December 13, 2021

Landing in this place, and it could have been anywhere else, brought along all those grown-up decisions about what’s next. The move to an apartment, the house hunt, then the mortgage, the move-in, left us dazed. We made our truce with the hard-right South Carolina politics and the “Lost Cause” culture that sometimes drags us back a century. We live in a state of perpetual amazement.

We knew the house needed work. We made that decision nervous homebuyers often make, look at the positives, stack them against the negatives. The quiet street, no stairs, gas heat, small, level yard, sold us. We met a couple of neighbors, they seemed friendly. Apartment life, after six months, was getting old.

In the first week we got a painter to cover up the odd mix of brown and pink that the previous owner, Miss Jean, had lived with for years. Then the place needed a new water heater. In stifling August heat we replaced the furnace/air-conditioning system.

At some point Miss Jean, or maybe the owner before her, had a small deck built outside the back door. Over time the paint chipped, the handrails cracked and loosened. At our Virginia place I built a brick patio. Eventually some of the bricks shifted, water pooled in spots after a heavy rain. But it was permanent, indestructible. Our deck now is on its way to splinters and sawdust.

We sat on the deck on mild evenings, but couldn’t turn away from the decrepit wood and popped nails. We laid down an all-weather carpet, trying to spruce it up. I guessed I could strip the paint and repair the railings. Really, no I couldn’t. I’ve acknowledged my minimal carpentry skills. Something about settling in a new home shouts, “Call a professional.”

Beyond the picket fence that marks the boundary of our modest lot and the broad expanse—close to an acre—of the lot on the next street, we could see, in the distance, the neighbor’s beautifully stained deck. Why didn’t we buy that house, I asked myself. Probably because it wasn’t for sale, and if it were we couldn’t afford it. So we looked sadly at our deck. It had to go.

The next step up from the deck would be a screened-in porch. But we guessed screens alone wouldn’t keep the rain out. Then too, I like the idea of an enclosed space that could be used year-round, with wide windows to admit plenty of light. We decided to go bigger: a “sunroom.”

We learned the difference between “four season” and “three season” spaces. Four-season means a new room. Three-season is screened in and popular in these parts. Do we need an expensive four-season room? The overnight temperature may drop to the thirties in winter, but it usually warms up by noon. Still, I don’t want to sit outside in a heavy sweater just because I could.

We called a contractor we found on the internet. The fellow showed up maskless, we asked him to put one on. He stared at us, we gave him one.  

We sat at the kitchen table, he talked about his company’s experience and gave us a brochure. We described our idea. He noticed Sandy was wearing a “UT” shirt. “Are you from Tennessee?” he asked. “I lived in Cookeville for a while. Great area.” I paused, thrown off by this. “Did you go to Tennessee Tech?” I asked, a tad impatiently. “No. I was working there. Several years. Liked it a lot.”

I steered him back to the project. He talked about designs and materials, then we went outside. He produced an expensive-looking tape measure, took some measurements and photos. We gave him our email address. “I’ll send you an estimate,” he said. He waved and left, leaving his tape measure on the table. We waited a week, then called him. The receptionist transferred us to his line, no answer. We left a message, when can we expect the design and estimate? No return call.

We called again a few days later. Nothing. Weeks went by, we threw the brochure out. We found another contractor through “Next Door,” the neighborhood gossip site. A young fellow came by. He said he was with a family company but now is on his own. He showed us dozens of photos of projects. We showed him the deck. He said he’d come by Friday with an estimate.

Around noon Friday I called him. “I’ll be there Friday,” he said. “Today is Friday,” I answered. “Goodness gracious,” he said. “I’ll get there 4:30.” He got here at 5:00. He brought a one-page description of the job, including double-hung windows, and a faint drawing. “My printer’s giving me problems,” he said. We squinted. But the price seemed reasonable.

He leaned forward. “You’re better off with E-Z Breeze vinyl windows than glass,” he said. “We’d have to put in studs for windows. E-Z Breeze is a lot easier to install.” We had asked for windows, his design included windows. “Maybe,” I said. “I’ll email you a new design tomorrow,” he said. The next day passed, no email.

I never heard of E-Z Breeze. We visited a local showroom. The material gives to the touch, like plastic you use to wrap leftovers, although stronger. The salesman rapped it with his fist. “It’s tough,” he promised.

Five days later we got the email, revised to include E-Z Breeze windows: $3,000 higher. I wondered why the first estimate, with double-hung windows, was lower. Does that make sense? He wrote back, yes, the E-Z Breeze windows are more expensive, plus the door would be $925.

We called another company, a big outfit with an impressive website. Their guy looked at the deck and off the top of his head quoted $45,000. “You’d save a little with E-Z Breeze, but an E-Z Breeze space is just that, a space. It won’t add value to the house.”

I thought I got it. The vinyl windows are more expensive than glass but easier to install—no studs, no sheetrock work needed. Adding value won’t be priority here until after we’re gone.

He took some photos, as the two previous guys had. We sat inside, he gabbed about local real estate. I sensed he lost interest in our project when he saw me go numb at the $45,000 quote, almost a quarter of the sales price of the entire house.

“Whatever you do, don’t hire a guy with two helpers and a truck who says he’ll finish in two weeks,” he warned.

He was describing the last guy we talked to. I looked outside at the deck. The railing nearest the house had split, part of it curled upward. I imagined a sunroom, then the E-Z Breeze room. Then I thought about what else we could do with $45,000. I’m still thinking.

December 6, 2021

In January 1977, Jimmy Carter became president. Two months later “Rocky” won the Best Picture academy award. Elvis Presley died in August. The Yankees won the World Series. Sandy and I met on December 4th at a church Christmas party in Nashville. It’s been 44 years.

It was a cold, drizzly day. I went to a movie with a friend that afternoon, just to get out of my apartment. The story is that I went to the party, hosted by a young-adult group at a nearby parish, because my sister wanted to introduce me to someone else. That didn’t work out. The rest is history.

Some memories fade and slip away, others never die, as in the Marty Robbins tune. We’re left with one choice: move ahead and find joy in the world left to us. We set aside the nightmares, the covid onslaught, the school shootings, the Trump cult’s assault on the Constitution. What’s left is to recognize our place in God’s creation, that is, the intense and graceful complexity of the natural world in which all of us, even the cultists, participate. The joy comes in setting aside our knowledge of evil and understanding our connections, the connections of humanity, with every component of life, which is nature, its scintillating beauty and danger.

I thought of all this when I recalled the work of an odd lot of great men, some famous, others now obscure:  Alexander Humboldt, the German biologist and philosopher, Charles Darwin, Henry David Thoreau, George Perkins, Ernst Haeckel, and John Muir, laid out in Andrea Wulf’s The Invention of Nature.

Humboldt led the way. His research in the first decade of the nineteenth century after five years of travel across Venezuela, the Andes, Mexico, and the U.S., led him to recognize the subtle connectedness of all of nature. In his 1808 essay “Views of Nature,” he described nature as a “web of life,” describing the interdependence of all living things, plants, animals, mankind. Darwin, in Origin of Species, went farther and shattered myths and superstitions about creation as he documented nature’s relentless pace of change.

Their work stunned the contemporary scientific world, and in Darwin’s case outraged religious authorities. Haeckel, Thoreau, Perkins, Muir carried Humboldt’s and Darwin’s teaching forward.  Haeckel, a disciple of Humboldt and Darwin, in 1866 invented the word “ecology.” Together they and others inspired the birth of the modern environmental movement. Perkins, in Man and Nature, and Thoreau’s Walden and The Maine Woods crusaded for protection of wilderness. Thanks to Muir’s nearly singlehanded campaigning, Congress created Yosemite National Park in 1890. They push forward, slowly, against ferocious opposition, awareness of the miracle of the world around us.

Humboldt, the obsessive, driven intellectual, made no allowance in his universe for mystery, for a reality beyond his calculations. Darwin struggled through life with faith, eventually rejecting Christianity and calling himself an agnostic. Thoreau believed in God but was indifferent to organized religion. These groundbreaking crusaders for understanding of the miracles of the natural world left no room for miracles.   

All this occurred to me as our life here along the southern Blue Ridge sped forward to that 44-year milestone. We resolved to think of it as one more starting point into the future. Then too, to see ourselves within the natural world around us, a world of forests, mountains, rushing streams and thundering waterfalls, small towns, and winding country roads. We see the elements of life in this place as Humboldt and his followers saw nature, linked not by accident but by mystery, the mystery of God’s work. So we took Saturday the 4th as a reminder that we’re moving forward, always, seeking joy in the world we see.

Changing scenery, even in small ways and even for a short while, shocks the system. Three years ago we camped at little Red Hills State Park in southern Illinois and at Twin Bridges State Park in northern Oklahoma, where the muddy Neosho River meets the equally brown Spring River. We spent one night in dusty Shamrock, Texas, another in desert just outside Eloy, Arizona. We got a hurried glimpse at newness and strangeness that somehow must fit the world we know.

We find good news. Jimmy Carter, still among us after all these years, elevated the nation’s moral stature, now under attack by enemies of science. We dodged bullets en route to the 44-year mark, like any other couple who gets there and moves beyond it. We looked back at a wild ride: along with four energetic kids, three moves to new states, hundreds of doctor’s appointments, job changes and layoffs, the passing of parents, the loss of siblings before their time.

We didn’t do anything special to mark the date last year. Restaurants were out because of covid. Two days earlier I had an MRI. That followed a CT in mid-November that confirmed the carcinoma found in a CT in October, just before we pulled up stakes in Virginia. Two weeks after the MRI I was in the OR at Greenville Memorial.

So Saturday, to celebrate, we stayed in downtown Greenville. That afternoon we walked around, bought some gifts, watched the Christmas parade, and looked at the lights and decorations. We had a nice dinner, enjoyed the evening and early morning, went to Mass, then headed home.

November 29, 2021

Because the Thanksgiving weekend is a benchmark for retail success or failure, stores deploy Christmas inventories, decorations, lights, and artificial trees in October, some in September. Two days out, we crawled toward the holiday by getting groceries and stringing Christmas lights in the afternoon chill.

We worked this year to salvage some authentic sense of the season, just the two of us in our place in the burbs in this northwest corner of South Carolina. The big get-togethers of past years still are problematic. Nearly one-third of Americans are unvaccinated. Experts have found a new variant, omicron, probably coming our way.

The idea of Thanksgiving as a day for family togetherness and good cheer, big meals, football, acts of charity, is still on the books. It recalls the elegiac Feast of the Pilgrims at Plymouth Colony in 1621, the start of a tradition eventually recognized by Presidents and official proclamations. A little research reveals that nearly all of the Pilgrims present were men, most of the women who arrived at Plymouth died in the first year. The local Wampanoag tribesmen who showed up outnumbered the Pilgrims two-to-one.

Many are thankful for the precious things, family connections, good health, and such prosperity as we may enjoy. Good health is a special gift these days. Some don’t have those things, we know that by looking around. We see, in this time of abundance, people who suffer, who look to the rest of us for a reason to give thanks. The U.S. Department of Agriculture reports that 10.5 percent of U.S. households (13.8 million) were “food insecure” in 2020. Everywhere in America good people write checks for charity and show up at churches and soup kitchens to serve Thanksgiving meals.

Years, no—decades ago, at our little place near downtown Nashville, Sandy and I were in the habit of inviting someone in the neighborhood, usually someone we barely knew, for Thanksgiving dinner. We weren’t doing anything special. We had room at the table. The folks we invited weren’t especially in need, just at loose ends. We toasted the day and ate and talked about everything, past, present, future. We then said goodnight and “Happy Thanksgiving.” Those brief hours were un-self-consciously full of good cheer. In time we moved beyond that as the kids grew and relatives would drift over. Now it seems so long ago. It is.

The power of Thanksgiving is, or should be, its sublime transcendence. We give thanks, those who do, most directly through prayer, which ought to seem self-evident. Give thanks for this or that—to whom, or what? The impulse to thank the Lord on some particular autumn day came from churchgoers, who understood that no matter how strong their faith, they still had to hunt game and work their rude acreages, as the Wampanoags taught them, to ward off starvation. Yet it was faith that brought them to that Massachusetts wilderness.

The years sped by, we stumbled into the mid-1980s and landed in New Jersey. Life got complicated. It seems, maybe only in my hazy memory, that the cataclysms of those years in business, politics, technology, everything else, distracted us about Thanksgiving, or distracted me. We bought our first computer in 1987 for $4,000, heavy as an anchor with a tiny fraction of the power of your cell phone. Just after Thanksgiving I visited a half-dozen stores looking for a Cabbage Patch doll. The relief I felt when I found one, at a J.C. Penney’s just as the place opened—indescribable.  

After one year in Jersey we landed in Virginia. Thanksgivings and Christmases then blurred together for us and for the world around us. The kids grew up and left home, the Thanksgiving ritual became a frantic scramble, one or two of them getting home, the others creating their own holidays. Retail Thanksgiving loomed. One year we all made it to our son Michael’s and daughter-in-law Caroline’s place near Philly. On Black Friday Sandy and the girls rose at 3:00 AM and headed for the mall. They were home with packages by dawn.

Around then we started seeing those news stories of long midnight lines outside Walmart and the other “big box” stores that led to fistfights over bargain-priced flat-screen TVs and video games, then riots and arrests. The spirit of the Pilgrims retreated to the high-school history books, maybe not even there. You can find something about it on Wikipedia.

We wondered last week about Thanksgiving 2021. We were looking at a quiet one. We called a few restaurants about reservations—all booked, we waited too long. We looked at the ads of local grocery stores describing their take-home Thanksgiving dinners: pick this “side,” or that one to go with a turkey breast, then show up at the store Wednesday to pick up your boxes of dinner for reheating at home. We passed.

I had a thought. An older guy, though probably younger than me, lives by himself up the street. He often sits in a lawn chair on his driveway next to one of those store-bought firepits, chain-smoking and waving at cars and pedestrians. We stopped by on a walk weeks ago and introduced ourselves. “I’m Steve,” he said, inhaling, with a faint smile. “Nice to meet you. My wife passed on in February.” A dozen butts littered the driveway.

I tried to guess what he thought about while he sat there, smoking and waving. Family? Childhood? How he landed in this town? He’s bounced around, Columbia, Charleston, a few other places. He said he has a brother in Missouri. He’s got some health problems, which I guessed have something to do with the smoking. We hung around for a while listening to his stories, then said so long. The next evening he was out there again. We waved, he waved.

I wondered if Steve would be free for Thanksgiving dinner at our place. He seemed to have time on his hands. I walked up the block and stopped in front of his house. His lawn chair was in its usual spot. I rang the doorbell and waited. A dog barked just inside the door. Then somewhere else in the house a second dog barked, a hollow, faraway sound. No answer at the door.

I waited, then rang again, then stepped over and peered through a window at the kitchen, barely visible in the late-afternoon light. The counters were cluttered with miscellaneous stuff, bottles, boxes, utensils. The dogs barked again. A woman walked out of the house next door. “Have you seen Steve?” I called. “No. Haven’t seen him in a few days,” she answered. “He’s usually sitting in that chair on the driveway.” I nodded. “Probably too cold for that,” I said. I waited a few more moments. He could be at his brother’s, I guessed. I turned and looked at the door, then headed home.

November 22, 2021

The Foothills Trail extends 76 miles across the northern tier of South Carolina, rising into North Carolina for one-third of its length. The end-points are Table Rock State Park in the east, due north of our place in Greer, and Oconee State Park on the western end, a half-dozen miles from the Georgia line. No towns, villages, or hamlets in either state are within ten miles of the trailheads. A few set-back houses and one retirement community lie along U.S. 11, the primary South Carolina access. Cell-phone service doesn’t exist. The midpoint of the trail is the middle of nowhere. 

I knew I had to run or hike all of it.

No, I didn’t. But the eastern terminus at Table Rock is only 35 miles from home, so I thought I would try. By August I had covered 47 miles, climbing rocky peaks, gawking at wilderness waterfalls, crossing rushing mountain streams. I scratched out sections from Table Rock to Sassafras Mountain and Chimneytop Gap to a place called Laurel Valley, off U.S. 178, for 15 miles. I then skipped ahead to cover the western 32 miles from an access point at Bad Creek, just south of North Carolina’s famous Whitewater Falls, the highest waterfall east of the Mississippi, to Oconee. These sections are reachable because they touch remote spots that allow parking along the few rural roads the trail crosses in Greenville, Pickens, and Oconee counties.

Because the trail is linear, covering it meant backtracking to wherever I parked. So every four-mile segment of trail covered meant eight miles of running/hiking. Eight miles of trail meant 16 miles. And so on. I got out of that routine in August when Sandy dumped me 20 miles from Oconee, the western terminus, then waited there for me. I showed up eight hours later and jumped in the lake. 

The middle stretch of about 30 miles, from Bad Creek to Laurel Valley, is nearly untouched mountain wilderness with no parking access. Hikers cross it by camping along the way.

For an old guy recalling a string of 31 (50 kilometer) and 50-mile trail runs ended in 2018 by a three-year medical detour, camping isn’t the thing. Neither is crossing the Bad Creek-Laurel Valley stretch alone; some vestigial sanity remains after all those doctor’s visits.

In September I contacted the South Carolina Ultramarathon Club asking for a volunteer to go along. No takers. Then Alex Papadopoulous, a longtime Virginia friend and an elite trail runner, stepped up. He’s the man for the job: among finishes in dozens of ultrarunning events, he’s completed the Hawaii Ultrarunning Team (HURT) 100-mile race 13 times. In September he finished a six-day 236-mile run in Wales. He flew down last week to haul me over the final 30 miles.

On Thursday Sandy humored us by dropping us at Bad Creek. In 6:30 AM darkness we took a photo, then headed up the short spur to the trail. Sandy climbed back in the van for a nap before heading to Laurel Valley for the pickup at some future time, which we all knew would be after dark.

The trail begins with exhilarating descents, then crosses into North Carolina. After the bridge over the thundering Thompson River we paid the fun back with a stiff half-mile climb, then zigzagged a gentle descent on fire roads and trails through swampy, jungle-like forest. The autumn foliage gave the trail a glistening edge, we kicked the ankle-deep fallen leaves.

We slogged, Alex staying with my snail pace, as we passed camps at Hilliard Falls and Bear Creek, moving north toward giant Lake Jocassee. We crossed Horsepasture River and Bear Gap, heading for the big turn to the south at Toxaway River, which like all these wild rivers, feeds the lake.

I kept track of the time, knowing the hours were slipping by faster than our progress. We rode a steep downhill to Toxaway, finally seeing the emerald-blue lake gleaming through the trees. At the north end of the lake the trail is accessible by boat. On the east side, the trail turns sharply south and upward, and upward again for an agonizing 600 feet to Heartbreak Ridge. We regained our pace on the downside, then alternately followed fire road and trail down to spectacular Laurel Falls, a faint sign of the end.

Now I was on familiar ground. I had been to the falls two months earlier, exploring the route west from Laurel Valley. We were eight miles from the finish, daylight was fading. Around 5:30 we lit our headlamps. The trail twisted through darkness, crossing a half-dozen bridges spanning Laurel Creek. We passed the four-mile point, then struggled (I struggled) up three switchbacks to a spot called Flat Rock, in all good humor. I gulped water and chewed beef jerky, scrounging for another spark of energy. I recalled the trail begins to level out past Flat Rock. I paused, sucking my breath. My mind cleared, I refocused, and tuned again to the mission. The golden leaves covering the trail gleamed in our headlamps as we kicked toward the finish.

The trail wound down through the blackness south of Flat Rock Mountain, we tapdanced over and around hidden rocks and roots, taking a recovering descent followed by another climb, passing the two-mile point. I had this last stretch memorized.  I led us down, around, down, around, sidestepping the leaf-covered stairs built on steep stretches for climbers, not runners.

We reached the bottom of the mountain with a half-mile left and climbed again, more steps, more descents, until the trail wrapped around the mountain once more. We rounded the last turn and saw the dozen-step ladder that dropped us to the trailhead parking lot. We bumped fists and looked around, then trotted down the quarter-mile gravel road, where Sandy sat, waiting and worrying. It was 9:00 PM, a finishing time of thirteen hours, 55 minutes. Alex drove. I stared out at the darkness.

November 15, 2021

“I’ll see you in three months, after the next scan,” the doc said. “But things are looking good.”

I was hoping for a six-month stretchout for the CT scans. This latest one was the 17th over three years, and they are getting old. Maybe he’ll go to six after the next one. But three or six, the drill is always the same.

The scan event was on the Marine Corps’ 246th birthday, the day before Veterans Day, which I wanted to celebrate some other way. First things first. A covid-symptoms interrogation at the hospital door, then check-in. “You’re getting a CT?” the receptionist asks. “Name and birthdate?” 

She handed me one of those radio-receiver discs restaurants use to keep track of people who have to wait for a table. Same principle. The disc blinks and buzzes when they’re ready for you.

All the patients are staring at their cell phones, aware the wait could be—whatever. Hospitals are short-staffed, but never short on patients.  A sign is posted outside: “Now Hiring Nurses and CNAs—Signing Bonus!” I brought a book and thumbed to my page. But soon my disc buzzed. “Name and birthdate,” the woman at the desk asked. Sitting beside her was the woman to whom I had just given the information.

She led me to a tiny office. We did the questions about current/recent health, shots, prescriptions (none). She pointed at a waiting room. A nurse asked for my name and birthdate. She swabbed my arm, jabbed me, and hooked up the IV tube. She handed me the two cups of water mixed with a solution that enhances the contrast dye. I waited in the outer office for an hour for the solution to work.

Done with that, a technician called me into the procedure room. “I’m Lauren,” she said with a smile. She pointed to the platform next to the scanner. I climbed aboard. She pumped the contrast into the IV, I felt a jolting chill, then sudden heat as it rushed into my bloodstream.

She started the scanner and slid me inside. I stared at inner core of the machine, spinning and flashing. “Hold your breath,” the machine ordered. Then “Breathe.” We did this three or four times, the CT scanner and I, working as a team. That was it. Lauren flipped a switch, I jumped up, thanked her, and headed for the parking lot.

The report was ready later that day. I keyed on the impression line: “no evidence of new recurrent or new metastatic disease.” That’s the upbeat story. Two days later, at the Prisma Cancer Institute, though, the oncologist looked at the fine print. He held up the report and pointed at page 1: “left paramediastinal bronchiectasis and fibrosis appears unchanged.” He nodded. “That’s always going to be there,” he said.

Two years ago the primary care and the pulmonary-critical care doctors in Virginia talked about bronchiectasis, a lung condition caused by 33 sessions of radiation bombing my chest, or “mediastinum,” the area between the lungs occupied by the heart, windpipe, and esophagus—the food tube—and thymus, which is where my real problem began. It pushed the kidney procedure, the “nephrectomy” out by a year. Another 30 sessions this year didn’t help.

He delivered the message, all systems look good, that is, “unchanged,” but this thing is not over. I recall my son, the medical physicist, telling me in 2018 that they never get every cell.

That done, we relaxed and talked about other things. Because it seemed like an obvious topic, I said I just got the covid booster. He asked about side effects, and said he hoped he’d get lucky because his second shot knocked him back for a few days.

I didn’t ask him what he thought of the school board in this fairly good-size town announcing that local schools would not serve as vaccination sites for children, although the vaccine now is approved for ages 5 through 11. Parents will have to hunt for it at pediatricians’ offices or drugstores.

A few days ago the South Carolina School Board cut ties with the National School Board Association over a letter the NSBA sent to President Biden seeking a federal investigation of reports of attacks on and threats of violence against its members over covid measures like masks. The SCSB said the letter “did not represent the values we have in South Carolina.”

Meanwhile, new cases are up 11 percent this week in South Carolina.

We moved away from all that, he refocused on the report, bullet point by bullet point. Heart, liver, pancreas, the rest look okay, apart from 72 years of wear and tear. I always like the note: “left kidney: absent,” as if it was out of town the day of the scan. The report frequently uses “appears” in citing normal conditions. Is it the TV weather-reporter shtick, the “chance of showers” routine that allows escape from ever being wrong?

He extended his hand, I took it, gratified we’re not bumping fists, which like my scan routine, has gotten old. “See you in three months. But call me if anything comes up,” he said. “Happy Holidays!” he yelled as he headed out the door. I yelled “Thanks” and ran for the exit.

The cancer patients in the waiting room, some of them in wheelchairs with family members, all of them with thick masks, didn’t notice me pass. Their minds are elsewhere, on symptoms, treatments, prescriptions, bills, as mine was when I was a daily visitor there. Some of these folks will not be having happy holidays. Yet it is a place of hope and courage. I know if I studied their faces I’d recognize some of them again in three months, still showing courage, still filled with hope.