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Thank You Clarity

~ aviewfromthiswilderness ~ 3 Comments

It’s easy to be overwhelmed by, even swallowed by, news stories saturating our lives. Mass shootings in Colorado Springs, Charlottesville, and Chesapeake. The hopelessness that is the environment, the economy—recession, inflation, bankruptcies, and a plunging housing market. People are aggravated. I spent five minutes in line at 711 this morning and any number of fights could have broken out over everything from gas prices to the store being out of French vanilla flavoring for coffee.

Someone finally said, “What have I got to be thankful for? This day is about football, that’s all.”

So yeah, I said it, out loud and very mater-of-fact: “Well there’s that! Bills playing the Lions on a Thursday and you’re going to watch that instead of going to work. Are you kidding me? You’re welcome.”

I was halfway out the door when Wayne, who is absolutely always in a good and grateful mood, said, “What about you Bob? What are you thankful for?”

I kept moving, calling back, “That there are several dozen 711’s on my drive to my mother’s this morning and one of them has got to have French vanilla coffee.” We laughed.

But he struck the match and ignited my thoughts for most of my seventy-five-mile drive.

What am I thankful for?

I’ll tell you: Tens of thousands of moments.

Like the time in my twenties I managed a health club in New England for lots of money and no work and wore sweatpants to work and listened all day to loud music.

Like my car breaking down in a college parking lot.

Like a son I’m close to and a father I loved. Like the fact I got to spend all day watching Hallmark Channel movies with my nearly ninety-year-old mother and we laughed and had turkey.

Or the way it doesn’t bother me to walk in the rain or hike in the snow or how I love the hot sun on my back in summer. I love and am grateful for the visceral reality of life.

I’m grateful for the love of those I lost way too soon. It is one thing to lose a father when he is ninety, but another entirely when you lose your closest friends decades before they should have even retired. But today I am deeply grateful for how close we were no matter how fleeting the time. The love of those like Bobbie and Dave and Debbie and Trish and Cole and Joe and Lianne and Eddie—beautiful Eddie—and more (and more). My God how we laughed and sang and lived, truly lived as fully as we could for as long as we could. Today is not for mourning their absence but for appreciating their presence.

I’m grateful for those I know now, dance with now, like Letty and our long walks, Rick and our endless texts and deep discussions, Sean-my brother from a different mother, my brother who has tolerated me for my entire life, luckily with a sense of humor, and my sister who understands—really understands. For the complete sense of peace and absolute sense of self that engulfs me when I spend time with someone I hadn’t seen in two decades. For catching up. For that sense of “What decades?”

For that English teacher in an elevator in Norfolk who asked if I was who I am and then told me she was my student twenty-years earlier and I was the reason she wanted to teach English.

For the long ago and brief time when music dictated my days and people showed up. For the 12-string guitar on the other side of the room that keeps creeping closer to my desk (like I don’t notice). For Tim and the Jewish Mother Sessions that taught me the art of brevity and the gift of laughter.

For Cabernet Sauvignon. For Baileys. For cold water and the taste of saltwater on my lips even when I’m in the mountains hiking through snow.  

For that time Tom and I hiked to the top of the mountains outside Tucson to watch the sunrise. And when my friend in Mexico, Diego, stopped me on some dirty street corner in a small village. For those Friday nights in the late seventies at Sondra’s in Virginia Beach with Jonmark. For Mike and that outrageous hike in the Blue Ridge. For roasted lamb in Spain, duck in Prague, blinis in Russia, cod in Norway caught by Magnus, for pizza, for hard rolls with butter from Stanley’s in East Islip, pancakes with Jack, oysters with Michael, beer with Rick, rum with Sean, Mocha Frappuccino’s with Mom, for summer days on the beach at 77th Street with every single one of my friends, for that rust color that comes and disappears from the trees out front, for that rainbow on my walk from Tullycross to Renvlye. For moose on frozen lakes and cows that drive to work.

My dad’s deep laugh. My mom’s deep breathe after laughing, and how she never minded us tying her up or locking her out on the roof. For those quiet afternoons when I’d be alone and I’d call Dad’s 800 number and he always, always answered and had time to talk.

For Dire Straits’ “Why Worry” when I was doing just that on a balcony in Dakar, and for Neil Young’s “Thrasher” a week later on the back of a charrete three hundred miles east, and for Van Morrison’s “Into the Mystic” spontaneously sneaking from some radio two thousand miles south.

For Richard for teaching me empathy.

For Michael for teaching me kindness.

For all those who accepted me for who I am with more flaws and shortcomings than deserves a second chance, let alone a third or fourth of fifth.

For those who each day let me know I am going to be okay.

For those times I trusted my instinct. For those times I listened to others. For those times I said what I felt instead of keeping it in. For those times I walked away. For those times I stood my ground.

I am grateful for whatever trick of fate finds me warm here at Aerie instead of hungry in Ethiopia, clothed and clean instead of homeless in some third world camp.

For the railway. For the Camino.

Today my mother and I laughed a lot, and she taught me to be grateful for anyone who helps—like doctors and nurses and community workers—and for anyone who needs help, grateful I can spare the change, grateful I can do what I can.

I’m grateful tonight for not quitting.

I’m grateful for whatever’s next.

I’m grateful for the passing of time.

Full Exposure

~ aviewfromthiswilderness ~ 1 Comment

Essay time at A View:

I have a scar on my cheek from a jagged section of chain link fence. But that is not what I told my son when he was two and ran his finger across it. One hand rested behind my neck the other outlined the scar, or pushed it, or pulled at it. “How did this happen, Daddy?”

