The summer I turn sixty I plan to ride my bike around Ireland. At first I thought about walking around Ireland but since a friend of mine who has done this before and who I am hoping will seriously consider doing it again says biking is the way to go, biking it is. I normally don’t plan that far in advance, but I do need to study the language you know.

I also need to do my homework. My sister-in-law, who is an avid biker and has donated much of her time and youthful energy to biking long distances for charity, will be a big help for useful tips. I’ll be studying maps of small villages and large cities, history books, and catalogs of rain gear.

I have my reasons for this. One, it is pretty there. I’ve seen pictures, and my son Michael spent some time there some years ago. Also, we do have some ancestry in the old country, though “McCormick” can’t possibly be an easy lineage to trace. Still, doing so just might spice up the journey a bit. And, of course, like most dreams, this one just latched on to my thought process and won’t let go. That’s how it happens, for me anyway. Ideas for work or ideas for travel get a hold of me from somewhere inside and maneuver their way into my bloodstream until the only way to excise them is simply to follow through. They are in charge, after all. We all know that.

Still, I thought I was done with riding bikes decades ago.

When my family first moved to Virginia from New York I was just about to turn fifteen. We actually left Long Island the very day I finished ninth grade and drove the whole way south that evening in the rain. So I spent the first summer in Virginia not knowing a soul. Since I could not yet drive, I occupied myself until school started by biking everywhere. Some days I would ride along the oceanfront, through the state park, down to the southern beach near the Carolina border and home, with total distances at least once a week of around one hundred miles in a day; the other days about half that. I was bored so I biked. Other influences encouraged me to take it up a notch, and the following summer I planned to ride across the country on what was known at the time as the “Bikecentennial” path, from Williamsburg to Oregon, in 1976. That dream never occurred, of course, and a few years later during my sophomore year at college someone stole my bike so I moved on.

Jump to now: Yesterday I was in an office with a few colleagues, one of whom is much older than me. He was talking about the things he never did when he was younger, including dreams he had as late in his life as my age now. I hear this a lot from people I am surrounded by. You slow down when you get older. You can’t do the things you used to do, they often say. Those dreams died a long time ago, they say.

Left turn: I wrote a piece a few weeks ago for a journal. I’d spent a lot of time on it some years ago and it simply never worked. It takes place in two different countries and for some reason I was always married to the idea of writing it chronologically, which is already against my nature. But that idea climbed inside and locked in. I edited, added, cut—everything, and the piece simply never worked how I wanted. Great story, crappy writing. It happens. Then a few weeks ago I found it while looking for something else and while reading it over, one paragraph on page four stuck out, like the numbers at NASA in A Beautiful Mind—total illumination. I immediately realized that paragraph needed to be the beginning of the essay, so I rearranged the order of things. I sent it and they accepted and I am happy.

Not everything we do happens in the order we thought it might. Sometimes ideas need to work themselves out. Lao Tzu was right: “Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished.”

So apparently I didn’t dream in the right order. Who knew? Some of the things I dreamed of doing when I was young I’ve not gotten to yet, and other ideas I thought of and carried out immediately. Timing is everything, in relationships, in art, in dreaming. Sure, I’ll never be an astronaut, a baseball player, or an ice cream man (that one died when 711 put stores on every damn corner). But I’ve got several buckets filled with possibilities, and whenever I let go of the “it’s too late for that” mentality, the younger I feel and the more energy I have.

Maybe sometimes we give up on things because of what we believe instead of what is true.

Some dreams clearly require compromise. I’m not going to ride from Williamsburg to Coos Bay, Oregon—just not driven to do so anymore; but I will from Dublin to Galway. Nowhere in my plan did I include an ambition to break any land-speed record. I might ride at the same pace as Richard Farnsworth in The Straight Story when he rides a tractor across the country to visit his brother. But he got there, and so will I. Age is only a factor insofar as the method is concerned. Jack Nicholas once pointed out when winning the US Open in his forties that he didn’t need to be as strong as he was at eighteen, he just had to use different clubs.

