Randy Fitzgerald

I don’t have a problem with leaves. Unlike most of my neighbors, I can leave them lying on my yard for weeks and months and they don’t worry me at all. In fact, I love them.

            I love looking out the front windows of a morning and seeing the nice yellow blanket of them on the grass. I love sitting at my desk while I’m waiting for an idea to come and watching them swirling one by one to the ground. I love seeing kids who are walking past on the sidewalk veer into my yard so they can crunch the leaves beneath their feet as they go.  I love watching them get caught up in a big gust of wind and go rushing down the street into—and I guess this is where the problem would come in—the yards of neighbors who apparently like leaves a lot less than I do.

            I come to this conclusion because every yard on my block has been raked (or in this day and age, I guess I should say “blown”) except ours. A carpet of bright green grass leads the way to every doorstep, but then there is our house, where magnolia leaves still blend with sugar maples and dogwoods, where the walkway to the front porch is covered—heck, where the front porch is often covered as well.

            I guess I think autumn ought to look like autumn. Once the leaves are disposed of and the green grass welcomed back, all that’s left is naked trees—not a pleasant sight. I prefer to focus my eyes downward on the reds and browns and yellows on the lawn. 

            We were given a hint, people, of how each year’s new crop of falling leaves should be greeted by the Anglo-Saxon who came up with the very words “leaves” and “fall.” Those terms are like a little advance notice that, gosh darn it, like it or not, those things on the trees are going to “fall” to the ground and we all should just “leave” them there.

            But a fellow sure can start to feel guilty when he’s the only one on the block who got the message.  Admittedly, seeing my leaves swirl into the freshly swept yard of one of my good neighbors does make me feel bad, and eventually the guilt overwhelms me. Then Barb and I will make the effort to get a few out to the street for pickup. I prefer to wait, though, until the crop on the ground is brown, and all the pretty reds and yellows have died away.

One year I waited so long that a nice neighbor paid her yardman to come over and blow our leaves to the street the day before pickup. Now that I have this little heart condition going on, the neighbors tend to lend a helping hand when they can, and I really appreciate it. I frankly am not up to raking leaves anymore, even if I wanted to, and all assistance is welcome. Of course, the neighbors who have lived here for years well know that my heart wasn’t into leaf raking long before it went south on me. 

Up at our little farm near Charlottesville, the leaves are in command. They blow across the open fields at will, and if the deer and the wild geese and the occasional fox mind, we don’t hear of it.  There’s also no sound of leaf blowers to wake one up on a Saturday morn, and no close neighbors to notice whether the yard is raked or not.

I do miss the days when we used to do a little leaf burning at the farm. Sometimes the leaves would all blow up against the house, and we’d start to fear that maybe a workman might accidentally drop a cigarette there, so we’d rake them into a pile and burn them. The smell of burning leaves in the fall was a treat to the senses, and we had no idea we were harming the environment.

One of my early memories is standing in my yard when I was probably just a toddler, spinning and spinning around as leaves fell all about me.  I see that as a lovely introduction to life.  I never had the more common childhood experience of jumping into a pile of leaves, though, because my father never got around to raking them either.

When my 26-year-old son, Kyle, called us about two weeks ago, Barb asked him his thoughts on the results of the presidential election. 

            “Well,” said Kyle—a huge opponent of big government and the two-party system—“I was sorry Obama won, and I was glad McCain lost.”

            “So whom did you vote for then?” Barb asked him.

            “Oh, I just wrote in Dad’s name,” he said.

            Gee, that was the second vote ever for me for president! 

The first one came from Barb. She has worked for about a dozen years as an election officer in the city in a precinct adjoining our own, and when she had her annual training on voting machines a few weeks before the election, she brought home the tape from her practice machine showing that she had written in my name just for fun.

            Few people realize how much training poll workers must undergo, how hard they have to work, the great responsibilities they feel toward the job, and what a long day they put in. On election day Barb left the house at 4:45 to join about ten other workers in setting up the voting machines, getting everything organized and getting sworn in before the crowds arrived and the polls opened at 6 a.m. For this year’s presidential election, there are two eager voters waiting when she got there, and when the polls opened, there were about a hundred waiting. Her precinct served about 300 voters in the morning hours, and then a constant stream all day. Well over 80% of the registered voters in that precinct voted on Election Day, including a number of young people voting for the first time.

            When the first-time voters made themselves known, the poll workers gave each of them a round of applause. Barb said in all her years working the polls, she had never seen so many new voters and such a spirited turnout. The phrase “Democracy in Action” kept coming to her, she said.

            Though she’s been an election officer for so many years, Barb still has to take a number of hours of re-training before each election.  A few weeks prior to voting, she’ll inevitably spend most of a Saturday down at City Hall, going over rules and regulations with folks from the electoral board, and then she’ll take the class on machines once again—often on another day altogether. There’s a class on paperwork that she takes every now and then as well, and for each day she undergoes training, the city sends her a check for about $15. One year she got a parking ticket during training that took care of her $15 stipend for about five years!

            Not only do poll workers put in a lot of hours both during training and on voting day, but once they arrive at the polls in the early morning darkness, they are not allowed to leave the polling place for anything until the last vote has been tallied, the results called in, the machines put away and the place put back in order. Sometimes that means a 17-hour day, a lot of it in Barb’s case sitting in front of a poll book for most of that time. She has to pack her own sandwich for lunch because there’s certainly no going out for a bite, and since there’s nowhere to sit and eat privately in her precinct, she and her co-workers eat lunch one by one standing up in a small kitchen. There is no “lunch hour,” just a few stolen minutes.

            Barb says that ex-poll workers who know what the job is like sometimes show up at the precinct with boxes of cookies, a homemade cake, fruit, candy—all kinds of treats for the often beleaguered poll workers.  “We may eat standing up,” she says, “but sometimes we eat well.”

            While former poll workers know that the election officials are there as a labor of love—nobody every did this job for the money, I assure you—voters seem pretty much unaware that the fellow who leads them to the booth, the lady who takes their name and finds it in the poll book, the man who demonstrates the machines, the person who greets them at the door, the person who resolves any problem—that all of those people are basically volunteers. Some weeks after the election they get a token check, and it’s so small that I don’t even remember what Barb’s usually is, but I know she takes me to lunch on it.

Since she’s been working the polls, I have a new appreciation for the good citizens who do that job. As anyone who deals with the public can attest, there are all kinds of folks out there, some of them very pleasant to deal with and others who aren’t. Barb’s always amazed at how many voters don’t think they should have to give their name and address, or how many don’t want her to repeat that name and address aloud, as state law requires. Though there is a sign on display explaining the law, there are always a few who say, “You have my ID in your hand—why are you asking me to say my address?”  There are always a few who are snippy or unresponsive, and there are sometimes even a few who are drunk.

There are also a good many who stop back by Barb’s table after voting to say “thank you.”  I told her that I try to remember to do that myself, both because I know what a hard job it is and also because I think it’s especially important for me to remember the little people now that I’ve been a presidential candidate myself.

Of course, it deflated me a bit to find out that in Barb’s precinct, Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck both got more write-in votes than I did!     

Where are the young men now who broke into my home 19 years ago? We heard back then that they, part of a gang of young boys who drove our north side neighborhood crazy over one long, hot summer, were all at the time from 11 to 15 years old. We’d see them in twos and threes riding through the streets on their bikes that summer, all wearing different shades of yellow or gold tees or tops, smiling when they passed you, sometimes saying hello—and when the burglaries started, the clues immediately led us to make the connection.

First off, whoever was breaking into homes all across Laburnum Park was obviously young. For instance, when our home was robbed early one evening as we were across town at our children’s Little League game, the thieves took baseball cards, video games, movies, the kids’ cameras and radios, and a bunch of toys—along with my UR class ring, some other jewelry and electronics.

I can’t remember how many homes fell victim to these little Oliver Twists that summer, but there were a good many, and the neighbors were not a happy lot.  One beautiful day when a lot of us were out in our yards, the cry went up that a burglary had been interrupted at a house around the block. The young man had run and had quickly disappeared—so quickly that we knew he was still in the neighborhood, hiding. So dozens of us started to search, looking behind boxwoods and vehicles, under porches and in trees—and finally he was found hiding behind a garage. The neighbors surrounded him (fortunately he was not armed) and kept him there until police arrived. One down, and the robberies continued.

A week or so later, a lady from a nearby street (who coincidentally happened to work with troubled youth) was driving down her alley when she saw a young man passing by wearing her distinctive red satin soccer shorts—the ones that had been stolen when her house was robbed a few days previously. So she got out of her car, threw him to the ground, and sat on him until police arrived.  We heard later from her that he had squealed on other gang members, and that at least some of them were young men from good families, that they had been divvying up the loot and dropping off the jewelry and electronics with a fence in their own neighborhood … and then that was the end of it.