I would smile, and with a story-telling voice, say something different each time, like: “I was escaping from a lioness when I accidently stepped on her cub, and just as I dove off the edge of the waterfall, her right paw clawed at my face.”

“Wow!” he responded, amazed for a moment, and then, “No, really. How did you hurt your face?” I’d laugh that laugh we use to dismiss what we said as recognizable nonsense, as if what we are about to say is the real story, and I would tell him “I fell off a train in Mexico and when I rolled safely into the Sonoran Desert, a scorpion stung me. Since I had no antidote for such stings, I had to dig out the poison myself with a dull pocketknife.” I would set Michael back down on the floor and he’d run off satisfied, not with the truth but with adventure, mystery, and more to think about. His vocabulary and imagination gathered these non-sequiturs—scorpion, lion, desert, waterfalls—and they would dance in his mind as he made up his own tales of near-death encounters and narrow escape.

At night I read Curious George to him and when the stories were finished, he would lean against me and ask what’s new or how my day was. And then after a few minutes of silence he might say, “Daddy. It wasn’t a scorpion.”

“What do you think it was?”

“I think you were born that way.”

“Well I wasn’t. I can show you pictures.”

“Well, then it must have happened at work. I think a student did that to you.”

“I’m sure many have wanted to, but none have tried…yet…so that isn’t it.”

“Then what?”

I would think a minute and say, “Son, honestly, it was a rabid vulture,” and he would sneer at me, laugh, and jump off the couch exclaiming, “I guess it’s time for bed.” After he ran off, I would sit and think awhile; kids do that to you. They say something, or ask, or sometimes just laugh a certain way that rakes up what had been settled matters, and you can’t help but think awhile before heading up and tucking them in and letting them know everything is fine and that you’ll be fine and when they wake up, you’ll be there, safe and whole, albeit with a few imperfections.

Scars are not unusual. For some, they are the unfortunate leftovers of disease, for others battle scars not treated or tended to, or untreatable. And for some they are souvenirs, notches on the skin akin to those carved on walking sticks or gun barrels. George Washington had scars left over from Smallpox, as did Soviet leader Josef Stalin, whom as a result was called “Pocky.” When Andrew Jackson was a boy, a British officer demanded Jackson shine the officer’s shoes. When the boy refused, the soldier cut his forehead with a saber—a mark which the future President of the United States did not hide.

George Custer’s younger brother, Thomas Ward Custer, a two-time Medal of Honor recipient, was shot in the face by a confederate color bearer when Custer reached for the man’s flag. The younger Custer killed the confederate and carried off his flag only to be shot and killed eleven years later beside his brother at Little Big Horn. Ironically, Crazy Horse had also survived a shot to the face, his by a war chief whose wife he stole. Go figure.

Me, well, I can still taste the dust, smell the rotten fruit of the nearby marketplace, hear the random commands in Lingala. I can still feel the fence, not on the way in but on the way back out.

When Harriet Tubman was young, an overseer threw a weight at her head which not only caused seizures most of her life but left a “horrific scar” which she said never let her forget “the horrors suffered during slavery.” A glance in the mirror may remind some of a tragic event, but that same memory might serve as inspiration, the signature of survival, the markings of the moments they overcame unthinkable odds. The picture of the slave’s back whipped to shreds and left to heal like a topographical map is also a document of inhumanity recorded for posterity. Branded numbers on holocaust survivors’ forearms forever keep alive the knowledge that evil walked these lands. Scars are history; they infect our psyche with sometimes unconscionable reality to make our history present. They are proof we survived our past despite odds, sometimes despite logic.

Some marks are merely fictional scars which, because of literature and film, are closer to legend than falsities teased by a father to his son. Harrison Ford’s marked chin comes from a car accident at twenty, but has since become an asset, a distinctive feature and part of his personality, even incorporated into the storyline of movies like Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Robert Shaw and Richard Dreyfuss exchange stories in Jaws of which sharks left their teeth marks on their legs. The scars render pride in their ability to survive. These souvenirs and conversation starters carve their credibility into bone, and they read like brail to tell us that these people have been there. Who we are is more than the aesthetic; we are all branded in one way or another.

The injury, disease, or self-inflicted wound caused the mark, but our character traits, from malicious villain to a hero with integrity are what we see. In both fiction and reality, the imperfection is just that because of its diversion from “normal.” Most people do not have scars, not visible ones. So when someone does expose such diversion from the expected aesthetic, judgment often follows. “If not for the wound,” they say; “He should have done something about it,” they say; “He should get it taken care of and move on,” some say. Of course, I didn’t seek out the wound like some scarification ritual; it isn’t an African osilumi—a mark of sorrow made after the passing of a loved one. It isn’t for fashion, similar to the tattoo-like Mehndi in India. It isn’t even political or ethnic as most African traditional markings. Some scars prove the woman can meet the demands of childbirth; some symbolize lost children either during childbirth or to slavery. And slaves themselves were branded or scarred to make less attractive or more noticeable. In other locations scars were burned or cut and then left to heal on their own to mark temples or foreheads or forearms for the pride or disgrace of a group. And paleontologists trace scarification to 50,000 BC.

When Michael was three, he slipped on monkey bars at a park and hit his head on the crossbeam. He wrapped himself around me and cried, but it was only when I checked to see if he had a bump that I noticed a hole in his forehead where a bolt on the beam had punctured his skull above his eye. Ultimately, he was fine, and his tears quickly resulted not from pain but because we left the park to go to the hospital where they sewed him up and we went home. More than two decades later there really isn’t any scar, but for a few years when he was little it was obvious. For others the scar briefly took attention away from his head of thick curls.  For me it was a crevice through which I traveled back to that moment, my shirt covered in blood, his piercing screams, the hole in his head. The scar is no longer visible. The markings of that moment of impact cannot keep pace with the persistence of my memory.

But years may pass before someone once again asks what happened. And by then, what happened often gets watered down and what seemed to happen takes over. Then, the story is either exaggerated or forgotten altogether.

Until you touch the cheek.

I was just across the border when a guard asked for my papers but actually wanted another payoff.  I can still smell rotten fruit; taste the red dust. That was more than three decades ago; that was just now. You see a scar; I smell sweat, I hear the low buzz of a generator not far away, the diesel sound of a truck. I smell rotten fruit and feel the tug of children begging for money. You barely see the unevenness of my face; I feel and taste the sweetness of my blood dripping into the corner of my mouth, I taste the significance of a terrifying moment. Sometimes the worst of our scars marks the best of who we were at that point in our lives. 

After the monkey bar incident, Michael and I returned home from the hospital, his head bandaged and a new book in his hands. We moved on. The physical wounds of war or personal battles are transient. Even when they seem permanent, they fade to some accessory-like marking, barely noticeable for seeing it all the time. No, the wounds which usually keep opening are the stinging reality of memory which wakes us at three am. For someone it is the love which melted into hatred and bitterness; for someone else it is the belittling by siblings, spouses, parents; it is the cuts on the wrist; the two-thirds of a man; the inability to vote—look at their scars, just under the skin, healed, forgotten, and then like magma rise out to flow through months and years, to grab us and say, “Yeah, now you remember.” It’s the vet. It’s the abused wife. It’s the battered child, the neglected, the forgotten, the Jew, the Serf, the back of the bus, the separate water fountain, the depression; the depressed. You can touch my scars, run your finger along the ragged edge where skin never really met skin again, and find some tale there, but it might be closer to myth. It can never be simply facts and dermatology. Really, it could totally have been a hot curling iron; no, a kitchen knife. Cancer. Ask me again, and I swear I will tell you the truth this time. The thing is: the truth never completely heals.

Maybe I was born this way. Perhaps my DNA bends toward crossing borders. It is possible I simply was not cut out to keep intact, and these scars have always been just below the surface waiting for the right place and time. Check points and jagged fences might have been inside somewhere while I was still gathering adventurous words and fantastic ideas.

That night after the hospital, on the couch after listening to me read him another story from one of his books, Michael touched his forehead, freshly stitched and bandaged, and then touched my face. “Will I have a scar like yours?” he asked, paying more attention to his bandage.

“No, of course not,” I said.

“How come?” he asked, and I truly wasn’t sure if he was curious or actually disappointed.

“Well, the doctor fixed yours right away and it won’t be long before it isn’t there anymore. But I couldn’t get medical help for a while.”

“How come?” 

I pulled his hand away from his bandage. “Well,” I said. “Once I pushed the mother dingo away from my head and pulled her paw far enough away to come out of my cheek, I had to rush her cubs to a vet to get them care.”

He was quiet, opened his book and fingered his forehead, then said. “Daddy, you can do better than that.”

3 AM. The Tigers Just Left

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I cannot change my age. I cannot change any path I have taken to reach this point. I cannot undo the choices I made about employment, people, where I have lived and where I have left; I cannot unravel a single thread sewn in or extracted from this tapestry that is me so far.

I can, however, stand to lose a few pounds, choose to walk a few miles more each day, eat a bit healthier, be nicer to people, be quiet more often, spend a few days alone in peace each day, do something for someone else each day, contact those I love just to say hello more often, stand and appreciate the good fortune that finds me here, now, taking a deep breathe in the cool autumn air, staring at a brilliant blue sky, knowing tonight I’ll watch Jupiter again, and Saturn, do their thing across the sky again.

I can try harder to fulfill obligations and stop spending time in regret. I can imagine each morning what I will have wished I achieved by the end of the day and make choices to reach that point. And do that for the week. And do that for the month. And a year. And a life.

I can refuse that which I crave if it is not healthy for me physically, mentally, socially. It does not matter how hard it is to add the good and subtract the harmful—I can, in fact, choose to choose correctly. I can include in my routine just five minutes out of sixteen waking hours each day to contemplate what is beautiful. I can listen to more music and less news, watch less television and more sunsets.

I can try a bit harder to understand my purpose and try a little less to satisfy what others think.

It does not take wisdom as has been suggested. It certainly takes discipline. It takes sacrifice. I can stop expecting perfection in what I am looking for which can lead to emptiness and depression by waiting too long. I can stop expecting everything to work now and accept life by degree, small daily gains, acknowledging sometimes small roadblocks and backstepping. But the pursuit of my “self” and how I would like to be, the truly satisfied self, is not a goal but a pursuit.

I need less than I think.

I can give more than I do.

And everything I require to be happy, to be satisfied, to be completely myself, I already have. Disappointment comes from looking elsewhere for what is self-satisfying.

I am not a wise man, but I know the difference between what I should have done and what I, in fact did; between what I can do now and what I am not doing, and what I can do next and what I should not do next.

I complicate what should be easy.

I put off what I should address now and spend time on things that have no value whatsoever.

These realities:

The past is done.

Tomorrow is not written in stone.

Most events and decisions in my life are my own choice, no matter how much I can easily blame someone or something else.

And when the tigers come at night, I can roll over and go back to sleep, no matter how much the chemicals in my brain often wish those beasts would just devour me and get it over with. No. I know better.

Because the morning.

Poetics

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I have several writing projects at various stages of incompletion.

My manuscript Front Row Seat is under negotiation; one of my early books, Penance, is getting attention and I’m seeking a new publishing home for it to find new life; I’m talking to a few publishers about my second book of short non-fiction prose, Wait/Loss, and I’m still in a boxing match—the same boxing match I’ve been in for decades—with my manuscript, Curious Men.

Shifting between projects is quite easy—oh, I can abandon one for another without much effort. It is sticking with one for a while that alludes me sometimes.

And I have drawers filled with starts and near-finishes, segments and introductions, good lines, decent paragraphs, and scribbles I can’t decipher but I keep them in case I learn my written language again.

This is all on my mind because at an online creative writing workshop recently someone asked the standard “Where do you get your ideas from?” question. I used to say, “Trenton. I use a mail-order catalogue,” but I realized that was somewhat snarky. Now I quote my good friend Tim Seibles:

Some things take root in the brain and just don’t let go

I love when someone says exactly what I’m thinking. Saves me time.

As for ideas, yes, that’s how it works. I might be out for a walk along the water, or perhaps driving somewhere, and one thought leads to another, and then just the right song comes on, or a smell—yes, sometimes it might be an aroma that makes me think of a place, and then the receptors in my head are off and running; I’m just along for the ride, somehow simply a spokesperson who never really gets the translation right. That’s the problem with writing; it is rarely right. If someone looks at a piece they’re working on and very comfortably suggests there is nothing more that can be done, I am weary of reading it.

But of all the writers I know it has always been the poets who can get me to sit back and say, “Yes! Exactly.” I can carry on conversations all day long about a subject and then toss it around in my head for a few days, write it out, readdress it, and pour some decent energy into it, only to turn to a few lines some poet wrote and find the need to burn my work. I’ll do it too; I’ll sit here with a match and hold the pages while they flare up. It has a very cleansing effect.

Here’s an example: Tim and I went to lunch at this same divey joint in Norfolk we always go to, and we talked. We talked about our fathers, or about something in the news. We talked about a variety of things that good friends talk about; no, we rarely talk about writing. Well, somewhere over the course of the last year I have several times talked about my dad, about how I miss him; I know Tim can relate so I don’t’ have to say much, but still, talking is always helpful. Unfortunately, my words are trite, predictable, and lazy descriptions of how missing a person feels. Of course, I’m not trying to compose a play; I’m just talking about my dad. Still, I want to get it right.

Then not too long ago I flipped through one of Tim’s books and came across this:

Missing someone is like hearing a

name sung quietly from somewhere

behind you. Even after you know no

one is there, you keep looking back.

I could write a thousand lines about how I miss my dad, but that covers it. That’s poetry.

Anyone who listens to a lot of music knows what I mean. Some lines just say it all.

I have tried to write essays about nature, already handicapped by the vast selection of the genre from people such as Thoreau, Muir, and E.O. Wilson. In my files are dozens of starts in an attempt to finish a piece about the closing of autumn and the onset of winter. Those particular brain receptors often click into the passing of time, the end of things, the changes beyond our control. I wrote one “epic” diatribe that might be the most bloated piece of crap I’ve ever attempted. The only way to make it more pretentious would have been to have it translated into Latin. Then Frost does this:

So dawn goes down to day,

Nothing gold can stay

Bastard.

I prefer conversations at lunch, of course. I like to sit and have a beer and talk about our dads; I like running into a friend and grabbing a bite and laughing about simple things like sports and movies.

But I also like reminders of our glide across this thin layer of life.

Still, over the course of the past bundle of time I found a way to handle my frustrations when I can’t find the right words to express our need to celebrate being alive: I call a friend and meet him for lunch. I head to a favorite café and have a beer and talk to strangers. After all, every single one of my closest friends was, at one time, a complete stranger. I walk along the water and watch the dolphins breech and disappear. I feel the coolness of morning give way to the warmth of the sun on my face.

I am surrounded by poetry.

I sat in an Irish pub in Prague once during a soccer match between Dublin and Manchester United. The excitement and roar of the crowd, the explosion of being in the moment, alive, right then ever-so-briefly, was poetry.

There was the time my friend Tom and I sat on a rock in the mountains west of Tucson and watched the sun work its way across the desert. Or that same year when my friend Renee and I walked through a Mexican village and found a restaurant inside a cave where, incredibly, someone who had babysat her sat at another table. Or the time Kay and I stood atop a supposedly haunted lighthouse and laughed uncontrollably, or when Michael and I walked past the small sign that said “Santiago de Compostella” five hundred miles and five weeks after we left France. Or when we watched the seals at Lake Baikal. Or nearly every night when we watch the sun slide away.

Poetry.

Or Tuesday nights after I finished teaching and Dad and I would have some Scotch. I can still hear the announcers of the baseball game, the sounds of ice in Dad’s glass.

So many poetic sounds.

The sound of the golf ball dropping into the cup.

The sound of cardinals on the porch, looking for food.

Waves. Rain on a lake.

A very long hug from an old, old friend when we knew there was no reason on Earth we should have lost touch.

My dad’s laugh.

His deep “Hello.”

