Back to this wilderness.

It occurred to me one day on my porch while staring at the surrounding woods, that at some point less than one hundred years ago none of those trees were there. The land has beautiful eighty foot oaks, some maples, tall thin pines and various other hardwoods including black walnut trees, which I am told can provide the ingredient necessary in the liqueur, Wild Spiced Nocino.

The branches protect birds as diverse as red-tailed hawks, downy woodpeckers, and countless chickadees, and they are habitat to other wildlife including one flying squirrel we spotted a few years ago when his tree fell. The squirrel was fine and found a new home in a white oak.

But a hundred years ago this was just land, sandy land, edged by the running Rappahannock River and backed by equally treeless farmland. A century before that these nearby plantations provided food for the region at the expense of slavery, and some slave descendants remain, selling vegetables at food carts out on the main road, or working the bay as watermen, telling stories about how the Chesapeake is just about farmed clean every season by crabbers at the mouth or the headwaters leaving nothing left for those working the midland shoals.

This area hasn’t changed much in one hundred years.

It is like this everywhere, the coming and going of things. In Manhattan a few hundred years before the wild construction on bedrock, coyote and deer were common. It was hilly (Manhattan means land of hills), and where the United Nations stands once stood grand oaks. The Lower West side was a sandy beach, and ecologists say if left to do what it wanted, most of the upper west side would be covered in trees and vines, shrubbery and wildflowers inside twenty years.

I can’t imagine what my house would look like if left untouched. When I don’t mow the lawn for a few weeks it looks like a refuge for timber wolves.

But these trees weren’t here a century ago and I sat on my porch and wondered if there had been other trees or if this land was barren, or was it used by the Powhatans, or was it home to some former slave family, or just a dumping ground. Evidence is scarce, buried beneath the roots of this small forest.

This happens to me everywhere I lived; I like to imagine what was on that spot one hundred, two hundred, a millennium earlier. The house I rented in Pennsylvania was used as a hospital during the civil war. Before that it was a farm. Now it is a Real Estate office. The maples which lined the road and shaded the living room are gone. Someone planted new ones but it will be decades before they mature. My house in Massachusetts was a fish market a century earlier. Purpose moves on with time. Maybe that’s why I’m so mesmerized by the Prague hotel I always stay at. It was the same building seven hundred years ago that it is now. But here on my porch I realize this house is the only place in my life I’ve lived for twenty years, and I was curious if five times that score of years ago I could sit on this spot and see right out on the water, or were there trees then as well, different ones which died or were timbered to make room for crops.

The house is made from western pine forested on land which I assume is either now empty of trees or filled with young pines waiting to become log homes. What will be left a hundred years from now? Will someone sit on this same porch and look right out toward the bay once these oaks have long fallen? I know this house, this land, is a “hotel at best” as Jackson Browne despondently points out. “We’re here as a guest.”

Wow. Wrote myself into some sad corner there. Thanks Jackson.

I know nothing is as permanent as nature, despite the constant changes. It simply isn’t going anywhere. We are. So I like to remember that a century ago farmers sat here and talked about the bounty in the soil, or talked to 19^th century watermen about the changing tides. And I like to realize that a hundred years before that the nearby swampland, now home to so many osprey and egrets, was a major route for runaway slaves. They’d have been safe in these woods, if there were woods then.

I like to do that because it reminds me a hundred years from now perhaps I will have left some sort of evidence of my passing through; even if just in the cultivation of language, the farming of words.

So I sit on the porch and listen to the wind through the leaves. It is now; it is right here, now. Sometimes at night we stand in the driveway with the telescope and study Saturn, or contemplate the craters on the moon—both here long before us and in some comforting way, long after we’re gone.

In spring and fall the bay breezes bring music even Vivaldi would envy, and I’ll listen to his Four Seasons, written nearly four hundred years ago, and listen to the wind through the leaves of these majestic, young trees reaching eighty feet high, and be completely, perfectly in the moment.

Despite the warming trends, the extreme tendencies of weather, the fragile ecosystem which sustains life, nature is still the only place I have found that really doesn’t change. It never has. Ice ages and dust bowls will alter it, but eventually some seed will take root.

 

How long is six months? Well, obviously, logically speaking it is simple math. But we have philosophy to consider, and that just messes everything up.

Six months is, in this case, 182 days, or 4368 hours. I can prove this; I counted. But it is not how I have perceived these six months. When a child moves from one year to eighteen months old, we are excited by the new date: “He is eighteen months old today!” we exclaim to questioning gawkers. But at fifty-five I don’t say, “Well, actually I’m fifty-five and a half today.” Six months means so much more on the edges of life than it does in the middle.

When I am entirely in the moment–focused and engaged–time is irrelevant. I couldn’t tell you if an hour passed or a week. It is only when I think about it that the laws of relativity engage. I would like a life where I remain completely in each moment. My “String Theory” is to have a string of those moments, from cradle to grave. If you think about  it, though, you can’t do it. Perception is an unfriendly conspirator in linear time.

It was a Wednesday night, six months ago, about eight thirty, and I just had finished teaching creative writing. The winter which passed since that Wednesday seemed to be milder than previous years. There were some cold days, and I remember a stretch in January when we needed to let the faucet drip upstairs, but mostly it was fine, the ground never too frozen.

