December 30, 2024

After three years in this subdivision we still don’t know most of the neighbors, but the young woman across the street has a nice way of dropping in to visit. She stopped by and introduced her fiancé and showed us her engagement ring.

We knew she has cared for him through cancer recovery the past two years, planning and preparing his restricted-diet meals, getting him to his appointments and therapies. This is love, I thought. We said congratulations and “Merry Christmas.”

Her son is studying at a local college. She worries about her sixteen-year-old daughter, who just got her driver’s license. I think they’ll be fine.

We arrived at the Holiday Promised Land of Santa hats and bright sweaters.  But amid all that we wonder, some of us wonder, why we have Christmas, the primal lodestar of Christian belief. We understand that the human mind seeks constantly to believe. Believe what? That our existence, or the existence of existence itself, has a cause, which we may call God. We may call it truth. We may call it love.

The Christmas story, the charm of the manger, the angels, the star, is a starting point, a beacon through doubt, confusion, ignorance, the darkness of unbelief. We light our Advent Candles, if we don’t forget, and ponder the Gospel message of that cataclysmic event.

Long ago, for years on Christmas Eve, we encountered the crowds at the Children’s Mass at the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington. Michael and I wore ties, Sandy and the girls dressed up. First stop, the poinsettia display at the National Botanical Garden, where we took pictures with real cameras. Second stop: Johnny Rocket at Union Station for hot chocolate and French fries, and a walk around the giant electric train display.

Sandy recalls with a frown 1998, when President Clinton was impeached on December 19. We were at Union Station when he and Hillary showed up for their Christmas shopping trip and greeted thrilled Democrats. Bill leaned forward, smiled, and shook Michael’s hand.

We had a Christmas Eve tragedy in 2001, when a nephew died in an accident that morning. On the 26th we left on a 600-mile drive to a funeral. That day’s pain has never faded.

Twenty-three years later and two states away the churches are packed with regulars but also with the once-a-year faithful who don’t seem to recognize what is going on in front of them. We got there early and found seats in front, but retreated when we noticed the “handicapped” sign. We squeezed into the last pew. Later, the road home was jammed with traffic from a half-dozen other churches.

Last week we were still unwinding from the hard mid-month Tennessee mission. We left I-75 in North Georgia near the Lake Alatoona exit, staying on U.S. 20 east through Canton, then got off course. We passed through the cute village of Ball Ground, then obscure places across the state into Gainesville, then Gillsville and Maysville, to I-85, then north to home.

This late in the year, the cold and gray highway horizons render the small towns and exit outposts tedious. We passed through them impatient to get beyond the sudden drops in speed limits, watching for sheriffs in patrol carts. The streets in those places, Marshall and Hurricane, N.C., then Del Rio and Newport, Tenn., seemed deserted and bleak.

In mid-December the cold moved in, mid-twenties. Even then the place still had the threadbare look of extracting itself from Helene. Since October the public-works crews piled storm debris high at our intersection with the main road, blocking the view of eastbound traffic. I hacked away limbs and branches with my carpenter saw for a couple of hours. Folks paused at the stop sign, I saw a few thumbs-up, a few smiles.

Meanwhile the festivities were building. The excitement started early downtown with outdoor booths at the Grand Bohemian Lodge, just off Main Street and next to the Reedy River. We joined the crowds wandering through the lobby, which is decorated with Native American art.

Habitat for Humanity conveyed the deed of a new home on Greenville’s Sturdivant Street to a new owner, Matrice, a mom with two boys. The Foothills Philharmonic played classical arrangements of Christmas tunes at a nearby Baptist church to standing ovations. Local kids performed piano pieces at their recital. We met young people marching forward in hope and enthusiasm, working to make their marks.

On Main Street downtown, a twenty-five foot fir gleams in front of the M. Judson bookstore. Folks sit on the steps to admire it and snap photos. Inside, readers of actual books browse the stacks of hardcovers. The place does a good business in Southern Literature.  Further along, kids and adults try to skate at the little public ice rink, most, it seems, for the first time.

The legacy of 2024 is Helene. On the way to Nashville we passed through Hot Springs, N.C., which sits alongside the French Broad River. The stains on buildings showed the level the water had reached. Storefronts and homes were boarded up. Tree trunks lay across lawns. Heroic men were clearing wreckage, at it still in this third month. Hot Springs is being transformed.

It is the Season of Hope, for kindness, compassion, faith, the mystical miracles of Christmas, for those close to us and, as the song goes, to men of good will everywhere. I remember Matrice and her new Habitat house, our neighbor and her kids and fiancé, the hurricane victims, those selfless people who support them, in our prayer that Christmas 2025 will bring joy to all.

December 23, 2024

The affair was the Senior Holiday Potluck at the local Y. The “member experience director,” Brent, sent an email spelling out the details: bring a favorite dish or a donation of $5.00, and a $10.00 gift to exchange after the lunch.

Our local YMCA puts on lots of activities for old folks. It supports Medicare’s Silver Sneakers fitness program, which enables seniors to use the gym and pool and participate in fitness classes. The Y sponsors an Active Senior Adults group, which holds monthly potlucks with bingo. The past year the group took bus trips to the casino in Cherokee in western North Carolina, the Biltmore estate in Ashville, and Lake Lure. 

Despite the marketing, we understand Christmas isn’t just for kids. The Season that for Christians commemorates the birth of Christ is for everyone, including the white-haired set. They were once kids, after all. But it doesn’t play out that way. The stacks of toys and video games at the malls are pitched at anxious parents playing Santa. Everything else: the clothes, the electronics, the pickup trucks are aimed at middle-agers earning paychecks. You don’t see ads targeting folks on Social Security.

Sandy and I attended the Seniors event two years ago. A rousing crowd of oldsters showed up, the Y hired a seniors’ jazz band to play old Christmas favorites (Crosby, Perry Como and so on). Feet tapped to the music, you could survey the room and see tears. We missed last year, it shot by us somehow. But the years now go by in a blur.

Sandy is a regular at the monthly Seniors potlucks, run by a dynamic lady, Cheryl, who’s younger than most of the crowd. She greets everyone, makes a few announcements, then steers the group to the potluck line, then bingo, a quarter a card. Usually 12 or 15 women attend who know each other from the Silver Sneakers programs. Maybe three men show up. I went a few times, then pulled back.

We started Seniors Week by driving 50 miles to Brevard, a touristy place a few miles north of the S.C.-N.C. state line, nestled in the wide Pisgah National Forest. The plan was to get a one-day change of scenery that might help confront family sadness. Somehow, the blur of passing forest, the sharp curves of mountain roads, the ghostly haze rising from Blue Ridge peaks, works. Brevard gets us all that.

We parked off Main Street near Rocky’s Grill, a breakfast place done up with a 1950s look—the bright green and red paneling of the lunch counter, the red leather booth seats, the prints of Babe Ruth and Marilyn Monroe, Elvis crooning in the background. We got eggs and coffee. We talked about old times, family, and loss.

But it’s Christmas, after all. We browsed at a few shops, picked up some things, looked north at the Pisgah peaks that seemed to begin at the end of the block. Turning onto Main, we noticed the Veterans Museum of the Carolinas next to the courthouse, open, admission free.

We stepped through the door. A docent, a slim, elderly gent who looked like a veteran, rose from behind a desk. “Welcome. I’m Joe. U.S. Army. Thanks for stopping in. Just follow the yellow arrows on the floor. There’s a room for each service branch and war starting with World War I. I’m here if you have any questions.”

We strolled through, the place was packed with military artifacts, uniforms, gear, insignia, photos of Carolina veterans going back decades, but also enemy stuff: mannequins of German and Japanese soldiers, fully equipped. I wondered about the collection of German Army propaganda photos. The place was heavy with infantry weapons, rifles, automatic weapons, rocket launchers, handguns. Par for the Carolinas.

A few other visitors, oldsters like us, wandered through. All the staff people were in their 70s and above, like me; old-timer veterans, also like me. Doing something they enjoy, something they fell important and worthwhile. Good for them, I thought. Seniors at work.

We moved forward to the next day’s Holiday Potluck. The Y staff had set up tables in the gym, decorating each with Santa-gnome centerpieces. Folks trickled in, some in bright red, some moving slowly, a lady with a walker, another in a wheelchair. They left their potluck casseroles, salads, and desserts on a table. Cheryl, in charge, announced, “Who’s got a December birthday? They get to eat first.”

We filled our plates and attempted small talk. I saw only a couple of familiar faces. The couple across from me seemed to speak only Polish, I think it was Polish. I glanced around. Down the table, ladies chatted about the food, grandchildren, health problems. I talked with one guy about road conditions since the hurricane. Things like that. A few folks rose and went back for seconds.

The attendance was smaller by half than at the previous Holiday Potluck. No band or caroling to summon the Christmas Spirit. A lady at the end of our table sat stiffly, staring forward, saying nothing.

Cheryl, in full leadership mode, roused the group to play quiz games. I won one of the Santa gnomes by scoring highest on the “Christmas music” quiz (which classic Christmas movie featured the debut of “White Christmas?” Answer: Holiday Inn). We did the “White Elephant,” each person picking a wrapped gift. I drew a sign saying “hope you like dog hair,” no doubt dredged from someone’s attic. Fortunately another guest who owns a dog took it off my hands.

The chatter picked up a bit as folks inspected their gifts. But it seemed we all were shifting in our seats, as if ready to return to the challenges that aren’t lifted by the Christmas Season. Some of the guests are dealing with complicated problems, health, family, finances, widowhood, the burden of living alone. For sure, all wondered whether they’ll be around for next year’s party.

Cheryl sensed the moment and thanked all for coming.  A few applauded, the applause spread. We pulled on our coats. I thanked Cheryl, as did a few others. “Thanks, hope you’ll come back and join us,” she said with a smile. “Have a wonderful Christmas.”

December 16, 2024

We looked along Elliston Place in uptown Nashville for the old Elliston Place Soda Shop. A new place with the same name occupies roughly the same location in the center of a block of shut-down storefronts a mile and a half from the jungle of downtown skyscrapers.

We thought we’d have lunch there, where I had a hamburger on that July 1979 day our oldest daughter was born across the street at Baptist Hospital. Then it occupied a cramped store space with a soda fountain counter and a half-dozen booths.

We had driven 360 miles to Nashville through Asheville and Knoxville. Between those landmarks was the Hurricane Helene detour, 55 miles of twisting U.S. 25/70 across the Upper Great Smokies. The detour added an hour to the trip, through flood-devastated hamlets along the French Broad River. It dumped us on I-40 outside Newport, Tenn., 50 miles east of Knoxville.

Sandy’s sister Kay passed 45 minutes before we arrived. We visited with family, old and young folks who, like us, arrived from distant points. Together we recalled the good times. But nothing more to do but remind ourselves that this town was our first homestead and meanwhile rediscover Music City’s transformation to grandiose grubbiness.

Over four decades Yankees and Rebs discovered the once-sleepy home of country music. The Sunbelt was a thing through the 1980s. We made a profit when we sold our little Cape Cod near Vanderbilt University in 1986. The old Hillsboro neighborhood off 21st Avenue and West End, with its shady streets and Victorian homes, later became a ghetto of academics who bid real estate prices beyond the half-million range.

We came back over the years to visit family and friends and run the Country Music Marathon. But we could see the place changing when we left. In the early 1980s a highway spur, I-440, went in, linking I-24 and I-40 east of downtown to I-40 West, the construction tearing through West End neighborhoods, the project ignoring homeowners’ protests.

The modest city airport, Berry Field, became Nashville International in 1988, the largest in the state, now handling more traffic than all other Tennessee airports combined. The runways border I-40 and eight-lane Donelson Pike, both choked with traffic at rush hour.

Nashville got NFL football, the Titans, in ’97 when the Houston Oilers relocated. The city built a gorgeous ballpark that became LP Field, now Nissan Stadium. That same year the NHL established the Predators, who play in Bridgestone Arena on Broadway downtown, near the original Grand Old Opry and dozens of old country honky-tonks.

A massive new convention center and an Opera House went up. The tourists dodge panhandlers on Lower Broad’s dirty sidewalks.

By the ‘90s Nashville was a hot business destination for insurance and IT. Traffic gridlocked on the interstates, 40, 24, and 65, and on downtown streets. Urban renewal wrecked the old Afro-American neighborhood in North Nashville. Steel-and-glass highrises rose in the center city. Home prices and rental rates doubled and tripled.

In May 2010 the Nashville flood devastated downtown. The Cumberland River engulfed the city streets, the Opera House, office buildings, the Country Music Hall of Fame, the giant Opry Mills mall, the massive Gaylord Hotel, the football stadium. The Harpeth River flooded hundreds of homes in the Bellvue suburb west of town.

With the floods, it seemed, the city lurched ferociously into urban renewal. Damaged blocks were rebuilt, streets were torn up and repaved, adding lanes. The population explosion didn’t slow down, the home of country music became a yuppie-foodie mecca. The seedy old downtown rail yard that ran under Broadway became the “Gulch,” crammed with chic restaurants and pricey townhomes and apartments.

On our last day on this trip we drove out to Bellvue to visit cousins. We battled the traffic along West End, which becomes U.S. 70 through the affluent Belle Meade neighborhood, anchored by the Belle Meade Plantation, 30 acres around the historic Belle Meade mansion. The property preserves its loveliness amidst the surrounding retail chaos, liquor stores, tire places, offices. Bellvue is more storefronts, pizza joints, big boxes, fast food.

Around noon we fought our way back downtown. The Elliston Place idea came up. We navigated past unrecognizable stretches of West End, thick with traffic, narrowed and overshadowed by skyscrapers, including the new high-rise Vanderbilt dorms. We found the new soda shop, three times the size of the original, next to a construction site. We walked in the street to avoid concrete chunks of the excavated sidewalk. 

The hostess seated us. What happened, we asked.

“We lost our lease on the old shop,” she said. “Landlords won’t renew long-term leases because the property is so valuable—worth millions. We were lucky, a longtime customer bought the place and guarantees the lease.”

The walls were lined with the original ads for fried chicken and milkshakes, the floor was the old checkered tile. A jukebox and a giant photo of the original storefront stood against a wall.

The server, a young woman, took our order, we mentioned we used to eat there. Sandy admired her engagement ring. “Just got it—he proposed at Isle of Palms, South Carolina,” she said. We laughed and said we live near Greenville.

We got burgers and fries, more or less the same lunch I ordered on that hot July 9, 1979. I thought for a moment I’d get the chess pie, but we had to go. We said thanks and goodbye. “See you when you come back,” she said with a wave. I wondered about that.

We stopped at Kay’s house to say goodbye to the nieces and nephews, then took I-40 to Mount Juliet, 25 miles east to Sandy’s cousin Mike’s place. The next morning we left early. I shielded my eyes against the glare of headlights of hundreds of commuters crawling towards the city. We turned south on I-840 toward Murfreesboro, then more interstate, then home.

December 9, 2024

Philadelphia, when we arrived, was sunny and cold. The lake-effect storms that raked the northwestern rim of the state, Erie and its environs, threw a dusting at the City of Brotherly Love. We were going to make the best of it. The kids all had made it in, for the first time in two years.

We weighed transcendent joy against sadness. As we settled into hellos and hugs we heard of Sandy’s sister Kay’s hospitalization in Nashville. Cancer, again. We called. Family began traveling from Florida, Georgia, Canada. We whispered prayers and planned our road trip back to Tennessee.

At such moments we remind ourselves that perception of what is true and good and precious in our lives emerges not from achievements and behavior considered grand to the external world—career recognition and so forth—but from belief, trust, and affection among those closest to us.

Philly is a cold city in winter. Bitter winds whip around downtown office towers, the Art Museum and its Rocky Balboa statue, the wide Delaware is a metallic, industrial gray. The joy of anticipation of family reunion eased the anxiety of travel, the complicated, expensive logistics of nine people departing airports across the country. The flights arrived mostly on time.

Every American knows the country was born in Philadelphia. Crowds line up to see the Liberty Bell and Independence Hall on Chestnut Street downtown, where the first American patriots voted on the Declaration of Independence. In 1777, after routing George Washington’s colonials at Brandywine, the British redcoats marched in. In 1789 the Constitutional Convention ratified the Constitution.

The town has a muscular reputation. Probably everyone in America has seen “Rocky,” the story of no-account failure transformed into glory by hard work and heart. Local folks bought into the theme. Tourists love the statue, which looks out across majestic Ben Franklin Parkway.

Police coat streetlamps with grease to prevent drunks from shimmying up them to celebrate Phillies and Eagles playoff wins. Eagles fans threw snowballs at Santa in 1968.

The idea of Philly has been of the roughneck working-class East Coast brother of New York and Boston. Our New York/North Jersey family and friends would drive to the Jersey Shore but never visit Philadelphia or even the Jersey side of the Delaware. It was an alien thought, we barely knew it existed. Philadelphia people didn’t care.

The Main Line begins in Center City around Penn, the Ivy League school and Penn Med, the world-famous cancer center, then continues west past Villanova and St. Joseph’s, beyond U.S. 1, where the Wawa fast-food/fast gas chain has its headquarters. The outer suburbs center on the massive King of Prussia Mall off I-275 and immortal Valley Forge, a sublime memorial to the colonial Army’s heroism and suffering.    

Philly world fades into Amish and Mennonite country around Lancaster and New Holland. The gem of Gettysburg is the state’s south-central marker. The middle and all the way to Pittsburgh is 250 miles of farmland and old factory and mining towns, among them York and Altoona, which the Democrats call “Alabama,” broken up by Harrisburg and State College. 

Starting around 2010 and forward for a few years three of our four kids lived in Pennsylvania. Laura was in Pittsburgh working on urban “sustainability,” that is, improving life for city folks. Marie and Mike were in Lewisburg, where Marie ran the overseas education program at Susquehanna University in Selinsgrove, a picturesque spot near the big Susquehanna, which flows southeast across the state. They rented places near the river, which sometimes flooded.

Michael finished his Penn M.S. and has stayed for twenty years. Daughter-in-law Caroline grew up in King of Prussia in nearby Montgomery County, next to Valley Forge, then graduated from Penn’s School of Veterinary Medicine.

Over time we slogged up the PA Turnpike to Pittsburgh or U.S. 15 to Lewisburg. The Pittsburgh trips always were in the dead of winter, across the bleak Alleghenies. In 2015 we detoured off the interstate to see the early work on the Flight 93 memorial near Shanksville. The Lewisburg trips took us through Harrisburg on 15, winding along the river through small isolated places mostly left behind by industrial decline.

In Philly we picked up the vitality of downtown markets, the amazing museums, Chestnut Hill and West Chester on either side of the Schuylkill, the Wyeth gallery and Brandywine.  We went to Phillies’ games at Citizens Bank Park.

We had our anxious Philadelphia moments. In January 2019 Michael brought us to visit Penn Med cancer oncologists about next steps for my problem. Six months later we came up again. Sandy felt numbness in her left arm. She spent a week in the Bryn Mawr Hospital ICU after a rush of microstrokes. The therapy continues.

Now we were back. Laura came from Minnesota, Kathleen and Steve from Wyoming, Marie and Mike and the boys, like us, from Upstate S.C. That evening, in frigid temps, we walked stiffly past the brilliant lights and floral explosion at Longwood Gardens, a magical spot in the farm country. We sipped hot chocolate, stunned by the lyrical winter beauty of the place.

We pulled on sweaters and overcoats to hike the woodland hills of Michael’s and Caroline’s property. The terrain was steep, the wind was raw, the trail obscured by fallen leaves. But the place, on the outer suburban fringes of the city, still sparkled with anticipation of Christmas, easing the chill. Philly does winter well.

We stayed up late visiting. In predawn darkness Kathleen and Steve hit the road for their flights, eventually back to Alta, Wyoming. Laura headed to St. Paul. We got to Mass and hung around a bit longer, regretting the end. The weekend was an anticipated Christmas and delayed Thanksgiving. We said so long, ‘til next time, and gave thanks.