Month: January 2024

Valuation

~ aviewfromthiswilderness ~ Leave a comment

outside my window

It’s foggy across the river and bay this morning, and out on the bridge a heavy mist blanketed the area so that even seeing the sky-blue girders above us was difficult. A foghorn sounded from the mouth of the river, presumably menhaden boats out on the Chesapeake, perhaps an oyster workboat. It’s chilly, but not too bad. That could be a description of my head, but it’s not. It’s outside my head I’m pretty certain.

The view from this desk is only slightly better. The woods are misty, but the fog lifted. I can see pretty deep into the trees, and the skylight above my head is wet.

Sitting before me is a to-do list. I need to record a few art lectures for a university in Ohio, send edits of a piece to a journal, read proposals from capstone writing students in West Virginia, make a topic list for my writing students down in Norfolk, rewrite twenty pages of the monster—twenty pages about a time in my life when absolutely nothing happened, but something should have happened and that is the point of nothing happening, so that the reader will feel like something should have happened all the while nothing happens at all. Wow. That sounds like a metaphor for life. But it’s not. It was life, once.

And I need to send emails to a bunch of people who I was supposed to send emails to a few weeks ago but then college happened. And deadlines. And basic malaise. Luckly, the Kahlua bottle behind me is still full.

Alternate plan: Sail down to the Gulf of Mexico, teach online from the aft cabin, grab the guitar, play some Fogelberg and Cat and Van around a beach bonfire with friends and Malibu rum. Forget finally that social media had ever been invented. Go back to wondering how everyone is instead of knowing constantly. I miss wondering, I miss “catching up,” telling stories about things that others don’t know about yet. But we don’t. We value our homes and the lives we built; we asses and measure in terms of security and balance instead of whim and ideals. Of course. It’s called being mature, something I have rarely been, I suppose. I don’t know why; a design flaw, perhaps? Too much daydreaming when I was young? Not enough classical music?

So naturally I’ll need to stick with Plan A for a while. I wonder why, of course. Not enough nerve? Gummies? Too many responsibilities?

First, though, I need to complete a self-evaluation for the college. It’s a once-a-year thing, not difficult, which includes understanding what I did right, what I might change, how I respond to criticism of others, particularly students, what I’m going to include or exclude in the future, and some sort of game plan. It sounds more involved than it is, and it won’t take long. And after thirty five years of these things, I can clearly see how they have helped fine-tune my work.

Yet recently I realized I should have been doing one of these self-evaluations about my life all along. Five pages about the year, perhaps. Five written pages about what worked, what didn’t, what I need to do differently and proposals of how I might get there. This time five pages might not do it; I messed up in some big ways simply by not doing things, which should be part of any evaluation: what didn’t I do that I should or could have?

Do you do this? Maybe schedule a drink with a significant other or close friend next to a fire, talk a bit, then do self-evals with each other. It’s what I like about the assignment: At least a few other people are going to read it, so I need to be clear, concise, constructive. And so the “life-evals” should be too, whether oral or written. In both cases, honesty is essential. In both cases, brevity is dangerous. The college assignment is two or three pages of actual written self-analysis. That’s just short enough to bullshit with the best of them, which is why I believe it should be five pages; then I’d have to come up with some serious details and examples to maintain info about the man in the mirror for that long. Plus my writing is foggy and misty for the first two pages, even in rewrites, but by the time I’m moving into page four, everything is clearer, and you can see even my metaphorical trees far into the woods.

She’s a 41’ Morgan Out Island, spacy aft cabin with a queen size bed, long and wide main cabin with a navigator’s table which converted makes an excellent writing desk, another two cabins up front and two heads, one forward and one aft. The stove is a good size, and the refrigerator holds more than a few bottles of Kahlua.

What would you do? How do you write this into your self-evaluation? Truthfully.

I guess we’re not always so honest with ourselves after all, are we? I need to finish preparing the week’s lectures, send in the rewrites to the journal, and clean up the monster, clarify I wasn’t doing anything when I was hoping to be doing something.

That’s the point, though, isn’t it?

I Never Needed Anybody’s Help in Any Way

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I heard an interesting comment on NPR last week. When talking about someone who died by suicide, the victim’s brother said he didn’t think his sibling didn’t like life anymore as their mother had suggested, but just didn’t like one particular part of life, and somewhere over the course of time—maybe weeks, maybe months or longer—the poor man hyper focused on that one aspect until it became a monster, blocking his view of any other aspect of existence remotely salvageable; even the finest reasons to continue were saturated with the pain of one part, perhaps even a small part, of life.

On the one had it made their mother feel a bit stronger—that her late son did not despise life, and in particular perhaps not the life she and her husband had built for them, but one thing happened, who knows what, and that overtook him despite the beauty around him. He couldn’t see past that monster any longer, and in his then-compromised view, nothing else existed any longer. Life became about the pain-inflicting monster, so killing oneself seemed the only clear way to end the pain.

On the other hand, for those who still know someone with some form of depression, particularly situational depression and not chronic or manic depression, being able to unearth and understand that aspect of life which has the potential to take over a person’s mind can help isolate it and, over time maybe, destroy it. At the very least the knowledge of the issue might help others keep it in perspective, perhaps even eliminate it.

The surviving brother then, almost off-handedly, said, “I wish we had gone hiking more.” No one picked up on it; at least not on air. But I did. It slid right in my thought process and simmered all day. His brother must have been considering how things might be different if he had helped replace the monster with something more powerful, more soul-owning. For them, apparently, hiking. Had they gone enough times, or consistently enough anyway, for the deceased to have discovered that hiking was his life and he now could own that choice, his routine and whatever negative issues came up—a problem with a partner, finances, even simple malaise that chronically depressed people will never be able to explain—would be minimized by the power found in something positive.

It doesn’t have to be hiking. Could be music, sports, food. But something active, something visceral and kinetic.

I asked my students the other day how much time each day do they spend watching other people live their lives or pretend to live life. That is, how much time are they stagnant viewing other people’s happenings on tv, movies, TikTok, etc. I’m not talking about going to events like sports or lectures or the like. No, those are very participatory. I mean the dead-brained observation we do that when we’re done—or better stated, when we take a break–we are exhausted, and we never did a damn thing.

The suicide rate among college-aged students is about 2 percent, about 1100 per year, and about 25% know of someone who killed themselves, and just over that percentage thought about it themselves, all of them offering as their primary motivators pressure, helplessness, relationships, loneliness, and money.

It takes just one issue to debilitate a person, make them feel hopeless, and all the time in the world trying to balance it with positive acts cannot extract that monster from the mind, and eventually ration slides away so that suicide is not a conscious decision but in itself a rational act to eliminate the pain, which by that point is all there is.

And later people say they wish they knew, they say they would have helped. The man on the radio said, “He asked for help; we told him we had helped him all we could and he had to do this alone.” He was riddled with guilt, but then realized that the way he could have helped may not have been clear to either his brother or him at the time. One just assumes the help one asks for when in a bad place is the only way to help them out of that place, but that’s not always accurate; in fact, it is often hardly ever accurate. “I just should have been there more, called and asked how he was doing more, had lunch,” the brother added. Exactly.

Yes. He should have, but not because of his tragic loss, but because we are humans, responsible for each other, and I am so guilty of not being there for others it is disturbing. I can change that, but there are some things I cannot change. We can at least change the things we can. I’ll leave the wisdom part for someone else.

I guy I knew a long time ago told me a story about a friend who couldn’t see past a bad relationship, a mentally abusive relationship, and saw no way out of it, particularly since they just had a baby girl. In all other aspects of his life he was okay, very giving, impossibly kind to others, but he felt he had nowhere to turn. His mother ignored him, his father tried to help but without emotion, making it difficult. And he thought his friends had moved on. One morning the troubled one called a friend, but the friend didn’t answer the phone. The friend was pretty sure he knew who was calling and that he was probably depressed, but he didn’t want to deal with it at that moment. Three hours later the guy I knew called to tell him that the troubled one killed himself. He told the friend that the widow told him his last outgoing call was to the friend. He thought it would make him feel good to know the dead guy was thinking of him, probably missed him. He had no way of knowing that the man had ignored that very call. I knew these people; and it is easy to say there was nothing anyone could have done, but that simply isn’t true. We just tell ourselves that. Certainly we may not be able to save someone’s life, but we can save some time for them. It’s a tough call but an easy decision; make the call, stop by, go for a walk. Grab some tea.

Give them a reason.

We are here for each other. It’s all we have. We are only here for each other. We can’t save others if they don’t want to be saved, but by trying to help others we just might end up saving ourselves.

Another Story of An Hour

~ aviewfromthiswilderness ~ 2 Comments

Anyway.

I went into class Monday and asked who had read the only assignment for the day, Kate Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour.” One person out of thirty. I want to be clear about this: the story is barely two pages long. I moved my chair to the center in front, sat, and said, “Okay, let me get the straight:” I had Morgan Freeman’s voice in my head. “You graduated high school, applied to colleges, decided to come here, went through whatever financial mess you had to go through from parents to grants to loans, found out what classes you need, packed your life and moved here, came to class, found out what you needed to do, which, again, was to read a couple of pages, and just didn’t bother. Isn’t that a little like hitting a home run but after you round third, you think ‘Ah, screw it,” and you walk into the dugout without touching home plate?”

“You just got here, and you already gave up.”

I’m not making any of this up. One person out of thirty read a story that is about half the length of this blog post. What do you do with that? They’re nineteen years old, on their own for probably the first time in their lives, living with strangers, trying to figure out from everyone else what their lives will be about, and I asked them to read a story written more than a hundred years ago about a woman who’s glad her husband is dead. But they don’t know that because they haven’t read it. I talked about the symbolism, the setting, and the internal monologue. I sighed.

It already hadn’t been a good day. Or week. Or, well, weeks anyway. I’ve been deep in the rewrites of a manuscript which has been bleeding out of my right ear for more than forty years; I started the damn thing during the first Reagan administration. I’ve abandoned it, tackled it, trashed it, and started over, published portions and rewrote all of it a dozen or more times.

A month ago, just as the winter season had kicked in strong here along the bay and I could see the long, moody haul to next spring, which, for some comes with another set of issues, I knew that I wanted this manuscript, this “monster in a box” as Spading Grey once called a work of his, released into the wild. Hell, there are only two characters, so you’d think it wouldn’t be all the difficult.

I tell my writing students that if you have trouble writing something, write something else. I don’t believe in writer’s block; I think that is the result of trying to drain something of value from something that should be passed on altogether, or at the very least addressed some other time. Sometimes there is a piece missing and you simply don’t know it, so instead you blame “block” or distractions or the story itself for being lame. You have no way of knowing that what it needs has not been born to you yet and in time it will materialize. That has happened with this monster several times. No longer.

About three weeks ago when I had been lifting portions of an introduction from writing by Beryl Markam to use in this work, I realized that the narrative is not about either of the two characters: it’s about being nineteen years old. The one hundred pages turned into one fifty. Then two hundred. It is now roughly two hundred and twenty pages long. It’s not War and Peace, grant you. But it’s at least Peace.  

And I just received an endorsement for the manuscript from a very well-respected writer in Oklahoma.

And that’s where it’s at as I continue to tweak, manipulating the middle a bit after hearing back from my long-time writing muse in Ohio. She nailed what is missing in the exact spot something is missing but I couldn’t figure out what. Geez I love when that happens. Writing is decidedly not a solo sport.

So I went into the week feeling pretty good. I made a fun video about art of the renaissance for my art history course, and another about the art of the Islamic world. I had some good conversations with my senior creative writing students about their final projects before graduating, and I felt pretty damned good. Yep.

Then Kate Chopin happened. Mrs. Mallard shows up with her not-dead-after all husband and the joy that kills, only to be abandoned as if the story had never been written to begin with.

They’re nineteen, I reminded myself. You just spent a lot of time writing about how hard it is to be nineteen. Give them a break.

“Okay,” I asked, “You knew the assignment, yet you didn’t do it, so why?”

I got the usual responses.

“Okay,” I said. “How’s this”:  I mock-typed on a dead keyboard on the front desk, and said to everyone, “Dear Potential Employer, Graduate Director, Grant Reviewer: He can’t even read a two page story he had a week to complete. Nuff Said.”

Everyone laughed.

“My guess is if I had assigned a novel of some length, you’d have at least started it; but this was too easy to wrap your minds around as a collegiate assignment.”

One guy spoke. “I didn’t even look to know it was only two pages. I would have read it. I just assumed that it would be really freaking long.”

Fair point, I thought.

So I cut them some slack. I talked about the story. Symbolism, setting. We talked about Chopin. We just talked. I explained why I chose the story, and I tried to explain how it is relevant to us for knowing what to look for when we analyze something. I looked at the course outline and saw that they needed to read Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues” in two days. Baldwin is one of my favorites.

“What do you guys read? I mean beyond TikTok.”

Crickets. I could hear my officemate on the next floor eating her lunch. They all checked out, mentally gone.

“When I was nineteen one of the books I had to read was All the President’s Men by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein about the fall of Nixon and how two reporters from the Washington Post brought him down, exposed what we now know as Watergate. I was a journalism major, so I found it interesting, and it was easy reading, but something else was different when I was your age. What do you think it was?”

Same guy spoke up. “Your story wasn’t about a lady glad her husband is dead?” I suddenly liked this guy.

“It wasn’t, no. But I didn’t know that until I READ THE THING!” We laughed.

I told them:

No computers. No games. No phones, texting, TikTok, Instagram, Starbucks, Redbull, fast food joints everywhere, no fantasy sports, no Fortnight. No Cable TV.”

“Booorrrring.”

I laughed but this time to myself. I didn’t say anything because I didn’t want to continue to sound like an old geezer.

“Yeah, in parts. The whole thing was boring for some people. I think we had less anxiety than you do. Less pressure from all sides to keep up with the latest…”

I tried to think what we might have done when I was that age that we would need “the latest” version of. All I could come up with was music. And that really doesn’t bore many people.

“Okay, Professor,” a student asked. She plays for the basketball team and seems focused, listening to whatever I say. “So then when you were nineteen, what did you spend your time doing?”  

I checked out.

I thought of my monster. I remembered being that age and how I had infinitely more energy than could fit in chair long enough to read a two-page story about a wasn’t-on-the-train-after-all husband and the now-dead wife he oppressed.

“Get a reading group together.”

They stared at me.

“Get a group together to meet once or twice a week to read the story. Once the conflict kicks in on the longer ones, you’ll want to finish it. But then you have others to keep your attention instead of your mind wandering wondering what others are doing. And you can take turns reading the story out loud, be expressive.”

“Sound stupid,” said the one I liked briefly but no longer did.

“Yeah, it does, but just meet for an hour. That’s not long.” I replied, thinking of all the times I embarrassed the crap out of myself when I was young. “I’m just some old guy to you,” I said to the same one, laughing so he knew it was okay.

He laughed and said, “Yeah a bit,” and we all laughed.

“You know what?” I stood up, gathered my things, and I thought of the monster and of that time, back then, and what happened and how I carry it still, picture it still like it all happened last Tuesday instead of 1981, and I said, “I did nineteen really well. I was really good at being nineteen. Now I’m doing this age. You’ll get here if you’re lucky.” I looked at the kid. “How are you doing nineteen? Hmmm? You nailing it? or are you trying to slide through without having to do too much?”

After about sixty minutes of this, I left and walked to my car more convinced than ever that it is definitely time to let the monster go.   

Numbers

~ aviewfromthiswilderness ~ 3 Comments

According to the stats page of WordPress, the platform I use for A View from this Wilderness, more than four percent of the weekly readers view it from Israel. None from Gaza. I have been in support of and have promoted the work of Israeli writers for four decades now, including both the journal Ilanot, based in Tel Aviv, which has posted more than a few of my works, and my late friend, best-selling Czech author Arnost Lustig. On the other hand, I have no personal ties at all to Gaza or anyone living there. This is not pro-anyone. This is not anti-anyone. Honestly.

But…

I am not a fan of needless, widespread, pointless killing. Call me quirky like that. So if anything about the following numbers, acquired from the Jerusalem Post, the UN and the WHO, bothers you, you either have difficulty facing the truth or you’ve not done your homework. I have; these are the undisputed numbers.

Killed in attack on Israel October 7th: 1139 people.

Israelis killed since then, 700, nearly all soldiers. Roughly 6000 wounded.

Palestinians killed in Gaza since then: more than 25,000

Including 10,000 children killed in Gaza.

Another 1,000 children in Gaza had at least one limb amputated.

62,000 people in Gaza wounded in life-altering ways.

96% of water in Gaza is unfit for human consumption.

90% of people in Gaza in life-threatening situation from lack of food. (“If your enemy be hungry, give him bread to eat, and if he be thirsty, water to drink! ” ~~ Proverbs (Mishle) 25:21)

16 hospitals still remain out of the 36 pre-October 7th. Of those 16, none have power from more than a generator, and all are “critically close to zero” of medical supplies.

85% of the people of Gaza have been displaced beyond any ability to return home. (“Who is a hero? The man that turns an enemy into a friend.” ~~ Avot Derabbi Nathan)

Honestly, the moment anyone starts defending Israel’s right to kill 10,000 children their argument falls apart.

No one I am aware of has ever spoken against Israel’s right to retaliate after the senseless and horrible attack by Hamas on October 7th, 2023. But their mission has slid definitively over the line from retaliation to annihilation. Simply put, with numbers like those above, the military’s mission is to obliterate not only the citizens of Gaza in their attempts to destroy Hamas, but also to eradicate future generations of Palestinians. Why else on earth would anyone have any reason to kill children—10,000 of them. (Please be clear; this is a reference to the leaders of the government and army in Israel, not the Israeli population at large or Jewish people anywhere). (“They shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruninghooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.” ~~ Isaiah (Yesha’yahu) 2:4)

That’s it. If anyone disagrees that the only recourse for Israel was to kill more than 25,000 people including 10,000 kids, I have no interest in a conversation with you. Get your own blog. (“Even on the threshold of war, we [Jews] are bidden to begin in no other way than with peace, for it is written: “When you draw near a city to fight, first offer it peace.”” ~~ Midrash Leviticus R. 9)

Drive

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I owned an ’85 burgundy, 5-speed, fuel-injected, three-door, turbo charged Dodge Lancer. We called it the POS. It was the car I used to bring garbage to the dump, carry bricks and wood, and haul crap without caring. I kept it clean but didn’t worry if it wasn’t. We’d find driftwood and toss it in the back, sand and shells and all. We spent countless hours driving to the beach, the ice cream parlor, the auto repair shop. My son practically grew up in that car, learned music from its cassette deck, held up the felt on the falling roof so I could see where we were going. I drove him to school in that thing well into third grade.

We all remember our cars.

My first was my dad’s ’72 Nova, which wasn’t mine but I racked up the miles on it for him as good sons do. My first car I drove when I lived on my own was a 1980 light blue, Chevy Monza. That little thing and I saw the United States a few times, smuggled blankets out of Mexico and Molson’s out of Canada. We spun out down an icy hillside in Massachusetts and I ended up junking it in Pennsylvania when the engine blew out. I was driving all of a friend’s belongings from my house to her mom’s when that happened. I think that’s when I started understanding metaphor. In fact, to this day metaphor drives my writing life. It comes from cars.

My favorite was a red Jeep Cherokee five speed. I abused that car the way jeeps should be abused, and it lasted far longer than I treated it. It is the car I think of when I hear Paul Simon singing, “If more of my homes had been more like my cars, I probably wouldn’t have traveled so far.” Those were good times, windows open, radio blasting. There was the time I was stranded in the desert with a dead battery a hundred miles from a tree. Or when for several years the gas gauge on the Jeep was backwards. In forty years I went from fitting everything I own in the trunk to needing a U-Haul just to go away for the weekend. I can think of very few objects I’ve owned that symbolized “freedom” more than my cars.

One day when Michael was small and we were in the POS we drove over a pothole at a sub shop parking lot. The chassis slammed hard and made a crumbling sound like folding metal. I tried to back up and it refused. A friend pushed me out and I drove home thinking whatever was wrong righted itself.

No. In fact, I couldn’t go backwards for the next eighteen months.

I learned to look for a pull through. I’d park far away at the mall, grocery stores or work. I learned to anticipate what was next so as not to corner myself, or worse, find myself with my face against the wall. I learned patience. Only three times in a year and a half I found myself trapped. The first was at Old Dominion University when arriving for a night class and the parking lot was full save one spot against a pole. I paused and asked my friend if he wanted to push me in then or push me out later.

I learned what roads I couldn’t turn down, what tight situations might be waiting, when to find a slope to roll back down, when to walk. Incident number two: A cop once pulled me over for pushing a yellow light. He let me go but stood and waited for me to leave first, but I had stopped in front of a sign and I couldn’t back up when I needed to. He waited. I waited. Finally, I said, “Wow Officer, my heart is still racing and I’m tired. I think I’ll sit here a minute and compose myself.” He left.

It was after the third time that I junked the car—excuse me—donated it to Good Will. I had to get it inspected and went to a shop where I know the mechanic, Tuna. Honest to God his name is Tuna. I didn’t want to tell Tuna about my inability to back up, obviously, since I refused to buy a new transmission, and I realized I was screwed when he pointed me into the one car bay with no way out but back.

In Virginia, an inspector’s first task is to scrape the old sticker off the windshield, so while he scraped I called, “Hey Tuna, it’s the last day of the month so I know you’ll be swamped, go ahead and put the lights on while you’re in there.”

“Good idea, Bob!”

I called out. “Okay. Brakes? Good. Left signal? Good. Right signal? Good,” and found myself doing my own state inspection. “Reverse” No white lights lit up, of course. “Good!” We finished that part and he finished the rest, put on a new sticker and asked for ten dollars. I gave him a twenty and said, “Tuna, I need a five, four ones, three quarters, two dimes, and five pennies.”

“Sure Bob,” he said and headed to the store in the front of the shop. When the shop door slammed I got in the car, threw it in neutral, got out, heaved it over the red tire lifts onto the gravel lot, jumped on the brakes until the POS was far enough back to go forward. Tuna came out and I held my side gasping for breath. “You must be in a hurry!” he said handing me my change. I drove off wondering what was next.

Seems like back then I was always wondering what was next.

The following day I drove Michael to school. We listened to music while he held up the roof. He grabbed his bag, got out and waved as I rolled forward, moving on, and realized the truth is we rarely have a reason to go backwards anyway.

Then and Now

~ aviewfromthiswilderness ~ 1 Comment
Flipping baseball cards on a summer day. The boys in my neighborhood did this when we were kids. Us girls ju… | Childhood toys, Childhood memories, Baseball cards

A million years ago I flipped baseball cards with friends on the sidewalk outside our home in Massapequa Park. I’d sit on the cement in my dungarees and Wildcats little league t-shirt with a stack of Topps cards in my left hand, ready with one in my right hand between thumb and index finger, hoping to take the stack on the ground between us. The older cards were limp and ripped in places, but the new ones were stiff, still dusty from the hard stick of gum that came with them.

I’d turn over a rookie Tom Seaver or a Cleon Jones, not knowing then that I held several thousand dollars in my left hand, and since at some point the following year I had the entire 1969 New York Mets squad, at some point I held tens of thousands of dollars. I only knew I wanted to kick some baseball card-flipping butt before I had to head back inside for dinner. We were about to move further out on the Island, to a new house out near the Great South Bay, and who knew when I’d have another chance to do this.

Life was about flipping cards. Ask anyone who was nine back then—they’ll back me up on this.

Everything was easy. For me, anyway. On the other side of the planet the Vietnam War was in full swing, my uncle on his way over, a friend’s brother on the next street was not coming back. And just upstate, music fans would gather in a month at Max Yeager’s farm, while just fifty miles away in the city, the Mets were in last place for the last time, heading in a matter of months to a miraculous championship. Hippies walked down Main Street, the Beatles were together and going strong, Nixon was reelected, and Steve Bezos just turned five.

Just about the time I lost the Seaver card, somewhere above us Apollo Ten was orbiting the moon, doing surveillance for their successors, Apollo Eleven, a few months later. Funny, now it occurs to me that up until that point I lived in a world where we still had never walked on the moon. I wonder what we compared tasks to before we could say, “We can land a man on the moon, but we can’t…”

In any case, I followed the Apollo mission, didn’t care about Tricky Dick, preferred the Birds to the Beatles , and baseball was the universe. I was eight, for God’s sake. My voice hadn’t yet changed.

Yeah, seriously; a million years ago.

That was back when my friends had no last names. They were simply Charlie and David and Chris and Tommy, and Kathleen, the Little Read Haired Girl Kathleen. We had a pool and block parties and barbeques, and sometimes there were blackouts and everyone came out into the twilight evening, my friends and I chasing each other, the adults standing around in the cooling summer air, talking about how, “Over in Amityville they still have lights, and a few houses on Euclid, but they’re out down on Park Lane, and all the way down East Lake.”

Lights. No Lights. Whatever. I was eight.

My cousins lived too far away to ever think about visiting on a whim—a good thirty or forty miles, and the ice cream man would come, and the television was a big black and white console on which my sister would watch Gunsmoke and Bonanza and my brother would watch Star Trek and the Olympics from Mexico City and I’d watch cartoons or Andy Griffith. And I’d watch baseball when it wasn’t blacked out to local viewers because the game over in Shea Stadium hadn’t sold out.

And at night after the Late Shows ended, if I was still awake in bed and one of my parents had fallen asleep on the couch, I could hear a man’s voice declare, “That is the end of our broadcast day,” and the screen would get fuzzy with a low buzzing noise all night. Didn’t matter which of the five available channels was on, they went off the air.

The friends I have now were from all over the place back then. Rick was probably about to leave high school and hitchhike across the country, Tim was playing high school football in Philadelphia; the other Tim was a lieutenant humping his way through the marshes of Vietnam, and Sean was learning from his father upstate the value of giving, of volunteering. And when I think of my friends back then, well, who knows where they are now? I think about them when I pass through Kennedy Airport or the rare times I’m on the Island and stop in a store, wondering if I just walked by or stood in line behind someone that at one time a million years ago was my absolute best friend; the one I’d know forever. It was so easy then. When you’re eight you’re simply always going to be eight—no discussion. Your parents will always be there, your siblings will always wake up early with you on Christmas morning to exchange gifts before you head down to the living room to see what is under the tree, and baseball card-flipping is more important than school.

Sometimes I have to try hard to make myself realize that that eight-year-old was me. That it wasn’t some kid I saw in a movie or read about, or a child someone told me about. That was me, legs crossed on the cracked cement sidewalk on East Lake Avenue, the same me that sits now near the river and listens to the approaching flock of geese, watches the descending sun, feels the faint brush of something familiar, like a song I once knew or a memory of someone that was kind to me. The same me that barreled across Siberia with my own son, who is now more than twenty years older than I was back then.

I’m at the other end of this game now. It’s late, and I’m tired. I have some writing to finish for readings next week, and a few deadlines looming, and I walked out on the porch and listened to the cold night, the clear, star-filled night, mid-winter night that is colder than it should be here on the bay. A friend of mine believes in reincarnation, believes we come back as, well, some other living form, whether another human like the Dalai Lama does, or as an orangutan, but as something. I’d be okay with reincarnation, but I want to come back as me. I want to do this again, make those mistakes again, fall in love again, have my heart broken by the same girl again, play golf with my father and brother, receive care packages from my sister when I was at school, move into those dorms again, play tennis again. Hurt and give and cry again.

If we agree eighty years is about a life, anything more than that is a bonus—overtime, if you will, then I’m now entering the fourth quarter. Games have been won or lost in the fourth quarter. Some of the greatest plays in history were made in this part of the game.

Back in 1969, the Mets turned a losing season into a winning streak now universally called miraculous more than halfway through the season. But as Mets catcher Jerry Grote pointed out, “It’s not a miracle, it is persistence, it is determination, it is faith in yourself and each other.”

It’s not over yet. And it just might be that the best resource I have so I can face whatever comes next on this pilgrimage is that eight year old boy somewhere inside who could flip baseball cards with the best of them.

Ya Gotta Believe. By Jay Horwitz | by New York Mets | Mets Insider Blog

Voice

~ aviewfromthiswilderness ~ Leave a comment

I walked to the river and watched geese settle on the field. It is cold, and the water is choppy today. I sat on the grass and watched the tide retreat to the Chesapeake, pulled by the moon and pushed by the current, both. I like the movement of water, the ebb and flow, and even on days when the river is glassy, you can see some subtle and constant change.

That’s how writing should be. And life.

I do not need New Year’s Day to know renewal; it is just down the hill. The last few years brought with it challenges I sometimes could not face without support, but at the end of the day, my pulse returned to normal and my often untethered and anxiety-ridden thoughts realigned themselves with the tide. Sometimes at night—often at night—I feel the same sense of being mentally cleansed that so many experience on this day, and the notion of a new start seems obvious and obtainable. My passive hopes become active plans; my stagnant ambitions, activities; my indifference, passion.

I don’t want to regret life, having lived not saying what I want to, even at the risk of failure and embarrassment. I don’t want to constantly and constantly and forever constantly wonder if I could have done X or succeeded at Y. I want to fail rather than wonder; I want to participate rather than watch others from a distance. I want to say what I want to say.

And I want to be clear.

I need to back off of the gerunds and modifiers, ease up on the nouns. Life should be a string of verbs. I’m attempting to live out the rest of the little there is of life without piling on more passive voice.

When I teach creative writing, I emphasize action. Too many rely upon some benign and wordy noun-universe. Characters—all of us—need to do something. Let’s see the love and heartbreak, the gentle breeze and the raging storm; at least then we’re paying attention. Safety has little place in the creative process, and what is more creative than life? Characters both imaginary and real need to get off their collective asses and act. You can tell me all day about what a person is like, looks like, thinks about, and you can expose the deepest concerns of her soul with some convoluted third-person omniscient narrator, but I want diagonal lines, not straight ones, I want inverted triangles and asymmetrical actions. I want first person. I want active verbs and movement and pace rather than nothing but moments of pondering.

Today is as good a day as any for a rewrite.   

Certainly, I have failed, oh my I have failed. I am failing still. So I need to stop holding back. Hesitation doesn’t pay off either on the page or on the go. So I’ll absolutely take advantage today of another chance to begin again. It is always the first day; there is always another draft.