Beautiful Things

I have been feeling a bit stressed lately.  We are moving.  I don’t yet have a job.  The job I am leaving was perfect.  I am not sure where my daughter will be going to school next year.  My wife is starting a new job.  Blah, blah, blah.  I know that all of these things will be great two months from now.  We will have survived the whole moving process.  I will have a job I like and feel good about.  Cold Spring School will survive—and even thrive—without me.  Isabel will be happily taken in and swallowed up by a new school with good teachers and good friends.  Erica will be making her new job her own and doing it with style and skill.  Yet…I worry.

One way I deal with the stress is to run.  Today it was close to 90 at noon and I hit the road anyway for a good, hard four-miler partially up East Rock.  While I run my mind goes fairly blank and my body relaxes.  When I am done the endorphins do their job and I feel good for a bit.  It’s a bit like magic, actually.  Within reason, this thing that makes me feel better is also good for me.

While I was running today I decided to help myself in another way, as well.  I am familiar with the research into happiness that has shown that where we focus our attention can have a big effect on our overall mood.  If we brood and stew and focus on all the unknowns and losses (actual and potential), we will be in a bad place.  But consciously making ourselves lookat the upside of things or focus on the things we are grateful for can boost our mood and leave us happier. 

What reminded me of this was a downy woodpecker.  It was on the branch of a shrub I ran by.  It did not see me coming and by the time it knew I was there, I was within five feet of it.  Downies are small woodpeckers—smaller than robins and cardinals.  They have a checked black-and-white appearance and often hang out at feeders with nuthatches and chickadees.  They, along with other species of woodpeckers, have a distinct way of flying.  They flap their wings a few times and then glide a bit.  As they glide, they lose a little altitude.  Then they flap some more and gain that altitude back.  This repeats over and over.  It looks like they are tracing out a somewhat-flattened sine curve through the air. 

The downy I startled today hopped off its branch and into the air directly in front of me at eye-level.  I had never been that close to a woodpecker before and the red spot on its head was brilliant in the sunshine.  I am not a sentimental guy about animals, but this bird was about as cute as it gets.  And then rather than flying left, (into the bushes), or right, (across the street and into the woods), this particular Downy flew immediately in front of me for a good fifty feet—maybe even seventy-five.  It rose and fell, rose and fell, like it was stitching up a rip in the fabric of the air.  It was beautiful to see.

So I took that image with me today and decided that I would write about it as my Beautiful Thing for today.  I also decided that I will write about one beautiful every day for the next month.  By that time, I should be moved into a new house and maybe even starting a new job.  I am considering this an exercise in conscious happiness.  

Simply Alone

Erica has been spending lots of time in other places the past two years.  We live in New Haven, Connecticut and, (for lots of compelling reasons), she has been teaching in Ithaca, New York and San Diego, California.  Our daughter Isabel, our dogs Ginger and Lotti, and I have all gotten pretty good at life without Erica.

In fact, as I left for work Tuesday morning and she left for Bradley Airport and ten days in San Diego, I found it slightly unsettling to realize that in some ways, life is easier without Erica here. 

Before I write another word, I need to say right away that “easier” is not the same as “better.”

Having said that, “easier” IS the same as easier.  When Erica goes away my world shrinks down very quickly to just three things: my work, my daughter, and my dogs.  I don’t have a lot of choices about what to do with my time.  I get up, I feed the dogs, I wake Isabel, we go to school, I sprint home to walk the dogs during work, I take the dogs to the park, I make dinner, I help Isabel with her homework, and then we all go to bed.  In the morning, we do it all again.  The needs of the creatures closest to me dictate my decisions.

Sometimes, I manage to squeeze in a run or a workout.  And if I get real lucky, Isabel has a sleepover at a friend’s house and I get a night to myself.  Other than that, life becomes very simple.

It’s when she comes back that things get complicated.  Once Erica is here my options expand exponentially, and so does my guilt.  When the things I have to do are clear and non-negotiable, I do them.  When choice is introduced, the clarity is lost and I tend to agonize over seemingly insignificant decisions.  I won’t go into the tortured thinking that plagues me when faced with a simple choice while Erica is here, but suffice it to say that I can be guilty of severely overthinking everything.

It is Friday and Erica is still in San Diego.  My world has taken on its Erica-less proportions.  Life is easy. 

And I miss her.

Life is No Longer Elsewhere

I was driving with my daughter Isabel a few years back when she said very earnestly from the back seat, “I know everybody probably thinks this when they are young, but I KNOW I am going to be famous some day.” I had to laugh at the accuracy of her statement—at least the first part of it. In fact, it seems that for most men I know part of the “work” of their thirties is making peace with their failure to become famous. Along with fame, I also think that everybody of a certain age, income, and education believes s/he will someday have a job and a stable relationship and a place to call home—will, in fact, have what we call a life.

I am 46 years old and to the casual outside observer, I have a life. I have been married to the same person for almost 16 years, I have a happy, healthy 12 year-old daughter, I have taught at a school I love for eight years, I own a house, I am not suffering from crushing debt, debilitating depression or chronic pain. I have friends. I have hobbies. I have two dogs that love me. Surely these things are sufficient to qualify as a life. Yet, for me life still feels like it is elsewhere.

Years ago I went on a Milan Kundera tear and read every novel I could find by the Czech novelist. I started with The Unbearable Lightness of Being and immediately moved into everything else he had published. In a few weeks I came out the other side of this immersion convinced that Milan Kundera is a brilliant writer. Twenty-five years later he is still on my list of top five modern novelists, along with Phillip Roth, Graham Swift, Vladimir Nabakov, and Haruki Murakami.

To be fully honest, I consumed his novels so voraciously that their plots and main characters bled together into a great big blob of darkly humorous Eastern European existentialism. One of Kundera’s novels is called Life is Elsewhere. I had to google Life is Elsewhere to even remind myself of the plot just now. I know that I read it and loved it, but even after reading the plot summary I could not remember a thing about the book. (Does it make me a bad person that I don’t really care that I am unable to remember anything at all about a book by one of my favorite authors? This is a question for another time.)

What I really want to focus on now is the title: Life is Elsewhere.

This title has come back to me again and again over the past twenty-five years; not because of the power of the story but rather because of the resonance of the idea. For me, life has been elsewhere ever since I graduated college in 1987. First, I went to the Peace Corps in North Yemen. I knew it was a two-year gig and that when it was over I would be moving back to the United States. Once I got back I lived in Delaware, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Maine, and Montana over the course of the next five years. None of these moves felt permanent and none of the places felt like home.

By the time I was 29 and living in Billings I was ready to commit to a place to call home. I was considering moving to Santa Fe, New Mexico to start a teacher certification/Masters of Education program. In the meantime, I met the woman who became my wife. She was a Montana girl and rather than moving to New Mexico I stayed in Billings for another 18 months. Shortly after we met we knew we would get married. We also knew we would be moving. She wanted more than what life in Billings was able to offer. She wanted graduate school and a bigger world of ideas and challenges.

So this is the story I tell myself: I was looking for a place to commit to; a place to put down roots and build a life one connection at a time. But instead of a place, I found a person. And then we moved to a new place and then to another. And now here it is a full 25 years since I graduated college and still I have not found a place to build a life.

Of course, life has been happening anyway. As I said, we own a home and have jobs and a daughter and two dogs. But I have not built this life that has been happening to me. As John Lennon wrote, “life is what happens while you’re busy making other plans.” I have been a participant so far, not a decider. (In this one way I hope to become more like George W. Bush in the coming months and years.)

There have been a couple of consequences that I can see to the way my life has unspooled itself. One is that I have never felt the pleasure that I imagine a person gets from feeling truly part of a place, with roots that reach down into the soil and connections that bolster and support all around. The other is that my long-suffering partner, Erica, has been forced to stand in for the place I want to call home. In the absence of a place to live my life fully, I have substituted a person and Erica has had to be the place I grew my roots and also the connections that bolster and support me all around.

As anyone who has spent more than ten seconds thinking about it can tell you, this sort of relationship cannot sustain. It is bound to crash under the weight of so much need and expectation. Luckily, we have both seen the problem and taken steps to change things. No single person is big enough to provide all the things a place can give—even the smallest sort of place. I realize I have been waiting to get to wherever it is we are going to build our lives for 25 years now and that is way too long.

So, it is with great excitement that I am looking forward to our next move. We are heading to Ithaca, New York sometime in the next few months and I could not be more thrilled. Of course I am feeling a fair amount of stress about selling our crappy house in New Haven and buying a not-crappy house in Ithaca, about finding meaningful work that pays well, and about my daughter’s new life in a new place. But all of these things pale in comparison to the excitement I feel about finally moving to a place with the full expectation that it will be where my life is. I will miss the school where I teach and the families who go there. I will miss my friends in New Haven. But not enough to make me stay. I am ready to put down some roots, to join clubs, to plant trees and asparagus and rhubarb instead of things that grow once and are gone, and to commit to living life where I am living instead of in my head in some future place.

Hot damn. Let the wild rumpus begin.

Update, September, 2014: It took 2 years, but we have finally bought a house in Ithaca and we are loving it. Also, it took a year, but I found a job as a writer working for Cornell's College of Engineering and it is going great. This fall, I will learn how to grow asparagus.

Stealing Leopards

“Hey, Patricia. Do you think the Taj Mahal has a bathroom?” I asked dubiously.

I was traveling with my friend Patricia through India on our way to Nepal. We had a month off from our teaching jobs in Hodeidah, Yemen Arab Republic, and we were celebrating Ramadan by getting out of Yemen and going to a place that had two big things going for it. The first was easy and legal access to alcohol. The second was the Himalayas
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We had landed in what was then called Bombay and got on a train and headed to Agra. Along the way I bought and consumed food and drinks from street vendors, which was maybe not such a smart thing to do. Hence my sudden, dire need of a bathroom at the Taj Mahal.


I will spare you the details. The end result was a rapid loss of fifteen pounds, severe dehydration, auditory hallucinations, and a terribly weakened state of being. A doctor in Agra prescribed Limodal, which stops ALL intestinal activity for a set period of time. I took the medicine and then took the 24-hour train and bus trip to Kathmandu. We found a guest house, the medicine wore off, and I re-descended into dysentery hell.

Kathmandu was supposed to be a quick stop on our way to a trek up in the mountains, but I was in no shape to leave our room, let alone the city. I told Patricia that she should at least enjoy the mountains, so she did. While she was hiking in the Himalayas, I was slowly recuperating from a severe bout of amoebic dysentery. I got a map and found my way to the United States Embassy, where the doctor agreed to see me because I was a Peace Corps Volunteer.

While waiting for the results of a few tests I was told to feel free to hang out in the Peace Corps Library on the grounds of the Embassy complex. So I did. Its collection of books was impressive in both number and variety. And it turns out those books would be more important to me than I could have predicted.

Being a volunteer at the time, I didn’t really get a salary. The money I had saved for the trip was budgeted pretty tightly and that budget hinged on me spending most of my time in Nepal OUT of the capital and instead up in the mountains where a person could eat for pennies a day and sleep in a tent for free. Kathmandu was not an expensive city, but I was living close to the bone and I certainly had not budgeted for three weeks in a guesthouse.

After one week it became clear to me that my money was not going to last unless I took drastic measures. I went to the Peace Corps Office in town and some volunteers told me I could use their small apartment while they were away, free of charge. I moved to a diet of yogurt and fruit supplemented by an occasional grilled cheese sandwich with garlic. And still the money just got tighter. I had one week and $3.00 left. It did not look good for me.

I decided to take a long walk, see parts of Kathmandu I had not yet seen, and think about my situation. As I walked I noticed something that had been bubbling just below the surface of my awareness: Kathmandu is full of used bookstores. Travelers come to Kathmandu with books, read them, and then realize they do not want the extra weight in their backpacks as they head out on a trek at 10,000+ feet. So they sell them to used bookstores. Then, when their treks are done, they come back to the capital and they need a book or two while waiting for their planes, so they go to the used bookstores.

Each store had some version of this sign in its window:



I let the idea percolate in my brain for one hungry day and then I acted. It is not something I am proud of—(or maybe it is. Why else would I be writing about it twenty years later?) The details are not pretty. I emptied a backpack, walked to the Peace Corps library, made sure I was alone, scanned the shelves for books with multiple copies, and then started loading the backpack. I only took books if there were three or more copies—and this somehow made it okay to me. I noticed when I got to the “M” section of the non-fiction books that there were more than a dozen copies of a book called The Snow Leopard by Peter Matthiessen. I had never read the book, but I sure was happy so many other people had.

I quickly looked around, grabbed nine copies, stuffed them in my bag, and walked straight to a used bookstore, where I got enough money to feed myself for a few more days. I held on to one of those copies of Matthiessen’s book and I read it in a park in central Kathmandu with the snow-topped peaks of the Himalayas looming in the distance over the top of a beautiful Buddhist temple. The book was incredible.


So, maybe it is an exaggeration to say that Peter Matthiessen saved my life, but he did give me food for several days when I otherwise would have gone hungry. And he came to represent for me my own ability to survive in any situation. I don’t often tell the story of stealing books in order to feed myself, but I do think about that time once in a while when I am facing a tough situation. I gained a lot of confidence in my ability to adapt to changes, to stay calm, and to do what needs to be done.

To Pee or Not To Pee?

“It is absolutely inconsistent with American values, with the standards of behavior that we expect from our military personnel.” US Secraetary of State Hillary Clinton

“This act by American soldiers is simply inhuman and condemnable in the strongest possible terms.” Afghan President Hamid Karzai

“No religion in the world will allow someone to do this…” Taliban Spokesman Qari Yousuf Ahmadi

By now you probably know what could unite Hillary Clinton, Hamid Karzai, and Qari Yousuf Ahmadi. Several US Marines urinated on some dead Taliban fighters in Helmand Province in Afghanistan. Someone on the scene filmed the actions of these soldiers. Someone then posted the video online, thus ensuring it will live forever. As evidenced by the quotations above, reaction around the world has been swift and near-unanimous condemnation of the actions of these young American soldiers.

People are shocked and horrified.

I have to be honest—I am shocked and horrified, too. But my shock and horror are of a different flavor than most. A soldier peeing on a dead enemy fighter is immature. Another soldier filming soldiers peeing on dead enemy fighters is perverse. Posting the video where anyone could see soldiers peeing on dead enemy fighters is ill-considered.

But I would argue that none of these actions is “inhuman.” In fact, it is ONLY humans who do this sort of thing. We always have and probably always will. Read the ancient Greeks. What did Achilles do when he killed Hector? He tied him up to a chariot and dragged his corpse around for all to see. Have you read or seen Black Hawk Down? What did the Iraqis do to the bodies of the contractors they caught in Fallujah back near the beginning of President Bush’s invasion of Iraq? For as long as there have been wars, there have been men (mostly) treating the bodies of the enemy in ways that are disrespectful.

In fact, it seems unfair to expect otherwise. Take a young soldier, train him to kill, immerse him in a situation that breeds hate and contempt, order him to kill, and then expect him to treat the hated enemy’s body with respect? That is asking a lot.

What amazes me about the behavior of US troops in Iraq and Afghanistan is that the great majority of these young men and women DO rise to the occasion and DO treat the bodies of dead enemies with respect. It is a real testament to their training and their character that incidents like this are few and far between. I am in no way excusing what those Marines did in Helmand—it was stupid and will have repercussions far beyond Afghanistan.

The shock and horror I have been feeling the past few days have been rooted in the fact that humans are still solving problems between groups the same way we did 5000 years ago. And instead of using our prodigious intellects to think our way around war, we have been making up rules for the “civilized” prosecution of our wars. Government officials, citizens, soldiers, and Taliban spokesmen are all upset that some dead fighters were peed on by some live soldiers, but no one seems upset by the fact that the live soldiers shot and killed the dead ones to begin with. Which is worse: that some living American soldiers urinated on some dead Taliban fighters, or that some Americans and some Afghanis who don’t even know each other are trying to kill each other?

As I said, I am not trying to minimize the stupidity and callousness of what those Marines did in Helmand. But I do wish Hillary Clinton, Hamid Karzai, Qari Yousuf Ahmadi, John McCain, and all the others who were so shocked and horrified by the actions of those Marines would step back and take a moment to think about which is worse: Killing someone or peeing on his corpse? These Marines certainly deserve some blame, but our species’ continued reliance on warfare to “solve” problems is the real culprit here, not a 23-year old grunt.