July 13, 2026

Thunderstorms came to Greenville, so downtown’s Falls Park presents as a rich green, although the Reedy River runs low and brown and the famous falls dribble over the rocks. Early in the week we had a nice dinner at an Italian place nearby, avoiding the piazza, which at 6 PM still simmered at around 90F. 

We waited nervously for the new drug, coming by Fedex. This was the course change, a decisive new chemo pill. Even better, no charge, the company is comping it.

The next day brought more sun. In early afternoon we drove back downtown for a couple of errands. Locals and tourists wander through the park among the joggers and cyclists. Folks take to the benches amidst the pretty landscaping along the water. Kids wade in the river. The sun sends down its broiling rays, but midtown is well-shaded, storefront doors are open, sidewalk traffic ebbs and flows. It’s midsummer in the South.

The park is a place to come to. The layout and landscaping are lovely year round. The city embarked on creating the spot in the late 1960s, rescuing the downtown from the declining textile industry. One hollow hulk of brick, now called the Wyche Pavilion, remains along the river just west of Main Street. The place started out as a paint shop then was occupied by a mix of businesses over the years. It’s now an event venue, seldom used, a spooky contrast to the upscale hotels nearby.

We got coffee at Spill the Beans, which is open until 10 PM on weeknights. The wide space is street level, carved out of an old brick building, the brick walls left preserved, creating a cavernlike feel. After the heat the hypercooled air steals your breath. The pungent aroma of many coffees sweetens the place.

Devoted coffee drinkers like “Beans.” The front room looks out on Main Street. A few oils decorate the walls, vibrant colors of trees, floral arrangements, clowns, giving the space an exotic European feel. It was a late weekday summer afternoon, the city seemed half-asleep. Traffic was sparse, even on Main. A few folks sat at the far end of a large room to the rear. We sprawled on a sofa against the bricks.

The coffee was rich and good. The spicy bitterness brought cool moisture to my forehead. We savored the quiet. A couple of women, faces flushed with the heat, waited at the counter for their iced drinks. Others came and went. Parents bought ice cream cones for their perspiring children.

The idea, which comes with coffee, is taking stock, which always suits old people free of young kids and jobs. The oldsters have their medical appointments and their aches and pains to fill the conversational gaps. If they’re lucky they have their cruises and tours and grandkids to talk about. They have their memories.

We engage to a point, then put all that aside. The story of life really is in odd, offbeat but enduring things—at that moment, the dark, cool space and the coffee that distracts from hard details like doctors and pills. Distraction is what we hope for. While sipping I drift back to the Virginia mountains and the biting winter air, the rocks, the darkness. This is 15 years, or was it 16 years. There were the long training episodes in January, when Sandy made her vegetarian chili. The runners called her the “Chili Lady,” she served it and gave out seconds and thirds.

The medical things had moved along through various decision points when we drifted into this city. We fell into the program with the treatments, soon it was well in hand. For the second time I rang the radiation bell. We pushed the disease episodes away. We found our way around but never lost a sense of the rich moments of the past.

In that first winter we drove to Waynesville, 25 or so miles west of Asheville. We drank coffee there, too. Waynesville has remade itself as a tourist destination, Main Street was packed. We walked through the art galleries and browsed the Mast General Store. The “Gateway to the Smokies” is chilly in January. More than chilly.

The real win was the ride home along U.S. 276, which bisects downtown then meanders down through the Pisgah Mountains. Snow covered the peaks. We paused at Looking Glass Falls, a cold place in deep forest. Ice hung on branches above the falls, which curled into a fast-moving creek. I stood transfixed by the beauty of the place. We soldiered on through Brevard into South Carolina. Just past the town the hospital called, scheduling more tests.

The following year we drove again to Brevard just before Christmas. We stopped at Caesar’s Head State Park and walked the path that shows the Upstate mountain panorama from the Hawk Watch at 3,200 feet. Sassafras Mountain and Pinnacle come into view, deep-blue Lake Jocassee glitters 40 miles west.

Back at “Beans” we finished the drinks and stepped into the street. The sunbaked air collided with the caffeine, I wobbled a bit. We padded over the South Main bridge toward the downtown towers. It’s a jumbled view, a bank, some hotels, as Main Street turns north.

We are done with reminiscing for the day. My drugs were scheduled to arrive the next day, they came in a big Fedex truck. I walked out to the truck, the driver scanned the package. I lugged the box inside. It was well put together, 60 capsules, a 30-day supply, embedded in cardboard with instructions and a blood-pressure gauge.

We scanned the enclosed clinical trial reports and side-effects warnings: hypertension, coronary, liver, and kidney problems. Then: perforation of intestines; low blood calcium; bleeding; jawbone problems (osteonecrosis); “QT prolongation”; and reversible posterior leukoencephalopathy syndrome or RPLS.

We know about drug boilerplate, required full disclosure of risk of possible side effects. Outcomes may range from nightmarish to negligible, a headache, a cough, tiredness. Disease, and fighting disease, means risk. Physicians prescribe the drug, patients use it.

We talked, Sandy said no. I thought of our serene afternoon at Spill the Beans, free of drugs, symptoms, side effects, fear. I thought of the Alaska trip next month.

Sometimes we just back away.

This is one of those times. I repacked the shipment and placed it in a corner. I pulled out my stockpile of the old pills and looked ahead.

July 6, 2026

Lenvima and Balversa sound like towns in Italy. They may be. In the medical world they’re in a category called “antineoplastics,” which are used to treat cancer, also called chemotherapy. Balversa is the one I know. Oncologists call it erdafitinib. Lenvima also has a funny name, levantinib. Both are in pill form, taken orally.

We’re constantly learning. Right now Balversa is the past, Lenvima is the future, as far as it goes. The present is logistics, transitioning from the downtown Cancer Institute to a branch only ten minutes from our house and getting to know a new doctor. He’ll be replacing the guy who tackled my problem nearly six years ago and never stopped working for me.

Dr. Britt Bolemon is a prince who stands head-and-shoulders above the medical technocrats. Over those years he smiled, he listened, he taught. But as the Prisma health care system pushed the docs to herd patients through the building faster, around 15 minutes per consult, he decided that was not his medical vocation. He found the practice and the philosophy he believed in 30 miles down the interstate in Anderson. Saying goodbye was tough.

We think of cancer in broad-brush terms: breast, colorectal, stomach, lung, pancreatic, cervical, esophageal, others, which are categories of hundreds, even thousands of specific strains of disease. Smoking, environmental factors like exposure to harsh chemicals and industrial pollutants, radiation, prolonged sunlight, obesity, diet, are factors. But the real battle is fought at the cell/molecular level, where for mysterious reasons things sometimes go haywire. 

One outcome may be something the oncologists, who are scientists, call the FGFR3 mutation. This is where my cancer, thymic carcinoma, begins. After all those oncology appointments, the doc’s tutorials and briefings, the gene-level tissue analysis he ordered in 2021, we heard the message but only vaguely grasped it. The analysis helped him decide I should go with Balversa which, like some other chemotherapy drugs, attacks where gene mutations form, and where we really live our lives.

Through these six years we watched the scans. Thymic carcinoma originates in the thymus, in the center of the chest, and like other cancers may travel elsewhere. The “urothelial” cancer in my kidney in 2018 reappeared along my rib cage in 2020. In November of that year when we landed in this town, Dr. Bolemon took charge. A week before Christmas surgery did the job, backed up by radiation.

A recovery year sped past, followed by a year of immunotherapy with Keytruda, the famous drug advertised on the evening news shows. It didn’t help much. Things lurched backward a bit. We talked about Balversa. In February 2024 I gulped down the first pill. I pushed the start date a day or two later to avoid side effects on my birthday.

A year passed in a blur of strange symptoms, numbness in my fingers, sensitivity to light, tiredness, similar things.  But soon the scans looked better and the doc cut the dosage from eight milligrams to six. Finally a thumbs-up, he called off the medicine, I took my drug holiday. Meanwhile the drug company kept sending pills, a 30-day supply every other week. I built up a stockpile. I waited a few weeks before canceling the deliveries, just in case.

But cancer doesn’t quit, those eerie shadows on the scans didn’t go away. “Let’s look at a PET,” the doc said. I got the PET scan at the downtown hospital. He studied the images. “Start back with three milligrams,” he said. I pulled the remaining Balversa bottles down from the kitchen cabinet, about six months’ supply. One tiny pill each morning.

Compared to the original eight-milligram dose, three doesn’t seem like much. Maybe it should have worked, maybe more would have worked. Three milligrams minimizes side effects, I never felt a thing. I went to the gym, jogged, took naps. For a year the scans looked good, those dark shadows fluttering around just a bit, growing a centimeter or two.

But then, two consecutive scans showed change. After the first the doc said simply, “It’s a stable scan.” But he could see, we all could see, this is a trend.

The late-June scan showed more growth. “Nothing remarkable,” he wrote in his notes, “but this combination warrants a change in therapy.” Cancer adjusts. Increasing the Balversa dosage probably wouldn’t have helped.

A first thought was a biopsy and another molecular study. Instead the doc proposed moving to Lenvima for four weeks to check tolerance, then a lab workup. He’s recommending 20 milligrams/day, a stiff jump from the three with Balversa.

Twenty milligrams of chemotherapy means business. Chemo targets fast-multiplying cells, cancerous or healthy, which could mean only hair loss, but possibly attacks on internal parts.  Depending on how the lesions behave after being hammered by Lenvima for ten weeks, the new doctor may order the biopsy and tissue study.

We kept up the rituals, exercising, getting coffee at our local place and, after ditching the road-trip idea, buying plane tickets to Idaho Falls for Kathleen’s and Steve’s September wedding party. We’ll get a car and drive to the site in Ashton.

Memories percolate back. Fifteen years ago we passed through Ashton, barely noticing it, on a road trip from Breckenridge, Colorado to Ennis, Montana. Maybe 20 miles farther north the highway divides into ID 87, which continues north through big-ranch country to Montana, and U.S. 20, which takes you to the west gate of Yellowstone National Park. We’ve gone both ways.  

So we have that. That follows our two-week expedition to Alaska in mid-August, a train, bus, and boat ride from Fairbanks to Vancouver. We’ll take photos, pick up souvenirs. More grist for “On the Road.”

Starting eight years ago, our plan was to see the country. We’re down to four states we’ve never set foot in, the Alaska trip will leave three, Arkansas, Oregon, and for Sandy, North Dakota. That would be nice. We’ll whisper a short prayer. The Lenvima is in the mail.   

June 29, 2026

Airfares to Idaho Falls in September have risen, like fares to everywhere. The advice we hear is look on Tuesday—no, look on Wednesday. Try “Google Flights.” Try “Kayak.” Try combining flights with a car rental. Look on the airline websites. American flies there, Southwest doesn’t. How much for the extra checked bag, or for picking seats in advance?

Almost everyone who travels agrees that flying, on top of the cost, is often painful. We slept on an airport floor in Denver and didn’t enjoy it. I remember especially the after-hours cleaning crews with their high-powered vacuums. Years ago another flight from Chicago was delayed for hours, until after midnight, when President Obama visited his hometown.

The road trip idea looks interesting. Four years ago, in-mid June 2022, we drove to Sheridan, Wyoming, for the Bighorn trail run. That trip took four and one-half days, but we spent the third morning in Independence, Missouri, visiting the Truman Presidential Museum. We stopped in Badlands National Park for part of an afternoon.  On the last day we visited Mount Rushmore and Sturgis, South Dakota, site of the big motorcycle rally every August.

The actual destination now is Ashton, Idaho, for our youngest daughter’s and son-in-law’s wedding party (they eloped last year). Ashton is a little over 400 miles farther west than Sheridan. Google estimates just over 2,000 to Ashton. It routes you on I-80 through Nebraska, which we have never visited, instead of I-90 through South Dakota, which we took in ’22.

Running the numbers, or the routes, we note that I-90 beyond Sheridan would force you onto winding rural roads across Wyoming. I-80 gets you farther west in Wyoming before you have to take a state road, U.S. 191.

It looks like an adventure. It was one, for sure, in 2022. We camped out the first night in Massac State Park, in Metropolis, Illinois, just across the Ohio River from Paducah. That ended a long day, nearly 500 miles of driving. I was tired slogging across Tennessee and Kentucky. We had a nice campsite at the park, it was a warm, comfortable evening. We walked, stretching our legs, and looked out at the wide Ohio.

I wanted to see Metropolis, the hometown of Superman. We saw the billboard on the outskirts, but didn’t do the tour. Instead we pushed forward on I-24 to I-57 to I-64 into St. Louis, then plodded across the hot, dusty center of Missouri on I-70. I had marked a campground in Blue Springs, just east of Kansas City. The place was hard to find, the campsite was on a slope. We cooked dinner and turned in. At 5:00 AM thunder boomed, lightened cracked, rain poured. We threw our drenched gear in the van and bolted.

We got breakfast at Starbucks and stopped at a park to repack. Luckily we found the Truman Presidential Library and Museum in Independence, Truman’s hometown, and spent a morning at that truly unique place. Then it was I-29 out of Kansas City.

Here the trip turned into work, as you venture into the official Midwest. Miles and miles pass leaving no impressions. The interstate plods on into Iowa, which has a nice “welcome” sign. We passed through a blur of places, then detoured into and out of Omaha without stopping. The highway crosses into South Dakota at Sioux City. It was flat, it was hot. We dropped the camping idea and got a hotel room in Sioux Falls. We had dinner at a sports bar, like any other sports bar.

We left early for the straight shot west across South Dakota, a sea of wheat and pastures. We paused for a walk at Mitchell, home of Sen. George McGovern, 1972 Democratic presidential candidate, then pushed on to Badlands, an amazing place that took a couple of hours. In another hundred miles we found the Black Hills campsite. A roaring wind capsized our tent, we spent a freezing night in the van, then headed out early.

After Mount Rushmore and Sturgis, we made Sheridan about 5:00 PM, beat and bleary-eyed. Pulling into the hotel, the odometer showed an even 2,000 miles.

One hard-to-remember problem when planning a road-trip adventure is that you have to drive back. We broke up the return by visiting daughter Kathleen in Colorado Springs, a solid 500 miles of prairie. Two days later we shot into Kansas. After camping at Lake Wilson, we visited the Eisenhower Presidential Library in Abilene—a must-see—then drove through hours of rain to Columbia, Missouri. Then it was St. Louis again, then across Illinois into Indiana.

We somehow detoured into Evansville, then eventually retraced our course through Kentucky and Nashville and got a campsite near Crossville off I-40. We finished that second-last day with dinner at a Ruby Tuesday’s. Five more hours of interstates got us home.

Right now, airfares are not budging from around $800 round trip before buying seats, etc. This is with a layover, then a car rental, plus the risk of flights being delayed or canceled. Storms are common along the South Carolina-Idaho flight paths in September.

The van performed well on the trip to Alabama. It’s been around the territory, dozens of trips to Tennessee, Virginia a bunch of times, Florida five times, New Jersey, all over North Carolina and Georgia; the big one to Las Vegas in 2018, when I started writing “On the Road” as a travel journal.

