March 2, 2026

Turning 77 is a lot like turning 76, and so on back into the misty past. Some thoughtful cards and phone calls came in. Friends and family joined us for a nice dinner downtown. It was chilly but warmed up a bit, a small peek at spring. That’s all I hope for about now, every year.

A few days earlier at the Cancer Institute, Dr. B. strode in to the little office he uses for meetings, smiling, as always, and extended his hand. He turned to his flat-screen monitor. “We’re going to need a PET [positron emission tomography] scan,” he said. “Let’s take a look.”

He opened my CT scan of last week, a black-and-white image of my insides, then the previous one, taken in November, then the PET scan of almost a year ago. He manipulated the three images on the screen and shifted the angles of view.

“I’m concerned about the lesion near the heart, which is—here.” He waved his hand at a shadowy patch, nearly invisible on the PET, larger in November, still larger now.

“You can see there’s an increase. So we want to stay on top of this. The PET will give us a closer look, then I’m thinking either some radiation or go back to the drug.”

If he gave me a choice it would be easy. The drug is a stew of side effects. Radiation was punishing in 2019, but lenient in 2021. Our son, Michael, the medical physicist, mentioned a new technique, SBRT (stereotactic body radiation therapy) which is more intense than conventional radiation but requires fewer doses.

The CT reports call these things “lesions” or “nodules” instead of the old-fashioned “tumors,” which for non-medical folks conveys a different impression. Lesion seems a bit gentler. The increase the doc picked up is in the range of centimeters, a centimeter being about half an inch long.

Within hours his office scheduled the PET for March 18. I’m a PET veteran, with seven behind me since late 2018. The drill is straightforward, check in at the hospital, wait 45 minutes for the radioactive tracer to flow through the body, lay on the slab under the scope for 15 minutes. The doc will get the image the same day.

We left the Institute and went shopping for a new bed for the guest room, which sits empty most of the time. No guests expected, but you never know.  

Putting a PET scan on the calendar helps your focus. We are talking again about those ideas for projects, for trips that we’ve talked about then set aside or forgotten. Suddenly the timing makes sense. We had thought about Alaska, it kept moving into the future. We’ll go, punching our tickets for another stop on the retired folks’ tourist circuit.

We talked about highway trips. The Massanutten Mountain Trails 100-mile race in Virginia is coming up in May, I’ve volunteered for years. The college class reunion in New Hampshire is in June—that’s a plane trip—followed by the Harper family reunion in Tennessee. We’re getting to be regulars there. We talked about getting to New Jersey sometime.

Eventually all the joyriding will come to an end, you hope because other things come up. We heard an old Virginia friend died a month ago. She had moved to North Carolina. For a while we’d drive up to visit. She suffered a stroke, the connection faded. We got word of a memorial service.  

The birthday evening set us off from that. We talked about good things, summer plans, kids’ accomplishments. The grandsons and the young daughters of a friend laughed and chatted. The kids’ smiles helped create joy. I guessed they wondered why they were invited to an old-guy birthday dinner.

We left the restaurant happy, anticipating great things in coming years from these young folks.

Then we moved on. The next morning, the first day of year 78, I got back to reproducing in oil paint a landscape printed on a placemat I picked up in a Saigon restaurant. The image, four farmers harvesting wheat, hints at hot, backbreaking labor in a remote Asian place. In some mysterious way it offers calm, serenity, retreat from the dark comedy of daily headlines.

The placemat reprint is unsigned. It’s marked ST25, so it’s an advertisement for a premium Vietnamese rice, which is offered everywhere in the country.

The job took about three weeks, not full time. I covered the canvas with three coats of acrylic white to create a base, then combined colors, shades of green and blue for the background mountains, then skin tones, yellow and orange mixes for the reflections of sunlight. The structures and forms were blunt and bold, no delicate strokes needed, which brings the project down to my skill level.

 I worked for a while on the sun hats, the reflection of sunlight on clothing, on the complicated color mix for the wheat. The steep slopes suggested Vietnam’s Central Highlands, but it could have been regions in neighboring countries with the same rugged terrain, farming practices, and reliance on manual labor.

I went back to Hobby Lobby a couple of times for new brushes, brush cleaner, paint, the works. This is something worthwhile, even fun, when you’re in your late seventies and waiting for a PET scan. You could call it creative, I wouldn’t go that far. Most likely it will end up on the garage wall next to the tool shelves, like much of my stuff. The next step: try again.

February 23, 2026

Next week marks the tenth anniversary of an accident. On March 5, 2016, a truck hauling nearly 8,000 gallons of fuel oil over the ice road across the Great Bear Lake fell through the ice.

The Great Bear Lake is way up there, at the northern edge of Canada’s Northwest Territories, about 1,000 miles from the U.S. border. It covers 12,000 square miles, the fourth-largest in North America, larger than Lake Huron and Lake Erie. The crash occurred about three miles from Deline, the only settlement on the lake, with a population of about 500 Native Americans.

At the time officials said the ice at the scene was between 2.5 feet and 5.5 feet thick. The lake at that point is 300 feet deep. The driver escaped as the truck sank halfway below the ice. Three days later crews drained the truck of 7,900 gallons of fuel oil. Within weeks the truck was dragged from the ice by a crane. An investigation found the truck weighed nearly 9,000 pounds more than the 88,000-pound weight limit for the ice road.                                                                                                  

The obscure, near-tragic incident resonated with a fragment of memory.  My son Michael and I visited Yellowknife, capital of the Northwest Territories, on a fishing trip 16 years ago. That was in June. The Great Slave Lake, near Yellowknife, was still thawing out. We talked about going back, but never did. The vast distance, the rough-edged remoteness, discourages travel. 

I found the story when I looked up the weather in Yellowknife. Midweek last week it was -38F according to weather.com, with a “feels like” temp of -54F.

News reports of the accident said that temperature changes and variations in the density of the fuel could have added to the truck’s weight. Authorities were understanding, you might say forgiving. No charges were brought against the driver or the company that owned the truck.

Meanwhile Lent, the season of penance, started with Ash Wednesday. Churches, judging from the parking lots, were crowded. We have lots of them here, in some neighborhoods clusters of two or three.

Penance, we’ve learned, is the opening of the heart hoping for forgiveness–always hard, sometimes excruciating. In an episode of the British TV drama Law and Order UK, the obnoxious prosecutor loses a big case and ends up in church, then in the confession box. “Bless me, Father,” he says, as the show ends. The scene hints at humility, the redemptive virtue that leads us to penance. All those Ash Wednesday preachers reminded us.

In the Old Testament book of Genesis (chapters 37-45), Joseph lives with his father, Israel, and brothers in Canaan. Because he is his father’s favorite, his brothers hate him and sell him as a slave in Egypt. Through hard work he becomes a high official in Pharoah’s family. When famine afflicts Canaan the brothers travel to Egypt to beg for food. They don’t recognize Joseph, but he knows and helps them. Later he reveals himself, and intercedes with Pharoah to allow them to settle in Egypt. Joseph reunites with his father, who weeps with joy.

Joseph’s story typically is cited as a lesson in forgiveness. It was an easy sermon on Ash Wednesday and a central theme of Christianity and every other spiritual tradition. That could also be because we see it in stark relief to the tenor of public life at this moment: anger, depression, fear. Things are not working out well in America.

But then. A friend lost her mother to Alzheimer’s after caring for her and her father for years, years of nights away from home. The memorial service was packed. “She’s in a better place,” her grandson said. We listened to some Scripture, the pastor’s rhetoric soared. “There’s no darkness in heaven,” he declared. It was that old-time Southern Baptist religion, lifting the congregation at that painful moment.               

A week earlier, the bishop of the Charleston diocese ordained 11 men as deacons, who will assist priests at their home parishes. One was a local guy. It was a happy occasion, a group from our parish drove down. The new deacon came to the Knights of Columbus social and gave a little pep talk. “Do something for Lent,” he said. Show up, be present, witness to goodness, he repeated.

His brief words pointed at the ancient lesson taught by all spiritual traditions, that men and women are led through faith to discover the truth about the universe, the nature of humanity, man and his destiny, the meaning of salvation.

I wrote last week about the hoopla over the Buddhist monks’ walk to Washington. We guessed they left something with a few people, maybe more than a few. There must be something to be said for bare feet pounding on asphalt and concrete for 108 winter days.

So we wait for signs and special moments, beacons of change. A grand jury of everyday citizens refused to indict six members of Congress, military veterans under Trump attack for reminding service members of their obligation to refuse illegal orders. The jury members stood up for the law.

I thought of the bizarre symmetry, the terrifying cracking of the ice beneath the overweight truck in Canada ten years ago and the metastasizing obtuseness of government.

Still, Lent’s solemnity is gaining ground. The Ash Wednesday services were crowded. The priest didn’t try for eloquence but offered the schedule of observances, then sat down. It was time for the simple, brutal ritual, the black crosses scratched on foreheads. He took his chair for a moment of meditation, then stood with the deacons and the young servers. We rose silently and waited for the blessing.

February 16, 2026

The Buddhist monks did not pass our way on their 108-day, 2,300-mile walk from Texas to Washington. They did travel through some small South Carolina towns on a due-east course to Columbia before pivoting north to Charlotte. At Greensboro they again turned sharply east then zigzagged northeast into Virginia, passing through Richmond.

They brushed by our old hometown, Lake Ridge, before a final sprint (at hiking pace) into Alexandria and Arlington and into Washington last week. At George Washington University last Wednesday the monks’ leader, Venerable Bhikkhu Pannakara, led a crowd in a “global loving-kindness meditation.” He made brief remarks:

“We are so deeply grateful for all the support we have received throughout this journey. Your love, your kindness, your presence—all of it has carried us forward. May we continue our walk for peace in our whole lives, not just for these 108 days, but forever. May we help peace bloom more in the world, one step at a time.

“This physical journey may be reaching its destination, but the walk for peace continues always—in each of us, through each of us, for all beings everywhere. Thank you so much for walking with us. May you and all beings be well, happy and at peace.”

I missed most of the news reports but picked up snippets here and there. The D.C. rally summoned memories of the 1968 antiwar marches, when crowds chanted “All We Are Saying Is Give Peace a Chance.”

The monks repeated probably hundreds of times on the walk the central message of their lives, which is the central mission of their Buddhist faith, the quest for enlightenment, the meaning of existence, release from suffering and human passion, nirvana. We translate all that readily in English as “peace.” Good enough for the monks, good enough for us.

For sure, most of the thousands who stood in the cold watching the 19 monks pass and fell in to walk with them aren’t Buddhists. The term “peace walk” struck a chord with Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, agnostics, and atheists, probably because they recognized in the monks’ crusade something they had been taught, maybe in Sunday school, or simply instinctively believed.

We don’t have to dig deep. As the ICE riot police arrest American citizens and non-citizens, as U.S. Navy aircraft blow up fishing boats in the Caribbean, as Russian missiles rain on Ukraine, Americans are beaten down by the pervasive bleakness of public life. News reports have found that Trump is down in the polls. The New York Times commentator Ross Douthat announced that “Trump has lost the country.”

Millions still fly Trump flags and wear those red hats. But then all those millions who followed and cheered the monks felt something, a sense that “peace,” serenity, relief from the rampages of the federal government against innocent human beings, isn’t a dream.   

Just over a month ago we hiked nearly a mile through Hamad International Airport at Doha in Qatar, a kind of fantasia of world travel. We stared at a glistening rainforest and massive sculptures of human and animal forms and other works of art, immaculate shops and restaurants and airport facilities. Separate prayer rooms were available for Muslim men and women. Doha supports operations by some 60 international airlines.

Hamad showed off something alien to us, a sense of Muslim culture, taste, a dazzling flair for the richness and excitement of international travel, an exotic, non-Western consciousness of joy at the experience of moving through the world.

Within a week we stood 9,000 miles from home before Buddhist memorials and stared at the elegant, glistening gold statuary and hulking stone forms of Buddha and his hierarchy of gods and prophets dating more to more than a thousand years ago, to which the monks of the Texas-to-D.C. peace walk owe their heritage. In Cambodia’s capital we removed our shoes and hiked the steep stairs of the Phnom Wat temple and inhaled the fragrance of incense burned in reverence for that ancient faith.

A few of us sat before three monks in the temple in the town of Oudong. We listened to their lyrical chanting as they conveyed a blessing and tossed lotus and jasmine blossoms over us. We climbed 400 steps to the summit of the temple and looked out at the vernal landscape, dotted with likenesses of Buddha and the farms and small villages he presides over in serenity and calm.

From those places we picked up, without truly understanding, a sense of the depth of Buddhist perceptions of the mystery of life. Then we listened to the Texas monks as they answered the same reporters’ questions over and over, about the need for peace, the search for peace, and come away baffled about their meaning, about the ultimate significance of peace—a state of mind, of purpose, of being, in our lives.

It may come to us more easily if we look again at the rage boiling over in the country, not just of political activists we see on TV every night, but also among the ordinary people who joined the Trump parade in the last election and now see what it has really done to them and to the country. 

So the monks who hiked half of America in the dead of winter may have left a mark for a while with the non-Buddhists in this non-Buddhist country. “Seek peace,” they said over and over, clearly and decisively, in the languages of all religions and creeds.  

Peace. How to discover it. Through hard weather huge crowds, thousands carrying signs, many in tears, received a message, both universal and intensely private. It will be, already has been dismissed by the hard-minded cynics, we know who they are; for others, it may penetrate to the soul.  

February 9, 2026

The snow disappeared after a few days in the sloppy, dirty stage. It came to five inches here, more than enough to cripple this town for three days. So the landscape was white, briefly. It’s winter, after all. Sunlight arrived, then faded behind pale, tired clouds. Then it rained.

It’s a season of bad news. Some of it followed us, in the middle of the Southeast Asia trip. Sandy went to a hospital in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. The doctor and her staff were skilled and helpful. We have a nice photo.

Still, the two weeks of sunshine and smiles roused us. We gained heart watching Vietnamese and Cambodian people working their farms, shops, open-air fresh food markets, full of energy and purpose, improving their lives in those still-developing countries.

The trip overrode the bleak national news and the local stream of medical anecdotes, the senior citizen emergencies, appointments, procedures, tests, test results. At home the natural order plays out: we readjust, as if we never left the chill, the bare landscape, the dark mood.

Then a woman at the YMCA, riding a spin bike, saw the “Happy Trails” on Sandy’s teeshirt and asked is she a hiker. Sandy pointed at me. The woman walked over. “I saw the ‘Happy Trails,’ I had to ask, because I’m hiking the Appalachian Trail,” she announced, smiling.

“North or south?” I asked.

“Northbound. I still have New Hampshire, Vermont, Maine—New England.”

We talked a bit about the AT, what I know of it, provisioning, hydration, rest, Maine’s 100-Mile Wilderness.

“I’m Bricey,” she said. “I’m planning on starting again around April. I should get you to come with me!” Her bright eyes flashed. She got back on the bike.

The AT. A “bucket-list” thing for some outdoorsy people. I used to do one-day 20-mile stretches of it, north and southbound, from Virginia’s Markham trailhead. Either way it was climb, climb, climb. Now I only want to get through the cold without slipping on ice. And the AT experience isn’t what it used to be. Thousands are on the trail half the year. At some points columns of hikers back up. Campsites and shelters fill up. The full AT hike costs more than a trip to Europe.

But Bricey is setting goals and pursing them. It wasn’t just talk. She had done Georgia, Tennessee, North Carolina, Virginia, Pennsylvania, or “Rocksylvania,” up to Connecticut.

She was probably a couple of decades younger than me, early- or mid-fifties. Not a newbie, but still full of pep and determination. She had tramped the trail, felt the exhaustion, the daily pain. The hard parts hadn’t stopped her. She wanted to finish, to climb Mount Katahdin, the northern terminus, and find joy in her achievement.

We said “good luck,” she pushed hard on the bike. If I see her again I’ll decline her invitation to join her. Regretfully, more or less. But I keep my membership in the Virginia Happy Trails Running Club (Sandy’s teeshirt).

It’s been two years since I entered a VHTRC event, but the club is going strong, now calling for volunteers for the Reverse Ring, a 71-mile ultra-trail race in Virginia’s Massanutten Mountains in late February, when it’s still cold. I finished it twice, that was ten years ago.

Trail-running/hiking is still out there. It’s a kind of therapy, a positive thing that offers a sense of taking on something hard and, you hope, completing it. Some jog city streets or parks, enter 5K and 10K races, take aerobics and yoga classes, pursuing personal fitness goals. Same thing.

Fitness is how we battle physical decrepitude: heart disease, high blood pressure, loss of muscle mass, osteoporosis, which threaten relentlessly as the years pile up. The fitness path is an inward mission, pursued for self, for those close to us. The point is achievement beyond health: the satisfaction—the thrill—of accepting a challenge, overcoming hardship, discomfort, pain. Like Bricey and the AT.

Another mission calls us to step forward for others, beyond self, for humanity.  The prerequisite is a commitment to help, to be of use, teaching, coaching, working at a food bank, Habitat for Humanity, raising funds for charity. It may mean doing difficult, time-consuming things. It may mean, in some way, sacrifice.

We may well venture here beyond signing up for a church charity event. Every quiet waking moment offers the potential for epiphany.  We could one day feel a calling outside ourselves, some mystical or spiritual awakening that gives birth to a social conscience.

That could be recognition that nobody pays people to shoulder most of the country’s social needs. Every church committee, every food bank, every charity, depends on volunteers. Volunteers visit nursing home and assisted-living residents, bringing them joy by being present.

In this city Habitat has built more than 400 homes. It helps low-income people with financing to purchase them, enabling them to escape shabby, overpriced apartments in dangerous neighborhoods. Much of the construction is a volunteer mission: raising walls, shingling roofs, painting, cleaning, the unskilled grunt work.

Stepping forward for others can build on personal achievements. You can do your fitness class or play your pickleball match, then put in time at the food pantry or teach English as a second language. You go home tired, but you’ve created goodness for other persons. 

We make our lives richer by going out of ourselves, overcoming self. In America here and now, the need is urgent, critical, it never ends. “Public service” now is an alien concept in our lowlife federal government, which looks perversely, obsessively inward. We all know it.

We need our YMCA exercise classes, our 5Ks, our ultra-trail challengers. Bricey will inspire others to seek greatness when she summits Mount Katahdin. We all can find our way to inspire. We can be with those who need us, to lift their spirits as we lift our own.