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.

November 10, 2025

A half-dozen folks stood at the hospital reception desk, a couple of them a little edgy. A woman tried to reschedule a canceled appointment, the receptionist proposed a date that she couldn’t keep. She argued.  An older guy rocked back on his heels, nerves getting to him.

We’d all rather be somewhere else. “I’m here for my CT,” I said. She handed me a cellphone-shaped device.

Within minutes the gadget glowed, as if my restaurant table was ready. A staff person waved. She held out her hand for the device and said, “Follow me.” We walked to her office. She pointed to a chair, I sat. “Looks like you’re busy today,” I said, trying to break the ice. “It’s always like this,” she answered without looking up.

“Full name and birthdate?”  I answered. She made a check on a form. “Do you have a living will?” Yes, I said, although I’m not sure where it is. “Sign here,” she said, pushing an electronic signature device at me. I signed. She printed a sticker with my name and birthdate, taped it to a paper bracelet, and fastened the bracelet to my wrist. She stood. “This way.” We walked to an inner waiting room. A half-dozen people stared at cellphones or straight ahead.

I had been there before, not sure how many times since we arrived from Virginia five years ago. This would be my 27th computed tomography (CT) scan since fall 2018. I had the first batch in Virginia, at Sentara Hospital in Woodbridge. I continued the streak shortly after we arrived in Greenville, S.C.

“This is Cindy, she’ll take care of you,” the staff person said, motioning toward a lady in scrubs standing next to the CT scanner. The machine resembles a giant donut fitted to a platform on which the patient lies. For the procedure, the technician hits a switch and the platform slides into the donut, which fires X-rays at the patient, targeting the body parts the doctor wants scanned. For me it’s always been chest to thighs.

Cindy smiled and pointed to the platform. I emptied my pockets, climbed aboard, and stretched my arms above my head. She pressed the switch, the platform slid into the donut. The machine chirped, “Hold your breath” for the initial check, then “Breathe.” If the set-up pass is good, the process is repeated to obtain the scan. The new machine at Greer Memorial can complete the scan in about ten seconds. I got up and thanked Cindy.

Within hours a radiologist looks at the scan image and sends it with his report to my oncologist. The hospital also sends the report to the patient. In Virginia, I recall, it took a couple of days. Technology is swifter now. I get the email within hours.

Cancer therapy changes and evolves. The Food and Drug Administration has approved a fast-track review process, the Commissioner’s National Priority Voucher, for selected drugs that show promise during clinical trials. The Washington Post has reported that one of them, daraxonrasib, developed by the biotech company Revolution Medicines, showed remarkable results for pancreatic cancer, shrinking one patient’s tumor by 64 percent. Other patients experienced similar impressive reductions. The drug also is being looked at for lung and colorectal cancer.

The article follows many others hinting at a cure for cancer sometime in the future. But really the data aren’t going there. The newspaper story on daraxonrasib notes that “the median overall survival was 15.6 months,” said to be about twice as long as with standard treatments.

The National Cancer Institute says that pancreatic cancer is the third-leading cause of cancer deaths, with a five-year survival rate of 13 percent. For patients whose cancer has metastasized, the rate falls to 3 percent. Both numbers are unchanged over 30 years.

The survival figures vary for the vast range of other cancers. Some are well-known by generic references to specific organs: breast, prostate, lung, brain, kidney, ovarian, bladder. Then there are so-called “lesser-known” cancers, including gallbladder, esophageal, small-bowel cancers, many others. My own case, thymic carcinoma, is the first my doctor has ever treated. I escaped kidney cancer but having the left one removed six years ago.

The science of oncology recognizes hundreds, possibly thousands of strains of cancer, some distinguishable only at the genetic level and identified by numbers or scientific markers. Some of these strains are extremely rare, even unique to individuals or groups. My brother died of a cancer identified by a three-digit number.  

Everyone knows smoking causes lung cancer and too much sunlight may cause melanoma, skin cancer. Generations of research funded by the Cancer Institute, American Cancer Society, and individual hospital and medical schools have identified near-limitless potential contributing factors, among them genetic, environmental, diet, injury, infection, on and on.

What we know, bottom line, is that cancer doesn’t go away. It may seem to go away for some folks, who experience “remission.” We like to think miracles happen. But it never actually disappears. That’s why “cures” are counted in months and years of life extension, like the 15.6 months cited for daraxonrasib. Among all the oncologists I’ve seen, none ever talked about “curing” cancer.

I’ve had a good run, three pretty positive scans over the past year. In February the doc excused me from my oral chemo pill, erdafintinib,  to enjoy a “drug holiday.” The unpleasant side effects disappeared. But we both know it’s a crapshoot. My new CT scan report notes a “mild increase in size of left pericardial and perirectal soft tissue nodules versus lymph nodes.” Two other lung “nodules” and the one in the liver appear stable, but the radiologists hedged a bit, from what I could understand.

The radiologist is giving the scan a fast look, my doc checks it and makes his own judgment. He’ll give me the full story. The plan is to keep enjoying my drug holiday. “We’ve got the drug in our back pocket, just in case,” the doc said the last time we met. Maybe it will stay there a little longer.

