March 21, 2022

Lent arrived promising spring. The sun shone and the backyard turned green, but the war ground forward. History is staring at us. We are reliving 1940, when the country didn’t want war, but Yanks went to England to fly with the RAF.

I went to an early weekday Mass. The elderly priest read the Gospel, then paused and spoke: “When things aren’t going well we always say ‘Pray.’ Maybe that sounds like a cop-out. But I don’t believe any prayer is wasted. They are answered, maybe in ways we don’t expect.” I heard him talking about Ukraine.

It is every morning, now for 25 mornings:  Zelensky’s and his countrymen’s nobility in the face of barbarism lifts our spirits, and we move forward. An HVAC technician came in to test the furnace and air conditioner. He looked at our dirty air filter, frowned, and recommended a high-tech air-purifier system for $2,500. I stuck his estimate and business card in a drawer. I then poured a tall glass of water. The nurse at our doctor’s office had called to say the blood she drew last week showed that my creatine, an enzyme that collects in your kidneys, is too high. Drink more, she said. They want to see me again.

In late afternoon we walked down the steep slope our street takes. A few doors away a sad-looking dog approached, Sandy petted him. The owner, a senior citizen standing next to his car, snow-white hair flowing down his back, said, “Hi, I’m Mike, my wife’s Lois. I used to walk this hill getting better after my surgery. I’d walk up, rest, then do it again.”

I asked him about the surgery. “Open heart,” he said. “I had eleven stents put in.”

I introduced myself. “So you’re Mr. Ed—I’ll remember that,” he said with a grin. “Well, that dates you,” I said. “See ya, Tom—what was it again?”

“It’s Mike. But call me anything, just don’t call me late for dinner.” 

We said hi to Mike again on our way back up the hill. I said his yard looked good. “I got a guy to take care of it after I got sick,” he said.

As we plodded on I mentioned that next week will be our one-year anniversary in the house. We said the usual things, like we can’t believe how the time has flown by. We looked at the front lawns along the block, most were in great shape. These people all have a lawn service, Sandy said. I answered that I’d never thought of hiring someone to cut the grass. “The service takes care of the weeds, too,” she said.

On the next street, in front of a stranger’s house, we saw it: a kind of low-slung chest with a sign taped to it marked “Free.” I stopped, Sandy stopped, we stared. The finish gleamed as if new—well, almost new. It was about four feet long. I noticed a few tiny dings. Tiny, but noticeable.

We had searched over months without much enthusiasm for some kind of chest or small table to hold plants. We looked at furniture stores, we looked at online sales. Then we gave up. The plants, the ones still alive, sat in vases on the floor near the back door.

I thought: I don’t really want something someone else is throwing away, something the owner now considers junk. Do we want to furnish our home by scavenging? Shouldn’t we be looking for a classy, beautiful piece, a shiny antique from a fashionable dealer, something we could pridefully show off to guests? But then, we don’t have anything else like that.

I thought about all that as I looked at the chest. As we cleared out our Virginia house I had dragged a few pieces of marginally serviceable furniture to the curb, hoping they’d disappear. I was pleased when they did. The homeowner who had stuck this chest on the curb probably had just spent real money on brand-new furniture and now wanted this thing out of his house.

We looked at each other, and at the chest. I walked around it. It was OK. And OK is about the speed we’re at right now. I had lost interest in slogging through furniture stores. Actually I’ve never had much interest in furniture. Not when I got my first apartment, not when we got married, not ever. Furniture was Sandy’s department.

“Well—what about it?” I asked. It’s all right, she said. At that moment, her heart wasn’t in shopping for furniture either. It’s inertia—you move into a place, spend lots of money on painters, plumbers, electricians, you arrange the furniture you’ve got, then rearrange it—then you run out of steam.

“The van is around the block,” she said. I set off for home. A few minutes later I backed the van along the curb close to the chest. It wasn’t heavy, but it wasn’t light. I spread a quilt on the asphalt and stood the chest on one end. Slowly I maneuvered it, end-up, around to the van’s back gate. Grunting, I lowered it carefully on its side and slid it in. I gasped for breath and grabbed hold of the van door and waited for my heart to stop racing.

