Happy Sunday, good people.

Reminder: You have about a month left to nominate someone for Southminster’s 8 Over 80 awards, honoring eight people over 80 who’ve made a lasting difference in Charlotte-Mecklenburg. The Charlotte Optimist is partnering with Southminster on this year’s program, and we’ll be publishing our own profiles of the honorees in a special issue closer to the October event.

Also, my guy Lewis Donald’s now a “legend.” Southern Living has the Sweet Lew’s owner on a lineup of esteemed pitmasters for a “Luncheon with Legends” barbecue in Weddington on September 20. Get a ticket.

Now, this week’s Optimist: We’re always working on several stories at once. Last week, we had three we couldn’t get to the finish line for one reason or another — folks we needed to talk to or photograph were on vacation, or some other glitch. My mind was a little scattered Thursday morning, as you’ll read below. So I went to one of those places I’ve always wanted to write about, and a little spark happened. I think you’ll enjoy our profile on Sherry Waters and The Pauline Tea-bar Apothecary.

Pick Your Own Cup

You’re a peaceful person. So easygoing and chill, people have told you since you were a kid. Maybe you even grew up to write a newsletter rooted in gratitude and optimism.

But now it’s 8:15 this past Thursday morning, and you’re late to daycare dropoff for your youngest kid, which’ll certainly make you even later to your other kid’s summer camp — Wait, where even is camp this week? Basketball at the church, or soccer at the college, or flame-throwing in a field? Look, I just need an address. — and being late to both of those will no doubt make you tardy for a meeting, and here you are stuck behind 20 hot cars in a single-file line on Caswell Road by the hospital, just shimmering on hot pavement, waiting for a light to turn green, whenever SOMETHING CAN JUST GO YOUR WAY.

“Mustard!” your 3-year-old says from the backseat.

You look to your left and see a yellow fire hydrant and smile. Good kid.

“Mustard!” he says again, because you didn’t explicitly acknowledge him the first time.

“Yeah, that’s right. Good job, buddy,” you say.

Then you look left again and see a car creeping up beside you. And where the hell are YOU going? you think.

You look closer and it’s a former coworker, a wonderful soul, actually. She has two hands on the wheel and, before you can roll down your window and holler hello, she zooms forward in a lane that doesn’t exist. She realizes her mistake and jerks back into the single-file line, which of course causes the car behind her to blast its horn, which reminds you that if you’re ever in charge of anything, you pledge to put a tax on angry car horn usage. Wanna honk? Go for it, pal; just drop a penny in our sidewalk fund.

Your morning reading didn’t help matters. The cease-fire in Iran’s off. Maine’s Senate race is gross. And closer to home, violent storms caused the roof to collapse at, of all places, Roof Above. You tried to read a good piece of writing to center yourself, but the one you chose this morning was an essay about how people aren’t reading anymore, and you read every word of that.

The energy’s off. The chill is gone. Even you aren’t immune to becoming the temporary sum of the world’s negative inputs. So you drop the kids, have that meeting, and drive straight over to The Pauline Tea-bar.

Have y’all been there? 

The sign on the door says “No WiFi.” The air smells of lemon ginger and raspberry green and elderberry. A square tabletop sand box inside comes with miniature rakes and hoes and shovels, and if you dig an inch you might hit a rock that reads “PEACE.” 

Located near the intersection of Morehead and Wilkinson, The Pauline is a bubble — a sanctuary in this feverish city, a tea shop that barely breaks even in a commercialist town filled with coffee shops built to scale, a place where people come for work meetings without laptops.

Owner and founder Sherry Waters is decorating the place for its seventh-anniversary celebration. She smiles and welcomes you in a way that lets you know she probably hasn’t honked a horn in 30 years. You feel like you again.

So I ask how she built a place that does … that.

“I didn't know what it was supposed to look like, and I didn’t know anything about the business of running a cafe,” she says. “But I knew what I wanted people to feel like.”

What’s that? I ask.

“For people to walk in and go, ‘I needed this,’” she says. 

Mission accomplished. We sit. She takes the couch against the longer wall, and I take a chair next to her. All around us are works from seven different local artists, whose pieces she’s displaying throughout the seventh-year anniversary celebration. She rarely finds herself on this couch. She’s usually at the back table or in her back office, providing grief counseling or spiritual counseling, or filling in as the hospitality hostess.

I start asking about her business — very Charlotte questions like what’s the business model? — and she tells me that Pauline’s doesn’t actually bring in a salary for her. She pays a living wage to her hospitality hosts, who are trained in herbalism and holistic medicine, and pays the rent and there’s not much left over for her. Sherry makes her income from other related ventures, including a consulting service for nonprofits, personal coaching, and spiritual companionship, much of which she does out of that back office.

Anyway, as I’m asking her all of these boring LinkedIn questions, she stops and looks away.

“I need to sit on this couch more often,” she says. “This is a wide lens of this place, and it’s like I'm seeing this place for the first time myself today.”

Her eyes start to well up.

What do you see? I ask. 

“A cared-for, cared-for cafe,” she says. “It feels like an open living room. It does feel like Grandma’s house.”

Sherry grew up in Asheville, the oldest of five children. Her grandparents lived near Lake Lure and were farmers. Her grandmother, Pauline, also taught Sunday school and elementary school. Whenever Sherry visited, Pauline made her two things — cornflakes and tea. Sherry remembers picking out her own cup from the cabinet.

“She would make me that cup of tea,” Sherry says now, “and I felt like I was the most beloved grandchild.”

Sherry went from Asheville to UNC Chapel Hill, and later got a certificate in nonprofit management from Duke. 

She moved to Charlotte in 1992 to become a TV reporter. She started with a nine-month apprenticeship at WSOC, then moved over to become a weekend reporter at WBTV for a year. She hated the job, and quickly turned her career toward community building and nonprofit development.

In 2016, she completed a residency with Carolinas HealthCare System as a chaplain, and she started to think about ways she could use her skills to help more people. She was the development director for the Harvest Center when, in 2019, she happened to drive past the one-story brick building off of Morehead and Wilkinson in west Charlotte. That morning, the property owner had put up a “For Lease” sign.

She calls what followed a “God Wink.”

She stopped and pressed her face against the window, then was startled by a man who said, “Can I help you with something?” She told him she was just curious about what the building looked like inside. She looked closer at his name badge, and she’d actually met the man two days earlier. He was a donor to the Harvest Center.

He showed her around and let her stay inside by herself. She didn’t close her eyes and envision how it would look or anything mawkish like that. Instead she just thought about what she wanted it to feel like. 

She went home and told her husband she wanted to leave her job. She talked to her daughter, then just 14 years old, about the vibe she wanted to create. Her daughter started creating a vision board. The girl came up with the branding and the logo. She even came up with what’s undoubtedly Pauline’s most important detail:

You pick your own cup.

On the wall beside the checkout counter are rows of gently used coffee cups, which she’s gathered through the years from friends and antique shops. They’re all different colors, mismatched and random. Kind of like a Grandma’s cabinet. My favorite is a vintage Morton Salt cup.

The shop has six different types of tea, with variations of each. When you order, the hospitality hostess asks if you’d like honey, then invites you to pick out your cup. Then she matches that cup with a teapot, which she’ll bring to you. That was all Sherry’s daughter’s idea, built on that “feeling.”

“If I get too woo-woo on you, let me know,” Sherry tells me, as if it’s necessary to apologize, as if I hadn’t come here explicitly for the woo-woo counterpoint to this go-go city. 

“But it’s the communion factor. A person choosing their teacup and then having our hospitality hostess pair the pot that they think would go with the cup — it’s a way of connectedness,” she says. “It's a way of just saying, ‘I'm with you; I see you.’”

One last God Wink.

That building Sherry stopped for, the one she wound up renting to create her sanctuary of tea and other things, sits on Arty Avenue. That’s short for artillery. 

Her lease runs out in December 2027, and she’s almost certain the property owner will want to turn the site into apartments. She doesn’t blame them. High-rises have sprouted up all around her in the seven years she’s been open. She’s also, you might guess, not stressing about it. God will wink again, she believes. 

Anyhow, back to Arty Avenue: A century ago, this area of Charlotte, Camp Greene, was a World War I training facility. It housed 60,000 or so Army soldiers, who stayed here and had a hospital here, while taking day trips to the Catawba River to train at the artillery range and airfield.

She likes that history. In her seven years as owner of The Pauline, she’s hosted funerals and weddings, baby and bridal showers. A few weeks ago she held a tea-tasting for a woman’s 40th birthday outing, and the woman’s friends asked if they ever had to leave.

And so goes the story of Charlotte. An Army artillery site becomes a medical facility becomes a rare house of peace that people don’t want to leave.

As Sherry puts it, “We’re repurposing this place to do something very different than arming up and getting ready for battle.” 

You put your teacup and dishes in the bin when you’re done, take a few more rakes in the sandbox, then walk back out into the hot summer morning, the sounds of busy people driving on busy roads all around you, and you wonder:

Have they ever stopped here?

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Roof Above powers through roof collapse

Roof Above’s Day Center, just north of Uptown, suffered a “catastrophic” roof collapse during last Tuesday’s overnight storms, leaving Charlotte’s centerpiece homeless services center with mud-caked floors and the summer sun pouring in from overhead, as WFAE reported.

Roof Above’s chief philanthropy officer, Jeremy Hall, said in an email to donors on Thursday that the team worked throughout the night, and was operating by 10 a.m., less than nine hours after the collapse. By 11:15 a.m., they were serving lunch as normal — barbecue, cole slaw, watermelon — and chef Sandra Smith said, “We’ve been serving lunch for 30 years, and this isn’t going to stop us,” according to Hall’s email.

The day services building, which provides laundry services and showers and mail for people experiencing homelessness, will likely be closed for six months and cost at least $5 million to repair and renovate, the email said.

You can give to the recovery effort here.

350 pages of Mayor Pat

The day after he was elected mayor in 1995, Pat McCrory took his dying father up to the top of the government center. Rollin “Mac” McCrory had been one of the most important figures in Pat’s story, and even though lymphoma would take his life two weeks later, Mac wanted to see how far his son had risen.

Former CMPD detective Garry McFadden, who’s now Mecklenburg’s sheriff, opened the doors and wheeled Mac to the windows overlooking the city. Mac stared for a few minutes, but then asked his son to come closer.

“Keep your damn zipper up,” Mac told Pat.

That story joins hundreds of other human anecdotes to make up a new book about McCrory’s life and work in politics. The Change Agent, by longtime writer, political analyst, and North Carolina obsessive Andrew Dunn, was published this past Tuesday.

The book was born from a simple question Dunn couldn’t escape. McCrory spent 14 years as Charlotte’s mayor, longer than any other, and then he swept into the governor’s mansion as a “rockstar Republican” in 2012, Dunn writes, winning deep-blue Wake and Mecklenburg counties in that election.

“How do you go from there to a complete political outcast in four years?” Dunn told me of the book’s central question last week.

If you’re one of the tens of thousands of people who’ve moved to Charlotte and North Carolina over the past eight years, you might easily not know the role McCrory played here. And if you do know of him, you may only recall that he was at the center of the contentious HB2 law that in 2016 overturned Charlotte’s nondiscrimination ordinance and led to boycotts of the state by large companies, artists, and sports leagues. Over the course of the year he not only drew the ire of Democrats, but lost his edge in rooms with Republicans to other leaders like Phil Berger and Tim Moore. McCrory ran for Senate in 2022, but lost by 34 percentage points to Ted Budd in the primary.

Dunn’s book takes a close look at 2016, and how McCrory still gets frustrated by how the year went.

But when I read an early copy of Dunn’s manuscript last month, I couldn’t help but think of it as a necessary read for the parts that come long before McCrory was governor. The Charlotte parts.

McCrory was born in Ohio and moved to Jamestown, near Greensboro, as a kid. He collected baseball cards and campaign posters from prominent politicians like Lyndon Johnson and JFK. He went on to become student-body president in high school, then again in college. He intended to go into teaching after college, but a job at Duke Energy offered him $50 more a month, so he took that.

He rose to gain the trust of CEO Bill Lee, one of the city’s most consequential figures, who eventually made the connections McCrory needed to run for political office.

McCrory won the last at-large seat on council in 1988. And in his time on the body, he made a lot of people mad. He once pushed for a seat-use tax to help fund the Panthers stadium. Dunn writes of how that effort caused a powerful businessman to call Bill Lee and say, “You need to control your guy.”

In some ways, the stories from his earliest political days remind me of the young politicians who’ve come into Charlotte’s politics since McCrory left. Folks like Braxton Winston, Tariq Bokhari, and now, J.D. Mazuera Arias, all have different political bents — but they disrupted the government center by making bold and uncomfortable proposals early in their terms. And all have been met with some sort of “wait your turn” response that McCrory encountered 40 years ago.

Some issues rhyme today, too. McCrory focused heavily on crime in his time on council and early in his tenure as mayor, launching a “Target 100” campaign that focused on the people who’d been arrested the most times for the most serious offenses. Soon he realized that the city could only play a part in crime reduction, because the state runs the courts. So he helped organize a caravan to Raleigh — including police officers, pastors, neighborhood leaders, and business leaders — to walk the halls of the legislature asking for help on that side.

McCrory’s most memorable accomplishment, of course, was pushing for transportation infrastructure, eventually opening the light rail from Uptown to Pineville. Almost any conversation about transportation since has stood on that foundation.

Who writes a book about McCrory is its own question. And Dunn, a south Charlotte resident and father of four, is an interesting answer. He’s a Republican, like McCrory. He worked on Dan Forest’s 2020 gubernatorial campaign, and now works at State Policy Network, which describes itself as nonpartisan but leans center-right. The book is friendly to McCrory, but it’s more reportorial than partisan.

