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in all of time coming and going

~ aviewfromthiswilderness ~ 1 Comment

from the forthcoming collection, Wait/Loss, this is “Sentence ’86”:

in all of time coming and going, whatever’s next and long before now, before this millennium, or the last, before the Dark Ages, before Jesus, Christ, even before time, we share these years, you and I, this splinter of nanoseconds as we tumble through space in this brief awareness, together, share these histories, these stories, that pandemic, that eruption, the wars, the towers tumbling, the time we stayed up all night looking at stars, and the time we said goodbye that hot summer day, that was us back then, over there, when somehow we got caught onto each other as the accident of now determined that in all of everything that ever was and might be somehow we should share this present, hooked, for just a while, then not, and billions of others and billions more were, are, and will be, so you have to know that the chances remain incomprehensible that we might ever collide at all, leaving pieces of each other in the other’s pockets to carry on some wayward journey through space, and, then, gone again, evaporated into that eternal foreverness of nevermore, so brief, so tragically beautiful yet sadistically brief is this whirlwind of now, so I must wonder what the odds are in the vastness of this expanding thought, that we’d collide yet again, so that here we are, somehow

It’s Time and Time and Time Again

~ aviewfromthiswilderness ~ 1 Comment

I don’t know the symbolic signs of winter. I see woolly caterpillars and I think that means something, but I also think it doesn’t mean anything at all. They’re just woolly. Squirrels are gathering nuts, but, again, they do that every year and not every year is cold, so who the hell knows? Wayne at the convenience store in the village complained his knee hurt and said that generally happens when it is going to turn cold, and to be honest I trust that forecast more than most others. In fact, that was a few days before the temperatures dropped and the ground this morning was slightly frozen for the first time.

I welcome the changing seasons, but I do so mostly just out of lack of options; healthy options anyway. The cold takes me up north, and it’s easy for my mind to wander for hours through New York’s Southern Tier or the villages of central Massachusetts, walking familiar paths from four decades ago. In my mind I can feel the cold on my neck back then just like I did when I stepped outside today. I can even hear Dan Fogelberg’s haunting version of “In the Bleak Mid-Winter,” or, of course, “Same Old Land Syne,” which played constantly this time of year when I sat at my small kitchen table in the yellow house on the Wachusett Reservoir. The water often froze over, and geese walked to the pools of melt. I’d sit at that table listening to Dan, the bang of the radiator keeping the small place pleasant. Aromas from the cider mill in Sterling drifted down through the village. I didn’t mind winter so much then.   

Something about life now is different though. More muted. I used to think it was me and some internal battle I’d dealing with, but lately I think it’s more than that. Some minor key is running behind life these days. Maybe it is the endless chill in the news of the war in Ukraine, the war in Gaza, the death of thousands of innocent people, civil unrest. I don’t know, but it seems as if any longer people simply hate each other. They despise the idea that other people don’t agree with them, don’t think like them, don’t look or act or believe like them. Death is normal, violence is expected, and the anxiety level running through the streets is unprecedented.

Attention spans have quickened to literally minutes on average, TikTok videos have replaced conversations, we no longer need to figure out anything; not finances, not directions, not phone numbers, nothing. We don’t have to contemplate a problem, we just need to find the solution online. We all, all of us everywhere, carry in our pockets electronic devices which use airwaves to transmit and receive, and we’re always on, the Wifi always searching or linked, so that the air between us, above us, everywhere, is always vibrating with transmissions going everywhere from everywhere so that if those transmissions were water we’d drown. The air is always, absolutely always, vibrating with some form of transmission.

This has to be disturbing our minds.  

We are angrier than we have ever been in human history. Seems that way, anyway. I can’t speak for the Visigoths or the Tartars. But we have less patience, seek out more revenge, than ever. More people are on blood pressure, anti-anxiety, anti-depressive drugs than ever. More people are being shot, dissed, made fun of, than ever. Candidates are being charged with countless felonies, making fun of others, mocking how they speak and how they look. And the people at large don’t care. It feels an awful lot like people don’t care about anything anymore. I know that’s not true; I mean I see the evidence of hope in my students, in soup kitchens, in playgrounds. But I really have to search it out anymore.  

So I wonder if I simply didn’t listen to enough news back then when the Cold War brought us to the brink of nuclear disaster? Was I half asleep?

Maybe. But I also understand something more disturbing which comes from noting the differences in my life now from then and the changes in the hundreds of twenty-year-olds I spend time with now compared to thirty years ago: Contemplation is dying. Thinking is ebbing, replaced by devices that think for us. Gone are the days where people might go for a long walk and daydream, absorb the peacefulness, contemplate the distant reaches of the northern plains, the vast everything that is out there.

Right before the end of the semester I had my students in two different classes do this assignment: Take out a sheet of paper (yes, I brought a stack as only a few people ever have notebooks with them). I wasn’t interested in laptops or cellphones where bells and whistles might distract their already buzzing brains. Everyone had a sheet of paper and a pen. For fifteen minutes I had them sit quietly, look out the window, walk around the room, whatever, but they absolutely could not talk to each other or check any device. Then I asked them to sit and write whatever is on their mind for about 200 words.

After ten minutes of them writing I had to stop them. Some cleared five hundred words using both sides of the paper. One student asked for another sheet. They found philosophy; they found questions they didn’t even know they had. They found a brief period of peace in a whirlwind of a life that never seems to unplug, ever.

My fifteen minutes? I remembered a retreat.

It was early November my freshman year of college and fifteen of us went to a cabin in the mountains of western New York. We had the normal circles of discussions and walks through the woods, and group dinners and breakfasts. We sat around the fire while music played and a guy who had a hearing-impaired sister signed all the music for us, and it made us cry when he signed “The Rose,” by Bette Midler. But at the end of three days there we talked about how we would carry this seemingly new-found peace back to campus, back to the dorm where keg parties disturbed the nights. We wondered how long it would be before we slipped back into the current of keeping up instead of taking the time to push pause, step aside, and contemplate ourselves, each other, life.

We blend too easily, no matter how much we would prefer to somehow rise above the grind of it all. “Back to reality,” we would always say. That has been my primary problem for my entire adult life: I feel obligated to live in a reality I’d simply rather not be a part of at all.

So, as Paul Simon once noted, “My mind wanders; it seems mindless, but it does.”

I’d like to believe I’ve shown my students a little trick to escape their TikTok lives, even briefly. I’d like to believe that fifteen minutes a day doing nothing but watching the geese out on the ice might just have saved my life, shown me there is something more than crosswires and catapults.

Anyway, I went for a walk earlier this morning, and the ground is frozen for the first time this year, and the cold bit at my neck and face. The bay is calm today, and a small, white foam from temps just above freezing formed at the break. It will be warmer tomorrow, and then warmer still, but winter is coming.

I don’t know all the signs of winter, and certainly not the foreshadowing found in nature, but it is coming. My plan to handle the change this time is to take ahold of the narrative. Maybe I’ll walk along the river every morning, bundled against whatever bone-wet cold the wind carries, and look for the peace that might be found in contemplating such a few visceral moments.

It just might be the only way to gain control over how we spend our time, the only way to take control over what we do with our own minds, is to step aside and let them go.

I Can’t Weight for Christmas

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Feel free to share the hell out of this one:

Here is a contradiction:

I am twelve pounds over what I want to be. The reasons aren’t relevant; I can make excuses as is customary in situations like this. I have had a stressful year; circumstances with obligations kept me from my routine, I was pretty sick for a while, and my son constantly makes delicious bread.

Whatever—here I am.

At the same time, I was once a highly trained and practicing expert in exercise and weight loss. I ran a club for one of the most celebrated and accomplished exercise gurus in America, and I went through months of training, eight hours a day, five days a week, to learn about how to properly work every muscle in the body, how to eat, how to lose weight and keep it off. I helped work out everyone from college football teams to excessively obese women. Granted, that was more than thirty years ago, but I still remember the process.

I know, for instance, age has little to do with it. DNA plays a part, of course, but in most situations, adjustments can be made as we grow older. Certain conditions and diseases are as close as we come to a true “reason” for weight gain. Certainly, metabolism slows making it more difficult to shed pounds as you age, but most of the gain or lack of loss is environmental, and there are compensations readily available to make up for that. Schedules are another oft-referenced excuse, but the exercise aspect doesn’t take long and the eating, well, if you’re doing it right, takes less time than you think.

No, we simply don’t bother doing what is necessary because of lack of will power, bad habits, pressure from loved ones, bad associations, and a slew of other contestable dissents.

I am not trying to go back to being twenty-five-years old, though how cool would that be? No, I’m going to apply the knowledge of then-me to the increasingly discouraged now-me. This has nothing to do with how I look; it is about how I feel. I used to tell all people who came to the club that it is not about the scale, it is not about how it weighs on your mind. It is about how you feel about yourself. Friends say I don’t look like I need to lose that much; but it isn’t about what they think. 

For some reason in my life right now it feels like a good time for a complete renaissance. So here are a few guidelines I plan to follow to help me lose weight by New Years Day. I used these at the club, and they helped some members lose upwards of one hundred and fifty pounds:

  1. It’s an old axiom but it is true: breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince, dinner like a pauper. 
    2. Cut back the carbs, cut out the sugar, cut out the salt. 
    3. Plan the day’s food the night before and stick to the plan. 
    4. Drink a lot of water; often we aren’t hungry we’re dehydrated.
    5. Cardio ten to fifteen minutes a day through swift walking or climbing stairs. 
    6. Get on the floor and do simple sit-ups, leg lifts, and a few others you can learn by Googling “lower body exercises” to work the waists and thighs fifteen minutes a day. And move slowly; speed during exercise is counterproductive. 
    7. Abdominal work 8 minutes every other day.
    8. Arm isometrics for five minutes every day.

And the small things:

1. Park far away from anywhere I’m going (not too far).
2. Wear comfortable shoes.
3. Carry water. 
4. Stop thinking about food, talking about food, and watching shows with food.

And the quirky things:

1. Brush your teeth when you start to feel hungry. No one ever enjoys following teeth-brushing with chocolate or sugars. That’s disgusting.
2. Eat food with natural sugars like oranges and apples, which are healthy and curb the desire for junk. People say to me, “You know fruit has sugar.” Come on. Show me one friend who is obese because of figs and oranges and I’ll go back to Oreos now.  
3. Leave your money at home. Empty the wallet except for what you need for gas. Carry no change and convince yourself that charging fast food is just pathetic. 
4. Keep the list with you of what you’re going  to eat for the day.
5. Avoid dairy; it screws with the digestive system. 
6. Until you reach your goal don’t agree to go to the normal places with family or friends where you always end up getting something to eat. 
7. Wear tight clothes. Everyone feels thin in sweatpants. And yoga pants are for yoga; not for airports or classrooms or grocery stores. You might as well come naked and start in the cookie aisle.
8. Choose one day (and it must be the same day—Sunday works for me) that you’ll allow yourself to not worry about what you eat (still worry about how much you eat, keeping the calories below 2000). This gives you something to look forward to instead of constant denial, which inevitably results in binge eating. When someone at the club would crave pizza, I’d suggest they make plans to have pizza that Sunday while watching football.
9. Set up a plan to cut back on bad habits. To cut out completely is always a mistake, just like with alcohol or heroin, there will be some serious withdrawal problems resulting in falling off the wagon. So if you’re doing ten snickers bars a day like someone I knew at the club was doing, go down to eight, then six, then four, in subsequent weeks until you’re only having one a day, then one a week. 
10. Don’t check the scale. Stop worrying about how much you are losing; you’re going to go up and down for quite some time until the body adjusts and then will finally find the slope back down to what you are working toward. If you must must must must check the scale, do it once a week at the same time wearing the same clothes, and then make sure you laugh at the lack of results when they don’t happen. If you have a deadline for losing weight, count on no more than two pounds a week, ever. If you do more, that’s great, but losing just two pounds a week insures you are seventy percent more likely to keep it off
11. Stop going to grocery stores; send someone else. Tell your son to stop making bread. 
12. Stop STOP STOP!! Eating out!! The sodium alone in processed foods will keep the weight on and cause unwanted heart problems.

Do. Not. Quit. After three weeks if you stick to this, you’ll more naturally start to accept this way of doing things, and it will work. I’m using the second person here but really that is mostly so when I read this again I will talk to myself (which is more normal for me than you might think). And this is key: I’m not trying to lose twelve pounds; I’m trying to lose three pounds in two weeks. At that point I’ll think about the next three. Eventually it will be the twelve. Think about it: We are adamant about what type gas we put in our car but not what food we put in our body. That’s insane.

One more trick, and I am not trying to be mean. Find two pictures of yourself: one when you thought you were at your best, and one when you were at your worst, and keep them somewhere visible. If you don’t have any, find a picture of some poor slob eating a box of Krispy Kremes, and find another of some buff person. In both sets of examples, ask yourself which direction you’d prefer to go and are you doing anything to get there. Two pictures; two ideas; two dreams of what can emerge, and shelf any notion that starting over is more difficult. I won’t list examples from the club or from the world at large of people who made up their minds to see it through. And the list of people who lost their target weight only on the fourth, fifth, or tenth attempt is extensive. In the end, though, it only worked when they did it for themselves. Just for themselves. 

The first time I ever heard my boss at the club offer advice I was sitting right next to him and I not only never forgot it, I used it many times both at the club and in classes at the college:

To paraphrase: Too often we do things because we are bored or depressed or because we aren’t getting along with someone we love or something isn’t going right at work, and we do something self-defeating because it is something we can control, such as eating. We can eat what we want and no one can stop us and it makes us feel good and empowered. The immediate satisfaction is worth the price of any long term problems. Sometimes when we eat it is the only time we feel alive. But you always have two choices. Always. You can do what brings you toward your goal or do what takes you further from your goal. Two choices. Immediate gratification at a cost or a lifetime of satisfaction. You decide. YOU decide.

For me? Well, twelve pounds to go doesn’t seem like much. But that’s more than two five pound bags of sugar strapped to my body. Try that. Go buy bags of sugar to equal the amount you want to lose, strap them on, then walk around. THEN, take them off. That’s step one.

Step two? That’s up to you.

Merry Christmas. I’ll raise a glass of eggnog to our mutual ambitions. Next Sunday.

What He Said

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It’s raining out, and I can hear thunder in the distance. It is supposed to be like this for the next day or so, and seeing as how I’m finishing up the semester, I made some tea, grabbed a snack, and have set in to grade writing assignments.

The good news is, these students, unlike where I worked fulltime for thirty years, do their own work. The bad news is not all of them. I have two papers I must investigate; that is Google various phrases, unique sentence structures. Easy, since previously I could expect a dozen or more per semester. These days early in the semester I tell stories about previous attempts at intentional plagiarism, and I always conclude my pontificating with this story:

Some of you have heard this before; it bears repeating, so allow me to plagiarize myself:

I gave an assignment in October of 2005 asking for students to dig into their memory and write five hundred words about September 11th, 2001. I wanted them to reflect on what will remain one of the most significant days in our lives. When the attacks occurred, these students for the most part were about fifteen, so as early teens they had very guttural, organic reactions. How, I wondered, do they remember that day? I thought it was a good assignment—a specific event but a vague enough request for them to wander where they wished. One student wrote of her aunt who never made it out of the South Tower. Another wrote about her sense of horror and disbelief, which, she wrote, she could never correctly capture on paper. Several actually commented they didn’t think it affected their lives at all while others spit out what they kind of paid attention to with one ear from local television reports—about heightened security, conspiracy factors, the indescribable loss of life that spontaneously erupted on TV that morning. But one student’s piece caught my attention. He wrote, in part:

In a way, September 11 demonstrated, more than any one phrase can contain, the strength of our Constitution. The day became the beginning of a new era of the democratic process, and the definition of how we will defend our liberty, maintain our principles and remember our purpose—to stand as an example of humanity’s potential. It was Memorial Day. It was Victory Day.

I read this with amazement. No student, I thought, could possibly be that stupid. While I admired his choice, I remained baffled by his idiocy. I asked for the rough draft and received exactly what I knew I would: A similar, hand written version with some words written differently and others crossed out.

“You plagiarized this,” I said, which, understand, is rare for teachers to say. We receive copied material all the time, but nearly never have enough proof to say, directly, “You didn’t write this.”

“I didn’t plagiarize that!”

“Yeah, you did.” I think he was put off by my small laugh.

He continued to challenge me. Normally, plagiarized papers frustrate faculty members when they know an assignment was plagiarized—either from another student or from one of the many web sites offering papers for sale— but can’t prove it.

