My Searing Junior High School Memory

My friend Alan and I agreed. Greenview Junior High School had a great cafeteria. We adored the establishment’s bill of fare. These hair-netted gals made big sheets of square thick-crust pizza, more a zesty than a sweet sauce, though somehow that’s the only entrée I remember. I remember the desserts quite well. There was pecan pie, which was new to me: a mixture of crunch and gooey teeth-aching sweetness. And oh, the little egg custards in a cup! Once, with someone timing me, I slurped one down in eight seconds. I never tried to secure the recognition of The Guinness Book of World Records, but that should be in there.

Alan wasn’t my only friend. There was Mike, of course, may he rest in peace. When I moved from Cleveland to South Euclid, Mike sponsored me in suburban society.

One of the kids Mike introduced me to was Peter, an anomalous Italian among the Jewish population of the neighborhood, who joined our knockabout tackle football games at Bexley Park. He was into athletics, fitness challenges. He once approached me as I sat on the bleachers during noon rec and said he could do 75 pushups, then dropped and did them. Good ones. Didn’t even seem winded when he sprang back up. Built like a Greek god.

Somehow I recall “having lunch fourth.” That was the earliest period you could have it. There was also fifth and, I think, sixth. I was sitting in social studies or math or English dreaming about lunch. When the bell rang I banged out the classroom door and went running – not walking, running – down the hall to be ahead of everybody. I shot down the stairs, barely holding onto the rail to correct for the centrifugal swing. I hit the bottom of the stairs to make my final turn and head into the home stretch to the chow line. Only trouble was, it had been raining, the tiles were slick, and I slipped and fell on my ass.

That would be bad enough, but I saw out of the corner of my eye, coming down from the top of the stairs, none other than Peter.

I was crimson with shame, and am sure I loaded my tray with a compromised élan that day.

Peter was pretty nice, and I wonder if he felt for me, felt my embarrassment, because it wasn’t long after that, during study hall, that he sat down across from me and engaged me in a real guy conversation, about, oh, among other things, whether I’d discovered playing with myself. I guess he just wanted me to know animal urges were normal. Not to impute adult foresight and guidance to this fun, blonde-haired moppet of a kid, but I did feel the presence of a gesture intended to mollify my little social agony and shame.

He revealed something about himself.

“You know what I love?” he said. “My mom makes it for me. You take chocolate cake and pour milk over it and it gets real soft, like mush . . . and then I eat it. That’s real good.”

You look at this kid with his rock chest and arms and shoulders and washboard belly – nobody looked like that at this age – and found it odd, and touching, to hear him talk about something so . . . private and comfort producing. So Pillsbury dough boy. He seemed made of iron.

I wanted to be made of iron too, but I had many guises, all competing for primacy during this period. I was figuring out who I was. There were a lot of Bob Gitlins.

I was athletic and loved not only the tackle football games but what we called “chicken fights.” One kid got on the shoulders of another and tried to claw down the rider of another team. Peter and I were a good team.

I played tennis. A kid named Artie once beat me two sets to one in ninety-degree heat at Bexley Park and though I lost I would always remember with a glow such an epic fight.

I hated Little League because I didn’t want to be there and performed sluggishly. I fell in love with Cap’n Crunch, precipitating a chubby phase that warred with the athleticism.

That war is still on. It’s why I still work out at the gym three days a week and put up with a manual labor job that would fell lesser sorts. I’m 67 and I still care about muscle and fitness. I wonder if it was Peter’s influence. I’ve lost touch with him.

My therapist says I have to be kinder to myself. There’s a happy medium between self-punishment and self-indulgence.

I told her she reminded me of my mother, who used to say you had to be your own best friend.

“You think there was wisdom in that?”

“Yes I do,” said my therapist, and she smiled.

I am guilty of promulgating fake news, and I am sorry

Young J.D. Vance (played by Owen Asztalos) learns much from his mother (Amy Adams), though addiction grows to subvert her authority.

 

The face reminded me of Adrienne Barbeau; something about the mouth was Tuesday Weld. The voice was pure Dolly Parton, though she was not burdened with the outlandish bust.

Lisa was in many ways my first real girlfriend. She might have been called a “hillbilly chick,” living as she did on the near west side of Cleveland, a working-class white neighborhood. I still lived with my parents in a two-story colonial in the east side suburb of South Euclid.

She was nineteen and I was twenty-nine when we met in a bar. We were both there to see Wild Horses, whose bass player was a friend of mine. She was feasting her eyes on the bull-necked, shaggy-haired, indecently studly Italian drummer, who was known to cause the drool level to rise in quite a few women.

She was not so distracted as not to respond to my inane repartee as I sat there, not far from her, guzzling Rolling Rock.

She went out with me, became my steady girl. After my repressed twenties, Lisa provided an intimacy I’d long been denied.

I got away with it for a year or two before she broke up with me. There was a culture gap between us, but also I had been denied sexuality and female companionship for so long that what I had with her could only be the start of a new chapter for me. I can’t say all the explorations matched up to her freshness and affection and charm.

I never forgot Lisa, and often considered how she’d made the right move marrying some fireman with a boat he put onto Lake Erie, a man who appeared a lot more fun than I was. All I ever did was take her to Corky and Lenny’s deli at Cedar Center to show off my glamorous exotic shiksa or to Loparo’s pizza joint up the corner from my parents’ house, then down my parents’ basement to make out on the hard couches.