Dunn started his career as a journalist. At UNC in the 2000s, he was the editor of the Daily Tar Heel, which in the college newspaper hierarchy is like being editor of the Wall Street Journal or New York Times. He came to Charlotte to work at the Observer in 2012, then spent three years at the startup Charlotte Agenda. His Longleaf Politics newsletter reaches political insiders around the state.

I sat down with Dunn at a SouthPark coffee shop on Friday morning. He wore a well-worn ball cap with a North Carolina flag on it. I asked about the tension of pursuing this project as a journalist, political consultant, and former campaign worker all at once.

“I don’t really get caught up in the distinction between who is a journalist and who is not a journalist,” Dunn says. “100 years ago, 200 years ago, there was none of that discussion. You had people who would write. … The main reason why I do what I do is because I want my children to inherit a small and growing and improved North Carolina.”

He published the book under his own Longleaf Politics Press and says it’ll be a win if it breaks even. But he believes — and so do I — that regardless of your opinion on McCrory, a consequential political career deserves a permanent printed account, HB2 and light rail and all.

Dunn spent about 200 hours with McCrory for the book. It’s worthy of a Charlotte citizen’s time, especially for those of us who didn’t live here then.

Find the book.

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Notes …

Davidson College announced last week that it will make tuition free for U.S. citizens or permanent residents whose families earn $175,000 or less, as Axios’ Ashley Mahoney wrote. Those whose families make $85,000 or less will also receive fees, housing, and room and board covered.

Speaking of Davidson, my pal and loyal Davidson alum Michael Kruse was part of a New York Times squad that wrote the definitive account of how the Graham Platner campaign imploded in Maine.

Hundreds of people protested outside of the Morris Family YMCA in Ballantyne earlier today, urging the Y to not sell the 22-acre property to Moments of Hope Church, according to the Observer. But the YMCA said in a statement earlier today that it is “moving forward with the transaction.” Here’s a gift link to the Observer’s coverage today.

South Carolina’s longtime senior senator, Lindsey Graham, died Saturday evening at 71 years old, after a brief and sudden illness, the Wall Street Journal wrote. Graham grew up in western South Carolina, near Clemson, and in college he became legal guardian of his younger sister after both of their parents died. Over the past two decades, he’d been a complicated figure — going from an across-the-aisle maverick who criticized the Tea Party movement in 2010, to a staunch supporter of President Trump after 2016.

Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, one of the historically Black “Divine Nine” sororities and fraternities, will host its 2026 South Atlantic Regional conference in Charlotte from July 30-August 2. The region has about 18,000 active members.

State lawmakers revamped North Carolina’s involuntary commitment policies, in a direct response to last year’s killing of Iryna Zarutska on Charlotte’s light rail — a case in which the defendant suffered from severe mental illness. The new law lets judges order someone into outpatient commitment for longer periods of time, and creates three programs to help defendants who are deemed unfit to stand trial, according to NC Local.

Ben Dungan, a champion for all things Gaston County, is taking his once-a-week newsletter, Hello Gaston!, to twice-a-week. Love how much he loves where he is.

“The biggest summer of soccer in American history” will continue in Charlotte after the World Cup, when the MLS brings its All-Star game here on July 29. Soccer nut Sam Spencer previewed the contest for Queen City Nerve.

One thing I’m holding onto …

Jeffrey Leak was a peaceful soul.

He spent nearly three decades at UNC Charlotte, working as a professor of English and Africana Studies, while serving as President of the Faculty and Director for the Center for the Study of the New South, among other leadership roles. He was a leader and mentor to several generations of young people.

He died in late June at 57. His colleague Mark West, another longtime UNC Charlotte English professor, wrote a lovely tribute.

Leak grew up near Beatties Ford Road and spent most of his time in the library, when he wasn’t listening to his mother and father tell him stories of his heritage.

I had the privilege of working with Leak once. This was in 2014, and our team at Charlotte magazine was producing an issue we titled, “Are We Southern?” I went out looking for established writers and thinkers to explore the question through their own lens. I called Leak, and he was in.

The essay he turned in, “Memories of Brooklyn,” is one of those pieces that altered how I think about Charlotte, in the best way. It was the first time I’d worked with someone who had a direct tie to the historic Black neighborhood that was razed during urban renewal. On top of that, Leak — whose career includes multiple books — was one of the easiest writers to work with in the editing process.

As one of his colleagues said in UNC Charlotte’s remembrance last week, “No matter who you were, he would affirm you and you felt special in your connection to him and to the Charlotte community.”

Thinking of his family, friends, students, UNC Charlotte colleagues, and his fellow Friendship Missionary Baptist congregants who loved him. Just look at all these tributes. What a life.

Thank you for reading. Be sure to share The Charlotte Optimist’s subscribe link with a friend this week.

Michael