Randy Fitzgerald

When we read in the paper a couple weeks ago that the fellow to whom Hillary Clinton had written bunches of letters while in college had managed to save them for all these years, I remarked to Barb that I was not sure I’d want to see what I had written during my own college days.

            “Well,” she said, “you can if you want to.”  And she proceeded to pull down the attic stairs, climb up the steps and eventually return with a boot box (not a shoebox, mind you) full of letters.  They were all addressed to “Barbara Goodman, P.O. Box 116, Longwood College, Farmville, VA”- postmarked from the fall of 1959 through May of 61. And they were all from me.

            Wow, what a find!  It was as good as coming across an old journal you’d forgotten you kept. I spent the next hour or so reading every letter, laughing out loud, alternately with disbelief and pleasure at the foolishness and innocence of youth in those years before assassinations, Viet Nam, Bull Connor, Kent State, financial worries, job hunts, deaths and other adult concerns.

            I wrote about my dorm mates at the University of Richmond throwing me into one of the girls’ dorms in my underwear and holding the door shut behind me-no doubt on an evening when they were very bored.  I wrote about my fraternity woes-how I joined one fraternity before deciding I had made a mistake, then taking it all back and joining another.  I wrote about classes and one professor who sprayed spit when he lectured, and how rooms in the back of that class were at a premium. 

            And like Hillary, I wrote about trying to find “me” in the middle of that first great adventure away from home and family.

            The first semester of letters is considerably different from the rest.  In high school and for the first part of our freshman years, Barb and I were friends-best friends, even, but not girlfriend-boyfriend.  So during that time I wrote about girls I was meeting and dating in Richmond, ones I might be interested in, and other details of my social life-and she was writing much the same kind of thing to me about her male prospects.

            Fairly often that first semester, I would round up a carload of UR classmates and head off to Longwood where Barb would line up blind dates for everyone.  I always saved the guy I considered the best fellow for her.  But on one trip early in 1960, two things happened. First, the blind date exchange ended up one girl short, so I reached out and grabbed Barb for myself before I ended up as the extra man.  The second thing was that with the girls along, there were too many people in the car so the girls had to sit on the boys’ laps as we journeyed over to Hampden-Sydney to party.

            It was a cold night, maybe even snowing a little, and with Barb on my lap cuddling up to keep warm, I remember thinking, “Randy, how is it possible that you have been such a fool?”

            After that night I was foolish no more.  We dated for the rest of the semester, over the summer, for the entire next year, and married in the summer of ‘61.  We were 19.

            The second year’s letters capture all the sweetness of young love. I think we wrote each other every other day, declaring love, complaining of abject loneliness when apart, dreaming of the next weekend we could be together, mooning over each other’s photos.  Reading those letters brought it all back, and it saddens me a little to guess that nowadays, love letters are probably a thing of the past. 

            Somehow “love e-mails” just don’t have the same ring.  And even beyond the loss of letters, I note the loss of romance.  Couples move so quickly now. Where is that long-drawn-out deliciousness of courtship, the slow advent of familiarity, the deliberateness of moving forward, the suspension of intimacy?  I know I sound like a dinosaur, but for me, “that first fine careless rapture” is worth prolonging.

            “I wish I had your letters to me,” I said to Barb, setting mine aside with a sigh.

            She produced a second box from the foot of the stairs, which she had recovered from the attic while I had been reading.

“Where did you find these?” I marveled.

“Many years ago when your parents moved from their house to an apartment,” she said, “they were in a box with your collection of the entire first year of Sports Illustrated and your putt-putt trophy.  That was when I knew for sure you loved me.”

Today is our anniversary, 46 years later, and this is just one more love letter.

Last Wednesday morning there was just one, scurrying beneath a bowl I had left out on the kitchen counter the night before.  He was tiny-so small as to be barely visible.  He could actually have been one of those floaters that appear and disappear in the eye every now and then, so I let him go his merry way.

            Thursday morning he returned with about fifteen of his friends.

I hope this admission isn’t going to make you question my macho credentials, but it has always been my policy not to kill living things if I can help it-including ants, spiders and bees.  (Flies, ticks and mosquitoes now-maybe so, maybe not.)

So, confronted with a small army of small ants, I put down a paper towel, blew as many as possible onto it, picked up the ends, shook them all into the middle, and deposited them outside.

            Then I went to tell Barb and, believe me, that news got her out of bed in a hurry.  Barb is not nearly as tolerant as I am of insects that wander into our home.  When she’s outside, she lives and lets live, but once anything that crawls or flies turns up inside the house, it’s fair game to her. Two or three times that day, I heard her having a one-sided conversation in the kitchen with an errant ant, followed by a loud “WHUMP.”

