Month: November 2023

The Girl in the Third Row

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“We teach everything in the world to people, except the most essential thing.  And that is life.  Nobody teaches you about life.  You’re supposed to know about it.  Nobody teaches you how to be a human being and what it means to be a human being, and the dignity that it means when you say, “I am a human being.”

–Leo Buscaglia, “The Art of Being Fully Human

About a month ago my students seemed unengaged during a lecture about literary terms. I sat down and was quiet for several minutes. Few things can grab the attention of a disinterested student like a professor’s sudden silence.

I told this story:

When I was a freshman, we had orientation where we broke into small groups and were led by a couple of seniors and a guidance counselor or other such school official, and we did various activities together from the obvious, like a school tour of where everything is that you could possibly need, to the ludicrous, like a swimming competition where we all had to wear pantyhose and do laps in the college pool.

At some point each group gathered in the library and watched a video called, “The Art of Being Fully Human,” by  the late Leo Buscaglia, a philosophy professor at USC, and a bestselling author/lecturer. In the video he tells of how when teaching he finds “friendly eyes,” someone in class who is mentally present, and he talks to them. He found them in the eyes of an alert young woman in the third row. She didn’t always agree with him, he says, but she was there. So he was looking forward to her showing up to his request of everyone to stop by his office and introduce themselves. She didn’t show, and several classes went by without her being present. So he went to the dean to inquire about her, and it turns out she had driven up to Pacific Palisades, got out of her car, and in front of many witnesses, jumped off the cliff.

I sat silently for a moment more.

Buscaglia says it changed his life, because that was the moment he became fully aware that we teach everything in the world to people, from calculus to literature to engineering to chemistry, but we don’t spend one moment teaching the art, the absolute art and beauty, of being alive. We leave that lecture off the syllabus. We’re supposed to just “know” how to deal with troubles and bullying and failure and insecurity and disappointment. No one teaches us the value of being ourselves, of being alive and human.

I then asked my students a familiar question to anyone who has ever taken one of my classes: What are you doing here? Why did you decide in your life that right now out of all the options available to you, you chose to sit here, now, with me, and learn about Melville? Because we need to remind ourselves of two things: one, we chose to be here instead of anywhere else; and two, while this class, or this semester even, may not be what you enjoy, we need to keep the big picture in mind; that this might be the slow part of an exciting life ahead.

End of story. That was in October.

Last night one of my students who had not been in class in a few weeks waited until everyone else had left and she stopped me. We’ve had discussions before as she is transitioning and it has been more than a little difficult with family, friends, and her own confidence. She had told me her depression can spin out of control.

She apologized for not being in class and asked if it was okay to still turn in the writing that had been due. I assured her it was absolutely fine, and I’d read it first to make suggestions before she turns it in for a grade. Then she reminded me of the Buscaglia lecture.

“I’m the girl in the third row,” she said. “If she were here she’d look around the room and recognize me as herself.”

I was quiet.

“I had written letters to everyone I know apologizing for what I planned to do. Again. I was completely at peace with the decision to die.” She was visibly shaking as she talked. “But then I searched online everywhere for who you were talking about, and I didn’t even know how to spell his name, but my mother knew who I meant, and I read a few of his books. I’m still alive now because of that.”

“How are you feeling?”

“Different. I feel different. I’m back in counseling.”

We talked a bit more and then walked outside. “You’re an engineering major, right?”

“I was. I am switching it for next semester.”

“To?”

“Philosophy.”

I laughed. “Leo Buscaglia would be very happy!”

She was crying a bit, and then said she feels like being in college, finally.

I nodded. “But you know, as a philosophy major, you’re never going to get a job, right?”

She laughed. “I’ll teach.”

I started my very long drive home up the bay and realized, quite clearly and positively, had she been in my class thirty years ago, my entire career would have been different. I’m so glad she showed up now.

***

 A school principal gave this to Haim Ginott.  She said:

“I am a survivor of a concentration camp.  My eyes saw what no person should witness.  Gas chambers built by learned engineers.  Children poisoned by educated physicians.  Infants killed by trained nurses.  Women and children shot and killed by high school and college graduates.  So I’m suspicious of education.  My request is:  help your students to be human.  Your efforts must never produce learned monsters, skilled psychopaths, or educated Eichmanns.  Reading and writing and spelling and history and arithmetic are only important if they serve to make our students human.”

The Full Lecture:

https://www.pbs.org/video/kvie-public-television-leo-buscaglia-art-being-fully-human/

Sundays

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A steady rain is falling along the Chesapeake today, and the sky is grey all the way upriver to the west. The clouds are low, and late-November leaves lay like wet carpet throughout the paths here at Aerie. It is cold.

I startled a heron earlier; she was hunkered down in the reeds on the edge of the marsh so that neither of us knew the other was there until the last minute, and she let out the familiar low honk as she lifted into the trees on the far side of the water and settled onto a high branch, then she immediately pulled her head down low into her body, and it was raining harder so she turned to face behind her, toward the woods, away from the wind.

The only sounds this afternoon are the rain on the water, a slight wind in the few remaining leaves, and some fishing boat through the low fog at the mouth of the river. It feels like November out. It feels like a Sunday.

When I was young I lived in a yellow house on a reservoir in central Massachusetts. This time of year I would sit at my kitchen table and look through a wall-size window across the grass and past the road to the water, and the leaves would have long been gone, and it would rain like this, or snow so that even the roof of the Old Stone Church out on Wachusett was visibly wet. I worked on a manuscript about Vincent van Gogh back then, and the late fall, early winter mood fit the subject. Days like today I desperately miss my small place, the chill coming down from the mountain reminding me of colder months ahead.

It’s lonelier here than it was there, but I don’t know why. Maybe it was more hopeful back then, and hope can certainly chase off loneliness, almost always. At least there it could. Sometimes I’d walk around to the near shore of the reservoir in the first snowfall and watch the Canada geese move by, or the occasional car come up the road from West Boylston, headed perhaps to the cider mill in Sterling, or further to the summit at Mt. Wachusett. Or sometimes I’d wander across the street to the Deacon Bench Antique Shop and talk to the workers, and someone would have brought in a dozen Country Donuts from down in town.

Up in Princeton on days like this I’d stop at a small, white shed-size store, a deli of sorts, and buy hard rolls and the Boston Globe, and I’d return to my small living room, also with a window looking out across the grass to the reservoir, and I’d read the paper, spreading it out on the plaid couch, on the wooden coffee table. I’d have already put a chicken with spices and cut up red potatoes in the oven, and it felt permanent, as if it was all designed just for me.

The Chesapeake is choppy today, and to the west the deep grey clouds announce some inevitable harder rain and cooler temperatures. I thought about heading down to the raw bar in the village to watch a game but opted to spend a little time here at my desk. I have a box of pictures behind me, and I thought it would be the right kind of day to go through them, get rid of the redundant ones, put some of my favorites in the albums still with empty sleeves. I might not pull it off the shelf again, but I will today since it is raining, and it’s good to remember other times like this when there was something more than weather in the way the raindrops hit the surface of Wachusett. Something more melodic than today’s rainfall, which seems to simply drown itself in the river.

Instead, I stood at the water for a while and watched the current, noted the incoming tide, felt the cold rain on my face which rather than dampen my mood seemed to massage my melancholy back into something akin to anticipation, to expectation.

Am I wrong to think Sundays have always been like this is some way? It’s as if the colder months were designed for Sunday afternoons, the sound of rustling leaves, a chill on the back of the neck, the familiar call of some announcer analyzing the passing game, commenting on some player’s career.

And there will be an instant replay so that we can experience it a few more times before moving on, noting what worked, what didn’t, anticipating the fourth quarter with just a small stabbing of regret for some of the plays we will never run again.

GAZA

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Gaza is roughly 25 miles long and 6 miles wide. It is about twice the size of Washington D.C. It’s been inhabited since the fifteenth century B.C. It occupies the exact same amount of land as Las Vegas, but about 2 million people live in Gaza.

Picturing it now? Big population, not a lot of land. Virginia Beach is nearly four times larger than the Gaza Strip. It is exactly the size of Raleigh, North Carolina, with four times more people.

Okay. Now, drop 1,000 bombs a day on the Gaza Strip, on Vegas, on Raleigh.

On DC.

For 6 straight days, non-stop, drop 6,000 bombs with a total weight of 4000 tons. 18,000 tons of bombs have been dropped on the Gaza Strip since October 7th.

We haven’t even begun to see the numbers of dead, of wounded. A four-day “pause” (they’re not even pretending it’s a cease-fire) in fighting will allow between ten and fifty hostages to be released before they resume bombing.

So far Israel has dropped 42 bombs per square mile. Roughly 30 tons of bombs dropped on about every 20 New York City blocks.

This is the absolute definition of genocide. This is the 21st century’s definition of holocaust. This is an attempt at complete destruction.

Israel has now dropped more tons of bombs on the Gaza Strip than the Allies dropped on Tokyo in World War Two.

In Israel, the number of tragically killed by Hamas since October 7th is roughly 1200 people.

According to the Norwegian Refugee Council, in Gaza, the number of people tragically killed by Israel is roughly 14,500. More than 4000 of them are children with another 1300 children unaccounted for.

Almost 50 percent of all homes in the Gaza Strip have been destroyed.

52 percent of schools have been bombed with more than 600,000 students denied access to education as a result.

114 health facilities and 15 hospitals have been bombed.

All water on the Gaza Strip is now unsafe.

62 percent of the population has left their homes either because of destruction or displacement.

All sanitation services have stopped with sewerage “flowing in the streets.”

Drinking water is nearly non-existent.

The World Health Organization reports, to date, more than 70,000 cases of severe respiratory diseases.

Israel has allowed 6000 gallons of fuel to be brought to the Gaza Strip since October 7th, but the WHO reports that the United Nations estimate for enough fuel to sustain life on the Gaza Strip is 42,000 gallons per day. PER DAY.

This is not retaliation. This is not even war. It is an attempt on the part of Israel to completely annihilate the Palestinian People, and nowhere in scripture is such a reaction sanctioned.

I hesitate to be so pedestrian here, but let’s go to Wiki:

According to Rabbi Judah Loew of Prague, Jewish law forbids the killing of innocent people, even in the course of a legitimate military engagement.[23]

Those few cases in the Bible in which this norm was violated are special cases. One example was when King Hezekiah stopped all the fountains in Jerusalem in the war against Sennacherib, which Jewish scholars regard as a violation of the biblical commandment.[22]

According to Maimonides‘, on besieging a city in order to seize it, it must not be surrounded on all four sides but only on three sides, thus leaving a path of escape for whoever wishes to flee to save his life.[23] Nachmanides, writing a century later, strengthened the rule and added a reason: “We are to learn to deal kindly with our enemy.”[23]

“If your enemy be hungry, give him bread to eat, and if he be thirsty, water to drink! ” ~~ Proverbs (Mishlei) 25:21

By the way,  “Mishlei is the second book of the section in the Hebrew Bible called Writings, which contains guidance for living a wise, moral, and righteous life.”

Happy Thanksgiving.

Peace my friends.

Shalom.

Banksy

Grateful

~ aviewfromthiswilderness ~ 3 Comments
Peter Trimbacher’s Castle

Let me tell you about last night:

An old friend I have not seen since the mid-eighties contacted me. She was just a friend, but she happened to be part of one of the most significant decisions of my life. I was living in Massachusetts, and we briefly worked together. She told me at the time about a man who owned an eight-hundred-year-old castle in Austria. She was going there the following summer to do housekeeping in exchange for her stay. I wrote the man, Peter, and inquired as to other positions, thinking a summer working in a castle built around 1100 just might be what I needed. He said yes, offering me a bartender job for the summer, and having told him my journalism background, asked if I’d help him edit a book he was writing about the castle.

So it was decided. We bought one-way tickets to Salzburg and decided that after that summer I’d wander south through Europe and on to visit a friend in Senegal. And on. And on. I moved to Pennsylvania to live rent-free with an old college roommate so I could save money for the trip. I even got a job at Hotel Hershey to save more money.

Things happened.

I didn’t go. I called my friend and told her I had decided not to go. She was more than a little upset, to be sure. I had reasons, and I don’t regret not going, but it was significant. The following summer came and went and she did go to Austria. And the following fall she called to tell me all about it. That Thanksgiving, she drove to Pennsylvania where I was then watching an estate for some friends who were spending the holidays in New York City, and we had a fun Thanksgiving Day, and she told me how it was a good call that I didn’t join her.  

Last night for the first time in ages, she contacted me and we remembered that Thanksgiving. Her and her husband still live in Massachusetts, and they’ve also traveled around the world since then. But that Austrian trip was the first jaunt, and we talked about her return, and that holiday in November when she clearly forgave me for bailing on her.  

Crazy. Am I sorry I didn’t go? Yes, it haunts me that I didn’t go. Am I glad that I stayed? More than anything else in my life I’m glad I stayed.

Life is like that, and it’s taken me since then to understand what it means to be grateful. I’m not thankful for some things in my life that changed the course of my existence, but I’m grateful for where those things brought me. They’re not the same thing. No kidding, I never really truly understood. I’ve always been thankful for so much, as I’ve pretty much had so much to be thankful for. But grateful? I’m just beginning to understand.

I sat this morning on the deck at Café by the Bay in the village, swirls of dry leaves moving through with the breeze off the water. The place isn’t on the Bay; in fact, it is a mile or more away, but the breeze moves through town this time of year, and this morning I sat on the deck with the leaves lifting and falling, and I drank my cappuccino, and in my mind ran through a list of things to worry about. It’s long.

It seems more common these days to be distracted by life and its happenings. People you love are ill, or they’re pressing against the edge of unhealthy, anyway. Others have fallen away from keeping in touch, and with the holidays imminent, you wonder how they’re doing, about the changes that find us here, and about the mistakes we’ve made.

I’d like to do the last few years over again. Honest to God, I need to do the last few years over again. And I’d like someone to call me up and say, “Hey, let’s try this again. What do you need to get it right this time?” But life simply doesn’t work that way. So what is to be done?

This:

I’m grateful for being here, now, on the deck of a café, drinking coffee and feeling the beautiful autumn breeze on the back of my neck, talking to neighbors heading in and out, making notes about edits I need to make in a manuscript.

I’m grateful that I just hung up the phone with my ninety-year-old mother, and we laughed, talked about the weather, talked about my cousin’s chickens running through her kitchen.

I’m grateful that my life really is a circle, and all that was true nearly forty years ago is still true and present and alive and such a part of me.

I’m grateful that my son is a reflection of my father, the same gentle spirit, the same deep, deep kindness, the same subtle sense of humor. Grateful that on his way back here from Richmond this morning he is stopping at Country Donuts for some toasted coconut fritters for me.

I’m grateful for so much.

I’m thankful for what’s ahead: more Ireland, more Spain, more western New York and the familiar reaches in Florida. I’m thankful for people’s forgiveness, for those who make excuses for me, for those who understand the subplot behind my eyes.

Recently I wrote about students who have died through the years. Today I’m thinking about the ones who kept going; those I can’t thank enough for tolerating my humor and arrogance as we moved through semester after semester, only to send me a note to let me know how they’re doing. The ones who speak up; hell, the ones who show up. The ones who stop afterwards to talk, who call me up and ask questions, who seem to understand the smallest of gestures have the biggest effects.

I’m grateful that I have siblings who have the same sense of humor, thankful they’re much smarter than I am, thankful they “don’t confront me with my failures.”

I’m thankful for the way the trees hang on to those yellow leaves so much longer than the rest, brightening up the sky, filling up our senses and reminding us we’re alive, and we may wake up tomorrow and begin again.

I’m more than a little grateful for my friends. I’ve known some for more than forty years and still can pick up the phone and call anytime and, in the words of Harry Chapin, know that they “see where you are, but they know where you’ve been.”

I’m thankful for the way the river keeps running past.

For the way the sliver of a moon reminds me of my insignificance, and the brightness of Vega reminds me of my own light that needs to shine on this all-to-brief journey though nature.

Happy Thanksgiving.

“Friends, I will remember you, think of you, pray for you.

And when another day is through, I’ll still be friends with you.”

–Bill Danoff

The Gardens at Hotel Hershey

A Good Stretch of the Legs

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In the summer of 2025, with hope and luck, I’m going to return to the small French village at the foot of the Pyrenees, and I’m going to start walking. Again. I’m going to slow my heartrate down to the length of my gait, and my world will stretch no further than the next kilometer. I’ll stop in thousand-year-old chapels and centuries-old pubs. I’ll drink café con leche every morning along with fajitas patatas, a glass of juice, and a baguette in my pack for the moments of rest, to share with others while we talk about where we’re from. In the afternoons I’ll find an albergue and sit at a picnic table with a bottle of rioja and a small meal, and new friends from Italy and the Netherlands and Nigeria will join me. It’s what we do.

And like last time, I’ll tell stories, and we’ll all laugh, and I’ll be in a fine mood the entire time. Just like last time. And it will again be genuine, not some façade forced by a preoccupied mind.

It is what I should have been doing for decades. No kidding. My life would have been drastically improved had I discovered Spain ten years earlier. I suppose each of us eventually careens into life as it should be. It simply seems most people I know collided earlier than me. I read once we all live out all periods of our life; it’s just that not everyone lives them out in the same order, some aspects delayed for one reason or another. The part where I unearth what brings me peace? Very recently. But that’s no surprise; at least not to me.

***

For far too many people, life can sometimes feel like everything changes at once; as if the Gods conspire to let all the difficult aspects of life accumulate until their collective voice announces, “Now!” and all the old ways are no longer relevant, the old friends no longer available, the old hopes and dreams seem adrift on some frayed tapestry of old expectations. And you feel just past the point where good times still seem plausible. It is the proverbial edge, and many people balance on that jagged edge on a regular basis.

Such is depression. Such is the crash of anxiety. Random afflictions are certainly less random when the smallest of circumstances consistently pinch that nerve between “everything’s fine” and “everything is going to fail.” I’ve been this way before. I’ll be this way again. A lot of us have, right? The “this too shall pass” and “it is what it is” lectures do not work.

You attempt to tackle the entire list of worries, but you know you’re never going to pay all the bills, you know you’re never going to finish the projects, and you are absolutely convinced you’re never going to get the car fixed, the oven fixed, the world fixed. You suffocate in the wash of world failures too, not just your own. So you seek some form of peace, some sense of escape, no matter what it takes to find it. Reason recedes to almost a suggestion, and what seems irrational and drastic to others can somehow make perfect sense. You don’t so much “decide” anymore; and it isn’t about “giving up.” Whatever happens next is simply the only exit in what became a cattle chute void of options. No one gets it. They think you should have simply “gotten over it.” They say, “Had we known.” They say, “What a waste.” They say, “We had no idea.” “We’ve done all we can.” “I didn’t know.”

Of course not. The depressed, the anxious, the one with deep, inescapable demons is more likely than not to make you laugh, get excited about plans, is always there with a sharp and funny story. No one knows; even they don’t know.

***

St. Jean Pied de Port, France, to Santiago de Compostella, Spain, is just under nine hundred kilometers—roughly five hundred miles. If you drive, you can make it in just about eight and a half hours. If you walk it takes about six weeks. I’m a walker.

I’ve been there before. I’ll be there again. It’s what psychologists call “the value of anticipation.” We all need something to look forward to. It can’t be out of reach or near the realm of fantasy. Yet it can’t be so obtainable that achievement becomes routine. As Lily Meola sings, “It’s not big enough if it doesn’t scare the hell out of you.” Yet it can’t be too big. Yeah, life for the afflicted can be a juggling act. In broad daylight you can keep those balls going, hands down. At three a.m. there’s a tendency to hear them all crash on the floor and scatter like delusions.

Welcome to how the world is for more than ten percent of the population. They must find their own truths, despite what others expect. And they carry their own baggage filled with failures and misunderstandings like backpacks, and the best anyone can hope to do is put them down and move on. Here’s the thing: the worst part of some psychological ailments is often the inability to see past the next hour, beyond the next mile, yet the ironic solution to those very same inflictions is to decidedly and quite purposefully not see past the next hour or beyond the next mile.  

You see, when you look too far down the path, and your blinders keep out the light of hope, there is no suspense to keep you turning pages; there is no reason to anticipate the resolution. Life is anything but dynamic.

***

Basque country is my favorite part of the Camino. Navarra. It runs from St Jean south to near Pamplona, and you pass locals who still speak this rare language, and all of the ones we met before, all of them, were friendly, helpful, and hopeful for your journey, as if they each have some personal stake in your every step.

The first day is the hardest. Straight up hill for twenty miles. No kidding; a forty-five-degree angle at times. After that it levels off to just mountain hikes akin to the Catskills until Galacia, where some climbing is involved. But by then, a month later, the body doesn’t mind and the mind doesn’t doubt anymore. And the vistas and the visitors from all over the world keep your mind occupied, and after a week south of France—less maybe, four days—an unhurried pace takes over, and the entire world is arranged by where you’re going and where you “might” stay that night. Somewhere just south of Pamplona, just as the Camino bends to the west, you’ve shut down the part of the mind that begs for self-criticism and doubt, and you feel more free, lighter, but you can’t define it, not exactly. You just know it is easier to breathe; it is easier to sleep. All of the complications which haunt you dissolve. The ghosts recede.

***

Of course, our normal life can be a journey with some “hypothetical destination.” But a journey with some semblance of hope can be the difference between feeling alive and feeling dead all the time, where having an ordinary day is an extraordinary achievement.  

How many of us make plans just beyond our reach, a little past our current condition? It truly might be what saves us. Some of us anyway.

It’s well past time to change the narrative.  

It’s time to go back to Spain.

Chronology, Two

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Great River

We had a dog. Sheba. Briefly. She and my mother were terrified of each other. 

And a pool in the back on the edge of the woods where honeysuckle grew, and where we built a small fort out of scrap lumber repurposed from building sites down our road. Before the pool went up, my siblings and I had to pick the stones out of the dirt so they wouldn’t rip the liner. In summer we barbecued in the stone fireplace on the patio and swam with visiting cousins. When I smell honeysuckle, I remember that pool. I remember working on the fort with my friend Eddie who told me one night before heading home when the streetlights came on to watch out for lunatics. I said I didn’t know what a lunatic was, but he left. A few minutes later when I walked past the pool, he jumped out and screamed and scared me to death. We laughed and I called him crazy, and he said, “that’s a lunatic.” When I smell honeysuckle, I think of Ed.

We were protected by our parents’ forcefield, and secure in our innocence. But it wasn’t innocence, was it? Everyone was in tune then; the music did that. It kept us informed about what was going
on in the world; in Ohio, in Vietnam, in Watts; indeed, for what it’s worth, the music was a constant reminder that there was something happening somewhere, even if what it was wasn’t exactly clear. We knew all the words, and the words were ours to build with in the woods, or hike with along the Bay, through Timber Point Golf Course, and along the river to the reeds where an old duck blind was our morning refuge.

Geez, we were twelve. When you’re twelve everything is brand new and it’s all yours, and nothing, absolutely nothing isn’t feasible. That was how life was in Great River in the late sixties and early seventies. An idealistic village surrounded on three sides by an arboretum, a state park, and the Great South Bay. The fourth side was the main road, Montauk Highway, but it was so far removed from us we could wander the woods and streets for hours and never consider heading that way. Only at six pm when Walter Cronkite arrived did news like Vietnam sneak into our consciousness.
At home, Watergate remained a presence because my sister was a history major focusing on politics, and she constantly quizzed me about the players. “Who is John Mitchell?” “Who is G. Gordon Liddy?” This wasn’t history though; it was current events during my junior high years. I had no way of knowing that a half dozen years later I’d sit with Liddy alone in an office at college. When I hear about him now, though, I don’t think of our conversation. I think of our kitchen table in Great River and my sister.  

Mitchell was the Attorney General.

Dad grilled Italian sausage when family from the city or friends from the old neighborhood came over, like Joe and Rose Fontana. Or when cousins came. They didn’t come too often though, other than those who lived four miles up the road. No one back then would make the drive from Nassau County ALL. THE. WAY. OUT. to the South Shore of Suffolk County. Forget about it. Recently I looked it up. The distance from the inconceivably far reaches of my old neighborhood to the new house in Great River was a pilgrimage of twenty-two miles. Seriously, that’s how far it is now from my house here at Aerie to the first stop light. Back then it might as well have been in Kansas. We weren’t going back.

We never do go back though, do we?

Every Thanksgiving my aunt and grandmother would visit. My dad’s mom would play some piano, and Mom would be in the kitchen making everything you’d imagine she would make on Thanksgiving, while Dad and my brother watched football. Sometimes, especially in the early years in the house, my brother and I would toss the football, or tackle each other, or play whiffle ball. We built the first fort together; an outhouse looking thing. And we played Risk and some sports card/dice game about baseball I can’t remember anymore, but I can picture perfectly. We knew everything—absolutely everything—about baseball. We moved in the same year the Mets moved to first place, and everything in life was working. The Jets were winning; the Rangers and the Knicks were winning. Armstrong walked on the moon. And I learned about the music being played just upstate at the village of Woodstock.

We were one of the first homes on this road, and very quickly other twelve-year-old’s moved in. We’d walk to the deli and the post office. We’d walk to the docks at the Connetquot River. Everything was improving.

That’s just the way it seemed back then.

The way friends came and went, and I don’t remember—I mean I have no recollection at all—of ever being inside unless it rained, and even then. We simply stayed outside. Steve and Todd and I played baseball, and Eddie and I marked every trail of Heckscher State Park. For years we stayed outside, even in winter, bundled to the bay breeze. I loved how we were then. Early in the mornings in spring and fall I could lay in bad and hear the fog horns of the fishing vessels headed out toward Montauk or across to Fire Island.

But it was baseball that dominated my summers. The way we always played in Steve’s backyard, and the fence to the Campbell’s yard was a homer. The way I couldn’t hit to save my life in little league, but there on the property I slammed so many balls over that damn fence I felt like Ed Kranepool or Tommie Agee. The way we never tired and we’d quit mid-day and pick it up at twilight. The way even then I’d walk back up Church Road and through the side door to the kitchen where we always, always, had dinner together when Dad got home. The way Cathy would quiz me. The way Fred would talk about what interested him at school and about his trip to Mexico, or to the camp out past the Hamptons that one summer. 

When we prepared to move south, my friends all signed a baseball. Steve Delicati, Todd Long, Craig Long, Camille Villano, Lisa Villano, Frank and Richie and Tom and Paul. And Eddie, who never liked baseball.

When people ask where I’m from, I never know how to answer. New York? Virginia? Deltaville? When they ask where I grew up, though, I say Great River. Because we moved there when I had just
turned nine and we moved out; well, I suppose part of me never did. I can picture every square foot of that house, can name every road in the village, remember the trail that ran along the back of the town to the creek, and remember where the soft spot in the fence was at the arboretum that allowed Eddie and I to explore the old Bayard estate.

Sometimes when I think of that town I imagine if I were to drive the four hundred miles north to the end of the Southern State Parkway, and head down Timber Point Road, make a left on Leeside Drive, and another left onto Church Road, I’d see us all, young, laughing riding monkey-bar bicycles with banana seats, and chasing time like it was never going to end.  

That town is in my blood, and just a couple of years ago, Eddie and I made plans to return there to eat at the old Great River Inn, which had become an Italian Restaurant. That was the plan, anyway. Maybe someday I will. I’ll park outside the old house and walk, wonder what happened to the old folks, what happened to my old friends, and I’ll get a table in the back and raise a glass to my childhood, to growing up, to innocence and coming of age. And to Eddie’s memory.

We will always be twelve-years old, Eddie and me.

Aerie: noun: 1. A Hawk or Eagle’s Nest. 2. Bob’s Home.

~ aviewfromthiswilderness ~ Leave a comment

It’s colder today, and a strong wind blows out of the northeast, off the water, and the last of the leaves are letting go. It’s desperately Autumn here along the Bay. Yesterday the colors were brilliant, at their “peak,” and today they are muted. Tomorrow the leaves will mostly have fallen. I walked the paths just now here at Aerie, and the skin on my face feels tighter, the back of my neck is cold.

The sound of dry leaves and the wind is immediate. The clouds are low and dark—steel blue—layered deep clear past the horizon, as if they’re keeping out the rest of the world. They threaten, of course, but somehow they protect as well. It only took a few turns around the property and a meander past the duck pond and river to let go of the world for a while. Genocide cannot find me here; bombings will not find me here. Invasions and deficits and brashness and ridicule cannot locate me when I’m here at Aerie, and the sky is low like this, and the only sounds are the leaves in the wind and the water pushing back on the rocks, and the geese over the recently harvested fields.  

I left home far more than I should have. It was always interesting and exciting to come home after a month somewhere else and see how so much had changed; leaves either completely fallen or fully alive. I am glad for the places I’ve been and the people I’ve grown close to in my travels. But in retrospect it seems I was mostly out there looking for something allusive, some semblance of peace, perhaps. And today walking up the hill from the river I realized it might be the kind of peace I find here at Aerie. I almost find it here in Spring, working in the garden, osprey calling above while teaching their young to fly; and in Summer when we scull out on the Rappahannock, up the inlets to the west, stopping for oysters at a small grill near the bridge. In Winter, when deer and fox come closer to the house looking for food, finding apples, and I can sit on the steps for hours teasing one fox closer, and then closer still, and she eats a few slices before taking a large core in her mouth to bring back to her den to share with her young.

But it is Fall, of course, when I come closest, and the smell of leaves is deep, and white oak burns in the fireplace, and we heat up apple cider and I can sit on the patio at night for hours, bundled against November, working on something in my mind, remembering the reach from some other time.

Last week I walked to the river and a bald eagle stood in the field to the east where corn had been just a few weeks ago. It never fails that every time the eagles return this time of year, I remember a song by one of the primary influences in my life for my love of nature–John Denver. He wrote, “I know he’d be a poorer man if he never saw and eagle fly.” I always knew it to be true; I just never dreamed it would happen from my front porch. I have hiked in the Rockies, and I’d hike there every day if I could. And I’ve walked across the Pyrenees, through the Berkshires, along the Camino de Santiago where I must return to truly unearth that peace. Yet here where the Rappahannock meets the Chesapeake is where all my songlines converge.

It’s colder today, and grey. The paths are covered in leaves, as they should be this time of year, and my son is baking biscuits and heating up apple cider downstairs. I have some serious metaphorical hills still to climb, but today, outside, I can hear squirrels arguing, and the driveway is covered in acorns. A close friend of mine pointed out recently that to him Autumn is hope, it is life tucked away for awhile giving us a chance to start over in a few months. He’s right, of course, but I wish I could slow the whole thing down. I don’t want things to change so fast anymore. I like the sound of the leaves as I walk the paths, the colors as I lay in my hammock and watch them fall. I find peace in the carpet of stars at night, out early enough in these winter months for me to spend hours looking up, wondering. My anxiety settles down when I sit on the patio at night and hear rustling in the woods as the fox comes to call. I have lost so much faith in humanity it is difficult to write about. I need a breath; I need to be restored. It seems that despite our potential to banish the evil in the world, we continue to falter. But here at Aerie on the eastern edge of Virginia’s Middle Peninsula, something eternal is happening even as life let’s go and settles softy around me, marking time like decades.

The Dead

~ aviewfromthiswilderness ~ 2 Comments

I guess the first was Karen. Karen was from Pennsylvania–this was quite early in my career and I had just moved back to the Beach from Pennsylvania myself, so I could relate to her writing. She spoke in class about adjusting to being away from home for the first time. Her husband was military and they were stationed here. Her paper was about the changes. I sat on my couch and read about her excitement to start life anew and all the places they would finally see together like they planned. She took a job–not because she needed the money, she wrote–but because she wanted to do something. So she took classes and got a new job as a server at the North Witchduck Inn in Virginia Beach. She got lucky, I read; another worker had been fired and she filled the opening in the place not far from their home.

I had just put her paper down and moved on to the next when the phone rang and it was the provost of the college. He wanted to tell each of her professors before we heard it on the news. The fired server and her boyfriend returned to the North Witchduck Inn and shot four people in the back of the head, execution style, including Karen. For a few years I held on to that paper. It reminded me how in a class filled with “I’d rather be anywhere else but here” students, someone was glad to be present, to be truly present.

Then there was Mark. Mark stopped me in the library and asked if we could talk. He had just received orders he was headed to Kuwait for the first Gulf War, and he was told to get his “affairs” in order. “Talk about telling you you’re going to die,” he said. I assured him everyone going overseas in the military is told to make sure their affairs are in order. We laughed a while about nothing; really nothing at all. The smallest of things that day were funny, the simplest of moments were beautiful. We walked to his car and he showed me a picture of his son. We talked about how when he got home our boys could play together. I don’t remember Mark’s last name, but I will always remember his face.

Tricia and I used to talk at the copier every day. We talked about music and travel. We talked about food and how the smell of cinnamon buns is better than the aroma of coffee. She had braces and said her students haven’t said anything about them yet, but she was certain they noticed. I remember her asking if I noticed her braces and I laughed out loud, right there, like the laughter was my answer, then I said, “Well, T…yeah! They’re right there! But they’re beautiful. I can’t imagine you without them. They’re just so you!” We laughed a long time. T got depressed easily and I could usually tell from the faculty workshops about recognizing various issues with students when she was in a down cycle. The dean came to me and said Tricia’s medicine was messed up and her husband found her hanging in the kitchen.

Stay with me. Please.

Then there was Rachel. Dear, beautiful, full-of-life Rachel. On a study abroad in St. Petersburg, we walked freely down Nevsky Prospect, the Fifth Avenue of the city. I was right behind Rachel on the crowded street so we were all pretty close to each other. As usual, she was engaged in taking pictures and writing in her notebook, jotting down “Kazan Cathedral” which was just to our right. Of all the people I’ve traveled with—numbering well over four hundred—Rachel was by far the most diligent about drinking it all in, making notes, taking countless photographs. She always smiled anyway and could make everyone around her laugh, and there on the other side of the world she was in her element. She absorbed every single moment. In the evenings she’d come into my room and show me what pictures she had taken that day and double-checked their locations. Then we’d sit and talk about her impending motherhood, what it’s like being a parent—my son had just turned ten. We walked past Kazan Cathedral; she was absorbed in her notes and stepped right off the curb and into the cross street where a bus was ripping past us at forty miles an hour. I was close enough to Rachel to grab her hair which she had pulled back in a pony tail, and I yanked her back into my chest, and the bus was close enough to knock her bag out of her hand on into the street. Those around us screamed and Rachel turned back somewhat unaware of what had just happened. “He saw me,” she said, to which I replied, “Yeah, he did. He just didn’t care. Pedestrians don’t have the right of way here.” We picked up her belongings and in no time she was back into enjoying her tour of Russia; my heart didn’t settle down for hours. The last time I saw her she brought her daughter, Shaylyn, to my office. This beautiful woman with her beautiful little girl was so excited to move on with her life; she’d be a single mother, she told me, and hoped she could set a good example. Then we remembered the bus in Petersburg, laughing at the nearly tragic outcome, and she assured me I had saved two lives that day. I laughed and told her I was just glad she hadn’t cut her long, curly hair. “Yeah that hurt, by the way,” she joked, grabbing the back of her head.

Her daughter has her eyes.

Not much later, in May of 2005, the little girl’s father went to find Rachel who was hanging out with some friends at their apartment. When she refused to let him in, he cut a hole in the screen and climbed through. Rachel ran out the back door and called 911. Her ex walked through the house and shot four people killing two of them before he found Rachel hiding outside. She had called 911 and the operator had to ask several times what was going on, but Rachel was quiet, until finally she replied, “He saw me,” and her ex put his gun to her skull and shot her in the back of the head, killing her instantly. This one breaks my heart.

I sat in class last week and watched my students do group work. A few engaged students carried the rest, but more than half the class kept reading their phones, staring out the window, messing with their hair. “What are you doing here?” I asked in a general fashion. They were quiet. “What are you doing here?” I asked again. They just stared at me. I remembered the rule of threes: First time they hear it; second time they think about it; third time they start to understand it, so I hit it once more: “Seriously,” I said. “What are you doing here?”

They remained quiet.

Bobbie slipped slowly inside herself. First alcohol, then drugs, then homelessness, until this beautiful woman who became a neonatal nurse was found dead next to a dumpster. Carrie OD’d and ended up in a brain center where she kept telling me the same joke when I’d go visit to talk to the patients: “Knock Knock. Who’s there? Cargo. Cargo who? Cargo beep beep.” We’d always laugh and she’d keep laughing long after I moved over to Dave who was learning to walk again. Carrie was a biomed major, graduated high school early and had applied for Drexel University to transfer and had just been accepted. The stress got the better of her and she “used a little something to keep her nerves in tact.” Dave was found in the garage. He brought the dog.

“For the next project,” I told my students before leaving on a reading trip to Ohio two weeks ago, “I want you to tell me what you are doing here. Include your short range and long term plans. Include your hidden ambitions, your unspoken dreams, that secret that can ignite your internal motivation. Tell me what you hope this moment looks like when you look back five years from now.”

They stared at me. No one, not one, not a single student: NOT. ONE. TOOK. NOTES.

I asked Geoff, who bares a stringing resemblance to Johnny Depp, and is someone I can usually count on to keep up, what they need to do. “Write about what we’re doing here.”

“And?”

“And…be ambitious with it.”

I repeated what I had said, asking them to write it down, which they all did–on their phones. Fine. I looked at a woman on the right side of the room. Sometimes I hope to see Karen. Or Rachel. I asked her the name of the woman immediately next to her who she had been talking to during group work for a half hour for the fourth time this semester, and it was already late October. “What is her name?” I asked. She looked out the side of her eyes as if the woman wore a badge.

I stared at them. “What are you people doing here?”

I am haunted, some days. Not by the dead or their memories; not by the tragic loss of life and the repulsively early departure of far too many souls–a dozen more of whom I’ve left out of this. I am haunted by how easy it is to not live at all. I stopped at the door. “If it makes you feel better, most of the time I have no idea what I’m doing here either.”

They laughed, and I thought of Bobbie. They laughed and the woman introduced herself to her classmate of ten weeks, and I thought of Karen. I thought of Rachel and Trish–adorable Trish. They laughed and I realized not every moment should be one of ecstatic joy. But we certainly should be closer to life than death, shouldn’t we?

Oh, and there’s Kevin, who simply disappeared, and Charlotte, who just three weeks ago tried to kill herself. Charlotte is transitioning and has just about as little support as a person can get. I leaned against the door jam and asked if they understood the assignment. So I asked again, knowing, waiting, certain someone would give me the answer I absolutely knew they all knew, and someone finally did.

“What are you doing here?”

“It’s required.”

I smiled. “No. It’s not,” I said. “You’ve been deceived. Certainly to attend this college, to graduate, this is a required course. But nothing is required of you anymore. You’re not children. You can tend bar in Key West. You can hike across Europe. You can be anywhere, do anything, and you, for some apparently unknown reason, chose to be in my class on this day at this hour and sit and stare at your phones even though you could be anywhere else.” I laughed at the last part. “Anywhere!”

“With that in mind,” I added, “What are you doing here?”

Oh, and Bo, who got killed when the car he was riding in hit a tree on the way to Florida. And Eddie. Dearest, kindest Eddie. And Marcus. Jamal. Chris. Joe.

Karen wanted to have kids. Rachel wanted to be a teacher. Mark wanted to come home and bring his son out for ice cream. Bobbie wanted to dance.

All she ever wanted to do was dance.

Listen:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kg-Qdrr3XSk

Au(tumn)

~ aviewfromthiswilderness ~ Leave a comment

I’m home and the leaves changed and mostly fell while I was away the past week. I love traveling in the autumn, especially in the north, this time western Maryland, Ohio, West Virginia, and the mountains of Virginia. Such colors I’ve rarely seen anywhere else, like a painter’s palette, like a quilt. Like fall.

“I lived in a yellow house, like butter,” Van Gogh wrote of his place in Arles where he did his boldest work, filled with colors and tube paints pushed onto the canvas like toothpaste. When we speak today of his work, it is from Arles we mostly mean.

I, too, lived in a yellow house, like butter, along a country road running past a reservoir in central Massachusetts. Next door was a tall, white church with a cemetery, and the road wound up through the small village, past the Deacon’s Bench Antique Store, past the nursing home, up into Sterling and past the cider mill. It ran up the mountain, winding into the village of Princeton on Mt. Wachusett, where in autumn I’d hike to the summit and look across the New England tapestry of orange and rust, stretching clear to Boston, to New Hampshire, and west toward the Quabbin Reservoir. The crisp air, like yesterday in West Virginia, cleared my head, pushing away fears and anxiety. “It’ll be fine,” it whispered. Well, it won’t, I thought, but for now it is, and sometimes that’s enough.

I wonder if I’m starting to enjoy autumn more now than summer because I’m getting older.

The trail behind the house is covered beautifully in leaves that no step, yet, has trodden black, though signs of deer are evident. They bed down in a holly grove at the far end of the property and walk down toward the patio where the deep, heavy birdbath is apparently now theirs. The front path remains mostly clear as it runs in such a way and is wide enough for a soft northern breeze to keep the leaves to the side. But not always, and certainly not after a good, steady October rain like last week before I left. There’s something so immediate about autumn.

It is the time of year my father died. I read somewhere that other than the holidays, autumn is the most common time of year for elderly deaths. Younger people die more in Summer, which makes sense for the numbers out doing things they probably shouldn’t be, and January through March has the highest rates of suicide.

It’s odd how so many people come to life in autumn when nature is slipping away for a while, ducking behind the guise of death, returning half a year later, slowly. For now, it is beautiful, and the colors reflect in the duck pond and out on the river. They shine back at the hills I walked around a few days ago, and they remind me that for now, just for now, we’re all noticing the same beauty. It’s incredible that people throughout the autumn world all marvel and gaze at the ripple of color coming down the tree line, the scatterings of hues under oaks and maples and birches, and how the white trunks stand forth as the control group so we can see just how fine a job nature did.

I used to get depressed in autumn, feeling the summer slip away, the time of life and the sun on my back. It always, absolutely always, brought me to life, so I pushed the fall off as much as I could, perhaps anticipating what happens after the fall, in the dead of winter when hope is often difficult to unearth. But now I find in autumn something reassuring. Maybe it is simply that even growing old and letting go can be done with absolute beauty and grace.

At the end of The Lion in Winter, Geoffrey wonders what difference it makes how a man falls, and Richard remarks, “When the fall is all that’s left, it matters a great deal.”

Nature knows how to make an exit. She knows how to hold her own. I suppose her last green is gold as well as her first. I am surprised I have been so resistant to change. Maybe I’m getting tired.

Or maybe I just miss my yellow house near the Old Stone Church on the road to Wachusett.

“The Old Stone Church” where I walked nearly every day for three years. My Yellow House is just off to the left of the picture. No, I didn’t take this shot.