by Robert Bowie, Jr. | Nov 8, 2022 | Featured, Personal
It is funny how a stranger’s aging face will never reveal the face of its youth. However…
A little less than a month ago, I went to a beautiful warm sun-drenched October wedding on the edge of a calm harbor in New Bedford, Massachusetts.
On the lawn, an hour or so before the wedding began, a small group of old men slowly gathered and greeted each other. Some had not seen each other for almost 50 years.
We had become friends long ago during high school, as a diaspora loosely formed by outcasts of various different New England schools. We had all been transferred or expelled from someplace, in several cases more than once, because of undiagnosed learning issues and/or an intransigent attitude, and thus had been prematurely released upon the world to get our education on our own terms with far less supervision.
No harm done. Most of us survived and had lived interesting lives of our own making and all of us had stories of our adventures along the way as we talked out on the lawn during that evening, or later on the phone. Nonetheless, we had bonded quite profoundly from our common experiences back then, and these stories and adventures defined who we believed we were.
As we told the stories about each other, the mask of old age dropped from our faces.
There was one friend who was not present as we rekindled old friendships and plowed through our memories.
The bride’s father had included in the program an “In Memorium” section that included those who had been lost along the way. One of our lost friends, let’s call him Brad, had been the bride’s godfather before his death.
Brad had been lost at sea years ago.
I didn’t know him as well as some of the others but I remembered, early one spring day, going down to the boatyard he used on Cape Cod, and watching him paint the waterline high on his boat to cover the approximately 2 1/2 tons of contraband that he expected to be bringing back from Jamaica a little later that year.
It was his custom to avoid returning by the Windward passage where he might be apprehended and instead sail far out into the Atlantic, then head north for an extended run, and then hug the shore as he traveled south back along the coastline in order to appear to be a tourist sailing down to the Cape from Maine.
He was a brilliant unflappable sailor.
One of his friends remembered how he had sailed back with him from Morocco, along with contraband, when Brad’s 37-foot deep keeled boat suffered debilitating electrical equipment failure. Brad then navigated without the aid of instruments, solely with a sextant, and expertly traveled down to the edge of the equator. As the sun came up one morning along the expansive horizon, he had watched “a thousand little squalls, each with rainbows beneath them in the sunrise” as Brad had navigated cross the Atlantic and hit his target, Antigua, perfectly.
Once freed from formal education, Brad was largely self schooled, but was well read in history, loved the Sherlock Holmes stories, and Shakespeare.
He was a wonderful and engaging companion. However, his freedom had not made him a saint. He indulged his ”weaknesses,” as he put it, sometimes at the expense of others as he enjoyed his world.
Early on, one of this group, who had become a lawyer, had been called upon to bail him out of a Jamaican jail where he had been held for some time.
He joked that he had been instructed to bring a little extra money to ensure his extradition, a fresh dry-cleaned white shirt folded on a cardboard back the way he liked it, and pressed pants, because within a half hour of his release they would both be drinking Remi Martin at a Jamaican bar.
We all knew Brad would not always be so lucky. He spent almost three years in Fox Hill prison in Nassau, and a year and a half imprisoned in Morocco, but it was the independence in him that we chose to remember.
No one knows for sure how he died.
He always had enemies in the trade, but he had also made good money doing commercial fishing off the New England coast. He disappeared offshore in the Atlantic during a squall off Cape Cod.
Nothing was ever found of him or his boat.
All the sailors in the conversation agreed that to leave no flotsam or jetsam behind was highly unusual.
The conversation turned from a general discussion of the squall to jokes about how improbable it was that the squall was really his cause of death.
Someone chimed in about how Brad had one time taken his boat to ride out a hurricane off Florida because being tied up at a dock would be more risky. However, when he had returned afterward, there were footprints on the ceiling of the cabin because his boat had rolled completely over during the storm.
