February 3, 2025

A few months ago we sat in the waiting area of an Urgent Care in Huntsville, Alabama. It was late afternoon, the place was crowded. We were on a road trip with the grandsons to the NASA Space Center, the main tourist attraction in the town. Huntsville was chilly and windy, and I had a hacking cough.

The receptionist handed me a sheaf of paperwork to complete. She explained that since we were from another state the facility couldn’t access my insurance.  She chatted cheerfully with other patients, some of whom, I guessed, used the Urgent Care as their doctor’s office. They came and went.

An hour passed, the place was nearly empty. The grandsons fidgeted.  The receptionist stared at her computer. I asked when I’d be seen. She didn’t seem to hear me. I asked again, she looked up. “It could be another hour, maybe two hours,” she said.

At that I recalled the incisive Albert Camus quote: “The realization that life is absurd cannot be an end, but only a beginning.” We left. I picked up some over-the-counter medicine.

An Urgent Care a mile from our home is owned by Prisma, the big South Carolina health-care company. We’d been there a few times. Prisma transferred management of the place to a support contractor. On our next visit we had to complete a half-dozen forms. “We’re part of Prisma, but we can’t access their records,” the desk person said.

Months later I went again. The receptionist handed me the same forms, saying the Prisma records aren’t accessible. She didn’t know why. Others in the waiting room were looking down at clipboards filling out forms. The people behind the glass were typing information from patients’ forms into their terminals. Where was it going?

On a trip last summer to the tiny town of Chapel Hill, Tennessee, named after the North Carolina city, I injured my foot. It was late Friday afternoon, we were at the lodge at a nearby state park. “We need to find an Urgent Care,” Sandy said. Oh no, I thought. The desk clerk gave us directions. We got there just before closing time, the only customers.

The young girl at the desk glanced at my insurance card. I detected a non-Southern twang. “I’m from Wisconsin,” she told us. “My family moved to Chattanooga, so here I am. Not sure how long I’ll stay.” She took me to a treatment room.

A nurse practitioner walked in. I explained my problem. “I’ll write you a prescription for an antibiotic. The pharmacy is right next door,” she said. Another non-Tennessee accent. “Are you from around here?” we asked. “I grew up in Oklahoma,” she answered. “My dad got a job here, so we moved here. I like it, it’s a nice small town.”

We thanked her and walked to the pharmacy. Weeks later we received a “thank-you for your business” from the Urgent Care. The note said drop by anytime.

A week ago we rushed to a nearby Urgent Care run by the Medical Group of the Carolinas. It was 7:00 AM, dark and raining. The lady at the desk took my date of birth. My medical records popped up on her screen, going back years.

A technician arrived, all business. She wanted my blood pressure and wrapped my upper arm in a blood-pressure cuff and pumped. A light blinked. “70 over 50, too low. Let’s try the other arm,” she said. Same result. She found another blood-pressure cuff and tried again. “It’s up a little, 80 over 60.”

Dr. Kevin walked into the room, smiling. He looked at my bloodshot eyes. “Pinkeye,” he said. “I’ll write you a prescription for an antibiotic eyedrop. We said thanks and were out of there, all in about 20 minutes.

I had been there last fall with a similar problem. A nurse practitioner looked at my low blood pressure. “I can’t help you here, you need to get to the ER,” she warned. Not what I wanted to hear. But I went, the hospital admitted me. Good call by the Urgent Care NP.

At another Urgent Care a nurse practitioner warned us against consuming honey. “Honey has this halo about it as a healthy cure-all,” she offered. “But it’s pure sugar and not good for you.”

The Huntsville Urgent Care experience is part of modern life. We risk something like it when we encounter petty bureaucracies: cable and cellphone companies, the homeowner’s association, Amazon, online retailers. The bigger ones, too: the IRS, DMV, the local tax office. health insurance providers. A person sitting at a desk before you is steadfastly unhelpful. Or you call the place and hear a barrage of options. No one answers.

We’ve all been to Urgent Care. Those storefront medical offices are everywhere, affiliated with hospitals or other medical organizations, sometimes teams of physicians, nurse practitioners, registered nurses. Some work wonders on the “urgent,” side of the term, others don’t.

