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Au(tumn)

~ aviewfromthiswilderness ~ Leave a comment

I’m home and the leaves changed and mostly fell while I was away the past week. I love traveling in the autumn, especially in the north, this time western Maryland, Ohio, West Virginia, and the mountains of Virginia. Such colors I’ve rarely seen anywhere else, like a painter’s palette, like a quilt. Like fall.

“I lived in a yellow house, like butter,” Van Gogh wrote of his place in Arles where he did his boldest work, filled with colors and tube paints pushed onto the canvas like toothpaste. When we speak today of his work, it is from Arles we mostly mean.

I, too, lived in a yellow house, like butter, along a country road running past a reservoir in central Massachusetts. Next door was a tall, white church with a cemetery, and the road wound up through the small village, past the Deacon’s Bench Antique Store, past the nursing home, up into Sterling and past the cider mill. It ran up the mountain, winding into the village of Princeton on Mt. Wachusett, where in autumn I’d hike to the summit and look across the New England tapestry of orange and rust, stretching clear to Boston, to New Hampshire, and west toward the Quabbin Reservoir. The crisp air, like yesterday in West Virginia, cleared my head, pushing away fears and anxiety. “It’ll be fine,” it whispered. Well, it won’t, I thought, but for now it is, and sometimes that’s enough.

I wonder if I’m starting to enjoy autumn more now than summer because I’m getting older.

The trail behind the house is covered beautifully in leaves that no step, yet, has trodden black, though signs of deer are evident. They bed down in a holly grove at the far end of the property and walk down toward the patio where the deep, heavy birdbath is apparently now theirs. The front path remains mostly clear as it runs in such a way and is wide enough for a soft northern breeze to keep the leaves to the side. But not always, and certainly not after a good, steady October rain like last week before I left. There’s something so immediate about autumn.

It is the time of year my father died. I read somewhere that other than the holidays, autumn is the most common time of year for elderly deaths. Younger people die more in Summer, which makes sense for the numbers out doing things they probably shouldn’t be, and January through March has the highest rates of suicide.

It’s odd how so many people come to life in autumn when nature is slipping away for a while, ducking behind the guise of death, returning half a year later, slowly. For now, it is beautiful, and the colors reflect in the duck pond and out on the river. They shine back at the hills I walked around a few days ago, and they remind me that for now, just for now, we’re all noticing the same beauty. It’s incredible that people throughout the autumn world all marvel and gaze at the ripple of color coming down the tree line, the scatterings of hues under oaks and maples and birches, and how the white trunks stand forth as the control group so we can see just how fine a job nature did.

I used to get depressed in autumn, feeling the summer slip away, the time of life and the sun on my back. It always, absolutely always, brought me to life, so I pushed the fall off as much as I could, perhaps anticipating what happens after the fall, in the dead of winter when hope is often difficult to unearth. But now I find in autumn something reassuring. Maybe it is simply that even growing old and letting go can be done with absolute beauty and grace.

At the end of The Lion in Winter, Geoffrey wonders what difference it makes how a man falls, and Richard remarks, “When the fall is all that’s left, it matters a great deal.”

Nature knows how to make an exit. She knows how to hold her own. I suppose her last green is gold as well as her first. I am surprised I have been so resistant to change. Maybe I’m getting tired.

Or maybe I just miss my yellow house near the Old Stone Church on the road to Wachusett.

“The Old Stone Church” where I walked nearly every day for three years. My Yellow House is just off to the left of the picture. No, I didn’t take this shot.

Fall(ing)

~ aviewfromthiswilderness ~ 2 Comments

This time of year when leaves start to fall I recall a line I wrote which to this day bothers me.

“Life is the distance between a falling leaf and the ground.”

I loved that line. I was walking around home some years ago and it popped in my head. At the time I had been working on a piece called “Walled In” and the end of the essay digresses into a litany of “life is” comments. I added this as the last line of the piece, which tied back to the narrative about stepping away from society a la Thoreau. The Southern Humanities Review picked up the piece and when I received the final edits before press I wrote Dan Latimer, the editor at the time, and asked him to strike the last line. He did.

I am pretty sure it isn’t original. I googled it; I turned it in to turnitin.com, I tried everything. I don’t read that much so I looked through the few possible books I might find it, but nothing. I looked through poetry books, I called writers I know who actually do read books and asked them. I even, thinking it might have been in a passage read by a writer as a guest on NPR’s “Fresh Air,” wrote the show asking if anyone there, namely host Terry Gross, remembered the line. They were nice enough to write back politely suggesting I might be having a mental breakdown. “But it is a great line!” I wanted to write back. I didn’t.

I remember an interview where Paul McCartney to this day is not convinced he is the author of the music for “Yesterday.” Unlike McCartney, I chose to strike the line. The piece went on to other outlets and has done very well through the years, including several anthologies, but san line. I was concerned someone would recognize it and know it wasn’t original, even though I’m pretty sure it is. My journalism training, however, requires me to be one hundred percent sure. “If you can’t back up your sources,” Dr. Jandoli repeated, “you don’t have a story.”

That might be in part why I slid away from journalism and into something more personal. I hate fact-checking. Instead, I found stories in life. Though to be honest I don’t know any writer who walks around looking for stories. We don’t stand in the middle of family circumstances or think about work issues or attend baseball games taking mental notes about some possible narrative arc.   

But those situations are always possible material. We never stop working. Either some digressive thought about an ongoing work, or a new work, or a very old work, crawls into our consciousness while we are watching television, or some quick phrase catches our attention and we know it is the beginning of or end of or transition to something. It is not on purpose; there is no attempt to blend writing and “life.” I swear. It just happens. We are always working.

An artist’s brain functions differently. A photographer goes for a walk and finds himself framing nature, a painter sees color schemes, a musician notices sounds, and writers, well, complete mental breakdowns from information overload is not out of the question. It is why we despise the comment: “You know what you should write about?” Go away. Did you really think we were sitting around thinking “I have no idea what to write about, I hope someone makes a suggestion”?

And we don’t actually “find” something to write about; it seeps into our existence like humidity or allergies. For me, I walk in the woods, or along the water, and the nature of nature is non-judgmental, absent of debate. I can walk for hours and my thoughts move through unattached to some human-inspired “suggestion” from a billboard or odd structure. It is organic, like leaves falling: thoughts let go and gather around.

Near my home at the river is a small strip of beach which changes with the weather and storms. Sometimes there is room enough to walk quite a ways along the water, and other times the river moves right to the edge of the swamp or rip rap and to continue means wading through the tide. In either case, I am always discouraged at my inability to communicate the perpetual reality of that tide, the infinite days the water will ebb and flow, and the significance of nature compared to the miniscule roll I play in this short span of decades. So I don’t even try. I “stand back and let it all be” as the Boss suggests. And the passing of time is enough some times.

That’s writing. A writer spends a great deal of time not writing. Not because we have nothing to write about, but because we have an absolute conviction we can never, ever do it justice.

Additive Inverse

~ aviewfromthiswilderness ~ Leave a comment

My doctor asked if there was anything that bothered me on a daily basis. Habits, she suggested, or small annoyances.

This was an easy one. “People talking with food in their mouth. Or chewing with their mouth open.”

“How do you feel?”

And this is true. “Like my chest hurts and if they don’t stop–and sometimes even after they do–I’m going to throw up or collapse with a seizure.”

I suggested I overreact and I know that. She said no. “You have misophonia.” I “feel anger, disgust and a desire to flee” when I hear certain sounds.

Last week she suggested that for several years beginning about 2017 I had suffered from a form of cognitive dissonance. I asked her to explain it and she tried, she really did, but then I remembered Google. It turns out everyone experiences it; we call it “stress.” But some people—a minuscule percentage, which apparently includes sixty-three-year-old white writers from New York who live in Virginia, have trouble listening to the news, dealing with hostile people, understanding conflict to the point that the stress (dissonance) can be intolerable. It’s not simply that the way things are contradict how they should or can be; it’s that some minds can’t tolerate that often serious digression from what should be normal. Think of turning on the radio and the music is all off key, and everyone else ignores it or tunes it out, but you feel it in your bones so that your skull starts to crack. That. It’s when the solution to a problem that anyone else would either figure out quickly or abandon and move on leaves you so confused that a complete mental breakdown is entirely likely.

It’s when your actions do not coincide with your beliefs or strong desires because of some lack of information, pressure from others, whatever, and instead of being mindful, instead of having enough self-awareness to reconcile those differences by not rationalizing your way out of your beliefs or desires, you live with absolute anxiety and disarray, psychologically, of course, but also physically as it can manifest as high blood pressure, lightheadedness, or rapid heart rate, and often it is set off by some event or occurrence slamming you off track like a landslide taking out a passing train. The causes are simple: severe and sudden change of direction in life either through leaving a job, losing everything, or some form of physical or mental attack that seems to never end.

So while it is not uncommon to not want war (everyone wishes for peace and can’t tolerate war), it is an entirely different level if your mind cannot comprehend the very existence of war, the very notion of hurting others for some gain, and even for self-preservation, makes your mind freeze and your heart race; and the news reports are the adult equivalent of some childhood bully yelling in your face in some foreign language. You cannot for the life of you understand how it is that war leaked into the pool of peace and watching or hearing about it causes a racing heart, drastically increased blood pressure, and irritability. So if the conflict is personal, confusion is even more common, and you might very likely abandon critical thinking skills entirely making a difficult situation–whether it be in relationships, finances, or even employment–tragically worse. And if one must deal with all three, jumping off a cliff is not off the table.

So when two seemingly opposing forces attempt to exist in the same space, or even attempt to conquer each other, it can be damn near suicidal to tolerate for someone suffering from cognitive dissonance.

I think I explained that better than the doctor. Just saying.

There is a way out of it besides suddenly or even gradually becoming completely mindful and self-aware, as if you can buy a gallon of that with a yoga mat and stretch pants.

So I asked the doctor just that, and her reply was this: “Do you spend any time in nature?”

I smiled. “Yes.”

“Not enough.”

“I live in a jungle near water. It’s pretty enough.”

Not anymore, she said.

Here’s why nature: Nature, it seems, does not contradict our expectations of its actions since it always has and always will be in and of itself its own source and recipient. We are not in charge and when we try to be we eventually lose.

Check out the blade of grass coming up through the sidewalk.

This isn’t OCD. And it isn’t in a person’s control without first having some sense of absolute awareness that it exists at all. In other words, you have to know you have some form of cognitive dissonance before you can avoid (not cure) it to begin with. Not an easy task. Otherwise, one can continue to come across to others as mentally disheveled, dependent, bothersome, irrational. Some of you who know someone like this know well exactly what I mean.

Here’s the bizarre thing: My favorite class to teach is critical thinking wherein we must examine all the sources of a particular argument, vet them for expertise and accuracy, examine as many sides of the argument as seem legitimate, and come to some conclusion based upon rational thought and an absence of fallacies. No wonder I enjoy it; it’s a course with a primary objective of eliminating dissonance from an argument. Boom.

So today after my nature walk, I made a list of opposites. Please don’t comment that some of these are not, in the Webster sense of things, actually opposite. I know that. But they play out as opposing forces in some way. You can make your own list as you’ll see in a minute:  

War/Peace

Israel/Gaza

Russia/Ukraine

Republicans/Democrats

Vanilla/Chocolate

Trump/Biden

Cain/Abel

Frazier/Ali

Fires/Floods

Smalls/Shakur

York/Lancaster

Grudge/Forgiveness

Torrents/Drought

Yankees/Mets

Hamilton/Burr

Addiction/Pain

Manic/Depression

China/Thailand

Android/Apple

Elizabeth/Mary Queen of Scots

War/Peace

Batman/Superman

Brexit/EU

Jobs/Gates

Brady/Montana

Army/Navy

Public/Private

Imperial/Metric

Crawford/Davis

North/South

Permission/Forgiveness

Harding/Kerrigan

Winter/Summer

Byron/Keats

Hot/Cold

War/Peace

Heaven/Hell

Give/Take

Hatfields/McCoys

Here/There

Stay/Go

Live/Die

Attract/Repel

Edison/Tesla

Opposite/Same

Jefferson/Adams

War/Peace

Now/Forever

Okay, you get the point. But next we must do what is infinitely more difficult: Make the personal list, the opposites “within” which battle or have battled so deep in our psyche they rattle our very notion of our purpose in life. This list of “opposites” might not appear to be so contradictory but merely choices. But our lives are set up to label the path not taken as “opposite” of where we went, not because of coordinates but the “one or the other” significance of choice.

New York/Virginia

St. Bonaventure/Chapel Hill

Tucson/NYC

Austria/Pennsylvania

Log/Brick

Oysters/Clams

And then in recent years the list gets more specific for its sheer continuing presence. For instance:

No.

No, this list is mine. I am mindful enough to keep this to myself.

There are advantages of practicing mindfulness beyond not allowing the off-key aspects of life to make our blood curdle, not the least of which is a new sense of self-awareness. To look back now, for me anyway, over a few years when my cognitiveness was anything but harmonious, is to be flush with embarrassment at the choices I made, at the favors and requests I asked of others when needing help instead of figuring it out on my own. They were not conscious decisions; they were somehow self-embodied survivalisms that, if I had any presence of mind outside of the stress of dissonance, I never would have pursued. Ever.

So that list is mine to burn.

Or freeze.

Bury/Cremate

Rent/Own

Lease/Purchase

Chicken/Egg

Fiction/Non-fiction

Comedy/Drama

War/Peace

Peace.

Peace.

Departure Signs

~ aviewfromthiswilderness ~ 1 Comment

Some stories are difficult to write about for a variety of reasons. This falls into that category, but not for the reasons one may conceive, such as “too sad,” or “too morbid,” both of which I write without much trouble.

No, this is about diction and sound. It relies heavily on the reader “hearing” particular words phonetically so one can understand the misunderstanding.

Here’s what happened:

Many years ago I drove my parents to Norfolk International Airport for a flight to Islip, Long Island. It was early, just after six, and nothing was open at the airport food court yet except an “A&W Root Beer” joint serving breakfast biscuits and coffee. Dad was still tired, so he and I sat at a table while Mom went to get two coffees and two breakfast sandwiches for them. I opted out.

I could hear my mother repeating the order several times to the Filipino woman working alone behind the counter, and frustration grew between both of them. After fifteen minutes of Dad wondering where Mom disappeared to, she returned with a brown tray with their order.

“Somethings not right,” she said.

“Why?”

“It came to $27.50.”

“Airport food is very expensive,” my father chimed in, reaching for his bacon, egg, and cheese biscuit.

“That sounds wrong, Mom.”

“I couldn’t understand a word she said.” And at that, Mom grabbed the sandwich out of Dad’s hand, put it back on the tray, and walked to the counter.

“They’re speaking Spanish. No wonder.”

“No Dad, it’s Tagalog.”

“Why don’t you help your mother. You speak Spanish.”

I walked to the counter. The woman looked at me. I simply repeated what my mother had said from the start, that the sandwiches and coffee should have come to just over $8. I swept my hand across the plate and showed her the receipt for $27.50, and she put four more sandwiches on the tray. I took them off and asked if she was the only one there. She walked into the kitchen.

Exasperated, I put my hands on the counter with my head down and said, mostly to myself, but my mother could hear, “We’re not going to get anywhere unless we speak Tagalog.”

My mother stood up as if she had new life breathed into her. “Well! Then let’s speak to Galag. Is he the manager?“

The woman returned with an older, Filipino gentlemen, and my mother, very politely, told him, “I’m sorry but we paid almost thirty dollars for sandwiches that only cost about eight, so we’d like to speak to Galag.”

“Mom…” (it was hard for me to speak as I was laughing)

“I think my son here knows him, but we’d like to speak to Galag immediately.”

“I don’t understand!” the man said.

“Is Galag here? We’d like to speak to Galag please.”

“I speak English,” he said to her, and then, just as I was finally calm, added, “I’m sorry but it takes quite a while to speak Tagalog.” I lost it when Mom looked at me and asked when the flight leaves and if we had time to wait for him.

The man, figuring out the problem quickly, refunded all of Mom’s money and gave her new sandwiches for free. On the way back to the table, she turned to me and said, “How do you know Galag?”

Dad had wandered across the hall to Starbucks which had opened by then.

I was at Mom’s this week. We talked about Long Island, and about Dad, who passed away eight years ago on October 21st. I think of him when I’m in airports, or when I see a payphone. He had an 800 number at his desk back when the only way to call home was “long distance,” and it cost a fortune. So throughout my techless twenties, I was able to talk to Dad several times a week. I’d call from the Arizona/Mexico border, from New England, New Orleans, and everywhere in between. He was a quiet man with a deep sense of humor. One of my biggest regrets in life is I am not more like him.

In their later years I brought them to the airport or Amtrak more than a few times. Once, we were on the train and I disembarked just before they left. But it turns out my officemate Tom, who knew them, was on the same ride north and kept them company the entire way. Another time I brought Dad to some flight somewhere, I forget where, but we had a drink at Phillips Seafood Restaurant in the airport and talked about travel and books and plans. When we talked like that I felt close, of course, but also more connected; as if we shared something larger than ourselves. I could always tell when he was thinking about travel, though he rarely went very far. He didn’t miss a chance to talk to his kids about it, though. The signs were there to show me where his mind was; the way he liked to ask where I was going next. The way he listened so closely, responded always with such encouragement.

The first time I flew in my life I was fifteen. Dad had a convention in California, and Mom refused to fly. So Dad and I dropped her off at the Amtrak Station in Norfolk, played golf, and went home. Spent the next day around the house and then we went out to dinner together. The following day we flew to Los Angeles business class—my first ever flight—with dinner menus and a large screen on the wall so all the passengers could watch a movie together. It was Rooster Cogburn with John Wayne. We arrived in LA, rented a car, and drove to the train station and waited for Mom to arrive. We laughed about that for years.

One time we remembered that story when he brought me to the airport to fly back to Buffalo for college. He said he couldn’t stay, so he shook my hand and left. I got something to eat, wandered around, found my gate, waited, boarded, and the plane taxied out to the runway.

It had been about ninety minutes, but when I looked out the window, I saw Dad at the observation parking lot standing near his car, waving.

“My life has been a poor attempt to imitate the man.”

–d fogelberg

Me with Dad at Mahi Mah’s Restaurant in Virginia Beach (photo by Michael Kunzinger)

The Great Escape

~ aviewfromthiswilderness ~ 1 Comment

aerie one

Fall has arrived and the breezes this weekend cleared away most of what was left of summer. Last week at home I walked along the river like I always do this time of year when the water laps at my feet, it is warmer than the air, inviting, deceiving, teasing me into thinking summer will push back on autumn and maybe even win out. I don’t mind the change so much; I’m not bothered by the passing of time as much as how I spend the passing of time.

The truth is, some things need to change. Even with resistance, sometimes it is the only way to make room for new growth.

For me even the seasonal change from summer to fall is often troublesome. Again, I don’t mind fall—my days in western New York and Massachusetts are most memorable for this time of year. And obviously I know it is going to happen. I watch the weather, I mark the calendar, I see the leaves letting go. But still it always takes me by surprise. I wake up one day and I need to wear more clothes, or I no longer feel the sun so strong on my shoulders, and I am saddened.

So when a change is even more unexpected, like anyone else I wonder how I am going to handle it. And the surest way—for me anyway—to gauge my reaction to life being different or accepting some sort of radical, unexpected shift in existence is to look back to when these things have happened before.

I’ve never lived a conventional life.

Like that time we moved away from what had been “home” when I was eight or so. In kindergarten I liked a little red-haired girl, Kathleen. Just like Charlie Brown I was afraid to approach her. We were in the same class until third grade when at the end of the school year my family moved much further out on the Island. Instead of saying goodbye to her I made a card that said, “I love you” and threw it at her in the hallway. I think she got it. Now I wish I had just handed it to her politely and said I was sorry I was moving. I never saw her again. I probably didn’t handle that relationship well.

But I liked moving. I liked heading to somewhere new, and even at eight I sensed the need to see it as an adventure instead of a radical shift in life. Man, was I innocent. Again, I was eight. But the times were simpler, not because of how old I was but how more focused we were, as if we still were growing, getting stronger. I don’t feel that way about society anymore. It’s like we peaked quite some time ago, and now we keep trying to invent new ways of regaining that hope we had. A line from a favorite song of mine says, “Can you picture a time when a man had to find his own way through an unbroken land?” Imagine that for a second. No satellite photos, no GPS, no maps and indicators, no sextant, nothing but perhaps some paths beaten by cattle or floods. Wild, but filled with hope.

In some ways that’s all of us in our youth. Personally, I often ignored advice of my older siblings, examples set down on television or in school. I simply preferred to assess a situation and have at it on my own terms, even if it meant complete and utter disaster. Once I walked three blocks from home just to play with a friend’s plastic bowling pin set. I was eight. Another time I decided to hike into the San Jacinto Mountains outside Palm Springs without telling my parents, or anyone for that matter. I missed the small sign that said “Danger: Rattle Snake Area. Keep Out.” What a beautiful hike that was until I fell into a Saguaro cactus and spent an extra hour on a rock pulling thorns out of my leg. What a great day. I think there are too many signs telling us what not to do, too many limitations, and maybe that’s from the technology; I really don’t know. But I know this: we went outside and escaped the very notion of limitation. Our imaginations were limitless, and we “searched” the wilds of our world. Okay, I suppose it was more dangerous. But as Lily Meola wrote of daydreams and imagination: “It’s not big enough if it doesn’t scare the hell out of you.“

So maybe I should be dead. Or abducted. Or in juvi for harrassing an eight year old girl. Instead, I gained that small bit of confidence we used to earn out on our own, trying and failing, fantasizing and acting and pretending. You simply never know when those youthful lessons will return to come in handy, see us through an unexpected left-turn, help us through the changes.

I thought about those years, my early youth in Massapequa Park on Long Island, and how innocent it all was; how we flipped baseball cards and played stickball. We had block parties where the block would be closed to traffic and we all put picnic tables and grills out and walked up and down the street talking to everyone else and sharing food, and riding bikes, and the adults had drinks and the kids had fun. Television went off the air at night, just a fuzzy white noise until the early morning when a black and white flag waved across the screen and some dude said, “We now begin our broadcast day” after the National Anthem.

This was the age of my youth. It was innocent and tech-free and filled with hippies and protests and flag-burning and marches and sit-ins and rumbles. The laughable Mets became the champs and we walked on the moon. On the moon, for God’s sake. How can you possibly not understand why at the core of my generation is some semblance of hope, still simmering. We were not a generation of followers staring at our hands; not by any stretch of the imagination. So when the times were a ‘changing, we changed—or we were the ones causing the change to begin with. And as we grew older, those organic traits became part of our DNA.

Note: No, I’m not reminiscing or longing for the days of my youth. Not at all, Just the sense of hope we had that seems to be missing now. If there was anything I look back there for, it is that. Part of who we are is absolutely dependent upon how we were when we were young. And when I was young I was restless, always ready for something new. I didn’t mind our move away from the Little Red-Haired girl. I didn’t mind the move to Virginia. But I’m saddened by the slow erosion of hope, the dilution of imagination.

Everything needs to change, and it scares the hell out of me, so I could use a bit of that eight-year-old gumption right about now.

“If you do not change direction, you may end up where you are going.”

–Lao Tzu

quixote

Passing through Nature to Eternity

~ aviewfromthiswilderness ~ Leave a comment
there’s a house in there, swallowed by the growth

It’s raining, and the air is cooler than it has been, which brings with it, for me anyway, a soft undercurrent of sadness. You see, I love summer. I love the heat and the stillness of it, the hot sun on my face and shoulders, the sand under my feet, the water—oh the water. So when I wear long sleeves or shoes with socks, or when the water can no longer be waded into for no reason at all other than slant of earth and distance to the sun, I get melancholic (as if listening to Jackson Browne right now might not already be responsible). And today was like that, but more so because of the rain.

This week’s work involves adding random details from my younger years to a one-hundred-and-eighty-page manuscript to set a sharper tone to a time that was above description, beyond anything that could be limited by diction. This editing stage sends me back to a place I would, both at once, relive again in a heartbeat and never want to think about in my lifetime. But it was so long ago I have trouble remembering some details and I get lost in the weeds of long ago. So to clear my head, I went for a walk to keep myself present, keep my mind on the here and now. Rain can certainly do that. This can be a Herculean task at times—keeping things clear. More so for me when the air is cooler, and the sun is not so hot anymore. It made me realize how much simply fades from our lives if we stop paying attention to it.

Writers have various ways of dealing with ghosts. Some watch Pirates games, some watch movies. Some drink and some play with their dogs in open fields. I walk.  

Down the road is a track of wooded land with an old colonial house. At one time, even since I built here twenty-seven years ago, the house was completely visible and well admired. It sits recessed on the front edge of beautiful, forested land with hardwoods, which this time of year are starting to show their colors. The house is white with a wrap around porch, hedges, and a front lawn more akin to a rolling, green field where deer gathered every day at dawn and dusk to sip the dew. I loved walking by and think about sitting on the porch, drinking tea on a day like this, watching deer and listening to something gentle, like piano music, while rain kept meter on the porch roof.

You can no longer see the house. The front lawn has grown deep in weeds and small trees after just a half dozen years of no one caring for it. Nature has reclaimed the entire property, and the house, if you walk up the no-longer-navigable driveway far enough, is covered in vines and mildew. Several porch slats are caved in, and while the windows remain in tack, portions of the siding are simply gone. I don’t know who owns the place, but the man who rented it and lived there with his dog has gone back to Richmond an hour from here and, presumably, has no connection to or obligation for the place. For all I know the owner is dead. That happened elsewhere nearby. One house not far from here has been so reclaimed by nature it is absolutely impossible to tell there is a structure there except for a slight glimpse on a sunny day of a car bumper and an old boat appropriately named “Prozac.”

It happens sometimes when there is a lack of heirs in a community where restrictions are limited and property size is usually somewhat sweeping. The once lived-in and celebrated home is a house being swallowed by the earth, as all eventually will be. It makes me wonder if Mars at one time had a suburbia which a billion years of burning sun and negative-Kelvin ice storms vaporized into nothingness. That’s what crosses my mind when someone doesn’t mow their lawn very often.

There was a time, though, when someone oversaw the construction of the beautiful place, measured twice and cut once, new owners backing up a moving van and carefully designing the rooms, children running up the steps to their bedrooms, leaning against the window on days like this to watch the deer out front. The place might have filled with the aroma of turkey in the fall, soft sounds of football from the television in the den in the back, with the double doors that looked out over the marsh to the east. Geese frequent the area, and from the porch the kids would have sat in the chairs when relatives visited and watched the birds land in the fields across the road.

The kids grow up and leave, for Richmond, for DC, for another place. The parents can’t take care of it as well as themselves, so they move to a smaller place in the village, or in with one of their kids, and the paid-for-house sits alone and silent. Taxes only run a few hundred a year, so they’re easily paid and then forgotten. Then they rent it to a man with a dog, but he leaves too, and the owners die, and the kids let it go, hoping to take care of it someday.

Or maybe they had no kids, like the Prozac house. It just sits there until nature, which always wins in the end, wins.

I wonder if I’d run through that entire scenario if it wasn’t raining. Autumn is proof, I suppose, like old, uninhabited homes, of the passing of time.

Back at Aerie, I sit on the porch, drink tea, listen to a football game, and can smell turkey drifting out from the kitchen. I have some planting to do for the fall—bulbs mostly, but the back trails have gone untended for far too long. I’ll do that, this week probably. The area behind the shed needs to be cleaned up as well, and I need to get an estimate on stripping and restaining the house; I’m way overdue on that. I don’t have the energy I did when I built the place twenty-seven years ago. Then, all winter long I came and helped stack the logs, met sub-contractors while my then three-year-old son sat watching his home rise out of the dirt. While the roofers worked or the electrician figured out how to install wires in a log home, he’d ride on my shoulders as we walked down the hill to the river and we’d talk about what we’d do here–a pool, of course, and a basketball net. We’d play football in the yard, and we’d throw the baseball, of course. Come that early Spring I built the inside; all the interior walls, the cabinets, the stairs, the rest. The rest of life was still a distant curve after a still-to-come lengthy journey, and this place was forever. Come spring, we moved in, and the wood smelled so fresh, plus outside honeysuckle and lilacs.

The leaves are changing colors early this year, and I can feel the fall in the chill of the wind. The bay breeze helps keep it seasonal for now, but the winds will shift soon to the north, shutting down summer completely.

I don’t mind fall; it is beautiful. My time in western New York and especially in central New England spoiled me for how intensely beautiful autumn can be. But summer for me has more hope, still holds just enough promise for everything to work out fine in the end. It is the time when we keep building our lives instead of stepping aside and letting nature run its course.

Does everything eventually bend the way of the once-white colonial? Is even Aerie headed someday to the condition of the Prozac house? We like to think not.

And anyway, for now, I am here, sitting and drinking tea. Tonight the fox will come by the side of the house for apple pieces, and the birds flitter between the crepe myrtles and the porch-rail feeders. Life is everywhere right now, even while summer fades. I can hear the geese headed toward the field.

The rain has eased, and I think I’ll walk again, down past the farm, past the unseen, recaptured house, and to the river, which will hold its own for eras beyond everything else, as waters have done since the start. But then I’ll need to cut the grass. If I have the energy, I’ll also trim the hedges.

“And while the changing colors are a lovely thing to see,

if it were mine to make a change I think I’d let it be.

But I don’t remember hearing anybody asking me.”

–John Denver

Aerie

That Which We Are, We Are

~ aviewfromthiswilderness ~ 1 Comment
The Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel

I immersed myself in outdoorsy stuff in my early teens; even beyond that. I wonder if something innate in my DNA attracted me like chemistry to the outdoors and references to it, or my environment and influences doused me with enough references to nature that my path was clear.

I listened to all of John Denver; knew every word to every song. Played his music on the record player and my guitar. At the same time, my friend Eddie and I spent every single day in the woods and along the Great South Bay at Heckscher State Park, nearly literally our backyard back then on Long Island’s South Shore. I watched movies like Jeremiah Johnson and television shows like Grizzly Adams. I wanted to disappear from civilization like they did; I wanted cabins like they had up in the Rockies, with a warm fire going.

The beach took hold of my Buddhist-bending mentality, combined with Dan Fogelberg and Jimmy Buffett, books by Joshua Slocum and Robin Lee Graham. Patrick O’Brien and the first paragraph of Melville’s Moby Dick, which reads:

Some years ago—never mind how long precisely—having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world.

Damn I wish I wrote that, wrote “Son of a Son of a Sailor,” “Rocky Mountain High” and “Sweet Surrender,” wrote home from some mountain in Utah not far from Redford’s “Sundance” ranch, long before the film festival was born. Instead, I played their music, watched the shows, and spent as much time as I could in whatever nature I could.

I think it was the beginning of me always feeling slightly outside of everything, just a little beyond understanding people. For some time I thought it was insecurity, but now I believe I just preferred the natural state of things, how perfect it is out there. I had the theme of Grizzly Adams down pat:

Deep inside the forest
Is a door into another land
Here is our life and home
We are staying, here forever
In the beauty of this place all alone
We keep on hoping.

Maybe
There’s a world where we don’t have to run
And maybe
There’s a time we’ll call our own
Living free in harmony and majesty
Take me home
Take me home.

Even that line repetition is a nod to Frost’s line “Miles to go before I sleep.” Exactly.

Is it true that everything we are we remain? Our hopes remain. Our dreams remain. And if we hadn’t lived them out yet, perhaps we still will in some other season? Maybe.

A part of my mind never truly grew up, I know that. A part of my psyche still holds tight to how I used to think when I was young, sometimes to the point I can be out for a walk and not even remotely feel my age, forget that my ability to do most of the things I could then is, shall we say, compromised. But we trick ourselves. I can still ride a bike; can still hike in high altitudes. In my fifties I walked across Spain. So who knows.

What happens is we forget. We let go of so much of who we were to make room for who we become. It is natural and beautiful and necessary, and we would not come close to being who we are today without who we were then, watching Dan Haggerty and his bear walk down the mountain, or listening to John Denver’s opening guitar riff on “Rocky Mountain High.” It’s in our blood. It has to be.

Unless, again, something in our blood attracted us to those things. Who the hell knows, right?

Ever come across a trigger that brings you back to those moments you had then? Maybe it’s a picture in some old album your parents kept; or a book you read. I have books like that, from then, I have a baseball my friends all signed when I left Long Island and it transports my mind to that small village, almost as if had I driven there today I’d see fourteen-year-old Eddie coming out of his house ready to hike through the park. We have so much more ability to manipulate time than we realize.

So, I had this job. One of my first, and the last one as a high school student. I worked on Seagull Pier on the South Island of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel which connects Virginia Beach, Virginia, with the Eastern Shore of Virginia, known as the Delmarva Peninsula. I was thrilled to get hired out there for one reason: I’d be working “nearly” on the water, watching the sunset and rise, feeling the salt water on my face all the time, like Melville but without whales. I worked 10 pm to 6 am every night, usually alone, frying shrimp and fries, serving sodas to travelers with coupons they received when they paid their toll to make the crossing of one of the longest bridge-tunnels on the planet. Yes, they got a free Pepsi at the pier. It was pretty barren then—a diner-style interior with a few tables, a gift shop, and a pier filled with fishermen. In later years the restaurant took over part of the pier and became quite nice with a full menu. But back then it was just a quick stop for a basket of fried food, coffee or Pepsi, a few souvenirs and back on the road.

They tore it down a few years ago to expand the bridge tunnel.

I would drive my dad’s ‘72 Nova out there just before dark, park and stand on the rocks looking west up the Chesapeake, west, toward the setting sun. Then I’d head inside and cook, serve, clean, make coffee, talk to fishermen on rainy nights when they crowded the counter, talked to the rare customer who stopped for their free Pepsi or a burger at three AM. Then when my shift ended, or sometimes even before then if no one was there, I’d walk out on the parking deck on the east side of the building and watch the sunrise over the Atlantic at the mouth of the bay.

Just remembering that brings me such absolute peace I can, just for a moment, forget some of the minutia that I find myself up to my neck in. I remember, and I am there, can smell the salt, can feel the breeze coming off the water.

I love to remember.

One morning at about four, the door opened as I was just about to clean the grill. I glanced back to see who was coming in and it was a man by himself in a sweater. He had long hair, a thick beard, was tall, big, like a linebacker, and stood for a moment looking around.  I called to him to sit anywhere and he came right up behind me and sat at a stool, and he said, “Can you make me a burger on that grill before you clean it, my friend?”

Instant voice recognition. It was Dan Haggerty. Grizzly Adams himself. I asked and he said yes. We talked and he insisted I make a burger for myself as well, and fries, and we sat together and talked for an hour in the empty Seagull Pier restaurant. He was on his way to Florida and preferred to drive very late and very early.

Young people: This is before there was any form of a device with which I could capture the moment unless I happened to have my camera—a big device with film in it—which I didn’t. So we have those triggers. A baseball, an old guitar. Stories.

Today I received mail from my sister. My brother-in-law bought a new car, and in the old car, buried somewhere in the console or glove compartment or somewhere, they found three Free Drink coupons for Seagull Pier from one of their many trips south to see our parents in Virginia Beach.

She was discarding outdated coupons some toll clerk shoved at her with her change. I received a wormhole to a version of me that had my entire existence in front of me from a place I loved to show up and leave out in the middle of nature, where the sun set and rose again with my arrival and departure. What had for nearly fifty years become illusionary, almost some fiction from forever ago, suddenly seemed to happen this morning, and I felt younger, more alive.

I still head to the bay—same bay, ironically—to watch the sunrise; and to this river every evening to watch the sun disappear west into the Utah mountains. I still dream of riding horses across the Rockies. I still listen to Denver and Fogelberg.

If not, I know for certain I’d be a poorer man.

Everything we are, we remain. Our hopes remain. Our dreams remain. And while not all of them will find fruition, some might. Some just might. If not in this, then perhaps in some other season.

Perhaps.

Thanks Cathy and Greg, for not stopping for a free beverage

Awake

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Originally published in the now defunct St Petersburg (Russia) Times English edition, as well as the collection Fragments. In honor of National Caffeine Day (September 29th).

Awake

Irina asked if I wanted something to drink besides water and suggested coffee. “Espresso might be a good idea, Bob.”

“No thanks. I don’t drink coffee.”

“You are an American and you don’t drink coffee?”

“Never have. The one time I tried it the bitterness was so bad I couldn’t swallow.”

“Oh! You thought it would taste good! That’s the problem,” she said, laughing. “Bob, you don’t drink coffee for taste.” Then she poured a cup, a regular sized coffee cup, filled with espresso. “Here, try espresso. It will give you some energy.”

I’d already been awake for nearly thirty-five hours including the flight from New York to St Petersburg, and at some point my body simply woke up again, as if the bright midnight sun and the over-exhaustion were sensors to start over. Still, my mind flat-lined and I sat in the café and stared at the wall expecting it to move or fall or something. This was a new level of exhaustion. Friends showed up one at a time, each ordering a glass of wine or a beer, sometimes just water. Without noticing I had finished my cup of espresso. Also without noticing, Irina filled it up again. When we were all there and made our plans to walk along the gulf during the few short hours of the midnight sun, one friend sitting close put her hand on my arm and said, “Bob! You’re vibrating!”

That was the moment–just after midnight–I discovered caffeine.

I needed to know who came up with this so as soon as I returned to the United States I ordered a venti, half-soy, non-fat, caramel cappuccino extra hot with foam and an extra shot of espresso, and googled away the night. Caffeine dates back to the Stone Age. They’d chew seeds of certain plants to ease fatigue and elevate their mood. But it wasn’t until about 3000 BC when a Chinese emperor accidently dropped some leaves in boiling water that the

“drink” form was formed. I drank and kept researching: Actually coffee as we know it according to myth though it is widely accepted as accurate evolved from Ethiopia of course Ethiopia where else I mean almost everything has some sort of origin in Ethiopia but anyway the myth suggests that Kaldi a goat herder noticed his flock would not rest well and in fact be extra active after chewing on certain bushes so Kaldi began eating the berries of the bush his hyper goats were eating and he felt a sense of vitality and it really grew in reputation and spread west so that by the 16th century coffee was pretty well used in the near east and in the early 17th century it swept Europe and was most often referred to as Arabian wine and it was during this time that the first coffee shops opened in places like Constantinople and Venice and in 1652 the first coffee shop opened in London and they quickly became places of important social relations where significant trades and dealings were carried out on this addictive legalized substance which I suddenly craved again so I got up and ordered a quad half caf venti 3 pump vanilla 3 pump hazelnut soy extra hot no foam with whip and cinnamon sprinkles latte and read more about how caffeine heads right to the blood and the liver takes the stuff and cuts it into three parts one of which elevates the glycerol and fatty acids in the blood which must kick open the eyes a bit, another dilates blood vessels making us pee more, and the third relaxes the bronchi muscles making breathing easier and man that is so true talk about getting the motor going so anyway various studies show dramatic increase in the pace runners have the distance cyclists cover in any given period and intense results in attentiveness driving but it cannot make a drunk person sober at all never could and it cannot replace the bodies need for sleep but since I couldn’t sleep I mean I wasn’t close to tired I got up and ordered a triple grande skim iced upside down iced caramel macchiato and read about the Kola nut.

Since that night on the Gulf of Finland when the sun both literally and metaphorically never went down, that wonderful, miraculous property has kept me awake during long drives, helped two of us count all the stripes on the wallpaper in a Russian hotel room, kept me awake during my own boring lectures and a couple of wedding ceremonies. It has mowed my lawn, painted my bedrooms, and wrote more than a few essays.

Happy National Coffee Day

Time and Tide Wait for No Man–Chaucer

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I don’t know what tomorrow will be like, but today was a good day. My son and I hiked a short trail along a tidal pond on the Northern Neck of Virginia. The water is covered with lily pads, though today for the first time we didn’t hear any frogs. Perhaps the impending storm. We walked to the end, noting the cooling air and how in a month or so the trail will be beautiful for the oaks’ changing leaves.

We drove to Hughlett Nature Reserve, which is basically a wooded area with trails that lead to a long stretch of beach on the Chesapeake. Other than an elderly couple who left as we arrived, we were alone, which is astonishing when you consider the beauty of both the area and the day. The rest of the weekend is going to be a washout because of Tropical Storm Ophelia, but today, with twenty or twenty-five miles per hour winds and no rain was perfect for beach combing. We walked down one wooden walkway out to a crow’s nest from which we could see nearly to the Eastern Shore as well as up and down the bay. Normally, there would be egrets and herons as well as countless gulls and sandpipers, but none today, again, because of the storm. Once we came upon an eagle who refused to leave one spot on the beach no matter how close we approached her. Not today.

But on that platform with the perfect breeze, the temperature just enough for what I wore, and the rough seas in full demonstration of nature’s moods, a sense of peace swept through me. I could have stayed, should have stayed.

We leave these moments in nature too soon. I suppose we are hardwired to change what we’re doing every so often. I don’t think it’s attention span or even retention span. And I don’t think we get bored. I suspect muscle memory engages and we take a deep breath and “move on,” as if we have another class to get to, or some appointment to keep. We did this too. We looked around for awhile and then left. More to see? Not from that vantage. We walked back to the car and eventually went home. But I could have stayed and when I got home I wondered why I didn’t.

But I don’t want to douse that sense of peace with analysis of leaving or time spent. Instead, I looked at a few pictures of today, remembered how I felt, and noted I’d like to go back in a few days. It was one of those moments; we’ve all had them. Moments in which we are completely present without memories or anticipation bleeding into the now. We just are, and it is beautiful.

I’ve had more than my share, and I’m forever grateful for having such a life which afforded those times.

Like the Northern Lights in northern Norway one March evening when the planet was covered in snow and the entire earth could reach up and touch green bands of light.

Standing on a rock at the end of the world in Fisterra, Spain, feet from Camino Kilometer Marker which read “0.”

Have you had those? Can you recall them quickly, feel the wind again? Hear and taste those moments again?

Standing on another rock, this time Chersky’s Rock above Lake Baikal, the absolute peace of a thousand miles of nothingness to the north, east, and west. Looking out and seeing what explorers saw for a thousand years, and more.

Something snapped outside, a branch perhaps. The wind is picking up and I can hear the long windchimes even from here on the other side of the house and sixty feet through the woods to where they hang. And we’re still twelve or more hours from the eye moving past.

Another moment of presence: Hurricane Isabele. I stood on the front porch in the pitch black of that September night, nearly exactly twenty years ago to the day, when thirty oak trees snapped like sticks and fell, on the driveway, in the woods, across the yard, everywhere. I had loved the wind before then, always tilted my head toward it to feel it brush my face. Since that night a score of years ago, the wind remains in perfect sync with my anxiety. Tonight it is not so bad, but I just heard something snap. I’ll end up on the porch of course. Such a day of complete peace followed by such high anxiety, as if the peace was a respite offered to me in preparation for tonight.

My father and I went whale watching once off of Virginia Beach and we saw a humpback breach the choppy Atlantic waters and roll onto her back, go under again, her tail swinging well into the air before slapping down and moving on. That moment.

That sunset across the Great Salt Lake I wrote about recently.

A golf game with my father, my brother, and my son, followed by lunch, endless laughter. That day. The one during which my brother drove a golf ball through someone’s house window, my father backed over a sign in the parking lot, my son drove the golf cart over a garbage can and flattened it, and I, well, I tried to cover the bottom of a lake with Callaway balls. Give me that day now, one more time again.

A quiet tearoom that no longer exists in Prague. I went there every night for a month, had spiced tea and apple strudel and wrote, listened to beautiful music, walked back to my apartment near the castle at midnight.

Today. On the platform reaching out over the tidal marsh along the Chesapeake across the river at Hughlett Nature Reserve.

When we think ahead, life seems to stretch out like some airport runway, and it reaches out beyond our vision, further than conceivable for not knowing how long it will take, what will happen along the way, unforeseen moments of joy or sorrow. But when we think back, our minds are able to bypass the minutia and go immediately and exactly to a specific moment. It is why life seems to have gone so fast; we don’t need to retrace our steps—we simply chose a memory and beam our minds to that moment. The past is accessible like a quick Image Search, whereas the future is a speculative climb up endless rungs. So of course life in retrospect seems so swift. I think of the platform and the wind and the sound of the crashing waves and today seems fast; just that moment eight hours ago now might well have been last week. But I’m there, now, even as I type this.

But this wind, that cracking outside, the windchimes, the gusts in the tops of trees, all indicate this storm is still approaching and I cannot conceive of its conclusion—and I’m guessing it is going to be a very long night, despite the fact that tomorrow night I will once again think to today’s moment out at the bay and be there again instantly, as if time were mine to manipulate.

It isn’t though, time. It is clearly out of my hands.

Sitting on the rocks on Ireland’s Wild Atlantic Way drinking wine and watching the waves across the north Atlantic.

Drinking frappes with my mother, talking about life, laughing about life.

Sitting in beach chairs on the gulf, Malibu Rum and OJ with Mango juice, just being there without baggage or appointments.

Something else cracked, or the same branch/tree cracked further and soon I’ll hear that familiar and haunting sound of wood hitting earth in the dead of night.

There are more, some tragic, some deeply transforming. I’ve been lucky to have a life of moments.

When I was in college I hiked to a hillside across the river behind campus and sat in a clearing in the woods. The great spiritual writer and monk Thomas Merton used to sit there when he taught briefly at the college, and so the spot became known as Merton’s Heart. I hiked to Merton’s Heart and sat and wondered what, since I would graduate just days later, I wondered what I would do with the rest of my life. I knew clearly unlike most of my classmates who mapped out some logical and ambitious future, that I had absolutely no idea. I’m not kidding. I had no idea.

And I’m not kidding about this either: I still don’t.

But my senses are all alive and conscious of where I’ve been. Really, I wouldn’t trade anything for where I’ve been.

Like sitting on a pile of blankets in a shed in a small Mexican village with my friend Diego, laughing about the trinkets sold at the market and drinking Tecate Beer.

Standing with friends on the summit of Mt. Wachusett in central Massachusetts watching kettles of hawks circle above.

Sitting on the steps to the house here at Aerie, ready to explore the woods with my then six-year-old, remembering my son’s birth in one retrospect instant but not yet knowing—not able to possibly conceive—where we would go in the decades ahead.

The Drifters

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And today I learned that the moon is slowly drifting away from Earth. Like I really needed this with everything else going on. Last week it was one excuse after another from students; this week I picked up a new bottle of an old prescription but instead of it being 50 mg per dose, the pharmacy accidentally gave me 200 mg per dose. Yeah, yesterday sucked. The good news is I survived. Today I learned that the moon won’t.

The truth is we won’t really have to worry about losing our lunar brother. By the time it slips out of this planet’s gravitational hold, the sun will have already swallowed up most of the solar system anyway.

There’s a positive spin for everything.

This reminds me of Woody Allen’s movie Radio Days. The parents of a kid about ten take him to the psychiatrist because he refuses to do his homework. The doctor asks why he won’t do his homework and the kid replies, “I learned in school that the sun is going to die in four billion years.” “So??” the doctor says, and the kid replies, “So what’s the point?”

I know it is extreme, but I get this. I mean, I TOTALLY understand this. Especially yesterday with 150 extra milligrams of drugs in my blood. We put forth great efforts to make some contribution to the world, add our “verse” to the “play,” as Whitman wrote and which I’ve often quoted, yet even the greatest humans in history become footnotes. Friends die, parents, relatives die, or worse, fade away and stop calling or stop returning your calls, which can be even more painful, and you wonder what was it all for. What good amid these people, these trappings of life, am I, to cop another Whitmanism.

Answer: The moon.

The very orb whose drifting I learned about which caused not just a little sadness circles back to play the role of savior. I mean, just look at it, the most common object for all of humanity, the one—and other than the sun, the only—object we all share, stare at, dream about, write poems and prose about since the origins of humanity, the one object we’ve relied upon since humans looked up, save the sun, and even more so, actually, since we often look right into those cold, white crater eyes of the lunar surface but shy away from the retina-burning sun.  

At night, at the river, I watch the moon shimmy on the surface of the bay, or catch a gull in flight and watch her wings spread out over the reach of the fullness of the moon. It has stood witness to wars, to famine and plight, to self-destruction and sacrifice, to suicides and celebrations; it has hung peacefully above pilgrims and plane passengers traveling overseas overnight; it illuminated safaris and caravans of refugees, guided Marco Polo, Magellan, my son, now, in Spain, fumbling home to his hotel.

There’s the Wolf Moon, the Worm Moon, the Snow Moon, the Pink Moon. There’s the Flower Moon and the Buck Moon.

In my life I have counted on it, hanging out there over the Great South Bay, over the Allegheny River, hung just above Merton’s Heart, over the Sonoran, the Sahara, the Chesapeake.

There’s a moon over Brooklyn, Anne Murray sang, and it’s coming into view. It was certainly in view the day I was born in Brooklyn, as it was a waxing gibbus, with more than ninety percent of its surface illuminated that July night. The Bob Moon it was called.

The sun on the moon makes a mighty nice light, wrote James Taylor.

She comes more nearer earth than she was wont, and makes men mad, Shakespeare said.

It’s the small step. It’s the giant leap. It’s one of three things with the sun and the truth that Buddha reminds us cannot be hidden.

I walked once, many moons ago, along a mountain path in Norway, and I watched the moon shiver in the wake of the Northern Lights bouncing around my head like lace curtains lifted by a breeze through an open window. I glanced at Brother Moon as an old friend as if to say, “Are you seeing this?” He was.

It’s a harsh mistress.

It’s the friend, Sandburg tells us, all the lonesome can talk to.

It’s made of cheese.

It knows far more secrets than Sister Sun. Of course. People have less to confess in the light of day, which by its sunny nature brings out our hope, pulls from us some sliver of possibility. But the moon catches us at the witching hour, it remains sole witness to our suffering when those tigers come and taunt us, tug at our fears and anxieties that keep us awake. He’s watching; promising us, if we stop crying long enough to notice, that we’ve been this way before, and we will again.

We have been there, to this moon of ours, for it is ours for now. It was simple science. Jim Lovell once noted that we now live in a world where humans have walked on the moon; that it wasn’t a miracle; we just decided to go. I once wanted to go, when I was nine or ten and Neil and Buzz were blemishes on its face. As I grew, I knew I’d never get there, but that was okay. I started to contemplate people instead, and fixated on Merton’s inquiry as to what can we gain by sailing to the moon if we are not able to cross the abyss that separates us from ourselves.

Now I’m depressed again. Time for some moonshine, head outside to talk to some neighbors, and if we drink enough we’ll moon people in passing cars.

But I digress. I’m sorry; sheer lunacy.

***

Some years ago my son and I walked across Spain. Sometimes we got up before the sun, like we did in the village of Ponferrada, and followed the moon down a trail west toward Santiago. We talked about breakfast and new friends and old ways. We talked about other places to see and the last village we stayed in. We were that rarest of all things—absolutely and completely present, walking beneath the moon, talking.

We drifted away from the village and the lights and the people ever so slowly, wondering if we remembered everything, but then letting it go, moving away from the city’s gravity and into our own space, just the two of us, knowing full well, as did Lennon, that we all shine on, like the moon and the stars and the sun.

Drift away as you must, Brother Moon. I’m not going to let it bother me tonight. You’ve gotten me through some seriously long nights before, and you certainly will again.

Let’s take it one night at a time, shall we?