Category Archives: Personal

Early voters

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Leah and I voted Thursday afternoon.

There have been reports on the news that lots of Republicans are voting early, so we felt that we had to do our part to to stem the tide. I hope our little effort isn’t as futile as Canute’s. I watched the other voters, trying to guess how they would vote, but that’s probably a waste of time. I imagine anyone who saw me would think, “There goes another old, white guy, casting his vote for another Trump surrogate.”

But just imagine what it would be like if the Democrat won the race for governor of Georgia — a black, woman Democrat. If not this year, then maybe another year.

All the little old ladies and little old men working at the polls reminded me of my father. He volunteered as a poll worker for many years, right up until he was physically incapable of doing it any more.

I have been letting the blog slide for a while. I’m hoping not to let it slide much longer.

Broad Street

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Leah and I hardly ever go downtown any more, but we arranged to meet Leah’s hairdresser Sheila for dinner and a drink Thursday night.

Downtown Rome is very different today from the way it was when I was growing up. Back then, the five blocks of downtown had multiple dime stores, locally-owned clothing and furniture stores, multiple chain department stores even in the same block, a theater, shoe repair shops, a newsstand (where one Baptist minister was caught buying a copy of Playboy. Scandal!), banks, and two restaurants. The Post Office was one block off Broad, and there were two mail deliveries a day. Today, the biggest draw is the many bars and restaurants. There are a couple of tattoo parlors (do they still call them that?), a few sad boutiques, the history museum and more restaurants. Oh, and one local jeweler who still manages to hang on.

If the city fathers had had the sense to realize what they had in the original buildings, downtown would look like Disneyland. This is an example of the architecture.

This is the Masonic Temple, whose upper stories remain pretty much the same as they were when the building was constructed in 1877. The street front has changed. The tan building behind it is the old, old Post Office, where my father worked. I spent many a long afternoon parked in front of that building, waiting for my father to get off.

I have updated this post to show this image that was on display on the wall of our local mall along with a lot of other shots of Rome from years ago. If you compare this to the current building, it’s clear that the ground level of the Masonic Temple has suffered the same fate as most buildings in downtown Rome — “modernization.”

When we walked into the restaurant, I recognized the long, white hair belonging to Bob, one of a pair of twins who went to Darlington School one year ahead of me and two years behind my brother Henry. He’s now Leah’s eye doctor.

We sat right behind him, but none of us bothered him. When we were almost finished, Bob got up and Sheila patted him on the back and said, “You don’t remember me, but I used to cut your hair all the time.” Bob insisted that he did remember her. They spoke for a  minute and then Bob turned to us. Leah introduced herself, and Bob seemed to kind of remember her, but probably mainly her brother.

I told him my name, and after a short pause, he threw his hands into the air and said, “Soccer!” I said, “No, you’re thinking of my brother,” who played soccer. In my freshman year I spent a lot of time in our car waiting for Henry to finish soccer practice. Henry played soccer  and ran track and cross country. I never played soccer, or any other sport.

After we left, Leah and I meandered up Broad, where I took the previous picture, and then this one.

“Psycho kitty” has been in this blog before. He’s a book store mascot.

When we got to the car, I thought about Bob mistaking me for Henry, and remembering that Henry had played soccer 53 years ago.

I thought, “I need to tell Henry about that.”

Four months in

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My brother is currently on his second type of chemotherapy treatment for metastatic pancreatic cancer. The first, which was a conventional type, did essentially nothing but make him lose his hair. The results of the second, a targeted therapy given orally, are not known yet. However, he has been having some significant pain, probably due to a tumor pressing on a nerve. He has been on morphine and oxycodone, which gives an idea of the level of the pain.

The last time I went to Chattanooga, he was pretty much his old self, but had been having enough pain that he took his pain pills. As the afternoon wore on, his pain subsided, but so did his alertness. But the time I left, he was half dozing in the living room, occasionally waking up enough to make confused comments that conflated his dreams with the conversation the rest of us were having.

We spoke to him on the phone Sunday evening. He voice sounded terrible and he sounded confused. I think it was partly due to the effect of his therapy, which makes him hoarse, and partly due to the effects of the pain medication he’s on. He said he felt pretty bad. His wife suggested that we call back right after lunch on Monday, which we did. He didn’t answer. Later Monday evening his wife texted us that he had gone to the hospital, where they had found elevated bilirubin levels. This could be caused by a tumor blocking a bile duct.

I’m planning to drive up to Chattanooga Tuesday (the day of this post) to visit him in the hospital. I hope they know something by the time I get there.

My brother was diagnosed just before Thanksgiving, so about four months ago. The median survival rate for untreated cancer at his stage is about three and a half months. With “good” treatment this increases to about eight months.

My brother’s younger son and his new wife were planning a family week at the beach next week, but it’s not looking like that will not happen.

Memories of steam

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I was going through old slides and prints and found this print from a photo I took sometime between 1973 and 1976, when I was a reporter for The Augusta (Ga) Chronicle. It’s an old Southern Railway steam engine that was being used for excursion trips. The quality of the photo is not great. When I used to turn in my rolls of film to the guys in the photo department, they made prints that were just good enough to last until the paper was ready to print the next morning. This one hasn’t stood up very well through the decades.

I’m almost certain that this is Southern Engine 4501. The first time I saw 4501 was the evening before it was to leave Augusta for the next leg of its trip. The engine was cold and dead, sitting in a yard with old guys crawling over it trying to fix something. All of them were about as old as the engine itself, which was made in 1911. I think the men retired from Southern at about the same time steam engines left regular railroad service. Now they were called back to drive the old thing.

This photo was taken the next day, when the beast had been awakened and was sitting ready to run.

We’re used to being able to jump into a car and have it rolling within a few seconds, but steam locomotives are a different beast. You have to build a fire under them, and that takes time. And, once you have the fire going, you have to wait till it builds a full head of steam.

A steam engine with a full head of steam is the closest thing to a living creature that man has ever made. There is a constant hiss in the background and every 20 or 30 seconds a kind of clunking chuff. Various train forums trace that sound to the air compressors steam engines used.

You’ll know when it’s getting ready to start moving. There is drama and sound. The engineer will open a valve on the steam cylinders and a huge cloud of hot mist will hiss out just in front of the drive wheels. That’s the engineer clearing condensation from the drive cylinders. If you’re standing in the wrong place, it will feel like a steam bath.

Next, there will be a chuff as the drive wheels start to turn, and a cloud of steam and coal smoke will shoot out of the stack. There will be another chuff from other side of the engine, and then another from the near side, four in all for every rotation the drive wheels make, and four puffs of steam and smoke from the stack.

I can’t remember exactly when I was invited to ride in the cab of the engine, but that’s the kind of invitation that I could not turn down. I climbed up into the cab with no knowledge of where the train was going or how I would get back to town.

Riding in the cab of a steam locomotive is like nothing else in the world. All that track that looks straight actually isn’t; there are little dips and side-to-side wriggles, all of which translated to the engine rocking all the time. And there was noise. Overwhelming, continuous, deafening noise.

I think there were four men in the cab, plus one reporter. The engineer and the fireman were the only ones actually doing anything. The day before all had worked late into the night, so they were tired. One of them sat up in the window, his head rocking back and forth, sleeping, despite the noise.

When the fire needed more coal, the fireman stuck a shovel into a pile of coal in the tender, and then turned around and stepped on a pedal at the rear of the firebox. Two half-moon-shaped doors clanged open, revealing the glowing, roaring fire. He tossed the shovelful of coal into the fire, then stepped off the pedal. The doors slammed shut. Then he did it again.

Eventually the train stopped at some little town not too far from Augusta. I don’t remember where it was – Edgefield? Graniteville? I don’t know. But I decided that I should probably take that opportunity to get off the train.

When I climbed down from the cab, I was deaf. My ears were telling me that they had had enough and just weren’t doing any more work for a while. I was also kind of lost. I called my office and got the number of a stringer in that town, and he gave me a ride back to Augusta. I’m not quite sure how I made that call, but I do remember telling anyone I spoke to that I couldn’t really hear anything.

My hearing, or most of it, eventually came back. I can hardly imagine what it must have been like to ride those engines every workday for years. Those were some real men.

On several occasions Engine 4501 seemed destined for the scrap heap, or a life as a static display at best, but it’s still pulling excursion trains for the Tennessee Valley Railroad Museum.

I think maybe Leah and I should ride a train pulled by that old engine sometime.

 

Engine 4501 has two small leading wheels (on a single axle), eight drive wheels, and two small trailing wheels. That makes it a 2-8-2, or what is known as a Mikado, apparently because the first steam locomotives of this configuration were made for Japanese railroads. The 2-8-2 wheel layout was probably most often used for freight, but working steam locomotives are so rare these days that museums and excursion railroads have to use what they can find. The drive wheel diameter is 63 inches. That’s also maybe a little small for passenger train use. One rule of thumb is that the normal top speed in miles per hour of a steam locomotive was equal to wheel diameter in inches. Passenger trains ran faster than freight, so passenger locomotives typically had larger drive wheels. The smaller wheels also allowed the engine to deliver more power for a given distance traveled, making it better to move heavy freight trains.

Branches

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It has been cloudy, warm, and wet for a while here in northwest Georgia. We have had very little in the way of actual rain, but sprinkles many days and high humidity every day. I don’t mind this kind of weather. I like the look of the bare, winter trees’ branches in the fog we often have up on the mountain – low clouds, actually, but it seems to us that we are in a fog.

My brother’s potential pancreatic cancer treatment course has branched again. His first chemotherapy had no evident effect. He and his doctor intended to enroll him in one of several clinical trials in his area. However, he had a blood test Tuesday morning, and the results disqualified him from the trial he was aiming for, as well as the other trials. He said his blood showed some anticlotting factors that ruled him out.

The next possibility is targeted therapy. Targeted therapy is aimed at cancer cell metabolism, like typical chemotherapy, but while typical chemotherapy targets characteristics of cancer cells that are shared by other, normal cells in the body, targeted therapy is intended to target characteristics that are specific to certain cancer cells’ metabolisms. Henry said that the targeted therapy he hopes to try is actually for colorectal cancer, but the treatment attacks a gene that colorectal cancer has in common with his particular cancer.

He said this treatment is given orally, which I’m sure he was relieved to hear; he still has problems with his right hand because of extremely sloppy and incompetent attempts to insert an IV into his right arm weeks ago. The American Cancer Society describes a couple of therapies that are given by IV, and one that is given orally. The ACS Web site says, “This drug is used to treat advanced colorectal cancer, typically when other drugs are no longer helpful.” That sounds about right.

Side effects can include fatigue, loss of appetite, irritation of the hands and feet, diarrhea, high blood pressure, weight loss, and abdominal pain.

Some targeted therapies have had decent results in life extension. None are cures.

There is still a possibility that something in Henry’s blood test will exclude him from this treatment. If not, he expects to start the treatment on the first of March.