I glanced at the house. It was still broad daylight. The owner probably was standing at his living room window peering out at us and grinning. Got rid of that junk, he was thinking.

I didn’t care. This thing would do for the plants. It had two shelves, where we could cram odds and ends. We’ve got plenty of those. We could wipe it down, clean it up. Some furniture polish might take care of the dings. Or they might be visible forever. But then—how much company do we really have? Who do we know who’s going to look at this thing and smirk?

I pulled the van back in our driveway thinking I’ll haul it in tomorrow. That’s what I did.

March 14, 2022

The rain fell, the wind blew, spring crept in around here while we settled into the new world of war. It snowed last week in eastern Ukraine. The news footage showed columns of refugees carrying children or holding their hands and dragging suitcases, nearly obscured by the wind-blown storm. They were the lucky ones. We also saw the bodies, casualties of shelling and long-range rockets, some covered, others lying where they died. The scene has been repeated, and repeated.

The news that day reported the temperature close to zero while the shells flew. Was this the way it was around Kyiv in the winters of 1941 through 1945? Here we debate the impact of higher gas prices. They are not the only thing to debate.

This land has been wracked by death. More than four million Ukrainians died in Stalin’s forced-collectivization famine of 1932-1933. Nearly seven million more, including 1.5 million Jews, were killed during World War II, when Nazis, collaborators, partisans, and Soviet troops massacred civilians and each other. The return of Soviet control brought back Soviet terror and a famine in 1946-1947 that killed one million, another half-million were purged and sent to prison camps. On December 26, 1991, after the USSR collapsed, Ukraine became independent.

In 1975, in the depths of the Cold War, New York Times military correspondent Drew Middleton wrote Can America Win the Next War? and concluded the huge Soviet and Warsaw Pact armies massed in Central Europe and primed to attack through West Germany might defeat NATO forces. The end of the Cold War and the stampede of Western businesses into Russia made the European war scenario seem dusty and quaint.

Putin’s assault on Ukraine shows he wants to turn back the clock. The hypothetical endgame then was use of nuclear weapons. It is again, today.

No one knows where this is going. The matchup of Ukrainians with Javelin anti-armor tubes and Russian tanks has produced a bloody quagmire. The wider war may come. Sanctions are pushing Russia into an economic stone age. The world could be dragged along.  

Last week James Grant, in Grant’s Interest Rate Observer, wrote that “in America, before the Russian assault, too much money was chasing too few goods. Post-assault, too much money is chasing even fewer goods.” He cited London Daily Telegraph columnist Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, who points out that “Putin has the means to cut off critical minerals and gases needed to sustain the West’s supply chain for semiconductor chips, upping the ante in the middle of a worldwide chip crunch.”

Evans-Pritchard added: “Furthermore, he could hobble the aerospace and armaments industry in the U.S. and Europe by restricting the supply of titanium, palladium, and other metals. If he controlled Ukraine, his control over key strategic minerals would be even more dominant … The Kremlin could unleash an inflation shock every bit as violent as the first oil crisis, with a recession to match.”

Aircraft builder Boeing has suspended its titanium contract with Russia’s VSMPO-AVISA, which is partly owned by the state conglomerate Rostec. The company said it had a diversity of titanium sources and adequate inventory. Reuters reports that Boeing obtained about one-third of its titanium from the Russian company; other major producers are China, Japan, Kazakhstan. French aircraft builder Airbus said that it would continue to rely on VSMPO-AVISA for half its titanium.  

Grant reminds that in 2018, when the U.S. sanctioned Russian aluminum producer Rusal, the consumer price index, the measure of inflation, rose by 2.4 percent. He adds that “Things are very different in this congressional election year with a CPI running above 7 percent.”

At the end of the first week we and everyone else tried to carry on. We went to the mountains for a 25-kilometer trail race, stepping back into a world I had lived in years ago. Runners focused on the task at hand, climbing Pinnacle Peak, the second-tallest mountain in the state. We hung around at the finish and visited.

The next day I spread one of those Home Depot lawn-care products on the grass then spent a half-dozen hours clearing the plot that last summer had been a garden. I dragged sacks of yardwork out to the street for the pickup guy. As I tugged on the bags the woman across the street waved. “Beautiful day,” she yelled. “Summer is here,” I answered. “I’m glad, except for the yardwork.” She said she and her husband hired a lawn service when they moved into their home. I wiped my perspiring forehead and looked down at my bags.

She said they would be moving to Ohio for the summer, her husband will be doing research at Wright-Patterson Air Force base. I wondered if he’s working on some top-secret project to upgrade weapons we’re sending to the Ukrainians. I said I’d keep an eye on the house.

Someone interviewed a guy from New Jersey who was volunteering for the “international brigade” the Ukrainian government is organizing. He had no military experience and hoped someone would train him to shoot.

The Grant predictions already are proving out, as prices for everything spiral up. The price of gas is now an American melodrama. Regular was above $4.00 this weekend in most states, diesel was closing on $6.00. The 7 percent CPI is out of date with the elections eight months away.

At this moment, in those frigid Ukrainian cities, men and women are shooting down Russian helicopters, evacuating women and children, digging trenches, making Molotov cocktails. They’re building tank traps, loading magazines, pulling victims from rubble, caring for their wounded and burying their dead, attending church services, getting married. They are teaching reverence for life in the midst of hell. Let’s offer a prayer with them, and pay for our gas.   

March 7, 2022

The Stoney-Baynard ruins fits oddly within the sleek tourist world of Hilton Head Island, South Carolina. The ruins, a hulk of the remains of a 220-year old plantation house and three outbuildings, stand in a patch of woods near the island’s southern tip.

Sandy and I thought a two-day jaunt down to Hilton Head would be a good idea. We had never been there, we’d heard good reviews. At the time we were struggling to grasp the cataclysmic impact of Putin’s 120 tactical battalions murdering Ukrainians and demolishing their cities, the unleashing of pure evil against humanity. The Putin tank and artillery columns were abetted by the MAGA cadre of useful idiots and fellow travelers, who meanwhile cheered a “convoy” of adult crybabies driving trucks to D.C. to protest vaccine mandates.

We thought we needed a brief change of scenery. Getting out of town to walk on a warm and quiet beach seemed the right thing.

Hilton Head usually is mild in late February, but not this year. We gambled on the forecast and lost. The rain thundered down sideways on the five-hour drive that should have been four hours, as angry clouds coiled above us. Shivering, we checked into a hotel at the northern end of the shoe-shaped island. Still, we thought we should see the beach. “It’s a short walk just past the pool,” the desk clerk said with a smile. We slogged out there, our jackets pulled tight.

On a sunny day the beach would have been beautiful to those who enjoy beaches. The white expanse stretched in both directions to the horizon. The sand sloped gently into low dunes that vanished into thick junglelike forest, no sign of the reckless development that produces the grim three- or four-story rental properties found at many expensive shore playgrounds. Here and there we saw markings of protected sea turtle nests.

Dark gray waves pounded the sand, the wind howled. We hustled inside before our teeth started chattering.

The overcast held firm the next day but the rain tapered off. We drove slowly south, getting a good look at the area, which is swamp-flat, like the rest of the East Coast from Virginia to Florida.

I noticed the Stoney-Baynard site on a map as we found our way to Sea Pines, a cluster of upscale neighborhoods and strip malls and a couple of marinas at the southern end of the island. The Sea Pines Community Association charges admission (private cars, $8.00) to visitors who long to shop and dine there. With the lousy weather, sitting on the beach was out. We paid the eight bucks.

We drove through the tollgate and cruised under giant oaks festooned with Spanish moss, which evokes for me Old South mystery and romance novels and the shady wealth of modern-day pirates and reclusive retirees. The houses along the quiet side streets were mostly hidden by tall hedges and underbrush. Yard-care crews were trimming, mowing, and planting, as if anticipating the drive-by gawking season.

The ubiquitous semi-tropical green was soothing, but the place prompted intimations of exclusivity I’ve sensed in similar communities: the Hamptons, Kiawah Island just south of Charleston, and Sea Island, Ga., where residents’ net worth almost compels them to nest in such places. Golf, of course, was everywhere, with warnings of golf-cart crossings nearly every block. Living in these oases of greenery offers a choice of hobbies: golf, tennis, visiting other similar settlements, and watching your investments. Bowling? Unlikely.

