Chuck Haga: Consider second friendly tour a success – not a farewell

Let me try to write one more column during my friendship tour, please, and I promise to move on next week.

Plus, I owe some of you some cancer news.

Some of you of course knew that I had organized these tours, the first in 2022 and the second over three weeks at the end of May and June, because I was feeling the effects of age and ailments and I wanted to , need to see faces. of people who matter to me.

I said that Chuck’s Excellent Friendship Tours were not farewell tours, and in saying that some of you thought maybe that was exactly what it was. I started thinking about it too. Was this the last time I would see these high school classmates and college fraternity friends, these wonderful people I worked with for decades?

I turned 75 in May and set off on a three-week, 5,007-mile road trip ruminating (I’ve wasted too much time in my life ruminating) about scans and imaging and doctors waiting to tell me “Time’s up” when I got home.

Well, it’s not as dark as my thoughts led me to fear.

“Your cancer is stable. That’s good news,” the oncologist said this week after the test results came back.

“Okay,” I said. “I can live with that.”

I’ve been ordered to take better care of myself, and that includes ruminating less (and leaving behind some of the tastes I acquired while traveling the South, like biscuits and gravy for breakfast).

I will try to face the inevitable challenges that await me at 76, then 77 – will I be able to make it to 80 and see my granddaughter Emma graduate from high school? – with the serenity that Thomas Jefferson demonstrated. I wrote three weeks ago on the road that he wrote at the age of 76 that a gradual decline in health can be seen as a gift, that “under no circumstances has nature been more lenient towards us than in the gentle gradations by which it prepares us to voluntarily separate ourselves from that which we are not destined to keep forever.

We who ruminate are perhaps less likely to see it as kindness when hearing, memory, and friends disappear, “stolen one by one until we are left among strangers, mere monuments to the past and specimens of antiquity intended for the observation of the curious.”

I sit in my café, feeling like an antique as the young people who run the place make my coffee, smile and ask how I am, and I can tell they care. Are they playing Edith Piaf in the background out of respect for my old self? No, I think they discovered Edith just like I did 50+ years ago, like my son did 30 years ago, and it doesn’t matter if you speak little French since she sings about regrets – no regrets.

I want to be able to appreciate youth, youth and beauty, without feeling sorry for myself. I live for moments like that, when I was sitting in a Mississippi coffee shop talking with my granddaughter Morgan, and a young woman in her thirties stopped in front of me and asked in a drawl, “Do I detect an accent?” We talked for a minute or two, me embarrassed by my North Dakota accent, and it made me happy.

One of John Steinbeck’s major observations in “Travels with Charley,” his book about a cross-country road trip in 1960, was the disappointing monotony he encountered as he moved from city to city, state to state. Regional specificities faded away: accents, favorite foods, local architecture.

“American cities are like badger burrows, surrounded by trash – all of it – surrounded by piles of wrecked and rusty automobiles, and almost choked with trash. Everything we use comes in boxes, cartons, trash cans, those so-called packaging that we love so much. The mountain of things we throw away is much bigger than the things we use.

It was the same when I charted Steinbeck’s route in 1988, and it didn’t change when I now wandered across 19 states, searching for friends, family, co-workers and moments of joy.

But my goodness, Northwest Arkansas is incredibly beautiful, and the view from Monticello must be close to what Jefferson saw and loved.

John Little’s picture is on his tombstone in Raleigh, Mississippi, and we had a good conversation… tapJohn would say.

Young baristas at a small-town Kentucky store made my coffee, smiled at me, and asked how I was doing. And a young woman from Hattiesburg, Mississippi, seemed downright charmed by my North Dakota accent.

I can live with that.

Chuck Haga had a long career at the Grand Forks Herald and the Minneapolis Star Tribune before retiring in 2013. He can be reached at [email protected].