That's the spirit

I'm not so sure if there was a sense of pride as much as there was a sense of purpose.

December had arrived and the good folks in our neighborhood were already putting up their Christmas decorations almost as soon as the last of the Thanksgiving turkey had been devoured. The 400 block of West 2nd Avenue, I'm pretty sure, was feeling the expectations of having been declared the Best Block in the Lexington Parks and Recreation Department's Light Up The Block contest for the past two consecutive years.

And in those two years, each house was pretty much on its own. Decorate your own house the way you want. That's the way it should be.

And it looked pretty good, too. All nine houses on the block participated, with some of the homes winning individual awards, like most original, or most traditional, or most unique.

It was kind of cool. Car loads of people actually drove down our street to have a look-see.

But what could we do differently this year?

The work is done and the neighbors gather together.

The answer turned out to be both obvious and simple: luminaries. I'm pretty sure that idea evolved during one of the neighborhood porch parties or fire pits. Maybe 100 percent sure. And I'm sure a little wine may have been involved, or perhaps some craft beer. Or both.

Anyway, one of our neighbors, Stacy Sosebee-West, ordered luminaries for the block: about 500 little translucent white bags and battery-operated tea lights. Meanwhile, T.J. Strickland had the sand we needed to put inside the bags so they wouldn't blow away.

Then, on Thursday, came the best part. Late in the afternoon, while there was still some sunlight in the sky, the neighbors came out and got to work. T.J. and Billy West loaded up two wheelbarrows with sand, with a wheelbarrow load for each side of the street.

We somehow organized an assembly-line process on the fly. On our side of the street, Keith Cude opened the folded bags one at a time. I filled each bag with a cup of sand, Stacy put a tea light in each one and then she and Billy lined them up on the sidewalk.

It was pretty much the same across the street with T.J. and his wife, Christie, and their kids, Ellie and Jackson, working the sidewalk, along with Kristi Thornhill and her twin daughters, Sarah and Mary Evann. Sam West, the son of Billy and Stacy, also joined in.

While we were in the process, Ken Coleman served as quality control, checking each luminary, making sure they were lit, properly spaced from one another and in a straight line.

The whole thing evolved into a remarkably efficient operation. In less than 40 minutes, we were done and at least 250 luminaries were in place. And it wasn't even dark yet.

The neighbors gathered to see what they had created. I've written numerous times about how unique this neighborhood is, at least as it is in my mind. But the camaraderie already on this block seemed to notch up another level.

And in a few moments, the sun slipped away and the luminaries took on their own special glow in the twilight. It was impressive. Like a church service. Like Christmas.

Suddenly, this didn't seem like a city-wide competition anymore. We were together as friends and neighbors, working with a purpose, having fun. Hey, we wondered, can they see this block from space?

Or do they see the spirit, joy and affection among us instead?

Like the way it should be. 

"Our house is a very, very, very fine house..."

 

 

Reflection

I am not a deep thinker, although there are times when I think I can have deep thoughts.

The tornadoes that ravaged six states in middle America Friday – and particularly a candle factory in Mayfield, Kentucky – have brought me to this location in my brain again.

The scenes of devastation are almost overwhelming: overturned vehicles, leveled buildings, a debris field that stretches across 250 consecutive miles. And then you think: the number of people who lost their lives just two weeks before Christmas is both heartbreaking and heartrending. And then you think of the survivors whose lives have been irrevocably changed.

When I first saw the news Friday morning, I turned to Kim and tearfully choked, "You know, you try to live your life each day. You go to work, and just like that, even the weather can kill you. You just never know."

One of the first things that crossed my mind was that this devastation is another prime example of climate change, as if we needed another reminder. Tornadoes, perhaps F-5s, in December. At least 30 tornadoes in six states. One of them rampaging for an unbelievable 250 miles on the ground. We're seeing things we don't think we've ever seen before.

Yesterday, right here in Lexington, on Dec. 11, it was 73 degrees. We haven't had a decent snowfall in nearly two years.

I try not to ponder on why there is suffering in the world. I'll leave that up to the theologians. Human history is littered with tragedy. Maybe a lot of it is our own doing. We build homes on fault lines, we live in the shadow of volcanoes, we insist on living near beaches that annually welcome hurricanes. We carry guns like they were toys and ignore vaccines because unqualified politicians tell us it's a hoax.

We eat ice cream when our cholesterol is too high and our hearts threaten to attack us.

Having said that, it's still the world we live in. Wars will happen. So will famine. So will disease. So we carry on, knowing the best we can do is to play the percentages and hope the next tornado veers to the left into an open field and not to the right into downtown Main Street.

It might be the best we can do. It might be all that we have.

The Beatles: Get Back, addendum

I never get tired of writing about The Beatles. So bear with me.

After recently watching Peter Jackson's time-traveling three-part documentary The Beatles: Get Back last week, I felt compelled to add to last week's blog.

There was just too much to process. So much to unpack.

The eight hours of Jackson's video were culled from nearly 60 hours of archived footage taken during The Beatles Let It Be sessions, held at Twickenham Film Studio and Apple headquarters in January 1969 and shot by directer Michael Lindsey-Hogg. The resulting film was a gloomy overview of the eventual breakup of the world's most prodigious band.

Jackson's effort, by contrast, showed The Beatles, at times, joking around, serious and mostly friendly with each other. The Beatles say so themselves in the footage. At least, that's how it came out in the film editing. But I'll take it.

I suspect the truth of their eventual breakup lay somewhere between the two films, released more than 50 years of each other. The one thing we truly gained here was perspective.

There were seminal moments for me in Jackson's work. I'll go through a few of them, as much for myself as for you.

Part 1

• About an hour into Part 1, and four days into the three-week project, we reach what I think is the most remarkable moment of the entire documentary. Paul, George and Ringo are sitting around together, waiting for John to show up. Paul picks up his signature Hofner violin bass and starts strumming a tune that only he can hear hidden in the synapses and axions of his brain. He's playing the bass as if it's a six-string Martin acoustic. Who does that?

A moment later, a melody appears and the beat is catching. Ringo starts hand-clapping a percussion line. George, who was yawning and bored to tears just 60 seconds earlier, picks up his guitar and follows along. We instantly recognize the tune as "Get Back," and already Paul is singing fragments of the lyrics.

Then John finally arrives, picks up his rhythm guitar, and seamlessly jams with the others to a tune he's never heard before.

It's a remarkable moment. The sequence was caught mostly by an overhead camera and, 50 years later, we truly feel like flies on the wall as we watch something special happening. We were granted access to the birth of a new single, created, coaxed and recognizable within two minutes. Two weeks later, The Beatles are playing it on the roof of Apple headquarters in full glory.

• Some of this documentary can be tedious as we listen into banal conversations and bits and pieces of songs from a group that knows it is fraying at the edges. Near the end of Part 1, George has had enough. He's been ignored. Disrespected. He announces that he is leaving the group. It's lunchtime. The others aren't sure what's happening. "See you 'round the clubs" he says and walks away.

In the film's most tender moment, as the group tries to figure out what to do, Paul, John and Ringo get ready to leave for the day. Studio engineers, girlfriends, technicians still linger, but the three come together in an arm-embracing huddle. We can't hear what they're saying, but we see it. The band is making an effort to stay viable in the midst of chaos. As the group begins to splinter, these three may be never closer than this moment.

The background music, as the scene fades to black, is George's "Isn't It A Pity?", which will ultimately end up on his epic All Things Must Pass trilogy. It's a timely lament of sorrow and heartache.

Part 2

• A few minutes into Part 2, Paul and Ringo are both on the verge of tears. George, who left the group on Friday, still hasn't returned. And John is late for Monday's session. John is always late.

Paul briefly touches on the forces pressing in on The Beatles after nearly 13 years together, and he can foresee their demise. John finally arrives in time for lunch, and in a revealing discussion with Paul around a hidden microphone in an arrangement of flowers in the studio canteen, Lennon/McCartney discuss how they've alienated George. It's almost a revelation to them, and they make another effort to get George to return.

• At the 21-minute mark, Ringo comes to work and immediately joins Paul at the Bluthner piano, where they bang out an original off-the-cuff boogie woogie tune together ("I Bought a Piano the Other Day"). I'm stunned because I didn't know Ringo could play the piano. "Lookit that," I said to myself.  "They can all play multiple instruments but can't read a note of sheet music."

• About 40 minutes into Part 2, George is back and the sessions have moved out of Twickenham and into the friendly recording studio in brand-new Apple headquarters on Savile Row. The Beatles are back at work, but there's an energy and a focus that's obviously missing.

Then, in a stroke of serendipity, Billy Preston arrives unannounced just to say hello to some old friends.  A keyboardist who backed Little Richard, Preston knew The Beatles as long ago as 1962. Because the group is now planning a live album, they need a piano player, because as good as The Beatles are, none of them can play guitar and piano at the same time. Would you like to have a go, Billy?

Billy sits down at an electric piano and immediately joins in with the others to "I've Got a Feeling" as if he's known the song all his life. He makes all the difference. Paul smiles. John smiles. The documentary smiles, and the new energy Preston creates carries the film all the way to the end.

"You're in the group," John tells Billy.

Part 3

• The opening sequence has Ringo back at the piano, working on a tune called "Octopus's Garden," which eventually shows up on the Abbey Road album.

Ringo is stuck and George comes over to help. It's a memorable moment as we see another song taking shape.

• But the final segment is building toward the famous rooftop concert, which covers the final 40 minutes or so of the documentary. It's amazing. And it's not really a concert, either. But it is their last performance as The Beatles, and Jackson gives us all of it, for the first time, from start to finish.

There's just enough time to knock out 10 tunes, all in bitingly cold weather. But it's more like a rehearsal. "Get Back" is played three times. "Don't Let Me Down" and "I've Got A Feeling" each are played twice. Also included in the set are "One After 909," "Dig A Pony," and an instrumental of "God Save the Queen." The last few songs are played in the presence of the police, who are responding to a noise complaint. The bobbies are unfailingly polite, but confused. How do you arrest the United Kingdom's greatest musical export for noise disturbance?

And then it's over.

 

 

The Beatles Get Back

The country was still in bewildered grieving that February evening when we gathered around the old black-and-white Motorola television set to see what all the fuss was about.

Just 79 days earlier, the trajectory of our world shifted dramatically when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated, virtually before our very eyes, it seemed. We were a nation that was seriously wounded, treading our anxiety through time, uncertain about ... everything.

We may have been seeking relief.

Little did we know that that impossible trajectory was about to shift again. Both seismically and sonically, in fact.

So our family sat down and watched The Ed Sullivan Show that night in rapt anticipation. We'd already heard about this overhyped musical group with the funny-but-clever name called The Beatles, and the big attraction – their long hair – was what we wanted to see the most. In an era of buzz cuts and flattops – this was 1964, mind you – The Beatles were almost comically outrageous to our eyes. 

When their images appeared on the screen, we mostly kind of smirked, I think. The song they sang, "All My Loving," was incidental to us. For myself, I didn't know that much about music then, didn't follow any particular groups or singers. My folks were into show tunes, with my dad a big fan of a barbershop quartet, The Buffalo Bills. My parents actually saw them perform in The Music Man on Broadway. Suddenly, the Bills were constantly on our console turntable. That's what we listened to. And maybe some jazz that dad liked. Dave Brubeck, Stan Getz. Mom leaned toward the classical, although she'd listen to current radio. Meanwhile, I flipped baseball cards and ho-hummed my way through adolescence.

The Beatles performed two more songs in that opening set, including, ironically, "Til There Was You" from The Music Man, and then, unforgettably, "She Loves You," with the iconically relentless hook "Yeah, yeah, yeah" that has been identified with The Beatles forever after. Later in the show, they sang "I Saw Her Standing There" and "I Want to Hold Your Hand." Wow. Who else could pull off five songs on Ed Sullivan? The Beatles seemed like they were having a good time that night. It's hard to believe that was 57 years ago, but a cultural milestone had clearly been carved.

My world immediately changed the next day when I went to school. I was laboring through seventh grade at an age when I was halfway scared of and halfway curious about girls. But the girls on that Monday morning could talk about nothing but The Beatles. They passed notes to each other. They giggled. They drew stick-figure pictures of their favorite Beatle, all the while proclaiming they loved Paul or John or George or even that goofy Ringo. The Beatles 4-Ever, they wrote to each other. I didn't get it.

I didn't get it for a couple years until I had a girlfriend who was also a Beatles fan. Then I started listening. I started tapping my foot to Ringo's beat, I started bobbing my head to the melodies. The lyrics struck home. "Help", "Yesterday", "Norwegian Wood", "Eleanor Rigby", "Penny Lane" and "Michelle" had caught my attention. In 1967, I had a summer job at the community swimming pool, when Sgt. Pepper hit the airwaves as well as the pool's PA system, and I was reeled in like a 20-pound bass in a fishing tournament. I finally caught up to them in real time.

•  •  •

The years rolled by. 

I bought books about The Beatles. I watched the documentaries and anthologies. I bought all their albums and then bought all of their CDs. You could track their obviously steady progression as artists from album to album, each one going a little step further than the last.

On April 4, 1964, they had the top five hits on the Billboard Top 100: "Can't Buy Me Love", "Twist and Shout", "She Loves You", "I Want to Hold Your Hand", and "Please, Please Me." Seven other tunes of theirs rounded out the Top 100 that day. Phenomenal.

All totaled, they had 20 No. 1 hits, basically from 1964 to 1969. About three a year. Get out of here. All while indelibly changing the recording industry with their overdubs, multitracks and tape loops.

•  •  •

I bring all of this up because I've been engrossed by Peter Jackson's recent three-part series The Beatles: Get Back. Jackson culled over nearly 60 hours of archival footage from the Let It Be sessions, filmed by director Michael Lindsay-Hogg in 1969, which more or less documented the breakup of the band. Jackson's work shows some of that, but even more remarkably the footage he selected puts on display the incredible songwriting process behind The Beatles.

Mostly, that process appears to be the result of inspired improvisation. Just a group of friends gathered around each other strumming away. No written notes. In fact, The Beatles could not read sheet music. They wrote down their lyrics, but not their melodies. Somehow, the music just poured out of them. Freely. Irresistibly. They knew their chords and chord progressions, but did they know music theory? Does it even matter?

As the film shows, many of the tunes we know now were identifiable right from the get-go. Some of the songs they were working on for Let It Be (they had a self-imposed deadline to create and practice 14 songs over a three-week span that were intended either for television or a live concert) ended up in the Abbey Road album or on George's epic All Things Must Pass. George was already becoming a prolific songwriter in his own right, maybe even moreso than John at this point. He'd already had "Something" well in the works, and "Here Comes the Sun" was about to rise a few weeks hence in Eric Clapton's garden.

Some of the songs developed out of simple nonsense vocalizing. Paul's "Get Back" started off as a protest against anti-immigrationists, and particularly of the views of Parliament xenophobe Enoch Powell. I wish the song had been published as such instead of in its familiar final form because it would be so timely in today's world. It was edgy and on point.

That said, the documentary may not be for everybody. The first and second parts are each three hours long, and unless you are a dedicated Beatles fan, there may not be much, if any, mystery or intrigue to be found here. The first part took place in spacious Twickenham Film Studios, the second part at newly-created Apple headquarters on Savile Row. The only action essentially comes from conversation, harmony and guitar, drum or piano riffs.

But that's more than enough. If you are an authentic Beatles fan, this film is pure, unalloyed gold. We're allowed to sit in with them via some stunningly vibrant video footage: we become almost as ever-present as Yoko. And it's not all gloom here. Sometimes the sessions are joyful. Sometimes wistful. Sometimes humorous. Sometimes awesome.

There is a touch of sadness here, too. John is murdered just 10 years after this documentary is filmed. George dies in 2001 of lung cancer that had spread to his brain. In some ways, we are watching holy ghosts perform.

But, my gosh, how young they all looked in this footage. Not one of them had of yet turned 30. They're just kids. Incredibly talented kids.

My own Beatlemania actually continued a few weeks before Jackson's work debuted when Kim purchased Paul's "The Lyrics" for me as an early Christmas present. The two-volume set offers Paul's thoughts on many of his Beatle creations as well as many of his Wings tunes and in its way is just as revealing as Jackson's film in detailing Paul's songwriting process. 

This is also Paul's opportunity (he's now 79 years old) to set the record straight (okay, pun intended) as he sees it. His collaboration with John on every song they wrote as Beatles was always tagged as a "Lennon/McCartney" tune, thus forming a timeless partnership as recognizable and substantial as Rodgers and Hammerstein or Gilbert and Sullivan, to name two. 

But in "The Lyrics", Paul declares "McCartney/Lennon" if he is the principle writer of a particular piece. This makes perfect sense to me. John, for example, had no input at all on "Yesterday", so why should the credit line go to Lennon/McCartney? Is McCartney a victim of his own ego here? Is he justified? Perhaps, perhaps not. 

So what?

To this day, I still have my occasional Beatles binge sessions, listening to two or three of their albums in a single sitting. By now, I've become a discerning listener. Sometimes I try to isolate Ringo's drumming, to follow in my head his beat and his fills. Sometimes I'll focus on George's lead guitar and appreciate how he grew as an artist and a musician while introducing synthesizers and sitars to the band. I appreciate the seemingly effortless and precise harmonies they emulated, with a nod, toward the Everly Brothers. I recently discovered, more than 50 years later, the simple finger snaps of John, George and Ringo at the end of Paul's "Here, There and Everywhere" and I almost shouted with glee at the revelation.

Imagine that. Jumping out of my chair and shouting with glee at The Beatles. The Beatles 4-Ever.

