I’ve lived in a score of different worlds in my life. I lived in Boston but was never a Brahmin or an Irishman; I lived in Texas but was never a hunter or meat-eater; I lived in New York but could never be easy among all the sharks.

I lived in a New Jersey suburb but made one friend in 25 years. He ran from me when I got divorced; I covered the police for years but was never one of them or accepted by them, I covered the Mafia for a long time, but I was always far outside their circle of trust and connection. I worked in network TV, but everyone around me was scared and unhappy.

“You are a Jewish gypsy,” a friend told me once, and I said I didn’t think such a thing existed. “Oh yes,” he said, “the Kabbalah is full of stories about Jewish gypsies, who moved from one place to another but never stuck anywhere.”

I looked this up; he was telling me the truth; his idea shook me up for the truth of it. I was nothing new.

We like to think we are one country, but the news reveals many countries, each different from the others.

Our unity was always an illusion, a manipulated or coerced reality; it never stuck really, as President Trump proved so dramatically. We seem to hate all of our leaders, rejecting one in the hopes of finding another like us, and when we do, everybody else works to knock them down and run them off.

And so we seem doomed to war with one another, this time without guns but on a new battlefield called social media, a swamp of lies and conspiracies and hatred.

There are no winners and no losers, just lost souls trapped on a spinning wheel.  Sometimes it’s good to be alone and think for yourself.

I lived in a dozen different places,  holding many other jobs, but when I left, I left them all behind, the people I worked with and the people I wrote about.  Nothing stuck to me, and I stuck to nothing.

I was reminded of this today when I brought my Amish necklaces to Bishop Maginn. Sometimes, when I buy things for the Amish, I barter instead of asking for cash. I’m continually trading necklaces and bracelets because the Mansion residents and the Bishop Maginn students love them. My wish is for every single one of them to have one.

I sometimes wonder what is wrong with me, to focus on such a strange goal. But then, crazy people are by definition alone and often lonely; it comes with the job.

The refugee and inner-city kids love the Amish bracelets and necklaces I bring; they rush up to get one and never say no. They wear them until they drop off.

It’s my goal to give one to every student in the school, I’m a third of the way there, but I’ll make it eventually. I’m halfway there with the Mansion residents; there are fewer of them than Bishop Maginn students.

Three girls came up to me at Bishop Maginn today; they were inner-city girls, I knew.  They asked me if I had any more necklaces. As it happened, I had three, and the girls were each excited about getting one. “These are Amish bracelets,” I said proudly as if that would make them more precious.

The girls looked at me blankly. One of them turned to me and asked. “What’s an Amish?” and I  realized none of them knew. Yet they loved their bracelets, as do the Mansion residents, and the Amish love making them and selling them.

And guess what? The Amish have no idea who they are either.

Most of the young people I meet at Bishop Maginn are not especially curious. Their heads are in their cellphones. One teacher calls them the “Tik Tok People.” Almost everyone is on Tik Tok much of the time.

I wear an Amish bracelet every day of my life, and I have never been into jewelry.

This has special meaning because when I had bartered for the bracelets earlier this week, I told the Amish family I was bringing them to Bishop Maginn and the refugees this week in exchange for something I had bought for them.

They nodded, smiling, but I had the same realization with the students at Bishop Maginn.

My Amish family didn’t know what I was talking about; they looked at me blankly. They didn’t understand what inner-city kids were. They didn’t get the refugee references either.

So here I am, I thought, once again navigating different worlds in which I constantly traveled, yet each world was a stranger to the other. Very few Mansion residents have ever been to the inner city; the Mansion is almost all white, as it is my town. Very few people of color have lived in either place.

The Amish don’t follow the news at all; they have no grasp of either inner-city social problems or the lives of refugees coming to American from geological, civil wars and genocides.

They relate to suffering, but I’m not sure they know what refugees are or where they come from. They don’t follow the lives of the English; they can’t get far enough away.

How easily I move through these worlds, not really belonging to any of them and not ever bridging the gap between them all, unless you count handing out bracelets and necklaces, and I am not sure that counts for much.

Or maybe it does.

I like connecting the dots around these different worlds. I am excited when I can get the two worlds to fuse, even briefly, one loving the necklaces of the other but having no idea who the makers of the chains are.

And the Amish, working so hard to make beautiful and popular things to sell, have no idea who I am bringing their necklaces to or why. Nor do they seem to care who buys them.

I had this idea the other day.

I asked Sue Silverstein if she would like to help organize a visit by her students either to the Amish or the Mansion residents, who would be thrilled to see them both.

I asked my Amish friends, the Millers, if they would be open to my bringing some Bishop Maginn students – the kids I’m bartering all those necklaces for – to their farm to meet the Amish and see how they live who is making the necklaces they all want to have.

She said sure, but she would have to get a lot of approvals and find the money and convince the parents. The days are long gone when you could just put many kids on a school bus and go somewhere interesting.

And then I asked the Mansion Activities director what she thought of an outing to the Miller Farm or a high school choir performance at Bishop Maginn in Albany.

Everyone seemed interested in the idea, but I learned there are many practical reasons it might be hard, from transportation to covid to medical problems to vaccines to safety regulation and the cost of traveling in a group, and the dietary and medical needs of so many.

I didn’t ask the Millers if they wanted to travel en masse to Albany; I know there are enormous religious obstacles to that.

But I did ask them if I could bring some Bishop Maginn students to visit, and they seemed fine with it. Everyone is welcome; they don’t turn anyone away. But that is not quite the same as getting to know each other. The Amish are masters of letting everyone in the kitchen, but almost no one in the rest of the house.

There is also the underlying question – I don’t have the answer – whether any of these different worlds wanted to go through the trouble and expense of going to meet the other, did it matter to them? Or were they content to live within their universe? Or was I still just crazy?

All of my life, I’ve found myself living in worlds I didn’t want to live in, as if some demented genies manipulated me into being drawn into the wrong places, places where I could not feel at home or be at home.

On my hill in the country, reading my Merton journals, I learned that I feel lonely when I most need to be by myself. What a brutal irony that is.

The poet and writer Maya Angelou wrote that music was her refuge. “I could crawl into the space between the notes and curl my back to loneliness.” I crawl back onto my farm and bathe in my loneliness.

Perhaps this is why I am so drawn to other worlds than mine. I love traveling through different worlds, even writing about them, but I never want to live in any of them.

The first time I ever entered a world I knew I belonged in was when I moved to my mountain house and read Thomas Merton for a year and yearned for solitude and nature and life near the animal world.

Since then, I have never doubted that I am where I belong; this has been cemented by my comfort living in my small town and finding someone who shocked me by loving me so completely. I can’t quite get over it.

But here I am, still moving through different worlds, writing about all of them,  none of them understanding or connected in any way, passing out my colorful necklaces as if they were magic totems that could heal and connect. Or as if I was on a wagon in the old west, selling soap and rheumatism cures.

I have to say it’s a fascinating and thought-provoking place to be.

In my mystical moments, I sometimes imagine that if I ever get everyone in my world to wear and want their Amish necklace – it would be about a year away – then something would snap in the universe. We would all be united once again, as we supposedly were during our creation.

Maybe I’m carrying out God’s will, as the Amish believe they are. If so, there must be a larger purpose in my curious pilgrimage.

Perhaps the Amish are channeling Jesus and God, as they believe, and I am a prophet, unknowingly working to heal the world and bring it together. Wouldn’t that be a kick in the ass?

It is something to think about. I’m about 100 Amish necklaces and 75 bracelets away.