November 18, 2019

We had breakfast at Waffle House the other day, the one closest to us, down in Dumfries. I hadn’t been in a while, but had to go after reading the piece in The Washington Post about the Birmingham, Ala., Waffle House where customers jumped the counter to help a lone employee stranded on duty.

It wasn’t my first Waffle House meal. Not by a long shot. The food and service were fine. The music was loud and awful, we asked the waitress to turn it down. She shut it off. Beyond that, I couldn’t hear myself think over the raucous argument of two guys in the booth behind us about an Alabama-Auburn football game.

Most people hereabouts know Waffle House, but no one I know goes there much, if ever. It tends to be a Southern experience. The company says it has 2,100 outlets in 25 states, but most in the South: square, squat buildings with big yellow signs. Waffle House, if you ask most people who have eaten there, is a bit farther down the quality scale from Cracker Barrel or IHOP. It’s not just that the menu is limited: waffles, eggs, hash browns and grits, some sandwich items like burgers and grilled cheese. Maybe it’s the name. Maybe it’s the spare, garish layout of the restaurants, with big round glaring light bulbs and cramped booths.

Some people don’t trust places that operate 24/7. Crime occasionally occurs in Waffle House parking lots, as at other 24-hour places. Early in the morning on April 22, 2018 a mentally disturbed man killed four people and wounded two others with a semi-automatic rifle at a Waffle House in Antioch, Tennessee, near Nashville. By some miracle, a customer jumped the shooter and wrestled the weapon away from him.

I’ve heard, too, that WH employees aren’t always in the best of spirits. They’re short-order cooks, servers, and busboys and girls, paid what you would expect. Conditions aren’t great. The late-night shifts deal with customers wobbling in from bars, who aren’t in great spirits, either. The restaurants are open 365 days a year, which means somebody’s always working on the early mornings after New Year’s Eve, St. Paddy’s Day, and other heavily drunk occasions.

In the Birmingham story, now all over the internet, Ethan Crispo showed up at the Waffle House just after midnight. He found the single employee, a young guy named Ben, stuck with about 30 customers. He reported that several patrons got up and started bussing tables, making coffee, and taking orders. “Humanity is great,” Crispo said. His story and some photos provoked hundreds of comments about the spontaneous kindness shown by the folks who jumped up to help Ben get through his shift. Especially now, some said, when things in the country aren’t so great. Southerners said it showed how nice Alabama folks are. Others choked on that and guessed that they’re all Trump people who wouldn’t have helped Ben if he were black.

Some commenters pointed out that, kindness aside, liability problems could arise with untrained, uncertified people handling food, a customer slipping and falling on the obviously dirty floor, somebody getting food poisoning. The big question: where was management?

The debate ensued, the good-feeling experience versus the potentially serious legal questions. Were the scheduled employees so poorly paid that they didn’t care about missing a shift? Was Ben unwilling to lose his shift pay by closing? Did his manager order him to keep the place open?

The story, and my WH breakfast the other day, brought me back to a treasured but bizarre experience. Almost exactly two years ago I entered the Pinhoti 100-mile trail run through the Talladega National Forest in northeastern Alabama. The race has a 30-hour time limit, which would be a stretch for me. I talked my daughters Laura and Kathleen into serving as my crew.

I started the course fast and got ahead of the early cutoffs, but at some point picked up dirt and grit in my shoe, which broke the skin. I changed socks at the first drop-bag station (27 miles), which cost me 20 minutes. At the 40-mile station Laura and Kathleen patched up my ankle. But shortly afterward I missed a turn in the dark and lost 40 minutes retracing my steps. I missed the cutoff at 55 miles by 15 minutes at 11:30 PM.

Kathleen and Laura met me and we drove to Sylacauga, Ala., the finish point. Since I expected to complete the race, I had no plan B, so we ended up at a Day’s Inn in Childersburg. I was starving, so at 3:00 AM we were sitting in a Waffle House next door. Two employees were on duty, exquisitely polite. We were the only customers. I wolfed down a mountain of scrambled eggs and hash browns. A mournful Emmylou Harris tune played on the radio, a well-armed local cop sat nearby. The girls got impatient, but I sat there a little longer, my eyes closed, sipping rich coffee, munching on my hash browns, on a quiet early Deep South Sunday morning.

I probably appreciated that Waffle House because—as in the Hemingway story—it was a clean, well-lit place, after hours in a dark mountain forest, and I was exhausted and famished. That was my situation then and there. Waffle House, I guess, was just a place I stumbled into.

Same thing, probably, for Mr. Crispo with his experience, and his thoughtful words about the people who helped poor Ben on his shift. He saw humanity, generosity, kindness. The Waffle House was the scene where all that goodness played out that early morning in Birmingham. But people are like that. And we all know it happens at other restaurants, some classier, some dingier. Try Huddle House.

November 11, 2019

Three of our kids are in Europe this week: son Michael and daughter-in-law Caroline are visiting Belgium and daughter Laura is visiting friends and doing free-lance work in the U.K., after spending a couple of months working in Costa Rica.

That’s all good. We’re hoping to see them at Thanksgiving or Christmas. We’ve never been to those places, and would like to travel to some exotic locale. But now we’re at home looking out the living room window at the leaves carpeting the back yard. In past years, like everyone else around here, I would be out there raking and sweeping the leaf-blower around like a fencer wielding an epee. We’d drag heavy bags of leaves to the curb. I’d dump some in a mulch pit at a far corner of the yard, with the idea that by spring they would become rich topsoil for planting things. Then we’d watch as the wind deposited another five or ten million leaves.

Gradually it dawned on me that all that work was pointless. What was left of the grass never did any better exposed to the cold winter sun instead of covered with leaves. And the mulch pit never produced much topsoil. I would push the wheelbarrow up the hill in the spring to harvest it, never got a full load.  I can’t say it ever did any good.

I didn’t start this fall ducking the yardwork, I was excused to get over my operation. Just as well, the yard looks okay covered with leaves, a patchwork of bright yellows, reds, and browns, like the trees themselves before they shed. Sure, our front yard stands out among the neighbors’ as an example of suburban yard-care neglect. Passersby glance at the leaf quilt, then up at the house, disapprovingly. I’m okay with that. Actually it cheers me up.

Still, this weekend’s cold snap and the end of the leaf-collecting frenzy reminds me that we are in the dregs of fall, post-Halloween, pre-Thanksgiving, when it now gets dark earlier and stays dark later, the woods duller and grayer as the leaves disappear, the TV weather people pleased to issue scary forecasts. We’re wearing sweatgear for our walks, and walking faster against the chilling breezes. This is the season when old people feel the pace of time more keenly, in the rush toward the dark end of year.

That could be because lately we botch even happy things: the anticipation of the powerful messages of Thanksgiving and Christmas now is overwhelmed by auto- and furniture-sales advertising and warnings of holiday highway gridlock. You can’t miss all that unless you avoid TV and newspapers, because bad news is what’s news, for example, the next revelation in the Trump impeachment series of revelations, now breaking with blurring speed.

But that isn’t it at all. December, now hurtling towards us, promises cold and darkness, which together hint at the end, out there for all of us, but not so far out for some of us. Still, we’ll look forward to watching the grandsons have fun opening their stuff Christmas morning. Christmas morning passes, in the inexorable passing of those short cold days and long cold nights. Then there’s the fake holiday, New Year’s, which some of us try to enjoy.

The falling of the leaves is a cheap metaphor, sure, but it’s there, impossible to miss if you see metaphysical meaning in things that have none. You get through November and December by living vicariously through the cheerfulness of others, young children and their parents, who stay young for a while through the happiness of their kids. That’s the way it was for us. But then too, God’s eternal lesson for all of us, old folks and everyone else, is the end becoming the beginning. The dark end of the last year begets the start of the next one. The wait seems interminable right now, but we know that winter gives way to spring. Every year. The bleak gray mornings that follow December eventually reveal sunlight a little earlier that lasts a little later in the day, even while the leaves still are piled in the corners of your yard, turning to mulch on their own accord.

That promise of good news seems remote right now, when we’re battered by relentless, soul-devouring commercialism, the empty glibness of political campaigns, cowardice and corruption in the nation’s leadership, and lousy weather.

But we still look forward to gathering at the dark end of the year, maybe traveling exhausting, dangerous miles to join those close to us at Thanksgiving and Christmas. We genuinely are grateful for getting there, and then to make it to church for too-long, too-elaborate services that may only clumsily express the message we are waiting and hoping for. We take the kids, we urge their parents to attend. We oldtimers sit, trying to look forward to the remainder of life, trying to remember to thank the Lord for all we have and all we’ve learned and experienced. And we brace ourselves once again to start over. Then, if we still care, we can hire a teenager to bag the leaves.

October 28, 2019

We took the long way down to Virginia Beach Friday morning, U.S. 17, avoiding the construction gridlock and speed maniacs on I-95 and I-64. We weren’t in any hurry, my young second cousin Kasey’s rehearsal dinner was not until evening. After a wrenching week of medical stuff, including a setback in getting over surgery, I was set on going. It felt good to pull out of the driveway.

We spent a couple of days in Virginia Beach back in April just to get out of town (this blog, April 8). We’ve done the trip dozens of times going back many years, when the kids were little and so was Kasey, who grew up there with her mom, my cousin Kathy. Later, I drove down many times for conferences and to visit the Norfolk Naval Base. I went to sea a few times on Navy ships, once sailing up to New York aboard the cruiser USS Anzio. Great fun.

This time it’s about a happy event, the wedding of an accomplished young couple, the joy due their hard-working parents, and a reunion with family members from New York and Florida. We’ve been mostly far apart for years, preoccupied, like everyone else, with our own lives. So it matters to see them.  But the trip—the travel—also matters. It’s been years since we ditched the interstate because, after all, the purpose of the car trip is to arrive as soon as possible, right?

Not always, not this time. Highway 17, starting in Fredericksburg, takes you on a quiet tour of the austere, nearly flat eastern shard of the state. Sandy is driving. We leave Fredericksburg, heavy with memorials to some of the Civil War’s cruelest engagements, and cruise into the eastern piedmont, the highway nearly empty, bordered by wide expanses of dried-out cornfields and vegetable patches killed off by the lingering drought. The brilliant fall foliage of northern Virginia fades in the temperate, humid piedmont climate. We pass through Port Royal quickly, then reach the hamlet of Tappahannock, overlooking the wide Rappahannock River, which flows down from the Blue Ridge. The high river bank is lined with ostentatious homes that prompt me to wonder what I don’t know about the town.

We stop for a short lunch at Shoney’s in Tappahannock. The restaurant drops hints of the Deep South, which has lots of Shoney’s, although the chain disappeared from northern Virginia decades ago, no doubt for good reason. We hurry on through desolate country, so it seems to me, although that may just be the sickness talking. The scrub woods and sparse truck gardens partly conceal occasional battered farm buildings and goodwill stores but little else. “Where are the schools?” Sandy asks.

We stop for a restroom break at Glenn’s Food Mart. It resembles a thousand other food marts: a few shriveled corn dogs are turning on a rotisserie. A forlorn-looking line of folks are waiting at the register to buy beer and groceries. Five senior citizens are sitting at slot machines. We’re on our way to a wedding and family reunion, but here we’re in a strange world, one we’ve seen before elsewhere, many times on road trips, but one that now, for reasons I don’t grasp, makes me impatient, anxious to move on. It prompts me to recall stories of U.S. 50 in Nevada, called America’s loneliest road. This road is not that lonely, but it’s close.

I take over driving, anticipating the Hampton Bay Bridge Tunnel, which Sandy refuses to attempt. The brown fields and empty warehouses fall behind us as we approach Gloucester, replaced by familiar stripmall sprawl. We cross the broad York River and enter Yorktown, heavy with history. It was at Yorktown that the colonials, with help from the French, outmaneuvered the British and ended the War for Independence. Eighty years later, from March until May 1862, the Peninsula Campaign unfolded between the York and James Rivers. Union General George McClellan sailed down Chesapeake Bay with a huge force to attempt an attack on Richmond from the southeast. He landed south of the York, but the Confederates were ready. The Yanks engaged smaller rebel units in a series of inconclusive engagements, until McClellan pulled back, allowing the rebels to withdraw to defend Richmond.

From Yorktown suddenly we’re on I-64, driving with the maniacs again. I push towards the bay. As we’re about to enter the tunnel a Navy destroyer slides past in the channel above us, heading for the naval base. Rising out of the tunnel you can see the silhouettes of three aircraft carriers tied up at the base, then the busy runways of  Naval Air Station Norfolk. In twenty minutes we’re in Virginia Beach, surrounded by familiar, comforting shlock, the tee-shirt and boogie-board and postcard shops, the bars where happy hour is all day, the Miami Beach wannabe pile of high-rise hotels along Atlantic Avenue. We get out of the van and breathe deeply.

