Author: aviewfromthiswilderness

This Year (Can’t End Fast Enough)

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What a year. Just, well damn, just, what a year.

For the first time in fifty years—1974—I have no reason to go to Virginia Beach other than a Bloody Mary at the Beach Pub or breakfast at Ocean Eddies, and of course to visit my father’s resting place. 1974 was the year my parents purchased a house on the Lynnhaven River, and this year my mother left the Beach for Williamsburg. It’s odd, really, not needing to go to a place I needed to go for five decades. And while I’m the sort that never needs a reason to go somewhere, I’m painfully aware that Virginia Beach has permanently aligned itself with other towns of my past, such as Massapequa Park and Great River. Oakdale and Wellsville.

Forty-five years ago this past September I met two people that would change and influence me for years—Fr. Dan Riley, who would visit me every night late in the infirmary for a few weeks while I had the Russian flu, during which time we bonded and came up with the idea of a radio show—Inscape. And Dave Szymanski, who joined me many mornings every week in the campus radio station as we tried to figure our way through the gives and takes of that freshman year—him pulling news off the wire, me spinning albums, both of us talking, sharing, hoping. Both of them died this year, exactly forty-five years later, and I meet them sometimes in my mind when I need some advice or companionship.

Forty years ago I walked into a hotel room in Worcester, Massachusetts, thinking I was trying out for a part time job as an exercise instructor at some local health club, and walked out that day a member of the management staff of that club, working for Richard Simmons. It was a wild ride for a while, and the fall of ’84 found me moving into a beautiful yellow house near a reservoir, making a ton of money from America’s Favorite Exercise Guru, and having a blast while getting in shape. This year, forty years later, Richard died, reminding us all it doesn’t matter how full of life we are, how much joy we bring others, eventually we too pass all too quickly.

Thirty-five years ago this past summer my car broke down in the parking lot of Tidewater Community College. This was pre-cell phone of course, so I wandered into an office to use a phone to call AAA. While on hold, the dean—Bill DeWeese—said to his assistant—Eleanor Shannon—that he needed someone to teach Humanities on Wednesdays. I hung up and got the job. One week later I stood outside the door of my first class waiting for students and talking to a woman in an office across the hall. She had a heavy French accent and in those first five minutes we laughed more than I had the previous five months. Letty welcomed me to the college, and the next day we went for coffee. Eleanor passed away some years ago, Bill last year, and Letty this past July, nearly thirty-five years to the day after we met.

Thirty years ago this year I made my first of two and a half dozen trips to St. Petersburg Russia. Prior to that initial journey with my colleague and friend Joe Antinarella for a grant with the Commonwealth, it was much more difficult to travel there. But through the years I watched the city move from vacant streets without advertising or western influence, to restaurants and concerts, European clothing lines and shoe stores, American coffeeshops and fast-food joints, and we wandered freely throughout the backstreets of the Window to the West, knowing Peter the Great’s idea of a “New Amsterdam” had finally been fulfilled. And now, thirty years after that first month-long stay, the streets are again vacant of advertising and western influence, and I cannot go back, nor do I plan to go back.

Twenty-five years ago I made my first of many trips to Prague. It was a month-long stay as I taught at Charles University, was befriended by the great Czech writer, Arnost Lustig, and read all the works of one of the more influential writers in my life, Bohumil Hrabal. I also discovered Pilsner and Terezine, the Hunger Wall and 19 Nerudova Tea Room where I wrote an entire manuscript at night over apple strudel and Irish Crème tea in just over three weeks, and some years later published it as Penance. Since then I’ve come to know Prague as well as I know any city, though much there has changed. It seems change tends to happen.

We like round numbers, don’t we? We like even years, silver and golden anniversaries. More people showed up for the fiftieth anniversary of Victory Day in St Petersburg than the forty-ninth. More people observed a moment of silence on September 11th, 2021, than the same day a year earlier or a year later. We count in decades, we measure in leap years. You can buy birthday cards for someone’s 45th or 50th or 60th, but not their 64th, as if there is less reason to celebrate a life until they finish some imaginary five-year plan.

Still, on this fiftieth anniversary, I understand that I have no real reason to return to the Beach anyway, other than see my Dad’s headstone and tell him about the Mets. I remember the city like it was last week, and what a time it was, managing the hotel those summers during college, attending gigs with my oldest friend, musician Jonmark Stone, and lounging on the beach or at Ocean Eddies back when the drinking age was eighteen. I’m not nostalgic—we had our day in the sun; a lot of them, and I’m lucky enough to carry those memories with me. When I talk to Jonmark on the phone we don’t reminisce, we talk about when we can make our next tee time or when I might get out to Indiana. No, looking back is fine, really, as there’s always going to be something there for me, but it’s not nearly as productive as looking ahead. Fr Dan and Letty would agree; Dave maybe not so much but I didn’t love him less because of his instinct to recall our Glory Days at the radio station.

