Mary Wakefield Buxton

URBANNA — Every so often I have a knock your socks off kind of experience. A recent dinner at Hazel and David Laughton’s house on Route 227 just outside of Urbanna earns such a rating.

The couple, married 63 years, hail from Birmingham, England. At an early age, in spite of growing up in the horror of World War II England and withstanding Nazi bombings in early childhood, they decided to live a life “well lived.”

David explained that meant following their dreams and going to sea as soon as possible. They quit their jobs and bought a 24-foot sailboat in need of repair and set off with their dog, Tramp, for adventures that could compete with Defoe’s “Robinson Crusoe” or Dana’s “Two Years Before the Mast.”

David is soon publishing a book relating their tales sailing off to sea in such a tiny boat. The tales are full of terror, joy, humor, fright and fulfillment as they sail down the coast of England in seas that would send most of us back to land as fast as we could go.

But they weathered on to France, down the coast of Europe, Gibraltar and on to Greece and even across the Atlantic Ocean.

Fortunately the 24-foot boat was eventually replaced by much larger and more seaworthy boats and ending up with a beautiful 50-plus footer.

Expect to read about a ship crashing into them while they were at dock and barely managing to escape alive. Poor Hazel was thrown on the dock at the last minute saved by David who then jumped to safety.

Then, their boat blew up and sank in the ocean as they spent many hours at sea in a blow-up raft wondering whether they would ever achieve that elusive end in their “pursuit of happiness.”

Hazel recalled one hilarious memory during that desperate time when David said … “My next boat is going to have a proper dinghy!” (Anyone who can plan for the next boat while marooned in the middle of the ocean in a rubber raft is the definition of an optimist.) They were eventually saved by a passing Norwegian ship.

Hazel made us an authentic English dinner of cottage pie, and David, not to be outdone in a marriage that contains the spark of highly competitive inter-action between husband and wife, created a treacle tart. I had never tasted treacle before, which is a syrup derived from sugar cane.

The dinner included a visit through David’s workshop filled with many exotic cars. He is presently restoring a 1903 Olds and a Land Rover that had been stripped down to the bare bones as David is totally reworking every square inch of the car.

One quality of David that stands out is absolute fearlessness. Once he and Hazel were crossing Baltimore’s Key Bridge, the one that has recently been destroyed by a ship crashing into it. The night was dark and stormy with gale force winds topping 50 mph. As they crossed over, a hood to an expensive car he was towing flew off and when they reached the other side, he pulled over and left Hazel in search on foot across the bridge for his lost hood.

There were no walk spaces for pedestrians and when the big semis came toward him in the night he had to jump up on the parapet and wait until the trucks passed.

Soon Hazel waiting back in the car heard over the police radio there was a “jumper” on the bridge and all police cars in the area were ordered to the bridge as fast as possible and to stop traffic. Soon there were eight cop cars circling David.

“What are you doing?” one policeman called to David who explained he was looking for his lost hood. The hood was found and returned to David. Another cop car came in sirens blazing. “Did you find the jumper in time?” the policeman shouted.

“No worry, he’s English,” was the response.

Over the years David and Hazel have enjoyed adventure and good living buying up and restoring old cars. They attend many car shows.

They are both busy in the community too — Hazel serving as president of Yacht Harbor Association and an active member of the Woman’s Club and David is an invaluable helper to the many boat owners at the docks near Urbanna Creek.

David has a sign in his home to welcome all guests that reads … “Please let us know if you are offended with anything here that we say or do so we can enjoy a good laugh.”

Which describes him to a T. He laughs at human behavior, marches to his own tune, and enjoys life to the fullest. Too bad more people aren’t so inclined, for David very well may have discovered the secret to happiness in life.

I can’t imagine life in Urbanna without this interesting and fun-loving pair!

© 2024

(Note:  One Woman’s Opinion columnist Mary Wakefield Buxton will be taking some time off from writing her column.)

Part 1 • Part 2 • Part 3 • Part 4

URBANNA — The emotional love poem that Peter had written and shared with me describing his feelings for his lost love introduced me to inter-gender romantic love. I was 33. In those years, human sexuality was learned at one’s own speed as schools did not teach the subject as is done today.

But there were other forms of love, too, the Platonic affection and concern I felt for him, certainly, the love we feel for our fellow man, our neighbors and friends.

It is a love that is color and gender blind, accepts others without judgment, loves regardless of differences, loves simply because we are human and the rare animals in the great kingdom that are capable of various types of love.

I had no illusions. Fifty years ago, it was a very different world. I worried as my young friend prepared to become a priest that there would be great challenges ahead. I wished I could help him in some way but no matter how I reflected on the hurdles he would surely face, I could think of no way I could be of help. A nagging fear for him remained.

Summer camp came to a close. There was a rumor among the counselors that the owner was thinking of selling the camp. I understood the ongoing liability must have been tremendous, all those children so busy every summer with so many activities, and suppose a child was hurt or even worse, suppose there were a death?

It was time to pack our belongings and head back to Florida. My children and I were tanned and rested and happy from the fun and adventures we had experienced. But it was time to go home.

Peter and I hugged goodbye and promised to write and to return next summer. As I drove away and saw his slight figure slowly disappear, I thought of his lines from his beautiful poem…

“Are we there yet, Mother?” came from the back seat. The eternal question that all children ask when traveling in a car had started. But I was still deep in thought of Peter’s telling poem …

“And now he’s gone, I miss him so.

At heights of grief the world will never know, His glow of love will never touch me more,
He’s gone. I must remember from before …”

We stopped at Blowing Rock, N.C., for a few days where my in-laws from Newport News were spending their summer vacation. On arrival, I immediately heard the shocking news that my teenage idol, Elvis Presley, had died, possibly from a drug overdose, at age 42. I was devastated, suddenly feeling unstable and alone in a growingly hostile world where only misery and death awaited.

My in-laws and their friends laughed at my grief. “The King is dead!” A doctor friend of the family teased me every time I came into the room triggering a great amount of laughter from his generation. They seemed amused at my despair. I finally realized the more I showed my suffering over Elvis’ death, the more I would be teased.

I did what we all must learn to do as we travel through life, and what makes a writer finally turn to his pen for relief. People can be cruel over other people’s suffering. They don’t mean to be cruel, they simply don’t have the same degree of sensitivity as others.

So to protect myself, I hid my feelings. The usual trick, learned long ago, I put on a merry face to fit in with the group. Only to have my feelings pop out of my head now … like long ago discarded seeds planted in the dark earth of my brain, and now finally germinated … 50 years after planted, and now in full bloom.

And how good it is to write today about how much I and so many others in my generation suffered over so many discoveries in our young lives … and especially how we agonized over the death of the king.

(Continued next week.)

© 2024

Part 1 • Part 2

Getting out of Florida during the unbearably hot summers, escaping parenting duties for a few months, and being in the center of nature in all its glory in West Virginia, produced an aura in me of great happiness. It was as if I had morphed into a different person, an angel, able to float in air, wings had emerged that had sprouted out of my ribs and given me the winsome gift of flight.

Indeed, those summers I felt as if I were soaring high above the luscious green world beneath me with the sun at my back, the white fluff of clouds parting for me as I made my way through the sky.

In West Virginia, nestled between the river and mountains, at “Indian camp” spending blessed days amongst the laughing children, I was happy. No, I was ecstatic. I began to write poetry for fear that if I did not, I would burst from joy. Poetry is the language of writers who can no longer express emotion any other way. That first summer I wrote 100 poems. Any poet would tell you that is happy.

I began to take an interest in my son’s cabin counselor. I did know what attracted my interest, which perhaps was more of a concern. But I could not put my finger on exactly why but in the evenings as the campers were getting their showers and heading for their cabins, PJs and bed, I found myself making my way down to the little boy group of cabins.

The counselor, Peter, was always standing on duty as the boys ran back and forth, half naked from the cabins to their showers and back. I took to standing with him as the little boys flew by, giggling, shoving each other, towels zapping each other or flapping in the air … there could not be a happier scene at camp.

Everything seemed fine, perfectly normal, but I noticed how much Peter enjoyed the spectacle of the little boys. Another counselor might have found the chore of supervising boys’ showers dull, tiring or with an attitude of I can’t wait for this duty to be over so I can get with the women counselors for some after-hours fun.

But not Peter. What passed for a counselor that was dedicated and doing his duty well beyond the call, gave him an instant reputation that he was far more responsible than the other college staff.

I mentioned my observation to my husband who visited camp every so often by simply catching a plane while on business from Roanoke and flying over the mountains. He did not seem concerned.

As the days passed the staff naturally paired off, college students finding each other, husband-and-wife counselors happy together and since Peter did not connect to those of his own age, I ended up spending free time with him. He was a deep thinker, introverted, and a writer and we read poetry together and discussed theology that he was studying in college.

