We don’t usually hear or see geese on the bay this late in spring, but the other day they were there. Canada geese fly over my house every night in winter. From late afternoon until after midnight flocks of geese pass or land or take off from the wealth of local waterways. Some settle in small ponds, but most gather in the harvested fields. Usually they commute in groups of fifteen or twenty, but I’ve heard their honking and stepped onto the porch to see upwards of two hundred fly by. One time they were so loud in the field I went out to find thousands of geese settling in before continuing to who-knows-where. Their stay is swift, albeit perennial.

And last week they uncharacteristically crossed the twilight sky. It is that sound, though, the whoosh of wings in a methodical push along with their familiar call, which remains as true and consistent in my life as the sounds of birds in the morning. Here along the Chesapeake some geese nest all year, but it is in winter when migration routes from the St. Lawrence Seaway to all points south steer them into the area after dusk. I have laid in bed well into the evening and listened to them move past in the cold, clear sky. Sometimes I sit on the porch expecting, hoping, knowing they’ll be back.

But the migration of geese in and of itself is not what keeps my attention in this narrative, even in June when they’re more abundant in January. It is their sound and the way it always calls to me, like so many sounds in our lives.

When I was young the foghorns in the early hours called out from the boats on the Great South Bay. I remember waking to their long, singular tone, warning other fishing vessels headed out or coming in across the reach. Foghorns will always remind me of my adolescence and riding bikes out on early spring weekend mornings with my friends, a band of twelve-year-olds biking it to the bay through the fog and up to the docks. On clear days we could see Fire Island, but some mornings we couldn’t even see each other, and being that close to the water so early meant feeling the booming vibrations from foghorns. I can still smell the marsh on the nearby river and feel the cool wetness of the salty air on my skin.

And I know as long as I find my way to the water in winter I can count on the geese overhead, calling across the river. I am not sure why they honk as they do but I like to think it is the same reason as the boat’s foghorns on the bay: they don’t want to bang into each other. If I was to head back to the Island and one night went to the docks at Timber Point, I am certain I’d not recognize the area for how much has changed. There might be more traffic nearby, and the number of leisure boats has most likely increased. But all these decades later I am equally certain the sound of foghorns would drift toward shore in the morning as certain as a flock of geese migrate through these local fields, even now on the front edge of summer.

Twenty years ago I built this house frequented by hawks, the occasional eagle, countless osprey, and on winter evenings, geese. In recent years the number of bald eagles has increased. I have never been complacent watching such majestic birds of prey in flight. One move of her wings and an eagle can glide on a draft clear across the river before turning east across the bay. Still, they make no sounds. Oh, sometimes hawks call out to each other in a very distinct high pitch caw. But mostly they perch in silence. Their lack of sound creates a distance between us like strangers in a waiting room. Once I walked back from the river and saw an adult bald eagle atop the house. But because of the raptor’s silence and blank stare, we lacked connection, some sort of shared space.

Despite my own random migrations, I find comfort in the familiar. The sounds of those I have loved and lost talk to me sometimes when I sit at night on the porch and recall long-ago conversations.

We can be haunted by sound. 

In a world where we often seek silence to escape the noise, it is the laughter of friends and companions that call to us through the fog of daily life and steer us home. Pavlov wasn’t far off, but the bells which I respond to are the sounds of friends laughing, family telling stories, a football game on television on Thanksgiving Day with the smell of turkey filling the house, an old western on a rainy summer Saturday afternoon. I love the daily calls of life, the drifting sounds on a summer evening, the persistence of the ocean waves, the relentless ranting of house wrens in the morning.

Wine glasses. Dice on a game board in the other room. The quiet wisp of golf on television. Steaks on a hot grill.

Bacon in a pan in the morning. New friends drinking wine, laughing. 

Children.

Recently I became much more aware of a significant difference before my classes from years past. When I first started teaching more than twenty-five years ago, after the first few weeks I’d approach the classroom and could hear the noise drifting down the hallway. Students would be talking about the night before or the weekend before, they’d be laughing about something on television or something I said last class. They’d be asking for updates about projects, vacations, families, kids; asking about the new car or talking about some bar on the bay.

Talking.

They’d ask each other out, some got married, some had kids. They noticed when someone didn’t show up and could tell if someone was upset. They knew each other’s names, jobs, hobbies, backgrounds and plans. At eighteen or twenty-five or even forty, these new students started brand new friendships they’d have for the rest of their lives. There’s nothing like friends you meet in college. As adults they move in new directions, and the complexity of life becomes more manageable because of new relationships with people in the same boat.