U.S. 17 still looks good for the drive home. The happy occasion of the weekend rouses me from my annoying habit of looking back instead of forward. Seeing family fortifies us for the trip through that peculiar strip of a richly varied state—alien territory, unless we welcome it as an adventure. I’ll get over the dark pettiness. One more time, I remind myself that health complaints can taint the rest of life, if we let them. That’s when we call on faith. Time to bear down, and overcome.

October 21, 2019

Forty-three years. That’s forty-three: General Jim Mattis’s service to the United States as a U.S. Marine. He added nearly two more as Secretary of Defense, resigning in December 2018. His departure followed President Trump’s announcement that he intended to withdraw from Syria a U.S. force that acted as a buffer between Turkey and the Kurdish forces that fought with the U.S. against the terrorist group ISIS.

In his resignation letter Mattis wrote that “Because you have a right to a Secretary of Defense whose views are better aligned with yours … I believe it is right for me to step down.”

Earlier in his letter Mattis wrote that “our strength as a nation is inextricably linked to the strength of our unique and comprehensive systems of alliances and partnerships. … I believe we must be resolute and unambiguous in our approach to those countries whose strategic interests are increasingly in tension with ours. … My views on treating allies with respect and also being clear-eyed about both malign actors and strategic competitors are strongly held and informed by over four decades of immersion in these issues.”

He closed with: “I very much appreciate this opportunity to serve the nation and our men and women in uniform.” At that time Trump backed away from pulling the U.S. force.

As the whole world knows, two weeks ago Trump attempted to appease the president of Turkey by withdrawing the U.S. contingent from Syria, over strong objections from his advisers and Congressional Republicans and Democrats. The House of Representatives, split between impeachment-pushing Democrats and Trump-groupie Republicans, still came together on October 16 to vote 360-60-4 to condemn the Syria pullout. After being reminded by Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer that Mattis had warned that “ISIS would resurge” in the absence of a U.S. force, the president called Mattis “the world’s most overrated general,” adding that “I captured ISIS in one month.”

Trump looks at U.S. Mideast policy and sees not a commitment to stand with allies against aggression by authoritarian regimes and the ravages of extremist factions and terrorists, but a hot campaign issue: a promise to end “endless wars.” Instead, his action of backstabbing the Kurds invites endless war, as Turkey’s powerful military destroys Kurdish towns, the Kurds ally with the bloodthirsty Syrian regime, and ISIS fanatics execute civilians. But his shtick about “endless wars” sounds like a winner among the Trump cult, his so-called “base.” They still show up at those MAGA rallies, and they love those cracks about “fake news” and “do-nothing Democrats.”

What they don’t care about is character, for example, the character of Mattis, who devoted his life to defending America and American allies in bloody places in Afghanistan and Iraq. His mission was leadership and the teaching of leadership in brutal combat environments. He often has been quoted as saying, to Marines in Iraq, that “whenever you show anger or disgust towards civilians, it’s a victory for al-Qaeda and other insurgents,” and “every time you wave at an Iraqi civilian, al-Qaeda rolls over in his grave.”

Character yet again shone through Mattis’s refusal since he left office to join many deeply worried Americans in criticizing the charlatans and amateurs now running U.S. foreign policy.

Instead, he maintained the personal dignity—the bearing—he had honed over those 45 years, offering only that, “If you leave an administration, you owe some silence. When you leave an administration over clear policy differences, you need to give the people who are still there as much opportunity as possible to defend the country.”

Others differ, saying those people have had their chance and failed, that Mattis should speak up.

Early in his career Mattis served at Marine Corps Base Quantico, the “Crossroads of the Corps,” going through the Amphibious Warfare School and Command and Staff College. After promotion to lieutenant general he returned to Quantico to head up the Marine Corps Combat Development Command, or MCCDC, which develops Marine Corps tactics and strategy.

When I finished my Marine Corps service in the mid-1970s—a lifetime ago—I left D.C., where I had worked as a communications-electronics officer at Headquarters Marine Corps, after a year with the Third Marine Division on Okinawa. Sandy and I moved back to northern Virginia a decade later. In my civilian work life I returned many times to Quantico and MCCDC.

In terms of facilities, Quantico is far different from when I was there to attend Marine Officers Basic School and Officers Communications School. But Mattis left his mark. His philosophy is indelible. It starts and finishes with development of character in defense of sacred values. Rather than tolerate ignorance and political opportunism in defense policy, he resigned, reinforcing those values. He gave the nation 45 years of character. The nation is left with: Trump.