This piece was originally written for the Jewish Mother Sessions with Tim Seibles, and then published in several journals and the collection Fragments: Flash non-Fiction. It has since been anthologized twice. It crawled out of one of my thumb drives this afternoon.
A
BCDEFGHIJK
LMNOP
QRSTUVWXY
Z
26 letters.
That’s it.
In the beginning. That which doesn’t kill us makes us stronger. To be or not to be—that one just six letters. Jesus wept—seven.
I can’t write, my students say; my mother said; my very own demons say when something needs to be said but I’m at a loss of words. The history of English has turned and spun back on itself, argued with endings and double negatives, trampled meaning, treasured nuances, made murderers of us all, and unearthed muses to slipknot a string of letters, tie together thoughts like popcorn for a Christmas tree, individual kernels only able to dangle dutifully due to one common thread.
I do. Rest in Peace. Go to Hell. I quit. Fuck you. I love you—7 letters.
The English language, more specifically the alphabet, was not alphabetical at first, made that way in the 1300’s on Syria’s northern coast. Today, we slaughter its beauty with a cacophony of sounds whose aesthetic value is lost in translation while simultaneously softening hardened hearts with poetry and prose for the ages. For nearly a millennium this alphabet whose letters lay the way for understanding in multiple languages, has dictated decrees, is uttered by infants one syllable at a time until by age five they’ve mastered the twenty six consonants and vowels. What circles of wonder are children’s faces when someone’s tongue pushes out “toy” “treat” “your mommy’s here” “your daddy’s home.”
Plato said, “Wise men talk because they have something to say, fools because they have to say something”; Socrates said, “False words are not only evil in themselves, but they infect the soul with evil.” The sins of our fathers forever condemn us to hell but for confession, penance, and absolution.
Forgive me father for I have sinned—14 letters.
Of all the languages on the planet, English has the largest vocabulary at more than 800,000 words, all from those same 26 symbols.
There are roughly forty five thousand spoken languages in the world, about 4500 written today but almost half of them are spoken by less than a thousand people. English, though, is the most common second language on Earth—translate or original, the Magna Carter, The Declaration, The Bible, the Koran, the Torah, the tablets tossed by Moses and a death certificate all reassembled versions of the twenty-six.
I have a dream—eight letters.
Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country—fourteen.
We the People–seven
Teeter-totter, gummy, Mississippi, and Utah—four.
Billowy is one of only a few seven letter words whose six letters remain alphabetical. Spoon-feed is the longest, at nine letters, whose seven letters are reverse-alphabetical.
We can talk, us English. We can spin a yarn, chew the fat, beat the gums, flap the lips. We have the gift of gab, we run off with the mouth, we can spit it out, shoot the breeze, talk someone’s ears off, or just talk shop, talk turkey, talk until we’re blue in the face, be the talk of the town. We can, for certain, at just seven letters, bullshit.
My point (7 letters) is that (3 letters) sometimes, despite our skills (4 letters) with the English language (6 letters), we are often left, at just six letters, speechless.
Like in the lobby that day.
You texted me well less than 160 characters, which is the alphabet 6.1 times, that you were in the lobby. I stood, lost, staring at strangers, until one more text; seven letters long—turn around.
I had aged twenty three years, you not one. The sun settled through lace curtains and bathed your face, your hair, your smile, my God your smile, and when you saw me, you leaned forward just enough like you used to when we laughed at some private joke, and there, for the first time, I knew I knew nothing about language, that Shakespeare, Keats, Wordsworth, would be worth nothing to me had they been muses in my mind feeding me phrases to capture what I saw when I saw you. There are no words. No language has been invented to allow me enough expression that others can read how I felt, how every moment returned, every hope, every single possibility, the innocence, the honesty, the complete oneness of two. No. It has never, can never be captured with twenty six times twenty six letters.
It isn’t love, exactly, and perhaps some symphonic phrase might come closer then the limitations of language. This is the frustration of poets, the complete sense of ineptitude of writers and lovers throughout history. To define that smile, the slight lean forward, that light through laced curtains at just that moment all those years later. We can’t impose such limitations.
We say hello. We say soon after, perhaps, so long.
We don’t get up early enough. We don’t play with the kids enough. We don’t walk on the grass enough, we worry too much about losing. We don’t throw the ball enough, hike through the woods, climb the low trees, eat fruit off the vine, go for a drive. We don’t tell enough stories, listen to records, dance for no reason at all. We don’t call old friends who are hard to find, aunts and uncles who made us laugh, stay longer with our parents talking about the times we had, talking about the rain. We don’t journey enough to places close by, we don’t find beauty in what there is plenty of, we don’t appreciate what is common, we don’t celebrate what is in our grasp. We’ve lost the art of contemplation, of solitude, of fasting, of quiet walks. We forget the world exists in each step, the saints and martyrs, philosophers and missionaries walk with us, whisper about the temporal state of life, the immortal flight of a bird. Life is the way we sit around and laugh until two. Life is the feet on the coffee table, the tie undone, the kids asleep in their beds. Life is the sound of water in a pool, the sound of tea poured into china cups, the sound of distant thunder at dusk. Life is unwrapped gifts, cards in the mail, the smell of bacon on Sunday morning; drinking beer with friends on Friday night, the first cold day in autumn we need to wear a sweater, life is the spring grass showing beneath the melting snow. It’s the mother in the door waving to her youngest child moving away. It’s the father at the observation deck waving to his son on the plane. It’s the letting go of small hands; it’s the giving away of the bride, it’s the days that pass without a phone call.
