Bob Kunzinger

That Student

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Its the end of a semester, finishing up today, and I sit and remember one of my favorite moments as a professor; ironically, it was a day I encouraged a student to quit school. Honestly, not everyone belongs. Not yet.

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

I worked at a bar. Good money and mindless work; the kind of work where if you don’t think too much about what you’re doing, you can keep on smiling. I know I spent a few years there but it seems like it was always winter, all grey and bone-cold. One morning I woke on a bench near a lake in a state park near my country house, but I didn’t know how I got there. I had to work a few hours later but never made it. I drained my accounts, stuck a little aside, then bought a ticket to Africa. Turns out changing my life, kicking my own ass out of the same ‘ol same ‘ol, was as easy as jumping off a cliff knowing you’re either going to land on your feet or learn how to fly. Boring disappeared from my life.

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

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

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

Between the Lines

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37.5531° N, 76.3403° W

It’s raining today along the river, and the puddles running along the roads and the edge of the woods are yellow, covered in the pollen which until early this morning hung in the air and on my body and in my lungs. It is the time of year when I most welcome the rain. Right now, I’m standing at the Chesapeake Bay where it is rainy and peaceful. I don’t get phone service when I’m out along the road near the bay, and I like it that way; I like how I’m on the edge of the continent, lost in the four thousand miles of water between here and, well, as it turns out, Sicily, where my maternal great-grandfather was born. When I’m out here out of service I feel more in touch with everywhere else, everything and everyone else, and my imagination takes control of the helm.

If my eyes could bend directly east along this vantage, I’d see through Athens where I almost went almost forty years ago and on into Tabriz, Iran, where a student of mine never came home from thirty years ago. Past there I’d move through Uzbekistan, a place I’ve never been but whose food I know well having eaten many dinners at an Uzbek restaurant in St Petersburg, Russia, where we’d spend four hours taking our time with each course and hot bread and samovars of tea, belly dancers and hookahs, and the most delicious entrees.  I had no idea all these years standing waist deep in the Chesapeake at Stingray Point, I was watching distant Uzbeks.

I’m standing on the imaginary line that runs just a sliver south of the 38th Parallel, closer perhaps to 37.5, or if you speak to any one of the watermen in this village, they’ll tell you 37.5531° N.

So, close enough. Let’s go further:

Passing Gansu, China, famous for its water-pipe tobacco out into the Yellow Sea almost directly through Baengnyeong Island, which means “White Wing Island,” so named for the resemblance to an Ibis in flight, and home of intelligence communities because of its proximity to North Korea, which brings me to the most famous spot on the 38th Parallel—the 38th Parallel. Of course it runs around the entire planet almost directly under my feet, but when most people hear “38th Parallel,” they think of the Koreas, of course.

I’m on the same white line as Canyonlands National Park, Utah, and Newton, Kansas, passing right under the counter at Gurty’s Burgers. Evansville, Illinois, too, but it makes me think of the tragedy of the 1977 plane crash which took the lives of the entire University of Evansville basketball team. I’m two and a half hours east of Charlottesville, Virginia, and just south of Chincoteague Island where the horses still swim. And when I was five with my siblings at the World’s Fair in Flushing, New York, standing in front of the famous huge globe with its metal longitudes and latitudes, who were my neighbors then? Are they still out there, following different lines? Searching away? Searching toward me?

But since I find myself at the proverbial crossroads in life yet again, I can’t ignore my northern and southern neighbors—since isn’t that what we are? Neighbors? I mean, if we are going to James Webb our way into the distant galaxies and black holes, I think we’ve reached the point where we can all consider each other neighbors, relatively speaking. If “neighbor” is someone with whom we have some physical closeness compared to others more distant, than astronomy has moved us all on this sphere into the category of “neighbors” to be sure, reliant upon each other, part of each other both as particles and participants.

And those north of here include the North Pole, of course, since all longitudes meet eventually, twice actually. But closer to home is Ellesmere Island, Nunavut, Canada, the world’s tenth largest island and home to Victor’s Seafood which has curbside pickup when you don’t want to get out of the car. And Prince Charles Island, also in Nunavut, of course. This line runs south from there through Ottawa and into my birth state of New York, into Pennsylvania, into Maryland, and down through the Chesapeake Bay to this rainy little piece of Longitude. But wait, I’ve always been drawn to the tropics. Here’s why: I’m standing, I mean I find myself smack dab on the same streak that runs just west of the Bahamas and right into Holguin, Cuba, its fourth largest city and cradle of Cuban Music. But here’s the crazy part: It goes on, this longitude, into Colombia, Ecuador, and San Bartolo, Peru, on the Pacific Ocean, famous for its beach-going tourists and surfers. That’s what nearly exactly attracts people to Virginia Beach, just a notch southeast of here and where I attended high school; and where I learned in geography everything about this world except that New York and Virginia were due north of the west coast of South America. Yes, here standing on North America’s east coast and staring out toward the Atlantic, I am due north of the west coast of South America where people are staring out on the Pacific Ocean. But further still, the Southern Ocean (which I don’t remember even being a place when I was a kid) and right into the northern cliffs of Charcot Island, Antarctica, with its crabeater seals and Adelie penguins. Right here, but south.

Deltaville is at 76.3403° W for those keeping score.

This one spot, here, this mark on my mental map is tied, distantly I admit, but tied just the same to people being born and raised and looking out, wondering. It’s kind of our own little “Double L” ranch, only really thin and exceptionally long. If we coordinate correctly, we could all plant flowers on our line, though somewhat problematic headed north and south as my daffodils might not grow in the Nunavut tundra or the desert of Patagonia, but we are neighbors; we work together on these things.

We have been nomads since the nomadic days, and while we might be “from” somewhere, we rarely stay any longer, following our songlines, chasing something unknown. Since I’m a child I have wanted to follow those latitudes and longitudes, since I read Robin Lee Graham’s Dove, since Joshua Slocum, since St. Brendan.

