It’s now been one full year since we lost Wendy Rieger.

To most, she was this charming, funny lady who anchored Channel 4 news at various times with a sharp mind and a bold laugh. But for me, she was Wendy from the neighborhood, as we grew up within a few blocks of each other in Norfolk. Luckily for me, from the sixth grade on, we stayed in touch.

I could tell you a dozen stories about her in her extreme youth, but the one I’m thinking about this morning involves a picture taken in the mid to late 1960s.

We were both attending Little Creek Elementary in Norfolk, and as was the tradition back then, they took a class picture every year. Kids of limited height got to sit in chairs in the front, the more moderately tall students stood in the middle, and those of us who were given the gift of height were on the back row. I’m 6-4, and while Wendy never grew THAT much, she was as tall or taller than me in the sixth grade. So in class pictures, we always seemed to end up standing next to each other.

There wasn’t anything particularly special about the picture. It just got thrown in a drawer with everything else from “the old days” when I left home after college, and somehow kept getting packed before each move to the next town, house, or new address on my life’s journey.

It’s not often I’m not disappointed when I see a good player leave Virginia Tech when he still has eligibility left.

But this morning’s news that Grant Basile is leaving the Hokies to go play pro basketball in Northern Italy made me smile.

Basile is Italian, so much so he has obtained dual citizenship both here and in Italy. If you've noticed the dozens of letters in my last name, I too am Italian, as my grandfather came to America right before 1920.

Unlike Grant, who obviously has been over there quite a bit, I didn’t make it over to the land of my forefathers until I was 40, spending three weeks traveling through Tuscany, Milan, Lake Como, Vicenza, Venice and many small towns in between.

You see, when you grow up here and have an Italian name, you are Italian to everybody else. But it’s not until you go over and spend a lot of time there that you become Italian. I grew up speaking very little Italian because it was drilled into my Dad to not speak Italian outside the house. He was 18 when World War II started, and if you had a couple of vowels in your name, you were very careful not to speak Italian less someone think you were a Mussolini sympathizer. I think that’s why most Italians volunteered to fight in the war, just to prove they weren’t.

So around our house, Italian phrases were uttered involving food (time to mangia!) and insults (I was 13 before realizing my middle name was not “chadrool” which means “a fool”) and obscenities when one accidentally hit his knuckles with a wrench. But any conversational Italian never happened.

I made the mistake of flying with Southwest Airlines to see family the day after Christmas.

It nipped me in the bud to historic proportions. Nearly 70 percent of their flights were cancelled that day, and lines to collect baggage from those cancelled flights were hours long.

Fortunately, my flight was cancelled quickly enough for it to be spat straight back out. In no more than an hour, my family’s flight from DC to Providence was pushed from 11:05 am to 11:35, to 12:45 and then canceled - moments before we tried to order an overpriced meal outside our terminal.

Naturally, my method of coping was to try comparing my experience with Southwest to some other relevant component of my life.

Since I don’t feel that negativity about my job, my mind quickly shifted to sports.

I don’t know if it will end up being a personal turning point, but the discovery of an old computer artifact got my attention this weekend when it comes to online priorities.

It started Friday morning. I tend to be on Twitter a lot for discussions involving sporting events we’re all watching, because I can access it on a computer and type my posts on a real keyboard. Being born with fat thumbs and fingers has always been an issue for me when it comes to texting on a tiny phone keyboard, and as a result it’s not my favorite way to communicate with friends.

But while looking for something else in the basement, I came across a small keyboard designed to connect to smaller devices made by a company called Targus. It’s about half the size of a regular computer keyboard, and when I found it, it was as dead as a certain local football team’s chances to play in the Super Bowl. But with a new battery, it easily connected to my phone via bluetooth, and problem solved. I put the phone on a little stand I had bought on Amazon so I could easily see what’s on it, and started texting people with the tiny keyboard.

As the baseball games started Friday, I did not immediately join in on the conversations on Twitter. No longer tethered to the computers in my office, I took my phone and keyboard out to the den and texted a few friends I knew were baseball fans. They responded, more friends jumped in, and for most of the day, I was discussing the game with 7 or 8 friends I’d actually met, had meals with, and would not call me some spawn of Satan if I said something they disagreed with.

Well, most of them wouldn’t.

It took 65 years, but I finally replicated the 4^th of July cookout I grew up with.

The old man loved his holidays, and food was a big part of it. Christmas would see Southern Italian foods that you wouldn’t get a chance to taste at other times of the year; Thanksgiving was the same basic fare everyone else had, but he’d throw in his own twist with a fruit salad he’d had as a kid that I’ve never had anything similar to since.

Independence Day to him meant a cookout. Didn’t matter if it was 70 degrees or 170 degrees outside, we were grilling. If you didn’t fill every part of the grill with every kind of meat you could get, you weren’t trying. He had a platter that was about the size of a small boat that he would just stack up what he cooked throughout the afternoon, and when everything was done, he’d bring that surfboard of a plate inside, put it in the middle of the table, and we’d all eat.

My memory advises it was always hot, but growing up in Norfolk, there was always a cool breeze blowing, or as my Dad liked to say, in Norfolk if you don’t like the weather, wait an hour. It will change. These were the days before cable television and wall-to-wall sports on TV, so I’d occasionally have a transistor radio with a baseball game on.

The mood was relaxing, the pace was slow, and the smell of smoke and grilled burgers, hot dogs, sausages and chicken ended up being seared in your memory. That was the smell of the 4^th of July.

Spring Training has come to an end, which means it’s officially time for the first “rebuilding” season the Washington Nationals have experienced in more than a decade.

Joan Adon

Some recognizable franchise fixtures are still on the team, and others have rejoined it, but even more are new and perhaps inexperienced at the game’s highest level. The combination of young blood and veterans on the back nine of their careers should serve as a sign of where expectations of fans and the organization should be, as the 2022 campaign will be a far cry from Washington’s glory years of consistently being championship contenders.

Still, there should be some hope of better days to come. From a short-term perspective - although the spring wasn’t very kind to the Nationals - the offense in particular finished on a high note, scoring at least seven runs in four of their final five games.

More importantly, there’s an abundance of talent on the cusp of the major leagues – and in some cases, just recently reaching the majors – for the first time in quite awhile.

I found myself this morning smiling at a moment from the past, all thanks to Virginia Tech winning the ACC Tournament in Brooklyn this weekend.

It was 1979. I had just recently met the executive assistant in the personnel department at the Roanoke Times over on Campbell Avenue, a wonderful lady named Debbie. I worked as a sportswriter, and up on the 4^th floor, my desk was next to our Virginia beat writer, Doug Doughty.

Our desks were in the middle of the room, and up at the front toward the entrance was a glassed-in office, which belonged to the sports editor, Bill Brill. Doughty and Brill were good friends, and Doug had developed a great imitation of Brill, right down to pretending to remove an imaginary cigar from his mouth while spouting off some intense opinion.

Doug wasn’t the only one to do this, as several writers who covered the ACC also had their imitations (John Feinstein of the Washington Post also had an excellent rendition) but Doughty’s was the best, probably because he got to study his subject every single day.

If you’ve ever been in a newsroom, you realize there’s a lot of jovial banter going on, and the sports department probably enjoys such things more than any room in the building. Brill – as everyone knows – had an interesting relationship with Virginia Tech, as while he was an excellent journalist and teacher, he always seemed to find an angle on a Virginia Tech story that really rankled Hokie fans.

On this given day, Brill was sharing out loud how a number of Hokies fans were really fired up about the latest thing he wrote, and as he returned to his office, Doug – without missing a beat – does a perfect imitation of Brill saying “I hate Tech” several times. I guess you had to be there, but the quality of the imitation and the timing of when uttered just made me burst out laughing.

A year ago, I wrote a story about my new year’s resolutions for 2021. To be honest, I had completely forgotten about it until the woman who owns all my stuff reminded me last week that I had listed a number of goals in that piece, but being nicer to her and being more receptive to what she wants was not in the top 3.

Do better this year, she gently suggested, as only a spouse of over 40 years can.

“Yeah, what she said, but for me too,” said a certain brown and white dog who answers to the name “Wonderbeagle.”

So there will be no goals or resolutions this year. In fact, the point of any resolution I might have made this year would be to avoid all the numbers and measurements that seem to have dominated my life these last 65 years.

It starts the first time anyone plays sports, as it is drilled into you to always strive to do better than you did the last time. You measure how long, how fast, how much, etc. and then next time out, see how you fare in pursuit of a “personal best.” It then progresses to your business life, where you compare previous performance in other months, quarters and years to determine success. If you can’t measure it, you find yourself saying, you can’t manage it.

Then at one point later in life you find yourself walking around in a circle in your living room at 11 PM on a Thursday night. Why? Because you’re 113 steps shy of 10,000 steps and you just can’t let that happen. Doesn’t really matter that 6 laps around the coffee table on carpet in your bare feet doesn’t have much of an impact on your overall fitness. But by then you’ve become a slave to the numbers.

The obsession ends up extending far beyond exercise. I like to read, but found myself looking up all the titles I’d consumed for the year in December to see how many books I’d read in 2021. Did it matter? No. But other people were posting on social media how many books they’d read, how many miles they walked, etc. And if you’re a competitive person, you HAVE to keep up with all these people on social media. That you’ve never met. And never will. And don’t even know their real names.

Tomorrow is Christmas Eve, and since every Christmas deserves a good story with a happy ending, allow me to tell my 2021 version of such a tale.

The adventure begins back in 1974, when in the first five minutes after I had moved into Pritchard Hall on the Virginia Tech campus, I met Doug. He was in the room next to mine, and after meeting each other, we became instant and lifelong friends.

We were both competitive sorts who enjoyed trash talking each other, but our skills were widely different, making competitions between us a bit interesting. When it came to sports, I was a 6-foot-4 white guy who couldn’t jump and had the quickness of a pregnant rhinoceros, but if left open, I could consistently hit an outside shot. This came in handy when Doug and I played either H-O-R-S-E or one-on-one, as I’d toy with him and let him get ahead, then drill three straight long jumpers to crush him.

Doug, conversely, was a table game wizard. On a foosball table, he could snap his wrists with no effort and score goals at will. I later in life bought a foosball table for my basement, trying to learn to be good enough to give him a run for his money. But every time he visited, he toyed with me in foosball the way I taunted him in basketball.

The rivalry went up a notch during my sophomore year at Virginia Tech, where I received at Christmas a gift that became the focal point of our competitions for years to come: It was an NHL Hockey game (the one where the players were connected to long thin rods that you’d push or pull to move your player, and twist the knobs connected to those rods to make the players shoot). After the holidays, I bought it back to the dorm, and Doug and I ended up playing this game all the time (this was before video games, cell phones, the internet, and a bunch of other stuff my daughter can’t believe we did without).

We knew nothing about hockey, but it provided everything we needed: a game you could play that allowed for constant trash talking, required no electricity or special equipment, was portable, and could be set up just about anywhere.

The game came with a miniature Stanley Cup, and whoever won that day’s game took it back to their room, as the trophy’s presence in your living area afforded you bragging and trash-talking rights until the next game. It went back and forth between us until for some reason, momentum shifted squarely to my side.

It’s a moment in time I don’t think I’ll ever forget.

Twenty years ago at this exact moment, I was pulling into the company parking garage and had no earthly idea how the world was about to change in just the next few hours.

We had just moved to Ashburn 18 months prior, and my new office was in Tyson’s Corner, overlooking the Galleria Mall. Most of that time wasn’t spent in that office, but was instead used flying back and forth to Los Angeles to oversee a division my company had in Carson. Half those flights were on American Airlines, the other half on United, as I usually left on a Monday or Tuesday if there were meetings scheduled on Mondays at our offices, I used those two because they were the only direct flights out of Dulles to LAX.

I was sitting in my office on a phone call that morning when someone walked down the hall and said a plane had hit the Twin Towers. My first instinct was they were describing a small private plane that had gone off course and collided with the building, so after my call, I walked down to the conference room where a television was on to see what was going on. It seemed like half our staff was watching.

I arrived just in time to see the second plane hit the World Trade Center.

Stunned would not adequately describe my reaction. This was like Hollywood movie special effects I was watching, but it was playing out in real life. What in the world was happening, we all thought.

When you get to be an old geezer like me, you look back, and at times remember really special occasions you did not expect to end up being so special.

Like what I experienced exactly 7 years ago.

That’s because September 6, 2014 was the date of my 40^th high school reunion in Norfolk. That alone should have made the night special enough, because unlike earlier reunions where people try to impress their classmates with their success, 40^th reunions don’t have such drama. The number one thing people are impressed with is that we all survived and are still standing. Nothing else really much matters.

But while I was reeling in the years hearing story after story from my friends, something else was going on. Virginia Tech was in the Horseshoe in Columbus playing Ohio State, and as anyone who knows me understands, my blood types are Type Orange and Type Maroon. I didn’t have great expectations for the Hokies, so it was being DVR’d back at my house in Ashburn, and I was going to get up early the next morning, drive home, and then watch what I thought would be athletic carnage.

But as I was donating my drink tickets to old friend Wendy Rieger (of NBC 4 fame here in the DC market), my phone started buzzing. Texts from multiple people – who happened to be in Columbus – filled my phone. Whatever I was doing, they all said, I needed to extract myself from what was going on and find a television.

The Hokies were beating the eventual National Champion Buckeyes.