September 8, 2025

The chart on the wall at Passport Health offered a question: “What are the most dangerous animals in the world? It listed them: Mosquitoes (725,000 human deaths/year); other humans (450,000); and so on, including snakes, dogs, tsetse flies, scorpions, crocodiles, down to deer, which kill about 130 people each year by colliding with cars. So don’t hit one!

We were at the place because our Vietnam-Cambodia trip is four months away. You don’t want malaria or Japanese encephalitis, typhoid fever or poliomyetis (polio). You want to avoid rabies, hepatitis, and chikungunya (what’s that?). You want protection.

Information about vaccinations is complicated. You need the injections and/or pills. The family doctor isn’t sure, the pharmacy isn’t sure. Google isn’t sure. A doctor referred us to Passport Health, a private company that has the information and charges for it.

Years ago I went to Nicaragua, Guatemala, and Mexico for work. I don’t recall whether I got some specific vaccinations. Of course I was younger. The standard guidance is “don’t drink the water.” I didn’t but still got sick.

Since the covid pandemic, vaccination has become a nasty political hobbyhorse. Ivy, the nurse we talked to, a former ICU staffer, walked us through our vaccination history, starting with smallpox and polio—we have the childhood scars—to tetanus and MMR (measles, mumps, rubella).  She tapdanced around the covid-19 shot, which incites rightwing outrage. “You don’t have to get it,” she said, probably wondering if we were Republicans.

But the world is a dangerous place. Ticks are out there. Lyme disease, caused by a tick bite, is treatable, but may linger for years if not caught in time. A fellow I know was bitten by a Lone Star tick in the Virginia mountains. He developed alpha-gal syndrome or AGS, an incurable condition that causes hives, nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, and low blood pressure. Victims develop a severe allergy to mammalian foods, beef, pork, lamb, venison, and for some, dairy products.

Then mosquitos. Wherever you are, except in Antarctica and other cold places like Iceland, you find mosquitos. Why did God make them, we sometimes wonder. The literature teaches that 3,700 species of mosquitos exist, which sounds like way too many. Some 700 million people develop mosquito-borne diseases each year, leading to those hundreds of thousands of deaths.

You learn that mosquitos do serve a purpose, as food for other creatures. Because they breed in water, dragonflies and other water-friendly bugs eat them. So do fish, ducks, other birds, bats, toads, and frogs. If mosquitos didn’t exist, those species would have to eat other things.

We know mosquitos are annoying in the backyard or in the woods. They chase your picnic guests inside and ruin your camping trip. They’re everywhere, in the swamps, in the mountains. When my son Michael and I visited Canada’s Northwest Territory, we ventured a walk in the woods. In ten minutes we were driven back to the car, waving our arms.

Our camp was on an island in the middle of a lake. The bugs followed. In our tent at night we hung a smoldering aromatic repellent from the frame. When the flame went out they attacked. Ivy, our Passport Health staff person, talked about the Louisiana bayous, where she’s camped. Just as bad.

The mosquito scenario is scary: yellow fever, Japanese encephalitis, chikungunya, dengue fever, malaria, zika virus. Vaccines are available for yellow fever, chikungunya, and the Japanese encephalitis. But the main defense: don’t get bitten. Use percaridin or permethrin. You can buy clothing treated with permethrin, when you get dressed you’re applying your repellent.

We duck disease one way or another every day. Covid-19 exploded five years ago and as of last month has killed 1.2 million Americans (of 7.1 million fatalities worldwide). Today some folks shrug. They believe the government was lying, making law-abiding citizens wear masks, restricting freedom. 

We march forward. The trip is a project, an adventure, a change from driving the interstate to Tennessee and Virginia.

Some people love Caribbean cruises to those little islands, going ashore and shopping for souvenirs. The locals survive on selling souvenirs; the souvenir shops are mostly owned by the cruise lines.  Most of the time you’re on the ship, eating, drinking, sitting.

We know folks who love European river cruises, up the Rhine, the Danube, the Seine. They see historic cities and stroll cobbled streets. They see cathedrals, museums, castles. They eat great food, drink great beer and wine. Some folks love both the Caribbean and European cruises. Then there’s Alaska. What retired couple hasn’t been or doesn’t want to go?

That bug never bit me. We’re going to Vietnam. Then Cambodia. It’s a long trip, two solid days flying there and two back. We have our reservations and our itinerary.

Lots of Americans make the trip, although not as many as go to Europe. For some it’s a pilgrimage, tinged with emotion. Some three million Americans served in Southeast Asia, depending on how you define the timeframe. Some were there in the mid-1950s.

In March 1965 two Marine infantry battalions landed in Da Nang, the recognized start of America’s Vietnam War. Eight months later in a valley called Ia Drang, the Army’s 7th Cavalry airmobile regiment fought a vicious battle with the North Vietnamese Army, the first major U.S. military engagement since Korea. We learned years later the scope of the nightmare.

I missed Vietnam in ’72 by a couple of months, watching from a Marine base 1,400 miles away. More than 50 years later, the history resonates. We’ll get our shots and the bug spray. We’ll be there.   

September 1, 2025

I dragged out the paints, charcoals, pencils and other paint gear and staged them on a table in the garage. The inventory, stashed in cardboard boxes, included acrylics and oils, dozens of worn and new brushes, brush cleaner, a half-dozen blank canvases. I set up the easel.

It had been a while since I touched the stuff through a summer of distractions. It had been too hot to paint, anyway. We walked through galleries downtown and looked at the work of local artists:  landscapes, portraits, abstracts, baskets of fruit and flowers, in oils, acrylics, pencil, watercolors, tempera.

A year ago some of my stuff hung in a “Veterans’ Art” show at the local gallery, the criterion being that it was painted by veterans, not that it had actual artistic value. My contributions, I think, show something of the world as I see it. No sermons or homilies.

The point is creation, of something real that somehow reaches the heart, someone’s heart. We search for it in the work of the masters, the great portraitists, the Impressionists. Then too, the Americans, Winslow Homer, Georgia O’Keeffe, Edward Hopper, the Wyeths (all of them), Thomas Hart Benton, Norman Rockwell, Frederick Remington, and so on.

They painted the world they saw. Ideas came to me, around the anniversary weekend.

We were downtown for our anniversary dinner. A fellow with a guitar, sitting on a low stone wall at Falls Park, crooned old favorites. Some passersby paused and tossed a dollar or a couple of dollars in his guitar case, which lay open on the pavement just for that purpose.

We went to the place we’ve been to the last three or four anniversaries. Afterward we walked along Main Street. Falls Park, a pleasant downtown Greenville, S.C., attraction, invites strollers and those who feel like relaxing on benches under the oaks and maples or, like the singer, on the stone wall. They listen to the music or watch people, or both.

The guitar player used an electronic sound device that played multi-instrument backup music, giving his strumming the resonance of a nightclub act. People tapped their feet. We got up and danced a bit. “Give it up for the young couple,” the singer purred. People around us clapped and smiled.

We didn’t have to be anywhere, so we sat and listened. It was Friday, a big restaurant night. Couples and foursomes and gangs of guys and gals passed. Some women wore long dresses, others blue jeans. Men wore Bermuda shorts and Clemson shirts. A few were in suits without ties. The odd loner paused for a few minutes then moved on.

From our perch we could see the rich green lawn below the park, where the local summer Shakespeare group performs. Just beyond was the slow-flowing Reedy River, lined by paths through the park. Strollers paused at benches to look at the river, which plods over rocks toward the falls. I thought of the scene in paint.

I thought of Rockwell, who rendered Americans enjoying being Americans. He painted presidents, he painted for the Boy Scouts, he painted Colonel Sanders. Some critics labeled him an “illustrator” because he painted homespun themes. But his skill was precise.

The evening was on the cool side, a sweet time in a sweet place near summer’s end, a setting for Rockwell. People sensed it as a moment to treasure, at this dark time in America.

A week earlier we had driven through Maryland’s rural countryside. We headed south and slipped past D.C., back to this tidy city, where the local art museum possesses a set of Andrew Wyeth watercolors.

Art by the great ones or amateurs may give what we all seek, a dream of remoteness from the dreck of headlines. I imagined, on canvas, the morning crowds flowing to the farmer’s market for the fresh air, the fresh coffee, the fruit and vegetable stands, the pottery, glassware, art booths. 

My last paint idea was Table Rock mountain from a photo taken on a hike. The next task was finishing the “by numbers” outline of a photo of Sandy as a college student. It took months through a chilly winter in the garage. The programmed colors didn’t mesh, I freelanced the hair, face, background.

I thumbed through photos of the New Hampshire trip, memories of other people’s art from an Asheville gallery. I looked where there’s life and color.

The immortal work of Remington stirs the soul, even without visiting cowboy country. He created dynamic, graceful movement, men and horses, cowboys, Indians, stagecoaches rushing down hillsides, art to make the heart beat faster.

A portrait of Sandy of years ago sits on a nightstand, based on the college photo. She doesn’t care for it, which is why it’s out of sight. Also out of sight is my portrait of her as a high-school student, which she likes even less. I’m happy with it, but it hangs in the garage.

I recalled the field of summer zinnias at the apple orchard I struggled with a year ago that now hangs in a neighbor’s kitchen. It was hard to get right, full of summer color, the colors of our part of the country, mountains, fertile farmland, the forest converging. She wanted it, it was hers.

I recalled, thinking in paint, of our sweet Falls Park evening, full of life, gentle music, the happy dinner crowd. It was summer’s end, the air clear and pure, that signaled a brief escape from the everyday onslaught of public corruption. You may find it in city centers or remote places. The moment hinted at hope, peace, joy—a moment to experience, to remember.

August 25, 2025

Forty-seven years. I know people who have been married 52 years, a few even longer. We get up, I drink coffee, look at the news, we putter around the kitchen. We talk about chores. Same thing for years and years. Seasons change and disappear in a blur.

The last few anniversaries have been low-key, just out to some local restaurant. I might have picked up flowers or earrings, an old staple. Two years ago, at forty-five, Sandy asked the parish priest to give us his blessing, I didn’t know he’d call us up front in the middle of Mass. 

As with birthdays, the first few anniversaries are a big deal, maybe one through five or ten. For the first we went out to a nice French restaurant. For years after it was mostly just a day on the calendar. Everything else came first, work, commuting, bills, health, family issues. For us and most folks we knew, school and other kids’ activities pushed the months, then the years along.

At some point we started noticing again. For number 16 we splurged and went to New York. For 20 the kids treated us to a dinner cruise on the Potomac. For 25 we went to Rome—I think it was 25. We got into the big open-air audience with Pope John Paul II. We watched for a couple of hours, perspiring in the August sun, as he blessed marriages of about 90 couples. I read that later that day he met with Vladimir Putin. He had more energy than me.

Things got complicated. We took off on the 2018 road trip just before number 40. In St. Louis I got a call from the urologist, he needed me back home in a week for a biopsy. We kept going and got to Las Vegas the day before the actual anniversary. Las Vegas in August is hot as blazes. For the anniversary I sat in the hotel’s air-conditioned lobby, Sandy played the cheap slots. We flew home.

Couples, not just us, put all these things together. They scramble to make the family work, the budgeting, kids’ birthdays, the college applications, acceptances and rejections, the frantic Thanksgiving and Christmas planning, the relatives’ melodrama, the trauma and horror of the death of a young nephew. It happens to single people, to everyone. 

How it works, as every couple knows, is a mystery. You meet, go out on dates, you decide you’re in love, you talk to the parents, have a wedding, big or small. We went small. Occasionally we pull out the wedding album, although wedding photos are scattered in books, old envelopes, bottom drawers. The guest list now is a necrology, so many who were there are gone.

Part of progress in getting to the wedding, and later to the anniversaries, is getting to know the person you’re with. These days that may go on for years. Six months ago the young woman across the street showed us her fabulous engagement ring. The planned big day? Not decided. Last week we asked again. No date yet, and she was fine with that. Still getting to know each other, I guessed. Leaving room for second thoughts. 

We have friends, and a daughter and son-in-law, who started dating in high school and stayed on track through their weddings and many anniversaries, without ever thinking about anyone else. They just knew.

After all, what do you want out of life? Love, in some way of defining it. Kindness, generosity, humanity. Patience is a big plus. Willingness to tolerate faults, to accept apologies over and over, to forgive shortcomings and smile. Wisdom, in a word, a sense of the truth about life with another imperfect person, which brings one closer to the Almighty.

So we went out for two months and got engaged in January ‘78. We guessed we knew enough about each other, it just made sense. The wedding was seven months later. Two months after that we were sitting with her dad at her folks’ place on a Friday night watching the Yankees and Dodgers play game three of the World Series. The Yankees won 5-1.

After the game, and it was late and raining, we drove down to an Alabama state park for a camping trip. We put up our tent at midnight in the rain. Somehow that weekend stays with me. I remember the wet sleeping bags, the muddy hike the next day. The sun came out, the fall foliage around the lake was brilliant. It was and is a kind of dream.

About 15 years ago, on annual trips to Tennessee, we’d drive down to visit the priest who married us. He had moved from Nashville to Oak Ridge to Lawrenceburg. We’d have lunch and talk about old times. I recalled that at the wedding he couldn’t resist giving his usual pitch to the visitors on the history of St. Mary’s, the first Catholic church in the state. He smiled. Along with the humor he talked about faith.

He was from Memphis, an old-school guy. He also was our connection to that happy, exciting time, the wedding, our first daughter’s baptism. But we noticed he was slowing down. Ten years ago I flew down for his funeral. Most of the diocesan priests were there. The bishop presided. He talked about faith, love, perseverance, Father B’s legacy and lesson.

I think we picked up on all that, if not from the start, then soon after, or maybe years later. We slogged through the relocations, the layoffs, the job searches, the chaotic years of freelance work, the loss of parents and siblings, the scary ER visits and hospitalizations, the surgeries, the cancer.  

We held our breath and watched the anniversaries keep coming. You hang together, haunted by time, the years rushing by, while you work together to figure out the next step, then the one after that. Folks ask how long it’s been. Forty-seven seems like a long time since that hot August day. The plan is still simple: Keep going.

August 18, 2025

We were in Westminster, Maryland, for just a few hours to honor a giant. Alan, a leader of men and women who love mountains, had just left us. Hundreds of friends and admirers showed up at a memorial service in his hometown, tucked just below the Pennsylvania state line.

We didn’t hesitate to make the trip. Alan was a tough guy, tough by being gentle, soft-spoken.  He wasn’t an everyday friend, but for years I saw him three for four times a year. A Maryland native, a craftsman with wood, he spent lots of time in Virginia’s mountains. He ran long trail races and did other hard physical things, but smiled at strangers, offered good words to anyone. His life defined kindness, serenity, peace.

We took a new route, I-85 to I-77, which extends north from Charlotte to Wytheville, Virginia, the turn point onto I-81. The Viriginia welcome center host sold us on detouring through Hillsville to visit the Rock Hill General Store on U.S. 100. We passed through Hillsville, found the place and walked through the eclectic offerings of tools, souvenirs, hard candy, along with a tour busload of old folks. We passed on the free soda.

Route 100, the detour back to I-81, winds through another of Virginia’s many stretches of woods and pastures separated by a few fundamentalist churches and gas stations. We sped through Sylvatus and Barren Springs and crossed the New River, at a point before it widens and quickens into white water. The pretty, empty country refreshed us after the interstate truck grind from Charlotte.

Traffic crawled through Harrisonburg up through New Market, a rural rush hour. We exited at Mount Jackson-Bayse onto U.S. 11, which passes through familiar places, Woodstock and Edinburg, Toms Brook, venerable, pretty spots in the shadow of the Massanutten Ridge. We visited with friends Pat and Mike at their farmhouse in Strasburg, just off the Shenandoah North Fork. From their kitchen window they look out at the dark silhouette of 2,000-foot Signal Knob, the northern tip of the range.

On the first morning a few folks from the old Virginia running group gathered at the base of the mountain and set off on the trail, which curls up for four miles in switchbacks more rock than soil. The fast young people sprinted ahead. At the summit I caught my breath and stared north and west at the panorama of farmland out to the West Virginia peaks.

The gravelly fire road dropped steeply into thick Virginia forest. No sound broke the serenity. After a mile the road intersects the narrow Tuscarora trail, which winds, littered with Massanutten rocks, up the western ridge. I breathed hard. At the top arrows on a worn signpost gave directions. I skipped down for four miles and finished alone.

The climb had been planned, but the gasping, out-of-breath scramble over endless boulders seemed somehow the right gesture at the time of our farewell to Alan. He would have been there, had been there many times, on the hard paths of this mountain range and countless others.

Westminster is tucked in farm country hard by the Pennsylvania border. No major roads reach there. The place is known, oddly, as the site of the famous, or infamous farm of Whittaker Chambers. In the darkness of the 1930s Chambers was a member of the American Communist Party. Years later he rejected communism and in August 1948 publicly accused high-ranking State Department official Alger Hiss of being a Soviet spy.

Initially no one believed Chambers. He produced documents he had hidden in a pumpkin on his Westminster farm. The documents, dubbed the “Pumpkin Papers,” incriminated Hiss. He was convicted of perjury in January 1950, and served nearly four years in prison.

All that aside, we navigated into Loudon County through traffic-choked Leesburg to the Point of Rocks bridge on U.S 15, which took us to Frederick. From there we guessed our way, groping northwest out into farm country, passing miles of corn, pastures, barns, through Woodsboro, New Midway, and Ladiesburg to Keymar, then east to the fringe of Westminster.

The place is near the Hashawa Hills Bear Branch Nature Center, where Alan and his family and friends spent lots of time. He put on a trail running event at Hashawa in February, when winter in Westminster gets cold, with deep snow. In 2015, when I showed up, it was -5F.

The service was wrapping up but we met with Pam and friends, many young guys and gals and their kids, community folks. Then some with as many decades as ourselves. Paul, Greg, Anstr, Quatro, Kevin had stayed into the last few moments. We talked a bit in recollection, which is what happens at these meetings, but also of new things, plans, work life. Everyone looked well. We browsed the photos which did justice to Alan, his family, and his life.

Slowly, folks made their way to the parking lot and back through the winding green byways of Carroll County. We could have avoided “historic” Westminster, but we plowed through the quiet streets of frame rowhouses and gorgeous Victorians. A fountain ringed by benches and lovely oaks centered Westminster City Park. We parked, I walked a bit through the small-town peacefulness. It seemed to summon thoughts of Alan.

We bore down on the roads, avoiding Frederick, tacking southwest into the maw of Greater Washington. I saw signs for Montgomery County, the nexus of Maryland’s most affluent D.C. suburbs, also of intensely gridlocked traffic, which is I-270. We paused before falling into the Sunday afternoon rush hour. Traffic crawled eventually across the Cabin John Bridge.

Our sojourn into the serenity of pastoral Maryland, just south, really from Hanover, Pennsylvania, came to an abrupt end. We looked back with a bit of regret, it had been too quick, somber yet full of meaning. A good man left us. He brought people to gather in beautiful, quiet places, greet each other with warmth, talk of hopeful things, and move forward.

August 11, 2025

They say when you marry into a Southern family you won’t know what to expect. Who said that? Maybe just me. But the LP record collection—the music of Beethoven, Mozart, Bach, Haydn, Lizt, Verdi, Chopin, Paganini, Rachmaninoff, Rimsky-Korsakov, Tchaikovsky—now is sitting in a cabinet in our living room. It was Laura’s music. That I didn’t expect.   

My wife Sandy’s mother, Laura French Harper, grew up in Cowan in Franklin County, in south-central Tennessee, near the Alabama line. Cowan did not and does not look at all like Andy Griffith’s Mayberry. There’s the one main street, a post office, a railroad museum, a couple of churches. There’s no supermarket. There are the out-of-business stores and the shut-down shoe factory.

There’s not much work, and hasn’t been for years. Young people have moved to Nashville or Chattanooga or Huntsville, or at least Winchester, the county seat. Residents are mostly retired people. 

I look back in time, more than 90 years. Life in small Southern places was hard, the Depression made it harder. Laura’s father, Sandy’s grandfather, left home looking for work, for a while he was in Alaska. Like a lot of young people in that time and place, Laura didn’t finish high school. She dropped out and picked cotton in fields outside town.

William, her future husband, left Winchester Central High School (now Franklin County High) at 17, before graduating, to join the Navy. He and Laura got married in 1947. He was 20, she was 19. They settled in Cowan.

They had six kids, three boys and three girls. William worked as an electrician, putting in long shifts at a local plant and picking up extra work around the county. Laura stayed home and kept house and cared for the kids, which is what was done back then.

The years flew by. The six kids grew up and left home, the boys joined the service. The two older girls, Lynn and Kay, moved to Nashville, got jobs, and got married. Sandy graduated from Middle Tennessee State and moved to Nashville, where we met. Soon Laura was a grandmother, eventually a great-grandmother.

In the 1950s Laura tuned the living-room radio to WZYX in Cowan for the twanging, forlorn tunes of the country music pioneers, Hank Williams, Roy Acuff, Ernest Tubbs, and so on. As a Baptist, she loved gospel pieces like “Old Rugged Cross.” When she left the house the kids would switch the radio to a pop music station, then quickly turn it back when mom returned. To this day Sandy won’t listen to country.

But then at some point the kids started hearing something else: the sweet, majestic, soaring music of Beethoven, Rimsky-Korsakov, Tchaikovsky. Lynn, the oldest daughter, says Laura began playing classical music when she, Lynn, was about 10. Sandy would have been six.

Time overcomes memory. Sandy only guesses how her mother grew to love the great composers. By pinching pennies Laura found the dollars to purchase the records, probably by mail order or at flea markets. She bought recordings of music’s immortal works: Dvorak’s Carnival Overture Op.92; Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 4 in F-Minor, 1812 Overture, and Slavonic March Op. 21; Beethoven’s Concerto No. 5 in E-Flat Major and his nine symphonies; Chopin’s Preludes and Waltzes; Verdi’s Requiem, dozens more.

The recordings include performances by the London Symphony Orchestra, Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, New York Philharmonic, Concertgebouw Orchestra of Amsterdam, Berlin Philharmonic, and artists including Arthur Rubinstein, Van Cliburn, Leonard Pennario, conductors Andre Previn, Leonard Bernstein, Herbert Von Karajan, Kiril Kondrashin, others.

At certain hours of the day in the Harper household, the guitar and fiddle plucking on WZYX and the Grand Ole Opry broadcast on WSM-Nashville went silent, replaced by the soaring sound of Beethoven and other great artists.

When we met 48 years ago, Sandy invited me for dinner. When I arrived the sweet sound of Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Scheherazade” filled the apartment. Her mom’s love of beautiful music stayed with her.

In the early 1980s the plant where William worked closed, the company moved to Cape Girardeau, Missouri. William wouldn’t relocate to keep his job. He and Laura sold the Cowan home and moved to Nashville.

When our son Michael began studying piano in elementary school, Laura gave him a stack of classical LP records. I didn’t pay much attention. Michael bought some of his own, and listened to them on an old turntable into his high school years. He went off to Johns Hopkins, then Penn for grad school. The music went silent. The record collection remained in a box in his room.

After grad school Michael settled near Philly. We shipped the piano to his home. Occasionally we used an old turntable, a gift from a neighbor, to play movie soundtracks, pop, sometimes country, Willie Nelson, Marty Robbins, that kind of thing.

William died in 1998. Laura spent her last years quietly in the Nashville house. She did come to our kids’ weddings, Michael’s in Pennsylvania, Marie’s in Virginia. She passed in 2014.

For more than twenty years the classical record collection sat untouched. When we sold the house and moved, we packed up the box and took it along. We stacked the records in a cabinet in the living room.

I browsed through the LPs. Some are single recordings, others are series of three or four performances. The cardboard envelopes of some, Laura’s favorites, are worn and dogeared. We bought a turntable. The gorgeous sounds filled the room.

I had learned something about Laura. Somehow in her hard life of homemaking, raising six kids, and worrying about money, she let her heart soar above the small-town Southern universe of honky-tonk country and scratchy gospel pieties, to love the rhythm and resonance of the world’s greatest music. It was, in that way, Laura’s music.