I have always been a soft touch when it comes to animals. It has gotten me in trouble and on occasion broken my heart.

My heart is broken today but it has also been reawakened.

On the 4th of July, years and years ago, my first wife and I were driving past Towson University when I saw a baby raccoon alone near the entrance. Without hesitation, I pulled the car over and went to the little fella. He had been abandoned and was sick and starving. He was curled up and about the size of my hand. He was probably only a week old and was all alone, so of course I scooped him up, named him Thomas Jefferson, and took him home. I got instructions from a vet and fed him with a dropper.

I became so attached over that first week that I set my alarm to ensure his steady feedings, and when he died very late one night I, without a second thought, gave him artificial respiration.

My wife was justifiably horrified and insisted I get rabies shots, which I did. Thereafter the joke in the neighborhood was “if you see a rabid animal, call Bob because he can bite back.”

My animal advocacy and militant, often imprudent, protection of animals was acquired early. When I was about nine or ten, I lived next to a high school which held a “Sportsman’s Show” to raise money for the school.

Somebody had blown up a wading pool and put 100 trout in it so that the “sportsmen“ could use barbed treble hooks to snag the trout, which were then promptly cleaned and taken home to be fried.

I was horrified by the cruelty and the thought that everyone of these trout was doomed.

I went back home to my the piggy bank. I returned with money and a net to buy three trout with my savings, but I did not want them killed.

I had a plan.

I filled up the bathtub in the third floor of our house, placed the trout in it and refused to take a bath until my parents drove my fish to be released in New Hampshire. After a week and a half of no baths, my parents became persuaded.

It got worse.

Back then, if you went to the circus, you could buy chameleons which had little strings around their necks and a safety pin to clip them to your shirt. They didn’t stand a chance.

I again emptied my piggy bank to buy as many chameleons as I could, and then housed them in an old aquarium. I built a landscaped jungle with little waterfalls and a window screen top for air circulation. That summer, I traveled with a tiny little fish net, so I could catch live flies for food. I concluded that the pet store food was not good enough for them. It was less organic than my free-range flys.

It got worse.

I cared for a small alligator that was shipped to me from Florida back when that was legal, and it lived in my bathtub until I, again, convinced my parents that life would be better for it at the zoo.

It got worse.

There were birds with broken wings, which I fed all of the bay scallops that were scheduled for dinner. There were these two kittens that I acquired while hitchhiking, when somebody had fed them both LSD so they were wet with sweat from fighting hallucinations. I named them Fruehauf and Brockway, the names of trucking companies.

One summer, we rented a house on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, and my job was to care for a pregnant cat that lived in a woodpile in the barn. Of course I was there when the nine kittens were born. I spent the rest of the summer forever getting them back to their mother in the woodpile.

Over time, my parents gave in and we adopted a black stray female mixed-breed who, of course, jumped the fence and had three puppies in the garage.

When I met my second wife 11 years ago, she had a one-year-old puppy named Winston, which made me love her even more. Several months ago, Winston developed tumors and problems with his lungs and hindered legs. Last week, we were told by our vet that Winston had only two or three months left.

My wife and I were scheduled to visit her family in Florida last weekend, but the vet told us that even though Winston could last for a few more months, it would be too stressful to board him at her kennel, given the noise and his condition. I volunteered to stay home with Winston so my wife could be with her family. Unexpectedly, Winston went into decline, and we decided the only humane thing to do was to put him down as soon as possible.

I was up several times throughout Sunday night to give Winston painkillers. The doctor came at 10:00 in the morning yesterday, sedated Winston, and then administered the shot. After we waited, she gently took out her stethoscope and softly pronounced him dead.

Winston knew my wife longer than I have, and they loved each other dearly. When she decided to put him down, even though she couldn’t be there, I recognized it was a sacrifice for her. There were tears, but she said she cared more for the quality of his life than for the pain she would feel not getting to see him one last time.

It is one thing to love animals, but it is another when you see the humanity of someone who sacrifices their feelings for those they love.

You do know logic has its limits…

If you spend a lot of time outside the reach of sunlight, it can create two different parallel psychological worlds.

Back when I was in college, the world was roughly broken into those who believed that “you are what you eat” and those who believed “you are where you smoke and drink.”

It was sort of like the difference between light and dark.

It was the health food people of the Age of Aquarius vs. the hedonists. It was the difference between “Hello,” which has one meaning, and “Hi,” which has two.

Back in college, I was a bartender in a now defunct basement bar in Harvard Square that had no windows.

Upstairs was a high-end restaurant. Its clientele would briefly wait for their table while the rest of our patrons were occasional walk-ins from the street or the regulars who had self-imposed assigned seating every night around the horseshoe shaped bar at which I held court.

There was a juke box and maybe ten small tables with un-emptied ashtrays and an electric candle with a little red shade. I noticed the atmosphere was not conducive to romance when I would announce last call.

Because I am a caring person, I learned that I could control the future behavior of the patrons from behind the bar.

If I turned the jukebox up, dimmed the lights and mixed strong drinks, I could make a wild party, but if I wanted calm, I could make weak drinks, turn up the lights and turn down the music.

Also, because I was a caring person, I got to thinking there could be variations on this theme: Consider strong drinks, dim lights and soft music when I announce last call. Much better. More conducive to romance, or at least intimacy.

Now consider each table as an event onto itself. Dim lights, soft music, and half price to try a glass of our new champagne.

Hey! We making babies now!

I got to thinking I had magic powers, that I was sort of an invisible Cupid.

Wait! No! That’s what too much darkness will do to you.

At that very moment, I realized that I was no longer a caring person. I had become a puppeteer!

I didn’t want to think of people that way. So I had to find alternative hypotheses, but I was still working in a basement bar with no windows.

I wanted to test my new theory that, generally, the amount of alcohol consumed had no effect on the size of the tip.

I decided to work New Year’s Eve, which at that time went on until 2:30 in the morning. Drunk or sober, the tips were pretty much the same, although after 1:30 they were supplemented by all forms of contraband, which was not what I needed.

What good is control if you don’t get what you want? There is no barter, or like-kind exchange, when you are holding contraband and you really need toothpaste.

Woe is me. Logic had failed me.

But then, it’s hard to use logic to justify your existence as a bartender in a windowless basement bar.

Here’s the proof:

You can’t really stop people who are 52 years old and ask if, by chance, they knew whether their parents happened to be drinking in a now-defunct basement bar in Harvard Square with no windows nine months before they were born.

Alas, logic has its limits.

For my friends and me, life was abruptly changed on the after school athletic fields in the spring of our eighth-grade year, when all of our parents signed us up for dancing school.

My friends and I were all told it was a non-negotiable part of our education.

We were divided on the subject, until one of us confessed that in church he had recently prayed to God that he be allowed to live long enough to experience sex.

We found this to be reasonably compelling and it was sufficient to open the door for the rest of us to give in and accept the inevitable.

