Fitting In

Discovering your place in university life is hard. The internet makes it harder.

Whether you move hundreds of miles from home or simply go to the local community college; life at college is change. Assuming you just go to a local community college the difference in rigor is apparent from day one. You get syllabi and you are told the grading scheme and how calculations of grades will be made. (So suddenly math is important.) There are deadlines. Usually, if you misread the assignment or fail to get your work done you fail. Accountability comes as a shock to many, many people when they leave high school. There are no safety nets.

Take it to the next level and add in the move away from your established support system relocating to a distant residential college brings and things get even more challenging. Support system is a bit of a misnomer. In reality there are two systems you are moving away from. First, you leave whatever is your extant family structure. You say goodbye to Mom, and/or Dad, siblings, cousins or whatever familial universe you have been made part of for those first 17 or 18 years of your life. Whatever hand on shoulder, eye gazing into eye, or voice tone guidance that was open to you 24/7 is now no longer a there for you to seek out.

Secondly the social hierarchy you have lived at secondary school no matter how Lord of the Flies-esque it might have been is also changed. I initially used the word gone instead of changed, but changed and fading is probably the better term. Going “away” to college means you are alone among new people who don't have the same life experiences. These are people who haven't come to a common lexicon of humor with you. They most likely have encountered occurrences and values from an environment vastly if not totally different from your own. At a point in your life when you have the greatest doubts about who you are and what capabilities you have you are sent out to a place where everyone is trying to define themselves in a manner that does not leave them one down in the pecking order.

It is hard. It is damn hard. The first night in that dorm room bed is probably the worst for most people when the thought keeps resounding, “What have I gotten myself into?” It may come a week or two later but in those initial days you mostly likely will ask yourself, is this the right choice?

Trying to peel back the haze of my move from New Jersey to Michigan, rose colored hue that it now is, fall 1974 was a cold lonely time for a skinny kid with an attitude. At that point there was no e-mail and Facebook did not exist when the blue LTD pulled away I was alone with a footlocker that contained my possessions, all the possessions I would have access to for the next three months. The only connection between Salem County New Jersey and the Michigan State Universe was a Bell telephone line. And if you were going to make that call you did it late evening or Sunday when the rates were down all day.

Michigan, (a place I had been two twice in my life in mid summer mind you) was a big state with lots of open space and cold winds that came early. So long ago was that first fall with its early snow and a blizzard on Thanksgiving weekend it predated the sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald by a year. The people were different-way more laid back. To a hyper squirrel from New Jersey I just couldn't understand their sense of time, at all.. Michiganders had different words for common things, sack for bag and pop for soda. They even made vowel sounds differently then. The only culturally common touch-points were movies and music. And even those were so startlingly different. Who was Bob Seger I would ask and they would respond with who is Bruce Springsteen?

By mid-October I had sent requests out to schools all over the south east seeking applications. I so wanted to go some location that was warn and where if needed I could get a Tastykake. I was so lonely I hitchhiked back one weekend and caught rides back on two other occasions. My roommate was a great guy and he drug me out of my room to see the movies that would show on campus. My classes were okay, nothing too scary. But it was all so different and I felt all so all alone. Ah and my first real girlfriend, she lived in Philadelphia.

With winter's onslaught I found a friend, a female friend. I found contemporaries who challenged my mind. I found a professor who cared and suddenly I could live with what was in the footlocker. The snow sucked but there was oases of wonder that served hot mulled wine and clam chowder.

I probably should thank the divine that the demon's span, the internet, was not available. Personally I think the internet has totally fucked up the minds of this entire generation especially the young ones who have never lived without it. Constant connectivity is a beast that never sleeps, that has a siren song of bells and whistles and false accolades for accomplishment in meaningless games. It distorts the terms of what it means to be a good human and gives the bully pulpit or maybe a megaphone to the outliers. It takes singularities and makes them seem the norm.

What I had to fill my life was class, the dorm, bad cafeteria food, books, newspapers, on campus concerts and lectures followed by sleep. Okay maybe there was the occasionally masturbation in the shower if nobody was around.

Today's students when faced with a move to a different world have the Internet's rabbit hole to dive down into. Their old friends with their old values still kinda live on there at least for a time. A point will hopefully come with the current life mutes the past for most. Those bells and whistles which when sounded by the right strokes of the ctrl and cursor keys release some endorphin are an addiction. The step out of the room into the new world to see if you can face it is made ever harder by electronic tendrils of the past.