I think sometimes people don’t lose the ability, they lose the will.

And for the record, I calculated the distance already. The average length from birth to death is about eighty or so. Subtract from that the fifty-six I’ve already spent, and I’m down to twenty-four, or about the time it took my son to get from birth to now. In there is work, sleep, sitting around and staring at the water, and, of course, writing. That leaves the “active” part of what’s left at about three weeks, or so it seems. I can ride that out, for sure. I’ll rest when I’m done with it all. And anyway, some dreams I had in my twenties are just now cycling back.

By the way, if anyone is interested in Ireland during the summer of 2020, start training. Ireland’s coastline is 1970 miles long. That’s about twenty days at the summer of 1975 speed. Rearrange some routes, eliminate all expectations except to enjoy myself, multiply my age and divide by eyesight, and it’s going to be a long summer, but a great summer.

Sixty is the new fifteen.

Oh, and dear naysayers: Cornelius Vanderbilt didn’t start buying railroads until he was 70; Katsusuke Yanagisawa climbed Mt Everest at 71;  Margaret Ringenberg flew around the world at 72; Bill Painter climbed Mt. Rainier at 82; and Frank Schearer was waterskiing long after he turned 100.

Maybe I should wait a few decades.

Today I saw pictures of people celebrating Thanksgiving in various ways in various locations. My incredible sister made the full spread for her family and a friend, and I am certain she was up before six making stuffing for the turkey, the pies probably done from scratch the day before. She has an uncanny ability, as did our mother, to simultaneously make dinner as well as dessert, while cleaning them up at the same time. The ratio of the work she puts in to the time it takes to devour the fruits of her labor is completely out of whack, but I’m sure she not only doesn’t mind, she is most happy on days like this, as is our mother. On holidays she very much reminds me of her. Though the way she sits back and enjoys everyone enjoying the day is Dad all the way.

My brother, his wife, two thirds of their daughters, along with our mother and one son-in-law all went out to dinner in DC. This after driving from near Houston and stopping along the way to visit in-laws and play golf with my son and me. There are three men in the family for whom I have incalculable admiration for their kindness, ethics, and example: one is my father, one is my son, and the other without question is my brother. Plus, he was kind enough to let me win at golf, though we are both sure it was because of the clubs I used which used to be his. Today in DC I bet he is back at his daughter’s place and they’re all sitting around talking, planning whatever’s next. He, like my sister, picked up all the best traits of our mom and dad.

Yesterday we had turkey, flounder (one can’t live this close to the Chesapeake and not include seafood on any menu, usually oysters in the stuffing), and all the trimmings. I sat on the porch and listened to the Vikings/Lions game while the sun came and went in an otherwise mild day. And in the spirit of the day, I sat in complete appreciation of everything in my life, and some things not in my life at all: no suffering, no hunger, no want, no question life has been good. My scattered family were close to loved ones and I’m sure all taking a moment or two to remember Dad.

These are the moments my father lived for. Not work, not vacations, and not even golf, though some might dispute this last activity. No, hands down, my father’s life was family, especially around the holidays. He absolutely loved his children and was proud of us; he adored his five grandkids, and he could never contain his passion for his two great-grandsons. So when the holidays arrive, I miss him more than usual, which is already a lot. I have a love/hate relationship with holidays. I suppose everyone does at some point in life. It is beautiful to look ahead and see new generations experience new and old traditions for themselves, and the house is filled with laughter and football and the blending of aromas—that is the “love” part. We pass around the same old jokes and stories, and we add a notch every year with new adventures and ambitions, the faces of young family alive with promise. But sometimes I still wish my dad was inside carving the meat or talking to my brother about how Notre Dame is doing this year. So yesterday I took a moment to walk off by myself and remember.