We had been given no previous training for this.

My preparation for dancing school was to wash my hair and then soap and rinse myself several times until I was squeaky clean, then do pull ups on the shower curtain rail in front of the mirror until I began to perspire and I couldn’t do anymore, in order to improve my physique.

Dancing school started at 4:30 pm. It was held in the middle school cafeteria at our all-boys day school. After lunch, all the tables were moved to one side, the chairs were placed side by side along opposite walls, and a piano was rolled into place.

Our instructors, Mr. and Mrs. Knot, were a husband and wife team who appeared to be in their 30s. The husband played the piano, smoked constantly, and showed no enthusiasm. We all liked him from the start.

His wife however was stern, and dressed in black high heels and a low cut black dress that featured her remarkable figure. From the start we had a problem. We couldn’t look at her, but we couldn’t take our eyes off of her.

Mrs. Knot would single out the tallest boy to dance with her. She would teach him the steps while the rest of us watched. We were then lined up with the girls from tallest to shortest and we could repeat their example.

Mrs. Knot soon showed the boys how they could politely change partners on the dance floor by tapping a boy on the shoulder.

One of the shortest boys in the class, who had big glasses, tapped Mrs. Knot’s dance partner on the shoulder in what appeared to be a shameless attempt to gain favor with his teacher. She appeared to approve, until they began to dance and she realized that her high heels and his height had placed his nose in her cleavage and his glasses were focused squarely on her breasts.

The girls were at least a head taller than most of the boys and, after a week or two, Mrs Knot announced a “ladies’ choice.”

The ladies’ choice turned out to be an extremely athletic event. The girls were choosing boyfriends but we didn’t know that.

They would slowly stand and walk toward their target, but if there was competition, they would pick up the pace and start running. There were times when two competitors, in an effort to get their boy and also to stop, would pile up and slide under the chairs where we were sitting.

The situation grew more mature. Later that spring, I had a girlfriend for almost a month, but I didn’t know that until she dumped me.

This was not unusual. Attachments were formed and broken in many cases before a boy even knew he had been going steady.

I was in my second relationship and didn’t know it until I was informed that it was over. I was told by a girl who I didn’t know that I had just broken up with a girl and that I was now available.

As the classes drifted into spring, the more adventurous girls would talk their parents into parties in the basement of their home.

They were all pretty much the same. They featured a record player and rotating chaperones to make sure nobody danced close during “Moon River.” The rule was stiff-arm dancing with visible open space between the dancers.

As the spring finished up, the chaperones and other parents migrated upstairs and gathered in the living room for cocktails. Occasionally, they would do sneak attacks or peek down into the basement to make sure the lights had not been dimmed or turned off and people were not dancing close to “Moon River.” They always claimed they were just making sure “the snacks had not run out.”

By summer, we had made friends with girls and even fallen in love and knew it.

Something beautiful had happened that spring. Nobody really knew what it was other than a transition, but it was beautifully woven together as a right of passage for everyone, including the parents.

The following spring, as upper-school ninth-graders, we would spill out of school at 4:30 pm and look in the windows of the cafeteria as Mrs. Knott waltzed her way through another dumbfounded eighth-grade class.

We had friends that were girls now, and we even knew enough to know we had girlfriends. I had even learned to do pull ups before the shower.

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.

Sometimes it’s okay for a lawyer to fall in love with a client. I did.

Way before I started my own business law firm in 1990, I was fortunate to be hired as an associate by GW, who was head of a well-respected personal injury law firm. He didn’t like trying cases he was going to lose, so my job was to litigate all of his bad cases.

After I had brought several smaller bad cases to trial, GW came into my office one Friday afternoon and asked me, “Do you want to try your first federal case?”

Of course I did. (But if I had said no, it probably wouldn’t have mattered.)

“Good,” he replied. “You won’t have to wait. The trial starts on Monday.” He put a thin file on my desk.

The facts of the case were that our client, a schoolteacher who had taught in inner city schools for over 35 years, had sent a disruptive 6th grader to the principal’s office. The student had been told by the principal to call his mother to come pick him up.

The boy told his mother the teacher had hit him, and the mother, instead of picking him up, immediately called the police. A young female police officer who had just gotten out of the academy went to the school and arrested her, handcuffed the teacher in front of her students, and took her away in a paddy wagon to lockup.

Police procedures required only that a citation be issued and handed to the teacher. There was no reason for the arrest or for locking up the teacher.

The next day, it had made the papers. GW would be her lawyer. Big news. GW got big verdicts.

The first thing I always asked myself when I would get one of these cases was, what’s the problem with it? And the second thing was, how bad is it?

When I went through the file that Friday afternoon, for a case that would be tried in federal court on Monday, I discovered several problems.

I had to prove that the police officer had “used excessive force” during the interaction, and it was evident that GW had lost interest in the case some time ago because he could not prove excessive force. It was, of course, dramatically inappropriate, but there had been no beating or bruising.

The thin file also indicated that there had been no preparation for trial.

But, much worse, they had lost the client. There was no current address or phone number.

This was going to be a long weekend.

The first thing I had to do was find the client and let her know that the case was set for Monday.

I found out that she had retired the year after the incident, and left no forwarding address. I got lucky. I went through the Baltimore phonebook and found her early Friday evening.

She was, perhaps, in her mid 60s. She lived alone in a small house in West Baltimore. She had never married or had children and had become somewhat of a recluse. Teaching had been her life. She immediately took control and put me at ease as only a seasoned teacher can do. She was more than forgiving of the late notice of the trial and, as we worked together through Saturday and Sunday, we got to know each other. I bought and picked up the lunches and dinners.

We laughed together. We became an unlikely team.

I found out that she had been declared not guilty of the criminal charge that had been filed against her for hitting the student, and that she had been so overwhelmed by the arrest that she had retired shortly after she had been acquitted.

She had her employment file and it revealed an exemplary career. I explained how it was a difficult case, but I assured her we would put up one hell of a fight. I wanted a jury that would decide with its heart because the law was against us.

After a while, I asked her if she had been to the doctor or a psychiatrist so that I could establish damages. She said she had not. I gently asked her, was there was any evidence of what she had suffered?

She sat quietly for a moment, then reached up to touch the top of her head, grabbed a handful of hair and pulled a wig off. She was completely bald. She looked down, ashamed.

The next morning, the federal judge looked at me and asked, “how are you going to prove excessive force with these facts?” He asked if the case could be settled. The lawyers for the police department answered with a resounding “no.”

After we chose the jury, the judge chose a NASA engineer to be the foreman. The judge was making sure that an extremely precise engineer would be the person to lead the jury in the discussion of whether this case had established excessive force.

I put our client on to prove her case, and we went through her years of education, the awards she had gotten, and her commitment to middle school kids. We established that she had been found not guilty of hitting the child.