Many of my habits ended this year, some for the better and some absolutely for the worse, but they ended just the same—they aren’t sitting just behind me in some fog. They’re done. No more weekly phone calls or thrice a week walks. No more late-night Bailey’s on Ice at a mountain on New York’s Southern Tier. That’s why I knew as fall slipped away that this New Year’s is going to be an important one; this is not going to be the same old lang syne.

This year I’m traveling again. First stop, the Netherlands. This year two books are slated for release, one about teaching college, Office Hours, and one I started more than forty years ago and which I finally completed, Curious Men, which tied me to the past for four decades, and which ironically enough is about a time in my life I learned to jump first and invent the parachute on the way down. Perhaps I was simply in denial back then, or a little too angry. For certain I was depressed. But if I understand psychology correctly, this is the acceptance part. And just in time, too. It’s nearly New Year’s.

I understand most people live between the two, comfortable in the daily life of here and now, glad for the past, at the same time they have prepared for their future. Their New Year’s Resolutions are practical and fulfilling, and while some are broken, a birthday is an inevitable chance for a reboot.

So this year, borrowing from Fitzgerald’s Jay Gatsby, I have but one resolve. This year, after the loss of three people I spoke to nearly daily, the completion of a manuscript that on a daily basis brought me back to when I was nineteen-years-old, and a nearly complete amputation of a city that shaped my very existence, as my one resolution for 2025 I’ve decided to simply get out of my own way. In the words of John Denver, who has been there for me from the start,

It’s time to make mistakes again

It’s time to change the show

It’s time and time and time again to find another way

It’s time to gather forces and get out of yesterday.

Happy New Year everyone. Thank you for another year of reading my small entries here.

Merry Christmas

~ aviewfromthiswilderness ~ 2 Comments

It has been a bad year, a year of great and significant loss, and I realize this evening the only way to approach Christmas this year is with love and much peace.

It is, after everything else departs us and closes the door, all we have left–that peace and such love, leaving us to realize, sometimes too late, it is all we ever had to begin with.

It’s almost Christmas now, and I can see some stars and what must be a planet in the west. Something about a clear sky on Christmas has always mystified me, captivated my attention and imagination, from the simple, fun thoughts of reindeer and sleighs to the philosophical digressive pondering of First Cause and the imaginative world of proof. I love Christmas morning with its tidings and anticipatory pay-off. But even more I love Christmas Eve, alone, when the sky is a narrative, and there remains enough room for us to fit in our own passages as we need to.  

In the west the fading light, and I pull my collar up higher and remember so much love.

On Christmas morning before our parents were awake, my siblings and I would gather, usually in my sister’s room, to exchange gifts we had bought for each other, before we headed down for the beginning of Christmas Day. It would inevitably still be dark out, and I know we’d lay awake waiting to hear each other also awake in the other room. A tap on the door. A “come in.” And we’d sit on the floor and open our presents.

At some point, our mother would wake our father and he would exclaim, “I thought I said no one up before nine am!” and he couldn’t hide his smile to our laughter at the ludicrous suggestion we’d be up any later than five. It was always cold out during those Long Island years, and often snowy, but we weren’t going outside so it just added to the magic. Dad would be in his robe and slippers and he’d head to the living room as we gathered on the stairs and waited for him to plug in the multi-colored lights on the tree, and those on the rail, bringing to life the otherwise dark room. Mom had, of course, already organized whatever presents we would get into separate piles, and Dad would stand back and she directed us to the right area under the branches, though sometimes it was obvious if an unwrapped toy appeared, clearly already wished for by one of us. Dad would sit on the couch and watch in joy, even through the stream of “Wow, thank you Mom!” wishes continued.

It wouldn’t be long before the aromas of breakfast mixed with the onions and Bell Seasoning already underway for the stuffing, and eventually we’d need to get dressed, if not for church since we might have attended midnight mass, certainly for the droves of family who would soon fill the rooms. It was a beautiful way to grow up. I do not know the possible stresses, fears, and sacrifices that went on behind the scenes—that’s how good they were at it. Then, much later in the day, after everyone else had left and we had all settled into the routine of looking at our gifts again, Dad would emerge from some closet with his gifts for each of us—books he had personally picked out, bought, and wrapped. It remains one of my favorite memories of all of my memories of my dear father.

It’s in the twenties here tonight along the Chesapeake. This is one of those days each year where I’ve been up so long and have done so much that it feels like it should be six hours later than it is. My sister and brother and nieces and nephew are all off in various parts of the country with their families celebrating their Christmases, all of us with some common traditions, all of us with our individual touches to the holiday. Certainly all of us fortunate enough to be celebrating Christmas at all, laughing and telling stories, enjoying the food, the drinks, the sounds of football or Christmas music. We are, to be sure, at peace today. Anyone with family is engulfed in traditions which bring peace to our soul while providing some shared space not only with each other but with the idea of our ancestry and the hope of our posterity. It is a day like Christmas that helps ease the sense of loss and emptiness some have in their lives on this day when we normally would spend time laughing with others who have left us all too soon. Sometimes it takes a day like Christmas to turn that around and move forward again.

