Randy Fitzgerald

I’ve written over the years about my love of bluegrass and also about my love of trying new things each month.  One of the new things I did last year was to help form and to start playing in a bluegrass band called East of Afton.  We’ve had several gigs and have several more planned, and we’re having a blast.  On May 31, we’ll be one of the groups playing at St. Michael’s Episcopal Church for its Fifth-Annual Old-Fashioned Sing Along and Social. It’s free, and the festivities begin at 4 p.m., and I’d like to invite you all to join us.  For more information, check out the festival at http://bluegrassville.com and click on Festivals and scroll to May 31 or just go directly to http://www.bluegrassville.com/events.dir/SaintMichaels/homepg.htm

Then click on “East of Afton with Randy Fitzgerald” for more information on us. Or go directly to http://rfitzger.googlepages.com/eastofafton

 I’ll be keeping you up to date through the blog and through my columns in print.  Hope you can make it.

I hope I don’t give all you gardeners out there apoplexy when I admit that there has been one whole side of my backyard that has not been mowed, weeded, trimmed, cut back, clipped, pruned or otherwise tended for the last 22 years. I think that must have been the corner where the last occupants of our house kept a vegetable garden with some leftover fertilizer perhaps remaining in the soil, because that part of the yard from the very beginning just ran wild. I admit right here in print that I let it go for decades, never tried to reckon with it, because I could see it was too much for me … until last week.

Last week I got a lot of yard work done.  I know it was a lot because it cost me more than $200. Clearly I am not one who enjoys doing my own yard work; otherwise I would not have a stand of bamboo on my fencerow that would generously feed Ling-Ling and Hsing-Hsing for the rest of their lives.

Actually, it would last far longer than the rest of their lives since Barb just informed me that both Ling-Ling and Hsing-Hsing are long dead, Ling-Ling for about 15 years and Hsing-Hsing for at least nine.  Time flies.

Several years ago, upon the death of June Allyson, I think it was, I wrote a column lamenting that so many of the lovely stars of my day had passed on to the great beyond—and then I went about assembling a long list of those old favorite stars who were now trodding the golden boards in the sky.  Unfortunately, I included on my rather extensive list Rhonda Fleming, Arlene Dahl and Esther Williams, and about 4,000 people from around the country immediately e-mailed me to say, “You idiot, Rhonda and Arlene and Esther are all still alive and kicking.”

See, this is what happens in the age of computers.  There are people out there who spend all their time sitting around the house just typing “Rhonda” and “Esther” into their machines to see if some mention of their favorites will turn up in that day’s media, and then some poor naïf in Richmond, Virginia, who’s just trying to scratch out a living, gets his column picked up nationwide and is promptly revealed as, well, “an idiot” is as good as anything, I guess.

By the way, I just Googled that fabulous trio of mostly redheads and found they are all still with us—Miss Dahl is 83, Miss Fleming is 84, and Miss Williams (who, like the others, apparently still doing swimmingly) is 86. And you and I are richer for their continued presence among us.

Anyway, to bring things up to date, there is enough bamboo in my side yard to feed Tian-Tian and Mei Xiang, the current panda residents of the National Zoo, so Barb informs me, for the rest of their lives. 

But, I digress, to put it mildly. I was speaking, was I not, of my backyard?

The nice gentleman who turned up to tune up that one really bad corner of the yard loaded up a huge truck body approximately the size of a freight car with limbs and brush and piled it so high that when it went under the cable lines, I got three free days of HBO from the disturbance. His clearing efforts unearthed a perfectly good if moldy kid-sized football (and our children are 25 and 27 now) and a rusty rake.  There was also a blue rubber ball that brought back the fondest memories of our long-gone Lucy dog, hurtling at top speed, chasing that ball into the underbrush, ears pointy, belly low to the ground, rushing back to us with her ball, only to refuse to give it up until it was wrenched from under her cold black nose.

Strangely—and perhaps you gardeners can explain this to me—there were also under all of that brush and overgrowth and vines the loveliest little patch of daffodils, blooming gaily, out of sight of human eye for lo these many years but no doubt blooming unseen year after year, choked a bit by vines and gasping for sun and wasting their beauty on the semi-dark jungle thicket that was the northeast corner of my yard.

There are other daffodils all around the lawn, a good many of them, in fact, but I keep thinking about the persistence of these particular ones, and the unveiling of these beauties is not unlike finding Esther Williams alive when you had feared otherwise.

 “For oft, when on my couch I lie, in vacant or in pensive mood, they flash upon that inward eye which is the bliss of solitude; and then my heart with pleasure fills and dances with the daffodils.”

Thank you, Mr. Wordsworth.

It all started when the water turned pink.

Barb would fill up the bathtub and the water would look like rose petals even before she put in the bath beads.  Or she’d put my white athletic socks in the washing machine and get back something in a hue fit for the feet of sweet little Shirley Temple. It got to the point that I couldn’t get a glass of water from the faucet to drink without thinking pink lemonade.

We city folk don’t have to worry much about our water supply, but for those who do not depend upon the generosity of city pipes but upon a well in the side yard, we can’t always just go with the flow.  Up at the little farm Barb and I inherited long ago near Charlottesville, something is definitely amiss this spring with the well water.

            It turned out that the farm had a hand-dug well dating back to the late 1920s, and now the sides are caving in and dumping red dirt and old flaky terra cotta pipe into the water supply. Hand-dug?  How could someone have hand-dug a 150-foot well? When I remove the top from that well and look down into the circle of water far below, the pipe seems a couple widths wider than the circumference of my body.  We may be far ahead technologically these days, but weren’t those folks in the old days ingenious to accomplish the things they did?

            One way they were surely superior to us was in their independence and their freedom from permits and licenses and local and state red tape.  (Ron Paul would have loved living in those days.) Wouldn’t you think that if you wanted to get a well dug, you’d just go to your local well driller and get the job done? Well, if that was ever the case, it is not like that anymore.

            The long-established well driller in Charlottesville told us that we had to start at the County Health Department, where we needed to pay $127.50 and get a permit.  But when we went to County Health, they said we had to go to the courthouse and get a plat of the land before they would take our money.

            Of course, since this land has been in Barb’s family over 100 years, there was no plat to be found. In lieu of a plat, the ancient deed book described the property this way: “Beginning where Harriet Johnson’s road enters the wood road, thence along the wood road two courses, down the old fence line to cedar pointer on mill road at hickory bushes.” I’m sure the hickory bushes and the cedar pointer are long gone, and no one in the neighborhood today has ever heard of a mill or Harriet Johnson, but it was nice to see the signatures of Barb’s father and grandfather on paperwork dating back at least a century.

We also found an answer to our long-standing question about when our farmhouse was built:  according to the documents, it was built in 1898. The original owner was Mr. Bill Brown, and the only thing we know about him was that he had a wooden leg. We know this because when Barb’s family lived in the house in the 1940s and ’50s, as it was starting to creak and moan in the aging process, her father used to tell her those noises were the ghost of Bill Brown, peg-legging his way up and down the stairs. That little historical allusion did not always make for easy sleeping for Barb and her two sisters.

Barb’s grandfather bought the home from the Brown ancestors (the property adjoined his own) and sold it to Barb’s father in 1925.  Now our daughter Sarah will be living there for the next year or so as she finishes up the novel she has started in graduate school in Austin. I like the thought of four generations being tied to this four-room cottage and the 15 or so acres that surround it.  There’s a nice symmetry to that, but I guess it’s not essential that present generations also have to use the original well—at least not if it’s gone pink on us.

Sadly, the last dowser we knew died in the past few years, and dowsers are hard to find anymore. If you’re not familiar with the term and the talent, a dowser is a person who, while holding a forked stick in both hands and walking around your property, is able to pinpoint the best spot for you to dig a well. The forked stick, a divining rod, supposedly bends downward when it passes over a source of subterranean water.

Being city folk like myself, I have to admit to being totally ignorant of dowsers and well water and hickory bushes, but if you’re lucky enough to marry a country girl, that’s what you get. 

Tune in next week and I’ll tell you all about bobwhites and broomsedge.

I lost my keys again.

My family would just raise their eyebrows and shrug their shoulders upon reading that.  My whole life is a story of being locked out of my office, barred at my front door and stranded by the roadside.

When I was in my late teens, I lost my dad’s car keys on the first tee of a golf course.  When it was time to drive the 25 miles back home, they were nowhere to be found.  My mistake cost Dad the cost of a taxi ride from one city to another.

I’ve been late to work too many times to remember because I couldn’t find the car keys.  Countless meetings, numberless events and far too many gatherings over the years have started without me.

I locked the keys inside my car with the motor running several years ago–fortunately at the dealer’s.

I locked another set inside a company car miles and miles up Interstate 95.  Panic-stricken, I reached in my pocket and found another set.  I remembered my colleague who was in charge of checking out the car, saying almost as an afterthought, “Oh, I’d better give YOU the extra set.”

I ruined a new suit standing in the rain helplessly trying to break into my own house because the keys I left with in the morning somehow didn’t make it home with me that evening.

I once severely delayed my children and their cousins on a day trip to Disney World because I had lost the car keys.  They did turn up–unbelievably to me but not to my wife and brother and sister– in the freezer.

The most recent loss was relatively brief but as always shocking.  Being aware of my propensity to misplace them, I left my keys in my office door.  After all, I was just to be in my office a few minutes between back-to-back classes.

A tap at the door, and Richard, one of my students, tucked his head in.  “You left your keys in the door, Dr. Fitzgerald,” he said.  “Do you want me to bring them in to you?”

“No,” I said, “I’m heading to class in just a moment.”

That moment had just passed when I heard the keys jostle in the door.  I got up, checked in the keyhole, and they were gone.  No one in the hall had them or had seen anyone take them.  “Oh, no. Not again,” I muttered to myself.

I went to my class, made some inquiries afterwards and went home for lunch.  When I returned to campus that afternoon, a student I ran into in the hall brightly asked, “Did you get your keys back?” 