He was conservative in his theology whereas I was a Bishop Spong Episcopalian but it did not bother either of us that we held such disparate views of Christianity, and since so many religious people are unable to discuss their beliefs without insulting others or even becoming angry, our conversations were quite enjoyable.

I began to notice Peter’s eyes. They were deeply set, thickly lashed and a deep brown and they seemed to glow in some strange way as if they reflected high intelligence. I thought a priest with such eyes would be powerful as the light in his eyes lent him an extraordinary aura. As if he were not human — but a saint.

As we talked, I learned he had recently broken up with someone he dearly loved and he was still recovering from grief. The person was just 16.

One day as we were sitting on the bank of the river after a hard rain and the water had risen and it was flowing high and fast by us, he read a poem for me that he had written about his lost love.

I heard the beautiful lines of a terminated affair and the agony of loss suffered afterwards. There was a great span of silence after he finished. I was leaning against a tree and I felt the hard bark gouging into my skin and I saw how the sun cut through the network of leaves forming intricate patterns on the ground.

I could not speak. His poem described agonizing grief over a parted affair between two lovers. It was a perfect poem in every way: meter, theme, rhyme, controlled emotion. But for one thing.

A topic that 50 years ago could never be discussed comes back to me from the rustling curtain of memory. The pronouns in his poem were wrong.

(To be continued.)

© 2024

Part 1

URBANNA — I was 33 years old then, almost 50 years ago, living in Palm Beach County, Fla. It was in the mid-1970s, and I was a rather harassed wife and mother of two rambunctious children, daughter, Liz, 10, and son, Wake, 5.

The Cincinnati Reds had won the World Series that year as they did the following season. President Gerald Ford had pardoned President Richard Nixon and was about to be defeated at the polls for doing so giving the country the kind, gentle and honest Jimmy Carter, who had promised never to lie to us, and delivered four years of incredibly high inflation, interest rates and unemployment.

Not the best of times for the occasional victims, we the people who pay the price of those that we vote for and suffer the consequences of their mistakes while in office. But he was a kind, gentle and honest president. One can’t hope for everything in our presidents.

I liked our lives in south Florida well enough, it was starkly different from how we had lived in Virginia — renovating a post-Civil War home on the Severn River in Gloucester, where we had lived after Chip had graduated from law school and was in the general counsel’s office at the shipyard. In those days, the yard only had three lawyers. Today, I would not be surprised if the shipyard had 50 lawyers; that’s how important it is writing government contracts to build ships and how extensive litigation has become today.

Yet the summers were hot and steamy in Florida. The days were so unbearable we had to stay inside in air conditioning, which quickly turned life into a stagnant affair for those who like to be outdoors.

So, when I spotted an ad for camp counselor at a summer camp in the mountains of West Virginia, I made an application. I had been a sailing counselor at a Girl Scout camp in Suffolk one college summer. That experience sufficed and I was hired.

Chip had left the shipyard by then and taken a new position with a tax foundation in Palm Beach. He agreed that taking the children north to summer camp was a good idea. His job required travel to Washington, D.C., so it would be easy for him to fly into Roanoke every so often and catch a two-seater special over the mountains to visit us. It would be for only eight weeks and the children would be tanned and relaxed and ready for another school year.

The camp had long served as a boys camp but was now coed, so it was a perfect fit for us to spend our summers. We could not wait to reach the cool country roads and welcoming mountains in wonderful West Virginia. I especially needed a break from my role as parent of my feisty children.

We packed clothes suitable for eight weeks of camp and after several days of grueling drives north with the car air conditioning on full blast and my children asking, “are we there yet?” every 10 minutes, we finally arrived. As I turned into the long driveway winding along the river leading back to the camp, I could feel the heat and stress of Florida beginning to melt away.

We quickly settled in three separate cabins that were clumped under the pines in groups according to gender and age. Wake was the youngest boy in the camp and was placed in a cabin of seven other 6 year olds. His counselor, I’ll call him Peter (not his real name), welcomed us as we moved his trunk in and claimed his cot. He was a 19-year-old college student headed to seminary to become a priest.

Liz went to a 11- and 12-year-old girls cabin and quickly made friends. Her counselor was also in college and appeared up to the challenge of living with seven giggly girls.

I was assigned a two-bedroom cabin on a bluff overlooking the campgrounds with my own room and shared bathroom with a woman who was the director of horseback riding.