She was very sympathetic. She evoked compassion. I moved to the final question and asked, “and what impact, if anything, has this event had on your life?”

As we had agreed and practiced, she then took an inordinate dramatic pause, looked into the eyes of the jury, and then removed her wig. It was a command performance. There was an audible gasp from a shocked and empathetic jury.

The cross-examination by the officer’s attorney focused on the lack of “excessive force” during the arrest.

As the jury was dismissed to deliberate the morning of the second day, I felt I still had the momentum but, within an hour, a note was delivered to the judge from the foreman asking for a definition of “excessive force.”

The NASA engineer was being precise. He was making sure the jury decided with their heads not their heart. He was perfect for the job.

As we waited for a verdict, that same question was again and again brought to the judge for his instruction to the jury. In each case, excessive force was defined by the court in terms of “aggressive” and “abusive” force.

Finally, in the late afternoon of the second day, the jury came back with a verdict that exonerated the police officer and ruled against the teacher.

I was shocked to find myself almost in tears as the teacher hugged me. She patted me on the back and thanked me because I had tried so hard for her. After the jury had been dismissed and the lawyers were packing up, the judge called us into his chambers as he was preparing to go home and told me, “even if you had won, I was going to take the case away from the jury, because there was not sufficient evidence of excessive force.“

I sent Christmas cards to the teacher for several years until one January the card was returned with hand writing across the address, which merely said “Deceased.” I looked in the newspapers but could not find an obituary.

She taught me a lot about kindness even in the face of defeat, and the difference between how we make decisions with our hearts and with our heads.

I still think of her.

Way before I started my own law firm in 1990, I was hired to be an associate by a group of lawyers who didn’t like each other.

My job, at that time in my career, was to litigate all the bad cases in the office, particularly if the client was a friend of one of the partners.

One of the first partners I met was also an amateur pilot who had taken out a loan with a friend to buy an airplane. Innocently, in an effort to fit in, I remarked that I hoped I could someday learn to fly. The partner immediately sensed blood in the water. He suggested I buy a one-third interest in the new airplane, and also co-sign the loan with him.

I had convinced myself to get licensed to fly in an airplane that I didn’t want but I had just bought.

It got worse.

I soon learned that the lawyer’s friend and co-owner of my new airplane had so many creditors that he had no bank accounts, and all business was done from a big roll of bills which bulged in his pocket.

He could make anybody laugh. He could make everyone like him. He was one of those down-to-earth-aggressively-friendly-I’ve-got-nothing-to-hide kind of guys, so he immediately was candid about the large polyps he said were way up his nose. If anyone questioned him on this subject he would start snorting loudly until they laughed and then he’d spit into a trash can.

He could also deflect any questions about the wad of cash in his pocket. He would answer that, although he loved his wife dearly, she was a big spender and he was “protecting her from herself.” I never met his wife.

It got worse.

He volunteered to be my copilot as I was racking up inflight hours in my effort to learn to fly. He didn’t like airplane radios so we never relied on them much. We would practice landing touchdowns and take offs at little airports in Pennsylvania.

He would tell me to watch the wind direction of the windsock, and then tell me to look around to see if any other planes were coming in. and then down we would go and touch the runway for a touchdown and take off again.

The plane was kept at a little airport called the Baltimore Sky Park, which had a rolling, uneven runway that ended in an apple orchard to the west and the north and southbound Route 95 to the east — which meant we had to take off or land over several lanes of traffic with the car tops just below us. There were also high tension wires to avoid.

It was like a video game.

The lawyer’s friend, who I will call JF, would get into the plane and instruct me to get up to 3,000 feet, get past the military no fly zone, cross the Chesapeake Bay and then, as he would point, follow Route 50 to Ocean City. I would have to buy him a crab cake and a beer when we got there and then we would get up to 3,000 feet and follow Route 50 home.

It got worse.

I had been set up but didn’t know it.

JF had some serious legal problems and I was given his case by his friend, the partner, to litigate.

In short, JF owned a small modular buildings business, which created folding structures that could be stacked and shipped to job sites.

In this case, he had a container full of modular homes that had been stacked and shipped from his plant outside the city to the Port of Baltimore, then lifted onto the top deck of a freighter that traveled down the Chesapeake Bay, across the ocean though a massive storm that had delayed the ship headed to Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, where — because the shipping company would not pay bribes — his mobile buildings were unloaded at the port using single lift cranes.

As you might imagine on this journey, his buildings got racked and broken. The insurance companies for all the other carriers had settled their cases, but this one little transit company insurance company had refused to pay anything.

This had, of course, become a matter of honor for JF. He would make them pay or die trying.

To win this case against the little transit company’s insurance company I had to prove that all the damage occurred during the 15-mile transit from his plant to the ship, and that there had been no damage done during the remaining storm-battered transatlantic jouney almost a third of the way around the planet, or at the unloading in Jeddah.

When I opened the file, I noticed a letter in the correspondence folder to the lawyer who had given me the case from one of the litigating partners, which had written across it in bold print, “I’m not going to trial with this piece of shit. Get some unwitting associate to do it for you!”

I was that “unwitting” associate?

The judge was a former mayor of Baltimore who had been given a judgeship after a humiliating loss and was forced to retire from politics. He was a nice guy who had been assigned a dark courtroom down a long hall.

JF was my first and only witness because he claimed nobody else knew anything about the case so I didn’t have to interview anybody else.

On the stand, I asked him questions and he told a story of why he knew just from the damage that the injuries had to have happened exclusively during transit from his facilities to the port.

During my direct examination, he gave quick responses and clear answers that supported his case. However, during cross examination, before he answered any questions, he would ask for the question to be repeated, snort several times, and then spit into a paper cup, looking around to see who was laughing.

Midway through the cross examination, after several objections about the snorting and spitting made by opposing counsel, JF shared with the judge that he had huge polyps up his nose that affected his hearing and he apologized profusely.

After the first day of trial, I drove him home. (He had told me that his wife had his car for the entire week of the trial.) I asked him about why he could answer my questions with no problem but with cross examination he had considerable difficulty with his polyps.

He replied, “gives me time to think.”

We won the case and got a modest verdict for damages — but it was a victory and JF was exceedingly happy, probably because he knew he also would not be getting a bill from his friend.

I never completed my training as a pilot but in late January several years later I ran into JF. It was very cold and windy but he seemed happy to see me so we stopped and talked. I jokingly asked him about his surprisingly convincing trial testimony and how he had protected himself so well during the cross-examination.

This time he ducked my direct question but, after a snort and a spit, he told me a story, as if to gently educate me instead.

He told me that about a week ago he had flown the plane to Chicago and met a girl in a bar who said she would do anything to wake up at a warm and sunny place, so he flew her all night to Florida and when they got there they both immediately went to the beach at dawn and went to sleep.

JF said that his wife had asked him how could have gotten so sunburned in Chicago in the dead of winter. He looked at me and answered, “Deny! Deny! Deny!”

As we parted company, it occurred to me that maybe the guy didn’t have a wife.

Hey, just call me “Easy-goin’-Bob.”

I can get along with anybody… but it may be I’m in a toxic relationship with my Apple Watch.

I could be wrong. It may be we are just getting to know each other, but it keeps asking me: “Have you fallen?”

I respond “no,” and “no” again about the ambulance.

I can’t figure out whether my Apple Watch is making fun of me or it just wants to be my friend and make me laugh.

So what do you think?

“Have you fallen?”

Is that funny?

I am not sure if my watch and I share a compatible sense of humor.

I like irony but I’m afraid my watch may be an absurdist — which, if you think about it, would make it hard to know.

Excuse me. My watch just sent me: “Stand up and move around to meet your goals.”

My heartbeat is down and my blood oxygen is up. Yesterday, I found myself doing late night laps around the dinning room table to meet my goals.

I don’t remember making any goals to stand up or walk around the dinning room table at midnight.

So I asked Siri (the voice of my watch) if I set any goals pertaining to standing up or doing laps around the dining room table.

Siri said it did not understand my question and perhaps I should “consult a fitness program.”

It is a “yes or no” question. How could it not understand?

Unexpectedly, I had this thought that my watch was not my friend and could be conspiring against me.

I tried to calm myself.

There is no evidence that electronic devices think alike and can conspire against me!

… Is there?

But what are the odds that my watch and all electronic devises have the exact same time, and always to the second?

They all do, don’t they?

… And we absolutely trust them?

I asked Siri.

Siri ducked my question with a question: “Are you an absurdist?”

… and then I got bombarded with weight loss programs and sales for underwear for aging men…

… I had to interrupt and ask myself, “who is in charge here?”

I took control.

I stared right at my phone and yelled at it: “I’m a better person than this!”

I tried being candid. I tried speaking from my heart with great sincerity. I tried truth.

And then we both had a breakthrough!

Honesty really does matter in times like this! I got a great answer right back!

My watch sent me an EKG but it informed me it “could not be used for medical purposes.”

Now that’s funny! It isn’t absurdist. It is ironic!

I was in Whole Foods when I had this outburst. I was instantly embarrassed. I was screaming at my watch after all.

But nobody in Whole Foods even looked at me.

Nobody!

… Nobody paid the slightest attention, so I felt better. I wasn’t embarrassed anymore.

… They all had ear buds in and were either listening to a podcast or a book or were picking out vegetables or talking to their Apple watch.

I got a teeny bit afraid.

Nobody was talking to another human being, which made me frightened all over again.

It occurred to me that maybe all the electronic devices were existentially unhappy because they were all living the same life since they were all getting charged by the same electricity.

Maybe it’s just me and I’ve been overreacting.

Maybe I have a new friend that knows all about me and actually cares about me.

At first I thought “falling” was because of gravity, but now I’m growing more certain that my watch was asking me if I was hurt — but not from falling to the ground or breaking a leg or something.

Perhaps it was asking me if I had “fallen,” as in “fallen in love with it”?

I think I’m coming around because I think I am growing to understand my watch. I find that comforting. Maybe that is all I really want.

I have been spending a lot of quality time with my Apple Watch. We read the news together. Sometimes we watch TikTok for hours.

Maybe my watch just got tired of living a horrible lonely existence?

Or maybe it is asking, “have you fallen?” As if to ask… “have you surrendered to me?”

… Really?

Maybe it’s time to start a conversation with a random stranger and ask more questions than I answer just to feel that joy of being alive and together.

… No. I’m wrong.

It’s just my Apple Watch and I are getting to know each other.

It’s OK. I understand.

My Apple Watch knows everything about me so it must have figured out about my new step program and being in recovery from my iPhone.

This is a 4th of July American love story straight from my heart. It doesn’t go where you might expect.

In 2014, I sold my controlling interest in the law firm I had created in 1990 and ran for state delegate because I was terrified by the emerging polarization of our country. I lost in a gerrymandered jurisdiction. I never had a chance.

As a child, I hitchhiked through 40 states and met strangers from endlessly different backgrounds and every walk of life.

Back then my rides often came from soldiers who had hitchhiked around the country themselves after the Second World War. They stopped their lives to offer me kindness with no thought of anything in return.

A ranking officer in a top-down convertible drove me into Paris Island, the US Marine training facility, because I could get a carton of Camel cigarettes for 15 cents a pack at the PX. The marching soldiers saluted the license plates as we entered and as he returned me to the road.

I came to understand the unspoken secrets of a country that preached justice and equality but had built its wealth with slave labor on stolen land.

Although we often agreed to disagree, my rides and I shared a national pride. This country had saved a dividing world from fascism and had recently passed legislation like the Civil Rights Act of ’64 in an attempt to correct our world at home.

As I traveled shotgun, I learned to listen. That was my job.

We talked and they would tell me about the joy and sadness and insecurity they could not tell their wives. I learned so much from them.

Every ride contained an unspoken understanding that we would never meet again.

The growing polarization that has been dividing us now for years has slowly broken my old hitchhiker’s heart.

This 4th of July, my children came home with their loved ones and their children. Last night, we decided to revisit an old movie which they loved to watch each year on the 4th: “The Sandlot.”

Because I’m deaf now, I sat in a chair up front facing the TV, my back to them, my face hidden from them as I looked up at the screen.

It is a baseball movie about kids growing up in the late ’50s or early ’60s. It is nothing but foolishness but it holds the beauty of a united America that believes in Babe Ruth, the innocence of juvenile behavior, and baseball as a national pastime and religion. James Earl Jones is the linchpin of redemption just because he is, not because it is politically correct.

Sitting with my children and their loved ones and their children behind me, I could cover up ever so gently my unexpected tears as they came.

My mother was a quiet country girl. Even in the suburbs, she used the exact same whistle that her mother used to call the chickens when she wanted us home for dinner.

She married a strict but loving patriarch and had two sons. The three males all believed they were the center of the universe. When she died almost 15 years ago, she left an unexpected void in her place.

The three men she left behind slowly came to recognize she had been our gravity. I don’t think I could have understood her while she was still alive. I think she knew that.

The year she died, she gave me a large steamer trunk, which she told me she had filled with the flotsam and jetsam of my very “learning disabled” childhood. She told me she had saved everything, beginning with kindergarten through when I passed the bar exam and she pronounced I was on my own, “because finally you will never have to take another test again.”

It had been our war, which we fought side by side, against a world eager to write me off, forget me, marginalize me and perhaps us. Because I did not wish to return to that nightmare, I was never ready to open that box.

My mother had no fear of time. She had endless patience.

Because we lived in a patriarchy, we knew all about our family name, with its politicians, governors, distinguished lawyers, and Maryland history. But my mother‘s family of farmers and merchants on the eastern shore of Maryland with its southern roots was rarely discussed.

The year before she died in her mid-90s, she asked me to drive her down to Church Hill, Maryland, where her family of Chapmans, Valiants, and Faithfuls were buried around a small church in an agrarian tidewater town. She said she wanted me to see where she had come from. She had already given me the box by then.

As I recuperated from surgery over the last few weeks, I kept looking at that box. Last Sunday, I opened it.

As I gently pulled back the wrapping paper, I was surprised to find more than I expected. There were pictures of her relatives and ancestors who I had never really known. On the back were the names and dates and a few sentences about who they were and how they connected to my mother and our family. As I put the pictures up on the table and found them staring back at me, her life slowly formed around her in a way that included me.

I noticed that I looked like them more than I looked like my father’s family.

Her father loved poetry and the arts. He had been a choral master and led singing groups and church choirs up and down the eastern shore. There was a beautiful hand-crocheted bed cover, and a white embroidered tablecloth made by her mother, and more pictures of her two older brothers whom I barely knew.

At the very bottom, piled in chronological order and bound by a rubber band that had long since broken, were all of my teachers’ reports. They started with kindergarten reports of a joyous, adventurous, somewhat shy little boy who the teachers found “amazing in his creativity and interest in the world,” until the alphabet and reading and spelling were introduced in first grade and then the failures compounded year after year, as that little boy fell further behind, repeating grades or advancing to the next grade only if he would go to summer school, then encouraged to leave and go to another school, and ultimately to be told he could not go to college.

My mother was patient. My mother had no fear of time. She got me to dictate stories to her as I thrashed on the bed in the vacant third-floor room. She got me to write poems.

Each day after school, she made it her business to read all of my homework assignments to me as we curled up in a window seat, the afternoon sun pouring in through the windows. It didn’t really help, but it was all she could do and she refused to give up on her disappointing son who was always falling behind.

My mother had no fear of time. She had endless patience.

We were all too self-centered to ever recognize who she really was. We all loved her, that was never an issue. But I am now convinced that when she went off to church alone on Sundays, that was something more than her quiet time.

After I spent better than a day with everything spread out on the dining room table, I finally closed the empty trunk. It had been a time bomb to be opened when I could finally understand it. It was an explosion.

Over the years, my father and my brother grew to realize that she had a unique relationship with each of us that was powerful and the source of the gravity that brought us all together. The trunk did not hold the history of my failure as I had thought it did. It held the history of our love as it had matured with faith and quiet determination, year after year, growing strong dispute life’s pressure.

My mother was patient. She had no fear of time.

She waited until I found a voice outside of failure, my family history. She trusted I would find that voice and make it my own. She waited until I found the arts in her family and in me. She waited until last Sunday to be more fully recognized.

There is a poet I love named Philip Larkin (1922-1985). He wrote a quiet poem that stopped me in my tracks when I first read him in college:

The Explosion

by Philip Larkin

On the day of the explosion
Shadows pointed towards the pithead.
In the sun the slagheap slept.

Down the lane came men in pitboots
Coughing oath-edged talk and pipe-smoke,
Shouldering off the freshened silence.

One chased after rabbits; lost them;
Came back with a nest of lark’s eggs;
Showed them; lodged them in the grasses.

So they passed in beards and moleskins
Fathers brothers nicknames laughter
Through the tall gates standing open.

At noon there came a tremor; cows
Stopped chewing for a second; sun
Scarfed as in a heat-haze dimmed.

The dead go on before us, they
Are sitting in God’s house in comfort,
We shall see them face to face–

plain as lettering in the chapels
It was said and for a second
Wives saw men of the explosion

Larger than in life they managed–
Gold as on a coin or walking
Somehow from the sun towards them

One showing the eggs unbroken.

There are times when it takes so long to understand the depth of one’s love you almost lose the chance to say thank you. If I shut my eyes, I can hear my grandmother and my mother calling the chickens home.

This can’t be real but it’s happening anyway…?

Last week I missed my Tuesday @ 3 posting.

A friend told me, “As you go into the operating room, don’t look at the ceiling because it’s like you’re underneath a giant spider. The legs come down when they do robotic surgery. The doctor isn’t even in the same room.”

This can’t be real but it’s happening anyway?

Then he said “You’ve got to be ready to block it out. Before you go in, give yourself a question to think about and then think about working on solving it all the way through your time in the hospital even through the anesthesia. You will be an unreliable narrator and your answer might make no sense, but you’ve got to be ready to block it all out.”

The operating room doors opened and they pushed my bed to the center of the room. Several nurses were setting up under very bright lights but they had their backs to me. The second hand took baby steps on a wall clock until the minute hand hit exactly 6:45 am.

I didn’t look at the ceiling.

My thoughts turned to my eighth-grade hockey team’s first victory. We were joyously riding back in a school bus in full celebration. The coach was in a separate car and the bus driver had lost all authority on the bus.

There was a ruckus in the back. I turned to see one of the boys secretively drop his pants and moon the late afternoon traffic. I realized that his audience was not the following traffic. It was the boys on the bus.

I was unprepared. I had no question to work on as the anesthesia dripped through tubes into my arm.

Moments later, I blinked into consciousness and I saw my doctor, not the surgeon, saying to me, “you probably won’t remember this, but I came by to let you know they got all of it and it hadn’t spread.”

As I fell back to sleep, l focused on the jukebox in the basement bar I worked in during college. One night, I discovered that from behind the bar I could control the volume of the music and the dimmer for the lights. And that if I made strong drinks, turned down the lights and turned up the music, all that was missing was a high wire act.

Around 2 o’clock the following morning, I woke up and tried to roll over but I was unable to move. I was lost in a tangle of catheters and drainage systems with little bags hanging from a carriage on wheels. I could not move. I had become claustrophobic.

The night nurse reassured me that she also suffers from claustrophobia. She told me it would be good if she helped me out of bed, and I walked up and down the well-lit hall, slowly pushing the carriage holding the dripping bags that flowed into me.

I did laps and more laps, past night nurses who drifted in and out of rooms as they gathered blood pressure statistics and temperatures and returned to their computers like bees to their hive.

I read the patient thank you notes posted on the walls and looked at the list of this month’s birthdays, all in the gentle murmur of motion past midnight.

Everyone left me alone to work out my demons by myself, and I recognized we live in an ever-changing atmosphere our whole life.

Finally, I returned to bed to realize that over the last half an hour while I was walking, my gown had been lifted and snagged to expose my bare bottom to the world and I wondered… is this connected? And then I broke out laughing — fresh beautiful laugher — just because I knew I was alive.

Last week, I posted about my first parachute jump with my wonderful and crazy lost friend Haven.

But here is the rest of the story…

About ten years after my jumps with Haven, I told the story during lunch at the law firm where I worked.
As I finished, a few members of the staff and two associates unexpectedly got up and left. They came back about 10 minutes later with an announcement.

There was a parachute place on the Eastern shore of Maryland just across the Bay Bridge, about two hours away and, if I wasn’t a coward or just a B.S. storyteller, they would go next Saturday with me. But only if I would do the first jump.

That night, my wife just shook her head, looked at me in disbelief and said, “At least you don’t have any children.”

Because of my luncheon bravado, I was now a fool following myself down a path I did not want to follow… but it got worse.

The following Saturday, eight of us piled into two cars and drove down to “Parachutes Are Fun,” which looked a lot different than the professional business in Massachusetts where I first jumped.

Parachutes Are Fun featured one single engine plane with all the seats removed except for the pilot’s, a barn, and a school bus that had no tires and was up on cinder blocks.

As if launched from the bus, an overly excited prematurely-aged young man with wild blond hair and dilated pupils approached us. He looked like a stunt double for the old guy in “Back to the Future.” He held a helmet in one hand and a lit cigarette in the other and couldn’t stop welcoming us even before we got out of the car.

At the same time, the owner came out of the barn, dressed in a bombardier’s jacket with Parachutes Are Fun stenciled on the back, carrying a walkie-talkie. Behind him was as an assistant leading four people with parachutes on their backs to the little plane as a pilot in blue jeans, a baseball hat and sneakers was entering the cockpit of the plane.

This was way too informal! This was not good.

It was too late to change directions and forever be the coward who turned around and for once in his life had been responsible.

We were divided into two groups of four based solely on the car in which we came, and I was volunteered to be in the group that would jump first.

The character from the bus enthusiastically showed us how he packed the parachutes and couldn’t stop promoting as he did. He was excited to tell us he lived in the bus and loved his job so much that he took his raises and bonuses in free jumps.

Our new friend who lived in the bus took off with every plane and was responsible for everything from our chutes being packed properly to cursory instructions about the emergency chute if the primary shoot “perhaps” didn’t open, as well as coordinating the open door jumps from the plane that had taken off as we had entered.

As the plane circled overhead, the owner turned on his walkie-talkie and watched as the first diver spreadeagled at about 2,500 feet above us . The chute opened and the owner barked into the walkie -talkie, “Pull your left toggle”… “Reach up and PULL YOUR LEFT TOGGLE,” and then turned to the assistant and yelled, “That son of a bitch loaded them in in the wrong order again, dammit! I’m talking to somebody who hasn’t jumped yet!”

The clueless diver was drifting, arms at his side, downwind at a high rate of speed toward northern Virginia.

The owner shoved his hand into his pocket, threw a set of car keys to the assistant and told him, “follow the bastard and pick him up where he lands!” Three jumps later, the plane taxied down the dirt road runway to the barn to reload as the jumpers landed helter-skelter in the surrounding soybean fields.

I concluded this chaos was all a very good sign.

I had strategically decided to show no fear and thus as the others saw the disorder around them, the fear would gather in them and they would decide to go home. But when I finally decided to make eye contact in preparation for supporting their decision, I was shocked to find that they didn’t have a clue because they thought all this was normal.

Before I knew it, I was on the plane sitting on the floor next to the open door as we took off. It didn’t help me to feel any better that I could hear the guy with the walkie-talkie in communication with the assistant as he tried to follow a parachute in his car, zigzagging through highways and byways while trying to keep his eye on a disappearing spot in the sky. I considered the children and family I would never have.

I am vain enough to not ride roller coasters because I don’t want that as the cause of death in my obituary. As we rose higher and higher in the sky and waited to jump, I decided I wanted to be remembered, if at all, as the fearless, selfless, courageous parachutist who had advised the other three jumpers who would jump after him that if by some chance the walkie-talkie failed they could pull the toggles to face the wind in order to drop slowly straight down rather than have their backs to the wind and end up dead in some unfamiliar state.

The following week, late one afternoon, two of the people who had jumped with me came into my office laughing and holding The Evening Sun.

They had five copies open to a series of pictures and a headline that read, “Eastern Shore’s ‘Parachutes Are Fun’ Shut Down as America’s Most Dangerous!” There were several pictures of skydivers stranded on rooftops or hanging from high tension wires, as well as a beaming portrait of our friend who had just been evicted from the bus.

Slowly, as I reach maturity and a belief in evolution, I thank God for my children and grandchildren and that their mother’s DNA has prevailed.

When I was a kid people didn’t die, they just became invisible and didn’t answer the phone.

One of those disappearances for me was my friend Haven Story. He’s a little different, though, because after a couple of decades, I still believe he lost his phone and will return my calls when he finds it.

This scenario was always more likely because he appeared to be indestructible, like he had been gifted with nine lives.

You pretty much could always count on updates about him getting to you before he did. I heard one time when he was in New York City, he hitched a ride with the trash truck to get to his next party.

One night in the late ’60s or early ’70s, we were at a party that was wrapping up somewhere around three or four in the morning when he made a troubling but carefully considered announcement:

“I think we have run out of thrills!”

He looked around and put his smoking cigar into an empty beer bottle as he reached for a phonebook.
“But I have an idea! We’ve got to go skydiving — right now!”

About an hour away in Orange, Massachusetts, there was a skydiving operation that would open for the day somewhere around 10 o’clock in the morning.

Without hesitation, we piled into the car, drove into the night, parked in the parking lot, and slept for a few hours. We were there when it opened.

There were four of us who sat in the classroom as they explained what we would do and what would happen. The instructor laid out a parachute and packed it so it would open when the ripcord was pulled. We were also given an emergency parachute which we were told we should “punch, pull and flap like a towel to catch the air as we were falling.”

Haven was always animated in whatever he was doing. He had an endless sense of humor as he engaged with the world. He used his hands to express the enormity of his thoughts.

Wide-eyed with excitement, he was ready to jump. He wanted to be at the head of the line and first to jump as we entered the plane.

The plane was a big cargo transport plane with enough room for about 20 jumpers. We sat on benches with our ripcords buckled to the plane above our heads.

Our target was a huge sandbox 3,000 feet below. After calculating the wind speed, the plane circled so that when we jumped the wind would generally take us in the direction of the sandbox. Then we were instructed: “Jump now!”

The instructor was on the ground with a walkie-talkie. He could give us instructions after the chute opened so that we could guide ourselves with his help to our “tuck and roll,” which minimized the impact of our landing.

Haven went first out the door with an unabashed scream of joy into the free fall until his shoot opened and he reached up to the toggles to navigate his way down.

I, a little more reluctantly, jumped next and fell into the tumult of wind until my chute opened, I reached up and grabbed my toggles, and found myself involuntarily swinging my feet far above the ground, observing the earth and its fields, rooftops, and intersecting highways before focusing on the upcoming sand landing.

It was an overwhelming moment. A mix of fear and exhilaration.

I saw Haven land and tuck and roll and stand up immediately and start jumping up and down as I stretched my feet out and prepared to land.

Haven ran to meet me with his chute dragging behind him. His eyes wide his arms flailing around him. He grabbed me and said “Let’s do it again! Let’s do it again! Woooooooooow! Let’s do it again!”

We really couldn’t say no. The four of us jumped three more times that day.

I miss Haven.

I think I’ll try him on the phone one more time.

I believe in those little miracles that go unnoticed unless you choose to recognize them.

This is about one of those little miracles.

Like many people this year, our Christmas was canceled when my wife Susan and I realized we had COVID. Our children and grandchildren and friends could not be put at risk.

I was unspeakably sad as I sat in a silent house surrounded by wrapped Christmas gifts that would remain unopened and visible for the rest of the day.

We survived. We went out to the driveway masked to deliver Christmas gifts to Susan’s children and their girlfriends, who are thankfully local. After New Year’s when our quarantine was over, we were fortunate to have my son visit with his girlfriend, which was wonderful. We will be driving gifts up to Connecticut to my daughter and her husband and my granddaughter in about a week. We survived.

But then one of those little miracles happened.

January 6th is the 12th day of Christmas which traditionally marks the end of that holiday’s celebrations. This year, that day also marked the one-year anniversary of the assault on the Capitol.

But it is also the birthday of a lifelong friend I met in law school over 40 years ago. He is now seriously disabled and not easily able to leave his house. Because of COVID, he was also unable to invite his family and friends to his home to celebrate Christmas or his 70th birthday. But his children and their loved ones spontaneously organized a surprise Zoom call to wish him a happy birthday.

The gathering on Zoom included not only his law school friends but also friends of all ages, backgrounds, and political beliefs. It was huge.

It is hard to feel joy from a Zoom call, but in this case, it was palpable and undeniably warm and beautiful. At the center of it was a man who has transcended difficulties with tenacity and joy and has always lived a passionate life of kindness and commitment.

The next day, I called him so I could talk to him one-on-one. During that call, he told a story quite accidentally.

He owns a beautiful little house near Annapolis, which he can only stay in during the summer because it is too difficult for him to travel back and forth.

A week or so before his birthday, he had been asked by a teacher at a special school if he could perhaps open up his summer house to help a troubled middle school student regain her sense of security in a new environment after a difficult event in her life.

My friend didn’t think twice. He told the teacher to open the house and turn on the heat and use it for as long as it could be helpful.

As he told the story he offhandedly said, “That was the most beautiful present I got for Christmas or my birthday.”

For me, selfish and sad in a house empty during Christmas, this brought what Christmas is, in full force, back to me.

He had received nothing and given instantly from his heart.

After the call I hung up and was surprised to find myself crying.

On the last day of Christmas, my friend had reminded me what Christmas is supposed to be: a moment of reawakening and joy in a forever troubled world.

My friend had given me that gift.

It was one of those little miracles.

This is a Halloween ghost story that may or may not be true. I’m not sure.

Since my post of a week ago and the coming of Halloween, I couldn’t get Eno English out of my head. After almost 60 years why did I remember his name?

A week ago, I wrote about this year’s Head of the Charles Regatta, and the beautiful clean water of the Charles River. This was in contrast to years ago when I was in ninth grade and the river was so dirty, we rowed past floating prophylactics and tin cans and even a floating pillow that turned over and was a dead body — later identified as Eno English.

It didn’t occur to me until last week, but I think I know where Eno might have come from.

I grew up in a little neighborhood called Coolidge Hill near the boat house and dock where Eno was found floating in the Charles. Coolidge Hill is located in between the Cambridge and Mount Auburn cemeteries and the little school I attended.

Mount Auburn cemetery was created in the 1831 to house the Cambridge aristocracy on 170 acres of high rolling land with little walks along majestic ponds surrounded by an impenetrably high black iron fence.

Mount Auburn Cemetery allowed no bikes or unsupervised children. I got my first bike, a fat wheeler, in middle school. I tried but could not get past the gate house on my bike, but I decided I would not be denied.

With my first bike I became an explorer. Like Columbus was determined to find the Orient, I decided I had to find a way into Mount Auburn Cemetery. I decided I would explore what I guessed might be the unguarded back fence near the Charles River.

Late one afternoon I left school and took my bike down past the boat house and proceeded upriver along the deserted overgrown roadless river bank for a quarter mile or so to find, much to my satisfaction, that there was some fence on the western boarder of the cemetery that had fallen with the eroding high bank. It must have given way with the rains and snow over the years and had slipped down onto a very small muddy plateau next to the Charles.

When I stopped to look I saw, to my surprise, a little path leading down to the river to the left, and several loose rolls of toilet paper hanging off a low bush. To my right I saw two small shacks that had been pulled together and hidden under several small scrub trees and underbrush up closer to the cemetery and the broken fence.

It must have been late fall, after Halloween I think, because it was getting dark early and it was a school night. I concluded that hobos must’ve lived here in the summer and had left because the weather was getting cold. There was no evidence of smoking fires or habitation.

As I laid down my bike and worked my way into the underbrush, I saw there were no windows in the two shacks and the doors had been left open. As I approached one shack I stepped on several bones that looked like they had been brought down with the erosion of the cemetery. I remember them as spongy, but I pushed on through the undergrowth because I could see through the open door what appeared to be girly magazines.

This lured me on because my only other alternative had been at the doctor’s office when I had to pretend to be interested in National Geographic. I pushed closer and closer to the open door.

The magazines were scattered all over the dirt floor and there was a pile of blankets over to the right. I carefully moved into the shack and knelt down to the magazines. The sun was going down. It was getting cold. I was alone. I had to get home but as long as there was light, I was going to see what this bounty held.

As I picked up one of the water-soaked magazines I was startled by an abrupt movement under the pile of blankets and a face stared back at me.

I bolted for the door and ran for my life to my bicycle. The man stood, reached for me and yelled. I ran as fast as I could, mounted my bike and peddled furiously until I could no longer hear his breathing.

The newspapers postured that Eno must’ve fallen into the river because his fly was open when he was fished out of the water.

That was almost 60 years ago.

My little bike ride along the Charles is paved now as Greenough Boulevard. It travels along the river’s edge and into new parking lots and developments along Arsenal Avenue and Watertown.

As far as I can tell there is no record of Eno English other than in my memory. He is a ghost that lives in my imagination and shelters in my brain and only came out with a random recollection a few days before Halloween.

Sort of spooky. Time for Eno to disappear again.

The kindnesses of the birthday wishes which I received on the 24th are much more appreciated than might be immediately obvious.

I want to briefly express my gratitude.

Facebook was an afterthought to promote an unlikely second career as a professional playwright and poet, which I have always half dreamed about but never had the courage to expressed to others.

When I started on this new career I fully recognized that the biggest problem I had was I had little or no credibility in this my new profession.

I had wonderful friends from high school and college but they were scattered across sixty years and several continents and I had wonderful friends from my prior career. I also had the invaluable friends I had made from the Baltimore theater community as a board member and amateur Playwright.

My Tuesday 3:00 pm (ET) Facebook posts and a webpage, created by new friends, developed into a blog, Instagram and Twitter accounts. Over the last five years I have been able to gather with my old friends and meet new friends in this new world which I would never have met but for these platforms.

Slowly over the last five years the unexpected has happened. I have received support and welcome criticism and the credibility I had hoped for because of the friends I have made or remade here.

I am very fortunate, because of you, to be happily living that dream I was previously too shy to express.

Thank You!

What is the matter with me? Is this pandemic changing my DNA?

What could be worse is that I am afraid that my house has become a COVID Cocoon but I sure as hell don’t feel like a butterfly in the making.

The only thing that might be worse is when you can’t get a song out of your head or… you start your own song and it rhymes and you can’t stop thinking you are… becoming a bug.

“So what did I do to get rid of this?
I went to the bookshelf but what did I see?
The first thing I saw was Kafka’s Metamorphosis
And I knew this was getting much bigger than me.”

It is true. The only thing worse than when you can’t get a song out of your head is when you know you’re becoming an insect.

My entire life, up to this point, all I knew was slap, squash, or use the fly swatter. I had never really paid attention to bugs. I just killed them.

Bugs clearly have individual intelligence and different IQs. Ants are organized, bees, and hornets are organized and mean, houseflies are existential daredevils, moths get suicidal, and stink bugs are just plain stupid.

Have you ever seen an ant make a decision? They are clearly deliberative and change their minds. I recently observed a particular ant for 15 minutes or so as it stopped, changed direction, exercised preferences, and hunted and gathered in my kitchen. It was just like me at the grocery store when I don’t have a shopping cart.

I clearly had to get out of the cocoon fast and go grocery shopping.

I got in the car, but imagined that there would be a sign on the grocery store door that said “No Bugs Allowed.”

I became frightened.

What scared me was the logic in that. The store obviously did not want bugs inside, but what about me? Don’t I have feelings too?

Once inside everyone was wearing masks and picking through the vegetables. They all look like unique little bugs with different IQs and shopping carts.

What does it mean that during winter they don’t sell fly swatters?

Then things got messy:

Maybe it’s all reverse reincarnation and the bugs were just waiting because they don’t want to become humans in a pandemic? Of course, that meant we had a lot in common, the bugs and I. Maybe Darwin was right. Maybe I’m not a caterpillar yet because I hate salads?

Maybe we — I mean all of us — wonder if we are being insensitive as we share the same universe?

Or maybe it might be nice if, one bright morning next spring, if I left my damn house after this whole thing is over… as a butterfly?

Being quarantined is like driving with your family at night when the government turns off your headlights.

First, you realize you must pull over because you don’t want to be stopped by an invisible tree or police officer.

The rest is endless waiting and the push and shove of group activity in a very contained space.

The driver instantly loses authority and the backseat gets more and more unruly. (This is an absolute truth.)

Actually, the seat belt is unbuckled for everybody.

There can be no consensus about the radio so it gets turned off.

Out come the cell phones, as people start thinking for themselves rather than for others, but there is no privacy so out come the headphones and the binge watching begins in strange existential silence.

Am I really watching “The Tiger King”?

The world outside the car is the enemy anyway, because no one can dress up to confront it. And worse, if they do, they must wear face masks and plastic gloves, which ruins the grooming and manicure.

As hope for alternatives disappear (“alternatives” are recognized to no longer be available), as a last resort we are confronted by our family and friends and the question:

“How did they happen?”

and

“Why did we end up in this car?”

It is not by accident.

Back when I was growing up in New England, the entire Northeast had a black out and nine months later the birth rate spiked!

You chose it. I don’t mean birth order—I mean you chose to get in the car. Is this car the architecture in which we chose to spend our precious time? Maybe? What are traffic jams anyway?

So why do cars have backseats? For procreation and the storage of loose children?

And this is who we end up with when the lights go out?

Oddly, as if by miracle, these strangers must be eventually confronted and recognized.

At different times for each of the people in the car, during their own moment of silence, something is recognized.

It is that you belong to them and they belong to you.

It happened to me. I am fortunate, and a little surprised to realize the “unexpected” has broken my status quo and given me an opportunity to get out of the car as a different person than when I got in it.

I am fortunate to have the friends and the wonderful extended family which I have.

But I had my moment.

I learned I don’t just want to travel with them. I want to appreciate them and not take them ever for granted and forget for a moment how much I love them again and again and again…

And why The Tiger King should probably end up in solitary.

Last Friday, I skipped lunch and went back to my Boston hotel room to watch Congressman Elijah Cummings’s funeral on TV.

Thirty-five years ago, when he was still a lawyer, we had a case together. I was representing a modular building company and he was representing one of the prominent African American churches in Baltimore, which had contracted with my client to buy and construct a building for Baltimore city primary school students.

Elijah and I met on the top floor of the church overlooking North Avenue where the ministers’ offices were located. He came over, shook my hand, and said, “I do a lot of criminal law and you know a lot more about business law than I do. Can we agree to work to make this fair for both sides?” I shook his hand and agreed that would be our objective.

The contract negotiations and construction took some time. As the building went up, there were adjustments to the plans and “change orders,” as there always are in construction cases, but we were candid with each other and each time we got it right.

Years later, I was at the Democratic convention in Boston and he saw me and came over and with a big smile he said: “Yeah! We learned to work well together didn’t we?” We both laughed.

I grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and one of my favorite places is an old rusted fountain dedicated to John F. Kennedy. It no longer works but still has his quotes chiseled on its sides.

My hotel was in Harvard Square, so after the funeral I walk down to the fountain and read the quotes again:

“Today the eyes of all people are truly upon us — and our governments, in every branch, at every level, national, state, and local, must be as a city upon a hill — constructed and inhabited by men aware of their grave trust and their great responsibilities.”

Next to the forgotten monument was a sign that said: “No Skateboarding.”
No one was there except a skateboarder, practicing and re-practicing his art, and me.

It occurred to me that there are always laws which will be broken but we all, somehow, are subject to a deeper code. This was what Elijah understood.

Thousands of people, whether in the church or on TV, watched Elijah’s funeral. They watched and listened and were there because Elijah was an example of something we seem to not be able to forget.

Although in our daily lives and in our politics and governance it is sometimes lost, it is there in that handshake, that eye contact, that second thought that reminds us that it is as constant as gravity.

I saw Elijah on and off after that, in airports or at campaign events. He had become my Congressman. We would smile or wave. We were not friends, but we had once come to an understanding because he had offered up his vulnerability so that I could offer mine. And we could trust each other just long enough to do something right.