A fresh pot of coffee. Stretchy yoga pants. Consistent WiFi. A
dog leash hung next to the door. A clean supply of masks. That’s pretty
much all I need, here on the 373rd day of the pandemic.
A
year ago this week, I remember being among the last to leave my office,
turning off the lights for what was supposed to be three weeks to
“flatten the curve.” I couldn’t shake the feeling though, that it was
going to be months before I saw some of my colleagues. One year later,
and our daily interactions are still through Zoom. I’ve long given up
worrying about my background screen.
In the poem “A
Servant to Servants,” Robert Frost wrote, “The best way out is always
through,” one of those lines that hits you like a lightning bolt as a
young college student, but you haven’t lived enough yet to know why. And
so the through line of the COVID-19 pandemic now spans 12 months and
includes so much heartbreak.
Lives
lost, relationships strained. And the loss of so many things we took
for granted, like shaking hands in church — or even going to church. A
proper burial for our dead. Baby showers and baseball games. Eating at a
restaurant.
“Flatten the curve” seems quaint now, as does the idea we would all band together to defeat a tiny microbe that turned our lives upside down. History is hard to put into perspective while it’s still happening …
Read the rest of the column in the March 19, 2021 issue of the Webster-Kirkwood Times.
For more than two decades, Des Peres resident Michelle Moffat
has worked as an inpatient surgical nurse, a rewarding career that’s
given her a front-row seat to the spectrum of the human condition: fear
and pain, hope and healing, life and death. Or as any nurse will tell
you, any given shift.
They’re heroes aren’t they,
our front line health care workers? And that was before COVID-19. Eleven
months in and it’s not a stretch to say we have hit a pandemic wall,
from vaccination frustration to February fatigue. If you ever think you
can’t keep going, talk to a nurse.
“Sure, I was scared and anxious at first because there was so much unknown,” said Moffat, who works for BJC Healthcare at Missouri Baptist Hospital and has had eight negative COVID-19 tests. “But I wanted to help …
At about 1:45 p.m. on June 27, 1992, I was getting ready with my Dad to walk down the very long aisle of St. Sabina Catholic Church in Florissant, Mo.
If you’re familiar with the place, you know how long — long enough to give you plenty of time to think about what’s about to go down. And all I could think of was how lucky I was to be marrying that tall guy waiting at the end of it.
Here are two pictures, the very first one taken of us together and the most recent, along with a column I wrote in 2017 on our 25th anniversary. Still holds up, even in the midst of a pandemic. Oh, and glad to say that my friend Colleen from the column is still my friend Colleen Hagerty Haug. Friendship holds up, too.
Each Friday since July 2003, the South County Times, a weekly community newspaper in South St. Louis County, allowed me, quite literally, one column of type. I did my best to fill it for more than 15 years, 870 weeks in a row and more than 400,000 words — but who’s counting?
Where did I get my material? I’m a mom first, thanks to Tom, my history-teacher husband of nearly 29 years, who also doubled as an editor and sounding board. The best topics were often right in front of me. Our boys, Matt, 25, and Jack, 23, are now grown and flown, but they gave me plenty of material growing up, I never wrote about them without asking permission first, although as they got older they pretended not to care. They still pretend not to care, but that doesn’t mean I stopped writing about them. I’m pretty proud of the men they have become.
I also told stories in and around my South County neighborhood, beginning with our little suburb of Crestwood and spilling over into Affton, Fenton, Sappington and other surrounding areas.
But on March 27, 2020, the South County Times published its last issue, a victim of declining advertising and the coronavirus. My last column is below. I think I left on a high note. My Grandma Gibson would agree.
Here’s what i wrote:
Leaving the light on
Each morning around 5:30 a.m, our 7-month-old puppy and I walk the neighborhood. For about the past week or so, we’ve noticed that nearly every porch light on the block has been left on overnight. It’s comforting to know that despite the greatest challenge of all of our lives, we persevere.
I think about a lot of stuff in those early hours, mostly about how we are going to get through this. I think about the example of our everyday heroes: health care workers and first responders, grocery store clerks and teachers.
I also think about my own heroes, one being my paternal grandmother, Ella Pearl Gibson. Born in 1902, she was 16 and married with a baby on the way at the onset of the 1918-19 Spanish Flu pandemic. When she was 19, she was burying that first child. By the time she was 22, she had buried three babies. She also lived through the Great Depression, World War II, and threats of polio. I came along in the 1960s, and my greatest memories of her are a soft laugh and a strong, steady spirit, one that remained until her death in 1976.
I wished I had been old enough to ask her how she survived what she did. I can only guess that it was a simple strength that allowed her to get out of bed every day and live the life that was in front of her. She fed her family, and cooked and cleaned and showed up at her job as a dimestore clerk. And in her leisure time, she sewed and quilted and kept her hands working, perhaps so that her mind wouldn’t dwell on things she couldn’t control.
I still have one of her quilts, red and white and tattered. I can examine the tiny, perfect stitches that remain intact some 50 years after they were made. I can think about the hands that once held what I hold in mine right now. Maybe that’s how we get through this, by examining our own DNA and holding in our hands tangible proof — a quilt, a Bible, an old photograph — that because of who we are we have more strength than we know.
So this is how I leave this space, maybe for a while, maybe forever. It’s been the privilege of my career to write for the South County Times, 870 weeks in succession. They weren’t always home runs, but I am grateful for getting an at-bat every week for 17 years.
Thank you for letting me share stories of my family and my community. I’m a better writer and a better person because of all of you. I’ll be on Facebook and my website, lesliegmccarthy.com. I’m not going anywhere.
In the 1990s, I was privileged to have a front-row seat to a legend, covering Pat Summitt and a few of Tennessee’s national title games for the Sporting News. I learned more about her and her coaching style witnessing the loss than in the victory the next year. Here’s a remembrance I wrote for the South County Times after Summitt won her 1,000th game:
A brush with a legend
FEB. 13, 2009 (SOUTH COUNTY TIMES)- It went unnoticed last week, a sports milestone lost in news of steroids and stimulus packages.
But not here. University of Tennessee women’s basketball coach Pat Summitt won her 1,000th game Feb. 5, making her the winningest college basketball coach of all time. Summitt, 56, has been coaching since 1974. In 35 years, she has 1,000 wins and 187 losses — she wins 84 percent of the time she leads a team onto the court.
If you’re a Vols fan, you’re cueing up that cute “Rocky Top” song. I prefer something from Helen Reddy, because never was there a case for “I Am Woman” girl power as this one.
I have a Pat Summitt story, having had the privilege to meet her on a few occasions, the first in 1995 when Tennessee was in the Women’s Final Four.
That April, I was at the Target Center in Minneapolis for the women’s national championship game between Tennessee and the University of Connecticut, seated in the first press row directly behind the Lady Vols bench. It was like having a front-row seat to every motivational informational seminar known to man – or woman. Pure, unadulterated passion mixed in spirit and intensity. And I had a 40-minute survey.
At one point near the end of a back-and-forth game, Summitt took out one of her starters and sat her on the bench. In the midst of the frenzy of about 23,000 screaming fans, she squatted down to eye level and with passion, intensity and a screaming southern drawl said, “This is the biggest game of your life. If you let it pass knowin’ ya didn’t give it your all, how ya gonna feel? How ya gonna FEEL?”
So there it was, the pinnacle of college basketball, and the coach was not just talking strategy, she was talking FEELINGS.
Therein lies the difference between a man and a woman. A man may, in the heat of a battle, tell you to go to h-e-double-hockey-sticks. A woman will tell you the same thing, but worry about how you’re going to feel making the trip.
I loved that moment.
Tennessee lost the game, UConn won the title. But I learned an indelible lesson that night: Never let any moment pass without giving it your inspirational, perspirational, 110-percent all.
A postscript:
I covered the women’s game for TSN for the better part of the 1990s, and somewhere along the line got a handwritten note from Pat Summitt thanking me for taking the time to promote women’s basketball in a national magazine. I was flabbergasted that she would write someone she met in passing a few times.
It’s tucked away in a box somewhere. I don’t know precisely what it said, but I remember exactly how it made me FEEL.
A diminutive writer from Monroeville, Ala., died in February at 89, sparking a social media flood of tributes because of one unforgettable book and the timeless message it conveys.
Among the remembrances of Miss Harper Lee was a YouTube video from Notre Dame’s 2007 commencement. The university was giving her one of its honorary degrees, calling Lee “a national literary treasure whose work has left an indelible imprint on the American psyche with its themes of justice, tolerance and courage.”
Upon stepping to the podium to receive the degree, Lee looks out over the audience to see thousands of young men and women in academic garb holding up a copy of “To Kill A Mockingbird.” The gesture is genuine; her reaction is priceless.
“Her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel,” the proclamation said, “was a testament to the power of one person … who introduced us to some of the most poignant, most human characters in contemporary fiction. They, and she, taught us that we are more alike than different. That in the words of her heroine, young Scout, ‘There’s just one kind of folks. Folks.’ ”
The power of one person. How true that can be.
Two days later, a beautiful Sunday afternoon, a walk in the park with a friend.
The weather was gorgeous, and the park was coming alive with families on the playground and neighbors on the pathways — including one elderly woman I came to know regularly last fall.
She stood out because she wasn’t your typical South County walker: No lycra or GoreTex, no earbuds, no cell phone. She appeared always to be simply an old woman out for a walk, dressed plainly in a blue or gray dress with tights and a scarf.
Around the paths she saunters, sometimes with her hands behind her back, as if she’s relishing every visit, every breath of fresh air. And the best part: she always smiles and waves.
I always wave back. One day, I tried to start a conversation. “No Anglisht,” she said, but offered her hand. Another time, I asked her where she was from and she said “Albania, Albania,” with sparkling eyes and a smile.
I missed that in the winter months. I didn’t see her again until Sunday with my friend, Anne, another park regular who also had experienced the friendliness of this Albanian woman. We hurried to catch up to her, checking our iPhones for the word “hello” in Albanian.
“Pershendetje!” Anne yelled as we approached. “Are we saying that right?”
She turned around and smiled – chuckling at Anne’s Albanian, and offered her hand. “Hello, hello!” she said laughing, and walked on.
It made all of our days, this Sunday in the park. A simple hello, a warm handshake.
“There’s just one kind of folks,” Scout says in Harper Lee’s novel. “Folks.”
March 27, 1963, was a sunny Wednesday, with a daytime high of 72 degrees. Nowadays, you can discover anything about a day in the distant past, from the No. 1 song (“He’s So Fine” by The Chiffons), to the popular movie (“Bye Bye Birdie” starring Dick Van Dyke), to the news that would make the next morning’s headlines (President John F. Kennedy and his wife, Jacqueline, parade in Washington, D.C.)
But I didn’t know any of that 52 years ago today. I was in a nursery at the old DePaul Hospital in north St. Louis, in the same room as the remarkable Mary Ellen Block. She was Mary Ellen Meyerpeter then, and, despite the fact we both grew up in Florissant, it would take us 51 years to reconnect.
Mary Ellen is my husband Tom’s second cousin, once removed — or something like that. She and Tom have the same great grandfather on the McCarthy side — good Irish bloodlines. So while we crossed paths at family funerals over the years, we didn’t really sit down and talk until earlier this year. Instant rapport, but then again we have seen the exact same number of days on this Earth — 18,993 to be exact.
Mary Ellen Block with her husband, Larry.
And then, because of Facebook, Twitter and other ways that social media connects us, I knew Mary Ellen wasn’t the only one whose date of birth I shared. My Incarnate Word Academy classmate, Kay Conroy Lenberg, was born that same day in the old St. John’s hospital, and Angela Shkodriani Sykora, a fellow St. Louis University High football mom, was making her debut in the old St. Mary’s hospital in south St. Louis.
All accomplished, strong women whose paths I had once crossed. It was time to cross them again and connect with the women who had seen, along with me, the same number of sunrises since that day in March 1963.
Women who were old enough to remember Neil Armstrong landing on the moon; whose first crush was Bobby Sherman or Donny Osmond; who bought 45s of The Partridge Family; who were taught typing on manual typewriters and for whom home economics was still a thing; who graduated from high school just as Ronald Reagan was starting his presidency.
Kay Conroy Lenberg with her husband, Butch.
We talked a lot, about the joys and struggles that have met us these 52 years. Among us four women are 18,993 days spent simply living life. We have successes and failures, achievements and setbacks, a lifetime of love and loss. Yet every single one of us lights up when talking about our children and grandchildren, more focused on the future than the past. The word that kept coming to me was resilience.
I called it the Sunrise Project, because it’s a blessing to connect with these women who have seen the same 18,992 sunrises as I have. I asked if they could recall their most memorable one. They could, in detail:
Mary Ellen, mother of twin girls and grandmother of one, remembers watching the sun rise over the Grand Canyon one summer day 2006, on a family vacation before the twins started high school. She and her daughters walked to the rim one morning, and saw a moose on the horizon. “It was beautiful,” she said, “and I kept wishing (my husband) Larry, who was sleeping, was here to see it with us.”
Angie Shkodriani Sykora with son Nick.
Angie, mother of two daughters and one son, was on a trip with her daughter Nina to Italy in 2007. She was in the town of Assisi and said she got up early to walk and remembers walking past a field of sunflowers that glowed in the early morning light. “It was like a postcard,” she said.
Kay, mother of two, stepmother of two more, and grandmother of three, was in Maine in June of 2012 at the home of now-husband Butch Lenberg when she got up early to watch the sun rise from his front porch. “I was freezing, but I just felt like all was right with the world.”
And me? I saw a whole week of sunrises last summer on North Carolina’s Outer Banks, but the one that stands out the most to me was that day in June 2008 when I saw the sunrise over Ireland’s horizon from the window of a plane, about to embark on a 10-day spirit-enriching journey.
Today, we add one more. As we will tomorrow, and the next day. Going on living, laughing, and loving because really, what more do you need?
An early morning on Ireland’s Ring of Kerry in June 2008.
A version of this story was published in the South County Times on March 27, 2015.
It has become, for me, as much a part of November as falling leaves and football: For the 19th straight year, a group of high school friends are taking a weekend to reconnect, rejuvenate and rehash old times.
Shopping at the Ozarks 2012. (From left:) Colleen, Beth, Stacy (standing), Leslie, Janice
What began in 1995 as a way to keep in touch with our friend who had moved to Kansas City has turned into an annual fall event — equal parts pajama party, spiritual retreat, group therapy session and mini-reunion.
Most years, we head to a condo at the Lake of the Ozarks for a weekend of wine, relaxation and the outlet mall. But we’ve made trips to Kansas City, to Hermann, Mo., and to Branson. This year, we’re keeping a promise we made to each other many Novembers ago — when 50 seemed old — to do something fun and exotic for our milestone birthday year.
And so today, I’m waking up in a condo in Orlando, Fla. Exotic? Hardly. But the price is right and we have promised to avoid early-bird specials at restaurants and references to “The Golden Girls.”
And it’s with my oldest and dearest friends in the world: A group of women who graduated from Incarnate Word Academy in 1981 — Janice Vollmer Duncan, Stacy Stelzer Heinsohn, Beth Zang Kopfensteiner and Colleen Lake Scott. I have known two of them, Beth and Stacy, since first grade. That’s a long time. But time is why an entire year can pass without talking to each other, yet we always pick up right where we left off.
The weekends have some constants: Wine, shopping and something chocolate. There’s also indecisiveness over where to go for dinner and what time to leave to get there. But the good part is we know each other’s idiosyncrasies and love each other anyway. It is one of life’s greatest blessings to have friends like that.
We will do a lot of talking throughout the weekend, mostly about our husbands and kids. We will swear we’re going to lose weight by the next reunion, and we will dissect the challenges of life that have hit way too close to home, including loss of some of our parents, a couple of divorces, college expenses, the empty nest.
But there is music and laughter, too. We’ll rehash memories like sitting together at the cafeteria lunch table when our biggest joys were boys and our biggest fear was college. We’ll talk about how we managed to survive those years after high school when we thought we were indestructible. We’ll talk about our darkest moments and greatest achievements.
And this year, we’ll talk about turning 50 and still thinking we’re 32, which is how old we were when started these weekends. I’m sure next year we’ll be back in the Ozarks, but for now it’s all golden, girls.
A version of this column appeared in the South County Times Nov. 14, 2013.
OK, so I’m 50. Now what? Here’s a list of 28 things I still want to do, from Broadway to Blarney Castle; Mint Juleps to Mackinac Island. Why 28? Averaging one per year, I think I might need to rest when I’m 78.
Climb a mountain, any mountain and throw my arms up in the air in triumph at the summit.
See Niagara Falls and fight the urge to quote the 3 Stooges while I’m there.
Get a Library of Congress ISBN number under my name.
Dance with Tom on our 25th — and 50th — Wedding Anniversary to When Irish Eyes Are Smiling, the first dance song at our wedding.
See a show on Broadway in New York City, preferably Les Miserables but Wicked will do.
Watch a baseball game with writer/historian Doris Kearns Goodwin and discuss her great baseball book Wait ‘Til Next Year.
Shake hands with the President of the United States, doesn’t matter which one.
Wear a designer dress to a black-tie, formal affair.
Dance at my sons’ weddings, to anything BUT The Harlem Shake or Gangnam Style.
With Tom and my boys, climb to the top of Blarney Castle, the ancestral home of the McCarthy clan.
Feel the beat of a grandchild’s heart against mine.
Go to Mass at St. Patricks Cathedral celebrated by the Archbishop of New York.
See Matt graduate college
See Jack graduate college.
See Paris from the top of the Eiffel Tower.
Take a hot air balloon ride.
Venture out on that skywalk thing over the Grand Canyon.
Walk across the Golden Gate Bridge (can you do that?)
See Jimmy Buffett in concert.
Drive the Going to the Sun Road into Glacier National Park.
Visit the Baseball Hall of Fame and have my picture taken next to Ozzie Smith’s plaque since I voted him in
Have a drink at a bar in Key West, Fla.
Stay at the Broadmoor Hotel in Colorado Springs.
Attend a wine tasting with a world class sommelier.
Drink a Mint Julep at the Kentucky Derby, funny hat optional.
Get my picture taken with the Stanley Cup (preferably because the Blues have won it).
Sit on the front porch of the Grand Hotel on Mackinac Island.
Walk the Freedom Trail in Boston, Mass.
Just for fun, I’m throwing in five things I hope I never do:
Read an entire book on a Kindle or electronic device.
Growing up, I read two newspaper columnists religiously: Bob Burnes, the curmudgeonly old sports columnist for the late, great St. Louis Globe-Democrat, and syndicated humorist Erma Bombeck. I wanted to be either one when I grew up. Or both.
While I come nowhere close to being in the league of either of these talents, I did manage a bit of a sportswriting career and I do have a weekly column in a suburban newspaper. Since July 2003, I have turned out 450-word columns more than 700 times. Can’t say they have all been home runs, but as another great writer and columnist Dave Kindred once told me, “sometimes a double to the gap is just as effective.”
So how do I do it? A little bit of panic, and a lot of prayer. The paper is printed late on Wednesdays and published each Friday. My deadline was originally given to be Monday at noon. Then I shot for Tuesday afternoon. Now, if I get it there before Wednesday at 7 a.m. — in advance of the newspaper’s Wednesday afternoon deadline — I’m doing pretty good.
On more than one occasion, I have set my alarm for 4 a.m. on a Wednesday and opened up the laptop. It’s amazing what deadline pressure does for the creative process. Something always comes to me, but they’re not all doubles to the gap. Some of them, well, a base on balls still gets you in play.
The editors give me pretty much freedom to write what I write, and typically that is right in front of me. My family is a pretty good sport about it; but anytime I write about the boys I will usually tell them. When they were younger I gave them the option of reading it first — and killing it if embarrassed them. By the time they got through high school and into college, they seemed to be nonchalant about it. “Mom, no one I know reads it anyway,” Matt said once. No, but their parents do.
I also get a paycheck once a month, so there’s that. And I do enjoy a tiny bit of notoriety in my little corner of South County. But if I ever get a big head, I just take a walk in my neighborhood and count the number of Times in red plastic sleeves that are still on people’s lawns days and weeks after they were thrown there, some of them reduced to pulp. It’s humbling.
But that’s not stopping me.
How it all began
In the summer of 2003, the South County Times and its sister publication, the Webster-Kirkwood Times, lost a dear friend, columnist Cele Cummiskey, who pulled double-duty in both publications. I used to read her all the time, a funny, warm and endearing woman. I was going to miss her, but I thought I might be able to write some columns worthy of Cele’s standards.
I knew a writer who lived in Webster, Mary Bufe, who had connections with editor Don Corrigan. I asked her if she knew what the plans were for the space. She said she had inquired about it, too, and that she had heard the editors were looking for a Webster Groves resident to write for the Webster-Kirkwood Times and a South County resident for the other.
Having worked as a writer/editor for The Sporting News — including a year or so as the sole editor of the prolific, superb Mr. Kindred — I wrote a few sample columns and sent my resume.
We both got hired. We’re both still writing. You can read Mary’s column at www.webster-kirkwoodtimes.com. She’s terrific, more Erma Bombeck than Erma sometimes. I’m somewhere in between.
Each Friday since July 2003, the 
That April, I was at the Target Center in Minneapolis for the women’s national championship game between Tennessee and the University of Connecticut, seated in the first press row directly behind the Lady Vols bench. It was like having a front-row seat to every motivational informational seminar known to man – or woman. Pure, unadulterated passion mixed in spirit and intensity. And I had a 40-minute survey.
