December 15, 2025

The young hematologist, Dr. Concetta, greeted us with a smile at the Cancer Institute. It had been six months since Sandy’s last appointment, but the doctor didn’t waste time on small talk. She waved an eight-page report, then sat and leaned forward to explain it.

“Hemoglobin, platelets, creatine look good. Kappa light chain reading is down. Kidneys look great. You’re doing great,” she said.

She talked about other things in the report, columns of terms and figures you would need a medical degree to decipher. We understood this was good news. We relaxed and chatted about the Vietnam trip next month, about the scramble to get the right vaccinations. “Sounds wonderful,” the doc said. We exchanged Merry Christmases and got out of there. Another medical escape.

All this started more than a year ago when a urologist sent her for blood testing. Kidneys are complicated things. They don’t like excessive protein, which may be produced in the body by processes that require a specialty in urology to understand. It can lead to an obscure condition—obscure to us—called “monoclonal gammopathy of undetermined significance,” or MGUS, the “undetermined” being key.

MGUS Kappa light chain is a risk condition for multiple myeloma, or blood cancer, which has no cure. It’s a low risk for most folks, we learn, but who’s the “most” and who’s not? Like lots of potential conditions for old folks, no one really knows. What you do know is that the possibility will keep you awake at night.

We were lucky. All this started with a friendly nurse practitioner who ordered some tests and referred us to a urologist. Referrals grind along slowly for urologists, after all, most old folks need to see them. In my kidney cancer days of 2019, the waiting room always was packed with seniors, friendly and chatting or silent, eyes closed. No one minded waiting, all felt lucky to have an appointment.

Sandy’s specialist wanted more tests. Blood test results, after all, are a critical indicator of lots of things. She is not one for being jabbed. Months later we got to the Cancer Institute and hematology with Dr. Concetta. She looked at the tests, ordered more, and set an appointment in three months. Meanwhile we googled Kappa light chain and MGUS.

We did what we could in the way of healthy living. Sandy gave up drinking diet soda, a lifelong habit. We ate more fresh vegetables and salads and cut back on meat. We quit the pork loin we used to grill using what seemed like a healthy recipe in The Fat Chance Cookbook. We ate grilled salmon and veggie burgers. We switched from sugary yogurt to plain.

She kept up her water aerobics classes at the YMCA and went to the gym.

All this is the conventional wisdom, the things you’re supposed to do, young or old. The hard part is finding whether it has any effect on the mysterious chemical composition of your blood and the progression of MGUS-Kappa light chain.

The doc gave us a copy of the report. The first page looked good, I guessed, the figures in the column of new results was lower for types of protein, by a fraction, than six months ago. The following pages were a barrage of abbreviations and acronyms. I recognized “Basic Metabolic Panel” from my own parade of blood tests: sodium, potassium, chloride, CO2, BUN, calcium, creatine, glucose. Most old folks, and some younger ones, would recognize them.

 The report offered more cryptic numbers, but we took our cues from the doctor’s cheerful mood. Whatever the report says, you’re okay if she’s smiling. The doctor’s expression tells you what shape you’re really in.

Cancer and its precursor conditions are everywhere. After the appointment we talked to our son Michael, a medical physicist and director of resident physicists at Cooper Hospital in New Jersey,  part of the M.D. Anderson Medical Group. He explained the use of statistical calculations to analyze the treatment of 1,000 cancer patients. One thousand patients? One hospital?

Our local Cancer Institute is a compact two-story building. Usually a dozen folks are waiting for appointments. Getting a seat is never a problem. But that’s a dozen when I’m there for an hour. Others are waiting when I leave, and that’s five days a week. There’s another cancer institute nearby in the suburbs, and satellite offices all over the county. So a thousand patients? Easily.

M.D. Anderson, the nation’s premier cancer center, partners with seven hospitals nationwide and one in Spain. Other major cancer hospitals reach through the country. The Mayo Clinic is in Minnesota, Arizona, and Florida. Sloan-Kettering is in New York City, Long Island, and New Jersey. Prisma Health has dozens of hospitals in South Carolina and Tennessee.

