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.   

March 31, 2025

As you drive I-40 across Tennessee, west toward Nashville or east toward Knoxville, you cross the Caney Fork River five times between Cookeville and Lebanon.

Approaching the Caney Fork crossings, drivers see billboards calling out “Canoe the Caney!” Local folks rent canoes, you can test your swift-river skills.  I’ve thought about doing it many times.

The fast-moving 150-mile-long Caney Fork winds south and empties into huge Center Hill Lake. It’s a tributary of the Cumberland River, which flows west for 660 miles from eastern Kentucky, eventually meeting the Ohio River near Paducah. In 2010 the Cumberland flooded Nashville, devastating much of downtown, including the football stadium.

Years ago I camped out at Center Hill with a friend. I think our wives were out of town. We drove from Nashville to the lake and put up a tent. The next day we rented a canoe and fishing gear and paddled out and fished for a few hours. We didn’t catch anything, but we did tip the canoe over and fall in the lake.

These parts are majestic country, but also wild country. We both were new to the area from the urban Northeast, and didn’t have any sense of the vastness of the water wilderness of the region, or of the power of nature to threaten civilization.

Further along I-40, between Crossville and Knoxville you cross the 72-mile-long, 38,000-acre Watt’s Bar Lake, which is formed by the Tennessee and Clinch rivers and the Watt’s Bar dam. The lake borders 722 miles of shoreline and crosses four counties. East of Knoxville and north of I-81 is massive Cherokee Lake, with nearly 400 miles of shoreline, formed by construction of the Cherokee Dam on the Holston River.

In North Carolina, the French Broad River starts as a humble, inconspicuous stream near the little town of Rosman, which sits near the N.C.-S.C. state line about 45 miles southwest of Asheville.

When the river reaches Asheville it’s wide and flowing fast. It then turns northwest, gathering mountain streams and crosses into Tennessee. At the state line it’s a monster. Just past Newport, Tenn., it feeds 60-mile-long Douglas Lake. The river continues west to merge with the Holston River and forms the Tennessee River near Knoxville. The Tennessee flows south into Alabama and Mississippi then west for 650 miles to the Ohio.

Hurricane Helene struck the area on September 27. The French Broad turned ferocious and rampaged through low-lying parts of Asheville. It devastated small communities west of the city.

As the French Broad flows into Douglas Lake it meets the mouth of the Nolichucky River, which like the French Broad flows west from its source at an intersection of the Cane and North Toe rivers near Huntdale, N.C., which is hard to find on any map.

Before joining the French Broad the Nolichucky passes through Erwin, Tenn., a town of around 6,000 on I-26 about 15 miles south of Johnson City. Helene flooding closed I-26 and destroyed Unicoi County Hospital in Erwin. Helicopters evacuated 54 people from the hospital roof. Six people drowned at a plastics factory downstream.

The hurricane flow from the French Broad and Nolichucky increased Douglas Lake’s water level 21 feet in three days. The Nolichucky destroyed five bridges in East Tennessee, including the 320-foot-long Kinser Bridge, used by 10,000 vehicles daily; 14 more were seriously damaged and six were closed. along with 22 state roadway sections that were damaged or swept away.

The National Hurricane Center reported that Helene killed about 250 people, including 106 in North Carolina, 50 in South Carolina, 37 in Georgia, 34 in Florida, and 18 in Tennessee.   

Early this month North Carolina reopened part of a section of I-40 that had been partly destroyed by Helene, one lane in each direction. Traffic crawls along at near-gridlock, 20 miles per hour for 12 miles. Drivers can see giant chunks of asphalt and concrete crumpled in the Pigeon River.

In December of last year, three months after Helene, Congress passed the American Relief Act, which provides $110 billion in disaster relief nationwide. The bill included $31 billion for farmers, $29 billion for the Federal Emergency Management Agency, $12 billion for community block grants, and funds for highways, military facilities, national parks, water supply systems, design studies, and other things.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration estimated the total cost of Helene at $78.7 billion, $60 billion for North Carolina alone. The state General Assembly has appropriated $1.4 billion for recovery. Democratic Governor Josh Stein has asked for another $19 billion. (Republicans have controlled both the Senate and House since 2011.)

The debate over disaster relief continues. FEMA and state officials have made progress, but parts of western North Carolina won’t recover for years.

Last week fires started in western North and South Carolina forests, the flames fed by Helene’s blowdowns and drought-parched underbrush. A few days ago the Table Rock fire had consumed 10,000 acres. Residents nearby evacuated. We could see the brown pall and smell smoke from 35 miles away.

The vote on North Carolina’s recovery funding was two weeks ago, just before the fires started. Stein said the fires will add to the recovery bill.

Disaster recovery news has faded amid headlines of massive firings of federal employees, tariffs on trade with American allies, and Trump threats against federal judges. Then Americans heard of the Keystone Kops performance of national security officials blabbing classified details about a military operation on an unsecure messaging program. Since then, disaster relief seems so last year.

March 24, 2025

Black Rock arrived again, the same rock-filled fire road ahead of the same twisting near-vertical one-third mile single track, the same boulder crawl. The start was gray and chilly, as it has been in my four turns in the race, and often is in the Plott Balsam Mountains, 50 or so miles west of Asheville.

The mountain junket, a 3.5-mile, near-3,000-foot climb to the Black Rock summit and return, followed by a couple of days our 600 miles from midstate Florida and up I-75, the centerline of Georgia. On the return we zigzagged through backcountry Hernando and Citrus Counties for a couple of hours, past the cattle and tractors, past the faded Trump banners still waving from pasture gates.

We made the interstate at Ocala, then settled into suburban Florida flatland. The trip was an odyssey across near-empty Deep South. After Gainesville, small Florida and Georgia places plodded by, Alachua, Lake City, Jennings, the state line, then Valdosta, Tifton, Cordele. We saw the signs for Andersonville, the death-trap Confederate prisoner of war camp where some 13,000 Union POWs died. We hurried past.

Faster drivers swerve around us. We felt the blur of long miles, the roar of 18-wheelers, the mesmerizing glare of the sun, the sameness of the strip malls, the gas-station and fast-food beacons lining the exits. The emptiness of the landscape is broken here and there by cell-phone towers or big box store marquees.

This is how to drive across America without seeing it. We feel the hypnosis of the highway, Interstate Land. What do we think if we get through it safely. Is God out there, watching? And which God, the God of the fundamentalist Bible or St. Thomas Aquinas’s “act of being,” a God with no name? The road is not where we find the meaning of the universe.

The traffic intensity picked up north of Macon. We crawled through the underside of Atlanta. Our morale improved as we maneuvered off I-475 onto I-285. My spirits grew when I read an emailed invitation to “Flannery at 100,” a four-day celebration of the life of Georgia storyteller and militant traditionalist Catholic Flannery O’Connor in her hometown of Milledgeville.

O’Connor wrote probing, disturbing tales set in small Southern places that spoke to raw human nature. She died at 39. The readings, lectures, exhibits, and music program will recognize her insight into life’s pain as she endured debilitating disease. O’Connor knew about Aquinas’s God. But we won’t make it.

We dodged through the east Atlanta traffic and stayed the night with old friends Sandy and Glen. Sandy and Sandy were childhood next-door-neighbor friends, still friends seven decades later. Glen grew up in Waycross, near the Okefenokee Swamp, 438,000 acres in the middle of deep-rural country of giant mosquitos that reaches into the Florida Panhandle.

At home we recovered from all that.

Runners Elise and Todd, two fast people, hung with me from the Black Rock start, a reprise of last year. The first mile sucks wind from lungs, especially 76-year-old lungs. Footing is a crapshoot over a double track of rocks. The turn off the climb is invisible in the blur of forest.

Our pace picked up for a quarter-mile, then returned to the 31-minute per mile average. Elise and Todd could have sprinted off, but stayed with me. They slogged two hundred feet ahead. One mile.

We eased forward, the valley of Sylva ghostly in mist. The teammates were dots ahead. I breathed hoarsely, placed a shoe, breathed again, placed another shoe. I looked up, they waved. We passed the water-break team. Mile two.

We rounded switchbacks, leaving the weak sunlight, feeling the mountain’s chilling shade. The field of runners was a mile ahead. Solitude dragged us forward. The trail curled around the mountain, then again through shade and back to sunlight. We passed the turn to the finish. Runners already down from the summit flowed past.

We looked up at the single track to the summit, something like a 40-degree incline twisting into thick canopy. We paused, I started, Elise slipped past me and flew up, quickly out of sight. Todd followed me, as he did last year, ready for tragedy. I leaned forward, grabbing for roots and branches. The wind howled.

Near the summit we entered a tunnel of massive boulders, the trail now tamped-down snow and ice. We grabbed at the rock walls. Elise, already on the summit, sent a text: “It gets icy. Be careful.” Todd yelled a warning. We gritted our teeth through the rock chute, dark in the mountain’s shadow. The chill closed in.

From beyond the rock wall Elise called, “Almost here!” We turned once more and felt sunlight and scrambled up the massive boulder, which is the summit. The bleak, spectacular Plott Balsams surrounded us, still winter brown for maybe 60 miles, fading into Blue Ridge blue at the horizon. I sat wheezing, then stood unsteadily for the group photo.               

This was Black Rock 2025. We shimmied down, teetering along the return ice-and-snow-packed trail, grabbing again at rocks and roots, then moving into sunlight.

The three-mile-plus return to the finish was a downhill blur on the mountain’s east side. We crossed the line, the staff folks waved and smiled. We took deep breaths, sipped water, stretched, got the obligatory photo. The mountain loomed through the forest, the summit hidden.

The race crew started breaking camp. They packed their gear, we packed ours. Black Rock signaled to us once again: hard things are possible, mountains can be climbed, complicated lives can be endured and celebrated. We crawled into the van. We’ll be back for the Black Rock climb: a promise to ourselves, and each other.