April 28, 2025

Friends came to town, we drove to the local state park and ran up and down the trails and around a pretty lake. The forest was muddy in places, but sweet and silent. North Lake flashed deep blue through the trees. Gentle waves break against the shore.

The glistening reflection of sunlight on the surface has a restorative effect. Folks will pause for brief moments near the water. Beyond the lake shore, low rounded hills crowd in, thick with forest. Fallen tree trunks reach out into the water, giving some perspective to the distance to the far shore. It is a place to lighten burdens.

Bitterness and angst are sweeping the nation as it lurches toward depression. Yet last weekend our group, five middle-agers and one senior citizen completed, decisively, with the figurative exclamation point, another chapter in a 15-year story, of friendship formed in one place then preserved at long distance by text message, email, and occasional meetups.

The purpose, on the face of it, is running forest trails. But it’s a deeper, more textured story, told here before, in Virginia, North Carolina, Florida, Texas. Now, as the local host, I charted the course and handed out maps. Paris Mountain State Park, within the Greenville, S.C., city limits at 1,500 acres, is one-tenth the size of our old running space, Prince William Forest Park near Woodbridge, Va.

The Paris Mountain trails mostly are well-manicured by hikers, dog walkers, mountain bikers, and scout troops on their badge-earning outings. Old folks plod through the woods, getting their dose of seniors exercise. But Paris Mountain has its moments. Here and there, along the Sulphur Springs and Brissy Ridge pathways, thick roots reach to grab feet and legs. Rocks shaped like axe blades protrude to slice ankles.

For some stretches the trails wind steeply upward through the woods, making legs go numb, lungs strain, hearts pump to exhaustion. Creeks are a gaggle of rocks strewn in rushing water. Dead logs obstruct crossings.

The first mile, Mountain Creek, is sedate. Chris, Paul, Archie, and Kirk sprinted out of sight, Kevin and I slogged it. He wore a rucksack with 25 pounds of weights, his Florida hiking routine. We moved on to Sulphur Springs, following a creek, the sound of moving water soft, soothing. Rocks became boulders. The trail twisted upward, three feet wide along a twenty-foot crevice crossed with root tangles. We inhaled and bent our backs.

We crossed the creek and climbed upward to the Fire Tower intersection, then parted at the Kanuga trail. Kevin followed the mapped course, descending to the lake. I turned onto Kanuga-light, my escape route.

As I moved onto Brissy Ridge Kirk and Archie showed up, forging their own alternate route. They hurried down toward the hard part. At the end of Brissy Ridge, Paul pulled up and moved ahead on the final descent back to Mountain Creek. Chris already had passed, slowed by thick roots and jagged rocks. He raced down the backside of Sulphur Springs to Mountain Creek, finished, and jumped in Placid Lake. Within an hour we all got there. The late morning sun warmed us.

Ten or twelve years ago it was all backslapping, stories, jokes. We ran, drank coffee, gathered for happy hours, and solved the world’s problems.

It went on like that. The number varied. At one point, around 2010, we were about a dozen, meeting at 5:00 AM at the local Gold’s Gym on Thursdays to run neighborhood streets. Tom, the instigator, combined “Gold’s” and “Thursday” to create “THuGs.” We had fun with that.

 Scott was still on active Marine Corps duty. Nearly all of us were veterans who turned into federal contractors. Chris was in accounting. Paul was more or less retired, we never were sure.

We ran the Marine Corps Marathon in 2011, then a “Tuff Mudder” obstacle event and a couple of half-marathons. During the work week we ran on roads. Saturdays were for forest trails at Prince William, Manassas National Battlefield Park, and county parks.

We kept it up through summer heat and winter cold, as if we’d be embarrassed to miss it. One morning five or six years ago we pulled on thermals and mittens in single-digit chill and slogged over frozen tundra at Prince William, trotting a short loop before scrambling back to warm cars and coffee. We remember that as a benchmark: we did not let the cold cancel us.

