I am slowing down, and it feels good and is about time. It is, in fact, precisely about “time.”

James Taylor was right: The secret of life is enjoying the passing of time.

Like everyone else I’ve ever known I’ve been excessively guilty of being caught up in the swirl and turmoil of life: the conflicts at work, the bills, the inundation of news, the negativity, the road rage, the “endless trains of the faithless, the cities filled with the foolish.” And I had mastered the art of adjustment. That is, I managed to dial-up my stress tolerance to accommodate increased worldly distraction and anger. In fact, the level at which I managed to maintain sanity despite the stress could have exploded the heart of a younger me. We don’t see it happening, do we? The slow dripping of tense interaction in the news and conversations makes its mark only over months and years, so that the only way to recognize how crazy it all became is to step away long enough to say, “I don’t even recognize who I’ve become.”

That was me; guilty.

My slow erosion of anger and anxiety has occurred in several stages. First, there was Spain. The pilgrimage for a month across the Pyrenees with my son at three miles an hour taught me to let go of nearly all possessions, worries, and regrets. “Simplicity” became my ambition, and I achieved it in some small way. But of course, out there, in Basque country and Galacia, it isn’t difficult, when all we had to do all day was walk, talk, meet people, stop in cafes and chapels, and let go of life. For all my worldly ambitions, I knew then I could live like that forever.

But I came home.

It didn’t take long for work issues to seep back into my psyche and anger to swell my attitude. The ridiculous often dominates our conversations and conditions, so much so that tunnel vision takes over and suddenly all that matters is one particular, otherwise irrelevant battle. We sacrifice the big picture because we get caught up in the whirlwind of small, pathetic quarrels.

I needed to let go again.

Now I spend my time working for what I need, which as it turns out isn’t nearly as much as I thought and yet seems more than I could possibly want. In the last several years I’d focus on the goal—in writing projects I simply wanted it done, in journeys I simply wanted to get there. Now, the journey itself is the pleasure—creating the work, making the trip. I stop and get out now, look around, meet people, and take it in, take control of the clock instead of being dictated by it. I’m heading to Florida next weekend—I have no idea how long it will take to get there. People ask, they say, “What is that, ten hours? Eleven?” I think yes, that sounds about right—or it might be two days. I’m not sure just yet.

You see, I’ve done the math. I’m fifty-eight-years old. In twenty years I’ll be almost eighty. Twenty years ago seems like a blink; twenty years from now feels almost fleeting. I’m not becoming regretful or melancholic or depressed; I’m really not. I’m becoming aware of the passing of time, and I enjoy the world more because of it.  

Honestly, it isn’t difficult to see what’s essential. One of my heroes is my sister. She was handed a short straw with Stage Four Ovarian Cancer, and she kicked it in the teeth. Five years remission and going strong and gaining momentum, and all with a quiet determination I’m sure she inherited from our mother. Some people “slow down” because they see the mortal exit ramp and would prefer to coast, but some people, and I count myself among them finally, slow down because we don’t want to miss anything. We want to enjoy the passing of time and not miss it by focusing on time passing.

When I was in college I once carved a pumpkin. I was on a retreat over a weekend which included Halloween, and a friend of mine and I decided it was time to carve a pumpkin, only it took us five hours. It was a huge pumpkin and slowly and methodically we approached it from all sides, making designs, slits for light, holes for depth, we became sculptors and monks, carving and contemplating. When it was done at some ridiculous a.m. we inserted a handful of candles and woke everyone. Not a single person minded—they all sat around talking about the pumpkin and suddenly we were telling stories by pumpkin light, sharing fears and hopes, out in a cabin in the woods somewhere. I remember it still, and that was two times ago the twenty years ahead of me. I had forgotten all about that pumpkin until today, sitting on my porch and slowing down my heart rate, slowing down my mind, trying to adjust the pulse of the planet around me.

I used to believe I needed to not only be a part of some race somewhere to prove to myself I am alive, but I needed to be “winning” at something, whatever that means. But now my pilgrimage has taken a different path, a new pace.

I think I am starting to master the passing of time, and it reminds me again of Whitman:

                  The friendly and flowing savage, who is he?

                  Is he waiting for civilization, or past it and mastering it?

 

When we are kids we look at our parents shirts, or their legs. Sometimes we look at their hands, especially if they’re holding ours. We notice the knuckles and the lines running under the cuffs and into ages ago. We simply don’t spend a lot of time looking up. Maybe it hurt our necks, or perhaps the brightness from the sky or the sun or the fluorescent lights in the store ceilings deflected our attention, or maybe the vague sense of repetition kept us from bending back our heads too far.

I can tell you most of the details of my father’s eyes and face in his later years. I can describe with precision the curves in his chin, the rollback of his neck, his deep eyes and his pronounced forehead bearing the lines of nearly a century. Without a glance toward a picture I know the sunspots on Dad’s face; the doctor’s mark; the slight, tight curve of his upper lip and the forward position of his reading glasses as he sat in his chair and leaned toward the light so he could read the paper.

