May 16, 2022

It was time to head back to northern Virginia. Eighteen months away isn’t all that long. Maybe I really didn’t want to go back. But I wanted to see people I care about, and wanted to do things that were, for the moment, important. So I had to go back, to the state, the community, the neighborhood that for 33 years had been home.

The North Carolina novelist Thomas Wolfe became famous, not so much because of the greatness of his books, but because of one of his titles: You Can’t Go Home Again. Wolfe, who also wrote Look Homeward Angel and Of Time and the River, died just before turning 38. Home Again was published posthumously. He never had the chance, as do those who last longer, to go home.

The trip was based on a chore, volunteer work at a trail ultra-running event in the deep-green Massanutten mountains that in two ragged ridges form a 100-mile-long rock fortress in the state’s northwestern corner. Virginia has its modest seacoast, mostly identified with low-rent tourism and military bases. It has its history as the nexus of Civil War tragedy that echoes through the Wilderness, Petersburg, and Appomattox. But the mountains down the western spine of the state, the Shenandoah and Massanuttens, in their eternal, brooding, stunning beauty, give Virginia its unique strain of majesty. 

The traffic crept up on me. It was Tuesday, but by Fredericksburg the interstate was nearly packed in. I rounded a bend and there it was, the massive project to extend new “high-occupancy” lanes still farther south. Backhoes, bulldozers, graders, and dump trucks lined up in rows. Huge rings of concrete sewer-line piping and prefab sections of overpass were laid out over giant dunes of plowed-up gravel. Crews stood around as if observing their work. Yet I could barely recognize any progress since we passed the same spot in October 2020.

The intensely complicated, vastly expensive job seemed a metaphor for my final thoughts about this place: the razing of natural features to achieve some small-minded notion of convenience. More and wider roads to attract more cars, more congestion, more sprawl. Should that matter? South Carolina and the feds have been widening I-85 for years. We still moved there.

Fredericksburg is a rough boundary between North and South. Below are the small cities, factory towns, and farms that still venerate the Gray in the War of Blue and Gray. Above is the suburban snarl of Stafford, Prince William, and Fairfax Counties and the urban enclaves of Alexandria and Arlington. Anyone who knows Virginia knows about the state’s split personality: the depressed, rural, Trump-devoted south and west and the traffic-choked, blue-chip northeast corner, frozen rigid in Democratic Party orthodoxy.

From the Woodbridge exit I drove past the house. The new owners had pulled the hyacinth and forsythia shrubs from the front yard and put up a patio umbrella with some chairs. The lawn was scruffy, the grass pale and feeble, struggling in the poor soil, as it did when I owned the place. The hostas I had planted years ago survived, maybe because as perennials they cared for themselves. Otherwise the block, the street, the neighborhood had hardly changed. I drove on.

The few familiar faces I saw the next day at the old parish church had aged, I searched my memory for names. I thought some noticed me, they wondered, probably, who is that old guy. I nodded then left.

The friends I visited have been busy upgrading their properties. Northern Virginia still is a sweet home for some. For me it became an impersonal, alien place, a swamp of commercial dreck (like many others), traffic, and bureaucracy.

At some long-ago time the northern Virginia suburbs south of the Beltway became a sensible place to settle for the droves of civil servants, military families, and contractors sent to or drawn to government. Affluent and not-so-affluent subdivisions grew like capillaries from the major arteries of I-95 and I-66. Eventually the interstates and local roads became choked. Residential and retail development stretched west toward Front Royal and south to Fredericksburg.

We landed in the middle of all that, in a subdivision attached to a main four-lane road that became a six- then an eight-lane road. A mile or so from our intersection was another subdivision, then beyond that another, which bled into a strip mall. The pattern repeated itself across the county. Walking to a destination became an eccentricity. Life was defined by driving.   

Long ago in other places we lived, families stayed for decades. Our neighbors in Nashville and Red Bank, N.J., were elderly couples and young families. They walked to the grocery, the drugstore, the park, the elementary school. Kids plays ball in the street. As a kid I played ball in the street and walked to the school bus stop then walked home. But I know, everyone knows, that world died a generation ago, maybe two.

Today parents walk their children to the bus, in the afternoon they gather to wait for them to get off. And so on. But things change, and we should have known that when we dreamed ourselves through the everyday world of the 1950s and 1960s. Apart from the nostalgia and the blowsy thinking, the world then was a very hard place. While we nestled in our comfortable communities, others suffered, in other neighborhoods, other worlds.