“Yes, you did. Tell me why I shouldn’t kick you out right now.”

“Because I didn’t plagiarize it.”

“Okay, I’ll tell you what. Go do some homework. I want you to bring me a copy of the original. If you do, I’ll let you redo the assignment without penalty.” I figured the embarrassment enough would be sufficient.

Once, a student turned in a paragraph she plagiarized from our own text. Another time a student turned in a paper right out of the psychology textbook assuming I wouldn’t recognize that his in-class writing had the ability of a seventh grader and the essay he turned in was written by Freud.

Not long ago I Googled  the term “college papers” and found the top ten of about 4,750,000 sites including essaytown.com, papercamp.com, duenow.com, term-paper-college.com, schoolsucks.com, chuckiii.com and, my favorite, smarttermpapers.com, where on the home page they offer “custom papers” with the following guarantee: “A 100% original document based on exact requirements given by you!” What is bothersome is their promise that “all writers hold at least a master’s degree.” But my favorite highlighted guarantee is that “all papers are plagiarism free—we use a plagiarism detection program to ensure that all texts are original.” When I tell my students that the papers are plagiarized the minute their name is placed at the top, they don’t really get it.

When students plagiarize and I know it but I can’t really prove it, I have to decide if I am to bluff and call them on it, spend time doing research to try and find the original source, or, since all writing is subjective and can be criticized, rip it to pieces anyway giving a C or D to the student who worked so hard at finding a professional piece that met my requirements. I did that once and the student, without thinking, exclaimed, “But this was in Time Magazine!”

I had a student once complain I didn’t accuse her of plagiarizing. She said she thought the work was brilliantly written and that she was convinced I would demand of her the origin of the information. Some are that good. Some papers are so moronic I pray they were plagiarized just so I don’t have to believe one of my students wrote that shit. A paper I received once had the same page printed three times. When I pointed out the mistake, he said he couldn’t think of anything else to write but knew the paper had to be 800 words so he just copied it a few times. I started to tell him that was not a good idea and he interrupted complaining of the requirements and how I am being unreasonable.

The mystery to me is why they would be involved in any activity during which they decided they simply haven’t got the ability, so they have someone else do it. On the surface the motivation is clear: The dude wants an A in my class and he’s too busy to get all the work done and watch TikTok videos. But something deeper is amiss; the generation of students currently calling themselves sophomores or juniors have become accustomed to finding work instead of figuring it out. Since birth, they have been taught to “find” the answers, to “find the directions” to “find the best rating for some diner.” The ability to figure it out has receded. No one asks for directions anymore when we used to also inquire, “And where is a great local place to eat?” No one asks others to take their picture, when doing so can often lead to a conversation, which can lead to the discovery of unsearchable information. The best answers are most often spontaneous; and the secret formula to writing is originality.

To use someone else’s work is to say, quite clearly actually, “I’m simply not up to this, so I’m going to pretend I’m better at it than I am.” Some call it cheating. I call it a reality check. If you need to plagiarize in order to continue on a particular path, you’re on the wrong path.

Step off.

Back to the assignment: When the student with the plagiarized paper returned. I gleefully asked (a bit too gleeful I suppose), “Did you find it?” No, he said. To be honest I didn’t expect to see him again.

“No,” he said, as I knew he would.

“It’s okay. I brought a copy. Shall I read it to you?”

“No.”

“Great! Here goes! Hey, it’s from the Virginian Pilot! Well, let’s see:

“’There are still no words for September 11’ by…” I paused. “Oh my god, Dude, should I go on?” He laughed a little at my sarcasm because he knew what came next and because, really, it was so laughable.

“’There are still no words for September 11’ by…” I stopped and looked at him.

“You’ve got to be kidding,” I said.

He spoke quietly: “I didn’t know you were the one who wrote it.”

It’s raining harder now, and the temperature is dropping. Time to put another log on the fire, get some hot water, and fill a bowl with Cheez-Its. Of course.

Video File: Small Talk

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I write mostly personal essays or memoirs, so my work bends toward the lengthy; it isn’t unusual for an essay to run fifteen pages. When I started doing public readings, it took about twenty minutes or more to read one piece, but this was not an issue as I would either read alone or with someone else who would do all their work at once and then I’d do mine, block style.

But then my dear friend, poet Tim Seibles, suggested we read together, that is, on stage at the same time, alternating pieces. We did a series of twelve readings for roughly two-hundred people each time at the now defunct Jewish Mother in Virginia Beach, Virginia. The Jewish Mother Sessions forced me to write short pieces so that when we alternated on stage, he didn’t read a four-minute poem followed by me reading a thirty minute essay; we’d have been there all night.

So I took fragments of long pieces, and then I started to write dedicated short work a la Kate Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour.” I’m not a poet, but I threw a couple of lame attempts in there as well later in the evening after the crowd had been drinking a while. As a writer, I loved the exercise of telling a story, or more often just a piece of story, in a flash. Hence, “Flash non-fiction” entered my world, and since then many were collected in my book, Fragments: Flash Non-Fiction.

The individual pieces had been picked up by some journals, including Kestrel, Matador, Sand, and more. I wrote about animal names, about health conditions, about 911 and art. A few pieces got some legs, like “Instructions for Walking with an Old Man at the Mall,” originally written for our readings, picked up by Kestrel, reprinted in Fragments, and then anthologized several times. This piece, “Small Talk,” is one of my favorites for self-explanatory reasons. I’m certainly more comfortable after a glass of cab in front of a few hundred people who have had several gin and tonics than I am in front of a small camera in a small space. But as my mother says in a phrase she is convinced she coined, “It is what it is.”

