Randy Fitzgerald

I did something a couple of weeks ago that I hadn’t done since the years when Mitch Miller was on TV:  I went to a sing-a-long. And I sang along.

            In the age of karaoke, that may not sound like such an unusual thing, but in this case there were a lot of voices raised in unison, and no one was trying to sing “Love the One You’re With.”

Although, come to think of it, love was the prevailing sentiment of the occasion.

            Barb and I had gone over to St. Michael’s Church in Bon Air on a Saturday afternoon for a community gathering, the church’s fifth annual old-fashioned sing-a-long/picnic/social/bluegrass and gospel festival arranged by one Don Spriggs, the kind of enthusiastic “promoter” every pastor probably dreams of discovering among his congregation. 

This free event has become a local tradition, and—until a threatening storm thinned out the crowd under the big tent a bit—there were singers and families and babies everywhere. I was there because the bluegrass band I play in, East of Afton, had been invited to be part of the program, but a little way into the afternoon, Barb and I just became two more faces in the crowd, caught up in the spirit of the event. We resisted the ice cream and the hot dogs, and I admired from afar the horse that was there for the children, but we really got into the entertainment and the singing.

The headliner group for the day was the famous gospel quartet The Coachmen, from Staunton. Then there was one very fine mandolin player, Pete Milano, from Vienna, teaming up with Bob Shaw, whom Spriggs calls “the best banjo picker this side of Nashville.”

And those groups were just for starters—the music and singing went on non-stop for hours. There were Rich Munroe and the Famous House Band, the dueling gospel pianos of Michael Simpson and Lavern Moffat, the McCullough/ Cox Family Band, “Tripp and Jenny” and a fantastic a capella men’s group, Gospel Truth, that no one in the audience was willing to let off the stage.

I know a fair number of hymns myself, but there were people at this event who had me beat by a mile. George Brown, the mandolin player in our band (a Chesterfield resident and a special agent with the Department of Corrections) knows every song ever written, I do believe—and that certainly includes every hymn anybody ever heard of. George was in his element at St. Michael’s.  And he knows all the verses, too, not just the first one.

My East of Afton cohorts kidded me royally because signs around Chesterfield had billed our group as “Randy Fitzgerald and East of Afton,” which only shows that I have a lot of friends at St. Michael’s. The designation is a laugh because I’m the band member that the rest of the group sort of carry along with them. And I am so grateful that they do, because there have been few things in my life that have given me as much pleasure as playing and singing in this band, practicing at our regular Friday night sessions, and traveling together to Merlefest this year. Then, of course, there’s all the kidding and ribbing and good fun that have been part of this musical adventure for me.

As an example of the disrespect I get, every time East of Afton plays at a nursing home, the other, far younger band members pretend to be worried that the nursing home will try to keep me.  I hope they’re pretending, anyway. 

Throughout my life, as Barb and I moved around a lot from state to state, the churches that stand out for us are the ones that either (1) had outstanding pastors or (2) provided regular and interesting opportunities for social fellowship. Apparently St. Michael’s is lucky enough to have both.  The Sing-A-Long Social was just a great afternoon and evening, and whether East of Afton is performing there next year or not, I plan to be back.

I read somewhere the other day that almost 50% of college graduates end up coming back home to live for a while. Although I feel quite confident Barb and I have been wonderful parents and are dearly loved, possibly worshipped, by our two kids, I can guarantee you that either one of ours, once they moved out, would have put on a fur coat and moved in with wolves before they would have come back to live with us.
That’s why it was a great relief to all that we had available our empty farmhouse up near Charlottesville when Sarah, having recently completed her MFA degree in Texas, was looking for somewhere economical to live for a while. The distance from Richmond to Charlottesville is probably not quite as appealing to her as the distance from Richmond to Austin, but I’m sure it’s a heck of a lot better than sharing space with old Mom and Dad.
Sarah tells me that in England, where she lived for awhile between college and graduate school, the percentage of post-college young people who live at home is far higher than here. A huge number of the friends she made there still lived with their parents, even when they had college degrees and jobs. That seemed very strange to her. “Who’d want to live at home?” she wondered. “That seems like going backwards.”
So now she’s ensconced way up the road in our farmhouse, prepared to pay us a fair rent as soon as she finds a job, and until then painting the roof, tackling the yard, repairing the porch screen and planting a garden. And Barb and I are happy to have someone living in the house again, especially someone who knows how much we love and treasure the place. Empty houses just don’t fare well. The mice come to live in the drawers and snakes come to live in the yard, and the whole place starts to spell fusty.
Of course, we will miss our regular summer excursions at the farm. It has always been a great joy to leave the concrete and noise of Richmond for a day or so and head up to the peace and quiet of the country. Sarah is having a little trouble adjusting to that difference. The first night it was so quiet she couldn’t sleep.
“I’ve never been anywhere this quiet or this dark,” she told us the next day. “How do country people sleep?”
That quiet has always been an adjustment for Barb and me, too, when we settle in there for an evening. There’s no TV and no phone, except for intermittent cell service, and Sarah’s right—the nights are pitch black. But the stars are wonderful. We shall miss them. Since there’s just one bedroom in the four-room house, overnight visits from us are not indicated.
And we’ve already found that advice is also unwelcome.  Sarah called on her cell phone from a walk in the woods behind the house a week ago. “What part of these woods belong to you?” she wanted to know.
“What are you doing in the woods?” Barb replied. “You’ll be full of ticks.”  Ticks had previously never been a concern to Sarah when she lived in Richmond, London or Austin.
“You need to spray yourself with Deet and tuck your jeans into your socks before you go in the fields or woods,” said Barb.
“I’m hanging up now,” said Sarah. And she did.
Two days later she turned up at our backdoor in Richmond with a bunch of hanging clothes and three big boxes. “These are your things from the farmhouse that I had to move out to make room for my things,” she said happily.
Barb was less happy.  She had sort of been using the farmhouse as a repository for a lot of the old clothes, extra books and tchotchkes that we no longer had room for in our own house—things she wasn’t quite ready to throw out or give to Goodwill. So now our back porch is full of treasures we don’t really want to bring back into our home.
“Couldn’t you have co-existed with some of this mess?” Barb asked Sarah.
“I did,” said Sarah. “A week was as long as I could live with a lacquer ware duck, a hundred issues of Country Living, and a Howdy-Doody puppet.”
We’re all adjusting. It’s nice to have her closer to home—and it’s nice to keep our empty nest.  I think the country is growing on her because she told Barb the other day that the farmhouse was the nicest place she’d ever lived. I’d like to think that’s at least partially because she’s now only 60 miles from her loving parents. 
But perhaps she would say it’s because she IS 60 miles from her loving parents.

The electrician said he saw a black snake in the yard,” Barb told me as we pulled up to our little four-room farmhouse near Charlottesville.  “We’d better watch where we walk until we get the grass cut.”
            No need to tell me twice. My appreciation for snakes is pretty much on a level with that of Indiana Jones. Snakes = bad. Even black snakes. You can tell me all day that they help clear the world of rodents and insects, that they’re not poisonous, that they’re shy and will try to avoid you, and that they keep other snakes away. As far as I’m concerned, black snakes = bad, too.
            As a city boy, one of the unwelcome features of owning a place in the country is the occasional presence of a snake. And if the house is deserted for more than half of the year, then a snake is even more likely to appropriate the yard and the outbuildings. Two years ago some plumbing problems at the old house (1898) led to the temporary removal of the bathroom floor, which sat about 12 inches above plain old country dirt.  And according to the plumbers who removed the tiles and the boards beneath, the floor also set about 12 inches above a black snake. That one was apparently not shy, because he hung around through the noise and activity to greet the plumbers as they ripped up the last board. (There’s a good line here somewhere about a plumber’s snake, but I’m going to move on.)
            Hmmm.  A snake in the yard is one thing; a snake under the house is another. That proximity makes you ask questions like this one: if a mouse can find a way to get into a house, couldn’t a snake use the same entrance? My sister, who lived in an old house near Scottsville at the time, once found a black snake in her lingerie drawer. I bet a psychology major (which she was) could write an entire book about the potential symbolism of that.
For us city slickers, reptilian experience is blessedly limited. I’ve seen a few snakes around water holes on various golf courses over the years, and Barb once almost stepped on a water moccasin on a course in Fluvanna. If you’ve ever seen anyone reverse course in mid-air, you have a sense of what that looked like.
            Barb spent a lot of her youth living at the same farmhouse we now own, and she says in all the years she lived there, she remembers seeing only one snake. She and her sister Betts used to play a game in which they jumped from root to root in the tree-lined yard, trying to make their way around the house without ever touching the ground. She remembers one time when they were playing that game at dusk, only to realize just before they made a big leap that the “root” they had set their sights on was actually a big black snake.
            Many times over the years we’ve let friends hungry for a touch of nature go up and spend a night or a weekend at the farm. One of those friends, a UR professor, reported after his visit that as he walked downstairs one morning, he glanced down at a step and asked himself, “Why the devil did I leave my belt on the step last night?”  Of course, the belt was a black snake, promptly booted out of the house by the professor, who was more amused than frightened. He did admit that he had left the door wide open for much of the previous day and practically invited a snake to enter.
            The snake the plumbers found under the house did not fare so well. The plumbers killed it, and the neighbors described it as impressive in length and girth.  I’m generally opposed to killing things, but I must say I’m glad I didn’t see it.
            Our daughter Sarah, fresh out of graduate school in Austin, recently moved into the farmhouse for the next year as she finishes a book she’s writing. Barb and I were worried about scaring her with the latest snake sighting, but she didn’t seem upset about it at all.  “As long as it’s just a black snake, I don’t care,” she said.
            But when she first arrived and went into the house and saw a mousetrap we had set, she panicked. “I can’t live in a place with mice,” she moaned.
            I thought about suggesting she leave the door open and let the snake take care of the mouse problem, but I restrained myself. She doesn’t always think her old dad is that funny.

http://www.richmondparents.com/50_time_of_my_life.htm

http://www.boomerlifemagazine.com/

I hope these few words do not destroy the Manly Man, tough guy, not-to-be-messed-with image I have so carefully built up while writing for various publications in Richmond and surrounding areas over the past 25 years or so, but I am certainly secure enough in my manhood at my age to take a risk. I’ve decided I may as well just come out and admit it.
I enjoy ironing.
            I like the smell of spray starch in the morning.  I like making the creases and wrinkles turn into a smooth sleek continuum of fabric. I like seeing the shirt collar come under control just over the little buttons that will secure it for good.  I hope these few words do not destroy the Manly Man, tough guy, not-to-be-messed-with image I have so carefully built up while writing for various publications in Richmond and surrounding areas over the past 25 years or so, but I am certainly secure enough in my manhood at my age to take a risk. I’ve decided I may as well just come out and admit it.
I enjoy ironing.
            I like the smell of spray starch in the morning.  I like making the creases and wrinkles turn into a smooth sleek continuum of fabric. I like seeing the shirt collar come under control just over the little buttons that will secure it for good.  I like forcing trouser creases where there were none before, pressing down pocket flaps and tugging the back of a shirt until the path of the back pleats forms itself. I especially like smoothing out the fly of the shirt—that doubled-over portion that extends down the front, home to the buttonholes. (While it’s true that I did have to call Richmond’s favorite tailor, Alan Zimm, to find out the proper term to describe that part of the shirt, that fact does not for a moment mean that I actually am ill-informed about shirts. I mean, the fly? Who knew?)
My favorite thing to iron is a white shirt.  It’s like bringing order to a chaotic universe to iron a white shirt well, to see it hanging proudly, no creases yet at the elbow, no ring at the collar, no beltline crunch up.  Just perfect orderliness, promising a well-mannered, smoothly running day.
Ironing is not a wimpy thing, gentlemen.  To me, ironing is power, it’s forcing your will, it’s CONTROL, it’s, well, totally manly. (Now it might go a little over towards wimpy if you’re ironing sheets or underwear, and my advice to you there is, if you are, just keep quiet about that part of it.)
Perhaps I would not be so bold as to reveal my fondness for ironing here had I not come across an interesting and unusual Web site the other day. I discovered www.extremeironing.com, proving once again that the Internet is a vast storehouse of often-useless riches. This particular lode features people ironing as cars speed around them on a racetrack, ironing underwater, ironing in the Antarctic (imagine how good it would feel to put on a freshly ironed, still-warm garment there!), ironing from the bottom of a Welsh bog, and ironing while bicycling.
The extreme-ironing Web site claims to combine “outdoor activity with the satisfaction of a well-pressed shirt.” Now that’s for me. We guys who iron and iron well (my brother Terry is another one, and it gives me great pleasure to out him here as a fellow ironer) well understand the dangers of ironing. Which of us has never applied iron to wrist as we deftly maneuvered our Proctor-Silex through its paces? Who has never fallen victim to hot steam or overheated water? Who among us has not threatened his immortal soul with the fires of hell through an intemperate choice of words as the iron spits and spurts black water onto an almost-finished, perfectly ironed shirt?
Clearly, ironing can be dangerous and “extreme” in and of itself, and we stalwart fellows who undertake the pursuit should be proud. Maybe we have wives who don’t care for ironing, as Terry and I both do. Maybe we think we can do a better job than the cleaners, where the right amount of starch is often a problem. Maybe we like to keep busy while we’re watching TV—and no, I didn’t mean “Oprah”—what are you, a wise guy?  I actually meant wrestling or football—yeah, that’s what I meant.
Sometimes I get complimented on a beautifully ironed shirt.  People will say, “Wow! Your wife is really a good ironer.”  And, ever proud of my skills and talents “above the board” and always willing to promote ironing as the most masculine of pursuits, I will invariably reply, “Yes, she is.”
And now that I know the activity of extreme ironing exists, I certainly plan to become part of that unique adventure. For my first effort, I believe I shall bring the ironing board up from the unappealing recesses of the basement, set it up on the highly polished hardwood floor of the living room where there’s a better TV, and—spray starching with reckless abandon—attempt to iron one of Barb’s silk blouses. 
Now that’s the kind of thinking that puts the “extreme” in extreme ironing.