And now looking around, it occurs to me the trees are not much different now than they were six months ago, the borders of two seasons, one going and one coming back, separated by mostly bare branches and plowed fields. Even the fairways at the golf course are the same half-brown, half-green as back then; this time the green is on the way in instead of on the way out, and life is returning in the rough. October and April are first cousins.

Six months in my professional world is more than one entire semester, which collegiately is akin to a completed project. We start, we meet everyone, we develop relationships, we advise and have meetings, grade and test, encourage and withdraw, come to a climax of exams and projects culminating in final grades and, for some, graduation; and then we start again—all within six months.

Excuse me for this but I “wikied” Time. Here’s what it said: “Time is the indefinite continued progression of existence and events that occur in apparently irreversible succession from the past through the present to the future.”

“Apparently.”

As usual, Wikipedia is only partly right. That’s a fine explanation of linear time. Thanks. But it doesn’t account for emotion or recollection. I’m talking about perception. I learned much about our perception of time  just by spending some with my father. A round of golf, for instance, went much faster when we played well than when we didn’t. Watching  baseball games on television wasn’t unlike being held hostage; they seemed to last so long. But when we showed up at Shea, the game passed in minutes. And two fingers of Scotch can somehow simultaneously last forever and disappear without noticing. It all depends, and that is what’s cool about time–it is much less scientific than it appears.

“All our sweetest hours fly fastest,” wrote Virgil. No kidding.

I didn’t see someone for twenty-three years and then one day I did, and it was as if no time at all had passed. This morning I spoke to a colleague and I thought I aged a decade just standing there. Perception.

If someone gives up cigarettes or alcohol for six months, it is a major achievement.

If someone has a new job for six months he or she is still suspect.

And in love: “They only knew each other six months” is diametrically opposed to “You mean you’ve not spoken for six months?!”

Six months isn’t always six months. Sometimes measurement is pointless.

The Mets won the National League pennant that night, 182 days ago, that Wednesday. Six months later we are well into the opening month of the baseball season, which six months from now will be over and we will have a new World Series champion. The half year to the next World Series seems so much further away than the six months since the last one, or is that just me?

It was 76 degrees that day with an evening low of 45. Fall was holding off as long as possible. I taught creative writing that night, finishing about eight-thirty.

A student commented it was too early to end, and I agreed, then left.

A doctor I know said the passing of time is also relative to experience. For an elderly person whose schedule has changed drastically due to retirement, less sleep, fewer or more frequent visits from friends or family, the perception of time fluctuates. If someone needs to use the bathroom more often, to that person it is not understood to be more frequent but instead the “time between trips to the bathroom” passed so much faster. If someone’s eyesight is diminishing along with slower brain function, it isn’t the eyes that have trouble with twilight, but how much faster night arrived than it used to.

Add to that the absolute reality that when we miss someone it seems so much longer since we have seen him. It is all perception. That’s what sucks about time: as an objective process it is relatively persistent and dependable. Relentless, in fact. I can tell you the definitive truth about how long it will take for six months to pass. But I can’t begin to measure what it will feel like.

Why does six months from now seem so much further away than six months ago? I suppose time recedes quicker than it approaches. Anticipation has a lot to do with that, and regret. They so work against each other. “I wish I could have” implies something happened, still fresh and recent, and we missed the chance to say or do or try something. However, “I can’t wait until” implies some event seems like it will never get here.

Maybe time isn’t linear after all. We can manipulate time by recalling just the right moment, smelling some fragrance, hearing the right song—they bring us right back, right there. You can’t slap that into an equation. Measuring how we experience time means allowing for some x-factor, be it love, or fear, or loss, which renders the numbers pointless.

Six months? It was yesterday. It was a lifetime ago.

“The secret of life is enjoying the passing of time” –James Taylor

 

 

I owned an ’85 burgundy, 5-speed, fuel-injected, three-door, turbo charged Dodge Lancer. We called it the POS. It was the car I used to bring garbage to the dump, carry bricks and wood, and haul crap without caring. I kept it clean but didn’t worry if it wasn’t. We’d find driftwood and toss it in the back, sand and shells and all. We spent countless hours driving to the beach, the ice cream parlor, the auto repair shop. My son practically grew up in that car, learned music from its cassette deck, held up the felt on the falling roof so I could see where we were going. I drove him to school in that thing well into third grade.

We all remember our cars.

My first was my dad’s ’72 Nova, which wasn’t mine but I racked up the miles on it for him as good sons do. My first car I drove when I lived on my own was a 1980 light blue, Chevy Monza. That little thing and I saw the United States a few times, smuggled blankets out of Mexico and Molson’s out of Canada. We spun out down an icy hillside in Massachusetts and I ended up junking it in Pennsylvania when the engine blew out. I was driving all of a friend’s belongings from my house to her mom’s when that happened. I think that’s when I started understanding metaphor. In fact, to this day metaphor drives my writing life. It comes from cars.

My favorite was a red Jeep Cherokee five speed. I abused that car the way jeeps should be abused, and it lasted far longer than I treated it. It is the car I think of when I hear Paul Simon singing, “If more of my homes had been more like my cars, I probably wouldn’t have traveled so far.” Those were good times, windows open, radio blasting. There was the time I was stranded in the desert with a dead battery a hundred miles from a tree. Or when for several years the gas gauge on the Jeep was backwards. In forty years I went from fitting everything I own in the trunk to needing a U-Haul just to go away for the weekend. I can think of very few objects I’ve owned that symbolized “freedom” more than my cars.

