Month: April 2024

Between the Lines

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37.5531° N, 76.3403° W

It’s raining today along the river, and the puddles running along the roads and the edge of the woods are yellow, covered in the pollen which until early this morning hung in the air and on my body and in my lungs. It is the time of year when I most welcome the rain. Right now, I’m standing at the Chesapeake Bay where it is rainy and peaceful. I don’t get phone service when I’m out along the road near the bay, and I like it that way; I like how I’m on the edge of the continent, lost in the four thousand miles of water between here and, well, as it turns out, Sicily, where my maternal great-grandfather was born. When I’m out here out of service I feel more in touch with everywhere else, everything and everyone else, and my imagination takes control of the helm.

If my eyes could bend directly east along this vantage, I’d see through Athens where I almost went almost forty years ago and on into Tabriz, Iran, where a student of mine never came home from thirty years ago. Past there I’d move through Uzbekistan, a place I’ve never been but whose food I know well having eaten many dinners at an Uzbek restaurant in St Petersburg, Russia, where we’d spend four hours taking our time with each course and hot bread and samovars of tea, belly dancers and hookahs, and the most delicious entrees.  I had no idea all these years standing waist deep in the Chesapeake at Stingray Point, I was watching distant Uzbeks.

I’m standing on the imaginary line that runs just a sliver south of the 38th Parallel, closer perhaps to 37.5, or if you speak to any one of the watermen in this village, they’ll tell you 37.5531° N.

So, close enough. Let’s go further:

Passing Gansu, China, famous for its water-pipe tobacco out into the Yellow Sea almost directly through Baengnyeong Island, which means “White Wing Island,” so named for the resemblance to an Ibis in flight, and home of intelligence communities because of its proximity to North Korea, which brings me to the most famous spot on the 38th Parallel—the 38th Parallel. Of course it runs around the entire planet almost directly under my feet, but when most people hear “38th Parallel,” they think of the Koreas, of course.

I’m on the same white line as Canyonlands National Park, Utah, and Newton, Kansas, passing right under the counter at Gurty’s Burgers. Evansville, Illinois, too, but it makes me think of the tragedy of the 1977 plane crash which took the lives of the entire University of Evansville basketball team. I’m two and a half hours east of Charlottesville, Virginia, and just south of Chincoteague Island where the horses still swim. And when I was five with my siblings at the World’s Fair in Flushing, New York, standing in front of the famous huge globe with its metal longitudes and latitudes, who were my neighbors then? Are they still out there, following different lines? Searching away? Searching toward me?

But since I find myself at the proverbial crossroads in life yet again, I can’t ignore my northern and southern neighbors—since isn’t that what we are? Neighbors? I mean, if we are going to James Webb our way into the distant galaxies and black holes, I think we’ve reached the point where we can all consider each other neighbors, relatively speaking. If “neighbor” is someone with whom we have some physical closeness compared to others more distant, than astronomy has moved us all on this sphere into the category of “neighbors” to be sure, reliant upon each other, part of each other both as particles and participants.

And those north of here include the North Pole, of course, since all longitudes meet eventually, twice actually. But closer to home is Ellesmere Island, Nunavut, Canada, the world’s tenth largest island and home to Victor’s Seafood which has curbside pickup when you don’t want to get out of the car. And Prince Charles Island, also in Nunavut, of course. This line runs south from there through Ottawa and into my birth state of New York, into Pennsylvania, into Maryland, and down through the Chesapeake Bay to this rainy little piece of Longitude. But wait, I’ve always been drawn to the tropics. Here’s why: I’m standing, I mean I find myself smack dab on the same streak that runs just west of the Bahamas and right into Holguin, Cuba, its fourth largest city and cradle of Cuban Music. But here’s the crazy part: It goes on, this longitude, into Colombia, Ecuador, and San Bartolo, Peru, on the Pacific Ocean, famous for its beach-going tourists and surfers. That’s what nearly exactly attracts people to Virginia Beach, just a notch southeast of here and where I attended high school; and where I learned in geography everything about this world except that New York and Virginia were due north of the west coast of South America. Yes, here standing on North America’s east coast and staring out toward the Atlantic, I am due north of the west coast of South America where people are staring out on the Pacific Ocean. But further still, the Southern Ocean (which I don’t remember even being a place when I was a kid) and right into the northern cliffs of Charcot Island, Antarctica, with its crabeater seals and Adelie penguins. Right here, but south.

Deltaville is at 76.3403° W for those keeping score.

This one spot, here, this mark on my mental map is tied, distantly I admit, but tied just the same to people being born and raised and looking out, wondering. It’s kind of our own little “Double L” ranch, only really thin and exceptionally long. If we coordinate correctly, we could all plant flowers on our line, though somewhat problematic headed north and south as my daffodils might not grow in the Nunavut tundra or the desert of Patagonia, but we are neighbors; we work together on these things.

We have been nomads since the nomadic days, and while we might be “from” somewhere, we rarely stay any longer, following our songlines, chasing something unknown. Since I’m a child I have wanted to follow those latitudes and longitudes, since I read Robin Lee Graham’s Dove, since Joshua Slocum, since St. Brendan.

I want to meet our neighbors before I sail on to different coordinates. Ireland, of course, and Prague. Spain again, and the Netherlands, for certain. It turns out these lines are everywhere, like a grid, like graph paper, like those moving walkways in airports leading us to the next terminal.

My first experience with Longitude and Latitude Lines on the globe at the World’s Fair in ’65

Melville Without Whales

~ aviewfromthiswilderness ~ 1 Comment
The Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel

Today is the 60th anniversary of the opening of The Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel, a series of bridges with two tunnels which run more than 17 miles across (and under) the Chesapeake Bay from Virginia’s Eastern Shore to Virginia Beach. I used to work out there, on the South Island in the restaurant, back when the Modern Marvel was just thirteen years old. The piece below is about there, about then, published about six months ago.

That Which We Are, We Are, Still

I immersed myself in outdoorsy stuff in my early teens; even beyond that. I wonder if something innate in my DNA attracted me like chemistry to the outdoors and references to it, or my environment and influences doused me with enough references to nature that my path was clear.

I listened to all of John Denver; knew every word to every song. Played his music on the record player and my guitar. At the same time, my friend Eddie and I spent every single day in the woods and along the Great South Bay at Heckscher State Park, nearly literally our backyard back then on Long Island’s South Shore. I watched movies like Jeremiah Johnson and television shows like Grizzly Adams. I wanted to disappear from civilization like they did; I wanted cabins like they had up in the Rockies, with a warm fire going.

The beach took hold of my Buddhist-bending mentality, combined with Dan Fogelberg and Jimmy Buffett, books by Joshua Slocum and Robin Lee Graham. Patrick O’Brien and the first paragraph of Melville’s Moby Dick, which reads:

Some years ago—never mind how long precisely—having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world.

Damn I wish I wrote that, wrote “Son of a Son of a Sailor,” “Rocky Mountain High” and “Sweet Surrender,” wrote home from some mountain in Utah not far from Redford’s “Sundance” ranch, long before the film festival was born. Instead, I played their music, watched the shows, and spent as much time as I could in whatever nature I could.

I think it was the beginning of me always feeling slightly outside of everything, just a little beyond understanding people. For some time I thought it was insecurity, but now I believe I just preferred the natural state of things, how perfect it is out there. I had the theme of Grizzly Adams down pat:

Deep inside the forest
Is a door into another land
Here is our life and home
We are staying, here forever
In the beauty of this place all alone
We keep on hoping.

Maybe
There’s a world where we don’t have to run
And maybe
There’s a time we’ll call our own
Living free in harmony and majesty
Take me home
Take me home.

Even that line repetition is a nod to Frost’s line “Miles to go before I sleep.” Exactly.

Is it true that everything we are we remain? Our hopes remain. Our dreams remain. And if we hadn’t lived them out yet, perhaps we still will in some other season? Maybe.

A part of my mind never truly grew up, I know that. A part of my psyche still holds tight to how I used to think when I was young, sometimes to the point I can be out for a walk and not even remotely feel my age, forget that my ability to do most of the things I could then is, shall we say, compromised. But we trick ourselves. I can still ride a bike; can still hike in high altitudes. In my fifties I walked across Spain. So who knows.

What happens is we forget. We let go of so much of who we were to make room for who we become. It is natural and beautiful and necessary, and we would not come close to being who we are today without who we were then, watching Dan Haggerty and his bear walk down the mountain, or listening to John Denver’s opening guitar riff on “Rocky Mountain High.” It’s in our blood. It has to be.

Unless, again, something in our blood attracted us to those things. Who the hell knows, right?

Ever come across a trigger that brings you back to those moments you had then? Maybe it’s a picture in some old album your parents kept; or a book you read. I have books like that, from then, I have a baseball my friends all signed when I left Long Island and it transports my mind to that small village, almost as if had I driven there today I’d see fourteen-year-old Eddie coming out of his house ready to hike through the park. We have so much more ability to manipulate time than we realize.

So, I had this job. One of my first, and the last one as a high school student. I worked on Seagull Pier on the South Island of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel which connects Virginia Beach, Virginia, with the Eastern Shore of Virginia, known as the Delmarva Peninsula. I was thrilled to get hired out there for one reason: I’d be working “nearly” on the water, watching the sunset and rise, feeling the salt water on my face all the time, like Melville but without whales. I worked 10 pm to 6 am every night, usually alone, frying shrimp and fries, serving sodas to travelers with coupons they received when they paid their toll to make the crossing of one of the longest bridge-tunnels on the planet. Yes, they got a free Pepsi at the pier. It was pretty barren then—a diner-style interior with a few tables, a gift shop, and a pier filled with fishermen. In later years the restaurant took over part of the pier and became quite nice with a full menu. But back then it was just a quick stop for a basket of fried food, coffee or Pepsi, a few souvenirs and back on the road.

They tore it down a few years ago to expand the bridge tunnel.

I would drive my dad’s ‘72 Nova out there just before dark, park and stand on the rocks looking west up the Chesapeake, west, toward the setting sun. Then I’d head inside and cook, serve, clean, make coffee, talk to fishermen on rainy nights when they crowded the counter, talked to the rare customer who stopped for their free Pepsi or a burger at three AM. Then when my shift ended, or sometimes even before then if no one was there, I’d walk out on the parking deck on the east side of the building and watch the sunrise over the Atlantic at the mouth of the bay.

Just remembering that brings me such absolute peace I can, just for a moment, forget some of the minutia that I find myself up to my neck in. I remember, and I am there, can smell the salt, can feel the breeze coming off the water.

I love to remember.

One morning at about four, the door opened as I was just about to clean the grill. I glanced back to see who was coming in and it was a man by himself in a sweater. He had long hair, a thick beard, was tall, big, like a linebacker, and stood for a moment looking around.  I called to him to sit anywhere and he came right up behind me and sat at a stool, and he said, “Can you make me a burger on that grill before you clean it, my friend?”

Instant voice recognition. It was Dan Haggerty. Grizzly Adams himself. I asked and he said yes. We talked and he insisted I make a burger for myself as well, and fries, and we sat together and talked for an hour in the empty Seagull Pier restaurant. He was on his way to Florida and preferred to drive very late and very early.

Young people: This is before there was any form of a device with which I could capture the moment unless I happened to have my camera—a big device with film in it—which I didn’t. So we have those triggers. A baseball, an old guitar. Stories.

Today I received mail from my sister. My brother-in-law bought a new car, and in the old car, buried somewhere in the console or glove compartment or somewhere, they found three Free Drink coupons for Seagull Pier from one of their many trips south to see our parents in Virginia Beach.

She was discarding outdated coupons some toll clerk shoved at her with her change. I received a wormhole to a version of me that had my entire existence in front of me from a place I loved to show up and leave out in the middle of nature, where the sun set and rose again with my arrival and departure. What had for nearly fifty years become illusionary, almost some fiction from forever ago, suddenly seemed to happen this morning, and I felt younger, more alive.

I still head to the bay—same bay, ironically—to watch the sunrise; and to this river every evening to watch the sun disappear west into the Utah mountains. I still dream of riding horses across the Rockies. I still listen to Denver and Fogelberg.

If not, I know for certain I’d be a poorer man.

Everything we are, we remain. Our hopes remain. Our dreams remain. And while not all of them will find fruition, some might. Some just might. If not in this, then perhaps in some other season.

Perhaps.

Thanks Cathy and Greg, for not stopping for a free beverage

For Those Who Stay Behind

~ aviewfromthiswilderness ~ 2 Comments

Note: This is a very serious one. Read. Share. Forgive. It’s all we’ve got.

This is for Dave W, Bobbie B, Bud D, Tricia K, and the one’s who live with those unseen wounds which simply won’t heal.

***

A broken limb is obvious. A cast, a sling, a set of crutches or even a knee cart, and people can see the problem, understand the delays and compromises. We move aside or assist in any way we can.

What happens when someone injures their mind, breaks their thought process, when a person cracks their perception of reality and ration? The world is quick to judge the results of some unseen wound festering in their frontal lobe. “They’re lazy,” we say; “They’ve given up,” we say; “They keep asking for help and I’ve had enough,” we say. No one replies to the unfortunate soul with some walker, “No, sorry. I’m not helping you anymore.”

Well, in both cases the likelihood of one asking for help is pretty slim anyway.    

Monsters such as depression, anxiety, and nervous breakdowns can destroy a person’s ability to function. People can’t think as clearly so they lose jobs, they make bad financial decisions and lose money and property. “They could have done something else; they could have sought help from a professional if that was true,” we say.

And when nothing makes sense anymore and the world is too much with them and there is absolutely no meaning in anything—when numbness overtakes the idle sadness, they find a way out.  

The truth is suicide is not always the result of depression; it is not always a person simply giving up. In fact, it is often seen by the psychologically afflicted as the perfect solution. It is not doing harm; it is solving problems. The mind no longer functions the same as others’ minds. If they even want to ask for help, they don’t even know what it looks like to ask for anything in particular, so they seek solutions on their own, like sleep, like cutting off contact, like shutting the brain down for good. It is not life they fear or wish to escape; it is their mind. It is a difficult task to escape one’s own thoughts.

“There is medicine for that,” we say.

Not really. Sure, there is medicine to help someone cover up the wound, like a Band Aid, but the sore doesn’t heal as much as it is buried. The infection will return as soon as

well 

as soon as it rains, or when the next call comes from a creditor because they can’t work enough to keep up, or, worse, when a call doesn’t come any longer from friends and they suddenly remember they were better once, and they won’t be like that again. But even that’s not accurate since they simply are like this now, and apparently always were, and the moment it happened is an allusive memory.

Because while in the movies when someone has a nervous breakdown, they flail their hands and scream, cry, and someone might slap them, tell them to snap out of it, in reality that’s not what happens. The truth doesn’t play well on film. In reality they say nothing. They might drink, of course, or become addicted to some pain reliever, some vice that keeps their brain in the moment like alcohol or other self-defeating measures that keep their mind from dwelling on some past or future attack, but they might just as easily sleep all day, or more likely not sleep at night. They try and work but the ability to focus is gone; not ignored or delayed—the actual part of the brain that helps them do work or see a reason to exist at all has a hole in the middle of it, the circuits are infected and surrounded by puss, but no one can see that, so it can’t possibly be anything other than “a phase,” “laziness.”

Later, afterwards, people say they didn’t know, “They always seemed fine.” “I thought they were going through something.” “They said it was no big deal.”

They say, “I wish they had asked for help.” They say, “I did all I could.”

They say, “What a shame.”

Indeed.

Did Hemingway have another novel, Van Gogh another masterpiece, Robin Williams another routine for the thousands of kids he used to visit in hospitals?

Depression and mental illness often caused by a mental breakdown can cause lives to rip apart, and the only explanation they have when they ask for help again and again is “I’m trying.” And eventually that simply isn’t good enough no matter how much they are loved. They live out on the fringe, they hold signs, they sleep on grates. Likewise, they live in country houses and city apartments. They seem to try, they try to seem to fit in.

Maybe if they wore a cast, had sutures across their forehead. We like to see problems before we help solve them. We don’t offer help to people when we don’t know they’re suffering; how could we? Unless we know them well.

And that’s the problem. No one knows them at all. They’re funny and outgoing. They make light of serious situations. They can work a room. So they either never ask at all or, when they do so too often say “I need help,” it is difficult to see how. “Again?” we reply. “Why now?” we ask. The thing is in a few days they will not even remember they ever asked for help to begin with. This is true; the compromised brain actually blocks that out completely. To us they can either be absolutely silent or seem constantly desperate; but to them it just happened.

Here’s the problem:

How can we find that line between someone who really needs help and someone who just needs a bit more tough love? What do we do if there is no visible “mistake” that needs correcting? What do we say when they say nothing at all, or if we do ask if they need help, they say, “No thank you, it’ll be fine,” more out of a notion of being too embarrassed to say yes. Too ashamed. They’d rather…what?

They’d rather die. To be sure. I remember a phone call early one morning when I just didn’t want to hear it again. I remember a visit from someone who needed more than I could give. I recall calling once and the phone kept ringing. I’ll never forget that one.

Where is the line between knowing whether we helped enough and we could have done more?

Honestly, it runs right down the middle of the rest of our lives, and we walk it aimlessly, hoping we made the right call, that there was nothing we could do. Even if we’d rather be on the side of foolishness, helping people way more than they probably deserve, we can’t ever know.

So we call and talk, stop by, we get them to laugh because apparently we think laughter is the best medicine.

That’s not how a nervous breakdown plays out. Trust me on this one. But there is no Habitat for Humanity that helps people rebuild their minds. So they lose everything: their homes, their families, their purpose. And there’s not a damn thing we can do about it. Well, sure there is, but the place between knowing and not knowing is dark and difficult to navigate.

So. What do we do?

We forgive them for finding a solution the rest of us thinks is foolish. We forgive them for believing that the pleasure found by watching their kids and grandkids grow, watching another sunset with someone, laughing at lunch with friends, still isn’t worth the pain—the constant and debilitating pain—that comes constantly to infect their mind; constantly, day and night. Even their dreams are saturated with pain.

Forgiveness for something we do not understand is a monumental task. But then for some, so is life.

If you need help, Call 988 immediately.

If you know someone who needs help, Call them. You don’t have to know what to say. Say anything.

If you are living with the memory of someone you feel like you could have helped more, it isn’t your fault. It isn’t their fault. Forgive them. Forgive yourself.

Remember what we learned as toddlers: How would we want them to react if it was us? What would we want them to remember if it was us?

Not everyone is fine. It’s that simple.

Bob Kunzinger writes the weekly blog, A View from this Wilderness, which premiered in January 2016, and is the author of eleven books, including the forthcoming Office Hours, as well as hundreds of articles in national and international publications. He lives in Virginia.

