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I was ten in 1968. It was a really bad time to be 10. There was a hell of a lot going on and I was just old enough to be aware of it and just young enough not to understand a single bit of it.

Martin Luther King was shot by James Earl Ray. I was struck, at the time, by how everybody always said all three of both their names. I was afraid to ask why. I didn’t know that there wasn’t really a reason. Beyond that, I was stumped. But everybody else seemed to be going along. So I went along. Later that year Bobby Kennedy was shot. His middle name we never used until after he was buried. There wasn’t a reason for that either, or if there was, I still don’t know what. I now know his middle name was Fitzgerald, like his older brother’s who was also shot five years earlier in 1963 by another three name guy: Lee Harvey Oswald. Oswald was also shot, but by a two name guy, Jack Ruby. Bobby was killed by a man who only had one name and used it twice: Sirhan Sirhan. I heard just this week that he’d been recently stabbed in prison, completing the cycle of incoherence. I don’t know who stabbed him or whether whoever it was goes by one name, one name repeated, two names or three names. I know only that none of this makes any sense. It never did. Anyway, I’m sure Sirhan Sirhan only cares about who it was that stabbed him so he can look out for that guy the next time. Sirhan Sirhan was a kid in 1968, just 24, and now he’s 75. I still don’t know what his motivation was other than that he was a Palestinian, and that Bobby had said something he took as negative concerning the Palestinians. Is that enough to shoot someone you don’t even really know? I guess, for him, at the time, it was. I wonder if he thinks it was worth it now. I wonder if he thinks there was reason enough for Bobby to die. At one point, apparently he did. Sirhan Sirhan will never see the outside world again anyway. He’s been a citizen of prison much longer than he was ever anything else. Maybe you can see some sense in there somewhere. I don’t. I do remember, a strange detail, that right after he shot Bobby, Rosey Grier the football player, and Rafer Johnson the Olympian, broke most of the fingers on Sirhan Sirhan’s right hand getting the gun away from him. To me it all seems pretty random and awful, just like it did in 1968 when I was ten.
There were a lot of other things that happened in 1968 too. None of which I understood. There were police riots at the Democratic Convention in Chicago, which involved my brother Tim, I found out many years later. Tim was a delegate for Eugene McCarthy, not to be confused at all with Joe McCarthy who history tells us was a flaming asshole bent on rooting out communists, who had as his lieutenants JFK and Richard Nixon who was elected in 1968 over the roars of a whole bunch of kids who wanted the Vietnam War to end. As for Tim, he and buddy got in their car and got the hell out of Chicago when Mayor Daily showed up and told them all, all of those leftist long haired Eugene McCarthy delegates to leave. Later a long haired friend of theirs was on the front page of the Chicago Tribune flipping off a cop in riot gear. It’s an interesting story, a little family connection to history, but I’m still not sure what that meant either. In Vietnam the Thet Offensive happened in 1968. I only knew the name about that, nothing else. I’ve heard it was pretty awful. How could it not be? It was war.
Anyway, I was 10. I knew nothing. I was living in a very white town in the Upper Peninsula, which I would find out later wasn’t actually all that white. The fact was many of the people in the town were Indian…er…Native American…er First People. Many of my friends were First People, in fact and I was completely unaware of that fact. Had you asked me at the time I would not have made that awful, stereotypical, racist statement, “Some of my best friends are Indians,” because I didn’t know that. Until I was in college, nine years later, I was, in fact, unaware that First People (who everybody including First People still called Indians then, even though the name is based on mistaken identity. Then again what name isn’t?) constituted a separate race from Caucasian, which I was largely unaware I was either. I just thought I was B.G. or Beeg. The fact is, many of my First Person friends may also have been unaware, at least in the existential sense that they were First People, or as it would have been then, Indians. At the very least they were oblivious or indifferent to that fact. Every once in a while somebody would start asking a crowd of kids what nationality they were and we’d say what we knew which wasn’t always much and then go on beating the shit out of each other for completely non-racial reasons, calling each other names, falling in and out of love with each other, beating the shit out of each other and calling each other names because we had fallen in love with each other and generally running around our little home town raising hell if we were brave and bad or staying home and studying if we were timid and good, all of which qualities, most of us possessed, at least part of the time.
It may not have been in 1968, but it was some time around then, when kids first started wearing bracelets engraved with the names of boys who were missing in action in Vietnam. It was a great awareness Idea. The motivation was good. Unfortunately, because we were young and tribal and didn’t really understand much of anything, because we lived in the middle of nowhere, though, during childhood, everywhere is kind of the middle of nowhere when you think about it, the whole nice gesture towards those poor missing or dead soldier boys quickly devolved into superstition. I remember several kids saying they would never take their bracelet off because if they did the soldier boy would die. I already was feeling Catholic guilt, though like everything else, I didn’t really understand exactly what that was at the time, but anyway, because of that vague feeling, I decided I didn’t need a bracelet I could never take off to go with it.
Woodstock happened that year too. I heard the name, later associated it with a Peanuts character, but honestly didn’t really know what that was until at least the late 70’s. I did know about the wild clothes and long hair, because my older siblings were wearing them, but what they meant and why, I hadn’t a clue. Truth, most of the kids with the hair and clothes, in retrospect didn’t either, no matter what they say now.
A Chicago song of that general period went, “Does anybody really know what time it is? Does anybody really care? Cause though I can’t imagine why? We’ve all got time enough to cry (die).”
It was true then. In 1968 a lot of crap was going down, but everybody was just living their lives the way people always do. Some folks got involved. Others not so much. It was what it was. You lived, you ate. If you were a kid, you teased, got teased, laughed, cried, occasionally got in a fight, sometimes fell in love, lived your life.
I would ask my mom and dad what it was like to be an adult then, but they’re both dead now so I can’t. I’m betting it was not unlike being an adult now, or being an adult during ancient Rome for that matter. It’s hard. You don’t know what the hell is going on most of the time. You do your best, try to make ethical choices and be civil to other people, having given up teasing others and beating the shit out of them and, for the most part, others having given up teasing and beating the shit out of you during childhood.
We didn’t know in 1968, even though a lot of stuff was happening, that we were living in a watershed year. I didn’t even know that phrase until I was in my 30’s. Are we living in a watershed year now? Not surprisingly, I don’t know.
So. Let’s look at 2019 in comparison to 1968.
A flaming asshole is President now. One who makes Joe McCarthy look like an intellectual. I mean, this guy really doesn’t know anything at all. If you voted for him, well, that’s your lookout, but I’m just stating the facts. The guy is a complete idiot. Among other things he doesn’t know what the phrase, “second thoughts” means. Asked by a reporter if he was having second thoughts about his China tariff policy recently, he responded, “I have second thoughts about everything.” Clearly he didn’t know this meant that he was unsure of himself because his staff scrambled around for hours afterwards putting a different spin on what he’d said. One thing I do know, and everybody who has ever listened to him for five minutes knows, is that that guy is never publicly unsure of himself. He’s incoherent a lot. He’s obnoxious, abhorrent, the next thing to a badly trained bear with the uncanny ability to mutter inanities, but he doesn’t, unfortunately lack confidence in himself or the mind bogglingly stupid, hateful things he says. He clearly thought “having second thoughts” meant he was smart not indecisive or contemplative. He isn’t smart, just to clarify. Not at all. That’s just a fact. In fact, he’s a big ignorant lout. As an example of his ignorant loutishness, he still believes in teasing people unmercifully and beating the shit out of other people. If you don’t believe me, just watch video tape of him in action. There are hundreds of examples. At one point he literally tells a crowd of his followers to punch a guy who is heckling him in the face. In other words, he’s not an adult, he’s a child, and a pretty badly behaved one.
So, that’s different from 1968.
The President we elected in 1968 was very much an adult. A corrupt, hard hearted one, no doubt, who didn’t hesitate to bomb another country (Cambodia) without getting permission from Congress, but an adult. He did have some vague idea about treating people decently. He also wasn’t an overt racist. Another guy ran as an independent in that race. He was a horrible bigot, overtly so, but still smarter than our current President. At the time, though, most everybody just thought he was a joke. He got a good slice of the vote, probably lost the election for the dithering guy with a decent heart from Minnesota, who lost the election to Mr. hard heart. Later, the third party bigot had a change of heart. Good for him, that doesn’t help all the people he hurt and had a hand in killing in Alabama before that, but, better late than never.
I could write a lot more about 1968, or about 2019. I could tell you that while assassinations for political reasons now seems to be on the wain, mass shootings for no reason whatsoever, or for out and out unreasoning hatful, bigoted, insane reasons, are on the rise. What caused that change in focus? Damned if I know. Damned if anybody knows. All I know is that it’s horrible and makes me cry like a little boy every time it happens because I still don’t understand. I just don’t understand.
So, where does that leave me? Where does that leave us? I don’t know that either.
I do wish that just for five minutes one or both of my wonderful, though dead, parents could be here in this room alive with me now just to hug me and tell me it’s all going to be all right. At age ten, or at almost age 61 that’s something everybody needs.
Come to think of it, they used to sing about that a lot in 1968.

Yup, I’m one of those people.

I get up at 4 a.m. nearly every day. Yup, you’re reading that right. Not five, not six: four. I feed my labradors Tom and Sam, and get them settled either out in the pen or back in the downstairs darkness. Then, I spend a solid two hours reading and writing. Then I have breakfast, a little granola with yogurt and fruit. I have some coffee as well. It’s still dark at this point, but the sun is coming. In warmer weather I head outside to the patio to do some stretches and lifting with a kettle bell. When it gets colder, I stay inside and try not to wake people up. Then, just as the sun is coming up, I head out on a two mile walk with the dogs, which they love, maybe more than they love being fed or petted. It may even rank right up there with going hunting. I’m not exactly sure. Anyway, they love it.
After that, often with lots of new ideas rolling around in my head, I’ll make a note or two about things to write tomorrow morning, or things to do today, then I head out on my bike, sometimes for 12 miles, some times for 28 miles depending on the day. If it’s raining a lot of this gets put aside, but I adjust, and do little somethings that approximate the usual, though I don’t feel exactly right without doing the whole routine.
In winter the walking and riding are replaced by cross country skiing, right out my door and into the morning. Sometimes the snow is deep and the going is sticky. Tough mornings, those. Sometimes I glide over the top as though I’m floating or flying. I always remember those mornings, but try not to hope for them. It’s so much better when they’re a surprise. On those good skiing days, nothing else really has to go right. I can glide over anything. Yes, it’s that grand.
There is absolutely nothing about getting up early and the whole routine that follows that I don’t love. I love being alone while others are sleeping, especially others I love. I like to think of them there, at rest, safe, with me as their watchman, their guardian. I like to launch into some new writing, like what I’m writing at this very moment. I’m always unsure exactly where it’s going, and I love finding out. What’s more, writing, thinking, reading, always seems easier early, when my old mind is fresh and the house is quiet. I’m sometimes amazed with how much I’ve gotten done.
I love the silence, of stars and streetlights. Then I love the little sounds, little lights, of my little town gradually starting to awaken. Maybe a kitchen light comes on next door, after I’ve been up for an hour. A truck starts up for somebody headed to work early, probably at the mine. Once the school year starts, little kid voices of song, joke, or complaint come up here or there, accompanied by advice or cajoling from somebody’s mom or dad. Dogs bark at the early morning doings, or at deer or bear or rabbits out in the early morning yards of our little wilderness town. Garage doors open. And after a long interval, day is started and my quiet time is over, but I’m ready. I’m truly ready to go. I don’t mind that it takes longer all the time, due to my ever advancing age, for me to be prepared for my day. It takes longer to get ready now, even though I do so much less during each day that follows my routine than when I was a full time teacher, director, and part time writer. I enjoy the long silence, even the extra effort it takes now. Even the new pain and strain of stretching, lifting, walking, riding, caused by the aging of my body.
Yup, I’m one of those people.
My mother was too. I’m not sure exactly when she got up, but I know that her manual typewriter in her work room on the top floor of our house at 515 Newberry Avenue started clacking and clattering at 5 a.m., creating words, phrases, sentences, and ringing off at the ends of lines. I didn’t know exactly what she was doing. I often wondered how she could possibly have so much to type in order to get ready for teaching school. We all found out later that it wasn’t just school. In fact, it mostly wasn’t school. We found out she was writing too. Essays and short stories. Letters. Even an attempt at a novel or two. She was published a few times. She loved that, I think, but from all the incomplete works we found I think there was a bit of frustration too. She was always pushing herself. Always! Right to the end. She never quite measured up to her own high standards for herself I think. She sure measured up to and exceeded mine for a mother and mentor. I’m not sure she knew that. I hope I told her so in a way that was clear. She deserved to know that.
I often wonder if it was growing up on a farm that made her rise early. Or was it that her mother was a teacher and writer too, or both? Was it that there had always been an early riser or two in her family going all the way back to the farms of the new world, and even before that to Europe. to names of early rising ancestors I don’t even know, maybe even my mother didn’t know. I don’t know how we became early risers. I only know that we did.
I never minded that her typewriter was clacking, clattering, and ringing at 5 a.m. I found it comforting. Sometimes I fell back to sleep after I heard it, often I didn’t. But I didn’t mind. It gave me the time, even then, to get ready. And pretty soon I was starting my own morning routine, though nowhere near as elaborate as the one I follow now.
If my mother’s typewriter hadn’t clacked, clattered, and rung at 5 a.m., I wonder if I’d be up writing this now. Is it nurture or nature, environment or genetics, influence or proclivity? I wonder if 20 or 30 years from now, if I’m still around, I’ll still be rising early and preparing in this long, luxurious, excruciating, invigorating, habitual fashion. I wonder if I’ll be able to. I hope I will. It would be great to just keep on with the process. Hold to it without thinking about it, never clinging desperately, just dong what I do. If I have to give up the silence and the stars and the writing and the typing, the sipping, the chewing, the feeding and petting, the walking and the riding, I hope it happens one thing, one simple pleasure, one habit at a time, very, very gradually. That would be fitting. That would have symmetry. That would be great. That would be the microcosm in the macrocosm or vice versa. I think I’d take pleasure in that too. I think I’d take pleasure in even the knowledge that I was down to just two or three things as part of my morning routine, then one, then eventually maybe just waking up would be enough.
That’s all very interesting to consider, and worth considering, but it doesn’t matter much in the end. I do what I do. I do something very similar to what my mother did. Likely something similar to what her mother or father did and on back to the turn of the last century, the time of the Civil War, the Revolutionary War, on back to England and Ireland. Back before there were countries at all. On back to the founding of the family names and places. Early risers. People who believe in getting on with things. Living small routines into a bigger day over and over until you can’t do it anymore. In the end, that’s my heritage.
In the end I’m just one of those people.

I’m not able to stop writing. That is until I am. Then I simply can’t start again. I don’t even want to. Until a new wave hits. That’s how it was when the first drafts of the 12 Hunter Lake books started developing one morning a couple of years ago: a light, insistent breeze that wouldn’t stop. The half created ideas swirled around me, waiting for me to take the action of making them real by writing them down. I am always hesitant to do so, because once they’re on paper, I usually like them well enough, but never love them. They always seem to have the right to exist, though. And, like Frankenstein’s creature, or a cake just out of the oven, it’s too late then anyway.
Well, right now that’s happening again, but not exactly the same way. It’s never exactly the same way. Right now, I’m musing.
I know this probably sounds strange. Any creation is strange and comes to exist in mystery and a kind of wonder. There’s a magic in making something that wasn’t there a moment before. It’s quite disconcerting too when the creation is a person, or group of people, or a whole damned town as in the case of my novellas. Yes, it’s quite a psychic event to make something up that wasn’t there a moment ago. Or was there but only in wisps and whispers, faint colors half seen in the dawn, happy dog barks in the distance.
Musings. That’s what they are. Musings. Negotiations, conversations, with the Muse. I listen for a while then ask the Muse, What is this you’re saying? The answer is always partly incomprehensible but lovely. Incoherent but bitter. Atoms, molecules, of thought and feeling swirling down or up or sideways or timelessly on the tides of the void that’s no void at all but full of spirit life.
I’m 60. Almost 61 and lately things from my childhood have been returning to me in these musings. One of those things, among the half realized musings, has risen in song, an impulse, a pulse, am impulsion and compulsion. It keeps coming back as the background music for little league baseball games, things my parents said, days at the lake that baffled me and broke my young heart with their beauty, the fur of a certain collie dog, and the sound of a nun’s rosary beads clicking together, coming this way as a threat from around the corner.
The background music for all of this, the song, is John Hartford’s Gentle on My Mind. Yes, I know it was Glen Campbell who had the hit with the song, but he’s only one among over three hundred who recorded it after it came out in 1968, right up to Alison Krauss in 2017. Hartford’s version is superior to anyone else’s but he never grudged Campbell the hit song. Hartford said that money from the song, especially Campbell’s version, bought Hartford his freedom for the rest of his life. And it was a very interesting life lived on his own terms until 2002. He could have done a lot of very commercial things he never did. He just stayed John Hartford the rest of his life. I wish I’d met him. Even when I was a boy, I felt like I knew him. He had a goofy half hippy air about him. He seemed like that genuine out there friend every good family has. The one with ideas who inspires without even trying, the person who represents for everybody you love, the road less traveled.
Anyway, his song keeps coming back. My son, Pat, said after hearing it for the first time, at my insistence a few days ago, said that it’s unique because it has a story, but it’s a story, as in most good poems that is open. You can fill in the detail any way you like. You can make it your own. I suppose it wouldn’t still be in my head after 50 years if I hadn’t made it my own. But the original metaphors, the open road imagery and all that traveling that harkens back to Walt Whitman is what really makes it live. Hartford said he wrote the song after seeing Dr. Zhivago, but also said that too much has been made of that over the years. He said he saw the movie, got into a mood, but then wrote from his own life. So there’s a source for the song, for the musing that created it, and I suppose, I know, that such things work on me too.
Anyway, if you don’t know the song, look it up some time. Both music and lyrics are enthralling. If you do know it, you probably already know what I’m talking about. Sorry if I’ve got it running in your head now. There are worse songs that could be there.
I wonder if this is what the scientists mean when they talk about a time warp. The song opens a pathway to 1968 when I was ten, or maybe it’s just one of the things that got through and the pathway happened on its own. To keep the ideas from continuing to swirl, I’m writing some of them down, but they don’t seem to be fully prepared yet. They don’t seem ready to settle and the music and the thoughts and the memories and the ideas all keep whirling. It’s not unpleasant, just slightly unnerving. There’s just nothing I can do about them. The compulsion to write is still there, but it doesn’t have a focus.
So, as I often do in such cases, I pick up Walden and start reading. I find myself, probably not randomly, at Thoreau’s description of Spring, but Henry Thoreau’s words are too beautiful, too perceptive for my local heavens, and I start to cry and can’t keep reading. I just don’t measure up. So I have to pick up Michael Cunningham’s Nightfall hoping that the New York writer’s way of making us lesser mortals feel at home, if slightly uncomfortable, will be a match for my currently timid soul, but there I read, “Was the burden of his potential too much for him?” and “What must it be like for Mizzy who came late to the part…who spent his adolescence in barely lit rooms among the leavings and artifacts…” and I, the youngest by six years in a family of incredible people, the rest of whom grew up together, am hit very close to home, but I try to hang on, so I can calm down the ideas which are still swirling, but then I read, “I have no idea how or when I fucked up. If I were a better person, I suppose I’d know,” and I have to put that book down too.
There has always been, will likely always be, a missing piece in my life. I don’t know if other people feel this way, but I suspect at least some of them do. I often think it’s simply that my father died when I was 14, but that doesn’t seem it exactly. It’s a yearning for love certainly. It’s a lost love that can’t be found too, and yet is always right next to me in a whirl of words and phrases each circulating on a different rhythm. Nebulous. It’s embodied for me for any number of no doubt logical and wonderfully illogical reasons I can’t begin to fathom, in the form of a woman. A woman I know but don’t know. I can never see her face. So, she is a Muse, I suppose. Trouble is, she isn’t in the material sense real, and so I can’t just talk to her and simply understand her words. The best I can do is get a glimpse, hear some scattered seemingly incoherent phrases, sometimes whole sentences, ideas. There’s talk, from ancient times among Christians with a literary background, about Divine Sophia: the embodiment of the wisdom of God. I doubt, as Eliot’s Prufrock, did of the Mermaids attentions, that such a personage would humble herself to speak to me, but a guy can hope.
Maybe the reason Gentle on My Mind is moving in and out of my consciousness now is it’s about a woman too, but unlike my musings that move in fragments in many directions simultaneously, the song is elegant in its completeness, its perfection. It flows exactly like the river it mentions and my thoughts flow too, but in many directions, like rivulets. Hartford’s composition is smooth and cool and takes me to a place where my heart swells even at the thought of the song. My heart swells at my incomplete melodies, ideas, fragments too, but far from smoothly, not painfully exactly, playfully. There’s a little teasing nature to them. So it’s probably not Sophia. It’s like Someone, something, saying, “C’mon! Find me!” and I try over and over again, but I never quite exactly succeed, though what I do manage can be pretty pleasing at times.
Who knows, maybe this muse is Sophia, and in my humble case, that’s the best Sophia can manage. You can’t make a silk purse…as they say.
There now. It’s calmed a little. It’s almost quiet in my head. Ha! Gentle on my mind. If I go for a walk or a bike ride now, I might come back with something useful. I’ll give it a try.
Thank you.

I forget stuff.
I have momentary inspirations.
Sometimes lines of poems, whole poems, whole ideas for books drop right down into my brain and just won’t leave me alone until I write them down.
Sometimes ideas for the one classroom of students I still teach hit me based on some experience I’m having, or something I observe.
I read and run across wonderful quotes.
I need lists for the grocery store sometimes.
There are days when I have twelve or thirteen errands in town and there is no way in hell my feeble brain is going to remember them all.
Names of writers, movie stars, old friends, former students go in and out of my head.
When I’m in a play, I forget my lines in the run up to curtain and jot them down in pieces until I can remember them whole, then I never look at them again, but the writing of them helps me remember.
All of these are reasons why I always carry a pocket notebook. Before I did, I remember writing all this stuff down with borrowed pens on scraps of paper which ended up illegible dryer lint in my pockets which I cried over because some great idea had gone. Quite pathetic really. I started carrying notebooks some time during my years in journalism I think, and once I got married and then started working as a teacher I got into the habit of carrying one every day, almost constantly jotting things down. I know what you’re going to say. You could do the same thing with your cell phone, and then you’d only have to carry a cell phone, not a cell phone and a notebook. I can’t tell you you’re wrong. I can’t say, “What if I lose my cell phone?” because you could say the same thing about a notebook. I won’t pretend I haven’t lost my notebook, and my cell phone in the past. Either is a truly terrible existential experience, as though your life is just floating away, just out of your reach and, as in those maddening, horrible dreams, you’re half paralyzed and can’t do a damned thing about it.
