Month: May 2024

In Humanity

~ aviewfromthiswilderness ~ Leave a comment

(various versions of this work have appeared in other journals and A Third Place: Notes in Nature)

It isn’t unusual for what the masses consider a “problem” to also serve as a “solution.” AI, for instance, electronic vehicles, self-driving cars. But we have bigger issues than the questions raised by these so-called answers. It seems scientists can now “edit” genes in a human embryo to prevent a disease. As a writer and a professor of writing I stand strongly behind any form of editing. It is, after all, an attempt to make something better either by adding clarity, eliminating awkwardness, or, in this case, correcting errors. So it is difficult for me to find fault with this.

I know the arguments; but they’re not what I’m talking about. Children are needlessly dying in Gaza, war-torn Ukraine has been set back centuries, poverty is rampant in the United States, and starvation in Ethiopia, homelessness in and violence in and disease in this world simply won’t cease.

Gene manipulation of any sort can lead to “designer” babies, sure. Parents with money will not only be able to eliminate disease, but they can order up some character traits not already fine-tuned in the sperm. Meanwhile, those without the means will suffer the process of natural selection and have to be satisfied with all things organic. Further, this embryo-envy group will inevitably insist gene-manipulation could lead us into dangerous territory, including cloning or possibly creating a robot-like race.

Wow. Slow down.

There are regulatory speedbumps still to overcome. In the meantime, if we can scrape the cancer out of a kid why would we not want to? And it’s frustrating when someone suggests it really should be “God’s will” how the baby comes out. For the record, my pissed-off reaction is an example of a trait that could have been removed with one more run through of gene-check when I was born. But how can anyone not become infuriated? It is God’s will that children be born with cancer? Cerebral Palsy? Cystic Fibrosis? Seriously? If so—if those elements should not be screwed with because they were pre-determined—then how (in God’s name) do these people not know it possibly was God’s will to enable scientists to finally have this moment where in some lab somewhere someone sat back, looked up, stared straight ahead, and said softly to herself, “Praise God. We did it”?

Under the acutely pretentious mentality that it was “God’s will” that misfortune remain standard, we should have no medicines, eyeglasses, or deodorant. You can’t have it both ways; the same condition that “allows” tragedy to befall a newborn might just have balanced such intent with a scientist’s capability to solve the problem.

If some baby has a dangling modifier or comma splice, I say have at it. Eliminate the gene that bends toward polio, Chron’s, leukemia, or blindness. Clean up the embryonic paragraph which begins with an incomplete digestive system, a fragmented spine, a misspelled heart valve.

And, my dear scientists, surgeons, or managing editors—however you will be so labeled—while you’re in there, quickly skim through the frontal lobe and fine-tune the common sense. See what you can do about the math scores on SATs and the gene that enables tailgating, stealing, lying, and pain. This little move toward disease control could be a step toward babies designed to share with others, to empathize, to help the needy and to not text and drive.

I wonder, though, if personality traits can be manipulated as easily as cancer. If so, can we finally make a move toward compassion and understanding? Is it possible that this discovery is the end to the common trend toward gluttony and greed? These designer babies might, by design, be intolerant of hunger, might make it a crime to be homeless because of some doctor who checked the fetus galley sheets and noticed a gene which still allowed unnecessary suffering and had the presence of mind to grab a bottle of amniotic white-out.

In a world where so many have no issue with the swerve toward technology and computers that think ahead, robots with limbs not unlike our own, what is so wrong with a step toward humanity? Instead of improving machines to help us make life more convenient and comfortable, how about making the technology obsolete by improving the people?

How much embryonic manipulation will it take before hunger is no longer an issue? How many edits is it before the desire for war doesn’t even enter someone’s mind?

Humanity is dying; we are on a slow decline and have become more accustomed to crude comments than constructive conversation, indifferent toward arms buildup and troop movement, and infinitely more blasé about hope, possibility, and peace. When did we decide that disease and suffering were simply part of humanity and will never change?

Still not convinced that gene-manipulation might be worth investigating further just to understand the possibilities? Then ask yourself this: If you knew your child was going to be born with a painful disease or perhaps die at ten-years-old from cancer, or grow up to be a psychopathic killer, and you could stop it from happening, would you?

From This Green Hill

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This article, the most shared of any I’ve written, originally appeared in the Washington Post, May 29, 2016.

From This Green Hill

by Bob Kunzinger

I was at Arlington National Cemetery and stood near a small wall on a tranquil hillside, and I could see Washington, D.C., the Washington Monument and other memorials to our Founding Fathers.

The unobstructed view looks out upon our nation’s capital, where for almost 250 years some of these souls have challenged the balance of power. A few of our former leaders lie just feet from this unassuming spot: an eternal flame for John F. Kennedy, a small cross for his brother Robert and, for their older brother, Joseph, one of the hauntingly familiar headstones. Across these green fields in all directions stand thousands upon thousands of marble markers, all carefully carved with the names of veterans and spouses, their birth and death dates, battalion or division and rank and conflict, a cross or a star, variations of both. A flag.

From this protected promontory I could see century-old oaks. Magnolias and dogwoods shrouded headstones like commanders keeping their soldiers safe. The Tomb of the Unknowns, mausoleums, small, singular sarcophagi and miniature monolith monuments stood scattered across acres of fields of fallen men and women who once stood as strong as those very stones that mark their last battle.

From this green hill I could see wildlife. I watched brave birds feed at an arm’s length away and then scatter to the safety of a nearby branch. Starlings perched upon headstones, and striking red cardinals gazed from the low branches of a tall maple. It was theirs, once, as were all the battlefields and all the cemeteries from Winchendon, Massachusetts, to the Texas Coastal Bend, before these battles took their toll, and men — boys — were buried in this wilderness.

From this tear-soaked soil I could see Vietnam, its rivers and forests where death kept too close to birth, whose beauty and wilderness taught men to pray and made brothers of them all. I could see the village battles between unknown enemies and blameless boys who should have been home riding bikes and reading books. I could see the more than fifty-thousand Americans never to become authors or professors, scientists or librarians, gathered beneath this field where their legacy is our common charge.

Beyond the Potomac, I could see Korea, the Philippines and New Guinea. The voices of spouses still crying for a husband to come home, women, standing alone too young, holding the small hands of children starting their fatherless flights toward tomorrow. I could see the medals and markers, veterans hugging veterans above a brother’s eternal assignment, saying, “It should have been me.” “He gave it all.” “He saved my life.” “He was too young.”

From this hallowed ground I could see Normandy. I could see the parachutes falling under the cover of night. I could see rows upon rows of men who marched side by side through shallow, blood-filled, mine-laden water toward the only hope left. I could see the hillside and the secured toehold. I could see the American flags on Omaha Beach and Utah Beach. I could see the graves of those forever beneath foreign soil and the ships returning with thousands of heroes. I could hear taps, the prayers of priests, the commanders’ thank-yous, the nation’s solace.

From this sacred spot I could see into France, the sacrificial fields, the trenches that saved the lives of our great-grandfathers. I could see the muddy, barren no-man’s land where brave men crossed only to lie here, now, beneath crosses too many to mention.

From this vantage I could see the heirs of Lexington and Concord. I could see Saratoga and Yorktown. I could see the battle for freedom, the commitment to integrity, the promise to defend. I could see the fight for the greater good. From this spot on a green hill I could see a small group of men standing like stone walls against England and claiming with absolute clarity and without compromise that we will be free. We will stay free. We will not fail.

From that green hill, from that perspective on such honorable sacrifice, I could see what bought our freedom. I could count the crosses, the sum of which cannot be measured, whose cost cannot be calculated.

vestibular schwannoma

~ aviewfromthiswilderness ~ 1 Comment

A stone in water.

The overture of Swan Lake.

Those brief piano notes that start “Scenes from an Italian Restaurant.”

How “Bob” and “Mom” sound so much alike in a busy mall.

A drink being poured over ice in a glass.

Ice in a glass.

An oboe coming in high, one note falling in slowly like silver rain, fading away and handing the note off to a French horn.

The way my friend Zhora stood on the rocks of the Gulf of Finland and played his flute for us, the Beethoven notes slipping off across the water under a midnight sun. The whispers of everyone about his playing. Champagne.

A few days ago, chickadees hatched in the birdhouse near the woods. When I am at my desk upstairs, I can hear them chirping away for the mom who seems to be in constant flight from the small hole in the eave of the birdhouse to the lawn and then back. They’re hungry. And they’re loud. Almost as loud as hummingbirds’ wings.

I have pretty good hearing.

Snowmelt dripping from a branch. The muffled sound of tires on a winter street. Rain on a canvas awning. Rain on the skylight above me.

Dizziness sometimes. Imbalance occasionally. Tinnitus.

A racquet solidly making contact with a tennis ball. Someone turning pages at a table in a library.

Geese in flight at dusk headed for the river.

My father’s deep voice. My mother’s laugh, which is more of an inhale.

Burgers sizzling over coals.

Rigging.

Some mornings there would be some leakage from my left ear. Could be anything, they said. I heard them clearly; they could have whispered. Three doctors in two weeks; well, two, one two times. I have an acoustic neuroma. “Shouldn’t I be losing my hearing?” “No. Well, I suppose it could rupture, but not always.” Not always.

