Maura Casey's Blog

Two weeks ago, I received more compliments from men sidling up to me than I have gotten since I last possessed a beach body during the Farrah Fawcett era 45 years ago. But alas, it was not my glorious silver hair, my rapier wit or my Irish good looks that attracted swarms of male attention.

Nope. It was my jacket. Specifically, my father’s 40-plus-year-old University of Notre Dame jacket, which I wore to the UND-Boston College game Nov. 1 in Boston. The experience taught me that sometimes sports has far less to do with competition, and more to do with memories.

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I wasn’t supposed to be there. With my encouragement, my husband Pete had purchased tickets to the game so he and our son Tim could attend. I often don’t enjoy live sporting events — I’m too small, and I often have to fight to see the action, particularly when the crowd leaps to its feet — so I wished the two of them well.

But over several days, Pete had second thoughts.

“You go,” he said. “Your father went to Notre Dame. He played football there.”

“Yes, but he always said he was mostly, ‘cannon fodder for the varsity squad,’” I said.

“But you’ve always said you wanted to see a Notre Dame game,” Pete said.

Tim in sun, me in shadow, but both of us happy.

That much was true. In the 1980s, my dad invited me several times to join him on organized bus trips from Buffalo to South Bend to see a football game — a nearly 12-hour jaunt one way — but, killjoy that I am, I could never bring myself to attend a bus trip in which every single bus passenger would get a Bloody Mary at 7 a.m. to kick off the journey. To my Dad, that was part of the fun. But his drinking made me fearful as a child, irritated as an adult, and in my early years of trying to stay sober, I could not imagine attending. After he died in 1987, I wondered, despite our complicated relationship, if I should have gone after all.

Pete insisted I go to the game in his place.

I finally relented.

I dug out my dad’s Notre Dame jacket, which my brother Seamus had given my son when he was a teenager. “Tim, do you want to wear your grandfather’s jacket?” I said.

He looked at me in disbelief. “Mom, that jacket hasn’t fit me since I was 15,” he said.

True. My son is 6 feet, 2 inches tall. My father was a head shorter.

I tried it on. It was loose, but fit fine over my layered clothing.

After Tim and I drove 90 miles, we parked, caught the “T” (Boston’s nickname for its mass transit), disembarked and began to walk the mile or so to the stadium.

Then the compliments began.

“Hey, great jacket,” men would say. Every time, I would reply that I wore my dad’s jacket, that he played football for Notre Dame, but usually warmed the bench, and that he had passed away in 1987. My explanation would open the floodgates. Their eyes would go wide, and their own stories would begin. They would explain their own ties to the university or what inspired them. Sometimes, it was just being Irish. Sometimes, it was the remembrance of watching a game with their own fathers, alive only in memory. The ties went deep.

My Dad never stopped talking about his college years.

One man told me his favorite uncle was a Catholic priest who had been on staff at the university. “I go to South Bend every year to lay flowers on his grave…and to see a game, of course,” he said with a wink. Then he turned serious. “You should go there, you know, for your dad,” he said.

“Maybe,” I said.

My father never stopped talking about his college years. My sister Claudia said once, with the pointed sarcasm of an adolescent, that she was pretty sure his life stopped on graduation day in 1944. The rest of us agreed. His stories reflected, to me, his longing for the carefree days before he had a family and six kids to support.

But maybe it was that the school became his second family, a celebration of his Irish heritage, his beloved Catholic faith, and all the endless possibilities of his life before worry, financial struggle and disappointment intervened. The school had been a place where everyone knew his name. No wonder that, in his 60s, he took that long bus trip.

In the stadium, hearing story after story in between plays, I couldn’t help but notice how many people had a personal reason for attending that went well beyond competition, often entangled with emotions, memories of someone they loved, or pride in someone still with them.

One young spectator in his teens waved a poster with a big, color picture of his sister, a Notre Dame cheerleader, on a squad nearly as athletic as the players themselves (they were utterly amazing).

“See that?,” he yelled as the cheerleaders did one gravity-defying flip in midair after another. “That’s MY SISTER down there!” We all cheered for him and for her, although I couldn’t help but reflect that when I was his age, Notre Dame barred women from attending. But times do change, I thought, cheering a touchdown and appreciating the good seats my husband bought. The day had turned blustery. The game was hard-fought. In the end, Notre Dame won, but not by as much as had been predicted.

Throughout, my Dad’s jacket kept me warm. As did my memories of him.

When my kids were in school, they and their friends thought my journalism job at a daily newspaper was the coolest ever (I had to agree). I would regularly invite their classes to the newspaper for a tour, pizza and a conversation about news. But besides the pizza, the highlight of the visits may have been the stack of photographs I gave them from the Associated Press wire, discards that the newspaper didn’t need. I would cull the photos and set the best ones aside for weeks before the visits.

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The boys would get pictures of sports heroes.

The girls? I would always give them pictures of female presidents and prime ministers. Alas, they were always from other countries – Panama, Ireland, Great Britain.

The girls would ask me why America had never elected a female president. My answer was always the same: You will see it within your lifetimes, and maybe mine. But because most other countries have a parliamentary system of government, I would explain, the equivalent of a prime minister would be our Speaker of the House of Representatives, the leader of the majority party in the most representative body of Congress.

Reuters/Downing

That hadn’t happened, either, but someday it might, I would say.

Then Nancy Pelosi came to power; she ultimately wielded the speaker’s gavel for eight years. She had the confidence, before she took her oath of office, to invite all children present to come join her at the podium. They came running, surrounding her in that ornate room, with its marbled pillars and aura of history, to share even more history with a woman leader not afraid of showing her love of kids.

Pelosi, who stepped down from party leadership in 2022 and announced this week she would not run for re-election next year, had standards and morals that she applied to government policy. Obamacare never would have been signed into law without her. Despite its flaws it has given millions of Americans the closest we have ever come to government health care for the masses. This became personal when my son went to graduate school; with his small income, he went on Obamacare and paid exactly $3.87 a month for insurance coverage.

When President Donald Trump came to office, he tried to bully and belittle Pelosi, showing for her the contempt and misogyny he shows most women. She wasn’t having it. She consistently refused to back down. When Trump stormed out of a meeting with Democrats during his first term, she said to reporters, “I am the mother of five, the grandmother of nine. I know a tantrum when I see one.” Pelosi led two impeachment attempts against Trump, which passed in the House but failed because of political cowardice in the Senate.

Pelosi on Trump: ‘The worst thing on the face of the Earth.’

No surprise, then, that there is no love lost between the two. Recently Pelosi described Trump during a CNN interview as, “The worst thing on the face of the Earth.” Trump, upon her announcement this week that she would retire next year, described her as, “an evil woman.”

Part of Pelosi’s public appeal goes well beyond policy making. Pelosi stood up to Trump in a way that he could do little about but fume. Yet he is enraging to me and millions of other women not merely because of his abundant character flaws, but also because we know his type. Most of us have worked with someone like Trump – someone who is ignorant, supremely confident withno apparent justification, sexist and yet too often has the upper hand.

I remember the compositor in charge of pasting up my editorial pages who would ignore corrections and deliberately send them to press with glaring errors; the abusive newsroom troll whose stated goal was to make female reporters cry. They were and are the weeds of the workplace. Pelosi has been not only the anti-Trump, but the anti-bully as well, a woman who knows how to smack down the office thug.

Pushback is sweet, even if it never comes often enough.

When I worked as an alcoholism counselor in Buffalo in the years before I became a journalist, a very high-level New York state official came one day to lecture employees of a local public detox center - people with the toughest and most thankless jobs, in the front lines of providing care to the poorest people. The official was arrogant and condescending. When he stopped talking, the room was silent.

Then one woman on staff raised her hand. Rose Creehan was a recovering alcoholic with decades of sobriety, a veteran of helping street people get sober. “Can I ask a question?” she said. The high-level bureaucrat nodded curtly. Rose had been smoking (we all did then). She stubbed out her cigarette, looked directly at the official, and without raising her voice, said. “What are you, some kind of an asshole?”

Rose instantly became my hero. Decades later, Pelosi did, too. Standing up to bullies is an act and an example that never dies.

Americans have always had a love affair with Halloween, but in the last few years true lunacy has taken over. This became apparent to me a few days ago as I was driving to a meeting in a location I was unfamiliar with. The gathering was being held in a country church. As I drove down a serpentine road in pitch darkness, I suddenly came upon 12-foot-high goblins, skeletons and various monsters looming over the lawn of an otherwise nondescript house. I veered, nearly drove into a tree, parked and stared. The blow-up ghouls did provide needed light on a street as dark as a coal mine, but, really?

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Decorations go on sale during summer, so no wonder that a similarly elaborate display stands before a house about a half-mile from my own. This one is replete with skeletons, but with one unique difference. The skeletons scream every few minutes, completely freaking out my dogs if I happen to walk past during their timed, blood-curdling shrieks. It makes me wonder: If someone on the street screamed for help, would anyone react? The nearby residents are becoming accustomed to continually hearing the sound effects of a horror movie. But at least a few residents are elderly, and maybe they just turn off their hearing aids.

I’m not really the Grinch who Stole Halloween. I like it still, and loved it when I was a child, even without dancing skeletons around the house. In my day, the holiday was preceded by Beggars Night, a sort of Halloween lite, an excuse for the bravest among us to dress up and go door to door to collect candy for two nights, not just one.

Photo by S L on Unsplash. Not my neighborhood, but close!

Mind you, the success of the holiday depended on good weather. We all feared a single thing: snow. In Buffalo, the city in which I grew up, it wasn’t an unusual sight to see snowflakes drifting down in October. If the weather was cold, we would have to put winter coats over our witch, ghost, or scarecrow costumes, opening our coats like flashers after screaming “Trick or Treat!” at every door to prove we were really in costume.

And who doesn’t enjoy dressing up? Even as an adult, I dressed as a vampire when my son, Tim, was in eighth grade, and we gathered his friends to celebrate. That delighted them, but to surprise me, three of them dressed as me, complete with gray-haired wigs. (Love those boys.) It was the ultimate compliment.

Twenty years later, my daughter, Anna, now has two daughters of her own, Riley, 2, and Ellie, 6, and she assures me that Halloween is not just one or two nights. It feels like a month, she told me, a note of exasperation in her voice. The school celebrates it. Little Riley’s daycare celebrates it. There is something called, “Trunk or Treat,” where parents give out candy from the open trunks of their cars. By the time the actual day rolled around yesterday, the kids had been on a sugar high, if not a diabetic coma, for days.

And costumes? I’ll have you know that my granddaughters were both princesses. Not just Halloween, either. The Cult of Disney has taken over; the girls run around the house singing “Let it Go,” from the Disney movie, “Frozen.” They wear long gowns and tiaras. Ellie told her mother recently that she needed gloves that reached to her elbows. Who knew?

It doesn’t surprise me. I took Ellie to the play, “Frozen,” in the past year and she was ready; with her gown and glittering shoes, she fit right in. When we arrived at the theater, the entire audience was crowded with hundreds of Elsas and Annas, Elsa being the crown princess of Arendelle with uncontrollable magical ice powers that haunt her, and her younger sister, Anna, who is brave and determined to help Elsa, and at the same time, renew their relationship as sisters.

I enjoyed being in the audience looking at these dressed-up girls more than I did the play. It was February, and not autumn, but it felt like Halloween. Who needs the last day of October?

After all, here it is November and the holiday continues in my neighborhood. I just walked the dogs, and the decorations are still up. For all I know, the shrieking skeletons will stay vocal until New Year’s Day. Maybe by then my dogs will be used to them.

Last week’s No Kings rallies in over 2,600 towns and cities nationwide attracted around 7 million people. Many were motivated to show up because of the stupid things Republican opponents said. Like House Speaker Mike Johnson, who called the gatherings “Hate America Rallies” attracting Marxists and anarchists. And don’t forget Texas Gov. Greg Abbott who ordered the National Guard and state troopers to – what? Patrol? Attend? Escort? -- the protests, which he claimed would be made up of members of antifa.

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(Raise your hand if you have ever met a member of antifa. I have written about politics for 45 years and I am pretty sure the group is little more than a Fox News fever dream.)

So there I was waving my, “I AM A GRANDMA TERRORIST” sign in front of the ornate city hall of Norwich, Conn., along with about 200 others. It had the atmosphere more of a fall festival than a Marxist celebration.

Yet the people present were clearly worried – about democracy, the state of the country and what President Donald J. Trump was about to do next.

Self-portrait at the No Kings rally.

What he did the following week, of course, is to tear down a significant portion of the White House to build a 90,000-square-foot obscenity of a ballroom while promising God knows what to wealthy corporate donors. All so they can pony up hundreds of millions to make the “People’s House” look just as hideous and tasteless as Mar-A-Lago. And the next day in a move that was strikingly infantile even for him, Trump posted a mocking video created with AI that showed him in a plane dropping crap on the heads of protesters.

Fellow terrorist at the Norwich, Conn. protest. Be afraid, be very afraid.

So here we are. Our country is headed by a completely corrupt president who revels in hatred and delights in division.

It’s why so many protested

Did it make a difference? It may not right away. But it will. And it already made a mark.

The biggest one-day protest in American history was the first Earth Day, April 1, 1970. That’s when 20 million people showed up to protest the fact that corporations were polluting the air, ground and water to make money at the cost of human lives. The U.S. Census, taken once every 10 years, was conducted that very day. It showed the country’s population was 203 million.

So one-tenth of the country showed up on Earth Day.

It mattered.

It turns out the No Kings protests were the second-largest one-day protest in American history. That matters.

There is strength in knowing you are not alone in your worry and outrage. There is solidarity in seeing a crowd of like-minded people who are against sweeps by masked government men who snatch suspected immigrants and act like the Gestapo. There is hope in meeting others who believe that cruelty and hatred should never be national values.

It all matters.

There is hope in meeting others who believe that cruelty and hatred should never be national values.

One of the greatest, yet virtually forgotten, protests in American history took place in 1912 in Lawrence, Mass., a multi-ethnic mill town by the Merrimack River. Called the “Bread and Roses” strike (it got that pretty name much later), the strike occurred when factory owners without warning speeded up machines and cut worker pay in response to a state law that weekly hours be cut from 56 to 54. Outraged, 25,000 workers, mostly women and children, walked out. They then organized across dozens of nationalities to fight back.

The strike was gritty and brutal. The governor (also a mill owner) sent the army to the city. Police arrested, injured and killed strikers. Members of the establishment, including the Catholic church, accused strikers of being communists and atheists. Months after the strike they sponsored a “God and Country” parade to shame the strikers and cozy up to the monied classes.

Strikers facing soldiers with fixed bayonets in 1912

Yet the 10-week strike changed America. Congressional hearings exposed horrifying factory conditions. The mill owners, knowing a public relations disaster when they saw one, raised pay and slowed down the machines. Child labor laws passed.

I was the editorial page editor at The Eagle-Tribune in Lawrence in 1987, the year the city and the newspaper marked the 75th anniversary of the strike. The workers, to my mind, were heroes. People still lived in Lawrence who walked out of the mills that cold January day. Yet they struggled all those years later with past accusations that they were atheists and anarchists. That undeserved shame was real: Some did not want their names printed in the paper.

Strikers, including child workers. (Strike photos from Library of Congress).

Despite that, they still changed the world. They had strength in numbers. They saw like-minded people who believed in the same thing they did – common decency.

None of the No Kings protests had to suffer like the Lawrence strikers. Yet I thought of them, because they have inspired me for most of my life, and because they demonstrated the power and strength that lie in numbers. They saw one another, and they knew their cause was righteous. And they persevered.

That’s what was good about Saturday. We saw one another. That’s what we have to hang onto – and keep showing up for. No matter what.

On a very different note; Buffalo State University’s Burchfield-Penney Art Center in Buffalo, NY will host a discussion of my book, “Saving Ellen: A Memoir of Hope and Recovery,” via zoom this Nov. 6, from 6:30 to 7:30 pm, and the public is welcome to join. Here is the information about the event; come one, come all!

My kitchen has been invaded by coffee mugs. They are crowding out other, far more needed items, like glasses. I swear they are multiplying. They take up two shelves and would take up even more room if I hadn’t taken some to my office, where I keep an electric kettle for tea.

The situation is entirely avoidable, of course. I could just throw out the older mugs. But I can’t. I’m too attached. I discovered this when my son moved into an apartment several years ago. Good, I thought. I can get rid of coffee mugs by giving them to him.

I didn’t get far.

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That sky-blue Brattleboro (Vermont) Reformer mug? I couldn’t let that go. The editor sent it to me 35 years ago after I wrote a commentary for the newspaper - along with a check. My first freelance opinion that paid cash money made every sip I took from the cup that much sweeter.

The Reformer cup is one of the innumerable media coffee mugs crowding the kitchen shelves. Some others are from National Public Radio; Channel 3 TV in Madison; the Courier-Journal, in Louisville, Kentucky; the Salina Journal in Kansas. It occurs to me looking at the sea of coffee mugs that I must have given away all of my mugs from The New York Times. In fact, I seem to have mugs from everywhere but the four newspapers for which I worked.

Panky Curtiss’ teacup, now nearly 90 years old. Picture taken last November one early morning from my 2nd floor porch; we still have leaves on the trees!

The “Mother of the Bride” cup that my daughter Anna presented me with on the morning of her wedding day? Nope; that stays. Besides, it’s a mere youngster at 8 years old.

Then there is the mug that made me realize that Anna had become an adult. It was a gift for Mother’s Day when she was 19, and shows a lady of leisure resting amidst flowers. The cup says, “Queen of F*#@ing Everything.” I guess it represented her opinion of me at the time. I remember laughing for 10 minutes when I opened the box, and it isn’t even chipped, so, no, can’t throw that one out, either.

I also have a mug lettered in green, surrounded by shamrocks, that says, “HERSELF.” I bought it in Ireland during the first of five trips there. If you are Irish, you understand.

One cup was a gift from myself to myself, to be used when necessary as a ceramic pep talk. In bold letters, it says, “Best. Journalist. Ever.” I drink from it when my ambition begins to be neutered by self-doubt. Priceless.

My Haslam’s Book Store mug from St. Petersburg, Florida, features a picture of Teacup, its most famous store cat, whom I petted more than once during winter visits there. Whenever there was a hurricane, the place would be besieged with calls to see if Teacup was OK. Nobody gave a damn about the humans, mind you; just the cat. Alas, my dishwasher’s hot water is making Teacup look like an ever-more ghostly feline, and the store itself closed in 2020 after being open for 87 years. But as long as I have the cup, the memories - and Teacup - live on.

One coffee cup and saucer, both delicate, were gifts from a delightful family friend named Panky Curtiss whom I knew growing up. She was always laughing about something. When I sent her an invitation to my wedding, she accepted immediately and in return sent me a beautiful teacup and saucer from one of the place settings she had received as a gift for her own wedding in 1936. When I want to commune in spirit with Panky, I make tea in her cup and talk to her.

I have two cups in my collection that look utterly ordinary. One is imprinted with daisies and the other has black-eyed Susans. They are small, only holding 6 ounces, both made in Japan according to a stamp on the bottom, and cost about $2 each.

My mother and I each bought one at a little store when I was 15. She took the one with daisies; I loved the bright yellow flowers of the other mug. I was flush with cash after being paid $25 for my first real summer job. Remembering my triumph, and how my mother and I sipped coffee in these cups every summer morning afterwards, makes me smile.

They are precious, and, like many of my cups, are more than utilitarian. In fact, they aren’t really mugs to me. They are memories. So I guess my shelves will stay crowded after all.

I started my Substack column three years ago today. There was no specific plan for me to start inflicting it onto unsuspecting friends and strangers alike on my 65th birthday; the timing of figuring out how to set up a simple webpage and subscription service just worked out that way. But I’m glad I picked Oct. 8 to press the launch button. Now I will always remember when the fun started.

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I began by strong-arming four people to subscribe. Of course, I picked the four who couldn’t say no – my children, Anna and Tim, and two of my siblings, Claudia and Tim. The first year, I gained 600 subscribers. Now I have just under 4,000 subscribers, which includes you, dear reader. You are ever so patient with my weekly rants and my writing, a mix about life on a small Connecticut farm and my attempts to deal with politics without tearing my hair out or lunging for the razor blades.

It is so rewarding to hear from readers. Connecting has made the time I spent writing 161 posts worthwhile. Otherwise, I would be swilling nonalcoholic beer from a paper bag and shrieking into the void. (As my friend Emily from New Zealand wrote to me when she subscribed, “We have to keep your head from exploding!”) You keep me from that fate, my friends. Sorting through Substack statistics gives me a dizzying sense of where my words end up.

Although I have lived in Connecticut for 37 years, the state with by far the most subscribers of my column is Ohio, at 450. (Thank you, Connie Schultz, and my Dayton friends.) New York State comes in second at 166, augmented by the efforts of my beloved former classmates of my small but powerful girls school in Buffalo, N.Y. (thank you, dears!). I have more subscribers from Canada (115, and happily, that includes Marie) than Connecticut (85). Even Australia, at 92, beats out my home state (Here’s looking at you, Genevieve!). Substack tells me that I have readers in 74 countries. I hope most are not bots, but you never know. I remain grateful for readers wherever they might reside.

When writers set up a Substack, they have to pick a name for their writings. I wanted a play on my last name, Casey, but I ran into just how common that is. No surprise there; in America, Casey is the third-most common Irish name behind Sullivan and Murphy.

So I was stumped about thinking of a unique name until I ran into a webpage called the Red Hook Daily Catch, which covers the news from the towns of Rhinebeck and Red Hook, N.Y. Hey, I like fishing, too, so I dubbed my column Casey’s Catch, satisfied that none of the shouting, happy Caseys (distant cousins, no doubt) scribbling away on Substack would copy that as a name. So far, so good.

When I began, I intended to write about politics more often, but I found that focus too narrow, and the toxic brew simmering in America right now is too much to take in every single week. Also, there is far more to life than the bilge spewing from the White House, the Trump enablers in Congress and those on the Supreme Court. So I write about current affairs when I think I should and every day I look for ways to throw sand in the gears of the plans and actions of the toads – er, people – who do not have the morals to be in public office, but squat there anyway. I fight when I can and in the interim, I take deep, yoga breaths to stay centered.

We will all get to the other side of this, I promise.

In the meantime, allow me to continue writing about simple things – the falling leaves of autumn, the joys of grandchildren, relationships, the sight of the stars at night and the ordinary moments of daily life.

It matters. You matter. And I am so grateful that you read my words. Thank you, thank you.

I knew I would miss the towering maple in our yard when I realized it would not live to see another winter.

