I found an old silver key while cleaning my closet floor. For years it might have been there shoved in the corner under the lip of a log, fallen perhaps from pants pockets or my winter coat. I don’t recall losing a key or changing a doorknob. Perhaps it opens some old lock on the old all-glass door on the side porch. At the start back then strangers would meander down the winding driveway through the woods to the house and cup their hands against the reflections on the door windows to look around. I replaced that door with a solid one and put a no-trespassing sign up front.
Older, I think; the place in Wellsville, Pennsylvania, where I came home one July morning to find plants and flowers in the entrance and at the top of the stairs for my birthday. It was the first place I lived where I gave someone else a key. Or it might be from my first house in New England, where the door stuck in winter when the frame froze. I’d spend hours shoveling my steps and those of the old woman across the street who delivered mail. She’d bring apple pie for my efforts or leave one for me with Sam at the Deacon’s Bench antique store.
But that key was gold. Now I think this one some souvenir from my childhood home on Church Road, the two-story colonial where I owned my own first house key though I never needed it since after playing ball or riding bikes all day along the Great South Bay, I’d run in the back door full stride and laugh the way childhood makes you laugh for no reason at all.
I can’t recall now what this silver key might be for, though I’ll keep it, resist the urge to throw it away as evidence shows I clearly resisted before. After all, it still opens doors to places I never thought I’d return.
Some years ago when I knew for sure I was leaving my job I held for nearly thirty years, I started to focus not so much on what was next as much as how fast, how so very fast it all went, and I realized that about the same amount of time to come would put me at nearly ninety years old.
I cleaned out my office—slowly at first, then with much more indifference. I carried piles of books to a common table in the building’s lobby, I moved file cabinets and other useless furniture into a storage area for someone else to claim and configure to their job the way we do with all things in our lives—we mold them to fit in the corners of our growth and accomplishments. Yeah, I was done with all of it.
And outside my office I took down all announcements and office hours and lists of readings from my bulletin board so that all that was left was black construction paper. It looked clean, like a slate, and I absolutely loved the metaphor of it all, but I also thought I should take a piece of chalk and write in some demanding font, “Outta here.”
Instead, I typed up a favorite saying of mine, “Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated,” by Confucius. I stapled it to the middle of the board, smiled, and went about my business of unraveling three decades and finding my way to that diversion Frost wrote about with such eloquence.
Next to my office was a classroom, and students often leaned against the wall (and my door) while waiting for another class to empty before entering. A few noticed the saying and commented to me when I returned to my office. “I like it,” one woman commented, “because it makes me think about it.” I liked that. I wish she had been one of my students.
The following week I added another quote to the board. This time Lao Tzu, one of my absolute favorites: “If you don’t change directions, you may end up where you are going.” Just stapling that to the board punctured a ball of emotion that spilled out across the rest of that day. How many times have I preached, I thought, about the dangers of getting caught in the currents and letting the world around us carry us through instead of pulling ourselves out of the stream and deciding for ourselves where we are going? Students had the same reaction, and I know they were wondering just who is it that decided going to college right then was the right thing to do. Often there is absolutely nothing wrong with where we are going; this is not a rebellious statement, I don’t think. I believe Lao was just indicating it can’t hurt to get a glimpse of what’s ahead every once in a while to see if you really are okay with the path you’re on.
Well, the board caught on and people started asking when the next quote was going up, gathering around my door on Tuesdays after they figured out I didn’t work Monday’s and that I must have posted them early Tuesday mornings, which I did. Up went James Taylor, Mae West, Seneca, St Augustine, and Jonathan Swift. More than a few passing people commented on how motivating the sayings were, and how they looked forward to them. Well, motivation was always my profession anyway, not teaching. For those thirty years it wasn’t English I was there for—hell, I was barely qualified for the first fifteen of those years. It was that I knew how to get them to find significance in it all—the work, the direction, the balance of dreams and reality. My job in New England after college was to motivate people, and I learned it well. So when I ended up teaching college, I knew instinctively that it really doesn’t matter how much I know the work, if they aren’t engaged—if they don’t feel motivated—I’d be speaking to the walls. Plus, my board was an extension of what I knew was about to end, and I started in those last months to motivate myself forward. I was absolutely projecting.
William Penn. Herman Hesse. Helen Keller.
Thoreau.
Darwin.
Then it was the first week in May at the start of my last week ever on campus. And I found this: We must let go of the life we have planned so as to accept the one that is waiting for us—Joseph Campbell.
I typed it up, printed it out, moved Thoreau a bit for balance, and stapled Joseph to the board. That one was for me.
One of my most vivid memories from Spain was being in Santiago after more than a month of walking at about two or three miles an hour, sitting in cafes, crossing Roman bridges noting each step, each breath—essentially, more than a month of barely moving to cross a nation—and then seemingly suddenly we we boarded a train for the six-hour ride–just six hours–back to Pamplona. Six hours. It took four weeks to go from Pamplona to Santiago, and six hours to get back. On top of that disturbing reality check was that after a month of barely moving, we were suddenly barreling along at sixty and seventy miles per hour. It simply felt wrong. I leaned against a window looking at the landscape and when I saw pilgrims walking the opposite direction toward Santiago, holding their walking sticks, their backpacks strapped and the sun beating down as they walked and laughed, talking to other pilgrims on the road, I got a pit in the center of my stomach, a nauseous pain, like a child on a school bus for the first time who sees his parents outside walking the other way. I wanted to get off; I wanted to pull back the doors between the carriages, toss my pack out onto the trail and tumble out like a character in a movie. Writing that just now brought the pit back; it was that real, it is that real. It was the only time in my life I compared side by side the notion of getting somewhere and going somewhere. They’re not the same.
I’m a pilgrim, not a passenger.
Sometimes that happens. You’re riding along, caught up in the mainstream, barely noticing where you’re going because you’re engaged with everyone else in the stream barely noticing where they’re going, and you catch a glimpse of some shadow of yourself just out of reach. And you know that’s where you should be, of course, but the trouble, the pain, the expense, the sacrifice, the explanations necessary, the possibility of failure, the probability of doubt all slide in front of you, each holding you back just a little, all adding up to a gravitational force of “now” and “comfortable” and “responsible” that’s harder to break free from than the strongest of currents.
And even if you do jump, you’re immediately inflicted with that same pit in the stomach, only this time it pulsates, “Oh my God, what have I done?” The things is, you’ll never lose the pit, one way or the other.
Anyway.
On that last day back then, I cleaned out my office and walked outside the door, and for a moment I thought about leaving the quotes there, or maybe replacing them all with just one quote in the middle of the black construction paper, saying, “and this bird you cannot change—Ronnie van Zant,” but I changed my mind and took them all down and gave them to my friend Jack. Each week he’d come by my office and we’d talk about the latest quote and what it meant to us. Then on that last day when I was about to throw out the last folder of teaching materials, I found another passage, typed it up and stapled it to the board. I’d like to believe it is still there.
I know now how much I need that motivation again. But there are two types of motivation: Internal and external. That external one is easy: do the work or don’t get paid. Clean the room or don’t eat dinner. But the internal motivation that drives us from somewhere deep inside, that contradicts the currents, that learns how to turn on a dime, I need that once again. I’m surrounded by people retiring and settling their affairs, haunted by others who slipped off the stage too soon, and it simply creates an indefinable stagnation.
But today while walking along a street in a small village on the Rappahannock River, I remembered that last quote, and it felt right, deep in my stomach it felt right:
“If a man in the street were to pursue his self, what kind of guiding thoughts would he come up with about changing his existence? He would perhaps discover that his brain is not yet dead, that his body is not dried up, and that no matter where he is right now, he is still the creator of his own destiny. He can change this destiny by taking his one decision to change seriously, by fighting his petty resistance against change and fear, by learning more about his mind, by trying out behavior which fills his real need, by carrying out concrete acts rather than conceptualizing about them, by practicing to see and hear and touch and feel as he has never before used these senses…We must remind ourselves, however, that no change takes place without working hard and without getting your hands dirty. There are no formulae and no books to memorize on becoming. I only know this: I exist, I am, I am here, I am becoming, I am my life and no one else makes it for me. I must face my own shortcomings, mistakes, transgressions. No one can suffer my non-being as I do, but tomorrow is another day, and I must decide to leave my bed and live again. And if I fail, I don’t have the comfort of blaming you or life or God.”
Every semester about the second week of classes I pull my chair into the center of the room and ask them how college is going so far. I ask what it’s like, the challenges and changes. It takes little imagination to guess the various yet typical answers, which tend to start with generalizations, such as “Going great. Love it,” and as I push for details they become more specific, such as the food in the dining hall or the dorm noise they’re not used to.
It’s a writing class so I keep the conversation casual but at times relate their responses back to essay development, demonstrating the combination necessary of personal experience and universal understanding. Eventually everyone enjoys this day’s discussion and contributes, laughs, argues, agrees. They start swapping stories about roommate issues and the volume of music while trying to sleep.
This happened Tuesday.
I won’t digress into the inane concept that they’ve been here for three weeks and most couldn’t tell me the names of more than three people, or how when I ask them what they do when not in class they say, “Nothing.” They go to the dining hall or the food court, then back to their room to log on. Getting this much information from them has become increasingly difficult. The student body as a whole has grown quieter, more introverted. Some of it is technology, some of it the fact these are Covid Kids, moving through middle and part of high school isolated at home. Part of it is being a freshman at college without any preparation or clue as to what to say when a professor asks these types of questions.
But I did and they answered, and it grew better as they talked and laughed and swapped stories about floormates. It was loud and active, and it felt good, it seemed classic, like a class out of my early career when a lack of cellphones and laptops forced everyone to talk to each other.
But one young quiet woman mumbled to herself when I asked how they felt when they got here. No one else noticed or heard as they were already involved in the group conversation, but I noticed. Quietly I asked her what she said so she could repeat it to me and not the class or she already would have, but she just said, “Nothing. Forget it.”
“Seriously,” I said. “I’m just curious, that’s all.”
She stared at me for a long ten seconds and said, “I’m terrified.” I nodded to her. She put her head back and I could see her eyes welling up. “I’m just fucking terrified!” she said louder, and the room quieted down. She ran her hand through her hair, sat up, and shrugged us off. “Forget it, just forget it.”
We were quiet just long enough for her to talk again. “I’m just terrified. I don’t know anyone and when I try and meet them they shrug me off. They do that to everyone. Everyone does it. I don’ t know how psycho these people are! I try and meet them but they never come out of their room! I’ve never been lonelier surrounded by so many people!“
One compassionate classmate, whether she meant it or not, said, “I feel the same way. Every single night.”
The first one said she can’t keep calling home. She said her advisor said to her, “You must have some idea of what you want to major in; what you want to do with your life.” Her voice broke at the end of it, and she moved like she was going to add more, but she just looked out the window, her eyes red and swollen.Then to herself, she said, What I want to do with my life?! Are you serious!?
The others contributed the expected comments: They also don’t know what they want to do, and they also call home way too much, but something about this girl told me something the others couldn’t possibly know: I was her.
I fell into a hole first semester freshman year. My roommate and I got along fine and I got heavily involved in music and the radio station and the newspaper. I kept busy, but at night in the dorms it was like a barracks and I simply did not fit in. I wasn’t terrified of anyone or anything in particular, but I was absolutely terrified I simply made a bad choice about what was the most important decision of my life to that point.
So I said that. I said one of the scariest things I have ever known, and it has happened on several occasions, is the absolute terror that I made a bad decision and there was no way out of it.
She sat up and stared right at me, then said, “Everyone in my life either wants answers to these huge questions or they want to be left alone completely. No one just wants to get a cup of coffee and sit quietly. She cried fiercely now, and several others became emotional.
“I think,” I said, “there is nothing more difficult to do in life, nothing more challenging…nothing more…misunderstood, than moving out on your own for the first time surrounded by total strangers and then having the authority figures nearby demanding answers you simply do not have. It’s absolutely insane and often unbearable for anyone.”
I pushed. “Let’s break this down.”
“If you’re not sure what you want in life, what are you doing here?”
She wants to be a nurse.
“You could have gone elsewhere.”
This school with its sister nursing school is the best.
“You could have waited until you had better perspective.
I don’t want to wait.
“Geez, you have a lot of answers for someone who doesn’t know.”
She laughed. It’s just at night, she said. She gets scared at night. She wakes up in the middle of the night with desperately bad panic attacks.
“I do too,” said one of the others.
Really?
“Yes, I’ve already called my mom more than a few times at three am.”
Her mom would kill her, she replies.
I walked to the front of the room and everyone straightened their desks. One girl finally asked the other’s name. It was the first time in several years I have heard someone ask someone else their name. She asked if she wanted to go get coffee after class, and they did.
I said, “Well, anyway, that’s what it’s like to be in college I suppose.” And we all laughed.
I added one thing: “What terrifies me is the student who isn’t scared. That scares the crap out of me. To move through like everything is just right and never think about it, never feel in your gut the questions about what you should be doing? That’s terrifying. Waking up at three am in a panic that I’ve made all the wrong decisions is exactly what I want to happen; not some complacent, mindless acceptance of the status quo. I need those emotional checks and balances. I just don’t want them to derail me.”
They didn’t move. They just sat though I was halfway to the door. So I stopped. “Here’s a quote for your Discussion Page musings: It is from a man named Denys Finch Hatton. “I don’t want to wake up one day at the end of somebody else’s life.”
They left talking to each other. I love when they leave still talking to each other.
Marvin Hamlisch: one of only two people (and Richard Rogers) to win not only an Emmy, Grammy, Tony, and an Oscar (three actually) but also a Pulitzer Prize.
I grilled some burgers on Labor Day; the kind that drips fat onto the coals and the smoke and flames sear the juices inside. I’m going pescatarian again with a strong reliance on veggies and some chicken in preparation for the Shamrock Half-Marathon in March. So I had one last juicy burger.
And I stood on the patio recalling burgers through the years, and steaks, thick-cut, medium rare steaks and burgers. Makes me sick a little now, but I have enjoyed my times with cooked cows. In more recent years I have been criticized for undercooking my burgers. Growing up we always had red meat medium rare; and according to Dave the chef at the Sterling Inn where I worked many lifetimes ago, anything more than medium-rare can’t be considered steak any longer, but a variety of material for handbags. So I knew ordering red meat medium rare, despite today’s bend toward not dying of some disease, to be the right call.
One time, however, I may have ordered wrong.
In 1984, I stayed at my dear friend Sean Cullen’s apartment in Brooklyn which he shared with a friend of his, Mike. I had an interview with Theatre Arts Magazine to be a staff writer—they had read a file of my work I had sent and asked to meet with me. I went to Brooklyn, parked in a friend’s driveway in Bay Ridge, and headed to Sean’s at Presidents Street and 4th Avenue—today a mecca of café glory—forty years ago a death wish.
The day of the interview I was flying high. I had worked hard back in Virginia and had saved money for adjusting to a move to “the city.” Sean had a PA job for some commercial and several auditions for television parts, so I told him I’d pick up a pizza at Vinny’s on 7th Avenue that night, and I boarded the subway at 9am for a 3pm appointment at the magazine. By 10 I was walking all over midtown, strolled into NBC and stood next to Walter Matthau on an elevator, walked to the park, and realized I still had several hours to kill when I decided to treat myself to lunch at Tavern on the Green. What a way to start my career as a writer in New York City, by eating in one of the landmarks of the Big Apple. This place was in Beaches, Ghostbusters, the Out-of-towners, Arthur, and more.
The maître d showed me to my small table near a window, just next to a table occupied by Marvin Hamlisch. I ordered a glass of wine, sipped some water, and nodded to one of my favorite composers of all time. “I love your work,” I said, quietly, then put my hand up to indicate that was all I was going to say. He thanked me earnestly and ordered a club sandwich.
My turn, the waiter indicated, and I perused the menu looking for something distinctly New York, particularly since I was starving. I knew I wouldn’t find black and white cookies on the menu, and nearly every item listed was out of my price range. I was about to order an appetizer when I saw steak listed for $18.95. Wow, I could afford that despite it seeming pricey for a 1984 lunch, but I couldn’t order the club sandwich. Marvin just ordered it and after my nod and comment, to do so seemed too stalkish for me.
“I’ll have the steak,” I told the server, who took my menu and said, “Oh, very nice choice,” in the same manner he said it to Marv for the club. I so fit in here, I thought.
“I will bring you a tray of spices, sir,” he said.
“That’d be fine,” I replied, noting how unique it is for the chef not to put them on himself during the cooking stage,
“And crackers,” he added.
“Of course,” I said. “Steak and crackers.”He left and I looked at Marvin just as he looked at me, so I said, “I’m having steak and crackers,” and I laughed. He did too.
I sipped my wine, looked out at a couple standing in the park-side entrance, at the tall buildings across the park, and the brilliant blue sky. I was disappointed I mentioned pizza to Sean since the steak was probably going to fill me up, but I’d be walking a lot, so I knew it would be fine.
The server returned with a round tray of spices and a separate tray of various style crackers, and water. He also put down a small fork—slightly bigger than a shrimp fork, but not like a salad fork. “They’re preparing the Steak Tartare now sir,” he said, and left. Looking back I think he relished the fact I had absolutely no idea what he was talking about, but at the time he was just probably doing his job. He brought Marv his sandwich with chips and an iced tea, then smiled at me. Marvin smiled at me too. I asked if he wanted a cracker and he said he was fine and that I’d probably be glad to have them.
I sat quietly looking at the spices and the crackers and thought of Ponderosa Steak House, where you stand in line with a tray and pick out your meal from overhead menus. I usually got a New York Strip, baked potato, corn, and fresh bread. They’d put a plastic marker on your tray indicating “MR” for medium-rare, and we’d find a table made from fat wood and sit on the bench, and I could smell the meat grilling like I was on some Texas ranch at suppertime. I don’t once in any trip to that place or Steak and Ale or Bonanza Steak House or Links on Long Island recall crackers and spices.
Then the waiter slipped a plate of raw meat in front of me. A round, Derby-hat shaped lump of ground beef–raw, like they just sliced open the cellophane and took this pile off of the green Styrofoam and flipped it onto the China plate. A sprig of parsley fell on the top. I looked at it a long time, thinking about the small chunks of raw meat my mother would let me have when she made hamburgers for a picnic, and how with each small amount she would say, “Not too much, you can get very ill from raw meat.”
I looked at Marvin but he was eating his suddenly delicious looking club sandwich, toasted, a small toothpick sticking out of the quarter he had not yet consumed.
I took a small pinch of one of the darker spices and some grated cheese and sprinkled it gently on the meat dome. I sat a moment looking at it, then overturned the spice tray onto the meat, feeling better, but resisting the urge to knead the spices into the meat as if making a meatloaf. I also resisted the urge to ask them to heat it up, or, you know, cook it; I’d wait.
Instead, I picked a cracker, picked up my odd fork with two prongs, and gently slid some chuck onto a saltine. I enjoyed it. A lot. But you know after a few small crackers of raw meat, it gets a bit tiresome. I chewed a bit for a while as Marvin looked over and smiled. I swallowed, looked around then back at Marvin and said, “A Chorus Line is by far my favorite.” He laughed and said thank you. Then I added, “Have you ever had the Steak Tartare here; best I’ve ever had.”
“I haven’t,” he said through a laugh as he paid his bill. I laughed, which I think he appreciated. “And The Way We Were. Good stuff,” I said, picking up another cracker. He stood to leave and picked up his plate which still had one quarter of his club sandwich on it, and placed it on my table. Then he looked at my plate and quietly added, “That’s not cooked nearly enough for my taste,” and left. So I ate the rest of Marvin Hamlisch’s lunch. Best damn club sandwich in Manhattan.
My stomach hurt in the elevator on the way to Theatre Arts Magazine, but I think it was just in my head while waiting for trichinosis to hit. At the magazine I met a wonderful editor whose name I have long ago forgotten who said she absolutely loved my writing but wanted to talk to me about what I knew about the technical side of the theatre.
It was a very short conversation. Nothing. I insisted I could learn but she insisted she had several other interviews that day and she’d call me. I knew she wouldn’t. I almost said, “But I had lunch today with Marvin Hamlisch; that’s got to count for something,” but I just left. I stopped on the way back to Brooklyn and had a hotdog and some chocolate Italian ice, and that night Sean and I had pizza from Vinny’s.
At dinner, Sean asked how everything went in the city, and I sat quietly swallowing a thin slice of pie, where I had to bend the edges to hold it together, and some oil dripped onto the plate, and I said, “You know what? It’s not important. Let’s just kiss the day goodbye and point me toward tomorrow. I did what I had to do.”
a view from this wilderness 