The good, caring people recreate home when we show up. The true friends cook for us and get us up to date on their kids, their adventures, their plans and dreams. They listen to our stories and smile at our grumpiness. They wish we hadn’t left, and they’re not likely to follow. Old timers who look for new “situations” are on their own. We knew that when we left, we left anyway. Home is, after all, always becoming what you hope it will be. Then the ones you love step up. They promise: you can go home again.

May 9, 2022

I closed the cover of Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine, a first novel by Scottish author Gail Honeyman. The book won a prestigious literary prize, the Costa First Novel Award in 2017, which is given to English, Scottish, and Irish authors. I’ve now read it twice.

Completely Fine is a story of confronting tragedy and of courage. God knows we are getting many such stories today in the nightmare world of Ukraine. But Honeyman’s story of Eleanor is personal, private, and consuming.

This isn’t the kind of book I would be inclined to read, but our daughter read it a while back and said it got good reviews. I borrowed it at the public library, browsed through it, then finished it in a few days.

Until two Virginia friends talked me into getting into a local book club two years ago, I almost never read fiction. The club selections include a lot of works of fiction, many of them ponderous agonizing about personal conflict, bad relationships, alienation, loneliness. It’s the literature of the modern world. I plow through it, waiting for the gems.

I’ve made the time. When you quit working you’re signing up, figuratively, for reworking your schedule—that is, for transforming your life. Some folks relocate, others stay put. In either case it’s the “R” word, retirement. We all aspire to get the formula right. Some do it gracefully, others go off the rails with money problems, health problems, personal loss, the way life works. You have close calls, you do what you can to right the ship and keep sailing. You can do those things, or you can stare at TV or the internet for hours every day.

The goal, everyone’s goal, is getting joy out of this chapter of life by seeking perspective, balance, a sense of the world. You could call it old-folks maturity, but really it’s the mission of any thinking person. Balance means preserving and sharpening the life of the mind by battling the impulse to lapse into routine. Retired folks can find themselves in a fix. Unless you “unretire” and go back to work, your schedule now is your own and you’re looking at seven days off every week. “Every day is Saturday,” a smart guy I know used to say.

You can seek joy by taking up hobbies, travel, staying fit, volunteering, dabbling in new things, like this blog. But they’re not obligations or commitments. The free time is still there, inviting you to reflect, to look out at the sunrise and the sunset, to ponder what you’ve accomplished and what your life means, what you believe, what lies ahead.

Balance and perspective means learning, opening yourself to awareness and understanding of new, even disturbing sides of human nature.

That’s how I found Eleanor Oliphant. It’s fiction, but somehow just barely. Like all good fiction, whether by Dostoevsky, Jane Austin, Charlotte Bronte, Scott Fitzgerald, Honeyman’s story says something about life that resonates. She may not end up with those names in some pantheon of great writers. But then, she might.

When Honeyman’s story begins, set in the author’s hometown of Glasgow, Scotland, Eleanor, the heroine—I think that’s the right word—is dutiful and meticulous in going about her life, which amounts to a clerical job in an office. She goes to work, says as little as possible to her colleagues, shops for her groceries, returns to her humble apartment. She stays home over weekends, speaking to no one but store clerks from Friday evening until Monday morning.

Her story begins to unfold. She reports that she drinks a couple of liters of vodka every weekend, then sleeps it off. She speaks on the phone with someone whom she calls “Mummy,” disturbing conversations with a voice that is difficult to identify as a parent.

The world barges in on her constricted life. Her office computer stops working, she calls IT—the IT guy, Raymond, shows up to fix it. She reports with irritation his appearance—slovenly dress, chin stubble, bad haircut. When she leaves work she is annoyed Raymond is leaving at the same time. Trying to be polite, she walks with him toward the bus stop. Suddenly an elderly man collapses on the sidewalk. Raymond rushes to help. He hands Eleanor his cellphone and orders her to call emergency services, but she is paralyzed and useless. Raymond grabs the phone from her and calls. EMTs take the man to the hospital.

A social services worker visits Eleanor’s apartment for a stilted, difficult interview. We begin to develop a fuller but still incomplete picture. Raymond persuades her to visit the old man at the hospital. At his bedside, the man’s children thank Eleanor and Raymond for helping their father.

That’s my teaser.

The writer draws us into the near-opaque mystery of Eleanor’s life. It is a mystery of profound personal tragedy that becomes, depending how the reader may score such things, one of redemption through self-knowledge, self-respect, self-love. She writes delicately and obliquely of fearless acceptance of life’s experiences, of honesty and courage, helped along by recognition and understanding of the value of the human person.

