Not Even Not Traveling 78: Canada - Touring the Countryside

Touring the Countryside
and Running Out of Chores

My wife took it upon herself to do deep cleaning in Donna's house. Basically, when she realized she couldn't finish the gazebo alone - we were going to need multiple sets of hands working at the same time, one of them belonging to someone tall - she started looking for other ways to help.

Diane can be surprisingly thorough about cleaning. Well, I've lived with her for over thirty years so it's less of a surprise to me nowadays. But I haven't stopped being impressed.

1. She decides an area, which may look tidy to me, is hiding dirt
2. Usually, she shows me a cleaned spot, proving, for instance, that the tan-colored tiles should be white
3. Then she approaches the dirt with so much determination you can see the steam rise off her (and off the floor or counter or the couch, which is sometimes, I admit, the color of our pets)
4. If I volunteer to help, she growls until I go off to my own project
5. When we next meet, the offending area is a different color

I grew up in a household of all boys. I had not been aware that dried soap counted as dirt. I'd considered it to be the opposite, in fact. Soapiness was, by definition, cleanliness. That's why I had never been bothered by the twenty years of soap scum on the walls of the shower I grew up using. Whereas Diane had to disinfect her eyes to look at it a second time.

Our host woke up to the partial results of my wife's cleaning decision. Fortunately, Donna could see Diane was in an unstoppable 'don't even look at me I'm working' mode and decided to roll with it. In fact, she labored side by side with Diane. And after a while, she decided to pursue her own project, which was finding someone to help build the gazebo.

She found someone, too, a young man named Jack who was looking for side jobs.

As they introduced me to him, Donna and Diane mentioned that he was building the gazebo for me and that I wasn't going to help. He was mildly amused to see mosquitos start to land on me while we shook hands.

"Oh, I see," Jack said. He continued to smile. In fact, he kept his pleasant attitude the whole time he worked on the gazebo roof.

I put on layers of clothing and insect repellent so I could finish stacking the woodpile. When I finished and cleaned up after myself, I headed indoors again to telework. (I've been leaving that out of the Canada trip descriptions, I guess. I was doing a lot of remote work and it helped extend our stay.)

A few hours later, Jack was still laboring away on the gazebo roof. Donna and I had reached stopping points in our telework. We took a look at the construction process but it was clear Jack didn't need help yet. With Diane, we decided we could afford to take a break while Jack continued. This would be our third visit to Tweed.

It's a really nice town. Tweed is so cozy (and pretty) that it reminds me of Frederick, Maryland in years past, back when Frederick was not so cosmopolitan. We visited the shops. Diane and Donna bought gifts. I got a paperback at one of the bookstores. In an herb shop, Donna finalized our plans to visit a lavender farm. 

Finally, we headed home and helped finish the gazebo. Jack had done a lot but the job needed many hands near the end to move multiple pieces in place at once. With the aid of insect repellent and a special candle, we all helped, even me.

#

We knew the next day would be our last in the area - at least for a while.

At the lavender farm, we saw yet another gift shop. Of course, we'd seen plenty in Tweed. This one, isolated, sold more product categories than the farm grew in its crops. The shelves offered herbal products from neighboring and not-so-neighboring farms. Now, if you think I was there because of the company I kept, Donna and Diane, you would be correct. But I also didn't mind. I'd never been to a lavender farm. I had never even considered that someone would farm it. But they do.

We got a tour of the lavender plants and the four types on the farm. We picked our own lavender, which sounds fine enough although it mostly involved crouching at various spots in a field while bees conducted surveillance on us.

Afterward we sat down to a lavender-themed menu — lavender scones, lavender honey, lavender shortbread, lavender soda, and a tea that tasted like someone had brewed a bar of fancy soap. We drank it because it's rude not to and talked about the trip and the general mystery of rural Ontario. Rather sadly, we started planning our drive back home.

The drive north had not been too bad. But it was hard to look forward to our return. Queensborough had been beautiful and Donna, a great host. The weather had seemed lucky, too, almost always perfect.

#

Rural Canada - A Review

Don't go for the food. But aside from that, it's highly recommended. Really.

Queensborough: small. It's got a hundred people. And it's a difficult place to visit unless you know someone there. If you do, it's fantastic.

Madoc: The town's principal export is the outdoors. It has got enough people to need a few stores. Still, if you visited Madoc deliberately, it would probably be to spend time in the parks. There are a lot. On the whole, there are fun things to do in the Madoc area but you're probably doing them on the back of a horse or a snowmobile.

Tweed: a full, if small town. Good stores. Pretty. Tweed is what economists call 'emerging,' which means there are three new stores and an optimistic sign advertising a fourth if you know what I mean. The town has a hotel and bed and breakfast apartments. It seems interesting in the longer term, too, because I know that I, at least, looked around and considered living there. I don't know where I could work but I saw plenty of homes where I'd like to move in.

The "Front Porch Ruckus" music festival was great. It wasn't a singleton attraction, either. Tweed hosts lots of other events during the summer. There are film festivals, art events, music, and more.

For a lot of the time, the folks in rural Canada - all over the small towns - did not look at their phones. They looked at one another, at us, or at least at their pets. People were hardly ever so busy they couldn't hold a pleasant conversation. And the dogs were friendly.
 

Not Even Not Traveling 77: Canada - The Tibetan Temple

The Tibetan Temple

For days, Donna had been offering to take me to a Buddhist temple. And for days, I had felt unsure about going. I know my reaction was puzzling to Donna and my wife. They were keenly aware I had been reading about Buddhism and talking with Buddhists for forty years. Why wouldn't I want to visit a temple?

There are so many reasons, I'm not going to try to list them. Among them, though, are how Western Buddhism, Zen, and Pure Land Buddhism are all different from one another. Navigating among the slightly different faiths can get tricky. And then there's Tibetan Buddhism, which is differently different from any of those. 

Pure Land emphasizes scriptures and devotion to Amitabha. (I realize I'm being so brief it seems flippant.) Zen focuses on meditation and koans. Western Buddhism is in the process of sifting through the parts of the philosophy that appeal to westerners. Tibetans, on the other hand, incorporate a lot of rituals, tantra, incarnations (think 'saints' if it helps), and a hierarchy of instructions under the guidance of lamas. It's not like the others, at least outwardly. And Tibetan temples, as all buildings do, tend to gather a lot of material goods. 

No one has a choice about being material. We live in bodies. Lots of other forms of Buddhism - there's plenty more - have temples hosting rituals and sacred objects. But avoiding attachments is a significant, guiding principle behind the practice of Buddhism in all its forms. That's why it can feel odd to be confronted by the imperfect people, their ceremonies, and their attachments to rituals or ritual objects. 

We were going to have a guide, though. That seemed helpful. He was a longtime resident of the area. He worked as a volunteer caretaker at the temple and he could meet us there. Plus, Donna's friend who knew the guide also sounded like an appealing person to meet. Basically, I thought we would at least meet good people if Donna could make the logistics work.

In the end, she did. Donna made the friendships and appointments line up. And so I leapt at the chance to go.

We arrived at the compound to discover a closed gate. That was usual. Donna's friend had the key to the gate. We rolled on in after shutting it behind us. The place looked beautiful. It also seemed deserted, which I hadn't expected. I didn't understand how the temple made sense here, how it did its business. 

The roof of one of the buildings was slate red. Someone had painted its walls a warm yellow, too. I hadn't expected the colors. The place didn't seem as fancy as some other holy sites or even churches downtown. Likewise, we parked behind a second building that was mostly red and yellow, this one with aluminum siding to keep out the Canadian winter weather. At the door, we met a gray-haired couple. They seemed to be weeding and doing chores. Sure enough, one of them introduced himself as Sangha, our guide to the grounds. The woman was his wife, apparently also a volunteer.

"I'll have to replace this weather stripping," he said as we stepped through the door. He ran his hand over the left side of the doorframe. 

He and his wife were the caretakers for the temple when the monks weren't around, which was most of the time. The monks treated the temple as a summer retreat and a place to hold special events, perform ceremonies on holy days, and hold meditation seminars.

Sangha gave us a private tour. How often do you get a private tour of a holy place? I gathered he had given it a few times before, though. And a minute or two after we started, his manners changed. He asked a few questions. I asked a few in return about Tibet, about the ceremonies, and suddenly he relaxed and grew more energetic. Any reservations I'd had about the visit melted away in the face of his warmth. 

He seemed delighted, and a little surprised, to find I was genuinely interested in Buddhism. And I wanted the details about Tibet and the history behind the establishment of the monastery. He beamed. He wasn't a dogmatic ritual-minder at all. And Sangha wasn't simply a janitor, either. He was spiritually drawn in. He took care of the trappings around him but he didn't seem particularly attached to them.

He didn't quiz me about Tibetan incarnations or rituals. Instead, he told us about how some of the art had arrived here after the Chinese invasion of Tibet, about the practices held here, the statues of incarnations, and more. He seemed happy I knew enough about Tibet to understand details of its geography and history.

(I absolutely did not let on that some of what I remembered came from reading and re-reading Seven Years in Tibet. I was pretty sure everyone even slightly associated with Tibetan Buddhism must get tired of hearing about a single book, however popular and respectful it is.)

As it turned out, Sangha was giving us a tour of the retreat house. It had once been a hunting lodge. To the south of us lay the lama house.

(Backstory on the corporate hunting lodge: for their very first hunting trip at the lodge, the company bosses invited their secretaries with them, not their wives. When the group returned home, someone told one of the wives. And that was the beginning of a scandal, a lawsuit, and the end of the hunting lodge. Apparently, there was never even a second company trip.) 

The monastery bought the land after the lodge closed. Monks converted it to a holy site. It was attractive because the lodge sat with a mountain to the north (as required for temples in Tibetan Buddhism) and a river to the south (again a requirement). All that remained was to orient the monastery facade to the south or east. (They did both.)

I could have spent hours talking with Sangha. We covered philosophy, history, and religious ceremony. He was spiritual and thoughtful. His wife stepped between us to remind him of the time and the chores he still had to do. Maybe everyone started looking at their watches, too. (I don't really think so, though.) 

Normally, when I describe a place I try to recommend it or warn everyone against it. This time, well - I highly recommend getting a private tour of a Tibetan Buddhist temple, especially if Sangha is your guide. It seems sort of hard to arrange, though. 
 

Not Even Not Traveling 76: Canada - Even More Golf

Canadian Golf

The rules may be different. 

We set out the next morning for golf our lessons, which required a drive of twenty minutes. From Queensborough, it always seems to take twenty minutes. To anywhere. This might be a rule specific to rural Canada: no matter where you are or where you're going, you will drive for twenty minutes (rule enforced by the Mounties).

Our destination was a golf course in Tweed, where we met our instructor, a young man who I am fairly confident was old enough to drive. He wore a light blue shirt, khaki shorts, a baseball hat, and sunglasses.

He led us past the driving range and past the putting green to a fairway just east of those. On the way, he grabbed a super-bucket of golf balls. He seemed to have picked our spot based on my request to learn the fundamentals — chip shots, putting, a whole beginner's curriculum. He started in the half-sleepy way of a young man who has taught the same lesson before and will again.

After rubbing his bleary eyes, he watched us. He made corrections. He seemed to wake up to our beginner status.

By the time we strolled over to the driving range, our pro seemed almost alert. He spent time on Diane's straight-legged stance, getting her to take more of a karate, bent-knees approach. After that, he seemed almost encouraged. It was like having a driving instructor relax because he thought we were going to stop knocking over mailboxes.

He kept asking us to switch clubs. He wanted us to find the ones best suited to our style and, at nearly three dollars a club, I thought we were doing our fine. But the instructor excused himself for a few minutes. He returned with a new five iron.

I didn't have one good enough for Diane, he thought.

"People lose clubs here all the time," he explained. "We've got a bunch. Don't worry about it."

It wasn't until I was loading the car that I discovered the full scope of the operation: there was already an extra club in my bag, one I hadn't thrifted. Apparently, Paul had done the same thing the first time we played golf. I think he left me with a three iron.

At this point I started to feel a little like the golf equivalent of a stray cat that keeps showing up and getting fed. The more I thought about it, though, the less bad I felt. These people were being nice. Maybe the stereotype is true, and Canadians really are polite, generous, and appalled by my ancient, thrift-store-special golf clubs. Of course, Paul is American, so maybe the attitude isn't limited to Canadians.

I'll admit the alternatives might be simpler: it could be Donna knowing nice people or it could be a small-town way of living. Tweed was the biggest town around for miles. At a booming population of six thousand, however, Tweed could still the kind of place where everybody's business is everybody's business and good people have the power to exert more goodness.

#

In the afternoon, we went to play golf with Charlie. Charlie was a genuine resident of Queensborough. He had bought the old hotel and fixed it up to be his house. When his family were away, he liked to golf. That's why he met us outside of the clubhouse. 

We shook hands and arranged to rent carts. We figured out how to handle our bags and take turns with the clubs. We had gotten lucky with the weather - it was a calm afternoon, sunny, and the temperature was right for short sleeves but not so hot we broke a sweat.

All four of us played. We relaxed and took shots, lost our golf balls sometimes, socialized, sank our putts, and kept moving. Charlie and Donna are neighbors and they started off most of the early conversations. But soon enough we were all making remarks, mostly about golf. Charlie found himself drafted as our golf coach for this session and he was a good sport about it.

The next day, I found another golf club in my bag. I think it must have come from Charlie.

I'm not sure how he did it or why. Anyway, two days later Diane and I returned to the same little golf course, this time for golf lessons. We so clearly still didn't know anything, the instructor seemed a little scandalized. We practiced for a while and then he told us to go ahead and play without him. We hadn't paid the course fees, so it seemed odd. He dashed off to the clubhouse and returned with two sand wedges, one for Diane, one for me.

"People just leave them," he explained. "Don't worry about it."

In the end, we decided to return to the clubhouse after a partial round of golf, and I donated money to a charity golf event prize. After all, I had still not paid my greens fees or even for the golf lessons and I had gathered two more clubs. So I donated. The lady at the front desk, apparently our instructor's mother, seemed very happy about it.

 

Not Even Not Traveling 75: Canada - Front Porch Ruckus

Canada - Back to Queensborough

The next day, I built a shelf unit. 

Donna's house has books - a lot of them. In time, she will divest herself of many of the big hardbacks, I expect. It takes thought, though, to pare down a collection. First, Donna has to see them so she can think about them. When I finished the kit, I spun the standing shelf to verify everything worked. And I asked her where to put it, which turned out to be a corner of her master bedroom.

Then I resumed my part-time job of stacking the woodpile.

#

The Front Porch Ruckus

In the afternoon, Donna took us to the "Front Porch Ruckus" music festival in downtown Tweed. Now, Tweed is a small place but it seems to be on the rebound. Its city council actively recruits people to visit and, for that matter, the town seems to be looking for new residents. You can move into Tweed; and you can be part of renovating the town; and it looks worthwhile.

We met a man who had revived an empty courtyard between row homes. Once, a building had apparently stood there. After it got taken down, the lot remained vacant. So he moved in, bought an adjacent building and the lot, and turned it all into an art installation. Aside from the beauty of the landscaping, he mixed painted plants and real plants, painted windows and real windows, and a painted door (although there is no real door). These stand on the other side of a cast iron gate. The red, painted bars around the gate keep people from entering the courtyard and messing with the fussy, careful arrangement.

I had been the driver for trips into town before. But for the music festival, Donna took us in her red, stickshift Toyota. She parked at the fair grounds, next to a polka band. She aimed for them deliberately because I said I thought they would probably be interesting - I've heard plenty enough folk singers with guitars - and we strolled up to the brick-colored picnic shelter and listened to a big band number. A moment later, the band played dixieland jazz.

Donna somehow persuaded the band to let us sing along.

This is not a normal thing. As a singer, I can say we do not usually invite anyone up to give it their best. Rock bands tend to throw their musical volunteers off the stage. It shocked me a little to find myself singing with the local horn section. One piece we performed, rather quickly, was 'You Are My Moonshine,' a parody I wrote years ago (for Mother's Day) of 'You Are My Sunshine.' The band members seemed to genuinely enjoy the new lyrics. They acted as pleasantly shocked by our performance as I was. But also, they stayed relaxed and pleasant.

We sang nine or ten songs with them and that’s a pretty long time. Toward the end of their long set, they played something that made me exclaim, “That’s a great arrangement!”

One of the horn players had written the arrangement herself. She beamed, smugly, while the others told me she'd written it. Everyone seemed awfully pleased. After we heard another piece and said, somewhat reluctantly, we had to go hear the rest of the "Front Porch Ruckus" show, the musicians invited us to circle back. They said we could come to them at the close of the day and sing along at their invitation.

They were great sports.

We wandered around Tweed and listened to (and talked with) the other street performers for an hour or two. They were mostly folk and blues guitar players, some of them singers-songwriters, most of them part-timers who were making a little money on the side to play the standards, as they usually did.  

And we did, in fact, circle back for a few more songs with the brass band. 

Past the end of the event, we dodged into a popular cafe in Tweed's downtown. We got there early, before the indoor music started. As we sat, debating whether or not to stay for the performance, the clouds rolled in outside. They rumbled, dark and silvery. Then the skies let loose. Suddenly, all the musicians and music fans scrambled into the cafe with us. Everyone wanted to be under a roof while the rain poured down in sheets. 

After a few minutes, the regularly scheduled folk singer turned on his microphone. He realized he was about to play to a more-than-full house, many of them fellow musicians. And fellow musicians can be judgemental. You could see he wasn't sure what to expect. He played a few folk standards and got hearty applause, which allowed him to relax. 

Then he played 'Country Roads.'

Everyone sang. Right on the first verse. The guitarist hesitated for a moment, thrown off his rhythm before he recovered and leaned into what was happening. Since I may have started the audience participation (after my wife slapped me in the shoulder and hissed, "Sing!"), I was happy to see everyone else knew the lyrics, too. How many folk musicians were drinking coffee and waiting for their food? Twenty? Most of them had been paid to perform this one a dozen times. 

The performer liked the participation so much, he tried to get everyone involved again with other, reasonably popular folk songs. But there were none to quite match 'Country Roads.' Mostly, we chatted and sang in unison choruses until there was a break in the clouds. Then, under the brightening evening sky, we dashed to our car. 

Not Even Not Traveling 74: Canada - Tweed Pt. 1

Canada - Tweed 

We alternated between being tourists in the area - Donna being our expert guide - and giving Donna some help around her house. Since it was a busy time at work back in the DC area - and I mean at both offices I participate in - I spent a few hours each day doing telework, too. It cut into my chores but, since some of the work was billable, it also extended my Canada vacation.

For the next little while, I concentrated on cleaning the house. And I tried out the shower nozzle I'd fixed. It worked perfectly.

In the late morning, we all took a break. Donna directed us into Tweed for a game of golf with Paul and his wife. Paul was friend of Donna's in high school. They had managed to stay in touch despite all the time and, often, lots of distance. The golf course Paul chose for us was called Nine. Not surprisingly, we played nine holes, not a full game. Paul had to teach me to chip, to choose clubs correctly, and more. I knew I was getting good advice (even though I sailed a chip shot across the green and into the rough). In fact, Paul could not be a more relaxed, more fun golf teacher.

It was especially impressive for someone who introduced himself by saying, "I'm not a golf teacher."

All five of us kept an eye on the golfers behind us and ahead of us, aware we were beginners and therefore slow. Eventually, the game degenerated into a match that was basically a coaching session, just Paul and me. Our lady friends entertained themselves by speeding around with the golf carts and planning our lunch, including our strawberry margaritas.

I think my level of play could be described by three of Paul's remarks.

"Wow, that was a pro shot!" he shouted as my drive sailed down the middle for three hundred fifty yards.

"Wow, that's ... something. I wonder what happened." He said as I hooked one into the water.

"Wow, we're not going to find that one." He pointed to the reeds, or perhaps the forest, or perhaps a distant ocean.

When I did get my scheduled lessons two days later, the golf pro made pretty nearly the same remarks. We were on a different course. He taught me chip shots, to start with, at my request, because I knew I was bad. Then he taught us putting. When we finally got to the driving range, he found my drives appalling and entertaining in equal measure, with sprinkle of 'wow.'

"Wow, did you play little league baseball?" he asked.

"Yeah." Every boy in North America had, around 1972. But I didn't want to say that to someone born in 2006.

"Looks like it, Good contact," he said encouragingly as I sliced high into the net that protected the real golfers. I was apparently developing a sort of consistency, meaning I was reliably inconsistent. And for someone who was old enough to be my grandchild, my pro seemed often patient, sometimes amused, and sometimes extra determined to be patient.

 

Not Even Not Traveling 73: Canada - Queensborough

Canada Trip, 2026 


At the end of June, I drove up to see a friend from my undergraduate days.

Donna lives in Queensborough, which has a population of about a hundred, depending on the relatives visiting. A century ago it was a bustling logging village with a railroad stop nearby. Nowadays, it's officially a hamlet. People are moving back in, buying up the old churches and the hotel and turning them into homes. It's keeping the town (okay, hamlet) alive. It is also, undeniably, changing it.

For anything resembling shopping, the residents of Queensborough have to look to Madoc, a thriving metropolis of over a thousand. It boasts two grocery stores, one of which is a package store. The drive takes twenty minutes and it's lovely. But we made the trip in June. I imagine it gets less charming in January.

Officially, Queensborough and Madoc are both unincorporated so they are part of the municipality of Tweed, population six thousand. Tweed has a full-featured downtown with banks, restaurants, and galleries. During our week there, Donna took us to a music festival in Tweed.

More on that later. Because, in truth, we'd come on a vacation with the intent to do chores.

Diane had a plan. Donna had a gazebo kit. Between them, they had worked out how I would help assemble a tasteful outdoor structure, put up a mosquito blanket around it, and sip iced tea while teleworking via my laptop on a sunny day. In reality, the mosquitoes to showed up to the construction site like it was a scheduled event and I was late. They buzzed with impatience. My wife took one look at the situation — me with a half-dozen scout-mosquitoes conducting test raids — and she suggested, not unkindly, that I go be useful somewhere else. 

When I popped back indoors covered with the blood of the bloodsuckers, Donna remarked, "They must really like you."

They really do.

I dressed in layers even though it was summer. Long pants. Long socks. I slathered on an insect repellent lotion. I stepped out to the foyer to spray myself with an odious spray. You would think, by then, I had to be thoroughly repellent. But I was back inside the foyer a minute later, spraying spots I'd missed on my clothes.

