Learn. Everything. All of it.

June 3, 2025June 7, 2025 ~ aviewfromthiswilderness ~ Leave a comment

At the risk of being logical and empathetic, I offer my plan for the best teaching and parenting. I call it The Bob Plan.

Dear Everyone:

Learn everything. All of it. Memorize the multiplication and periodic tables, memorize the dictionary, the standard one, of course, but also the Slang Dictionary, and the Urban one, the Rural, the Southern, and the New England Elitist one. Know how to talk to everyone; know what everyone is saying. In that vein learn French and Spanish. Find yourself fluent in Arabic and Mandarin, Farsi and all other ways in which others speak. Know sign language. Study the click languages.

Read the history of the world by writers in the United States, China, Russia, Ethiopia, and the Vatican. Know the sacred texts as well as you know your phone texts. Read the Torah in Hebrew and the Bible in Greek. Know the differences between the New Standard Bible and the King James Version and talk about it with friends after reciting the Koran. Know the Pali Cannon.

Why would any teacher, parent, civic leader, country leader, anyone not want their own people to know more than others? Why would anyone want to send their children/students/citizens into battle without at least as much knowledge as those they might face? It is a supreme derelict of duties to march our young into the world half-dressed, but there are some who believe to send those same humans into school, the workplace, the world arena, with only a portion of the material everyone else might have, makes sense. But it is not only neglect, it is criminal. If our students, children, citizens, can have the answers to life’s questions which might be put to them at the most inopportune time, what sane-thinking person would deny them that information?

Know the laws, all of them—the local dictates and the constitutional arguments. Say whatever you want to say about the ideas of those you disagree with and know the amendment which allows you to do so without interference. Know the statutes and precedents, know the case names and dates and understand their practical application.

Understand every sexual preference, position, and disease. Be able to converse with the unlicensed prostitute and the Surgeon General at the same table with equal respect and knowledge. Understand the schedules to the subway system and the history behind the Great Migration in the 1930’s. Be able to discuss the effects of slavery on the industrial stagnancy of the sub-Sahel as well as the disenfranchisement of your neighbors two streets away. Be able to predict the weather and prevent heart attacks. Know CPR and how to use a defibrillator.

What would happen if everyone in a society turned out to be the smartest person in the room?

How could that hurt anything or anyone?

Arguments would be tight and based upon verifiable evidence gathered cautiously and patiently. Accuracy would be a given, sources would be well vetted, and mutual respect would engulf the debate.

Know the value of diplomacy and the value of gardening. Understand short- and long-term investments, the advantages and dangers of credit, and the National Highway numbering system. Know how to use a slide rule and AI. Know how to spot any constellation at a glance and the species of every bird just by hearing its call.

Who would have a problem with all of this knowledge except someone who, by keeping the public ignorant, can take advantage of them? There is no other value of ignorance. None.

Learn to make an omelet and a whiskey sour. Learn to pick up after yourself and how to greet a stranger. Learn to say “thank you” and “you’re welcome.”

Know seventh grade Social Studies as well as eleventh grade English. Memorize the twenty-seven amendments to the constitution and read Dickens, Dickenson, and Stephen King. Read Flaubert in French and Dostoevsky in Russian. Kafka in German. Watch Citizen Kane and Fifty Shades of Grey. Read and watch and listen to it all. All of it. The entire everything.

Learn how to learn; observe, ingest, swallow. Learn diplomacy and humor, learn nuance and grandeur. Recognize hyperbole and subtle inflections. All of it. Understand how to fix a car, build a rabbit pen, and stack wood. Learn the proper methods to painting a room and the best way to get red wine stains out of a white carpet.

Why would anyone want their citizens to be less knowledgeable than others? It makes no sense. Study with the people of your community and those from small villages in other hemispheres. Find out what they know, share what you’ve got. Remember their names and learn their customs. Knowledge guarantees inclusion and diversity. Those who learn not only have the answers, they know how to find new answers, decipher fact from falsehood.

Be smarter than AI, more efficient than algorithms, more fluent than the translators. Be a step ahead.

No one should want someone they care about or are responsible for to be less prepared than anyone else.

Choose your own path based upon ambition instead of statistics, your own pronoun based upon preference not ordinance, your own partner based upon love not gender. Understand why that makes sense. Learn how to show others that makes sense.

Find out why we’re still talking about Mozart three hundred years later. Find out what happened at the Second Continental Congress, what did Henry Highland Garnett and WEB Dubois know? Read the slave narratives, read all of Shakespeare. Learn how to gamble; learn how to smuggle. Try the haggis. Taste the raw fish. Find out.

Everything. Learn absolutely everything. It is the only course of action you should want so you can navigate this world on your own terms with all the information necessary; and it should be the only logical ambition all true leaders should desire for their citizens.

Student Comes to See Me

May 26, 2025May 26, 2025 ~ aviewfromthiswilderness ~ Leave a comment

A Personal Reflection This Week:

I woke about three this morning; it happens a lot. This time it happened because this weekend has always represented change in my life. Growing up, of course, the school year is just about over and summer is waiting; throughout my college summers not only was one year over and another still three months away, during that time I worked at a beachfront resort hotel every summer, so the “season” started this weekend. And for more than thirty-five years in higher ed, this is about the time of year we finally exhale for a few months. At three this morning I woke thinking about those changes this weekend those years, but this time I found myself surrounded by the ghosts of those dear to me, and in my tired, gummy-induced thought process, they all had the same opinion.

This weekend might feel more significant because so much of my life completely changed in the past twelve months, beginning about mid-May last year, and I added to that weight by spending this same year tuning my manuscript for my next book about a time in my life when I had to grow up and move on, about learning what to let go of and what to hold on to and guessing wrong in both cases. The brain decides on its own when it will dump all of this in your lap to stare at and make sense of. Usually it’s at three am. And raining.

It’s safe to say that my life has been anything but consistent and predictable, but when we’re young we have more courage to change. I believe that’s because if whatever we try falls apart, well, we’re still young enough to laugh it off and start over. But as the years pass, we tie ourselves down, let the roots take hold, gather more responsibilities and obligations. So change is usually subtle, a series of nuanced negotiations that are closer related to diversions than anything resembling a complete abandonment of one way in favor of another.

When I was young, I would regularly jump into some unknown ideal. Now, with Realism as my guide, I am more apt to step off carefully, insuring there is solid ground ahead. But at three am the smallest variation in our path can seem like a canyon. This morning started like that as I listened to the rain on the skylight. I felt my anxiety simmer just below the surface and I was in danger of completely waking up, so I tried to repress it, remind myself that whatever status quo I find myself part of is not only fine but damn near ideal. But that didn’t hold. I thought of a line from, of all people, Barry Manilow: “My life goes along as it should; it’s all very nice but not very good.”

Just wait. I’m one of the more fortunate souls I’ve ever known, and I know that; but that is an external judgement. “Very good” is a relative term. We are in the awful habit of comparing ourselves to others when we should be measuring ourselves against ourselves alone: What are we capable of? What do we wish we had done? What are you going to do with the time that is left? This is that old axiom, “The only way to fail is to not even try.” And this isn’t about you. I swear it’s not. It’s about me, from the young boy in the park, to the young teen on the courts, to the young man on the go. The distance between where I am and where I will end up can only be measured by how I feel about where I am and where I am going; this has nothing to do with “accomplishment” and “achievement.” I think I’ve done okay. It’s has something to do with fulfillment and a personal sense of purpose. Honestly, success has many definitions; just ask the ghosts.

So I stumbled to my desk to organize my thoughts, write down my list for the day to help settle my simmering mind before my anxiety won, and in the pile of stuff I created on the floor while trying to find a piece of paper to write on, I found a postcard from one of my earliest students.

It was about 1994.

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’s twenty-five and 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, referencing our work in class, two paths that look the same, so he’s frozen, finds it 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 working. I know I only spent a few years there but it seems like it was always winter, all grey and bone-cold. One morning I woke on a bench near a lake in a park and didn’t know how I got there. I had to work a few hours later but never made it. I quit the bar, withdrew most of my money, and bought a ticket to Africa. Turns out changing my life was as easy as jumping off a cliff knowing for certain I would either land on my 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. I tell him all of that, and then I think, but I don’t say, that 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 and all you can think about is how if this is your career, if this is how you’ve chosen to spend your life, shouldn’t you love being here, love the interaction and discussions instead of dreading every word that someone says; 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. I tell him 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 wondering what your someday-dying self would say to you now.

Exactly, he says. I’m always staring at the clock. I’d love to know what you’d do, he says. I tell him about a bar somewhere I didn’t belong. I remember working and then not working but I don’t remember what happened between the two. I just recall waking up one day in the peace-of-mind of another world, centuries away from being behind bars; like I could finally breathe on my own. I remember dreading the moment between what was and what was next, so I just kept pouring drinks, hesitating, putting off change. But then one day I didn’t, and when I looked back from where I ended up, the “what used to be” that so engulfed my life didn’t even exist anymore. He looks at me like I am looking in a mirror. I tell him if it were me, I’d withdraw from school, liquidate my roofing equipment, put some in the bank and some in the gas tank and take just one slice of life to myself for a while. School isn’t going anywhere, I tell him. We’ll wait for you.

He stares at me a long time then laughs, sweeps his long blond hair back and blinks his eyes a few times, as if to restrain some emotion. “I’m not that brave,” he says, and we laugh. Then he says he’s going to work and he leaves.

Six months later he sends me this postcard from Australia. “Don’t know when I’ll return,” 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

100

May 22, 2025May 22, 2025 ~ aviewfromthiswilderness ~ 1 Comment

Frederick W. Kunzinger: May 23rd, 1925 to October 21st, 2015

Dad had a toll-free number, so for most of my life when I traveled I could call him at his desk for free. I’d be about to enter Mexico through Nogales, Arizona, and I’d find a pay phone and tell him I was going back down for more blankets and some Kahlua. He’d laugh and offer his “Well be careful” in his deep voice, and for some reason I always knew, despite his desk job on Wall Street and in Virginia, his troubled feet which kept him out of the service, I knew he wished he were out there with me. I once called from Massachusetts to tell him I wouldn’t be able to call for a few days because I was going whale watching off of Maine with a friend, and he was truly excited. I wasn’t going whale watching, though; I was flying to Virginia along with his entire extended family to surprise him for his sixtieth birthday. When he came in his house and he saw me among the crowd, he actually looked disappointed that I wasn’t out on some vessel in the Maritime Provinces. That was Dad. Quiet. Proud. And kinder than just about any person I’ve ever known.

Funny how I just assume all dads should be like him. And maybe to each of us in some way our own father is the model. I’m guilty of not emulating him earlier. As much as my memory tells me he worked a lot–leaving the house for the Long Island Railroad at the crack of dawn and returning barely in time for dinner five days a week, and after dinner, coffee, the newspaper, he’d watch television, burned out from another long day on Wall Street, somehow he fit us all in without complaint–ever–as if nothing else mattered but being around family. What an example he set without ever offering one single word of advice. That’s how to Dad.

When my son and I traveled across Siberia by train for a book project which became The Iron Scar: A Father and Son in Siberia, the original writings from the trip, many of which were published while he was still with us, were written in the form of letters from me to him about Michael and me headed through Russia. In those pages I wondered if he was such a good father because he lost his own Dad when I was just five, and perhaps we are never completely fathers or sons when we’re between two living generations. Eventually, the book became a narrative instead of a series of letters, but he is always present in the pages. At the time of the trip and subsequent year or so while working on the book, he was slipping away just as my son was coming of age to head out on his own, so comparison was instinctive, and I could say with complete objectivity that my son turned out to have the same personality–kind, caring, without judgement–as my father. It was somewhere near Irkutsk I understood that my father lives on in the way my siblings and I as well as our kids live our lives.

For a man who worked all the time, though, he was always there: He brought me on my first flight, first class, from Norfolk to LA when I was fifteen. He taught me to drive. He would come by my office after he retired and see if I had time to go to lunch. Mom and us kids were his life; and when family visited our house for holidays or just a Sunday afternoon barbeque, he was in his glory. Nothing mattered to him more than us; that was clear though he never, ever said so. That’s how to do it.

Random thoughts:

I saw him cry twice. The evening of the day my sister told him she was diagnosed with aggressive Stage Four Ovarian Cancer, and the evening of the day she told him she beat it.

The last thing I wrote which he could read, according to my mother, was “Instructions for Walking with an Old Man at the Mall.”

His face always lit up every time my then-toddler son and I would “accidentally” run into him at the stores.

Every Tuesday night we had Scotch. I hated Scotch but I loved Tuesday nights.

Every Super Bowl we sat in his living room and watched while eating wings and shrimp. It is the only time I ever saw him eat chicken wings, on Super Bowl Sunday.

He loved watching baseball and golf. To this day, when I hear golf or baseball on television, I think of Dad and miss him again.

He would go downstairs first on Christmas morning to plug in the tree lights. With a smirk at 5: 30 am he’d quip “I thought I told you no one up before nine!” He would wait until Christmas night when our relatives had left and we were all sitting around to give us each one last gift, books he picked out with each of us in mind.

I never knew my grandfathers. But my son and my father were as much friends as they were anything else. They were together a lot for Michael’s entire life until he was twenty-two, and we’d play golf regularly, especially when my brother came to town, and every month or more the three of us or the four of us would go to lunch at the beach, and sometimes we’d just go to his house while Mom was still working and sit and talk, or go out on the porch and watch the birds out on the river, and when Michael was still a toddler he would take his hand and walk him to the edge of the water to look for wildlife. I could have posted hundreds of photos of the two of them, and perhaps just as many as the two of us since Michael always had a camera with him.

But I see no need. I can hear his voice as clearly as I can hear these keyboard keys, see his face as if he was sitting right here. I’m not in denial about Dad’s passing at ninety-years old, ten years ago this October, but it isn’t unusual still for me to have a conversation with him, or almost pick up the phone to call him about going to lunch. I suppose it will always be that way, and I’m okay with that.

Some days are tough, of course, just as they must have been for him after his dad passed when Dad was just forty-years old. But he never showed it that I recall; he just continued to Dad us, and I am lucky–fortunate, blessed, grateful, honored, humbled–he was my father.

From The Iron Scar: A Father and Son in Siberia:

I guess you have to be a parent to understand what kind of child you were. You need a basis of comparison that goes beyond the parent-child relationships of cousins or friends. It must be later, years later, when you understand what he would have wanted you to ask, what he wished you had shown interest in, how close–or not close–you were. Turns out we were so much closer than I knew, and I could have asked anything, but I never did.

Happy Birthday Dad. I love you.

Canoeing in the Poconos on their honeymoon, 1952 (27 years old)

Fifty Days and Counting

May 16, 2025May 18, 2025 ~ aviewfromthiswilderness ~ 1 Comment

It is fifty days from my mother’s birthday to mine. This year feels different since this was the first of Mom’s birthdays that she is no longer with us, and this year I will turn sixty-five. Funny, but I don’t feel my age; I think of myself as about fifty-two. Maybe, on good mornings, fifty. Let’s call it that; so with fifty days to go to my birthday and feeling all of about fifty, I’ve decided to change a few things. I’m going with a “Fifties” theme this year. Cue Buddy Holly.

Fifty.

I can’t lose fifty pounds. I mean I can, but then my weight would be about what I weighed in high school when I was slightly more active and my body could digest Tupperware and be fine. So let’s try for some variation of fifty pounds to keep with this year’s magic number. Five pounds should do it. I re-joined the Y near my home, so I think for the next fifty days I’m going to get on the treadmill and walk for fifty minutes five days a week. If the Cartoon Network is available, I’ll stretch that out to fifty-five.

I’m going to write five pages a night on one or another book project I’ve got going—I really do have five files of work-in-progress here, but then I’ve had the same ones for going on five years now. Still, this next month and two thirds is different.

Damn right. High five.

Listen, like the rest of us, I know about time. I’ve read about it, watched it tick away, felt it creep up my spine and into my mind with new drips of hesitation and doubt. Geez I know about time, the way it tricked Bobbie into thinking she could get better, never knowing the addiction had already won, and the slight of hand it pulled with Letty, and Dave, and Cole, and others; tricked them all, so yeah, I know something about the passing of time. We all do, especially as we move through the years, and about how Mom and Dad made it to their nineties—no complaints there—but how Rachel didn’t make it out of her twenties. I’m sure I’ll be thinking a lot about time in the next fifty days, and about Mom and Dad as I hit the Medicare mark, and about Letty who died on my birthday, and about Michael who right now is exactly half my age yet when I was his age I felt like I had already lived several lifetimes. Honestly, I think I turned sixty-five when I was nineteen. Time, man. I can count on it to keep pace, not lose one fat second on my account. It doesn’t take a time out, doesn’t sit one out, doesn’t find any value at all in changing the pace. Yeah, we all know a little bit about time.

Fifty days. Forty-nine days and about seven hours actually. Fifty glasses of wine, fifty gummies, fifty mornings at the bay watching the sun crack the surface, fifty evenings at the river watching it take forever to fade. This year I’m going to make fifty phone calls and write fifty letters to old and new friends; I’m going to find fifty beautiful moments—one a day—and keep that habit going another fifty, then fifty more. That’s the thing about time; it can’t decide for me what I do with it, only when it will end.

And it will end.

So fifty songs that give me chills and fifty minutes spent each day finding just a little peace of mind.

Fifty is the fifth magical number in nuclear physics. It’s the Golden Anniversary. It’s half of whatever whole you fall into. Fifty is the traditional number of years for a jubilee. Fifty in both the Torah and the Bible is associated with the concepts of freedom and abundance.

There are fifty stars for the fifty states. It’s two bits. It’s just sitting out there as some sort of centennial half-way point.

In fifty days I’ll be ready to turn sixty-five and feel fifteen years younger than that. It was fifty years ago my life completely changed as a chasm fell between everything that was when I lived in New York and everything that would be when we moved to Virginia that June 18^th. I was terrified. I was just a few weeks short of fifteen, which is young at any age. But looking back now fifty years on, it seems to have turned out okay.

Seriously, what a time it turned out to be. For fifty days I’m going to remind myself I have a home and food, I was not born in a refugee camp in Somalia, was not born during a bombing campaign in the Middle East, was not born on the streets of just about any American city.

I’m going to remind myself of passion and hope, and that I still have the energy to climb mountains or simply just fall asleep. That I’m really good at. But for now, I’m going to keep moving, keep noticing the beauty and continue to look for the peace. I’m going to remember the grace I experienced being able to have the parents and siblings and friends I did for these years, I’m going to remember all of the love I had in my life from those who passed this past year, and I’m going to look forward to what happens next.

Time is persistent, yes. But how we measure it is completely up to us. Hell, they’ve already changed the calendar several times out of little more than convenience; I can do that too. For the next fifty days, I’m going to grow young again.

December 17th, 1944

April 23, 2025April 23, 2025 ~ aviewfromthiswilderness ~ 1 Comment

The American National Cemetery at Margraten, The Netherlands

When my Uncle Tom Burton died, the service was held at Arlington National Cemetery. He was a war hero, then a sheriff, always a father and a fine man. He lived a long life and it was an honor to be there when a marine knelt in front of my cousin, Audrey, and whispered, “On behalf of the President of the United States…” and guns were fired, and a soldier stood amidst some headstones and saluted the entire time. Nearby a horse-drawn carriage waited.

I walked about the cemetery that day and noted the names and dates, and while many of them did indeed die in combat and were interred at Arlington, many, such as my Uncle, served his time and lived a good, long life–never long enough, of course–and played with his grandchildren before that inevitable day. I wrote about Arlington Cemetery for the Washington Post, and while sadness was a motivating factor in my prose, it was not nearly as present as was pride for the women and men who served.

Staff Sergeant Edward L. Miller of the 309th Infantry, 78th Division, from Pennsylvania, was never buried at Arlington. Killed during the Battle of the Bulge, his final resting place is in the American National Cemetery in Margraten, Netherlands. His is one of more than 8000 soldiers buried there beneath the white crosses with names carved in perfect formation. The grounds of the cemetery–officially American Territory about two hours southeast of Amsterdam–are manicured and, in April, spectacular for the flowering trees and freshly mown lawns. Sergeant Miller’s niece, Kay Miller Debow, with the assistance of the abundantly friendly and respectful staff of the cemetery, made a rubbing of her uncle’s stone. After, she rubbed sand from the beaches of Normandy into the letters of the familiar name, washed the stone, and stood back to note how Edward’s name now stood out from the rest of the whiteness. What an honor it was to be there, to be part of this journey which began across the German border more than eighty years ago, and which continues with relatives who do not want their sacrifice to be forgotten.

In fact, honor was the word most exchanged in Margraten that day. The staff commented several times that it is an honor for them to care for the grave of the men who protected the country from the Nazis and liberated them not long after Edward Miller’s death. Kay commented what an honor it was to meet the people who look after so many fallen American’s, and the family who cares for his grave drove to meet her and brought flowers for her uncle and said it has been their family’s honor to be able to do so since the end of World War Two.

I don’t hear the word honor anymore. It was an emotional day for the obvious reasons, but also for what no longer seems to be so common: honor, respect, sacrifice, gratefulness.

It was a beautiful day; clear blue skies and a soft sixty degrees. I’ve known Kay since we were young, before the world slipped into our lives with all of its competition and anger; before Kay’s own service in the United States Air Force, before the world invented a way to sit at a table, logon, and find fallen soldiers, back when Sergeant Miller had been gone just forty or so years. That was a lifetime ago. Several. And I looked out at the crosses and wondered how many families in the States take the time to come to this remote, country town to pay their respects to someone who never made it home again to see their mom; never returned home again to get back together with an old flame and get on with their lives; never saw the sunsets and distant beauty of a morning mist.

Still, I could not understand why this was so much more emotional than the internment of my own uncle at Arlington. Then it struck me as I watched Kay place her hand on Edward’s headstone while no one was nearby: She never knew him. I knew my uncle; we laughed at parties together, and he showed up at my parents’ anniversary parties and always laughed with us, told stories. He died when my son was already in his twenties, and when my cousin’s kids were adults. Edward Miller died when his brother, Kay’s own father, was still a child.

Eric Van Heugten, the man who brings flowers to the grave and whose family has done so now for eighty years, stood next to me along with our host, Roel Timmermans, as I looked about and said, mostly to myself, “These men were the same exact age as my students.” That is what I couldn’t shake. That’s the difference. When I’m in class and my students are reading their text messages or staring out the windows, I look at them on the front edge of their lives, many of them living away from home for the first time, and they are the same age as the soldiers beneath the soil of Margraten. Eight thousand of them. More. Eight thousand men still teenagers and in their early twenties who never chose a major, never asked anyone out, never got back in touch with an old friend and said, “I’m so glad you’re home.” Because when someone you love goes to war, you simply don’t have a clue if you’ll ever see them again, and it’s terrifying.

And I don’t think my students understand that, or even understand the honor it is to be alive at all. I wish I could bring them all to Margraten, or the American National Cemetery at Normandy, or any of the other thirty-one cemeteries in seventeen nations which forever hold the remains of men who just learned to shave, just learned to drive. Just fell in love.

RIP Sergeant Edward L. Miller. You’d be proud of your niece and all of those who served with her in yet another war, this one in the Gulf.

Vocabulary list for my very-much-alive twenty-year-old students: Honor. Sacrifice. Gratefulness. Loss. Mortality. Love.

Love.

Somewhere Down the Road

April 18, 2025April 18, 2025 ~ aviewfromthiswilderness ~ Leave a comment

Since I’m a child I have wanted to travel the world–I think it was Pippy Longstocking who first turned me on to the idea of exploration and adventure. Certainly Robin Lee Graham and Woody Guthrie and Mark Twain. And I have done just that; more than I imagined. Ironically, for almost thirty years I’ve lived in one house which I built here in the country. My previous homes lasted, from birth, four months, eight years, six years, four years, four years, eight months, three years, three years, three years, two years, two years, and now, well Aerie since my mid-thirties.

If I had to choose between being always on the go for the rest of my days, or always at home for the same life, I’d choose home. I’d learn to garden and each year expand the crops with more tomatoes and cucumbers, and I’d have a fig farm on the land, perhaps more apple trees, and I’d share the results with neighbors. I’d know the names of the birds, and their migratory dates, and over time I’d have the hummingbird feeder ready for their return every spring. I’d add flowers to the land each year so that the back trail was lined with impatiens and the front with marigolds, and the north side toward the river would have a new trail with hanging baskets of herbs. I’d build by hand and bricks and stone a small guest house, with carvings in the doorframe and a wood-burning stove in the corner on clay tiles I made myself in the kiln I would build in the field. I’d have a dog, some cats of course, and a goat or two. Watermen and farmers would swing by sometimes to chat out front in the gazebo. And I’d walk to the post office to mail my manuscripts; I’d no longer be in a hurry.

Just as easily I might simply leave, keep going

I’d do the Camino again, perhaps for years, and everyone would come to know the “old American” who is always out there heading toward Santiago. I’d relish the knowledge that no matter what else happens in my life, I have as a foundation to keep going the Way, the pilgrimage trail from France to the west of Spain. I would take Paulo Coelho’s advice and unbecome all the things that I’ve accumulated over the years which were not me at all, until finally I become who I was supposed to be to begin with.

If I needed a break I’d head up to Connemara in August each year to walk the Sky Road near Clifden. Or I’d head to Prague in May for the music festivals in Old Town and stop and see my friends at the university. I’d have strudel and tell newbies about the time I used to write in the corner of Nerudova 19 when it was a tea room, and I’d write and have a pot of tea and strudel, and I’ll say it is too bad they weren’t around then since now it is an ice cream shop and it isn’t the same.

Parts of me are already scattered all over the world. Pieces of my twenties are in Mexico and Africa, and large portions of my thirties are in Russia. Some of my forties made it there along with Prague and Amsterdam, and slices of my fifties are sprinkled like diction across this country from St Augustine to Seattle. If I had been able to simply keep moving, I’d have distributed what’s left of me in Spain and Ireland, with a small sampling saved for a state park on Long Island’s Great South Bay where most of the elements in my being come from to begin with.

Still, I like the idea of spending my life in a small town where I’ve always known everyone, and I leave the doors unlocked, and I have a running tab at a local shack of a pub. Equally I like the notion of having friends all over the world, writers in cities throughout Europe to call up and spend time with on my way through again. I like knowing other cities in other countries as well as I know the trails here at Aerie.

I wrote a book once about a guy who traveled the world until he settled in a small town and meets a woman who knows everyone and is from there, and they fall in love and the idea of staying grows on him, but she, by meeting him, understands she isn’t stuck in a small town after all and there is a world out there to see and experience, so she leaves. He decides the small town life isn’t the same without someone to share it with, so he leaves too, ironically also traveling the world, always wondering where she went, looking for her in crowds and metro stations, but he never finds her. It was a great idea and a decent manuscript, called An Innocent Season, but I could never figure out how it should end. That and I suck at writing fiction.

Life has a way, doesn’t it?

Last week I pet a water buffalo. This was near Neunen in the Netherlands. He was quite cute, still relatively small, and I scratched his neck and rubbed his face between his eyes, and he kept nudging me to continue, licking my shoes and pushing my hand. Luckily he was an Asian water buffalo who are kind, unlike the mean African ones. We stood at the fence and I pet him and we had just bought water buffalo yogurt and cheese but passed on the water buffalo ice cream. This little guy was loving on my shoes and my hand but I had stepped back and he came closer and his nose hit the electric fence, and we could hear the “zap!” and a small spark shot out and that little guy backtracked to his mother near a muddy area across the pen. He just stared at me with scared eyes as if to say, “Why?!” It wasn’t anger; no sense of “you bastard” in his face. Just a questioning “why did you hurt me like that?” and it made me a bit sad. I ate the yogurt anyway, though, with raspberry jam and some nuts.

But we do that, we get close and then our perception is thrown off. Something zaps us and we associate that pain with those close to us when they might have had nothing to do with it; it was more than likely just circumstance, timing, the time of day. I wonder now how long will the little guy remember the pain. Will it make him leery to get close to the next guy with Hokas on and a hand stretched out? Or will he just keep getting hurt because the pleasure is worth all the pain?

I would. In fact, I have more than a few times. Emily Saliers wrote we must “take part in the pain of this passion play” if we must love. The worst pain of course is departure, leaving again, and one comes to realize that eventually you’re best off either to just keep going, following whatever Camino you find yourself on, or agree to stick around awhile and simply accept that the pain is part of it all.

So we ate the yogurt and gave away the cheese and went back to Amsterdam and flew home. Three days later my beautiful mother passed away. I’ve been thinking about my youth, and mostly I remember laughing. My childhood included every emotion possible, but what comes to mind first and strongest is the laughter. I remember going to the supermarket as a kid and pushing the cart and getting a treat. I remember her making food for my class in elementary school and not minding when my friend Eddie and I dragged in mud from the state park. I remember her making lemon meringue pie because I liked it, and I recall perfectly her listening to me attempt to play the guitar for the first time as I butchered John Denver’s “Sunshine on my Shoulders.” I am sure I was zapped more than a few times back then by her voice when I inevitably did something wrong, but I can’t pull those memories up right now; only the good things. Like all the laughter and the music; these two things I inherited from my Irish-Italian mother–laughter and music.

That and to keep going. Perhaps the finest lesson of all; just keep going.

Best Cheese I Ever Had

March 30, 2025 ~ aviewfromthiswilderness ~ Leave a comment

So here’s one I wrote and let it go. It’s partially told in a piece in my short collection Howl at the Moon (Cuty Wren Press). It came to mind this morning because I’m leaving in a few days for Amsterdam, and I’m sure there will be cheese involved.

I was in the Netherlands about twenty years ago, maybe twenty-five. I lectured at the University of Amsterdam and talked about art and Van Gogh and death. Normal stuff. In class one day, which was open to visitors and in which everyone was required to speak English, an older woman whose late husband was an artist sat in for the lecture, and afterwards she gave me an etching her husband did of a local cathedral. When she learned I was going to find a way up to the Zuider-zee, she offered me her son’s motorcycle for the day. Students gathered to talk about Van Gogh and about America and more. While the woman and I spoke, they talked amongst each other. One guy asked another if she was working that night and she said no, but the next night she was. He told her he’d come by. Another said it hurt to speak in English, and the young woman said it’s good for him to learn, that she wants to learn as many languages as she can. They all talked about van Gogh’s art.

That night on my way back to the hotel, I walked through the Red Light district to use a computer at a Brown Café to tell my officemate about how it was going so far. The windows of the district display scantily clad women, select lingerie on the floor, a couch, maby velvet, sensual surroundings and lighting. They move about tenderly like flesh and bone mannequins, and when a prospect passes, they urge him to pause, consider coming in for a quick turn. They whisper to them in Dutch, in English, French, German. There’s a back room for the business end of the exchange. I kept walking.

The next morning was one of those movie-set days with a perfect temperature, ideal soft breeze, postcard tulips and windmills, dikes running roadside holding back calm waters. I rode out to a Volendam café on the docks where som sailor just back from the states finished washing down his ketch, and we talked about his Atlantic crossing, about the Chesapeake Bay where he had been, and about the cheese he had on deck which he shared with me. We went in the café for a beer and the waitress offered some Gouda and bread with eel and herring. She said the cheese was from a small factory just a few miles away and that I should go, so I did.

Inside the cheese factory—a small barn-type building—a young man and woman stirred a vat of vlaskaas cheese which was sharp, and they told a half dozen of us how gouda is made and molded into wheels and how we shouldn’t refrigerate it, and how healthy it really is, being a hard cheese, including aged, smoked, and toasted. I bought two wheels for fresh gouda and stacked them in my pack and walked outside where a few other travelers from a bus sat at a picnic table.

A Dutch girl about twenty-five eating cheese and drinking white wine asked me to sit with her, and when I told her she looked familiar she said she had been at my lecture, and she swept her blond hair behind her ear and that’s how I knew her—she did that the entire reading, it kept falling forward and she kept sweeping it back and I thought Geeze just tie it back already. I told her simply I recognized her.

She offered me a glass of wine and retrieved a plastic cup from inside, and I shared her cheese. Her name was Abby and she came up to get a few wheels for her family and one for her. After about thirty minutes and a glass of white, the bus driver called for them to go so she left and said she’d hoped to see me again, and I walked toward the bike to leave. The cheese was heavy but I was glad to have it, and the perfect day made me not care so much.

That night I packed for my trip home the next day and decided to head back to the Brown Café to write again to my officemate back home to tell him about the ride out to the North Sea and the sailor and the hair-sweeping blond. I did so on the upper level of the first café I came to where the open door swept the smoke from the hash up to the internet café section so that by the end of my email I couldn’t spell anything correctly.

I left the café and strolled around the district where people drank espresso and the aroma of various smoke filled the narrow streets and top-shelf women worked the windows, and if you can see this coming you must believe me that I certainly didn’t see it coming at the time: I turned a corner and glanced at a blond in a prime-site window, and it was her, Abby, the hair girl with the cheese, and she motioned to me like I was just another passerby, but then recognized me and sat up more from where she had been prone on some pillows and her white lingerie lingered just a bit behind, and she pulled her strap back on not trying too hard to do so, and she pressed against the glass and urged me to come inside, motioning toward the door on the left. I thought about just walking by but that thought didn’t hold so I went in just to say hello. She cut me a slice of the cheese she had bought that day and she pointed that out, that it was the same wheel of cheese that we shared earlier, and that thought seemed to connect us closer than I cared, but it hung there between us. I had one slice of the vlaskaas on the table and said I didn’t want her to lose business on account of me, and that I really had no intention of patronizing her profession, and she smiled and said she understood. I left, and on the way out I passed the guy from class who had asked her if she was working that night. He glanced at me and I laughed. This is not like the colleges at home, I thought.

On the way home I walked by the Van Gogh museum one more time. It was quite in that part of town, and I stood in the cool night air, the sweet aroma of flowers everywhere, and remembered Vincent’s words about Sien, a prostitute who lived with him for a while with her young daughter. About her he wrote to his brother, “I believe there is nothing more artistic than to love people.”

Next week I’ll be there, at the museum, at the village where he lived a while with his parents, and along the canals. Just look at how everything in our lives moves on, grows and changes and, eventually dies. We age and hold out hope that some of who we used to be remains, knowing, of course, that is true only for a little while. Since I walked those streets last, friends and loved ones have died and my world has changed time and time again, but this week I’ll walk along that avenue and the hallways of the van Gogh museum where his work remains on permanent display, and I’ll think about the man who was nothing more than a peasant who lived with a prostitute, didn’t make any money in his last ten yers, lived off of his brother, was disliked and consdiered a leech and a failure by everyone including the best artists of the day who for the most part said his work had no hope. And I’ll think about that as I pass people sleeping on benches in the park and wonder which ones are artists and which ones of us merely pass judgement.

Van Gogh Drawing of Sien Peeling Potatoes

Vincent van Gogh

March 22, 2025March 31, 2025 ~ aviewfromthiswilderness ~ 2 Comments

Vincent van Gogh was born on March 30, 1852, and died at birth. His parents buried him in the entrance to the graveyard in the church where his father was an Episcopalian minister. Exactly one year later to the day, the couple gave birth to another boy and named him after his dead older brother. Vincent van Gogh was born March 30, 1853, and spent his youth seeing his name and birth date on a headstone when he went to the church.

He tried working in a bookshop, as a tutor, an art dealer, and a preacher in the mines of Belgium. He spoke multiple languages, read Hugo in French and Dickens in English. He fell in love with his cousin and lived for some time with a prostitute and her daughter. For the last ten years of his life he lived entirely off of his brother, sold only a painting and a scattering of drawings, fought with every artist he knew and rarely paid his bills. He was belligerent and sick with syphilis, manic-depression, and epilepsy. He was considered a bum by every contact he made, and only two art critics thought he showed any promise at all. At thirty-seven he shot and killed himself.

That was 135 years ago this July. We’re still talking about him.

By today’s standards, he would be outcast and dismissed as a man who wasted his life pursuing a passion with no hope of even making a living at it, let alone gaining any success. He would be quickly forgotten.

A few years after his suicide, Vincent began to be recognized for his innovations in art, his vision as an expressionist, and his deeply-moving letters to his brother about life, love, God, hope, art, and death. Today he is considered one of the most influential artists in history.

I’m going to the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam next week followed by a reading I’ll be doing at the Van Gogh Library in Neunen, Netherlands.

It started when I was a freshman in college, and a dear friend, the late artist James Cole Young, gave me a three volume set of letters Van Gogh wrote to his brother and other artists. I mostly ignored it for a few years, until in Massachusetts when I went home after work each night and read them several times, intrigued by two seeming contradictions: One, he wrote extensively about his inability to gain any attention at all in the art world and other artists’ bad opinion of his work, yet he became one of the greatest artists of all time; and two, he stated often his thrill for being alive, for life itself, for everyone, and he wrote of the insane idea of taking one’s own life, yet he did just that. So I looked further. As a graduate student, I wrote a one man play as one part of my Masters in Arts and Humanities at Penn State and performed it at the Olmstead Theatre in Pennsylvania, under the direction of the late playwright Eton Churchill. Eventually, my work Blessed Twilight: The Life of Vincent van Gogh was released in 2018. It is all first person from Vincent’s letters.

In just over a week I get to hang out where he lived and wander aimlessly down the same streets of Neunen. Perhaps I’ll even drink some absinth

Most people love Vincent’s art. But I like his writing.

Like this:

In a painter’s life, death perhaps is not the hardest thing there is.

The earth has been thought to be flat. It was true, and is today, that between Paris and Arles, it is. But science has proven the world is round and nobody contradicts that nowadays. But notwithstanding all of this people persist in believing that life is flat and runs from birth to death. However, life too is probably round and very superior in expanse and capacity to the hemisphere we know at present. For my part, I know nothing of it. But to look at the stars always makes me dream as simply as I dream over the black dots of a map representing towns and villages. Why, I ask myself, should the shining dots of the sky not be as accessible as the black dots on a map of France? If we take a train to get to Rouen, we take death to reach a star. One thing undoubtably true in this reasoning is this: that while we are alive, we cannot get to a star any more than while we are dead we can take the train. So it seems to me possible that cholera and cancer are the celestial means of locomotion just as steamboats and railways are the terrestrial means.

To die quietly of old age would be to go there on foot.

I feel more and more that we must not judge God on the basis of this world; it is a study that didn’t come off. What can you do in a study that has gone wrong if you are fond of the artist? You do not find much to criticize; you hold your tongue. But you have a right to ask for something better. It is only a master that can make such a muddle as this, since then we have a right to hope that we’ll see the same creative hand get even with itself. And this life of ours, so much criticized and for such good and exalted reasons—we must not take it for anything more than what it is and go on hoping that in some other life we’ll see a better thing than this.

–Vincent van Gogh

Best. Professor. Ever.

March 15, 2025March 16, 2025 ~ aviewfromthiswilderness ~ Leave a comment

To start, one of my students wrote this sentence: “The iridescent luminescence of the phosphorescent fungi, a phenomenon both ephemeral and mesmerizing, cast an ethereal glow upon the cavern’s labyrinthine corridors.”

I am a bloody brilliant professor. It took me more than thirty-five years to reach this level of excellence as a teacher, but at last I have proof of my abilities to teach college freshman to produce excellent work. Allow me to set aside any semblance of humility for this moment to suggest some rewards should be forthcoming. Teacher of the year, perhaps; a newly-imagined accommodation introduced this year for the purpose of honoring me, maybe. If there is still a Department of Education, maybe a plaque on a wall.

For the first time in my career, more than fifty students (out of sixty five) wrote nearly perfect papers. Every sentence structured with absolute perfection, diction equivalent to PhD candidates of some Ivy League institution after the work has been combed by editors with a thesaurus, and not a single comma out of place, even the Oxford commas; every single one of them exactly where they should be.

There’s more. Oh, and wait for the Big Reveal.

The expert sources, despite their association nearly exclusively with universities in Southeast Asia and India, all precisely attributed. What is especially satisfying is that I managed to enable my students, on only their second paper ever in a collegiate class, to write better than any student I have had since the end of the Reagan administration. These magnificent students used compound sentences with five-syllable words with such accuracy and topic-specific precision I have a renewed faith in this country’s education system. Bravo! primary, middle, and high school teachers! You have passed to us college instructors the finest composition writers in a generation.

But here’s the real reason to celebrate: These students are all high school students taking my college writing class in a Dual Enrollment Program. Again, Bravo! And, well, just Wow! And imagine, they’re almost all just seventeen-years-old.

Okay, so this can’t be a unique situation, one might think, and therefore not worthy of the accolades I suggest. So here’s more: This all happened in the past few weeks in West Virginia where 27% of high school students failed to meet the reading proficiency. And according to an extensive study by the University of Wisconsin of English Learners in Middle Schools and High Schools Pre, During, and Post Covid, English scores declined steadily and significantly just about the time my current students were in ninth grade. The most dramatic decline was in writing skills, followed closely by listening skills. And yet, I pulled their previously unrecognized talents out of the hidden depths of their inattentive minds and produced extraordinary students writing exquisitely ideal papers.

I’m that good.

Some suggest I investigate the possibility the papers were ChatGPT generated, but I say there’s no need. I understand their defense of AI with the car-replaces-the-horse analogy, and that the need to know how to write the essay is secondary to their ability to know how to find one that meets the requirements when they need to do so. The previous example in education might be the Texas Instruments primitive calculator replacing the slide rule. I do understand. But these seventeen-year-old Best-Essay-Writers EVER students would not use such devices since I specifically and clearly instructed them that to do so would result in failing the course and possible expulsion from the university for Academic Dishonesty; why would anyone smart enough to write such pristine essays at the same time be dumb enough to risk their entire college career and subsequently their livelihoods by cheating on a college essay by plagiarizing, even if from a computer? Nay! This work must be original!

Honestly, I had doubts at one time that I ever should have been teaching college. I wanted to raise goats. But I’m convinced now that this path I stumbled onto was the right one. I have written my own essays for more than forty years, shared them with best-selling authors and acclaimed writing faculty at the finest colleges for suggestions and assistance, and have an extensive publishing record–pardon my lack of humility here. I just write this to highlight the fact that I find myself surrounded by minors–for only a couple of these students are yet eighteen-years-old–who have clearly surpassed anything I have been capable of, editing and sentence structure wise, I mean. Nothing can be done about how dreadfully boring their essays are. But I do not grade college compositions based upon their level of “excitement.” No, these 900 and 1200 word essays, all in perfect APA format, stand alone as unblemished.

I’ll be straight–I was a bit worried at the beginning of the semester when I posted on the online discussion board for each of them to explain their interests, hobbies, and hopes for their future, and the responses were riddled with incomprehensible fragments and more dangling modifiers than I’ve ever seen dangled before. But my worries where unfounded. After just five weeks I have successfully produced a stellar group of writers, all in a school district ranked 41st out of 55 in the state. All in a state ranked last–50th–in overall education.

At the very least I deserve a raise.

The Joanie Channel

March 10, 2025March 10, 2025 ~ aviewfromthiswilderness ~ 1 Comment

Joan in the Great River house, circa 1969

On June 22, 2002, my sister sat at our parents’ kitchen table and recorded an audio interview she did with them about their lives, about life during the depression and World War 2. She asked other questions, and just like Terri Gross on Fresh Air, did a great job of bouncing off of their responses. She sent copies to my brother and me about five years ago, and when I sat to listen to them, a few things struck me. One, my father was precise in his responses, and my mother was hysterical in hers. He was 77 at the time, and Mom was 69. But what hit me hardest was hearing our father’s voice for the first time in half a decade. I can hear his voice in my mind, of course, but to actually hear his voice like he was sitting there made him young again. The last few years of his life I was around him all the time and his dementia grew worse and worse. So when I played the cd, I heard not just my father, but my father younger, still alert to everything. It was nice to push past the sound of his weak and confused voice that had filled the corners of my mind and hear him as he had been. Ironically, at the same time it makes it hard to listen.

About two years ago while out to lunch I randomly recorded a video of my mother talking about something. I don’t remember what and the video is gone, but the idea took hold, and for the last two years every couple of weeks when we were at lunch or getting coffee, I’d ask her a specific question, or I’d encourage her to remember a particular time in her life. Note that she is one of the funniest and smartest people I’ve ever known, and understand too that she has had quite the life from the streets of Bushwick, Brooklyn, to Long Island, to Virginia Beach, and now in Williamsburg, Va. There are fifty plus videos here, but I recorded more than a hundred and deleted many. Some were redundant, and some in the past year or so I got rid of when Mom would struggle with a memory, or lose track of what she was talking about.

Still, this is decidedly not about Joan Catherine.

It is about time. This has everything to do with the brief flash of time we have to share with each other. Watch how a person can at once both change so much and still be themselves, who they are in their heart. The truth is at some point as we age we realize that we must set aside our anger and anxiety and arguments, and we seem to do so far too late in life. In the past year I’ve lost a half dozen people I loved very much who were my confidants and companions, and every one of them died relatively young, three of them in their early sixties. At the same time, my mother has nose-dived into a wall, fallen and slammed her head on a porcelain tub, fallen on the floor, faced cancer–again–had a pacemaker put in, battled neuropathy, and moved from her spacious condo where she lived with my dad, to an independent living apartment in Virginia Beach, to an assisted living apartment in Williamsburg, and she just keeps going. Last July she was in the hospital with pneumonia and sleeping eighteen hours a day, and the doctor did not think she would leave the hospital. Yesterday we went to lunch at an Italian restaurant and she woofed down a massive piece of tiramisu. She Just. Keeps. On. Going. And always with a sense of humor. She talks here about her move from Brooklyn to Long Island, from there to Virginia, and about how patient she can be. Or not. She sings the Banana Song, Woody Guthrie, a Shampoo commercial, and in one of my favorites when she had no idea I was taping from the cup holder of my car as we drove along, she sings “New York, New York.”

But this isn’t about Joan. This is about brevity. When we look ahead–when we anticipate–time can slow to a tragically slow pace. But when we look back, when we recall, we can transport our mind instantly to another era, as if it happened two seconds ago. This makes it seem like time goes by so fast. But it is the same now as it was when we were children. That’s the thing about time: it is dependable. Not one fat second will lose an ounce on my account. But the older we get, the more we recall instead of plan, so the clock can be deceptive. In these videos, Mom is full of energy, sitting up and laughing, with immediate recall of incidents an hour earlier as well as two generations ago; at the same time, here Mom is wearing oxygen, sometimes softly gasping for air, and her memory is nearly non-existent.

Time. It is the only measurement that matters. And we are endlessly distracted by the news and entertainment and the stress of finances and politics and health. But all of it slides away when we start to list what is essential. Then, the answer is easy: each other. That’s it. People leave us, sometimes slowly and sometimes with the swiftness of a cool, autumn morning that takes us by surprise. But they do, in fact, leave.

These videos are in no order, so one of Mom recently trying to remember her Uncle’s name might be followed by one of her looking stronger, heavier, talking about her favorite foods. I decided against a strict chronological order so that instead of watching a woman’s slow decline as age takes hold, we can see how life is, in the words of my friend poet Toni Wynn, “Paper thin.” I will add more to her page as time permits. Thanks for enjoying our mother’s beautiful sense of humor and simple take on what matters the most.

Note: There are some videos on the “Video” tab, but most of the videos are on the “Shorts” tab. Please check out both. And “follow” The Joanie Channel.

https://www.youtube.com/@TheJoanieChannel/shorts