Here we are again

Kim went into her Einstein mode the other day. 

I mean, true, she's a bright woman who offers plenty of deep, independent and original thinking that features some interesting perspectives of her very own. So it was no surprise to me when she boldly stepped into the slipstream of the time-space continuum:

"I can't believe Thanksgiving is here already," she sighed, looking ahead to Thursday. "Do you feel that way? I don't think I'm ready for it."

The subliminal message here is that if she's not ready for Thanksgiving, then it follows that she's not ready for Christmas, either. The first Sunday in Advent, after all, is only a week away. Already, some early Christmas decorations have sprouted up in the neighborhood that greatly support her early arrival hypothesis.

But to get back to Thanksgiving.

I tried to answer her, relying on my age (I'm nine years older than she) as the voice of experience.

"When you get older," I said, using my own best Einstein impression, "time seems to go faster."

You know. E equals MC squared. She ignored me, I think. Probably wisely.

She started ticking off all the stuff that has to be done, even though we're still unclear what's going to happen Thursday. We usually have a family gathering, but Covid could scotch that for a second straight year. Or we might just stay at home and fix our own meal. Kim prepares a great turkey breast in the crockpot, and her dressing and sweet potato casserole are to die for. There might even be a pumpkin pie out there. She inherited all her mother's cooking skills, which is why I'm in the gym every day.

We've barely done any Christmas shopping, but we avoid Black Friday like the plague. We'll probably do the boutique thing, filling out our gift list with Mrs. Hanes cookies, or finding somewhere that offers scented candles and soaps. Maybe a bottle of wine or two.

This pretty much all happens the Saturday after Thanksgiving but the Sunday before Advent.

So, unless the arrival of Thanksgiving is already on your radar, then, yes, I guess it does get here pretty fast.

Try not to get caught in the slipstream.

Storming the beaches

Thanks to Covid, it had been two years since we last went to the beach.

I suppose we could have gone before now, but we didn't want to take the risk. We'd heard all the horror stories about the unmasked hordes at the beach and just who was – and wasn't – vaccinated.

Kim poses with her turkey (it's not me).

 We'd even purchased tickets to see The Beach Boys (what's left of them) at Alabama Theater. We bought the tickets in advance back in May when the Covid crisis seemed to be waning, but then the Delta variant popped up heading into autumn, so we cancelled our date for October. We really didn't want to be in a sold-out venue sitting next to somebody shoulder-to-shoulder who was unmasked and spewing along to "Good Vibrations" at the top of his infected lungs.

But then the Veterans' Day weekend came along, and so did opportunity. Kim and I are both fully vaccinated and boostered, so we felt relatively comfortable going to Cherry Grove. On Thursday, we hit the road.

The weather was perfect. The only drawback was that there was some glitch in the cable system where we were staying and, consequently, we had no television. I am a child of the '50s who grew up on television. Howdy Doody. Sky King. Roy Rogers. Superman. Ovaltine. I've probably watched something on the tube every day of my life for the past 65 years. I often turn the screen on just to give me background noise, even if I'm in another room and not watching anything. I'm kind of pathetic that way. I probably came this close to going into withdrawal. (I wonder if there's an approved program for television addiction?)

But guess what? I brought a John Grisham book with me. I had the Internet on my phone. Kim and I had complete and uninterrupted conversations. We were happy to be there. Kim actually shed a few tears of joy as we entered the Cherry Grove town limits for the first time in two years. "I never thought I'd be back," she sniffed.

As it turned out, we were at the beach for about 44 total hours, but we packed a lot of stuff into a short amount of time. We ate a great meal at Dockside in Calabash, followed by our traditional stroll through Callahan's emporium. On Friday, we took in Broadway at the Beach, Barefoot Landing, the Tanger Outlets on Hwy. 17, and Books-A-Million at a nearby mall. 

I don't know how we did it. Neither one of us took a nap on either day.

We even walked the beach for an hour or so. That's something we hadn't done in years. I didn't even mind the sand in my shoes.

Then we wrapped up the day with a wonderful deck-side meal at Molly Darcy's Irish Pub, watching the tide roll in and the sun roll out.

It was all nearly perfect. We got away and cleared our heads. I don't think it'll be two years before our next visit.

Look. There really is an Atlantic Ocean.

The joys of no noise

Kim and I try to go for an evening stroll as often as we can, usually after we've had dinner and before all the good stuff comes on TV ("good stuff" being relative, of course. Usually, for me, it's a ball game of some sort).

Anyway, the stroll up town is usually our quality time together. Kim is still an 8-to-5 working person, meaning unless it's the weekend, the lunch hour is about the only time we have with each other until she gets off work.

So, after dinner, we walk. We usually head up to Main Street because we like to look into the store windows. It's also the time when we get to talk. Usually, it's about how Kim's day went, but we also map out our strategies for the rest of the week, whose birthday is coming up, when is the next fire pit.

But talking on Main Street is getting tougher these days. I don't know when it started, but suddenly, cars without proper mufflers seem to be taking over. Sometimes they travel together. Sometimes they try to out-loud each other at intersections by gunning their engines (why would you do this when gas is $3.30 a gallon?). It's like American Grafitti has come to Lexington. Consequently, there are times when Kim and I can't hear each other talk, even when we're walking side by side.

When did Main Street become Pit Row?

OK, OK. I know what you're thinking. When did I turn into such an old fart? Cruising Main Street is pretty much a young man's game, I guess, designed to impress – who, exactly? But, geez, when the rest of the town has pretty much rolled up its sidewalks by 7 p.m. on school nights, is this noise really necessary?

And it's not just Main Street. Loud cars don't just suddenly materialize out of the blue in front of Lanier's. They have to get there, and sometimes, it's through residential areas. Heck, we live just five blocks off Main Street as it is. We can hear the noise from our front porch. It's really unnerving when loud vehicles come roaring through our street to get to Main.

I wonder how those residents living in loft apartments in town must feel? The residential district is, essentially, Main Street itself.

Lexington does have a noise ordinance. In Chapter 8 of the Code of Ordinances (Police Administrations and Provisions, Article II – Offenses and Miscellaneous Provisions; Division 2 – Noises; Section 8-31, Generally prohibited, under (a), it states "Subject to the provisions of this section, it shall be unlawful for any person or persons to make, permit, continue or cause to be made any unreasonably loud, disturbing and unnecessary noise in the city..."

The ordinance goes on to define (1) "Unreasonably loud" (2) "Disturbing" and (3) "Unnecessary." I could write word for word those descriptions from the ordinance, which all seem to apply here, but if I did, this blog would take until Tuesday to finish.

I did talk to a police officer about this one night while on our walk, and while she did take note of the noise ordinance, she did point out that it would be very difficult to enforce. The offending vehicles are transitory and probably would be gone by the time a police officer arrived. I guess. Maybe they could set up a noise trap, I don't know.

I think my best hope in all of this is that eventually, the thrill of making noise with your car on Main Street simply runs out of gas.

Why we play the games

Did anybody really see this coming?

The Atlanta Braves are going to the World Series. They'll be going up against the cheatin' Houston Astros. That's a big deal for Braves fans. And national interest, I think, is hovering just above life support when the Series begins Tuesday night.

I have a thought or two behind this Fall Classic ennui.

In a weird happenstance of the baseball playoff system, the best teams in the game are nowhere to be found.

In a regular season of 162 games for each team, the American League East champs, Tampa Bay, finished with 100 victories. The Rays were eliminated by the upstart wildcard Boston Red Sox, winners of 92 games, in the league division series.

Meanwhile, the Astros, with 95 victories to win the AL West, eliminated the Chicago White Sox, who won the AL Central with 93 victories.

The Astros, who are seeking some sort of redemption for a sign-stealing scandal a couple years ago, then eliminated the Red Sox in the league championship series.

Pearls on the diamond.

 It was worse in the National League, where the West Division San Francisco Giants posted the best record in baseball with a whopping 107 regular season victories. But the Giants ended up being eliminated by the Los Angeles Dodgers, coming out of the wildcard berth with an equally astounding 106 victories.

The Braves, meanwhile, came out of baseball's weakest division, the NL East, with only 88 wins to claim the division title. And yet, they advanced to the league championship by knocking off NL Central champs Milwaukee, which had 95 victories.

The 88-win Braves then stunned the 106-win Dodgers last night to advance to the World Series. That 18-game disparity between the two teams may suggest a lot about the state of baseball right now, but it's also why you play the games.

Imagine: three teams that won 100 games or more are going to be at home watching the Series on television.

Before expansion, World Series teams were determined by the winners in each league of a 154-game season. The long season was clearly the most accurate method to determine the best team to advance directly to the World Series because, over the course of six months, it considered injuries to key players, managerial brilliance or faux pas, winning and losing streaks, front office capability, and sometimes, just dumb luck.

Expansion, by necessity, brought divisional play to the postseason. Consequently, the best teams over the course of the regular season were sometimes eliminated in the playoffs by perhaps lesser teams that just happened to get hot at the right moment. 

Which is where we are right now. The Series pits one team – the Astros – trying to overcome the bad taste of a sign-stealing scandal in 2017 and 2018 for which it was fined $5 million and forfeited first- and second-round draft picks, against a team – the Braves – who feature a homer-hitting outfielder who wears a pearl necklace.

The Braves used to be America's team, thanks to a cable superstation, TBS, that broadcast all of the Braves games across the country back in the 1980s and '90s. You could find Braves fans in Idaho, for crying out loud.

But now streaming, cable packages and other avenues of broadcast have given fans alternative opportunities to cheer for teams without tomahawks on their jerseys.

Although, I don't know, a guy wearing a pearl necklace might bring some of them back.

It's not entirely clear why Joc Pederson is wearing pearls at the plate, but his fashion statement is catching on. Burly men oozing testosterone through their beards and goatees can be seen sitting in Truist Park clutching their pearl necklaces during crucial moments in the game. I suppose I ought to salute these guys for being secure in their sense of gender identity, but I'm guessing it's really a baseball thing that has more to do with superstition and not messing with baseball fate than it does with chromosome identity.

I suppose a man could walk into a restaurant today wearing a pearl necklace without drawing a second glance – as long as he was wearing a Braves hat.

But who would ever have thought there'd be pearls on the diamond? What if his necklace breaks and pearls go rolling all over the field? That would be something for Sports Center.

Anyway, who's going to win the Series? This is a tough one for me. On paper, Houston is the better, more complete team. But there's that scandal that still lingers over the Astros in the same way that the New England Patriots can't quite shake Spygate and Deflategate. Look, sign stealing has been in baseball for as long as there has been baseball. The difference here is that the Astros got caught and are paying the price to their reputation.

The Braves are a good, young team that could be around for several more years. And really, they're just a few hours drive from Lexington. I should be pulling for them if for no other reason than proximity. And they did defeat one of the best teams in baseball.

I just don't know. OK, if I have to pick, Astros in six. Cover your nose and hide your jewelry.

To boldly go...

Sending 90-year-old actor William Shatner into space on Wednesday through the auspices of the private Blue Origin enterprise (see what I did there?) was not a monumental achievement in space science, but it was still significant, I think.

To me, it was more than a bunch of rich white guys playing astronaut with their rockets and space suits. To me, it was moving science and astrophysics to another plateau. It's remarkable to me that the current privatization of space exploration has produced reusable booster rockets that can fall back to Earth and land upright on a target.

The fuel used in the Blue Origin rocket is a combination of liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen, which leaves no carbon footprint when they react with each other to provide the thrust to reach the Karman Line – the border between outer space and the Earth's atmosphere. Wow.

But through all of this, there is a friction between the need/desire for space exploration versus the need for social justice/awareness.

This friction first caught my attention with the Project Mercury program in the 1960s. I was a teenager and caught up in the excitement of America's fledgling space program. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) was the guiding force behind the program, using ex-Nazi's like Werner von Braun – along with millions of tax dollars – to beat the Russians to the moon.

A number of my precocious friends questioned the need to go into space when hunger, disease, homelessness and famine still plagued us on the planet, and it's a worthy question.

But here's the thing: the space program was never a linear project. In finding ways to launch men into space, there was also spawned other sciences, inventions and tools for the benefit of mankind.

Like digital imaging breast biopsy; laser angioplasty and fiber optic catheters; fiber optic forceps; cool suits to lower body temperatures; light emitting diodes to help in brain cancer surgery; programmable pacemakers, and tools for cataract surgery can all trace their roots to space science.

The list goes on: insulin pumps, artificial limbs, Lasik surgery and solar cells, not to mention communication advances, weather satellites and GPS systems.

Space exploration can also help us appreciate the value – and fragility – of our planet. Space science may eventually help us get a handle on climate change.

NASA is operating on an annual budget of $23.3 billion, which is about 0.48 percent of all U.S. government spending. Seems like a bargain to me, given the benefits we now enjoy.

And why would you muzzle the apparently human instinct to explore and find out what's going on beyond the next hill?

So, on the one hand, sending an overweight actor into space might not be the look that is needed to keep space exploration going. It does look pretty frivolous. But on the other hand, the planet's resources are finite – even the sun, our solar battery, will eventually decay and implode. If the human race is destined to go where no man has gone before, it has to start somewhere at some time.

My new ground rules

Last week I wrote a blog about 175 healthcare employees in the Novant Health system who opted not to get vaccinated for Covid-19. Consequently, they were fired by their employer after having a week or so to think about whether or not to comply with the company's vaccination mandate before making a decision.

So they made their decision. No vaccine. No job. Their choice. I applauded Novant's resolve, especially as it comes in the midst of a national nursing shortage. But in my opinion, it was the right call, and that's what I wrote. (It should also be noted that Novant had 99 percent compliance from its workforce of 35,000 employees, an indication that its employees thought that keeping their jobs was more important than a false sense of lost personal freedom during a pandemic that has killed 700,000 Americans).

I published my blog and then posted it on Facebook, my preferred social media platform, like I usually do.

Then the comments started rolling in and that's where I stumbled and did something I promised myself I was never going to do: I got into a tit-for-tat war of posting links with one of my readers in a public forum, each one of us trying to prove his point by outlinking the other. It's easy to get caught up in that nonsense, and it's not wise.

I should have known better – and now I do. I will no longer respond to readers' comments with whom I disagree. It's exhausting. It's time consuming. And it's fruitless. You're never going to change someone else's mind on matters you are both passionate about.

I will not censor a comment. I've been in journalism for more than 40 years and I am wary of anything that smacks of censorship or an abridgement of our First Amendment right of free speech. That freedom still exists on my page.

I consider my blog to be something akin to an editorial page in a newspaper, and the comments are the letters to the editor. Keep in mind many newspapers edit letters to the editor, or choose not to run certain letters at all. I have done neither to this point, so, please, continue to comment away.

But make no mistake: I am not surrendering my stance on an opinion I own simply because I am not responding to a comment. If you think you're getting the last word with me and that you've won the debate, it's an illusion. The way I see it, I've already said my piece in my blog. I might consider responding to you in a private message, although that option is still a work in progress. But our personal exchanges will not be made in public.

One thing I will no longer tolerate is insulting or disrespectful language to another reader's opinion. It's hurtful and beneath all of us. I will demand civility to another person's opinion, whether you think that person is correct or not. That's not negotiable. I may block you or delete you if that happens.

This is my blog, and I can say what I want. Here, I'll make it easy for you – these are some of the things I believe:

• Masks work.

• Mandates work.

• Vaccines work. Yes, you can still catch Covid after vaccination (nobody said vaccines had 100 percent efficacy, especially with this particularly insidious virus), but it appears the vaccine most likely will keep you off a ventilator, out of the hospital and out of the morgue. That seems very true when combined with masks and mandates.

• The mainstream media is not the enemy of the people. I get most of my information for my blogs from the Associated Press, Reuters, NBC, The New York Times, The Washington Post and several other reliable organizations. Anything not in the mainstream, I believe, tends to deal in conspiracy theories or misinformation. I also rely on my own critical thinking, my own eyes and ears, and my own common sense. That's why it's my blog.

• The Democrat Party is not the enemy. It is the opposition. As a former Republican myself (I am now Unaffiliated), I wish I could say the same thing about the Republican Party, but the Jan. 6 riot and the subsequent attempted GOP rewrite of the insurrection, the absurd Fraudits designed to sow seeds of doubt about our democracy, the Big Lie, voter restrictions trying to overturn the will of the people, and other democracy-destroying assaults, have changed all that.

• The GOP has no platform other than obstruction. If it does, please tell me what it is. It is no longer a party of governance. Lincoln is weeping.

• I believe in science.

• I believe there was Russian interference in the 2016 election. 

• I believe most political memes on the Internet are Russian or Chinese in origin and are designed to further divide us. It's working.

• I believe the 2020 election was the most secure in American history. Anything else is a lie.

• I believe Jan. 6 was not tourists strolling through the Capitol while Congress is in session. It was an insurrection before our very eyes. Anything else is a lie.

• I believe Dr. Fauci is a dedicated public servant striving to save lives.

• "I believe in the soul, ..., the small of a woman's back, the hanging curve ball, high fiber, good scotch, that the novels of Susan Sontag are self-indulgent, overrated crap. I believe Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. I believe there ought to be a constitutional amendment outlawing Astroturf...". Oh, wait. I got confused. That was Crash Davis from Bull Durham. Then again, I don't think he's wrong.

I hope this helps. There are plenty of other things I believe in. And every now and then, I'll write a blog about some of them.

 .

Nursing the situation

One thing I haven't figured out yet is why anybody in the healthcare industry – and particularly nurses – would object to being vaccinated for the highly contagious Covid-19 virus.

You know, the virus that has killed more than 700,000 of us.

So this past Monday, when Winston-Salem based Novant Health fired 175 employees for failure to meet its vaccination mandate – even in the midst of a nationwide nursing shortage – a voice deep inside me shouted, "Yes! It's about time."

The objections to vaccines seem to be extremely counterproductive and flies in the face of common sense. How can an unvaccinated healthcare employee (and this includes orderlies, administrators, janitorial workers, food vendors and others, not just nurses and doctors) be allowed to work in a facility dedicated to healing diseases, not transmitting them?

I'm guessing the real objections are being made in response to having to follow mandates. Nobody wants to be told what to do because, well, we're Americans and we have a Constitution that guarantees us our rights to be stupid whenever we want to be.

Resisting Covid-19 vaccinations might sound good on the surface for some, but how does that stack up against vaccination mandates that have been in place for decades? You can't enroll your kids in public school unless they've been vaccinated for a number of diseases. You must be vaccinated to enter the military. Why do you accept being vaccinated for polio and smallpox, but not for Covid-19?

Why do you not want to be vaccinated when 98 percent of Covid-19 deaths are among the unvaccinated?

Mandates are everywhere anyway. Is it government overreach to wear mandated seat belts? Don't stop signs and speed limits tell you what to do on the road?

Our form of democratic government was given birth through a midwife mandate when Gen. George Washington required that his troops be vaccinated against smallpox in 1777. I don't suppose it gets more American than that.

Some vaccine reactionaries claim our personal freedoms and our own ability to choose what is best for each individual are under (government) assault, but this strikes me as a red herring. We're in the midst of a global health crisis, and because we are, mandates are necessary. They're necessary because we keep spreading the virus. In the middle of a pandemic, it's not about personal freedom. It's about personal responsibility. It cannot be otherwise.

As far as healthcare employees are concerned, taking personal responsibility is the foundation of the Hippocratic Oath, which doctors take upon graduation from medical school. Not legally binding, it's designed to give the rest of us a sense of security in what otherwise could be rampant quackery. One of the Oath's promises is, "First, do no harm." (So, doctor, take the vaccine.)

And nurses take the Nightingale Pledge, part of which reads, "I will abstain from whatever is deleterious and mischievous..." (So, nurse, take the vaccine.)

Today's numbers show the virus is receding in many areas, which is good news. That's probably because more and more people are being vaccinated. But winter is approaching and we've been here before. We know what obstinance looks like. Maybe we'll take vaccination more seriously this time around.

Mandates are probably our best way out of this mess. In the end, it could be this is all a trial run for the next pandemic. We better pay attention.

Faux audit

Does it get any more bizarre than this?

After it was announced Friday afternoon by the Arizona State Senate that its six-month long election "forensic audit" determined that Joe Biden did indeed win the presidential election in Maricopa County – in fact, finding Biden an additional 99 votes than in the certified vote count – former President Donald Trump claimed last night that the audit proved that he, Trump, actually won in the county.

"We won at the Arizona forensic audit yesterday at a level that you wouldn't believe," Trump said in a rally in Georgia.

He's right. I don't believe him. I never have. 

More audits are planned for other states, even though they'll probably confirm the same thing that Arizona did. Some suggest it's Trump's 50-state plan, designed mostly to keep his funding faucet alive.

So here we go again. Trump completely twists the truth like Atlantic City salt-water taffy, right before our very eyes, even when evidence clearly shows otherwise. It's how he placates the perceived grievances of his base. It's how he raises funds. This five-year onslaught on the truth has sent us running for the protection of our partisan camps, further dividing the country like it hasn't been since the Civil War.

Neither side can agree on what the truth is. Truth, as always, is in the eye of the beholder. But truth requires evidence. It requires analysis. It requires common sense. It does not require party fealty. Trump, by contrast, requires loyalty to his cult, not to the Constitution.

Trump almost always never offers evidence to his claims. All he provides is more grievance politics for his white nationalist base.

The problem, of course, is that our democracy as we know it is now dangling by a thread. The ability to vote, perhaps our most sacred Constitutional institution, is being challenged and altered like never before, even in spite of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Instead of making it more difficult to vote, as many GOP-controlled states are doing, it should be made easier. Isn't that what democracy is all about? Do you believe in democracy? Or is it about autocratic power? That's the choice we've come to. That's the choice we have to make.

This quest for autocracy is what brought us Trump's Big Lie about who won the last presidential election. It's what brought us the horror of January 6. It's what has transformed the Republican Party into the Party of No, simply existing to veto any Democratic proposals, many of them incredibly popular, without offering any ideas of its own. Want proof? Where is the Republican health care plan?

Infrastructure needs immediate attention, as evidenced by yesterday's Amtrak derailment in Montana. The debt ceiling needs congressional attention, as does immigration. Everything, it seems, needs attention.

The last thing we need are more faux audits to prove what we already know.

And that's the truth.

Assault by battery

 The last thing I ever expected to see was the eye-catching red battery light come on in my car.

That's never happened to me before. Ever. But here we were, on Route 421 just outside of North Wilkesboro on our way to Blowing Rock for Art in the Park weekend, and my dashboard was telling me to pull over. "Battery not charging," screamed the panic-inducing message. "Pull over safely."

Whaaa...??

I halfway expected the message to continue: "Do it now, or else!"

How could this be? My Volvo S60 is less than four years old. It has just under 23,000 miles on it. 

Kim said to pull off at the next exit and call the Volvo dealership in Winston-Salem. But whatever you do, don't turn off the car.

I rely on Kim for many things, and one of them is her rational calm in stormy seas. Where does that come from? I mean, I've already jumped off the Titanic here while she's rowing around in a lifeboat looking at seagulls and icebergs.

But I called Volvo Cars Winston-Salem and explained what was going on.

"Can I make it back to Winston?" I asked.

A Volvo alternator.

 "I don't know without doing a diagnostic," said Todd, the service manager. "It sounds like it's either a battery cell or an alternator, but I just don't know. Where are you?"

I told him we were outside North Wilkesboro on our way for a much-needed weekend retreat. I told him I was going to try and make it to Winston. He told me the car could quit on me at any time. I told him I was coming anyway. He said they would be expecting me.

So we turned around. We were about 40 miles away. I turned off the radio. I turned off the fan. I turned off the daytime running lights. Anything to save whatever charge was left in my battery.

And, lo, in about a half hour, we had arrived.

"Don't turn off the car," said Kim, and I didn't.

The service manager came out and said they would do a diagnostic, which I figured would take at least an hour as we saw dollar signs ka-chinging in our heads while stewing in the waiting room. Some vacation.

But 15 minutes later, he called us out. "Come with me," he said and I thought, oh-oh, the Titanic was going down for sure.

"We did the diagnostic," said. "It's your alternator. Somehow, the pulley unthreaded itself from the alternator and came off. This is designed never to happen. Our mechanic has been here since 1985 and he said he's never seen anything like this before. You were driving only on the charge you had remaining in your battery. I doubt you could have made it much further.

"But we have to order parts," added Todd. "It'll be Monday before it's fixed."

Then, as if by magic, the sun came out. Doves flew in. Fireworks exploded. The Titanic resurfaced.

"I see here," said Todd looking at his computer, "that you still have about a month of your car's warranty left. This won't cost you anything."

I nearly cried. I could have kissed him, but, you know, Covid. 

But there was more.

It's Volvo Car's policy not to provide a loaner unless you purchased the car from them. We bought our car from Flow Volvo in Burlington. Uh-oh.

"I talked with our manager and told him your situation," said Todd. "And he agreed to let you have a loaner. Enjoy your weekend."

The loaner was waiting for us outside the office. We took all of our stuff out of our car, and put it in the Volvo S60 that had three-quarters of a tank of gas in it. We headed off to Blowing Rock for what turned out to be a spectacular weekend and we never looked back.

Some vacation.

•  •  •

(When we got home, I Googled "Volvo alternator" out of curiosity to see how much a new one would cost. A site, Repairpal.com, listed alternators between $945-$995, with labor adding another $150 or so. My neighbor said I ought to buy a lottery ticket right now, right this minute, before it's too late. Hmm...)

 

Texas

Perhaps the most pernicious aspect of the Texas anti-abortion bill (Texas SB 8), signed into law by Gov. Greg Abbott on Wednesday, is the one that allows private citizens to sue abortion providers – and anyone else – who helps a woman get an abortion.

We're talking about taxi cab drivers, Uber and Lyft drivers, persons who offer financial assistance to help pay for an abortion, or even someone talking about getting an abortion in the privacy of a whispered conversation with a supposedly trusted listener. It doesn't matter if the person seeking an abortion was raped or was the victim of incest, the resulting pregnancy, by this law, cannot be aborted.

If a plaintiff successfully wins such a lawsuit, said plaintiff can receive up to $10,000.

A person could make a decent living turning in friends or total strangers via anonymous tips on a Texas Right to Life "whistleblower" hotline. While some Texas legislators claim SB 8 will not devolve into spying on your neighbor because the law does not directly challenge the established law and constitutionality of Roe v. Wade, that's exactly what will happen. I mean, who's going to ignore the lure of a $10,000 bounty?

And this rat-on-your-neighbor policy smacks of Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy or Communist Russia of the 1930s. Is that what we've become?

Actually, we've already been there. The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 also depended on citizen participation in the return of fugitive slaves to their supposedly rightful owners. Sometimes, bounties were paid for the surveillance and capture of people who wanted nothing more than personal liberty and autonomy.

It feels strangely familiar, doesn't it?

Enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act was a precursor to the Dred Scott decision, which declared slaves to be little more than property. The Dred Scott decision, under Chief Justice Roger Taney, was one of the emotional touchstones leading to the Civil War.

SB 8 continues the slow-boiling war on women in this country in another effort to take away rights they clearly won with the landmark Roe decision nearly 50 years ago. Not only will abortion issues be put at risk, so will women's healthcare in general, I believe. Think birth control. Think uterine, ovarian and breast cancer screening, especially for the poor. This law, I think, will result in horrible collateral damage.

It's a law designed to set the country back at least 50 years, maybe more. Abortions will never go away, no matter how many laws you pass. They will be performed illegally. Or they will be self-administered with chemicals or medications, if not coat hangers.

And women will die.

And SB 8 is hardly representative of its constituency. Of the 150 members of the Texas Senate, 83 are Republicans. Of those 83 Republicans, only seven are women, and only three are persons of color. Meanwhile, 31 of the 67 Democrats are women, many women of color. So basically, it's white men telling women what to do with their own bodies. Again. As usual.

And why is this all focused on women? There is a male involved with every abortion.

Keep in mind that nationally, polling shows nearly 70 percent of the country favors Roe. Consequently, we may be watching the efforts of a decided minority to challenge, if not bring down, the will of the people.

SB 8 last week got tacit approval from the Supreme Court when five of the nine justices allowed the law to go into effect without a ruling. Thus, SB 8 opens the door and provides a road map for other states so inclined to abolish abortion.

Instead of penalizing women who are already devastated over making a difficult decision, the abortion discussion should also include subjects like sex education, free birth control, adoption and severe sentencing for rape and incest.

Then maybe we can make real progress within the 21st century.

On the (LSB) beam

Although I worked as a part-time employee in the mail room at Newbridge Bank (formerly Lexington State Bank) for five years after my retirement as a sportswriter for The Dispatch, I never grew a serious attachment to the place.

I always thought that kind of loyalty was reserved for the long-term, full-time employees – like my wife, Kim, who spent 31 years there. Those 31 years represent nearly half of her life on the planet.

But times change. Nothing lasts forever.

Consequently, when the current demolition of the main office building began about a month or so ago, I didn't feel much of an emotional impact. Each evening, when we took our daily walk together, Kim and I would stop and look at the debris from that day's reduction. Kim never shed a tear, but I could sense her anguish. How could it be otherwise? Clearly, she was weeping inside. "It's just so sad," she would say.

And then: "I wonder if they know about the beam?"

Signatures decorate a recovered I-beam at LSB.

 I knew about the beam. Back in 1987, when the new towering Center Street addition was being built, a steel I-beam was cere-moniously signed by most of the employees and board of directors and then raised to be installed on the still-to-be-completed fifth floor. It was a crowning moment for all and the gesture was meant to be a keepsake for posterity.

Turns out posterity lasted 34 years.

Kim told Deric Brady, a former Newbridge colleague and the current branch manager of what has now become First National, about the beam. Deric hadn't been hired yet when the beam was signed, but he was aware of its existence. Deric passed the information on to the workers of D.H. Griffin, the wrecking company hired to take down the building, telling them to keep an eye open for a special I-beam and where to look for it.

Then, on Monday, I got a call from Kim.

"They're knocking down the fifth floor," she said. "You better get over here."

I arrived about a half-hour later. Kim was already back at work, but I ran into Cathy Wilkerson, a former LSB/Newbridge employee. She was taking pictures and videos of the demolition, which featured a long-armed machine that looked like something prehistoric. A Caterpillarsaurus Rex (Wrecks?), maybe.

"Did you see the beam?" asked Cathy.

Here's a closer look at some of those names from 1987.

 And there it was, lying in the parking lot inside the enclosed (de)con-struction compound. It was a little bent and dusty, but not so bad off, all things considered. You could clearly see the 120 or so names written in silver or white marker.

I instantly went into time travel mode. Suddenly, Haynes Sherron, Bob Lowe, Kearney Andrews, Ronnie Hartzog, Wayne Kimbrell, Kathy Oakley, Cindy Norman, Earl Snipes, Ardell Lanier, Bob Timberlake, Dothan Reece, Jo Peoples, Steve Weeks, Robin Huneycutt, Max Church and a lengthy host of others were standing right there with me.

I rushed home to get my phone, which I had been charging. When I came back to take pictures, Deric was there.

"I did my job," smiled Deric, taking his own pictures of the beam so he could post them on the Legacy LSB & NBB Bankers group Facebook page. "Yes, you did," I replied. "Great job. And thank you."

As I was walking home, all that sentimental emotion that I couldn't find in earlier trips to view the demolition grabbed me by  the throat: What it meant for Kim. What it meant for me. All those names, some of them now gone. Ghost names.

It made everything personal. Very personal.

And it occurred to me, those names not only signified the people who worked there, but also the heart and soul of that business.

And I held back a tear.

Afghan sunset

It's been awhile since I've had such conflicted opinions, but the situation in Afghanistan is bewildering, to say the least.

On the one hand, I'm delighted to see us withdraw our military from the region. The United States has invested – and lost – $85 billion over the past 20 years trying to train and equip the Afghan army to defend itself against the oppressive Taliban regime. And what was the return? At least 2,500 lost American lives and an Afghan army that couldn't defend itself or its country.

Sounds a whole lot like Vietnam, doesn't it? Why didn't we learn from that experience? Or even the Russian adventure in Afghanistan in the 1980s, which also proved to be equally fruitless for them. Why wasn't that a clue for us?

And while I'm pleased to see us leaving the region, I can't help but feel appalled and let down by an apparently ill-conceived evacuation process that has left tens of thousands of Afghani allies in peril. How in the hell did it come to this? Wasn't there a better way?

This is all very complicated and nothing is in black or white. I'm not in the military, nor do I sit in meetings with the Joint Chiefs or with White House advisors. There are strategies and considerations that I'll never know about, much less understand.

All that I have are the images I see in the media.

The original mission in Afghanistan was to disrupt Isis and the Taliban from using the region as a training ground for terrorism in the wake of 9/11. And the mission was working, sending the Taliban into full flight. But somewhere along the way, the mission somehow shifted from terror busting to nation building, and that's where the quagmire develops. Our withdrawal is coming 19 years too late, it seems to me.

Because a whole generation of Afghans – and particularly women – were given a measure of Western-style freedom from Sharia law, our withdrawal seems particularly heartless as the Taliban returns with its raging male-centric brutality.

And, yet, it was way past time to leave. Recent polling shows that 65 percent of Americans approve of the withdrawal, if not its execution. Will the subsequent absence of American security mean that the Taliban will use Afghanistan as Terrorism Central once more? Probably. But I suspect ever-evolving American technology, featuring drone and air strikes, could hinder and disrupt future terrorist plans.

As it is, we have enough on our plate with our own home-grown terrorists trying to dismantle our democracy.

It all leaves me confused and conflicted. Depending on the time of day, I can give you a different answer to the same question. That's where I am on Afghanistan.

My frustration, anger grow

 

I'm posting this picture for a reason. There are so many aggravating things about this image (found floating around on social media) that I felt I had to respond. It encapsulates all the frustration and anger I have inside of me as we muddle our way through this fourth – and perhaps most dangerous yet – iteration of the Covid-19 virus.

Wait. What? The fourth iteration? What, are we stupid or something? Why do we keep doing this to ourselves? 620,000 dead. Do we need a fifth iteration and even more deaths to knock some sense into our heads? What more proof is needed?

Kim said to be careful, because the image could be a fake. Or professionally posed. And she may have a point. But even if it's all of that, the photo still illustrates my position.

So here goes.

If the image is fake, then it's meant to further divide us. This would also suggest the presence of foreign influences, like Russia or China, who are reaping easy dividends off our internally warring and conflicted tribes and rattling our democracy. The very fact that this image came off an unregulated social media also compounds the issue. What is a lie and what is the truth?

But I'm assuming the image is real. The background is flat and scrubby, which suggests a southern red state like Florida, or Texas, or even Arizona, where anti-vaxxers and anti-maskers are royally screwing things up for the rest of us while killing themselves. And us.

The woman is wearing scrubs, suggesting she is a healthcare worker. Her sign hints that she is proud that she is not vaccinated, but that while she is in the medical field, she doesn't care if she might be asymptomatic. She has no way of knowing if she is carrying the virus and passing it on to someone else. Like a child. Or an elder. Or a colleague. And if that's true, she is not smart. She should be fired.

Where is her empathy? Where is her morality?

Why is she smiling? Does she enjoy working in a place where patients are overloading the system, raising the cost of health care? So even if she is helping, she is not helping. She's a hypocrite. Great picture.

Asking that her choices not be mandated makes her protest political. She no doubt thinks her freedoms are being compromised by government mandates (like seat belts, right?). In fact, the key word in her protest – "I" – actually unveils her irresponsibility. Covid-19 is a nationwide – no, a global – healthcare emergency, and therefore requires a national (and global) response, such as masking and taking the vaccine. Individual freedoms also require a responsibility to the greater good of the whole – the "We," if you will, as in "We hold these truths to be self-evident."

We are where we are right now because the anti-maskers and anti-vaxxers have given the original Alpha variant enough time to mutate into the current Delta variant. Which begs the question, how far away are we from the Lambda variant and perhaps a total resistance to the vaccine? Already, breakthrough infections are occurring at an unnerving pace. School is about to start and children under 12 are not eligible for the vaccine – yet. But they can catch the virus and give it to somebody else.

If something isn't done soon, look for a resumption of lock downs and mandates. If that happens, we have nobody to blame but ourselves – and the unvaccinated.

The current rate of death and suffering are, to me, the result of unbridled selfishness, not a misplaced sense of patriotism.

So this is how I feel. We are in a very, very strange and dangerous place these days.

The eyes have it

Several weeks ago I was weeding my gardens and throwing down mulch, wondering how much longer we were going to be sweating in the oppressive summer heat.

I actually don't mind sweating. Sometimes, I even like sweating. I gives me a sense a accomplishment, like when I complete my 90-minute recumbent bicycle fitness routine, or when finishing up in the garden for the day.

So when I quit mulching the other day and went inside to cool down and watch a little TV, a little black dot surreptitiously floated across the vision of my right eye.

Great. An eye floater. How annoying.

I've had floaters before, but they usually disappear in a few moments or so.

Not this one. A couple days later, it was still there, criss-crossing across my field of vision and stubbornly refusing to go away. It was particularly aggravating against bright backgrounds, like a clear blue sky on a sunny day, or reading a book printed on bright white pages. There it was.

So I made an appointment with my optometrist, Dr. Cathy Fulp. Cathy's been my eye doctor for probably 25 years or so, ever since she had her own practice here in Lexington.

I like Cathy. She's as nice as they come, and more importantly, she knows that I'm the squeamish eye guy. I hate messing with my eyes. I hate getting drops in them to dilate my pupils. I don't like looking into optometric eyepieces when they almost touch my eyeball. Eeeewwwww.

Cathy knows this. So when I made my appointment with Triad Eye Associates (where she now practices with several other doctors), I requested that Cathy, and only Cathy, check out my eye. She knows how to put me at ease in the optometry chair.

Meanwhile, I made the mistake of Googling eye floaters in an ill-advised self-diagnosis. Suddenly, I'm reading stuff about detached retinas (requiring immediate eye surgery), macular degeneration and other causes of potential impending blindness.

I was on edge. Worried. Crap.

But when it came time for my appointment, Cathy almost instantly put me at ease. An associate put drops in my right eye, per Cathy's instructions. Then Cathy came in. She had me read an eye chart. I peered through eyepieces. She did an eye check with some kind of magic hand-held magnifier (or something) that lets her look inside my eyeball. One machine even took pictures of the inside of my eye.

She had me describe my floater. In my case, it looked like a small black doughnut that was hollow in the center and partially fuzzied up my vision in that eye.

"That makes sense," she said. "Everything else looks good."

What I had, said Cathy, was something called vitreous detachment. This is when the vitreous fluid in the eye begins to deteriorate as we age and floaters develop. There's a 70 percent chance that 70 year olds will get this. It's basically harmless and, with luck, a persistent floater can eventually move out of your field of vision over time.

It's not a more serious retinal detachment, which is usually accompanied by flashes or streaks of light. Then you might have issues. Like eye surgery.

You don't want to mess around with your eyes. I made the appointment to make sure there was nothing more serious going on.

Take it from me – the squeamish eye guy.

Market time

 If you looked closely enough, you could see the years virtually rolling off Lee Jessup's face as if he was in some kind of time warp. Or perhaps, more precisely, on some kind of magical mystery tour.

He was back at the historic Lancaster (PA) Central Market, taking in the scents, sights and tastes that captured him more than 40 years ago and held him hostage ever since.

OK, OK. Disclosure time. The Right Reverend Dr. Lee Jessup, no doubt a familiar name to many, if not most of us Lexingtonians, was once the pastor of the First United Church of Christ before moving on to head up the local United Way chapter. And then there was that Lexington Barbecue Festival gig as the official emcee where he performed for X number of years, not to mention a memorable stint as a Blues Brother with local attorney Roger Tripp. That Lee Jessup.

He's also a Civil War buff, and this year, he was able to tag along with our breakaway Civil War Institute group of rogues, which includes fellow Lexingtonians Chris Ripple, Jay Egelnick and myself, as well as Arkansan Paul Becker and Pennsylvanian Richard Solon. The five of us have met in Gettysburg on our own for the past five years or so because we felt the CWI week had become too expensive and was not as battlefield oriented as it had been once in the past. So we broke off on our own and we now follow our own agenda.

Lee Jessup makes a stop at Long's.

In gratitude (I'm guessing), Lee took Ripple, Solon and myself to Lancaster on our free day on Friday to visit the theological seminary from where he graduated. The seminary is smack dab in the middle of the campus of beautiful Franklin and Marshall University, so that was a treat in itself.

But it was fascinating to see Lee visit his former classrooms and haunting grounds. You could see that it brought him great joy, and he was pleased to share this experience with his friends. Perfect.

On a personal note, we met the outgoing president of the seminary, who told us that they were merging with Moravian Theological Seminary in Bethlehem, PA. It seems like a fitting marriage. Moravian will now have access to a doctorate level program, which I think (as a Moravian) is a good thing.

Anyway, after about an hour, we headed to the market. This is a huge place (20,540 square feet) that has been in the current building since 1889. The big draw, of course, are the baked goods and produce from Amish and Pennsylvania Dutch farmers and bakers, but there's also a cultural mix of Greek, Korean, Caribbean, middle Eastern and Slavic goods from which to be tempted.

On a historical side note, King George II chartered the site as a marketplace in 1730, thus making this the oldest public marketplace in the country until 2005, when it became part of the non-profit Central Market Trust.

Lee and I broke off on our own and we promptly scouted all five aisles of the building. Then we were ready. We headed to the Long's booth (who are third generation vendors at the market), where Lee and I both purchased some locally famous Long's horseradish. At some point in the past, Lee probably wrote a column about the market and the horseradish for The Dispatch.

We also purchased some Long's Hair of the Dog Bloody Mary mix. Enough said.

Then it was off to Weaver's meats, located in the upper section of the gentle sloping market. Lee made a serious purchase of some sweet and regular Lebanon bologna, a Pennsylvania Dutch treat that only occasionally makes it out of the region. The guy behind the counter sliced off a sample for both of us, and we were momentarily transported to taste bud heaven. I decided right then that it's always good to have a minister with you when you go to heaven.

We shortly joined up with Chris and Richard outside for a deli lunch, and then it was back to Gettysburg.

The market was all good, but to me, the best part of it was watching Lee roll back the years. That's always Lebanon bologna for the soul.

The drinks are on me

I swear to you, this is how it went down:

Our cluster of six Civil War buffs were enjoying our last night together dining at the historic Mansion House 1757 Boutique Inn in Fairfield, PA, just a skedaddle away from Gettysburg.

As it can sometimes happen, when six guys get together, our voices might carry just a bit in a restaurant. This time, they carried to the husband and wife sitting at a table across the socially-distanced aisle from us.

"Excuse me," said the gentleman there. "Did I hear you're from North Carolina?"

We told him that four of the six of us were. 

"Oh," he said. "I worked in Charlotte for 25 years."

We told hm that we were from Lexington, and isn't that amazing?

"Great barbecue there," he said. "By the way, do you know Ted Royster?"

 Ted was a District Court and then a Superior Court judge for our area and who recently passed away. He was also our former neighbor who lived on the block behind our alley.

So my head exploded. I mean, we're 400 miles from Lexington and we run into a guy who knows Ted Royster? Incredible.

Turns out, this gentleman worked with Tad Royster, Ted's son. I believe I covered Tad at some point in my sports writing years at The Dispatch when he played basketball at Lexington Senior High School. Gosh.

We talked with him for a while longer, and then when he got up to leave, he came over to our table and said, "Gentlemen, your next round of drinks are paid for." And then he left, walked out the door and faded into the early evening twilight like a Gettysburg ghost, presumably never to be seen by us again.

This would have been remarkable if nearly the same thing hadn't happened 48 hours earlier.

Wednesday was the day the six of us assembled for our annual three-day weekend in Gettysburg. We gather together at the Appalachian Brewing Company, arriving from points in North Carolina, Arkansas and Pennsylvania. We're usually a bit travel weary, in need of a nap, and hungry. Four of the six of us are in our 70s, and the other two are in their 60s, and we've made this trip to Gettysburg for more than 30 years, either on our own or as students at the Civil War Institute on the campus of Gettysburg College. We were dorm-mates when we attended the CWI each year for a week of seminars and field trips. That's how we met. A band of brothers.

But all of us showed up on Wednesday within an hour of each other, glad to have coalesced again after missing last year due to the pandemic.

While we're catching up at the bar, a gentleman comes in to order beer to take out (Pennsylvania liquor laws are archaic and defy explanation) and he notices that one of our group, Paul Becker, is wearing a Vietnam Veteran baseball cap. Paul, a Navy man, served on a destroyer in the Gulf of Tonkin for two years during the mid-1960s.

Anyway, this fellow comes up to Paul and thanks him for his service and they start a conversation. This guy, it turns out, is a former Marine who put in 30 years, mostly as a master gunnery sergeant, and he's been deployed at various locations around the world. There's a little bit of good-natured Navy vs. Marine trash talking that ensues between the two of them, but no fisticuffs. (That might have been fun to watch, though).

He talks with us for nearly an hour and then, when he leaves, he pulls out his debit card and tells the barkeep that the next round of drinks are on him. I tell him, "Thank you, sir, but I didn't serve."

"It doesn't matter," he said, pointing to Paul. "You're with him."

Holy smokes.

I suppose I could have had my entire weekend paid for by others if I was devious enough and knew how to manipulate the circumstances, but as my wife pointed out when I told her these stories, "You know, this shows you that there's still good people in the world."

Indeed. Maybe even better than good.

 

Another blog about our Gettysburg experience will follow tomorrow. There's just too much to talk about for one entry. At least there is for me.

 

Walking through history – 10 years later

My faithful readers might remember this: About 10 years ago, I did a walking tour of the Lexington City Cemetery and then wrote a six– (or seven–) part series about what I thought were some of the more prominent or interesting people buried there.

One of those people was Albert M. Hunter, a Civil War veteran who fought for the Union (see here). I could tell because his grave, an obelisk about as tall as me, was marked with a bronze five-point star Grand Army of the Republic (GAR) marker.

Curiously enough, his was the second GAR marker I found in the cemetery. Earlier, I had discovered the grave site of Charles E. Burgess. Wow, I thought. Two Union soldiers buried in a small-town Southern cemetery. What are the odds?

Could there be others?

Guess what? Yes.

About a week or so ago, my good friend and fellow Civil War enthusiast Jay Egelnick texted me that while searching for the burial site of a distant family relative, he came across the humble headstone of Samuel S. Hunter, complete with GAR marker.

Samuel Hunter and his GAR marker.

 Double wow! Now we had three Yankee soldiers buried in the cemetery, and two of them were named Hunter. What are the odds?

I sent Jay my original blog about Albert for his perusal, and he promptly dove into the research, utilizing Google, Ancestry.com and whatever other tools he had available.

And this is what he found:

 Samuel Shields Hunter was born on July 3, 1842, in Liberty township, Adams County, PA. Just to refresh your memory, the county seat for Adams County is a small, unassuming farm town named Gettysburg.

He enlisted in Company K of the 209th Pennsylvania Volunteer Infantry on Sept. 9, 1864 at the age of 22.

The fact that the regiment number is in the 200s is an indication that it was a late-war outfit. The Union never replaced its existing regiments with individual soldiers. Instead, it simply created new regiments. I'm not quite sure why. Maybe since it's because Union soldiers were generally recruited regionally, even locally, it could have been done for unit cohesion: if you grew up and knew the guy you were fighting with, perhaps you might fight a little harder.

Anyway, the 209th was a part of John G. Parke's 9th Corps. The provisional regiment was first detailed to Bermuda Hundred outside of Richmond, VA, in November 1864, and then became part of the 1st Brigade, 3rd Division of the 9th Corps a little bit later. It participated in the Petersburg Campaign, serving when Robert E. Lee surrendered at Appomattox on April 9, 1865. 

The 209th saw limited action at Petersburg, losing 39 men. Hunter was mustered out on May 31, 1865, and went back home to war-ravaged Gettysburg and Adams County.

In 1871, Samuel fell in love and married Maria Elvira Catherine Musselman (a good Adams County apple butter surname). Somewhere along the way, they moved to North Carolina. I have no idea why. Barbecue, maybe. Or maybe the textile industry, which brought many Yankees south during Reconstruction.

Samuel died on Sept. 21, 1928 in Guilford County at the venerable age of 86, and was buried in Lexington City Cemetery on Sept. 23, 1928. I have no idea what happened there. Did he live in Lexington and die in Guilford County of a heart attack? Old age? An accident? Barbecue? Perhaps.

At any rate, Samuel ended up buried in Lexington in the same cemetery as his older brother ... wait for it ... Albert M. Hunter.

The brothers are not buried together. Their resting places are about 200 yards apart from each other, with Albert close to the State Street fencing while Samuel is buried more toward the center of the old section, under an old Blue Atlas Cedar tree, along with his wife Elvira (the name she preferred and who has a bigger headstone than Samuel's. The family plot also includes a Lula and a Rife, who could be their children).

Imagine, two brothers, both Yankees and both veterans of the Civil War, buried in a Southern cemetery. It can't get any stranger than that, right?

Well, not unless you walk a few yards away from Samuel's grave and come across the Confederate marker of Pvt. Andrew Hunter of Co. H, 35th North Carolina. Andrew, like Albert, died in 1911, so the timeline prevents them from being immediately related, if they are related at all. Unless they're twins. But, geez, this is really getting weird.

Many thanks to Jay Egelnick for his steadfast research for this blog and for making my head explode.

Space flights of fancy

 I am a space baby.

I grew up watching the federally subsided glory days of NASA, rooting for the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo space programs to develop and then, ultimately, culminate with the moon landings in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

It was exciting stuff until both the funding and the national will dried up. There never was any colonization of the lunar surface, which I always thought was the ultimate goal of NASA. Instead, we got a space shuttle program that seemed like an unsatisfying substitute for space exploration. Shuttles were never going to go to the moon, much less into deep space.

And then the shuttle program, stunned by the Challenger (1986) and Columbia (2003) disasters, dried up.

All that's left is the International Space Station and robots on Mars. I know important research is being done on the ISS, but it seems like the $100 billion spent so far mostly gives us images of astronauts turning weightless somersaults in their cramped cylinder. Okay. Ho hum. Go back to your research.

Until this month when the billionaires arrived.

On July 11, Sir Richard Branson took himself and several of his Virgin Galactic employees to the edge of space. They traveled in a vehicle (Unity 22) that looked something like a cross between an airplane and a gooney bird, and even though they didn't exceed the Kármán Line (that arbitrary threshold between atmosphere and true space 62 miles high that nobody ever heard of until this month), they got to float weightlessly for four minutes and saw the curvature of the Earth. That makes them astronauts in my view.

Then, today, Amazon.com Inc. founder Jeff Bezos took three other passengers with him beyond the Kármán Line in a more traditional-looking rocket in a flight that lasted 11 minutes. It was reminiscent, to me, of Alan Shepherd's sub-orbital Project Mercury flight in 1961. You gotta start somewhere.

Bezos' mission looked pefect. The most amazing thing, I thought, was how the reusable booster rocket made a perfect upright landing on a pad not far from its desert launch site. The crew capsule, which included 82-year-old Wally Funk (an original Mercury 13 astronaut who trained with the guys but never flew because, well, she was a woman in a high-ceiling era), also made a perfect landing. Funk flew today and she could barely contain her excitement. Consequently, neither could I. She brought tears to my eyes. Good for her.

Originally, I wasn't too excited about billionaires trying to beat each other into space. Wouldn't humanity be better served if they put some of that incredible wealth into social projects to help the hungry and homeless? Or would it?

But I've revised my thinking. Maybe later, I'll revise it again.

We live on a fragile and finite plant. Eventually, some bazillion years from now, the Earth will be swallowed up by its dying giant red sun. Hopefully, by then, humanity will have found a way to Star Trek itself to other life-sustaining systems. Unless, of course, we continue to reject vaccines and mask mandates every time a pandemic comes along to try and wipe us out.

We can be, at the same time, both brilliant and extinction-insistent dinosaurs.

So, yeah, I salute private funding of space exploration. It's their money (if would help if Amazon would pay taxes, though. That's a good way to help the hungry and homeless. Actually, you might be helping to subsidize each space mission with your next Amazon order), they can do what they want with it.

In the end, this makes me feel like we're back in the game. This kind of space race might be just what we need.