Unstir the Gravy

Note: The following is my 2025 Nine Dots entry. I was one of over 600 applicants, and although I did not win, I am grateful for the experience and the opportunity to interview Glenna Combs Stidham and Steve Napier — two highly influential people in my life.

My essay responds to the question: "Is data failing us?"

Please visit ninedotsprize.org to learn more about the competition and view the 2025 winning entry.

Unstir the Gravy 

At ten years old, Granny lived in a cabin with no electricity or plumbing, just like all her neighbors in 1960. Her home was nestled in the Daniel Boone National Forest in Kentucky. “We didn’t have a car road to my house until I was eight- or nine-year-old. We either had to walk out or we had to ride the mule.”1 Granny’s warm Appalachian accent permeates her words. She sprinkles more flour into the bowl and stirs the biscuit dough with a wooden spoon before nudging the sausage crumbles sizzling in the cast iron skillet. The little kitchen smells like home. Some things never change.  

Granny, or Glenna Combs Stidham as everyone else knows her, tells her story in her book, Down a Crooked Road, but nothing beats hearing her reminisce over the familiar stories while she pours milk, butter, and flour in with the sausage. “I hope I don’t make thin gravy,” she says. Granny doesn’t need a recipe—all her recipes are stored up from years of cooking. Her parents, Ott and Rachel, owned farmland, and although they didn’t have much money or access to electricity or plumbing, they lived a self-sustained lifestyle. Her dad journeyed on foot eight miles one way to work every morning, yet all they bought from town was flour, sugar, and spices. They raised everything else they needed on the farm.2 

“I was raised just like everybody else was—unless you were some of the town crowd, you know, the business owners. About all our neighbors were raised like we were…never thought nothing about it, it was just the way you lived, everybody lived the same.”3 

The spirit of the Kentucky people contains strains of Scottish and Irish fire. When the Scotch-Irish first settled in the sloping Appalachian Mountains, it was an unconquered frontier—one no other immigrant group desired to tame. The mountains cut these tenacious settlers off from the rest of the world.4 As the rest of the country was enveloped in the information boom and embraced technological advances, life in the back hollows of Kentucky remained chiefly untouched. The Scotch-Irish way of life was passed on for generations through music, architecture, and speech.5 To this day, the dialect of those in this region of Appalachia is the closest remaining link to the Shakespearean dialect. Kentuckian speech can be traced back to the time of Chaucer and Layamon. Common mountain terms such as “afore, atwixt, awar, heap o’ folks, peart, up and done it, usen for used…were contemporary with the Canterbury Tales.”6 The mountains acted as a time capsule and preserved a way of life lost to the rest of the country and the world. 

“‘Try to imagine,’ proposed Walter J. Ong, Jesuit priest, philosopher, and cultural historian, ‘a culture where no one has ever “looked up” anything.’ To subtract the technologies of information internalized over two millennia requires a leap of imagination backward into a forgotten past.”7  

For Granny and many others who grew up in rural Appalachia, this past is not distant and certainly not forgotten. She lived it. “The only thing we had was a battery radio, and we’d only get two or three stations. We had coal oil lamps, a wood cookstove, and an outside toilet. We didn’t have any modern conveniences at that time. I’m the youngest of ten children, and when the eighth child came along, Dad bought Mom a Maytag washer that was battery operated. You started it up like a lawn mower.”8 This lifestyle had largely disappeared in the rest of the country as the rise of the Information Age took over. Although behind the rest of the country, Kentucky would soon be enveloped in this wave of new data. 

Granny recalls when change arrived in Kentucky. “When Kennedy got killed and Johnson took over, he started the war on poverty, and they started bringing in all these college kids. That’s when I figured out that I was poor. I didn’t really know we was poor until then.”9 

The time capsule was opened to the rest of the world. For the last two decades or more, the rest of the USA was swept with the information boom and the onset of technology and computer growth. Until now, the information boom was merely trickling into the rugged mountains of southeast Kentucky. However, the flood was coming.  

For Granny, access to technology and education brought positive growth and opportunities. Granny is a true “American dream” story. She hitchhiked her way through nursing school, while she raised three children, earning her RN. She then worked as head nurse at Mary Breckenridge Hospital in Hyden, Kentucky while continuing her education by taking master’s classes. She retired from nursing and now runs a millinery business, owns and operates several Airbnbs, and takes music classes at the Kentucky School of Bluegrass.10 

Granny benefited from data and access to information—access she was not afforded in her youth. However, growth happens through loss. It is a trade. As access to information and technology increased in Appalachia, skills and culture faded. Because Kentucky was slightly behind the rest of the country in the Age of Data, we can see more clearly the impact of this loss.  

“It actually started when everybody started driving cars, back in the 60s,” Granny says as she stirs the gravy, “because until we all had cars, everybody walked, and so you went along the road and you passed your neighbors’ houses—they didn’t have air-conditioning, and so they’d be sitting out on the porch fanning and burning up, and you’d say ‘hello!’ and they’d say ‘come in’ and you’d talk about what’s going on. You actually talked to real people. It got so when everybody got cars, you’d just be a-zipping along and you’d wave your hand and that’s about it—now you don’t even wave half the time.”11 

With the onset of technology, the internet, and ready access to information, Granny watched society become less social. People became more individualistic and lived in less community. Skills were lost as well. People weren’t as self-sufficient and, simultaneously, didn’t rely on each other as much. Growing a family garden and raising animals was replaced with grocery stores and takeout.  

“When you had the old-fashioned telephones, you could call and talk, but you couldn’t do that often, you know. And now, with the computer, you can get on Facebook and send a message and it’s there in a minute, but there’s no warm human contact there, you know, you’re just talking to a machine…It’s not like me and you sitting down here and quilting all day and talking about everything.”12 

Research confirms Granny’s theory. Gen Z is labeled the “Loneliest Generation,” and an article in The Atlantic reported that since 2003, adults have spent 30% less time socializing with other adults face-to-face. For teenagers, the prognosis worsens as they spend 45% less face-to-face time with friends. The article cites overscheduling and technology, like social media, as the culprits.13 

Along with less time socializing face-to-face, anxiety and other mental health issues have skyrocketed in the last generation. Gen Z is the generation with the most ability and access to information, able to contact anyone in the world at any time, and yet is the most isolated generation thus far. 14 

Granny grew up surrounded by seven hundred thousand acres of forest, no electricity, no plumbing, and no car access. Many around her lived the same, however, she was less isolated than today’s urban teen sitting on a couch, smartphone in hand. This is undoubtedly a negative outcome of the information boom and technological advances.  

Before the days of widespread data, it was common to get together for Sunday dinners and community box suppers at the one-room schoolhouse or church. But it was a hard life. Granny lives a life of ease compared to when her parents were her age. “[My parents] was tough as nails. They [worked hard] until they died. We ain’t got that kind of grit no more.”15 Life was hard, and people worked hard, but they supported each other and lived in community. 

The oven door groans open, and Granny snatches the pan of biscuits out with one mitted hand. “When the crops came in, you’d have neighbors come and help, and you do a bean stringing and cook a big supper, or build a house—everybody come pitch in and help, and then you’d go help that person when they needed you. But that’s not happened since the 60s at least.”16 

Granny’s upbringing is a disappearing culture and lifestyle, and although she lives with air-conditioned rooms, big screen TVs, and indoor plumbing, not everything has been an advantageous trade-off. “I have six hundred friends on Facebook, and I know every one of them—who they are—and I’ll say hello and talk to them, but I don’t have four real close friends.” Granny plates the biscuits and douses them with thick, creamy sausage gravy. “Now, if I didn’t make myself, I wouldn’t have a social life outside of this house.”  

The widespread availability of data brought with it a change of lifestyle and culture, one in which people do not live in community and are not as dependent on each other for basic needs. Data and technology brought the hope of greater connection but have led us to a society of isolation. Loneliness and ease are more interchangeable than anyone could have imagined. “Time flows on, never comes back,” said Léon Brillouin in 1949. “When the physicist is confronted with this fact, he is greatly disturbed.”17 Even though we see the damage done to society by the onset of data and technology, there is no going back, even if we wanted to. 

James Gleick writes in his book, The Information, that statistically, everything tends toward maximum entropy. Though, in theory, the numbers show that one should be able to reverse this damage, it thus far hasn’t been done. Gleick writes, “You cannot stir things apart.”18 Even if we wanted to, we cannot go back in time and undo society’s advances. We may be witnessing sociological entropy as the information boom and technology continue to take over the modern world.  

Data has drastically changed our lifestyle and relationships in the last few decades, and this includes our romantic relationships. While for most of modern society, old-fashioned courtships are fading from memory, the people of Kentucky remember. Steve Napier lives thirty miles up the road from Granny in the town of Hazard, Kentucky. Steve stands well over six feet tall and casts a laugh so jolly, he could be ol’ Saint Nick if he weren’t lacking a pot belly and white beard. His wife, Neda, would have fit right in as Mrs. Claus, with her half-moon eyes sparkling with a dash of mischief and a heap of kindness.  

Steve recalls life was a lot different in Kentucky when he was growing up. “We had water to the kitchen, but we didn’t have a bathroom or anything like that for a few years, and we didn’t have a telephone for several years when we were young. Some things have changed for the better, and some things would be better off back with the slower pace.”19 

 Unlike Granny, Steve lived closer to town with access to paved roads and buses. “When we were growing up, we had a Greyhound bus station here in Hazard. A lot of people traveled from different areas through the Greyhound bus system. But we had city buses that actually ran out in the county for a while until more people got driver’s licenses. My mom never did drive, so when Dad was working, if we had to go into town for any sort of unplanned shopping or to go to the dentist or anything like that, we always rode the city bus.”20 

Although he has no memories of riding mules to town, Steve does remember the trek down Ball Creek—the road where Neda grew up. “It was a dirt road, very rough, and you was in and out of the creek driving up through there.”21 

According to a study conducted by Stanford University, the majority of couples between 1930 and 2013 met through mutual friends.22 This was true for Steve and Neda. The pair was set up on a blind date, and less than a year later, Steve looked over at Neda and said, “When we gonna get married anyway?” Steve chuckled at the memory. “I was never a romantic.”23 

Neda was eighteen when Steve proposed, and she told him he’d have to ask her daddy. Steve obliged, and Neda’s dad told him, “She is young and stupid, but if you wanna marry her, you can marry her anyway.”24 

The two married on Neda’s nineteenth birthday: February 19, 1977, and were married for over forty-two years until death did them part. In 2019, Neda unexpectedly passed away from a brain aneurysm.  

“Forty-two years, five months.” Steve’s voice grew contemplative. “I’ve always thought, especially years later, that the Good Lord knowed what he was doing, because life sure changed when she passed. That’s your best friend. You wind up [knowing more] about each other than you know about yourself.” 25  

Steve and Neda’s beautiful love story translated into a beautiful life full of gardens, church community, children, and grandchildren. Although Neda has gone on, her and Steve’s relationship with each other and the Lord is a beautiful legacy that continues to bring growth to their children’s and grandchildren’s lives and the lives of those in the community.  

Steve recalls, “In some ways you grow up together when you’re young and sort of naive on a lot of stuff about life…Back in my day most people were married in their late teens or early twenties.”26 

In the 1960s, men’s median age at first marriage was about 22.8, and women first married at a median age of 20.3. Today, according to the US Census Bureau, the median age has shifted to 31.1 years for men and 29.2 years for women at the time of the first marriage.27  

Now, instead of meeting through mutual friends, the most common way to meet a spouse, by far, is through online dating.28 Far from a blind date, singles can find someone with the same interests, beliefs, and attraction with the swipe of a finger. There is more data than ever in the dating world. Singles have access to new people and the ability to narrow down to specific attractions and common ground. However, the result has been fewer and later marriages along with a high divorce rate. One would expect having so much data to find your perfect match would lead to finding your person faster and locking in a longer lasting marriage. Yet, we see the opposite.29 

As our social relationships have become more clinical and superficial, so have our romantic relationships. We have traded meeting a friend of a friend and unraveling who they are for a lifetime for a list of facts on a phone screen and a picture taken at the perfect angle—reading about people and judging them under the blue light for half a second before swiping left or right. More access than ever, yet more isolation.30  

The information boom and widespread accessibility of data and technology have left their mark on the world—positive and negative. Life has changed a lot in Granny’s and Steve’s lifetimes. Some changes have brought a higher quality of life, while others have been a mark of social entropy, leaving us with lower quality relationships and life satisfaction.  

The gravy cannot be unstirred back into flour, butter, and milk. Entropy cannot be undone. However, there is a growing trend of young people trying to claw their way back to a simpler life. Homesteaders are revitalizing an old way of living. There is a growing desire to live a more self-sustaining lifestyle revolving around growing gardens, cooking from scratch, and raising chickens.31  

A greater demand for “dumb phones” and life with less internet access and limited social media is emerging. This movement, coined “crunchy,” points to a growing desire to relearn the traditions, knowledge, and skills lost in the information boom.32 Younger generations are aware that ease of life and quality of life are not interchangeable terms. Even so, not many homesteaders are trading indoor plumbing for outhouses. The advances and widespread nature of data are here to stay.  

“Has data failed us?” Granny ponders the question as she takes a bite of the fluffy biscuit covered in mouth-watering sausage gravy. “The only way data has failed us is we’ve let it fail us by how we use it. You are in control of your life. You have to learn to control your own life. You can’t control nobody else’s.”33 The age of data and technology has ushered in positive and negative changes in culture and society. It has brought both ease and painful isolation into our day to day lives. However, blaming data for society’s problems is like saying “The devil made me do it.” There is good and evil, joy and struggle in every time and generation. We cannot undo the past, but we can take what we have now and build and struggle with it like our hardworking ancestors worked with what they were given. We can use the data as a tool and refuse to let it rule over our lives making machines out of us. 

“I had a good life,” Granny says, giving the leftover gravy another stir. Her eyes drift to a far-off time, and her face softens into a smile. “I still got a good life.”34  

Bibliography: 

Bowler, Abby. “Isolation Among Generation Z in the United States.” Ballard Brief, July 30, 2024. https://ballardbrief.byu.edu/issue-briefs/isolation-among-generation-z-in-the-united-states. 

Brillouin, Léon. Scientific Uncertainty and Information. Academic Press, 1964. 

Combs, Glenna. Down a Crooked Road: Memoirs of My Journey. KDP Publishing, 2020. 

DeAngelis, Tori. “Teens Are Spending Nearly 5 Hours Daily on Social Media. Here Are the Mental Health Outcomes.” https://www.apa.org, n.d. https://www.apa.org/monitor/2024/04/teen-social-use-mental-health. 

Gleick, James. The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood. Pantheon Books, 2011. 

Kephart, Horace. Our Southern Highlanders. University of Tennessee Press, 1984. 

Klotter, James C., and Freda C. Klotter. A Concise History of Kentucky. University Press of Kentucky, 2008. 

Maskoff, Sasha. “In America’s Heartland, Homesteading Is Making a Comeback.” Midstory, August 9, 2024. https://www.midstory.org/in-americas-heartland-homesteading-is-making-a-comeback/. 

Pearce, John Ed. Days of Darkness: The Feuds of Eastern Kentucky. University Press of Kentucky, 1994. 

Rosenfeld, Michael J., Reuben J. Thomas, and Sonia Hausen. “Disintermediating Your Friends: How Online Dating in the United States Displaces Other Ways of Meeting.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 116, no. 36 (August 20, 2019): 17753–58. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1908630116.  

Smith, Zachariah Fredrick. The History of Kentucky: From Its Earliest Discovery and Settlement, to the Present Date. Prentice Press, 1886.  

Stanford Libraries Social Science Data Collection. “How Couples Meet and Stay Together 2017 (HCMST 2017),” n.d. https://data.stanford.edu/hcmst2017. 

Stoltzfus, Martha. Hope in the Deepest Hollow. Masthof Press, 2005.  

--. New Moon Over Slick Rock Hollow. Masthof Press, 2005. 

Thompson, Derek. “Why Americans Suddenly Stopped Hanging Out.” The Atlantic, December 19, 2024. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/02/america-decline-hanging-out/677451/.  

US Census Bureau. “Historical Marital Status Tables.” last modified November 7, 2024. https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/demo/families/marital.html