Life is the distance between a falling leaf and the ground.
Michael texted from Spain a few days ago. He was boarding a train. I don’t know where he was going, and I’m pretty sure he didn’t either. I don’t know where he gets it from. The empanada doesn’t fall far from the oven.
**
Mark Z is in a hearing and META is being sued by hundreds of parents across many cases because FB and Instagram might be “dangerously addicting,” with bad influence on their tweens, including suicide. Question: Where the hell were the parents when the kids were nose deep in tech? Why aren’t parents of fat kids suing Hershey’s? Why aren’t the parents of wired kids with enlarged hearts suing Red Bull or Monster? Why aren’t the parents reading to their kids when they’re toddlers and teaching them the value of imagination? Why aren’t they instilling in them the value of life and individuality? Oh, that’s right, they’re on Facebook talking about who they saw at their college reunion.
**
Three months ago on Facebook I said Trump is not interested entirely in Venezuela as an endgame, that it was solely a means to and end, that he wants Cuba. Yesterday they announced their support of the current interim president in Venezuela, and it won’t be long before a deal is cut to get their oil at rock bottom prices. Meanwhile, no fuel or food has entered Cuba and they are quite literally dying, with no tourism, not business, no nothing. But wait, “we” can save them. Putin doesn’t care; especially if in exchange djt backs off his barely-there-anyway support of Ukraine. I think djt and the hotel side of his life has been Havana Daydreaming for quite some time.
**
I now have about forty pounds of Hershey’s chocolate. I use the cup holder on the treadmill at the Y to hold the wrappers.
**
Michael is now in Prague. I told him about the strudel; he told me about the Pilsner.
**
Ilia Malinin came in eighth place, falling twice in his free skate. Good. Here’s why: I support the US team, of course, but not his outrageous ego. He is the self-proclaimed “quad God,” and in one interview before the games he wondered not in any joking way why anyone questions his excellence. He dropped to eighth place; hopefully he dropped his ego as well.
**
Conversation a few days ago at Big Johns, a convenience store about twenty miles from here:
Guy eating chicken (I kind of know him so I felt comfortable responding) : “It’s those fucking Antifa’s. They can all fuck themselves.”
Me (I stopped eating all meat, including chicken, but that’s neither here nor there): “Holy Crap! You support Hitler! Stalin!!”
Guy: Fuck no! (laughs) Hell, no I don’t support them!!
Me: But…but…they’re fascists!!
Guy: Damn right they are!
Me: So you’re against them and people like them?!
Guy: Damn right, Bob! What the fuck?
Me: So then you’re against those fascists???
Guy: Yeah (chicken spray).
Me: You’re…you’re Anti Fascist! Antifa!
Guy: Not the same thing! (silent) Is that what Antifa means?
Me: Yes.
Guy: Fuck, I thought it was the name of some radical anti-Trump group!!!
Me: Well, yeah, it is.
**
When the fog starts to lift but is still in the trees and resting above the pond and river, my mind is focused and everything in my life seems clear and obvious. We need nature to clarify that which is muddled by cinderblock and drywall. We need nature to remind us to breathe.
**
The last thing Dave texted to me was “And we’ll all be together again.”
The last thing Fr. Dan said to me was “I’ll call you tomorrow night, Bobby.”
The last thing Letty said to me was “I love you, Bawb. Look for me with the birds on the porch rail.”
The last thing my mom said to me was “I’m so confused.”
The last thing my dad said to me was “What hotel am I in? HA! Hotel! I wish I was at a hotel! What hospital am I in?”
The last thing Eddie said to me was “I’ll call you this weekend.”
The last thing Cole said to me was “I hope your journey on this earth reveals itself to you.”
So now I wonder on a daily basis what the last thing I say to someone is. I’d hate for it to be something negative or down, something benign or flippant. Despite my Roy Kent tendencies, I’m determined to keep Ted Lasso in mind when I’m with others, especially when I leave others.
The last thing I say to most people is “see you soon,” or “talk later.” That’s normal I suppose, and somewhat hopeful and mostly about right.
I’d like to peel away the layers I’ve adopted over the course of decades. I’d love to let go of tethers, let the twirling plates drop to the ground and shatter. When we were in Spain, I discovered how wealthy I felt when I had just what I carried across the Pyrenees. And when we were at Spirit Lake, I learned quickly how much more at peace I am and remain when the distractions are three thousand miles east. And when I was sitting around a camp fire in eastern Senegal with no water, no news, no electricity, not anything different over the course of a hundred years, the conversation never ran dry, the laughter always pure and honest, and the stars—oh, wow, the stars—I lay on my back at night and drifted in the saturated sky for hours.
I find myself in less need now of most things than I ever have before. I’m going to spend more time in nature, in Oregon, in the Catskills, in France. In Ireland and Alaska. I want to listen to the earth as she was meant to be heard, not through the filters of inventions and progress.
