September 18, 2023

O’Connell Street in central Dublin is the place to be. We found it a few blocks north of Parnell Square, lined with shops and restaurants and crowded, recalling the flaring streets of James Joyce’s Dublin. O’Connell crosses the sullen gray River Liffey and passes Trinity University campus, site of the library that houses the ancient Book of Kells.

That first morning the rain and chill drove us to an Insomnia coffee shop. In mid-September the Irish sky was gray and dark, cars and buses drove with headlights, pedestrians and cyclists were wrapped in parkas with hoods. We shivered in our summer jackets. By noon the rain slackened, the streets were packed with local people and tourists dodging the hop-on/hop-off buses, taxis, and trolleys.

The Ireland visit has always been waiting in the background for us, as it is for many with Irish connections. The original Walshes, I’ve heard, are of County Cork. Most of the family have made the trip, my parents finally in their later years. Daughter Marie spent a student year at University College Dublin.

Putting it off has to do with what we know. Ireland is famous for tranquil, rural countryside of lush, deep-green meadows, pretty towns and farms, spectacular seaside vistas below the rugged Cliffs of Moher, along with the magical folk yarns and mythology. All that is set off by the history, centuries of tragedy, privation, sectarian conflict, oppression, violence.

The tension between the Irish and their oppressors has ancient origins. Oxford scholar Paul Johnson, in his history of Ireland reveals that, centuries before the Protestant Reformation incited by Martin Luther in 1517, Pope Adrian IV in 1154 gave Henry II of England a papal bull to assert control over Ireland and its bishops, who tended to run their churches their own way. Henry hired Norman mercenaries who in 1167 entered Ireland. Henry then was “acknowledged as sovereign by all concerned, Norman and Irish, lay and ecclesiastical.”

In 1172 Pope Alexander III endorsed Henry’s actions, writing that, “how great are the enormities of vice with which the people of Ireland have been infected, and how they have departed from the fear of God and the established practice of the Christian faith …”

Johnson writes that the Reformation largely bypassed Ireland. Irish Catholic hatred of the English set into the deepest threads of the country’s history and culture. It simmered along with resentment of the indifference and greed of absentee Protestant English landlords towards the grotesquely poor Catholic tenants, who were bled white by taxes or thrown off their land, their homes burned if they couldn’t pay.

The primitive Irish economy exploded with the Great Famine of 1847, when blight devastated the potato crop. Starvation ravaged the country, causing the emigration of millions to Canada and the U.S. The Irish agony of the 1840s and early 1850s finally was answered by emergency relief by British churches and charities worldwide, from Europe to Russia and Latin America to the U.S. I was surprised to learn that private groups in South Carolina, along with some in Pennsylvania, were the largest American contributors.

Most of us, Irish-heritage or not, know something of the more recent nightmares centered on the conflict between Catholic republicans and Protestant unionists: the Irish Republican Army and Ulster Defense Association terrorism; the thousands of victims, men, women, children; the clumsy, brutal British interventions; the endless talks and broken truces; the Irish Civil War of 1922-1923. Then the “Troubles” of roughly the late 1960s through 1990s, and the still-fragile Good Friday Agreement of 1998.

Still, we went. The flight, helped by a 100-mile/hour tailwind, arrived early, at around 4 AM. We sat on the tarmac because the customs people didn’t start work until 5 AM. A friendly cab driver dropped us at a hotel north of O’Connell, but last night’s guests still were sleeping. We wandered up Dorset Street in wet dawn darkness and found Insomnia. A sweet Irish lady treated us to her musical brogue and made us sandwiches and poured coffee.

By noon the rest of the city had ventured out, shopping, visiting, drinking strong coffee, listening to music. Students demonstrated along O’Connell Street against Iranian government oppression. The crowd’s mood was mostly upbeat. A smiling Irish girl served us coffee and delicious “breads and spreads” at Bewley’s Cafe on fashionable Grafton Street. 