One day when Michael was small and we were in the POS we drove over a pothole at a sub shop parking lot. The chassis slammed hard and made a crumbling sound like folding metal. I tried to back up and it refused. A friend pushed me out and I drove home thinking whatever was wrong righted itself.

No. In fact, I couldn’t go backwards for the next eighteen months.

I learned to look for a pull through. I’d park far away at the mall, grocery stores or work. I learned to anticipate what was next so as not to corner myself, or worse, find myself with my face against the wall. I learned patience. Only three times in a year and a half I found myself trapped. The first was at Old Dominion University when arriving for a night class and the parking lot was full save one spot against a pole. I paused and asked my friend if he wanted to push me in then or push me out later.

I learned what roads I couldn’t turn down, what tight situations might be waiting, when to find a slope to roll back down, when to walk. A cop once pulled me over for pushing a yellow light. He let me go but stood and waited for me to leave first, but I had stopped in front of a sign and for the second time I couldn’t back up when I needed to. He waited. I waited. Finally, I said, “Wow Officer, my heart is still racing and I’m tired. I think I’ll sit here a minute and compose myself.” He left.

It was after the third time that I junked the car—excuse me—donated it to Good Will. I had to get it inspected and went to a shop where I know the mechanic, Tuna. Honest to God his name is Tuna. I didn’t want to tell Tuna about my inability to back up, obviously, since I refused to buy a new transmission, and I realized I was screwed when he pointed me into the one car bay with no way out but back.

In Virginia, an inspector’s first task is to scrape the old sticker off the windshield, so while he scraped I called, “Hey Tuna, it’s the last day of the month so I know you’ll be swamped, go ahead and put the lights on while you’re in there.”

“Good idea, Bob!”

I called out. “Okay. Brakes? Good. Left signal? Good. Right signal? Good,” and found myself doing my own state inspection. “Reverse” No white lights lit up, of course. “Good!” We finished that part and he finished the rest, put on a new sticker and asked for ten dollars. I gave him a twenty and said, “Tuna, I need a five, four ones, three quarters, two dimes, and five pennies.”

“Sure Bob,” he said and headed to the store in the front of the shop. When the shop door slammed I got in the car, threw it in neutral, got out, heaved it over the red tire lifts onto the gravel lot, jumped on the brakes until the POS was far enough back to go forward. Tuna came out and I held my side gasping for breath. “You must be in a hurry!” he said handing me my change. I drove off wondering what was next.

Seems like back then I was always wondering what was next.

The following day I drove Michael to school. We listened to music while he held up the roof. He grabbed his bag, got out and waved as I rolled forward, moving on, and realized the truth is we rarely have a reason to go backwards anyway.

 

 

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

We are not alike.

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

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

We obviously address frustration differently, which makes me wonder how we ended up this way. Would Monastery-Bob and Professor-priest keep their temperaments in tack? If I lived on a mountain in prayer would I be less likely to want to kill the cashier for not being able to multi-task?

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I suppose,” he said, calming down.

“Why?”

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

“You get confused?”

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

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

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

Bring the peace, Bob. Bring the peace.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bringing peace to an otherwise hostile environment is a difficult task. Maybe that’s why I, too, often avoid the challenge and wander down country roads, watch the water ebb and flow rather than the anxiety. It’s why I don’t drive during rush hour, avoid fast food restaurants and box store checkout lines. Hell, maybe I’ll just start giving everyone A’s so less people will call me bad names.

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

 

 

I fell through the ice on a frozen lake in northern Norway in March of ‘95. It was two in the morning, twenty below, and I followed two friends across the snowy ice toward a road on the other side. I heard the ice crack and I stood still, a green band of aurora borealis bent just above us, and I stood still like Wile E. Coyote—suspended for just a moment listening to the ice crack—and thought, “oh, wow, shit,” and went through.

I landed just about ten inches below the surface on another ice shelf. I stood just deep enough for frigid water to cover and fill my boots about calf-high. I waited for the next crack when Joe turned and we froze in fear of us both plunging into the lake. This wasn’t the first time I’d walked on thin ice, but previous mishaps were mostly metaphorical—pissing off my parents, trying to pass a class, trying to cross borders with contraband. I stood with icy feet; my heart pounded in my chest ready to plunge into my stomach when the ice again cracked. Nothing.

Our friend John turned and laughed. “It’s day melt,” he said, ahead of us by twenty feet, already on the shore. “The surface ice melts a bit each day then freezes at night, but it’s thin. That’s what we were walking on. The second layer you landed on is probably six feet thick.”

“Why didn’t you go through?” I asked, John was six two and not a light man.

“I was first,” he said. “I loosened it for you.”

I sloshed to shore, took off my socks, and stood at the end of a fjord when across a field six moose stood taller than us all. I put my boots back on and watched the moose move toward us. They were bull-like, each one heavier than the three of us combined. The night was still, and the air was calm. To the north lay nothing but wilderness for a thousand miles; the Arctic Circle sat a hundred miles south. This was as close to sacred ground as I ever got. I was soaked in below zero temperatures, green bands of borealis bent above my head, the moose moved toward us, and I never felt so awake, like sleep wasn’t part of the Human idea, like caffeine was a tranquilizer. Awake. The northern lights lingered like they were in water, as if the the sky was submerged and the green bands couldn’t bend faster than the deep blue flow would allow, and we floated between. The moose moved closer. I held my breath. Two leaped just beyond our reach and bounced over the ice with absolute grace.

