Truth be told I’m simply overwhelmed. There is so much going on in every aspect of my life it is difficult some times to keep anything straight at all. The irony is that when I returned from Spain I did so with a conviction toward “simplicity.” I came back focused and determined to concentrate on what I learned on the Camino, that the simplest things in life are the most valuable and fulfilling. But somewhere in the course of the past two years things got away from me. And here I am back in the thick of spread too thin.

I’m not complaining since I can control what I add to my life and what I don’t. But still the current trench is somewhat deeper than usual and it makes it difficult to see the sky.

So, I walk.

I walk along the Rappahannock River near the Chesapeake Bay, or back along the small roads running along the marsh lands under tall pines and past duck ponds. Deer, geese, osprey, egrets and eagles are normal companions on my walks. In the winter I don the proper clothes and keep going. In the summer I’m down to a t-shirt, sunblock shorts, and my Merrell hiking sandals and I sweat my way through eight or ten miles. I think, I write in my head, I remember what needs to be done and I plan on what I will no longer do. The endorphins engage and at night I get down more thoughts about projects I’m working on.

But it is a required retreat, and that isn’t always healthy either. So I am going to simplify again, ease my way out of the trench. This afternoon I heard an ancient John Denver song I have not heard I believe since I’m seventeen years old, and it made me remember the simplicity of being seventeen, the innocence. Ironically I was very plugged into events and society back then. About to go to college for journalism made me aware of things around me, and like Woodward and Bernstein (younger readers can go Wiki them now) I was going to be uncovering the next scandal, so I wanted to know what was going on. But it seemed different, and I think it wasn’t because the times were more innocent or that less corruption infiltrated the government and businesses and colleges, but because there was less coverage, less inundation by media and watch-dog groups, Go Pro and Facebook posts, and Twitter, and on and on.

Left Turn:

I was on a bench this morning at the beach next to another bench with a guy about my age, emaciated, deeply burned black skin, who looked as if he hadn’t been in a shower in a while. He said, “This might be the most beautiful morning in a very long time!” At 7:30 it was about 68 degrees and the sun still hadn’t risen so high. I agreed with him. He went on, “This tells me it is going to be a good day.” Again I said I was certain he was right.

Than this:

“What is it you do? You on vacation? Where you from?”

“No I live here. I’m just out for a walk before headed to the office. I teach.”

“Where do you teach?”

“Today I’m at TCC. Tidewater Community College.”

“Oh that’s absolutely fine! I never made it to college. I could have! I got out of the army and could have gone to college but I never made it there. What do you teach?”

“Writing.”

“Oh well I’ll tell you what you oughta do! Bring them students down here and have them write about this beautiful day! This’ll inspire them.”

I agreed. We were quiet a moment and I fixated on what a tremendous suggestion that was.

“You know I was going to ask you for some money but I can’t now.”

I reached for my wallet. “Oh I’m sorry, absolutely, it isn’t a thought! Let me give you enough for breakfast at least.”

“Absolutely not,” he said. “We’re friends now and I don’t take money from friends. I’ll ask one of these fine tourists from out of town.”

I handed him a five. “I’m actually from New York, originally.” He smiled and took the five.

We talked a few minutes more and I left. We don’t have enough conversations like this. We don’t talk enough about nature, about sunrises and breezes. We listen too much to the wrong information. I’m turning toward simplicity; at least I’m going to try again. I don’t want to be homeless on an oceanfront bench, for certain, but that was still the most valuable conversation I’ve had all day.

I headed to campus singing to myself. For the life of me I couldn’t remember what I had to do that was so urgent.

Sadly, another seven-week break quickly comes to an end, and in a few days I’ll find myself in front of hundreds of college freshmen. First, however, we have faculty meetings. The buzzword before this break, and for several semesters prior, was “Retention.” College enrollment has decreased across the country, and administrators are worried about how to keep the students from dropping out.

Then there’s me.

We all received an email asking what we thought faculty could do to “retain” students. The question wasn’t meant to “blame” faculty, though some took it that way; instead, it was a plea for help, a way of saying “We are at a loss as to why they’re leaving; what do you think?”

Here’s what I think: They see no reason to stay. Most college students don’t drop out because they aren’t up to the task, and while money is a major issue even that is not difficult to deal with. No, most community college students don’t see the point in attending.

First of all, many have the ability to do the work, they’re just conditioned to be lazy. We live in a world of convenience and college course material is not at all convenient.

Last year on the first day of the semester I asked students to all write a 150 word introduction to a paper about their first day at college. When they finished I asked them if they thought they would have done a better job if they knew I was going to read them all but only give A’s to the top five and I would fail the rest. They agreed they would have done better. So I raised the stakes: I asked them if they knew that the five introductions which caught my attention and made me want to read the paper would each receive one thousand dollars, would those introductions be better written. They all sat up straighter and said with absolute affirmation, “Yes!” There it is. I told them, “So you always could do better; you just couldn’t be bothered.” When I put some reward in front of them, something more tangible than an A or the promise of being better prepared for the world, they suddenly were bucking for honor roll. Take the reward away and replace it with the obscure grading scale as the only immediate satisfaction, and boredom quickly kicks in.

One more: In my Humanities class I asked my students to read Hamlet, or watch a good version since it is a play, and to come in the following week ready to discuss why is it still so relevant and still taught in classrooms four hundred years later. The following week they came in predictably and embarrassingly unprepared. So I asked if I gave them another chance to read or watch Hamlet and come back ready to discuss it, the five people who all contribute the most intelligent material to the discussion will all get brand new I-Pads that day, would they be ready? They all, again, laughed and agreed, and one student said he would watch every version and memorize the Spark Notes. I said. “So you can do the work, you just don’t bother. Listen, you’re wasting your money, your time, my time, and you are, without a doubt, in everybody’s way. You really should reconsider college. You’re not up to it.”

The dean of my department hates when I do this.

