by Robert Bowie, Jr. | Mar 25, 2025 | Featured, Humor, Poetry
If you’re like me, the best memory you ever have had is an act of self-deception that you can’t remember. However, if you happen to stop forgetting for only a fraction of second it will be abrupt recollection.
It is like if you have ever accidentally slammed a door in your own face. It’s not easy to do, but you’ll remember it if you succeed.
On the first day of spring this year, I had one of those abrupt remembrances.
My New Year’s resolution this year is to get into better physical shape this spring. Unconsciously, of course, I have been getting less and less inclined the closer I get to springtime when I must start fulfilling my commitment to myself.
The truth is this New Year’s resolution has been the same New Year’s resolution I have made each year for over 20 years, but each previous spring I had successfully forgotten that years’s resolution.
Then I stumbled upon one of the sonnets in the book I wrote more than 20 years ago, entitled “Marathon Man.”
This year the door slammed in my face. Coincidentally, it occurred on the first day of spring last week, at a doctor’s appointment when I was told I must start exercising. I had forgotten that over 20 years ago I wrote “Marathon Man.” which made it much worse.
It starts:
The Marathon Man
“In a world of educated guesses
About one’s loves, integrity and health,
It is my custom to keep promises,
Even if they are only to myself.”
This is the perfect example of delusions of grandeur, which I had pleasantly forgotten into a magnificent memory of never committing to exercise, which is regrettably false.
As early as I can remember, I have consistently joked that I was so lazy I played goalie in all sports to avoid running laps. (The coach always shoots on the goalie while the rest of the team runs laps.)
But in my defense, technically being a goalie is not about the commitment to never exercise. It is a commitment not to exercise that I practiced religiously. I never committed to exercise. That’s entirely different.
Nonetheless, I’m highly competitive.
My memory is that I have saved myself from exercise to avoid injury so I will be ready for the senior Olympics when some doctor finally tells me I must exercise.
I have been told this before over 20 years ago when I was the marathon man but still as lazy and competitive as always.
Back then, I challenged a friend who is a very good runner to a 10 K race, but I got a 10-minute reduction of my time as a handicap to even the odds. For about three weeks before the race, I committed to run a mile around the high school track and, as a further commitment, I would eat four raw eggs poured out of a blender because I had seen “Rocky” the movie and Rocky did that.
It didn’t go well, which led to the delusion of grandeur in the form of a marathon. As is indicated in the third stanza:
“I trained on a treadmill, March to July.
Got my first runner’s high at 55.
Depleted my life‘s endorphin supply,
and blew out both knees and begged to die.“
So this time the doctor prescribed a certain number of steps as a target for each day. The doctor reminded me hopefully that it would also get me outdoors and into sunlight neither of which happened.
At the end of every day around midnight, before bed, I would find myself doing endless laps around the dining room table to meet my minimum requirement of steps.
Covid helped me along. My wife, who exercises regularly, proudly told me one evening her total steps and asked me about mine. I had decided to take the day off, so I happily worked and read pretty much all day. My total step count was around 50. Which probably is two trips to the bathroom and one to the kitchen.
Then I ran into this damn poem and I don’t feel good about getting ready for the senior Olympics. I feel my lethargy has not sufficiently ripened.
The sonnet ended with this final couplet:
“Oh yes, but the hell with all this fun;
Next year, for sure, I’ll be ready to run.”
— “An Accidental Diary: A Sonnet a Week for a Year” by Robert Bowie, Jr.
https://a.co/eg2uDCx
That was 20 years ago. No escaping it now. The door slammed in my face.
I guess I better go try to find my shoes.
by Robert Bowie, Jr. | Mar 18, 2025 | Featured, Humor, Personal, Travel
In Buddhism, there are instances of instant enlightenment brought by shock or surprise.
(I feel it is okay for me to comment on Buddhism and its wisdom as long as I admit to you that I know nothing about it.)
Nonetheless, I offer an example:
There are instances where a monk will slap a student of Buddhism to surprise them or shock them into enlightenment.
I have always worried about this experience of receiving shock and resultant enlightenment ever since I may have accidentally shocked some Buddhists out of their enlightenment.
It all occurred in the second floor men’s room of The Charles Hotel in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Many years ago, I took a morning plane to Boston dressed travel casual, with my blue suit, white shirt, tie, black socks and black lace-up shoes in my suitcase. I was to attend important meetings that afternoon in Cambridge.
When I got to The Charles Hotel in the early afternoon, I was informed my room was not ready. I had nowhere to change into my suit.
I was told the delay was because the Dalai Lama and his large entourage were staying at the hotel. The Dalai Lama was there to plant a tree in Harvard Yard with the Harvard president and then scheduled to go off to Foxborough to give a message to the masses in the football stadium. Apparently, the hotel was behind schedule because of these new guests.
Since I couldn’t get into my room, my only alternative was to go to the second floor men’s room of The Charles Hotel with my suitcase and haul it into the handicap stall of the public men’s room, where I would have enough room to change.
I put the suitcase on the toilet seat and began to disrobe and change into my business attire.
I hung my suit on the back of the stall door, unpacked my black shoes and pulled out my dark socks, and was starting to put on the white shirt when I heard the unexpected sound of chattering female voices exploding into the men’s room.
There seemed to be a great urgency and effort to bring in two people who were in wheelchairs. One, a very old woman and the other, a very old man. These voices were not in English.
I stood there, stunned with my suit pants in one hand and a black sock in the other and stood listening. It sounded like a kitchen in a busy restaurant.
I tried to peek through the crack in the door, but only saw a flurry of female activity. All I could make out was at least one person, perhaps more, had an urgent need to go to the bathroom.
I waited patiently with my sock and my pants, but nobody was leaving. It was as if everybody, male or female, had to urgently go to the bathroom.
I waited for nearly 10 minutes, but I was late for my meetings, so I had to make a decision about what to do.
I quickly dressed and repacked my suitcase. I decided to open the door and just march straight through this mob of people.
Given the circumstances, this was a very rude thing for me to do, but given the fact that I was in a men’s room, I felt entitled.
With my suitcase in one hand, I pushed open the door and confronted the group.
Instantly, there was stunned silence and, as if my mind were a flash camera, I had a mental picture of as many as 20 colorfully-dressed people staring at me with their mouths open.
There were people staring as they stopped washing their hands. There were people staring as they stopped midway through entering or exiting a stall. Everything was frozen.
Then there was a collective gasp. Not a shriek or anything, just a gasp. I tried to pretend I was invisible as I barreled toward the exit with a sea of bright colors parting on both sides.
I may have caused significant damage. Or, possibly, I shocked some of the entourage into a different vision of enlightenment.
First, it was clearly an emergency of some sort. Somebody had to really go to the bathroom badly and I fear it was an old person.
Second, these were elderly people in wheelchairs and I am not handicapped but I was in a handicap bathroom.
Third, and finally, I consider myself a very sensitive person but even if I had no empathy at all, one must consider reincarnation in all of this.
I offer no excuses. I think there may have been damage done to me, as well. I’m certain my karma is permanently shot. If there is reincarnation, I shudder to think what I will come back as.
So I’ve confessed it. I will also confess that I’m a believer in the “butterfly effect,” which is that every action causes a ripple across the universe.
If anything good comes from this, it is simply that I can warn you to be careful if you run into a similar situation.
You never know when a cosmic event will hit you.
by Robert Bowie, Jr. | Jan 21, 2025 | General
I am an American, who loves our country, but hates its present polarization. I have not written about politics over the last several months because I have been putting together and marketing my book “The Older You Get the Shorter Your Stories Should Be.” However, any chance at humor will break down my resolve to avoid politics and be politically incorrect.
Today I couldn’t resist the humorous head-on collision of President Trump being sworn in (without his hand on the Bible) at the same spot where almost 50 years ago, Jimmy Carter, a devote Christian, was sworn in as our 39th president. But it got more ironic after Donald Trump was sworn in where four years before he had led an insurrection to overthrow the election that he had lost and, within hours after being sworn in, signed an executive order releasing 1500 people convicted of the insurrection. It made me laugh to think of poor Jimmy rolling over face down, as he lay in state.
Of course, my observation was random this morning because I had been randomly leafing through the section of the book entitled “It Can’t Happen Here” and found, on page 159, “Back to the Future.”
What made me laugh and write this now was a feeling of claustrophobia, which made no sense. I know this is dark and perhaps inappropriate, but we still have to figure out how we can all laugh together again at the absurdity of all this irony.
—
Back to the Future
Last month I took a trip because I wanted to “feel” what it was like to live in WWII Germany and the Soviet Cold War occupation in Czechoslovakia and Poland.
I already knew the dates, places and times from textbooks, but it’s quite different to experience what it was like to have lived during those times.
Of course the trip would come alive in museums and, unexpectedly, it brought back for me a long lost feeling I had years ago when I was just a young boy. I had gotten lost off shore in Buzzards Bay in a small motorboat that was running out of gas on an outgoing tide in thick predawn fog.
It is odd how we learn through memories and association.
How odd that museums, which were about imprisonment, brought back the feeling of drifting out to sea, creating an odd claustrophobia without barriers other than an endless borderless fog.
The claustrophobia slowly kicked in when I visited Checkpoint Charlie, the famous heavily guarded passthrough in the Berlin Wall, which kept the East Germans imprisoned inside.
It started with a set of pictures of a boy who had scrambled to climb the wall in an effort to live in freedom, but the photos chronicled how he had died riddled with bullets, hanging from barbed razor wire near the top of the wall.
How odd that I could feel claustrophobic under wide-open skies?
A few days later, the claustrophobia increased in one of the East German museums that focused on the Nazi SS and their little gray bread trucks. These had no windows, just a sliding door on one side and three closet-sized cells so small that prisoners could not stand but only sit in a narrow chair, hands by their sides, while they were taken to a concentration camp somewhere outside of Berlin.
A few days later as we traveled toward Prague, we stopped at another prison that was three or four stories high with interrogation cells on the top floor. The inmates who would not answer were showed pictures of their family who would be killed if they continued to resist.
Putin had spent six months in the house across the street when he was in Soviet intelligence, attempting to flip the tortured inmates to become Soviet spies.
The claustrophobia wrapped around me in that silent building when I realized what it must have felt like day and night in there. It was missing the noise of slamming cell doors, the echoing screams and the smell of the single bucket in the corner, which acted as a bathroom in each cramped cell, with three to a single bed and no mattress.
I know now why the feeling I had on this trip was claustrophobic but I thought it was still an odd reaction to the history of the past until I realized I had lived my whole life free in a democracy.
All of a sudden, I felt imprisonment under borderless wide open skies as a psychological imprisonment which became unbearable.
All of a sudden, I could feel the last breath of the boy crucified and bleeding from razor wire on the top of a Berlin Wall as a reaction to my claustrophobia and his death.
Years ago, as I slowly ran out of gas in my little boat, I saw the outline of a cliff as the late morning fog broke. There were connected ladders and a climbing set of stairs. I beached the boat and climbed to the top of the cliff and knocked on the door of a little cottage overlooking the ocean.
A woman with the Sunday newspaper tucked under her arm answered the door. I breathlessly asked, “Where am I?” She looked at me quizzically and answered “Menemsha,” then paused, “Martha’s Vineyard,” and then paused again… “The United States of America.”
I remember feeling happy and alive.
—
My only hope is that we can end this polarization with the brilliance of our democracy as we go into the future.
by Robert Bowie, Jr. | Jan 15, 2025 | Featured, Humor, Personal
At 8:30 pm, kickoff time last Saturday night, it was four degrees below freezing but that didn’t bother me because I am still a young man and invincible. The truth is I was probably the oldest geezer at this playoff game at Ravens Stadium that night.
The only concern I had was how many layers I needed. I figured about three or four layers would keep me warm. I put on hiking boots, double socks, old long johns, regular zip-up khaki pants, zip-up snow pants with a snap at the top to hold it all together and then, above the waist, two parkas layered on top of each other, and my Ravens’ Ray Lewis jersey, then finished off with thick gloves and a hat that I could pull down over my ears. I probably looked like a Michelin Man moments before a career ending explosion.
As I dressed for the game, it never occurred to me that this might be absolutely the coldest I wiould ever be in my whole life.
Susan and I have compiled six season tickets on the rail at the corner of the end zone. These tickets are great because they are so close to the field it is like watching high school football.
I bought the tickets over 20 years ago when my son, age 12 and under five feet tall, announced he wanted to be a quarterback and begged me to get us Ravens tickets, which I did.
Of course, as soon as I had purchased the tickets, my son asked my assurance that if, per chance, the Ravens went to the Super Bowl we would also go to the Super Bowl, to which I agreed.
Even the Las Vegas odds makers were good with that bet. Much to my horror, that year we went to the Super Bowl and I found myself behind a 711 in a dark parking lot peeling off $100 bills to get tickets to Tampa Bay where the Ravens would beat the New York Giants.
Nonetheless, in the first game of that very first season, way before that Super Bowl, we met lifelong friends who would occupy the seats behind us. The father sat right behind me on the aisle and, next to him, right behind my son, was his son Derek, who was several years older than my son. Derek listened to the game with a headset while we all watched live. The first play there was a whistle blown, and all the people behind us burst into rowdy inquiries about what the hell was that whistle for.
My son, already a scholar of the game, immediately turned around and answered: “The quarterback took a step before the snap.” Instantly, the stadium announcer repeated the exact same words my son had said, as did the announcer on the radio, which Derek then quoted. From the beginning, Derek, his father, his family, and Rick and I became friends and have remained friends ever since. Derek, from the start, was a fact checker and reserved, thoughtful observer.
During the regular season, we give the tickets to our children and watch the games on TV. However, if the Ravens got into the playoffs, you gotta go!
So that’s how I got to see Derek again for the first time this year at Saturday’s playoff game. Everybody was bundled up, but the hugs and the high fives were everywhere as the stadium filled and became more and more raucous.
Despite my layering, I started to get cold as soon as I got out of the car. We had about an eight-minute walk to the stadium. I proved to myself what I had often heard, that you lose 30 percent of your heat from the top of your head, so I pulled the hat down over my ears as I plodded toward the stadium.
I was shaking with cold by the time we reached our seats. I wanted to take pictures with my phone but I had to take off my gloves first. I had no place to put my gloves so, finally, I tucked them into my hat and put my hat back on. Then I started to shake and the hand warmers fell with my gloves, onto the field. After my gloves were returned to me, my hat fell off onto the field, and that had to be returned to me as well.
By halftime, my feet were freezing and I had to go to the bathroom to try to warm up. There was a line in front of the stall where I had hoped to strip off each one of my three layers in order to be able to stand and deliver in front of the toilet with privacy. But because the line was too long, I had to strip down in front of one of the many urinals, and so a crowd watched me slowly disrobe as I tried to unzip three sets of zippers and drop my pants. That took some time, but it got much worse when I tried to pull the three layers back up, because the long johns’ old elastic waist belt had deteriorated and broke so I developed “droopy drawers.”
In order to re-dress myself, I had to move out of the way of others who wanted to use the urinal, so I stood in the middle of the floor with a bank of urinals on either side of me as football fans with beer-loaded bladders filed in, looking at me as I tried to zip up and button up and pull up my pants as they passed. The button snap at the top of the snow pants was an Olympic event.
By the time I reached my seats again, the roar in the stadium had continued to rise so nothing could be heard except the screaming of the crowd. Derek was screaming at the top of his lungs and had moved from his aisle seat down to stand next to me at the rail. The place was insane.
At the other end of the stadium, in the second balcony, a man started ripping off his shirt and started spelling out R-A-V-E-N-S, bare chested, and the stadium burst into cheers and chanted the letters. Then, of course, his entire performance was being performed on the Jumbotrons at both ends of the stadium.
At this point, I was convinced if I thought about how cold I was, I would give my brain frostbite.
I clenched my whole body to try and keep warm. Then there was an explosion of noise all around me. Why was everybody shouting around me and pointing at Derek?
Derek, who had always been reserved, was upstaging the guy at the other end of the stadium, and was now ripping off his shirt to the delight of the crowd. As I was freezing to death, Derek was getting naked on the Jumbotron.
If it takes a village to raise a child, it apparently takes a football stadium to mature a geezer.
I’m not quite as upset that the Ravens’ next game won’t be at home, and I’m certainly not going to Buffalo. If I don’t get pneumonia from the postseason, I’m planning to go to the first preseason game in late August — in shorts and a Ravens T-shirt.
Life has always been good to me as a slow learner. I finally threw away the snow pants with the broken elastic belt.
by Robert Bowie, Jr. | Dec 24, 2024 | Featured, Personal, Poetry, Shorter Stories Book
Once upon a time… I was in a Rotary Club that was going to sing Christmas carols at an old age home, but because I couldn’t sing or dance, I had to be Santa. I had to wear a huge red Santa suit, and a big grey beard that hooked behind my ears, install two king-sized pillows into my new jolly belly and then keep it all together with a big black belt to hold my pants up.
It took a long time to assemble Santa, so I dressed at home and drove in my little BMW Z3 convertible to the event. I’m a good driver, but I was listening to Jingle Bell Rock or the Chipmunks or something and I found myself as the last car in the middle of an intersection trying to turn left into an old age home as the light changed. All of a sudden, there was loud honking as traffic passed in front of me and behind me as I spread Christmas joy throughout the intersection.
It was a pretty long light, so I got a lot of attention from the Santa-stalled traffic. Everybody was honking at me and children were laughing and waving at Santa from the backseat in the slow moving cars that went past me as the traffic jam spread like a stain in all directions. When the light changed, the last car to get past me gave me a Merry Christmas two-fisted finger and stopped in front of me and leaned on the horn as we spread our joy of Christmas in all directions.
That is the exact place. The “when” and “where,” the “place and time” I lost my Christmas spirit those many years ago.
It’s not come back yet. Someday I may want to be Santa again, but not yet. I still have Santa PTSD but I’m working my way through it. I try to think about happy things as I fight to regain my real inner Santa. I imagine I am taking a warm shower:
Santa
Like a massive multicolored parachute
His boxers have collapsed upon the floor
Slightly south of a wrinkled Santa suit
That was left just outside the bathroom door.
A bunch of imagined elves in repose,
Smokin’ cigarettes, feet on the table,
Hangin’ and laughin’ ’bout Rudolf’s nose
Are lovin’ life as only elves are able.
Another Christmas is, at long last, past
As the fat man shampoos in the shower
And thinks of golf and summer thoughts at last.
Who’s this metaphor for redemptive power?
An old fat guy driving a sled with gifts?
A father at midnight is what it is.
——
If you are like me and somewhere, perhaps in some random traffic jam, you also lost your Christmas spirit, here is Santa’s two-step solution:
First, seriously get over yourself and just do something nice for someone else. I’m serious about this! It can be nothing but a random act of kindness but make it happen. You will be amazed at what will happen. It will rekindle that lost Christmas spirt. Don’t expect anything in return.
…And second, when you are asked who gave you this advice, straight out tell them, without hesitation, that you got the advice from Santa. There’s a pretty good chance you can share a free Christmas dinner in some state institution.
Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays from me to you. Peace on Earth! Make it happen with random acts of kindness while expecting nothing in return.
P.S. A little side note: If you want to make commercial Santa’s Christmas, you can buy his book, An Accidental Diary: A Sonnet a Week for a Year on Amazon. Or maybe pick up his new book, The Older You Get the Shorter Your Stories Should Be at The Ivy Bookstore in Baltimore, The Manner Mill in Monkton, Maryland, or at https://bookshop.org/shop/robertrbowiejr)
