September 2, 2019
Summer tiptoed away this Labor Day weekend with soft sunlight and clear sky. We tried to keep it here by seeing people we care about. I continued to annoy Sandy with my “where were we this time last year” shtick, recalling the road trip, but that more or less petered out after our anniversary (last week’s post). For the record, on this day last year we were in the two-week dead zone, me waddling around with a stent, as we looked forward to our flight back to Vegas.
As this past week ended our daughter sent us a real-estate listing, a two-bedroom house in Greenville, S.C., near where they live. Why don’t we just do it? Our son Michael, the closest to us of the four kids (near Philly), quizzed me. “Go ahead and do it if that’s what you want,” he said. “If that’s what you want”—the caveat always attached. So, for us, the usual paralysis.
We thought about what touch-ups the house would need if we decided to put it on the market. Paint the kitchen ceiling. Paint the bathroom downstairs. Do something about the shower in the other bathroom. Replace the broken spigot on the back of the house. Replace the drain line from the sump pump. When I think about it, the list of stuff we’ve put off gets scary. Who in his right mind would want to buy this place? We’ll paint that ceiling, maybe next week.
I pulled back from all this navel-gazing just in time. It’s been a great week, starting with a charming visit with four ladies, two from Guatemala, two from Peru, with whom I worked at our former parish’s food pantry. I asked them if they’re going back; they all have family in those places, but they’re all U.S. citizens. They shook their heads, they don’t know what the future holds. Same as us, same as everyone. They sang old Latin love songs along with a karaoke machine. It was fun to watch, the way native-born sixty- and seventy-somethings sing along with the Beatles, the Stones, the Beach Boys.
Afterward, we all had tea. We kept the conversation light, although that day Trump had announced new barriers to asylum for those who seek it.
The next day we showed up at the Happy Trails running club annual picnic. Grizzled old guys, my group, along with kids in their twenties and thirties, all talking about their next 100-milers, their favorite shoes, their injuries. It’s fun, although my last ultra event was more than a year ago.
We headed out for our anniversary trip to Richmond. Our hotel was at the bottom of narrow, cobblestoned Cary Street, in the well-preserved old business district that draws the visitor back to Richmond’s dark years as capital of the Confederacy. Downtown then blends with the Monument Avenue neighborhood, the Avenue accented by all those fabulous old homes and with the statues and memorials that lend the name: Robert E. Lee, J.E.B. Stuart, Thomas (Stonewall) Jackson, and Jefferson Davis.
Those four still are revered by the Trump constituency, who don’t care much that Lee, Stuart, and Jackson learned their military skills at West Point and Davis was U.S. Secretary of War, before they all decided “states rights” and preserving slavery were more important to them than a united nation, and crossed over to the Rebels.
Offering a faint sort of balance, Afro-American tennis star Arthur Ashe’s statue, much smaller, is there, too.
The government district near our hotel reminds me of the slippery characters we’ve had to endure in state leadership in recent years. Still, Richmond is a net positive, with its elegant Fan District, Virginia Commonwealth University, the prestigious VCU Hospital. The city is the southern redoubt of the growing Democratic clout of northern Virginia. It also marks the jumping-off point to the hardscrabble red-state rural South, the depressed old coal-mining and farming counties on down to Tennessee and North Carolina that still send hardcore Republicans to the legislature.
We enjoyed a relaxing dinner with our son’s best friend. Tuesday morning we piled on the fun with a mile-long hike up East Main Street to the Third Street Diner, a 24-hour hole-in-the-wall bar-diner that serves great breakfasts. Thursday, a happy visit with old friends, contemporaries who braved northern Virginia traffic to visit. We compare notes on our aches and pains, next medical stops, our kids, our plans, such as they are.
Saturday—the Ring, the annual masochistic Happy Trails Labor Day extravaganza consisting of a full circuit of the 71-mile Massanutten Trail out in Fort Valley, Va., usually held in oppressively hot weather. I’ve completed the Ring once and twice finished the “reverse” Ring, held the last weekend in February—same race but in the opposite direction, usually in brutally cold weather. No ultra-running for me this time, or maybe ever again. We’re volunteers, delivering dropbags, handing out aid at the 25-mile point, and hauling exhausted, dropped-out runners to their cars.
Driving those winding rural roads through the lush, thickly forested mountains takes me back, not just to when I entered every Virginia mountain trail event I could afford, but also to those young years, when Sandy and I drove through Middle Tennessee to her aunt’s farm in Pikeville, hard against the Cumberland Plateau. We indulge in these memories then awaken abruptly to load whipped runners into the van. I sympathize, but privately think: I finished this thing. Next time: persevere, get it done.
So our life is full of these treasured days. I did get a letter Wednesday from the pulmonary critical-care doc (copy to oncologist) advising more diagnosis of the thickening of my pericardial wall, which encases the heart. “Recurrent cancer or radiation effect,” he wrote.
Still waiting to get a surgery date for the kidney. Still taking my pills. Still swinging, metaphorically, from vine to vine, among the physicians here in northern Virginia. But ready to say goodbye to summer. And maybe to this place.
On the Road 