Wait. Loss.

December 5, 2025December 5, 2025 ~ 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.

May 23, 1925-October 21, 2015

October 17, 2025 ~ aviewfromthiswilderness ~ 3 Comments

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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Let Go

September 2, 2025September 2, 2025 ~ 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.

The Rest of Me

August 11, 2025August 11, 2025 ~ aviewfromthiswilderness ~ Leave a comment

I ask my students the same question the first class every semester. I pull a chair into the middle of the front of the room, ask them their names and where they’re from, and we talk about the area, hobbies, majors, quirks, travel favorites, and more. Half the class—I find it a priceless investment in time as they warm up, get to know me and each other, find themselves more able to talk throughout the semester, ask questions, share ideas.

Then I sit quietly for a second and ask them the same question every time:

What are you capable of?

What do you think you are capable of? I don’t mean “What do you hope you can do?” but what tangible proof from previous experiences has convinced you it is worth reaching out a little further than your grasp this time because you know you can do it?

It’s not an easy question to answer because it is difficult to know if we can achieve that which we have not yet attempted, so at best we need to guess. And even the most educated guess is still hypothetical. Yeah, I lose a few at this point, but I usually can reel them back in by jumping that chasm to the goal. “Okay then,” I continue. “What do you wish you were capable of?”

I remind them that unfortunately, every semester the evidence gets worse that freshmen in college are capable of anything other than having technology complete their assignments for them. I insist, then, that one of the finest results of college beyond the degree and the friends and the job prospects is the sense, the absolute pure sense, of accomplishment. To achieve something, to find out we are capable of so much more than we thought, becomes part of one’s bloodstream.

I asked myself that recently, the Capable Question. It was my birthday, sixty-five years to the day after I showed up at the now defunct Shore Road hospital in Brooklyn; one year to the day after Letty “closed the door behind her.” I looked back at what I have done with my life, who is in it and who no longer is, and who is again, and the good news is I’ve been around the block a few times and that’s one thing I always wanted to do. The bad news is as it turns out the block isn’t in my neighborhood.

Sometimes I don’t know where the hell I am. For a person who has traveled as much as I have, I still need direction an awful lot of the time.

So I asked myself, “What are you capable of?” I figure I still have a couple of decades, surprisingly. Maybe more on a good day, maybe just a few weeks when my mind downshifts. But let’s call it twenty years.

I just agreed to a location to perform a one man play in New York. My book Curious Men comes out in just a few months. My book Office Hours comes out in about eighteen months. My fig trees need watering. I’m thinking of getting a new cat or two. Maybe a dog. A goat for sure.

A few months before she died, Letty and I sat in Starbucks at the beach and after a lot of laughing, she said, “I always thought I’d be here past sixty-five, Bawb. I just never thought it would all be over; my life would be completely done at sixty-five.” I nodded. I tended to avoid trying to come up with a response. She didn’t want one. She wanted me to listen, to hear her existence, to be there while she was being alive. After a while she leaned forward and said, “Since I’m not using the rest of me, you can have those years. I trust you to use them well. What will you do with them?”

I thought about it like she had some power to give me twenty more years. “I am going to walk the Camino de Santiago again. I’m going to drive through the northwest for a few weeks. I’m going to take a river cruise in Europe with a friend of mine. I’m going to camp in Havasu Falls.”

“…and?”

The perfect response. “And?”

This is all to bring up a point:

After something I wrote went online about a month ago, several people, some I don’t know, wrote to tell me how good it is that someone my age still thinks I can do something new. They wanted me to know how much they are behind me no matter how outrageous it is that I’d try something besides enjoying retirement.

Two things here: One, I have no idea what they’re talking about. And two, Seriously? I mean, I’m sorry you took a nose dive as soon as you were eligible for Social Security, but I can’t wrap my mind around that mentality. Maybe it’s because retirement is somewhat irrelevant if you never really worked to begin with, but also in the world of arts, in the realm of love, there is no “retirement.” You can’t turn it off, you just can’t. And I want to spend my time with people I care about, seeing things together. I felt the same way when I was in my twenties. Did you guys grow tired of those you know?

“Someone my age” my ass.

I’m not going to republish the litany of accomplishments by people in their seventies and eighties. If you understand then you’re not sitting around lamenting anyway; and if you don’t, you’ll just shake your head.

I have done okay until now, and parts of my life turned out to be riddled with circles, as if Einstein was right—there is no actual “time,” humans have just made it linear so we can comprehend our passage here. Well, I’ve never been good at staying inside the lines anyway.

Honestly, I don’t know what’s going to work and what won’t work from day to day. I just hope for the best for the rest of me.

But, at the risk of being in over my head, here’s my plan: To speak my mind, about love, about hopes, about what is working and what is not. To keep writing as long as I have something to say. To fulfil some plans that I can’t shake.

I’ll retire when I’m dead, and then I’ll close the door behind me. If something should happen to abort those plans, feel free to take the rest of me and see what you’re capable of.

However,

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

I mean, it isn’t exactly “Everything” I’ve lost interest in.

Sunrises still can manage to get me out of bed before dawn for a saunter to the bay where the best moments are about fifteen minutes before the actual sunrise, when the sky is still dark blue, with a streak of burnt orange in one smooth paint stroke near the horizon.

Then coffee, the sound of cups in a diner kitchen, the sound of the pour into the cup, tables and stools of people talking laughing, planning the day, remembering the night.

And children of course, the non-starving, not yet war-torn ones. The ones who remain the way they should, laughing at the simplest nuance, and drinking milk with two hands. It’s the laughter that gets most of us, especially when it reminds me of my own son at a young age, laughing at some lizard in his hands. That memory still holds my attention.

I stood in line behind a World War Two vet a few months ago–ninety-eight years old–stood strong and told me he was driving to Richmond that afternoon to watch his great-grandson play baseball. That is worth the time any day of the week.

I once waited half the night for the moon to rise above a mountain but it never did. That night, the stars, the floating dock, the non-moon night was filled with such peace both literally and psychologically, such complete presence and stillness, that would keep me going a long time during the worst of days. That day closed up decades and reminded me something so essential: Everything we are, we remain. And that real friends are often the only thing worth our attention.

The sound of geese keeps my interest, and talking to local farm workers from Mexico about where they’re from, villages I don’t know, some I do sometimes.

Talking about Ireland, or Prague. Talking about Spain and how the stretch from Southern France to the first village in Spain is so beautiful you hardly notice the climb is trying to kill you.

Yeah, that one always keeps my interest.

Acoustic guitar music. Pachelbel’s Canon in D on piano, slowly, ice in a glass. These remind me of life. Listening to a musical piece written nearly four centuries ago reminds me of the emotions that transcend time while connecting everyone. When I hear the Canon I imagine Johann playing on his organ, thinking about the night he stood outside waiting for the moon to rise above some hill outside Nuremberg, and how it took his breath away, the stars he saw while waiting, the absence of indifference, the absence of apathy. Nothing mattered more than that moment then, and he forgot all about the news of the day. He just watched the moon not rise above the hills and in his mind he played those keys, slowly, as if it was the only thing he cared about in the world.

Close your eyes and let this play, and remember all there is in life to be passionate about.

Enough

July 20, 2025July 20, 2025 ~ aviewfromthiswilderness ~ Leave a comment

Let the video play while you read

I’m taking more time.

I headed off by myself for a few days last week, wandered about some trails, sat and stared across a lake for a few hours, just stared, thought about people who I used to know, used to love–love still, I suppose–and came to a few conclusions.

Nothing is more important than love. Spending as much time with people who make you forget all about what might happen next, what happened already, people who chase away anxiety and dismiss regret, who finish your sentences, know when to laugh, know when to sit in silence while you cry. Know when to hold on and when to hold on even tighter. Nothing, I swear to you, nothing can possibly be more important than this. We build our lives and occupations and make contributions to society so we can know we played our part in this powerful play that just goes on and on, and that’s all right and true, but it remains secondary at best, a shadow at best, to how our lives can only be truly illuminated by the love of those who make us understand more of who we are. Those who we celebrate for who they are, all of each of them, not just the parts we find convenient.

I’ve been around the block and have had the good fortune to ease my way through so many worlds, so many lives, with some of the most accomplished people of our age. Oh, in the name of all that’s holy I have known life at its best, and experienced more than I ever imagined I would, from deep deep rivers to the wind-shaped rock formations on the sides of mountains, and there is more beauty in what I’ve seen than one can experience in ten lifetimes, and what I’ve seen is nothing, a sliver, a minute fraction of what there is to be experienced in this world, and yet we spend our time watching other people live there lives, watching other people pretend to live yet other people’s lives; we spend our time looking for the right moment or the right person or the right way to say the right thing, instead of letting the beautiful passages of truth and pure love come out of who we are as we simply live in honesty, not afraid to take a chance if we know it leads us closer to who we were meant to be. We start so pure and honest, and we go through all those firsts until we become experienced and “wise” only to find out all those firsts were the closest we ever were and ever will be to the truth of who we are.

Here’s another truth: People die of brain tumors, of heart failure, of kidney disease, they die from falling over or falling down. But first, if they were lucky, they lived. Death is not so sad if it comes after life. But lately I’ve noticed people passing away before they had a chance to live their lives at all. It reminds me of an old lyric: “Pity the poor one, the shy and unsure one, who wanted it perfect but waited too long.”

We need to stop waiting for something to happen.

The world these days is not worth the beauty that life can be. Leaders are corrupt, struggles are real, starvation is epidemic, children are being killed for no good reason at all. The world has been ravaged by waves of interference that have compromised our nerves and our focus, and we are drowning. This world leaves so many believing suicide is a viable option. Society has not nearly earned the beauty that life can be.

So I’m stepping to the side for a while. I took a few days to myself last week to finally and conclusively mourn my mother and father, my friends Dan and Dave, Letty, because I had not yet done so and because I have not yet loved the way I believe we were intended to love.

And that is a death worse than all the others.

I took a few days off last week to try and see if I could find that person inside buried beneath layers of the soot shoveled onto me from a life of almost’s and nearly’s. And I quickly understood the time I have left is a fragment of the time I’ve already wasted.

Breaks over.

65

July 4, 2025 ~ aviewfromthiswilderness ~ 2 Comments

It’s that time again. When I was born Dwight Eisenhauer was president and Richard Nixon was his vice. The average household income was just over $5000 a year, the average house just about twice that and the average new care just about half.

I appear on the scene just hours after the first fifty-star flag had been revealed noting Hawaii, and a week before the Pulitzer Prize winning Harper Lee book To Kill a Mockingbird is published.

Benin, Niger, Ivory Coast, Ghana, all gain independence, and Aretha Franklin makes her first recording. Cyprus, the Central African Republic, and Chad gain independence. And in August, the Beatles with Pete Best perform for the first time with their new moniker in Hamburg.

Belka and Strelka board Sputnik with forty mice, two rats, and a rabbit and actually make it back to earth alive.

Hurricane Donna rips up the east coast and in my home state of New York, Governor Nelson Rockefeller declares September 19^th Grandma Moses Day in honor of her 100^th birthday. She was born at the start of the Civil War and died when I was a toddler. Time is deceptively swift.

I’m amazed by the people I shared this space with. First and foremost, birthdays remind us in fine mathematical style that we are alive and are still part of the population which constantly expands like bottle rockets in the deep blue sky. It bends my small mind to think of this reality that I’m certain everyone knows but few contemplate: I shared this planet with every other human who ever breathed the air. Read Carl Sagan’s “Pale Blue Dot” as a brilliant reference.

Just in my lifetime: Mother Theresa. Malcolm X. Neil Armstrong. Jimi Hendrix. Pope Paul the Sixth. Lech Walesa. St. John Paul the Second. Thomas Merton. President General Eisenhower. Elvis. Pablo Picasso. Albert Schweitzer.

Rwandan Tutsis. The Lost Boys of Sudan. Steven Biko. Pol Pot.

I shared time with these people; these saints and sinners brushed my sleeve simply by sharing the earth during my stay. I have a loose connection to miracles and massacres.

This world has some serious issues; always has. It is at best, though, a hotel, and every once in a while I take a look at the register to remind myself who else stayed here. Alexander the Great, Charlemagne, Mohammed, Ivan the Terrible, Ghengas Khan, all guests just over the slope of the horizon, just beyond some small slice of linear time. On the same human trajectory as mine but before is Geronimo, Moses, Jesus, think about the gentle bend of time, the careen of place that separates me from the disciples, the Visigoths, the founding fathers. All here but just before.

Closer to now, when I look inside the lines of my coming and going, I can see the souls who at one time or another shared with me this spinning blue wad. Not short of miraculous, we claim the same particles of stardust, and that’s what keeps me looking around when I walk down some city street; I want to know who on earth is with me on earth.

Time has ripped past. I was born a month ago. I waded through foreign rivers last month. My son was born last Tuesday. Fleeting. Swift. Impatient. And my thin life falls on the same graph as Richard Wright and Ernest Hemingway.

Carl Jung lectured during my youth, and Ty Cobb watched the same Mets players as me. When I was still cutting new teeth and outgrowing my Keds, I could have headed downtown with my Dad and possibly been on the same train as William Faulkner, ee cummings or Marilyn Monroe. I might have passed them on the street, maybe stood in line at some drug store counter with my mom and behind us because of the blending of circumstance might have been Sylvia Plath or Sam Cooke; Nat King Cole; Otis Redding. We have overlapping lives. On a Venn graph, we share the shaded space.

Judy Garland and I watched the New York Jets in Super Bowl Three. When I was born World War One vets weren’t yet senior citizens and World War Two Vets were in their thirties. Vietnam isn’t history to me; it is my childhood, my early teens. The fall of Saigon was announced over the loud speakers at my high school.

There are empty fields save monuments and markers where soldiers died defending this land against the British, against ourselves, and they stood where I stand and watched the hazy sun rise. Same sun; same beach, same blessed Commonwealth. Don’t mistake history for “back then.” Those people just happened to check out before us. It could have been us. It is us now, watching the orange moon like we do, noticing the calm river, sharing time with loved ones, thinking about others. Getting ready to die since it won’t be long before our lives overlap with the crying call of a newborn Einstein. Did you see that boy running at the park? That girl climbing the tree at her home? Did I just pass by some senator, some Cicero or Socrates, some St Augustine?

Like a couple today buying the same house that young lovers lived in centuries ago, like sour-dough starter. Like a relay race.

My adult son is trying to get a shot of fireworks in front of the moon, but the angle is wrong. When he was just five months old I held him with my hand over his ear, the other ear against my chest, as we watched fireworks out over the Atlantic in Virginia Beach. That was last Friday or so.

What a life. How many times do we reinvent ourselves? How often do we stop in our tracks, get out of the rush and inertia of humanity pushing from behind, and let it all go by, catch the moon over the Chesapeake? Why do we so rarely rest easy in the love of those near and of those still far away when our stay in this world in our time is brief at best.

I love getting older, knowing more people, turning the pages. I miss my mom and dad, I miss Dave and Fr. Dan, and I miss Letty. My parents lived longer than I thought and the others I really didn’t think would check out as soon as they did. Thank Buddha for Ghosts and reincarnation. Just in case I watch the birds on my porch.

Listen, please:

Student Comes to See Me

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

A Personal Reflection This Week:

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

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

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

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

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

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

It was about 1994.

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

I worked at a bar. Good money and mindless work; the kind of work where if you don’t think too much about what you’re doing, you can keep on working. I know I only spent a few years there but it seems like it was always winter, all grey and bone-cold. One morning I woke on a bench near a lake in a park and didn’t know how I got there. I had to work a few hours later but never made it. I quit the bar, withdrew most of my money, and bought a ticket to Africa. Turns out changing my life was as easy as jumping off a cliff knowing for certain I would either land on my feet or learn how to fly. “Boring” disappeared from my life.

But this student has trouble talking about it, so I talk: I tell him I get that feeling in my chest too. Tight, constricting, difficulty breathing. You know what I’m talking about. It’s the sense that something needs to change. I tell him all of that, and then I think, but I don’t say, that it’s the Philosophy class with five minutes left of three hours and the prof starts another chapter because there are still five minutes left; it’s the meeting you can’t tolerate but you’re in a row of seats with too many people on both sides so you can’t leave and all you can think about is how if this is your career, if this is how you’ve chosen to spend your life, shouldn’t you love being here, love the interaction and discussions instead of dreading every word that someone says; it’s that this-homily-is-way-too-long feeling. It’s the feeling you’re just one day away from something else, but then that day comes and you find yourself one day away from something. I tell him it’s the Whitman poem about astronomy; the wide awake at three am feeling and you can’t move so you stare at the alarm clock wondering what your someday-dying self would say to you now.

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

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

Six months later he sends me this postcard from Australia. “Don’t know when I’ll return,” it says. “When I am, let’s get some beers and talk.“

I look forward to it but, of course, way leads on to way, and I doubt he ever came back

100

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

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

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

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

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

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

Random thoughts:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Happy Birthday Dad. I love you.

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

May 15, 1933

May 14, 2025May 14, 2025 ~ aviewfromthiswilderness ~ 3 Comments

May 15th would have been Mom’s 92nd Birthday.

I can write volumes about her life which is a true record of life in the twentieth century, or about her ethnicity which rewrote itself in her mid ’80s, or her uncanny ability to make friends with a two by four; I could write about how she’d become friends with the ladies in the bakery or the fish market or the produce section of Farm Fresh. One day I stopped by and Dad was all dressed waiting for Mom. I asked where they were going. “To a wedding,” he said. “Oh? Who’s getting married?” “The daughter of the lady who sells fish at the food store.” Of course.

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But before that:

I can recall going to A&S’s with my mom, walking through racks of skirts, pushing aside blouses a few racks away, my face near the metal pole waiting for her to call me out. I made her laugh, but, honestly, everyone could make her laugh; she was light, light as air, and laughed like that too, aware of her deep breath.

I remember her making Irish Soda Bread for Ethnic Food Day in second grade, and she said, “Wouldn’t you rather have German potato salad,” noting to my father how much easier it is to make. “Please Mom?” I pleaded. Of course. Yes, of course. She joked with me not long ago about that day and how if she knew then what she knows now I would have just brought a bowl of spaghetti with marinara sauce.

Mom was always there. I remember in the East Islip Public Library asking the librarian a question and when she answered, I was looking down, and Mom said, “Always look in the eyes of someone talking to you.” I never didn’t again. I remember after that we went to Stanley’s Bakery for black and whites and hard rolls with butter. Non-New Yorker’s need to trust me on that one. To get to Stanley’s Mom would tell guests at our house to “turn right two blocks before you get to the mailbox.” It made sense to her.

We went to the doctor when my lower back hurt shortly after joining the track team at Islip Terrace Junior High. Dr. Wagner said, “I’m afraid he has strained his sacroiliac,” and my mother sat quietly a second and then laughed and said, “Are you making that up? There’s something in him called a sacroiliac?” There is and I did so I dropped off the team and she bought me a tennis racket. She had a subtle way of changing my life that way.

Can anyone truly grasp the lessons we learn from our mom’s who somehow manage to teach us things without doing anything more than practicing unconditional love? That’s it; that’s everything, the secret to parenting. Mom would yell–and she could yell–if I did something stupid, which was not that unusual, and it took me years—years—to understand she was yelling at herself, not at me.

Then life got interesting.

My sister was at St Bonaventure, my brother at Notre Dame, Dad had moved to Virginia to buy the house we would eventually move to, but Mom and I stayed on the Island because it was a recession and it took more than a year to sell the house out in Suffolk County. It was just her and me, driving once a month four hundred miles to Virginia Beach and back. We had fun dinners like pizza and omelets, family over for visits, and I had more freedom than most fourteen year old’s as I’d explore the state park day after day, endlessly. And that winter in the mornings I’d sit in the kitchen before school while she made breakfast, the radio playing a bank commercial. “F. B. L. I. Leaves you more money for living…” and I’d walk to the bus stop with the rising sun. In the evening she’d make spaghetti, or we’d have eggs and fries, or we’d have subs from the deli out on River Road, and once a week I’d get to watch “All in the Family.”

That last day there in the house which I consider to be where I grew up, she had to be at a lawyer’s office to close on the house, so I walked home from school on the last day of ninth grade with my friends Steve and Eddie. My aunt met me in the driveway and we went back to her house where Mom picked me up and we drove the eight hours to Virginia Beach, June 18^th, 1975. Life completely changed; everything I had ever known was suddenly an eight hour drive north, and Mom and I adjusted to our new life together.

Time passes.

High School.

Gap Year.

College.

In the Summer of 1983 I decided to move to Tucson, and I packed my small, light blue Monza and she stood at the door early one morning as I backed out of the driveway to head west. She waved once then closed the door. At the time I didn’t know why.

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I could add more, of course. Yes, of course. Like how no matter the conversation she could without missing a beat turn one of the lines into a song she remembered from her youth, and she’d sing it. Like the time my siblings and I locked her out on the roof of the house on the Island when she was washing windows, and by the time she was back inside we were all laughing. Or how our German Shepard was so terrified of her that when the dog was in my sister’s room one morning, all my mother did was whisper “Is the dog up here?” and that poor dog didn’t touch a step flying down the stairs and into the safety of the kitchen. Or how when it was time to give my dog Sandy away, a dog which won Mom’s heart, when she dropped him off at the new owner’s house, Sandy jumped up on Mom and put his paws on her shoulders and whined for her not to go, and Mom cried all the way home.

I can clearly recall several years worth of five thirty am talks in her condo kitchen while Dad was still sleeping, and I’d complain about problems at the college and she’d listen so well, and then she’d talk about Dad’s health and small signs she’d notice or which I had noticed the night before, and we’d compare notes. She loved him, honestly she loved that man like a person who should be used as an example of love, for sixty-three years she loved him like that. And no matter how frustrated she got, that always rose to the surface, that love.

Laughter and Love. That was my mom.

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She loved light blue.

She loved music.

She always worn a Miraculous Medal.

She had a life I can’t write about properly except to say she took on serious responsibility at a very young age, walked through some serious fires in her life, and always maintained a strength and intelligence and a sense of humor that set an example I can never match. She taught me how to be alive.

But, with apologies to my late beautiful mother, Joan Catherine, she has one blemish, one which scarred me for, well, I’m going to be sixty-five and I still remember it:

In 1974 or 75 I stayed up to watch The Poseidon Adventure on television and with just fifteen minutes left she yelled down for me to go to bed. I said, “Ma! Gene Hackman’s hanging from a pipe!!” “I don’t care it is getting late and you have school!” she called back, and so I went to bed and wouldn’t see Hackman fall into the fiery water for another fifteen years.

Some people think their mom’s are just oh so perfect and easy to love and can tell stories about what amazing women they are and that’s fine, really, that’s fine, and I’ve tried, I really have, and she comes close, but, seriously, the Poseidon Adventure, Hackman, the freaking climax of the movie for God’s sake. Come on. There’s simply no forgiving that.