I miss the days before society took “nearby” and “not far away” and tossed them to the strong breezes of technology and One World. In that small house around that small table when I was a child were so many relatives it is crazy to conceive how we pulled it off. But no one cared—we were together. Everyone was close enough to “drive over,” and by the time the turkey came out of the oven, a small crowd was sitting and standing and outside and in, laughing and sharing serious moments, because it was Christmas.

I’m going inside again. I bought Michael a book at a local nautical shop and I need to wrap it. He will be gracious enough to act surprised, just as we did with our father when he would predictably surprise us with books forty and fifty years ago. I won’t be calling as many people this year to tell them Merry Christmas, so those that I can talk to, I will let them know how much they mean to me, how important they are to me in this brief flash of time we share.

Peace. And Merry Christmas.

On This Silent Night

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The Blue’s Brother’s Light Display

It’s misty tonight but not raining, and all the lights have halos from the soft air. Today I slowed down after sixteen weeks of not, followed by a few days of noise–it was all in my mind, of course, but noisy just the same, so this evening I decided to slow down and after standing on the front lawn looking at the moon through the haze in the east, I drove down into town.

I put on some solo piano music from George Winston’s December and rolled slowly past the fish market to the real estate office where Steve and Randy Blue have the best lights I’ve seen. They have music synced with a radio station across the river, and the largest tree in the front keeps beat with the sounds, but I kept my windows rolled up and just listened to George’s deep rendition of Variations on Canon in D. Kids with parents ran through the paths between light displays, and I assume they were yelling, or calling out what they saw, but I heard nothing. Just George and Pachelbel.

I stopped next door at 711 and bought some hot chocolate, talked to Wayne a while in the parking lot, but families started moving past the Nutcracker display to the parking lot, so I drove off toward the bay, pausing in front of Hurd’s Hardware. Jack Hurd has the entire front window filled with illuminated Christmas trees in various colors, and on the left side the trees are several deep. This window against a black sky with no other stores around makes it more silent than it should be. I turned off the car and the radio and rolled the window down and still heard nothing but quiet, a faint spill of music from the light display at the realtors.

Behind Hurd’s and across the street is the village branch of the county library, and tonight my son worked while a local Y hosted kids who had entered their artwork to be hung in the library gallery in the back. I rolled down the street and looked back into the window. This, right here, is one of my favorite things to do in the dead of a cold night in December; to see kids and families laughing and warm inside a window, not able to hear them, but watching them play and talk while outside I can see my breath and my face is tight from the cold. At one table near the front Michael talked to a woman, while over near the door a few kids entered to head back to show their parents their work.

On the way home I rolled into the IGA and could see Kristin from the museum and one of her kids at the checkout, talking to the clerk, laughing. The lot was empty, mostly because it’s Monday but also the rain, and I headed to the river, rolled down the windows, and turned off the car and sat quietly. Out on the Norris Bridge I could hear the whining of truck wheels moving across to White Stone, and the light at the airfield was circling, indicating someone will land at some point tonight, probably Mike in his PT-13 headed back from some weekend show. All of this going on yet all I can hear is the lapping of the Rap on the sand and the slow movement of a heron about fifty feet away in the marsh. To my right in the windows of the yellow house across the reeds is a blue light of a computer or television flashing on the walls.

I like the peace I find when I am outside looking in at Christmastime, and some rebirth of familiar connections take hold of everyone. It is fleeting of course, but present for now. I enjoy watching these flashes of life around me. I try not to be creepy and prefer only to look in public spaces like convenience and hardware stores, but it is nice to catch a place like the library where so much activity is going on behind my music, like shadows on some cave wall. But this year is different than last. Some of the people I used to talk to every day have gone silent, somewhere beyond the ideas and anticipations of those still here. So my world in general has gone mostly silent in the past several months for the first time in three decades.

So tonight I decided a drive made perfect sense; not only because it fills me with some sort of hope to see life being lived, but also because I’ve always been just outside looking in.

This happens to a lot of people, especially this time of year; we have a sense that we’re better off a step back, perhaps a small part of the conversation but not participating as much as others, preferring instead the safety of the next row back instead of the circle of talkers; we are more comfortable on the patio bench quietly watching the stars until someone else who feels awkward comes out and quips about needing some air. That’s where I am, away from the small talk, and I turn around, place my elbows on some wrought iron fence behind me, and look in a everyone laughing. I am okay a step back.

But at the river I sat in silence and thought about why this distance works for me.

It is safely consistent. I know blindfolded how to walk through most of the Blue’s Brother’s light display, and I know Wayne and Maria will be at 711 at this hour. Monday nights Michael always works the library, and Jack’s trees make everyone smile for a few weeks. They make me smile anyway, and I appreciate that. It is predictable and consistent at the end of a year that has been anything but either.