            The next morning, the ants had tripled in number, Barb said.  Sadly for them, she got up before I did. “WHUMP! WHUMP.”

 In an effort to find a humane way of dealing with the problem, I went online and Googled “organic ways to get rid of black ants.” You’d be amazed at how many ideas were offered to deter them, everything from putting down a cinnamon “fence” along the routes they seemed to be traveling to creating a barrier of talcum powder to spraying the counters with Windex.

            Barb’s methods were more direct. Friday I caught her crushing as many as possible with a tennis shoe. “WHUMP!  WHUMP!” It was then I recalled the first time I learned how desperately my wife hates insects in her house.

            Back in the sixties when we were first married and still very young, we lived in an apartment building near the Westhampton Theater.  Our apartment was tiny, a living room and bedroom lying parallel. At the north end of the living room was an open  kitchen, and beyond the bedroom, a bath.  That means the kitchen and the bath were relatively the same size. 

            That apartment was, I think, the only place we ever lived that had a roach problem.   We’d spray the little boogers and they’d scurry over to the apartment next door where the fraternity boys lived, and then the guys would spray a few days later and the roach kingdom would return to us.

            Barb was brutal about fighting them, and she was obsessive about keeping them out of our food supply.  Unfortunately, being just barely out of my teens at the time and still retaining a lot of my old schoolboy habits, I tended to create havoc in the kitchen when I went in to fix a snack, leaving a big mess out on the counters when I left.

            I remember very clearly a Saturday evening when I had a late-night sandwich and left the bread out-didn’t even bother to fold the top over, apparently.  When I slumped into the kitchen early the next morning, barefoot and bleary-eyed, my feet sank into something that felt like sponges.  Looking down, I saw that the entire surface of the kitchen floor had been tiled while I slept with slices of Wonder Bread.  They were grouted together with peanut butter as neatly as any tile man could have laid them, and in the corners were little half slices and diagonal slices cut to fit.

            “What the …?” I yelled in to Barb.

            From beneath the covers came her reply:  “I figured if you were going to leave food out for the roaches, Randy, we might as well make it easy for them.”

            These days Barb’s better tempered, having mellowed with age, but I was still happy to get off the hook this time when Barb returned from a vacationing neighbor’s house the other day, where she’s been taking care of their cat.  “Guess what?” she said, addressing me from the kitchen.  “They’ve got little black ants, too.  Maybe it’s just a bad year for black ants.”

            Since that last statement was punctuated with a string of “WHUMP!  WHUMP!”  Whumps, I would say that, yes, at least at my house, it is indeed a very bad year for black ants.

Barb and I were sitting in the front porch swing at our little weekend farmhouse in the country up near Charlottesville yesterday, watching our neighbor move out.

            Watching a neighbor move in or out in the country is a very different experience from watching a move in the city.  For instance, I can’t remember the last time a Ginter Park neighbor moved in with a horse trailer. Or moved all their possessions on a 1988 Ford pickup truck.  Or when they had to stop to figure out a way to transport the chickens and the tractor.

            Our country neighbor (next-door-but-one) kept two horses on the property she rented, a few acres with a small cottage down at the end of the three-home country lane on which our farmhouse is located.  We couldn’t really see her house from ours, but we could hear her horses whinnying and nickering, usually in the mornings, competing for attention with her rooster and her dogs.  We liked all those sounds very much-a counterpoint to the sounds of the intersection of I-64 and I-95, which lies near our Richmond home.

            Ginter Park has, in fact, a rather sweet cacophony of its own, with the sounds of the racecars at RIR as they zoom around the track and the roar of the crowd over at the Diamond when the Braves are in town. We can also hear the John Marshall band practicing and the sounds of the gridiron when that school plays at home. All the cheers and drums and engines in that group are very pleasing to me.

At the farm, it’s mostly animals and insects we hear, and occasionally the rain on the tin roof. So whenever our neighbor’s voice broke through the usual quiet, it was somehow comforting.  We were alone but not isolated.  Generally we’d hear her summoning her various pets, urging the horses in from the field for a nice bale of hay or rounding up her two black dogs at the end of the day. 

            Even though we can’t see the house “in the bottom,” as we’ve always referred to the now-empty rental property, we are sad that she left, sad no one is living there anymore. We liked having that pickup truck drive past our gate every now and then. We liked exchanging a wave with the pretty young woman who seemed so comfortable living alone with her menagerie.  She usually wore sunglasses and a baseball cap backwards, and she always gave us a friendly smile.  Sadly, though, we never met her and never knew her name.

