Working with my Hands
I admire people who know how to work with their hands. Working with your hands is a different kind of intelligence. It is not one that comes naturally to me. The genesis of this was a decision that my father made. Because I only got to see him once a week, he took me to work with him most of the time. My dad fixed pool tables and juke boxes and pinball machines. He would open the back of a pinball machine and miles of wires would sprout. I was both fascinated and intimidated by his knowledge of where these wires went and what they did. I wanted to learn about the jukeboxes and pool tables as well.
My dad refused to teach me one thing about any of these machines. My job was to hold the flashlight or fetch the tool. He taught me to play pool and helped to teach me to love music, but he never taught me anything having to do with repair. It was a conscious refusal. He said, “I don’t want you to end up like me; learn to work with your brain.”
My hand eye coordination was very good. I could have learned. My dad said no. In one of our endless conversations, riding alone in the car, either transporting me or going from one job to the other, he told me that his dream was to have become a doctor. It was one of the few times that I saw tears in his eyes. “You’ll be better off learning to work with your brain.” That was what he said and I did not question it. Questioning my father about something like this was not a smart move.
My ability to work with my hands was manifested through sports. I was an ok pool player, except that I had glasses that I did not wish to wear. Glasses were not cool where and when I grew up. That did not translate into table tennis and I was a natural. It did not translate into football, and I showed talent there as well.
What I did very well was read and I knew how to talk. When my dad was being mean, he would say that I knew how to bullshit. That word stung like very few others. It made me feel inferior. At the same time that he encouraged me to be this way, it felt like he mocked me for it.
I was about to turn sixteen, and my dad got me my first fulltime, summer job. I would be helping to install aluminum siding. One of his friends had hired me. Two weeks into the job, I had to leave. I had flunked Latin and Geometry and would be required to attend summer school. My dad was incredulous. “If you did not pass these subjects, it was because you chose to fail, and now your failure is embarrassing to me. Don’t embarrass me again.”
I had hated Latin and Geometry. I had failed on purpose, but I did not understand that my failure would embarrass my dad. It appeared that the decision to rely on my brain had been a bad bet and my dad hated bad bets.
When young, I was pretty strong. I ripped the front a house away with a crowbar. I have dug ditches that were four feet deep. I enjoyed the labor. But there is a difference between brawn and working with your hands.
Working with my hands has always been elusive. I know how to take things apart but I am less successful at putting them back together. I always doubted that I took them apart correctly. Early on, that was particularly true of clocks. Later, there were other things. I did have brawn but I lacked skill in working with my hands.
That changed when I taught myself how to refinish furniture. I had a house filed with old furniture and I had the energy and need to refinish it. I stripped it and then sanded so late into the night that neighbors called and pleaded with my wife that I stop. I did, but the next day I was at it again, early in the morning. I stripped and sanded and discovered the magic of polyurethane. More than thirty years later, I have refinished almost each and every piece of wooden furniture in our home.
The sanding brought me comfort. It was like an unveiling. There were new worlds revealed from underneath the finishes laid on the wood. I could see visual progress each time I worked with the wood. I was finally working with my hands. I wore masks and goggles and gloves. I was relentless. Refinishing furniture became a love.
I worked with my hands in my gardens. There was the brawn of mowing the grass, both acres. My dog Keats would help me. He would sit just aside from the last pass of the mower and then move back just enough for the next pass. But in my gardens, it was both working with my hands and my brawn.
Working with your hands includes using your eyes in particular ways. It includes knowledge from your fingertips. Is the soil dry? Is the plant happy? Have you rooted out the aggressive, indigenous plants that tend to choke off what you wish to nourish?
There is that sense of tactile enjoyment when one works with hands. It is not unlike that sense of tactile enjoyment that comes from love-making. Knowledge and experience educate touch. Leonard Cohen wrote, “I couldn’t feel so I learned to touch.” That resonates in me. I always felt that I needed to learn to touch, After all, “I didn’t come all this way to fool ya.”
It’s that next line. “There’s a blaze of light in every word…* There is a blaze of light. There is a chance at furthering understanding in every word. It is closely related to working with your hands. They are integrated languages and intelligences. I love to caress wood. I love to caress flesh. There is so much knowledge in touch. Perhaps I am still working with my hands.
I imagine the feel the touch of the keys under my fingers and I wish fervently that it caresses the words. There is doubt. Is a clumsy sentence like a stubbed toe, or is it worse? Can a clumsy sentence mark you forever? It can for a time, not unlike the mistakes that one makes when first working with your hands.
I love the tricks that people who work with their hands learn. They come with adages like “measure twice cut once.” One also learns that the proper tool is an essential component to working with your hands. Tools sometimes replace strength but they do not replace knowledge. Feeling can sometimes substitute for knowledge, when you are lucky and the world bestows its magic upon you.
Dutch elm disease decimated the elms in the area where I made my home for twenty years. There was this dead tree that eventually split off and collapsed. I had a feeling about this once piece of the tree. It had once been a very, very large and thick branch but now it was about seven feet tall and a little more than three feet around.
I hauled it back to my barn slowly and with difficulty, using brawn and a good hand truck. Where it snapped away left an image that reminded me of a horse’s head. I sanded and filed the stump for hours and days. I shaped it to enhance what I had glimpsed. Then I added coat after coat of spar wax. I filled it with rocks to stabilize it and set it on an abandoned, slate circle, septic tank cover. It aged well. Birds and squirrels nested in it. I photographed it in the sun and in the snow. I looked at it every day and felt that swell of pride that comes from making something with your hands. In its second life at the age of ten, it collapsed. It was the rocks. I would have been smarter to weight it with sand. Inspiration can take you so far but, afterwards, knowledge can take you further.
The blend of aesthetics and working with your hands is an essential balance. Knowing what looks good and how to achieve it is a blending. Maybe it is a blending of form and function but maybe it is also a blending of imagination and reality.
Cooking is working with your hands and sometimes your imagination. My wife is an experimental cook. She loves to fly by the seat of her pants. Often, I have heard her say, “It doesn’t look great but I love the taste.” She never says that with a real swell of pride. When it is also beautiful to see she exhibits that pride.
Working with my hands will always be a fine mystery for me. For others, it is how they move through the world.

My ethnicity has always been a bit of a mystery. My great grandmother was Mina C. Lowell. Yeah, those Lowells. The ones who spawned Amy and Robert and have a spot in Massachusetts named after them. I know little else. It surprises me that I know that. She was the daughter of a minister. She married with a railroad man. They came to Newark, New Jersey. She spent the rest of her life there. I am her great –grandson; that is all I truly know about my lineage. The rest is subject to conjecture. I believe that she had five children. I got to know two of them, and I was told about a third. That was my grandmother. She died many years before I was born. I knew my great aunts and I loved them but not equally. I was taught that my ethnicity was that I was an American. Does anyone ever love equally?
Ironically, I have spent the majority of my life with people who felt otherwise. They were Italian-Americans. They were Hispanic-Americans. The Jewish- Americans were a bit different in that they did not really identify geographically as much as they did culturally and religiously. I think that I partially feel this way from having been the bastard son that would never be accepted as a Jew. Then Israel told me that I actually had “the right to return” mostly because Hitler would have considered me a Jew, not an American.
This is not the way that I expected this essay to go. Here’s what happened. I have become mildly addicted to this TV program called Shark Tank. People come there, after what I imagine is a fairly extensive, screening process and pitch entrepreneurial deals to wealthy people who may have an interest to invest. It is a form of reality TV. I console myself by saying that at least it is not the housewives of anywhere, or that it does sell itself by putting “America” in its title.
So, this kid from Croatia presented an idea for LED lighting on bicycles. It was a good idea. The young man was an immigrant. One of the panelists was also a Croatian Immigrant. Instead of bargaining, he gave the young man twice as much as he asked for and then sat patiently while he listened to others before giving him an answer.
It struck me that they shared a sense of ethnic identity that governed their behavior in a way that was not clear to others. No one mentioned the connection. It occurred to me that even mentioning it might go against a kind of code.
Ethnic identity came into my head as a subject that held intrigue. I had always been on the outside of it, looking in. My first experience with ethnic identity was that I was embraced. My second was that I was rejected. It had nothing to do with me, but then again ethnic identity cannot be readily shared.
I was just a kid. I could be told that I was loved and then not loved with impunity. That is one of the natures of ethnic identity that I have discovered. Either you are in or out, but it is always about blood. For a while, I detested ethnic identity for this reason.
I felt that who you are should matter more than your lineage. Boy was I wrong. It matters all the time. It never ceases to matter and if you do not believe that you are a fool who will be raped by it mattering or not mattering. Who you are is part of your lineage. It is not totally up to you. There are other rules.
How does that saying go, “Blood is thicker than water.” I have learned that there is blood and that everything else is water. But I was not deterred. I kept pursuing something stronger than blood. I’m not sure that I had a name for it, but I am sure that I was drawn to it.
The girls at Good Counsel loved me with something that I thought was at least as strong as blood. But I know that they also have genetic identity. I know that I am not part of that. It is good that I know this. We have stretched the limits of a non-sexual, non-genetic love. It lifts my heart to hear from them.
I needed to teach and they needed to learn, it was really all about that. About that and that I loved them and they loved me back. My identity will always be in part that I loved and taught them with an open heart. It would seem that they learned and loved back. How blessed we are to have come together in that time in that way.
I’m confused about how this relates to ethnic identity. We had different ethnicities and yet a shared identity. At least it feels as if we did. I am turned away at the altar of ethnic identity because I lack credentials. Most of these students had a strong sense of Hispanic American Identity. Some felt marginalized by not having that. I’m not sure how, but feelingly I managed to identify with most all of them. I was not Hispanic any more than I was Italian. But I knew one ethnic identity from experience and I learned the other through exposure.
So the question becomes, what have I learned? I learned that devotion to blood is something that I do not feel as others do. I feel blood, I will always remember and cherish my great grandmother and her daughters. It would seem that I did not choose to further the line through blood. If I had, I suppose that ethnic identity would have become much more natural to me.
My choice for a life partner was more inspired by my soul than my bloodline. My wife speaks to my soul, the greater person that I aspire to be. Very differently, my students have always reached my soul. There is no ethnicity to this identity except that the cultural mores seem to surface again and again.
I feel as if while I am writing this that I am standing on shifting sands. I’m trying to explore the birthright of an Identity that I do not share. I am trying to create the pathways for other forms of identity. I am far afield of where I began.
Maybe, I have answered my own question. I can say that I have the ethnic identity of being American. I believe it to be an embracing identity. I feel respect for the older world cultures but I have always been an outsider to them and I always will be. It is silly for me to look for ethnic identity there, simply because it is that to which I have been exposed.
I have felt the weight of the chains on others who are part of ethnic identity. I have felt their need to pay homage and to, at the same time, break loose of these chains. That process has mostly been one that women have undergone. Not always but it seems to me mostly. Perhaps this is because women tend to have more emotional courage than men.
I feel like I no longer have an ethnic identity. Maybe elections do that but maybe it is because I do not have anything to fall back on. I can only fall back on those people that I have touched and hope that they will catch me.

When some people find out that I am a lover of literature and music, they tend to ask, “What is your favorite song? What is your favorite book? What is your favorite poem?” I am always at a loss to answer these questions about favorites. How does one decide between Ode to a Nightingale and Annabel Lee? Why would a person limit their choices to these two? Why does there need to be a choice? What is this thing about favorites?
My tendency is to think that it is an idle question. It seems impossible to shine a light with its answer. Choosing one seems to relegate others. I don’t have a favorite and this seems to dull my appearance at parties where such things are asked with regularity. Is it one more iteration of the American chant of “We’re number one?”