That moment, right then, will never go away.

I’ve been lucky to have had many such moments—the tram at Lake Baikal in Siberia, just about any day in Spain, the sunrise in Tucson, just about any evening at the river. We rise every morning and gaze at life around us, but how often are we awake, I mean completely and blatantly alive?

Studies tell us that most of us sleep a third of our lives and most of us work a third of our lives. And now at my age with hopefully about a third of my life left, I’d like to spend as much of what amounts to one third of that third being fully awake before the ground falls beneath my feet.

 

 

 

 

b

 

 

 

I cut off a lady in the parking lot at Food Lion this morning, and it reminded me of an article I wrote several years ago about obesity. Knowing Michelle Obama’s drive to eradicate obesity in children, I sent it to her. This is the First Lady’s response:

The instigation for the original article was a trip to Starbucks. Some dusty pre-teen kid in triple x clothes asked his mom for a second brownie, chocolate milk and a donut–and she obliged. The boy bulleted about Starbucks for fifteen minutes while his mom sucked down a second frappe of some sort, then he collapsed on the floor near her feet and stretched out, forcing customers to portage around him. And I wondered very simply: How is this not child abuse? How is it possible that she can get in serious trouble for giving him cigarettes but nothing can be done when she pumps pounds of sugar into his bloodstream, heart, and kidneys, likely leading to diseases including diabetes, heart disease, and kidney failure. So I wrote the article, sent it to Mrs. O who read it and subsequently wrote me back pushing her plan to eliminate junk food from schools everywhere. Good idea, I thought, but flawed.

Years ago I worked at a health club where we reminded members at the end of a vigorous one hour workout that they always have two choices: They can give in to temptation or avoid it by reminding themselves of their ultimate goals. Not easy at all, of course. But how hard is it to say, “No, Son, if you eat that you’ll be gross and you might die.” I’m guessing Starbuck’s Mom didn’t want to listen to him whine, though eventually that happened as well anyway because for fifteen minutes he complained of stomach aches.

The owner of the health club was good at helping people lose weight. The best. He had a simple trick when it came to food: Ask yourself every time you’re going to eat something, “Is this a good idea or a bad idea?” As simple-minded as that sounds, it works. The problem, of course, is getting the answer wrong. It is easy to say, “This is a good idea because if I don’t have just a little chocolate I’ll binge!” or “Seriously, I read online that eating four Snickers Bars a day actually helps.” But all things being equal the constant good-bad question can work well, especially if you allow yourself three “bad ideas” a week. That’ll give you something to look forward to, assuming you don’t use up all three during one episode of Breaking Bad.

But a bigger issue looms in this wilderness of ours which turns bad parenting into a symptom instead of a cause: Limited Vision.

Some punk in a jacked-up pickup rode my ass for three miles on a narrow country road last week. I suppose I made the situation worse when I slammed on the brakes not caring so much if he rammed my ass. That might have been wrong. Just as wrong as coming as close as he could because his mono-syllabic brain can’t handle complicated thoughts like driving and pinching some chew at the same time. I should have thought through the bad idea/good idea thing and pulled over, swallowed my right to be on the road at all, and let him race on to whatever bar awaited him. My inconvenience would have been limited, my discontent over within seconds. Instead, we played this game for three miles until we reached the four lane. To be fair I had nothing better to do anyway and going ten miles an hour allowed me to watch the birds fly from tree to tree.

But we do this all the time: We decide to address an immediate problem even if it creates a bigger problem later, and all along we ignore the underlying issue which created the initial problem to begin with. My need to get this guy off my ass by braking could have created all sorts of bad situations, not the least of which might have been a bullet in my back in this rural, gun collecting, hunters paradise we call home. Likewise, the enabler mom has created an obese child with a future of complaining, food bills, medical bills and most likely being bullied. In both cases we weren’t thinking ahead.

It happened again the other day when some Earnhardt wannabe rode my tail, but this time I pulled over and let him go and he waved as he went by. Maybe he didn’t realize how close he was. Maybe I didn’t realize he wasn’t so close. Maybe he was late for the doctors, or the airport. I have no idea, but by braking I clearly would have created more problems for both of us. It is just like deciding not to eat another brownie. It really is.

The problem with Mrs. Obama’s plan is it attacks a symptom instead of the cause. The problem isn’t healthy food versus junk food. The problem is decision making ability. Yes children should be eating better, and yes it is a good idea to limit the junk food in schools, and of course parents should do what is right instead of what just keeps the kid quiet. But the solution is for everyone to learn the downside of immediate gratification and the benefits of long-term gain, even if it means sacrifice–or pulling over, or letting the kid scream. Making the right decision doesn’t mean solving “a” problem, it means avoiding new ones as well. The solution to a problem should not create a new problem. Positive actions can have all sorts of negative results. Simply, removing the bad choices will not solve the problem in the long run.

Which is why this is actually about the lady at Food Lion this morning.