November 3, 2025

The trick-or-treaters lined up at the front door in the more-or-less ancient ritual. I quizzed a couple of them about their costumes. Many wore getups of video-game characters I didn’t recognize.  I dropped a couple of quarters in each of their bags. They looked puzzled but yelled “Thank you!” and ran back into the darkness. I could see the silhouette of a parent out on the sidewalk. He or she waved, I waved back.

We started giving out quarters on Halloween years ago, knowing many parents aren’t thrilled by sacks of candy in the house, even for Halloween. A couple of years ago, thinking of inflation, we doubled it to fifty cents. “Save it for college,” I say to the older ones.

Hard to say if it’s cost-effective, although it doesn’t matter. Instead of those bags of mini-Snickers bars, lollipops, and the traditional yellow-and-orange candy corn, I bought a couple of rolls of quarters. Twenty bucks’ worth would cover forty kids. On Halloween afternoon we’d arrange the quarters in stacks of two and be ready. In recent years we’ve given them out by 8:00 PM, when trick-or-treating is pretty much over.

Halloween has changed. Hardly anyone today knows that it evolved in a convoluted, obscure way from the medieval Catholic observance of Hallowtide, which recognizes the feast of All Saints on November 1, when the canonized saints are honored, and All Souls the following day, when those who have passed, but are undergoing purification in Purgatory, are remembered.

Over generations, the religious underpinning of the season ebbed away. Last week the Christian magazine First Things published an article entitled “The Death of Halloween” by Justin Lee. He speculated that when Pope Gregory III moved All Saints Day to November from May in the eighth century, the rites naturally merged with the ceremonies of an ancient Celtic autumnal festival called Samhain that marked the approach of winter.

In the U.S., the coming of autumn with its glowing, glorious foliage, bonfires, crisp cool air, pumpkin harvests, and family gatherings remains a perennially upbeat, happy time. A Greenville company, Seasons of Grace Porches, decorates porches and business entryways with cheerful stacks of pumpkins, chrysanthemums, cornstalks, and other signs of the bounty of nature. 

Some historians trace a connection between Hallowtide’s reverence for saints with the Samhain fixation on the “otherworld,” when spirits of the dead became visible and the gates of Hell opened, releasing fiends and goblins. People would leave offerings of food to placate the spirits. Young men would wear disguises and seek payments, an echo of trick-or-treating.

All this cultural reconstruction merged over centuries with the evolution of religious traditions of respect for or fear of the spirits of the dead. In the 17th century English Protestants banned the Catholic observance of “souling” which, Lee writes, prefigured trick or treating and jack o’lanterns. People carried lanterns made from hollow turnips, seeking prayers for the departed. Other traditions encouraged celebration and partying as a release from the dark preoccupation with death.

These days the parents who get their kids’ costumes on Amazon generally are clueless about all the ponderous history. Decades ago, when Halloween amounted to moms dressing their little girls as princesses and little boys as cowboys or firemen and dads carving jack-o’lanterns, that was all there was to it.

The kids roamed the neighborhood and brought home sacks of candy. They were footsore and ready for bed. Parents inspected the haul. In following weeks they would distribute the candy as a sort of allowance until it was gone or turned stale. And that was Halloween. On to Thanksgiving.

Some years ago, still in Virginia, we noticed that a couple in our neighborhood—didn’t know them well —did nothing to decorate for Christmas—no lights, Santa, or angels. Instead they went all-out at Halloween: lights, ghosts, witches, fake skeletons. The effect was scary, ghoulish, haunted. I wondered what treats they offered to the kids, if any kids dared approach.

Over time, although All Saints still is a Catholic holyday and All Souls remains a commemoration, Halloween’s religious content was replaced by varying degrees of vandalism. In the 1960s and 1970s teenagers smashed windows and slashed tires. In our neighborhood in New Jersey “Cabbage Night,” the night before Halloween, included egging houses, soaping car windows, smashing pumpkins, and laying yards of toilet paper on trees and landscaping.

Halloween riots occurred in major cities. The dark turn became darker with the slasher movies of the 1980s, which studios released around Halloween. The season became big business. You can find giant plastic skeletons, witches, and goblins for sale at Lowe’s, Home Depot, and Walmart in August. A while back a neighbor here kept a twelve-foot-high skeleton upright on his front lawn for most of a year, until the HOA made him take it down.

Right now, in this and in lots of other places, a single skeleton wouldn’t stand out. Yards are littered with fake corpses, plastic bones, tombstones, giant nylon spiderwebs. Some of them are genuinely scary. A few residents have mounted orange and yellow lights. They also have sound systems that roar and cackle.

It’s true, we live in a dark time. There’s an art to being scary, which you find in Edgar Allen Poe’s stories and Stephen King’s novels. I wonder if the front-yard displays convey some deeper meaning about our moment. Maybe it really is for fun. But the effect is grim. The meaning of Hallowtide, is lost, forgotten.

I did my part, giving my humble jack o’lantern a scowling face. It sits outside for a few nights before and after the big night, illuminated by a single candle. The trick-or-treaters walk by. It has not yet scared anyone.

October 27, 2025

They had to make the journey. There was no other way. The Pittsburgh storage unit was costing Laura $80.00 per month, a lot for warehouse space nine hundred miles from home. Laura and Michael came up with the plan: haul the contents of the unit from Pittsburgh through America’s industrial heartland to St. Paul, roughly one-third the width of the country.

Laura, our eldest, is the visionary, the idea girl who worked on urban transformation in Washington, San Franciso, Pittsburgh, New Orleans, and Medellin, Colombia. Younger brother Michael is a numbers guy, Johns Hopkins Phi Beta Kappa grad, winner of the JHU Math Medal, Penn M.S. in medical physics.

The storage unit rental made sense three years ago when Laura moved from Pittsburgh to Colombia, then New Orleans for a couple of research projects. Now, settled in St. Paul, hiring a moving company would be ridiculously expensive, more than the actual dollar value of the stored furniture, household items, books, and so on. Some of it represented sentimental value.  

She flew to Pittsburgh from St. Paul on Saturday. At the storage facility she took inventory and readied the cargo for loading. On Thursday Michael got the short flight from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh. He rented a 12-foot truck and met Laura at the storage site.

They left Pittsburgh Thursday afternoon, fighting the city’s rush hour to I-76, then heading north. They crossed into Ohio and picked up I-80 south of Youngstown. Michael has done lots of long road trips and for years battled Philadelphia’s rush hour across the traffic-clogged Commodore Barry bridge into South Jersey. After two hours, as they turned west on 80, he was ready for a break. They stopped for the night in Warren, just north of Youngstown.

Early Friday morning they were back on 80, skirting Cleveland and its suburbs. The Ohio Turnpike then is a straight shot west past Toledo, then 200 miles of Midwest farms and factories across Indiana. It’s still 80/90 through Elkhart, Mishawaka, South Bend, Gary. The big target is Chicago with its web of traffic-heavy roads.

They made Chicago about 1 PM Friday. Michael wanted Chicago deep-dish pizza. They avoided the heart of downtown but stopped at a famous place, Pequod’s in Morton Grove, just off I-94 near Lake Michigan. Traffic moved at about 30 mph through Chicago.

They pushed out of the city on I-90 past Rockford, then through Beloit, Wisconsin. The destination was Madison, site of the state capital and the main campus of the University of Wisconsin. Homecoming Weekend was going on. “No hotel rooms, not even a parking space,” Michael said.       

They pressed on to Wisconsin Dells, an hour north and found a hotel. The Dells is popular vacation spot, a chain of small canyons and precipices bordering the Wisconsin River. We stopped there in 1979. I can’t remember much, but it’s within a couple of hours of the Minnesota state line.

We all love the rich, endless variety of American countryside, as the song goes, the amber waves of grain, purple mountains majesty, the hills, deserts, forests. But the interstate is the interstate, mostly numbingly the same, Maine to California. Road trips can be fun if you avoid them.

For months we quibbled over the logistics and costs of getting Laura’s household goods from Pittsburgh to St. Paul. Shipping would have required her to trek to Pittsburgh, hire a mover, pack and oversee loading on the mover’s schedule. She would face the risks of damage and delays.

Instead, the brother and sister team planned and executed on their schedule. The costs of airfares, truck rental, hotels, gas, and meals added up. But the do-it-yourself route meant control.

Their journey prompted memories. I made the same trip in 1973 on leave between Marine Corps assignments. It started on I-80 in Jersey, then across Pennsylvania and into the Midwest. I stopped in South Bend to see a friend at Notre Dame. We caught a Fighting Irish football game.

One image I keep is U.S. Steel’s Gary Works along Lake Michigan. As I drove past, the blast furnaces belched toxic fumes, turning the sky red. Fifty years ago the Gary Works employed more than 30,000 people. The number is now about 2,000, as the U.S. steel industry battles competition from foreign producers.

The Great Lakes South Shore then was the home of the country’s great metalbending plants, Big Three auto operations, and other heavy manufacturing and machine shops that used to use Gary steel.

At Calumet City, Ill., just south of downtown Chicago, the highway bisects, 80 heads due west to Iowa. I-90/94 winds through the city along Lake Michigan, then I-90 turns northwest. Chicago and its western suburbs, called Chicagoland by locals, seem to go on and on.

I stayed in Madison for a few days, visiting a friend. The school’s anti-Vietnam war cadre was angry and aggressive. As I walked across the campus my military haircut attracted catcalls and curses. I ducked and hoofed it to my car.

Michael and Laura arrived at Laura’s place St. Paul at noon, bleary-eyed after 900 miles of interstate. Unloading took a while, the two of them maneuvering the furniture through the apartment door. Michael grabbed a nap. That evening they enjoyed dinner with my sister Regina and their cousin Annie and Annie’s boys, Ben and Jonathan. On Sunday they found a sports bar and watched the Eagles-Vikings game. Michael flew home Monday.