Hard Lessons

On two separate times in my life I have attended a function at the Country Club of Virginia, both of which were occasions of great discomfort. The first was a business meeting, the second a wedding. Twenty five years separated the two but the vibe was exactly the same. The source of my discomfort probably says more about me than it does the Country Club of Virginia. I will readily admit to a long held bias and prejudice against institutions like CCV and the sort of people who are most likely to be members there. I have always held firmly to the views best expressed by Groucho Marx who famously said that he would never become a member of any club that would have him as a member. Groucho needn’t have worried with regards to CCV.  He was Jewish.

The source of my CCV problem dates back to my time as a student at the University of Richmond. I was a townie who drove his 1966 Volkswagen Beetle all the way from Elmont to class every morning, each day passing by the beautiful homes on Three Chopt Road with their finely trimmed lawns and dazzling cars parked in curved driveways. Once I got on campus it was even worse. My beat up Beetle stood out amongst the BMW’s and MG’s of many of my fellow students who lived on campus in one of the gorgeous dorms that grew out of the grounds like so many mushrooms after a week of rain. UR’s campus screamed old money with its Gothic architecture and brick walkways. My money was always brand new, doled out to me every other Friday in the form of a paycheck I earned building pallets in a warehouse in Ashland while my classmates partied. I graduated from The University of Richmond…but I was never really a student there. The resentment that I felt was palpable and grew over time into something of an obsessive dislike and distrust of wealthy people. To this day I struggle with the same dislike and distrust.

The Country Club of Virginia is ground zero for my biases. Actually any country club will do, but CCV is the poster child for Virginia’s generational wealth. One becomes a member by invitation only through a mysterious process governed by some sort of star chamber of elites who up until the early 1990’s had never admitted a black member. The first Jewish member came just a couple years before that. When I turned off of Three Chopt road onto Westhampton Drive I felt like I was going behind enemy lines. This time I wasn’t driving an exhaust-belching clunker. My Cadillac would fit in nicely. There was a masterpiece of a sunset in the distance…

The reception was lovely, the view over the grounds from the elevated clubhouse was breathtaking. Men and women dressed in their finery stood huddled around propane heaters as the temperature dropped with the setting sun. The open bar yielded cocktails while tuxedoed men and women roamed the crowds offering us trays of bacon-wrapped scallops and spinach-stuffed mushrooms. It didn’t escape me that each of the attendants who waited on us were black and heavily accented, exactly the sort of people who didn’t stand a chance of ever becoming a member.

Eventually the crowd was ushered inside to a ballroom filled with beautifully decorated tables with linen table cloths and fine china. There was a seven piece band performing for our entertainment. Dinner was delicious. We were placed at a table with several people we had never met. They were all delightful. As is usually the case, I had a difficult time staying seated. Several times I excused myself from the table and wandered around the place. I smiled when I found several worn spots in the carpeting. You would think that for $75,000 down and $1500 a month the members could expect decent carpeting. Eventually I found the gentlemen’s bathroom. It was everything I was expecting it to be. No paper towels, just hundreds of neatly rolled cloth towelettes. The thought came to me that there was probably a 60 year old black man in the laundry room who had been rolling these towelettes 8 hours a day for the past 40 years. Then I thought of another wedding we had attended recently where we ate barbecue off of paper plates. We could have used some towelettes.

This was one of those weddings that husbands are asked to attend by their wives. The bride was her friend. I only knew a handful of people. But you go with her because you love her and she looks amazing in her dress. It gives you an excuse to wear a suit. When you discovered that the reception would be at CCV you sighed and prepared for the worst. That old ugly chip on your shoulder reappeared. You spent much of the evening looking for confirmation of every uncharitable thought you’ve ever had about country club people. But then the father of the bride stood up to make a speech. He was nervous, he said. He had written his remarks down so he wouldn’t ramble. He looked familiar. It dawned on me that they were members of my church. We had shared a table with them at a marriage class last year. His speech was an amazing tribute to his daughter and new son-in-law. He was a man of faith and his powerful words bore witness to that faith. He spoke of grace and answered prayers. It was a humbling moment. 

It’s funny how blind we are to our own sins. I have spent almost 50 years harboring class resentment, assigning a host of malignant intentions to people from money and inherited privilege. I stand in judgment of institutions like CCV for their racist, exclusionary past. I blithely belittle them with the accusation that they “woke up on third base thinking they’ve hit a triple.” Then suddenly I find myself a member of a church filled with the very people I have always resented. Some of them have vindicated every stereotype that exists for them. But many, like the father of the bride, have proven to be humble, grace-filled people. It has caused me to examine my resentments. I am learning things I never knew about people I’ve never liked. They are flawed, like me. They are insecure, like me. They struggle with the idea that salvation is a free gift and they wonder if they deserve it…like me. I am learning that we, all of us, have more in common than I ever thought possible.

The Letter

I was finally able to write that retirement letter I was struggling with a couple of weeks ago. It was mailed out several days ago. I like the way it turned out…I think. No letter as important as this one feels perfect. There’s always something else to say, something you wish you had worded differently. But it’s done now and I’m ok with it.

Cleaning Out My Office

The attic in our house is one of those walk up things that leads to a cavernous open space that stretches from one end of the house to the other. When we built this place 28 years ago it looked like you could land a plane up there. Now it is packed to the gills with the detritus of a full life well lived. That’s a flowery way to say—it’s an unruly nightmare. One of the jobs that await me in my pending retirement is to bring order to the chaos up there. But, there’s a problem. Before I can do that I will first have to add stuff because very soon I will have to clean out my office.

When I retire at the end of this year, Allison will be moving in to my old office. She has told me this many times. “What furniture will you be taking with you?” She asks several times a week. Not that she is anxious for me to leave or anything. They all claim they will miss me terribly and I want to believe them, but sometimes when I catch them in there measuring for drapes, I wonder.

Anyway, so I know that eventually I will have to decide what I’m going to do with all the furniture, the artwork, and the accumulated memorabilia from a 42 year career. I will have to empty my desk and credenza, sort through all the important papers and files I will need to keep along with my collection of fidget spinners, fart machines, water pistols, magnetic beep-making devices that I have employed over the years, along with my collection of remote controlled cars. Honestly, I’m not looking forward to it. Packing up an office into cardboard boxes is an activity that lends itself to introspection and melancholy. I would rather not go there. But, it’s got to be done.

Victory Has a Thousand Fathers. Defeat is an Orphan.

Recently I have been texting with a friend of mine about the election. My friend’s preferred candidate lost and he has been trying to figure out what went wrong. He has offered up several theories, some his own and others he had run across on the internet. I’ve been no help to him since I don’t pretend to understand the American electorate. People vote the way they do for many and varied reasons, none of which are terribly predictable. But as I was texting back and forth this morning I suddenly remembered an old black and white clip from a John Kennedy press conference back in the day. He had only been President for three months and was facing the press after the embarrassing and disastrous Bay of Pigs fiasco had come to light. Even though the CIA plan had been conceived and approved prior to Kennedy taking office, he took to the microphones with this gem—“Victory has a thousand fathers but defeat is an orphan.”

This is self-evidently true on so many levels. Everyone takes credit for victories, but the blame for defeat is always assigned to someone else. It’s part of human nature—the selfish, prideful part. We see this in sports all the time. A relief pitcher comes in with the bases loaded and two outs and gives up a hit that loses the game. Afterwards, when he’s interviewed by the press he takes responsibility for the loss with, “I feel like I let my team down. This loss is on me.” But then, if he’s on a real team, one of the other players takes up for him by suggesting that if the rest of them had done their jobs earlier in the game the outcome wouldn’t even have been close. Of course the opposite is sometimes true. A quarterback throws a crucial interception and after the game points out an error his intended receiver made in running the route, throwing him under the bus. People grow to love the stand up relief pitcher and despise the selfish Quarterback.