It’s still pretty good on gas. But gas and meals and hotels for four days add up. Or you buy plane tickets and rent a car. But then, really, the choice isn’t important. It’s our daughter’s and son-in-law’s party, a positive, happy thing.

It’s a big country. Those adventurous road miles become long. Creating memories of never-before-seen and never-to-see-again places weighs heavily as you stare at lonely interstate lanes that stretch to the horizon.

The long-distance driver, holding the wheel, watching traffic and looking for the next rest area, may enter something like a meditative state in which the past and the future merge, maybe creating wondrous, mystical insights about life, love, family. Regrets and sadness may rush back. The mind frees itself to confront the unknown, to learn from it, to remember.  And really, what’s beyond the next turn. Maybe that’s the allure of it. Right now, we’re still looking at flights.     

June 22, 2026

Orange Beach, Alabama, is a lot like other beach-vacation towns: high-rise hotels and condos lining the water, fast food, pricey seafood restaurants, teeshirt and souvenir joints. It has the white sand and the surf. Of course it’s the Gulf, not the ocean. We got there as storms gathered, then the rain came.

The idea developed in an odd way. Last summer we took the grandsons to Lambert’s Café, a heavy-Southern food place in Sikeston, Missouri, where the servers throw warm rolls to diners. Yes, they do, it’s on their website at https://throwedrolls.com/ The kids got a kick out of it, most folks do, it’s always packed. Lambert’s has a restaurant in Foley, Ala., near Gulf Shores and Orange Beach. We knew we should go.

Orange Beach is a long drive, about 500 miles from home, but we were in Nashville for the family reunion, which we thought would make it shorter. But Alabama is a long state. On the map the trip down I-65 looks like a straight shot. It’s around 90 miles from Nashville to the state line, then nearly another 400 to Orange Beach.

Like all Southern states, Alabama is mostly rural, farms, pastures, small towns.   The interstate passes quickly through Birmingham, once but no longer a major steel-producing city and Montgomery, the state capital. Before reaching them, and thereafter, I-65 is a path through a blur of forest and occasionally farmland and clusters of barns and warehouses. It’s deep backcountry, probably the way the locals like it.

The GPS mysteriously routed us off I-65 just north of the tiny settlement of Fort Deposit. We discussed, intensely, whether to follow the directions, but it appeared other vehicles were complying, so we did. They quickly disappeared on local roads, we were alone on two-lane highway 185, which winds eerily through woods and clusters of mobile homes and deserted shacks for 12 miles before leading back to ’65 at Greenville.

We left the highway again near Barnett Crossroads, taking state road 113 into Florida and due south on U.S. 29. We watched nervously for local sheriffs as the speed limit bounced from 65 to 55 to 45, then 25. I studied my map. We cruised south, ever south, trying to correlate the GPS directions to the map. We slipped from local highways to city streets through McDavid, Molino, Cantonment, small towns, then smaller towns.

We pulled off the road a couple of times to reorient. Eventually we emerged from the boondocks near Pensacola and found a westbound state road. Water and dunes suddenly showed up, then the beach towers of the Gulf, the high arching bridge back to Alabama, finishing an eight-hour trip.

Like most beach resorts, Orange Beach is a grid network, a main highway running parallel to the beach, intersected by side streets packed with hotels, shopping, eateries, amusements like minigolf and stuff for kids. An actual town does exist, stretching inland from the tourist playground. We learned what should have been obvious: that the place got its name from orange groves that used to occupy private plots. The Gulf winds aren’t kind to the oranges, which ruled out commercial orange farming. But the soil is fertile, and the story is that a single Orange Beach tree once produced 2,000 oranges in a season.

On our first morning, on the murky pond outside the hotel, dozens of giant turtles rose to the surface, waiting for scraps tossed by guests. They swam close to the railing, eyes bulging creepily, then submerged again. Later, an alligator appeared and lay perfectly still, as if eyeballing the turtles—and the guests.

The town’s efforts to lure tourists don’t end at the beach. We read about “Bamahenge,” a replica of England’s Stonehenge surrounded by a dinosaur park. The boys love dinosaurs. From Lambert’s we drove probably 20 miles of rural roads to find it: a deserted clearing in dense woods where fiberglass rocklike structures are arranged in the pattern of Stonehenge. A knock on the fiberglass gives a hollow sound. A path leads through the sweltering woods to a half-dozen fiberglass or plastic dinosaurs. We didn’t stay long.

A hundred or so teenagers arrived at the hotel on buses from Lafayette, Louisiana, for a church camp. They packed the dining room, lugging their backpacks and wearing earphones and teeshirts displaying quotes from Scripture. They overwhelmed the Domino’s Pizza next door for hours and held Bible study in the hotel lobby. Only in the Southland, I thought.

On our last day we made it to the beach. The surf conditions flag was red, snapping in the breeze, warning bathers. The sky was gray, a scattering rain pelted the sand, the Gulf of Mexico/America (take your pick) incoming tide crashed against the sand, slowly eroding the edges of the man-made beach. As the sand washed away, I guessed the city or county or state would soon be trucking in fresh sand to keep the tourists coming.

Other beach visitors were scarce, no doubt because of the stormy weather, which I failed to check before proposing the trip. Our 12-year-old grandson and I walked east for a while along the waterline, feeling the warm Gulf surf wash over our feet. A few brave folks ventured in waist-deep. A fellow cast his long surf-casting rod. The rain picked up, we could see others lugging their towels and umbrellas toward the street.

We followed, hunched low against the wind and rain. That afternoon we were trapped in the van by a monsoon-like cloudburst. I pulled over and parked as the rain obscured the car next to us. Afterward, as we glanced at the sky, angry clouds extended from the horizon. We ended at a Fifties-type diner, the Sunliner, where the servers wore Fifties styles, oldies blared from the sound system. Tourists looked over antique Fords and Chevies parked outside.

We got underway about 7 AM on back roads to I-10 into Mobile. I pushed for a stop at the USS Alabama Memorial on Mobile Bay, nestled among the oil refineries. The Alabama fought in the Pacific, supporting the Marianas, Philippines, Leyte Gulf, and Okinawa campaigns. After the war she was decommissioned. In 1964 Alabama was towed to Mobile for her new career as a museum ship. When the Navy reactivated its four Iowa-class battleships in the 1980s the ship was cannibalized for parts.

 We skipped the ship tour, anxious to hit the road, but stopped at the Aircraft Pavilion and snapped some pictures. We cruised past the oil tanks, inhaling the rich aroma of America’s energy industry. It was the business end of the beach trip. The rains returned, we pushed on.            

June 15, 2026

We picked up the grandsons and headed for I-40 and slipped through the western North Carolina peaks and the rebuilding of the Pigeon River overpasses. We passed Knoxville and headed into Midstate Tennessee, crossing the pretty Caney Fork River four times, possibly five.

The target was Mount Juliet in Wilson County, just east of Nashville and site of a reunion of the Harper family, which traces roots to an Irishman who as a teenager left the Old Sod in 1857 or 1858. While still a teenager he fought for the Confederates.

Michael Farrell mustered out at war’s end with no rack of medals or recognition. He managed to buy some land and got into farming. He married Bridget, they had ten children. Their kids had kids, and so on. Eventually, Harpers were and are found all over Tennessee. Sandy’s uncle Pete Harper lived to 95. He and his wife Elrose had six. Mike, the third son, organized the reunion.

Saying “yes” to the reunion conveyed not exactly a plan, more of a vague understanding that the trip was no family social drop-in. Inevitably, it was a pilgrimage into the past. Like other Southern places, Tennessee loves its history, revers it, luxuriates in the virtuous and the nightmarish. We stayed in Mount Juliet with Mike, a dedicated scholar, not only of the Harper family story, but also of the vast reach of history that leads us to understanding of our lives.

Mike revealed a sampling of hard truths, the mostly invisible, hardscrabble details of the lives of ordinary people of which history is composed. He showed me three books of a four-volume opus, The Tennessee Civil War Veterans Questionnaires which, strangely, he was able to buy on Amazon. It’s available for $50. The books, published in 1985, are a catalogue of answers to questionnaires sent to some 1,600 Tennesseans, obtained between 1915 and 1929 by two Tennessee State Library archivists.

Two forms of the questionnaire were distributed to these elderly gents, all in their seventies or eighties. The questions sought personal information, name, birthdate, birthplace, family background. They probe the mens’ (they’re all men) lives, like date and place of enlistment, details of service. The questions explore awareness of the war’s cause, the horror of slavery, whether the men owned slaves (very few) or knew slaveowners—again, very few.

Most, like Michael Farrell, were farmers, their fathers were farmers, their mothers and wives cooked, sewed, cleaned, cared for children, often five or six or more. They were low-ranking enlisted men who fought in many battles, suffered serious wounds. After the war most returned to farming, often to poverty.

The answers were unedited, rough and raw, showing a few years of school, sometimes a few months. One remarkable man attended the U.S. Naval Academy; when the war started he abandoned the Navy and enlisted with the rebels. Another said he himself had been a slave, he didn’t know his age or where he was born, but he knew where he had fought. Yes, the Confederates had black soldiers.

The books, the names in alphabetical order, draw excruciating detail about private lives in those tragic years, halting, pained commentaries written decades after the fighting ended.

The next day Mike finalized his reunion planning. He packed his detailed family-tree display boards, old photo albums and documents. He bought food, packed the gas grill and table coverings, made last-minute calls.

Sandy and I drove with the boys into the city and stopped at the veterans cemetery near Madison. We walked a bit and found the gravesites for Sandy’s mother and father, a Navy veteran, and older brother, who served three Vietnam tours and died young, his death attributed to Agent Orange exposure.

We parked near the State Capitol and climbed the dozens of steps to the entrance and got through security. The massive, somber, church-shaped building was quiet. The governor was absent. The rock-solid Republican legislature recessed after passing a “redistricting” measure that reshapes the state’s lone Black-majority 9th district in Memphis as a safe Republican district, pushing the state’s longtime Democratic congressman to retire.

The Capitol’s statuary recognizes the state’s warlike past. Outside, Andrew Jackson on his steed looms above the north view of the city. Nearby, World War I sharpshooter Audie Murphy aims his rifle at imaginary Germans. In the second-floor corridor, busts of Jackson, segregationist President Andrew Johnson, and Alamo hero Davey Crockett stare down at visitors.

The Capitol isn’t all about combat. The second floor displays a bust of Sampson W. Keeble, the first Black member of the General Assembly. Also shown: an engraving recognizing passage of the 19th Constitutional amendment, which establishes women’s suffrage. Another depicts Black men voting after passage of the 14th amendment, which guarantees citizenship to all persons born in or naturalized in the U.S, and the 15th, which guarantees the right to vote.

As in other places, history starts fights. In 1987 the Sons of the Confederacy demanded removal of a portrait of Governor William Brownlow, a one-time defender of slavery who changed his thinking and supported Reconstruction while in office (1865-1869). In 2021, over protests, a bust of Ku Klux Klan founder Nathan Bedford Forrest was moved to the Tennessee State Museum.

We climbed back down the outside stairs past the giant Jackson and Murphy statues. Their bold stories didn’t register with the 1,600 veterans who wrote their answers decades after their service.

Like other ordinary people across America who served in all of America’s wars, they fought and suffered. Books weren’t written about them. Their lives created histories, of the agony of war, in suffering, but also humility and dignity, stories that teach and inspire.