You get the point. And I’m sure you see where this is going.

The other day I walked down the hallway toward my one o’clock class, now three weeks into the summer semester, and it was absolutely silent. There might have been no one in the room for the deafening quiet. I turned into the doorway and saw twenty-three students sitting next to each other for no less than six classes by this point, all completely silent looking down at their phones, texting the same friends they’ve been talking to since seventh grade. No one—not a single person—was talking to anyone else in the room.

It is the same all over campus. I walked by the bus stop and no one talked except the homeless guy who is always there to talk to people, but no one was listening. The student center was quieter than the library, and the only noise I found on one of my walks was in the hallways between classes where people were talking on their phones to the people they were texting during class. I am not exaggerating.

So I went into my class and students slowly came out of their Cell-Trance and noticed I was sitting quietly, waiting. Eventually most of them blinked their eyes and shook their heads to break the spell and stretched their bent necks. I asked a young woman the name of the guy next to her. She didn’t know, of course. I asked others. Nothing. I asked if anyone knew what the tall man in the front row did for a living. I asked if anyone knew where the girl with strong foreign accent is from. I asked if anyone knew why the guy in the third row had his arm in a cast. I asked if anyone knew what anyone else’s major is.

I left for a minute and ordered some pizzas. I showed part of Leo Buscaglia’s “The Art of Being Fully Human” lecture, the part where he reads the Haim Ginott letter listing what he saw in a concentration camp. They wanted more.

The pizzas came and we all grabbed a slice and settled down. After a few minutes I asked a guy in the front row to stand up. He wasn’t afraid to answer questions during lessons so I figured he’d be a good start. I asked his name, where he was from, if he worked and where, if he had a family and who. I asked if he had hobbies. I asked his major and why he chose this school and not another in the area. I asked what music was on his radio on the way in. I asked if he drank coffee, if he prefers winter or summer, if he is a morning person or a night owl, what his favorite tv show is, sports team, Peanuts character, Simpson’s episode. It didn’t take long and we moved to the next person. After only ten people it was hard to hear what the “spotlighted” person was saying because everyone else was talking to the already deposed student about things they had in common, places they shared. We were laughing at the noise, but we got through it, finished the pizzas and they left.

It was the best class I ever had. And I figured a few things out: I don’t listen enough. I don’t pay attention enough to those around me. I used to. At one time I was the uninvited guest who overheard their conversations before class and knew which ones were parents, which ones were widowed from war. I used to hear what they were scared of or excited about, and now I really don’t know my students because they’re not talking anymore. But really, I could have asked I suppose. I was probably sitting in my office checking my Facebook posts. Now, every class I teach after the first week or two, this is what we’re going to do. Someone else is going to have to spring for the pizza, though.

I am a survivor of a concentration camp. My eyes saw what no person should witness. Gas chambers built by learned engineers. Children poisoned by educated physicians. Infants killed by trained nurses. Women and babies shot and killed by high school and college graduates. So I’m suspicious of education. My request is: help your students to be human. Your efforts must never produce learned monsters, skilled psychopaths, or educated Eichmanns. Reading and Writing and spelling and history and arithmetic are only important if they serve to make our students more human.             –Haim Ginott

My high school prom theme was “Breakaway” by Art Garfunkel. I remember a lot of friends found it cynical, and maybe a bit uncool for the times. We had just snuck past disco and Manilow, so we were really hoping for something edgy, but we ended up with a non-Simon Garfunkel. In fact I might have been the only one who couldn’t get the song out of my head, not in a “tune won’t go away” fashion, but the sentiment. It captured exactly what I was feeling at the time.

I watch the distant lights on the runway, Disappear into the evening sky

Well, yeah. Everyone was thinking about partying at the beach and my mind was already out of there. I was always a bit strange. Truly. I was the one you find in every crowd that kept thinking I should be somewhere else. Any song or poem or movie or work of art or conversation which steered toward distant places and beyond the horizon instantly attached themselves to my psyche.

Even then I could feel time like drips of water on the back of my neck.

It’s not the sun you’re trying to find; Something else is on your mind. You need a little space and time to break away

I love that line.

I took a gap year. It wasn’t called a gap year back then; it was called the not-go-to-college-and-be-lazy-for-a-year year. I just figured sometime during those twelve months before I headed to the hills of western New York for college, something amazing would fall in my lap. I kept thinking if I kept looking around I’d find something that would have changed everything. So I looked around. Nothing changed.

You ever feel like you’re just one thought away from exactly what you want to say? That was what that whole year felt like. Like I was onto something but couldn’t quite put my finger on it. A year passed and one of my friends headed to Nashville, another pursued local media, another married and had a child, another started sliding away. I left.

Break away, fly across your ocean. Break away, time has come for you. Break away, fly across your ocean. Break away, time has come…

New York. Arizona. Mexico. New England. Pennsylvania. Virginia. A bunch of foreign lands.

…and I’m back. Got a job teaching at the local college none of us ever wanted to attend to begin with. I broke away several dozen times through the years since then to places all over the world, but I kept coming back.

Turns out there were a few things from high school I’m glad I left behind, a few I wish I had never abandoned, and one or two I’m glad I took with me, the most important being that sense of standing on that edge, the sense of leaning forward and jumping off, the sense of possibility and hope. When I returned all those years later all those years ago  I discovered I wasn’t like any of the people I knew in high school save two, both of whom had also left. It isn’t the “leaving” that connects us, or even the coming back; it is the idea that we are still trying to break away from complacency, from predictability and lack of passion. I still don’t feel like I’ve done it, so I keep thinking it is time for me…

To awaken in another country. Greet the morning under foreign skies

And then it hit me. It is the “looking” that I was after. It was the pursuit of what’s next that I wanted to pursue, not some place or event or career—but the actual act of simply looking around, as if somewhere back in 1960 God said, “Hey I’m just going to drop you off here for a while so you can check everything out” and simply not sitting around would be my measure of success.

So this morning I was on the pier at the oceanfront. It was foggy and I couldn’t see beyond where the surf was breaking. I stared at the fog for quite some time, the mist, and how it beautifully shrouded the fishermen on the pier, the workers setting up for an event on the beach, the sculptures up and down the boardwalk. I watched a young boy try and bait his hook, and I talked to an old man about how the selection of fish has changed through the decades. I watched a lone surfer let lesser waves roll by. At some point I thought about what it was like a bit further out to sea. It was brighter beyond the fog and I knew that out on the horizon the sun was inevitably pushing through, we just couldn’t see it. I turned and watched walkers and joggers pause at the rail waiting for the sun to come through and I turned back and had this overwhelming desire to borrow the man’s surfboard and push out beyond the fog and go looking for the sun. I thought how cool it must be for the fishing boats already out past the shelf searching the deep waters to be able to feel the sun on their faces, pulling in their catch while gulls dive nearby, and back on shore people wait for that morning light to come to them.

And, of course, like some trite metaphor just waiting to pounce, I stood at the end of the pier and realized: It’s not the sun I’m trying to find, it’s something else that’s on my mind. I just need a little space and time to breakaway.

Yesterday I walked out on the 14th Street pier and stopped in Ocean Eddies. It was the dive I would frequent the summers during college. Back then the bar money was kept in a box and the register was a big brown monster. There was no a/c and the windows had to stay open in the oppressively humid night, but the live bands would wake up guests at the hotel I managed next door, so I had a deal with Eddie: I’d not call the cops on him and he quit the music by 1. Yesterday I paid for a drink and noted the same wood slat floors, but now there is a  deck. It felt good to have a drink above the sand, though thirty-five years ago the beach wasn’t as wide and more often than not the tide was just feet below the floor boards. 

I was nineteen when I got the job at the Sandcastle Hotel at 14th Street on the beach. The owner, Johnny Vakos, and I got along, and the manager, Jack, had a heart attack about a month after I started, so John made me manager. I stayed that way for four summers, May until August, working all shifts, dealing with every character conceivable. Sometimes at night I’d head out to Ocean Eddie’s on the pier behind the hotel and swap stories with other locals over margaritas. Sometimes when I worked the overnight shift, come morning I’d head up to the seventies past all the hotels and sleep on the beach, and later in the day friends would show up and we’d waste away an afternoon swimming and listening to music. At night we’d all head to Sondra’s Restaurant or the Jewish Mother or Fantastic Fenwick’s Flying Food Factory to listen to our friend Jonmark Stone play guitar. But come the following morning I was back at the beach, working the desk, talking to Niki the bike rental girl, bs-ing with guests about where to eat or the weather or surf conditions. I only have to think about those days and I can smell the salt air.

That part of my life stayed in my blood and every once in a while it passes through my heart and becomes real again. We all have periods of long ago like that. For me it’s probably this place because I’ve almost always lived near the ocean, or maybe it’s because our brains and bodies and this planet are all about seventy percent water and I simply feel the tug of the tide. Perhaps I just like the sound of the surf. But I’ve not come upon many places in my travels which simply don’t change. Old neighborhoods seem smaller, the trees suffocate the once open fields, and old hangouts usually have new crowds, or shut down, weeds pushing through parking lot pavement, some window broken and boarded near the rusted dumpster.

The rest of nature can show signs of change as well. Forests give way to fires, or new growth simply pushes out old oaks changing the landscape; rivers erode at the banks, and while the mountains can retain their majesty, trails and roads can rip small scars across the land, or some new cabin is built whose windows catch the sun and the glare flickers across the valley.

But I can stand on the sand behind the pier and know what i’m going to see. Certainly some days are rougher than others, and in winter a white foam can gather at the break point, but it is the same as it ever has been. The strength of a wave is like no other natural force on earth. Just to stand in the surf waist deep is a lesson in mobility and resistance no physics class could replicate. At some point you give in and fall back or dive forward, and feel that dark, salty, always slightly cool water sweep across every aspect of your body.

And when you look out across the vastness of nothing but blue water, steel blue, metallic greenish slate blue water, you are looking out at exactly what John Smith saw when he first landed a mile and half up the beach four hundred years ago. It is what Powhatan saw, and whatever wandering seaman or viking or ancient civilization saw, exactly the same. Maybe rougher, maybe in the morning perfectly still like glass. Maybe the tide was higher, or so low they could walk out to the scallop beds and pull them up by the load. But it is the same. Exactly.

I can stand here and it might as well be 1979, or ten years earlier and four hundred miles further north, on the beaches of Long Island. It simply makes sense. We all need a place to go that makes sense. 

I read once that we all should discover a “third place.” We have home, which comes with it certain responsibilities and routines. We have work with its predictable patterns of give and take. But we need a third place that is neither, that is ours to claim how we want, and gather with friends, or be alone, and let our stresses and expectations dilute in the deluge of “somewhere else.” For many it is a bar, or a coffee shop, or a park or a gym. For me, back then, I thought it was Ocean Eddies where I learned more about people than I ever cared to know. But it wasn’t; it was outside, on the sand, looking out toward Portugal, toward Spain, and Africa. Looking up the coast toward the Island and wondering if anyone I used to know was looking south. 

We all need a third place. We all have somewhere that gets in our blood. 

This Monday, May 23rd, is my dad’s birthday. He would have been ninety-one. A few years ago I wrote a trilogy about Dad which remains some of my favorite writing and memories. This is Part Two of the Trilogy originally published in Kestrel Journal, with part three later picked up for a Norton Anthology.

———————-

Sons

“Big Al” came in the Harris House Pub by eleven-thirty every morning for a few Buds and a pack of cigarettes. He couldn’t see well, and in fact worked at a nearby diner whose proceeds provided aid to the blind. He’d sit at the bar and talk about his daughter and how she doesn’t call anymore, and about his son who he hasn’t seen since he was young, who told him once, “I’m not spending my days dogging it for my blind dad.” Al was truly a big man and moved slowly. He’d gaze with difficulty across the thickest glasses I’ve ever seen, and walk the snowy streets with his hand touching the wall. He’d pause every once in a while and wait and then continue, eventually swinging open the old door to the Harris House to sit on the same stool closest to the door, order his Bud and begin the questioning.

“Who played in the first world series? Who won?”

I’d laugh and make a few drinks for other customers then wander into the back. When I returned with ice for the bin I’d say, “Pittsburgh versus Boston, 1903, and Boston won …um…five to three!”

“Excellent, Bob, here’s another quarter,” he’d say and laugh, saying to his friend Kenny at the next stool how I was a walking encyclopedia of baseball facts.

“Who struck out more batters in his career than anyone else?”

I’d return with hot food from the kitchen for a customer. “Too easy, Al, I grew up watching him when he was with the Mets! Nolan Ryan!”

Another quarter hit the bar.

My co-worker Sandy figured I had a baseball encyclopedia in the back but I told her I didn’t.

“When was the first professional baseball league formed?”

I’d roll out a keg, and while tapping it tell him, slowly in a state of recollection, “1871.”

Two bits more.

Kenny followed me to the kitchen after one of Al’s questions and heard me on the phone: “Hey, highest batting average. Cobb? What was it? 367—got it, talk to you soon.” I turned and he laughed. “Some hotline?” he asked. “Dad,” I told him.

“Cobb. 367,” I said, placing another beer on the counter without charging him. Al never lost a dime.

Back before cell phones, when payphones were standard, my father had an 800 number at his desk, and wherever I traveled in the United States I could call him for free—from the Arizona/Mexican border, from Maine, from every dusty state in between. I’d tell him where I was and how life was progressing, and he’d tell me what was new with him, my mom, and life in general in Virginia Beach. A certain peace permeated the air back then, a silent sense of security until the next payphone in the next state.

Dad’s hearing, of course, has grown weak, and he rarely talks on the phone. He watches the games with subtitles on, but they don’t always keep up with the announcers rapid-paced reporting. It’s harder to see the score box on the television and sometimes keeping track of what’s going on is frustrating. When that happens he tells me about his youth in Brooklyn, the Branch Rickey days of the Dodgers, and going to Ebbett’s Field with his friends or his father. He still knows the players’ names, the records, the managing staff and where they went after the Dodgers went to California. He asks me to read the time so he can watch the weather, unless the Mets are playing, and David Wright is on deck, and while the World Series may not be in the cards for the home team this year, Dad takes each game one at a time.

We’re into extra innings now, breaking records just by marking time. I loved going to games with him in New York, or watching New York games with him on television in Virginia, like I loved calling him up for facts.

Through it all, though, baseball had nothing to do with it.

 

I miss you Dad.

 

 

 

 

I cleaned out some old boxes in my office last week and found an old postcard from Australia. Then I remembered where it came from:

Student comes to see me. He says he can’t handle the pressure of school. I tell him I think he’s a good student and he says yes, he can do the work, he just can’t stand it. He hates it, he says. He gets bored fast. It’s a good conversation, honest. Had we been somewhere else we would have talked over beers. He looks at his watch and says he has to work in a few hours and sighs. He runs his own roofing company but hates that too. He has six grand invested in equipment and no help and he just dreads doing the work now. He says he’s at some fork in the road, two paths that look the same so he’s frozen, easier to just stay put. He gets quiet and stares at a photograph on my wall of a village in Africa. Looks nice he says, like he wants to say anything to forget what he’s really thinking about. Then he remembers and sighs again. He’s quiet for some time and I find myself drifting.

I worked at a bar. No bills but good money and mindless work; the kind of work where if you don’t think too much about what you’re doing, you can keep on smiling. I know I spent a few years there but it seems like it was always winter, all grey and bone-cold. One morning I woke on a bench near a lake in a park and didn’t know how I got there. I had to work a few hours later but never made it. I drained my accounts, stuck a little aside, then bought a ticket to Africa. Turns out changing my life, kicking my own ass out of the same ‘ol same ‘ol, was as easy as jumping off a cliff knowing you’re either going to land on your feet or learn how to fly. I landed on my feet and boring disappeared from my life.

But this student has trouble talking about it, so I talk: I get that feeling in my chest too, I say. Tight, constricting, difficulty breathing. You know what I’m talking about. It’s the sense that something needs to change. It’s the Philosophy class with five minutes left of three hours and the prof starts another chapter because there are still five minutes left; it’s the meeting you can’t tolerate but you’re in a row of seats with too many people on both sides so you can’t leave; it’s that this-homily-is-way-too-long feeling. It’s the feeling you’re just one day away from something else, but then that day comes and you find yourself one day away from something. It’s the Whitman poem about astronomy; the wide awake at three am feeling and you can’t move so you stare at the alarm clock. Exactly, he says. I’m always staring at the clock, he says. I’d love to know what you’d do, he says.

I tell him about a bar somewhere I didn’t belong. I remember working and then not working but I don’t remember what happened between the two. I just recall waking up one day in the peace-of-mind of another world, centuries away from being behind bars; like I could finally breathe on my own. I remember dreading the moment between what was and what was next so I just kept pouring drinks, but then one day I didn’t. He looked at me like I was looking in a mirror. Then he says he’s going to work and he leaves. 

Six months later he sends me a postcard from Australia. Don’t know when I’ll be back, it says. When I am, let’s get some beers and talk. I look forward to it but, of course, way leads on to way, and I doubt he ever came back.

I had to fill out an online form for a writer’s conference and I knew all the answers about my identity but one.

Gender.

Okay, hold on: I know I’m “male.” Or at least I thought so. The anatomy suggests so, as does my need to shave daily, my voice, and my bend towards dark beer.

But the form had a drop down menu, and when I hit the little arrow to expose what I thought would be a binary choice, male or female, with a possible third entry of some form of Trans, I found these eleven options:

Male

Female

Agender

Adrogenous

Bigender

Cisgender

Gender fluid

Intersex

Transsexual

Transgender

A gender not identified here

I had to look up some of them.

The first two along with Transgender and Transsexual all seem obvious, though one might argue that if a Male or Female does trans to the other, once the trans is done they are officially the other gender. Transsexual and Transgender, like Male and Female, are well established terms, one being the operation is complete, the other the “identification” is complete but the packaging is original. For the latter Trans option, I asked myself if I identify more with the other “standard” gender—Female—than I do my birth gender, Male. If the answer had been yes, then I’d have checked Transgender. That was an easy one, though it almost sent me searching for a bathroom.

Agender totally baffled me. Bigender I understood, particularly if I had been born with a mixture of gender identifiers (see Intersex below), or I never quite Transed all the way and am still walking the line between genders—bigender it is. But agender—having no gender—doesn’t make sense to me. I suppose if I simply couldn’t identify with either (as opposed to having tendencies to identify with both), I’d be absent gender—agender. But then I still feel like I would have to make some call in the matter. At the end of the day I really do have to pee, and at some point I need to commit. Bigender implies I can use either bathroom, of course. But agender leaves me hanging. I have nothing on that one.

Adrogenous was easy; I am of the age to well remember “Adrogenous Pat” of Saturday Night Live. In this case I am drawn toward parallels with bigender, though now I think this might better explain agender. The middle ground here gets murky. Bigender, agender, and adrogenous all imply similar non-committal answers to the initial question. Still, I do not think they’re synonyms. In fact, agender and bigender might be precise opposites with the same outcome. One identifies with neither and the other both, leaving both in a holding pattern when it comes to decision making. Just writing that makes me feel uninformed, so my confusion could very likely be lack of experience and information more than lack of clarity on the part of the form. This is a writer’s conference, after all.

Cisgender is crystal clear. Cisgender is when I solidly identify with my birth gender. No freaking pink paint or rainbows in my room, Bucko. This is where the answer to the initial question is not “Male” but “you’re damn right I’m male, asshole.”

Gender fluid makes me uncomfortable. As such, it basically means at any given moment I can move unseen between the two dominant genders, which is very different from transgender where the move is deliberate and usually one-way. There is a breed of sandpiper here on the east coast that is gender fluid. I am not belittling people who are as well. I just don’t know of any but I have seen the sandpipers, so relax.

Intersex is less confusing than it seems. It feels a lot like gender fluid but it turns out this is when someone is a hermaphrodite—born very clearly with both dominant gender organs apparent. I figure by the time someone is old enough to fill out a form for a writer’s conference and has to choose this option, he/she has already transitioned, or at least might probably check the bigender box, though bigender implies “identity” whereas intersex is a physical reality. It is possible to be intersex but completely identify with only one of the two, making an altogether new, hyphenated category.

What makes my mind wander, however, is gender not identified here. In coming up with that option, wouldn’t the list creators had to have at least entertained at least one other, or is that option to leave the door open for some combination not yet considered? They may have been thinking about the US Navy vet who went through an operation to become like a tiger. He grew whiskers and had a mechanical tail surgically implanted. Check transfeline if you fall into this category.

For the record, I have friends in nearly every one of these categories, and they can share a bathroom with me anytime. I’m going to have a Guinness Stout and finish the application.

 

Back to this wilderness.

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

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

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

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

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

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

But these trees weren’t here a century ago and I sat on my porch and wondered if there had been other trees or if this land was barren, or was it used by the Powhatans, or was it home to some former slave family, or just a dumping ground. Evidence is scarce, buried beneath the roots of this small forest.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

How long is six months? Well, obviously, logically speaking it is simple math. But we have philosophy to consider, and that just messes everything up.

Six months is, in this case, 182 days, or 4368 hours. I can prove this; I counted. But it is not how I have perceived these six months. When a child moves from one year to eighteen months old, we are excited by the new date: “He is eighteen months old today!” we exclaim to questioning gawkers. But at fifty-five I don’t say, “Well, actually I’m fifty-five and a half today.” Six months means so much more on the edges of life than it does in the middle.

When I am entirely in the moment–focused and engaged–time is irrelevant. I couldn’t tell you if an hour passed or a week. It is only when I think about it that the laws of relativity engage. I would like a life where I remain completely in each moment. My “String Theory” is to have a string of those moments, from cradle to grave. If you think about  it, though, you can’t do it. Perception is an unfriendly conspirator in linear time.

It was a Wednesday night, six months ago, about eight thirty, and I just had finished teaching creative writing. The winter which passed since that Wednesday seemed to be milder than previous years. There were some cold days, and I remember a stretch in January when we needed to let the faucet drip upstairs, but mostly it was fine, the ground never too frozen.

And now looking around, it occurs to me the trees are not much different now than they were six months ago, the borders of two seasons, one going and one coming back, separated by mostly bare branches and plowed fields. Even the fairways at the golf course are the same half-brown, half-green as back then; this time the green is on the way in instead of on the way out, and life is returning in the rough. October and April are first cousins.

Six months in my professional world is more than one entire semester, which collegiately is akin to a completed project. We start, we meet everyone, we develop relationships, we advise and have meetings, grade and test, encourage and withdraw, come to a climax of exams and projects culminating in final grades and, for some, graduation; and then we start again—all within six months.

Excuse me for this but I “wikied” Time. Here’s what it said: “Time is the indefinite continued progression of existence and events that occur in apparently irreversible succession from the past through the present to the future.”

“Apparently.”

As usual, Wikipedia is only partly right. That’s a fine explanation of linear time. Thanks. But it doesn’t account for emotion or recollection. I’m talking about perception. I learned much about our perception of time  just by spending some with my father. A round of golf, for instance, went much faster when we played well than when we didn’t. Watching  baseball games on television wasn’t unlike being held hostage; they seemed to last so long. But when we showed up at Shea, the game passed in minutes. And two fingers of Scotch can somehow simultaneously last forever and disappear without noticing. It all depends, and that is what’s cool about time–it is much less scientific than it appears.

“All our sweetest hours fly fastest,” wrote Virgil. No kidding.

I didn’t see someone for twenty-three years and then one day I did, and it was as if no time at all had passed. This morning I spoke to a colleague and I thought I aged a decade just standing there. Perception.

If someone gives up cigarettes or alcohol for six months, it is a major achievement.

If someone has a new job for six months he or she is still suspect.

And in love: “They only knew each other six months” is diametrically opposed to “You mean you’ve not spoken for six months?!”

Six months isn’t always six months. Sometimes measurement is pointless.

The Mets won the National League pennant that night, 182 days ago, that Wednesday. Six months later we are well into the opening month of the baseball season, which six months from now will be over and we will have a new World Series champion. The half year to the next World Series seems so much further away than the six months since the last one, or is that just me?

It was 76 degrees that day with an evening low of 45. Fall was holding off as long as possible. I taught creative writing that night, finishing about eight-thirty.

A student commented it was too early to end, and I agreed, then left.

A doctor I know said the passing of time is also relative to experience. For an elderly person whose schedule has changed drastically due to retirement, less sleep, fewer or more frequent visits from friends or family, the perception of time fluctuates. If someone needs to use the bathroom more often, to that person it is not understood to be more frequent but instead the “time between trips to the bathroom” passed so much faster. If someone’s eyesight is diminishing along with slower brain function, it isn’t the eyes that have trouble with twilight, but how much faster night arrived than it used to.

Add to that the absolute reality that when we miss someone it seems so much longer since we have seen him. It is all perception. That’s what sucks about time: as an objective process it is relatively persistent and dependable. Relentless, in fact. I can tell you the definitive truth about how long it will take for six months to pass. But I can’t begin to measure what it will feel like.

Why does six months from now seem so much further away than six months ago? I suppose time recedes quicker than it approaches. Anticipation has a lot to do with that, and regret. They so work against each other. “I wish I could have” implies something happened, still fresh and recent, and we missed the chance to say or do or try something. However, “I can’t wait until” implies some event seems like it will never get here.

Maybe time isn’t linear after all. We can manipulate time by recalling just the right moment, smelling some fragrance, hearing the right song—they bring us right back, right there. You can’t slap that into an equation. Measuring how we experience time means allowing for some x-factor, be it love, or fear, or loss, which renders the numbers pointless.

Six months? It was yesterday. It was a lifetime ago.

“The secret of life is enjoying the passing of time” –James Taylor

 

 

I owned an ’85 burgundy, 5-speed, fuel-injected, three-door, turbo charged Dodge Lancer. We called it the POS. It was the car I used to bring garbage to the dump, carry bricks and wood, and haul crap without caring. I kept it clean but didn’t worry if it wasn’t. We’d find driftwood and toss it in the back, sand and shells and all. We spent countless hours driving to the beach, the ice cream parlor, the auto repair shop. My son practically grew up in that car, learned music from its cassette deck, held up the felt on the falling roof so I could see where we were going. I drove him to school in that thing well into third grade.

We all remember our cars.

My first was my dad’s ’72 Nova, which wasn’t mine but I racked up the miles on it for him as good sons do. My first car I drove when I lived on my own was a 1980 light blue, Chevy Monza. That little thing and I saw the United States a few times, smuggled blankets out of Mexico and Molson’s out of Canada. We spun out down an icy hillside in Massachusetts and I ended up junking it in Pennsylvania when the engine blew out. I was driving all of a friend’s belongings from my house to her mom’s when that happened. I think that’s when I started understanding metaphor. In fact, to this day metaphor drives my writing life. It comes from cars.

My favorite was a red Jeep Cherokee five speed. I abused that car the way jeeps should be abused, and it lasted far longer than I treated it. It is the car I think of when I hear Paul Simon singing, “If more of my homes had been more like my cars, I probably wouldn’t have traveled so far.” Those were good times, windows open, radio blasting. There was the time I was stranded in the desert with a dead battery a hundred miles from a tree. Or when for several years the gas gauge on the Jeep was backwards. In forty years I went from fitting everything I own in the trunk to needing a U-Haul just to go away for the weekend. I can think of very few objects I’ve owned that symbolized “freedom” more than my cars.

One day when Michael was small and we were in the POS we drove over a pothole at a sub shop parking lot. The chassis slammed hard and made a crumbling sound like folding metal. I tried to back up and it refused. A friend pushed me out and I drove home thinking whatever was wrong righted itself.

No. In fact, I couldn’t go backwards for the next eighteen months.

I learned to look for a pull through. I’d park far away at the mall, grocery stores or work. I learned to anticipate what was next so as not to corner myself, or worse, find myself with my face against the wall. I learned patience. Only three times in a year and a half I found myself trapped. The first was at Old Dominion University when arriving for a night class and the parking lot was full save one spot against a pole. I paused and asked my friend if he wanted to push me in then or push me out later.

I learned what roads I couldn’t turn down, what tight situations might be waiting, when to find a slope to roll back down, when to walk. A cop once pulled me over for pushing a yellow light. He let me go but stood and waited for me to leave first, but I had stopped in front of a sign and for the second time I couldn’t back up when I needed to. He waited. I waited. Finally, I said, “Wow Officer, my heart is still racing and I’m tired. I think I’ll sit here a minute and compose myself.” He left.

It was after the third time that I junked the car—excuse me—donated it to Good Will. I had to get it inspected and went to a shop where I know the mechanic, Tuna. Honest to God his name is Tuna. I didn’t want to tell Tuna about my inability to back up, obviously, since I refused to buy a new transmission, and I realized I was screwed when he pointed me into the one car bay with no way out but back.

In Virginia, an inspector’s first task is to scrape the old sticker off the windshield, so while he scraped I called, “Hey Tuna, it’s the last day of the month so I know you’ll be swamped, go ahead and put the lights on while you’re in there.”

“Good idea, Bob!”

I called out. “Okay. Brakes? Good. Left signal? Good. Right signal? Good,” and found myself doing my own state inspection. “Reverse” No white lights lit up, of course. “Good!” We finished that part and he finished the rest, put on a new sticker and asked for ten dollars. I gave him a twenty and said, “Tuna, I need a five, four ones, three quarters, two dimes, and five pennies.”

“Sure Bob,” he said and headed to the store in the front of the shop. When the shop door slammed I got in the car, threw it in neutral, got out, heaved it over the red tire lifts onto the gravel lot, jumped on the brakes until the POS was far enough back to go forward. Tuna came out and I held my side gasping for breath. “You must be in a hurry!” he said handing me my change. I drove off wondering what was next.

Seems like back then I was always wondering what was next.

The following day I drove Michael to school. We listened to music while he held up the roof. He grabbed his bag, got out and waved as I rolled forward, moving on, and realized the truth is we rarely have a reason to go backwards anyway.