August 10, 2020

As we looked for things to do while stranded at home this spring, Sandy found under a pile of papers the kit she had purchased from Ancestry.com, one of the companies that will research your family tree. She stays close in touch with family members in the old hometown, or home county. Family ties are big for her.

She bought the kit two years ago then forgot about it. I guess it doesn’t matter when you get around to researching your dead relatives. Nothing’s going to change for them.

You’ve seen the ads on TV. You send in a saliva sample. In six to eight weeks the company gives you a report on your national origins. You get on the internet, enter family names, and you get more names. You can pursue it further if you’re interested. I guess it’s fun if you find you’re related to the Rockefellers or Mellons or Great Britain’s Windsors. They didn’t show up for Sandy, though. Her report was close to what she expected: English, Irish, and Scottish, but then also an odd dose of Swedish (Who in heck was Sven?).

Some family trees, I’m sure, are fascinating, populated with great saints or sinners, governors, business titans, movie stars. We all come from families who came from all over. Americans trace their ancestry to every continent. I’ve read that some revelations can be awkward, say, if you find your parents aren’t really your parents, or you’re related to the Lindbergh baby kidnapper. Still, somebody’s great-great-great-etc. came over on the Mayflower.

Not mine. I’ve never looked very far back. I think most of my people arrived in the New York City area sometime in the mid- to late-1800s, most likely with the influx of Irish after the potato famine.  They pretty much stayed around there until my parents’ generation. People who grow up in or around New York consider the rest of the country an alien world, another planet. When I was three my parents moved from Manhattan to the New Jersey suburbs. After my father passed, my mother purchased an empty lot in the Bronx so she could own a piece of New York. In the early Sixties an uncle and aunt on my mother’s side shocked everyone when they pulled up stakes after their wedding and moved to California. My uncle is still out there.

The lives of families and how they’re remembered in genealogy don’t tell whole stories, but they hint at them. The lyrical Southern writer Peter Taylor’s In the Tennessee Country tells an evocative, painful story of three generations of a well-off Memphis family paralyzed by conflict over an elderly parent’s decline. Taylor isn’t unique. Libraries have been written about the power of family ties.

Family trees are linked to and actually help create the nation’s history. Sandy’s dad’s ancestors settled in southern middle Tennessee in the early- to mid-nineteenth century, after transiting the Carolinas and the Appalachians with thousands of other Irish-Scotch immigrants. They farmed and worked at small businesses. They built and ran the railroads that transported farm products for export to generate revenue for the Confederacy, and food and supplies for the rebel armies.

Some in Sandy’s family say her great-great-great grandfather on her mom’s side owned slaves. Her maternal grandfather was born in Mississippi, her maternal grandmother in Tennessee. They settled in Franklin County, Tenn., where Sandy’s mother was born in 1928. During the Depression she, like thousands of other rural Southern kids, quit school to pick cotton. Her parents had three other girls and two boys. They moved to California with the boys. The girls stayed in Tennessee and got married. Eventually the grandparents returned, and today are buried in Cowan in Franklin County, Sandy’s hometown.

With most family trees, the branches can get hazy a few generations back. The courthouse where the records are kept burns down, the family members who paid attention to such things die young or move away and sever ties. People go through hard times. Feuds break out, people nurse grudges, sometimes for decades. Couples get divorced, families break up. Children sometimes are abandoned, sometimes run away and disappear. Folks get in trouble with the law, their stories are hushed up. Families, whether poor, middle class, or affluent, experience heartbreak and grief.

We pursue family connections, or some of us do, for a simple reason. We’re getting older. We want our legacy, our place in history, humble though it may be. We know that we, our spouses, friends, contemporaries, are receding into what our grandkids will think of as the past: first the recent past, when memories still are fresh and the photos still sharp then, as time rolls on, the first outlines of history. We will become what our parents and grandparents and those who came before them are to us right now.

I skim through the old family albums of frayed black-and-white photos and smile at the clothing and hairstyles. We browse through our parents’ wedding album and admire the gents in their suits, bright silk ties and fedoras, the women in their long dresses and stylish hats.

Farther back, the photos become grainier; the expressions and poses more serious, more formal, as the subjects thought of picture-taking as, well, a contribution to history. And that is what it was. Today, kids wave around their cellphones taking pictures of restaurant meals and “posting” them to Instagram.

Let’s hope someone is keeping track of the lineages that will help our kids and grandkids, and their kids and grandkids, to place us in the family tree, to connect us to their own lives, their own experiences and histories. And maybe someday they’ll browse through today’s digitized images of us, smiling next to the Christmas tree, on the beach, at Thanksgiving with the family. The youngest will squint at the photos and ask, “Who’s that?” just as we did. We hope they’ll want to know something about us. It was fun to place names with faces. Maybe it will be for those who come after us.

August 3, 2020

Five young guys came by the house last week and relieved us of a sofabed that had sat in the living room for at least 20 years. They tied it precariously to the back of a beat-up pickup truck for a trip up I-95 to Alexandria. We let them have it for free, but I worried about it bouncing out on the interstate. When the driver thanked me he impulsively extended his hand to shake mine. I bumped his elbow. He grinned.

Getting rid of the sofabed is a strange relief.  We also sold our entire dining room set to some antique dealers, the kitchen table and chairs to somebody else, and gave away two small sofas.

We’re not slowing down. The days, hot as blazes this past month, are flying by. On Wednesday I put a second coat of paint on my former office in the basement. We stacked boxes of books and old photos in the toolshed. We’re waiting for a couple more painting estimates. Then the fun begins, as we try to stage the remaining furniture.

We’ll keep giving things away or taking them to the landfill.  You can take anything. Kids find it fun. About a year ago when our daughter and two grandsons were visiting, I proposed we visit a nearby park, with a quick stop at the landfill. I had a vanload of stuff to dump. She wasn’t enthusiastic. But we went.

You wave to the attendant. You back into position to open your trunk just above the bins. The older boy got out with me and helped me pitch the trash. He enjoyed it, we both did.

Looking at the near-empty house has a calming effect. Why is that? It simplifies the logistics of moving, but means also we’ll have to buy more on the destination end, still undetermined. But if it feels so good now, why didn’t we do it years ago?

It’s complicated. Maybe we had other things on our minds, health care, bills, car trips. Maybe we didn’t care. I think we made up things to avoid facing our inertia. Of course the answer is that we were engaged in great and wonderful things: world travel, executive staff meetings, other critical projects of vital importance to humanity!

That’s what I tell Sandy and others. It’s fun to see yourself as important when you’re not.  But moving creates the struggle to—to what? To complete the chores, remembering that’s what they are—chores. Then to keep our focus on the world in all its strangeness, chaos, and tragedy, as we watch the virus casualties soar and meanwhile confront the complicated questions of our lives. After many years I encountered again the English novelist Graham Greene, the on-again/off-again “Catholic” novelist, so he’s called in undergraduate English classes. Apart from his rationalizations about faith as he vectored between fidelity and infidelity, he asks the same question as St. Thomas Aquinas about the significance of human action in forming belief in God and the message of Christ. He probes and then probes more deeply the nature of love, sin, repentance.

Greene came to mind through his work, but also because he’s cited in Eric Larson’s The Splendid and the Vile, which tells the story of Churchill’s first year as prime minister, 1940-41, the year of the Blitz. Greene, who had just published his bestseller, The Power and the Glory, worked as an air-raid warden in Bloomsbury in London’s West End. In his journal he reported on the devastation of the German attacks, writing, after a night raid on April 16, 1941, that “one had ceased to believe in the possibility of surviving the night.”

Greene’s work, in all its tortured moral ambiguity, wrenches our perspective away from chores. Larson, writing history, takes us to darker places. He quotes extensively from the diary of Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels. Goebbels and his wife poisoned their six children as the Soviet army entered Berlin. But we can look still deeper than Goebbels’ evil life and its end.

Goebbels’ wife Magda had a son from a previous marriage, Harald, who served in the German air force, the Luftwaffe. He was captured and sent to a POW camp, then released in 1947. His father, Gunther Quandt, was a captain of industry whose companies used slave labor to produce weapons and other equipment for the German army. After the war he was detained briefly by the allies, but avoided prosecution and rebuilt his businesses. When he died his sons Harald and Herbert inherited his companies. Harald died in a plane crash in 1967. He and his wife had five daughters, who inherited the businesses, including shares of Daimler-Benz and BMW. Their families now are among the wealthiest in Germany.

For years the Quandts refused to discuss the source of the family’s wealth. A German media company produced a documentary, “The Silence of the Quandts” complete with family members’ evasions. You can watch it, with subtitles, on YouTube. After its release the family funded a study of the Quandt businesses that revealed the Nazi connections.

We can back away from that nightmarish story. I wonder how I even got there. From the lessons it teaches, maybe not. I went back to Greene and his unsettling questions as we thought about our reasons for attempting to move during the pandemic, which seems to have no end. We read it’s now spreading north again, abetted by a civil war over masks in southern states and pseudo-mystical medical falsehoods spreading even more quickly.

There’s all that, unfolding before us while we’re packing, donating, and hauling junk to the landfill. Tragedy is playing out before our eyes, but then so is goodness. I get that same vague charge of satisfaction when I dump stuff as when we said goodbye to the sofabed. We are bringing our long-cluttered house to life, doing good things, positive things, in the small world we can control. The place looks almost empty.

Moving has turned us into small thinkers, preoccupied with trivia. I try to recall why I saved some of the things we’re now parting with. Really, it doesn’t matter. We’re walking away, starting a new life someplace quieter, we hope. At this point, quiet is good. We don’t need things. We need the example of those Londoners, who, Graham Greene reports, overcame evil in ‘40-‘41, then the example of those covid-19 victims, right now.

July 27, 2020

Some milestones flash by. You get married, acquire in-laws, have kids, make new friends, change jobs, attend weddings, move to a new town. You’re reminded (someone always knows) of birthdays, anniversaries, graduations, soccer games, swim meets, then deaths and funerals, sometimes after they’ve occurred. If you don’t pay attention, life can be a blur of missed special occasions.

Not this one. One year ago tomorrow Sandy was released from the ICU at Bryn Mawr Hospital in Bryn Mawr, Penn. She spent a week there, starting the day before her birthday. Her birthday present was an MRI, followed the next day by an angiogram—a catheter inserted in her thigh and pushed into an artery in her brain. The diagnosis: an ischemic stroke, in which blood flow to the brain is blocked.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that strokes kill about 140,000 Americans each year. Nearly 800,000 have strokes each year.

She experienced symptoms: numbness in her arm and an optical migraine, on Saturday, July 20. It was the hottest day of 2019 in eastern Pennsylvania. Our daughter-in-law Caroline rushed her to the Bryn Mawr ER. Luckily, the hospital is a stroke specialty center.

The docs said Sandy’s stroke was “minor”; it didn’t seem minor at the time. It affected the left side of her brain, but she didn’t suffer any loss of physical or brain function. Through her ICU week, cardiologists and neurologists debated the right level for her blood pressure. Too high could cause damage to limbs or vital organs, possibly blindness and death (true for anyone with chronically high blood pressure, if untreated). Too low risked inadequate pressure to push blood through her brain’s constricted arteries and veins. I don’t think they flipped a coin, exactly, but the range they agreed on, between 140 and 160 (systolic, or top number) is too high for most people, but strong enough to keep blood flowing to her brain, with moderate risk.

It was a rough week: following the angiogram, two or more blood draws, days and nights, a continuous IV and real-time blood-pressure monitor, an emergency CT scan, summits with a rotating crew of specialists who shared their uncertainty. The problem: how much blood pressure medication would she need to stay in that 140-160 spectrum? They came up with a mix of pills.

Through it all—or most of it–she smiled, or tried to smile. She gritted her teeth during the blood draws, but came up with a grin. She toughed it out.

We picked up her first prescriptions from the closest CVS after discharge. It still was hot as blazes. We stayed with our son and daughter-in-law for a couple of days, extending our total stay from a weekend to twelve days. Then, at home, weekly visits to the family doc for blood-pressure checks and appointments with a cardiologist and a neurologist.

A few quiet weeks passed. We started walking, first up the street, then around the block, then a mile, then two. I covered this in some of my posts of last summer. Sandy’s BP was way up, then down. She went through two or three of those at-home blood-pressure devices, including one with an audio feature. It spoke to her: “Your systolic pressure is … your diastolic pressure is …”

Time crawled by, weeks, then months. She saw the cardiologist and took the stress test and passed. A “B+,” I called it. The neurologist visit was a little creepy, he grilled her about depression and gave her a prescription for anxiety. More pills. But she started feeling better.

She went back to the gym and walked on the treadmill, rode the exercise bike, lifted light weights. She went to weekday Mass. We kept up the walks. She talked to other women who had lived through strokes.

We got back on the road, to a family wedding in Georgia, then, for symmetry, Thanksgiving with our son and daughter-in-law in Pennsylvania. I suggested driving by the hospital, she wasn’t interested. For Christmas we trekked to South Carolina and watched the grandsons open their stuff Christmas morning.

She talked to people at Sentara hospital and a nearby assisted living facility about visiting with recovering stroke patients. The need is real, and urgent. Recovery, even for minor strokes, is slow, difficult, painful.

We managed to get our last “on the road” junket in, to Florida, in March. Then covid-19 hit. The workshops and visitation programs all shut down. We shut ourselves down. Like the rest of the country, we watched the reports: seniors were the first victims, then first responders, then everyone else.

Meanwhile, healing continues. Sandy still is on her meds, 6:00 AM then again at 6:00 PM. That will be every day, forever. She won’t be getting off the stuff, with one exception, the anxiety prescription. One day she simply stopped taking it. The doc was OK with it. I haven’t noticed a difference, probably because anxiety is contagious. She may have passed it to me.

She came with me to my oncologist’s appointment last month. We sat in the waiting room, everyone wearing masks, looking nervous. The doc came in, we talked through our masks. He looked over my scan and said it looked good. Back in four months.

So this week, her anniversary week, we looked back to the stroke birthday, 66—here we were at 67. It was uneventful. The kids called and sent gifts, we went to Mass. Prayers were for the covid victims, for all those suffering.

Later we went to dinner, socially distancing. We looked back two years, when she turned 65, a big deal. I recruited all the kids to show up for a surprise party. I called friends local and long distant, most made it. We ordered food, drinks, the works. The weather cooperated, it was clear and cool out in the yard. It all came together.

This anniversary moves us forward. We’re thinking of all the stroke victims, still in need. You push on, knowing what they’re experiencing, while their doctors and nurses now are in their own danger. Then we remind ourselves: another year is ahead. Prayer and courage gets you through it, to healing, peace, and the next anniversary.

July 20, 2020

As I read about Trump and his White House people savaging Dr. Anthony Fauci, I thought of Vietnam. That is, the vicious war and its spinoffs at home, some of which I lived through and participated in. Then, as now, America suffered.

Last week I watched a “webinar” presented by a history professor at my alma mater, St. Anselm College in Manchester, N.H., entitled “St. Anselm and the Vietnam War.” The presentation focused on 1969-1970, the height of the anti-war movement. The professor referred with academic dispassion to a demonstration in downtown Manchester in fall ’69 and the “love it or leave it” criticism of the demonstrators by the local newspaper editor. He then discussed the explosion of student activism in May 1970, following the killing of four people on May 4 by Ohio National Guardsmen at a demonstration at Kent State University that responded to President Nixon’s “Cambodia incursion.”

In April President Nixon had authorized U.S. and South Vietnamese forces to attack sanctuaries in neutral Cambodia used by Viet Cong guerrillas and units of the North Vietnamese Army (the People’s Army of Vietnam, or PAVN). The operation abruptly expanded the scope of the Southeast Asian war. Historians believe the action, (opposed by Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird) incited further popular support for the communist Khmer Rouge, which was fighting a civil war against the Cambodian government.

I got a mild kick out of the professor using a digitized image of the front page of our May 15 issue, which featured a story I had written, “Events of Week Lead to Optional Strike.” Those memories rushed back: two weeks of angry exchanges among students, faculty, and administrators, dozens of tense interviews, sleepless nights of writing, rewriting, copyediting, page pasteup (no desktop publishing in 1970).

Just before the Kent State killings, Connie Buckley and I, both juniors, had taken over as editors of the college newspaper. I recall we wondered what in heck to put in our first issue to get our fellow students to pick it up and read it. Suddenly the nation blew up before our eyes. Instead of announcing spring sports scores and exam schedules, we found ourselves reporting on national tragedy, as colleges and universities shut down in a strike against the war, against Nixon, against the military. Those who were there remember: the nation’s most prestigious schools shut down by angry, agonized protests that at times descended into violence.

We already were on the front lines. In mid-November 1969 Buck and I hitchhiked from New Hampshire to Washington for the Vietnam War Moratorium march organized by the “New Mobe,” along with 250,000 others. On a cold gray Friday we marched past the White House, each wearing a sign bearing the name of a soldier who had died in the war. We shouted the names. Buses had been parked along Pennsylvania Avenue to keep the marchers at a distance. Weeks later, in a story for the paper, I wrote, “for a few moments it seemed we became the dead G.I.s whose names we wore, saying, ‘What about me?’”

At the time and for a while afterward we savored the sense of being “involved,” of doing something meaningful and important. Yet while in D.C. I watched marchers carrying Viet Cong flags smash windows along the route. This is not for me, I thought. And as we watched over the next six months, despite the sincerity of millions of Americans who opposed the war, the movement was coopted by political extremists, including some very violent people.

We both wrote editorials for that May 15 issue. Although many students expected us to endorse a school shutdown (some hoping to get out of taking exams), we went the other way, opposing the shutdown. And we heard about it.

The debate over the impact of the antiwar movement continues and never will end. The war ended because America’s leaders saw finally that it could not be won, whatever that meant. American troops were pulled back and shipped out. Without them, the South Vietnamese army, organized to fight Viet Cong guerrillas and led by corrupt officers, was no match for the regular North Vietnamese army, the PAVN, armed with Soviet-supplied weapons, including tanks and heavy artillery.

In September 1974 President Gerald Ford issued a pardon to Nixon. Suddenly, in April 1975, as Ford watched on the sidelines and America’s ambassador to Vietnam refused to believe what was happening around him, the PAVN was in Saigon. Two weeks earlier the Khmer Rouge had entered Phnom Penh, Cambodia’s capital, and started four years of genocide.

The opposition to the Vietnam war evolved through the late 1960s. It started with horror among ordinary Americans at casualty reports, hundreds of dead soldiers and Marines, week after week. It grew to anger, in voice and strength, under Johnson, then Nixon. The Cambodia incursion prolonged the agony. The antiwar movement descended into nihilism and Nixon was reelected. We are still living with the consequences.

So today, full circle. In 2016 a cadre of Americans, as angry with conventional politicians as their parents were in 1975, managed to elect a pseudo-reality show host as president. For three years we watched, and Senate Republicans watched, as Trump marketed hotels, slandered good people, fawned on dictators, lobbied foreign leaders for political gain, played golf. Then covid-19 attacked. When Americans weren’t sufficiently distracted by the president’s tweets about movie stars, women, and race-car drivers, he needed a bigger target, a teller of truth. That’s Fauci, whose expertise in the science of infectious disease may help us end the pandemic which, with Trump’s connivance, has become a holocaust.

For most Americans Vietnam and the antiwar movement now are a brief few paragraphs in history texts. I recall those casualty figures. I read about the covid-19 deaths, now more than double those of Vietnam and rising. I think of Fauci’s warnings to all of us. Then I think of Trump, and—golf.

July 13, 2020

We’re getting used to the idea of moving to South Carolina. Or trying to get used to it. Our daughter, son-in-law, and two grandsons are there. The rest of our kids fled Virginia years ago. We’re stranded here in a place that the passing of time has made as comfortable as old shoes. Right now, with the virus raging, the timing for a move is a little uncertain. But life here is getting a little weird. See last week’s post.

I like the feel of Virginia. The Old Dominion is one of the three places, along with Boston and Philadelphia, where American history got its start.  We have Mount Vernon, Williamsburg, Jefferson’s Monticello, James Monroe’s Highland, James Madison’s Montpelier. The American Revolution and the Civil War both ended here. South Carolina? Famous for starting the Civil War.

That’s unfair, sure. And, although it’s true, also beside the point. History hasn’t tied us here, it doesn’t tie anyone to anyplace. People who will spend their lives here won’t do it because they’re sharing in the story of their surroundings. Same with the old timers in South Carolina and everywhere else. We all have our cultural inclinations: highly unlikely someone who grew up in Alabama surrounded by friends and family will one day decide to move to Vermont. Other things matter. Folks who don’t like cold look to escape to warm places. Local politics may chase people, though not likely to a distant state. The other things really come down to work, health, family. When those things push us, moving is easy.

What’s hard is looking at the options. Regardless of age, what we’re all looking for, move or not move, is decency, tolerance, a steady state for the balance of our lives. Sandy and I know this transplant to South Carolina is our last best shot.

Right now the virus is dictating the decency of life everywhere. Virginia is battling back, reporting fewer cases and deaths lately, as people wear their masks and take care in public places.  In the Trump/red states, Texas, Florida, Arizona, covid is tearing out of control.

Is state leadership smarter in Virginia? Probably. We have our 10-percenters who always do the wrong thing. Some Yankees see only politics. Talk-show polemicists insist that many southerners risk infection to show they’re loyal Republicans: no masks, no distancing, all-out at the bars and the Trump rallies. They have demolished the quality of life of the places where they live, the argument goes.

Is that so? That’s the easy presumption: that southern and western states opened early because they’re more concerned with business and a tough-guy sort of freedom than protecting health. But that’s wrong, completely wrong. The same thing happened in Michigan, Wisconsin, New York. It happened in L.A., it happened in London. The pool parties, the bar scenes, the unmasked crowds showed up everywhere.

It happened in those places because people want to belong, to be with others like themselves. Just as true in Virginia as everywhere else. Here we paid attention to the experts. In Texas, etc., state and local governments let human nature have its way. Ignoring sound medical guidance was colossally stupid. But they did what people wanted.

The point is about belonging which, let’s face it, includes going out, having a good time, with the bright lights, the music, the good-looking gals and guys. When I was in my twenties Mickey Gilley put a point on it with “The Girls All Get Prettier at Closing Time.” Years later Toby Keith followed with “I Love this Bar and Grill.” Belonging, when you’re young, is about going out, rubbing elbows and shoulders. It’s all a little fantasy, as the music tells it. Nothing about covid-19. You can’t drink wearing a mask. It’s what we do, what we all do—or did.

That’s a digression: “opening up” in Texas, etc., also let infirm seniors toddle off to the buffet and the barbershop.

We’re in a different universe, but not so different. Belonging matters for us, too. But our kids are far away. Our “guest” bedrooms, the beds neatly made, have become silent spaces, cheerfully, lovingly fixed up, but silent. Family can’t just drop in. Their lives are filled with work, chores, bills. Life is complicated. For us, that means life is quiet.

Moving away will be excruciating, like tearing off a bandage. Driving away from here that last day will be like a slap in the head—if we can get to that point. The practical problem is overwhelming. We’re looking back now at 42 years of collecting stuff.  This house became a warehouse. Along with the two never-used bedrooms, we have two others disguised as an office and a storage room. Weeks go by when I don’t visit the far end of the house.

I’ve been probing back there, tentatively. I found a dusty folder labeled “Original Orders” that sent me to Marine Corps Officer Candidate School in August 1971. The orders—surprise—were typed on an actual typewriter, with a carbon copy attached. Then plastic model jet fighters our son Michael and I built when he was in grade school, lined up on top of a bookshelf.

I stumbled on copies of papers I wrote in grad school. Copies of hundreds of my bylined articles from magazines and newspapers back to the late 1970s. One of them, entitled “Music City Not Altman’s Nashville,” appeared in the Nashville Banner (long defunct) in 1975 after I moved to Music City. I have a copy of the Marine Corps Gazette from December 1976, and magazines that ran book reviews I wrote. Another piece ran in The Wall Street Journal in 1986, after we landed in Jersey. Still have a copy.

This is the way it is when you hike up your britches to move. Some of it I’ll keep, some will go to the landfill. Keep sifting, shake the dust off, come up for air. Constantly. This is how we learn about ourselves. We’ll probably replicate these collections at our next house. The truth about us may be buried, but it’s there. It’s home.