Outer Banks and blogging come full circle
by Anton Zuiker on July 12, 2020
Our traditional family vacation photo (Corolla, North Carolina, June 2020)
Erin and I and the children have lived in North Carolina since 2001, but until last month, we had never been to the Outer Banks. With my brother, Joel, and our mother living down in Wilmington, we’ve visited Kure and Carolina and Wrightsville beaches for the weekend, and we’ve spent a week on Oak Island (and I retreated to Southport once). Our longer beach vacations have been to South Carolina and Georgia, and to St. Croix.
All along, I thought about my grandparents. Francis and Clarice Zuiker visited the Outer Banks often in their retirement, camping and beachcombing and fishing and sending their stories back to the extended family. My 2003 blog post was about my grandfather’s letter recounting their epic fishing trip to Chesapeake Bay and Manteo, and the hurricane that chased them from the Outer Banks.
I regretted not getting to the barrier islands all these years.
But, finally, at the end of June I found myself passing through Williamston and Manteo as we made our way to Corolla, where we would spend a splendidly relaxing week in a big house with Erin’s sister, Mary, and her family. From the deck, we could see both the Currituck Beach Light House and the nearby Atlantic Ocean. Each day, as I sat under the beach umbrella watching the porpoises and the pelicans and the osprey, wriggling my toes in the sand and through the broken seashells, I said a prayer of thanks for my family nearby, far away, and gone.
I started blogging 20 years ago because of Frank the Beachcomber; this post from 2010 best tells the story.
I kept blogging for the past two decades because of my other grandparents, and because of my parents, and because of my brothers and aunts and uncles and cousins, and because of Erin and our children, and because of the people I work with and the people I invite to gather, and because of the world as it is and because of the world I want it to be.
Thank you for letting me share my memories, my travels, and my hopes. Thank you for reading.
Work anniversary
by Anton Zuiker on July 12, 2020
Late last month, I marked a full 10 years since I started my job as communications director for the Duke Department of Medicine. It’s been a fabulous job, and I feel fortunate to have been given this challenging, rewarding work. Together with my colleague, Elizabeth McCamic, we built a responsive and adaptive communications strategy and set of tools—a sprawling website, the MedicineNews portal, and the This Week in Medicine e-newsletter, among others—to reflect the mission and activities of one of the top internal medicine departments in the country.
When I started in 2010, there were only a few other communicators in the School of Medicine. Today, there is a network of dozens of communicators across the 25 departments and 12 institutes. There have been many opportunities to help recruit, mentor, partner, and celebrate these colleagues over this decade, and every day I’m inspired by their talents and work, which you can see flowing through the Duke River of News.
As I mentioned in my birthday post, one of my work projects, Voices of Duke Health, received an honorable mention in the GIA Awards for Excellence. The Association of American Medical Colleges hosted an online awards ceremony last week and posted the award winners. I was proud to represent Duke University, and the winning projects got me thinking about new ways to do our work here even better.
Close encounters
by Anton Zuiker on June 22, 2020
I have time on my hands, and a nice spot to enjoy it. I brought a stack of recent issues of the New Yorker, and in the June 8 & 15, 2020 issue—the Fiction Issue—I found four essays on the theme Close Encounters. The New Yorker publishes these essays in special issues throughout the year, and I’ve always enjoyed the compact writing, contained in two columns and an illustration on one page. I read them, marvel at the good writing, and feel inspired. The themes can be good writing prompts, so my goal this week is to use some of that time to write a close-encounters essay of my own.
Apeirogon
by Anton Zuiker on June 21, 2020
Today was the first day in many months that I truly relaxed. Sitting outside, I alternated between mindlessness—just sitting there, calm and breathing and not thinking—and reading the final 100 pages of Apeirogon, by Colum McCann. It’s an amazing book that has had me in tears a few times over the last month. The book jacket describes it as “an epic story rooted in the real-life friendship between two men united by loss.” It’s that, and so much more, sad and maddening and full of connections and hope. As the title suggests, there may be a “countably infinite number of sides” to the Israeli and Palestinian story, but in the end, the Occupation is not good for either side. It must end. And my country must stop exporting guns and bullets to places where daughters are killed and their fathers, through their unending grief, must teach us all that peace can prevail. It’s fitting that I should finish this book on Father’s Day. I am grateful that McCann used his storytelling gift to honor Bassam Aramin and Rami Elhanan and their daughters Abir and Smadar.
This land
by Anton Zuiker on June 21, 2020
Earlier this month, Erin and I purchased the undeveloped lot adjacent to our home in Chapel Hill, so now we own 8-and-a-quarter acres of land. Most of it is covered by tall oak and tulip poplar and red maple trees. We have plans to build a new house at some point, and we’ve been thinking about ways to use the land for good, at least regular Long Table dinners with friends and strangers, on tables made from the blackjack oak we had milled last year.
For now, we are going to make a trail through the woods, and I’ll continue to stand out back listening to the birds and feeling grateful to live on this land.