I have a problem: I am having trouble writing about beauty.

This frustration all comes from failed attempts to write about the scenery in northern Spain and eastern Siberia, my two latest locales for my current work. I envy photographers who can wait for just the right light and mesmerize us with panoramic views of anywhere. I suppose, though, even they would say the same; that when they look at their photographs they just shake their heads and admit, “No. Close, sure, but this isn’t what it was like.”

Landscape artists (apologies to Cole Young who hated that term) as well, such as Young and Mikel Wintermantel and Thomas Cole and others, might admit this gap between what they see and what they create, though I’ve been to the places some of these artists captured and can confidently say they nailed it.

The irony, though, is I surround myself with beauty. In my house are artifacts from various travels: A small shell from Spain, icons from Russia, a musical instrument from Africa, and more. On the walls is the inspiring artwork from my son, Michael, from our travels together; a half dozen or so Mikel Wintermantel paintings which calm me, energize me, remind me of where so much of my soul resides in western New York; and other beautiful artwork. There’s the glass work by artisan and friend John Almaguer, the pottery of NY and Arizona compatriot Tom Schell, and on the shelves books by friends too many to count. I read them sometimes—I read about the ‘60’s in Philadelphia, or the things they carried in Vietnam, or growing up in the Bronx, or the floods of North Dakota, and I am mesmerized by beautiful prose and poetry; I am transfixed as writing is apt to do when it is that good.

In my office, too, I have taken the time to insure I am not cut off from that beauty for which we should be alive. I have Michael’s photos overlooking the Atlantic in Spain and others on the wall for me to fall into, and pictures by my Russian friend Valentine. When I look at those photos I laugh and remember how out of touch with reality he is, and how in touch with beauty he has always remained. He is legitimately crazy and figured out how to make a living at it. That’s beauty.

Also in my office is a small statue of St James the Greater as a pilgrim on horseback Michael bought for me at the cathedral in Santiago. There is artwork from friends in various places. A monkey clock from Kay. Pottery from St Augustine (the place not the person). A Cole Young painting which to look at immediately places me in his studio listening to his rant, listening to Van Morrison. I can smell paint.

Outside, however, the beauty has always escaped my writing. I think because that scenery is so obvious, such the standard example of what is recognized as “beautiful.” The ocean this morning was especially calm, and more dolphins swam by than I’ve seen in some time with pelicans barely above the water, always in a straight line, not a “V” like geese. The sun burned through the few clouds at eight a.m. and it was warm before I was half way down the sand. I rarely try and describe that for the countless scribes who tried and failed in years past. Oh, there were some who knew how to capture the beauty of nature—Muir, Thoreau, of course, Frost, even EB White’s “Here is New York” describes the city in a most enticing way making the skyline as much horizon as the Atlantic.

You’d think with something like eight hundred thousand words at my disposal I’d not have an issue with translating the lush mountains of the Pyrenees. So I find myself instead writing about my inability to write about something. It can be a cruel occupation.

To avoid writing, as we writers are quite apt at doing, I decided to clean out some boxes I moved in here a while back. Also, my file cabinet should be thinned out. Oh, and a few tea mugs look dusty so I need to wash them in the bathroom sink, which isn’t far from the café, so I might as well head over there for something to drink. See, that is how we think. It is absolutely beautiful to watch a writer avoid writing.

But I did empty the box to focus on something other than beauty and found old artifacts from before I began measuring time. A wall rug of seagulls and clouds my sister made for me almost half a century ago; a few mugs my dad bought for me in some of his travels to conventions during the early years; a drawing, scribble really, of the moon Michael did when he came to work with me one night when he was two; a high school yearbook with a picture of my old friend Mike and me doing the morning announcements (a good hour was lost looking through that relic); a key to my house in Wellsville, Pennsylvania, I have kept for all this time; a guitar pick from an old friend; two tootsie rolls.

A note here: the tootsie rolls aren’t garbage. I collected money once outside a grocery store for the Knights of Columbus and we gave away the candy. Michael was just six at the time and we had so much fun that day I believe we both remember the details of every person who came by; at least I do. There is certainly beauty in recollection, much to admire in some degree of melancholy.

I have a dried sunflower, a ton of photographs, and three rolls of undeveloped Kodak film; I have no idea from when or where.

I think the natural instinct when wishing to write about something we find beautiful is to turn to metaphor instead of focusing on detail. We do that in life too, I believe. I know I do. When stress is overwhelming and the days feel like something to “get done” instead of enjoy, it isn’t the “ocean” I need to fix on, but the break of the wave right near my feet and how it chased young sandpipers back and forth with the surf. I shouldn’t write about Siberia, but about that moment our cabin mate Alexander figured out how to say “rain” in English, and he taught us the Russian; and it certainly isn’t possible to write about the Pyrenees, but I can write about the Basque café owner who gave us flag pins and shots of Pacheron and was thrilled beyond description when Michael spoke some of the man’s native tongue.

And so throughout writing, it is the details. I can’t write about how much I miss my father, but I can write about how his face lit up when he sank a long putt; or how I forgot to say just the right thing; or how I never really did like Scotch all that much; or how I’ve lost interest in eating at Mahi Mah’s.

It isn’t difficult at all to write about beauty. The problem then is not recognizing how we are always surrounded by it and never know.

 

I was three when President Kennedy was shot, just a few months older than John-John. I don’t remember the incident at all, nor am I aware of a difference in temperament before and after that fateful day in November of ’63. But I’m told it was distinct, black and white, an absolute clarity in “before and after” references.

I’m told Kennedy came with hope, with promise, with lofty goals like landing a man on the moon and cleaning the earth, the Peace Corps, the hope of peace in general. He was young and so was most of the population as the first wave of baby-boomers came of age. Things were good.

Camelot.

I saw footage only in great retrospect years later. People talked about conspiracy theories, they talked about Vietnam and Civil Rights; and they talked about the subtle differences of expectation and hope before and after November 22^nd, 1963. But all I was ever exposed to was a post-Dallas world. There are newsreels, of course, and stories from older relatives. But there will always be something lacking in the narrative for those of us who didn’t experience life back then. There will always be some subtle element we will never be able to grasp.

***

This Sunday will be the fifteenth anniversary of the terrorist attacks on September 11th, and like I do every single year, I asked my students this week to write a few hundred words about that day: What do you remember? How were your parents that day? When I first did this fourteen years ago, the responses were heartbreaking. As the years went by the paragraphs covered the spectrum from indifference to passionate recollections from military members who had returned from Afghanistan and Iraq. And, predictably, as the years went by the details became less clear, less “involved,” and more repetitive to what they heard from others, from history class.

I gave the assignment yesterday and one of my more ambitious students raised his hand. “Professor. I’m sorry, but I was three when that happened.” The rest of the class nodded in agreement. An image of JFK Jr saluting his father’s passing casket ran through my mind.

I let this reality sink in.

“Then you couldn’t know,” I said.

You couldn’t know that before 911 our thought process was different, more hopeful, absent of impending doom. We still had that absolute conviction that whatever happened to us as individuals and as a nation was still pretty much in our hands. You have no idea that before that day we looked forward to what was next, not fearful of what might happen. Our daily vocabulary was absent of phrases involving extremism, terrorism, anthrax and Fallujah. These concepts were real and among us, but they affected others, were problems for others, were handled by others. Our attitudes of issues concerning Afghanistan and Iraq and terrorism back then were similar to students at this campus today worrying about what was happening to students at another college thousands of miles away. We were peripherally aware of it, that’s all.

But it is all you know. Your daily news intake since then—which involves a plethora of social media outlets not yet invented fifteen years ago, as well as traditional media—is riddled with world events as if the next horrible event will be fifty yards away in the dining hall and you’d better be ready.

It is hard to be positive, isn’t it? It is difficult to find some pathway to hope and prosperity when it seems as if we’re swimming upstream against an inevitable tsunami of a collapsing world.

***

In an age when higher education has once again become more of a world of industrial education, where students expect that the sole purpose of their classes should be to prepare them for employment, where enrollment is plummeting not just because of cost but because of the greater population of teenagers not seeing a point to it, there is a desperate need for the study of philosophy and art.

I can’t think of a better time for educators to emphasize the potential of humanity. But technology is our new curriculum, and students today are convinced it is the sole foundation of whatever they do. But “it has become appallingly obvious,” Einstein said, “that our technology has exceeded our humanity.”

“Intelligence plus character is the goal of a true education,” Martin Luther King, Jr. insisted.

And according to Plato: “The direction in which education starts a man will determine his future in life.”

I cannot teach these people what life was like before terrorism terrified our cities. I can perhaps only describe what it was like to sit at a table at Windows on the World for lunch and enjoy a view absent of fear. I can talk about crossing borders without interrogation, walking family members all the way to the plane for their departure, carrying pretty much anything I wanted on board a flight. I can talk about what wasn’t talked about, places we never heard of.  

I changed their assignment. I asked them to write what they thought was humanity’s greatest strength, most encouraging potential. Again my student raised his hand. “Professor,” he said. “I’m sorry, but can I write about what I remember from fifteen years ago instead?”

                                                                                 (apologies to Hemingway)

At lunch today, I talked to a man at Ocean Eddie’s about our preference for pubs that are dives. The tide came in beneath the floor boards and we sat at separate tables with patio umbrellas on the deck . He drank a draft and some of the head dripped over the side of his glass and onto the table.

He told me about his favorite dive, outside Danville, Virginia. Then he asked about mine. 

“No contest. The Shack.”

There was a bar in the woods on the Gulf of Finland just outside St. Petersburg, Russia, I frequented in the late night early morning hours back in the nineties, but it burned down. It was a small place to drink and sing Gypsy songs and meet people you’d never want mad at you. The windows barely kept out the weather, including a storm blowing off the Baltic one night. It was well after midnight and we ordered a bottle of Georgian Merlot and several plates of shashleek, a Russian shishkabob dish the owner grilled on a hibachi in the sand out back.  A gypsy band I knew showed up, including a guitar player and a violin player and a woman singer I had never met. Hours passed as we sang and drank; I milked one glass of Merlot for hours while others indulged with more energy. There were four of us from America, three musicians, a waitress, the owner and his cat, and one other customer, Alexi, and we sang and drank while some storm from the west intensified.

I tried explain to the man at Ocean Eddie’s what it was like. I watched a surfer wipe out, took a sip of my beer, and described that night: 

“This duck blind of a building sat among birch trees, but that simply made me more aware of the weather, wondering when one might topple through the roof. It was exhilarating, an adrenaline rush that had nothing to do with the wine; it was just being there . It felt dangerous, subversive, but it was just a bar in the woods. Being in Russia just a few years after the coup helped mystify the atmosphere.”

I told him how the band took a break and came to our table and we spoke in broken Russian and English about the storm and how we hoped it wasn’t high tide soon since the water was just a hundred feet away, maybe less. Then the other customer, Alexi, the two hundred eighty pound drunk Russian who hated Americans, started to yell at me like he did the first time I ever met him, the first time I walked in the place a few years earlier. It was as if he never moved. He had mostly kept to himself on my previous visits to the Shack, sometimes talking to me, mostly not, but this night something got under his skin and he yelled at me like he did that first time, “I hate Fucking Americans.” He startled me but he had a drink in front of him and the woman from the gypsy band was sitting with him and told him to quiet down and he did.

But his eyes all night seemed deep and vacant as he kept looking through the window at the storm, and once in awhile when he noticed me watching him he would lean forward and say, “I hate fucking Americans!” But then a sound like the sky opening slammed on the walls and ceiling, and we all ducked, we cringed, and I thought for sure one of the birch trees cracked and was going to kill us all. I went down on the floor with my friends and the gypsy band and Alexi cursed and fell against the back of his booth. He suddenly looked so small, and the thunderclap crashed on us again, this time blowing open the swinging window near Alexi as rain and wind sheered a path across the booth to the other wall. Dima put his violin under his coat and our shasleek flew off the table onto the floor. The shack cat went for it but the wind and rain chased him back under the bar and into his bed.

“I would have gotten the hell out of there. The trees would have scared the crap out of me.”

“I know, right?! but leaving in the dark in the storm in the woods is the only thing that scared me more than being there.” We both drank our beers.

Another flash of light lit up the shack and Alexi was trying to hide under his booth but he was too big, and I watched him, and he looked out the window for some time until the weather calmed, then he looked at me, and with a nod he said, “Horosho. Horosho” which means, “okay. It’s okay.” He looked at me as if to ask me to come sit with him but he didn’t know how. Instead he closed the window and latched it. He nodded to me, “Horosho. Edeesuda.” It’s okay, come here. A few of us gathered and sat at his table, and Dima took out his violin. Alexi smiled at me, looked at the closed window with a stoic face, then turned and smiled again. He looked at the waitress and said “pivo,” beer, and he motioned to us all so she brought us all beer. When she returned she told us she didn’t know what Alexi would do if something happened to the Shack; she had no idea what he would do, that he practically lived there. I asked Alexi if he lived nearby but Alexi just nodded at me and said, “I hate fucking Americans,” and we laughed and toasted each other.

Dima played, then Sasha joined and then the singer, and the beer tasted good. Alexi sat quietly the rest of the night. The storm passed and the sky quieted down.

At Ocean Eddie’s we sat on the pier in the August heat. “Then it burned down. Dima wrote me and told me it burned to the ground and everyone was pretty sure local businessmen who owned a hotel not far did it, but they could never prove it.”

“Places disappear, man. The place in Danville closed up years ago. Hard finding a new one.”

Unfortunately, the distinguishing feature of a “dive” is that it is about to burn down, be condemned, fall apart, or otherwise render itself uninhabitable. I love those places, right before the fall. It is important, then, not to become too attached. 

I thought of the places I frequented that have closed. The Shack, Rasputin’s on the other side of that city, the Blue Door Blues  and Jazz Club in Prague (where the door was brown and they didn’t play either blues or jazz), the old Jewish Mother right here at the beach, and I just read that Sea Gull Pier on the Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel is closing as well, talk about a dive. But the Shack wins for losing. It was both literally and figuratively on the edge of everything. It was the stereotype of some Soviet-era bar in the middle of nowhere, and I always half expected Rasputin himself to wander in. It burned, though, like most of the traditions and purity of Russia. It seems the city is built on ashes. 

He drank more of his beer and then asked, “So where are you going to go after this place is gone?”

“Well, luckily I have other places I like.” I sat quietly for a few minutes and thought of some: Big Sams at the Inlet is a shack, for sure;  There’s the Golden Tiger in Prague which I love; Maria’s Pub in Santiago is my new favorite, the Burton in Allegany. Things burn or get torn down or simply fall apart. It’d be nice if these places were always there for us when we return to them; or for people like Alexi who never leave. I go because I meet the people that way, real ones, with personalities and a severe lack of pretense. Mi Casa Cafe in St Augustine, Yorktown Pub. Some lady’s garage just west of Portomarin, Spain.

“Well I need to find a place. A shame really. I was just getting used to it here.”

He could tell from my face I had no idea what he was talking about.

“I’m guessing you didn’t hear. It was in the papers and the old man in the bait shack told me a few weeks ago. They’re closing it up, tearing it down and rebuilding some steel pier, gift shop, amusement, hotel complex. This is Ocean Eddie’s last season.”

He left and I sat and watched lone surfers working the small waves.

Damn.

Well, this place doesn’t have what it takes to be a shack anyway. Maybe thirty years ago when it was falling apart, but after it was cleaned up and painted, not so much. Ironically it came into its own just in time to tear it down.

No, a dirty, dark shack has to be open late, at least until three. It needs old floor boards and low lighting, it most certainly needs low lighting though bright lights is all one can find these days. It is best if the vast majority of clientele do not speak English and look as if they escaped a gulag. These are the people to talk to. This is where to find honesty.

A dirty, dark shack doesn’t serve drinks with umbrellas and it doesn’t own a blender. Even electricity should be a last resort except for keeping the beer cold. It should serve only a few food items and those should be grilled. A pet is helpful. And just for atmosphere and to pay homage to Hemingway who understood sometimes a person needs a place to go late to sit alone and have a drink, a dirty dark shack should have an old man in the corner; someone who looks like he still has the dust from the road. He should look like he is always just a few hours from where he wants to be. And he should be wearing flip flops. He most definitely should be wearing flip flops. 

 

 

Truth be told I’m simply overwhelmed. There is so much going on in every aspect of my life it is difficult some times to keep anything straight at all. The irony is that when I returned from Spain I did so with a conviction toward “simplicity.” I came back focused and determined to concentrate on what I learned on the Camino, that the simplest things in life are the most valuable and fulfilling. But somewhere in the course of the past two years things got away from me. And here I am back in the thick of spread too thin.

I’m not complaining since I can control what I add to my life and what I don’t. But still the current trench is somewhat deeper than usual and it makes it difficult to see the sky.

So, I walk.

I walk along the Rappahannock River near the Chesapeake Bay, or back along the small roads running along the marsh lands under tall pines and past duck ponds. Deer, geese, osprey, egrets and eagles are normal companions on my walks. In the winter I don the proper clothes and keep going. In the summer I’m down to a t-shirt, sunblock shorts, and my Merrell hiking sandals and I sweat my way through eight or ten miles. I think, I write in my head, I remember what needs to be done and I plan on what I will no longer do. The endorphins engage and at night I get down more thoughts about projects I’m working on.

But it is a required retreat, and that isn’t always healthy either. So I am going to simplify again, ease my way out of the trench. This afternoon I heard an ancient John Denver song I have not heard I believe since I’m seventeen years old, and it made me remember the simplicity of being seventeen, the innocence. Ironically I was very plugged into events and society back then. About to go to college for journalism made me aware of things around me, and like Woodward and Bernstein (younger readers can go Wiki them now) I was going to be uncovering the next scandal, so I wanted to know what was going on. But it seemed different, and I think it wasn’t because the times were more innocent or that less corruption infiltrated the government and businesses and colleges, but because there was less coverage, less inundation by media and watch-dog groups, Go Pro and Facebook posts, and Twitter, and on and on.

Left Turn:

I was on a bench this morning at the beach next to another bench with a guy about my age, emaciated, deeply burned black skin, who looked as if he hadn’t been in a shower in a while. He said, “This might be the most beautiful morning in a very long time!” At 7:30 it was about 68 degrees and the sun still hadn’t risen so high. I agreed with him. He went on, “This tells me it is going to be a good day.” Again I said I was certain he was right.

Than this:

“What is it you do? You on vacation? Where you from?”

“No I live here. I’m just out for a walk before headed to the office. I teach.”

“Where do you teach?”

“Today I’m at TCC. Tidewater Community College.”

“Oh that’s absolutely fine! I never made it to college. I could have! I got out of the army and could have gone to college but I never made it there. What do you teach?”

“Writing.”

“Oh well I’ll tell you what you oughta do! Bring them students down here and have them write about this beautiful day! This’ll inspire them.”

I agreed. We were quiet a moment and I fixated on what a tremendous suggestion that was.

“You know I was going to ask you for some money but I can’t now.”

I reached for my wallet. “Oh I’m sorry, absolutely, it isn’t a thought! Let me give you enough for breakfast at least.”

“Absolutely not,” he said. “We’re friends now and I don’t take money from friends. I’ll ask one of these fine tourists from out of town.”

I handed him a five. “I’m actually from New York, originally.” He smiled and took the five.

We talked a few minutes more and I left. We don’t have enough conversations like this. We don’t talk enough about nature, about sunrises and breezes. We listen too much to the wrong information. I’m turning toward simplicity; at least I’m going to try again. I don’t want to be homeless on an oceanfront bench, for certain, but that was still the most valuable conversation I’ve had all day.

I headed to campus singing to myself. For the life of me I couldn’t remember what I had to do that was so urgent.

Sadly, another seven-week break quickly comes to an end, and in a few days I’ll find myself in front of hundreds of college freshmen. First, however, we have faculty meetings. The buzzword before this break, and for several semesters prior, was “Retention.” College enrollment has decreased across the country, and administrators are worried about how to keep the students from dropping out.

Then there’s me.

We all received an email asking what we thought faculty could do to “retain” students. The question wasn’t meant to “blame” faculty, though some took it that way; instead, it was a plea for help, a way of saying “We are at a loss as to why they’re leaving; what do you think?”

Here’s what I think: They see no reason to stay. Most college students don’t drop out because they aren’t up to the task, and while money is a major issue even that is not difficult to deal with. No, most community college students don’t see the point in attending.

First of all, many have the ability to do the work, they’re just conditioned to be lazy. We live in a world of convenience and college course material is not at all convenient.

Last year on the first day of the semester I asked students to all write a 150 word introduction to a paper about their first day at college. When they finished I asked them if they thought they would have done a better job if they knew I was going to read them all but only give A’s to the top five and I would fail the rest. They agreed they would have done better. So I raised the stakes: I asked them if they knew that the five introductions which caught my attention and made me want to read the paper would each receive one thousand dollars, would those introductions be better written. They all sat up straighter and said with absolute affirmation, “Yes!” There it is. I told them, “So you always could do better; you just couldn’t be bothered.” When I put some reward in front of them, something more tangible than an A or the promise of being better prepared for the world, they suddenly were bucking for honor roll. Take the reward away and replace it with the obscure grading scale as the only immediate satisfaction, and boredom quickly kicks in.

One more: In my Humanities class I asked my students to read Hamlet, or watch a good version since it is a play, and to come in the following week ready to discuss why is it still so relevant and still taught in classrooms four hundred years later. The following week they came in predictably and embarrassingly unprepared. So I asked if I gave them another chance to read or watch Hamlet and come back ready to discuss it, the five people who all contribute the most intelligent material to the discussion will all get brand new I-Pads that day, would they be ready? They all, again, laughed and agreed, and one student said he would watch every version and memorize the Spark Notes. I said. “So you can do the work, you just don’t bother. Listen, you’re wasting your money, your time, my time, and you are, without a doubt, in everybody’s way. You really should reconsider college. You’re not up to it.”

The dean of my department hates when I do this.

Listen, we’ve lowered the bar so far we are trying to come up with new ways to beg them to not leave. We’ve compromised entrance and placement exams, we’ve offered accommodations up the whazoo, we’ve got work-study students calling the students who leave and asking them to return, and we are allowing them to do more work online in case they “can’t make it to class.” Colleges now offer courses so outrageously simple that pre-teens can master the material: at the university, “Curves: the shape of women in art”; “The Simpsons: A comprehensive study”; and even at Amherst—AMHERST—they offer a course on the music of (Dear God) Miley Cyrus. I am not kidding. What can we do to retain students? Here’s an idea: maybe we have so lowered our standards that a “college education” doesn’t command the respect it once did. If I were in college today I’d leave too.

In addition, students don’t see the point of spending tens of thousands of dollars for a degree when they’ve been conditioned that the degree is a means to an end, and the end is not looking very hopeful. Forty years ago a college education offered hope. There was a brick wall out there and the degree was the ladder of hope necessary to climb over. Now many students only see the wall itself, and a college education doesn’t offer any better hope of clearing that wall than a dozen other avenues, all of which are infinitely cheaper and less challenging.

We need to make the wall irrelevant. College should become the destination, not an exit ramp from high school to life. It needs to be the arena of discussion and connections so that students see being in college as the objective. But offering simple-minded courses shows the student such disrespect, curriculum committees should be embarrassed. Keep the courses challenging; make having a college degree something not every person can or should do. Raise the bar so that if students can’t make it, then they shouldn’t be there to begin with. A degree can then once again command the respect earned through hard work, focus, and discipline, and not through the music of Miley and binge watching cartoons. Then, if students drop out, it is because they aren’t up to it, and not because we bored them out of there.

Unfortunately some students have parents who don’t prepare them. Some come from high schools that only made things worse. Some are too spoiled, too smart, too dumb, too hyper, too distracted, too angry, too tired.

Too bad. Yeah, welcome to the fucking race, Frosh.

It isn’t like they aren’t warned about what is required of them. Every course outline in college now spells out in anal-retentive detail every aspect, expectation, and demand for the semester. All students understand how many times they can be late, how many absences are allowed, when papers are due, what happens if papers are late, how long papers must be, and what to do in an emergency. They know professors’ phone numbers, emails, office numbers, and if they check some social media, they can learn professors’ temperament, workload, travel schedule during the semester, and more. No matter what shit-field these poor bastards had to wade through before they arrived, make no mistake, once they’re registered and sitting down, every single student is well informed and warned about what is expected of each of them going forward. They are told that if they don’t understand or have a problem or need to discuss things or are completely clueless as to what anything means, they should come see the professor, or a counselor, or an advisor or the dean. But many simply don’t bother. Retain them? Ha! Get them out of the way! DING! We have some lovely parting gifts for you.

Many students simply aren’t up to the challenge of college and it is way easier in the real world to seek out and find challenges they know they can conquer. The worst part is that in a world of college grads with outrageous debt who can’t get jobs, many new students wonder why they should go to college in the first place. Colleges don’t seem to offer as much promise for the future as they did when I was eighteen.

And now we are assigned with the task of “keeping them here” until they complete at least two years. The students who understand the value of a college education will need no explanation at all; and the ones who can’t figure out why they have to study anything other than the subjects in their field will never grasp the concept of a “higher” education. No, Higher Education is not about legalization, sorry.

So how about this: Admittedly, the grades are clearly not the most enticing element to make students want to bust their collective asses; I’m with them on that. So maybe they need to understand that the key to success in college isn’t simply showing up, it is how they act in class, how much they focus on what is going on at the moment, how well they can tune out distractions, how well they show respect for the professor, their peers, and the subject matter, and how sincerely they knock on the door and say, “Help me understand, please, how to get through this to your satisfaction.” If they don’t understand that, I don’t want them in my class to begin with, let alone beg them to return.

They’ll be back, though. As a professor at a community college as well as a university catering to retiring military students, I know they almost all come back, and are almost always infinitely better students at an older age than had they come right out of high school. We don’t need to “retain” students; we need to find the ones wandering around in their late twenties and say, “Are you ready yet?”

They will be ready eventually. And they will no longer make excuses. They will know something that their eighteen-year-old counterparts have trouble grasping: if you’re not going to take going to college seriously, seriously get out of the way and let someone who gives a damn have a shot at it.

Humorist Dave Barry once wrote that a person who is nice to you but is not nice to a waiter is not a nice person. It is terrifying how we overlook the faults of people whom we otherwise are friends with, or agree with, or admire. Rare is the person who has the integrity to act with respect in all situations.  

It is called character.

This has been written about often and I am certain I can’t add anything to the discussion, but I do wish to at least raise the issue. Because for quite some time and for apparently some time to come people seem to celebrate those with a lack of character. We have seen it on television for many years now with reality shows featuring housewives and bachelors and lost people and even naked lost people. It is in the way they yell at each other, make fun of each other, curse and degrade and ridicule each other. Talk shows have done this for a while as well. Most famously, perhaps, is Jerry Springer where it isn’t unusual to see people throwing chairs at each other after it is revealed Guest A is not the father of Guest B’s baby, and then Guest C comes out to say he is the father, only for the host to confirm the father is actually Guest D. This is entertainment, and it is being played out in communities throughout the country. This is what we’ve become.

It is called lack of character.

I’m not going to speculate on causes; I’m not a sociologist or psychologist or talk-show host. I do want to recall, however, some basic rules we were all taught as kids. This is similar to the bestselling book, Everything I Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten. Only really, we learned it before then.

1. Be nice to people. The Golden Rule thing. Do unto others….
2. Don’t speak poorly about people, especially if that person is not in the room.
3. Don’t make fun of people.
4. If you wish to criticize someone’s performance on a certain job, stay focused on the performance and do not attack him or her personally.

A brief interlude to point out that in basic essay writing classes there are things called fallacies. There’s the sweeping and hasty generalizations that any half-brained student should avoid. There’s the deceptive ideas and statistics that any person with character would never lower him or herself to. And there’s the slandering issue, where the writer is required to stick to the issue, and NOT attack the person.

5. Let the other person talk, or, if arguing, hear them out with the same respect you want in return.
6. Don’t lie.
7. And just to reemphasize the essential element of a good character as listed in number one, Be Nice To People.

If our young children violate any one of these basic character traits, we correct them and show them how essential it is in life for vertical homosapians to act like dignified humans if they wish to be taken seriously and respected. It is the core of every preschool, kindergarten, elementary and beyond education, especially at home.

Back to Dave Barry’s restaurant parable: If you’re on a date and your date is being nice to you but then is consistently an asshole to the waiter, most likely any clearly thinking person would not go on a second date with that person. It is only a matter of time before that unkindness and lack of character is turned on you. At some point we step back and look at a person not solely for the aspects we agree with, but for that person as a whole—his or her attitude, actions, demeanor, decorum.

You’re getting ahead of me here, aren’t you?

We have had leaders with whom I disagreed completely, some of whom I thought simply did not have the mental capability to hold a milk jug, let alone a public office. But none of them in my adulthood were foul-mouthed, characterless, embarrassments. And everyone can read this and say, “Of course, Bob! No kidding!”

So the question is this: Why do some bullies get so much support?

I found part of the answer in twenty-seven years of teaching community college: If I say what the students want to hear, they don’t hear anything else. They don’t do research to find out if I am right or wrong, they don’t discuss what I say with others to find out the validity of opposing viewpoints. In the wisdom of Paul Simon, they “heard what they want to hear and disregard the rest.” (da da do da do da da dum, do da do da do da dum)

But we want a person of character to lead us because that person represents who we are as a nation. We want a person of character to negotiate for us because there will be effects months and years down the road we, and others, must answer to. We want a person of character to command the military because we can then trust that decisions will be based upon the desire not to engage in war, and not based upon the desire to “bomb the shit out of them.”

We want a person of character to execute the duties of the executive office because even if we don’t trust that person, we can then at least trust they will act on our behalf with concern for the character of our nation.

Barry’s restaurant again: Even if you completely agree with the other person, admire his or her ideas and ambitions, trust his or her judgement on how to handle difficult situations, if the person lacks character and bullies the waiter and makes fun of him, that person doesn’t show the dignity necessary to be with you, and you shouldn’t lower yourself to such an absence of standards.

I guess I got political. It is a view, after all, from the wilderness.

I often plagiarize myself. I write phrases or concepts in one essay and use them in another, or, often, both. Sometimes subject matter blends across pieces and some semblance of work I wrote elsewhere peeks out its phrases in new work. It happens. Tim O’Brien does it. Hemingway. St. Luke. Borrowing from oneself for reuse is more dangerous due to accusations of repetition than for self-plagiarizing. I’m just saying it isn’t taboo.

When I was a student in a world with card catalogues and reference librarians, where no one—no one—knew what a computer was, where you wandered through “stacks” at the library looking for documentation in old reference books from deep in the bowels of the building, plagiarism would have been easy. Odds were low that some keen-minded prof would think: I know exactly what reference book from the library’s bowels this came from! The professor would rely upon consistency of voice within the paper and through other papers and compare the writing to other work done in class. Today for every one site a student has for plagiarizing a paper, we have three sites to find it. Hell, just Googling some key phrases often brings up the original source. Sometimes colleagues and I will order pizza and hang out and search sentences from a stack of papers. It’s addicting.

One night at work last semester I started wondering what motivates them to steal other people’s work. Time and laziness, I am sure, are at the top of the list, since they think it is easier, though I still claim it has to be just as hard to search around for other people’s papers which meet my requirements as it is to just write the thing themselves. Fear is another factor “forcing” them to plagiarize. Fear of bad grades, of losing their grants, of disappointing their parents, of disappointing themselves or me. So I went to work and gave them an assignment. I wanted a 750-1000 word argumentative essay on any subject. I told them what concepts should be in each section and how it should be structured. And then I instructed them to “not write one single original word.” That’s right, they were required to “lift” every aspect of the paper, and if they were good, the entire paper all at once, from some other source or sources.

