It’s a cool September afternoon some 40 years ago. I’m driving to work (the sports guy on a little TV station in Elmira, NY) listening to the Yankees, my team since birth. The inning is late and the Yanks are behind… until one of them cracks a home run. I cheer like it’s the last play of the World Series, though today I can’t recall why. The year was 1967 or eight, meaning by that point in the season, pennant hopes, like local strawberries, were no more than a pleasant memory. Maybe the batter was Mickey Mantle, every fan’s hero, then in the twilight of his career. Anyway, the highway was a four-lane. The stadium is going bananas in my ear as I pass a sedan on my right. I look over for a second. The driver is an older man, which to me at the time probably meant he was 40. He, like me, is smiling large. It’s obvious that, behind our closed windows, we’re both listening to the game. Our eyes meet. Without missing a beat, we give each other a thumbs-up, then I’m by him.
Why have I carried that moment with me all these years? Because of the indelible energetic experience of spontaneous, shared joy. That connection has been a big teacher. Each time I recall it, I’m reminded of what’s possible between people, and within our own heart.Great sages have forever advised that we are the architects of our destiny. Every thought is a prayer and every prayer is answered, said Emerson, who gets no argument from me. At the same time, I find the notion of independence, of reaching goals on our own, to be way up there in the wacky department. I say this as a man who has pretended to be the Lone Ranger for a lot longer than those boyhood years when every day after school I strapped a cap pistol on each hip and tamed the wild west (while living in rural New York). We fight wars for independence, yet, despite our often Spartan discipline and Herculean effort, there is likely not a single decision we make, or a single skill we have, or a single thought or feeling we experience that hasn’t been influenced by any number of people and events—probably more than we will ever know. And that’s not even counting reincarnation. So to look in the mirror and say, “I accomplished this,” which I’ve done countless times, reveals as much as anything else that we’ve sipped the Kool-Aid that keeps us believing we are separate from the rest of humanity. If there is any perception more harmful than that, I am unaware of it. At its extreme, how else do we bring ourselves to brutalize all sorts of people if not from the belief that they are “other” than we are?
One way I attempt to corral those Lone Ranger compulsions is the practice of making a list of every person I’ve ever known, met, brushed elbows with or otherwise encountered. As you might imagine, hindsight that extends six-plus decades results in quite a menagerie: loved ones, classmates, girlfriends, neighbors, coaches, teammates, celebrities, colleagues, bosses, cops who’ve given me a speeding ticket, performers, friends, physicians, teachers, mentors, taxi drivers, family to be sure, all the way to those complete strangers whose lives and mine intersected for barely a nod or a thumbs up.
Obviously, it’s not just the list. The juice is in the exploration of how a person’s presence has become an integral part of my being.
Charlotte Fitzpatrick, my high school speech coach, awakened me to the worst feeling an audience has: the pain of someone on stage performing poorly. “Every audience wants you to do well,” she said, inoculating me to life at ease before just about any assembly this side of a firing squad. I might have been 25 when a veteran newsman told me, frankly, accurately, I wasn’t nearly the hot stuff I thought I was. A year later I decided it was time for college, and because my dad used to say, “When in doubt, go to the top,” my first step was phoning the president of Harvard at his home. An art professor I studied with bounced around the studio squawking, “Don’t marry your effort,” surely a candidate for the best piece of advice I’ve ever received. These are but a few top-of-mind bubbles of experience in the ocean of moments that is anyone’s life. Their potential as nourishment, however, is realized through the practice of remembering—then feeling their power as sacred, ever-present teachers. I’m a bit like an archeologist’s daydream: with every step I stub my toe on some new artifact rich with meaning.
Here’s another. From age eight to twelve, I played Little League baseball. Toward the end of at least three of those four summers, my mom took me three hours down the road to the Little League World Series in Williamsport, Pennsylvania. We stayed with a favorite uncle and aunt, she one of my mother’s five sisters. They had a vast library. I was free to read whatever I liked, though most of it was too adult for me. One exception became the most important book of my young life: a collection of cartoons by the legendary Charles Addams. Addams’ humor was for many years a staple of the New Yorker magazine and eventually inspired the Addams’ Family television series. I attended a parochial grammar school followed by three years in a Franciscan seminary. Hot for God I’d been forever, but I was still learning that those in the church business weren’t necessarily able to satisfy my spiritual thirst. Tellingly, during that time, of all the adults I encountered, Charles Addams was the closest to what I thought of as a saint. Well, maybe not him personally, but him as expressed in his work. Addams’ cartoons embraced the polarities of ghoulishness and sweet enchantment in a manner that made me laugh out loud with pleasure. Eccentrics who relished the macabre were presented with kindness. The part of us that wishes some people would take a long walk on a short pier was celebrated. No wonder organized religion was beyond my grasp. Shalt-nots and razzle-dazzle were ultimately unsatisfying for a boy whose intuition tended toward the unconditional acceptance of everything. Thanks to my list-making hobby, it’s been a bit of a hoot to discover how much my affinity with Charles Addams remains an active part of me half-a-century later. Consider the titles of some of my essays: “Why I Love Alzheimer’s,” “Suppose Jesus Had Been Molested by a Priest,” “Knowing You’re Going to be Hanged in the Morning,” “Child Molesters are Good Teachers.” All are inspired by the sentiment that there is always more to life than we might imagine, and that even the painful and foreign can also be tender, captivating and touched with humor.