I saw a spot open up in the parking lot and shot into it from the aisle, not realizing she had been waiting for the spot from the other direction. My fault. This has happened to me before. I was about to pull back out and give an apologetic wave when she was already out of her car and banging on my trunk. I rolled my window down as she approached the side of the car still yelling. I yelled back, “Are you out of your mind?!?! You could be shot! You have no idea if I’m some psychotic killer just out of prison or what! You don’t know I don’t have a gun, a knife or a baseball bat! Get back in your car you idiot! It is a SPOT! I didn’t see you. I apologize. I’ll pull out and you can have it.”

She looked terrified. Good. It never crossed her mind to simply find another spot and let jackass me have that one. She saw the decision as “one spot and two cars.” In the meantime other cars waited behind her Mercedes, now sitting alone with the door open, fresh for some carjacker. She quickly returned to the car and drove off. I doubt she’ll do that again. Instead of seeing it as a “that spot is mine but he got it” situation, we both could have looked around at the dozens of other spots available. Likewise, Mrs. Obama should be able to place a plate of junk food and a plate of healthy food in front of junior high students and instead work on their decision-making ability.

For the record, I’m writing this at Starbucks, sucking on a chocolate chip frappe and a chocolate croissant. My suggestions are theories, folks, just theories.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

My father enjoyed telling the story of how when I was young, despite going to a number of different teachers who didn’t know each other in several different elementary schools, each teacher wrote the same thing on my report card: “Robert pays too much attention to the people around him in class.” I could say I was bored. I could make a case they all kept repeating themselves and “honest to God I heard them the first time.” I could claim I was multi-tasking. But the truth is I am easily distracted. Several teachers said I needed everything repeated two times before I understood. It was Mr. Kingston in fifth grade who took me aside and said, “You’re doing fine, Robert,” for the first time. I told him I make a lot of mistakes and he said, “Compared to who?”

Compared to who? Forty-six years ago and I never forgot that, so at least I remembered something from Timber Point Elementary School. Still, I’ve packed on a plethora of mistakes since then.

A Russian nun once prayed for me for ten minutes at the Shrine of St Xenia. Then she gave me a piece of bread from the top of the sarcophagus and asked if I liked it. I wanted to say yes, I enjoyed her blessed bread, but my weak language skills kicked in and I told her, “I love you and lust for your black God.”

It is odd making mistakes in a foreign language. Oh, there’s more:

I wanted to ask a cab driver where a bathroom was but ended up saying I like to drink dark beer from a toilet.

I had already gulped what I thought was water when my esophagus discovered the burning effects of bad Vodka.

I told someone I thought was a waitress who turned out to be a prostitute what I thought was “yes I could use a few minute to think” which turned out to be “yes I’d absolutely love oral sex.”

I told a room full of students whom I needed to listen that they should all get their suitcases.

I pulled out a chair for a lady and told her to heel.

I asked for five sandwich rolls and walked out with fifty. No fish.

A friend of mine wearing his priest’s collar wanted to tell the waitress he would like some mayonnaise and ended up saying, “I love to masturbate.”

Some friends went to buy coffee. The world for sugar is “Suga” but the word for bitch is “Suka.” They returned exclaiming, “Don’t ask for sugar in your coffee in Russia, Dude; they’re assholes about it.”

I could go on but more or less by screwing up I learned to fit in, pick up the nuances of accent and syllables, which brought down prices at the flea market, brought out their best Georgian wine, and opened gates to closed graveyards and monasteries.

At the back of one church, in the rubble of what was and would eventually again be St Catherine’s Catholic Church, a woman stood looking for a priest I knew. She seemed confused and we talked a bit—slowly of course. Her mother had been the secretary of the church before the revolution seventy-five years earlier. She needed to see the father. In my weak Russian I determined the woman told me she had a huge cross to bear because of the horrors of communism for all those decades and wanted the priest to take the sins away from her, but when Fr. Frank appeared with sharper language skills than mine, his translation was somewhat more significant. She had outside with her the original cross for the church dating back hundreds of years, which her mother had taken when the Bolsheviks took control after World War One, and which her mother had buried in the yard at their dacha where it remained for seventy-five years. She thought it was time to return it.

My mistake.

Back at home and much more recently I showed my students how to present a paper using the guidelines from the Modern Language Association. I gave them copies, I presented another example on the outline, I asked them to open their books to the appropriate example in the text, and still forty percent of them did it completely wrong. Is that a mistake? Is that boredom? Distraction? Idiocy? I like to think they are overwhelmed and go home kicking themselves for doing something wrong that was so easy to get right, but I’m probably wrong. A few years ago I would have returned to a class like that and lectured them about how their priorities are screwed up; I would have told them that if they can’t get the easy stuff done they’ll never handle the challenges as they attempt to move up the collegiate ladder. I would have used the appropriate sarcasm  with a touch of professorial belittling attitude.

But last January I was driving through the Pennsylvania countryside on my way to western New York on a Sunday morning when I heard a guest on a talk show quote St. Bernard of Clairvaux who said we need to learn to make excuses for other people.

We need to learn to make excuses for other people.

To drive the point home, a few days later a friend of mine posted a video of an impatient man leaving his house one morning pissed off at everyone on his way to the coffee shop and to work. At some point someone gives him glasses. The day rewinds and he leaves his house again, but this time the glasses allow him to see other people’s reasons for their actions and the world changes.

See other people’s reasons and the world changes.

Like the student who came in late because her husband is stationed in Iraq and she got to talk to him that afternoon. The one who left early has a dying father. The one who couldn’t get the presentation correct no matter how hard he tried has never been the same since returning from war. The one who stared at me the entire class without blinking an eye, then left, only to email me later an apology, that she wasn’t concentrating, that she had just learned her cousin was shown on television in Baghdad, dead and left swinging from a bridge. I teach in a different environment here in the military rich resort of Virginia Beach. We learn to make excuses for other people.

St. Francis de Sales said, “Never confuse your mistakes with your value.”

On the other hand, sometimes we really can be lazy assed bark-at-the-moon stupid. I do it all the time. Make no mistake about that.

 

 

I eat almonds, wild berries, and artichokes. I consume legumes, fiber, and almost always avoid fast food. Last night, I passed on New York style Pizza, the thin kind where oil drips off a folded slice, and there’s just enough cheese to cover the sauce. You know the kind. When I was young we used to bring home the coveted white box, held hot in the passenger seat, that most unique smell, combination of crust and toppings, filling the car making everyone hungry. Then we’d pull the slices apart, glad for the way the pizza guy slammed the round blade onto the pie and spun it four times to make the slices even. In college sometimes I’d order an entire small pie for myself and sit and watch the game, drinking ice cold coke. Life is too short not to enjoy food.

Still, last night I passed on the slice my friend kindly offered. Instead I ate a plate of lettuce which looked a lot like weeds I pulled from the garden and tossed onto the overturned lid of a metal can to carry into the woods, only this had oil and vinegar. You see, I’m not trying to lose weight, though I should; and I’m not trying to save my heart from heavy foods, though, there too, I really must pay more mind. What I’m trying to do is act my age. Guys like me, you see, those for whom the graph in the shape of a pie is about two-thirds colored in, have to spread out the years a bit more, make it last, like butter on a toasted bagel.

Sometimes I feel like I’m trying to make it to the end of the day before something bad happens. I’m not a negative person, but I live in a negative world, what with the monsoon of bad news from every outlet. I don’t remember feeling this way as a kid. I remember picking up trash and thinking at that moment everyone in the world was picking up trash. That applied to all aspects of my innocent existence. My generation entered the mid-twentieth century as the younger-half of the greatest generation gap in American history with the idealistic sense we would make the world bomb free, pollution free, nuclear waste free. We were the tree-hugging, turtle-friendly, whale-watching, love-thy-enemy generation. I have great respect for naiveté and ignorance.

We “flew our fists high in the air.” But the world remained the same.

Last month I sat on the flatbed table in the doctor’s office and he listened to my heart.

“You eating right?” he asked.

“Sure.”

“How about exercise? Are you getting enough?”

“Absolutely.”

“You really shouldn’t eat pizza so much you know.”

“Hey, when I was in college I ate it all the time.”

“Yes, and now you’re at the doctor’s office being asked if you are getting enough exercise.”

I went outside into the grey morning sun and sat in the car.That conversation made me hungry. It was a beautiful day out, though, and I really thought about going for a run. With or without exercise, most of us live roughly the same length of time, give or take a dozen years. Most of us are roughly the same height give or take, possess a small variety of features like eye or hair color, have nearly identical operating systems for intake and evacuation, and suffer cold and heat, pain and comfort, desire and illness roughly the same.

So what separates us from each other? I wondered as I drove off to find a Duck’s Custom Made Donuts. My dad’s was a generation of “doers.” Survive the depression; fight the Nazi’s, build a house and raise a family. They took the punches and kept moving forward. My students’ generation waits for things to happen. Through no fault of their own, they are raised in a paranoid, post 911 world where you never know when the next shoe is going to drop, but based upon the news, reality shows, games, friends, and social media, it is going to drop.

But mine is the Earth Day generation. We were going to clean up the world; we stood together anti-nuke, anti-oppression, anti-war, pro-environment, pro-animals’ rights, pro-conservation dreamers with an absolute conviction we would be successful. We had Dylan. We had Chavez. We had time.

Two dollars and fifty cents for a friggin’ donut. This is insane. I paid the woman and took my small, custom-made lunch to an empty park and wondered why no one was outside playing. “Are you getting enough exercise?” the doctor asked. I finished eating and got on the slide. Yeah, sure I am, I thought, and slid right down to the bottom with ease then threw my trash in the can.

I think I’ll adopt a highway; get myself a yellow vest, orange garbage bags and a spear.

 

 

I own a porcelain cup made in Russia in 1896. It is about four inches tall, white porcelain interior with blue and red markings. On the side is the seal of Czar Nicholas II and Alexandra, and “1896,” the date of his coronation. A friend of mine in St. Petersburg gave it to me. The “coronation cups” were made for the occasion to be filled with beer and passed out to the masses of people outside the Kremlin walls so the peasants could celebrate along with the aristocracy. The military training field where half a million people gathered for the souvenirs of cups and various food and clothing items was already a dangerous place to walk for all the trenches and mud pits. But things quickly went south when a rumor spread that each cup had gold in it and there were not nearly enough of them to go around. The stampede left over 1700 people trampled to death. The cup became known as the “cup of sorrow,” so called by Alexandra herself, but it is more often referred to as the “cup of blood,” and the tragedy seemed a bad sign for things to come during the reign of the last Czar. I own one of only five hundred or so made.