On Sunday morning the rain poured, we stepped out anyway and got to Mass at St. Theresa’s Church near Grafton. Afterward we walked through St. Stephen’s Green, the city’s largest park, a lovely place of ponds, birds, flowers, and trees, which hung heavy with rain. The air was soft and gentle. The Green offers dozens of memorials to well-known locals, including Constance Markievicz (1868-1927), daughter of Irish Arctic explorer Henry Gore Booth.

Gore Booth, fifth baronet of Sligo, provided assistance to starvation victims during the famine of 1878-1880, following the example of his father, Sir Robert Gore Booth. Markievicz helped found Na Fianna Eireann (Soldiers of Ireland) and the Irish Citizen Army. She fought in the Easter Rising of 1916, when the republicans tried to throw out the British, and St. Stephen’s became a battleground. She was sentenced to death, later commuted to life in prison.  In 1918 she was elected to Parliament while in prison and appointed Minister of Labor.

We got more coffee and sat for a while in a warm shop. To escape the dampness we browsed at Aran’s Sweater Market, piled high with heavy wool sweaters, caps, and jackets. A video showed the processing of wool from sheep to shelf. The place was packed with tourists demanding authentic Irish wool, lines at the register stretched the length of the store. Sandy bought a sweater, I got in line.

The air warmed a bit, but the rain kept coming, the tourists pulled up their hoods and tightened their scarves. We circled the block near the college and the Bank of Ireland, built without windows to avoid Britain’s “window tax,” and looked for a ride. So we missed the Little Museum of Dublin and the Museum of Literature. We missed most of the places on our list. But we felt a bit more Irish. We’ll be back.     

September 11, 2023

It was time to go back to the Massanutten Mountains, the roughneck sidekick of sleek Shenandoah National Park. The reason is the running of the Ring, the 71-mile slather of sharp rocks along two 40-mile-long ridges. The Ring, put on by the Virginia Happy Trails Running Club, is held on Labor Day weekend, when it’s hot. The Reverse Ring, the same event in the opposite direction, occurs in late February, when it’s cold.

Mountains may fill the human heart with peace and joy, awe and fear. The pale blue and ghostly white silhouettes on the horizon, nearby or at great distances, prompt thoughts and emotions with power to rip us from our everyday lives. They carry us to a vision of God’s majestic purpose, or paralyze us with foreboding and dread. Men and women struggle to climb and explore hard, unforgiving surfaces and turn them into monuments. They also die on them.  

In the East, the Appalachians is the broad label for the mountain spine that can be split north-south, with Virginia being the splitting point. Everyone has a name for their own: Maryland has the Catoctins, Pennsylvania the Alleghenies and Poconos, New Jersey, the Ramapos, New York, the Catskills and Adirondacks. Then there’s the Berkshires (Mass.), Greens (Vt.), Whites (N.H.), and Mahoosucs (Me.)

In Virginia all that becomes the near-unbroken Blue Ridge, which extends eventually into West Virginia, North and South Carolina, Georgia, and Alabama, and west into the Great Smokies in North Carolina and Tennessee.

Shenandoah National Park, the glamorous nexus of the Blue Ridge, continues from just outside Front Royal roughly to a place called Rockfish Gap, a few miles west of Charlottesville. Shenandoah, forever a setting for postcard and calendar photos, welcomes you with picturesque, manicured trails, overlooks, picnic grounds, souvenir shops, restaurants, and campgrounds. On pretty summer weekends, it can be hard to find parking.

Ten miles west are the Massanuttens, mostly within the George Washington National Forest. The Ring starts at a gravel parking lot below Signal Knob Mountain, the race finish point, a 2,000-foot rise just west of Front Royal. The Massanutten Trail crosses Fort Valley Road (U.S. 678) and Passage Creek and enters a campground called Elizabeth Furnace, the site of a 19th-century stone blast furnace.

The trail is marked by orange “blazes” on treetrunks, many faded and hard to see, the only guidance for the event is “stay on orange.” Along with the orange blazes are blue ones that mark the Tuscarora Trail, which passes east-west. Orange and blue alternate for a while, as if the folks who applied them were trying to save paint. But the point is orange. Persevere, look for it, it’s there.

Beyond Elizabeth Furnace the trail zigzags through thick woods. It curls gently, then climbs to around 2,200 feet of elevation at a spot called High Peak. The rocks build up to an intersection with the Shawl Gap trail. The morning sun gleams over the eastern ridge and lights the forest. The trail rises and falls, then swings eastward to allow a spectacular view of the Shenandoah before turning west into forest for two miles.

Along this stretch a single hiker, a young woman, approached. She smiled as she passed and said she had left Camp Roosevelt, my finish point 25 miles south, a day earlier. She moved on, the forest was silent. I was alone, the others were well ahead. My one complete Ring was in 2016, with the Reverse the next two years. Time wears on the legs and lungs.

The trail slopes for maybe a mile then passes a junction with the pink-blazed Sherman Gap trail, a northwest-inclined downhill back to Elizabeth Furnace and Signal Knob. Orange crosses a stream at a forest clearing called Veach Gap, where the Veach trail picks up and offers another escape to Fort Valley Road. A rough shelter stands just off the trail, a rusted firepit shows the remains of many campfires.

The orange twists a bit then rises up a steep eastbound mile-long straightaway. It then levels out and turns sharply south, the ultimate direction. There the trails split as Tuscarora heads southeast across the South Fork of the Shenandoah River. The blue blazes disappear. Two miles farther along orange is Milford Gap, where volunteers offer water and good words.  Jill stepped forward and waved, and offered me cool water. I sat, we talked a bit. I moved on. The trail passes an intersection with a steep, purple-blazed descent to a place called Indian Grave.

In early afternoon the September sun rises higher, the deep-green panorama of the Shenandoah valley inspires wonder. The trail narrows between long knife-like granite slabs that threaten legs. Three miles farther on Jill and fellow volunteer Michelle caught me. We visited for a few minutes. They held out the prospect of dropping from the course, then left me with gatorade and snacks.

They and others no doubt wondered what I was doing there, sixteen years older than the next-oldest entrant. I wondered myself, although there really was no point. I thought of the chemo and radiation. But it was the Ring, after all, and the orange trail, and its transcendent, mystical, wild power. One morning five years ago, training for the Reverse Ring, I started on orange at Roosevelt and ran and fast-hiked 20 miles to the Indian Grave turnoff and back. I can’t recall how I then tapdanced easily up the climbs that now seem excruciating.

The next stretch seems interminable, the forest thins, the afternoon sun blazes. It’s possible to catch glimpses of farmland and the river far below, glimmering in the mottled light. Ahead, the route is a ragged rock carpet that rises, turns, descends. 

A modest milestone appears, an intersection with an eastbound blue-blazed trail, a sharp descent to a spot along the Shenandoah called Habron Gap. Three miles of orange remain to a junction with the yellow-blazed Stephens trail, which winds down the ridge to Roosevelt, roughly equal to the distance remaining on orange. The sun moved across the sky, the shadows grew longer.

A mile north of Stephens my cell phone beeped, the aid station volunteers expected me hours earlier. After a long day waiting at Roosevelt Sandy was worried. Volunteers Rande and Travis trekked up, we met at the Stephens intersection. Rande handed me gatorade. After twelve hours on orange, we set off at an easy trot down Stephens. Soon daylight faded. We lit headlamps, and finished.

September 4, 2023

At the Republican debate nearly two weeks ago, six of eight people on the stage raised their hands to advertise that even if Trump is convicted of a felony they’d still support him if he were the Republican nominee. Three of the six, Pence, DeSantis, and Ramaswamy, are lawyers. A verdict in a court of law, for them, matters less than being loyal Republicans. That’s one notion of honor.