It’s raining tonight, finally warm enough to not snow or sleet, but cool enough to know it’s winter. The drops on the skylight above my head soothe me like they do when they do so on a tent when I am inside resting and the world is raining. There is something magical about how being in the wilderness can keep my attention, and Muir is right when he wrote that the clearest way to the universe is through a forest wilderness. Still, it’s taken me some time to understand why: it is absolute presence. I am wholly in the moment, the rain, the cool temperature and the sound of the rain and often geese in the distance looking for a field or pond just at the bottom of the hill.
Nature knows nothing except now. I sit at this desk and everything in this room has ties to back when. Mementos of travels, piles of unfinished work, guitars and a few bins of items from autumn or Christmas I’ve not yet put in the attic. It is the same anywhere in the house, with songlines running right through to some other where or when. But the minute I step outside and gaze deep into the woods or walk the hill to the river and look out across the bay, nothing exists but now in that nature, and I am completely aware of the air, the sounds, the conditions on the water and the cloud cover. And Zhuangzi’s note that “the sound of water says what I think” is present and true. There is nothing else like the sound of water in nature, rain, rivers, small creeks which have carved around and through rocks since before humans created the notion of earlier and later, created the beasts known as before and after, created the disabling “remember when we” and “why don’t we.” Cities and towns are linked always to others and plans and histories. Even at events people sit and talk about other places, different times.
But in nature, in the mountains out west or the porch out front, I can sit and listen to the rain and slow my pulse to something primitive, something organic, and I can dial up Emerson who suggested we adopt “the pace of nature; her secret is patience.”
No, I’ve had no mushrooms tonight, no Rioja or Malibu. Maybe a little. But no, my awareness tonight is from the rain, and I know Dar Williams’ comments “The beauty of the rain is how it falls” brings me closer to why I’ve managed to suspend the passing of time, for now, anyway.
Portions of this piece originally ran in Ilanot Review as “I Knew Two Men,” and it has subsequently appeared in several journals, including a publication honoring the late Arnost Lustig.
My son is leaving for Prague in a few days and this is on my mind.
Prague Adaptation
Arnost Lustig and I drank pilsner at the Golden Tiger in Prague. A large man in a white smock served our fourth pint when I asked about Hrabal. “You knew him, then,” I said.
***
“Yes, of course. We all knew him. The writers, the musicians, we all knew each other.” Arnost leaned forward. “Prague’s not that big, you know,” he said and laughed.
Arnost was a burly man who wore a leather coat and carried a satchel. We sat one table down from where Bohumil Hrabal, the great Czech writer, once drank. Hrabal came here to enjoy his beer and tell stories which ended up as classic works of European literature, such as I Served the King of England and Too Loud a Solitude.
“He came to Washington and stayed in my flat once,” Arnost added.
After a while I mentioned Hrabal’s death.
“Okay, then, let me ask you,” I leaned into him so the gatherings of Czech men at this mostly hidden pub couldn’t hear. “Do you think he fell out of that window like the nurse reported, or did he jump?”
Arnost leaned back and laughed. “Ah! Such mysteries we can’t answer! How we all love unanswerable questions!”
“She said he was feeding the pigeons. At a hospital? Come on!”
Arnost smiled at me while ignoring my comment and continued to talk while he said hello to some patrons. Everyone knew this man. “So yesterday you went with Jan to Terezin. Tell me about it.”
The day before I had walked about the Terezin Ghetto with Jan Weiner, a colleague of ours. Unlike Arnost, Jan was a stern man with a straight back and fine combed hair. He was calculating. He didn’t turn his head to talk but his entire body instead, like a soldier always at attention. He was very proud of himself, and every conversation somehow reeled back to his accomplishments during the war. To be certain, he deserved the praise, albeit mostly self-inflicted these days.
Arnost shook a stranger’s hand then nodded to me. “Did you sit on the cot?”
We sat on the cot.
Terezin is actually the so-called “town Hitler gave to the Jews,” for its use in successfully teasing the International Red Cross into believing the Nazis had set up the Jews well in small towns of their own. An adjacent eighteenth-century small fortress, used as a political prison for anti-Nazi protesters, is where Jan and I spent the morning, walking about the museum. Arnost knows Terezin well: he spent nearly three years there interned during his teens. He worked the rails that would bring him and his family to Auschwitz where his father was immediately gassed. On a transport to Dachau, the allies bombed the train and Arnost took advantage of the confused guards and escaped into literary history, writing countless bestsellers about the Holocaust and Terezin, all wrapped in the folds of unrequited love and the romance of war, despite its genocide. Diamonds in the Night, Night and Hope, and Darkness Casts No Shadow all remain staples of Holocaust literature.
So Jan and I walked into the women’s quarters at the Small Fortress, a compound really, and he showed me what one of the small cells looks like. We sat on a cot and he said, “Here, my mother was a prisoner. Right here.” He stroked the rusty metal and sat straight, stern, and oddly proud. “They tortured her for several days in every way imaginable before they killed her.” We walked about for an hour or so, and outside the compound he sat on a wall and ate a sandwich.