When I’d watch television with my father, whose own hearing had diminished in his final years, he’d keep the volume at 35-40. For perspective, when he left the room, I lowered it to 5, and even then, it still seemed loud. The joke was I knew which episode of Law and Order he was watching when I turned the car onto his street. If I’m trying to get work done at my desk I put on headphones just to muffle the noise coming up from the river or down from the highway or in from the trees where squirrels scatter and chase. When they are scared they sound like a ball pein hammer, and herons sound like they have something stuck in their throats and they’re trying to hack it out. Osprey and hawks have their own similar high-pitched sound, and eagles take it up an octave.

Some surgeon makes an incision above the ear in the skull bone, uncovers the internal auditory canal, and removes the neuroma. Takes about the length of the entire production of Gizelle, or the extent of all Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony. I tell my doctor I don’t want to only be listening to John Cage’s 4’33” the rest of my life, but I don’t think she heard me.

Water talks to me too, usually at night. The river is calmer in the evening and the slow, methodic lap at the land is nearly imperceptible but lasts a while as the dripping lip of the water bends on itself, running down the beach. I sit on the rocks sometimes and listen as it folds away, holding on, eventually giving in to one last break. On the marsh shore peepers are chanting their own scripture.

Acoustic guitar strings, a piano, pool water splashing, the voice of an old friend, waterfalls, foghorns, a baseball slapping into a mitt, a cat’s purr, children aimlessly laughing. And odd sounds too; a dryer spinning, a plow, a lawnmower starting up, cups and plates hitting each other in the kitchen of a diner. Swirling conversations from people on beach blankets, kids calling, music floating on the breakers. Champagne glasses meeting on some western salt bed at twilight, and a small plane moves along the dry lake about what sounded like a mile or so away.

It’s a gumball. It’s basically a small sack of nothingness camped out deep inside my ear canal. I was supposed to fly next month, and I was told in no uncertain terms not to do so until at least sixty days after it is removed. It is benign, but if it explodes (they say rupture, but we’ve taken to calling it an explosion, with images of ear canal parts landing on the person next to me on the plane. I suggested she wear a smock; she suggested I wear a football helmet), I could go deaf, at the very least in my left ear; more likely both.

When I am reviewing my work, I read aloud to myself; I can hear the cadence, the meter, how lyrical it sounds, much more accurately than if I just read it on the page.  

Because writing, when it is done right, is music; it can be recited and sung like hymns by choirs; it should hang in the air like winter-breath, and it should worm into someone’s mind and play in there all day, birthing ideas and pressing them into some new direction, ever present, a small presence you don’t even know about but is there, waiting.

Dave

~ aviewfromthiswilderness ~ 6 Comments

That’s my friend Dave Szymanski. He died Tuesday, May 14th. RIP my brother. We laughed so much that now just laughing at all often makes me think of him. We were going to get together when we both turned seventy and sing “Bookends” on some park bench. No kidding; it was part of the plan. We wanted to belt out to whatever audience was out walking their dog, “How terribly strange to be seventy!” Well, that won’t happen. Still, I am absolutely certain if I make it that far I’ll most definitely do just that, but alone, crying, laughing. I have so many stories about Dave you’d think we were twins. But those are mine now–Dave and I agreed to have joint custody of the stories of those times, but since he is gone now, I’m assuming full ownership. Unfortunately, they fall squarely under the category of “You had to be there,” so there’s no point in sharing them.

This is not likely to go where you believe it might go.

I’ve been thinking about what I can best call the start of some independent consciousness–that is, the time when I was first aware I was a growing, independent thinker/dreamer, mentally unattached to others, my thinking not entirely tethered to parents or siblings or teachers. I guess I was in what we then called Junior High, now Middle School, and at thirteen or fourteen years old life was still idyllic. That’s the point I think I started to think of myself as an individual. I have no idea if that is late, early, or disturbed. We lived near the Great South Bay next to a State Park and an arboretum, a golf club, and I was surrounded by friends in the village of Great River. I have memories before that, and possibly even dreams, which at that time were to either be an astronaut (Apollo 11) or play baseball during the summer (Miracle Mets) and be an ice cream man in Florida during the winter. But those were the “in the immediate” aspects of life; that is, things you thought about and said to friends but then forgot nearly instantly. But realism crept into my view somewhere around seventh grade when more realistic plans surfaced, like sailing around the world or riding my bike across the country, or being a musician or a writer or a tennis pro. All seemingly real plans at the time; those things which you no longer imagine and pretend but which you pursue, even if fruitlessly and without much talent.

No one save his family knew Dave was sick, so most of us didn’t have the chance to take the time to reminisce. It’s important; we always say, “Tell people how much you care about them because you never know if they’ll be around next week,” but we rarely follow through. We know it is true, and we know it is real, but we just don’t. But if we really did know it was the last time we might talk, the last chance to say something, like how much you appreciate the long conversations in the radio station at five in the morning, you picking out albums, him tearing UPI articles for the news; or how the three am pancake house runs were more important than final exams; or how the weekly texts through the next forty years kept you going, you’d tell him. Listen: Please, make sure if something happens and you know you’re going to be checking out, do not keep it a secret; some of us have a few things to say.

Anyway.

A few days ago someone asked me for my favorite picture of Dave. I went searching deep both on and offline, but I do not have many at all since back when we spent a lot of time together we rarely walked around with a camera and film. But I looked, all the while sifting through tons of other photos of the scattered years throughout my life, and at some point I stopped and simply sat remembering, and I realized something close to lifesaving during an otherwise heartbreaking week: What an amazing ride this has been so far.

I’ve mostly taken the paths of least resistance, I must admit, but apparently someone was up ahead clearing it for me, because it’s been outrageously fortunate. And I finally figured out what the pictures are for. Not only to reminisce, but to remind myself when I get lethargic or depressed, lonely, or tired, that I’m still walking this brilliant Camino, and to remind me of the words of Virgil when he wrote that Death twitched his ear and whispered, “Live….I’m coming.”

Not knowing when someone is going to die, or even that they are sick, is a cold reminder that we don’t know when we’re going to die, or when we might fall ill, and the truth is we just might have a few things to say to those we will leave behind. Speak now or forever…

I normally try to not write too directly only about myself, choosing instead for a digression into some common ground. But not this time. Honestly, this one is for me. Just a few findings from the journey so far:

Sandy. My best friend forty-five years ago.
My yellow house in Oakdale, MA. I lived for a few years on the first floor/basement behind the hill. The water is the Wachusett Reservoir, and up the road to the right was an apple mill, then up the mountain to the ski slopes, Princeton, Massachusetts. I loved it there and never should have left. 100 years earlier the house was a fish market.
My siblings and me (in the middle) in Massapequa Park on Long Island, where we lived from just after I was born until I was nine. It was a great place to be; Dad worked his tail off so we had great childhoods. My siblings are two of my five heroes.
My friend Michele during high school. One day I borrowed Dad’s car to go to Michele’s for “about an hour.” Instead, we drove to the end of Knott’s Island on the Carolina border, drove onto the ferry, and headed down the coast of the Outer Banks. Neither one of us wanted to turn around. If we hadn’t we might well still be driving.
In Senegal where I spent some time before headed somewhere else in Africa. A few months earlier my life had completely changed, so I decided to change it further and ended up there. My college friend Claire and me with a village jeweler on the left. We had no clue who the dude on the right was. He just jumped in the picture.
I lived in this cabin in northern Norway for March of 1995 with my colleague Joe and American teacher/writer John Slade while we taught at the Bodo Graduate School of Business. We filleted cod caught by our seventy-five year old neighbor, Magnus. A Russian guitarist, Max, and I spent evenings in the cabin dueling folk tunes from the US and Russia. One night I fell through the ice on a lake but only to my ankles. Another we felt we had to duck from the swirling bands of the Northern Lights. Another we chased moose up a hill. Other stories for another time.
This old guitar saved my life. Coffeehouses kept me from falling through some proverbial ice during those years. And what stories from those gigs, like the time when 150 people sat to watch us play and at one point we opened the curtains behind me (there’s an Olympic size swimming pool on the other side of the windows) at the exact time a swimmer climbed out of the pool and his suit had slipped to his knees. We all waved. He dove back in the pool.
The Great River house my father had built and where we lived until moving to Virginia in ’75. When people ask where I’m from it is a difficult question to answer, but as I get older I say “Great River” and it is listed that way on my FB page. I live in Virginia. But I’m from Great River. Hard to explain.
My advisor and mentor, Pete Barrecchia. He was one of the true journalists of this country and the source of my first and greatest writing lesson. When someone in editorial writing class complained about not knowing how to start and where to put in the research and on and on and on, he put down his cigarette, grimaced, and said, “Oh just write the fucking thing.” It worked.
One of my escapes during college; Letchworth State Park. My escapes were either music or nature. Sometimes just the smoke-filled art studio beneath a dorm on the other side of campus. But escape was always important for me. Hard to explain.
My boss in the mid-eighties. One of the finest humans I’ve ever known. Yes, that’s him.
Village chief. And his wife.
My Great Uncle Charlie Kunzinger and Aunt Jane. Time note: He fought in WW1 in France, and when I was a freshman in college at St Bonaventure, he was still writing me letters and sending poetry.
Mike Bonnano and Kermit when idealism was still okay to sing about, and where no one cared how bad you were.
My friend Tim O’Brien who most know for his prose writing but few know is an extremely accomplished magician. True story.
Michael and me in mountains of eastern Quebec many years ago. We’ve been literally around the world since then, and we’re still going. With apologies to Maya Angelou, “I wouldn’t take nothing for my journey now.”

Call someone. Tell them something. Anything. Forgive them. Ask them to forgive you. Tell them you’re sorry you didn’t answer the phone that last time they called and said they felt like talking. You planned to call them back but just didn’t “feel” like it yet. Now you can’t. Go ahead, call someone and say you wish you were as good a friend to them as they have been to you. Don’t be embarrassed. It’s only life, you know. That’s all.

It’s only life.

Instead, this:

~ aviewfromthiswilderness ~ 2 Comments

I started this blog twenty-three times tonight and ended up with nothing. It is one of those times when nothing I write comes close to what I want to say.

So instead, this:

for Dave

“I counted my years and realized that I have less time to live by, than I have lived so far.

I feel like a child who won a pack of candies: at first, he ate them with pleasure but when he realized that there was little left, he began to taste them intensely.

I have no time for endless meetings where the statutes, rules, procedures and internal regulations are discussed, knowing that nothing will be done.

I no longer have the patience to stand absurd people who, despite their chronological age, have not grown up.

My time is too short: I want the essence; my spirit is in a hurry. I do not have much candy in the package anymore.

I want to live next to humans, very realistic people who know how to laugh at their mistakes and who are not inflated by their own triumphs and who take responsibility for their actions. In this way, human dignity is defended and we live in truth and honesty.

It is the essentials that make life useful.

I want to surround myself with people who know how to touch the hearts of those whom hard strokes of life have learned to grow with sweet touches of the soul.

Yes, I’m in a hurry. I’m in a hurry to live with the intensity that only maturity can give.

I do not intend to waste any of the remaining desserts. I am sure they will be exquisite, much more than those eaten so far.

My goal is to reach the end satisfied and at peace with my loved ones and my conscience.

We have two lives and the second begins when you realize you only have one.”

~Mário de Andrade (San Paolo 1893-1945) Poet, novelist, essayist and musicologist

Pravda

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Eleven years ago I read a not-so-subversive piece called “Driving Under the Influence” at St Petersburg, Russia’s, infamous Stray Dog Café, where in earlier years Pasternak had read, and before him Mandelstam, who died in a gulag near Vladivostok for his threatening words, and also Anna Akhmatova, and a string of dissidents who risked their lives so their prose and poetry might be read and heard.

We sat at a long table, and while everyone listened to my innocent story of teaching my son to drive, I imagined the whispers and quiet conversations in those same corners about the Czar, who walked the hallways of the Winter Palace a few hundred yards away. What a world it must have been, I thought, but also, how good those days of revolution and dissidence were in the past. The city in 2013 was alive with artists, writers, photographers, musicians, and mostly legal political opposition to everything, with St Petersburg University students free to protest, complain, object, and support whatever they desired. As a result, no one needed to so much. It’s the greatest value of freedom; when people are free to choose, fighting and uprising recede. The horror of seventy-five years of Soviet oppression, preceded by three centuries of Czarist rule, was finally over.

My Russian friend and photographer Valentine shot pictures of old women, survivors of the siege, and of his children, his “Butterflies,” and laughed through a cloud of vodka, ever ecstatic at being able to express himself in marketplaces, newspapers, and galleries. Full of life and hope, these artists pushed their mediums to the max and shared stories of “darker” times when pointing a camera at anyone meant a possible sentence in Siberia, just east of Irkutsk, not far from the archipelago of dead poets. Not any longer, Valentine told me again and again over shots of Russian Standard and tables of photographs that just a few years earlier he had to hide those photographs inside the lining of books. “You should write here, Bob,” he told me. “You’d be free to write here,” he said. “Those dark days of Soviet Russia are dead.”

That was then.

The truth has once again folded up her tables and left the marketplace; transparency has turned away in shame. The Russia that Valentine came to love for three decades, and the only one I ever knew firsthand, is gone. It is gone. The citizens still attempt to navigate the streets of Peter the Great, the backroads of their “Window to the West,” but they are once again driving under the influence of a Neo-Stalinism, Vladimir Putin’s Fascist Regime.

Russia needs dissidents again. It is a time for poets. The Stray Dog should be crowded again with college students and artists listening to new poets risk everything for a few stanzas of truth. A contemporary Mandelstam, a modern-day Pasternak, should come out of the corners of the university classrooms and set ablaze a bonfire of observations and digressions. Because nothing ignites writers more than the attempt to extinguish truth.

I Can Breathe in a Small Town

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My brakes went and my mower broke this week. I’m not mechanically inclined.

I drove the car to a mechanic two miles from Aerie and asked him to check it out. He said it was a full brake job from calipers to pads, but he could do it the next day, and while his rates were higher than I was hoping to dish out for something I can’t even see (though I could hear them well enough), they were still lower than anyone else I called to compare. And I know Scott; he’s reliable, dependable, and has a reputation for being very fair. Plus I can walk home from there past cows and sometimes even turkeys.

While I was there the first of those two very recent days, I asked him about small engine repair since the two shops I’ve used in the past have since closed, and my own attempts to fix the engine did not pan out, despite watching several YouTube videos (though admittedly, one thing lead to another and I spent a few hours watching Taylor Swift songs and Family Feud clips).

So I asked, and Scott recommended Kelly Slaughter in the village. Cool.

I spent the better part of the past thirty years working in the city of Virginia Beach with its half a million residents. But throughout my adult life, I’ve always managed to live where I knew everyone and people knew me. In Massachusetts it was a fine 100-year-old house in a small hamlet on a reservoir. In Pennsylvania it was a farmhouse three centuries old with push out lead windows and farms everywhere. Here at Aerie, if I don’t know someone in town, they certainly know my son. There is something safe in this life, something reliable. I love traveling, headed out to Ireland, Prague, the Gulf Coast of Florida or the hills of western New York, but I know I can come home and settle right back into life on the bay.

I couldn’t find Kelly listed so I stopped at a shop known as “The Man Cave,” with deep hallways and rooms, alcoves, and endless piles of yard sale type items. This is the place where you can find virtually anything, but you have to climb and sift, move aside, and dust off. Fred is a man of about eighty and he sat in the front room in his chair and welcomed me to his world.

“Hey Fred. I need a mower. I’m going to find Kelly Slaughter to fix mine, but I saw the one out front and wonder how much it is?”

“Kelly! Kelly and I been close friends since we were young. I’m sorry to tell you but he’s not doing well. Thirty bucks and it’ll start right up. Already filled with gas.” This all in one sentence. Fred and I talked a bit. I told him I had to head to 711 to get money from the ATM and he gave me an envelope and said, “Well, I’m leaving so just put the money in here and slide it through the door next time you get a chance.”

I loaded the mower (which did start right up) and told him I’d have paid someone twice that to mow the property just once, so this is a great deal. “You’ll get a few seasons out of this anyway,” he assured me. “711 huh? That puts me in mind for a few slices of pizza. I might stop there myself.”

I took the money out of the ATM and bought Fred a few slices of pizza and paid him for the mower, went home and cut the grass after a month of outrageous growth.

Then back to Scott’s to drop off the car.

“I felt a slight shimmy earlier when I accelerated,” he said.

“Yes,” I answered, not feeling the need to expand. Scott’s good.

“I have transmission flutter stuff; should get rid of that. Car will be ready tomorrow about lunch.”

On the way home I walked by a ranch with close to a hundred head of cattle. It’s one of my favorite properties around here, and I stopped and talked to the cows a while. An eagle—very late for his trip north before all the osprey return and reclaim their nests—settled in the yellow field for a rest then headed out toward the river.

The next day at lunch I picked up the car and went to 711 to fill up with gas, where I ran into Wayne. “I hear Fred sold you a mower.”

“He did, and I already mowed the entire property, including the field and the northern yard.”

“Hell, Bob, you would’ve had to pay someone twice that at least just to mow it once.”

“Exactly.”

Bubba came out of the store headed to his new job in the next county. “How’s that new mower Fred sold you?”

“Good. I still need to get the old one fixed though.”

“You try Kelly Slaughter? I used to see him parked at the end of his driveway waiting for the mail each day. Haven’t in a bit though.”

“Kelly’s not well anymore and Fred said most likely not going to improve.”

“Oh too bad. I always liked Kelly. There’s a shop in Mathews. Another in White Stone. Or you can watch a few videos and do it yourself.”

I went home and put some old tomatoes out for the fox and filled the birdbaths for the deer. Then I decided they are right; I can absolutely fix the mower myself. So I sat once more at my desk and scanned YouTube for mower-repair videos. Turns out there are even videos for my specific brand and model.

I must have spent an hour watching. You know, I wasn’t crazy about Steve Harvey as host at first, but he grew on me, and I like how he keeps the show moving. And Taylor, well, I like “All Too Well,” of course; I mean, who doesn’t. But that one line from “Anti-Hero” keeps cycling in my mind: “Hi. It’s me. I’m the problem it’s me.”

3.5 Decades

~ aviewfromthiswilderness ~ 2 Comments

I completed my thirty-fifth year of teaching college this week, reaching into five decades, and I’ve collected some observations through six presidential administrations, hundreds of school shootings, several wars, and three blood pressure medications.

When I began, students did not have cell phones, laptops, pcs, Starbucks, energy drinks, vapes, internet or any of its time-sucking programs like Spotify, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, and so on—there was no device with which to communicate with others other than the house phone or pay phone. We didn’t have GPS or Uber, relying upon paper maps and taxis, or hitchhiking. We learned through experience instead of Google; research was completed at the card catalogue and microfiche section of the library. Students were less distracted and profoundly less hyper.

At the beginning of it all, it took the first five minutes of class to get students to stop talking; friendships and even marriages were conceived in classrooms where everyone moved swiftly away from high school friends and old neighborhood habits into new relationships which would last a lifetime. They looked at each other, talked and laughed and worried with each other. They took notes in notebooks, asked questions, and they learned how to figure things out instead of find things out. I kept attendance in an attendance book, and everyone knew everyone else’s names. The need to reestablish oneself at eighteen without a net (and without the Net), forced first-timers away from home to grow up faster, mature without the crutch of pre-teen friends a tweet away.

The campus grassy areas, the student center, the dorm lounges were filled with students studying, throwing a frisbee or football, standing behind tables proselytizing about organizations or providing information about that month’s cause. Lounges were packed, the line to my office was long with students ready to ask questions, review a paper, attempt to con me into extended due dates. Some just came by to talk and they’d sit in the office for hours, sometimes on the floor and some in the door as my officemate Tom and I would share stories of our college days, which even then seemed archaic—so when compared to my students today, our own freshman ways are tales from neanderthals.

But they were there, the students, laughing and talking, enlivening the office and the next day the classroom, trying a bit harder, doing a bit more.

When cell phones first entered the classroom, they were quickly forbidden, and students’ common claim was they carried one just in case of an emergency. That evolved to constant texts and phone calls before and after class, which morphed to phones behind books and in laps during lectures. In recent years when I walk down the hallway to the classroom it is quiet, deafeningly so, as if no one is going to be in the room when I turn into the doorway. But of course they are there, staring at their phones, texting their friends from middle school, watching TikTok videos. One semester with fourteen weeks gone I asked them the names of those sitting next to them, and no one—not one—knew anybody else’s name. I told them they might have spent the semester next to someone who could have been a good friend, a confidant, a soulmate. I remind them someone else in the class might have an answer to some question, a thought that completes theirs. They shrug.

In the beginning, students plagiarized out of books; then they bought papers online; today they turn in AI generated work, which they don’t realize is more often vague and filled with generalities, and while well documented, lacks in any significant attribution that is necessary in excellent collegiate writing, so they do poorly and can’t figure out why.

But there’s something else which has changed and is difficult to define that has something to do with simplicity. In thirty-five years the world has grown more angry, more impatient, and aggressive. This isn’t an old prof ragging on their generation staring at me from the silence of the seats; I hear the same thing from twenty-something year old colleagues. Most of today’s students don’t think they can face the day without a few Red Bulls, coffee, or three Five Hour Energy Drinks. This isn’t an exaggeration. In the beginning it seems students had big hearts—helping others in class, stopping by (pre-email, remember) my office to ask for help or offer thanks, willingly teaming up with two or three others for projects and study groups. Today, students’ hearts are big—physically I mean, often fifty percent larger than they should be from the synthetic drinks, in turn causing anxiety, insomnia, intestinal issues, muscle spasms, and excessive restlessness, all from the B vitamins and caffeine coursing through their veins, causing classroom issues including tardiness, inattentiveness, impatience, irritability and a desperately clear lack of focus.

And me? Thirty-five years ago was I a better teacher? Ha. No. I feel so bad for those students those first few years, mostly because of my own arrogance borne of insecurity, my impatience resulting from fear of my own ignorance about a subject. I was almost the same age as them back then. The average age at that college was twenty-nine; exactly my age when I started teaching. So sure, I’ve changed too. But hopefully for the better.

Last week I pulled the chair in front of students, most of whom could be my grandkids, and I sat quietly for a bit. I told them

you just arrived at college this year and within a few weeks a half dozen adults my age want to know what major you wish to declare to invest your entire college education in for the next four years, what discipline you wish to focus on, what your plans are for the rest of your life, all while you’re attempting to navigate fifteen credit hours with professors who have no intention of holding your hands like high school teachers might have, while living with total strangers in tight quarters, sharing bathrooms. For the first time in your life, now, at eighteen, you’re thrust into this whirling processor trying to find your bearings, and you find safety and security in your phone which is your only remaining umbilical back to a more organized and predictable life. I get it.

In the beginning, when I first started teaching—I go on—students were forced into dealing with this new life with little ability to retreat, and it is how they found out what they’re capable of. And when they did, their energy didn’t come from a can; it came from knowing they could handle so much more than they thought they could.

Do you even know what you’re capable of? Because until you let go, you haven’t moved on.

I stood to leave. Abby, a fine student who takes notes and drinks water from a reusable vessel, asked, “What was college like when you were a freshman?”

I laughed because I have spent the better part of my writing life recently writing about just that. “Terrifying,” I said, and they laughed. “I was not only cut off from home because of the stone-age communication system we used in those pre-historic times, I also went to college ten hours away. I didn’t drink much and lived in a dorm with those who did drink, nonstop, at a time the drinking age was eighteen. I was never a great student so there’s that, and I tried to balance it all by getting involved in the radio station and newspaper and local coffeehouse scene, but that just made me neglect my work even more.” A “D” student in the back sat up and listened.

“You survived, I guess,” he said, reflectively.

“I did. Though it didn’t always seem that way. But I’d go back and do it again in a Monster Drink-infused heartbeat.” We all laughed, which is how I always preferred to leave them.

It’s been thirty-five years since I first walked into B-100, a small auditorium on the Beach campus of Tidewater Community College, to teach a college comp course. I sat in the seats like any other student while thinking of my lesson for my first ever class, as students walked in. Two behind me, of course not knowing who I was, said, “Geez I hope this one’s not an asshole.” I stood up and walked to the front and the faces on those two dropped.

“I hope not too,” I said. “But if I am, be sure to let me know,” and we all laughed.

Yeah, I’d do it again.   

That Student

~ aviewfromthiswilderness ~ Leave a comment

Its the end of a semester, finishing up today, and I sit and remember one of my favorite moments as a professor; ironically, it was a day I encouraged a student to quit school. Honestly, not everyone belongs. Not yet.

A student comes to see me. He says he can’t handle the pressure of school. I tell him I think he’s a good student and he says yes, he can do the work, he just can’t stand it. He hates it, he says. He gets bored fast. It’s a good conversation, honest. Had we been somewhere else we would have talked over beers. He looks at his watch and says he has to work in a few hours and sighs. He runs his own roofing company but hates that too. He has six grand invested in equipment and no help and he just dreads doing the work now. He says he’s at some fork in the road, two paths that look the same so he’s frozen, easier to just stay put. He gets quiet and stares at a photograph on my wall of a village in Africa. Looks nice he says, like he wants to say anything to forget what he’s really thinking about. Then he remembers and sighs again. He’s quiet for some time and I find myself drifting.

I worked at a bar. Good money and mindless work; the kind of work where if you don’t think too much about what you’re doing, you can keep on smiling. I know I spent a few years there but it seems like it was always winter, all grey and bone-cold. One morning I woke on a bench near a lake in a state park near my country house, but I didn’t know how I got there. I had to work a few hours later but never made it. I drained my accounts, stuck a little aside, then bought a ticket to Africa. Turns out changing my life, kicking my own ass out of the same ‘ol same ‘ol, was as easy as jumping off a cliff knowing you’re either going to land on your feet or learn how to fly. Boring disappeared from my life.

But this student has trouble talking about it, so I talk: I tell him I get that feeling in my chest too. Tight, constricting, difficulty breathing. You know what I’m talking about. It’s the sense that something needs to change. It’s the Philosophy class with five minutes left of three hours and the prof starts another chapter because there are still five minutes left; it’s the meeting you can’t tolerate but you’re in a row of seats with too many people on both sides so you can’t leave; it’s that this-homily-is-way-too-long feeling. It’s the feeling you’re just one day away from something else, but then that day comes and you find yourself one day away from something. It’s the Whitman poem about astronomy; the wide awake at three am feeling and you can’t move so you stare at the alarm clock. Exactly, he says. I’m always staring at the clock, he says. I’d love to know what you’d do, he says.

I tell him about that bar somewhere I didn’t belong. I remember working and then not working but I don’t remember what happened between the two. I just recall waking up one day in the peace-of-mind of another world, centuries away from being behind bars; like I could finally breathe on my own. I let him know I remember dreading the moment between what was and what was next so I just kept pouring drinks, and he nods. He knows. Then I say that one day I didn’t. It was that simple. He looked at me like I was looking in a mirror. Then he says he’s going to work and he leaves. I went to class slightly high on remembering, still somehow slightly down, suddenly lethargic.

Six months later he sends me a postcard from Australia. Don’t know when I’ll be back, it says. When I am, let’s get some beers and talk. I look forward to it but, of course, way leads on to way, and I doubt he ever came back.