THE THINGS YOU REMEMBER

Virginia and Dan in Paris, 1972

 The other day I came across a photo of Virginia and me in Paris. That was the second year we were married, so half a century ago. How time flies! On the one hand, some of the memories seem as clear as if they had happened yesterday. But on the other, it seems like it happened to someone else in another life.

That set me thinking about what it is we—or at least I—remember. Like, it’s never the monumental reality of being given the opportunity to live in the cultural center of the world, or even that what I recall was part and parcel of three years of my life that I handed over to the military. No, it’s the little memories. Things that happened on a day to day basis in the midst of one’s reality at the time. And I’ve realized that it’s all like that. That your life is all about what you’re doing while you’re making plans for what to do with the rest of your life.

At the particular time of this photo that I found, we were living, courtesy of the US Army, in Germany, a short distance by train from the French border and about five hours from Paris. It was, perhaps, the most bohemian time of our lives because I’d made Spec-5 (sergeant’s pay grade) by then and was doing some playing with a jazz trio on the side, so we were feeling more flush than at any time since we’d married in LA the year before. If we weren’t playing a tour —“we” being the 30^th Army Band that I was assigned to, attached to the 32^nd Army Air Defense Command under Major General C.J. Levan—our days were usually short. I mean, let’s face it, the “lifers” weren’t any more anxious than we three-year Regular Army and two-year draftees were to work a full day. So there were a lot of hours in the day to just enjoy living in Europe. And since we played tours where we were on the road during weekends and holidays, we also racked up a lot of compensatory time off. That meant we frequently had three, four or even five days off when we hung our soldier suits in the closet and lived like college kids bumming our way around Europe.

Barracks rats - Newland and Hardin (foreground)
Berg and Orcutt (rear). A little foosball after work.

For me, it was sort of like “a junior year abroad” without the benefit of the family money or university education that usually go with that institution. All I had to do in return was the job my Uncle Sam paid me to do—that, and put up with what Whitie, my dad, would have called “the usual Army chickenshit.” The rest of my time was mine to do with as I pleased.

Before Virginia arrived, I spent a month alone, living on the base. I stayed busy after work looking for an off-base apartment for us to live in, since despite being Regular Army, I wasn’t eligible for on-base housing. Those official quarters were only for guys who were already career soldiers and had “re-upped”. But living off-base would make the illusion of bohemian life all the more authentic.

For that month, I lived in a barracks, but nothing like the rough wooden barracks I’d live in as a single soldier during two of my earlier Stateside postings. This was a former German barracks (Kaserne as the Germans call it) and was a large three story stucco-sided brick and mortar building with a cadre office, storage and shops on the bottom floor and work area, sleeping quarters and spacious bathrooms on the upper floors. We rehearsed in the work area, and there were also foosball tables in there for after work. We barracks rats slept on single beds instead of bunkbeds and each was partitioned off with lockers where we kept our clothes and gear.

Kleber Kaserne - US Base at Kaiserslautern

I made friends right away with a group of other three-year RA troops—Tressler, Toy and Rice. Rice and Tressler were cultured guys, sound intellectuals and Yankees like myself. Toy was a Kentucky boy, born and bred, with excellent musical training and a passion for orchestral trumpet. Hardin, a six-foot-five, two-hundred-fifty-pound Texan who drove a Fiat 1100 that he barely fit into and put on like a shirt when he drove it, was the comic relief. He played baritone horn and was a pretty terrible musician. So you would have thought he’d be a really good soldier, but he wasn’t that either. He simply didn’t have much of a career choice, since everybody in his family, including his aunt and his mother, were, or had been, in the Army. Well, almost everybody. I once asked him if there was anybody in his family who hadn’t been in the Army.

“Yeah,” he said. “My daddy’s little brother.”

“How’d he manage that?” I asked.

“Died when he was fifteen.”

“So that’s the only one, in the whole family?”

“Well, there’s my momma’s older brother. He’s kinda the black sheep.”

“What is he, a pacifist?”

“Nope. A goddamn jarhead Marine.”

Hardin had tried to dodge the draft for a while. Wanted to sow some wild oats before he’d inevitably have to join the family business. So he went down and got lost in Juárez for a time. But he couldn’t stay out of trouble. Got into a fight in a Mexican cantina—something about cards and a señorita, he claimed—and ended up in jail.

His daddy, who was a command sergeant major, had contacts in Mexico and Hardin, after a few days in the clink, availed himself of a phone call to ask his ol’ man to come bail him out. The next day a couple of American MPs showed up. When they stood in front of his cell looking at him like he was a cockroach, he said, “Hey guys, what’s up? Y’all here to take me home?” one of them said, “Not so fast Hardin. Your ol’ man gave us specific orders. We take your ass outa here and accompany you to the recruiting office in El Paso, where you will sign up. Otherwise, pal, Top says you can stay here and rot for all he cares.” And that was how he’d enlisted.

