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Weather: A 30 percent chance of showers after 1pm. Partly sunny, with a high near 76. Saturday Night: Partly cloudy, with a low around 63.
- Daily weather briefing from the National Weather Service in Jacksonville here.
- Drought conditions here. (What is the Keetch-Byram drought index?).
- Check today’s tides in Daytona Beach (a few minutes off from Flagler Beach) here.
- Tropical cyclone activity here, and even more details here.
Today at a Glance:
The Saturday Flagler Beach Farmers Market is scheduled for 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. today at Wickline Park, 315 South 7th Street, featuring prepared food, fruit, vegetables , handmade products and local arts from more than 30 local merchants. The market is hosted by Flagler Strong, a non-profit.
Coffee With Commissioner Scott Spradley: Flagler Beach Commission Chairman Scott Spradley hosts his weekly informal town hall with coffee and doughnuts at 9 a.m. at his law office at 301 South Central Avenue, Flagler Beach. All subjects, all interested residents or non-residents welcome. The gatherings usually feature a special guest.
2025 History Academy Talk Presented by the Palm Coast Historical Society, 10 a.m. at the Palm Coast Community Center, 305 Palm Coast Parkway. To register for this free lecture, please call 386-986-2323 or register online. www.parksandrec.fun or https://secure.rec1.com/FL/palm-coast-fl/catalog. The Academy is organized by Dr. Elaine Studnicki. Today’s talk: “The Seminoles of African Descent in Florida,” by Dr. Vincent Adejumo. This presentation provides a general overview of the origins of the Black Seminoles of Florida, their impact in the Seminole Wars, and their legacy after being exiled from Florida.
Grace Community Food Pantry, 245 Education Way, Bunnell, drive-thru open today from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. The food pantry is organized by Pastor Charles Silano and Grace Community Food Pantry, a Disaster Relief Agency in Flagler County. Feeding Northeast Florida helps local children and families, seniors and active and retired military members who struggle to put food on the table. Working with local grocery stores, manufacturers, and farms we rescue high-quality food that would normally be wasted and transform it into meals for those in need. The Flagler County School District provides space for much of the food pantry storage and operations. Call 386-586-2653 to help, volunteer or donate.
Storytime: Breece Pancake’s “Hollow” was first published when he was 24 in a journal or magazine called The Declaration about which I could find nothing. It was re-published in the October 1982 Atlantic, three and a half years after Pancake’s suicide by gun in Charlottesville, Va., a few years after he’d left his West Virginia hollows, a word that in this story describes and eulogizes the life of Buddy, a struggling coal-miner in a strip-mine who in the space of a few pages loses his girlfriend (“He remembered a time when the price of her makeup and fancy habits would have fed his mother and sisters something besides the mauve bags of commodities the state handed out”), passes out drunk at Tiny’s, shoots and eviscerates a pregnant doe in patchy snow, and calls a strike against his company, and against his co-workers’ will: they have families to feed. Pancake in a few words places you in the damp gray grime of West Virginia hillsides where light even in daytime can feel in permanent eclipse. Buddy’s life is equally dusky in a landscape of grave-markers that call out to him like sirens: “Through the half-light, he could make out the rotting tipple where his father was crushed only 10 days before they shut it down, leaving the miners to scab work and DPA.” (The Defense Production Act was apparently used to subsidize mining.) Miners’ lives were cheap in the coal fields. Buddy has designs on starting a coal operation of his own in a land scheme he cooks up with co-workers. Sally, coked up in their trailer when he gets home, is tired of the promises: “I’m tired of livin’ on talk.” She stayed with him that long she says not out of love but “Whore’s talk.” She drives off with another man, taking his TV but not his dog, who retches on a can of sardines. Buddy isn’t so lucky in his hangover. He dry-heaves, grabs his rifle and goes out for a hunt at dawn, leaving his blood-spit for a bobcat to sniff. The sun sputters between clouds. He spots the deer. One shot does it. The violence of the last scene turns a simple hunt into depravity, unintentional on Buddy’s part, a bit manipulative on Pancake’s part. When Buddy first grabbed the rifle I thought Pancake was writing his own epitaph. Maybe he was. Maybe he saw himself in that doe’s entrails. “Hollow” is an accomplished gem, as good a story as any Chekhov, a flash, like the way the sunlight glistens on branches around Buddy, of what Pancake already was, and what literary lion he would have been had he let himself live.
—P.T.
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Hunched on his knees in front of the three-foot coal seam, Buddy was lost in the back-and-forth rhythm of the truck mine’s relay: the glitter of coal and sandstone in his cap light, the setting and lifting and pouring into the cart that carried the stuff to the mouth of the mine. This was nothing like shaft mining, no deep tunnels or up-and-down man-trips, only the setting, lifting, pouring, only the rumbling of the relay cart and the light-flash from caps in the relay. In the pace of work, he daydreamed his father lowering him into the cistern: many summers ago he touched the cool tile walls, felt the moist air from the water below, heard the pulley squeak in the circle of blue above. The tin of the well-pail buckled under his tiny feet, and he began to cry. His father hauled him up. “That’s the way we do it,” he said, laughing, and carried Buddy to the house. But that came before everything; before they moved from the ridge, before the big mine closed, before welfare. Now, at the far end of the relay, the men were quiet, and Buddy wondered if they thought of stupid things. From where he squatted he could see the gray grin of light at the mouth of the truck mine, the March wind spraying dust into little clouds. The half-ton relay cart was full now, and the last man in the relay shoved it toward the chute at the mine-mouth on two-by-four tracks.
–From Breece D’J Pancake’s “Hollow” (1979).
Dennis C Rathsam says
Why is the democratic party so affraid of an audit? We already seen the waste thats come up in 2 short weeks!