No one wants to go to the doctor, even with spectacular health insurance. Being sick is frightening. The treatments, drugs and their side effects, the thought of being hospitalized, are frightening. The costs, even with insurance, can be devastating, although doctors, nurses, and their support staffs do heroic work to help severely ill people. 

Urgent Care is a kind of twilight zone of health care; not the doctor’s office, not the hospital. The patients usually are there with aches and pains, cuts and bruises, coughs and fevers. The care calls for prescription drugs, sometimes a few stitches, or just health-care advice. The doctor prescribes something, the rest is up to the patient.

Some Urgent Cares sit in strip malls between the pet store and the Walmart. If I spent years in medical school and residencies, studying and working 80-hour weeks, I’m not sure I’d want to work in those places. Sometimes, I’ve noticed, the front-desk people seem bored, detached. They’re processing insurance, taking payments, listening to complaints.

The patient sits alone or with a family member, ill at ease, worried. The medical professional walks into the treatment room. They’re not on the staff of some famous hospital, the Mayo Clinic, Cleveland Clinic, Johns Hopkins. But they’re doing what they trained to do. It may not be brain surgery. Yet in those cramped, windowless rooms, they’re doing good work, helping people; in a way, saving lives.

January 27, 2025

On January 21, 1985 the mercury fell to -17F in Nashville, Tenn. The frigid temperature, the second-coldest ever recorded there (after -18F in January 1942), was caused by one of those Canadian arctic fronts that sometimes dip down through the middle of the U.S. Folks in the Upper Midwest are used to them.

This one dipped deep. The entire city shut down. I couldn’t start my car for three days.

We are in the depths of that season when old folks will say, as above, “I remember how cold it was in Chicago (or another place) in …”.

Since a fishing trip with son Michael to Canada’s Northwest Territory in June 2010, when we froze in our tent at night, I often check the weather in Yellowknife, the provincial capital. Routinely, starting in October the temperature drops below zero there. Recently it’s been in the -30F range, often dipping below -40F.

The Great Slave Lake, where we fished, freezes to six feet thick, aircraft land on it.  In some spots in the Midwest last week lows reached below -20F, with wind chills in the -30F range.

Winter is a foundational element of our culture. Some of us have fond winter memories of sleighriding on neighborhood slopes, friendly snowball fights, the wonder of a white Christmas, helping an elderly neighbor clear his or her driveway, the bracing aroma of warm cider.

Later in life our thinking changes. Many people shiver at the winter forecasts and count the weeks to April.  When last January we visited Hawaii and walked around in teeshirts and shorts, we read of arctic temperatures in the Midwest. I wondered how anyone could live there, as the Pacific sun warmed my shoulders.

Yet as the lake-effect storms dumped five feet of snow on northwest Ohio, Pennsylvania, and western New York in December, the local folks pulled on their parkas, shouldered their shovels, revved up their snow blowers. Last week, as snow piled up at Lincoln Financial Field during the Eagles-Rams playoff game, the TV audience watched in shock. The fans in the stands loved it. The closeups showed them bundled in thick coats, furs, and scarves. Winter people.

Yet for sure, they would rather not drive home in snow. Winter’s chilling blasts force us to dress in bulky clothing and spend more to heat our homes. Cold and snow make travel difficult, sometimes life-threatening or impossible. And if we’re inclined to think about it, winter’s bitterest weather brings not only discomfort and danger, but a sense, maybe irrational, maybe paranoid, of something dark, threatening, malevolent.

Jack London’s 1908 short story, “To Build a Fire,” tells of a man and a dog trekking across sub-zero Yukon wilderness. He stops to rest and builds a successful fire. He continues but falls through ice and soaks his feet and legs. He builds a second fire under a tree loaded with snow, but the heat melts the snow in the branches, which falls and puts out the fire.

As his feet grow numb the man struggles to relight the fire with the wet kindling, using his last matches. Finally he sits back, resigned, doomed to freeze in the forest. The dog trots off. 

History is full of horrific encounters with the bitterness of winter: Napoleon’s retreat from Russia in 1812, when an estimated 300,000 froze or died of disease; the Battle of the Bulge in December 1944, when U.S. Army forces fought off German attacks in frigid weather and heavy snow; the Communist Chinese surprise night attack on American troops in sub-zero cold near the North Korea-Chinese border in November 1950.  

