Randy Fitzgerald

If you ever start thinking the economic downswing is universal and hopeless, just go try to get into Olive Garden on a Saturday night.

Barb and I and my two siblings and their spouses had an hour-and-40-minute wait on a recent evening, and you might have thought that long a delay would have discouraged about two-thirds of the would-be diners but, no, the waiting area, and the bar area as well, were packed the whole time we were there.

Personally, I try not to wait anywhere for anything more than 30 minutes anymore, but the Saturday night deal was not my call.  It was my brother-in-law’s birthday, Olive Garden is his favorite restaurant, and they don’t have one in Charlottesville where he lives.  So wait we did. And wait some more.

The get-together was also the February sibling supper for my brother, sister and me, and our spouses. Sib Sup is a set-in-stone reunion for dinner the first Saturday of each month, started some years back when we realized that, although two of us live in Richmond and the other only 65 miles up the road, we had been seeing each other only a few times a year.

Our interaction had simply fallen victim to busy work schedules, the  kids’ activities when they were younger, and, I guess, inertia.  Back then, we were actually doing a better job of keeping up with friends than with family. It’s just that you assume  your family will always be there when you get around to them, but your friends you might have to pay more attention to.  All that changed when my sister-in-law suggested sib sups.

Anyway, the other Saturday night at Olive Garden the Fitzgerald “family” grew remarkably larger in the space of an hour and forty minutes.  As our party of six moved around among the crush of the waiting crowd, we found ourselves near some chairs where sat a young woman who immediately got up and offered her place to us older folks. She said she was holding the seat for her father, who had not yet arrived, but one of us could sit there until he showed up.

We started to chat and quickly found out that she and her party were Fitzgeralds, too, though not from the same part of the country that my Fitzgeralds hailed from. Coincidently, her name was Beth Fitzgerald (my mother’s name) and her party was there to celebrate a birthday too—Beth’s mother’s birthday. My crazy brother Terry kept taking Mrs. Fitzgerald’s nicely wrapped birthday presents off the table and presenting them to my brother-in-law, the birthday boy in our party.

When Beth’s father arrived, he turned out to be a great guy—the owner of a local oil supply company. He had a few more years on him than I do, but as a man who really enjoys his work, he was committed to keeping at it for as long as he could. Retirement was not in his vocabulary, he said. “Why would I ever want to retire as long as I’m having a good time at work?” he asked me.  Why indeed.

I’m thinking about that. Maybe a lot of us retire just because we think we’re supposed to, and maybe this bum economy will keep more of us who have a job on the job long enough to take a second look at automatic retirement. And with this financial crisis, none of us may be able to afford to retire anyway.

By the time our table was called, all the Fitzgeralds were starting to feel a little like kin, or at least old friends.  We had exchanged so much information that we felt well acquainted, and the wait time at the restaurant had flown by.

A postscript: During dinner that night, I was telling my sister about another encounter Barb and I had once had as we waited for a restaurant table. The background on the story is that in 1969 I had taken a job teaching English at the College of Charleston in South Carolina. I soon learned that I was the replacement for a young man who, despite his Ph.D. and years of training, had decided to give up college teaching and go into carpentry.  No one knew where he had gone to pursue his new career—he was apparently quite an adventurer, a favorite with the Charleston students.

Cut to 1972 when Barb and I went to London to live for awhile. One day we decided to visit the part of town where poet John Keats had lived, stopping in at a busy pub near the underground station for a quick quaff. As we waited, we started to chat with the chap standing in front of us, and guess who?  Yes, it was my predecessor at Charleston, now happily making cabinets at Hampstead Heath in London. What an afternoon of conversation we shared!

I think life shows us, now and then, that having to wait in line can sometimes be a happy circumstance. You just have to take the time to find out who’s waiting along with you.   

On Valentine’s Day this year, Barb and I found ourselves in Gordonsville, Virginia, at a really nice bed and breakfast called Wolf Trap Farm. We had left Richmond late, after a long, hard day during which we both had worked to finish up a bunch of separate, overdue projects. By the time we reached our destination that night, it was dark, we were exhausted, stores were closed—and we each had to admit that we hadn’t had time to buy Valentine’s presents for one another.

            I was especially ill prepared.  I had neither present nor card. Barb had a card for me, at least, but no present.  “Why don’t we just forget about the presents this year,” she suggested. “There’s really nothing we need, and I can’t think of anything I want. Staying at this beautiful B&B is more than enough.”

            Listen, I may be getting old, folks, but I’m not getting stupid. A husband who doesn’t buy his wife something for Valentine’s, whatever she says, is taking a dangerous chance.  But what to do? All the shops on Gordonsville’s Main Street were deserted and dark, and we were too tired to stage a hunt for something that might be open. 

