Unbirdened

So, a Spiritualist, a serialist and a literalist walk into a bar.

Except, they didn’t. And two of those three descriptions are inexact at best—fashioned in service to the opening line of what promises to be a joke but actually was our Thanksgiving.

The trio in question didn’t walk into a bar, but, rather, into our house. (Although wine was served, I should note.) The Spiritualist is Kathy, who in addition to being our longtime friend, computer fixer and cat-sitter is a member of the Center for Spiritual Enlightenment in Falls Church, Virginia, which is affiliated with the National Spiritualist Association of Churches. The serialist is Joanne, a veterinary technician and Florence Nightingale to animals who, though slightly north of 40, is in pop-cultural terms one of the older teenagers around—a self-described geek about the Harry Potter, Twilight, Hunger Games and Lord of the Rings franchises who proclaims, to her husband’s helpless acceptance, that she would so “do” Joss Whedon, creator of the long-running television series Buffy, the Vampire Slayer, should events ever conspire to facilitate such intimacy. The literalist is Trudy, an accountant by day who’s all about numbers on the job but off the clock is all about friendship and compassion and a matchless brand of charm that is awkwardly and uniquely her own.

Kathy, Joanne and Trudy were our guests Thursday for a turkey-less Thanksgiving dinner (Trudy, Lynn and Joanne being vegans, and Kathy and I vegetarians). It was pretty untraditional in menu, guest list and conversation, but it met the holiday’s highest ideals in terms of gratitude, warmth and community.

The afternoon kicked off with Kathy and I conversing in the sunroom while the others convened in the kitchen. Kathy’s quest for meaning and belonging in the world brought her home a few years ago to a local church community led by an internationally known and recognized Spiritualist medium. Communication with the corporeal dead is commonplace within Kathy’s congregation, and the amazing, spot-on details of those interactions cannot easily be explained away. On Thanksgiving, Kathy shared with me Spirtualists’ belief not only in our eternal existence, but in constant learning and growth beyond this life. She said Spiritualists believe that each of us retains his or her individual identity after passing over, and that such earthly pleasures as self-improvement, eating and sex continue in some form. (This leads me to question whether our deeming a sinfully delicious dessert or particularly memorable orgasm “other-worldly” isn’t, in fact, somewhat premature.)

During dinner, but fortunately after most of the eating was done, a spirited roundtable conversation centered on the subject of anal licking and cleaning among cats and dogs. Trudy started it off by noting (appropriate of what, I can’t recall; Trudy tends not always to require segues) that she lately has been wiping the ass that her hefty foster cat is prevented by girth from reaching. Joanne—whose small Loudon County home makes Noah’s Ark look like a near-empty rowboat by dint of its accumulation of permanent and foster dogs, cats, chinchillas, rabbits, lizards, etc—chipped in by noting that her own substantial kitty, Oreo, has a personal dispenser of Redi Wipes in the form of Annie the Chihuahua’s tongue. (Which you therefore, Joanne further noted, don’t really want licking your face despite the diminutive dog’s abundant adorableness.) Kathy closed that particular discussion by toasting a collective comfort level with the gross that made our focus on the feline anus not only acceptable but enjoyable. (Damn, though, if Lynn and I didn’t fail to mention our constant need, years ago, to yank hardened crumbs of shit off the ass of our dim but heartrendingly sweet Manx, Franki. Next Thanksgiving, maybe.)

Then, after dinner, it was Kathy’s turn to marvel, on our PC, at the aforementioned Joss Whedon’s astoundingly articulate and well-reasoned, not to mention hilarious, YouTube video, posted days before the presidential election and delivered deadpan, in favor of a Mitt Romney presidency. His argument? That the resulting poverty, chaos and class warfare would hasten the purifying zombie apocalypse that each of us in his or her macabre heart of hearts (if not in our soon-to-be-eaten brains) really would like to see. Weeks ago, Joanne had shared this video with me, and I in turn had shared it with Lynn and several other ideological fellow travelers. Kathy, who given further Spiritualist training may one day be able to foresee and announce to the rest of us the approach of an actual zombie apocalypse, nevertheless enjoyed Whedon’s frighteningly plausible outline for the recent unrealized one.

During our multi-hour gathering, there were no combustible family dynamics for us to gingerly negotiate, no roiling political discussions to upset our digestive tracts, no rancorous social-policy debates, no after-dinner self-segregation into football and non-football camps. (Although I’ll concede that I did surreptitiously check the scores a couple of times.) Granted, there was one friendly debate about whether or not it’s stupid to spend $225 a ticket to see the ancient band The Who perform the 1973 rock opera Quadrophenia at the Verizon Center, with Lynn being squarely in the “yes” camp and Joanne and I, who recently had attended that totally awesome show, begging vociferously to differ. But given that any Thanksgiving table potentially harbors a cornucopia of acrimony, that lone jibe scarcely amounted to a gourd in the centerpiece. 

Not that there’s anything wrong with spending the Thanksgiving holiday with one’s for-real blood/legal relatives. And not that each of us at the table on Thursday doesn’t love his or her own mother and father and other relations, living and dead. They certainly were in our thoughts. (And at times in our fond conversation, as when Lynn and I told Trudy and Kathy how Joanne’s father once spent a good 15 or 20 minutes relating to us “cute”— read “horribly embarrassing”—stories of Joanne’s youth when she wasn’t there to shush him. Joanne’s face was roughly the hue of the table’s cranberry sauce as we recounted that conversation.) At any rate, we soon will again be in our respective families’ company, with the approach of Christmas.

But what it comes down to is that there are many different types of families. Lynn and I derived great joy from hosting three key members of our family of cherished friends this Thanksgiving. We were sorry only that Joanne’s husband Eric, a teacher, artist and author, couldn’t be with us because he literally was taking care of business at a workshop in Canada—a nation that peevishly refuses to align its own Thanksgiving Day with our own. Still, we felt deeply enriched by a communal experience that was devoid of discomfort, abundant with laughter, and unblemished by the dismembered presence of a bird slain for our supper.

And that, readers, is no joke.

Good Night for POTUS, Pot, Santa

For the past few days I’ve been pondering what to write about Election Day 2012. Not that the blogosphere exactly has been clamoring for my take. (Or, frankly, knows I exist.) But presidential elections are big deals, and there were many other interesting races and issues on local and state ballots this past Tuesday, as well, about which I have thoughts.

Initially, I had pegged my approach to this post to today's debut in selected theaters of Steven Spielberg’s film Lincoln. I envisioned brilliantly and insightfully writing about all that I’d found good and bad, hopeful and troubling, new and old in Tuesday’s results, and then comparing and contrasting all that with What Abe Would’ve Done—Could’ve Done, Might Do—were we to have a leader of his vision, savvy and integrity on our national stage today.

That approach seemed workable until I woke up his morning and realized it was trite, lame and obvious. (Lame and obvious may be redundant.) Then, too, my idea of ending this post by informing you, the reader, that I was temporarily tabling my cynicism and responding to the better angels of my nature by going out to catch Abe at the local bijou was thwarted by the logistic fact that the film currently is playing at only a single local theater that’s a bitch for parking. (“Fourscore and seven minutes ago I began circling the lot in forlorn hope of a finding a spot.” Ha ha ha.)

So, I’ll spare you the overarching theme, or any strained attempt to weave a sociopolitical, historical tapestry, and simply run through my list.

The White House. Obviously I’m happy the president was reelected, and that he won both the Electoral College and the popular vote, with the claim to legitimacy that this "bifecta" entails. I frankly thought that was the way it would go, but one never knows. Much has been said and written in the past few days about America’s changing demographics, and how the Republicans no longer can win elections by nailing the Grandpa Simpson and Jerry Falwell votes, given the facts that tomorrow’s seniors are today’s moderate baby boomers, that Jerry Falwell is dead and America’s religiosity is turning fuzzier, and that those damn minorities not only aren’t going away, but are growing in number—and voting, to boot.

While I do find those trends encouraging from a presidential-election standpoint, I also have no doubt that the GOP eventually will come up with some brilliant strategy, resplendent in spin and obfuscation, to win voters back without radically changing the substance of their policies. Maybe they’ll nominate Florida Senator Marco Rubio in 2016 and he’ll somehow make more-nuanced immigrant-bashing cool, since he’s Latino himself. Or, this whole changing-demographics thing will take a breather for one election cycle, as voters drool over themselves and their Big Macs in rapture over the fact that Republican nominee Chris Christie, in his button-popping glory, literally Looks Like America.

(One quick aside, because I love this joke and shamelessly urge you to applaud me for it. It had been my contention, in the calamitous aftermath of Superstorm Sandy, that the floodwaters that devastated vast swaths of New York City, New Jersey and Long Island might have been stopped, had only the Garden State’s massive governor been positioned in precisely the right places at the right times. This may be one case in which my steadfast refusal to engage Twitter denied me satisfaction. As it was, I was reduced to sharing my observation in a few e-mails and then being disappointed that the recipients did not respond by nominating me for the Mark Twain Prize and Kennedy Center honors.)

Anyway. What I took from the presidential election was that yes, the result was a reflection of changing demographics—with minority populations rising and younger voters looking at things differently than do their elders—but also that, while the US Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision has badly tilted the playing field, it hasn’t quite succeeded in turning it upside-down. I’m always glad when Republicans don’t win presidential elections, as much because they can't install foxes in all the regulatory henhouses as because of the higher-profile damage they can do. But that’s not to say that I’m a huge Obama fan. I’m hoping, now that he’s a four-year lame duck, that he’ll turn bolder, less conciliatory and more candid as he seeks both to address the huge issues now being discussed—the “fiscal cliff” being tops among them—and the many dormant issues that demand action, such as global warming and gun control.

Congress. I’m thrilled that the Democrats retained the Senate, and I’m particularly grateful, as are all Democrats, to Tea Party voters for nominating as Republican nominees such knuckle-draggers as Todd Akin in Missouri and Richard Mourdock in Indiana. Still, it’s sobering to note that both of those throwbacks to the Paleolithic Age weren’t thrown back at the polls by so thumpingly much, still having secured 39 and 44% of the vote, respectively.

It’s cool, too, that the chamber now has its first openly lesbian senator-elect in Wisconsin’s Tammy Baldwin. (It’s not too early, however, to anticipate conservative bloggers’ snickering speculation as to whether this will embolden Hillary Clinton to finally come out, or whether she’ll maintain her business-arrangement marriage to Bill as she prepares to step down from the State Department and weigh a presidential bid in 2016.)

The House remained solidly in Republican hands, maintaining divided government and ensuring continued gridlock on most issues. Gridlock that, by the way, could be greatly lessened if states would put an end to politically drawn redistricting that results in tortuously gerrymandered safe havens for extremists on both sides of the aisle. But alas, the prospects for that are dim. And even removing the issue from the politicians’ purview isn’t necessarily the pathway to reform. Which brings me to …

Maryland. In my state, the lone disappointing election result Tuesday was the decisive defeat of a ballot question that would have forced state leaders to redraw a convoluted 6th congressional district map—described by one district court judge as a “Rorschach-like eyesore”—that had been crafted by the ruling state Democratic Party specifically to defeat longtime Republican Congressman Roscoe Bartlett (and which on Election Day succeeded in doing so). While I believe that most voters, regardless of political party, favor fairness and nonpartisanship in the drawing of district lines, the matter was dwarfed on the Maryland ballot by such glitzy, ad-fueled issues as gay marriage, casino gambling and the Dream Act. Also, Marylanders were of a collective mindset Tuesday to vote “for”—for legalization of same-sex marriage, for expanded casino gambling, for facilitating in-state college tuition to children of noncitizens. In the case of that abhorrent 6th District map, a vote “for” affirmed the status quo—the contorted geographic contours already in place.

The same-sex marriage vote, however, was historic. Maryland, Maine and Washington on Tuesday became the first states to affirm gay marriage by statewide referendum, ending a string of some 30 defeats nationwide. This surely was due in part to changing societal attitudes that will ensure future statewide victories, but Maryland long has been a progressive state. I’m particularly proud of the fact that populous Montgomery County, where Lynn and I live, powered the narrow statewide victory on this issue, with 65% of its voters casting ballots in favor.

The vote on the Dream Act was similarly groundbreaking and affirming, if more widely anticipated. Expanding casino gambling in the state, meanwhile, was hardly a moral victory, but it does promise to bring jobs to Prince George’s County and to pump money into state coffers that otherwise simply would be spent in neighboring states.

The nation. Last Sunday, the Washington Post published a special section that took a state-by-state look at the presidential race, Senate and House elections, and ballot issues. Two of the more offbeat items that caught my attention at that time were the fact that Democratic Senator Maria Cantwell was favored for reelection in Washington state over Michael Baumgartner, who’d earned the nickname “F-Baum” for encouraging a taunting blogger to go fuck himself, and that Republican Kerry Bentivolio, a reindeer farmer and Santa Claus impersonator, was seeking an open House seat in Michigan’s 11th District. My immediate thoughts on those races were that F-Baum might yet win by emphasizing (ideally without obscenity) the “can’t” in “Cantwell,” but that Michigan voters might be wary of a candidate who’d built his career playing God with “naughty” and “nice” declarations and threats of coal-filled stockings on Christmas morning.

In fact, however, Cantwell cruised to reelection, and it was Bentivolio rather than his Democratic challenger who was issuing hearty ho-ho-hos on Tuesday night. This despite the fact that the erstwhile Jolly Old Elf, a Tea Party favorite, had been condemned by his own brother as “mentally unbalanced” just five days before the vote, as I belatedly discovered upon Googling his name earlier today. Phillip Bentivolio had called his brother “conniving” and “dishonest,” and said that he’d undergone electroshock therapy as a child and was a glue-sniffer as a teenager. Also, there was this today, from Huffpost Detroit: “According to Politico, in old court documents Bentivolio was quoted as saying he had “a problem figuring out which one I really am, Santa Claus or Kerry Bentivolio.” (Of course, as the film Miracle on 34th Street documents, it’s not so easy to prove that a claimant isn’t, in fact, Kris Kringle.)

On a serious note, I was saddened but not surprised by the defeat of Proposition 34 in California, which would have repealed that state’s death penalty. I’m simply not in favor of governments executing their citizenry. I see it as being morally wrong, too subject to error, without deterrent value, and on balance, even more economically costly (totaling the legal costs) than imprisonment without parole. The 53-47 vote was, however, a vast change from the 70% favorable margin in 1978 that had placed the law on the California books in the first place.

Finally, there were the successful ballot initiatives Tuesday in Washington state and Colorado to legalize marijuana for recreational use. As victory had been forecast in both states, I wasn’t surprised. But, as I outlined in my August 6 post headlined “Rolling Stone Blows Smoke,” I’m neither enthusiastic about the prospect of state-sanctioned stoners, whatever the potential tax benefits, nor convinced that these votes ultimately will mean anything, given the federal ban on recreational marijuana use. It remains to be seen what the federal response will be. Sure, Barry Obama liked to toke during his Hawaiian youth, but he’s the Man now, and he’s gone from laidback hoopster to unapologetic launcher of unmanned death drones. “Don’t make me sic my jackbooted thugs on your dopily giggling asses!,” I can hear POTUS exclaiming, as law-and-order Republicans nod in grudging respect and, somewhere, Willie Nelson reassesses his relocation plans.

The Pain in Gain

For my job yesterday, I was talking on the phone to a physical therapist in Pittsburgh who, four times now, has completed the 34-mile Rachel Carson Trail Challenge, and once placed ninth out of 600 finishers. “Unlike in a footrace,” its Web site tells readers, "the ‘challenge’ is not to win, but to endure—to finish the hike in one day.”