Word quickly spread I was requiring their papers be plagiarized. Many questioned my motives and suggested I wasn’t teaching them anything valuable. I assured them the most essential part of the lesson was the students’ discovering we are keenly aware of the difference between their writing and someone else’s.

The papers they turned in were mostly choppy and poorly structured. A few met the mark with seamless transitions and flawless sentence structure while still meeting the paper’s requirements. But a few lazy students tried to get away with turning in their own work! Can you believe it?! When I asked why they would do such a thing, they said they didn’t have time to plagiarize. Punks. Still, those who did successfully steal other people’s writing said they believe they had a better understanding of what I was looking for in an essay and they believe it made them better writers, or at least better at structuring, which is not a small thing in freshman English.

Still, the first day of every semester I read them the Plagiarism Riot Act, which is also printed clearly on my outlines:

Do not turn in anyone’s work but your own. Do not turn in someone else’s writing, answers, ideas, proposals, or bad humor; do not, as some have, turn in an article published in Time Magazine or written by Hemingway; do not, as some have, turn in work written by me; do not put quotation marks around the entire essay and declare you did give credit. If you do plagiarize, do not ask for an incomplete; do not come to class anymore; do not contact me, do not pretend you have a future. God gave you one face and you paint yourselves another by doing something stupid like quoting Shakespeare and allowing others to suppose your thoughts are original. Stop pretending you can do college level work. Stop pretending no one will notice. Stop pretending you’re anything more than howl-at-the-moon-lazy-ass-stupid.

 Go ahead and copy this and pass it along. I’d be honored

About four feet to the right of this “STAY BEHIND” sign on the ground next to the tracks at the Amtrak station are the words “YELLOW LINE.”  I found it interesting that they put them so far apart. Other people were also hanging out waiting for arriving family, so the platform was busy and all I saw was “STAY BEHIND” on the ground at the train station. The natural rebel in me looked around for schedules and destinations. Suddenly I had the urge to go somewhere, anywhere. 

I was already ticking toward fantasies of travel. Train stations do that to me; whether it was the one on Long Island where trains left for Manhattan, or the rails running near my apartment at college, or the Siberian Railroad I am currently writing about and of which I have fond memories of traveling on with my son. “Everyone loves the sound of a train the distance. Everybody knows it’s true,” aptly acknowledges Paul Simon. I’m one of them.

So I stood and wondered if there is a benefit to “Stay Behind.” On an ethereal level, it is nice sometimes to let the world keep going while we step off the wheel for a while and enjoy the moment. I heard a scientist today on the radio say how the most dangerous problem afflicting humanity today is our inability to be “in the moment;” he worried we were getting too far ahead of ourselves. Maybe if we stayed behind a bit more we might avoid the supposed progress and advancement of day to day life and actually live day to day life. So many things, after all, make things more convenient, not better. We keep mixing the two up. I “stayed behind” when I built my house in the most insignificant way, which has taken on so much more meaning. You see, I never installed a dishwasher. I simply designed the kitchen wrong and didn’t leave room for one. So for twenty years now I have been washing dishes, and the truth is it takes less time to do that than to load and unload them, uses way less energy, and allows me the satisfaction of seeing something through. I live a life where the results of my efforts often aren’t obvious for years, and even then the urge to “redo” the work is strong. But when I wash dishes I can stand back a short time later and swoosh my hand and say, “Done.” Feels good, it really does. 

I could go on about other examples of where the decision to “Stay Behind,” sometimes literally and other times metaphorically, has ended in adventures, friendships, job opportunities, and various other encounters. Even now a few examples which literally changed my life come to mind. We’ve all had those moments. But that’s not what this blog is about. 

Obviously, it is about the weather. 

There is a heat index of 118 here in Virginia Beach right now, late Thursday afternoon. The un-humidified temp is about 99. Either way there is some weather going on here. I remember it being this hot without the “index” when I lived in the Sonora Desert and my dad would say, “Yes but it is a dry heat.” A dry heat–kind of like a blow-torch. 

Still, the heat doesn’t bother me. Nor the cold. In college in western New York the freezing temperatures were tempered by the dryness, and a ten degree day might warrant a mere sweater, whereas the humidity here at the beach combined with cold temps can be to-the-bone bitter. In either case, many people simply stay inside.

But I have a strange habit which makes me want to experience and absorb every degree of the extremes: I can already feel the absence of the strong sun on my shoulders or equally the cold wind on my face, my boots crushing snow on the walk. As early as mid-July I sense summer slipping into cooler temps and changing colors. And while I might claim autumn to be my favorite season, I miss summer before it has even half over. It is as if it is the only summer that ever was and ever will be again, and I want to suck the marrow out of it, drain it of every ounce by my constant participation, let my senses explode from the enormity of the very reality of feeling summer happen. 

That’s borderline psychotic, I know. 

But listen, when it is hot we want it cooler, when cold we want it warm. When it is dark we turn on lights and when it is sunny we wear sunglasses. We constantly temper reality. I have become more interested in being deeper into reality. That’s not to say I want to stare into the sun, but honestly, that really IS where the fun is. 

Jay stands on the deck looking across the Bay to the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. Nick stands next to him, the ordeal of the city behind them, and Jay says, “Summer’s almost gone. It makes you want to reach out and just hold it back,” to which Nick replies, quite non-nonchalantly, “There’ll be other summers.” Jay seems quite satisfied with the answer and thanks Nick for the insight.

My response is different. I’d have looked at Nick and said, “Yes, but I’m not done with this one yet.” What’s next people often ponder. What is down the line? Around the bend? I can’t wait to get there, they say. I can’t wait for fall, they say. Yes, that’s true. And it is coming, regardless. For now, I’m right here, and right here has always worked very well. 

 

I no longer like butterflies. Those miserable little hyperactive buzzards flutter around like drunk scraps of tracing paper. “Oh they’re beautiful, especially the Monarchs,” everyone says. Why? Because of their colors? Their fragility? We just like things more delicate than we are. As George Carlin famously pointed out, we eat more lobsters than bunnies because bunnies are soft and furry and lobsters look like miniature monsters. No contest. Honestly, I used to love the little beauties, butterflies. I was always intrigued that the average life span is less than a year. I watched documentaries about the monarchs’ migration from northern regions of the states to the mountains of southern Mexico. I couldn’t find my way there with a map and a guide, and these little fuckers do just fine every single year. But lately I have lost interest. They’re as disturbing to me now as the flying monkeys in “The Wizard of Oz.”

And as to the “The Wizard of Oz, ” the scariest scene is not the flying monkeys, or the balls of fire the Wicked Witch of the West throws down upon the bone-dry scarecrow. It is the hour glass filled with red sand set up in the castle room with Dorothy. Such a small scene in an irritating film still affects me half a century later. “You see that?” the witch cries to the terrified Judy Garland, “That’s how much longer you have to be alive! And it isn’t long, my sweetie. It isn’t long!” This scared the crap out of me. You mean it’s that easy, I thought, to no longer exist? Someone just flips the hourglass and the sands run out? My heart raced every time the camera focused on the depleting red grains dripping through the huge timepiece.

It didn’t help that during those years my mother watched “Days of Our Lives,” and the opening sequence was always, “Like sand through the hourglass, so go the Days of Our Lives.” Whoa! Talk about depressing. I was raised saturated in this daily dose of “you’re going to die soon.” Growing up near the beach probably didn’t help; the shifting patterns of sand symbolized to me the passing of seconds and hours and days and years. And when aunts and uncles exclaimed I had an “old soul” I thought they were ordering last rites.

So some sense of urgency festered in me from quite early on. I started attacking my ambitions like I had just three weeks left before the sand ran out. When I was young, I had an outrageous list of dreams, ambitions, or “fantasies” as most others called them. One of the first brilliant ideas was doomed for failure: My friend Todd and I had been sending up rockets; the ones with a gun-powder-filled battery shoved up their tails which we bought from a hobby shop. We were getting good at this and our imagination ran away fast. This was around 1973 and I was totally into adventure. Papillon had just come out and my mind was already bent on traveling to faraway lands. Mostly, though, I was obsessed with becoming an astronaut. I knew all their names, and I had memorized every detail I could find about rockets, their speeds, thrust, history and expectations. I had a brown cpo jacket and asked my mother to sew on an American flag and a NASA patch. When we went into stores I liked to pretend people thought I must have something to do with the space program. I played it cool, of course, holding my mom’s car keys like I just got back from the Johnson Space Center. I was twelve.

Even so, Todd and I had a plan. We were going to take apart the batteries to study how they are made, and then we would make a large one that could carry one of us, me, into the clouds. We knew we would have needed a heat shield to exit the atmosphere and return—we weren’t dumb—so we planned to use a metal garbage can. We only were going to lift a few hundred feet just to show the naysayers we earned our patches. So we slowly filled a coffee can with the gun powder from several dozen batteries bought over several months. But one night Todd left the coffee can on his patio in the rain. We didn’t have enough money to buy more batteries so we tossed the plan and played baseball. A few years later I moved away and found more pragmatic plans. I am not certain, however, if I was ever so serious or energetic as I was when I thought I was going into the clouds. To me that fantasy was simply reality’s childhood.

Back then I couldn’t possibly know that eventually the most treasured content of my bucket list would be the simplest of thoughts—plans really—like lying on the floor playing Risk and Boggle with my son and sharing a bowl of pretzels while we laughed at the anxious final seconds of each round. Or the one of walking slowly through a mall with my dad, sitting on a bench reminiscing or being quiet, sitting having Scotch on Tuesday nights. I was always excited to be able to sit and watch a baseball game on television with him, neither of us saying a word. That doesn’t sound a bit like a dream for anyone’s bucket list, but it makes it into most of ours at some point. I thought of all those small moments while standing in the doorway to his room during his last days. I’d lean against the wall and stare at the paper butterfly, the universal symbol of comfort care, on the door jam.   It’s crazy how the simple moments like time together get overshadowed by fleeting ideas like skydiving and hot air ballooning.

I’m certain at some point early on in my life while listening to “Days of Our Lives” my mind turned toward adventure. I’m equally sure that my dad had a lot to do with that. Every Christmas he bought us books and for some reason, perhaps intuition, the ones he picked for me all focused on outrageous escapades. Robin Lee Graham’s The Boy Who Sailed Around the World Alone; Peter Jenkin’s A Walk Across America, Bound for Glory about Woody Guthie, Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad, and more. These were obvious influences for me, and growing up a child of the late sixties certainly added to the action. From the moment of Kennedy’s decree to reach the moon to actually reaching the moon occupied exactly my first nine years of life. Many moments in my youth lit a fire under me that still burns. This can be both exhilarating and exasperating.

Still no one ever told me I was wrong. No one ever indicated anything I suggested was a bad idea, only that it was too early, or that I was “too young.” So dreams got pushed aside, never making it to the “did that already” bucket but never really leaving the list. It took me years to realize the dreams we fill our lives with don’t necessarily play out in chronological order. I’m lucky, actually, that some chaotic appearances on my radar don’t coincide with their fruition. I learned quickly that if things don’t play out as planned to just toss them back in the bucket and let them simmer around awhile like a lottery ball.

I have only a little desire left to climb in a garbage can and light a fire under my ass, but since then biking around Ireland made the list. Or maybe I’ll just go back to Spain. And more than a few folks older than me sail the Caribbean well into their sixties. Sometimes it’s just that we take the long way. I had other bad ideas besides dying in a flaming piece of metal. There was the time my friend Tom and I were going to push a desk from Tucson to Washington, DC to point out corporate waste while people were starving to death. Even philosopher and writer Leo Buscaglia dropped us a line to wish us luck. It took us a while to realize he was being sarcastic. No good Monarch would waste his time on such nonsense, no matter how noble. Butterflies, man. Butterflies. .

Whenever my son and I would play that Boggle game, he flipped that damn hourglass with the three-minute timer and tap his finger. My anxiety level increased and my blood pressure peaked. He couldn’t know he was feeding the trauma of PTSD from some fictional witch. “In good time,” I can hear her saying. It was that threatening decree, “In good time,” that motivated me. Still, she never said “in time”; it was always, “In good time.” Exactly

NOTE: I arrived at class and the conversation turned to cell phones. I wasn’t complaining (this time) or preaching (yet). But then one of the students asked in reference to cell phones if didn’t I wish I had that kind of “advantage” when I was their age.

The following is not verbatim, obviously, since ironically no one recorded it–but here is, to the best of my recollection of the past forty-eight hours, my response:

——

Advantage? Well, I’m not sure I am happy with having it now, let alone thirty-five years ago. I’ll tell you what: I walk on the beach several days a week. I walk between six and eight miles. I usually bring my phone to talk to family while out there for a few hours, but also to take pictures of the sunrise. Some of them can be spectacular. Ha! All of them can be spectacular, and I just want to share it. Sometimes I email a picture to someone, often I post them on Facebook.

Well, this morning I left my phone in the car, by accident. I was two blocks into the walk before I realized it, but I kept going. My initial reaction was, “Oh I’d better get it! What if..” and fill in that blank however you want: someone calls, someone texts, there is an emergency, a funny comment, someone wanting or expecting a response and I don’t get to do it for hours! Unreal. You see, my generation did this all the time. We could go months without talking to someone. And we certainly could make it through the day. But I am keenly aware that your generation was born with cellphones, and all you know is this increasingly tragic umbilical world.

 But listen:

What if one day you left your phone at home and went for a long walk? Would you wonder if everything is okay? Would you keep touching your pockets, looking behind you? At the very least would you wonder the time? How long, I wonder, before you turned and went home to check your texts, your messages. You’re hooked—we all are.

But what if, if, one day you just keep walking. Not many people anymore remember what it was like to have no ability to call home anytime they wanted. We looked for payphones at gas stations. And when we finished plugging it with coins for the three minutes we bought to talk, it was barely long enough to say, “Great, everything’s going great! How is everyone? Good! Okay, I’ll talk to you next week!”

Next week. Sometimes, in college far away, next month. It is in part how we grew up, and it most definitely is how we matured.

But those three minutes, then, was enough to know everyone was fine and we could focus on what was happening around us. We were fully aware of place. We kept no records. We didn’t update anyone. No texts. No tweets. No snapshots. We were that rare state of being which is slipping into the past: solely and completely in the moment.

No phone, no internet, no messages, no voice mail, no apps, no games, no kidding—just conversation with whomever you’re with or whoever happens along. If you wanted a picture of yourself at some site, or with a friend, you stopped someone walking by and asked that person to take it—we didn’t have long sticks to hold the 35mm. But that person would be friendly, and conversations would ensue, and information about local places to go could be discovered. In fact just yesterday I walked the boardwalk and saw ample opportunity for others to ask to grab a shot of them in front of the water, the Neptune Statue at 31^st St, something with more perspective than the length of their arms. But we do that now—we are in such a meme world we don’t risk much beyond the length of our arms. Am I the only one who misses the long talks and laughter after not seeing someone for a few days and “catching up”?

I do understand the picture obsession more than I do the constant texting and phone calls or face time. Someone sent me a picture of herself that I took thirty years ago this very week. Two things happened. It made me miss that time and made me wish we had hundreds of more pictures of then, of the endless laughter of then, of the immeasurable hope of then. Yet it also made me realize how very much we were in that moment; too much to spend any time trying to capture that moment. We were too busy living it.

But back to that long walk: At the end of that long day if you did just keep walking, by bedtime, phoneless, you might miss your normal routine to lie on your back, phone in hand, and seek out information for a while. You can’t, though, because you’re tech-less, and you can’t imagine that you ever couldn’t, but you do. No worries, the world keeps spinning, friends are not diligently waiting to hear from you or have anything to report, and the news is not going away.

The next morning is harder still. You ache to know what happened over night about which you have no information all these hours later. Did someone text? Call? It’s killing you but you can’t go back now. You’ve walked too far. The anxiety, withdrawal, is real and stressful, and like giving up a blanket or a bottle each step seems endless, the day an eternity. You want to borrow someone’s phone. You want to just check real fast—find out everything is fine. And what if you did? Everything is fine, benign, most likely predictable and familiar. We crave the familiar and predictable; it falsely makes us feel safer. It is why we stay in bad relationships which become routine; it is why we stay in bad jobs which have no future but which we’ve mastered and manipulated.  

I know the arguments. And it must seem like I’m some old geezer saying, “Things were better when I was your age!” No, the advances in this world have made much of your lives infinitely more convenient than my world. No contest, and I am often thrilled that I can be a part of “what’s next” as we bullet toward tomorrow. But there is a price to pay—there is always a tradeoff—and as far as some technology is concerned that price is how you spend your time. Life can go by too fast to dish out that kind of time so consistently. Thirty years will pass faster than you can fathom, trust me. Don’t spend it looking down.

Here’s a test to see if your priorities are in order: Plan to travel for a week and tell everyone you know you will be out of touch the entire time—no calls, no texts, no emails, no matter what happens. Tell them you’ll check in when you’re back to make sure your loved ones are alive; otherwise, you’ll be meeting new people, finding cafes and maybe a motel where you’ll spend nights drinking wine and laughing with new friends from new places, and you’ll catch the sunrise without capturing it on camera. No one needs to know on a daily basis what’s going on; they’ll ask when you return. No one needs to be updated, see pictures, videos, receive OMG texts at every mountain and mystery along the way. They’ll ask when you get home.

You’re without your umbilical, untethered, freefalling into yourself absent of the consistent clicks and taps of that certain cell. We grow anxious when faced with our own thoughts without possible deflection, no technical tangent. But the anxiousness erodes and new conversations linger like lace curtains, sometimes lifting, often drifting down and raised only by the occasional wistful comment, and it is peaceful. You had forgotten “peaceful.” You maybe never learned just how to be full of peace.

But it isn’t so silent, is it, this peacefulness? This ironic disconnection links you to those nearby, groups you with others looking up, talking about the places you’ve been, talking about the possibilities. Talk about unplugged! Most of the time you talk about life and how far you might reach and the truth is you can’t reach out and grasp something if you’re holding anything. We do that though, we want to reach for more but not let go of what we’ve got. “If I put this down,” we say, “I might lose touch with what I know.”

Okay, lecture over. The old man is done preaching to the younger plugged in population. But listen: take a deep breath. Take a moment. Take, for instance, that time you sat by the water at the north end of the beach and a couple caught you staring at the trees near the houses and they told you of an area filled with Spanish moss over walking trails just a few miles off the beach. “Lived here for eighteen years,” you say, “And never knew that.” If you were looking down, they never would have said a thing. You know they wouldn’t. But the absence of such a small device can dial up the most spontaneous connections.

Really, you get used to this simplicity, this absence of noise, of interruption, of course you do. Find out what it is like to walk with empty hands and touch the world, what it was like to listen to nothing at all. At night those hands hold wine and bread and you hear tales of the day. We tell stories out loud, and we listen to stories and share moments, out loud, and we live, as much as possible, out loud. In this way, every single conversation is different. Every single shared sunset is different. And we come to have a sense of the senses.

And the biggest difference between your generation and mine is that you would have no possible way of knowing that the most important moments cannot, cannot, cannot be captured by the most efficient technology. Sometimes you need to be away from someone to understand just how close you can be.

Everyone you’ve ever known is at your fingertips. And you don’t even realize how that might keep you from growing.

Now turn your phones off. Let’s talk about Whitman.