November 3, 2025

The trick-or-treaters lined up at the front door in the more-or-less ancient ritual. I quizzed a couple of them about their costumes. Many wore getups of video-game characters I didn’t recognize.  I dropped a couple of quarters in each of their bags. They looked puzzled but yelled “Thank you!” and ran back into the darkness. I could see the silhouette of a parent out on the sidewalk. He or she waved, I waved back.

We started giving out quarters on Halloween years ago, knowing many parents aren’t thrilled by sacks of candy in the house, even for Halloween. A couple of years ago, thinking of inflation, we doubled it to fifty cents. “Save it for college,” I say to the older ones.

Hard to say if it’s cost-effective, although it doesn’t matter. Instead of those bags of mini-Snickers bars, lollipops, and the traditional yellow-and-orange candy corn, I bought a couple of rolls of quarters. Twenty bucks’ worth would cover forty kids. On Halloween afternoon we’d arrange the quarters in stacks of two and be ready. In recent years we’ve given them out by 8:00 PM, when trick-or-treating is pretty much over.

Halloween has changed. Hardly anyone today knows that it evolved in a convoluted, obscure way from the medieval Catholic observance of Hallowtide, which recognizes the feast of All Saints on November 1, when the canonized saints are honored, and All Souls the following day, when those who have passed, but are undergoing purification in Purgatory, are remembered.

Over generations, the religious underpinning of the season ebbed away. Last week the Christian magazine First Things published an article entitled “The Death of Halloween” by Justin Lee. He speculated that when Pope Gregory III moved All Saints Day to November from May in the eighth century, the rites naturally merged with the ceremonies of an ancient Celtic autumnal festival called Samhain that marked the approach of winter.

In the U.S., the coming of autumn with its glowing, glorious foliage, bonfires, crisp cool air, pumpkin harvests, and family gatherings remains a perennially upbeat, happy time. A Greenville company, Seasons of Grace Porches, decorates porches and business entryways with cheerful stacks of pumpkins, chrysanthemums, cornstalks, and other signs of the bounty of nature. 

Some historians trace a connection between Hallowtide’s reverence for saints with the Samhain fixation on the “otherworld,” when spirits of the dead became visible and the gates of Hell opened, releasing fiends and goblins. People would leave offerings of food to placate the spirits. Young men would wear disguises and seek payments, an echo of trick-or-treating.

All this cultural reconstruction merged over centuries with the evolution of religious traditions of respect for or fear of the spirits of the dead. In the 17th century English Protestants banned the Catholic observance of “souling” which, Lee writes, prefigured trick or treating and jack o’lanterns. People carried lanterns made from hollow turnips, seeking prayers for the departed. Other traditions encouraged celebration and partying as a release from the dark preoccupation with death.

These days the parents who get their kids’ costumes on Amazon generally are clueless about all the ponderous history. Decades ago, when Halloween amounted to moms dressing their little girls as princesses and little boys as cowboys or firemen and dads carving jack-o’lanterns, that was all there was to it.

The kids roamed the neighborhood and brought home sacks of candy. They were footsore and ready for bed. Parents inspected the haul. In following weeks they would distribute the candy as a sort of allowance until it was gone or turned stale. And that was Halloween. On to Thanksgiving.

Some years ago, still in Virginia, we noticed that a couple in our neighborhood—didn’t know them well —did nothing to decorate for Christmas—no lights, Santa, or angels. Instead they went all-out at Halloween: lights, ghosts, witches, fake skeletons. The effect was scary, ghoulish, haunted. I wondered what treats they offered to the kids, if any kids dared approach.

Over time, although All Saints still is a Catholic holyday and All Souls remains a commemoration, Halloween’s religious content was replaced by varying degrees of vandalism. In the 1960s and 1970s teenagers smashed windows and slashed tires. In our neighborhood in New Jersey “Cabbage Night,” the night before Halloween, included egging houses, soaping car windows, smashing pumpkins, and laying yards of toilet paper on trees and landscaping.

Halloween riots occurred in major cities. The dark turn became darker with the slasher movies of the 1980s, which studios released around Halloween. The season became big business. You can find giant plastic skeletons, witches, and goblins for sale at Lowe’s, Home Depot, and Walmart in August. A while back a neighbor here kept a twelve-foot-high skeleton upright on his front lawn for most of a year, until the HOA made him take it down.

