I wrote this piece a long time ago and it received a lot of positive feedback and has since popped up in various online publications. I’m posting it here today because my mother is very much on my mind as yesterday was her birthday, and we had a great day. At one point we talked about life long ago when we had family over for a barbecue. This remains one of my favorite pieces. 

A lady in line at the market turned toward me and said, “I so much prefer iceberg lettuce over Romaine.” I did not provoke her. I didn’t make eye contact or in any way use body language to indicate I was remotely interested in conversation. In fact, I was engaged in the celebrity headlines on the rack above the Doritos. But I looked up. Damn it I looked up, which the woman interpreted as “Oh please continue.” So she went on. “Romaine is so dirty. I mean I know it has so much more nutritional value than iceberg, but it is always grimy no matter how much I wash it.”

I know people, good-natured people, who can handle this. I have friends who might willfully and enthusiastically engage this poor, lonely woman in conversation about various greens, their benefits, and possibly even move on to legumes or even poultry. I’m not one of those people. I have never been good at small talk, nor do I care. Halfway through her very innocent observations about the roughness of Romaine, I stopped listening, wanted to say, “Who cares? It’s a head of lettuce!” but didn’t. It seemed rude. Instead, I said simply, “Oh I know,” in a definitive manner, clearly indicating to the average person that “Oh I know” was all I planned to say. She didn’t get it.

“My husband, God rest his soul, loved Romaine lettuce, but he also loved plum tomatoes. Oh my, tomatoes are a whole other problem for me. You know just last week I was trying to decide between cherry tomatoes or plum tomatoes for the salad and I remembered that…”  Shut up! is what I wanted to say, but instead I stared at her with vacuous eyes. I cannot explain this physical reaction, but it is real and akin to the shortness of breath I experienced as a child at mass when Fr Charles at Our Lady of Lourdes parish would go on and on in his homily. I truly can’t breathe in situations like this. My blood sugar drops, time slows to some immeasurable pace, and my left arm starts to hurt.

Once when a woman asked which Chapstick flavor was my favorite I answered in Russian. I used to use Spanish but people started answering me in Spanish and then I had to have small talk in another language. Once I actually abandoned my cart in line and left the store.

When Iceberg Lady left, I paid for my groceries and wheeled to my car still thinking about the difference between the two types of lettuce. I wonder now what I would have thought about had I not be hijacked to think about this. I learned to like Romaine when I was older, and it can taste dirty, she’s right. But at least it isn’t bitter like some of the other dark green ones. See, I can think about irrelevant minutia all day long. But I can’t discuss it. I prefer conversations with depth and direction, meaning and thought. Give me a good Aristotle-like argument over a coupon swap any day.

Most people will say when you’re only passing through someone’s life for a few seconds in line at the checkout, small talk is all time allows. But I insist the opposite is more valid. If I were to hang out with the lady for a while, then perhaps eventually we’d get to ridiculous discussions about lettuce, but we only spent five minutes next to each other. Five minutes in all of time, eternity coming and going, our lives from birth to death and beyond and before, and in such a flash of explosive existence, five valuable minutes are spent with a woman contemplating lettuce! We negotiate neighbors and strangers alike like this, trying to fit in fragments of our lives as we spin along.  Shouldn’t that time, that precious, fleeting time, be worthy of something substantial? When she said, “I so much prefer iceberg lettuce over Romaine,” I should have said, “Yes, that’s interesting. I wonder if it is because of your youth, or how your taste buds formed when your mother or perhaps grandmother cooked for you. Where are you from? Have you ever wondered if hunters and food gathers were picky or did they just grab what they could and move on? Are you afraid of death?

Instead I know this about her: She prefers iceberg lettuce because it doesn’t taste like the ground.

So I put my groceries in the car and wondered when I started eating Romaine. Growing up it was always iceberg. Perhaps because it was so much cheaper, or maybe that was more widely available back when I was young. But I remember standing at the kitchen counter while my mom smacked the head of lettuce on the cutting board to break the core. Then she’d pull it out and toss it, and I’d help her tear the lettuce apart in small chunks for salads in the black bowls we got at Esso for free after so many tanks of gas.

She’d pull the lettuce apart and start cutting Beefsteak tomatoes and ask about my day. I’d tell her stupid stuff like how Jimmy O’Roarke asked if I wanted to come to his house to have some candy. And she’d comment about how Jimmy always had candy, and then we’d talk about our favorite candy; or I’d talk about how I played football at recess with Norman but I just couldn’t keep up with him so I’d end up just watching everyone. Then we’d talk about what cousins might be coming over and what we could do for fun when they did. It was nothing, really, nothing at all. I loved those mornings when she made sandwiches for school. In winter it was still dark out and my siblings were in bed or already in school and just Mom and I would sit in the kitchen and the radio played late sixties music and we’d talk about food. I can still hear an FBLI bank jingle playing right before the news at the top of the hour, and I can sense the stillness of the quiet winter mornings as I walked to the bus stop. I don’t remember caring that it was cold, and my friends and I would talk about the snow and wait for the school bus.