It’s not just people who’ve become part of me. There are also barn animals. Our 30 year-old grandmother pony, most recently.
Some yogis meditate a dozen or more hours a day. Grandmother grazes, even if all that’s available is vegetation you need a magnifying glass to see. A chorus of donkeys singing Klezmer classics wouldn’t cause grandmother to glance up from her steady, peaceful munching.
Until a few months ago I knew zip about horses. Now I know next to zip. My bride, Dear, on the other hand, has loved all things horse since that age when it made all the sense in the world for her to meet her dad out on the sidewalk as he returned to their Boston suburban home after work and ask if this were the day he would be bringing her the green horse she knew was destined to be hers. While horses have been part of Dear’s life the entire 30-plus years we’ve known each other, only in the past year have any resided a short stroll from our backdoor. Last summer Dear built the barn of her dreams and brought into our daily lives two mares, one of them grandmother, a Fiord pony, the so-called golden retriever of ponies, albeit an 800 pound retriever.
Among the few tips I’ve picked up about equine relationships are these. Regardless of a horse’s behavior, if we freak out things only get worse. We need to communicate to the horse that whatever it’s doing is no big deal as far as we’re concerned. The tricky part is that, since energy doesn’t lie, it’s not like we can simply pretend we’re calm and collected. We actually have to be it, by allowing fear and pain to flow through us as if we were a screen door. (There are those who say a horse can teach us everything we need to know about ourselves, if we’re willing to learn.) That’s one thing. The other is this: ponies can eat themselves to death—the downside of perpetual grazing. A nice swatch of clover-rich grass can be lethal for a pony who eats too much of it at one time.
All of which sets the stage for the day this past spring when Dear was away for several hours and I arrived home from running an errand to be told by a house guest that grandmother pony had liberated herself from her pasture and was chewing her way across the lawn that fronts the barn—for her the equivalent of Christmas dinner at the Dessert Hall of Fame. How long she’d been there, and thus what danger she was in, was hard to say.
Getting beyond “OHMYGOD!” took only a few breaths once I allowed myself to take a cue from grandmother herself. Her calm grounded focus in the face of “whatever” helped me gain my own inner equilibrium. We strolled like two pals into her stall for observation, where she promptly took a nap.
This essay could easily become a book you’d need a forklift to carry around. But then, so could just about anyone’s stories, I would bet. Sleuthing the events and associations of life and how they’ve shaped our perceptions can be never-ending. I imagine on my deathbed recalling for the first time something like the day on a mountain in Massachusetts when a man I’d deeply wounded a year earlier crossed my path by happenstance and, barely stopping and saying little more than hello, presented me with the wildflower he was carrying. As I remember and join these experiences, I get the lunacy of thinking I’m the Lone Ranger—separate from others, much less from the rest of existence, as if a snowflake could be separate from water. There are times I feel relentlessly pursued by a tidal wave of motherly indulgence.
A final example. My grandsons, Sam and Jake, nine and eleven, who’ve been my sidekicks the past two summers, are God’s henchman. Whatever else their life purpose, they were born to be a source of endless awe and awakening for me. Sam’s most recent offering began with the question, “Buck, what do you like to do most in the world?”
(Without going into the details of how my grandkids came to call me Buck, let me just say there was a time when it was a nickname I would have chosen for myself only if it were accompanied by an opera-singing mouse that pooped diamonds.)
“Remembering who I am,” I said.
Sam looked at me funny, as though he’d been expecting me to tick off one of the many worldly activities he knows I’m passionate for, such as surprising him and his brother with adventures big and small—like the night this summer after a day of endless, exhausting plane travel when the three of us dragged into our hotel starving and the only available food was in vending machines and I, mister-one-sugar-a-day-eat-all-the-fruit-and-vegetables-you-want, said, “Boys, let’s have a banquet of junk.”
“I am the great love of God,” I said, “just as you are. In fact, the great love of God is all there is. Everything is made of it. And when I remember this, I experience a deep, joyful gratitude for all of life—that I don’t feel when I forget. So remembering who I am is the thing I like to do most in the world. Does that make sense?”
Sammy thinks a second, then twinkles, mister-nine-going-on-ninety, and says, “If everything is God, are you saying you’d be happy to eat a worm?”
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