June 26, 2023

The fastest routes from Greenville S.C., to Franklin County, Tenn., about six hours, are all interstate. You go either north, through Asheville and west past Knoxville, then southwest to I-24, or south through Atlanta, then northwest to Tennessee. The only direct east-west route is across winding state roads. We tried that once, tramping through the wilderness, South Carolina to Georgia then North Carolina to Tennessee just above Chattanooga.

The southern interstate route is about 40 miles shorter. We got lucky through Atlanta, navigating the beltway under 50 mph, but always moving. We broke free of the commuter slog and headed for the northern Georgia peaks, then past the Chickamauga battlefield.

Our mission was a memorial service for a departed cousin. She had lived in Michigan for many years but was determined to return to her parents’ resting place in Franklin County. It had been years since Sandy saw her, but we knew we would be there, for the husband and son, for all who loved her.

Lookout Mountain looms over Chattanooga just west and south of I-24. The wide Tennessee River rolls by the city. There’s an odd stretch where the highway leaves Tennessee and briefly reenters Georgia. It then crosses spectacular Nickajack Lake, which is a broad place on the Tennessee as it winds up from Alabama. The terrain grows rugged across this remote, majestic corner of the state. The highway then starts a seven-mile rise around hair-raising turns into Monteagle.

Monteagle isn’t much of a place. It was a way station along the Trail of Tears, the route taken in the late 1830s through 1850 by thousands of Cherokee, Choctaw, Seminole, and other native peoples from their Southeast homelands to Oklahoma. The Trail ordeal, ordered by Andrew Jackson, is an indelible stain on American history. You can see markers of it here and there.

The town unfolds along U.S. 41A, which then transits small Tennessee communities north to Nashville and on into Kentucky. The Monteagle stretch accommodates the Smokehouse Lodge, a Piggly Wiggly grocery, the Dixie Lee Diner, and fast food clustered along the I-24 exit. Further east, but inclining north is Clifftops, an upscale gated community and the usual mix of rural Southern businesses, construction, cement mixing, auto repair, and so on.

Six miles in you stumble on Sewanee, the lovely 13,000-acre campus of the University of the South. Regional Episcopalian leaders established the school in 1857 as a “Southern” alternative to Northern institutions and Northern values, as North-South acrimony neared its explosion four years later.

For decades after the war the school was tainted by its early entanglement with the Confederacy and the Lost Cause and dubbed “The University of the Old South.” Today Sewanee has rejected the ugly connections. In 2017 the school initiated the Roberson Project on Slavery, Race, and Reconciliation, intended as a clear-eyed look the school’s history. From 2020-2022 a Black man, Robert Brigety II, served as chancellor, until his appointment as ambassador to South Africa.

Institutions create their history as they shape their future. Meanwhile the place has some magic for us, beyond history, beyond the graceful Gothic architecture, rolling forest, and the 60-foot white cross perched on a mountainside that honors Franklin County’s veterans. The place isn’t just an ivory tower for tweedy academics.

Sewanee looms over Cowan, where Sandy grew up at the base of Sewanee Mountain. She went to Middle Tennessee State in Murfreesboro, but when home used the Sewanee university library.  She came with friends to swim in Lake Cheston, a pretty five-acre pond hidden in woods on campus property but shared by Sewanee preppies and town kids alike.

We drove to the lake along a wooded gravel road past farmland and pastures and walked the footpath along the sand beach. The woodland reflected in the water, which shimmered in the afternoon heat. A few kids splashed near shore, students were setting up a picnic. She glanced around the place where she had swum fifty or so years ago. I proposed an early morning dip, she declined.

We headed back to the main campus, past gorgeous but understated homes half-hidden by dense woods. Students stirred about, a music festival was getting underway amid the stone towers, past All Saints Chapel, Saint Luke’s Chapel, and Bishop’s Commons. Students hiked or cycled by, kids who had not yet been born when we first walked the Commons, gawking at the rough-hewn beauty.

We got breakfast the next morning at the Dixie Lee, done over as a step back to the 1950s, and took a quick spin through Tracy City, a spot on the map in nearby Grundy County. I reported here in October 2021 that Grundy had the lowest rate of covid vaccinations of children in the country. Not everything about small towns is wonderful.

In Cowan we visited the couple who had purchased the home Sandy grew up in. They showed us the lovely upgrades to the place they had completed over the past 35 years. I vaguely recognized the kitchen, the placement of the wood stove, the bedroom I had slept in eons ago.

The memorial service brought together cousins, uncles, aunts, friends. Some were local, others had trekked from Michigan. Some were young and moving forward in life, others, like me, were at the story-telling, reminiscing stage. At the cemetery, in the hot Tennessee sun, we prayed and dropped pale roses on the grave, hugged, waved, and drifted away. I looked up at the green sweep of the mountains and saw the Sewanee cross, ten miles away, gleaming in the high sun.                

June 19, 2023

We parked and headed for the entrance to massive Riverside High School, then to the cafeteria. The grandsons ran ahead, looking forward to the cereal and fruit juice.

The county school system offers free breakfast and lunch for students at the high school even through summer break. My grandsons like going for the fun stuff. The hot-food lines were crammed with sausages and biscuits and other things that kids don’t want. But the place was nearly empty. Before we left I saw one other adult, one other child. An excess of good intentions? Maybe the crowd gets there later. If not, all that food would have to be thrown out.

After eating we strolled down the school’s main corridors. We looked in wonder at a twelve-foot-high trophy case crammed with silver cups and plaques celebrating sports championships going back years. The three-story-high ceiling is highlighted by the Stars and Stripes and the flags of many nations of Europe, Asia, and Africa suspended from rafters. I blinked. In the first row hangs the flag of North Korea.

North Korea?  The flags of Russia and China also were displayed, along with a few others of politically repressive states, Cuba, Turkey, Vietnam, and Saudi Arabia. Russia and China I could get, they’re major powers. Turkey and Saudi Arabia are non-democracies, but important players in world affairs. Again, I wondered: why North Korea?

We all know about North Korea: Kim Jong Un, political paranoia and isolation, summary executions, massive prison camps and armed forces, regional bullying, nuclear saber-rattling.

The BBC reported last week that North Korea’s chronic food shortage now may be the worst since the famine of the late 1990s. The country sealed its borders in January 2020 at the start of the pandemic, stopped importing grain from China, and halted purchases of fertilizer and farm machinery. Food markets are nearly empty. Starvation is becoming common.

Meanwhile the regime test-launched 63 ballistic missiles last year, at an estimated cost of $500 million, BBC says, enough to make up for the country’s annual grain shortfall.

The Brits say the intelligence on North Korea’s current internal conditions is provided by a South Korean organization, Daily NK, which maintains a network of anonymous sources, ordinary North Koreans who are brave enough to be interviewed. Their answers are relayed in multiple installments to avoid detection. Responses that could reveal identities are not published.

The sources report, among other things, that the government has passed a law against using words associated with the South Korean dialect.

The logic of the Riverside flag selection escaped me. A United Nations-like potpourri of color to spruce up the hallway? A testimonial to the breadth of the social-studies curriculum?

I sent an email to the school principal, writing, “North Korea is a totalitarian Communist dictatorship that forbids all freedom of expression, prevents its citizens from leaving the country, imprisons thousands of its citizens under brutal conditions. The North Korean government has threatened to use nuclear weapons to attack its neighbors and the United States.

“Displaying the North Korean flag creates the impression that North Korea, like other nations whose flags are shown, is just another member of the ‘world community.’ That is tragically untrue. I urge you to direct your staff to remove the North Korean flag from the hallway display.”

Within hours, she wrote back: “Thank you for reaching out. The flags that are hanging in our school represent a country where a student is from. We have students attending Riverside from all over the world. We have a few flags hanging where those nations restrict freedoms and are anti-American but its where our students are from and we want our students to feel welcome at RHS.”

Am I just being a grump? Is my complaining about the North Korean flag hanging in the main corridor of the local high school like an old guy yelling “Get off my lawn” at neighborhood kids? I don’t have kids in the school. Is this none of my business? While the principal was polite, she probably thought exactly that.

Parsing the rough phrasing of her email, I guessed she dashed it off in thirty seconds and didn’t look back. It’s summer break, but a principal of a large, prestigious high school is busy year-round. She didn’t need the extra chore of responding to, or even reading, a cranky email from me.

But then. We can be sure that if the North Korean students at Riverside High are refugees or escapees, they would have reason to fear for their lives if they returned to their native land.

The flag (any flag) symbolizes the political traditions and ideals of the nation, not individuals who happen to be natives. Americans raise the Stars and Stripes on Independence Day to express love and support for their country, not to identify themselves as Americans (even non-Americans wave the U.S. flag).

 Does the North Korean flag hanging from the rafters at Riverside help North Korean students and their families feel welcome? More likely it inspires fear.

I didn’t respond to the principal’s email. The flags in the school hallway may mean different things to different observers. Some may see “diversity” without political overtones. Nothing wrong with that. And then, we’re all tired of politics, in this era of Republican attacks on school officials. But the flag of North Korea as a beacon of diversity? I get a different message.

June 12, 2023

Before we left home for my appointment I walked behind the house and looked at the garden and the lawn. More weeds had shown up, thanks to the hot South Carolina sun. As we putter up the block we see “Congratulations Graduate!” signs in front yards. People are stirring about at their lawn chores. They wave, I wave back.

We headed to East Greenville, made the right turn onto Commonwealth Drive then onto International. The street is lined with beautiful landscaping, enormous shade trees, and modern medical office buildings, clinics, and one of the Bon Secours hospitals. We pull into the lot, which is bordered by a garden and a shrine to the patients.   

Everyone is friendly at the Institute. Cordiality, concern, sympathy are part of the mission. Patients wait maybe ten minutes at most for their labs, the phlebotomists get them right in. “Right arm or left?” they ask, followed by, “Band-aid or wrap?” Then back to the waiting area outside the oncology offices.

Promptly, or nearly promptly, a nurse calls the patient in and does the usual weigh-in (although you can decline it), blood pressure, and temp check. “Any falls?” she asks.

The six months of immunotherapy sessions have become a ritual. I show up, give blood. The lab checks the blood and, for most visits, sends the data to the physician-assistant. She looks at the numbers, some are always little high, others a little low. She asks me how I’m feeling. “You need to hydrate better,” she says. “Sixty to eighty ounces per day.” She then gives the pharmacy the go-ahead to mix the drug.

Last Thursday we went straight to the treatment room.

Dr. B. usually is on time. His appointments are scheduled for 15 minutes, but he’s always with us longer. He’s a young, good-looking guy with a lyrical South Georgia drawl, and he knows cancer, the big four therapies, radiation, chemo, surgery, and the newer drugs, but also the complex gene science that controls our lives. After my December 2020 operation he sent my tissue to Foundation One, the Boston lab that studies cancer at the cellular level. He wanted to know that much about my insides.

That’s where he was last week. He called up the new CT scan on the computer monitor, peered at it, and sat back. “You’ve got me stumped, Ed. I looked at these again last night.” He leaned forward and drew his hand across the shadows on the screen. “This is where we are. There’s some growth. But I don’t think we need to move to something stronger yet.”

I mentioned that the scan report showed a change in the liver tumor from millimeters to centimeters. “No, that’s wrong,” he said. He scratched out “CM” on my copy and wrote “MM” next to the number. “It’s a typo. I don’t know how they did that.” We let out our breath.

He got to his feet and turned to a white board and scrawled “Erdafitinib.” It’s a drug identified by Foundation One thought to benefit my er—situation. The disease has something to do with the mutation of a gene, dubbed FGFR3, that creates a protein used in cell functions. Mutation of the gene can cause cancer cells to multiply.

“If we decide that Keytruda isn’t working, we could go to Erdafitinib. It’s a chemo drug, taken in pill form. But it brings some toxicity—side effects—nausea, abdominal pain, others,” he said, still upbeat, smiling.

I like to think I was done with that.

The doc took his seat and leaned back, his hands behind his head. He asked about the Murph workout I did at Crossfit last week, how I broke up the sets. Then he moved on. “You’re tolerating Keytruda so well, I’m inclined to go a little longer. I’m not ready to say it’s not effective. You’ve got three more sessions, right?

“Let’s finish those. We may get you a few more, then another CT. Then we’ll make a decision. We’ve looked at your liver, no problems. Stay active. Keep doing everything you’re doing.”

I headed down the hall for immunotherapy session number eight. A decision, a path forward is what matters. The real start of decline in cancer, any cancer, is in your head: uncertainty, ambiguity, which creates the second stage, depression, followed by despair.

A smiling nurse, Becky, met me outside the treatment room. I walked with her past the other patients, some looking at their phones or sleeping, some with that blasted look of “what the heck is going on?” They’re the ones on the serious drugs, the major-league toxic medicines that kill healthy cells along with cancer, wrecking the body to save it. The room was nearly full.

“Looks like you’re busy,” I said.

“Always,” she answered.

Becky pointed at a Laz-Z-Boy next to an older lady. I sat, she inserted my IV. We waited 15 or 20 minutes while the pharmacists brewed the drug.

She picked up the plastic bag with the drug and hooked me up. The stuff flowed, I sipped water. The young chaplain, making his rounds, stopped by and exchanged pleasantries, asking if anything was new. I told him where I stood, he scribbled on his clipboard. He moved on to the lady on my left and chatted with her for a while. I was out of there in under an hour.

We headed home, into the minor-league rush hour traffic this minor-league city produces, past the lovely shade trees. We steered past pretty subdivisions and thick green pastures. As I drove, I wondered how many times I had visited the Cancer Institute. I had been seeing the doc now for two and a half years. For a couple of months he passed me to Dr. Z, the radiation oncologist, who pitched me back after radiation.

Then I thought of other things, the trip to Tennessee next month, the good, loving people around us, the cosmic events that create history, the blessings and tragedies we live through. The world creaked forward.     

June 5, 2023

Memorial Day came and went. Some folks enjoyed picnics, parades, and regular updates on the soap opera in Washington over the new bill to allow the government to continue borrowing. Others, maybe thousands, engaged in an exercise routine called Murph.

Many Americans have heard of the heroism and the tragedy of Navy Lieutenant Michael Murphy and Petty Officers Marcus Luttrell, Danny Dietz, and Matthew Axelson. They are the SEALs sent on a covert mission into a death trap in a remote place in Afghanistan in late June 2005. Murphy, Dietz, and Axelson were ambushed and killed by Taliban fighters. Only Luttrell survived. Sixteen more Special Forces members en route to rescue the SEALs were killed when their helicopter was shot down.

Murphy received a posthumous Medal of Honor for his actions during the battle. Dietz and Axelson were awarded the Navy’s second-highest honor, the Navy Cross, posthumously. Luttrell also received the Navy Cross. In 2007 Luttrell published Lone Survivor, which told the story of the mission. The book became a movie in 2013.

The SEALs have their legacy. Parks, post offices, schools, and roads have been named after them. Non-profit foundations have been established in their names. A new Navy destroyer, USS Michael Murphy, is now in the fleet. Morgan Luttrell, Marcus’s brother, himself a former SEAL, was elected to Congress in Texas.

Murphy, a native of Long Island, N.Y., graduated from Penn State in 1998. He considered law school but instead entered Navy Officer Candidate School and went through the highly selective, some say brutal, SEAL training in 2000. He served in Qatar and Djibouti before deploying to Afghanistan in 2005.

Murphy developed the program named after him: a one-mile run, 100 pullups, 200 pushups, 300 body-weight squats, topped off by another one-mile run. Murphy did the routine wearing a 16.4-pound body armor vest that he wore on missions. He called the workout “Body Armor.” Background on Murphy reports that he completed the routine in 32 to 35 minutes. It caught on among SEALs and other service personnel deployed worldwide, wherever they could find a horizontal exercise bar, doorframe, or tree branch for the pullups—and the body armor. 

In 2007 Dr. Joshua Appel, a former Air Force search-and-rescue specialist who helped rescue Luttrell and recover Murphy’s body, suggested that his Crossfit group in Albany, N.Y., attempt the Murph workout on Memorial Day. Thousands of people belong to Crossfit clubs. Many Crossfitters and others subject themselves to the Murph.

Exercising may seem an offbeat way to observe Memorial Day, America’s tribute to its service men and women who have fallen in combat. But, as if competing with the parades and solemn ceremonies, businesses use Memorial Day to hawk stuff we’re told will make us happy: cars, appliances, furniture, mattresses, beer. Today, fewer than one percent of Americans step up for military service. Of those who do, a small minority will ever face combat.

The Murph workout isn’t combat. But in some mystical way, it brings far more meaning to the Day than appliance shopping. The Murph workout is pain. Typically Crossfitters or anyone else attempting it break up the three centerpiece exercises in sets, for example, 20 sets of five pullups, 10 pushups, and 15 squats, or some similar mix.

The Murph candidate finishes the first mile breathing hard. He then grabs the pullup bar for his set then sinks to the floor for the pushups. Still gasping, he climbs to his feet for the squats. Then repeat, over and over. Somehow, he keeps track of his progress. In a gym some people scrawl on the floor with chalk. One set, then two, then three, and so on. I used a notebook.

People yelled while the Murph workout crew grunted and gasped. A few family members and kids showed up to cheer and encourage. “Good job, Joe!” “Keep it up!” A few shouted, “Almost there!” when I knew I was not almost there. Ten or so minutes in, I grabbed my water bottle, guzzled, then grasped the bar again. Up. And up. Then down, and down.

I looked around, panting and sweating. The floor in front of me was a puddle. The place was becoming quiet. Others who had finished their first mile ahead of me (most of the team) had finished their pullup-pushup-squat sets and were heading to the door to get their second mile. 

By the last three or four sets the pullups were becoming half-jumps to get my chin above the bar for a legal repetition. For the pushups the full body must touch the floor, not halfway down then back up. The squat has to be thighs below parallel to the floor, no bouncing. Then back up again, back down, one (pause), two (pause) three—the pauses get longer, the thighs feel like rubber.

By the time I finished my last squats, nearly everyone else in the group had either completed the run or was close. A few candidates lay on the floor staring upward, savoring their success. Some have gathered their gear and were staggering toward the exit.

I stumbled to the door for my final mile, which the coach measured, eight laps around the parking lot of a supermarket next door to the gym. We started at 6:30 AM, now the early shoppers were starting to arrive, I watched for the traffic. Sandy, the coach, and a few other team members who already finished stood nearby and cheered. I plodded for seven laps, then a friend, Elise, who long ago finished her Murph, jumped in and ran the final lap with me.

My shoulders felt numb. I looked for water and a place to sit down, not thinking solemn thoughts about duty and country. But the team got it done, the expression we use about these things that are so hard, painful, exhausting.

The pain I felt isn’t remotely like that endured by those SEALs, or by the millions of Americans who have stood their ground in hostile foreign places, their lives on the line. But we try, in our humble way, to share something with them, to remember them, on Memorial Day.