I learned from Tim to STFU and just read. So, here, from my office at Old Dominion University a few years ago, is “Small Talk.” Thank you for tolerating my face and voice for a few minutes.

The Girl in the Third Row

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“We teach everything in the world to people, except the most essential thing.  And that is life.  Nobody teaches you about life.  You’re supposed to know about it.  Nobody teaches you how to be a human being and what it means to be a human being, and the dignity that it means when you say, “I am a human being.”

–Leo Buscaglia, “The Art of Being Fully Human

About a month ago my students seemed unengaged during a lecture about literary terms. I sat down and was quiet for several minutes. Few things can grab the attention of a disinterested student like a professor’s sudden silence.

I told this story:

When I was a freshman, we had orientation where we broke into small groups and were led by a couple of seniors and a guidance counselor or other such school official, and we did various activities together from the obvious, like a school tour of where everything is that you could possibly need, to the ludicrous, like a swimming competition where we all had to wear pantyhose and do laps in the college pool.

At some point each group gathered in the library and watched a video called, “The Art of Being Fully Human,” by  the late Leo Buscaglia, a philosophy professor at USC, and a bestselling author/lecturer. In the video he tells of how when teaching he finds “friendly eyes,” someone in class who is mentally present, and he talks to them. He found them in the eyes of an alert young woman in the third row. She didn’t always agree with him, he says, but she was there. So he was looking forward to her showing up to his request of everyone to stop by his office and introduce themselves. She didn’t show, and several classes went by without her being present. So he went to the dean to inquire about her, and it turns out she had driven up to Pacific Palisades, got out of her car, and in front of many witnesses, jumped off the cliff.

I sat silently for a moment more.

Buscaglia says it changed his life, because that was the moment he became fully aware that we teach everything in the world to people, from calculus to literature to engineering to chemistry, but we don’t spend one moment teaching the art, the absolute art and beauty, of being alive. We leave that lecture off the syllabus. We’re supposed to just “know” how to deal with troubles and bullying and failure and insecurity and disappointment. No one teaches us the value of being ourselves, of being alive and human.

I then asked my students a familiar question to anyone who has ever taken one of my classes: What are you doing here? Why did you decide in your life that right now out of all the options available to you, you chose to sit here, now, with me, and learn about Melville? Because we need to remind ourselves of two things: one, we chose to be here instead of anywhere else; and two, while this class, or this semester even, may not be what you enjoy, we need to keep the big picture in mind; that this might be the slow part of an exciting life ahead.

End of story. That was in October.

Last night one of my students who had not been in class in a few weeks waited until everyone else had left and she stopped me. We’ve had discussions before as she is transitioning and it has been more than a little difficult with family, friends, and her own confidence. She had told me her depression can spin out of control.

She apologized for not being in class and asked if it was okay to still turn in the writing that had been due. I assured her it was absolutely fine, and I’d read it first to make suggestions before she turns it in for a grade. Then she reminded me of the Buscaglia lecture.

“I’m the girl in the third row,” she said. “If she were here she’d look around the room and recognize me as herself.”

I was quiet.

“I had written letters to everyone I know apologizing for what I planned to do. Again. I was completely at peace with the decision to die.” She was visibly shaking as she talked. “But then I searched online everywhere for who you were talking about, and I didn’t even know how to spell his name, but my mother knew who I meant, and I read a few of his books. I’m still alive now because of that.”

“How are you feeling?”

“Different. I feel different. I’m back in counseling.”

We talked a bit more and then walked outside. “You’re an engineering major, right?”

“I was. I am switching it for next semester.”

“To?”

“Philosophy.”

I laughed. “Leo Buscaglia would be very happy!”

She was crying a bit, and then said she feels like being in college, finally.

I nodded. “But you know, as a philosophy major, you’re never going to get a job, right?”

She laughed. “I’ll teach.”

I started my very long drive home up the bay and realized, quite clearly and positively, had she been in my class thirty years ago, my entire career would have been different. I’m so glad she showed up now.

***

 A school principal gave this to Haim Ginott.  She said:

“I am a survivor of a concentration camp.  My eyes saw what no person should witness.  Gas chambers built by learned engineers.  Children poisoned by educated physicians.  Infants killed by trained nurses.  Women and children shot and killed by high school and college graduates.  So I’m suspicious of education.  My request is:  help your students to be human.  Your efforts must never produce learned monsters, skilled psychopaths, or educated Eichmanns.  Reading and writing and spelling and history and arithmetic are only important if they serve to make our students human.”

The Full Lecture:

https://www.pbs.org/video/kvie-public-television-leo-buscaglia-art-being-fully-human/

Sundays

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A steady rain is falling along the Chesapeake today, and the sky is grey all the way upriver to the west. The clouds are low, and late-November leaves lay like wet carpet throughout the paths here at Aerie. It is cold.

I startled a heron earlier; she was hunkered down in the reeds on the edge of the marsh so that neither of us knew the other was there until the last minute, and she let out the familiar low honk as she lifted into the trees on the far side of the water and settled onto a high branch, then she immediately pulled her head down low into her body, and it was raining harder so she turned to face behind her, toward the woods, away from the wind.

The only sounds this afternoon are the rain on the water, a slight wind in the few remaining leaves, and some fishing boat through the low fog at the mouth of the river. It feels like November out. It feels like a Sunday.

When I was young I lived in a yellow house on a reservoir in central Massachusetts. This time of year I would sit at my kitchen table and look through a wall-size window across the grass and past the road to the water, and the leaves would have long been gone, and it would rain like this, or snow so that even the roof of the Old Stone Church out on Wachusett was visibly wet. I worked on a manuscript about Vincent van Gogh back then, and the late fall, early winter mood fit the subject. Days like today I desperately miss my small place, the chill coming down from the mountain reminding me of colder months ahead.

It’s lonelier here than it was there, but I don’t know why. Maybe it was more hopeful back then, and hope can certainly chase off loneliness, almost always. At least there it could. Sometimes I’d walk around to the near shore of the reservoir in the first snowfall and watch the Canada geese move by, or the occasional car come up the road from West Boylston, headed perhaps to the cider mill in Sterling, or further to the summit at Mt. Wachusett. Or sometimes I’d wander across the street to the Deacon Bench Antique Shop and talk to the workers, and someone would have brought in a dozen Country Donuts from down in town.

Up in Princeton on days like this I’d stop at a small, white shed-size store, a deli of sorts, and buy hard rolls and the Boston Globe, and I’d return to my small living room, also with a window looking out across the grass to the reservoir, and I’d read the paper, spreading it out on the plaid couch, on the wooden coffee table. I’d have already put a chicken with spices and cut up red potatoes in the oven, and it felt permanent, as if it was all designed just for me.

The Chesapeake is choppy today, and to the west the deep grey clouds announce some inevitable harder rain and cooler temperatures. I thought about heading down to the raw bar in the village to watch a game but opted to spend a little time here at my desk. I have a box of pictures behind me, and I thought it would be the right kind of day to go through them, get rid of the redundant ones, put some of my favorites in the albums still with empty sleeves. I might not pull it off the shelf again, but I will today since it is raining, and it’s good to remember other times like this when there was something more than weather in the way the raindrops hit the surface of Wachusett. Something more melodic than today’s rainfall, which seems to simply drown itself in the river.

Instead, I stood at the water for a while and watched the current, noted the incoming tide, felt the cold rain on my face which rather than dampen my mood seemed to massage my melancholy back into something akin to anticipation, to expectation.

Am I wrong to think Sundays have always been like this is some way? It’s as if the colder months were designed for Sunday afternoons, the sound of rustling leaves, a chill on the back of the neck, the familiar call of some announcer analyzing the passing game, commenting on some player’s career.

And there will be an instant replay so that we can experience it a few more times before moving on, noting what worked, what didn’t, anticipating the fourth quarter with just a small stabbing of regret for some of the plays we will never run again.

GAZA

~ aviewfromthiswilderness ~ 1 Comment

Gaza is roughly 25 miles long and 6 miles wide. It is about twice the size of Washington D.C. It’s been inhabited since the fifteenth century B.C. It occupies the exact same amount of land as Las Vegas, but about 2 million people live in Gaza.

Picturing it now? Big population, not a lot of land. Virginia Beach is nearly four times larger than the Gaza Strip. It is exactly the size of Raleigh, North Carolina, with four times more people.

Okay. Now, drop 1,000 bombs a day on the Gaza Strip, on Vegas, on Raleigh.

On DC.

For 6 straight days, non-stop, drop 6,000 bombs with a total weight of 4000 tons. 18,000 tons of bombs have been dropped on the Gaza Strip since October 7th.

We haven’t even begun to see the numbers of dead, of wounded. A four-day “pause” (they’re not even pretending it’s a cease-fire) in fighting will allow between ten and fifty hostages to be released before they resume bombing.

So far Israel has dropped 42 bombs per square mile. Roughly 30 tons of bombs dropped on about every 20 New York City blocks.

This is the absolute definition of genocide. This is the 21st century’s definition of holocaust. This is an attempt at complete destruction.

Israel has now dropped more tons of bombs on the Gaza Strip than the Allies dropped on Tokyo in World War Two.

In Israel, the number of tragically killed by Hamas since October 7th is roughly 1200 people.

According to the Norwegian Refugee Council, in Gaza, the number of people tragically killed by Israel is roughly 14,500. More than 4000 of them are children with another 1300 children unaccounted for.

Almost 50 percent of all homes in the Gaza Strip have been destroyed.

52 percent of schools have been bombed with more than 600,000 students denied access to education as a result.

114 health facilities and 15 hospitals have been bombed.

All water on the Gaza Strip is now unsafe.

62 percent of the population has left their homes either because of destruction or displacement.

All sanitation services have stopped with sewerage “flowing in the streets.”

Drinking water is nearly non-existent.

The World Health Organization reports, to date, more than 70,000 cases of severe respiratory diseases.

Israel has allowed 6000 gallons of fuel to be brought to the Gaza Strip since October 7th, but the WHO reports that the United Nations estimate for enough fuel to sustain life on the Gaza Strip is 42,000 gallons per day. PER DAY.

This is not retaliation. This is not even war. It is an attempt on the part of Israel to completely annihilate the Palestinian People, and nowhere in scripture is such a reaction sanctioned.

I hesitate to be so pedestrian here, but let’s go to Wiki:

According to Rabbi Judah Loew of Prague, Jewish law forbids the killing of innocent people, even in the course of a legitimate military engagement.[23]

Those few cases in the Bible in which this norm was violated are special cases. One example was when King Hezekiah stopped all the fountains in Jerusalem in the war against Sennacherib, which Jewish scholars regard as a violation of the biblical commandment.[22]

According to Maimonides‘, on besieging a city in order to seize it, it must not be surrounded on all four sides but only on three sides, thus leaving a path of escape for whoever wishes to flee to save his life.[23] Nachmanides, writing a century later, strengthened the rule and added a reason: “We are to learn to deal kindly with our enemy.”[23]

“If your enemy be hungry, give him bread to eat, and if he be thirsty, water to drink! ” ~~ Proverbs (Mishlei) 25:21

By the way,  “Mishlei is the second book of the section in the Hebrew Bible called Writings, which contains guidance for living a wise, moral, and righteous life.”

Happy Thanksgiving.

Peace my friends.

Shalom.

Banksy

Grateful

~ aviewfromthiswilderness ~ 3 Comments
Peter Trimbacher’s Castle

Let me tell you about last night:

An old friend I have not seen since the mid-eighties contacted me. She was just a friend, but she happened to be part of one of the most significant decisions of my life. I was living in Massachusetts, and we briefly worked together. She told me at the time about a man who owned an eight-hundred-year-old castle in Austria. She was going there the following summer to do housekeeping in exchange for her stay. I wrote the man, Peter, and inquired as to other positions, thinking a summer working in a castle built around 1100 just might be what I needed. He said yes, offering me a bartender job for the summer, and having told him my journalism background, asked if I’d help him edit a book he was writing about the castle.

So it was decided. We bought one-way tickets to Salzburg and decided that after that summer I’d wander south through Europe and on to visit a friend in Senegal. And on. And on. I moved to Pennsylvania to live rent-free with an old college roommate so I could save money for the trip. I even got a job at Hotel Hershey to save more money.

Things happened.

I didn’t go. I called my friend and told her I had decided not to go. She was more than a little upset, to be sure. I had reasons, and I don’t regret not going, but it was significant. The following summer came and went and she did go to Austria. And the following fall she called to tell me all about it. That Thanksgiving, she drove to Pennsylvania where I was then watching an estate for some friends who were spending the holidays in New York City, and we had a fun Thanksgiving Day, and she told me how it was a good call that I didn’t join her.  

Last night for the first time in ages, she contacted me and we remembered that Thanksgiving. Her and her husband still live in Massachusetts, and they’ve also traveled around the world since then. But that Austrian trip was the first jaunt, and we talked about her return, and that holiday in November when she clearly forgave me for bailing on her.  

Crazy. Am I sorry I didn’t go? Yes, it haunts me that I didn’t go. Am I glad that I stayed? More than anything else in my life I’m glad I stayed.

Life is like that, and it’s taken me since then to understand what it means to be grateful. I’m not thankful for some things in my life that changed the course of my existence, but I’m grateful for where those things brought me. They’re not the same thing. No kidding, I never really truly understood. I’ve always been thankful for so much, as I’ve pretty much had so much to be thankful for. But grateful? I’m just beginning to understand.

I sat this morning on the deck at Café by the Bay in the village, swirls of dry leaves moving through with the breeze off the water. The place isn’t on the Bay; in fact, it is a mile or more away, but the breeze moves through town this time of year, and this morning I sat on the deck with the leaves lifting and falling, and I drank my cappuccino, and in my mind ran through a list of things to worry about. It’s long.

It seems more common these days to be distracted by life and its happenings. People you love are ill, or they’re pressing against the edge of unhealthy, anyway. Others have fallen away from keeping in touch, and with the holidays imminent, you wonder how they’re doing, about the changes that find us here, and about the mistakes we’ve made.

I’d like to do the last few years over again. Honest to God, I need to do the last few years over again. And I’d like someone to call me up and say, “Hey, let’s try this again. What do you need to get it right this time?” But life simply doesn’t work that way. So what is to be done?

This:

I’m grateful for being here, now, on the deck of a café, drinking coffee and feeling the beautiful autumn breeze on the back of my neck, talking to neighbors heading in and out, making notes about edits I need to make in a manuscript.

I’m grateful that I just hung up the phone with my ninety-year-old mother, and we laughed, talked about the weather, talked about my cousin’s chickens running through her kitchen.

I’m grateful that my life really is a circle, and all that was true nearly forty years ago is still true and present and alive and such a part of me.

I’m grateful that my son is a reflection of my father, the same gentle spirit, the same deep, deep kindness, the same subtle sense of humor. Grateful that on his way back here from Richmond this morning he is stopping at Country Donuts for some toasted coconut fritters for me.

I’m grateful for so much.

I’m thankful for what’s ahead: more Ireland, more Spain, more western New York and the familiar reaches in Florida. I’m thankful for people’s forgiveness, for those who make excuses for me, for those who understand the subplot behind my eyes.

Recently I wrote about students who have died through the years. Today I’m thinking about the ones who kept going; those I can’t thank enough for tolerating my humor and arrogance as we moved through semester after semester, only to send me a note to let me know how they’re doing. The ones who speak up; hell, the ones who show up. The ones who stop afterwards to talk, who call me up and ask questions, who seem to understand the smallest of gestures have the biggest effects.

I’m grateful that I have siblings who have the same sense of humor, thankful they’re much smarter than I am, thankful they “don’t confront me with my failures.”

I’m thankful for the way the trees hang on to those yellow leaves so much longer than the rest, brightening up the sky, filling up our senses and reminding us we’re alive, and we may wake up tomorrow and begin again.

I’m more than a little grateful for my friends. I’ve known some for more than forty years and still can pick up the phone and call anytime and, in the words of Harry Chapin, know that they “see where you are, but they know where you’ve been.”

I’m thankful for the way the river keeps running past.

For the way the sliver of a moon reminds me of my insignificance, and the brightness of Vega reminds me of my own light that needs to shine on this all-to-brief journey though nature.

Happy Thanksgiving.

“Friends, I will remember you, think of you, pray for you.

And when another day is through, I’ll still be friends with you.”

–Bill Danoff

The Gardens at Hotel Hershey

A Good Stretch of the Legs

~ aviewfromthiswilderness ~ 1 Comment

In the summer of 2025, with hope and luck, I’m going to return to the small French village at the foot of the Pyrenees, and I’m going to start walking. Again. I’m going to slow my heartrate down to the length of my gait, and my world will stretch no further than the next kilometer. I’ll stop in thousand-year-old chapels and centuries-old pubs. I’ll drink café con leche every morning along with fajitas patatas, a glass of juice, and a baguette in my pack for the moments of rest, to share with others while we talk about where we’re from. In the afternoons I’ll find an albergue and sit at a picnic table with a bottle of rioja and a small meal, and new friends from Italy and the Netherlands and Nigeria will join me. It’s what we do.

And like last time, I’ll tell stories, and we’ll all laugh, and I’ll be in a fine mood the entire time. Just like last time. And it will again be genuine, not some façade forced by a preoccupied mind.

It is what I should have been doing for decades. No kidding. My life would have been drastically improved had I discovered Spain ten years earlier. I suppose each of us eventually careens into life as it should be. It simply seems most people I know collided earlier than me. I read once we all live out all periods of our life; it’s just that not everyone lives them out in the same order, some aspects delayed for one reason or another. The part where I unearth what brings me peace? Very recently. But that’s no surprise; at least not to me.

***

For far too many people, life can sometimes feel like everything changes at once; as if the Gods conspire to let all the difficult aspects of life accumulate until their collective voice announces, “Now!” and all the old ways are no longer relevant, the old friends no longer available, the old hopes and dreams seem adrift on some frayed tapestry of old expectations. And you feel just past the point where good times still seem plausible. It is the proverbial edge, and many people balance on that jagged edge on a regular basis.

Such is depression. Such is the crash of anxiety. Random afflictions are certainly less random when the smallest of circumstances consistently pinch that nerve between “everything’s fine” and “everything is going to fail.” I’ve been this way before. I’ll be this way again. A lot of us have, right? The “this too shall pass” and “it is what it is” lectures do not work.

You attempt to tackle the entire list of worries, but you know you’re never going to pay all the bills, you know you’re never going to finish the projects, and you are absolutely convinced you’re never going to get the car fixed, the oven fixed, the world fixed. You suffocate in the wash of world failures too, not just your own. So you seek some form of peace, some sense of escape, no matter what it takes to find it. Reason recedes to almost a suggestion, and what seems irrational and drastic to others can somehow make perfect sense. You don’t so much “decide” anymore; and it isn’t about “giving up.” Whatever happens next is simply the only exit in what became a cattle chute void of options. No one gets it. They think you should have simply “gotten over it.” They say, “Had we known.” They say, “What a waste.” They say, “We had no idea.” “We’ve done all we can.” “I didn’t know.”

Of course not. The depressed, the anxious, the one with deep, inescapable demons is more likely than not to make you laugh, get excited about plans, is always there with a sharp and funny story. No one knows; even they don’t know.

***

St. Jean Pied de Port, France, to Santiago de Compostella, Spain, is just under nine hundred kilometers—roughly five hundred miles. If you drive, you can make it in just about eight and a half hours. If you walk it takes about six weeks. I’m a walker.

I’ve been there before. I’ll be there again. It’s what psychologists call “the value of anticipation.” We all need something to look forward to. It can’t be out of reach or near the realm of fantasy. Yet it can’t be so obtainable that achievement becomes routine. As Lily Meola sings, “It’s not big enough if it doesn’t scare the hell out of you.” Yet it can’t be too big. Yeah, life for the afflicted can be a juggling act. In broad daylight you can keep those balls going, hands down. At three a.m. there’s a tendency to hear them all crash on the floor and scatter like delusions.

Welcome to how the world is for more than ten percent of the population. They must find their own truths, despite what others expect. And they carry their own baggage filled with failures and misunderstandings like backpacks, and the best anyone can hope to do is put them down and move on. Here’s the thing: the worst part of some psychological ailments is often the inability to see past the next hour, beyond the next mile, yet the ironic solution to those very same inflictions is to decidedly and quite purposefully not see past the next hour or beyond the next mile.  

You see, when you look too far down the path, and your blinders keep out the light of hope, there is no suspense to keep you turning pages; there is no reason to anticipate the resolution. Life is anything but dynamic.

***

Basque country is my favorite part of the Camino. Navarra. It runs from St Jean south to near Pamplona, and you pass locals who still speak this rare language, and all of the ones we met before, all of them, were friendly, helpful, and hopeful for your journey, as if they each have some personal stake in your every step.

The first day is the hardest. Straight up hill for twenty miles. No kidding; a forty-five-degree angle at times. After that it levels off to just mountain hikes akin to the Catskills until Galacia, where some climbing is involved. But by then, a month later, the body doesn’t mind and the mind doesn’t doubt anymore. And the vistas and the visitors from all over the world keep your mind occupied, and after a week south of France—less maybe, four days—an unhurried pace takes over, and the entire world is arranged by where you’re going and where you “might” stay that night. Somewhere just south of Pamplona, just as the Camino bends to the west, you’ve shut down the part of the mind that begs for self-criticism and doubt, and you feel more free, lighter, but you can’t define it, not exactly. You just know it is easier to breathe; it is easier to sleep. All of the complications which haunt you dissolve. The ghosts recede.

***

Of course, our normal life can be a journey with some “hypothetical destination.” But a journey with some semblance of hope can be the difference between feeling alive and feeling dead all the time, where having an ordinary day is an extraordinary achievement.  

How many of us make plans just beyond our reach, a little past our current condition? It truly might be what saves us. Some of us anyway.

It’s well past time to change the narrative.  

It’s time to go back to Spain.