FXBG Advance SUNDAY, July 5, 2026
The Family Heart Part 2. From the Bicentennial to This. History in Motion: What We Don't Know Matters.
The Family Heart, Part 2: O, Brother
By Steve Watkins, ADVANCE EDITOR
Second in a series.
September 2022. I called my brother Wayne a while ago to find out how things had gone at the doctor. This might have been back in the spring. It was early morning for him—he lives on Maui—and he was out in his vegetable garden gathering kale. Chickens and roosters screeched in the background. I was in Virginia on my way to Costco, sitting in lunchtime traffic, waiting for the light to change. We’re getting old, him and me, both of us doing hard time in our 60s, though I don’t usually feel it except in those panicky moments when I’m tired and have chest tightness and wonder if my heart’s about to give out. It’s not as if it hasn’t happened before. I also feel it whenever I climb stairs or hike steep hills, “steep” being a word I define much more loosely these days than I did back when I was an endurance athlete and once ran the Pike’s Peak Marathon.
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From the Bicentennial to This: ‘Never Imagining That a Tank Driving Down a Neighborhood Street Would Instill More Fear Than Pride’
By Drew Gallagher, ADVANCE COLUMNIST
On July 4 of that Bicentennial year, the local parade ended at nearby Carsonia Park in a red, white, and blue splash of food and carnival games next to the tot lot where we often played. The parade featured a real live tank that turned down Emerald Avenue, the street where we lived, on its way back to the armory. The tank weighed more than our family’s Ford Granada, and left impressions in the street’s macadam that remained there for the rest of our time in Pennside. When we made new friends in the neighborhood, we would show them the tank tracks as if we had discovered the bones of a T-Rex.
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History in Motion: What We Don’t Know Matters
By Phil Huber, ADVANCE COLUMNIST
Living through today’s turbulence, it is tempting to say that history is repeating itself. My own experience has led me to a different conclusion. History is less a fixed story than a shifting landscape of what we know, what we know we don’t know, and what we do not yet realize we are missing.
That lesson came to me in stages. First came NATO exercises in Europe during the late 1980s. Later came life in Virginia, where the Civil War is never far away. And more recently came the surprise of learning about a Loyalist plot in New York in 1776 to kidnap or assassinate George Washington, a story many Americans never encountered in school.
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