We staged a casual trail half-marathon in Virginia, some of the team ran a race in rural Tennessee. But it was inevitable: the THuG thing couldn’t stay the same; we all had family situations and jobs having to do with corporate decisionmaking and government funding. Al, Tom, Josh, and Dave drifted away. Paul, Scott, and Amir pulled up stakes and left.

Over three years most of the rest of us scattered. Chris, Archie, and Alex hung on in Virginia. Paul, in Asheville, kept sending messages, jokes, ideas for reunions.

We pulled off the gatherings, twice near Sylva, N.C., for a painful 2,700-foot climb up Black Rock Mountain, when Chris won a fast-finisher souvenir buckle. This was Paul’s idea, a tortured slog up a sinuous fire road into the fog of the outer Blue Ridge. We showed up at Kevin’s place in Sarasota, then last April again near Paul’s for a trail in the Blue Ridge and an evening in Asheville. Scott got us down to Austin last fall.

For a brief weekend in this town we were present again. We finished the run, a bit slower then last time. That’s the way it is. It’s been fifteen years, after all. Our kids then now are adults. The happy hours are ancient history. The hair is mostly gray. THuGs are watching their carbs, turning in earlier. In Greenville, the topic of religion and belief came up.

Sunday morning arrived, the end of the adventure, the trip from the THuG dream back to the world. We talked a bit about next time, the next place: to be present, to march forward, to live in the moment, and the future. That’s the plan, and the hope.

April 21, 2025

Lent rushed to its sublime yet nightmarish close. The Sunday church music is intense, at our church, at least, summoning hope and joy. Outside the world is gnashing its teeth. The country is drowning in political derangement.

Masses were crowded at St. Mary Magdalene in Simpsonville, S.C. The mix of anguish and gladness of the Triduum arrived, with the country paralyzed by ratcheting psychosis at the top. Midwesterners and Southerners still are picking through tornado rubble, even while federal recovery funds are zeroed out. Still, wildfires are mostly controlled, floodwaters receding. The countryside is green and vernal.

Statues and crucifixes at Catholic churches were shrouded in purple. Protestant churches advertised their services. The congregations and the celebrants looked forward to the solace of blessings. At the nearest church, Prince of Peace, I heard prayers for Ukraine and for death-row inmates. 

We are seeking the life of the spirit, sustenance for the soul. We search along many paths to faith: family, community, regional habits and allegiances, history, cultural traditions, affections, preferences. We have around here stern cradle Catholics and stern evangelicals, Baptists, Church of Christ folks, and so on.

I thought of four Catholic communities: the parish closest to our home, Prince of Peace; Belmont Abbey College in Belmont, N.C., 90 miles away; St. Anselm College in Manchester, N.H., and Christendom College in Front Royal, Va.

For Holy Week at Prince of Peace the pews facing the altar were fitted on the aisle end with a pole to which a palm frond was attached, creating a theatrical canopy of palms for priests, deacons, and altarboys to process through, in the way we imagine Christ entering Jerusalem.

The Mass there, to my prejudiced mind, inclines to a procedure. The parish follows the traditional practice of the priest at Mass facing away from the congregation. Some folks are fiercely loyal. We belonged for a year, and didn’t find our spiritual life. We looked elsewhere.  

The monastery chapel altars at Belmont Abbey, from which our youngest daughter graduated, and at the church at St. Anselm are stark chunks of stone. Both schools are run by monks of the Benedictine order. You would expect austerity from the monks, and you get austerity.

The new chapel at 554-student Christendom College, completed in 2023, like Prince of Peace resembles a medieval church, that was the intent. From the rear pews the priest is an indistinct dot. We went to Mass there with friends a year ago. Afterward, one of them said, “That was joyless.”

Christendom assures students and parents that its curriculum is “faithful to the Magisterium of the Catholic Church.” The school doesn’t accept Title IX funds or participate in federal student loan programs out of concern that federal money would interfere with its Catholic mission. I know the place because I earned my M.A. there.

