Month: May 2018

I rarely remember my dreams, or understand what they are about.

Maria can recall her dreams in great detail  hours after she  wakes up, but I rarely can recall much about mine. Over the last two nights I’ve had distinct and vivid dreams.

They are representations of my other life and  I do remember them in great detail, perhaps because they came from real life.

I dreamt about my other life both nights. I don’t know why.

I sometimes think the world is divided into two types of  people, those who had other lives and those who have One Life. The One Life people are the stables ones, they choose a career and stay in it, they make friends in high school and still have them decades later, they marry their high school sweetheart.

They live a few doors down from their parents, have dinner with them every Sunday, and are close to their families for their entire lives.

No life is perfect, I think, but some lives do move in a straight line, some zig and zag and twist and turn. I used to resent One Life people, but then I got over it. They had their own problems, you can’t judge a life from the outside.

But still, they were fantasy figures to me, it’s almost as if their lives were a script, written out by protecting angels from cradle to grave. I have had several lives.

The longest so far (although this life is getting close) was the life I lived after my daughter Emma was born.

She and I and her mother lived in the same house on the same suburban street for 25 years. Mostly, we saw our neighbors pulling in and out of driveways in their cars. We had little to do with any of them.

Maria and I both had the experience of having other lives, from time to time we have to pinch ourselves to remember who we really are and where we really are.

I  became a writer in that house of my dreams,  that 20’s house, frayed but sturdy. I began to really love and appreciate dogs in that house and write a lot of books and magazine articles there. I became a father in that house, perhaps the most complex and confusing and important experience of that other life.

Like many women and few men at that time, I was deeply absorbed in Emma’s life. It was probably too much. She was not given the chance to solve too many problems on her own.

For the first few years, I went off to big jobs in the big city, then I saw that I could not work for other people or be in the corporate world and remain sane. And I wanted to help raise my child, not hear about it at night.

Ever since then, sane or insane, I have worked for myself. That was a lifesaver. I wrote novels, non-fiction books, mysteries and sex advice columns for women’s magazines (yes, they paid $5000  for 2,500 words). Every day that I have written, I have had something to love.

The house was in a suburb of New Jersey, my wife thought it would be the best place to raise my daughter Emma, and back then, fathers like me – I was too busy –  didn’t really get too involved in those decisions. I wish I had fought harder to live in Brooklyn then. Our town in New Jersey  was a hip, child-centered and beautiful and affluent suburb, full of reporters, writers, editors and actors who worked in New York City. Everyone’s kid was headed for the Ivy Leagues, almost all life centered around the children.

Safe streets, find schools.

It was what we now call a “progressive” town, crammed with intolerant people on the left, I’m not sure we even met a Republican while we lived there.  It was diverse racially, but not economically. Few poor people could afford to live there.

There I learned that people on the left and people on the right share a kind of social bigotry, a smug hatred of the other, a sense of grievance, and a civic selfishness and myopia. Dissent is just not tolerated.

I disliked living there, from the first day to the last. I was lonely, unfulfilled and sick of heart. I am sorry for the pain I caused other people. I thought it was an intolerant place, filled with driving, child-obsessed yuppies. Soccer was the common faith.  I made a good living there, there was plenty of work for an energetic writer living near New York City. I just didn’t belong there.

I see that way  back the love had begun to seep out of my marriage, we both cared for one another and still do, we just  fell out of love and began to drift apart rather unconsciously and with little self-awareness. We lived different lives even back then. I wanted to fix up the house, she didn’t, and over the years we lived there.

I don’t think we ever invited a single friend to come over and have dinner or just visit. We had very few friends, or at least I had very few friends.

We were so isolated I couldn’t quite fathom why we were there at all, but of course it was for Emma. The schools were said to be the best around. And it turned out to be a good bet on that score, Emma got into Yale early, the grand slam of Boomer parents. At the time, that meant a great deal to us. I don’t think it would now, at least for me.

Every morning, my wife got up to go to exercise class, and I went out to walk the dogs. We then went our separate ways to our separate offices to do our separate work. We lived on parallel tracks, but not really together.

I worked in the basement and wrote much of the time, she worked in an office upstairs, she was a reporter, and worked much of the time and was often away. I supported her work in every way I could, and she supported mine.

I did the shopping and much of the cooking, and  drove Emma back and forth to school, to her lessons, to visits with friends. I was in the carpool, that most suburban of things. I loved taking care of Emma. Her schedule was in my head.

Her mother was a modern woman, rushing off to the city to do important things. I was the author, holed up in the basement for  hours in my Dickens gloves,  freezing for literature, slaving over words.

I suspect we were both lonely.

I worked hard on my books, printing out reams of paper, editing them, sending them off to New York City.

I often  took the bus into the city  to meet with my editors, they liked to meet the writers then, and talk to them face-to-face in long boozy lunches,  it was quite a different world, I wrote and wrote and wrote and have never stopped writing. My editors and I never talked about sales, it was considered inappropriate. Now, we talk about little else.

I went on long book tours and spoke to large crowds and gave long and intense interviews.

Writing has saved my life, it was a ship that survived all kinds of storms and gales and battles, scarred and creaky,  but is still somehow sailing proudly.

I remember that my world centered much around Emma, and her schedule and well-being. Still, I began to drift, hanging out on farms in Pennsylvania where dogs herded sheep, and mists covered the hay fields in the morning. It got into my blood somehow, it seemed that this was where i truly belonged. It was mystifying.

My wife and I were beginning to lead increasingly separate lives, although neither of us saw it or wanted to deal with it.

We got up at different times, went to sleep at different times. On Fridays, we all went to the movies together, then out for pizza. It was one of the only things we all did together. The other was going to very hip Wellfleet on Cape Cod, where everyone on the beach wore clogs, had cotton beach umbrellas, and read the New York Times or New Yorker Magazine.

On weekends back home, we had separate interests, separate chores to do, usually in different places.

Life took on a ritual quality. We thought we were quite modern, giving each other the independence we both wanted. We thought that was love. We gave up on sex.

Otherwise, we were mostly on our own. I didn’t realize this was a problem, neither did she.  People can really get used to anything if they are frightened enough. Bit by bit, I gave up on life and love, I thought it was too late for those things in my life.

My involvement with dogs deepened in that other life.  I started writing books about them, and they led me to the country and the natural world and the world of animals. The natural world touched something deeply inside of me. There, I began to reawaken and slowly crawl out of my deep sleep.

I started going upstate to visit a good friend, a writer who later moved away and no longer speaks to me. He opened me up to the beauty and appeal of the country, of life in a beautiful place with streams and woods and nature all around.  He changed my life. The  rest is well- known, I think, i don’t need to revisit it, I’m tired of telling it.

I ran to the mountain, moved to a cottage on a hill, then bought the first Bedlam Farm, and TV crews were driving up to see me regularly. One even wrote that I was the next Thoreau. He was the only one.

They even made a movie about me. I began to explore the spiritual life. I began to see that I was living in fear.

I was drawn to the country, my wife loved the city. I loved living on a farm, living with animals, re-connecting with the natural world. Turns out, I am lost without it, I just didn’t know it.Be

After awhile, my wife and I both realized we had essentially been living apart.  My daughter and almost everyone who read my books saw it. I did not see it. She took care of the bills, I ran around like a drunken adolescent, free at last.

Fear, I came to understand, was fragmenting my life. So many things to do, to think about, to plan for,  fear fills our loves with torment. I spent a lot of time  attacking others and defending myself, fear pulled me apart and made me lose my center. A friend, a priest, said I had an address but could not be found there.

I decided to give up living a life in fear, it took me many years to push it out of my life. I  decided to take responsibility for my life, that took even longer. Then, a few years later, I began to live another life, a  second life, a completely different one. One with Maria, with animals, more deeply in nature. My shrink said I had come to the North Country looking for love. I guess she was right.

I rarely think about my other life now, it is disorienting and confusing to me. The dreams haunted me all day.

I was married the first time for 35 years, and the last six of them were spent apart, me on my farm, she working in New York City, which she loved. We sold the musty old hose, she lived there in a small apartment in the same town where  we had lived  for so long. I had my farm and I did notice there was not much space for me in the apartment. But then, I wasn’t there for very long.

The divorce was hard on my daughter, and we were hard on one another. We are past that now, time does heal wounds. We lost something we have never fully recovered, but we are coming together all the time.

I think we did a good job with Emma, we had our bumps but she is living the way we hoped she would – she takes good care of herself, has a husband she loves and a daughter she adores and work she also loves and where she is appreciated. She is happy and independent and self-sufficient.

She leads her own full and productive life.

Isn’t that what it’s really about?

My life here is rich, full of love and connection, it always feels like home to me, my other life seems like that of a stranger, someone other than me. I have few friends left from that period, when I do see one they tell me I am unrecognizable from the person they knew in that other life. I am different, they say, in almost every way. I guess I wouldn’t know. I didn’t know me then.

And does it matter any more?

My life, and perhaps me, have changed so much I really can’t recall that other life, it seems ghostly and remote to me like a talkie-movie, no sound. i drifted a way from the few friends I had, and they from me. I lived mostly for Emma, she is my connection to that past, and in many ways, is much more a part of it than I am now. When she left us for college, I left us for the mountains.

I’ve learned a lot of things. Community is important. So is making love, it is at the core of the soul connection. I’ve shed my secrets and most of my anger. I like me now much better. Maria is responsible for much of that, but not all. It’s what I wanted and worked for.

And up here, i also had a reckoning. I came apart and went mad.

Perhaps that happens when you transition from one life to another, a disturbance in the field. One Life people don’t do that.

It’s like one of those rocky space travels from one planet to another.  I left the familiar for the unknown, faced great perils, met magical helpers, some on two legs, most on four legs, and came out of the dark places alive and mostly unscathed. I learned to love a donkey.

I remember asking myself if my life was worth living, and I didn’t have an answer.

So I set out on my hero journey and sought fulfillment. I was angry in that other life, bored, resentful and depressed. All of these are symptoms of disconnectedness. When we are lonely we perceive ourselves as isolated individuals surrounded by people but not a part of any supportive or nurturing community.

There was, at first, nothing to hold me up or to stand on.

I am still lonely, I suppose, but life is very different. I am connected to my wife and partner and to my community and friends, they are all supportive and nurturing. We can take a lot of pain and suffering, but when I was cut off from the human family, I lost heart, and nearly my life.

I had the strange sensation of being filled but unfulfilled, busy but disconnected, rushing around but never home.

I wanted to come to the place where I belong, and I am now there. It isn’t a perfect life, but it is my life, the one I was destined to live, my real and true life.

I bow to my knees at least once every day and give thanks to whatever power brought me here. I was  living a false and somewhatempty life. Perhaps pain and sorrow are the greatest of healers, they force us to think about who we  really are.

My dreams of the other life have brought back this sense of isolation and disconnection. My other life is hazy. I felt like I was trapped under water, popping up to the surface from time to time to gasp for air. I remember that I was very busy, rushing from place to place, my life was full of drama, but nothing much else.

There was a message in my Other Life dreams, I’m not sure what it was.

As it turned out, I found the love I was seeking and thus began the journey back to life. It is still underway, this trip is thrilling, fulfilling, challenging. Tonight, I sat out on the chairs on the lawn with Maria and ate dinner together. We are anything but separate from one another, even though we also have our own lives.

I turned to her after dinner, a breeze was blowing across the pasture, the sheep and donkeys were out grazing in the meadow, the border collies sat still like  Sphinxes, watching the sheep, which is the greatest thing for them.

The wind was cooling, rippling the young flowers emerging in the garden in front of us, swaying the meadow grass back and forth. The late afternoon sun was blessing the hills on the horizon.

This was a scene that did not fit into my other life in any recognizable way, and it comforted me, the other life was just a dream, after all.

I turned to Maria, Red and Fate sitting regally in  front of us, the wind rippling their coats. We saw the chickens, hugging the fence (to keep out of the sight of hawks), and the sheep standing in the tall grass,  eating something fresh.

“Did you ever think you would sit outside having dinner looking out at two donkeys grazing in a field?”

Maria turned to me and smiled.

“No,” she said, “I didn’t.”

My friend Ed Gulley often tells me I am his best friend, next to some of the Swiss cows that is. I think the truth is that his wife Carol is his best friend, but we are close, we often refer to our friendship  as being brothers from different mothers. That feels close to me.

I have had very few best friends in my life, and neither has Ed, so this experience is new to both of us, and sometimes difficult for me. It’s an odd thing about Ed, we are so very much alike, and yet so very different. Ed is in trouble now, he is driving across South Dakota heading towards the Badlands, which he very much wants to see.

He is struggling with terminal brain cancer, Carol writes on their blog,  the Bejosh Farm Journal, in a post called “Tough Day,” that Ed is getting weaker on his left side, especially his hand, arms and legs, his peripheral vision is also fading on that side. That is a primary symptom of his brain cancer.

If you know Carol and Ed, two tough and battle-hardened dairy farmers, you know that “tough day” for them means something a lot harder for someone like me or most people. It means real trouble. It is a kind of scream.

I supposed this ought not to be surprising to anyone, I sat down with Carol and Ed – after talking with specialists who treat this disease – and told them of the pitfalls and challenges of the trip to the Badlands of South Dakota. They took it all in, and didn’t blink, and I told myself, okay this is the right thing, they really want to go and need to go.

The doctors say Ed has 10 tumors moving through his brain, and they are far from home.

Carol says Ed is struggling to sleep and she describes him as being “scared and apprehensive.” She says she is determined to get him where he wants to go on this, possibly his last trip. He wants to get to the Badlands, he told me before he left that he feels the spirits are calling him there and waiting for  him.

Before he left hurriedly on the trip last Monday, we talked almost every day and were getting into the habit of going to lunch, we talked and talked about life and it’s meaning and the difficult challenges he is facing now.

I have not talked to Ed since he left on this trip, not once. And one thing I know about Ed. If he isn’t talking, he really doesn’t feel like it. Like me, Ed is a talker.

I know that he is not looking to talk to me now, that is his right and privilege, and it isn’t something he needs now.  I don’t question it. He is going somewhere I can’t go and he doesn’t want me to go. In a sense, I understand Ed is already saying goodbye to me.

Lots of people are talking to Ed on the trip, in e-mail and messages. I don’t need to be one of them. He knows where I am. Carol and I have been texting back and forth several times a day.

But I admit that I am in what is a painful and difficult position for me.

I am good at many things, but doing nothing is not one of them.

I reject drama and posturing, this is not my sickness, and I don’t wish to take one iota of it away from Ed and Carol.

It is theirs. In my mind, I suppose there is the fantasy of the dutiful friend, helping out, present and strong. But for me now, I think this means a different narrative.

I am worried about them out there, of course, and am now challenged to reach inward to respect both life and death and bring my fragmented personality into a meaningful whole. This is the beauty of understanding the idea of boundary.

The work for me is to do nothing with grace and acceptance. In all of these kinds of situations, I have always been able to be helpful – bring a dog, fresh water, listen, tell stories, bring books or food. How can I be helpful now?

Carol’s posts suggest a turning point, a rapid advancement of the aggressive cancer Ed is facing.

I can feel the weariness and pain in her writing as well, she is a student in my writing workshop. I texted them to say I was holding Ed’s hand and walking with him, out there, and hugging him, and he passed on the message through Carol that this meant so much to him.

I know it is true, I could feel his string and calloused farmer’s hand in my soft and clean writer’s hand when I sent it.

For me, helplessness has always been a sign of the disconnected life, filled with countless different words, ideas, thoughts and impulses.

The inside of my head often feels like garbage swirling around in tepid waters. Helplessness, like boredom, so easily leads to depression, it is a constant temptation,  difficult for me to shake off.

And I have rarely felt so helpless.

I think of my brother lying awake at night, feeling the left half of his body begin to betray him, frightened and very much alone in the dark.

I only veered off course once today, partly because of that image, I reminded Carol via text that they can call their family practitioner and get a sedative to help Ed  stay calm, he could call it into a local pharmacy if it would help. i have gotten no answer, I know they are on the road, steaming purposefully towards the Badlands National Park, which Ed so badly wants to see.

I am sure they know what a sedative is.

Carol says there is talk of turning back towards home – I know they know this kind of cancer is fast-moving – but they want to try to make it all the way. Carol is utterly devoted to Ed, who she calls “My Farmer,” and she will get him where he wants to go, “one way or the other,” as she put it.

A part of me wants to urge them to head back, a part of me wants to cheer them on.

In either case, it’s not for me to  do either, not for me to say what they should do. They are not seeking my advice.

I am a Mature Adult now, a person of great faith. This is no drama or TV show.

A situation like this calls upon me to be wise and thoughtful, to draw upon what I have learned, it adds a new dimension to the basic realities of life. As a writer and a hospice volunteer, I saw much illness and death, but not coming from a close friend, let alone a brother.

There is always a gift in trouble, nothing challenges us more to find the spiritual part of ourselves.

This is what brings my fragmented self into a meaningful whole, it unifies my divided soul. It proves the source of inspiration for a restless and searching mind, the basis for a true friendship and understanding, for humility and trust, a powerful incentive for a never-ending renewal of life.

So Ed and I come towards another milestone in our own individual journey from Magic To Faith. I find myself, like Ed, in a constant dialogue with our surroundings. We bring ourselves together in a new kind of unity, not that of Magic, but that of Faith. I think he is finding his Faith. I think I am finding my Faith.

I am called  to do absolutely nothing, to pray and wait and watch, and to see the love in that. I am there. That is enough.

I can’t fix this, change this, solve this, nor is it mine to change or affect. No message of mine can help.

Nothing can be an intimate act of love, it can be the most help I can offer.

What I can do is perhaps the ultimate acts of friendship. Nothing. He knows what is in my heart.

I wish him and Carol peace and compassion on their quest.

We need some help with Bingo Prizes for the Mansion games.

Maria and I run the Friday games, and we have been scrambling for weeks to come up with interesting and quality prizes. We have done well, coming local stories, but there are not many good options here for us, and there are other games each week that the residents love.

They especially love prizes – there is a big rolling prize cart that gets empties out regularly, one to the winner of each game, there are some fiendish Bingo players at the Mansion.  They pore over the cart as if the crown jewels were there.

The games and the prizes are very important to them.

I’m hoping  the Army Of Good could use their creativity and energy to bu or make some prizes and send them to Julie Harlin, Activity Director, the Mansion, 11 S. Union Avenue, Cambridge, N.Y., 12816.

The residents love candy (sugar free), and small objects – trinkets, jewelry,  stuffed animals,  home made crafts, colorful socks, bracelets, seasonal wreaths or crafts to put on their doors,  books about animals, things like small music  boxes, large print stories and puzzles, snow cones with puppies.

I think of some of the holiday gifts you send are amazingly creative and much loved, many of them would also make great Bingo prizes.

And please do try homemade crafts if you can and wish, they are often especially popular and seem to bring out good memories.

We are looking for small prizes, the residents don’t have much space in their rooms.

This would be helpful, I’m buying sacks full every Friday when I find them.

The alternative is staff treks to the Dollar Store. The staff often buys prizes with their own money, and they don’t have much money. I have no squawks with the dollar store, but I think and hope the Army Of Good can be more creative and original.

The Mansion staff rarely asks for help but they did ask for help with Bingo prizes.

If  you can help, thanks, please send the Bingo prizes to Julie, c/o The Mansion, 11 S. Union Avenue, Cambridge, N.Y., 12816, and thanks again.

Now available for $10 (free shipping) on Maria’s Etsy page or by sending a check or cash ($10) to The Gus Fund, c/o Jon Katz, Post Office Box 205, Cambridge, N.Y., 12816. Additional money for donations or any overage will to straight to the Mansion residents or the refugee and immigrant children. Thanks, they are moving quickly. We ordered 500, about 370 left.

If you don’t like to wear it on your sleeve, you can wear it on a car. Think of how much fund we will have spotting one another, the stickers have already gone out all over the country. Thanks for keeping good alive.

I never really heard of Mail Art until I saw some striking drawings Maria was making in her spare seconds, but never showing or selling.

I loved these drawings and badgered her a bit about the idea of selling them. But you cannot really tell Maria anything about her art, and it’s wise not to try.

Maria is one of those people whose mind is always racing and creating. If we are driving, and I run into a store to get some coffee, she will be  working on a sketch when I get back.

I sometimes sit and stare out the window or scratch a dog, but Maria will take that time and draw some  quite unique illustrations on a piece of cardboard. They are quite original, unlike other art that I have seen.

They have been sitting in a pile and accumulating in the living room for a couple of years now, and I often stop to look at them, but stopped suggesting she sell them.

In those moments, she has been making Mail Art.

Mail Art, also known as Postal Art,  is centered on the idea of sending small scale art works through the United States Postal Service. It began in the 1950’s, developed by artist Ray Johnson’s New York Correspondence School.

Mail Art has since developed into a global movement that continues to the present. Populist art is right in Maria’s wheelhouse, in a sense, all of her art is populist art.

I would surely notice if I got a drawing like this in the mail, a quite original gift or kind of personal letter. Tomorrow, she will be putting up these drawings on her Etsy page.

It’s not my business, really, to tell her what to do and it just annoys her on those rare occasions when I try it. If you suggest she should do something, it’s a good bet she will not do it. Like me, she likes to have her own ideas. I am the same way.

Maria thinks about things for awhile, and when she’s ready, she just goes and moves on them. I don’t think I’ve ever actually seen her drawing one of these creations, it happens in seconds while I am reading or checking my mail.

This week, she announced she is ready to sell them on her new Etsy page or on her website([email protected]). The drawings will sell for $10 plus shipping.

I don’t know why she decided to sell them now, but I think it’s a great idea. You can buy them on her Etsy page, starting tomorrow, or for $10 plus shipping or by e-mailing her at [email protected].