I decided to focus on one thing at a time. Around seven we drove to the local grocery store so I could at least buy a card. And while I was doing that, Barb got us a lovely dinner-to-go from a nearby Italian restaurant. Coming out, she spied the answer to our lack of presents: a Family Dollar Store at the end of the strip mall.

            “This will be fun,” she told me when she picked me up at the grocery. “We’ll get our presents at Family Dollar, and we’ll each have a $10 limit. How does that sound?”

            Actually, it sounded like a plan, and maybe even fun. So off we went to different parts of the dollar store like kids on an Easter egg hunt.

            There was so much good stuff in that place that after about ten minutes we had to meet mid-store and agree to up the ante from $10 to $15. We soon left with two bags apiece, smiles on our faces, and more money in our wallets than anyone should ever have after a Valentine’s “shopping spree.”

            Here’s some of what we found at Family Dollar to save our Valentine’s:

The most puzzling gift to me from Barb was a set of ladies’ false fingernails, with clear polish. Barb reminded me that I’m always complaining that it’s hard to strum my banjo with my short fingernails, so now I could just glue one of these on my strumming finger as needed. “Good idea,” I told her, “but it might have been better had you found some without the little blue flower down here on the bottom.”

            I gave her two wooden picture frames, displaying two poems I had hurriedly written for her after we got back to Wolf Trap—and if you think I’m going to share my poems here, dream on.  (But I will tell you that one was a limerick.)

She gave me a gaudy little three-dimensional plaque with the message “The place to be happy is here.” 

            “Where should I put it?” I asked her.

            “It doesn’t make any difference,” she said. “Move it around if you’d like, to remind yourself that a person can be happy anywhere.”

            I found for her a mystery novel, some razors (because she’s always using mine) and a sink strainer just like one she had admired earlier in the drain at Wolf Trap Farm. She gave me Elmer’s Glue (not for the fingernails, but because I had been fruitlessly searching for some a week or so earlier), and razors, because she’s always using mine. She gave me a Made-in-America (obviously one-of-a-kind) toothbrush with real bristles—not those plastic sticks and circles that most toothbrushes have of late.

 I gave her an ice scraper, so she’ll stop using her credit card to clean the car windows. We exchanged our favorite candy bars, and she found for me a colorful jar (with only a small crack) for 60 cents, to hold pencils on my desk.

            I initially thought my best purchase for her was a bottle of a usually very expensive name brand of shampoo, but the wind went out of my sails a bit when Barb read aloud that it was the formula for “weak and damaged hair.”  Uh-uh.

            There was more—an amazing amount of “stuff,” in fact, for $15 apiece, and we had a lot of fun both in choosing and opening those crazy gifts. In fact, I’ll probably remember these presents better than some of the expensive Valentine’s gifts we’ve shared over the years.

            Oh, yes, about the cards:  She got mine at a card shop in Richmond a week earlier, and I got hers at a grocery store in Gordonsville at the last minute, but somehow we ended up with exactly the same one.

My wife Barb told me the other day how happy she was that she had finally found Mr. Right, that one man who could strike joy in her heart every time he arrived at the door, who could solve all her problems and understand what she needed almost before she even knew it herself. “It seemed as though I spent most of my life looking for him,” she said, “and now he is here each time I call.”

            I was about to say, “Ah, shucks, Ma’am,” when she added, “I only wish we had found somebody like Eric years ago.”

            Eric?

            Eric is the young man that Barb’s sister Rue introduced us to some weeks back. A VMI English major who ended up through a rather circuitous route in the business of home renovations, Eric got caught like so many of us beneath the falling economy and, facing a drought of nice big renovating jobs, decided that he would do pretty much anything in the handyman field while he awaits the return of jobs and prosperity.

            “I think he can do anything around the house,” Rue had told us, and we quickly found out she was right.

            Our house was built in the early 1920s, and like every old house, there’s always something going belly-up in it.  For instance, for at least 20 years we’ve been tiptoeing around ancient bathroom sinks and toilets that Barb is totally unwilling to replace, even though a number of plumbers have shaken their heads over them time and again. “Can’t be fixed,” we’ve heard too many times to count, but we’ve nursed them along, though operating them has often involved a series of steps that you’d have to write down in a notebook for an overnight guest.

            A month ago Eric tackled three bathrooms in one day, and all are still doing great. His success where others failed came, I think, from his willingness to put in the time and do whatever was necessary. When I came home from lunch the first day he was working, the commode in the master bath was sitting in the bathtub, and the tank had been removed from the wall (yes, the fixtures are so old that the tank is a separate unit). No one had ever gone that far before. By the time I got home at the end of the day, everything was back in place and operating perfectly. Plus, some long-loose tiles on the floor had been reglued and, I kid you not, the new shower curtain had been hung.

            I have a feeling this is the way things might have been years ago, maybe before I was born, when people needed jobs and took pride in their work.

            Over the next few weeks, Eric put up weather stripping, replaced a broken pipe in the basement, sealed the storm windows, replaced some cracked panes, fixed a light switch, closed up a hole in the basement wall, repaired a broken chair, reglued Barb’s grandma’s flower bench, patched a leak, repaired some shutters, rehung a gutter and, best of all, closed off the place way up near the eaves of the house where the possums had been strolling into the attic.

            “Now that I know he can do anything,” Barb told me, “I was thinking about asking if he could fix the broken zipper on your golfing pants.”

            I believe he could have done it.

            When the young man had finished everything we could find for him to do, he went across the street and fixed the malfunctioning windows (you know, the old kind with rope and pulleys) of a neighbor, and then went down the street and quickly solved the plumbing problem of an elderly gentleman who lives alone (no charge for that one).

            This week, Eric is working at our farm near Charlottesville, this time on a house built in the late 1880s.  The living room floor there has been sagging a bit, the perfect job for a man who lives and breathes old homes. Because that house rests on bricks with a dirt crawlspace as low as four to six inches in places, Eric is spending a lot of time scooting around on his back. Yesterday he succeeded in disturbing a hibernating black snake, who groggily went under another part of the house in response to a few well-placed rocks from Eric, who couldn’t really do much with his throwing arm in that tight a confine. In fact, at one point he said he got stuck and literally had to dig the dirt out from beneath before he could move forward or back.

            I’m pretty darned impressed that somebody who couldn’t be more than 30 has this kind of old-time gumption, determination and pride in his work, whatever the job might be. Maybe I thought that kind of attitude died with my father’s “greatest” generation.” 

            It’s been quite a nice experience finding out I was wrong.

            It’s also very nice to have commodes that flush on command.

When I was in my twenties in graduate school at the University of Georgia in Athens, Paul Harvey came to town one night. Barb and I spent a lot of time studying back then and didn’t go out much, but that night we scurried from the ugly wine-colored trailer in which we lived at the edge of a cemetery all the way across town to hear him.

            That was in the late 1960s, and our politics then were about as far from Paul Harvey’s as they could have been. You may remember Harvey, who died a couple of weeks ago on February 28, as the voice of Middle America, a radio commentator who in his early days was a supporter of McCarthyism, a pro-war enthusiast, an anti-hippie and a flag-waving anti-intellectual. He was indeed the pioneer in conservative radio, his expressive voice commanding the noontime airways long before Rush Limbaugh came on the scene.

Paul Harvey in those days was wildly popular—a Gallup poll named him the second most admired American in 1969. Around that time he had about 24 million listeners every day. But he was probably not somebody you would have expected to be well received by your liberal friends and professors.

            But well received at Georgia he was. The audience to hear him was large and enthusiastic, and I doubt that many of them were any more in line with his ultra-conservative politics than Barb and I were. We were all there because Paul Harvey was a kind of legend, was fun to listen to, was likeable and interesting, and was, well, Paul Harvey.

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The man was always a lot more than his political philosophy (which did, by the way, become a lot less black and white as he aged).  He was a storyteller extraordinaire, a master of the English language, an expert with idioms and rich metaphors and wonderful words.  He had a way of putting a spin on stories that made it impossible for a listener to change the dial.

The vignettes he so winningly told on the air often ended with a sharp turn, like his story of the would-be artist who turns out to be Hitler or the teenage boy who received cash from FDR and ends up being Fidel Castro.

            And has anyone else ever had so distinctive a style?—that halting, staccato delivery with emphasis in what might have seemed like all the wrong places. He was also a master of the pause—the looooong pause. And the man had a million-dollar voice as well.

            Paul Harvey’s 15-minutes of midday airtime came to us out of Chicago, but Harvey came to us like someone with his roots in Oklahoma, which is exactly where his roots were. He was born there, and he never lost the touch of small-town America. He was a consistent supporter of cops (his policeman father had been killed in the line of duty in Tulsa), of soldiers and veterans, and of conservative politicians like Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon.  However, when his friend Nixon extended the Viet Nam War in 1970, Harvey told him on air that he was wrong.

                                          THE REST OF THE STORY

            I’m going to miss Paul Harvey. There are certain people I’m awfully glad I had a chance to see in person in this life—and he’s one of them. All these years later, I remember well that night Barb and I went to hear him speak in Athens. I don’t usually wait around to talk to a speaker after a lecture, but I waited for him. I had already started writing a bit then, and I told him after his speech that he was one of the best storytellers I’d ever heard, and that I wanted to be a storyteller of sorts, too, only in print someday.

And Paul Harvey took the time to give a long-haired, bearded, hippyish college student a bit of advice. “Two things,” he said, in that so-familiar telegraph style of speech.  “I have always found it … useful … to have an appreciation for things that are odd and unexpected …and things that are ordinary and true.”

I’ve remembered that, and I’ve used it.  I’m going to miss Paul Harvey.