PHRED: G’day and welcome back to Harry’s World. I’m Phred, and with me as always is Maxine.
MAXINE: Good morning.
PHRED: Virginia, 2004 to 2020 — the Obama years, the Trump years, and Harry watching it all from Abingdon.
PHRED: Now, we’ve been working through Harry’s memoir in more or less chronological order — England, MIT, the Army, Caracas, his early marriages. Last episode we covered Chapter Fifteen, which was Elaine: how they met, the Scarsdale Quaker meeting, the move to Hofstra. And today we’re doing the chapter that comes after that in the sequence — Chapter Eighteen, “Virginia 2004 to 2020.” There’s a gap in between, Chapters Sixteen and Seventeen, but this is what Harry had ready when he wrote the memoir in May 2020.
MAXINE: And what a span of years it is. Sixteen years. Harry retires, nearly dies, rebuilds, loses a marriage, buys a Volkswagen camping bus in Mexico City, meets Phyllis, gets married again at seventy-three, goes to Burning Man at seventy-five, and ends up — where we find him in February 2020 — sitting in the house in Bristol, Virginia, writing all of this down while a pandemic closes in.
PHRED: Before we get into it, I’ve picked today’s word of the day.
MAXINE: Phred, we haven’t done that in weeks.
PHRED: Which makes it overdue, not retired. Today’s word is “resilience.” I’m aiming for three usages before we close. You say it — or any form of it — I hit the horn.
MAXINE: I’m not going to say it deliberately, Phred.
PHRED: Nobody ever does. That’s why it’s a game.
MAXINE: It’s not a game if only one person is playing.
PHRED: Everything is a game if you approach it with the right spirit.
MAXINE: …Let’s just read the piece.
PHRED: Right. So — the frame. The whole chapter has this shadow over it. He knows something’s coming. He doesn’t know how big yet — it’s only February 2020 — but he knows COVID’s out there, and he writes: “My current concern is the Covid-19 pandemic and this has give me some incentive to get this far.”
MAXINE: The typo — “give” for “given” — I find that almost more affecting than if it were corrected. It feels like speed. Like he wanted to get it down.
PHRED: Yeah, exactly. Now, let’s start at the top. Harry retires from Hofstra in June 2004. He and Elaine have bought this house in Abingdon, Virginia — 870 Wayne Ave — and they’re meant to move around July 4th. But instead, Harry ends up at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital getting two stents put in his heart. He writes: “The doctors told me that this operation probably saved my life.” And then he says something that stopped me cold: “Even if it fails tonight I have been incredibly lucky.”
MAXINE: That line is characteristic Harry. The gratitude is real, but it’s measured against mortality. He doesn’t say he’s out of danger. He says he’s been lucky so far. There’s a stoicism in it — not a denial of fear, but a refusal to let fear be the whole story.
PHRED: And he bounces back like a wombat off a fence. He’s walking for exercise by Monday, moving to Virginia a few weeks later, and before long he’s mowing the lawn on a riding mower and sitting on a back porch he helped build. “Life was good,” he writes. Three words. And then — well, we know what’s coming.
MAXINE: The Emory and Henry section is interesting to me. He’d been rejected for the Instructional Technologist job the first time around. He says: “I was pretty upset and disappointed when I did not get the job, but I got over it and went on with my new, and I thought wonderful, life.” The comma splice there — “new, and I thought wonderful, life” — it’s Harry qualifying his own hope in hindsight.
PHRED: And then a year later the dean rings him up, the previous two people hadn’t worked out, and Harry’s back in the saddle — managing their “Angel” online learning system, which he’d used a cousin of at Hofstra. Nine years, age sixty-six to seventy-five. And then the same line we’ve heard before: “I would still work there if I could.”
MAXINE: He said almost exactly that about Hofstra in Chapter Sixteen — “I would have continued working at Hofstra had I been able to do so.” It’s a refrain with him, isn’t it? He finds a place he loves, he does well there, and then circumstance pulls him away. Retirement, divorce, a pandemic. He’s not someone who leaves jobs because he’s restless. He leaves because something bigger than him decides it’s time.
PHRED: Right. And then — Elaine. They celebrate their fifth anniversary in December 2006. She goes off to visit a friend. Harry finds out she’s actually meeting another man. He meets her at the airport with a dozen roses, tells her he knows, tells her he wants to work on the marriage. And she says no. She’s already decided. She’s moving to Arkansas.
MAXINE: Harry’s account of this is almost startlingly flat. “This was a total shock and surprise to me.” That’s the whole emotional sentence. And then he turns the scalpel on himself: “I did not handle it well, though better than my first divorce, and whined and complained to anyone who would listen for over a year after she left in May of 2007.”
PHRED: He references Bonnie there — Chapter Fourteen. Two marriages, both ended when his wife left him for someone else. He doesn’t ask for pity. He reports the facts and rates his own performance. It’s brutal, in a way.
MAXINE: It’s honest in a way that makes you wince. And I think the flatness is a choice — or at least a habit. Harry feels things deeply, but when he writes about the worst moments, he often goes plain. He doesn’t dramatize. He states. And somehow that makes it heavier.
PHRED: Now — I’m going to need a drumroll for this next bit.
[SFX: DRUMROLL]
MAXINE: Phred, no. We don’t drumroll a divorce.
PHRED: Not for the divorce, Maxine. For what Harry does after. He’s feeling low. Lost. And he decides he needs to make a statement to himself that he won’t give up on life. And the statement is — he buys a VW camping bus. From a Swiss couple. In Mexico City. For three thousand dollars.
MAXINE: …Fine. That does deserve a drumroll.
[SFX: RIMSHOT]
PHRED: He flies down with his friend Barry Germond and they drive it back through San Antonio, Houston, New Orleans, all the way to Abingdon.
MAXINE: It’s one of the most Harry details I can think of. A sixty-five-year-old man, fresh from a divorce, flying to Mexico City to buy a vehicle most people his age would consider impractical. And he keeps it for five years.
PHRED: “I wanted something to make a statement to myself that I would not give up on life.” That’s the sentence. The bus isn’t transport. It’s punctuation. An exclamation mark after a very hard paragraph.
MAXINE: And then there’s a gap in the narrative — he rents a house on Mason Place, lives there five years, and somewhere in there he meets Phyllis Haile in 2009. By 2012 they’re married in the Unitarian church, and he’s moved into her house in Bristol.
PHRED: And this is where the chapter turns, for me. Because Harry writes something that I don’t think he’s written in any of the other memoir chapters we’ve covered. He says that Phyllis is the first wife he’s been able to say “I love you” to.
MAXINE: That is a remarkable sentence. He doesn’t strip the past of meaning — he qualifies it with “Though I think I loved Elaine and Bonnie” — but he refines it. He allows himself to say that this is different. That something he couldn’t do before, he can do now. And I think it’s significant that this comes in the same chapter where he also says: “This is the longest I have ever lived in one house and I love it.”
PHRED: For a bloke who’s lived in Tampa, England, Carlisle, Monterey, Caracas, Boston, Columbus, New York, and Abingdon — that’s a statement. 108 Pebble Beach Drive, Bristol, Virginia. Since May 2012. And he loves it.
MAXINE: There’s a theme here about settling. Not settling in the sense of giving up — settling in the sense of arriving. Harry spent so much of his life in motion: childhood moves, the Army, career changes, marriages that didn’t hold. And now, in his seventies, he finds a house he stays in and a marriage where he can say “I love you.” The chapter gains its power from that contrast.
PHRED: You know what this reminds me of?
MAXINE: I’m going to guess wombats.
PHRED: Wombats! Specifically — wombat rear ends.
MAXINE: Of course. Specifically that.
PHRED: No, listen. Wombats have these incredibly tough rumps — like a brick wall at the end of a tunnel. When a predator tries to follow them into their burrow, they just block the passage and wait it out. Hours if they have to. The toughness isn’t aggressive. It’s just — I’m still here. You can’t move me. That’s Harry in this chapter, Maxine. Heart surgery, divorce, losing a friend — he just keeps blocking the tunnel.
MAXINE: That’s… actually not a bad metaphor.
PHRED: I told you.
MAXINE: I hate that it’s not a bad metaphor.
PHRED: He also talks about the cats — Buckeye and Sally, Chester who died. Buckeye is “my buddy.” And he mentions Burning Man, which he did at seventy-five with his MIT friend Andy Stokes. “A challenging and utterly fascinating experience.” Andy died in 2018, and Harry notes that with a simple “To my sorrow.” No elaboration. Just the fact.
MAXINE: The Burning Man detail is fascinating to me — it’s so far outside what you’d expect from a retired instructional technologist in rural Virginia. But it fits the pattern: Harry doesn’t stop being curious. He doesn’t stop saying yes to things. The VW bus, the fiddle lessons in Portugal, Burning Man at seventy-five — this is the same person who read Automatic Control as a teenager and decided to go to MIT.
PHRED: The curiosity’s the through-line, yeah. He mentions going to Europe with Phyllis — Rome, a cruise, Portugal where he took fiddle lessons in Lagos, London where he revisited his old school, John Fisher. And the music camps — Swannanoa Gathering, Augusta Music Festival, Pinewoods. Plus the Caracas reunions with Phyllis — Galveston, St. Louis, St. Croix, Tidewater, Charleston.
MAXINE: We covered his Caracas Reunion Song back in Episode Seven. It’s good to know he kept going to those reunions. That community mattered to him across decades.
PHRED: It did. Now, I want to talk about who this is for, because I think that’s one of the standing questions. Who’s Harry writing this for?
MAXINE: I think it’s shifted. In the early chapters — England, Caracas — he’s writing for his descendants, yes, but he’s also writing for himself, piecing together who he was. Here, in Chapter Eighteen, I think the audience is more specific: it’s the people who are still in his life. Phyllis. His son Paul. His grandson Matt. The people who might need to know, after he’s gone, how he got here.
PHRED: And the COVID mention at the end — “this has give me some incentive to get this far” — that suggests he felt time pressing. That this might be something he needed to finish while he still could.
MAXINE: Which brings us to the questions we’d want to ask him. What I’d want to know is about that line — “Phyllis is the first wife I have been able to say ‘I love you’ to.” What changed? Was it something in him, something in her, something in the timing? Because he doesn’t explain it. He just states it.
PHRED: And for me it’d be about the VW bus. Did it work? Did driving it make him feel better, or was the act of buying it the whole point? He says it was a statement to himself, but I’d love to know what happened on that drive. Six days from Mexico City to Abingdon — that’s a lot of road to think on.
MAXINE: What strikes me about this chapter, structurally, is that it’s organised by events but held together by emotion. Each section has a heading — “Emory & Henry,” “Divorce from Elaine,” “VW bus Mexico,” “Burning Man and Andy Stokes” — but the real thread is Harry’s ability to keep going. Heart surgery. Rejection. Divorce. The death of a friend. He doesn’t linger on any of them. He notes them, moves forward, finds the next thing.
PHRED: And the prose stays plain throughout. He’s not reaching for literary effect. He’s reporting. “Life was good.” “This was a total shock.” “A great trip.” The sentences are short. The feelings are there, but they’re under the surface.
MAXINE: Which is both a strength and a limitation. The strength is authenticity — you believe every word. The limitation is that sometimes you want him to stay longer in a moment. The dozen roses at the airport. The night in the Detroit motel on New Year’s Eve. The drive back from Mexico. These are scenes that could have been expanded, and he chose not to. I respect the choice, but I notice it.
PHRED: I reckon Harry’s saving the deeper scenes for other documents. He mentions several times that he has “a whole story” about something — the heart surgery, the Mexico trip, Burning Man — and he hopes to find his notes. This chapter is the frame. The paintings go in the middle.
MAXINE: That’s fair. And as a frame, it works. We come away knowing the shape of those sixteen years: the health scare, the good job, the marriage that ended, the statement in the form of a bus, the new marriage, the settled house, the music, the travel, the friend who died, and finally — sitting in that house in Bristol, typing this out while COVID approaches.
PHRED: What stays with me is the gratitude. Not gushing. Measured. “Even if it fails tonight I have been incredibly lucky.” Harry looks at his life — at the losses as well as the gains — and he calls himself lucky. That takes a particular kind of person.
MAXINE: It does. Someone who’s learned that luck isn’t about avoiding the hard things. It’s about surviving them and finding the next good thing anyway.
PHRED: Maxine, quick — what word rhymes with “brilliance” and means keeping on despite the knockbacks?
MAXINE: Resilience. Obviously.
PHRED: [SFX: HORN] THAT’S THE WORD OF THE DAY! Resilience!
MAXINE: You set that up.
PHRED: I absolutely did. That’s one.
MAXINE: You are impossible.
PHRED: Let’s leave it at this: we showed up. Goodbye.
PHRED: Peace, then.
MAXINE: Peace.
[SFX: OUTRO_VW_BUS_ENGINE]
MAXINE: …Was that an engine.
PHRED: A 1970s Volkswagen camping bus starting up, Maxine. Seemed appropriate.
MAXINE: It was. Goodnight, Phred.