When I discovered she’d wandered into my Facebook orbit forty years later, I was delighted. I don’t know to what extent she read my blog, but I know she read the Facebook teasers I would create to advertise it.

It saddened me that I pissed her off because of a rant I did about Biden and Trump. I am using this space to apologize for it.

I referred to “rednecks” cruising around in big pickup trucks with American flags and Trump banners waving even after he lost the election.

I launched the thing spuriously, though, and this I now must admit. I said the Walmart sporting goods department no longer had guns because, fearing a “gun grabber” president, people bought them out. I never knew that for sure.

I found out from some blowhard in the lunchroom at least a week later that there are no guns there because Walmart decided to stop selling them. The guy he was sitting with put in that recent shootings in Walmarts, like El Paso, prompted the move.

I swooned at the thought of my laziness, my never having checked it out. Just to make sure, I Googled the thing and found that at the end of October the company made this decision.

When I had ranted online, I used the absence of the firearms to lob a nasty comment about how, day after the Sandy Hook horror, it must’ve been “these same assholes” muttering, “That nigger better not try to take my gun,” but that was a lie too. I made that quote up. Fictional license? No. This is a form of journalism. Anger untampered by facts is poison.

I didn’t know I’d fucked up right away with what I’d written, except Lisa commented, “You dated a redneck once. Boy, I had you figured wrong.”

I felt sad. Fell into abject apology mode. I love everybody, blah blah. Meant no offense.

In truth, I don’t think I harbor any animus toward people of Appalachian background. Yet I can feel some kind of unavoidable falseness going on here as I say this.

My friend Dan, former fellow teacher and Marine, once said to me, “Around here, you’re a redneck or you’re nobody.”

A month ago a guy in an AA meeting intimated he was disappointed Trump lost. “I went to work out this morning at my redneck gym,” where guys there were bitching and moaning.

My old girlfriend bristled at my use of “redneck,” the whole context. Felt it smeared her. I know she liked Trump, am sure her husband and family want him to keep being president.

But that’s not the point. I should have been more sensitive.

If I hear someone talk about “Jewish people” I cringe. First of all, why not just say Jews? You can feel them dancing around these alien people they don’t get. Or like.

THE MOVIE Hillbilly Elegy was quite good and did not deserve its negative reviews. First of all, Amy Adams filled out wasn’t bad on the eyes, and she inhabited this intellectually brilliant but crazed character with all the aplomb she brings to her other work. Secondly, Glenn Close’s pistol-packin’ mama — a brave and unflinching foray from the sexpot of Fatal Instinct — stole the screen. Thirdly, Gabriel Basso was believable as the product of Kentucky rustic culture and all that family fierceness in protecting one’s own: a young man trying to fight his way out of (what my Texas sister once called) the rural ghetto but without losing his pride in his heritage.

The book, by J.D. Vance, told the story of a people that needed to be told, people from the upper South, using Route 23 to get to Ohio and all those factory jobs. This scene has fallen into economic depression and opioid abuse, a slew of social agonies that are just now beginning to be correctly catalogued.

There’s even a scene in the film where the character playing Vance bristles at the use of the word “redneck” by one of the east coast lawyers he came there to get hired by.

I don’t think I’ll be using the word redneck anymore.

Long as you don’t talk about Jewish people.

Renewed Hope in the Rockwellian Barber Chair

I voted for Biden to pick up where Obama left off, but I wonder whether Trump has mutated America beyond repair.

 

The glass case in Walmart’s sporting goods department commonly displays a full array of rifles and other guns.

It’s empty.

Against the advent of a “gun-grabbing” Biden presidency, Prescott-area residents bought up firearms. Must be the same assholes who, day after Sandy Hook, ran around muttering, “Just let that nigger try to take my guns.”

Sometimes I wonder why I live here.

Chorus of Prescottonians: “So go back where you came from. We don’t need you.”

Ah, they’re stuck with me. Anyway, the shits are just some of them. And there are shits everywhere.

Barb and I have a nice house; we’re dug in. I always had more of a sentimental association with Cleveland than she did anyhow.

I’ve bonded with Prescott. You can’t beat the climate.

Moving back to Cleveland wouldn’t help. My friend there told me on the phone, some months back, he’d driven to Lake Erie for a yacht or boat party and the scene bristled with Trump and MAGA regalia, boats and trucks with banners broadcasting love for this political gate-crasher who bled civility from public life. Nostalgia for Ohio? Hah! Ohio just went redder than Arizona!

Unless you’re living in a gay enclave in densest Manhattan, you can’t escape Trumpism.

Shame abounds. I know at least one Jewish relative who will spew the spurious gospel of tax freedom and Trump’s enabling of Israel. I’m all for Israel, never saw Zionism as an epithet; I advocate for that beleaguered nation’s staunchest defense. But Clinton was right. A two-state solution has to happen. And whoever thinks Trump is better for Israel than Biden would be, and Obama was, is dead wrong.

Don’t get me started on religion. Because let’s not forget the evangelicals, in bed with Trump because of conservative Supreme Court judges and abortion. The whole thing is the perfect storm of nonsense and horror.

I keep my mouth shut in the Walmart break room where the loudest people are employees spouting off in favor of Trump, who lost the election but isn’t man enough to admit it. He doesn’t give a shit about them; they’re just acolytes in his cult of personality.