I drove to the next store on my list thinking about my mom, about how little I was against the counter helping her make a salad. I can still smell the cucumbers sliced on the plate, and the hamburgers cooking on the grill, like it was right there with me. That was so long ago. My dad would work the grill, and our neighbor Joe would stand by keeping him company while I leaned against the kitchen counter and Mom would let me have small chunks of ground beef or slices of salted cucumber. I’d tell her about what my friend Charlie and I had been doing and she always seemed interested.

So just for fun I grabbed some bread and ground beef, cheese, onions, and iceberg lettuce because that’s what we used to use on burgers. Of course. And I stood in line thinking about mom and how most of who we are is tethered in beautiful ways to who we were.

I held the lettuce in my hand. It was firm and fresh, and I said, “Iceberg is still the best lettuce for burgers!” to the man behind me in line. He just stared at me.

For most of my life I’ve been surrounded by beach sounds. The ocean, of course, its current coming ashore in a predictable, rhythmic pattern (though sometimes, more so lately, the water makes lazier progress with a more common calmness, a wave seemingly wandering to the sand almost as a second thought instead of its normal troop movement speed and persistence).

Also at sea are the gulls, calling and diving, chasing each other for scraps of found food or small fish claimed just below the surface. And pelicans occasionally lift from their glide to angles of light and school movement, then dive into the shoal rising slowly with a catch. It is the only time I hear a pelican; they are quiet. Dolphins, too, seem silent unless one breaches and spins, and even then she would have to be quite close to shore, which happens, sometimes.

On the beach is a symphony I’ve tuned in to since I’m a child. There’s the music from other blankets and people sunning in beach chairs, from vendors and from the speakers during scattered events up and down the strand. In the sixties when I was a toddler it was transistor radios with the “tiny tin voice of the radio man,” and in the seventies in my teens it was boomboxes mixing disco and Beach Boys; always the Beach Boys. Add to this the constant conversations ranging from requests for suntan lotion application to talk of kids and parents, to talk of work, to the best places to eat according to the guide they found in the top drawer in their room, to the heat, to the humidity, to financial plans to boyfriends and girlfriends and wedding plans and sunburned shoulders and faces and the dreaded burns on the backs of knees.

Further back still near the hotels, a store owner on the boardwalk is hosing down the sidewalk and a sanitation truck rolls by surrounded by workers walking while peering in garbage cans at each block, and the joggers muffled headphones, their shoes methodically hitting the pavement, and the two men in suits who always stand in the same spot next to a table of bible literature, never pushing but always encouraging people to have a good day. They refuse donations. They’re okay, those two men.

And it all works. It works as if Leonard Bernstein or Toscanini stood atop the twenty-feet tall Neptune statue at 31st Street and covertly conducted the separate sections, blending them so everyone anywhere on blankets and beach chairs, under umbrellas with kids or strolling with elderly parents on the boardwalk, and the three guys throwing a football, and the handful of surfers at First Street and the bike rental girls wearing bikinis and holding clipboards and the people fishing off the pier and the businessman on break talking on the phone, one foot on the rail between the boardwalk and the sand talking to someone about an appointment that didn’t go well, all of them, charted out in three quarter time and blended to some shoreline perfection.

I don’t know if it is some sort of Doppler effect or another sound-wave phenomenon, but if you stand on the sand right where the waves break and look to sea and listen, it is like being in an altogether different theater than when you simply turn around and face the boardwalk.

I spend a lot of time looking east across the pounding and ever receding tides. The seasons remain on their perpetual flow, and after some time you can recognize the nuances, the subtleties of change.

In fall I look forward to the slow erosion of tourists, some in September, and by October they’re nearly all headed home to West Virginia and Pennsylvania and Quebec. That’s when the dominant sounds are the natural ones coming from the current. But come spring, when the sun has risen higher and so have the room rates, and the traffic is heavier and you have to pay the parking meters again, and stores which had not been open since Labor Day once again have their baskets of body boards and circular racks of T-shirts on display on the sidewalk, I welcome the movements of summer, the sounds of the season, as the months slowly drift by of their own free will.