There’s a clickable video on the event’s home page with the still image of participants engaged in various states of movement—running, walking, testing their footfalls—as they try to negotiate a downhill gulley in the middle of a forest. Above this scene appear the sentences, “This time [the event always is held on the Saturday closest to the summer solstice], the Challenge starts at North Park at sunrise, 5:50 am. The deadline for finishing is sunset, 8:54 pm, or 15 hours 4 minutes, whichever comes first.”

Below the video image, under the heading “Course Description,” are advisories that the trail is “primitive,” that it features “no special grading or surfacing materials,” that it isn’t always clearly marked, and that it includes “poison ivy, nettles, bugs, loose gravel, wet stream crossings and steep hills.” Participants are advised to “expect the unexpected and think the unthinkable.”

The PT with whom I spoke—a 45-year-old father of three who’s a university professor, researcher and clinician—conceded with an appreciative whistle that the course is indeed “brutal,” but added that he finds himself “chuckling” when the marathoners start fading at around mile 28. This guy also has completed the Mt Washington Auto Road Bicycle Climb in New Hampshire, described on its site as “the toughest hill climb in the world, at 7.6 miles in length, with an average grade of 12%, extended sections of 18% and the last 50 yards an amazing 22%.” (It’s probably worth noting, too, that Mt Washington is more than a mile high and, per Wikipedia, is “famous for dangerously erratic weather”—which has included a wind gust of 231 mph that was a world record for 76 years.

The previous day I’d been speaking on the phone with a different PT—a woman ’d interviewed for a story about 10 years ago. We’ve kept in occasional touch over the years, and I often kid her about her athletic mania. Kim and her husband compete in all manner of long-distance mountain biking and cross-country skiing events, and she’s placed first in her age group (she’s in her mid-40s now) in a multi-race cycling series in Wisconsin. We’ve only ever met in person once, but I’ve issued a standing invitation for Brian and her to cycle to DC from their house in Iowa for a visit—or to hop a freight train and leap from it at 100 mph at a local rail yard, or perhaps parachute onto our yard from a military cargo plane.

When we spoke the other day she regaled me with the story of how once, in the midst of a leisurely hike up a steep mountainside while on vacation in Colorado, Brian pointed to a guy hiking at a rapid clip in the far distance and suggested they try to pass him. Kim, of course, was up for that. A hiking competition ensued. Kim and Brian won. Kim, oxygen-deprived and as exhausted as she’d ever been in her life, celebrated by spiritedly vomiting off the mountaintop.

This story came after she’d noted that, in addition to being a PT, she now works two days a week for Brian’s construction company—roofing, tiling, pouring cement, hauling plywood, laying drywall. All in order to ensure, you see, that she gets enough exercise.

I conceived the story for which I interviewed Kim and the Pittsburgh guy. Its working title is “Extreme PTs and PTAs [Physical Therapist Assistants].” My idea is to highlight two things: 1) the ways in which these individuals’ background in physical therapy helps them train for demanding athletic pursuits and avoid or at least limit injury, and 2) what these PTs and PTAs have learned in competition that informs and enhances the patient care they provide. It’s slated to be published early next year in PT in Motion, the magazine my employer, the American Physical Therapy Association, distributes to its 80,000-plus membership.

Given that physical therapy is all about motion science, it’s not surprising that within the profession’s ranks there are many individuals who practically make it their second job to move around quite a lot. By the time I complete my interviewing process for the story I’ll have spoken with triathletes, Ironman competitors, and an array of other men and women who may see the pavement or trail about as much as they see their own families. But it isn’t just PTs and PTAs who do this, of course. Rather counterintuitively, as our nation gets more and more obese there’s also been an explosion in recent decades of interest and participation in endurance competitions, with mere 26.2-mile marathons being the least of it. (I myself lack the endurance at the moment to seek out supporting statistics, but I know they’re there. My God, every other burg hosts a marathon these days, and it sometimes seems there are so many Ironmen and Ironwomen walking among us that it’s a surprise Robert Downey Jr still sells movie tickets each time he dons the suit.)

Maybe it’s another 1% versus 99% thing, with the health-wealthy on top of the heap while the rest of us simply hope we can afford the health care we’ll need to battle sloth-and-gluttony-fueled type II diabetes. But that’s not quite right, because then there are people like me: those who get a reasonable amount of exercise and try to watch our weight, but to whom “thinking the unthinkable” is trying to picture ourselves tripping over exposed roots on some damn Pennsylvania trail for 15 hellish hours, or vertically cycling up a mountain into gale-force winds.

It’s my friend Kim’s philosophy that life is all about seeking out, facing down and overcoming challenges. I suspect a lot of extreme athletes feel the same way. In an e-mail this week she wrote that one of her favorite quotes is, “There’s no growth in the comfort zone and no comfort in the growth zone.” She added that she believes “growth only comes from a person’s ability and willingness to experience discomfort.”

I’ve been thinking about all this quite a bit over the past few days. My route to and from work takes me past the staging area for the Marine Corps Marathon, which will be held this Sunday. I entered that race only once, several years ago. Though I thought I’d trained sufficiently, and had successfully completed half-marathons in the past, I had a miserable experience that day. I developed a foot injury about halfway through the course that forced me to walk the last several miles, and I posted what I considered to be a shameful time. I had experienced discomfort, all right, not to mention embarrassment. But, growth? I grew all the way to never entering the event again.

For years afterward I continued to enter shorter races, however—10Ks, 8Ks, 5Ks. But I always dreaded them, and I never enjoyed or got any kind of adrenaline rush out of participating. The only part I liked was regaining my breath afterward and feeling I’d “earned” the T-shirt for which I’d paid $20 and most of my lung capacity. Again, the discomfort seemed less to me like a growth opportunity than like what Lynn called it: idiocy. I used to tell people that, for me, running in a race was like hitting oneself on the head with a hammer: It feels so good when you stop. For years, Lynn essentially had been reminding me that if this was a vaudeville joke, the punch line would be, “So, don’t do that.” A few years ago I stopped running in races entirely.

I do still run, of course, but at my own plodding pace, which I purposely don’t time. The only time I’m interested in is one hour. That’s how long I generally run. Sometimes a little longer, every once in a while 90 minutes or even two hours. There are various routes I like—in DC, my neighborhood, sometimes Arlington on the Virginia side of the river—and as I lope along I watch the world wake up, in that post-dawn period when people are out walking their dogs or heading to work or the gym, when traffic is light, when stray deer sometimes linger at the edge of the woods. It wouldn’t be quite accurate to say I enjoy those runs. It’s still work to keep at it for an hour, however slowly, and it certainly feels much better afterward, when I’m sipping coffee somewhere and reading the newspaper.

I mull this equation of discomfort with growth, which hardly is original to Kim. It echoes through a thousand books on entrepreneurism and maximizing one's potential, and it’s filled countless arenas where motivational speakers preach the gospel of shaking up your life and laying bare the power, will and fortitude you never knew you had. The thing is, though, that I’ve never really seen comfort as an enemy. If I did, I’d no doubt be more ambitious professionally, more knowledgeable about any number of things and less intimidated by 21^st century life. Perhaps I’d be a supervisor or a manager. Computer savvy. Fluent in French. I’d undoubtedly run faster—and force myself to compete.

For better or worse, however, I seem unable to push myself any farther than earning a decent living, staying sharp in the one language I know, and remaining an obesity outlier among our, um, growing population.

Last Saturday, Lynn, our friend Julie and I went to Arena Stage to see the musical production One Night with Janis Joplin. I referenced the play’s subject in an e-mail to Kim this week, writing, “It occurs to me that you are to athletic competition as Janis was to boozing and pouring out raw emotion. It’s just that you and your Bobby McGee leave it all out on the trail rather than on the stage or at the bottom of a bottle of Southern Comfort. (Interestingly, though, both hard-driving lifestyles seem to involve copious amounts of puking.)”

Maybe that’s what it boils down to for me. A little bit of discomfort—as I huff and puff my way down city streets or face occasional obstacles in my relatively low-pressure job—is one thing. Vomit-level discomfort, however, is quite something else. I’ve visited the Rock ‘n’Roll Hall of Fame, but I never will be enshrined in it. I jog, but I don’t race

 Am I growing? Not much, I suppose. But even jogging is not standing still.

Daughter of the Old Dominion

I’d like to share a letter I sent to a dear friend a few weeks ago. First, a little background.

The recipient, “Mildred,” was known to me for much of the past 35 years as “Mrs Pope.” She was the mother of my college classmate John Pope. When I first met her in 1977 or ’78 at John’s family home in Falls Church, Virginia, she’d already been widowed for several years. She had the kind of formal gentility and Southern grace that perfectly suited her loyalty to the Old Dominion, Virginia’s sepia-toned nickname. She was a collection of charming contradictions: forthright and self-effacing, elegant yet clumsy, both old-school and incredibly open. Our relationship had been friendly but hardly close until one sunny afternoon sometime in the mid-1990s.

John and his brother Jim, whose name you’ll see referenced in the letter, held an annual summer cookout at Jim’s house in Arlington. Just prior to that year’s event, John had had a health scare involving a severe headache and his sudden inability to remember the route to a familiar hospital. Just before Lynn and I were about to leave—we were standing in the leafy backyard while a by-then-recovered John stirred the chili indoors—Mrs Pope took my hand and, tearing up, asked me to pray for her Johnny.

Which I subsequently did over the course of the next many months, in my questionably effectual agnostic way. John nevertheless died of brain cancer in 1997. He was only 38. It was in the years after his death that Mrs Pope encouraged Lynn and me to call her Mildred, as we got together on occasion to reminisce about John and  discuss and admire the wonderful paintings and drawings he’d left behind. Eventually we moved on to develop a strong rapport and a friendship in its own right. For whatever reason, the three of us clicked, and the obvious pleasure Mildred took in our company helped lessen some of the guilt I felt over the fact that her dead son and I had never been the tight friends she seemed to imagine we’d been. I mean, I’d always liked John, but he and I had been essentially admiring acquaintances who’d shared an alma mater. I got to know him better posthumously through Mildred, and to some extent through Jim, than I’d ever known him in life.

But if my kinship with John never was quite real, Lynn’s and my friendship with Mildred deepened and grew. We visited each other’s homes and kept in touch over the years. When her health dictated that she sell her house and move into a senior-living apartment near her daughter’s home in Georgia, I continued to write her occasional letters and to sometimes phone her.

Nearly two years ago she called me up and, after characteristically thanking me effusively for a recent letter, then making some small talk, she got to the crux of the matter. She’d been diagnosed with leukemia and was going to be placed under hospice care. She was 94 at the time, and she told me she’d already been out shopping for caskets and was shocked by the prices. We laughed a lot during that call: about her practicality, the racket that is the death industry, the crazily brief time we all get on his Earth, who knows what else. I remember getting off the phone that day and, after wiping a grin off my face, thinking, "Mildred is terminally ill."

As it turned out, reports of her imminent death proved inaccurate. Mildred would outlive that six-months-and-out prognosis connoted by hospice care by more than a year. This made her family and friends very happy, of course, but made her much less so. Not because her quality of life was so greatly diminished until the very end, but because she felt she’d somehow overstayed her welcome and perhaps become a bit of a fraud—like the way Barbra Streisand keeps un-retiring until most people just wish she’d just be done with it already.

But then, finally, Jim called me at work one day late last month to tell me the end truly was near. So, I wrote Mildred one last letter, just before we left for a vacation in New England.

This past Wednesday, October 17, Jim called me at around 5 pm to report that his mother had passed away earlier that day. Her interment will come later this month. I’ll be a pallbearer, at her request. And a proud one, of course.

I’ll end this post with the letter and let it serve as my loving sendoff. But FYI, lest you might wonder as you read, I’ll first make these final notes:

I specifically mentioned Iceland because Mildred herself had toured that beautiful and strange country with her daughter in fairly recent years, after Lynn and I had raved about it and shared our pictures. I hope the reference conjured fond memories of a trip she told us she’d loved.

Clive and Karen Scorer are lovely people with whom we had a wonderful reunion on Cape Cod. I mostly was kidding about Clive’s “British eccentricity” for comic effect. (Americans hardly have room to talk, our national “eccentricities” being passions for deadly firearms and divisive religion.)

I did indeed succeed in adding Vermont and New Hampshire to my running-states list—not that you’d know it from the appalling lack of national media and social networking coverage. And the weather did cooperate, though I might have preferred a bit of seasonal chill in the air.

I always tried to limit my letters to Mildred to a single typed page, so as not to bore her to death (though she might have welcomed that as her self-reproach at her earthy lingering grew). In principle at least, I’m all for brevity. So I’ll close here and let the correspondence finish this out.

September 28, 2012

Dear Mildred,

Jim called me yesterday and told me he’d been with you on your birthday, and that he’d read to you the card Lynn and I had sent you. While I was happy to know you’d received that small token of our love, I was saddened by Jim’s use of the words “read to” and asked him if that meant you no longer can read things yourself. He confirmed that your abilities to read and write have largely been taken from you at this point. I remarked that this must be very difficult for you, given your love of reading and your skill at correspondence. But please know the Lynn and I always will cherish the letters we have received from you.

I’m writing this on a Friday. Both Lynn and have taken the day off and have been busy making preparations for our upcoming vacation trip to New England. We’re leaving Sunday for Lynn’s mother’s house in East Greenwich, Rhode Island, and during the course of the week we’ll spend nights in Falmouth, Massachusetts (on Cape Cod), Brattleboro, Vermont, and Portsmouth, New Hampshire, before returning to my mother-in-law’s house and driving home from there. The main reason we’re traveling north at this particular time is to meet up with a British couple who are roughly our age, Clive and Karen Scorer, who we met during our tour of Iceland in 1999. We’ve kept in touch over the years, but we last saw them in the flesh in 2000, when they came to Washington on vacation and we had occasion to make them dinner (well, Lynn made them dinner—but I did the dishes) and play tour guide on trips to the White House and the top of the Washington monument. They will be flying to Boston this weekend to begin an organized bus tour of Massachusetts and New Hampshire that will focus on history, culture and, of course, that star of fall tourism in New England, the colorful foliage (which we hope for their sakes will oblige with a proper rainbow). Their lone unscheduled day is Wednesday on Cape Cod, so the four of us will spend the day together. We plan to drive them across the Cape to arty Provincetown, and also to indulge Clive’s request to visit a local kaleidoscope store, as he collects same.

Speaking of Clive’s hobby, which strikes me as being a very British sort of eccentricity, I’ve suggested in the past that my friend really lays on the British thing a bit thick, given that he’s already named “Clive” and lives in a town named “Biggleswade” He has not, frankly, rebutted the charge. In fact, I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if he and his wife were to have us scouring retail districts for tea cozies, monocles and suchlike before the day is through.

Although from everything we’ve read both Brattleboro and Portsmouth are lovely towns, the main reasons we’re visiting them is to satisfy my own eccentric pursuit and because they were among the few places we could secure lodgings at fairly reasonable prices during Leaf Season in New England. The eccentric pursuit to which I’m referring is my determination ultimately to run in all 50 states. My own idiosyncratic definition of what constitutes a run is one uninterrupted hour. (I’m writing the word “run,” but at my speed think “jog.”) I’ve been stuck on 30 states for several years now, and Vermont and New Hampshire are the only remaining East Coast states that somehow have eluded me to date. So, Lynn has graciously agreed to abet my efforts by routing our trip accordingly. I just hope for decent weather, or at least rains that are short of monsoonal. Because I’m pretty much determined to make like the Post Service and let no conditions keep me from my appointed rounds—um, runs.

This will be the first real vacation (more than a long weekend) that we’ve taken in a very long time. We’re greatly looking forward to it. But first, I must get back to the aforementioned preparations! So, our very best to you. And, of course, as always, our love.

Eric