Honeyman leaves us an eloquent but discreet message of the enduring promise of acceptance and kindness, humble and unpretentious as it may be. She doesn’t preach. She offers no happy ending, but unwritten lessons about pain, honesty, and recovery, lessons that call to us, and endure.

May 2, 2022

Who knows about the Oconee Bell? Probably very few, outside the botany field, and maybe not many botanists. They may know it as Shortia galacifolia, the scientific name. Obviously, Oconee Bell is easier for those who may have a reason to talk about it. It’s a rare, delicate flowering plant found only in a stretch of mountain forest in northwestern South Carolina and environs nearby.

We were introduced to the Bell, or Shortia, at a picnic put on by the Foothills Trail Conservancy, a bunch of city and small-town folks who love wild country more than meetings. It’s a taciturn group; we gathered they don’t get together much outside this once-a-year picnic. We met at Gorges State Park, just north of the state line, in spooky, near-impenetrable forest.

The massive park, 7,500 acres, is hidden high on the Blue Ridge Escarpment, the rugged stretch of country between the gentle piedmont farther east and the soaring western North Carolina peaks that merge with the Great Smokies. This is magical country, crisscrossed by rushing whitewater streams and waterfalls, rich with wildlife and countless species of unique flora, where the pure forest mountain air creates its own unique weather patterns.

S.C. 11 follows an arc across the top of the state onto the Escarpment and into North Carolina’s vast Nantahala National Forest, at 531,000 acres the largest of the state’s four national forests. Route 11 meets U.S. 130 maybe a dozen miles east of the gorgeous Chattooga River, a National Scenic River that forms the Georgia-S.C. state line. The highway, dotted with a few homesteads, then steadily gains altitude as it winds north through the backcountry. In 12 miles it crosses into North Carolina and becomes N.C. 281. Within a half-mile of the border it rims huge, deep-blue Lake Jocassee and passes spectacular Whitewater Falls, the highest waterfall east of the Mississippi.

The forest thickens along 281 as it rises into a sort of paved-road switchback open to vistas of green peaks stretching east. The Gorges gate is eight miles past Whitewater. The park road then cuts through woods for a couple more miles and you’re there.

Most of the Conservancy guys and gals are getting up there in years, although some younger ones showed up. They came from all over to this corner of the country, the pointed end of the South Carolina pie slice. Around there, state lines seem non-existent or at least invisible. Northwestern South Carolina, northeastern Georgia, and southwestern North Carolina, to those who know the territory, form one massive, rocky green world, crossed mainly by narrow, rocky trails and clear, fast-moving streams. 

Botanical research is one of many professions I know nothing about, and one I have never made any effort to learn. But as we sat after lunch, Kay Wade, a naturalist and co-founder of Jocassee Wild Outdoor Education stepped up. Her “Story of the Oconee Bells” introduced us to the explorations of Frenchman Andre Michaux and Scotsman John Fraser, late-18th century botanists who tramped the eastern wilderness of North America seeking unique species. They discovered the Bells in these parts. Michaux sent specimens back to nurseries in Paris.

In 1839 American botanist Asa Gray found the plants at the Jardin des Plantes in Paris and named it Shortia galacifolia in honor of a friend, Dr. Charles Short. For decades he hunted for it around North Carolina with no luck.

Kay presented a deep dive in botanical history. In 1877 a man named George Hyams found the plant near the Catawba River in North Carolina. His father, a botanist, got word to Gray, who in 1879 was able to see it himself. In 1888 another botanist, Charles Sargent, found the Bell in the wilderness bounded by the Horsepasture and Toxaway Rivers, where Michaux had discovered it. In 1973 part of the area was flooded to create Lake Jocassee.

Kay filled us in about flower, its coloring, leaf structure, where it’s found, in two species, northern and southern, even giving us the lowdown on the moist soil it likes. As it happens, we missed the blooming season, March through early April, which occurs in a narrow quadrant between Routes 11 and 178 in South Carolina and U.S. 64 in North Carolina. I learned there’s an Oconee Bell Nature Walk at Devil’s Fork State Park. But wait ‘til next year to see them.

She recognized her talk was a tad heavy on history and science, and with a smile wrapped it up in 30 minutes. A few folks, not including me, asked polite questions. She noted that Asa Gray is considered the “father of American botany.” I didn’t know that. For her, we could all tell, the story is a personal labor of love.

I’ve never been much on the details of what’s growing out there in the woods. Most likely I’ve passed Bells on trail treks, but never noticed them, never picked them out among the rich variety of the delicate and rough natural beauty in the places I’ve wandered through.

We came away touched somehow by this gentle dose of education we had not pursued. Nature here is mainly the still, dense forest in its rich shades of green and the multi-colored diversity of these specimens. Oconee Bells and every other living thing create grace that reaches out to us, like God’s mercy. In a stunning, fortuitous way they offer a measure of beauty and serenity that sustains us while, an ocean and a continent away, we confront man-made darkness.

April 25, 2022

A bright-eyed young woman wearing a baseball cap walked up our driveway. We met her on our way out, thinking she was a new neighbor, and said hello. She carried a tablet-type computer. She said she was offering AT&T’s internet service provided by superfast fiber optic lines. I nodded impatiently and said we’re leaving to run an errand. She said she’d stop by later.

I thought door-to-door was for survey takers, political campaign workers, and occasionally guys selling firewood or yard-care services. High-school kids raising money for a club or team go door-to-door. Many years ago we bought a set of encyclopedias from a young guy who came knocking. They’ve long since gone to recycling.

Some of us remember a bygone era when door-to-door was more acceptable. Suburban and rural residents, and in midday that usually meant women, were more willing to listen to product pitches from strangers. Well-dressed women sold beauty products door-to-door. Men in loud suits sold, or tried to sell vacuum cleaners, life insurance, and medical products, including patent medicines of dubious quality. Fast forward a few decades: schoolkids sold magazine subscriptions. Boy Scouts sold grass seed and fertilizer, Girl Scouts sold cookies, usually in pairs or with a parent. We haven’t had any Scouts come knocking recently.

These days most homeowners don’t welcome door-to-door salespeople. We’re sensitive, maybe hypersensitive, to the risk of shady characters casing the neighborhood. Some people don’t even answer ringing doorbells or knocks. You now can feed your paranoia by buying technology gimmicks to surveil your front yard and allow you to see who’s loitering outside. Some devices can snap photos, upload them to the internet, and call the police.

I’m not much for sales pitches. I’ll open the door, but quickly send strangers with clipboards on their way. We’re skeptical consumers in general; we’ve never bitten on invitations to free dinners with investment-advice firms or offers of weekend stays at retirement communities. The overly friendly invitations that come in the mail are easy to recognize. At restaurants, I’ll almost never order the special if the server pushes it too enthusiastically.   

The AT&T girl was a few doors away when we got back. We had not said “no” earlier. She approached again. In a grumpier mood I would have brushed by her into the house. But we lingered. Our internet seemed OK to me, although sometimes it ran slowly. Sandy mentioned we’re on the cheap introductory rate plan. “That’ll go up by $30.00 when the introductory rate expires,” the girl said. “That’s why it’s called an introductory rate.” I couldn’t argue with her. And I had not paid much attention. Researching internet services is an acquired, not a natural skill.

I know one thing about participation in the age of digital technology: the rates the customer service people quote never quite capture everything that later appears on the bill. You sign up, then you discover the costs: federal, and usually state and local taxes, then fees for maintenance, equipment rental, and insurance, and the surcharges for this or that. Who tries to figure it out? We look blankly at the bill, grumble a bit, and pay it.  

We invited her in. We sat, she introduced herself—Serena. She asked for my cellphone, opened the internet, and typed “speed test.” She stared at the phone, then looked at us. “Very slow,” she said. “That’s because you’re sharing a segment of the network with your neighbors.” That is, it turns out, the 200 megabits per second speed we thought we were getting, whatever that means, is the speed of a wider network, not our personal internet connection. We don’t have a personal internet connection. It’s more like the “party” telephone line my Aunt Irene, who long ago actually worked for the phone company, shared with her neighbors.

I didn’t know about the party internet connection.

We listened to her pitch. She was quick and sharp, with ready technical answers to my unfocused questions, which usually had to do with cost. She said her service would be higher, but less than the rate the current provider would stick us with very shortly. And AT&T is no fly-by-night operation. Decades ago my dad, a tech guy, worked for New York Bell, one of AT&T’s ancestors.

Serena saw she was making an impression with us and relaxed a bit. So did we. She stayed more than an hour, in the end we signed up to make the change. She fired off a flurry of emails and text messages locking in the sale. It was late afternoon. I was tired of the internet hookup talk, but the story seemed larger.

I wondered: is door-to-door coming back? Why was a huge tech company deploying salespeople to pound the pavement ringing and knocking, getting far more “Nos!” than “Yeses?” She said the company is trying a new strategy: reaching out to potential customers directly, face-to-face instead of relying on time-worn mass-market advertising, like TV and internet pitches. Knocking on doors seemed an odd throwback to another time. It worked with us. It turned out that Serena also had landed our next-door neighbors, on both sides.

