Lowcountry New Year’s resolution: Don’t let your dreams get trapped on a list | Opinion
(Editor’s note: A version of this column was originally published Jan. 1, 2013.)
In sorting through New Year’s resolutions, I’m reminded of my friend Dick McTeer.
Dick would stroll over to the newspaper office from Rose Hill, where he retired from the rigors of business and civic leadership in Hardeeville.
He usually came over to straighten me out on matters of the war. The Civil War. He was never mean or ugly, as some folks tend to be on that subject, but he did want me to realize how mean and ugly Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman was to the citizenry of the Lowcountry, both black and white.
Like others with a long view of our corner of the Lowcountry, Dick knew how much better life has become here than it was when he was growing up, and when he was trying to scratch out a living. He knew how much more opportunity there is here now. And just how poor it used to be around here — a level of poverty few could imagine today.
For many years he ran a motor lodge in Hardeeville. These mom-and-pop enterprises lined the streets of Hardeeville and Ridgeland, catering to travelers headed to Florida on U.S. 17. It’s how Hardeeville got the name “The Inn Village.”
They had fetching names for visitors: the Magnolia, the Plantation, the Siesta, the Palms.
It’s likely that no one in that era could have dreamed of the day Hardeeville would be home to a 2,700-acre housing development called Latitude Margaritaville Hilton Head, catering to retired Parrotheads chasing the Jimmy Buffet dream.
It’s a story of how much the Lowcountry — and all of America — has changed, and how much it has remained the same.
Omar Bradley
Dick said there was room in the inns of his day for everyone in America, and it seemed that they all showed up sooner or later.
One night when a guest checked in, Dick called his cousin, JuJu Hutson.
“Hey, JuJu,” he said. “You better get down here. There’s a man here who said he served in the Army with you.”
JuJu said, “Oh, really. Who is it?”
“Omar Bradley.”
Dick always told wonderful stories like that when he strolled over to the newspaper office. He once sold newspaper display ads, God bless him. He was a born salesman, but also an English and history major at Wofford College in Spartanburg in the Upstate.
Dick was 86 when he passed away in the fall of 2012. The last time we talked, his topic was a proposed Indian tribe gambling casino in Hardeeville. He said at one time parimutuel betting — horse racing — was suggested for Hardeeville, and he thought that still might be a good bet.
CVS
But it is at this time of year — the time of New Year’s resolutions — that I most often think of Dick.
One time he said:
“David , if you want to do it, do it now.”
He told me not to save a list of things to do when I get older and have more time. It might be too late.
“When I walk into CVS, they applaud,” he said.
Your dream trip, he said, might turn out to be a well-worn path between doctors’ offices.
He told another story about seizing the moment. It went something like this:
Dick and his wife, Jacqueline, were grocery shopping when she caught him looking longingly at a live lobster in a tank of water. She encouraged him to get it if he wanted it, but Dick said it was too expensive.
Dick said they kept shopping, and a few aisles later, his wife asked, “What are you saving your money for, your son-in-law?”
It was a joke. It made him laugh. Dick loved to laugh, and make others laugh. But he got his lobster. And I got his point.
Maybe our 2020 list of resolutions should not be a list at all. Maybe we should quit plotting and planning, and simply make the world our lobster. As the headline said: “It’s 5 o’clock in Hardeeville.”
This story was originally published December 26, 2019 at 10:44 AM.