It was my usual walk along the water and through woods that run past ponds and marshlands. It is a place of absolute peace, far from just about everything. Even the local market was closed for Thanksgiving so that if I did want something I would have had to drive fifteen miles to get it. I walked and thought about Thanksgivings when I was very young when so much of our extended family came to our house on the Island, and also in my early teens when just my paternal grandmother and aunt would celebrate this holiday with us. The day went much like how my sister’s day went this year, but in addition there would be football streaming from the living room, and dinner planned for about halftime, and wine, and the aromas of Bell seasoning or apple pie or turkey. Sometimes there would be light snow. Often just cold gray skies. When we moved south we could count on warmer, blue skies. My sister or I would slice the cranberry sauce. My dad carved. But he also spent some time in the margins, watching everyone enjoy each other. He would sometimes sit on the porch for a moment alone while everyone was inside talking, and he would sip a beer and talk to whoever came out for some quiet, which always included myself. I would catch him watching the river, or looking at the cardinals moving from tree to tree. Sometimes he was looking out, but sometimes I wondered if he was looking back.

I wonder if during those days when he stepped aside for a moment it was possible he was thinking about his beautiful childhood in Brooklyn, and his large family crowded around on holidays, his older brothers, his younger sisters, his Chesapeake Retriever. I know he wouldn’t trade the holidays we had for the world, just as none of his children would trade the ones we share with our own families. But when he stepped outside quietly and sipped his beer and looked off across the river, I like to think he was missing his father. Perhaps his childhood home on holidays was also filled with laughter and conversations and all the excitement that comes with it for a large family like his. And I wonder if back in his childhood, sometimes his dad, whom I never knew, might have sat off by himself, quietly, taking it in and enjoying his family enjoying themselves while my grandmother was making dinner, and he sometimes quietly looked out the window and thought about his youth.

It is an incredible gift to be thankful for what we have; I believe this is more rare than most of us know. But every once in a while in the mix of the young energy and the middle-life balance of planning and recalling, I like to step aside and remember why it is we do so appreciate family. It is because of Mom and Dad’s example. It is the absolute conviction that we can always count on the holidays to bring us closer to family and friends, both the ones we are surrounded by and the ones who went on ahead and are waiting, watching the cardinals move about, watching the river run.

I had a third grade teacher on Long Island who hated boys. This was not a secret; even my mother used to complain that the woman, whose name I long ago blocked out, despised boys. She would make us sit in the corner but never the girls, would never call on us if we apparently knew the answer but always would if we apparently did not.

And I remember once she said that boys who play outside are very susceptible to spider bites and that might be dangerous since it isn’t unusual for a spider to lay eggs inside you. In fact, she said, she knew of someone who had been bitten in the cheek by a spider, and it started to itch not long after the bite. It became uncontrollable until he ripped open the bite scar with his nails and hundreds of baby spiders crawled out and down his cheek and neck, but some had already crawled into his brain and he died not long later.

We were eight years old.

This can’t be true, I remember thinking. We live in New York, not Panama. The following summer my family moved further east on the Island into a new house in a small village surrounded by an arboretum, a state park, and the Great South Bay. There were bound to be spiders. Still, I spent most of my time during those years hiking through woods, climbing trees, walking forbidden trails to mysterious creeks, and building forts in the trees behind our house. In fact, I’ve spent the better part of my life outside in nature, and I don’t think I ever had a single spider bite, let alone a colony inside my face.

But the story stuck. The following year at a new elementary school, I had better teachers who told us we could grow up to be anything we wanted, and nothing at all could stop us; absolutely nothing. Mark was going to be a musician and Norman was going to be a great athlete. I was going to play baseball. Unfortunately, I sucked. But no matter what happened, I always felt lucky. And I wasn’t afraid of spiders anyway; I just didn’t want them building canals through my dental work.

Who does this? Who so instills fear into others as to mark them for years, decades, to come? When I mention to my students that in my youth it was simply expected that we’d at the very least treat each other with respect, they laugh. They tell me in no uncertain terms that they believe they are entitled to treat each other how they see fit, and the funnier the disparaging comment, the more popular the person.

They call me old. Go figure. Students don’t have much hope in their future. Faculty doesn’t have much hope in students. The media doesn’t have much hope for our country. It goes on. And all of them attempt to outdo each other in securing the best sound bite. There are some days I long for a good arachnid attack. Still, I am an acute optimist.

— 

I remember in fifth grade at my new school, Timber Point Elementary, where we had to work things out for ourselves in the schoolyard. One kid, Steve Brady, was constantly making fun of another, Norman Esiason. Yes, him. My teacher, Mr. Kingston, was on playground duty. He asked them to settle the issue in front of everyone. He stood next to them like a ref in a boxing ring waiting for the contenders to touch gloves. They stood there silent a long time. I believe now Mr. Kingston would have been satisfied with a handshake. But Norman suggested that Steve sit with him and his friends at lunch the next day. He said he supposed they might have more in common than Steve thinks.

I never forgot that. And I’m glad, since I really don’t see it so much anymore even among adults, let alone kids. I miss the time when people who didn’t agree were still somewhat respectful of each other. Such mutual acknowledgement of separate ideas should not be found solely on the playing field. To not treat each other with respect would be at the very least un-sportsmanlike conduct.

We make fun of each other too much. We ridicule what we don’t understand or agree with. We insult what we are threatened by. We manipulate what we wish so we can win. We ignore our weaknesses and pay too close attention to those of others without stopping to say what we admire in others. We should change.

I am being overly idealistic and simplistic, I know. Please don’t make fun of me for it or slip some spiders onto my pillow. From what I have witnessed, despite the more immediate successes of questionable character, it is still the only journey that has enduring results.

 

 

“If you ask me what I came to do in this world, I, an artist, will answer you: I am here to live out loud.”       –Emile Zola

 

I moved through several stages of grief in the past twelve hours. Denial hung on a while, anger held court the longest, at about three am I woke up bargaining that it all be a dream, at five I woke up depressed, and at six I got up but instead of moving to acceptance, I back-peddled to anger again.

First, a quick note to my friends and family who happened to support our president-elect: This isn’t about policy—it can’t be since I have no idea what his policies are. It is about lack of character, lack of experience, an absence of respect and compassion. I am scared for my LGBTQ friends. I am worried for the economy. I am horrified for my grand-nephew Sitota whom his beautiful parents brought here from Ethiopia for a better life. I am thankful I do not have a daughter.

In fact, this is an appeal to my colleagues in the art community. There has rarely been a more important time for us to be writers and musicians. Our discouragement at watching this country move backwards into what many in the past few days have called that horrific term “Melting Pot” instead of forward into a multi-cultural society must be met by our abilities to give voice to our frustration.

It has always been the task of the artist to expose inequity, injustice, and fascist tendencies. It was Thomas Paine whose small seditious book Common Sense instilled in the citizens of the colonies the ability to move forward; it was David Walker who called upon his Black brethren to resist; it was Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience; it was Ida Tarbell and Carl Sandburg. It was the writings of John Stuart Mill, and Richard Wright. It was the writings of Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan.  

It was, it is, the poets.

President John F Kennedy said, “When power leads man toward arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations. When power narrows the area of man’s concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of existence. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses.”

Some have suggested that one voice doesn’t weigh much anymore in a world of a million sound bites. However, there has never been such a thing as a spontaneous chorus. The artist, despite his isolation, has it in his or her power to put voice to what others wish to say but cannot, but once they hear it said, sing along with the harmony of their generation. Ginsberg wrote, “Poetry is the outlet for people to say in public what is known in private.” And our own Robert Frost said, “A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong.”

This is an appeal, then, to the poets and to the musicians and actors and painters to combine our talents with our grief, to blend our anxiety with our refrain, to risk exposing truth.

And what do we say, exactly?

In whatever way we can, with whatever genre we can, that we can do better than this. Simply, that we are better than this.

 

“We must always take sides. neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.” –Elie Wiesel

 

Tomorrow is November 8^th, and we all know the significance of the day: it is, of course, the anniversary of the invention of the insect exterminator by William Frost in 1910. Understanding the serendipity of tomorrow’s date being the anniversary of extermination of insects, I found it equally terrifying that tomorrow is also the anniversary of Hitler’s first attempt to seize power during his failed coup in 1923 Munich at the event which became known as the “Beer Hall Putsch.”

Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.

The Louvre Museum in Paris opened on November 8^th in 1793 just a dozen years before Lewis and Clark reached the Pacific Ocean.

Appropriately enough, Ford rolled the Edsel off the line for the first time on November 8^th, nine years before “Days of Our Lives” premiered.

Reagan became governor in 1966.

Let’s go back: in 392 Roman Emperor Theodosius declared Christianity the official religion, but we’ve screwed with the calendar since then so to be honest I have no clue what day that would be. I do know that Ben Franklin opened the first library in Philadelphia in 1731, and in 1789, much to the pleasure of my old friend Mike Russell, Bourbon Whiskey was first distilled from corn by Elijah Craig in Bourbon, Kentucky.

The number one type “event” whose history lands as a start date on November 8^th is a battle of some sort. Go figure.

But tomorrow is irrelevant to me. There isn’t a blessed thing I can do about tomorrow more than I’ve already done by voting. The importance comes the day after. This is the significance of history; it is the measure of integrity and character; it is proof of sustainability—what happens next. The tragedy of September 11^th was followed by armies of volunteers on September 12^th ready to do what was necessary. December 7^th was followed by a surge in enlistment and patriotism. The death of Mother Teresa was followed by canonization. It is progression. We have an uncanny ability to survey whatever happens and move forward.

It is never the situation; it is how we handle the situation.

Tomorrow I have classes all day. Some will show up, some will not. They know that if they vote instead of going to class I won’t count them absent. But there are so many things they do not know. They don’t know their individual vote counts. They don’t yet realize that one voice whether in a crowd or alone on a beach somewhere can still make waves. They have no idea that they are as much a part of the decision process as me, as the candidates’ spouses, as the candidates themselves. Tomorrow is historic no matter what happens. It is one of those days that will end up on the timelines I read to compile the above list of events.

And no matter what happens, it is important to note that on the next day, November 9^th, Einstein received the Nobel Prize in 1921, that the first US pharmacy college held classes in Philadelphia, that the Atlantic Monthly was first published in 1857, the NY Symphony Orchestra played for the first time in 1858.

They played Pachelbel’s “Canon in D.”  According to one review, “I was left with hope, with a sense that no matter what else, everything is going to be okay. The audience was left in tears, and I wish to believe it from the sheer possibility.”

Every November I pack my bags, pack the car, and leave my home near Virginia’s Historic Triangle and drive ten hours to St. Augustine, Florida, to find the no-name food shacks and art shops down side roads. I travel under the guise of a writer’s conference where I’ll be running a workshop and then reading Friday evening. But I’m here for the places where local people linger long after vacationers are in bed. I know they’re the best locales to find fine food. I’ve spent most of my life in the heart of tourist country between Williamsburg and Virginia Beach, Virginia, living on the cusp of the very first settlement in America—Jamestown.

Founded by John Smith in 1607, Jamestown has grown into a world class tourist spot, including Williamsburg and Yorktown. In fact the first landing was right up the beach from my high school and people come from all over to see the replica cross marking Smith’s arrival thirteen years before the pilgrims at Plymouth. Smith’s spot sits near First Landing State Park, the beautiful beach and wilderness area commemorating the arrival of Europeans to the mainland.

On my drive south yesterday I skirted by the Lost Colony of Roanoke Island, North Carolina, pitched to people as the origin of old-world settlements, where players act out the arrival and the subsequent mysterious disappearance of the entire population of the Island. Andy Griffith tried to learn acting here, not far from where the first child was born in America to European parents—Virginia Dare. When you grow up in the Historic Triangle and the surrounding areas, by God you know some American history.

So heading to St Augustine for me was about avoiding the tourist crap and finding the cool dives in which I thrive; the places not on Google Maps, Wikipedia, or even the Chamber of Commerce’s must-visit list.

The first time I arrived many years ago, however, I read the brochure in my hotel room.

“Saint Augustine was founded in September of 1565.”

It is America’s first European settlement, claimed forty-two years before John Smith sailed up the James, and roughly four hundred and ten years before I was taught that Jamestown was the first settlement. Somebody has been lying to me.

Certainly, in recent years, the books added “British” to the notation for Jamestown, but not when I was young. Back then, we were taught Virginia was where it started. Florida wasn’t on Johnny’s map. In fact, in my youth Disney hadn’t been there yet; Cuba had only been communist a few years, and “buying swampland” and “Florida” were synonymous thoughts. A fort? You think when I was a kid I would forget something like a freaking fort in Florida? Come on. No one told me about this. And as for Little Miss Virginia Dare, well I’m just guessing two of those sixteenth century people must have been attracted to each other and ducked out behind the walls of San Marcos decades before her dad and mom even met.

So I had to see this place, explore the tourist spots, eat in the predictable traps. Florida was no longer a conference location; I was on a journey to rewrite my education. Ten hours after leaving the Farce on the James, I rolled past the school Ray Charles attended, tacky tourist trains, the fountain of youth and other Ponce de Leon locations, and the shrine where Pedro Menendez first landed and proclaimed the territory for Spain, where a chapel was built and the first service celebrated one hundred and nine years before Bruton Parish was built near William and Mary College.

And then I turned the corner on A1A and saw San Marcos. Stark and bold like blocks of brown ice, shaved cliffs, the weight of half a millenium. It was night, and the few lights illuminating the 16^th century fort rendered an ominous, subtly imposing presence. It’s the burly friend, quiet, steady, always been there and always will be. You might get around me, it says, but you’re not going through, and I’m not moving. I walked about the walls, along the bay, behind the former moats, and imagined the Old World. This whole town is a tribute to Spanish Europe, filled with people who for the most part have never seen Spain. I walked the streets and learned about the settlers, the missionaries, and the pirates.

When Menendez found this coast, he and other Spanish explorers found gold, making King Phillip the II and Spain the wealthiest nation in all of Europe. Then, with their sister Portugal, they mastered the art of slavery, thus driving their economies skyward while swallowing the people of other continents. In China the Ming Dynasty had just started its decline, Europe was engulfed in religious turmoil with schism after schism during the reformation. All while San Marcos was being built near the eventual Golf Hall of Fame.

Fifteen years before John Smith was born.

I sat on the wall overlooking the harbor that first time. I feel kind of guilty when I see this fort, though, like I want to find some Seminoles and apologize. What a history we have. Jamestown, St. Augustine, Plymouth. All of them “claiming” something for someone. I like to think that out on Roanoke Island, the inhabitants of the Lost Colony looked around one day and said, “You know, this is just wrong. Let’s get out of here.” I like to believe they surveyed their profits, the abundance that is this new world, and realized it cost them their souls.

This fort called San Marcos demonstrates one truth quite clearly: we as individuals are not here for long. If I live a life as long as my father’s, who also loved this town, I’d still not see one fifth of what these walls have seen. But I’ll still recall the words of the fort’s namesake: “For what shall it profit a man, if he should gain the whole world, and lose his soul?”

Eight years ago this month a friend of mine died. Coincidentally, while cleaning out an old box in my office last week, I found a play I wrote, “Blessed Twilight,” which he directed. He was an artist in every sense of the word. In the same box was a copy of the following piece of writing I did just after his death. I am in the middle of a writers festival this week, and next week I’m headed to Florida to do the same. I am intensely lucky to be surrounded by artists, and when I found this I realized that has been the case since I was a teenager and became friends with such talented folks as musician Jonmark Stone and landscape artist Cole Young, the latter who died in his fifties.

Too young. So many artists die too young:

I saw “Witness” before I attended Penn State for graduate school. In one of the last scenes, Harrison Ford comes out of the barn and is going to be shot, but he’s surrounded by Amish. It has a happy ending–the dude gives up the gun, Harrison Ford walks away, and the Amish go home. One of those actors was Eton Churchill. To Ford’s left in the blue shirt and white suspenders, which he borrowed from Ford.

When I arrived at Penn State I was accepted for the Masters of Arts in Humanities, but since I wanted a double major to include one in Art History, I requested an active project in addition to my required thesis. The director asked what I wanted to do beyond my humanities proposal, which was the adaptation of prose into film and theater. I told him I wanted to write and act in a one man play about Vincent van Gogh. He sent me to Eton.

Eton Churchill published short stories, documentary films, and had plays produced around the country as well as having published a novel, “Mind How the Sun Goes.” Eton shared the power of storytelling, his compassion for humanity and his deep devotion to nature — in particular the islands of Penobscot Bay where he frequently sailed. In addition to his written works, Eton’s creative production included building wooden boats and playing the acoustic guitar. We became immediate friends, talked about sailing, about New England, played guitars together. We’d go for pitchers of beer and talk about writing and plays. He said he could get my project done, though something like that had not been done at PSU before.

He took my source, “The Complete Letters of Vincent van Gogh,” which is 2000 pages long, and helped me narrow it down to the less than 40 pages for the one-man show. Previously, when it was thinned out to 160 pages, he published it as a book. When I memorized the 40 page version, he drilled me on stage until I knew when to look toward the lights, when to fall on my knees, and when to keep going when I made mistakes. He was not concerned about our ability to pull this project off, but about people watching a play about a dead artist who kills himself at the end. “It’s real, but it’s real depressing,” he told me.

When rehearsals began, he told me in his less-than subtle way, “Don’t quit when you suck at something.” The writing was right on the money, he said. But my acting wasn’t working. “Just keep pushing it until you get through it.” I did, and 18 months later we premiered “Blessed Twilight” at the Olmstead Theater in Pennsylvania. The play did well, but it was his friendship which endured. He helped me get my job teaching in Virginia Beach.

He died at just 64. What I remember most about Eton is his passion about not simply talking about life, but living it, then writing about it. Talking about it has no destination. His plays have won awards, his directing has won more, including a nomination for the Pennsylvania Humanities Award for “Blessed Twilight.” When the first performance ended, the audience asked questions, and one person inquired who was my acting coach. “The writing is excellent,” this person said. “But your acting is, well, not beautiful.” After everyone stopped laughing, she asked, “Who taught you?” I pointed to Eton. Later that night while drinking beer at some Pennsylvania dive, he said, “You know, it wasn’t bad acting, it was the character. Van Gogh was psychotic–all over the place when it comes to emotion. They just didn’t get it, Bob. Nobody likes to see anything about a dead artist.”

No, I sucked. He knew that. But we didn’t talk about it. We pushed through it. When he read online a piece I wrote about artist Cole Young who had died, he called to say he was sorry and that he remembered me talking about him. “Another dead artist, huh?” he said, and we laughed. I heard from Eton after “Out of Nowhere” was released. He said, “Finally, you’re writing about yourself instead of dead artists.” He supported my writing more than any professor I recall. He knew it came from life, not from imagination, as his came from life. He wrote about humanity, about relationships, about sailing and music and the brief run on the reach when the trade winds come on. He wrote descriptive essays and plays with more imagery than most poetry.

Me, I’m still writing about dead artists.

This afternoon a colleague told me she had to spend more time with the students not doing well in class. “I need to spend time with all of them!” she added. “But I’m going to pay closer attention to the ones who need some prodding to get things done.”

In an effort to be professional, I bit my tongue. But you know the analogy: When there are several people who are having problems on the mountain climb, help the ones most likely to survive, not the weakest. If you spend too much time with the weakest, everyone might die.

A bit extreme, I know. But go with it for a moment.

I have students who are doing almost really well but for that extra information, that little bit of one-on-one. They try hard, they do the work early and thoroughly, but they could use just a bit more assistance to see them to the end. I also have students who need a lot of help; who barely made it out of some developmental class; who forgot all the information taught in high school or in other English and writing classes; who are smarter than the first group but couldn’t care less about the material. If spending extra time with these students means not spending enough time with the very first group, then everyone suffers. There might not be much I can do to help these students get far, and I might neglect the ones with a real shot at moving on successfully.

In other words, the students who aren’t trying or aren’t up to the task are draining time away from those who are. Either the first group shouldn’t be here and should rather be at UVA or Tech or any other four year institution with an enormous endowment and well-placed grads, or the second group should be out working for a few years longer to find out how badly they really do need this information, and then they can come back later. I’ve said this before. Either way, someone shouldn’t be here.

Well, just a short time ago in the copy room two faculty members were planning a “brown bag” lunch discussion to review pedagogy for improving ill-placed students into faculty tutoring sessions so they (the ill-placed students) might better address their shortcomings in college. They made a list of assignments for various committee members to review before the meeting along with plans to seek out documentation on such programs at various other colleges to support their beliefs.

Then it was all so perfectly clear: I don’t belong here.

These hallways are packed with indifference, lined with skepticism, and overflowing with doubt. Everyone walks in shadows, wanting to commit but not knowing what to commit to, not knowing who to listen to since contrary voices abound, and finding it all so irrelevant. We are running out of absolutes. “It depends” is the backbone of every argument, rule and objective.

———

Last night Michael and I brought the telescope to the river at low tide and at the water’s edge stood and looked across the mirror-like Rappahannock and Chesapeake at such an abundance of stars we could not see them all in ten times ten lifetimes. We focused briefly on Saturn, then some stars whose names I forgot or never knew. It is a state of absolute presence. Billions of years old and still spilling down on us at night, the peace found by looking up can’t be written down, let alone taught. You have to see for yourself. I took astronomy in college, read some books, try and keep up with Michael’s magazines about the Sky during the various months. But either it doesn’t stick or it can’t compare to being there, under the stars, the stark reality just out of reach. There is absolutely no pretense, no digression from the facts. And yet it is not so much science to me as it is poetry. The night sky was abundant with perfect meter and appropriate rhyme schemes.

Nature simply “is.” There is no argument, no digressions at all, no false attempt to chase illusions. No, it is all so clear. I’ve lost interest in the shadows. I’m going to quietly follow Whitman out of here:

When I heard the learn’d astronomer,

When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,

When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,

When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,

How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,

Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself,

In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,

Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

I wore a t-shirt this morning from an organization which has zero tolerance for snares in the wild; Painted Dog Conservation. I drove to 711. 

Reminder: I live I very rural Virginia where wildlife and Trump signs are common.

A few men always gather near the coffee counter to talk; it is a routine. Their trucks idle outside and they wear camouflage clothing even when they’re just headed to the store. Ironically, they really do blend in here, especially near the shelves of chips and display of Redskins paraphernalia.

One of the two noticed my shirt. I was not part of this conversation; just the catalyst:

“Yeah I gotta get rid of my snares.”

“Ain’t using them?”

“Nah. They’re not good. They snap the legs right off the turkey and the damn things get far enough to die where I can’t find them.”

“Sheeeet.”

“Yeah.”

“Dang.”

“Uhuh.”

“I saw me some snares got grippers electronically hooked up to know how much to grab to hold them without snapping off the best part.”

“I heard of them. I sure did, down at that show in Richmond.”

“That’s where I saw ’em. They got a device will text me when the snare snaps.”

“Sheeet.”

“Yeah.”

“Ain’t cheap I’m betting you.”

“Forty or so.”

“Ain’t bad. I’ll have to get some.”

They sipped their coffee. One asked how I was doing and that he liked my shirt. I honestly think he believed the shirt promotes snares. Though to be fair, it has a lot of words on it so can be confusing.

To the other guy:

“You ready for deer?”

“Almost. I needs me new collars for the dogs. Something with better range so I can track them right to the kill. I shot me one last year made it a mile before he collapsed. Damn dog collars were out of range and I had to hike out there looking. It was pouring out, like today.”

“Sheeet.”

“Can’t wait to go huntin.”

“Yeah, me too.”

I opened the door to leave and I wished them a good day.

“Yeah, you too. See ya out there, brother!” one said. I walked to my car eating my vegetarian egg roll and drinking some apple juice.