You know the routine: Someone says to you, “Hey I’m thinking of buying an Outback,” or they casually say, “I’ve seen more bluebirds than I used to,” and for the next several days you notice way more Outbacks or bluebirds. In college the practical joke would be to tell someone to “watch out for red trucks.” Of course, they’d suddenly be aware of them and so see them more.

It’s called “the Frequency Illusion,” also called the Baadar-Meinhoff phenomenon. It is what distracts us; but it is also what helps us focus. If you know you’re going to look for a new coat, you are hyperaware of others’ coats. If you are trying to lose weight, you are hyperaware of Dunkin Donut shops everywhere. Tragic. The point is, once we become aware of an idea, usually the first time or at the very least when the idea is brought on with some sort of urgency, we find it in the cracks of our lives where it most likely has always been lingering, it’s just that we haven’t.

I’m going to Ireland in two weeks, and don’t you know that for the past month I’ve noticed All Things Irish. Shops, songs, foods, teas, books, everything. I’m certain the world didn’t suddenly drop Ireland onto the map now that I’m going, but that is what it feels like for all of us subject to this psychological saturation.

Someone said to me she was more aware of her constant use of the phone when there exists a significant gap between the percentage of time using it compared to the amount of work getting done. After reading an essay I wrote about cell phone distraction, she more often sees the numbers of people with their head’s down, not communicating with life around them, not even noticing the life around them. I’m glad I had a small part in that.

So I have an idea I’m trying out. Each morning I’m going to list five or six things to look for that will make my day better. “Look out for children playing,” I might include. Or “There are going to be a lot more nice people out there today.”

Or

The colors of spring are more abundant this year.

Or

I’ve noticed getting stuck at a red light really doesn’t slow me down all that much.

Or

I can’t believe how many nice people I encounter in one day.

It might not work, but not doing it at all isn’t working either. I’m aware, always, of the nature around me, even when in the city, and I notice the numbers of people who pass through parks deeply engrossed in the stresses of somewhere else. I bet if someone had said to them, “Have you noticed how tall the trees are getting in the park?” their day would have been different. Even if ever so slightly.

I noticed in the last year something grounding in my life; I have a better chance of changing the course of my day than I do the course of my life. And, of course, doing so in the end changes my life.

So, be sure to look out for sunsets; they’ve been more brilliant lately.

(and look out for red trucks…I won’t say why, just…you know…look out)

This is not writing:

“I had a good weekend. I was driving through the countryside a lot, and on Sunday my son and I went to a local pub and watched the Masters while eating from their brunch buffet. Last night it rained, but overall it was a good weekend.”

No, that’s a brief brain dump; it’s a tweet storm. It’s not writing.

But this:

“Oh my God, last night about three I woke to something slamming in the backyard, and it was a can that was tossed by some gale from the porch to the patio. Just then the alert on my phone buzzed to tell me to “SEEK COVER NOW! TORNADO WARNING!” Before heading downstairs I looked through the skylight and didn’t see the normal trees which blocked the view to the sky so I ran…”

The first concerns more than forty-eight hours, with no details, no direction, and little more than a conversation with a stranger. In fact, the next line in almost any situation would probably be, “How about yours?” It’s not good when you can see the next line coming. The second, however, is about a few, brief seconds. That’s it. It has direction, a sense of urgency, because not only does the reader enter the story in the middle of some action–in medias res–the subject in the piece literally wakes in the middle of the action.

At my office at the university where I teach a couple of courses and a professor in the next office is telling her student to stop being so specific; good essays have a vagueness about them which forces the reader to fill in gaps. WHAT?!?! I’m not sure if I thought that or actually screamed that out loud. In any case, I picked up my stuff and headed out. I have been wondering for quite awhile if my lethargy and general malaise is from my heart meds and basic depression or from being around heartbreaking, basically depressing situations. I changed the meds and briefly felt better. Then that. Yeah, it’s the second reason.

I did a small test. I withdrew from all situations, all connections, all thoughts of obligations and expectations, I withdrew from routine and wifi and social media and, well, everything. Totally withdrawn. Get it? Promontory Man. And I tracked my health and the results were clear: I felt healthier, more rested, more alert, calmer, and more energetic without exception. I felt myself when I think of how I wish I would normally feel on the best of days. And this told me something most research institutes have been stating for years–our health is directly related to how we spend our time. When I left the college earlier, I was exhausted, though the truth is I didn’t do a single thing to cause such tiredness. It was psychological. 

When writing I’m working on isn’t going well, I get tired. Some fluid in my brain changes its level and I am suddenly left with too little or too much of some sort of orphine, and I want to lay down. But when it goes well; when I sit back and see that I’ve managed to keep my own attention on a piece, I feel awake, ready to do whatever I’m itching to do. In both cases when I sat down I was equally tired or, more likely, evenly calm. I didn’t produce well because I sat down wired with all the wires cracking in my brain. It’s just that doing well at my craft somehow energized me. It’s as if if I write well I get to have a hit of something like concentrated caffeine. I come to life. It happens too when I’m walking and have a decent idea about something. 

But if it doesn’t go well, I lay down and fall asleep while staring blankly through the skylight, or, like now, lean my head against the window here at Panera and hope no one hears me snore. This tricks me into thinking I need more caffeine, which of course I don’t, but if I get some coffee or tea or, you know, straight caffeine, I don’t produce better, I just get more restlessly tired and lay down but can’t sleep. 

So I flip to social media or Netflix, or send out some filament from this promontory trying to connect to anything to make me feel productive, but of course it doesn’t work, so I put in a movie and figure I simply didn’t sleep well last night, tossed and turned, never got that deep sleep we need, today’s shot, I’ll try again tomorrow. 

My point (and I did have one earlier in this missive), is when I am aware that if my environment is not working for me, I need to change my environment. 

Oh, the point, yes:

I am coming up on exactly one year later this week that I walked out of TCC after almost thirty years and never so much as glanced back. I know the arguments for that career–the income, the opportunities including world travel, grants, further education, connections, etc. Yeah, it was amazing and as close to not working as working gets. 

And? 

You cannot create passion. You cannot bribe people into becoming passionate. The passion must always precede the efforts, and my passions always lay elsewhere. Leaving TCC wasn’t so much an exit as it was an escape. It isn’t their fault–nothing that place did caused my indifference and general malaise. I arrived that way. Truth be told, I never should have been there to begin with. At some point we understand the gap between passion and being practical. I was very practical–it was a great ride for three decades, but it came at the cost of that drive, that internal motivation, which, for each of us, rises eventually. And I found it again after I left, and here I am being anything but practical but feeling healthier than I ever have. 

Okay, I’m being vague here. But good essays have a vagueness about them which forces readers to fill in the gaps. 

Well, anyway, I’m heading to Ireland soon. And maybe I’ll just go back to Spain. Turns out from this promontory, I can go just about anywhere. My God, you should see the View from this Wilderness!

If James Taylor is right and the “Secret of life is enjoying the passing of time,” then I nailed it this morning. I woke early and walked along the beach well before sunrise, when the tone of the sky moves through myriad shades of blue before some strip of amber appears. Then the sun. 

I walked a while watching pelicans glide inches above the still surface and osprey move from water to rooftops with small fish in their claws. Only a few dolphins surfaced on their way south following some school of fish. The hotels along this coast are crowded again, but not so much at this hour of dawn when early risers like me head out to run or walk along the boardwalk. A garbage truck moved up the sand emptying cans, and two men walked along side.

I walked up Fifth Street to the inlet behind the fishing and tour boats to eat at a small favorite place of mine, Big Sam’s. It is frequented by the crews just back or not yet out to sea, and some locals who know, and also, every once in a while, by some tourists made aware by an attentive desk clerk. This morning I had scrambled eggs with peppers and tomatoes with a soft-shell crab on the side. By the time I started my coffee I’d already been up three hours. That’s a good morning. That’s how I like time to pass—no collusion with anyone.

The staff had the presence of mind to put sports on the televisions and music on the speakers, so I sat without speculations and commentaries. Where’s my cardiologist with his blood-pressure pump at moments like this?

Not everyone is aware of the stresses of others, what preoccupies them, no matter how absent of worry they might appear from afar. Depression is easily disguised, anxiety is a silent companion. So when people seem at peace, seem untethered by the concerns of a plugged-in world, they may actually be in despair. Or, more likely, feel some indefinable uneasiness in their stomach, something like the beginning of a stomach bug, only it’s not, and they can’t explain what it is and they can’t make it go away. The world, as has been pointed out so many times, is often too much with us.

When I sit and stare through the windows at Big Sam’s to the boats and docks and jet ski’s and morning flock, I have taught myself a brief but most effective game: What can I focus on right now to make my world spin smoothly? There are times when I need to be planning or thinking of other issues—when I walk I am often writing or editing in my mind, and when I’m settling in for the night watching a show or reading, I try and catch up on my accounting and make a list for the next day. I’m getting better at scheduling my brain’s activities so that I don’t need to worry about anything when I’m not on the clock. I love lists. It makes it easier for me to know that when I’m not doing something I don’t need to be doing something or worried even if I should be doing anything. A quick glance at my day’s list tells me if I’m neglecting something important. It relaxes me to have a list and follow it.

There’s more though. I’ve spent too much time around people and in situations which caused me to believe something was way more important than it needed to be. The news does this. Not that issues flooding the broadcasts, newsfeeds, and personal conversations aren’t important, but it is all too easy to blow their importance to our lives and our anxiety and our worry out of proportion. There is only so much I need to know, so much I can possibly do. Staying up to date on the daily shortcomings of government and the inconceivable loss of life and culture and possibility in the world is very different than the saturation which occurs. I am teaching myself balance. I was never very good at balance. And now, if I’m going to err at all, I’ve decided it is in my best interest to err in the direction of Big Sam’s.

My mother worries too much. My father, if he worried at all, certainly didn’t show it. My son has not yet learned to worry about anything. We all know that worry can be healthy—a way of precaution, a device to keep ourselves aware of our surroundings. We also know it can be debilitating. It can even cause some unfortunate souls to hibernate, to withdraw, but they’re in grave danger of “reaching the point of death only to find out” they “never really lived at all.”

And so it comes back to the simple decree, “The secret of life is enjoying the passing of time.” This morning when the sun was clearly about to rise, I noticed something interesting: the moments seemed to pass in slow motion. I mean they actually felt like the huge second hand on the wall was taking its time in some dramatic fashion. I waited as the light blue moved to pale yellow and the sun was, according to my free app, supposed to break the horizon, and it…just….was…not…happening…so slow. So so slow.

And then it did, and it felt very much like I earned it. I was focused only on the sun rising—nothing else, and that sunrise slowed down enough for me to completely absorb its perpetual drift.

Then I had a softshell crab and eggs because such patience should be rewarded.

I saw two bumper stickers this week which have the unique quality of being both funny and poignant. The first said, “My dog ate your stick family,” and the second–a line of a stick family of four with a dog–said, “Everybody hates your stick family.”

It’s all true and it’s all disturbing. Everyone needs to know the problem with the entire family’s names plastered on the back window of the Suburban.

But first, of course, a story:

A colleague and I were at a Starbucks some years ago sitting at a table against the window. Just outside was a parking spot and a car pulled in. As the young woman got out of her car to come in I said to my friend, “I’ll bet you ten dollars the next person in this place is named Anna.”

“You know her.”

“No, I don’t.”

“You planned this.”

“With God as my witness I’ve never seen her before, didn’t plan this and have no prior knowledge of this person even coming here.”

Anna got in line. I called to her, “Hey Anna!” She came over–right over, I mean inches from me, and smiled.

“Do I know you?” she asked.

“You’re Anna, aren’t you?”

“Yes!” She looked for a chair to pull up. Unbelievable. “How do you know me?”

“I don’t. Your license plate says “Anna 95. It was either you or maybe your daughter.” The three of us looked at the car.

Then I told them this story. My Uncle Tom Burton was a sheriff in Florida for some years and he told me once of how high the crime rate was because of names on the outsides of mailboxes and the then-brand-new practice of vanity plates. “A young woman could be in a parking lot at night, and some psycho sees her plates and calls to her. Of course she is going to wait–we don’t think of our plates that quickly, and suddenly she’s taken somewhere or carjacked or killed.”

Anna took a step back. “Wow! I’m going to DMV today and changing my plates!” Good, I said. My friend asked if I was on a mission, if I was going to drive from coffee shop to coffee shop to spread the word. I laughed but said I was surprised the DMV doesn’t have some sort of warning about such plates. It seems irresponsible. They’re more concerned about a plate that says, “N S Wipe” or “420 Weed,” both plates rejected by their screeners, than a sixteen year old ordering a plate with “Briana” on it.

And then we have those stick figures, many of which have the kids names under the little ridiculous kid figure, just to the left of the dog, also with a name. I mean, come on! You put your kid’s names on your window?! Then some psycho walks up to you at Target already knowing their names and ready to role play.  Scrape those names now  

We do an awful lot of crying out in the darkness, don’t we? We want people to know we are here, we exist, we are happy (or not), motivated, in love (or not), on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, car windows, t-shirts…everyone is vying for a few moments of attention, and, truthfully, attention feels good. It can be reassuring, it can be uplifting. I want attention for the work I do, as does any writer, any artist. I hope the attention I seek is for the work and not for me personally–I would rather put a sticker of my books in the window than my family, especially since my dog died years ago and they probably don’t make a sticker for that.

But the problem is real. Young people on Instagram and Facebook enjoy attention from strangers; parents want their children to be popular, and newbie drivers, etc, want everyone they know to know it is their car. So she puts Anna on the plate and drives off hoping someone notices.

Someone did.  “Hey Anna!” I called out with a smile, like I knew her years ago and was excited to see her again. She came right over–not one second of hesitation. I hope she wouldn’t have done that in a garage or parking lot–she was relatively safe in the confines of a Starbucks. So I asked her, and she said, “Honestly, yes! I probably would have come right over to you! I wasn’t thinking! I thought we were old friends!” I’m glad she changed her plate.

Bob the Vanity Plate Buster strikes again

A new caravan of migrants is walking from Honduras to the US/Mexican border. Walking. Women and children and men are walking from the Honduran border to the US border, a distance of about 1600 miles. That’s like walking from New York City to Houston, Texas.

The vast majority of them, just about 99 percent, have no criminal background. Part of that is because the vast majority of them are children, but those left are laborers, agricultural workers, and more. Their jobs have been threatened by local Honduran cartels who force out or kill anyone not willing to work for them. These people are scared, and they’re determined to provide a better opportunity for their families, a better education, leaving home with only what they can carry or drag or are willing to abandon along the way to maybe–maybe–have a chance in the United States, because they already know they don’t have a chance in their native land. They’re walking across mountains, a desert, with hardly any food or water, risking the lives of their children to avoid the death sentence pretty much guaranteed in their homeland.

Their determination to literally cross barriers and risk separation, and even life, is a trait that carries them through the hardships of this journey. It isn’t unlike those fleeing Nazi Germany, fleeing Bosnia, fleeing starvation in Ireland, fleeing religious persecution in England, and on and on. The overwhelming majority of these starving, tired, battered souls are seeking something other than, better than, oppression and servitude.

Why aren’t we sending buses down there to get them and bring them here? What work force wouldn’t thrive on a population of people with such integrity and determination, who have clearly proven they would rather die than turn to a life of crime–if that weren’t true they’d stay home and move up the ranks of some cartel.

I have always been proud of most of my students, proud of their efforts to find their way in life. But they–we–could stand to learn from those whose sacrifices to better themselves can’t be compared to the so-called struggles we face on a day to day basis. Their pilgrimage to this sacred place–a journey three times longer than the Camino de Santiago from France to Spain–has taught them to carry humility, sacrifice, determination, compassion, and hope. Why wouldn’t we–my God I hope this is taken as rhetorical since it is so obvious–why would we not want them in our classrooms and workplaces as examples? There is nothing lazy about these people. If they wanted a lucrative life of crime they could have just stayed home.

This country has always benefited from immigration. In every study conducted by everyone from the NY Times to Gallop to CNN and even Fox, crime rates have dropped in cities where the most immigrants settled, the overwhelmingly largest percentage of drugs comes through recognized DHS check points, not across illegal crossing sections of the border, and the primary occupation sought by those fleeing crime and murder in their homeland is agriculture–jobs simply not sought by US citizens.

We should be setting up job fairs for these people, not jail cells. We should find housing and extended family and help them get settled as quickly as possible–there’s work to be done.

And I’d love to sit in the back of the classroom sometime while a student who might have crossed the 1600 miles from the Honduran border to the US border talked about what it was like, how the family survived, what dreams were they chasing, and what’s next. We could all learn from such fortitude, such determination, such hope.

 

The fifteenth hole at Broad Bay Country Club in Virginia Beach is a par three. It isn’t long, just over 140 yards, but it can be a bit tricky. The brief, if any, fairway in front of the tee box slopes toward a creek and marsh, and the green is immediately on the other side of the bridge. Beyond the green are woods backing up to someone’s home, but to the left of the green is a broadening creek opening up to a bay. This hole gets in your head. I once stood waiting to hit while NFL star Bruce Smith whacked his tee shot with a short iron, and none of us had any clue as to where it might have gone. He took a drop.

I wasn’t there twenty-five years ago today when my dad took out a five wood to send it up high sailing over the creek to God knows where. It was only when they crossed the bridge and my father—most likely joking—and another gentleman, walked across the green and found Dad’s shot in the hole.

A golfer’s dream. He was so proud of that shot that day, and rightly so. It’s funny how one’s passion—and Dad’s passion for golf wore a thin disguise—can so occupy our conversations and memories. Dad recalled that shot on that day to his golfing buddies more than a few times, as if he was forever in some sort of disbelief it had happened at all. He knew it happened; but it simply couldn’t be true.

My father was a respected stock broker and vice president for one of the largest companies on Wall Street, he patiently and proudly raised three kids, and he loved—loved isn’t the right word, too soft, too simplistic—but he loved being around his family, his grandkids and his great-grandsons. Yet for his personal achievements, recalling that hole-in-one at Broad Bay made his entire being light up.

Most sports, or any hobby for that matter, don’t have many equivalents to this achievement. Winning a marathon, perhaps, or just completing one. A significant high-jump? Shot put? While “personal best” comes into play, those aren’t hobbies—anyone leaping over bars or tossing bowling balls across a field is most likely doing so at the competitive level. Maybe bowling a 300 game is the only other landmark for an enthusiastic amateur.

But the hole-in-one is one of the most famous achievements for the everyday player.

From the time he was in his late-forties when he first learned to play at Timber Point Golf Club on Long Island, he brought my brother and me out on the course and we all played together. For years, and in some way right up until just a few years before he died, we all would play golf together. It was a place we connected, talked, spent uninterrupted hours together, had lunch and kept playing together, encouraging each other on, and too often pointing out mistakes. I can still hear his baritone voice when a putt came up short, “Oh it is just short.” Mr. Obvious. Or more commonly when I’d mess up a swing, he’d quietly say, “You picked your head up.” No kidding.

And it is with some regret that neither my brother nor I were there on the fifteenth at Broad Bay that day. After half a lifetime of golf it would have been something to be there, to see his face when he saw the ball in the hole and said, “Oh boy!” That’s exactly what he would have said. As we both grew taller and stronger than our father, our shots were usually longer and our scores often better, but he was dangerously consistent, right down the middle of the fairway, and he could putt. In fact, the last shot he ever took in his life, on a practice green, was sinking a twenty-two foot putt. But of the three of us, he is still the only one with a hole-in-one, and it feels right this way.

The odd thing is when I brought the trophy home from my mother’s just about a year or so ago, I simply put it on a bookshelf and, honestly, I haven’t looked at it since. But for some reason this morning, I was getting a book and for the first time glanced up at the plaque and saw today’s date—March 25th. And then the year—exactly twenty-five years ago! I smiled and had a brief urge to call him.

But there’s no need. He called me, reminded me one more time about the sunny day in March a quarter of a century ago, and in my mind he told me the story once again.

 

I’m at a table in the garden area on a beautiful spring afternoon. There’s a light breeze and not a cloud in the sky; in fact, it is the darkest blue I’ve seen in quite some time. The garden benches are covered with overturned pots, and beneath the last bench are bags of dirt. Not long ago I rehung the garden tools on the outside back wall of the shed and raked the area smooth of rocks and debris. Danger of the last frost will soon be past, and the growing season will begin in earnest.

One problem. I couldn’t care less. I’m just not into it this year. Maybe it’s because I’m mentally tired of putting long hours—days—of effort into something which literally doesn’t bare any fruit, and maybe it is because the farm stand in the village always has plenty of fresh picked produce, is inexpensive, and is a nice place to talk to people. In year’s past the garden was a physical and mental escape; a place to be away from the droves of people I was in constant contact with, and a place to let my mind wander, get lost in the metaphor of sowing and tending to life until it grows and can stand on its own. I don’t know.

But this year I’m not feeling it; not yet anyway. I have a lot of traveling to do in the next few months, a major project which is way overdue, and a small market down the road selling the freshest tomatoes and peppers you’d ever find.

All that is true, but I still know I’ll haul my tired ass out here and garden, and not long later I’ll find myself excited about it. Finally, I’ll post a picture or two of the half dozen cucumbers I’ll pick and then run down the road for something to eat. I know routine; I’ve been growing in this spot for twenty-three years.

I suppose the garden is not unlike this monster of a project I’ve been working on for a few years now; I can’t not do it. I won’t be satisfied until I get it right, and then once I do, that will motivate me to do more. I have quit a few things in my life which I might have pursued to more success, and only sometimes do I look back and think I should have pushed it further, get past that proverbial “wall” until I found a new stride and, as a result, a new reason to keep going. But I don’t dwell on them and am smart enough to know my limitations.

But this is different, this is a challenge I look forward to. I know what to do and how to do it, I just need to be attentive. And in my project, I know what I want to say and how and even where, I just need to keep turning and wrestling the material until it ripens. And the uncontrollable elements like the weather for the garden and, well, I suppose an editor or publisher for the project? Well, that’s just about being persistent. I could catalog here the plethora of artists who faced rejection after rejection sometimes for years but who stuck with it and finally succeeded, but past performance doesn’t guarantee future results, as they say. So I persist. I’m convinced Martha Stewart’s tomatoes were consistently rotten for a few years before she hit on the right variety.

So my garden right now is little more than an outline waiting for me to till the soil, mix the organic fertilizer and plant a rough draft.

And if it fails again, and if I can’t get this narrative arc to push out toward where I need it to go, I’ll swing by the market for some hot peppers, grab some potato-based vodka for the makings of a Bloody Mary, and have at it one more time.

I think this is my season. It’s harvest time both in the garden and the garret. After all, Whitman had Leaves of Grass, but I have the blank sheet of paper. This leaves me with the advantage. Everyone knows the work Whitman sowed and how it still grows in the literary field, but I have the indisputable blank sheet of paper, and with the right choice of words, I might harvest my own grass.

When I was in my teens and worked for other people—as a cashier, a desk clerk, a server, a bartender—we were not allowed to take personal calls at work. It was logical and no one seemed to have a reason to contest this; we were on company time. If things got slow they found something for us to do, or a good employee would seek out duties, even ask what could be done.

The cashier who took my order here at Panera has already pulled her phone out of her back pocket and checked her messages a dozen times—between customers usually, but twice while customers were looking at the selections. I am sure she washes her hands after using the restroom; but clearly not after using her phone. The woman cleaning the booths has stopped after wiping down each bench to read her phone and text someone, one time so engrossed in the message a customer who could not pass had to ask her twice to move to the side.

According to research by OpenMarket, 83% of millennials open their text messages within a minute and a half of receiving them, even when working. And according to Pew Research Center, 18-24 year old’s send an average of 3200 text messages a month. And the price is high: a study by Florida State University found that after receiving a phone call or text message, workers’ mistakes increased between 23 and 28 percent. The number one productivity killer at work is the cell phone, and the back pocket distraction kills an average of eight work hours a week—that’s the equivalent of paying someone an entire day’s wages to do nothing but check the phone.

I can’t fathom why they can’t be made to leave them in their cars or a break-room locker. If there is an emergency, people are certain to know where these tech-dependent minions work and can call the place directly; no boss is going to divert an emergency phone call. If it isn’t, then who would want someone like that working for them? Someone who doesn’t keep their attention 100 percent on work; someone who is thinking about something else one quarter of the time; someone who gets paid an entire day’s wages for being on the phone.

But that’s the bosses’ problem. Whatever, right? Sure, costs will probably creep up and service has certainly suffered, but we are welcome to patronize a place with sharper management practices.

The real problem is the inability to accept quiet. Their brainwaves are always operating at a heightened pace, causing stress, inattention, and long-term health problems. They are losing the ability to accept and be immersed by peace. Peace of mind, peace of spirit, and peace of soul.

Yes. Peace of soul. The practice of walking in silence from class to class or work to the car or store to store and any point a to any point b has faded. And according to more than a few studies, it is during those moments—not the extended sleep at night or the hour-long yoga class—when true peace of mind, rest, de-stressing, takes place, like small reboots throughout the day. But if the buds are always in, or the pocket is in a constant state of vibration, those quick shots of a settled soul no longer exist and the body adjusts to a heightened state of stress it doesn’t even realize is unhealthy.

“But there might be an emergency!” my students told me when we discussed this in a critical thinking class. And right there I understood the problem and I understood the president’s ability to convince his followers that we have an emergency on the southern border: they have redefined what constitutes an “emergency.” For my students, their absolute need to know what the plans are, what’s for dinner, where they’re going to meet later, and a plethora information that could easily be obtained later when not at work or school or peeing, is a dire emergency. They will absolutely not be able to concentrate if their Pavlov-proven-right minds aren’t relieved of the larger stress of knowing someone is paying attention to them but not knowing why. And this mentality has given social permission to the president to take what used to be an emergency—earthquakes, floods, tornadoes, terrorist attacks—and redefine it to be something as benign as a group of minorities without food and in relatively poor health crossing the border on foot. For a racist, a person of color is an “emergency.”

Few examples exist anymore of leaders who are laid back and put things in perspective. It is true that it is never the situation, but how we handle the situation that determines our character.

Worse, there is no “now” now. The phone by invention links us to somewhere else and what was and what will be. The loss is greater than the lost pay, and greater than the distraction holding people up in the aisle; it is the sacrifice of presence. It is not noticing the elder couple in the corner who are laughing and enjoying their lunch. It is not noticing the way the storm clouds broke, the way the steam rises from the pavement from the rain heated by the breaking sun. It is the inability to practice yesterday’s norm of being present.

The guy at the computer trying to order lunch needs help. The green tea machine is almost empty. Two tables within eyeshot have dirty dishes and no customers.

The daffodils are in full bloom and the blossoms on the pear trees too are in full bloom. There’s a hint of salt in the air from the ocean, and a flock of robins has gathered under the crepe myrtle on a grassy spot in the parking lot.

The cell phone is a brilliant device I use often to communicate with friends and family, to keep up to date on virtually everything going on in my life. But it is unsettling to the soul