On the way back to Prague he told me that during the war his family took care of two young girls. Their parents had traveled to Africa as missionaries and were to return for them but the Nazis took over during the interim. “Those girls were gassed,” he said, then explained how soon after this his own father and step-mother killed themselves in their apartment in front of Jan. That’s when instead of giving up he escaped on a train south to Italy where he was imprisoned, only to escape to England. There he joined the Royal Air Force and flew bombing missions that helped turn the war. This was a real hero. Before we got off the bus in Prague we shook hands and he said, “I don’t believe in God.”
“Okay. I get it,” I said.
“No God could exist in a world like this,” he added.
“Okay.”
Arnost smiled and said, “Jan is always trying to convince himself of something. It makes him feel better about life.” He nodded toward a relief of Hrabal on the wall above the next table. “What do you think, Bob? Do you think you know what happened?”
Here’s what I knew:
Hrabal died when he fell from the fifth floor window of the Bulovka Hospital in Prague while leaning out trying to feed pigeons. He also lived on the fifth floor of his apartment building, which itself is uninteresting except for his fascination with fifth-floor suicides. He dreamt of his own death from that height. He would lean out the fifth-floor window of his flat to gaze up at the sky above St. Giles, and he would often walk down to the Maison Oppelt, where Franz Kafka once wanted to jump from the fifth floor.
I knew he sat here, six feet from where I drank my fourth pilsner with Arnost. They spent a weekend together in DC drinking beer and watching Charlie Chaplin films, right after Susan Sontag wrote in the New York Times that Hrabal’s Too Loud a Solitude would be “one of the twenty books that would shape literature in the twentieth century.” I asked Sontag once about Hrabal with whom she had laughed and drunk in New York City, and Susan said to me, sober as can be, that if I could only read the writing of one person let it be Hrabal.
And I knew that his devotion to his wife, whom he called Pipsi, was so complete that after her long, drawn-out death, he wanted to jump from their fifth floor window. “Every room in the apartment hurts,” he wrote, and every time he thought of jumping from that fifth floor he said his guardian angel pulled him back because the angel wanted him to “remain as yet. But I’ve felt like it.” Just like Kafka, Hrabal noted, who had also been “hurt by the world,” he supposed. Kafka didn’t jump from the fifth floor of the Maison Oppelt onto Paris Avenue, as he desired. I knew Hrabal was fascinated that, ironically, Rilke’s Malte Brigge tried to jump from another fifth floor in Paris.
And I supposed it was all too poetic for Hrabal to bear, like his beloved poet Biebl who jumped from a window to die only after asking a painter to create a canvas of a man falling backwards out of a window. So Hrabal’s routine included what he called “morning suicidal, work until midday, lunch, bus ride, back to the pub.”
This pub where one beer after another would fall backwards into his round and grateful stomach, and he’d listen to these very same men in this very same Golden Tiger talk, feeding him what he called “morsels of life,” which he’d store away and use later in his work.
Including Too Loud a Solitude, his very last work before his unfortunate fifth-story pigeon-feeding plunge. Too Loud a Solitude, where at the end the protagonist climbs into the trash compactor he ran for thirty five years beneath the streets of Prague and compacts himself, saying, “I will follow Seneca. I will follow Socrates, and here, in my press, in my cellar, choose my own fall, which is ascension.”
I thought perhaps Hrabal chose his own fall.
That’s what I knew. I stared through Arnost’s large glasses into his engaging eyes, which have witnessed what no human should, but who took those experiences and excised them through his enchanting and haunting prose. Jan never let go of what happened, whereas Arnost took what happened and gave it back to the world in bestsellers, some of which had been made into films. By 2003 he was so respected in Prague that his good friend, playwright and President Vaclav Havel, gave him high honors and an apartment in the Castle, yet his eyes looked the same as they did in the rare pre-war photos of him with his parents and sister.
“What do you think, Bob?”
I listened to the old men who sat at picnic tables which lined the pub walls and wondered if Arnost listened to what they said. Did he store away morsels of life for use in one of his works? What were these men saying that Hrabal might have half listened to and molded into prose the way only he knew how while beers tumbled all afternoon?
This was in 2000. Hrabal fed his pigeons only a few years earlier. These may in fact be the same men.
I nodded at Arnost. “I read once that he could recite whole chapters from books without missing a word,” I said. Arnost laughed and agreed he had heard the same thing and noted Hrabal to be one of the most intelligent men he’d ever known.
I stared at the room full of Czech men. “There’s really no way for someone like that to make a graceful exit, is there?”
Again Arnost laughed. “Nothing poetic enough you don’t think?” He thought for a moment, always searching for a better way to phrase his words. “Maybe nothing more poetic?” he added. “You know sometimes it is best not to know too much, don’t you agree?”
I knew Arnost enough to know that “don’t you agree” was rhetorical.
We didn’t order, but the large man in the white smock brought two more beers, marked them on a white slip of paper on the table, and walked away. After a while we toasted toward the relief of Hrabal on the wall.
“Okay,” I said. “Here’s what I think: He wrote that if God really loved him, he’d just drop dead over a beer at the Golden Tiger.” We laughed hard and Arnost raised his eyebrows, nodded slowly, and finished his drink. “Finish up,” he said. “I have to lecture in thirty minutes or so.”
It was a time of extremes. I drank in every morsel of life from the minds of men who cracked open history and edited the outcome. It was a time to speak of the tragic haunting of dead relatives and the mystical power of words. One man finds romance in the crumbling memories of internment, and the other loses faith in God. Sometimes soldiers, whether fighter pilots or writers, dilute death and inhumanity with beer, while others drink to celebrate what’s left.
Sometimes they spend a weekend watching Chaplin films and talk about home and how it was before before the Nazis and the Communists cared about Prague, the trashing of books, the elimination of a race, the fatal tumblings of souls.
Later that night I left the university alone and went to the hospital on my way back to my apartment. I stopped and stared, counting floors to five, and wondered what Hrabal would have written about next. He was in his early eighties when he died; there was still plenty of time. I left, but turned back briefly and gazed at the façade for a few minutes.
I didn’t see a single pigeon anywhere.
About a week later, I returned to Terezine with Arnost and a friend of his, Academy Award winning filmmaker, Milos Foreman. On that particular day in 2000 Arnost needed to talk to Milos who wanted to make a movie based upon Arnost’s book The Unloved. He made beautiful movies like One Flew Over the Cockoo’s Nest, Man on the Moon, Heartburn, and others including my favorite, Amadeus. At some point on that cool afternoon between conversations about the horrific ghetto museum of Terezin and the prison for anti-Nazi protesters, the Small Fortress, I ended up having a conversation with Milos about adaptation. He discovered that subject matter to be the focus of my lectures at the university. It seems the theme of my entire time in Prague that year was Adaptation.
“So we agree then,” he said to me. He was much younger than Arnost with the same controlling conversational style.
“Yes,” I said, “Of course. It is always frustrating when people say how much more they like the book, or do any form of comparison at all. They are completely separate art forms.”
“Exactly! I can’t film all of a book!”
We talked further about our common concern on the subject of movies based upon a novel or play, and we reiterated the inability of people to see movies and books they are based upon as separate. Yet we also agreed on the difficult task of expecting anything else of the average person at a movie on a Saturday afternoon.
Eventually, of course, the talk turned to his work.
“Yes,” I said. “I’ve taught both “Cockoo’s Nest” as well as Amadeus, and I did read Kesey’s book as well as Shaffer’s play, which I first saw when I was in college.”
“Well?”
“Both times you nailed it. From Kesey’s novel you kept the major themes which worked and consolidated what needed to be. In Amadeus you made music the central theme of the movie instead of the ridiculous “mystery” between Mozart and Salieri. I still enjoy watching both films and teaching them. Oh, and Amadeus has the BEST cut in movies, when Mozart is in bed and Salieri finally hands him the completed “Requiem,” and Mozart says, “Okay, from the beginning,” and we hear an entire orchestra for the first time as his wife’s horse and carriage come into view. Love that scene.”
Milos indicated it was hard to miss with such material and brilliant film editors, but I appealed. He was a great director.
Then he mentioned Ragtime.
When I was young my father bought me E.L Doctorow’s book. I loved it and read if several times. I loved how it swept across decades and included some major historical figures such as Houdini. But I never could picture it as a movie; even if one could save the major themes, it simply is too complicated to pull off as a traditional narrative with the proper conflicts clarified.
Then I saw the movie and I didn’t like it all that much. I even watched it again after I learned a few things about adaptation at Penn State, and it still, for me, didn’t work. I even left behind my memory of the book and focused solely on the new art form, trying the best I could to not include the literature in my analysis.
“What about Ragtime,” Milos said.
I thought about saying, That was really some casting they did for “Cockoo’s Nest,” wasn’t it? But I could tell he was enjoying our conversation. I looked at his Czech copy of The Unloved in his hands. It was bookmarked and folded and noted in dozens of places. He clearly learned the book as if it were his own, like his films each became his own, not Kesey’s or Shaffer’s and definitely not Doctorow’s.
“It seemed too complicated to capture,” I said.
“Yes,” he agreed, reflectively. “It never did convey the themes well. Or at least the way I wanted to.”
“It seemed more of a vehicle for Cagney seeing as it was his last film.” I was feeling ballsy now in the conversation.
“You’re probably right. He got more attention than the film. Will you discuss these films tomorrow in your class?”
“No. I’m moving on to Hrabal’s Closely Watched Trains.” He smiled. Milos was a fan and friend of Hrabal’s. As Arnost said, the Prague art community is not very big.
I told him I was going to talk about how adaptation of one art form into another involves both deciding what essential elements must make the transition and which ones very specifically needed to be left behind.
Arnost returned, always sharp, always ready for what’s next. I stared at this man’s eyes and thought about how much he went through. The Nazi’s disrupted his life, caged him for three years as a workhorse, forced him to build a railroad from Terezin to the mainline on the way to Auschwitz, killed his family, and still he escaped. And still he went on to not only live his life, but live it fully as a writer. He knew what to take with him after the war and he knew what he need not address ever again. His entire life was about what to leave in and what to leave out.
It is not easy, adapting, saving the best of what exists, our strengths, and leaving behind the weaknesses, the parts we wish we could do over given the chance.
The river is icy tonight; not frozen at all but frothy on the whitecaps, foam along the sand. The sky was clear last night adding to the bone-chilling air, and the stars and planets filled the horizon. Tonight, however, it is cloudy, low dark clouds heavy with snow and eventual ice as a storm approaches, one like we have never seen before, so we are told. This is, this is not, a metaphor. Yesterday morning the sky and the bay seemed one, both calm, a mirror, still, complete peace, and the blue of the sky and the blue of the bay were only interrupted by a white cloud stretching across both. Tonight the water is rough, choppy, the spray stings the skin, and standing outside too long is dangerous, deadly.
Nature does what she wants, as well.
A soft sound came out of the woods earlier, rustling but heavier. I thought it was a deer at first, or the fox who visited the other night, or perhaps the racoon family which lives in one of the trees behind the shed and spends much of their time under the shed. But it wasn’t. A cat came out of the brush and sat on the icy stones and stared at me. I tried to coax her to the porch, but she simply meowed and moved away. I followed briefly but that only chased her further, so I retreated inside remembering my own cat who died some years ago and who, when he wanted to come inside, would leap from the front rail to high up the screen door to look through the thin windows at the top. When he saw me get up to go to the door in the back, he’d leap back to the porch, run around the house and slide inside. The cat earlier looked a little like him, a grey tabby, but this one had too much white. For a little while I was fine in the encompassing world of the cat in the driveway, and I felt such peace to be so present.
There will be Ice tomorrow. Again. So before I went inside, I stood for a moment in the chilly air and listened to the silence stretching far across the river and the bay, far inland as well, through the woods and into the night. No marches here tonight, no protests, no threats. No starving children waiting for medical care in Gaza or homeless in Ukraine, freezing. No unpredictable folly, no disparaging comments, no ridicule or mockery or distasteful gestures. No needless deaths or poor excuses, no narcissistic nonsense, no impatient though warranted commentary from allies. We live in a world now where no one is reading opinions unless they already agree. Heather Cox Richardson is preaching to the choir. So is Fox news. ICE shoots at will. The president acts without restraint. Congress doesn’t act at all. The news stopped covering the Epstein Files, Venezuela, the bombing of boats in the Gulf, the skyrocketing cost of healthcare, the impending shutdown, the redistricting debacle, the purchase of the Supreme Court justices. I can’t breathe.
I’m moving on, maybe longer than planned. Across the pond and then the river and far out beyond the Norris Bridge up river I heard geese approaching, their honks growing in volume and number, until they scattered about and landed in the fields and the ponds and the shoreline, hundreds of them, more, and they quieted down so that only a few calls could be heard and after ten minutes or so it was quiet again, the water choppy forcing them to find the sand, and other than that, just the silence of a heavy sky about to snow.
I have spent mornings here for three decades and no mornings are the same, the geese or ducks or herons and me, the rising sun, the setting sun, the hole in the sky of the moon, and we, it, are never the same. It is the same in the Uinta’s, the Catskills, the Blue Ridge, the same in the fields of Neunen, the trails throughout the Commonwealth, Nogales, St Petersburg, the Mala Strana, the Sahel, the Lofoton’s, the same silence, same presence, the same sense I never want to leave. The peace that comes when you know you have no need for yet more change.
I am fine here, at the water, or there, in the hills, or down along the clear endless coastline with water moving in and then away, completely oblivious to the mayhem, the seeming end of a republic. I am fine in a state of unknowing, cousin to the ostrich, brother to the deceased, though still here just the same.
And it occurs to me tonight as the streets of Minneapolis are aglow with the burning fires of defiance, and the world is ridden with anxiety because of one demented mind, that I have always been this way, along the Great South Bay, the Allegany, the canyons in Arizona, and the central New England hills where kettles of hawks kept me company on clear summer nights, not so much avoidance as control, predictability and allowance. I could so easily disappear to the east of Tangier, to the west of Coos Bay, to the North of Minnesota where if we focus on what we should focus on, is exactly where the light gets in.
So I have chosen, as well, in the spirit of Shen Yu, to only experience what I choose to focus on.
I’m thinking of doing a kid’s show. Maybe an adult show but as if we’re kids. I’m not sure; I just thought of it when I started typing just now. But it could work.
I’ll call it Bob’s Log House. or Bob’s Got Way Too Much Time on His Hands.
I’ll play a song for all the seniors as we sit in a circle around a bowl of Cheese-Its and a few bottles of Mike’s Hard Lemonade, and I’ll play “Today,” or “This Land is Your Land,” or “I’m All Out of Fucks.” A bowl of gummies to share, perhaps.
And then we can have a special guest. Someone to explain Medicare, or someone to explain K-Pop. And there will be questions and I can move from person to person like Phil Donahue, and tilt my head slightly as if my follow-up question should be carved in marble for its brilliance. Then we’ll give the guest a BGWTMTHH t-shirt and coffee mug. It’ll be great.
Like SNL and other shows, we can have a News Update, and I could comment on what’s happening in the news, in Ukraine, Iran, Venezuela, and, of course, Greenland. I’ll keep the information as valid and accurate as possible, but since it’s my show I might toss out the occasional declarative observation, such as, “Apparently the President is attempting to get away with as much as he can in his first two years since he knows once the GOP is voted out of congress, he is fracked.” Or, “The Bills look good to beat the Broncos this Sunday.” I’ll keep it light, of course.
And I’ll finish each show with a stroll outside to the river; it doesn’t matter what the weather is since the weather was here first and I’m just passing through, and sometimes we need the storms and winds and rain to remind us we can still feel something, that all of the emptiness we constantly sense from others, slips out of our mind when a crisp wind comes down the Rapp and tightens our skin. And we’d walk to the river as I and whatever special guest might join me–sometimes my son, sometimes Kevin from next door or Wayne from the village, and maybe sometimes artist William Clarke or Governor Abby Spanberger–walk quietly until we both toss out short comments about what we discovered today.
Like how I just learned that if you take the pit of an avocado and slice it up, boil it until the water is dark, then let it become lukewarm, it is a powerful pain reliever to rub on your joints and skin, better than the emu stuff even.
Or how in Switzerland it is illegal to own just one guinea pig, or that Australia is wider than the moon (and way wider than the Mississippi), or that a shrimp’s heart is in its head, or how Romans used to drop a piece of bread in their glass before raising a glass, hence, to make a “toast.”
I have more. And you will hear them if you watch the part of the show where some guest and I walk to the river and mention that the shortest regional flight in the world is on Loganair and goes the entire 1.7 miles from Westray to Papa Westray, Scotland, in about 90 seconds. People will love this segment and it might make BGWTMTHH a viral hit.
And it’s educational so I could have gotten a grant from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, but they’re gone so I can point out in that quick segment the irony of the defunding of the CPB because a tiny tiny tiny fraction of NPR’s budget comes from the CPB; the vast majority of that money was going to local NPR stations to help fund local programming, so now those shows are being cancelled, but the stations have to fill the time with something and since they pay one fee for NPR no matter how much or little of it they use, they are filling in the empty local timeslots with MORE NPR. So that DJT in his effort to get less NPR by defunding CPB, is helping to spread the bass-heavy, treble-absent voices of America. Who doesn’t love irony. I could have an Irony segment where I sit on my porch eating bacon and talk about irony.
I will never run out of material.
Like how when someone is cremated, the eyes vaporize. They just, well, vaporize. And I can’t shake that one. I think of all the beauty in the world, all the fields of the Netherlands with windmills and canals, and the dusty trails of West Africa, or the village streets of Mexico, or the rivers–all the rivers–and the tears from unbearable sadness and unforgivable laughter, and the idea that the eyes don’t so much burn up as much as they vaporize like a tissue tossed on a firepit that lifts into the air, into the darkness, its light fading quickly, and it is again part of the air and the world. That. That the eyes vaporize. Maybe I’ll end one of the shows on that, and the picture can fade out to quick images of places that are too beautiful to look at sometimes, and the faces of people who live inside my soul.
Tune in, my friends, for the new Netflix show, “Bob’s Got Way Too Much Time on His Hands.”Coming soon.
It is January 3rd. Again. Spins around every winter, and over the last few years it seems as if we dropped a few summer months, maybe some weeks in October. Because it is January again, and my chances of reinventing myself are growing fewer.
Like anyone else, I would do a lot of things differently, especially over the course of the more recent years. But I can’t. The best I can do is start now, and keep starting. As many times as it takes.
Because, honestly, life is beautiful, but we insist on talking about the ugly. And as Confucius pointed out: Life is easy, but we insist on making it complicated.
Much peace my friends.
If I had my life to live over
by Nadine Stair
******* If I had my life to live over, I’d dare to make more mistakes next time. I’d relax, I would limber up. I would be sillier than I have been this trip. I would take fewer things seriously. I would take more chances. I would climb more mountains and swim more rivers. I would eat more ice cream and less beans. I would perhaps have more actual troubles, but I’d have fewer imaginary ones.
You see, I’m one of those people who live sensibly and sanely hour after hour, day after day.
Oh, I’ve had my moments, And if I had it to do over again, I’d have more of them. In fact, I’d try to have nothing else. Just moments, one after another, instead of living so many years ahead of each day. I’ve been one of those people who never goes anywhere without a thermometer, a hot water bottle, a raincoat and a parachute. If I had to do it again, I would travel lighter than I have.
If I had my life to live over, I would start barefoot earlier in the spring and stay that way later in the fall. I would go to more dances. I would ride more merry-go-rounds. I would pick more daisies.
So ends the tenth volume of A View from this Wilderness. I started this in 2016, three months after my father’s death. Since then I’ve written 667 posts. In the past year alone there were more than 100K views from more than 9K independent viewers. One disturbing stat: This past year there were 30 views sent by Chatgpt.com. It reminds me of the student many years ago who turned in a plagiarized assignment about 911 not knowing that I was the original author of the piece. Oops.
I’ve written about every possible subject I can think of, and I’ve not written about a few things as well. I’ve finished a piece and thought twice about publishing it and so deleted it, and I’ve finished pieces and thought about publishing it somewhere else, and sent it on to newspapers, journals, and magazines. But I’ve written, which always feels good and right and somehow cleansing. It’s not unlike confession or therapy; I’ve done both in my life and I like writing better.
It used to be writing felt like a means of justifying my true ambition which was simply to wander at will. But that is hard to make a living at, so I wrote, which is also hard to make a living at, so I taught, which is also hard to make a living at, and suddenly I’m hell and gone from my original ambition of being able to wander at will, and depression sets in. SAD is going to creep in within a month or so like it does every year, and even the writing will stop at that point.
Is anyone still with me?
Anyway, so after analyzing all of that, I have come to understand a significant truth: I have worked long enough now and written long enough now to be able to just chuck it all and, finally, wander at will. I might even write about it.
You see, last night I watched Deliver Me From Evil.(Traditional transitions always bored the hell out of me). In it, a thirty-two-year old Springsteen attempts to wrestle out the demons in his soul by writing through it with dark, disturbing acoustic pieces. While recording them, he also records the songs which a few years later will become the Born in the USA album, and the record execs have heard that stuff and want it, but Bruce insists on the dark, acoustic stuff first. And to make matters worse from the execs position, he doesn’t want the songs “cleaned up” at the studio. He wants the sound from the cassette tape he originally recorded the songs on in a hotel room. His manager and friend, Jon Landau, finally sees how badly Bruce needs this and how he won’t be able to move forward until this is out of his system. Landau explains to the execs that if they want Born in the USA, they’re going to have to release Nebraska first, and they have to do it without any support from the artist–no tours, no singles, no interviews, not even his picture on the album. They agree and Nebraska goes to number 3 on the Billboard Charts anyway. Two years later Born in the USA shatters all records.
Back to me:
Curious Men: Lost in the Congo is my Nebraska. I have other projects laid out in front of me: “Front Row Seat,” Office Hours, The Coward, more. But this Monkey of a book in the Congo rode my back for forty plus years, and I knew I had to get it out, not for anyone but me. My publisher, Kim, agreed, and a diverse array of readers, critics, and authors chimed in with nothing but good things to say, but I didn’t really care all that much; Curious Men was for me. And now that the story is finally told the way I wanted it to be told, I can “Breathe in, Breathe out, Move on.”
And with cinema-like timing, the year comes to an end. Tomorrow I can wake up and start new, like we should be able to do every year, but we often don’t. We make the same honest but tired resolutions and try to fit them into the same old routine, and that doesn’t make sense. If you want something different to happen, you have to do something different.
Sure, some of you will tune in to watch the Apple Drop in Times Square, if it is, in fact, dropping this year. In fact, throughout New York State, balls drop at midnight. But some of us prefer the big bologna drop in Lebanon, Pennsylvania, while others tune in to the Peach Drop in Atlanta.
But if you prefer to go to sleep early, catch the Lego Drop in Winterhaven, Florida, at 8pm. At Sloppy Joe’s in Key West, a giant conch shell drops to the bar, while in Indianapolis they drop a car. Honestly, a car. In Easton, Maryland they drop a crab while in Havre de Grace, Maryland they drop an eight foot by five foot foam, illuminated duck. In Hagerstown, of course, it’s a donut. In Pensacola, Theresa will be watching the Pelican Drop, while in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, I fully expect both my friends Barbara and Sean to watch the Peep Drop. It should be pretty quiet.
In Beaufort, North Carolina, they drop a pirate, and in Chagrin Falls, Ohio, much to their…they drop a ball of popcorn. In Dillsburg, Pennsylvania, just ten miles from where I used to live, they drop two pickles, while in the capital of Harrisburg it’s a strawberry. I have no idea why. My cousin Ed said his head will drop on the pillow in Austin just after midnight, whereas Toledo will weigh in when it drops its Cheese Ball. In Boise they’ll drop their new Glowtato–a potato internally illuminated, of course. My favorite, however, is in Las Cruces, New Mexico, where they drop a 19 foot illuminated chrome chili pepper.
The whole notion of dropping the ball in Times Square began in 1907, organized by Adolph Ochs, owner of the New York Times, with nothing dropping at all in 1942 and 1943 due to “dimouts” during the war in case of invasion. Instead, attendees spent a moment in silence for the fallen. This year, the ball which descends at midnight is more than twelve feet in diameter, has a surface of crystal panels made by Waterford, and contains roughly 32,000 LEDs. But this year for the first time ever, there will be two balls (have at it late night hosts). The second, which will begin to fall at 12:04 am, is red, white, and blue to commemorate the 250 anniversary of the country.
It’s definitely a night to drop things. We drop hints about things we want and a few pounds as part of the new resolutions. Plenty of people in the entertainment industry use this significant date to drop their new album, their new book, their new movie, their old boyfriend, and the occasional dime bag.
In the old days neighbors would take it upon themselves to drop in and wish everyone a Happy New Year, while relatives are likely after a few more rounds to drop the charade and tell us how they really feel, and we’ll argue and argue until one of us, finally, says, “let’s just drop it.”
I’ll be outside as well, at the river, watching the nearly full waxing gibbous moon wash over the Chesapeake and it will take my mind off of the passing of time, the coming of the New Year, and the spinning of the earth like a ball, like a top, like a “tiny blue dot.”
a view from this wilderness 