In the past two days I have seen two different pieces of entertainment that implied time is the measure of reality. One asserted it is the defining unit of measurement of the infinite and unknowable. I am not sure of that. What I do not is that time connected in the real world at university with the allure of the internet is something necessary to integrating into campus. Hell is it something needed for us to integrate into life.

Morning Comes With a Surprise

 

…[I]n Buddhism, we talk about extending our arms and our hearts outward, about reaching out to the whole world and embracing all, without exception. We talk about truly seeing the ones standing before us and loving them deeply, just as they are, with their many faults. That's the secret of the spiritual path. 

 

—Vanessa R. Sasson, "Teaching Ground"

 

 

My path, I followed it this morning.  Walking in today the air was cooler and I was occupied with my smartphone. Glancing up every once in a while so not to be hit by cars crossing streets, I ran down the events in the lives of those I know as digitally presented.  

 

Looking up I merely looked forward. What I saw were trees that had been so beautiful just days before were half barren. Mostly I noticed it was a great deal darker walking in that it had been even a month ago.

 

Travelling west on Michigan Avenue I got to my turn on Friendship Court. Just as I was taking that right angle change in directions one of the baristas from the coffee shop was jumping out of her car.  She hunkered down in a crouch facing east and began aiming her phone past me.  Turning around I saw spread out across the sky the most beautiful sunrise.  As dark and gloomy as the night before had been this array of gold and purple was its antithesis.   

 

Sometimes we have to look up to see God’s wonder.  Sometimes we have to be open to what will be.  Sometimes someone has to gently if inadvertently push us towards the beauty in existence. See, truly see, someone else today.  They may be a sunrise just about to explode in the brilliance of a new day.

My I dea of heaven is pretty simple.

Somebody is cooking chicken on the grill and a light easterly wind is bringing the scent of that home cooking to me.  Cooked and crisp I bet, I can imagine that bird’s breast dripping fat onto the coals and cooking up quite nicely. White meat suspended above hot coals and mesquite chips.  End of summer food.  

 

I bet they hit the farmer’s market today and picked up some fresh croissants and corn too.  Maybe some green beans to fill out the feast.  Now if it were me, and it is not, I would have found a source for some oysters to open the meal.  A half dozen Maine oysters with a little bit of horse radish would put me in the right frame of mind at this moment.

 

Day is coming to an end much earlier now.  The sky at night has been clearer.  The hot humid haze of summer has been stripped away and the miles and light years of infinity are laid open much earlier that in days just recently passed.  The chicken scent wafted by again and I felt the hunger come on again.  

 

(You have to excuse me if my train of thought gets kind of lost here.  The chicken scent overwhelmed me and I had to go get some coals going for burgers. As with all tasks it required more than originally anticipated, I.e. cleaning out the grill and preparing the coals.)  

 

The soundtrack for this end of day reverie is a stream of the Cowboy Junkies, Mae Moore and Mazzy Star.  Right now Ms. Star’s cover of Wild Horses is playing. I can remember an early October weekend riding up along the Lake Superior coast and having a cassette player in the car blast having the original Rolling Stones version just blaring.  What a sunny day that was and how few people there were to bother my enjoyment of the sunny moments.

Wispy

In the passing of the seasons, especially when summer moves into fall, past hours lived rear up and demand to be considered.  Perhaps the sight of decay triggers an automatic reflective mindset. 

 

 

Fall begins as a festival of color. If you walk about leaves fall drifting by you.  Swirling, spinning they are washed in bright shades of yellow, red and orange.  Within a day or two the maple leaf gliders have turned brown as they rest upon the earth. 

 

 

The silent earth is growing colder as it waits to reclaim us all.  In another couple of trips from day to night to day the pieces of fall’s bright garment lay clogging gutters in a brown, icky, clumpy mass of rot.  Smiles at the cheerful carnival of summer’s end give way to eyes downcast and thinking about what might have been.

