Be Prepared

{Prompt: What was it like, being a boy? Is it challenging, being a man?}

Becoming a “Man” - The Stages

I probably know more than the average person about child development and gender roles. Believe it or not, I took both Child Psychology (at NC State University), and Child Psychiatry (at Duke University Medical School), during my academic career (a long and tedious stage of my life when I accepted both trivia and tutelage for my efforts instead of money). I even learned the stages of childhood cognitive development as defined by the Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget.

Jean Piaget— an eminent child psychologist

I should know a lot about childhood from my “edumacation” (as they say ’round here) but I think I learned just a little bit… and maybe more… from my personal experiences as a boy and as a man. I’m no Jean Piaget; but here are my stages of boyhood/manhood:

Stage 1 - Blissful ignorance: The first three or four years of life when there are no expectations, and all behavior is acceptable, except for flinging yourself into a busy road or walking barefoot into Church. Those actions will get you put into time-out. (And if you sass back your Momma or your Daddy, you might even earn yourself a whuppin’.)

Stage 2 - Social consciousness: The whole prepubescent time frame when you begin to realize that you must embrace heteronormative behavior or risk being called things like “sweet”, “shy”, “sissy”, or, worst of all, “gay”. (At least, that’s how it was in the ’60s. You tell me if it’s changed.) Boys were expected to be good at football, dodgeball, and tag, but not good at skipping-rope or clapping-games. Boys were expected to play with little green soldiers, Hot Wheels, cap guns, and Tonka trucks, but not Barbie dolls, Lite-Brite, or the Easy-Bake Oven. Boys were expected to use hand tools, get dirty, and strike out on adventures. Girls were expected to use kitchen tools, look pretty, and take care of babies. I’m not saying that’s right or wrong. That’s just how it was when I was a kid.

Stage 3 - Finding a mate: the agonizing period between the full embrace of gender roles, at the onset of puberty, and marriage (the happenstance pairing of two people who have a mutual attraction and more than a passing acquaintance). For men, most of this stage is spent learning to anticipate and deal with rejection, learning to act with impunity (and to hell with the consequences), and learning to “control” (or hide) emotions (and desires).

Stage 4 - Married life: the period (if all goes well) when you unlearn all those self-destructive habits associated with toxic masculinity (or — if things do not go so well — you find a mate who can abide all of your bad habits, who is happily subservient to your whims and caprices).

Of course, marriage could include all sorts of dysfunctional relationships (and frequently does), but much of my marriage involved a good deal of negotiation and compromise as to the proper, best, or at least acceptable way of doing things. It included an ongoing effort to learn how to communicate (out loud and with civility); learn how to spend less money on fast food (and eat more homemade food and leftovers); learn how to clean the kitchen before cleaning any other part of the house (or yard); and learn how to reflexively say, “Yes, dear” instead of “You must be kidding!” to every spousal request.

I could spend days deconstructing the dynamics of couplehood and marriage. And it might be truly therapeutic. But this story is about boyhood, so let’s focus on that stage — stage 2 in my fanciful model above.

Let’s go back to the middle of the Civil Rights Movement, when blacks (and whites) were engaged in peaceful resistance, and the Counterculture Era, when hippies were listening to rock ’n’ roll (and Folk) music and protesting the Vietnam War. Let’s go back to my childhood in the late ’60s and the early ’70s.

My fifth grade class - I am at the bottom left.

School and Sunday School

Of course, I was in elementary school in the seventies. I was at Sherwood Bates Elementary as a boy. I was learning to write in cursive and to multiply using multiplication tables.

We checked books out of the library (by punching a date stamp on the checkout card), ran all over the field at recess (playing games or watching the bees buzzing around the clover), held assemblies to sing “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head” to our parents, and stared out the big classroom windows during lessons at the chalkboard.

My elementary school was a conglomerate of Black and white children and Black and white teachers all living in harmony. (Desegregation began in earnest in 1971–72 in Raleigh, when I would have been in second grade. The song Black and White, by Three Dog Night, came out in 1972 and pretty well captures the feeling of the time.)

I was also going to Sunday school at Hayes Barton United Methodist Church, as a boy — learning about the Bible, and especially about Jesus. Jesus was, and always has been (and always will be) the paragon of virtue. I’m sure you knew that.

He was most certainly my earliest role model, outside of my family. He would turn the other cheek to avoid conflict. He would give the shirt off his back to help others. He would talk to a prostitute, even when she had been shunned by the whole town.

He was held forth as a model of peaceful coexistence, back then, both inside and outside the Church sanctuary. Jesus Christ Superstar, the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical, premiered in October 1971. I think I saw a version of it at Raleigh Memorial Auditorium, with my family, within a year or two of its premiere.

When I wasn’t in church school, learning all the stories about Jesus and the parables he taught, I was learning to sing (and play music) as a member of the children’s choir, and then the youth choir, and then the handbell choir.

We also had religious “fun” by going to a variety of Christian events. We went to an old-fashioned revival, out in a field with a tent, way out in the country, in some place like Garner. Or Benson! They served barbecue with baked beans and Brunswick stew (Yuck), and instead of hush puppies they had strange fried bread sticks the length of a pencil. They had a quartet singing spirituals in four-part harmony. They sounded just like the Oak Ridge Boys. Maybe it was the Oak Ridge Boys.

We went on religious retreats to places like Lake Junaluska and Wrightsville Beach. We once stayed at a high-rise hotel on the beach called the Blockade Runner, named for the ships that would run through the blockade around Wilmington during the Civil War.

We once went to a service where folks were encouraged to come up front and be filled with the Holy Spirit by speaking in tongues. I’ve since learned that’s something that’s often done in the Pentecostal churches. Of course I couldn’t understand what they were doing or saying, so I’m pretty sure I asked my mom what they were saying, and she explained the whole phenomenon of speaking in tongues to me in a way I could understand.

By the time we went to the Billy Graham crusade in September of 1973, I was prepared. I knew just about everything I know today about Jesus and the Bible.

But in all seriousness, the Billy Graham crusade was an amazing event, led by a truly charismatic preacher. Billy Graham held his crusade at Carter (now Carter-Finley) Stadium, in Raleigh, near the fairgrounds, for seven nights in a row; and most accounts agree that the stadium was filled every night. I had never been to a place so big, or as filled with reverence, as the stadium was that night, when I was still just a 9-year-old boy.

There were hymns sung by George Beverly Shea, who probably sang How Great Thou Art. And there were hymns sung in unison by the 40,000 people in the stadium! They probably including He Leadeth Me, and Just As I Am, the latter serving as the altar call — the call to come to the (football) field below the preacher’s podium to make a public commitment “to take God as your savior” and dedicate, or rededicate, your life to Christianity— to “be reborn. Thousands of people were reborn in Carter Finley stadium in Raleigh that week, including myself.

Evangelist Billy Graham inspiring Faith

Gaining Merit (Badges)

Outside of school and religion I was just an ordinary boy. I liked to explore the neighborhood creek. I liked to climb the dogwood and magnolia trees. I liked to ride my bike. I liked reading books (The Hobbit, The Chronicles of Narnia, etc.), and I liked watching TV.

But in two activities, in fact, I must have been a boy by definition— I was a newspaper “boy” for the Raleigh Times (which I write about in another story), and I was a member of the Boy Scouts of America (BSA, now called Scouting USA).

Looking back on those times, when I was in elementary school and 6th grade — from age 5 to 11 — it’s surprising how much the things that I did in the Boy Scouts match the things that I enjoy as an adult. My love of hiking and being outdoors undoubtedly started with the backpacking and camping excursions in Boy Scouts. And my first introduction to medicine probably began with the first aid skills that I learned back in the ‘70s with my Boy Scout troop.

Besides first aid, scouts were expected to learn certain basic skills — skills that I can boast a bit of familiarity with when called upon, albeit rarely — tying a knot, pounding in a tent stake, pitching a tent, chopping wood, gathering kindling, starting a fire, preparing a dehydrated meal from a package, filtering water, cleaning the dishes, packing a backpack, hiking, and not getting lost.

Chopping a log, in uniform - circa 1976

Boy Scouts must always “be prepared” — the scouting motto. Some would say that I’ve embraced preparedness to an unhealthy degree.

I blame the scouts.

Scouts must swear, “On my honor I will do my best to do my duty to God and my country and to obey the Scout Law; to help other people at all times; to keep myself physically strong, mentally awake, and morally straight.”

That’s quite a proclamation, if you think about it.

Boy Scout Oath, Salute, and Logo

I think in my life, I’ve gone four for four:

- Help people at all times. Check. Well… partial check. “At all times” is a pretty high bar.

- Physically strong. Tentative check. Strength is kind of relative, I’ve learned.

- Mentally awake. Double check.

- Morally straight. Well… I met the moral requisites of the NC Medical Board for almost 30 years, so I think that’s a check, also.

Do you know the twelve principles of Scout law?

I do — or rather, I did. I used to have them memorized.

They are:

Trustworthy, Loyal, Helpful…

…Friendly, Courteous, Kind…

…Obedient, Cheerful, Thrifty…

…Brave, Clean, and Reverent.

Those last three are the hardest.

Did I mention the uniform? Scouts wore a khaki shirt and pants, with a U.S. flag patch on the right shoulder and the Scout council, unit, and troop number on the left shoulder.

With a little research (and photo confirmation), I can state that our troop was a part of the Occoneechee Council, in the North Star district. I was in troop 348, which met in the basement of the Hayes Barton Methodist church. (Troop 325 met at the Hayes Barton Baptist church about three blocks away.)

The khaki shirt came with epaulettes on the shoulder, sorta like in the military. The shirts had a collar of course, but not the pointed collar of a disco shirt. It was just an ordinary collar, but we could wear a tie or a neckerchief with the collar. It seems like the neckerchief was for the Cub Scouts or the Webelos, but I have no idea, anymore. I just remember that at some point in my life I was rolling up a dark blue scarf diagonally, to proudly hang around my neck (see below).

There was an olive green web belt with an adjustable metal buckle, embossed with the BSA logo, to be worn around the waist. In Cub Scouts, we could earn belt-slide metal clips, decorated with enamel icons, for certain “Skill Awards.” Those metal loops were fantastic. I loved them.

I think that in Cub Scouts we also wore a sash for the merit badges that we earned. (They had to be sewn on.) But in Boy Scouts I think that the sash was only worn on ceremonial occasions, and your most ‘meritorious’ badges could be sewn onto your shirt.

A truly unbelievable collection of patches

Or maybe it was the patch for the “rank” of the Boy Scout that was sewn onto the shirt.

I know now that the ranks of Scout are Tenderfoot, Second Class, First Class, Star, Life, and Eagle. I’m fairly sure I only made it as far as Second Class.

As much as I loved earning merit badges, I can’t imagine why I didn’t achieve a higher rank. Maybe the higher ranks required more time, loyalty, and obedience than I could muster. Maybe academics took precedence. Maybe our troop was too much in disarray.

Or maybe I was in disarray.

I always knew that Eagle Scout was unachievable for me. Eagle Scouts were seemingly in it for life. They had to be tenacious and they had to complete an insanely laborious community project, which seemed impossible to me at the time.

But I have to give them kudos for such an accomplishment. I think my Uncle Bill was an Eagle Scout. (And a Physics professor.) At least someone in the family made it.

Mike Gallup, in BSA uniform, with an impressive backpack.

A Cautionary Tale

Most stories about the Boy Scouts are stories about disaster. I mean, what else can you expect when you put a bunch of preadolescent boys in one place.

Here’s one example.

On one of our trips we traveled to the “far off” wilds of western North Carolina (possibly in the Uwharrie mountains—which, by the way, are more like foothills than mountains. None of them are over 1,200 feet high.)

After the mayhem of arriving, pitching tents, gathering kindling, cooking some beans, and poking at the fire, we went to bed, trying to find a comfortable way to sleep on the uneven, knobby ground of the real outdoors in our poofy nylon sleeping bags.

The next day we spent an hour or so in preparation to navigate our way, a mile or two down the trail to a lake. It must have been a well marked or an isolated trail, because no one got lost and no one took a wrong turn—which is a rarity in my experience. In fact, we did the entire trail without adult supervision.

Be that as it may, we ended up at the lake as planned, with no misadventures upon the trail.

However, no one had really planned what to do at the lake. There were no boats. There was no swimming area. There was no fishing gear. There was only a short pier and a rocky beach and about eight pre-adolescent boys from the city, dressed up in Boy Scout garb.

Well, one of this intrepid bunch decided to take off his shoes, roll up his pants cuffs, and wade out into the muckety-muck.

Not having anything better to do, and by nature willing to imitate the actions of anyone with assertiveness, some of the others began to take off their shoes and socks, and dip their toes into the placid water. One or two of us had waded out into the lake, where the shore was littered with moss-covered stones, driftwood, and mud.

Unfortunately, one of the troop discovered there was also broken glass beneath the surface… he cut his foot, and with a cry of alarm he limped his way back to the shore.

With images of an underwater minefield of glass in our heads, all the rest of us carefully retraced our steps, hoping to avoid the fate of our fallen comrade.

Safely back at shore, we inspected his cut for embedded glass, which was thankfully absent, and we applied a bandage, probably wrapped from a sock, a T-shirt, or a blue Boy Scout bandana. The bleeding was minimal but undoubtedly painful.

Then we debated how best to go back for proper treatment — whether to prepare a cot with which to drag the hobbled child, or attempt a fireman’s carry, or send a runner up the trail for assistance. In the end, we decided upon the “Four-handed Seat Carry”, a lesser-known rescue carry, possibly one known only to army medics, paramedics, and Boy Scouts in training.

The Four-handed Seat Carry

I had never seen this rescue technique before, and I’ve never seen it since, but I saw it implemented that day with an incredible amount of conviction.

In theory, two people form a sturdy place to sit by grasping each other’s forearms, while the conscious or semi-conscious victim sits with their arms around the necks of the rescuers. And in practice, it looks pretty much like the picture above — at least until the rescuers start to get tired.

And it doesn’t take long for some ten-year-old boys to get tired when lugging a 75 pound scout up a forest trail.

And its awfully hard for this assembly of three to walk sideways up a trail that’s only wide enough for one or two hikers.

Still, we made some progress, using our overly engineered, merit-badge worthy carry, but it was slow progress — painfully slow.

In the end, I think that the boy with the laceration chose to dismount this humiliating makeshift seat, and limp, hopping on one leg, with one person for support — football-injury style.

Upon our return, the scoutmasters reacted with alarm to the whole situation. They had little regard for the ingenuity of our rescue or our chivalrous behavior. (I think they were probably sweating bullets for letting the boys go off and hurt themselves, while they were completely unsupervised.)

Conclusion – The Mantle of Manhood

Before my time in the scouts came to an end, I was lucky enough to have my Dad participate in a day of gun safety and shooting at a gun range, with the troop. I don’t know how it came to fruition, but my Dad spent a few hours talking to us about guns and letting us actually shoot some guns under proper supervision.

He had a rifle that we learned to fire in the standing… kneeling… and prone positions. (I think most of our firing was allowed only in the prone position, where we were least likely to dangerously swing the rifle from side to side.)

We learned to load the chamber, line up the sights, and slowly — very slowly — squeeze the trigger.

I hardly ever touched a gun after that day, but for one day at least, I was a “deadly weapon.” I would hazard to say that the other kids took my dad pretty seriously too, when he gave this session on the use of firearms. It wasn’t playtime anymore.

Gerry Gallup with his .22 rifle in August 1971

My dad died unexpectedly in the winter of 1977, when I was still only twelve years old. Even so, I was lucky to have a pretty good male role model, for the entirety of my boyhood.

After his death, I still enjoyed the rambunctious ramblings of a teenager in the days before internet and smartphones.

I went to movies at the Rialto, rode a moped around to see my friends, chopped up wood for our fireplace, saw the orthodontist for braces, and played basketball up at the courts outside of Sherwood Bates Elementary School.

The halcyon days of childhood — playing kickball and picking buttercups , were gone forever.

I became less involved in Boy Scouts and in Methodist Church activities, and more or less withdrew to hang out with a stable group of childhood friends who supported me (along with my family’s support) for the next three years, until I went off to school at the School of Science and Math.

It’s been many years since the boyhood I fondly remember. Many years learning to be a good man. And many years learning to be a good husband.

I’m still learning, but now that I’m married and retired, the mantle of manhood seems a little bit lighter than it did before.

Redbuds in bloom at Sherwood Bates school

Appendix I - “The Seven Ages of Man”

From As You Like It by William Shakespeare

All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages. At first, the infant,
Mewling and puking in the nurse’s arms.
Then the whining schoolboy, with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school. And then the lover,
Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad
Made to his mistress’ eyebrow. Then a soldier,
Full of strange oaths and bearded like the pard,
Jealous in honor, sudden and quick in quarrel,
Seeking the bubble reputation
Even in the cannon’s mouth. And then the justice,
In fair round belly with good capon lined,
With eyes severe and beard of formal cut,
Full of wise saws and modern instances;
And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts
Into the lean and slippered pantaloon,
With spectacles on nose and pouch on side;
His youthful hose, well saved, a world too wide
For his shrunk shank, and his big manly voice,
Turning again toward childish treble, pipes
And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion,
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything

Appendix II - Lyrics to “A Man I’ll Never Be”

from Boston’s Don’t Look Back album by Tom Scholz. 1978

If I said what’s on my mind
You’d turn and walk away
Disappearing way back in your dreams
It’s so hard to be unkind
So easy just to say
That everything is just the way it seems
You look up at me
And somewhere in your mind, you see
A man I’ll never be
If only I could find a way
I’d feel like I’m the man you believe I am
It’s getting harder every day for me
To hide behind this dream you see
A man I’ll never be
I can’t get any stronger
And I can’t climb any higher
You’ll never know just how hard I’ve tried
Cry a little longer
And hold a little tighter
Emotions can’t be satisfied…

Appendix III -List of Fictional Role Models on TV in the ‘70s

TV dads

Mike Brady (Robert Reed) on The Brady Bunch

Pa (Michael Landon) on Little House on the Prairie

John Walton (Ralph Waite) on The Waltons

James Evans (John Amos) on Good Times (Seasons 1-3)

Andy Taylor (Andy Griffith) on the Andy Griffith Show

TV families without (suitable) Dads

All in the Family

One Day at a Time

Good Times (Seasons 4-6)

The Partridge Family

Not Dads at All, (but role-models, nonetheless)

Gabe Kotter (Gabe Kaplan) on Welcome Back Kotter

Hawkeye (Alan Alda) on M*A*S*H

Kirk (William Shatner), Spock (Leonard Nimoy), and McCoy (DeForest Kelley) on Star Trek

James West (Robert Conrad) and Artemis Gordon (Ross Martin) on Wild, Wild West

Mr. Grant (Ed Asner) and Murray (Gavin Mcleod) on the Mary Tyler Moore show

James Rockford (James Garner) on The Rockford Files

When I Grow Up

{Prompt: If you had to go back in time and start a brand new career, what would it be?}

Fire Station Six

When I was five or six, I remember going with a gaggle of children to Raleigh Fire Department, Station 6, at the corner of Fairview and Oberlin.

Sidebar: The corner of Fairview and Oberlin was near the edge of my known world, at the time; across the street from Johnson’s Pharmacy, where we could go for shakes and burgers, and spin on the bar stools after school, when I was older.

And it was on the way to Hayes Barton Methodist Church, where I would struggle to stay awake, on Sunday mornings, during the interminable oratory of the 11 o’clock service. (I spent most of the service looking through the pages of the hymnal or entering a slightly hypnotic state, by gazing at the stained glass windows of the chapel.) But I digress. Back to our story….

I knew it was Fire Station Six, because it said so in big blocky, aluminum letters on the front of the red brick building — so big and so legible that even a preschooler could read them. As we milled around the concrete driveway of the fire station garage, firemen in faded yellow canvas outfits with indefinable gear (indefinable for a little kid), gave us pep talks on the civic virtues of the fire department, showed off their impressively clean and bright, metallic red fire trucks, and showed how the shiny poles inside the garage led up into the living quarters above.

I think it was about that time that I wrote “Fireman” on a little piece of lined elementary school writing paper, carefully printed in graphite, in answer to the question of “What would you like to be when you grow up?”

Shiny Ladder & Pump Truck at Station 6 (Credit: Mike Legeros).

Our Backyard Brick Patio

As a child, I remember my father being pretty handy with tools, and taking on many small projects inside and outside the house. I’m pretty sure he built a storage shed in the very back of our backyard, beneath the oak tree that had held our treehouse the year before.

And he had planted a garden on one side of our backyard, with rows of corn, tomatoes, and something called “Dill”. I remember that clearly.

And we had a sturdy clothesline running at a jaunty angle from one pine tree on one side of the backyard to another one way down at the other end. Pulling in the laundry was a way I “helped” my Mom from time to time.

But I was about 12 when my father decided to undertake a project in our backyard unlike any he had done before. He decided to build a curved brick patio, serving as a transition from the 10 by 10 foot concrete slab (our de facto backyard terrace) to the previously unimproved lot, of trampled pine straw, clay, and tree roots. This patio was to serve no useful purpose for a child or a teen — it couldn’t be drawn on with chalk or used for playing marbles. It wouldn’t be good for rolling around on a bike or a scooter, or root-filled enough to serve as an imaginary WWII landscape for our little green army men. As a matter of fact, it was planned to have a gently flowing border with a short retaining wall, a bench, and a small pond for keeping fish. It was built purely to be a place for relaxation and to be aesthetically pleasing.

Over the span of several weeks, my dad leveled the ground, laid out the bricks, spread out sand to fill the spaces, and constructed a small sitting wall and pond using bricks and mortar. I don’t recall any celebration or party, but to me, at the time, the undertaking seemed Herculean… the result, somewhat mythical. (Years later, my brother and I built an addition to the patio — a wooden deck that I like to think my father would have approved of.)

A photo of the patio (taken by Gerald Gallup).

It was about that time that I entertained the idea of becoming a Landscape Architect when I grew up.

A typical illustration of a landscape architect.

Vocational Planning

In junior high school, back in the day, we all were given a reprieve from our lessons for an hour or two, to take a vocational aptitude test. Sometime in the 70s, I think I took the Strong Interest Inventory. It was designed to match our expressed interests and our personalities with those of people in various careers. Based on our responses, our interests were graded and categorized as “Realistic”, “Investigative”, “Artistic”, “Social”, “Enterprising”, or “Conventional”. I’m pretty sure that I was told on the computer-generated report (something new, at the time), that my scores highly matched those of people in “adventure” careers, and in “science” careers. My scores poorly matched those of people in “clerical” or “service” careers. Consequently, the top matches for me were careers like “Airline Pilot” and “Medical Doctor”.

An array of workers from various vocations.

I think it was less than a year later that I entered the School of Science and Math. Although the school took pains to be sure that we had a complete education, including the humanities, I think that we all felt an unspoken (or thinly veiled) pressure to succeed in our future endeavors — or, at least, not to fail and bring disgrace to the school — a publicly funded experiment of a residential school for students gifted in science and math. So I guess, I drank the Kool-aid, as it were, and I found myself applying to colleges in the School of Mathematics or the School of Engineering. Mind you, it wasn’t a wrong choice. I was quite good at math, and I had an interest in design and problem-solving. Engineering was a solid, logical choice.

However, when I took the Intro to Engineering course at Vanderbilt University, I found out that Engineers are frequently beholden to corporate entities, working at the behest of others, with what I perceived to be limited autonomy. Something about the experience turned me off, and when I transferred back to NC State University (due to tuition costs), I entered the Department of Agriculture and Life Sciences as a Pre-med major.

I honestly think that was the best decision I ever made, although it was really only the first of many decisions to be made in choosing a medical career.

Patterson Hall - at NC State University (Credit: Bryan Pollard)

Medical School and Residency

Later I narrowed my medical ambitions to either Emergency Medicine or Family Practice. Ironically, those are the two specialties that treat the widest variety of medical conditions, so I hadn’t narrowed my focus by much.

I matched to a Transitional Year - Medicine Internship at Montefiore Hospital in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, a city where there were several highly regarded residency programs in Emergency Medicine — the direction I was leaning at the time. I even interviewed for Emergency Medicine residency programs, traveling as far as Worcester, Massachusetts, and Albuquerque, New Mexico, to explore the options.

But when it came time for me to rank my residency programs for “The Match”, I had serious doubts about how much I wanted to subject myself to critical level scenarios on a daily basis. I tried to pivot to a match in family medicine where continuity of care and bedside manner were more important. Unfortunately, by the time I realized that family practice is a perfectly respectable specialty (contrary to Duke Medical School’s culture), I failed to match with any program at all.

At this time, I was married, and I had already taken my wife from the warm Southern weather of North Carolina, to the Arctic winter and sunless skies of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Now I had to tell her that we were moving again. And mainly because of my lack of foresight regarding my career aspirations.

Luckily, Dianne has a job that relies on medical data, and a job that would be in great demand at nearly any institution that I chose. Together, we looked at the options for programs that had unmatched openings for second-year residents, and one location sort of popped off the page — Columbia, South Carolina, the city in which my mother had been born and raised.

Columbia— the capital of South Carolina.

Would I Do It All Again?

So I went to residency in South Carolina, and following residency, I practiced family medicine for 26 years. I retired in 2019. I think I can honestly say that I never regretted my choice of career. I’m not saying I wasn’t exhausted, overwhelmed, or unprepared. I just knew, when I went through medical school, that I was in the right place. I was in a field of study where there was—and still is—so much to be discovered. A field of study that would allow me to exercise my independent streak, by opening a private practice, and yet allow me to give advice and comfort to people in all walks of life, while enjoying just a little bit of small talk with each encounter.

When I retired, I made a list of jobs I would consider, if I had to return to work (if our financial resources were insufficient). The jobs I had listed included Teacher, Surveyor, Ecologist, Landscape Architect, Writer, Park Ranger, and Bookstore owner. I even entertained returning for a residency in Pathology, or serving as a Medical Director for a Hospice program or a nursing home, or working as a Medical Examiner (for disability determination), or keeping my hand in the medical field by serving as a Scribe.

But I have little interest in returning to medicine after 30 years of medical school and practice. I would prefer to feed my hunger for the outdoors, or strike out into the world of the arts. Neither of those fields are likely to bring me much profit or acclaim, but they might bring me a measure of mindfulness and satisfaction.

Then again, is it too late to become a firefighter?

(Credit: Cosumnes FD)

Time Everlasting

{Prompt: What do you remember of your relatives?}

My Aunts and Uncles

As I grew up, around age four or five, I became aware that my mother had two brothers and a sister, and I had numerous cousins. They just didn’t live nearby. Her brothers were Bill and Frank (Whitesell). Her sister was Mary Lou (Minyard).

Uncle Bill and Aunt Corinne lived in Yellow Springs, Ohio, with their children. They were “The Whitesells”. Aunt Corinne had two children from a previous marriage who were adopted by Uncle Bill when they married. They were part of the family. But Aunt Corinne also lived a long time in Anchorage, Alaska, without Uncle Bill, for reasons unknown. That was just the arrangement.

Uncle Bill was a physics professor at Antioch College for years upon years, and he was an avid runner, even running up forest roads into the mountains from my grandparents’ farm in the Shenandoah Valley. Uncle Bill was a boy scout (probably an Eagle scout) as a kid, and I’ve seen pictures of him with a violin. It seems like he was good at everything he did. He was probably the pride of the family.

Uncle Jim and Aunt Mary Lou lived in Starkville, Mississippi with their family. They were “The Minyards”. Uncle Jim was a chemistry professor at Mississippi State University. Uncle Jim was probably a Baptist, judging by his fervor for the Bible and his zeal for spreading the Word. Aunt Mary Lou became his wife, and the mother of five children. She must have been a wonderful mother, judging from the happy disposition and affection of her children. Whether Uncle Jim was a wonderful father or not, I can’t say for sure. Uncle Jim had strong opinions and seemed to see the world in terms of right and wrong. I felt like his expectations might have been hard to live up to — a feeling that was confirmed at his funeral, when my cousin Tommy said as much.

Uncle Frank lived in another part of Mississippi. He lived in Hattiesburg, where he was an Economics professor. Although he was married to a woman named Dixie, they were divorced after 7 years, and he never married again. I don’t know why. If he had other relationships down in Mississippi, they were never discussed.

The few times that we met, he always had a gentle smile, treating me with kindness, and treating me as if I was an adult. Possibly he had learned how to treat young men with kindness and ease, from his experience as a college instructor. He had no children, and left all of his retirement savings to his sister — my mother, Margaret — when he passed away. He died from cancer in 2017.

Frank, Margaret, Mary Lou, and Bill - circa 1990.

My Cousins

My cousins, the Whitesells of Ohio, included David, Selwa, Betty, Janet, and Danny. My cousins, the Minyards of Mississippi, included Susan, Tom, Barbara, Carol, and Billy. I always think of my cousins as the children that they were in the ’70s, because that’s when we saw each other the most—wandering around the farmhouse (“The Farm”) in the Shenandoah Valley, near Stanley, Virginia.

David and Selwa Whitesell were the oldest, and were sometimes absent at family get-togethers (possibly doing things with their mother, Corinne, or possibly doing things that older children would enjoy.) When they did show up for a get-together, I had to be reminded that they were my cousins. They just didn’t hang out with us much. I thought they were already all grown up, but in reality, they were only six or seven years older than me and my brother.

Susan and Tommy Minyard were only a little bit older than my brother, Mike (three and one year older, respectively), and they were naturally expected to come up with fun things to do whenever there was nothing to do. And that was most of the time, since the adults were usually engaged in boring conversation, and we never had access to a TV at the farm.

Betty Whitesell and Barbara Minyard (the middle children) were closer to Mike’s age (maybe just a little bit younger), but I think that he spent more time hanging out with Tommy. He and Tommy were both little mischief-makers, looking for ways to get themselves in trouble, and then trying to keep word of the mischief from reaching our dads, who might very well have given them a whuppin’ if they felt it was justified.

Janet Whitesell and Carol Minyard were just about the same age as I was. I had never had a sister; so when I met a female relative — a cousin — that was my age, in my family, I studied them with a great deal of curiosity, as if they were extraterrestrials or body snatchers.

Danny Whitesell was about my age, and Billy Minyard was just a little bit younger. Now they call themselves, Daniel and Bill, respectively, but back in the 70s, they were still Danny and Billy. They were along for the ride. And so was I, most of the time.

Most of us at my grandparents’ 50th anniversary – July 1976

The Farm

Most of the time, we met each other at the farm in the summer, or sometimes, at Thanksgiving. I think that once we met for Christmas at my grandparents’ first home, in Columbia, South Carolina. I vividly remember a small decorative sculpted metal tree with colorful jellied gumdrops at Christmas time, and a rendition of O Little Town of Bethlehem, by Uncle Jim, at bedtime, in an unabashedly mellifluous, baritone singing-voice.

Christmas in Columbia, South Carolina with the Minyards

And once we went to Hattiesburg, because I remember going to the Mississippi State University student center and playing some improvised game (without pool sticks) at a pool table. That might have been the same time that I went exploring with somebody near my age in the belly of a church, behind or under the altar, and I got a reprimand from my mother, because the congregation could hear us screaming in glee while we were playing hide and seek, or tag, or some other ad hoc children’s game.

But every other time, we were at the farm, the historic farmhouse in the Shenandoah Valley that had been built around 1830 by my ancestors. It was built in pioneer times. Now it is listed as the Locust Grove property in Page County, by the National Register of Historic Places, but once it was simply known as the Old Jacob Brubaker house.

“The Farm” in Page County in the Shenandoah Valley

Most of the time, while we were at the farm, we were exploring. We would go back, past the lawn of the backyard… and down, into the cow pasture, dodging Frisbee-sized cow-patties, and avoiding thorny thistle plants that were as tall as a rake.

We would wander down the two ruts of the dirt road that led to the cow barn, and look into the big barn doors, opening on their rusty hinges — looking at the bits of hay suspended in the air above the upper floor where there was a hay loft. Or we would wander a little further down, to the lower floor where the mud was impressively deep, having once been gouged into deep hoof prints by cattle during the rainy season.

We wandered sometimes all the way to the creek at the bottom of the sloping pasture, and we would attempt some feat of hydraulic engineering with whatever objects we could find to use as building materials (mostly big rocks and mud).

Usually I was distracted by dragonflies, with their metallic sheen and iridescent bodies, perching imperiously on a blade of tall grass… or hovering over the water in a perfect state of suspended animation… or gliding through the air in lines as straight as vectors… completely unlike the circuitous paths of the houseflies, moths, and butterflies.

On one occasion, we walked down to the creek by way of the country road, the one that headed north towards Ida and Luray. At the bottom of the hill, where the road crossed the creek, we turned onto a flat metal, grated structure, sort of like a pier, that extended away from the road about 10 feet out over the brook. I have no idea what it was for.

As we went out onto this lookout point, we stirred up a nest of bees or hornets. I think it might have been Tommy, Mike, me, and Billy. There was a lot of screaming as one of us got stung, and the prospects of more stinging seemed assured as a small swarm of buzzing vespids started flying all around us, chasing us up - at least halfway up - the hill, back to the farmhouse. I think that Billy suffered several stings. I ran the fastest, when the alarm was raised, and came away mostly unscathed.

We also explored the crawl space and the basement underneath the house. But they were cold and dank compared to the area beneath the porch. The back porch of the old farmhouse was covered by lattice, and the space beneath was relatively cool and comfortable on a summer day. We could stay hidden beneath the back porch for hours. I rarely ventured farther back into the darkened basement beneath the house. I only learned later that there were rooms and cots under the house that had once belonged to domestic servants or slaves.

We loved to go down to the pump house where a 3 or 4 foot tall, heavy hunter green, cast-iron water pump stood, right above a trough, where the water from the well could be pumped into the cow pasture. On the antique pump there was a long curving pump handle that with the proper ministrations — a long sweep of up-and-down pushing and pulling — could be persuaded to suck water up from far below, and send it gurgling out of the sizable spigot. That was the best mechanical creation I had ever played with!

The Pump House on “The Farm” (without the pump)

There was also a large farm bell placed atop a 4x4 post, right outside the back door to the kitchen. There were no cattle and no farm hands at the farm in my lifetime, but the bell was still there, and once or twice it was used to beckon us children back to the house. I thank grandma let us use it once to call grandpa in from his woodshed.

The woodshed — in the back, off to one side — was the place where granddad crafted his black walnut stools, side tables, picture frames, and weather vanes. It was a thinly clad wooden structure with a very small, open crawlspace — a crawlspace only big enough for cats and vermin to crawl beneath — too small even for preschoolers. On the stoop, at the door to the shop, I recall the smell of varnish and the swirl of sawdust in the air — the interior mostly hidden in shadow. Children were not generally welcomed amongst the cutting tools or the finished wooden projects, which were waiting for the glue and varnish to dry.

There was also an ancient graveyard on a small hill between the farmhouse and the mountains. It contained the graves of a few of the Brubaker ancestors that once lived on the farm — some of them, infants. The graves were out past the outhouse — well past — at the edge of the yard, where the woods began.

The outhouse itself was at the end of a flagstone path that ran beneath an arbor of grapes. Night and day the rickety wooden door was secured by a swiveling wooden latch, which could easily be dislodged, allowing the door to accidentally open. Someone had added a cabin hook on the inside, allowing the occupant to keep the door closed more securely — a small concession to privacy. Still, there was little comfort in using the outhouse, as the stench of it was certainly far greater than a modern bathroom — more nearly in line with the overwhelming odor of urine and feces in a Porta John.

The Outhouse on the Farm.

The House

We also spent many summer hours enjoying the cool interior of the old farmhouse. The best part of it all (inside or out) was the wide banister rail of the grand flight of hallway stairs in the middle of the house. The rail was at least six inches wide, securely fastened, and as slippery-smooth as a water slide. A child with even the least amount of balance could easily slide five to ten feet down the banister rail, slip off to the side, and land on their feet. If there were any fear of sliding across the curlicue of the rail at the bottom of the stairs, one could make an easier slide above the turn in the stairs, at the landing near the top.

In the attic could be found vintage toys from a bygone era — dilapidated editions of The Marvelous Land of Oz, wooden spelling toys, and toys loosely associated with the old TV Batman series. “Wham! Pow!”

In the kitchen, there were other vestiges of life in the past. Water from the outdoor pump was brought to the kitchen and ladled into a basin, and there we would wash our hands for dinner. A tank-sized antique oven had been decommissioned, and now adorned the corner of the dining room — replaced in the kitchen by a less primitive version from the ‘60s or ‘70s.

Next to the kitchen, there was a small screen porch with dozens of shelves holding pickled vegetables and canned fruits. Sometimes, not far from the canning room, we would assist the elders in shucking the corn (they preferred white corn), snapping green beans, or peeling potatoes. Granddaddy kept a vegetable garden with ten to twenty rows of produce off to one side of the front yard, between the carport and the grape arbor. Sometimes we would see him out in the garden, working away.