But honor exists, in other places and times. On December 20, 1943, an American B-17 bomber, crippled by German antiaircraft fire and fighter aircraft during a mission over Germany, tried to stay airborne en route back to England. Two of its four engines stalled. The tail gunner was killed, other crewmen were severely wounded.

The pilot, 21-year-old Lieutenant Charles Brown and his co-pilot wrestled with the controls to avoid ditching in Germany. The plane had fallen far behind other friendly aircraft. Brown and his crew were alone over hostile country. The bomber flew north to reach a westbound course across the North Sea, which would take it over a fearsome German flak battery.

As the bomber struggled, Brown and his crew spotted a single German Messerschmitt Bf-109 fighter aircraft approaching. The German pilot, Lieutenant Franz Stigler, had been at a nearby airfield and spotted the B-17 flying low overhead. He took off and closed on the bomber, finger on his trigger, watching for defensive fire from the bomber’s three gun turrets. He then saw the dead body of the tail gunner. 

Adam Makos, in A Higher Call, published in 2012 by Berkeley, tells the powerful story of Brown and Stigler, and their incredible, accidental encounter.

In December 1943 Stigler was a 28-year-old ace with 22 “kills” of allied aircraft. He was no Nazi. He and most of his fellow pilots hated the Nazis. His parents had voted against the Nazis in Germany’s 1933 election, in which twelve political parties competed, allowing the Nazis to win power with 44 percent of the vote. He was raised in a devout Catholic family and had thought of becoming a priest. He carried a rosary with him on every mission.

Stigler didn’t join the German air force, the Luftwaffe. As a flight instructor for Lufthansa, the civilian airline, he was drafted. He showed skills as a fighter pilot. His brother August became a bomber pilot. They believed they fought for the German people. Many German pilots believed they fought by a code of chivalry that dated to Germany’s medieval Teutonic Knights. They fought with restraint, respecting their enemies. As Makos reports, the Luftwaffe rescued downed allied flyers and protected them from the Nazi police force, the SS. August was killed in 1940.

As Stigler closed on Brown’s B-17 on that December day, he saw that the fuselage was shot through. The crew were caring for the wounded. The left tail stabilizer was missing. One engine was dead, another was failing. The plane had lost nearly five miles of altitude and was barely at 2,000 feet.

Stigler flew within a few feet of the bomber’s left wing. He could see Brown working to fly the plane. Stigler resolved not to fire, but to be true to his chivalric code of honor. He signaled to Brown to fly to neutral Sweden, a 30-minute flight instead of attempting the two-hour return to England. Brown stared straight ahead, expecting the German to blow his plane out of the sky. Instead Stigler waved. The Americans guessed he was out of ammunition.

As the two planes flew together, they passed over the coastline antiaircraft batteries. The ground crews, seeing the German fighter escorting the B-17, held their fire. The two aircraft flew out over the sea. Stigler, seeing that the Americans were determined to try for England, saluted, then banked and disappeared. The Americans, losing altitude all the way, made it back to base.

Stigler never reported the incident, which he knew could get him shot. When Brown told his superiors, he was ordered to keep quiet because of concern that American bomber crews might think other German pilots would hold their fire.

Brown flew a total of 29 bombing missions as the allies pulverized German cities and military sites. Stigler and his fellow pilots continued to fly, shifting to the world’s first jet fighter, the Me-262. For the entire war Stigler flew 478 missions and shot down 28 allied aircraft. In early May 1945 German forces began surrendering. Stigler escaped, first in a truck, then on foot. He surrendered to American troops near Berchtesgaden, Hitler’s hideout.

Makos’ story begins with the war’s aftermath in Germany, where civilians struggled to recover from the devastation of defeat. Hunger and suffering were everywhere. Stigler searched for menial work in mills and factories to help support his mother. Eventually he found work, got married, then moved to Vancouver, Canada. He learned English.

Charlie, back in the U.S. also got married. He made a career of the Air Force, then worked for the State Department until he retired to Florida in the early 1970s.

Both Stigler and Brown raised families. Both kept in touch with their pilot friends. But as Makos writes, Charlie still dreamed of his mysterious encounter with the German fighter pilot who didn’t attack. He talked to veteran’s groups. He searched Air Force records. He wrote to German Air Force General Adolf Galland, describing the B-17/Bf-109 incident. Galland ordered the German veterans’ newsletter to publish Brown’s letter. Stigler, at home in Canada, saw the letter.

Brown included his address in his letter. On January 18, 1990, Stigler wrote to Brown: “Dear Charlie, all these years I wondered what happened to the B-17, did she make it or not? I inquired time and again without results. … I am happy now that you made it, and that it was worth it.”

Brown wrote back, asking Stigler about the markings on his aircraft. “I have the distinct feeling that some power greater than our respective governments was looking out for most of us on Dec. 20, 1943. I am sure that your skill and daring made you an extremely successful fighter pilot; however, if you repeatedly exhibited that type of camaraderie/chivalry and daring, your chances of surviving combat would not have been too great.”

On June 21, 1990, Stigler and Brown met in Seattle. Stigler revealed he had not been out of ammunition when they met in the air. Later, he told Gen. Galland he had let the B-17 escape. Galland said only: “It would be you.”

Stigler and Brown became close friends. Two months after their first meeting, Stigler gave Brown a gift, a book. He wrote an inscription: “In 1940 I lost my only brother … on the 20th of December 1943, four days before Christmas, I had the chance to save a B-17 from destruction, a plane so badly damaged it was a wonder that it was still flying. The pilot, Charlie Brown, is for me, as precious as my brother was.”

They died within months of each other, in 2008.

August 28, 2023

As our wedding reception wound down on Saturday, August 26, 1978, Sandy and I realized we didn’t have enough cash with us to pay the bill. We told the manager of the place we’d send him a check that day. We didn’t have a postage stamp to mail the check. The post office was closed (grocery stores didn’t sell stamps).

In late afternoon we drove the near-deserted streets of downtown Nashville and climbed the darkened stairs to my office to get a stamp from my desk.

Fortunately I had a key. We found a stamp and an envelope, wrote the check, and dropped the envelope in a mailbox. Then we went to dinner at a Ruby Tuesday’s which, like most of that chain, is long gone.

As with every other couple, our anniversaries are benchmarks for recalling things. That October we went camping at a state park in Alabama. On the way we stopped at Sandy’s parents’ place in Cowan, Tenn., and watched the Yankees play the Dodgers in Game 3 of the World Series with her dad. The Yankees won, 5-1. We drove through heavy rain the rest of the trip down I-59 and set up our tent, using a flashlight, in the downpour at midnight.

In those early years, we’d drive to Cowan for R&R weekends. I went fishing with her dad and uncle on giant Tim’s Ford Lake near Winchester. Her folks had bought property at the lake. Then the company he worked for closed. They moved to Nashville and asked us if we wanted to buy the lot. We didn’t have the money. Now we wish we had found a way.

Over years, anniversaries come and go in a kind of blur. Young couples with kids discover this. Unless you’re sentimental or mark dates on the calendar, they seem to come out of nowhere.

You can “google” your anniversary date (or any date) and find both amazing and pedestrian things. On August 26, 1682 the English astronomer Edmund Halley discovered the comet named after him. Then too, on August 26, 1907 Harry Houdini escaped from chains underwater at Aquatic Park in San Francisco. Our daughter’s and son-in-law’s wedding date was June 6, 2009—they didn’t plan to commemorate Operation Overlord in 1944, but it worked out that way.

We annoy our kids with our ancient stories. Still, we place memories in the sweep of change. In 1978 I used an IBM Selectric typewriter at work and thought that was high-tech. My desk phone had rows of buttons. In ’78 or ‘79 Sandy took a night course in computer programming at nearby Belmont College, studying Fortran. She passed the course, it didn’t do much for her career.

