December 16, 2019

In mid-December we look forward to a holiday season that offers the promise of spiritual peace. This time calls us back to memories, maybe joyful, maybe not, but lasting, either way. Yet this year, while we look again to our families and friends for sustenance and hope, we’re distracted by the ugly fight on Capitol Hill over impeachment. We’re challenged to preserve the joy of the season, in the face of spiritually exhausting national events.

We can find that joy in our faith. Yet we’re forced to confront the unfolding tragedy, if only to remind ourselves to persevere, to remain on a path that strengthens faith and offers hope. Meanwhile, to grasp the meaning of the current trauma we can find perspective, and maybe a lesson, that emerges from other moments in the nation’s experience.

For me, one is striking. It speaks to faith and hope—but, as today, at the end of a hard path.

In 1952 a short, rumbled man published a book. It is an autobiography, a story of a deeply troubled life, yet an incisive and eloquent history, and an indictment of an age and its politics. The rumbled man’s book, entitled Witness, chronicles his acceptance of Soviet Communism, his nightmarish 12-year membership in the American Communist Party, and his ultimate rejection of Communism. Just as important, the book tells the story of an urbane, Harvard Law School-educated and well-connected man, a former senior State Department official named Alger Hiss.

In 1948, the rumbled man, Whittaker Chambers, then a senior editor for Time magazine, testified as a witness before the House Un-American Activities Committee to accuse Hiss of belonging to the Communist Party and of espionage for the USSR. Hiss indignantly denied being a Communist, but eventually admitted to having known Chambers by another name. Given irrefutable evidence in the form of government documents Chambers had concealed for years, a jury convicted Hiss of perjury. He served three years in prison. He never confessed.

In his Forward, entitled “Letter to My Children,” Chambers seeks to explain why men leave the Communist Party. He quotes the daughter of a German diplomat assigned to Moscow who had been extremely pro-Communist, but abruptly became a dedicated anti-Communist. The daughter, who also was sympathetic to Communism, was embarrassed by her father. In explaining his defection, she said, “he was immensely pro-Soviet. But—one night in Moscow—he heard screams. That’s all. Simply one night he heard screams.”

Chambers cites the names of many American Communists he knew during the 1930s, some in important government jobs. In the 1920s and 1930s, and even later, Americans were exposed to the views of many Communist sympathizers, beginning with the newspaper reporter Lincoln Steffens, who in 1919 visited Russia, then convulsed by violent revolution, and returned crowing, “I have seen the future and it works.”

The American writer John Reed smuggled Russian jewels into the U.S. to support Communist operations in this country. In the 1920s Armand Hammer, president of Occidental Petroleum, financed the Communist newspaper, The Daily Worker. In the mid-1930s The New York Times reporter Walter Duranty, on assignment in the Soviet Union, wrote articles praising Stalin and denying that he caused the famine that killed millions. The sociologist Margaret Mead declared that “great progress for humanity” was being made in the USSR. Henry A. Wallace, FDR’s vice president, became a Soviet apologist. In 1948 he ran for president as a candidate for the Progressive Party, accepting the endorsement of the Communist Party USA, and Party members campaigned for him. Later he broke with the Soviets and wrote a book, Where I Was Wrong.

Through those years other prominent Americans romanticized Communism and denied or ignored Stalin’s brutality. In time, they earned the apocryphal label,“useful idiot,” attributed falsely to Lenin, referring to those who facilely accepted Soviet propaganda and heaped praise on its purveyors. In decades since, many prominent public figures became infatuated with the Communist prison states of China, Cuba, and North Vietnam, useful idiots, even in our own time.

Today, looking back 100 years during which untold millions have suffered the cruel consequences of disinformation spread by totalitarians, we now hear Republicans in the House and Senate suggesting that it was Ukraine, not Russia, that interfered with the 2016 Presidential election. Many have ignored, belittled, or denied the findings of the CIA, FBI, and Defense Intelligence Agency, which established definitively that Russia carried out a massive campaign to influence the election.

