Old Dominion University, March 12, 2026

~ aviewfromthiswilderness ~ 1 Comment

This past Monday morning I returned to classes at Old Dominion University for the first time since the day before the shooting which killed ODU professor Lt. Col Brandon Shah. On Thursday, March 12th, a gunman entered Professor Shah’s room in Constant Hall, where he taught ROTC students, and killed him. Classes were cancelled, Spring Break followed, and everyone left campus for ten days or so to process—or not process—what happened.

During break we received a stream of emails from the college president, the dean, the counselors, a colleague who has training and experience in trauma recovery,and more, all updating us on the actions of the college and reminding us of the availability of counselors, some of whom were set up across the street in the Chartway Arena. When I returned on Monday, a colleague sat with a counselor at a table in the lobby of our building and made themselves clearly available to anyone who wished to talk. They handed out blue ribbons of support, and their presence along with similar setups throughout campus reminded everyone that not only did something happen here, but not everyone will handle it the same way.

The very notion of yet another school shooting is actually somewhat abstract when it doesn’t occur in front of you; when the information you receive comes from the same devices which deliver the weather and Fortnight updates. While the incident occurred just a football field away, it is apparently only relative to those who were there when it happened, otherwise it might as well have been across the country.

At a table in the hallway on the floor where my classes meet sat a chaplain who wore a vest stating as much. I introduced myself and asked if anyone had spoken to him, out of curiosity. “They’re still processing” he said, which meant no. But my fears were about to be realized. They’re not processing this at all.

In some of those emails we received, experts, including counselors trained in post-traumatic situations, suggested how to discuss the events with students who might still be in denial, scared, in defense mode, or worse. One of the suggestions was to simply make students aware that it’s okay to talk about it but not necessarily talk about it then. In other words, business as usual but with a sense of awareness to the tragedy which played out just two hundred feet to the north.

I decided to go to my classes, pull my chair into the center of the room, and talk.

For too many years too many times on the news I have heard so many reports of how “counselors will be available” and “assistance will be available throughout the campus” or high school, or elementary school, and now this school, ODU, which is both one of my alma maters as well as my place of employment. Nine years of higher education and thirty-seven years as a college professor, yet this is the first time I experienced the presence of those aids. That’s a good thing, of course. I returned to campus and scattered throughout the buildings and outdoor areas were tables, counselors with identification about their necks indicating who they are, chaplains in yellow “Chaplain” vests. Blue Ribbons, Blue wrist bands. Boxes of Klenex.

I met one of the trauma specialists who introduced himself to me before class, who told me in front of everyone that he will be in the hallway if anyone wanted to talk.

I pulled my chair to the center of the room and I asked how their break had been, who had traveled, who stayed home. No one was going to bring it up, so I did. I said, “Listen, I didn’t know Lt. Colonel Shah. I have taught in Constant Hall several times and I know where the classroom is, but I was home when this happened and this is my first time back. But this hits close to home, doesn’t it? It does for me.”

Silence, of course. Honestly, at nineteen I don’t think I’d have a clue what to say either. So I put it out there. “Does anyone want to say anything about how this effected them?”

Oh my:

One girl was pissed because her math tutor is in that building and she had to miss her session that day and she has a midterm and isn’t doing well.

One guy shrugged and said he heard about it and was sorry for the loss, but it didn’t really affect him at all. “I’m not in ROTC.”

Another: Shit happens.

Laughter.

Complete indifference. It’s a reality show episode. It’s a reel on Instagram. It’s a minute ago so move on already.

During a break I asked the counselor, who could hear the entire exchange, if this was simply denial and some sort of defense mechanism, but he said he didn’t think so. That sure, for some of them, they truly are still in the denial stage and haven’t processed it enough yet to understand the implications of what happened, but for a growing number in his experience, the new norm is indifference. It isn’t a lack of compassion or even empathy; those are situational responses and they’re not necessarily ready to dial them up in a writing class. It is more or less “just something else that happened last week.”

Inside I wondered why everyone wasn’t outraged that one of their professors was gunned down closer to us in that class than their dorm rooms were. It’s not easy being a student today. Aside from the barrage of instructions and technology and demands, they are also part of a generation which grew up with shootings as daily news, guns in backpacks, violence as an alternative behavior, and media from movies to games which inundate us all with killings and destruction as entertainment.

I thought about one of my previous jobs as professor at Saint Leo University on the Little Creek Amphibious Base in Virginia Beach, where nearly all my students in thirty years were retiring or active-duty military who had served in the Gulf War, Afghanistan, Iraq, Kuwait, and some in Vietnam. I remembered how some didn’t come home, and some came home unable to function as they had before. I remembered one student who had been in three of my classes who went home from class one night and shot himself. But I always, absolutely always, felt safe in their presence, on that base—one of the most secure in the world. It never crossed my mind that anyone would come into the room and shoot me. But there, they all had stories like that, horrible and unforgettable stories which redefined their life’s narrative and reset the trajectory of their existence. At St Leo’s one time in 2009 or 2010, we talked about an incident in Camp Liberty, Iraq, when a solder went into a training camp during a seminar and killed five soldiers serving with him. In that class, everyone opened up about how they felt; they had been there and knew the value of sharing those emotions. On that night, one solider said, quietly, “I was there. I was at the clinic that day.”

The entire class at St Leo’s talked for an hour about how he processed it. Was still processing it.

Monday, I went back into class and some read their phones, some stared at the counselor, wondering, perhaps, if they should talk to him. I wondered if anyone wondered if they were supposed to feel more disturbed than they do and are worried about that.

I sat down and after some teaching wrapped up class. But before I stood up I said, “Listen. Seriously, everyone, please.” They were uncharacteristically present. “You’ve got three or four other classes still. It’s quite possible that you’re going to be in class next to someone who was in the room that day.” I waited. “It is possible that someone next to you in the next class was in the next room and heard the gunfire, heard the screams and chaos as other students your age subdued and killed the assailant. They may want to talk. They may just say that they were there, or maybe they’ll say more than that. They might want you to listen. So if that happens, listen—take the time to let them talk. Don’t say “I understand.” We don’t. Just say you’re sorry and listen more.

Two students broke down. A few others sat longer than they should, lingering like maybe they did want to say something after all.

Later the counselor told me that since they weren’t there, the indifference was prevalent. But when I suggested some friends of theirs might have been, certainly someone in a class might have been, their empathy rose to the surface and it became, perhaps for the first time, quite real to them indeed.

The world is a war zone, a failed project. These students sitting through their writing course with another four years ahead of them before “life actually starts” as someone once told me, are in it for real, wanting to change things, wanting to be part of something. I was glad to know that when it came to their peers, they were very much negatively affected by the possibility of violence.

Because they don’t know if at some point some other disturbed person will confront someone they know in some class and kill them. They do not know. Two weeks ago it seemed a mostly ridiculous notion.

Now it is part of their narrative. This is not the education they came here for.

Famous Last Words

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I’ve run out of words. Out of ideas. Out of patience and interest and desire. I’ve run out of stories to share and any sense that any of those stories are remotely worth writing about to begin with. I’ve grown tired of getting it right, of editing, of restructuring and developing and trimming down. I’m over the clarity thing, finding the right noun, the more specific verb, eliminating obtuse modifiers, over the placement of pronouns and split infinitives.

I’ve said what I wanted to say.

Except to say this:

Every instance is miraculous to me. Every nuance of life, the breezes and stillness of a summer night, the aroma of honeysuckle, lavender in the air, the yellow of forsythia, the hints of orange and rust low on the horizon. All of it and more of it strikes me speechless and as often as I’ve tried to write about this I couldn’t do it justice. Time and again I ripped up or deleted the prose out of protest to my own lack of focus and ability. I should have been a photographer, bought the equipment and peddled my pictures to magazines and couples on the beach just before dawn–you know the shot, two people in the sand leaning against each other watching the sky lighten in the east. Before cellphones, couples remembered the moment by their presence, but now the moment is ever present because of the picture from the phone, so they no longer know if they recall that moment or simply the endless stream of “love this picture of you two” comments which flood their feed. But what of the shot from behind? The one of the two of them three feet from the water’s edge when the quick ray of dawn hits that small solstice space between their otherwise entangled lives. I could have done that instead of writing about dead relatives and other love songs.

It turns out what I’m best at is simply being present, watching the river run past, a heron searching for minnows and the osprey teaching her young to fly. I have mastered the art of taking it all in and the constant state of miraculous now which engulfs us every moment. But I tried writing instead because I couldn’t make money simply being alive, though I came close; but I could make money writing, teaching about writing, showing people some places I’ve been and what happened along the way, hoping they would sit back and say, “Yes, I know what you mean.”

Instead, I’m out of stories. I am starting to believe my last book took forty years to write not because it was so difficult but because I knew once that story was told I would have nothing left to say.

The story is told and I was right: I have nothing left to say.


Except to say this:

I have been working on a book about teaching. Well, it’s not about teaching, it’s about the best of and worst of what happens when you spend thirty plus years with twenty-year-olds and some of them go on to wonderous things while others die by their own hand, or their ex’s hand, or the random drop of evil. So I’m dealing with a publisher about that manuscript, but my mind is entangled in something that is a bigger deal to me, and that’s the “who gives a damn” factor which plagues writers from time to time, only this time the plague has spread into sentence structure and transitions and now its damned near everywhere. Even the pronouns are complaining; it’s always “I hate” this and “You suck at” that. And I’m also stage-deep in a play, a tragic play about the glory of hope, a one person play which I’m planning to premier in upstate New York but I ran into the “this kind of sucks” part of the writing process and if the book were not out I’d totally use the play as an excuse to avoid the book and most likely would finish the play, but instead the book is out and the play is pointless now. And my book about traveling, about the philosophy of being somewhere for a week or a month and being 100 percent present so that years later we remember every moment—that book, it is out there waiting for me to gather all the words and slap them into the correct order. But not today. It’s rainy and windy and there’s a possibility of tornados today, so maybe next week after coffee one morning.


You see what I mean? It just might be that all the other books and essays and readings and articles I’ve done in the past thirty plus years was a way to avoid finishing the book, and it worked, but now that that the book is done and out, everything else seems to have been a distraction from what I wanted to do originally, before the writing, before the planning and scheming and blind ambitions of a teenager, and that was simply to “live in the world, not inside my head” with thanks to Jackson for the line—to just take it all in at this rest stop as I pass through nature. Wordless. Anonymous. Present.

Maybe I’ll just head back to Spain.

After I get back from Oregon of course.

And Paris.

I feel as if my point—if I ever had one—has been made so I have no reason to go on with these unalphabetically disorganized letters.

Except to say this:

Everything I do seems to be prep work for something that I have not yet figured out. Or, to return to Jackson again, “It seems I’m just a day away from where I ought to be.”

Letty’s birthday would be Wednesday. Dave’s next week. Mom’s and Dad’s in two months, Dan’s a month ago, Cole’s in ten days. I’ve written about all of them. And about Joe, whose birthday was the day my last book, the one about him, kinda sorta, launched. So it can often feel like I’m all out of words, but this time it’s extreme, like the alphabet hasn’t even been invented yet.

But then a hawk flew by my window here at Aerie, and I read something about the Oregon coast, and I saw a clip of Lady Gaga singing “La Vie en Rose,” and I woke up. See, there’s no such thing as writer’s block, there’s only the lack of wind and the empty sails and that sense the doldrums are a permanent state of being. Then, softly at first like a fragment, like a clause, the wind picks up, then more, and suddenly you’re sailing wing on wing through compound sentences and everything, I mean all of it, falls into place and, as Dan notes, “There’s nothing left to say but come on morning.”

Except to say this.

In Convenience

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1

Chapter One

Sandy stands at the cash register waiting for Jimmy to finish pumping gas. She knows he will come in and ask for two packs of Marlboro Lights, make some off-color comment, look her up and down, smile his creepy grin, and wink as he leaves, calling, “See you later, Babe.” So she gets the cigarettes ready and is glad for customers getting coffee and picking out food from the grill. She doesn’t need to be nice to him for very long if there’s a line.

Harry is standing at the rack of novelties near the door; trinkets such as lighters that look like fishing poles, key chains with toy turtles, and some stuffed animals on the lower shelves where kids can see them and grab them with slushie-coated hands and the parents will have to pay. Harry reads the headlines in the paper while sipping his coffee which he rests on top of the stack of Gatorade cases, and when it gets crowded, as it does every morning around seven, he carries his coffee and paper to the counter, places down exactly two dollars and eight cents (never in her hand, few people are polite enough to actually hand her the change, she thinks), says, “Thank you Sandy,” and walks out to talk to the younger watermen in the parking lot gathered around Billy Ray’s truck backed up to the pile of bags of logs for sale. It’s like this every morning. If it rains, they sit on the logs under the overhang.

“See you tomorrow, Harry,” Sandy calls back to eighty-something Harry, and is sorry he leaves before sixty-year-old Jimmy comes in since Harry usually engages the creep long enough to distract him so that by the time he turns his attention back to Sandy’s twenty-five-year old body, she’s waiting on other customers.

Jimmy enters and gets to the counter just before another customer, Patty, with her coffee and a small bag of donuts, as usual. Sandy puts the cigarette packs in front of him and rings them up. “Anything else, Jimmy?”

“Oh darling!” he says, a slight sound of drunk in his slur, but it’s just his way. He turns to Patty, “Look at how my girl knows me! No darling, just the cigs today.” He pays and starts to talk when Sandy looks toward Patty, who places her donut bag on the counter in front of Jimmy. “See you later, Babe,” he says and leaves, a chill running down Sandy’s spine.

Every damn day.  

Tracy the manager mingles with the customers near the cooler getting their cases of Corona and Bud Light and only once in a while some dark beer worth the money, with her small iPad strapped to her neck like a server’s tray at the old fifties style roller skating drive-in restaurants. She scans sandwiches and bagged pickles and some small cakes. The chips and soft drinks and alcohol are counted when the men who carried those cases in and out deliver them, like the chip guy, Gus, who rolls in six or seven cases of varieties of bagged potato chips in familiar and disgusting flavors. He leans on the boxes waiting for Tracy or Sandy or anyone willing to take a few minutes away from the constant line of customers at the counter so they can count the delivery and he can be on his way. “I’m leaving in three minutes” he might mutter sometimes, but, really, no he’s not. It just makes him sound more in control instead being forced to wait for the old woman at the register holding a twenty-dollar bill who seems to gain gratification by standing over the lottery tickets for far too long, saying, “Sandy, I’ll take a number three. How much is that? Oh, no, no. Maybe instead a number twenty-five. None? Oh okay, well let me see then…” and a line forms, so Sandy will say, “I’ll be right back,” and she counts Gus’s bags, sends him on his way, opens the other register and gets others on their way, sips her Red Bull and moves back to the old woman who still hasn’t landed on a number she likes. Eventually, the woman says, “Oh just give me the number three anyway. I came in for that so I should know what it costs!” and everyone in line lets out a sigh of disgust.

It is eight-thirty am. It should slow a bit now, briefly.

The last customer to check out for now is Casey. A “true gentleman” Sandy always says, both to him and to her coworkers who have a penchant for making fun of every single person who enters the store. “He always buys the same damn thing,” one will say of whoever just left. Or, “He never buys the same thing twice.” “He is such a smoker!” “What an alcoholic!” “Dear God! I wish he’d shower! He smells like fish all the friggin time!” and on and on. Sandy stays silent, most of the time, except for the more than occasional exhales of exasperation when dealing with guys, and the occasional woman, hitting on her.

But there are some, like Casey, who make it worthwhile. He’s always polite and always has a compliment. Today it was, “My Sandy, you really have beautiful eyes, and today they seem more alive. Enjoy your day!” and she smiles. Casey isn’t that old, fifties perhaps, still too old for Sandy. But there’s something about him that makes anyone who hears him know he isn’t trying to pick her up. He is just a nice guy. There are others, too, both men and women, a scattering of fine customers who like it when she works and make it known to Tracy. Part of it is how sharp she is and how she can clearly correct a problem almost instantly, and part of it is her pleasant disposition and even-temper despite those problems and despite the jerks.

There are moments when their rudeness gets the best of her. She might ring something up twice by accident, or, worse, tell someone they are out of something the customer is determined to have, and, of course, it is Sandy’s fault and they’ll let her know what a crappy human she is. Once, when she came in to work late, Brenda, a co-worker, though usually on a different shift, asked if everything was okay at home, knowing it almost always isn’t since Sandy’s boyfriend, Tim, usually rags on her each morning. Sandy said, “Yeah, sure, Tim let me know how lucky we are now that we must wear masks since my face looks gross in the morning. I cried for twenty minutes.”

“Geez,” Brenda said, “you can get that abuse here!” and walked out to head home after her shift, but when it slowed down and Sandy stood sipping her second Red Bull and watched a woman fumble with the gas pump, she thought, No, no. At least here, Casey comes in, or some of the other guys who always say how nice I look. Or that lawyer who comes in sometimes and tells me this job is fine, but I have it in me to do so much more. And even Jimmy, the pig, clearly thinks I’m attractive. There’s some good here, some chance to feel good about myself. Not at home. Luckily, she is usually too busy to think about it since her sharpness and friendliness placed her right on the busiest parts of the day. No, she likes it here. She is needed and appreciated here and it gives her a sense of purpose, which, at twenty-five, can be gratifying, but, as Sandy is beginning to figure out, can be a death sentence. For now, though, she enjoys her job.  

Until Ben comes in at noon for his shift, the POS as he’s referenced when he is not in the store. Not because Ben isn’t nice—he calls all the men “Brother” and all the women “Ma’am,” no matter the age—something left over from his military service and subsequent jail time, his early release for good behavior, and his subsequent non-violated probation. But he is known in the convenience-employee crowd both here and at several stores up and down this stretch of highway as the Piece of Shit because, as Brenda likes to point out, “No one, anywhere, ever, knows more than this prick.” How to do inventory, how to check people out faster, how to pick the best lottery tickets (“you really have to watch the news to see what’s going on and find the equivalent reference in the cards”), how to lose weight, how to talk to your boyfriend at home when he is constantly putting you down, or in the case of Brenda, how to raise three boys properly since he raised a teenage girl for at least a couple of the years he was around. He knows it all. What’s more, they will point out, it doesn’t matter how correct one of the employees is about any given subject; he absolutely must outdo. If Brenda tells a customer that the beef and cheese tacos on the grill are fresh, Ben needs to let the customer know not only the same, “Yes, Ma’am, they are absolutely fresh, freshest we’ve had in a while,” but he has to add his imagined contribution to that: “I was just telling Brenda we need to make sure we only serve the freshest ones so she went ahead and made them for me just now,” even though that never happened and he has less seniority than anyone else in the store save Old Peg who comes for four hours every day to make coffee and clean the counters, and has been there since it was a “Dave’s Stop and Go,” back in the sixties when there was nowhere else in town to get anything to eat except the IGA.

Sandy, to the point, does not like working with Ben. It isn’t the work—Ben is efficient and can be left alone to do most anything, and, she likes say, at least he can count, unlike many who have spun through this job. No, she doesn’t look forward to shifts that overlap Ben’s because he both gives her a headache and makes way too many personal comments to her, especially about Tim. Tim may be an asshole, she thinks, but he’s my asshole. 

Other than that, they all get along well. Ben has to be there because no one else will hire him, and this is walking distance to his home, albeit a long walk, and he doesn’t drive. He is there because he accepts his fate that this will pay the bills and he has learned to live on what me makes. Brenda is terribly smarter than the job, smarter than this life she’s living with overdue rent and three kids who constantly need things, one of whom is special needs, but she knows that, and has, to her credit most people say, taken it on one hundred percent. She will be manager someday and is already assistant, which means she makes a bit more money than she used to, and is given more responsibilities, like access to the larger bill section of the safe, the ability to check in deliveries and make orders, and even the ability to hire if they need help. Tracy is there because she started there in high school, worked her way up, proved to be efficient, honest, and desperately even-keeled in any situation, and never had ambitions to do more, though managing a corporate convenience store is demanding enough—she loves running the store, gets paid well, and even won Manager of the Year at the annual corporate convention in Orlando, which came with it a generous financial reward. She treats the other workers like offspring, and she is still young enough at fifty to work for many more years. Her and Brenda make a great team.

Then there’s Sandy who simply shouldn’t be there, knows she shouldn’t be there, everyone else except Tim knows she shouldn’t be there, but like so many twenty-somethings in the last twenty-something years, had trouble emotionally moving much past high school, just eight miles away. She has always lived in the small town, knows everyone and everyone knows her, has been with her boyfriend forever, and is respected and appreciated by Brenda, Tracy, and everyone that comes in, and a position like that in a small town on a peninsula far from any city doesn’t always happen. God knows what it might be like down in Richmond or up in DC, she thinks. No, this works. “Someday” is her mantra. Someday. “If Tracy cared about her,” one regular, a lawyer who works over in Richmond, said one day to Harry at the Gatorade cases, “she’d fire Sandy and force her to move on, find her potential.” But Harry has observed far too much for far too long, and since the lawyer has only been in the area for fifteen years, he’s still a come-lately and doesn’t know better. But Harry does, and told him plainly, “Tracy isn’t the problem. Not even Tim’s the problem. Sandy’s the problem.” They both nodded at that cold truth.

Sandy glances at the clock to note her shift ends soon, so she offers to help Tracy do inventory after work for some overtime. Tracy says okay, not because she needs the help or because Sandy is that ambitious, though both of those things are true, but because Tracy understands Sandy simply doesn’t want to go home.

At the coffee counter, Peg wipes down a spill and complains about how messy everyone is these days and it wasn’t like this even during the sixties, and she starts ranting about how much more courteous customers used to be, and an afternoon is dedicated to this subject. Every day it is a different rant—sometimes the way people are dressed or not dressed, sometimes the cursing so common in convenience store lines, and sometimes about how the shelves are left in disarray. Her voice grows louder to outdo the rattling of the drink machines, and Sandy regrets her offer to stay noting a headache coming on. Ben comes over to explain to Peg how to better clean the counter, but Peg, the woman in her eighties who just a few days earlier complained about the cursing, tells Ben to shut the fuck up, and Tracy and Sandy laugh so hard they lean on each other, and suddenly Sandy knows that is exactly why she stayed; the laughter she doesn’t have at home. It takes her mind off of her pointless relationship. But, damnit, she thinks. It’s hard to get motivated when everyone’s fine with where they are now! The watermen are content. The old men and women who come in for coffee and lottery tickets are all content. Her co-workers, her boyfriend, hell, even Jimmy is content. She sees this and knows being surrounded by so many satisfied people is going to destroy her. She needs to quit. For now, though, she counts egg salad sandwiches.

The Quick Brown Fox

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This piece was originally written for the Jewish Mother Sessions with Tim Seibles, and then published in several journals and the collection Fragments: Flash non-Fiction. It has since been anthologized twice. It crawled out of one of my thumb drives this afternoon.

A

BCDEFGHIJK

LMNOP

QRSTUVWXY

Z

26 letters.

That’s it.

In the beginning. That which doesn’t kill us makes us stronger. To be or not to be—that one just six letters.  Jesus wept—seven.

I can’t write, my students say; my mother said; my very own demons say when something needs to be said but I’m at a loss of words. The history of English has turned and spun back on itself, argued with endings and double negatives, trampled meaning, treasured nuances, made murderers of us all, and unearthed muses to slipknot a string of letters, tie together thoughts like popcorn for a Christmas tree, individual kernels only able to dangle dutifully due to one common thread.

I do. Rest in Peace. Go to Hell. I quit. Fuck you. I love you—7 letters.

The English language, more specifically the alphabet, was not alphabetical at first, made that way in the 1300’s on Syria’s northern coast.  Today, we slaughter its beauty with a cacophony of sounds whose aesthetic value is lost in translation while simultaneously softening hardened hearts with poetry and prose for the ages. For nearly a millennium this alphabet whose letters lay the way for understanding in multiple languages, has dictated decrees, is uttered by infants one syllable at a time until by age five they’ve mastered the twenty six consonants and vowels.  What circles of wonder are children’s faces when someone’s tongue pushes out “toy” “treat” “your mommy’s here” “your daddy’s home.”

Plato said, “Wise men talk because they have something to say, fools because they have to say something”; Socrates said, “False words are not only evil in themselves, but they infect the soul with evil.” The sins of our fathers forever condemn us to hell but for confession, penance, and absolution.

Forgive me father for I have sinned—14 letters.

Of all the languages on the planet, English has the largest vocabulary at more than 800,000 words, all from those same 26 symbols.

There are roughly forty five thousand spoken languages in the world, about 4500 written today but almost half of them are spoken by less than a thousand people. English, though, is the most common second language on Earth—translate or original, the Magna Carter, The Declaration, The Bible, the Koran, the Torah, the tablets tossed by Moses and a death certificate all reassembled versions of the twenty-six.

I have a dream—eight letters.

Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country—fourteen.

We the People–seven

Teeter-totter, gummy, Mississippi, and Utah—four.

Billowy is one of only a few seven letter words whose six letters remain alphabetical. Spoon-feed is the longest, at nine letters, whose seven letters are reverse-alphabetical.

We can talk, us English. We can spin a yarn, chew the fat, beat the gums, flap the lips. We have the gift of gab, we run off with the mouth, we can spit it out, shoot the breeze, talk someone’s ears off, or just talk shop, talk turkey, talk until we’re blue in the face, be the talk of the town. We can, for certain, at just seven letters, bullshit.

My point (7 letters) is that (3 letters) sometimes, despite our skills (4 letters) with the English language (6 letters), we are often left, at just six letters, speechless.

Like in the lobby that day.

You texted me well less than 160 characters, which is the alphabet 6.1 times, that you were in the lobby. I stood, lost, staring at strangers, until one more text; seven letters long—turn around.

I had aged twenty three years, you not one. The sun settled through lace curtains and bathed your face, your hair, your smile, my God your smile, and when you saw me, you leaned forward just enough like you used to when we laughed at some private joke, and there, for the first time, I knew I knew nothing about language, that Shakespeare, Keats, Wordsworth, would be worth nothing to me had they been muses in my mind feeding me phrases to capture what I saw when I saw you.  There are no words. No language has been invented to allow me enough expression that others can read how I felt, how every moment returned, every hope, every single possibility, the innocence, the honesty, the complete oneness of two. No. It has never, can never be captured with twenty six times twenty six letters.

It isn’t love, exactly, and perhaps some symphonic phrase might come closer then the limitations of language. This is the frustration of poets, the complete sense of ineptitude of writers and lovers throughout history. To define that smile, the slight lean forward, that light through laced curtains at just that moment all those years later. We can’t impose such limitations.

We say hello. We say soon after, perhaps, so long.

And the rest is silence.

Letting Go of Small Hands

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We don’t get up early enough. We don’t play with the kids enough. We don’t walk on the grass enough, we worry too much about losing. We don’t throw the ball enough, hike through the woods, climb the low trees, eat fruit off the vine, go for a drive. We don’t tell enough stories, listen to records, dance for no reason at all. We don’t call old friends who are hard to find, aunts and uncles who made us laugh, stay longer with our parents talking about the times we had, talking about the rain. We don’t journey enough to places close by, we don’t find beauty in what there is plenty of, we don’t appreciate what is common, we don’t celebrate what is in our grasp. We’ve lost the art of contemplation, of solitude, of fasting, of quiet walks. We forget the world exists in each step, the saints and martyrs, philosophers and missionaries walk with us, whisper about the temporal state of life, the immortal flight of a bird. Life is the way we sit around and laugh until two. Life is the feet on the coffee table, the tie undone, the kids asleep in their beds. Life is the sound of water in a pool, the sound of tea poured into china cups, the sound of distant thunder at dusk. Life is unwrapped gifts, cards in the mail, the smell of bacon on Sunday morning; drinking beer with friends on Friday night, the first cold day in autumn we need to wear a sweater, life is the spring grass showing beneath the melting snow. It’s the mother in the door waving to her youngest child moving away. It’s the father at the observation deck waving to his son on the plane. It’s the letting go of small hands; it’s the giving away of the bride, it’s the days that pass without a phone call.

Life is the distance between a falling leaf and the ground.

Observations

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Observations

Michael texted from Spain a few days ago. He was boarding a train. I don’t know where he was going, and I’m pretty sure he didn’t either. I don’t know where he gets it from. The empanada doesn’t fall far from the oven.

**

Mark Z is in a hearing and META is being sued by hundreds of parents across many cases because FB and Instagram might be “dangerously addicting,” with bad influence on their tweens, including suicide. Question: Where the hell were the parents when the kids were nose deep in tech? Why aren’t parents of fat kids suing Hershey’s? Why aren’t the parents of wired kids with enlarged hearts suing Red Bull or Monster? Why aren’t the parents reading to their kids when they’re toddlers and teaching them the value of imagination? Why aren’t they instilling in them the value of life and individuality? Oh, that’s right, they’re on Facebook talking about who they saw at their college reunion.

**

Three months ago on Facebook I said Trump is not interested entirely in Venezuela as an endgame, that it was solely a means to and end, that he wants Cuba. Yesterday they announced their support of the current interim president in Venezuela, and it won’t be long before a deal is cut to get their oil at rock bottom prices. Meanwhile, no fuel or food has entered Cuba and they are quite literally dying, with no tourism, not business, no nothing. But wait, “we” can save them. Putin doesn’t care; especially if in exchange djt backs off his barely-there-anyway support of Ukraine. I think djt and the hotel side of his life has been Havana Daydreaming for quite some time.

**

I now have about forty pounds of Hershey’s chocolate. I use the cup holder on the treadmill at the Y to hold the wrappers.

**

Michael is now in Prague. I told him about the strudel; he told me about the Pilsner.

**

Ilia Malinin came in eighth place, falling twice in his free skate. Good. Here’s why: I support the US team, of course, but not his outrageous ego. He is the self-proclaimed “quad God,” and in one interview before the games he wondered not in any joking way why anyone questions his excellence. He dropped to eighth place; hopefully he dropped his ego as well.

**

Conversation a few days ago at Big Johns, a convenience store about twenty miles from here:

Guy eating chicken (I kind of know him so I felt comfortable responding) : “It’s those fucking Antifa’s. They can all fuck themselves.”

Me (I stopped eating all meat, including chicken, but that’s neither here nor there): “Holy Crap! You support Hitler! Stalin!!”

Guy: Fuck no! (laughs) Hell, no I don’t support them!!

Me: But…but…they’re fascists!!

Guy: Damn right they are!

Me: So you’re against them and people like them?!

Guy: Damn right, Bob! What the fuck?

Me: So then you’re against those fascists???

Guy: Yeah (chicken spray).

Me: You’re…you’re Anti Fascist! Antifa!

Guy: Not the same thing! (silent) Is that what Antifa means?

Me: Yes.

Guy: Fuck, I thought it was the name of some radical anti-Trump group!!!

Me: Well, yeah, it is.

**

When the fog starts to lift but is still in the trees and resting above the pond and river, my mind is focused and everything in my life seems clear and obvious. We need nature to clarify that which is muddled by cinderblock and drywall. We need nature to remind us to breathe.

**

The last thing Dave texted to me was “And we’ll all be together again.”

The last thing Fr. Dan said to me was “I’ll call you tomorrow night, Bobby.”

The last thing Letty said to me was “I love you, Bawb. Look for me with the birds on the porch rail.”

The last thing my mom said to me was “I’m so confused.”

The last thing my dad said to me was “What hotel am I in? HA! Hotel! I wish I was at a hotel! What hospital am I in?”

The last thing Eddie said to me was “I’ll call you this weekend.”

The last thing Cole said to me was “I hope your journey on this earth reveals itself to you.”

So now I wonder on a daily basis what the last thing I say to someone is. I’d hate for it to be something negative or down, something benign or flippant. Despite my Roy Kent tendencies, I’m determined to keep Ted Lasso in mind when I’m with others, especially when I leave others.

The last thing I say to most people is “see you soon,” or “talk later.” That’s normal I suppose, and somewhat hopeful and mostly about right.

Mostly.

Now. Rain.

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I’d like to peel away the layers I’ve adopted over the course of decades. I’d love to let go of tethers, let the twirling plates drop to the ground and shatter. When we were in Spain, I discovered how wealthy I felt when I had just what I carried across the Pyrenees. And when we were at Spirit Lake, I learned quickly how much more at peace I am and remain when the distractions are three thousand miles east. And when I was sitting around a camp fire in eastern Senegal with no water, no news, no electricity, not anything different over the course of a hundred years, the conversation never ran dry, the laughter always pure and honest, and the stars—oh, wow, the stars—I lay on my back at night and drifted in the saturated sky for hours.

I find myself in less need now of most things than I ever have before. I’m going to spend more time in nature, in Oregon, in the Catskills, in France. In Ireland and Alaska. I want to listen to the earth as she was meant to be heard, not through the filters of inventions and progress.

It’s raining tonight, finally warm enough to not snow or sleet, but cool enough to know it’s winter. The drops on the skylight above my head soothe me like they do when they do so on a tent when I am inside resting and the world is raining. There is something magical about how being in the wilderness can keep my attention, and Muir is right when he wrote that the clearest way to the universe is through a forest wilderness. Still, it’s taken me some time to understand why: it is absolute presence. I am wholly in the moment, the rain, the cool temperature and the sound of the rain and often geese in the distance looking for a field or pond just at the bottom of the hill.

Nature knows nothing except now. I sit at this desk and everything in this room has ties to back when. Mementos of travels, piles of unfinished work, guitars and a few bins of items from autumn or Christmas I’ve not yet put in the attic. It is the same anywhere in the house, with songlines running right through to some other where or when. But the minute I step outside and gaze deep into the woods or walk the hill to the river and look out across the bay, nothing exists but now in that nature, and I am completely aware of the air, the sounds, the conditions on the water and the cloud cover. And Zhuangzi’s note that “the sound of water says what I think” is present and true. There is nothing else like the sound of water in nature, rain, rivers, small creeks which have carved around and through rocks since before humans created the notion of earlier and later, created the beasts known as before and after, created the disabling “remember when we” and “why don’t we.” Cities and towns are linked always to others and plans and histories. Even at events people sit and talk about other places, different times.

But in nature, in the mountains out west or the porch out front, I can sit and listen to the rain and slow my pulse to something primitive, something organic, and I can dial up Emerson who suggested we adopt “the pace of nature; her secret is patience.”

No, I’ve had no mushrooms tonight, no Rioja or Malibu. Maybe a little. But no, my awareness tonight is from the rain, and I know Dar Williams’ comments “The beauty of the rain is how it falls” brings me closer to why I’ve managed to suspend the passing of time, for now, anyway.  

A Story from Prague

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Jan Weiner (left) and Arnost Lustig
Arnost Lustig

Portions of this piece originally ran in Ilanot Review as “I Knew Two Men,” and it has subsequently appeared in several journals, including a publication honoring the late Arnost Lustig.

My son is leaving for Prague in a few days and this is on my mind.

Prague Adaptation

Arnost Lustig and I drank pilsner at the Golden Tiger in Prague. A large man in a white smock served our fourth pint when I asked about Hrabal. “You knew him, then,” I said.

***

“Yes, of course. We all knew him. The writers, the musicians, we all knew each other.” Arnost leaned forward. “Prague’s not that big, you know,” he said and laughed.

Arnost was a burly man who wore a leather coat and carried a satchel. We sat one table down from where Bohumil Hrabal, the great Czech writer, once drank. Hrabal came here to enjoy his beer and tell stories which ended up as classic works of European literature, such as I Served the King of England and Too Loud a Solitude.

“He came to Washington and stayed in my flat once,” Arnost added.

After a while I mentioned Hrabal’s death.

“Okay, then, let me ask you,” I leaned into him so the gatherings of Czech men at this mostly hidden pub couldn’t hear. “Do you think he fell out of that window like the nurse reported, or did he jump?”

Arnost leaned back and laughed.  “Ah! Such mysteries we can’t answer! How we all love unanswerable questions!”

“She said he was feeding the pigeons. At a hospital? Come on!”

Arnost smiled at me while ignoring my comment and continued to talk while he said hello to some patrons. Everyone knew this man. “So yesterday you went with Jan to Terezin. Tell me about it.”

The day before I had walked about the Terezin Ghetto with Jan Weiner, a colleague of ours. Unlike Arnost, Jan was a stern man with a straight back and fine combed hair. He was calculating. He didn’t turn his head to talk but his entire body instead, like a soldier always at attention. He was very proud of himself, and every conversation somehow reeled back to his accomplishments during the war. To be certain, he deserved the praise, albeit mostly self-inflicted these days.

Arnost shook a stranger’s hand then nodded to me. “Did you sit on the cot?”

We sat on the cot.

Terezin is actually the so-called “town Hitler gave to the Jews,” for its use in successfully teasing the International Red Cross into believing the Nazis had set up the Jews well in small towns of their own. An adjacent eighteenth-century small fortress, used as a political prison for anti-Nazi protesters, is where Jan and I spent the morning, walking about the museum. Arnost knows Terezin well: he spent nearly three years there interned during his teens. He worked the rails that would bring him and his family to Auschwitz where his father was immediately gassed. On a transport to Dachau, the allies bombed the train and Arnost took advantage of the confused guards and escaped into literary history, writing countless bestsellers about the Holocaust and Terezin, all wrapped in the folds of unrequited love and the romance of war, despite its genocide. Diamonds in the Night, Night and Hope, and Darkness Casts No Shadow all remain staples of Holocaust literature.

So Jan and I walked into the women’s quarters at the Small Fortress, a compound really, and he showed me what one of the small cells looks like. We sat on a cot and he said, “Here, my mother was a prisoner. Right here.” He stroked the rusty metal and sat straight, stern, and oddly proud. “They tortured her for several days in every way imaginable before they killed her.” We walked about for an hour or so, and outside the compound he sat on a wall and ate a sandwich.

On the way back to Prague he told me that during the war his family took care of two young girls. Their parents had traveled to Africa as missionaries and were to return for them but the Nazis took over during the interim. “Those girls were gassed,” he said, then explained how soon after this his own father and step-mother killed themselves in their apartment in front of Jan. That’s when instead of giving up he escaped on a train south to Italy where he was imprisoned, only to escape to England. There he joined the Royal Air Force and flew bombing missions that helped turn the war. This was a real hero. Before we got off the bus in Prague we shook hands and he said, “I don’t believe in God.”

“Okay. I get it,” I said.

“No God could exist in a world like this,” he added.

“Okay.”

Arnost smiled and said, “Jan is always trying to convince himself of something. It makes him feel better about life.” He nodded toward a relief of Hrabal on the wall above the next table. “What do you think, Bob? Do you think you know what happened?”

Here’s what I knew:

Hrabal died when he fell from the fifth floor window of the Bulovka Hospital in Prague while leaning out trying to feed pigeons. He also lived on the fifth floor of his apartment building, which itself is uninteresting except for his fascination with fifth-floor suicides. He dreamt of his own death from that height. He would lean out the fifth-floor window of his flat to gaze up at the sky above St. Giles, and he would often walk down to the Maison Oppelt, where Franz Kafka once wanted to jump from the fifth floor.

I knew he sat here, six feet from where I drank my fourth pilsner with Arnost. They spent a weekend together in DC drinking beer and watching Charlie Chaplin films, right after Susan Sontag wrote in the New York Times that Hrabal’s Too Loud a Solitude would be “one of the twenty books that would shape literature in the twentieth century.” I asked Sontag once about Hrabal with whom she had laughed and drunk in New York City, and Susan said to me, sober as can be, that if I could only read the writing of one person let it be Hrabal.

And I knew that his devotion to his wife, whom he called Pipsi, was so complete that after her long, drawn-out death, he wanted to jump from their fifth floor window. “Every room in the apartment hurts,” he wrote, and every time he thought of jumping from that fifth floor he said his guardian angel pulled him back because the angel wanted him to “remain as yet. But I’ve felt like it.” Just like Kafka, Hrabal noted, who had also been “hurt by the world,” he supposed. Kafka didn’t jump from the fifth floor of the Maison Oppelt onto Paris Avenue, as he desired. I knew Hrabal was fascinated that, ironically, Rilke’s Malte Brigge tried to jump from another fifth floor in Paris.

And I supposed it was all too poetic for Hrabal to bear, like his beloved poet Biebl who jumped from a window to die only after asking a painter to create a canvas of a man falling backwards out of a window. So Hrabal’s routine included what he called “morning suicidal, work until midday, lunch, bus ride, back to the pub.”

This pub where one beer after another would fall backwards into his round and grateful stomach, and he’d listen to these very same men in this very same Golden Tiger talk, feeding him what he called “morsels of life,” which he’d store away and use later in his work.

Including Too Loud a Solitude, his very last work before his unfortunate fifth-story pigeon-feeding plunge. Too Loud a Solitude, where at the end the protagonist climbs into the trash compactor he ran for thirty five years beneath the streets of Prague and compacts himself, saying, “I will follow Seneca. I will follow Socrates, and here, in my press, in my cellar, choose my own fall, which is ascension.”

I thought perhaps Hrabal chose his own fall.

That’s what I knew. I stared through Arnost’s large glasses into his engaging eyes, which have witnessed what no human should, but who took those experiences and excised them through his enchanting and haunting prose. Jan never let go of what happened, whereas Arnost took what happened and gave it back to the world in bestsellers, some of which had been made into films. By 2003 he was so respected in Prague that his good friend, playwright and President Vaclav Havel, gave him high honors and an apartment in the Castle, yet his eyes looked the same as they did in the rare pre-war photos of him with his parents and sister.

“What do you think, Bob?”

I listened to the old men who sat at picnic tables which lined the pub walls and wondered if Arnost listened to what they said. Did he store away morsels of life for use in one of his works? What were these men saying that Hrabal might have half listened to and molded into prose the way only he knew how while beers tumbled all afternoon?

This was in 2000. Hrabal fed his pigeons only a few years earlier. These may in fact be the same men.

I nodded at Arnost. “I read once that he could recite whole chapters from books without missing a word,” I said. Arnost laughed and agreed he had heard the same thing and noted Hrabal to be one of the most intelligent men he’d ever known.

I stared at the room full of Czech men. “There’s really no way for someone like that to make a graceful exit, is there?”

Again Arnost laughed. “Nothing poetic enough you don’t think?” He thought for a moment, always searching for a better way to phrase his words.  “Maybe nothing more poetic?” he added. “You know sometimes it is best not to know too much, don’t you agree?”

I knew Arnost enough to know that “don’t you agree” was rhetorical.

We didn’t order, but the large man in the white smock brought two more beers, marked them on a white slip of paper on the table, and walked away. After a while we toasted toward the relief of Hrabal on the wall.

“Okay,” I said. “Here’s what I think: He wrote that if God really loved him, he’d just drop dead over a beer at the Golden Tiger.” We laughed hard and Arnost raised his eyebrows, nodded slowly, and finished his drink. “Finish up,” he said. “I have to lecture in thirty minutes or so.”

It was a time of extremes. I drank in every morsel of life from the minds of men who cracked open history and edited the outcome. It was a time to speak of the tragic haunting of dead relatives and the mystical power of words. One man finds romance in the crumbling memories of internment, and the other loses faith in God. Sometimes soldiers, whether fighter pilots or writers, dilute death and inhumanity with beer, while others drink to celebrate what’s left.

Sometimes they spend a weekend watching Chaplin films and talk about home and how it was before before the Nazis and the Communists cared about Prague, the trashing of books, the elimination of a race, the fatal tumblings of souls.

Later that night I left the university alone and went to the hospital on my way back to my apartment. I stopped and stared, counting floors to five, and wondered what Hrabal would have written about next. He was in his early eighties when he died; there was still plenty of time. I left, but turned back briefly and gazed at the façade for a few minutes.

I didn’t see a single pigeon anywhere.

About a week later, I returned to Terezine with Arnost and a friend of his, Academy Award winning filmmaker, Milos Foreman. On that particular day in 2000 Arnost needed to talk to Milos who wanted to make a movie based upon Arnost’s book The Unloved. He made beautiful movies like One Flew Over the Cockoo’s Nest, Man on the Moon, Heartburn, and others including my favorite, Amadeus.
At some point on that cool afternoon between conversations about the horrific ghetto museum of Terezin and the prison for anti-Nazi protesters, the Small Fortress, I ended up having a conversation with Milos about adaptation. He discovered that subject matter to be the focus of my lectures at the university. It seems the theme of my entire time in Prague that year was Adaptation.

“So we agree then,” he said to me. He was much younger than Arnost with the same controlling conversational style.

“Yes,” I said, “Of course. It is always frustrating when people say how much more they like the book, or do any form of comparison at all. They are completely separate art forms.”

“Exactly! I can’t film all of a book!”

We talked further about our common concern on the subject of movies based upon a novel or play, and we reiterated the inability of people to see movies and books they are based upon as separate. Yet we also agreed on the difficult task of expecting anything else of the average person at a movie on a Saturday afternoon.

Eventually, of course, the talk turned to his work.

“Yes,” I said. “I’ve taught both “Cockoo’s Nest” as well as Amadeus, and I did read Kesey’s book as well as Shaffer’s play, which I first saw when I was in college.”

“Well?”

“Both times you nailed it. From Kesey’s novel you kept the major themes which worked and consolidated what needed to be. In Amadeus you made music the central theme of the movie instead of the ridiculous “mystery” between Mozart and Salieri. I still enjoy watching both films and teaching them. Oh, and Amadeus has the BEST cut in movies, when Mozart is in bed and Salieri finally hands him the completed “Requiem,” and Mozart says, “Okay, from the beginning,” and we hear an entire orchestra for the first time as his wife’s horse and carriage come into view. Love that scene.”

Milos indicated it was hard to miss with such material and brilliant film editors, but I appealed. He was a great director.

Then he mentioned Ragtime.

When I was young my father bought me E.L Doctorow’s book. I loved it and read if several times. I loved how it swept across decades and included some major historical figures such as Houdini. But I never could picture it as a movie; even if one could save the major themes, it simply is too complicated to pull off as a traditional narrative with the proper conflicts clarified.

Then I saw the movie and I didn’t like it all that much. I even watched it again after I learned a few things about adaptation at Penn State, and it still, for me, didn’t work. I even left behind my memory of the book and focused solely on the new art form, trying the best I could to not include the literature in my analysis.

“What about Ragtime,” Milos said.

I thought about saying, That was really some casting they did for “Cockoo’s Nest,” wasn’t it? But I could tell he was enjoying our conversation. I looked at his Czech copy of The Unloved in his hands. It was bookmarked and folded and noted in dozens of places. He clearly learned the book as if it were his own, like his films each became his own, not Kesey’s or Shaffer’s and definitely not Doctorow’s. 

“It seemed too complicated to capture,” I said. 

“Yes,” he agreed, reflectively. “It never did convey the themes well. Or at least the way I wanted to.”

“It seemed more of a vehicle for Cagney seeing as it was his last film.” I was feeling ballsy now in the conversation.

“You’re probably right. He got more attention than the film. Will you discuss these films tomorrow in your class?”

“No. I’m moving on to Hrabal’s Closely Watched Trains.” He smiled. Milos was a fan and friend of Hrabal’s. As Arnost said, the Prague art community is not very big.

I told him I was going to talk about how adaptation of one art form into another involves both deciding what essential elements must make the transition and which ones very specifically needed to be left behind.

Arnost returned, always sharp, always ready for what’s next. I stared at this man’s eyes and thought about how much he went through. The Nazi’s disrupted his life, caged him for three years as a workhorse, forced him to build a railroad from Terezin to the mainline on the way to Auschwitz, killed his family, and still he escaped. And still he went on to not only live his life, but live it fully as a writer. He knew what to take with him after the war and he knew what he need not address ever again. His entire life was about what to leave in and what to leave out.

It is not easy, adapting, saving the best of what exists, our strengths, and leaving behind the weaknesses, the parts we wish we could do over given the chance.

The Golden Tiger

Fr. Dan Riley, ofm

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Fr. Dan at the campus ministry, 1980
On the porch at Vic’s Cabin, Nov ’79

I was nineteen, Dave Szymanski eighteen, and Fr. Dan Riley thirty-six years old. I met Dave because I simply met him; I’m not sure where or when but we were both J majors and worked for both the campus newspaper and radio station, WSBU, 88.3 FM. I met Fr. Dan when just weeks into my freshman year I caught the Russian flu and ended up in the infirmary, and he’d come by every evening and sit bedside and we’d talk; instant friends.

Early that fall we started a radio show. Dave and Fr. Dan were hosts and I was the producer and engineer. “Inscape” aired every Saturday morning for an hour, with open discussion about spiritual matters, a deeper conversation with a new guest each week, and a musical artist for interludes. The guests included Fr. Mathias Doyle, college president, Charles Osgood, CBS newsman and St. Bonaventure favorite, author Fr. Roy Gasnick, an expert on St. Francis of Assisi, and Fr. Irenaeus Herscher, campus librarian and archivist, close friend of the late Thomas Merton, and namesake of what would become Mt. Irenaeus (yes, named after the good priest, not the saint himself).

One fall day in 1979, Fr. Dan and I met early for breakfast at Mary’s in Allegany, and we walked in the chilly air for an hour and talked about hopes and fears, about friendships and families, and we continued that conversation consistently until July 23rd, 2024—the day before he died. We talked, we texted, we emailed, snail mailed, visited each other, and shared writing—he sent copies of my book Penance to a dozen friends of his, I sent copies of his book Franciscan Lectio to a dozen friends of mine. I have piles of letters from Dan; over 300 spanning four decades. We consulted each other. When Dave died, his widow asked me to call Fr. Dan. When he answered the phone before I could speak, he said, “Bobby! I’m glad you called! I don’t like you anymore and I don’t want to be friends with you!” and despite his eighty-one-year-old frailty, he laughed the laugh he is known for by tens of thousands of students across five decades. He added, “Brother Kevin is sitting right here, and I want to tell him something. Kevin, it’s Bob. We don’t like him anymore,” and they both laughed. Then I said, “I’m not calling you for a good reason” and he slipped right into Franciscan-priest mode, his voice going deeper and more serious, and I gave him the news of Dave’s death. For some time we remembered those innocent days in the Fall of ’79.

Jimmy Carter was president, the Iranian hostage crisis (kids, watch Argo to understand) was underway, and Inscape—a Merton term for escaping within—was on the air, and one of our early guests was Fr. Irenaeus, the featured music was from James Taylor. The theme music for the radio show which lasted for two years was by Dan’s fellow Rochester native, Chuck Mangione’s “Hills Where the Lord Hides.” Reference: This was forty-five years ago this fall. Dan, Dave, and I with a dozen others were about to go on a retreat to a place called “Vic’s Cabin,” and it would be the first of many retreats in various mountain areas over the next four years while he looked for a permanent location for spiritual retreats for students.

On that show, the three of them talked about retreats as Fr. Irenaeus spoke softly and with such kindness about how his friend Fr. Louis—Thomas Merton—thought retreats were essential to the human soul, and the same of St. Francis. He said he personally believed a true retreat, however, was about community as well, where people can be alone, yet with others, in silent prayer but in living gospel. Fr. Dan smiled wide, his brown mustache stretching to his ears, him nodding, repeating, “Yes, exactly.” After the show we walked Fr. Irenaeus back to the friary. A few days later he was hospitalized for several months and died not long after that. Fr. Dan and I walked back to the dorm we both lived in and sat in his apartment on the fourth floor and talked about the retreat scheduled for early November.

I graduated. I moved about: Arizona, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, all the while exchanging letters with Fr. Dan, and in early May of 1989 I drove to what had become Mt. Irenaeus near West Clarksville, New York, to spend the weekend talking to him, helping out around the two-hundred or so acres. Construction on the Holy Peace Chapel had begun, but only the frame was standing at that time, and Dan and I worked on a small stone edging of a path to run through the woods to the chapel entrance. It was in the upper sixties and we laughed and talked for hours, noting the beautiful spring day and the budding trees. On Saturday morning I woke to his bellowing laughter and walked into the small hallway of the original house of peace for the mountain. He walked me to the door and pointed—it had snowed six inches overnight.

