Randy Fitzgerald

“How does it happen,” old Randy has been asking himself recently, “that a 64-year-old man, totally challenged electronically and with extremely limited computer knowledge, ends up writing on his very own blog?”

            (There are also more immediate questions such as, does one write “on” a blog or “in” a blog? And, as one of my more senior readers recently asked me during a phone call, “What the heck is a blog?”)

            I know how she feels.  When my weekly column in the Richmond Times-Dispatch was dropped at the end of July after 18 years, my first thought was that that was that. I would no longer have an outlet for sharing my random thoughts and family misadventures, for my own take on the local scene, for the various repercussions of going through life with a rampant jerk gene, for ideas of places to go and things to do-all that “stuff” that makes up my life and which has either drawn readers in over the years or else left them in a terrible stupor.

            But on the first Friday the column did not appear, 46 calls came to my home and office, and on that day and over the next few weeks, there have been about 200 e-mails, cards and letters. If I can figure out how to do it, I’ll share a few of those e-mails with you on this blog. (Don’t hold your breath. I’ll be lucky if this column actually turns up in the right place).  Some were moving, some angry, a lot puzzled.  But together they let me know that I couldn’t just disappear off the radar screen of my longtime readers-and thus did a blip become a blog.

            Barb correctly reasoned that I had been writing a blog for 18 years anyway, that my column from its very beginnings had met the definition of a biographical log. “You have always written about how your days go anyway,” she encouraged.  “So now you’ll just be doing it online instead of in print.”

            I found very quickly that it is a lot more fun to write when one is getting paid for it.  My stipend from the newspaper was always small. It allowed me to go to poker games with an easy conscience, indulge myself occasionally at the golf shop or spring for a nice bouquet for Barb when the jerk gene had been acting up.  So it takes a bit of thought adjustment now to accept that things are just as valuable (or worthless, as the case may be) whether or not they are salaried. 

            However, to the gentleman who wrote suggesting that now I could write more and longer columns since I don’t have an editor or a length requirement to restrain me, I must admit that perhaps that little extra income was more motivation than I knew.  As personal as this blog can be and as free as I am to say whatever I want here, like the old codger I am, I would still prefer to be in print somewhere. 

            Since undertaking this blog, I’ve been moved to check out some of the other bazillion blogs in existence online.  Before starting mine up, I had never looked at a blog once. Now that I have, I find that my life is more interesting than some (like the fellow who reports the three kinds of fruit that went into his cereal yesterday morning) and less interesting than others (the lady who wears her shoes to bed). My overall reaction is, isn’t it wonderful that so many people are writing!  I’ve always used my column to clear my head about things, give me perspective on my life and the things that happen inside it.  Writing is the greatest release, and as an English teacher, I approve of anything that gets people putting words together and thoughts together. It doesn’t matter at all whether it’s taking pen to paper, or fingers to keyboard: writing organizes thoughts-and that’s always a worthy goal. Wherever and whoever you are, I hope you’re writing things down.

            After 23 years away from teaching, I am now, this fall, back in the classroom and loving it. I’m teaching English and journalism at Virginia Union University, about a mile and a half down the street from my home.  Virginia Union is a historically black school with a long and storied history and some interesting alumni, such as Governor/Mayor/presidential candidate L. Douglas Wilder.  I can see already that my students at Union are bright and involved and interested, and it’s certainly one of my goals to have them all writing regularly as the academic year continues.  If they want to carry around journals or start their own blogs, either is fine with me.

            However, I probably won’t tell them about THIS blog-just in case some old jerk gene story finds its way into some future column here.  Now that I have students again, I may have to be more judicious in what I own up to.

Every year for at least the past 15 or so, I have written about the amazing experience of attending the annual Old Fiddlers Convention in Galax, and once again this year, the second week in August did not disappoint. Though the crowds seemed to be a little smaller, probably because the week in the mountains saw a lot of rain, the bands and the bluegrass music were all you could hope for.