Despite access to the best nonpartisan intelligence available and the testimony of public servants committed to national service, these men and women, many of them trained in law, have surrendered to disinformation to defend a morally threadbare political agenda. Like the President, they closed their eyes to the casualties inflicted on the Ukrainian military by Russian forces for the three months that U.S. military aid was withheld as a political bargaining chip—aid intended to help reduce or prevent those casualties.

We thought we had seen the worst of useful idiocy in President Trump’s praise of North Korea’s Kim Jong Un and China’s Xi Jinping, who lead regimes that have murdered and imprisoned countless thousands, as “great men, great leaders.” The House and Senate Republicans are front and center in the current great debate transfixing the nation. They know the truth about Russian hacking of the election. At the moment they choose instead to repeat the canards spread by Trump about Ukraine. Someday, perhaps they will hear screams.

We look again to Chambers. His path away from Communism and to faith was almost absurdly simple. He writes of how he sat in the kitchen with his young daughter in her high chair eating her oatmeal. He noticed her ear, with its perfect curves and whorls. He recognized then that no impersonal force could create such delicacy and beauty, and that the child’s ear could only be the result of a design by an intelligent Creator. At that moment he left Communism forever. He became a man of faith. Right now, faith seems hard, almost unattainable. But if we can find it in simple things—an act of charity, a moment of prayer, the recognition of difficult truths—even in the shape of a child’s ear—the dreary complexities of the moment drop away. The meaning of the Season returns.

December 9, 2019

The Tuesday before Thanksgiving a lady with the bank called.  “An unauthorized attempt was made to withdraw funds from your checking account,” she said. She recommended we open a new account. We did that, although we kept the old one open, just in case.

Monday—a big day: the plastic mediport was removed from my chest in a 45-minute surgery. No more hospital visits for a few months—for me, that’s big.  I tried to rest after the operation. But that afternoon my IRA website locked me out. The IRA people advised that somebody had tried to get in. They shut down access to it until we took our two computers to an IT pro to be scrubbed. We hauled them to Best Buy and got in line.

Every organization you do business with by using your computer says the same thing: create passwords of six to 20 characters, use capital and lower-case letters, numbers, and symbols. Don’t use your birthday or street address. Don’t use family member names or initials in cute ways the bad guys can decipher.

Computer wizard that I am, all my passwords consisted of my kids’ names. I cranked in the same “user name” for nearly everything. I kept a Microsoft Word file on the computer that listed all our passwords. I thought I was clever. To the pros, I was a fat target.

I recall, when visiting a friend, asking him for his “wifi” address so I could use my laptop computer while at his home. He stared at me as if I were with the KGB, looked around the room, then thrust his cellphone in my face, showing something like, “Ovb5*gq?wrt7-txt4L.” I blinked. No one is going to get into his business. And no doubt he changed it after we left.

We didn’t lose any money from either of these intrusions. The guy who got into the bank account tried to withdraw $4,500, which we didn’t have. He went for broke, lost, then moved on to another fat target. We were lucky.

We picked up the computers at Best Buy. The tech guy said they didn’t find any problems. The intrusion was an attempted identity theft, not a computer problem, he added.

So we changed the passwords. I started a new project: calling the water company, the power company, the mortgage company, and everyone else who takes money from our checking account or pays us through it. I was amazed that Social Security, after serenading me for forty minutes, simply took the new account number over the phone.

We all know, but hardly ever think about, how technology has transformed our world, from the cosmic to the trivial. When Sandy and I met with our pastor for his blessing a week before my October surgery, he demonstrated with a smile how he could order “Alexa” to turn on the lights in his office. We laughed.

We live online every day. Every business operation, except the kid stocking shelves, bagging your groceries, and loading your car, is associated with a website. A company, charity, or college that doesn’t have one doesn’t exist. So all week I sprawled on the sofa, the phone stuck between my ear and my shoulder, listening to bright techno-people guide me to nirvana. I spent an hour as a woman with the water company directed me to click on links, then sub-links, looking for “delete bank information.” Someone else walked me through downloading an “app,” which did not work.

We started using the bank “bill pay” function a few years ago. I recall writing checks, sticking them in envelopes, licking stamps. People still do that, but the cost of stamps has become annoying. If you get the hang of using the bank website, paying online is easy.