At that time Jimmy Carter was president. He was known for his cardigan sweaters, turning down the White House thermostat, and his July 15, 1979 “malaise” speech. He never used the word, but he did say, “A majority of our people believe that the next five years will be worse than the past five years.” Less than four months later 52 American diplomats were taken hostage in Iran and held for 444 days.

For many, the stampede of technology may be the significant theme of the past 45 years. Anyone with gray or thinning hair, or no hair, can pinpoint some experience with “devices” that now seems awkward or comical. We bought our first computer in 1986. It was made by AT&T and cost nearly $4,000. The hard drive had 12 kilobytes—right, kilobytes, of memory. Your cellphone has the equivalent of thousands of those.

Our oldest daughter was born in ‘79, the last three kids were Reagan babies in ’82, ’84, and ’86. In 1986 I took a job in New Jersey, we packed up and moved to a rented house in Red Bank, 40 miles south of New York and close to family. A year later we landed in Virginia.

Those were the now-infamous years of runaway inflation and the sky-high interest rates imposed to choke it. Our initial mortgage on the Virginia house was 13 percent. We tumbled forward through the late 1980s. Anniversaries came and went.

By 1990 the kids were all in school. In August we took a week’s vacation at a state park in southern Virginia. Driving home we heard President George H.W. Bush and U.K. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher announce Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. They and other allies initiated Operation Desert Shield, the buildup of forces around Kuwait. In late February ‘91 it became the 100-hour war called Desert Storm.

We worked overtime to move forward. In ’94 we took a 16th anniversary trip to New York. In ’98, for number 20 our kids treated us to a cruise on the Potomac.

In 2003, number 25, we splurged and went to Rome. At a public papal audience attended by thousands at the Vatican, we found ourselves in the front row, pushed against the ropes. John Paul II rode by in his popemobile. I thought he stared down at us.

Americans persevered. We struggled, all of us, to move into the new century. The running meter of anniversaries kept ticking, but we hardly noticed. Our kids were in college, then graduated, then job-hunting, then working. They all trekked across the world, Europe, Russia, Japan, Latin America, places we had never been. We tried to keep track of them.

We look at cataclysmic events that now shape the world and our own lives. Experts still argue whether Desert Storm spawned the festering Middle Eastern hatred of the U.S. that exploded on 9/11 then led to the second Iraq war and the 20-year agony of Afghanistan. Three years ago we lived through covid, which may be back.

The sterling moments of our wedding on that stifling August day have receded into the dim past. The church, St. Mary’s in Nashville, is surrounded by high-rise office towers. The rectory building was demolished, the square footage paved as a parking lot.

We look again at the photos. The priest, the parents, and some of the guests are gone, the rest, like us, are moving slowly to their medical appointments. Still, we recall with happiness the Mass, the lovely notes of “Ave Maria,” the good wishes all around. We remember, too, that we didn’t have a stamp.     

August 21, 2023

An avocado tree grows in our kitchen. A year ago I placed an avocado pit in a cup of water on the kitchen table. Now a magnificent tree stands, nearly six feet tall, in a corner near a window. Some of the rich green leaves are 15 inches long, broad and thick. New shoots rise continuously from the top. We water it every few days, but don’t do anything else. It seems indestructible.

I look at the tree in the morning, when sunlight reflects warmly off the leaves. In the evening we watch the news shows, which are all about tragedy, now the agony of the people of Lahaina. Yet the lovely tree raises our spirits, evoking, somehow, hope.

Beautiful things coexist with danger. The life of the tree is fleeting, temporary. Eventually it will shrivel and die. Still, like everyone else, we look for beauty wherever we may find it.

In two years the tree has been our only step forward in the bare, nondescript kitchen. It was time to do more, to do what everyone we know has done: put in a new countertop. Really, isn’t that what everyone does? It was time to make the effort.  

We had put in a countertop in our Virginia house years ago, either quartz or granite or marble. I don’t remember the details, how we made the decisions. I was at work when the contractor installed it, so I didn’t watch the job. It was shiny, went well with the kitchen colors.