But I don’t know much about the determined look of his younger days, when I was a toddler, and even a young man. I never noticed the intensity of his eyes when leaving for work, or the joy in his eyes watching his favorite teams win when he brought us to baseball games. I can’t describe the pain or pleasure of life when he still had life in his eyes. I didn’t pay attention.

I never asked my dad what he did for a living. I mean I know what his occupation was, but I never inquired about his day, about what took place. Part of me was too busy growing up or playing with friends, and part of me didn’t want to bother him after he had been doing it all day. But those are adult responses when I wonder why I didn’t ask, and the truth is I probably didn’t care. He did his thing and I did mine. His thing made my thing possible but even that was too complicated to contemplate. So when we talked we talked about baseball, or golf.

We got a long absolutely fine. We just didn’t talk because of our circles. My circles crossed paths with friends, sometimes with siblings, often with my mother. His circles crossed paths with colleagues, my mother (rarely at the same time as me, except for dinner and weekends), neighbors. This was old school; this was adults being one generation and the kids being another, between them one of the biggest abyss’s in American history. It was no big deal, at least not in our home. But I never asked him about his day, what he did all day.

I just figured I wouldn’t understand or if I did ask he’d give a quick, often funny response. I think you have to be a parent to understand what kind of child you were. You need a basis of comparison that goes beyond the parent-child relationships of cousins or friends. It has to be later, years later, when you understand what he would have wanted you to ask, what he wished you had shown interest in, how close—or not close—you were. Turns out we were so much closer than I knew but I never asked.

When I was a teenager, two days a week I got to keep my Dad’s car for the day. The trade off was I had to bring him to the parking lot where he met a colleague by seven thirty in the morning. He never lectured me about what I could and couldn’t do that day, where I could and couldn’t go.

We’d get to the donut shop early on purpose, and he’d have coffee and a plain donut and I’d have juice and a chocolate one, because we liked routine because routine keeps things simple and keeps things from changing too quickly. Like our routine for years at bedtime where I’d say good night and he’d say to sleep tight, and while I really never knew what that meant, to sleep tight, I couldn’t imagine going to bed without hearing him saying it. He’d tell me not to let the bed bugs bite which somehow seemed creepy but again, to not hear it meant certain devouring by whatever it was he was talking about. I can still see him in the doorway, the hallway light on. “Don’t let the bed bugs bite,” he’d say, and so they wouldn’t.

At the donut shop he’d watch the news on the television above the counter and eventually we left for the parking lot where his colleague would pull in just as we did, always. Their timing was phenomenal. He’d say to have a great day and to pick him up at five, and I’d drive off before he had a chance to walk to the other car. Maybe I was late, or maybe I was afraid someone I knew would see me, shattering the illusion it was my car and not my dad’s.

But I liked that routine. It became Scotch in his later years, like clockwork, but it was the same thing. We’d sit with the television on and know the other was there, which was in itself the purpose of the routine to begin with.

Yes, in later years on Tuesday nights we drank Scotch. Dad always like J & B, an inexpensive blend he probably first drank and therefore a taste to which he grew accustomed. On occasions he drank Chivas, and a few times he had a bottle of Edradour in the house. Routine is important and on Tuesday nights I’d get there about nine and was no sooner in the door when he’d say, jokingly, “My coaster seems to be empty,” or something similar with a laugh and a welcoming smile. I’d put my things down and say I’d get some, and he’d say he was just joking and he didn’t mind getting it at all, which he always enjoyed. He would walk in the kitchen and I could hear the cabinet and the ice and the heavy bottle he put back in the cabinet, never leaving it on the counter for more because we never had more. He’d return steadily and slowly and hand me my glass and we’d raise them to toast and he’d say, “Well,” nodding his head politely, and I’d interrupt and say, “to your health,” to which he would again nod and with his deep voice reply, “and to yours.” Then we’d watch baseball, not really talking much. It was late. He sipped his Scotch.

But I preferred to pour the Scotch. I hate Scotch. When I poured the Scotch and he sat in his recliner, everything was the same but instead of Scotch in my glass I would pour water. His eyes had faded in those last few years and he wouldn’t have noticed the tint of my drink. And anyway, it wasn’t about the Scotch. We sat together a long time and he would turn once and say, “Boy that is good, isn’t it?” and I’d agree. Sometimes I felt guilty and would pour some for myself as well, but usually only when it was the Chivas or Edradour or another fine single malt. It always made me tired, but he always would be the first to head upstairs to bed. Then I’d sit quietly for a while glad to be able to sit in peace, but the next day at work, or walking across a parking lot, I’d wish he had stayed up longer even just to sit quietly. I’d be sorry he went to bed and promise myself that the next Tuesday while drinking Scotch I’d make more conversation, talk more about the game or about my day or anything really, since he wouldn’t have minded. But the following Tuesday would come and like clockwork I’d be exhausted and silent and he would get tired and go to bed.

He aged well, my father, and sitting with him on Tuesday nights was the purest time I had during those days. When I hear ice in a glass I can hear his voice and sometimes I can turn it into a laugh, but usually even that fades to a slow, soft sigh.

A few years after Dad retired I’d bring his toddler grandson to the mall to meet him and walk around. Nothing could distract him from walking around at the top of three generations. Dad’s smile exploded with happiness when he watched his young grandson grow more excited as we approached the toy store, or when we stopped for ice cream and Dad would pretend to lick some of my son’s cone. The two of them would laugh hysterically until my son offered him an actual lick, always refused with a string of thank you’s.

Once my son and I walked around alone and then saw Dad sitting on a bench, taking a break. His face lit up, of course, when this small boy ran up to him. I always wished that had happened more often. We did meet him many times to walk the mall, but it always felt more exciting when it wasn’t something he was expecting, as if an ordinary day of routine was suddenly cracked wide open by this small but exciting surprise. I can’t think about that too much, about not doing that more.

I think the spontaneity of unexpected meetings made it more like his youth, or even mine, when siblings or cousins and countless friends lived within a few blocks of where they all grew up. Visiting was normal, and running into each other at the grocer or the hardware store, or later the mall, was an ordinary occurrence. I believe Dad missed those times, and seeing his grandson that afternoon was a beautiful mixture of possibility and recollection.

The three of us spent a lot of time walking around various locations together. The food store between our houses, the cul-de-sac at the end of Dad’s block, to the river at the back of his property where they’d hold hands and be equally thrilled by whatever nature they discovered together. Once we went to a golf extravaganza and my son and I watched Dad in his glory putting balls and swinging drivers. He told his grandson to pick out a dozen golf balls for himself as Grandpa’s treat from six or eight huge crates of various balls. Dad explained the difference between the ones which said “100” on the side and those which said “90” while his grandson dug deeper for another ball with Garfield on the side. They had separate agendas but one memorable afternoon. Golf was at the heart of many times together.

But when we met Dad at the mall, I would hang back as we walked, so it felt to both of them like they were alone. They discovered the stores together and Dad always allowed his grandson to pull him into the ones he wanted, namely the toy store or the bookstore. Dad bought more than a few books on those visits.

Somewhere in my attic is a box of books from those days. I am glad we kept them, but I have no idea why, and I have no intention of looking in the box. Someday, perhaps, but not soon. At some point my son will take those books with him—I am sure of it. If he has children, and I sit somewhere to read to my own grandchild, I’ll picture some inconceivable moment in the past when my father and my son laughed hard together turning the pages, and I’ll think about the passing of time and the persistence of memory.

I’ll remember donuts and orange juice. I’ll remember the time he took me to Jolly Rogers Amusement Park on Long Island when I was a child—just the two of us—and he let me have whatever I wanted to eat. I’ll remember the Scotch, his deep voice, the subtle laugh.
My memory is not nearly as strong as it was even not so long ago, but I’ll remember forever my son and my Dad on a putting green the last time he ever held a club in his hand. Dad sank a twenty-two-foot putt, and he didn’t smile so much as smirk, as if to say, “Of course it went in,” and then laugh out loud at the joy of the sound of the ball in the cup.

 

Norton Hurd stood behind me in line at the store yesterday. He put his hand on my shoulder and asked how my son is doing. Around the village I am “Michael’s Dad.” We talked for a bit and then discussed Hurricane Florence and how it missed our waterfront community.

“We were lucky,” I said to him, and he agreed, saying he was happy for everyone in our area but worried for those in the path. Then I asked which hurricane was the worst that he had experienced in this area. He didn’t hesitate.

“That would be the one in ’33.”

That’s 1933. Norton was 17 at the time. Norton Hurd turned102 years old today.

In the 1940’s, he founded Hurd’s Hardware in Deltaville which is where I do a lot of shopping and where he goes to work every day. He studied history at Lynchburg College during the depression, and while there he played tennis, baseball, and basketball, landing in their Hall of Fame.

During World War Two he trained pilots in open-cockpit planes in Minnesota, and then traveled to Guam onboard the Wasp as one of the “Hell Razors” and was in the first group of planes to bomb Tokyo. On one flight one of his engines failed and he ditched his plane in the Pacific not far from the Wasp, and he was rescued and awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross.

I offered to let him go ahead of me but he nodded and said no, he wasn’t in any hurry. Just on his way to work.

When he returned from war he figured everyone would need appliances so in 1946 he opened the store.

“You live down that road had the tavern on the pier. Chowning’s place. I used to go there when I was young but the storm destroyed that. Did you know about that place?”

I did. Back before the storm and when the steamboats still ran up the Rappahannock River from the Chesapeake, jettying out into the river from the end of the road in front of my house was a pier with a restaurant, along with other facilities.

That was the year my mother was born. FDR was president. Norton was 17, had just graduated from Syringa High School, and was headed across state to college.

The year he was born President Woodrow Wilson was trying to end World War One; Czar Nicholas the Second was still very much in power; German Zeppelins bombed Paris; Pancho Villa invaded the United States; the Cubs played their first game at Wrigley Field (then called Weegham Park); the Easter Uprising against the British occupation of Dublin; Ernest Shackleton is stuck in Antarctica; Lenin declares Imperialism is caused by Capitalism and begins his climb to the rule of Russia.

Penicillin didn’t come along until Norton was twelve.

The irony of him being a history major is that, to me, to us, he is history, he is witness to the most brutal and powerful and awe-inspiring, and sadistic century in human history. I stood in line in front of someone who was my adult-son’s age when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. I just retired from a three decade career teaching college, after spending a decade bumming around the country, and this man is almost twice my age; forty-four years older than me, and he is on his way to work.

And he is fine. Absolutely fine, running just ahead of time, outlasting countless “End of the World” events. He has patience. He has paced himself perfectly. He has all the time in the world. He missed the first flight just south of here by only thirteen years.

Some people make us stop in our tracks and realize what is important; what is essential. Norton does that every time I walk into Hurd’s Hardware and he asks if he can help me find something. One of these days I’m going to say, “Yes, actually. The meaning of life?”

Some people should live forever. He’s one of them. Some people spend their lives in such grace, such kindness toward humanity that I wish they would just keep going. Norton’s one.

There are others. People who don’t study history or make history but actually are history, colleagues of time, adding such peace to the human condition that it is cruel for them to simply no longer be.

Charles Schulz is another. Dr. Seuss. Francis of Assisi. People who not only do not bother anyone, but they dedicate their lives to making our lives simpler, more endurable, more aware. I wake up when I’m around Norton.

Pachelbel is another. Cousteau. Andre the Giant.

Sometimes the good don’t die young. Sometimes they stand as a measure to all we can be. And I’ve been studying the history of these people, and I’ve noticed one common trait: they all make people feel better about themselves and the world. They all give more than they receive.

I’m heading to Hurd’s tomorrow. I don’t know why. I’ll find something there I need.  

 

I’m teaching two non-fiction, critical thinking, research-focused seminars at Old Dominion University. It is a favorite of mine for the convergence of creative non-fiction writing in the vein of Truman Capote or, to a lesser degree, Tom Wolfe without his fabricated presence in events, and journalism in our attempt to establish credibility through in-depth, valid research of indisputable sources.

I asked the students, all roughly nineteen-years-old and more attentive than any students I taught at other local colleges, what drove their interest in the course. The answers varied from “my advisor told me I had to take it” to “my professors in the science courses don’t like my research or writing.” One student asked what inspired me to pursue classes like that when I was in college.

Don’t you love good timing? I absolutely love excellent timing.

I told them I was sixteen-years-old as a junior in high school and required to read some books which intrigued me, including Electric Cool-aid Acid Test, In Cold Blood, and, most notably All the President’s Men about the Watergate debacle which had occurred just a few years earlier. I told them I continued that interest into college where classes like this were standard for journalism majors. And while the world was just starting to fall in love with the works of Stephen King, my writing heroes were two men in particular—Woodward and Bernstein, the Washington Post writers who brought down Nixon and his henchmen. In fact, most of the communication majors at college admired the integrity and thoroughness of these journalists—other grads like Neil Cavuto and Dan Barry taking the lead of our seasoned professors to insure nothing—absolutely nothing—can be challenged.

All the Presidents Men was published forty-four years ago, and since then not one single aspect of research or information Bob Woodward has published has been shown to be wrong. What he brings to the table in his half a century as a journalist is the indisputable reputation of being right. He doesn’t rely upon editors to check his work for accuracy—though of course they will—he does that work before it reaches their inbox. His meticulous attention to detail through the years has resulted in a trust of the information he provides. That’s what you’re shooting for, I told them. That’s what you want professors to think when they pick up your essays and research projects: “Oh, this was written by Jane Doe, I know this will be accurate and thoroughly researched.” It affects your grade, it affects your letters of recommendation, it affects your job placement.

And that’s why despite the dozen or more books about djt which have been released and scrutinized and argued in the past two years, this is the first one which terrorizes the president, his confidants, and his lawyers. This isn’t Kitty Kelley with her spurious accounts of goings-on in the lives of her subjects. This is Bob Fucking Woodward. This is the voice of everything journalism is supposed to be, and is.

In every generation, it is said, comes a writer who makes everyone pay attention. Woodward is well into his third generation of readers. Never doubt the power of an accurate story or two. 

Watch the news, I told them. Something’s about to happen.

I am drawn toward the early morning hours of dawn, when I feel ahead of the world, and I can sense some small whisper of…what….hope, I suppose, or wonder maybe. To hear life around the river in those moments motivates me, awakens in me possibilities which otherwise lie dormant. Before the sun rises, often just after the first sliver of light reaches up across the bay, I can hear osprey and other sea birds who at that hour never seem to mind my presence.

But earlier, when that glimmer on the eastern horizon is still merely a possibility, I have taken to walks by moonlight, sometimes not even that. In the woods where I live and down along the water, something is going on. There is life out there wide awake and moving through the dark hours like spirits who need to finish their errands before the sun gives them up. Like sneaking up on some grand behind-the-scenes operation, or suddenly discovering the dark web and meddling around a bit, those hours when the rest of our lives are at rest, motionless, recharging, the world around us is in full swing on the midnight shift.

Generally, this happens for me just before the wild life around me packs it in for the night; just before I watch the horizon for illumination.

Fox come about the edges of the woods looking for scraps of food or the peels and rinds of bananas and melons. I can stand patiently off the side of the drive and one fox will wander across the yard from the woods behind me to those on the south and stop before disappearing again beyond the laurel, and he will stare at me, relaxed, nosing around the base of a tree I occasionally put food. Then he’s off—not swiftly or in fear, but nonchalantly, demonstrating that he lives here as well and has decided to stretch his legs. That’s all.

Owls, too—some barn but mostly screech owls, perch in the oaks and elms, sometimes swooping down and moving through branches with precision. But my favorite are the geese which cover the night sky in flocks sometimes so enormous the swoosh of their wings alone creates a breeze, and their call to “Go! Go! Go!” is startling.

Closer to home, out front near the edge of the trees, deer nearly always feed on the dew-soaked grass and often the hostas, and if they sense me sitting on the porch or standing in the clearing, they will look up, briefly, ears turned forward—just for a moment—and then return to their grass, not minding me, aware just the same.

And it is then, when I am well acclimated with the night and my eyes have adjusted, and my soul too has adjusted, that I think of my way in the world, the motivation behind the turns and hesitations, my purpose of this passing in time. Oh, do I ever have an internal monologue underway with others gathered in my nocturnal imagination! There’s one friend nodding his head and insisting I follow my own path. I can hear him clearly when I’m out there, see his small sardonic smile as he says, “Come on Kunzinger. You know how to do this, stop waiting for approval or it’s never going to happen.” And there, too, is another friend whose smile is as wide as dawn pressing his sense of adventure into my spirit with an “all or nothing” carelessness about him which brings me up short yet livens my ambition. In one brief moment I am eased by no longer thinking of them in the past tense, but just as quickly, we all move on.

And sometimes sitting there on one of the benches is another friend, subconsciously rubbing her neck and looking at me with wide brown eyes saying, “Someday I will,” and then laughing and repeating, “Honest, someday I will,” and it makes me sad, deeply sad like liquid, but that moment too passes.

And then the distance across the reach lightens ever so slightly, from dark, almost Navy blue to something slightly more pale, like powder, and I’m alone again—the fox rushing off into the woods, the geese at rest in the harvested field or at the river’s edge, and the murmurs of chickadees and wrens and cardinals chase away what’s left of the stillness, and even my friends bow off, and I have trouble separating memory from imagination. So I go inside and wake my son so we can head to the bay to catch the sunrise.

It’s as if time lets me manipulate her however I wish just by heading outside at just the right moment; as if time has been neglected, ignored, or taken for granted, but for some of us who stay up late or get up early to gather as much out of our moments that we can, it offers a small reward, and I can bend her ever so slightly. Then, just briefly, it eases the almost vague pain in my soul which gathers around loss, which surrounds emptiness, and which almost always seems to visit during those late-night hours.

But predictably and somehow simultaneously surprisingly, dawn returns with that hope I need and says, “Wait, watch. Just watch.”

…is to believe in tomorrow. –Audrey Hepburn

In the garden the peppers gave up for now, yielding enough to cover their cost, making them worthwhile, of course, for the fresh taste and the seasoning of satisfaction.

The cucumbers, too, have let me know they’re growing weary, pulling it together enough to hand over a few last small ones, but their withering leaves and the absence of new growth announce it’s time for me to head to Merryvale in the village to get the vegetables.

The tomatoes were the blowout. Early on I harvested bowls of cherry tomatoes, but they grew smaller and more tart, and now they seem to be spitting out just one or two here and there from behind brown vines, as if to say, “Wait, here’s another. You might as well eat it here. No point in ‘gathering’ them.” I haven’t yet done the accounting on the tomatoes but in the end each one might have cost me more than I care to admit. It reminds me of the man who grew a garden and kept an accounting only to find out each tomato cost about fifty-four dollars.

The eggplant win. I only had four plants, and one of them was behind what turned out to be a snake-sunning spot, but in the end, I harvested a whole bunch of eggplants, and while I can only eat so much of the stuff, it is rewarding nonetheless, which is why a garden to begin with.

I like taking from the earth—harvesting fruit and finding soil beneath my fingernails, the dirt under my feet, the unmistakable aroma of tomato vines, and cucumbers. I start the season with visions of baskets filled with big, ripe tomatoes, a row of peppers of various colors next to the bowl of string beans, which it turns out deer rather enjoy. Clearly reality digresses from the virtual image, but I never tire of spending time back there, behind the shed, noting the heat and feeling the hot sun on my back. There is always a buzz of flies and the occasional sound of a bee, and when I go back inside I have a sense of abandonment if I don’t get back there soon. And sometimes there are storms, downpours, but even in the rain—sometimes especially in the rain—I enjoy the peace, the absolute presence, of the garden.

It gives so much more than fruit. I have worked in my mind on more than a few writing projects there, and worked out some worries, burying them forever beneath the mulch and compost. I don’t listen to the news there, and I stopped listening to music. I prefer the eternal sensation that I am gathering from the garden in a fashion not unlike Thom Jefferson, Voltaire, or Cicero, who said if you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need. I spent my Sundays out there not in conversation, but consultation with George Bernard Shaw who said, “The best place to find God is in a garden; you can dig for him there.” And, of course, Monet, who said, “The garden is my most beautiful masterpiece.”

It is art. Writing is not unlike the work in the soil outside. The high hopes before starting, the impatience, the need to weed and prune (Hemingway must have done a lot of pruning), and water. If we give well to the garden, it tells us stories, it feeds our imagination and seasons our lives, deliciously. Someday when I can no longer tend to the plants and vines, I’ll long remember the sun on my neck and the feel of taking a tomato or cucumber off the vine and resting it gently in the basket, and then its sweet taste that afternoon.

And I hope the garden remembers me. I wonder if someday when someone else clears out the area to garden, or even perhaps build, or plant grass, when someone has long impressed his own identity on this land, will some piece of me stay behind? Maybe someone will find an old rusty wire from the bean vines, or the rotted-out bottom of a basket I left too long in the soil one winter. Maybe someone will find herself humming a tune I left there in the spring air while turning over the ground for lettuce and squash. We try hard not to leave our mark in nature, allowing it to remain its trusted and pure self, but a part of me prays that if someone excavates the area that used to be “my” garden, he will find some inspiration.

 

The first class I ever took in college was Media Law and the professor was my advisor, Dr. Russell Jandoli. He was one of the reasons I went to St. Bonaventure. This seasoned journalist had worked with everyone in the business and did his time with Stars and Stripes. He introduced me to the work of Ernie Pyle, and spent several hours with me in the basement of the library talking to Fr. Ireneaus Hirscher, who had known Thomas Merton, and we talked a long time, the three of us. On the way back to his office his simple comments about what to listen to and what I clearly wasn’t paying attention to helped me through all the writing courses at the college.

Dr. Jandoli would have been 100 years old Thursday. He seemed older than his years even four decades ago, yet had a laid back way about him that indicated he could handle, and probably had already handled, anything and anyone. He was a gentle man; a pure soul who was straight out of central casting for old time journalists. The first class on my first day in college, Dr. Jandoli walked in, called roll, and said quietly, “There’s no such thing as objectivity. It doesn’t exist,” and walked out. We sat quietly for a few moments until one student walked to the window and looked out and saw the professor walking away. “He’s gone!” he said, and we all walked back to our dorm rooms.

He caught my attention.

The following class he told us he didn’t want that information—essential for journalists—to get lost among all the other information we had no intention of remembering or caring about.

A few years later he was very sick in the hospital. When I visited, he told me that teachers talk too much. “We have two hour classes for one hour of information,” he said. “No wonder everyone stops listening.” He believed writing did the same thing. “Too many words. Your essays need to thin out as you rewrite. Leave some words behind as you go.” It was like sitting on a hillside with some prophet—his legs crossed, a long beard, the strength of ages in his straight and sturdy back. Instead, Dr Jandoli’s fragile frame lay eroded and weak in a hospital bed. We talked about things I was writing and then we sat quietly for a few moments before his wife would come and chase me out. Then he laughed and said, “Mr. Kunzinger—leave death for the poets.” His skin was transparent, and his once keen eyes that stared at ages of students from behind thick black glasses sunk subjectively into darkness.

He recovered from that stay, of course, returning stronger and then retiring. Just a dozen or so years later he wrote me a beautiful letter when a colleague of his and a friend and mentor of mine, Professor Pete Barrecchia, died. It was a beautiful letter, precise and deep. Those two were the journalists who set the pace, established the essential integrity necessary for the Fourth Estate to exist at all. And as a teacher he was the type who quietly demanded attention when he talked. He was the professor who we didn’t take advantage of simply because we couldn’t live with disappointing him.

Every time I write an editorial for the paper or a piece for a journal or magazine, I think of him, can see his deep, humble, and cunning smile. I think I moved away from journalism and toward personal narrative because I understood too well how difficult it can be to remain objective. It was rare then, and today nearly non-existent.

Happy Birthday Russ. Your influence is still present, and more necessary now than ever before.

Yesterday I published a piece on this blog about how disappointing humanity is in the grand scheme of history and potential. It was a simple piece, and it barely scratches the surface of my thoughts in the matter–I need more philosophy first. But early this morning I experienced a moment of how pathetic humans can be. 

This is the first of what might be several writings about the subject in other more notable publications. But for today, thanks for reading this: 

I don’t even know how to write about this. It is one thing to address the horrific conditions of the planet and of humanity in large terms—noting the genocide and hatred which has permeated since the beginning of it all—and question how we can continue to believe we are anything worthy of redemption. Individually perhaps, but as a whole? There is no proof.

It is something else altogether to experience this hatred, or better explained, overhear the small-brained among us converse.

This morning at the Y I rode my favorite bike which has no headphone jack. I don’t mind it so much since at this hour the news shows remind me of things I go to the Y to forget for a while, but today I was subject to a conversation of two men on other bikes. Since this just happened an hour ago, this dialogue is close to exact:

“Did the Skins win this week?”

“I don’t know.”

“I was wondering if last night everyone stood for the flag.”

“I hope so.”

A brief pause while the second man (I almost called him gentleman) looked around to note the three of us, all white, were the only ones around.

“The problem is the n……”

“Exactly!”

“They’ve been a problem since we brought them here.”

“Damn right.”

“I heard something like sixty-five of those n….. were killed in Chicago this past weekend, and I thought, ‘well that’s a good start.”

Laughter among them both. At this point I couldn’t decide whether to say something, leave, or get on the treadmill and plug in my headphones to watch something less stressful, like the Manafort trial update.

Then this:

“I need to start attending meetings again.”

“You should. We miss you there.”

“I wish I could be up in Washington this weekend.”

“Yeah, especially now with Trump. He’s gonna get rid of those colored. Every last dang one of ‘em.”

I read once to never suppress anger; it isn’t healthy. So, okay…I had to say something.

“Wow.”

“What’s that?”

“That’s really pretty repulsive, the way you guys are talking about other people.”

“We aren’t talking about other people. We talking about n…..” “Yeah, mind your own business.”

I can’t figure out which is worse, that they are ignorant, or that they actually went to school.

“You know, Bob, you can just…”

“I was going to mind my own business. I can’t figure out if I should just keep my mouth shut and let us all think the way we want to think, which is absolutely how it should work in this country, or if I should go home and do what it is I do and write about you guys for the Sentinel (local paper) or the Washington Post, or anywhere to show that racism is alive and well in Deltaville.”

“Why don’t you mind your own business.”

I thought of Marley’s ghost when he stands up and screams at Scrooge, “Mankind was my business! The common welfare was my business!” Instead I apologized for interrupting but continued to talk to myself, loud enough for them to hear, while I rode the bike, and occasionally I directed my quiet tirade at them:

“Unbelievable. Unreal. I’m here with two grown, mature men who are stupid enough to think they’re better than others. Geez I’m sick of this. (to them) How is it possible that you can be so ignorant!? Where’d you learn to hate like that?! (to myself again) unreal. I’m writing about this, I’ll send it to the Washington Post. Geez, (to them) You guys read the Washington Post (I laugh). I’m writing about you guys. Someone’s got to shed light on how wide spread this problem is.”

I rode the treadmill for a while with one headphone in, the other dangling, and they were silent the whole time except to talk about the Redskins. I wanted to leave right away to get some work done so I went to them before I left and said, “Hey, Guys, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to be so rude, I really didn’t. Just caught me at a bad time.” And they laughed and said of course and they weren’t awake yet either and no problem and blah and blah and felt very fine and good and all that, and I said, “But seriously, with no due respect at all, I’m writing about this. I’ll give you a head’s up when I know when and where it will be in print. The way you two talk and think about brothers of ours is repulsive. Have a good workout.”

And I left. Is it too early for a drink?

 

A white-supremacist group is about to gather in Lafayette Park across from the White House. It is just one year since a similar group gathered in Charlottesville, Virginia, and violence broke out killing one person. It’s been three years since the riots after the death in Baltimore of Freddie Gray. That was just a year after the riots in Ferguson, Missouri, after the death of Michael Brown. It’s been nine years since the 2009 riots in Oakland after the shooting of Oscar Grant. It’s been twenty-two years since the riots protesting racial profiling in St. Petersburg, Florida. That was three years after the LA riots after the acquittal of police officers in the beating of Rodney King.

That wasn’t unlike the Miami riots of 1980 after the acquittal of four police officers in the death of Arthur McDuffie. He died while being arrested by four white police officers after a high-speed chase.

Forty-seven years since the summer of riots throughout the country.

Fifty years since the riots in 125 cities after the assassination of the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King, Jr.

Fifty three years since the Watts Riots.

That was a year after the Civil Rights Act.

Which was one hundred and one years after emancipation.

In 2016, 38,658 people were killed by a gun in the United States, either in an assault, suicide, or accident.

According to a report out of Stockholm in May of this year, the world’s military budget is $1.7 trillion a year. Human Rights Watch notes a minimum of 50 million people were killed in the twentieth century because of their race or religion.

Wars currently active in the world accounted for, in 2017 alone, 14,000 deaths in Afghanistan, 13,000 in Iraq, 14,700 in Mexico in drug conflicts, 39,000 in Syria, and 17,000 in Yemen. I’ve left some off. Those are just the conflicts where over 10K have been killed; more than a dozen more are out there right now with more than a thousand deaths last year.

This is us. This is who we are. The human race, noted for being just slightly below the angels. Hell yeah.

Humanity’s default position has become assertive, aggressors. Power and greed have always been in control, but it used to be the other side didn’t have to lose for one side to win. It used to be when both sides of a conflict benefited, it was better for the world. No longer.

No wonder suicide is higher than ever; depression is diagnosed more than ever; the number of heart disease and stroke victims are higher than ever.

No wonder I have tried to turn off the news, turn toward nature, turn back my expectations of administrations around the world and their ability to solve any—ANY ONE—of the problems. Something has been missing. We need Superman. If Christ is coming back, now’s good.

I’m wondering more and more lately if there are any Mother Theresa’s alive and well, any Schweitzer’s, any King’s or Gandhi’s. It certainly doesn’t feel like it. In the years between my birth and turning ten, we saw the initiation of the Peace Corps, Earth Day, NASA’s moon launch, the Civil Rights Act, and more, including idealistic events like Woodstock. It is hard to find hope now. It is difficult to put a finger on possible solutions. I understand the world was a bit too idealistic in a time that also brought us so many riots, the Vietnam War, assassinations of heroes, and more. But just a little more idealism wouldn’t be so bad, would it?

I spend most of my time near water; maybe because of its constant unpredictability; maybe because of how true it is. It is cleansing; it is purifying. I really am finding it difficult to believe in much else anymore, but when I look out I remember what Gandhi said:

“You must not lose faith in humanity. Humanity is like an ocean; if a few drops of the ocean are dirty, the ocean does not become dirty.”

I’d like to believe that.

In Isak Dinesen’s story “Wings,” she and Denys Finch-Hatton come upon a dead giraffe, shot and abandoned by poachers. Two lions are feeding upon the carcass, and they’re the same two which have been terrorizing villagers, so they decide to go out one night and kill the lions. They do. It’s tight writing and exciting narrative with just enough philosophical digression to make the piece not solely about 1920 Kenya.

Last night I thought about them out there, nothing but a gas light and one long gun, facing down two not-so-hungry-anymore lions. I came across a turtle trying to make it across the road before some wild car came by; and a great blue heron on top of a tree, sitting up nervously as we went by. He stayed; we aren’t that threatening.

While I live in what in some quarters can be considered wilderness, I don’t live in the wild. Even domestic preserves like Myakka in Florida had more dangerous wildlife than I ever saw in Africa.

In the story Denys points out that the lions were just doing what lions do. To which Karen Blixen (Dinesen’s real name) replies, “and we are just doing what we do. Shoot them.”

I would like to blend in to the wilderness more, go unnoticed. Some deer will stand still while I walk by, ready to run, determined to stay. Dogs, cats, and even squirrels seem attracted to me, and hummingbirds have taken to zeroing in on my bloodshot eyes. But I’d like to rest along the river or at a pond while wildlife calmly go about their business. I like to observe, to note how they handle the passing of time. I like to watch the osprey glide then find their way to their nest to feed their young. It would be a pleasure to do this without them wanting to fly away. It has certainly made me more stealth.

I believe I’d be more like Karen than Denys. The man had nerves of steel, but Karen was nervous, even scared, but nonetheless enjoyed the adrenaline rush that often accompanies life. Some endeavors come at a cost, but that cost—what at the extreme can be called a Death Wish—is what Denys was doing out there to begin with. I think he just wanted to experience the very happening of life, not its passing.

It is one thing to understand we are alive, here, now, resting on the passing of time. It is an entirely separate situation to be in tune to the pulse of life, to watch its chest rise and fall, to feel the breath of life on the back of your neck.

To a certain degree I find that in nature, in my version of wilderness, which seems to be rapidly retreating from the suburbs which have spread out like a flair on a paper towel. Maybe if I didn’t head down to the city every once in a while I might not appreciate as much the vibrations of life in nature; I don’t know. In the city when I get used to the sounds and the life I can predict its next move, and this is not so interesting, almost futile. In nature, every single time that deer does not move as I walk by is a surprise. Each osprey that dives for a fish and carries it to its young in the nest is nothing short of miraculous.

And so too the Carolina wrens when they sing; and the goldfinches, or the indigo buntings.

It has become difficult to be somewhere unarguable, somewhere absent of shallow conflicts, questionable motives.

I’ll take the wilderness, quietly.