In both poems below, I have highlighted the words and images that stuck me so deeply then and resonate today at a place that is beyond verbal. I can bring these lines and images into my consciousness so easily that they are simply part of me.

I won’t explore Rich’s poem as a statement of women’s battle against the patriarchy; Rich, of course, is one of the preeminent feminist voices of our time. When I first read the poem, I understood the feminist literary analysis, the literary criticism through a feminist lens. We had great discussion of the poem in Dr. Zoellner’s class.

“Diving into the Wreck” moves me in another way. The speaker’s willingness to immerse herself into the journey of self-discovery, of searching out her identity, struck me then and resonates now. Her awareness that she is “having to do this ... alone” (which Rich repeats later, “I have to learn alone”) emphasizes the solitary journey in doing this work.

In our own process of self-discovery, of coming to know who we are, we have to reach “the wreck and not the story of the wreck / the thing itself and not the myth.” We have to shed the stories about us, understand that the influences that shaped us are not us, in order to reach an understanding of our Self. It is the work we have to do – alone, with words that are purpose and words that are maps – to explore the “damage that was done / and the treasures that prevail.”

We have to be honest about the work to be done, be sincere in our efforts to do that work, and, because this is on-going, we have to be willing to “find our way / back to the scene” whether driven by cowardice or courage.

And I, a straight male, also wondered why the poem hit so hard. I was 21 or 22, engaged in this highly personal work of self, when I first read the poem; “Diving into the Wreck” further invited me into the immersion, and perhaps submersion, in the journey of self-exploration and self-discovery.

Diving into the Wreck
By Adrienne Rich

First having read the book of myths,
and loaded the camera,
and checked the edge of the knife-blade,
I put on
the body-armor of black rubber
the absurd flippers
the grave and awkward mask.
I am having to do this
not like Cousteau with his
assiduous team
aboard the sun-flooded schooner
but here alone.

There is a ladder.
The ladder is always there
hanging innocently
close to the side of the schooner.
We know what it is for,
we who have used it.
Otherwise
it is a piece of maritime floss
some sundry equipment.

I go down.
Rung after rung and still
the oxygen immerses me
the blue light
the clear atoms
of our human air.
I go down.
My flippers cripple me,
I crawl like an insect down the ladder
and there is no one
to tell me where the ocean
will begin.

First the air is blue and then
it is bluer and then green and then
black I am blacking out and yet
my mask is powerful
it pumps my blood with power
the sea is another story
the sea is not a question of power
I have to learn alone
to turn my body without force
in the deep element.

And now: it is easy to forget
what I came for
among so many who have always
lived here
swaying their crenellated fans
between the reefs
and besides
you breathe differently down here.

I came to explore the wreck.
The words are purposes.
The words are maps.
I came to see the damage that was done
and the treasures that prevail.
I stroke the beam of my lamp
slowly along the flank
of something more permanent
than fish or weed

the thing I came for:
the wreck and not the story of the wreck
the thing itself and not the myth
the drowned face always staring
toward the sun
the evidence of damage
worn by salt and sway into this threadbare beauty
the ribs of the disaster
curving their assertion
among the tentative haunters.

This is the place.
And I am here, the mermaid whose dark hair
streams black, the merman in his armored body.
We circle silently
about the wreck
we dive into the hold.
I am she: I am he

whose drowned face sleeps with open eyes
whose breasts still bear the stress
whose silver, copper, vermeil cargo lies
obscurely inside barrels
half-wedged and left to rot
we are the half-destroyed instruments
that once held to a course
the water-eaten log
the fouled compass

We are, I am, you are
by cowardice or courage
the one who find our way
back to this scene
carrying a knife, a camera
a book of myths
in which
our names do not appear.

From Diving into the Wreck: Poems 1971–1972 by Adrienne Rich. Copyright © 1973 by W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. 
Adrienne Rich read “Diving into the Wreck”:

”What We Lost”

“What We Lost” came into my life as I was digging deeper into my family of origin, exploring my own family tree and an inheritance of story. Both of my parents had died years before I found the poem. Aunts and Uncles who carried the family stories had passed. My siblings and I shared the fragments that we had each held. These are all “frail connections.” Our family stories were in the distance, and we were distancing ourselves even further.

After the woman in the poem tells her story, the child “moves away,” distancing herself from her own inheritance. We don’t know what was shared – “what we lost is here in this room”– and the moment “leads nowhere.”

My heart aches for the stories I have lost. The stories that my ancestors didn’t share; the ones that they shared and were not held. I grieve for those lost stories, for the questions that I didn’t ask, for the lost opportunity to seize the moments holding “something of importance.”

What We Lost
By Eavan Boland

It is a winter afternoon.
The hills are frozen. Light is failing.
The distance is a crystal earshot.
A women is mending linen in her kitchen.

She is a countrywoman.
Behind her cupboard doors she hangs sprigged,
stove-dried lavender in muslin.
Her letters and mementos and memories

are packeted in satin at the back with
gaberdine and worsted and
the cambric she has made into bodices;
the good tobacco silk for Sunday Mass.

She is sewing in the kitchen.
The sugar-feel of flax is in her hands.
Dusk. And the candles brought in then.
One by one. And the quiet sweat of wax.

There is a child by her side.
The tea is poured, the stitching put down.
The child grows still, sensing something of importance.
The woman settles and begins her story.

Believe it, what we lost is here in this room
on this veiled evening.
The woman finishes. The story ends.
The child, who is my mother, gets up, moves away.

In the winter air, unheard, unshared,
the moment happens, hangs fire, leads nowhere.
The light will fail and the room darken,
the child fall asleep and the story be forgotten.

The fields are dark already.
The frail connections have been made and are broken.
The dumb-show of legend has become language,
is becoming silence and who will know that once

words were possibilities and disappointments,
were scented closets filled with love letters
and memories and lavender hemmed into muslin,
stored in sachets, aired in bed linen;

and traveled silks and the tones of cotton
tautened into bodices, subtly shaped by breathing;
were the rooms of childhood with their griefless peace,
their hands and whispers, their candles weeping brightly?

-Eavan Boland, 1944-2020; from her collection, Outside History

As I put these poems side by side today, I am struck by how both women talk of words as “maps,” words as “purpose,” and words were “possibilities and disappointments.” These two poems, separate and distinct, now paired here, allow me to see how I have used writing to attempt to know myself and, through searching the boxes and bins of family artifacts, to understand the familial history and relationships that shape a life, too.

How language, despite being frail, shapes my understanding of self, of family, of lineage, of history, while I attempt to use language – oftentimes awkwardly in my poems and stories – to convey my own experience.

Eavan Boland talks about “loss, history, and poetry” on this video from The Writing Life.

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Several years ago when I was teaching at the Colorado Springs campus of the University of Colorado (UCCS), I was walking from the parking lot to the library building. It was late in the fall semester, maybe 90 minutes after sunset, as I headed to my 7:00 composition class. As I turned the corner of the sidewalk, a coed student approaching from the other direction, stiffened. At first, I thought she was simply startled by my sudden appearance. She hugged her books in tighter to her chest. Her face expressed fear.

Because of my physical size, I have a privilege that women do not possess. I can walk my dog late at night only a minimal concern for my physical safety. Maybe I am foolish in presuming my own safety, but a walk on a path across the street from our home, along a relatively well-lit street running alongside a park, does not rise to the threat level that my wife, stepdaughter, and daughter face.

On a daily basis.

I can walk across a college campus feeling relatively safe. Even if I walk with a heightened awareness of my surroundings, alert to others moving through the parking lot or along a darkened side of a building, my day-to-day behaviors may be slightly altered but hardly ever completely abandoned. Of course, there are situations and environments that I avoid; these are not part of my daily routine, though.

I need conversations and experiences such as these to change my perspective. Left alone in my own privileged world, I may not see beyond my own personal experience. Not listening to the women in my life when they share their fears and apprehensions – of living their daily life – similarly keeps me in a bubble protecting my own privilege.

Becoming a feminist was not a conscious act. What I did do, consciously, was create opportunities to hear the experiences of women to shed light on my own behaviors and attitudes I have and to understand societal influences that shape those things. Only then can I begin to question those behaviors and attitudes.

When I was teaching composition courses at UCCS, I took a course from Dr. Janice Hayes entitled “Women’s Literature and Feminist Criticism.” On the first day of class, Dr. Hayes asked us to go around the room and introduce ourselves. The introduction was to contain three elements: name, why we were in the course [UCCS was a “commuter campus” so many of the students there were nontraditional (working moms, career changes, etc.)], and one aspect about ourselves so others in the class would more easily remember us. Our class was set up in one large circle, and I listened as classmate after classmate introduced herself. I was at the end of the circle, seated by the door, and after 21 women students introduced themselves, it was my turn. “My name is Vince. I teach composition here and am interested in reading more women’s literature.” When I ended, Dr. Hayes said, “And the one memorable aspect?”

In unison, 21 women laughed and called out, “he’s the man!”

For the initial reading that we did in class that evening, Dr. Hayes handed out the first couple of pages of Chapter 14 of Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Connie and Mellors are, for lack of a better term, admiring Mellors’ penis. His erection. As we read silently, titters of giggling began to rise up around the room. Then there was outright laughing. I determined then that I had better simply listen when the discussion began.

My classmates basically peppered their comments with “oh brother.” And “wow. Lawrence is really something here.” Lawrence has Mellors say that his penis is “lordly” and “proud.” While I laughed, too, at this description, I leaned toward a more traditional reading of the passage.

Even though Connie is feeling some liberation from the binds of societal expectations and is pursuing her own personal, sexual fulfillment, she is still submissive to his desires, his domination. My classmates’ comments revealed that Lawrence develops Connie’s attitude toward Mellors’ penis as one of adoration. The class discussion brought to the forefront that a male writer is attempting to capture the scene through her eyes and convey an experience through a woman’s perspective. And he’s not doing a very good job of it.

This lens, the “feminist literary criticism” portion of the course title, offered me a new way to perceive a piece of literature. Left alone with my own experience, my own perception, and the text reads in a very different way.

I need this lens – a feminist reading – of the general, day-to-day experiences of women. Of my wife, my daughter, my stepdaughter. Without it, I walk through my days blind to my own privilege, unaware that different ways of viewing the world even exist. This blindness does not improve my life at all. I’m not a better husband, father, stepfather as a result of this blindness. In fact, I am less of a support to the women in my life because of this blindness.

I have, in the 35 years since teaching at UCCS, committed to grow. I have committed to actively listening. To see the world through a different lens. I have committed to interrogate the systems and structures that I grew up in, to question the values and beliefs I simply inherited from the larger society and culture around me, to examine the behaviors and attitudes that I carry that do not serve me, do not serve the women in my life, and do not serve the type of community I want to be part of building.

I am not perfect at this. I hope I continue to grow and not be a dick about it.

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Listening to Pete Hegseth over the past few months speak of a “woke” military, change the name of the Department of Defense to the Department of War, and refer to military personnel as “warfighters,” I have been pondering my friendship with Jimmie G, a Vietnam veteran with whom I worked in 1977 in a factory called Whitco in Colorado Springs. I wrote about this friendship in my memoir, In the Middle of Things, and offer this version of that story here.

Jimmie wore black-framed glasses, a green Army fatigue jacket, and black steel-toed boots. His face was mildly pock marked. He carried his thin, wiry body with a bit of an intensity of being completely attentive to his surroundings and maybe even hyper vigilant. He may have been a bit skittish, but he still managed to have a dip in his hip when he walked. He was more than twice my age, 42, African-American, veteran, father to a son my age.

