Randy Fitzgerald

This column originally ran in City Edition

As part of an ongoing campaign to do at least one new thing every month that we’ve never done before, Barb and I joined a bus trip on March 31 with about 100 people journeying to Charles Town, West Virginia, for a long evening’s entertainment in the casino and at the racetrack.

            The trip was arranged by a farmer and his wife of our acquaintance who live up at Ferncliff, a small rural community about 40 miles west of Richmond on I-64. This couple line up these bus trips twice a year, spring and fall, for their friends and neighbors. Once Barb heard about it, she recruited 10 members of our family-some from her side, some from mine-to go along.  Perhaps because of our family’s participation, the recent outing required two busses instead of the usual one.

I can’t remember the last time I’ve been on a bus trip, but it’s certainly been a lot of years.  I believe it was might even have been before busses had bathrooms in the back and TVs in the front-both of which, by the way, are handy inventions.

Anyway, our family group arrived at the farm an hour early for a picnic.  Barb had gone to Sally Bell’s the day before and bought a bunch of box lunches, and the Fitzgerald contingent had a tailgate party before the busses arrived.  The only problem was, here we were, this little group of people gathered in the front yard of the farmhouse, feasting on chicken salad and roast beef on Parker House rolls, first-rate potato salad and deviled eggs, little cheese straws with a single pecan in the center, and an assortment of cupcakes that would have made Nicole Ritchie drool-and gathered all around us awaiting the bus were 90 other people who had not arranged to have a tailgate party and an elegant lunch.  The Fitzgerald contingent was not popular by the time the busses arrived. 

Off we went, though, on what turned out be about a three-hour journey through some beautiful Virginia countryside, via Gordonsville and Orange, and I don’t remember much after that because Barb brought out some back-up Smithfield ham sandwiches and chips she had packed, and the Fitzgeralds set to eating again. Traveling has always been an excuse for an eating frenzy by us Fitzgeralds, along with other appetite-stimulating activities such as bathing, sleeping and thinking.

Despite this second gastronomical slight, the other travelers on our bus were a gleeful lot. Listening to the hoots of laughter, the jokes and the camaraderie, you would have thought we were all going off on a vacation to Hawaii together instead of riding in a bus (a few seats ahead of a public restroom) for about 200 miles to lose all our money.

Barb and I hadn’t been to Charles Town in years-certainly not since the casino was added to the racetrack that we first visited in the 1960s. When our destination came into view, a stunned “Wow” seemed appropriate. The place is huge.  I spent most of the evening lost as one slots-filled room merged into the next … and the next.  I had to ask directions twice to get to the racetrack, and it’s under the same roof as the casino. Barb and I got separated at one point and ended up sitting in opposite ends of the same restaurant area with different family members (yes, eating again) and never seeing each other until we both got up to leave. This place is a huge operation!

At Charles Town, you have two convenient avenues by which to lose your money:  you can bet it on the horses, or you can put it in the slot machines. That wild and crazy gambler Barb chose to put half of her $20 in gambling money on the horses and the other half in the slots.  She lost her bets on the horses and won $17 in the machines.  I do not care to go into my possible losses or winnings at this time.  Suffice it to say that there were no cakes and ale on the way home. Actually, we did have cupcakes to celebrate our son Kyle’s 25^th birthday just after midnight.

But I did fare better than our hosts, the farm couple who had arranged the trip for the rest of us.  When the busses arrived back at their home at four in the morning, they had a message on their answering machine from a neighbor, advising them that some of their cattle had gotten out while they were away and were last seen in the highway.  So at 4 a.m., in the rain, the couple had to go out and drive all over creation looking for the missing cows, eventually even wandering on foot into nearby woods in the dark, calling cattle-however it is that one does that.

Then, just as the sun was coming up, they suddenly realized that this was the early morning of April 1, and “missing cattle” was their neighbors’ idea of an April Fool’s joke.

I don’t think we’ll be seeing those particular neighbors on the fall bus trip.  And that’s my only “sure bet” to come out of an evening in Charles Town.

This column originally ran in City Edition

I’ve never filled out a tax form in my entire life.  In the first place, I wouldn’t know where to begin, and in the second place, I’ve got Barb.