After some car touring we walked through the strip malls, but skipped the spas and the boutiques. We browsed through shops at the “Salty Dog” complex near the water. They mostly resembled the souvenir outlets at Virginia Beach or Atlantic City: racks and stacks of tee shirts and sweatshirts emblazoned “Hilton Head” or “Sea Pines,” ball caps, towels, the usual. Even in late February customers were lining up at the register to buy them, some folks wanted two or three.

After getting lunch we were about to say so long to Sea Pines when I spied a sign for the ruins. This place surely has some history, I thought. I made a U-turn and we followed the directions. We parked near two other vehicles and hiked up a narrow trail through a bamboo jungle. Around a turn, in a small clearing, we saw the ruins. Another visitor was pausing to read the historical marker, we waited, he moved on.

The history of the ruins is that Captain Jack Stoney, who fought as a privateer in the Revolution, built a grand house on the site in 1793 using a Carolina-unique type of cement called “tabby.” Stoney was killed in a hunting accident in 1821 and his sons James and John inherited the property. William Baynard, a local plantation owner, bought it around 1840. One yarn that juices the history a bit is that in 1837 Baynard won the property from John in a poker game. Union soldiers arrived in 1861 and the Baynard family fled. The soldiers eventually burned the place.

What’s left is part of the walls of the main house and some of the tabby-stone blocks marking the site of the slave quarters and overseer’s house, and the foundation of a structure occupied by the soldiers. Like many curiosities of dubious historical significance (to me), it’s on the National Register of Historic Places.

We stared at the remains of the plantation house. Another path through the woods led to the outbuildings. The other visitors had disappeared. We looked at the rest of the site then followed the trail, which curved through thick woods to a quiet street lined with large homes. We walked along the grassy shoulder under the trees. A woman with a dog gave us the once-over, no doubt debating whether to call the police. We nodded and kept walking.

Soon we found the trail back to the ruins. I reread the history of Captain Stoney and the strange end to his once-prominent plantation house. The clearing was quiet, deserted. The spot and its glimpse of local history rated only a brief stop. I wondered about those violent moments in 1865, when the house went up in flames. We paused. In that moment the images and sounds of Russian savagery returned. The silence and the soft feel of the green woodland offered a touch of calm. I thought of Ash Wednesday and Lent, the season of preparation and atonement. We turned and moved forward.

February 28, 2022

There is no purgatory for war criminals. They go straight to hell.

                                                            –Sergiy Kyslytsya, Ukraine’s U.N. ambassador

As Putin, the twenty-first-century Stalin, sent Russian tanks in a rampaging, bloody assault on Ukraine early Thursday morning, we realized that from that moment life will be transformed in some as-yet unknown way for Western civilization. That goes also for Donald Trump, who praised Putin for his “genius” and “savvy” the day before Russian troops started murdering Ukrainians. The stain of those words attaches to him forever. It is the stain of moral turpitude.

In the face of numbing tragedy, we push on with life. When the war was one day old I turned 73. At first I barely noticed. Nearly everything will change before I’m 74.

Some birthdays set the stage for big thoughts. The Washington Post last week ran a story about two women in Florida, identical twins, who just celebrated their 100th birthdays. They both looked great in the photos, and of course, identical. They’ve outlived both their husbands. I was impressed, as were others who read the story. They’ve lost track of more birthdays than me. They were 27 when I was born.

I’ve been making that same comparison since we landed in our new town. I’ve met lots of younger people who embrace their lives with energy and smiles, in the neighborhood, at the YMCA, at hospitals and doctors’ offices. I do that mental calculation, how old was I when they were born. There’s usually three or four decades worth of years’ difference. They’re all busy with jobs and kids. We’re in the grandstand, watching.

Birthdays at every age come with some kind of theme. Gifts, parties, cake with candles and funny hats, friends and “Happy Birthday” for the kids, maybe subtract the hats for the teens (maybe not). Later, adult beverages may be added. Parents’ birthday celebrations depend on what their kids think of them, and may get a little awkward, as in, what in heck is really appropriate? What do you give the sixty-eight-year-old who slouches around the house in a threadbare sweater and never wears earrings or a watch? With gray hair birthdays may get a little wistful, a little, or a lot more solemn, more portentous.

