October 5, 2020

This is a moment to wish President Trump well. The helicopter ride to Walter Reed Friday, the waiting black SUVs, the hushed tones of TV reporters, should stanch the flood tide of suggestions, according to news reports, that the president is looking for a covid sympathy vote. Despite his yelling at Biden last Tuesday night, he’s still down in the polls.

We jumped on I-95 to I-85 on Wednesday nearly two weeks ago, heading for Greenville, S.C., with the house up for sale for one day. On Friday, except for some paperwork, it belonged to someone else. We spend a frantic weekend looking for a six-month rental as a starting point for  finding a permanent home.

Permanent—but then, nothing lasts forever. On getting home last Tuesday I got together with five old friends, the gang that started running together 10, maybe 12 years ago. We called the group THuGs (running Thursdays, from the Gold’s Gym). Now, four are moving away or have left already. Others had left two, three, five years ago. I’m next.

We conjured up memories. Since the so-called debate was coming up later, some of us talked briefly about the election.  We kidded about it a little, then dropped it. One friend reminded me that other things—family, friendship—are more important than politics. In America, no one tells you what to believe, you choose your candidate. Liberty, freedom from tyranny, those original American aspirations, still engage us. Right now I’m deep into Edward J. Larson’s Franklin & Washington, for which Larson won the Pulitzer. In combing through the earliest years of their alliance that became a generation of deep friendship, Larson reminds that those noble principles drove the Revolution. Through the late 1760s and early 1770s, Ben and George worked to avoid breaking with England. Then they resolved that liberty was worth fighting for.

There’s liberty, uniquely American. Then there’s the calculated, bilious abuse of it, on display later that evening during the so-called debate: a 74-year-old behaving like a four-year-old. It’s contagious, like the virus. We went to Mass a week ago in Greenville. Fewer than half the congregation wore masks, neither the priest nor altar servers wore them, seniors packed together. I emailed the pastor, asking why. He replied: “the clergy are keeping to what the bishop has asked for but no more.” Nice work, bishop.

Masks help protect our health, also our freedom. Not wearing them near others says: “I don’t care about your welfare.” Have we learned anything in the past ten months?

The group joked about planning the Christmas party, who would come back for it. The jokes were more about past parties than this year’s. I sensed a little sadness to it, because not everyone will be back. But you never know, I have to schedule a scan and an oncology session, maybe I’ll get back. Another member does return for medical appointments. We talked a bit about destination runs, finding events that would bring the group together at some distant place.

The freedom business comes back to me. We celebrated 10 years of togetherness, choosing to take on challenges that we overcame on frigid winter mornings and in sweltering summers, on mountain trails and in deep forests. We entered big road events like the Marine Corps Marathon, the Army Ten-Miler, the Historic Half in Fredericksburg, and local ones in the neighborhood. Members ran in Austin, Asheville, Tennessee. We made our own shirts and jokes. It was, really, all about freedom.

Over Saturday morning coffee through the years, politics came up, but always with a witty bite to it, the way it used to be for most Americans. Now the country is hurtling towards a dark nightmare, the fracturing of the nation’s identity. We all know that corners of the country, from northern Idaho to midtown Manhattan, nurture very disturbed people.

The Trump people are angrier now than in 2016. The term “cult” applies. In this political season we have a pandemic killing a thousand every day, two-digit unemployment, world leaders ignoring or laughing at America. Leftwing vandals and guys in pickup trucks with automatic weapons fight in the streets. The President spews venom in his child-bully, semi-English dialect, sending signals to his fast-shrinking “base” that translated, trash the liberty fought for by Washington for six years, from Ticonderoga to Yorktown.

The evening ended, we bumped elbows and scattered in the pelting rain. A few of us will still show up for the Thursday and Saturday runs.  Sandy’s and my departure from Virginia in less than a month still is a vague, uneasy dream. We are still somehow lassoed to this place and the people, me to the cancer specialists and to the rocky, lonely trails of nearby mountains. But the South Carolina move draws us to family, to the grandsons, the next step for old folks: be near and with the young.

I smile because I know, we all know, that the THuGs all are getting older. Running may now be the least important connection. The conversations are about other things: family, work, travel, transitions. We talk about new homes, new communities. Politics recedes. We’ll all be OK by staying close to those we love, bearing up with the complexities, the distances, the ordeal of tearing away from familiar places.

Five hundred or so miles from the hills of northeast Virginia and the Shenandoahs just to the west, the Blue Ridge plunges into North Carolina and South Carolina. The pale outlines of the mountains rise beyond downtown Greenville, just as in Virginia from Warrenton or Centreville or Culpeper. We’re moving downrange. The terrain, the weather, the politics, the culture will change for us. We are staring at the transformation of all that. We’ll hold and treasure the connections that teach us about freedom, about faith, about who we are. The things that matter.