“They really, really like you,” said Donna.

Finally, I was safe enough to work on the woodpile. Donna's firewood had arrived two weeks before, about a cord of it. The supplier had dumped it in front of the shed with the confidence of knowing he had not been paid to stack it. Instead, that service was supplied by me. Fortunately, wood does not care about your feelings or your mosquito bites, You just move it, log by log, until the pile in front of the shed becomes a stack inside the shed.

When I had about a third of the woodpile relocated, I went inside to deal with one of the showers. A downstairs shower-bath had developed a problem that can be summarized as "it's in several pieces, but they used to be one piece." Something in the manufacturing had gone sideways and parts of the fixture had popped apart. The threads of them looked like they were never really meant to go together in the first place. But that wouldn't matter because Donna had stocked her house supplies with marine-grade epoxy. It would give us the adhesive, waterproof strength we needed.

The fix didn’t take long, which was a pity. I enjoy the the epoxy-making process. Apparently, I'm one of those people who doesn't get globs of glue or paint where they don't belong. Those types of jobs tend to go smoothly for me - until someone distracts me for a microsecond.

“Let’s go hit a bucket of balls at a golf course," Donna suggested. She knew I had been asked to play in a charity tournament for work. And I had never played.

#

Donna had researched golf courses, including one in Tweed. In the trunk of our car, I'd brought the bag of clubs I got for $40. (Customs agents don't regard pieces of golf equipment as weapons, no matter how bad you are with them.) My first step, aside from learning how the golf bag worked, was figuring out how to rent a bucket of golf balls. The teenager behind the desk thought we were clueless and, because we were, I told him to give me a golf lesson.

"Uh, you need a golf pro," he said.

"Right, I've got a lesson time reserved. That's for two days from now. I'm hitting golf balls today, right now. You just rented me the bucket. Tell me what to do."

"Okay." He took thirty seconds to tell us the main secrets of golf, most of them involving how to stand, which I thought I already knew (but as it turns out, not quite). Basically: take a baseball or karate stance, slightly bent at the knees. Square up your alignment with the ball, parallel to the target. Use a baseball grip, overlapping grip, or interlocking grip. (Overlapping felt right for me.) If you're right handed, bring your left arm back, like in a baseball swing, but keep it straight at the elbow.

Swing and hit the ball. Success! Maybe.

This left out a lot of important pointers but I found the basics to be useful enough. I could hit drives - of a sort - using any of my cheap clubs. Most of the shots went forward, too, which is basically where they should go. Diane and Donna could make shots move forward, too, and they were also beginning golfers.

Special sports note: The three of us originally thought we would go kayaking and take nature hikes between house chores. But I am, as mentioned, a mosquito magnet. The Queensborough area has a lot of biting insects, especially along the hiking trails. In contrast, golf courses take care to eliminate the most annoying insects. So golf ended up being a good answer to the question of how I could spend time outdoors.

At the driving range, I succeeded (if that's the right word) in slicing a ball so far that it cleared the hundred-foot-high shielding net that protected the golfers on the course from idiots on the driving range. Fortunately, there was no one on the course when my ball sailed over. Same with the other three times. Man, I was looking forward to lessons from a golf pro. But first we had to do more house chores. And Donna had arranged for us to play actual golf with a friend of hers, who, we hoped, could be persuaded to give me lessons. Or at least not point and laugh.
 

Not Even Not Zen 448: Poem - Things They Say

Things They Say

When you're young,
they say 'follow your passion,’
but my father puffed blue smoke from his cigar
and responded, "Yeah,
you'll make big money writing poetry."

When you're hurt,
they say, 'Everything happens for a reason'
but my mother in her gardening shirt
glanced at my ankle and said in a slow breath,
"Stop jumping off the roof."

When you’re impatient they say,
'good things come to those who wait'
but after my grandmother said it,
my grandfather looked at me with contempt and added,
"Why aren’t you just doing it?"

They say, "There's no 'I' in team"
and it's literally true but
there is no 'we' in "Who's getting the credit?"
so sometimes we have to speak up
to make sure we do.
It's okay - my wife reminds me.

Sometimes when you’re lonely they say
"It’s the dark night of the soul"
but actually, visibility is pretty good.
I see what I'm doing, no excuses,
I could have helped more
and I know I should do better.

They say 'you’ll always change your mind'
and maybe I agree with that one
because I'm wearing the purple shirt
I used to despise.
So it's just a matter of time.
We'll have to check back about this one later.
 

 

 - Eric Gallagher 

Not Even Not Zen 447: Poem - You Shouldn't Have Asked

You Shouldn't Have Asked

You asked why,
why could I possibly love you.

And I have bad news.

The sun rose in a purple morning sky. 
And that’s why I love you.

And it does that every day.

 - Eric Gallagher

Not Even Not Zen 446: Biomythography - Note 152, No One Converts, Pt. 3

No One Converts, Part III

The world feels holy. 

That's stupid, and yet there are times when simply walking alone in the woods or strolling along a dirt road with friends, or almost any other ordinary thing can bring us a feeling of, more or less, 'this place is sacred.' It can happen suddenly. My friend Michael's comments made it impossible not to remember some of those moments in my life.

Despite our rational approach, despite how my talks with Michael about the reasons behind belief in God (and non-belief) were supposed to be about what's provable, we were left with a difference in our underlying experiences. It wasn't even a big difference in outlook. We both felt holiness around us. We interpreted it differently.

Michael had been raised in a private, Jesuit boarding school. Perhaps it's not much of a surprise that the Jesuits converted him. The conversion from Judaism to Catholicism came to him as a revelation, apparently, as a series of visions of God. He got dream visitations from an actual, white-haired, bearded holy man. He loved the Jesuit priests' rational approach to it all. That's why Michael thought he could prove God must exist. For sure, he told me at length how believing in the Catholic trinity made the most sense.

For my part, I came from a tradition that included some family Catholic church membership, some Methodist, some Baptist, but mostly a bunch of Quaker church ceremonies as part of my schooling. And the biggest spiritual influence of all was reading about Buddhism and about pre-Socratic philosophies (which I often compared to Buddhism, especially the Epicurean school). 

The rational approach, at least for the two of us, seemed to come from a need to explain our sense of holiness. If someone notices a heaviness or lightness in the air, they might search the trees or the skies or look to a nearby river to try to find the cause. We were doing something similar on a spiritual and emotional level. We sensed something. Where was a source?

That's why it was such a disappointment for Michael to finally admit, "I guess there's no rational reason to believe in God."

I remember feeling a slight sense of shock. I hadn't expected to convert him. I'd helped with a conversion before but with a girlfriend. That's suspicious because of all the love and affection and trying to please each other. With a religiously-oriented friend, even a good friend, I had no reason to expect it. And I had no reason to be suspicious of it. 

The next day, when I saw Michael, he seemed depressed. But non-belief can affect people like that. It had depressed me, at first. We discussed the lack of God for a little while that day but I didn't see any reason to try to talk him out of his mood. He had to come to terms with non-belief in his own way. 
 
When we ate dinner together, Michael remained quiet. He didn't want to debate. Then, almost abruptly, I didn't see him for two days. Eventually, at another dinner with friends in the cafeteria, he said he wanted to talk. Almost immediately, before we even walked out of the dorms on our hike across campus, he revealed that he believed in God again.

"Eric, he came to me," Michael said. "He was a sturdy older man, sort of, with a flowing white beard and a voice. And the voice talked to me. I could feel Him. I felt His presence."

"Okay," I conceded. Rationality was not going to win over such a personal, powerful experience. "So really, you still believe."

"Sorry, I thought it was rational. But it's more than that. I can feel God."