Listen, we’ve lowered the bar so far we are trying to come up with new ways to beg them to not leave. We’ve compromised entrance and placement exams, we’ve offered accommodations up the whazoo, we’ve got work-study students calling the students who leave and asking them to return, and we are allowing them to do more work online in case they “can’t make it to class.” Colleges now offer courses so outrageously simple that pre-teens can master the material: at the university, “Curves: the shape of women in art”; “The Simpsons: A comprehensive study”; and even at Amherst—AMHERST—they offer a course on the music of (Dear God) Miley Cyrus. I am not kidding. What can we do to retain students? Here’s an idea: maybe we have so lowered our standards that a “college education” doesn’t command the respect it once did. If I were in college today I’d leave too.

In addition, students don’t see the point of spending tens of thousands of dollars for a degree when they’ve been conditioned that the degree is a means to an end, and the end is not looking very hopeful. Forty years ago a college education offered hope. There was a brick wall out there and the degree was the ladder of hope necessary to climb over. Now many students only see the wall itself, and a college education doesn’t offer any better hope of clearing that wall than a dozen other avenues, all of which are infinitely cheaper and less challenging.

We need to make the wall irrelevant. College should become the destination, not an exit ramp from high school to life. It needs to be the arena of discussion and connections so that students see being in college as the objective. But offering simple-minded courses shows the student such disrespect, curriculum committees should be embarrassed. Keep the courses challenging; make having a college degree something not every person can or should do. Raise the bar so that if students can’t make it, then they shouldn’t be there to begin with. A degree can then once again command the respect earned through hard work, focus, and discipline, and not through the music of Miley and binge watching cartoons. Then, if students drop out, it is because they aren’t up to it, and not because we bored them out of there.

Unfortunately some students have parents who don’t prepare them. Some come from high schools that only made things worse. Some are too spoiled, too smart, too dumb, too hyper, too distracted, too angry, too tired.

Too bad. Yeah, welcome to the fucking race, Frosh.

It isn’t like they aren’t warned about what is required of them. Every course outline in college now spells out in anal-retentive detail every aspect, expectation, and demand for the semester. All students understand how many times they can be late, how many absences are allowed, when papers are due, what happens if papers are late, how long papers must be, and what to do in an emergency. They know professors’ phone numbers, emails, office numbers, and if they check some social media, they can learn professors’ temperament, workload, travel schedule during the semester, and more. No matter what shit-field these poor bastards had to wade through before they arrived, make no mistake, once they’re registered and sitting down, every single student is well informed and warned about what is expected of each of them going forward. They are told that if they don’t understand or have a problem or need to discuss things or are completely clueless as to what anything means, they should come see the professor, or a counselor, or an advisor or the dean. But many simply don’t bother. Retain them? Ha! Get them out of the way! DING! We have some lovely parting gifts for you.

Many students simply aren’t up to the challenge of college and it is way easier in the real world to seek out and find challenges they know they can conquer. The worst part is that in a world of college grads with outrageous debt who can’t get jobs, many new students wonder why they should go to college in the first place. Colleges don’t seem to offer as much promise for the future as they did when I was eighteen.

And now we are assigned with the task of “keeping them here” until they complete at least two years. The students who understand the value of a college education will need no explanation at all; and the ones who can’t figure out why they have to study anything other than the subjects in their field will never grasp the concept of a “higher” education. No, Higher Education is not about legalization, sorry.

So how about this: Admittedly, the grades are clearly not the most enticing element to make students want to bust their collective asses; I’m with them on that. So maybe they need to understand that the key to success in college isn’t simply showing up, it is how they act in class, how much they focus on what is going on at the moment, how well they can tune out distractions, how well they show respect for the professor, their peers, and the subject matter, and how sincerely they knock on the door and say, “Help me understand, please, how to get through this to your satisfaction.” If they don’t understand that, I don’t want them in my class to begin with, let alone beg them to return.

They’ll be back, though. As a professor at a community college as well as a university catering to retiring military students, I know they almost all come back, and are almost always infinitely better students at an older age than had they come right out of high school. We don’t need to “retain” students; we need to find the ones wandering around in their late twenties and say, “Are you ready yet?”

They will be ready eventually. And they will no longer make excuses. They will know something that their eighteen-year-old counterparts have trouble grasping: if you’re not going to take going to college seriously, seriously get out of the way and let someone who gives a damn have a shot at it.

Humorist Dave Barry once wrote that a person who is nice to you but is not nice to a waiter is not a nice person. It is terrifying how we overlook the faults of people whom we otherwise are friends with, or agree with, or admire. Rare is the person who has the integrity to act with respect in all situations.  

It is called character.

This has been written about often and I am certain I can’t add anything to the discussion, but I do wish to at least raise the issue. Because for quite some time and for apparently some time to come people seem to celebrate those with a lack of character. We have seen it on television for many years now with reality shows featuring housewives and bachelors and lost people and even naked lost people. It is in the way they yell at each other, make fun of each other, curse and degrade and ridicule each other. Talk shows have done this for a while as well. Most famously, perhaps, is Jerry Springer where it isn’t unusual to see people throwing chairs at each other after it is revealed Guest A is not the father of Guest B’s baby, and then Guest C comes out to say he is the father, only for the host to confirm the father is actually Guest D. This is entertainment, and it is being played out in communities throughout the country. This is what we’ve become.

It is called lack of character.

I’m not going to speculate on causes; I’m not a sociologist or psychologist or talk-show host. I do want to recall, however, some basic rules we were all taught as kids. This is similar to the bestselling book, Everything I Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten. Only really, we learned it before then.

1. Be nice to people. The Golden Rule thing. Do unto others….
2. Don’t speak poorly about people, especially if that person is not in the room.
3. Don’t make fun of people.
4. If you wish to criticize someone’s performance on a certain job, stay focused on the performance and do not attack him or her personally.

A brief interlude to point out that in basic essay writing classes there are things called fallacies. There’s the sweeping and hasty generalizations that any half-brained student should avoid. There’s the deceptive ideas and statistics that any person with character would never lower him or herself to. And there’s the slandering issue, where the writer is required to stick to the issue, and NOT attack the person.

5. Let the other person talk, or, if arguing, hear them out with the same respect you want in return.
6. Don’t lie.
7. And just to reemphasize the essential element of a good character as listed in number one, Be Nice To People.

If our young children violate any one of these basic character traits, we correct them and show them how essential it is in life for vertical homosapians to act like dignified humans if they wish to be taken seriously and respected. It is the core of every preschool, kindergarten, elementary and beyond education, especially at home.

Back to Dave Barry’s restaurant parable: If you’re on a date and your date is being nice to you but then is consistently an asshole to the waiter, most likely any clearly thinking person would not go on a second date with that person. It is only a matter of time before that unkindness and lack of character is turned on you. At some point we step back and look at a person not solely for the aspects we agree with, but for that person as a whole—his or her attitude, actions, demeanor, decorum.

You’re getting ahead of me here, aren’t you?

We have had leaders with whom I disagreed completely, some of whom I thought simply did not have the mental capability to hold a milk jug, let alone a public office. But none of them in my adulthood were foul-mouthed, characterless, embarrassments. And everyone can read this and say, “Of course, Bob! No kidding!”

So the question is this: Why do some bullies get so much support?

I found part of the answer in twenty-seven years of teaching community college: If I say what the students want to hear, they don’t hear anything else. They don’t do research to find out if I am right or wrong, they don’t discuss what I say with others to find out the validity of opposing viewpoints. In the wisdom of Paul Simon, they “heard what they want to hear and disregard the rest.” (da da do da do da da dum, do da do da do da dum)

But we want a person of character to lead us because that person represents who we are as a nation. We want a person of character to negotiate for us because there will be effects months and years down the road we, and others, must answer to. We want a person of character to command the military because we can then trust that decisions will be based upon the desire not to engage in war, and not based upon the desire to “bomb the shit out of them.”

We want a person of character to execute the duties of the executive office because even if we don’t trust that person, we can then at least trust they will act on our behalf with concern for the character of our nation.

Barry’s restaurant again: Even if you completely agree with the other person, admire his or her ideas and ambitions, trust his or her judgement on how to handle difficult situations, if the person lacks character and bullies the waiter and makes fun of him, that person doesn’t show the dignity necessary to be with you, and you shouldn’t lower yourself to such an absence of standards.

I guess I got political. It is a view, after all, from the wilderness.

I often plagiarize myself. I write phrases or concepts in one essay and use them in another, or, often, both. Sometimes subject matter blends across pieces and some semblance of work I wrote elsewhere peeks out its phrases in new work. It happens. Tim O’Brien does it. Hemingway. St. Luke. Borrowing from oneself for reuse is more dangerous due to accusations of repetition than for self-plagiarizing. I’m just saying it isn’t taboo.

When I was a student in a world with card catalogues and reference librarians, where no one—no one—knew what a computer was, where you wandered through “stacks” at the library looking for documentation in old reference books from deep in the bowels of the building, plagiarism would have been easy. Odds were low that some keen-minded prof would think: I know exactly what reference book from the library’s bowels this came from! The professor would rely upon consistency of voice within the paper and through other papers and compare the writing to other work done in class. Today for every one site a student has for plagiarizing a paper, we have three sites to find it. Hell, just Googling some key phrases often brings up the original source. Sometimes colleagues and I will order pizza and hang out and search sentences from a stack of papers. It’s addicting.

One night at work last semester I started wondering what motivates them to steal other people’s work. Time and laziness, I am sure, are at the top of the list, since they think it is easier, though I still claim it has to be just as hard to search around for other people’s papers which meet my requirements as it is to just write the thing themselves. Fear is another factor “forcing” them to plagiarize. Fear of bad grades, of losing their grants, of disappointing their parents, of disappointing themselves or me. So I went to work and gave them an assignment. I wanted a 750-1000 word argumentative essay on any subject. I told them what concepts should be in each section and how it should be structured. And then I instructed them to “not write one single original word.” That’s right, they were required to “lift” every aspect of the paper, and if they were good, the entire paper all at once, from some other source or sources.

Word quickly spread I was requiring their papers be plagiarized. Many questioned my motives and suggested I wasn’t teaching them anything valuable. I assured them the most essential part of the lesson was the students’ discovering we are keenly aware of the difference between their writing and someone else’s.

The papers they turned in were mostly choppy and poorly structured. A few met the mark with seamless transitions and flawless sentence structure while still meeting the paper’s requirements. But a few lazy students tried to get away with turning in their own work! Can you believe it?! When I asked why they would do such a thing, they said they didn’t have time to plagiarize. Punks. Still, those who did successfully steal other people’s writing said they believe they had a better understanding of what I was looking for in an essay and they believe it made them better writers, or at least better at structuring, which is not a small thing in freshman English.

Still, the first day of every semester I read them the Plagiarism Riot Act, which is also printed clearly on my outlines:

Do not turn in anyone’s work but your own. Do not turn in someone else’s writing, answers, ideas, proposals, or bad humor; do not, as some have, turn in an article published in Time Magazine or written by Hemingway; do not, as some have, turn in work written by me; do not put quotation marks around the entire essay and declare you did give credit. If you do plagiarize, do not ask for an incomplete; do not come to class anymore; do not contact me, do not pretend you have a future. God gave you one face and you paint yourselves another by doing something stupid like quoting Shakespeare and allowing others to suppose your thoughts are original. Stop pretending you can do college level work. Stop pretending no one will notice. Stop pretending you’re anything more than howl-at-the-moon-lazy-ass-stupid.

 Go ahead and copy this and pass it along. I’d be honored

About four feet to the right of this “STAY BEHIND” sign on the ground next to the tracks at the Amtrak station are the words “YELLOW LINE.”  I found it interesting that they put them so far apart. Other people were also hanging out waiting for arriving family, so the platform was busy and all I saw was “STAY BEHIND” on the ground at the train station. The natural rebel in me looked around for schedules and destinations. Suddenly I had the urge to go somewhere, anywhere. 

I was already ticking toward fantasies of travel. Train stations do that to me; whether it was the one on Long Island where trains left for Manhattan, or the rails running near my apartment at college, or the Siberian Railroad I am currently writing about and of which I have fond memories of traveling on with my son. “Everyone loves the sound of a train the distance. Everybody knows it’s true,” aptly acknowledges Paul Simon. I’m one of them.

So I stood and wondered if there is a benefit to “Stay Behind.” On an ethereal level, it is nice sometimes to let the world keep going while we step off the wheel for a while and enjoy the moment. I heard a scientist today on the radio say how the most dangerous problem afflicting humanity today is our inability to be “in the moment;” he worried we were getting too far ahead of ourselves. Maybe if we stayed behind a bit more we might avoid the supposed progress and advancement of day to day life and actually live day to day life. So many things, after all, make things more convenient, not better. We keep mixing the two up. I “stayed behind” when I built my house in the most insignificant way, which has taken on so much more meaning. You see, I never installed a dishwasher. I simply designed the kitchen wrong and didn’t leave room for one. So for twenty years now I have been washing dishes, and the truth is it takes less time to do that than to load and unload them, uses way less energy, and allows me the satisfaction of seeing something through. I live a life where the results of my efforts often aren’t obvious for years, and even then the urge to “redo” the work is strong. But when I wash dishes I can stand back a short time later and swoosh my hand and say, “Done.” Feels good, it really does. 

I could go on about other examples of where the decision to “Stay Behind,” sometimes literally and other times metaphorically, has ended in adventures, friendships, job opportunities, and various other encounters. Even now a few examples which literally changed my life come to mind. We’ve all had those moments. But that’s not what this blog is about. 

Obviously, it is about the weather. 

There is a heat index of 118 here in Virginia Beach right now, late Thursday afternoon. The un-humidified temp is about 99. Either way there is some weather going on here. I remember it being this hot without the “index” when I lived in the Sonora Desert and my dad would say, “Yes but it is a dry heat.” A dry heat–kind of like a blow-torch. 

Still, the heat doesn’t bother me. Nor the cold. In college in western New York the freezing temperatures were tempered by the dryness, and a ten degree day might warrant a mere sweater, whereas the humidity here at the beach combined with cold temps can be to-the-bone bitter. In either case, many people simply stay inside.

But I have a strange habit which makes me want to experience and absorb every degree of the extremes: I can already feel the absence of the strong sun on my shoulders or equally the cold wind on my face, my boots crushing snow on the walk. As early as mid-July I sense summer slipping into cooler temps and changing colors. And while I might claim autumn to be my favorite season, I miss summer before it has even half over. It is as if it is the only summer that ever was and ever will be again, and I want to suck the marrow out of it, drain it of every ounce by my constant participation, let my senses explode from the enormity of the very reality of feeling summer happen. 

That’s borderline psychotic, I know. 

But listen, when it is hot we want it cooler, when cold we want it warm. When it is dark we turn on lights and when it is sunny we wear sunglasses. We constantly temper reality. I have become more interested in being deeper into reality. That’s not to say I want to stare into the sun, but honestly, that really IS where the fun is. 

Jay stands on the deck looking across the Bay to the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. Nick stands next to him, the ordeal of the city behind them, and Jay says, “Summer’s almost gone. It makes you want to reach out and just hold it back,” to which Nick replies, quite non-nonchalantly, “There’ll be other summers.” Jay seems quite satisfied with the answer and thanks Nick for the insight.

My response is different. I’d have looked at Nick and said, “Yes, but I’m not done with this one yet.” What’s next people often ponder. What is down the line? Around the bend? I can’t wait to get there, they say. I can’t wait for fall, they say. Yes, that’s true. And it is coming, regardless. For now, I’m right here, and right here has always worked very well. 

 

I no longer like butterflies. Those miserable little hyperactive buzzards flutter around like drunk scraps of tracing paper. “Oh they’re beautiful, especially the Monarchs,” everyone says. Why? Because of their colors? Their fragility? We just like things more delicate than we are. As George Carlin famously pointed out, we eat more lobsters than bunnies because bunnies are soft and furry and lobsters look like miniature monsters. No contest. Honestly, I used to love the little beauties, butterflies. I was always intrigued that the average life span is less than a year. I watched documentaries about the monarchs’ migration from northern regions of the states to the mountains of southern Mexico. I couldn’t find my way there with a map and a guide, and these little fuckers do just fine every single year. But lately I have lost interest. They’re as disturbing to me now as the flying monkeys in “The Wizard of Oz.”

And as to the “The Wizard of Oz, ” the scariest scene is not the flying monkeys, or the balls of fire the Wicked Witch of the West throws down upon the bone-dry scarecrow. It is the hour glass filled with red sand set up in the castle room with Dorothy. Such a small scene in an irritating film still affects me half a century later. “You see that?” the witch cries to the terrified Judy Garland, “That’s how much longer you have to be alive! And it isn’t long, my sweetie. It isn’t long!” This scared the crap out of me. You mean it’s that easy, I thought, to no longer exist? Someone just flips the hourglass and the sands run out? My heart raced every time the camera focused on the depleting red grains dripping through the huge timepiece.

It didn’t help that during those years my mother watched “Days of Our Lives,” and the opening sequence was always, “Like sand through the hourglass, so go the Days of Our Lives.” Whoa! Talk about depressing. I was raised saturated in this daily dose of “you’re going to die soon.” Growing up near the beach probably didn’t help; the shifting patterns of sand symbolized to me the passing of seconds and hours and days and years. And when aunts and uncles exclaimed I had an “old soul” I thought they were ordering last rites.

So some sense of urgency festered in me from quite early on. I started attacking my ambitions like I had just three weeks left before the sand ran out. When I was young, I had an outrageous list of dreams, ambitions, or “fantasies” as most others called them. One of the first brilliant ideas was doomed for failure: My friend Todd and I had been sending up rockets; the ones with a gun-powder-filled battery shoved up their tails which we bought from a hobby shop. We were getting good at this and our imagination ran away fast. This was around 1973 and I was totally into adventure. Papillon had just come out and my mind was already bent on traveling to faraway lands. Mostly, though, I was obsessed with becoming an astronaut. I knew all their names, and I had memorized every detail I could find about rockets, their speeds, thrust, history and expectations. I had a brown cpo jacket and asked my mother to sew on an American flag and a NASA patch. When we went into stores I liked to pretend people thought I must have something to do with the space program. I played it cool, of course, holding my mom’s car keys like I just got back from the Johnson Space Center. I was twelve.

Even so, Todd and I had a plan. We were going to take apart the batteries to study how they are made, and then we would make a large one that could carry one of us, me, into the clouds. We knew we would have needed a heat shield to exit the atmosphere and return—we weren’t dumb—so we planned to use a metal garbage can. We only were going to lift a few hundred feet just to show the naysayers we earned our patches. So we slowly filled a coffee can with the gun powder from several dozen batteries bought over several months. But one night Todd left the coffee can on his patio in the rain. We didn’t have enough money to buy more batteries so we tossed the plan and played baseball. A few years later I moved away and found more pragmatic plans. I am not certain, however, if I was ever so serious or energetic as I was when I thought I was going into the clouds. To me that fantasy was simply reality’s childhood.

Back then I couldn’t possibly know that eventually the most treasured content of my bucket list would be the simplest of thoughts—plans really—like lying on the floor playing Risk and Boggle with my son and sharing a bowl of pretzels while we laughed at the anxious final seconds of each round. Or the one of walking slowly through a mall with my dad, sitting on a bench reminiscing or being quiet, sitting having Scotch on Tuesday nights. I was always excited to be able to sit and watch a baseball game on television with him, neither of us saying a word. That doesn’t sound a bit like a dream for anyone’s bucket list, but it makes it into most of ours at some point. I thought of all those small moments while standing in the doorway to his room during his last days. I’d lean against the wall and stare at the paper butterfly, the universal symbol of comfort care, on the door jam.   It’s crazy how the simple moments like time together get overshadowed by fleeting ideas like skydiving and hot air ballooning.

I’m certain at some point early on in my life while listening to “Days of Our Lives” my mind turned toward adventure. I’m equally sure that my dad had a lot to do with that. Every Christmas he bought us books and for some reason, perhaps intuition, the ones he picked for me all focused on outrageous escapades. Robin Lee Graham’s The Boy Who Sailed Around the World Alone; Peter Jenkin’s A Walk Across America, Bound for Glory about Woody Guthie, Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad, and more. These were obvious influences for me, and growing up a child of the late sixties certainly added to the action. From the moment of Kennedy’s decree to reach the moon to actually reaching the moon occupied exactly my first nine years of life. Many moments in my youth lit a fire under me that still burns. This can be both exhilarating and exasperating.

Still no one ever told me I was wrong. No one ever indicated anything I suggested was a bad idea, only that it was too early, or that I was “too young.” So dreams got pushed aside, never making it to the “did that already” bucket but never really leaving the list. It took me years to realize the dreams we fill our lives with don’t necessarily play out in chronological order. I’m lucky, actually, that some chaotic appearances on my radar don’t coincide with their fruition. I learned quickly that if things don’t play out as planned to just toss them back in the bucket and let them simmer around awhile like a lottery ball.

I have only a little desire left to climb in a garbage can and light a fire under my ass, but since then biking around Ireland made the list. Or maybe I’ll just go back to Spain. And more than a few folks older than me sail the Caribbean well into their sixties. Sometimes it’s just that we take the long way. I had other bad ideas besides dying in a flaming piece of metal. There was the time my friend Tom and I were going to push a desk from Tucson to Washington, DC to point out corporate waste while people were starving to death. Even philosopher and writer Leo Buscaglia dropped us a line to wish us luck. It took us a while to realize he was being sarcastic. No good Monarch would waste his time on such nonsense, no matter how noble. Butterflies, man. Butterflies. .

Whenever my son and I would play that Boggle game, he flipped that damn hourglass with the three-minute timer and tap his finger. My anxiety level increased and my blood pressure peaked. He couldn’t know he was feeding the trauma of PTSD from some fictional witch. “In good time,” I can hear her saying. It was that threatening decree, “In good time,” that motivated me. Still, she never said “in time”; it was always, “In good time.” Exactly

NOTE: I arrived at class and the conversation turned to cell phones. I wasn’t complaining (this time) or preaching (yet). But then one of the students asked in reference to cell phones if didn’t I wish I had that kind of “advantage” when I was their age.

The following is not verbatim, obviously, since ironically no one recorded it–but here is, to the best of my recollection of the past forty-eight hours, my response:

——

Advantage? Well, I’m not sure I am happy with having it now, let alone thirty-five years ago. I’ll tell you what: I walk on the beach several days a week. I walk between six and eight miles. I usually bring my phone to talk to family while out there for a few hours, but also to take pictures of the sunrise. Some of them can be spectacular. Ha! All of them can be spectacular, and I just want to share it. Sometimes I email a picture to someone, often I post them on Facebook.

Well, this morning I left my phone in the car, by accident. I was two blocks into the walk before I realized it, but I kept going. My initial reaction was, “Oh I’d better get it! What if..” and fill in that blank however you want: someone calls, someone texts, there is an emergency, a funny comment, someone wanting or expecting a response and I don’t get to do it for hours! Unreal. You see, my generation did this all the time. We could go months without talking to someone. And we certainly could make it through the day. But I am keenly aware that your generation was born with cellphones, and all you know is this increasingly tragic umbilical world.

 But listen:

What if one day you left your phone at home and went for a long walk? Would you wonder if everything is okay? Would you keep touching your pockets, looking behind you? At the very least would you wonder the time? How long, I wonder, before you turned and went home to check your texts, your messages. You’re hooked—we all are.

But what if, if, one day you just keep walking. Not many people anymore remember what it was like to have no ability to call home anytime they wanted. We looked for payphones at gas stations. And when we finished plugging it with coins for the three minutes we bought to talk, it was barely long enough to say, “Great, everything’s going great! How is everyone? Good! Okay, I’ll talk to you next week!”

Next week. Sometimes, in college far away, next month. It is in part how we grew up, and it most definitely is how we matured.

But those three minutes, then, was enough to know everyone was fine and we could focus on what was happening around us. We were fully aware of place. We kept no records. We didn’t update anyone. No texts. No tweets. No snapshots. We were that rare state of being which is slipping into the past: solely and completely in the moment.

No phone, no internet, no messages, no voice mail, no apps, no games, no kidding—just conversation with whomever you’re with or whoever happens along. If you wanted a picture of yourself at some site, or with a friend, you stopped someone walking by and asked that person to take it—we didn’t have long sticks to hold the 35mm. But that person would be friendly, and conversations would ensue, and information about local places to go could be discovered. In fact just yesterday I walked the boardwalk and saw ample opportunity for others to ask to grab a shot of them in front of the water, the Neptune Statue at 31^st St, something with more perspective than the length of their arms. But we do that now—we are in such a meme world we don’t risk much beyond the length of our arms. Am I the only one who misses the long talks and laughter after not seeing someone for a few days and “catching up”?

I do understand the picture obsession more than I do the constant texting and phone calls or face time. Someone sent me a picture of herself that I took thirty years ago this very week. Two things happened. It made me miss that time and made me wish we had hundreds of more pictures of then, of the endless laughter of then, of the immeasurable hope of then. Yet it also made me realize how very much we were in that moment; too much to spend any time trying to capture that moment. We were too busy living it.

But back to that long walk: At the end of that long day if you did just keep walking, by bedtime, phoneless, you might miss your normal routine to lie on your back, phone in hand, and seek out information for a while. You can’t, though, because you’re tech-less, and you can’t imagine that you ever couldn’t, but you do. No worries, the world keeps spinning, friends are not diligently waiting to hear from you or have anything to report, and the news is not going away.

The next morning is harder still. You ache to know what happened over night about which you have no information all these hours later. Did someone text? Call? It’s killing you but you can’t go back now. You’ve walked too far. The anxiety, withdrawal, is real and stressful, and like giving up a blanket or a bottle each step seems endless, the day an eternity. You want to borrow someone’s phone. You want to just check real fast—find out everything is fine. And what if you did? Everything is fine, benign, most likely predictable and familiar. We crave the familiar and predictable; it falsely makes us feel safer. It is why we stay in bad relationships which become routine; it is why we stay in bad jobs which have no future but which we’ve mastered and manipulated.  

I know the arguments. And it must seem like I’m some old geezer saying, “Things were better when I was your age!” No, the advances in this world have made much of your lives infinitely more convenient than my world. No contest, and I am often thrilled that I can be a part of “what’s next” as we bullet toward tomorrow. But there is a price to pay—there is always a tradeoff—and as far as some technology is concerned that price is how you spend your time. Life can go by too fast to dish out that kind of time so consistently. Thirty years will pass faster than you can fathom, trust me. Don’t spend it looking down.

Here’s a test to see if your priorities are in order: Plan to travel for a week and tell everyone you know you will be out of touch the entire time—no calls, no texts, no emails, no matter what happens. Tell them you’ll check in when you’re back to make sure your loved ones are alive; otherwise, you’ll be meeting new people, finding cafes and maybe a motel where you’ll spend nights drinking wine and laughing with new friends from new places, and you’ll catch the sunrise without capturing it on camera. No one needs to know on a daily basis what’s going on; they’ll ask when you return. No one needs to be updated, see pictures, videos, receive OMG texts at every mountain and mystery along the way. They’ll ask when you get home.

You’re without your umbilical, untethered, freefalling into yourself absent of the consistent clicks and taps of that certain cell. We grow anxious when faced with our own thoughts without possible deflection, no technical tangent. But the anxiousness erodes and new conversations linger like lace curtains, sometimes lifting, often drifting down and raised only by the occasional wistful comment, and it is peaceful. You had forgotten “peaceful.” You maybe never learned just how to be full of peace.

But it isn’t so silent, is it, this peacefulness? This ironic disconnection links you to those nearby, groups you with others looking up, talking about the places you’ve been, talking about the possibilities. Talk about unplugged! Most of the time you talk about life and how far you might reach and the truth is you can’t reach out and grasp something if you’re holding anything. We do that though, we want to reach for more but not let go of what we’ve got. “If I put this down,” we say, “I might lose touch with what I know.”

Okay, lecture over. The old man is done preaching to the younger plugged in population. But listen: take a deep breath. Take a moment. Take, for instance, that time you sat by the water at the north end of the beach and a couple caught you staring at the trees near the houses and they told you of an area filled with Spanish moss over walking trails just a few miles off the beach. “Lived here for eighteen years,” you say, “And never knew that.” If you were looking down, they never would have said a thing. You know they wouldn’t. But the absence of such a small device can dial up the most spontaneous connections.

Really, you get used to this simplicity, this absence of noise, of interruption, of course you do. Find out what it is like to walk with empty hands and touch the world, what it was like to listen to nothing at all. At night those hands hold wine and bread and you hear tales of the day. We tell stories out loud, and we listen to stories and share moments, out loud, and we live, as much as possible, out loud. In this way, every single conversation is different. Every single shared sunset is different. And we come to have a sense of the senses.

And the biggest difference between your generation and mine is that you would have no possible way of knowing that the most important moments cannot, cannot, cannot be captured by the most efficient technology. Sometimes you need to be away from someone to understand just how close you can be.

Everyone you’ve ever known is at your fingertips. And you don’t even realize how that might keep you from growing.

Now turn your phones off. Let’s talk about Whitman.

I accidentally did a security wipe of my phone and eliminated all my contacts, and—no—I didn’t have a backup at the time. So I got on a real computer and emailed all those I wanted reentered in my phone log. I wrote this:

“Could you please text me ‘Hi, this is _____’ so I can put your phone number back in my contact list?”

It was, I thought, a simple request.

First, my friends Robert and Molly in Ohio carried this out perfectly. From both I received a text with their names in the text. Understand, when you send a text to me, I can only see a phone number; it does not come through with your name on it unless you are already in my address book, which obviously no one is. So for the twelve people who wrote, “Here you go” or “It’s me” or “Sorry about your phone, here’s my number” or “Here ya go, let’s get beers,” some deciphering was necessary.

“Let’s get beers” was easy—Jose. It is his standard comment to me, so perhaps he wrote that on purpose knowing I’d know he’d know I knew. Someone else wrote, “So if I don’t say who I am, will you be able to figure it out?” which I figured out because we have always thought exactly alike and often complete each other’s thoughts. For a few of the texts I had to look up the area code to figure out who it might be. One of them was on Long Island, so I knew it was a cousin, but that really doesn’t narrow it down much in my family. Then the message said, “Funny I just saw someone who looks just like you and I was smiling, thinking, ‘Hey there’s my cousin’ when he clearly thought I was smiling at him and it kind of got me in trouble,” so I knew it was Lisa. My cousins, all of them, have distinct personalities.

One friend emailed his name, address, current location, plans for the weekend, apologies for my troubles, offers of assistance, and his next week’s schedule. But no phone number. No kidding. And since it was an email and not a text, I still can’t call him. No problem.

My brother, my friend Jack, and several others just replied to my email with their phone numbers, which was actually much easier and made more sense, but they also took that opportunity to tell me my Blackberry is not 21^st century. Well, I suppose neither am I.

And that really is the point here.

There was a time back in the last millennium when I knew everyone’s number by heart. That was when I had no “contact list” in my phone; back when “my” phone was a fat machine on the counter used by the entire family, long before the invention of voice mail, call waiting, or answering machines. When we looked up someone’s number in a small address book enough and then dialed it (rotary), the digits tended to stick in our minds. I can recall most of my own numbers well back into my childhood, most of my friends’ from then and through my twenties, as well as work numbers and relatives’ numbers, including my grandmother’s from her apartment in Queens in the eighties. It is not age that stole my retention; it is convenience. We now live in a world where, “If we don’t have to, we don’t.” In fact I know it isn’t age because yesterday I went into one of my classes and asked fifteen twenty-year-olds if they could tell me the phone number of their best friend, and only one of them could. These are the same people who don’t take notes or rewrite notes from a peer after they’ve missed class, but instead simply take a picture of the pages and then can’t understand why they don’t understand.

I had a friend at Penn State who asked me for the date and time of something I was involved in. When I told her and asked if she wanted a pen to write it down, she said, “No, if I write it down I’ll forget it.” Exactly. Certainly, my memory is not what it used to be. Students’ names for me are nearly impossible, though to be fair that has less to do with memory than it does interest. One young lady said I don’t remember their names because I’m not trying hard enough to do so, and I said she was wrong, that I wasn’t trying at all. Ironically, I can tell you the name of every single person in my first class I taught twenty-seven years ago. Much like the phone numbers, however, I had more reason to retain them years ago than I do now.

Numbers, though, have always come easy for me. I never had trouble committing to memory zip codes, addresses, bank account numbers, as well as phone numbers, and I still can, but since obtaining what is apparently an outdated phone, I’ve made it easy to forget what is essential—the phone numbers of my loved ones. Shouldn’t those numbers be second nature?

Apparently not, so I emailed everyone. Some people didn’t respond at all, which made me realize, yeah, I don’t need them in my life either. What a great opportunity to weed out the ones I wonder why I knew to begin with. Worse, there were numbers for people for whom I don’t have emails and can’t contact them at all. I know if there is a reason to contact me they will, but something more revealing crossed my apparently feeble mind: I don’t need nearly so many people in my life. My average contact-scroll used to take awhile, and why oh why I had so many numbers is beyond me. We have information for lots of people yet we “know” so few. This turned out to be a great way to clean house.

Still, I most likely will not return to memorizing numbers, though I will attempt to retain a dozen or so of those people I can’t imagine not being able to call in an instant. What if I had to borrow someone’s phone? I’d like to remember those numbers again, or recall someone’s birthday without a Facebook prompt. The ability has less to do with age than practice, though I suppose that is true of just about everything. One response via text was, “Hey, it’s me! Shouldn’t you know my number by heart?!”

My immediate thought was, “Yes, of course.” But then I thought, “No, I shouldn’t.” What I should be doing is seeing loved ones often enough that we have no reason to call. We should be laughing together at pubs, at picnic tables, across the fence in the yard, across the room, across time. Numbers should be pointless. Memory should be irrelevant for our consistent commitment to spending time together now.

My favorite response to my email was the last text I received. It said simply, “Just put me in your contact list as ‘Tumbleweed’.” I knew exactly who it was. And then there is my mother’s cell phone, which I opted not to bother re-entering since she hasn’t turned it on in years. That is wisdom.

Ever been home and looked around only to see so much that needs to be done that it is impossible to get started? It can be overwhelming, with gardening, weeding, mowing, dishes, dinner, dusting, and laundry. The lists go on and are as varied as we are, despite so many common tasks to which to tend (moved that preposition there, I did).

Yeah, that to me is life. I look around and see so much more that needs to be done and seen and experienced than I couldn’t possibly do in ten times ten lifetimes that I just get brain-lock. I still have my eyes set on Spain again, Siberia, the Continental Divide Trail, the Canadian Rail, biking to Coos Bay, Oregon, and around Ireland. I want to grow a bountiful garden and I’d love to raise a goat. I have books to write and old friends and family to visit. The list goes on and on and the time does not, it simply does not. It took me decades to realize I just need to pick a direction and go, see what happens and then bounce from there. Still, sometimes I sit on my porch and look out at the property and end up instead walking the docks looking at sailboats, thinking about cruising around the bay or down the inter-coastal waterway someday, or we drive around taking pictures and we always end up at this abandoned building on a bluff over the river and I think how I’d love to open a pub there. It makes me tired thinking of it all and I can’t even write because there are so many words and I can only chose one to get going, so instead I sit on the porch and look out, tired, but not really.

I often wonder if seemingly lazy people aren’t unambitious as much as they are simply overwhelmed with possibility without firm decision-making skills.

Artists can be like that. Writers and musicians too. I remember a line from a song written by Alan and Marilyn Bergman—“I pity the poor one, the shy and unsure one, who wanted it perfect but waited too long.” Love that.

Just yesterday I read an article by a writer who said he shoots for no less than 100 rejections a year. That is his goal, he wrote, adding that if he doesn’t get at least 100 rejections a year it means he wasn’t working hard enough. I know what he means. Often we sit on possibility not because we are afraid of failure—rejections are more than welcome and way more than common—but because we are never quite sure if it is the “right” place to send something, or to return to the life example, the right place to go, the right person to ask out, the right plan for the weekend. It isn’t that we don’t want to get it wrong as much as we want to make sure it is right. There is a fine difference and it feeds our idleness.

Idleness leads to chronic immobility, both physically and mentally. In writing classes I tell my students to just go, pick a direction and go, and it might not be the right way but I swear somewhere in paragraph three you will make a left turn into exactly where you want to be next. And so in all things, just go. Sometimes we are afraid we might miss something if we go, or stay, or change or remain idle. That’s funny since no matter what happens we’re going to miss something. The list of things we’ll never do will always be infinitely longer than the things we attempt.

So this was all brought on because I was listening to very old James Taylor, which isn’t always a good idea because it reminded me, as music is apt to do, of times in my life I sat staring at possibility, and today it was a very particular time I recalled during which I hesitated because I was overwhelmed. Well, I’m not feeling overwhelmed anymore, just much older. I’ll be fifty-six in a few days and I don’t much care about that. Age really never has and still doesn’t bother me in the least. The only thing, the one thing, which bothers me is if I become indifferent to the passing of time and incapable of getting up and jumping off into whatever might be next.

And so I will do so. Tomorrow.

 

 

 

“I’ve Run Away from Politics; it’s Too Bizarre at Home”

–with apologies to Jimmy Buffett

There are going to be riots in Baltimore, more refugees from Syria to Greece. England will stay in the European Union because independence costs money. There is a sit-in by our elected officials because some of their colleagues think it is an infringement of rights to withhold the ability to get a gun from people suspected of being terrorists; people SO suspected of being terrorists, it is against the law for them to fly. Putin will flex his strength in Murmansk later this summer and Assad is going to be “displaced.” The Cubs will lose, the Mets will lose less, and David Wright is not coming back. Neither is Tiger. And Sharapova; she isn’t coming back also. Too. Either.

Student enrollment in college will continue to tumble, not because of financial aid and not because of a growing economy providing better jobs out of high school, but because students just don’t see any benefit to being here over not being here. That valley of “hope” and “possibility” we climbed toward in decades past is now saturated with insecurity, pointlessness, redundancy, and impatience.

This morning I went for a walk at the boardwalk like I do every Tuesday and Thursday morning. On Mondays and Wednesdays I walk four of five miles near the amphitheater near the college. On weekends I walk along the river. I love to walk. Sometimes I see fascinating sights, like the eagle on my house, or the deer always gathering in a neighbor’s field, or pelicans—dozens of them—flying single file just inches off the ocean, following each other like tethered hikers heading up a slope. I have finally passed the point where I care how far I walk; distance is no longer an issue and my endurance is fine. Just the other day I walked a dozen miles without really thinking about it. Now I am limited only by time, or like this morning, storms.

And while I’m out there my thought process had been very predictable. The news would still be swimming in my head and I’d go from being pissed off at the hypocrisy and simple-mindedness of both parties dealing with basic issues they’ve politicized, to deciding I’m going to write about it. Yes, dammit! I would say to myself, “I’m going to go home and get out an editorial to some relevant paper or magazine. I’ve done that before with my essay “Sliced Bread,” or “Apology to the Citizens of the World” during W’s days, to a right-leaning rant about the lack of responsibility in a Dutch newspaper and how sometimes “freedom of speech” is a burden some can’t handle, to slamming the network which aired the first season of Survivor and calling them on their claim it wasn’t scripted. Bullshit! You can’t tell me that…sigh…well, anyway…that’s what I did years past, hence the morning doses of Lisinopril.

And I walked along the boardwalk this morning and thought how in times past I would be formulating a letter about this and that, when it started to rain. I walked out to the water and took in the vast Atlantic and thought about George Carlin’s famous quip in retort to those who say the government doesn’t know what it is doing and the planet is dying. He said, “The planet will be fine! Humanity is fucked.”

Nature wins, and that is why I stopped reading editorials and listening to political pundits and watching West Wing, and instead started walking more, reading Thoreau and Muir. I think I’ve finally reached the point where I don’t need to know what is going on and I certainly don’t need to comment on it—I am no one at all with no qualifications, and I am simply one simple opinion of three hundred and thirty million in this country. Further, who would disagree with me at how majestic the ocean is?

It isn’t an attempt to remain ignorant, and it isn’t bowing out of the political process. It is finally finding my place in this writing world. It is a small world, by the way; we run into each other time and time again in various places, and it feels so much less stressful to show up and talk about dolphins rather than immigration problems. I don’t have the energy or stamina for unsolvable battles. With nature, however, I concede, and as a result we get along just fine, thank you.