The time has come for new beginnings. Being born again is a daily endeavor, a daily emergence. Then upon occasion the blessed event is far more than it might otherwise be intended or expected to be. Another beginning hoves into view. It might be an iceberg or open water. It might be a harbor or open sea. It might be the treasure or bankruptcy that brings fiscal liberation either way. Whatever way, it is known for what it is and brings a feeling without precise understanding. Beginnings must be that way. Only the ending knows the ending and brings understanding, despite questions never to be answered. I can give you an example. Years ago I walked into a room and heard Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto in C Minor playing, the second movement adagio sostenuto to be precise and it opened for me he next forty years of my life. Melancholy years. […]
My Dogs
I want to tell you about my dogs. The first one I named Colleen, because I wanted a dog and I wanted a name I could yell out across the fields on a farm where I lived. Colleen sounds good when you give it all you’ve got and the sound goes out and over those wide expanses, up into the sky and your dog comes running because she loves you and you’re glad, because the sight of a dog running free and over every obstacle to greet you is wonderful. You kneel down as she gets closer and you meet and you say, “Good dog,” and you both go home. Colleen is buried beneath an oak tree on the farm where we used to live. I buried her with a collar and a scoop of food in a quilt I wrapped around her and I cried for days. She’s the […]
A Tiny Little Screw
So I went to the hardware store today to buy a tiny little screw like the ones I needed to repair a set of window shade brackets. The brackets were originally fastened to the window frames with tiny little nails and the nails came loose over time, so I thought I’d fix them. I’m that kind of guy. I thought the screws would hold more securely than the nails and if I used screws I wouldn’t have to mess with the brackets again and the window shades would work better and I like to make improvements when I can. I’m that kind of guy. I wanted to find a little plastic packet of screws in the hardware store. You’ve seen them, a dozen or so of anything in a bag on display and there’d be a price and I’d pay for not too many screws like I wanted for not […]
On First
I want to tell you a story. A man told it to me today. I want to tell it to you. He organizes baseball games for children with mental and physical disabilities. Himself a man with a limp and a deformed arm from birth, he knows what he’s doing. After a baseball game, after being told he could not participate in sports long ago because of his own disabilities, a mother came to him with tears in her eyes and told him on the way home from a game her son spoke the first word of his life. Her five year old son had never spoken a word before. This man had been told as a child he could never play sports, so he determined to make it possible for others to play and he participates, because the impairments of his life never overcame his life. He wouldn’t let them. […]
The Strongest Man In Poland
I will write this without amendation or revision. It comes from the heart. When I think of my family, when I think of the past I think of what I have been told and what I remember. I don’t research, but I believe and I know what I know from those I loved and one of those stories came from my father who told me we came from Poland and one of our ancestors made his living in Poland by performing as The Strongest Man In Poland. Imagine. At a time when my great grandfather immigrated to American to build a log cabin and live in Wisconsin and raise eleven children with his wife in that log cabin which still stands, one of our people made his living as The Strongest Man In Poland. There are many strong men and woman in Poland and in Ukraine today. In those days […]
Endurance
In 1915 the ship Endurance of the Earnest Shackleton expedition to Antarctica became trapped and sank in the pack ice of the Weddell Sea. Shackleton’s men abandoned ship and began a 350 mile trek across ice and open water pulling and rowing their lifeboats to Elephant Island. It took them over two months. When they arrived they stood on land for the first time since the beginning of the expedition, a total of 497 days. Now marooned, Shackleton and five members of his crew eventually set out in a 22-foot lifeboat by dead reckoning 800 miles to a whaling station on South Georgia Island. Fifteen days afloat, they survived a hurricane that sank a 500 ton steamer in the same waters. Shackleton and two others then hiked across a previously uncharted glacier, a distance of 32 miles in 36 hours without mountaineering equipment to find help. Eventually Shackleton returned with […]
Memorandum
I went to a Civil War battlefield recently, a battle for which I had no knowledge. Bentonville, south of Raleigh in North Carolina. There, on March 19-21, 1865, General Joe Johnson and his twenty thousand Confederates met General William Sherman and his sixty thousand Union boys on their way anywhere they wanted. They fought. Three days they fought in sandy forests, amid teeming creeks and fields under cultivation in what some described as fighting every bit as horrific as anything that happened at Gettsyburg or anywhere else during the four year blood letting that became American history. Eighteen days later Lee would surrender to Grant at Appomattox. Johnson himself would surrender to Sherman eighteen days after that. No one at Bentonville believed anything but the truth, yet they fought valiantly, bravely, heroically and without respite. Casualties amounted to four thousand two hundred men. A wood frame house on the battleground […]
The Great American Novel
United States Copyright Registration Number TXu 2-152-977 The day before a great storm he sat behind the wheel of his old pickup truck before his God with his eyes closed and he considered all the necessary preparations. He had made them. Now he wanted to go somewhere, because men like him want a breather before they enter the realm of combat, although so much of life is conflict. He knew this war would come. It had been predicted. Other men had told him of its coming. As a man he knew the inevitability. They just made it official. They told him when and how much and where but none of that concerned him. He just knew he needed to be ready. Nobody would take care of him if he did not take care of himself and those for whom he cared or loved, for whom he would give himself. They […]
And What Have You Done?
It’s Christmas, so what does my neighbor do? He puts a ratty old chair out on the curb. That’s right, a ratty old chair. Now, you might think he’d wait until after Christmas, but no. Right before Christmas he puts a ratty old chair on the curb. It’s blue. It contrasts nicely with the snow right before Christmas. I’ve never liked my neighbor. When other people I do not know are putting up Christmas lights and getting ready for Christmas, my neighbor I also do not know but now thoroughly dislike put that, oh you know, ratty old over stuffed chair out on the curb on top of the snow. So you know what I did? I’ll tell you if you can’t guess. I went out there and first I laid a string of Christmas lights on the chair, every which way so its completely covered. Then I ran an […]
Pandemic Polemic
The pandemic has done many things. No, that’s not true. It only does one thing to many things. It destroys. It’s a virus. It doesn’t know what the hell its doing, but its doing it to a lot of things and its doing it to a lot of people who thought they knew what they were doing. They were wrong. The pandemic is stupid and brutish and vile. People exposed to it may run a fever and develop a cough or become very weak, but some people may also become stupid and brutish and vile. Stay away from them. People may lose their appetite, but the pandemic eats everything. It’s omnivorous. The point I want to make is the pandemic is good for only one thing. The virus reduces everything to the lowest common denominator. You end up with only what matters. That can be scary. No one likes to […]