Another friend suggested it was more likely that Brad had been hit by a freighter on the commercial trade routes that never saw him. Others who knew him well believed it was a settlement of old scores by others, and he had died with an anchor around his neck and his boat had been dragged back, repainted, and was now repurposed somewhere on the inland waterways, probably down south.
“No,” one of them chimed in. “He’s alive in Hawaii free of his enemies and debts.” One friend laughed as he peeled off toward the bar. “If he was alive, he would be here. He is the bride’s godfather. Remember how he had come to her high school graduation in a white suit? He took this stuff seriously!”
It is funny how old bonds of real friendship never break and how, when you see an old friend’s face, the young face can be reconstructed from a familiar smile or a remembered look. It is both a resurrection from the past and rebirth into the future.
Brad is still forever young for us even now, 50 years later, as we are for each other.
by Robert Bowie, Jr. | Oct 25, 2022 | Featured, Personal, Politics
Fear separates heroes from cowards.
I live in beautiful northern Baltimore County west of Harford County, north of Baltimore city and south of the Pennsylvania line. It is rich with beautiful horse farms, deer and fox hunting, verdant farmland and wonderful people.
I am a moderate Democrat. Where I live is by and large Trump country but I love my neighbors. For the most part, we don’t let politics get in the way of respect and friendship.
Last week, two friends and I held a small fundraiser for a Democratic Congressional candidate who is running to unseat an incumbent Trump Republican who met in the White House to plan the January 6th attack on the Capital.
As the midterms have been approaching, for some reason, I have been remembering old litigation from when I had been hired by a prominent personal injury lawyer to try the cases he thought he would lose.
I wanted to learn how to try cases before I started my own firm in 1990, so this was perfect and I took the job.
In the 1980s, the Harford County Courthouse was being renovated. An alternative courthouse annex was set up to handle cases while the renovations proceeded.
This temporary courthouse had a makeshift heating air conditioning and ventilation system hung from the ceiling, and the sounds from other courtrooms and the neighboring bathroom could be heard through this system during the proceedings.
I had been assigned a case which my employer had said was “difficult.” Our client, a young-for-his-age teenage boy, was so shy he could barely answer my questions about his bicycle accident during our first meeting.
The accident involved a car and the boy had his leg broken and his bicycle destroyed. There were real questions about who was at fault. His parents filed on his behalf, and without his knowledge, a lawsuit for extensive damages.
The boy had no friends and was so shy that his only freedom came when he left school in the afternoon to ride his bike for hours along country roads while his classmates played seasonal team sports.
His parents were clearly disappointed by their son. He would never be the football captain or the class president.
I met him with his parents for trial preparation about a week before trial. After we went over the case that had been filed, the boy seemed reticent and I asked his parents to leave the room. I asked him to go over the facts once more with me one on one. He looked down and repeated what his parents had told me before they had left the room. He was uncomfortable, but what was striking about him was that when his eyes met mine and he told me something, he was honest, definitive, and straightforward.
I feared this was a boy who was being forced to tell a story instead of the truth.
He clearly was not looking forward to testifying under oath.
On the day of trial, I asked his parents to bring him to the courthouse early so that he could sit in the witness chair alone without anybody there, to familiarize himself with the space and settle his nerves.
When he sat alone in that witness chair he was terrified. I wanted his parents to see him sitting there alone staring into space and shaking before anybody else came into that courtroom.
I then asked him to go sit with his parents so we could talk about the possibility that the case could be settled before trial. The parents refused and reiterated that they wanted several hundred thousand dollars in damages.
Several minutes later, the opposing counsel came in and started to set up for the trial. Shortly thereafter, the people who would be chosen as jurors filtered in.
The boy become more and more frightened. About 10 minutes before the judge would appear and we would pick a jury, the boy slowly started to cry by himself. I noticed that the parents were trying to cover this up, and they asked to remove him briefly from the courtroom to go to the bathroom so he could compose himself.
The defense counsel had offered nothing to settle the case, because he believed that the boy was too shy to make a good impression before the jury. He ambled over and offered a nominal amount to resolve the case, which is not unusual before a case begins.
All of a sudden, through the heating ducts from the bathroom, the sound of gagging and then a toilet repeatedly flushing could be heard.
The defense counsel asked where was the boy. I said I was sure he would be back before the judge entered and we started picking a jury.
Moments later, the boy’s father came into the courtroom and signaled for me to join him in the hall. He told me the boy had refused to testify but his father instructed me that he was going to make sure he did.
I asked the father to consider a settlement of the case, because the boy clearly was uncomfortable with testifying to something that apparently he did not believe was true. The father said he would consult his wife. I insisted that whatever decision was made had to be given to me by my client, their son.
He hurried off to the bathroom and returned with his wife who agreed that the boy would be ready to testify.
I told them to get their son. They told me to come into the men’s room because he wouldn’t leave his stall.
The boy looked at me when he came out of the stall, tears streaming down his face. He looked down and wouldn’t talk. I looked at him and said, do you want me to resolve this case? And he nodded. His parents objected. I push them aside. What do you think is a fair settlement, I asked. He waved his hands as if to say nothing. I told him that the other side had made a nominal offer to merely resolve the case and I asked him whether I could negotiate further and resolve it rather than dismiss it. His parents resisted, but he nodded yes.
When I reentered the courtroom the sound of the toilet flushing was coming through the ductwork and there were muffled heated voices also coming through.
The defense counsel asked again where was my client. The judge was about to enter. I joked that if he only had offered a little more money, maybe it could have been resolved. He added to his offer. I told him I was authorized to settle the case for double that amount and we did.
It wasn’t much. It was a compromise. Enough to pay some hospital bills and get a replacement bicycle for the boy.
It only took about 10 or 15 minutes to put the settlement on the record and send the jury home. I left the courthouse and looked for the boy and his parents. Their car was gone and I never saw them again.
I wish I could have said goodbye to that boy who was too shy to confront the world, but had the courage to stand his ground and refuse to lie!
Fear separates the heroes from the cowards.
Two days ago, after our little political fundraiser, my friend and his wife, who had held the reception at their home, woke up to find a dead fox hung from their mailbox.
This is not who we are in northern Baltimore County.
This not who we are as Americans.
by Robert Bowie, Jr. | Oct 18, 2022 | Featured, Personal, Poetry
Last Tuesday, October 11th, at 7 pm, the Robert Frost Poetry Foundation hosted a Zoom reading by the winner and ten runners-up of the annual 2022 Robert Frost Poetry Contest. The winners came from as near as New York and as far away as New Zealand.
I was extremely fortunate to have my sonnet, “Summer Thunderstorms,” chosen as the first runner up. This is a real honor.
These readings lit me up!
Every single one of the poems was exquisite but what was personally wonderful for me was Helena Minton, who I have not seen since high school, was on that call. This high school, the Cambridge School of Weston, was a remarkable place because it respected the arts as a part of life rather than a collateral activity.
Helena and I were both on the board of the literary magazine of the Cambridge School of Weston. Also on that board was Susanna Kaysen, who wrote “Girl Interrupted,” which became a movie starring Winona Ryder. Helena has also become a well respected writer. The Boston Globe recently gave her rave reviews for her new and selected poems entitled Paris Paint Box, which I have read and highly recommend. I cannot name every member of that high school board, but they each were accomplished writers even in high school.
As I remember, we met once a week in the basement of one of the school buildings, and our faculty advisor was Mr. Pastorini, who took this stuff seriously.
The quality of the work that we received for publication was consistently very high and we learned from each other as we shared our perspectives about the submissions by our schoolmates.
I raise this because, again and again, I realize that the seeds and roots of my efforts now, fifty years later, to create a second career as a playwright and poet were planted and nurtured at that school and in that basement.
A month ago, the little library near where I live offered me a chance to teach a class in poetry. I am going to teach it in the same way as I was taught. We will learn from each other in a nurturing environment.
I have also been invited to start an open mic at a newly created independently owned cultural center in Monkton, The Manor Mill. I will try to support it much the way Mr. Pastorini ran that school magazine. We will learn from each other in a nurturing environment.
Finally, I had lunch yesterday with Allen Reese, who is a well respected poet, professor and previous publisher, to learn how to put together a small press to support the class and the open mic readings.
The real heroes, however, are Angelo Otterbein, the entrepreneur who created the Manor Mill only a year ago. It is growing into its future as a home for all the arts — from the visual arts and crafts, music in all forms, and writing. Similarly, Cynthia Weber at the Hereford Library opened a room and planted chairs in a circle for my class, with several recommended poetry books on a table nearby.
What little I can do I owe to these new and old friends who have nurtured me and given me the unbridled courage to be a little different and to create.
Do unto others, especially when others have done right by you.
———
Summer Thunderstorms
As with the generations long since dead
The fire and brimstone of the status quo
Wakes him up from the safety of his bed
And lightning frames him in the window
And photographs him in its afterglow.
Tonight he feels his present and its past
As the summer storm also comes and goes.
Conclusions are foolish in a world so vast.
For at the edges of his world and heart
Far past the farthest boundary of his grasp
Where ideas cause worlds to come apart
He lives in this place that will not last.
He loves his life more than he can explain
And leaves the window open to hear the rain.
———
I hope you will consider joining all those who taught me that the arts are at the heart of life. You can find An Accidental Diary on Amazon and, after you have enjoyed it, please spread the word. Give it away. The arts are not just a collateral activity.
by Robert Bowie, Jr. | Oct 11, 2022 | Featured, Personal, Politics, Travel
I have twice lived in a divided country. The first time it still had American kindness and we could still talk.
The Vietnam War had divided my country in 1968. I was hitchhiking because I wanted to abandon all of that, and be together with American strangers and their kindness, which was how we defined ourselves. I wanted to believe.
I got rides from both sides.
A senior Marine officer in a convertible had taken me into the PX at Parris Island to buy tax-free cigarettes. The marching soldiers on both sides of his car stopped to salute his license tags when he brought me in and then returned me to the highway.
It was a kindness he offered to me.
I had changed my mind late that summer. I had made it to California, but decided to head back to be with my father in Easton, Maryland for his birthday at the end of August.
The Democratic Convention in Chicago would be happening in about week. Violence was predicted.
Because it had been impulsive and I had started late, I tried to hop an eastbound freight train in Cheyenne, but I got caught and was mercifully dumped back on Interstate 80 East by a gruff but kind state cop who told me to disappear in 30 minutes because he was coming back.
Within 15 minutes, I got a ride from a boy dressed as a rhinestone cowboy in a white convertible with the top down and Iowa tags. He was heading east to Fort Dodge. He was going home to see his father. This was good. It would be a 660 mile ride so I would make up lost time and we were going to get to know each other.
He told me he had spent two years in Vietnam and was a war hero. He told me he had spent a year in Wyoming herding cattle. He told me that the night before, he had been in Las Vegas with girls in the front seat and girls in the backseat and had won big at the slots and had decided he wanted to see his father back in Fort Dodge. We drove nonstop all afternoon and all night laughing, smoking and talking. From the start, we liked each other.
We were Americans and therefore brothers by accident.
When he pulled over for gas, he bought me cigarettes, a can opener, and a can of peaches. It was a kindness he had offered to me.
As we rolled down the highway, I forked out the peaches and drank the sweet syrup. He told me about his life in Vietnam and the year he spent out on the western ranch, and how much he loved his father.
As we turned off the interstate and entered Fort Dodge dawn was breaking and, as the sun was coming up, he parked the car in front of a broken house in need of paint and shutter repair. The front door was unlocked and two of the windows in the front of the house were broken.
When we entered the house, there were slats missing on the staircase going up to the second floor. Beer cans littered the floor and overflowed out of a trashcan next to the refrigerator.
Before the boy went to wake up his father, he opened the refrigerator and handed me a beer. Then he took two more and excitedly bounded up the staircase.
There was loud coughing from upstairs and after a while the boy and his father came down. The old man was weak and had phlegm in his lungs. He didn’t look like he was long for the world.
I wanted to leave them alone so father and son could be together. I asked if I could take a bath upstairs. They said no and pointed at a wash tub, tilted against the stove. I was told there was no hot water but I could heat water on the stove and mix it with tap water and bathe while we drank breakfast.
So I did.
I was happy in my warm and soapy water thinking about how soon I would have a “dishpan body” as I sat in a washtub in the dawn drinking beer.
It was clear the boy and his father loved just being together. They joked, laughed, and chided each other as if they were long-lost friends.
After about a half an hour into my bath and after more breakfast beer, there was a knock on the door and two police officers entered the unlocked door without permission.
I obviously was in a considerably compromised position, but the officers paid no attention to me.
Chaos broke out. The car I had been riding in apparently had been purchased about a week ago with stolen money. Both the father and the son were confessing to the police officers to save the other. The officers arrested the boy, handcuffed him, and took him away in a squad car. The father burst into tears and told me the story.
The boy had just been released after seven years in prison for smoking marijuana. He had not served in Vietnam or been a cowboy, but he had won big in Las Vegas with money his father had given him. The boy had come home to give his father money to pay off the used car his father had bought for him.
After his father had given the car to his son, he had ordered him to leave and go west to start a new life. He instructed the boy to not come back but his son could not resist sharing his good fortune. They had only each other in this world.
The old man continued to drink beer, cough and smoke cigarettes at the kitchen table. The more he told his son’s story the more he drank and the more he cried. Somewhere around noon, he took off for the police station on foot in an effort to do what he could for his son.
I had not slept since before Cheyenne so, when he left, I put my duffel bag under my head and I curled up on the floor and slept for a while. I woke up late in the afternoon. The father had still not returned, so I threw the knapsack over my shoulder and headed out to try to catch a ride.
There was a United States post office hub in Fort Dodge, so I hung around there until I got a postal driver to let me ride shotgun to the mail district in South Chicago. As I was let out, I got cat calls from some of the postal workers who were waiting to punch the clock to begin their shift. Mayor Richard Daley was fighting the demonstrators outside of the convention.
From Chicago, I got short rides through Ohio, Pennsylvania, and then across the Bay Bridge on to Maryland’s Eastern Shore. My last ride was from a tow truck driver, who had never left the Eastern shore, and never been on a boat.
During those last short rides, I kept thinking about how different we all were, but how we could talk and share our lives, and how each person had enriched mine.
That is America to me. That is what will make us great again.
I got to Easton on my father’s birthday, and the prodigal son was welcomed home yet again.
by Robert Bowie, Jr. | Oct 4, 2022 | Featured, Personal
The culture we live in is like the hands of a sculptor.
Because of undiscovered learning issues, it took me six years to get through high school. I had to repeat 4th grade, 9th grade and 11th grade and, of course earlier, I attend summer schools.
Because I moved from school to school a bit, I came to learn that the classrooms taught us very little compared to the culture of the schools where we were taught.
All of these schools had very different cultures.
After my first 9th grade at a day school, I was shipped to a boarding school in western Connecticut for my second attempt. I was a 16-year-old 9th grader.
I was embarrassed about my age and kept it secret because many of the other 9th graders were almost 2 years younger. I was bigger than many of the 9th grade students and I inadvertently made the varsity soccer team.
The only other 9th grader who made the varsity soccer team was young for the 9th grade and was small, a little overweight, and had been appointed the manager of the team. His job was to keep track of the soccer balls and pack up uniforms for away games.
