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.