January 20, 2020

I dialed Sandy’s cell number. She answered.

“I’m done,” I said. “I got lost.”

“You’re kidding.”

As we stumbled further into winter, I started the week getting turned around—check that, lost—in  the 14-mile-long network of mountain bike trails at Fountainhead Regional Park in Fairfax. I ran out on an old horse trail, one I’ve taken many times. On the return I detoured onto a barely visible stretch of trail into unfamiliar woods. I guessed I was entering the northernmost leg of the network, marked Green, not the lower Black or Blue sections, which extend crooked fingers of trails down to the Occoquan Reservoir.

I followed a trail I’d never set foot on, then turned onto another, then another, under thick cloud cover that promised rain. Two hours passed as I ran, then walked, then ran, enjoying the adventure, until I realized I was totally baffled by my surroundings.

I saw no one. It was a weekday, after all. Along yet another branch, three husky white-tail deer leaped ahead of me and crashed through the underbrush. At one point a large red fox ran by. Otherwise, just bird calls and squirrels. The wildlife and I were deep in nature, their element, not mine. Peaceful, if you look at it that way, which is supposed to be the point of venturing out there. Silence, meaning calm, tranquility, respite, which we seek, and treasure when we find it.

I saw the deep-green reservoir ahead and to my left, meaning east—or maybe south. The reservoir branches in short inlets between peninsulas on all sides, so I could be facing either direction. The trail curled around sharp turns into thick woods then back to clear stretches near the water. Through the trees the reservoir grew wider, on the far side I could see a large house, which enjoys a water view. I noticed red blazes occasionally on the trees, but no escape route.

This was Fairfax, Virginia, not some mountain wilderness. I knew I’d walk out, embarrassed. But time was passing. I had said I’d be gone a couple of hours. It had taken 90 minutes to complete the first part of the course, before I entered the network. I could see no clearing along the horizon, just treetops massed in every direction, winter gray and bare of foliage. The dead leaves of last summer covered the trails.

The red blazes pulled me around another peninsula, where I quit the trail, grinding my teeth. I skied through the mud down a steep embankment to the water, then hiked overland along the reservoir. The Fountainhead crew dock was visible in the distance, but across another impassable bay. I reclimbed the embankment and reentered the trail, which led to another bypass. In another half-mile I found the spur that would take me to the parking lot.

I had run in circles in the center of a regional forest park, in a maze of trails engineered to be easily navigable, through uniform deciduous woods, with only the meandering reservoir as a vector. I could have been out there even longer. Number one lesson: know where you’re going. I was lucky, the weather was mild, the rain held off.

So this minor-league crisis ended. I wasted time wondering why it happened, where I went wrong, etc., etc. Careless sums it up.

As a counterweight to my self-absorption, Sandy drove the next day with two friends out I-66 and I-81 to Mount Jackson in rural western Virginia to visit a fourth friend, a woman married just a year, now bedridden with a debilitating illness. The friend’s face lit up when she saw them coming, Sandy said.

The three friends knew the woman from their local church choir. At some point she and her fiancé moved the nearly 150 miles out to Mount Jackson, a pretty but remote place just west of the Massanutten Mountains and about halfway between Front Royal and Harrisonburg. We attended their wedding there, in a small Methodist church. A dozen folks from the choir made the trip and sang at the service.

Sandy has visited her a few times since the wedding, usually when I was running trails in the mountains. She’d drop me off at the event start, pick me up in the evening. But since I’ve been laid off that for a while, she has missed those trips.

A small rural community is a hard place for complicated health problems. No specialists practice in Mount Jackson, seeing one means long drives to Front Royal or Harrisonburg. My impression of the place, on one visit: isolation. But what I think doesn’t matter. Sandy’s mission was one of friendship, and hope.

She calls the woman regularly to ask about her health, but more than that, her feelings about her life. She knows how to be a friend.

That evening we drove to Springfield. Bishop Michael Burbidge came to a parish there to make his annual pitch for his Bishop’s Lenten Appeal. A year ago, at the same event (this blog, Feb. 4, 2019) he said a quick prayer for success of my chemo-rad treatment. He was then getting through prostate cancer therapy. We’re both apparently okay now. Sandy mentioned she’s doing well after her stroke last July, taking her meds. The Lord must have heard all those prayers.

The bishop then spoke with passion, as he does, about people in his diocese afflicted by poverty and hopelessness Those folks are hidden, some in the mountain hamlets along I-81, but also in the affluent suburbs around D.C. Drive past wooded lots along the main thoroughfares in Prince William County and look out the window. Through the trees you will see their tents.

Sandy notices them. She’s at ease in our short conversation with the Bishop, and he listens. His BLA does much good, but we know it’s not likely the food donations reach the tent people. The work is huge and enduring. It calls for good people to “go out” of themselves, to recognize the mission. I want to say I keep learning, or at least trying to learn. Between Sandy and me—who had a good day, and a good week–I finished third.

January 13, 2020

The New Year arrived with cold and darkness but, for us, also with new ideas about getting out of town permanently. Leaving appears as the Next Step, perhaps the final one.

For some folks, regardless of age, the dream of a life of order and peace, a life that is settled and hopeful, blends with thoughts of moving someplace else. Younger people relocate, some for better jobs, others to change scenery in hope that the new scenery leaves out old problems.

Many older people look forward to moving, usually to a warm place. It may be because their current home or hometown doesn’t hold them in some emotional or spiritual way. Changing addresses may promise some form of peace or truth now lacking. Or they may simply want to be closer to grandchildren.

Some are weary of the world. They may hope to escape the human comedy around them, from lying politicians to nosy neighbors to robocalls. But Shangri-la doesn’t exist.

It’s been no different for us. The idea of moving has been in the air since I quit working, and especially since our kids scattered across the country.  So our eldest daughter, Laura, who’s staying with us for a while, convened a meeting of the three of us in the living room to talk pros and cons about our future dream home, and where we’ll find it.

We’ve been through this before. Readers of this blog also have been put through it. It’s the play that’s always in Act I.

Sandy throws herself into it. For her it’s a newer house with two or three bedrooms, one level, i.e., no stairs; hardwood floors, gas heat, a wraparound porch. Also: a walkable neighborhood, close to stores, parks, a church. Finally, no more than 90 minutes to an airport. I guess that’s an airport served by major airlines, as opposed to a dirt strip.

I have a little fun with it. I say that except for the one level and the wraparound porch, we hit all those markers by staying here in Woodbridge, Va. But that’s not in the program. She points out that some people call this place “Hoodbridge.” As I listen, I can’t help thinking of those retirement trade shows we’ve attended, and the endless do-loop of sales pitches for sunny beaches, walking trails, and golf (this blog, March 4, 2019).

On the “con” side, she ruled out Upper Midwest, New England, “tornado alley,” wall heat, a big yard, a homeowners association, cold, and scorpions. I’m sure that’s still an incomplete list.

In what they suspect is a diversion, I point out that first we have to sort through the junk we’ve stockpiled here over the years, which we didn’t consider junk when we acquired it. That includes piles of the kids’ stuff, tucked away in closets and crawl spaces.

So we go through this drill. As with anyone else, our preferences are based on personal experience and prejudices. I grew up in New Jersey. Who wants to move there? People are fleeing the Garden State, New York, and Connecticut before they’re taxed to death. My younger brother moved from Jersey to Delaware, a tax haven. Delaware just doesn’t grab me.

Pennsylvania, where our son and daughter-in-law live, is a fascinating state, full of smart people, rich history, and beautiful places. I finished my one 100-mile ultra-run in Titusville, way up near Erie a few years back. Great trip. But winters, and even autumns, are pretty darn cold there.

Our youngest daughter lives in Colorado ski country. We’ve been to Montana, which is spectacular, but only in summer. Rocky Mountain winter weather is a big negative. I’d like to explore the Southwest. But a Maryland friend with family in New Mexico said that state taxes make New Mexico more expensive than Maryland. I want to see more of Texas, but it’s had its share of violent weather lately.  California and the Pacific Northwest are gorgeous, but too expensive, too remote.

Our second daughter Marie and her family are in the Greenville, S.C., area. So the inclination for the moment is a mid-size city in the Southeast, but not too Southeast. We’d steer clear of the rural Deep South, ruling out Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana. Northern Georgia, with its rugged mountains, could be OK, I wouldn’t go near Atlanta or the mint-julip South. We have friends and family in Florida. I like the warm weather, don’t like the flatness and the bugs.

I keep reminding myself, as Thomas Wolfe wrote in his lyrical way, “you can’t go home again.” Years ago we assumed we’d go back to Nashville, which was a friendly, comfortable place when we left in the mid-eighties. It’s now congested and expensive. Still, the great storyteller Peter Taylor’s In the Tennessee Country makes me think about the Volunteer State. Sandy has family near Chattanooga. Her hometown is in Franklin County, below the beautiful Cumberland Plateau and near the respected University of the South. But we’d quickly run out of things to do there.

The list probably is endless. Last week Marie called and said someone told her that Floyd, Va., southeast of Roanoke, is a nice place. So is Canton, N.C., west of Ashville, which I toured by looking it up on the internet. Not mid-size cities. But local boosters say they offer interesting history, modest home prices, mountain vistas, and Fourth of July celebrations.

We come back to the same place. We have a bunch of fix-up projects to take care of here. Other things get in the way and the time melts away.

Among the things that get in the way: the comfortable sameness of the place we’ve lived in for so long. Moving, even to some paradise on earth, means saying goodbye to the same old neighborhood with the same old neighbors, some of them eccentric, not all of them friendly—the same church, the same parks, the same weather—none of that fabulous, but familiar. And the house we’ve slept in all these years, and the memories that haunt it, of kids growing up—the swim meets, soccer games, science projects, Brownie and Cub Scout meetings, grandma visits—all those things that cling to this place.

So the chore is to convince ourselves that the next stop on the way to meet our Maker has got more to offer than here, in the way of all those frills we talk about endlessly. Once we do that, we’ll move on, to become strangers again in a strange place. With no tornadoes or scorpions.

January 6, 2020

The Holy Family parish food pantry, where I pulled many shifts until 18 or 19 months ago, looked much like it did last week as when I left. The canned stuff—vegetables, soups, fruit, tuna, and oddball meat products like spam—are on the same shelves. Same with the breakfast cereals, the Corn Flakes, Rice Krispies, and so on.  The pasta, Mac ‘n Cheese, Hamburger Helper, and instant potatoes are where I remember them.

The rickety old computer still spits out the roster of clients with phone numbers and addresses, hundreds of them. The list of items included in the food packages—two cans of soup, three canned vegetables, one box of pasta, one sleeve of crackers, a bag or box of rice, and the rest—hasn’t changed.

Several of the volunteers I became friends with still work there, others have left, a few new people have signed on. The pantry has a new director, a volunteer like the workers. He stepped up after the previous director, Ana, an employee who had been there nine years, was let go by the new pastor to cut costs.

Ana put her soul into running the place. She kept the books, stacked shelves, greeted clients, made appointments, counseled desperate people, inspired the staff with her golden heart. She worked like an executive but lived the message of Christ. She was paid an hourly wage with no benefits. First her hours were cut. Then, just before I left, her job was eliminated. The social ministry director, Maddie, who made a vocation of reaching out to support troubled persons and families, also lost her job.

When they left the word was that the pastor planned to shut the place down for security reasons because it’s next to the church school, although inaccessible from the school. I wrote a letter, signed by most of the volunteers, pointing out that the pantry served the county’s poorest people and the food is all donated—that is, free. He backed off on the shutdown, but insisted that clients couldn’t come during school hours, meaning volunteers would have to stay into the evening and work Saturdays.

It was my time to leave, as doctors’ appointments were stacking up. Last Monday I went back. I was happy to see Pat and Marge and Debbie, who had stuck with the place through a hard year. They still were answering calls and making appointments, stacking the donated food, greeting the clients warmly. They wait for latecomers and walk-ins, and smile at those who rifle through the food packages, and those who demand more.

The pantry is besieged with calls, often in Spanish. In this national boomtime for business and 3.5 percent unemployment, the need never relents. People still call every church and social service agency in the county seeking assistance. They are of every race and ethnic group: young couples with small children, middle-aged folks, and seniors, many worn down by hard lives. Some are in the U.S. illegally. They’re out of work or work low-paying, backbreaking jobs. They’re being evicted and have no rent money. They’re overdue on utility bills, the power or water is being shut off. They have to see a doctor because of diabetes, hypertension, heart disease—the illnesses of the chronically unhealthy—but have no insurance. Their children are sick.

That afternoon, my first day back, we had five appointments. We sorted through the produce, throwing away the spoiled fruit and vegetables. This Christmas, a company donated dozens of frozen turkeys. Someone else donated gift cards. A local organic grocery sent their usual shipment of “natural” yogurts and beverages.

After 4 PM the clients started showing up. The first two are couples with young kids. They’ve been here before, they know the routine: show an ID, fill out a form that requires a local address, take a chit that shows the next date they’re eligible to return—they can come once per month.

They’re smiling and grateful, happy to get the frozen turkey.

There’s an informal system—one volunteer greets the clients and checks their name on the computer against the name on the completed form. Someone else hauls out the grocery package from the dozen already assembled. We pack loaves of bread, the fresh veggies and fruit we can spare, meat products if available. Parents with young kids get milk if we have it. First-timers get a few extra items. I load the half-dozen sacks in a shopping cart and walk with them to their car, which typically is beat-up and strewn with the flotsam of hectic, disorganized lives. I load the stuff while they buckle up the kids.

We get a woman who says her whole family is on strict diets and doesn’t need bread or cereal, but will take extra beef and chicken. I unload the unwanted items from her package.

I put together a couple of new packages. The doorbell rings and we go through the routine again. This time it’s an eccentric older guy who wants no meat, just lots of bread, cookies, cakes, even those “Little Debbie” snacks that kids eat. He hangs around when we’re finished loading the shopping cart, hinting he’d like more. We nod and say see you next time.

One or two more, then we’re done. Everyone says thank you and God bless, happy new year. I watch them putter off in their unreliable-looking vehicles, wondering what kind of a year they’ll have. But they’ll have a few good meals, thanks to the folks who keep us stocked. The food is okay. Some of it, the non-perishables, are high in sodium. We have to watch the expiration dates. But it all goes. And the clients will be back. Always.

December 30, 2019

We arrived home from our South Carolina week numbed by the impact on our brains of all that interstate-staring. Like nearly everyone else, we now stare at the start of 2020, unprepared.

We’re still looking back. We listened to the usual, and always helpful, family suggestions about decluttering and then relocating. We talk about it all the time, wrestle with it, but so far haven’t done anything, even while friends a decade younger plan their moves. Maybe that’s because the past still is with us, not just our Year of Sickness, but the years long gone, when the kids were growing up, when our parents still were with us. Memories draw us back into the past, where our kids think we live comfortably.

It’s true, the coming year is a blank but for a few ideas, some hopeful, others whimsical, and our preemptive strategy for not thinking about the election that everyone already is thinking about and already angry about.

We, or anyone, can try to avoid the anger by dreaming. One thought is a family summer trip to the Shenandoahs. We’d rent a house, the kids would come for a week or a few days. Alternatively, the same type of thing at the beach. We haven’t sold either idea, they wonder what the mountains offer besides hiking. Meanwhile we’ve resurrected our old plan to drive to Florida to see friends and cousins. Then, or before then, I want to get back to New England, maybe Long Island again. Sandy wants to visit our youngest daughter, Kathleen, in Colorado, and see what we should see out there.

We indulge ourselves like this. Medical stuff may get in the way. Short story: everything depends on other things.

The real world rushes back. The country is in a hard place, consumed with hard feelings. In recent days the Post reported the sad story of a farm family in upstate New York made desperate by the drop in milk prices caused by Trump trade-war tariffs. The parents scramble, embarrassed, for groceries at food pantries, apply for food stamps, and ration meals for their young children, while repeating the Trump mantra: “It’s gonna hurt for a while.” Meanwhile, neighboring farms already have been sold or abandoned.

You find plenty of sources for what’s going on in America, one being the Labor Department’s employment statistics: 266,000 new non-farm jobs in November. A December rally puts stock equities indexes close to a two-decade high. CNBC reports that “36 percent of millionaires support Trump, up from 32 percent in May.” (It then adds, though, that head-to-head he would lose millionaires to Biden.)

The report about the millionaires is strange, but probably true.

Then you can drive through small towns nearly anywhere, southern Virginia or East Tennessee being good places to start, and pass boarded-up stores, abandoned factories, mines, and gas stations; shut-down hospitals, clinics, nursing homes. In these places people drive for hours to line up for free medical care; survive on public assistance; maybe work part-time in retail and fast food.

Sure, these anecdotes are cherry-picked. But the folks working shifts at the 7-11s and Walmarts probably aren’t impressed by the December rally.

The anger isn’t only about bank accounts.  It allows no compromises, it is raw and deep and lacerates the souls of men and women, whether affluent or in poverty, who see no answers in the nation’s political life.

The antidote, if we seek one, is truth, learned through reason, and faith.

That is to say: truth is what exists around us, a lesson taught by Aristotle in those long-ago B.C. years. He explains that we recognize the truth of the physical world, its fundamental nature, through reason, a razor-sharp weapon that demolishes the pernicious notion that we can, all of us, have our own personal truth.

Aristotle’s triumph, handed down by wise men through the centuries, became the bedrock for hard-won traditions and values, personal and political. Over time and even today, those traditions and values have been distorted and manipulated by totalitarians, candidates for public office, and their helpers.

