What Happens in Dothan
Dothan, Alabama, is chilly this morning. The temperature is hovering at 20 degrees. Wind chills down to 16. It’s so cold, the maids in my hotel were salting the hallways.
The sun was rising over Circle City. The cloudless sky was the color of a Chilton County peach. Ray’s Restaurant was open for the early crowd. Ray’s has been opening up for the early crowd since Richard Milhous Nixon was in office.
Each morning, the oldsters huddle themselves over Ray’s bottomless coffees. They cuss, clear nasal passages loudly, and solve the world’s issues. Where would the federal government be without these men?
I order my eggs over medium. The cook is a borderline genius. The yolk of an over-medium egg should not run. It should merely creep. They can cook eggs in Dothan.
On my serpentine route through town, I pass the National Peanut Festival fairgrounds.
Dothan has been celebrating the Peanut Festival since 1938. The festival is like Woodstock for tractor owners. If you’ve never been, you need to go. The greased hog chase alone is worth the price of admission.
I once attended the peanut festival when I was 18. I was dating a girl from Dothan. We went out on a few dates. She said I was the first guy she ever went out with who didn’t have a Skoal ring in his back pocket.
There are other world-famous attractions here, too.
Such as the World’s Smallest City Block. At the Intersection of Troy, Appletree, and Museum streets. This little triangle of land was given the official title by “Ripley’s Believe It or Not” in 1964.
The city block originally measured 20 feet by 20 feet. It still stands today. Bring the family.
There’s the Dothan Opera House. They’ve been running since 1915, hosting everything from vaudeville acts to Boy Scout badge ceremonies.
There is Annie Pearl’s Home Cooking Restaurant, one of my top-five favorite restaurants. The only place in the city where you can get authentic liver and onions.
Tell them Sean sent you.
Also, one of America’s coolest bookstores lives on North Foster Street. Downtown Books. Support your local independent bookstore.
But the true reason I love Dothan has nothing to do with attractions or peanuts.
I love this place because Dothan is where I first discovered what I would do with the rest of my life.
I had my first-ever book signing at the Houston County Library, long ago. I didn’t think anyone would come. I was convinced that I would be in an empty backroom, carrying on an in-depth conversation with a Bunn machine.
But people did come.
One old lady hugged me and said, “You have no idea how important your life is to me, young man.” And we just cried and cried.
Someone brought me a pound cake. A guy who looked like Jerry Garcia made me a tray of brownies. His wife said, “Do NOT eat these alone.” Another elderly woman asked me to autograph—seriously—a brassiere.
But there was one guy in the crowd who I’ll never forget. I have no idea who he was. He was gray and frail. He walked with a cane. He embraced me with his bony arms and told me his father had died the same way mine did.
Then, mid-hug, he looked at me with tap-water blue eyes and said, “You’re ours now. No matter where you go, you will always belong to Dothan.”
And I still do.
Sean, you capture the life of a town beautifully, and I love that you are not willing to omit such details as noisy nose clearing at the old men’s coffee klatch. Thank you for sharing your heartstring to Dothan. You show as much gratitude for small town recognition (like Cairo yesterday) as you do The Grand Ole Opry, and that is but part of what endears you to your readers.
You had me at Liver and Onions.
I was born in Logan, Alabama, about 50 miles from the big city of Cullman. In my late 20s I followed an historic preservation career into the northeast but my soul will forever be in the South. When I was diagnosed with breast cancer [in my dreams], it was my grandmother, a healer in the Alabama mountains, who came in my dreams and got me through. I had one doctor who believed in dreams. He asked me if I dreamed "where" the cancer lived because it was defying mammograms and ultrasounds. I said "yes." He drew the location I shared with a felt tipped pen on my body and after the biopsy said I would have been dead within a year if it had not been for my dreams with my grandmother. The breast cancer was aggressive but 34 years later I am still here. My oncologist has a beautiful letter from my extraordinary surgeon pinned in my folder - my surgeon had written to my oncologist and said to listen to me, that I was dreaming with a healer. My oncologist later said I was his poster child for survival and led me out to a room filled with people celebrating one year of survival. He said he would not have given a tinker's dam for my survival beyond 5 years but now, he said, "I listen more carefully."
I didn't think I was a writer but I wrote a book about that experience which became a book about my life and growing up among people who dream. Thank you for these beautiful posts. I might look up Dothan next trip South.