Grandmother confined her preparations to the kitchen, and, when she was ready, she had a tiny silver bell to summon family to the dining room in the farmhouse addition. When the bell began to tinkle, lazy readers and napping cousins, from all over the house, began to assemble around the boardroom-size table, filling up the the entire dining room, and then some.

We found seats or stools all around the table, sometimes a baker’s dozen, or more of us, drawn up elbow to elbow. Platters and bowls of steaming food sat, equally crowded, across the table, from end to end.

We gave thanks for our blessings, hands cupped in prayer, or we peeked out at the relatives, heads reverently bowed. Then we began to pick and choose, from the bountiful options, what buttery-delicious cooked vegetables to consume, whether to take a biscuit or a roll, and how much meat to fork over.

Slowly the food was passed around — sometimes getting more distant, sometimes closing in. When the meal was finished, we asked to be excused, or we waited for dessert.

Time Slips By

When we went to the farm, we took a step back in time, and time seemed to lose its meaning — the magic of a simple life.

Talking… playing… gathering… eating… sleeping. We communed with the family — doing all things together.

We communed with our ancestors — sepia portraits on the walls and ghosts in the graveyard.

We communed with the valley:

—Dragonflies whizzing over the brook and the field at midday.

—Fireflies twinkling across the lawn at dusk.

—Crickets chirping at night.

Time slid by seamlessly, as life on the farm moved from season to season, and the people came and went.

Comings and Goings

My family — my father, Gerry; my mother, Meg; my brother, Mike, and I — went to the farm many times, driving up from North Carolina and across the mountains of Virginia so often — once on the way up, and again on the way back — that I know every gap in the Blue Ridge Parkway.

Sometimes we went to see a Civil War battlefield. Sometimes we went to see the historic Natural Bridge. Several times we saw the Caverns in Luray, or the Johnny Appleseed Restaurant in New Market.

We also swam at the Hawksbill pool, when the asphalt on the roads was hot enough to fry an egg. We attended service at Stanley United Methodist Church, crowding into a small partitioned annex for the Sunday School lesson. We drove along the narrow roller coaster roads of the back country, bouncing out of our seats when the car hit a dip or a hump in the road.

I’ve seen my cousins as adults since then, visiting Barbara (and Ron) in Maryland for a lobster boil, visiting Tom (and Liz) in Golden, Colorado before hiking in the Rocky Mountains, visiting Carol (and Jim) in Petaluma, California, before touring the wine country.

And I’ve seen them at weddings and anniversaries and funerals. Betty (and Mark) came, wearing full Roaring ‘20s attire, to Mike’s costume wedding. The entire Whitesell clan was in attendance for the 50th anniversary of Bill and Corinne. (Selwa showed us the quirky shops of Yellow Springs, a progressive enclave, overflowing with arts and crafts.) ‘Most everyone was there, that could be there, at Graves Chapel, to sing The Old Rugged Cross when Granddad passed away in 1991, and when Grandma died, about two years later.

Whitesells (clockwise) - Selwa, David, Bill, Betty, husband Mark

The Farm has been sold once or twice since then, passing out of the family, and into the caring hands of other members of the community.

The water pump has been removed and the well has been covered.

The woodshed is empty of sawdust and varnish. The pantry, empty of pickles and jam.

The graves on the hillside are hidden by brambles and overgrowth.

The children that played capture the flag around the venerable house have all grown up, and have children (and grand-children) of their own.

Still….

The dragonflies hover and whizz.

The crickets’ wings twitch and chirp.

The fireflies twinkle and glow.

Time stands still.

Cruciverbalism

{Prompt: How did you get into crosswords?}

I was first introduced to 20th-century American crossword puzzles by my grandmother, Mary Cook Atkinson Whitesell. I was very young. I was wandering around the old farmhouse where my grandmother lived. She was doing a crossword. I was curious.

But wait. You really must understand more about the farmhouse — the place where I almost always saw my grandparents. That’s how important it was.

The Farmhouse

We often went to the “mountains” in the summer. We were really going to the little town of Stanley, in the Shenandoah Valley, in Virginia, and then a little bit further, to an even smaller place, called Ida, where there was an ancient farmhouse where my grandparents stayed. It was out past the bend in Highway 340 at D-R’s Quick Stop, past the little rise in the road at Graves’ Chapel, and past the turnoff to Hawksbill Park, where the pool was fed by a fresh mountain stream and the park-swings could swing at least 10 feet high.

My grandparents, back then, were also traveling back and forth. They went from Columbia, South Carolina, where they lived during the school year, to the “mountains”, where they went to escape the heat in the summers.

Eventually my grandfather retired from his job as a chemistry professor at the University of South Carolina, and he (Willard) and his wife (Mary) moved into his parents’ house in Ida, in the rural valley beneath Hawksbill Mountain. The farm house was a part of the tapestry of the countryside. You could see its red walls and green roof as you approached on the little country road, or you could see the whole panoramic vista from the overlooks on Skyline Drive, after a visit to Skyland Lodge or Big Meadows.

Spitler Knoll Overlook on Skyline Drive, near Stanley, VA.

They lived in a two-story, barn-red-brick house, with a tin roof that was painted hunter green. There were two big trees in the front yard (sometimes covered with cicadas), and in the back there was a long sloping hill leading down to a creek. It was fenced off for cattle, although they had long since been moved off to greener pastures. Halfway down the hill, the field contained a big, red barn with deep, squishy mud on the floor, and a scattering of dusty hay in the attic.

Above the field there was a little stone spring-house with a cast iron water pump, also covered with thick layers of hunter-green paint, with a swiveling handle that could be used, with strenuous effort, to suck up water into a trough that ran down to the cow pasture. With up-and-down movement of the mechanical arms, it produced deep hydraulic moans, and then gurgling sounds, before water eventually came gushing out of the spigot.

Spring House (water pump no longer in place)

The farmhouse was built around 1830, and had no bathrooms in the original building. As a matter of fact, if we spent the night in the bedrooms, we had to choose whether to use a bedside urinal, called a “chamber pot,” or make a long solitary journey to the outhouse.

The journey to the outhouse would entail going down the wide central staircase (usually by sliding down the banister); turning left and going through the room with the fireplace and the chairs, where the old folks had their conversations; then through the long room with the very long dining room table, where we had family dinners; then through the kitchen with the antique cast iron oven, and the wash basin, and the water ladle; then through the pantry with all the mason jars of pickled and jellied concoctions; out the door and down the rickety steps of the side entrance; and down the path that ran through the grape arbor, which had the sweet smell of crushed grapes on the flagstones. Finally you would arrive at the rustic wooden outhouse where fetid smells arose from the hole in the wooden toilet seat. Its door was secured by a swiveling wooden latch.

There may have been another bathroom in the farm house, when modern plumbing was installed, but I only remember the journey to the outhouse.

The Outhouse at “The Farm”*

The original house was a wonderful place to explore, and we did explore it, from the basement to the attic. We found the remnants of the slave quarters in the basement, though we didn’t know what they were, at the time. And we found all kinds of childhood goodies in the attic: vintage Batman figures, Wizard of Oz books with weak spines and profuse illustrations, and sliding wooden-lettered spelling toys. We sometimes rang the big farm bell on the back porch, and sometimes we ventured into the wood shed, where Granddaddy built his wooden frames, and stools, and miniature windmills.

The Reading Room

On one particular day, I found myself wandering through the house on my own. It must have been in the afternoon, when most of us were napping or trying to find a place to escape the heat of the summer sun. I found my grandmother idling, her feet curled up on a sofa, in a den filled with books and knickknacks.

It was a shady little parlor that had been built off to the side of the room with the dinner table — a place for a little privacy. She was doing something with a newspaper and a pencil, and it seemed to have her deep in thought. So naturally, I interrupted her, and asked her what she was doing.

Very kindly she put down her paper and pencil, and she showed me how someone had cleverly constructed a puzzle. It had two sets of clues (and two sets of answers), half of them running “across” horizontally, and half of them running “down” vertically. Every space in the puzzle was to be filled with a letter; and every space in the puzzle had two words passing through it, with two corresponding clues. It was a crossword puzzle.

And then she told me how the words in the puzzle were not ordinary words. Many of the words had an equal number of vowels and consonants. As a matter of fact, many of the words started with vowels — quite a lot more than you would ordinarily find in something like a storybook.

In addition, many of the words were relatively obscure: the name of a river that ran through a European valley, the name of a character from a Shakespearean play or a Wagnerian opera, or a portion of a Latin phrase from the legal profession.

There was no chance of my solving the puzzle that she was working; or even solving a single clue. After all, I was only five or six. She was seventy or seventy-one. She read newspapers. She knew how to solve crossword puzzles. Nevertheless, I became interested in her pastime. She seemed to enjoy solving crossword puzzles, and she was glad to pass along some secrets to its construction and its unique collection of words and clues.

That was when I first became interested in crosswords.

Grandma in a mock-serious pose

Duke Hospital South

Years later, I found myself in another dimly lit room on a regular basis. It was Page Auditorium, the medical school auditorium, deep within the wood-paneled halls of the historic Davison Building — Duke University’s South Hospital. In the first year of medical school, before clinical rotations began, we spent hours and hours in the lecture hall auditorium, in mildly uncomfortable cushioned seats, each with an oddly shaped writing surface, that could be pulled up from the armrest on one side and locked into place.

A typical auditorium desk chair.

A spiral bound notebook, or a binder with sheets of paper, could be placed on the makeshift desk, and used for recording the details of each and every lecture — each talk describing some vital but incredibly detailed and boring concept in biochemistry, physiology, microbiology, pharmacology, immunology, histology, or pathology.

Lecture notes were incredibly important, because the tests were based on the oral lecture material, not necessarily on text in the textbook. And so, medical students banded together to create lecture notes — detailed notes on the lecture material. In a sort of co-op, fifteen or twenty students would share the work, each one taking notes on a particular day. Before the exam, the notes would be organized into a packet, and copies would be distributed to each member of the study group. This way, each student could focus on a particular lecture, taking notes that would be more complete and more legible than normal.

The notes produced by this communal arrangement were invariably better than any notes an individual would normally take. They were certainly better than any of my abbreviated, hand-scrawled scribblings. The best notes of a given lecture even summarized the didactic material, and highlighted the most important concepts for the group.

The reason I’m describing this note-taking system in such painstaking detail is to point out that (even though the material was complex and necessary) our full attention was only required once every week or two, on our assigned note-taking day. On all the other days, our minds were free to focus on the speaker or wander off into space, all according to our level of interest or disinterest. We could use the time as we pleased, just so long as we studiously reviewed the compiled notes and understood the material before the test was given.

Many days I found myself browsing a copy of the Duke Chronicle, the student newspaper. And each copy of the Chronicle contained a crossword puzzle. It wasn’t long before I found myself working the daily puzzle during class.

I would go into the lecture hall. I would sit two or three rows from the back. I would listen to the lecturer for 5 to 10 minutes, and I would size up their oratorical skills. If they could be heard and understood, and the topic was halfway interesting, I might wait another 5 to 10 minutes before working the crossword. If their microphone was ill-placed, or their speech was unintelligible, or if they were meandering and incoherent, I would go to the crossword clues without delay.

Solving a puzzle in ink.

Cruciverbalism

Over time, crosswords became a pleasant pastime — something to do while waiting in line, or while traveling, not just an escape from a world of exhaustive learning.

I became more adept at crossword solving. I stopped putting uncertain answers in the “fill.”. And I knew more of the crossword vernacular, so I routinely did the crosswords in ink. I would rarely look up an answer, mostly because, at that time, looking it up would have required an encyclopedia. It was simpler to ask others for help, but I needed help less and less. Sometimes, I would put the puzzle away for a while, and try to figure out the unfilled portions later. You’d be surprised how often that works.

For a while, I felt like it was “cheating” to look up an answer (and it became easy to look up answers in the age of the internet). But you won’t ever learn anything new, if you never look up the unknown answers. Over time, I’ve become less strict in that regard. The reality is that Friday and Saturday puzzles are so hard… the clues so obscure… that it only makes sense to look up the answers that are not part of my cultural zeitgeist.

Over time, the nature of the crosswords themselves also evolved. The current NY Times crossword puzzle editor has allowed more-than-one word answers to populate puzzles. That in turn has allowed for more recognizable answers to replace the really obscure foreign words and names of the past.

There are also other answers allowed now, that would have been unacceptable in the past: messaging abbreviations, slang, and informal (mis-spelled) words, for example. Even “rebuses” are allowed, meaning that a full word could be allocated to a single square. Puns and wordplay have become common.

In some ways, the earlier era, when I was discreetly solving crosswords during medical school, was more difficult than the solving required today. Clues and answers were more difficult, and I had a smaller cache of accumulated crossword knowledge and solving experience.

But neither era compares to the solving skills that my grandmother had to master. All the answers were real words (or names) and if the word fill required the answer to be a Russian mountain range, such as the “Urals”… or the opera character, “Aida”… or the phrase, “Caveat Emptor”… you just had to know it. I don’t know how she did it.

Rivers of particular significance to crossword solvers.

*Addendum: The Locust Grove Farmhouse

Today the property is listed on the National Register of Historic Places as NRHP reference # 15000879. They say, “Locust Grove, constructed ca. 1830, is located in eastern Page County, approximately 7 miles southeast of Luray on 2.69 acres of land and situated on a slight knoll off Route 629 (Ida Road). The parcel includes a two-story, five-bay brick Federal style dwelling with a one-story service wing off the south elevation….”

It was formerly known as the Old Jacob Brubaker House.

We just called it “The Farm”.

Locust Grove house - Page County

Willard and Mary Whitesell - circa 1986.

James 1:17 (Every Good and Perfect Gift)

{Prompt: How would you describe your grandfather}

Retired Professor and Grandpa

By the time I was born, my grandfather was about to retire, or he had recently retired, from his job as a chemistry professor. I was born in 1964, at the beginning of the space age. He was born in 1897, at the beginning of the machine age. He was over 65 by the time I had any concept of the world around me — by the time I discovered that he was my grandpa.

Now that I am in my sixties, and recently retired myself (5 years ago at the time of this writing), I think I understand him a little better than I did during his lifetime.

I think he enjoyed his solitude and he enjoyed the quiet country life, but he needed to be productive and he enjoyed a challenge. After retirement, he moved back to his family’s farmhouse, and out of the city. He created a garden and a woodworking shop on the family farm to occupy his time.

For me the woodworking shop was a mysterious place. I only saw the dimly lit interior from the rustic, aging wooden porch, and even the interior was obscured by sawdust floating up into the rays of the summer sun, moving around in a gentle swirl, like the floating misdirection of a magician’s handkerchief. I was too young and timid to venture inside, and had probably been cautioned not to. I was too young, at that time, to be a carpenter’s apprentice.

He worked methodically on wooden frames, wooden stools, and miniature windmill-style wooden weather vanes. His woodworking shop became a replacement for his chemistry lab. Instead of chemistry beakers, condensers, burners, and flasks; he had woodworking saws, planes, lathes, sanders, and shellac.

In the garden, he worked just as steadfastly, to grow all the vegetables that he brought to the table. I imagine he spent a lot of time learning how to amend the soil, control the weeds and pests, and produce fruitful crops. Once he retired to Virginia, he had a lot more time and space for the wonderful vegetable garden than he had before while working as a chemistry professor in Columbia.

I imagine that those two hobbies (woodworking and gardening) were his new occupation, filling his time and stimulating his mind. And they yielded tangible rewards — wooden furniture that could be admired and gifted to family, and an abundance of foods that could become a source of sustenance and communion at dinner time.

Willard and Mary at their 50th anniversary in 1976.

My memories of my grandpa (as I called him), were of a no-nonsense, professorial man with small silver, wire-rimmed glasses and a bowtie. He wore short-sleeved, button-down shirts, and he had strong sun-tanned arms with visible veins.

I never knew him to joke around or play around with children, but from time to time he would enlist the grandchildren in helping with food preparation or helping in the garden; or I should say, I think he did, because I was among the youngest of the grandchildren, and was never very helpful.

On at least one occasion, he brought out a sizeable watermelon, and… whap, whap, whap… he sliced it up, lickety-split. There were fresh watermelon slices sitting outside the side door, between the canning room and the garden. I think he sat back and watched the bedlam that ensued, as we all tried to eat it down to the rind, getting pink watermelon juice all over our baby cheeks.

He must have been amused as we tried to nibble around and dribble out the black watermelon seeds without ingesting them. And someone had the idea of a seed-spitting contest. He probably set that affair in motion with an idle remark. “I wonder how far you could spit a watermelon seed…” I think that’s about when I first heard the expression, “within spittin’ distance,” meaning not very far.

On one occasion, when I was older, he found me mesmerized by the flames of the wood in the fireplace, and he tried to draw me into a discussion about the chemistry of burning wood. Different elements in the wood create different colors of flame in the fireplace. I, unfortunately, had nothing to say. I was just enjoying the ephemeral movement of the flames, as they licked around the crisp, splintery split-pieces of firewood. Neither of us was very talkative. So the conversation died.

Thanksgiving Dinner and Church at the Farm House

But clearly he cared about the family. He made Thanksgiving dinners possible, placing an unbelievably long row of tables in the middle of the farmhouse addition, with stained, black walnut wooden stools pulled up at the corners for the littlest children.

Possibly my first conscious memory is of sitting in a baby seat at the corner of that Thanksgiving table, surrounded by family. As I got older, I learned to take a little food and pass it along. I’m pretty sure that grandpa was the one who encouraged the good table manners. I learned to politely ask for someone to “please pass the butter beans.” (You could never get enough of them.)

I loved the butter beans and the corn pudding, but I didn’t like the okra, even though I was encouraged to give it a try. And I did give it a try, but I had the sort of unpleasant, visceral reaction to okra that I’d never had before. Something about the slimy texture and the fuzzy surface was repulsive. Although I’ve heard that fried okra can be really delicious, I don’t think I will ever get past the smell and memory of the well prepared, but truly revolting, baked okra that I had in my childhood.

Unfortunately, my experience with okra at the farmhouse, made me fearful of the rhubarb pie, which I refused to even try. I had never, ever, heard of okra, much less rhubarb; so after my difficulty with okra, I was understandably cautious about rhubarb. I thought, “You won’t fool me again.” “Even if you put it into a pie, to feed it to me, I won’t be deceived.” There was no way I was going to eat a pie with cut-up stalks of a vegetable, even if it came with strawberries and whipped cream. It was a shame.

Dinner at the home of Cora and Rev. Wm. Whitesell (center).*

Grandpa (and Grandma) were very religious, and in the setting of a Methodist service, I felt more at home. I knew the Lord’s Prayer, and the Doxology. I even knew most of the Nicene Creed. I enjoyed attending the little church in Stanley — a change of pace from our big city church in Raleigh. It was a charming chapel, with dark wooden pews and lofty beams, sunlit stained glass windows, and a piano in front of the altar — all packed within a space the size of a classroom. It had a small vestibule at the entrance, below the bell tower, where there were people to greet you when you arrived, and the pastor would always wait to meet you as you departed.

Inside Stanley United Methodist Church.

I was somewhat versed in the parts of the Bible, and a number of passages, but I knew nothing compared to my cousins, the Minyards. Their father had insisted that they read the entire Bible. I don’t know if they read it from beginning to end, but I was more than content to get my biblical lessons abridged for me — from children’s Sunday school, from radio evangelists, from The Upper Room, from study aids, or, best of all, from allegorical series like The Chronicles of Narnia, by C. S. Lewis.

Whenever we went to church with Grandma and Grandpa, I would observe him preparing for Sunday School, like he must have prepared for chemistry class lectures in his past. He studied the Bible verses and referred to the cross-references in the Bible concordance. He put notes in the margins of his Bible, and created his own annotations. He led the senior Sunday school class, standing in front of the pews in one section of the tiny church to give the reading, solicit opinions, and steer the course of discussion.

It was clear, from his actions, that grandpa had had a whole other life before he retired, before his children, and his grandchildren. He was comfortable leading a group in study, even if only on Sundays. He owned a farm, but had no cattle. He had a garden in the front yard, but he tended it in the fashion of an organized researcher. He had a woodshop, but he didn’t make crafts for sale. He gave them away to his family.

Willard Whitesell - Circa 1923.

Grandpa’s Other Life

Today, through genealogical research, I know that my grandfather (Willard) lived in three or four different towns before he graduated high school. He was the son of a Methodist minister, whose job took him to different places in the Virginia mountains. Willard was the preacher’s kid, never staying very long in one place before moving to the next parish.

Willard was born at the end of the 19th century, and he was two and a half years old when the 20th century arrived. His family lost two children at a time when child mortality was high. Children frequently died from pneumonia, diphtheria, or other infections. (These were the days before the advent of vaccination or the discovery of antibiotics.)

Willard was two when his sister, Lucille, was born. She survived. He was four when his second sister was born, but she died less than 6 months later. Willard was five when a brother was born, but this brother died before he reached two years of age. Another brother, Edwin, was born when Willard was twelve, and Edwin lived a long, healthy life. But by age twelve, Willard had already lost two siblings, and must have been at least a little wounded by the misfortunes that he and his family had faced.

At age eighteen, Willard went off to college, first to Bridgewater College in Rockingham, VA, close to home, and then to Randolph-Macon College in Ashland, in central Virginia. (It was an all-boys school.) In October 1918, shortly before the end of World War I, he served in the US Army at Fort Washington, on the Potomac, near Alexandria, Virginia. Fortunately, he wasn’t required to serve active duty in the war, and he was able to leave the Army and re-enroll in college in 1919.

He went to Johns Hopkins University, in Baltimore, Maryland, just a little bit further from his family in the Shenandoah mountains. He earned a Ph.D. in chemistry in the next four years. By the time he graduated in 1923, chemistry was a burgeoning but still developing field. This was before the development of modern methods of refining petroleum or the creation of plastic polymers. The nature of the atomic nucleus was only starting to be defined, and it was years before the structure of DNA would be worked out by Watson and Crick (and Rosalind Franklin).

Willard went even further from home, to work for the University of South Carolina (USC) in 1923. He became an associate professor of chemistry in a new USC department. That same year, Mary Atkinson, a recent graduate of Emory University (with a master’s degree in chemistry) also moved to South Carolina, to teach chemistry at Columbia College nearby. Mary also attended graduate school at USC from 1924 to 1925, when she and Willard must have met.**

Within two years, they were married in Mary’s hometown, Newnan, Georgia.

Mary and Willard - circa 1926

They must have enjoyed the roaring 20s together: radio broadcasts, telephone communications, moving pictures, and the advent of modern automobile transportation. They endured the Great Depression with their first two children, and by 1941, amid the years of World War II, they had a full contingent of four children in their family.

So far as I know, Willard and Mary were busy raising those four children — Billy, Mary Lou, Margaret Ann, and Frank — until Frank graduated from high school in 1958. Willard worked as a chemistry professor at the University of South Carolina, from 1923 to 1962 — almost forty years! I never heard much about those forty years, and the paper trail for those years is sadly lacking.

Memories of a Fruitful Life

By the time I had much interest in my family tree, my grandparents were quite old. My grandfather passed away in 1991, the same year I was married and completed my medical degree. Somehow, I was able to take time off and drive up for the burial at Graves’ Chapel during my medical rotations.

My grandmother passed away in 1993, a little less than a year before her great-grandchildren, Jasmine and Samantha, were born in Columbia, South Carolina, the same town she lived in with Willard for about 35 years.

I didn’t really know much about Willard or Mary, although I knew I had their love and support. I imagine that they knew all about me and my brother, since my mother (Margaret) lived with them during the twilight of their years, staying with them from 1986 until the day that each of them passed away. Then she stayed in Stanley, Virginia, and took their place.

My memories of my Grandpa, Willard, are relatively few, but they are beautiful, nonetheless. For me, he is that shadowy figure inside a woodshed, working on a thick wooden stool, while sawdust swirls in the doorway, and a farm cat looks for shade in the crawlspace underneath.

He is that slightly bent-over fellow out in the garden, with the suntanned arms, putting a watermelon into a wheelbarrow, and bringing it back to a shady spot where he and the grandkids can cool off and enjoy the fruit of his labors.

He is that fellow with the small round glasses and bow tie, standing in the prismatic, colored light of the church’s stained glass windows, with a Bible in his hands, holding forth on the blessings we are given by God.

****************************************

*Also pictured - Mary, Frank, Willard, Virginia, Jim, Carolyn, Cora, William, Margaret, Bill, Mary Lou, Lucille, (picture possibly taken by Edwin)

** Mary Atkinson also attended graduate school at Bryn Mawr in 1923, and the University of California in 1925. 

My Dream Car

{Prompt: What car did you dream of having one day?}

Growing up in the 60s and 70s, the roads were filled with station wagons, VW bugs, muscle cars, and Cadillacs.  We had a Plymouth Barracuda when we were young. It was jet black, had chrome barracuda logos on both sides, a sizable sloping rear windshield and a sporty tail — its distinguishing feature.

A 1969 Barracuda with the “fastback” roofline.

It was one of the first cars to have back seats that could lay flat with an opening to access the trunk space. If you were small and you put down the back seats — on a trip to Virginia, for example — you could lie flat and fall asleep. I don’t think we ever really did that, but I think we might have pulled over once, on the side of a dark country road, and put down the seats, to lie down and look up at the stars through the rear windshield.

Mike and I in front of the barracuda - circa 1970.

The barracuda had manual windows and manual door locks, which were just fun to play with. But you could also get fresh air by opening these little triangular windows/vents that were right behind the windshield and next to the side mirrors. I would ride shotgun whenever I could just to play with these swiveling vents. I don’t think the car had AC. I don’t think we could afford it.

Iconic side mirror and window vent of a Barracuda

Once I rode in the back of a big, expensive sedan, when I was in middle school. It was some other parent’s car — maybe a Cadillac, like the Cadillac Seville. All I know is that when we got inside — three or four of us in the rear leather seats, it made so little road noise, and had such an amazing shock-absorbing system, that it felt like riding in an airplane… at least I imagined that’s what it felt like.

I think my dream car at that time would have been anything with a hood ornament.  Rolls Royce was the gold standard, but a Mercedes was much more likely to be seen in the real world.  I think my favorite, though — my favorite car with a hood ornament — was probably a Jaguar.  There was nothing quite like a leaping jungle cat made of shiny, silvery chrome to inspire my adolescent imagination.

My favorite hood ornament.

I also held out hope, for many years, of owning a Jeep — ideally, an army-issue Jeep, but I would have settled for a Wrangler. Of course, I didn’t know what notorious gas guzzlers they were, and I had no concerns about their service record when ownership was just a pipe dream.

When the time came when I was actually old enough to drive, and I had enough money (from working at Arby’s or the Pullen Park pool) to pay for gas and repairs, my mother bought me a small, used, Honda Civic. Not nearly as sporty as a Civic today, but this Honda Civic — my first car — had the great advantage of being a beautiful shade of lemon yellow.

My first car - a yellow Honda Civic.

Back then, the Iran Contra hostage crisis and the gasoline shortage of 1977 were affecting gasoline prices, and fuel efficiency was the deciding factor in many a purchase. The American market was seeing an influx of far more fuel efficient cars from Japan, including the one that I got.

I’d still love to have a Jeep or a Land Rover; a Jaguar or a Mercedes, but these days I find myself dreaming about vintage cars from the ’40s or ’50s. Maybe something that suits my age.

Or maybe I should get a souped-up 1969 Plymouth Barracuda… this time with air-conditioning.

Or maybe I’ll just keep dreaming, while I drive around in my Subaru Outback — the station wagon of the 21st century.

My Agent

{Prompt: What early memories do you have of your brother}

There is a ripple in the water. It isn’t an eddy — a water current. It is a ripple… from a critter.

“It’s a crayfish!”, my brother says, excitedly.

My brother is looking in the creek intensely, to see which way it goes. I’m not watching ’cause I didn’t even know there was a critter in there.

He’s focused on a good-sized, slimy, moss-covered rock.

“We gotta turn it over,” he says.

“Why?” I ask.

“Cuz it’s under there!”

A sizeable crayfish, in plain sight.

He Knew Things

I realize now that this is when… more or less, this is when I discovered that my brother had a store of knowledge… advanced knowledge… superior knowledge… that I could not imagine. He knew how to find a crayfish in a creek. He knew how to climb up into a tree house. He knew how to ride a bike, and more importantly, how to use the brakes.

He knew how to take a piece of unmown, seeding grass, in the Spring, bend the stem back on itself, and shoot the seedhead into the air. He knew how to take a rubber band, wrap it over the tip of his thumb and shoot it across the room. He knew how to shoot a BB gun. I guess he knew how to shoot just about anything. He was the ultimate source for practical knowledge.

Backyard (top). Front yard (bottom).

Of course, I had my parents, to teach me right from wrong. I guess they had practical knowledge, too. And I had TV, where I could watch the Underwater World of Jacques Cousteau to learn about creatures in the sea, and I could watch Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom to learn about creatures on the land. And we had umpteen volumes of the World Book encyclopedia, the Bible, and the Dictionary. We had a ton of written reference material.

But my brother knew things, and he was always around. He was like my handler… my agent. Or my personal bodyguard. He would walk with me to school, to the end of Wayland Drive, and across the crosswalk. He would take me along (or maybe he just tolerated me), when we went up the road to hang out with his friends. He was there to go to the swimming pool with me in the summer. If I ever went anywhere in the world besides my home and my school classrooms, it seemed like Mike was there to secure the ‘scene’.

When there was nothing else to do, Mike was in charge of the entertainment. He would come up with a game for every surface in the world. We played marbles on the patio, which was made out of cement. We played “World War III” with green, plastic army men on the oak tree roots and pine straw covered clay, in the back yard. And when there was nothing better to do, we went exploring the creek at the bottom of our neighborhood, after school.

Me, Mike and Grandmother, Emily Gallup - May 1971

Exploring the Creek

Let me tell you how water got to the creek, and what we would do, along the way. If it rained at our house, the water would wash down the gravel drive into the street. (The gravel driveway was one of the few places that we weren’t allowed to play. At least, I think we weren’t allowed. I just don’t remember ever playing there.)

The stormwater would run down the curb on the side of Wayland Drive. That’s where we sometimes would float a makeshift raft after a summer thunderstorm, and sometimes even during a summer thunderstorm, water coming down in buckets.

The water would wash into the opening of a heavy iron street gutter on the lowest part of Wayland Drive. If you were small enough, you could crawl into the street gutter, through the 2-foot round cement drain pipes, and out into the empty lot at the corner of the neighborhood. (Crawling into a street gutter is easy as pie when you’re a little kid. It gets harder as you get bigger.)

From the empty lot you had to walk through a probably tick-infested acre of brush before you got to the creek. After sunset, on the return journey, it got a little harder to find your way back through the empty lot to civilization. You had to look for the street lamps or listen for the sound of Daddy’s whistle, or his yelling, if he was getting impatient.

When we got to the creek, we always headed upstream. I guess the most interesting “rapids” were upstream, as the creek passed through a bed of limestone. The back of the shopping center — Glenwood Village shopping center — was also upstream, and if you went far enough (and started early enough) you could even trace the creek up to the cultivated lawns of the Raleigh Country Club Golf Course. (I felt like kids weren’t truly welcome on the golf course. Or maybe I just didn’t like to be so out in the open, in the middle of “fine” society.)

But we usually turned around well before we were out of earshot of our house. We mostly spent time looking for crayfish, or watching the water spiders, as they skittered across the surface. We kept a lookout for water moccasins, especially in deep water, but there wasn’t much deep water — really, practically none, in the heat of the summer.

We dug around in the pea gravel, or we poked around in the tree roots. At least once, we blew up a Hot Wheels car with the gunpowder from a cap gun… or with a firecracker… or something. I was only an innocent observer. It wasn’t me.

Naturally, we got into trouble, but mostly there was a policy of “Don’t ask. Don’t tell.” Our parents didn’t ask, and we didn’t tell. At least it seemed that way. Whether or not our behavior was condoned, I’ll never know.

I fell into the creek once or twice. Usually I just got my shoe or my socks wet, but once I fell in completely, and I had to walk back home with my t-shirt and my shorts sopping wet. Mom thought it was hilarious.

Making Mischief

As we got older, we went exploring the city, and we got into different kinds of trouble.

One time we got run off from Glenwood Village shopping center, because we were peeking into the back of a strip club, trying to look at the strippers through the spinning blades of a ventilation fan. Someone saw or heard us and came out to chase us off, and we ran for cover, back to the woods. We were too slippery. At least I like to think of us that way.

We broke into my elementary school once. But it was entirely for a good reason. We were playing basketball on their basketball courts, which were open to the public. We got hot… and sweaty… and thirsty. So the logical thing was to go get some water from the water fountain in the hallway. I guess we were able to jimmy open the locked door, walk down the vacant school hallway, and have a sip of water. But we were caught, and we were detained.

I think Mike was forced to call our Mom by the administrator. Either that was our punishment, or he thought that we were hoodlums and vandals. It was all very innocent, and it got blown way out of proportion. I was just thirsty.

Mike took most of the blame. I reckon that was the cost of being the leader. Although in this case, I guess it was really my idea. But still… Mike should have known better. Why would he listen to me, a little kid? And why didn’t we have water in the first place? Sometimes I wonder if my brother was properly qualified to be my handler.

Another time, we got caught sneaking into the back door of a theater in broad daylight. We wanted to see the R-rated movie, Amityville Horror. Mike was old enough, but I wasn’t. So we hatched this simple plan. Mike would buy himself a ticket, and I would go around to the back of the theater. Then I would sneak in when he opened the fire exit door. As it turns out, opening a door in a dimly lit theater in the middle of the day is like shining a searchlight on an escaped convict at night. It was obvious to everyone in the theater what was happening. Although we sat down, only a minute or two passed before an usher came and escorted us out the door and off of the premises. Maybe a manager was involved. I don’t know. I was only an innocent pawn.

Getting Along

As we got still older, and a little bit wiser, we did a lot of things together that we couldn’t do as equals in the past. I was still new to the game in most cases, but I became a fast learner.

We started to play Avalon Hill strategy board games (like Blitzkrieg and Formula One). We were among the first wave of gamers to play this new game, called Dungeons & Dragons. My brother played in actual games with other players, while I mostly spent time creating characters, character names, and dungeon prototypes. I went on only one or two campaigns. I remember that the subtle downward slope of the dungeon walkways had a disproportionate importance, and every brick of a wall had to be inspected for secret doors or magical treasures.

We were in the Boy Scouts together. We learned to camp and set up a tent, split wood and start a fire, hike down a trail, and never, ever, take a turn that wasn’t clearly marked or found on the trail map. We learned to march stoically, for hours if necessary, to reach the top of the trail and reach the viewpoint. There was no turning back on a trail until we reached the lookout. At least that’s the way it seemed.

And the stuff in our backpacks. It was all so bizarre. A pack of aluminum eatingware, with an aluminum mug, that all fit together in a small metallic bundle. Rolled-up, blue foam bed mats and rolled-up sleeping-bags, wrestled into a bundle of fabric, above or below the central storage of the pack.

We developed an interest in medicine and veterinary medicine from our shared experience with pets at home, and visits to the Shenandoah Valley, to see our grandparents at “The Farm”. Mike expanded his understanding of animals, from the cats and dogs of our house, and the newts and the crayfish of our creek; to the raptors and livestock of the “Valley”. He went on to attend NC State University’s College of Veterinary Medicine and became a veterinarian.

I ended up studying human anatomy, physiology, and pathology. I went to Duke University Medical School and became a family doctor.

We experienced the unimaginable; the death of our father together. We made the phone call to 911 together. We waited for the paramedics together. We grieved together.

We sat in the front pew at the funeral service. We stood out on the cold hillside at Raleigh Memorial Gardens for the burial. We spent our fury at the loss by splitting wood in our front yard.

A cringeworthy picture of our “family” in the early 80s

Everything Changes

That’s about the time that we went our separate ways. Shortly after his death, Mike went off to college in Louisburg, North Carolina, and I went off to a public residential high school, newly established by the state of North Carolina, the NC School of Science and Math.

We were back in Raleigh together briefly, when I transferred back to NC State University from Vanderbilt (where I had considered, and reconsidered, a major in Engineering.) We were both at NC State University in the Spring of 1983, when the Men’s basketball team went on a miraculous run to win the NCAA tournament. We watched some of the games together — I’m pretty sure that we watched the final together (when the “Cardiac Pack” faced the “Phi Slamma Jamma” team of Houston.) When the game ended in the perfect alley-oop “pass” from Whittenburg to Charles, we had a few minutes of unbridled celebration and then we headed for Hillsborough Street together, to be a part of the city’s biggest unsanctioned crowd of troublemaking youngsters to ever assemble.

My brother taught me back in the ’60s or ’70s, before the 1974 NC State national championship, that I needed to choose a college to root for, NC State or UNC. He knew that I should be an NC State fan, and he seemed to know all the reasons that State was historically the superior team. I took him at his word. And it finally paid off.