A friend of mine is a Franciscan priest who remains calm no matter what happens.

We are not alike.

He is compassionate, understanding, patient, and saint-like. He is perfect for his job and does it 24/7; that is, he is one of those rare souls that couldn’t be anything but some sort of man of God. If he gets stuck in traffic, for instance, he keeps it all in perspective. If someone cuts him off, his response remains, “They really must be in a hurry. I hope they’re careful.” Or, “Wow, God bless them and watch over them, they really must be anxious about some appointment.” His is a peaceful soul.

This contrasts directly with my “Use a frigging turn signal, butthead!” approach. When entering a tunnel and the traffic decelerates from sixty to forty, the good Father cares: “Oh, thank our Lord they are all being careful going into this tunnel. It really must be frightening to so many people.” I handle it with my own style: “It’s a tunnel. IT IS A TUNNEL! It is not a brick wall! The Road did NOT shrink! It’s a damn TUNNEL!”

We obviously address frustration differently, which makes me wonder how we ended up this way. Would Monastery-Bob and Professor-priest keep their temperaments in tack? If I lived on a mountain in prayer would I be less likely to want to kill the cashier for not being able to multi-task?

I was like him once, my friend the peaceful priest.

When we met during college we talked a long time about peace and where it comes from. To search for peace in the world is a fruitless act. Even if we find it, it can disappear with war, with stress, with distractions and interruptions. It is like turning to others to find what you want to do with your life; it must come from within. And peace, too, must be a spring, not a shower. I always liked that thought.

I once went to Father’s room and found dozens of people drinking beer and laughing as they told stories about their lives. Afterwards, I said I had a great time and found it strange that I could feel so lost among friends on one day and on another feel so connected and centered. He said, “Bobby—tonight you brought the peace with you.”

Man, he made it sound so simple: Bring the peace with you.

So when some dirtbag student of mine called me an asshole in class, I thought of Father, and how it is never the situation but how we handle it. I could picture him with his wide smile and deep laugh and huge hands on my shoulders telling me I’m going to be just fine. Last week I brought the student into the division office and sat the little bastard’s ass in a chair while I filled out a withdrawal form. Before I could finish the paperwork, however, and before he stopped crying, I decided to give this “peace” thing a shot.

“Are you scared?” He looked at me. “College, I mean, the assignments? Are you worried?”

“I suppose,” he said, calming down.

“Why?”

It took him a long time to answer something other than the moronic, I don’t know. “I’m not a good student. I was never good at school.”

“You get confused?”

“Yeah,” he said, nodding, knowing I hit on his fear.

“Yeah,” I said. “A lot of people do. I know I did. What you might try doing is stepping back a bit. Sit to the side and watch everything from a distance for awhile—get some perspective. Instead of calling me an asshole, ask me some questions.”

“Right,” he said, with not just a little indignation.

Bring the peace, Bob. Bring the peace.

“Sometimes we need to see things from a different point of view.”

He was quiet a long time and I believed I got through to him, and I wondered what he pictured as I recalled sitting in Father’s room listening to stories of scared and lost students like myself still trying to get a handle on our place in the world.

“Wow, thanks for your psycho-babble bullshit, Dude,” he said.

I took a breath, thought of Father, and told the little prick to get out of my site; that Hardees is hiring and someone has to clean the toilets.

It’s a gift, really, knowing one’s place in the world.

I headed home thinking about peace and frustration, fear and anxiety. He’s where he should be, this former student of mine. He’s out in the real world where he can seek out only those challenges he knows he can conquer. He is part of the masses that only face what they’re not afraid of.

Bringing peace to an otherwise hostile environment is a difficult task. Maybe that’s why I, too, often avoid the challenge and wander down country roads, watch the water ebb and flow rather than the anxiety. It’s why I don’t drive during rush hour, avoid fast food restaurants and box store checkout lines. Hell, maybe I’ll just start giving everyone A’s so less people will call me bad names.

Yes. Let there be peace and let it begin with me, Bob the Asshole. I’m going for a walk and I’m bringing my peace with me.

 

 

I fell through the ice on a frozen lake in northern Norway in March of ‘95. It was two in the morning, twenty below, and I followed two friends across the snowy ice toward a road on the other side. I heard the ice crack and I stood still, a green band of aurora borealis bent just above us, and I stood still like Wile E. Coyote—suspended for just a moment listening to the ice crack—and thought, “oh, wow, shit,” and went through.

I landed just about ten inches below the surface on another ice shelf. I stood just deep enough for frigid water to cover and fill my boots about calf-high. I waited for the next crack when Joe turned and we froze in fear of us both plunging into the lake. This wasn’t the first time I’d walked on thin ice, but previous mishaps were mostly metaphorical—pissing off my parents, trying to pass a class, trying to cross borders with contraband. I stood with icy feet; my heart pounded in my chest ready to plunge into my stomach when the ice again cracked. Nothing.

Our friend John turned and laughed. “It’s day melt,” he said, ahead of us by twenty feet, already on the shore. “The surface ice melts a bit each day then freezes at night, but it’s thin. That’s what we were walking on. The second layer you landed on is probably six feet thick.”

“Why didn’t you go through?” I asked, John was six two and not a light man.

“I was first,” he said. “I loosened it for you.”

I sloshed to shore, took off my socks, and stood at the end of a fjord when across a field six moose stood taller than us all. I put my boots back on and watched the moose move toward us. They were bull-like, each one heavier than the three of us combined. The night was still, and the air was calm. To the north lay nothing but wilderness for a thousand miles; the Arctic Circle sat a hundred miles south. This was as close to sacred ground as I ever got. I was soaked in below zero temperatures, green bands of borealis bent above my head, the moose moved toward us, and I never felt so awake, like sleep wasn’t part of the Human idea, like caffeine was a tranquilizer. Awake. The northern lights lingered like they were in water, as if the the sky was submerged and the green bands couldn’t bend faster than the deep blue flow would allow, and we floated between. The moose moved closer. I held my breath. Two leaped just beyond our reach and bounced over the ice with absolute grace.

That moment, right then, will never go away.

I’ve been lucky to have had many such moments—the tram at Lake Baikal in Siberia, just about any day in Spain, the sunrise in Tucson, just about any evening at the river. We rise every morning and gaze at life around us, but how often are we awake, I mean completely and blatantly alive?

Studies tell us that most of us sleep a third of our lives and most of us work a third of our lives. And now at my age with hopefully about a third of my life left, I’d like to spend as much of what amounts to one third of that third being fully awake before the ground falls beneath my feet.

 

 

 

 

b

 

 

 

I cut off a lady in the parking lot at Food Lion this morning, and it reminded me of an article I wrote several years ago about obesity. Knowing Michelle Obama’s drive to eradicate obesity in children, I sent it to her. This is the First Lady’s response:

The instigation for the original article was a trip to Starbucks. Some dusty pre-teen kid in triple x clothes asked his mom for a second brownie, chocolate milk and a donut–and she obliged. The boy bulleted about Starbucks for fifteen minutes while his mom sucked down a second frappe of some sort, then he collapsed on the floor near her feet and stretched out, forcing customers to portage around him. And I wondered very simply: How is this not child abuse? How is it possible that she can get in serious trouble for giving him cigarettes but nothing can be done when she pumps pounds of sugar into his bloodstream, heart, and kidneys, likely leading to diseases including diabetes, heart disease, and kidney failure. So I wrote the article, sent it to Mrs. O who read it and subsequently wrote me back pushing her plan to eliminate junk food from schools everywhere. Good idea, I thought, but flawed.

Years ago I worked at a health club where we reminded members at the end of a vigorous one hour workout that they always have two choices: They can give in to temptation or avoid it by reminding themselves of their ultimate goals. Not easy at all, of course. But how hard is it to say, “No, Son, if you eat that you’ll be gross and you might die.” I’m guessing Starbuck’s Mom didn’t want to listen to him whine, though eventually that happened as well anyway because for fifteen minutes he complained of stomach aches.

The owner of the health club was good at helping people lose weight. The best. He had a simple trick when it came to food: Ask yourself every time you’re going to eat something, “Is this a good idea or a bad idea?” As simple-minded as that sounds, it works. The problem, of course, is getting the answer wrong. It is easy to say, “This is a good idea because if I don’t have just a little chocolate I’ll binge!” or “Seriously, I read online that eating four Snickers Bars a day actually helps.” But all things being equal the constant good-bad question can work well, especially if you allow yourself three “bad ideas” a week. That’ll give you something to look forward to, assuming you don’t use up all three during one episode of Breaking Bad.

But a bigger issue looms in this wilderness of ours which turns bad parenting into a symptom instead of a cause: Limited Vision.

Some punk in a jacked-up pickup rode my ass for three miles on a narrow country road last week. I suppose I made the situation worse when I slammed on the brakes not caring so much if he rammed my ass. That might have been wrong. Just as wrong as coming as close as he could because his mono-syllabic brain can’t handle complicated thoughts like driving and pinching some chew at the same time. I should have thought through the bad idea/good idea thing and pulled over, swallowed my right to be on the road at all, and let him race on to whatever bar awaited him. My inconvenience would have been limited, my discontent over within seconds. Instead, we played this game for three miles until we reached the four lane. To be fair I had nothing better to do anyway and going ten miles an hour allowed me to watch the birds fly from tree to tree.

But we do this all the time: We decide to address an immediate problem even if it creates a bigger problem later, and all along we ignore the underlying issue which created the initial problem to begin with. My need to get this guy off my ass by braking could have created all sorts of bad situations, not the least of which might have been a bullet in my back in this rural, gun collecting, hunters paradise we call home. Likewise, the enabler mom has created an obese child with a future of complaining, food bills, medical bills and most likely being bullied. In both cases we weren’t thinking ahead.

It happened again the other day when some Earnhardt wannabe rode my tail, but this time I pulled over and let him go and he waved as he went by. Maybe he didn’t realize how close he was. Maybe I didn’t realize he wasn’t so close. Maybe he was late for the doctors, or the airport. I have no idea, but by braking I clearly would have created more problems for both of us. It is just like deciding not to eat another brownie. It really is.

The problem with Mrs. Obama’s plan is it attacks a symptom instead of the cause. The problem isn’t healthy food versus junk food. The problem is decision making ability. Yes children should be eating better, and yes it is a good idea to limit the junk food in schools, and of course parents should do what is right instead of what just keeps the kid quiet. But the solution is for everyone to learn the downside of immediate gratification and the benefits of long-term gain, even if it means sacrifice–or pulling over, or letting the kid scream. Making the right decision doesn’t mean solving “a” problem, it means avoiding new ones as well. The solution to a problem should not create a new problem. Positive actions can have all sorts of negative results. Simply, removing the bad choices will not solve the problem in the long run.

Which is why this is actually about the lady at Food Lion this morning.

I saw a spot open up in the parking lot and shot into it from the aisle, not realizing she had been waiting for the spot from the other direction. My fault. This has happened to me before. I was about to pull back out and give an apologetic wave when she was already out of her car and banging on my trunk. I rolled my window down as she approached the side of the car still yelling. I yelled back, “Are you out of your mind?!?! You could be shot! You have no idea if I’m some psychotic killer just out of prison or what! You don’t know I don’t have a gun, a knife or a baseball bat! Get back in your car you idiot! It is a SPOT! I didn’t see you. I apologize. I’ll pull out and you can have it.”

She looked terrified. Good. It never crossed her mind to simply find another spot and let jackass me have that one. She saw the decision as “one spot and two cars.” In the meantime other cars waited behind her Mercedes, now sitting alone with the door open, fresh for some carjacker. She quickly returned to the car and drove off. I doubt she’ll do that again. Instead of seeing it as a “that spot is mine but he got it” situation, we both could have looked around at the dozens of other spots available. Likewise, Mrs. Obama should be able to place a plate of junk food and a plate of healthy food in front of junior high students and instead work on their decision-making ability.

For the record, I’m writing this at Starbucks, sucking on a chocolate chip frappe and a chocolate croissant. My suggestions are theories, folks, just theories.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

My father enjoyed telling the story of how when I was young, despite going to a number of different teachers who didn’t know each other in several different elementary schools, each teacher wrote the same thing on my report card: “Robert pays too much attention to the people around him in class.” I could say I was bored. I could make a case they all kept repeating themselves and “honest to God I heard them the first time.” I could claim I was multi-tasking. But the truth is I am easily distracted. Several teachers said I needed everything repeated two times before I understood. It was Mr. Kingston in fifth grade who took me aside and said, “You’re doing fine, Robert,” for the first time. I told him I make a lot of mistakes and he said, “Compared to who?”

Compared to who? Forty-six years ago and I never forgot that, so at least I remembered something from Timber Point Elementary School. Still, I’ve packed on a plethora of mistakes since then.

A Russian nun once prayed for me for ten minutes at the Shrine of St Xenia. Then she gave me a piece of bread from the top of the sarcophagus and asked if I liked it. I wanted to say yes, I enjoyed her blessed bread, but my weak language skills kicked in and I told her, “I love you and lust for your black God.”

It is odd making mistakes in a foreign language. Oh, there’s more:

I wanted to ask a cab driver where a bathroom was but ended up saying I like to drink dark beer from a toilet.

I had already gulped what I thought was water when my esophagus discovered the burning effects of bad Vodka.

I told someone I thought was a waitress who turned out to be a prostitute what I thought was “yes I could use a few minute to think” which turned out to be “yes I’d absolutely love oral sex.”

I told a room full of students whom I needed to listen that they should all get their suitcases.

I pulled out a chair for a lady and told her to heel.

I asked for five sandwich rolls and walked out with fifty. No fish.

A friend of mine wearing his priest’s collar wanted to tell the waitress he would like some mayonnaise and ended up saying, “I love to masturbate.”

Some friends went to buy coffee. The world for sugar is “Suga” but the word for bitch is “Suka.” They returned exclaiming, “Don’t ask for sugar in your coffee in Russia, Dude; they’re assholes about it.”

I could go on but more or less by screwing up I learned to fit in, pick up the nuances of accent and syllables, which brought down prices at the flea market, brought out their best Georgian wine, and opened gates to closed graveyards and monasteries.

At the back of one church, in the rubble of what was and would eventually again be St Catherine’s Catholic Church, a woman stood looking for a priest I knew. She seemed confused and we talked a bit—slowly of course. Her mother had been the secretary of the church before the revolution seventy-five years earlier. She needed to see the father. In my weak Russian I determined the woman told me she had a huge cross to bear because of the horrors of communism for all those decades and wanted the priest to take the sins away from her, but when Fr. Frank appeared with sharper language skills than mine, his translation was somewhat more significant. She had outside with her the original cross for the church dating back hundreds of years, which her mother had taken when the Bolsheviks took control after World War One, and which her mother had buried in the yard at their dacha where it remained for seventy-five years. She thought it was time to return it.

My mistake.

Back at home and much more recently I showed my students how to present a paper using the guidelines from the Modern Language Association. I gave them copies, I presented another example on the outline, I asked them to open their books to the appropriate example in the text, and still forty percent of them did it completely wrong. Is that a mistake? Is that boredom? Distraction? Idiocy? I like to think they are overwhelmed and go home kicking themselves for doing something wrong that was so easy to get right, but I’m probably wrong. A few years ago I would have returned to a class like that and lectured them about how their priorities are screwed up; I would have told them that if they can’t get the easy stuff done they’ll never handle the challenges as they attempt to move up the collegiate ladder. I would have used the appropriate sarcasm  with a touch of professorial belittling attitude.

But last January I was driving through the Pennsylvania countryside on my way to western New York on a Sunday morning when I heard a guest on a talk show quote St. Bernard of Clairvaux who said we need to learn to make excuses for other people.

We need to learn to make excuses for other people.

To drive the point home, a few days later a friend of mine posted a video of an impatient man leaving his house one morning pissed off at everyone on his way to the coffee shop and to work. At some point someone gives him glasses. The day rewinds and he leaves his house again, but this time the glasses allow him to see other people’s reasons for their actions and the world changes.

See other people’s reasons and the world changes.

Like the student who came in late because her husband is stationed in Iraq and she got to talk to him that afternoon. The one who left early has a dying father. The one who couldn’t get the presentation correct no matter how hard he tried has never been the same since returning from war. The one who stared at me the entire class without blinking an eye, then left, only to email me later an apology, that she wasn’t concentrating, that she had just learned her cousin was shown on television in Baghdad, dead and left swinging from a bridge. I teach in a different environment here in the military rich resort of Virginia Beach. We learn to make excuses for other people.

St. Francis de Sales said, “Never confuse your mistakes with your value.”

On the other hand, sometimes we really can be lazy assed bark-at-the-moon stupid. I do it all the time. Make no mistake about that.

 

 

I eat almonds, wild berries, and artichokes. I consume legumes, fiber, and almost always avoid fast food. Last night, I passed on New York style Pizza, the thin kind where oil drips off a folded slice, and there’s just enough cheese to cover the sauce. You know the kind. When I was young we used to bring home the coveted white box, held hot in the passenger seat, that most unique smell, combination of crust and toppings, filling the car making everyone hungry. Then we’d pull the slices apart, glad for the way the pizza guy slammed the round blade onto the pie and spun it four times to make the slices even. In college sometimes I’d order an entire small pie for myself and sit and watch the game, drinking ice cold coke. Life is too short not to enjoy food.

Still, last night I passed on the slice my friend kindly offered. Instead I ate a plate of lettuce which looked a lot like weeds I pulled from the garden and tossed onto the overturned lid of a metal can to carry into the woods, only this had oil and vinegar. You see, I’m not trying to lose weight, though I should; and I’m not trying to save my heart from heavy foods, though, there too, I really must pay more mind. What I’m trying to do is act my age. Guys like me, you see, those for whom the graph in the shape of a pie is about two-thirds colored in, have to spread out the years a bit more, make it last, like butter on a toasted bagel.

Sometimes I feel like I’m trying to make it to the end of the day before something bad happens. I’m not a negative person, but I live in a negative world, what with the monsoon of bad news from every outlet. I don’t remember feeling this way as a kid. I remember picking up trash and thinking at that moment everyone in the world was picking up trash. That applied to all aspects of my innocent existence. My generation entered the mid-twentieth century as the younger-half of the greatest generation gap in American history with the idealistic sense we would make the world bomb free, pollution free, nuclear waste free. We were the tree-hugging, turtle-friendly, whale-watching, love-thy-enemy generation. I have great respect for naiveté and ignorance.

We “flew our fists high in the air.” But the world remained the same.

Last month I sat on the flatbed table in the doctor’s office and he listened to my heart.

“You eating right?” he asked.

“Sure.”

“How about exercise? Are you getting enough?”

“Absolutely.”

“You really shouldn’t eat pizza so much you know.”

“Hey, when I was in college I ate it all the time.”

“Yes, and now you’re at the doctor’s office being asked if you are getting enough exercise.”

I went outside into the grey morning sun and sat in the car.That conversation made me hungry. It was a beautiful day out, though, and I really thought about going for a run. With or without exercise, most of us live roughly the same length of time, give or take a dozen years. Most of us are roughly the same height give or take, possess a small variety of features like eye or hair color, have nearly identical operating systems for intake and evacuation, and suffer cold and heat, pain and comfort, desire and illness roughly the same.

So what separates us from each other? I wondered as I drove off to find a Duck’s Custom Made Donuts. My dad’s was a generation of “doers.” Survive the depression; fight the Nazi’s, build a house and raise a family. They took the punches and kept moving forward. My students’ generation waits for things to happen. Through no fault of their own, they are raised in a paranoid, post 911 world where you never know when the next shoe is going to drop, but based upon the news, reality shows, games, friends, and social media, it is going to drop.

But mine is the Earth Day generation. We were going to clean up the world; we stood together anti-nuke, anti-oppression, anti-war, pro-environment, pro-animals’ rights, pro-conservation dreamers with an absolute conviction we would be successful. We had Dylan. We had Chavez. We had time.

Two dollars and fifty cents for a friggin’ donut. This is insane. I paid the woman and took my small, custom-made lunch to an empty park and wondered why no one was outside playing. “Are you getting enough exercise?” the doctor asked. I finished eating and got on the slide. Yeah, sure I am, I thought, and slid right down to the bottom with ease then threw my trash in the can.

I think I’ll adopt a highway; get myself a yellow vest, orange garbage bags and a spear.

 

 

I own a porcelain cup made in Russia in 1896. It is about four inches tall, white porcelain interior with blue and red markings. On the side is the seal of Czar Nicholas II and Alexandra, and “1896,” the date of his coronation. A friend of mine in St. Petersburg gave it to me. The “coronation cups” were made for the occasion to be filled with beer and passed out to the masses of people outside the Kremlin walls so the peasants could celebrate along with the aristocracy. The military training field where half a million people gathered for the souvenirs of cups and various food and clothing items was already a dangerous place to walk for all the trenches and mud pits. But things quickly went south when a rumor spread that each cup had gold in it and there were not nearly enough of them to go around. The stampede left over 1700 people trampled to death. The cup became known as the “cup of sorrow,” so called by Alexandra herself, but it is more often referred to as the “cup of blood,” and the tragedy seemed a bad sign for things to come during the reign of the last Czar. I own one of only five hundred or so made.

As the Raiders of the Lost Arc character, French archeologist Renee Belloch, notes, “We are simply passing through history; this is history.” When I hold the cup in my hands and turn it over I wonder which guard, swarmed by people, handed it out, which peasant held it in her hands. I turn it over and realize the likelihood it was stepped on in the mud, or smuggled away quickly by some young worker who managed to escape the tragedy. It is one thing to listen to a history lecture about the event, and something else entirely to go to the Kremlin and hear the tour guide explain the events as you look out over the parking lots and office buildings on the once barren land, and imagine the droves of Russians pushing for the gates, their comrades crushed just for the cup, this cup.

I am not a history buff by any means, though I have toured many historical sites around the world. My own sister earned a doctorate in history from Notre Dame. Her husband, too, received his Ph.D. from there and is a leading historian at Temple University, author of countless award-winning works about military history, and it isn’t unusual to see his familiar face pop up on the history channel as commentator. Even my father knew so much about history he could have taught it in college, and in school he won a history award.

Me, not so much.

But I am a hands on guy fascinated by items that survived time and war and neglect. I need an object, a talisman of sorts, to bring history to life. When I hold the cup, my mind wonders what they were talking about before the stampede, what music were they listening to, was it an exciting time or, because of the conflicts already underway throughout the empire, was it subdued and the cup distribution simply a brief diversion. Who made the cups? For me, owning one is a way to reach through a rabbit hole and pull out some 19^th century reality. Though I suppose it might also be considered moronic to have it in my possession and I should probably sell the damn thing on Ebay.

The irony is I have made so many trips to Russia for the purpose of experiencing culture that I became heavily steeped in history by virtue of immersion. Russians are deeply rooted in their tragic and beautiful past. In Prague it is the same. There, I stay in a building built almost 700 years ago and dine in former bomb shelters as well as a wine cellar used by Charles the IV in the 1300’s. I have no interest in reading about those times. I like to be in the present, walk the same hallways with someone like my brother-in-law to tell me what happened while I half listen and half focus on the immaculate trajectory of time, like an arrow, like a beam of light, like a falling star. Time remains relentless, and I like to hold the cup in Russia or lean against a wall in Prague, or sit in a pew in a Spanish chapel prayed in by Charlemagne and contemplate the immediate reality that we are on the same line, standing between them and what’s next, isolating this moment. I am nobody, to be sure, but I am here, part of the conspiracy to keep those ages alive. Time can be like a relay that way. Observers grab the events of the past and pass them along to whoever’s next, and on. But while my sister and her husband are direct descendants of Herodotus, I like to consider myself the descendant of the barkeep who served up some honey mead for the evening gatherers who stood around and told stories and tried to pick up eunuchs.

History would be well served to have a bartender’s version as well as a scholar’s. We could bypass the normal reference material like dates and plans and titles and influences, and keep track of what they really thought, their insecurities, their ambitions. Who wouldn’t want to pour another hekteus of wine and listen to Aristotle rattle on about which Sophocles play bored him to death and which sent him reeling to his corner table after intermission to contemplate the center of the universe? What tender stood by with the bottle of chianti that got Galileo hammered, relegating him to the courtyard at three am on his drunk ass with a dizzy head, and as he lay on his back he looked up at the stars and thought, “Whoa, hang on here.”

I think I’ll let the others write history. Instead, I’m heading to this small oyster shack I know and have a dozen Old Salts and sit in the same place oystermen sat while Teddy Roosevelt was pounding up San Juan Hill, and I’ll talk to some fisherman about changes in the tides, and how some Bay islands used to be so much larger, before the storm of ’33, and before the one in ’03, and if you paddle out to them at low tide and work your way through the mud, you can still find hundred-year-old hand crafted beams, and abandoned hand-made traps. When I was a child on Long Island, we would find arrowheads. The Native American culture on the Island wasn’t solely history lessons in school books; it was lying around in the sand and marshes of the south shore.

If I drink enough at the oyster shack, I might stumble out to the patch of grass on the river and fall on my back and stare up at the stars and think about Galileo and Copernicus and who else lay still in the quiet of night, the faint sound of water lapping the shore nearby, and watched Orion’s belt loosen, or the Pleiades spread out like buck shot. Then I might go back inside and sit a few stools down from the cook sitting alone on the corner stool, and lean toward the tender and ask, “So what’s his story?”

 

There was the time Renee and I stopped to have lunch at a restaurant in a Mexican village. While we were eating I noticed a woman staring at us. I figured she just appreciated seeing other Americans in the place, but she didn’t look away. A few minutes later she came to our table, laughing excitedly. She was Renee’s babysitter back in their small western New York town.

These things happen. Right place, right time.

Then there was the time two friends from high school came to one of my readings. I’d not seen them in thirty-five years, yet they stood there as if neither aged all that much. Later when we sat talking I asked if they lived on mountaintops. They both said no so I said then it doesn’t make sense, them not aging all that much.

(Physics sidebar: time goes slower the higher you are. Time is measured at sea level, so someone on top of K-2 would take longer to get all the way around. Think of a track around a football field. The person on the very outside lane [the mountain top] will take much longer and travel farther than the one on the inside lane, which is the one used for measuring. These two women from high school looked like they had been high).

Someone once told me that everyone we meet in life we pass again at least once more. At first this frightened me because the first and only time I ever saw Lee Pierce was in seventh grade when he beat the crap out of me at a bus stop because his girlfriend liked me; I don’t need that drama back in my life. But the more I thought about it, the more I wondered how true it might be. For those who don’t travel much, running into everyone twice over the course of seventy or eighty years might not be too difficult. And for those who travel often, the constant shuffling through airports and pubs increases the likelihood of multiple run-ins. I’ve been through Kennedy airport quite often. Surely at least once or twice someone I grew up with was there at the same time.

Like the time I was walking down a street in St Petersburg, Russia, when a woman I had worked with ten years earlier in Pennsylvania was standing in a restaurant banging on the window to get my attention.

We have long lists of people we’d love to see again. It’s why I like to people-watch while waiting in malls or airports or train stations. Even more fun is spotting the Doppelgangers out there, both famous and familiar. Years ago I spent time at Chapel Hill with the visual twins of Pete Rose and Penny Marshall. Then there was the time just a few years ago in Spain when a friend from college who knew I was going to be on the Camino wrote to ask if we’d light a candle for him for a health issue. Of course, so the morning of his appointment in Ohio, July 25^th, we headed out for the next twenty miles of our stroll near Pamplona when John from New York joined us for the. John was the spitting image of my friend from college. His voice, his eyes, the way he laughed, his gait—all of him—was the mirror image of the one person who asked us to light a candle for him on that very day for his appointment five thousand miles away. Good timing I suppose.

I was in a food store in the late eighties when a kid ran past and knocked over a display. A very old man bent to pick up the packages and I helped. While we were crouched down I noticed his Knights of Columbus lapel pin. I said I knew of the organization and when he talked I knew he was from Brooklyn. I said my grandfather had been heavily involved in the Knights in Brooklyn but it would have been before his time, I’m sure. It wasn’t. When I told him my grandfather’s name, he responded with his ancient smile, “Ed! Ed Kunzinger! I knew him when I first joined! He was already State Deputy then!” That man was the only person I’ve ever met outside of family who knew my grandfather. That was kind of cool and, again, good timing. Thank God the kid knocked over the cookies.

Everything is timing, isn’t it?

A man in Buffalo was sitting in his recliner watching television when a jet trying to land at the airport crashed into his home and killed him. The news said he was in the wrong place at the wrong time. No he wasn’t. He was in the right place at the wrong time. The plane was in the wrong place. We do that a lot, excuse things, find cause and blame.

There are four possibilities: Right place right time, right place wrong time, wrong place right time, wrong place wrong time.

1. You’re going to work and while waiting to turn at the stop light you look down and outside the car is a bag of cash: Right place right time.
2. You’re going to work and while waiting at the light a plane crashes into your car. Right place wrong time.
3. You’re going to work and get lost. When you stop for directions someone gives you a bag of cash for no reason. Wrong place right time.
4. You’re going to work and get lost. When you stop for directions a plane crashes into where you are standing. Wrong place wrong time.

Could be luck. Could be fate. Could be distractions or even hyper-attentiveness.

The other day I stopped to buy something at a mall in Virginia Beach. It is the same mall that my father liked to walk around during his later years. It is quiet there, less crowded than others, and the floor is carpeted. Comfortable chairs and benches are nicely spaced, and since it is on my way from one college to another, I would often swing through the parking lot to look for his car. He always parked in the same area, and if it was there I would go in and find him and walk with him a while.

On Tuesday last week I walked through to get to a particular store when I spotted someone walking slowly. It made me sad, of course, remembering my walks with Dad, but the familiarity of it made me look at him as I walked by, and I knew I knew him, or knew him at some point. So I followed him to talk to him when he sat down. I’m sure security were all gathered around a monitor somewhere to figure out what this stalker was doing. I was stealth, looking in windows and stopping to tie my shoe several times. He went to a lottery machine and looked at cards, so I went to the next machine and looked at other cards. I had no idea that some of these things cost twenty bucks and the odds of winning at least twenty dollars back are pretty bad! There was one ticket that was twenty dollars and you only got to scratch one spot to win. And people buy these things!

Anyway.

He looked at his machine and I looked at mine and finally I said, “Twenty dollars. That’s crazy.”

“Yes it is.”

“Do you play at all?”

“No. Sometimes I buy the dollar ones for my grandkids, but I don’t waste money like that. I worked too hard.”

“You sound like you’re from up north”

“I am. From Brooklyn. But I’ve lived in Colorado most of my life,” he said. It figures, I thought, the mountains; he might actually be a hundred and fifteen.

“Me too! Well, Long Island, but I was born in Brooklyn.”

I introduced myself. So did he. Nothing.

“You look familiar to me.”

“Yes, you do too. Well perhaps our paths have crossed before,” he said, “back in the old country.” We both laughed. I said it was nice to meet him and he said the same and that perhaps we’d see each other again, and I sat on a bench thinking about my dad, hoping he would come around a corner and smile.

I like to think I’ll see him again, the old man, perhaps staring at a lottery machine for no other reason than to take a break while walking. And we’ll talk about what has been going on since the last time, and eventually we’ll walk to the food court and have coffee and talk about the old days, back when we always seemed to find ourselves in the right place at the right time.

 

 

I’ve been reading Frost again. He’s a good diversion.

Of course sometimes I wonder if what I’m doing is what I should be doing; I mean in the big picture. Who doesn’t? Here I am ages and ages hence and occasionally I think back with a sigh and briefly consider whether or not the “other path” really would have been just as fair. Honestly, we spend the better part of three or four decades almost entirely in one profession before we retire. I can’t possibly be the only person busting down the path full speed who would love to return from the dead five or six more times to live out all the careers I dreamed about. I’d come back as a musician for certain. Then maybe open soup kitchens everywhere. After that I’d do a spin as an architect; maybe one round as an athlete. Cooking would be cool.

Back at the start just before I graduated from Penn State while working at a bar, my brother sent me a job-listing for adjunct professors at the community college in Virginia Beach. My brand new graduate degree qualified me for English, humanities and art, so I sent my application. Still, I had already secured a position teaching journalism in the Chesapeake high schools. A few weeks earlier I had interviewed there and got the job. They just hadn’t figured out which of the schools would be mine.

When I went that August to claim my position, human resources informed me they lost my paperwork and hired someone else. After some brief words with the director which pretty much insured that they never again would consider hiring me, I drove toward our beach apartment, but a traffic jam on the interstate sent me through back roads. Just as I worked my way to the southern part of the city, my car rattled and coughed so I pulled into the first safe area I could find, and my car promptly died—in the community college parking lot.

This is pre cell phone so I walked toward a building to make a call. It was just before fall semester and few offices were staffed, but I found one with a phone and a lovely woman named Eleanor and her boss, Bill. AAA put me on hold, of course, and while I waited Bill walked from his small office to Eleanor’s desk and said in his distinct southern accent, “Eleanor! We still need someone to teach humanities on Wednesday nights!”

I had planned to get the car working and go see a friend of mine who owned a hotel on the beach and ask to work with him again. Instead, I lowered the mouthpiece and said, “I can do that.”

Bill looked at me. “Who are you?”

Eleanor explained my car situation. I added the master’s in humanities part and that I had sent an application a few months earlier on my brother’s advice. Bill asked me to come in his office when I was off the phone. I hung up. AAA could wait.

Within a week I had five courses to teach. Two years later they hired me full time. Almost three decades later I work in the same building, teaching the same courses, still staring at rooms filled with twenty-year-old people. My world has not aged, though I have. It is an odd existence to stare at twenty-one for twenty-six years. Earlier this week I taught Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken,” and today I wondered what I would have done if they didn’t need someone on Wednesday nights. Or if my car hadn’t broken down, or if they hired me to teach Journalism in Chesapeake, or if my brother hadn’t sent the ad and I hadn’t sent in my application.

So it’s my brother’s fault that I teach college. “Either/or” decisions fill our lives like trodden leaves. We constantly move forward constantly leaving “unknowns” behind, constantly believing we can “go back” and give it a go someday, and constantly delude ourselves.

I was going to be an astronaut, but I was ten at the time. Then an architect; a race car driver; a tennis pro; a musician; a hotel owner; and the list goes on. A cook, a left fielder, an ice cream man, a pilot, a performer. I am not attention deficit; I am restless. But none of those dreams pursued me with the passion that a true vocation demands. In the end, traveling the world was the only occupation that rattled my soul, but the counselors had no idea what to tell me. “You can be a travel agent,” one of them said when I was a senior in high school. “I want to travel, not send other people,” I told her sarcastically. Based upon her advice of where I should go next, she would have made a lousy travel agent.

So traveling it would be and since I liked to write, I figured majoring in journalism might afford me the opportunities to be on the go, albeit most likely war zones. “How are you going to pay for this?” a friend in college asked when I stared at maps. I told him I would find “a good paying job that gives me a lot of time off.” We laughed a while, and I graduated, and followed a series of bizarre jobs from blanket smuggling to health club management, all with the primary goal of making enough money to quit and move. Throughout my twenties I always felt like I was “just a day a way from where I ought to be,” as Jackson Browne claimed.

Then my car broke down, and now I owe my brother a boatload of thanks; teaching college has allowed me time off to travel more than I ever could have imagined. It all worked out. That’s what we say, isn’t it: “It all worked out” or “It’s fate” or “Everything turned out the way it was supposed to” or my favorite, “It is all in God’s plan.”

Back to the two diverting roads in the yellow wood: What might have happened if I didn’t throw a dart at a map senior year and hit Tucson? What if it had hit New York? What if the crazy red-headed exercise freak didn’t like me? What if I had just gone to Monterey? What if I hadn’t gone to Pennsylvania to begin with and instead tended bar in Peter Trimbacher’s 800-year-old castle in Austria? What if we had never left New York? I obviously could go on, as we all can, splitting hairs and making ourselves feel better by reminding ourselves “It is for the best” and “How grand everything turned out” and “I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

Ha. I would, of course. There are certain particulars I’d totally change. You know who you are.

I like to think the Almighty allowed us to make a few choices of our own, like what to do with our lives. So a few weeks ago I traveled to a cabin in the mountains of western New York to think about it all. I met some friends there, we drank some wine, and I hiked around the snowy trails filled with diverting paths. A few days to get some perspective seemed a good idea. And here’s what I figured out; if tomorrow I had to tend bar again I’d be okay with that. My psyche bends that way most of the time anyway. Sure, sometimes I think to myself, Wow! I’m a freaking college professor; the second most respected profession on the planet behind doctors. But I quickly remind myself that is my career only because of a bad alternator. What if I had learned how to fix cars? See how things turn on a dime? What would life have been like if I had driven past the college, or straddled a chair in front of twenty high school journalism students. I think we have a habit of backing into opportunity, despite the desire and ability to “choose” our destiny. Kids have conversations with counselors about their future, which is chosen more often than not based upon what major might lead them toward the most likely employment or the highest paycheck. Sure, someone might ask them to define their “passion” before choosing a major, but why? Most teenagers haven’t yet stumbled upon their passion, or if they have it is for something that isn’t taught in college.

Traveling was the one occupation that occupied my long-range forecasts from my adolescence to adulthood. I wanted to see the world and write about it and explore and connect to civilizations outside the confines of our small town. Sometimes we get lucky and bend our careers around our lives instead of adjusting our souls to accommodate a career.

Is it possible my brother knew that if I got the job I’d see the world? It is more likely no matter what livelihood I stumbled into I would have figured out how to manipulate some frequent flier miles out of it.

Still, thanks Bro. Buen Camino.

 

Next week I am reading for a group of senior citizens at a retirement community on the bay in Virginia Beach. I’ve done this at the same place a few times. In fact, last time just before the gig my host and I were eating dinner in the facility restaurant when halfway through the meal a woman at the next table fell out of her chair and died. Or she died and fell out of her chair. Either way, she was dead on the floor feet away, and my friend said, “Oh I hate when everyone stares! Why can’t they just do what they are doing?!”

Well, to be honest, I was one of the ones who looked perhaps longer than I should. When she first fell I jumped up but William said to sit, that the medics on staff would be there in seconds, and he was right. They came out of the kitchen faster than a cook answering a complaint. She was a small woman, at least ninety, and her demise seemed more of a prank fall then a heart attack or choking incident. It was almost as if she were already dead, but a few seconds earlier she had been talking to her friend, who I might add, was polite enough not to stare. The friend sat with her hands folded until the paramedics escorted her to a different table. It felt very much as if upon moving in everyone had been told: “If you are eating with anyone, and they die, do not help, do not get up. Wait for someone to move you to the next available table!” Even the way William immediately protested “I hate when everyone stares” implied this happens often, and people usually, rudely of course, stare. Perhaps the exertion necessary to attend dinner or a function pushes some over the mortal edge. I don’t know, but the way the medics immediately arrived with screens to surround the poor woman and everyone else returned to their meals made me believe I did not happen upon an unusual evening at ye ‘ol facility. I had the salmon and William had the prime rib. I sipped my wine and William watched me, like he was processing the information. Odd.

After the event (which continued without comments concerning the corpse and was well attended by quite jovial people) I thought about William’s expectation that no one should stare. There was a corpse closer to me than the basket of bread on my table; I stole a glance. I looked longer than I should, and while I’m sure there is some etiquette concerning corpse staring, I am equally sure no one in the room was looking at me anyway.

When I was a child, probably about eight or nine, my mother taught me two things: look at people when they talk to you, and don’t stare. This can be a fine line to walk, especially for a kid. She brought me to the library to check out books. We stood in the stacks and I asked the librarian a question and while she answered I looked at the books instead of her. My mother quickly corrected me: “Look at someone when she talks to you, Robert. Look in her eyes when she talks.” I did and clearly I never forgot that lesson. But later that day when I watched a neighbor we visited struggle her way out of her chair, my mother told me not to stare.

I was confused. Look but don’t stare. Timing is everything with etiquette. When someone is done talking, a quick glance away to disengage eye contact is necessary, unless you’re hitting on someone and the chemistry is strong, then holding the stare a bit longer allows the other person to know you were staring, blatantly staring, because you couldn’t look away from her beautiful eyes. The problem there, of course, is if you stare too long you are in danger of crossing that line to psychopath. If she does look away you have to figure out if she looked away because she is completely uninterested or because she is afraid of revealing her deep rooted passion to plow over the table at you. Hard call.

Now imagine one of you is dead. The rules change.

It seems staring isn’t the issue as much as being misunderstood. It is an art form. One thing I always admired about my father was his absolute eye contact when he talked to someone. He was not an intimidating man in the least, yet he somehow commanded respect, and I believe it was because of his eyes which so clearly let people know they could trust him, which was not a small thing for a stock broker. He looked right at you when he talked or when you talked. And he knew when to let it go. He was the master of the look-stare genre. I picked up on some of his ways, but my profession has altered my opinion about the timing of it all.

As a college professor people stare at me all the time, and when I am talking or about to talk, it truly doesn’t bother me. But often, especially on the first day of class before the lecture starts, they just sit there and stare at me. I suppose they’re sizing me up: do I look mean, aggravated, am I an easy A or a piping bastard? But as I watched the years roll past and students have come and gone, they don’t stare as much. Part of it is because they’re looking at their phones; part of it is because the latest vacuous zombie-obsessed generation doesn’t make eye contact at all.

Some people look, some stare, some have a gander, some a look-see, people peak, they glimpse, behold, gaze, and leer; they survey, observe, give the once-over, and keep watch.

Look, I am not so self-conscious that I care what people think when they scrutinize. I just prefer they get their timing down. Unless, of course, there is some cross table-plowing involved. Personally, I don’t ever want to stop staring. There is too much to see, too many faces to commit to memory. I’m glad I stared a long time at my father’s face, my grandmother’s eyes. I can recall them now without the need for photographs.

“Look at people,” my mother said. Absolutely, though she probably didn’t mean the ones on the floor at the restaurant. There are definitely flaws in the whole “look/stare” methodology, but I’m working on it.