…the Fozzie pillow my sister made me,…

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I have a lot of shit.

Books I’ll never read again, clothes I don’t wear, boxes of frames and a stack of artwork I’ll never hang leaning against the wall next to the bureau. I have enough pottery to supply a small restaurant, enough reusable grocery bags in my house and in the trunk of my car to carry away the frozen food isle of Kroger, and a shed full of tools I didn’t use when both me and them were newer.

I have scribbles of notes for articles and essays, folders of rough drafts for books and short non-fiction I never read or even attempted to get published, sixteen previous versions of a book which comes out in a year that doesn’t resemble any of the first fifteen variations.

Even when I get away from it and go for a walk down the hill to the river, I have too much stuff. I have obligations both financial and professional that weigh heavily, an overwhelming desire to call Letty or Dave or Dan and just talk like I did every few days for three, four, almost five decades, and sometimes a powerful flash of memory of my father so real I can hear his voice next to me. Those moments can be debilitating, and I just want to swim away. When that happens, I carry it all home and sometimes write about it, sometimes lay down and try and sleep. I lay down and not sleep at all a lot.

A few days ago my son and I took the ferry to Tangier Island, eighteen miles into the Chesapeake, and we walked the historic, tiny slab of sinking land. It was good to slap the world’s largest estuary between me and my stuff, walking around, talking, noticing the birds, the friendly residents, and watching the watermen do their thing the way their ancestors did since Cornish settlers arrived in the 1680’s, more than fifty years after John Smith rowed by and took note. A lady in a golf cart next to Lorraine’s restaurant where we had fresh soft shell crab sandwiches spoke to a friend of hers in a Cornish accent the islanders are famous for.

And we had ice cream.

But all of that was all I needed to clear my head and not carry around the volumes of concerns back on the mainland. I was in the moment, which is quite a rare thing for anyone these days. I have noticed that when I travel—Prague, Ireland, Spain, especially all those trips to Russia, even the pond of lily pads across the river where my son and I often stop to listen—I am completely present, uber aware of my surroundings, the people, and my memory sharpens so that I can write about it sometimes years later and still smell that moment, still hear a veteran’s voice telling me about “the time that…” Absolutely present.

And I come home after those moments and look around at the stacks of magazines I won’t read again if I ever did, the boxes of ornaments too many to hang them all, grade books from my early teaching years, relics of a time I wish hadn’t happened to begin with never mind reliving it, and I wonder why I still have it all.

When we walked the Camino de Santiago, it took about a week to shed the sense I was forgetting something, to ease up on the worry that something needed to be done. It took only a few more days to remind myself that at all times I am indeed here, breathing in and out, moving along, celebrating the passing of time, and everything else is needless no matter how sentimental we are about stuff. We rarely stop and appreciate the fact we are actually alive to begin with, standing here, able to negotiate the next moment however we desire. I forget this most of the time, and I wish I didn’t.

Many, many years ago I went to a wedding reception on the shore of Lake Erie in the small village of Angola on the Lake. I stood looking out across the water not unlike I do almost every morning when I head to the bay at Stingray Point and stare east, and Fr Dan, who had celebrated their marriage, walked to me and we talked. I remember he said I seemed quiet. I told him I wasn’t sure what to do with my life. He told me the normal Fr Dan stuff like God will show me the way, and I’m young and have so many options, and more of what I’ve heard him repeat to me and others in the nearly forty years since then, but I knew all that. So I said something to the effect of, “I suppose just knowing no matter what else all I need is ‘me,’ alive and functioning, to start over if things don’t work out in whatever direction I choose and to truly enjoy the ‘passing of time.’” He laughed and put his hand around my shoulder and said how right that is.

But we don’t really mean that. We work hard, we gather memories and even though we stack them next to the bureau or on closet shelves, we need them there to glance at once in a while to know there was some reason and rhyme to our pilgrimage until now. Of course I can land on my feet and start in a new direction at any time, knowing that in about a week that routine will realign my anxieties and I’ll be fine, and all I’ll need to carry with me are memories of those I have loved. Yes, that is all true.

But I like my shit. The funky photos Valentine took in Russia, and the photo Letty had framed for me of four ladies on a bench; the stacks of brochures and pamphlets from state parks and museums my son and I have hiked and visited for nearly thirty years, the signed books from authors I have had the pleasure to talk to and read with, the tins of pins from Soviet shops and Czech artists’ studios. The sloth birthday balloon and a crazy little light-generated cat from someone who can finish my sentences for me, the folders of drawings from my son’s youth, the small bottle of absinth I never opened.

The miter box my brother bought me and the rug of seascape my sister made when I was in college. My mom’s large Dopey Doll. Shells from a walk with a friend on the Gulf of Mexico and a nutcracker my son painted when he was young.

I have so much stuff, but it all reminds me of what an amazing pilgrimage it has been.

In two years I’m going back to St. Jean Pied de Port, France, to start walking again, south to Pamplona then west to Santiago. I’ll carry a pack with just enough to know I’ll be fine. And if I should stumble upon mementos to carry home, I am sure I can find someplace to put them.  

Pando

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“Baby” John Walsh and me

I sat against the wall in Durty Nelly’s, an old Irish pub next to the Bunratty Castle near Shannon, Ireland. The bar was packed and next to me was the only available place to sit: a wide, stone windowsill looking out over the running creek below as the place had been a mill at one time. The window has bars on it, otherwise the drop is straight down about fifteen feet. A short, quite Irish-looking Irishman sat on the sill and drank his beer. It was loud from music and talking so that even my companion and I had to yell to hear each other.

The Irishman leaned toward me, his legs dangling above the floor. “Last time I was here I drank too much and fell out the window into the creek. That’s why they put bars up!” He toasted the air and drank, and it was easy to believe him even though the scenario was unlikely. He came straight from central casting, acting all the part of Barry Fitzgerald in The Quiet Man.

After I spoke, revealing my Yankeeness, he asked where I was from and what we were doing there. “Connemara!” he exclaimed. “The wild west!” We laughed as his response was common and I had previously noted that the Wild Atlantic Way which runs through the western portions of County Galway and all of Connemara were indeed rustic, scenes from Banshees of Innisfree shot there, as well as The Quiet Man and others. I told him my ancestry is Irish, Connacht, and in particular County Galway, noting Connemara specifically. He asked the relative surname.

“Walsh!” I screamed over the noise. “There’s some McCormick and others for sure, but Walsh is the Galway connection.

He stood up, set his beer on our table, pulled out his wallet, removed his license, and handed it to me. “Baby John Walsh is the name! Nice to meet you cousin!”

When I returned home, I thought about how connected everyone really is; how I could make trips to Bavaria or Sicily and have similar experiences, pushing out the concentric circles of my DNA. Actually, we do that socially all the time. In one family we usually break down the “lines” by aunts and uncles. Outside the family such as here in the village near Aerie, the families of many watermen have been here since the 1600’s and so when you talk to natives in town you slim down where you are “from” by creeks. “Oh he’s from over near Broad Creek.” “He’s from Mill Creek.” “Her family is down on Stove Point.” But if I head up-county, I simply say I’m from Deltaville. They wouldn’t know the Duck Pond near Parrot’s Island. When I’m down at the college, I note I live “up on the Middle Peninsula.”

You see where it goes.

When traveling as I just did to western Maryland, “I’m from Virginia” suffices. In Ireland, I usually don’t need to expose my already obvious “United States” origin, but for those who know our country, I’ll add the state.

I suppose if we ever end up on Triton, I’d pull out my license and signify to some other-worldly writer that I’m from Earth, just past Mars on the right.

What captivates me about this is the closer our ancestry is to others, the more likely we are to get along. John Walsh and I would have talked anyway since we drank beer next to each other, but once we realized we shared that name the conversation grew deeper, and I learned he wrote restaurant reviews, and he did, in fact, fall out the window into the creek on several occasions.

My brother spent time with Kunzingers in our ancestral village of Lohr a. Main, Germany. I’m Facebook friends with two Michael Kunzingers. One is my son, and the other a mathematician in Austria whose great great great great something or other is the same GGG as mine, back in the early 1800s. It’s just that his line of family never left the old world as mine did in the 1850s.

We all have the same roots no matter how far apart we grew up and eventually branched out, stretching our posterity across distant ideas.

I’m reminded of what now seems like a trite mentality from perhaps the sixties when those coming of age declared against the supporters of the Vietnam War and later the threat of Nuclear War, “We are all one family! The Human Family! We are one race!”

But it’s true. We are. And if nothing else we often drink the same beer, choose the same corner of some obscure pub and maybe bump into a distant cousin.

John Edgar Wideman wrote that everyone needs two parents, four grandparents, eight great-great grandparents, then sixteen, then thirty-two; and that’s just five generations back. He acutely notes that less than two hundred years ago, sixteen men and sixteen women made love. None of the couples most likely knew any of the other couples, living as far apart as Kings County, New York, and County Galway, Ireland, and never met any of the others in their lives, not knowing what would eventually be true—that it was all part of some grand conspiracy to set in motion the DNA which would eventually create you.

We are rooted in our past, which means we are truly rooted in each other to some degree. I understand that doesn’t mean we will get along. Tradition tells us the first two brothers certainly didn’t.

But we are here. Together on this world. At the very least we can have a beer and compare notes I should think.

Pando. The world’s largest tree.

Talk about Opening Doors

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My Yellow House in New England

I found an old silver key while cleaning my closet floor.  For years it might have been there shoved in the corner under the lip of a log, fallen perhaps from pants pockets or my winter coat.  I don’t recall losing a key or changing a doorknob.  Perhaps it opens some old lock on the old all-glass door on the side porch. At the start back then strangers would meander down the winding driveway through the woods to the house and cup their hands against the reflections on the door windows to look around. I replaced that door with a solid one and put a no-trespassing sign up front.  

Older, I think; the place in Wellsville, Pennsylvania, where I came home one July morning to find plants and flowers in the entrance and at the top of the stairs for my birthday. It was the first place I lived where I gave someone else a key. Or it might be from my first house in New England, where the door stuck in winter when the frame froze.  I’d spend hours shoveling my steps and those of the old woman across the street who delivered mail.  She’d bring apple pie for my efforts or leave one for me with Sam at the Deacon’s Bench antique store.

But that key was gold.  Now I think this one some souvenir from my childhood home on Church Road, the two-story colonial where I owned my own first house key though I never needed it since after playing ball or riding bikes all day along the Great South Bay, I’d run in the back door full stride and laugh the way childhood makes you laugh for no reason at all.

I can’t recall now what this silver key might be for, though I’ll keep it, resist the urge to throw it away as evidence shows I clearly resisted before.  After all, it still opens doors to places I never thought I’d return.

My childhood home on the Island
Aerie
The Wellsville House

Uncomplicated

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The board outside my former office, May 2018

Some years ago when I knew for sure I was leaving my job I held for nearly thirty years, I started to focus not so much on what was next as much as how fast, how so very fast it all went, and I realized that about the same amount of time to come would put me at nearly ninety years old.

I cleaned out my office—slowly at first, then with much more indifference. I carried piles of books to a common table in the building’s lobby, I moved file cabinets and other useless furniture into a storage area for someone else to claim and configure to their job the way we do with all things in our lives—we mold them to fit in the corners of our growth and accomplishments. Yeah, I was done with all of it.

And outside my office I took down all announcements and office hours and lists of readings from my bulletin board so that all that was left was black construction paper. It looked clean, like a slate, and I absolutely loved the metaphor of it all, but I also thought I should take a piece of chalk and write in some demanding font, “Outta here.”

Instead, I typed up a favorite saying of mine, “Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated,” by Confucius. I stapled it to the middle of the board, smiled, and went about my business of unraveling three decades and finding my way to that diversion Frost wrote about with such eloquence.  

Next to my office was a classroom, and students often leaned against the wall (and my door) while waiting for another class to empty before entering. A few noticed the saying and commented to me when I returned to my office. “I like it,” one woman commented, “because it makes me think about it.” I liked that. I wish she had been one of my students.

The following week I added another quote to the board. This time Lao Tzu, one of my absolute favorites: “If you don’t change directions, you may end up where you are going.” Just stapling that to the board punctured a ball of emotion that spilled out across the rest of that day. How many times have I preached, I thought, about the dangers of getting caught in the currents and letting the world around us carry us through instead of pulling ourselves out of the stream and deciding for ourselves where we are going? Students had the same reaction, and I know they were wondering just who is it that decided going to college right then was the right thing to do. Often there is absolutely nothing wrong with where we are going; this is not a rebellious statement, I don’t think. I believe Lao was just indicating it can’t hurt to get a glimpse of what’s ahead every once in a while to see if you really are okay with the path you’re on.

Well, the board caught on and people started asking when the next quote was going up, gathering around my door on Tuesdays after they figured out I didn’t work Monday’s and that I must have posted them early Tuesday mornings, which I did. Up went James Taylor, Mae West, Seneca, St Augustine, and Jonathan Swift. More than a few passing people commented on how motivating the sayings were, and how they looked forward to them. Well, motivation was always my profession anyway, not teaching. For those thirty years it wasn’t English I was there for—hell, I was barely qualified for the first fifteen of those years. It was that I knew how to get them to find significance in it all—the work, the direction, the balance of dreams and reality. My job in New England after college was to motivate people, and I learned it well. So when I ended up teaching college, I knew instinctively that it really doesn’t matter how much I know the work, if they aren’t engaged—if they don’t feel motivated—I’d be speaking to the walls. Plus, my board was an extension of what I knew was about to end, and I started in those last months to motivate myself forward. I was absolutely projecting.

William Penn. Herman Hesse. Helen Keller.

Thoreau.

Darwin.

Then it was the first week in May at the start of my last week ever on campus. And I found this: We must let go of the life we have planned so as to accept the one that is waiting for us—Joseph Campbell.

I typed it up, printed it out, moved Thoreau a bit for balance, and stapled Joseph to the board. That one was for me.

One of my most vivid memories from Spain was being in Santiago after more than a month of walking at about two or three miles an hour, sitting in cafes, crossing Roman bridges noting each step, each breath—essentially, more than a month of barely moving to cross a nation—and then seemingly suddenly we we boarded a train for the six-hour ride–just six hours–back to Pamplona. Six hours. It took four weeks to go from Pamplona to Santiago, and six hours to get back. On top of that disturbing reality check was that after a month of barely moving, we were suddenly barreling along at sixty and seventy miles per hour. It simply felt wrong. I leaned against a window looking at the landscape and when I saw pilgrims walking the opposite direction toward Santiago, holding their walking sticks, their backpacks strapped and the sun beating down as they walked and laughed, talking to other pilgrims on the road, I got a pit in the center of my stomach, a nauseous pain, like a child on a school bus for the first time who sees his parents outside walking the other way. I wanted to get off; I wanted to pull back the doors between the carriages, toss my pack out onto the trail and tumble out like a character in a movie. Writing that just now brought the pit back; it was that real, it is that real. It was the only time in my life I compared side by side the notion of getting somewhere and going somewhere. They’re not the same.

I’m a pilgrim, not a passenger.

Sometimes that happens. You’re riding along, caught up in the mainstream, barely noticing where you’re going because you’re engaged with everyone else in the stream barely noticing where they’re going, and you catch a glimpse of some shadow of yourself just out of reach. And you know that’s where you should be, of course, but the trouble, the pain, the expense, the sacrifice, the explanations necessary, the possibility of failure, the probability of doubt all slide in front of you, each holding you back just a little, all adding up to a gravitational force of “now” and “comfortable” and “responsible” that’s harder to break free from than the strongest of currents.

And even if you do jump, you’re immediately inflicted with that same pit in the stomach, only this time it pulsates, “Oh my God, what have I done?” The things is, you’ll never lose the pit, one way or the other.

Anyway.

On that last day back then, I cleaned out my office and walked outside the door, and for a moment I thought about leaving the quotes there, or maybe replacing them all with just one quote in the middle of the black construction paper, saying, “and this bird you cannot change—Ronnie van Zant,” but I changed my mind and took them all down and gave them to my friend Jack. Each week he’d come by my office and we’d talk about the latest quote and what it meant to us. Then on that last day when I was about to throw out the last folder of teaching materials, I found another passage, typed it up and stapled it to the board. I’d like to believe it is still there.

I know now how much I need that motivation again. But there are two types of motivation: Internal and external. That external one is easy: do the work or don’t get paid. Clean the room or don’t eat dinner. But the internal motivation that drives us from somewhere deep inside, that contradicts the currents, that learns how to turn on a dime, I need that once again. I’m surrounded by people retiring and settling their affairs, haunted by others who slipped off the stage too soon, and it simply creates an indefinable stagnation.

But today while walking along a street in a small village on the Rappahannock River, I remembered that last quote, and it felt right, deep in my stomach it felt right:

“If a man in the street were to pursue his self, what kind of guiding thoughts would he come up with about changing his existence? He would perhaps discover that his brain is not yet dead, that his body is not dried up, and that no matter where he is right now, he is still the creator of his own destiny. He can change this destiny by taking his one decision to change seriously, by fighting his petty resistance against change and fear, by learning more about his mind, by trying out behavior which fills his real need, by carrying out concrete acts rather than conceptualizing about them, by practicing to see and hear and touch and feel as he has never before used these senses…We must remind ourselves, however, that no change takes place without working hard and without getting your hands dirty. There are no formulae and no books to memorize on becoming. I only know this: I exist, I am, I am here, I am becoming, I am my life and no one else makes it for me. I must face my own shortcomings, mistakes, transgressions. No one can suffer my non-being as I do, but tomorrow is another day, and I must decide to leave my bed and live again. And if I fail, I don’t have the comfort of blaming you or life or God.”

                                                                                                                    –Joseph Zinker

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Break Down

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Every semester about the second week of classes I pull my chair into the center of the room and ask them how college is going so far. I ask what it’s like, the challenges and changes. It takes little imagination to guess the various yet typical answers, which tend to start with generalizations, such as “Going great. Love it,” and as I push for details they become more specific, such as the food in the dining hall or the dorm noise they’re not used to.

It’s a writing class so I keep the conversation casual but at times relate their responses back to essay development, demonstrating the combination necessary of personal experience and universal understanding. Eventually everyone enjoys this day’s discussion and contributes, laughs, argues, agrees. They start swapping stories about roommate issues and the volume of music while trying to sleep.

This happened Tuesday.

I won’t digress into the inane concept that they’ve been here for three weeks and most couldn’t tell me the names of more than three people, or how when I ask them what they do when not in class they say, “Nothing.” They go to the dining hall or the food court, then back to their room to log on. Getting this much information from them has become increasingly difficult. The student body as a whole has grown quieter, more introverted. Some of it is technology, some of it the fact these are Covid Kids, moving through middle and part of high school isolated at home. Part of it is being a freshman at college without any preparation or clue as to what to say when a professor asks these types of questions.

But I did and they answered, and it grew better as they talked and laughed and swapped stories about floormates. It was loud and active, and it felt good, it seemed classic, like a class out of my early career when a lack of cellphones and laptops forced everyone to talk to each other.

But one young quiet woman mumbled to herself when I asked how they felt when they got here. No one else noticed or heard as they were already involved in the group conversation, but I noticed. Quietly I asked her what she said so she could repeat it to me and not the class or she already would have, but she just said, “Nothing. Forget it.”

“Seriously,” I said. “I’m just curious, that’s all.”

She stared at me for a long ten seconds and said, “I’m terrified.” I nodded to her. She put her head back and I could see her eyes welling up. “I’m just fucking terrified!” she said louder, and the room quieted down. She ran her hand through her hair, sat up, and shrugged us off. “Forget it, just forget it.”

We were quiet just long enough for her to talk again. “I’m just terrified. I don’t know anyone and when I try and meet them they shrug me off. They do that to everyone. Everyone does it. I don’ t know how psycho these people are! I try and meet them but they never come out of their room! I’ve never been lonelier surrounded by so many people!“

One compassionate classmate, whether she meant it or not, said, “I feel the same way. Every single night.”

The first one said she can’t keep calling home. She said her advisor said to her, “You must have some idea of what you want to major in; what you want to do with your life.” Her voice broke at the end of it, and she moved like she was going to add more, but she just looked out the window, her eyes red and swollen. Then to herself, she said, What I want to do with my life?! Are you serious!?

The others contributed the expected comments: They also don’t know what they want to do, and they also call home way too much, but something about this girl told me something the others couldn’t possibly know: I was her.

I fell into a hole first semester freshman year. My roommate and I got along fine and I got heavily involved in music and the radio station and the newspaper. I kept busy, but at night in the dorms it was like a barracks and I simply did not fit in. I wasn’t terrified of anyone or anything in particular, but I was absolutely terrified I simply made a bad choice about what was the most important decision of my life to that point.

So I said that. I said one of the scariest things I have ever known, and it has happened on several occasions, is the absolute terror that I made a bad decision and there was no way out of it.

She sat up and stared right at me, then said, “Everyone in my life either wants answers to these huge questions or they want to be left alone completely. No one just wants to get a cup of coffee and sit quietly. She cried fiercely now, and several others became emotional.

“I think,” I said, “there is nothing more difficult to do in life, nothing more challenging…nothing more…misunderstood, than moving out on your own for the first time surrounded by total strangers and then having the authority figures nearby demanding answers you simply do not have. It’s absolutely insane and often unbearable for anyone.”

I pushed. “Let’s break this down.”

“If you’re not sure what you want in life, what are you doing here?”

She wants to be a nurse.

“You could have gone elsewhere.”

This school with its sister nursing school is the best.

“You could have waited until you had better perspective.

I don’t want to wait.

“Geez, you have a lot of answers for someone who doesn’t know.”

She laughed. It’s just at night, she said. She gets scared at night. She wakes up in the middle of the night with desperately bad panic attacks.

“I do too,” said one of the others.

Really?

“Yes, I’ve already called my mom more than a few times at three am.”

Her mom would kill her, she replies.

I walked to the front of the room and everyone straightened their desks. One girl finally asked the other’s name. It was the first time in several years I have heard someone ask someone else their name. She asked if she wanted to go get coffee after class, and they did.

I said, “Well, anyway, that’s what it’s like to be in college I suppose.” And we all laughed.

I added one thing: “What terrifies me is the student who isn’t scared. That scares the crap out of me. To move through like everything is just right and never think about it, never feel in your gut the questions about what you should be doing? That’s terrifying. Waking up at three am in a panic that I’ve made all the wrong decisions is exactly what I want to happen; not some complacent, mindless acceptance of the status quo. I need those emotional checks and balances. I just don’t want them to derail me.”

They didn’t move. They just sat though I was halfway to the door. So I stopped. “Here’s a quote for your Discussion Page musings: It is from a man named Denys Finch Hatton. “I don’t want to wake up one day at the end of somebody else’s life.”

They left talking to each other. I love when they leave still talking to each other.

Tavern on the Green with Marvin Hamlisch

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Marvin Hamlisch: one of only two people (and Richard Rogers) to win not only an Emmy, Grammy, Tony, and an Oscar (three actually) but also a Pulitzer Prize.

I grilled some burgers on Labor Day; the kind that drips fat onto the coals and the smoke and flames sear the juices inside. I’m going pescatarian again with a strong reliance on veggies and some chicken in preparation for the Shamrock Half-Marathon in March. So I had one last juicy burger.

And I stood on the patio recalling burgers through the years, and steaks, thick-cut, medium rare steaks and burgers. Makes me sick a little now, but I have enjoyed my times with cooked cows. In more recent years I have been criticized for undercooking my burgers. Growing up we always had red meat medium rare; and according to Dave the chef at the Sterling Inn where I worked many lifetimes ago, anything more than medium-rare can’t be considered steak any longer, but a variety of material for handbags. So I knew ordering red meat medium rare, despite today’s bend toward not dying of some disease, to be the right call.

One time, however, I may have ordered wrong.

In 1984, I stayed 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 Sean’s at 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 television parts, so I told him I’d pick up a pizza at Vinny’s on 7th Avenue that night, 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, the waiter indicated, 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 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.” He left and I looked at Marvin just as he looked at me, so I said, “I’m having steak and crackers,” and I laughed. He did too.

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 asked if he wanted a cracker and he said he was fine and that I’d probably be glad to have them.

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.”

I looked at Marvin but he was eating his suddenly delicious looking club sandwich, toasted, a small toothpick sticking out of the quarter he had not yet consumed.

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, looked around then back at Marvin and said, “A Chorus Line is by far my favorite.” He laughed and said thank you. Then I added, “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. “And The Way We Were. Good stuff,” I said, picking up another cracker. 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, “That’s not cooked nearly enough for my taste,” and left. So I ate the rest of Marvin Hamlisch’s lunch. 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 while waiting for trichinosis to hit. At the magazine 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 almost said, “But I had lunch today with Marvin Hamlisch; that’s got to count for something,” but I just left. 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? It’s not important. Let’s just kiss the day goodbye and point me toward tomorrow. I did what I had to do.”

Tavern on the Green
Steak Tartare

Mint and White Hawthorn

~ aviewfromthiswilderness ~ 1 Comment
Connetquot River

The tide is low this afternoon, and the vapors from the marsh saturate the air along the road all the way up the hill. I know this smell, low tide. I’ve inhaled it since I was nine years old when we moved to a small village on the Island where the Connetquot River meets the Great South Bay. My friend Eddie and I would walk the bay and meander through the marshes along the waters of Heckscher State Park next to the town, and it filled my senses so that when I walk now along the Rappahannock half a century later and the small creeks near Aerie during low waters, I still smell my youth. In so many ways those years seem like I see them just below the surface, sometimes exposed when the water recedes.

But here, now, when the tide rolls in, the refreshing smell of salt water and Atlantic mist overtakes everything, like it did back then too when the fog horns out on the Great South Bay called through the wet and cool mornings.

Today the muddy marsh is exposed with reeds and fiddler crabs, small bubbles from submerged frogs, and periwinkles everywhere, hundreds of them; thousands. Herons pull their fragile legs up out of the mud as they walk, and above me several osprey circle and dive for small fish and crabs in the Rapp. Soon they will make their pilgrimage to South America for the winter only to be replaced locally by eagles.

I come here to clarify my confused and often anxiety-ridden mind. Everyone needs a place like this, akin to that “safe home” kids designate during hide and seek—if you touch it before anyone touches you, you’re safe. This is that for me, when I’m here no one can touch me; I cannot be “it” when I’m surrounded by water and salty air, even at low tide. And if I close my eyes this could be the marsh running behind the greens at Timber Point, and boaters might be headed out to Fire Island or just across the river to Oakdale and West Sayville, and sometimes I feel like I’m twelve when my mind would drift during Social Studies at seventh period to the waters of Heckscher and the muddy flats off of Montauk Highway.