The previous owner of our South Carolina home, Miss Jean, was an elderly single lady who more than decade ago papered most of the walls in elaborate old-country flower patterns. We never met her, she had moved to a nursing home. She sold the place to pay those expenses, her nephew handled the sale. He told us her only child, an adult daughter, had died of cancer some years ago. That cruel blow, it seemed, ended her interest in the house. She didn’t have internet service for the last five years she lived here. It was her final place.

The kitchen, a short, narrow passageway, is called a “galley kitchen.” The countertops were the standard bargain-basement laminate installed by the homebuilder, a solid off-white shade that, without constant attention, easily chips or stains.

The house was on a downward slide. We had it painted. A month after moving in the water heater died, we replaced it. Four months later we dipped into savings to replace the rickety furnace/air conditioning unit because it failed in the dregs of a stifling South Carolina summer. No one would visit us, even for a few minutes. We installed new faucets in the kitchen and bathrooms. Then we stopped, exhausted.           

Every homeowner yearns for this improvement or that one: a deck, a patio, a renovated basement, and so on. Some decisive folks take on complicated, expensive projects, creating beacons for others who believe home improvement to be a benchmark of success. A new water heater and furnace don’t qualify. We wanted to add something beautiful.

We talked and talked about it. We walked through Floor & Décor and looked at their dazzling variety of stone types. We looked at the displays at Home Depot. We looked at pictures everywhere. We found a coupon for a company in Spartanburg.

A salesman came to the house with a briefcase and eight samples, all variations of a vaguely white pattern. I guessed he left his other samples in his car when he saw our house. He measured the kitchen and gave us an estimate. We hurried him out the door. We stopped at Encore Stone, a big warehouse filled with twelve-foot-long slabs of quartz, soapstone, granite, and marble. We walked among the aisles and left more confused.

This was the middle of the tiny industrial neighborhood of this small town. A block away from the warehouse, as we waited for a traffic light to change, Sandy noticed a house turned into a business named “Kitchen and Bath Gallery.” We pulled into the lot.

Inside, a middle-aged lady was talking on a cell phone, surrounded by stone samples. “I’m Sherry,” she said with a smile. She said she and her father ran the business for years. He retired, she took over. We looked around. I was tired of this. We picked something.

The rest was a kind of blur. A few days later Sherry’s guy, Carlos, show up and took measurements. We talked a bit, he was from Mexico, near Acapulco, and came to the U.S. as a teenager. He raised a family here. I wondered, why here? There’s lots of work, he said. This town is booming. People are building, fixing things. 

Within a week Sherry had ordered the stone and had it cut. A few days later Carlos and his son showed up with the new countertop lashed to the back of their truck. In an hour they had ripped out the old countertop, laid in the new one, and fastened it in place.

We said thanks, they said so long. A plumber arrived that afternoon to reattach the water and drain lines. We waited 24 hours to use the kitchen. It has turned out OK. I wondered what Miss Jean would think.

Whenever we visit Nashville, I drive by the old house, near Vanderbilt University. It’s been 37 years since we moved away, the neighborhood has gone from middle class to upscale chic, populated by professors and university honchos. The house has been sold and sold again, and worked over inside and outside. I want to knock on the door and ask to see the rooms.

Miss Jean wouldn’t recognize our place if she stopped by. Well, yes, she would. A paint job, new faucets, and a new countertop in two-and-a-half years isn’t that much. But we’re another short step beyond the home she left us. Then there’s our avocado tree, reflecting the sunlight, making us happy, inspiring thoughts of continuing, refreshing new life. She couldn’t miss that.

But it won’t last. And she’s not coming.

We’ll come up with another fix-it idea, maybe an upgrade to the bathroom.  We’ve already talked it to death. We have to cost these things out. We’ll fall back into our maybe/maybe not routine, and wait another two years. Or more.