Computers are tools, like rakes and hammers. They enable marvelous breakthroughs in the design and performance of highly complex systems used for navigation and communications, manufacturing, defense, finance, medicine, and so on.

The unsettling question: are we any smarter? Many published authors can’t write a coherent sentence or carry an intelligent story line. My book club assignments (Aug. 19 post) are a six-book losing streak. Are we morally stronger, more tolerant, more honorable? Republicans exist afraid of a “tweet” from the president. Answering my own question: No. No way.

Not smarter, not better. That was never the point. More efficient, in many ways. For you and me, computers are communication systems. They link us with others, in a lazy sort of way. Do our emails and “texts” really replace letters or phone calls? How many of your Facebook “friends” are friends?

There’s the dark side: all kinds of online crime—identity theft, fundraising scams, porn. We’ve all heard the horror stories. Thousands of folks, including some very savvy ones, have lost millions with a few keystrokes. The bank reported that our account hack was traced to Collegeville, Penn. Never heard of it. Our son, who knows computers, said that’s a dodge—the hacker may be “spoofing” a computer in Collegeville, but could be in Toronto—or anywhere.

Yet there’s the exception that proves the rule. The low point, so far, is a demand by one company that I obtain a medallion signature guarantee, more authoritative than notarization, to complete a two-page paper form, then mail it back. Paper form? What about your website?

I visit the local branch of our bank. Someone said the manager could do it, but he left early, come back tomorrow. I was there at 9:00 AM. Uh-oh, he actually is not authorized. I need to go to Lorton, five miles up I-95. Fighting the dregs of rush hour, I drive to the Lorton branch. I explain why I’m there—medallion signature guarantee.

The manager, Chris, shakes his head. He could do it, but it would then have to go to the legal department for approval. He squints at my form. At the bottom of the second page there’s a sentence in tiny print: “medallion signature guarantee is required if a voided check is not included.” He hands it back to me. My branch gave me a facsimile of a voided check, which is not a voided check. “Try that anyway,” he says.

At home, I stick the paperwork in an envelope, attach a stamp, and mail it. Then, an email from the bank: “Sign up for our mobile app today!” I’ll think about it.

 

December 2, 2019

Thanksgiving began for Sandy and me Wednesday with a nervous embark on I-95 to our son’s and daughter-in-law’s home in southeastern Pennsylvania. A little paranoid after hearing the frantic forecasts of holiday traffic nightmares, we left at 5:00 AM, braced for disaster—but cruised into PA about eight o’clock with no snarls or delays.

Thanksgiving Day offered the chance to be with two of our kids as they took a break from busy lives. That morning we caught Mass at the nearby parish. Afterward the pastor distributed loaves of bread to the entire congregation.  “I used to say that Thanksgiving should be a holyday of obligation,” he offered with a smile.

Caroline’s mom Mary and brother Ben and a bunch of friends joined us for the day. As usual, Caroline did nearly all the work. Dinner was spectacular.

This Thanksgiving was high time to remember the Lord’s gifts and the many who kept us in their prayers through months of medical drudgery—scans, chemo/rad, surgeries, Sandy’s week in the ICU—all that. Then too, like most Americans, we’re grateful that we see reasons to be hopeful for the country’s future beyond a political storm that no one predicted. Some days that’s hard, but we work at it.

Visiting Brandywine, which few know about, helps.

When we arrived on Wednesday we headed for Chadd’s Ford, site of the Brandywine Battlefield along Brandywine Creek, nine miles northwest of Wilmington, Del., and 30 miles southwest of Philadelphia. Here, on September 11, 1777 (that dark date again) 11,000 colonial soldiers—call them Americans—faced 18,000 better-trained, better-equipped British and Hessian troops. The Brits’ plan was to seize Philly, the colonial capital, by attacking from the south.

General George Washington staged his forces on high ground north of the creek along the fords he knew. British General Sir William Howe, with better intelligence, sent most of his army to cross the creek at a ford farther north, using only a small cadre in a feint at the American front line. Helped by an early morning fog, the main British force then turned and attacked the American northern flank, surprising Washington. The Americans fought through the day but were outmaneuvered and outgunned and forced to retreat. Howe led his army unopposed into Philadelphia, which they occupied until June 1778. The Continental Congress fled to Lancaster, then to York.

Historians believe British losses were 93 men killed and nearly 500 wounded. Rough estimates of American casualties run to 300 dead, about 600 wounded, 400 taken prisoner. The British captured 11 of the Americans’ 14 artillery pieces. Brandywine was the longest single-day battle of the war, as the two sides fought for 11 straight hours.

Yet the British failed to pursue, and the wounded American force escaped. Washington reported to the Continental Congress that “despite the day’s misfortune, I am pleased to report that most of my men are in good spirits and have the courage to fight the enemy another day.”

Good spirits. At Thanksgiving, or anytime, we’re heartened by the bravery at Brandywine. Our spirits are amplified further by those who see acutely the abundant beauty around us–the collective calling of the Wyeth family, who created their mystically realistic work mostly at their Chadd’s Ford home on the Brandywine.

Famed illustrator and painter Newell Convers (N.C.) Wyeth and his wife Carolyn had five children. Daughters Henriette and Carolyn and son Andrew, the youngest, shared N.C.’s creative touch. Andrew’s son Jamie inherited his father’s gifts. The Brandywine River Museum, near the Wyeth home where Andrew’s wife Betsy still lives, maintains a permanent collection of Wyeth family work.

Their paintings show the roughhewn grace of American life. The brilliant illustrations of N.C. highlighted popular books and journals until his death in 1945. The austere, lustrous landscapes of Andrew and the stark yet humane portraits of both Andrew and Jamie tell stories of men and women, their strengths and vulnerabilities.

Andrew’s Christina’s World catapulted the already well-known artist, then 31 years old, to world fame in 1941. It is now in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The painting shows the handicapped Christina Olson crawling toward her family’s homestead. Andrew  painted her portrait years later, revealing gently the cares and passions of the elderly woman. His landscapes, set near Chadd’s Ford and at his home on the Maine seacoast, full of delicacy and detail, speak of the hardships and the joys of rural life, in spare shades and subtle color.

Andrew, trained by his father, learned from him that the purpose of art is in the creation of beauty, not in the response to it. N.C Wyeth warned that the artist who paints for the critics “does not know what he is missing.”

Andrew also found a connection to two other American icons, Henry David Thoreau and Robert Frost. Both New Englanders—Thoreau, the essayist and rebel, and Frost, the poet—like Wyeth, communicate to readers a sensitivity to nature and the value of human closeness to nature.

Andrew’s sister Carolyn and son Jamie extended the family devotion to precise realism in oil, watercolor, and tempura. They, like N.C. and Andrew, convey a reverence for humanity, compassion, love, truth. Andrew, best-known of the Wyeths, spoke of his work: “I paint my life.” He died in his sleep in 2009.

The Wyeths’ art draws us to their perception of the dignity of work in the fields and homesteads of this wooded, rolling corner of Pennsylvania. For us, Brandywine is a place for appreciating the richness of our colonial history, the courage of good people facing suffering and joy, and the sublime beauty of everyday life. At this moment, we all need that. Good spirits.

November 25, 2019

On Monday the medical oncologist told Sandy and me that my last CT scan looked good. He isn’t one for drama. No thumbs-up or touchdown signal. He said what cancer doctors say: “Within the constraints of our detection capabilities and the close proximity of organs in the region, I see no need for further treatment at this time.”

We sat back in our chairs and exhaled. For a moment I said nothing.

My first question: “Can I get this taken out?”  I tapped my chest.

“Yes, let’s go ahead and take it out. You can always put it back in if, God forbid, you need it again,” he answered. “But that’s not the end of the world, either.”

We’re talking about the plastic port embedded in my chest. It was inserted in a surgical procedure back in January, when the doctor nailed down the schedule for my six-week chemotherapy-plus-radiation regimen. The port is a connection point for the needle through which the chemo drugs and other medicines flow. My best analogy is a wall electrical outlet—you plug in your lamp, computer, hair dryer, and get power. The drugs flow from the IV through the port into a major vein, avoiding the potential for damage to veins of repeated needle sticks.

So you show up for your treatment, stretch out on an lounge chair, the nurse inserts the needle in the port, and you sleep, on and off, for five hours. Intermittently you gaze up at the IV bag.

The doc wants another scan and another meeting in five months. Back in June he was encouraged after looking at my PET scan. But the port had to stay. He wanted to see definitive healing.

On another front, I see the urologist in January for a cystoscopy, an unpleasant procedure—involves a tiny camera—to check the urological landscape.

He gave me a more or less positive report a week after he removed my left kidney and ureter. “I took lots of surrounding tissue out,” he said. So along with losing the organs I got a free liposuction. So I won’t need to schedule one of those. He added that what he found “could be aggressive,” meaning I need watching. So I’ll be in his office, grimacing, in a couple of months, and out into the future.

Sitting in the oncologist’s office, I recalled the cardiovascular surgeon’s comment after he opened my chest last December, then quickly aborted the procedure when he saw what he saw. “You’ve got a really ugly tumor in there. You need further treatment,” he warned.

Seems like a lifetime ago. So I’m lucky. Blessed. All those prayers by so many people, family, friends, total strangers, carried some weight with the Almighty.

Through all this—18 months—we’ve had lots of adventures as we reexamined life: a bunch of trips to out-of-the way places; happy visits with family; some rich experiences doing practically nothing. I wondered about the future in my own peculiar way, which is way different from the way young people think about it. When I got into my dark moods I wondered about the future of the country, as a huge swatch of Americans ignore or defend the president’s lies, and coming generations likely face crippling tax burdens to pay those federal entitlements to the oldsters.

Sometimes I talked vaguely about picking up last year’s road trip where we left off, pre-biopsy. The plan, sketchy as it was, had us pushing on from Nevada to San Diego. We’d drive up the Pacific coast to Seattle. From there, state highways east. Or perhaps head south to Utah to see those famous parks.

Right now it’s just me talking—or hallucinating. Other things, like the bills, insurance, fixing up the house, have intruded.

Meanwhile, others sit in oncology treatment spaces waiting for their chemo and radiation, and the side effects that follow. They’re both older and younger than me, hoping for their own good news, some with vicious, voracious strains that the conventional treatments can’t defeat.  Sometimes the chemo cocktail doesn’t have the kick they hope it will. Sometimes the radiation beams seem to bounce off the tumors. Our son, the medical physicist who works with cancer radiation therapy, says simply, “They never get every cell.”

Those I recognize from my visits to the waiting rooms will move on, replaced by others. They’ll wonder about the future: Why is my life suddenly so complicated? Why is this bad joke on me? I wonder: how do those eighty- and ninety-somethings do it? What good did all that jogging do for me? What about all those vegetables and fresh fruit?

You recognize sooner or later that the jogging and eating well and getting enough sleep all amount to a holding action. Eventually everything breaks down.

Once you’re clear on that, you can relax and enjoy life. We don’t know where the cancer will take us, although we’ve heard those stories about patients living decades, knowing it’s there, knowing the docs never get every cell. What matters is how we fill up the time ahead, understanding that it’s given by the Lord as something precious. The illness is a mystery that transforms. The sick pray for healing, but they really pray to make their lives, their presence, a gift for those around them, for everyone they encounter.

So my doc finished up, saying, “let’s schedule the port removal. We’ll see you in April, then in six months and then a year later, then we’ll look out over three to five years.” Five years? Sounds good to me. By then he may be head of a hospital somewhere. Our older grandson will be 11. We haven’t scheduled the five-year appointment yet. I’m free on Mondays.

November 18, 2019

We had breakfast at Waffle House the other day, the one closest to us, down in Dumfries. I hadn’t been in a while, but had to go after reading the piece in The Washington Post about the Birmingham, Ala., Waffle House where customers jumped the counter to help a lone employee stranded on duty.

It wasn’t my first Waffle House meal. Not by a long shot. The food and service were fine. The music was loud and awful, we asked the waitress to turn it down. She shut it off. Beyond that, I couldn’t hear myself think over the raucous argument of two guys in the booth behind us about an Alabama-Auburn football game.