A name sung quietly from somewhere behind you

Welcome to my Morning

~ aviewfromthiswilderness ~ 1 Comment

First of all, I love every season. I like the icy winds on my face when I am near Lake Erie or when I lived in New England. Nature is so absolutely objective; she just lays it out there on the line and says, “Today, you’re going to freeze your ass off,” but means nothing by it. It is absolute honesty. It does not differentiate between those who love the cold and those who don’t. The same was true in the Sonora Desert; it wasn’t unusual to hike in 110-degree heat, but it was what it was. Once in a while the desert whispered, “Go inside if I’m too hot for you.”

That’s what draws me to nature; it keeps me in the moment, I experience again what humans have experienced since the dawn of us. But these days surrounded by processed landscapes and prepackaged cities, people tend to pass judgement on everything from lip gloss to the definition of genocide; they categorize and change their minds; their moods can be unpredictable and hard to trust.

This isn’t the case in nature. Nature just might be the only place of absolute fairness. It doesn’t bully. It doesn’t ridicule or praise. It simply doesn’t care, which is all that is necessary for one to be oneself. It’s why I walk—to find myself, to be somewhere I can hear my own thoughts and find who I am again. We are so saturated with otherness these days. Cinder block hallways and poster-laden classrooms offer nothing. When I am in the woods or near water, the criticism is all internal as it should be, and, ironically, mostly positive. I am proud of myself when out there, first for being out there, for shedding the residue of concrete expectations. And what I find when the sun is sliding along the water or the leaves linger just a few moments more before letting go for good, is that I expect more out of myself out there, alone or with someone I trust, than I do when I am closed in. In the hallways and meeting rooms and online spaces saturating the air with invisible communication cables, I do what is necessary, sometimes what I think is more than necessary, but always I am tethered by others exceedingly low expectations or exceedingly high expectations, and certainly the wrong expectations. But when I’m out on my own meandering I tear down the low-bar mentality and realize what I am capable of and what I could have done if I had just listened to myself—spent more time in my Unapologetically Bob world.

I’m talking about the nature of us.

Recently, I stared out at a sea of twenty-year old’s and could tell they wouldn’t know their own thoughts if they leaked out their ears and saturated their desks. They spend no time alone, unplugged, silent with their own thoughts. It made me keenly aware of how little time I spend doing just that.

Well I did today.

When I walk along a deserted road, I take full responsibility for every thought and action and reaction. When I stroll down the oceanfront or along the river I can find the right words, discover the correct image. It isn’t only that nature doesn’t pass judgement on my decisions or actions that relaxes me and allows some sort of organic process to work at its best; it is that I can clear my head of those who do.

I’m not young anymore. But I’m still here, and as Vincent van Gogh noted, “Those of us who live; why don’t we live more?” I used to worry about being myself; but “I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now.” (thanks bd)

It was a very long walk today. Long enough to realize, finally, I’ve started to shed those tethers which have been slowing me down. I was able to examine my regrets—it is a healthy exercise I haven’t done in a long time. When people tell me they never have regrets, I don’t believe them. I do, and I welcome them. Taking some time to look back at what I wish had done differently allows me to think ahead: to take chances when in the past I hesitated, to hesitate when I acted impulsively. Of course I have regrets; it doesn’t mean I wanted it to go differently. It’s just I’m a slow learner in just about everything. Still, I’ve done fine, but I think the only real difference between what I have done and what I know I could have done is I simply didn’t do it. It seems of all the things I’ve done and the places I’ve been, they have one thing in common—I just decided to. There was no magic, no conspiracy, no mapping out or counting down—I just decided to.

“It’s time to make mistakes again; it’s time to change the show. It’s time and time and time again to find another way. It’s time to gather forces and get out of yesterday”

–j denver

Veterans Day 2022

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I spent twenty-eight years teaching active duty and retiring military for Saint Leo University on the Little Creek Amphibious Base here in Virginia. Some became close friends. Some fought in the Gulf War, nearly all spent time in Iraq and Afghanistan. Some never came home. Some came home altered—physically, mentally, certainly emotionally. I have stories I’ve told; I have heard stories I’ll never repeat.

No matter how exhausted I was from teaching twenty-year old community college students all day who didn’t want to learn, my energy returned when I went through the base gates and into the education building where instead of calls of “Hey Dude!” from students I heard, “Good afternoon, Professor. Glad to see you again, sir.” Instead of late papers that didn’t meet the requirements, I collected assignments days before the due date and rarely gave less than an A. I once told my concern about that to my supervisor, that I’m giving all A’s, and she replied, “Welcome to St Leo’s Little Creek Bob. These are the most disciplined and appreciative students anywhere.”

One day at the early job a student who missed almost two weeks came to me and apologized—she couldn’t find a ride and lives nearly two miles from campus. I’m not making this up. That same night a student who had missed three weeks came to apologize (even though I received a letter from her command that she could not be in class); she had been TAD for that time—Temporary Active Duty—in Kabul.

Nearly two miles from campus my ass.

Some significant people in my life are veterans, including but not nearly limited to my two Uncle Tom’s, Uncles Ed and Bob, my cousin Tom among others in the family. Tim O’Brien, Tom Montgomery, Mike Kweder, Jose Roman, Bill Mullis, and Kay Debow, whom I drove to the airport for her flight to Lackland a hundred years ago; it is one thing to know people and love them, but another thing entirely to respect them for their sacrifices which can be quite literally life or death. One of the most emotional moments for me was watching a swearing in ceremony at the airport in Pennsylvania. That’s right, they swear you in right before you get on a plane and leave. Smart. But emotional for all involved. If you’ve never heard or read the oath, it is quite something to watch someone with their hand in the air declaring their lives are no longer their own, but are to be sacrificed if need be. Wow.

We have Memorial Day to remember those who sacrificed everything for the country. Please understand that tomorrow is designed primarily for the living; it is a chance to thank those who put their lives on the line, those whom even when they come back from a warzone fine, they never come back the same.

I’d sit at the front desk before class and listen to them. The first day was always interesting, particularly in both the early ‘90s and then the early 2000’s. Someone would walk in and call out someone else’s name with excitement, and they’d embrace, having last seen each other in Kuwait or Lebanon or Baghdad. Over time I learned military lingo, which consists mostly of a long stream of acronyms. I learned to recognize rank, and I came to see the innocence behind these young—young—men and women who are all at once both skilled technicians and terrified young adults hoping for the best.

Thanks are not nearly enough.

I spent 28 years teaching an average of 220 students a year at St Leo’s. That’s almost 7000 students—all of them military. The cool part was I taught fun courses—not the required gen-ed ones. We laughed through Art History, Fine Art Studies, and Creative Writing. One can better appreciate the beauty of a Mozart symphony or a painting by Pissarro when the class presentation is delivered by a student whose job it was to determine the severity of an injured soldier. And in Creative Writing, tissue boxes were standard since I mostly taught memoir, and stories of a trip across Siberia by train pale in comparison to a run across a compound at night while a sniper is on the hillside.

One wrote of a friend who was told, I mean he was drilled, to never, ever light up a cigarette while on duty at night, but he did. Damnit, he did.

Another wrote of how much he discovered about love and what is essential in life by serving two tours in Iraq. And of course there’s Tim’s The Things They Carried, which if you have read you already know is not a war story—it is a love story.

When I see people disrespect Veterans, or, worse, ignore them completely, I think of my students and those I love and know we will never comprehend their sacrifices or the danger they faced. When I was young, I didn’t quite comprehend someone’s enlistment as anything other than leaving; it took years to understand that this kind of service is nothing short of a calling.

So thank you Veterans of the Armed Forces for your service; thank you for traveling to some of the most dangerous conflicts on the planet without question.

And thank you for coming home again.

The Length of the Light

~ aviewfromthiswilderness ~ 1 Comment
Urbanna Oyster Festival on the hill to the river

I sat on the porch and stared at the moon just near Jupiter, and to their right, Saturn. I didn’t get the large telescope, didn’t grab the deep space binoculars. My son is at work tonight in the bustling Urbanna, Virginia, where the weekend’s Oyster Festival draws thousands and thousands of people. I have been to the annual event a dozen times or more, ate a variety of oysters and deep-fried everything, listened to live music, negotiated the flow of people from Main Street down the hill past the old Tobacco Factory to the historic waterfront, also jammed with oyster-eating tourists listening to more live music. My son is there since nine this morning, bartending and serving food at a pub in the heart of all of that. I imagine he’ll be there well into the early morning hours, a constant flow of tourists and locals and noise and more. It all happens again tomorrow.

I sat on the porch and relied solely on the naked eye to grasp the wide-angle perspective of these distant, celestial transients. A small flock of geese just passed, headed toward the pond near the river. I could hear their call for a mile or more, and then nothing. Some frogs, a light wind. In the distance out on Route 33 a truck went by, east it sounds like, though they won’t get far before reaching the bay. Acorns are falling steadily now, and near the house an oak reluctantly lets them go and I can hear some hit the canoe, some the A/C unit, some the roof.

But with that it is still peaceful, absolutely quiet. I don’t mind the bustle going on right now up-county. I have tended in several pubs and listened to patrons lose their minds over a barrage of troubles; I’ve drank in several more, and I’ve settled into the ebb and flow of crowded streets in cities throughout the world. This, though, here, has my attention, keeps my mind focused, aware of the turning of things, conscious of the circular quality of things.

And one of my companions tonight, Jupiter, makes me understand how insignificant my daily troubles actually are. There is something about true permanence that underscores the temporal state of everything else. Even our moon is a child to that mother of a planet. And me? A speck, like sand, like grain, like a drop of water.

Always like water. I started my journey on the Brooklyn Narrows, learned to breathe on the Great South Bay and the Connetquot River. I came of age on the Lynnhaven and the Atlantic, found my footing on the Allegany. I took a deep metaphorical dive into the Neva, the Vltava, and the Congo, learned to let go on the Susquehanna, and learned to slow down on the Chesapeake and the Rappahannock, right there, where geese settle in tonight, disturbing the moon’s reflection stretching all the way to Cape Charles on the Eastern Shore.

I had a day, today. Quite a day. And tonight I am being what a friend of mine would call Unapologetically Bob. It’s peaceful tonight, here in my peregrino soul, and out there at the mouth of the Rap where the still waters of the Chesapeake are tangled up with planets, and out there further still, where the light I’m seeing now left Jupiter almost an hour ago; roughly the time it takes to walk through the crowded streets of Urbanna, Virginia, this evening, surrounded by drinking watermen.

These celestial companions will be my drinking buddies tonight. I have lost touch with friends because some sadly lost touch with themselves, and I have lost touch with others because for whatever reasons they have they no longer have a need to keep in touch, but tonight I’m at peace. I’m just going to hang out tonight, unhurried, breathing well, sipping some sauvignon and thinking about the waters and watching the moon and Jupiter as if I’d never seen them before.

To Change is to be New

~ aviewfromthiswilderness ~ 4 Comments

aerie one

I’ve not been well the past day or two. I’m feeling much better but it certainly gave me the time to rest and absorb the world around me without distraction.

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

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

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

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

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

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

But these trees weren’t here a century ago and I sat on my porch and wondered if there had been other trees or if this land was barren. A few hundred years ago it was used by the Powhatans as hunting grounds.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

aerie two

Tavern on the Green, August 1984

~ aviewfromthiswilderness ~ 1 Comment
La Caverna Restaurant, Mexico

In the summer following college graduation, my primary occupation was driving.

Not for Uber or Lyft; no taxis or any other respectable means of earning money. No, I just drove. In August that year I drove across the country to Arizona, and then on to San Diego, up to the Grand Canyon, south into Mexico and weekly trips to San Xavier Mission down Route 19.

And I ate my way around. I loved trying the local food everywhere, whether served at the fancy restaurants in cities or dusty dives in places barely registering as villages. In Nogales, Mexico, I ate weekly at La Caverna. It was the first time I ever had guacamole mixed in my salad, and sour cream, and I was hooked. In another Mexican village further south I used to knock on the door of a woman I met at La Caverna. She would make me paella for a few dollars. I’d eat on her porch next to her beagle, and she’d tell me everything I said wrong in Spanish. In Tucson I ate lunch in a park near the old mall on the southside of the city where old women sold fireplace-log sized burritos for fifty cents. Authenticity at its most mejor. For breakfast I went to Irv’s deli, transplanted from Manhattan with signed pictures on the wall from everyone from Alan Alda to Stephen Sondheim, all exclaiming, “Good luck in Tucson, Irv!! I’ll miss your bagels!” He had water flown in from New York and the bagels were as good as those in Brooklyn.

I drove to El Paso and had tacos. To New Orleans and had beignets. Back near home the following summer I had Carolina barbeque and Chesapeake Bay softshell crabs. I kept rolling, eventually to the Sterling Inn in Massachusetts where I worked when not at the health club, and where I ate bowls of New England Clam Chowder and schrod (a white fish—with the “h” it is usually haddock, and without the “h” it is usually cod), “Vineyard” style—coated with a Dijon/mayonnaise spread then breaded. Hence the need for the day job at the health club.

But along the way I spent some time at my dear friend Sean Cullen’s apartment in Brooklyn which he shared with a friend of his, Mike. I had an interview with Theatre Arts Magazine to be a staff writer—they had read a file of my work I had sent and asked to meet with me. I went to Brooklyn, parked in a friend’s driveway in Bay Ridge, and headed to Presidents Street and 4th Avenue—today a mecca of café glory—forty years ago a death wish.

The day of the interview I was flying high. I had worked hard back in Virginia and had saved money for adjusting to a move to “the city.” Sean had a PA job for some commercial and several auditions for parts, so I told him I’d see him that night for pizza at Vinny’s on 7th Avenue, and I boarded the subway at 9am for a 3pm appointment at the magazine. By 10 I was walking all over midtown, strolled into NBC and stood next to Walter Matthau on an elevator, walked to the park, and realized I still had several hours to kill when I decided to treat myself to lunch at Tavern on the Green. What a way to start my career as a writer in New York City, by eating in one of the landmarks of the Big Apple. This place was in Beaches, Ghostbusters, the Out-of-towners, Arthur, and more.

The maître d showed me to my small table near a window, just next to a table occupied by Marvin Hamlisch. I ordered a glass of wine, sipped some water, and nodded to one of my favorite composers of all time. “I love your work,” I said, quietly, then put my hand up to indicate that was all I was going to say. He thanked me earnestly and ordered a club sandwich.

My turn, and I perused the menu looking for something distinctly New York, particularly since I was starving. I knew I wouldn’t find black and white cookies on the menu, and nearly every item listed was out of my price range. I was about to order an appetizer only when I saw steak listed for $18.95. Wow, I could afford that despite it seeming pricey for a 1984 lunch, but I couldn’t order the club sandwich. Marvin just ordered it and after my nod and comment, to do so seemed too stalkish for me.

“I’ll have the steak,” I told the server, who took my menu and said, “Oh, very nice choice,” in the same manner he said it to Marv for the club. I so fit in here, I thought.    

“I will bring you a tray of spices, sir,” he said.

“That’d be fine,” I replied, noting how unique it is for the chef not to put them on himself during the cooking stage,

“And crackers,” he added.

“Of course,” I said. “Steak and crackers.”

I sipped my wine, looked out at a couple standing in the park-side entrance, at the tall buildings across the park, and the brilliant blue sky. I was disappointed I mentioned pizza to Sean since the steak was probably going to fill me up, but I’d be walking a lot, so I knew it would be fine.

The server returned with a round tray of spices and a separate tray of various style crackers, and water. He also put down a small fork—slightly bigger than a shrimp fork, but not like a salad fork. “They’re preparing the Steak Tartare now sir,” he said, and left. Looking back I think he relished the fact I had absolutely no idea what he was talking about, but at the time he was just probably doing his job. He brought Marv his sandwich with chips and an iced tea, then smiled at me. Marvin smiled at me too.

I sat quietly looking at the spices and the crackers and thought of Ponderosa Steak House, where you stand in line with a tray and pick out your meal from overhead menus. I usually got a New York Strip, baked potato, corn, and fresh bread. They’d put a plastic marker on your tray indicating “MR” for medium-rare, and we’d find a table made from fat wood and sit on the bench, and I could smell the meat grilling like I was on some Texas ranch at suppertime. I don’t once in any trip to that place or Steak and Ale or Bonanza Steak House or Links on Long Island recall crackers and spices.

Then the waiter slipped a plate of raw meat in front of me. A round, Derby-hat shaped lump of ground beef–raw, like they just sliced open the cellophane and took this pile off of the green styrofoam and flipped it onto the China plate. A sprig of parsley fell on the top. I looked at it a long time, thinking about the small chunks of raw meat my mother would let me have when she made hamburgers for a picnic, and how with each small amount she would say, “Not too much, you can get very ill from raw meat.”

This has gotta be a better grade, I thought.

I took a small pinch of one of the darker spices and some grated cheese and sprinkled it gently on the meat dome. I sat a moment looking at it, then overturned the spice tray onto the meat, feeling better, but resisting the urge to knead the spices into the meat as if making a meatloaf. I also resisted the urge to ask them to heat it up, or, you know, cook it; I’d wait.

Instead, I picked a cracker, picked up my odd fork with two prongs, and gently slid some chuck onto a saltine. I enjoyed it. A lot. But you know after a few small crackers of raw meat, it gets a bit tiresome. I chewed a bit for a while as Marvin looked over and smiled. I swallowed. “A Chorus Line is by far my favorite,” I said, then, “have you ever had the Steak Tartare here; best I’ve ever had.”

“I haven’t,” he said through a laugh as he paid his bill. I laughed, which I think he appreciated. He stood to leave and picked up his plate which still had one quarter of his club sandwich on it, and placed it on my table. Then he looked at my plate and quietly added, “They never cook it long enough for my taste,” and left. Best damn club sandwich in Manhattan.

My stomach hurt in the elevator on the way to Theatre Arts Magazine, but I think it was just in my head, plus nerves. I met a wonderful editor whose name I have long ago forgotten who said she absolutely loved my writing but wanted to talk to me about what I knew about the technical side of the theatre.

It was a very short conversation. Nothing. I insisted I could learn but she insisted she had several other interviews that day and she’d call me. I knew she wouldn’t. I stopped on the way back to Brooklyn and had a hotdog and some chocolate Italian ice, and that night Sean and I had pizza from Vinny’s.

At dinner, Sean asked how everything went in the city, and I sat quietly swallowing a thin slice of pie, where I had to bend the edges to hold it together, and some oil dripped onto the plate, and I said, “You know what? Kiss the day goodbye and point me toward tomorrow. I did what I had to do.”

Tavern on the Green
Steak Tartare

26

~ aviewfromthiswilderness ~ 1 Comment

26 letters.

That’s it.

In the beginning. That which doesn’t kill us makes us stronger. To be or not to be—that one just six letters.  Jesus wept—seven.

I can’t write, my students say; my very own demons say when something needs to be said but I’m at a loss of words. The history of English has turned and spun back on itself, argued with endings and double negatives, trampled meaning, treasured nuances, made murderers of us all, and unearthed muses to slipknot a string of letters, tie together thoughts like popcorn for a Christmas tree, individual kernels only able to dangle dutifully due to one common thread.

I do. Rest in Peace. Go to Hell. I quit. Fuck you. I love you—7 letters.

The English language, more specifically the alphabet, was not alphabetical at first, made that way in the 1300’s on Syria’s northern coast.  Today, we slaughter its beauty with a cacophony of sounds whose aesthetic value is lost in translation while simultaneously softening hardened hearts with poetry and prose for the ages. For nearly a millennium this alphabet whose letters lay the way for understanding in multiple languages, has dictated decrees, is uttered by infants one syllable at a time until by age five they’ve mastered the twenty six consonants and vowels.  What circles of wonder are children’s faces when someone’s tongue pushes out “toy” “treat” “your mommy’s here” “your daddy’s home.”

Plato said, “Wise men talk because they have something to say, fools, because they have to say something”; Socrates said, “False words are not only evil in themselves, but they infect the soul with evil.” The sins of our fathers forever condemn us to hell but for confession, penance, and absolution.

Forgive me father for I have sinned—14 letters.

Of all the languages on the planet, English has the largest vocabulary at more than 800,000 words, all from those same 26 symbols.

There are roughly forty five thousand spoken languages in the world, about 4500 written today but almost half of them are spoken by less than a thousand people. English, though, is the most common second language on Earth—translated or original, the Magna Carter, The Declaration, The Bible, the Koran, the Torah, the tablets tossed by Moses and a death certificate are all reassembled versions of the twenty-six.

I have a dream—eight letters.

Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country—fourteen.

We the People–seven

Teeter-totter—four.

Billowy is one of only a few seven letter words whose six letters remain alphabetical. Spoon-feed is the longest, at nine letters, whose seven letters are reverse-alphabetical.

We can talk, us English. We can spin a yarn, chew the fat, beat the gums, flap the lips. We have the gift of gab, we run off with the mouth, we can spit it out, shoot the breeze, talk someone’s ears off, or just talk shop, talk turkey, talk until we’re blue in the face, be the talk of the town. We can, for certain, at just seven letters, bullshit.

We hope some symphonic phrase might come closer then the limitations of language. This is the frustration of poets, the complete sense of ineptitude of writers and lovers throughout history. To define that smile, the slight lean forward, that light through laced curtains at just that moment all those years later. But life, like language, is filled with limitations.

My point (7 letters) is that (3 letters) sometimes, despite our skills (4 letters) with the English language (6 letters), we are often left either in love (four letters) or, at just six letters, speechless.