Sid Paine, cousin extraordinaire

My cousin Sid Paine died the other day while on a trip with his wife Elaine up in Vermont, pursuing their common passion for travel, meeting other folks, hearing their stories and telling, oh, I would guess about 1,000 stories of their own.  He was a spectacular human being, and I find myself recalling that he has been my idol since I was age 5 or 6.

Sid was everything I wasn't: Good looking, great hair, a million-dollar smile, a terrific athlete in every sport he ever took up, and equipped with that rare ability to make friends with just about anyone, anywhere.  He should have been an ambassador, but what he was was an educator, a historian, and oral storyteller who knew people around the world, and knew their kinfolk back in places like Haw River and Monck's Corner and Ninety-Six and South Bend and Chapel Hill and Columbia and any city or county in the South named for Nathaniel Green.

I'll put his formal obituary at the end of this post, but the thing that always made me feel better was just being around Sid's and Elaine's good cheer.  The world might be caving in around you, but they'd be telling you about some fisherman in Wales or a castle watchman in Salisbury or a wayward student at Darlington School or the time in high school when Sid had to guard future basketball All-American at UNC, Lennie Rosenbluth. And Sid's punch lines always had you in stitches: "Yep. Held him to 40 points,"  he would say with a grin. "All I saw that night was Lennie's armpit."

Sid and Elaine were career teachers who taught their students about life, not just about the course of instruction or what they needed to know to get through the school year. They were walking Encyclopedias of what it means to be a citizen any place on the planet.  Oh yeah -- they also knew the best places to eat wherever you were going, or the best place to find a good Scotch, or their favorite place at Augusta National to watch the Masters, or who to talk to when you wanted to do something different on vacation

Sid had a little bit more than a decade on me, and it was his idea to go to England and rent a narrow boat, as they are called, to navigate along the hundreds of miles of restored industrial-revolution canals across that country. Sixty feet long and six feet wide, with a little bitty diesel engine and a long tiller to steer by.  There is  nothing like locking yourself through scores of hand-operated locks on those old blackwater canals,  poking along at 3 m.p.h. through the English countryside, stopping every few miles to stake the narrowboat fore and aft to the towpath and  pop into a pub and pass the afternoon with his new best friends of, oh, about 10 minutes' acquaintance.

We didn't see one another every year, but when we did, we had to allow two or three days just to catch up on the family stories.  Our mutual grandparents, Mary Atkinson Monie Betts and Dr. Joseph Shawen Betts of Greensboro, N.C. were characters in their own right -- fascinated by the history of generations  of family going back to places like Kilmarnock, Scotland and the Towles Point Plantation on the Rappahannock in Virginia, and tales of growing up in the South in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.  We'd tramp around the battlefields of Yorktown, explore the yonder reaches of the Blue Ridge Parkway, replay long-forgotten football and basketball games, tell outrageous jokes and carry on late into the night, exploring unanswered family questions that we never thought to ask the grownups about.

I've thought about this a time or two: I don't think I could've invented a more likable, cheerful, knowledgeable and always-ready-to-talk-though-the-night-if only-you-could cousin, as Sid Paine. Everyone in our family will miss him greatly, but I especially will miss those moments when he'd remember something, get a sly grin on his face, hunch over the bar and ask me, "Say, did I ever tell you about the time......" and then we'd be off on another lively Betts family tangent, digging up something from long ago, and wearing it out over another wee dram of that MacCallans he took with him in the trunk of the car.   Oh, the stories.  Rest in peace, Sid, and the next one's on me.  See you.

From Mackey's Funeral Home:
Sidney Betts Paine of Greenville, S.C., beloved husband of Marie Elaine Brooks Paine, died on September 5, 2017 in Burlington, Vt. Sid, who was born in Greensboro, N.C. on June 26, 1936, was the elder son of the late Sidney Lake Paine and Margaret Delaney Betts Paine. Besides his devoted wife of 58 years, Sid is survived by daughter Elizabeth Paine Weaver, her husband William Bennett Weaver, and their children Matthew Bennett Weaver, his wife Erin Wolfe Weaver and daughter Reagan Julia Weaver, and Lindsay Elizabeth Weaver, all of Rock Hill, S.C.; daughter Marianne Paine Childers, her husband Gregory Stephen Childers, and their children Delaney Brooks Childers and Cameron Stephen Childers, all of Greer, S.C.; and a brother Christopher Borden Paine of Asheville, N.C.

Sid’s paternal grandfather, Sidney Small Paine, was the world’s largest manufacturer of corduroy, while his great grandfather, Sidney Borden Paine, was the first to electrify a textile mill. His maternal grandfather, Joseph Shawen Betts, was the president of the North Carolina Dental Association, and his grandmother was a founder of the Greensboro, N.C. Historical Museum.

Sid graduated from Woodberry Forest School and earned B.A. and M.A degrees from the University of South Carolina. He was also a veteran of the United States Army. He taught at the Darlington School in Rome, Ga., the Stanley Clark School in South Bend, In., where he was also assistant headmaster, and the Greenville County School System (including Hillcrest Middle School, Greenville Middle School and J.L. Mann High School), where he also held administrative positions. He retired in 1997.

During their summer vacations, Sid and Elaine took their daughters on expeditions to all 50 states, as well as most of the provinces and territories of Canada, dipping into Mexico as well. In 1985, they spent 7 weeks touring England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland plus Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands. After the girls had left the nest, Sid and Elaine continued international travel and visited all the continents at least twice, except for once to Antarctica.

Sid enjoyed the game of golf, especially playing with the Golden Boys of Pebble Creek Country Club and the members of Senior Golfers of South Carolina. He was privileged to play some of the great courses in the United States and in foreign countries.

Sid was a life-long Episcopalian. A memorial service will be held at St. James Episcopal Church on 301 Piney Mountain Road on Saturday, September 16 at 11:00 A.M.

In lieu of flowers, memorial may be sent to St. James Episcopal Church on 301 Piney Mountain Road, Greenville, SC 29609.

Changes on the wind

When we woke up yesterday the thermometer told us what season it was: 46 degrees, and no longer late summer.  It's still a couple weeks before the autumnal equinox, but the sharp breeze carried its own message: Start bringing the firewood up to the house.  It won't be long until the soapstone wood stove, cool and silent since last spring, will be fired up and providing most of the heat as we head into increasingly cooler weather.

It's a time of year I love: the change in the seasons, the dramatic colors on the maples and chestnut oaks and poplars, the hauling in of the abundant apple crop this season and the putting to bed of this old farm.  There's a fence to be rebuilt, and a bit of orchard to put in when the new apple trees arrive, and the mowing -- ye gods, the mowing.   Our extended family owns 71  acres on this Belcher Mountain spread, and I keep the open fields open by giving it a good bush-hogging several times in the warm season and a final cut along the Smith River feeder creek in November with the sickle bar mower, an iron beast made a long time ago by Massey Ferguson that fits, with a little bit of cussing and banging and heavy grease, on my Kubota tractor.

We've also learned over the years that when our apples ripen, the critters here about -- the bear cubs and the ground hogs and the bobcats and I don't know what-all -- will give us a few days to get ours before they crawl up into the trees and sample each apple a little bit. We've harvested the apples inside the fence; Today's the day we go after the heritage apples -- the Limbertwigs, the Northern Spies, the Firesides (still coming on an apple tree trunk that has lain on the ground ever since Hurricane Fran in 1996 -- or was it Hugo in 1989?, the Yellow Bellflowers and the seedlings that still produce fruit even when we don't know their names.  We call 'em Uncles for lack of a better word -- a contraction, of sorts, for "unknown apples."

There's firewood to cut and split, too. Much of a massive maple blew over during a summer storm down near the old Connor-Wood house in the bottom, which loses more of its roof and siding each season, and the woods are full of dead-on-the-stump, leaning-and-looking-to-make-widows, fallen locusts.  Those are prizes -- good firewood, already dried most of the way, and ready to burn this winter once they have a little more chance to dry out and get ready to make some heat.  I've alerted a couple of friends that we'll have a firewood gathering in a few weeks, felling, cutting and splitting enough of these old trees to help each of us get through the winter.  We somehow get a lot more wood cut, split and loaded into various trucks and trailers than we would working alone, even without the distractions of story-telling, leg-pulling and spleen-venting that can go on when gents of a certain age get together amidst the roar and clink of chainsaws, wood splitters and mauls and wedges. We'll top off the day once the work is done by a sip or two of a noble whiskey -- in front of a roaring chiminea, of course, to toast the remains of the day, solve world problems, run down whatever crowd is in Washington lately and reflect on the glories of the season.  Bring it on.