The Valley Forge National Historical Park outside Philadelphia honors the colonial Army’s suffering as well as valor in late 1777-mid-1778. Of the 12,000 soldiers and civilians who bivouacked at Valley Forge, some 2,000 died of hunger, disease, and exposure. The winter of 1779-1780, when troops sheltered at a place called Jockey Hollow near Morristown, N.J., was even colder.

Other nightmarish examples: the Franklin voyage seeking a Northwest Passage in 1845, when two ships and 129 men disappeared; the Donner Party expedition of 1846-47, when survivors, trapped and starving in brutal winter conditions, resorted to cannibalism.

Cold as a metaphor of tragedy occurred to some people last week when the temperature fell to 25F in Washington during the inauguration of an elderly spoiled child whose every word and act strain the meaning of words like “vulgar” and “obtuse.” This is the one Americans elected to save the nation from immigrants and reduce the price of eggs.

In this town, the notorious polar vortex lowered temperatures below freezing, then to the low-twenties, then at night into the teens. A few flakes drifted down. Schools closed, businesses and doctors’ offices limited hours. The local report on western North Carolina mountain towns told of temperatures 20 degrees colder.

Yet our experience was minor-league chilliness. Like everyone else, we were stunned by the reports of minus-30 wind chills from Idaho to Minnesota, single-digit temps nearly everywhere above the Mason-Dixon line, the blizzards in New Orleans and Houston. New York and Philly were close to zero.

It was 25F at 10:00 AM here a couple of days last week. At the nearby state park the lake showed a thin sheet of ice, too thin for skating, an unknown pastime in South Carolina anyway. But the weak sun did shine so that I could feel warmth faintly on my back. The ground was still frozen, but showing a few melted muddy spots. A stream flowed freely past shards of ice. But it flowed.

We all know it will end. The polar vortex winds will shift and fade. The thaw will show up here in the Southland soon, while Northlanders continue shivering a little longer. The sun slowly will grow warmer, our dark moods will be lifted, the heavy coats go back in the closet. We’ll look for brighter days, and brighter days will come.      

January 20, 2025

We drove by Plains, Ga., a couple of years ago as we headed north through the state from Gulf Coast Florida. We were on our way to Milledgeville to see the home of writer Flannery O’Connor, like Jimmy Carter, a diehard Peach State native. At the time we didn’t seriously consider a detour through Plains. I’d like to see the place.

The Carter funeral last week was a dignified final point of a dignified life, a few days before today’s Trump inauguration, which promises, putting it mildly, a far different approach to government.

Before passing the Plains exit we spent the night in Valdosta, a modest I-75 stop just above the Georgia-Florida line. The next intermediate marker was Macon, where we left the interstate and weaved through backwoods central-east Georgia into pretty Milledgeville, home of the oddly named Georgia College and State University.

We walked a bit downtown then stopped at the O’Connor home. We got the house tour and watched the pet peacocks, which strut free across the yard. The drive home took us winding northeast through deep rural country, woods, small farms, and tiny settlements like Sparta, Culverton, Warrenton. The plan was to get to Athens then hit I-85. The more direct route became rural backroads that eventually crossed the Savannah River.

The Peach State, like the rest of the old Confederacy, recalls tragedy. Georgia was the second state to secede from the Union, in January 1861, a month after South Carolina, when the governor declared that Lincoln’s election would end slavery in the United States. The rebels defeated the Yanks at Chickamauga in September 1863. But the major Civil War benchmark is Union General William T. Sherman’s capture of Atlanta and march to the sea in September 1864.

Georgia, the largest state in land square miles east of the Mississippi, is a Southern anchor, the gateway to Florida.  Atlanta is a monster city encompassing parts of five counties. It’s home base for Coca-Cola, Home Depot, Delta Airlines, and other big companies. A few years ago Mercedez-Benz North America moved its headquarters to Atlanta from New Jersey.

There’s Atlanta, then there’s Augusta, home to the Masters, the aristocracy of the pro golf tour. Then there’s the rest of the state, captured by novelist Erskine Caldwell’s title, Tobacco Road.

On the east coast I-95 crosses the S.C.-Georgia state line and passes through miles of wetland into Savannah, famous for its gorgeous homes and suffocating humidity. Another 80 miles south are the Golden Isles, Sea Island, Saint Simon, and Jekyll Island, pseudo-tropical seashore retreats for retired tycoons and honeymooners.

Beyond Jekyll is the King’s Bay Naval Base. Golden Isles dreaminess ends abruptly there, where the Navy docks ballistic missile submarines. Suddenly you’re at the Florida visitor’s center, which is usually crowded with old folks on pilgrimage to the sunshine.

The other near-interminable Georgia byway is I-75, which descends from Upper Peninsula Michigan all the way to Fort Lauderdale. It passes through Georgia’s share of the Blue Ridge at the southern end of the Great Smokies and the 860,000-acre Chattahoochee-Oconee National Forest.

Dalton, the first big Georgia town on 75, is a hub for carpet manufacturing. It’s the center of the district represented by firebrand Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who actually hails from Milledgeville.

About 40 miles east of Dalton on U.S. 76 is Ellijay, the “apple capital of Georgia,” tucked in a gash in the mountains. Further east, still on 76 is Blairsville, nestled under a scary ridge called the Dragon’s Spine, six or eight jagged peaks rising from the national forest. Nearby is Vogel State Park, the start and finish of the 100-mile Cruel Jewel trail race, which requires climbing Dragon’s Spine twice. Runners get 48 hours to finish the course. Many don’t.

Awhile back we went to a nephew’s wedding in Ellijay, then drove to Atlanta. On the way we climbed seven miles of sharp switchbacks on a narrow gravel road to the day-hike parking space for Springer Mountain, the southern terminus of the Appalachian Trail. Later, I met a friend at nearby Amicalola State Park, site of spectacular 730-foot cascading Amicolala Falls. We climbed the rocky stairs alongside the falls for a hundred-mile view.

Years ago I drove I-75 to Sea Island for corporate meetings. At Macon you begin a straight shot east on I-16 to Savannah. The route is a punishing 160-mile, three-hour trip through small-farm counties, an archetype of the isolated backcountry South. Suddenly the interstate ends at downtown Savannah’s lush parks and gardens draped with Spanish moss.

The city’s riverfront stroll is a soothing couple of hours, quiet, shaded block after shaded block of beautiful places that beckon at a retreat from the hard side of life. But much of the rest of Georgia is the hard side, both the rugged north along U.S. 76, and the dusty, wide-open south.

The people of the out-of-the way settlements many miles from Atlanta are the Southerners that Flannery O’Connor wrote about. O’Connor, the daily Mass-going Catholic who suffered from debilitating lupus and died at 39, crafted austere, haunting tales of down-and-out mill workers, dirt farmers, and hustlers and their fierce Protestant fundamentalism. She told somber, resonating truths about the small-town South. 

Sandy has family and friends near Atlanta. She made the drive a few months ago, down I-85 for 100 miles, then turned north on local roads. It was a rough four hours each way, the highway wracked by endless construction, the lanes narrowed into chutes, traffic choked with 18-wheelers.

The relatives are part of our Georgia connection. In 1978 we spent a few days at Sea Island on our honeymoon, before the place started charging five-star rates. Three years ago on our anniversary we camped at a state park on Lake Hartwell, the giant resort spot on the S.C.-Ga., border and had a nice lunch in Livonia.  

We should see more of the Peach State. Our daughter Marie suggested visiting Helen. It’s a tourist town done over as a Bavarian village and only a couple of hours’ drive, a short haul in that giant state. We’ve never been to Bavaria, or Helen. Maybe sometime soon. Then we’ll head down to Plains.

January 13, 2025

We looked down at a winter wonderland from the aircraft as it approached Washington’s Reagan National Airport. Back on earth we saw a winter nightmare, a panoramic view of “Snowmageddon” stretching across northern Virginia.

It was February 2010. We attended my boss’s daughter’s wedding in Florida, and for a couple of days enjoyed gentle sunshine and a side trip to the Kennedy space center. At home, friends and neighbors shivered in their homes, getting out only to shovel. Four storms, two of them more than 20 inches, fell on NOVA from December 2009 through February 2010.

Twelve years later, in Upstate South Carolina, a storm swept in from the southeast. The area had plenty of warning, schools and many businesses closed. It snowed through the night, thick enough for a while to block our view of the trees behind the house.

In the morning the neighborhood was silent in white. A chill wind purred. We heard the whine of tires spinning on the street as a driver gunned his engine on a snow-covered ice patch. Eventually he quit and walked away.

We walked down to the main road, kicking through six inches of white stuff.  Tire tracks showed a few drivers had escaped their subdivisions. TV news reported I-85 was snowbound, a few vehicles crawling, others pulled onto the shoulder and abandoned.

By mid-morning neighbors appeared here and there and scraped snow from their windshields. I found my garden shovel and plowed the driveway, row by row. The woman across the street was using a piece of wood. No one around here owns a snow shovel.

Around noon the sun appeared, the cloud cover broke up, showing blue sky, the temperature rose. Traffic churned the snow into channels of slush. Kids built snowmen and threw snowballs. By mid-afternoon patches of brown grass were showing.

The mercury slipped back below freezing that night, turning the slush to ice. In the morning it melted into sloppy rivers, splashed by impatient drivers into heaps on lawns. A large tent at the YMCA had collapsed under the snow’s weight.

This was the 2022 South Carolina blizzard, serious business for rural folks and for those who lost power for more than a day or two. But this isn’t lake-effect snow country. We don’t have Nor’easters, or those 100-inch snows of the Rockies and northern California that skiers love. I built a snowman and got a photo. Then it was gone.

Last winter South Carolina was the only state in the country to report no snow. Even Hawaii and Florida got some. Our daughter in Wyoming sent a photo showing four-foot depth from her front porch out to the horizon.

Fifty-plus years ago my New Hampshire college erected slat fences across the grassy quadrangle in the center of the campus and around buildings to hold the winter drifts. When the blizzards came the fences vanished beneath walls of white.

Last week while the country watched the news coverage of the horrific Los Angeles fires, Upstate folks anticipated a “weather impact day,” the phrase used by the local forecasters. Temps dropped to the upper 20s for a few early morning hours then rose in bright sunlight.

The city began shutting down, with announcements of closings: doctors’ offices, church services, civic and sporting events, and so on. School closed, but kids still had to get up and log on for “e-learning,” which deprives them of the snow days they used to hope for. I taped insulation around the outside faucets.

Friday dawned bleak and gray, the flakes began fluttering down around mid-morning. The afternoon was sloppy and wet, the temperature fell again into the 20s, damp and bone-chilling. We settled in after a final grocery run. We had candles, a camping lantern, batteries.

Snow fell for a couple of hours. Freezing rain fell into the night, coating the landscape with ice. Greenville made The Washington Post’s “winter storm impact” report with an 8 of 10 rating, which credited two to four inches, but really more like one to two inches. In the morning the street was a sheet of ice.

The weather reporters worked overtime, repeating forecasts in scrupulous technical detail that backed up looking out the window. The town stayed mostly closed through the chilly weekend. The sun rose, the ice melted a bit, then refroze at night.

Our little storm moved north, bringing power outages and hardship elsewhere. The California fires kept spreading, following the monster blizzards in the Great Lakes border states; and before that the devastation of last fall’s hurricanes, Helene and Milton. Some victims still live in public shelters.

The high melodrama of our once-every-three-year’s storm faded. This town got a one-day snapshot of nature’s jagged edge, a faint hint of New England or Chicago. The inch of snow and ice stayed for the weekend through the bleak January sun. Yankees and Midwesterners surely are smiling.

The South’s booming cities, like this one, have their pockets of need remote from downtown’s shopping-and-restaurant vibe. This spasm of winter in this temperate place lingers for the victims of life’s other traumas.   

The locals are back on the roads, back to the downtown shops, the fitness classes and church services. Suddenly the temperature dipped to the teens. Our winter is still our winter. Some here pay the price of endurance, of hardship. They still are with us.  

January 6, 2025

Sunlight beamed through the tall windows of Cosmic Rabbits Tea Company on the second-last day of the year. A man sat at a front table, silhouetted in the light behind him. Three young women and a little girl were at a table nearby, the women sipping their tea.

It was strangely warm, mid-60s, the shop door was open to the street. At the counter someone chatted with Tracy, who has run the place since she and her daughter Allie opened it on McBee Street eight years ago. Tracy says the name is a connection to the local Swamp Rabbit Trail, the asphalt path that extends 20 miles from downtown Greenville to Traveler’s Rest. “Cosmic” is tacked on, I take it, for the sake of off beat originality.

