The morn­ing of my knee replace­ment surgery, my wife and I drove along Med­ical Cen­ter Dri­ve at 5:30 a.m. When we turned into the West Hills Hos­pi­tal park­ing lot, the head­lights washed over a teenage boy wear­ing a pair of white box­er shorts, a blue bath tow­el tied around his neck, and noth­ing else, run­ning along the side­walk, laugh­ing mani­a­cal­ly, tilt­ing his out­stretched arms back and forth like a big bird bank­ing in the wind. We watched him sprint across the lot to the bus stop on Sher­man Way, his shoul­der length black hair and the tow­el fan­ning out behind him, his knees pump­ing, his bare feet slap­ping the asphalt.

“A bad omen,” I said.

“Means noth­ing,” my wife said. “If your sur­geon shows up in his under­wear, you’ll have some­thing to wor­ry about.”

Her com­ment con­jured a night­mar­ish vision I could have done with­out. I let out a long breath and pulled into the lot. As I got out of the car, I watched a city bus slow down at the bus stop, then speed up, and pull away. Box­er-shorts boy waved his fists and screamed at it. I stared at him, hollow-eyed.

“Come on,” my wife said.

I trudged inside. The ancient vol­un­teer lady at the recep­tion desk gave us vis­i­tor badges. We took the ele­va­tor to the fifth floor and walked into the pre-op room.

The anti­sep­tic smell of dis­in­fec­tant. Blind­ing bright lights. Every­thing hos­pi­tal white. Rows of beds along the win­dows. Com­put­ers and IV stands strewn around the room. 

A stern heavy­set nurse found me in her com­put­er. “Right knee replace­ment. Full.” She launched into a detailed sum­ma­ry of the hospital’s plans for me that day. 

I tuned her out. This wasn’t my first rodeo.  My right knee was sev­en­ty years old, bone on bone, but my two month old left knee was made of tita­ni­um, and I knew what lay ahead for me. Emp­ty of food from fast­ing but awash in ner­vous acid, my stom­ach rolled as I thought yet again that I could have avoid­ed all this if I’d lis­tened to my body. 

If you go by mileage, my knees last­ed a long time. I start­ed run­ning to relieve stress in col­lege. I kept it up through teach­ing, law school, prac­tic­ing law, work­ing as an exec­u­tive, and retire­ment. I wasn’t fast, but I could run a long way at a slow pace, and I fell in love with it. In my for­ties, I ran in a few 5k and 10k races. I ran my first marathon when I was fifty-two. My goal was mere­ly to fin­ish. I bare­ly made it, stag­ger­ing across the fin­ish line at five hours. Three days lat­er, I start­ed train­ing for anoth­er one.

When I was six­ty-two, I wrenched my back on a steep down­hill slope at the end of a long run. The doc­tor found inflam­ma­tion in my low­er back and advanced arthri­tis in both knees. He told me to give up running.

When the swelling went down and the pain sub­sided, I hit the road again. 

At six­ty-five, my knees and back broke down com­plete­ly. I tried every­thing to get back on the road. A doc­tor gave me a series of cor­ti­cos­teroid shots. A chi­ro­prac­tor adjust­ed my back, admin­is­tered mag­net­ic pulse treat­ments, jammed my legs in hip-boots inflat­ed with air, and turned me upside down. I made bi-week­ly vis­its to an acupunc­tur­ist. With Zen music play­ing in the back­ground, I lay face-down on a gur­ney while he stuck nee­dles in my low­er back over my tail bone. 

When I couldn’t walk fifty yards with­out pain, I came to grips with the truth: I would nev­er run again, and I would have to go under the knife just to keep walking.

I went to a train­er to build strength in my legs before the knee oper­a­tions. She start­ed with a phys­i­cal test. I couldn’t stand up straight; I leaned heav­i­ly to my right side when I walked; and I couldn’t step over a hor­i­zon­tal bar six inch­es off the ground.

Alone in the car on the dri­ve home, I cried.

One month before my sev­en­ti­eth birth­day, the sur­geon replaced my left knee. When I woke up in the hos­pi­tal bed, I expect­ed a sharp pain, like a knife cut­ting into bone, but it wasn’t like that. It was a weary-to-the-core ache in my calf and thigh, so intense it felt like I’d run ten marathons back to back. The sur­gi­cal team moves your knee-cap to the side when they install the new knee. This stretch­es all the mus­cles around the joint, and after they put the knee-cap back where it belongs, these mus­cles are rabid­ly pissed off and they do their best to make you scream, which I did. 

The nurs­es’ pro­to­col starts with a mild drug, like Tylenol, and pro­gress­es up a lad­der of more pow­er­ful pain-killers until some­thing works. My pain tol­er­ance is appar­ent­ly great­ly wimp­ish. To peel me off the ceil­ing, they had to inject mor­phine straight into my IV. The next day they weaned me off mor­phine in favor of hydrocodone, and they sent me home with a bot­tle of pills.

The rehab went well. I walked with­out assis­tance on Day 4. Three weeks after the oper­a­tion I got off the pain killers, and sev­en weeks lat­er I was strong enough to under­go my sec­ond knee replacement.

Before the first oper­a­tion, I was scared because I didn’t know what was going to hap­pen. When they wheeled me into the oper­at­ing room for the sec­ond one, I was scared because I knew exact­ly what was going to happen.

But box­er-shorts boy turned out to be a good omen instead of a bad one. The pain wasn’t as intense the sec­ond time around, and I walked with­out a cane on Day 4 again.

When the Medicare-cov­ered rehab expired, I went back to the gym where my train­er had worked. She was no longer there, hav­ing moved north to attend grad­u­ate school. I didn’t think I could find any­one as good as she was, but she referred me to a young guy who panned out to be her equal.

My new knees healed quick­ly, and mirac­u­lous­ly, a reg­i­men he devel­oped seemed to cure my back prob­lems. I could stand up straight. I could walk long dis­tances with­out pain. My bal­ance improved. My strength came back.

At the end of work­outs, my train­er some­times put me on a tread­mill, attach­ing weight by a strap around my waist, and I walked short dis­tances, pulling the weight. We usu­al­ly did six sets with breaks in between for me to catch my breath. The goal was to improve my time each session.

Four months after my sec­ond oper­a­tion, I was walk­ing on the tread­mill. After the sec­ond set, my train­er said, “Try to pick up the pace this time. If you feel good enough, see if you can jog, but stop if it hurts.”

I looked at him fear­ful­ly. My sur­geon said I could run short dis­tances on soft sur­faces, but I had been afraid to try. My train­er knew how much run­ning had meant to me. “You can do it,” he said.

I start­ed walk­ing. A few steps into it, I broke into a ragged shuf­fle. My form smoothed out a lit­tle; I found a rough rhythm; and I ran.

When I fin­ished, I looked over at him. He and two of the young train­ers, who had watched my jour­ney from the time I couldn’t step over a bar six inch­es off the ground on up to that moment, were clap­ping and grin­ning ear to ear.

I only cov­ered six­ty yards, pulling twen­ty pounds, and it took me almost thir­ty sec­onds, but I ran.

I ran.

The first time I shook the hand of a Unit­ed States Sen­a­tor, I thought it was a big deal. This was before I learned that any politi­cian would shake your hand, and do most any­thing else you want­ed, for the right price, as this sto­ry illustrates.

The hand­shake occurred in 1979. I was a junior lawyer in Wash­ing­ton, D.C., work­ing with Rod Hills, a for­mer senior advis­er to Pres­i­dent Ford and Chair­man of the Secu­ri­ties and Exchange Com­mis­sion.  A Sen­ate com­mit­tee held hear­ings on amend­ments to the Employ­ee Retire­ment Income Secu­ri­ty Act (“ERISA”), which gov­erns employ­ee ben­e­fit plans. The com­mit­tee asked Rod to tes­ti­fy. He assigned me to write his testimony.

I was not hap­py about this. ERISA is extreme­ly com­pli­cat­ed. Even U.S. Supreme Court jus­tices seem to strug­gle with it, call­ing it a “retic­u­lat­ed statute,” mean­ing criss­crossed, inter­twined, and con­vo­lut­ed. I was capa­ble of under­stand­ing only small parts of it for brief moments, and when I tilt­ed my head to one side, those few insights would slide out of my ear.

Work­ing under a tight dead­line, I crawled through ERISA’s dense thick­et of “retic­u­lat­ed” sub­sec­tions, draft­ed a lengthy state­ment that made no sense but had a lot of big words in it, and hand­ed it off to Rod, con­vinced he would cut it to shreds and ques­tion the wis­dom of my con­tin­ued employment.

To my sur­prise, he sent it to the Sen­ate com­mit­tee with a cou­ple of minor changes. I assumed he didn’t have the time to read it care­ful­ly. For days, I lived in fear the com­mit­tee would call to tell him some­one forged his sig­na­ture to an utter­ly stu­pid state­ment. As time passed and the com­mit­tee didn’t rat me out, I learned my draft prob­a­bly died under a bliz­zard of writ­ten sub­mis­sions. Forty wit­ness­es filed such state­ments, and over a hun­dred inter­est­ed par­ties post­ed lengthy com­ments. As we’ve recent­ly learned, mem­bers of Con­gress don’t even read the statutes they enact, so it’s hard to imag­ine they pay much atten­tion to the moun­tain of back­ground mate­r­i­al sub­mit­ted by the pub­lic. In this case, I’m great­ly thank­ful for their negligence.

On the day of Rod’s tes­ti­mo­ny, he and I entered a cav­ernous room and sat at a table look­ing up at a row of high-backed chairs stretch­ing across an ele­vat­ed dais. All the chairs were emp­ty except the one in the mid­dle. Of the committee’s fif­teen sen­a­tors, Har­ri­son “Pete” Williams was the lone ranger that day, and he only showed up because he chaired the com­mit­tee and had to run the hear­ing. Serv­ing his fourth term, Williams was known as New Jer­sey’s “sen­a­tor for life” because of his enor­mous pop­u­lar­i­ty, and he was pow­er­ful, hav­ing led the charge to enact reams of social wel­fare laws, includ­ing ERISA.

He intro­duced Rod in glow­ing terms. Rod spoke elo­quent­ly and answered ques­tions. I didn’t under­stand any­thing he said, but Sen­a­tor Williams seemed pleased.

After­wards, the sen­a­tor joined us on the floor of the hear­ing room, and Rod intro­duced me to him, where­upon the big hand­shake took place.

I was young, green, and not the senator’s con­stituent. He had every rea­son to ignore me, but he asked about my fam­i­ly, my move from Cal­i­for­nia, and my impres­sions of Wash­ing­ton, and he seemed gen­uine­ly inter­est­ed in my answers. When we left the hear­ing room, I liked him and felt priv­i­leged to have met him.

My warm feel­ings didn’t last long. I was read­ing the news­pa­per one night with the tele­vi­sion on in the back­ground when I heard Sen­a­tor Williams’ name men­tioned. I looked up to see a live cam­era film­ing gov­ern­ment agents stand­ing at the door of his house. A few min­utes lat­er, an NBC reporter stuck a micro­phone under his chin. Smil­ing ner­vous­ly, Williams said he’d been served with an indict­ment, but he didn’t know what it was about.

This is what it was about. In 1978, the FBI set up a sting oper­a­tion code-named ABSCAM, using Melvin Wein­berg, a con­vict­ed con artist, to run it. Wein­berg cre­at­ed a fake com­pa­ny called Abdul Enter­pris­es and super­vised a cast of FBI agents, who posed as Arab sheikhs seek­ing to invest mil­lions of dol­lars in the Unit­ed States. They offered bribes to politi­cians to secure gov­ern­ment advan­tages for the pho­ny company.

The sting was wild­ly suc­cess­ful. A big crowd of politi­cians fell for it, includ­ing six mem­bers of the House of Rep­re­sen­ta­tives, three Philadel­phia City Coun­cil­men, the May­or of Cam­den, New Jer­sey, and one U.S. Sen­a­tor, my hand­shake bud­dy, Pete Williams.

A few weeks after I shook his hand, he shook the hand of Richard Farhart in the Plaza Hotel in New York. Farhart was an FBI agent out of the Cleve­land office. Of Lebanese descent, he wore a sheikh’s tra­di­tion­al head­dress and flow­ing robes and feigned a Mid­dle East­ern accent. “I would like to give you some mon­ey,” he told Williams. The sen­a­tor was hor­ri­fied, imme­di­ate­ly exclaim­ing, “No, no, no, no, no!”

Unfor­tu­nate­ly, the bribe itself didn’t hor­ri­fy him. It was the form of pay­ment, which he con­sid­ered too easy to trace. In sub­se­quent meet­ings with the ersatz sheikh, Williams nego­ti­at­ed a com­plex deal with Abdul Enter­pris­es, where­by the com­pa­ny would issue 18% of the shares of a tita­ni­um min­ing enter­prise to Williams’ lawyer with the under­stand­ing that the lawyer would deliv­er the own­er­ship inter­est to the sen­a­tor. In exchange, Williams promised to use his posi­tion to steer gov­ern­ment con­tracts to the venture.

Williams vehe­ment­ly denied all of this. “I know I broke no laws.… time, his­to­ry, and almighty God will vin­di­cate me,” he thun­dered, but when it came out that the FBI tape-record­ed his meet­ings with the sheikh, noth­ing short of almighty God’s divine inter­ven­tion could have saved him. At his tri­al in 1981, his lawyers were reduced to argu­ing he hadn’t real­ly tak­en a bribe because the tita­ni­um min­ing com­pa­ny was fake and its stock had no val­ue. When that failed, they com­plained that the Attor­ney Gen­er­al tar­get­ed him for pros­e­cu­tion sole­ly because he sup­port­ed Ted Kennedy for pres­i­dent over Jim­my Carter. Not sur­pris­ing­ly, the jury came back in record time with guilty ver­dicts on nine counts of bribery and conspiracy.

Williams remained free on bail while he appealed the con­vic­tion. Mean­while, the Sen­ate Ethics Com­mit­tee asked him to resign. He refused. The com­mit­tee moved to expel him, and he demand­ed a full hear­ing on the Sen­ate floor. The com­mit­tee played the damn­ing tapes. Sen­a­tor Inouye, who act­ed as his coun­sel, didn’t ask the sen­a­tors to dis­be­lieve their lying eyes. Instead, he railed against the FBI. “The Unit­ed States gov­ern­ment had no busi­ness test­ing the weak­ness of Unit­ed States sen­a­tors,” he said, and he warned the sen­a­tors to be wary of inves­ti­ga­tions into their own activ­i­ties. Inouye’s trans­par­ent “vote-for-Pete-because-next-time-it-could-be-you” defense didn’t work. Know­ing the tal­ly was against him, Williams resigned just before the roll call vote.

He lost the appeal of his con­vic­tion in 1983, served two years in a fed­er­al pen­i­ten­tiary, and a third in a halfway house. His request for a par­don from Pres­i­dent Clin­ton failed. Despite the FBI’s tapes, he main­tained his inno­cence until he died of heart dis­ease in 2001 at the age of 81.

Had he not resigned, Sen­a­tor Har­ri­son “Pete” Williams would have been the first sen­a­tor expelled from Con­gress since 1862 when Jesse Bright of Indi­ana sold guns to the Con­fed­er­a­cy, and he was the first sen­a­tor to go to jail since 1906 when Joe Bur­ton of Kansas served a stretch in the big house for tak­ing a bribe in a mail fraud case.

But, hey, I got to shake his hand!

Post Script: Tom Pax­ton wrote and record­ed a hit song about ABSCAM enti­tled, I Thought You Were An Arab. An excerpt: “When you hand­ed me the brief­case full of cash,/I accept­ed with a wink./You can catch it on the evening news you rat,/Now I’m head­ed for the clink.” And: “I smiled for the camera,/I could­n’t see it from my seat./So I thought you were an Arab,/And all the time you were the heat.”

“There is no dis­tinct­ly Amer­i­can crim­i­nal class except Con­gress.” – Mark Twain

Near the end of my third year at UVA, some of my fra­ter­ni­ty broth­ers planned to car­a­van to Mary Bald­win Col­lege to take their girl­friends to The Rafters, a dance hall with a live band. One of them was engaged to a Mary Bald­win senior, who was leg­endary for set­ting up suc­cess­ful blind dates. She offered to match me up with one of her friends. My expe­ri­ence with blind dates had been dis­as­trous, to put it mild­ly, but her rep­u­ta­tion con­vinced me to sign on.

Mary Bald­win sits on the side of a hill in Staunton. We pulled to the curb at the foot of a flight of stairs that climbed to a yel­low build­ing front­ed with mas­sive white columns. We entered the lob­by; the sec­ond floor doors opened; and ten girls came down the steps sin­gle file. One of them caught my eye. Auburn hair, chin length, flipped up on one side, stun­ning hazel eyes. I won­dered which lucky guy would be paired with her.

When my friend’s fiancé intro­duced me to my date, the girl with the auburn hair flashed a pix­ie grin that took my breath away.

We had a lot of fun that night, and I drove back to UVA in a daze.

I asked her out again and she accepted.

On our third date, I gave her my fra­ter­ni­ty pin. “Pin­ning” was a big deal back then, sort of a pre-engage­ment com­mit­ment. I was rush­ing it big-time, but she didn’t turn me down, so I thought maybe I had a chance.

Then the school year end­ed, and I despaired. She’d planned to grad­u­ate in three years. To fin­ish the few remain­ing class­es she need­ed, she’d enrolled in sum­mer school at Boston Uni­ver­si­ty. She didn’t intend to return to Mary Bald­win. I was com­mit­ted to a job in Vir­ginia for the sum­mer and had anoth­er year at UVA still to go. I thought I’d nev­er see her again.

In a great ges­ture of friend­ship, one of my fra­ter­ni­ty broth­ers offered to dri­ve me to Boston to see her that sum­mer. I took a week off from my job and spent it with her.

She took me to one of her class­es. A guy who played gui­tar for The Jef­fer­son Air­plane sat in the row behind us. A full­back on the Boston Uni­ver­si­ty foot­ball team sat on the oth­er side of her. They were very inter­est­ed in her, and they were both good-look­ing, nice guys. I hat­ed their guts.

We were sit­ting on a blan­ket hav­ing a pic­nic lunch in front of the camel exhib­it at the Franklin Park Zoo in Boston when I asked her to con­sid­er return­ing to Mary Bald­win for anoth­er year.

“Why?” she said.

“I want to keep see­ing you.”

She looked at me curi­ous­ly, as though she didn’t under­stand, and I real­ized I had to tell her the truth. I swal­lowed hard. “I want you to mar­ry me after graduation.”

I don’t remem­ber much about the camels, the zoo, or the rest of the day. She was all I could think about after she said she want­ed to mar­ry me, too.

That fall, I met her fam­i­ly. I over­heard a neigh­bor talk­ing to her father. “What says they’re going to get mar­ried?” the neigh­bor asked. “That old pin, I guess.” The neigh­bor wouldn’t let up. “Is he going to give her an engage­ment ring?” A long pause. Then, “I don’t know.”

I planned to give her an engage­ment ring, but being flat-out broke, I hadn’t fig­ured out how I would spring for it. Back at school, I asked her what kind of ring she want­ed, think­ing it would be a tra­di­tion­al dia­mond. She launched into a detailed descrip­tion of a green jew­el sur­round­ed by a cir­cle of lit­tle dia­monds on a gold band. “A lit­tle green flower,” she said, giv­ing me that grin that got me in trou­ble in the first place.

I knew noth­ing about jew­el­ry, but I fig­ured a lit­tle green flower would be hard to find. The first ring I saw in the first jew­el­ry store I walked into sat in the cen­ter of a glass case near the door – an emer­ald sur­round­ed by a cir­cle of dia­monds perched on a gold band. A lit­tle green flower.

I thought it was meant to be! Until the jew­el­er told me its price. When I recov­ered my voice, I explained that I had to have that ring even though I couldn’t pay for it. The jew­el­er returned the ring to its red satin bed inside the glass case and turned the key on the lock.

Short of armed rob­bery, I couldn’t think of a way to get that ring.

“Why don’t you sell your stamp col­lec­tion?” my moth­er said.

When I was a lit­tle boy, my moth­er and I would save our loose change. Every cou­ple weeks, she would take me to a stamp collector’s store in Williams­burg and drop me off while she gro­cery-shopped, and I pieced togeth­er a lit­tle col­lec­tion of stamps that didn’t cost much.

“My stamp collection’s not worth any­thing,” I told my mom.

“Some of those stamps are pret­ty old,” she said. “Give it a try.”

I went to a collector’s shop in Char­lottesville. When the own­er gave me his bid, I almost faint­ed. My moth­er was right. Over the fif­teen years my stamps lay in a shoe­box in my bed­room clos­et, a few of them had become valu­able. The sale got me with­in strik­ing dis­tance of the ring’s price, and I bor­rowed the rest.

The lit­tle green flower burned a hole in my blue blazer’s side pock­et as I drove my auburn-haired blind date down Route 250 at noon toward the new Chi­nese restau­rant every­one was talk­ing about. It was closed. I sped back toward Char­lottesville and drove around fran­ti­cal­ly for what seemed like sev­en­teen hours, look­ing for a roman­tic lunch spot where I could give her the ring. There was no good place!

Des­per­ate, I lurched off the street into the Howard Johnson’s park­ing lot and pulled her by the hand into the din­ing room. Dur­ing the six years it took to get a wait­ress to take our order, I began to chick­en out. I had pro­posed in front of a camel. Now I was giv­ing her an engage­ment ring at a Howard Johnson’s. I was blow­ing it!

It didn’t mat­ter. I had to get that ring on her fin­ger before I had a ner­vous break­down. I put my hand in my pock­et to draw strength from the flower. You have THE RING, I told myself. That’s what’s important.

“You know that engage­ment ring?” I said.

“Yeah?” An unsus­pect­ing tone.

“Which hand does it go on?” Because I was so stu­pid I tru­ly didn’t know.

“This one,” she said, extend­ing her left hand across a plate of fried clams.

“Which fin­ger?” I’m not that stu­pid. I was stalling while I tried to pull myself together.

She showed me her ring finger.

I took a deep breath, pulled the ring out of my pock­et, and slipped it on. It only made it half-way down her fin­ger because she clenched her fist with super­hu­man strength, crush­ing my fin­gers, both of us shak­ing all over, she from excite­ment, me from excru­ci­at­ing pain.

We got mar­ried the week­end after grad­u­a­tion. We had three chil­dren. Four grand­chil­dren came along a gen­er­a­tion lat­er. We cel­e­brate our forty-ninth anniver­sary next month.

My blind date still wears the lit­tle green flower. As I wrote this, just to see if I could raise that pix­ie grin, I asked her what she thought my old stamp col­lec­tion would be worth today if we’d held on to it.

“Not as much as my ring,” she said.

She’s right about that.