Jimmie started at Whitco on the swing shift a few weeks after I did, and the foremen said he would be shadowing me for a few nights. It didn’t take too long before we were spending the fifteen-minute breaks talking at the small, round tables in the break room. Our half-hour lunch break began to include a quick trip up to Pikeview Liquors for a six-pack of Budweiser and Jimmie’s bottle of vodka. When we got back to the plant’s gravel parking lot, we sat in his car eating the sandwiches we brought from home. We usually saved the drinking for after work, but occasionally we took a quick slug before heading back in at 8:30 p.m.

After work, Jimmie and I headed over to the Tam O’Shanter Pub, across the street just west of Whitco. On Thursday nights, they cashed our paycheck, and my $2.90 an hour would add up to about $90 take-home every week.

Thursday’s nights ended early on Friday mornings at the restaurant off of I-25 and Garden of the Gods Road for breakfast before heading home. Big, red neon lights lit up the “Truck Stop” sign just a few blocks from the Tam.

Jimmie and I slid into a booth by the window looking out at the frontage road. A few other people were scattered around the restaurant at 2:00 a.m. Guys from Western Forge , the factory up the road, who may have just left the Tam, too. A semi-driver or two. The waitress signaled with her pen that she’d be over in “just a sec” to take our order.

I learned early not to ask Jimmie about Vietnam, not to probe too much into his own experiences there. He knew I was interested, but my questions probably seemed to be motivated out of some sort of a morbid curiosity. Stories like the My Lai massacre surfaced in 1969 and then flooded the news during the War. “Vietnam.” The stories coming out of it were ugly. Even though I wanted to hear Jimmie’s personal story, it wasn’t going to happen.

Instead, by telling me stories of the guys in his platoon in the Vietnam jungle, Jimmie hinted at, circled around, his own experiences. And some of the stories seemed to have little to do with war, at all. Like the night a handful of guys in his platoon chipped in while on R&R to pay for Jimmie’s hooker so they could peek through the window and learn to have sex. “Get that Vietnam pussy,” Jimmie laughed. “Those dudes who never busted a nut…” The story trailed off with his laugh, a shake of his head. He took a long draw on his Newport cigarette.

“What was the drug situation like?” I asked. “Were there a lot of drugs over there?”

“Hell yeah, bro.” The cigarette quivered between his lips as he spoke, and the smoke exploded from his mouth in quick bursts. “Weed, heroin, alcohol, hashish ...”

“Jesus. Guys you knew? Your platoon?”

“Everywhere … Shhheee-iiit.” He drew out the word in a long, two-syllable sigh. “You can’t ask a man to do the shit they did, and see the shit they saw, and think they won’t get fucked up.”

He leaned back in the corner of the booth, against the vinyl seat and the wall that framed the window. “They were just young dudes.”

Plenty of research show the impressionable nature of young adult males. Drinking, smoking, and sexual behaviors are all influenced by social and environmental factors, by the influences in that environment. That impressionability is one of the reasons why 34% of gang members are between the ages of 15 and 17 and 37% are between the ages of 18 and 24. Young adult males are malleable and can be shaped into soldiers as they seek camaraderie, purpose, and a way to express aggressive impulses in ways that are socially acceptable. That they also are vulnerable, of course, to PTSD, that they suffered incredible psychological damage.

A couple of months shy of my twentieth birthday, I had never busted a nut, either. Naive, immature. Just a young dude. And, honestly, what challenges had I faced in my life? A pitcher’s fastball? Difficult novels in high school? Bad skin? The fact that my father left and I hadn’t heard from him for three years?

Jimmie filled a void. How unlikely of a pair we were, at Whitco, at the Tam, sitting at this restaurant. Influences come in mysterious ways: A 42-year old African American man befriending a twenty year-old trying to find his way.

One morning after breakfast, Jimmie invited me to his home. I sat on his sofa, afraid our conversation would wake his wife as I flipped through the pages of his Vietnam photo album. He had stories for nearly every Polaroid and grainy black and white picture taped onto those pages, stories about each face, these young dudes, not any older than I was.

Jimmie knew what it was like to be 20. He knew guys like me trying to find themselves, trying to figure out their place. They were taped down in that photo album. He never judged me for my ignorance, my naivete, of the realities of the world. He didn’t judge me for holding whatever fears I had in facing some of those realities. He listened and, when necessary, shifted my thinking. Maybe I wasn’t supposed to hear his story. Maybe he was supposed to shape mine.

The smoke from Jimmie’s cigarette blended grey against the pane of glass at the Truck Stop. I dabbled the last of my toast into the egg yolks.

“So, if you got a call from the government to go fight again, would you go? Not Vietnam, necessarily,” I asked. “I just mean in general.” We had been packing and shipping sand-colored tops for military vehicles in the Middle East. Something seemed to be heating up in the deserts there.

“Yeah. I’d go.” He didn’t hesitate with what he said next, “And you’d go with me.”

“Nah, not me, bro.” I tried to laugh it off.

“You’d be right there with me.” A quick jerk of his chin punctuated his words.

“Nah, I’m a poet.”

“We’re warriors, brother. You and me. We’re all warriors.”

I’m struck here, in 2026, at the idea that things were “heating up” in the Middle East in 1977. I’m thinking of Hegseth and his call to his “warfighters” to take “no quarter” and, reportedly, that they are on a mission from God.

~~

Jimmie found me in the back corner of the packing area in the maze of pallets stacked with flattened cardboard boxes, a narrow path between the dark brown, corrugated-carton walls. “What’s going on, Puz-ack?” He always liked to mess with my name.

“Not much, man. Just gettin ready to get this work done.” I was pulling boxes off the stacks to prepare them for the night’s quota.

“Yeah, that’s what I’m talkin about!” Jimmie was upbeat. Happy to be back at it. He grabbed some flat boxes and slid them to the floor, his lean body fluid in its motion.

I lifted a handful of boxes and, with one hand up to steady them, balanced them on top of my head as I took them over to the packing tables. When I got back to the caverns of flat boxes, Jimmie grabbed my arm and slowed me down.

“Bro, you’ve been draggin around here for a week now. What’s goin’ on?”

“Nothin really. Just tired of some of this shit.”

“C’mon, man. Damn, I can see it.” He wouldn’t let up unless I quit trying to bullshit him. I wouldn’t be able to sidestep talking with him. I wouldn’t be able to stall, not with his hand on my bicep, his body blocking mine from the boxes.

“Fuck this shit, Jimmie. We’ve worked overtime for the last two weeks. We don’t even get out until 1:00 a.m.” My frustration filled the air. I was stuck in indecision about trying to return to college or staying in this factory. I was depressed with the conflict and no direction. But I couldn’t put it into words. So I blamed it on the job. “I don’t mind doing the work, but fuck it. Shit’s wearing me out.”

“Look, man, it’s not been all that long, doing this overtime. And we’re getting beaucoup money from it. Big money.” He laughed. “But you can’t bullshit me, man. It’s more than that. A dark cloud over you.” He wouldn’t let go.

Jimmie’s hand still clutched my bicep, right about where I wore my heart on the sleeve. It was no surprise that he could see this dark cloud, yet it also feels incredibly insightful that he did. His calling me on it, though, interrogating me about my depression, my confusion, in that cavern of corrugated cardboard, stands out as even more profound. His invitation to talk seemed antithetical to his own statement over breakfast that to talk about his Vietnam experience would kill him. He wouldn’t let me go until I talked.

My head ached. The fluorescent lights seemed too harsh. But I couldn’t put words to what was going on with me.

He leaned in. “My man, there’s only one unforgivable sin. You know what it is, bro?” Jimmie was afraid for me. He asked again, “The one unpardonable sin?”

“I don’t know, Jimmie.” He wasn’t letting go until I offered some answer. “To use God’s name in vain?”

“Nah, none of that. Shee-iiit.” He paused but looked directly at me. “Taking your own life, man. That’s unforgivable.”

I hadn’t voiced anything to Jimmie about how down I was. He just witnessed the spiral. And I hadn’t known Jimmie to be religious, so his words surprised me. Maybe his conception of suicide and connecting it to religion was merely a fear tactic. What he didn’t say but what he implied was, “Kill yourself, homes, and go to Hell.”

This conversation, the very interaction, was such an unlikely scenario. Two men talking in the back of a factory about something of substance, of significance. He may have wielded what might be seen today as an archaic understanding of suicide to scare me into staying alive. I chose to hear Jimmie’s comment as concerned, even compassionate. I still choose to think of it that way. His comment wasn’t judgmental. He just didn’t want me to die.

I don’t know if I bought his intersection of suicide and religion, but I didn’t want to die, either.

Jimmie may not have known much about an academic life. He may not have known what exactly I needed, but he knew that I wouldn’t find “it” here, in this factory. I had grown in the last year, matured either despite of or because of the physical and mental challenges.

“Look, man, you got to get the education. This ain’t your place. You do good work, but this ain’t where it’s at. You got to get the education.”

How do you make that decision with a low sense of self, with an unclear vision of a future?

Jimmie repeated it like it was an obligation, an expectation, a command: “you got to get the education.” Claim it. Own it.

~~

The last time I saw Jimmie was just before I graduated from Colorado State. We ran into each other at Rocky Mountain Greyhound Park, a dog-racing track not far from the factory where we had worked just four years before. I turned from the betting window and saw Jimmie standing with three or four other men.

I startled him by calling his name and approaching too quickly. The younger men seemed to recoil and became hyper alert. Pure adrenaline rush.

It took Jimmie a second or two to recognize me. It had been a few years.

“Damn, Puz-ack! You’re lookin’ good, bro!”

Jimmie held a wad of money, thick and round, in his right hand.

“Brother, let me tell you something.”

He leaned in closer to me, his eyes ablaze from the vodka. The others around us visibly relaxed when they saw Jimmie’s familiarity. Yet they also kept an attentive eye on me.

He went on. “I used to think it was all about gettin’ laid. Getting’ women, man, knockin; boots. But that ain’t it. Make that money,” he said, flashing the bills in front of me. “Make that money, bro.”

Jimmie wasn’t perfect. When I read these words through filtered through some 50 years of experiences – school, work, adulting, parenting – I cringe.

We were unlikely friends. Poet. Warrior.

~ ~

I googled Jimmie’s name in the summer of 2012. I had turned 55 not too long before which meant Jimmie was 77.

My cursor flashed at the same home address where I sat on his sofa 35 years before, at 3:00 in the morning, and flipped through his photo album of young dudes in Vietnam.

Under his home address on the screen, his phone number. I debated whether to call him.

Beyond the “hello,” I hadn’t thought through what I’d say. And since he answered on the second or third ring, I didn’t have much time to formulate any direction for the conversation.

“Hey, is this Jimmie?”

There was a long pause before he replied, “Who’s calling?”

“You might not remember me. We worked at Whitco in 1977. My name is Vince Puzick.”

Another long pause. “How do I know this is Puzick?”

“Jimmie. Who the hell would call you and say it’s Vince Puzick? Know what I mean?”

His laugh and then his familiar, “Yeah, you right.” Another laugh. “Puz-ack” he said, messing with my name like he did.

“Jimmie, how ya doin’, bro?”

“I’m good. Good, man. Damn. Puz-ack …” I envisioned him taking a drag off his Newport, the smoke spiraling above him.

“I was just thinking back to those days at Whitco.” It didn’t occur to me that maybe Whitco, the factory, wasn’t some fond memory for him. Reminiscing about a significant time in my life may not have jived with his recollections.

“Oh yeah. I remember.” We paused a long time. “Hey, how is your brother doin? The cop?”

So, he did remember some details, even some things that I had forgotten we talked about. “And your sister? How’s she doing?” My sister met us at the Tam O’Shanter a couple of late nights when she returned to town. Jimmie was impressed that she ran the pool table, beating guys game after game, and how she kept up with the beers, too. “She was alright, man,” and he laughed into my cell phone.