Most people hereabouts know Waffle House, but no one I know goes there much, if ever. It tends to be a Southern experience. The company says it has 2,100 outlets in 25 states, but most in the South: square, squat buildings with big yellow signs. Waffle House, if you ask most people who have eaten there, is a bit farther down the quality scale from Cracker Barrel or IHOP. It’s not just that the menu is limited: waffles, eggs, hash browns and grits, some sandwich items like burgers and grilled cheese. Maybe it’s the name. Maybe it’s the spare, garish layout of the restaurants, with big round glaring light bulbs and cramped booths.

Some people don’t trust places that operate 24/7. Crime occasionally occurs in Waffle House parking lots, as at other 24-hour places. Early in the morning on April 22, 2018 a mentally disturbed man killed four people and wounded two others with a semi-automatic rifle at a Waffle House in Antioch, Tennessee, near Nashville. By some miracle, a customer jumped the shooter and wrestled the weapon away from him.

I’ve heard, too, that WH employees aren’t always in the best of spirits. They’re short-order cooks, servers, and busboys and girls, paid what you would expect. Conditions aren’t great. The late-night shifts deal with customers wobbling in from bars, who aren’t in great spirits, either. The restaurants are open 365 days a year, which means somebody’s always working on the early mornings after New Year’s Eve, St. Paddy’s Day, and other heavily drunk occasions.

In the Birmingham story, now all over the internet, Ethan Crispo showed up at the Waffle House just after midnight. He found the single employee, a young guy named Ben, stuck with about 30 customers. He reported that several patrons got up and started bussing tables, making coffee, and taking orders. “Humanity is great,” Crispo said. His story and some photos provoked hundreds of comments about the spontaneous kindness shown by the folks who jumped up to help Ben get through his shift. Especially now, some said, when things in the country aren’t so great. Southerners said it showed how nice Alabama folks are. Others choked on that and guessed that they’re all Trump people who wouldn’t have helped Ben if he were black.

Some commenters pointed out that, kindness aside, liability problems could arise with untrained, uncertified people handling food, a customer slipping and falling on the obviously dirty floor, somebody getting food poisoning. The big question: where was management?

The debate ensued, the good-feeling experience versus the potentially serious legal questions. Were the scheduled employees so poorly paid that they didn’t care about missing a shift? Was Ben unwilling to lose his shift pay by closing? Did his manager order him to keep the place open?

The story, and my WH breakfast the other day, brought me back to a treasured but bizarre experience. Almost exactly two years ago I entered the Pinhoti 100-mile trail run through the Talladega National Forest in northeastern Alabama. The race has a 30-hour time limit, which would be a stretch for me. I talked my daughters Laura and Kathleen into serving as my crew.

I started the course fast and got ahead of the early cutoffs, but at some point picked up dirt and grit in my shoe, which broke the skin. I changed socks at the first drop-bag station (27 miles), which cost me 20 minutes. At the 40-mile station Laura and Kathleen patched up my ankle. But shortly afterward I missed a turn in the dark and lost 40 minutes retracing my steps. I missed the cutoff at 55 miles by 15 minutes at 11:30 PM.

Kathleen and Laura met me and we drove to Sylacauga, Ala., the finish point. Since I expected to complete the race, I had no plan B, so we ended up at a Day’s Inn in Childersburg. I was starving, so at 3:00 AM we were sitting in a Waffle House next door. Two employees were on duty, exquisitely polite. We were the only customers. I wolfed down a mountain of scrambled eggs and hash browns. A mournful Emmylou Harris tune played on the radio, a well-armed local cop sat nearby. The girls got impatient, but I sat there a little longer, my eyes closed, sipping rich coffee, munching on my hash browns, on a quiet early Deep South Sunday morning.

I probably appreciated that Waffle House because—as in the Hemingway story—it was a clean, well-lit place, after hours in a dark mountain forest, and I was exhausted and famished. That was my situation then and there. Waffle House, I guess, was just a place I stumbled into.

Same thing, probably, for Mr. Crispo with his experience, and his thoughtful words about the people who helped poor Ben on his shift. He saw humanity, generosity, kindness. The Waffle House was the scene where all that goodness played out that early morning in Birmingham. But people are like that. And we all know it happens at other restaurants, some classier, some dingier. Try Huddle House.