Right now, in this and in lots of other places, a single skeleton wouldn’t stand out. Yards are littered with fake corpses, plastic bones, tombstones, giant nylon spiderwebs. Some of them are genuinely scary. A few residents have mounted orange and yellow lights. They also have sound systems that roar and cackle.

It’s true, we live in a dark time. There’s an art to being scary, which you find in Edgar Allen Poe’s stories and Stephen King’s novels. I wonder if the front-yard displays convey some deeper meaning about our moment. Maybe it really is for fun. But the effect is grim. The meaning of Hallowtide, is lost, forgotten.

I did my part, giving my humble jack o’lantern a scowling face. It sits outside for a few nights before and after the big night, illuminated by a single candle. The trick-or-treaters walk by. It has not yet scared anyone.

October 27, 2025

They had to make the journey. There was no other way. The Pittsburgh storage unit was costing Laura $80.00 per month, a lot for warehouse space nine hundred miles from home. Laura and Michael came up with the plan: haul the contents of the unit from Pittsburgh through America’s industrial heartland to St. Paul, roughly one-third the width of the country.

Laura, our eldest, is the visionary, the idea girl who worked on urban transformation in Washington, San Franciso, Pittsburgh, New Orleans, and Medellin, Colombia. Younger brother Michael is a numbers guy, Johns Hopkins Phi Beta Kappa grad, winner of the JHU Math Medal, Penn M.S. in medical physics.

The storage unit rental made sense three years ago when Laura moved from Pittsburgh to Colombia, then New Orleans for a couple of research projects. Now, settled in St. Paul, hiring a moving company would be ridiculously expensive, more than the actual dollar value of the stored furniture, household items, books, and so on. Some of it represented sentimental value.  

She flew to Pittsburgh from St. Paul on Saturday. At the storage facility she took inventory and readied the cargo for loading. On Thursday Michael got the short flight from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh. He rented a 12-foot truck and met Laura at the storage site.

They left Pittsburgh Thursday afternoon, fighting the city’s rush hour to I-76, then heading north. They crossed into Ohio and picked up I-80 south of Youngstown. Michael has done lots of long road trips and for years battled Philadelphia’s rush hour across the traffic-clogged Commodore Barry bridge into South Jersey. After two hours, as they turned west on 80, he was ready for a break. They stopped for the night in Warren, just north of Youngstown.

Early Friday morning they were back on 80, skirting Cleveland and its suburbs. The Ohio Turnpike then is a straight shot west past Toledo, then 200 miles of Midwest farms and factories across Indiana. It’s still 80/90 through Elkhart, Mishawaka, South Bend, Gary. The big target is Chicago with its web of traffic-heavy roads.

They made Chicago about 1 PM Friday. Michael wanted Chicago deep-dish pizza. They avoided the heart of downtown but stopped at a famous place, Pequod’s in Morton Grove, just off I-94 near Lake Michigan. Traffic moved at about 30 mph through Chicago.

They pushed out of the city on I-90 past Rockford, then through Beloit, Wisconsin. The destination was Madison, site of the state capital and the main campus of the University of Wisconsin. Homecoming Weekend was going on. “No hotel rooms, not even a parking space,” Michael said.       

They pressed on to Wisconsin Dells, an hour north and found a hotel. The Dells is popular vacation spot, a chain of small canyons and precipices bordering the Wisconsin River. We stopped there in 1979. I can’t remember much, but it’s within a couple of hours of the Minnesota state line.

We all love the rich, endless variety of American countryside, as the song goes, the amber waves of grain, purple mountains majesty, the hills, deserts, forests. But the interstate is the interstate, mostly numbingly the same, Maine to California. Road trips can be fun if you avoid them.

For months we quibbled over the logistics and costs of getting Laura’s household goods from Pittsburgh to St. Paul. Shipping would have required her to trek to Pittsburgh, hire a mover, pack and oversee loading on the mover’s schedule. She would face the risks of damage and delays.

Instead, the brother and sister team planned and executed on their schedule. The costs of airfares, truck rental, hotels, gas, and meals added up. But the do-it-yourself route meant control.