            That’s not what you’d expect in the country, is it?  You’d think people who live in the country would be really neighborly, but-if I can generalize-it’s been our experience that country folk are very private people. Nice, but reserved. On the other hand, it might be the luck of the draw but we’ve always found folk in the various communities where we’ve lived around Richmond to be extremely friendly.

            When a home two streets over burned down last year, the whole neighborhood kicked in immediately with accommodations for the family, storage for items saved, checks to get them through the rough spots, clothes until they could shop, food to let them know they were cared about. Mayberry can’t come close to that.

            When Barb and I were on our extended vacation back in June, the neighbor across the street who was feeding and looking after our 19-year-old cat quickly found a vet who would come to our house when the cat stopped eating. Then, with no veterinary training, the neighbor took it upon herself to administer a daily IV shot to the cat to provide the prescribed 100cc of fluid that would treat the kidney failure he was experiencing, until we got home.

Where do you find neighbors like that? I wouldn’t want to give my own pet a daily shot, much less a neighbor’s. I’m convinced our old tomcat would never have made it without that good care. When neighbors like this move away, you don’t wave, you weep.

I hope the house in the bottom is rented soon. When the new neighbors arrive down there, I’m going to try to get to know them, whoever they are. I just hope they won’t need help positioning the sofa on the front porch or getting the old car up on blocks.

Back in June at the start of this, my first summer off in 23 years, my wife Barb said excitedly, “This summer is going to give us a good idea of what life will be like once you retire and are around the house with me all day.” She actually clapped her hands together twice at the prospect. She’s been trying to get me to retire for years.

Now, a couple of months into this togetherness experience, I think it safe to say that her excitement has probably abated a little.

We husbands have no idea how our wives spend their daily lives. When we’re not around, they go about conducting a whole life of which we’re pretty much unaware. My two major discoveries about Barb this summer involve how much she does during a normal day around the house, and how frequently she goes out to lunch with friends. Fortunately, now that I’ve returned to teaching after all these years, I’ve had this whole summer to help her out with the household matters that keep her so occupied, and I have also been available to join her and her friends for lunch. You cannot imagine her gratitude.

A few weeks ago, for instance, I offered to go to the bank for her to transfer some money from savings to checking, in preparation for some plumbing needs in our old Ginter Park home. “Maybe you’d better take this savings account statement,” she told me, “so you’ll have that account number handy.” She handed me our latest savings account statement, with a number of deposit receipts stapled to the top.

Somehow, during a stop at the grocery store on the way to the bank, I misplaced the statement. I retraced my steps in the store and searched the car, and it was simply gone. When I got home without it, Barb was worried. “Well, at least I made the transaction,” I said. “The bank found the account number with no trouble.”

“Yes,” said Barb, “but now our savings account number and balance are floating around out there somewhere among strangers.”

Oh, right.

I called the grocery store. Yes, a helpful clerk told me, someone had found my bank statement atop the carrots and she had just this minute finished shredding it. To my surprise, Barb-the world’s best keeper of receipts-was almost as unhappy with having it shredded as with having it lost. I don’t think I’ll be sent out again to do the banking any time soon.

Then there was the matter of the cooking. Having me home for three meals kept Barb in the kitchen so much that I decided to help out. The first morning I made us breakfast, I decided to brown the toast under the broiler, so I could do four pieces at once. I lined the broiler pan with aluminum foil, put in the toast, and made a phone call that took a little longer than expected. By the time I opened the oven door again, the broiler was on fire. Not the toast, mind you-that was already long gone-but the broiler itself.

“I don’t think you’re supposed to put foil up that close to the unit,” Barb told me, a few days and most of a $100 later. “It holds the heat too well.”

Oh, right.

The lunching with her friends has gone much better. We’ve met different “girls” for lunch three times this week, and you can’t imagine how happy her friends are to see me arrive with her. They are rendered practically speechless. “Randy,” they say, “we didn’t know you were coming.” And I beam at them, happy to be out of the house.

“Somehow I expected your lunches to be a little livelier,” I said to Barb, after one at which I seemed to do most of the talking.

“Yes, they generally are,” she replied.

When women lunch, they do a lot of “catching up,” meaning sharing the latest news of children and husbands, talking of recent vacations and telling funny stories from work. You’d be surprised at how rarely they discuss sports-I really had to work hard to bring Tiger Woods into the conversations. Nor do they seem to want to talk much about bluegrass music or high-speed Internet connections. I have all I can do to keep the conversations going.

“I think I’ll bow out of these girlfriend lunches,” I told Barb yesterday. “I like your friends, but I feel a little out of place.”

“As you wish, dear,” she responded, clapping her hands together twice.

I might also mention in passing that, since I started to grow this beard, I haven’t heard the word “retirement” from her once.