Did you shave just half of your face?” Barb asked me on the morning after our first night of sleeping in a tent near Wilkesboro some weeks back.

            “Yes, that’s as much as I got done before the battery died on my razor,” I grumbled.

            That exchange came after I had already grumbled about not being able to sleep on a poorly inflated air mattress, about being so cold that my chattering teeth woke me up three times and about the noise of the waterfall that cascaded about 75 yards from our tent.

            To make matters worse, Barb awoke from her first-ever camping experience marveling about how well she had slept, how cozy it was in her sleeping bag, and how beautiful the waterfall sounded. Is there anything more aggravating than someone who is cheerful in the morning when you yourself have arisen with the intention of being a grump?

            So started our three-day camping trip to Merlefest, the bluegrass music festival honoring the memory of guitarist Merle Watson, son of bluegrass great Doc Watson —and it was all uphill from there. The festival, now in its 21^st year, is held annually on the campus of Wilkes Community College in western North Carolina—surely one of the prettiest community college campuses anywhere.  One of the staff there told Barb that most of the buildings she was admiring “and just about everything else you see” came from festival proceeds.  As a clue to approximately how much money is taken in, there were 76,000 people in attendance this year, and tickets ranged up to $50 a day for the four-day event.

            Barb and I and the six real musicians with whom I play in a local band (other East of Afton members are George Brown, Phillip Gravely, Martin Gravely, Jon Marks, Scott Sayles and Brian Sullivan) drove to Wilkesboro for three of those days, enjoying such musicians as Sam Bush, The Waybacks, Marty Stuart, Tony Rice and Rhonda Vincent. Some of the performers we had seen when they performed at the National Folk Festival here in Richmond in recent years, like the Whitetop Mountain Band and Ralph Stanley and The Clinch Mountain Boys, and others had performed locally even more recently—Old Crow Medicine Show and Bearfoot, for instance.

Richmond has definitely been on the circuit for a lot of the country’s best bluegrass performers, but the assemblage at Merlefest was unparalleled. Over the four days, there were hundreds of opportunities to see musicians as varied as Ricky Skaggs and Levon Helm, George Hamilton IV and (originally of Jefferson Airplane fame) Jorma Kaukonen. 

What a weekend! I can’t wait for next year to go back and do it all again. The jam sessions were a highlight for me, when East of Afton gathered around our campfire in the evenings to play and sing, while other campers and their families came to sit a spell and sometimes sing along, or other musicians or singers joined in with us, or when we’d all go to the other side of the huge campsite area and join in with other bands and musicians.  It was all heady and pure and, for me, uplifting.

My band mates are all far younger than I, so I had great help putting up and taking down our tent, and fortunately one of them is a chef, so we had fantastic omelets for breakfast and delicious gumbo—and even more fortunately, another band member is a physician so I was able to eat well without worrying too much about small things like arteries.

As for Barb, I needn’t have worried about her first campout.  She loved every minute of it—though admittedly was less than thrilled with the campsite’s port-a-potty and the ice-cold showers. But she soon discovered that all the campus buildings were open to festivalgoers—with warm water yet.

            I’m glad to learn, at our age, that there are still new and untried experiences out there for us, experiences we can permanently add to the list of things we love to do. Barb lived all these years before ever sleeping in a tent, camping out near the sound of a waterfall, sitting around a campfire and singing at night—and these were all immediately things she loved and wants to do again. 

            As for me, I particularly liked an instant when my bride gave me what I took to be a beaming smile one night across the campfire.  I thought we were sharing a romantic moment until she told me later that I had looked so funny in the firelight with that one side of my face still unshaved.  

The tent that “sleeps six” has remained in its box in the trunk of our car since Barb and I purchased it several weeks ago at a local sporting goods store. It’s waiting for our upcoming trip to North Carolina to attend Merlefest, a rather famous and extremely popular bluegrass festival—so popular that as long as four months ago, nary a room remained available without 60 miles of the festival site.

“Why do you want a tent that sleeps six for the two of us?” I asked Barb, when we were deciding which one we should buy. 

“So the EMTs will have plenty of room to work,” she said.

Barb is not overly enthusiastic about this adventure. She’s never slept in a tent, and her idea of roughing it is a hotel without a concierge. Not that I’m any expert either.

I seem to remember camping out at least one summer when I was a Boy Scout in Charlottesville.  We had a Camporee with a number of other troops around the area, but all I remember about it is that we had these huge cat-head biscuits for breakfast. 

More recently, I slept in a tent a couple of times in the 70s when daughter Sarah was in Indian Guides.  I recall that one of the other fathers had to help me get my tent up, and I remember that my Indian Guide name was Steppenwolf. That’s the extent of my camping memories.

            “Can I bring my hair dryer?” Barb asked me yesterday. 

            “You can bring it,” I said, “but I’m not sure how far you’ll have to walk to use it.”

            I don’t really know whether there will be electricity at our campsite, short of possible thunderstorms horrifying enough to send my eyebrows off pointing in all directions.  And will the intermittent and disturbing flashes of lightning be visible through the green nylon of our fabric home, as the small river of water courses beneath my thighs and back?

 Occasionally when I’m driving around and brake suddenly, I can hear the heavy box of tent slide against the rear wall of the trunk, a reminder of this first camping trip we are either to undertake or undergo together, depending on how you want to look at it. I have to admit I’m a little worried. How will my old back take to sleeping on the ground? How cold is it likely to be in the mountains of North Carolina?  Are snakes out and about this time of year?

“If we wanted to sleep in a tent,” Barb grumbled when I proposed this trip, “we should have gone to Woodstock.”

“This will be much like Woodstock,” I assured her, “only the drugs will be Zocor and Zestril, and the campers will be bringing pajamas.”

A week ago when I opened my car trunk to show a neighbor my banjo, he noticed my tent.

“You going camping?” he asked.

“Yeah,” I said.  “Barb and I are going to Merlefest.”

“Where’s Barb gonna sleep?” he wanted to know.

When I told him she was sleeping in the tent, too, he laughed all the way back down the alley to his house. “I hope you didn’t buy tickets for the whole week,” he yelled back at me.

            In any case, by the time you read this, Barb and I will be back home, no doubt enthusiastic camping converts wishing to sing the praises of the fresh air and wide open spaces—or else we’ll be down with pleurisy or snakebite.  Whichever, come next week, I’ll try to give you an update on how it went, this back-to-nature outing for a couple of camping novices of a certain age.

            “Do you think we’ll be able to get a New York Times in the morning while we’re there,” Barb wants to know. 

“This is the boonies of western North Carolina we’re going to,” I remind her. Being a confirmed Virginian, I added, “I doubt that you could get a New York Times on a normal morning in the best hotel in Charlotte.”

            If this were a soap opera, we might say at this point: “When we left Randy, he was about to drive to the mountains of North Carolina, where he will be expected to raise a tent for six and sleep on the ground for three nights alongside a lady approximately his own age who has never slept in a tent or done without her New York Times or her hair dryer.  Tune in next week to see how our episode of ‘Randy and Barb go to Merlefest’ turns out.”