So I drove around listening to Winston’s version of Bach’s Joy and felt completely and literally at peace. Life is out there, through the windows, in the market and the front steps of the convenience store. The kids in the library laugh like Michael used to when I brought him in to sit at those same tables two and a half decades ago. This is what we can count on when we are running out of things to rely upon; that Christmas will bring out people with lights and once dark window displays are somehow almost personified, the trees in Jack’s window display appear more like watermen at the cafe standing around talking about the coming snow.

I slowly rolled down my long, winding driveway until I reached the lamppost near the lawn at the house. The porch is lit with white lights, as usual, and the wreathes illuminate the walls and windows. I had one other significant loss this past year; the Penguin, affectionately known as Pengy, died last January. His wires were shredded from years of moisture and his skin simply popped. Sad really, because I liked seeing him for twenty years at the corner of the porch.

But things change. I have new light displays now someone sent me, and after tonight’s Chocolate Bailey’s on ice I’m not going to care so much anyway. But I do have a suggestion: Turn off the music except for something peaceful, and stay outside for a bit–watch life for a while from the outside, observe it’s consistent laugher and predictable love. Watch others enjoy the moments they have together while they still have those moments.

But don’t stay out there too long. The love is inside.

Hurd’s Hardware, Deltaville
west on the Rappahannock tonight

Stopping by the River on an Icy Morning

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The tide is lower than I’ve seen in some time, mud flats running into the river easily one hundred feet or more. Fiddler crabs scurry about and seagulls land to grab them in the same place they normally would dive from on high into water three or four feet deep. This ebb is unusual.

Where the water does lap at the mud, foam formed from the icy cold winds, with temps in the upper twenties and lower thirties early this morning, and the winds pushing down from the northwest drop those another eight degrees or so. It is cold, and damp, so I feel it in my bones.

I like this. I mean, no, not all the time. But every so often I need some visceral reminder that I am alive now, not tomorrow when I have a laundry list of things to do or yesterday when some punk in my college comp class complained because I didn’t pass his plagiarized paper. Now, I am aware of the cold, the mudflats and panicked crabs, and my skin is tight, my eyes water from the wind, and my breath is frozen. It cleanses my entire world. I move about, which gets my blood flowing, and that not only warms me but awakens my senses even more. My mind, too, is clear, as if the winds and the cold blew off the soot that settled all semester.

Then the obligations seem fleeting, the problems which yesterday boiled my blood from the sheer weight of such minute interruptions, are cooled and dismissed by the ripple of foam running down the beach to Locklies Creek near Rappahannock River Oysters.

Here’s what is important, that I am still here. Alive, but more so, aware that I am alive, here, along this river today, and the cold pulls tight the skin on my face.

I thought of Richard Bach this morning and his work Illusions, in which the protagonist says almost as an aside, “Here’s a test to see if your mission on this earth is complete: If you’re alive, it isn’t.”

Hard to know sometimes, though, what that mission might be, isn’t it? You’d think by my age it would not only be second nature, but nearly complete, but I’m just waking up to the fact I should probably do something with my life. To do that I’m going to have to suppress the cold reality that I’m not young.

Except today, when what could have been some stagnant morning happened to turn kinetic because of the cold. My energy returned like a flood tide, and I stood on the sand wondering how to channel it. I think we do that sometimes; we have ambition, energy, even a wave of hope, but we simply don’t know what to do with it.

And for the first time in a long time, I understood my immediate response:

Nothing. Do nothing.

See the day, walk along the river and watch the eagles find food, and the lingering osprey who has not yet left for points south, dive for his meal. The most essential elements for life go ignored, or worse, aren’t even considered, for our need to be “productive.” But is it any less productive to walk on a leaf-covered path and watch cardinals move from holly tree to the ground and back? Is it any less productive to look east across the bay or the Atlantic and contemplate the waves, their calm and their power, as they approach and recede?

It is the same in summer for me, the blazing heat on my neck and face insist I remain present, the sweat on my forehead somehow similar to the tears from the cold wind, catch me and hold me tight in the moment, and I welcome it because at some point it will no longer be, or, better said, I will no longer be.

But not today. Today a dozen geese came in low across the duck pond and settled on the river just to the west, their honking subsiding, their journey paused for now. It doesn’t end exactly, not yet, but they take a moment and rest before they need to continue their flight.

And maybe they discover their purpose is in these moments, aware of the peace around them when they’re not rushing from one place to another, leading a flock or following the same. For geese, it is when they land and rest that it is impossible to tell who was in charge and who fell behind.

I came home, eventually, made some tea, organized my thoughts, responded to a few inquiries, but I did so with added calm I didn’t have before. I have a sense of peace now, of some sort of presence I can’t quite define, which is good, since I still have more than a little to do in front of me.