I want to meet our neighbors before I sail on to different coordinates. Ireland, of course, and Prague. Spain again, and the Netherlands, for certain. It turns out these lines are everywhere, like a grid, like graph paper, like those moving walkways in airports leading us to the next terminal.

My first experience with Longitude and Latitude Lines on the globe at the World’s Fair in ’65

Melville Without Whales

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The Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel

Today is the 60th anniversary of the opening of The Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel, a series of bridges with two tunnels which run more than 17 miles across (and under) the Chesapeake Bay from Virginia’s Eastern Shore to Virginia Beach. I used to work out there, on the South Island in the restaurant, back when the Modern Marvel was just thirteen years old. The piece below is about there, about then, published about six months ago.

That Which We Are, We Are, Still

I immersed myself in outdoorsy stuff in my early teens; even beyond that. I wonder if something innate in my DNA attracted me like chemistry to the outdoors and references to it, or my environment and influences doused me with enough references to nature that my path was clear.

I listened to all of John Denver; knew every word to every song. Played his music on the record player and my guitar. At the same time, my friend Eddie and I spent every single day in the woods and along the Great South Bay at Heckscher State Park, nearly literally our backyard back then on Long Island’s South Shore. I watched movies like Jeremiah Johnson and television shows like Grizzly Adams. I wanted to disappear from civilization like they did; I wanted cabins like they had up in the Rockies, with a warm fire going.

The beach took hold of my Buddhist-bending mentality, combined with Dan Fogelberg and Jimmy Buffett, books by Joshua Slocum and Robin Lee Graham. Patrick O’Brien and the first paragraph of Melville’s Moby Dick, which reads:

Some years ago—never mind how long precisely—having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world.

Damn I wish I wrote that, wrote “Son of a Son of a Sailor,” “Rocky Mountain High” and “Sweet Surrender,” wrote home from some mountain in Utah not far from Redford’s “Sundance” ranch, long before the film festival was born. Instead, I played their music, watched the shows, and spent as much time as I could in whatever nature I could.

I think it was the beginning of me always feeling slightly outside of everything, just a little beyond understanding people. For some time I thought it was insecurity, but now I believe I just preferred the natural state of things, how perfect it is out there. I had the theme of Grizzly Adams down pat:

Deep inside the forest
Is a door into another land
Here is our life and home
We are staying, here forever
In the beauty of this place all alone
We keep on hoping.

Maybe
There’s a world where we don’t have to run
And maybe
There’s a time we’ll call our own
Living free in harmony and majesty
Take me home
Take me home.

Even that line repetition is a nod to Frost’s line “Miles to go before I sleep.” Exactly.

Is it true that everything we are we remain? Our hopes remain. Our dreams remain. And if we hadn’t lived them out yet, perhaps we still will in some other season? Maybe.

A part of my mind never truly grew up, I know that. A part of my psyche still holds tight to how I used to think when I was young, sometimes to the point I can be out for a walk and not even remotely feel my age, forget that my ability to do most of the things I could then is, shall we say, compromised. But we trick ourselves. I can still ride a bike; can still hike in high altitudes. In my fifties I walked across Spain. So who knows.

What happens is we forget. We let go of so much of who we were to make room for who we become. It is natural and beautiful and necessary, and we would not come close to being who we are today without who we were then, watching Dan Haggerty and his bear walk down the mountain, or listening to John Denver’s opening guitar riff on “Rocky Mountain High.” It’s in our blood. It has to be.

Unless, again, something in our blood attracted us to those things. Who the hell knows, right?

Ever come across a trigger that brings you back to those moments you had then? Maybe it’s a picture in some old album your parents kept; or a book you read. I have books like that, from then, I have a baseball my friends all signed when I left Long Island and it transports my mind to that small village, almost as if had I driven there today I’d see fourteen-year-old Eddie coming out of his house ready to hike through the park. We have so much more ability to manipulate time than we realize.

So, I had this job. One of my first, and the last one as a high school student. I worked on Seagull Pier on the South Island of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel which connects Virginia Beach, Virginia, with the Eastern Shore of Virginia, known as the Delmarva Peninsula. I was thrilled to get hired out there for one reason: I’d be working “nearly” on the water, watching the sunset and rise, feeling the salt water on my face all the time, like Melville but without whales. I worked 10 pm to 6 am every night, usually alone, frying shrimp and fries, serving sodas to travelers with coupons they received when they paid their toll to make the crossing of one of the longest bridge-tunnels on the planet. Yes, they got a free Pepsi at the pier. It was pretty barren then—a diner-style interior with a few tables, a gift shop, and a pier filled with fishermen. In later years the restaurant took over part of the pier and became quite nice with a full menu. But back then it was just a quick stop for a basket of fried food, coffee or Pepsi, a few souvenirs and back on the road.

They tore it down a few years ago to expand the bridge tunnel.

I would drive my dad’s ‘72 Nova out there just before dark, park and stand on the rocks looking west up the Chesapeake, west, toward the setting sun. Then I’d head inside and cook, serve, clean, make coffee, talk to fishermen on rainy nights when they crowded the counter, talked to the rare customer who stopped for their free Pepsi or a burger at three AM. Then when my shift ended, or sometimes even before then if no one was there, I’d walk out on the parking deck on the east side of the building and watch the sunrise over the Atlantic at the mouth of the bay.

Just remembering that brings me such absolute peace I can, just for a moment, forget some of the minutia that I find myself up to my neck in. I remember, and I am there, can smell the salt, can feel the breeze coming off the water.

I love to remember.

One morning at about four, the door opened as I was just about to clean the grill. I glanced back to see who was coming in and it was a man by himself in a sweater. He had long hair, a thick beard, was tall, big, like a linebacker, and stood for a moment looking around.  I called to him to sit anywhere and he came right up behind me and sat at a stool, and he said, “Can you make me a burger on that grill before you clean it, my friend?”