Everyone left over the course of the next few hours, but I stayed by his insistence to enjoy the weekend and write—I did, and the journal by my side now is called “These Days: The Weekend Alone at Mt. Irenaeus” but I’ve never published it. Still, I noted many of our conversations from the previous day, including Dan’s fear the Mount would become too big to handle; too popular to remain personal.

No one was there and they had not stocked the pantry yet except for cereal, so I spent the next two days eating Captain Crunch and walking through the pines in snow, surrounded by absolute peace, taking advantage of the chance to inscape.

But everyone who knew him, which was everyone who went to St. Bonaventure University since the mid-seventies, has stories about time with Fr. Dan Riley. The first time I met his family, they kept calling him Billy (Fr. Dan’s birth name is William) and I joked “I’m going to start calling you Fr Billy from now on,” and he quipped—with his dark eyes peering across his glasses at me to demonstrate his seriousness, “No. You’re not.”

When my son had a solo show of his abstract art at the Quick Center for the Arts on campus, Fr. Dan let Michael know his old friend, Tony Bannon, former director of the George Eastman Museum of Photography and the oldest photography museum in the world, thought Michael’s work was one of the best and most unique catalogs of photography he had ever seen. Fr. Dan seemed so proud, and so energetic about all people and the moments we shared. Not long ago before his passing he recalled how he enjoyed telling Michael what Tony had said.

But listen, everyone who knew him has stories. It is what raises Fr. Dan up from the status of “friend” to the realm of mentor, truly, without equal, the seeming recurrence of St. Francis of Assisi himself in virtually every way, for Fr. Dan’s influence on students, community, and faculty of the university helped him almost single-handedly, like Francis, rebuild the church in the hearts and souls of us all.

Late one night a couple of years ago he and I sat in the House of Peace drinking Baileys and he nodded toward a poster on the cabinet entering the kitchen. It says, “Ending World Hunger Starts Here: Please Don’t Waste Food.” “I remember when you had those posters made,” he told me, “and when you started the World Hunger Committee on campus your sophomore year.”

“Yes,” I said. “I told one of the Wintermantels—I think Dan—what I wanted it to look like and we made thirty of them. I’m glad one survived to be here at the mountain.”

“Whenever I look at that or think of the outreach programs for the hungry, I think of you,” he told me, and I realized how far I had strayed from those days. It was then I understood why Dan and the mountain remained a place that I needed to return to from time to time to understand who I am at the core.

***

My mother was very ill and on July 23rd, 2024, I texted Fr. Dan. He called me immediately and we talked awhile, laughing of course, and he said he would pray for her, naturally. I told him I had a reading up North the end of September and planned to come by the mountain to visit if he would be there.

He said, “Yes, Bobby, I’ll be here. I’ll always be here for you. I can’t talk right now, he said, but I’ll call you tomorrow night.” When I hung up, I received this text: “I certainly will be remembering your mother in prayer. Probably Kevin is coming by and I’ll ask him to have the community hold her in prayers as well. Your memory of her certainly will bring you comfort even though eventually when someone you love dies there is great pain. Peace, and all good my dearest friend. Dan.”

The very next night I walked from the hospital to my car to find my phone lit up with messages. I remembered then that Fr. Dan had said he’d call me that night, but the messages weren’t from him. They were about him. My dear friend had died that day, July 24th, 2024.

Yes, memories bring comfort despite the great pain. I wonder often why we lose our innocence to such a damaging degree that we need to go back to find it. At retreats back then–particularly that first one at Vic’s Cabin, we talked about how to carry that peace with us instead of looking for it out in the world. One night not long later I was depressed for what could have been a dozen reasons, and I wandered to Dan’s room where three of four guys were hanging out talking, and I joined them. Eventually, they left, and I told Fr. Dan how much better I felt just sitting and talking, and I wondered why. Dan smiled and said. “Bobby. You brought the peace with you this time.”

Amen.

I imagine now Dan is off in the hills where the Lord hides.

At Mt. Irenaeus the day we worked on the path to the chapel
At Mt Irenaeus House of Peace the night we drank Baileys and remembered
The poster at Mt Irenaeus, originally hung in the campus ministry in 1980.

January 28th, 1986

~ aviewfromthiswilderness ~ Leave a comment

Geez, it was forty years ago.

I’ve told this before.

I was tapping a keg of Bud. Tom was swamped behind the bar. The Sterling Inn was packed for lunch early that day and even Patti, the manager’s wife, came down from the nine rooms upstairs they rented out to travelers so that she could help on the floor. Her husband, Mark Roy, moved from maître d’ to waiter to give me a hand. The entire wait staff and kitchen staff showed up to work.

Normally the Inn was subdued, a quiet whisper no matter the number of patrons. It was an upscale restaurant with a pricey menu and listed as one of the finest in New England by Yankee Magazine. The head chef, Al Roy, had studied in France, and his specialty was duck. Dave the “other chef” who was always on duty and who normally never came out of the kitchen where he made steaks, haddock, and duck, wandered at some point into the lounge area.

“Did they go up yet?” he asked in his thick central-Massachusetts accent.

“Not yet,” I said as I placed lunch in front of a couple at a table nearby. Tom called me over to tap a keg. The entire place was buzzing, almost loud, everyone talking and laughing. Half the customers were friends or relatives of Christa McAuliffe, and they were there that day with the rest of us, with the rest of the country, to watch the now mythical and beloved teacher ride the Challenger into Space. When I did get a chance to hear the announcers talk about what the crew was doing at any given point, I got goosebumps. I’d followed the Apollo program and had been an avid fan of space flight since I was a kid, as were many people my age. But this was different. A civilian–a teacher at that–captured the attention of the country.

Christa grew up about thirty miles east in Framingham, and taught in Concord, New Hampshire, about an hour and a half away. This was a time when the nation followed her progress from applicant to astronaut, and her enthusiasm, energy, and warmth engulfed everyone. Back in Massachusetts, she was as beloved as the Red Sox, and it seemed everyone suddenly “knew” her. But on this day, the place was packed by her true friends from Framingham who swamped stories or bragged to us about the times they had with her “back in the day.”

Back at my house just down the reservoir my bags were packed and a friend from Pennsylvania was flying in a few weeks later to help me move to Hershey before my own travels were supposed to commence. But on that day I was a native of Massachusetts, and the young teacher’s ambitions and plans for her students after her return inspired us like little had for quite some time. This was the Reagan years, and the world was being beaten by constant life-altering events like the explosion of the AIDS epidemic, the verbal battle between Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev, the Mexico City earthquake, and more. But then just after the New Year after months of buildup and anticipation, Christa and the rest of the crew, including Commander Francis R. Scobee, Pilot Michael J. Smith, Mission Specialists Dr. Ronald E. McNair, Lt. Col. Ellison S. Onizuka, and Dr. Judith A. Resnik, along with Payload Specialist Gregory Jarvis, moved us all into a place of hope. We were literally and metaphorically taking the stagnant thoughts of the nation and rocketing them into another place entirely. No one was not affected by this.

I wrestled with the keg with one eye on the television behind the bar as the Challenger lifted off the pad and cheers filled the place, and a few tables grabbed their pre-ordered bottles of champagne.

Patti: That doesn’t look right.

Tom: What happened?

Patti: Something is…

deafening silence in the place.

just absolute silence. Then comments to justify the explosion, like it was just a “bad angle of the booster,” or it “did that last time too,” until NBC commentator Tom Brokaw said, “The Challenger appears to be a fireball…”

and someone screamed.

And I don’t remember hope like that in this country since then

Do not, do not, please do not skip this video: The Challenger Preflight, and “They Were Flying for Me” by John Denver, and Reagan’s memorial words