“How’s your family, Jimmie?” I tried to divert the attention to hear in his voice the emotion he might not directly express. And 35 years had passed. I was curious about his life. What about his son who was about my age? His wife? As usual, though, he redirected.

“Hey, Puz-ack. Did you become a preacher?”

I laughed. I can’t remember for the life of me what I would have said on any of those late nights in the factory, then at the Tam, then over breakfast at the Truck Stop, about becoming a preacher.

“Nah, man. I became a teacher.”

He laughed quietly. “Sort of the same thing, right?”

On summer nights like this, we would have been working in short sleeve shirts, heading into the last few hours of our shift. I’d then go home and sit in the backroom off my mother’s kitchen and write bits of conversation from the swing shift, character sketches of the people on the assembly line, short poems about Jimmie and Leonard and other men who had such different experiences than I lived.

“Did you ever write your book?”

Jimmie’s question caught me off guard. His recollections about my brother and sister, even inaccurate recollections of my ambitions, were one thing. But his memory that I held some nascent desire to be a writer surprised me. What do we hold on to after so many years?

“Not yet, man. But working on it.”

Memory is a strange thing. I didn’t know why Jimmie remembered these details about me. The fact that he remembered these details meant something, that maybe I impacted his life in some way, too. That if we had a photo album from the factory days, he would have a story or two about me to recall. I guess I want to know why.

“Hey, before I let you go,” I said, “I was wondering if you’d want to get breakfast some time?”

“Oh, I don’t know about that, Puzick. I can’t tell you about Vietnam. To talk about it would kill me.”

“I just want to buy you breakfast. You don’t have to tell me any of that.”

I just want to thank you, man, for saving my life.

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The hospice nurse checked the morphine drip and measured my mother’s vitals before she dabbed and dribbled water from a sponge on to mom’s lips and tongue. The nurse’s turquoise necklace dangled as she leaned over my mother’s bed.

Some say turquoise calms and soothes. Some say the stones allow one to release negative energies, to clear the throat, to increase connection and communication.

My mother always loved turquoise. The trip to Taos some 30 years before this night remains a favorite childhood memory. My mother returned home with necklaces of blue-green stones laid in elaborately smithed silver.

Now, my mother reached to touch the nurse’s necklace. The nurse leaned in, mindful, intentional, as if this were the most important moment, and stayed for as long as my mother needed.

drying fingers touched each polished stone,
like prayer beads, a rosary,
bridging the earthly with the heavenly,

touch as light as the sound of aspen leaves
falling in autumn,

quiet as a whispered prayer.

Under a vague light from the corner, my mother spoke into the room, and beyond, into the distance. Breathy, yet with what I now think was veiled anticipation, with relief, she said, “Well, is that Uncle Paul?”

I laughed nervously, reflexively, and said, “No, mom.” She may have furrowed her brow at my intrusive voice. She wasn’t talking to us.

My sister whispered, “Shh. It could definitely be Uncle Paul.”

My mother stood at the threshold. Who knew who would greet her?

A Small Gratuity

I had gotten coffee at Up Top several times over the previous month, and it became a refuge while staying with my sister when she entered home hospice. Deb recommended it, and it was her sort of place: an airy and spacious coffee shop with art on the wall, with good lighting to sit, or sit and read, or sit and talk with others. My brother and his partner and I had sat there a month before, when we went down to do a deep clean of her apartment in August of 2024. When I returned to my sister’s apartment after Labor Day weekend, not knowing how long I would be with stay with her, Up Top became a destination a couple of times a week. Its openness was in stark contrast to the confining apartment where I slept on a futon in the living room.

My sister died at 6:22 p.m. on September 24 after three weeks in hospice. I could not bring myself to stay in her apartment the night that she passed, so I stayed in a funky, quirky motel called the Mellow Moon Lodge. It, too, was the sort of place Deb would have liked. Despite being mentally and emotionally drained from being with my sister at her end-of-life, I didn’t have a particularly good night’s sleep. Or maybe it was because of the level of fatigue and relief, I did not sleep well.

When I ordered my coffee that morning, the owner (who was working the cash register) asked me what my plans were for the day. I was caught off-guard. For the past twelve hours, all I had thought about were my plans for this day.

Back at her apartment, all of my clothes, my iPad, my journal, and my sister’s artwork that I was going to take to my home were ready to be loaded into my truck. Other things had to be thrown away. Her refrigerator had to be cleaned out. Other items I would take to storage. My mind had been playing out what the morning would look like before I started the drive home. Part of that drive was to stop at the mortuary, 15 miles down the road, to complete the paperwork.

“What are your plans for the day?” Innocent enough. I hadn’t expected the question. The owner and I had talked before, but I had never told her that I was staying with my sister or why I was in town for so long. Del Norte is the kind of town you pass through on your way to some place else.

The question knocked me out of my mental gymnastics of planning the day.

And all I could respond with was, “Uhhmm. … I really cannot say.” I was aware that my tone was distant, maybe defensive. I had lost all mindfulness of being in the present moment that I had tried to bring to my sister for the past 22 days. My voice may have cracked.

Her brow furrowed as she rang up my order. Mine wasn’t a friendly answer. Too sharp. To evasive. I knew it.

“My sister died yesterday,” I said. “ and I am heading to her apartment to pack some of her things and then head back to Colorado Springs.”

I immediately felt like this response was too much. Too emotional. Too much of a depressing gut-punch at 7:30 a.m. in response to a simple question.

Her eyes swung up to meet mine.

“I am so sorry. So, so sorry.” And she leaned over the counter to hug me. “I am so sorry.” When she let go of the embrace, her eyes were filled with tears.

Through my own tears, and the fatigue, and the emotional drain, I told her that Up Top had given me the tiniest respite in the weeks that I spent with my sister. Everyone here had been so kind. I thanked her for that.

What I didn’t say, because I may not have even been able to articulate it but, instead, just feel it, was that merely coming through the doors and being able to sit in the space, look at art hanging on the brick walls, listen to the chatter, and not have to do or say or even think anything was a beautiful and restorative thing.

The things that linger: the sound of my distant voice, her compassion offered immediately in response, her grace offered in a space that had given me such light for so long.

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(I am in the process of rethinking my approach to “subscribe” to this Substack. In lieu of subscribing, I think I may simply ask readers to “Leave a Tip” if they found a piece particularly engaging or thought-provoking, or resonant. I would also like to simply have people subscribe on a monthly basis, if they so choose, rather than annually. In any event, no “Subscribe” button today as I continue to think through these options. I would love to hear your thoughts on subscriptions.)

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My infatuation with words may have begun before 6^th grade. In 3^rd grade, I won the class spelling bee several weeks in a row. Since I was the youngest of four kids, I probably developed some language sense early on with all the different influences that peppered my brain: the language of sports; my mother, the nurse, and medical language; my father, the blue-collar worker; siblings who were fifteen, six, and three years older.

But the dictionary game is a milestone in this love affair. I wish I could recall the specific word that Mrs. Meyers called out that morning. Maybe, in some ways, it’s more meaningful that I don’t. I remember the sense of pride in knowing words, in being curious about words.

When I was 22, the Yankee great, Thurman Munson, was killed in a fiery plane crash. His death was really a sad day for baseball fans, and as a Yankee fan, myself, I really felt it. In a Sports Illustrated article after his death, maybe the press conference announcing the tragedy or a report after his funeral, the writer used the word ashen to describe the mourners’ faces. I felt the word choice was awful considering the plane burst into flames. I wrote a letter to the editor to express my consternation at the word. I never had a response, and my letter didn’t appear in a future issue. I wasn’t expecting my letter to be printed, but I would have appreciated some response. Was it an inappropriate word choice or not? Maybe I was more interested in knowing the writer’s choice to go with that word. It struck me as wrong then, and it seems wrong today.

My oldest brother, Steve, and I had a long discussion once about the word “short-lived.” He said that most people pronounce it incorrectly. The “lived” should not have a short “i” as in “livid” but a long “i” as in “life.” It took me a minute to be convinced, but I came around to agree. Common usage vs. traditional. Sort of sums up the difference between my brother, who is fifteen years older, and me, too. (I won’t mention our conversation about the pronunciation of “forte” here, but it was a doozy.)

I did a paper once on e.e. cummings’ poem “next to of course god america i.” I was working in a factory at night and taking an intro to poetry class in the morning. It was 1977 and a handful of my co-workers on the assembly line were Vietnam vets. One of them, Jimmie, became a friend. After our shift ended at midnight, we would go to the Tam O’Shanter until 2:00 a.m. and then head over to the truck stop near the highway for breakfast.

One night over bacon and eggs, I asked him if he would re-enlist in the Army if America went to war. He exhaled a long drag from his Newport. He said that he would. “We’re warriors, bro. And you’d go with me.” I laughed and said probably not. “I’m a poet.” He gently pointed his cigarette at me and said, “We’re all warriors.”

In cummings’ poem, he says

thy sons acclaim your glorious name by gorry

by jingo by gee by gosh by gum

I remember digging into an old, red Webster’s dictionary and looking up each word. “Gorry” is an archaic word for “God.” It’s also a homophone for “gory” which seems right for a poem about war. Its more modern use, though, is as an interjection, similar to “by gosh.” “By gee” and “by gum” serve a similar function. Stringing together five interjections emphasizes the speakers’ mindset — shallow as it may be.

But cummings’ use of “by jingo” drew my attention then and stays with me now. At first blush, it is one more interjection emphasizing the speaker’s religious fervor for America. But, of course, “jingo” also is used satirically in the poem. cummings’ use of the word highlights the speaker’s unthinking, empty rhetoric in this string of interjections to reveal his own superficial, jingoistic “patriotism” which is really an underlying nationalism.

(I don’t know if Jimmie was patriotic, nationalistic, or just held the belief that men were, innately, warriors. I would lean toward the latter. I mostly was intrigued by this juxtaposition of talking with a Vietnam vet, twice my age, an African-American, a very unlikely closest friend on the assembly line while I was a twenty-year-old studying poetry, falling in love with language.)

I think of the power of words to shape, and to share, our understanding of the world around us.

cummings’ last line is “He spoke. And drank rapidly a glass of water”

I think of how we face this barrage of language–in Oval office speeches, in Congressional hearings, in Executive Orders, in podcasts, in media, in social media–and it becomes almost too much to process. This relentless, rapid fire onslaught of words doesn’t allow us the opportunity to pause, to underline, to write notes in the margin, to question, to interrogate for meaning. We get hammered with the phrase “common sense” while almost sacrificing “critical thinking.”

But we have to. We have to pay attention. We have to be that 6^th grader in the dictionary game. We have to be that reader who questions, right or wrong, word choice. We have to be that young adult pondering language over breakfast at an all-night truck stop.

I think of how words matter. Literally.

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In the last month we have witnessed the range of how males, American mostly but not completely, move through the world. The shooting of Alex Pretti visibly, disturbingly, violently illustrated this spectrum.

Toward one end of this spectrum, we have the VA nurse, Pretti, protesting in Minneapolis. And, I will acknowledge right up front that, yes, he spit on the ICE vehicle and kicked the tail light off of it. An action motivated by anger, fear, frustraion, for sure. The sentence for that action is not execution in the street.

What I also viewed is an ICE agents pepper spray Alex when Pretti went to the aid of a woman that an ICE agent pushed down. And then they shot him in the back when they had Alex Pretti on the ground. Even in the old wild west, pushing a woman down and shooting an unarmed man (they took his legally carried weapon) in the back revealed the bad guys in old western movies.

On this range of male behavior, then, we have masked agents, with no visible IDs, heavily armed, and with the inability to show much self restraint when provoked. With a gang mentality, they would probably have less self restraint, fired up with adrenaline and inadequate training combined with group-think and encouragement (think of the agent who clapped his hands after the ten shots were fired into Pretti’s body). They moved from pepper spraying a man whom they had subdued to shooting him in the back. Whether it was seeking revenge for kicking out the taillight, we may never know. My hunch, which I am hesitant to share because it is just speculation, is that they did have him on some sort of watch list, they knew he carried a weapon, and they were seeking revenge for his actions.

By all accounts, Alex Pretti served his community and was a well-respected nurse at the VA. He is at the other end of range of maleness. He was a nurse, a caregiver, one who must have valued compassion, empathy, healing. In the United States, the nursing field is about 10% male. At the VA, that number increases to about 33%. Whether they knew he was an ICU nurse or not, they would have called Pretti “lib,” “snowflake,” “soy boy,” “f****t.” To say that the ICE agents viewed him with disdain is an understatement.

What occurred to me in the last few days, though, is another aspect of male behavior that, frankly, has my stomach churning in disgust. As each phase of the Epstein files are released, my disgust is further unleashed. And last night, in one of those inexplicable middle-of-the-night questions, it hit me: where is the outrage at the Epstein files expressed by men?

I awoke this morning thinking of the rapists and abusers on that island and in those files. Rich, powerful, the untouchable elite who, in their inner circle, knew that they wouldn’t get caught. And if they were identified, they knew they would not be held to account for their crimes against teenage girls. The language that the media, and others, use to describe these crimes soften the blow: frequently referring to the teenage girls as “young women,” for starters, and for describing the action of the men in terms other than “abuse,” “rape,” and “trafficking.”

I’ve known males like this. Their behavior wasn’t sexually predatory in junior high and high school, but because they came from nice homes in upscale neighborhoods, they held a certain privilege and sway in school and in the community.

I knew them at college. I knew them when I worked in Silicon Valley.

I have known males along this whole range of male behavior, witnessed the types who brandished weapons not for hunting or sport shooting but as a power play, as intimidation, as conversation stoppers. Men who use power and intimidation — physical and with guns — as their trump card. Men who use income and status as the weapon.

I’ve known the Alex Pretti types as well. Hell, I am one. I worked at the University Counseling Center while in college. Later, I worked in a drug and alcohol treatment center where I facilitated nightly meditations for patients. I was a teacher and worked in the field of education for over 32 years.

I have an adult daughter. I have two stepdaughters (four, if you count the two stepdaughters from my first marriage). I think of their place in the world; no, what I think a lot about is the threats to their place in the world. I want to protect them from the men they may encounter, that certainly they have encountered, in the world.

I want every male to be held accountable — whether protected by the camo they’re wearing in the streets, face covered by masks, no IDs, ill-prepared with inadequate training using unjustifiable tactics. Or maybe their protection comes in the form of “good ol boy networks” of the rich and famous, accountability protected by wealth, status, and privilege.

I want there to be collective outrage from men who are as disgusted as I am. Men who see that other powerful forces can counter the power play of weapons and wealth. Men who fight for the rights of others–Constitutional rights, civil rights– armed with reason, compassion, empathy, and dignity in the face of adversity.

Let’s do better. Young men, choose your mentors wisely. Let’s be better.

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As is often the case, “I need....” is really a not-so-secret code spoken between child and parent. It translates to “Can you _____ for my class project due on _____?”

I didn’t mind helping out, or even doing the class project myself, this time. The problem: what food to make?

I joked that she could take in a pot of beans and wienies, my mother’s default dinner when she didn’t quite feel like cooking. Mom would have gotten a kick out of that, actually. She often said that she was not much of a cook, didn’t like carving out the time for it, and really was not much of an eater, herself. She worked the graveyard shift at the hospital, which meant that she slept while we were at school from 7:30 until 3:30. Cooking an elaborate dinner, or even a simple one, was not high on her “favorite things about being a working mom” list. And, yes, I wish my siblings and I would have stepped it up and taken on that chore. But that’s an essay for another time.

My mother was of German descent, but no dishes from her side of the family sprang to mind as I contemplated what dish I could send with my daughter the following week. What she did take pride in making was fudge at Christmas time. (That’s an essay for another time, too.) I didn’t know how she made it. More importantly, I didn’t want to send a plateful of candy to a middle school classroom. I was a teacher. I envisioned sugar-buzzed middle schoolers leaving World Culture and heading to their English class. I didn’t want to consider the crash after the fudge-binge, either. Teachers would be at my door. I could just see it.

What I decided to make came from my father’s side of the family. In the first ten years of my life, we lived next door to Aunt Millie and Uncle Chuck. Millie made the most delicious breads, and my favorite was her Serbian walnut bread: potica. Sometimes called povitica. I decided to try my hand at baking this nut roll. Millie had never passed down a recipe; I wonder now if she even had it written down. It’s pure speculation on my part, but I can picture Millie at her mother’s side, helping to make the bread. She would have just absorbed the recipe like one would remember a parent’s most common expression. I conjured Millie’s presence in my mind.

I also had to conjure the potica recipe through a spiritual medium called a search engine. I don’t know if I used Google or Yahoo, but I found a recipe that I’ve used for nearly 20 years now. I wish I could say it was Aunt Millie’s recipe. It’s quite close. I lie and say it is.

I have made potica virtually every year since my daughter’s classroom assignment first motivated us. And by “us,” I mean “me.” I can, without braggadocio, say that my potica is requested every holiday season by my daughter, wife, and stepdaughters.

I have had failures along the way. My favorite failure that springs to mind is the winter that I forgot to put the yeast into the mix. Well, “springs” is the wrong word: the dough never rose. I baked it anyway. The resultant bread was more like a cowboy’s hardtack that he would have put in his saddlebags on his dusty cattle drive. I can imagine John Wayne tossing his wranglers a piece of walnut hardtack before the sun even came up, cajoling them that they’re “burnin’ daylight!” before pushing those little dogies up to Belle Fourche.

The other morning when I was kneading the dough, I asked Siri to play “country songs from 1962.” I would have been 5 years old. I envision being at Millie’s house after kindergarten let out, and she was watching me while my mother took her after work nap. Maybe Millie had General Hospital on or Days of Our Lives. But I imagine that she was listening to KPIK on the radio while rolling out the dough. “Mama Sang a Song” came on as I listened and shaped the dough into a ball:

I get to thinking lots of times

About back when I was a lad

Of the old homeplace where I grew up

Of the days both good and bad

The process moves from very active stages of working the separate elements — flour and yeast (don’t forget the yeast) and egg and milk and oil; shaping that mixture into a ball

to a long stretch of waiting for it to rise;

then active again: spreading it out so thin; layering it with the walnut filling;

then waiting again for it to rise before it goes into the oven.

It reminds me of the way writers bring ideas together, knead them into a shape, wait for them to rise and rise again, spread a thin filling, and roll it into layers:

layers of dough & filling & memory: Jessica’s homework wrapped in an inheritance not of a recipe but an image rising in the warm kitchen with the soft sounds of country music crooning from the turquoise radio above Aunt Millie’s stove.

Dough

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When I first got sober, there was a little yellow card in the recovery rooms that had a handful of one sentence affirmations on it. When I first stepped into recovery, I was not feeling great about myself. The life I had created wasn’t flourishing. Far from it. Spiritually and emotionally bankrupt, I walked into recovery physically malnourished, unemployed, living in my mom’s one bedroom apartment then in the Cardinal Hotel on borrowed money as I tried to build a new life. I had been mired in remorse and regret, self-pity and depression, for a long time. I needed simple statements.

One of the sayings on the little yellow card was “cultivate an attitude of gratitude.”

Even before I became an English major, I had a fascination with words and ideas. That fascination turned into an infatuation as I made my way – drunk and stoned – through my undergraduate years. I do not say that with pride or braggadocio. My college years, particularly the last two, were lived under the influence of alcohol and weed.

It wasn’t so much that my alcoholism and weed addiction had destroyed some great life over time as is often the case with those who enter recovery. I was young – began drinking at 13 and stopped at 26 – so I had not built much of anything.

Oh, I had enjoyed successes along the way. Academically, my grades were fine and I was respected among other students majoring in English and my professors. Professionally, after graduation, I had found a great job.

Academic achievement and employment, though, served as a façade to the reality of low self-esteem, even self-loathing, and the frequent feelings of regret and self-pity. I didn’t have days or periods of depression or remorse or a lack of confidence. Instead, I had short periods of time and brief experiences where I actually felt confident, self-assured, bright in spirit. Two years after graduating, I was clinging to some vague idea that I could turn my life around.

I filtered the world through a lens of low self-regard. I couldn’t see the joyous or find the awe or wonder of the world because I couldn’t see any of that in me. My perspective of the outer was influenced by my inner world.

Then I found the one sentence that changed my life: cultivate an attitude of gratitude.

I thought a person was either born with gratitude or not. One either possessed it or didn’t. (I felt the same about faith but that is a post for another time.)

Cultivate. What actions could I take to grow my attitude of gratitude (a phrase that initially made me cringe. Too pollyanna for me.)?

All I could think of was what else we cultivate. A garden, of course, comes first to mind. And all the tools we use – shovels, rakes, hoses – and all the actions we take – sowing seeds, weeding, pruning, watering – to cultivate that little plot in which we place so much hope. I needed tools.

At the suggestion of others, I started making gratitude lists. I still do, some 40+ years later. At the end of the day or during a particularly down stretch of time, I list things for which I am grateful. Sometimes, I set the goal of writing down ten things. Other times, I just started listing until my attitude shifts. The shift may happen at three items. Maybe it is 13. Or I list the things I am grateful for about my home life. About my daughter. About my wife. My stepdaughters.

I give myself different challenges:

• make a list beginning on the first day of the month. Make an entry aligned with each day: on the 1^st, make one entry; on the 2^nd, make two entries; on the 15^th, make 15 entries. No repeating entries from prior days! It’s tough!

• make a list of things about me for which I am grateful. Go ahead and turn that gaze inward. Defeat the self-loathing with statements of self-regard. What a challenge! What a gift!

Things shifted.

I began to see the world differently.

I began to see myself differently.

A few years ago, after retiring, I found myself a little bit down. I had created a plan for retirement, but as Mike Tyson says, “everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face.” Retirement posed different challenges after 32+ years in my career: how to manage time and budget finances (for starters); what passions and interests do I really want to explore? I went to a counselor who turned out to be the perfect guy at the right time to help with the transition from the familiar to the new.

He asked if I had ever practiced making a gratitude list. When I shared that I did, he suggested a change to that tool. “In the morning, list three things that you are going to watch for during the day that fill you up. That make you grateful. Then at the end of the day, identify if you spotted those items.”

Here is an example of the sort of thinking I had fallen into: I walk my dog early in the morning. For a stretch of days, I had been noticing every place that somebody didn’t clean up after their dog. I watched for the times that were most egregious: poop in the middle of the trail, poop on the sidewalk. I spotted a lot of poop. How crummy of a way is that to spend the 30 minutes out walking my dog?

Clearly this is a metaphor: what am I watching for as I go out into the world? As I live my life?

I live basically at the foot of Pikes Peak. I’ve lived here a long time; I can take it for granted.

So ...

Every morning, I can pay attention to the light as the sun hits the east-facing granite. I can watch the changing colors and shifting shadows as the dawn turns into morning. I can look east and watch the light in the clouds over the plains.

With this new practice, I begin my day with both a positive outlook and a challenge. Instead of being conscious of any slight, I turned my vision to search out the joy in my world, the wonder, the awe of the current moment. I can watch for the grace of others, the beauty of my wife’s enthusiasm for her photography, the glee in her laugh, the beauty of her smile, the kindness of the cashier at Sprouts.

I can find the joy in the present moment.

And for that, I am grateful.

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The initial encounter was quite unintentional and accidental. Not even a blind date. Not a match made by well-meaning friends.

A couple of months ago, I started listening to classical music. I was merely updating the preset stations on my truck’s radio when I came across her, KCME, way down on the FM dial: 88.7. That should tell you something about our incompatibility. I mean, my truck’s most glamorous attribute is its affinity for fly fishing excursions. It’s the sought-after vehicle for helping friends move a dining room table, or a backyard grill, or haul some mulch. Utilitarian. Classical music’s got diamonds on the soles of her shoes; I’m empty as a pocket. I don’t always explore the 80s on the FM dial, but there she was, all adorned in piccolos and oboes, violins and violas, horns and percussives.

Most of the time, I don’t even know what instruments I am listening to.

I don’t quite have an ear for it. But maybe my inability to identify instruments is part of the appeal. I listen for things that I don’t even have a name for: the repetition, the shifts, the movement through a piece of music. I’m not sure – are there specific musical terms for those things?

I can’t tell an octave from … something that isn’t an octave.

My lack of vocabulary is both frustrating and liberating. The frustration stems from not being able to accurately communicate what I am experiencing. The liberation is that I am truly just listening to the music. I think I listen more closely. I’m not identifying “oh, look what he did there with the woodwinds.” I don’t know. Maybe I am just making that up. All I know is this: I am truly enjoying listening to classical music every day.

When I declared English as my major so many years ago (so, so many), I mainly chose the degree because of my interest in writing. I wasn’t particularly an avid or passionate reader in high school. I was, though, a lover of stories and language and ideas. By my junior year at Colorado State, I had eased my way into a specific focus: American Literature. Beyond my required courses for British and World literatures, almost all of my electives were in American lit: a course on Faulkner, another on Eugene O’Neill. The projects that I most vividly recall focused on a specific work or author from the American canon or a particular period: an essay on Wallace Stevens’ “Sunday Morning”; a paper for a U.S. History class that analyzed The Grapes of Wrath through a historical and social studies lens; an oral presentation on the literature of the Harlem Renaissance in my Oral Reading and Interpretation course.

This morning, John Alden Carpenter’s “Sea Drift” was the first whole song I heard when I launched the KCME app. The opening minute ... I mean, What the hell!? I can identify the drum and the violins. But what hit me first was the opening mood that it evoked. Ominous. It changed later – maybe more melancholy – and then lighter, more lively. My frustration: I can’t identify what the specific instruments are throughout. Can’t tell you what the conductor is asking the musicians to actually do. Liberation: I am so focused on the effect that the music has on me. I can hear and feel the movement. Appreciate the specific notes and sounds. Sometimes, I find myself whispering aloud “wow” as in — awestruck. As in moved.

I captured a screenshot from the KCME app that I will text my daughter later this morning. Along with the photo, I’ll say, “Playing my jam!” I have texted similar screenshots in the past, so she will only be mildly surprised by the random text. I can envision her eyeroll, though, and maybe the familiar shake of her head.

Unlike with other songs, though,I google “Sea Drift” when it is over. And I discover that it is, indeed, my jam.

Turns out that John Alden Carpenter was an American composer from the early 20^th century. An American composer. Carpenter describes “Sea Drift” as a tone poem inspired by Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass – perhaps the greatest collection of poems in American literature. “Sea Drift” is a cluster of poems within that larger volume.

In 1933, Carpenter wrote a letter to Lawrence Gilman of the New York Herald Tribune explaining his attempt to set excerpts of the Sea-Drift poems to music in vocal form:

In February of last year, under the influence of the blue Mediterranean at Eze village, I took up the old problem again, and abandoned any attempt to make a literal setting of the Whitman verses in a vocal work. I tried to make a composite orchestral record of the imprint upon me of these poems. My hope is that the music makes sense, just as music, with perhaps a special meaning for those who love Whitman. My work represents an effort to transcribe my impressions derived from these magnificent poems. [emphasis mine]

Unbelievable. Does it make sense, “just as music,” to me? I would have to say no. Does it have “a special meaning?” I’m going with yes.

I am left to wonder:

• What were the chances that the first song I listened to today was from an American composer and

• the subject matter was from a collection of poems I studied some 45 years ago?

• Of course it is just coincidental. Plenty of American composers of classical music. But …

• Why would I google this one? I mean, I have listened daily to KCME for over a month, maybe two, both in my truck and on my app at home. I have not googled one song.

• I think there is something deep in my bones about American literature, the American experience, that maybe language can’t get to. I know…I know. Sounds woo-woo.

But I’m not trying to make some mystical woo-woo argument! For a few days now, I have been toying with the idea of writing this post about my unlikely infatuation with classical music, alongside my lack of any sort of musical talent or history or experience other than attending a less-than-occasional holiday performance by the Colorado Springs Philharmonic.

When I woke up this morning (Thursday), I thought it was time to draft an exploration of “classical music and me” for tomorrow’s post. And then as luck would have it ... “Sea Drift.” Maybe we were meant to be together?

In 1934, Werner Janssen gave “Sea Drift” its first New York performance. That performance was reviewed by Olin Downes of the NY Times:

“Sea-drift” becomes long and inconsequential, in spite of some fine passages, as for instance the conclusion. Mr. Carpenter was present last night and appeared on the stage with Mr. Janssen to acknowledge the applause.

But it must be said that Mr. Carpenter has given us much better scores than this one, and it must also be said that a happier choice of American works could have been made. ... We have better American music.

Ah, what does Olin know, anyway?

Here is a production of Sea Drift from 1945. The original source says that it is Leonard Bernstein conducting the New York Philharmonic Orchestra. A commenter suggests that it is probably Artur Rodzinski conducting.

Bravo!

The question did what good questions do. It stopped me in my tracks. My initial response, after re-reading Steve’s piece, was unexpected. I couldn’t recall, not vividly anyway, elements of awe in my childhood. Those moments certainly didn’t happen in our light blue Ford Country Squire station wagon (not unlike Steve’s father’s Oldsmobile station wagon, I’m sure). The most vivid drives we took were to the mountains to fish. But, for me, those road trip memories are almost always tainted by words of rebuke from my dad, by his sudden turn of emotion, that diminished the pleasure or excitement of the excursion.

Of course, Steve’s station wagon drives are a vehicle he uses to bring alive the childhood awe he held for the world around him. And his challenge, the question he posed, asked me to do the same.

I had to put the station wagon aside. I couldn’t get to the feeling of awe that way. Steve’s accompanying question was “Where are your sources of literary inspiration?” When I quit comparing my childhood experience to Steve’s, which caused my initial pushback, I was able to get to the heart of both questions.

Like with a good conversation, the questions invited me into a reflection of my own.

And the answer I found was at Monument Creek.

Monument Creek, or just The Creek (as in, “we’re gonna head down to The Creek” when my brother and sister and I headed out the kitchen door), flowed in its insignificant way less than half a mile from my childhood home. By the time we cut through our untamed acre of yucca, anthills, and prickly pear cacti, then across the corner of Mr. Talamine’s property, and finally scurried down the slope to the side of the creek, I was transported from the chaos of our alcoholic home to a place of wonder.

In the winter, we skated on the uneven ice of varying thickness. More than once, one of us broke through. Since the creek at its deepest (except during the 1965 flood that turned it into a raging, angry river) was maybe a foot deep, it posed no danger. A soaking wet sock and foot was worth the risk and the trade-off for the winter’s day.

In the summers, we went down with our dad to shoot BB guns and .22 rifles. If guns weren’t involved, we were there almost always with no adults. At this stretch, The Creek didn’t run through a neighborhood. Rarely would we see kids from Shangri-La Mobile Home Park. They were further upstream from us and wouldn’t venture down. And we didn’t head up their way. Why would we? This was almost an extension of our backyard, our private wild area.

The Creek had an interesting topography along its bank. On the far side, the west side, the bank widened out into a flood plain. Cottonwoods and other trees grew here. Rabbits dashed through grasses. Magpies flew. On the east side, as we approached from our house, the open field with no trees descended to an open space along the bank.

A steep embankment stretched for maybe fifty yards just south of the sloping, gentle approach. It rose vertically from the sweeping curve of The Creek. We were able to scurry a few feet up before the cliff was too steep to climb.

That embankment held a small world of its own. We snatched spoons from the kitchen drawer and dug in the side of the cliff. There were tiny shells in the subsoil, remnants from a whole different time. I have a vague recollection finding small bone fragments and of digging around one larger bone until we had four or five inches of it exposed. I squint my eyes now to wonder if this fragment of bone were real or a figment of my imagination. I swear it was real. I swear my brother and sister and I were fascinated, awed, with it.

In some regards, it doesn’t matter today. What matters is the recollection of the dirt caked under my nails, the spoon digging into the bank, the soil sliding down the steep slope. What matters is the intense focus on that bank, the digging and digging.

What I remember is escaping down there on hot summer afternoons. Crossing The Creek and feeling the sandy bottom against my feet. What I remember is a place that offered a respite, this unlikely, seemingly nondescript, little stretch of nature that left its mark.

I wrote, in my memoir, about a pond.

A pond was there, across the creek, and encircled by cottonwoods. We watched dark blue and iridescent green dragonflies skirt across the surface of the water in the shade of the trees. They hovered in place just above the water then flashed to another spot. In the cool shade on summer afternoons, the pond became a mythical, mystical, place. It felt like our own discovery, this escape, this canopy of trees serving as sanctuary.

It’s been 60 years since I lived within walking distance of Monument Creek.

Sometimes I let my perspective of my childhood get framed by a too-narrow focus on the neglect at the house within hollering distance of The Creek. My childhood was more both/and rather than either/or.

I can’t always get to the awe and wonder. I couldn’t get there by station wagon. I had to meander down. I had to dig. And there it was.

Buy a Guy a Spoon

Every night, or rather every morning, for ten or twelve nights straight, I woke up at the exact same time: 1:43 a.m. It didn’t matter what time I went to bed, I woke up at 1:43 a.m. I tried to trick my body by going to bed at 11:00 p.m., and then 11:30 p.m., but it just meant I got a little more than two hours of sleep. If I went to bed at 9:00, my night’s sleep was somewhere close to five hours.

Regardless of the time that I went to bed, though, I was still awake for the next twenty hours or so.

I don’t know what I did in all those hours of being awake. This was 1992, so I didn’t doom scroll. Didn’t play Wordle. Didn’t post updates. I think I prepared for my classes. Read student essays. Read but not with the intent or effect of going back to sleep. I wasn’t writing much, then, but I probably journaled or worked on essays to model the ones I was assigning my students.

When I retired in January of 2019 from the Department of Education after six years there, I thought I would sleep in. Before I retired, I would get up at 4:00 or 4:30 to catch Bustang from Colorado Springs to Denver. I liked getting up early. On the bus, which had wifi and a bathroom, I would meditate, post on Facebook (“Let’s go to Denver, people!”), listen to music, and answer emails. I kept a journal periodically (but not enough. I was not cultivating my own writing life, then, which is disappointing in retrospect.)

But sleeping in today is staying in bed until – at the latest – 5:30 a.m. Today, I was out of bed by 3:45. I don’t intend to get up this early. It just happens.

Today, for example, at 3:23, I knew I would not go back to sleep. What happens lately is that I find myself brainstorming or revising whatever piece of writing I am working on. This morning, I began thinking about a piece that I’m writing for the open mic night at Cottonwood Center for the Arts. The theme for October is “are you afraid of the dark?” The short answer is “no.” The long answer, the piece I am writing, is still getting worked out. Stay tuned.

