June 9, 2025

Chapel Hill, Tennessee, takes its name from the North Carolina city. The connection ends there. The Tennessee settlement is far harder to travel to, unless you live exactly in the middle of the state. If not, it’s a long way from anywhere.

We had been there before, just shy of a year ago, for the same reason, the Harper reunion. Most families stage reunions occasionally, usually years apart. The Harpers, Sandy’s family, like to get together. So we drove over again, chugging across three states for nine hours, the last three through drenching rain, reminiscent of our May voyage to Virginia. The grandsons, Noah and Patrick, were with us.

It’s an uphill trip. The little mountain towns along I-40 west of Asheville appear then fall away; Canton, Waynesville, Maggie Valley, Clyde. Tennessee shows up just past the 12 miles of single-lane where crews are repairing Hurricane Helene damage, part of the highway collapsed into the Pigeon River. Traffic crawls past the crews and heavy equipment at work, now eight months.

We flew through Newport and then Knoxville, Oak Ridge, Hariman, Kingston, Crab Orchard. Rain whipped across the highway as we made Crossville, the gateway to Pikeville in the center of the Sequatchie Valley, a magical place where Sandy’s aunt and uncle raised cattle and grew vegetables on 130 acres of rich Bledsoe County soil. They’re long gone, but the place still beckons.

Our trip was a familiar pilgrimage, the fifth to Tennessee in seven months, this time to a park in the middle of the state. The interstate reopened, one lane each way, just three months ago.

At 5:00 PM in Chapel Hill we were hungry. The gift-shop lady recommended an oddly named place, From the Heart, next to a gas station. We found it, a tiny spot with a half-dozen tables possibly salvaged from an elementary school cafeteria. A row of amateur oil paintings lined one wall. Games and toys piled on the counters. We were the only customers.

The young girl who brought menus explained that the owner’s name is Hart, she added an “e” to create the name. The fare was comfort food with a bit of flair, Nashville Hot Chicken, cheese-dosed French fries, really anything you want if starving.

The girl was helpful but reserved. She brought us water and tea and disappeared to do the cooking. Through the front window we could see a flow of folks enter the pizza place next door, ignoring From the Heart. The place offered an impression of small-town quietness, maybe loneliness or isolation, as if hardly anyone ever visited.

I sensed the remoteness of the little place and somehow, of the town. The main street through Chapel Hill is U.S. 41/31, lined by the usual small-town businesses: stop-and-go stations, a supermarket, an urgent care. There’s an auto-repair shop, a couple maybe three churches. City Hall is a storefront. A few residential streets branch away from the highway.

Like many small Southern places, it has its touch of Civil War seediness; a monument to Confederate soldiers uses Ku Klux Klan founder Nathan Bedford Forrest as its centerpiece, the “t” missing from “Nathan,” and “Forrest” lacks the “e” and “t.” The local modern-day Confederates haven’t noticed.

The land was mainly flat, as it is west of I-65. We had left the mountains a hundred miles back. On the trek across the state we enjoyed the gentle rise and fall of the country as it sorts itself from the Great Smokies and prepares travelers for cotton fields of West Tennessee that show up east of Memphis. Keep going west and you’re in prairie.

The reunion the next day was our main event. Early that morning Patrick and I walked the gravel paths that cut across the wide greenway. A midnight storm had left the lush grass glistening. We detoured off at a steep slope down to the Duck River, which flows with silent quickness along the park’s northern boundary. He walked out on a log and bent forward, looking for living things.

The boys were disappointed that the Harper group that showed up included no one younger than 40. We had heard the last-minute excuses and cancelations. Then the forecast wasn’t promising. The faithful ones were there, the ones who always come, first cousins Mike and James, Deborah, Donna, and Bob.

Sandy’s nephew Caleb drove down from Nashville. He’s the farrier with the easy Southern smile, the forever-young fellow who plays Irish ballads at country bars. His tunes—I’ve heard a few recordings—express a kind of mournful mysticism or devoutness that may limit him in the raucous Nashville music scene. He keeps playing, and shoeing horses.

We circulated, renewed acquaintances, repeated the introductions we made last year. Mike grilled burgers and brat, others laid out the potluck. We donated to the tombstone fund, which Mike and Deborah will use to purchase headstones for the unmarked family graves at Nashville’s Catholic cemetery. We want to know who’s where.

Caleb had brought an Irish football for the boys. We kicked it around in the grass near the pavilion, the three of us, staying in the muggy shade. We could feel the storm brewing.

The guests stretched in their lawn chairs, happy to be there, to recognize other familiar faces and learn a few new ones. We walked past the whiteboards explaining the family tree and its timelines: Michael Farrell, the Irish immigrant, in 1830, his daughter, Annie and John William Harper, their 10 kids and down the line. We could see the need for adding the most recent level.

That would be a project for next year’s reunion, if there is one. The enlarged color photo of last year’s gathering included a few no longer with us. Sandy’s sister, smiling and happy in last year’s shot, passed suddenly in December. Brother-in-law Dale, with a big smile in the photo, died two months later.

The middle-agers and seniors talked and laughed. I stared at the photo. Next year’s party probably would miss a few present at this one. The ranks may get thinner, but younger folks will show up, we hope. We’ll come again, I guess, doing our part.

June 2, 2025

Sometimes unique moments—odd maybe, but unique—don’t involve going anywhere or doing anything. At the back of the Flying Fox coffee shop in downtown Greer a young man stared at his laptop. That wasn’t unusual. He tapped at the keyboard. Also on the table: a thick paperback entitled Plotinus. That was unusual.

From a long-ago grad school course I recalled Plotinus, the third-century Greek philosopher associated with the term “Neoplatonism,” a revival of the thinking of Plato. Sitting nearby, I finished my coffee. “Reading Plotinus?” I asked.

He looked up, surprised. “Not right now. But I will be,” he answered. “Plotinus’s thought is related to that of an earlier philosopher, Origen.”

Origen was a complicated, controversial figure of the second century, when early Christian scholars were debating what the Christian religion stood for.

“Grad school?”

 “No, I’m taking an RTS course online. RTS—Reformed Theological Seminary, in Charlotte,” he said. He answered my next question before I asked. “And no, I’m not planning on the ministry.”

Had he been studying engineering, computer science, business, or marketing I wouldn’t have noticed. But as he sipped his coffee he read philosophy and religion. He had longish hair pulled back in a braid, a wispy beard, and wore a plaid lumberjack shirt. I knew to move on. “Good luck,” I said.

Plotinus—why not? The braided fellow wasn’t the first guy or gal to read philosophy in a coffee shop, just the first I’ve seen. Most coffee shops allow laptoppers to sit for hours as long as they keep buying drinks, sometimes even if they don’t. In the same place a young woman in a long dress balanced a textbook on her keyboard and scribbled in a notebook. Another girl next to her read a thick book.

You can “google” Plotinus and be drawn into the crosscurrents of early philosophical and religious thinking that eventually, 1,000 and more years after him, formed the intellectual foundation of Western civilization.  

At home, I thought of my grad-school days. I recalled, with a lot of gaps, the lessons I picked up while reading in the same currents. The early Christian thinkers, called Patristics, who lived between the first and eighth centuries, studied the Gospels to meld faith and philosophy in concepts like the divinity of Christ; the meaning of the incarnation; the nature of Baptism, and on through the pantheon of Christian belief.  

They were men, today mostly forgotten, with names that ring oddly off modern ears: Origen, Athanasius, Ireneus, Ignatius, Polycarp, Justin Martyr. Then Clement of Alexandria, Basil, Gregory Nazienzus, Hilary of Poitiers, many others, who created the path for Saint Augustine of Hippo.

Augustine (354-430) is the patron of the Augustinians, the religious order to which the brand-new pope, Leo XIV, belongs. He also wrote two of Christianity’s great declarations, Confessions and The City of God. His work, along with the scholarship of Dominican monk Thomas Aquinas of the 13th century, reconciled Christian faith with Greek philosophy.

The evolution of philosophy integrated with religious faith continued through the middle ages, inspired by St. Anselm of Canterbury, St. Albertus Magnus, Aquinas, and other priest-philosophers, among them John Duns Scotus and St. Bonaventure, who drew on Aristotle and other classical thinkers. They debated and refined intellectual arguments supporting Christian doctrine, accepted by some, rejected by others. 