Who was my favorite person? Who was my favorite student? Who was my favorite teacher? There is a similarity among all questions that begin “who was your favorite?” Is it not unlike asking a parent of multiple children “Who is your favorite?” I am always at a loss to answer and my wife would say that it is because I overthink it. She was say that it isn’t a pronouncement, just a light, party question.
I’ve never done well with light, party questions. I don’t see the value. If Thomas Mann, or Franz Kafka or F. Scott Fitzgerald, or Alice Walker is my answer, does it really say anything about me or them?
What is your favorite food? Well sometimes it is potato chips but I do not wish to be defined by potato chips and I would not like to eat them every day. Again my wife objects and teases that I would like to eat them every day.
Sometimes it is couched differently. “If you were stranded on a desert island and could only have three books, what would they be?” I have no idea. I assume that they would be the books with which I was stranded. Being stranded does not mean that you get to pick and choose. So why ask?
Do people who ask that question really wish an answer or are they just waiting to tell you what their favorites are? Why do they want you to know?
Maybe if the question were phrased, “Whose books or songs or poems do you really love?” I would find that question more palatable. Maybe it is why I am not the first choice for a party guest.
This question lingers with me though. What does it mean to have favorites? I had a favorite towel. I would use it every time I showered. My wife would warn me when she was about to wash it. I preferred it to the exclusion of all other towels. I have a favorite pair of jeans. I wear them every chance I get. I put off having them washed.
Expressing a favorite can be an act of vulnerability. My friend Howard once expressed that owls were his favorite images. He was inundated by them. The owls kept coming long after he wished that they would stop. It was an easy choice for people to get Howard an owl. After a point, each owl only furthered his regret at having mentioned a favorite. One becomes too easy a target with mention of a favorite.
In competition I always longed to play against someone better. Table tennis is my best example. I was quite good but what I longed to do was play with someone better. Losing did not matter. What mattered was playing better. It was a love of the experience, rather than a love of winning.
Favorites imply a winner, and then everyone else. I’m hard pressed to do that in some areas, not in others. The New York Yankees and the New York Giants are my favorite teams, Yes, I choose them in exclusion to others. They are sports teams, but they are not people. We do not have a personal relationship. My interest in them is a one way street. I do not care if this offends any other team in any other sport.
People are a different matter. Music is a different matter. Art is different. Teaching is both different and the same as having a sports team. You root for your students. You hurt for their defeats and revel in their victories. I may not have known it then but I know it now.
One definition of the word is that it describes someone who enjoys special favor or regard. Another is that it is someone expected to win a specific contest, the favorite. Another is that it is a person treated with “undo favor” by a king or an official. Five definitions down and still all about people. There is one slight mention as an adjective, a special thing held in high regard.
It does not mean that other things cannot be held in high regard, but it has become to mean a form of summit of high regard in a given area: song, film, novel, poem, and painting. Why has our language done this? Is it a form of monotheism? Is that the Genesis of favorite?
Favorites has survived transition to the digital age. One is constantly asked to express Favorites. They are listed and catalogued. A person is sent tempting advertising based on an expression of Favorites.
It seems to have been dressed in new clothing, but does that mean that it has been redefined?
Emily Dickenson wrote: The Soul selects her own Society —
Then — shuts the Door —

Is that not the natural expression of favorites? It always seemed to me like the happy sperm fulfilled its mission, penetration followed by closure. Selection. I only know that the carriers of those happy sperm have been changed forever. Maybe that is the key to having been a favorite.
The favorite is changed forever. My favorites are rarely human. That says more about me than the nature of favorites, doesn’t it? I really do try to avoid doing that. Maybe it is not as instinctual in me as it is in others. Maybe that is why I feel as I do about favorites.
What does it say about me if the truth is that I have very few? Does a lack of favorites equate to a lack of interest in this world? I do not think so, but you may disagree. That would make you one of my favorites.

I don’t know why the places that I have lived have almost always felt sacred to me but they have. After Presbyterian Hospital in Newark, New Jersey, I was taken home to a place on Thomas Street in Newark. The street is no longer there, but have these pictures of it in my mind and these movie like replays of what happened there. Joey and Carol and I were children there and it was there that they told me about my first ghost. I was excited and afraid. The place held the ghost. I think that was when I first considered an entity that inhabited a place, at least for a time, at least in some minds.
The address was 780 Broadway, Newark, New Jersey. This was before the era of zip codes. It was a basement apartment that was considered two and one half rooms because of the kitchenette. I loved it there. There were glass enclosed cabinets standing up on a hardwood floor. I lay curled on that floor and played with baseball cards, marbles, and toy soldiers. I could look out and see the sunlight and the passing traffic. It never occurred to me that I lived beneath the ground. That little apartment held the enclosure of my existence.
I experienced holidays there for the very first time. I remember my very first joys being there. My life flowed with family then. The concept of friendship was fairly new. Joey and I were friends because his mom and my mom were friends. I had not realized that friends were people that you met.
That small basement apartment came with horrors. I contracted asthma there. I had to put my mom back together there and save her from going insane. But the place was good to me. I’ve gone back to visit more than a few times. Inner city economics has not been kind to it and I think that it may well disappear.
I can picture every inch of that small apartment and they soothe me. I learned to read there. I recited scripture to my great grandmother there, in our shared bedroom, where she lay dying for years. I believe the room offered all the comfort that it could.
We moved to a now nonexistent apartment house on 41 Lincoln Avenue in Newark. It was above ground and bright, on the third floor. I mostly remember it sexually, after all I was just 13. But I read the first book that made me cry in that apartment, Animal Farm. I lived there when Pope John the 23rd was elected as pontiff. I was re-baptized as a Catholic there.
I remember French glass doors and a long hallway. I can feel the walls. I can see out of the windows. I can hear the song “I Will Follow Him.” Apartments are like harlots, aren’t they? They are rented out, passed around. They sometimes become hardened. They bear witness at the mercy of business.
There have been so many apartments. Some had no heat. Some had no way to be cool. Some were without toilet. You might think that I lived in an underdeveloped country, but it was all in New Jersey.
John Lennon wrote, “There are places I remember…” Places are not always a silent witness. Sometimes they speak to you. It depends on whether you are able to listen.
The first house where I lived came about because of debt. My stepfather gambled and then gambled again. My mom tired of paying off the endless debts and made the calculated decision that since my stepfather was actually a hard worker that if she put him in more debt that he had ever known that he would curtail the gambling.
It was a two family house on a one block one way street that also housed the police department and the firehouse for an upscale, suburban community called Glen Ridge. We rented out the second floor. I was given the bedroom of a four room apartment. They placed a hide abed into what was supposed to be the dining room we had an eat-in kitchen and what was glorious to me was a backyard that did not feature broken glass. I was a city kid with high rolls and leather, and this was the madras capital of the world. But there was a porch and a basement that we did not have to share. We could have a washing machine that we did not have to rent by the load. There was a garage and a driveway that we only shared with the next door neighbors.
Delight of delights was when my Aunt Dotty and Uncle John became the tenants of the upstairs apartment. It was the place where both of them would spend their last days. We were able to get a dog. My room was mine except for the closet, which they needed. When I looked out my windows, I did not see feet or traffic, I saw green.
I lived on every level of that house, including the fairly uninhabitable attic. I knew every room and every window and every doorway. The first time that I had sex in a place where I lived was this house. The only other experiences had been in motels and car seats. I first took out my bedframe and put a mattress and box spring on the floor and called it my bed there.
On the whole, memories of places are fonder for me than memories of people. Experience attaches to a place differently than it attaches to people. Things become colored by future interactions with people but they tend to stay the same with memories of places. The image of a staircase with a stained glass window brings me a feeling of warmth. An above ground pool in the back yard brings me joy. When I lived in the attic, I would descend the pull down ladder at night and cool off in the pool. I was then able to sleep in the stifling heat of the attic.
Quirky things are now comical. The pantry was unheated and things would freeze out there. The basement would take on water. The house abutted the high school field and the band would blare music into my room. They were all annoying at the time but now they just bring a smile of remembrance.
Rahway, what more can I possibly say about that place? I loved it so but it was never mine.The feelings that I found there have been seminal in what much of my writing tries to express. I found the seeds of hope for a new way of looking at life in Rahway. Now it is gone. I’ve visited and revisited that place so very many times. I know every crevice and every corner, but is there a use for those memories? Are they baggage or propellers?
I once lived in a garage. It was in Paterson, New Jersey. My oldest friend had lived there since I met him and now he was getting married and moving to a larger space. That converted garage had been magic for me. It was there that I first heard the music of Phil Ochs and Pete Seeger. It was there that I first listened to Hal Holbrook perform Mark Twain tonight. It was there that I first heard Lightnin Hopkins and Lenny Bruce. I am so grateful to Lanny. He taught me so much and then gave me this garage.
I almost died there. I had no money, no food, no income, and no car. The sink was irreparably clogged. I shivered listening to the street traffic at night. My door was right there and there were only factories around. It was very dark at night and the door was flimsy. I wondered how he could have lived there for so long.
That garage and Rahway were places of learning for me. In the garage were stacks of magazines and a fish tank on the kitchen table. Empty bottles of wine and tequila- It was a place that I loved to be, until I had to leave. Rahway was much different and somehow the same. Love of a place is only a rental agreement. You may love it forever but it moves on.
I think that it may be the same with all places. You embrace but then move along. The embrace of a home is something different. More strange than inter-species, it is an embrace between creatures of fast time and creatures of space.
There was this kid that came to the garage, at first he was looking for Lanny. But he found me and brought pot. At the time I was listening to Jackson Browne’s Late for the Sky. The kid was enraptured by it. He thought it was the best thing that he’d ever heard. I smiled and felt old. I wondered how many people had sat in this garage and heard the best music that they had ever heard before. I think that it must have been dozens.
I remember being hungry and sick and without money. My car was broken and I was walking up a steep hill for two miles a day to get to school. I knew that I couldn’t maintain, but I didn’t see alternatives. I had to finally have a degree. I’d needed to do it on my own but my sense of stubborn pride was failing.
One night my friend Howard came over and said, “I’m taking you home to stay with my family for a while.” I felt touched by the magic of the world. One of those times when the world is not just about physics-
Howard and Karen’s home had been Howard’s parents’ home. There was his beautiful wife, and three wondrous children. I had a room in the attic. There was a high up, stained- glass window. I had my own radio, a mattress and box spring, and my first ever down quilt. I graduated from college in this room and did my first preparations for teaching as a graduate assistant here. I can feel the temperature of it in my mind like an emotional thermometer.
It was an old house and Howard employed me to earn my keep. I ripped the front of the house away with a crowbar. I dug a trench from the street to the house. It was four feet deep and I dug it by hand. He was most at home in the garage. He taught me how he cared for his motorcycles there. He tried to teach me mechanics but I was hopeless. Instead I offered Shakespeare.
I gave back the only thing that I had to give then, an opportunity to learn from someone who had taught me. It wasn’t a gift that had financial obligations, but it was a gift given in gratitude for being able to share a space in time.
The gift of a place is not easily given, it can’t be. A person has to see the place and embrace it and be embraced by it. Others must join in. It is very difficult to give the gift of the experience of a place. It may be sought after but not possible.
Places that you remember cascade with aging. I can see each and every classroom where I ever taught. Every window out of which I looked while reciting Anabel Lee. Time in still life, like a gif with some animation.
I left Howard and Karen’s home for relocation. I was moving to Minneapolis, I was all in on love that I did not realize was gone. It was a three room apartment on University Avenue. There was a kitchen, a middle room and a bedroom. The bathroom was shared with others.
I remember the thunderstorms and rain that washed down the street in torrents. I remember walking everywhere. I remember the Mississippi, way up north. I recall the yoga in that apartment. I can feel the air there. Images flood from a place that was never ever mine, but I can see out the windows. I think that I was only there for 6 weeks, but so many years later, so vivid. That is the character of a place that you remember, whatever the reasons for and duration of stay.
I came back to Rahway and found that my home was no longer a home and now a battleground, because of the people. Everyone feels like they own a place, but places are not owned. One can be a caretaker.
I’m not bad at husbandry, although that is a matter of judgement. The first place that the law said belonged to me and the bank was a townhouse. It was an end unit. There was magnificent light in some rooms and almost none in others. It suffered from a lack of insulation that caused a couple of rooms to be less than comfortable for a good part of the year. But there was the first fireplace that I ever had that was mine, at least it felt that way then.
There was this floating staircase and a bedroom that had a sort of balcony. There was a Jacuzzi. Many moments of a place are attached to people but some are just between you and the place. It wasn’t like that for me there. Everything got attached to people. The coloration wasn’t great. I was glad to sell it.
My fondness for places seems to be related to how much I was able to write there. Maybe, in the process, my writing is an attachment to place as well as time. A place that my mind sees as a mental laboratory- A place where I can be alone with the natural world-
Where we moved, on Decker Pond Road was just such a place. There were windows looking out over a fine, small lake. This place was the essence of magic for me. The embrace of person and place, is what I felt in Rahway, but that was never mine. I felt it again on Decker Pond Road in Lake Tranquility. We lived there for eighteen years, long enough to plant trees and watch them grow. As long as the life span of creatures who would share this place with you and then move along to somewhere else.
Only some of these creatures were human. People came and stayed and then left. Some creatures spent their entire lives there. Keats and Fitzgerald lived and died there. Howard and Tom called it their home for a time and then moved on. There is not a day that goes by that I do not think of that lake and of my gardens there. There is not a day that goes by that I do not look out of those windows. The flowers the trees and the ground are woven into my soul.
It was our glorious home. I tell myself that we left it better than we found it, but I am not sure what that means to a place. I know that it wore me out and would have crushed me with its challenges, at least it seems that way. All logical evidence leads to that conclusion. I wanted my home with its magnificent views and gardens to be a place I never left. I didn’t get my way.
The soul is in part a product of the places that you have lived. I think that place speaks to soul. I’m not sure about the why of that mystery. But I know that it exists for me, mystery or fallacy, it exists for me. The bond between person and place seems to extend beyond death of people, but I am less sure about the death of place.
Rahway burnt down and was condemned. By chance, I visited before it was destroyed. I felt the passion and the depth that a memory of place has. It felt desolate. People and places have this in common, sometimes they feel desolate. Travelling back up the highways to my gardens and views and animals and trees, I felt renewed and if I could pray, one of my prayers would be to have places avoid desolation. I want my places to prosper and my fervent hope is that they will have benefited from my tending.
The history of people and places is intertwined. Each have their highs and lows. If you recall a particular place, does it not usually come with a warmth bath of feelings? I does for me.
There are so many more places and not enough time, for me, but I pray that there is time for them.

Passing Through

One reason that the voices of the dying and the voices of the dead differ is the yearning. Dedication to the dying is temporary but dedication to the dead is more enduring. How many of us have an enduring dedication to the dead? Do they reach back from the grave ensnaring or guide us toward a light? The voices of the dying are different from this.
We age and the legions of those once in our lives but no longer grows. Is being faithful to the dead a trap of time? Is it a world of ghosts? Is it a ladder on which we climb? In this shocked about existence, do we know if we climb up or down?
At heart, I am more of a diver than a flyer. At more than 100 feet below the surface, I am relaxed and at ease. I feel agitated in the air. I dive deep and accept that there are no mistakes for which I will not pay, but aloft I know that mistakes are out of my control.
Funny feeling that way and being a Gemini. I’m supposed to love the air but I long for the sea. The songs of the dying and the dead are different on the sea. I am writing about the dying but not for the first time. The air is my friend but it frightens me with the lie of its endless space. The sea has a bottom and a top and immense power. I am not a child of the sea although sometimes I wish that I were.
I feel like I am one of the living who hears the voices of the dying and the dead. I struggle with feeling that it is merely a redundancy of what has been heard before. It’s difficult to not look for meaning.
My wife knows this far more intimately than I do. For a decade she helped the dying and the dead. She became an acknowledged expert therapist. We had the dying to our table. I so admire what she was able to bring to them, but I got to witness the price of the dying and the cost for her to facilitate it. She has always told me that she did not fear death but feared the dying. I’m afraid it is the opposite for me.
I once had this dream that frightened more than any other that I have ever had. I was eternal and totally alone in a void of blackness for eternity. It sounds like a dream of one’s personal hell, doesn’t it? Most things eternal between heaven and hell feel like hope. Maybe they should feel like dread. I know, at least, that they are wishes.
The dead and the dying, what am I doing? Why am I here? What drives me in these directions these days? What gives me pause abut looking towards a future? There’s the rub. Right there. Pause about looking towards a future-
Voices of the dying often sing of their pain and longing. Voices of the dead are more settled with the accepted tinges of regret. It did not work out the way it might have, but now it is done. Do I have acceptable tinges of regret? What would make them acceptable?
I traded a gift for a paycheck. I traded it for financial security, not all gifts come with this benefit, but mine did. If you know what good teaching is and how to organize it, you will be paid twice as much, but you will no longer have time to teach. I tried to go back to teaching, but it was a voice of the dying. I’d left. I let it go for the sake of my family and the need to do more for them. I saw myself as the necessary provider.
I feel as if I have wandered into some existential cemetery. The voices of the dead seem like roots. It feels like the voices of the dying will be swept away. I am almost afraid to know how I fit into this dichotomy. Maybe I am just here as a witness, Leonard Cohen wrote “passing though.”
“Passing through, passing through- Glad that I ran into you.”
But what does that say about the voices that I hear? Maybe I am better off not listening to these voices of the dying and the dead. Maybe I have written too many eulogies and have grown an affinity for the form. Maybe I need a dose of something else. Do I need to deny what I hear to have that portion? Gift for a paycheck- Trading senses for understanding-
As far as I know, I am the last of my maternal line, all genetic evidence to the contrary. I should say that I am the last of my known maternal line, but is there a difference? Perhaps Ancestry.com or some other service for hire could help me with this, but they would just be names with whom I really have no history. I think that is why I seem to listen to the voices of the dying and the dead.
While writing this essay I get the news that my next door neighbor has died. She is no longer a voice of the dying. She was a ninety-five year old retired school teacher who bought her home in 1947. She met my wife and my grand-daughter and we will attend the funeral. I have mixed feelings about not ever having met her.
The voices of the dead are more muted when they have not been the voices of the dying in your life. She was one of my people, a teacher who lived and taught and loved that she did, or so I am told. My wife calls it a missed opportunity, but I feel somehow spared. I do not have her image in my mind, I don’t have her voice in my head.
What does it say when I value this more than having had the experience to share with her? There were only a few days when she was not back and forth to the hospital. I remember Valerie coming home and saying that Miss B, as she was called, was off to the beauty parlor. I did want to meet her. She expressed a desire to meet me. I can imagine a cup of tea and talk of the classroom and a pride in students who we taught.
The timing just wasn’t right. I think feeling this relief says more about me and really nothing about her except for her achievement of endurance. Something seems to be pressing down on me. I’m not sure what it is but it feels like me pressing down on me.
Perhaps the voices of the dying and dead need to be heard. Maybe the remembrance does them a service. Perhaps, unheard it is they who are in that dark void.