Literally, the end of it, for after that, we never heard another word, not from the police or from anyone else in authority. If there had been a hearing or a trial, we never learned of it. If they were punished, we were never told what the punishment was. If anything was recovered, we never knew it. Because the young men were juveniles, all action and records were closed.

Over the years, I have thought about those kids many times. I always hoped that one day I’d get a note in the mail or a young man would turn up at my door with an apology. He would write or say, “I sorry I stole so many of the things your kids had worked so hard to earn. I’m sorry I took the irreplaceable video of your daughter coming home from the hospital as an infant—I mistook it for a movie.  I’m sorry I stole the UR ring that you would have passed on to your son when he went to Richmond. I apologize for the destruction in your home, for pouring orange Gatorade on your living room carpet, for pulling all your books off the shelves and upending your mattresses and making a general mess of your house. I regret invading your home and frightening your wife and children. What can I do now, all these years later, as an upstanding citizen, an adult in my thirties, to make it up to you?”

            But, of course, none of that ever happened, none of that was ever said. Did any of the boys in that “gang” indeed grow up to be responsible citizens? Are they out there working in banks or offices? Are some or all of them in jail? Surely at least one or two of them, being from good families, must—as my mother would have said—turned out all right.

            If so, that one should have written me, and others in the neighborhood, or had the courage to come back to our door and say he was sorry.

And if he’s not sorry, I hope that long ago he’s managed to forget our address.

Like so many baby boomers and older folks in our age group, Barb and I have had a very nervous few weeks over the stock market and our plans for the near future.  As we planned for our retirement, we’ve been counting heavily on our 401(k) funds, but now—with all the financial disasters on Wall Street—we’re not sure what’s left of them. When that quarterly statement finally arrives, I won’t be eager to open it.

            It’s a harsh awakening to hear that those who have 10 years or so to wait for the market to rebound will be fine—but those of us who’ll need our investments soon for retirement—well, we’ll apparently just be out of luck.  We’ll have to take our losses, and maybe that will mean working for longer than we want to.

            Barb and I had been congratulating ourselves that we had continued to work past the usual retirement ages. We saw 62 go by and kept working. We saw 65 go by and kept working. We love our jobs, but it was wonderfully reassuring to think that we could quit anytime we wanted to and start calling on the money we had carefully put into our retirement plans over the years.

            We probably aren’t going to be able to do that now. Now, again like so many others who get that AARP magazine every month, we may have to keep plugging away longer than intended.

            What a mess.  I don’t pretend to understand all this. Should we try to remove what’s left of our investments from the market? And, if so, what do we do with the money that won’t cost us a fortune in taxes?  Should we remove something from savings, and if so, where do we put it?  If our bank should fold, could we get to our safe deposit box?

            One thing I did hear last week that was in itself frightening is that it can apparently take about a year and half for the FDIC to return the funds that they insure—and one banker even told me it can take as long as 10 years.  Check that out for yourself—I can’t verify that the people I spoke to were experts. If either of those figures is anywhere near correct, that’s not good news.

            I don’t remember ever having concerns like this in my lifetime. Though I was born in the 1940s and missed the last great collapse, I do know that my parents had vivid Depression-era memories—and certainly Barb’s parents did.  They were so haunted by that period and by bank failures that they actually buried their savings in Mason jars under the dirt floor of the garage. Barb never knew it was there until they dug up all the jars in 1960 to pay cash for a house they bought in Charlottesville. Barb’s sister said it was a little embarrassing when they counted the money out to the seller of the home because it definitely smelled very musty.

            For years Barb worked at an ad agency housed in the Plantation House down on Main Street. That building has the distinction of having been one of the tallest buildings in the city during the Depression—and legend has it that several men, wiped out financially, leaped to their deaths from there.

            Barb never researched whether that was true, but it was an unnerving story, especially when she worked there late at night, by herself.  She said she thought of it often because the elevator in the building had a tendency to go up and down by itself with no one in it—a mystery that was kind of funny during the daylight hours but a bit nerve-wracking in the dead of night.

While a lot of us may be weighing worst-case scenarios, whether it’s postponing retirement, cutting way back on expenses and credit, or downsizing, no one I know is feeling desperate yet. We older folks tend to be an optimistic lot—we’ve been up and we’ve been down, and we have faith in our coping and surviving mechanisms. I for one am grateful that social security is still available to us, at least for a few more years.

 Meanwhile, if things get worse, be advised that Barb and I will be open to dinner invitations at your house.