Birthday: December 23, 2014

While walking home from school one afternoon -- I was six or seven -- some kid punched me in the stomach. It must have been Fall or Winter because I carry the image of a thick outer jacket with a belt. I can't remember why or what was said but I remember the punch well enough. No pain -- the thick material snuffed the blow -- but blind panic. I bolted away and ran into the street where I was seriously clobbered and dragged by a car until someone pointed out to the driver that there was a kid stuck in his wheel well. I don't remember pain or anything else, but I still have a sense of the angle of the stretcher as it left the ground and slid into the ambulance. My mother was there, I know, but her presence was vague. Apparently, I had taken a beating but all systems were still intact, nothing broken, nothing missing, nothing critical. A month in my parents' big mahogany bed and lots of presents. It could have been much worse, except I was plagued by the thought that I had run like a coward instead of fighting back. Even had the kid hurt me it would never have been nearly as devastating as getting hit by a car. What really hurt was knowing I'd run away. It was humiliating, something that lingers like dog shit on my fingers even after all these years. What was born that day decades ago was the drop dead absolute certainty that such a thing would never happen to me again. I've conducted my life to ensure it. Even today at the age of 74 my guard remains up.  At some point, more recently than you might think, I came to understand that I did not really want to hurt anybody. It was simply that I didn't want anybody to hurt me. I'm sure this also has a lot to do with having grown up in a house where anything not bolted down was a potentially lethal weapon in my mother's hands. Old friends, family, and followers of this blog can attest to this carnage.

I don't know why I'm thinking about this, nor do I know where it's going, but today's my birthday, and this is what's coming out.

So.

And then there was the time I directed my first big musical, "Carousel", at the New Haven Jewish Community Center, right around the corner from the Yale School of Drama where I was a student, circa 1965. Their productions were elaborate and quite good for community theatre, in part because they were always bringing in ringers from Yale in key roles, the director being one of them. This was a plum job, one vied for by the student directors. only I was not a director but got it anyway. The fact that I was a Jewish boy from Baltimore didn't hurt. so, not only did I direct "Carousel" I was fed by every Jewish family in town. Not only fed but I was proposed to three times although I can only remember two of them, both very big ladies. It was a helluva year.

Opening night was a big success, and Mom was there. She was always there at milestone events, even attended my graduation from Parris Island, walked across the parade field, right up to my drill instructor and thanked him for taking such good care of me. "Very nice," she said, and waited patiently for me to walk her back to her hotel as I addressed the cast and gave notes. Very nice. She was quiet on the walk back. When we got to the corner opposite her hotel I said, "OK, Mom, out with it. I know you're dying to tell me something."
            "Not really, darling," she said -- We had a green light but she stayed put -- "Actually, I do have one suggestion. I see you going this way and that way, busy, busy, busy doing what you do very well, I might add. Don't think I'm not proud. A mother's proud but you don't need a mother you need a wife. Somebody pretty. She'll stand beside you, hold your hand, bring you tea at rehearsals..."
            "Are you out of your mind?" I yelped.
            "You asked."
            "I'm not doing this," I said and threw up my hands.
            "Doing what?"
            "Go home. Wait for a green light, go back to the hotel, pack, and go home." With that I turned around, walked away, and left her standing there.

A few days later a letter arrives. It's from Mom. "Dearest Son, Please believe me when I tell you that all mothers truly love their children and are very proud of them, even if those children are mentally retarded. Love and kisses, Mother."

An old friend, gay and now dead once said to me, "With a mother like yours it's a wonder you're not sleeping with me." You can see that Lizzy Hermanson was a serious opponent. Like a good boxer the woman could come at you from many different angles. She was relentless, tireless, always locked and loaded, ready for the next round.  When I was a teen I used to think, "Just be quiet for two weeks, just two weeks, and I'll be what you want." But she never was, and neither was I.

My First Pair of Jeans

                                               

1952 or 3, Baltimore, Maryland.

My father liked characters. He collected them. If he had been a writer it would have been a Damon Runyon, a Ring Lardner, an A.J. Liebling. Ruby was no kind of bandit but he enjoyed keeping track of the small time hustlers who worked the neighborhood: the bag man, the bookie, the street preacher, colored men (known as street Arabs) on mule drawn wagons hawking fruits and vegetables, women sitting on stoops, church women with enormous hats, neighborhood kids running every which way. He owned and operated the Ruby Tire Company (or Rooby Tar as spoken by a native Baltimorean) where he retreaded bald tires and sold new ones in just about the poorest neighborhood in the city. I worked there from the age of eleven until Ruby died in 1963. The world that encompassed Ruby Tire was made up largely of narrow alleyways lined with warrens of row houses built after the civil war. The “place” (which is how the family referred to it) was on Fremont Avenue bordering an alley, and sat back a block from where Fremont intersected with Baltimore Street, a lively though shabby thoroughfare that began deteriorating before I was born. It was lined by small businesses, many of which were already closed and boarded. Gray was the dominant color. Louis the Greek’s was the restaurant just on the other side of Baltimore Street where I ate many, many plates of hamburger steak smothered in onion gravy, with a pick-up stix pile of French fries. Louis had a picture of his son, a wrestler in tights, on the wall above the counter. Up the street a way was a gypsy fortune-teller who was always trying to entice me into her shop. I say entice but, really, she’d pop out of her door and try to drag me in by my arm. She’d also be trying to nick my wallet with her other hand, but I always pulled away from her. It was annoying but it was also funny, a little something to make the walk more interesting.

            On this particular Spring day, somewhere in the really early fifties, I had saved up the money to buy my first pair of dungarees from the Hecht Bros. department store and was walking back to Ruby Tire down Baltimore Street with them on. It was really an act of rebellion (though I hadn’t yet thought of it that way), my first stylistic break with the Ivy League uniform of khakis and button down oxford blue shirts. The only other guys who wore dungarees back then were bikers, gentile guys from tough neighborhoods, and those who worked in cornfields. The new dungarees were very stiff, and I had them folded up to about a one-foot cuff to keep from tripping. The idea was to get into a bathtub with them on, get out and let them dry on you so they conformed to your particular shape and size. Miraculously, my stomach would be firm and my hips would finally be narrower than my shoulders, but, even as it was, I was feeling pretty cool. Then the gypsy jumped out from her doorway like one of those spiders that leap from ambush as an unsuspecting bug strolls by. “C’mere, c’mere,” she said and tried to grab my shirt. I twisted away. “What do you think I’m going to do with you?” she asked.

 “I don’t have any money,” I protested.

             “Who said money?” She made it sound like a command. “Stop. C’mere, You think you look good, kid, but you look stupid.”

“Huh?”

“Come on. C’mere.” She waved me over. I still didn’t move. She sighed and shrugged and got down on her knees right there on the sidewalk then waved me over again, and this time I went. She unrolled my one-foot cuffs and refolded each of them meticulously as a two-inch cuff that she folded up to size until it rested lightly on the laces of my desert boot. “There,” she said and smiled at her work. “Help me up,” she said and used my knee to give herself a boost. That fast she had my wallet out of my back pocket and turned inside out looking for money. When she didn’t find any she tossed it back. “You get a fashion tip it’s worth something. What’s in your pocket?” she asked.

“Nothing,” and turned them inside out to demonstrate.

“You owe me, boy,” she said. “Come back and I’ll tell yer fortune half price. Yer daddy, too.”  I must have looked surprised at that. “Rooby Tar,” she said.”  Yer  Rooby’s boy. I know who you are.”

Time of Death: Sunday, October 26, 2014, 8:55 a.m.

Monday, October 27, 2014

We will bury her tomorrow.

Tuesday, October 28, 2014

She fought all the way through the end, at first, maybe fighting to stay alive, then fighting to die: refusing medicine, refusing food, simply refusing, I think, to live. I had not seen her for two years, a time that coincided with her descent into dementia. My cousin Suzy said she spoke with a death 'n' dying expert who said that her children had to visit her and give her permission to let go. I am, to say the least, sceptical of such stuff, but I went. She was unconscious and looked every inch a concentration camp inmate tossed on a pile of other mangled corpses. She had recently taken a fall when for some reason she tried to get out of her wheelchair and took a face plant, so there she was with half her face deep purple, her forehead split, wearing a collar, her face contorted. Jaw slack. Hands and wrists like bird claws. One hundred years and eight months. How could she still be alive? My sister went to do some business at the front desk. I stayed awhile, then I said, "OK, mom. I'm heading back to LA", and walked from the room. This was about six p.m., maybe seven. Her dying began shortly thereafter, and by 8:55 a.m., Sunday, she was gone.

There is more to this. As I've said elsewhere, a lot of what but very little why, at least, not to me.

My trip to Baltimore, city of my birth, had been planned for weeks. It would include old friends, family, and my first visit to the Morgan campus in fifty years. It began the Tuesday before her death. I finished closing our home for Winter in the Catkills and drove the Jeep to Boston where I left it with my daughter. I spent two delicious days with Madden until Thursday morning when she took me to South Station for a seven hour train ride to Baltimore. Madden urged me to see my mother (she had a much more benign image of Bubbe based on having once done her nails), but I had no plans to do so and, though I hate to refuse Madden anything, was right adamant about it.

Fifteen minutes later than scheduled my train arrived at Penn Station, Baltimore, a railroad station my family had used even before my birth. Beloved Uncle Milton always arrived from New York City at Penn Station, and when my father came to pick me up -- a slick sleeve grunt on leave from four months in the Marine Corps, swaggering like an old salt -- he walked right by me. "Dad," I called. He stopped, turned around, gasped, and stifled a sob. This night, however, when I'd just arrived from Boston, an old high school buddy picked me up and took me for the ritual Chesapeake Bay dinner: crab soup and a back fin crabcake the size of a softball. Two beers and a martini later, we might as well have been back in high school. We were having that much fun. But, when with friends, the conversation invariably came around to my mother. She was famous among my friends. Most of them had only seen the side she chose to show them, mostly an energetic and enthusiastic side. She was a lot of fun one friend recently told me. People have good memories of her. Howard asked about her. She'd barely been awake for  months, didn't recognize anybody any more. Are you going to see her, he asked? Not planning to. "You should." Why? "It's a mitzvah," he said, a mitzvah, in this case, being a good deed, a fine thing to have on your spiritual resume. "She won't even know me, worse if she does."  "Go," he said, "Say goodbye." "Suppose she's not awake?" "Do it anyway." "Why? And don't gimme that horseshit about it being my mother. I know who she is. She's why we're having this conversation." Howard's a really good guy, a mensch di tutti menschen, so I told him I'd think about it.

The next day I had lunch with Carolyn Wainwright, the first actress ever to do a play of mine when we were both students at Morgan. She was a Dotson back then, fifty years ago. We laughed and yakked away and heartily enjoyed each other's company. And then she asked how my mother was. She remembered her as a cheerful, funny lady, easy to be with. I told her of my mother's condition and that I hadn't seen her since she entered deep dementia two years ago. "You have to go see her," said Carolyn. "Why?" "Because she gave you life." She was adamant. I told her I'd think about it. That was Friday. When I went to bed that evening I was teetering on the edge. I meant what I'd said to Howard: worse than unconscious would be conscious.  I'd kept a life time of crazy mostly at bay, and I wasn't about to put myself in danger again at this end stage of a long and bloody war.

I woke up the next morning not knowing why only what: I would go to see her. I asked my sister who reluctantly said yes and my brother who said no, and Ellen suggested a time much later in the day, down to the last possible nanosecond that the place our mother was in would let us through the door. My sister delayed, and I was just as happy to be delayed except I also wanted to get it over with.  As I already told you, this was late in the day on Saturday, nearly seven. Then Sunday morning. You know the rest.

The cousins' get together was as scheduled Sunday afternoon at Peggy's, cousins and cousins of cousins, so the talk was mostly about Aunt Lizzy. It was good to be with them. They knew her well and remembered her as the one who introduced us all to culture: art museums, symphonies, theatre. She was the one who threw all the cousins into her 1940 Ford and took us to West Virginia on back roads. She was a Jew from North Fork and bragged about how she was delivered by Dr. Hatfield of the Hatfields and the McCoys. Come to think of it, and I mean really come to think of it as in right this instant come to think of it, Aunt Lizzy never touched one of the cousins, and I can't remember any of them being berated until they were adults and off with their own families when she could find nothing good to say about any of them. The funeral was set for Tuesday morning. Monday was my planned visit to Morgan, and there was no way I would miss it. Tuesday morning. My Cousin Suzy offered her home as the shiva house.

There are orthodox women who volunteer to bathe and dress the dead. She was wrapped in a shroud with a prayer shawl around her shoulders and placed in what seemed to me a hastily made pine box. The lid had a Star of David on it, but it was no snug join. One corner was slightly off. She would have had a fit. The coffin stayed closed. She had been a tiny woman, yet it appeared so big I had to wonder at her in there? She never broke four-eleven and was much smaller as she aged. Was it so that she was truly in that box? That's what was in my mind, and it stayed there as the coffin lowered into the earth, and one by one mourners lined up to pitch a shovel of dirt into the grave. Each made a hollow sound when it hit the lid. I didn't participate. I just watched; and, when everyone else returned to their cars, I simply stood there looking down into the grave. The dirt. The lid. The Star of David. Was she really in there? Where was her temper now? Why wasn't she banging her heels and flailing about? Had her temper cut loose (like a soul some would say) and soared up into the stratosphere to wage eternal war with the winds? Years before she'd said to my nephew, "Jonathan, if Uncle Stephen cries at my funeral, you have my permission to break his nose." I'm sure you're relieved to know that a punch to the nose was never needed. Put that in a eulogy. I think I just beat myself to it.

What nags at me is the symmetry of it all. A trip that had been planned for weeks to include family time did just that. My bags were already packed and loaded into my sister's car, an easy transfer from her car to my brother's at the cemetery. The shiva house was a half hour away. My cousin Suzy had spread a table with every kosher delicacy Baltimore had to offer. We got to the shiva house at two, stayed till four, then my brother, Joel, took me to the airport. At 6:40 p.m. my plane to LA took off. The flight had been booked for weeks. Exquisite timing. Some might say cosmic. There could not have been a more perfect plan they say. "You were in Baltimore. You gave her permission to go." A grand coincidence. Still. Here's what I read somewhere: "When I pray, coincidences happen. When I don't, they don't." I don't necessarily subscribe to this, but standing by her bedside looking at this battered creature I wanted her out of her misery. I didn't think of this as a prayer, not then, anyway, just a wish for her to be peaceful. What to make of it? Out there is a multiverse of infinite questions and infinite possibilities, and you shouldn't trust me for the answers. I might have them, but that doesn't make me right. Yet, lurking in some faraway corner of my brain is the notion of all this having been pulled together without me. It seems in some far corner of my brain that I might be a witness to my own disbelief.

She's dead for sure. She hasn't clawed her way to the surface. She remains where she was put. However -- here we need a drum roll -- it really doesn't feel that  much different than it ever has. Like Robert DeNiro as Jake Lamotta  after he had taken a beating from Sugar Ray Robinson. Barely able to stand without holding onto the ropes, Lamotta taunts him. "I'm still standin', Ray. I'm still standin'." Me 'n' Jake, priding ourselves that we're each still standing. I'm not saying there's no work to be done. Even now, at this late stage, there's still plenty of it. I haven't reached nirvana, yet (the Jewish version), but I know that bitterness and anger are not the trails to take. Recently, someone told me I was kind. I've never thought of myself that way nor had anyone ever said that to me. I liked it. It was nice. Kind. Yes. That's a new one on me, but I'll take it.

In Transit - October, 2014 - Triple Creek to LA

Our corner of the Catskills peaked a week ago in a rush of sunshine that gave one final push to those leaves and blew them out in a blaze of glory. Last year a surplus of apples covered the ground like a billion ball bearings. Walking was a balancing act. This year no apples at all, but the mountains maintained a palette of colors that made my heart beat faster. I am headed for Los Angeles in a week, and by the time I leave, the trees will be bare; the color will be gone. Winter is unofficially here. The song birds have gone. Jays and chickadees have shown up. Everything quiets down. The peep of the chickadee is nice to hear, but the shrieks from the jays and the squawks from the crows only mean mischief. "Stand aside," they seem to say, "I got my thing to do." And then they do it and make enough damn noise to make sure we all know they did it. As for the locals they either made it through the winter, or they didn't. Winter kill happens. Count on it. My gargantuan sunflowers attest to this. One week ago they were ten feet tall -- an entire row of them -- with flowers so large they looked like they were trying to snag radio signals from outer space. Now they are bent low like haggard old ladies. They are not resting on their canes. They are in mourning.

A new species has come into our valley this past year. Thirty plus years ago we were the new species: two veterans of Hollywood and Broadway with income independent of the local economy. Our neighbors had been here longer than that: mountain people who long ago learned how to make it work.through hardscrabble labor and a determination not to let the weather whip them. I believe when we moved here there were maybe two second homes other than our own -- a cabin and a bunkhouse on acreage at the end of the valley that's been in the same family for a hundred years, and a girl scout camp that was turned into a stables. A former Miss Poland lived there for awhile where she often called us to come and get our dog. He'd long since sacrificed his testicles for civilization, but she had three females and didn't trust him. Aside from Miss Poland and the Fiesingers no one else comes to mind.

Since then the demographics have changed. My neighbors, a retired couple half a mile west, no longer operate as a B & B (save for hunting season) and complain that they left Brooklyn years ago to get away from these people, and now they've tracked them down here, these people being the folks half a mile east in their early thirties, recent migrants from Brooklyn, who now run their own place for folks who seem to come primarily from Brooklyn, hip and lively and stylish. They made this month's Vogue which is not a problem for me since I can use some hip and lively from time to time, and a little style never hurts. If I'm not mistaken, I am now the oldest person in this valley; but, if I am mistaken, I'm close. I belong here. I may not have decades ago but I do now. I've transited from curious species to neighbor to local. A neighbor meant people knew where I was if they needed me. A local is someone who sits on the porch with another local and watches the changes pass by. They're still sitting there the next time you pass by as well. Sometimes you'll stop, and when you do you'll find out who butchered the sheep back then and that he shot himself when he became too weak to work, something common to farmers up here when they no longer felt useful. That sort of thing. Stories to tell. Lore. And now I am the repository of some of it, one of the voices that passes it on.

   

My Momocidal Maniac

Momocidal maniacs. Mothers who kill. Mine.  Pole-ax the heart. Gut the soul. Cripple the dream. What dream? Mine. Who said you could have one?  The woman in the black and white photo is twenty-seven years old with a month old infant in her arms. Seventy-three years ago. The sun shines through the window. She is smiling, no older than my son is now, smiling at the tiny thing in her arms. There is no hint here of anger. Her brothers and sisters said it was always there, even when she was very young, but I don't see it, not in this picture, anyway. She seems serene and happy, not how I remember her. Once I heard her say that she knew she had a temper, but, after five minutes, it's all over, like it never happened. All over for her, yes, but the collateral damage remains. She was under four feet, eleven inches tall and never weighed more than ninety pounds, small, compact, like a hand grenade.

The first time I ran away from home I was four years old. I remember stashing all the things I'd need -- coloring books, crayons, my sipping cup, a picture book of dinosaurs -- all the essentials. I hid them underneath the living room sofa until I could make my getaway. When I made my move my get-away kit was too heavy for me to carry, so I left it there. I managed to get across the street to Aunt Mildred's. The next time I got further. I was eleven. I don't remember the inciting incident -- the usual assault and battery stuff -- but I remember collecting all the loose coins I could find, taking a streetcar downtown to the bus station, buying a ticket, and arriving in New York City with nothing in my pocket but a pocketknife. The goal was to find shelter with my favorite relative, Uncle Milton, who lived there. I walked from Port Authority in the forties to Willoughby's Cameras in the thirties where he worked in the advertising department. Everybody knew me because he'd taken me to work on a former visit. "Hey, what're you doing here?" someone asked."I came to see Uncle Milton," I said, only to find out he'd gone to Baltimore for the week-end, and I was in New York City, eleven years old, all by my lonesome. Jess Wilkes, a friend of my uncle's, put me up for the night and shipped me back to Baltimore the next morning. I walked into the kitchen expecting to be hit with something, but nobody paid any attention to me at all. Nothing out of the ordinary. My father was napping on the sofa in the family room with the funny papers over his face, an Orioles game on the radio. My mother folded laundry. There was a roast beef sandwich on the kitchen table. It was a tactic, a rare moment of family sanity. I don't remember any others. The next time I ran away I found myself at the Marine Corp Recruit Depot, Parris Island, South Carolina. It seemed calm by comparison. Here was my Drill Instructor's first speech: "My name is Staff Sergeant Smith, and I am your Drill Instructor. You will address me as sir. I am your mother and your father packed into one big, ugly package. Your soul may belong to Jesus, but your ass belongs to me."

I told you, calm by comparison.
                                                       **********************

If Jane Austen will forgive me, it is a truth, universally acknowledged, that a new Marine in possession of a Parris Island education not be fucked with. Having said that, here goes.

Back then there were no SEALS, no Green Berets. There were Marines.

And I was one. I was a slick sleeve private, a lowly grunt, but I was one of Uncle Sam's Misguided Children now, and nothing, not no Hell nor high water, could stop me. It was in this state that I went home to Baltimore for a week's leave, liberty they called it.

I arrive at Penn Station, Baltimore, in uniform, and my father who has come to pick me up walks right by me. "Hey, Dad!" When he turns around and realizes it's his son he actually stifles a cry. The week went, as a gentleman from Minsk might shrug and ask, "How should it go?" Family. Friends. The usual internecine tumult. Laughter. Bickering. Open wounds. Salt to rub in them. Cousins rolling bandages in the kitchen. Tourniquettes handy. Hearing for the umpteenth time how your Uncle Herbie always hit on her, how her boss tried to crawl in bed with her. What was she doing in the bed, anyway, and, more to the point, do I really need to know this? The week went, and everyone was still standing, given the requisite sarcasm and sniping. Today I would call what went on in my house back then asymetrical warfare. Attack, inflict maximum damage, fade back into the woodwork. That was a good day. You just might get hit with a hanger or rapped with a wooden spoon, but that was it. Let me tell you about a bad day. She went after my brother with a baseball bat, swung, missed, and split the top of a vanity. True dat. But that wasn't a really bad day. A really bad day would mean she'd have connected. A really really bad day would be when a seven year old gets his nose bashed in with a heavy, cut glass, crystal ashtray. That seven year old had Tourette's, and he had twitched.

So, it was the night before I would report to Camp Lejeune. She'd been berating my sister over some grave transgression, picked up a stainless steel ladle and went after her. I yelled at her to cut the shit, and she turned and came at me.

Let's pause here a minute.

I know something about violence. It's one of those things like riding a bicycle. Once it's in you, you've got it. You don't even think about it. If the time comes, when it comes, you just do it. For the past few months I'd been in survival mode daily, not one day off ever. Mostly I was learning not to hurt. So when she came at me -- no thought at all -- I stepped to the side and slugged her. A straight left. Suffice it to say, she went down. I never told my body what to do. It knew before I did. Many years later, while going through a divorce, I made the mistake of visiting Baltimore. I had this crazy notion there might be some comfort there. At the time my mother lived in an apartment with a kitchen just large enough to allow a small, round ice cream parlor table and two chairs across from each other. She sat in one chair. I sat in the other. She kept asking me questions about the divorce. "Mom, I don't want to talk about it." This did not stop her. And the more she asked and the more I wouldn't answer the angrier she became. Goddamn woman, she bristled with it! I was watching madness. It was an epiphany. Mom was nuts. "You know what?" I said, truly incredulous, "You're really crazy." She was up out of her seat, fists clenched, ready to rumble. I jump up with my right fist cocked. She slams on the brakes a la Wiley Coyote. "You're gonna hit me just like you did in the Marines," she said. "One more step," I told her, "One more." There was no doubt in either of our minds what would happen if she didn't back off.

She's warehoused now, lying in bed or tied to a chair so she doesn't slip to the floor. She's half way to one hundred and one, and her mind has all but been erased. What's left is her basic meanness. When she's awake she throws cups of coffee at people and calls them names. She was thrown out of two nursing homes before this one -- for violence. Truth. Mostly, though, her head hangs to one side, and she repeats the sound ma ma over and over, mamamamamamama...So many times while growing up we heard, "You're making your bed. You're going to lie in it." It was uttered not in warning but as a curse, an outcome devoutly to be wished, and there she lies. Mamamamamamama...

August: Spruceton: Triple Creek: 2014

Not ten days in and the leaves have begun to change. Wasn't May just yesterday? Didn't the garden just go in? When did the sunflowers get to be six feet tall? My inner time clock  says it's still Spring, yet there was a red and yellow maple leaf on the front lawn. That was yesterday, too. It's not that one can look at the mountains and see colors. Not yet. It's still very green. Goldenrod, tall and yellow, bobs and weaves in the breeze. Purple loosestrife juts up all over the place. Queen Anne's :Lace seems to spread her canopies up and down the road. Pull up a clump, scrape the root with your fingernail, put to nose. Smells just like a carrot, doesn't it? A far-sighted farmer way back in time bred it to be just that.

If you visited you'd think it was simply a beautiful summer day, and, yes, it would be. However, people who live here are aware of subtle change and know that the blue jays, a winter bird, are maybe two weeks away. The air smells crisp and clean. Pelts become thick and full. Spots on fawns begin to fade.Blackberries are here. Apples coming soon. The bears will be up in those trees. Deer are scraping off their velvet. You can see where they walk by a patch of bark rubbed off the trunk of a sapling. Three more weeks and the fire bush will be bright red. Three more weeks and summer is gone. Where are the snows of yesteryear? someone once asked. If you live here you know they're on the way. And the tomatoes haven't even come in yet.

If you live here you know the change never stops. You may not see it but it happens anyway, and eventually -- even though you had no hand in it nor will you have a hand in it -- what happened will sink in. One day the grass is a trifle more brittle. One day the trees, their proud chests swollen with summer leaves, are a shade less green. The clover dies out. The thyme comes in. My forehead now sports an age spot. It wasn't there, and then it was. And is. If you don't change you die, although you're going to die whether you change or not. But the journey! Oh, yes, the journey is so much more interesting when you don't know for sure where you're going or even where you are. Call me a Luddite, but if I had my way I'd ban GPS systems. It lops off yet another innate, natural skill: the ability to find our way back. I've been lost in Alaska. I've been lost in a rain forest. Hell, I've been lost on the mountain outside my back door. But just because you lose the trail doesn't mean that's the end of the trail, something a tracker told me a long time ago. His way would not be my way but here's what he told me: when you're lost sit down, settle down, stare at the ground and breathe deeply. Then you look up at the sky and ask for help. You'll find your way. As I said, not really my way, but it sure worked for him. I've found that if I stay calm and keep walking down hill I'll eventually get where I'm going. Or somewhere else. But, not to worry. I will get there.

In the woods and mountains where we live, we know there is a reason for everything, even when it's not readily apparent. This past spring there were more mice than usual. Then I noticed more rabbits than usual. There were also far more turkey poults than I've seen before. How come? A neighbor told me that ruffed grouse, partridges, were back. He'd seen a lot of them up at the tree line of Rusk Mountain. How's that? Their numbers have been down for years. As preface to my answer, let me explain that in all the decades I've lived here I've seen a fox maybe four times. Yet, this past spring there were foxes all over the place. Two dens within walking distance of each other. One den is across the creek on a dead neighbor's property. The other is in another neighbor's abandoned barn. Four times in thirty-one years? How about a dozen times these past two weeks? Sleek. Black noses. Red fur. Bushy tails. I watched an unusually long line of poults follow their mother hen into the woods, and a couple of days later saw the little foxes returning to the barn from that same trail. Haven't seen the turkey there since. Was there more food because there were more foxes? Were there more foxes because of all the extra food? I don't know why. I just know what.

I think I'm beginning to ramble, so I'm just gonna stop.

Happiness Is For Idiots

It was my mother's mantra in the house of horrors where she remorselessly tortured three siblings until each was old enough to beat it the hell out of there. Happiness is for idiots. She was like a woodpecker perched on one's ear tapping away at one's head. "Only idiots are happy" was the single variant of the theme. If that woman's corpse ever undergoes autopsy (she's currently approaching 101), the doctor will discover a venom sack instead of a heart. "How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is to have a thankless child," you say? All I can say in return is that you weren't there when missiles were airborne and the weapon du jour was whatever object was closest to hand. It wasn't easy, folks. It was not easy. It's taken a lifetime.

Normally, when I wake up in the morning I have two first thoughts 1). Oh, good, I'm still alive, and 2). Coffee! One morning (already many decades into my life) I woke up to something new, a feeling  which was like the feeling I imagine Gatsby might  have had while he was under the summer sun in that elegant swimming pool, dozing on his rubber raft. The instant before the bullet entered Gatsby's brain, that very instant for him could well have been sublime, his last thought, one without anger or anguish, might well have been of Daisy's adoring face. Lenny, from Steinbeck's "Of Mice and Men", suits this trope as well. The very instant Lenny is awash in the fantasy of the farm they will someday have, of the rabbits he will raise, that very instant George puts a bullet in the back of his dear friend's head. Lenny dies happy. George will never be. Yet, his act is an act of love. And the act that eventually gets Gatsby killed is also an act of love. Anyone see a lesson somewhere in this?

History is needed here: for most of my writing life I credited my anger for my success. The best work, I believed, came from heartfelt pain and a core of righteous fury fueling my hero's and heroine's journeys as they pummeled their way to ultimate victory. Revenge! "How sweet it is" as Jacky Gleason used to say when threatening to put Alice on the moon. Of course, he never did nor ever would. We wouldn't have watched otherwise. Come on. What is the lesson here, and how did I miss it for so long?

More history: I was fortunate enough to sell my first film script before I'd ever set foot in Hollywood, a script titled, "The Hunting of Pink Mountain Tinney". It brought with it a three picture deal at Universal. My radar tells me that it would not work the same way these days, probably, would not work at all, period. I'd never been to film school, had never taken a course in screenwriting, improvised the form, balked at watching the Academy Awards, was only minimally taken with the medium unlike most of my peers, and told a love story set in a coal mining town in West Virginia in the 20's. Try and sell that one today. You'd get laughed out of somebody's office is my guess, or tossed out. It took me a long time to realize how fortunate I'd been. I was unconscious until friends brought it to my attention. Hard to believe the naivete, right? I have my lapses. Have had.

I was still living in New York working at becoming a paid playwright (as if) when the phone rang and a secretary told me that Jennings Lang was coming to New York and wanted to meet with me (We'd never yet spoken) at Universal on Park Avenue. All I knew about the man was that he bought my script, signed me up, and set me free of my day job. A meeting? Sure, right there.

Yes, I was impressed. The halls and offices were so thickly carpeted that all the sound was muffled. There were no footfalls. There was a hush over everything. It had the feel of a sanctum in which important decisions were made but sedately and out of sight of commoners. You heard nothing. Contrast this with the last time I was in a "major office" in Beverly Hills waiting for a meeting to begin. Clickety click. Clickety click. High heels on marble. Nice. Sexy. But not reassuring at all.

OK. So, my meeting with Jennings Lang. It was reassuring (I said I was naive.). Jennings was respectful  and  impressive, so I gradually gained the confidence to open my mouth. We'd gotten to talking about the action elements in my script, and I patted myself on the back for writing such riveting sequences. The future would be full of them. No doubt. Bread and butter. Yo! "Hold on a minute," interrupted Jennings, "I didn't buy your script for the action. I bought it for the love story." The love story! Geez! The mystery of my life and career is why it took me so long to arrive at the truth. In geological time it seems as if it only just happened.

But that morning I'm talking about, the one that began all this, that morning I woke up and I was happy. How did I know, not being used to such a thing, that this was happiness? I didn't at first, but, since I believe in evolution, I knew something was different, yet  it felt pretty good, and what I really wanted was to get to my desk  in the mountains and write. I didn't have to fight it. There was little struggle. I thought of a book, "The Unbearable Lightness of Being".  A momentary spasm. Happiness? I actually began to feel that I was finally where I was supposed to be, and I did not want to be anywhere else. "I am Writer; Hear me roar!" It's about goddamn time, bub! You do what you do because it is what you do, and it's gotta get done. You've jettisoned the gumption trap, amigo. Now, get with it. Zen and the art, or, as the Marines say, "Just do it". It doesn't need to come from solely a place of anger. It can come from someplace softer. It can come from love, too. Both the love and the anger come from the same deep well anyway.

My current fervent hope is that my Ivy League friends don't heave when they read this.

Morgan State and The Superstition Wilderness

I graduated from Morgan fifty years ago. I recently found a photograph taken of my entire graduating class in caps and gowns on bleachers in the football stadium. As I remember, there were about three hundred and fifty of us. Find me. I can't even find myself. It makes me remember what it was like crossing the quad during class changes. Whoa! Negroes! 360 degrees of Negroes! Total surround. Two thousand students. Various hues. All Negro! But not me. I was the only one like me. I'm trying to remember what I was feeling at the time, what I was thinking, or whether I was just rushing to class like everyone else?

Wait a minute! Wait a minute! There's another memory fighting for space. It does have bearing. I think. Not sure. I'm gonna go with it.

A good forty years ago I was somewhere in the desert surrounding the Superstition Wilderness in Apache Junction, Arizona. What it is today is not what it was then.. I remember Main Street in Apache Junction as maybe four, wooden, sand blasted, decrepit shops, one of them a custom shoemaker who made me a set of moccasins. Now, it's a destination. Superstition Mountain, a rugged fortress of rock pillars and twisted canyons, repository of myths and demons, loomed in the background. It wasn't a national monument then, so anybody who could withstand the rigors of the trek and the remorseless sun could go in there. Mostly nobody did, and those who did were mostly prospectors looking for the fabled Lost Dutchman Gold Mine: an eponymous site rumored to be on the burial grounds of the local Apache Thunder God Himself. Which is how I wound up in Apache Junction myself. I'd been hired to write a movie, so I went to see what treasures I could find.

The desert does strange things to people when they spend their daily lives under that sun. It cooks their brains, turning all those dendrites and ganglia into a gelatinous mush you need to eat with a spoon, like Jello or brains. Folks will rave at the drop of a hat -- true believers -- often exasperating but never boring. "Me? A desert rat? Damn tootin'!" -- "Proud to be, by Jesus, yessir!" -- after which you'll hear for sure some fervent monologue, part myth, part opinion. Mostly the myths were "true stories" of death and disaster in the Supe. Prospectors snuck up on and mysteriously beheaded, mysteriously disappeared. Had they gotten too close to the Thunder God's lair? Had some claim jumper bushwhacked and murdered them? Had they gone mad and died of thirst? Had they been sucked up by extra-terrestrials? Very dramatic stuff. If a man didn't get them what ghost or demon did? It was fraught with danger. If you weren't ready for it, you dasn't  go there. Mostly, people didn't, not back then, anyway.

But I met a man who'd been in and out of the Superstition countless times. He was eighty-seven when I met him and barely able to walk from having spent a life time in the saddle. Fella could've been the Marlboro man's grandfather. Early on in the 20th century, he led the first search and rescue mission into the desert wilderness and did the same most of his life. I don't remember how I got to him or what his name was, but, we spoke before I went in, and, as we spoke, he braided a set of leather reins and barely looked up. His opinion came quick and clean. "Ain't nothin' gonna hurt you out there. That mountain does to you what you bring to it." Yes, he did, yes, he carried a pistol, a .22 loaded with snake shot being as the only thing he intended to worry about was a rattlesnake. He told me make sure to shake out your boots before you put them on in the morning. Scorpions. Nasty. He spat. So what's the moral here? Ain't nothin' gonna hurt you out there? The mountain does to you what you bring to it? What does this have to do with crossing the quad at change of class?

Bear with me while I work this out.

It was I think ten years after I graduated Morgan that I first went into the Superstition Wilderness. I went in a second time by myself, and a third time with the woman who would become my wife, but this first time I packed in on horseback with a local guide, a hard core desert dweller: prickly. If he's still alive today I'd bet he'd have that "Don't tread on me" flag tattooed over his heart. He believed in one thing only -- the existence of the Lost Dutchman gold mine -- no ghosts or goblins, no demented desert rats, no Indian curse, -- and he was working a claim to prove it. The point is: my guide brought nothing to the mountain except perhaps greed, no fear, no hesitation, just lust for gold, and I brought nothing to the mountain except my story radar (Stories being my own particular  nuggets). We -- my guide and I -- came to the same place. Treasure, too, is in the eyes of the beholder.

I don't remember what I brought with me that first day on Morgan's campus. I know for sure it didn't feel anything like Custer's last stand. After the initial shock of recognition I just hurried on to class with the rest of the students. The books I was carrying -- an early English novel, "Tristram Shandy", Sarte's "Being and Nothingness", ancient history -- not a math book anywhere close, no atomic table in the vicinity -- these books were like gold nuggets to me then, like the crumbs of bread that helped Hansel and Gretel find their way back home, a path to a mother lode which, of course, I will never see in my lifetime, though I've been tracking it all along.

Sumbitch Was Too Miserable to Die, And Hell Wouldn't Have Him, Anyway

If the man had lived in Texas this is what the good ol' boys would've said of him: "Sumbitch was too miserable to die, and Hell wouldn't have him anyway." Asshole is the operative word here. He'd miraculously survived some mighty illness only to re-enter the work force more arrogant than ever, as if it were proof that he was divinely selected. The man, a white man, was my instructor in music appreciation at Morgan State College, my least favorite teacher in the entire school, three of the eighteen credits I was carrying. It was my last semester at Morgan, and I wanted to go out with a 4.0 average, a goal which had eluded me although I'd come close many times, close enough to warrant magna but never summa. In retrospect I understand why, but that is for another time.

The man had a monstrous maw of an ego. When I picture him from this distance his head appears the size and shape of an alien's, light bulb like. He was also at the time the conductor of a small town orchestra. One class turned into a rant about how awful was every existing orchestral version of the "Star Spangled Banner" except for his. As proof he played it for the class, and it did, it sounded terrific. I wanted to hate it but didn't and couldn't. I think it only made me hate the man more. My contempt would cost me dearly.

As we say in the movie business, fade to black and come in seventeen years earlier when I was five years old. I might have been four. Somewhere in there my mother enrolled me in a percussion class at the local music conservatory, a class taught by this same man. I remember her taking me into this big studio type room -- it must have been an orchestral space -- with lots of drums. Kids were already there, and when once our mothers left us this man launched into a persnicketty recital of his rules. I only remember one: the first. "Do not touch those drums or those drumsticks unless I say so. Am I clear?" At that instant an evil impulse impounded a nearby set of drum sticks and beat them on the kettle drum in front of me. BawoomBawoomBawoomBawoom. "Am I clear?", I seemed to be saying. BawoomBawoomBawoomBawoom. Well, children, the guy went beserk. He bellowed for me to get my mother and tossed me out of his class. Dissolve to seventeen years later, and I am in the man's classroom one more time, seventeen years later and feeling exactly the same. I could not bear him. It wasn't the music -- that was fine when he played it -- it was his pontificating in extremis. I was five years old again, a tot with a strong sense of smell. If a drum had been in front of me I'm sure I would have pounded it. I'm not defending this impulse, only reporting it, although in some ways I think I still may be pounding that same damned drum. Picture me pounding on that drum at the same time I'm shooting myself in the foot. That had to be worth at least a bronze. I lost by a smirk. Music appreciation, the easiest course ever invented, cost me a perfect 4.0.  You'd think by then I would have learned something? You'd think by now...?

The Death of Ruby Tire

1963. It's this year that I'm trying to remember, that and the first half of 1964. '63 began with the production of my first play, continued with the death of my father, ended with the assassination of JFK. January of '64 would be my final semester at Morgan. It's this period of time -- January, 1963 through June, 1964 -- that I'm trying to retrieve. This was the last period of my life spent in the town of my birth. I didn't know where I was going, but, believe me, I was most ways there and had been since my early teens. "Dad," I said. (I was fifteen.) "When I graduate high school I'm leaving and not coming back". He scoffed, but I was serious. Joining the Marines was what really got me out of there. Small price to pay. I may have written this someplace before (and I may again):my first week on Parris Island my drill instructor, Staff Sergeant Smith, pulled me aside, got smack up in my face, and bellowed, "What're you doin' in my Marine Corps, turd?" "Sir," I answered, "Sir, because it's safer than being at home, Sir." It was the first but not the last time his utter disdain was unleashed on me.

I give June of '64 as the end date of this memoir because that was my graduation from Morgan, but, really, it was back in May that the end came. Maybe April. Ruby Tire had died a long time ago, only now it was official. Like it's said of a Hollywood career: "It's dead six months before you know it."

Reuben Henry Foreman was his whole name. Ruby Tire was the name of his business, or, as we used to pronounce it in Baltimore, "Rooby Tar". It was a small retreading plant with a tire outlet in front. Ruby, my father, was in business with my Uncle Frank. Ruby ran the shop. Frank was the outside man, hustling and servicing accounts, mostly filling stations and auto dealerships. Uncle Frank's legendary moment came when he was on the train heading for a business trip in Ohio. Instead, Frank got off the train midway when he realized he didn't have his toothbrush, and hopped the next one back to Baltimore. You'd never accuse either my father or my uncle of having heads for business -- titans they were not -- however, the actual demise of the business was done by plotting elegant in its simplicity and oozing with classic machiavellian intent.

There wasn't much to divvy up. The two brothers had a legal agreement stating that if one died the surviving brother and partner would see that his brother's family got their fair share. Except that's not what happened. Shortly after becoming sole proprietor, Frank informed my mother that there would be no more money coming her way. Business was down and not looking up. He barely had enough for his family and none for his brother Ruby's.  My mother appealed to Uncle Will, the patriarch of the Foreman clan. "Blood is thicker than water," he said, meaning Frank was his brother and my mother was merely a sister-in-law. He shrugged her off. "I can't help." Can't help. Won't help. Didn't help. And more!

Yes, there's more, a plot both diabolical and, in its way, brilliant.

Uncle Frank's in-laws were a tribe of first generation bandits, proto typical slum lords, late of Eastern Europe, mini-minded, and troll like, in particular, that angry one who lived under the bridge. The one named Anna had no teeth but wore diamonds the size of jelly beans on damn near every digit. The rings dug into the flesh of her fingers. She sat with her feet planted far apart. Her accent was thick, and it was hard not to look at her gums. I think she spit when she talked, but that might have been some of the other ones, or all of them, the ones about whom all I remember was that they were short. When my father died, they smelled blood in the water, and the following came to pass. My uncle would never have thought of it on his own. The man was a putz but not a thief.

With the exception of the war years in the forties when retreading tires was a bustling industry, Ruby Tire struggled to get by. The advent of a brand new tire for less than the price of a retread drove a stake through the failing heart of the business, yet this same business continued to eke out enough to support two families until my father's death. Those four words are key -- "until my father's death" -- because the day he died -- the body was still warm -- they began answering the phone, "Foreman Tires". A business which formerly served two familiies suddenly brought in barely enough for one, suddenly could no longer pay its debts, suddenly found itself in bankruptcy. So what was the plot? That was it: deliberately drive Ruby Tire into bankruptcy so your slum lord in-laws can buy it dirt cheap at auction then hand the business back to you with no debt attached. Ruby who?

It was even announced in the papers: auction...building plus equipment...such and such time and date. My mother's brother, Milton, a cherished uncle who often visited us from New York, happened to be in Baltimore at the time. He suggested we go watch. I didn't want to do it, felt like I'd be watching my father's funeral all over again, but I did it. I went, and, yes, it was like watching my father's funeral all over again.

The auction took place in an alley that ran beside the building. The auctioneer was above the crowd, but I don't remember what he stood on -- a box? the roof of a station wagon? the bed of a truck? Uncle Frank wasn't there, but three of his brothers-in-law were. Their suits were drab and disheveled, their bellies big, their faces pasty like dumplings. Breakfast was still on their ties. Other than a smattering of on-lookers, me and Uncle Milton, the three brothers-in-law were it.

The auctioneer got the pack's attention. He described the building and its contents, instructed us that the sale would be for the entire package which had been appraised at $3,000. That sum, paltry even by the standards of the day, is where the man began the auction. "Do I hear thirty five hundred dollars, three five zero zero?" What the man heard was nothing. I'd like to say all that was heard was a Tasty Cake wrapper scuttling down the alley in a dandy breeze. Nice image. Except it wasn't true. What was true was the silence. Not one word. Not one sound. There were always people on the street. Traffic must have been passing by. I just don't remember any sound at all. Uncle Milton leaned into me and asked, "Do you want it?" Did I want it? It never  occurred to me that I could want it. "I'll give you the money," said Milton.

I'd have the money to buy the business and fire my uncle -- a favorite fantasy at the time.

"Three thousand dollars," barked one of the brothers-in-law.

"Do you want it?" asked Milton.

"I have three thousand. Do I hear four? Do I hear thirty five hundred?"

"Three thousand," repeated Frank's in-law.

"I have three thousand, three thousand dollars,"cried the auctioneer. "Three thousand going once."

"Do you want it?"

"Three thousand going twice."

"Do you want it?"

I didn't know what I wanted, but I knew what I didn't want. What I didn't want was to remain in Baltimore one day longer than necessary. What I didn't want was to be a slave to a business, any business, but certainly not the tire business.

My uncle nudged me. I choked on my words.

When I was small my father literally dandled me on his knee as he sang, "How y'gonna keep 'em down on the farm after they've seen Paree...?" I hadn't yet seen "Paree" but I'd seen enough.

"Do you want it?"

"Three thousand three times..."

My father worked there six days a week from six to six. Was I going to simply roll over and let that man's hard work go? Ingrate! Down the toilet! The conscience of a Hitler!

I couldn't get a word out.

"Sold!"

My heart took a hit.

The troll wearing the baggiest suit stepped forward and counted three thousand cash into the auctioneer's hand.

Foreman Tires opened the next day. That June I graduated from Morgan. Soon I was gone.

Memory Loss, or Huh?

I have a friend who's a very funny guy. We went to different high schools but still knew each other well. We were Jewish kids in Baltimore, circa the mid fifties, and every Jewish kid knew every other Jewish kid, plus the fact that we were, for a time, pledged to the same college fraternity. I didn't get "brotherhood". He did. He wound up in the Peace Corps. I wound up reading poetry in smoky coffeehouses, and, of course, we drifted apart. We rarely see each other and never talk on the phone, but every so often we exchange e-mails, and he's one of those people I know I could joke around with instantly no matter how long it had been. OK. So we're both the same age, and recently got to swapping details on memory loss. I confessed that sometimes my brain seems to be minus sixteen minutes like Nixon's secret tape. Another thing: I access google in order to look something up, then I forget what I wanted to look up. Happens a lot. Very frustrating. But, soldier on. Another friend of mine, long gone, used to say was that his father's best advice was, "It's a good life if you don't weaken." My first friend, the Jewish kid from Baltimore -- you know who you are, Kenny -- said that nowadays when someone asks him what restaurant he ate in or what movie he just saw or where he's going on his vacation, when anyone asks him such things, he says, "How soon do you need to know?"

This was too good not to pass on.

Hold the fort, amigo!

Old friends. Nothin' like 'em.

Morgan & Muhammad Ali

My life seems to have divided itself into two major periods: before Morgan and after Morgan, and then there was everything in between. Those years shaped me as much as any others. Morgan was there when no other school would touch me. I don't blame the ones who turned me down. Anybody judging me at that time would have labelled me a bad bet. But Morgan said yes, and I had the good sense to stay there. Did I ever feel out of place? You'd think I would, right? But, nope, wait, possibly once: the first time I crossed the quad when classes were changing. Suddenly, Negroes were everywhere, 360 degrees of Negroes, wall to wall Negroes, and not a one of me.  In trying to retrieve the feelings I had then the one that seems most appropriate is bemusement. I remember smiling to myself and thinking, so that's what it's like. Then I went to class, and I don't recall ever feeling isolated at all. OK, maybe when I went out for the wrestling team. And surely when I took Judy Brown to the Lyric Theatre to see Dick Gregory, and we were the only white folks in the audience. One of the jokes he told was that it was easy to stop smoking cigarettes because it was easy to put down anything white. Judy and I laughed along with everyone else, something I'd never do today. Couldn't everybody tell I was a fellow of good will? Apparently not, but I didn't yet notice it. I would only come to realize it years later, what Wordsworth meant when he said poetry was emotion recollected in tranquility. The single time somebody told me point blank that I was racist she was a good friend, a coed, very bright, future prom queen, named Jackie. We took some classes together. German was one of them. Ali was still calling himself Cassius Clay when he fought Sonny Liston for the title. Liston was a brooding, murderous looking beast who had in fact served time for murder. Clay was a loudmouthed upstart. Most white fans wanted Liston to pulverize Clay. You got it. I was one of them which is what I told Jackie when she asked me who I was for? She told me the only reason I wanted Liston was because I was a racist. I, of course, ranted against this assertion. We stood in front of the language arts building and swapped arguments. For God's sake, I was a student at Morgan! What racist? We were laughing but each of us was serious. I was dumbfounded. She was dogged. Jackie wouldn't back down, and I kept peppering her with examples of my lack of racism. It was never a heated argument. We parted friends, however, for many years now I have thought a lot about what she said. It was a cold day. I remember that, too.

I don't remember when -- I think it was way after I graduated Morgan -- but I finally got it. Now, don't be smug from the vantage point of contemporary time and place. We're talking a half century's difference. I hadn't yet grasped the subtler versions of racism. I knew big things. I knew my parents sent me to school the first day that Negro students were allowed in white schools. My brother and I braved the gauntlet of screaming racists that lined both sides of the sidewalk. It was a goddamn lynch mob! It was a terrifying time, every step, one hundred yards.  A gauntlet of rabid goyim (That's what we said then). Jesus Christ, don't let them figure out I'm Jewish! Still, my brother and I made the door before bottles began flying. If we'd been Black, we'd have been dead. This was not the kind of racism Jackie talked about. It was the kind that programs us to be unaware, to accept versions of the story without question, to call down judgment, the kind of thing that seeps  into your brain while you sleep. Sonny Liston was a white man's Negro, a man who fit the stereotype --- surly, mumbly, shambling, and very dark. Cassius Clay was an uppity colored guy. Light skin. Big mouth. That damn fool was a whole lot of terrible things -- loud, opinionated, in your face, disrespectful, taunting -- everything any sensible man would hate, right? And so I hated him without understanding how programmed I'd been, not by my family, just by growing up in Baltimore and breathing the air. For the record, I came to regard Muhamud Ali as a bonafide American hero. He literally put his money where his mouth was. He was forced to give up the way he earned a living. He was stripped of his title. He literally risked five years in prison. Still, he stayed true to his principles in the face of extraordinary hatred. "No Vietnamese ever called me a nigger," he said. How many of us have the fortitude to walk that walk? And do we know if that strength will be there when we need it? Is that what it means to have faith?

I met the man. It was during the period of time in which he was stripped of his title. I was teaching in West Virginia when he came to the campus to speak. Even without his title Ali was already a legend. Bundini Brown, his longtime friend and bodyguard, was with him. "Hold me back! Hold me back!" the champ yelled when he saw me coming to shake his hand. Muhammad Ali lunged forward as if to grab me. Bundini held him back. Another bodyguard held onto him from the other side. "Hold me back! Hold me back!" It only took me a second to figure out he was kidding, but I tell you true: in that one second my life passed before my eyes. The era of behemoth athletes was still a long way away, but when we shook hands my hand disappeared within his. Ali was the biggest man I had ever seen. He crackled with unbridled energy, like he existed within a force field of his own making. But there was an edge to him, a sense of unpredictability and danger. My life has afforded me many opportunities to meet and work with high end personalities, and that includes a president of the United States (smack inside the White House, too), but to this day I have never met anyone -- movie star, politician, or athlete -- who could electrify a room like that man could.

There is a story about a conversation a father once had with his son. The son came to his father and asked what sport he should play. He was trying to choose between playing football or boxing. "Football," his father said, "Because boxers don't play."

My Mountain

Well, it's not exactly mine -- it's mortgaged -- but the name on the deed is mine and has been for the past three decades now, plus the fact that it begins at the foundation of our house in the northern Catskills and rises gently to its peak a couple of thousand feet later, more. I'm somewhere on that mountain all the time, so, for all intents and purposes, it's mine. If I don't want you to find me you won't. My rough estimate is that I've climbed my mountain in the neighborhood of six thousand times, probably more, not always six thousand to the top but always some place on its slopes. I know my mountain well. Often, when I'm not on it, I make believe I am, and, when I am on it, I pinch myself and feel grateful, not always but often. There is constant discovery, always something seen that wasn't seen before, and, when that something catches my attention, I can stop and stare and allow it to sink in. Where is there new growth? What are the colors? Breathe in the scent. Has an animal been here? A turkey? A white tail? What's that in the dirt? A scratch? A track? Is the grass pressed down? In this space of time I am only what I am and nothing more. I would come here if there were a tragedy in my life. I would come here to keep from losing my mind. Some other mountain really doesn't interest me. I've never had the desire to climb the seven highest. I've never even had the desire to climb all the peaks in the Catskills. What I want is to know my mountain well, to take on its delight and its wonder. For a mountain to come to life you must be there. I've watched it grow dark, and I've watched it grow light, always enthralled, always entranced, always with my senses at their peak. I am alive, and at any instant something miraculous might happen! That bear? You know, the one who's out there but you've never seen him, seen sign but not him? You still might. But, you won't know until the bear shows himself, and, if he shows himself, he doesn't know you're there, which is exactly where you'd need to be.