Mike Myers
Caroline Love Myers
Maybe I was born with dirt under my fingernails. Maybe it’s embedded in my DNA. I’m southern, so neither is outside the realm of possibility.
For whatever reason, dirt is my medium. I write poetry about dirt. I consider pulling weeds after a rainy spell to be a zen experience. I see a patch of bare ground and know what wants to grow there. When I come home from a walk, I empty my pockets of ground things — leaves and acorns and cones and stones so lovely they evoke a spiritual response in me.
So a few weeks ago, when I heard about the opportunity to work in a community garden that will be shared with Friendship Trays, the Salvation Army and a bi-lingual pre-school, the earth-mother hippy-chick in me couldn’t wait to start.
I haven’t had my first opportunity to dig yet. But today I learned that the dirt for the garden — 14 tons of it? could that be right? that’s enough to bury the BofA tower, isn’t it? — came from a plot of ground that’s been excavated to build a parking lot. That plot of ground, before it was destined to be paved over, had been the location of the family home of Caroline Love Myers, the woman who was instrumental in the early success of Charlotte’s Crisis Assistance Ministry. The house was moved years ago, then renovated into a sparkling jewel by Caroline’s son, Charles.
Mike in front of the Love family home on Providence Road
Before it was moved, the house was one of the great loves of Mike Myers. Mike’s first love, of course, was Caroline, his remarkable wife. But the house…oh, how he loved that house.
I know this because Mike was my boss at Central Piedmont Community College for five years. Mike took child-like delight in a great many things; one of them was showing people around the house where Caroline had grown up, the house where he and Caroline raised their four children. He loved talking about the rugs, the paintings, the kitchen, the side porch, the history of the house. He loved introducing visitors to Extra Dog and telling the story of how the mutt came into his life. He loved going upstairs and telling tales of the days when Charles and Mike Jr. and Richard and Susie were small. He loved entertaining in that house. Mike Myers loved life more than any person I ever knew and, for him, life was centered around his years in that stately old house.
Mike is gone now. People still miss him acutely, as I do, because there was never anybody else quite like Mike.
So to dig in the soil that was the ground of Mike’s life with his family will raise in my ears the echo of Mike laughing, calling me Pegarino, hatching a harebrained scheme that only he could turn into reality. He would love to know, as I do, that I’m kneeling in his dirt this summer, getting his earth under my fingernails. Mostly, he would love knowing that his dirt is being used for something more than the ground floor for a slab of concrete — that it will be used to feed people.
