My earliest memory of water:
a blue plastic kiddie pool nearly melting
against the Texas border, the middle of
a dusty, scorching Laredo summer, a lizard
tilting its head, taking me in. My sister
and I, 2 and 4, wait while the small pool
fills, drinking from the metal end
of that curling hose, then sliding
naked into cool relief, our skin
blistering impetigo, water
splashing, splashing, splashing this
heavenly coolness while my mother
hides in the shade of our small,
robin’s-egg blue mobile home,
reading a book in a bent-but-not-broke
lawn chair my parents
probably found beside the dumpster
when they arrived, new to the state.

The next memory of water (or un-
water): going to a different pool
six months later in a different Laredo
trailer park—I guess we were still
searching for home. We carried towels
and water toys, only to discover
the pool was empty of water and full
of snakes, a writhing lostness
at the bottom of that dry empty,
hopelessly attempting to slither
up the sides. I peered over the edge
of the pool. The hope of it
had been just about all we had. My mother
shivered at the sound of those snakes’
desperation and walked us home.

In those early memories
of water, my mother hovers always
somewhere at the edges. Could I feel
her sadness then, her homesickness,
her thirst for familiar places?
Or is that something I’ve imposed
on the memory, something my 50
years better understands now
that I have, at times, been an adult
aching for home? She would have,
I am sure, thirsted for her northern
home, something green,
for cornfields in July,
for the red maples in October,
for the smell of pines in December,
for the push of daffodils and tulips
breaking earth skin in spring. Also
she would have ached for
her mother who sent
letters and recorded messages
that we played back over and over on
a small tape player, marvel of all
marvels, a voice coming from that
small box, a voice that knew
my name.

Now, as a 50-year-old parent of
young children, I cannot stop thinking about
how my mother must have gone
to the store and bought with such
meager funds that blue
plastic swimming pool in Laredo,
Texas, somehow fit it into
the back of our run down car,
and filled it for her two children,
both of us with rash-covered bottoms
and legs, dragging it across the dust
to that first mobile home,
baptizing us with a moment’s
coolness even while she sat in the
shadows of the trailer and ached
for home.

At some point in life, perhaps when you’re around 49 years 7 months old for example (just a random number), the question might arise for you: should I keep doing what I’m doing? Have the things I’ve been doing gotten me to a place in life I feel good about? Or is it time to take drastic measures and pivot?

Or, more specifically, maybe you’ll ask such questions of your creative life. Should I keep writing (or painting or drawing or making pottery or taking photographs or dancing or sculpting)? Where have these artistic endeavors gotten me up to this point? Is this creative life the kind of life on which I want to spend my remaining decades?

Or not?

Or not.

Read more

We have been apart for too long,
you overseas, me here, camping in
remote northern Pennsylvania, and
how do I know it has been
too long? Because I’m
fussing with this satellite feature
on my phone. Text, wait, chase, wait, try
again, turn slowly, lift the phone,
rotate again, people must think
I’m a lunatic. Remember mailing letters
to each other? Yours always arrived
just in time to save everything,
your teenage writing naive
and tentative on small envelopes,
my name—my name!—
written with such affinity,
your loveliness always
coming through. I would see a letter
from you and immediately stop
whatever I was doing and drive
the nine hours to Troy (or want to)
just to see you, just to sneak long
kisses when your parents weren’t in
the room, just to take in your smell,
your smile.

Maybe when I return home
from these (old-growth?) forests
I will write you a letter, shuffle it
in among the mail, and you can feign
surprise at its arrival. Maybe in the letter
I can tell you something new,
something I’ve never told you before,
and I can drive around the block, arriving
home as if I’ve just driven nine hours
to see you.

Back at camp, I don’t give up
trying to divine the location
of a satellite thousands of miles
above these trees. Two old people
(old growth?) sit outside of
a small camper, surrounded
by a fence enclosing a kind of kitchen,
keeping in two dogs the size of squirrels,
a carpet spread out. They have brought
their living space with them. Why come here,
my son asks, just to lay out
a carpet? Why bring your living room?
One of their tiny dogs
barks an electric smoker’s cough
as if it has had a tracheotomy. Three
plastic flamingos stare at me
from the fence. The woman flip-flops
her way to the shower. The man tilts
his head back against the camper,
falling asleep, mouth wide open,
mosquitoes be damned.

Will we ever do such things, you
and me, sitting in one place while
the wide world rages around us?
It’s hard to imagine, though
you do like those logic puzzles,
and I could take up pipe smoking
or the care of old dogs or
finally read all those books
or perhaps tell our campsite neighbors
the best places to fish or kayak
or see elk. Which is precisely
what the neighboring man did,
before napping. He spoke slow and kind
as if there was not a single other thing
in the sky above or the earth below,
for 20 tedious minutes, but maybe
in another life this wouldn’t chafe me
as it did. Maybe, in another life,
I will learn to sit still again or
talk slowly with strangers
or not care that the sun is setting on
too many things left to do. Maybe
I can stop chasing satellites and breathe
in the oxygen these old trees
are dying to give me.

Maybe this is what I will write about
in my first letter to you, the one I will
shuffle in amongst the other mail,
the one in which I will tell you
things I’ve never told you
before.

As I jog through
my neighborhood, trying to
live a bit longer than I would
otherwise, circling past
my own house once again, as I sweat
and will myself to take another step,
there are billionaires exploring
how they might never die,
might keep their bodies
from expiring or, if that fails, transfer
their brain’s contents into a machine,
their mind replaced by ones and
zeroes. A life with no end.

Jogging, the pavement scraping
by under my feet, I listen
to an audio book and
the narrator pronounces
the main character dead. I slow
to a walk, stunned. Why hadn’t
this protagonist simply
called for an ambulance
when the swelling began? Why
are we ashamed to cry
for help at the first sign?

I thought,
then, of my own eventual death,
inevitable as it is.

How will my children
stare down my passing? What memories
will they turn over and over
in their pockets? What versions
of me will come out in the stories they
share and what small things
will they keep only for themselves, perhaps
even things I do not remember?

Imagine doing away
with death: yes, first no winter,
but then, what no one seems
to remember: no spring. No snap
pea blossoms white to mark
the beginning of another season
and no persistent pushing of green up
through the hard winter’s end: the daffodil
and then the tulip. No thawing of the ice
around the spring so that
the water bubbles alive again,
and no new grass in the fields, no
first cuttings, no rosebuds. No babies
screaming at their new world or making
that soft sound just before falling
asleep

And you, of course, you, lying
so still beside me, only sleeping for now
but this death will come soon
for one of us. Would we escape it
if we could? Would we sell everything
we own, amass a fortune on the backs
of the world’s vulnerable, in order
to preserve never-ending-still-failing
bodies or perhaps produce an app
that will turn our memories
into pulsing bits of data our children
can converse with, fall asleep to, take
advice from?

Perhaps one day the billionaires will leave death
and us behind, perhaps they already have.
Perhaps.

But on that day they will have lost
the breath that comes
after winter. New birth is the gift
that death bears in its other hand,
the path I hope will lead you and me
on a new journey to a place
where there is no
looking back.

And still you are asleep beside me. I turn
over and listen to the peculiar sound
of my own breath. I move my arm
so the outside of my hand finds your
thigh, the lightest touch, and in your sleep
you turn and face me. And the night
is not long enough.

The bookshop air is so still
after story time, little voices
having run their way through, piled out
the door and back onto the sidewalk,
strollers lumbering down steps
diaper bags banging hips
and now only the background hum of
traffic on Prince Street or Waltz No. 19
on the speaker or ghostly creaking
footsteps from apartment residents
above while Thomas Hardy’s Jude
the Obscure stares at me
from the Classics shelf and also
Robinson Crusoe’s broad back as he walks
away through beached skeletons, carrying
a parasol and a gun. A parasol
and a gun. Somehow fitting.

Somewhere in the silence, my
notifications blaze, 10 million
people have seen your post! (readers
or scrollers?) and 450,000 have
liked it! (ironically or truly or
because they mistakenly thought
I was begging them to use AI?) numbers
the shape of which I cannot comprehend.
Zeroes and zeroes and zeroes, perhaps
I am a trillionaire examining
a balance sheet or swimming in
a duck’s silo full of gold, counting
coins over and over and over

The algorithm whispers, Do it
again Chase the zeroes Recreate
this success Become the machine
Regurgitate the formula Do it
over and over and over
and over or at least try to

Other voices, though,
that feel more true, saying

All things are wearisome,
more than one can say.
The eye never has enough of seeing,
nor the ear its fill of hearing…
“Meaningless! Meaningless!”
says the Teacher.
“Utterly meaningless!
Everything is meaningless”.1

Outside the shop, a storm gathers,
(is it the same day or another I
cannot tell the difference) the air
a weighted blanket, clouds roil over and
over these lonely sidewalks. And when
the rain comes Noah’s flood
pours down Prince, rivers
run from the parking garage,
downspouts overwhelmed

and there on the bottom
shelf, the rabbits of Watership
Down board a boat to cross
the river, fleeing embleer, the foul
scent of evil.

embleer

I smell it too in the likes and restacks,
the messages of adoration (and scorn),
a foul-smelling scent, this life
every writer can opt into
these days, chasing, chasing, chasing,
over and over and over

What did Galadriel say while turning
down the One Ring?
I pass the test. I will diminish,
and go into the West
and remain Galadriel. Somehow success
in lessening.

In the shop, after the rain, I chat with a man
with a hand-carved walking stick who built
a dumbbell out of scrap metal and
then I help a child find a book (adventurous
but not too scary) and then I talk
to a customer who drove three hours
to see our shop and said she cried listening
to our podcast and then I try to kindly explain
to some indignant deal-hunter
why we don’t price-match Amazon.
A toddler wearing glasses machine-guns
marbles down the marble roller. A woman
says she comes here for a quiet hour
in our Sun Gallery while her foster child
spends time with their mother
at the courthouse. I hold a friend’s baby.

Later that night, much later, (is it yet
another day? I cannot tell) I am home
and let the dog out into the muggy June
dark and up in the towering pines lightning
bugs flash over and over and over,
for no other reason than
that is who they are,
that is what they do,
especially after a storm. I wonder

What am I doing
over and over and over
that is making me
who I am?

and

Am I willing to diminish?

The air so still,
and the sound of faraway traffic,
and the rain, a gentle rain,
begins to fall.

“If people won't pay for our product, it's not a good enough product…
It would be like poetry without rhyming. It's too easy.”

- Jeff Bezos

And I wondered

at the ease with which Walt Whitman
must have penned “Leaves of Grass,” barely
even trying, I guess, or how simple
it must have been for William Carlos Williams
to depend on that red wheelbarrow, no effort
required, or how little thought Langston
Hughes must have needed to write,
”I, too, am America.” That’s only four
words, after all, and what rhymes
with America, anyway?

And of course “Caged Bird”
by Maya Angelou though that occasionally
rhymes, so not as easy.

And then there is ’s Jubilee or
’s I Hope This Finds You Well or
Mary Oliver’s Devotions, books overflowing
with free verse,
far too easy.

Perhaps as easy, I’m guessing, as the movement
of the hummingbird as it hovers there gauging
the breeze and probing, or as easy as
the rose unfolding this morning
whose flowers I cut and
put in a vase on Maile’s desk before
the withering sun could come for them,
or as easy as the green grass which seems
to glow on these cool June
mornings, or as easy as the towering oak
in my backyard 100 years old
or more, somehow still standing
through all these storms, though many
have fallen around it,
how easy to just keep standing there,

and then I wondered if Jeff remembers
being little Jeff or Jeffrey or JP or whatever
name those who loved him called him,
and what it was like for him
as a child to step on a crisp spring morning
into a bookshop—does he remember?—
surrounded by all those
stories, the delight in finding something
new—has he forgotten?—being swept up
in another world yet again. They say
he loves books.

And if he does love books
and if he does remember those days,
how does it now feel to know
he has made an empire of bullying
bookshops and the people who pour
often their entire selves
into a business that will never
make them wealthy, at least not
financially. I think of
Byron and Beth Borger or my friends
who own Aaron’s Books or Pocket Books
or Warren Farha, God rest
his soul. It’s like picking on the weakest
kid in class, the one who looks different
or lives in a dumpy house, the one
who spends recess reading The Lord
of the Rings or maybe even T.S. Eliot’s
”The Waste Land”

April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.

(which is free verse, by the way, and way too
easy)

Imagine bullying that child, that weakest one
reading TS Eliot along the fence,
striking them in the face
while they read, knowing
they would never fight back,
because they’re not strong enough
or it’s simply not their temperament,
and then knuckles splitting skin,
even the unhinging of a jaw
or gentle snap of cartilage
around the nose, or maybe kicking
at them where they sit, breaking
ribs, the proverbial
kicking them while they’re down. Imagine
beating up a child, the one
at the edge of the schoolyard,
for loving books—

isn’t being a bully
far easier
than writing
a free verse poem
and sharing it with the world?

If you value third spaces that foster community and conversations around books, please support your local bookshop. Find out more about the local bookshop Maile and I own, Nooks, at our Substack, our Instagram page, or purchase your books online at our Bookshop.org space where we receive a generous portion of each sale. Thanks!

There’s a line in Tom’s Crossing where
a parent tells their child as they head
out on their own, “This door ain’t ever
gonna have a bolt you can’t unlock,” in
other words I love you or You’re always
welcome to come home, no matter
what or Wherever I am is always
yours, and this, I guess, is
what I want you to know,
while you wait in that sea of gowns
for your name to be called.

But no, now I see you at six months
old on your back on the floor
in our cottage in Wendover, England,
your arms spinning little windmills,
your legs churning. The bleating lambs
outside rise in chorus with your tiny
voice, and I scoop you up and take
you outside and walk laps around
the small garden, marveling
at the blue British sky, the green summer
hedges taller than me, the weight of you
in my arms,

light as a new beginning,

but no, now you are four years old, standing
outside the bus on our cross-country
adventure, staring up through the door
blue-eyed with dirt on your face, smiling
at the world

but no, now you are 22 again and
you walk the stage and take your diploma
and immediately look up, trying to find us
in the crowd, your grin as you spot us,
your fist raised in celebration of finishing.

Brother and sister, the two of you each
finishing
beginning
staring down all the world’s
terrible beauty, and I wonder
if there’s anything to say that one thousand
commencement speakers haven’t already
said so many times.

Outside, the roses bloom and the Japanese maples
slip from red to summer green and
the sycamores shine glimpses of white peeling
trunks all the way to the river. Adolescent
trees growing towards adulthood
find spaces in the canopy to stretch
towards. Maybe that’s what I would say
if I were the speaker at your commencements:
accept the foundational strength of the
rootedness all around you, but grow
into your own space.

Later that night, after
you’ve thrown your cap, your mother and I
read side by side in bed (as is our custom)
and I think of both of you and I want to text you
and say, I love you, or, How’s it going, or
Are you watching the game? But then
I sigh and realize what I really want to say
has already been written, already
said by a mother in Danielewski’s book
to her son who is heading
out on a fateful adventure:

This door ain’t ever gonna have
a bolt you can’t unlock.

but why are the tractors crawling
up the walls and why do people stand
miraculously sideways on the concrete and what
are the tiny wrapped packages
floating at the top left corner?

My youngest daughter has recently taken
to leaving notes around the house
for her mother and me, small rectangles
of white paper that say, “I love you dad,” or
"You’re the best dad ever,” or “I love when you read
to me.” She spends evenings
on the carpeted floor in her large bedroom
drawing, sketching, pretending. Small rectangles of color
she leaves lying
around the house, randomly
dropped here
or there.

“The United States never ever
targets civilians,”
he says, replying to allegations
we/us/our country bombed a school full of children,
elementary-aged girls.
“Whatever the report shows,

I’m willing to live with that

report,”
he
says.

Have you seen a child caught up in the throes of
drawing a picture, fresh
hands twisted around this new pencil,
focused so focused on nothing nothing
nothing else but what is so-slowly
emerging? Have you ever
watched a child sleep, the stillness
of their closed eyes inviting those who love
them to lean in and check
for a rising chest
a flickering eyelid
the sound of breath
signs of life.

Spring is here now. I stand on the green
grass in our front yard, though the air is cool.
The sun. I close my eyes. There is warmth there
and life and I hear a child
call to me from the house, signs
of life. I think
I spot a hummingbird but it is still
too early, a trick of the light. And I wonder
at the part I am playing
in this wide world,
and whether or not
I am willing to live with that.

Watching, you might think I am simply
helping my son carry a queen-sized mattress
up a very beautiful spiral staircase, going first
because as a parent we often
take the difficult end,

but in reality it isn’t only a sofa.
I am helping my oldest child move
out. He is the first to leave without any plans
of returning. I remember so many
years and milestones and wonder if,
now that I’m 49, life might pause
just for me
just for a moment
please

And then the bookcase, and then
the coffee table, and then boxes
of books, his love of reading part of our
inheritance to him and his children
and his children’s children (should things
progress in that direction), and

the electricity is not yet turned on
in this new apartment, so we drift
through box-filled rooms in the dark,
shining phone flashlights, oohing
and aahing about it all, and

then we leave and he locks the door because
he is now the one with the keys, the one who must
remember to lock, the one who will come home
at the end of a long day or a good day or a hard day
to a place that is not mine and turn the key and go in

and that
is that, and

this particular end comes quietly
and somewhat unforeseen
or maybe it just feels that way
because I have been refusing
to look directly at it.

Home, the next day, and I hear through
the screen my cousin and his family
walk past our house on a warm spring afternoon,
wife holding their three-day-old baby,
their other small children chattering
to each other, so innocent, still so close
to their own beginnings. Beside
me on the couch, Winnie trembles and barks
in her sleep, imaginary foes closing in
on all sides.

I remember the weight of strollers and long
nights, the relief at the end of the day when
all small children were finally asleep, when Maile
and I would collapse onto the couch,
grateful for a moment’s peace, or slink off
to bed for a few minutes alone.

Now, on a dark evening, I sit in the lamplight,
our house quiet, and I wonder what my son,
the one who just moved out, is doing
in his new place, if he is reading any of those
books we lugged up the steps, and

if he remembered
to lock the door.

I stared at For Sale flyers for days
through glass realtor windows in that 3,000-
year-old city, weighed what it would take
to move, how much better life would be there—

evenings walking
cobblestone streets and Sunday
morning mass in the duomo and surely
we would throw our phones

into a cistern and no longer watch
the world devour us and our children.
We would live on gelato and fresh pasta
and cheap wine and never experience

writer’s block and my knees would stop
aching in the morning and the bags under
my eyes would tighten as we wandered
through vineyards and olive groves. We

wouldn’t have televisions or laptops
or cell phones (remember, they’re in the
cistern), and we would learn Italian
and don’t forget the gelato—oh,

the gelato!

But

“wherever you go, there you are,”
a phrase attributed to a dozen different people—
the internet doesn’t even know
who said it first—but it’s still true. Because even in Italy

we occasionally fought or wrote or laughed or
didn’t write or read books or watched
movies or made love or felt fear or worried
about the world or grew bored or scrolled Instagram.

Even in Italy.

What if we we didn’t wait for Orvieto?
What if we went outside, right now, here in
this riven country, left our phones
inside or dropped them in the old cistern

under our front porch or even just placed them
in a drawer, and what if in this chilly
May sunshine we moved the rocks
from the path’s edge as you have been wanting

all spring, and what if we
simply let the grass and weeds tumble in? What if
I threw the frisbee into the woods over and over
to keep the dog happy?

What if, after all that, we finally sat on the white rocking
chairs on our front porch and waited and
watched as our two youngest lolly-gag down the
long straight street from the bus stop, all the way

home, to our door? What if we sat and waited?

What if we waited?

Somewhere, there is last year’s ruby-throated
hummingbird returning from 2000 miles
away to this very plot of ground, these trees, this
sunshine, the eaves of this house. This must be

some place, if that kind of
beauty works so hard
to return here every single year, to
this regular everyday, to us

Be sure to use AI when making
your next, I don’t know, meal plan,
for example. Definitely do not call
your friend who loves to cook and ask her
for her favorite recipes or tips or ways
to save time making meals,
because you will end
up talking for longer than you had hoped,
hearing, perhaps, about her father’s cancer
diagnosis or how lonely she’s been or even
what she’s planted in her spring
garden and then lost with the early frost.

And be sure to use AI when planning that next
camping trip, the last one you will take
with this particular child. Definitely do
not text your friend who has fly-fished every
river in Pennsylvania and biked every
backwoods trail, because you might end
up texting back and forth for the rest of the day
or even meeting up late for a beer and hearing
how he has ended each recent night black-out
drunk, or perhaps you’ll hear how his
cousin is an idiot on Facebook or maybe just
that he repaired his own washing machine
and is pretty damn proud of that.

And be sure to use AI when your next child
gets married, so that you can write them
the perfect toast or poem or speech or song
because no one wants to hear your
words, the actual poorly written words
of a parent (you) who changed
hundreds of diapers for said child or fed
them in the middle of the
night from your actual body. Or cried
when they were late home because
you were positive they were dead. We don't
want those words—we’d prefer the sterile
words of a machine that never lived, never
had an original thought, never felt
the pain of miscarriage or broken
relationships or the joy of a friendship restored
or of seeing spring’s first
robin dancing on frost.

And be sure to use AI when working on your next
book or essay or piece of art or photography,
and then smile or even laugh at your own
cleverness when you see how good it is,
and how easy,
because who the hell has time
to work at something, to give time to craft, to
create with their own minds, to spend
years being mediocre. Why do that when
mastery, or at least competency
is so simple
only a good prompt away?

How magnificent
the funeral song our children or contemporaries
will write for us, a song they will make by
taking our obituary and Facebook posts,
plus random quotes from our algorithm,
and feeding them into Chat
or Gemini
or Claude.
The tears that will fall in the face of such
sanitary sweetness!

Be sure to use AI

and while you do I’ll be over here in my 50th
year, my youngest daughter asleep on my chest,
my arm falling asleep because I dare not move
lest I scare away this moment,
lying here melancholy about my older
children moving out and my middle
children no longer needing me, at least
not like they used to, weary about this body
that fails me now in ever increasing ways
that will never be restored. Sighing
over stories I tried to write but never hit
the page the way they felt in my mind.

But isn’t that, my flesh-and-blood friend,
the natural order of things?

the longing for something that could always be
a bit better

or the way that anything
worth doing feels a bit clumsy and painful,
especially at first

or hearing another human voice and somehow
realizing the beauty of life is found in all of these
subtle imperfections

He gives me a bear hug before he leaves. The morning has barely begun. Another day at the bookshop.

Where is the world headed? Has it always felt like such a headlong dash for the edge? Diesel at our station is at $6.08 and our health insurance policy expired so they offered something new: worse policy, double the deductible, rates going up 50%. School doesn’t feel like a safe place, not in the US or in Iran, and people trip down the sidewalk in front of our shop because they refuse to look up from their phones. Can I blame them for seeking out some form of avoidance?

And yet.

I sold multiple books of poetry, including Mary Oliver’s Devotions, and a few people have been brave enough to try House of Leaves which in itself is an act of hope. My son comes home bragging about the books he hand-sold, and at our little staff meeting, when asked what is going well, our newest employee says it just brings her so much joy to recommend beautiful books and see people walk out into the world with them.

A woman stops by the shop, one of our earliest customers from two years ago, and buys books I’m pretty sure she never reads. She just wants to support us. And two young women spend hours perusing the shelves, sometimes sitting in comfy chairs, sometimes just standing quietly and taking in the titles. One of them squeals with delight after purchasing Swallows and Amazons, something that gives me a great deal of hope for the next generation.

Grandparents bring in their grandchildren. Couples celebrate anniversaries. Some folks come in alone and quietly meander through the shop.

Mary Oliver writes,

I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.

and I know what she is saying, because what is prayer and who is God, exactly, and what is this life we live always pell-mell dash towards death?

And yet.

A mother curls up in the children’s reading nook with her two small kids, the three of them sinking into bean bags, her loving voice reading, Guess How Much I Love You. A father hands his son his favorite book from middle school, beaming. And even when the shop is empty, the afternoon sunlight falls just so on the yellow and gray checkered floor, and the books are there, just there, just waiting.

I suddenly remember that I, too, know how to pay attention. How to walk along the shelves of books and let my fingers drift over the spines. How to look people in the eye and ask them how they’re doing, ask them what their favorite book is. How to pause on my way out of the parking garage and look down at our little bookshop, this gift, this miracle.

I do know how to pay attention.

What is February if not gray, the snow melting and rain falling and lazy mornings with wisps of fog and memory? What is this second half of life if not a February day?

Let me write a book for you and I will call it, “In My Fiftieth Year.”

Tomorrow my daughter leaves for four months studying in Europe and this is the domino upon which so much change will begin to cascade: our oldest son graduates from college, moves out, and gets married this summer, the first time a child has left without plans to return. The aforementioned daughter galavants around Italy and then returns for her senior year of college; middle daughter graduates from high school in a few months and then a gap year and then out into the world; middle son gets his driver’s license, and then off into anything that isn’t at home.

I spent the first large swathe of life eager for what was on the horizon. As a child I ran from one activity to the next, literally, ran through school hallways and around the house and through the fields in my part of the world because I couldn’t wait for what was next. And I couldn’t wait to finish high school, and then finish college, and then get married, and then move home, and then move to England, and then and then and then.

Recently, though, in my fiftieth year, life feels unacceptably short. Slow down, life. How is it I am here? A few short hours ago Maile and I were in an English hospital welcoming our oldest into the world, taking him home to our tiny cottage on a 100-acre estate, and now here we are, and in a few short weeks I will be on my death bed wondering what comes next.

Slow down, life.

Poppy has built a fortress in her room which is nothing more nor less than a large, pink comforter draped from the top bunk, held in place with plastic pins, a wide enough space for someone to sleep in the bottom bunk as well as on the floor beside the bed. A reading lamp peers around the corner of the entrance, making it feel like a tent, or a hobbit hole. A box fan whirs the air in.

And because she is the youngest and does not like going to sleep on her own I find myself, some nights, on the floor or the bottom bunk, both of us reading in the lamplight—she’s working through Rebellion 1776 and I’m either in Memory Wall by Anthony Doerr or Tom’s Crossing by Mark Danielewski.

And then time passes and I tell her she should probably turn out the light.

And then more time passes and I fall asleep.

And then more time passes and I’m army crawling out of the fortress, trying not to wake her.

A few nights ago when I did this I went down the hall and turned towards our bedroom but heard voices downstairs. I stopped. It was the older kids in the kitchen—they were laughing and talking about who knows what, and the sound of it was a balm to my soul. Just to hear them chatting and laughing and protesting and laughing again. Someone was cooking burgers. It was at least 11pm.

This is life, in all its dizzying speed. This is life, not slowing down.

Warning: does include a few Hamnet spoilers, if you haven’t already read the book or seen the movie. Also, get on that. You can order that beautiful novel HERE from Bookshop and our bookshop, Nooks, will receive a portion of the sale.

At one point while watching the movie Hamnet last night, I was so overcome with grief I had to pull my sweatshirt up over my face and sob quietly while the show rolled on. I reached that point where the sadness approached in a wave from far off, and when it arrived there was nothing to stop it. I’m still not entirely sure where it came from—I’ve watched other devastatingly sad movies before without this kind of response. My shoulders shook.

Who knows what it is that can so precisely move us in such a powerful way? Who knows the formula to make art reach down inside and leave a 49-year-old man trying his darnedest not to absolutely lose control and ugly cry in a way that would concern every other person in the theater?

There is no formula. That’s how it catches us unawares.

Maybe it was the phenomenal acting by Jessie Buckley playing the grieving Agnes. Her heartfelt scream at that death, her reaching out at the end, was the depths of grief personified. Maybe it was the moving, slow nature shots, the wind in the trees, the hawk soaring through low clouds. The realistic nature of Agnes’ relationship with her husband, the frustrations, the love, the sense that we are all ships passing in the night.

Maybe my emotion rose because of Little Hamnet in the movie and how much he reminds me so much of our 11-year-old, with the twinkle in his eye, the willingness to cry, the quick attentiveness with anything that interests him.

There is something about an 11-year-old boy that exists in two places at once, not quite a teenager, no longer simply a child. Our son’s mind stretches curiously out into the world these days, and confronts worldly things, and reaches tentatively to see what it will find, and is too often rebuffed with cruelty and cynicism and callous adults or fellow children who scorn such simplicity. And yet he also encounters whimsical delights and beauty and a glimpse of what the world could give him.

It takes so much bravery to be a young person.

I will be brave, little Hamnet says.

I came up out of my sweatshirt and took off my glasses and took the tissues Maile offered. The main wave passed and I felt numb. I watched as Agnes entered Shakespeare’s Globe, as she took up the playbill and saw what she saw.

What can we do when confronted with such sadness?

“I don’t understand,” she said to her brother. “I don’t know what to do.”

He looked at her quietly and said four words I have not forgotten.

“Keep your heart open.”

The same eleven-year-old is playing youth basketball this year for the first time and they invited all the young players to a varsity game, so we showed up to the high school gym with all the other youngsters and cheered on the older kids.

Just before the game began, a potentially awkward moment settled on us in the form of complete silence. The National Anthem was supposed to begin playing over the loudspeakers, but nothing happened. We all stood there quietly, hats off. People cleared their throats in the liminal space. Looked around. Chuckled nervously. I was reminded again of how uncomfortable we are with silence in this culture.

One of the game officials looked around and, realizing the music wasn’t going to start playing, raised his hand.

“Okay, I think we all know the words,” he said in a commanding voice, and then he began.

Oh say can you see…

He did not have a good singing voice, and he did not start it in an octave that was particularly conducive to everyone singing along. I didn’t think anyone else was going to join him.

And yet, we did. The folks dressed like farmers in their jeans and flannel shirts, the soccer moms with their nails and hair done, the jocks and the band kids and every other one. The student section belted it out. The players on the benches joined.

Voices rose, and we sang, a spontaneous performance. And for the first time in a long time, I felt something—patriotic, perhaps, or maybe just part of a community. But just as soon as I felt that, I felt weird about it, because even though I do love the United States, I hate what we’ve become recently.

Innocent people murdered by federals officers in the streets.

This is what happens when you resist federal officers. It’s a very very bad idea.

Refugees here legally being deported.

This is what happens when you leave your home country. They don’t belong here.

Rights trampled by abuses of power.

This is what happens when you speak up. You will get steamrolled. It’s the natural order.

Too many feelings. When everyone stopped singing, a lot of people cheered. I sighed.

Six years ago, I read Charlotte’s Web to our youngest son for the first time. We read one chapter every night, and he fell in love with Charlotte immediately. When we got to the page just before Charlotte dies, he put his little hand in the book and demanded that I stop reading.

“Leo, we have to finish the chapter,” I said. “We’re almost there.”

He kept protesting. It was unlike him. I couldn’t tell if he was entirely serious or not, so I finished the chapter.

As soon as I read the last sentence–“No one was with her when she died”–he burst into tears, and we just sat there, the two of us, his head leaning over on my chest, sobs shaking his skinny body, tears dampening my shirt. Outside, the city was quiet, the street lights shining through the window.

No one was with her when she died.

I don’t know what to do in this world anymore. I don’t know what to say or how to say it. I don’t know how to feel—I want to reach out and stop the next page from being read, put my hand in the book and pretend that Charlotte isn’t going to die alone.

But something keeps telling me.

Keep your heart open.

At the end of Hamnet Agnes is grieving as she watches the play, but something transcendent happens as she experiences the death of Hamlet on stage: her grief is transformed. She reaches out for him, as does everyone else in the audience. And in that reaching, you see that every single person in the crowd is dealing with their own grief, their own sadness, their own desperation, and this play, remarkably, unexpectedly, has helped them all. They weep, but there is healing there as they grieve alongside one another.

In the same way that Agnes, watching the play, was able to begin moving through her grief, I, while watching Hamnet, could do the same. I guess I didn’t know how much grief I had in me—the general grief that comes with raising children, or living in community with people you love, or living in a country where atrocities are happening at greater and greater rates. The pain around us is palpable.

What can I do in the face of such sadness, such overpowering evil?

Like Leo, I can cry.

Like the crowd, I can sing.

Like Agnes, I can reach out towards the suffering ones.

I don’t understand. I don’t know what to do.

Keep your heart open.

Again, make sure you read Hamnet.

If you don’t believe that time can morph and stretch and shrink right before your eyes, you’ve never dropped a bowl while retrieving it from the top cupboard shelf. The way it slips effortlessly from your fingers, falling in slow-motion to the granite counter, handle ricocheting off the cabinet, or the way you reach for it as it falls, your hand forever and always a fraction behind, or the way it splits like a melon on impact, your hand still chasing what is now broken shards of porcelain, sharp as the White Witch’s knife.

All impossibly fast, and yet the time slows and stretches and splits, like the outside of the middle finger on your right hand, now a slab of skin flapping open, now blood racing for the exit.

My left hand bares a similar scar, this one on my index finger, when, some years ago, I tried to poke a hole through a plastic table covering with the open end of a scissors. The brand new blade raced through easier than expected, and then kept right on going until it met the bone above the final knuckle on that finger. The scissors was brand new and so sharp the cut didn’t hurt, at least not at first, but I knew it was bad, and I clenched it in a wad of paper towels, not wanting to look.

It bled and bled, but that one was even deeper, and as the cut healed I realized the finger never would—to this day the inside of that index finger is numb, sometimes tingling, sometimes a random pain shoots through like heat lightning if bumped.

Ten years ago I dropped a glass pitcher and it landed in between my feet, then shattered, and gave me two cuts, one on the inside of each foot, so that now, a decade later, I have matching scars, one on the inside of each foot, so similar that when the kids see those scars they point and shake their heads.

There are other things that have changed in my 49-year-old body: there is the dull pain I sometimes feel on the outside of my left elbow, a pain that comes and goes; there is the gentle ebb of hairline; there is the tectonic rearranging of teeth; there are the Crohn’s flare-ups, each leaving unseen scars of their own; there is the middle toe on which I dropped an industrial mixer last year, the toe that still doesn’t bend the whole way.

In my 50th year I think I am finally realizing the cost of growing older, and it’s not simply the cute wrinkles at the corners of your eyes or the hair harmlessly fading into white.

The true cost of getting older is that you lose things you will never recover. The true cost of getting older is experiencing some physical ailment and realizing with certainty, This will not get better. This will be here for the rest of my life.

Sometimes these are relatively small things like the bending of a toe and sometimes bigger things, like actual feeling in a finger, and sometimes even more monumental and personal things that alter the way you exist in the world, like losing a beloved pet who was with you through hard times, or a person you love.

Yes, even people will be lost.

Vanishing along with them are entire eras of life, entire blocks of memory. They looked at you or hugged you or lifted you in ways that no one else can.

Alongside all of these losses comes a dwindling down. A lessening of self. All of which eventually gather together until all grows dark and The End is here.

Sorry.

This can, at first, be depressing.

Each loss, small and large, becomes a constant reminder of mortality, a sign that, while The End may or may not be quite near, it is certainly on its way, no matter how loud you scream or protest.

But is this long, slow process of becoming less actually a negative thing? Does it have to be an experience we enter into kicking and screaming? Or is there a gentler, more peaceful way to grow older?

Henri Nouwen writes, “The compassionate life is the life of downward mobility! In a society in which upward mobility is the norm, downward mobility is not only discouraged but even considered unwise, unhealthy, or downright stupid. Who will freely choose a low-paying job when a high-paying job is being offered? Who will choose poverty when wealth is within reach? Who will choose the hidden place when there is a place in the limelight? Who will choose to be with one person in great need when many people could be helped during the same time? Who will choose to withdraw to a place of solitude and prayer when there are so many urgent demands from all sides?”

And I would add, “Who would choose to accept growing older, when there are so many ways to pretend it’s not happening?”

There are ways. We know them. We use them for this reason or that.

We can whiten our teeth until they glow, or darken our hair and stretch our skin and tuck things in. We can surgically repair our bodies, and sometimes this is good and helpful and necessary in order to function, and sometimes it’s just to make us feel better about ourselves. We can chase younger relationships and faster rides and pump ourselves full of medicine so that our bodies will behave itself, go back to being younger, sexier, more desirable, or easier to look at in the mirror.

We can choose to chase importance, relevance, all for wonderful causes that we know we can further if only we had a larger platform, a louder microphone, a bigger audience.

Or.

We can choose the hidden place. Diminish. Allow the limelight to pass us by and move (slowly) into the shadows, perhaps to be with one person in great need, or care for those in our direct sphere, or, as someone once said to me, tend the garden that has been given to me.

Or simply sit in solitude and pray.

But who will choose poverty when wealth is within reach?

Who will choose to slow?

Who will choose to withdraw?

Perhaps the simple fact that I’m posting here, that I write for the public, illustrates that my ego has not yet been sufficiently tamed, that I can not yet go quietly into my later years and simply spend my days working, splitting wood for the stove, and caring for my kids. Yes, that may be true.

But I will say that there is great freedom in no longer chasing the limelight, the conference stages, the next big book deal. There is freedom in knowing this world will continue on without us, for good or ill, and as the poet Malcolm Guite writes in “Refugee,”

The lambs are slaughtered by the men of power,
And death squads spread their curse across the world.
But every Herod dies, and comes alone
To stand before the Lamb upon the throne.

Even the most powerful will diminish.

There is no escaping this fate.

I wonder if these small scars and no-longer-working nerves are preparing me for a quieter journey, the one that comes at the end, the one on which I cannot take a thing with me?

Many dark mornings this winter I go down two flights of stairs to the wood stove in the basement where Maile’s mom has her apartment. I get on my knees in front of that iron behemoth of a stove and put two larger logs inside, then a few pieces of newspaper, then small twigs and sticks. And I light it. The flames dance and crackle and if the wood is dry, within a few minutes there is a roaring sound as the heat rolls around in the stove and races up the chimney.

There is something holy in this small act of morning, this small service of bringing heat into the house. On my knees, something from nothing, light out of darkness. Holy.

And yet this building of a fire in the basement of a home on Conestoga Ave is one of the smallest acts being done in all of the wide world—it will not be written about in the newspapers or spoken of on the Nightly News. This act will not enter into international negotiations over conflict or satisfy the calls for blood in the streets. It will not depose a dictator or bring justice where it is so sorely needed.

Accepting that this is my lot in life, that this may be the most important thing I do today, is a kind of diminishing.

And yet, this small thing done every morning feels somehow beautiful in its simplicity.

It feels like praying.

Check out our latest podcast episode over at So, We Bought a Bookshop: “It Finally Happened.”

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Tomorrow I turn 49. In some ways it feels like the drawing of a curtain on an entire era of my life, a vista from which I can stop and look back over the grandness that has been my life for half a century.

Getting older is hard to fathom, and if not for the things changing around me, I’m not sure I would believe it. Inside my head, I don’t feel that much older than 30-something, and I can still remember quite clearly the things my 11-year-old self was concerned with. And yet . . . our oldest is graduating in the spring and getting married in the summer. Our second is heading overseas for a semester. Our third graduates from high school and our fourth is in the second half of his high school career.

Our littles keep me feeling young, but even they are starting to feel like preteens. Maile sent me a photo this morning of them walking to the bus stop by themselves, on a rainy morning, their hands hitching up their backpacks.

Tomorrow I turn 49. What is this life?

Nooks, the bookshop we bought a year and a half ago, continues to surprise us with the joy and chaos it brings to our lives. In fact, I’m sitting there now, in an armchair, waiting to open the doors at 10am. Through the glass I can see traffic plodding down Prince Street, shushing through the rain, and construction workers, and people on their way to market.

We have met so many incredible people here, and so many of you support us in person as well as over at Bookshop (if you buy your books there and select us as your local bookshop, we make 30%!). We’ve recorded podcast episodes about the experience over at So, We Bought a Bookshop: we survived another shop opening down the street, construction closing our sidewalk, and all sorts of other challenges.

2026 holds a lot of promise for our little shop, and we have some exciting things we can’t wait to tell you about.

When I went to load up all of my son’s things yesterday at college (he’s moving home for his last semester of interning), I thought there should be some kind of grand ceremony or fanfare. After 3 1/2 years, he was leaving! This was it! Moving out!

But it was a rather quiet day. The snow was melting under 40-degree temps and a stiff breeze, and the campus was feeling empty and apathetic, with most students having headed home for break.

This is part of the strangeness of life—we’re constantly crossing the threshold into new days, into new experiences, new eras even, and leaving important things behind, and yet often there’s nothing to mark the passing. Maybe we pause. Maybe we look around and feel the emotion somewhere deep within. But then we sigh and get back in the car and drive home, another major event in life behind us.

“Youth always tries to fill the void, an old man learns to live with it.”
― Mark Z. Danielewski

Tomorrow I turn 49. I’m trying to resist the old temptation to fill the void, instead learning to sit with it.

Maile and the kids will wake me up with singing and breakfast in bed (Apple Jacks with extra creamy oat milk) and then I’ll do some Christmas shopping and in the afternoon we’re reading through the entire, unabridged Christmas Carol at Nooks.

All the kids are home, and we’ve arrived at the time of life where that may not always be the case anymore, so, when they are all home, it’s pretty much heaven on earth. When they’re all home, I can imagine letting all other responsibilities slide away while we sit together and talk.

This may very well be the most tired I’ve ever been in my entire life, even more tired than when we had four kids under 7, because now there are children in college, high school, and elementary school, and there’s a bookshop to run alongside Maile. A house that includes nine inhabitants plus a dog, with three children about to flee the nest in some form or other.

And it may also be the best that life has ever been, even with its loss and overwhelm and weariness. How full and hard and wonderful life can be.

Tomorrow I turn 49. Some of you have been reading my meandering bloggish writing for nearly 17 years. Maybe for my birthday you can comment below with when you think you started reading my writing? Just curious. In any case, whether you’ve been here for 17 years or this is the first thing of mine you’ve ever read, thank you. You’re one of the reasons I love my life.

We walk to the river
in the morning after they
climb into their yellow bus. 17
degrees, and when we arrive
at the water’s edge there is a thin skin
of ice on the pools and the rocks
are coated in frost and mist that has
settled and frozen, surprising even
the stones.

tell these stones to become bread

You sit on the low bank,
take off your socks, your shoes,
and put your feet in that icy water,
grimacing, counting slowly.
Winnie runs along the path behind
us, always ready to move on. We are
always ready to move on,
aren’t we?

throw yourself down

The sun shines through the glistening
trees but there is no warmth anywhere,
not even at the bottom of my pockets. I
make fists inside my gloves. I stamp and
stomp back and forth as my toes grow
numb, watching you.

23, 24, 25,

What to do with the iciness that creeps
in at the edges of our lives? I try stepping
on it, and while it creaks and cracks, it is
too thick to break.

Will the ice run deeper and deeper into January,
grow solid all the way down to the bottom,
or will a mid-winter thaw spring up, loosen
what has become solid, invite
us all in again to the shallows
where we walk among the laughing
rapids?

46, 47, 48

And then there are the ducks
floating on the cold water as if it is the middle
of summer, as if that water couldn’t
kill me in five minutes, as if
the trees are covered
in summer leaves.

How can they?

And then I remember the darkest day
is nearly here, and after that the light
will begin creeping in again. The mornings
will brighten and the buds appear
and the bees, yes even the bees, will
come back, explore deep inside
the daffodils, then the tulips, hang
heavy on the roses
the flowers swaying, moaning
with delight.

58, 59, 60

There are gifts here, even in the winter,
even in the dark, even in the cold
that shows my bursting breath, that
freezes in tiny icicles in my beard.

You groan and take
your bright red feet out of the river,
pull on wool socks,
slide them into warm boots, and
stand. We walk back home along
the frozen trail, you take my gloved hand
in yours, both of us believing,
perhaps for the first
time in weeks, that winter
will not last
forever.

the sycamore branches remember how to become one
with everything around them and particularly
the sky where their silver-white skin disappears
against a backdrop of freezing rain I walk
outside into this winter morning
and climb into a cold car
now on my way to a funeral

driving through the city this pace these screens this
ever-encroaching alternate reality and i see a woman
lying on the sidewalk mumbling
to herself, and then there is the tired teenager
turning the sign to “open” and then there
is the man holding the folded cardboard that reads
WE ALL NEED WEED there are people
whose lives i cannot fathom

through the church doors
i watch a family mourn their way
into a new life, a new way of
being, i can still remember
his voice, the way he asked questions,
the way his mouth turned down into
a frown while he listened
can we ever truly remember the sound
of those who have left us, their
breath, their laughter, how they
wept? i can still see him but i
can’t hear him anymore

what is death but the start
of a long, slow forgetting

and later back through the city
i want to shout
we are all losing each other
one day at a time, even the strangers,
even those we have never met are all
dying, our world diminishing one
by one by one so much forgetting

and later still as if none of this
is happening we trudge through
the woods carrying our chainsaws
to an old oak tree
that fell twelve years ago i remember
the storm, the sound of trees falling,
the gathering of the wind like a train through
the woods and for all these years it has
remained there making its long slow
journey into the ground how many
years until it is completely gone how many
years until someone can walk straight
through these woods and never know
this monument of a tree existed

my father teaches my son how to use
his chainsaw and i watch through the clearing
generations of me in various forms
it’s likely that none of us will be
alive for the entirety of each other’s existence
likely that one or more of us
will have to learn to live after the other two
are gone

with a loud buzzing we dis-
member the old giant, or un-remember it,
its rings grown so hard the branches throw
sparks against the humming metal, so
twisted in on itself that we must take
care or those spring-loaded years
will fly into us
one branch snaps back splits
my forehead drawing a thin bead
a ring
a branch
a spark

and later still we load the trailer
with one month’s heat and drive home
where all those years are split and we
sit in a warm basement, staring at
the glowing coals, reminded that
we are human and are well
on our way to becoming
one with everything around us

When you’re flying, when you’re in an airplane and it’s in that final descent, and it banks so steep that you’re looking down at the clouds at that crazy angle through a tiny window, and a few shuddering bumps makes someone four rows back gasp or give out a nervous laughing shriek? What other experience is like that moment, being suspended thousands of feet above the ground, the clouds disinterested in our passing?

There I find myself thinking about death—what if the plane plummets, or my heart stops, or the tiniest of clots strikes a dead end in some pulsing capillary—the quick and sudden exiting from this world, and then . . . what?

Descending through that last flat layer of clouds and then seeing the rolling expanse of a brown, December Texas is at first one of the most drab scenes I’ve ever seen. The long straight highways intersecting at right angles and the distant, placid skyscrapers and the never-ending ongoingness of it all, knowing that very little changes for mile after mile all the way to El Paso.

But it only takes a few moments for the stark beauty of it to settle in, and then I’m thinking of Toby and Tanner, the brothers in the movie Hell or High Water, and their bank-by-bank undertaking in an effort to save their mother’s home, or John Grady Cole in All the Pretty Horses and his adventure into Mexico, or Llewelyn Moss in No Country for Old Men, how he found that fortune on the plain, in the midst of all that carnage, and decided to take his shot at keeping it.

The never-ending Texas countryside might be flat but there’s also something mystical about it, something that says anything at all could happen, anything at all will happen. Especially out beyond the cities, out beyond the freeways and the macadam and the glass skyscrapers.

Where else can you see an entire day’s journey just by looking out at the distant horizon?

And what is it about growing older that’s made my imagination grumpy? Cold, rainy days used to feel mysterious or wonderfully melancholy—now they just feel annoying. The idea of the plains used to conjure up images of endless journeys or adventures—now they just feel boring.

What can I do to reanimate the imagination of my childhood?

My children remind me, from time to time, what it’s like to live in that whimsical mindset. My son eats copious amounts of cheese before he goes to bed because he read somewhere that doing so will give him fantastic dreams. My daughter comes running when the light in her bedroom flickers because it fills her with a sense of something ominous. Before our neighbors had the bamboo forest cut down, it used to be a place we would huddle in the snow, certain there were fairies on the loose.

I remember as a child coming home from the gnome forest, certain of their existence, spinning around quickly or turning on a bedroom light, expecting to see a tiny creature scuttle into the shadows or duck under the bed. Those were the days I believed I would one day walk in space or find a tunnel to another world. Those were the days I pushed all the clothes to the side and examined the back of every closet, as if it was more than just a wardrobe.

I walk out into the city rain and my shoulders automatically clench up towards my ears. I pull my head further inside my hood, stuff my hands in my pockets. I mumble something about the rain and the cold and the mist, these short December days.

But then I remember. The possibilities, the fantasy, the inexplicable all around us.

I take my hands out of my pockets. I pull my hood back and feel the drizzle. The cold wind bites at my ears. The smile of a 10-year-old kid rises on my face and I chuckle to myself.

The frost is on the glass.

The leaves have fallen from the trees.

The smoke twists up and out of the chimney.

There is wonder here.

A mountaineer at basecamp
rises with the sun and drinks
her coffee black goes through
the checklist thinks with wonder
for only the briefest moment
of what that view will be like
above the clouds above the world
seeing

But as she sets out a helicopter
lands thrashing her tent
this way and that an angry beast
the snow rising in clouds of glory
and the driver offers to fly her straight
to the summit no journey required
no aching muscles or lungs gasping
for oxygen and almost no threat
of death or injury
a safe passage that requires
nothing of her except a willingness
to take the easy way which maybe
is not nothing

and then somewhere on the road in Ohio
a man hikes west, walking the span of a
nation in remembrance of one he has lost
is it the saltwater from his eyes or that of
the Pacific he can taste as he imagines
trudging that last 50 yards of beach months
from now and collapsing into the ocean
named for peace

blisters line his feet and he cinches his belt
another notch for the 2,000 miles ahead
darkness falls quietly around him
storm clouds gather in the west and he
considers another night
in a wet sleeping bag eating
a smashed granola bar hears the crinkling
plastic of a near-empty water bottle
and the ever-present cold of loneliness

when an eighteen wheeler wheezes
to a stop beside him and the window slides
down and the driver shouts through the
gathering dark, Los Angeles? need
a ride? and the hiker stands on the shoulder
considering
warmth
comfort
ease

What do we miss when the machines
make the journeys for us, when the machines
cheat us of these muscle cramps oxygen
deprivation sleeping wet missing a meal
blisters frustration long nights aches
grimy sweat blank page even broken bones
even death yes they cheat us of death
when the machines spit out the words
or seeds of ideas or summaries of this and that
so easy so normal so painless

the machines

and the mountaineer raises her hand in thanks
but turns her back on the whirling blades
her boots sticking into the snow, her eyes
on the summit

and the man on the road sighs and shakes
his head no and shrugs his pack up once more
in the stench of truck exhaust as it
lurches away because there is no quick
road to peace no smooth
road to the healing we need
no ocean worth swimming in
if we have not made the journey
on our own two feet