writing

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

Wait. Loss.

~ aviewfromthiswilderness ~ 2 Comments

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

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

October 2015

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Hey Dad, how are you?”

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

“You’ve been here for four days.”

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

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

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

“It is serious, then?  Tell me.”

“You have pneumonia, Dad.”

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

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

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

April 2025

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It was worth the wait.

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

Soundtrack

~ aviewfromthiswilderness ~ 3 Comments

This will work better if when you come to a song you click the link and listen to it. Please.

I’ve put away all my notes, maps, pictures, and other paraphernalia surrounding the life I led when I was nineteen-years-old. I had much of it hanging on my back for decades as I wrote, rewrote, trashed, rewrote, destroyed, started over, ripped up, burned, buried, and then rewrote one more time my newest book, about when I was that age and spent time with a friend of mine at the time. The book will never be what I wanted it to be, but it is finally about what I had envisioned–it isn’t about him, it’s not even about me. It’s about that hope you carry with you, often blindly, when you are first on your own and you still believe you can do anything.

At the time I listened to a song by Dan Hill which to this day reminds me of him and back then, “If Dreams Had Wings.” I listened to it tonight one more time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NCtI4bJyeyE

I’ve been immersed in music since I’m a child. My mother always had the radio on, and she was always singing. If she didn’t know the words she would make them up, but singing, dancing, that was Mom. I most definitively inherited my love of music from her. Even now I remember the words to nearly every song from my youth, from the late sixties when I was still in single digits through the seventies and right on into the now. So when a song from then comes on the radio–yes, I still listen to the radio so I keep track of memories and stay up to date on what’s new–I not only can sing along, much to the disappointment of those around me, but I can usually tell you exactly where I was and what I was doing when I first heard the music. And I can always associate a person with the song.

Early on was the Beatles (my sister) or teen idols like Bobby Sherman (my sister) or British invaders like Herman’s Hermits and the Dave Clark Five (my brother). But when we moved further out on the Island and I spent most of my time in nature along the Great South Bay, the music changed with the landscape. It was John Denver most of the time, and later when hiking with my friend Eddie through the trails it was anything by Neil Diamond or Harry Chapin and the Fab Four. When I hear “The Long and Winding Road” I think of Eddie. The Beatles had just broken up and we sang that one to death.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fR4HjTH_fTM

Then I learned guitar. That, combined with a move south and new friendships, most notably to my still-dear friend, musician Jonmark Stone, considerably expanded my knowledge of music. We had the same taste in writers and performers, but he knew of people I hadn’t heard of. When I went to college with my guitar, I brought along John and Neil, but also Dan Fogelberg and Dylan, CSN and Dan Hill, and in a way, Jonmark.

http://jm@jonmarkstone.com/mp3/people.mp3

Music takes me right to places he played back in Virginia Beach, right to Eddie’s side, right to Mom in the kitchen as she made dinner and sang something nonsensical to make me laugh. It always worked.

Over time we formulate a soundtrack that transports us to a particular person or place, and especially a unique time. Obviously, environment is everything with this; I know the lyrics to a slew of songs from the forties and fifties because of my mom, and while I was too young to catch most of the sixties folk music the first time through, my sister’s interest fell squarely on my shoulders, as did quite literally her guitar.

Unfortunately, music can blindside us when we least want it to. I am having trouble listening to some particular songs because of association. Dan Hill destroyed me tonight. It has all been too much. But other songs are currently banned as well. I can’t deal with “The Waters of March” (Letty) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sa2kuAYOpBE, “Bookends” (Dave S) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sovVYInjHjw&list=RDsovVYInjHjw&start_radio=1, “Singing Skies and Dancing Waters” (Fr Dan Riley) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H014dRyG3uU&list=RDH014dRyG3uU&start_radio=1, or “Beautiful Boy” (Cole) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1BZkYfqa4Fs&list=RD1BZkYfqa4Fs&start_radio=1 because life really is what happens when you’re busy making other plans.

I have shelved a few of my favorites, including “For A Dancer” (Roberta) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQPvdCWZWzE&list=RDBQPvdCWZWzE&start_radio=1, “Dust in the Wind” (Dave W) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tH2w6Oxx0kQ&list=RDtH2w6Oxx0kQ&start_radio=1, and “Sky Blue and Black” (Joe) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZaT04YFgAIY&list=RDZaT04YFgAIY&start_radio=1

Because sometimes I still look for people I love who are gone, and I needn’t turn any further than a song.

You’re the color of the sky
Reflected in each store-front window pane
You’re the whispering and the sighing of my tires in the rain

You’re the hidden cost and the thing that’s lost
In everything I do
Yeah and I’ll never stop looking for you
In the sunlight and the shadows

And the faces on the avenue
That’s the way love is

There is hope, luckily. Not all music reminds me of dead people. Some music reminds me of now, of the people who have been in my life forever and still are. Like “Along the Road” (Sean) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ywx6CIw3RIA&list=RDywx6CIw3RIA&start_radio=1, and most significantly, “House at Pooh Corner” (Michael) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hH8MzXPK29A.

And because there are some friends who go and then come back as if they had never left to begin with, just like there are memories which go and come back as if I am young again, standing in the kitchen watching my mom dance to some tune on the radio, because my life is riddled with repeats and reappearances, the one song which seems to define it all is “Circle.” Some music I can’t listen to much anymore. It is too real or too recent. But Harry reminds me, as music has always reminded me, that “we’ll all be together again.”

Honestly, if you’ve skipped all the other tunes until now, at the very least listen to this one:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fW0vjZiu_rw&list=RDfW0vjZiu_rw&start_radio=1

No straight lines make up my life;
And all my roads have bends;
There’s no clear-cut beginnings;
And so far no dead-ends.

Out Like a Lamb

~ aviewfromthiswilderness ~ Leave a comment

“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.

The Rain that Day

~ aviewfromthiswilderness ~ 2 Comments

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

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

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

What is it about the rain? 

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

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

“The beauty of the rain is how it falls”

–Dar Williams

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

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

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

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

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

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

–Bob Marley

Speechless

~ aviewfromthiswilderness ~ 1 Comment

Some years ago while working at a different college, I wrote this essay loosely ripping off an essay by Tim O’Brien. I’m not ashamed. I found it recently and thought about how I still neglect to complete the very assignment I encouraged my students to complete as often as possible. . Something needs to change.

What Have We Learned

Older students are better than those just out of high school. The big dude with the pierced face and tattooed eyelids is probably a great writer. Many students would rather pull a lower grade than have a professor look at a rough draft. Students who take copious notes don’t always fair as well as students who just listen intently. If it happened before they were born, it really doesn’t have any affect on them and therefore they shouldn’t be required to learn about it.

Hamlet is boring; Oedipus is stupid; statistics is tedious; bio lab is too long; developmental classes are a waste of money; introduction to literature is a waste of time; history is not relevant; philosophy has no practical application; psychology is disturbing and the instructors are disturbed; text messages are read more than text books; face to face communication is obsolete; and the only source of information is the internet.

Here’s the great irony of education: While we should become smarter as time goes by because we’ve been given the answers through the centuries, watched the lessons played out on the battlefields and in seminar rooms, we’re actually ignoring more, learning less, and not really keeping tabs of our decline.

Maybe if I text my lectures they’ll pay attention. Phones go off in class, in the hallways, in their backpacks. They reach in to quickly shut it off because they “forgot it was on,” and spilling out onto the floor are the books they need, a few small notebooks, and various articles of clothing. They carry more in their bags then in their minds. 

The science and math books are ten-pounders, and the anthologies aren’t lightweights either. For lab they need their lab equipment, gloves, goggles, special notebooks, dead animals. Rough drafts, final copies, required journals, various books read besides the textbook, art supplies, tape decks, language discs, keys, wallets, games and personal items. Some have staplers, toothbrushes, condoms, aspirin, medicine bottles, and hand soap. Some carry crayons and cookies because their kids come to class sometimes when elementary school is out or cancelled, or when the kid is sick but the Prof told the parent if she missed one more day she’d fail the course. They carry medicine for those kids, bi-polar, attention-deficit, hyperactive. They carry the same for themselves, medicine for their own ADD, ADHD, OCD, diabetes and manic-depression. They carry a lot. They need to remember when papers are due, when tests are scheduled, including their math tests, their physics test, algebra, pregnancy, special needs tests, mammograms, CT scans, and various other tests they’ve got on their mind and written down in their notebooks at the bottom of their parcel.

They carry cell phones with various rings, various friends calling during class, right before class. They have small machines attached to their ear so they can remotely answer the phone without having to move their arms or lift their hands. They have the numbers of everyone they know automatically programmed in. They no longer have to walk to see anyone, walk to find a phone, remember any numbers, lift their arms, or turn their heads.

Once someone’s phone vibrated during class. The vibration on the desk was as loud as a ring, but she politely excused herself. Some professors insist the phones be off during class, and they won’t even allow them to be turned to vibrate. But this student came back in and said she was sorry and that she had to go, that was her babysitter calling and someone from her husband’s command post was at her house waiting for her to come home. A week later I discovered her husband had been blown up at a roadside bombing on the airport road from Baghdad. Another student’s brother was on television. He worked for Blackwater in Baghdad and she watched her brother’s charred body swing from a bridge in Iraq.

One student shot himself in the head because he thought the paper was due and he thought his medicine wasn’t. True story. A colleague of mine listened quietly one day to a near-suicidal student explain why her paper was late and how her daughter was going through depression and they were bringing her to the doctor to see what was wrong, and it weighed so heavily on her mind that she couldn’t really concentrate on the paper and would the professor mind the paper turned in a few days late, and she agreed. Students knew this about her—she would work with anyone. A few days later my colleague hung herself in her kitchen because her medicine was fucked up.

This is the American Community College. These are the trenches, in the city; some of these students come to get ahead, knock off some basic education classes before transferring and paying more at the university. But some come here instead of jail, or to bide their time, or to hang with old friends and maybe hook up with new ones. Some come to keep off the streets; it can get dangerous these days. But some of these students come from real war-torn areas. My student Deng walked across Somalia to Ethiopia twice looking for safety. Before he found it at ten-years-old in a Red Cross camp, he was given an automatic rifle and taught to kill. Now he tries to write about gun control and crime in seven hundred words, making sure the grammar is right. His mother was raped and hacked to death in front of his eyes. His father “disappeared.” He was a Lost Boy. Sometimes he didn’t concentrate. Yeah, okay, sometimes he didn’t pay attention. But when he came to my office we talked about politics and survival. We talked about Africa and faith. We talked about ideas, and he told me Chinua Achebe knows Africa. He told me how Sartre would not be popular in Somalia but Descartes would. He knew the differences, understood the gentle nuances that separate philosophy and politics. I didn’t ask about his scars. He didn’t ask about mine. Deng came here with an education the likes of which we can’t possibly conceive. He told me he as soon as he found the camp he knew he needed to leave. I said I understood. He said it was too much, and he wanted to die so badly and that’s when he knew he just had to get out. I didn’t answer. I had nothing left to say to him.

What I know now is this: all the lectures in all the classrooms from all the professors in the world will not prepare us to be anything of value if we don’t find any value in what we do and how we live our lives.

Of course we would all do things differently; even just a few small moments. I’d never have left Massachusetts. I’d have gone to Monterrey anyway. I would have passed on the Trout in Prague, the oysters in Asheville. When I left Tucson that last time I’d have headed west instead of back east.

We are always in pursuit of ourselves, aren’t we? Even if we don’t consciously consider such notions day to day. In class one morning I asked my students if there was anything they would have done differently in their short but tech-dominated past. They all laughed and had answers that ranged from staying off-line to trying harder in high school to treating a loved one better while she had the chance. They talked for a bit; they got quiet. They thought a while. And I added this: What are you doing now that five years from now you will wish you had done differently?

They looked at me for a moment with just a little confusion and some wonder about their future, and they waited for me to talk.

But honestly, I have nothing left to say.

May 23, 1925-October 21, 2015

~ aviewfromthiswilderness ~ 3 Comments

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

12063306_10207030426106557_3199067376729529480_n

Instructions for Walking with an Old Man at the Mall

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

12143183_10207071237766823_459922957598238343_n

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 Shed

~ aviewfromthiswilderness ~ Leave a comment

The Shed was twenty-feet deep by eight feet wide, with two windows, two lofts, double doors, and sturdy enough to withstand everything except Hurricane Isabel.

Of course, I bought the shed to hold supplies when I was building the house. Before I started, when I had first cleared the small portion of the property for the home, I had this shed delivered figuring I might need to sleep in during bad weather while up here for three of four days in a row seventy-five miles from the place in Virginia Beach. Michael and I went together to the shed place in Virginia Beach. Some guy paid for it but never picked it up so I bought it brand new for a song and the father and son team I bought it from delivered it seventy-five miles, across the Hampton Roads Bridge Tunnel, across the still-narrow Coleman Bridge, the Piankatank bridge, and down my winding driveway through the woods—for twenty-five dollars. I also bought them lunch.

It didn’t take long, as it tends not to take, to have stories to tell from the shed.

Back in ’99 we had fifteen inches of rain in two days and the water ran from the river side of the property down to the woods beyond the shed. I had the shed leveled off the ground by about eight inches on blocks, so the water rushed toward the door but instead dug crevices under the shed. The shed, miraculously was dry, but impossible to get to.

Isabel didn’t do a thing to the shed, but she knocked down thirty oak trees here at Aerie, and one of them lingered for weeks right above the shed. I knew it had to come down but this was a job I couldn’t pull off myself. Scavengers wanted more than fifteen thousand dollars to clear the fallen trees, so I said I’d do them myself, which I did, but I was afraid to cut the half-fallen tree in fear it would crush the shed. Instead, another storm just a few months later cracked the trunk and it crushed the back half of the shed for me. I remembering thinking, “Hell, I could have done that.”

So in the lemonade tradition, I made the back half into a greenhouse with plastic sheets for the roof, but it didn’t really work, and over time the mold and mildew and various snakes and wood rot got the best of The Shed. It took about twenty-seven years.

One time early when Michael was about five, we played hide and seek as we often did, and I ran in the shed while he was still too far away to follow me right in, but he could see me. I then climbed out the back window and settled behind the back wall. I heard him come in the shed and was quiet for a minute then said, to no one in particular, “Holy Cow, How did he do that? Daddy?”

I remember how we laughed.

We built things with wood and made signs and birdhouses. None of them were well done but they were all perfect. Occasionally we’d take a break and play “Voices.” That is, we’d recreate “Wind in the Willows,” and I was the voice of most of the characters—Badger, Toad, Moley, even the stoats.

And we kept the sporting equipment in there and played frisbee, football, golf, and ring toss, which we still do nearly thirty years later when outside barbequing.

The bikes he kept in the shed got bigger, and the toys were relegated to the loft while more accessible spaces were reserved for tools, chemistry sets, then inflatable kayaks and eventually equipment to hold his art supplies and frames.

When he was little, he would tie me up in a chair with a lasso his uncle sent him from Texas, and he kept lizards and frogs in tanks until he couldn’t feed them anymore and would let them go behind the shed, in the woods.

He kept buckets of fake snakes and lizards in there when he was young, and when the roof collapsed and water raged in, it carried the rubber reptiles out the door and under the shed. The next day I spent an hour reaching under the shed and pulling out the toys, until one reach pulled out amongst the fake snakes a real one with red and yellow and black, and I forgot the rhyme about poisonous snakes so I just threw everything as far as I could.

There were other days like that.

But there’s a hole out there tonight. And Michael is in Ireland, far from the fallen shed. It had to come down. I had to do it now or we’d be still out in the still standing shed telling stories.

I destroyed the last of it a few hours ago, and I rested on the nearby patio remembering the times we shared for his entire life, and the talks we had—so many talks we had safe in the shed, just the two of us, about growing up and traveling and things that frustrated us, and things we were scared of. Out in the country like this along the bay when a father and son go into the shed, usually it is for some form of punishment, “a whooping” as they say. Well I never had a reason to punish Michael; but we did have plans to make, so out to the shed we’d go, and he’d make notes on wood with a nail, and we’d plan adventures like training across Siberia or walking across Spain.

We kept tools in that shed, and mowers, bikes, grills, and more. And memories filled the spaces between everything else. We let a lot of memories occupy that space.

Funny though. I sat out there today when I had finished knocking it down and thought about the next week or so during which I will haul away the remnants, clean up the ground, lay down some field stones and mulch in front of a much smaller, new shed, put a few chairs and a small table there, and I tried to imagine the new way it will be, and it made me a bit sad, of course, but excited for a new place to talk. But lingering a bit in the hot afternoon air was the sound of ten-year-old Michael playing his harmonica and the distant hint of his unchanged voice asking if I want to play hide and seek.

There are some things that shed kept safe for us I’ll never be able to destroy.    

Now:

Next: