05-NOV-A-10
DERWOOD FALL WEEKEND AND FIRST
WITH THE
VETERANS OF “OPERATION LIFELINE”
IN
AND A FEW RUNS NEAR HOME
November 11--13, 2005
It is all golden and glorious as the slanting rays of the all too quickly setting sun gild the yellow leaves of Derwood that are raining down on the skylights through which I am viewing them, with about three times as many already down, many of them blown into corners of the decks and on the drive and walkways. It is that poignantly brief beautiful time of year called Indian summer in which the morning chill gives way to sixty degree sunny afternoons, with a twilight that comes so soon as four thirty in the early afternoon.
I ran Needwood bike trail on
Saturday, passing my neighbor teaching a Magruder band of boys to play rugby,
and spotted several deer scurrying along through the same golden leaves I was
admiring at Derwood. I made a plan to
run with Joe from which I have just now returned on a late Sunday afternoon,
taking off in the splendors of a glorious autumn afternoon and returning in the
dark and hour later with one fox and nine deer that crossed in front of us on
return in the dim evening—one an eight point buck. It is time for me to get out and encounter
these when armed to fill the three new freezers! That will come two weeks away, along with a
chance to scout out the Sika deer farm for the single
I got a call form Christian Elwell who had invited me up to Upstate New
York to go deer hunting next weekend when I am going to be in
I went two hours form Derwood to
We all got together for a large
party of the kind they have often it seems with the swimming pool outside and a
fire pit and large porches and crab soup fried chicken and hot mulled
cider. The group was quite interested in
the complete collection of my photos all organized in the album along with the
reports I had written and many groups went over it all evening. I talked with some of the people whom I remembered
and some I do not recall ever seeing.
They tell me that the Governor’s reception on Tuesday was quite an event
and each of us was awarded a citation and another medal and a cd of photos of
the experience which should be coming by mail.
Of all the incongruencies, the
least effective and most politically bombastic of the docs was also one with a
Latino name—the one who could not control his group and was the one when told
about he “adopted dog” they chose to call Katrina which was being dognapped by
the vacuous young woman who was “rescuing” this well-fed and obviously owned
and kept dog, he responded only “It is out of my control.” But, he was the one involved with the only
big thing that happened on his team—the wedding of the young couple with the
two kids. It turned out that upon his return, he received a “Presidential
Medal” for “Leading us” through this
rescue effort, and made a speech before the collected dignitaries and the
unaware President G W Bush saying magnanimously “I will only accept this medal
if it is on behalf of my hard working colleagues whom I led in this
effort”—when he was the weakest and least effective person of the group but the
quickest to make speeches about the wonderful efforts he was making through his
trusted more competent colleagues!
I had listened through the weekend to some desperate phone calls ranging from feisty pre-conditions to total despair and self-loathing breakdown and urgent pleas for help in a serous mental illness with a request for hospitalization. I will check further into the status of the mood swings
I went to
church this morning and stopped by for the run with Joe and stayed for dinner
so we could compare plans for the Thanksgiving holiday in which we will all be
running the race in the morning before I turn form grad student/teacher to
hunter/gatherer for the next week. I
will be busy with more of the same plans until I make a trip to