August 25, 2025

Forty-seven years. I know people who have been married 52 years, a few even longer. We get up, I drink coffee, look at the news, we putter around the kitchen. We talk about chores. Same thing for years and years. Seasons change and disappear in a blur.

The last few anniversaries have been low-key, just out to some local restaurant. I might have picked up flowers or earrings, an old staple. Two years ago, at forty-five, Sandy asked the parish priest to give us his blessing, I didn’t know he’d call us up front in the middle of Mass. 

As with birthdays, the first few anniversaries are a big deal, maybe one through five or ten. For the first we went out to a nice French restaurant. For years after it was mostly just a day on the calendar. Everything else came first, work, commuting, bills, health, family issues. For us and most folks we knew, school and other kids’ activities pushed the months, then the years along.

At some point we started noticing again. For number 16 we splurged and went to New York. For 20 the kids treated us to a dinner cruise on the Potomac. For 25 we went to Rome—I think it was 25. We got into the big open-air audience with Pope John Paul II. We watched for a couple of hours, perspiring in the August sun, as he blessed marriages of about 90 couples. I read that later that day he met with Vladimir Putin. He had more energy than me.

Things got complicated. We took off on the 2018 road trip just before number 40. In St. Louis I got a call from the urologist, he needed me back home in a week for a biopsy. We kept going and got to Las Vegas the day before the actual anniversary. Las Vegas in August is hot as blazes. For the anniversary I sat in the hotel’s air-conditioned lobby, Sandy played the cheap slots. We flew home.

Couples, not just us, put all these things together. They scramble to make the family work, the budgeting, kids’ birthdays, the college applications, acceptances and rejections, the frantic Thanksgiving and Christmas planning, the relatives’ melodrama, the trauma and horror of the death of a young nephew. It happens to single people, to everyone. 

How it works, as every couple knows, is a mystery. You meet, go out on dates, you decide you’re in love, you talk to the parents, have a wedding, big or small. We went small. Occasionally we pull out the wedding album, although wedding photos are scattered in books, old envelopes, bottom drawers. The guest list now is a necrology, so many who were there are gone.

Part of progress in getting to the wedding, and later to the anniversaries, is getting to know the person you’re with. These days that may go on for years. Six months ago the young woman across the street showed us her fabulous engagement ring. The planned big day? Not decided. Last week we asked again. No date yet, and she was fine with that. Still getting to know each other, I guessed. Leaving room for second thoughts. 

We have friends, and a daughter and son-in-law, who started dating in high school and stayed on track through their weddings and many anniversaries, without ever thinking about anyone else. They just knew.

After all, what do you want out of life? Love, in some way of defining it. Kindness, generosity, humanity. Patience is a big plus. Willingness to tolerate faults, to accept apologies over and over, to forgive shortcomings and smile. Wisdom, in a word, a sense of the truth about life with another imperfect person, which brings one closer to the Almighty.

So we went out for two months and got engaged in January ‘78. We guessed we knew enough about each other, it just made sense. The wedding was seven months later. Two months after that we were sitting with her dad at her folks’ place on a Friday night watching the Yankees and Dodgers play game three of the World Series. The Yankees won 5-1.

After the game, and it was late and raining, we drove down to an Alabama state park for a camping trip. We put up our tent at midnight in the rain. Somehow that weekend stays with me. I remember the wet sleeping bags, the muddy hike the next day. The sun came out, the fall foliage around the lake was brilliant. It was and is a kind of dream.

About 15 years ago, on annual trips to Tennessee, we’d drive down to visit the priest who married us. He had moved from Nashville to Oak Ridge to Lawrenceburg. We’d have lunch and talk about old times. I recalled that at the wedding he couldn’t resist giving his usual pitch to the visitors on the history of St. Mary’s, the first Catholic church in the state. He smiled. Along with the humor he talked about faith.

He was from Memphis, an old-school guy. He also was our connection to that happy, exciting time, the wedding, our first daughter’s baptism. But we noticed he was slowing down. Ten years ago I flew down for his funeral. Most of the diocesan priests were there. The bishop presided. He talked about faith, love, perseverance, Father B’s legacy and lesson.

I think we picked up on all that, if not from the start, then soon after, or maybe years later. We slogged through the relocations, the layoffs, the job searches, the chaotic years of freelance work, the loss of parents and siblings, the scary ER visits and hospitalizations, the surgeries, the cancer.  