Both children signed up for swimming, tennis, canoeing, horseback riding, archery and riflery. I was teaching Indian Lore, (a far cry from sailing), so I would only see my own children for meals and at all-camp activities in the evenings. This offered me a much-needed rest from parenting for eight heavenly weeks and I was sure it was good for my children too.

It was to be a vacation of sorts and like most mothers of young and active children, I was glad to have it. I looked forward to a heavenly summer of no stress, my lifelong held pipe-dream of what life should be, but never is.

Part 2

© 2024

URBANNA — It’s been a few years since Middlesex County has suffered such a cold winter. It seems these last few weeks, no matter how many sweaters I had on, I still felt cold.

And that’s indoors. Going outdoors was unbearable when those 20 degree days arrived and there was a wicked wind blowing in on Kent Street off the Rappahannock River.

Brrr. But I still went out every day with Dandy to walk around the block. One would think an alien from Mars was in town the way I was dressed; parka, furry hat, scarf, sun visor, goggle sized sunglasses, mittens, slacks and wool knee socks. And heavy boots if sleet or snow was on the ground.

Dandy wears a sweater on frigid days, which he dislikes. He gives me that ole big, brown-eyed look of disgust that no breed but a cocker spaniel can do quite so well. Then he sighs as if long ago he has given up trying to maintain his dignity around Mom. I think he looks cute tucked into his turquoise plaid woolie, but he apparently has different taste.

My sisters aren’t faring much better weather this winter. Alice is in Charleston and she texted me one morning it was 24 degrees there when it was 20 degrees here. She had both gas fireplaces on, one on each floor, going full blast, plus her usual heating system.

Georgia is in Naples, Fla., for the winter and texted it was 44 that same morning and she had to put on her heat. That’s cold for southwest Florida, even in January. She complained how cold it was that morning during her tennis game. I did not feel one bit sorry for her, however. Cold weather hardens the heart.

The challenge in frigid weather is to get enough exercise each day as I don’t care to go to a gym or aerobic classes to work out in groups. Exercise for me is a private affair.

One way I am supplementing my daily walk in freezing weather is use of an indoor bike that my neighbor no longer used and was so kind as to pass along. It offers both leg and arm workouts. The only problem is it is so boring. I have it in the gallery, so I can watch TV when I bike, which helps the time pass.

I have also started “in bed yoga.” Other names for in bed yoga are “eyes closed yoga” or “sleepy head yoga.” If you have never heard of such yoga there has, as far as I know, never been such an exercise. I invented it.

What I love about this exercise is you do it in the morning before getting up when you are half asleep and therefore going through the routine is nothing more than a (bad) dream.

The moves consist of leg lifts, arm stretches, neck turns, finger splays, foot and hand rotations and finish with the old -fashioned bicycle.

My routines are over in about 10 minutes and by then I am awake and ready to jump out of bed and get on with the day. In bed yoga is the best!

Of course, there is opportunity for exercise in everyday housework like vacuuming, dusting or sweeping floors for those so inclined. Such routines are not appealing.

I suppose I shouldn’t complain so much about cold weather. I was raised in the 1940s and 1950s on Lake Erie and during those decades it was really freezing, the lake and rivers froze and it snowed heavily in winters. Gale winds would form ice mountains, caves and caverns turning our world into an Arctic country.

There was a long driveway to our house that crossed over a bridge and climbed a hill and the snowdrifts were so high Father had to leave the car at the highway and we had to trudge back and forth whenever we needed to go somewhere.

That trudge to the house from the car in boots and leggings was not for the weak of heart. I remember Father telling me we needed to “toughen up” to survive in such cold weather. I was told to use his footprints and follow him home as he broke through hip high snowdrifts. Those were memorable years in severe weather. Strangely I never remember losing power in all that time in Ohio.

I’m just grateful now I live in a milder climate. Still, I wouldn’t mind being in Naples now and suffering with my sister on her occasional 44 degree mornings.

© 2024.

Note: One Woman’s Opinion columnist Mary Wakefield Buxton will be taking some time off writing and will return in the spring.

URBANNA —

What a year 2023 was. I don’t have space today to list the many worrisome events that took place around the world.

The savage massacre by Hamas on Israeli citizens on Oct. 7, 2023 was especially alarming. The cruel barbarity and number of deaths to innocent Israelis attending a music festival when attacked left the world speechless.

Too soon after such shocking human behavior American college students, apparently totally naïve or ignorant of the Oct. 7 massacre or even the brutal history of the Jews began protesting “Jews” with zeal that I never dreamed I would ever witness in America.

The protests became much more than a simple act in support of Palestinians. Some of the protests were downright ugly… filled with hatred, some even calling out the ominous phrase “from the river to the sea” (the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea), which is part of a Hamas slogan that translates to Israelis as literally wiping Israel off the map.

The protesters attacked not only Jews in Israel, but American Jews along with Jews across the globe. Jewish students on American campuses stated they no longer felt safe and some even claimed they feared for their lives.

The protests demonstrated many college students no longer study world history. Their knowledge of geography is also weak. When asked, many students using the phrase “from the river to the sea,” could not identify either the river or the sea. One college student even named the sea as the Caribbean!

I’m not sure when I was first aware of antisemitism in the world. Perhaps it was my undergraduate history major program that introduced me to the painful history of the Jews who have been (until the middle of the last century) long denied their own mother land.

After World War 11, the West decided the Jewish people should have their own country and drew the boundaries of Israel, later changed somewhat after the Six Day War waged in 1967.

Jewish people deserve their own country as they were historically the original inhabitants of Palestine. Eventually they lost their homeland and they began their long history of moving into other countries and experiencing cruel antisemitism wherever they went. The last century saw tens of millions of Russian, German and European Jews murdered by totalitarian governments.

The great Irish novelist, James Joyce, published his famous novel, “Ulysses,” in 1922. It was about Leopold Bloom, a Jew living in Ireland. The book, among other things, challenged readers to create a world where a Jew was safe wherever he went in the world.

My generation was ultra-sensitive to attacks against anyone for religion, gender, age, racial, or ethnic differences. I grew up at a time when few women had broken through the male exclusion rules that kept women out of most professions. Anyone who has had to fight for equal rights in the past still remembers what it was like to be excluded from opportunities.

Since the battle for equal opportunity was so intense for women (as it was with other minorities in America) it mystifies me how any college student today could be so oblivious, ignorant, and darn right heartless in their protests against any “other people.”

Perhaps the reason for this is simply that they didn’t experience the past struggles for equality. Their equal rights were handed to them.

Palestinians feel that Israel is really “their country,” and thus many feel oppressed. Hamas, a terrorist group operating in Palestine, is determined to rid the land of Israelis and apparently by any means.

But Israel must have its own country. The U.S.   supports a two-state solution to serve both Palestinians and Israelis. This seems the only sane and just solution.

Here are some suggestions that might help bring peace. Stop the practice of rearing children in racial or ethnic hatred. Teaching “hate” to anyone is evil. Hate comes easily enough later in life without having to be installed in the brains of our youth. (For example, understand how Ukrainians might feel about Russia and for the next several generations.)

Rather we should teach our young the “Golden Rule” — love of others, compassion, tolerance and compromise. Without such behaviors we will never see world peace.

And let’s return to requiring world history to all students in high schools and college. There can be no wisdom or hope for peace with people who do not know history and its two major lessons: All people of the world have suffered terribly at the hands of others and history repeats itself for those who do not know it.

Then, with knowledge, perhaps no citizen of the world will ever repeat the tragedies of the past.

© 2024.

Am I the only one in this country that is sick and tired of the use of district attorneys, special counsels, attorney generals, courts and Congressional committees to investigate and explore impeaching our presidents?

And now we even have the state supreme court of Colorado and the secretary of the state of Maine barring a presidential candidate from ballots? So now the precedent is set that “we, the people” no longer have full choice in elections?

And we think we are living in a democracy?

Please. Let the voters who alone have the right to decide for themselves who to nominate and elect and keep the hands of those in power off tampering with our ballots.

I know we have scoundrels in politics today, as in the past, which get elected to the highest offices in the land (and we are learning more and more about such leaders on every passing day,) but we, the people, have the right to decide who our leaders are and the power to change leaders in coming elections. And no one else.

America is not a totalitarian system where government controls all things and where political opponents can fall out of windows of high buildings, drink poison in their tea or be sent to places like Siberia.

Nor should we start the dangerous precedent of one political party sending presidents of opposing political parties to jail. Once that devious practice starts, there would be no end to it and our poor republic would finally collapse from the bitter division such action would cause.

The impeachment circus was started over the behavior of Bill Clinton and his racy relationship in the oval office with his intern, Monica Lewinsky. Outraged republicans “investigated” and he became the first president in more than a century to be impeached by the House of Representatives.

Too soon the democrats sought a special prosecutor to investigate Donald Trump, who became president in 2016, which led to not only one impeachment in the House, but two.

But that wasn’t the end of investigations against political opponents. After Trump was elected, a general counsel was appointed to investigate the highly contentious 2016 election and Mrs. Clinton’s fake Russian dossier. Special Counsel Durham discovered evidence that the CIA, Justice Department and FBI had been part of that deception.

All this back and forth investigation of political opponents cost taxpayers millions of dollars. Not to mention the constant stress of listening to daily regurgitations of murky details of behind the scenes behavior of both political parties.

Then on Jan. 6, after the last highly contentious election, angry protesters that believed the election had been stolen from Trump were arrested, one by one hunted down, found guilty, and sentenced to prison. All this done, Democrats tell us, not to destroy Biden’s political opponent, but to save the nation from insurrection and destruction of democracy.

First, no one approves of violence and destruction of property, but in a democracy the people have the right to peaceful protest. And insurrection? Have we forgotten what a real insurrection is?

Check out the Civil War when in 1861 when the Democrat “solid south” seceded from the nation and founded its own government. The result was more than four years of war, close to 800,000 casualties and polarization and bitterness within the union that lasted many decades. Hardly what happened on Jan. 6.

Speaking of the Civil War, we could use some of Abraham Lincoln’s noble magnanimity about now instead of the constant partisan hatred and fighting for power today that we, the people, are treated to on an almost daily basis. 

I am reminded of Abraham Lincoln’s words in his second inaugural address. “With malice toward none, with charity to all …” This nation desperately needs to return to such sentiment.

After his assassination, President Johnson and President Grant both dealt with the post war bitterness in the same spirit. President Johnson even wisely opted to “forgive” the Southern leaders of the Confederacy which helped the nation recover.

Let the partisans today return to this sentiment. No one is fooled. We all know there are some scallywags in politics in both parties. There always has been and there always will be. Let us, the people, deal with them as we might and hopefully send them packing.

Political parties are necessary. When politicians are working for the benefit of the people instead of themselves, they offer opposing ideas for society to consider. They should work together with respect and tolerance for each other. And quit the childish and expensive bickering which now even attempts to send each other’s leaders to jail.

This is America. It’s time to act accordingly.

© 2024

Part 1 • Part 2

The swing doors to surgery swung open to admit me into a large room fitted with looming and fierce equipment. I was shifted from my gurney to the operation table rather like a big piece of meat served up for Thanksgiving dinner.

A surrounding team of masked staff dressed in scrubs looked down at me. I smiled weakly. “How is everyone?” I asked, a silly thing to say but I could think of nothing else.

There was friendly banter to make me feel at ease. Someone guessed by my speech I was not a native. I felt a new prick in my arm perhaps for anesthesia. There was no escape now.

A tent like thing was placed over my head which promptly collapsed on my face, “I can’t breathe!” I gasped and a hand was inserted inside the canvas to readjust the tent.

“If you don’t mind we are strapping down your arms,” a voice said. I wondered what they would do if I said I did mind? But, of course, they couldn’t have flailing arms getting in the way of surgery.

I began to feel drowsy from anesthesia coursing through my veins. Perhaps I should just go to sleep. But hey! Was that a knife slicing into my chest? “I feel that!” I cried. I heard the doctor order more anesthesia and soon I felt nothing other than pressure on my chest.

A pacemaker is a small battery unit the size of a watch with wires that connect to the heart. If the heart stops beating, the pacemaker gives it a nudge. Fortunately, one does not feel such nudges. My pacemaker was set at 60 beats a minute and if my heart feels a little lazy, my pacemaker will step in.

I was wheeled back to my room. I looked at the clock. About an hour and a half had passed. The worst was over. And it wasn’t bad at all.

I was surrounded with nurses and aides as they worked to see that I was settled comfortably and all my signs from various machines were good. I soon realized I was starved.

No wonder. Dr. Cubbage had called me at breakfast almost 12 hours ago. Chip had missed lunch and dinner too. Dinner hour had passed but I asked the nurse if it was too late to get something to eat.

Soon two box lunches containing turkey sandwiches, salt free chips, fruit and cookies arrived. The food was the best I had ever eaten.

It was late and Chip left for Urbanna. As he was leaving a friend from church was downstairs in the lobby checking into the hospital after a fall. The hospital never closes to emergencies.

No one enjoys the first night after surgery but caring nurses attended to me all night long. They appeared to me more like angels fluttering around my bed helping me stay as comfortable as possible.

One night nurse was ever so sweet, I wish I had learned her name. She was, I think, Filipino and she called me “Mama” every time she came in to check on me. Her tender loving care brought tears to my eyes.

The next morning nurse Amanda Creekmore arrived for the day shift and took over my care. I immediately told her what every patient must say….“I am going home today.”

But I had to wait for my surgeon to release me. He had called for a CT scan of my heart to make sure the pacemaker was just right and to satisfy him that the mass he spotted the day before from the sonar image was calcium. They compared my new CT scan to an earlier CT scan taken in 2018 and discovered there had been no change, a good sign.

A PT therapist and a cardiologist came by to speak to me. I was given some exercises to help my left arm recover. After a tasty lunch, Dr. Ziki came to see me and said I could go home.

Amanda came in to read over the post-surgery advice and help me pack my bag. We laughed when we discovered I could not move my slinged arm in order to wear the dress I had arrived in so I had to make my exit in my robe. I tried to appear as if wearing a robe as one passed through the lobby was perfectly normal. It would be a month before I would have much movement in my arm.

Off we went back to Urbanna. I was soon hugging my dog, “Dandy,” with one arm and propped up in bed remembering the amazing last 36 hours.

Everyone at Riverside cardiology was super. I was well cared for and more than that I actually felt loved and even cherished. They do a marvelous job.

My thanks to the entire Riverside team starting with Amanda, Vickie, Lanette and Dr. Keith Cubbage at White Stone Family Practice who first spotted my problem. I owe them my life.

© 2023

URBANNA — Shortly after returning on a what I called facetiously, “The trip of a Lifetime,” (because the trip was so stressful) a vacation to celebrate our 60th wedding anniversary, something odd happened. Or maybe my serialized columns describing my trip actually foreshadowed what was bound to happen.

One evening soon after our return I rose from the sofa and the next thing I knew I awoke sprawled flat on the floor.

It was eerie finding myself looking up into the brown eyes of my cocker spaniel “Dandy,” who was standing over me looking down at me with concern. Thank goodness I regained consciousness just seconds before a very pink and wet tongue was about to lick my face.

My world was suddenly turned upside down. I had to think who and where I was and wonder whatever was I doing on the floor?

I pulled myself up using the hallway molding to steady myself and headed back to the sofa. I was confused. I must have fainted.

The next morning, I was sitting in my doctor’s office sporting a black eye that made me look like I was related to Ricky Raccoon, whom I feed occasionally, and hearing Dr. Cubbage from White Stone Family Practice lecture me on lesson number 1: whenever you faint, you call 911 immediately and head right to the emergency room.

My black-out triggered various tests to determine what caused me to lose consciousness. I told the doctor as I occasionally will do that I thought it was nothing to worry about and that I had just been over stressed of late.

He wasn’t convinced. “It’s either brain tumor, clogged carotid arteries or heart,” he explained. I didn’t like the sound of any of his choices and secretly felt he was wrong. Everyone knows stress can do terrible things to a person.

I was directed to Riverside Hospital in Newport News to have a heart event monitor fastened to my chest. But I foolishly delayed the test a month because I wanted to swim in the Urbanna Harbour pool in September. Which leads me to lesson number 2: Don’t delay heart monitor tests when your doctor orders it.

Meanwhile I did brain and carotid artery scans and they were fine. I could easily do those tests because they wouldn’t interfere with my swimming schedule.

In October I finally made it to the cardiology department at Riverside Hospital. My instructions were to wear the heart monitor for two weeks to see if there was some irregularity in my heartbeat that had caused the fall.

It was only a small and painless device attached to my chest above my heart but I disliked it mightily. I felt like a stuck pig and complained to anyone who would listen to me. (Dandy.) Lesson number 3: It’s foolish to complain about tests that could save your life.

But as luck would have it, or perhaps better said as bad luck would have it, I only had to wear it one night. It was almost as if my heart took offense at its beat being recorded by some manmade device and kicked up an immediate fuss. Fortunately, I slept right through it.

The next morning was glorious. The sun was streaming into the kitchen from a blue sky that reflected the shimmering Rappahannock River. As I stood spellbound gazing out the window it seemed to me the world was rejoicing in the light.

I was happy because it was Friday and Chip, who had recently gone back to work, was taking a day off from the law office and we had planned some fun.

I was daydreaming, too, remembering mornings growing up long ago in Ohio on the shore of Lake Erie. I thought of Father and how he would greet the morning on a beautiful sunny day. He would throw open the front door and sing a few merry stanzas of “nothing could be finer than to awake in Carolina in the mooorning!”

