I’ve read them now, but for a while I had yet to finish a journey through several of his paperbacks. Some I read were were small storybooks or collections of verse (those items he called “poem things”). There were also essay-like ruminations, and engaging articles observing people around him. I read all of these and for good measure re-visited a favored older book or two.

Many of us called him “Stob” back in the 1970s because he once worked part-time staking out house foundations, literally hammering stobs into the ground. He compared it to structuring written pieces.

Tom Weathers has an author persona that straddles the line between a Southern gentleman writer of intelligence and refinement and a Waffle House good ole boy scribbler. He can pull the mix off. His writing is congenial and well-constructed, wide in its readability appeal.

Tom’s published ventures are in sum his crónicas. His reports of life as he sees it, come from vantage points often located in Shelby, NC or Gastonia, NC. Most accounts are humble and honest, almost none are showy. He also produced a wealth of travelog writing and photos based on his roadtrips throughout America and Canada in his pal Conservative Bob’s BMW Roadster.

With Weathers in general, here are a few things you get:  inside accounts of close family events, astute profiles of friends and work peers, clever cosmic realizations, tales of his uphill veneration and loss of certain women very dear to him, the odd twists of fate and Vonnegut-like moments of karass, or as we called it, intertwingle, where lives magically cross other lives. e.g., Who among us but Tom would have someone like a tanned post-pubescent George Hamilton drift in and out of his personal history chapters?

I stumble over the riffs about physics and engineering that are beyond my grasp. It’s in Tom’s DNA. Once when we traveled together on an Amtrak to NYC, he talked about the theory of relativity as our train ran next to another train going in the opposite direction.

He is an admirer of Faulkner as well as Castaneda and Hemingway. His writing is often understated, and he withholds content that could be considered “unseemly.” Part of doing so is brought by the caution of being un viejo wary of being too brash.

Tom’s writing has always put me in the spirit to write a little bit myself. After all, he was my editor and supervisor in my first writing job out of college. His stuff has always influenced the way I write.

I’d tell him that. It’s praise. In previous times, hearing it would please him. But for now he’s conspicuous in his absence. O Lost, and by the wind grieved…Stob.