At Mary Magdalene on Palm Sunday we listened once again to the reading of the Passion, the immortal passages from Luke that tell of Christ’s trial and crucifixion. Again the congregation is transfixed by the brutality of the execution, for centuries a common event in the Western world. We shudder, reminded of the truth of it at that bleak moment at the dawn of civilization.

The scandal of the crucifixion resonates throughout history. It flows through the centuries of inhumanity perpetrated by Christians and pagans. We walk, we are forced to walk, through the barbarity that assaults our attempts at civilization.

The somber message that may lead us to faith reminds us that two millennia of preaching and proselytizing failed to transform human nature, which in a grotesquely twisted way tolerated the Soviet famine of the 1930s, then the Holocaust. These are the darkest benchmarks of the twentieth century, along with genocides of recent decades, Red China in the 1960s, Cambodia in the 1970s, Bosnia and Rwanda in the 1990s, countless others less prominent.

We don’t dwell on those things, which would cost us our sanity. One of the gifts of faith is the capacity to abide, to persevere. We recognize madness but still struggle to realize our gift. Yet the central reality of the Mass, and of Christian services everywhere, in every humble church and congregation, is transformation through a miracle.

It can only be a miracle, the event we call Resurrection. It is all we have, our only source of strength as we struggle to extricate ourselves from our nature. The miracle may lift us from our unsteady, tentative faith to grasp the possibility of a higher life, better than our own but still wholly human. We may call it the mystery of Christ’s life; we may call it other things.

Crowds rushed to the churches on Easter, for some it was a once-a-year outing. Some wore suits, others blue jeans. The kids were there, some awestruck, others bewildered.

The priest intoned the prayers and raised the cup, as Christ did, assuring the crowd that the freedom of salvation was present for all. The people move forward in long lines. They participated in the mystery, then moved on with their lives.

April 14, 2025

We landed in Middle Tennessee for the second time in three months for a funeral, this one a cousin on my side. We had visited Claire back in December. She was a New York Irishwoman, quick with a joke or a funny story. Her daughter Joann cared for her in her last few months. She passed on April Fool’s Day, which Joann said she’d have loved.

The Mass, in the chapel at Claire’s parish, was beautiful. The priest said good and true things. I looked around at the mostly gray heads. We fit right in.

We were in Bellevue, just west of Nashville. After the Mass, with no better idea, we drove over to the Loveless Motel café just outside town for lunch.

The Loveless, founded by Lon and Annie Loveless in 1951, is a once-authentic Southern “country” joint that has turned itself into a tourist attraction, I think, by serving every patron a half-dozen fluffy biscuits with peach and strawberry preserves.  It also could be the fried food and “red-eye” gravy, that reinforces the Southern thing.

If you’re worried about your heart health, the Loveless is not the place. Still, the food has won rave reviews from Bon Appetit, Southern Living, and other pubs.

It was our second visit, the first was a few days before our wedding in August 1978. My parents and a great aunt had flown down from Jersey. You didn’t need a reservation then. We got a big table and everyone had the ham and eggs and red-eye gravy. We’ve got a photo somewhere. I recall the red-and-white checkered tablecovers. I thought everyone had a good time. Then, strangely, we never went back.

In our Nashville years, early 1980s, we lived near downtown, 12 or 15 miles from Bellevue. We’d go out to see friends, but with young kids our restaurant choices were close in, the Hillsboro Village neighborhood near Vanderbilt. For a treat we’d walk, pushing the kids in their strollers, down 21st Avenue to the Pancake Pantry, back then a local hole-in-wall breakfast place, now, like Loveless, a tourist attraction; also a hot meet-up spot for Vandy kids.

We didn’t go back to the Loveless partly because the down-home/y’all come Southern riff never grew on me, even after becoming part of a Southern family. I didn’t like biscuits much, and I never went near red-eye gravy. I almost never eat fried food. Southern food, maybe mostly small-town Southern food, is fried: eggs, ham, chicken, hamburgers, fish, green tomatoes, veggies, okra (okra?). Back in the day, the frying was with lard.