Yes, much more to do still in front of me.

Thankful 4

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I am not yet among the dead of this world, scattered ashes or sunken corpse. Not yet discussed in past tense, not yet absolved at last rites.

I am still conscious of the leaves on the red maple, hanging on, like me, trying to express brilliance before the fall.

I wake up in soft, fresh cotton sheets and see the trees through the skylight turning toward the sun, and a bird scatters to the porch rail, just like she promised she would.

I can call my mother and say hello, talk to my siblings, laugh with people I have loved since I was nineteen, since I was twenty-five, grateful to have closed those gaps in our lives when we lost track of each other. Grateful to know what it’s like to be quiet and know peace. I can climb hills with my son, stop for lunch and talk about what is beautiful, talk about what is next.

For the peace that can only be found in life, that stillness of the soul that keeps us present. Yes, for that peace and stillness and presence, which one must be conscious of to understand.

For consciousness.  

For the fox at the edge of the woods waiting for apple slices.

The veteran who stopped to see if I was okay.

The homeless man in Norfolk last week who let me help, which reminded me I could; his gift to me.

For having had the type of relationships—so close, so intimate and alive—so that when those souls died, my sadness which is alive still simply reminds me I have known such love, even briefly.

For the way the river still keeps tabs on my moods, washes clean the extremes which constrict my hopes, tugs me back to the Island, or off across the equator to distant mountains on the moon and then washes me ashore here on the edge of what’s next, giving me the strength to fight the tigers that come at night.

Thankful is a shallow word. There must be something better to express our gratitude for being alive, now, with the aroma of leaves, the chill at night pulling the skin taut on my face, the stars stretched out like compassion through the universe. Thankful is not enough.

To still be able to string together a battalion of words which might make someone cry when I remind them of a loved one or make someone laugh when they recall a moment they once knew but thought they had long ago forgotten.

For forgiveness.

For compassion.

For the way I feel when I reach for the phone to call someone who left this world before me, and my heart sinks, and my stomach drops, and I remember, and I put the phone down. For remembering that is another way you can measure love; you remember how you almost called anyway but then didn’t.  

Thankful for the ones who see my mistakes and don’t give up on me.

For the soft touch of another soul who understands.

For understanding.

The History Conspiracy

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The Cup of Blood, a Gift from a Colleague in St Petersburg, Russia

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 19th 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 The Hunger 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?”

When Power Corrupts, Poetry Cleanses

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“If you ask me what I came to do in this world, I, an artist, will answer you: I am here to live out loud.”       –Emile Zola

I moved through several stages of grief in the hours and days following Election Day. Denial hung on a while, anger held court the longest, at about three am I woke up bargaining that it all be a dream, at five I woke up depressed, and at six I got up but instead of moving to acceptance, I back-peddled to anger again. Acceptance is a distant, blue ghost waiting in the shadows.

This is an appeal to my colleagues in the art community. There has rarely been a more important time for us to be writers and musicians. Our discouragement at watching this country move backwards into what many in the past few days have called that horrific term “Melting Pot” instead of forward into a multi-cultural society must be met by our abilities to give voice to our frustration.

It has always been the task of the artist to expose inequity, injustice, and fascist tendencies. It was Thomas Paine whose small seditious book Common Sense instilled in the citizens of the colonies the ability to move forward; it was David Walker who called upon his Black brethren to resist; it was Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience; it was Ida Tarbell and Carl Sandburg. It was the writings of John Stuart Mill, and Richard Wright. It was the writings of Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan.  

It was, it is, the poets.

President John F Kennedy said, “When power leads man toward arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations. When power narrows the area of man’s concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of existence. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses.”

Some have suggested that one voice doesn’t weigh much anymore in a world of a million sound bites. However, other than bad flash mobs, there has never been such a thing as a spontaneous chorus. The artist, despite their isolation, has it in their power to put voice to what others wish to say but cannot, but once they hear it said, sing along with the harmony of their generation. Ginsberg wrote, “Poetry is the outlet for people to say in public what is known in private.” And Robert Frost said, “A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong.”

I can’t swallow.

I can’t do most things that will benefit this country and prevent its further demise, but I can write. I can do that. This is an appeal, then, to the writers and poets and to the musicians and actors and painters to combine our talents with our grief, to blend our anxiety with our refrain, to risk exposing truth.

And what do we say, exactly?

In whatever way we can, with whatever genre we can, that we can do better than this. Simply, that we are better than this.

“We must always take sides. neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.” –Elie Wiesel

Rutting Season

~ aviewfromthiswilderness ~ 2 Comments

I spent time tonight outside watching Saturn slide west, and the half-moon along with an abundance of stars visible along route 33 east on Virginia’s Middle Peninsula. From my vantage just up the side of an embankment three miles from any town, stars filled the ordinarily black sky.