We walked in silence for a while. 

"Fair enough," I said. And we started talking about black and white photography and whether it was really art. It was easy to talk with him. 

#

Conclusion

Michael converted back to his beliefs after a few days. Other friends lasted longer, some more than twenty years. But I think everyone I knew who converted from a form of Christianity to atheism has since converted back to the sort of Christianity they'd grown up with. 

Because I was young and fervent, maybe, I could seemingly help people convert themselves. But I think, in almost everyone, conversions are unlikely to last. There's no good way to measure it historically, but I suspect that thousands of years ago, maybe two to five percent of people were non-believers in their local religion. It's a rational thing to be. But more than being rational, it's an underlying judgement of people, a basic sense of experience. You have to determine whether or not other people might be fooling themselves. No one wants to die. Therefore, people might fool themselves about it. And nowadays, it's probably the same two to five percent making essentially the same judgement.

I'm sure the self-reporting has changed. In the middle ages, you might not want to come out and say everyone else is wrong. In the early days of Rome, you might not want to risk your life by saying Zeus is a figment of everyone's imagination. You might keep your opinion to yourself. But I suspect that, throughout the ages and throughout the religions, the proportions of doubters is roughly the same. 

Not Even Not Zen 445: Biomythography - Note 151, No One Converts, Pt. 2

Biomythography 151
No One Converts, Part II

Here, roughly, are the arguments for belief in God as written by Thomas Aquinas. I remember these not as the starting point of the conversation between Michael and I, nor the end, but as a mid-point of sorts. We spent considerable time walking and talking about these concepts, the way you do when you're trying to solve the universe and you're nineteen years old.

**Argument from the First Mover** — posits that there must be an initial source of motion that itself was not moved.

This is a misunderstanding of physics (just think of virtual particles, which appear wherever they want and do whatever they want until they bump into something) and it fails on the initial look, even without physics. If there's a first movement, great. There's no need for a god involved, just a first movement. I mean, what makes God move? Is he finally getting up to change the channel?

Beyond that, it's a lack of calculus. Aquinas objects to infinity because it's infinite and, to him, it can't add up to anything, which is absurd. Well, the objection is absurd itself — not everything needs to add up — and anyway calculus shows us that many infinities do reach a knowable total. On all fronts, this is the worst of arguments, and I've heard plenty of other bad arguments (including one where two people agreed at increasing volume until one stormed out of the room).

**Argument from Universal Causation** — everything that exists has a cause, leading to a first cause, which is God.

Ugh, this is the same as the first argument wearing a mustache and hoping we won't notice. Michael pretty much had to acknowledge the duplication. Also, even as a six-year-old, I could ask, "Well, what caused God?" — which is the kind of question six-year-olds are by nature required to ask, right after "why." 

**Argument from Contingency** — because things exist that could "not exist," there must be a necessary being that causes existence.

Yeah, you could "not exist" instead of existing. Buddhists would say, in fact, your existence is an illusion. You don't actually exist. Conan the Barbarian had an answer to that, which was basically, "fine." Aquinas was definitely not comfortable with such an answer.

Aquinas would have hated the Multiverse Theory in physics. Non-existence, ephemeral existence, and multiple potential existences are all accepted explanations, nowadays.

**Argument from Degree** — varying degrees of qualities (like goodness) imply the existence of a perfect being as their source.

This is stolen from Plato's ideal forms, which isn't an argument against the concept, but the idea itself isn't an argument for anything. That there are degrees of qualities we perceive ("Whoa, this chair is even more green than the couch!") is part of our sensory perception, plus our ability to assign qualities and idealize them.

It's a good argument for humans being interesting. It's not an argument for holiness, except maybe for the delicacy of our perceptions being awe-inspiring.

**Teleological Argument** (the watchmaker argument) — order and purpose in the world indicate a designer.

I find this one the most compelling. As humans, we make things. It's very nearly our defining characteristic, second only to complaining about the things someone else made. It's natural for us to look at a hammer and think about its creator. We tend to imagine creators whether there are any or not — is this stone a tool? Did someone shape it? For sure, it's comforting to think about creations and the purpose of them, and to imagine ourselves, and humanity as a whole, as having a purpose rather than just being a ambitious species of ape that discovered fire and never really calmed down.

Being created for a purpose is a pleasing idea. It doesn't look like it's true, but it's attractive to me because I think our senses of purpose and shared imagination are what enabled us to built civilizations.

Not Even Not Zen 444: Biomythography - Note 150, No One Converts, Pt. 1

Biomythography 150

No One Converts, Part I

They say there’s no point in trying to convince anyone about religion. No one ever converts. Except they do, sometimes.

When I was in college and believed deeply and fervently in my version of atheism, I was always happy to talk. I could go on and on about it. I thought I could convince anyone, really, if they were interested in the truth. Atheism isn't comforting at first but it is a truth and it's a gateway to more important truths. So I was always interested in finding like-minded life explorers.

It's important to have friends with views opposed to yours. Nevertheless, it establishes a bond of friendship to go on a mental journey together, to search for the truth, as much as friendships happen during a physical journey. Literature is full of stories about heading abroad to accomplish a common mission. It's the plot of the Dirty Dozen, O Brother Where Art Thou, Lord of the Rings, and many others. The theme of going on a mission to resolve a coherent philosophy isn't as popular. But, for friendship, it's still as good.

Here's the thing: if you're raised in a Jesuit school, like my friend Michael, and you take philosophical debate seriously, you're a good candidate for the mental journey. And if you're raised by a philosophy major father and you read a lot of his library out of boredom, it's much the same; you’re a good candidate. Together, Michael and I tended to drift from talking about food at the dining table to talking about philosophy.

We were the philosophy geeks at our college, often to the surprise and annoyance of others at our table. Finally, Michael proposed that we set aside time for better discussion

“You like rationality,” he said. “Well, I can describe a rational proof of God.”

I had heard them all, I thought. I had not only been raised on Aristotle, Plato, the pre-Socratics, Dogun, D.T. Suzuki, Paul Reps, and Alan Watts but I had decided on my own to invest in books like Critiques of God. Still, I had to admit there might be arguments or demonstrations of divinity I had missed.

Instead of dominating dinner conversations because we couldn’t shut up about our beliefs, we waited. After dinner, we walked the halls of our dorm and talked about the logic of a philosopher in the Catholic church, Thomas Aquinas. After a couple evenings like that, Michael grew impatient with the people around us. He didn't like the constraints of the dorms. Traveling from wing to wing meant passing through the bathrooms.

The next week, after dinner or late classes, we hiked on the sidewalks between the campus dorms. Our conversations grew longer and more detailed. We roamed farther. We marched from the sidewalks to the dirt paths and outlying roads, talking. We strolled in the purple dusk of sunset. We debated under cloudy skies and next, under a clear, cold starlight. Within two weeks, our debates lasted so long we had to do laps around the campus.

We were true believers. And in a religious sense, our talks were exciting. I didn’t always have immediate answers for Michael's questions. Sometimes I had to think for so long I would put off an answer until our next walk. Michael did, too, because I posed questions of my own and gave answers he didn't seem to expect. For my part, at least, I was inexperienced in such a deep level of debate. And surprised to have the friendship of such an earnest seeker for the truth.

After the first few days I started to recognize every twist and turn in the arguments of Thomas Aquinas. I knew Michael had found them convincing. They were ancient reasonings, though, and had been thoroughly refuted in the ages since. I had, years before, educated myself on some of the logical refutations and added my own notes.

Michael found Pascal's wager someone compelling, too - or at least enough to try it on me. But it wasn't a wager I would make myself. There's no particular logic against it other than my judgement that it's a pointless guess and morally suspect. We both agreed, actually, that God probably wouldn't be too flattered by someone believing in Him for an "eh, why not" sort of reason.

Interestingly, it was my own thoughts that seemed the most compelling to Michael, just as his personal views on a very personal God were the most moving for me. Our logic wasn't pointless - it was the way we both worked as we tried to make sense of our lives - but every logical system has to ground itself on judgements and observations about the world. Some of our observations weren't the same.

“I can feel God,” he said one night as we turned a corner in the road near the Enfield Mods. He stretched out is arm, almost pleading. “Can’t you?”

“I do feel something,” I admitted. For me, it was a sense of calling beyond humanity and even beyond life itself. It was a nebulous sensation but it was there, a duty to humankind, a sense of holiness around me.

In fact, the sensation of holiness was a driver in my search for the truth. In some ways, I was looking for an explanation for why I felt it.

(to be continued)

Not Even Not Zen 443: Biomythography - Note 149, People or Politics

People or Politics

We were socializing over the sort of game that doesn’t take much attention. We had time to discuss politics.

This was in college. Half of us were guests in a group living arrangement called the Prescott Mods that always looked to me like the sort of condos you would find around a ski lodge. The buildings had high-angled metal roofs. Inside them, the many-bedroom units were spacious and, despite the college furnishings and modular furniture, they felt comfy. Our discussions about politics tended to fill the common areas. Everyone walking through joined in for a little while. Our concepts remained idealistic, of course. I'd assumed we had all worked jobs for a few years, at least, but we were still young enough for us to imagine every political system functioning if people wanted it.

The ‘if people wanted it’ problem was larger than anyone knew. It is, essentially, the most serious problem in economics. Most of the fiscal judgments that appear to be about math are really about incentives and other estimations of human nature. But our judgments of other people were about what one might expect from college students.

“Communism does work,” a young man said from the sidelines. He hadn't joined the board game. He was a roommate on his way to the kitchen. His political contribution came from his experiences in his previous year, which he had spent in communal living. “Just because the Soviets are corrupt doesn’t mean the Czechs are corrupt. Or the Chinese. They're making things work.”

Across from me, my friend Al made a skeptical sound. He thought America was full of crooks. And we all, everyone around the table and elsewhere around the room, thought the Soviets were corrupt. The Chinese government seemed idealistic but also full of power-mad people at the top who were happy to murder one another and sometimes kill swathes of their own countrymen.

“It sort of works,” a couple of us allowed. I snuck a peek at my game cards.

“But it assumes people are honest,” Al commented. "That's the flaw."

At some point during our game, we ended up in a half-hour argument about capitalism, specifically the part where it eventually curdles into monopolies, like milk left out on the counter of Free Enterprise. Then we tried to tackle socialism, except nobody at the table could actually agree on what socialism was, which did not stop half the young men from having extremely strong opinions about it. This is, I believe, a requirement for being a college student: you must be prepared to argue passionately about things you cannot coherently define.

Eventually it dawned on me that the real design flaw in every political system ever invented is the people running it. Specifically, their tendency to get corrupted, which is basically a law of human nature on par with a law of physics.

This, I decided, is probably why the United States has muddled through as well as it has. It showed up to the philosophy party before capitalism, socialism, and communism brought in the serious drugs and ruined the nation-building vibe. Humanity had already spent several thousand years watching leaders get corrupted, so the founders had time to think about that part of things. And that's maybe the most important part. The political theories that came after our founding seem to operate on the assumption that people are rational and well-intentioned, which is an assumption I would not make about my best friends, let alone a large government.

Even today, actual functioning countries are basically political system smoothies - a blend of everything, yes, but with one of the main ingredients still being 'try to stop people from being terrible.'

As I sat with my friends, I had a sudden vision, as I often had back then, of moving parts, of organizations in action, and of the people in and around them. I realized I could make any political system work. It didn't matter if I had to implement communism, capitalism, socialism, anarchy (so popular then among teenagers), theocracy, or pretty much any other thing. The system didn't matter.

It was always about the people. Which, frankly, explains a lot.

If I had the right people, I could form a business. I could form a tribal government; run a farm; do anything constructive I wanted to do. What's more, the right people were always the same people. They're the people who will make any system function because they're hard workers who are willing to be responsible for themselves and others.

And I knew who they were. I built a list in my head with Al's girlfriend, Donna, at the top. The list totalled four or five people at most. That, I found discouraging. I could add a few others who weren't the right people, exactly, but who wouldn't go against the team effort. They could work under the influence of the great souls. The list grew to eight or nine people.

But for the ones who mattered most, there were at best five people out of the (roughly) thousand I knew.

In contrast, I was aware there are people who excuse themselves from responsibility under any system. They cause any politics to fail and die in corruption. I thought those were rare, maybe one or two out of a hundred. But that estimate made the great souls even more rare than the selfish ones. I tried not to think about those proportions.

I focused on the list and what it meant. It's the people, not the politics, that make efforts succeed or fail. Good people - not just well-intentioned ones, but folks actively working and doing good deeds - were at the root of every success I'd heard about. With good souls, I knew I could build any organization.

About a minute later, I realized it would probably all fall apart in the next generation. Any system that depended on good people driving it would fall apart on the next regression to the mean, on the tendency of children not to be quite like their parents.

The progeny of saints are not saints themselves.

So while it was obvious that a society built on good people is a good idea — right up there with "exercise more" and "stop eating the entire sleeve of Oreos" — I circled back to a slightly less comfortable realization: a well-run society can't just hope everyone behaves. It has to actively lean on people. It needs to reward the good citizens, ideally with something better than a certificate of appreciation. It needs to punish the bad ones. It probably needs public shaming. And corporal punishment, maybe, for people who can't be shamed but the society doesn't want to outright kill.

Basically, a society has to do all the awkward, unglamorous things that every successful nation has always done. Corruption, of course, never fully goes away — it's less a problem you solve and more a raccoon you continually manage — but in the early days of any effort, before the checks and balances are in place, success really comes down to the people involved. The quality of the people determines the quality of the victory.

It's a concept that could be deeply inspiring or deeply terrifying, depending on who you're standing next to at the time. For me back then, it was inspiring.
 

Not Even Not Zen 442: Biomythography - Note 148, Equations of the Sun

Equations of the Sun

It was a homework assignment. My professor was the curly-haired Herbert Bernstein. He liked to stride across the front of the classroom with chalk in his hand, and sometimes with both hands behind his back. As he thought about the assignment, his face broke out in a wide smile.

He turned and finished his set of equations on the chalkboard. Although we were only a couple weeks into his quantum mechanics course, I was finding his enthusiasm to be infectious. This was my favorite class.

"These are what we see, roughly, coming out of our nearest star, the sun," he told us. His eyes swept the room. He swiveled and tapped the slate next to what he'd written. "According to our best measurements, here it is. These are the results of whatever is going on in there."

"Nothing more?" someone asked, the young, blonde man who had dropped out of Princeton and returned to college here.

"Nothing of significance," Herb put his hands behind his back. He shrugged. "This is pretty much it. So your homework is to explore. Tell me, with equations, what you think is going on inside the sun to produce these results on the surface."

Dutifully, I copied the results. As I did, I started thinking backwards. What was the previous reaction step? Or really, what were the set of previous reactions that would produce this? Some of them could be simple. Maybe most of the results came from hydrogen and helium. The odds and ends in the equations could come from the traces of other light elements reacting in the plasma.

Next to me, one of my classmates, a young woman who spoke up with keen questions, pulled back her kinky blonde hair and jotted the assignment down on her page more quickly than I did. When she finished, she slapped her pencil down. She noticed me staring at her and flashed me a smile. I put my head down for a few seconds, embarrassed, and checked my equations.

It was my first semester at Hampshire College.

I'd made a few acquaintances but no close friends yet. And since I had a routine of working late into the night and getting up early to exercise, I could make lots of time for homework, especially writing. I was working on a novel, bit by bit. I was composing notes for my Division I linguistics paper. Naturally, I spent an hour on the equations for the interior chemical reactions of the sun. In fact, I spent another block of time on the problem on Saturday morning.

On Sunday, the young woman from my quantum mechanics class found me as we were passing through the halls. It was an odd chance, very welcome, but I had thought she didn't live near me. In our conversation, I found I was mostly right. She revealed her room was two floors up and two sections north of me, although conveniently we were both in the Dakin building.

“Did you make any progress on the homework?” she asked. The light in the hall was dim. It made her golden hair seem browner, but her blue eyes shone.

“Yeah.” I thought about where I had given up. I had not been able to make my forward-looking solution and backward-looking solution join together. “But it doesn’t quite balance.”

“Let’s meet up and go over it.” She gave me a determined look, based on the slight crease in her brow, but with a hopeful, uncertain grin beneath. It seemed like a challenge.

I had been thinking of her as the bright girl. She was smart and fairly quick-witted. She spoke in a feminine but slightly rough voice. For the first time, in the hall with her, I really looked at her upturned nose and her freckles and thought about how cute she was. She would later tell me she hated the bump in her nose although, if she had one, it was essentially invisible. As far as her freckles, she would tell me she hated them. She never told me she hated being smart. That, I think she felt good about.

In the afternoon, we sat down together and got out our notebooks. On hers, she had written a few lines. She appeared to have lost interest early. Maybe she figured out quicker than I did that we didn't have much of a sense of direction, in our group, about the chemical reactions in plasma even though we had spent most of a class on them.

So far, I had filled three pages with equations and maybe a sixth of another. I had given up, too, when I had gotten enough sense of the bigger problem. I had started to develop opinions about how the output from the sun should theoretically appear. I was able to contrast it with how the results actually appeared and see a significant gap. I suspected something was wrong with our starting point. Everyone was sure about the starting point, apparently, because we knew the proportions of elements in our sun, but I was starting to guess our picture had to be wrong somehow - or at least incomplete.

"Explain this," said the young woman. She put a finger down on the second step in my equations.

Line by line, we stepped through my work in the first two pages. She listened to my thinking. Twice, she jotted down notes in her own notebook. She checked my math. When she reached the middle, she tapped her chin. She sat, lost in her thoughts for a moment.

With awkward smiles and confusing body language, we said goodbye before dinner. On Monday, we met again in our quantum mechanics class. There, I discovered how little I had written compared to another student, the blonde young man who had dropped out from Princeton. He had returned to academics here at Hampshire College. He had filled page after page, nearly twenty pages, before he gave up getting the reactions to balance between the starting elements and the finished products. He seemed consumed by the project. However, he was kind enough to read my work a little and see I had tried a different direction, which seemed to frustrate him, please him, and make him want to resume. He really wanted Professor Bernstein to reveal the answer.

"There is no answer yet," Herb Bernstein told us. "No one has solved this."

That made everyone a little happier with how far we had gotten. This wasn't a trivial problem.

"The important part," Herb continued, "Is the thinking about it. The question of particle reactions in our sun is an interesting one. I think we can all see the math doesn't work out. Either it's tremendously complicated, more than humans can do, or there's something we don't know. And I think there's something we don't know."

Our classmate from Princeton seemed frustrated but he obviously felt happier, too, and more relaxed. I think he was discovering that he hated required courses and the pressure of exams but he actually liked learning. He loved the process.

I think I was coming to the same sort of understanding. When all the external forces and distractions were removed, as they mostly had been at Hampshire, I loved to learn. I wanted to figure out solutions to problems. And I wanted to make things.  

Not Even Not Zen 441: Biomythography - Note 147, Competitive Writing

Competitive Writing

The class was advertised as creative writing. We auditioned with stories about ‘an egg,’ each no more than five hundred words long. Everyone got the same story prompt for the audition. It was a decent way to limit class size. A year earlier in my quantum mechanics class, the professor let everyone attend. After two weeks, he enrolled everyone who hadn't given up. But in the arts, Hampshire College classes had to proceed differently. A professor couldn’t let a hundred students carry in their manuscripts about alienation, rain, childhood trauma, and eggs and then hope only twenty would stay.

Lynne Hanley, our newest writing professor at the college, had to know writing classes were the most popular type of course on campus. Even if she had been willing to punish herself with yards of typewritten manuscripts weekly, there were factors to consider like 'how many students will fit into this room?' For a host of practical reasons, including fire codes, Lynne had to impose a limit.

Submitting audition stories struck me as better than holding a lottery. Maybe I felt that way because I had already lost a class lottery. And with the auditions, I got in.

On the first day, the professor asked me to read my audition piece aloud. This was alarming, due to my previous writing class experiences. Those were workshops wherein the operating philosophy was: no sentence should survive. Students would go through a manuscript line by line as if they were members of a special literary police unit. Sometimes it was helpful. Sometimes it was a competitive sport. Sometimes, students would find flaws in great writing not because the sentences and paragraphs weren't strong but because finding flaws was what we were supposed to do. I think it felt even-handed, to some.

But this time, people liked the story. There was even a small burst of applause, the academic equivalent of being told by surgeons that they see no immediate reason for concern. I relaxed. At the end of the class, after the readings and discussions had finished, I thanked everybody and said I would keep their comments in mind when revising.

Professor Hanley's eyes widened.

"Oh, I almost forgot," she said. "We will not be doing revisions in this class."

For a moment, I opened my mouth to object. But that was me trying to stick up for the force of my habits. Writing and endless revision went together like college and debt, to my mind. I'd been trained to believe every piece of writing must be polished until it glowed like a jewel or it caught fire from the friction and burned the author's house down.

As the next couple of weeks went by, I started to understand the system. This class emphasized first drafts and momentum. Instead of spending six geological eras polishing one paragraph, we wrote new things. It was strange, but it was good. Compared to the earlier writing classes I'd taken at a faraway university, at Hampshire, and at Amherst, Lynne Hanley's class was speedier and more productive. The Hampshire writers remained enthusiastic, too. They were willing to work, including doing the kinds of work - and the sheer amounts - it takes to improve.

In the fourth class, though, Professor Hanley said we would do something different.

"Someone in our class has been writing songs," she said. "And I think we should listen to some of his writing and give him comments in the way writers do."

Inwardly, I winced at the announcement. I had written songs for high school and college garage bands but I knew I wasn't good at the arrangements. In my head, the instrumentation and harmonies sounded wonderful. On the page, I gave up. I couldn't make enough sense out of the musical notation. Nor, for that matter, could I play five or six instruments - and certainly not at once. Songwriting, I knew, was not just poetry with a guitar leaning against it. It required additional powers. It was the difference between being able to hammer one board into another and being personally responsible for the plumbing, wiring, roofing, windows, and whatever else it takes to make sure a house doesn't fall over.

After class, a couple of students and I talked about this development.

"You know his father," one young woman said, and she named someone famous. He was a musician whose songs I hadn't heard and yet, she was right, I knew his name. He was famous.

The other student reacted as college students do when celebrity brushes the outer edge of campus life.

"That's amazing," she said.

It was, in a way, but it didn't encourage me. Maybe our song-writing student would be relatively expert. But maybe not. Also, he might be self-indulgent and overly forgiving of his own flaws. I had known a few children of successful people. Some of them seemed driven to achieve great things, which was interesting, but some seemed to assume they had already achieved them, which was not.

The next time, as I walked toward the room in Prescott where our writing class met, I remembered I was going to listen to songs. I prepared myself emotionally to hear something terrible. I assumed there would be at least one major defect: clumsy lyrics, awkward melody, embarrassing instrumentation, or the general unfinished quality common to art made by people who are, after all, still teenagers and do not yet command a full studio orchestra with backup singers working for union scale.

After we took our seats, Professor Hanley started the class normally. We reviewed a brief slate of stories. Then she nodded to a dark-haired young man. He pulled out a boombox. After some problem with the power cord, which had gotten disconnected as people shuffled around during class, the fellow pressed play.

His song came out. And it was a finished one. Not "promising." Not "interesting." Finished. He had laid down tracks in a studio, somehow. This was not a guy strumming uncertainly to a single tape recorder in his dorm room. This was finished work. Within about a minute I realized I was not remotely qualified to critique the arrangement. I could barely scribble out partial versions of vocals and strum a few chords.

I strained to listen to the lyrics closer. Those, at least, I would be comfortable with. But it's hard to criticize words you can’t discern. And mostly, I couldn't. Lyrics on a recording do not line up neatly on a printed page. They do not give you a chance to scan ahead or return to an earlier verse to review a line again.

Abruptly, the young man pressed the stop button on the boombox. The song was over. What could I say? I didn't have even token criticism in mind. And then all the class poured in and gushed with praise.

As usual, I felt like I should pick through the words with a comb as if this had been any other piece of fiction writing from the class. But I realized, well, my response was mostly just my old habits. I was trying to do what I had usually done. With some relief, I saw everyone else was going to discuss the song. It was a good song. Maybe I could just shut up.

Sometimes when I need to be quiet or to be patient, I practice meditation. This wasn’t one of those times. I really was just trying to shut up. And maybe not be so competitive. I was growing aware I should not always try to re-write a poem or a song in my head. Mostly, for a few minutes, I practiced shutting up and trying to get with the supportive culture of Hampshire College.

Not Even Not Zen 440: Biomythography - Note 146, In Common

In Common

I stepped through the doors, first in line.

"Go on," said Roberta. The brown haired woman tilted her head to the stairs. With her not-yet-used hole punch in her left hand, she waved me through.

I was on the minimum meal plan at the Hampshire College dining commons, so I was usually hungry by dinner. Roberta knew it. She let me go through without punching my meal ticket about half the time if I was among the first to report. That way, she let me eat a few lunches during the week.

Every time she punched my ticket at lunch, it seemed to make her happy.

I put the meal pass back into my wallet and turned down the steps to the front-kitchen meal line. Unfortunately, I already knew from the eye-watering odors that I wasn't going to find anything I liked. There are only three things worse than eating a skunk, I guess, and those are: cooked squash, cooked eggplant, and cooked carrots. When carrots are raw, they're pretty good, so it's astonishing how they are transformed into a force for evil by the act of cooking.

Possessed by chaos spirits, the chefs had added carrots to otherwise fine spaghetti.

Tray in hand, I marched around to the back kitchen in the hope there would be something tasty and hot. The attendant waved me in. He gave me a big smile as I picked up a plate of spinach pie. (Other students called it spanikopita.) Then I smelled the pie. It reeked. I put the plate back where I'd gotten it. I crouched and squinted.

The pie was spinach and squash. Inedible.

A few minutes later, I found a place in the middle room of the dining commons. One drawback of arriving early was that I sat alone. A benefit, though, was I sat alone - sometimes with my writing pad or a paperback.

I was staring off into space, not writing, when a short, cute woman poked her head through the middle room doors. She spied me, gave an uncertain smile, and made a decision. She stepped in.

“Mind if I sit here?”

"Not at all!" 

She lived on the hall near my girlfriend. Her name was Annette. All I knew about her so far was she seemed smart, funny, and a little shy.

She started talking before she sat down. I tried to move a chair for her. She pulled up another. Her conversation seemed to come in bursts, each carefully measured, like leveled tablespoons of complete thoughts. When she gave me room to respond, she laughed at my responses. Her dark eyes seemed to sparkle.

To my dismay, Annette carried a plate of the forbidden spaghetti on her tray. She ignored it and took a sip of her drink. She eyed my peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

"Why aren't you eating the dinner?" she asked.

I looked at the carrots in the marinara sauce. At this point in life, I sat quietly in meditation an awful lot and I didn't think I needed to use words, so I just gazed at carrots more meaningfully. You could smell them in the sour red sauce all over the dining commons.

“Well?” She indicated my sandwich with her water glass.

"Can't you tell how bad it is?" I replied after a few seconds.

She tilted her head to one side for a moment. She could smell it all right. She just hadn't thought it was as bad as I did. She chatted a while longer, hands pursed together. Her wit about her classes, professors, and life in general made me laugh. Finally, she picked up her fork.

"Wow." She chewed for a moment and, as if determined to prove me wrong, she swallowed. She looked me in the eye the whole time. I gagged a little as I imagined the taste. "Yeah, that's bad."

"The salad bar is the best thing in the dining hall." Today, I felt particularly strongly about it.

She waved her arm and continued her thoughts on politics. I liked her gestures, graceful and quick. But her sarcastic opinions and general smart-assedness were even better. She paused at the finish of a complete thought and gazed down at her plate.

"I've never tasted spaghetti this bad," she observed. She gave her food a sort of disappointed smile and she was off again, conversationally, this time back to life in the dorms. As she described hanging out with her friends, I started to hope, just maybe, that I would fit in with them. They sounded great.

To my surprise, Annette stirred up another forkful of spaghetti, complete with a carrot. While checking me out to see if I was staring in horror, as I was, she popped it into her mouth. Again, she chewed - this time, slower.

"It really is awful." She frowned.

I stared in astonishment. She had eaten the cooked carrot.

"If you don't mind my asking." I put down my sandwich. "After you said it was bad the first time, why did you take a second bite?"

She barked out a laugh.

"To make sure I was right?" Her eyes sparkled. She got me laughing about this, too. "I couldn't quite believe it."

She stirred the spaghetti a third time.

"Fuck this," she said. She put down her fork. "I'm going to go make a peanut butter and jelly or something. Save my place?"

For the cutest smile and sharpest wit around? I would have been happy to wait as long as I could sit still. Longer, really, since that usually wasn’t enough. 

"Sure!"

And when she walked away, I felt instantly bereft. Sometimes I felt lonely in the dining hall. This was a little like that but this time accompanied by a feeling of warmth, as if I could feel the layer of affection that underlies the world.

 

Not Even Not Zen 439: Poem - A Line of Children

A Line of Children 

Gently, I eased my car past a line of children
on a wide, white sidewalk in the city.
Each of them held to a colored rope as they walked.
A woman at each end of the line, front and back, 
hovered near, mother hens watching over 
their row of baby chicks.

And suddenly I was in a different age.

I was standing on a wide concrete deck,
like the wide sidewalk but at the edge of a pool.
Shielding my eyes from the harsh sun,
breathing in the chlorinated fumes.
I was wondering where my nephew Julian was.
The women watching him in the pool, 
how did they lose track of him? 

He was four years old. Four.

He was an articulate boy, a little shy, 
a gentle soul. He was kind to other children,
willing to share but happy to play alone,
a quiet touch with adults, and a great admirer 
of his cousin, my oldest son.

I remember the looks he gave my son.
his short, nimble fingers, his gestures,
his deep eyes, his walk, his smile.
Julian was going to be a great person.

This year, he would have been twenty-eight.




 - Eric Gallagher