So last week when we arrived at Loveless we walked past the walls hung floor to ceiling with photos of country stars and local politicians. We got a table near the kitchen. Country music twanged through the sound system. You’d need to love it to work there, I thought.

The place looked vaguely familiar, the staff wore “Loveless” teeshirts. Our server, smiling, set down a plateful of biscuits and preserves. She asked the standard thing, had we been there before. We squinted, doing the math. “We were here almost 47 years ago, just before our wedding,” Sandy said, returning the smile.

The woman’s eyes grew wide. “Well, that was before I was born,” she answered, laughing. Across the aisle another young woman delivered a tray of huge hunks of fried chicken to a table of six. I wondered, who eats that much at lunch? I got a burger, Sandy wanted the barbecue sandwich, a Loveless classic.

The food was okay, a burger is a burger. The place hummed with business, a mix of young and older, mostly older. Diners and servers chatted and laughed, dishes and utensils clashed and clattered.

It was a happy, cheerful place, the staff joking and calling to each other, enjoying the mood as much as the customers. I recalled, somehow, our wedding-week visit. My native New Yorker parents and great aunt seemed a bit overwhelmed by the onslaught of Southernisms, but took it in good humor. They tucked happily (I think) into the piles of deep-fried breakfast, the biscuits, and gravy. Afterward we stopped at the souvenir shop. Yes, there is one.

Sandy and I finished up. As we stood to leave the server warned us, “You need to come back before another 47 years!” We laughed and said sure we would.

I looked at the celebrity photos of country singers, some current stars, and oldtimers, George Jones, Johnny Cash, Porter Wagoner, others no longer with us.  We browsed through the souvenir shop, the typical range of teeshirts, coffee mugs, and dinnerware. We walked over to the Country Market, which offers country hams, sides of bacon, Loveless honey, and the famous preserves. The prices seemed a bit steep.

It was a lovely, cloudless Tennessee day. We drove a couple of miles down Highway 100 to the ramp onto the Natchez Trace Parkway, which winds from just outside Bellevue for 444 miles through pretty parts of Middle Tennessee, northern Alabama, and western Mississippi to Natchez, Miss.

The Parkway is maintained by the National Park Service. The route follows the historic “trace” of game through the region, used by local tribes and white settlers. The Civilian Conservation Corps started work in the 1930s, the parkway opened in 2005. Points of interest include ancient Native American burial mounds, historic churches, pioneer settlements. Then too, the whole region was a Civil War battleground.

I steered onto the Parkway, we drove about ten miles. It was a nice sight, decked out in early spring green, winding through gently rolling country. Lots of visitors ride the entire length. It wasn’t the time for us, maybe next year. We’ll stop first at Loveless and get the biscuits, chicken, and sweet tea. We’ll skip the gravy.

April 7, 2025

The Fed Ex guy rang the doorbell then ran back to his truck. I opened the door and waved, then picked up the box. It was compact but heavy, maybe five pounds. I pulled the tape away. The box contained a beautiful crystal optical glass prism, a square about three inches deep and wide. I placed it on the mantle.

The prism is a gift from an old friend, a man named Tim for whom I had worked for nearly ten years, a dozen years ago. He retired, soon I followed. Our lives took similar paths, the baseline theme being annoying health problems. He and his wife Ann stayed in their longtime Fairfax County, Va., home. Sandy and I hung around northern Virginia until late 2020. We visit occasionally. Tim shares jokes, and a persistent faith in humanity.

“Happy Spring!” He wrote on the card with the gift.

Tim served in the Army’s enlisted ranks, graduated from Reed College, and completed M.S. and Ph.D. degrees at Yale. He served as an Air Force Biomedical Science Corps officer, then earned a Navy commission. He became a naval aviator and was selected as a candidate for the NASA astronaut program, before the shuttle program was halted after the Challenger disaster.

He served as a Navy flight accident investigator and later, during tours with the Naval Air Development Center and Naval Air Systems Command, spent years analyzing human systems and complex human-machine interfaces, leading teams of Navy aviators, scientists, and civilian officials. He lived the aviator’s code: Fly the aircraft, complete the mission. 

Although his business was deadly serious, there was always humor. At Tim’s Navy retirement ceremony, when he finished his final tour at the Office of Naval Research as a captain, the tape recorder that was supposed to play the national anthem wouldn’t work. He led the crowd in humming the anthem: “da-da-da, da-da-DA, Da-DAH da-da …”  We all laughed.

He returned to ONR as director of medical and biological research. In 2005, responding to incidents of abuses of human subjects in military research the Defense Department ordered the military services to reorganize their human research protection programs.

For the Navy the Surgeon General, a three-star admiral who commanded the Navy Bureau of Medicine, got the Navy assignment for both medical (hospitals) and non-medical research. The two-star Chief of Naval Research tapped Tim as director for the non-medical program.  

The mission of the Navy’s Human Research Protection Program was ensuring Navy commands followed Defense and federal policy on protecting human beings—a no-brainer. The work was critical, but agonizingly arduous. Navy commanding officers have executive authority, which means they run the show at their outfits, including research activities. Complying with policy means paperwork. Commanders don’t like paperwork.   

Sometimes, in research involving humans, bad things happen. New systems being tested, like Navy diving gear, malfunction or fail. People are injured, or worse.

Tim was a Navy line commander. He understood the culture. He didn’t like paperwork, either. He recruited a team, we worked out of ONR. Month by month, we created policy, writing new stuff, rewriting old stuff, selling the work to commanders, bringing them around. Tim defined the program, that is, the responsibility for caring for research subjects. The work generated paper: instructions, reports, PowerPoint slides. It was policy to protect human beings.

The HRPP work met resistance. Navy leaders want the payoffs of research, not regulations. We visited Navy commands, teaching, persuading, helping. In time they learned the lesson Tim taught, a simple lesson of fundamental decency: research subjects must be protected and defended.

We had our wins, but the work was a slog, dotting Is and crossing Ts. We wrestled with indifference from senior officials. We listened to mind-numbing briefings. A year after we started, the Secretary of the Navy signed a new instruction. The program officially was born.

Tim stayed steady. “Fly the aircraft,” he reminded us. He scrutinized our work with a commander’s experienced eye. He understood the bureaucratic grind; we were bureaucrats, after all. He saw through the excuses of officials who tried to circumvent the urgency. He defended the program when leadership opposed or ignored it.

He understood Navy research better than anyone. The Ph.D.-level managers who evaluate technical proposals from Navy and university researchers stopped by his office to pick his brain. The Senior Executive Service department head knew Tim was the guy with the knowledge.

Through it all we had the humor.  We drank coffee, told stories, and joked. Others recognized our staff meetings by the sound of laughter. Tim was all business, but he dressed up for Halloween. When the bureaucracy lurched into chaos, when computers wouldn’t work, when senior officials looked for excuses, Tim told a funny story.

The team worked with purpose and with pride. The man who had completed a distinguished active-duty career then stayed to do more, cared deeply for the people on the team, the civil servants and contractors. He respected and supported them.

He retired suddenly for health reasons. A new guy, a classic bureaucrat, took the job. The work plodded on but something was missing: the joy, the sense of pursuing a mission. A year later I also left.

A while back Tim had sent me a model of an N2S “Yellow Peril,” a Navy biplane trainer aircraft. The aircraft gets its name from its bright yellow paint job, which warns anyone nearby that a novice pilot is flying. The prism will sit next to the N2S.

We talk, trade books, share stories. Tim’s longtime friends, colleagues, Navy people, write, call, stop by.  Tim’s jokes come readily, with smiles, and with faith, which endures.