It gave me pause. Jupiter started to reveal itself just about the time the State Trooper showed up to take pictures of my car and the deer, but once he put out the flares and made sure I was okay before he left, I moved right back up that hill and found what is probably a nebulous, and other than talking to three or four kind people who stopped to make sure I was okay and to see if I needed a ride, I spent the night focused on the distant lights.

A deer hit me. I think we need to dispense with the ridiculous notion that we “hit” deer. Sometimes, perhaps, if we are distracted and a deer happens to be minding her own business in the middle of a road. But usually, and this time in particular, we are moving along fine when from the woods on the right a deer hit me, a beautiful tall, strong buck leaped to clear a small ravine between the road and the hill, and landed on the front of the passenger side of the car, crushing it entirely to the ground. I managed to stop on the shoulder but the deer went spinning through the air another twenty feet in front of me. He never twitched. Never looked back up. Dead on contact, both the deer and the Toyota.

But man, those stars. Just this morning on NPR I heard that a good friend of Galileo, Simon Marious, named the moons of Jupiter. I couldn’t see them with the naked eye, nor the rings of Saturn, but our own moon was perfectly visible. When the State Trooper lit the flares I thought I wouldn’t be able to see as well, but it was fine.

I was trying to remember some song from the seventies about the moon when a pick-up pulled up and a man got out. He asked if I needed help and if everything was okay. His license plate noted Disabled Vet so I asked and he had served two tours in Afghanistan. We walked up the road to the deer, still in perfect shape except for being dead, and the vet asked what I was going to do with it.

I’ll be honest. It never crossed my mind to do anything with it other than pull it off the road. I told him since the police already got pictures and filled out the police report for the insurance, he was welcome to the buck. I helped him load it on the bed of his truck and he was so pleased. “This is a ton of fresh meat” he told me. I wished him a Happy Veterans Day and thanked him for his service, and he drove off. I climbed back up the hill to wait for the tow truck. Almost two hours later he arrived. It was a flatbed since my engine is more or less crumbled beneath the new accordion style hood. I climbed in his cab and after he hauled my car onto the truck, we drove off. The car now sits in a field in the front of my property since he was able to make it around the first bend of the driveway.

I’ll deal with the car tomorrow.

Tonight my mind is on stardust and the million tons of meteor dust that fall every day, some of it fell tonight while I waited, almost bridging the distance between me and the cosmos, uniting us, like a deer and the hood of my car but with more grace.

I can have an anxiety problem on occasion. It hit tonight and it might take a few days to subside, but it will dissipate faster because of the stars, and the sky, and the way it never minded what went on. I kept thinking of my mother who in so many videos I’ve made of her, says, “It is what it is.” Trudat Joanie. Damn straight. I actually thought “It is what it is” as I climbed back up the small embankment and watched the sky, fixed on some bright star not far from Ursa Minor. Maybe Vega.

I have been in need of slowing down, of taking my time, being more present. I have been on the go for far too long cruising in the left lane, and lately I’ve been thinking about that, about walking the Camino in the summer of ’26, about just slowing down in everything I do. Then a deer hit me.

The tow truck driver was like Obi Wan, the way he talked with such exactness, with a kind tone. He said he was glad I was okay, and he put his hand on my shoulder when he saw the car and said, “Brother you are not having a great night, but I’m glad we’re here and talking about it.”

Way to slide the worst of this night immediately behind me.

We drove home and he slid the car off the truck bed onto the grass in the field on the front of the property, where it sits right now in the cold instead of down here near the house under the porch lights, warm and comfortable.

After I emptied it of most of the stuff inside, I stood in the field and looked at it, thinking about the myriad trips to western New York and Maryland, to Florida so many times, and to all the state parks my son and I have hiked in the past five years or so, and I sighed, looked up, and found Vega again, lighting my way, walking me back from the car to the house. Before I went inside I heard something in the woods. Deer bed down around here all the time, and when I heard several I knew that’s what was out there behind the shed. More likely a fox, but that just ruins this story, so I’m going with the deer.

I wanted to apologize. I mean, I can replace the car. But that poor deer is now on his way to some Vets freezer.

Breathe In, Breathe Out, Move On

~ aviewfromthiswilderness ~ 1 Comment

The sun came up today; I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. People out on the highway going to work, rubbing their eyes. The morning flock came calling as kids ran off to school. Autumn leaves kept falling, following nature’s rule.

It seems I forgot. This happens to me a lot.

I need to head back to Boston; I need to be northbound. Feel the chill sweep down from the Berkshires and stop at the cider mill in town. Climb to the summit of Wachusett to watch kettles of hawks fly by; maybe drive up to Ringe, New Hampshire, to the Cathedral in the Pines.

I need to find that peace again. I’m tired of waking up in pieces.

