family

Letty

~ aviewfromthiswilderness

“What do you think happens, Bawb?” Letty asked at coffee one day last year.

“I don’t know, but I know I’ll miss you.” She started to cry.

“Guy said he thinks it’s like closing the door behind me. I like that. I’m just going to close the door behind me.”

“You going to be wearing heels?” We laughed. “Not this time! I think I’ll wear my running shoes and get in one last workout on the way.” Honestly, we made light of everything. “I’ll close the door behind me and keep on running.” We sat quietly a long time. Then we talked about the reality of it all. “I’m sorry I don’t have the strength to walk. The treatments are exhausting.” I said nothing. There was nothing to say. “Oh! Did you figure out our mileage?” For thirty years or more we walked a few times a week about four miles each time, talking, sharing, helping each other through the thirty years or more.

‘Yes I did. We walked six thousand miles. I figured the four miles each time, twice a week, but I only figured thirty weeks a year since we missed some and vacations. And i figured twenty-five years since at the beginning is was more sporadic, but later on it was more miles, so it evens out.’

‘Six thousand miles!”

I didn’t care so much about not walking anymore. The point was to talk and we were doing that anyway.

“What do you want after you shut the door?” I asked.

“You know exactly what I want,” she said. I did, but now that it’s real I had to ask again. “What about you?” she asked.

“I’d like to be cremated and then rolled into joints and have a bunch of writers smoke me while reading all my work that was rejected.”

“You know if I outlived you I would have made that happen.” That made us quiet again. “Let’s go outside and take a picture.

It’s the last one of us.

***

I don’t even know where to start. I was waiting to teach one of my first classes ever at Tidewater Community College in Virginia Beach, and across the hall Letty sat in her office with the door open. We said hi, and after I left class that day we talked all afternoon.

That was 1989 and immediately followed by three plus decades of hour and a half walks three times a week talking about our kids, our hopes and disappointments, the other people in our lives, and endless deep conversations about what we (mostly she) had read that week in The Economist, The Atlantic, Le Monde, The Washington Post, and more. When she was pissed off she’d switch to French, then realize I was staring at her and she’d switch to Spanish. We helped each other through the most significant changes people can face.

Almost thirty-five years of coffee in the morning, afternoons at the Mexican place across from campus, cider at the local pub–way too often–and sharing. I gave her books I thought she’d like; she introduced me to French and Italian writers, we’d walk through the Chrysler Museum in Norfolk and talk about everything except art. We made fun of each other, like the time in the Hermitage Museum in Russia when I told her I’d meet her in the Impressionists so I could see some of Jean Francois Millet’s work. I didn’t pronounce it correctly though and she had no idea who I meant; “Apparently I’m not spitting enough,” I told her. She said, “But you had me all discumboobulated,” and I told her there is no such word in English. We spent our lives making fun of how each other talked, though she won hands down since she could carry on a conversation in a half-dozen languages. I made fun of her heels, she made fun of my flip flops. It was like that.

The week after my son was born she came to my office and sat and we talked for hours about life. We cancelled our classes and talked about kids and grandkids and posterity and ancestry. She told me how every summer when she was a little girl, her father would drive the family to the Mediterranean coast to a town there where they spent a month swimming in the Med. Her father would head back home to work during the week but return on weekends. It was her favorite place. She said maybe someday we could travel there. A few days after my father died, she called me up and asked if we could meet for coffee on the boardwalk. We did, and she talked about Camus, and about Saint-Exupery–one of her absolute favorites. She remembered a day in the mall when we were shopping and ran into my father who was there to walk, and how she would remember forever how thrilled he seemed to see us. She said she missed her dad.

We were each other’s open books, somehow more than friends despite the misconception of that suggestion. She told me once that I knew her better than anyone except Elisabeth and Guy. That night she texted me, “I wasn’t just saying that; I mean it; no one else knows me like you do.” I wrote back, “Really? You mean that’s all you’ve got? I know all of it? How sad you must be.”