The pontificating above, in the bared teeth of national anger fed by Fox and MSNBC, won’t help much. But to dive deep beyond the power of reason, to again paraphrase Aristotle—we discover another, more sublime truth, revealed by faith. If we accept it, faith leads us to recognize a higher form of existence beyond the world we see, which we can call God. That simple assent helps us know good and evil, truth and falsehood, justice and injustice, the moral life and its opposite. We then are equipped to confront the seedy domain of politics in peace, free of anger and resentment, prepared to change the country, and change the world.

December 23, 2019

We found no more inexpressively beautiful sound this weekend than The First Noel, played by 82 tuba and euphonium musicians at Tuba Christmas, on Saturday on Main Street in Greenville, S.C.

The First Noel, the Angels did say,                                                                                                        Was to certain poor shepherds in fields where they lay,                                                                  In fields where they lay, keeping their sheep,                                                                                      On a cold winter’s night that was so deep …

Farther down Main Street, a young boy, maybe 14, played carols on his violin, the notes soaring sweetly. I tossed a dollar in the violin case, the first, in a few minutes it was filled with bills. People were in that kind of mood.

Like everyone else at Christmas, we got busy—the planning, shopping, budgeting—all the usual stuff that passes in a blur.  Last weekend I entered the Happy Trails holiday fun run. It’s nominally a 50-kilometer run but I wanted only to show up—the first event I’ve entered in 19 months. I slogged 14 wet, slow miles in the rain and was happy with that. Happy, but dazed.

That same evening members of our local running group, the THuGs, gathered as pirates for our traditional Christmas dinner. We exchanged gifts and shouted toasts. The wives, who didn’t dress as pirates, enjoyed it, or pretended they did. They awarded prizes, all seven of us got something—as we should. Participation has been down this past year. We’re certain that pirate-related events will boost interest.

I set aside my pirate gear and we confronted things a chord or two higher. Tuesday evening we joined the Holy Family food pantry volunteers for dinner. I rejoined the team after more than a year’s sabbatical. It was a happy reunion with the veterans and an occasion to meet new volunteers, who help people who need help, some desperately, a need that keeps growing. Later that night we picked up our daughter Laura in Washington after her exhausting journey from London. Seeing her again after seven months answered our prayers, the prayers of parents who lose sleep wondering what their kids will encounter in foreign places.

On Wednesday we had one medical thing, a neurologist appointment for Sandy. She gave him a positive report and we bolted from his office. The next day we headed for Greer, S.C., for our middle daughter’s and son-in-law’s home, for the third year.

Last year’s trip now seems a decade ago. With me out of surgery then just two weeks, Sandy drove the entire round trip, nearly 1,000 miles. Our other kids also showed up, first time in years. The older grandson, then five, read me stories at bedtime. Still, it was a tough week.

Yet here we are again, at Christmas, seeking the eternal truths of the season. A few days earlier a friend, a Notre Dame alum, sent me a letter from the university president, Father John Jenkins. Instead of flogging the school’s sports teams and asking for money, as with the usual college president email, Father Jenkins said other things:

“In this season of Advent, we reflect upon our blessings and our struggles. We can see God’s Providence working in our lives, just as it did in Mary’s life. And yet we worry, fretting about matters great and small, and making many plans that we hope will guard us from sorrow, suffering, pain, and loss.  … we cannot shield ourselves from these things, they come into our lives unbidden as part of the human condition. … our blessings also come to us unbidden and unearned, gifts from God in the truest sense. … As we gaze upon the manger this Christmas, may the infant Jesus remind us of our vulnerability and dependence on God.”

Here I find myself reading about my own year. Yet as Father Jenkins uses the plural pronoun, I force myself to stop with the “me” and “my” as I look back. I didn’t get through it myself. Sandy, our kids—were, and are there every inch of the way, along with all the physicians, their staffs, siblings, other family, spread out across many states. Others were present for me: friends, the THuGs, those still in the area and others who have moved; the Happy Trails gang, many of whom I haven’t seen in a year or more; the Food Pantry team, parishioners, the monks of St. Anselm Abbey, the lady across the street—got me through the operating rooms, the radiation chamber, the chemo pen.

It felt good to get out on that trail last Saturday, gasping and wheezing aside. I watched the trail stretch out before me, finessing the rocks as best I could, sidestepping the mud for a while, then giving up on that as it rained harder and the trail started flowing.

After four hours I took a tumble, luckily my Santa Claus hat cushioned the blow. I shook my head, clearing the cobwebs. I climbed to my feet. Then I was back in the barn. Old times. Well, not exactly. All those people to remember. All their prayers to treasure—and the infant Jesus in the manger.