One third of the tree came crashing down in the middle of a quiet night this past June, just missing our house. There had been no dramatic storm or gust of wind. Water for years had probably collected about 20 feet up, where several large branches met, an arborist told us. New England’s cycle of freezing and thawing had caused decay; the arms, spread wide, became too heavy for the tree to hold them up.

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Most trees can survive with even a big portion lopped off. But when the branches wrenched away they left a gaping hole. You could see the sky through the tree, a space that yawned just beneath the sweet canopy that had long shaded our back porch and once had held swings for our children. Its leaves had formed huge piles for the kids to jump in, followed by our dogs, who, no matter how old or arthritic they were, became puppies once again.

The portion of our maple tree after it toppled

Trees, scientists say, have a heartbeat of sorts, but one that beats once every two hours or so as water is pulled from the roots for nourishment. I didn’t need science to know that our tree had a beating heart as it presided over our lives for more than 27 years.

But sentiment clashed with cold reality. The tree would have to come down.

It was around 85, according to a neighbor. Years ago he had stopped by and recalled the day when the little sapling was planted, around 1940. He had been a boy of 10, he recalled, as he rested on his cane and glanced upwards. Look at it now, he said, smiling.

Bella sniffing around the very diminutive replacement for the maple

No longer. After the accident the stately tree was in pieces all over our yard, and soon, with the roar of chain saws, what wasn’t cut for firewood was chipped in great piles. Soon – too soon – even the wide stump was ground to nothing . My heart ached. The landscape seemed bleak. The back porch and patio baked in the sun. I never realized how much shade the tree gave us.

My husband Pete bought a red maple and planted it where the old tree had once stood. The sapling was about my size – a little over 5 feet – and no bigger around than a fat piece of chalk. Surely, someday it would be impressive.. But it would take a long time to cast any substantial shade, or heck, even be strong enough to hold up my laundry line. Pete and I had the same thought: At nearly 68 (me) and 71 (him) we didn’t have the time to wait

We needed a bigger tree. But, how? I had never heard of anyone planting a really big tree in their yard. Who does that, anyway?

Us, apparently.

The new tree arrives

Research brought us one afternoon to an isolated, lush meadow close to the Connecticut River. There stood oak, birch, beech and maple trees of all kinds, all planted in rows like stalks of corn – if corn were 30 feet high. We wandered until we came upon a large red maple. It would be a good companion to the little one just planted. This new tree was about 25 or 30 years old. Maybe it could mentor the sapling, I thought. They could keep each other company.

The man in charge promised he would water the tree regularly for six weeks and deliver it on a flatbed truck no later than the middle of October. Then he would dig a hole six feet deep and six feet across, use machines and manpower to place the tree in its new home and stake it down on three sides for stability.

And that’s what happened.

I had long planned a lunch with two close friends about 45 minutes away the day of delivery, so everything was done by the time I arrived back home. I parked the car and gaped up at the stately red maple, with its beautiful shape, already casting generous shade over our patio.

The new red maple, settling in

The sight brought tears to my eyes, moved by how graceful the tree seemed and how perfect it was in our yard, as if it had always been there. I was still sad over the tree we lost, but grateful we had followed through with a plan that had at first seemed to me to be hare-brained and, frankly, not a little indulgent.

But it was neither.

Long after we are gone, I hope our two maples hold swings for children, laundry lines for busy parents, and shower barking dogs with autumn leaves, all the while accompanied by the slow beating of their kind hearts.

It is a measure of the warped world in which the American government now exists that the president in August complained bitterly about the Smithsonian Institution, that magnificent collection of 21 museums and galleries. What did the Smithsonian do that so offended the commander in chief? Apparently the Smithsonian - including the iconic National Museum of African American History and Culture - is too focused on “how bad slavery was.”

Let that sink in. The president is infuriated that we are ignoring the positive aspects of being bought, sold, beaten and forced to dwell in bondage from birth.

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As my rage began to boil up yet again, I paused for a moment to wonder what a certain officer in the Civil War would have thought.

His name was William Toomey and he was one of the “Boys of ’61.” An Irish immigrant, he lived in Dunkirk, N.Y., and, at 35, had a wife and five children. He signed up for Company E of the New York 72nd Infantry’s Third Regiment in May of 1861, barely a month after the war began. He mustered into the Union Army with his friends and neighbors, and, possibly because of his age, Toomey began military life as a second lieutenant. Within 14 months he was the company captain.

He was my great-great grandfather.

In the three years of his service, Toomey would fight in many of the most horrific battles of the Civil War. At Gettysburg, while amidst the bloodbath that became the war’s turning point, his sword broke and he plucked another from a dead soldier to fight on - the same sword that is my family’s prized possession. The Wilderness, the battle that took place in dense forest that caught fire and burned alive many soldiers. Cold Harbor, where the Union side lost 7,000 men, most in the first eight ferocious minutes.

Capt. William Toomey

The war resulted in about 700,000 dead and brought about the end of slavery. Toomey mustered out with his company in 1864 during a day-long lull in the battle of Petersburg. I suspect by that time he had had enough, had seen enough and he certainly had done enough.

I can only speculate why he joined the Army to begin with. After all, most of the Irish who came to America had already fled for their lives from their native land. Toomey emigrated from County Cork, Ireland, and either lived through or certainly knew about the horrendous suffering of Ireland’s “Great Hunger,” the Irish Potato Famine (1845-1849). For what sets the famine apart from others is that its enormous mortality rate (400,000 died in 1847 alone) occurred at least in part because England continued selling Irish crops abroad rather than use them to feed the starving.

With the knowledge of that fresh hell, who wouldn’t sympathize with the enslaved?

Yet here we are, more than 150 years past the Civil War, with a president bent on a wholesale whitewash of our troubled, racist history. The parks have begun to take down exhibits on slavery and Native Americans that do not promote a “positive view” of our past. The most famous picture of the horrors of slavery, that of an enslaved man whose back was crisscrossed with scars, is being removed from exhibitions. And why? Because the exhibits tell the hard truth. That said, taking them down cannot snuff out the facts, now or ever.

Captain Toomey lived to have two more children and died in 1901, at the age of 75, at the Erie, Penn., home of his daughter Joanna, my great-grandmother. He was honored to the end of his days for his leadership during the war.

But until several years ago, I had never seen a picture of him in uniform. My cousin sent it, and I showed the picture to my son Tim, who now teaches history in an urban public high school (and unsurprisingly, knows nearly everything about the Civil War). Even his students had the same reaction as I when he showed them the image. “You have his hair!” they exclaimed.

And, I think, Captain Toomey’s willingness to do the right thing – something our country, and certainly this White House, could use more of.

I can’t count the number of people who have mentioned to me in the last year or so that they just don’t listen to the news anymore.

These are intelligent people, and thoughtful, too; they give back to their communities, they vote in elections, they generally have informed opinions.

But what they do not do is, for the most part, listen to or read the news.

They’ve walked away.

At a Journalism and Women Symposium conference in Washington, D.C., over the weekend, I listened to Sally Buzbee put her finger on why. Buzbee is former executive editor for the Associated Press, former executive editor (and first woman in that role) for The Washington Post, and current Reuters news editor for the United States and Canada.

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“I think the country is very exhausted about politics, so it is very hard for journalists to break through,” she said.

Amen, sister.

To Buzbee, if Americans are walking away from news, journalists have to figure out how to re-engage them. And, she acknowledges, the current atmosphere affects reporters, too, whom she calls “the guts of journalism.”

Sally Buzbee speaking at the Journalism and Women’s Symposium (JAWS)) conference Sept. 6. That’s “JAWS” on the stage behind her.

“The world is massively interested in what is happening with this administration. But sometimes Americans are really turned off. They are really not paying attention to this stuff,” she said. “So we have to figure out how to capture what is happening without being so shrill that no one is reading you. For me right now, Reuter’s matter-of-factness is useful to the world. We are literally not shying away from reporting ... But it’s exhausting, right?”

But in the same breath she also articulated why news reporting is so important, no matter how much is spewing from Washington.

Take the recent U.S. military strike on a Venezuelan ship that killed 11 people. The Administration claims that the boat’s crew were part of a drug cartel. About the only information has come from a social media post from Donald Trump and a tweet from Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

The reality, Buzbee pointed out, is that we know shockingly little about the U.S. attack on a ship from another country.

“I am keenly aware that nobody trusts me.” - Sally Buzbee

“We know almost nothing about what happened,” she said. “We don’t know who the people are who were killed. We don’t know their nationality. We don’t know what they were doing. We don’t know where they were going. We don’t know what legal authority the U.S. government used [to shoot them]. We don’t know what weapons the U.S. government used. We don’t know who gave the order...

“A government official tweeting out that something happened is the information they want to give us. It is not the information that the public needs to know,” she said. “There is a really strong need for journalism that tries to be very factually based and very accurate and as nonpartisan as it can possibly be. There is a real fight for the accuracy of information across our globe.”

Yet, Buzbee said, “There are people who think that when the government tweets, they are getting the full story.”

Another problem: People don’t believe what they read or view from the media.

“I am keenly aware that nobody trusts me. Nobody says, ‘I believe you, and you are doing the right thing.’ They want us to tell them how we got information. We’ve made progress in being more and more transparent, but we are three steps behind the audiences’ demand for transparency.”

“I don’t personally spend a lot of time on TikTok, but everybody else in the world does, including all the up-and-coming readers. We need to get over ourselves, and understand the way the world is going.”

Yes to all that.

And I, too, feel exhausted with the firehose of news, much of it fear-based and threatening, to come out of Washington. With social media in particular, it feels like the news is everywhere.

One thing I don’t do is listen to a lot of TV news. I prefer reading, because then I can control my intake of news more effectively. I have subscriptions to four newspapers – overkill, maybe – three national newspapers and the local paper at which I worked for more than 17 years, The Day of New London, Conn.

But everyone needs a break. Buzbee said she hikes on weekends. Me? Long walks and weekly karate classes.

We all need to find serenity in our own ways.

In that spirit, what I would say to my friends and anyone who has walked away from news: Take that needed break. Find a way to take the news in small bites. But don’t be so discouraged, so turned off, that you disengage and unplug for too long, or, God forbid, permanently. Because that’s a form of surrender that the extreme right, the conspiracy theorists, the forces of darkness, would love. The more uninformed the citizenry, the more power – our power - they will amass. So we cannot give up.

I was stumped.

I figure out all my bills around the first of every month. On Saturday, I spread out the invoices and immediately could see I had a problem.

I bought a used car two weeks ago, and through the dealer, obtained a loan from a national credit union I had never heard of. The company had sent me a congratulatory letter, but nothing else. How do I pay this bill? I wondered.

Sighing, I called the number on the letter, fully expecting a robot, a recording telling me to call back later or to go to hell. Or perhaps an endless loop leading to a communication cul-de-sac, as is the case with just about every company I deal with lately.

Instead, after answering a question or two from an automatic system, I got a HUMAN BEING. On a Saturday. During a holiday weekend for Labor Day. I almost dropped the phone. Honestly, I nearly had a heart attack.

She was pleasant and efficient, and when I mentioned the company had not yet sent me a loan number, she gave that to me, along with the bill due date and instructions on where to send the check.

Photo by Icons8 Team on Unsplash

I hung up, stunned. When is the last time anyone got service over the telephone? From a real person? The experience left me almost confused.

I know a couple who are having an epic struggle with Xfinity to get problems with their bills for home internet resolved, spending pointless hours on the phone. The only people they have encountered have offered one excuse after another and little else.

For my part, I’ve been trying to find just one warm body at ExxonMobil’s credit card company to help me change the telephone number on my record. The number has been disconnected for more than 20 years. But without a telephone number that can accept texts, I can’t get anywhere with the automatic system. And God forbid the corporation would provide any people to help.

Fuggedaboutit, as they say in Jersey.

Despite this, I can offer an occasional glimmer of hope, like the nice lady I talked to Saturday about my loan.

About six years ago, I switched cell telephone providers because Sprint coverage in my area became, in a word, appalling. (Sprint soon merged with another company, T-Mobile) But I kept getting bills from Sprint. I haggled. I begged. All to no avail. Finally, I got angry. I wrote a letter to the president of the company laying out the problem, saying that I hadn’t left Sprint, the company had left ME. A few days later I got a call from company headquarters. It was the president’s administrative assistant, who told me she would handle the problem and I would stop getting bills. She was as good as her word.

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My favorite story about a rare success in the perennial case of Corporate America v. All Customers Anywhere is from wonderful Alice Fitzpatrick, one of my wisdom figures in southeastern Connecticut where I live. More than 30 years ago she paid cash for a brand new car, a Chrysler, and before she had gone 100 miles the car interior filled with smoke when she so much as drove around the block. She went back to the dealer to request a new car only to get the patronizing, “now, now, little lady” treatment. The dealer told her that her husband (who had recently absconded) could surely fix the car. He would most certainly not undo the sale.

He had no idea.

Alice fumed, paced, railed against a man’s world and the unfairness of it all. Then she began to work the phone. Alice talked her way up the chain of the Chrysler Corporation until she connected with the president of the company, the iconic Lee Iaccoca himself. She told him the problem. He listened. He said he had no control over individual dealerships, but he would see what he could do.

Indeed.

Within the hour, the dealership called Alice and gave her a new car she was proud to drive. “It became a symbol of my own empowerment, all because I, as a customer, encountered empathic, humane service providers along the way,” Alice wrote me in an email. Lucky for her that AI had not yet been invented

Yet telephone trees, automatic messaging or any new-fangled system we have now is not the problem. The issue is that far too many companies simply don’t care about ordinary customers. That’s the problem.