the editor talks with you

My father used to say there are 4 South Carolinas: The mountains, the midlands, the coast and Charleston.

I think there’s a 5th. It’s the South Carolina of long-held memories.

That’s the one that used to be and will there come again. Those who remember it will treasure those memories for the rest of our lives, talk about them, bore our kids with them and enjoy the feelings they stir.

We steal away from Lexington twice a year and come to a place that used to be called Windy Hill. It has since been gobbled up by the developers and politicians and renamed North Myrtle Beach.

They may call it North Myrtle now but to me it will always be Windy Hill.

My first memory of coming here was to a weekend house party with a bunch of people my age. We stayed in an aging house with umpteen bedrooms.

The boys were supposed to sleep on the ground floor and the girls upstairs. Some rearrangements were made after dark.

A vivid memory of that weekend, besides the good seafood, was meeting a young man who was proud he had been graduated with honors from Carolina in 4 years and never attended a football game.

I thought that was one of the primary reasons you went to college.

The other night we went to a weathered little place on US 17 – the King’s Highway in Windy Hill – that has probably survived more hurricanes than you could name.

It isn’t a lot of look at but neither are most of those places that are still standing.

They have no fancy neon lighting, white table cloths and plastic everything else.

The menu is limited to seafood – raw, fried, steamed or broiled. The service is fast and the prices are, well ... it’s the beach and you’re expected to shell it out just like the snow birds who come down from Canada.

We sat at a little square wooden table on well-worn wooden chairs in full view of a ball game playing on the TV monitors behind the bar. The TVs were about the only new things you will see in Rockefeller’s beside the bartenders and our waitress. She may have been at least 16. They must not have child labor laws on the coast.

We ate fried oysters, peel-’em-yourself jumbo shrimp and she crab soup and what gorgeous memories they brought back.

Rockefeller’s is one of those joints that look like they’ve been here 100 years. Same furniture the owner bought back when the beach opened on Memorial Day and closed on Labor Day. What the locals did the other 9 months to survive is a mystery. Not now.US 17 - the Kings Highway - is a steady stream of traffic morning, noon and night.

When we drove up to Cherry Grove for our semi-annual visit to Boulineau’s – family owned and operated since 1948 – the traffic would make you think you were on a southern California freeway.

We love places like Rockefeller’s. They remind us of our past and what it used to be.

It’s fortunate our memories are selective. We remember the good days and tend to bury in memory the ones that weren’t.