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.

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.

http://www.richmondparents.com/50_time_of_my_life.htm

http://www.boomerlifemagazine.com/

I hope these few words do not destroy the Manly Man, tough guy, not-to-be-messed-with image I have so carefully built up while writing for various publications in Richmond and surrounding areas over the past 25 years or so, but I am certainly secure enough in my manhood at my age to take a risk. I’ve decided I may as well just come out and admit it.
I enjoy ironing.
            I like the smell of spray starch in the morning.  I like making the creases and wrinkles turn into a smooth sleek continuum of fabric. I like seeing the shirt collar come under control just over the little buttons that will secure it for good.  I hope these few words do not destroy the Manly Man, tough guy, not-to-be-messed-with image I have so carefully built up while writing for various publications in Richmond and surrounding areas over the past 25 years or so, but I am certainly secure enough in my manhood at my age to take a risk. I’ve decided I may as well just come out and admit it.
I enjoy ironing.
            I like the smell of spray starch in the morning.  I like making the creases and wrinkles turn into a smooth sleek continuum of fabric. I like seeing the shirt collar come under control just over the little buttons that will secure it for good.  I like forcing trouser creases where there were none before, pressing down pocket flaps and tugging the back of a shirt until the path of the back pleats forms itself. I especially like smoothing out the fly of the shirt—that doubled-over portion that extends down the front, home to the buttonholes. (While it’s true that I did have to call Richmond’s favorite tailor, Alan Zimm, to find out the proper term to describe that part of the shirt, that fact does not for a moment mean that I actually am ill-informed about shirts. I mean, the fly? Who knew?)
My favorite thing to iron is a white shirt.  It’s like bringing order to a chaotic universe to iron a white shirt well, to see it hanging proudly, no creases yet at the elbow, no ring at the collar, no beltline crunch up.  Just perfect orderliness, promising a well-mannered, smoothly running day.
Ironing is not a wimpy thing, gentlemen.  To me, ironing is power, it’s forcing your will, it’s CONTROL, it’s, well, totally manly. (Now it might go a little over towards wimpy if you’re ironing sheets or underwear, and my advice to you there is, if you are, just keep quiet about that part of it.)
Perhaps I would not be so bold as to reveal my fondness for ironing here had I not come across an interesting and unusual Web site the other day. I discovered www.extremeironing.com, proving once again that the Internet is a vast storehouse of often-useless riches. This particular lode features people ironing as cars speed around them on a racetrack, ironing underwater, ironing in the Antarctic (imagine how good it would feel to put on a freshly ironed, still-warm garment there!), ironing from the bottom of a Welsh bog, and ironing while bicycling.
The extreme-ironing Web site claims to combine “outdoor activity with the satisfaction of a well-pressed shirt.” Now that’s for me. We guys who iron and iron well (my brother Terry is another one, and it gives me great pleasure to out him here as a fellow ironer) well understand the dangers of ironing. Which of us has never applied iron to wrist as we deftly maneuvered our Proctor-Silex through its paces? Who has never fallen victim to hot steam or overheated water? Who among us has not threatened his immortal soul with the fires of hell through an intemperate choice of words as the iron spits and spurts black water onto an almost-finished, perfectly ironed shirt?
Clearly, ironing can be dangerous and “extreme” in and of itself, and we stalwart fellows who undertake the pursuit should be proud. Maybe we have wives who don’t care for ironing, as Terry and I both do. Maybe we think we can do a better job than the cleaners, where the right amount of starch is often a problem. Maybe we like to keep busy while we’re watching TV—and no, I didn’t mean “Oprah”—what are you, a wise guy?  I actually meant wrestling or football—yeah, that’s what I meant.
Sometimes I get complimented on a beautifully ironed shirt.  People will say, “Wow! Your wife is really a good ironer.”  And, ever proud of my skills and talents “above the board” and always willing to promote ironing as the most masculine of pursuits, I will invariably reply, “Yes, she is.”
And now that I know the activity of extreme ironing exists, I certainly plan to become part of that unique adventure. For my first effort, I believe I shall bring the ironing board up from the unappealing recesses of the basement, set it up on the highly polished hardwood floor of the living room where there’s a better TV, and—spray starching with reckless abandon—attempt to iron one of Barb’s silk blouses. 
Now that’s the kind of thinking that puts the “extreme” in extreme ironing.

Did you shave just half of your face?” Barb asked me on the morning after our first night of sleeping in a tent near Wilkesboro some weeks back.

            “Yes, that’s as much as I got done before the battery died on my razor,” I grumbled.

            That exchange came after I had already grumbled about not being able to sleep on a poorly inflated air mattress, about being so cold that my chattering teeth woke me up three times and about the noise of the waterfall that cascaded about 75 yards from our tent.

            To make matters worse, Barb awoke from her first-ever camping experience marveling about how well she had slept, how cozy it was in her sleeping bag, and how beautiful the waterfall sounded. Is there anything more aggravating than someone who is cheerful in the morning when you yourself have arisen with the intention of being a grump?

            So started our three-day camping trip to Merlefest, the bluegrass music festival honoring the memory of guitarist Merle Watson, son of bluegrass great Doc Watson —and it was all uphill from there. The festival, now in its 21^st year, is held annually on the campus of Wilkes Community College in western North Carolina—surely one of the prettiest community college campuses anywhere.  One of the staff there told Barb that most of the buildings she was admiring “and just about everything else you see” came from festival proceeds.  As a clue to approximately how much money is taken in, there were 76,000 people in attendance this year, and tickets ranged up to $50 a day for the four-day event.

            Barb and I and the six real musicians with whom I play in a local band (other East of Afton members are George Brown, Phillip Gravely, Martin Gravely, Jon Marks, Scott Sayles and Brian Sullivan) drove to Wilkesboro for three of those days, enjoying such musicians as Sam Bush, The Waybacks, Marty Stuart, Tony Rice and Rhonda Vincent. Some of the performers we had seen when they performed at the National Folk Festival here in Richmond in recent years, like the Whitetop Mountain Band and Ralph Stanley and The Clinch Mountain Boys, and others had performed locally even more recently—Old Crow Medicine Show and Bearfoot, for instance.

Richmond has definitely been on the circuit for a lot of the country’s best bluegrass performers, but the assemblage at Merlefest was unparalleled. Over the four days, there were hundreds of opportunities to see musicians as varied as Ricky Skaggs and Levon Helm, George Hamilton IV and (originally of Jefferson Airplane fame) Jorma Kaukonen. 

What a weekend! I can’t wait for next year to go back and do it all again. The jam sessions were a highlight for me, when East of Afton gathered around our campfire in the evenings to play and sing, while other campers and their families came to sit a spell and sometimes sing along, or other musicians or singers joined in with us, or when we’d all go to the other side of the huge campsite area and join in with other bands and musicians.  It was all heady and pure and, for me, uplifting.

My band mates are all far younger than I, so I had great help putting up and taking down our tent, and fortunately one of them is a chef, so we had fantastic omelets for breakfast and delicious gumbo—and even more fortunately, another band member is a physician so I was able to eat well without worrying too much about small things like arteries.

As for Barb, I needn’t have worried about her first campout.  She loved every minute of it—though admittedly was less than thrilled with the campsite’s port-a-potty and the ice-cold showers. But she soon discovered that all the campus buildings were open to festivalgoers—with warm water yet.

            I’m glad to learn, at our age, that there are still new and untried experiences out there for us, experiences we can permanently add to the list of things we love to do. Barb lived all these years before ever sleeping in a tent, camping out near the sound of a waterfall, sitting around a campfire and singing at night—and these were all immediately things she loved and wants to do again. 

            As for me, I particularly liked an instant when my bride gave me what I took to be a beaming smile one night across the campfire.  I thought we were sharing a romantic moment until she told me later that I had looked so funny in the firelight with that one side of my face still unshaved.