Travel

Extended Metaphor

~ aviewfromthiswilderness ~ Leave a comment

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

But then it happened.

Release.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Maybe I’ll just go back to Spain

Out Like a Lamb

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“Mary had a little lamb

whose fleece was white as snow

and everywhere that Mary went

her lamb was sure to go”

Which in reality was a small schoolhouse in central Massachusetts where Mary Elizabeth Sawyer walked each day from her farm, followed by the lamb.

I’ll come back to this.

I worked for some time at a quaint inn in Sterling, Massachusetts. The restaurant with a small lounge and several rooms upstairs sat just near the Wachusett Reservoir, at the bottom of a hill in the village. It was owned by the Roy family, and Al Roy had studied cooking in France. His son, Mark, ran the restaurant and inn, along with his wife Patti. The staff consisted of about ten of us. Dave was a chef, Tom the bartender, Rich—a student at the time at the Culinary Institute of America—assisted Dave, and the wait staff. We were like family and shared each other’s lives.

I’d go hawk watching at the Quabbin Reservoir an hour west with Dave and his wife, and often Cathy and Stacy and others would come to my place—an old yellow house just down the shore of the reservoir a few miles past the cider mill—and sometimes after the dining room closed we’d sit around and have a drink and talk. There were funny times, like when I went out one cold winter night to put the trash out and the only other person left was Cathy who was placing the fine China plates out for the next evening’s guests, but I locked myself out. I went to the back windows of the dining room which faced the wooded hillside, standing two feet deep in snow, and knocked on the window. It scared the crap out of Cathy and the stack of plates sailed out of her arms and crashed to the floor. She screamed. I laughed. It was an accident, truly. Or when a couple from Quebec came to dinner just as the dining room closed and kept just Tom and me there for hours, well past midnight. Dave had closed up the kitchen after their meal and went home, but they still had wine and dessert. At about 1 am they left and when I opened their bill folder to see what kind of tip they left on the $40 tab for keeping us there so late, the credit card receipt showed no tip at all. I cursed loud enough for Tom to laugh and say, “No tip, huh?” and when I picked up the folder, a $100 bill was underneath.

Some tragic times as well, mostly January 28th, 1986, two months to the day after Thanksgiving, and just about a week before I moved to Pennsylvania. Most Americans will never forget this day, but it was particularly poignant for those of us in New England since Christa McAuliffe had lived just across the border in New Hampshire, and on that morning and afternoon, the inn was packed with people—many friends of Christa’s—to watch the Challenger launch on television. I was tapping a keg of Budweiser and looked up as Patti said, “Oh wow, that doesn’t seem right.”

It was completely silent, followed by cries. I can still smell the beer, hear the dishes from the kitchen, Cathy saying, “What’s going on?” and Tom behind the bar quietly repeating, “Holy Shit. Oh wow. Holy Shit.”

But today I remember a happier time there. Thanksgiving Day, 1985. Forty years ago next week. We had a limited menu of Turkey, Scallops, or Prime Rib, and we were booked for all three seatings. The last guests left about 7 that night, and after we cleaned the dining room and the kitchen, we all sat around a bunch of tables pushed together and had a full meal with all three entrees, bottles of wine, pies, and stories, constant and hilarious stories. It was a beautiful time in my life and I loved where I lived, what I did, and the people I spent my time with.

But something had to change; I knew this. I did not know what needed to happen, but something else needed to be next. I had graduated from college, traveled through Mexico, lived in Tucson, managed a health club, and was happy, but stagnant, and this state of being, albeit pleasant, contradicted my very nature. It would not be long before I would turn in my notice and move to Pennsylvania, but on that Thanksgiving where a dozen misfits all sat around the table together laughing and drinking and wishing it could be like that forever but knowing it had to change—and would, for every single one of us—I got up to open another bottle of wine but instead walked out the front door to see that even more snow had accumulated on the couple of feet we already had.

I walked to the center of the village just a half block away and found a statue I’d never seen before. It was of Mary Elizabeth Sawyer’s lamb. Mary is the young girl in Sterling, Massachusetts, who had a small lamb that followed her everywhere, including school. It was a big event in the small school, and the next day a classmate of Mary’s, John Roulstone, a year older than Mary, handed her a poem he had written about the event. The poem had three stanzas—the first of which is at the top of this page.

Some years later, a poet, Sarah Hale who lived not far from there, published a small book of poems which contained a longer version of the poem, but Hale insisted it was original and based upon imaginary events. The controversy lasted for some years, well after both Mary and Hale had died. Until Henry Ford—yes, that one—investigated the incident and not only sided with Sterling’s own Mary, but purchased the schoolhouse from the village of Sterling, moved it to Sudbury, Massachusetts, and then published a book about Mary.

Back to me.

I stood at the small statue watching snow slowly cover the lamb’s wool now truly white as snow, and waited in perfect silence, listening to the quiet of rural Massachusetts. I can feel that moment today, that sense of peace braided with a sense of restlessness. I had to leave. I had to stay. Back then for people my age riding the tail of the Baby Boomer generation, the urge to “change” something usually meant going to the liquor store for boxes, filling them with books I’d never read again, tying them up with string, and moving somewhere else. Boston was out of the question—geez, an hour to the east was too far. Staying meant improving my life where I was—figuring out how to take the best of my situation and improve it, and I stood in front of Mary’s lamb and knew I didn’t know how to begin to do that. I only knew how to pack up and leave; that I was good at.

I went back in and grabbed the wine bottle and while I was opening it, Mark came in the kitchen.

“Where the hell have you been? We’re a bottle a head of you!”

“I was talking to the lamb.”

“What lamb?”

“Mary’s.”

“Ha. Oh. Well…”

“Mark, I think I’m going to have to turn in my notice, but, I don’t know, maybe January, maybe February. I need to find something else to do.”

“Oh wow, well, okay. We can talk about this later. You’re here for the holidays, though?”

“Yes, of course.”

We drank wine. I suddenly felt a little out of place, more like a visiting cousin than immediate family.

At the end of the night, everyone had left, Mark and Patti had retired upstairs, and just Cathy and I were left, she placed the dinner plates out for the next day, and I put out the trash, where I accidently locked myself out.

I moved. Cathy moved. Dave opened his own restaurant. Tom died. And the Sterling Inn fell into disrepair over the next few decades, abandoned, with vines taking over the building, the parking lot cracked and covered with weeds. Someone bought it from the Roy family a few years ago with the intent of restoring it to its full original glory. Same red trim; same black shutters. But some town controversy has kept it from proceeding. I miss the place. I’m glad I moved but I’m sorry I left.

That was forty Thanksgivings ago. Some memories follow us around, waiting for us to notice them.

“Blessed Twilight” Dickens Called It

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This blog is about reading some of the most motivational writing you will find while helping fight Parkinson’s Disease.

So here’s what happened: About four decades ago I put together a book called Vincent which my former advisor at Penn State, Eton Churchill, and I published. It did okay and had rave reviews for its simplicity combined with insightfulness on the part of the author. I did not write this book; I pared down more than 2000 pages of letters that Vincent van Gogh wrote to others–mostly his brother Theo, but also other artists. The book became about 160 pages of startlingly beautiful first person prose in which Vincent tells his own life story including his turmoil with depression, his passion for life, his visions in art, his relationship with God, and his relationships with women. It truly is captivating writing.

In 2017, a real press picked it up and reissued it as Blessed Twilight: The Story of Vincent van Gogh, with a gorgeous cover and more wide-spread distribution. especially since the release coincided with the release of the movie Loving Vincent. It did incredibly well, but eventually went out of print as the publisher in Florida shut down and the people in Ohio who took it over also closed their doors.

The overstock of these books floated around the east coast and the mid-west, and with great generosity on the part of the people in Ohio, arrived at my door yesterday.

I am selling them and all the money is going to aid in the fight against Parkinson’s Disease.

These make fantastic Christmas gifts or just reading material for yourself. I can’t overstate how everyone who reads this book is captivated by Vincent’s philosophy, perspective, and passion. I can compliment it since I only organized the material, Vincent van Gogh did the writing.

Order copies for yourself and your friends. They are $25 a piece including shipping, or 5 for $100.

You can:

Venmo: @Robert-kunzinger

Zelle: rskunzinger@gmail.com

or send a check made out to APDA (American Parkinson Disease Association) and mail it to me at Bob Kunzinger, PO Box 70, Deltaville, VA 23043. ALL the money (except postage) will go to assist the research for Parkinson’s.

“There’s nothing more truly artistic than loving people“

Foolish. Insane. Successful.

~ aviewfromthiswilderness ~ 2 Comments

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

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

Two truisms:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Everyone was quiet.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Flip Flops

~ aviewfromthiswilderness ~ 1 Comment

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

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

–Virgil

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Higher You Climb

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This one’s for me.

When I was out west we hiked uphill (because the West is uphill) to a waterfall. I’m not sure of the elevation but it really doesn’t matter since I live at sea level and the waterfall is not. My home is about 80 feet above sea level and a short stroll down the hill is zero.

A few days before the waterfalls we were at just above eleven thousand feet; June, and still there was snowpack on some of the trails. At night we had a fire going, of course to toast peeps but also to keep us warm. In the cabin we kept the wood burning stove going all night. Back home the ac was running strong. Back at zero elevation. that is.

On the way to the waterfall–it was hot that day–I had to stop more than a few times due to my unconditioned lungs. I had no issue with my heart or legs; no, I felt pretty strong actually. It was just the lungs which in my mind looked like the deflated oxygen masks in planes. I wanted to quit; it was clear I wanted to quit, but it was also clear I just needed to catch my breath and push on. “It’s just a little further” translated to me to those days driving my son long distances and from the back seat I’d hear an impatient, “How much longer, Daddy?” “Not far,” I’d say, as if a two year old could translate “not far” into some sort of calculable distance. Yeah, that was me on the mountain as kids–I’m not kidding, kids!–ran past. I reminded myself they’re closer to the ground and need less air, and “it’s just a little further” to me translated to “move your ass for Buddha’s sake, or we’re going to have to make camp soon.”

I made it. I sat on some rocks and watched the majestic water fall from other rocks, down to a pool, off into a creek, down the mountain past the path we just hiked. I quickly gained my energy back as the issue was my lungs inability to climb at that altitude, not “be” at that altitude. A few days earlier we were at eleven thousand feet and I was fine because there was little steepness about us; it was a casual altitude gain. Plus it was colder. But there I sat outside Ogden, Utah, having climbed what I swear was the Matterhorn and I watched the sky grow bluer, watched the water mist up into the trees, and watched the world below try and make excuses for itself. I can’t recall ever feeling so at peace.

A few years ago we did the same thing not far from there to a place called “Wind Cave” and that was more than just a steep climb, for a flat-earther like myself it was like scaling The Freedom Tower, but we climbed and a few times I wanted to quit–apparently I’m not adept at steepness yet–but I didn’t, and when we came around the top slope and walked back down to the opening of the wind cave, there was nowhere on earth I would have rather been. And so again in the mountains, and then again at the waterfalls.

Fast forward, for that is the theme here: Today I wondered about two distinct things: Why is it so hard for me to do these things when I used to have no issue with them when I was younger? and why did I push myself to finish when I could have so easily stopped without objection?

Let’s get the age bullshit out of the way first. Yes, there are conditions which can slow a person down as we age, and it makes it harder to do what we could do with ease decades earlier, but all things being equal, one can battle a decreased metabolism by eating right and working harder. The list of reasons those antiquated excuses are irrelevant aside, internal motivation has more to do with accomplishment than external excuses. I have some experience in fitness and working with people whose challenges could not be calculated, but who, with the right motivation and persistence, reached their goals. So why is it so hard for us other than absolute and flat out indifference as our minds are occupied by other issues? And two, what changed? Why did I push on despite my better judgement only to find out I was capable of more than I thought? The company? Partly. The kids running past? No. The beauty at the end of the hike? I promise that wasn’t on my mind while dry-heaving into the creek.

No, something different took over.

I wanted to do it for myself.

***

I went to the Y today, again. I’ve been going on and off for some years now, though I took a break during Covid and another break not during Covid. I get bored, or I find something else to do, or…or…or…I lose some weight and I get in shape then I tumble back. This is normal. While my old boss at the fitness club could take an eighty year old and make them feel young and able to accomplish anything–and they often did–it was more normal for a healthy, capable young-something to cave at the first sight of a donut. Enter me.

But I have gained less time, and that is something they and most of the members I trained when I was there did not have at that age back then. It takes a while to understand that all we gain as we age is less time.

Tick tock tick tock tick tock people; times ticking away.

When I did the math this past weekend as the calendar turned on me again, I realized the list of things I plan to do is longer than the remaining time allotted, and that’s if I’m generous with myself. So I went to the Y today just like any other day, but this time I wondered if I could push it a bit, so I increased the incline on the treadmill and turned up the mphs. And again, until my heartrate was safely beyond what I normally do, until I was sweating, which I rarely do, and until I was at the point I never have been to before at the Y–the point where I wanted to quit for a reason other than boredom, so I pushed the dial up a bit more and for ninety minutes I climbed to the wind caves and to the waterfalls, I climbed Mt Wachusett in Massachusetts and to the upper falls of Sabino Canyon near Tucson. It brought me back to those days, first, when I taught classes at the club and I had to push myself because the class wanted to be pushed, and then earlier when playing tennis, and I wasn’t done until I dropped on the court, spent.

Why? Because I want to ride my bike to Coos Bay, Oregon, and I want to go to Seattle and hike Mt. Rainer with my cousin, and I want to make the climb to the waterfall a stroll, a meander. Because I saw the clock. I didn’t want to look; I really didn’t, but I did and I saw it as the large digital numbers clicked over, and I did the math because I’m pretty good at math and the distance from here to 80 is barely enough time to love anymore, barely enough time to dream anymore.

Something was different today. Something clicked. It’s that there are going to be a plethora of things out of my control as I move forward, so I’m going to take control over those aspects of my life I do have some say about. Of course I’m not going to get back to my club weight again, which is fine since I forgot to eat from 1983 to about 1988, but I am going to get to the point I believe I can if I decide to. And that might be all I need during this last push to the summit.

And by the way, we do these things at this point in life for ourselves, no one else, and that’s different too.

This time it’s for me.

Winging It

~ aviewfromthiswilderness ~ 3 Comments

I no longer like butterflies. Those miserable little hyperactive buzzards flutter around like drunk scraps of tracing paper. “Oh they’re beautiful, especially the Monarchs,” everyone says. Why? Because of their colors? Their fragility? We just like things more delicate than we are. As George Carlin famously pointed out, we eat more lobsters than bunnies because bunnies are soft and furry and lobsters look like miniature monsters. No contest. Honestly, I used to love the little beauties, butterflies. I was always intrigued that the average life span is less than a year. I watched documentaries about the monarchs’ migration from northern regions of the states to the mountains of southern Mexico. I couldn’t find my way there with a map and a guide, and these little fuckers do just fine every single year. But lately I have lost interest. They’re as disturbing to me now as the flying monkeys in “The Wizard of Oz.”

I turn sixty-five this week and I’ve been thinking about that trite and necessary Bucket List. I figure I have another good–good being solidly vertical–fifteen years. Hopefully more, of course, but with some adjustment for pace. Still, the first six and a half decades found me mostly pinballing through life. This evening I sat setting up my new Snoopy and Woodstock 3D light and thought about what I might still be able to accomplish.

Here’s my list:

Whatever. It’s all good to me. Just glad to be here, really. A good garden and a small grove of fig trees. Go for walks in various countries, through marketplaces, along coasts, small villages. Nice walks, hikes, talking and laughing. Sit at a café near the ocean with drinks and a soft breeze.

Not what you were expecting, huh? I guess I’ve already done what I wanted to do. The time left is reserved for those I love and as much laughter as possible.

And as for the “The Wizard of Oz, ” the scariest scene is not the flying monkeys, or the balls of fire the Wicked Witch of the West throws down upon the bone-dry scarecrow. It is the hour glass filled with red sand set up in the castle room with Dorothy. Such a small scene in an irritating film still affects me half a century later. “You see that?” the witch cries to the terrified Judy Garland, “That’s how much longer you have to be alive! And it isn’t long, my sweetie. It isn’t long!” This scared the crap out of me. You mean it’s that easy, I thought, to no longer exist? Someone just flips the hourglass and the sands run out? My heart raced every time the camera focused on the depleting red grains dripping through the huge timepiece.

It didn’t help that during those years my mother watched “Days of Our Lives,” and the opening sequence was always, “Like sand through the hourglass, so go the Days of Our Lives.” Whoa! Talk about depressing. I was raised saturated in this daily dose of “you’re going to die soon.” Growing up near the beach probably didn’t help; the shifting patterns of sand symbolized to me the passing of seconds and hours and days and years. And when aunts and uncles exclaimed I had an “old soul” I thought they were ordering last rites.

So some sense of urgency festered in me from quite early on. I started attacking my ambitions like I had just three weeks left before the sand ran out. When I was young, I had an outrageous list of dreams, ambitions, or “fantasies” as most others called them. One of the first brilliant ideas was doomed for failure: My friend Eddie and I had been sending up rockets; the ones with a gun-powder-filled battery shoved up their tails which we bought from a hobby shop. We were getting good at this and our imagination ran away fast. This was around 1973 and I was totally into adventure. Papillon had just come out and my mind was already bent on traveling to faraway lands. Mostly, though, I was obsessed with becoming an astronaut. I knew all their names, and I had memorized every detail I could find about rockets, their speeds, thrust, history and expectations. I had a brown cpo jacket and asked my mother to sew on an American flag and a NASA patch. When we went into stores I liked to pretend people thought I must have something to do with the space program. I played it cool, of course, holding my mom’s car keys like I just got back from the Johnson Space Center. I was twelve.

Even so, Eddie and I had a plan. We were going to take apart the batteries to study how they are made, and then we would make a large one that could carry one of us, me, into the clouds. We knew we would have needed a heat shield to exit the atmosphere and return—we weren’t dumb—so we planned to use a metal garbage can. We only were going to lift a few hundred feet just to show the naysayers we earned our patches. So we slowly filled a coffee can with the gun powder from several dozen batteries bought over several months. But one night Eddie left the coffee can on his patio in the rain. We didn’t have enough money to buy more batteries so we tossed the plan and played baseball. A few years later I moved away and found more pragmatic plans. I am not certain, however, if I was ever so serious or energetic as I was when I thought I was going into the clouds. To me that fantasy was simply reality’s childhood.

Back then I couldn’t possibly know that eventually the most treasured content of my bucket list would be the simplest of thoughts—plans really—like lying on the floor playing Risk and Boggle with my son and sharing a bowl of pretzels while we laughed at the anxious final seconds of each round. Or the one of walking slowly through a mall with my dad, sitting on a bench reminiscing or being quiet, sitting having Scotch on Tuesday nights. I was always excited to be able to sit and watch a baseball game on television with him, neither of us saying a word. That doesn’t sound a bit like a dream for anyone’s bucket list, but it makes it into most of ours at some point. I thought of all those small moments while standing in the doorway to his room during his last days. I’d lean against the wall and stare at the paper butterfly, the universal symbol of comfort care, on the door jam.   It’s crazy how the simple moments like time together get overshadowed by fleeting ideas like skydiving and hot air ballooning.

I’m certain at some point early on in my life while listening to “Days of Our Lives” my mind turned toward adventure. I’m equally sure that my dad had a lot to do with that. Every Christmas he bought us books and for some reason, perhaps intuition, the ones he picked for me all focused on outrageous escapades. Robin Lee Graham’s The Boy Who Sailed Around the World Alone; Peter Jenkin’s A Walk Across America, Bound for Glory about Woody Guthie, Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad, and more. These were obvious influences for me, and growing up a child of the late sixties certainly added to the action. From the moment of Kennedy’s decree to reach the moon to actually reaching the moon occupied exactly my first nine years of life. Many moments in my youth lit a fire under me that still burns. This can be both exhilarating and exasperating.

Still no one ever told me I was wrong. No one ever indicated anything I suggested was a bad idea, only that it was too early, or that I was “too young.” So dreams got pushed aside, never making it to the “did that already” bucket but never really leaving the list. It took me years to realize the dreams we fill our lives with don’t necessarily play out in chronological order. I’m lucky, actually, that some chaotic appearances on my radar don’t coincide with their fruition. I learned quickly that if things don’t play out as planned to just toss them back in the bucket and let them simmer around awhile like a lottery ball.

I have only a little desire left to climb in a garbage can and light a fire under my ass, but since then biking around Ireland made the list. Or maybe I’ll just go back to Spain. And more than a few folks older than me sail the Caribbean well into their sixties. Many many years ago I had hopes of getting to Greece. Maybe I’ll still get there and share a bottle of wine. Sometimes it’s just that we take the long way. I had other bad ideas besides dying in a flaming piece of metal. There was the time my friend Tom and I were going to push a desk from Tucson to Washington, DC to point out corporate waste while people were starving to death. Even philosopher and writer Leo Buscaglia dropped us a line to wish us luck. It took us a while to realize he was being sarcastic. No good Monarch would waste his time on such nonsense, no matter how noble. Butterflies, man. Butterflies are bad examples; they offer false hope.

Whenever my son and I would play that Boggle game, he flipped that damn hourglass with the three-minute timer and tap his finger. Tap. Tap. Tap. My anxiety level increased and my blood pressure peaked. OH, he knew what he was doing. But he couldn’t know he was feeding the trauma of PTSD from some fictional witch. “In good time,” I can hear her saying. It was that threatening decree, “In good time,” that motivated me. Still, she never said “in time”; it was always, “In good time.”

I suppose even a witch, like turning sixty-five, can have some redeeming qualities.

Bob Unplugged

~ aviewfromthiswilderness ~ 1 Comment

No running water, no electricity, no means of communication. We hiked from our cabin at just over ten thousand feet in the Uinta Mountains to just over eleven thousand feet. Snowpack remained, and while the temperature was pleasant, often even warm, a quick turn into the shade marked the cool dryness. In the evening we kept a fire going in front of the cabin, cooked on a camp stove, drank, went for a walk to watch the moon rise—which didn’t—walked to the dock at Spirit Lake and lay on our backs to watch the abundance of stars. An otter or two swam by, a few moose showed up in the field, chipmunks buzzed about, and the unmistakable peace of absolute silence dominated the days to the point I didn’t even notice. The nights turned cold and we fed the small, nearly 100-year-old cabin’s wood burning stove long enough to make it to morning.

Absent was the news, cellphone reception, communication with anyone else save the lodge owner and his wife, no neighbors in the few other working cabins to chat with, just the indescribable silence and laughter, a lot of laughing.

I worried about grizzlies. “There are no grizzlies here; they’re over in Colorado. Just black or brown bears.” So I worried about black and brown bears.

I worried about snakes. “There are no snakes at this altitude. Too cold.”

Damnit, I needed something to worry about. Habit. What I didn’t worry about was the disconnection with the world; being above the tangled waves of electronics saturating the air just a few thousand feet below. I could breathe; well, except for the air being so thin that I couldn’t breathe. And I could in that brief stretch of days, for the first time in a long time, be unapologetically myself because I knew I could. Sometimes it takes a friend to reveal who you really are. Sometimes it takes a lifetime.

Bob Unplugged.

I’ve been this way before, a long time ago during my sometimes-weeklong jaunts into Mexico before cellphones, or two excursions into Africa, and other places where I was mostly alone, or where the people I was with were equally absent of some umbilical to all things civilized, and all that was left to do was to talk, so we talked. Indeed. We talked about how we missed our moms, we talked about what breaks our hearts, we talked about what we dream of and what we don’t dream of, we talked, as Harry Chapin described, “of the tiny difference between ending and starting to begin.” We talked about how sometimes it takes years to understand the beauty of silence, the value of peace. Remember talking? Not words out loud, but real talking.

The night before I left Virginia I hit “Send” on the email to my publisher which contains the final draft of a book which talks about, in fact, celebrates, that very sense of disconnect, the abandonment of society, the push into the unknown. Early one morning after wandering to the outhouse and then up to the field to see if the moose had returned, I wandered to the lake and walked out on the dock. A soft orange sky spilled just to the top of the mountains, and the water worked from dark black to its normal greens and blues, and I stood alone before the dawn and my mind dislocated itself from time. This could be 1981, I thought, remembering a solid portion of my just-sent book; or it could be 1984 half a world away. It could be 1986 in Pennsylvania, or a year later waist deep in some equatorial river.

It might be years from now or just as easily the Jurassic or Cretaceous periods when dinosaurs tramped about these very hills. I forgot what day it was, and then I forgot how old I was. And then everything fell apart because that happens, things fall apart, but as it turns out that just makes it easier to rebuild from scratch.

I found myself on the dock completely at peace no longer worried about anything. I lay again on the dock as we had the previous night but this time alone and looked up and felt transported in such realistic ways that to describe it here would be to hack my way through this short reflection, but I was transported not to Pennsylvania 1986, not to Senegal or Allegany or the Congo. My entire presence slipped into Great River, New York, nearly fifty years earlier to the very day, and Eddie Radtke must have been somewhere in the woods looking for firewood, and I stared past what must have been the Great South Bay early one morning which he and I had explored daily for a solid wave of our childhood. That’s where my mind went; it reeled northeast about as far as one can, and slipped into 1975.

It was like being back in 1975 at the start of something but this time knowing how to handle it, knowing what to say right and what not to say at all, this time. I had not yet unearthed tennis courts and guitar shops, not yet swallowed the ocean water of the southeast beaches, not yet changed my mind, not yet learned hesitation and self-doubt that befell me just a decade later.

—

I turn sixty-five in two weeks. This year that day is tangled up in so many memories and symbolism, but something is different now than just a few weeks ago, pre-disconnect, if you will.

At one point in the book to be published later this year, I had been working in a bar in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, with no true sense of direction except the absolute conviction that the lack of direction was not working for me. Late one night, early one morning I woke on a bench near a lake in a local State Park with no real recollection as to how I got there. I had not been drinking, no drugs, no overworked exhaustive excuses led me to the familiar shore where I had at one time laughed so hard. No, it was my complete indifference that brought me there. And I sat up and waded into the lake to my waist. When I returned to my home that morning, everything changed; or, better said, I changed everything.

Peace does that. Silence, and the depth of some connection that is difficult to find does that.

I lay on the dock at Spirit Lake and remembered the bench two thousand miles east. I’ve had so many changes this past year, perhaps more than in all my previous years combined, and I thought of Jackson Browne: “Oh God, this is some shape I’m in.” But I recalled not the last twelve months but my long drives into Mexico more than forty years ago when I thought I’d find the answers, or the walk across Spain, or the train across Siberia. All those times I was so at peace, so much in the moment and loving my existence, but I had not been this much at peace with myself and who I am—or, better said, who I need to be—since that morning in the park when I felt some sense of absolute clarity, when on a dime I let everything go, disconnected from absolutely all aspects of thought and commitment and simply let myself be myself as I imagined I was meant to be. And I lay on the dock and thought of Paulo Coelho who wrote, “Maybe it’s about un-becoming everything that isn’t really you, so you can be who you were meant to be in the first place,” and things seemed suddenly obvious.

Thank you clarity.

We packed, we meandered our way four days later though the mountains to the lowlands through a small swatch of Wyoming and back into now, back to suburbia, back to the news—the bombing of Iran, the bombing of Israel, the war in Ukraine, the disarray of Washington, the murder of protestors, the abandonment of morality, the sacrifice of truth—all of it, and I briefly envied those who left—Eddie and Letty, Dan and Dave and Mom and Dad. They have been spared this nonsense.

But, briefly, so was I, by choice. We sat in chairs around the fire and laughed like hell when I accidently burned off the soles of my sneakers, laughed harder when after banging my head several times on the exceptionally low doorframe, returned at one point to find the door jam covered in bubble wrap, laughed at the sudden appearance almost on demand of a family of moose, and laughed at the nature of change, the value of friendship. We too often choose not to step away from it all. Seriously, metaphor warning: If you keep your feet too close to the flames something’s going to burn.

I’m stepping away from the nonsense; life is too short. Six and a half decades down and I’ve already outlived nearly everyone I know, so I suppose it’s “time and time and time again to find another way.”

Periods of Long Ago

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A few days ago I walked out on the 14th Street Pier in Virginia Beach and stopped in Ocean Eddies. It was the dive I would frequent the summers during college. Back then the bar money was kept in a box and the register was a big brown monster. There was no a/c and the windows had to stay open in the oppressively humid night, but the live bands would wake up guests at the hotel I managed next door, so I had a deal with management: I’d not call the cops on him and he quit the music by 1 am, and I’d get free drinks and a burger. Now, almost fifty years later, there is a  deck around the outside, inside has ac, and the food is better. The tide, however, is still just a few feet below the floorboards.

I was nineteen when I got the job at the Sandcastle Hotel at 14th Street on the beach. The owner, Johnny Vakos, and I got along, and the manager, Jack, had a heart attack about a month after I started, so John made me manager. I stayed that way for four summers, May until August, working all shifts, dealing with every character conceivable. Sometimes at night I’d head out to Eddie’s and swap stories with other locals over margaritas. Sometimes when I worked the overnight shift, come morning I’d head up to the seventies past all the hotels and sleep on the beach, and later in the day friends would show up and we’d waste away an afternoon swimming and listening to music. At night we’d all head to Sondra’s Restaurant or the Jewish Mother or Fantastic Fenwick’s Flying Food Factory to listen to my dear (still) friend Jonmark Stone play guitar. But come the following morning I was back at the beach, working the desk, talking to Niki the bike rental girl, bs-ing with guests about where to eat or about the weather or surf conditions. I only have to think about those days and I can smell the salt air.

Something was different this time, like I really won’t be back this time. It happens.

Still, that part of my life stayed in my blood and every once in a while it passes through my heart and becomes real again. We all have periods of long ago like that. For me it’s probably this place because I’ve almost always lived near the ocean, or maybe it’s because our brains and bodies and this planet are all about seventy percent water and I simply feel the tug of the tide. Perhaps I just like the sound of the surf. But I’ve not come upon many places in my travels which simply don’t change. Old neighborhoods seem smaller, the trees suffocate the once open fields, and old hangouts usually have new crowds, or shut down, weeds pushing through parking lot pavement, some windows broken and boarded near the rusted dumpster. Sometimes it’s simply that people pass away, and the reasons for being somewhere pass away with them.

But the ocean and me, well, we go way back. The rest of nature can show signs of change as well. Forests give way to fires, or new growth simply pushes out old oaks changing the landscape; rivers erode at the banks, and while the mountains can retain their majesty, trails and roads can rip small scars across the land, or some new cabin is built whose windows catch the sun and the glare flickers across the valley.

But I can stand on the sand behind the pier and know what i’m going to see. Certainly some days are rougher than others, and in winter a white foam can gather at the break point, but it is the same as it ever has been. The strength of a wave is like no other natural force on earth. Just to stand in the surf waist deep is a lesson in mobility and resistance no physics class could replicate. At some point you give in and fall back or dive forward, and feel that dark, salty, always slightly cool water sweep across every aspect of your body.

And when you look out across the vastness of nothing but blue water, steel blue, metallic greenish slate blue water, you are looking out at exactly what John Smith saw when he first landed a mile and half up the beach four hundred years ago. It is what Powhatan saw, and whatever wandering seaman or viking or ancient civilization saw, exactly the same. Maybe rougher, maybe in the morning perfectly still like glass. Maybe the tide was higher, or so low they could walk out to the scallop beds and pull them up by the load. But it is the same. Exactly.

I can stand here and it might as well be 1979, or ten years earlier and four hundred miles further north, on the beaches of Long Island. It simply makes sense to me. We all need a place to go that makes sense. It was just ten blocks north of here at my son’s tent for a juried art show in 2017 that my mother walked for the last time without assistance; it was just fourteen blocks south at The Inlet House that my dad lived when he first moved to Virginia Beach before buying the house we would all move into four miles west. They’re all gone now, Mom and Dad, the Art Show moved to October, the Inlet House is a parking lot. But this ocean, well, it’s right there keeping my anxiety at bay.

I read once that we all should discover a “third place.” We have home, which comes with it certain responsibilities and routines. We have work with its predictable patterns of give and take. But we need a third place that is neither, that is ours to claim how we want, and gather with friends, or be alone, and let our stresses and expectations dilute in the deluge of “somewhere else.” For many it is a bar, or a coffee shop, or a park or a gym. For me, back then, I thought it was Ocean Eddies where I learned more about people than I ever cared to know. But it wasn’t; it was outside, on the sand, looking out toward Portugal, toward Spain, and Africa. Looking up the coast toward the Island. It’s lonelier now than it ever has been, and maybe I’ll not be back for some time, or ever. But I like knowing it is here. I like that I can depend upon this. I like that I know it is time to leave.

December 17th, 1944

~ aviewfromthiswilderness ~ 1 Comment
The American National Cemetery at Margraten, The Netherlands

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Love.