            Barb and I were 19 when we got married (the first time), and even at that tender age she had about three years of working experience in the Albemarle County Tax Office under her belt. She worked there after school in her junior and senior high school years and in the summers before and after her first two years of college.  And even though that job involved state taxes rather than federal, she did learn her way pretty well around a tax form. So part of her dowry was the promise that she would always fill out the old 1040s for both of us.

            Of course, it’s not just taxes that flummox me. I can’t keep up with anything involving money. Unlike my brother, Terry-the-Accountant, I just don’t do numbers. I don’t do checkbooks. I don’t do budgets or balancing. I don’t pay bills. After years of misadventures involving unrecorded checks and missing funds, Barb long ago relieved me of my checkbook, presented me with a debit card and sent me on my way.

            I think there are two kinds of people in this world: those who can handle money pretty well, and others who are like me.  I confess that the real catalyst for the confiscation of my checkbook was my failure to record four checks that I wrote in one day, all having to do with things related to my guitar-playing hobby.  Sadly, within two days, I had forgotten those purchases, sending Barb into days and days of huge angst when her call to the bank revealed our account to be about $400 short.

            Barb is serous about this money stuff. She’s always on the phone with the bank, listening as the automated voice recounts our last 10 checks and debits, our last 10 deposits and credits and, sometimes, whether a certain check has cleared.  That’s the only way she keeps up with my use of my debit card. Personally, it’s all beyond me.

            One month about 10 years ago I made the mistake of saying she was overdoing it with the account balancing thing, so she put the checkbook register in my hand and told me to pay the bills for a month. When statements arrived from Verizon, Dominion Power, State Farm, AT&T, the mortgage company and so on, I put them all in various safe places around the house, where we are still finding them. To my credit, I did pay the mortgage, the credit cards and the cable TV. Everything else I either forgot or put aside, unaware (and this is the truth) that businesses other than credit card companies actually make you pay late fees. Who knew the city would charge extra if your gas payment was late? What am I paying taxes for here if not for a little tolerance?

            I didn’t find much tolerance from Barb, either, so except for that one foray into high finance, I’ve been happy to have her do it all.  Especially the taxes. I am not about to get near those. Late fees are no problem at all compared to a couple of years up the river.

            Some years our taxes have involved up to 10 separate forms: after all, in addition to the regular jobs that give us W2s, we also each have free-lance businesses on the side. And we have to fill out extra social security forms to go along with the free-lancing. One year we rented out our farmhouse and that was another form, as well the year we sold some stock I’d inherited and had capital gains. When the kids were in college, we had at least two education-related forms to fill out-and then, if you itemize. … 

            Barb used to be a lot faster with all those forms than she is now. In recent years, she starts the process two weeks before April 15, getting all her records together, and she never finishes until the last minute.  We’re always in that group of cars you see on the 11 o’clock news at the main post office on Brook Road on the night taxes are due, waving our big fat envelope out the window for the post office employees who stand out there collecting at, literally, the eleventh hour.

            One year a TV reporter stuck a microphone through the open car window and asked Barb why she waited until the last minute to do the taxes. “Because I keep reworking them until I’m sure I won’t be getting a refund,” she told him, passionately. “I just so love paying taxes.”
I think I can safely say she was speaking for all of us.                            

This column originally ran in City Edition

NOW it’s spring.

Whatever date the calendar says is the first day of spring, for me spring isn’t really here until the week after Easter. That’s when I can at last feel pretty confident that I no longer have to worry about snow or sleet, ice or teeth-chattering cold, influenza, runny nose, wet feet, car heater malfunction, keeping up with gloves, and how far overdue the quilts and blankets are for a good washing.

We Richmonders know that not even here in the Gateway to the South can we trust the so-called First Day of Spring that usually falls on March 21.  We’ve stood through too many cold and drizzly Easters on Parade along Monument Avenue, and while we’re very grateful when we have a beautiful Easter, we know not to count on it.

            I do remember when I settled on the week after Easter-this week, as it were-as the true start of spring.  It was in the 1960s, whatever that year was when everybody was quoting a line from the TV show “Get Smart,” prefacing their answers to almost any question with, “Would you believe. …”

 That spring Barb and I left the pretty little town of Athens, Georgia, where we then lived, heading to a big Easter weekend in New York City.  The week before we left, Athens was glorious with spring.  I remember pulling into the Varsity for lunch that Friday when the wisteria hanging from the trees around the parking lot smelled so overwhelmingly sweet that it completely wiped out the usual aroma of hot dogs and rings.  Flowers were blooming everywhere, and co-eds from the University of Georgia were out in their summer dresses.

            The next day we got to New York.  Clearly, we had failed to read a national weather report because we arrived to find several inches of snow on the ground and at least a couple more inches in the air all around us, falling so fast and so thick that even the New York cab driver pulled over to the curb at one point, shaking his head and saying, “Correct me if I’m wrong. Dis is Easter, right?”

            Actually, it was the day before Easter.  On the following day, Easter itself, it was about 10 degrees colder and snowing harder. Barb and I decided to walk from our hotel to St. Patrick’s cathedral for church, but we had barely stepped out on the street when something came crashing down from about thirty stories up like an ice sculpture of that piano that’s always just missing characters on the sidewalk in old movies.  This thing was an enormous solid block of ice that splattered into a zillion smaller pieces when it hit the concrete, any one of which had it, alone, hit us would have made that left brain/right brain thing a horrifying reality.

            We edged back against the front of the hotel for a few minutes while New Yorkers just walked on around the mess, through the snow, not even bothering to look up.  One man said to us pleasantly as he passed, “It’s just ice off the top of the building. Wind blows it over the edge. Happens all the time.”

            Oh, good.  We needed to hear that.  For the rest of the way to St. Patrick’s, we sidled along with our backs against buildings as best we could, our eyes darting upward every few feet no matter how hard to tried to be cool. As a result, we stepped in every puddle and slipped on every patch of ice and sunk into every pile of snow for nine blocks.

            At the church, after we had brushed the snow from our legs and dumped it out of our shoes, we sat shivering in our raincoats, the only wraps we Southerners had brought with us for an Easter outing, hoping to dry out before going back into the cold.  I laughed out loud when Barb, ever the Southern gal, leaned over and whispered at one point, “I’m the only one here with white shoes.”

            “Don’t worry,” I said to her. “All the shoes will be white very quickly when they go back on the street.”

            The day after Easter we took a new tack.  I found a store with New York sweatshirts that morning, and we put them on over our short sleeves and thin cotton and set out to tackle the city again.  We had decided to try to find something at Tiffany’s for my mother back in Virginia, something that would come in a Tiffany’s box, but considering our budget, something very small.  For this outing Barb had fashioned us galoshes from the plastic laundry bags in our hotel room closet.

“One more day of wet feet and we’ll get pneumonia,” she said, as she tied her-yes-white shoes into a bag that said on its side “In by 9, out by 3.”  Then we both put on two pairs of slacks-two pairs each, I mean, one atop the other.  And there we stood on Fifth Avenue, in our sweatshirts, double-decker pants and plastic foot baggies, trying to hail a cab in the snow while pressed hard against the wall of the hotel, looking skyward with what could only have been interpreted as horrified apprehension.

Not surprisingly, it took a while for a cab to stop.  When one did, we scooted in quickly before the next glacier hit the pavement, as the cabbie eyed us up and down, taking in our ensembles.

  “Tiffany’s, please,” I said to him.

              I’ve always loved his response.  It may well be the only time I’ve ever seen a New York cab driver laugh.  He looked back over the seat and said, “Would you believe … Macy’s?   

This column originally ran in City Edition

I had hoped to get all the way through this winter without coming down with it-and I did come so close, too.  I made it past all those cold days when you’re cooped up in the house with your spouse, when you’re especially vulnerable to it; and then, on the week before spring when I least expected it, it struck.

            No, I’m not talking about a winter cold or an ear infection, not bronchitis or the flu.  I’m talking about an attack of the male jerk gene, which we guys all do our best to ward off for as long as we can between episodes but which will, despite our best efforts, eventually rear its ugly head, whatever we do.

            I’ve been writing about my own male jerk gene since 1988, when I first discovered what it was that, for most of my adult life, had been making me do things that left all the women around me-my wife, my sister, my daughter-shaking their heads in amazement.  I think my earliest recognition of impairment came the time I spilled red soda pop on the gray carpet and, in a hurry to get off to work, just left it there.  I figured I’d get to it at the end of the day when I got home.  Wives, I found, are not able to take a nice, relaxed delayed approach to things like that.

            Later jerk gene incidents ranged from the minor annoyance (putting the cat tuna away in the fridge without a top) to what apparently amounted to a major violation. (cutting down azalea bushes disguised, to my eye, as brush, on one of my infrequent forays into yard work).

            Barb says there is one universal symptom of rampant jerk gene: if you’re in the group of people who love the Three Stooges, you’ve got it. That, of course, would include-sorry, fellows-the entire male population of the US.

            Anyway, as I said, I had made it through nearly the whole winter without doing anything that caused wife/daughter/sister to look at each other and roll their eyes, and then suddenly I suffered two attacks in a matter of weeks, and I have to say I still don’t understand the import of either. Perhaps I’m at the mercy of unusually persnickety women in my family, so if there are ladies out there who share my view that these incidents are hardly worthy of note, please let me have your reassurances. I need all the support I can get.

            The first malfeasance was exposed several weeks ago when Barb stopped by my office at the university.  As is usually her habit, she can barely pass through that door before she starts straightening everything up, which I am generally happy to have her do, given that my office floor often seems to be carpeted over with papers to grade and papers to return and papers to file. There are always a dozen or so half-drunk plastic bottles of water scattered around, and the wall behind my desk is alive with Post-It notes.  Again, I need all the support I can get.

            But on that particular visit, Barb unearthed something in the bottom drawer of my desk that left her aghast.  She came up with the spoon I had months ago brought from home with which to eat my morning envelope of oatmeal.  “Good Lord,” she said. “This is my good silverware.”

            “I’m not going to lose it,” I lied.  “It’s right there in the drawer, when you want it.”

            “I want it now,” she said, putting it in her purse and rolling her eyes toward the ceiling, where a little rope of sprayed-on silly string hung from the light fixture, the gift of an exuberant student.

            That night, I asked Barb to explain to me why a woman would think that removing a silver spoon from the house would be so egregious since clearly it would not be a big deal to any male.  Her displeasure had something to do, as best I understood it, with the fact that we had a zillion worthless spoons I might have removed from the house with impunity, but the silverware had been disappearing regularly over the years, particularly the spoons. “We’re getting so low on spoons,” she said, “that I’ve been considering frisking dinner guests at the end of the evening to see if they were absentmindedly slipping cutlery into their coats.”  Of course, I had no recollection of having taken away a silver spoon previous to this one incident … until I found another one hidden away under textbooks in the middle drawer of my desk the very next day. Best not to talk about that.

            The other recent jerk gene manifestation came, sadly, one night into the promising new spring season.  Barb woke up in the middle of the night with the bad cold she had tried so hard to avoid all winter.  She had made it through, but now she got to greet spring with a hacking cough, a stopped-up nose, and general malaise.  “Would you get me a cough drop?” she asked me at 2 a.m.

            Oh, dear.

            “I don’t think we have any,” I sidestepped.

            “Yes, we do,” she asserted.  “I bought a whole box of cherry cough drops at the start of the season, and they’re on the table in the little room.”

            I did not even have to bother to look.  I well knew that over the course of the winter, in the middle of one extreme diet to improve my heart and another extreme diet to placate my diabetes-neither of which allowed me even a morsel of sweets or sugar-I had turned with some regularity to chomping down on a cherry cough drop now and then as a substitute for hard candy.  It’s amazing how exciting a cough drop can be when there are no cakes and pies. Now there were no cough drops either.

            I ‘fessed up to Barb and offered to drive out and find her some, but she wanted me to wait until morning.  But I did feel bad as she coughed and hacked for the rest of the night.  And once I thought-I’m sure I was mistaken-two of her back-to-back coughs seemed to merge into a replica of the words, “Jerk Gene.”