Garden Tour, part deux

 Forty days and counting.

That's how many days we have left before the Master Gardener's Tour begins on June 4-5. And I'm feeling the pressure.

OK, OK. I know what you're thinking. I spent more than 30 years of my professional career in journalism under deadline pressure. So what am I so worried about?

Well, it seems to be a different kind of pressure. When I wrote sports for The Dispatch, all our copy had to be in around 10 a.m. for the 11 a.m. press run. Curiously, I didn't mind that kind of pressure. It was kind of fun. It made putting out a daily newspaper resemble something like an everyday miracle.

I even once had the opportunity to run down to the press room and shout to the pressman, "Stop the presses!" It's something I always wanted to say and mean it. Really. I was working on a late-breaking story about a coach, I think, who just got hired. Or fired. I forget which. Anyway, within a span of 20 minutes or so, I got a few quotes, banged out the story, had the story repaginated and put on the press. The paper still hit the streets before noon and nobody was the wiser for it.

That's my story and I'm stickin' to it.

But this Master Gardener thing is different. The house still looks like it's climbing out of its winter hibernation, even though I spent the past week thatching and seeding – and reseeding – my front and back yards.

I do have seedlings in the front yard. It took about six days for the first sprouts to show, which is probably pretty quick. But then, we're down to 40 days. Six days can be interminable.

The back yard still looks like the 50-yard line of a natural turf football field after a game in the rain. C'mon seedlings. Hurry up. We only have 40 days to go.

I wonder if this is what it's like for the groundskeepers in Augusta as they get ready for The Masters every year? I feel their pain.

Kim just planted scarlet red geraniums in the kitchen window box, but the driveway window box is still waiting for ideas. The perennials in our front English Cottage Gardens are just now waking up, but we're still thinking about border plants to decorate the gardens with color.

Since I'm retired, I'm the guy who can invest four to five hours each day doing the weeding, seeding, mulching and watering. Kim is still a working professional, so her free time in the garden is limited to weekends. She's the garden organizer. She's the one who decides what goes where. So time is of the essence.

A garden deadline seems much more stressful because you're letting nature take its course. It's mostly out of our hands. All you can do is stand there and remind the seeds and plants and herbs and flowers, "Hey, guys. Hurry up. There's only 40 days to go."

Going on tour

The way I remember it, a few years ago, Kim and I jokingly noted to ourselves that our house was never included in any Master Gardener recognition.

"Why not? we laughed. "Our gardens looks as good as anyone's."

(Note: Our gardens, front and back, are basically humble ones, having already been established mostly by previous owners by the time we bought the house in 2003.)

Our front garden in 2018.

So we let the matter rest without any further thought.

That is, until several weeks ago. Kim said she had gotten a phone call at work, out of thin blue air, from a representative of the Davidson County Master Gardeners, wanting to know if we'd be interested in participating in their annual tour this year, and can they send somebody over to look at our house first?

Umm, OK. This is interesting. I told Kim, sure, why not, let them look, but I'm not going to throw a lot of money at our gardens or go out of my way to create something extravagant. Our house is a simple Craftsman bungalow, and that's the way I want to keep it.

Then two nice ladies came over to scout out the property. One of them, Frankie Mefford, explained that the Master Gardeners were resurrecting their popular tour after a two-year hiatus because of Covid. They already had six houses lined up in the beautiful Grimes School area, but six houses weren't enough to justify selling tour tickets. They needed a few more attractions and could we help them out?

I expressed my concerns about throwing more money into my yard than I was comfortable with, but Frankie graciously pointed out that many of the people on the tour probably feel the same way that I do, and that our house would be a fine example of simplicity intersecting with beauty.

How could we say no to that?

So, we agreed. We are now on the tour, along with eight other participants, scheduled for June 4-5. Frankie recently sent us an email that said the Master Gardeners are expecting upwards of 500 people to tour the participating gardens.

The pressure is on.

Right now, hardly anything is in bloom, so it's difficult to envision what hopefully will be. Or to even meet the description we wrote for the tour brochure. On top of that, I weeded and feeded (wed and fed?) the grass in our yard before this tour project actually became a thing for us, so all of our grass right now looks like circus elephants have been grazing on the property. Plus, with about 54 days to go, the weeds have been merciless.

Indeed, I've already started significant weeding. I'll be turning the soil and throwing out grass seed this week. Kim has already bought geraniums for the kitchen window box and put up the hummingbird feeder. Both of us have submitted our pleas for Divine Intervention over the coming weeks. We've even taken our second Covid booster shots to make sure we get through this thing intact. And, if all goes according to schedule, I'll be throwing down at least three Bobcat loads of hardwood mulch in about a month.

But until the tour actually gets here, I'm anticipating daily work in our yards and gardens. We'd be doing this even if we weren't on the tour, except there's a deadline now.

But we're excited about this. It'll be hard work, but it'll be fun, too. Simplicity meets eye appeal.

Participating in the tour will be Stuart and Grace Ward, 210 Westover Drive; Willie and Jo Ellen Edwards, 212 Westover Drive;  Don Patterson and Marcia Michaud-Patterson, 4 Hege Drive; Courtney and April Crowson, 27 Grimes Circle; Amy Suttle, 116 Chestnut Street; Bright Carter, 209 Chestnut Street; Tom Tussey and Jeff Miller, 500 West Second Avenue; Gail and Judy Lanier, 304 West Second Avenue; and us, Bruce and Kim Wehrle, 406 West Second Avenue.

Tickets are $20 and will benefit several charities.

Band of brothers

Back in 1991, when Mom was losing her battle with breast cancer, one of the things she asked her three sons was to promise to never lose touch with each other.

I think it was her vision that the brothers would reunite every few years, hoist a few, arms locked around shoulders, singing John Denver tunes.

Unfortunately, as it usually does, life got in the way.

One son, me, was already living in North Carolina. The youngest son, Scott, was soon to live in Tennessee, then Iowa, and finally Oklahoma. The middle son, Dave, ended up spending more than 40 years in Alaska.

It was nearly an impossible promise to keep. And while in truth we never did lose contact with each other (promise kept), we never had that reunion of the three of us together. To this day, that is still an open possibility.

What did Mom expect? She and Dad created a family in Allentown, PA, then packed us up for brief tenures in Portsmouth, NH, East Hartford, CT (where Scott was born), and then back to Pennsylvania, a state where we moved three more times in just a handful of years. Indeed, our parents ended up in Wisconsin. It is where they are buried. Perhaps inadvertently, they handed down the wanderlust gene to their children. No wonder she worried we'd lose touch.

Technology helped. The brothers would call and chat with each other on holidays. Then we could text, which made contact even easier. About a year or so ago, my laptop beeped and I received a facetime call from Scott.  A what? But that was nice. Shortly after that, my cell phone beeped, I hit "answer," and I got a visual call from Dave. All of these things have brought us closer.

 Scott and I have reunited several times in person over the years, the latest event several years ago when he and his wife, Shelly, came to help me through my recovery after colon surgery.

But Dave was a different matter. He was soooo far away. Kim and I did see him in Anchorage back in 1992, and then saw him again in 1998 when he brought his toddler son Charlie to Allentown to be christened. But that was the last time we saw him in person.

Until yesterday. The cog wheels of time were gaining some traction. In his retirement, Dave returned to Allentown, having seriously reconnected with a high school friend, Linda, who sat at the desk in front of him in home room in high school. They now plan to be married. It's a great love story, one of those with a Hallmark happy ending, I think.

Anyway, they're on their way to Florida to visit one of Linda's friends. And yesterday, they showed up at our house to stay overnight. Maybe two nights. We'll see.

It's the first time I've seen Dave in 24 years...

(Excuse me for a moment. I'm a little verklempft right now. I need to take a breath...)

We're tying to pack a lot of things in a short amount of time. We gave them a brief tour of the house, then a brief tour of Lexington. We drove to Childress Vineyard and then had some barbecue. That night, they met some of our neighbors as we sat around the fire pit, watching the Final Four and sharing conversation. Everybody wanted to hear Dave tell them my secrets, and what was I really like? 

Dave and I broke away for a few moments to enjoy a couple of celebratory cigars and some personal time as we caught up.

Even this morning, I still can't quite grasp this moment, although I know it's here.

Now that Dave is back in Pennsylvania, the thought of a brothers' reunion is more real. Where? When?

Well, there is that wedding to plan for.

Mom would be delighted.

Courtside

Just when I thought the Supreme Court of the United States was relatively immune from all the political chaos surrounding us the past five years or so, up pops Ginni Thomas.

Ginni Thomas is the wife of Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas, who also happens to be a prominent conservative political activist in the Washington DC power structure.

That fact alone should be alarming, given what her husband does for a living. Can you imagine the pillow talk?

Ginni Thomas

But late last week The Washington Post published a story – co-written by legendary muckraker Bob Woodward, along with colleague Robert Costa – that Ginni Thomas exchanged messages with President Trump's then White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows to look into overturning the 2020 election results and to never concede the election loss to Joe Biden.

At least 29 messages between Ginni Thomas and Meadows were revealed by The Washington Post. The 29 messages were handed over by Meadows himself to the House select committee, investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. He actually forked over 2,320 messages before deciding enough was enough, citing nonexistent presidential executive privilege as his reason to stop, subpoenas be damned.

I'm guessing that Ginni and Clarence both had wished Meadows had stopped with 2,291 messages.

Some of the messages included such refrains as "Help This Great President stand firm, Mark!!! ... The majority knows Biden and the Left is attempting the greatest Heist in our History."

Her use of the upper case and verb agreement (Creighton University must be proud) is perplexing enough, especially for a lawyer, but to wallow in QAnon conspiracy is simply astounding.

Although what Ginni Thomas wrote in her messages is not illegal, the texts are still chilling. The wife of a Supreme Court justice is calling for the overthrow of an American election (she attended the Jan. 6 rally on the Ellipse, but left before the assault on the Capitol because the weather was "too cold."), which is essentially calling for the overthrow of American democracy.

Freedom fighters in Ukraine are currently showing more of a conception of democracy then many House and Senate Republicans, some of whom still can't bring themselves to acknowledge that Biden is the legitimately elected President of the United States in the most secure elections ever held in this country.

What makes Ginni Thomas's messages so alarming has already been illustrated by her husband, who was the lone dissenting vote (without comment) in a Supreme Court decision to allow the Jan. 6 committee access to the National Archives for White House records. Apparently, Clarence Thomas felt strongly enough that the Jan. 6 panel should not have those documents. So did his wife. Did I do right, dear?

It's not a good look for the Court, which is supposed to operate in a world of equal justice and transparency and not conflict of interests. If that supposition holds true, then Clarence Thomas should recuse himself from any relevant Jan. 6  cases, if not resign outright. This affair goes directly to the integrity of the Court. He can thank his wife for that.

But neither recusal nor resignation will happen. The court is steeped in politics, no matter how indignant it becomes when it's accused of being political. But such may have always been the case, dating back to slavery and Dred Scott in 1857, if not Madison v. Marbury in 1803. It seems we have no choice but to accept the illusion that the Court is free of politics. Even now, the justices are claiming they can police themselves without following the ethics rules that are mandatory for the lower courts. Yeah, right. But this is where we are. This is why there will be no recusal or resignation.

Madisonian democracy, which mandates a revolution every four years with free and fair elections, is coming under assault by a Republican Party that has no platform – and hasn't had one ever since the Trump administration. How does that serve a government of, by and for the people? Consequently, American democracy is trying to keep its balance on constantly shifting ground littered with land mines.

Mid-term elections are approaching and the chaos constantly swirls around us unabated. Think hard and carefully before you vote. The ball, ironically, is in our court.

News views

 There's an old, familiar chestnut that says the first casualty of war is the truth.

So what is the truth? How do you determine the truth? What is propaganda? What is disinformation? What is a lie?

The current struggle in Ukraine, a sovereign nation fighting to keep its democracy in the face of an invasion from neighboring Russia, shows us almost hourly how the truth – and the bending of the truth – is a potent weapon of war.

And while war is almost always a battle for territory, it is also a battle for hearts and minds.

So while most of the world appears to support Ukraine's courageous struggle just to stay alive, there are some – Americans – who still favor Russia's rationale for its campaign of conquest.

Why?

Do they believe that Russia attacked Ukraine because there are supposedly biolabs on the border that threaten Russia? Really? Where is the evidence for that? Where are the pictures of these labs? Where are the videos? There is no physical evidence because there are no biolabs. It's that simple. To believe otherwise is to believe Qanon.

Russian president Vladimir Putin, who is propelling this vanity war in an effort to restore the old Russian empire, claims that Ukraine must be excised of Nazis. Is that believable? Of course not. There are no Nazis in the Ukraine government. But, remember, Russia lost perhaps as many as 30 million people in its Great Patriotic War against Hitler's Nazism during the 1940s. Mentioning Nazis now becomes a historical threat to those Russians who opt to believe it: Nazism happened once before, it can happen again. It's an effective brainwash.

Women and children – civilians – have fallen in the Russian onslaught, but Putin seems determined to blame those war crimes against the Ukrainian people themselves – that they are responsible for their own misfortune. A hospital blows up, a school crumbles, and Russia blames Ukraine. Right.

Ironically, that's exactly the same road map Germany used in World War II in its invasion of Russia.

Why some Americas – conservative politicians like Madison Cawthorn, Matt Gaetz or Marjorie Taylor Greene, to name a few – denounced the Ukrainian struggle is baffling, if not actually outrageous. Mostly, I think, it's a political stance taken solely to oppose the current administration. What else could it be? Unless it's a treacherous path to support Putin. If so, then what are Cawthorn, Gaetz, Greene, et al, doing in an American congress? Useful idiots.

Social media also influences thought. I've seen the memes on Facebook – memes designed to divide Americans from each other. The next time you see a clever meme and feel compelled to post it, you might want to consider that it probably originated in a cyber meme factory in St. Petersburg, Russia.

Truth is not always easy to discern. Common sense helps. So does a smell detector. So does logic.

The truth is what you make it.

Map quest

 I was working out at the YMCA the other day and got involved in a conversation with a person at least 50 years younger than me (which would still make this person I was talking to about 20 years old).

It somehow came out that I was from the Philadelphia area. I was trying to give this person a mental point of reference about something we were discussing when I asked, "You know where Philadelphia is on the map, right?"

"Umm," came the reply. Then came a few passing seconds of silence, like I was offering up a trick question on an SAT exam. "Near the eastern part of Pennsylvania? About halfway up?"

I almost said, "Yeah, next to the Delaware River," but then I thought that this little tidbit might be overkill given the way this conversation was headed, so I just nodded "yes" and worried about the future of our children.

This geographic discussion got me to thinking about where we are in the world, and more precisely, do people actually know where we are located in the world? And especially now, with global events unfolding the way they are.

I've always been a map guy. I liked the folding maps we kept in our cars' glove compartments back in the day. When I got older and started traveling across state lines, I found comfort (and motels) in Rand McNally's life-saving road atlases. I still take an atlas with me on road trips, even though I've got all kinds of GPS stuff in my car.

I study maps in history books.

The mapboard.

 And, years ago, I played Avalon Hill strategy war games.

Whut?

Yep. Back in the 1960s, when I was about 10 or 11 or so and living in East Hartford, CT, a good friend of mine, Richard Bober, introduced me to Avalon Hill war games.

Briefly, the games are played on cardboard maps printed with hexagonal grids which determine movement. The playing pieces are little cardboard counters representing battalions and divisions, and they are printed with numerical movement, attack and defense factors. In addition, the mapboard includes rivers, mountains and cities, which can double defense factors.

Combat (and sometimes the weather) is resolved by the roll of a die, which are the games' random element. But, curiously, most of the games turned out with historically correct outcomes.

So, over the years, I bought Avalon Hill games left and right. I played D-Day, which taught me the geography of France. I played Afrika Korps, which taught me the geography of north Africa. I played Battle of the Bulge, which showed me Belgium and parts of Germany. I played Stalingrad, and later, The Russian Campaign, which showed me the geography of Russia and eastern Europe.

I even played Gettysburg, which showed me where Devil's Den was on the battlefield before I actually saw it for the first time.

Anyway, in Russia's current real-time onslaught of Ukraine, I know where Kiev and Kharkov are. I know where Lviv is, as well as Odessa and Brest. I know the Bug River, the Volga and the Dniper. I've crossed them hundreds of times with the roll of the die on my way to crushing Nazism.

I remember playing D-Day with Richard, who always seemed to win (hey, it was his game). In fact, I called him up the other day after going through my closets and finding a few of my old Avalon Hill games.

"Hey, Rich," I said with great anticipation. "I was looking through my closet, and you'll never guess what I found."

"Your Avalon Hill games," he instantly replied, stealing my thunder, and so the nostalgia tour began. 

I tried playing The Russian Campaign the other day (you can play the games solo, but what fun is there in beating yourself?), but after about an hour of trying to set up the counters on the battlefield and re-reading the directions on how to play the game, I gave up. Thin patience.

Avalon Hill was eventually bought by Hasbro in the 1990s and no longer publishes strategy war games. I think they've been replaced by computer games, which take no time at all to set up.

But I do have the memories. I reminisced with an old friend. And for what it's worth, I know where Kursk is.

 

Ukraine migraine

There's a part of me that can't help making comparisons from the past with the current crisis in Ukraine. I mean, history can't help but repeat itself, it seems. We just have to be observant enough to see it.

The fact that Ukraine is reportedly providing unexpectedly stiff and unrelenting resistance to the Russian invasion makes me wonder if this is similar to what the American colonists faced against King George III and the world's strongest military at the time as the colonies tried to gain their independence.

Ukrainians, of course, are fighting to keep their independence. Different, but the same.

The comparisons of Russian president Vladimir Putin to Nazi German chancellor Adolf Hitler in the 1930s and '40s is almost too easy. Both leaders relied on obviously contrived and unprovoked excuses to justify their aggressions upon neighboring sovereign states. Both leaders are/were heartless in their world view of humanity.

In truth, most aggressors initiate their invasions with provocations.

Incredibly – and I hadn't really considered this until now – is the persecution of both Jews and people of color by the invader state and, in some cases, by states supposedly providing safe spaces. World history cannot escape its centuries long oppression of Jews, Blacks and immigrants in general. And so it continues.

Refugees still flee from their oppressors with not much more than the clothes on their backs and whatever they can carry in their hands. What has surprised me is the seemingly large number of refugees bringing their pets with them. I didn't expect that.

Sanctions are a tool to use against aggressor nations, and the sanctions imposed on the Russians right now seem to be significant. Financial sanctions that cause discomfort among the populace can ultimately result in revolution. Russia should know this from the revolution it experienced in World War 1 in 1917.

A large number of body bags returning home also could foster a Russian revolution. It depends on how the critical mass of the dead is defined and reached. Vietnam is within our own history – and memory – on this matter.

And speaking of critical mass, the existence of nuclear technology, both in weapons and vulnerable power plants. has a role in this conflict, and maybe for the first time since the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962. Even now, it's enough to be unsettling. 

If the nuclear option ever does come into play (and I might sound a whole lot like a duck-and-cover kid from the 1950s – which I am), this conflict will require a deft mixture of diplomacy, brinkmanship, wisdom and luck to keep us from becoming the third cinder from the sun.