I’ve been to the side of a canyon on New York’s Southern Tier and imagined it some foreign land then swam in the river, ate sundried fish, laughed at the infinite possibilities, threw caution to the wind. I once walked fifteen miles in the heat of the Sonoran Desert after my car broke down—no cell phone, few truckers with CB radios, just walking and dust, and I’d do it again, that silence, the distant hills of Mexico. Drove on over to New Orleans one January in some cold snap, drank wine watching a Dixie Jazz Band on Bourbon Street.

How can I forget that day? Why did I forget that day?

I woke up this morning at four am and grabbed my phone and read the news, turned over, went to sleep. Woke up a few hours later and headed to the bay, bothered by the reality of what comes next, until a gull flew by, and the bay like glass could pass for a blue mirror, sat like it did for watermen for centuries, like it has for those of us who dreamed of sailing away, like I dreamed of doing after reading Robin Lee Graham’s account of his five year journey around the world in the sixties during a decade of war and turmoil, and found peace, and the Great South Bay back then looked just like this today, just this morning after the news and the shock of it all.

No one’s going to slow me down.

“No one’s going to know I’m gone.”

After the last one I went to Florida and watched a manatee make his way north along the gulf shore and I was in the moment, alive, then, as life should be, as it always should be. Like the time a deer walked up to me in the woods of the Southern Tier and ate some bread I had in my hand, nibbled my palm, pushed her head against my chest, while my friend the late Fr Dan watched from a porch, like he sent her himself to come call me in for breakfast. That’s being alive. That’s me aware and present.

I need to ride again that ferry to Nantucket, pull my sweater around my neck, my face damp of saltwater, my heart solidly present and strong. It’s just up there, due north and to the right. Right now.

Life has not paused, will not pause, will not disappoint, cannot be compromised or negotiated with. Not my life anyway. Not for a speck of an insignificant bad decision. Not for this moment nor any implications for the next term. I can be too present to be distracted by yesterday’s or tomorrow’s false suggestions.

Venus is in the western sky before dusk tonight, bright right above the sliver of a moon. And just past there is some kid from the Island who once wanted to travel in space, who settled for Plan B, who measured the reach from Brooklyn to eventual nothingness and discovered there’s too much distance still to cover to not recover from some passing disappointment, some temporal distraction.

“Show don’t tell” said my writer friend Tim in Texas. He was talking about the narrative, but so am I when I thought and then said aloud to myself, “Show, don’t tell,” and thought again about the Netherlands and Connemara, about Boston, about the peace I know on Merton’s Southern Tier and the presence I know here at Aerie.

Yeah, the sun came up today; I shouldn’t be surprised. No one rewrites what I write. No one gets to decide where this narrative is going but me. Not today.  

Acceptance: Part Five of Five

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This is Part Five of a Five Part Series here at A View.

The five stages of grief as outlined in Elizabeth Kubler-Ross’ On Death and Dying are Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, and Acceptance.

To wit:

  • Denial: A natural reaction to loss, denial can help people slow down the grieving process and avoid feeling overwhelmed. It can also be a way to try to understand what’s happening.
  • Anger: A common reaction to the frustration of no longer being able to live in denial, anger can feel like an emotional outlet as people adjust to a new reality. It can also provide temporary structure and a connection to the person who died.
  • Bargaining: People may try to change the circumstances that are causing their grief, such as hoping that things will improve if they take certain actions.
  • Depression: A stage of grief
  • Acceptance: A stage of grief where people find control and figure out how to proceed 

PART FIVE:

Acceptance:

The truth is I accepted some deaths nearly immediately. Letty is the best example. We saw it coming eighteen months out and we talked about it often, particularly her take on the post-life expectations. She told me to look for the birds feeding on the porch and she’d be among them. She told me she’s just going to close the door behind her. So by the time July rolled around and she slipped away, acceptance of that new reality was already on the table.

Dave was more difficult having not told a soul about his impending death due to cancer. Richard was a shock but his self-isolation from society for several years prior to falling and dying made his death closer to acceptance than any sort of anger or denial.

They’re all different, and Ms. Ross is clear that the stages weave in and out of our consciousness, rising then receding, and just when acceptance seems at hand, depression might pop back on the scene.

The thing is acceptance is about knowing someone you love is gone and finally learning to accept that your new reality is one without them and learning to live that way. The less involved someone has been in your life, the easier acceptance becomes. Dave and Letty and Fr Dan and Dad maintained an absolute presence in my life, so accepting their absence, particularly since with the exception of my father, the rest all checked out at nearly the same time, has been more difficult. Accepting is a sense of no longer being lost when a particular time of the day might have been occupied by conversation or even texting, a long walk to the Farmer’s Market or a slow walk around the mall. The instinct might remain to wish you could do that again, or at the very least to slip into a funk because you can’t do that again. But acceptance is being able to remember those times, smile, appreciate how lucky you were to have at least had them, and continue.

Caution: Just when that happens, depression might snap back. Just saying. These stages are circular.

In any case, when my father died nine years ago, acceptance was easy because of the conditions of those last few years, but to this day I have trouble sometimes understanding that loss of security, even at my age. There’s something about the loss of your father that says, “You’re on your own, Pal,” even if I was an AARP member when it happened.

What I have found interesting is the larger picture here that I’m trying to frame for myself. Accepting the deaths of the primary people in my life from all stages of my life—Eddie from childhood, Dave and Bobbie and Debbie from high school, Joe and Cole and Dave from college, Richard from a time I was learning to live on my own, and through those years and the rest of my years until recently, Dad, Letty, and Fr. Dan, has caused an unexpected twist: the acceptance of my own death. While it has not become something I welcome, it has become something I don’t worry about, as if everyone else on my team went on ahead and is waiting, but that’s not right either.

Maybe it is just that I accept that the world keeps turning without them, and so must I, maybe even by living more, experiencing more, particularly for those who left too soon. Acceptance for me—and this isn’t for everyone—means that death is more a motivator, like a new teammate; we’re working together here, this unusual macabre mentor whispering in my ear through the absence of my friends and family, “Keep going,” or as Virgil noted, Death “twitches my ear and says, ‘Live. I am coming,’”

Acceptance comes quickly when you hope for someone to no longer suffer, but it soon evaporates and is replaced by those other stages, like soccer players on a pitch replacing each other, taking a break so that the entire Grief Team remains strong. Eventually acceptance will return and dominate until it is our turn to put others through those same stages with our own departure, closing that door behind us.

For me there has been one exception, and those who knew Fr. Dan, and more specifically had a relationship with him like I did, as many have had, my “acceptance” of Fr. Dan’s death was nearly immediate. Of course the suddenness of his death, particularly only a day after we talked and hours before we planned to talk again, allowed Denial to dominate, but with Dan it is different. It has to do with his spiritual presence in all he did, his nearly reincarnation of the life of St. Francis and how Dan discussed saints and holiness as if they were brothers and sisters and he was already in and out of the otherworld, and more often than not it felt like he was heavenly from the start and took some time to visit us on occasion. This is difficult to explain, but he was not of this world anyway, so his departure from it seemed right. Letty wanted to stay, as did Dave and all the others. But Fr. always struck me as someone who couldn’t wait to die despite his absolute love of life and nature and all that exists, not in any depressive, suicidal way, but as if he knew something we didn’t, and we’d just have to see for ourselves.

People over the last six months have not missed the chance to remind me “you don’t get over one’s death or grief, but you learn to live with it, live differently.” Yeah, I know, and I do appreciate the sentiment and concern, but while acceptance is the ultimate goal, denial remains my favorite.

The Yankees lost the World Series

(how’s that for a non-sequitur—hang in there)

and while I’m not a fan having pulled for the Mets during the playoffs, once the Mets were out of it, as a native New Yorker I had to pull for the Boys from the Bronx. I know many Yankee fans, including close friends and a handful of misguided cousins, and I could observe the five stages of grief play out over the course of the last twenty-four hours. Denial, of course, that they could make it that far and lose so swiftly, despite the game they kept for themselves. Anger, of course; I mean they left the bases loaded with one out! Come on! That lead to bargaining of what could have been done differently, followed by the harsh reality you could see on the players faces after the Dodgers won, and, of course like all players of all games, eventual acceptance that this one got away but wait until next year. Having been a Bills fan for decades I’m well used to the routine.

So Liz’s efforts to label the stages of grief allow us to stretch beyond just death and find them applicable to many situations. But at the end of it all is death, which for the rest of us is the beginning of life without someone we loved and still love.

When I go for a walk I think of these people, and sometimes simply by having a wandering mind I end up in some pseudo conversation with them, talking to Letty about the floods in Spain, talking to Dad about his putting, talking to Fr. Dan about how hard it is sometimes to keep going.

And in my head he tilts his head back and smiles that wide smile, lets out a small laugh, and says, “I know Bobby, I know. It’s exciting, isn’t it? To not always know what happens next?”

In these days now when this happens, he walks away just then and I watch him move into my neighbor’s cornfield like James Earl Jones, and I turn to see Letty staring at me, saying, “He’s right Bawb. You need to keep going. Just ask him,” and she points behind me where I see Richard bouncing from foot to foot, saying, “She’s right Bob! Move your tooshie!”

and that thought makes me laugh out loud, until depression settles back in, and just as EKR warns, it gets heavier and heavier, and heavier, until I put it down and spin back into denial, wondering what everyone is up to that day, out doing their own thing in the world.

But I know better.

You’re the color of the sky
Reflected in each store-front window pane
You’re the whispering and the sighing of my tires in the rain

You’re the hidden cost and the thing that’s lost
In everything I do
Yeah and I’ll never stop looking for you
In the sunlight and the shadows

And the faces on the avenue
That’s the way love is

–Jackson Browne

Acceptance: Fr. Dan Riley, OFM