“How did you know I lost them?” I asked her.

“Because I saw them in the door,” she said, “and I thought you might have absent mindedly left them there.  I took them to the  administrative assistant.”

I thanked her and chalked it up to one more chapter in my hapless key chronicles.

There are things I could do, I know.  But even when I do, I’m often still inside looking out or vice versa.  Many of my colleagues, for instance, have long straps with seemingly dozens of keys they hang around their neck.  I’m the kind of guy, though, that doesn’t even like to wear a wristwatch or wedding band because I don’t like the way they feel.

I also could find a place for my keys and a place for spare keys and put them there until the habit is ingrained.  For the life of me, though, I can’t remember to do that.

I think Dad finally forgave me for the taxi trip, but I must report that maybe losing keys is genetic and hence his fault after all.  Shortly after my keys-in-the door episode, I got a call from my son.

“Dad, do you have the extra keys to my car?” he inquired.  “I’ve locked mine inside.”  The odds of my knowing where the extra set might be were infinitesimal, of course, and sure enough, he had to get a friend to jimmy their way in.

It made me remember many similar instances and also an event from Kyle’s early childhood.  His mother and I were frantically trying to find the keys one day so we could take him to some outdoor event.  Of course, I was to blame, we assumed.  We found the spare set and took off.  Once there, we saw something glinting around Kyle’s leg.  Turns out he had slipped the car keys into the top of his sock.

Many years back I saw on a bathroom wall at the now-defunct Soble’s restaurant in the Fan a few words of graffiti that I really liked:  “The only reason for time is to keep everything from happening at once.”

            As many of my previous bosses would tell you, for most of my life I really haven’t been much into time.  Students at one of my early college-teaching jobs used to refer to me as “the late Dr. Fitzgerald.”  I’ve always been rather casual about gatherings and appointments, figuring that five or ten minutes one way or the other wouldn’t kill anybody; after all, I’d get there eventually. But combine a tendency to be late with a propensity for getting lost, and you get a fellow who has stumbled into a lot of unhappy meetings in his lifetime.

I do not think it’s true that people who are late mean to be disrespectful of others.  We’re just out here doing the best we can. And despite the invention of time to keep things organized, sometimes everything happens at once anyway. Just this week in the span of a single hour, the plumbing in my bathroom went kaput, I fed the garbage disposal a dishrag, and I locked myself out of the car. Some days a fellow has very good reasons for being late.

            One problem is that I’ve seldom worn a watch—any kind of jewelry feels unnatural and bothersome to me. Instead, I used to depend heavily on TIGER-11, and I can’t tell you how many times I’ve dialed that number since it closed down shop. Now that it’s gone and watches are out of favor, it seems that cell phone time is in; but I always forget to look there for the time.  I’m left to depend on a kind of internal clock to get me where I’m supposed to be, and with that, daylight saving time becomes a real problem.

            Most of you converted to daylight saving on Sunday morning at 2 a.m., but it will take me at least a full week to make the adjustment.  I’ll still be waking up at seven, but it will really be eight.  I’ll still be going to bed at midnight, but now it will really be one a.m. My stomach will know when it’s six o’clock tonight, but—surprise, stomach! You have to wait an hour to eat.      

I always had the idea that daylight saving was something invented to help out the farmers, but it turns out farmers don’t like it much. Farmer Brown may eventually adjust to having that extra hour to sleep, but it takes his roosters and hens a lot longer to catch on, and they will continue to wake him up just like they never heard of DST. “Who’s responsible for this bright idea?” they may well ask.  Well, chickens, it’s our old friend Benjamin Franklin, creator of so many revolutionary inventions such as the wood stove, bifocals and the urinary catheter. Ben conceived of DST in 1784, but (much like the chicken herself) it didn’t fly. Finally Germany and England gave it a try in the early 1900s.

            When daylight saving was first proposed in Britain, one of the objections had to do with the birth of twins.  The concern was that for twins born during the “shift back” hour in the fall, the firstborn could actually end up being the second born, and vice-versa. For instance, if one twin was born at 1:35 a.m. during daylight saving hours, and the second twin was born 30 minutes later once standard time was back in effect, the second twin’s birth would be documented as occurring at 1:05 a.m.  This would create all kinds of problems in a country still practicing primogeniture, when the firstborn son was to inherit the entire estate. And we all saw what a problem that can be in Jane Austen, even in standard time.

            On the other hand, I saw a story online about a fellow who grew to love daylight saving because it kept him out of Vietnam. When the draft lottery was in effect and his “birth date” was one of the early draws, he was able to show that, because DST was not in effect in his state at the time of his birth, while it was in effect in every other state, he was really born, federally speaking, on the day before the date documented on his birth certificate. Because that day drew a far better lottery number, he was able to avoid the draft.

            My only memorable personal experience with daylight saving was the year I accidentally arrived at work almost an hour early on the Monday morning after the changeover.  My boss was stunned.  He said he had expected to live and die and never see what I looked like before 9:15 a.m.