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Student Comes to See Me

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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

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~ 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)
Virginia Beach
With My Siblings and Me
With his first Great Grandson, Kieran
With My Son Michael
With His Brothers Ed and Howard
with my Brother-in-Law Greg and me at The Tides inn on my parents’ 35th Anniversary
With Michael at a Tides Game in Norfolk, VA
The Normal Choking on My Front Porch
With His Brother Howard, 1930’s
Behind the House on the Lynnhaven River in Virginia Beach
Michael’s Birthday
63 years of Marriage
His LAST Putt, 22 Feet and it went in
At His Parents Home in Point Lookout, Long Island
August 23rd, 1952
His Passions were Family and Golf, Not Always in that Order
With Michael on the Chesapeake Bay
An Avid Reader, Especially of History
with Michael a few months before Dad Died
One of our frequent lunch outings
On Marion Street, Bushwick, Brooklyn, where Mom grew up
Fred, Michael Dad and Me at Mahi Mah’s in Virginia Beach
Dad’s Siblings in 1987
With their Grandson Edward
With their Granddaughter Barbara and her husband Jean
With Michael in Williamsburg
1985 in front of the Bull and Finch Pub, Boston, inspiration for Cheers
another of Michael’s Birthdays

May 15, 1933

~ 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 18th, 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.

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Somewhere Down the Road

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Asian water buffalo of course

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

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

Just as easily I might simply leave, keep going

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

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

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

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

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

Life has a way, doesn’t it?

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

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

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

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

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

The Laughter Never Stopped

neither did I

The Lasso Way: A Needed Philosophy Today

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When my brother suggested I watch “Ted Lasso,” I trusted his judgement. He had already nailed it with a few other shows, including “Eureka.” The first time through I enjoyed it immensely, the acting, the writing of course, the timing. It took a few episodes to understand this was not simply a series of set-up/punchline comedy, a method I despise. And it took a few times through the entire three seasons to recognize the primary overall theme at the heart of creator/producer/writer/star Jason Sudeikis’ efforts: This show is all about fathers and sons. 

When I struggled with transitioning my book The Iron Scar from the “who gives a shit” stage to the essential-to-be-published “readable and relatable” stage, the answer came while in a writing seminar in Ireland where I had been formulating the final draft of a series of letters from myself to my dad while traveling with my son across Siberia. Writer Elizabeth Rosner, almost as an aside, asked me why the chapters are formulated as letters. “I don’t know,” I told her. “Bad bad answer” she said. I pulled together a response about wanting to have three generations on board, and the reality of my son becoming an adult and moving on in the world the same time my father was approaching his final days. But I still couldn’t answer so I came home from Connemara and chopped my manuscript to small pieces. A few weeks later in a conversation with a friend in Texas, I said, “Tim, I’m losing focus on the theme.” He responded, “I’m not. This is all about fathers and sons. About moving on while trying to hold on. And the metaphor of the train is nothing more than setting.” Between the time my son and I rode the train and the time I wrote the book, my father died. I heard once that the loss of a parent is the greatest loss of security we can face, even at fifty-five years old. Not because we aren’t able to handle the turmoil of life on our own but because that foundation has been rocked. 

So I rewrote the entire book as a narrative that takes place on the trans-Siberian railway, with all the characters and unknowns that trip entails, but that’s not what it is about. It’s about relationships, about being between two generations who are about to transition. 

Back to Ted.

Sudeikis masterfully weaves every possible father-son relationship into what on the surface is a comedy about an American football coach hired to the helm of a British premier league soccer (football) club. 

Right away we have the estranged father as Ted Lasso separates from his wife, and his young son remains with his mother. We also soon learn the powerful impact his own father had on him and the fallout from his father’s suicide when Ted was just sixteen. In England we meet the team, including Jamie Tartt, whose father is physically and verbally abusive, Sam Obisanya, whose father is more of his best friend and mentor, Nathan Shelley, whose Dad is demanding of his son’s talents and seemingly never satisfied, Leslie (male) Higgins who is the proud and dotting father of five boys, Roy Kent, who becomes a surrogate father to his niece, and of course Ted himself, who moves into the father-role to the entire team, the individual players with which he has various degrees of parental conflicts and resolutions.

This is listed as a comedy, but it absolutely fits the bill as a drama as well, placing it in the same vein as shows like MASH which walks that thin line between laughter and tears. 

But this isn’t about that. We are in a drama that has become laughable, and the line between what’s funny and what is tragic is a shadow at best.

Both the Mother and Father figures in our lives have served to keep grounded the best efforts of humanity throughout history. We need either to recognize the example or play the part. Almost all aspects of society rely upon those roles to set the strong example with seemingly unconditional love as we push through difficult moments. When hope seems fleeting and one feels “lost in a pathless wood” as Frost proclaims, that Maternal strength or Paternal guidance is almost always enough to help us keep going, knowing that whatever happens we’ll be okay. Even if we lose, we suffer those losses together, and we move on. 

There seems to be a lack of parental symbolism in the world, in the nation, in our lives. In fact, more often than not those who should be in those roles these days are appearing more like Jamie Tartt’s abusive and untrustworthy father. It would be perfect if we could always rely upon Sam Obisanya’s Yoda-like dad to turn to, but that’s not the hand we’ve been dealt. In fact, it feels like we’re a player down right now and this time it’s the captain of the team who is absent. That loss of security can be overwhelming. 

I do not want to judge. In fact, if we are to do so, I remember Ted’s line, “I hope that either all of us, or none of us, are not judged by our weakest moments, but what we do with it if and when we are given a second chance.” But our foundation has been rocked, and it’s getting harder to find solid ground these days. So we must do what the team does and depend upon each other, pass to each other when we don’t have a clear shot, hold each other up when we’re flailing, and celebrate each other when we work things out. 

We will get through this time we are in. We might have to switch our game plan, but we’ve got each other’s backs, and that might be enough. 

My brother, my son, and my dad, 2015

Thankful 4

~ aviewfromthiswilderness ~ 1 Comment

I am not yet among the dead of this world, scattered ashes or sunken corpse. Not yet discussed in past tense, not yet absolved at last rites.

I am still conscious of the leaves on the red maple, hanging on, like me, trying to express brilliance before the fall.

I wake up in soft, fresh cotton sheets and see the trees through the skylight turning toward the sun, and a bird scatters to the porch rail, just like she promised she would.

I can call my mother and say hello, talk to my siblings, laugh with people I have loved since I was nineteen, since I was twenty-five, grateful to have closed those gaps in our lives when we lost track of each other. Grateful to know what it’s like to be quiet and know peace. I can climb hills with my son, stop for lunch and talk about what is beautiful, talk about what is next.

For the peace that can only be found in life, that stillness of the soul that keeps us present. Yes, for that peace and stillness and presence, which one must be conscious of to understand.

For consciousness.  

For the fox at the edge of the woods waiting for apple slices.

The veteran who stopped to see if I was okay.

The homeless man in Norfolk last week who let me help, which reminded me I could; his gift to me.

For having had the type of relationships—so close, so intimate and alive—so that when those souls died, my sadness which is alive still simply reminds me I have known such love, even briefly.

For the way the river still keeps tabs on my moods, washes clean the extremes which constrict my hopes, tugs me back to the Island, or off across the equator to distant mountains on the moon and then washes me ashore here on the edge of what’s next, giving me the strength to fight the tigers that come at night.

Thankful is a shallow word. There must be something better to express our gratitude for being alive, now, with the aroma of leaves, the chill at night pulling the skin taut on my face, the stars stretched out like compassion through the universe. Thankful is not enough.

To still be able to string together a battalion of words which might make someone cry when I remind them of a loved one or make someone laugh when they recall a moment they once knew but thought they had long ago forgotten.

For forgiveness.

For compassion.

For the way I feel when I reach for the phone to call someone who left this world before me, and my heart sinks, and my stomach drops, and I remember, and I put the phone down. For remembering that is another way you can measure love; you remember how you almost called anyway but then didn’t.  

Thankful for the ones who see my mistakes and don’t give up on me.

For the soft touch of another soul who understands.

For understanding.

Letty

~ aviewfromthiswilderness

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

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

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

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

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

‘Six thousand miles!”

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

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

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

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

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

It’s the last one of us.

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The results were heartbreaking.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Happy Birthday to me,” I laughed.

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

“Yes.”

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

“Do you want to write it?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For Those Who Stay Behind

~ aviewfromthiswilderness ~ 2 Comments

Note: This is a very serious one. Read. Share. Forgive. It’s all we’ve got.

This is for Dave W, Bobbie B, Bud D, Tricia K, and the one’s who live with those unseen wounds which simply won’t heal.

***

A broken limb is obvious. A cast, a sling, a set of crutches or even a knee cart, and people can see the problem, understand the delays and compromises. We move aside or assist in any way we can.

What happens when someone injures their mind, breaks their thought process, when a person cracks their perception of reality and ration? The world is quick to judge the results of some unseen wound festering in their frontal lobe. “They’re lazy,” we say; “They’ve given up,” we say; “They keep asking for help and I’ve had enough,” we say. No one replies to the unfortunate soul with some walker, “No, sorry. I’m not helping you anymore.”

Well, in both cases the likelihood of one asking for help is pretty slim anyway.    

Monsters such as depression, anxiety, and nervous breakdowns can destroy a person’s ability to function. People can’t think as clearly so they lose jobs, they make bad financial decisions and lose money and property. “They could have done something else; they could have sought help from a professional if that was true,” we say.

And when nothing makes sense anymore and the world is too much with them and there is absolutely no meaning in anything—when numbness overtakes the idle sadness, they find a way out.  

The truth is suicide is not always the result of depression; it is not always a person simply giving up. In fact, it is often seen by the psychologically afflicted as the perfect solution. It is not doing harm; it is solving problems. The mind no longer functions the same as others’ minds. If they even want to ask for help, they don’t even know what it looks like to ask for anything in particular, so they seek solutions on their own, like sleep, like cutting off contact, like shutting the brain down for good. It is not life they fear or wish to escape; it is their mind. It is a difficult task to escape one’s own thoughts.

“There is medicine for that,” we say.

Not really. Sure, there is medicine to help someone cover up the wound, like a Band Aid, but the sore doesn’t heal as much as it is buried. The infection will return as soon as

well 

as soon as it rains, or when the next call comes from a creditor because they can’t work enough to keep up, or, worse, when a call doesn’t come any longer from friends and they suddenly remember they were better once, and they won’t be like that again. But even that’s not accurate since they simply are like this now, and apparently always were, and the moment it happened is an allusive memory.

Because while in the movies when someone has a nervous breakdown, they flail their hands and scream, cry, and someone might slap them, tell them to snap out of it, in reality that’s not what happens. The truth doesn’t play well on film. In reality they say nothing. They might drink, of course, or become addicted to some pain reliever, some vice that keeps their brain in the moment like alcohol or other self-defeating measures that keep their mind from dwelling on some past or future attack, but they might just as easily sleep all day, or more likely not sleep at night. They try and work but the ability to focus is gone; not ignored or delayed—the actual part of the brain that helps them do work or see a reason to exist at all has a hole in the middle of it, the circuits are infected and surrounded by puss, but no one can see that, so it can’t possibly be anything other than “a phase,” “laziness.”

Later, afterwards, people say they didn’t know, “They always seemed fine.” “I thought they were going through something.” “They said it was no big deal.”

They say, “I wish they had asked for help.” They say, “I did all I could.”

They say, “What a shame.”

Indeed.

Did Hemingway have another novel, Van Gogh another masterpiece, Robin Williams another routine for the thousands of kids he used to visit in hospitals?

Depression and mental illness often caused by a mental breakdown can cause lives to rip apart, and the only explanation they have when they ask for help again and again is “I’m trying.” And eventually that simply isn’t good enough no matter how much they are loved. They live out on the fringe, they hold signs, they sleep on grates. Likewise, they live in country houses and city apartments. They seem to try, they try to seem to fit in.

Maybe if they wore a cast, had sutures across their forehead. We like to see problems before we help solve them. We don’t offer help to people when we don’t know they’re suffering; how could we? Unless we know them well.

And that’s the problem. No one knows them at all. They’re funny and outgoing. They make light of serious situations. They can work a room. So they either never ask at all or, when they do so too often say “I need help,” it is difficult to see how. “Again?” we reply. “Why now?” we ask. The thing is in a few days they will not even remember they ever asked for help to begin with. This is true; the compromised brain actually blocks that out completely. To us they can either be absolutely silent or seem constantly desperate; but to them it just happened.

Here’s the problem:

How can we find that line between someone who really needs help and someone who just needs a bit more tough love? What do we do if there is no visible “mistake” that needs correcting? What do we say when they say nothing at all, or if we do ask if they need help, they say, “No thank you, it’ll be fine,” more out of a notion of being too embarrassed to say yes. Too ashamed. They’d rather…what?

They’d rather die. To be sure. I remember a phone call early one morning when I just didn’t want to hear it again. I remember a visit from someone who needed more than I could give. I recall calling once and the phone kept ringing. I’ll never forget that one.

Where is the line between knowing whether we helped enough and we could have done more?

Honestly, it runs right down the middle of the rest of our lives, and we walk it aimlessly, hoping we made the right call, that there was nothing we could do. Even if we’d rather be on the side of foolishness, helping people way more than they probably deserve, we can’t ever know.

So we call and talk, stop by, we get them to laugh because apparently we think laughter is the best medicine.

That’s not how a nervous breakdown plays out. Trust me on this one. But there is no Habitat for Humanity that helps people rebuild their minds. So they lose everything: their homes, their families, their purpose. And there’s not a damn thing we can do about it. Well, sure there is, but the place between knowing and not knowing is dark and difficult to navigate.

So. What do we do?

We forgive them for finding a solution the rest of us thinks is foolish. We forgive them for believing that the pleasure found by watching their kids and grandkids grow, watching another sunset with someone, laughing at lunch with friends, still isn’t worth the pain—the constant and debilitating pain—that comes constantly to infect their mind; constantly, day and night. Even their dreams are saturated with pain.

Forgiveness for something we do not understand is a monumental task. But then for some, so is life.

If you need help, Call 988 immediately.

If you know someone who needs help, Call them. You don’t have to know what to say. Say anything.

If you are living with the memory of someone you feel like you could have helped more, it isn’t your fault. It isn’t their fault. Forgive them. Forgive yourself.

Remember what we learned as toddlers: How would we want them to react if it was us? What would we want them to remember if it was us?

Not everyone is fine. It’s that simple.

Bob Kunzinger writes the weekly blog, A View from this Wilderness, which premiered in January 2016, and is the author of eleven books, including the forthcoming Office Hours, as well as hundreds of articles in national and international publications. He lives in Virginia.

Peace. Out.

~ aviewfromthiswilderness ~ 3 Comments
The Peaceful Priest on the left/the asshole on the right/1980’s

A friend of mine is a Franciscan priest who remains calm no matter what happens.

We are not alike.

He is compassionate, understanding, patient, and saint-like. He is perfect for his job and does it 24/7; that is, he is one of those rare souls that couldn’t be anything but some sort of man of God. If he gets stuck in traffic, for instance, he keeps it all in perspective. If someone cuts him off, his response remains, “They really must be in a hurry. I hope they’re careful.” Or, “Wow, God bless them and watch over them, they really must be anxious about some appointment.” His is a peaceful soul.

This contrasts directly with my “Use a frigging turn signal, butthead!” approach. When entering a tunnel and the traffic decelerates from sixty to forty, the good Father cares: “Oh, thank our Lord they are all being careful going into this tunnel. It really must be frightening to so many people.” I handle it with my own style: “It’s a tunnel. IT IS A TUNNEL! It is not a brick wall! Wilie E. Coyote didn’t paint the f***ing thing! The Road did NOT shrink! It’s a damn TUNNEL!”

We obviously address frustration differently, which makes me wonder how we ended up this way. Would Monastery-Bob and Professor-priest keep their temperaments? If I lived on a mountain in prayer would I be less likely to want to kill the cashier for needing a pen to subtract $5 from $20?

I was like him once, my friend the peaceful priest.

When we met during college we talked a long time about peace and where it comes from. To search for peace in the world is a fruitless act. Even if we find it, it can disappear with war, with stress, with distractions and interruptions. It is like turning to others to find what you want to do with your life; it must come from within. And peace, too, must be a spring, not a shower. I always liked that thought.

I once went to Father’s room and found dozens of people drinking beer and laughing as they told stories about their lives. Afterwards, I said I had a great time and found it strange that I could feel so lost among friends on one day and on another feel so connected and centered. He said, “Bobby—tonight you brought the peace with you.”

Man, he made it sound so simple: Bring the peace with you.

So a few years ago when some dirtbag student of mine called me an asshole in class, I thought of Father, and how it is never the situation but how we handle it. I could picture him with his wide smile and deep laugh and huge hands on my shoulders telling me I’m going to be just fine. I brought the student into the division office and sat the little bastard’s ass in a chair while I filled out a withdrawal form. Before I could finish the paperwork, however, and before he stopped crying, I decided to give this “peace” thing a shot.

“Are you scared?” He looked at me. “College, I mean, the assignments? Are you worried?”

“I suppose,” he said, calming down.

“Why?”

It took him a long time to answer something other than the moronic, I don’t know. “I’m not a good student. I was never good at school.”

“You get confused?”

“Yeah,” he said, nodding, knowing I hit on his fear.

“Yeah,” I said. “A lot of people do. I know I did. What you might try doing is stepping back a bit. Sit to the side and watch everything from a distance for awhile—get some perspective. Instead of calling me an asshole, ask me some questions.”

“Right,” he said, with not just a little indignation.

Bring the peace, Bob. Bring the peace.

“Sometimes we need to see things from a different point of view.”

He was quiet a long time and I believed I got through to him, and I wondered what he pictured as I recalled sitting in Father’s room listening to stories of scared and lost students like myself still trying to get a handle on our place in the world.

“Wow, thanks for your psycho-babble bullshit, Dude,” he said.

I took a breath, thought of Father, and told the little prick to get out of my site; that Hardees is hiring and someone has to clean the toilets.

It’s a gift, really, knowing one’s place in the world.

I headed home thinking about peace and frustration, fear and anxiety. He’s where he should be, this former student of mine. He’s out in the real world where he can seek out only those challenges he knows he can conquer. He is part of the masses that only face what they’re not afraid of. I wondered, though, how often I only face what I know I can conquer.

Bringing peace to an otherwise hostile environment is a difficult task and it gets harder when we watch the world simmering in anything but serenity. Maybe that’s why I, too, often avoid the challenge and instead wander down country roads, watch the water ebb and flow rather than suffer the anxiety hurled at us from the news of Ukraine, of Gaza, of DC, of course. It’s why I don’t drive during rush hour, avoid fast food restaurants and box store checkout lines. Hell, maybe I’ll just start giving everyone A’s so less people will call me bad names.

Yes. Let there be peace and let it begin with me, Bob the Asshole. I’m going for a walk and I’m bringing my peace with me.

Cathy Kunzinger Urwin, Ph.D.

~ aviewfromthiswilderness ~ 1 Comment

Today my sister turns seventy-years-old.

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

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

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

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

Cathy and Fred holding up their chubby brother

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

Cathy and Greg

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

Cathy with Lyra

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

Cathy with Henry

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

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

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

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

Happy Birthday Cathy.

Cathy and me, 1988

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

For Cathy: