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

Too young. So many artists die too young:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Me, I’m still writing about dead artists.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

———

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

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

When I heard the learn’d astronomer,

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

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

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

How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,

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

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

Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

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

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

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

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

“Yeah I gotta get rid of my snares.”

“Ain’t using them?”

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

“Sheeeet.”

“Yeah.”

“Dang.”

“Uhuh.”

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

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

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

“Sheeet.”

“Yeah.”

“Ain’t cheap I’m betting you.”

“Forty or so.”

“Ain’t bad. I’ll have to get some.”

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

To the other guy:

“You ready for deer?”

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

“Sheeet.”

“Can’t wait to go huntin.”

“Yeah, me too.”

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

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

 

“The Weather is Here, I wish you were Beautiful” –j buffett

Maybe (maybe) the most universal effective aspect of life is weather. It concerns every person who wakes and must go outside, and even those who remain cloistered. It determines what we wear, how we travel, what grows and can be harvested, what we eat, our health, our heating bills, flight schedules, road conditions, skin cancer, landscaping, pizza delivery, getting to work, to school, to the stores to buy food, to our friends and family in need. To be clear—it is everywhere, this weather.

No metaphors here. No convoluted comparisons. Just weather.

I spend the vast majority of my time outside. I absolutely love to walk in the rain. Part of that is I know when I’m done I can dry off, change my clothes and make some tea. It is the same with snow. The cold tightness of my skin on a blustery winter day feels oddly healthy, as does the blistering sun on my neck in August. I love wearing my flip flops, shorts, a t-shirt and sweating profusely as the hours pass well into the afternoon while walking in the sun, listening to nature react. Equally, I’m completely engaged when I have to put on three shirts, a hoodie, sweat pants and two pairs of socks just to be able to go for a walk during which I might see deer, cardinals, and various other life scooting around for something to eat while I am engulfed in the deafening silence of the snow. I’ll cover the porch rail with seed and stay dressed and sit on the porch. Those birds don’t care that I’m a foot away; they stay, they brave my presence. Only in winter.

Then I go back inside and change into warm sweatpants and have tea. See, it works for me; it doesn’t work if you have no home. A little perspective there. Every time I walk in extreme weather I think about someone who might be in the streets of some cold place, or blistering hot place, and I remind myself it is more than bearable for a little while until I make the choice some can’t—to get out of the weather.

“Come in from the cold,” people say. “No I can’t it is pouring out,” people say. “Wow, it is just too damn hot,” people say. They’re not speaking for me. I like to spend as much time as possible immersed in the unbearably brilliant sensual joy of life. That includes rainy days.  

Hurricane Matthew is approaching the Florida coast and predictions show it will go ashore in just a few hours. I worry about my friends there, and I think about one of my homes away from home, St Augustine. It seems at this moment the worst of this storm will not make it as far north as my house, not like Isabel did, and others. But maybe (maybe) it is too soon to tell. There are times the weather seems not so much part of nature as it is simply nature having a bad spell. Blizzards, tornadoes, drought; these to me are nature’s way of hemorrhaging.

Van Gogh wrote, “There is peace even in the storm.” I understand that. When it rains hard, or the wind is fierce and I can hear branches snap, as long as I am safe it all simply reminds me I am alive to experience this weather, this turn of currents, this atmospheric screwball, and I feel somehow calmer and more alive. Of course I love the perfect weather, the still day with low humidity and pleasant sunshine. But equally, to experience the rain on my face, getting drenched, reaching out and being a part of the earth and nature instead of it simply being something “around” me or something “outside,” floods my senses and elevates my awareness to keep everything else in perspective.

Who among us during the calm days doesn’t hope for some metaphoric lottery win, some breakthrough in life to make us feel like there is something more to grab on to? And then severe weather arrives and we shift our thoughts and pray no one gets hurt and our property is spared, and above all else that we come out of it alive. When some system swirls off the African coast creeps its way up the Saffir-Simpson Scale, it throws our lives into a whirlwind of measuring value and understanding perspective to discover what is essential. Hell, just a little rain should do the same thing. Putting on warm clothes and having tea is absolutely more enjoyable when doing so is preceded by a good drenching.

The weather is constantly changing, and so are we. Rachel Carson believed that a rainy day was the perfect time to walk in the woods. Of course. And “the best thing to do when it is raining,” Longfellow tells us, “is to let it rain.”

I talked about Spain at the Regina A. Quick Center for the Arts at St Bonaventure University Wednesday night. Normally, I do readings of my work. But last night I talked about the pilgrimage I walked with my twenty-one-year old son, and the places we saw, the chapels and mountains, the people we met. I’ve done this before in various venues, but never at my alma mater.

There was the exciting and predictable chance to be back home, and I didn’t miss the opportunity to point out how my own pilgrimage began in 1979 in Devereux Hall, just a few dozen feet from the auditorium. Some old friends showed up whom I haven’t seen since graduation, and some whom I’ve seen quite consistently since. But last night we realized just how many years have passed. We all are well along our journeys. 

There was some consistency. I saw Rula who traveled to Russia with me and other friends a few years ago. I saw the good friars at Mt. Irenaeus, including Fr Dan who has been an anchor for three dozen years. Renee and I ate at the Beef and Barrel, of course, as we did thirty five years ago before heading to Arizona. I saw Fr. Kevin, and went to dinner with Sean, a kindred spirit who understands how to listen and how to laugh. I saw Liz. Mikel. Bobby. And Rick—good friend and publisher, as well as excellent writer, who made the pilgrimage from West Virginia since he wasn’t far, comparatively speaking.

I can’t talk too much about what has changed. That students walk around with phones, so spontaneity seems rare; that there are endless fast food joints; that “sponsorship” signs are abundant; that there is a Starbucks on campus. I did notice, however, the view to “Merton’s Heart” is the same. At some point while having coffee with Sean, we noticed how empty campus was, even between classes, and I wondered if the students don’t hang out so much anymore, sitting under trees or throwing a football as was common years ago. It was, after all, an absolutely beautiful fall day. 

My journey since I was a student is nearly impossible to communicate. In fact I’ve written volumes about my life in books and articles yet haven’t scratched the surface of  what happened during the years since I lived here. When I think of my life back then, I remember innocence and hope, much like Michael’s and my innocence and hope while standing in Saint Jean at the start of the Camino. As the pilgrimage continued, new experiences contributed to the narrative, and the innocence slowly slipped away, but never the hope. The small village of Saint Jean became little more than a gorgeous village to begin from and which I look forward to seeing again, but it holds nothing on the deep satisfaction gained on the journey itself.

Yesterday I stood near the Center for the Arts about to talk to the audience surrounded by my son’s brilliant artwork, and I looked up at Devereux Hall where I lived when I was nineteen-years-old, and for a moment I glanced at a young man looking back at me. I swear I almost called out to him across the quad, across the ages, the innocence on his face so precious and frightening, to tell him I promise it is going to be okay. I immediately knew, however, he wouldn’t listen. And it’s just as well. We have to find our own way. And we will, so long as we keep hope. I still wanted to quickly warn him about the girl on the second floor of Francis Hall, but all lessons must be learned on our own. 

I walked around for a long time on roads and pathways so familiar in my youth. In that aspect nothing changed and I made my way across the bridge into the village of Allegany then back and well into Olean and was overwhelmed by the thought that  I’ve already done this; I’ve already walked this way. I wanted to find new roads but there weren’t any around here–not for me anyway; maybe for some newbie nineteen year old. I guess a few things the Camino taught me well is to keep going forward and only bring along what is necessary–like those people who made all of these journeys so worthwhile. My heart does not remain in the Enchanted Mountains; it is with people like Liz and Sean, Rula and Renee, and those who “see where you are, but they know where you’ve been.”

Harry Chapin had it right when I was doing coffeehouses thirty-five years ago, and it is still relevant today: All my life’s a circle. No straight lines make up my life–all my roads have bends. With no clear cut beginnings, but so far no dead ends.

Buen Camino.

 

It’s been raining for a few days now; almost four inches last night alone. Roads throughout the area are flooded and creeks and rivers have swelled well beyond their banks. Today schools throughout the area are closed because of impassable roads, and classes at the college are only half-filled.

I went to the oceanfront and walked as usual, though no one else was around. The waves were choppy but the tide wasn’t that high, and the wind was strong, though not as fierce as I’ve found before.

There is something so cleansing about walking in the rain. It keeps my mind almost entirely in the moment, and though by the end of a half dozen miles I’m soaked as if I dove in the Atlantic, it doesn’t bother me so much since I know I can change my clothes, or at the very least find a place to dry off.

Still, I prefer the sun and warmth, but I don’t mind the rain. There’s something about wet weather which makes me feel alive. It is the visceral, it is the texture of life we normally don’t brush against. Usually weather is something “above us” or “out there” or even if we are out on a fine autumn day, it is something somehow balanced so that we barely notice. Rain, though, a heavy rain with a slight tropical wind swirling back down from the northeast, makes its presence known. I love it.

When I was very young we lived in a house with a side patio surrounded by hedges and covered by a green canvas awning. I loved sitting at the picnic table on the patio when it rained and listening to the sounds. It is the same camping. After high school my friend Mike and I went camping in the mountains of Virginia and one day the rain was torrential. I’ll never forget it. We found things to do like visit the most obscure caverns in the east, but mostly we sat inside the canvas tent, listening to the rain and writing a letter to Jimmy Carter. It passed the time.

I am sure my most memorable rainy day was one spent with my son in Spain. We walked east on our way back to Santiago from Fisterra on the Atlantic, and there was a long, steady, heavy rain the entire hike. The mist was heavy and while there were supposed to be scenic cliffs and vistas to our right as we walked, we couldn’t see past the trees. At one muddy incline we followed a path to the left which led to an old chapel and stood in a bandstand-type structure in the back. It was the most beautiful sight, looking out at the chapel in the mist as if it was a thousand years ago or a thousand from now. We were soaked to the skin, but it felt fine; we didn’t mind. We were there, understanding the absolute sense of “now.” Rain can do that.

In 1983 I was in Tucson for the floods. Renee and I and Tom and a few others headed to the San Rillito River which had been used for kids baseball games just a few days earlier and watched an A-frame house drop off the cliff as the mud was torn away from raging waters. The house flipped and floated downstream toward Mexico. Even Route 19 South to Nogales was wiped out in one direction from the floods, which came from the heavy rains. It never ceases to amaze me how individual droplets of rain are harmless, but gathered together they are the number one cause of weather-related deaths. It is amazing and terrifying what the singular can do when bonded to others with a common goal—in this case just, you know, falling and saturating the ground.

The least rainy place on earth is Antarctica. Lloro, Colorado is the rainiest with 534 inches a year. Raindrops look more like chocolate chips than teardrops. Rain falls at about 18 to 22 miles per hour, no matter how “torrential” you think it is—it isn’t falling faster or harder, just denser. (See, sometimes you learn something from a blog)

In college I once borrowed a Franciscan friar’s robe for a Halloween party and went as a priest. With the hood up on the rainy walk home to my off-campus apartment about a mile away, no less than a dozen cars stopped to offer me a ride. I simply blessed them and kept walking.

It doesn’t seem to rain as much as it used to growing up. I used to love rainy Saturday afternoons when I was young, and we’d hang out in the den and watch old westerns or old movies. I thought those days would never end. Like that rain, the rain today reminds me that it had been sunny and isn’t now. It is a slight push toward melancholy, it hints at appreciation of things past. I welcome the rain so that I will not take for granted the sun. It is like fasting, a rainy day. It forces me to spend an entire day not in the sun, somehow allowing my senses to breathe.

“Some people walk in the rain. Others just get wet.” –Roger Miller

I have a problem: I am having trouble writing about beauty.

This frustration all comes from failed attempts to write about the scenery in northern Spain and eastern Siberia, my two latest locales for my current work. I envy photographers who can wait for just the right light and mesmerize us with panoramic views of anywhere. I suppose, though, even they would say the same; that when they look at their photographs they just shake their heads and admit, “No. Close, sure, but this isn’t what it was like.”

Landscape artists (apologies to Cole Young who hated that term) as well, such as Young and Mikel Wintermantel and Thomas Cole and others, might admit this gap between what they see and what they create, though I’ve been to the places some of these artists captured and can confidently say they nailed it.

The irony, though, is I surround myself with beauty. In my house are artifacts from various travels: A small shell from Spain, icons from Russia, a musical instrument from Africa, and more. On the walls is the inspiring artwork from my son, Michael, from our travels together; a half dozen or so Mikel Wintermantel paintings which calm me, energize me, remind me of where so much of my soul resides in western New York; and other beautiful artwork. There’s the glass work by artisan and friend John Almaguer, the pottery of NY and Arizona compatriot Tom Schell, and on the shelves books by friends too many to count. I read them sometimes—I read about the ‘60’s in Philadelphia, or the things they carried in Vietnam, or growing up in the Bronx, or the floods of North Dakota, and I am mesmerized by beautiful prose and poetry; I am transfixed as writing is apt to do when it is that good.

In my office, too, I have taken the time to insure I am not cut off from that beauty for which we should be alive. I have Michael’s photos overlooking the Atlantic in Spain and others on the wall for me to fall into, and pictures by my Russian friend Valentine. When I look at those photos I laugh and remember how out of touch with reality he is, and how in touch with beauty he has always remained. He is legitimately crazy and figured out how to make a living at it. That’s beauty.

Also in my office is a small statue of St James the Greater as a pilgrim on horseback Michael bought for me at the cathedral in Santiago. There is artwork from friends in various places. A monkey clock from Kay. Pottery from St Augustine (the place not the person). A Cole Young painting which to look at immediately places me in his studio listening to his rant, listening to Van Morrison. I can smell paint.

Outside, however, the beauty has always escaped my writing. I think because that scenery is so obvious, such the standard example of what is recognized as “beautiful.” The ocean this morning was especially calm, and more dolphins swam by than I’ve seen in some time with pelicans barely above the water, always in a straight line, not a “V” like geese. The sun burned through the few clouds at eight a.m. and it was warm before I was half way down the sand. I rarely try and describe that for the countless scribes who tried and failed in years past. Oh, there were some who knew how to capture the beauty of nature—Muir, Thoreau, of course, Frost, even EB White’s “Here is New York” describes the city in a most enticing way making the skyline as much horizon as the Atlantic.

You’d think with something like eight hundred thousand words at my disposal I’d not have an issue with translating the lush mountains of the Pyrenees. So I find myself instead writing about my inability to write about something. It can be a cruel occupation.

To avoid writing, as we writers are quite apt at doing, I decided to clean out some boxes I moved in here a while back. Also, my file cabinet should be thinned out. Oh, and a few tea mugs look dusty so I need to wash them in the bathroom sink, which isn’t far from the café, so I might as well head over there for something to drink. See, that is how we think. It is absolutely beautiful to watch a writer avoid writing.

But I did empty the box to focus on something other than beauty and found old artifacts from before I began measuring time. A wall rug of seagulls and clouds my sister made for me almost half a century ago; a few mugs my dad bought for me in some of his travels to conventions during the early years; a drawing, scribble really, of the moon Michael did when he came to work with me one night when he was two; a high school yearbook with a picture of my old friend Mike and me doing the morning announcements (a good hour was lost looking through that relic); a key to my house in Wellsville, Pennsylvania, I have kept for all this time; a guitar pick from an old friend; two tootsie rolls.

A note here: the tootsie rolls aren’t garbage. I collected money once outside a grocery store for the Knights of Columbus and we gave away the candy. Michael was just six at the time and we had so much fun that day I believe we both remember the details of every person who came by; at least I do. There is certainly beauty in recollection, much to admire in some degree of melancholy.

I have a dried sunflower, a ton of photographs, and three rolls of undeveloped Kodak film; I have no idea from when or where.

I think the natural instinct when wishing to write about something we find beautiful is to turn to metaphor instead of focusing on detail. We do that in life too, I believe. I know I do. When stress is overwhelming and the days feel like something to “get done” instead of enjoy, it isn’t the “ocean” I need to fix on, but the break of the wave right near my feet and how it chased young sandpipers back and forth with the surf. I shouldn’t write about Siberia, but about that moment our cabin mate Alexander figured out how to say “rain” in English, and he taught us the Russian; and it certainly isn’t possible to write about the Pyrenees, but I can write about the Basque café owner who gave us flag pins and shots of Pacheron and was thrilled beyond description when Michael spoke some of the man’s native tongue.

And so throughout writing, it is the details. I can’t write about how much I miss my father, but I can write about how his face lit up when he sank a long putt; or how I forgot to say just the right thing; or how I never really did like Scotch all that much; or how I’ve lost interest in eating at Mahi Mah’s.

It isn’t difficult at all to write about beauty. The problem then is not recognizing how we are always surrounded by it and never know.

 

I was three when President Kennedy was shot, just a few months older than John-John. I don’t remember the incident at all, nor am I aware of a difference in temperament before and after that fateful day in November of ’63. But I’m told it was distinct, black and white, an absolute clarity in “before and after” references.

I’m told Kennedy came with hope, with promise, with lofty goals like landing a man on the moon and cleaning the earth, the Peace Corps, the hope of peace in general. He was young and so was most of the population as the first wave of baby-boomers came of age. Things were good.

Camelot.

I saw footage only in great retrospect years later. People talked about conspiracy theories, they talked about Vietnam and Civil Rights; and they talked about the subtle differences of expectation and hope before and after November 22^nd, 1963. But all I was ever exposed to was a post-Dallas world. There are newsreels, of course, and stories from older relatives. But there will always be something lacking in the narrative for those of us who didn’t experience life back then. There will always be some subtle element we will never be able to grasp.

***

This Sunday will be the fifteenth anniversary of the terrorist attacks on September 11th, and like I do every single year, I asked my students this week to write a few hundred words about that day: What do you remember? How were your parents that day? When I first did this fourteen years ago, the responses were heartbreaking. As the years went by the paragraphs covered the spectrum from indifference to passionate recollections from military members who had returned from Afghanistan and Iraq. And, predictably, as the years went by the details became less clear, less “involved,” and more repetitive to what they heard from others, from history class.

I gave the assignment yesterday and one of my more ambitious students raised his hand. “Professor. I’m sorry, but I was three when that happened.” The rest of the class nodded in agreement. An image of JFK Jr saluting his father’s passing casket ran through my mind.

I let this reality sink in.

“Then you couldn’t know,” I said.

You couldn’t know that before 911 our thought process was different, more hopeful, absent of impending doom. We still had that absolute conviction that whatever happened to us as individuals and as a nation was still pretty much in our hands. You have no idea that before that day we looked forward to what was next, not fearful of what might happen. Our daily vocabulary was absent of phrases involving extremism, terrorism, anthrax and Fallujah. These concepts were real and among us, but they affected others, were problems for others, were handled by others. Our attitudes of issues concerning Afghanistan and Iraq and terrorism back then were similar to students at this campus today worrying about what was happening to students at another college thousands of miles away. We were peripherally aware of it, that’s all.

But it is all you know. Your daily news intake since then—which involves a plethora of social media outlets not yet invented fifteen years ago, as well as traditional media—is riddled with world events as if the next horrible event will be fifty yards away in the dining hall and you’d better be ready.

It is hard to be positive, isn’t it? It is difficult to find some pathway to hope and prosperity when it seems as if we’re swimming upstream against an inevitable tsunami of a collapsing world.

***

In an age when higher education has once again become more of a world of industrial education, where students expect that the sole purpose of their classes should be to prepare them for employment, where enrollment is plummeting not just because of cost but because of the greater population of teenagers not seeing a point to it, there is a desperate need for the study of philosophy and art.

I can’t think of a better time for educators to emphasize the potential of humanity. But technology is our new curriculum, and students today are convinced it is the sole foundation of whatever they do. But “it has become appallingly obvious,” Einstein said, “that our technology has exceeded our humanity.”

“Intelligence plus character is the goal of a true education,” Martin Luther King, Jr. insisted.

And according to Plato: “The direction in which education starts a man will determine his future in life.”

I cannot teach these people what life was like before terrorism terrified our cities. I can perhaps only describe what it was like to sit at a table at Windows on the World for lunch and enjoy a view absent of fear. I can talk about crossing borders without interrogation, walking family members all the way to the plane for their departure, carrying pretty much anything I wanted on board a flight. I can talk about what wasn’t talked about, places we never heard of.  

I changed their assignment. I asked them to write what they thought was humanity’s greatest strength, most encouraging potential. Again my student raised his hand. “Professor,” he said. “I’m sorry, but can I write about what I remember from fifteen years ago instead?”

                                                                                 (apologies to Hemingway)

At lunch today, I talked to a man at Ocean Eddie’s about our preference for pubs that are dives. The tide came in beneath the floor boards and we sat at separate tables with patio umbrellas on the deck . He drank a draft and some of the head dripped over the side of his glass and onto the table.

He told me about his favorite dive, outside Danville, Virginia. Then he asked about mine. 

“No contest. The Shack.”

There was a bar in the woods on the Gulf of Finland just outside St. Petersburg, Russia, I frequented in the late night early morning hours back in the nineties, but it burned down. It was a small place to drink and sing Gypsy songs and meet people you’d never want mad at you. The windows barely kept out the weather, including a storm blowing off the Baltic one night. It was well after midnight and we ordered a bottle of Georgian Merlot and several plates of shashleek, a Russian shishkabob dish the owner grilled on a hibachi in the sand out back.  A gypsy band I knew showed up, including a guitar player and a violin player and a woman singer I had never met. Hours passed as we sang and drank; I milked one glass of Merlot for hours while others indulged with more energy. There were four of us from America, three musicians, a waitress, the owner and his cat, and one other customer, Alexi, and we sang and drank while some storm from the west intensified.

I tried explain to the man at Ocean Eddie’s what it was like. I watched a surfer wipe out, took a sip of my beer, and described that night: 

“This duck blind of a building sat among birch trees, but that simply made me more aware of the weather, wondering when one might topple through the roof. It was exhilarating, an adrenaline rush that had nothing to do with the wine; it was just being there . It felt dangerous, subversive, but it was just a bar in the woods. Being in Russia just a few years after the coup helped mystify the atmosphere.”

I told him how the band took a break and came to our table and we spoke in broken Russian and English about the storm and how we hoped it wasn’t high tide soon since the water was just a hundred feet away, maybe less. Then the other customer, Alexi, the two hundred eighty pound drunk Russian who hated Americans, started to yell at me like he did the first time I ever met him, the first time I walked in the place a few years earlier. It was as if he never moved. He had mostly kept to himself on my previous visits to the Shack, sometimes talking to me, mostly not, but this night something got under his skin and he yelled at me like he did that first time, “I hate Fucking Americans.” He startled me but he had a drink in front of him and the woman from the gypsy band was sitting with him and told him to quiet down and he did.

But his eyes all night seemed deep and vacant as he kept looking through the window at the storm, and once in awhile when he noticed me watching him he would lean forward and say, “I hate fucking Americans!” But then a sound like the sky opening slammed on the walls and ceiling, and we all ducked, we cringed, and I thought for sure one of the birch trees cracked and was going to kill us all. I went down on the floor with my friends and the gypsy band and Alexi cursed and fell against the back of his booth. He suddenly looked so small, and the thunderclap crashed on us again, this time blowing open the swinging window near Alexi as rain and wind sheered a path across the booth to the other wall. Dima put his violin under his coat and our shasleek flew off the table onto the floor. The shack cat went for it but the wind and rain chased him back under the bar and into his bed.

“I would have gotten the hell out of there. The trees would have scared the crap out of me.”

“I know, right?! but leaving in the dark in the storm in the woods is the only thing that scared me more than being there.” We both drank our beers.

Another flash of light lit up the shack and Alexi was trying to hide under his booth but he was too big, and I watched him, and he looked out the window for some time until the weather calmed, then he looked at me, and with a nod he said, “Horosho. Horosho” which means, “okay. It’s okay.” He looked at me as if to ask me to come sit with him but he didn’t know how. Instead he closed the window and latched it. He nodded to me, “Horosho. Edeesuda.” It’s okay, come here. A few of us gathered and sat at his table, and Dima took out his violin. Alexi smiled at me, looked at the closed window with a stoic face, then turned and smiled again. He looked at the waitress and said “pivo,” beer, and he motioned to us all so she brought us all beer. When she returned she told us she didn’t know what Alexi would do if something happened to the Shack; she had no idea what he would do, that he practically lived there. I asked Alexi if he lived nearby but Alexi just nodded at me and said, “I hate fucking Americans,” and we laughed and toasted each other.

Dima played, then Sasha joined and then the singer, and the beer tasted good. Alexi sat quietly the rest of the night. The storm passed and the sky quieted down.

At Ocean Eddie’s we sat on the pier in the August heat. “Then it burned down. Dima wrote me and told me it burned to the ground and everyone was pretty sure local businessmen who owned a hotel not far did it, but they could never prove it.”

“Places disappear, man. The place in Danville closed up years ago. Hard finding a new one.”

Unfortunately, the distinguishing feature of a “dive” is that it is about to burn down, be condemned, fall apart, or otherwise render itself uninhabitable. I love those places, right before the fall. It is important, then, not to become too attached. 

I thought of the places I frequented that have closed. The Shack, Rasputin’s on the other side of that city, the Blue Door Blues  and Jazz Club in Prague (where the door was brown and they didn’t play either blues or jazz), the old Jewish Mother right here at the beach, and I just read that Sea Gull Pier on the Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel is closing as well, talk about a dive. But the Shack wins for losing. It was both literally and figuratively on the edge of everything. It was the stereotype of some Soviet-era bar in the middle of nowhere, and I always half expected Rasputin himself to wander in. It burned, though, like most of the traditions and purity of Russia. It seems the city is built on ashes. 

He drank more of his beer and then asked, “So where are you going to go after this place is gone?”

“Well, luckily I have other places I like.” I sat quietly for a few minutes and thought of some: Big Sams at the Inlet is a shack, for sure;  There’s the Golden Tiger in Prague which I love; Maria’s Pub in Santiago is my new favorite, the Burton in Allegany. Things burn or get torn down or simply fall apart. It’d be nice if these places were always there for us when we return to them; or for people like Alexi who never leave. I go because I meet the people that way, real ones, with personalities and a severe lack of pretense. Mi Casa Cafe in St Augustine, Yorktown Pub. Some lady’s garage just west of Portomarin, Spain.

“Well I need to find a place. A shame really. I was just getting used to it here.”

He could tell from my face I had no idea what he was talking about.

“I’m guessing you didn’t hear. It was in the papers and the old man in the bait shack told me a few weeks ago. They’re closing it up, tearing it down and rebuilding some steel pier, gift shop, amusement, hotel complex. This is Ocean Eddie’s last season.”

He left and I sat and watched lone surfers working the small waves.

Damn.

Well, this place doesn’t have what it takes to be a shack anyway. Maybe thirty years ago when it was falling apart, but after it was cleaned up and painted, not so much. Ironically it came into its own just in time to tear it down.

No, a dirty, dark shack has to be open late, at least until three. It needs old floor boards and low lighting, it most certainly needs low lighting though bright lights is all one can find these days. It is best if the vast majority of clientele do not speak English and look as if they escaped a gulag. These are the people to talk to. This is where to find honesty.

A dirty, dark shack doesn’t serve drinks with umbrellas and it doesn’t own a blender. Even electricity should be a last resort except for keeping the beer cold. It should serve only a few food items and those should be grilled. A pet is helpful. And just for atmosphere and to pay homage to Hemingway who understood sometimes a person needs a place to go late to sit alone and have a drink, a dirty dark shack should have an old man in the corner; someone who looks like he still has the dust from the road. He should look like he is always just a few hours from where he wants to be. And he should be wearing flip flops. He most definitely should be wearing flip flops.