The Divine Spark

You’re in your mid 50’s, married for over 35 years to a good man. You have grown children and several beautiful grandchildren. Life is good. Then one day you’re shopping at Walmart when your cell phone rings. You glance at it and don’t recognize the caller. Probably one of those robo-calls trying to sell you an extended warranty on a car you no longer even own, but you answer it anyway. The man on the other end of the line identifies himself as a Virginia State Trooper. Instantly your mind fills with a thousand nightmares. Someone’s been in an accident or worse. You brace yourself for his next words, but nothing can prepare you for what you hear…that your husband has collapsed at work and that the State Trooper needs to speak to you in person, face to face, as soon as possible. Everything else is a blur. There, in the middle of Walmart surrounded by strangers, you collapse under the crushing weight of the news.

But, we go nowhere by accident. At this point, with everything crashing down, you are approached by two strangers, a couple who look to be in their early 40’s. The woman speaks, “Ma’am, what’s wrong dear? Are you alright?”

You don’t remember exactly what you said in response, but it was conveyed with terrible anguish, “My husband is dead!!”

Then the strangers take over. They take you to somewhere you can sit down. The woman puts her arms around you and holds on tight. Your son is notified and he is on the way to pick you up. The kind woman tells you, “I will stay right here with you until your son arrives, ok?” And she does. She and her husband stay there doing their best to comfort you.

The rest of the day proves to be the worst of your life. You soon start having chest pains of your own and wind up in the emergency room. “Broken heart syndrome,” the doctor calls it. You stay overnight for tests. Your children gather around you. Things have to be done. There’s the funeral home arrangements. You just can’t. You’re not able, so your grown children take over. You are left in the grip of unimaginable grief. Your happy life has been turned upside down. With all the doctors and nurses and family buzzing around you and your heart broken over such monumental grief…you think of that couple at Walmart, you whisper a prayer for their kindness and compassion. You are so thankful that they took the time to stop whatever they were doing to stay with you during those first terrifying moments when you were at your worst. What would you have done without them?

This is not fiction. This isn’t the opening sequence of some new story I’m writing. This actually happened to a friend of mine a couple of days ago. It shouldn’t matter and it doesn’t matter, but since this is 2021 I feel compelled to mention that the couple who came to my friend’s aid in that Walmart were African-American. 

We live in a time of great racial tension and unrest. Every encounter between people from different races seems fraught with peril. The only stories we see in the media are bad ones. But the story I just shared and ones just like it that happen every day across this country don’t end up on the nightly news. My friend, a white woman in deep pain, gets approached by an African American couple who see her pain and can only think to stop whatever they were doing to come along side a total stranger, a fellow human being in great distress, to offer kindness, support and grace at the hour of her greatest need. They did so anonymously. They will get no credit for it, no accolades will come their way. But this story and it’s telling in this space hopefully will serve as a reminder that all of us has within us a spark of the divine, the better angles of our character which so often rise to the occasion. For my friend, it was strangers at Walmart who showered upon her their love and concern, offering the one single ray of light in a day of profound darkness.

Who will you be a ray of light to today?

The Meaning of Friends

The To Do Lists are getting crowded. Time is starting to feel short. One week from today we leave for Maine and I think I’ve got a cold, which is suddenly big news in the post-COVID world. I haven’t had a cold in almost two years because of all the hand washing, hand sanitizing and mask wearing. But recently I have done several things that placed me in close proximity to thousands of my fellow human beings. I have attended a baseball game, taken long rides on the crowded DC Metro etc. So a couple days ago I started with cold symptoms. But post-COVID, how do you know what is a cold and what might be …the big C? Sure, I’m fully vaccinated, but its not 100% effective. Since we are leaving for Maine next week I decided to get a rapid test at Patient First last night, out of an abundance of caution. (Having just used that dreadful phrase, I feel an apology is in order). Good news: I do not have COVID. Bad news: I have a cold. On an optimistic note, this is the time to get a cold, not next week.

Attended a funeral yesterday. One of our dear friends lost her mother after a battle with dementia. She lived a fruitful life of 85 years and was truly beloved by all who knew her. The chapel was packed. I know from personal experience how terribly difficult it is to stand up in front of a large gathering of family and friends and eulogize one of your parents. You so desperately want to say the right words, to convey the appropriate sentiments while simultaneously realizing it is impossible. You can’t reduce anyone’s life to a ten minute speech, much less the women who gave you life. Plus, as soon as you arrive at the podium and look out at the crowd your heart begins to beat louder and your stomach is suddenly in your throat. But, our friend stood up in that podium and honored her mother with a gracious and tender speech all the while holding herself together with great poise. Well done.

It’s funny what happens in the week or so leading up to Maine. I’ve noticed it before but this year more so than other years. Although Pam and I cherish nothing in the world more that the weeks we spend in Maine, we also feel this strange need to get together with people who we love before we leave. Pam has spent almost every day recently having lunch or breakfast with all of her dearest friends. We just scheduled a dinner for next Monday night with our Hope small group so we can see them all before we leave. How lucky are we to be surrounded by so many people who we love? This is what really matters, isn’t it? We won’t miss Short Pump. We won’t miss our house. We will only miss the dear people who make Short Pump and our house worth coming back to…the incredible human beings we call friends.

Reputation

No…you’re not seeing double. Yesterday I posted a photograph of this cool Father’s Day present I received from my wife. Well, thirty minutes later the doorbell rang and there were my two angel girls from next door, Sully and Kennedy along with their sweet Mom. They had a gift they wanted to give me for Father’s Day too….the exact same thing.  So now I have one for my home office and one for my work office. I also have to admit that I’m a bit concerned that I have developed such a predictable reputation in my neighborhood…slayer of squirrels and dad-joke teller.

Just Another Night at the Ballpark

Sometimes the best laid plans don’t end up turning out the way you wished. Take last night, for example. My big brother picked up a couple of Nationals tickets from a friend of his who has season tickets and was out of town. The two of us had planned to meet up at the center field gate around 5:30 for the 7 o’clock game. We were both taking the Metro to the ball park, he from Rockville, Maryland and me from Springfield,Virginia. We had both been looking forward to it for weeks and the weather turned out to be absolutely perfect. All seemed teed up for a great night.

I leave my house in Short Pump at 2:10 in the afternoon. My GPS assured me that the Springfield Metro station was a mere hour and forty minute drive. All was going swimmingly until I got onto Interstate 95 heading north…

Yes kids, that tiny green sign in the distance is the Elmont exit and this photograph was taken while sitting graveyard-dead still. Not a good sign. But, Let not your heart be troubled, I reminded myself. This is exactly why I left so early. Ignorance of 95 traffic is no excuse for anyone who lives near the thing. It is the place where travel plans go to die a painful, excruciating death. 

But eventually the traffic began to thin out, just in time for this…

Was there an accident, you ask? No. Was there road construction? No. Was there flatbed truck full of naked models pulled over on the side of the road causing a festival of rubber necking? No. So, what caused the traffic to grind to such an inexplicable halt all the way from Quantico to Springfield? I have no idea. It is a profound mystery. Nevertheless, I didn’t arrive at the Metro station until 5:12. Then, the real fun began.

I am not a city guy. The Metro is a city thing. I’m sure if I had to use it every day I would get used to it and grow to appreciate its charms. To the uninitiated, this is not charming…

Yes, it goes without saying that I missed a connection that I was supposed to make and wound up going considerably out of the way. All the while I was texting big brother with my ETA. Finally I saw the big lug standing there in his Strasberg Jersey at the centerfield gate. It was 6:15. For those of you keeping score at home, that’s four hours.

Donnie’s friend’s tickets were awesome. There was a restaurant there with tables outside…

So, the Dunnevant boys were finally together with plenty of time to spare. We ate some ballpark food, caught up a little bit and marveled at the glorious weather and the obnoxious Met Fans who had somehow gotten tickets far to close to us.

The actual game was a tight pitchers duel and the two of us had a blast providing expert analysis and color commentary to those within earshot. Through four innings it was 0-0. To change our luck, I decided to excuse myself long enough to go to the W store to buy a hat. Twenty minutes later, I returned. The score was still tied but my big brother seemed oddly quiet. By the middle of the sixth inning he informed me that he wasn’t feeling well with a look on his face that I was very familiar with. Our sainted parents bequeathed to their children many admirable traits, however, from our mother both of us inherited an unpredictable , confounding, and devilish condition that we euphemistically call stomach issues. It’s virtually impossible to predict with any certainty why or when it will strike. Lucky for both of us, it is a rarity. But when it does arrive on the scene it is almost always at the most impossible time…like the middle of the sixth inning at a baseball stadium, an hour’s metro ride away from your automobile!! I will not go into any details, but the next hour was quite the experience, involving everything from a five dollar bottle of water and botched Uber attempt to an amazingly professional ambulance crew that saved the day. My brother is fine and at home recovering from the ordeal. In the middle of all the angst and turmoil, the Nationals walked off the Mets on a run scoring single in the bottom of the ninth from Yan Gomes. We heard the roar even from the ambulance!

Of course, my night was not over because I had to once again sample the unique pleasures of 95 south. My handy GPS took me on a perilous detour at some point which was of nebulous benefit since eventually it placed me back here…

I trudged along, and trudged along and about when I was all out of trudge, I pulled into my driveway at 1:18, a full eleven hours after I left.

Just another night at the ballpark.

The Hard Wait

In less than two weeks Pam and I will begin a five week adventure at this place. This will be our home for the first two weeks, then we will head to the other side of the lake to this place for the remaining three weeks.

The alert reader will notice that I have not chosen to show pictures of the actual houses we are staying in. That’s because it’s far less important, and less interesting to me than the lake and these views. This is Quantabacook, and I will be spending far more time on these docks and in that water than I will be spending inside. Don’t misunderstand. The houses are important. Neither of them are dumps by any means. Both are actually quite lovely. The thing is, houses in Maine during the glorious summer months are places you go when its raining or its time for bed. But if you insist on lake house pictures…

Here’s the view of the lake from house number one. we will be eating our meals here if it’s raining and/or at night.

This is where I will be writing this blog for three weeks and eating lunch I imagine.

That’s it. That’s all the important things to know about where we will spending our time.

Oh, and another thing. This second place will be where our kids will be staying with us for as long as their hearts desire to do so. Six of us getting to hang out together on this lake is the greatest of gifts in this life. It makes everything I had to do to make it happen worth the trouble. And one day soon, instead of five weeks it will be all summer, every summer.

Morning Conversation

It had been several days since I had texted my friend in Buena Vista, so I knew her guard would be down. I just couldn’t resist…

Me: Hey Pup. How have you been this week?

Pam: Doing ok my friend. How about you?

Me: Not bad…except I had a colonoscopy yesterday.

Pam: That go ok?

Me: You know me, I struck up a conversation with the anesthesiologist. I asked her, “How long have you worked at this clinic?” She said, “About a year. I’ve been with field medical teams my entire career. This is the first time I’ve settled down in a clinic and the first time I’ve been in gastrointestinal.” I relied, “I see. So, after all those years in the field, how do you like working in an orifice?”

Pam: Geez, Doug!

….long pause

Pam: Did you get a good report? No polyps?

Me: GOTCHA!!!!!

Pam: ……you are such a punk!!

Me: Seriously though, yesterday my daughter Kaitlin was telling me about cheetahs and how skittish and nervous they are. They require a lot of attention and sometimes in zoos they even have a companion dog to help keep them calm.

…another long pause

Me: Turns out, without a lot of care, cheetahs never prosper.

Pam: It’s awfully early for this nonsense, Douglas.

Me: You know, as I’ve told you before, poop jokes aren’t my favorite kind of jokes.

…yet another long pause

Me: But, they’re a solid number two!!

Pam: (twenty eye-roll emojis)

Me: Your kids ever play The Oregon Trail when they were little? Mine did.

Pam: …….???

Me: You meet a man on the Oregon Trail, the man says his name is Terry. “Terry? That’s a girls name”, you laugh. Terry shoots you.

Pam: ….sigh

Me: You have died of dissin Terry.

Pam: Ok, I’ve had enough.

What a great way to start the day!!

Russ and Baseball

Yesterday, Pam gave me my Father’s Day present early by taking me and her Dad to a Flying Squirrels game…

Great seats, great food, and a beautiful day. Of course, after attending a game in Nashville recently, I was reminded just how much of a dump The Diamond has become. The concessions are a mess, the bathrooms stink, and the scoreboard is uninspired and hard to read. But any hopes that we might get a new stadium are dead simply because this is Richmond, Virginia we’re talking about, a city with perhaps the most pathetic and inept government in the history of democracy…but that’s a topic for another day. Right now, I’d rather talk about my father-in-law.

Russ is in his 80’s somewhere. I won’t offer a specific number because it doesn’t matter. He’s not old, at least he doesn’t act old, which is the important part. He’s just a really smart, funny guy who is always fun to hang around. On the subject of baseball, he is one of the few people in my life who I can talk baseball with who…understands. He’s a baseball lifer and still follows his RedSox and the Nationals, mostly because they are on television a lot. But yesterday he told a fascinating story from when he was a kid. Pam had asked him if he could remember the first big league game he ever attended. Russ didn’t hesitate.

“I was around 14 or so and we had driven down to Fenway Park to see the RedSox play the Yankees. I was so excited that I was going to see my hero, Ted Williams. Only bad thing was when they announced the starting lineup he wasn’t in it. He had a cold that day so he didn’t play. I was so disappointed!! But later on my senior class in high school went to Fenway for two days to see the RedSox play the Kansas City Athletics. On Sunday it was a double header and Ted Williams had himself a day. In the first inning of both games he hit a three run homer!”

How great is that? First of all that his senior class trip was to Fenway Park, but second of all that he got to see Ted freaking Williams hit two home runs…and he still remembers the details?! When I asked him about the lineup that day he immediately mentioned that one of the guys on base for both home runs was Dom DiMaggio, Joe’s kid brother. 

There’s something about baseball that does that to you. It makes an impression that stays with you. Although its been over fifty years now, I can still remember the guys who played for the old Richmond Virginians from when I was like 7 years old…Joe Pepitone, Tom Tresh, and Al Downing. Then the Braves came to town and it was Hal Breedan, Shawn Fitzmorris, Ralph Garr and Dusty Baker. If I live to be 100 and all of my other faculties are gone, I’ll still be able to tell the nurses at the old folks home about who was in the starting lineup for the Mets in game five of the 1969 World Series.

And now, my son has taken up watching baseball videos on YouTube and sending them to me. Dad, have you seen this catch and throw?! Crazy!!