She told us she lived in a small town 50 miles away and had just finished high school. Her route to her sales territory was a traffic-choked commuter highway, meaning a solid two hours each way. She lived with her mom, siblings, and a cat. She said she and her sister planned to move into the city soon. Meanwhile, AT&T was an opportunity, salary plus commissions. And there wasn’t much to do in her hometown. I thought, well, she isn’t pounding a cash register.

Business in this midsized city is booming, you see “now hiring” signs everywhere. Fast-food joints, grocery stores, and auto-body shops are looking for people. But so are the “career” industries: machine shops, auto-parts manufacturing, electronics components, engineering support. What are bright young people in small towns in Middle America doing? I’ve met enough to know: they’re leaving, heading for cities, looking for opportunity to move on, to make a mark.

The data tell us that unemployment is down, wages are up. Still, some things aren’t getting better. Rural and small-town America, especially the places stuck in the mountains, away from the coasts and the interstates, are hurting, as they have for decades. No one has answers for them. Some people want more than retail, more out of life. Maybe AT&T is on to something. Serena probably won’t make a career of door-to-door. But right now, it’s working.

April 17, 2022

Holy Week arrived along with war crimes. The evil of the event on Calvary is matched today, right now, in Ukraine. We have seen it again and again, in Vietnam, Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia, the Sudan, North Korea, Afghanistan. It is happening elsewhere, without headlines. The ending in Ukraine is unknown, but we understand it will change the world forever. It will happen again somewhere else. That also is the legacy of Calvary. Even now, at Easter, we struggle to grasp its meaning. Meanwhile, we are seeking grace.

We find it by acting. We drove to the boondocks past the rich green pastures and planted fields through outlying forestland. The quiet open spaces of the northwest corner of South Carolina unfold along rural roads unused to traffic other than tractors and pickups.

We turned onto U.S. 11, which skirts the boundaries of Georgia and North Carolina, passing the sheer rock faces of Table Rock and Pinnacle. The highway bisects the northern one-third of the state, separating the mountains from the piedmont. It vectors southwest past Walhalla then ends abruptly, the asphalt petering out just across I-85 at Lake Hartwell.

The lush scenery has a calming effect. This place is full of history pocked with tragedy: slavery, white-on-black violence, endemic “states rights” politics, and the legacy of all of that.   

Neighbors are out seeding, mowing, and so on. And most folks face the responsibility of earning a living, which usually comes before road trips and yardwork. Work, along with seeing new places or sprucing up the presentation of the house, apartment, flower plot, somehow can move us forward. Then too, some are working for the good of others, those who have less. The need, which is a mission, in fact, a crusade, is always present.

The point is attention paid to concrete achievements. We approach these things as the needs and exigencies of our lives. They help us confront the spasms of evil we see now, the war crimes and the rest, including the fundamentalist “end times” pronouncements that periodically emerge from dark corners to assign guilt to all of mankind. The attack on civilization in the assault on Ukraine is fully rational in its brutality, not a parable or an echo of an Old Testament allegory.

The Easter miracle meanwhile is the abundance of grace, which is no more and no less than the conquest of fear. The enduring lesson of the Gospels, the reason they were written and the reason they have been preached for two millennia is their promise of victory over the pervasive reality of fear: that is, the condition of human existence untouched by truth, the nearness of salvation and redemption.

That message may sustain us through the ordeal of reading the headlines and trying to think ahead. We’re looking at trips to Nashville around Memorial Day, then New Hampshire and Wyoming in June. In Music City we’ll drive by the house we owned in the cute Vanderbilt neighborhood until 1986, when we packed up three little kids (the fourth had not yet arrived) and moved to Jersey. It’s been five years since we visited. I think about ringing the doorbell and asking if I can get a look at how the place has changed. We sometimes wonder what life would have been like if we hadn’t cut and run.

New Hampshire is the big college reunion. The Wyoming trip is the Bighorn trail run. We’ll see family and old friends, maybe make some new ones. The plan now is to drive, visit new places, see some things we haven’t seen.  

The point of all this is to move on, taking with us the Easter reinforcement of hope. We talked about the trips and went back and forth on whether to commit to them, or instead sit home and watch the grass grow, as the saying goes. Things could still fall apart. Covid is back as Omicron BA.2.

Carrying on, marching forward in hope. It’s what we see in those heartbreaking, sacred funerals in the ravaged cities, of the fallen Ukrainian soldiers, the elderly, the women and children. Family members hold each other as the priest leads them in prayer and says a blessing. They pray for their loved ones and for each other, for their country in its struggle against evil. They pray in hope, for victory for their country. We join them in sadness and hope, for their salvation, and ours.