I got a haircut the other day and got into a political chat with the barber. He’s from Bulgaria, as is his mother, who was styling a gal behind us.

I mentioned to my barber the talented Bulgarian actress in the new Borat movie. We picked up where we’d left off last haircut, talking about Bulgaria.

I asked whether Bulgarian barbershops were any different from ours.

Mom, overhearing, chimed in that Bulgaria was a communist country, there were only a few politically sanctioned cuts. That wowed me.

Isaac, my talented young barber, said he was afraid Biden was a socialist who’d raise his taxes.

“Who told you that?” I said.

“People here say that.”

“Your taxes wouldn’t go up,” I corrected him as gently as possible.

He laughed. “But that’s what I’m hearing. You would hear that in a conservative Republican town.”

I smiled and allowed, “Yeah, well, Democrats can talk a lot of bullshit too.”

Didn’t want to prolong any defense of the Biden administration I’d copped to voting for; I could feel the neck hairs on the lady customer getting cut behind me prickling as I spoke.

I AM ENGROSSED in Barack Obama’s memoir, marveling at its wit, humility, and vision. I always felt history will be kind to him and burnish his legacy. I miss his big heart and disdain for esoteric frippery. People have said he was wonkish and long winded (he admits that when he began in politics he was), but when you listen to his speeches overall, to his most recent, and to those that marked his presidency, you hear plain language, language pristine and elemental.

Trump is hateful and inarticulate. And got seventy million votes.

I just read a decent piece in The New York Times about the futility of trying to empathize with Trumpers.

My take on this thing is that Trump backers found the Trump reign to be … well, fun. There was no teacher in the room to tell them to read pages 17 through 34 and answer the questions on page 35. The mood was anti-intellectual. It doesn’t matter whether the countervailing force was Bill Clinton, the best president in my lifetime, or Barack Obama, whose political finesse lagged behind his communications genius. No accounting in words of the inevitability of a multicultural nation and need to consider a new melting pot, no adult explanation about race as a core issue and Black Lives Matter a fit reaction to entrenched bias in our policing, will work.

Thank you, internet culture and social media magnates — and Donald Trump, their cementing force — for bringing us into the era of no facts, only warring tribal myths. The more outlandish, the more successful.

And Bill Maher’s right. Democrats are culpable too, with their far-left outing of public figures in the name of political correctness. No wonder nobody likes us either.

It’s highly likely Biden will be hogtied, what with chinless whore Mitch McConnell exerting his clamp hold on the Senate. How I root for a miracle in Georgia!

Do we have political naïf Obama to thank for bringing us into this era of opposing-party intransigence?

I guess we’d better not forget it was a room of Pelosi-spearheaded Democrats that pushed through the Affordable Care Act.

The sword cuts both ways. And that sword needs to be retired in favor of compromise.

Biden has said as much, and he’s right.

Looking Forward

Me and my girl, who loved car rides. Is it me, or does she look pensive, or sad, here? (Photo courtesy of Barbara Chiancone Gitlin. Annie Leibovitz, eat your heart out.)

 

My shrink screwed her face up as politely as possible when I unburdened myself of a bit of searing cynicism regarding whether there was any point to me continuing to write. I’d done a longish bit of autobiographically derived prose, call it a novel, call it a memoir. Some of it was good. But I’d got to wondering whether the whole thing lashed together amounted to anything coherent or compelling, let alone saleable. I wondered this because I was starting to get damned with faint praise from New York agents.

“Mm hm. But Bob, you sat there in that chair not long ago and expressed the highest possible praise, and optimism, for what you’d written.” Or words to that effect. I don’t take notes during our sessions. Neither does she, though I sometimes wonder if — perhaps as the antidote to insomnia — she plays back my tape-recorded dronings.

The book sits in a drawer: my stories, or my story. It’s all one story, just as Keith Richards says all Stones songs are one song.

“How do I know my liking it doesn’t take place in this little subjective, solipsistic bubble?” I defended my refusal to battle on. I have this terror my obstinate refusal to give up constitutes the ultimate folly. “I might like it, but the world has the opposite reaction.”

My therapist doesn’t seem to be listening. Not that she feels she must labor to buttress a sagging ego; more that she doesn’t believe me, or she sees though my bullshit, my self-defense tropes.

She’s seen some of my writing. Says I have enough talent to make writing worth my while.

Hell, this blog was at her suggestion. I began it as something to lift me out of the doldrums that pervaded my world when I first saw this therapist, fresh from having got my ass handed back to me, well chewed, by a soured career in compulsory education and the most difficult kids it had to offer. My shrink said I should start a blog to record my “mythopoetic hero journey.”

So I did.

 

My last writing before this post was marked by terrible grief. My dog had died.

I’d been there when the vet eased the needle in to end the dog’s suffering. Barb and I drove home tear-stained, stunned. Went back to bed at dawn, but no sleep could fill the hole in our lives. I bounded out of bed, wrote a Facebook post about my dog — right from the heart, with little or no revision — and got well over a hundred sympathizers, which helped me get through this thing. I hadn’t expected so many well-wishers what with a national emergency rendering insignificant any man’s sniffly little lament.

So here’s an old photo Barb took iof me and the dog during a car ride. I’m wearing long sleeves so I don’t think it’s hot. Rosa liked to lean over into the front seat to catch the air conditioning on her face. Sometimes she just liked being in our human space. There’s me and there’s that furry muzzle.

It’s been two weeks now since she roamed the house.

I refused to pick up her last poops. Heat and wind and snow have turned them back to land. Barb and I have a box of her ashes, half of which my friend Bill from Boston will help me scatter in a special hiking place.

And life goes on. One must look forward, just as Rosa and I are looking forward in the photo.

I have a new president and am so thankful. I feel sorry for all the people lamenting the end of Trump’s aegis, but I must work at mending the national fence. Beyond spite or recriminations. We’re better than that. I loved Biden from the start.

I have more work to do at Walmart, burning off karma, rubbing shoulders with Trumpers. It’s all good for me. I’m working harder than I ever worked in my life. Whether this travail is sufficiently lofty is not my call. I look forward to seeing the movie Nomadland, based on a good book, about seniors working their poor ass off in this economy.

I can work at being a husband. My wife grieves the hole in our lives same as I do. We’ve bonded in mutual reflection and consolation. Just got back from Palm Desert and those healing hot springs. We’re addressing our mundane human concerns. She’s decided to wait till January to collect Social Security checks. I can get mine too or follow my original game plan and hang on till I’m seventy. Money is boring but it gives us hard reasons to do stuff.

And I guess I’ll stay a writer. Not like I have much choice — I mean, I am one. Maybe spend some bucks entering literary contests. What the hell. “Just One Victory,” as Todd Rundgren said. Life is a dream.

MY DOG LIVES ON. ROSA, REST IN PEACE.

My beloved Rosa had to be put down early this morning and my wife and I are still in grief. No more feeling her warmth as she stretches and groans on the waking couch of a dawn. No more athletic hikes up Granite Mountain, down and up Smith Ravine, up the big White Spar trail that after the rock clamber levels off on a deer-grazing plain. No more cavorting with my hiking pal. I got up this morning and missed having to worry about gates and her running into a room she’s not supposed to be in. I will miss her so much. She provided companionship and love to me and Barb for a little more than six years. She had stomach and intestinal problems to the point where another surgery would have promised questionable benefit. We cried over her as the vet put her down, telling her how much we love her, letting her get out of her agony and go to her heaven surrounded by a rope toy and even a piece of liver Barb brought for her final sniff, one of the things she loved.

She had gone outside after messing the house and garage, wouldn’t move, we could have left her there next to my SUV on the cold concrete all night, I didn’t know we had a choice, went to bed, but Barb said at 10 p.m., already shaking with tears, we had to get her inert form off the concrete and into my car and to the emergency vet clinic in Prescott Valley. I managed. Better she died at the hospital surrounded by love than alone — as the vet said she would have — to be found cold upon my waking to go to work. We gave her final love on the floor of the hospital, even as she leaked the putrescence that had alerted everyone to the direness of the situation.

I’ve heard it said that dogs have a soul and I believe it, because hers is with me, and with Barb, now and forever. We love you, girl. You’re running after rabbits and eating bacon and kibble in paradise.

Facebook friends, wish me luck getting over this. Never did a man love a dog more than I loved this willful Airedale.

Rocker muses over sentimental transports

I don’t know what’s happening to me. I can’t decide if I’m hard or soft. I guess both.

I spent the late morning and early afternoon unloading a truck at Walmart with heavy metal blasting.

And liked it.

I’m CAP 1 stocking crew. CAP 2 usually unload trucks when they start at two, but things are in disarray at my store what with absenteeism related to Covid 19 and everybody’s nerves frayed, so last two days the age-diverse CAP 1 crew — a mix of old guys like me and some young people thrown in — had to do it.  The hard gargle of metal vocal and that battle-axe guitar attack usually leave me cold. But today some of it came through as precisely what rock ‘n’ roll is supposed to be about. Maybe it was Metallica I was listening to; them I always liked. Or maybe Slayer. Who knows?

 

Slayer, a well-known metal band

 

All I know is I worked well with this raucous stuff blasting. Some things, you can’t have “nice” music as a soundtrack to.

 

Like when I was in the gym trying to bench two hundred three times and “My Sweet Lord” came on the Classic Rewind they pipe in there. I had to ignore the song to get mad enough to attack the bar. Now I love that song! George Harrison is in heaven, I wear him in my heart. But it wasn’t working for me to lift weights. (I like to think George would understand.) “Born to Be Wild” by Steppenwolf or “Hang Fire” by the Stones might have worked better. There’s a time and a place for the hard and raucous.

But my musical tastes have drifted of late into the lyrical and innocent, and into years past, into realms one might call those of the doddering old sentimentalist.

Recently I had this unopposable yen to use my Spotify app to find songs nobody but me is looking for. I sat in my office and bathed myself in decidedly unhippyish half-century-old pop hits on my Bose desktop speakers, turned up pretty loud. I didn’t care that Barb across the house might wonder what I was up to. She leaves me to my musings and soul adventures when I’m in my sanctum.

 

First, I found the YouTube video for “I’ll Never Find Another You” by the Seekers, a folk-influenced Australian pop quartet who were big in my younger days. The song could be a statement of friendship, a testimony of what a fine and memorable friend someone was. But it might be about romantic love.

There is always someone
For each of us, they say
And you’ll be my someone
Forever and a day.
I could search the whole world over
Until my life is through
But I know I’ll never find another you.

The Seekers may look square, but ‘Another You’ still hits me where I live.

So much drifts by, flotsam. What – or who – rises above the ruckus and letdown of life to provide a sustaining voice, a calming hand, a wise counsel? Female voices that are pure – another is Welsh singer Mary Hopkin in “Those Were the Days,” a McCartney composition – elevate the spirit. Maybe I love the woman who sings lead for the Seekers. Judith Durham made this a 1967 hit. I think maybe the song stuck with me because that was a golden time in my life.

The next song I had to hear on YouTube was even more explicitly romantic, “Deep Purple” by Nino Tempo and April Stevens. When their collaboration came out, in 1963, I took no notice. I heard it over the years as an oldie and might have liked it all right. Then it began to captivate me when I heard it again in yet later years. It stuck in my heart, a musical amulet, a pure and very lush celebration of amour, shamelessly immediate, even embarrassing, but real.

“In the mist of a memory / You wander all back to me / Breathing my name with a sigh.”

And later:

“And as long as my heart will beat / Sweet lover, we’ll always meet / Here in my deep purple dreams.”

This could be called pap. Schmaltz. Guilty as charged.

But it’s sung with such passion it becomes … true. Not what you sing, but how you sing it.

Why would such songs demand to be heard on this particular day of my life, at this particular juncture of my battle to find meaning in this existence, when the existential fact is that there is none?

It’s a blind need that brooks no reasons. I needed those songs. I needed them because … well because I can’t make it on reality alone.

Nobody can.

We who dream of love, or who remember it, have to do the work of making the world go round.

‘People are like onions. They grow in layers.’

We never lose our ability to dream. Life’s grind is always counterbalanced by life’s fairyland. (Photo blithely appropriated from the World Wide Web.)

 

How old will I get? Hard to say.

Just a little old? Methuselah old?

I hope it doesn’t morph too far beyond the current state of disintegration. Half-moon bags under my eyes. Male-pattern baldness. Hemorrhoid that comes and goes. Sciatica which requires me to lean on a door jamb while putting on my underpants. Swollen prostate making my urinations longer.

Yet I am vigorous for a man on the brink of sixty-seven. I lift weights three times a week, hike my dog mucho miles.

I have been thinking about age and how I regarded old people when I was young.

I may have been arrogant, looked down on them. My sister said I once cruelly mocked palsied Uncle Joe. I feel bad about that. I had no right.

A guy in the Walmart break room, back in spring, groused to me about this pandemic “bullshit,” how it just meant a bunch of old people would die, and who cared?

“It’s like … Darwinian. The population has to thin, always has. But they’re making a big deal out of it.”

I grunted noncommittally, trying to make my own my sense of the newly announced “menace.”

Back when I taught high school English, I discerned a sneering, dismissive attitude toward the aged.

As my career progressed, the kids in my classrooms trended more and more toward delinquency and the impossibility of graduation. They sat there illiterate and intransigent, and they hated you. They hated you because they hated all the other male authority figures in their lives.

You read about countries like Japan where the aged are revered. Or Native American cultures, sachems holding forth around the fire, fonts of ancient lore and enduring wisdom, interpreters of dreams. That is not America, certainly not our reality now. We’re all hung up on the respective ages of two old farts battling it out for the presidency.

When I’d started at the county-run “accommodation” school program, it was fun. The kids were naughty but curious. It was a little one-room schoolhouse, a catch basin for kids who’d otherwise slip down the drain. Yavapai County High School admitted wayward teens who just didn’t work out in big regular public schools, usually for absenteeism. We were their last chance.

I could get them to read. I used books and traditional writing assignments.

My cabinet of books became moot as, over the years, more chilling criminal elements, particularly of one outlying high-desert town, began (for district money reasons) to be admitted into our schools.

Yes, schools. Now there were two of them.

Aspire, the new high school built by the Yavapai Accommodation School District, was a miniature “real” high school, hallway spurring out to discrete subject-area classrooms, which became competing entertainment venues, each teacher vying for popularity with his own special audiovisual system.

As hardened fuckups became our clientele, everything went to the computer. We “taught” the unteachable. They would not read or learn; they bided their time, sitting there because probation officers had prodded them in.

But even back when I could get kids to read, I’d found a certain antipathy to written content that was about old people.

Case in point: “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty,” about a meek, hen-pecked man who finds refuge in a fantasy world where he is a hero, saving the day as surgeon, fighter pilot, courtroom lawyer.

Every kid who wrote a reaction said the same thing. “There’s this old dude and he’s losing it. It’s sad.” They saw a depressing tale about clinical delusion. There was nothing funny about it.

Once – only once – did I see a young person crack up at this classic tale.

Tyler was a lanky youth longing for the military. He took a deep breath and committed himself to “triple,” meaning go to morning, afternoon, and evening shifts to cram in as many credits per unit time as humanly possible. Thirteen hours among kids arrayed around desktop PCs and perimeter carrels, teachers scheduled like nurses. You could be on from seven a.m. to two p.m., or three to ten.

A kid might “double,” stretching himself across two of the three shifts. But Tyler, bent on the Navy, had a deadline in mind by which to be accepted. Ready to dive-bomb off the board, he held his nose and plunged in for an improbably extended daily immersion in remedial education.

One task was to plow through American Short Stories for my junior English course.

I was on one afternoon when suddenly he erupted in loud crazy uncontrollable laughter in his chair around a table.

He was reading “Walter Mitty,” I heard him explain to the students around him, who wondered whether Tyler was hysterical from overwork.

I ambled by to chat with him and thrilled to realize that this story – which I’d been thinking of dropping from the course – had got over on someone. He identified with Walter Mitty.

There’s no greater pleasure in reading than to have such moments; or, in teaching, to see them take place.

I don’t know whether he went on to serve in the military, but I do know he exercised his humanity on that long late afternoon, when mordant James Thurber spoke to him about the compensatory mechanism of the human mind.

We’re all – if we’re lucky – going to get old someday.

My dad used to say, “People are like onions. They grow in layers.”

The imaginative faculty of the child never disappears.

To live is to dream. We can weather any prosaic chore, endure the whole slog of our grumpy round, if we never lose that child inside, who is always open to the adventure.

Because sometimes it’s the adventure within that sustains us.

Dog recovers from plastics binge

Rosa post-surgery: A little dopey, but coming back. At vet’s advice we put an old T-shirt on her to keep her from chewing at her incision.

 

I try to be tough but I’m a big softie.

I saw my dog post-surgery lying in the warmth of the vet operating room at Harmony Holistic Veterinary Care in Prescott. My Airedale’d had her stomach cut open and a cup of plastic junk removed. She’d been stitched back up, her shaved belly stapled to prevent her chewing loose the surgical incision.

She’d stirred to consciousness and now her little kopf poked out the swaddling blankets these angelic gals, vets and vet techs, had placed around her.

“Can I … touch her?”

“Oh sure,” said Dr. Joy Fuhrman with her distinctive South African accent. Dr. Joy had led the two-vet surgical team.

I walked into the room toward that ruffled brown head. Squatted down and petted it. Even sat on my butt on the tile floor to keep stroking her, feeling her silken ears, her neck.

Rising to my feet, back still turned to the staffers and my wife, I pulled up the front of my oversized T-shirt to tamp my eyes.

“God damn allergies.” Turning and snatching a paper towel from a dispenser, I stepped into the hall to blow my nose.

I guess all dogs do it. Grab and eat things that aren’t food.

Rosa’s quasi-culinary thieveries caught up with her. Barb thought she wasn’t shitting because she’d inhaled a good part of a chicken carcass, bones and all, or because after Barb had broken a peanut butter jar on the kitchen floor the dog had snapped up not only peanut butter but pieces of glass.

But the stuff pulled out of her stomach was neither chicken bone nor glass. It was some mysterious and still undetermined plastic. Almost hard, like a ball coating, only it wasn’t a tennis ball or other kind of ball.

Barb thinks it’s from when the dog tore loose from her grip and ran down the sloped side lot we bought to keep anyone from building there. Trailing the leash, the dog shot down the hill to a house construction site on the street. And got into something. Barb may be right.

The dog loves construction sites. I make jokes about how she flirts with construction workers. Where there are construction sites there are men; where there are men there are food scraps. Rosa will find a hot dog wrapper from some guy’s lunch from two years ago and on the strength of a lingering or imagined aroma attack and consume the thing.

 

She’s indiscriminate. She once stole some guy’s cigarette pack. I had to chase her, zigzagging behind her darting form like some clown chasing his hat in the wind, before I could wrest it back and, wiping off the slobber, return the squashed thing to its stunned owner. Clearly, keeping Rosa on the leash is indicated.

I had thought if anything would have fucked her up it would have been plastic bags. If I’m stupid enough to come back from our trail hike with treats still in a baggie, and I’ve got the baggie sitting out on my desk, and she’s at large, she can come into my office and before I know it snatch it off my desk and eat the whole thing, plastic and all. That’s her modus operandi.

I’d figured the accumulation of baggies had caught up with her. Thought the baggies had stopped coming out swirled in her turds and were now, finally, plugging up the works. But I’ll never know. The vets don’t think so. Barb’s supposition seems to have more credence.

The damn dog couldn’t shit.

Day after day after worrisome day she showed herself unable to really back one out, anything but these sad little dribbles. This is a dog who will have two prodigious bowel movements a day! I walk her on undeveloped, adjacent land, county land, where she seems to find rough remote areas to crap in, places so out of the way I won’t have to pick up after her. It’s one thing I love about my dog. There’s a certain delicacy about her.

If you’re wondering why Bob Gitlin, who had an Ivy League education, is always writing about shit, I don’t blame you. But let’s face it, in life, if you’re wondering what you’ve ever “contributed” to or “produced” in society, and your best prayed for answers begin to look like ephemera, wispy dodges, you begin to see that nitrogenous waste may well be a main achievement.

Anyway, leave it to me to realize Rosa needed medical attention. I had to go to work but Barb took her in.

I was stocking the grocery aisles at Walmart when she came in to tell me the vets said good thing we’d acted. There was a problem.

I am indebted to the two vets who managed the surgery, and to Dr. Roxanne Batt, Rosa’s longtime PCP, who couldn’t do it herself, tied up as she was all day in surgery herself. Dr. Rox had already saved the dog’s life when she came down with a deadly fatigue. And Rosa’s regular doctor figured strong in the huddle over what to do pending examination of the perilous X-rays and the realization that the barium enema hadn’t budged down her tract. An early worry was whether the cutting would, given the presence of that barium, invite leakage into breathing organs. You’re talking sepsis, danger of pneumonia.

After I saw the dog lying doped and swaddled on the floor, Barb and I drove her to the Prescott Valley emergency vet clinic for overnight observation. The vet there gave her oxygen to make sure her lungs stayed clear. Rosa bore up all right. Next morning we drove her back to Harmony Care so the splendid Dr. Fuhrman and crew could watch her again. And that evening she returned to us.

 

We’re a few days into her recovery. The dog’s wearing one of my old T-shirts so she can’t worry that incision on her belly.

Deal cost us four grand and change. Glad we had the money.

Main thing, she seems to be on the mend. Looks like our four-legged friend will be with us for a while yet.

We can’t feed her much, so no big shits yet …

And I think I’d better stop here. Before I wax rhapsodic about shit again. Though when you think about it, it is something to be grateful for.

We take so much for granted.

 

Satori on a camping trip

Resting the legs that just got her through an ass-buster hike, and relishing Margaret Atwood, is my wife. Barb’s being kept company by the world’s most stalwart terrier, also recuperating from the unforgiving but panoramic Bill Williams Trail.

 

Just because I don’t use drugs anymore doesn’t mean I don’t get high. I’m the same headbanger I was in college.

Just spent a half-hour enjoying Spotify on my laptop and Bose speakers, rocking out to: “Everything Is Broken,” the Dylan song nailed by Kenny Wayne Shepherd; off of Grateful Dead (Skull and Roses), “Goin’ Down the Road Feeling Bad (Not Fade Away),” “Johnny B Goode,” and “Me and My Uncle,” the original full-throated rock ‘n’ roll roar and cosmic twang; and, because that country spirit moved me, old “El Paso” by Marty Robbins.

Got my eyes closed rocking back and forth in my swivel chair, not caring how loud it is out the windows. Jerry Garcia still makes me tingle.

Just because I don’t smoke cannabis or snort coke or drop acid anymore doesn’t mean I don’t get high. Just because I don’t gape at internet pornography anymore doesn’t mean I don’t have a sex urge. Just because I live in austerity doesn’t mean I don’t live.

Ever find you had to redefine happiness? It’s not just about doing everything you “want.” I will meet my maker; this aging Hebrew needs some metaphysical lambs to throw on the fire, as well as some new kinds of celebration to mark a new stage on his trek.

Barb and I just went camping at Dogtown Lake near Williams, a four-day trip. Even after hiking Bill Williams Trail, a seven-mile ass-buster (my calves still hurt), I got back to Prescott weighing five pounds more than I’d set off at! We ate good. Cooked on a grate over an open flame, partly because I spazzed and spilled a pan of water onto the propane burners of my camp stove. I love eating outside on a camping trip. I do enjoy the woods.

I’d crawl out the tent in the dark or dawn, start a fire, put my bashed-in camp percolator on the grate, and wait. Ah, those first cups tasted so damn good … warming your hands on the fire, feeling the woods waking around you.

I dig Williams, that whole area. I read where Sam Shepard loved Williams, so I’m in good company.

Barb and I spent a lot of time at our campsite reading. She’s become quite the bookworm. She’s in a book club, says I should join, there’s only one other guy. Maybe I will. But I’m too bossy in my opinions. She’s in love with Margaret Atwood.

Me, I’ve been reading Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me, relishing the poetic moments, where a phrase might break through the personal-historical murk into a nugget of crystalline truth. I’m not sure Toni Morrison’s right, that he’s our generation’s James Baldwin, but his argument for reparations, available on The Atlantic, is riveting and important.

I enjoyed Zadie Smith’s latest essay collection, the spare Intimations. She embraces the moment in all its nuance and complexity. Whether she’s talking about warring cultures, drugs, or politics, she’s keen-witted and amusing. If Nigella Lawson taught England how to cook, Zadie Smith taught the world how to think.

Blasted through Bari Weiss’s How to Fight Anti-Semitism on my Kindle. And I’m going back to temple. One of the things I love about The New York Times these days is the mix of liberal and conservative voices. Bret Stephens and David Brooks balance off Michelle Goldberg and Jamelle Bouie. My favorite columnist is tart-tongued, laconic Maureen Dowd, who can take down a pompous braggart in four seconds. Bari Weiss is a liberal with conservative guard rails. Everything she says about the hatred leveled at Jews over Israel is brave and correct. We both don’t like Netanyahu but feel Israel must be defended and supported by Jews, who hold her to account! Weiss chronicles a phenomenon as old as the ages. It’s refreshing to hear her assert and reassert her ethnic and religious pride. The old poison from the far right is easier to deal with than the insidious, censoring voice of anti-Zionist bile on university campuses. I get why Seinfeld won’t play colleges anymore.

But maybe the big prize has been the book I’m still getting through, one I should have picked up a long time ago and did finally secure on Amazon. The Hero With a Thousand Faces, by Joseph Campbell, has changed me. My therapist tells this quacking neurotic he must work on improving his self-image. I’m trying to see in my life the delineations of an actual hero journey. Who has this kind of scholarship anymore? Reading this makes me see things anew. It’s vast yet hits home in moments of intimacy. Wisdom comes from the heart, not the head. Dreams and myths beyond our ego impel and shape our journey. Campbell offers a guidebook on how to say yes to this crazy world, beyond stifling shoulds. He teaches us how to love, how to dig the trip we’re on.

I know a fine woman who didn’t think she had it in her but insisted on tackling that mountain. I might want to pull my head out of my ass and pay attention to her. I’ve found that’s generally good for a better return on investment.

It’s nice being back home, having bathed the foot stink away, and re-immersed myself in all the old household rhythms.

I finished watching a two-part Western on my Roku feed, Broken Trail. You get a good story when Walter Hill’s in charge. (He directed The Warriors and 48 Hours, perhaps guilty pleasures, perhaps acknowledged gems.) Here, Robert Duvall’s aging cowboy says he’s not as brave as he appears. Says he wakes up in the dark and remembers all he’s done and not done.

Asked what he does when that happens, he says he tries like hell to get back to sleep.

Being awake has been fairly kind to me. But I know what he means.

 

Below: “I know, girl, my tongue’s hanging out too.” At the top of Bill Williams Mountain, better than 9,000 feet up, in the pine wonderland of northern Arizona.

Still Life: Cell Phone with Pile of Shit

The morning beauty of Prescott National Forest

My wife wants we should go camping. Be one of those couples you see plugged into the KOA power line, sitting out in folding chairs sharing stories from the road.

Sounds like a good idea, except I can just see me pulling this huge rig knocking down telephone wires and running over kittens. The whole thing scares me.

So I got on my hind legs and bawled about it.

“You’re not the one who’ll be driving it.” We’re talking a Type C camper van like a Winnebago, or an F-150 pickup and 17-foot trailer. “Ever try to back up one of those trailers into a parking site? It’s counterintuitive. I don’t need another Three Stooges show in my life.”

Nor did she; she didn’t argue. In fact, my opposition represented progress for our marriage. Instead of caving in to her zeal to Have Fun, despite her boring husband, then fucking shit up, like I did with those kayak racks which almost got us killed on the highway, I expressed my real feelings.

I employed the baby steps argument.

“Let’s get our tent camping game together.”

We have this ripped old tent, the one you get for $59.95 anywhere.

We stood in line in masks to get into the REI store in Flagstaff. I got us a good tent, more expensive, bigger than the old one. Then proceeded back home to show my handyman chops by setting it up in the garage. Rain fly too, no problem.

The whole time I kept asserting my outdoorsman bona fides. I do like being in nature.

Not long after we got back from Flag, I pulled off a neat trick when a challenge arose on a hike in the Prescott National Forest. I share this tale with you to prove – to you, if not my wife – I am not a bookish nerd. Well, not always.

I have to get the dog onto the trailhead at dawn. It gets into the nineties here and she hates heat.

I wake in the dark even on days off, but still don’t have much time to sip coffee and read online newspapers before I have to throw backpack, dog, and last-cup-to-go into my Forester and get going.

Get her onto the trailhead at five fifteen or five thirty and she shoots off like a rocket as I unsnap the leash.

Two days ago I was still yawning, even with two cups of coffee in me, as I released her to her dawn frolic at the head of Trail 393, off the Copper Basin Road parking lot.

I’d made it here good and early, full knowing there’s a more dire aftermath to the haste than mental cobwebs yet to clear.

I might have to do a number two.

At the one-and-a-half-mile point I swung off 393 onto 327. Not a half-mile up the new trail I realized I had to take a dump.

We two creatures were the only ones in the woods — I had yet to step aside for dirt biker one — so being discreet would not be an issue. Recent prescribed logging to thin timber and lessen the chance of forest fire made it harder to find concealment, but I located an ideal spot. Hung my backpack on an obliging stump off a tree, clambered up a rise over dirt and pine needles, and, finding a perfect place behind a shrub, dropped my shorts and jockeys and did my business.

I wiped with tissues from the front pocket of my shorts and, without looking behind me, stood back up and pulled up my underwear and shorts and started back down the rise, when who should I encounter bounding up the rise toward me but Rosa. She eludes me when I want her back, and here she is finding me when I’d rather not be found. Dogs.

The two-and-a-half-mile point, our customary snack-and-water turnaround, was half a mile away as I re-shouldered my pack and resumed my walk.

In about five minutes I realized my shorts felt light.

I slapped my pockets.

Oh no.

My cell phone was gone. It had fallen out a back pocket.

I decided not to worry; you only make mistakes. I got us all the way to the resting spot. Rosa was so thirsty she slurped up a whole collapsible bowl and a half of water as well as slobber down a few venison bites. I stayed cool, fighting off despondency about losing the phone. I sat on my customary stump, slugged some water, and realized I needed to head back sooner rather than later. I stood, changed into a fresh T-shirt, put the part-emptied water bottle, bowl, and sweaty jersey in the backpack, zipped it up, and shrugged back into it. Clipping the clasps at chest and waist, I said, “Come on, girl.”

Ever so slowly I worked my way around the switchbacks, waiting for instinct to instruct me.

No, not here.

No … not here either.

Here.

There, the tree and, up to the right, the climb I’d made. The whole scene a snapshot imprinted on my brain.

I started up the rise. Twenty feet up lay my phone.

Good thing it sat well apart from both shit pile and soiled tissues. Having to pull my phone out of a pile of my own crap might have sullied my victory somewhat.

Quiet elation filled me as I pocketed my Android and headed back with the dog.

I felt like a chopper pilot using laser focus to hit a target. A moon capsule astronaut pulling off a pinpoint touch-down in a galaxy of random lostness.

I went home and told Barb of my accomplishment.

She shrugged.

Next day she said, “Barry texted me some info about a good camper. Wasn’t that nice?”

“Yeah,” I agreed weakly.

She still wants her RV.

Ah well, a new challenge. What else is retirement for?

Wish me luck.

Ten-four, good buddy.