Sound Without Fury

by Robert Bowie, Jr. | Jun 16, 2026 | Featured, Personal, Travel

Everybody knows there’s nothing worse than a deaf extrovert — except for the deaf extrovert or, worse, perhaps a person trying to learn how to be a deaf extrovert.

This spring, Susan and I went to the London Book Fair for a week, and to Paris for three weeks in late April.

I am an introvert but I have had to learn to be a deaf extrovert.

Susan and I were invited to a large, loud, and formal restaurant party, where I was seated next to a woman who I could not hear at all. I decided I would ask her questions so she would not ask me questions that I couldn’t hear or answer.

I asked her questions all night and after dinner was over, she went over to my wife and exclaimed to her that I was the most interesting dinner partner she’d ever had.

Such challenges are a gift to those who are growing old and deaf. Everything becomes redefined. It’s just like when you were a kid and looking through spy glasses to bring the distance up close but then you turn it around and everything looks far away.

London was new for us and the book sale hustle brought me back to my work ethic of years ago, but Paris is familiar to us because we have gone each spring for several years.

What is fun is these changes are making me understand the contrast and that contrast has always been there as a metaphor for memory or as familiarity. It’s a little like turning that spy glass around and then thinking about the process of change rather than instantly normalizing it.

The contrast has always been there. But nobody notices because we change everything into normal immediately in our daily lives. We take this contrast and this friction in our life for granted.

The London Book Fair was a predatory hustle. I was provided 30 copies of my book, The Older You Get the Shorter Your Stories Should Be, by my sponsor. I was instructed to selectively give them away to people who visited their booth to promote the book. I was surrounded by posters about the book, which added to the hustle.

I had to learn how to adapt so that I would get the most effective reaction to my gift of a book. I quickly learned to single out my target, interview them and get their card before I gave them my book. Nobody likes a deaf introvert, so you have to get them talking fast about themselves and their interests in books like yours. If I got their card, I could exchange emails with them later without needing to hear them.

In Paris, Susan and I decided to master the Metro. I don’t speak French, so it was easy being deaf. Susan does speak some French so she would break the ice and then, because everyone in Paris can speak English, I would be back to the struggle. The level of concentration needed when you can’t fully hear is exhausting.

But the peace of pure silence once the hearing aids come out is its own reward.

We Never Quite Live Up to the Obvious

by Robert Bowie, Jr. | Nov 12, 2025 | Featured, Personal, Travel

There is nothing sadder than the moment that you realize you have missed the chance for an apology or an “I love you” that can’t be delivered because it’s too late.

At the end of my recent guided trip to Savannah, Georgia and Charleston, South Carolina I had back-to-back realizations of long-lost opportunities to apologize and to say “I love you.”

I have previously written about the trip that my friends and I took a year and a half ago to witness the history of the nonviolent practices of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the effort to enforce the civil rights laws in the western part of the south.

The focus of this trip was to follow the American slave trade pretty much from its beginning at two of the entry points and places between — from its beginnings to its end. It was a powerful experience and an amazing trip because it shook me to my roots and changed my understanding.

There are people who pass through your life and then before you can truly understand the dignity of their life and the kindness which they showed you before they are gone. In my case, one was Florine and the other was Jane. Both were Black women.

There is a fair amount of written material that documents the slave trade in America but it only becomes real when you are standing in a slave cell in which human beings were held for extended periods of time before they were auctioned into slavery, and after they had withstood the travel, in which 20% of the cargo are lost by the end of that journey.

Ten percent died on the ship and the other 10% were the unruly who couldn’t be sold. Sharks followed these ships across the waters to their destination.

As usual, I had read the dates and about the places, but to walk into slave quarters or visit buildings which have been inhabited during whippings, and experience the culture of slavery made it all real for the first time.

Slave women were forced to be kept pregnant, because they were producing product and this product was valuable. When they were old enough, the children would be sold and be lost forever. At birth, they were given only a first name no last name. After emancipation, they often just assumed the last name of their owners.

Chewing cotton roots was known to be an abortive for female slaves who did not want to bring their children into a world of degradation, however, if a pregnant slave was caught chewing cotton roots, they would receive 36 lashes, which is an unthinkably cruel punishment, especially for a pregnant woman.

Whipping was also administered to punish both slaves and their educators if it was discovered that a slave was being taught to read or write or learned mathematics such as the multiplication tables.

Florine Burk took care of my little brother and I in the late 1950s when we were kids in Washington, DC. She was a heavyset African-American woman in her 50s who had grown up in the South and had gotten her education in a single room school.

She was a force.

She could sing the alphabet and the multiplication tables. She was an avid reader who never spoke about her politics but you could feel by her presence what she thought.

She loved and knew a whole lot about Jackie Robinson and the Brooklyn Dodgers. My brother and I were required to memorize and recite the lineup for the Brooklyn Dodgers.

My brother and I loved her. She would hoist up her skirts and hit long fly balls in the backyard. If my brother or I hit a ball over the fence and through a neighbors window, she took our hand, walked us around the block, got us to knock on the door, made us promise that we would fix the window, and then she took us out to buy the glass and the caulking, and we would put in the window as she watched.

Eventually, we asked her to take us to a Washington Senators baseball game. She refused, and there was no doubt we were never gonna go with her to a Washington Senators baseball game.

Her reason, she said, was that Washington was “first in war, first in peace, and last in the American League.” She said she did not want us to witness bad baseball.

It was the 1950s, but it wasn’t her real reason and you could feel it, but I didn’t know what the real reason was until the last day of our recent trip.

Some things you have to learn late in life, and this trip taught me to look deeper into for Florine’s logic.

The morning before the end of the trip, I went online and researched the Washington Senators and found that they were one of the last teams in baseball to ever hire an African-American. They had drafted a black Cuban pitcher and identified him only as Cuban.

Florine knew her stuff. But this trip made me realize that I did not understand the depth of her character or what life must have felt like to her as a domestic raising white children in a brutally segregated city.

After she retired, she went to Los Angeles to be with family there. My brother and I wrote her birthday cards each year and sent her Christmas cards. After a few years, they would be returned to us unopened. I never told her face-to-face how much we loved her and respected her before she died.

That morning, I also realized the pain of a court clerk at the first trial I ever did in the Circuit Court of Baltimore City. I had been told that if you don’t know the judge or what to expect in the courtroom the first thing you do after you unpack is talk to the court clerk and try to make friends.

The court clerk was an entirely professional Black middle-aged woman who shook my hand and welcomed me to the courtroom when I offered my name and explained why I was there.

I put out my hand and said “I am Bob Bowie. What is your name?” She replied, “My name is Jane Bowie.”

She was instructive throughout the case and helped me when I asked my naïve questions. After the trial, I went over and thanked her and said how much I appreciated that we both had the same last name, and I had “a family friend in the court.” She smiled and laughed and patted me on the shoulder.

Over the next few years, I would see her on the streets around the courthouse and we would stop and talk. We became friends.

On this trip to South Carolina, we went to a museum that had only people‘s first names engraved in the walls at the entry room. I asked why were there only first names and the guide politely said during slavery, there were no last names, only afterward did many of the slaves just pick up the last name of the slave holder.

My family owned slaves in Prince Georges County. Much to my horror, I realized that Jane Bowie most likely came from an enslaved family that my family may have owned.

I was stunned and ashamed, but then I realized, and deeply respected, the kindness that she had offered me in the face of this country’s white supremacist history. Jane, like Florine, vanished 20 years ago and I never had the chance to recognize what she knew and the courage she had in dealing with me.

I fear that even in this generation, our children will look back and wonder how we could have looked the other way when immigrants came to this country and, as punishment, they were separated from their children when all they wanted was a chance to be free to raise them.

If you’ve ever had a blood transfusion, you never know whose blood it was. It was given as a gift from one human being to provide life for another. It’s a reminder of our common humanity, but we never quite live up to the obvious.

A Complete Unknown

by Robert Bowie, Jr. | May 20, 2025 | Featured, Personal, Travel

When Susan and I flew to Paris again this year for three weeks this spring, I had planned to watch the Bob Dylan movie, “A Complete Unknown” on the flight that night, but I was too tired so I slept instead.

Paris was warming to its spring as we landed at Charles De Gaul airport and traveled into the heart of Paris to a beautiful flat with its view of the Seine from its fifth floor living room and bedroom windows on the Île Saint-Louis.

The six hour difference in the time between the East Coast of the United States and Paris delayed the news reports that poured into my cell phone at three in the afternoon Paris time as America woke up and went to work.

The distance and the time change diminished my obsession to keep up with America’s politics, but nothing could uncouple it from my daily concerns.

Over our three weeks, Susan and I committed to walk the city, but for longer trips to Montmartre or the outskirts of Paris to the Louis Vuitton Museum to see the huge new David Hockney exhibit, we took the Metro.

Each evening, we would go to one of the little restaurants on Île Saint-Louis and then climb the stairs or take the little elevator to the flat to read the news before bed.

Last year. we had taken three days off from Paris to go to the LaVar Valley to stay in a beautiful Château and visit the region’s medieval history. This year, we went to Normandy and, as I observed the beaches and cliffs, and finally the dramatic American cemetery, the pride I’ve always felt for America rekindled with my respect.

On the morning that we flew back in mid May, Paris was in full bloom as we got on the plane to fly into the upcoming day on our return to the United States.

I again committed to watch the Bob Dylan movie on our way home.

Even though it had been out for some time, I still had not seen it, but I knew enough from the reviews that it was about the transition from Dylan’s early folk years to the electric folk rock that Dylan made in 1965.

In the fall of 1965, I had started my first year at the Cambridge School of Weston, a progressive high school that knew something about learning disorders and thus was unlike the boarding schools and summer schools I had attended previously.

It was my second try at 11th grade. My new school was so very different in so many ways, but as my classmates wore sandals and blue jeans and played guitars out on the quad or went off to the ceramic studio and the wide range of classes offered, I attended my classes in a sport jacket, but eventually gave up on the tie.

I believed I was in transition to a better place and I believed that from the start. I was hoping that repeating the 11th grade would rekindle my love of learning in a new environment with a fresh start.

Within weeks of my first day, a sign-up sheet went up in the dining room, which offered tickets and a bus ride provided by the school to see Bob Dylan play in a Boston theater.

I signed up with about 15 of my fellow students and we got on a little bus to go down to the theater.

When we got to the venue in downtown Boston, we were told that it had been sold out almost immediately and, though we had paid for our tickets, no seats had been assigned for us.

The theater instantly took action and placed folding chairs in a semicircle on stage directly behind Bob Dylan.

The first half of the performance was all Bob Dylan singing his folk songs in front of an adoring audience with us directly behind him.

When the audience returned to their seats for the second half of the program, however, a rock ’n’ roll band was now set up to back up Dylan. We pushed our seats back further to accommodate the instruments and cables.

When Dylan entered, he was met with catcalls. I could not believe what was happening in front of me. I sat, self-conscious and a little bit frightened, as Dylan faced the catcalling audience.

Dylan played the first few songs with the electrical back up in the midst of the continuing catcalls.

Somewhere in the middle of one of those songs, a very loud voice broke through and yelled something like, “You sold out!”

Dylan stopped the performance. After a very awkward moment, the silence was broken by Dylan’s voice over the microphone:

“I don’t believe you!” he said, and there was a smattering of applause as he signaled to start the song again, resuming the concert.

As the movie portrayed the transition at the Newport Folk Festival from folk to folk rock, Dylan spoke those same lines to that hostile audience and I returned momentarily to being a teenager on the back of that stage. But I was proud to be there rather than surprised and frightened by the event.

As we landed at Dulles Airport in Washington DC, and returned to our political world, I felt reborn and re-nourished by the experience.

I had this very odd feeling that these juxtapositions had reawakened me to the messy but resilient democracy in which I have been fortunate to have lived and prospered.

Somehow, America, through its history, has been endlessly capable of being reborn, newly appreciative of what the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution have provided for each generation.

Shortly thereafter, I laughed when the news reported that Harvard University had discovered in its archives an original copy of the Magna Carta, which had been presumed to be a copy, purchased in England for less than $30 after the Second World War. It turned out to be the thing itself.

It was a great trip to Paris, which taught me yet again how much I love this country.