walked in the place to eat with his girl but Lem! It was a trip. Everybody said what's up and exchanged love.

Re the weekend's bowling tournament, I'm proud to report that the Alec-Kyle-Erik team beat the Mani-Dana team by a resounding 149-141. Although there was a disputed six points that Mani insists Dana accidentally scored on one of my frames, which would have been enough to swing the outcome in reverse."

- e-mail to N'Gai