Politics is no different than any other endeavor. It takes a whole lot of things to go right to win, and a bunch of things to go wrong to lose. It might be difficult to find the exact reasons things happen, but searching the facts out is essential for you to have any chance of correcting the problem. Step one of any postmortem is humility. Step two is unvarnished honesty. I have no idea what step three is but I’m thinking that if after any failure in life you are humble and honest, eventually you’ll figure it out.

Officially in the Fall-Zone

Falling as an adult is quite the humiliating experience. You are busy with your day walking along the sidewalk in front of your office when suddenly you find yourself on the ground wondering what the hell happened. All you’re sure of is the fact that your hand is bleeding, your sweater is dirty and your ribs are sore. Lucky for you, nobody witnessed the event. You got up quickly, took a casual inventory of the situation and proceeded to make your way into your office bathroom to clean up your hand. As falls go, this one was relatively harmless. However, it does beg the question—is this the first of many? Probably. The calendar doesn’t lie. At 66 I’m told that I am entering the fall zone, that charming season of life where socks become tripping hazards, where the smallest stone can send you face first into the gardenias, and excessive house dust might send you ass over tea kettle down the stairs.

This, being the first adult fall of my retirement years, caught me off guard and honestly kind of hurt my feelings. This is now how I perceive myself or my physical capabilities. Tripping over virtually nothing on a sidewalk isn’t the sort of thing that happens to me frequently or…ever. My wife famously took a dive while we were in Maine last year resulting in a broken wrist, but that was a one off, Pam being one of the most buttoned up non-fallers of all time. Matter of fact in our 40 years together I can only remember one other time when she fell. Now that I think about it, that fall should have been a harbinger of sorts for the both of us since we both fell that day. We were on a beautiful walk from Camden to Rockport along the rugged Maine coastline when suddenly Pam went sprawling on the ground in front of me. She came through the event embarrassed but unscathed. I was quite solititous of her well being in the moments afterwards but then couldn’t help but laugh. She scolded me for doing so, as I recall. But then, not fifteen minutes later it was my turn. I went flying in front of her but hopped straight up afterwards sending her into uncontrolled fits of laughter. There was no, “Honey are you alright??” Just a lot of pointing and hysterical belly laughs—-“I’m not laughing at you, but if you could have seen yourself!!!”

 So, I guess now I will have to place —Strive to remain upright while walking—on my to-do list every day. Fabulous…

The Miracle of Ice Cream

Yesterday the Hope Thrift store was hopping. Pam and I arrived just before 1:00 for our afternoon shift. There was a very long line at the cash register. Pam, as a cashier, was in for a long day. When I arrived at my post at the donation door in the back the place looked like a disaster, boxes of donations covered every inch of floor space, my buddy Bruce was busy serving the three cars in line by himself. I have no idea what the occasion for all of the hubbub was. It seemed a perfectly normal November Saturday to me, but for some reason business was booming.

About an hour later Bruce and I had managed to restore order and finally there were no cars at the back door. When this happens I usually do a walk through inside the store to see if my limited skills are needed in some other department. When I made it through the swinging doors which separate the back room from the store I noticed something I had never seen before at Hope Thrift. The line to the cash registers had backed up almost to the end of the clothing aisle!! If you have never been inside the store before this won’t mean very much to you so. I will try to explain with a football metaphor—the line was the equivalent of 1st and 15!!

I walked beside the line checking out the facial expressions on the customers and was not encouraged. There was a lot of frustration. I tried some garden variety apologizing, “So sorry you folks have had to wait. I’ve never seen so many customers in this line before! Ha!” My attempt at light-hearted banter fell flat. I then glanced up to the cash registers and saw Pam and Lynn and two other volunteers who had been taken off other duties to help with bagging. They looked totally overwhelmed, but all were smiling cheerfully. It was at this point when the idea popped in my head. I needed to come up with a way to make the people in line start smiling, instead of plotting an overthrow!

I ran to my car, retrieved a small cooler I had brought from home for just such a time as this, and then walked next door to the Food Lion. Just my luck, the ice cream sandwiches were on sale. I got four boxes of 12 for a grand total of $13.49!! I paid for them and proceeded to open up each box and stuff the proceeds into the cooler while the attendant looked at me with bewilderment. “What’s ya doin?” She asked after seeing my Hope Thrift volunteer badge. “You taking those to the thrift?” 

“Yes,” I answered. “But not all of them.” Then I handed her one and said “Wish me luck!”

Once I made it back to the store the first place I went was the very back of the line where I began offering everyone a free ice cream sandwich. The first guy looked very suspicious of my intentions. “How much?” He asked. “They’re free,” I explained. The man dismissed me with a two word response I heard no fewer than a half dozen times over the next 30 minutes—“I’m diabetic.”

But as I made my way through the line I began to have more success. A few ladies who had initially balked because of some diet they were on, eventually couldn’t resist the price or my roguish charms. As more and more people took the ice cream I noticed other shoppers trying to figure out what was going on. Soon I was handing out ice cream to smiling people like it was my job. In less than 30 minutes I had given away 48 ice cream sandwiches and a quick inspection of the still long checkout line revealed a total 180 change in attitude. People were smiling, talking to each other, proving once again the scientific fact that it is impossible to be in a bad mood and eat ice cream at the same time.

The lines never thinned all afternoon. Pam had virtually no time to visit with the other volunteers because of the sheer volume of customers in the store. We were both exhausted by the time the place closed. But what incredible fun it was to see the looks on people’s faces at the spectacle of being handed free ice cream from a weirdly aggressive and overly friendly man who probably looked like he was off his medication. But you know who didn’t give me the suspicious side eye? The kids. I would offer one to a Mom and she would say, “No, but that’s my son over there. He would love one!” When I offered the kids ice cream I always got an immediate smile and a huge Thanks!!, or No Way!! There’s a lesson there somewhere, I think.

Who is my Neighbor?

The election is finally over. Emotions are raw. One of the two predictions I made came true, Trump winning easily. My Trump friends are triumphant, my Harris friends are depressed. I am neither which brings with it an odd feeling of detached guilt—shouldn’t I be able to conjure some sort of more fitting emotional response? Yes…I believe I should. Perhaps the reason I can’t has something to do with what I have done for a living these past 40+ years. 

When you advise people about their money you spend a lot of time managing people’s emotions. This was the tenth Presidential election year of my career and in each of them I have had to deal with partisan clients who were heavily invested in one candidate or another. We would have conversations leading up to Election Day that sounded like this:

Client: Doug, if my candidate loses I’m going to pull all of my money out of the market because the other guy will be a disaster!!

Me: That would be unwise. History tells us that the markets are quite resilient to changes in politics. Please don’t do that.

It happened when Bill Clinton ran for office. It happened when George Bush ran. It happened when Obama ran and each time that Trump has run. Each new President terrifies the losing candidate’s partisans. My job is always to talk my scared clients down from the ledge. With the benefits of hindsight, virtually none of the dire predictions of calamity ended up being true, so my moderating advice was vindicated. While it is certainly true that Presidents have tons of influence and do make a difference, it is never as much as we are led to believe during the heat and panic of an election.

Some will say that this time it’s different. This time we are more divided. The influence of social media has exasperated the divides. Trump is uniquely evil etc etc.

Maybe. Maybe not. Time will tell.

Regardless of the outcome of the election I still operate under the two great mandates of my faith—to love God with all my heart mind and soul, and my neighbor as myself. That’s a lot on my plate. I find nothing in scripture in the form of dispensation from the loving my neighbor as myself part that allows me to exempt those who voted for Trump or Harris. Who is my neighbor? Pretty much everyone.

I’ll be busy trying my best to be faithful to that command.