I never wondered why someone living in Ohio would sing such a song. If Father did it, it would be alright with me. I just loved his exuberance, eternal good cheer and bright optimism … traits I rather wished I had inherited.

My reverie was interrupted by Chip’s cell phone. It was Dr. Cubbage, of all things … he had been trying to reach me for the last hour. He needed to speak to me immediately.

“How are you feeling?” he asked in a concerned voice. I was dumbfounded. Why would my doctor be calling me on a Friday at 9 a.m. and asking me how I was feeling? My brain was grasping hard to find some logic to my doctor’s strange question.

Part 2

© 2023

Part 1 • Part 2 • Part 3 • Part 4 • Part 5

I  have often thought the presidents we end up electing is a direct result of our reaction from the policies of the last one. Thus, we got the honest Carter who promised he would never lie to us after Nixon and the moral Bush after the escapades of Clinton.

Obama’s big win was getting “Obamacare” passed, which opened up medical coverage to many Americans that previously did not have coverage.

My one criticism with Obama was his policy of cozying up to Iran and cooling down our traditional relationship with Israel. Regardless, after eight years of Obama’s policies, enough Americans were unhappy enough to vote for a change. Trump’s election was a gut reaction to Obama’s plan to fundamentally change America.

Donald Trump, however, was the most obnoxious of all the presidents elected in my lifetime. The man couldn’t get through a day without levying insults on someone, usually someone who questioned his ideas. He went through staff like a hungry hen empties a seed bucket.

But let’s give the man some credit. Most of the media were against everything he did and said and did not appreciate what he did for the country. After two years with President Biden, we have seen changes and we might wish for some of Trump policies to return.

For example, our southern border was much more secure then with Trump’s “wait in Mexico” policy so entering immigrants could be vetted and cleared before crossing into our country. We have lost control of those coming into America and this has created a dangerous situation.

Then the state of the world has worsened since Trump left office. Under Biden, Russia felt empowered to invade Ukraine and Hamas attacked Israel, triggering more outbreak of war in the Middle East. Worse, China now threatens to invade Taiwan.

Even more startling is the upsurge of inflation that has caused increases in prices for everything, including groceries, utilities and gasoline. Even Halloween candy this year was noticeably pricier.

And the government keeps spending money with no concern over the rising national debt, which now nears $33 trillion. Both parties are guilty of this trend but it is no wonder inflation is high.

Under Trump we were energy independent and did not have to use our oil reserves meant for national emergencies as we do now or bargain with hostile nations to get the oil we need. The price of gasoline with Trump was moderate.

If anyone wants to buy a house today or get a loan, prepare for a sharp increase in interest rates. And the stock market has dropped abysmally since Biden took over the presidency hurting retirement investments.

COVID-19 came during the last few years of Trump’s term in office as the public tired of his bombastic need to insult or fire anyone who didn’t agree with him. Moderate Republicans didn’t like his personality, most Democrats despised him, especially those who worked in government, because Trump made it no secret he intended to cut back bureaucracy.

But hard working, middle class and rural Americans, blue collar troops, the military and many conservatives adored him because they felt at last there was someone in the White House who cared about them.

After a raucous election in 2020, President Biden was elected president. Those who voted for him were convinced he would bring a new era of good feeling and an improved society.

But I no longer feel safe in the world. I worry about another world war breaking out and nations letting loose nuclear weapons. I worry about terrorist attacks at home. I am horrified by the new wave of antisemitism in the world, like a reoccurring nightmare from World War II.

I have lost 20 percent of retirement savings in a slumped stock market and my grocery, utility and gas bills have gone out of sight.

My daughter was caught with high interest rates when buying a house and my son struggles in his business with high taxes.

I am concerned about my granddaughter, who attends a college in New York, as crime, violence and protests have spiked in most major US cities. I am worried our nation will go bankrupt unless a change is coming in fiscal responsibility.

I am concerned about how America will support the millions of new refugees that could overwhelm schools, clinics, hospitals and social services. I wonder if native Americans will receive the attention they need or are they to be forgotten under new economic strains?

Our presidents affect the quality of our lives and the state of our nation. We need a great leader today to inspire the nation, bring our divided nation back together again and solve our worsening problems.

They say needy times produce great leaders… the George Washingtons, Thomas Jeffersons, Abraham Lincolns, Franklin D. Roosevelts, Ronald Reagans and Martin Luther Kings of this world.

The time of great need in America has once more arrived.

(This is the final column of a series on recent U.S. presidents.)

© 2023