Let’s call him PG. PG and I were both outcasts for different reasons. I think he was the only Jewish student at this boarding school and I was the only 16-year-old ninth grader. PG was very funny with a self mocking sense of humor once he let you know him and he was as nice as he could be.
From the start, all the seniors and juniors on the varsity soccer team picked on PG. At the end of every practice they would kick the balls in different directions to see if PG would miss dinner. Because we were both 9th graders, I would join him to collect the soccer balls.
A certain amount of this practice of cruelty was leveled at him because he was Jewish and small so his persecution became the basis of a tribal unity not only for the soccer team but the school.
This was part of the culture of the school.
The faculty member who organized dances with girls’ schools chose by grade-level, seniors first. I got to go in place of shorter sophomores because I was taller. We lined up and were matched with our date from tallest to shortest. The faculty member told me to tell my date that I was in 11th grade.
It was all about appearances.
The cruelty ran both ways. The boys nicknamed the faculty member “grave digger” because he had been a mortician in the army, saw himself as a southern aristocrat, and had a huge Adam’s apple.
The most important event each day happened after the first two classes, when recess allowed people to go to their mailboxes and get mail from girls. The girls were also imprisoned in boarding schools and they would perfume their letters. The more perfumed letters you got the more your status grew.
I got perfumed letters, but PG, because he was small and younger, was not invited to those dances and did not get perfume letters.
PG’s mistreatment was relentless, and included rolled wet towels to make “rat tails,” which would be snapped in the locker rooms and at one point caused a bleeding cut on PG’s leg.
One awkward boy got an erection in the shower and was dutifully punished with a rat tail.
PG suffered his indignities with great courage and, even though we were in different dorms, we at least knew each other and knew we liked each other.
The administration obviously knew what was happening but they did nothing other than let the tribalism run wild.
They were letting boys become men.
I saw one boy get expelled from school. Right after recess the headmaster knocked on the door as the class was settling down.
When the headmaster entered he addressed one fellow in the back row. He said he wanted to talk to the boy. The boy got up, took two steps toward the door, and the headmaster looked at him and said, “bring your books.”
After PG had made no team sport during the winter’s sports schedule, and also had made no team in the spring — each time treated badly as the manager for one team or another — he quietly gave up.
Just before recess that spring, after the spring teams had been chosen, the fire alarm went off and no one was allowed to leave their classrooms to go down to the mailboxes.
The sounds of an ambulance and a firetruck could be heard coming down the little road that ran beneath the windows of our third floor classroom.
The teacher pulled down the shades.
After about a half an hour, we heard the sirens leave and we were released from class. Everyone went down to the mailboxes except me. I waited until the classroom was empty and then I pulled the shade up and peaked out the window.
Two maintenance men were hosing down a place three floors below the window, and the water was emptying down the road into a sewer. The water was blood red.
At lunch, the headmaster asked for a moment of silence because an accident had happened. He announced that PG had fallen off the fifth floor roof of the classroom building. After that, there were no updates about PG and his injuries.
Several times thereafter, I went to the nurse’s office and asked where I could send a card to PG. I was politely discouraged. Finally, after more visits, the nurse told me In strict confidence a secret. I was told that PG had jumped head first off the roof and had died on impact.
The students who succeeded at that school were like all good kids, but the culture was defined by tribal safety at the expense of others. Its viciousness rewarded its members with confidences that weren’t kept and conspiracies that were suspect. It was about “me” not “us.”
PG was real and the school killed him, but he took the souls of the living with him when he died.
Midway thought the next year, the headmaster knocked on the door after recess as we were settling in to class and encouraged me to bring my books.
He took me to my dorm room and I loaded my belongings into two suitcases. By the time it was lunchtime, I was at the Springfield bus station headed home.
I think of PG and believe we are better than this.
The culture we live in is like the hands of a sculptor.
