Mom, again

There's this picture of Mom that I love when she had just turned 19. She's just graduating from high school, so I figure it's about 1947.

I don't think the photo was professionally done because the top of her head was nearly cut off. It might have been taken by a family member. Perhaps one of her four siblings. Or maybe her dad, Harry. Or even my Dad, who was dating Carol at the time. I'll never know. 

 But it's beautifully posed.

She's standing in an open field, in heels, wearing dress gloves and an above-the-knee skirt, complete with a shoulder bag. And a corsage.

She might be smiling, but I'm not quite sure. Maybe it's the hint of a smile. Or perhaps the suggestion of one, as if she knows some really good stuff and she's not going to tell anyone. At least not yet.

What I love about this picture is that she is standing firm on her ground, facing 45 degrees from straight on. She's looking ahead. There's confidence there, I think. She's holding her shoulder bag with a measure of authority.

Mom and Dad are already an item by this point, and it'll be three more years before they are married. I remember hearing stories that Dad would take the trolley from where he lived in Allentown to see Mom, who lived in neighboring Bethlehem.

There's no way she can clearly see what awaits her, however. 

She never goes to college (she did major in accounting in high school and worked for an insurance agency for a while) but she and Dad end up having three sons who kept them pretty busy.

I'm supposing Mom was the ideal 1950s-60's housewife, but I have to guess this part: even though I lived it, I was in my world, she was in hers. Dad changed jobs fairly often, first as a high school English teacher, then a Red Cross counselor, then a teacher again, and then a Moravian minister before becoming a teacher once again and then, at last, back to the church again. I like to say he couldn't keep a job, but that wasn't it. I think he needed to find his true challenge; his authentic self. It always seemed to be somewhere he wasn't.

Consequently, the Wehrles lived in Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, Connecticut and back to Pennsylvania before moving to Ohio, and then, finally, to Wisconsin before Dad found himself. I'm pretty sure Mom never factored in all the traveling she would do as a housewife in her life, but there it was.

Sometime in the 1960s, Betty Friedan wrote a bestseller called The Feminine Mystique and a copy somehow ended up in our house. It wouldn't surprise me if Dad bought it for her because she was a voracious reader, but the book challenged the belief at the time that "fulfillment as a woman had only one definition for American women after 1949 – the housewife-mother."

I'm not sure if this book was life changing for Mom or not. I was only 12 in 1963. But I think an independent streak emerged and evolved in Mom. She got a job at Moravian College to help with finances while Dad was in seminary. A few years later, when Dad had a church in Coopersburg, Mom turned to oil painting. She was very good at it. I'm sure she found a sense of fulfillment in her talent and soon Carol Wehrle originals were hanging in many of the rooms of our house.

I have a few to this day.

She died in 1991 at the early age of 63 when she could no longer hold back the breast cancer that  ultimately ravaged her body. She outlived Dad by four years (who died of the prostate cancer that found his bones), and in those four years she displayed a courage and strength I don't think I'd seen in her before, even though she needed courage and strength to raise three sons.

I didn't see it then.

I see it now.

Thanks, Mom.

 

 

 

 

Home improvement

If you had asked me several years ago what a pergola was, I probably would have answered "Huh?" and shrugged my shoulders.

Our old arbor was in serious disrepair.

 "Something made in Japan?" might have been my guess. It's likely that I might actually have been thinking of a pagoda.

But we had this simple wooden structure in our backyard that over the years was seriously deteriorating. It was there when we bought our house more than 22 years ago. It was our decorative arbor and bench where the wisteria grew and climbed.

But the structure was in bad shape, even back then.

Finally, about a year or so ago – about the time we had our new backyard fence built – the arbor/pergola became a real eyesore. It had a bad lean to it, so much so that we figured it might collapse the next time a bird landed on it. Slats were falling off of it. The only reason it was still standing is that the wisteria was no doubt holding it all together.

We thought it was only a matter of time and that we needed to do something this year.

Our new pergola is a sight to behold.

 So we contacted Nico Barrie of A&K Quality Fencing in High Point, the same guy who built our fence.

"Help," I pleaded. 

Nico arrived in the nick of time to give us an estimate. I showed him a picture of an arbor that Kim and I liked at the Davidson County Senior Services Center and asked him if he could build us something similar.

He said he could. The day he started the job, he tore down the old structure within minutes, then set the new four main posts in concrete, which already made it different from the old one. He and his crew came back the next day, after the concrete had set, and finished the job within hours.

Just like that, we had a beautiful, brand-new pergola. (OK, OK. Turns out the terms arbor and pergola are pretty interchangeable. I think it might all depend on how upscaly you want to be). It's the perfect addition to our yard. I kind of wish we had done this a few years ago when our house was selected for the Master Gardeners garden tour.

Just for the record: By description, a pergola is "a garden or patio feature that creates shade and defines an outdoor space. It typically has vertical posts, horizontal beams and an open roof made of slats or of a louvered design."

By description, an arbor is "a vertical structure in a landscape or garden that consists of two or four posts with a simple slatted roof."

Nico settled the issue when he billed us for a pergola.

 

Finding our voice

More than 50 years ago, I stumbled into an antiwar protest on the campus of Kutztown State College, a small liberal arts school near Allentown, PA, where I was a student majoring in English.

This was probably sometime around 1970 or '71, and the war in Vietnam was in hyperdrive and dividing the nation. Protests were no guarantee of a safe space for free speech by that point: the shootings at Kent State where four young people were killed at the hands of the Ohio National Guard had occurred in 1970, and every gathering of demonstrators anywhere thereafter was fraught with danger and fear of the unknown. Uncertainty hovered over us like some dark, viral cloud.

The Wehrles and the Hoffmanns speak with one voice.

 The war was relentlessly chewing up American lives for a purpose we could not comprehend. More than once I wondered if I'd flee the country for Canada, even though my draft lottery number of 262 kept me safe. The highest number called in 1970 was 195.

Still, I came to the protest by accident. It wasn't a particularly large demonstration, but I was curious, so I wandered by to see. I carried no signs and I came without a true agenda. But the next thing you knew, I was raising my fist in defiance. Hell, no, we won't go.

And that was it. My days as a protester were over.

Until yesterday.

Less than three months into the second Trump administration, there's been nothing but chaos. An illegally created (and absurdly named) Department of Government Efficiency, headed by an unelected billionaire oligarch, somehow has been granted (or assumed) the power to cut one federal agency after another: slashed, possibly beyond repair, are critical agencies like USAID, the Department of Education, the Department of Energy, the Department of Health and Human Services, the Department  of the Interior (including the National Parks Service), the Department of Veterans Affairs, NASA, and NOAA, to name some.

The result of these cuts has – or will – stifle medical research into such fields as cancer research, Alzheimers, autism and Parkinson's. Cuts to the Department of Education will eliminate school lunch programs. student loans and civil rights protections. Even the arts have been hampered with cutbacks created by Trump's expanding net of autocratic power.

It's Project 2025 in full form.

All of which pisses me off. People are being hurt while Trump, a convicted felon who laughs at us daily from behind the Resolute Desk, gathers more and more power.

So Kim came to me the other day and said she wanted to go to the National Day of Action (Hands Off!) protest to be held on the steps of the Old Courthouse on the square on Saturday. Kim has been growing more and more frustrated by the cruelty and stupidity of this administration and wondered how we could respond.

So, Saturday afternoon, we joined the 55 or so people who collected on the square. I'd made each of us a cardboard sign – Kim's sign said, "Stealing women's rights is wrong," and mine said, "Hands off our Democracy."

As soon as we got there, we ran into Scott and Catherine Hoffmann, our former next door neighbors who are now living in Charlotte. Catherine said they had the option of protesting somewhere else yesterday, but she wanted to be in a place where she had lived for decades.

We stayed for a little more than an hour in the 80-plus degree weather. We were encouraged by the occasional car that honked its horn in support as it drove past the courthouse on Main Street. That was a positive sign to see in cherry red Davidson County. Another surprise was a pickup truck that pulled up in front of the courthouse from out of nowhere. Moments later, a young man was distributing bottles of water to the gathering.

Today is April 20. It's Easter. It's also 90 days past inauguration, the day when Trump issued an executive order to invoke the Insurrection Act of 1807 after falsely proclaiming a national emergency on the Mexican-U.S. border. The Insurrection Act could pave the way for Trump to institute martial law in this country, which could have implications for our First Amendment rights. Oh, and by the way, April 20 is also the anniversary birthday of Adolph Hitler. Just sayin'.

Will any of this matter? Is anybody listening?

I don't know, but the seeds of a grassroots movement (50501 decodes into 50 protests, 50 states, one movement) are often sown in the most unlikely places. The trick will be to grow and maintain momentum, especially as the crucial 2026 midterm elections grow closer.

In my hour of protest I felt something I hadn't felt in more than 50 years. It felt good. It felt like we had a voice. It felt important. 

It felt righteous.

 

 

 

 

The oligarchy

Oligarchy.  

Noun. 

A small group of people having control of a country, organization or institution.

I've been thinking about this a lot trying to figure out how our country has seen its democracy teeter on the precipice toward anarchy. Or worse. It might be above my pay grade.

I mean, how did we get to the point in our history to where we're scooping mostly brown-skinned people off the street, deporting them to a foreign prison, perhaps "disappearing" them forever, all without the fundamental right of due process? Due process. The original cornerstone of our form of government, based on the rule of law. Where is it? Has due process been disappeared as well?

Does this make you proud to be an American citizen?

I guess it's possible when your leader is lawless himself, a 34-time convicted criminal and adjudicated rapist who has been given the keys to your future, your fortunes, your very lives, because the cost of eggs was too high. 

So how does this happen?

The only thing that makes sense to me is the money.

Trump, the lawless leader, has stacked his cabinet with a coterie of maleficent billionaires intent on not serving we the people, but rather we the top one-tenth of one percent. It's why we've been inflicted with ridiculous and unnecessary tariffs that manipulate the stock market, and when played correctly, further enriches the wealthy. Has possible insider trading crossed your mind?

Money talks. It always has. Which makes Trump's power base all the more incongruous since his primary appeal seems to be with those who can never live the lifestyle. "He looks out for us," claims the working class, somehow never seeing the graft and corruption unfolding in front of their eyes.

So Trump surrounds himself with 13 billionaires in positions of control and whose combined personal wealth of more than $460 billion exceeds the GDP of 172 countries. Take a look:

• Elon Musk, department of government efficiency co-head: $439 billion. 

• Leandro Rizzuto Jr., ambassador to the Organization of American States, $3.5 billion.

• Warren Stephens, ambassador to the United Kingdom, $3.4 billion.

• Linda McMahon, education secretary, $3 billion.

• Howard Lutnick, commerce secretary, $2.2 billion.

• Charles Kushner, ambassador to France, $1.8 billion.

• Jared Isaacman, NASA administrator, $1.8 billion.

• Thomas Barrack Jr., ambassador to Turkey, $1 billion.

• Steven Witkoff, special envoy to the Middle East, $1 billion.

• Frank Bisiganano, Social Security Administration commissioner, $1 billion.

• Scott Bessent, Treasury secretary, reported billionaire.

• Vivek Ramaswamy, department of government efficiency co-head, $1 billion. 

• David Sacks, AI (not A1) and crypto czar, net worth unknown.

• Doug Burgum, interior secretary, $100 million.

• Mehmet Oz, administrator for the centers for Medicare and medicaid services, $100 million.

That's what an oligarchy looks like. I'm still trying to find where we the people are in here. 

What could possibly go wrong?

Sleep well.

 

 

 

The Covid couple

The one thing that Kim and I hoped to accomplish was to go through the rest of our lives without ever having contracted Covid-19. 

I mean, after all, we made it this far. We survived the deadly outbreak back in 2019 by doing everything we were told: we wore masks, we sanitized our hands, and, when it became available, we took every Covid vaccine the schedule offered us at exactly when the schedule offered it.

Well, so much for that.

Last week, around Monday, both of us started feeling a little punkish. I had a slight sore throat, a bit of a runny nose, aches in my joints. Kim was much the same way, but with a persistent cough to boot. She suggested we take a flu/Covid test, even though we've been vaccinated for both.

So on Wednesday evening we bought testing kits, swabbed our noses and immediately dropped our heads when the dreaded double lines showed up on our testing devices.

Covid! How the heck did we get Covid?

The first thing we did was try to contact as many people as we could after we attended a recent funeral over the weekend. Then we tried to figure out what to do next.

Apparently, there's not much more you can do. We called our doctor's office Thursday morning and told them our symptoms. By the afternoon, we had our prescriptions for Paxlovid, the treatment designed to mitigate the effects of severe Covid. It's not a cure.

Anyway, Kim's Rx was affordable, but mine was over $300. Whoa, whoa, whoa. What the heck? I wasn't feeling that bad.

"I'm not buying that," I told Kim. "Forget it."

That turned out to be a wise decision. When Kim opened her package, it came with a list of medications not to combine with Paxlovid. Lovastatin was on that list. I take Lovastatin. OMG. So I guess this is the one time the high cost of a medication saved me from further problems, if not something worse.

Kim, meanwhile, is taking her Paxlovid, complete with the side effect of altering her sense of taste. She said she feels like she's been licking aluminum cans.

So here we are, entering our fifth day of Covid. Neither of us can taste our food, and both of us feel more lethargic than people our age should probably feel. I do have more of my appetite back than I did a few days ago, but what's the point of eating if I can't taste anything? So now I'm on the Covid-19 diet plan. Yes, I've lost a few pounds. Yay.

Truth be told, I'm not feeling that bad. We did some light yard work yesterday because I hate to waste a beautiful day. Then we napped and afterwards watched a lot of television.

And we continue to test, impatiently waiting for the double lines to finally disappear.

 

 

 

 

An old friend shows up

I'd just settled into my chair, pretty much minding my own business without any expectations whatsoever, ready to watch another episode of Vera on Britbox.

Our 1966 Mustang back in the day.

 Vera is a beloved British crime drama series that showed up on ITV for 14 seasons before running its course this past January. The show is based on the novels written by Ann Cleeves. It starred Brenda Blethyn as detective chief inspector Vera Stanhope, a matronly character with an irritatingly scratchy voice and nimble mind who could solve murders in 90 minutes.

Most of the episodes were well written and I got hooked, binging on one show after the other.

One of the things that really intrigued me was that most of the series was filmed in Newcastle, a beautiful port city in the northeast corner of England just a stone's throw from the Scottish border. Hadrian's Wall is just a short drive away. I can tell you this without ever having set foot in England. Because of Britbox, I've walked the campus of Oxford University, floated down the Thames, seen the White Cliffs of Dover. You get the point.

Heading overseas. Note decal on windshield.

 Watching Britbox has even sharpened my vocabulary. I mean, we're in the land of Shakespeare here. After watching all these police shows, I learned that "defenestration" is the act of throwing somebody out of a window. Really. It's in the Oxford dictionary. Look it up. You can use it in a sentence: Vladimir Putin employs defenestration as a policy to subdue his political enemies.

Anyway, I digress.

The thing about Newcastle is that it's the city where my cherished 1966 Mustang ended up, of all places. It wasn't until about the 11th or 12th season of watching Vera that the thought popped up in my mind that, hey, maybe the Mustang will show up in the background parked on the side of the road or something. So I kept a casual eye on the lookout, not really expecting much.

I still call it "my" Mustang because we owned it for 19 years, slowly refurbishing it over time: we had the engine and transmission rebuilt, put on new chrome trim, replaced the upholstery and carpet, gave it a new coat of Wimbledon White paint. There was clearly a personal relationship between us. And it looked fantastic.

On TV in England. Note decal.

 Then, in the 13th season, in an episode of Vera titled "Tender," a white Mustang wheeled onto the screen about five minutes into the program with two women in it.

My breath quickened. My eyes widened. Could this be it?

The one clue I had was that our car had a Mustang Club of America decal on the front right corner of the windshield.

And there it was. I reversed the video for another look. The decal was still there. Oh my God! That's my car! It's on TV. In England.

Well, I was about 90 percent sure, anyway. Another clue is that the windshield had two BB shot nicks in it, and yep, there they were, right where they always were. My heart was pounding. Now I was 99 percent sure.

But I still had one more verification (Vera-fication?) to make.

So I texted Phil Ternent, the owner of Northumbria Classic Car Hire in Newcastle. After we put up our Mustang for consignment with Streetside Classics in Charlotte back in 2014, Phil ended up with the vehicle after the original buyer in Kent suffered some health issues and could no longer drive it.

Phil has a fleet of classic cars, most of them European, like MGBs, Jaguar E-Types, Porches, etc. He rents them out for weddings, graduations, birthdays, stuff like that. Phil texted me out of the blue one day asking if I was the last American owner, and we've become Facebook friends ever since then. Right now, he's still my only friend from across the pond.

He once posted a video driving the Mustang down a back country road lush with deep green English scenery. The video was from the driver's perspective and, being in England, he was on the left side of the road. It was a little disorienting for me. A car was coming from the other direction. "For God's sake, man!" I shouted. "Get on the right side of the road!" I'm glad he couldn't hear me.

Anyway, I texted Phil: "I'm writing because I'm curious: did the Mustang show up in an episode of "Vera," the one titled "Tender"?

Phil answered: "Hi. Yes it was in Vera in one episode. Shot a few minutes away from where it lives! I do see your posts on Facebook. Hope your football team is doing well." (That was about the time the Philadelphia Eagles were on their way to winning the Super Bowl). Then he added: "Car still going strong, still being used for hires for weddings and bucket list experiences."

And, apparently, for TV appearances as well.

I couldn't believe it. I couldn't wait for Kim to get home for lunch. She teared up when she saw the car.  So did I. We watched it over and over again.

It was a jolly good show, luv.

 Cheerio.

 

 

 

 

Neill

As I get older, I keep getting reminded of my own mortality.

When that happens, it almost always means somebody else has come to the end of their journey. And those reminders are coming at me quicker and quicker these days, it seems. 

Neill

 So on Thursday, I learned that Neill Caldwell, a good friend and former Dispatch colleague of mine, was in the hospital following a fall he'd taken earlier in the week. But his hospitalization addressed other issues as well, including advanced pneumonia.

He'd been treated with intravenous medications, but with no effect and consequently, he was taken taken off the ventilator that morning. He died shortly thereafter. He was only 65.

News like that often travels along curious paths, sometimes arriving with lightening speed, at other times showing up frustratingly incomplete. 

It's confusing. And unreal. And that word – what do you mean, he died?

It requires processing. Remembering. Grieving.

My own memories are a little spotty these days, so forgive me if I don't catch it all, or I don't see something in the same way that you did. But what I do remember is this:

I was a few years into my job as a sports writer at The Dispatch. This would have been in the early 1980s, and the two-man sports department was seriously understaffed. One day, sports editor Larry Lyon told me The Dispatch had approved of adding another member, somebody who would cover sports half of his time and shoot photos for the entire newsroom the other half.

Neill in his natural habitat.

 Then Neill came in. 

The first thing I noticed, because you couldn't unnotice it, was his physical stature. He was short. I'm not sure he cleared five feet.  

But the moment Larry introduced us, the bonding began, as you would hope with any new employee finding his way. Or rather, us finding our way. I think we went to lunch together that very first day as the newly constituted sports department. Larry already knew Neill previously, but I immediately found out Neill had a quick sense of humor and he certainly was friendly enough.

As time progressed, it was clear to me that Neill was also a talented writer and a dedicated journalist. He was a great addition to the staff. Although his time was supposed to be divided 50-50 between writing and photography, I think it gradually morphed to something more like 60-40, and then maybe even 70-30 in favor of writing. The sports department might have silently endorsed that invisible shift in his job description.

Neill (right) in his other natural habitat.

 Although I will say this: Neill was proud of his work behind the lens as well as in the darkroom. He was a better photojournalist than I could ever be.

It also became clear that Neill could have a short fuse. If the newsroom photo machine got jammed at deadline or a story wasn't panning out the way he wanted, not only could you see the air turn blue, you could feel it, too. Sometimes it paid to walk a wide circle around Neill on those off days.

Then he met Lynne. They fell in love. They got married. Neill, from my perspective, became a calmer, more patient person. The two of them traveled everywhere. Lynne was a Methodist minister and Neill fully supported her, becoming involved in the church as well. He served as an editor for the Virginia Conference of the United Methodist Church as well as a correspondent for the United Methodist News Service. And when he was done there, he became the editor of The Stokes News.

Printer's ink was in his blood. If nothing else, Neill was as versatile as they came.

In the past few years, as time put more distance between us former Dispatchers, we'd try to get together as a sports department once in a while to catch a minor league baseball game. A reunion, of sorts. We traded our life stories like they were baseball cards, talked sports, talked nonsense and just figured we'd see each other again next season.

We were, after all, a team. There's always next season.

Except when there's not. 

Fare thee well, my friend. Fare thee well.