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.

                                                PAGE TWO

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.

When I got home from work yesterday, the floor of my closet was strewn with ties—stripes and paisleys and solids, some in a heap, others stretched out like colorful snakes taking in the heat of a warm floor.

       That was my first clue.  Then I noticed spools of thread all over the bedroom floor, rolled here and there, long strands of brown and green thread crisscrossing the rug. What was this?

A trail of cloth measuring tape wound around a corner, under a door and into another room, the room that usually houses our “One Good Rug.”  That rug was now rolled up in the corner, clearly trying to stay out of sight. And then—there they were: two tiny blacker-than-black kittens riotously chasing their tails and each other, tumbling over and over, squeaking and growling and doing what kittens do best—making grumpy old men smile at the end of a long, hard day.

       I could smile even more happily at these two kitties because they’re not ours. Daughter Sarah had innocently made a trip to the Charlottesville SPCA last week to “look at the kittens” and returned to her house with two of them.

       “Don’t you know better than to go look at kittens?” her mom asked her. “Nobody ever went to look at kittens without coming home with kittens.”

       Actually, after Sarah had already become smitten with one of them—the one with the fuzzy fur and more hair in his ears than Andy Rooney—an SPCA staff worker advised her she really needed to have two. “A kitten always needs another kitten to play with,” she was told.

       I don’t know if that’s really true, but Barb and I have always chosen cats in twos, and it’s worked out well. I don’t think we’ve ever had two males at once, though, so we’ll have to wait and see how that works out for Sarah. They’ve already been neutered, but will they fight each other when they’re grown? Will one have to be dominant? Will they leave their socks and underwear on the bedroom floor?

       The SPCA staffer also told Sarah that these two little guys are brothers, though one is sleek as a panther and needle thin, and the other is a fuzzy wuzzy fat boy. The thin one purrs and sleeps a lot, and the fat one frets and frolics. That’s the great thing about cats—people who’ve owned some know that no two are ever alike in personality or life philosophy.

       It’s been over a year since our big gray Muffin Cat died, since Barb and I wholeheartedly agreed then never to have another pet.  Our animals tend to live into their twenties or at least late teens, and that would mean we’d have to make it well into our eighties to outlive the next one.  And I know you’ve heard a lot of people say this, but we’re just not up to having another pet die on us—it’s too hard, too painful.

       But that’s not a thought for today, when cute little kittens are running amok all over the house.

Sarah brought them along to town this morning since she’s teaching three classes here today and didn’t want to leave them alone.  One of her classes is creative writing, so I guess it’s logical that she would look to literature to come up with names for these fellows. 

       She googled “cats of famous people” and soon learned that Mark Twain’s cat was “Beelzebub,” Lord Byron’s was “Beppo” (and that was many years before the Marx Brothers, too), and Poe’s was a clever “Catarina.” Hemingway was on the list about three dozen times—that man knew some cats—including one named “Mr. Featherpuss.” (John Lennon’s cat, by the way, was named “Elvis.”)

       Not finding a cat name she liked, Sarah decided to give them people names, working from the brother angle.  She looked up first names for the Brothers Grimm (Jakob and Wilhelm) and the James brothers (Henry and William) before thinking of the Brothers Karamazov.

Ah, black Russians would be perfect, she told her mom. So at least for now these tiny little urchins have the rather pompous names of Ivan and Dmitri, though I take comfort in the fact that the next time I see them, they’ll probably be named something else.

I do hope she manages to be a little more imaginative, though, than Churchill, Coolidge and Matthew Arnold, all of whom named their cats “Blackie.”

I hated to confess to Barb the other day that I had torn one of her guest towels. I was drying my hands, and a finger just seemed to poke right through it.

            “No big deal,” she said. “Which one was it?”

            When I told her it was the pink one with the bFg monogram, she started to laugh.

            “No wonder it tore,” she said. “That towel is 48 years old.”

            It turned out that the towel I had torn was the last one left from a set that Barb’s Aunt Mattie had given us as a wedding present when we married in 1961. Mattie Morris worked at Miller & Rhoads here in Richmond, and she had gotten us this beautiful monogrammed set using Barb’s new married initials for the first time. The bath towels and washcloths had long ago bit the dust, but somehow this one guest towel had survived.

            Either we haven’t had a lot of guests over the years or Miller and Rhoads sold some amazing towels.  The edges are a little frayed and the towel’s a little thin, but imagine lasting and still being usable after all these years. It even still has the silk tag sewed on, faded and ragged, but one can make out a shield with an F on the side. Barb says she thinks that might mean Fieldcrest. I believe if that brand is still made, we should all go looking for some.

“Let’s put what’s left of it away,” Barb said, “in honor of five decades of service.”

But the tearing of the towel led us to sit down and consider whether any other of our wedding presents had survived for 48 years, 17 moves across four states and three countries, two kids and a heck of a lot of use.

What became clear instantly is that brides remember such things as gifts a lot better than grooms do. Barb could recount in great detail any number of presents, as well as who gave them to us, and I remembered exactly one thing: A decanter with a dancing couple in the bottom that my best friend and fraternity brother had given us. And that we still have, too, although it was overwound at some point so the couple no longer dance and the music no longer plays, but they’re still there together.

Barb looked under a kitchen counter, way in the back, and brought forth a few pieces of old silver, and then found elsewhere a big china bowl and a frying pan—not much to show from so many gifts—and lord knows how that last item escaped being burned up by me over the years.

“Maybe we should write the people who gave us those things another thank-you note,” I suggested. “Wouldn’t they be amazed to know we still have them?”

Forty-eight years after that 1961 wedding, Barb cringed. “There’s one thank-you note I never did write,” she remembered, “and I still feel bad about it.” It turned out that shortly before our marriage, a package had arrived at her parents’ home in Charlottesville—that time, too, from Miller & Rhoads in Richmond.  A card inside let her know it was a gift from two sisters who had been good friends of hers at Longwood.

Everything else in the box was smithereens.

Clearly the gift had been crystal of some sort, but it was so finely broken that there wasn’t a handle or a neck or top or bottom that could be recognized at all. “It might have been a vase,” she said the other day, “or a pitcher or two wine glasses—there was just nothing identifiable.”

Being 19 years old and not very worldly, Barb had no idea how to respond to that. She felt bad about saying, “I got your present, but it was in shards. Send me another one.”  And she couldn’t write and say, “Thanks for the …” because she had no idea what she was thanking them for. It didn’t occur to her to contact Miller & Rhoads. So she did nothing and has always regretted it—and really never had any further contact with her old friends.

So Beverly and Diane, if you’re out there somewhere, know that your good thoughts and your gift, smithereens or not, were appreciated.

All these wedding stories led to our getting out our wedding album, which we hadn’t looked at in years, and that was actually a little emotional. All four of our parents are gone, but there they were, on our happiest of days, beaming at us. Barb teared up at the sight of her mother straightening her veil. One of the bridesmaids is gone, too—but Barb is still in close touch with every one of the others. My groomsmen were good choices, too.

Most of all, we were happy to know that this very young boy and girl have found their way through almost a half-century to a place where they are together and still in love.

I do believe the marriage is going to outlast even the towel.

 I’ve been writing a column here and there in various publications around the city for about 25 years now, including 18 years in the Times-Dispatch and the old Richmond News Leader.  When I met somebody new and they asked me what I wrote about, I was always a little stumped.

I generally wrote about whatever was on my mind each week at the point I sat down to write. When the kids were small, it was often about the funny things they were doing; once they were teenagers, I knew better than to write about them. Besides, teenagers aren’t often all that funny.

I’ve often said that I’d never have trouble finding a story or something to write about as long as I’m married to Barb, to whom and with whom every day is an adventure. Over the years I’ve written about her chasing a burglar down the alley in her bare feet, about her following the cat around one morning to see where the heck he was going every day, about her getting engrossed in a conversation during a funeral procession and starting to pass all the other cars, nearly overtaking the hearse. I write about how she takes me away each year to a surprise location each Valentine’s Day (stay tuned—it’s drawing nigh) and how she sets the Christmas tree out in the front yard in its stand each January and leaves it there, watering it until it dies (you can see it now on the front porch if you drive by).

There have been not just dozens but hundreds of Barb stories, and she’s not slowing down much in recent years either.

I have kept copies of most of my columns over the years, and they make a record of sorts of my life and my family’s life—maybe my kids will appreciate them some day.

But there is definitely a more immediate benefit to me from all these years of writing, and that comes from the readers who write to me or call and share their lives just as I have tried to share mine in print.

Three weeks ago I dilly-dallied and failed to get a column in by the deadline of this publication, with the result that my usual space was filled with something else, to my chagrin.  My only excuse is that I have several jobs, give a lot of speeches, do a lot of writing, and am pretty bad sometimes about getting things done on time. (This one is actually a few hours late, too.) Anyway, I wasn’t here three weeks ago—but something nice happened as a result.

I had three phone calls at home, inquiring as to where my column was, if I had stopped writing it, whether I might be sick, and the like. Two of the callers left no name, but one, whom I’ll call Mrs. C., left a nice long message with her name and the information that she lived in Powhatan. Barb tracked her down in the phone book, called her back, and the two had a long conversation one evening about family matters.

Mrs. C. told Barb about her five children, whose names all start with J, and their interesting jobs all over the country. Barb told Mrs. C. a little about our lives, and by the time she passed the phone to me to say hello, we were all old friends.

That’s the great thing about writing a column. I can’t tell you how many friends we’ve made over the years, people we’ve never met but from whom we hear every now and then, like clockwork.  I’m thinking about these folks today partially because of the three nice phone calls from Powhatan but also because of the Christmas cards we get every year, often from people we’ve never met, never seen, but whom we consider friends because we came together through a column at some point. They come from all over Richmond, but at least one other we heard from this year is a Powhatan resident—Georgia Hening.

Mrs. Hening goes back to the early 90s with us after our paths crossed at a Cancer Support Group at Johnston-Willis Hospital, back to a time before her husband died and other worries entered her life. Her card this Christmas read, “Since that time, I’ve followed your … stories from the paper and now the Community Weekly… thanks for bringing me smiles.”

My pleasure, Mrs. Hening, and thank you for bringing me a smile in return.

In his old age my dad used to like to go out to the airport in Charlottesville and watch the planes come in. Like so many who were good-sized fellows the first time they ever saw an airplane, he had a lifelong fascination and respect for air travel. He was 16 when the Wright Brothers flew at Kitty Hawk, and a few years older, of course, before the first plane ever flew over his own head. So in his retirement years, he whiled away some hours watching takeoffs and landings.

            I never go to an airport without thinking of him.

            Our daughter Sarah’s holiday visit to London necessitated trips to both Reagan and Dulles airports in Washington recently, and I thought how much Dad would have enjoyed those scenes. The electronic board in International Arrivals at Dulles spoke of worldwide adventure, heralding arrivals from Tokyo, Rome and Riyadh, Singapore and Munich. There were a few places I’d never even heard of, like Narita and Jeddah. Wherever they are, Dad would probably have enjoyed a visit.

            There is a marked difference in the areas set aside for domestic arrivals and international arrivals at Dulles. One can sit a bit mesmerized in the latter, watching the people: the blackest hair, the bluest eye, the women dressed to the nines, looking as though they had just stepped off a flight from Paris—and perhaps they had. Unlike the old days when everyone dressed up to fly, there is a great variety of dress now—from a woman completely swathed in black, head to toe, only her eyes revealed, to the tiniest boy in the tiniest suit and tie I’ve ever seen.

            I played a game with myself, trying to guess people’s nationalities, but I found I wasn’t very good at it. The people who looked most American to me often ended up speaking in unknown languages. Only their babies gave them away. Somehow I was good at spotting “domestic” babies; the international ones all looked exotic to me. Of course, all mothers seem to love their babies the same way—eye-to-eye, cuddles and pats, soft whispers.

            There were a number of drivers, I suppose they were, holding up signs for new arrivals as the travelers came out of customs:  “Olive and Mirate,”  “Mr. Swanson,” and one that just said “Faux.”  As the doors opened and the newcomers swept out into the arrivals area, most of them were looking around expectantly, hoping for family and friends, perhaps. On the other side of the low restraining wall, fathers held their babies high so arriving family members could see, and a man held a dozen roses against his chest, eyes fixed on the customs door each time it swung open.

            I like sitting in airports, but I don’t like the process of getting to either of the ones in D.C.  No matter how many times I go, I’m always a little unsure of each turn, and the signage is never quite clear enough to suit me.  My daughter said, “Which one did you prefer driving to?”

            And the answer was, “Neither one, if I can help it.”

            Like the Mosque, the Nickel Bridge and Cape Canaveral, Reagan will always be National Airport to me—and to my surprise, it continues to be National on about half of the signs going into Washington. I guess if pinned down, I’d say I prefer to drive to National, but I prefer to come home from Dulles.  The route back to 95 from National has too many signs saying “I-95” in too many different directions.

            Whatever else you’ve done in your life, I bet you remember the first time you ever flew. I was a grown man, married, working on my Ph.D. the first time I went up. A family member, a WWII pilot, owned a Swift, and we flew out of the Athens, Ga., airport one clear winter day.  He was such a good pilot and such a smooth talker that he had me convinced there was no way imaginable that that plane could fall from the sky, so I flew with absolute confidence and have done so many times since.

            I do find I enjoy flying less as I age.  The whole security thing is stressful—and for some reason good old Barb always seems to get singled out of the line of boarding passengers for special attention. She’s been wand-ed more times than Cinderella.

            I miss the dressing up, the legroom, and the peanuts and hot towels I used to get on Piedmont.  I understand Dad’s nostalgia for the early days of flight.  Truth is, his generation saw the early years of both cars and planes—and I guess there have been no comparable inventions in the field of transportation for us boomers.

            When I retire, I somehow can’t imagine going downtown and watching the Segway Personal Transporters zoom along the canal walk.

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.

I’ve decided to start off the New Year by being a curmudgeon because I’m still smarting from a realization that came to me while Christmas shopping last month: I am totally out of step with the rest of the world. My newfound observation comes with its own set of questions and challenges.

            Have you tried to buy a pair of pajamas lately? They don’t much come in pairs anymore. You can buy as many bottoms as you want, but don’t expect the bottoms to come in a package with tops.  Are there great numbers of men out there who no longer were pajama tops? Well, let me tell those fellows something—they might as well get back in the habit of two-piece jammies because their chests are not going to look so great either when they get a few more years on ‘em. Case in point: Have you seen Arnold Schwarzenegger without a shirt recently?

            Have you noticed how clerks in the bookstore look at you funny if you ask for something by Damon Runyon?  First they ask you to spell it, and then they spell it behind you—and clearly those guys and dolls have never heard of Damon Runyon in all their young lives. How could Damon Runyon suddenly be an unknown? (It’s the same reaction you get in a record shop when you request “White Christmas” by Clyde McPhatter. “The Mac Platters?” I was asked. And did you know there’s no such thing as a record shop anymore?)

            This isn’t a new concern, but what is one’s reaction supposed to be to all the young male shoppers who have to hold their pants up with one hand while carrying their packages with the other?  Barb tends to laugh at them (always behind their backs, of course), and I tend to frown at them because—let’s face it—there’s something not really bright in walking around with your pants falling down.  I have to think they’re practicing this magic feat of suspending their pants in midair just to get a reaction, and I’m not sure what my reaction is supposed to be.  I wish someone would let me know, but I can tell you now that admiration is not a possibility.

            Did you know Ben Franklin is not a dime store anymore? Did you know you can get very, very cold shopping at Short Pump?  Did you know that you might as well park at City Stadium if you plan to shop in Carytown at Christmastime?

            Have you observed that Americans don’t queue up very well? We haven’t quite caught the knack of the queue yet, except at the post office where people from one big line go in turn upon hearing the call, “Next in line, please.”  That’s the way lines are supposed to work, but everywhere but the post office, people will insist of forming a line in front of each cash register, where one person with 12 items can force a dozen people to miss lunch. And dinner.

            What do the think the odds are that a bag of groceries left in a car overnight on an evening when the temperature sinks into the teens will be the bag that contains the milk, the fresh fruit, and at least one item in a glass jar?

            Why is it that, as you head east on Broad, all the gas stations you pass up on the west end of Broad (hoping for better) turn out to have had far cheaper gas prices than the ones closer to town—unless you’re heading west on Broad, in which case the ones you pass up near town are cheaper than the ones farther west?

            There’s nothing wrong with the four-way stop on Alverser Drive that an on-site, 24/7 traffic cop couldn’t fix. Actually a traffic light might be helpful, too.

And since when should a Christmas tree cost $85?

            What is the new practice at certain stores that you can’t get your money back when you exchange an item, even if you bought it yourself only a couple of days earlier, have a receipt, and just want your charge card credited? I bought something for my daughter at a store at Regency, and apparently even though she doesn’t live in town, she’ll have to make a special trip to find something in that store that she wants (even though she’s already found something at another store she wants) because I can’t get a refund.

            Why is it that, if you’re going to get a cold in December, it arrives in force two days before Christmas?

            Finally, why does someone like me, who has so little to complain about, start off the New Year by complaining?  Point well taken.  After this one little outburst, I’m going back to remembering what a great Christmas I actually had, and I’ll happily return this curmudgeon role to Andy Rooney.