POSITIVE THINKING FOR A MODERN DAY PLAGUE

It has been a crisp, beautiful, blue autumn day here in my corner of Patagonia. Sun dapples the ground through the spreading branches of the four century-old beeches in the yard. I can hear the hollow chopping sound and strange chortling of a couple of the large and stunning Patagonian woodpeckers that grace us from time to time with their presence. And the squawk of the colorful and flamboyant burrowing parrots that usually live in rocky hollows up high in the mountains but that flock out of the heights in bands of twenty or so at this time of the year to descend on the apple trees that grow wild everywhere in these parts. The festive green, blue, yellow and red birds come to gorge themselves on the almost past-ripe fruit.

I can hear one neighbor’s lawn mower somewhere in the distance, hammer blows on the deck that my closest neighbor is building in fits and starts, as time allows, and the occasional whine of a chainsaw from my friend Daniel’s house down by the lagoon, where he’s preparing firewood for the winter. There was a light breeze a while ago, but now everything is doldrums-still. Virginia is out sitting in a lawn chair in the late-afternoon autumnal sunlight, wearing cap and sweater and reading Dickens from her Kindle as our four dogs sunbathe nearby.

It is a warm, bucolic scene that belies what is going on in most of the rest of the world. The seventy-odd acres of forest beyond the yard—so inserted into the woodland are we that we’ve never figured out whether to call that the front yard or the backyard—stand immutable, a natural barrier to the outside world, and the solitude of which, as their warden for the past quarter-century, I have jealously guarded.

The peace and tranquility here are an invaluable treasure. And if it weren’t for having to go out occasionally for supplies, you could, perhaps, live perfectly well without ever learning that a modern-day plague has made the world grind to a halt, or that there is literally rampant panic and economic chaos in practically every country on earth—nowhere more than in my own native United States where the virus is literally testing and even belying the chimera of the American dream.

It would have been even easier to indulge in abstraction when we first arrived here all those many years ago. Back then, communications were scant. When we first started living here, we made do with a service that provided walkie-talkies with a telephone patch. “The Privileged Phoned” among our acquaintances had to grow accustomed to waiting for us to say “over” before they spoke. Then we had a land line. The phone company had to put in sixty-six telephone poles and a multi-par line to get it to us. And as soon as cellphones arrived in Patagonia, I was one of the first to have one, a cumbersome apparatus as large and hefty as a small paving brick. I was also one of the first to have dial-up Internet and to use it to make a living from home.

But before those later stages of “progress”, it wouldn’t have been hard to remain oblivious to anything but the raw nature surrounding us. Especially since, back then, there were only seven neighbors in hundreds of acres, and all of them nearly as skittish as we were. For us, the “news” could easily have been the changing of the seasons, the coming of long days of continuous heavy rain or extended drought, thirty- or forty-mile-an-hour wind gusts, the occasional blizzard, or the much more occasional eruption of one of the nearby volcanoes that dusted us with grey ash. With the exception of one family of autochthonous born-and-bread locals, of which Daniel forms part, we had all at some time survived the stress of busy careers in the city and had come here in search of solace.

But my career had been in big-city and international journalism and I quickly realized that I was a news junky who couldn’t get along without remaining permanently updated on what was going on in the rest of the world. Try as I might, I couldn’t shake the news monkey on my back. I had the constant nervous sensation that I was missing out on something crucial. So I quickly became an avid researcher and interpreter of the international news sources that swiftly populated, then overpopulated, the World Wide Web.

I have been thinking a great deal about all of this in the days since the corona virus left China on a world tour, infecting hundreds of millions and killing tens of thousands along the way. As a communications professional with forty years of history in the craft, I get that it is important for all of us to have full and accurate knowledge of the extent to which this disease is capable of affecting our lives and of what we must do to avoid the contagion and to prevent its spread as much as humanly possible. But once we are proactively doing all of those things, what more can we ask of ourselves?

Metro police check authorizations to circulate in Buenos Aires

Here in Argentina, where I live, the current president, Alberto Fernández, took swift and decisive measures to curtail or restrict the spread of the virus. He closed the country’s borders with neighboring nations, grounded international and all non-essential domestic flights, imposed a fourteen-day quarantine on all Argentines returning to the country from other nations, decreed the immediate closure of all schools, ordered bars and restaurants shuttered and took steps to close all non-essential businesses—pretty much everything but food suppliers and pharmacies. And those remaining open are subject to strict social-distancing norms to protect both consumers and employees.

President Fernández also imposed strict shelter in place orders on the country’s entire population to halt all non-essential human circulation. For common citizens this means only absolutely necessary trips to the grocery or drugstore. Essential public and private personnel, meanwhile, can circulate only as much as necessary to commute to and from work and to discharge their functions, but they must be in possession of authorization letters or credentials from their employers. To put teeth into these emergency measures, the Argentine president set fines of up to a hundred thousand pesos—about one thousand two hundred and fifty dollars—and worked with federal justice to implement already existing national emergency legislation imposing jail time for anyone violating the terms of the nationwide quarantine, ranging from fifteen days to fifteen years (depending on the seriousness of the violation).

Here in Patagonia, normally bustling
tourist towns are also deserted.

To date there have been several thousand people detained nationwide, but up to now, all of them have been fined and/or given house arrest under their own recognizance. However, the infraction goes on their record, with the idea being that any further violations of the quarantine would result in much harsher fines or sentences.

These measures seem to be working well to drastically reduce circulation. For instance, my sister-in-law requires twenty-four/seven home care and has a wonderful team of care-givers for that purpose, headed up by a male nurse friend of ours and his sister. My sister-in-law’s apartment building is on Cabildo, one of the busiest avenues in Buenos Aires—a capital city of three million people, with an urban sprawl surrounding it that is home to another fifteen million souls. On any given day of the week, Avenida Cabildo is a veritable sea of bustling, noisy humanity, and is jammed with buses, taxis, trucks and private automobiles. To add to the movement, one of the city’s busiest subway lines runs under it, with a surface entrance to a station on that line roughly every four blocks.

Avenida Cabildo at "rush hour".

But the other day, our friend had to go out at what is usually rush hour to buy some medication for his patient. What he saw was so strange and disconcerting that he snapped a photo with his cellphone showing that main commercial avenue virtually empty with only a handful of essential workers like himself out to make a crucial purchase or to wait for the sparse public transport.

His sister, who replaces him on his days off as my sister-in-law’s main care-giver, has a two-hour commute by train, which she takes at the main south-bound terminal, Constitución. She has started wearing a uniform and we’ve had to issue her with a care-giver authorization since she was stopped twice by Metropolitan Police officers on a single night as she was heading for Constitución to go home.

Images from downtown Buenos Aires shot over the days since the quarantine began in the early days of March are even more eerie. One shows an aerial shot of the principal entrance to the city proper from Buenos Aires Province completely deserted. Another picture is the iconic Obelisk at the heart of the city on the broad and usually traffic-bound Avenida Nueve de Julio. It is Twilight-Zone empty, as if a neutron bomb had vaporized all traces of humankind and left the buildings and Obelisk untouched.

One of the main accesses to downtown Buenos Aires

I can’t help but think that the decision to take such early, strict and severe action here is a reflection of the results of Italy’s delay in doing so. More than sixty percent of Argentina’s population is of Italian descent. Many families still have relatives and close ties to Italy. The tragic outcome of the pandemic there couldn’t help but hit home. And in general, people around the country have so far demonstrated an admirable level of solidarity and compliance, as well as bringing withering peer pressure on anyone who doesn’t obey, including reporting quarantine violators to the authorities.   

American friends have been a little shocked at the severity of these actions when I’ve mentioned them, but news from the US this morning was headlined by the decision of Maryland’s governor to impose similarly tough measures after witnessing the exponential advance of the virus in New York and New Jersey. Only time will tell how Argentina will weather this storm in the end, and indeed, known cases have doubled in the past week. But they remain relatively low for now, at just under a thousand infected, with two dozen fatalities to date out of a population of forty-four million.

The Obelisk...Twilight Zone-deserted

  

During a siesta the other day, I dreamed that I was part of a White House team working directly with the president. This president. The Don. My specific job was to do what I know how to do best. General research. Gather all available information on the virus to date. But another part of the job was to create executive summaries on the subject so hard-hitting and devastatingly convincing as to spur the president and his policy team to take every drastic measure suggested by current science, so as to not only halt the spread of the disease, but also to fully and adequately respond to it for as long as it posed a threat.

The president was at a long table surrounded by advisors. They were all sitting. I was standing before them with a sheaf of papers in my hands. All of them looked confident and professional in their dark suits, bright white shirts and silk neckties. For my part, I was the only one dressed in the same everyday attire that I wear to sit at my desk at home and write—faded jeans, a well-worn work shirt and a hoody. I felt entirely unequal to my task and doomed to failure.  

It would be wonderful at dire times like these if we all had vast medical research knowledge to help contribute to finding a vaccine and a cure. But we don’t. The best we can do is everything in our power to get out of the way, and to not complicate any further the lives of front-line professionals—doctors, nurses, technicians and first responders—who are working so hard and sacrificing so much to save as many of us as possible.

But once that’s done, I’m thinking, maybe I should go back to seizing the opportunity offered by the welcome isolation I found when I first arrived in this relatively remote area of the world. Maybe I need to tune out all of the “noise” extraneous to the basic knowledge of the virus that I require to keep myself, my neighbors and my loved ones safe. In short, to actively seek abstraction and to try to accept and enjoy being out of play for awhile. Perhaps each of us individually needs to embrace that sort of voluntary isolation-mentality for the time being. As if we were “on assignment” in Antarctica, or enjoying a period of rest, meditation and introspective reflection in some remote temple.

Maybe what we need, in order to help quell our worry and anxiety, which are futile and of no practical help in pulling us through—on the contrary, they undermine our inner strength and wellness—is to replace them with the sure knowledge that this crisis, like others we’ve survived in our lifetime, will eventually pass. That our task is not just to survive it, but to do so with the most positive attitude and heightened energy possible, so as to start rebuilding our worlds the minute the all-clear sirens sound. And that those of us fortunate enough to still have a roof over our heads and food on our tables are not “captives in our houses”, but safe and sound in our homes, for which we should be eternally grateful.

Anything else, for the moment, is simply beyond our control.             

REQUIEM FOR THE REVEREND

The last of my father Whitie’s brothers passed away last week. His name was Don.  He was the youngest of the four Newland Boys. He died of cancer. He had licked it once before, but not this time. The second youngest brother, Chuck, was the first of the four to go. Like his mother before him, he died of cancer in his sixties. The eldest brother, my Uncle Red, also died of cancer at seventy-five. And Whitie, the second-oldest brother, died at eighty, of cancer as well. You might speculate that it marks a hereditary trend.

With Uncle Don, near Apple Valley, Ohio, 2013, when he was 80. 

Reba Mae, my mother, always said that Don had been like a little brother to her. During World War II, when Whitie and his two other brothers were away in service—my dad in the Army and Red and Chuck in the Navy—my grandfather, Murel Newland, most surely at the behest of my grandmother, Alice Henry Newland, moved Whitie’s new bride out of the apartment she had rented “for the duration” and into their house in the four hundred block of North Defiance Street in Wapakoneta, Ohio, my home town. It wasn’t right, they argued, for her to be living alone as a newly married young woman. Her place was with her husband’s family while he was off at war.

Perhaps they thought she was too young—nineteen—too beautiful and too full of life to resist temptation for years on end. Or maybe they just couldn’t fathom how she could possibly be happy living alone when she was still so young. If so, they clearly hadn’t gotten to know her, because it was only with the greatest reticence that she finally went to live with them.

Don was the only brother still left at home. He was in grade school at the time. He went along with his dad to help with the preemptive move.  

My grandparents, and Don's father and mother, 

Murel and Alice Newland

Reba Mae came from a family with four siblings as well. She had an older brother, Gene, but she also had a sister, Marilyn, who was several years younger than Don, and a little brother, Kenny, who was a few years older. So she was used to being a bit like a second mother-type big sister, and Don was a quiet, likable kid who was content to tag along with her whenever she let him. My mother ended up living for three years with her in-laws while Whitie was overseas. She commuted fifteen miles each day to nearby Lima, Ohio, where she worked at the country’s most important military tank and amphibious vehicle factory, known as the Tank Depot. But having a kind, intelligent kid like Don around was a highlight in her home life when she was off work.

My Uncle Don was only sixteen years my senior. A generation of his own sandwiched between mine and my father’s. When you’re a little kid, sixteen years seems like a lot. But as you grow older, the relationship ends up being more like having an older brother than a young uncle. When he turned eighty, it was hard for me to imagine, even though I was already in my mid-sixties. I think it was for him too. Despite a string of health problems in his latter years, he always looked spry and fit and younger than his years. A few years ago, he told me, “You know, Dan, I’ve lived the longest of anybody in the family except Murel, a lot longer than poor Chuck, eight years longer than Bob (Red) and even a few years longer than your dad. The only one I still have to out-live is my dad.” He didn’t, but he at least tied. Both father and youngest son passed away at eighty-six, thirty-six years apart.

The family moved into that house on Defiance Street when Murel decided to leave the South End of Lima, where Red, Whitie and Chuck grew into their teens and thought of it as home. My grandfather moved the family to Wapakoneta after landing a job with the local office of the Western & Southern Life Insurance Company. For the older boys, it meant leaving behind their pals and their neighborhood and going to high school in a new place. But Don was almost fourteen years Red’s junior, so Wapakoneta was pretty much all he knew and became his home town.

Neil Armstrong's Blume HS senior photo

Don was a contemporary of Neil Armstrong, the first man on the moon. That wouldn’t mean anything if Don were from, say, Butte, Montana, or Gnaw Bone, Indiana. But like Don, Neil was from Wapakoneta and they were, indeed, briefly at Blume High School together. After Neil landed on the moon, Red and Whitie liked to tell people that their little brother Don had played basketball with Neil in high school. And then as an aside, they would mutter, “Of course, Don was the team captain.” If you look at their birth dates, however, Neil was three or four four years older than Don, which means that if they did play together, Don would have been a freshman and Neil, part of the senior varsity. But it made for a good story and shows how proud Don’s two oldest brothers always were of him.

Actually, everyone was proud of him. In a family of rough and tumble hotheads, Don was different—quiet, soft-spoken, pensive, a reader, an intellectual, a deep thinker. There was a time when he was finishing high school that his mother began to worry about him. He grew even quieter than usual. He was preoccupied and sullen. And then one day, out of the blue, he told his parents that he’d had a calling and that he planned to go to college and to the Methodist seminary to become a pastor. My grandmother, who was a staunch Methodist, and my grandfather who was as well, but was also a member of the Gideon Society, couldn’t have been happier. It was not only that they were going to have a son who was a pastor, but also that Don would be the first in the family to go to the university.

I remember one summer when Don was at our house a lot. When I refer to “our house”, I’m talking about the house on North Defiance where Don and his brothers had lived when the family moved down to Wapakoneta from Lima. After the war, my grandfather sold that house to my father and built a much smaller one half a block away right at the corner of Defiance and Glynwood. So for Don, it was kind of like coming back home to come visit his older brother. I must have been about four and I can only imagine that Don was already studying at the university and was on summer break. Whitie had apparently talked his little brother into giving our house a much needed paint job so as to make a little “book money” for school. Don was handy and always enjoyed this type of work.

I liked watching him work, moving the ladder from one place to another, scraping off the peeling old paint and then brushing on smooth coats of pure white, stirring a powerful perfume of linseed oil into the air in the process. I followed him all around the property. Eventually, he said he had a gift for me. With that, he handed me a small, clean, but well-used trim brush, a peach can half-full of water and a short length of virgin wooden siding. He told me he needed me to “paint it” for him. He patiently showed me how, dipping the brush into the can of water and stroking it carefully onto the board, always with the grain, never against. As soon as it was dry, I was to brush on another coat. How many coats? As many as it took.

It was a ruse, I’m sure, to get me out from under foot, but I couldn’t have felt more empowered. Over and over I “painted” the wood, fascinated with how the water highlighted the grain, impatient for it to dry so that I could swab on another coat.

I think back now to how different his reaction was to that of, say, Whitie or my mother’s ever gruff father. Both of whom would have ordered me to get the hell out of the way and stop making a nuisance of myself. Don not only got me out from under foot but also made me feel useful and important in the process. When the day’s work was finished, he complimented me on the good work I’d done and said I could keep the brush. It was mine. I kept that brush in a little toy toolbox I got for Christmas or my birthday one year. I think I had it until I was in my teens.

That same summer, I believe, he promised my older sister Darla, who was about seven at the time, a trip to go rock-hunting. I tagged along. Darla was into rocks and insects right then. Her favorite insect was the praying mantis. Her favorite rocks were glassy quartz and smooth Ohio limestone. Don said he knew just where to find such stones.

Studebaker Champion

So one summer afternoon, he picked us up in a Studebaker Champion. I’m not sure whether the car was his or my grandfather’s because both men favored Studebakers for some years. Anyway, off we went on a road-trip, which to a four-year-old seemed like a great distance, but it was probably not far outside of town. At one point, we left the two-lane road and took a wide well-trodden gravel track that was flat for a time, but then steeply dropped and curved around until we were on the edge of a worked-out gravel pit. To me it looked like a wide, beautiful, bright green lake in the middle of a stark, lunar landscape. It was breath-taking and scary. On the other side of the water, I could see the old crew shanty. It had once, perhaps, been a tidy, neatly-constructed building, but it now was the stuff of ghost towns, the yellow paint peeling and powdery, the windows broken, the door standing open off its hinges. There could easily have been a picture of it next to the word “abandoned” in the dictionary.

While Don and Darla walked along the edge of the pit picking up a stone here and a stone there, rinsing the grey dust off of them in the green water, I stood alone, throwing pebbles in to hear them plunk. I eventually got bored and climbed back into the Studebaker for a nap. I awoke when Darla and Don came back to the car. I climbed down from the car and went back to the rear where they were standing and talking as they finished loading geological specimens into the trunk. Don’s patience and tolerance were again in evidence because he had let Darla take possession of every “pretty stone” she could find and the entire bed of the trunk was covered with rocks.

Now, Don, like his father before him, was already showing signs of becoming the heir apparent to the title of King of the Shortcut. And he said he knew one to leave the quarry by another route. He wanted to give us the grand tour. Only thing was, part of that shortcut went through the water in the shallows of the gravel pit and then up the other side to the road. For Darla, who was much more adventurous than I was, this was great fun!

Me, I was scared to death when the Studebaker rolled into the water and started moving across it. And my panic fully set in when the car, with the weight of the stones in the trunk, balked, hunkered down as if pulling through molasses, and then stalled out. Don tried several times to start it again, but it was no go.  In my own ever-dramatic mind, all was lost. This was the end of the line.

My confidence came back, however, when, without ever getting flustered, Don took off his shoes and socks, rolled up his trousers, climbed out into the shin-high water, opened the hood and began meticulously checking everything in the electrical circuit, blowing on this, drying that with his hanky, and finally, getting back into the driver’s seat and pressing the starter. The car ground then roared, to our gleeful cheers, and off we went through the rest of the stretch of water, up the grade and back onto the road home.

I remember attending Don’s first sermon. It was part of his applied seminary training. I must have been about nine or ten at the time. It was during a service at the Grace Methodist Church, downtown on West Market Street in Lima, that Ohio city’s main east-west avenue. I was impressed with church services as a little boy—the candles, the stained glass, the music, the images and the ritual—and this was only the second church I’d ever been in, the other one being the original, century-old First Methodist Church in Wapakoneta, located where the “new” Auglaize County Library stands today. Grace seemed like a vast cathedral by comparison and I was entranced. It was so thrilling to see my uncle, dressed in his vestments, come up the aisle from the back of the nave to the altar, his acolytes in tow, as the pipe organ made the entire sanctuary vibrate with the playing of the Prelude and Introit.

The whole family was sitting in one long pew. My grandparents, my parents, my sister and little brother, my other two uncles and their wives and kids. It was a major family event and we were all dressed in our Sunday finest. I think it was spring-time, or perhaps early fall. I only remember that it was a crisp, bright, blue morning full of diaphanous sunlight when we emerged and shook hands with Don on the steps of the church.

Old First Methodist Church in Wapakoneta

I also recall Don’s wedding to my Aunt Irma (née) Benny. It was the first wedding I’d been to. I was very young. But if I remember correctly, it was at the old First Methodist Church in Wapak. I can’t remember a great deal, but I do recall Don and Irma standing at the altar, exchanging vows and rings and then walking up the main aisle when the ceremony was over.

I also remember the excitement of the reception, which, I think, was held at the Wapakoneta Women’s Club—a former Presbyterian church and today the Auglaize County Historical Society Museum. There was a table with neatly wrapped wedding gifts on it, and another one bearing a small buffet. On the buffet table, there was a tray on which, among other things, there were English-type mint patties. They were white and pastel green and pink, and they reminded me of the silky gowns of the bride and the women in the wedding party. They were soft and smooth and melted in your mouth, and while everybody else was busy chatting, I ate so many that I spent the rest of the day with a stomach ache.

Soon Don and Irma were starting a family of their own and there were three new additions to our clan of cousins—Wes, Tim and Todd—who came in sequence after my little brother, Dennis James. That meant that we were now twelve cousins at every family event, since each of the four Newland Boys had three children, ten boys and two girls in total.

With Uncle Don and Aunt Irma near Apple Valley, 2013

Don’s missions as a pastor carried him to other parts of Ohio, always several hours by car from Wapakoneta, so we saw him, Irma and the boys seldom, but we always made up for lost time when we did, at Christmas, Thanksgiving and summer reunions. Christmas and Thanksgiving were always held at Grandpa Murel and Grandma Alice’s house, but the venues for the other reunions were set for someplace more or less equidistant between Wapakoneta and wherever Don happened to be pastor. As a result, we visited parks and picnic grounds in places none of us had ever known before and enjoyed each other’s company in novel surroundings.     

I doubt anyone was more studious than Don in his regular studies at Ohio Northern (a Methodist university) or later at the seminary. I remember him telling me once that his reading load in the latter part of his seven years of combined studies had been over two thousand pages a week. Although his brothers were fond of saying that their little brother was “a preacher”, Don was, in the truest sense of the word, a theologian. And his curiosity about not just religion and spiritual belief systems, but also about the world at large meant that he continued to be an absolutely prodigious reader throughout the rest of his life. The older he got, the more avidly interested he became in history, social injustice, civil rights, American politics, international relations, current affairs and science. And he did some very heavy reading on all of them.

My sister Darla and I were to become known as “the other liberals” in the family. Don was the first and unlike many Americans, his liberal mindset only broadened with age. Reba Mae always sought to steer the conversation away from politics whenever Don got together with older brother Whitie, because it was sure to end in heated debate.

Even long after retirement, Don still campaigned vigorously for the Democratic Party, often cold-calling door to door—something at which his work as a small-town pastor had given him a great deal of practice—to get people to get out and go to the polls. He and I shared a hardly unique admiration for John and Bobby Kennedy. But we also held the often unpopular opinion that Jimmy Carter was one of only a handful of truly great statesmen and diplomats of modern American history.

More than a preacher, Don was, indeed, a pastor. He was much more interested in his role as a spiritual and social counsellor than he was in the church ritual, and he had no interest whatsoever in the internal politics of the Methodist hierarchy. He was happiest working with youth and at his most uncomfortable with the projects of the local church authorities.

The church, to his mind, should be a vehicle for helping people with their problems and their existential doubts, not merely a Sunday venue in which to “practice” a certain cult within the broader Christian faith. He sought, above all, to demonstrate his humanity. He never waffled, never indulged in bullshit. In questions of faith, he knew that there were no absolutes except what each individual took in his or her heart as unquestionable truths. Religious dogma played no part in his relations with others. What he didn’t “know” from the standpoint of religious beliefs, he admitted, and he was quick to confess that he was as full of doubts as any other human being. The point of religion was to be of palpable help and comfort to the individual and to the community.  

The older he got the more, I think, church bureaucracy got him down. I recall once when I was back from Argentina on a visit, he had planned to get to Wapakoneta to see me. Pastoral duties kept him from it, so he called. We didn’t get to see each other often over the years, but whenever we did, we always had hours’ worth of topics to share. Even when the motives for our get-togethers were, as they increasingly tended to be, deaths in the family.  

He opened that call by asking me what I was doing.

“Well,” I said, “I’m thirty-nine and still trying to figure out what I want to be when I grow up.”

Don laughed and said, “I’m fifty-five and still trying to figure out the same thing, Dan. And I think what I want to be is retired.”

Like most true intellectuals, Don was also imminently practical and valued the benefits of hard work. Like Jimmy Carter, the former president that we both admired, Don developed considerable skills as a home builder and remodeler. He built, remodeled and/or directed the construction of several homes of his own as well as helping others, including two of his sons, build theirs. He learned a great deal about all facets of home-building and very clearly took pride and pleasure in a construction project well-done.

That was the kind of life he sought to build for himself and his family as well, a sound structure, built on solid ground, with the integrity to provide peace of mind and the resilience to last forever.