East Coast ART & BOOKS

Michelle Gill

Downtown Roanoke Murals

Update: 8/7/22

Another awesome mural has just been added to the Greenway.

Artist: Jon Murrill (painted with the help of volunteers)

https://www.instagram.com/p/Cg7seO3v2yJ/?igshid=NWRhNmQxMjQ=

Golden Cactus Brewing on Salem Avenue

206 Williamson Road (Who is the artist?)

Salem Avenue at Big Lick Brewery, Artist James Bullough of Berlin

James Bullough >

4th Street and Elm Avenue

The Great Heron in Wasena, Artist Toobz (Scott Noel)

Mosaics at the Market Building - Cheryl Foster
Around Taubman - "Everyone Wants to Love Their Mark" by Mickael Broth
& "In It for the Long Run" by Toobz
First Street alley by Toobz
581 Overpass pylons by Brenda Mauney Councill
Western Virginia Water Authority mural by Ashley Roop

Wasena

Wasena Bridge - "Beautiful View" by Jared Bader of Philadelphia
Main Street Bridge in Wasena
Maurice's Mockingbird Mural by Toobz

Roanoke Art extras...

Stormdrain Inlet Art Project information >

Roanoke's Art by Night >

Michelle Gill

A conversation with Dikkon Eberhart

“I fell in love, that is the only expression I can think of, at once, and am still at the mercy of words, …”

Dylan Thomas

Words, #books, the actual feel and smell of a book - I inherited my love from my daddy. I hated reading when I was little and stood around waiting on him as he looked for yet another book, more times than I can count. He quit school when he was fifteen but he loved to read. He knew all the private book dealers in town.

I remember one such man named Danny Wheeler, who had an old house with tall high book shelves that had an attached wooden rolling ladder to reach the top shelves, just like the one in My Fair Lady. Cats ran around on top of his counters and his house was packed to the brim. It seems to me that I can still smell the cigarette smoke, of course that could have been from my daddy as we traipsed across the valley looking for books in his yellow Duster. I now see the value of all the interesting characters that he knew – book collectors, book sellers, book hunters and their stories, not to mention the many friends in the books themselves.

Now many years later, I too have a love of books. April, a friend and writer, heard of a #memior from her violin instructor that she said I must read - , The time Mom met Hitler, Frost came to dinner and I heard the Greatest Story ever told. Most of my college years I was an English major, although in my last year I changed to PolySci. My love for writing and reading is how I began in the English track and this writer, Dikkon Eberhart, grew up with those writers in his home on a regular basis, that I read in my classes. Dylan Thomas had a crush on his mom and read him bedtime stories. He and Robert Frost had a conversation about the intentions of his most famous poem. Of course, I was hooked.

What kept me reading was this writer is not just a writer but a #wordsmith. To me, being able to use words so the reader feels what you intend for them to feel and more; to paint a picture without brush or colors on a canvas – only using words - is an art. Also, his writing has a rhythm that keeps the reader moving ahead.

It is a memoir that ends with his journey to Christ from Judaism. Extraordinary, yes?

Since my first touch of that book, Dikkon Eberhart has moved from Maine to where I live. I have had the fabulous opportunity to get to know him first hand and he allowed me to ask him some questions at a restaurant the other day for a short interview. If you have any interest in word crafting at all, I suggest that you read his writing. I can still smell the cigars on their family boat, taste the bourbon, and feel the movement of the sail boat on the lake with his father. (I have never smoked a cigar, I don’t like bourbon, and I have never been on a boat with he or his father but it is now a memory of my own because of the way he painted it for me in his book.)

THE INTERVIEW...

When will your next book come out and do you have a title?

I hope to have the manuscript completed by the end of the year. I have three or four titles, none that I particularly like. Once I know truly know what the book is about, it will be the billboard.

How many books do you own?

Thousands

I understand that you were a food critic for five years in Maine. Since moving to Roanoke, what has been your favorite meal dining out?

Brunch at the River and Rail Restaurant and the Chicken Copacabana at Montano’s International Gourmet

What is one thing Jesus is speaking to you about your life today?

Tell people the truth about Channa and my’s coming to Jesus and give my gift of energy back to those who need it. I believe I have a gift for understanding how my life has progressed and why. I have a gift for assisting other people with their possible coming to Christ.

What is your favorite food?

Eggs because you can make them into anything.

If you could live anywhere in the world, where would it be?

I lived on the coast of Maine for thirty years and loved it. I hope that I will come to love Roanoke the same. It is too hot here but I am hopeful.

What is your favorite thing in New York city - where one of your daughters lives?

She lives in Brooklyn. I love the energy of the people and all the opportunities to view good art. Personally, I am more of a quiet atmosphere person myself.

What was your favorite play that you were in?

A Man for all Seasons in college at Dartmouth

What are some of your hobbies now?

Tinkering, fixing small things

How does God speak to you?

When I least expect it and I hear His words in my head. Words are vital. I take those moments as miracles.

"If God, while intending Adam, should have created Satan instead, it would not have been a righteous creation; it would have been a clang. My father created me, molded me, and taught me, and once - when I needed it - he slapped me down. As he forced me forward, sometimes he slipped in his effort, and instead of making music, his effort went awry, and there was a clang.

I hated those clangs, but the effort of the man behind me - that is, of my father, and of his father, and of his father, all the way back to Eberhart the Noble sitting on his throne in Stuttgart in the scarcely imaginable thirteenth century - that effort, too, tensed me up.

And more to this: Eberhart the Noble had a father, who had a father, who had a father, who eventually was our very first father - our very first father, Adam himself, who was pushed into existence - fearfully and wonderfully made - by the very breath of God."

- quote from The time Mom met Hitler, Frost came to dinner, and I heard the Greatest Story ever told

by Dikkon Eberhart

For more about Dikkon Eberhart, visit his website at www.dikkoneberhart.com

Dikkon Eberhart

When Crickets Cry

March 30. I was hot, sweaty. I like being hot, sweaty.

Five hours of landscaping, mulching. One last trip to the store, another twenty bags after the forty I’d spread. I paid, loaded my bags. Should I wait for someone to count my bags?

How long? Ten minutes?

I know I haven’t stolen a bag. God knows I haven’t stolen a bag. I am tired.

A communication occurred in my head. Go home.

It is difficult to drive. I reach home. I try to remove the bags, but suddenly they are too heavy. I am panting. I can’t understand why my feet and my hands are like ice.

An elephant – no, two elephants – are standing on my chest, with all eight of their feet.

My wife rushed me to the hospital, screeched to a stop. I fell out the passenger door. Want fast service at an e-room? Arrive falling out the car door, with your wife crying, “Chest pain, chest pain.”

During seventy-four years, no one, not ever, had ever warned me about my heart.

Next morning, after being catheterized and stented during three hours of urgent work by masterful technicians of cardio salvation, the chief nurse of last night’s team came into my ICU. “Dikkon, that heart attack was massive. If you had been ten minutes later getting here, I don’t think you’d be alive now.”

Remember: at the store? Do I wait?

Ten minutes.

My chest hurt. And the surgery to implant an ICD hurt worse. It left me breathless and dizzy and unable to climb stairs. But I was not scared. Throughout, I had never been scared.

Because –

All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.

Julian of Norwich said that, and I’m glad she did.

The quote from that 14th century English anchoress continued to buoy me without fear. But I needed more. I needed a book to read. I read a lot. I always need a book to read. And since my heart attack I’d been on a fiction jag.

There’s a writer of intense, thrilling novels of whom I had heard but whom I had never read. I wondered – could I find one of his?

I had no title in mind, but I liked what I knew. He lives in Florida, his settings are usually oceans or lakes, he is respected in Christian circles, and – since I’d seen a photo of him and his family – I felt drawn to him.

Despite emotional pain in my family, despite sudden elephant pain on my heart without warning, despite wondering what to do in retirement after it is thrust upon me, despite recognizing with a grip of sadness that our pastor really is also about to retire – despite all that, yet still buoyed by the words of Julian of Norwich, all things shall be well, in the Lord.

Which means that miracles abound.

I entered the bookstore – shelves in all directions. Dozens of thousands of books. There must be one here for me. The fiction shelves, trade paperbacks and mass market paperbacks. My man was not there.

I began to be sad. I’d staked my heart on finding a book of his. Oh, I could always buy something else. But now I felt I had a mission, and I don’t like failing in my missions.

Where else might they shelve him?

Oh! Duh. Religion. Of course.

And right there, exactly at my eye level, exactly in the middle of a shelf otherwise laden with Amish-girl-meets-motorcycle-bum stories – right there, just as though it had deliberately been placed there, spine out, was the single Charles Martin book in the whole store.

The Holy Spirit must have engineered this placement, just as he had engineered my quick trip home from the mulch store.

Gratefully, I pulled the book off the shelf – its subtitle: A Novel of the Heart.

Oh!

Thank you.

I love hearts.

… having never thought much about them before.

Seven-year-old Annie is doing a brisk business in the middle of her small southern town, selling lemonade from her stand. The stranger who lives beside the lake, the man who observes the scar on Annie’s chest, knows more than he is willing to admit. And the radio-blasting delivery truck careening around the corner – it changes the trajectory of both of their lives, as well as of most other of the lives in that town.

Three hundred thirty pages later, I knew why crickets cry, who the stranger is and why he won’t tell, what really happened during the storm, how Charlie became blind, really how heart surgery works … and also that miracles are both as commonplace and as mysterious as a glass of lemonade from a little girl’s stand.

And that I had stayed up nearly all night, reading faster and faster, moaning as each new connection was made, in tears, hand over my heart, with deep thanks for the man who could execute so flawlessly in fiction as to redeem me from the fearsome weight of both of my elephants.

Dikkon Eberhart is the author of The Time Mom Met Hitler, Frost Came to Dinner, and I Heard the Greatest Story Ever Told, Paradise, and On the Verge. Dikkon is a Maine native transplanted recently to the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. He is a retired salesman, former actor and food critic, and always a writer.