FLASHBACK: Family Politics (1986)

I drove Herr Cucaracha to Reedville, Virginia where my uncle and cousin owned property not far from the Chesapeake Bay.  It would have been hard to find Robbie's house from the highway if not for his homemade sign.  Then again, he also tuned in to Rush Limbaugh every day.

Dad had come up from Texas with Lois, my stepmother.  It must have been hard for her to visit relatives on my mother's side of the family even after Aunt Sissy, my mother's sister had died.

We headed to Washington, DC after staying overnight and headed straight to the Supreme Court.  Reagan recently had appointed William Rehnquist as the Chief Supreme.  

 

Lois, from Emporia, Kansas, was pretty conservative.  My father leaned libertarian.  I'm pretty sure I didn't tell either of them how Gore Vidal lampooned Rehnquist in Myron after the then associate justice signed an anti-pornography Supreme Court decision.

 

Nevertheless, we all wanted to see the deeply moving Viet Nam Veterans Memorial designed my Maya Lin.   If things had gone differently in our lives, the Hon name could have been inscribed upon it along with 58,000 others.  Dad had served in Saigon during the Tet Offensive and I had been eligible for the draft during my freshman year of college. 

 

 

Bittersweet

Doug, my 84-year-old cousin recently moved to the Beth Shalom assisted living facility in Richmond.  I last saw him in Roanoke, five years ago.  He said the funniest thing when a staff member asked him why so many people love him so much.  "Don't stay too long!"

Bolt Bus got me as far as DC's Union Station where Christine lent me her trusty Toyota Acura to make the rest of the trip.

After seeing Doug, Cathy and Scott, his children and my first cousins, once removed, took me to lunch at an Italian restaurant.  We don't know each other well, but we had a good time reminiscing about our parents and grandparents.  Doug is the only one of the group still alive.

Back in DC, Christine and I went to the Kennedy Center to see Bowie & Queen.  The less said the better about the performance.  Balletomanes may have appreciated it more than Bowie fans.

You can't go to Washington without passing a few monuments.

 I'd never seen either the FDR or Martin Luther King Memorials.

I'd hoped to indulge my passion for cemeteries at Arlington, but time constraints forced this dyed-in-the-wool peacenik to settle for the Iwo Jima Memorial.

Doug In Roanoke

All my first cousins are a generation older than I am.  In adulthood, I got to know Doug best during Thanksgivings at his home in Reedville, on the Chesapeake Bay, during the nineties. He and Anne, his second wife, eventually moved to Roanoke, a charming city in southwest Virginia.  Not long after Anne died, I drove down through the Shenandoah Valley to pay my respects.

Our grandfather on my mother's side, a locomotive engineer, would have felt right at home in Roanoke. When coal fueled a rapidly industrializing America, the city was a major rail center.

Architects still pay homage to the tracks of the Norfolk and Western Railway in their building designs.

Mill Mountain offers wonderful views of downtown Roanoke, today a lovely, midsize city that a hundred thousand people call home.  Health care, government and education employ most of them.

We dined at the famed wiener restaurant.

For locavores, there's a farmer's market nearby, too.  Pretty as a peach, indeed!

H&C Coffee has a storied history in Virginia, North Carolina and Tennessee.  The company roasted its beans in Roanoke until a flood wiped out the factory in the mid eighties.  Only the colorful neon sign survived.  You should see it at night!