For the oldsters, life’s theme for a couple of decades has been: how do we keep up? We live uneasily in the kids’ universe, which we call “online.” “Kids” now includes the twenty-, thirty-, and forty-somethings and their children down to preteen. The text messages flow continuously, nearly every thought, decision, and act transcribed and transmitted. Making a doctor’s appointment or a restaurant reservation or paying a bill entails a text message at one or both ends. Awhile back I pulled out pen and paper and wrote a longhand thank-you note to someone, complete with envelope and first-class stamp. I received a thank-you for my thank-you—a text.

It’s the world we live in. The grayheads either adapt or retreat into the underworld of geriatric helplessness, when the kids step in and take charge of their lives. The frailties of aging are matched by the marvelous effectiveness of modern medicine, meaning we live longer with debilitating illness, never mind the costs. Then the dark side: still-young people, in their forties and fifties, even later, who had launched their children into the world and looked forward to getting some rest, now are drafted into caring for their own parents.  

When Sandy and I were first married and moved into our fixer-upper in the Vanderbilt neighborhood of Nashville, we charged hard. We sanded down and refinished all the floors and painted all the walls and ceilings. I talked to a plumber, and built a full bathroom upstairs, running the water and power lines and drain connections. Later we stripped old linoleum and laid down a parquet floor, tile by tile. I tuckpointed the chimney and built a brick patio. I installed and connected the power for vent fans in the attic. Then, with three kids, we moved away.

Later, at our Virginia place I installed a drop ceiling in the basement, built another bedroom, and put up paneling. We wallpapered, stripped wallpaper, and painted, over and over. I bought a kit and assembled an eight-by-ten-foot utility shed. I installed a children’s swingset, complete with concrete-anchored pilings. When the kids left I dismantled it. I built another patio, this one with flagstones. We planted dozens of shrubs and hundreds of flowers, year after year. I rented a tiller and tilled and replanted. We slaved away on the lawn, seeding, fertilizing, reseeding, refertilizing, weeding, watering, year after year.

That was then. I said goodbye to all that. When we arrived here we looked at a couple of “country” houses on big lots. We thought hard, and ended up with our postage-stamp-size front and back yards. I bought a shoulder-powered push mower. We hired painters and a plumber. We hired an electrician.  In the spring I planted some flowers and veggies. In the fall I half-heartedly tossed some grass seed around by hand. I barely pay attention to it.

What’s that other bromide about adding years? The one about experience fosters prudence and wisdom? Prudence, or patience, has to do with slowing down. Blood pressure may have slowed down, so heat isn’t rising to the brain as quickly. Tempers and passions tend to cool over a good dose of years. We don’t get as steamed up. We’ve learned from our mistakes or seen how getting steamed up just upsets others. And really what’s the point? The point, in our seventies as at any age, is to see the good in humankind, to extend to others respect, compassion, kindness, love.

The wisdom part is up for debate. As Biden called down sanctions on the Slavic butcher Putin, septuagenarian carnival barker Trump went dark. We reach out with compassion, but meanwhile know mendacity and disloyalty are distributed across all age brackets. If the exception proves the rule, we’re witnessing an argument for listening politely to some old folks, but locking up others.

February 21, 2022

The van wouldn’t start after it sat in the driveway for three cold days. Not even a click. In 45 minutes the roadside assistance guy showed up and attached his power box to the battery. I turned the key, the engine chugged to life. “Is that it?” I asked. “That’s it,” he said. “Let it run for a few minutes. Get it checked at Auto Zone,” he said with a wave and drove off.

This held me up from my trip to the Urgent Care to have three staples removed from my head that a nurse inserted last week to close a cut after a fall. Not a hard fall, it could have been worse. Head wounds bleed. I held a damp cloth against it but the blood wouldn’t stop, so I went in to have it looked at. The staples worked and I moved on.

While the cut ached, I sat on the sofa and thought about driving the van last week to a remote mountain park 40 miles from home and outside cell-signal coverage. An orange warning light popped on, I ignored it. The battery could have died out there, in a deserted field, in below-freezing temperatures.

 I massaged my head, recalling the warning light, stunned at my carelessness, my narrow escape. Eventually I excused myself, distracted around 5:30 by the evening sky, which still glowed pale blue beyond the bare branches of the woods at the end of the street. The lawns are still brown, but daylight is arriving earlier and staying later. February is slouching by. Dawn is chilly but the chill fades and by noon the sun is warm.

Gentle afternoons prompt cosmic thoughts, or pretentious ones. Last week Storyworth, the online interview program, asked, “Who inspires you?” Lots of people inspire me, beginning with authentic heroes, those who sacrifice for the welfare of others. So many, some I know, many I don’t know, parents, teachers, healthcare givers, first responders, military personnel, who lay their comfort and safety on the line for the innocent, the weak, those who now are suffering. The suffering are everywhere, coughing and choking in hospitals and nursing homes. Then too, Ukrainians are facing Russian tanks across three borders.

But then: inspiration grows from truth in the world around us. As I wrote for Storyworth, I’m inspired by Etienne Gilson (Gee-SOHN), the French philosopher, born 1884, died 1978, who probed the dense, argumentative thought of St. Thomas Aquinas, as the saint, in his Summa Theologica, confronted the profound problems of human life. His calling was truth.

Gilson was a historian and a philosopher, inevitably the two disciplines merge. Through his inconspicuous but brilliant career he wrote dozens of works of history and philosophy, in prose both simple and beautiful. He taught at the great French universities, Lille, Strasbourg, Paris, the Sorbonne, and at Harvard, Oxford, Toronto, Aberdeen. He explained gently, again and again, that Aquinas (1225-1274) was not just another name on a roster of the big names of Catholicism.

Gilson is there to lead as we stumble over the questions we all eventually ask ourselves: What is truth, what is the meaning of existence? Does God exist? Ultimately, for all of us in early 2022, on the brink of cynicism, disillusionment, depression, the question is: what is the point? Is there a point? Aquinas, through Gilson, has an answer.

Although ordained a humble Dominican priest, Aquinas was driven to study the great crises of history—not the “Catholic” ones, but the crises of humanity that endure to fascinate and torment mankind over 3,000 years or more. He looked to the thought of the giants of Greek philosophy, Aristotle and Plato, whose teachings, in the face of centuries of intellectual assault and indifference still define, more profoundly than any other, our civilization.

I started reading Gilson in 1979 when I picked up The Gilson Reader. My copy now is dogeared and ragged, held together by tape, nearly every line underlined or highlighted, filled with decades-old scribbles. Then in The Christian Philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas, published in 1956, Gilson attacks our cynicism with logic that is both excruciating and relentless. He shows us an end to doubt and ambiguity, as he draws us cordially and patiently into the misty intellectual world of classical metaphysics.

In the first sentences of his first chapter (entitled “Existence and Reality”) of Part I (entitled simply “God”), he asks: “how do we come to grips with the problem of the existence of God? The problem …  presupposes some understanding of what is meant by the verbs ‘to be,’ or ‘to exist.’ … [Aquinas’] concept of the real and of being dominates his metaphysics.”

Aquinas uses the Latin word esse, designating “act-of-being.” In English, esse is translated as “being,” which “comes to us in sense experience.” He then explains that any concept of God must begin with sense understanding, what we perceive in the physical world.

For Gilson, meaning for Aquinas, God is not an abstract concept or an idea, a glib notion of preachers quoting Scripture and promising miracles. He writes, “it is hard to conceive a [philosophy] more fully and more consciously existential than that of St. Thomas Aquinas.” He reminds that esse, like every verb, designates an act, not a state. “Thus understood, the act of existing lies at the very heart of the real. … it is what we shall later call God.” He escorts us through the razor-sharp discipline of Aquinas’ thought, always anchored in existence, a philosophy of optimism and beauty.

I recall digging out my copy of the Reader in grad school, my five years of night classes with kids (actually very smart people) one-third my age. I read and underlined and made it through the M.A. oral exam. Then I moved to other things.

The sun had fallen beneath the woods. For a moment I looked out the front window at the brown grass, already pocked with clumps of weeds. I remembered the next chore, spreading crabgrass killer on the lawn. Then I went out and started the van and let it run for a couple of minutes, just to be sure.