Randy Fitzgerald

My wife Barb, out on a shopping trip last weekend, called home to ask if I would check her date book to see if by chance she had a lunch date scheduled with a friend that day.

            In the process of providing the information she wanted, I was baffled by a series of barely decipherable notations appearing in the upper left corners of most of the days on her calendar.  I sat down and tried to decipher her code.  Throughout the entire month of January, there were cryptic little comments here and there like “black and white stripes,” “green floral,” “the necklace dress” and “orange with matching bag.”

            “Are you keeping up with what you’re wearing every day for some reason?” I asked her when she got home.

            “Yes, since I started teaching again this semester,” she admitted. Barb is teaching two classes of freshman English at a local university; and as she’s been out of the field for awhile, she’s trying very hard to do everything right-including a desire to dress for success, apparently.

            “I write down what I wear,” she explained, “because I don’t want to wear the same thing on Wednesday that I wore on Monday, or even this Monday’s outfit next Monday. At my age I can’t always remember what I wore last.”

            “And in what way does this rotation of clothes help you with teaching?” I teased her.

            “Well, it helps the students’ grammar because it keeps them from whispering behind my back, ‘Does this woman only have two dresses?’”

            “In that sentence,” she clarifies, “‘only’ would be a misplaced modifier.”

            I had no idea that women feel an obligation to keep up with what they wear.  Barb says she also writes down each year what she wears to the annual high school reunion and what she wears to “The Nutcracker,” and to the Strawberry Hill Races and to lunches with friends. 

            “These events that you do annually or on a recurring basis-you don’t want to wear the same clothes to again and again,” she told me.

            Well, I’ll be dog.  I sure am glad we fellows don’t have to worry about that stuff. We don’t, do we?

“Do you think I should be keeping a record like that on my calendar?” I asked Barb.

“No,” she said. “All your entries would just read ‘blue shirt,’ ‘blue shirt,’ ‘blue shirt.’”

Touché. My favorite shirts are blue, and I probably have about 15 in shades so imperceptively different that unless you saw them all hanging together, you’d swear they’re the same shirt.  I know they’re different, but my own students must be horrified. No wonder they all sit in the back of the class.

At least they should notice that I don’t wear the same tie day after day. I know for a fact I don’t, because I tend to come home and hang that day’s tie on a doorknob or bedpost; and it usually takes it about three days to a week to get back on the tie rack where I find it again. I have no idea how it gets there-it just magically reappears.

As for choosing a suit each day, I start with a tie and then choose a suit to match, though that’s probably not the best way to do it since all my suits are blue, too.  I have a plethora of shirts, but not very many suits, unless you count the ones I discarded on the way down from 225 pounds 10 years ago to my present 150 or so. When I get desperate and dig out one of the embarrassingly outgrown suits to wear, Barb asks with a smile whether I want to wear the big clown shoes with the floppy soles that day, too.

I do think she was a little embarrassed herself that I found the lists of her daily attire on her calendar-we both probably have more clothes than we need (although there’s some comfort in the fact that we’re inveterate Goodwill shoppers). Mainly, though, we’ve just accumulated a lot of clothes over the years.

  Barb’s late father, a railroad worker with a very sparse dress-up wardrobe, always believed that more than one Sunday outfit was excess. “The advantage to having just one suit of clothes,” he used to say, “is that you always know where your handkerchief is.”

And, you also don’t have to worry about wearing last week’s clothes again too soon.

Here’s the annual Valentine’s Day column (finally!), which originally ran in City Edition

“When I was a young, innocent student at Longwood,” Barb said to me on Valentine’s night, “I never thought that someday I’d be sleeping with a man in the president’s bedroom.”

            But there we were, warmly ensconced for the evening in a cozy downstairs bedroom in the beautiful white-columned house that, years ago, had served as the home of the president of what was then Longwood College.  Late in the 60s, another president had moved the presidential residence from this home on High Street in Farmville out to the edge of town, adjacent to the school’s golf course. (That man obviously had his priorities straight.)

            But he did leave behind a remarkable old structure, from the wood floors to the high ceilings, chair rails and arches, porches and tall windows-the perfect place for a romantic, old-fashioned, charming Valentine’s.

            For years (ever since I dropped the ball a few times on making plans) Barb has chosen a Valentine’s Day destination for us, usually at a bed and breakfast somewhere across Virginia, made all the reservations and dinner plans and then driven away with me to my surprise celebration.  I never know where I’m going until I get close enough to make the right guess, and then she shares the plan. Last year it was Old Town Alexandria (where we had to leave early due to snow); and the year before that, it was the Inn at Three Bridges in Powhatan. I’ve been enjoying all this special attention for about 15 years now.

            This year, she learned online that this fine old home was now a B&B, and because Longwood and Farmville are part of our personal love story, she knew this was a great destination for Valentine’s ‘07. After all, we did most of our dating during the two years she was at Longwood in the 1960s, while I was an undergraduate at the University of Richmond. The dating went so well that we got married at the end of our sophomore years, and while I went on to complete my degree, she postponed hers until a few years later when she finished up her degree in Georgia.  But Longwood remains the alma mater of her heart.

            Everywhere we looked on this recent trip, there were memories.  Barb even recalled walking up the street to this very house when Dr. Francis Lankford, the Longwood president of her era, had the entire freshman class over for a reception. “I thought at the time it was one of the grandest homes I’d ever been in,” she recalls. It is still lovely, and the furnishings are as interesting as the house itself. We had a canopied bed, elegant hand-carved mahogany furniture and a mirror over the mantel that Barb fell in love with. One of the upstairs bedrooms (there are six in all at the house) housed furniture Gen. U.S. Grant had used when he stayed at the old Prince Edward Hotel in town on his way to Appomattox. In fact, one of the tables in the room was the one on which he had written to General Lee the first request for his surrender.

            Saturday morning we enjoyed our “free” breakfast at the house, then walked a bit around campus, though it was very, very cold. We found, now well hidden among newer, modern buildings, the old power plant behind which we had our first real kiss-in a part of the campus we weren’t even supposed to be frequenting in those days.  This visit we sat in the Rotunda, wonderfully restored to perfection after a massive fire a few years back, and remembered all the times I had waited for her in that lobby while she came down to  ”sign out” in a book for the evening’s destination. Usually I brought a bunch of fraternity brothers from UR with me, and she would find dates for all of them. Now, of course, there’s no reason to import men, because Longwood University has its own supply. As we sat in the lobby, male and female students alike went up the winding staircases of the Rotunda, forbidden territory to men in our time.

            Our Valentine’s dinner included a tip of the hat to Richmond. We went to Charley’s Waterfront Restaurant, an offspring of the old Charley’s that used to be at Stony Point, a favorite of ours when our kids were students at Trinity Episcopal School in that neighborhood.  The Farmville Charley’s was very large and clearly very popular. It was well-filled, with lovers of all ages waiting to get in when we left.

            After a stop the next morning at the brand new Buffalo Creek Guitar Co., where Barb bought me a $40 banjo book, I told her I was overwhelmed with all the wonderful things she had planned for me; in fact, this whole trip to Farmville felt as though it had been designed just to make me happy.

            “Mostly, yes, that’s true,” she said.  “However, I should tell you now that you will be sitting in the car reading that book for the next four hours while I shop at Greenfront.”          

This column originally appeared in City Edition. Pick up Randy’s annual Valentine’s Day column in two weeks from one of City Edition’s 200 locations around town.

Have I told you yet about the times I used to walk a mile to school in the freezing cold when I was-wait a minute! That wasn’t when I was a kid; it was just last week when we had all that cold, cold weather.

            And actually, it wasn’t a mile. It was just a walk across a big parking lot to get to class, but when the temperature is 13, it can seem like a mile.

            I don’t do cold.  I’ve always had this thing that sends me into uncontrollable shakes and shivers and violent teeth-chattering, sometimes accompanied by primal screams at the top of my lungs, when I get too cold. I’m especially vulnerable to such an attack when I get into a cold car after a cold walk from a warm building, especially at night.  Don’t invite me to a movie in February-or if you do, at least be sure to park close to the door.

I’m not too happy to admit the shakes-and-shivers thing in print, because I know it tends to cancel out the strong masculine image I’ve been cultivating for all these years. I know you’re thinking, “What are you, Randy?  A man, or a mouse?”  Well, now that chest hair protruding from the collar of a button-down shirt has fallen into such depths of unpopularity, I have few obvious ways to re-establish my manly reputation once I have besmirched it here.

Shakes and shivers are not only unpleasant to the person undergoing them; they are also very distasteful to watch. It’s kind of like a Saint Vitus’ dance, but without the rhythm. Mine are so pronounced they have actually changed my life plans.  For instance, any thought that Barb and I ever had of retiring to Minnesota or Montana has been rendered out of the question. Boise probably has been knocked out of the running, too.

Also, thanks to shaking and shivering, I’ll never be able to practice my boxing skills, like Rocky, in a meat locker-also something that might conceivably have come up in my hopes for an unorthodox retirement.

The screaming is also a problem. A grown man running to his car screaming is often looked at askance, especially when he’s weighted down a bit with an insulated coat much like that worn by the Michelin Man (only not in that easily-soiled white) and a red- and-white New England-style cap with ear flaps.  This scenario especially does not go well in a company parking lot

As for the teeth-chattering, wwwhat cccan I sssay? It has been known to reach a volume and intensity somewhat like Lionel Hampton playing the spoons.  My ex-brother-law used to say I sounded like I was desperately trying to tap out Morse code.  I was not sorry when divorce took him.

The only good thing about my “weakness” is that Barb’s response to it has always been heartfelt bear hugs-a great wrapping of arms around me, cheek-to-cheek comfort (being careful, of course, to keep the earlobes away from the uncontrolled hammering of the teeth), hot breathe on cold neck, gradual submission of screams.

I don’t do cold.  The coldest I’ve been for the longest time was during a long stay Barb and I had once near Swansea in Wales. The cottage we were borrowing was heated (living room only) with a “coal fire,” and it was hard to get it started and hard to keep it going.  The bedroom had no heat at all, just what wafted down the hall from the parlor. It was so cold in the bedroom that we slept both on top of and beneath electric blankets. That way we could be halfway cozy, even if the image of grilled cheese sandwiches kept coming to mind.

In preparation for the last week’s Big Chill, Barb and I had to go up the road to our little farmhouse and winterize it a little.  You may recall that we put new plumbing in the bath and kitchen last spring: what we did not do was put any heat in the house.  Naturally, it occurred to us that predicted temperatures of below zero in the Charlottesville area might not bode well for our new pipes. 

So we carried up there two little electric heaters, put one in the kitchen and one in the bath, set them to the lowest setting, and then got out of the way of the long line of mice who were waiting at the back door as we left, hoping to find a way into a warm home for the rest of winter.

I noticed that they were all shaking and shivering, and I think I even heard their little screams as we drove away.