The Visit

In July a friend visited me from out west and we had a wonderful time traveling about for almost a week. After she met with a specialist in the District for some followup treatment, we played pickleball in my town and then we travelled to Maryland where we feasted on a dozen crabs in Annapolis and spent a magical three days on the Eastern Shore. We shopped for art and she bought a southwestern piece to have sent out to her apartment, we rode bicycles, enjoyed an elixir by the harbor and explored Tilghman Island.

 Next we jumped into my car and drove to Virginia where we visited a fabled postbellum hotel in Richmond. While my friend attended, in its grand lobby setting, a formal English tea which she had reserved at exorbitant cost, with some family members who naturally arrived late, I walked over to the Virginia War Museum down by the river to have a look at it and gaze at the water. When her desultory "family reunion" was concluded she called me back and we returned to Fairfax. There we hung out in our old haunts in Mosaic, saw a movie, did some shopping and partook in a happy hour at our favorite English Pub, where we each had a gin and tonic that turned to lavender from clear when we touched it. Afterwards we ate a dinner of fish cakes, shepherd's pie and had a sticky toffee pudding for dessert.

 The next day we attended a service at a nearby church of my faith which had a cool outdoor altar, cross and labyrinth that I had wanted to show her, and then she attended a service at her former church and afterwards she had lunch with her friends.

 When she picked me back up in my car late that afternoon, we drove down the Shenandoah Valley to North Carolina where I dropped her off at midnight in Charlotte and drove home overnight so that she could visit with a friend there for a couple of days and then fly home.

 I had taken a photograph we both admired of a fiery sunrise on the Eastern Shore during our travels; I didn’t suspect then, being obtuse or perhaps blindly unaware, that as a result of her recent move I had somehow become merely a naive suitor of hers rather than something far closer just a short time earlier, and the picture better represented a fast approaching sunset rather than a grand burgeoning dawn.

Virginia

And so my seven day car trip came to an end after my last stop at...Appomattox, the tiny hamlet where the Civil War came to an end and America was assured to be a world superpower and free.  Lee signed the surrender terms on the afternoon of April 9, 1865, men died on both sides on the morning of the ninth.  (The Confederate Cemetery at Appomattox; it has an unknown Union soldier buried there also with an American flag at his gravesite.)

The great war was over and the southern men made their way south to return home in the best way they could, the trek of the vanquished.  But they soon set about terrorizing the freedmen of their communities and instituted another century of slave-like Jim Crow dominance before federal power finally broke to pieces the ways of the past.  (The Civil War ended here, at the McLean Hose behind me.)

In wandering about the McLean house yard, in which the armistice was signed in its parlor, where the slave quarters were behind the main house, the obscene difference between the single room with loft shack out back and the mass'a's 3-storey house was stark.  A South American couple was examining the placards describing the conditions of lifetime enforced servitude and I could sense their disapprobation and I felt embarrassed to be an American.  (The big house and the shack in back.)

But slavery was abolished there at Appomattox, in effect, and the great country was bound up to heal from its divisions.  A century and a half later, after yet another great war and many, many little ones, are we better now?  (The slave quarters at the McLean House.)

Bedford

On the last day of my week-long car trip I was in Virginia and went to two reverential sites in south central Virginia (plus the UVA campus where two of my children were born and I earned a law degree in my late-thirties) that defined our country.  The first was Bedford, a small farming community of 2500 souls where unknown to its inhabitants, in a terrible half-hour on Omaha Beach in Normandy on June 6, 1944, D-Day, twenty of their sons were cut down in the first wave of the Allied assault on Hitler's Fortress Europa.  It would be a full month before the residents of this sleepy town would know, in three terrible days in July when the War Department released casualty lists from the battle and sent telegrams to the affected families that their sons, husbands, brothers, and fathers had been among the 80% carnage rate of the first wave on that beach during the assault, the true cost of our freedom.

That was a different generation, a breed hardened as children who often went hungry during the Great Depression where 25% of Americans were out of work, and payment for services and goods were done in a barter economy.  My grandfather in Colorado, a dentist, took chickens in payment for dental work in his small farming community there, Doc Fox, and for all I know and highly suspect, no payment at all, only a promise, very often fulfilled later, or not.

This is the America I love.  When I was a young boy, practically everyone's household had a veteran of WW2, tightlipped, many having seen the elephant, like my father did in the Pacific War, learning there in the crucible that having to depend unthinkingly and instantaneously upon boys from Brooklyn, Birmingham, Boise and Bath for their very survival, that American greatness depended upon cooperation with all other Americans who were there and learned the same lesson, leaving out the lunatic fringe who never went which unfortunately, we see influential in a commanding way as "victims" today.