Their journey prompted memories. I made the same trip in 1973 on leave between Marine Corps assignments. It started on I-80 in Jersey, then across Pennsylvania and into the Midwest. I stopped in South Bend to see a friend at Notre Dame. We caught a Fighting Irish football game.

One image I keep is U.S. Steel’s Gary Works along Lake Michigan. As I drove past, the blast furnaces belched toxic fumes, turning the sky red. Fifty years ago the Gary Works employed more than 30,000 people. The number is now about 2,000, as the U.S. steel industry battles competition from foreign producers.

The Great Lakes South Shore then was the home of the country’s great metalbending plants, Big Three auto operations, and other heavy manufacturing and machine shops that used to use Gary steel.

At Calumet City, Ill., just south of downtown Chicago, the highway bisects, 80 heads due west to Iowa. I-90/94 winds through the city along Lake Michigan, then I-90 turns northwest. Chicago and its western suburbs, called Chicagoland by locals, seem to go on and on.

I stayed in Madison for a few days, visiting a friend. The school’s anti-Vietnam war cadre was angry and aggressive. As I walked across the campus my military haircut attracted catcalls and curses. I ducked and hoofed it to my car.

Michael and Laura arrived at Laura’s place St. Paul at noon, bleary-eyed after 900 miles of interstate. Unloading took a while, the two of them maneuvering the furniture through the apartment door. Michael grabbed a nap. That evening they enjoyed dinner with my sister Regina and their cousin Annie and Annie’s boys, Ben and Jonathan. On Sunday they found a sports bar and watched the Eagles-Vikings game. Michael flew home Monday.

October 20, 2025

Ten kids, both boys and girls, went through their warm-up runs up and down the gym floor. They lined up to jump on a foot-high platform, then pulled on their fencing jackets and masks and picked up their foils.

They sat on the floor and watched as Coach demonstrated the “number 6 parry,” the maneuver for the day. He waved his foil in a circle then lunged forward as if to stick an opponent. Then he called a couple of the kids up to try it. They stood ten feet apart, left hands behind their backs, raised their foils, advanced, and lunged at each other. The foils made a sharp tinny noise as they clashed.

We were not exactly watching Tyrone Power and Basil Rathbone in The Mark of Zorro (1935) or Errol Flynn in Captain Blood (1935) or The Sea Hawk (1940). Well, not right away, the kids looked to be pre-teen at most. Our grandson Patrick, who was clashing foils with the rest, is about to turn nine.

Fencing wasn’t a kids’ sport when I was a kid, nor when our kids were growing up. We had baseball, football, and basketball. Soccer arrived later, two of our girls played. Now there’s softball, tennis, flag football, golf, lacrosse, rugby. Some schools offer archery. And, I just learned, fencing.

Fencing, a popular sport worldwide, evolved from man-to-man combat with swords. I read that competitive fencing emerged in Italy in the 16th century when Filippo Dardi started a school for fencing at the University of Bologna. Early fencing training focused on military skills. In 1763, a man named Dominico Angelo opened a fencing school in London to teach swordsmanship to wealthy young men to train them for dueling. He also stressed the fitness benefits of footwork and lunging.

In 1891 a group of hobbyist fencers set up the Amateur Fencing League of America or AFLA in New York. In 1896 fencing became an Olympic sport. A fencing club was established in England in 1902, and another in France in 1906. In 1940 the U.S Olympic Committee named the AFLA the national governing body for fencing in the U.S.

The Olympic competitors use the foil, a lightweight weapon with a small handguard to protect the fingers; the epee, a heavier instrument with a larger handguard; and the saber, a larger cutting and thrusting weapon. Foils target only the torso. The epee can be used to touch the arms and legs, and sabers are used to attack the entire body.

Fencers wear form-fitting jackets, underarm protectors, mesh masks, and gloves for the fencing hand. Girls and women wear chest protectors.

The kids I watched at Foothills Fencing Academy used foils. This was Fencing 102, they already had finished Fencing 101, the basics. The students sat on the floor in their jackets while the coach demonstrated the thrusting and lunging I had seen years ago in The Three Musketeers.

Older folks have seen or at least heard of the classic “swashbuckler” movies starring the greats, Douglas Fairbanks, Flynn, Rathbone, Power, and others. Less ancient films would be Pirates of the Caribbean and remakes of The Three Musketeers and Robin Hood.

Swordfighting isn’t seen much in the movies these days. Actors (and some actresses) who showed off dueling skills in films are now mostly forgotten. Robert Shaw, the menacing boat captain in Steven Spielberg’s 1975 blockbuster Jaws, was a swashbuckler in The Buccaneers, a British TV series in the 1950s.

My awareness of fencing has been limited pretty much to the movies and snippets from the Olympics. I recall a possibly apocryphal story about the last battle of the notorious pirate Edward Teach, also known Blackbeard, in the long-ago year of 1718. The colonial governor of Virginia sent a contingent of Royal Navy sailors after him. They boarded Blackbeard’s ship and attacked his crew of pirates armed with lightweight, whiplike rapiers.

The pirates wielded heavy cutlasses and slashed away at the sailors, who parried and lunged with their light weapons. When a pirate shifted his ten-pound cutlass from one tired hand to the other, the sailor he was dueling lunged and killed him with his epee-like rapier, which proved to be the superior weapon. The battle was the end for Blackbeard and his men.

That sort of oddball anecdote is pretty remote from Fencing 102. But then the kids lunged and parried, just like the sailors, just like Flynn and Fairbanks.

You may have missed fencing in the 2024 Olympics in Paris, but of course it’s on the internet. The competition was intense, with the athletes showing amazing speed, footwork, and grace. As partisan crowds cheered, Oh Sanguk of South Korea defeated Tunisia’s Fares Ferjani 15-11 in saber for the gold, leaving Ferjani with the silver. Luigi Samele of Italy won bronze.

Fencing for kids, and not just for kids, is light-years removed from historical trivia. Foothills holds classes five days a week, including sessions with the foil, epee, and saber. Student fencers can get private lessons and attend fencing camp. They can move on to more intensive classes and competition.

Fencing academies are teaching kids in big cities and small towns nationwide. The fencing club at a local high school is staging a meet next week. South Carolina Junior Olympic Qualifiers is next month. Events are going on for juniors, cadets, and veterans, including combined teams.

In a few weeks Patrick and probably lots of his fencing classmates will be playing basketball in the YMCA league. They’ll have to get to practices and games, on top of homework. Some will drift away from fencing. They’ll still be able to lunge and parry and yell “En Garde!” But then, maybe some will be inspired to persevere, put in the hours and years of training to excel. Korea’s Oh Sanguk should watch out.

October 13, 2025

An uncle suddenly passed, the last of six siblings. Ed McVey, at 88, outlived his last-departed sister by a decade, my mother, the eldest of the six, by nearly two decades, his youngest brother by 23 years. The obituary, created by his three daughters, my cousins, was appropriately beautiful.

Not long ago, Ed was playing golf in California sunshine. But a few months back he said, “It’s tough getting old.”

In the past year we’ve lost six, siblings, in-laws, cousins, all in their seventies or eighties. In nine months we probably drove two thousand miles to funerals and farewells. Then too, the farther you look back, the higher the numbers. There were more older folks, always closer to the end.

Then there are the heartrending tragedies, the young and middle-aged taken suddenly, who should have stayed much longer. An eighteen-year-old nephew, Rusty Hager, died in a motorcycle accident on Christmas Eve 2001. Ten years ago my brother Bob died at 59 after fighting hyper-aggressive cancer for six months.

We feel, even physically, the intensity of loss. Then the hospitals, the funeral homes, the churches, the institutions that deal with mortality, offer their procedures and rituals that for a moment distract from the pain: the viewings, the services, the eulogies. The rituals enable grief and support it. Things must be done, words spoken, bills paid.

The individual, the parent, child, brother, sister, in his or her uniqueness, then emerges. He or she creates or contributes to indelible moments in the life of the family in certain times and places. Death creates history. We look back at his or her place in our lives, how we or others were affected or changed.

Ed McVey grew up in the New York borough of Queens. He married Sue, a Long Island girl. This was around 1960. Within a week of the wedding, saying nothing to anyone, they packed up and moved to California. Ed didn’t have a job. They settled around Los Angeles. In time they figured things out. Three girls were born.

Over the decades he moved forward in his career in finance. He became a senior vice president at Franklin Templeton and, his daughters write, “lived with energy and joy.” He kept in touch with the East Coast family, he would call, we would call. My brother, sisters, and I all visited. In 2006 Sandy and I and our kids flew out for the wedding of Ed’s and Sue’s youngest daughter Holly.

Sue passed in 2011. I flew out for the funeral and offered a eulogy at the Mass.

Ed was a man of deep faith, who earned a degree in philosophy and studied at divinity school. He always had stories, of growing up in New York in the ‘40s and ‘50s, one of six kids of a single mother; later he told stories of the girls’ adventures, work experiences, the places they lived. He traveled often to Ireland and obtained dual citizenship.

Another Ed, Ed Kelleher, the father of a friend, passed a couple of years ago. I didn’t know him but learned something of the tenor of his remarkable life. He also was father to three daughters, and grandfather to six grandchildren.

Ed served in the Air Force and Air National Guard and for a while worked for the Pacific Daily News on Guam. For 32 years he was an editor for The Richmond News Leader and later The Richmond Times-Dispatch, and wrote probably thousands of opinion columns and news stories. After retiring he wrote stories for the award-winning newsletter of the Richmond Road Runners Club.

He went through difficult cancer therapies before passing at 79. On his obituary site a co-worker wrote: “he was a joy to work with.” Editor and Publisher, a trade journal, reported that “colleagues … remember a man who had an uncanny ability to focus on what mattered most at the moment, while never losing sight of everything else he had to do in the intense, deadline-driven world of a daily newspaper.”

He was a writer, but also created stories that always will be precious to his girls and others who knew him.

The so-called “Anna Karenina” principle about families lingers in the background of all of our lives. It’s the Tolstoy sentence, the first line of his massive classic: “All happy families are alike, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

The happiness or unhappiness of families is revealed in the lives of individual family members, parents and children, in-laws, aunts and uncles. The past year of loss brought us to that inevitable next stage, recalling the broad themes of lives through intimate details.

Sister-in-law Kay passed last December. Forty-five years ago I sat with her in a hospital cafeteria late on the night of the birth of our first daughter. Sandy was being prepped for delivery. Kay had just had her first child. We talked. It was a brief but a calming moment.

The years flew by. We moved away, we saw Kay maybe once a year. Twenty-two years later, on Christmas Eve 2001 we struggled with the agony of Rusty’s death, pain that still returns at Christmas. Kay became ill in early December, we jumped in the car. We arrived 45 minutes after she passed. Others who were there said she whispered, “I’m going to be with Rusty.”  

Such anecdotes are in their own way both intimate and eloquent. Families preserve and treasure them, and place them, maybe unconsciously, in the hierarchy of family history.

The stories of the two Eds echo infinitely in the histories of their families who, with all of those they touched in their lives, preserve them forever. We all are destined for our place in the memories of those we love, who love us. We look back at the lives of those now gone and see their place in our own lives in both joy and pain. We learn from them, and move forward.  

October 6, 2025

The two men sat in the truck, outfitted in their chest-high waders, watching the southern Idaho weather. The Teton River flowed silently and swiftly a few yards away. They heard thunder cracking and saw flickers of lightening. Dark clouds massed overhead, raindrops plunked on the windshield. A thunderstorm is bad news for wading and waving a fly rod. They waited.

A half-hour passed. The clouds moved east, the rain slackened to a drizzle. They climbed from the truck and moved to the bank, stepped into the river and leaned forward against the current. They eased into thigh-deep water, felt a cold rush, then moved slowly forward.

The younger man was the veteran. He had fished this spot, called Horseshoe Bridge, a dozen times, and others along the Teton. He had fished many rivers around the West, in Idaho, Wyoming, Colorado, Montana, California, New Mexico. He had fished in Yellowstone, sometimes hiking six miles to isolated spots where bears wandered. He had the tools, the rods, the cold-weather clothing, the knowledge. He tied his own flies, dry for surface fishing, wet for below surface.

The older man had never fished with a fly rod. He had fished as a boy with his father, mostly saltwater, back East. As a teenager he had done some bait fishing. Fifteen years ago he had taken his son on a fishing trip to Canada, an unforgettable experience. He had taken his young grandsons fishing once or twice, with no luck. Now they played sports and did other things.

For this outing he listened and watched for thirty minutes as the younger man coached him on dry land, demonstrating the fly-casting motion. “You use the weight of the line to carry the fly,” the young man explained. He missed a dozen tries before finally making a few short casts.

At a quarter-mile upstream the two men paused. Here the river was bounded by thick brush and woodland on the east bank, a broad pasture on the western side. A few cows grazed the pasture. The Grand Teton range, tinted pale gold in faint sunlight, rose to the east.

“We may see a moose,” the younger man said. “There are a few in these woods who have lost their fear of humans. They come through the brush for water.”  

He stared across the river. “The fish rise to the surface for bugs. You can see the little circles they make.” He stood still, casting his eyes upriver. The older man squinted in the same direction. He saw only the ripples in the current.

The younger man pointed out over the water. “There’s a fish, did you see it? Look over at that stretch of eroded bank. There’s a couple of bushes just to the left. Fish are breaking the surface. They’re feeding. Let’s try here.”

He opened his fly case and selected a bug and tied it to the leader on the older man’s line, using a clinch knot, and clipped the ends. “We’ll try dry flies. This is called a Parachute Adams. Fish rise for it.” He tied a similar fly to his own leader and moved a couple of hundred feet farther upstream. The older man played some line from his reel with his left hand, raised his right arm, and flicked his wrist to cast. The line dropped into the water about five feet from the rod’s tip. He frowned.

He recalled the younger man’s coaching: wave, or “mend” the line forward, drift, then cast again. Unlike bait fishing from a bank or boat, when the fisherman can toss his hook and wait, fly fishing is continuous movement. The young man had warned, “A bug in the water doesn’t make a wake.”

He lifted his rod, pulling the line back, and cast again. The wet line flew out maybe eight or ten feet. He mended, waving the rod tip up and down and let the fly drift with the current for a moment. No fish rose for it. He pulled the line in and cast again, mended, drifted, and cast. He developed a rhythm, sending the fly a few feet farther with each cast.

The younger man yelled, “Got one!” The older man turned and watched as his partner expertly played the fish. As it broke the surface the younger man raised his rod tip, pulled his net from his backpack and scooped up the fish. The older man waded over to look. The fish, about 12 inches long, flapped in the net. “It’s a brown trout,” the young man said. “See the speckle pattern?” With a quick motion he released the fish.

A few moments later he yelled again, and reeled in another brown trout. Again he released it.

“Let’s try a wet fly,” he said. He removed the dry fly from the older man’s line and replaced it with a Flashback Pheasant Tail. “This imitates a nymph that lives near the bottom. We’ll cast downstream and let the current take the line. It’s easier, less maneuvering the rod.”

He moved back upstream. The older man faced downstream, flicked his wrist and cast the wet fly at a 45-degree angle to the current. The line plunked on the surface and disappeared. He mended with an up-and-down motion, then let the line drift. He cast again. As he lifted the rod he felt a sharp tug. The rod tip bent. He felt it again. He raised the tip, feeling drag. “I’ve got one!” he yelled.

He reeled, still feeling weight on the line. Then nothing. The rod tip went slack. He kept reeling until he saw the fly. No fish. Whatever had tugged on his fly had shaken free. Smart fish, he thought.

The clouds moved back overhead, rain sprinkled the river surface. On the far bank a cow climbed down the bank and drank. He stared at the fishermen then wandered off. The older man focused on getting his casts right, wrist at shoulder height, quick motion forward, mend, let the line drift, cast again. He felt no bites, but it didn’t matter. The silence of the place, the swift-flowing water, the majestic Tetons mattered. The time with the younger man mattered.

The older man felt the serenity, the rhythm of the afternoon, cast, mend, drift, cast. The line drifted through the ripples. He pulled it back and cast again, then again. Why had he waited so long to try this? Why had he waited so long to do other things? You barely notice time passing, years passing, he thought. Make the best of it. All we can do, he told himself.

The sky grew dark, evening gathered. A gentle breeze rose. The older man watched the ripples and eddies take his line. He felt confident about his casting, now sending his line high and far, nearly to the center of the river.

The younger man called, “Let me know when you’re ready. I can do this all day.” The surface of the river had darkened, reflecting the sky. The older man felt comfortable tossing the fly out, even if the fish weren’t fooled. It didn’t matter. He looked up at the younger man. “I guess we’re done for today.” The young man nodded and pulled in his line. They turned and moved downstream.