Those places, and many others, treat thousands and thousands of patients, who go through test after test using technologies that generate vast piles of data, to be parsed by sophisticated statistical methodologies. Medicine and computer science are integrated, blended, mulched, to spit out figures incomprehensible to the average patient (most of us). We don’t follow the briefing or stare at the paperwork. Instead we look for a smile.  

December 8, 2025

It was inevitable, as always. Christmas is a couple of weeks away, ending this year of distractions and trauma. The lights are glowing, or twinkling, up and down the street. The city parade was Saturday. The stores are busy, or some are. Thanksgiving raised spirits around here, they needed raising.

Now we are paying attention, once again entangling the celebration of the birth of Christ with the big retail season, the eternal, awkward irony. Advent started a week ago, we pulled the Advent wreath from a cupboard and lit the first candle.

We will open, again, the immortal message in the Gospel of Luke, the real Christmas celebration. Beyond that, one caveat: make it special for children. Teach them the mystery of the season, watch for the thrill in their eyes.  

So we were present when the First Baptist Church of Mauldin, S.C., was packed with parents of students of Mauldin Christian Academy for a children’s Christmas concert. What could be more traditional, more innocent, except maybe a visit by St. Nick?

Like many such places in the South, First Baptist is big enough to house an entire school, the auditorium grander in size than any Broadway theater. A giant video screen glowed with “Snowmen at Night,” the concert theme.

The youngest students performed first. One hundred kids in their red and green Christmas outfits sat below the stage. Someone, maybe the school principal, offered an impromptu prayer. The children stood and launched into song, filling the huge space with their lilting young voices. The volume overwhelmed the lyrics, but the crowd applauded, rapt with parents’ pride.

The kids moved through a litany of light-hearted children’s songs about snowmen, about the season, about the joy of Jesus’s birth. They swayed and waved their arms with music generated by an electronic sound system. For a fast number they strummed on toy guitars, for another they put on little top hats. Parents waved flashing cell phones, capturing videos.

The young singers filed off the stage, the older students came on. They offered a mellifluous litany of Christmas classics, Silent Night and the rest, their sweet, disciplined voices filling the hall. The crowd, boisterous for the younger ones, now was reverently quiet.  

Afterward we joined the scrum of kids and parents and congratulated our young friend, fifth-grader Josephine, who performed. Our spirits had risen a notch. Driving home, the holiday lights seemed a tad brighter.

Pushing forward, we joined daughter Marie, son-in-law Mike, and the grandsons for their junket to the annual gingerbread competition at Asheville’s glittering Grove Park Inn. The massive stone lobby of the place was filled with holiday visitors. Hotel guests sipped cocktails and warmed themselves by two giant fireplaces, savoring the cheerful atmosphere.

Tourists squinted at photos of the eclectic mix of politicians and celebrities who have stayed or visited, including most twentieth-century presidents. I wondered if Hoover and FDR thought about the Depression during their visits. F. Scott Fitzgerald, Lawrence Welk, William Shatner, and Michael Jordan, in their times, came by.

We walked past stunning displays of gingerbread creations offered by crafters from North Carolina to California. We joined a crowd gathered on the Sunset Porch to stare at the wild palette of evening color settling sixty or more miles out in the eastern Great Smokies. The dark silhouettes of the distant peaks seemed to evoke the abiding, calming permanence of the Christmas lesson.      

The Arboretum, beautiful year-round, was decked out in brilliant lights that convey the joy of closeness to nature. We pulled wool caps over our ears against the 30F night chill, along with hundreds of others needing a fix of cold-weather cheer. The multicolor designs of local wildlife, geodesic forms, and graceful carvings of grinning trolls create a world of fantasy and mystery. The crisp night air transported us at least halfway to the season.

The fun is supposed to pick up speed in the final weeks. Our plan then was an evening out to celebrate the anniversary of the night we met in 1977 and watch the Christmas parade. Then at the parish there’s “breakfast with Santa” for the younger kids, followed by “dinner with Santa” a week later, then caroling in the streets for those who like that.

The churches and civic officials lean in earnestly. The war over hearts and minds gets intense, amid the spending forecasts for these last few weeks that make or break the year for retailers. One first-hand account was that Black Friday at the mall was a bust, with barely more than the usual crowd and the usual discounts. We like everyone else are buying stuff online.

Herculean efforts are being made to lift Christmas from the nation’s sour mood. Some of us are less affected than others, shown in the many houses decked out in thousands of flashing lights, giant inflated Santas, nativity scenes staffed by multiple apostles and angels. You now can hire a pro to install your lights, no need to climb a shaky ladder yourself.

If I get around to it I’ll save a buck and hang my own, at my typically crooked angles.

Again it’s the kids that matter. We took away something from the children’s concert, a bit of serenity, then hope, that the brightly wrapped boxes on Christmas morning won’t crowd out the eternal message of the season. It’s a hope that the kids get to church and see the infant in the manger, learn, and understand.

December 1, 2025

Sandy’s shepherd’s pie won the prize in the “savory” category at Pie Night, hosted by a friend, Elise, at her parents’ farm at the rural end of Greer, near South Carolina’s share of the Blue Ridge. We had been to Pie Night before, an annual event. Guests bring savory and dessert-type pies, sample them, then vote for their favorites. You can eat too much.

We got there a little early. It was quiet, I walked past the massive barn and looked around. Rough woods surround the farmhouse. A small lake flashed through the trees. A couple of horses grazed in a pasture, children chased chickens that wandered unpenned near the house. It was Mountain South Glorious.

In the cool evening we visited with Elise’s parents, Luther and Sherrie, greeted guests, and helped arrange the pies, savory on one table, sweet on another. We formed a line cafeteria-style.

The last time we were out there, around Easter, we missed our turn and stayed on Pennington Road into gorgeous country. U.S. 11, a few turns away, runs northeast to Gaffney near the North Carolina state line. Westbound, it extends for about 70 miles, crossing into Pickens then Oconee Counties, passing giant Lake Jocassee, to I-85 near Lake Hartwell and Georgia.

Just over the line in North Carolina are Flat Rock and Carl Sandburg’s home. The area forests were ravaged by Hurricane Helene north and east to Lake Lure and the little tourist spot of Chimney Rock, which was nearly obliterated. Beauty and tragedy collided. The scars, the flattened trees, will litter the landscape for years.

The wreckage, the legacy of the storm, darkened a sense of the past year. Today spirits are lacerated by the stain of presidential corruption; slouch toward authoritarianism, murders in the Caribbean, revenge prosecutions, extra-legal deportations and abuse of brown-skinned people, fawning on dictators, a bootlicking Congress.

We put all that aside and navigated to the farm. It was nearly Thanksgiving, after all. The evening was a brilliant, soothing stab at normalcy. Kids played on swings hanging from giant oaks. A crackling bonfire burned. Guests talked about family, work, travel, holiday plans.        

On Thanksgiving Eve we cooked a few things and visited friends Mark and Allie and their children. We traded stories, Mark talked of visiting his folks in Sidney, in eastern Montana and hikes with his brother in North Dakota. We looked at photos of his place and the North Dakota prairie, dotted with petrified tree stumps. Mark’s and Allie’s niece told of her four-day trek along the Foothills Trail, which runs across South Carolina’s northern fringe.

Thursday started with late-fall chill. We headed downtown for the morning holiday run, daughter Marie and grandson Noah did the 5K. I shuffled through the 8K. Thousands showed up to enjoy this traditional cold-weather trek through the city to Cancer Survivor Park and Unity Park. Volunteer road guards smiled and yelled “Happy Thanksgiving” as the back-of-the-packers slogged into downtown. The morning sun warmed us and spread gladness.

Later in Greer Mark tended a bonfire and cooked bacon. Friends arrived, a neighbor offered a prayer, Allie created a bountiful breakfast for ten or twelve, at least. The talk shifted to everyday things, careers, family, cooking. We went on a bit about health, as old folks will do, test results, what comes next.

That afternoon Marie and son-in-law Mike prepared the traditional sides, Sandy provided the turkey. We said our Thanksgiving prayer and passed things around, the dog waited near the table for his share. I called Mike’s homemade gluten-free cheesecake a success. The boys look forward to their “Christmas Days of Fun” and the Gingerbread House Competition at Asheville’s Grove Park Inn.     

Daughter Kathleen and Steve in Wyoming set out a spread for local friends; Laura and Michael called, Laura reported three inches of snow in St. Paul. Distant friends sent good wishes.

The chill deepened into the mid-20s by morning. Gusts swirled, leaves scuttled across streets. Many neighbors already have set out their inflated Santas and plastic nativity scenes, here and there alongside each other for a confusing Yuletide message, but cheerful and bright. Some homes already have lined their eaves with multicolored lights. We are not there.

The message of the Season is descending as it always does, happy or somber. We work to carry the smiles and hopes of Thanksgiving into the coming month, already darkened by the tightening noose around Ukraine, death of a National Guard trooper in Washington, the coldness of national leadership. What remains is the will of so many around us, so many we know who do good, seek virtue, conquer despair.

Yet again, Pie Night, when Elise penned a question: most memorable Thanksgiving? This one for sure, topping the last one, which topped the one before that. It is the people who give thanks, who persevere against tragedy facing those who don’t have Thanksgiving or Christmas.

We remember them, we do what we can to raise them up. We think of those who live in service, they are all around us. And we hope for reason to give thanks now, and through the year.

November 24, 2025

Pat Brostek, co-director of the food pantry at Holy Family parish in Dale City, Virginia, is in her basement office Monday taking calls from pantry clients. Her husband Mike had picked up donations from Panera Bread Sunday evening: bread, bagels, other food items.

The volunteers will get donations from Food Lion Monday. On Wednesday Target donates food. On Friday two veteran volunteers, Charlie and Rose, get stuff at Safeway. Parishioners leave food donations in the church hallway.

Twice a month the pantry gets a delivery from a warehouse in Manassas run by St. Lucy’s, the food bank for the Diocese of Arlington. St. Lucy’s is supported by the Capital Area Food Bank and Feeding America, which coordinates the work of thousands of food banks and food pantries.

Pat taught and worked as a librarian in local public schools for years. She started volunteering at the pantry 10 years ago, when it occupied a tiny room in the church basement. Donations, stacked in two closets, included canned vegetables and fruit, soup, tuna, and chicken, boxes of pasta, cereal, crackers, bags of rice. A few years ago local groceries began donating fresh vegetables. The pantry dips into its budget to buy meat and eggs, other perishables.  

I volunteered for four years. For hours I hunched low in the closet to fill the paper sacks with food: two cans of vegetables, two cans of fruit, two boxes of pasta and soup, cereal, and so on. The next day my back ached. Later I moved up to meeting clients, giving them their packages, and entering information on a rickety computer.

We worked for Ana, who managed the operation. Two or three others showed up a day or two each week. A lilt of cheerful Spanish livened the place. Debbie and Maria, natives of Peru, sorted donations and packed bags for clients. They meticulously scrawled expiration dates on cans and boxes. Debbie’s family kept an apartment in Lima, she said if Sandy and I ever visited Peru we could stay there.

The donation system was and still is no-frills but good enough. Sometimes we ran out of things. Sometimes arrangements didn’t work out. I drove 20 miles round-trip to a Harris Teeter in Manassas a half-dozen times. They handed over stale birthday cakes, brownies, donuts, and cookies, as if to overdose our people on sugar. A local “organic” grocery contributed vegetables, mostly spoiled, that went in the trash.