Heroes, those twenty two or more men from Bedford, (more Bedford Boys died during the Bocage Campaign in Normandy).  The National D-Day Memorial is there in Bedford, symbolizing American greatness, belying the notion of American Carnage as espoused recently by people who never knew or forgot our greatness.

Passing Through Newport News

Day 2 of my trip to North Carolina earlier this month dawned overcast but my cousin and I went out for an early morning walk on Buckroe Beach, which her condominium unit overlooks.  We brought her three-legged pet Gabe, who lost a hind leg as a puppy in an encounter with a car but who gets around just fine as an adult dog.

The beach has a center square with a pavilion which serves as a sort of dog park where neighbors can meet.  There's a sign in the common area there which warns that there might be live ordnance buried on the beach, dumped there by mistake by the Army years ago after dredging operations offshore on a firing range a mile or so out to sea that was active during the war.
I left in mid-morning to drive to Vandemere, the tiny town on the North Carolina mainland coast where my college roommate lives in a hurricane-resistant house on stilts, driving through the tunnel to Newport News in Virginia to take rural backroads through rustic North Carolina.   Along the way I drove past gas stations advertising gas under $2 per gallon, the first time I have seen gas so low since the last administration.

Arriving at Jimmy's place mid-afternoon, we relaxed on his porch, overlooking his riverfront view past his former dock ruined by hurricane Florence, and then enjoyed a spaghetti and sausage dinner and called some college friends out west as the evening wore on.  We made plans to visit several North Carolina towns in the next few days as Jimmy is contemplating moving to a larger town someday and, who knows, I like picturesque seacoast North Carolina too, where federal retirees get beneficial tax benefits.

Hampton

Driving to Hampton, VA, to visit my cousin and her husband, my first car trip since my eye surgery three weeks earlier, went well enough.  I left in the daylight, after rush hour, and arrived early in the afternoon at Buckroe Beach where my cousin has a condominium.  Buckroe beach is a quiet, laidback small sandy beach on the Chesapeake where it flows into the Atlantic.

My cousin's unit has a view of the beach, only 60 feet away.  We walked a couple of miles along the beach when I arrived, my first substantial exercise, sort of, since my operation.

Then we went to the Hampton History Museum, which had a very informative exposition on the history of the Hampton Road area from Indian times to the present.  There's a lot that goes on there beyond recreation, as NASA has a presence there and there's a large military presence there in addition to major shipbuilding in the region.

That evening she and her husband treated me to dinner at a waterfront restaurant.  It had very nice views of the harbor.

A Trip

I finally took a little car trip beyond going to Columbus as I recover from my third and hopefully last eye surgery and I went south to visit relatives and friends.  The first day I drove to Hampton to see my cousin and her husband and enjoyed a day walking on the beach with her and a dinner of a fried seafood sampler plate that evening at a waterfront restaurant.

The next day I continued on to Vandemere, passing by gas at $1.69 a gallon along the rural highway, and enjoyed a dinner of spaghetti and sausage links prepared by Jim, my friend from college, in his house on stilts on the waterfront.  Jim, despite the incredible natural beauty of his rustic coastal location, might be moving to another town where there are more sailing opportunities, so we looked at houses near the water in a seaport town the next day and indulged in sightseeing, including sampling a tasty local brew at the town's brewery during happy hour.

 Then came a somber day where we attended the funeral of a World War Two veteran who survived Halsey's Typhoon during his service in the Pacific War, on a destroyer no less, which yawed during the tempestuous storm to within 2 degrees of its keel over point, learning in the big blow's aftermath that three other destroyers within the fleet capsized with great loss of life.  Then came another day of looking at houses and sightseeing in a seaport town.

I got up early and drove back to DC the next day, having had a fun and satisfying little car trip of about a thousand miles.  I saw people on this trip that I knew from my life that stretched back decades, to even when I was married, and before.

The District-Maryland-Virginia

Washington, besides being a swamp that needs to be "drained" (of money?), is a city that is filled with moment and beauty everywhere.  The view from the Tidal Basin.

The Mall is a national treasure.  The Washington Monument dominates the Mall.

The Smithsonian museum system--most admissions are free--is a draw for the region and is unparalleled anywhere else. The plane that ended World War II hangs from the ceiling at the Dulles Air and Space Museum.

I love living in the DMV.  Locals understand about tourists and don't let their idiosyncrasies get in the way of welcoming these treasured visitors to our wonderful city.

America's Coming Back

Against my better judgment and against all my wishes, I signed up to work in the gubernatorial race in Virginia for democratic candidate Dr. Ralph Northam, who is a fine man and a moderate in the recent trend of winning democrats in turning-blue Virginia.  I was gun-shy because I have worked intensively in two campaigns in my life, Hillary Clinton in 2016 and George McGovern in 1972, thinking they were transcendent times, and the result each time was a devastating defeat resulting in utter disaster (an effing moron winning and a president resigning in disgrace).  (5 a.m. somewhere in Virginia yesterday.)

But I volunteered to register voters and make phone calls last month, I sent out e-mails and undertook training to be an inside poll observer this month and yesterday I put in a 16-hour day working at Precinct 1 in Manassas Park.  When I got home from my exhausting day I was astounded and gratified to learn that already Northam had been declared winner and the democrats had won the other two top state spots of lieutenant governor and attorney general.  Maybe the country has awoken from its self-induced stupor.  (Taking training at the George Mason School of Law, trying to quell my gag-reflex.)

The day was interesting watching rough looking voters in not-quite-Northern-Virginia not-really-Tidewater-either file through all day.  One man angrily asked if we were "letting all them illegal aliens vote" and another angrily objected to the check-in election worker call out his name out loud, as is required, due to "privacy" concerns, and the local roving Republican operative showed up to angrily berate the local Board of Elections chief in strident terms over some supposed infraction of the rules or the law with much finger jabbing towards her face and hand slaps on the important papers he was holding, obvious anger and disdain infusing his body and soul, a tall twenty-something man towering over a diminutive fifty-something woman as he gesticulated for show, in his mind's eye a projection of power.  Dan Dodds, you're a querulous a**.  (Just like your hero, who is a train wreck.)

When the long day was done it was Northam 669, Trump surrogate Gillespie 295, with similar showings for the rest of the top of the ticket.  Make America great again.  (Campaigning a year ago, before the fall.)

  

A stunner

I'm back after an exhausting day yesterday working fifteen hours without a break as an inside poll observer, armed with a thick playbook and sworn to ferret out and report any voting irregularities, at a voting precincts in Newport News, 200 miles away.  Of fourteen precincts there, thirteen were manned by inside poll observers who were lawyers from Northern Virginia; ten of them, like mine, didn't have a single outside observer assigned to it by the democrats.

What, they don't have any lawyers down there in that hugely democratic district who are, or will admit to being, democrats and can act as their own locale's inside observers?  Our efforts might have helped to put the state into the blue column yesterday but it was a Pyrrhic victory for us thirteen who traveled down there at our own expense for our herculean day.  And you know how the day turned out, a stunning nationwide debacle.

Once I arrived at the polling place at 5:15 am to observe its set-up, I couldn't leave until the precinct announced its final tallies at around 8 pm, which were 635 votes for Clinton, 10 for Trump, 7 for Stein and 6 for the stoner Johnson.  I was working in the poorest part of town.

After giving us a training session, an admonishment to study our thick playbook long and hard, and a wish for good luck, the Virginia Democrats dispatched us thirteen inside observers from Arlington to the Hampton Roads area like we were top gun mercenaries.  I learned from the outside observer who came to collect our final numbers that she and the three other local workers were all headed to a Victory for Hillary party at a ballroom in Hampton to await results, to which we were not invited that I know of.

Probably for the best.  I felt used as I drove away to return home today, my exhausting effort having gone for naught with nary a thank you nor a follow up closing email from any of my numerous monitors in Arlington save for a curt "thanks" immediately following my text reporting the precinct's tallies once they were assembled.

Anti-Democratic Measures under the color of law

I just voted in Virginia and for the first time in my 44 years of voting was required to present a photo id.  I am ashamed that my state has turned to this to try to suppress economically-depressed, elderly, minority and recent immigrant voters.

Virginia is a state that went to war trying to preserve human bondage.  In my lifetime Virginia necessitated the United States Supreme Court decision (unanimous) Loving v. Virginia to overturn another of its outrageous practices, its anti-miscegenation laws. 

Did the founding fathers carry photo ids?  I'm thinking not, and they certainly didn't put a national id requirement into the constitution.

Papers, please.  I'm not trying to cross a border into a foreign place where they don't like our way of life, I am here to exercise my fundamental right of voting in a democracy!