Hypocrisy

~ aviewfromthiswilderness ~ 1 Comment

A few days ago, the editors at the widely read Vox Populi (18K daily subscribers) published my essay, “Moral Absolutism: Do Not Kill Children.” The emails have streamed in, most of them understanding and in agreement, and most of them understanding my issue is not with Israel’s right to defend itself against Hamas, nor even Israel’s right to seek out Hamas and destroy them. My issue is the exorbitant amount of civilian casualties, in particular women and children. It is all in the essay below.

But then something happened.

A few days ago, seven aid workers for World Central Kitchen were killed by accident in an Israeli airstrike (the disclaimer “by accident” was never used by Israel for the deaths of children). Since then the world has been outraged. “Repulsed that this has happened!” exclaimed “Left, Right, and Center” host David Green. President Biden said he was, “Outraged and heartbroken.” A reporter for Slate covered this best and I’ve included her article below, please please read it. But the obvious explanation, and one that repeats itself all too often, is also dangerously close to an accusation of such sweeping generalizations that I hesitated to say it, but that moment passed and here it is: We are more disproportionately outraged by the deaths of seven aid workers who voluntarily entered a warzone to provide relief than we are the deaths of over fourteen thousand children, because the aid workers for the most part look like us. The Israeli government even came out quickly and said they screwed up, they apologized, they promised swift resolution to the issue and punishment to those involved. A rare and decisive apology was delivered nearly immediately for the “error.”

Wait a minute. No such declaration was made by the Israeli government, and no such clear and emotionally charged disgust was displayed by President Biden nor British Prime Minister Sunak nor US Secretary of State Blinken for the extermination of fourteen thousand children. Can this mean the kids were targeted so no apology was due? You really can’t apologize for something you intended to do, can you? Or does this imply Israel is not sorry or disgusted by their deaths? Does it suggest the lives of seven people, only one of whom was Palestinian, were more valuable because they worked for Spanish celebrity chef Jose Andres?

Tens of thousands of innocent civilian deaths, fourteen thousand of them children, famine, rampant disease, accusations of genocide from UN officials all reported by the world media daily, but it is the deaths of these seven that pissed off the west and made them pay attention. Come on. This is simply wrong. Isn’t it beyond time we admit the rest of the world couldn’t care less until it directly affected them either through death or economic impact? It happened in Rwanda thirty years ago with the deaths of 800,000 Tutsis, and it will happen again. Apparently, we can afford for all the children to die and tens of thousands more who are about to through more attacks, hunger and illness caused by the Israeli Army and Hamas, but damnit, Israel stepped over the line when these seven familiar faces were killed.

Anyway, I’m just confused, that’s all. Why is it acceptable for innocent children to die but unacceptable for aid workers who knew the risks to die? Why is one called an accident but the other not? Why did one result in an apology but the other not? After all of the refusal on Israel’s part to allow aid to begin with, and when they did they made it nearly impossible to get it through, how can we believe these seven weren’t targeted and the culprits knew they’d just have to apologize, all the while anticipating exactly what would come to pass: that Chef Andres would cancel future aid deliveries and Save the Children would end up going to save other children, pulling back their presence in Gaza as well?

And to those officials whose response is, “Of course the deaths of the children were unacceptable as well,” one must demand an explanation for the six months of silence on the matter.

Please read these two pieces: one from Vox Populi, the other from Slate.

Peace.

The Vox Populi Article:

Bob Kunzinger: Moral Absolutism | Do Not Kill Children

The Slate Article:

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2024/04/world-central-kitchen-workers-killed-israel-gaza-idf-jose-andres.html

Peace. Out.

~ aviewfromthiswilderness ~ 3 Comments
The Peaceful Priest on the left/the asshole on the right/1980’s

A friend of mine is a Franciscan priest who remains calm no matter what happens.

We are not alike.

He is compassionate, understanding, patient, and saint-like. He is perfect for his job and does it 24/7; that is, he is one of those rare souls that couldn’t be anything but some sort of man of God. If he gets stuck in traffic, for instance, he keeps it all in perspective. If someone cuts him off, his response remains, “They really must be in a hurry. I hope they’re careful.” Or, “Wow, God bless them and watch over them, they really must be anxious about some appointment.” His is a peaceful soul.

This contrasts directly with my “Use a frigging turn signal, butthead!” approach. When entering a tunnel and the traffic decelerates from sixty to forty, the good Father cares: “Oh, thank our Lord they are all being careful going into this tunnel. It really must be frightening to so many people.” I handle it with my own style: “It’s a tunnel. IT IS A TUNNEL! It is not a brick wall! Wilie E. Coyote didn’t paint the f***ing thing! The Road did NOT shrink! It’s a damn TUNNEL!”

We obviously address frustration differently, which makes me wonder how we ended up this way. Would Monastery-Bob and Professor-priest keep their temperaments? If I lived on a mountain in prayer would I be less likely to want to kill the cashier for needing a pen to subtract $5 from $20?

I was like him once, my friend the peaceful priest.

When we met during college we talked a long time about peace and where it comes from. To search for peace in the world is a fruitless act. Even if we find it, it can disappear with war, with stress, with distractions and interruptions. It is like turning to others to find what you want to do with your life; it must come from within. And peace, too, must be a spring, not a shower. I always liked that thought.

I once went to Father’s room and found dozens of people drinking beer and laughing as they told stories about their lives. Afterwards, I said I had a great time and found it strange that I could feel so lost among friends on one day and on another feel so connected and centered. He said, “Bobby—tonight you brought the peace with you.”

Man, he made it sound so simple: Bring the peace with you.

So a few years ago when some dirtbag student of mine called me an asshole in class, I thought of Father, and how it is never the situation but how we handle it. I could picture him with his wide smile and deep laugh and huge hands on my shoulders telling me I’m going to be just fine. I brought the student into the division office and sat the little bastard’s ass in a chair while I filled out a withdrawal form. Before I could finish the paperwork, however, and before he stopped crying, I decided to give this “peace” thing a shot.

“Are you scared?” He looked at me. “College, I mean, the assignments? Are you worried?”

“I suppose,” he said, calming down.

“Why?”

It took him a long time to answer something other than the moronic, I don’t know. “I’m not a good student. I was never good at school.”

“You get confused?”

“Yeah,” he said, nodding, knowing I hit on his fear.

“Yeah,” I said. “A lot of people do. I know I did. What you might try doing is stepping back a bit. Sit to the side and watch everything from a distance for awhile—get some perspective. Instead of calling me an asshole, ask me some questions.”

“Right,” he said, with not just a little indignation.

Bring the peace, Bob. Bring the peace.

“Sometimes we need to see things from a different point of view.”

He was quiet a long time and I believed I got through to him, and I wondered what he pictured as I recalled sitting in Father’s room listening to stories of scared and lost students like myself still trying to get a handle on our place in the world.

“Wow, thanks for your psycho-babble bullshit, Dude,” he said.

I took a breath, thought of Father, and told the little prick to get out of my site; that Hardees is hiring and someone has to clean the toilets.

It’s a gift, really, knowing one’s place in the world.

I headed home thinking about peace and frustration, fear and anxiety. He’s where he should be, this former student of mine. He’s out in the real world where he can seek out only those challenges he knows he can conquer. He is part of the masses that only face what they’re not afraid of. I wondered, though, how often I only face what I know I can conquer.

Bringing peace to an otherwise hostile environment is a difficult task and it gets harder when we watch the world simmering in anything but serenity. Maybe that’s why I, too, often avoid the challenge and instead wander down country roads, watch the water ebb and flow rather than suffer the anxiety hurled at us from the news of Ukraine, of Gaza, of DC, of course. It’s why I don’t drive during rush hour, avoid fast food restaurants and box store checkout lines. Hell, maybe I’ll just start giving everyone A’s so less people will call me bad names.

Yes. Let there be peace and let it begin with me, Bob the Asshole. I’m going for a walk and I’m bringing my peace with me.