The pantry requires appointments, clients get one per month. Pat and others take calls between 10 AM and 2 PM Mondays and Wednesdays to a limit of 25 families per day. Clients arrive for pickup between 4:00 and 5:00 PM Mondays and 3:30 to 4:30 Wednesdays. Volunteers spend Tuesdays and Thursdays sorting donations and packing bags.

People receive about 60 pounds of food. Parents can get baby formula and diapers. The packages must be weighed and the total weight of donations reported to the Capital Area Food Bank.

Until a few years ago, clients reported to the food pantry office for their appointments.  Sometimes people showed up without appointments. One guy came nearly every week asking only for bread, arguing that it was okay because that’s all he wanted. I recall some tense moments, but Ana would smooth things out. No one left empty-handed.

During the pandemic volunteers staged food packages on tables in the church parking lot, clients would pull up in their cars and walk over to get their packages. Now all pickups are outside.

Volunteers like me come and go. Pat stayed the course and now runs the place. She deals with the church administration, coordinates donations and pickups, and trains new people. About 20 folks take shifts.

The place has had its melodrama. Before I left a new pastor, cutting costs, laid off the two paid staff people (no benefits) who managed the parish’s social outreach, including the pantry. He wanted to shut the place down. The volunteers gave him a letter reminding him of the mission: feeding the poor. He backed off.

That guy retired or was replaced. Pat then endured an internal spat between a now-former pantry director and the next pastor over how to run the pantry and whether to continue the work.

I left because of health problems but still showed up occasionally until we moved away. My food-pantry days offer some sweet memories: happy potluck Christmas parties, heavy on exotic Latin dishes, smiles, hugs, good words. Sometimes we went out to lunch. One day, while packing food I lost my wedding band, probably by dropping it in a sack. After I left the Hispanic ladies called all the day’s clients to ask if anyone had found it. No luck.

Ana, from Guatemala, talked of her childhood there, when she survived the devastating earthquake that struck the country in 1976. She worries about political violence but still returns to visit family.

The mission of the Holy Family operation and all food charities now is defined by the government’s cuts to food assistance. The pantry used to average about 130 families per month, about 700 people across the three local zip codes. In October, the figures were 177 families, more than 900 people, 209 were new clients. Last Wednesday when Pat arrived at the office she found 31 phone messages seeking appointments.

Feeding America and other sources report that some 47 million Americans are “food-insecure.” The stock market is up but that number is growing. Some are Hispanic, some are Middle Eastern, some have English and Irish surnames. Good people step up to work long hours at food pantries and food banks in every city and town in America. They are present, in service for others. We know who they are, or should know.

November 17, 2025

Our Virginia running group went back to Bayse, Virginia, last weekend, a remote little place just west of Mount Jackson and New Market in Shenandoah County. Alex, one of the oldtimers, owns a house in Bayse, so we had a place to stay. We did our traditional things, mountain hikes, cocktails, trading stories. These semi-annual get-togethers seem more important now.

On Sunday morning nearly everyone left, Kevin and I stayed one more night so I could drop him at Dulles for a Monday flight. On Sunday afternoon we wanted to get away from Bayse’s dense forest and narrow mountain roads. Alex had mentioned the Virginia Museum of the Civil War in New Market. Why not, we thought.

These were the last days of the federal shutdown, while the government is blowing up boats and people in the Caribbean. The political parties and everyday folks are at each other’s throats, the country is torn apart. We have no leaders of boldness, character, and integrity. The Civil War, represented in that little museum along a rural interstate, seemed the right metaphor.

The graceful structure houses exhibits, photos, and artifacts that capture the full panorama of the war: the angry debate over slavery, the first shots at Fort Sumter, the exhausted end at Appomattox. But why here, in this place? Virginia was the setting for major Civil War engagements: Bull Run, Chancellorsville, the Wilderness, the Peninsula, Fredericksburg, Petersburg, Richmond. Why New Market, in the boondocks 150 miles from Richmond?

There’s the American Civil War Museum, with a site at Appomattox, where Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered to Union General Ulysses Grant on April 9, 1865, and a second site at Tredegar Iron Works in Richmond. There’s a National Civil War Museum in Harrisburg. Here in Greenville, S.C., we have the Museum and Library of Confederate History.

But New Market is the right place for commemoration of a fight on May 15, 1864, when a few thousand Confederates routed a larger Union force. The background: Grant sent Gen. Franz Sigel with about 9,000 men to take control of the Shenandoah Valley, which extends east-west roughly from the Blue Ridge mountains to the West Virginia state line. Grant expected Sigel to sweep through the Valley then turn east against Lee at Richmond.

Some 4,000 rebels were commanded by Gen. John Breckenridge, who had been vice president under President James Buchanan, then served in the Senate from Kentucky. Initially he supported preserving the Union, but when war started went with the rebels. At New Market, 247 cadets of the Virginia Military Institute in Lexington, ages 15 to 18, stepped forward as Breckenridge’s reserve.

Breckenridge took the initiative and attacked a leading edge of Sigel’s force, an infantry brigade and a cavalry brigade. Sigel’s main force was massed north of Bushong’s Farm. The rebels pushed the Yankees past the town of New Market. They paused their attack to reorganize, when Sigel’s troops opened fire. The Confederates retreated. At that point, it’s reported, Breckenridge reluctantly called the VMI cadets to advance.

The Yankees attacked but were driven back by Confederate artillery fire. As the rebels moved forward, several cadets lost their shoes in the mud, which later prompted the sobriquet “Field of Lost Shoes.” Union Gen. Sigel ordered a retreat, the Yanks broke off and headed north to Strasburg.

Union casualties came to 93 killed, more than 500 wounded, the Confederates lost 43 dead, 475 wounded. But the rebs had more heartbreak. Five of their combat dead were VMI cadets. Five more later died of wounds, 50 others were wounded. These were teenage boys.

Grant replaced Sigel with Gen. David Hunter, who advanced south through summer as far as Lynchburg. In Lexington he burned VMI. Lee sent Gen. Jubal Early to counterattack. Early advanced north to the Potomac and burned Chambersburg, Penn., in August. In October Union Gen. Phil Sheridan routed Early at Cedar Creek near Strasburg. Historians argue Sheridan’s victory helped ensure Lincoln’s reelection.

By October the war had shifted east to Richmond and Petersburg, which the Yankees had held under siege since spring. Vicious fighting continued until April, when Lee was cornered and asked for Grant’s surrender terms at Appomattox.

The New Market museum captures all this. A large window on the north side of the building looks out at the “Lost Shoes” field where those young kids, thrown into bloody combat by adults, charged into enemy guns. The museum offers a graphic video of the recreation of the battle, including the agonies of those dying boys.

In the cruel history of the war, their suffering was pointless. The minor Confederate victory at New Market had no impact on Grant’s relentless campaign against Lee. The Union forces, superior in men and resources and supported by the North’s industrial strength, would not be defeated by the agrarian South and its brave but smaller, poorer army.

The accepted figure for Civil War deaths is around 620,000. The American Battlefield Trust estimates that for every three men who died in combat, five died from non-combat-related disease. Their sacrifice is immortalized in museums, from Richmond, the Confederate capital, to Harrisburg, to Greenville, to dozens of other cities. They were Americans.

Lincoln’s generous dream for Reconstruction died with him. In following decades the country plunged into a nightmare of racism, violence, and corruption that has resurfaced today.

On Friday afternoon, on my way to Bayse, I pulled off I-81 at Lexington and drove through downtown. I passed upscale restaurants, coffee shops, boutiques. At VMI a ceremony was going on. Hundreds of cadets in their sharp uniforms were completing a formation. Officers in the active-duty military services stood supervising. I didn’t stop.

About 80 miles farther north I passed New Market. I could see the museum off to the west, abutting the Field of Lost Shoes and the rebuilt Bushong farmhouse. I wasn’t thinking about what happened there in May 1864. We are thinking about America. We have no Lincoln. What we have are lessons, taught, perhaps, at New Market.