Their idea is that “tea fixes everything.” So, seven days a week folks drift in for a cup or two. Nearly all stay an hour or more.

Half the room is a curiosity shop offering exotic teas from various places, high-end knick-knacks, elaborately painted teacups, mugs, teapots and pitchers, kitchen decoratives, and so on. Walls are arranged with original paintings of landscapes and wildlife, along with old newspaper frontpages like “Man Walks on the Moon,” and a NASA logo.

A collection of non-working clocks, all showing different times, covers part of one wall. A shelf stocked with books and board games is set in back, next to two loveseats. You can sit and stretch your legs and page through old history texts. I didn’t see any magazines, no old LIFE or Time, or National Geographic, or People, which would suggest a doctor’s office and the impatience and irritability that go with it.

The place was quiet, as we guessed it is nearly always. Drinking tea is a quiet activity, whether it’s the black, high-caffeine yerba mate, oolong, formosa mango, almond moon cake green, zero-caffeine rooibos, or any of dozens of others. There’s no food. You show up, you drink tea. You sip and if you’re inclined, ponder the direction of your life.

The shop does have a website, featuring a quote from children’s author Aprilynne Pike: “As far as her mom was concerned, tea fixed everything. Have a cold? Have some tea. Broken bones? There’s a tea for that, too. Somewhere in her mother’s pantry was a box of tea that said, ‘In case of Armageddon, steep three to five minutes.’”

Tea is associated with good manners, gentility, serenity. We may borrow that notion from old British melodrama Those may be qualities we wish we saw more of in ourselves or in others. Or not.

We may drink tea because it doesn’t have the caffeine kick of regular coffee. I’ve read that one eight-ounce cup of coffee contains 96 milligrams of caffeine. The same size cup of black tea gives you only 47 mg, and green tea just 28 mg. We may drink it because we’ve read that tea can provide health benefits, like anti-oxidants, which lower cholesterol. 

You can get tea at Starbucks, but Starbucks isn’t about tea. You can’t get coffee at Cosmic Rabbits.

We were in no hurry. We walked in and looked around. Tracy was brewing a cup for a takeout customer. The guy by the window was reading a book. We browsed the displays of tea-related stuff and glanced at the oddities on the walls.

It was a slow point in a slow business week. I guessed business is better at breakfast? Cosmic Rabbits doesn’t open until noon, 1:00 PM on Sundays. Somehow Tracy and Allie make it work.

We sprawled on one of the loveseats. The late December sunlight filled the room. Pedestrians strolled by outside.  The three women talked quietly. I sipped my tea. Fifteen minutes passed, then twenty, then thirty. My 16-ounce cup was still half-full. The tea was hot, then warm, on this warm South Carolina day.

As I stretched my legs toward the sunlight, the year came back, the visits to friends and family, the goodness of the holidays. I recalled the New Hampshire forests, the rugged mountains of Northern Virginia, East Tennessee, and Western North Carolina, the warm sunlight of Hawaii, the scrub plains of South Texas, the chaos of Nashville.

Cosmic Rabbits is a kind of piazza, an urban refuge where life’s stresses and strains can be dismissed for a little while. We’re not in Paris or Rome or New York, where busy cosmopolitans will stop to drink, talk, laugh, dwell on the meaning of their lives, and dream great dreams. But in this inconspicuous city in the northwestern corner of a small Southern state, we can settle in at this quiet side street shop and think those same thoughts and dream those same dreams.

I thought of our adventures, trooping in the van around the country. Then too—it was unavoidable–of the sadness of loss, the trauma of illness of family and friends, of the opaqueness of the future. Then calls not made, letters not written, the rush of days, weeks, months that appear then disappear, obligations not met, promises not kept.   

I stared at the lifesize cutouts of Princess Leia and a Storm Trooper near Tracy’s brewing station. Cosmic Rabbit somehow reminds us that much of life is about imagining, finding beauty in the real world, making dreams come true, finding the good we can find around us. Family and friends are doing things we’ve never done. The grandsons are widening their horizons.

The serenity of the moment may be exaggerated by the seasoning in the tea, but still may carry us through winter. Somehow we don’t stay with the doubts. We can look ahead and find a promise of hope. Maybe there’s a tea for that.