We made each other laugh. We were friends in what must be the original intent of the word.

Thirty years of laughing about work, about changes in personal lives. Thirty plus years of lunches and coffee breaks, of drives to the beach. Once, a memorable trip to Russia for eight days where she refused my pleas to lose the high-heel shoes on six mile walks up Nevsky Prospect. “I was born in these and I’ll die in these,” she said.

There’s more, but I am having trouble explaining myself here. It’s like I have no idea how to do this.

Over the last year and a half since the diagnosis, we finished each conversation with “Talk to you in a few days.” On our last conversation recently, she said, “Talk to you in a few days. I love you Bawb.” It was the first time she signed off that way and the last time we talked. But for several years after I left the college, she would go for a walk three or four days a week and use that time to call me. Then when she told me of her prognosis, we spoke every few days; sometimes for ten minutes, often for a few hours. She talked about how Billy was taking such good care of her, she always asked about my mother and how she is doing, we talked about what I was working on. On one call she asked me to read some of my new work to her; she said, “In case it comes out after.” After that last call last month, a few days passed and she didn’t call or answer my texts, then a week, then more, so I knew she had turned that corner.

We saw this coming from the start, though. In October of 2022, she texted me: “I just want to say you are the best friend I ever had and I’ll never be able to tell you how much I care about you.”

An hour later I was out for a walk and thought about her message. She had never expressed herself like that. We specifically didn’t do that on purpose. So I texted back: “What’s wrong?” Part of me expected some laughing emoji and her words saying “Nothing! Just thinking about you!” but a bigger part of me expected a serious response. Unfortunately, I was right. She wrote: “I was rushed to the hospital from the gym; they thought it was a stroke. It wasn’t; they are taking out a brain tumor. I wanted you to hear it from me. I’ll call you when the alien is out of my head.”

The results were heartbreaking.

She called. She said, “I want to tell you something.” I was quiet. “Do you remember that time you walked by my French classroom and I wasn’t there yet, so you went in and said that Madam Stone would be along shortly. You then got to talking, and you taught them some Spanish and told them they were wasting their time taking French, unless they planned to hitchhike across Quebec, but they couldn’t go anywhere without being able to use Spanish. By the time I showed up and walked in, you were all talking in short Spanish sentences.”

I told her I remembered it well. She said she loved that day. She then recalled another time when she was late I brought her entire class across campus to the faculty parking lot and we stood where she normally parked and waited. When she pulled in she was laughing so hard she nearly drove over the curb.

This was how we passed time; three and a half decades of a friend like that is another level of fortunate. She used to say we were Jerry and Elaine, and the comparison completely fits. Not long after her diagnosis and some treatments, we had coffee at the beach and she said she has so many pictures of me but only a few of us and they were from Russia. So we took a picture. I love the shot. I’m just in front of her and she’s leaning against me from behind, looking short that day since she had on running shoes, not high heels. People say how nice the picture is and how affectionate she is in it, but she isn’t being affectionate; I’m holding her up.

But these are personal musings about someone I cared about who left us all too soon. There’s nothing in this writing that could possibly matter to anyone who doesn’t know the two of us, which is the vast majority of readers. I fear this remembrance can too easily be met with an “oh that’s so nice they had such a great relationship” response and not understand that there’s more than that here. It’s about being open, about dying without leaving anything unsaid. We all have lost someone or experienced something that can’t be communicated properly enough to capture the raw and festering emotion, and it frustrates us because we want people to truly get it, but we are shackled by language. The true essence of the love we have for someone we lose is very personal and something we must accept as ours alone and can’t be shared.

I’d give anything to hear her voice one more time, call me, saying, “Oh, hello Bawb” in her heavy accent, but that’s not going to happen. Ever, no matter how much time passes, it simply is part of my past now; memories remain, of course, but the reality of her voice, the way she always held my arm when she said goodbye, the way she smiled. The way after I told people I was leaving campus and my plan was to never return, and their response was one of “of course you will visit,” not knowing me, but Letty’s response was, “It’s about time, Bawb. Take me with you.”