 

 

The thoughts may range from morose to wistful.  Ideas about what the turning of the season means may linger for a mere moment followed by acceptance.  On the other hand a scent of wood smoke from leaf pile pyres may bring us back to a very specific time and place. Before the frost comes I will revisit probably every fall I have lived since 1974. Some of them will bring me smiles and some will bring me tears.  But that is what life is, is it not, a mixed bag.  

 

Luck and the Moutain

Sometimes luck just isn’t with you. On any given night fortune in general may be riding you but situational luck not so much. On a foul weathered evening in 1982 late fall the dice just did not roll my way and they were dice I had so prayed would fall my way for so many years it was heartbreaking.

Years ago in mid-autumn I was underemployed. I was a lawyer without a paying job, hence the underemployed reference. When you leave law school they tell you that if you pass the bar you are a lawyer and that in most cases you will remain so. The money may not come but you are a lawyer. Graduating from a mid-level law school with mid level grades in the midst of a big recession was not the career starter it might have been.

My roommate was also underemployed. He had a great voice and he used it to good effect most of the time. But every now and then what came out of his mouth came out at the wrong time and in the wrong tone. He was a broadcaster who had told his boss to piss off one to many times.went on a spur of the moment tour of North American by sports arenas.

Often we just lay on the couch for hours stoned out of our gourds debating the hierarchy of fast food, McDonald’s vs Burger King vs Taco Bell. The nuanced discussion was scintillating. Once in the middle of this we had seen a blurb about one of the old hockey barns being razed or was being considered for destruction. My roommate had been a denizen of Olympia where the Red Wings played. He loved the old hockey halls.

Well we so totally and quite completely under-employed and we decided to head off in search of America via basketball and hockey venues. Damn we thought we have to go. Having seen the imminent threat to whatever rink it was we decided we had better see some of these classic places before they are all gone. Off we went. The trip was grand.

It wasn't all hockey rinks and civic centers. You might not believe this but we had breakfast at the White House. But that is another story. We saw the Leaf’s play the Blues after breaking into Maple Leaf Gardens that too is another story. And we saw the Sixers with Dr. J. play the Pistons, again another story.

We began our journey by heading off to New York City for some ungodly reason. I don’t know what it was for sure. I think my friend had a line on a possible radio gig. My memory is that we had dinner at some overpriced Manhattan bar with his contact. The job thing didn’t pan out and we needed someplace to be for a day or two. Well that was simple, my brother had a couch and how far could Vermont be from NYC? A phone call was made and it was all arranged.

Off we headed off to Bennington Vermont to where my oldest brother was living. He was an instructor at the college there and he had rented a house up in the hills. Vermont was right up his alley. He had left the swamps of Jersey and spent most of his time after in the area around Schenectady and Albany New York. These were the years prior to his divorce from his first wife.

I had gone up to New York a couple of times when marriage one was still intact to see him. He tried to be the cool brother. While I was there for a couple of weeks one summer (in Schenectady) Rosemary’s Baby came out. It was 1968 and I was twelve years old. He took me to see it. Rosemary’s Baby had tits in it. My brother was an instant god to me.

Well that marriage had crashed and burned. He had lost pretty big in the divorce. From out of the ruins he took some jobs that turned out to set forth his future path in life. Whether it started just before the marriage ended or just after he had gone into marketing rustproofing. He worked fore Ziebart and when he came out to Michigan to their corporate we would meet up. Ziebart's headquarters was about 5 miles away from my apartment.

These get togethers were happening when I was going to law school. If he was in town we would get together. We would go to some quirky buffet and eat all you could eat frog legs. Eventually I graduated into the big recession and was thus unemployed. Thank you Ronald Reagan. He in the meantime but had somehow swung this teaching gig.

Anyway after the quick phone call was to make sure he was home we headed up to Vermont. The roads were winding and wet as we tooled on up into New England. Eventually we met up with him in his cabin up the mountain. As brothers are wont to do we had to celebrate.

Celebration was not to be as easy as I thought. There was about a fifth of a bottle of scotch at the house, not enough, nowhere near enough. The bars and the liquor stores were back down the mountain. We had pulled into his place mid darkness. Still we were at the house only a few moments when the trip down the mountain was decided upon. We took his car. I think my brother had an old BMW at the time.

Back down the winding road we went until we finally pulled into an Adirondack kind of bar It was a real log cabin and had signs that glowed neon green and said Genesee beer. Being on an adventure my roommate and I wanted to drink, and drink a great deal. After a few rounds my brother who had a prior DWI decided he had to call it quits and headed back up the mountain. He offered us a ride but we declined claiming we would find a way back up on our own.

With my brother gone the drinking got serious. We were pounding back pitchers of beer. The bar maid thought we were interesting or at least humorous and we thought she was cute, well I did and that was before the beer goggles were on. We talked, we flirted, we glanced back and forth as she was pulling the tap and filling frosted mugs.

About an hour before closing time the barmaid offered me the option of staying at her place. Was I in heaven? In all my life a good looking bar maid had never offered me a shot at going home with her. Even with the ancillary offer of a couch to my roommate things were looking good.

Bubbles burst.

Balloons pop.

Brothers return.

My dear brother worried about my fate had given himself to sober up. He decided leaving me down in town when the weather was turning (and it was starting to sleet) was not the thing to do. With just a few minutes before I was going to get the girl for once he walked in and said, “Hey I am here to save you”. Like a balloon with a slow leak I deflated. My roommate just kept muttering obscenities so only I could hear it. I looked at the barmaid and she just smiled. Her eyes had that look that said without question, “Hey he made the trip all the way back down here to make sure you were safe you got to go dude…”

Who knows maybe she was a psychopath ala Sharon Stone or Glen Close. Who knows maybe she was the “one” although I seriously doubt that. But truth be told I never got that close to taking home the barmaid again.

Fortune was with me, but luck was not.

Halloween is Coming

Halloween is coming. As I walked in to the office today I heard fragments of songs from forty years ago. One after another on a bit of an endless loop they were playing in my head. Bits of old Fairport Convention, Strawbs and Renaissance tunes floated in my consciousness. All of these bands have songs that remind me of the fall season. Tam Lin by Fairport stands out as does the Autumn Trilogy from the Strawbs. 

Before several of my friends pipe up I know I should listen to some new music. In a manner I do, but the songs are not mainstream. Most days I hear one new song courtesy of Toronto’s CBC Morning program. The most recent was Johnny Reid’s Picture of You. It was pretty nice. 

https://youtu.be/amMuJBlJPE8

I digress. As I walked in this day the signs of mid/late autumn were growing quite strong. On one stoop there was a pumpkin painted white with glittery hair. On a number of porches there were pumpkins, big pumpkins. On house had not scary but clearly Halloween, scarecrows. I guess they were scarecrows maybe there is another crafter’s term for them. These broom based figures reminded me of the joy of taking my kids walking for Halloween. John Lee loved to dress up as the monsters that Halloween holds dear on its scary side. Loren, well my favorite of his was the Frank Sinatra get up when he would sing “Fly Me to the Moon” when the door opened and the candy came into sight.

As I watched the trees thinning out into skeletal frames I found myself praying after a fashion. I found myself hoping that the day would be good for all the people in the houses I passed. I longed for peace for the people I must talk to as part of my work. Mostly I tried to send off good will and intentions (vibes if you would) for the world at large. I love this time of year, it makes me happy.

October Morning with Memories Fluttering By

Mist covers the streets today; warm air is fighting the coming cold.  Side streets look like

dreamscapes.  Clammy air hangs about like damp sheets hung out on a line.

Many years ago today (although if truth be told it might have been yesterday) my father

died.  Death came when his heart gave out. A fiercely independent man, someone we

would call self-reliant if we used the old language of the hunting and fishing books he

loved, he probably had been nursing his heart condition for many years. In the end he

died in the kitchen when a heart attack

My father died when I was 27 years of age.  With his passing suddenly there was an

absence in my life, a huge hole really.  The best analogy I can come up with is that I

looked to the sky to find the North Star to guide me and it was quite simply and quite

absolutely gone.  My grief was great and I still feel the loss today.

Being alone can be a gift.  With no one to sit in judgment of your actions means that you

must begin to judge yourself.  You must come to terms as to those things you accept as

right and those you accept as wrong. Without a guide that a parent provides your errors

may be based on ignorance.  Mistakes can be immense.

Alone you may focus only on your weaknesses.  Alone all you may see is errors.

Eventually you have to learn to be a compassionate judge of yourself.  Eventually you

have to become a realistic judge of yourself.

What I do not have that I need, I must pray for and wait.  –Thomas Merton