As the Raiders of the Lost Arc character, French archeologist Renee Belloch, notes, “We are simply passing through history; this is history.” When I hold the cup in my hands and turn it over I wonder which guard, swarmed by people, handed it out, which peasant held it in her hands. I turn it over and realize the likelihood it was stepped on in the mud, or smuggled away quickly by some young worker who managed to escape the tragedy. It is one thing to listen to a history lecture about the event, and something else entirely to go to the Kremlin and hear the tour guide explain the events as you look out over the parking lots and office buildings on the once barren land, and imagine the droves of Russians pushing for the gates, their comrades crushed just for the cup, this cup.

I am not a history buff by any means, though I have toured many historical sites around the world. My own sister earned a doctorate in history from Notre Dame. Her husband, too, received his Ph.D. from there and is a leading historian at Temple University, author of countless award-winning works about military history, and it isn’t unusual to see his familiar face pop up on the history channel as commentator. Even my father knew so much about history he could have taught it in college, and in school he won a history award.

Me, not so much.

But I am a hands on guy fascinated by items that survived time and war and neglect. I need an object, a talisman of sorts, to bring history to life. When I hold the cup, my mind wonders what they were talking about before the stampede, what music were they listening to, was it an exciting time or, because of the conflicts already underway throughout the empire, was it subdued and the cup distribution simply a brief diversion. Who made the cups? For me, owning one is a way to reach through a rabbit hole and pull out some 19^th century reality. Though I suppose it might also be considered moronic to have it in my possession and I should probably sell the damn thing on Ebay.

The irony is I have made so many trips to Russia for the purpose of experiencing culture that I became heavily steeped in history by virtue of immersion. Russians are deeply rooted in their tragic and beautiful past. In Prague it is the same. There, I stay in a building built almost 700 years ago and dine in former bomb shelters as well as a wine cellar used by Charles the IV in the 1300’s. I have no interest in reading about those times. I like to be in the present, walk the same hallways with someone like my brother-in-law to tell me what happened while I half listen and half focus on the immaculate trajectory of time, like an arrow, like a beam of light, like a falling star. Time remains relentless, and I like to hold the cup in Russia or lean against a wall in Prague, or sit in a pew in a Spanish chapel prayed in by Charlemagne and contemplate the immediate reality that we are on the same line, standing between them and what’s next, isolating this moment. I am nobody, to be sure, but I am here, part of the conspiracy to keep those ages alive. Time can be like a relay that way. Observers grab the events of the past and pass them along to whoever’s next, and on. But while my sister and her husband are direct descendants of Herodotus, I like to consider myself the descendant of the barkeep who served up some honey mead for the evening gatherers who stood around and told stories and tried to pick up eunuchs.

History would be well served to have a bartender’s version as well as a scholar’s. We could bypass the normal reference material like dates and plans and titles and influences, and keep track of what they really thought, their insecurities, their ambitions. Who wouldn’t want to pour another hekteus of wine and listen to Aristotle rattle on about which Sophocles play bored him to death and which sent him reeling to his corner table after intermission to contemplate the center of the universe? What tender stood by with the bottle of chianti that got Galileo hammered, relegating him to the courtyard at three am on his drunk ass with a dizzy head, and as he lay on his back he looked up at the stars and thought, “Whoa, hang on here.”

I think I’ll let the others write history. Instead, I’m heading to this small oyster shack I know and have a dozen Old Salts and sit in the same place oystermen sat while Teddy Roosevelt was pounding up San Juan Hill, and I’ll talk to some fisherman about changes in the tides, and how some Bay islands used to be so much larger, before the storm of ’33, and before the one in ’03, and if you paddle out to them at low tide and work your way through the mud, you can still find hundred-year-old hand crafted beams, and abandoned hand-made traps. When I was a child on Long Island, we would find arrowheads. The Native American culture on the Island wasn’t solely history lessons in school books; it was lying around in the sand and marshes of the south shore.

If I drink enough at the oyster shack, I might stumble out to the patch of grass on the river and fall on my back and stare up at the stars and think about Galileo and Copernicus and who else lay still in the quiet of night, the faint sound of water lapping the shore nearby, and watched Orion’s belt loosen, or the Pleiades spread out like buck shot. Then I might go back inside and sit a few stools down from the cook sitting alone on the corner stool, and lean toward the tender and ask, “So what’s his story?”

 

There was the time Renee and I stopped to have lunch at a restaurant in a Mexican village. While we were eating I noticed a woman staring at us. I figured she just appreciated seeing other Americans in the place, but she didn’t look away. A few minutes later she came to our table, laughing excitedly. She was Renee’s babysitter back in their small western New York town.

These things happen. Right place, right time.

Then there was the time two friends from high school came to one of my readings. I’d not seen them in thirty-five years, yet they stood there as if neither aged all that much. Later when we sat talking I asked if they lived on mountaintops. They both said no so I said then it doesn’t make sense, them not aging all that much.

(Physics sidebar: time goes slower the higher you are. Time is measured at sea level, so someone on top of K-2 would take longer to get all the way around. Think of a track around a football field. The person on the very outside lane [the mountain top] will take much longer and travel farther than the one on the inside lane, which is the one used for measuring. These two women from high school looked like they had been high).

Someone once told me that everyone we meet in life we pass again at least once more. At first this frightened me because the first and only time I ever saw Lee Pierce was in seventh grade when he beat the crap out of me at a bus stop because his girlfriend liked me; I don’t need that drama back in my life. But the more I thought about it, the more I wondered how true it might be. For those who don’t travel much, running into everyone twice over the course of seventy or eighty years might not be too difficult. And for those who travel often, the constant shuffling through airports and pubs increases the likelihood of multiple run-ins. I’ve been through Kennedy airport quite often. Surely at least once or twice someone I grew up with was there at the same time.

Like the time I was walking down a street in St Petersburg, Russia, when a woman I had worked with ten years earlier in Pennsylvania was standing in a restaurant banging on the window to get my attention.

We have long lists of people we’d love to see again. It’s why I like to people-watch while waiting in malls or airports or train stations. Even more fun is spotting the Doppelgangers out there, both famous and familiar. Years ago I spent time at Chapel Hill with the visual twins of Pete Rose and Penny Marshall. Then there was the time just a few years ago in Spain when a friend from college who knew I was going to be on the Camino wrote to ask if we’d light a candle for him for a health issue. Of course, so the morning of his appointment in Ohio, July 25^th, we headed out for the next twenty miles of our stroll near Pamplona when John from New York joined us for the. John was the spitting image of my friend from college. His voice, his eyes, the way he laughed, his gait—all of him—was the mirror image of the one person who asked us to light a candle for him on that very day for his appointment five thousand miles away. Good timing I suppose.

I was in a food store in the late eighties when a kid ran past and knocked over a display. A very old man bent to pick up the packages and I helped. While we were crouched down I noticed his Knights of Columbus lapel pin. I said I knew of the organization and when he talked I knew he was from Brooklyn. I said my grandfather had been heavily involved in the Knights in Brooklyn but it would have been before his time, I’m sure. It wasn’t. When I told him my grandfather’s name, he responded with his ancient smile, “Ed! Ed Kunzinger! I knew him when I first joined! He was already State Deputy then!” That man was the only person I’ve ever met outside of family who knew my grandfather. That was kind of cool and, again, good timing. Thank God the kid knocked over the cookies.

Everything is timing, isn’t it?

A man in Buffalo was sitting in his recliner watching television when a jet trying to land at the airport crashed into his home and killed him. The news said he was in the wrong place at the wrong time. No he wasn’t. He was in the right place at the wrong time. The plane was in the wrong place. We do that a lot, excuse things, find cause and blame.

There are four possibilities: Right place right time, right place wrong time, wrong place right time, wrong place wrong time.

1. You’re going to work and while waiting to turn at the stop light you look down and outside the car is a bag of cash: Right place right time.
2. You’re going to work and while waiting at the light a plane crashes into your car. Right place wrong time.
3. You’re going to work and get lost. When you stop for directions someone gives you a bag of cash for no reason. Wrong place right time.
4. You’re going to work and get lost. When you stop for directions a plane crashes into where you are standing. Wrong place wrong time.

Could be luck. Could be fate. Could be distractions or even hyper-attentiveness.

The other day I stopped to buy something at a mall in Virginia Beach. It is the same mall that my father liked to walk around during his later years. It is quiet there, less crowded than others, and the floor is carpeted. Comfortable chairs and benches are nicely spaced, and since it is on my way from one college to another, I would often swing through the parking lot to look for his car. He always parked in the same area, and if it was there I would go in and find him and walk with him a while.

On Tuesday last week I walked through to get to a particular store when I spotted someone walking slowly. It made me sad, of course, remembering my walks with Dad, but the familiarity of it made me look at him as I walked by, and I knew I knew him, or knew him at some point. So I followed him to talk to him when he sat down. I’m sure security were all gathered around a monitor somewhere to figure out what this stalker was doing. I was stealth, looking in windows and stopping to tie my shoe several times. He went to a lottery machine and looked at cards, so I went to the next machine and looked at other cards. I had no idea that some of these things cost twenty bucks and the odds of winning at least twenty dollars back are pretty bad! There was one ticket that was twenty dollars and you only got to scratch one spot to win. And people buy these things!

Anyway.

He looked at his machine and I looked at mine and finally I said, “Twenty dollars. That’s crazy.”

“Yes it is.”

“Do you play at all?”

“No. Sometimes I buy the dollar ones for my grandkids, but I don’t waste money like that. I worked too hard.”

“You sound like you’re from up north”

“I am. From Brooklyn. But I’ve lived in Colorado most of my life,” he said. It figures, I thought, the mountains; he might actually be a hundred and fifteen.

“Me too! Well, Long Island, but I was born in Brooklyn.”

I introduced myself. So did he. Nothing.

“You look familiar to me.”

“Yes, you do too. Well perhaps our paths have crossed before,” he said, “back in the old country.” We both laughed. I said it was nice to meet him and he said the same and that perhaps we’d see each other again, and I sat on a bench thinking about my dad, hoping he would come around a corner and smile.

I like to think I’ll see him again, the old man, perhaps staring at a lottery machine for no other reason than to take a break while walking. And we’ll talk about what has been going on since the last time, and eventually we’ll walk to the food court and have coffee and talk about the old days, back when we always seemed to find ourselves in the right place at the right time.