Randy Fitzgerald

When I called my sister Linda in Charlottesville a few weeks back and invited her down here for the annual Vegetarian Fest at Bryan Park, she said, “Isn’t a Vegetarian Fest a contradiction in terms-an oxymoron?”

            Actually, no, it’s not. We vegetarians enjoy a lot of festive food, and the booths at that gathering brought forth many samples of it.  Linda, however, is, right now in the midst of an Atkins diet, which is pretty much a meat-only endeavor. So she and I approached the Fest and the vegetarian booths like Jack Spratt and Mrs. Spratt.  I had both hands full of veggie wraps and marinated broccoli and brown rice, and she enjoyed a tall, cool lemonade.

            Truthfully, the big attraction for both of us that day was a local band we like called Special Ed and the Short Bus, a bunch of zanies performing at the Fest who have such a contagious time onstage (and sometimes down in the audience) that they’re kind of irresistible-not to mention the fact that they’re all excellent musicians, even if not vegetarians.

If I hadn’t suspected already they were meat-eaters, their choice of songs might have clued me in. They sang with great spirit songs about imperiled little “wabbits,” and if memory serves, there were also a couple of ditties in which dogs and cats didn’t fare too well either-just what anyone who’s ever heard this irreverent group might have expected from them at a vegetarian fest.

I’m not one who’s too serious about vegetarianism. I’m perfectly happy for meat-eaters to exist.  Actually, I haven’t been a vegetarian for very long, and initially I was kind of a “vegetarian except for bacon.” I switched teams back a year and a half ago, after a lifetime of burgers, barbeques, prime rib, sirloin, subs, foot-long hotdogs-you get the picture. I went on the Dr. Dean Ornish vegetarian diet in ‘06 with two goals in mind: to lose some weight (and I did-34 lbs., although I’ve put a few back on) and to give my genetically doomed heart a fighting chance.

Ornish is a tough diet-not only no meat, fish, chicken, etc., but almost no fat; no butter, margarine, oil or eggs.  I’ve also eliminated salt and caffeine.. It’s so tough that I took a few months off from it last winter and this spring, and my heart symptoms very quickly returned.

So I’m trying vegetarianism again. I might have come back sooner, but zucchini pancakes and buckwheat noodles lost their charm somewhere along the way, until I got my mind right again.

 Daughter Sarah has been a vegetarian since high school, for at least 11 years now, and every time she would come home for a visit, the fridge and cupboard filled up with what I then considered to be the most unappetizing assortment of treats: soy milk, hummus, tofu, polenta and the like.

“What the heck are chickpeas?” I said to Barb once, in those days.

“You’ve had them,” she reminded me. “That time years ago when we went to the Cowpens Battlefield in South Carolina.

“You’re saying I had chickpeas in Cowpens?” I asked her. “Shouldn’t I have had cowpeas in Cowpens?  Or maybe chinquapins in Chickpens?”

“Chickpeas are garbanzos, cowpeas are black-eyed peas, and a chinquapin is a nut,” she replied, “and so are you.  Had I known you liked puns so much, I would never have married you twice.”

Those are the actual conversations we have around our house, the kind that make one really regret that the Ornish diet also doesn’t encourage whiskey.

I feel I should admit that my life as a vegetarian was not an outgrowth of my abhorrence of killing animals. I do have that-if I had to kill my own food I would have been a vegetarian my whole life. But, sadly, all that harmful animal food (harmful to us as well as the animals) is so darn good. Even Sarah breaks down and eats something forbidden about once a year.

One August when she met us in Galax for the fiddlers convention, I came upon her standing around a grill with one of the bands camping there, and she was enjoying a cheeseburger.  I guess my mouth fell open because she huffily said, “Yes, I do have a burger every year or so. I don’t want to be fanatical about this.”

(I might mention in passing that that bluegrass band preparing the cheeseburgers was-yes, it was-Special Ed and the Short Bus.)

            I myself am able to resist burgers, now that Barb has had a while to perfect a bunch of really good vegetarian recipes, like Brazilian Black Beans, Veggie Burritos, an unbelievable oil-free sauce for whole wheat spaghetti-yum, yum.

            But some days do I still yearn for chicken-fried steak, blackened catfish or Bernie’s subs?

            Of couscous.

When “The Reagan Diaries” came out this month, I realized that Ronald Reagan set a worthy example for us all in keeping an account of the daily adventures of his life, and that it would behoove everybody, even ordinary folk like me and you (forgive me if you’re not) to get out the old yellow legal pad and the ballpoint pen that says, “Sonesta Hotel, New Orleans” and, goshnabit, sit down and write a little each day about life’s experiences.  Here are my entries from Fourth of July week, which I thought might be more interesting than a normal week, but as it turns out, isn’t.

Monday, July 2:  As part of the ongoing pact that Barb and I made New Year’s Eve to do one thing each month that we’ve never done before, today I watched “The Young and the Restless.”  Being a newcomer to the story, I can only report to you that Jack appears to have been elected senator from Wisconsin, though Barb, a regular viewer of “Y&R,” as we fans like to call it, doesn’t know if Jack is a Dem. or a Rep., or whether he’s in the state senate or the U. S. Senate and when I tried to determine which, she told me to please pipe down or watch in another room because Nicholas didn’t die in the plane crash after all and she wanted to see if he remembers that he’s no longer married to Sharon, since he now has amnesia.  I plan to watch this show again in about, oh, 2010, unless, like Nicholas, I forget.

Tuesday, July 3:  This morning I asked Barb to call AAA so that they could come out and jumpstart our second car, the old 1987 BMW, which we discovered had a dead battery when we returned from our recent two-week vacation. Barb unfortunately approached the phonebook without her reading glasses and called AA instead (you couldn’t make these things up), which momentarily caused a little bit of confusion, which Barb, trying to explain, turned into a lot of confusion.

Wednesday, July 4:  Today we drove up to Charlottesville to a family pool party, where we had a great time with a bunch of relatives and friends on Barb’s side of the family.  Among the group we had two guitar players, a banjo player, and a mandolin player, so after lunch we sat out under a tree and did a little pickin’.  All those present except the one vegetarian present (me) ate grilled hot dogs, potato salad, slaw, baked beans-traditional Fourth of July fare-and I had a Morningstar Farms Grilled Prime Veggie Burger-yum, yum.  This annual gathering is always interesting because most of the group are doggedly of one political persuasion and the rest are decidedly of another, so you dare not discuss anything in the news or start any kind of political discussion, or bring up war or stem cells or abortion because you just know somebody is going to get thrown in the pool.  I’d thought I’d be safe to bring up Jack and his Senate victory, but one of the ladies present said rather testily, I thought,  that Victor’s wife should have won that election, and if she hadn’t kissed her campaign manager on camera she surely would have.  After that, I wasn’t about to mention Hillary.

Thursday, July 5:  You really don’t want to know about Thursday.

Friday, July 6:  Each Friday night I journey across the river for a practice session with the band I’m lucky enough to be part of (I’m by far the oldest member), a group formed this year called East of Afton. Tonight we met at John’s house and planned out a set-list for an appearance we’re planning soon at an area nursing home, which is the venue of choice for a lot of beginning bands.  I think the theory is that nursing home patients, once you get them in a room, often can’t move fast enough to get away even if a particular song goes to hell in a handbasket.  I was not especially amused when John told the group to keep an eye on me because “If we carry Randy into a nursing home, the staff is liable to want to keep him.”

Saturday, July 7:  Tonight is the birthday party of our friend Bill Dixon-I told him if he were truly the artiste and bon vivant I consider him to be, he would have arranged to turn 77 on 07/07/07 instead of just 75. Bill knows everybody in town, and I wish I could tell you who was at his party, but I’m actually writing this in advance, in case the bon vivanting gets out of hand or goes into the early morning hours, past my deadline.

 FYI: Bill’s wife, Violet, is the one who picked up Barb in her car a couple summers ago as Barb was chasing a carload of suspected thieves down Gloucester Road in her bare feet. The two women continued the pursuit, called the police, witnessed the arrest, and then went on to Ukrop’s for pies, all of which is another story. I should have been keeping a diary then. I bet nothing like that ever happened to Nancy Reagan

Barb and I had to buy a new car recently (for us, a “new” car always means a used car), and the process of shopping and buying made me realize that I have one foot in the 2000s and the other somewhere back in the ‘50s.

            The car we purchased is a 2005 Mercury Sable, and when I first opened the driver’s side door, I said to Barb, “Ohmigosh. Look at this. It has a dimmer in the floor!”  I was so excited for a moment because I have always felt having the dimmer down there by your left foot was so much smarter than having it up on the steering wheel where there are so many other buttons and levers and dials to fool with. Your left foot is just sitting there, after all, with nothing to do except wear out the carpeting.

            Alas, though, my old eyes were deceiving me.  To Barb’s considerable amusement, I was looking at a pedal-sized hard-rubber patch Mercury put in the floorboard for me to rest my left foot on, so I wouldn’t wear out the carpeting.

            I miss the old touches. I wanted to ask our salesman, Willy at CarMax, whether they had any cars with wind-up windows, but Barb said if I did that, she was going to ask if they had any with running boards.  I like wind-up windows.  Haven’t we all wondered at least once what the devil we’d do if we ever drove into a lake with our fancy automatic ups and downs? Son Kyle ordered his last car with wind-up windows, so I know they’re still out there as an option.  Kyle, being a young fellow who will live forever, wasn’t worried about driving into a lake; he just didn’t see the logic in having windows that work on a motor that always plays out and costs several hundred dollars to replace. Seems like sound thinking to me.

            On the other hand, I really do appreciate all the new-fangled little extras that my first car, a 1950 Olds, never had-extras like blessed air conditioning. How in the world did we Southerners make it through those long-ago summers without air in our cars?  I remember my family used to drive from Charlottesville to Glenwood, Ark., each summer to visit my grandmother, collapsing at the end of the day in an air-conditioned motel and otherwise pretty much dying during the daylight hours of travel.

            Our new car has a thermostat accompanying the air, one you can dial up and down to set a temperature for the whole car, just like you do at home. I’m sure that’s not a new feature, but it’s new to me, and I almost got on my knees when I saw it.

            I also love the airplane dashboards these newer cars have-so many buttons and lights that sometimes you think you’d better look for a landing strip instead of a parking place.

On the other hand, whatever happened to those great little side windows cars used to have on the front doors, the ones with the silver latch and triangular pane that you could adjust to bring a huge burst of fresh air right onto your face? You could enjoy that private air supply without having the people in the back ending up with hair like Sanjaya.

            Tell me, what did we all do with our cups when we were driving 50 years ago? I know we didn’t have Big Gulps back then, but surely we must have had a Coke in a Dixie cup every now and then. Cup holders are a wonderful addition to vehicles-I think the number of cup holders one has means almost as much as the number of cylinders.  We have six (cylinders and cup holders), including two in the back (cup holders, at least. I have no idea where cylinders are.) Never mind that no one ever rides in the back seat, now that the kids are grown and gone. I’ll still get satisfaction from knowing there’s a plethora of cup holders back there.

            I do wish cars still had dials you turned to find your radio stations instead of little bars that say “seek.”  Those little bars sometimes leave you just slightly on the edge of a good station, and that old reliable dial would have put you right on the spot in an instant. One station that was often just a little off kilter in our old car was the WTVR-TV channel which comes in on the FM radio at 87.7.  Barb likes to listen to “The Young and the Restless” on 87.7 when she’s out driving around after lunch, and nothing takes her right to a hissy fit faster than my having changed the dial when I drive her car. “It’s so hard to find that station and bring it in,” she moans. And the farther you get from town, the harder it is to get clear reception. The day we got the new car, Barb drove it to Charlottesville and called me excitedly on her cell phone at one o’clock to exclaim with disbelief, “I’m at Gum Spring, and I’m listening to Y&R.”

            So I guess new is mostly better. But that doesn’t mean I still can’t get nostalgic about a running board, push-button gears and a Studebaker.                      

These vacation columns originally appeared in City Edition, published by
R.L. Kent Publishing, my home since the start of the year.  I’m sorry to say
that the July 9 issue of City Edition will be its last, because of “the harsh
financial reality of today’s print media climate.”   I was proud to be
associated with it, even for a short while. I am happy to announce, however,
that my column will appear in the Powhatan edition of Community Weekly, also published by R. L. Kent Publishing.  I also will keep this blog going and
continue my monthly column in Fifty Plus.

In this my first year back in the classroom after a 23-year sabbatical, I have rediscovered one of the truly great joys of teaching:  the summer off.

            This feeling of having a whole summer free is as close as an adult can get to the blissful joy we all knew as kids on the last day of school, when endless summer stretched out ahead of us with the promise of hot days at the pool, ice cream trucks cruising through the neighborhood with a chiming tune and baseball games on a vacant lot at dusk, while our mother’s voice called us home for meat loaf and mashed potatoes.

            But to my wife, a summer off means mostly one thing:  a road trip. Before I even knew which was the last day I’d have to report to work, Barb was already planning a June road trip, a big map spread out on the kitchen table and an address book handy with the phone numbers of all the friends we’d love to see.

            Barb’s idea of a road trip is a drive that takes you at least halfway across the nation, with much of it spent sightseeing along country roads and stops at unexpected places you just happen upon.  So off we set the very afternoon I “got out of school,” with a final destination of Austin, Texas, where daughter Sarah has been in graduate school for two years.  “But we won’t be there for about a week,” I heard Barb tell Sarah on the phone, “because we’re stopping in South Carolina, Georgia, Mississippi, Louisiana and one last night in Houston on the way.”

            “I understand all the other states you mentioned,” I told Barb, “but who do we know in Louisiana?
“Nobody,” she said, “but I think New Orleans needs us to stop in.”

            Barb and I must be about the only people left in our age group who have never been to New Orleans, and while I wish we could have seen it at its best, I’m happy to get there under any circumstances.  I don’t want to get to heaven and have St. Peter say, “Do you know what it means to miss New Orleans?”

            So off we went, our first night’s destination Columbia, S. C., where our friends Mary and John had promised us bluegrass and a lot of it.  We headed south on I-95, working our way through all the fifties summer songs we could remember, singing at the top of our lungs, “Here comes summer; school is out, oh happy day,” and “Summertime, summertime, sum-sum-summertime,” and Eddie Cochran’s “Summertime Blues,” which as we all well remember, “there ain’t no cure for.”  We sang “V-A-C-A-T-I-O-N” as we swung past Colonial Heights and Chester, and “Summertime, and the living is easy” is we crossed the state line.

            Barb and I always have our best conversations on road trips. The car is the perfect place to share all the stories we’ve forgotten to tell each other lately, the little things going on at work, the phone calls of interest we’ve both had recently, news items we haven’t gotten around to dissecting and the latest gossip of friends and family.  We talk and we sing.  I doze as she drives. We deliberate on a treat from the cooler to tide us over until the dinner stop, and we gasp over a tractor-trailer accident we come upon in North Carolina where a whole side of the trailer has been sheared back like a sardine can, spilling multi-colored boxes along the shoulder.

            Five and a half hours down the road, we reach our first night’s destination, barely making it to Columbia in time for the evening’s entertainment, an outdoor concert by a great bluegrass group called Cosmic Possum.  (My Richmond friend, mandolin player George Brown, believes that every bluegrass group should have the word “possum” in its name, so he would have been delighted with this group, which even had authentic-looking toy stuffed possums hanging by their tails from the mike stands.)

            Cosmic Possum features one of the country’s best banjo players, a state and regional champion named Randy Lucas, and hearing him was a treat. Sitting under the stars on a warm South Carolina evening, with fantastic bluegrass music, a vegetarian burrito in my hand, friends across from me and, beside me, the same blonde girl I’ve loved for 48 summers-yep, by George, it’s summer.

            Oh, happy day.

–Austin, Tex.-Ten minutes into our hour-long lesson in the Texas Two-Step at an Austin roadhouse called The Broken Spoke, Barb started referring to the place as “The Broken Foot,” which gives you a good idea of what a fine dancer I am. But you can’t pass through Texas and not learn the two-step, the Texas way, so there I was, counting my way around the floor and whispering “fast fast slow slow.”

We came into Texas on a blue highway after several days of mostly interstate travel through Mississippi, Alabama and the southern coastal states. The great thing about a 15-day road-trip summer vacation is that you can take your time, choose a slow route if you want to, linger over lunch at a diner without having to be anywhere at any particular time. We are enjoying that luxury.

            I’ve been to Texas before, spent time in both Dallas and Houston, but I had forgotten what a stereotype this state is of itself, of that Texas image of wide-open spaces, big sky, big hair and 10-gallon hats and boots on just about every male older than twelve, even when there’s a 100-degree temperature.  Our blue highway took us past road signs announcing Noonday and Tool, Gun Barrel and Blooming Grove, and eventually to Corsicana and Waco, where we once again hit an interstate and headed straight south to Austin-which after several days here I now proclaim to be the best city in Texas.

            If you ever make it to Austin, head directly to the state capitol, a jaw-dropping architectural wonder of pink granite, marble floors that record artistically the state’s six-flag history and a 400-foot expanse from lobby to dome that left our tour group ohhing and ahhing.

            For young folk like our daughter Sarah, who lives and goes to graduate school here, Austin’s Sixth Street is the draw, and Barb and I were lucky enough to be in town when my favorite group, Old Crow Medicine Show, appeared at a Sixth Street club. The club was actually the second floor of a huge old warehouse-like building, and there was barely room to move, except for the hundreds of college students who were dancing madly in place.  The crowd was stomping so loudly and the wooden floor shaking so badly when the band played “Are you from Texas?” that Barb, fearing collapse, steered me towards a pillar and said, “If this place goes down, grab my leg and hang on.” What a show! (Our turn to cheer and stomp came when Old Crow played “James River Blues,” which mentions Richmond by name.)

            Since Sarah shares a house with two other grad students and sleeps on a pallet on the floor (her choice-we offered to buy her a bed, but she says the pallet is good for her back and prevents parents from staying in her room), Barb and I opted to stay at a great B&B nearby called the Star of Texas, decorated in Lone Star antiques and brothel reds.

                                    Luckenbach, si-Bandera, no

            We did not fare nearly so well on a side trip we made to Bandera, Texas.  Back in April, Barb had read a wire-service article in the local paper recommending a visit to Bandera, “The Cowboy Capital of the World.” Noting some proximity to San Antonio, where we were going anyway to see the Alamo, she put Bandera on our itinerary.  Bad move. We got into town after dark, got turned away from one bad-looking motel, warned off another one, and ended up in what was surely “The Worst Motel in the World.” How bad was it?” you might ask. It was so bad that after we checked in, Barb considered walking across the street to a gas station and asking to use their bathroom.  It was so bad that I pulled back the curtains the next morning to see what hell looked like in daylight. 

            The town itself was OK, if a little touristy.  The General Store was fun (“Don’t even ask for low-fat yogurt: This ain’t California.”) and the whole town is about a block long.  But if Bandera was okay, Luckenbach was fantastic.  We were astounded at Luckenbach, made famous by that great old country song written by Waylon Jennings and sung by Willie Nelson-astounded because Luckenbach is literally a four-building town on a dirt road.  Roosters and hens roamed the perimeter-I can’t say “the streets” because there weren’t any-and dust flew every time a new car arrived.  There were just the Luckenbach post office and general store, a dance hall and an open-front hot dog stand-and a lot of tourists happy and laughing and, as the song says, feeling no pain.

            We returned to Austin for one more day, just to see one of the strangest attractions there: each night at dusk 1.5 million bats fly out from beneath the Congress Avenue Bridge, prepared to eat some 30,000 pounds of local insects.  Crowds gather at a park at the southeast corner of the bridge while others-Barb and I in this group-line the bridge from one end to the other, awaiting the spectacle. Believe me, a million and a half bats swarming from somewhere just below your feet create a dramatic scene well worthy of Hitchcock.

            Now it’s on to New Orleans. I hope I won’t have to take zydeco dance lessons.

Do you know what it means to miss New Orleans?

Now I do, having finally made my first visit there years past the time I planned to have seen it but no less grateful for the experience. Here’s what would have been missed had we not included this wonderful city on our 15-day road trip across the South.

            Everyone raves about New Orleans food and, sure enough, we had the best meals of our whole journey here. A friend of Barb’s had recommended the Redfish Grill, which looked so good, smelled so good and tasted so good that we sat for hours, feasting and watching the Bourbon Street crowd outside the window by which we were seated.

            Bourbon Street is a parade, literally. Each afternoon a band comes marching down the street, heavy on horns, followed by costumed paraders (a mini-Mardi Gras), with tourists falling in at the end, clutching their “hurricane” drinks in tall glasses, striding and cheering and having the best old time.  Barb said good-naturedly that it would have been splendid if we had made it here earlier in life, before we had to consider how a “hurricane” would have affected our daily medications.

            Nevertheless, we spent most of two days smiling.  We stayed at the Royal Sonesta hotel right on Bourbon Street, so we had easy late-night access, and the party was still going on when we gave up and turned in. 

            We had planned to take a Katrina tour, but they all seemed to cost $50 each, and we decided we’d rather contribute that $100 to Katrina relief, so on our last day we just drove down into a flood-damaged area, which looked just as bad as you would expect from TV, with maybe one house on a block refurbished at this point and the rest boarded up or falling down.  It was a sobering drive, but we took heart that the locals we talked to were so optimistic.

                        Montgomery: MLK, Scott and Zelda, and Old Hank

            We had a rather eclectic itinerary planned for Montgomery, Alabama, as we headed in the direction of home.  We wanted to see the Hank Williams Museum, the house where Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald had lived in the city, and the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, where Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. preached. We found it interesting that none of the three seemed to know exactly where the other two were.

            The highlight of the Hank Williams Museum, besides an excellent film on the singer/songwriter’s life and times, was the 1952 baby blue Cadillac convertible in which Hank died of a heart attack on New Year’s Eve 1953. But for a fan, everything in the museum was interesting-his costumes, letters he wrote to his mother, his guitar and his gold records-we spent two hours there.  The Fitzgerald house was a much smaller museum, but with a good collection of her paintings and his books. 

            The Dexter Avenue Baptist Church still functions as a church but is also a King memorial. Montgomery pays tribute in several places to its Civil Rights history, and especially to Dr. King, who preached there from 1954-60.

            If we have a final observation about our 15-day drive across eight southern states, it’s that in an era when, city after city, the restaurants, motels and gas stations along each interstate are mostly chains sharing a familiarity of name and architecture (how many Cracker Barrels, Raceways and Comfort Inns do we need?), each city, each state, does retain its particular personality when you get off the interstate and talk to the people.

            We ended up, by coincidence, passing through six state capitals and once we realized this, made a point to hunt down each capitol building. That put us into the heart of a lot of cities, eating lunch at out-of-the-way places where we talked to wait-staff and folks around us and concluded that southern hospitality is alive and well. I got so engrossed in a conversation with a waiter, a UT film student in Austin, that I could barely finish my catfish enchilada.  Folks in Atlanta would come up to your car and offer help if they saw you perusing a road map.

            In Jackson, Ms, the director of the Eudora Welty museum came out on a day the museum was closed, opened it up, and gave a personal tour so four English teachers (us, and two of our friends who live in Jackson) could see it. In Lake Charles, Louisiana, where we stopped to spend the night at a beautiful waterfront casino, the desk clerk upgraded our room to one that looked like a president’s suite after we chatted with her a bit about our long road trip. And as for New Orleans, the businesses there are so grateful for tourists and support that everyone says out loud several times they’re glad you came.

            It’s good to come home with a reaffirmation of people’s kindness.  And it’s good to come home to the remainder of a whole summer off-returning to teaching has turned out to be a wonderful idea! Barb is already contemplating the next road trip.  “We’ve never been to Cape Cod,” she said last night.

            Stay tuned.