Randy Fitzgerald

If you were born in the 1940s as I was, the next century—the 2000s—seemed impossibly far away and hard to imagine.

I still remember well one day in Miss Beard’s history class at Albemarle High School in 1959 a discussion about what we might expect by the year 2000, and one student’s response was that he didn’t expect to be around by the year 2000. Neither did I. I don’t think any of us did.

Young people often can’t foresee themselves as getting old; at the teenage stage of our lives, at least, we somehow conclude that we’ll probably die young—or else won’t ever die at all. There’s no room for simply getting old, though.

Well, not only did we all make it to the year 2000, but here we are on our way to winding up the first decade of the now no-longer-New Century. “How the time flies,” said a Brook Benton song from my teenage era, and how it has flown indeed: the last century, the last almost-decade, the last year.

Almost as soon as I started to feel really comfortable with 2008—poof—2009. I rather liked old 2008—an interesting year, wasn’t it? The election certainly kept us alert and, at least in my case, taught us not to talk politics with family members. In a lot of cases, political feelings were like raw nerves as the election drew closer and closer. My sister and I were off in one direction and my brother in another, and Barb supported a different candidate from her entire family. At least the two of us ended up in the same camp, which made dinner a lot more pleasant, I’m sure.

2008 had a somewhat split personality for me as well. It was the year I had the opportunity to go back to college a bit and play student, thanks to a summer grant to study at Yale. It all felt so familiar, heading off to a seminar in the morning, eating in the dining hall, browsing in the library. I spend about nine years of my young life doing just those things, and being back on that side of the desk again brought back so many memories of my youth.

On the other hand, 2008 was my worst year physically—a constant reminder that many of my real student days were actually about half a century ago. To attack an obstinate heart problem, I chose to undergo a little-known treatment program called EECP, offered in conjunction with only two or three hospitals in Virginia, like UVa and, locally, CJW. It’s a simple, painless procedure, but one that required me to daily don bright blue Superman-like tights that regularly brought Barb to gales of laughter.  

The procedure is too hard to explain here, but its goal was to encourage one’s capillaries to take over the job of blocked arteries. Did it help?  I’m not real sure—I think it did, but I definitely still have a good deal of my original problem. We’ll see what the New Year brings.

So, I was a young man at Yale, an old fellow at Chippenham. But 2008 was also the year Barb and I went to Woodstock, to the new museum capturing that crazy era of the 1960s and the wonderful music that came with it. Now that was enough to take a fellow happily back to his youth—except that you’ve never seen so many old geezers wandering around there in Bermuda shorts in your life.  I was secretly laughing at a few of the more stereotypical ones until Barb pointed out that we had met an endangered species, and they were us.

This past year was one in which we honored most of our family traditions, too. We made our two annual trips to the Outer Banks, we continued our monthly dinners with my siblings (not discussing politics!), and we enjoyed our children as often as we could get them to come over and visit. One good thing about each new year is that you already know much of what will take place.

It’s those darn surprises that make it interesting and scary and, after all, a “new” year. There’s no way of telling what will befall us in 2009—who could have predicted the serious economic collapse of 2008—or all the twists and turns of that election year? But the things I know for sure—that every day with Barb will be interesting and valuable, that my children will always hold my heart, that my family will continue to offer support and that my friends will be a constant source of joy—all that is enough to know.

Whatever else comes in 2009, I’m sure it won’t be dull.