The Protestant Reformation that exploded in 1517, set off by Martin Luther, transformed Christianity forever. In 1536 John Calvin published his Institutes of the Christian Religion; the Catholic Council of Trent (1545-1563) repudiated Protestantism; in 1611 the Church of England published the King James Bible.  In Central Europe the Protestant-Catholic Thirty Years War killed millions.

Catholic property was seized, priests executed. England’s Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell led a brutal war against the Catholic Irish.

Protestantism, which the coffee-shop guy is studying, continued to evolve in Europe and America over generations, based on shades of distinctions in faithfulness to the Bible. Catholicism’s Second Vatican Council, 1962 through ’65, produced 16 ground-breaking documents that reaffirmed traditional tenets of belief but modified liturgical practices.

The legacy of organized religion in America isn’t pure. Fundamentalist preachers through two centuries thundered from their pulpits that segregation was God’s will.

I wondered about the fellow. He expected privacy, as folks do when they bring their laptops to coffee shops. But in that cramped public place his mind was somewhere else, searching for knowledge and insight in the first or second century after Christ.

Maybe he’s on to something at this low point in American history: a path to rise above the bleakness and low-life grubbiness of daily national news. One answer: ponder higher things, the subtle nuances of religious truth and spirituality born two millennia ago.

If we look around we’ll find others looking for answers, studying the impact of great thinkers on their lives and beliefs. They may find questions that create doubt, that undermine or destroy lifelong assumptions. They may make excruciating discoveries about themselves, about truth, that lead them to faith and sustain them in today’s world. You may see them in coffee shops. And everywhere.        

May 26, 2025

We looked to the solemnity of Memorial Day, recalling the sacrifice of millions of men and women who over 260 years answered the country’s call. It meant dealing with the grim political stuff, like last week’s vote in the House of Representatives on the tax bill that, if it became law, would add $3.8 trillion to the federal deficit over ten years.  

We set all that aside and thought about positive things. We thought about pickleball. It lifts us for brief moments from the nightmare news.

A few days earlier I walked onto a court in Pittsboro, North Carolina. Anita whacked the ball on a low line drive over the net. I raised my racket, or paddle, to return her shot and protect my face. I made contact, the ball caromed over the out-of-bounds line. This went on and on in my first attempt at pickleball.

She moved forward and laterally, swinging one-handed or two-handed, forehand and backhand, banging the ball mostly past me or lobbing it just over the net beyond my reach. She charged and retreated. I lunged, left and right, forehand and backhand, waving the paddle like a tennis racket, which it isn’t. I started to get the hang of it and returned a few within bounds.

Pickleball has swept the country. Courts are going up everywhere. Our local park just put in 18 courts, taking acreage from the athletic fields. When we drive by the parking lot is always full. At night the lights stay on late.

I stopped at the park and watched for a while. Jen, sitting courtside, pointed to her husband, daughter, son, and daughter-in-law, playing a fast game. “We play all the time. In our neighborhood we have seventies, eighties. Even a ninety-two-year-old gentleman plays.”

I read that the game was invented in 1965 by Joel Pritchard and a couple of friends in Bainbridge, Wash., who used paddleball paddles, a whiffle ball, and a tennis court and net. Various explanations circulate about where the name came from, including the name of Pritchard’s dog. In 1967 some of Pritchard’s neighbors built the first pickleball court

In 2024 some 3,250 players competed in the Minto Pickleball Championship held at Naples, Fla. More than 50,000 spectators, according to Pickleball Magazine, celebrated the “spirit of pickleball” at the “biggest pickleball party in the world.” A nationwide sports and fitness organization reports that in 2024 nearly 20 million people in the U.S. played the game.

A few weeks ago the pickleball venue near our street held a tournament. Dozens of men’s, women’s, and mixed male-female teams competed. Teams lined up waiting for their slots. As the teams finished their games others crowded onto the courts.

Inevitably, as the game grew, it became organized. The U.S. Amateur Pickleball Association, now USA Pickleball, developed rules. Two professional pickleball tours were established. Collegiate pickleball began in 2022. You can watch pickleball on streaming TV. A pickleball stadium was built in Fort Lauderdale, and a pickleball hall of fame in Austin.

Until now I didn’t pay attention. Years ago Sandy and I played a little tennis on high school courts near home, but eventually lost interest, tired of chasing balls around the court or distracted by other things. I noticed pickleball only in the last year or so. Like others I thought of it as an old folks’ version of tennis. Then Chris, the fastest guy in our old neighborhood running group and three decades younger than me, mentioned he plays.

“The reason people love pickleball is that you can be competitive right out of the gate,” he says. “The toughest part of tennis is getting the serve in. In pickleball you’re serving underhand, so it’s a lot easier to keep the serve in the court. The pickleball net also is slightly lower than the tennis net.”

We knew Anita and Peter in Nashville. About the same time we moved from Virginia to the Palmetto State, they relocated to central North Carolina. Anita says she never heard of the game in Tennessee. “Then a while ago the neighborhood email invited folks to learn to play pickleball. So I went,” she says.

One day someone rang the doorbell and asked her if she wanted to play pickleball. “It was the first time anyone asked me to go out and play in many years,” she says. The local players use two “aps,” Team Reach and Instateam, to organize, schedule, and sign up for games, either at the neighborhood court or elsewhere in town.

I walked with Anita over to the neighborhood court for my first stab at the game. She explained the rules on serving, on staying out of the “kitchen,” the couple of feet of court closest to the net, how to score. We volleyed a bit, warming up, which always takes me a while. Maybe one of every three of my strokes stayed inbounds.

Anita and her friend Lori formed a team, I teamed with another old guy, Enzo, to play them. The two women stroked evenly, consistently. I guessed they noticed I’m left-handed, most of their shots came to my right, making me backpedal then lunge and reach back-handed. I mostly smacked the ball out of bounds or into the net.

The women beat us, something like 11-5. We played a second game, same outcome. The others yelled encouragement, things like “great job for your first time,” more or less acknowledging my good strokes were just luck, which was true.

As we wrapped up, a middle-aged guy, Alan, and his son Andy arrived and formed a team with Lori and Cindy. They played and played. Anita and I played singles for a while, not keeping score. She got some practice, I got more comfortable with my swing. Anita’s shots were a coaching clinic, mostly right down the middle. She did hit a few zingers. I scrambled, making some shots, missing others.

The sun set, darkness approached. We went back and forth, the hard yellow ball a blur in the court lights. I chased my missed balls across the court. Anita shouldered her backpack for the walk back to the house. My legs wobbled a bit, absorbing the new exercise routine. I handed her the paddle. I’ll have to get one of my own, I thought.

May 19, 2025

In early 1940 the novelist John Steinbeck embarked with a friend, biologist Ed Ricketts, on a cruise through the Gulf of California, also called the Sea of Cortez, to collect specimens of marine life. While German forces rampaged through Europe they chartered a boat, hired a crew, and set out from Monterey, heading south.

Steinbeck was enjoying the payoff for his great novels, The Grapes of Wrath and Tortilla Flats. Ricketts had published a well-received paper entitled Between Pacific Tides. After the cruise they teamed to write the book that eventually became The Log from the Sea of Cortez. In an early chapter Steinbeck wrote:

“We were coming now toward the end of our day-and-night running; the engines had never paused since we left San Diego except for idling the little time when we took the langustina. The coastline of the Peninsula slid along, brown and desolate and dry with strange flat mountains and rocks torn by dryness, and the heat shimmer hung over the land even in March.”

They chartered a 76-foot work boat named Western Flyer in Monterey, owned by Tony Berry, who sailed with them as master, and hired Tex, the engineer, and Sparky and Tiny, seamen. “All three were reluctant to go, for the whole thing was crazy,” Steinbeck wrote. “None of us had been into the Gulf, although the master had been as far as Cape San Lucas, and the Gulf has a really bad name.”

They named the boat’s outboard motor the Hansen Sea Cow, a “mean, irritable, contemptible, mischievous, hateful living thing.” They called at San Diego to buy gas then sailed for the Gulf. The boat entered Magdalena Bay, two-thirds the way to the tip of Baja California, where the men started collecting specimens. They paused at Cape San Lucas, guarded by giant rocks called “the Friars,” then Pulmo Reef, La Paz, and Angeles Bay. And so on for those six weeks.

At the same time I picked up Cortez we started our own pilgrimage, back to Fort Valley, Va., where a 100-mile trail race is staged in mid-May every year. For the 11th time in 12 years I showed up in this thickly rocky, densely green paradise, either to endure the pain of the event or to help others endure it.

Our journey began in the same rollicking way as Steinbeck’s and Ricketts’, also through water, but the monsoon kind, the atmospheric river of mid-May above the mid-Atlantic. The rain fell laterally much of the 11-hour trip, which should take eight hours.

No detail of our experience is similar to the Western Flyer’s cruise. What mattered to us, and to Steinbeck, Ricketts, and their men was the breaking away. We knew what we were about better than they, but they outclassed us in grit and flair. With a gruesome war consuming nations week after week, one skilled scientist and five amateurs (plus Steinbeck’s wife Carol) explored a near-God-forsaken strip of ocean six thousand miles away from the carnage.

For us, the monsoon abated somewhere along the spine of Virginia, but the rain never stopped. It swept again in blinding sheets across the highway as we passed Natural Bridge and Lexington. The heavy wet clouds moved away around New Market, where the western ridge of the Massanuttens is broken by U.S. 211. We visited friends in Centreville and Sterling, then headed for Fort Valley, to a place called Caroline Furnace.

Volunteers walk the trails the day before the race, hanging ribbons and luminescent markers from trees to mark the course. Bill, Gretchen, and I, doing our part, tramped along a south-inclined stretch called Duncan Hollow, which a little rain turns into a streambed and swells the actual streams into swamps. We had done this before, the three of us, seniors who now leave the racing to men and women decades younger.

The forest was thick and marshy, the Massanutten rocks slick and sharp. We moved deliberately, pulling our shoes from thick mud, swatting bugs, breathing sweet mountain air.  In four miles the trail turns west and climbs torturous switchbacks up the western ridge then descends, the descent just as wet and rocky. I thought again of Steinbeck and his adventurers, staring across the water at the brown slopes of Baja California.

We finished Duncan Hollow and started climbing. We paused to gasp and stare back at the eastern ridge and beyond, across miles of farmland to the Shenandoahs 20 miles distant. A thin Blue Ridge haze across the mountains conveyed a sense of the permanence, the immutable, calming power of this quiet world.

In late March the Western Flyer called at San Jose Island and then Puerto Escondido, where the crew continued collecting specimens: crabs, sea anemones, other creatures. They moved on to Concepcion Bay and San Lucas Cove, San Francisquito Bay, and Bahia de los Angeles. They visited Estero de la Luna, Agiabampo Bay, and San Gabriel Bay, then headed home.

Steinbeck and Ricketts initially co-published the book as a travel journal. It didn’t sell well, we can imagine why. Ricketts died in an accident in 1948, Steinbeck republished the log in 1951.

They touched, in their own mysterious way, something of the essence of life in an obscure place, in sun-baked little settlements few if any of their readers had heard of. The act of collecting and studying living things, humble sea creatures, also was an act of assent, acceptance: that God’s creation, His world, is a sublime gift.

Nearly nine decades later Bill, Gretchen, and I also touched that world, as we tramped through cool fast-moving streams and struggled up the ridge. We all are up there in years, this was not the first time. The trek, in our tired, measured steps, affirmed truth about our lives and our beliefs. We find it, as Steinbeck and Ricketts found it, in being present as witnesses to the miracle of this rugged, serene, consoling corner of our world, revealed in completing the journey.

May 12, 2025

It was time for the ophthalmologist. He comes after the optometrist, like the orthodontist comes after the dentist. The point is cataracts, the mysterious film that, over years, develops on the lens of the eye. I have the years. An optometrist found the cataracts. Get it done, he said. We found Southern Eye.

Meanwhile, some things come to a purely felicitous ending. We have a new Pope. We, that is, everyone, need Leo XIV, a math major from Villanova, a guy with hard executive experience who speaks five languages not counting Latin, and paid his dues bringing the Gospel to obscure places.

It was more than a month ago that we set out to take care of the cataracts. Experience sharpens your skill at making doctors’ appointments. Medical practices, like other businesses, are intoxicated with the shallow freedom from personal engagement offered by text messaging. Phone recordings demand texts. A human being answers only if you choose the “billing” option.

Eventually we got a choice for an appointment: the local office two months out or the Clemson office, a 60-mile roundtrip. It had just opened, slots were available. We picked Clemson.

People who have had the cataracts work say it’s quick and easy. Still it’s surgery and your eyes. It involves sharp instruments. Things can go wrong.

The Clemson trip is a trek through downtown Greenville out into the western industrial and commercial suburbs. Eventually the road opens into pretty country, but it’s still 30 miles one way. Southern Eye is in a just-completed pseudo-colonial townhouse subdivision that accommodates both residents and businesses. The streets were quiet. The Southern Eye office was quiet.

A technician, a young guy dressed in black, led me to a treatment room and fitted my head in his device, my chin propped on a ledge, the eyepiece against my left eye. He flashed a line of five block letters at me, I read them, he reduced the size, once, twice, three times, until I just guessed. We went through the drill for the right eye. Without a word he left the room. I waited.

Dr. Dave walked in. He asked a few questions, then fitted another device over my left eye. He turned a knob, a bright light blinded me. He moved to the right eye. “Cataracts, both eyes,” he said. “We’ll take care of you.”

The doc gave a primer on cataracts. They develop over time and if not removed can lead to loss of sight. The process takes 30 minutes, usually, under local anesthesia, but it’s major surgery, requiring cutting into the eye. I winced.

We got an appointment for “alignment” a week later at another Southern Eye site, this one in the medical ghetto near the downtown hospital. The waiting room was crowded with oldsters, everyone wearing glasses. I didn’t have to wait, a tech called me. She fitted my chin in a machine and did a few more tests. I got the appointment a month out for the right eye and for the left two weeks later.

A thick FedEx packet arrived, full of paperwork and two vials of eyedrops, one vial for each eye: start the drops three days before the surgery, four times each day. I struggled to remember the schedule then had trouble finding the eyeball. The medicine mostly dribbled down my cheek.

On surgery day we headed for yet another Southern office, this one near the big suburban hospital complex. Convenient in case things go wrong, I guessed.

At 9:30 AM several patients waited ahead of me. A nurse, Laura, took me to a cubicle. I lay on a cot, she took my blood pressure and readied her IV needle. She tried my wrist. “Well, that didn’t work,” she said. I gritted my teeth. She tried again, again, the needle passed through my vein. The third time was the charm. I exhaled hard.

An anesthesiologist stopped by to ask how I tolerated anesthesia. I’m okay, I assured her, lots of experience. Dr. Dave entered the cubicle. He asked how I felt. Then he asked, “Would you like to have a quick prayer?” he asked. “Sure,” I said. He placed his hands on the rail of the cot and whispered a short ecumenical prayer.

It was the day after Pope Francis died. I didn’t think Dr. Dave was thinking about the Holy Father, but who knows? This is the Bible Belt Southland. Public prayer is off-the-cuff, extemporaneous, not my style, yet still prayer. No doubt he prays for all his patients. I appreciated it.

An hour later I was first in line at Cataract Central.  Dr. Dave and a colleague were hard at work relieving folks of their cataracts. It’s highly precise surgery, and no two patients have exactly the same situation. But it is repetitive.

 Around 2 PM Laura pushed my cot into a surgical space. Someone well practiced at this squirted a drop of medicine in my right eye, then a drop of local anesthesia. I saw Dr. Dave’s silhouette above me, then an intense white light. I felt nothing. It was over in twenty minutes.

Sandy drove home. I wore a plastic shield over the eye at night. At the post-op the next day Dr. Dave said the eye looked good. “Keep wearing the shield at night, keep taking the drops, no exercise, no bending, no lifting more than ten pounds,” he warned.

I sat around the house for a week. No pushing a lawnmower. It rained, the grass grew longer and thicker. Sandy carried the trash out to the curb. I kept up the eyedrops and taped the shield over the eye each night.

At the second post-op Dr. Dave explained what happened. “I made two incisions and inserted instruments into the eye and lifted the cataract from the lens.” He showed a video of the incision, the probes, the cataract torn away and pulled out. I gulped. But the eye felt okay.

“Thanks for helping me,” I said as I stood up. He grinned. “God gave me the skills to help people,” he answered. “See you in a couple of weeks for other one.”

So far my vision is no better. I’m still squinting. No miracles, even with Dr. Dave’s God-given skills. But while inserting his cutting tool in my eye he lifted my spirits. Maybe that was the point.