The year in review

As 2019 draws to a close, an historic year which was ushered in with the Republican death-grip on our country being broken by the wave of freshman Democratic congresspeople coming to DC to restore representative government and finished with a rogue president being impeached, I reflect back on its start, remembering the trip I took in January to Hampton to visit my cousin and her husband.  I went for an early morning walk on Buckroe Beach with my cousin and her dog and we briefly and hesitantly talk politics, and got to understand each other's point of view a little better, if we listened.  I heard about the danger of the deep state and she heard about the peril of the criminal presidency.  We listened respectfully and responded moderately, and she said things that I still think about.  From there I went to North Carolina to visit my college freshman roommate at his house on stilts on the Inner Banks.  We attended the funeral of a World War II veteran, the father of someone special to him, and then traveled down the coast touring small towns where he might like to move to like Oriental and Southport.  As we drove around I suddenly saw someone whom I knew in another life, who I did not care to even wave to.  It was an interesting trip.

Two of my three long-estranged children have birthdays in February so as had been my won't since the youngest one turned 18, I went at noon on each of their birthdays, and also on President's Day, to a restaurant in Westover near where they grew up to have lunch, in the hope that one or more of them might come by so we might start living the first day of the rest of our lives together again.  No luck so far!

In March I travelled overseas for the first time ever and went to spend a few days in Oxford and London with two friends of mine.  They planned the trip and invited me to come along and I am eternally grateful to them, especially since one of them went to Oxford and so knew how to perambulate that ancient, venerable town.  But best of all, after England, we went to France for a few days, spending them in Bayeux, Normandy.  It was 75 years since the D-Day invasion at the nearby beaches and we took two whole days touring all five landing sites, two American beaches and three Commonwealth beaches.  At the end of March I stood on Omaha Beach, site of one of the most famous battles in not only American but also world history, ranking alongside Cannae, Hastings, Trafalgar, Yorktown, Gettysburg, Midway and Stalingrad in importance in changing the fortunes of history.  One hundred yards of beach led from the water's edge to the false protection of a sea wall at Omaha, and for six hours American boys huddled underneath its scant, inadequate protection as the issue of a successful Allied landing on the European continent was in doubt.  Hundreds died there while Nazis dug into hardened positions along the overlooking ridge line raked them with murderous fire.  But by the end of the day the Americans had persevered and had slogged inland several hundred yards, thus preserving the center of the entire five-beach seaborne lodgment and saved the invasion itself, which would have faltered and perhaps been been sliced in half and driven off shore if the center, Omaha Beach, had failed.  I felt a reverence at being there, the same feeling I had the next day as I viewed the thousands of gravestones at the American Cemetery overlooking the beach.

April saw us in Paris, after a stopover at Giverny.  We passed right by the Arc de Triomphe as we drove in and took 10 minutes to cross a bridge over the Seine (traffic in Paris is terrible!) with the Eiffel Tower just off our left side.  My friends flew back to the states the next day but I stayed over for two more days and loved my time in Paris, even though I don't know any French.  I discovered by accident that if I started a question or statement in my best French ("Ou est . . .") then switched into my high school Spanish the French listener would seem to appreciate my attempt at learning their language, be amused but soon grow impatient with my seemingly ignorant reversion to bad Spanish and sometimes answer me in English.  I toured or walked by Notre Dame (two weeks before it burned), Montmartre, the Basilica Sacre-Couer, the Church of St. Pierre, the Paris Opera, the Jardin du Luxembourg, the Musee d'orsay, and Versailles, which was my favorite.  The gardens were amazing, the palace was cool but best of was the Hall of Mirrors.  As a schoolboy I read about Louis Quatorze, the Sun God, with his Hall of Mirrors as emblematic of his power and prestige.  I was thrilled to walk through it a half-century later.