Just over a month ago she told me she was not feeling well. “But I made it to 65!” she added. “Now I need to make it to your birthday! That is my goal!”

“Happy Birthday to me,” I laughed.

“That way you will not forget me!” She was quiet and I could hear her trying to talk normally. “You’re going to write about me, aren’t you?” She wasn’t hoping I would, but predicting I would.

“Yes.”

“Good. I trust you. Will you mention how much I love Billy? And how I wouldn’t have any life at all without Guy and Elisabeth? Oh, and how I’m so glad I lived long enough to see my Sophia, my granddaughter!? And mention the time we went over to Elisabeth’s office at Operation Smile and banged on the window to get her to come to lunch with us! And you have to mention that Jewish Mother reading and the books that night and how your student thought I was your wife, so I said, ‘yes I am’ and sold him five books and for weeks on campus rumors in my French classes kept going, all of them asking if you were going to come by the class again. I liked that.”

“Do you want to write it?”

“Oh sure, this way I can write myself back to life,” she joked, and we were both quiet. “Besides, there’s more to write about.”

“I know. but some things should remain just ours.”

“I’m very glad for that, you know. Etre en paix avec quelqu’un,” she said mostly to herself.

‘Letty, I’m from the United States. Speak Spanish.”

It’s about having a connection with someone. It’s not love, exactly; it’s a sense of peace.

A minute later: “Watch for the birds that come to feed at your porch mon amour et ami. I’ll be among them.”

That image saddened me. “Will you be chirping with an accent so I know which one is you?”

“Yes! I’ll be the Bawbwhite!” We laughed. We laughed, so I knew we should hang up. It was the last time we talked.

Letty reached her goal and died in the overnight hours of my birthday. Her ashes will be spread across the Mediterranean Sea.

with granddaughter Sophia
Laetitia Sciarrino Stone
March 18, 1959-July 4, 2024

Correspondence. Remember?

~ aviewfromthiswilderness ~ 1 Comment
van gogh's letters

Dear You,

Some of this I’ve written before, But some is new. I’ve started to write letters again. Emails, yes, but real letters as well on actual paper. I sit at one of the tables here at Aerie and cover my iced tea from flies, find the spot where the shade hits the table and place my pad down, and write. I write about my garden, about the bay, about travel plans or family matters, depending upon who I’m writing. I don’t write about writing. I try not to write about anything negative, and I never have written and never will write about politics in a letter.

When I was young I wrote a lot of letters. On summer vacation from college I wrote friends in other parts of the country, and even after college kept a close written communication going with a few people. One is a woman I’ve known since we were freshmen, and another is a priest who I remained very close to through the years. I still have some of those replies, and some I recently sent back so my friend can see what was on her mind forty years ago. I wrote probably several hundred letters to someone I obviously cared very much about to write that many words who joined the air force back in the 80s. Listen: here’s how far we have come since then: At that time I would have to address the OUTSIDE of the envelope with her full name, followed by her full social security number—right there on the front of the envelope. I still remember it, actually. The former maintenance crew who emptied the trash at Lackland Airforce Base probably does as well.

Letters used to be the sole source of communication. Vincent van Gogh wrote more than two thousand pages of his thoughts to his brother Theo, a sister, as well as fellow artists. Thomas Jefferson and John Adams letters to each other famously expose the thoughts of our forefathers, and even as far back as the early Christian era we have Paul’s letters to the Corinthians. I just want to write some stuff about my garden and mail it in an envelope to my friends. Thought I’m tempted to write a large group like Paul did: Letters to the Czechs perhaps. Or the New York Mets.

I learn so much when I write letters. Simply by telling other people what I’m doing, I’m reminding myself how I spend my time. It also allows me to sit in nature, slow down, and take my world one word at a time. In an age that is spinning at Mach 6, writing is like sitting on a stage coach, but that’s okay. Remember those days when we would anticipate mail from a friend? It seems like a long time ago now, but I recall the satisfaction of dropping a thick envelope into a mailbox, or opening mine to see that marvelous white rectangle of someone thinking about me.

My sister found letters our dad wrote to his mother when he was eighteen. When I was in college my Great Uncle Charlie, who was in his early nineties at the time, wrote me letters and often included poems he wrote. This was a man who fought in France during World War One. And when I was in my late teens he was still writing letters and poems and dropping them in his local postal box. I don’t know what happened to those; I moved around so much. Also lost are letters from my childhood friends on the south shore of Long Island. During the first year or so after my exodus, we wrote religiously. I am back in touch with a few of those people from that time, but I wish I still had those epistles of what we were like then, our hopes, our plans, our fears, and our indescribable confidence which time has eroded along with our penmanship skills. My closest friend from then has since died, as have several other close friends through the years, and those letters would have brought their voices to life. When I read a letter I don’t simply look at it, I listen to it as well.

I know the problems in resurrecting such an ancient art form: besides the “slowness” of letter writing, there is the “I don’t really know what to write about” aspect my mother used all the time when I was away at school. Then there’s the “I don’t have time” factor which is just a crock. Sitting down to do anything for ten minutes is not an Olympic feat. And can we please just stop with the “it’s just easier to email” laments. Yes, it is. Write anyway. My favorite avoidance mantra is “I think faster than I write and I can’t slow down to do it.” Geez if you don’t think faster than you write than you’re probably legally brain dead. As Neil Diamond wrote, “Slow it down. Take your time and you’ll find that your time has new meaning.”

As for the upside, it helps me remember what is important in life that I want to write about it, and it reminds me that since I spend the vast amount of my time doing things I don’t deem worthy of including in a letter, I should appreciate the small stuff through the day as much as the grand letter-worthy events. It really does slow me down, helps with my blood pressure, my stress, and sometimes I might sit back while writing a letter to listen to the wrens or the cardinals, or leave it all on the table and wade in the river a bit before returning to finish. Mostly though, it is instigating a physical presence in another’s life in a completely non-threatening way; it is my DNA sealed and sent to another state.

I wish I had written back and forth with my father, or kept in written contact with some friends from Spain. I’d love to have heard from my grandparents, or to read a collection of letters from ancestors from another land. They are treasures; they are history, humanity, emotion and time, all in one stroke of a pen. 

Despite the losses of valuable letters from loved ones through the years, I still have some I cherish. I have a few from Leo Buscaglia, a few from Martin Sheen, and one from Michele Obama. I have some from friends in Germany, Russia, and various other distant places. When I was young I remember my brother had a pen-pal in Germany. I would love to start a correspondence with someone far away, someone I’ve never met. According to the data page of WordPress, this blog has roughly 2000 unique weekly readers in twenty one countries including India, Japan, and Australia. If anyone is reading this, drop me a line, hand-written, to PO Box 70, Deltaville, VA 23043. I will reply, Promise.

I’ll even stick a leaf in the envelope to send along a small piece of Aerie. It really is peaceful here; a place to write home about.

Always,

Bob

siberia-phone-316
writing a letter to my father while in the dining car of a train in eastern Siberia

Dave

~ aviewfromthiswilderness ~ 6 Comments

That’s my friend Dave Szymanski. He died Tuesday, May 14th. RIP my brother. We laughed so much that now just laughing at all often makes me think of him. We were going to get together when we both turned seventy and sing “Bookends” on some park bench. No kidding; it was part of the plan. We wanted to belt out to whatever audience was out walking their dog, “How terribly strange to be seventy!” Well, that won’t happen. Still, I am absolutely certain if I make it that far I’ll most definitely do just that, but alone, crying, laughing. I have so many stories about Dave you’d think we were twins. But those are mine now–Dave and I agreed to have joint custody of the stories of those times, but since he is gone now, I’m assuming full ownership. Unfortunately, they fall squarely under the category of “You had to be there,” so there’s no point in sharing them.

This is not likely to go where you believe it might go.

I’ve been thinking about what I can best call the start of some independent consciousness–that is, the time when I was first aware I was a growing, independent thinker/dreamer, mentally unattached to others, my thinking not entirely tethered to parents or siblings or teachers. I guess I was in what we then called Junior High, now Middle School, and at thirteen or fourteen years old life was still idyllic. That’s the point I think I started to think of myself as an individual. I have no idea if that is late, early, or disturbed. We lived near the Great South Bay next to a State Park and an arboretum, a golf club, and I was surrounded by friends in the village of Great River. I have memories before that, and possibly even dreams, which at that time were to either be an astronaut (Apollo 11) or play baseball during the summer (Miracle Mets) and be an ice cream man in Florida during the winter. But those were the “in the immediate” aspects of life; that is, things you thought about and said to friends but then forgot nearly instantly. But realism crept into my view somewhere around seventh grade when more realistic plans surfaced, like sailing around the world or riding my bike across the country, or being a musician or a writer or a tennis pro. All seemingly real plans at the time; those things which you no longer imagine and pretend but which you pursue, even if fruitlessly and without much talent.

No one save his family knew Dave was sick, so most of us didn’t have the chance to take the time to reminisce. It’s important; we always say, “Tell people how much you care about them because you never know if they’ll be around next week,” but we rarely follow through. We know it is true, and we know it is real, but we just don’t. But if we really did know it was the last time we might talk, the last chance to say something, like how much you appreciate the long conversations in the radio station at five in the morning, you picking out albums, him tearing UPI articles for the news; or how the three am pancake house runs were more important than final exams; or how the weekly texts through the next forty years kept you going, you’d tell him. Listen: Please, make sure if something happens and you know you’re going to be checking out, do not keep it a secret; some of us have a few things to say.

Anyway.

A few days ago someone asked me for my favorite picture of Dave. I went searching deep both on and offline, but I do not have many at all since back when we spent a lot of time together we rarely walked around with a camera and film. But I looked, all the while sifting through tons of other photos of the scattered years throughout my life, and at some point I stopped and simply sat remembering, and I realized something close to lifesaving during an otherwise heartbreaking week: What an amazing ride this has been so far.

I’ve mostly taken the paths of least resistance, I must admit, but apparently someone was up ahead clearing it for me, because it’s been outrageously fortunate. And I finally figured out what the pictures are for. Not only to reminisce, but to remind myself when I get lethargic or depressed, lonely, or tired, that I’m still walking this brilliant Camino, and to remind me of the words of Virgil when he wrote that Death twitched his ear and whispered, “Live….I’m coming.”

Not knowing when someone is going to die, or even that they are sick, is a cold reminder that we don’t know when we’re going to die, or when we might fall ill, and the truth is we just might have a few things to say to those we will leave behind. Speak now or forever…

I normally try to not write too directly only about myself, choosing instead for a digression into some common ground. But not this time. Honestly, this one is for me. Just a few findings from the journey so far:

Sandy. My best friend forty-five years ago.
My yellow house in Oakdale, MA. I lived for a few years on the first floor/basement behind the hill. The water is the Wachusett Reservoir, and up the road to the right was an apple mill, then up the mountain to the ski slopes, Princeton, Massachusetts. I loved it there and never should have left. 100 years earlier the house was a fish market.
My siblings and me (in the middle) in Massapequa Park on Long Island, where we lived from just after I was born until I was nine. It was a great place to be; Dad worked his tail off so we had great childhoods. My siblings are two of my five heroes.
My friend Michele during high school. One day I borrowed Dad’s car to go to Michele’s for “about an hour.” Instead, we drove to the end of Knott’s Island on the Carolina border, drove onto the ferry, and headed down the coast of the Outer Banks. Neither one of us wanted to turn around. If we hadn’t we might well still be driving.
In Senegal where I spent some time before headed somewhere else in Africa. A few months earlier my life had completely changed, so I decided to change it further and ended up there. My college friend Claire and me with a village jeweler on the left. We had no clue who the dude on the right was. He just jumped in the picture.
I lived in this cabin in northern Norway for March of 1995 with my colleague Joe and American teacher/writer John Slade while we taught at the Bodo Graduate School of Business. We filleted cod caught by our seventy-five year old neighbor, Magnus. A Russian guitarist, Max, and I spent evenings in the cabin dueling folk tunes from the US and Russia. One night I fell through the ice on a lake but only to my ankles. Another we felt we had to duck from the swirling bands of the Northern Lights. Another we chased moose up a hill. Other stories for another time.
This old guitar saved my life. Coffeehouses kept me from falling through some proverbial ice during those years. And what stories from those gigs, like the time when 150 people sat to watch us play and at one point we opened the curtains behind me (there’s an Olympic size swimming pool on the other side of the windows) at the exact time a swimmer climbed out of the pool and his suit had slipped to his knees. We all waved. He dove back in the pool.
The Great River house my father had built and where we lived until moving to Virginia in ’75. When people ask where I’m from it is a difficult question to answer, but as I get older I say “Great River” and it is listed that way on my FB page. I live in Virginia. But I’m from Great River. Hard to explain.
My advisor and mentor, Pete Barrecchia. He was one of the true journalists of this country and the source of my first and greatest writing lesson. When someone in editorial writing class complained about not knowing how to start and where to put in the research and on and on and on, he put down his cigarette, grimaced, and said, “Oh just write the fucking thing.” It worked.
One of my escapes during college; Letchworth State Park. My escapes were either music or nature. Sometimes just the smoke-filled art studio beneath a dorm on the other side of campus. But escape was always important for me. Hard to explain.
My boss in the mid-eighties. One of the finest humans I’ve ever known. Yes, that’s him.
Village chief. And his wife.
My Great Uncle Charlie Kunzinger and Aunt Jane. Time note: He fought in WW1 in France, and when I was a freshman in college at St Bonaventure, he was still writing me letters and sending poetry.
Mike Bonnano and Kermit when idealism was still okay to sing about, and where no one cared how bad you were.
My friend Tim O’Brien who most know for his prose writing but few know is an extremely accomplished magician. True story.
Michael and me in mountains of eastern Quebec many years ago. We’ve been literally around the world since then, and we’re still going. With apologies to Maya Angelou, “I wouldn’t take nothing for my journey now.”

Call someone. Tell them something. Anything. Forgive them. Ask them to forgive you. Tell them you’re sorry you didn’t answer the phone that last time they called and said they felt like talking. You planned to call them back but just didn’t “feel” like it yet. Now you can’t. Go ahead, call someone and say you wish you were as good a friend to them as they have been to you. Don’t be embarrassed. It’s only life, you know. That’s all.

It’s only life.

I Can Breathe in a Small Town

~ aviewfromthiswilderness ~ Leave a comment

My brakes went and my mower broke this week. I’m not mechanically inclined.

I drove the car to a mechanic two miles from Aerie and asked him to check it out. He said it was a full brake job from calipers to pads, but he could do it the next day, and while his rates were higher than I was hoping to dish out for something I can’t even see (though I could hear them well enough), they were still lower than anyone else I called to compare. And I know Scott; he’s reliable, dependable, and has a reputation for being very fair. Plus I can walk home from there past cows and sometimes even turkeys.

While I was there the first of those two very recent days, I asked him about small engine repair since the two shops I’ve used in the past have since closed, and my own attempts to fix the engine did not pan out, despite watching several YouTube videos (though admittedly, one thing lead to another and I spent a few hours watching Taylor Swift songs and Family Feud clips).

So I asked, and Scott recommended Kelly Slaughter in the village. Cool.

I spent the better part of the past thirty years working in the city of Virginia Beach with its half a million residents. But throughout my adult life, I’ve always managed to live where I knew everyone and people knew me. In Massachusetts it was a fine 100-year-old house in a small hamlet on a reservoir. In Pennsylvania it was a farmhouse three centuries old with push out lead windows and farms everywhere. Here at Aerie, if I don’t know someone in town, they certainly know my son. There is something safe in this life, something reliable. I love traveling, headed out to Ireland, Prague, the Gulf Coast of Florida or the hills of western New York, but I know I can come home and settle right back into life on the bay.

I couldn’t find Kelly listed so I stopped at a shop known as “The Man Cave,” with deep hallways and rooms, alcoves, and endless piles of yard sale type items. This is the place where you can find virtually anything, but you have to climb and sift, move aside, and dust off. Fred is a man of about eighty and he sat in the front room in his chair and welcomed me to his world.

“Hey Fred. I need a mower. I’m going to find Kelly Slaughter to fix mine, but I saw the one out front and wonder how much it is?”

“Kelly! Kelly and I been close friends since we were young. I’m sorry to tell you but he’s not doing well. Thirty bucks and it’ll start right up. Already filled with gas.” This all in one sentence. Fred and I talked a bit. I told him I had to head to 711 to get money from the ATM and he gave me an envelope and said, “Well, I’m leaving so just put the money in here and slide it through the door next time you get a chance.”

I loaded the mower (which did start right up) and told him I’d have paid someone twice that to mow the property just once, so this is a great deal. “You’ll get a few seasons out of this anyway,” he assured me. “711 huh? That puts me in mind for a few slices of pizza. I might stop there myself.”

I took the money out of the ATM and bought Fred a few slices of pizza and paid him for the mower, went home and cut the grass after a month of outrageous growth.

Then back to Scott’s to drop off the car.

“I felt a slight shimmy earlier when I accelerated,” he said.

“Yes,” I answered, not feeling the need to expand. Scott’s good.

“I have transmission flutter stuff; should get rid of that. Car will be ready tomorrow about lunch.”

On the way home I walked by a ranch with close to a hundred head of cattle. It’s one of my favorite properties around here, and I stopped and talked to the cows a while. An eagle—very late for his trip north before all the osprey return and reclaim their nests—settled in the yellow field for a rest then headed out toward the river.

The next day at lunch I picked up the car and went to 711 to fill up with gas, where I ran into Wayne. “I hear Fred sold you a mower.”

“He did, and I already mowed the entire property, including the field and the northern yard.”

“Hell, Bob, you would’ve had to pay someone twice that at least just to mow it once.”

“Exactly.”

Bubba came out of the store headed to his new job in the next county. “How’s that new mower Fred sold you?”

“Good. I still need to get the old one fixed though.”

“You try Kelly Slaughter? I used to see him parked at the end of his driveway waiting for the mail each day. Haven’t in a bit though.”

“Kelly’s not well anymore and Fred said most likely not going to improve.”

“Oh too bad. I always liked Kelly. There’s a shop in Mathews. Another in White Stone. Or you can watch a few videos and do it yourself.”

I went home and put some old tomatoes out for the fox and filled the birdbaths for the deer. Then I decided they are right; I can absolutely fix the mower myself. So I sat once more at my desk and scanned YouTube for mower-repair videos. Turns out there are even videos for my specific brand and model.

I must have spent an hour watching. You know, I wasn’t crazy about Steve Harvey as host at first, but he grew on me, and I like how he keeps the show moving. And Taylor, well, I like “All Too Well,” of course; I mean, who doesn’t. But that one line from “Anti-Hero” keeps cycling in my mind: “Hi. It’s me. I’m the problem it’s me.”

Cathy Kunzinger Urwin, Ph.D.

~ aviewfromthiswilderness ~ 1 Comment

Today my sister turns seventy-years-old.

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

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

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

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

Cathy and Fred holding up their chubby brother

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

Cathy and Greg

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

Cathy with Lyra

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

Cathy with Henry

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

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

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

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

Happy Birthday Cathy.

Cathy and me, 1988

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

For Cathy: