December 30, 2021

I’m thinking of my final Christmas in San Francisco, Christmas 2019, now a week away from two years ago. December that year had been a month of farewells. Josh and Peggy’s poignant dinner party, my close friends Ray and Michael, Greg and Ross, Zina and Al, there to say goodbye, Ray not well that night, barely hanging on. Christmas was with Adam and Rachel and Rachel’s family, Adam still enduring chemotherapy. 2019 had been a bad year by so many measures: Brenda’s abrupt decision to end our marriage, Adam’s lymphoma, Ray’s cancer. The world had not yet succumbed to a global pandemic—who would have guessed that fate was only a few months away, maybe even percolating as we sat around Josh’s dinner table in Mill Valley. I wore a beaded bracelet that evening that said Love.

Two years.

Ray is gone; he died in April 2020 as the pandemic was just beginning to grip the city. He was so fearful of contracting the virus but died alone in his apartment in still what’s unknown circumstances.  It wasn’t Covid-19.

Adam recovered, graduated from medical school, and began his residency at Highland Hospital. In May 2021 he and Rachel had a baby boy, Oliver Elliott Schwemberger Mortimer. They are prospering.

Josh and Peggy sold their house in Strawberry, organizing their exit while I visited last August, and moved to a rental in Corte Madera.

And I have been in Boston, two years on January 7^th, two years—and counting—of living under the cloud of a virus that still keeps us masked and out of casual circulation.

All of us have moved on. For me, Boston has been a godsend. Close to Sam and family, work blossoming at Hult and Northeastern and for a year at Fletcher, an apartment I like across from an East Boston swimming beach, Walden Pond, a few new friends. My close friends in San Francisco have remained close. Josh, Josh and Peggy, Fran, Mark, Don, Robin, Travis. My hopes of being bi-coastal with frequent cross-country trips spoiled by Covid. I miss swimming in the Bay.

I think about those twelve years in San Francisco, the significance of those years in my life, what they gave me, what I lost. What I found as a result of loss. The unexpected passion of love, for the first—and perhaps only—time. The shattering disappointment of that love gone. The tranquility and eventual sadness of a kind of love regained. And lost again. I realize now I was the lucky one, the one who could leave, to start again. I should be, and am, grateful.

Do I want any of those old relationships again? Not with those same women—three strikes, over so many years, and I’m more than out. The times have changed, too. Not with any women. I don’t want any of that possible drama. I’m willing to be surprised, and willing to be open to something different, too. And willing to be free of any relationship. It’s a good place to stand.

For Christmas this year Travis sent me a book titled Ikigai: The Japanese Secret to a Long and Happy Life. Apart from moving to Okinawa the key is keeping busy, being focused, having purpose. Some people I meet ask if I’m retired. I can’t imagine that. I love teaching and have come to see teaching as the purpose I’ve always wanted.

This fall in my strategy class, as a final assignment I asked the students to write a five-year strategic plan for themselves, focused on career goals, their commitments beyond prestige and monetary gain, and their definition of career happiness. I was unprepared to be as moved as I was reading what they wrote, these strong yet still fragile young men and women. As I read their plans, their worries, their hopes, their dreams, I teared up. I want them all to realize these plans, to achieve their goals. That I could be, in some small way, a catalyst on their journeys is a purpose I couldn’t have conceived when I started my own career adventure in teaching. Now I do.

Professor Niland, this is off topic, but I feel I need to address this. I want to say thank you. Thank
you for being an amazing professor for my last semester at Hult and for continuing to further my
understanding of marketing. I appreciate you and the care and passion you have for teaching. Thank you so much. Professor. I hope to see you again!

In such a serendipitous, even mysterious way, this is the gift Brenda gave me by ending our marriage. From that rupture a new life has evolved.

Welcome 2022.

Today is the anniversary of my father’s death. He died a few days after his 90^th birthday in 2018. He didn’t suffer—had rarely been ill in his life. The end came fast from the first phone call I received from his wife Sonya informing me he had been admitted to the hospital and the next day call telling me he was gone. She organized a fast memorial at their church and didn’t invite me. She said, “I didn’t think you would want to come.”

I would have gone. Because I grieved for the love we never shared? Because a son, an only child son, ought to attend his father’s memorial? Because my blood bond with him was stronger than theirs, his adoptive children and grandchildren? To prove a point? To be a reminder to all the people I didn’t know, and wouldn’t have wanted to know, that this man their friend had had another life, a life before Alabama, a life that in no way at all resembled the life he lived there in exile from everything that came before? To stand in isolation of all that?

I didn’t grieve his death. As I hadn’t enjoyed his life. Very late in our lives, a few years before he died, I called him and told him I thought he had never loved me. His response was that he believed I had never loved him. A father and son who perhaps had loved one another but never could accept that love and lived in the doubt of being unloved.

I don’t grieve him today on this death anniversary. I have a portrait of him hanging in my bedroom, a tinted photograph of my father when he was perhaps thirteen. He’s a handsome boy. He was a handsome young man. I see myself in that portrait. I see my sons. The bloodlines are evident.

In so many ways I constructed my life to be different from his. I rejected his masculinity, his love of hunting and shooting, of fishing in any kind of water, his pursuit of Pittsburgh capitalism, his flirtatious charm with women, his ready ability to build anything.  I never wanted to be him. I wanted to be the opposite of the man he was. He wanted me to be a lawyer. I majored in English and went to Ireland to pursue a graduate degree in literature. He disapproved—but paid for it all. He never said no even when the distance grew farther and deeper. I don’t think I ever said thank you.

When he divorced my mother, leaving me with the emotional wreckage of her attempted suicide and subsequent dependency, I hated him. I was nineteen, a sophomore in college. He bought me a vintage Austin-Healey in a wordless attempt to say he was sorry. We didn’t speak for three years. He didn’t attend my college graduation or years later my wedding. My life diverged away down pathways he would have found distasteful at best. His disapproval hung like smog over my life, silent but ever-present.

Life repeats itself even when we don’t want it to. I said I would never divorce yet have twice.

Today I ask myself would I have turned out differently, made other decisions, had his influence not been such a heavy weight on my shoulders? Would I have been less fearful of being myself, not some anti-Dad?

I can’t create a life that didn’t happen. The past needs to be placed securely in the past drawer. I don’t need to be the man I wound up being. I’m still trying to figure that out—at this late but not too-late stage.

And I can’t know the effect my life, the deeds of my life, has had on my own sons. They are each remarkable men, making remarkable choices, leading remarkable lives. Having been a burden in the past, perhaps having left unknown scars I can only imagine, I live today knowing that all I can do is not be foolish, not be a burden, build my own future on right decisions, and express my unconditional love in as dependency-free ways as I can.

I will try to think fondly of my father today. Think of him as the man he was and not the father he wasn’t. May he rest in peace.

Can we ever really know someone else? We can touch; we listen; we see. That smell that only she owns, precisely hers, that instantly takes you to a place that once had meaning. Was that love? That only touching her caused instant tumescence. Was that lust? Was it knowledge? Did I ever know her?

A tear in my heart, healed over, is only the memory inside of three women. They were the only ones.  The scars aren’t visible. Once painful, no more. Nothing lasts. Not this. People break apart.

Touch, I remember touch
Pictures came with touch
A painter in my mind
Tell me what you see

Snapshots of other days. I take them out of the past drawer and look long and deep into the faded technicolor, looking for a sign, something that hinted at what was missing. Late afternoon in the Santa Iglesia Catedral Primada de Toledo, light streaming through the ceiling windows, an organist playing: I couldn’t stop crying, spontaneous tears that flowed and flowed in quiet sadness, provoked by god knows what—the light, the music, the mystery of faith no longer held– maybe the knowledge that so early the seeds of an end were growing and that a great mistake had been made. Another year, the Protestant Cemetery in Rome, closed, arriving too late in the rain. I couldn’t stop crying. I couldn’t speak. I stared out of the taxi windows on the way back to the pensione on the Piazza Navona, the rain streaming, Roman streets a blur, my life a blur. My eyes as wet as the rain. Her anger had subsided; she tried to recover the moment. Silent, a great weight lodged deep inside, leaden.

Why is this on my mind, anyway? I was thinking about the frustrations and the disappointments of life, of which there are a very great many. I haven’t been entirely honest with you about that.

A tourist in a dream
A visitor it seems
A half-forgotten song
Where do I belong?

Years later we returned. Redemption? Shelley’s heart.  My heart. That day there was light, yet bittersweet , reconciling what couldn’t be put back together because it had never been of one piece.

Tell me what you see
I need something more

Kiss, suddenly alive
Happiness arrive

Another snapshot: another woman, another time. Walking in the Mission, a man stopped us and said we were a beautiful couple. We were a beautiful couple. Love was the answer, then. The only time in my life. San Francisco was a dream. She was that dream.

Hunger like a storm
How do I begin?

A room within a room
A door behind a door

I remember her touch. I didn’t need more.  Then I needed more. Happiness arrived for the first time, true happiness. Amsterdam in the snow. One time out of all time.

Touch, where do you lead?
I need something more
Tell me what you see
I need something more

Was the more I wanted too much? She thought so, said so.  It’s what she saw and it frightened her. The expectation was too heavy. It was too heavy for me, too, and nearly sunk me. JP said happiness is a small boat on a very rough ocean. The boat made it to safe harbor. That life departed, another began. Short-lived. Unlucky triad.

My own dark time, as I call it, the time of my loneliness, was most of my life, as I have said, and I can’t make any real account of myself without speaking of it.

Hold on
If love is the answer you hold

Touch, sweet touch
You’ve given me too much to feel

If love is the answer, what was the question? I was always asking.

Sweet touch
You’ve almost convinced me I’m real
I need something more

This is an important thing, which I have told many people…When you encounter another person, when you have dealings with anyone at all, it is as if a question is being put to you. So you must think, what is the Lord asking of me in this moment, in this situation? If you confront insult or antagonism, your first impulse will be to respond in kind. But if you think, as it were, This is an emissary sent from the Lord, and some benefit is intended for me, first of all the occasion to demonstrate my faithfulness, the chance to show that I do in some small degree participate in the grace that saved me, you are free to act otherwise than as circumstances would seem to dictate. You are free to act by your own lights. You are freed at the same time of the impulse to hate or resent that person.

Grace: free to be, free to act.  What would that look like in my life? Would I be a different man? Would I take another close to my heart? Would I choose differently? Try another way?

I’ll pray, and then I’ll sleep.

Thanks to Daft Punk (Touch) and Marilynne Robinson (Gilead)

February 9^th. The dreaded 9^th of February. I wonder if she remembers?  I didn’t.

February 9, 2019. Today’s the second-year anniversary of the afternoon Brenda told me she no longer wanted to be married, didn’t love me anymore, wanted to be on her own. Ironically, we had been to Bobby Roper’s memorial service at the South End—ironic because it was Bobby who named the 9^th of February the Dreaded 9^th, allegedly the day when the water in the Bay is the coldest.

We got home from the memorial and Brenda said, “we need to talk.”

Cold water on a cold day.

And it didn’t occur to me today until a friend mentioned the cold water reference. Two years past, one in Boston. The days were long at first, the nights painful. Then the days slipped by unmarked by memory.

Regret? No, not much. The times it was good it was lovely. Then it wasn’t. I don’t think she could help it, the outcome was ordained. I chose not to see the signs, the patterns that ought to have been so evident. Only in hindsight.

Love is cancelled. Never again. And it’s okay.

Another birthday milestone passed. A new year begun with the old catastrophe worsened. Like Odin’s ravens seeking news from an oracle who can only weep at what she sees. This is the world today. I’m glad not to be young.

It’s cold tonight in Boston, low single digit temperatures. A snowstorm is predicted for tomorrow through Tuesday. Winter in New England. I’ve now been here a year, a peculiar year of pandemic lockdown. In so many ways 2020 was a good year despite the virus, a better year than the misfortunes of 2019. Adam recovered in 2020. I recovered in 2020. I settled into my small apartment, overcrowded with books and pictures and my painting easel in the middle of it all. Ray’s CDs added a wall of music. It’s warm and cozy and a bit eccentric, the way I like it and couldn’t live when sharing space with Brenda. The wounds of her memory are healed. If I were a praying man I would pray for her but I am not so I don’t. Her soul is hers to redeem which of course it always was. And since she believes in neither souls nor redemption there’s nothing left to ponder. The Chairman gathers his misguided children in mysterious ways, to the peril of those who may mistakenly fall in love with them.

Here on Bennington Street in Orient Heights I swam in the harbor across the street at Constitution Beach most days of summer and fall. Lucky for me since all the pools are closed, and Walden Pond a drive away. Many mornings Sam would join me, a strong companion as we navigated our course from boat buoy to boat buoy, a zigzag swim between the beach and the western runways of Logan Airport, empty planes from Europe descending like giant swans landing on still water. Other days I would swim alone in late afternoon after work, always the only swimmer at the beach.

It’s hard to imagine the next ten years, maybe twenty. Decline will come, perhaps not harshly. Not yet anyway. Miles to go before I sleep. I’ve been visiting my longtime friend JKD across the state and slightly south in Columbia County, New York, and take inspiration in her 93 years, never a day not working on a project, a plan, a new venture, a new idea. May I have more years with her yet.

Still, for all my creature comfort, I feel the country is at an end of time. Not that it will collapse, as social order has collapsed under Trump, but that the cataclysmic reckonings of the past years will take a toll that cannot be repaid. The divisions are too deep, the wounds too deep to heal without jagged scars.  Some will never heal and will bleed forever until the victims die.

I see this every day in the microcosm of my work at Fletcher. Civil discourse among students and alumni is a quaint memory. That diplomacy is a founding pillar of the school now stands as some kind of antiquated relic.

Meanwhile the winter storm warning is in full effect. Snow hasn’t begun to fall here in East Boston but over west in Worchester it’s coming down hard. Tufts has closed for the day; I’m waiting to hear about Hult.  My classes are late afternoon and likely will go remote. I missed these closed-in snow days in San Francisco. Living in an apartment I have no snow to shovel or cares about the roof—unlike the years in Briarcliff Manor when a snow fall meant hours of snow removal and worries about ice dams in the gutters. Here, I can simply enjoy the silent snow, watching the frenzy of house sparrows at my balcony feeder. They will be grateful for the food today.

That’s the irony of the time we’re in: gratitude within this pervading atmosphere of gloom. Today’s a day not to look too far away into the future. Stay home.  Be warm. Let the snow cover all the ugliness of this decaying world, at least for a day or two.

Christmas Eve, 2020

It’s my first Christmas in Boston, and the first Christmas I’ve ever spent alone. Sam and family are in Finland. Adam is in Oakland, both he and Rachel as residents on hospital call. David and family are in New Hampshire. It’s okay, even better than okay. After the heavy snow of last weekend the weather’s turned warm and wet. It’s to rain tomorrow with high winds and power outages predicted. Home cooked lamb shanks on the menu tonight.

Foregoing expectations is the sure route to a happier life.

Christmas Day, 2020

Warm rain and wind all day, at times torrential. The good news is that the rain washed away the piled and dirty remains of our two feet of snow from a week ago Thursday. It’s the way of city snow: the white and silent beauty lasts only a day or two.

On that snowy Thursday I drove from Boston over to the Hudson Valley to stay with JKD at Midwood. On Friday morning it was -4°, the river steel grey with the snow blanketed Catskills beyond looking as austere and beautiful as I have ever seen them. I can’t recall ever being at Midwood in the snow, when snow filled the landscape and set the great pink house even further apart from the less civilized world, an island of remarkable quiet and joy. Time spent at Midwood is a subtraction from the gloom of the world.

Several trips over to the town of Hudson, now so tony beyond anything it ever was. I remember back in the late ‘70’s when I lived in Pine Plains no one would go to down-and-out Hudson. Nothing but bars and abandoned houses and New York’s last brothels. Then it succumbed to drugs and gunfights before gay New Yorkers discovered its historic architectural bones and slowly began restoring the houses and buildings to their current immaculate state. A year of Covid closures has taken a toll, with many empty storefronts, but for the holidays most of the antique shops and art galleries were open and the upscale housewares stores thriving. I made two trips to my favorite shop, The Red Chair, finding its vintage French treasures too special to pass up, and adding to my collection of 19th century confit pots, perfect for small plants in my small apartment. It’s an indulgence.

On Sunday Joan invited a new friend for dinner, a young and amiable philosophy professor from nearby Bard College, and the table conversation ranged from the merits of different translations of the Iliad to the late writings of Hannah Arendt. Our new brilliant and charming friend turned out to be a poor driver however, skidding his car off the winding driveway in the icy dark. It had to be towed out of the snow bank the next morning.

In the nearby town of Catskill, across the Rip van Winkle Bridge from Hudson—all of Columbia County feeling like it just sprang from a Washington Irving tale, painted by Frederick Church– I found a gem of a used bookstore and filled a bag with must-haves including three first edition Philip Pullman’s I’ll send to Maxwell for his birthday and Nigel Nicolson’s short biography of Virginia Woolf, which I finished this morning (December 28th). As much a memoir as a biography—as Vita Sackville-West’s son he knew VW and the Bloomsbury scene well—it’s much my favorite of the many biographies of VW I’ve read over the years. Nicolson capture’s VW in all her acerbity, brilliance, wit, and compassion.

December is nearing its end, the end of a strange and unhopeful year. The wages of the pandemic, of the BLM reckoning, of Trump’s destructive energy—hardly abating despite his election loss, the loss he refuses to accept—have all colluded to make the year one of continuous stress and anxiety in day-by-day anticipation of the next calamity.

Still, beneath this atmospheric gloom, 2020 has not been personally a bad year. Moving to Boston has been a success. Work has expanded. I have avoided the virus. I swam in the harbor most days of the summer and fall. Adam recovered from cancer and Rachel is expecting a baby boy in June. A Christmas spent without Brenda’s killjoy displeasure.

My bonds with all three boys have deepened despite the inability to travel. I mourn the loss of my friend Ray, though his music fills my apartment with his memory every day. Moreover, inheriting Ray superb collection of CDs has inspired my own renewal of musical passions, building on new discoveries and adding movements of my own.

Sigur Rós’s brooding Icelandic musical saga “Odin’s Raven Magic” has been playing in a nearly continuous loop for the past week, its deeply melancholy sense of doom overlaid with rich waves of harmonics that made me cry the first time I listened to it, somehow suits the year’s ending. The poem from which this musical collaboration springs tells a Norse myth in which the god Odin sends his ravens Huginn and Muginn to an oracle seeking answers to a catastrophic future.

She can only weep when she sees what lies ahead.

Welcome 2021.

We talk in Creating Course Leaders about climbing a mountain with no top.

What I have discovered about my already-always listenings is that they exist in a well with no bottom.  As soon as one already-always listening is distinguished, another one is revealed, one layer beneath, down ever deeper into the person I wound up being.

I’m reminded of the final lines of Wallace Steven’s Sunday Morning:

And, in the isolation of the sky,

At evening, casual flocks of pigeons make

Ambiguous undulations as they sink,

Downward to darkness, on extended wings.

Downward to darkness, on extended wings: I experience an expansion of self-awareness as I dwell deeper and deeper in my already-always listening.  I have come to realize that everything I perceive is through these already-always listening multi-layered filters.

I meet another person and before they ever speak I have processed my perception of them though a complex system of signs and codes that calibrate my acceptance of their very being. Speech adds another set of filters. Prior or newly acquired background information about them fills in the gaps.  All this before actual experience.

Years ago I took a two-day interviewing skills seminar and the facilitator claimed that the majority of hiring decisions were made in the first ten seconds of an interview.

One story I tell about myself is that I have escaped the WASP strictures of my privileged white male upbringing, that I have grown into a progressive liberal man free from all the conservative stereotypes that label implies. And while this is true in a political sense, I know, now, that my already-always listening ingrained since birth is grinding away in the background. I know my hierarchies of what I regard as human acceptability.  I have been able to distinguish between openness in my head versus openness in my life.

I realize that while I may say I have few prejudices of race, sex, education, origin, style, or other markers of human potential, my comfort zone of friendship lies in a narrow range of parameters—very particular parameters defined idiosyncratically by the things and characteristics I value most, and aspire to, in my own life.

I once compiled a list of the one hundred books one must have read to be regarded as a civilized human being; and I meant it. I have preferential, already-always listening, hierarchies of colleges and universities, States, musical taste, countries and nationalities, clothes (shoes!), physical size (obese people trigger an automatic negative response: they’ve lost control of their lives), food and dining, the list goes on and on—or deeper and deeper into that bottomless well of already-always listening. All of the boxes are rarely ticked.

While once I might have characterized these traits as discriminating, in a good sense, I realize now how confining these already-always listening filters have narrowed my life experience.

Distinguishing these layers of already-always listening is heavy going, revealing layer under layer. Ultimately it’s liberating, allowing for the possibility that I can be free to be and free to act.

A final story (with due respect for our avoidance of storytelling).

Five years ago I was traveling alone on a month-long trip centered on my son’s wedding in Finland. I was visiting Tallinn, Estonia for a few bitter cold days between Christmas and New Years, having come directly from Finnish Lapland a hundred miles south of the Arctic Circle. There were few tourists in Tallinn, and the nights were long, cold, and dark.  Having spent many enjoyable evenings in old-style, wood-fired saunas in Finland with the brother of my new daughter-in-law, I decided to find something similar in Tallinn.

I located a likely candidate outside the old city walls of the city. I walked through an unfamiliar working class neighborhood to find the place, hesitant to enter given its down-market exterior and sketchy environs. Nevertheless I went in. A group of guys in the undressing area were in the final stages of a drunken post holiday celebration. They paid no attention to me. I showered and entered the dark, exceptionally hot sauna, where about ten men were sitting in silent steamy contemplation.

There’s not much to know about ten naked men sitting in a sauna in a foreign country. Doctors or ditch-diggers? Professors or thieves? Old school communists or progressive reformers? No way of knowing. My already-always listening feared the worst and I was apprehensive.

After a while one guy observed, in perfect English, “you’re not from around here.”  I explained I was from San Francisco, en route from my son’s Finnish wedding. Immediately I had ten new friends: instant chatter about Obama and the American elections; the silliness of Mitt Romney, the emerging dangers of conservative politics. The men wanted to know everything about me and my life—all well-informed, in comprehensible English. With no embarrassment one man offered to beat me with his bound birch leaf branches, and I accepted. I stayed for hours. The evening turned out to be one of the most enjoyable, profoundly human, experiences of my trip.