We held our breath and watched the anniversaries keep coming. You hang together, haunted by time, the years rushing by, while you work together to figure out the next step, then the one after that. Folks ask how long it’s been. Forty-seven seems like a long time since that hot August day. The plan is still simple: Keep going.

August 18, 2025

We were in Westminster, Maryland, for just a few hours to honor a giant. Alan, a leader of men and women who love mountains, had just left us. Hundreds of friends and admirers showed up at a memorial service in his hometown, tucked just below the Pennsylvania state line.

We didn’t hesitate to make the trip. Alan was a tough guy, tough by being gentle, soft-spoken.  He wasn’t an everyday friend, but for years I saw him three for four times a year. A Maryland native, a craftsman with wood, he spent lots of time in Virginia’s mountains. He ran long trail races and did other hard physical things, but smiled at strangers, offered good words to anyone. His life defined kindness, serenity, peace.

We took a new route, I-85 to I-77, which extends north from Charlotte to Wytheville, Virginia, the turn point onto I-81. The Viriginia welcome center host sold us on detouring through Hillsville to visit the Rock Hill General Store on U.S. 100. We passed through Hillsville, found the place and walked through the eclectic offerings of tools, souvenirs, hard candy, along with a tour busload of old folks. We passed on the free soda.

Route 100, the detour back to I-81, winds through another of Virginia’s many stretches of woods and pastures separated by a few fundamentalist churches and gas stations. We sped through Sylvatus and Barren Springs and crossed the New River, at a point before it widens and quickens into white water. The pretty, empty country refreshed us after the interstate truck grind from Charlotte.

Traffic crawled through Harrisonburg up through New Market, a rural rush hour. We exited at Mount Jackson-Bayse onto U.S. 11, which passes through familiar places, Woodstock and Edinburg, Toms Brook, venerable, pretty spots in the shadow of the Massanutten Ridge. We visited with friends Pat and Mike at their farmhouse in Strasburg, just off the Shenandoah North Fork. From their kitchen window they look out at the dark silhouette of 2,000-foot Signal Knob, the northern tip of the range.

On the first morning a few folks from the old Virginia running group gathered at the base of the mountain and set off on the trail, which curls up for four miles in switchbacks more rock than soil. The fast young people sprinted ahead. At the summit I caught my breath and stared north and west at the panorama of farmland out to the West Virginia peaks.

The gravelly fire road dropped steeply into thick Virginia forest. No sound broke the serenity. After a mile the road intersects the narrow Tuscarora trail, which winds, littered with Massanutten rocks, up the western ridge. I breathed hard. At the top arrows on a worn signpost gave directions. I skipped down for four miles and finished alone.

The climb had been planned, but the gasping, out-of-breath scramble over endless boulders seemed somehow the right gesture at the time of our farewell to Alan. He would have been there, had been there many times, on the hard paths of this mountain range and countless others.

Westminster is tucked in farm country hard by the Pennsylvania border. No major roads reach there. The place is known, oddly, as the site of the famous, or infamous farm of Whittaker Chambers. In the darkness of the 1930s Chambers was a member of the American Communist Party. Years later he rejected communism and in August 1948 publicly accused high-ranking State Department official Alger Hiss of being a Soviet spy.

Initially no one believed Chambers. He produced documents he had hidden in a pumpkin on his Westminster farm. The documents, dubbed the “Pumpkin Papers,” incriminated Hiss. He was convicted of perjury in January 1950, and served nearly four years in prison.

All that aside, we navigated into Loudon County through traffic-choked Leesburg to the Point of Rocks bridge on U.S 15, which took us to Frederick. From there we guessed our way, groping northwest out into farm country, passing miles of corn, pastures, barns, through Woodsboro, New Midway, and Ladiesburg to Keymar, then east to the fringe of Westminster.

The place is near the Hashawa Hills Bear Branch Nature Center, where Alan and his family and friends spent lots of time. He put on a trail running event at Hashawa in February, when winter in Westminster gets cold, with deep snow. In 2015, when I showed up, it was -5F.

The service was wrapping up but we met with Pam and friends, many young guys and gals and their kids, community folks. Then some with as many decades as ourselves. Paul, Greg, Anstr, Quatro, Kevin had stayed into the last few moments. We talked a bit in recollection, which is what happens at these meetings, but also of new things, plans, work life. Everyone looked well. We browsed the photos which did justice to Alan, his family, and his life.

Slowly, folks made their way to the parking lot and back through the winding green byways of Carroll County. We could have avoided “historic” Westminster, but we plowed through the quiet streets of frame rowhouses and gorgeous Victorians. A fountain ringed by benches and lovely oaks centered Westminster City Park. We parked, I walked a bit through the small-town peacefulness. It seemed to summon thoughts of Alan.

We bore down on the roads, avoiding Frederick, tacking southwest into the maw of Greater Washington. I saw signs for Montgomery County, the nexus of Maryland’s most affluent D.C. suburbs, also of intensely gridlocked traffic, which is I-270. We paused before falling into the Sunday afternoon rush hour. Traffic crawled eventually across the Cabin John Bridge.

Our sojourn into the serenity of pastoral Maryland, just south, really from Hanover, Pennsylvania, came to an abrupt end. We looked back with a bit of regret, it had been too quick, somber yet full of meaning. A good man left us. He brought people to gather in beautiful, quiet places, greet each other with warmth, talk of hopeful things, and move forward.

August 11, 2025

They say when you marry into a Southern family you won’t know what to expect. Who said that? Maybe just me. But the LP record collection—the music of Beethoven, Mozart, Bach, Haydn, Lizt, Verdi, Chopin, Paganini, Rachmaninoff, Rimsky-Korsakov, Tchaikovsky—now is sitting in a cabinet in our living room. It was Laura’s music. That I didn’t expect.   

My wife Sandy’s mother, Laura French Harper, grew up in Cowan in Franklin County, in south-central Tennessee, near the Alabama line. Cowan did not and does not look at all like Andy Griffith’s Mayberry. There’s the one main street, a post office, a railroad museum, a couple of churches. There’s no supermarket. There are the out-of-business stores and the shut-down shoe factory.

There’s not much work, and hasn’t been for years. Young people have moved to Nashville or Chattanooga or Huntsville, or at least Winchester, the county seat. Residents are mostly retired people. 

I look back in time, more than 90 years. Life in small Southern places was hard, the Depression made it harder. Laura’s father, Sandy’s grandfather, left home looking for work, for a while he was in Alaska. Like a lot of young people in that time and place, Laura didn’t finish high school. She dropped out and picked cotton in fields outside town.

William, her future husband, left Winchester Central High School (now Franklin County High) at 17, before graduating, to join the Navy. He and Laura got married in 1947. He was 20, she was 19. They settled in Cowan.

They had six kids, three boys and three girls. William worked as an electrician, putting in long shifts at a local plant and picking up extra work around the county. Laura stayed home and kept house and cared for the kids, which is what was done back then.

The years flew by. The six kids grew up and left home, the boys joined the service. The two older girls, Lynn and Kay, moved to Nashville, got jobs, and got married. Sandy graduated from Middle Tennessee State and moved to Nashville, where we met. Soon Laura was a grandmother, eventually a great-grandmother.

In the 1950s Laura tuned the living-room radio to WZYX in Cowan for the twanging, forlorn tunes of the country music pioneers, Hank Williams, Roy Acuff, Ernest Tubbs, and so on. As a Baptist, she loved gospel pieces like “Old Rugged Cross.” When she left the house the kids would switch the radio to a pop music station, then quickly turn it back when mom returned. To this day Sandy won’t listen to country.

But then at some point the kids started hearing something else: the sweet, majestic, soaring music of Beethoven, Rimsky-Korsakov, Tchaikovsky. Lynn, the oldest daughter, says Laura began playing classical music when she, Lynn, was about 10. Sandy would have been six.

Time overcomes memory. Sandy only guesses how her mother grew to love the great composers. By pinching pennies Laura found the dollars to purchase the records, probably by mail order or at flea markets. She bought recordings of music’s immortal works: Dvorak’s Carnival Overture Op.92; Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 4 in F-Minor, 1812 Overture, and Slavonic March Op. 21; Beethoven’s Concerto No. 5 in E-Flat Major and his nine symphonies; Chopin’s Preludes and Waltzes; Verdi’s Requiem, dozens more.

The recordings include performances by the London Symphony Orchestra, Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, New York Philharmonic, Concertgebouw Orchestra of Amsterdam, Berlin Philharmonic, and artists including Arthur Rubinstein, Van Cliburn, Leonard Pennario, conductors Andre Previn, Leonard Bernstein, Herbert Von Karajan, Kiril Kondrashin, others.

At certain hours of the day in the Harper household, the guitar and fiddle plucking on WZYX and the Grand Ole Opry broadcast on WSM-Nashville went silent, replaced by the soaring sound of Beethoven and other great artists.

When we met 48 years ago, Sandy invited me for dinner. When I arrived the sweet sound of Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Scheherazade” filled the apartment. Her mom’s love of beautiful music stayed with her.

In the early 1980s the plant where William worked closed, the company moved to Cape Girardeau, Missouri. William wouldn’t relocate to keep his job. He and Laura sold the Cowan home and moved to Nashville.

When our son Michael began studying piano in elementary school, Laura gave him a stack of classical LP records. I didn’t pay much attention. Michael bought some of his own, and listened to them on an old turntable into his high school years. He went off to Johns Hopkins, then Penn for grad school. The music went silent. The record collection remained in a box in his room.

After grad school Michael settled near Philly. We shipped the piano to his home. Occasionally we used an old turntable, a gift from a neighbor, to play movie soundtracks, pop, sometimes country, Willie Nelson, Marty Robbins, that kind of thing.

William died in 1998. Laura spent her last years quietly in the Nashville house. She did come to our kids’ weddings, Michael’s in Pennsylvania, Marie’s in Virginia. She passed in 2014.

For more than twenty years the classical record collection sat untouched. When we sold the house and moved, we packed up the box and took it along. We stacked the records in a cabinet in the living room.

I browsed through the LPs. Some are single recordings, others are series of three or four performances. The cardboard envelopes of some, Laura’s favorites, are worn and dogeared. We bought a turntable. The gorgeous sounds filled the room.

I had learned something about Laura. Somehow in her hard life of homemaking, raising six kids, and worrying about money, she let her heart soar above the small-town Southern universe of honky-tonk country and scratchy gospel pieties, to love the rhythm and resonance of the world’s greatest music. It was, in that way, Laura’s music.

August 4, 2025

I put down David McCullough’s 992-page biography of Harry Truman with a deep breath. The final paragraph reports that “he had lived eighty-eight years and not quite eight months. Truman’s wife Bess lived at 219 North Delaware for another ten years. She died there on October 18, 1982 and was buried beside him in the courtyard of the Truman Library.”

The house at 219 North Delaware, Independence, Missouri, is the Truman house. In 1903 Bess Wallace and her mother and brothers moved in with her grandparents after her father committed suicide. When Bess and Harry married they moved in with Bess’s mother. The house was Harry’s Independence home until he died on December 26, 1972 at a Kansas City hospital.

Three years ago we stopped in Independence on our road trip to Wyoming. We camped out after a long day on the interstate. The next morning we visited the Truman Library, for which Truman spent five years raising funds after his one full term as president ended in 1952. The Library was dedicated on July 6, 1957.

The Truman Library is one of America’s wonders. It tells the story of a humble man, born in rural Missouri in 1884, who failed as a farmer, failed as a businessman, did not go to college, yet became one of the nation’s great presidents.

Truman grew up in Independence and Grandview, Missouri. In 1901 he applied for admission to West Point but was rejected because of poor eyesight. His father’s farm failed, he worked trying to save it. He joined the Missouri National Guard, getting in by memorizing the eye-test chart. In World War I he commanded an artillery battery in France, and met a nephew of Tom Pendergast, a Kansas City political boss.

Harry and Bess married in June 1919. A month before the wedding an Army buddy got the idea of opening a men’s clothing store. Harry put up $15,000 by selling farm livestock. The place opened in November. It failed in November 1922, $35,000 in the red. Fifteen years later Harry was still paying off his creditors.

Even before the store closed, Pendergast drafted him to run for election as a judge in Jackson County, although he didn’t have a law license. Harry won and took office on New Year’s Day 1923. In February 1924 Bess’s and Harry’s daughter Margaret was born. Harry was happy.  McCullough writes that “he loved being called ‘Judge.’” 

In 1934, when kingmaker Pendergast looked to back a candidate for U.S. Senator, Harry was his fourth choice. He campaigned hard through 100-degree temperatures of the 1934 summer. Two other Democrats ran in the primary, all three trading charges of corruption and patronage. Truman won. In the general election, in the solid Democratic state he won in a walk. 

In the Senate, after a slow start, Truman made a name for himself heading a committee that investigated fraud in the defense industry. He won reelection in 1940, swept along by President Franklin Roosevelt’s and the New Deal’s popularity.

Then Truman’s real story began. At the start of Roosevelt’s 1944 campaign, his fourth, Democratic kingpins booted Vice President Henry Wallace from the ticket. They judged the junior senator from Missouri the least bad choice. Truman insisted he didn’t want it. Roosevelt, on the phone, told his political people to get Truman on board.

Truman, the hardscrabble dirt farmer and small-town politician and Roosevelt, wealthy New York aristocrat, already president for twelve years, could not be more different. They had met briefly once or twice. After the election Truman barely saw Roosevelt. Then suddenly on April 12, 1945, 82 days after the inauguration, Roosevelt was gone. Truman was president.

It was the man from Independence who led the country through the gathering darkness of the Cold War. In late July he met with Stalin and Churchill at Potsdam in Germany to discuss the future of Europe, while the Soviet army held Eastern Europe. At Potsdam, which divided Germany into allied and Soviet zones, Truman grasped the reality of Soviet intentions.

On August 6, four days after Potsdam ended, an American bomber dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima. After the second A-bomb on Nagasaki, the war was over.

When he took office in April Truman had heard only vaguely about the Manhattan Project. He made the decision to drop the bomb based on estimates of 4 million American and 5 million Japanese casualties in an invasion of Japan. He said, “it was done to save 125,000 youngsters on the U.S. side and 125,000 on the Japanese side from getting killed and that is what it did.”

In April 1948 Truman established the Marshall Plan to provide emergency assistance to Western Europe. In three years the U.S. sent more than $13 billion in aid. In June 1948 Soviet troops blocked road and rail access to Berlin. Truman ordered resupply by air, the Berlin Airlift. In nearly a year the allies conducted more than 278,000 flights carrying food and fuel to Berlin. The Soviets called off the blockade in May 1949.

The 1948 election looked hopeless for the Democrats. The experts predicted a Republican landslide for Thomas Dewey. It seemed only Truman believed in Truman. He made a cross-country train tour, speaking to millions, defending the New Deal: Social Security, universal health care, minimum wage. He blasted Dewey as the rich man’s candidate. Election day showed the polls were wrong, the people voted Truman a full term. 

In June 1950 North Korea invaded South Korea. While the McCarthy “Red Scare” raged at home, Truman sent American troops, 90 percent of the U.N. task force. When Communist Chinese forces attacked in October, U.N. troops were forced to retreat. Supreme Far East Commander Gen. Douglas MacArthur urged attacking China with atomic bombs and ignored Truman’s orders. On April 11, 1951, Truman fired MacArthur, setting off a firestorm of protest.

Truman survived an assassination attempt in November 1950. He survived shady dealings by staff people and the McCarthy slanders. But in 1952 he decided not to run again. He tried to persuade Dwight Eisenhower to run as a Democrat. Instead, Eisenhower ran as a Republican and won in a landslide. During his campaign he declined to disavow McCarthy. Truman saw him for what he was: a politician, and said so.

On Inauguration Day morning the Eisenhowers refused to enter the White House for a cup of coffee and greet the Trumans. Instead they waited in the car.

When Truman left office presidents did not receive pensions. He returned to Independence. Luckily he got a contract to write his memoirs. Years later, on July 30, 1965 President Johnson came to Independence to sign the new Medicare bill, Truman’s lifelong cause.

On a visit to the White House in January 1952, Winston Churchill said to Truman, “I must confess, sir, I held you in very low regard [at Potsdam]. … . I misjudged you badly. Since that time you, more than any other man, have saved Western civilization.”

When Truman ordered American forces into action in Korea, New York Times columnist James Reston wrote, “These are days calling for steady nerves, for a strict eye on the ball and for a renewed resolve to keep our purposes pure … . The occasion has found the man in Harry Truman.”

McCullough cites the tributes: Dean Acheson, Secretary of State (’49-’53), called him the “captain with the mighty heart.” In 1948 George Marshall, who led both State and Defense, said it was “the integrity of the man” that would stand down the ages.

Eric Severeid, journalist and author who observed Truman for years, wrote ” … remembering him reminds people what a man in that office ought to be like. It’s character, just character. He stands like a rock in memory now.”

Integrity, character, in national leadership. What an idea.

On our return drive from Wyoming we stopped in Abilene, Kansas, on a pouring rainy day and visited the Eisenhower Library. Impressive. Eisenhower was a great general. Truman was a great president.

 

July 28, 2025

Sandy’s birthday came around. “Don’t buy me anything, we’re spending enough money,” she said. We went to dinner with family and friends. She made her own cake, without candles. We sang “Happy Birthday.” The restaurant gave her another hunk of cake, which she didn’t eat. It was a nice evening.

Friends sent cards, the kids called. I drove up to Caesar’s Head State Park, near the state line, looking for something not mass-manufactured. I picked up some South Carolina earrings, hoping they didn’t look too much like the ones I bought last year, also at Caesar’s Head.

The real meaning was the six-year mark since the strokes. We were in Bridgeport, Pennsylvania that day, visiting our son and daughter-in-law. It was the hottest day of the year in the Philadelphia area, close to 100F.

The day before, on the drive up from Virginia, Sandy felt dizzy. Then early the next day, July 20, 2019, her left arm went numb.  “Time for the ER,” our daughter-in-law said. She drove Sandy to nearby Bryn Mawr Hospital, a stroke treatment center. That night she was in the ICU.

The next day, on her birthday, she had an MRI. A neurosurgeon conducted an exploratory cerebral angiogram, which meant inserting a wire fitted with a sensor through her femoral artery into her brain. The finding: several mini-strokes, called transient ischemic attacks or TIAs, caused by narrowing of arteries in her brain.

She went through a week of tests and scans at Bryn Mawr, her blood pressure monitored continuously.  I stayed at our son’s and daughter-in-law’s place in nearby Glen Mills and battled rush hour to the hospital every day. The docs’ consensus: a recent change in her blood pressure medication had caused pressure to drop, restricting blood flow to her brain.

Cardiologists and neurologists who examined her debated the right level for her blood pressure, controlled by medication. Either too high or too low would be risky, as with anyone. Her pressure had to be kept at a higher-than-average level to ensure adequate brain blood flow.

She left the hospital with new prescriptions. In coming months, more appointments, more tests, including a stress test involving a treadmill, a plan for a new lifestyle. A year later we packed up and moved away.

Birthdays are a bigger deal for some than others. They’re important for young kids and their parents, with parties, cake, presents. After the 21st things calm down for most adults. Work and relationships are center stage, life gets complicated. Forty is often a big one, we had people over for my 40th. After that no memories for a couple of decades. Birthdays amount to rushed phone calls.

Years fly by, people start to pay attention again. I put on a surprise party for Sandy’s 50th, the kids came home from school, friends showed up, hugs and photos all around. A priest new to the parish stopped by, he has become a friend. We made a big deal for my 65th, hiring a place for a dinner with music and dancing. Hers was lower-key, in the back yard, her childhood best friend flew up from Atlanta.

The years exact their price. Birthdays become acts of defiance or irony. Am I really this old, is the question. Mortality crashes the parties, no kidding. We know the last birthday party, when it happens, is a lot closer than the first.

Our son drove down for last week’s birthday and stayed a few days. The grandsons had fun with their uncle, who they see maybe once a year. He and I took them out for Chick-fil-lay, putt-putt golf, ice cream. They were thrilled.

He walked around downtown with us, we got lunch, window-shopped. He bought some books, we sat in a quiet tearoom and sipped tea. He cooked dinner, we talked about his work in medical physics for cancer oncology, the patients, the treatments, the tough cases. He made some points about health, fitness, diet, that whole routine, which is his career.

He headed back to his place in Jersey. I thought once again of the symmetry, my life formed there in the urban north of the state, he now settled in South Jersey just across the Delaware from Philly. 

All four of them, the boy and three girls, are keeping pace with us in birthdays, like everyone else. The youngest girl is next, in October, then the grandsons. The eleven-year-old is starting middle school, the younger boy is three years behind him.

Sandy’s big day is still in the season. The health things are center stage. She is getting her early morning walks in, getting to the gym, watching the carbs, as we all should be.

Birthdays reaffirm connections across years. “I’m so glad you have become my friend,” one young woman wrote. “I love you Sandy,” a little girl wrote in her card. The kids, the young adults, the busy working folks are present, so are the old ones, the eighty- and even ninety-somethings, women who she sees at the YMCA senior gatherings, some in tough shape, who need Sandy’s touch of kindness, concern, love, sometimes just a phone call.

We are looking at down time through our South Carolina summer, blasting heat, the grass and trees parched, the air conditioning roaring. The days sometimes seem to drag but weeks speed by, the routine we recall in Virginia and in Tennessee, just a bit worse in the deeper Deep South.

The suffocating days pass, like that hot 2019 Bryn Mawr week, when the docs puzzled over her but found answers. She marched forward across the years and birthdays. This one, with good people near, was special. They are all special.