Life

Extended Metaphor

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I suppose my parents were the original plunger to my pinball life. From the time I was born they slowly pulled back on that spring, maintained that illusion of safety and determination. “We’ll move him to the Island,” they said. “We’ll go out to a quiet village,” they said, “where he can grow up in nature with friends.” I think their hands got sweaty and slipped a bit when they said we’d all move to Virginia, but they recovered just fine.

But then it happened.

Release.

Suddenly I moved about life bouncing from one influence to another, bouncing and tumbling from high scores to near elimination, and all my parents could do was keep their fingers on the flippers so if by chance—and a slight chance it usually was since I mastered the art of bouncing around—I moved anywhere close, they could try and catch me for a moment in metallic suspension, then send me in their chosen direction, or at least back into some middle-ground where I was safe from an early exit.

The thing is, others got their hands on the flippers too. Advisors, sometimes friends, sometimes lovers, holding me out on the end of the bar, deciding which way and how hard to send me on. Too gentle and I’ll tumble right out of the game; too hard and I’ll inevitably come back to haunt. That happened a lot.

The thing is when I was at the height of my ricocheting life, I was in my prime, in my element. I liked not always knowing where I was headed and what might happen. It kept me perilously in the moment, so blatantly aware of the “now” as I kicked off one bad experience and bulleted toward hopefully something better, a tiny cannonball without any ability to steer. Yeah, that was me for a long, beautiful and exciting time.

Then something game-changing occurred: I had a son, and I found myself pulling back on that plunger, looking ahead at the same time wondering if I could help him score the most points by spinning him toward a certain destination of my choosing. I remembered what that was like to not simply be without control, which has its own benefits and limitations, but to be at the mercy of others with their fingers on the flippers. A coach told me I needed more discipline and I could compete at a higher level in tennis, but the parental plunger pulled back a bit more declaring a difference of opinion. I decided not to go to college for a while and I really thought that plunger would let me go in any direction I chose, but no, as a year later I was tucked nicely away in the safety of a university chamber. Truly, my parents weren’t the best in letting this loose cannon follow my own lack of control, but it was to their credit they recognized in me that carelessness. Ironically, life went very well for me because of their foresight, their ability to look ahead, having played the game before. Sure. But it was their game. Not mine. In subsequent years they handled the flippers just fine, often helping me get back on the course I had chosen. So with my son, I wanted so desperately to simply let go and watch that ball of a boy rip out on his own. But I’d been around the block by then, and while I thought I could help by holding the plunger as long as possible, I let go earlier than I wanted, maybe even earlier than he wanted, and he’s found the right bumpers to play off of in his life.

But the point is I’m bored again. Certainly I’m too old to just richochet about hoping to bump into something good, but I’m too young to leave the game. So I looked at some maps and noticed places I want to go and haven’t yet been, and I can’t remember the last time I put myself out there, risked embarrassment in hopes of chance. If I remember correctly, I always got five balls when playing pinball, and when I got to that last one I needed to savor it, and the tendency was to try and manipulate and control those flippers as much as possible, create some illusion I can make this last longer than possible.

But it is in that way that we lose those very years; we slow down, play it safe, find comfort in the flipper that holds us a moment before deciding which way to propel the time that remains.

You know what would be really interesting? Pull the plunger all the way back, and even beyond back, then let it rip. Yes. Maybe go to the Islands, bounce about the South Pacific, perhaps walk the Pacific Coast, maybe train through India or take a river cruise on the Danube. Whatever. But that’s my new plan: I’ll let my imagination control the flippers and see what happens.

Maybe I’ll just go back to Spain

Wait. Loss.

~ aviewfromthiswilderness ~ 2 Comments

In my youth Dad always walked down the small staircase on Christmas morning to plug in the lights while my siblings and I waited. Mom would have stacked our gifts in separate piles under the tree, and after the three of us exchanged our own gifts earlier that morning in my sister’s room, we’d gather on the steps and wait. When the tree lights lit, Dad would call out “Okay, you can come down now,” and we would, each of us steered toward our own third of the presents.

Mom was our Santa back then, waiting in lines for the right gifts, hoping she doesn’t ever again buy my sister the wrong album, trying to get it right, not knowing of course that she couldn’t possibly get it wrong. She’d be in the kitchen as soon as the presents were open so she could make the stuffing and prepare the pies for the relatives coming that day. And then later, after everyone had gone home and the five of us were again alone, Dad would emerge from his closet with books for each of us. This was special as it was common knowledge that Mom did all the shopping, but in the case of the books, Dad shopped himself, wrapped them himself, always picking out the perfect one for each of us, and would “surprise” us with them that night. It is a tradition I continue with my own son. Those days of “Dad’s Books” happened it seems just months ago, and the times that Mom worried she used too much spice in the dressing seems to have occurred weeks ago, but it could not have been. They both made it seem as if we had hundreds of holidays together with just the five of us, but it wasn’t even two dozen. That’s what time does when you’re complaining about the cold or the crowds or the difficulty finding just the right thing to give someone–it passes. Fast.

October 2015

I remember sitting in the uncomfortable recliner next to the hospital window and thinking, “If I’m here a few more days, I might take down the clock; laminate the list of television stations he will never watch; ask to fill in the information on the empty whiteboard I’ve stared at for four days, note the nurse’s name, cross off the faces from frowny to happy to indicate his pain tolerance. If he had more time, I might move his bed closer to the window.” Three times I moved his food trays, trice-daily reminders he hadn’t regained consciousness, into the bathroom. I can still smell the aroma of onion soup he never knew existed.

Most certainly I would move the two boxes of blue latex gloves from the wall inside the door to the wall outside the door. Nothing says “If I touch you, I might die” like blue latex gloves. I would silence the incessant beeping from the health monitor above his head.

I didn’t mind the wait. As sure as I knew his blood pressure, blood oxygen level, and pulse, I will miss the wait, the slim possibility, the sliver of “just maybe.”

The text from my brother read, “He’s gone. Come back over.”

I dismissed class just after 8:30 and left for the hospice center a few miles from the college. I forgot to tell the students it would be a few weeks before I returned. I drove to see my suddenly late father.

We took turns saying goodbye again, this time after the fact. He looked gone—as if he’d been dismissed, like he transferred or simply dropped out. I held his bare arm below the sleeve of the green golf shirt they provided. I wondered if all the patients had the same shirt. The entire building had a sense of oneness, of warm togetherness, like all the nurses should have the same name, and all the patients looked like my dad.

I kissed his withdrawn face. I thought he might feel cold, but his arm felt warm as if from the sun during all those days at the field coaching my brother in Little League, and from sitting all day in the baseball stadium bleachers, buying me hotdogs, letting me keep score as he showed me how to fill in the small boxes.

When I took his folded hand in mine, it felt stiff, but not from some medical transition; no, more like his muscular grip back when he took my infant son in his arms and laughed, his eyes wider than space, his laugh deeper than love, just moving his grandson up and down as they laughed and my son reached for his nose, for his glasses. I reached for those glasses now, unused on the nightstand, and held them.

A week earlier I stopped at the hospital to check on him, expecting another day of quietness after a week of unconsciousness. But I walked in to see his eyes wide open, staring at the ceiling, then at me.

“Well hello,” he said in his baritone voice.

“Hey Dad, how are you?”

“I’ve been here since 4:30 this morning.”

“You’ve been here for four days.”

“Four days! What hotel am I at? Ha! Hotel! I wish I was at a hotel! What hospital?”

He could have been thirty years younger. After a long, slow year-long erosion from dementia, I had not heard Dad so lucid in several seasons.

“You’re near home, Dad. You’re at the hospital right near home.”

“It is serious, then?  Tell me.”

“You have pneumonia, Dad.”

“So I probably don’t have much longer, do I?”

And that nurse came in and Dad checked out, turned his head and closed his eyes one last time just days before he died. That night I rode in the transport ambulance to take him to hospice.

If I had more time I might tell him about my failures, my shortcomings. But there is never enough time.

April 2025

We were in a cheese factory shop in Volendam with baskets of cheese wheels to bring home. I held a bag of four wheels and thought about who I can give them to after I separate them. “I’ll give one to Mom,” I said.

Stateside, I stopped at my sister’s home in Pennsylvania when Mom’s nurse called to say she had fallen while rising from her chair at bingo, and she hit her ribs on the chair, bruising the bones around her already-weak lungs. Her nurse, Max, held the phone so Mom could talk. “I’m so confused,” Mom said to my sister and me, and I said I’d be home the next day. A while later another nurse called. “Your mother is transitioning.” She’s becoming a man? I momentarily wondered, not trying to be funny; I truly had never heard anyone reference the stage between being not at all dead and about to die as a “transition,” but I suppose it is as good a euphemism as any. Certainly, “Your Mom is dying,” appears a bit colder, but I still think I’d have preferred such directness over the “I’m so afraid to say what is happening that I’m going to wrap it in obtuse verbs.”

The next night I leaned over her sleeping body and she opened her eyes and they welled up, and I said “I love you, Mom” and she fell quickly back to sleep. Later that night my brother texted. Mom was gone. That was either eight months or eight years ago.

I miss the waiting, especially this time of year when I’d be waiting to give her some gifts—probably flowers and a gift certificate to take her to a nice lunch. She reached the age where those gifts of time spent together were the most valuable.

I miss making videos of Mom, and how for every one video I recorded I deleted four or five because they were too ridiculous to publish. I miss those outtakes now.

I miss seeing Mom in the foyer of her home waiting for me to drive up the circle to pick her up, a wide smile followed by an “Oh, it is so good to get out for a bit! You know?” I knew. She didn’t care if we just drove around. I’d park the car at the market and she’d wait for me as I ran in to get her bananas, fudge stripes, and flowers.

That last time I saw my dad before he entered the hospital he had sank a twenty-two foot putt on the practice green and looked at me with such a proud and excited reaction it’s as if my entire life collapsed into that moment—the golf when my brother and I were young on the Island, that time Dad and I went to see Jaws when it first came out, or when he and I went to Disneyland in California; our lunches every week after he retired but before Mom had. Strangely, I think I felt the loss of my father before he even died because of his ebbing mind and misunderstood timeframe. Loss comes unexpectedly and often out of joint.

The last time I saw my Mom I told her I’d be in Amsterdam and we were going to Keukenhof to see the acres and acres of flowers, and would she like me to bring her some tulips. She stared at me a long time, and I waited, and more time passed, with my phone video playing, and still I waited wondering if I had lost mom right then, until finally she smiled and recited a poem from her youth.

It was worth the wait.

Merry Christmas Mom. I’ll put on some Christmas music for you—some of your beloved Andy Williams. And Merry Christmas to you too Dad. I’ll plug in the lights Christmas morning and later that night I’ll give Michael a book, and I’ll be thinking of you.

The Rain that Day

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There’s a scene in one of the Hunger Games films where Jennifer Lawrence and Josh Hutcherson are sitting in the doorway to their house. The shot is from deep inside the room and we can see them almost silhouetted on the floor leaning against the door frame looking outside where a heavy, steady rain is falling. It’s summer or fall. The door is open yet and they seem comfortable, and it is raining. 

That image stayed with me. I want to call the director and say, “Well done,” you nailed one of the most comforting images I can recall–inside warm and dry away from the storm but close enough to appreciate it. 

I loved sitting on the patio when I was a child, under the canvas awning when it rained, and I just assumed it was raining everywhere, which at eight years old was probably a three block radius. What did I know of everywhere? But that closeness of rain never left me. In Spain on more than one occasion we donned our raingear and walked out onto the Camino to keep going, a heavy fog sometimes filled the air, and on one day near the village of Cee on the way back from Fisterra to Santiago, we couldn’t even see ten feet forward. But here I am eleven years off the Way and I remember that day as if I just walked in the door from the path and set my walking stick against the fireplace stones. 

What is it about the rain? 

On a trip to Ireland, the only day out of ten it rained was the very day archeologist Michael Gibbons planned to give us a walking tour of the Renvyle Peninsula in Connemara just along the Wild Atlantic Way. We went anyway, along roads and across bogs for a half dozen miles, and sometimes it was only cloudy, but more often a steady Irish rain fell as more of a pleasing accompaniment than any nuisance of weather. In fact, when we walked near an abandoned home we stood under the eaves to wait out a downpour and during the short break we laughed and joked with each other about nonsensical things, but it is the time from the walk we remember most, the moment we all took pictures and realized how stunning the Irish Pete could smell in a rain, and how we didn’t mind, not in the least.

I took a moment just now to look up the history of rain, already knowing the first evidence dates back 4 billion years, and the first mention of it in literature dates back to both Gilgamesh and The Iliad. What I didn’t know until just now is that raindrops are not shaped like teardrops but more like hamburger buns, that one inch of rain over one acre of land weights over 110 tons, that Mawsynram, India, is the wettest place on Earth with more than 450 inches of rain annually, and that rain really does have its own odor, called petrichor, caused by the wetness releasing the oils from plants and soil which then fill the air. 

“The beauty of the rain is how it falls”

–Dar Williams

I love the smell of rain, the feel of it on my back and neck, but my reason has little to do with any enjoyment of being wet, soggy, drenched; it is because I can, because I am here in nature still, well after so many I love have closed the door behind them, all of whom if they could would love to be drenched in the rain with me, and we would laugh at being here, alive, and I’d say how moist I am and we’d laugh even harder. 

I love feeling alive and rain does that, even if I’m just on the patio at an old picnic table sixty years ago and the sound on the canvas above me and the steam off of the sidewalk nearby all kept me present, absorbing the moment before the next one came. How often in life can we be so acutely aware of a moment so that we can hear the nudge of the one that follows? Time is too swift for rain; life is too short for the subtle rise of mist from the pavement. 

“Let the rain kiss you, Let the rain beat upon your head with silver liquid drops, Let the rain sing you a lullaby.” –Langston Hughes

It’s the same with the sun, the feeling-alive thing. The heat and scorch on my neck and back energizes me like nothing else can, and everything around me is hyper-present, like I can feel the molecules, the very atoms of the light, and too of the rain, like the coursing of blood. 

It’s raining now, and I’m going to pour a cup of tea, put on a sweatshirt and go sit on the porch and listen to the rain in the woods and on the porch roof here at Aerie. I’ll let my mind wander and try and remember the last time I heard my father laugh and remember the last time my mother and I talked about nothing at all. I’ll think about Eddie and that time we walked all day in the rain through Heckscher State Park on the Great South Bay, just two fourteen-year-olds who suddenly owned the planet, and we spent all day out there and sang “The Long and Winding Road,” and now when I hear that song I think of rain, and Eddie, and how it always takes me a moment and a shake of my head to understand that day was fifty years ago, forty-five years before he closed the door behind him, and how that rain that day was like a third friend laughing along with us, singing along with us. When it rains now I can have that day again, and I like that. So I walked up here to my desk and settled into this chair and I’ll listen to the rain on the skylight before I turn out the lights. 

“Some people feel the rain. Others just get wet”

–Bob Marley

May 23, 1925-October 21, 2015

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Dad died ten years ago this Tuesday, the 21st. Words can’t express how I miss him. The following essay first appeared in Kestrel: A Journal of Literature and Art, as well as my collection Fragments, and anthologized in a few other publications. It was the last piece of my writing I am aware my father read.

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Instructions for Walking with an Old Man at the Mall

First of all, he’s walking, you’re joining him. Don’t stop if he doesn’t. Don’t keep walking if he doesn’t. You are a shadow, an imitation.

Stand on his side where he can better hear you. If he can’t, repeat yourself as if for the first time, no matter how many times. Never say “never mind.” When he tells you something, you have never heard that story before, even if you can repeat it word for word. When he tells you about the baseball games with his Dad seventy years earlier, they are new stories, and your response must sound genuine. When he tells you about the time he went swimming at camp with his friends, and how when they went to retrieve their clothes from under a boat they found a snake, be amazed again, ask what happened. Laugh again since he will laugh.

When he pauses in front of a store, don’t question it. At that moment, allow his sole purpose in pausing is to look at whatever item is in that display. He might mention how he used to own that tool, those pants. Let him know you remember; do not make a big deal that he remembered. He needs you to know he didn’t stop “to rest”—he stopped to look at the display. When he says he could use that new suit, a new pair of shoes, or a new whatever is new, agree. If he happens to stop in front of Frederick’s of Hollywood, there’s no need to joke; it will only emphasize he couldn’t get past a place he would never stop with his son. This time he simply couldn’t continue. Talk instead about his grandkids. Talk about the rain. Do not talk about old times. There’s no need to recall the time he drove you to the airport for a flight to college and you saw him hours later waving to you onboard the plane. Avoid bringing up the time just the two of you spent the day at Shea Stadium when you were a child. Instead, ask about the Mets and if he happened to catch the game last week. You know he did. Let him tell you about it.

When he seems tired but doesn’t want you to keep stopping, stop to fix your shoe, to read a sign; look for a bench and suggest you sit and talk. He’ll ask about your son; he’ll ask about work. Have something to say other than “fine, Dad.”

Do not look at your watch. Do not check your phone; most definitely do not check your phone. Leave both in the car. Do not indicate in any way he is keeping you from anything. No other time is relevant anymore. But you will grow tired and restless. If he senses this, he will insist you leave. He will say he knows you have a lot going on, and he’ll say he’ll see you later, and he’ll do whatever he can to make you feel he is completely fine with it. Stay anyway. Then sit a bit longer. Do not ask about the doctors; the walk is to forget about the doctors. Do not quiz him on medicine or schedules. He is out for a walk, you joined him, it is something about which he will tell others—that he went for a walk at the mall and his son was there and joined him. Do not let his story end with “but he had to go.”

When he can’t remember where he parked his car, ask if he parked in the usual area. He did. Sit down for a few minutes. It will come to him. There’s no need to ask probing questions like “which stores” or “what street” he was near. Just sit a while. He’ll remember. You’re not in a rush.

When you leave the mall be near him as he steps from the curb, but do not help. He will be fragile and unstable. The step from curb to parking lot is a leap; he used to do it with you on his shoulders and two others running out front. Let him step down on his own but be ready. He bruises easily and a simple scrape is a trip to the doctor. Have the patience he had when your childhood curbs seemed like the cliffs of Dover.

Don’t say “I guess I’d better get going.” Don’t make plans. Don’t make any comment to indicate he did well or that it was a “good walk.” He didn’t do well and it wasn’t a good walk. He’s older now. He’s slower now, but he knows this. Really, once the walk is done, the time spent together always seems to have passed faster than we recall. He knows this as well.

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I Barely Remember When

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Fall has arrived and the breezes this weekend cleared away most of what was left of summer. Last week at home I walked along the river like I always do this time of year when the water laps at my feet, it is warmer than the air, inviting, deceiving, teasing me into thinking summer will push back on autumn and maybe even win out. I don’t mind the change so much; I’m not bothered by the passing of time as much as how I spend the passing of time.

The leaves are just beginning to change here, and my drive in a few weeks to West Virginia will bring me through every stage of autumn. Sometimes you can see all the changes happen in one day. Crazy. Well, the truth is, some things need to change. Even with resistance, sometimes it is the only way to make room for new growth.

For me even the seasonal change from summer to fall is often troublesome. Again, I don’t mind fall—my days in western New York and Massachusetts are most memorable for this time of year. And obviously I know it is going to happen. I watch the weather, I mark the calendar, I see the leaves letting go. But still it always takes me by surprise. I wake up one day and I need to wear more clothes, or I no longer feel the sun so strong on my shoulders, and I am saddened. The Seasonal Affective Disorder which strikes some of us in February can also have its way in October, though usually not as bad.

This year is different; I’m both tired of change and in desperate need of some right now.

In kindergarten I liked a little red-haired girl, Kathleen.

Stay with me here.

Just like Charlie Brown I was afraid to approach her. At the same time I was thrilled I met someone I would get to grow up with. We were in the same class until third grade when at the end of the school year my family moved much further out on the Island. Instead of saying goodbye to her I made a card that said, “I love you” and threw it at her in the hallway. I think she got it. Now I wish I had just handed it to her politely and said I was sorry I was moving. I never saw her again. I probably didn’t handle that relationship well. The change, however, the move east to what would become where I would forever call “where I am from,” was unexpectedly pleasant despite my resistance at first. The same thing happened when I was fourteen and moved to Virginia Beach, four hundred miles south. I absolutely and definitively did not want to go; I’m so glad we did.

During each major change in life, though, I consistently ignored the advice of my older siblings or from examples set down on television or in school. I simply preferred to assess a situation and have at it on my own terms, even if it meant complete and utter disaster. I was slow to learn as a result, but I gained that small bit of confidence we used to earn out on our own, trying and failing, fantasizing and acting and pretending. You simply never know when those youthful lessons will return to come in handy, see us through an unexpected left-turn, help us through the changes. And it seems these days everything is changing, doesn’t it? It’s as if people in positions of power are scanning the horizon to see what they can disrupt next. Even friends are acting strange, distant, and when the very essence of what we can count on is no longer predictable, we must either adapt or run away. I’m running away.

I thought about those years, my early youth in on Long Island, and how innocent it all was; how we flipped baseball cards and played stickball. We had block parties where the block would be closed to traffic and we all put picnic tables and grills out and walked up and down the street talking to everyone else and sharing food, and riding bikes, and the adults had drinks and the kids had fun. Television went off the air at night, just a fuzzy white noise until the early morning when a black and white flag waved across the screen and some dude said, “We now begin our broadcast day” after the National Anthem.

This was the age of my youth. It was innocent and tech-free and filled with hippies and protests and flag-burning and marches and sit-ins and rumbles. The laughable Mets became the champs and we walked on the moon. On the moon, for God’s sake. How can you possibly not understand why at the core of my generation is some semblance of hope, still simmering. Hope is what got us through; the hope of humanity, the hope of leaders, the hope of lovers and friends. We were not a generation of followers staring at our hands; not by any stretch of the imagination. So when the times were a ‘changing, we changed—or we were the ones causing the change to begin with. And as we grew older, those organic traits became part of our DNA.

But hope in everything is fragile now. And the falling leaves are no help; not for me anyway.

It almost seems ridiculous and it is certainly ironic that the best way for me to handle these unexpected and troublesome changes is to, in fact, change. So be it. “To change is to be new. To be new is to be young again.”

“If you do not change direction, you may end up where you are going.”

–Lao Tzu

We now begin our broadcast day.

Foolish. Insane. Successful.

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Some of us are masters of self-deception; we can convince ourselves of just about anything and we learn to look for the smallest of clues to justify whatever illusion keeps our delusion alive.

I am certain this all sounds somewhat psychotic, even sinister at times. I know. Yet this mental acuity of delusion and ambition is not only necessary, it’s what separates those of us in lives of quiet desperation from those whose names are synonymous with acts of greatness.

Two truisms:

One, “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over hoping to reach a different result.” Okay.

Two, “The Greater Fool is the one who thinks they can succeed where others before have consistently failed.”

But notice the problem; no advancement in technology, science, the arts, moves forward without a delicate balance of both: Science in particular means doing the same thing over and over to check results, to see if it comes out differently even once, only once in a million trials, to make certain everything is okay or everything just changed. The movie The Right Stuff which begins in California with test pilots does an excellent job of showing how insane those fools were to get into yet another new jet after everyone else had died, only to take flight to another level and eventually out of this world. Certainly the engineers made alterations each time, so it wasn’t the same thing over and over, but with patience and caution.

It is a difficult thing to keep trying to get something right that continually fails. And worse, everyone that cares about you watches and calls you insane for still persisting when nothing positive has happened, and they call you a fool for not listening to the sage advice of intelligent and caring people. But the reality is only we know what we are capable of and so few of us ever try to find out what that is.

Example: Vincent van Gogh kept painting the way he believed was right despite being told to change his ways by the most respected art critics and dealers—including his own brother—of the day. When he failed, they said, “The fool is insane, and he lived off of his brother!” When he succeeded, they said, “His persistence paid off, and he had the undying support of his family.” When he painted “Starry Night” from a room in the asylum, it wasn’t liked at all by others in the art world. Today, some estimates place its value at just about one billion dollars. Can you point out the genius among delusional if pressed to do so? Can we ever know for certain the guy on the corner in St. Augustine I met decades ago who was screaming to passers by that the voices in his head told him the “water is rising my brothers and sisters; the water is rising,” wasn’t talking about Hurricane Mathew? There’s a thin line between genius and delusion; and history has proven it takes an insane person, a fool, to be exalted for their persistence and determination. “How pathetic” they say beforehand; “How original” they say later.  

I’m sure that, like me, this all makes you think of the overweight patrons at the health club I managed forty years ago. Some of the members were there to lose well over one hundred pounds, some fifty. I taught an advanced class for the football squad at Holy Cross College as well as a class where the minimum desired weight loss was fifty pounds, and some wanted to shed triple that. They tried everything. Everything, over and over.

One day I walked into class with five, five-pound bags of sugar in a backpack. I sat on the small riser at the front of the room and put the pack on the floor and told everyone to sit down. We talked a bit about weight, about the physicalness of carrying it around, the mental weight we carry with it; the ridicule from others, the spouses telling them they’ll never lose it and to give up, the neighbors calling them fools for going to the club everyday when “you should have thought of that before you gained all that weight,” never understanding, never ever empathizing.

So I asked a woman to come up and pick up the pack. She gasped when she tried, of course, and she barely got it off the ground. So I told her to crouch down and I put the pack on her thighs so that she could wrap her hands around it, and then I told her to stand up, helping her at the elbows. She laughed when she was all the way up, and then I told her to drop the back, which she gladly did, and it made a thud when it hit the gray carpeting so that everyone jumped. She sat back down; I picked up the backpack and put my arms through the straps.

“This is heavy,” I said, and we laughed. When I asked if anyone else wanted to try and pick it up they all shied back, laughing, looking away. I sat again and opened the pack and pulled out the yellow bags of sugar one at a time and lined them up on the riser.

“Sugar! Not-yet-completed cake!” We laughed. “How many people want to lose twenty-five pounds?” Everyone’s hands went up, of course.

“Of course! You have to want to lose fifty just to get in this class. This is just half of that–this is twenty-five pounds that you could not lift without great effort! Should I get another five bags so it meets the minimum of the classes’ desires?”

Everyone was quiet.

“Buy a backpack. Buy ten bags of sugar—granulated sugar of course.” We laughed some more. We had to; we had to laugh to do this at all. “Buy the backpack and fill it with ten five pound bags of sugar, and when someone tells you to give up, when you tell you to give up, when someone calls you a fool or says you’re insane for trying what you’ve already tried before and it clearly isn’t working, hand them the back pack—give your weight to them and tell them to carry it for a while. And then come to another class. Let them know that this time it’s different.”

“Persistent and determined remains crazy and foolish unless you keep going and succeed, but to keep going short of success is insanity. That’s where you come in. You believing in yourself is all that’s necessary for everything to work out. The others are just more grains of sugar you have to carry around.”

Why is it we praise the people who stay within our boundaries of expectation and understanding, but when someone pushes the envelope a bit, heads out toward Mach One on the meter, they’re crazy because they’re doing something we wouldn’t.

“Maybe people laugh at you because they know they do not have the determination and persistence you do to do what you’re doing, and they don’t have the vocabulary to tell you that. Don’t get upset, just keep emptying that backpack one bag of at a time.”

I have felt foolish lately and it has slowed down a project I am working on, and I thought of the members of the club, and I thought of Richard, the club owner who himself at one time needed to lose more than twenty bags of sugar, but he played the role of The Greater Fool, and he persisted to the point of insanity, until he crossed that thin line into “inspirational.”

There’s a thin line between so many things, but most allusive is the one between failure and unprecedented success. The problem is sometimes that line is so far ahead of us giving up seems not only easier, but logical. “No one would blame you if you just strapped the pack on and kept going; it’s easier than trying to empty the damn thing.”

But that’s why when we’re working on something you believe in that no one else does, something which everyone else might consider insane and foolish, it’s important not to look toward the distance for that line, but to look at the next step, then the next step, then the next one after that.

Flip Flops

~ aviewfromthiswilderness ~ 1 Comment

This work was originally published in “Barely South Review” about twelve years ago. It has since been anthologized and often pops up around 911.

“Death plucks my ear and says, ‘Live. I am coming. Live now.'”

–Virgil

I went to the local hardware in Hartfield and bought a sickle—a huge rake-like piece of
steel only instead of a rake at the end there is a double-edged sharp, wavy blade made to rip
through branches, thick weeds and other bone-like growth. Eighteen dollars.

The front of my property is wooded, and on a few acres toward the river, I spent some
time clearing out brush and unwanted vines. I piled it up to haul away, but before that could
happen, other more tenacious weeds—small trees really—took over the area. Some I pulled out,
some I mowed, but I couldn’t grasp to tug out the tougher ones—so the sickle. One warm
morning while alone I put on shorts and flip flops, grabbed the sickle and walked the six hundred
of so feet through the woods to swing away at a small grove. None would rip out easily, so I
aimed for the fences, came down from my right with major-league force and tore through the
vines like an axe through balsa. I attacked one after another, muscles taught so that sweat came
fast, and I made progress. Then I stepped to swing at what looked like a thick, knotty growth at
the bottom of the stump. It was a Virginia creeper vine. Sometimes these monsters look rooted
but aren’t. But what do I know; I’m from New York. So I swung at it like A-Rod. The blade
passed through as if the weed were nothing more than a figment of my imagination, and with all
my energy plus a good deal of inertia, the metal blade ripped into my left ankle.

I like flip-flops. I grew up on the beaches from Long Island to Virginia, so I’ve been
wearing them since I’m a kid. I actually had one pair for ten years, sometimes rigged with a thick
paperclip to hold them together. My feet from April to October have a thick white stripe across
the tops seen only when my flip flops are off. I teach in them. I walk in them. I even mow the
lawn and chop wood in them. Despite what many have said, they are not the cause of the blade
Tarantino-ing my ankle. I don’t remember my foot slipping. I do remember almost not going out
to cut the underbrush to begin with because I couldn’t find my flip flops. What a different story
this would have been had I not come across them on the back porch.

When it happened, blood exploded like water in a hose that’s been held back by bending
and then released. My ankle, foot and flops looked as if dipped in bright red paint. I hobbled the
six hundred feet to the back of the house to wash off the wound, bandaged it, then went back out
to cut more wood; I was wired from adrenaline, my ankle didn’t hurt too badly, and to be honest
I had a lot to do.

That night I iced it. I kept it clean. I was fine. Really.

A week later my leg was pitting a bit when I pushed my thumb into my shin. Excess fluid
I figured. Prior to the whacking, I had been running up to eight miles a day, prepping for the
Rock and Roll Half, so one evening when I was feeling a bit more hyper than usual, and the
swelling moved to both legs—a feat I could not comprehend from injuring one ankle, but I don’t
have a medical degree—I stopped at Kroger and spotted a blood pressure machine. This can’t be
right, I thought, when the first reading came up 270 over 190. I did it two more times and both
readings came pretty close to the same. At the checkout I let them know the machine was
broken. We all laughed at my numbers—even the bagger laughed and put the laundry detergent
on top of the bread. It was that funny.

The next day, worried about my ankle, I washed off my flip flops and went to the doctor.
He took my blood pressure. Again. Again. He asked why I was stupid enough to wear flip flops
while doing yard work. I pointed out I wacked myself above where any shoe would have come
anyway. He asked if I were doing cocaine, heroin, or any other substance, asked if I had
shortness of breath, dizziness, if I had thrown up, fell down, or otherwise felt corpselike. He took
my blood pressure again. He asked how long I felt hyper. “Years,” I said, and he took my
pressure again. Then he sent me to the emergency room. Average BP—260 over 175.
Tests. IVs. Tests. On and on it went for several hours. Nurses came, two doctors stopped
by, some punk there to visit a friend who had overdosed came by to check out my vitals because
my blood pressure was the talk of the ward. The nurses upped the meds. Finally the doctors said
based upon my blood vessels behind my eyes and various tests, my blood pressure had
apparently been that high for probably some years, and that if it wasn’t for the fact I’m totally
healthy otherwise with excellent results from blood and other tests, I’d have had a major stroke.

I asked the cause. The doctor shrugged. Genetics; in a high stress situation for far too
long; a combination, he said. They brought it down to 190 over 95 and sent me home with meds
to bring it back to normal. They told me to keep exercising and that because of my medicines I
could do the marathon, but to be clear, I’m going to be very weak for awhile until I adjust to a
life where I’m not pumped on triple doses of double shots coursing through my veins.

A few weeks later at a follow up where my pressure was at 110 over 70 the doctor told
me in complete agreement with the cardiologist and another doctor, had I not gone in, I’d have
most likely had a major stroke trying to run the half, and probably would be dead. I asked why I
didn’t have one while doing the eight miles a day prior to the Great Sickle Incident, and he was
quite professional about it: I don’t know, he said. I really don’t know. You should have. Good
thing you wacked your ankle, he said.

Yeah, thank God I wacked my ankle. And I thought how often that happens. Good thing I went back for the keys. Good thing I stopped for coffee. Good thing you kept me on the phone, or I’d have been at that intersection just at that moment.

“Good thing I watched Monday Night football on the 10th and overslept: I work on the
85th floor and I’d have been right there,” the stock broker said in the street to the television crew.
As the towers tumbled, he counted his blessings.

Good thing Larry Silverstein, owner of the lease of the World Trade Centers, has a wife
who made him go to his dermatologist appointment that morning instead of yet another meeting
in the North Tower.

Good thing Chef Michael Lomanoco of “Windows on the World” broke his glasses and
had to stop at Lenscrafters that morning to get them fixed.

Good thing Lara Clarke stopped to talk to her friend, actress Gwyneth Paltrow, in a
chance meeting down in the village that morning making her late for her job on the 77th floor.

Thank God singer Patti Austin, booked on flight 93, had to leave Boston a day early
because her mother had a stroke and she had to get back to San Francisco on the 10th instead. “I
went back and forth all day about when to leave,” she said.Thank God actress Julie Stoffer and her boyfriend had a wailing fight that morning and
she missed Flight 11.

Actor Mark Wahlburg is still haunted by that same Flight 11 to LA, which he missed at
the last minute when an 11th hour invitation to a film festival sent him to Toronto instead. He has
nightmares thinking about who took his place on the flight. He would have been sitting next to
Family Guy creator Seth McFarland who also missed that flight when his manager gave him the
wrong boarding time and he was fifteen minutes late. He, too, still has bad dreams, he says. But
thank God, he says.

It’s chance. It’s the phone call, the caught light, the traffic backup. It’s changing your mind. It’s
sticking to the plan. It’s oversleeping, insomnia, an upset stomach. It’s a few seconds. It’s the
wrong shoes. It’s the stroke of luck.

Let Go

~ aviewfromthiswilderness ~ 2 Comments

Taxi Driver by Martin Scorsese (1976) | SP Film Journal

It’s the second week of classes and something new and exciting is happening that reminds me of my first days away at college: No one is using their phones. They are actually all in class talking to each other and to me, and listening. I have no idea why.

The first time I went away by myself, other than a few extended trips with a high school friend of mine to Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and camping in the mountains, was my freshman year at college. That was a nine-hour drive from my home, so returning on a weekend was simply out of the question. This was a time when communication by today’s standards was archaic. We had no cell phones, no computers, no answering machines if we even had a regular phone, which I didn’t. Mine was a payphone at the end of the dorm hallway which I shared with ninety, often drunk guys. So even if someone did try to reach me, one of us on the floor would not only have to hear it ring, but we’d have to muster up the energy to walk down the hall and answer it. Doing so then entailed learning who the person was calling for, walking to that person’s door, banging until they answered as you yelled “Bob! Phone!” and then return to bed without letting the caller know if the person was even home. So no “message” would be left.

We wrote letters, on paper, with stamps and envelopes, and walked them to the post office on campus. But with papers to write, parties to attend, basketball games, and hikes along the river, letter-writing was not a priority. Instead, when we went away to school, we went away. Gone, out of their lives. See you in someday.

I arrived that first year in August and returned to Virginia Beach in November, and during that time away, while I often called my father at his office due to his toll-free line, and my mother much less often due to my lack of ability to plug the payphone with quarters, I didn’t talk to a single high school friend in any way for three solid months.

But when I got home. Oh, wow, when I returned home that first Thanksgiving weekend, I headed to my friend Mike’s house, and our friends Dave and Michele and Kathy and Patti all came over, and we sat out back or went to Pizza Hut and we talked. We told stories and talked and laughed so hard I can still picture us sitting there like it happened last week.

We had so much to catch up on. I told them about college, about the hills of western New York, about my roommate and floormates and others I met and became close to. I told them about apple picking in Albion, New York, with a friend, or about how two other friends and I drove to the Billy Joel concert in Buffalo and got lost on the way back. I had an endless bag of stories to share with them, and they caught me up on life there. Dave was married, Michele had her first son, another was still out in Nashville and another in nursing school.

We all looked different than four months earlier. Older somehow, despite the probable lack of change. But nineteen is a time when even just a little bit of maturity comes from the slightest change. We met new people, added new dimensions to our personality and experiences. I was hitchhiking to Niagara Falls, Jonmark was doing well in Nashville, Mike was doing traffic and news for a local television station. We had stories to tell that we would never have had to share if we all stayed a part of each other’s lives on a daily basis. What’s more, other people entered our narrative. When you break off completely and start anew elsewhere, you learn new ways—it truly is that simple. I’m not suggesting that one doesn’t mature and learn and grow without leaving. But one point is indisputable: I had no idea what any of them had been up to, no clue. And they couldn’t possibly conceive of what I’d been doing. And there was no device save the US Postal Service to keep us informed.

So we had to catch up, and I had new friends.

You see, something unexpected happened that I just now tried to tell my students about. When I returned to college, the same thing happened as when I went home that first time. It had only been a week since I left for Thanksgiving, but upon return, I could not wait to see my new friends, those I was literally living with, ate with three meals a day, walked home with at three am, cried with. The few days away from them felt longer than the time away from those friends from high school I’d known for some years. Something was different. All those changes that had scared me to death before leaving for college turned out to be the best thing for me, and that time then would not have been nearly as significant had those changes occurred while still holding the hands of friends through some WIFI umbilical back to the beach.

Fast forward.

During my first few years teaching college in the early nineties, I’d walk down the hallway toward class and could hear the students talking, multiple conversations overlapping about the weekend, about plans, majors, transfers, food, concerts, about life, all of it. New friends mostly, evolving into new relationships, new ways of thinking. I’ve seen strangers become partners become parents. And after a long college break, it took ten minutes to quiet down the room, everyone catching up, seemingly happier to be back then to have gone home to begin with.

But that eroded; slowly at first, and then with discouraging speed. When I approach a room for class these days, it might as well be empty for the silence. It’s easy to think it is, until I turn in the door and see twenty-three students sitting silently, staring at their phone, texting the same friends they’ve been texting since seventh grade, not knowing even the names of those next to them, one of whom might be their significant other, or a friend with similar interests, or someone with familiar plans and hopes. They don’t seem to even care.

They’ve never learned the art of missing someone, the value of silence, the strength that comes from a complete lack of ability to communicate. The time spent in their own thoughts, without music, without social media, without letting go for a period of time without knowing what happens, has slipped away. College students remain knee deep in high school conversations well into their collegiate years, and it leaves them all with a much more provincial perspective.

Today, just now, that seemed to change again, and my students–all away from home for the first time–talked to each other, learned names, made plans. It felt right, like some semblance of humanity has survived the technological advances.

There was a time we were all prodigal children, and those we loved embraced our return from that unreachable place we went to, be it away at school or another state. And we learned how love can survive such incommunicado. I once went twenty-two years without talking to someone and then spent two straight days catching up. And honestly, I don’t think I would have appreciated her half as much had we never lost touch. It helps to let go, to follow different paths and not be tethered by technology, and then find each other again and find out how friendship has little to do with constant communication.

And more, during those times I was somewhere else–Arizona, Massachusetts, abroad, and had no means of reaching someone, I discovered more about myself than I ever would have by holding on. I see my students now using expressions I had thought were long gone:

I hope to see you soon.

Keep in touch.

Drop me a line.

How have you been?

So, what happened?

I have missed you.

These simple phrases have brought me such growth, such love, and such peace, they remind me that the strongest connections come after letting go.

Just, before Dawn

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I rose early this morning since I needed to be in Norfolk by 8. That’s okay, though. I am drawn toward the early morning hours of dawn when I feel ahead of the world, and I can sense some small hint of hope. The geese flew by headed to the river, and to hear life around the water in those moments motivates me. Before the sun rises, often just after the first sliver of light reaches up across the bay, I can hear osprey and other sea birds who at that hour never seem to mind my presence.

But earlier, when that glimmer on the eastern horizon is still merely a possibility, I have taken to walks by moonlight, sometimes not even that. In the woods where I live and down along the water, something is going on. There is life out there wide awake and moving through the dark hours like spirits who need to finish their errands before the sun gives them up.

Fox come about the edges of the woods looking for scraps of food or the peels and rinds of bananas and melons. I can stand patiently off the side of the drive and one fox will wander across the yard from the woods behind me to those on the south and stop before disappearing again beyond the laurel, and he will stare at me, relaxed, nosing around the base of a tree where I occasionally put food. Then he’s off—not swiftly or in fear, but nonchalantly, demonstrating that he lives here as well and has decided to stretch his legs. That’s all.

Owls, too—some barred but mostly screech owls, perch in the oaks and elms, sometimes swooping down and moving through branches with precision. But my favorite are the geese which cover the night sky in flocks sometimes so enormous the swoosh of their wings alone creates a breeze, and their call to “Go! Go! Go!” is startling.

Closer to home, out front near the edge of the trees, deer nearly always feed on the dew-soaked grass and often the hostas, and if they sense me sitting on the porch or standing in the clearing, they will look up, briefly, ears turned forward—just for a moment—and then return to their grass, not minding me, aware just the same.

And it is then, when I am well acclimated with the night and my eyes have adjusted, and my soul too has adjusted, that I think of my way in the world, the motivation behind the turns and hesitations, my purpose of this passing in time. Oh, do I ever have an internal monologue underway with long-gone friend now gathered in my nocturnal imagination. There’s Cole nodding his head and insisting I follow my own path. I can hear him clearly when I’m out there, see his small sardonic smile as he says, “Come on Kunzinger. You know how to do this, stop waiting for approval or it’s never going to happen.” And there, too, is another friend whose smile is as wide as dawn pressing his sense of adventure into my spirit with an “all or nothing” carelessness about him which brings me up short yet livens my ambition. In one brief moment I am eased by no longer thinking of them in the past tense, but just as quickly, we all move on; usually just as the sun surfaces.

The sky in the distance across the reach lightens ever so slightly, from dark, almost Navy blue to something slightly more pale, like powder, and I’m alone again—the fox rushing off into the woods, the geese at rest in the harvested field or at the river’s edge, and the murmurs of chickadees and wrens and cardinals chase away what’s left of the stillness, and even my friends bow off, and I have trouble separating memory from imagination. So I get in the car and head south to the city where I simply don’t belong.

It’s as if time offers a small reward for some of us who stay up late or get up early to gather as much out of our moments as we can. Then, just briefly, it eases me back into this new reality I never anticipated. It remains for me the most honest time of day, the most just, when all thoughts have a chance of pushing through the darkness, and the truth about what we are here for is ironically illuminated.

I’ve started to live for the deep hours of the night at the twilight of dawn.

Curious Men: Lost in the Congo

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The Allegheny River, Allegany, New York

Memory is as fluid as anything in our lives. What happened and what “seemed to happen,” as writer Tim O’Brien points out, can often be confused. When looking back we might have a habit to recall what seemed to happen, reality having been washed and hung out to dry over the course of decades. Sometimes though we can recall nearly ever nuance of a time in our lives for its significance, its uniqueness, or its romance. I have a pretty sharp memory when it comes to many events. A friend of mine and I were talking not long ago about how we can both remember nearly every detail, everything, about a period in our lives so long ago you’d think it was from another life. Many of us have times like those which, for whatever psychological reason, we can summon up to the point of remembering the clothes we wore on a particular day.

My basic memory for most things is pretty solid. I remember all my phone numbers and license plates, and, worse, the phone numbers and license plates of friends of mine. The old joke about song lyrics holds true with me, but so do the times spent with extended family. One of my only memories of my paternal grandfather was him weeding a lot he owned next door to his house on Long Island. He died when I was five, so I was no older than that, probably still four. But I picture that day, those moments, perfectly.

Some years ago when Meanwhile in Leningrad came out, someone asked how I can remember the conversations I had with survivors of the Siege of Leningrad, who at the time I knew them were in their eighties, and I wrote the book several years after our conversations. I said, well, first of all, they’re never going to find or read the book, so there’s that. But more accurately, when a woman sitting on a bench holding my hand tells me about dragging her dead husband and son across the city to leave in a mass grave, and she sat with me clinging to their photograph sixty years later, I will not forget any of it. Much of the writing in that book falls in that category. Did the conversation happen verbatim? Doubtful, but the gist of it is pretty damn accurate. There’s an old journalism method that when you write the piece and include quotes from someone, call them up and read what you wrote to them and ask, “That’s pretty much what happened, right?” Nearly all the time they’ll say yes. Can you remember the words, exactly the words, you spoke an hour ago? Exactly. If that’s not possible as in this case, I rely on memory and notes.

Memory is reliable or not depending upon just how present we are during the event. That time so long ago when we said we could remember everything: We were both very much present at the time, we lived the example of what would later be called “mindfulness.” Of course we remember. Likewise there are times I so shut out of my memory it’s like they never happened at all.

Still, some events are so close to my soul I would need the team from Matrix to come extract them.

Like what happened in 1980 and 81, when I was a freshman and sophomore in college, the subject of my forthcoming book, Curious Men, from Madville Press. Of that time then, I remember everything. I watched, studied, and listened so intently that this memoir could be considered a documentary for how clear the details remain to me four and a half decades later.

I like that “memoir” includes the Spanish word “oir,” to hear, because much of memory stems from what we hear, and as a nonfiction writer I am bound by listening to the world around me, sometimes to the one sitting in front of me, and those sounds of vowels and consonants and the musicality of language I know will never escape my recollection.

My friend, colleague, and former officemate, Tom Williams, once introduced me at a reading as a non-fiction writer by saying, “Here’s some shit that happened to Bob and the best he can remember of it.” That’s pretty spot on. Despite a degree in journalism, I never had what it took to do the job in the traditional sense like so many I graduated with, some of whom have won prestigious awards for their work. I was definitively not up to that task. But I could handle the feature work, the “Let me tell you what just happened to me” work, just fine. In college, my friend Deb used to help me with news stories and I’d help her with features. We knew our strengths. I had a column in the college paper for which I ventured out into the community and did something, and then I wrote about it. I went horseback riding in Machias, New York, flew planes in Wellsville, kayaked the lake in Allegheny State Park, and sat on the ground behind campus at Merton’s Heart. Those events I could remember. I knew how to be present. Most of those activities were out of my wheelhouse at the time, so recalling what happened was easier. I was paying closer attention, sometimes just so I wouldn’t die.

Memoir is like that. If we can’t remember it we’re certainly not going to write about it.

But not this time, not this book. Summation: As a college freshman uninterested in the normal activities of my floormates–that is, drinking and drinking–I felt lost and disconnected from everyone. Then a family friend returned from the Peace Corps and asked me to help him plan a trip, solo, on the Congo River. So I did.

Long story short, it didn’t work out and his trip became mine. The first half of the book takes place in western New York. The second half in the Congo.

Still, that’s not what the books about.

Most of it takes place now, in every classroom across America where nineteen-year-olds sit and try and find something worth doing, something that reaches deep inside them and wakes them up. I’ve been staring at nineteen-year-olds for thirty-six years and one thing hasn’t changed: they’re scared out of their minds. They’re alone in a new place far from home living in a room this size of their car with a total stranger, and every adult within earshot constantly wants to know their plans for their major, their careers, their lives. It is often unbearable.

I was exactly like that back then. Until a friend walked into my life and said, “I have an idea. I need your help.”

We were so young.

So that’s what this memoir is about: About that time back then. What we did and how and why we did it, yes, but mostly about being nineteen and far from home looking for a reason to exist at all.

This is how I remember it.

Coming this winter: