Loose Leaf Notes

1. At Folly Beach we eat seafood off Frisbees and dig to China on the beach.

2. My son Dylan posted on Facebook a few days before we left for the trip: Dear beach, I miss you!! But I’m glad we have a date for some drinks this weekend. You’re beautiful and I can’t wait to lay all over you.

3. I looked up the word “folly” to double check that it meant foolish, while humming the Beatles “Fool on a Hill.”

4. According to the Folly Beach website the island was named after its coastline which was once densely packed with trees and undergrowth, as the Old English name for such an area was “Folly.” The first official document that mentions the island is a land grant from King William III to William Rivers that dates to September 9, 1696.

5. Some more Folly Island history and its connection to the Denzel Washington movie Glory: During the Civil War, Folly was occupied by Federal troops beginning in 1863. Despite the the jungle-like foliage, the soldiers constructed roads, forts, an artillery battery, and a supply depot. Eventually Folly Island had the capacity to hold up to 13,000 troops and their equipment. The Federal army used Folly Island as its main strategic base for the battle to take Fort Sumter. In May 1987 construction workers discovered 14 bodies at the western end of Folly Beach. A subsequent investigation by the South Carolina Institute of Archaeology and Anthropology established that the remains were of soldiers from the 55th Massachusetts Volunteer Regiment. The 55th Regiment was joined on Folly by the 54th Regiment, made popular in the movie Glory. What was surprising, however, was that 12 of the bodies did not have skulls and other body parts. The bodies also had no obvious signs of battle injuries. Nobody knows why the bodies were buried this way. It’s a great mystery in the history of the Civil War!

6. Our four year old grandson Liam has learned to wear flip flops, take outdoor showers and love plums.

7. The benches here are made of surfboards and people name their cottages things like Vitamin Sea and The Big Pink.

8. Liam to his Uncle Josh: Let’s swim out further than boats!

9. Someone on Facebook just called my Asheville Potter Son Josh a Clayevangelist. You can follow Josh’s clay excavations and other adventures on his blog HERE.

10. “It got a little rowdy. Some in the rock and roll crowd with seats near the stage and others who moved up close and filled the aisle, seemed to be playing out Mellencamp’s “I fought authority” song” and giving the ushers a hard time. There was a “don’t make me come down there” moment from Mellencamp, who requested that people stop fighting and asked if everyone was alright.” – Read more about Mellencamp, who I’ve been following since he was John Cougar and MTV was good HERE.

11. My grandsons’ honorary uncle for the week, Josh’s friend Gabe, just told us that the hip hop group Wu-Tang has a bigger vocabulary than Shakespeare. The story goes that Data scientist Matt Daniels compared the first 35,000 lyrics — or in Shakespeare’s case, the first 5,000 words of seven of his works — of 85 different rappers from Salt-n-Pepa to Drake and counted each unique word and those that appear only once to determine the extent of vocabulary and the rappers won out, with Californian rapper Aesop Rock at the top of the list.

12. The Pope is dope: “What would induce anyone, at this stage, to hold on to power only to be remembered for their inability to take action when it was urgent and necessary to do so? … We are not faced with two separate crises, one environmental and the social, but rather one complex crisis which is both social and environmental …Once we start to think about the kind of world we are leaving to future generations, we look at things differently; we realize that the world is a gift which we have freely received and must share with others.”

13. HERE is the post where we fed seagulls and posed with shark heads.

____________Thirteen Thursday