“This is one of the great sports stories of 2025,” the announcer gushed after the 18-year-old Canadian Victoria Mboko upset Naomi Osaka to win the National Bank Open in Montreal last night. Then, rather than letting its viewers enjoy the moment – the crowd’s embrace of its new star, the on-court interview, the joyous trophy presentation – Tennis Channel switched to the men’s final being played in Toronto (which was not concluding but in the middle of an unmemorable first set). So we got to watch one of the year’s great sports stories but we didn’t get to bask in its afterglow – we didn’t get to hear the words of the winner. The ceremony, for some of us, is just as important as the play it celebrates.
Our first stop, after picking up our rental car, was at the Carrboro Farmers Market. It was smaller than I expected, and subdued because of the heat and the absence of dogs. Carrboro’s is that rare outdoor market than bans canines, one of the chief attractions of markets (at least for Hania).
We checked into our Chapel Hill hotel and, on a recommendation from the receptionist, drove to The Pig for lunch. I was tempted by the bahn mi pulled pork tacos but went with the more traditional pulled pork sandwich, accompanied by a side of fried okra. Of all the things that one fries, okra may be the best.
Back at the hotel, Hania took a nap and I went out to explore. Franklin Street featured a handful of shops selling Tar Heel garb but no store that sold the Wall Street Journal. A fire engine passed, painted the same baby blue as the clothing in the stores.
I drove to the library and asked if there was any room devoted to Thomas Wolfe. The young man at the circulation desk didn’t say “Who?” Instead, he told me of the library, closed on weekends, that has a collection of Wolfe’s papers. Then he directed me to the garden dedicated to the writer that I once was addicted to and now never read. But I remember his writing about Chapel Hill, how he had arrived to the leafy campus as an awkward mountain boy from Asheville. His overwrought prose had given the town, and the campus, an almost sacred air to me.
The garden sat behind one of the old college buildings. It had a couple of benches, donated, according to their plaques, by members of the Thomas Wolfe Society, and an abstract sculpture titled “Look Homeward Angel.” The shade from the trees provided little relief from the heat.
But I still made it over to the student store, which had more baby blue clothing – the color, I was told later, is known as “Carolina Blue” – and rows of books and basketballs, many of the latter painted white. The others, encouragingly, were brown not blue.
Raleigh, where we were last week, was hotter than Fort Lauderdale. This was disappointing – it made walking around difficult – but I thought: In two weeks we’ll be in Montreal. No chance of a heat dome there.
Last night I learned about the forest fires in Canada, and that the northeast is blanketed in smoke.
(Impressions from North Carolina tomorrow.)
One of the things I hate about this country is how, if you express familiarity with something from the past – and not ancient history, a period more than 50 years ago – you are not admired for your knowledge but mocked for being old. In the United States, it’s better to feign ignorance than to date yourself.
So I was pleased and surprised to see all the tributes to Tom Lehrer, the songwriter who made a name for himself in the ’60s by singing about Alma Mahler, Wernher von Braun, and Nikolai Lobachevsky. Clearly, knowledge of what came before was not the stigma in the ’60s that it is today. Lehrer’s broad learning – in culture, science, mathematics (his true love, which would eventually woo him away from the world of entertainment) – made him an unlikely star even back then and an unimaginable one today. One obit called him “popular and erudite,” making him probably the last American to be described with those two adjectives.
My general rule of travel is that, wherever I go, the weather is unseasonably cool. It was this past May in Philadelphia, last March in Charleston, September 2022 in Warsaw, where I bought a scarf the day I arrived and wore it every day for three weeks.
Tomorrow I’m flying to Raleigh, NC, where I think that rule is going to be challenged. See you back here in August.
Yesterday in Warsaw, Poles marked the 70th anniversary of the Palace of Culture and Science, an unwanted gift from the Soviet Union. During the Cold War, the building “towered over the city in brute, dulled, gloating majesty” (from Falling into Place: A Story of Love, Poland, and the Making of a Travel Writer). Today, backdropped by taller towers of glass, it has an almost endearing homeliness.