I hate that.
Anyway, I can only say in answer to this reasonable proposal that tapping information I need into my cell phone just isn’t the same as writing it in a notebook. It’s less substantial somehow, as though the physical ink, the feel of paper makes the message, the memory, the half conceived line of verse, the name, the idea, more real, gives it tactile existence.
My notebooks do exist. Anyone who knows me knows that. Former students will tell you stories of me standing in front of the classroom and suddenly getting a funny look on my face then holding up a finger to plead for patience as I jot something down. Friends have tried to look over my shoulder as, in mid conversation I start scribbling into a notebook, hoping, I think that I’m not writing down something they just said. Sometimes I am. Sorry, that goes with being a writer, teacher, actor. My wife takes a certain comfort, I think, in the fact that I supplement my memory with my notebook. She knows I’d probably forget every damned thing on Earth and float away into the ether without it.
There are hundreds of notebooks now, I think. Well, at least a hundred, but likely more. I go through at least half a dozen or so a year. Less now that I’m retired, I think. I wonder what that means? They’ve come in lots of forms. Some were too big for my pocket, some too flimsy and got tattered and smudged when they got wet or worn. The one I have right now, which was hand made for me from leather by a former student, Brandon Salo, is perfect. The size and the durable cover. I’m a little panicky about this particular notebook right now because I’m down to the last few pages and Brandon lives in Madrid. I’m spoiled now, I’d hate to go back to a paper cover, but I’ll survive, I suppose.
Here’s a maudlin thought: the notebooks, when I die, will likely all get tossed away by my wife or my sons or whatever other relative or near anonymous someone who goes through my stuff. And that will be my fault. It’s not as though I have put them all in a strongbox marked “important papers” or even filed them in some particular drawer. They, once filled, are in lots of drawers on lots of shelves, in lots of canvas and cloth bags and cardboard boxes. They are everywhere in my house, in my truck.
Pages and pages of words that became poems, words crossed off lists, once vitally important words, mundane words, esoteric words, incomprehensible words, and lots and lots of dates, now long past, half real, ink impressions of former existence.
Really, honestly, I should probably just toss them all out. All but the one I’m using now and the last few before that just so I can reference something I’m doing now that might be mentioned there. Much older than a year and the notebooks are probably just useless collections of paper gathering dust. I should just toss them all out.
Still, each page of each notebook is a bit or piece of my life, both compelling and banal. History in a sense. When in use they were the webs of logic, metaphor, whimsy that kept my life coherent. Or gave me the comforting illusion of coherence. Disregarded and left on a shelf or drawer in a bag or box or in some dusty corner, they become the definition of incoherency, unless, in going through them some quick and pithy memory strikes me, sticks, and then the webs reattach and I am propelled back into former days.
But why in the world would I want that to happen? Sure, nostalgia can be soothing, poignant, sweet, inspiring. Sometimes it can even help in building a better future. But reliving the past, at least for me, is also dangerous. Regrets wait like unexploded landmines. Regret is a terrible, terrible thing. The definition of uselessness and masochism unless you can somehow use it to keep from making the same mistakes over and over again. But who does that?
I wonder, I wonder if whoever eventually discards my notebooks, tosses them into the flames in a burn barrel perhaps, will be compelled to look through them first and in doing so have the same experience I sometimes have. I hope they are not reminded of their own regrets by the implication of mine in those pages, I hope they catch on to the sweetnesses there, the innocence, the limited wisdom. I sincerely hope so, but the point is likely moot. I rarely if ever go through them. Why would anybody else do so?
Still, a guy can hope. Here’s what I hope. I hope some young man or woman who is related to me, or even unrelated to me, will some day, long after I’m gone, go through these notebooks ignore the dark bits and try to piece together what it was I was trying to do, where it was exactly that I was headed. Given the luxury of time and perspective, maybe they’ll be able to piece it all together maybe suddenly one word that I frantically scribbled down all those years ago will click and it will all come out meaning something that he or she can use. Maybe even use to change the world for the better.
Yeah, I know it’s unlikely, almost certainly silly, but that’s why I’m saving my notebooks.

My puppy brings me presents. On our morning walk each day, we work our way east along the edge of Boston Lake, down the railroad tracks off on to a snowmobile trail, through a cutover land, back down the tracks west and home. It takes almost exactly an hour and fifteen minutes. At some point, when Sam, my chocolate lab pup, is not playing with his older uncle Tom, also a chocolate, he veers off somewhere, disappears for a few moments and comes back with something. What? Empty cigarette packs, empty beer cans, soda cans and bottles, water bottles, candy wrappers, plastic bags, paper bags, bits of cloth, once a whole pant cuff, parts of broken snowmobiles and bits of snowmobile helmets, (I’ve been relieved that he’s never brought me a snowmobiler, but the joke is if I keep saving the parts he brings, eventually I’ll have a snowmobile of my own.) deflated basketballs, bits of birch bark and huge sections of tree limbs, a child’s mitten designed to look like a penguin, a bobber with the Canadian flag maple leaf design on it, and recently, a large, tin, no trespassing sign. He’s seven months old now and he’s been doing it for a while. I have a box in the garage where I keep the most unusual items. I do that so that when I tell this story, people will believe me.
Sam. Samwise actually, named for a character in The Lord of the Rings, who was, no doubt, given Tolkien’s literary background, named for Pickwick’s wise if simple servant Sam in Charles Dicken’s The Pickwick Papers. Interestingly, George R.R. Martin almost certainly named his similar character Same Tarley, for Frodo’s servant Samwise Gamgee. And so it goes among literary types. I also had, of course, Sam Clemens in mind when we named him, to go with my old dog Huckleberry, who I told you so much about recently, and, of course, Tom, whose actual name is Tom Sawyer.
Tom is a story all his own. Raised by Huck he has his own peculiarities which Huck’s calm nature helped to quell. Tom’s thing is his need to let us know when anything is out of the ordinary, especially outside or at the door. He’s a barker, even when somebody he knows is coming in. It’s a compulsion, which has calmed down a bit at our urging and Huck’s when the old guy was still around, but also by Tom’s own actions. Whenever he feels the need to bark he picks up a stuffed toy or his bone and still can’t help to keep from barking, but muffles it with this encumbrance.
When this habit of barking at everything first emerged in Tom I said, “Boy, he’s alert!”
My wife Deb responded, “He’s a lert all right.” And has ever after called poor Tom, “The Lert.”
She doesn’t mean anything unpleasant by it. And it is pretty funny.
But back to Sam’s presents.
I don’t know why he brings them. But it’s always the same. He walks back up to where I’m walking, usually on the tracks, and lays whatever it is at my feet. That is unless it’s a deer or bird bone which he also brings to me, but doesn’t give me until I demand them.
Most of the presents, I’ve noticed, are something connected with people somehow, so I guess he’s be a pretty good rescue dog. He’s got a great nose, and he obviously uses it to find these items, and deer, and birds, and snapping turtles, squirrels and dead frogs. Sometimes he brings me the dead frogs. These gifts, I don’t keep.
Tom never interferes with these presentations. It’s as though he, now seven years old, understands that this is the puppy’s way. This is Sam’s thing like Tom’s “a lert ness”. Tom has had to put up with a lot from Sam. Sam is a kind of irascible and endlessly playful character. He baits and tugs at Tom all the time, and the older dog only occasionally retaliates by knocking the pup head over tin cups when they’re out for a run. Unfortunately, these good natured, well-intentioned assaults have almost no effect on Sam’s behavior. He likes them.
Saint Tom, I sometimes call the older dog when I see Sam mauling him and Tom just lying there peacefully. Tom has been through a lot with me and my family and all we have to put up with is a little barking now and then from him, it’s a pretty good deal for us, at least.
But what’s with Sam’s gifts? Is it about attention? Is he just trying to please me? Is he truly fascinated by what he’s found and wants me to share in the fascination? Does he think I’ll find some use for these things? Of course I’ve reinforced this activity by always looking over what he brings and praising him for them, before either pocketing the latest item to be disposed of later or kept as a conversation piece if it’s interesting.
So now, this behavior, this gift-giving is locked in, part of almost every walk. I accept as Sam’s nature. So does Tom. Tom takes it at face value. I’m usually too distracted by whatever is in my head or heart to anticipate the almost daily gift, to wonder, “Gee, what will he bring today?” so, there’s no anticipation and it’s always a surprise. It’s flattering really. Humbling. Somebody wants my approval or at least attention and goes out of his way to get it. I like that. Love it really.
It’s quite a gift.
And maybe there’s some wisdom in that simplicity. It’s just a gift. A simple gift. There’s nothing to contemplate here. The existence of it ought to be enough. And it’s not the item itself, whatever it happens to be, that matters. It’s the gesture. Am I reading too much into this? Probably. Does that matter? No. I’m just glad to keep on accepting Sam’s presents and his presence and that of Saint Tom the Lert’s in my life.
Both make me very happy.

On a clear crisp morning recently, I was biking on my old one speed along county road 496 near my home.
A young woman with her labradoodle ran towards me on the rough shoulder. She was in black running clothes. Her hair was tied back with a matching black hair swaddle. As I passed her I said, “Good morning!” and I smiled. She smiled back at me. Her smile was a nice, friendly smile, but at that moment I was in an indifferent mood for no particular reason and her smile didn’t mean anything to me.
Maybe my smile didn’t mean anything to her either. Or maybe her smile was quite genuine and mine wasn’t. What came to me as I rode on beyond her and her dog and on down the road, was that I should really be more generous towards others. I should give them credit for caring. The benefit of the doubt at least.
Smiles are funny things.
Biologists and anthropologists tell us that smiles among humans and other primates are a way of showing good will. A way of fending off possible attacks is a darker way of looking at that. A survival mechanism. Something we do to preserve our lives. An act of selfishness in essence. Wow, that’s dark.
Interestingly, just the slightest tweak of an expression can turn a smile from a welcome to a threat. That’s pretty dark too.
Sometimes, though, we smile because we’re genuinely happy. Those are great times. We’ve just given birth, or watched our wives give birth. We’ve just gotten married or engaged. One of our kids has done something amazing or cute. We’re in love, or satisfied with something we’ve done at work or in our homes. We’re proud of ourselves or somebody we love. Or a nice Summer breeze, Winter sunset, Fall leaf, Spring wildflower has touched us at some childhood core and a smile has bloomed. The best of times, those.
Sometimes we smile just so that somebody won’t ask us how things are going because they’re not going that well, or because we just want to get on with the day and get this person we’ve encountered out of our face as quickly as possible. If we’re lucky in life, or blessed, or just very optimistic and open, the first kind of smiles outnumber the second.
How many times have I smiled in my life? How many times a day do I smile? How many times have I smiled out of genuine happiness? How many times as a survival mechanism? How many times out of force of habit? How convincing are my smiles? And what have been all of the causes? It would take a very long time to figure all of that out. I wonder how many smiles, trying to figure it out would engender.
When I was in college I remember people saying to me that I was always smiling. I remember during my full time teaching career people saying that to me as well. In both cases when people said that, I frequently was unaware that I was smiling. It was as though somebody else was smiling for me. Maybe somebody else was.
Who was it, I wonder?
Sometimes if you walk around purposefully smiling, your mood improves. Really, I’ve tried it and it works. I mentioned that to somebody once, I don’t remember who it was, a fellow teacher, a student or friend I was trying to cheer up or give solicited or unsolicited advice, and his or her response was a sardonic, “Fake it to make it, huh?” followed by a sardonic smirk. Not a smile, a smirk.
When I look at it ingenuously, a smile is the least we can do for other people, isn’t it? I mean, it’s only fair, right? There’s a lot of shit going down, why add to it? Look at it this way: you’re not being deceitful, you’re being kind, empathetic. Not dishonest, but hopeful. The least we can do is to hope that somebody else is happy, to wish happiness on the world, especially when we’re feeling some darkness. That may be one of the very finest gifts we can bestow on our fellow human beings, in fact.
Another is to work with others who are trying to help us out of a funk and towards happiness when, for whatever reason, legitimate, or illegitimate, we’re in a foul mood. Trying not to screw up somebody else’s day because we’re having a bad one is the very least we can do. And taking our shit out on somebody else, especially by targeting somebody who is obviously happy, is one of the very worst things we can do, and a sure way to bring down the world around us. It’s as though we’re saying, “Hey! My life sucks! I want yours to suck too.”
Moods are contagious. Be careful out there.
I have known people who can smile through anything, who are always kind, who always see the best in other people, who always, like Gatsby, choose to see you in the way that, at your very best, you wish to be seen by the world. I’m not sure if there is always a conscious effort involved behind the smiles and kindness of such folks, or if it just comes naturally to them. In the end, it doesn’t matter much, it’s just nice to be around them. I want to be like that. I try to be like that.
You know what else I’ve noticed? Often those same perpetually or seemingly perpetually happy people could be seen, in certain lights, to be some of the least fortunate people in the world. They’re frequently poor, or have had a lot of bad shit happen to them, or life’s circumstances haven’t exactly taken them to a crystal haven in the clouds. I’m not sure if they really don’t care about all that, or if they’re smiling in spite of all that, just to show the powers that be that nothing is going to bring them down. Both are admirable. It doesn’t matter much which motivation is more so. What does matter is that they tend to make the world a better place to live in. Those folks may be saints. I’m not sure exactly how that works. That probably doesn’t matter much either.
It’s just nice to be around such people.
So what’s my thrust here? Smile even if you don’t have a reason to? Smile especially when you don’t have a reason to? If you’re having a shitty day smile your way back to happiness? Just smile all the time and wait for the nervous breakdown?
Ha!
That last bit made me laugh. I hope it made you laugh too. If so, there’s a little something to smile about today. Start with that. Go from there.