I also thought about the other thing I am working on: a collection of essays about my mother and my relationship with her. I envision a memoir-in-essays but the form, the container to carry this piece, is still being worked out, too. I have brainstormed essays in my journal (beginning May of 2024), on my computer, and in my bed in the wee hours of the morning. Some pieces are taking shape. Some are still nebulous.

What motivates me to get up is when I have a clearer sense of the revision I need to make or what brainstormed idea needs to be put down on paper. And those ideas comes with clarity but not urgency. When I get out of bed, I make a cup of coffee, do some meditation, do Wordle, and then start writing. I don’t go straight to the computer (or journal) to write. I’m not sure why. I do know this: that early morning mental work while I am still in bed stays with me through the morning routine.

Getting up at 4:30 a.m. is far different than the insomnious period I went through in my mid-30s. I get it. I don’t want to relive that, at all. But oh man. I wish I could get that time back and focus on my own writing. I was more focused on teaching, then, and not writing – and wish I had the discipline to do both. I wish I had the clarity and drive to put my own writing first and then prepare for my course load with college students. No going back, though.

Which is why I think I get up early.

In the morning, almost all the time, the quiet and stillness fills me. The morning hours are, of course, a space that doesn’t happen anywhere else in the day. Thoreau, quoting the Vedas, wrote “All intelligences awake with the morning.”

I love my morning routine. Sometimes my dog joins me in my office. I’ll meditate, and write, while he sleeps until it’s time for either his breakfast, my breakfast, or our morning walk. The cat is obnoxious and meowing back in the bedroom. He’s a senior, too, and we are too similar in our sleep cycle. I don’t think I am the obnoxious attention-seeker that he is, though.

Often times, I think sleep is a waste of time. I know it’s good and necessary for the body. A good night’s sleep heals the injury we may have. A good night’s sleep, obviously, rejuvenates the body. I get all that. I also get that I will probably take a nap later in the afternoon. But it’s just that – the middle of the afternoon. Not this morning light and quiet and awakeness. (I see that awakeness is not a word – but it should be.)

Maybe because I am older now, I see what a precious commodity time is. In my reflections and periodic inventories, “use of my time” surfaces. I don’t have regrets about the money I frittered away (and I didn’t have a lot of “frittering away” money; I was a teacher!). Money squandered, money saved...it ebbed and flowed.

I have regrets, though, about the time I let slip away. Late nights, early mornings, summer days, winter and spring breaks. It dawns on me right now that it was not a matter of being “productive” (that societal pressure); it was a matter of being attentive. Of paying attention. Of using the abundance, the gift, of space and light and morning time to nurture a creative passion.

Maybe at 68 years old instead of 38 years old, I can see the hands of the clock move differently. I can see the days on the calendar get X-ed through at a little quicker pace. I can feel the speed with which the pages of that calendar get flipped. There’s no going back. There is being in the ever-present now. There is this morning.

Maybe in the not-yet-light-out morning, and even in the still-dark middle of the night, I see my life with more clarity.

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Tip Jar for the Piano Man

Enjoy this Billy Joel video of “The River of Dreams”

The first time I tried to tie a surgical knot was the late winter of 1970. I was twelve. To add unnecessarily to the difficulty, I squeezed my fingers into a small matchbox. The move required attention to detail, not with vision but with touch. I fingered the thread I had taken from my mother’s sewing kit, my fingers squeezed into that small box like some sort of a torture game. It was impossible. I possessed neither the dexterity nor the precision to accomplish the move.

Dr. Denton Cooley, who performed the first artificial heart transplant in 1969, was said to have had the finest hands, to have been the finest heart surgeon who ever lived. He was my idol. A hero. He perfected his surgical knots by tying them inside small matchboxes.

I remember sitting at the dining room table, trying to move my fingers in the small box. At twelve years old, I could barely even hold the thread. I’m not sure how long I tried nor how many times I returned to the task over the next few weeks. Not many, I would guess, knowing myself, or knowing who I was then. Persistence was not much of a trait, either.

My motivation to tie that knot began two years before. I was fascinated by the human heart, the focus of my 5^th grade research project. When the school photographer came to the classroom to take a picture of me beside my poster, he said, “We need an action shot. Point to the aorta with your pencil.” So, slump shouldered and spindly armed, typical-fifth-grader me is captured in a black & white photo creased with time pointing to the human heart. I wanted to be a heart surgeon.

Interests fade -- as did my math and science grades. I pursued other paths, followed different lines, found my own passions. Leaned over this desk, tried to write into and through the dark, fumbled to make connections between two strands of almost equal diameter until I could pull the idea tight in a too-small space.

Standing in the river, I lay two strands of line next to each other, looping them over and through, and pull the knot tight. I tie on an artificial fly at one end.

The other strand, the longer line, leads back to that twelve-year old at the dining room table.

I see him. I’m proud of him, sitting there, leaning in, trying to be dexterous, precise, and wanting to be skilled with fingers and thread that he cannot even see.

Tip Jar

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One of those expressions is False Evidence Appearing Real. I came to appreciate that expression for many situations, particularly when I was caught up in fears about finances. I didn’t just go from thinking that I didn’t have enough money for gas or that I may need to cut back on grocery items at the end of the month. I went straight to the idea that I was going to be homeless and living under a bridge in a matter of days.

At 68 years old, fears about my physical health surface. What I think is going to be a debilitating condition, or a permanent state of my body and health, has often turned out to be a moment of uncertainty (I was going to say “fleeting moment” but, as mentioned, I am 68 and not particularly fleet at anything right now). Of course, that health fear interweaves with financial security. Instead, I gather more evidence from my primary care physician. I gather more evidence from some place other than my brain.

I need to slow down, assess the evidence, and not sit in those fears for too long.

To call them worst-case scenarios seems to be an understatement. I could convince myself that the evidence was, indeed, true, real, and have dire consequences. The expression false evidence appearing real helped me step back and reconsider the truth of my situation.

The other expression that was popular was Fuck Everything And Run. Well, while that may be appropriate in the woods with an encroaching mountain lion or some other physical threat that may be lurking, it isn’t exactly logical or widely applicable. Of course, with physical threats, it may be wise to flee. The flee, fight, freeze, or fawn responses have their place. I don’t, in my day-to-day, have those sorts of experiences too often.

Some of the fears and anxieties I have been experiencing lately, though, are more nebulous. Very difficult to pin down and also not difficult to pin down. I guess they would be categorized as existential threats. (I don’t want to sound overly dramatic, so I am hesitant to use that phrase. But if the shoe fits … )

I become fearful at the state of our country, the state of the divisiveness in our society. I become fearful at the loss of rights — free speech, due process, voting rights for all of our citizens. The fear intensifies when I think of the American way of life that my daughter and stepdaughters may inherit as they pursue their lives. I fear economic challenges that exist outside of my own ability to budget or merely solve by tightening my belt.

Those fears seem to have evidence to support them. They are not merely fabricated in my mind but are potentially very real threats. They are virtually impossible to out run.

In the past few weeks, I have pondered what I actually do in the face of my fears today. What antidote do I have. What “actions” do I take to combat my fears?

Fly fishing is one. Disconnecting and going to the mountains. Preparing a meal is one. Writing is one. Sometimes I make awkward acrylic paintings. I listen to classical music (of which I have absolutely no training and no understanding, musically, of what is happening in a piece). I go to open mics once a month. I meditate daily.

What do they have in common?

Each of these passions forces me to live in the moment. It is virtually impossible for me to be in the present moment and experience the emotion or state of mind of fear. My fears are almost always of something that could (or could not) happen in the future. (Again, if it is a looming physical threat — perhaps not so much in the future.)

And if my fear is future-directed, focused on something “down the road,” then I can do things in the present moment to counter it. Make a phone call. Draft a plan. Make an appointment.

But I do not have to live in fear for something I perceive is going to happen. Something that might happen. I just don’t. What is right here in the ever-present now?

I wrote this poem in May of 1978. I was just a kid (well, 21) and living in Fort Collins.

Listen:

Stellar jays call raucously, there, in those pines.

The lake laps the shore:

a stone, thrown,

sounds plop! so quickly

quietly you can miss it.

Two days of rain—

drops no longer click

in sporadic

rhythm on cement.

They pound quick little dimples

in the mud

in the ooze

of my backyard.

Listen:

you can miss it.

I share it now because the truth of it holds even today. As a young man trying to make my way through college, into the world, I felt the insistence of

living in the moment,

paying attention,

being present.

The fear is about his discomfort. It is about the expense of another vet visit, too, but mainly about his discomfort with whatever is going on inside of his ear.

My fear wraps itself around my powerlessness to fix him, my inability to get inside his ear and wipe it clean. But mostly, it is about my powerlessness to do something right then in the middle of the night.

I told my wife the other morning that I have had a pervasive feeling of fear for several weeks now. That fear has been mostly for others.

A few weeks ago I drove down to Del Norte, Colorado, about four hours from my home. My sister lived there and when I was with her last year at this time, I met a friend of hers who became a friend of mine. I’m not sure how old Alex is, mid-70s perhaps. She is a little older than my sister who passed away on September 24. So Alex and I became friends, bonded while I stayed with my sister in hospice, and we stay in touch today out of our shared passion for writing and love of my sister.

I went down to Del Norte to support Alex as she had a hearing for a man living in an apartment across the courtyard from Alex’s. Alex was being intimidated by the man. He blocked her path when she took clothes from the community laundry. He flipped her off from the balcony of his apartment. He messed up some art work — little crosses she was making out of tree branches — as she spread them out on the sidewalk. He bullied her — all 5 feet, 90 pounds of her. She feared him.

So I asked her if she needed my support at the hearing. I couldn’t do much. Couldn’t testify against the man. Couldn’t read the email my sister sent to Alex that detailed the times that the man tried to intimidate my sister, too. But I could have dinner with Alex. Could sit in the courtroom as moral support as she laid out her story to the judge, her history with the man who caused her to be fearful in her own home, fearful to go do laundry. Fearful to park in “his” parking space (there are no assigned spaces at their apartments). Fearful to make Christmas decorations, crosses made of limbs from downed pine trees, for her friends.

I imagine that Alex tosses and turns with fear late at night. No, I know that she does. She told me as much.

A couple of weeks ago my wife went on a solo road trip to her old college town. She was feeling a little restless, cooped up and slowed down due to a severe ankle sprain that cost her a more active summer routine. She headed to Gunnison to take photos, have lunch at her favorite spot, be out in nature.

She headed to a little lake. She had her fly fishing rod, her camera, healthy snacks. There was a guy hanging out around the curve of the lake, sitting on some rocks. He slowly worked his way toward my wife’s car as she fished and photographed until he was sitting at the picnic table not too far from her car.

He creeped her out as he tried to make small talk. She realized that here, in the mountains, at a beautiful lake, she had no real defense against this guy who now was ruining what she came to enjoy.

As my wife told me the story, I felt my fear for her rise in my chest. I realized that the creepy dude would not have made his way to her car like that if I had been there. And the interaction would have been an entirely different conversation. As my wife talked, I felt the fear of my own powerlessness.

My daughter and I had lunch yesterday and she told me some of the fears she has. Some of it — a generalized anxiety at the state of the world, the state of being human — she inherited, I’m afraid, from me. Low-grade but ever-present anxiety. Anxiety about the stripping away of First Amendment rights. Anxiety about easy access to guns and the threat of young men wielding them. Anxiety about people with power exploiting those with less — less power, less money, less status.

She has more specific anxiety, too, about walking to her car after work, but “I’m not going to let them win,” she says. And I am simultaneously proud of and fearful for her. She’s 32. I still want to wrap her in a bubble that offers more protection than “be careful” or “do you carry mace, pepper spray?”

I’m fearful of my powerlessness.

That I can’t knock the bully on his ass so Alex can do her laundry (yes, I know… ironic). That I can’t be at the lake when my wife wants to simply capture the beauty of it under a Colorado sky. That I can’t walk my daughter to her car at the end of her work day.

I can be aware of my own behavior around and towards others; I realize that I may actually be a perceived threat. Many years ago, I taught college writing at the local campus. Late in the fall semester, in November or December when it got dark early, I was heading from the parking lot to the library building where I had my evening classes. The parking lot was not particularly well-lit and as I turned the corner on the sidewalk, a young woman heading to her car was coming toward me. She almost immediately clutched her book bag closer, tensed up, looked surprised and maybe fearful. I’m 6’4”. She was smaller. I’ll never forget that few second encounter. She saw me as a threat.

How sad is that? How understandable is that? How powerless am I to change that perception?

What I can do is call out the bullies on their behavior. Call them out. And yet my fear is that it is merely whistling in the dark. Spitting into the wind. But absolutely necessary.

As my daughter said, we can’t let them win. We can’t let the bullies win.

Because the nurse said, “home hospice does not mean home bound,” my wife and I are taking my sister, Deb, on a road trip. We’re heading west on Highway 160 toward the Rio Grande at the end of the Valley. Deb’s choice. It’s 25 minutes to the river from her apartment. Road trips don’t need to be long.

Deb is upbeat and animated. Part of the reason for her bright spirits is that Jannetta is here. They have had a strong connection ever since the beginning of our relationship. “She’s good for you, Vince,” Deb said after Jannetta and I had dated for a while. “She keeps you grounded.” She does, indeed.

Deb angles her phone’s camera against the window and takes photos along the way. She captures a cloud above the palisades, its shadow darkening the slope beneath it. The scene will change in seconds; the cloud and shadow will move, shape-shift, disappear.

I find it interesting, curious, as I watch her take photos. Then I am startled by my realization that there won’t be some point in the future when she says, “remember when you and Jannetta took me to sit by the Rio Grande when I was in hospice?” We won’t have a time when she texts me the photo and says, “I took this picture on that day.”

It occurs to me that I am already grieving.

She, though, is tending to the present moment as fully as she can, her artistic eye finding the beauty in this moment. What a wonderful world, she seems to say.

We walk hand-in-hand to a sunny patch near the bank of the river.

We are here for Deb, to move at her pace, her rhythm, to share this moment with Jannetta, with me.

Mostly we listen to the river.

Deb and I fished this stretch of river before. Before the cancer. In this present moment, we simply sit by the river. I want to know what she is thinking, feeling. I don’t ask. Unlike other unasked questions, though, I am fine with this one. I can sit with no regret about the not-asking.

What Deb needs, a respite, an escape from her apartment, she receives in this brief moment. I need this moment, too.

We listen to the river.

Tip Jar

I was heading back to Fenwick, Stone, Davis and West. I had quit my job with them after I transferred to the New York City office. Two months after moving there in July, I quit. Drunk. Stoned. I was 26. Immature. For some reason, they gave me my job back in the Palo Alto office. It’s a story for another time, for sure, but I was getting a second chance for reasons unknown to me.

If you’re going to break down on a pilgrimage, break down with your mother in the passenger seat. Have some Wyoming rancher, some unlikely godsend when there is nobody else around, see that you’re in trouble and lend a gnarled, grease-stained hand to get you back on the highway across the wind-swept prairie. Is that what this became? A pilgrimage. Can you unknowingly take a pilgrimage? What is it called then? An odyssey? Is there a word for a journey where in the end you find yourself?

153 miles north of Colorado Springs, I-25 intersects with I-80 in Cheyenne, Wyoming. My mother’s Mercury Montego had a little shake to it as we headed west across the Wyoming prairie. She glanced over at me every mile marker or so, maybe wondered if I was hung over from the previous night’s wine. Or maybe I still had a lingering drunk from the night before.

I commented that it must be the crosswinds making her car shimmy. We barreled west on I-80 toward Green River with the plan to spend the night in Salt Lake City.

The sudden thud and bang shocked both of us. I steadied the wheel as the car pulled and strained. When we rolled to a stop on the shoulder, I got out to inspect what had happened.

What in the hell. Jammed into the wheel well was the driver-side rear wheel. It had fallen off the axle. How we didn’t careen into the ditch with the wheel continuing down the highway at 65 mph ...

As we looked at the wheel and considered our options on this early November day in pre-cell phone 1983, an old beater of a pick-up truck pulled away from an white-washed farmhouse about 150 yards across the prairie. We watched it cut across the land straight toward us.

The older man scanned the situation, hooked up our car to the tow-bar welded on to the frame of the truck’s bed, had us squeeze in to the cab, and pulled the Montego to one of the outbuildings on his property.

After a few minutes with the car raised up on his jack, he emerged from the garage.

“Ma’am, did you have new tires put on your car before you hit the road?”

My mother nodded “yes.”

He gestured in a twisting motion with his thumb and forefinger held out in front of him. “Well, your lug nuts were only finger tight. All four wheels. Those lug nuts ain’t even seen a wrench.”

Back on the road, somewhere west of Little America, I turned to my mom, “I don’t know about you, but I believe in some sort of God.”

“What do you mean?”

“Mom, we were speeding down the highway. A wheel falls off of the car. The worst thing that happens is that it jams into the wheel well? We coast to a stop across the field from some guy who happens to have a home-made tow truck? He fixes our car?”

* * *

I don’t know what sort of God I believed in out on that prairie. My attempts at finding religion always fell far short of commitment. I chose to be baptized into the Presbyterian church around the time I graduated from high school because my girlfriend belonged to that church. I don’t remember feeling anything on that baptismal Sunday and my girlfriend broke up with me not long after. Someone said that my Transcendental Meditation practice conflicted with a Christian path.

My interest in religion waned, as did the idea of following a spiritual path. The soothing effects of either the religious or spiritual practices didn’t come quickly enough, especially compared to the immediacy of a slug of Southern Comfort or a hit from a bong.

The Unification Church tried to recruit me when I was in New York City. And the Church sent the right disciple: a young woman, a singer in a band, whom I had met at CBGBs when I first visited New York. I was certainly an easy mark: clearly lost, desperately lonely, disconnected, drunk or stoned or both whenever she and I talked.

During a cab ride back to my apartment on Waverly Place, she became offended when I blurted out, “You’re a Moonie?”

“We don’t like that term. I’m a member of the Unification Church of Reverend Sun Myung Moon.” I got out of the cab and didn’t talk with her again.

Not long after, I quit my job and drank Olde English 800 in Washington Square Park before I found my way back to Colorado Springs.

* * *

If not a pilgrimage, barreling west on I-80 at the lowest point in my life, what is the word? My mother used the opportunity – where was I going to go? – to give me a little pep talk. I was a captive audience. Literally.

“Vince.”

Her pause summoned my attention.

“You need to take advantage of this second chance. Mr. Fenwick has been awfully good to you. They didn’t need to offer you your job back.”

She wanted to reground me. Shift my perspective.

“You need to stop and smell the roses. Enjoy what this job is giving you. Don’t be in such a hurry. This is a good thing.”

I started to respond. My life would look different now, I just knew it, with this second chance. I would be different.

When I spoke, I envisioned my words floating from my mouth toward her ears across the bench seat of that car. I watched my words rising and falling in the air between us, riding on a current of hope.

I wanted to believe what I was telling her, that things would be different.

Like a small bird might grow tired in mid-flight, though, my words drifted down and sat in the space between us.

I would be different. I didn’t know how.

Tip Jar

I adopted a pretty simple strategy for this long-distance excursion. I have been a habitual early riser for many years and that routine served us well on this first trip. The plan was to get on the road by 5:00 a.m. on the first three mornings to cover the 1,300 miles between Colorado Springs and Palo Alto.

I’m good for a ten- or twelve-hour driving day but traveling with a not-yet 5-year-old posed new challenges. Her mother and I had divorced just after Jessica turned one, so it was routine to spend time alone with her for a few years. Every other weekend, and two or three evenings a week, in those first five years became a pretty solid routine. This dad-daughter date, though, of almost two weeks on the road, would be memorable – one way or another.

Colorado Springs, Colorado to Vernal, Utah. 6.5 hours. 391 miles.

My hope was that I would load Jessica in the car early in the morning, and she would doze for the first couple hundred miles. My hope became reality. She slept for a couple of hours, and we found a Denny’s for breakfast. After pancakes and bacon, back on the road for another 5 hours. We ended the day’s driving by 2:00 each of those first afternoons on the road.

Since this was the beginning of July, we were in the heat of summer. I enticed her to be patient, “hang in there,” for the miles between breakfast and our first motel stop where, I promised, we would have a swimming pool.

Denny’s helped out. They had a promotion where they sold plush toys for a few bucks. Little stuffed puppies, if I remember correctly, that soon joined the gaggle (or is it a herd? a pack?) of stuffed animals she brought with her from home. With her herd in her lap, the Pocahontas soundtrack playing (it was hard to believe that I had a six-cd player in the trunk, and this one dominated the rotation), we headed to Dinosaur National Monument on the Colorado / Utah border. We walked around, endured the temps, and found some of the exhibits pretty interesting. There wasn’t a lot to really hold a 4-year-old’s interest for very long. I was just grateful that the plan worked for this first day.

After visiting exploring at the Monument, we made our way to our motel in Vernal, Utah, and splashed in the pool to get some relief from the heat. Between the pool and dinner, she took a quick nap.

“Just Around the River Bend” was my favorite song for this leg. It must have been; I can hear it in my brain now.

Vernal, Utah to Winnemucca, Nevada. 7.75 hours. 520 miles.

Driving Day Two, we made the journey from Vernal, Utah to Winnemucca, Nevada. Those miles, when you cross the state line from Utah to Nevada is a whole lotta desert white. We drove near the Bonneville Salt Flats – a vast, flat, very bright stretch with some unique landscapes. The Salt Flats are known for high speed car racing; in fact, it’s the location of many land speed records.

Waylon Jennings’ Live! album played from the CD. The album opens with the emcee saying, “Ladies and gentleman, Mister Waylon Jennings!” By the time we pulled into Winnemucca, I pretty much had Jessica skilled in making that introduction right before “T for Texas” plays.

We didn’t set any land speed records, but I was glad to have that leg done.

At the pool, Jessica made friends with another 4-year old while they played in the shallow end of the pool. I had to tell Jessica, ‘no,’ we wouldn’t be inviting her new friend and her mother to dinner that night. I was secretly pleased, though, that she had somebody to play with and made that connection, regardless how brief it would be.

When we were in the restaurant next door to the motel, Jessica told me, “Nonie is sitting outside right now. On that street lamp.” Nonie was Jessica’s make-believe friend. Good kid. Kind of quiet. I hardly knew she was around.

“Maybe you should invite her in,” I offered. “She can have dinner with us.”

“She said she’s not hungry. And she is having fun outside,” Jessica said. I peered out the window to see if I could spot her on that light pole.

Winnemucca, Nevada to Palo Alto, California. 6.5 hours. 413 miles.

Driving Day Three took us into Palo Alto where we would stay for a few days visiting friends. The motel’s unheated swimming pool was freezing, so we didn’t spend much time in it. I was disappointed at the temps. Jessica rolled with the punches.

This leg of the trip was for me, mostly.

Jessica and I hung out with folks I got sober with in 1984. We hadn’t seen each other for several years, ever since I had moved back to Colorado Springs (much to their dismay. Who would leave the vibrant and hopping Silicon Valley?). It was an opportunity to reconnect with friends who played a crucial role at a pivotal point in my life. None of this, not my daughter, not this road trip, would have been possible if I had stayed drunk. Of course, for Jessica, it was just a group of her dad’s friends, who shared a lot of laughter, were glad to meet her, and who made her feel like they had known her for her entire life.

