Bob Kunzinger

A Season Out of time

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Sometimes you can sense some sort of lethargy this time of year revealing itself in subtle ways, like not wanting to go to work, not filling out some forms or editing some article, not bothering to return important calls completely out of a sense of avoidance, as if you might be able to wait long enough and all of this will pass—this stuff that brings you down, and to be honest, you’re not really sure what that stuff is. The idleness of society maybe, the constant sense of impending doom reported in all forms of media about democracy, about pandemics, about weather, climate, Ukraine, Gaza, shootings, political attacks, corruption, the economy, about depression and isolation. You have no reason to take any of it personally, but some people can’t let it go, it is so overwhelming and it weighs heavy, and you wonder how can you hold out hope for anything, let alone just one good day, when humanity is humiliating itself; so you settle for avoidance, which adds to the isolation, which fans the grief.  

And you wonder what happened to everyone; what did you say or do to create some distance with family or friends, which may not be true at all, but with Seasonal Affective Disorder, it’s exactly true, and it’s your fault, clearly, and you know you’ve made mistakes but you know also what no one else does, that some contact can cure, even for a short while, some malaise.

You can sense yourself not trying as hard or caring as much, like eating whatever is around instead of thinking it through, not going for a walk because you don’t want to be bothered putting on a coat or dealing with any sensory change. You’re sitting; you’re comfortable, and you’re numb. It works. Numb is good.

Going for a walk helps. Filing out the forms, returning calls, all help by providing a sense of accomplishment and forward motion, like checking things off the to-do list, it leaves you with the hint that if you keep going there’s something worthwhile on the other side. You convince yourself it is the medicine side effects. You tell yourself the mistakes you made are in the past; you know it doesn’t matter.

There’s the rub. It seems you keep reaching the other side and there’s still nothing there to lift the spirits, not this season anyway—more hostility in the east, more pessimism in our government, more variants on deck ready to step to the plate after some new mass shooting smacks a triple into right field. So you try a little less at one task, and it spirals from there. You realize it’s not depression; it’s, well, yeah, it’s depression, but not in the deeply caving sense; more like in the “whatever” sense. You tell yourself you’re not even close to suicidal; then you read telling yourself that is a bad sign.

More spiraling.

The problem with this type of malaise is it can be debilitating to you without being scary to others if you are not suicidal. The truth is, the vast majority of people who deal with depression are not contemplating suicide and will never kill themselves, which is what most friends fear most, and when those friends learn that is not part of the equation, they feel better. But that can often make it worse since the objective is for you to feel better, not them. But that’s fair since you know what they don’t: that a different suicide exists, a slow erosion of sorts, which anonymously eats away at ambition and accomplishment, takes the edge off of energy and momentum. It’s the guy sitting at a bar nursing a beer, nowhere to go despite having a million things to do. It’s the one on the park bench watching people walk by but not noticing a single one of them; it’s the inability to concentrate, the disinterest in listening, the short responses to questions, the inability to make it through the most basic of activities. It’s writing endless emails about nothing to others in some attempt to reach out; but that just backfires. Rational thought has nothing to do with it. “Knowing” what to do is not relevant. Your mind is suspended, your thought process withdraws into some elementary state.  

On the one hand it’s situational—financial problems, relationship problems, blizzards. But it can also be chemical if you don’t have medical help. It’s addiction without restraint. It’s a combination of these, and it is unpredictable because the same thing that leaves you in bed staring at the ceiling feeling hopeless can drive you to your feet to tackle whatever it is that left you prostrate to begin with. It is a conundrum that plays handball in your brain.

The guy at the bar with the beer, the woman in the park, the man at the river watching the tide roll out, all know exactly what the problem is. But their brains are aflush with fog, their anxiety has disabled their decision-making capabilities, and their strongest assets and most celebrated talents that normally keep them going the rest of the year, are no longer applicable since they carry a sense that those traits are probably what brought them to this place to begin with. They sit and wonder what if. They sit.

“Maybe if I had just…”

“Perhaps I should have…”

“Fuck it.”

At some point it seems you stop fighting altogether and are either not afraid to hit bottom, or you hope to use that bottom to bounce back, not afraid to fail since it can’t be worse than this. It is extreme but that is part of the diagnosis—extremes, polar reactions—sometimes both in one day. Sometimes within one hour.

More often than not, the guy on the corner holding the cardboard sign didn’t “decide” to quit, didn’t give up, but “felt” a pressure that he no longer could handle or define, caught in some stream of disconnect and hopeless confusion. Sometimes the one who does, in fact, tragically go that last fatal step didn’t “decide” to do anything at all, and that is the point. Suicide is not a decision. It is one step beyond decision making. The vast majority of people who deal with depression have that in check, less so in the dead of winter, of course.

But that’s not you. Truly. And that is the problem; you really aren’t suicidal at all. And when suicide is not part of the equation, others feel that you must be “okay,” or “going through something right now.”

Yeah, winter, you’re going through a snow bank that’s three months thick. This is the worst time of year for many people with depressive issues. Seasonal Affective Disorder is real and feels like all of the above. Nothing helps but time, but time to some people sounds like the slow drip of icicle melt. Others say you’ll get over it, it will pass, hang in there, talk to someone. Yes, all of the above, but right now–right this minute–you need help and you don’t know it.

Other people try to help so they talk about the weather or sports or anything at all with enthusiasm and a sense of caring, but it often makes it worse, only emphasizes that others get excited about the minutia while you can no longer find value in a sunrise.

And the disguises are nothing short of cunning. I’ve known people fighting depression who on the outside resonate as the very poster image of Carpe Diem. I’ve been friends with people who contemplated overdosing on Monday while making plans for Tuesday, who loved others more than the average soul but only wanted their puppy nearby at checkout time, and people who fought depressive ways by pushing adventure to the limit, and beyond. “What a lust for life!” people exclaimed. They had no idea.

It isn’t exactly depression, by the way, though it is easier to simply call it that because it certainly wears the same eyeshadow as depression. It is indifference; it is a vague inability to muster the energy to lift your spirits enough to give a damn about anything. It’s not like you woke up depressed so you decided to stay on the couch all day; you simply don’t care that you’re on the couch to begin with. Complete apathy. You’re not down about anything; you answer “fine” because you really are fine; fine’s a fine word; vague and indifferent. It has the definitive weight of a horse shoe and the value of fog. “I’m fine, really,” should never be left alone with a person who fights depression.

Ironically, for most of these afflicted people, life is amazing, every half-beat is a moment of “miracles and wonder” which is why you cannot comprehend the misuse of time. The abuse of time in so short a life, you think, is as suicidal as the abuse of substances, and that can be depressing as well.

It is the time of year when you wake at three am knowing nothing is going to work, and you’re going to lose your house and your sense of security and no answer makes sense, no way forward seems rational. Equally, the dawn can come with new ideas and hope, and if you push those moments far enough into the morning, you just might be able to make a day of it. But January has 285 days. And February is several months long. March? Well you well know that March is merely a tease. April comes and breathing is easier. May, and nothing stands in your way. But in January it is safe to say yet difficult for others to understand that May hasn’t even been invented yet. It doesn’t exist and neither will you by then.

On the outside you seem to be fine. On the inside you’re grasping the thin rope of enthusiasm with clenched fists, pretending all will be well, but your insides—much against your will—are shredding at the thought of what to do next.

You “hang in there.” You “get through it.” You suffer the trite suggestions of others who simply can’t understand what the big deal is. That’s okay though, you think. Really. You absolutely know, logically, it is chemical; while at the same time you absolutely know, logically, the world has moved on without you. There are no solutions, per se. Just more questions. And “hang in there” is at the very least an acknowledgement you really aren’t trying to dismiss your very existence; it just happens sometimes. Depressed people do not feign depression; they feign contentment.

This afternoon I went to the river where a bitter breeze is pushing down from the west. There’ll be ice tonight somewhere, and snow, but I sat reminding myself I have been there, touched that ring of undefinable despair, and I’ve moved through it, sometimes with difficulty, often with ease, always with the knowledge that I’ve had one freaking incredible life so far, and time enough left, I hope, to continue my pilgrimage well into the next mood swing. But there are moments, collisions with frustration at the gap between the way things are and the way things should be, that catch some people off guard. “You’ve been like this before,” a dear friend told me not long ago when things were less than fine. “And you’ll be like this again.” And all you can think is, “Yes I will, like right now.” But what she meant was this is you, this is part of your DNA, this is as much you as your skin. What she meant was there is no “fighting” the tigers that come at night. Better to sit and dine with them, pour some Bailey’s on the rocks, and wait. Just wait.

And Eventually you remember that the seasons, like everything else, change. And love, despite its bad reputation, is holding the other end of that thin line you’re grasping.

Because nothing else matters but love. Nothing.

I’ve been released
And I’ve been regained
And I’ve been this way before
And I’m sure to be this way again
One more time again

–N. Diamond

 stēlla

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The moon last week through the telescope looked like a golf ball, the dimple-craters and the bright white side imbedded in the mud of the dark side. We looked at it a long time with the perspective Apollo 8 must have had when it orbited the place, moving around it like Tiger Woods circling his next putt.

It’s cold, but still, and the air off the bay bites a bit, and some rustling in the leaves makes me think the fox is around tonight, or a cat from a house through the woods, but it is how it should be–we seem to look at the stars most in winter because it gets dark so much sooner, the air is cleaner, the humidity low.

But last week despite the bright half-moon, the sky was dark and the telescope picked up an amazing nebula all ablaze not far from Orion, shining out from billions of years ago. It is the middle star on the belt and the brightest nebulae up there. I’ve needed perspective lately. When “the world is too much with me” and “life is like a pathless wood,” it is good to look at the same stars as did Copernicus and Galileo and ancient astronomers who saw bulls and crabs and horseheads where I can only see a random sampling of bright dots, like dots on a map.

And the top half of a golf ball stuck in the mud of space.

“Why, I ask myself, shouldn’t the shining dots of the sky be as accessible as the black dots on the map of France?” wrote Van Gogh to his brother, Theo. “Perhaps we take death to reach a star. We cannot get to a star while we are alive any more than we can take the train when we are dead. So to me it seems possible that cholera, tuberculosis and cancer are the celestial means of locomotion. Just as steamboats, buses and railways are the terrestrial means. To die quietly of old age would be to go there on foot.”

I like that, the illusion that death is another mode of transportation, and those we love and lose here are simply on some galactic pilgrimage. I have several books about the stars given to me by my brother, by my son, and I’ve read them, returned to them for reference, for maps, and I have such trouble remembering the names of space stuff. I mostly use my cellphone app, point, and then say with absolute authority, “I’m nearly positive that’s Avior. I think it’s a star in Corina if I’m not mistaken.” But I swear ten minutes later if anyone asked me to repeat it, I couldn’t.

So I’ve started making up my own star names, like the International Star Registry, only specific to Bob. Deep in the Pleiades I can see “Cole,” leaning into the other stars, preaching, pushing them into agreement about the colors he should use to paint Jupiter with all her moons. And what used to be Lesath in the Scorpio constellation according to my Backyard Guide to the Night Sky is now “Eddie.” I can almost hear some Janis wailing from his band of Red Dwarfs. “Dad” is clearly Polaris, my North Star, up there to guide me if I wish, follow him when I’m lost. I wish I had turned to him more when I couldn’t find my way.

Now, I know from these books from my brother and son that the brightest star in the night sky should be Sirius. Orion’s belt points right at it, yet more than a few times I’ve mistaken it for her sisters, like Vega and Canopus. So I’m saving her, putting a sticky note on Sirius. I have a special name for her I’m keeping to myself and will send to the Star Registry—though I doubt they’ll change the name of such an important celestial body; but I will, if only in my mind. And I’m going to memorize her location so I can go outside on a clear night and talk, reminisce, find a bit of permanence in an all too temporal existence.  

(nee Sirius)

NIL for Everyone

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For the past several years at the college, I’ve had more than a few athletes in my classes. This isn’t unusual when one teaches general education courses, required by the college for every discipline. One of those courses on my schedule every semester is an argumentative course of critical thinking and writing. And one of the hottest topics for quite some time that inevitably comes up during our weekly discussions is, “Should college athlete’s get paid?”

The conversation is partly predictable. This semester a starter for the women’s basketball team is in class, several lacrosse players, a few swimmers, and a rower. Last semester three or four football players. Their contribution to this particular subject is generally predictable; they’re in favor of paying athletes. Go figure. The basketball player, in respect to the rower, said it depended, and that she would not want to get paid if it came at the cost of cutting smaller squads, like the scull team.

The focus we land upon, however, since any argument is irrelevant if you don’t find a particular point to address to avoid butting heads all day, is what is known as a NIL contract. This is when college athletes are paid for the use of their name, image, or likeness in promotions, on jerseys, in gaming. Most agree this seems fair, though most agree it probably doesn’t add up to much unless you’re up for the Heisman Trophy and play for Alabama or Notre Dame. Still, it’s something (above the full ride and other benefits—I’m not arguing this here). In a gross oversimplification, the NIL contract is through a third party such as Nike or Cheerios, not the college, and cannot be tied to performance or choice of schools.

Okay, it’s something. For some not enough, for others more than they imagined. Not everyone is going to be Bronny James of USC Trojans basketball, who makes $5.9 million from his NIL deals with companies like Nike, Beats by Dre, and PSD Underwear. The average NIL deal is roughly between $1000 and $10,000, which is no small chunk of change, but the numbers can be distorted when coaches are pulling down seven figures and some colleges’ television deals seem like enough wealth to share the good fortune with the players who generate the revenue to begin with. But there are more than half a million athletes in the NCAA in this country, and only about 2% of them will ever play professional sports. So on the one hand any NIL contract provided by a company is not going to last long; that is, it is unlikely in 98 percent of college athletes to transfer to a professional deal, but on the other hand for that 98 percent, it is as close as they will come to compensation beyond their tuition, room and board.

But this isn’t about them. I really don’t care either way.

This is about me.

I left class last week with these numbers swirling in my head, walking with basketball player who said she really enjoys my class. “No kidding, Professor Bob, I tell everyone about the class; I look forward to this every single week.” That feels good. We never ever hear it. Like ever. 😊

Player went her way, and I headed toward the parking garage considering something that had never crossed my mind: I want a NIL contract. Why not?

I once wrote a piece comparing my salary over a thirty-year career, total, to Alex Rodriguez’s, who at the time was the highest paid player in baseball. It turns out in my entire career, including cost of living increases, bonuses, overloads, and raises, I will earn, total, what A-Rod made in seven games, eight innings. Something is out of whack. I understand that no one is running to the bookstore to buy jerseys with my name on the back, and that whether I show up on the collegiate classroom playing field or not, students will still come, still take the course, and still graduate. Still, surely the transitory impact of watching a sporting event cannot be measured against the lifelong impact of a college degree. But in comparison to A-Rod you might say I made nil.

I know the college won’t pay me more, but someone can supplement my income, like LL Bean, Vans, 3M paper products. For a small sum I’ll wear a polo shirt with Nike on it and throw a swoosh at the bottom of my course outline. It can’t affect my teaching; and hell, the news stories alone at the beginning will make it worth it for the company. There can be billboards with my name and image, stating, “Prof B uses 3M sticky notes,” or one of me walking into the classroom with my vintage tan Vans, stating, “Walking from his office to classes and back is easier in Vans.” Come on, there’s a gold mine to be made.

It is laughable, of course; a parody of such ridiculous proportions that all I’ve done is made people more aware of the financial situation in collegiate sports.

But think about this: forty-five years after I started college, I can only remember the names of one or two athletes, and at the time, St. Bonaventure’s basketball team was decent under the coaching of renowned Jim O’Brien, going 20-10 and 18-13 back-to-back seasons. I knew a few of the starters and still can’t remember their names.

But I don’t know a single person my age who can’t tell you the names of every professor they had in college. Every one of them; the impact they had, the life-steering energy some of them provided. Every semester, professors have anywhere from sixty or seventy students to one hundred and fifty, depending upon the school. Every season students watch forty or forty-five football players, a dozen or more basketball players.

Yet every semester each student has just four or five professors, two or three times a week, for fifteen weeks. It wouldn‘t kill a company to toss some action our way and gain a reputation for supporting education in America at the same time.

And why can’t the bookstore rack some jerseys with “Kunzinger” on the back. Hell, I’d buy one.

lithograph by Marc Snyder

Valuation

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outside my window

It’s foggy across the river and bay this morning, and out on the bridge a heavy mist blanketed the area so that even seeing the sky-blue girders above us was difficult. A foghorn sounded from the mouth of the river, presumably menhaden boats out on the Chesapeake, perhaps an oyster workboat. It’s chilly, but not too bad. That could be a description of my head, but it’s not. It’s outside my head I’m pretty certain.

The view from this desk is only slightly better. The woods are misty, but the fog lifted. I can see pretty deep into the trees, and the skylight above my head is wet.

Sitting before me is a to-do list. I need to record a few art lectures for a university in Ohio, send edits of a piece to a journal, read proposals from capstone writing students in West Virginia, make a topic list for my writing students down in Norfolk, rewrite twenty pages of the monster—twenty pages about a time in my life when absolutely nothing happened, but something should have happened and that is the point of nothing happening, so that the reader will feel like something should have happened all the while nothing happens at all. Wow. That sounds like a metaphor for life. But it’s not. It was life, once.

And I need to send emails to a bunch of people who I was supposed to send emails to a few weeks ago but then college happened. And deadlines. And basic malaise. Luckly, the Kahlua bottle behind me is still full.

Alternate plan: Sail down to the Gulf of Mexico, teach online from the aft cabin, grab the guitar, play some Fogelberg and Cat and Van around a beach bonfire with friends and Malibu rum. Forget finally that social media had ever been invented. Go back to wondering how everyone is instead of knowing constantly. I miss wondering, I miss “catching up,” telling stories about things that others don’t know about yet. But we don’t. We value our homes and the lives we built; we asses and measure in terms of security and balance instead of whim and ideals. Of course. It’s called being mature, something I have rarely been, I suppose. I don’t know why; a design flaw, perhaps? Too much daydreaming when I was young? Not enough classical music?

So naturally I’ll need to stick with Plan A for a while. I wonder why, of course. Not enough nerve? Gummies? Too many responsibilities?

First, though, I need to complete a self-evaluation for the college. It’s a once-a-year thing, not difficult, which includes understanding what I did right, what I might change, how I respond to criticism of others, particularly students, what I’m going to include or exclude in the future, and some sort of game plan. It sounds more involved than it is, and it won’t take long. And after thirty five years of these things, I can clearly see how they have helped fine-tune my work.

Yet recently I realized I should have been doing one of these self-evaluations about my life all along. Five pages about the year, perhaps. Five written pages about what worked, what didn’t, what I need to do differently and proposals of how I might get there. This time five pages might not do it; I messed up in some big ways simply by not doing things, which should be part of any evaluation: what didn’t I do that I should or could have?

Do you do this? Maybe schedule a drink with a significant other or close friend next to a fire, talk a bit, then do self-evals with each other. It’s what I like about the assignment: At least a few other people are going to read it, so I need to be clear, concise, constructive. And so the “life-evals” should be too, whether oral or written. In both cases, honesty is essential. In both cases, brevity is dangerous. The college assignment is two or three pages of actual written self-analysis. That’s just short enough to bullshit with the best of them, which is why I believe it should be five pages; then I’d have to come up with some serious details and examples to maintain info about the man in the mirror for that long. Plus my writing is foggy and misty for the first two pages, even in rewrites, but by the time I’m moving into page four, everything is clearer, and you can see even my metaphorical trees far into the woods.

She’s a 41’ Morgan Out Island, spacy aft cabin with a queen size bed, long and wide main cabin with a navigator’s table which converted makes an excellent writing desk, another two cabins up front and two heads, one forward and one aft. The stove is a good size, and the refrigerator holds more than a few bottles of Kahlua.

What would you do? How do you write this into your self-evaluation? Truthfully.

I guess we’re not always so honest with ourselves after all, are we? I need to finish preparing the week’s lectures, send in the rewrites to the journal, and clean up the monster, clarify I wasn’t doing anything when I was hoping to be doing something.

That’s the point, though, isn’t it?

I Never Needed Anybody’s Help in Any Way

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I heard an interesting comment on NPR last week. When talking about someone who died by suicide, the victim’s brother said he didn’t think his sibling didn’t like life anymore as their mother had suggested, but just didn’t like one particular part of life, and somewhere over the course of time—maybe weeks, maybe months or longer—the poor man hyper focused on that one aspect until it became a monster, blocking his view of any other aspect of existence remotely salvageable; even the finest reasons to continue were saturated with the pain of one part, perhaps even a small part, of life.

On the one had it made their mother feel a bit stronger—that her late son did not despise life, and in particular perhaps not the life she and her husband had built for them, but one thing happened, who knows what, and that overtook him despite the beauty around him. He couldn’t see past that monster any longer, and in his then-compromised view, nothing else existed any longer. Life became about the pain-inflicting monster, so killing oneself seemed the only clear way to end the pain.

On the other hand, for those who still know someone with some form of depression, particularly situational depression and not chronic or manic depression, being able to unearth and understand that aspect of life which has the potential to take over a person’s mind can help isolate it and, over time maybe, destroy it. At the very least the knowledge of the issue might help others keep it in perspective, perhaps even eliminate it.

The surviving brother then, almost off-handedly, said, “I wish we had gone hiking more.” No one picked up on it; at least not on air. But I did. It slid right in my thought process and simmered all day. His brother must have been considering how things might be different if he had helped replace the monster with something more powerful, more soul-owning. For them, apparently, hiking. Had they gone enough times, or consistently enough anyway, for the deceased to have discovered that hiking was his life and he now could own that choice, his routine and whatever negative issues came up—a problem with a partner, finances, even simple malaise that chronically depressed people will never be able to explain—would be minimized by the power found in something positive.

It doesn’t have to be hiking. Could be music, sports, food. But something active, something visceral and kinetic.

I asked my students the other day how much time each day do they spend watching other people live their lives or pretend to live life. That is, how much time are they stagnant viewing other people’s happenings on tv, movies, TikTok, etc. I’m not talking about going to events like sports or lectures or the like. No, those are very participatory. I mean the dead-brained observation we do that when we’re done—or better stated, when we take a break–we are exhausted, and we never did a damn thing.

The suicide rate among college-aged students is about 2 percent, about 1100 per year, and about 25% know of someone who killed themselves, and just over that percentage thought about it themselves, all of them offering as their primary motivators pressure, helplessness, relationships, loneliness, and money.

It takes just one issue to debilitate a person, make them feel hopeless, and all the time in the world trying to balance it with positive acts cannot extract that monster from the mind, and eventually ration slides away so that suicide is not a conscious decision but in itself a rational act to eliminate the pain, which by that point is all there is.

And later people say they wish they knew, they say they would have helped. The man on the radio said, “He asked for help; we told him we had helped him all we could and he had to do this alone.” He was riddled with guilt, but then realized that the way he could have helped may not have been clear to either his brother or him at the time. One just assumes the help one asks for when in a bad place is the only way to help them out of that place, but that’s not always accurate; in fact, it is often hardly ever accurate. “I just should have been there more, called and asked how he was doing more, had lunch,” the brother added. Exactly.

Yes. He should have, but not because of his tragic loss, but because we are humans, responsible for each other, and I am so guilty of not being there for others it is disturbing. I can change that, but there are some things I cannot change. We can at least change the things we can. I’ll leave the wisdom part for someone else.

I guy I knew a long time ago told me a story about a friend who couldn’t see past a bad relationship, a mentally abusive relationship, and saw no way out of it, particularly since they just had a baby girl. In all other aspects of his life he was okay, very giving, impossibly kind to others, but he felt he had nowhere to turn. His mother ignored him, his father tried to help but without emotion, making it difficult. And he thought his friends had moved on. One morning the troubled one called a friend, but the friend didn’t answer the phone. The friend was pretty sure he knew who was calling and that he was probably depressed, but he didn’t want to deal with it at that moment. Three hours later the guy I knew called to tell him that the troubled one killed himself. He told the friend that the widow told him his last outgoing call was to the friend. He thought it would make him feel good to know the dead guy was thinking of him, probably missed him. He had no way of knowing that the man had ignored that very call. I knew these people; and it is easy to say there was nothing anyone could have done, but that simply isn’t true. We just tell ourselves that. Certainly we may not be able to save someone’s life, but we can save some time for them. It’s a tough call but an easy decision; make the call, stop by, go for a walk. Grab some tea.

Give them a reason.

We are here for each other. It’s all we have. We are only here for each other. We can’t save others if they don’t want to be saved, but by trying to help others we just might end up saving ourselves.

Another Story of An Hour

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Anyway.

I went into class Monday and asked who had read the only assignment for the day, Kate Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour.” One person out of thirty. I want to be clear about this: the story is barely two pages long. I moved my chair to the center in front, sat, and said, “Okay, let me get the straight:” I had Morgan Freeman’s voice in my head. “You graduated high school, applied to colleges, decided to come here, went through whatever financial mess you had to go through from parents to grants to loans, found out what classes you need, packed your life and moved here, came to class, found out what you needed to do, which, again, was to read a couple of pages, and just didn’t bother. Isn’t that a little like hitting a home run but after you round third, you think ‘Ah, screw it,” and you walk into the dugout without touching home plate?”

“You just got here, and you already gave up.”

I’m not making any of this up. One person out of thirty read a story that is about half the length of this blog post. What do you do with that? They’re nineteen years old, on their own for probably the first time in their lives, living with strangers, trying to figure out from everyone else what their lives will be about, and I asked them to read a story written more than a hundred years ago about a woman who’s glad her husband is dead. But they don’t know that because they haven’t read it. I talked about the symbolism, the setting, and the internal monologue. I sighed.

It already hadn’t been a good day. Or week. Or, well, weeks anyway. I’ve been deep in the rewrites of a manuscript which has been bleeding out of my right ear for more than forty years; I started the damn thing during the first Reagan administration. I’ve abandoned it, tackled it, trashed it, and started over, published portions and rewrote all of it a dozen or more times.

A month ago, just as the winter season had kicked in strong here along the bay and I could see the long, moody haul to next spring, which, for some comes with another set of issues, I knew that I wanted this manuscript, this “monster in a box” as Spading Grey once called a work of his, released into the wild. Hell, there are only two characters, so you’d think it wouldn’t be all the difficult.

I tell my writing students that if you have trouble writing something, write something else. I don’t believe in writer’s block; I think that is the result of trying to drain something of value from something that should be passed on altogether, or at the very least addressed some other time. Sometimes there is a piece missing and you simply don’t know it, so instead you blame “block” or distractions or the story itself for being lame. You have no way of knowing that what it needs has not been born to you yet and in time it will materialize. That has happened with this monster several times. No longer.

About three weeks ago when I had been lifting portions of an introduction from writing by Beryl Markam to use in this work, I realized that the narrative is not about either of the two characters: it’s about being nineteen years old. The one hundred pages turned into one fifty. Then two hundred. It is now roughly two hundred and twenty pages long. It’s not War and Peace, grant you. But it’s at least Peace.  

And I just received an endorsement for the manuscript from a very well-respected writer in Oklahoma.

And that’s where it’s at as I continue to tweak, manipulating the middle a bit after hearing back from my long-time writing muse in Ohio. She nailed what is missing in the exact spot something is missing but I couldn’t figure out what. Geez I love when that happens. Writing is decidedly not a solo sport.

So I went into the week feeling pretty good. I made a fun video about art of the renaissance for my art history course, and another about the art of the Islamic world. I had some good conversations with my senior creative writing students about their final projects before graduating, and I felt pretty damned good. Yep.

Then Kate Chopin happened. Mrs. Mallard shows up with her not-dead-after all husband and the joy that kills, only to be abandoned as if the story had never been written to begin with.

They’re nineteen, I reminded myself. You just spent a lot of time writing about how hard it is to be nineteen. Give them a break.

“Okay,” I asked, “You knew the assignment, yet you didn’t do it, so why?”

I got the usual responses.

“Okay,” I said. “How’s this”:  I mock-typed on a dead keyboard on the front desk, and said to everyone, “Dear Potential Employer, Graduate Director, Grant Reviewer: He can’t even read a two page story he had a week to complete. Nuff Said.”

Everyone laughed.

“My guess is if I had assigned a novel of some length, you’d have at least started it; but this was too easy to wrap your minds around as a collegiate assignment.”

One guy spoke. “I didn’t even look to know it was only two pages. I would have read it. I just assumed that it would be really freaking long.”

Fair point, I thought.

So I cut them some slack. I talked about the story. Symbolism, setting. We talked about Chopin. We just talked. I explained why I chose the story, and I tried to explain how it is relevant to us for knowing what to look for when we analyze something. I looked at the course outline and saw that they needed to read Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues” in two days. Baldwin is one of my favorites.

“What do you guys read? I mean beyond TikTok.”

Crickets. I could hear my officemate on the next floor eating her lunch. They all checked out, mentally gone.

“When I was nineteen one of the books I had to read was All the President’s Men by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein about the fall of Nixon and how two reporters from the Washington Post brought him down, exposed what we now know as Watergate. I was a journalism major, so I found it interesting, and it was easy reading, but something else was different when I was your age. What do you think it was?”

Same guy spoke up. “Your story wasn’t about a lady glad her husband is dead?” I suddenly liked this guy.

“It wasn’t, no. But I didn’t know that until I READ THE THING!” We laughed.

I told them:

No computers. No games. No phones, texting, TikTok, Instagram, Starbucks, Redbull, fast food joints everywhere, no fantasy sports, no Fortnight. No Cable TV.”

“Booorrrring.”

I laughed but this time to myself. I didn’t say anything because I didn’t want to continue to sound like an old geezer.

“Yeah, in parts. The whole thing was boring for some people. I think we had less anxiety than you do. Less pressure from all sides to keep up with the latest…”

I tried to think what we might have done when I was that age that we would need “the latest” version of. All I could come up with was music. And that really doesn’t bore many people.

“Okay, Professor,” a student asked. She plays for the basketball team and seems focused, listening to whatever I say. “So then when you were nineteen, what did you spend your time doing?”  

I checked out.

I thought of my monster. I remembered being that age and how I had infinitely more energy than could fit in chair long enough to read a two-page story about a wasn’t-on-the-train-after-all husband and the now-dead wife he oppressed.

“Get a reading group together.”

They stared at me.

“Get a group together to meet once or twice a week to read the story. Once the conflict kicks in on the longer ones, you’ll want to finish it. But then you have others to keep your attention instead of your mind wandering wondering what others are doing. And you can take turns reading the story out loud, be expressive.”

“Sound stupid,” said the one I liked briefly but no longer did.

“Yeah, it does, but just meet for an hour. That’s not long.” I replied, thinking of all the times I embarrassed the crap out of myself when I was young. “I’m just some old guy to you,” I said to the same one, laughing so he knew it was okay.

He laughed and said, “Yeah a bit,” and we all laughed.

“You know what?” I stood up, gathered my things, and I thought of the monster and of that time, back then, and what happened and how I carry it still, picture it still like it all happened last Tuesday instead of 1981, and I said, “I did nineteen really well. I was really good at being nineteen. Now I’m doing this age. You’ll get here if you’re lucky.” I looked at the kid. “How are you doing nineteen? Hmmm? You nailing it? or are you trying to slide through without having to do too much?”

After about sixty minutes of this, I left and walked to my car more convinced than ever that it is definitely time to let the monster go.   

Numbers

~ aviewfromthiswilderness ~ 3 Comments

According to the stats page of WordPress, the platform I use for A View from this Wilderness, more than four percent of the weekly readers view it from Israel. None from Gaza. I have been in support of and have promoted the work of Israeli writers for four decades now, including both the journal Ilanot, based in Tel Aviv, which has posted more than a few of my works, and my late friend, best-selling Czech author Arnost Lustig. On the other hand, I have no personal ties at all to Gaza or anyone living there. This is not pro-anyone. This is not anti-anyone. Honestly.

But…

I am not a fan of needless, widespread, pointless killing. Call me quirky like that. So if anything about the following numbers, acquired from the Jerusalem Post, the UN and the WHO, bothers you, you either have difficulty facing the truth or you’ve not done your homework. I have; these are the undisputed numbers.

Killed in attack on Israel October 7th: 1139 people.

Israelis killed since then, 700, nearly all soldiers. Roughly 6000 wounded.

Palestinians killed in Gaza since then: more than 25,000

Including 10,000 children killed in Gaza.

Another 1,000 children in Gaza had at least one limb amputated.

62,000 people in Gaza wounded in life-altering ways.

96% of water in Gaza is unfit for human consumption.

90% of people in Gaza in life-threatening situation from lack of food. (“If your enemy be hungry, give him bread to eat, and if he be thirsty, water to drink! ” ~~ Proverbs (Mishle) 25:21)

16 hospitals still remain out of the 36 pre-October 7th. Of those 16, none have power from more than a generator, and all are “critically close to zero” of medical supplies.

85% of the people of Gaza have been displaced beyond any ability to return home. (“Who is a hero? The man that turns an enemy into a friend.” ~~ Avot Derabbi Nathan)

Honestly, the moment anyone starts defending Israel’s right to kill 10,000 children their argument falls apart.

No one I am aware of has ever spoken against Israel’s right to retaliate after the senseless and horrible attack by Hamas on October 7th, 2023. But their mission has slid definitively over the line from retaliation to annihilation. Simply put, with numbers like those above, the military’s mission is to obliterate not only the citizens of Gaza in their attempts to destroy Hamas, but also to eradicate future generations of Palestinians. Why else on earth would anyone have any reason to kill children—10,000 of them. (Please be clear; this is a reference to the leaders of the government and army in Israel, not the Israeli population at large or Jewish people anywhere). (“They shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruninghooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.” ~~ Isaiah (Yesha’yahu) 2:4)

That’s it. If anyone disagrees that the only recourse for Israel was to kill more than 25,000 people including 10,000 kids, I have no interest in a conversation with you. Get your own blog. (“Even on the threshold of war, we [Jews] are bidden to begin in no other way than with peace, for it is written: “When you draw near a city to fight, first offer it peace.”” ~~ Midrash Leviticus R. 9)

Drive

~ aviewfromthiswilderness ~ Leave a comment

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

We all remember our cars.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Good idea, Bob!”

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

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

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

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

Voice

~ aviewfromthiswilderness ~ Leave a comment

I walked to the river and watched geese settle on the field. It is cold, and the water is choppy today. I sat on the grass and watched the tide retreat to the Chesapeake, pulled by the moon and pushed by the current, both. I like the movement of water, the ebb and flow, and even on days when the river is glassy, you can see some subtle and constant change.

That’s how writing should be. And life.

I do not need New Year’s Day to know renewal; it is just down the hill. The last few years brought with it challenges I sometimes could not face without support, but at the end of the day, my pulse returned to normal and my often untethered and anxiety-ridden thoughts realigned themselves with the tide. Sometimes at night—often at night—I feel the same sense of being mentally cleansed that so many experience on this day, and the notion of a new start seems obvious and obtainable. My passive hopes become active plans; my stagnant ambitions, activities; my indifference, passion.

I don’t want to regret life, having lived not saying what I want to, even at the risk of failure and embarrassment. I don’t want to constantly and constantly and forever constantly wonder if I could have done X or succeeded at Y. I want to fail rather than wonder; I want to participate rather than watch others from a distance. I want to say what I want to say.

And I want to be clear.

I need to back off of the gerunds and modifiers, ease up on the nouns. Life should be a string of verbs. I’m attempting to live out the rest of the little there is of life without piling on more passive voice.

When I teach creative writing, I emphasize action. Too many rely upon some benign and wordy noun-universe. Characters—all of us—need to do something. Let’s see the love and heartbreak, the gentle breeze and the raging storm; at least then we’re paying attention. Safety has little place in the creative process, and what is more creative than life? Characters both imaginary and real need to get off their collective asses and act. You can tell me all day about what a person is like, looks like, thinks about, and you can expose the deepest concerns of her soul with some convoluted third-person omniscient narrator, but I want diagonal lines, not straight ones, I want inverted triangles and asymmetrical actions. I want first person. I want active verbs and movement and pace rather than nothing but moments of pondering.

Today is as good a day as any for a rewrite.   

Certainly, I have failed, oh my I have failed. I am failing still. So I need to stop holding back. Hesitation doesn’t pay off either on the page or on the go. So I’ll absolutely take advantage today of another chance to begin again. It is always the first day; there is always another draft.

Time Piece

~ aviewfromthiswilderness ~ 2 Comments

This work originally appeared in Susurrus Magazine, with portions published in various other journals.

Happy New Year. Sort of. I can’t keep track anymore, what with shifts and adjustments through the ages. Hell, I can’t even keep track of the days of the week. Last Monday was Christmas, which made Tuesday feel like Monday, but my son works on Mondays and Wednesdays so being around all day made Monday feel like Sunday or Thursday, until Wednesday came and it felt like Monday again. Next week I’m certain to go through this once more, with Monday being a holiday, and Tuesday feeling like Monday, and to add to that I’ll still date everything 2023, though, really, what difference does it make?

It’s only time after all.

Time Piece

The truth is, if we made lists of all the reasons why we need to know the days of the week, those lists would not be that long, nor the reasons to remember the year for that matter. It’s all relative, and they can be as irrelevant as they are essential to our lives, existing in the extremes. 

No calendar can keep measure of how much time has passed since my father died; I can argue it was a month ago, I can claim it decades ago. And my childhood on Long Island ended about fifty years ago, but when I recently spoke to a friend from then, my adolescence seemed to have happened on Tuesday. No education I can conceive can inform how I feel when I stand on the sand along these beaches in Virginia before dawn, quietly watching the surfacing sun as buffleheads swim by and oyster boats churn out to sea; it is timeless in its immediacy.  Einstein’s relativity metaphor aside, nothing says “it depends” more than our references to time—sweet, delicate, ethereal time. Certainly, calendars keep track of the days of the week, the months, but they can never measure moments, they cannot calculate how long we love, how long we have mourned.

Which makes the measurement of time as problematic now as it was in pre-recorded history, when sundials and seasons were used instead of Big Ben and Prague’s Atomic Clock. Still, they managed to mark holidays and celestial changes with the most primitive tools. Some people had that rare ability to look up to the stars, do a double-take, and say, “Shit. I think it’s Friday,” and then things change.   

New Year’s Day, for instance, is New Year’s Day for a reason. Since my tenth birthday on a warm Fifth of Quintilis, in 1970, I have wondered why the New Year often starts smack dab in the middle of a blizzard. Simple, actually: First of all, ancient Romans had a God for everything. One of them held the key that unlocked that “passage” between what is and what is to come; or, metaphorically speaking, this particular God was the key master that opened the way for new things to occur.

His name was Janus. He was also the God of doors, by the way, which makes sense. New Year’s used to begin in March, but in 46 BC, the world’s most popular Caesar and favorite orange drink, Julius, decided the calendar needed reform. He was right, actually, as the Roman calendar already in place for six centuries followed the phases of the moon, and that totally screwed with people over time as the seasons seemed to “shift.” Worse, the politicians who oversaw the calendar kept adding or subtracting days to affect the length of their terms one way or the other.

So JC met an astronomer named Sosigenes who convinced him to trash the lunar module and follow the Egyptians’ lead—they followed the sun. To balance it out, JC added sixty-seven days to 46 BC, which put the solar calendar on track, and the first New Year’s Day of the Julian calendar fell on the First of Janus’ month, January. Mr. Sosigenes also instructed that a true “year” around the sun is six hours longer than 365 days, so JC decreed that once every four years an extra day be added.

We know most of this. Let’s leap to the good part. 

After JC was killed, his successor, Mark Anthony, changed the name of Quintilis to “July” to honor him. But JC and Professor Sosigenes had miscalculated slightly, so by the end of the first millennium there were seven extra days, fifteen by the time Prague was founded in the fourteenth century. The Czechs were royally confused. And to add to this cluster of cloistered calendar decision makers, a monk, Dionysius Exiguus, figured out in the early 500s that Christ was born about 753 years after the founding of the city of Rome, so he called that year “zero.” Up until then, Roman years from 753 BC forward were numbered from the founding of the city, making what we call 753 BC, they called zero (founding of Rome). So according to Brother Dionysius, Christ was born in 753 Ab Urbe Condita: “after the founding of the city.” The monk decided, conveniently during a time when Christianity was sweeping the empire, to call that year “zero,” but it was not widely adapted until the eighth century just as the Roman Empire was becoming the Holy Roman Empire, so that nearly until the time of Charlemagne, people mostly counted time Ab Urbe Condita.  Once more then, what we call 800 A.D., people at the time mostly called it 1553 Ab Urbe Condita, or AUC.

All of this speculation was finally confirmed in the 1740s by Jacques Cassini with his astronomical skills, and it was only then that the Roman years before Brother Dionysius’ declared year “zero” were labeled “Before Christ.” If it wasn’t for Brother D and Dr. Cassini, New Year’s this Janus the 1st would be the year 2774 AUC.

There is more; hang in there. 

With all that timeline information, we cut to the 1570s, about the time St. Augustine, Florida, was beginning to flourish. St. Gregory the XIII noted the days were still not accurate based upon both the lunar and the solar measurements, so he hired a Jesuit astronomer named Chris to fix the damn thing once and for all and get the dates aligned with the sun, and he did so by dropping ten days from the calendar for that year only—a realignment, if you will. Thursday, December 21st, 1581, was followed by Friday, January 1st, 1582, the first day of the Gregorian calendar. You know they partied hardy that New Year’s Eve. Honestly, I have awakened on January First with some serious hangovers in my years, but I have never thought, “What the hell happened to the last ten days?”

And while most of the time I’m not really sure what day of the week it is anyway, I do know of one consistency through the ages from 753 BC through some hot summer Quintilis afternoons, and on past zero to today: people from kings and popes to paupers and astronomers made resolutions and promises, and maintained the hope that life would not pass them by. Most certainly, for all of these January Firsts, people resolved to spend more time with those they love,  go for more walks in nature, stare at the moon, wake up with the sun, sit and talk to their dad, tell him how much he is loved, how much he is missed, and not one of them could imagine how swiftly life would dissolve. 

‘We mark time, humanity; calculate how long it has been, how long it will be. We measure and subtract, add, and subsequently deduce that we know what time it is according to astronomical wizards and Holy Texts. Yet we can’t grasp the speed of the fleeting lives of those we love and lost.’

Now let’s assume you follow the Chinese calendar, which follows the moon, with an extra month every three years, and it dates from 2637 BC, when Emperor Huangdi started counting. This worked for farmers, and the fact the emperor “knew” the astronomical cycles made him a bit other-worldly (with thanks to his astronomers). In the seventeenth century, Jesuits introduced the Gregorian calendar in the east, but the tradition of the Years of the Monkey, Rat, Ox, Tiger, Rabbit, Dragon, Snake, Horse, Goat, Rooster, Dog and Pig continue. 

The Hebrew, or Jewish, calendar is the official calendar of Israel and is used throughout the world to determine religious holidays and readings from the Torah. The clock started ticking in 3761 BC, which, according to the Old Testament, is the date of the creation of the world. It is also the oldest calendar in use, dating back to the ninth century BC. 

We mark time, humanity; calculate how long it has been, how long it will be. We measure and subtract, add, and subsequently deduce that we know what time it is according to astronomical wizards and Holy Texts. Yet we can’t grasp the speed of the fleeting lives of those we love and lost. 

For some years before his death, my dad and I drank scotch. Dad always liked blends to which he probably became accustomed early on. On special occasions he drank Chivas, aged just right. And on Tuesday nights we poured two glasses on the rocks. Routine is important when one pushes ninety years of age, so I’d always try and get there about nine and was no sooner in the door when he’d jokingly say, “My coaster seems to be empty,” or something similar with a laugh and a welcoming smile. I would put down my things and offer to pour, and he would insist he was just fooling and didn’t mind at all getting our drinks, which was true. He would walk in the kitchen, and I could hear the cabinet and the ice and the heavy bottle he put back in the cabinet, never leaving it on the counter for more because we never had more. He’d return steadily and slowly and hand me my glass, and we’d raise them to toast and he’d say, “Well,” nodding his head politely at a loss of words, aphasia setting in some time before those last months, and I’d interrupt and say, “To your health,” to which he would again nod and with his deep voice reply, “And to yours.”  Then we watched baseball, not really talking much. It was late. He sipped his scotch. 

But I don’t like scotch, so I preferred to pour. When I went in the kitchen everything was the same, but instead of scotch in my glass I had mostly water. Dad’s eyes had faded in those last few years, and he wouldn’t have noticed the lighter tint of my drink. And anyway, it wasn’t about the scotch; we would sit together a long time those Tuesday nights and he would always turn once and say, “Boy this is good, isn’t it?” and I would agree. Sometimes I felt guilty and would pour a bit more for myself as well, but usually only when it was the Chivas. After a while he would head upstairs to bed. Then I would sit alone in peace after a long day, but inevitably I’d wish he had stayed up longer even just to sit quietly. I’d promise myself that the next Tuesday while drinking scotch I’d make more conversation, talk more about the baseball game or about my day or anything really, since he wouldn’t have minded even turning the game off, but the following week would come and, like clockwork, I’d be exhausted and silent and he would get tired and go to bed. 

My father aged well and sitting with him on those nights was the purest time I had during those days. When I get home late and stand in the driveway on a clear, cold night, it is too real to think about, and I know Virgil was right when he said that time passes irrevocably. But memory tosses linear time to the wind and leaves us with years which shift positions from our perspective, and we come to understand what Elie Wiesel meant when he said, “In the end, it is all about memory.” Death, perhaps, is the consequence of time, but so is memory, whether that time be linear or ephemeral.  

Even before he died, time slipped out of joint those last few months, passing quickly, moving slow. And our calendar certainly needed adjustments along the way. Of his ninety years, I was alive for fifty-five of them. Of those, I was out of his life, physically, for thirty-five of them, and of the rest he worked and I played or went to school. 

It was only those last years, the fleeting ones which cannot be calculated by astronomers or priests, when we truly bonded. In the end, I would give anything to add that extra day, set my world right again, realign my time with his.