Instant voice recognition. It was Dan Haggerty. Grizzly Adams himself. I asked and he said yes. We talked and he insisted I make a burger for myself as well, and fries, and we sat together and talked for an hour in the empty Seagull Pier restaurant. He was on his way to Florida and preferred to drive very late and very early.

Young people: This is before there was any form of a device with which I could capture the moment unless I happened to have my camera—a big device with film in it—which I didn’t. So we have those triggers. A baseball, an old guitar. Stories.

Today I received mail from my sister. My brother-in-law bought a new car, and in the old car, buried somewhere in the console or glove compartment or somewhere, they found three Free Drink coupons for Seagull Pier from one of their many trips south to see our parents in Virginia Beach.

She was discarding outdated coupons some toll clerk shoved at her with her change. I received a wormhole to a version of me that had my entire existence in front of me from a place I loved to show up and leave out in the middle of nature, where the sun set and rose again with my arrival and departure. What had for nearly fifty years become illusionary, almost some fiction from forever ago, suddenly seemed to happen this morning, and I felt younger, more alive.

I still head to the bay—same bay, ironically—to watch the sunrise; and to this river every evening to watch the sun disappear west into the Utah mountains. I still dream of riding horses across the Rockies. I still listen to Denver and Fogelberg.

If not, I know for certain I’d be a poorer man.

Everything we are, we remain. Our hopes remain. Our dreams remain. And while not all of them will find fruition, some might. Some just might. If not in this, then perhaps in some other season.

Perhaps.

Thanks Cathy and Greg, for not stopping for a free beverage

For Those Who Stay Behind

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Note: This is a very serious one. Read. Share. Forgive. It’s all we’ve got.

This is for Dave W, Bobbie B, Bud D, Tricia K, and the one’s who live with those unseen wounds which simply won’t heal.

***

A broken limb is obvious. A cast, a sling, a set of crutches or even a knee cart, and people can see the problem, understand the delays and compromises. We move aside or assist in any way we can.

What happens when someone injures their mind, breaks their thought process, when a person cracks their perception of reality and ration? The world is quick to judge the results of some unseen wound festering in their frontal lobe. “They’re lazy,” we say; “They’ve given up,” we say; “They keep asking for help and I’ve had enough,” we say. No one replies to the unfortunate soul with some walker, “No, sorry. I’m not helping you anymore.”

Well, in both cases the likelihood of one asking for help is pretty slim anyway.    

Monsters such as depression, anxiety, and nervous breakdowns can destroy a person’s ability to function. People can’t think as clearly so they lose jobs, they make bad financial decisions and lose money and property. “They could have done something else; they could have sought help from a professional if that was true,” we say.

And when nothing makes sense anymore and the world is too much with them and there is absolutely no meaning in anything—when numbness overtakes the idle sadness, they find a way out.  

The truth is suicide is not always the result of depression; it is not always a person simply giving up. In fact, it is often seen by the psychologically afflicted as the perfect solution. It is not doing harm; it is solving problems. The mind no longer functions the same as others’ minds. If they even want to ask for help, they don’t even know what it looks like to ask for anything in particular, so they seek solutions on their own, like sleep, like cutting off contact, like shutting the brain down for good. It is not life they fear or wish to escape; it is their mind. It is a difficult task to escape one’s own thoughts.

“There is medicine for that,” we say.

Not really. Sure, there is medicine to help someone cover up the wound, like a Band Aid, but the sore doesn’t heal as much as it is buried. The infection will return as soon as

well 

as soon as it rains, or when the next call comes from a creditor because they can’t work enough to keep up, or, worse, when a call doesn’t come any longer from friends and they suddenly remember they were better once, and they won’t be like that again. But even that’s not accurate since they simply are like this now, and apparently always were, and the moment it happened is an allusive memory.

Because while in the movies when someone has a nervous breakdown, they flail their hands and scream, cry, and someone might slap them, tell them to snap out of it, in reality that’s not what happens. The truth doesn’t play well on film. In reality they say nothing. They might drink, of course, or become addicted to some pain reliever, some vice that keeps their brain in the moment like alcohol or other self-defeating measures that keep their mind from dwelling on some past or future attack, but they might just as easily sleep all day, or more likely not sleep at night. They try and work but the ability to focus is gone; not ignored or delayed—the actual part of the brain that helps them do work or see a reason to exist at all has a hole in the middle of it, the circuits are infected and surrounded by puss, but no one can see that, so it can’t possibly be anything other than “a phase,” “laziness.”

Later, afterwards, people say they didn’t know, “They always seemed fine.” “I thought they were going through something.” “They said it was no big deal.”

They say, “I wish they had asked for help.” They say, “I did all I could.”

They say, “What a shame.”

Indeed.

Did Hemingway have another novel, Van Gogh another masterpiece, Robin Williams another routine for the thousands of kids he used to visit in hospitals?

Depression and mental illness often caused by a mental breakdown can cause lives to rip apart, and the only explanation they have when they ask for help again and again is “I’m trying.” And eventually that simply isn’t good enough no matter how much they are loved. They live out on the fringe, they hold signs, they sleep on grates. Likewise, they live in country houses and city apartments. They seem to try, they try to seem to fit in.

Maybe if they wore a cast, had sutures across their forehead. We like to see problems before we help solve them. We don’t offer help to people when we don’t know they’re suffering; how could we? Unless we know them well.

And that’s the problem. No one knows them at all. They’re funny and outgoing. They make light of serious situations. They can work a room. So they either never ask at all or, when they do so too often say “I need help,” it is difficult to see how. “Again?” we reply. “Why now?” we ask. The thing is in a few days they will not even remember they ever asked for help to begin with. This is true; the compromised brain actually blocks that out completely. To us they can either be absolutely silent or seem constantly desperate; but to them it just happened.

Here’s the problem:

How can we find that line between someone who really needs help and someone who just needs a bit more tough love? What do we do if there is no visible “mistake” that needs correcting? What do we say when they say nothing at all, or if we do ask if they need help, they say, “No thank you, it’ll be fine,” more out of a notion of being too embarrassed to say yes. Too ashamed. They’d rather…what?

They’d rather die. To be sure. I remember a phone call early one morning when I just didn’t want to hear it again. I remember a visit from someone who needed more than I could give. I recall calling once and the phone kept ringing. I’ll never forget that one.

Where is the line between knowing whether we helped enough and we could have done more?

Honestly, it runs right down the middle of the rest of our lives, and we walk it aimlessly, hoping we made the right call, that there was nothing we could do. Even if we’d rather be on the side of foolishness, helping people way more than they probably deserve, we can’t ever know.

So we call and talk, stop by, we get them to laugh because apparently we think laughter is the best medicine.

That’s not how a nervous breakdown plays out. Trust me on this one. But there is no Habitat for Humanity that helps people rebuild their minds. So they lose everything: their homes, their families, their purpose. And there’s not a damn thing we can do about it. Well, sure there is, but the place between knowing and not knowing is dark and difficult to navigate.

So. What do we do?

We forgive them for finding a solution the rest of us thinks is foolish. We forgive them for believing that the pleasure found by watching their kids and grandkids grow, watching another sunset with someone, laughing at lunch with friends, still isn’t worth the pain—the constant and debilitating pain—that comes constantly to infect their mind; constantly, day and night. Even their dreams are saturated with pain.

Forgiveness for something we do not understand is a monumental task. But then for some, so is life.

If you need help, Call 988 immediately.

If you know someone who needs help, Call them. You don’t have to know what to say. Say anything.

If you are living with the memory of someone you feel like you could have helped more, it isn’t your fault. It isn’t their fault. Forgive them. Forgive yourself.

Remember what we learned as toddlers: How would we want them to react if it was us? What would we want them to remember if it was us?

Not everyone is fine. It’s that simple.

Bob Kunzinger writes the weekly blog, A View from this Wilderness, which premiered in January 2016, and is the author of eleven books, including the forthcoming Office Hours, as well as hundreds of articles in national and international publications. He lives in Virginia.

Hypocrisy

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A few days ago, the editors at the widely read Vox Populi (18K daily subscribers) published my essay, “Moral Absolutism: Do Not Kill Children.” The emails have streamed in, most of them understanding and in agreement, and most of them understanding my issue is not with Israel’s right to defend itself against Hamas, nor even Israel’s right to seek out Hamas and destroy them. My issue is the exorbitant amount of civilian casualties, in particular women and children. It is all in the essay below.

But then something happened.

A few days ago, seven aid workers for World Central Kitchen were killed by accident in an Israeli airstrike (the disclaimer “by accident” was never used by Israel for the deaths of children). Since then the world has been outraged. “Repulsed that this has happened!” exclaimed “Left, Right, and Center” host David Green. President Biden said he was, “Outraged and heartbroken.” A reporter for Slate covered this best and I’ve included her article below, please please read it. But the obvious explanation, and one that repeats itself all too often, is also dangerously close to an accusation of such sweeping generalizations that I hesitated to say it, but that moment passed and here it is: We are more disproportionately outraged by the deaths of seven aid workers who voluntarily entered a warzone to provide relief than we are the deaths of over fourteen thousand children, because the aid workers for the most part look like us. The Israeli government even came out quickly and said they screwed up, they apologized, they promised swift resolution to the issue and punishment to those involved. A rare and decisive apology was delivered nearly immediately for the “error.”

Wait a minute. No such declaration was made by the Israeli government, and no such clear and emotionally charged disgust was displayed by President Biden nor British Prime Minister Sunak nor US Secretary of State Blinken for the extermination of fourteen thousand children. Can this mean the kids were targeted so no apology was due? You really can’t apologize for something you intended to do, can you? Or does this imply Israel is not sorry or disgusted by their deaths? Does it suggest the lives of seven people, only one of whom was Palestinian, were more valuable because they worked for Spanish celebrity chef Jose Andres?

Tens of thousands of innocent civilian deaths, fourteen thousand of them children, famine, rampant disease, accusations of genocide from UN officials all reported by the world media daily, but it is the deaths of these seven that pissed off the west and made them pay attention. Come on. This is simply wrong. Isn’t it beyond time we admit the rest of the world couldn’t care less until it directly affected them either through death or economic impact? It happened in Rwanda thirty years ago with the deaths of 800,000 Tutsis, and it will happen again. Apparently, we can afford for all the children to die and tens of thousands more who are about to through more attacks, hunger and illness caused by the Israeli Army and Hamas, but damnit, Israel stepped over the line when these seven familiar faces were killed.

Anyway, I’m just confused, that’s all. Why is it acceptable for innocent children to die but unacceptable for aid workers who knew the risks to die? Why is one called an accident but the other not? Why did one result in an apology but the other not? After all of the refusal on Israel’s part to allow aid to begin with, and when they did they made it nearly impossible to get it through, how can we believe these seven weren’t targeted and the culprits knew they’d just have to apologize, all the while anticipating exactly what would come to pass: that Chef Andres would cancel future aid deliveries and Save the Children would end up going to save other children, pulling back their presence in Gaza as well?

And to those officials whose response is, “Of course the deaths of the children were unacceptable as well,” one must demand an explanation for the six months of silence on the matter.

Please read these two pieces: one from Vox Populi, the other from Slate.

Peace.

The Vox Populi Article:

Bob Kunzinger: Moral Absolutism | Do Not Kill Children

The Slate Article:

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2024/04/world-central-kitchen-workers-killed-israel-gaza-idf-jose-andres.html

Peace. Out.

~ aviewfromthiswilderness ~ 3 Comments
The Peaceful Priest on the left/the asshole on the right/1980’s

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! Wilie E. Coyote didn’t paint the f***ing thing! 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? If I lived on a mountain in prayer would I be less likely to want to kill the cashier for needing a pen to subtract $5 from $20?

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 a few years ago 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. 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. I wondered, though, how often I only face what I know I can conquer.

Bringing peace to an otherwise hostile environment is a difficult task and it gets harder when we watch the world simmering in anything but serenity. Maybe that’s why I, too, often avoid the challenge and instead wander down country roads, watch the water ebb and flow rather than suffer the anxiety hurled at us from the news of Ukraine, of Gaza, of DC, of course. 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.

Eostre: The Goddess of Dawn

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aerie one

Eōstre is the Old English way of saying Easter. The reference is to a new birth, a sense of rising quite appropriate for the holiday. Few realize, I’m sure, that Eostre was the name of the pre-Christian Goddess of Dawn.

Life is always being reborn, whether the result of the changing seasons or divine intervention, rising from the past to try again.

I’m home now, and it is Easter Sunday, and I’m thinking about the need to start over. In that frame of mind with the buzz of a dozen candy coated chocolate malted eggs, I found again a metaphor in nature.

Back to this wilderness.

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

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

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

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

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

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

But these trees weren’t here a century ago and I sat on my porch and wondered if there had been other trees or if this land was barren, or was it used by the Powhatans, or was it home to some former slave family, or just a dumping ground. Evidence is scarce, buried beneath the roots of this small forest. Local historians settled long ago that this lower part of the peninsula was primarily hunting ground for the Powhatans, including Chief Powhatan and his daughter Pocahontas.

It’s changed since then. Four hundred years of rebirth in these woods finds me on the porch contemplating the ghosts of Aerie

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

aerie two

Cathy Kunzinger Urwin, Ph.D.

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Today my sister turns seventy-years-old.

Let’s start with this: My sister should be dead. Some years ago Cathy was diagnosed with aggressive stage four ovarian cancer. She had to undergo treatments in Philadelphia, knowing the odds of surviving even for just a couple of years were slim. She continued to work daily in Princeton, New Jersey, forty-five minutes from home, and she battled the monster. To the point: If you know anything about my sister, you know that ovarian cancer, even stage four, didn’t stand a chance. That was more than ten years ago, and not only did she defeat the cancer, not long ago she was told she is completely cancer-free and doesn’t need to return.

First picture ever of the three of us with Mom, Point Lookout, NY, 1960

Of course. That’s Cathy. One of my heroes.

I thought about telling “Cathy stories” here, like how she got my copy of the then-brand-new Let it Be album by trading me a Bobby Sherman album. Or how she let me use her guitar all I wanted. Or how she sent me care packages, made me ceramics like a seagull mug and another of a seagull standing on one wing, a beautiful rug she made of a seascape, and a pillow she made of Fozzie the Bear. How she introduced me to the music of John Denver which carried me through some difficult nights as I went out on my own, and how she sent me a plaque she made with the lyrics to John Denver’s “The Eagle and the Hawk.”

Cathy and Fred holding up their chubby brother

She doesn’t recall but I do how during the Watergate fiasco, my history-major sister quizzed me relentlessly in who the primary players were at the hearings. I was thirteen and she was in college, so I didn’t really see her too much after I turned twelve. But I ended up at the same college some years later to discover she had left a mark at our alma mater, graduating seven years before I did, but her former professors knew who I was because of her. I let them know quickly I was not my sister; an always straight A student who excelled in her studies, particularly in history, eventually earning her doctorate at Notre Dame where she met her loving and devoted husband, Greg.

Cathy and Greg

I’m not going to provide details of the myriad times she ended up being the butt of my jokes and those of our brother Fred. I will say she is such a fine cook and baker that her food should be in restaurants, she is an excellent writer of both history and other subjects, authoring the fine and definitive book Agenda for Reform, about Winthrop Rockefeller. I’ll not embarrass my sister with stories of her dancing to the “Hokie Pokey” at a resort in Downingtown, Pennsylvania, or bring up the complete drenching she received on the Roman River Rapids ride at Busch Gardens in Virginia, where she apparently didn’t know she’d get wet, to which her son replied, “Ma! It’s Roman River Rapids! What did you think was going to happen!”

Cathy with Lyra

I’m going to save the story of calling her one August day in 1988 just seconds after she received beautiful news that would change her life; how she became a committed and loving mother; a passionate grandmother, which only deepened her love for her husband and the rest of our family.

Cathy with Henry

There are too many details necessary to explain the time I finished a reading at a major conference and afterwards a woman approached me and asked if I was related to Cathy Kunzinger Urwin. When I told her, she said, “I’m with the Winthrop Rockefeller Center in Arkansas and we’ve been trying to reach her! Her book Agenda for Reform is the best work written about Rockefeller and the work he did, and we want to invite her to a symposium.” I was never so proud of my big sister, and I really don’t remember much about the rest of that three day conference, but I remember that.

The three of us at the World’s Fair, Flushing, NY

And I’m going to keep to myself the history we’ve shared not solely as brother and sister but as friends. And readers do not need to be reminded of what it means to have an older sister; how she is counselor, surrogate mother, teacher, patient audience, how she teaches scared younger brothers how to care about others, how to show compassion, how to think of others first. Few people with an older sister don’t already know she is a security net for the most challenging of emotional events, how she listens, how she is tolerant.

“Life is paper thin,” my friend Toni Wynn once wrote. Sometimes we all take each other for granted, forget to check in, see how life has been treating us. On the one hand we might talk often enough to know our sisters are there if we feel like calling. On the other, we don’t let them know nearly enough, not nearly enough, how much they mean to us.

Happy Birthday Cathy.

Cathy and me, 1988

But I can’t avoid this one, just for old-time’s sake:

For Cathy:

Can You Say “Non-fictionalist”?

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Last night I had dinner with seven other writers at an Italian restaurant (manicotti, meatball, salad with blue cheese dressing, chianti). I never before met the two women on either side of me, or a few of the others for that matter. We talked about weather, of course, and about the food. Where we’re from, what genre we write in (most of these people are poets). The talk turned to “what we’re working on,” and that’s when I ordered the wine. I’m not comfortable talking about what I’m working on unless I, a. know you very well, and even then, b. will change the subject. I’m not alone in this. One of my closest friends for twenty years is a poet and in all of our lunches or dinners through the years we only ever talked about writing when we read together at some event, and even then we don’t. Rick, another very dear friend, was there last night and we sideswipe the writing conversation nearly all the time. We’ll send each other drafts for comments, but don’t really talk about it

I never saw the point. I’m interested in what they’re working on, sure, kinda, but I’d rather really just read the final copy. If they do mention it, I’m really looking for little more than, “A collection about warts” or the like, no details. Peek my interest and step back. And who am I kidding; I’m not going to ask what anyone is working on, particularly people I don’t know. I don’t think it’s rude; I’m more comfortable with my work if it goes from brain to screen without getting blown around in the air between other people. I don’t mind the question; I get it all the time. But my answer will be little more than “some work about teaching,” or “several things going right now,” which doesn’t answer the question at all, which works best.

I find it revealing that the writers I know well also simply don’t really talk about it. We’ll talk about the process, or the stages of publication, or past work (ugh), but what’s on the front burner now is simmering and it’s best not to get too close.

It might be different for poets, or even novelists. But then those monikers right there in the previous sentence explains a lot–they are, in fact, “poets” and “novelists.” I’m neither, and what I do do does not translate to such a label. “Hi, I’m Bob, I’m a non-fictionalist.” Memoirist comes closest, I suppose, but most of my writing is not (my last book and my next book excepted, since both are full-length manuscripts about a certain time and place in my past). I write essays, or observations. A book slated for 2025 is a Sedarisest-style book about teaching; it’s not a memoir, so in that case I could be called an essayist, but that’s not accurate either since, it’s very memoiry, but, well, never mind.

The point is the manicotti. Growing up my mother always pronounced in manigaut (I’m not even sure how to spell this, but assume it is said as might an Italian who doesn’t speak English–without offense to my Italian cousins, and you know who you are). I was old enough to order my own food when I pronounced it that way and some server somewhere looked at me for a minute and replied in all her Virginian perfection, “OH! ManiCATTi!” Okay. Last night I heard a lot of menu items pronounced by the staff in a very non-West Virginian way of saying it, so when I knew I was going to order this dish (avoidance there, thank you), and when our excellent server, Jaimie, asked what I would like, I replied, as might my mother fifty years ago, “Manigaut.” She looked over my shoulder for a few seconds at the menu and replied, “Oh, the manicAtti, excellent.” Sigh.

Do you say what is the proper way to say things or do you say what they simply need to hear, are used to hearing? “I’m working on a piece about being nineteen years old.” “I’m working on a group of short essays, really nearly flash non-fiction, about stages of life, the patience we need when our children are very young and the patience we need when our parents are very old.”

That usually gets an accepting “Sigh. That sounds so good.” But it sucks, so I can’t agree, it might be good later, maybe tomorrow maybe in a dozen years by someone else. And that’s why I don’t talk about it.

Another writer I’m very close to is working on quite an involved work of fiction and is already nearly 100,000 words into it, and does not mind talking about it. But it helps, I believe, that writer clarify all the various aspect of this work, so talking about it somehow sharpens the mind about it. And I truly loved hearing about it.

But that’s not me. I don’t do small talk to begin with, and certainly have more trouble with it when even I don’t know what I’m talking about yet. So I’m more of the grunting type. “What are you working on, Bob?” “A book.” “Nonfictional stuff.” “Being nineteen.”

I was honest and as thorough as I could be. Jaimie returned and asked if I wanted anything else. I was about to order another chianti but hesitated. In America, shouldn’t that be che ante, hitting the ch, instead of the keeantay, pronouncing it as it should be in Italian? And if not, then why are we calling it ManAcotti? It’s Managaut.

A real non-fictionalist would know that.

Proof:

Sliced Bread

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Note: I wrote this piece nearly exactly as it reads below not long after the invasion of Iraq. Originally, I sent it to Dan Latimer, who at the time was editor of The Southern Humanities Review. He rejected it. About a year later at a reading in Atlanta, I read this, and Dan came up after and said, “I love that piece! Is it published? I want to use it in the SHR.” It was a few years later after he published several other works of mine I told him of his initial rejection of “Sliced Bread.” A year after the initial publication, Dan wrote to congratulate me; “Sliced Bread” was noted in Best American Essays, edited that year by Adam Gopnik. Since then it has been anthologized several times and even taught at a university in Taiwan. It remains one of my favorite pieces. I watched Oppenheimer again the other night and thought of this. Thank you for reading/sharing.

Sliced Bread

Tennessee Williams ate cornbread, as does Bill Clinton. Hemingway ate anything toasted. Vladimir Putin likes pumpernickel, named, according to spurious account, by Napoleon during war with Russia when he demanded a loaf of bread for his horse, Nicole, and shouted, “Pain pour Nicole.” Jacques Chirac chooses French from the Mediterranean region while Vincente Fox finds southern Mexico’s flatbread best with paella and beans.

Reagan liked sourdough. Nixon, a connoisseur of fine food, enjoyed sliced wheat bread and lightly buttered popovers, as does Margaret Thatcher. Thom Jefferson like Sally Lunn, of course. Mao didn’t eat bread. Stalin soaked black bread in beer and Lenin liked rolls. Alexander the Great relied upon some form of flatbread, while Ivan the Terrible ate black bread. Seafarers fared fine on hard biscuits inedible without sopping up soup or grog, and the staff of life literally saved the lives of millions during the nine-hundred-day siege of Leningrad during World War II, when bakers mixed breadcrumbs with sawdust to trick the stomach into feeling full. While mothers waited for food, while children starved to death, the Nazis pounded the city from the south with endless bombings. Hitler ate rye.

Which made me wonder about George W. Bush, so I Googled “Bush + Bread” and came up with “Damper Bread—a favorite in the Australian Bush.” Campers eat this horrific outback specialty in the wild. They bake damper in the hot ashes of the campfires in the outback dirt. It tastes disgusting but the sustenance is often necessary. Still, this tells me nothing, and I don’t think Bush bakes bread in the ashes of his Crawford ranch.

But just below that entry is “damper bomb.” This small exploding device can be manufactured at home for just dollars and will smoke out or kill anyone in the house. The damper bomb how-to page notes, “This is not a smart idea.” I should think not.

This same search, however, exposes “Smart Bombs” as a brilliant result of precision technology. They’re designed with a sensor system that uses a battery and onboard controls. Instead of just being dropped from an airplane as dumb bombs are, smart bombs are dropped then guided to their computed targets. They essentially become heavy gliders. Dumb bombs, however, fall helplessly.

So I searched “dumb bombs” further and found “Dum Bread.” This is a round loaf that indentured servants brought to the Caribbean from India after slavery. The dough was sweetened with coconut and placed in a covered skillet and fried on coals. More coals were placed on the lid. Later, wheat flour was added to the dough and the result was called Smart Bread. It can sit heavy in the stomach, however.

Equally difficult to digest is Daisy Bread. It is the most popular treat at the Lighthouse Bakery in England. It is dense, but pulls apart into pieces that resemble daisies. For an extra few pounds hungry daisy-eaters can add soup. The cook admits the weighty combination. “It’ll warm you up, though,” he says.

So will the infamous Daisy Cutter Bomb.  This cutter is essentially a dumb bomb weighing in at fifteen thousand pounds with more than six tons of explosives. Someone thought this was a smart idea. These bombs were common in Afghanistan but became most popular in Vietnam, where soldiers were hungry for landing-zone clearings. One of these twenty-seven-thousand-dollar-apiece bombs could clear an area three-quarters of a mile wide, including all buildings and rock formations. One of the problems with the Daisy is that the pilot must fly low, right over the target, so the wind won’t carry the bomb off course. They cost a lot of dough for such dangerous operations.

The fact that I searched for Bush and Bread and came up with bombs at first seems ironic. Not so much. Since I’ve already stumbled upon heavy bread and bombs, I look for the two in one shot and come up with MOAB, the Mother of All Bombs. This weighs in at twenty-one thousand pounds with nine tons of explosives. It’s the largest non-nuclear bomb in the world and is considered a Smart Bomb because of its gliding ability through GPS. It sprays a highly flammable liquid mist and then explodes about six feet above the ground for maximum impact. This monster is the size of a Jeep Cherokee. In 2002, Donald Rumsfeld said as far as weapons were concerned, the MOAB was the greatest invention since…well, how trite.

Truckers often stop at the Moab Bakery and Brewery in Moab, Utah. There they serve a popular bread bowl filled with whatever soup customers desire, along with some fine microbrew, for a few dollars. Moab is appropriately named; it means “beautiful land,” and Utah sure is beautiful. Of course, Moab also rests above one of the world’s largest uranium deposits.

The name has a biblical reference as well; it means “of the father.” Turns out that after Lot escaped from Sodom, his two daughters got him drunk and had sex with him. They both gave birth to sons and named the oldest Moab, whose primary diet consisted of salted bread. The territory in which they settled became known as Moab and one of the leading Moabites was Ruth, the great-grandmother of Kind David, whose lineage cuts directly to Christ. The first breadline, perhaps.

To go back:

Ancient Mesopotamians nearly nine thousand years ago chewed wheat grain. Eventually, the pulverized from, heated, tasted better, especially when they accidentally added yeast. It didn’t take them long to figure out that pulling off some of the old dough to use as starter for new dough would speed the process, and sourdough was born. In about 1000 BC, they grew a new strain of wheat which allowed them to make white bread. They ate thirty different varieties and washed it down with their most popular brew—beer. This all spread to Greece, which carried it to Italy, where grain and bread became the primary sustenance and monetary unit. Soldiers didn’t mind so much if they missed out on the meat, but don’t dare short them the bread. And the Roman welfare state was based on the distribution of grain to the citizens. Eventually, the government even baked the bread for them.

In 186 BC, the bakers formed a guild, making baking a separate profession. They enjoyed special privileges and theirs was the only trade carried out by freemen, not slaves. The members of the guild were not allowed to mix with regular people and were prohibited from attending events at the coliseum for fear they would be “tainted,” contaminated with the vices of ordinary folk. Romans loved rich breads with eggs and butter, but their favorite was white bread, made with special wheat grain, and to eat white bread indicated one was special. However, bakers considered it somewhat stupid, recognizing what the rest of the world would discover later—dark bread simply tastes better. Bakers believed it was bad taste to eat white bread.

Still, throughout most of history, white bread was an elite product since the grain was more expensive, and darker breads were distributed to the poor. Eventually, that switched and darker breads became renowned for their taste, making them more expensive. Through the dark ages, bread helped humanity rise above the plagues. Bread prevented suicide; bread filled young stomachs when nothing else worked; it was used for trade, as a status symbol, as an aphrodisiac. During the French Revolution, the Bread Riots nearly collapsed the government, giving rise to the myth of Marie Antoinette’s insensitivity: her supposed declaration that the poor, for whom bread was too good, should eat cake instead. Beer and bread were the two staples of life throughout the Middle East for centuries. Mothers used to send their children to school with both.

But even the Egyptians, who greatly improved bread-making recognized that the origin of the process and the best-tasting bread came from Mesopotamia, where the Euphrates and the Tigris rivers form the Fertile Plain.

Modern-day Baghdad.

The irony is so thick you can slice it.

The wheel was invented here, and the great mathematicians of ancient Greece recognized the Fertile Plain area as the source of their inspiration. Ancient Mesopotamia gave the world the first metal-working, architecture, city-building, urban planning, legal system, medical writings, cobblestone streets, and even beer. All of these six millennia and billions of loaves of bread ago.

The first bread with a name was called Lotus Bread. Flatbread with little or no yeast, it was used mostly to sop up oil and gravy in the meal so as not to allow anything to go to waste. Pita is a modern form of this. Roti in India; hleb in Russia; pan in Spain; brot in Germany; ogi in Basque; pao in Portugal; ekmek in Turkey; non e barbari in Iran; and in Iraq, khubz—the correct name for pita, taken from the Hebrew and Arabic. It’s the most widely eaten bread in the world. The Body of Christ is a middle-Eastern recipe. Michelangelo ate pita, as did the first popes. It is available at the Lotus Bakery in England, which also makes bread and rolls from the finest spelt flour, grown in the Middle East for nine thousand years. Today, farmers grow nearly a thousand varieties of wheat grain but still only one strain of spelt. And according to the Lotus Bakery it is easier to digest and tastes better than wheat.

The Lotus Bombing Principle is more difficult to swallow.

This declares that an independent government has a right to defend itself with whatever method is not prohibited. Here’s the problem: the World Court, in determining that states have the right to use nuclear weapons to defend themselves, ironically determined that states have the right to choose a course of action that could conceivably lead to the extinction of humanity. But not allowing the state that right would not allow them to carry out an action that is not prohibited under the law of the World Court; the “lotus” principle. Confused?

Simple: The world governments with money and know-how set out to find and extinguish nuclear weapons of mass destruction from the arsenals of governments considered “high risk,” Bush’s “Axis of Evil” members. And how do they find them?

Yeast.

As it turns out, yeast functions like a scout, or a canary in a coal mine. If yeast cells are exposed to dangerous chemicals they change color and die. Scientists genetically modified yeast so that when something happens to its cells they change color. These yeast cells are placed on the backs of cockroaches—a species which can apparently survive a nuclear war. The roaches are then sent into places where someone might hide dangerous chemicals or weapons. These yeast cells can stay alive for several days, and that is long enough to keep an eye on the little indestructible suckers to see where they’ve been and if, when they come out, the yeast cells have turned color.

So war and bread apparently need each other. However, I still need to know the president’s favorite bread. In need of aspirin as well, I wander to the drug store, where the clerk watches Oprah, and who’s her guest but the Commander-in-Chief himself. I watch the way one watches a NASCAR race: waiting for, just expecting, an accident, but she keeps the questions relatively simple. One of them is his favorite food—I can’t believe it.

“Oh,” the president says, “I love peanut butter and jelly on white bread.” I pegged the president as a white bread loafer from the start, with maybe an occasional drift toward tortillas. But any WWII Navy personnel could predict he’d go for the PBJ because the PBJ-1 was the US Navy’s designation for the famous B-25 Mitchell Twin-engine bomber. It had a mounted upper turret and retractable radar unit  along with the ability to carry a single torpedo fitted outside the bomb bay. One of the Mitchell’s finest hours was the Doolittle Raid in which Jimmy Doolittle led a group of PBJs off the carrier Hornet in a bombing raid of Tokyo. Many years later, President Reagan and Vice President George H.W. Bush awarded Doolittle the Presidential Medal of Freedom for “dropping the bombs that led to the end of the war.” During Doolittle’s tours overseas, he was allotted four ounces of bread per day.

According to Saint Don Bosco, a nineteenth-century Silesian priest, our only salvation from the bombs that will rain down is the “bread of life.” Saint Don would have eaten mostly flatbreads from Northern Italy. The year Bosco died, Van Gogh wrote that he ate only “bread and whatever beer I can borrow from the innkeeper from the night café to keep myself from suicide.” Van Gogh liked sourdough. Snoopy eats wheat toast. My son likes hard-crusted Italian. My father likes white bread; he voted for Bush.

In America last year we spent about seven billion dollars on bread. The workers who built the pyramids were paid in bread. The great fire of London started in a bakery. Of the more than six billion people on the planet, nearly five and a half billion of them rely upon bread as their primary nourishment. Meanwhile, that same number has at one time or another in the last five years been in some sort of volatile conflict.

Julia Child once wondered, “How can a nation be great if its bread tastes like Kleenex?”  Henry Miller said you might travel fifty thousand miles in American without once tasting good bread. Gandhi said there are “people in the world so hungry that God cannot appear to them except in the form of bread.” Francis Bacon said acorns must have been good enough to eat until bread was found. And he wasn’t far off; the first bread probably tasted nutty.

Bread is a slang word for money. Bread is the staple of life, both nutritionally and spiritually. Thomas Merton wrote, “Stale bread is much closer to crumbs and I am humbled by that.” Plato believed an ideal state “where men would go to their grave old was one where people ate locally grown whole grain wheat.” Socrates, on the other hand, believed whole grain bread to be pig food. Christ probably ate Parthian bread, and the loaves that fed thousands were a similar variety. “Companion,” literally translated, means one with whom we “break bread.” Bread is the staple of civilization; it keeps the seams from unraveling.

When a movie fails in the United States, it is considered a “bomb.” When it succeeds in London it is considered a “bomb.” In both cases the word comes from the Latin, bombus, which means “a booming sound.” Bread, on the other hand, is derived from the Hebrew, which is known in some lexicon circles as the “mother of all tongues.” To brew, the root of the word “bread,” is to concoct. No wonder warm beer and bread have been linked since biblical times. Certainly those downing loaves of Parthian must have been getting bombed along the way. Dwight Eisenhower said, “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed.” Eisenhower liked Irish soda bread.

Robert Oppenheimer, director of the Manhattan Project, upon watching the first atomic explosion in 1945 quoted a Sanskrit verse from the Bhagavad-Gita. He whispered, “I am death, destroyer of worlds.”

Oppenheimer loved white bread, lightly toasted, with butter.