The BBQ at Gordon’s house was a regrounding, a reconnection through conversations that seemed to have not skipped a beat. They knew me better than many people whom I had known longer. The visit revealed a continuation of a life we began to share nearly ten years before.

When we said our goodbyes, my friend, Paul, leaned down at the passenger window to say goodbye to Jessica.

“Hey, if you get pulled over by the highway patrol, just start yelling ‘this isn’t my dad! This isn’t my dad!’” They both laughed.

“Thanks, Paul,” I said. Then, to Jess, “We won’t say anything to the highway patrol, ok?”

Before we left Palo Alto, Jessica and I walked around the Stanford campus. I had graduated from the Teacher Education Program in 1987. While we sat at the White Memorial Fountain (aka “The Claw”), just one more random stop for Jessica, I thought of the life made possible with my sobriety.

Sitting with my daughter, where I had sat with my mother at graduation just after I turned 30, the current reality intermingled with the past. Memories layer here — my time at Stanford, my mother, my daughter.

Palo Alto, California to Monterey Bay to Disneyland. 7.5 hours. 461 miles.

The Palo Alto to Disneyland leg was the best one of the trip. We were back with Pocahontas and “Colors of the Wind.”

We first stopped at Monterey Aquarium. Regardless of miles traveled, people seen, conversations and food enjoyed, there was something mesmerizing, joyful about watching the otters eating sea urchins or crabs in the Monterey Bay. I was, of course, experiencing all of this through the eyes of a four-year old: the water, the waves, the salty breeze. Neither one of us wanted to leave, but we still had 375 miles to drive.

On the day that we spent in Disneyland, July 9, Jessica turned 5. So yes, despite the crowd, despite long lines, despite too much ice cream it was definitely a magical day in the kingdom.

Can I recall each ride, each character, each ice cream cone of the day? No.

With Minnie and Winnie and Snow White, though, and Jessica getting autographs from them in her little autograph book, the day was really for her.

My favorite ride, which became our favorite ride, was the rollercoaster that wound through the “sandstone” terrain familiar throughout the southwest: the Big Thunder Mountain Railroad. Jessica says she remembers. We made a big deal of it, mimicking the recorded train station agent’s voice that boomed “wildest ride in the wilderness.” We rode it more than once, another loop around like the Pocahontas cd that we were well into memorizing.

Visceral memory. Emotional memory. Something that wires an event or time in memory that is beyond mental recall. An event so etched in one’s system that it simply becomes part of you. Of course, we know that happens with traumatic experiences.

But what about the joyful times? This day, this trip, must have ingrained itself in some fiber of Jessica’s core that she may not be able to call up, may not be able to articulate, but isn’t it there? An implicit memory where the spirit of adventure resides? An engrained trust between father and daughter? A memory of being loved by her dad’s friends like they had known her for her entire life?

Those memories have to be written in some DNA equivalent of that autograph book, now long stored away. We may not quite be able to recall where we put it, but those experiences are captured, written in an indelible ink.

Disneyland to San Diego to Tucson. 7.75 hours. 405 miles.

The most nerve-wracking part of the trip was the 5.5 hours on Interstate 8 between San Diego and Tucson where we visited my Uncle Bob.

I messed up. I had gotten gas when we were in Los Angeles but underestimated the mileage and the mpg in my Dodge Intrepid. Before we reached Tucson, I was getting nervous that we would run out of gas. As Jessica played with her stuffed animals, now boasting a few new faces and voices in her own plush menagerie, I was playing out scenarios if we ran out of gas.

We would need the kindness of a stranger to get us to a gas station. How long would we need to wait for a person to pick us up? I envisioned standing on the desert side of the car pulled off the shoulder, thumbs up, waving a stuffed animal, trying to get a driver to stop.

We would need another kind stranger to get us from the gas station back to the car.

I would need to leave the car at the side of the road in July heat.

Would having a five-year-old be a help or a hinderance in getting a ride?

Mostly, though, I worried. Am I putting my daughter’s life at risk?

I swallowed hard. Waves of “how irresponsible” washed through me as I wished for the miles to click faster on the odometer.

While I decreased my speed in an effort to extend the miles, I listened to Jessica create her own storylines with the multiple stuffed animals spread on her lap and wedged safely between her leg and the console.

I breathed a sigh of relief when we cruised into a gas station on the outskirts of Tucson, no doubt running on fumes.

At my Uncle’s apartment complex, we had dinner and waited until later in the evening to swim. When we were swimming, Jessica tossed the float ring on to the side of the pool. When she let it fly, her momentum pushed her backwards, and her outstretched hand missed grabbing the edge of the pool. After she came up, sputtering a little, and swimming to the edge, she looked at me and said, “I wasn’t scared, dad!” I laughed and thought to myself, “Well, I got a little scared”; I also felt a sense of pride, for lack of a better word, that she didn’t panic and made it to the side of the pool after one or two strokes.

The next day, we headed to Sabino Canyon before the heat of the day set in. And then back to his apartment for lunch and a nap before swimming that night.

While Jessica got ready for bed, Uncle Bob, who was very kind and generous to us, said, “you know she’s too young to remember any of this, right?”

Tucson to Colorado Springs. 12 hours. 840 miles.

I wasn’t so sure that Uncle Bob was right. I had memories of when I was four and five years old. What would Jessica remember?

Turns out that she remembers the Wildest Ride in the Wilderness. Turns out that she remembers the tail of her stuffed kitty getting caught under Uncle Bob’s chair. Rather than say anything, she gave it a big tug and yanked the tail right off. I imagine she did some doctoring as we made the long drive from Tucson to Colorado Springs.

We made the last 12-hour push in one day. We were both road weary. She wanted to get to her mother’s house. I wanted to be done driving.

We crested Raton Pass that links Colorado with New Mexico just after 5:00 p.m. A rainstorm had passed through and the highway was wet. Splotches of blue skies broke through the overcast skies. The dappled light streamed through openings in the clouds.

A bright streak shone down and lit up the mesas to our left. Jessica said, “Maybe that’s how you get up to God.”

I said, “Maybe so.”

We drove on.

A bit later she said, “I think I’ll ask God if I can be a kitty next time.”

“Next time? What do you mean?”

“You know. Next time when I come back again. You come back again after you die. I think I will ask God if I can be a kitty.”

I had rarely had these conversations with Jessica. I knew she had a more traditional religious atmosphere at her mom’s house. I had more of a Buddhist approach to living my life. I loved that she blended a Christian belief system with something outside of such a formal tradition. She would hold on to that for the next 27 years.

“What about you, Dad? What will you ask God to come back as?”

I paused and wondered for bit. “Oh, I might leave that up to God, I guess. He may know better than I do.”

We drove on. We drove far enough that I thought the reincarnation conversation may have died, so to speak. But it had not.

Jessica broke the silence. “I think that’s a good idea, Dad. I think I’ll let God decide.” I thought about her thinking, how she had held on to that topic for a few mile markers down the highway. How she must have mulled that question around in her mind for a bit: what sort of requests do you make of God?

Maybe when we, as parents of young children, say “we are making memories,” it is not about the kid’s memory at all.

Over the 3000 miles, I learned a deeper lesson about being in the moment: Jessica’s joyful run along the beach in San Diego; her enjoyment of each ride, and each repeat of each ride, at Disney; her laughing with my friends. Her trust in the fact that there would be a swimming pool at the end of each day. Her trust that I would get us there.

Being present in the way that a five-year-old was present embedded those moments in my memory. I have to remember to remember:

Remember to be in awe of the otter cracking open a sea urchin; remember the big-eyed glee as Winnie signed the autograph book; remember the whispered chatter between stuffed animals; remember that light as we descended Raton Pass headed for home.

I have to remember to remember that there’s this long stretch of highway and, at the same time, a life built on each singular moment.

Choose state highways like the 40-mile stretch of Colorado 112 from Del Norte to Saguache, and then the more curvaceous 70-mile run between from Saguache to Gunnison on Colorado 114. Choose a dirt road from point to point.

You’re not choosing a route to a destination. The route is the destination.

You’re choosing a route to reflection.

Preparations are simple but necessary. Pick out road snacks and a playlist or two. Both are personal choices. You might go all-in with junk food: Hot Tamale cinnamon candies, beef jerky, fried pork rinds, original Coca-Cola in the 20 oz. bottle. You might choose carrots, celery, nuts, and water in a Nalgene. I’ve done both. I’ve done both on a single road trip.

My go-to playlist is old-school country. Waylon. Johnny Cash. Jessi Colter. I’ll slip in Emmylou, John Prine, Bonnie Raitt. Storytellers. I made a playlist last year, boringly called “A Self-Care List.” I made it for the drive to and from the San Luis Valley when my sister entered home hospice. Keb Mo, Bruce Springsteen, Alabama Shakes. Hoyt Axton. The songs are not necessarily uplifting or light. They simply move me. (I have, after this most recent road trip, discovered that classical music moves me, too. I didn’t make a playlist; I just streamed KCME.)

The playlist serves two purposes: background accompaniment and, when necessary, to bring you back to the present.

It’s fine, even preferable, to have songs that you have listened to a hundred times, ones you know by heart. You want the freedom to daydream, ponder, let your mind wander: think of lost opportunities, old houses, think of job changes, take stock, take note. Feel grateful for today. Think of the roads not taken that have made the difference. The job you did take, the daughter that makes you proud, the right one you did ask to marry you. Think of your wife at home who knows you so well that she bought the package of fried pork rinds even though they disgust her. She knows you well enough to know that you need this road trip. You think of the fact that you never really even had a “career path,” but had a fine career anyway. It’s the same here. You don’t need to know where you are going to have a fine road trip.

And don’t daydream. Let the song bring you to the here and now. Feel free to sing along. No. Absolutely sing to the best of your ability even if it is off-key and you can’t, as your dad said, “carry a tune in a bucket.” Belt out “Nowhere Road” with Waylon and Willie from the re-released “Wanted! The Outlaws” album.

There’s a road / straighter than a preacher / Longer than a memory …

It’s been a good teacher / for a lot of country boys like me.

You’ll pass ranch land with sporadic houses far beyond the split rail log fence, a porch light on, an old truck next to the silhouette of a barn, and you’ll wonder what it’s like living out here at the foot of that ridge, at the end of that long drive that arcs from the highway.

You are on cruise control with background music playing so your mind can find familiar topics to ponder. Like the songs, you have played these thoughts before. Maybe you put them on shuffle to make connections you may not have seen before: work, home, the past, your parents, your children.

I’ve been down this road just searching for the end

It don’t go nowhere, it just brings you back again.

It’s not all heartache. You drive, too, with the joys from mile marker to mile marker.

You’ll feel the energy of the road trip down shift as you go over the summit of the pass, slow through the hairpin turns, straighten out across the wide valley.

… I don’t know how long I’ll last

Because it’s just a road, it ain’t no highway

You’ll know when to turn toward home.

Buy A Guy Some Gas

I have learned with this candle about the idea of throw. Throw is basically the reach of the candle’s fragrance, how effectively does the fragrance spread through a room. This candle’s throw seems less than other candles I have used. Throw changes with temperature, so even unlit candles are releasing molecules into the air. The evaporation rate changes when the candle is lit. There’s a whole science behind throw and fragrance. And I’m no scientist — just a former English teacher and current writer meditating in the morning.

And I have been thinking about throw.

What am I sending out into the world — how far, light or heavy, slight or strong? How does what I am sending out into the world change with heat? And what sort of heat is releasing into the world — the heat of anger? the heat of passion, commitment, the heat of wonder at the world?

What is my reach?