            Barb and I always try to take along different sets of friends as our guests each year—and you’d be surprised at how few people really get excited about going to hear bluegrass and staying in a four-room cabin on the side of a mountain with no phone (and no cell phone service for miles), no computer hookup and a TV that we immediately unplug upon arrival. But I don’t think we’ve ever taken anybody that didn’t end up enjoying the adventure.

            Early in the morning, everybody gathers on the big front porch of this Civil War-era log cabin, to be greeted by a nip in the air (even when it’s 100 degrees back in
Richmond) and a view of the mountains that never fails to leave all gasping. It is truly one of the loveliest spots I have ever seen.  The cabin we always rent is on the ridge of a mountain near Grayson National Forest—so isolated this is the place where the state brings bears to drop them off after they’ve wandered too close to cities and civilization.  From the cabin, which is built of huge wooden logs with a kind of chinking—crumbing in spots after all these years—that  I’m sure could not be found anymore; there is not another house, not a car, not another person visible.  And the view goes on for miles.

            The owner of the cabin is Ronnie Cooper (the nicest man you’ll ever meet, as my late father-in-law would say), who grew up in the area, speaks with a strong mountain accent, and who lives farther down the road, where he raises Christmas trees for a living and where an emergency phone can be had if you’re desperate. Occasionally on a clear night, you can hear Ronnie’s dog barking, but otherwise all is still. 

            Quiet is almost palpable when you spend your life in a city.  Sometimes it’s so still at the cabin around three o’clock in the morning that if you happen to wake up, it almost hurts your ears. You find yourself straining to hear something, or you scratch the sheet a bit to prove your ears are still working.

            Mary, one of our guests this year, is learning to play the fiddle–she bought a new, red one in Galax–and some days we awoke to the sounds of “Ashokan Farewell,” that haunting fiddle tune from Ken Burns’ Civil War mini-series years ago.  That beautiful tune brought me out of bed to lay hands on my guitar, and Barb even showed up on the porch with the left-handed mandolin that I gave her years ago and which mostly rests in its case.  But this week, this always-special time, even brings out the would-be musician in her, as it does in the rest of us.

            When I write about this experience year after year, I’m never sure whether I want to focus on the evenings 30 miles away from the cabin, the trips to Galax to hear the real musicians, the stage performances and jam sessions there—or linger instead on the days at the cabin and the serene moments that await us there.  One experience is so personal, and the other so communal—and each is perfect in its way.  At the cabin we read; we make music; we pick blackberries for our morning cereal; we talk rather more profoundly, probably, than any time all year; we breathe the freshest air and we sleep the deepest sleep. 

            But when we go into Galax and down into the basin that is Felts Field, the crowds are thick and loud; the music is hard-driving; the temptations for funnel cake and curly potatoes and fried pies overwhelm, as do the scents of popcorn and sizzling beef and butter—all things no longer part of my diet. The bands are beyond my ken, too: guitar playing that quickly brings you to your feet; mandolins and banjos that get the most passive farmer clapping, harmonizing like you’ve never heard.  There are always some Richmond bands in the group, including Paul Muller’s authentic and excellent band, the Farrington Ferrets; and the brilliant young musicians of Special Ed and the Short Bus, a crowd-pleaser year after year.

 The people who attend the “convention” cover the gamut—they arrive in bib overalls and designer pants, flip-flops and expensive boots. It is the best people-watcher show I know. Barb and I have certain people that we look for year after year, and the ones we don’t really know we have our own names for, like “Duckman,” who every year walks around with a ceramic duck under his arm. He told us once it helps him meet people, who invariably come up and say, “What’s with the duck?”  Then there’s “Raccoon Tail,” who wore one on his head the first year we saw him there. There’s the Easter family, to whom we finally introduced ourselves last year, after sitting a few rows behind them for at least a dozen years, watching their kids grow up.

            The familiar faces at Galax become our once-a-year friends. We’d miss them if they didn’t show up, and we think they’d miss us, too.  And as for the bluegrass, well, I can’t imagine life without bluegrass, or life without Galax.

            For me, this experience is simply the best week of the year.

When I woke up Thursday morning two weeks ago, I was a man with three jobs.

     This morning I’m down to one. I may be the only person you know to be hired for one job, retired from another and fired from a third all in the space of several weeks.

      Let me explain. I had decided recently to take early retirement from my job as senior writer at the University of Richmond, the institution where I have been employed fulltime for over 23 years. At 64, I was close to retirement anyway, but then an offer had come along earlier this summer to become chairman of the English and journalism department at Virginia Union University, and I very quickly knew that that was something I really did want to do. Having taught college English and journalism for about 15 years before coming to UR, it made sense to me to end my career back in the classroom, where I had started. So here I am, beginning next week a whole new phase of my life, in a whole new place at a whole new job at a rather advanced age to do so.  I’m excited.

     The firing you probably know about by now. On that same Thursday I mention above, I was invited to lunch by my editors at the Times-Dispatch and advised that, after an 18-year run as a columnist, last Friday’s column would be my last. It seems they needed my space for “hard news.” I notice that my space in this morning’s paper is taken by an article headlined “Danville teen holds inline-skating record.”  Be sure not to miss it.

     You may also know that the last column I was asked to write never ran. The paper’s new executive editor, Glenn Proctor, spiked it.  You’d have to ask him why.  It does appear elsewhere on this blog, and it seems rather innocuous to me.

      Life goes on, and so does our conversation. There hasn’t been much that was funny about my exodus from the newspaper, but nevertheless it has been a good week. I’ve had an elaborate, warm and wonderful week-long send-off from UR, and I have heard from scores of readers this week checking to see if I was okay. The newspaper never explained what happened to me-there was no notice at all last Friday-so some readers feared I was ill. I don’t know how so many of you missed the column so quickly.  I assumed everyone would think I was on vacation and not even notice anything was different until a number of weeks had passed. I’m trying to answer everyone’s letters and calls, but since I’m packing up one office and setting up another one at the same time, it may be awhile before I get back to some of you. But I’m reading everything.

     Let me share some things that have made me smile during what might otherwise have been a depressing week.  A number of readers have worried about my livelihood, assuming, I guess, that the newspaper column was “my job” and that Barb and I might be facing tough times-that made me smile because the concern for us was touching. Actually, the column was a labor of love and the income from it pretty much just about covered the expenses of writing it. (That means that if any other publication in town wants to pick it up, I’m sure I’m affordable.)

     I think my son, Kyle, would have been delighted had the column ended years ago, during his adolescent years when he was being featured too regularly for his comfort; but now he has been one of my best advisers in how to keep it going, suggesting I start a blog and telling me how to set one up. Daughter Sarah called early this week from Austin, Texas, where she is in graduate school to ask what the story was on the missing column. Not knowing that Barb had called and left her the message a day earlier, I asked how she had known the column had not appeared. “I could hear women wailing all the way to Austin,” she replied. Sarah always teases that all my fans are female because women like the fact that I’m a fellow who clearly dotes on his wife. She would be surprised, I think, at how many letters I’ve gotten from men this week.

     In fact, that’s not unusual.  The last column I wrote that was printed-the one that spoke of June Allyson’s death and the golden era of Hollywood-brought in numerous phone calls and about 25 e-mails-and 18 of those were from men.  (I think I’ll print some of those on the blog when I have time next week-very interesting.) I’d also like to share some of the letters I’ve gotten this week.  I’m glad you found this blog.  If you have friends who read me in the paper, please tell them where to find me here. I wish so much the T-D had leveled with the readers and just told them I’d been dropped. Then I could stop explaining what happened and just get back to writing about the exciting new things in our lives, rather than the old regrets.

      Don’t worry-pretty soon I’ll be funny again.