Note: This column appeared Jan. 15 in City Edition, the first of my weekly offerings for that paper. I hope you got to pick up one, but if not, I hope you enjoy it here and are able to pick new ones as they are published. See my previous blog for many of the 200 locations around the city where you can pick it up. Those locations include all the public libraries, City Hall, the Greater Richmond Chamber of Commerce, JSRCC, the commons at VCU and UR, Westhampton Market and Ellwood Thompson. City Edition hits the stands each Monday and stays there for a week. The column is a continuation of the one I did for 18 years for The Richmond News Leader and the Richmond Times-Dispatch.
It’s been five months now since I’ve had a regular column in print each week, and I don’t mind telling you I have sorely missed it. After 18 years of sharing my life and my thoughts with readers who over time became very much like friends, I had a clear feeling of loss when something interesting or unusual or funny happened to Barb and me in recent months, and I had no way to talk or laugh about it with the folks whose presence I had always felt out there in newspaperland.
That presence was certainly confirmed in the more than 300 letters and e-mails I’ve gotten from readers since the column was cancelled in August-not even counting phone calls. It was interesting how many readers said that my life and family experiences had very much paralleled their own, and that my being able to look humorously at the Fitzgeralds’ adventures and misadventures had helped them gain a better perspective on their own problems. In turn, I must say that getting 300 letters served to improve my perspective, too, after the unhappy experience of being let go from the paper.
So I am of course delighted to be back in print on a regular basis-this first of regular weekly appearances in City Edition. This publication is now to be my home base, and I will be writing here pretty much exactly the column I wrote for the Times-Dispatch for the past 18 years.
The past few months have not been uneventful in the Fitzgerald household, just unreported. To review a few stories that might have made good columns: In September, my wife Barb and I undertook some last-minute painting of the kitchen up at our farmhouse near Charlottesville, in preparation for entertaining 50 or so classmates from the Albemarle High School class of ‘59 that weekend. Barb started on one wall and I another, and when we met at the window, it was obvious we’d both been using different shades of yellow paint. Barb hung a long apron from a nail at the junction, and none of the guests seemed to notice or else were too polite to mention. They were not too polite to mention that we had burned the lasagna, though. Good reunion, great group.
In October, Barb made a trip by herself to New Jersey on a crowded train to see relatives, left the house with a tuna sandwich in a brown bag, pitched the bag on the rack above, changed seats several times on the way and ended up opening her brown bag in the snack car somewhere north of Washington and finding roast beef with horseradish on a bun. Since we had been abstaining from red meat for over a year, with nary a hint of beef in the house, I feel sure it would have been interesting to have explored how that turn of events came about. She told me when she got home that, beyond the vegetarianism and despite hunger, she did not eat the roast beef, fearing some sort of unexplainable act of terrorism.
In November I was part of a panel discussion at Mary Baldwin in Staunton and Barb and I had the chance to stay at the restored Stonewall Jackson Hotel there, which I would certainly recommend highly. It’s a beautiful restoration, and half a block over is Staunton’s main street with wonderful restaurants, antique shops and book stores. While I was speaking, Barb shopped, inquiring unsuccessfully at all the bookstores for any of our new Senator Jim Webb’s books. She was told that the accusations made prior to the election that his books were sordid had resulted in every copy of all his books being sold out.
Also in November at the annual Thanksgiving gathering of extended family at Nags Head, we had a very curious experience. We arrived at our rental house to find a brand new gas stove in the kitchen, which would not have been unusual except that the house had no gas hookup. Alerted by the rental office, the owner called to ask doubtfully, “Are you sure it’s a gas stove?” We were. “Well,” he said, “I stayed there last week and the stove was electric.” It took us four days to get a working stove. Now you may think your family’s experiences are similar to our own, but let’s see what you have to equal that.
Before I run out of space, let me say that Christmas was lovely. Both our kids, Sarah and Kyle, were home, and I got a banjo. So far I can play one song, a ditty called “Chicken Squawk,” written spontaneously by Sarah in response to hearing me play.