Tressler and Rice both despised Hardin, and Toy was simply embarrassed by him, but I usually found him a comedic addition to any social gathering. He was always saying things like, “Man, I think you could fuck up a steel ball with a rubber hammer.” Or, “Y’know, son, I think the best part o’ you run down yer daddy’s leg.”

Luxembourg

I recall one occasion when I was picked as dance drummer with a four- piece combo to play at an elegant garden party thrown for the American consul on the grounds of a mansion in Luxembourg. Hardin went along as our driver in an Army-issue, olive drab station wagon.

The Luxembourg government treated us like VIPs and assigned a minor ministry official to accompany us to at a very nice restaurant when the garden party was over. I’d gotten my Spec-5 promotion by then so was the ranking member of the group. My colleagues and I made polite conversation with the gentleman accompanying us while we had drinks before our food arrived. Hardin, who was a notorious beer-drinker, was out of sorts because, as our official driver, he couldn’t drink—I made sure he didn’t—and was having a Coke.

Bored with the conversation and anxious for the food to arrive, during a lull he said, “Scuse me, can I ask you a stupid question, sir?”

The other four of us cringed at the thought.

But the polite official smiled, turned his full attention to Hardin, and said, “But of course, please do!”

“I know Luxembourg’s not very big, but just how big is it?”

“You mean surface area?” the official asked and Hardin nodded. “It’s about, but not quite, one thousand square miles.”

Hardin stared at him for a beat as if he thought maybe the guy was pulling his leg. Then he whistled, shook his head and said, “God-damn! You know you could fit six o’ this little bitty country in my county back in Texas?”

Lunch was pretty quick and quiet after that.

The things I remember best about barracks life there, however, were the little get-togethers after work with my buddies. There were only two private rooms in the living quarters. All of the ranking NCOs but one had on or off-base quarters of their own to go home to after work, so it was just us barracks rats who stayed behind. The one room was occupied by a lifer buck sergeant known to us as Sky King, who was always polite and friendly but never mixed with the rest of us and never left the base except on assignment throughout his entire tour. The closest he came to knowing anything about Germany was the minibar type fridge in his room that he kept chock full of a cheap locally brewed beer called BBK.  

My friend Rice was my same rank but I was a newbie and he was “short” (about to be discharged). He had a year’s time in grade on the rest of us so, other than Sky, he was the ranking NCO at night and had dibs on the room. That was where he, Tressler, Toy and I would retire to after work to play poker or Yahtzee. As the only Midwesterner, I also introduced euchre into our game mix and they all became immediate fans.

Typical Gasthaus

But it wasn’t really about the cards. It was about getting together and chewing the fat, sharing common interests, usually while enjoying good Chianti that we could buy cheap through the PX on post.

The thing I remember best, though, was the little supper adventure the four of us would have when we got hungry. We’d been warned to stay out of the woods behind the base. There was a Gypsy camp in the middle of it and it was considered an insecure place for soldiers. However, on the other side of the woods and across a two-lane highway, there was a wonderful gasthaus that made the alleged risk worth it. The Army never bothered to mend the hole in the fence that we made to slip through, so we had our own back door off the base.

The food there was inexpensive and absolutely delicious German fare. It was a homey atmosphere with a narrow dining room occupied by one very long and broad table and a few other smaller ones. It was attended by its owners and when you sat at the table, the lady of the house, in typical dirndl, apron and head-kerchief, would set out heavy ceramic plates and sturdy stainless silverware that she retrieved from a large hand-carved china cabinet and sideboard that had probably been in the family for generations. Typically, she would offer us schnapps and shot glasses while we waited for the meal and then bring us beer with the food. My mouth still waters at the thought of her wonderful Jägerschnitzel with mushroom gravy, or her sausage and homemade kraut with hand-mashed potatoes. Whatever the dish, it was preceded by hot soup, usually pea, and was served with homemade sourdough bread and butter.

As for the Roma people in the woods, with their luxurious tents and colorful wagons, they didn’t bother us and we didn’t bother them. They got so used to seeing us that they’d wave and bid us guten Abend as we passed through.

Virginia in the window of our attic flat
in Kaiserslautern

Even after Virginia arrived and we moved off-base, I, and sometimes both of us, would still get together some evenings with my buddies, but in downtown Kaiserslautern, at a place called Spinnrädl (Spinning Wheel). To Americans like us, it seemed utterly amazing that we were guzzling beer and schnapps in a tavern where workers had been doing exactly the same thing daily for well over two hundred years—or perhaps longer since that was just how far back the first historical reference to that place dated.

Anyway, about the picture…

The Spinnrädl, a centuries-old tavern 

That picture was from our first trip to Paris. We had been doing some local sight-seeing in Germany, taking daytrips to Heidelberg, Frankfurt and Worms, hiking to nearby Frankenstein Castle, taking the bus or train on a short trip to Landstuhl and so on. We had ventured in to France to see the incredible Metz Cathedral, but that was still close to home. Voracious readers that we were, Paris was the city that both of us were dying to see. That day when my then brand new Cannon Quickload camera snapped the portrait of us, I remember in vivid detail.

We had taken the night train from Kaiserslautern, and it was in the grey light of early morning that we were seeing Paris for the first time. Our first real glimpse of it was the dauntingly huge Gare de l'Est train station, with its endlessly sprawling switchyard. For Virginia, born and bred in Buenos Aires, it was exciting because it was Paris. But her own city was long known as “the Paris of South America” so the sheer size of the urban architecture wasn’t intimidating for her. For my part, however, I can still recall being nervous as a dog in a canoe as the train made its bumpy way over the numerous switches that lined it up with its assigned track in the station, and the butterflies that suddenly took flight in the pit of my belly as the train pulled into the impossibly high-ceilinged station proper, from which our Parisian adventure would begin.

Garre de l'Est, Paris

I had started traveling at eighteen. I had been to South America twice and had traveled from coast to coast with the Army. But the small-town boy in me shrank at the sight of the City of Light. This was Paris, a city that was previously a mere fantasy, a place I knew only through the descriptions of the likes of Hemingway, Joyce, Orwell, Henry Miller and Georges Simenon. I was glad to have Virginia there to snap me out of my daze and get me moving because the mere emotion of arriving had me so mesmerized that I could barely make my way out of the station.

I have vague sketches of Paris in my brain, the rainy Paris of impressionist paintings. There are clear snapshots of certain street corners and neighborhoods. I see the Arc de Triomphe not as a clear-cut memory but as a picture. And I’m not at all sure that it is a memory, but perhaps actually a photograph I’ve seen of it. The image of the Sacré-Coeur Basilica is, instead, authentic, since I found its interior, at least on that rainy day, somewhat dark and forbidding, and that’s exactly how I recall it. I remember little of the interior of Notre Dame, but I clearly recall standing on an outer balcony marveling at the gargoyles along the sides of the building and the view of the Seine from up there.

The Louvre, for its part, was nothing short of overwhelming. I can see a few of the great works housed there in my mind’s eye, and the art students who gathered with their sketchbooks for hours on end to try and capture the essence of one work, one detail or another, with the goal of learning by replication. But what I remember best about that unique treasure trove of great art was how neither Virginia nor I could sleep that night because our brains were overloading with the colors, textures and images that we had taken in as we tried to see as much as we could in a single day. On subsequent visits we learned to concentrate on a single area since trying to take in the Louvre in its entirety is a little like trying to drink Lake Superior in one sitting. I could have gone every day for years and only scratched the surface.

But what comes most clearly to mind when I remember that, and subsequent trips to Paris, aren’t the landmarks that tourists will ask one another about: Did you see this or did you do that. Instead, I have a sharp memory of the down-at-heel hotel we stayed in on the Left Bank. I remember the room with its creaky wooden floor, tall sooty windows overlooking a narrow, crowded street, a four-poster bed with a dusty, fringed canopy, a lavatory and mirror close by, as well as a bidet, but the bathroom—a rudimentary shower and a toilet with a roll of toilet paper that resembled nothing as much as birch bark—down the hall and shared by a few other occupants. And the thing is, I don’t remember it as horrific, which it was by almost any standard, but as romantic—as a room Miller might well have stayed in during his lean early Parisian days, or as that of almost any Lost Generation artist before they achieved fame.

I also have a clear memory of the Jardin du Luxembourg between the Latin Quarter and Saint-Germain, which is where the “Jurassic” selfie in question was shot. I can visualize the beauty and color of those verdant gardens on the morning when we went to walk there. I remember thinking about how Hemingway would take his infant son John, whom he called “Mr. Bumby”, in his baby buggy for a stroll in the park and, along the way, would surreptitiously catch pigeons, wring their necks and slip them under the covers with the baby so that he and his wife Hadley could broil them later like Cornish hens.

Sidewalk café in Saint Germain

I recall a lovely sidewalk café in Saint-Germain where we breakfasted on crusty croissants with big bowls of coffee and milk, which, to our surprise, also included a melted bar of chocolate. And leaving that same café, I remember colliding with a pretty young French woman in stylish clothing who smiled and said, sincerely, “Je suis désolée.” It was the first time I’d heard the phrase, which Virginia translated for me, and I thought it must be the most wonderful way in any language to say, “I’m sorry.”

My memories are similar about other places we visited during the fourteen months that we lived in Europe. They aren’t “big picture” memories, but tiny moments.

Like when our band was one of several that marched in a parade through a small town during the Fasching (Carnival) holiday and every time there was a pause along the route, florid-faced ladies from the town would mix into our ranks and serve us shots of cognac or schnapps.

We played at a beer tent afterward, where the organizers showed their appreciation by plying us with free locally brewed beer or mugs of cold white Moselle wine. People all danced, changing partners frequently, even when we played marches (Alte Kameraden—Old Comrades—was always a favorite, but they loved the Sousa marches as well), and one chunky man in his sixties even cheered us on as he climbed up onto one of the tables, bumping and grinding to the music as he stripped down to his undershorts. Nobody got upset or tried to stop him. Everyone was having too good a time, while outside the tent, wherever there was a semi-secluded spot, couples were making out or making love as others walked discreetly on by. The beer tents of Fasching and Oktoberfest quickly dispelled any learned cliché I ever entertained about the Germans being a cold and stodgy race.

The bohemian life - picnicking in Bad Homberg

I have many memories of certain places in Germany that I visited numerous times—Heidelberg, for instance—but there were many daytrips that now afford me a single, simple memory. One of these was a visit with an Army buddy and his wife, who were also our neighbors, to a town called Bad Homburg, located near Frankfurt.

I recall it because, despite the fact that its history dates back to the eighth century, there were no remarkable tourist attractions there. Long a residential haven for the upper classes, it was best known in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries for its thermal waters and the spa that gave it its modern era designation (Bad, meaning bath). My memory, however, is of a lovely, sunny afternoon, a relaxing walk with our friends and a little picnic of some good Gouda cheese and French bread that we had brought along and a bottle of wine that we bought there, and that we enjoyed in the local park. It was all very impromptu and unplanned, which was what made it so special. 

Another memory of an impromptu picnic is from Genoa. We were staying at a threadbare little pensione that was high enough that the picturesque view from the balcony was of the surrounding hills and the orange-tiled roofs of the many old buildings. I remember little about the room except that it had a tiny balcony with a wrought-iron rail on which we hung our perennial jeans to air out at night. We were traveling light so didn’t have a lot of clothes—pretty much what was on our backs and a single change of underwear and sock. Everything we could, we rinsed out and let it drip dry while we slept. But jeans take a notoriously long time to dry, so they didn’t get washed. By this far into the trip, they were, thus, getting pretty gamey. A nightly airing helped a lot.

The other thing that I remember about the “accommodations”—clearly a figure of speech here—was that bathing was done on another floor in a bathroom with a large claw-foot tub. But the first time we decided to have a bath, we found that the faucets had no handles to turn them on. I went down to the concierge to ask him what the story was. Using pantomime and a few words of Spanish since I knew no Italian, I eventually managed to get him to understand that I wanted to know where the hell the faucet handles were for the tub.

Old Town section in Genoa

As if a lightbulb had switched on, he suddenly smiled, reached under the counter and handed me two handles, one for hot and one for cold. I was given to understand that it was how he made sure no one left the water running and how much time any occupant spent in the bath. So much for a leisurely scrub!

The picnic came after a morning of exploring the strange and ancient city from which Columbus had first set sail for the New World. Over the centuries Genoa had expanded up the steep and varied terrain that surrounds the port. So what I mostly recall is narrow, tortuous streets that twisted and turned in keeping with the lay of the land. Some leading down into the bowels of the city where shopkeepers’ lights are lit the whole day through and where sunlight seldom makes a real dent.

It was down in there that, not having eaten breakfast and feeling quite hungry by forenoon, we stopped at a rosticceria, where we bought a small, beautifully roasted chicken. Further along, we came to a bakery, where we bought a large, crusty shepherd’s loaf. Making our way upward, we came across a wine store where I bought a bottle of deep red spumante wine. Looking for a lovely place to have our lunch, we ended up climbing for nearly an hour into the hills surrounding the city, and there, found a beautiful park overlooking the many layers of the Genoa landscape as it tumbled toward the glistening harbor. There, near some ancient and crumbling stone walls, we flopped down cross-legged in the grass and, eating like savages with our hands, devoured the crispy chicken and delicious bread, and washed it down with the sweet, red spumante.  Seldom have I found a meal more delectable.

In Monaco I remember little or nothing about the Grimaldi’s palace, or the many yachts in their slips. But I vividly recall the pleasure of having nothing to do but sit on a castle rampart above the sea feeding the gulls that would pluck pieces of French bread right out of my fingers.  

Feeding the gulls in Monaco

In Milan, I remember the spectacular sight of Il Duomo Cathedral by night. But I have a clearer memory of wandering with Virginia, quite hungry, and quite by accident, into a wonderful neighborhood pizzeria where we stuffed ourselves on thick-crusted pizza alla Margherita with black olives.

 My recollection of a visit Virginia and I paid to the famed city of Cannes has nothing to do with either the beaches and marinas of the Riviera or the yearly film festival that the place is known for. Instead, I remember a pleasant park flooded with golden light at sunset as we sat on a bench there and watched the people go by.

I also remember our room in an old hotel with tall narrow windows that looked onto that park. Each window had a set of vintage wooden jalousie shutters. I was looking out the window as night fell when I heard a knock at the door. When I opened it, I was facing a tall, expressionless, hatchet-faced man who reminded me of no one as much as Lurch, the Addams Family’s butler. Without a word, he nodded toward the windows. I stepped aside to let him in. He strode across the room, opened each of the two windows, and, in turn, pulled closed the shutters with a bang and latched them. Then, just as silently and expressionlessly as before, he crossed the room and left without a single word. And the following night, at precisely the same hour, he did exactly the same thing. Clearly, having the shutters open or closed wasn’t a question of the occupant’s free will.

Another memory is of getting off the train, on a whim, at the Golfe-Juan-Vallauris station just three miles from Cannes and close to Antibes. There had been no plan to do that. It was all about Virginia remembering that she’d read something somewhere about the town of Vallauris and couldn’t recall what it was. It was nearly noon when the train left us and we started hiking up a winding road from the coast to the town proper. I can still feel the warm sun on my back and shoulders as we climbed.

That turned out to be a pleasant afternoon spent visiting the same streets Pablo Picasso had walked for the seven years that he lived there. Although today Vallauris has grown to the place that it is essentially a suburb of Antibes, back then it was a town of twelve thousand, barely larger than it had been seventeen years before when Picasso had last lived there. An artist of incredible scope and energy, Picasso didn’t move to Vallauris until he was sixty-seven. But his vitality and artistic longevity were such that his life and work would span nearly another quarter-century.

Picasso in his Vallauris studio

That afternoon, on that unexpected side-trip, we learned that the French town was best known for its pottery, and that medium was what would pique Picasso’s curiosity. He enthusiastically embraced the local potters, became their disciple and quickly learned from them the best ways to turn earth into art. Once he had made clay a medium of his own, he became obsessed with pushing beyond the known limits of ceramics into new frontiers. Vallauris became, in a very real sense, a place where the already celebrated painter and cubism pioneer re-invented himself as an artist.

Vallauris

His closest collaborators in those days were Suzanne and Georges Ramie of the Madoura ceramics shop. With them, Picasso created art objects that are among some of his most sought-after—plates, dishes, jugs and vases. Ever the painter, although his interest in earthenware itself was keen and inventive, his most powerful focus was on the firing process and everything that went with it. He worked with enamels, glazes and metal oxides in ways that they had never been used before to create stunningly decorated fire-clay ceramics. But he also created a new ceramic medium called white paste, which was decorated in relief and required no glaze.

It was also in Vallauris where the artist gave rein to yet another new passion: linocuts, the art of engraving linoleum block as a print-making medium for poster art. It was while in Vallauris that he would revolutionize this art form as well by introducing innovative designs and more vibrant colors than had ever been used before. Prolific as always, the combined ceramic and linocut works that Picasso produced there number into the thousands.

War and Peace

I recall being curious about a unique statue that stands in the main square of the town. That too turned out to belong to Picasso, perhaps one of his strangest and most controversial works: Man with Sheep. It was the artist’s first sculpture. He created it in 1943 and 1944, while living in Nazi-occupied Paris. He gave it to the town of Vallauris in 1949, in gratitude for the warmth shown to him during his first year living there. We later visited a chapel which is dominated by another Picasso work, entitled War and Peace, an abstract diptych mural that occupies the arched ceiling and both walls of the tunnel-like room—another gift from the artist to the town he clearly loved.

A momentary decision to get off the train, a whim to see what we could see, and an afternoon in Vallauris became another of those memories that last a lifetime.

These are the memories that we have, the ones that are less about the big picture and more about living every day, the ones born of surprises.  Ralph Waldo Emerson said it best: “Life is a journey, not a destination.” It’s all about the ride, not about “getting there”.

 

THE FUTURE’S NOT OURS TO SEE

 

As I get older, I spend a lot of time thinking about things that I didn’t have time to think about when I was younger. Either that, or maybe they just didn’t seem very important back then. It’s funny though, at this stage of the game, it seems as if what people refer to as “the little things” take on much more importance than before, when I was still nursing a set of “priorities for the future”.

I guess the key word here is “future”. When you first realize you’re getting older, that word haunts you for a while. If you’re fifty-ish, say, you might lie awake some nights thinking things like, “I’ve got more life behind me than ahead of me,” or, “I wanted to be so much closer to my goals than I am right now,” or, “What’s wrong with me? Why can’t I advance? I’m so worried it’s not going to happen for me.” Although you may think you’re getting old at that age, believe me, those are the thoughts and concerns of a still young person.

The secret you learn as you advance ten or twenty years more from that stage—or, at least, the secret I’ve learned…sort of—is that that kind of thoughts tend to be a monumental waste of time, a futile concern. Wondering “what’s going to become of me” is a fool’s errand. What and where you are is all you’ve got or all you’ll ever have. The only way to know the future is to live it. It’s the only way to know “what life will bring”. You can’t even be sure of the future five minutes from now.

The first time I gave any thought to the futility of “futurizing” was actually when I was still quite young. It was back in the late seventies when I first read anything by famed self-help author Wayne Dyer. I suppose his admonitions about not wasting your present worrying about the future—which he hammered home in his first best-selling hit, Your Erroneous Zones, as well as in every subsequent book that he wrote—struck home with me because I was living in a very dangerous environment at the time and was really at risk of having my life cut short. I was an opposition journalist under a harsh dictatorial regime and those marked as “enemies of the State” weren’t apt to find a life-insurance firm that would risk covering them. But once democracy returned and the danger was over with, my attention span for Dr. Dyer’s sage advice tended to dwindle.

It’s hard to think that way when you’re younger. Sure, life would be a lot more fun and more stress-free if we did. But when you’re young, it’s impossible not to think about the future. Chances are, you’ll have one—a future I mean—even if it isn’t guaranteed. So if you didn’t make plans, if you subscribed to a radically existentialist view and only saw the here and now as “real”, it would be hard to get anything done. If the future is non-existent, if the here and now are all there is—and again, they are—why would anyone bother going to college, learning a skill, studying for a career or trying to be upwardly mobile in their chosen field, or in whatever field they happen to stumble into?

I mean, of course, there’s nothing wrong with having ambitious goals and going after them the best way you know how while you’re young. Anybody who isn’t goal-driven when they’re young can’t expect to be “successful” when they’re older. But that’s all relative too, because there’s nothing broader or more subjective than the meaning of “success” for each individual. And even if young people are focused on career goals, they’ll lead a lot happier life if they also manage not to lose track of the present, not to let their concerns ruin today at the service of some possible but also clearly non-existent future.

Success can, and usually does, mean money, because that’s the society we’re brought up in. If you don’t have money—at least enough to get along, whatever that might mean to each of us—in Western society it’s really hard to have a life, or at least a life that most of us would want. But there are those—specifically talented and/or enlightened folks, as I see them—for whom “success” is all about accomplishment totally disconnected from money. It’s all about excelling at something, at being, in the broadest sense of the word, an “artist” at whatever it is they do. Oddly enough, these are sometimes the very people who, now and then, end up making a lot of money at whatever their craft or skill might be, without ever focusing on wealth as the prime goal.     

There are, however, some people—lucky people to my mind—for whom the goal is no goal at all. To just live life to the fullest and be happy at whatever they happen to be doing at any point in time. And if they aren’t happy doing whatever “it” happens to be, simply quitting and trying something else for a while. These are the people who often end up being jacks (or jills) of all trades, or vagabond world travelers who make their living however they can, because the goal for them is to keep moving and to see everything they possibly can in life before their shadows set them free.

It wasn’t until I met a few people like that, people just more concerned with instant happiness and living the present than with fretting about the future, that I finally understood that common Christian teaching that we heard again and again growing up but that wasn’t the way any so-called Christians I came across actually lived their lives. It was that New Testament verse about “Why trouble yourself about clothing? Look at the lilies of the field, how they grow. They toil not, neither do they spin.” It was like, hey, quit sweating stuff that, in the long-run, in the big picture, is usually little more than a fleeting chimera. Things that might happen, sure. But things that are no more a sure thing than Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny. Don’t miss out on what you’ve got, by obsessing about what you’re out to get!

I’ve known a few people like that. Very few. People who were focused on the now, not on the what’s to come. And I now think maybe they were always ahead of the curve, when, back in the day, we just thought of them as bohemians, sort of grasshoppers observing the anthill with a sardonic grin, wondering why we ants were striving so. At the time, we figured the last laugh would be ours when winter came. What we were too busy to notice was that winter comes to everyone, at one point or another, and the grasshopper, at least, would have the good times to remember when it did.

My brother Dennis was a guy who loved a good time, a real partier. He loved bars and rock and roll. He loved road trips and golf tours. He enjoyed hanging with his buds. Rock recitals were like catnip for him, and he even volunteered as security for a few of them just to be closer to the stage and to the band.

But he was also a meticulous man, a fretter and a worrier, a perfectionist, and he was seriously driven for most of his life. He worked in retail from age nineteen, climbed to the top of middle management in the region-wide family-owned record store chain he worked for over the course of a couple of decades. He was fully expecting to land a VP post shortly. But suddenly, the owners decided to take the firm public and the new majority shareholders filled upper management with their own people, leaving him stuck in the middle with little chance of any greater promotion.

He could have taken it as the luck of the draw. He even could have seen it as an opportunity. He’d been happy in his several-state district manager’s post, living in Saint Louis, where he was based. He’d made it his city, knew every cool place there was to know, and could easily have stayed on in his post while taking his time to shop for a more upwardly mobile job.

But that wasn’t him. He was devastated. He felt betrayed and hurt, and decided to quit. His marriage of many years also shortly went south, and that only added to his feeling of failure. Now middle-aged, still young, but not really young, he had to start over. He moved back to Ohio, got into a new retail field and started climbing the ladder. But when he graduated from sales to store management, the cruel reality about his likely future seemed to overwhelm him. Who was he kidding? Making a career for yourself at forty-something wasn’t at all like making it at twenty-something.

I tried to convince him that he could do anything he wanted to do. He was smart, educated, effective as a manager. He had a great personality, was handsome and looked great in a suit. Especially his suits, which were never “just suits”. If climbing to the upper rungs of the corporate retail ladder was what he wanted to do, he could surely do it, like he had the last time. But I didn’t figure that was what he wanted to do at all. “You know what you really want,” I said, “is your own business.”

“Yeah, big brother, but I just never had the cojones for that,” he said. “Not that I wouldn’t like to try, but I’m just too scared of everything that could go wrong. I’m great at managing other people’s businesses, but am I ready for one of my own?” He shook his head.

Dennis, starting over at 40-something

But he tried to do what he thought was the next best thing. Bought into a friend’s business. To him, it seemed like a good idea at the time. His high school friend had inherited a family business after his parents retired, but had quickly found that it was one thing to work for his dad and mom, and another to actually run the business himself. The work involved an area of interior design and installation which he knew a great deal about. That’s what he had been in charge of while his parents ran the business. But his mother and father were the ones who had founded and built the business, and the ones who had kept it afloat. Dennis’s friend, for his part, had no management training or experience and, worse still, no real head for business. He ran the business a little like a glorified lemonade stand, grabbing whatever money he needed out of the drawer with little thought as to how he would cover suppliers, utilities, rent, taxes, equipment, and all the other factors that go into keeping a business up and running.

In short, the guy didn’t seem to understand that he was the problem, not the business. He thought maybe it was location that was killing him, so long before he ever brought Dennis in, he had already moved the business from our home town, where his family’s store had been a local icon for decades, to a much bigger and more affluent town forty miles north, where nobody knew him from Adam.   

What my brother was supposed to bring to the mix was his business acumen. Well, that…and his money. Dennis thought maybe this was the challenge he’d been looking for. His friend knew the business and he knew management. Together, they’d have it up and running again in no time. That’s what my brother thought.

What actually happened was that Dennis’s investment in the company ended up being used to fill huge gaps that this friend had been carrying for some time. It didn’t make a dent in terms of improving and expanding operations. So when they decided to do that, his friend’s credit status was in such bad shape that they had to again depend on Dennis’s good name and credit rating to take out a business loan.

In the meantime, his friend kept right on treating the firm as if it were his alone, writing himself checks there was no money for, failing to pay his half of the company debts and further driving the concern toward bankruptcy. After a couple of years, the partnership was dissolved and the friend went on hanging on by his fingernails, leaving Dennis stuck with the task of returning the money borrowed to the bank. It was either that or sacrifice his own credit rating for his friend’s business failure.

In the midst of all this, Dennis was keeping watch over our mother and father. Whitie, our dad, was dying of lung cancer. Dennis was there constantly for our mother, Reba Mae. Whitie died after a four-year battle with his disease. Reba Mae died six months later.

Dennis needed a change. He needed to figure things out. Everything he’d worked and hoped for had vanished like a mirage. He was out of goals and stuck in an on-again-off-again relationship with an unstable woman he probably never should have gotten involved with in the first place. “Her ex is a real nut job,” Dennis told me. “He’s still around. Surfaces now and then. I changed my phone number. I was getting threats.” Then he said, “She says the guy claims she’s the one who drove him crazy. She was crying once and asked if I thought that was true. Did she drive him crazy? I comforted her and said, no, of course it wasn’t her fault. But, you know, now I’m not so sure any more. Maybe he was right.”

He had decided to sell his house in Ohio and move to our parents’ now vacant winter condo in Florida. Once when I was back from my home in Patagonia, he and I were out for a steak and a few drinks at a place we knew in Ocala. Apropos of nothing, he said, “If you could have a do-over, what would you do different?”

I thought about it and said, “Not a lot.” But then I thought about it again and said. “No, let me take that back. True, I’d have done a lot of the things I did, but I’d have done more and I’d have done it sooner. I wouldn’t have stayed in journalism past my prime. I’d have gotten out while I still had a reputation and used that to launch my career as a writer. I never would have quit playing music. I’d have kept on being a drummer in some obscure blues band at night while writing during the day. I’d have better learned how to promote myself and how to make the mid-list as a writer while I was still young. And I probably would have found a way to live part of the year here and part of it in South America.”

Clowning around...but wishing that mic was real

He listened, nodded, drank a shot of Jack he’d ordered and washed it down with some draft. “Sounds like you’ve given it some thought,” he said.

“Not much,” I said. “Just every other day or so.”

There was a pause. Then I said, “How ‘bout you? What would you have done differently?”

He sighed. “I don’t know. I mean, like everything?”

“What would you have wanted to do?” I asked.

His answer was immediate. “Be a front man with a rock and roll band.”

I was surprised. But I shouldn’t have been. Music had always been a huge part of his life. In fact, it was what first attracted him to the record store chain he began working for as a teen. Like writers I knew of whose day job was at a bookstore.  And it was very likely what kept him working for that company for twenty years. It wasn’t his love of retail, as I’d always thought, but his love of music.

In my own case, I’d always loved playing music and writing. But the daily grind, the striving for upward mobility, the struggle to make a good living seems to get in the way when you’re reaching for dreams. I got into journalism to better my writing skills but let the newsroom seduce and then obsess me. Soon, it was more like a bad marriage than a job. Writing stories and books became “a goal for the future”, and playing music would be sorely missed, but who had the time?

Suddenly, I realized that my brother and I had even more in common than either of us had ever realized. We had let “the future” obscure and subjugate the present. It took a long time to realize that this “future” we’d been busy reaching for was never tangible. And in the meantime, the present had been slipping through our fingers.

Dennis died suddenly at fifty-one. But in the two years between our parents’ death and his own, I think he was taking a stab at living in the present. He was still haunted by the bad relationship that he couldn’t seem to let go of, but beyond that, he appeared to have learned to live life as it came.

He was done with business. He drove a school bus down in Marion County, Florida, and in between time, he worked with a skilled ex-con putting up chain-link fencing, or on his own doing landscaping maintenance on the golf course that formed the center of the condo complex where he lived. He also found that a lot of folks there were looking for someone with good taste and skilled hands to help them revamp and repaint their condos, so he started a little one-man business doing that sort of thing as well, and apparently garnered a lot of satisfied customers. He was well-liked and was the new blood on his condo board. He golfed, hung out with friends, partied and quickly became beloved by all of his fellow bus drivers, who were devastated by his untimely death.

Good times with friends in Florida

Dennis’s death haunted me for years. It still does. So much so that it seems like it only happened yesterday, when, in fact, last December marked the seventeenth anniversary of his passing. When he died, several of his bus driver friends came over to his condo where my sister Darla and I were going through his stuff and putting his affairs in order. They asked if they could be of help and told us that they had found homes for our brother’s two pet rabbits and his two birds.

I remained at Dennis’s desk, going through papers and his computer while Darla was off in another part of the apartment with his friends. When I joined them, she said, “You need to hear this.”

“Hear what?” I asked.

Leaning close, out of earshot of the others, she said, “It’s like this urban legend. It made me cry.” Then to a young woman who looked to be grieving more than anyone else, she said, “Would you mind telling my brother what you told me?”

Tears filled the woman’s eyes and she gazed into mine and said, “God, you look so much like him.”

“Yes,” I said, trying to touch a more jovial chord, “but like the extra-extra-large version.”  The others laughed. She didn’t. She seemed to be seeing something the rest of us didn’t.

She said. “Dennis was always helping the rest of us out. He was so nice, and so tidy! He used to carry this bottle of Windex around. He’d wipe down every single window on his bus before he started work in the morning. And sometimes I’d be pulling out while he was finishing up. He would step out and put up his hand for me to stop. He’d jump up on my bumper, spray Windex on my windshield, and wipe it spotless. Then he’d grin at me, wink, give me a thumbs up, and hop down.”

She sniffed. It was like she was seeing him as she told the story. She wiped her eyes on the back of her hand and went on. “Sometimes when we finished for the day, I was in a hurry to get out of there and go pick up my kids. If Dennis saw me, he’d holler, ‘Don’t worry about your windows, I’ll get ‘em,’ because I’d always forget a bunch of the windows open. I’d thank him, he’d say, ‘Not a problem,’ and he’d hop up on my bus and close all the windows for me.”

Again she paused. A couple of tears ran down her face. Then she cleared her throat and went on. “So anyway, we’ve got these security cameras on our buses. They film one day and the next day they record over what was on them twenty-four hours before. We’re supposed to have a look at them at the beginning or end of every day just to make sure there’s nothing going on we should know about and report. Usually, what you’ll see from the day before is sort of a mess.  I mean, you know, kids getting on and getting off, laughing, shoving each other and fooling around, the usual stuff.  

“So the other morning, I get on my bus and look at the video playback. It’s weird. There’s nothing happening. Just the empty bus and no kids. But this time what I see is a guy get on the bus with his cap pulled low over his eyes. And he goes real quick down the aisle to the back of the bus and, from there, starts slamming shut the windows I’d forgotten open the evening before. Then he comes up to the camera lens, looks right into it, grins and gives me a little wave. It’s your brother. Then he’s off the bus and gone, and the picture goes blank.”

She gets choked up and we all wait for the punchline as she regains her composure. “Thing is,” she says, “I now know that by the time that was recorded, Dennis was dead already, here in his apartment!” 

I’ve always been what I like to call “a hopeful agnostic.” I’m not at all sure I believe in any of this. But I’d like to. I’d like to think the story Dennis’s friend told me was not a figment of her imagination. I’d like to think there’s no logical explanation for it, that maybe he just still got a kick out of partying and horseplay, that he still had that ornery prankster’s spontaneous sense of humor that I’d always loved about him. Mostly, I just want to believe he was happy at heart. Happy to have been here and just as happy to move on.