Those are familiar names to me, but probably not most others. And those places at that time still belong to me. Just like the aroma of the marsh near Aerie; that’s mine too, and the sound of gulls and osprey and herons, and diesel engines of fishing boats before dawn, and the water lapping on the riprap and sand. Those smells and sounds belong to me; always have. Of course many others know and have absorbed these visceral aspects of life as well, but that’s not what it feels like when you’re alone at a marsh, relishing the peopleless world, and the only sound is the call of gulls, and your sole desire is to roll out with the tide and see what happens; it has the same enticing pull as the comforting tug home up the hill, as strong as the moon’s grip on the tides. We are seventy-percent water, after all, and so is the earth. Being near the ocean or this river and bay helps me keep my balance, like some sort of metronome. It’s always been that way.

Nature has always been my safety net no matter where and when life happens. It is predictable in its controlling and haphazard way. It is non-judgmental; it isn’t distracted. It is as consistent now as it was for the native Americans who hunted on this land, and perhaps some nomads before that, as ancient and consistent as whatever life lived here, died here. Nature asks nothing of me except to be left alone. It’s all I ask of it.

I left the marshes of the Island fifty years ago next June. And even though I’m not there and Eddie is gone, I know the marshes still line the shore of the Connetquot, and out on the Bay the fishing boats cross before dawn. The salty air I’ve always inhaled is in my DNA, and it still hangs out on the reach just below our consciousness. I don’t know how long I might have survived without nature to steady the tides of my moods as they move in and out, pulling me further afar right before I’m trust back ashore. In so many ways my life is one of extremes.

I have been around the block since my days on the Island, and just when I thought I had grown tired and weary of fighting the tides; just when it seems life was more akin to the salt flats out on the Great Salt Lake with a shoreline that will never recover, I notice some sunset beyond the pulsating marsh and it settles me again, moves me right back into the moment where nothing had ever happened and nothing will ever change, for a little while anyway.

It’s like that here, at the river, just down the hill. High tides are exciting and fill me with a sense of awe and possibility, hope, but when the tide pulls back out, that ebb exposes nature for everything it is with its raw and beautifully honest frame filled with nature’s debris. I wish I could see myself with such blatant honesty.

I wish I could always feel so at home, safe and untouchable. How much of our identity can be traced to our youth and those places we chased each other through after school, explored and conquered on summer afternoons? If I lived in the city, miles from any semblance of the salty marshes of the South Shore, would I still feel the tug of the tides? I tell people I found this land here at Aerie by accident. I tell myself that. Sometimes I feel like I should turn around and find Eddie a few steps behind, whispering to himself the lyrics to some Harry Chapin song, asking if we should go swimming in the bay.

September is just days from now, and the August heat, the rise of gnats in the hazy air, the stillness of often stifling walks along the Rappahannock are once again slipping behind me. I believe that like Jay Gatsby I can be melancholic, some strong desire to “reach out and hold it back” overcomes me when the weather turns, and to be honest, Nick’s retort that “there’ll be other summers” is simply not good enough. Not when so many of them fade so fast. Not when the afternoon sun can so easily burn off the mist of our youth.

Conscious of Streams

~ aviewfromthiswilderness ~ Leave a comment

Tim and I had lunch a few days ago and talked about Salt Cay and the donkeys. About the heat and the isolation, which is for some of us a chance to breathe. We talked seriously about some friends we’ve lost, and then we laughed about what it costs to die. There are few things the two of us do not laugh about. Sometimes irreverence keeps us sane.

Not for nothing but for many years I had a map in my office of a bike route from Williamsburg, Virginia, to Coos Bay, Oregon, Sixteen-year-old Bob was going to do that ride but never did. I kept the map though. It is good to have something slightly out of touch to think about. Some sliver of purpose to sift through.

Anyway, today I called Dee and we talked long about Fr. Dan, about what happened, and about one person’s ability—his—to influence so many through time and space and his presence never seems diluted, not at all. She isn’t feeling well, though, Covid, and her already devastated immune system laid her up for a while, but she’s feeling better than she had been, coughing less she told me. I told her that’s the Italian in her, and she laughed. She has a great laugh that her mom and dad cherished. She sent a picture of herself with Timmy—a 17-year-old cat—and neither looked healthy at all. The eyes. You can tell.

The bay was a lake this morning. The river ran fast. The sun bust its ass to get above the low clouds out over the Eastern Shore this morning, and tonight it settled behind a new bank of storms hovering over the Piedmont. It’s muggy; like rain is coming. Like it did that summer with Isabel. Tim said he was told that sometimes when a storm blows through down there, a stream forms right through the middle of the tiny Island, splitting it in two.

I told Tim I’d like to spend a month at Salt Cay. With the donkeys and the small bar the size of a Jeep Cherokee, and boat the forty-five minutes to Grand Turk for food. A full month. I feel phrases simmering already and I haven’t even had drinks with the locals yet. But someday. The donkeys wander in the yard to chew on the cactus-like leaves, sometimes two or three, sometimes eight or nine, wild donkeys just grazing the cay.

When I look out across the bay to the Eastern Shore in the morning, I often think of my friend Sheri who has a place in Cape Charles which is right there but for fifteen miles of water, but she’s mostly in South Carolina now. But I think of her and how we’d laugh in the halls at the college. I had her sign one of her books once I found at a used book shop for a quarter and in the book she signed, “I can’t believe you got this for a quarter!” I thought of that this morning and about talking in the hallway and how that might have been three books ago, but the current keeps moving, doesn’t it? The current keeps moving.

Tim said the two of them stood out; like there were just the forty-something residents of the Cay and them, and I told him the trick is to stay long enough that you disappear into the landscape, and they stop seeing you as new and maybe even start wondering how long you’re going to stay, which can lead to conversations, which lead to friendships, which is why I want to go but not for a week like them, but for a month. Long enough to name the donkeys.

There are geese on the river tonight, a small flock. They’ve been around for a few weeks but for some reason tonight they felt more present, as if I realized that now that’s happening, and I remembered a post by my cousin Jack just the other day who wrote, “The Geese are heading South; summer is over.” I suppose. He lives just a dozen or so miles from Dee but they don’t know each other. Doesn’t it sometimes feel now like everyone you know knows everyone else you know? Facebook probably caused that. I once wrote a post that my friend Sean responded to which Kay responded to, and then Eddie laughed at that and commented in kind to which Mike made some hysterical retort. None of these people have ever met. None live in the same state, and none are even from the same periods of my life, but right there in one post—one picture—people from all my decades were conversing like we all met at a bar and swapped a few jokes while drinking a few beers. It lasted only a few comments, but it neatly tied up my entire existence right there next to the HIMS ad.

Yesterday my Facebook memory suggested a post of a sunrise I had taken some years ago, and of the six people who made a comment on the picture, five of them are dead. Time is out of joint. All my Bobs are floating on the surface when I really think I’d be better off if the old Bobs would just sink again, disappear again out to sea, drift over to Cape Charles, and let just one of me land a small Cessna on Salt Cay, flaps down, flying south before it gets too cold, just the one of me.

We had Princess Anne sandwiches, which are vegetarian, both Tim and me, and we talked about current projects, which we rarely do, but we also talked about the growing sense of urgency to get things out, to not die with some unpublished works still buzzing our brains at three am. We’re not popular enough for posthumous work, we decided, so everything is going to have to be moribundus at best.

Go ahead, look it up. It means “near death.” Perhaps a book of essays someday about all the people I have loved who left too soon. “Moribundus” by Bob Kunzinger, with an introduction by TS, still chasing donkeys on Salt Cay.

Dee’s voice was weak but way stronger than a few week ago. I have great admiration for people who fight. They take the “it is what it is” concept and push back on it. I hope I’m like that. I know I haven’t been. Part of that is I’ve been lucky, but a bigger part of it is I’m kind of disturbed. I’ve accepted that. Anyone who wants to spend a month on Salt Cay with donkeys has issues that even the poets won’t touch.

Anyway.

This morning at the Bay I almost called a friend of mine I hadn’t spoken to in long time but didn’t. I had no idea what to say. “What’s new?” he’d ask. “Not a lot,” I’d say, which is desperately pathetic when you think about it. It’s not like I saw him this morning; it’s been years. “How about you?” Nothing he’d say, maybe mention a new grandkid. We’d be silent for a minute with a few “it’s so great to hear your voice” comments, until I broke some silence with “Oh, I’m thinking of living with goats.” I like that I know he’d understand.

Listen: I have had one bad fucking month. Two months really. But you know what I remember? You know what surfaces when I let my consciousness stream over the days and weeks? A couple of calls from some old friends, from some people excessively important to me to just talk and laugh, to talk about music, about cats, about the sound geese make at dusk, about farms in Indiana and bears in Utah and Iowa’s Mississippi; about the beaches of Alligator Point and the long reach into the Great Lake out off of the North Coast. I like that that’s what I remember, because at night when it’s quiet, at three am when the tigers come and start gnawing on my stomach and sit their ass on my chest, It helps to know I might talk to someone again tomorrow.

I can tell them about the donkeys of Salt Cay and my plans to know them. Or about Coos Bay and how I can’t believe I was ever sixteen years old. It’s just not possible.

Creatio ex Nihilo

~ aviewfromthiswilderness ~ Leave a comment

Note: If you are easily offended by religious thought that contradicts your oh-so-verified and perfect understanding of God and the Afterlife, move on. You probably shouldn’t be reading my work anyway.

Let’s start with this religious/philosophical concept: God created the heavens; the universe; all of it; not only this corner of the Milky Way. It is rightfully assumed by believers that God wasn’t relegated a portion of the universe or put together just this one part of the universe and then accidentally spilled the rest on the floor.

No. God created the universe. Any God you want, since all the major religions claim the same accomplishment for their deity. In Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, this is absolute. In Hinduism, it is damn close in that the universe was asleep and then came to life, but it wasn’t not there and then was as is the case in the dominant trifecta.

The after-death part: In Christianity, Islam, and most schools of Judaism, everyone will end up in heaven. The do-gooders pretty quickly; the rest of us after some pretty compromising-sounding trials. But still, the post-purgatory promise is some sort of salvation awaits us all. Eventually.

Okay.  Of the major religions, while Mormonism would be the most chill with the concept of life in other galaxies, Jews and Muslims alike have come to terms with the reality of science. Christianity is the slowest to nod to the extraterrestrials, impaling people as recently as the 16th century for suggesting the earth is not the center of the universe, but they’ve come around. Extremist evangelicals not so much but they live in their own universe anyway.

Recap: God created the heavens—all of them—and when we die those of us who chewed our food with our mouths closed get to go there.

What this means to me is there just might be life from other galaxies in heaven, unless there are a whole bunch of heavens, as in each planet or galaxy has its own heaven isp domain and the universe is indeed segregated. Otherwise, heaven just might appear closer to life in Mos Eisley Cantina than a moose lodge. But how cool would that be? No matter their origin, anyone in this galactic heaven would have had to been good by their God’s standards, so fights are not likely to break out and they’ll probably never run short on stock.

A few glitches.

Cremated people, like those spread in Russian art galleries and artists graveyards, or those dispersed in the Mediterranean Sea near childhood beaches, would either not be present, or none of us is actually “present” to begin with as if we will run into a cousin at the mall, but instead we are there in some sort of thought presence, a force if you will, a spiritual embodiment we recognize because of something eternal, like the soul. Since the earthly ashes simply ended any actual post-mortem embrace or long, tight hug with a kiss on the neck, they must not be present. Right? Not so much.  

The major (and minor actually) religions have an answer for this dilemma: The body is a vessel, nothing more, and the afterlife is a gathering of souls. This allows the dismissal of ET showing up in our heaven because most of these same belief systems assume the rest of the universe is soulless. It’s that arrogance we have, I assume, that keeps them away from Earth to begin with. Shame.

I’ve made some mistakes in my life; wrong turns, bad decisions, like everyone else. At the same time, I’ve spent the past forty-five years either studying research and verification methods or teaching it at the collegiate level. Truth has a closer relationship with science to me than it does with faith. I haunt my students with one question which I tell them is the beginning and end of all they do in college: Where did you get your information?

The bible? The Koran? The Torah?

Mom and Dad? The plumber?

Maybe this is why I spend so much time in earthbound cantinas; I want to celebrate what is, here, the tangible love of the human touch, laughter, sorrow, now, here. This much I know is true, the rest is certainly faith, and I’ve spent my life surrounded by a few people as close to sainthood as ever one could be, and they have often swayed my faith. But I get tied up sometimes in what I “want” to be true. I “want” to meet Letty again, have a hard cider and tuna bites in whatever soul-like state we find ourselves. I want to drive to Florida with Eddie, guitars in tow. I want to sing on some heavenly park bench with Dave. Of course I do. I want to sit quietly again with my dad, talking about nothing, just being nearby and again feel that wonderous safety of my father, even if–especially–in heaven.

But for now, truth impels me to seek love while I’m still using this aging vessel. We are the only known species in the universe—for if there are others, we don’t yet know—leaving us the only species anywhere who can create from nothing; creatio ex nihilo. We can create a space between us reserved for compassion, for understanding. We can create hope for those who have had less fortune, and we can use language—another creation from nothing—to tell someone, again, “I love you,” like we did before, no matter how long ago it was. We can say again, “I will miss you,” before they move on and close that door behind them.

We can say, “We will meet again someday,” and know that despite the lack of evidence, despite the need to rely entirely upon faith to say that and believe it, eventually, it is all we have left.

She led a beautiful life.

He led a holy life.

They have moved on and whatever truth there is to know they now know. But for us, they’ve decidedly moved on.

So must we.

Vincent

~ aviewfromthiswilderness ~ 1 Comment

The following is an excerpt from my 2018 book Blessed Twilight: The Life of Vincent van Gogh; however, the words are his from a letter he wrote to his brother Theo in 1888. Often, an artist who excels in one genre does so in others as well; Vincent was no exception. I believe his writing to be as artful as his paintings.

Vincent van Gogh: March 30, 1853-July 29, 1890

From a letter to Theo:

It certainly is a strange phenomenon that all of the artists, poets, musicians, writers, and painters are unfortunate in material things—the happy ones as well. Maupassant is a fresh example of that. It brings the eternal question: Is the whole of life visible to us or isn’t it rather that on this side of death we see one hemisphere only? Painters, taking them only, dead and buried, speak to the next generation and very often several after in their work. Is that all or is there more besides? In a painter’s life, death perhaps is not the hardest thing there is. 

The earth has been thought to be flat. It was true, and is today, that between Paris and Arles, it is. But science has proven the world is round and nobody contradicts that nowadays. But notwithstanding all of this people persist in believing that life is flat and runs from birth to death. However, life too is probably round and very superior in expanse and capacity to the hemisphere we know at present. For my part, I know nothing of it. But to look at the stars always makes me dream as simply as I dream over the black dots of a map representing towns and villages. Why, I ask myself, should the shining dots of the sky not be as accessible as the black dots on a map of France? If we take a train to get to Rouen, we take death to reach a star. One thing undoubtably true in this reasoning is this: that while we are alive, we cannot get to a star any more than while we are dead we can take the train. So it seems to me possible that cholera and cancer are the celestial means of locomotion just as steamboats and railways are the terrestrial means.

To die quietly of old age would be to go there on foot. 

I feel more and more that we must not judge God on the basis of this world; it is a study that didn’t come off. What can you do in a study that has gone wrong if you are fond of the artist? You do not find much to criticize; you hold your tongue. But you have a right to ask for something better. It is only a master that can make such a muddle as this, since then we have a right to hope that we’ll see the same creative hand get even with itself. And this life of ours, so much criticized and for such good and exalted reasons—we must not take it for anything more than what it is and go on hoping that in some other life we’ll see a better thing than this.