Still in motion, today I had breakfast in one town, lunch in another, and tonight will have dinner here, where I've landed, yet again in the thick heat of this region. I dusted off an old fan but it didn't seem to work, at first. So I shook it soundly, and manually caressed its circular cover with the forefinger of my right hand until it suddenly sprang to life, moaning, and cooled this stuffy room where I write.
With all due respect to everyone celebrating July 4th, I can't join you. I wonder why are we still excited that we broke away from England 230 years ago? These days, aren't the English practically our only "ally" in that "war" we are fighting? (Except for Poland.) Everyone else in this world sees what we are doing in Iraq as a grab for control over oil resources. But the good old U.K. stands with us. (That tree didn't fall far from its apple.)
The other day, my ten-year-old son, Dylan, brought up the subject of global warming. "Dad, that is something that gives me nightmares. Kids like me will probably grow up and feel the effects in our lifetime. The old guys like Bush say it doesn't exist. It's going to be up to my generation to do something but it may be too late already!"
Dylan is an old soul at a tender age.
Imagine a world where we still celebrated our various national and cultural heritages, but not in nationalistic, exclusionary ways. All of our xenophobic "independence" marches would be downplayed (sorry old soldiers), so we all could explicitly celebrate our knowledge that we are one species, clinging to a rock spinning through space, governed by laws of physics we only partially understand. (My 11-year-old, Aidan, prefers the Flaming Lips version of this image, and sings it frequently, something about the "illusion of the sun going down" when it's really just the "earth spinning 'round."
A long time ago, when I was very young, I read "The Challenge of Man's Future" by Harrison Brown. I think he wrote that book in 1954, long before the first "energy crisis" here in America, where today a fancy 1955 dark-green Buick with whitewalls sat with a flag affixed to its aerial in the town near where I ate breakfast. Brown speculated that we would have to unlock the hidden stores of energy in wind, rocks, and waves in order to survive as a species.
His words were prescient.
So much of what I've written here has been extremely personal, which is not my main desire as a writer. Yet it is equally true that we need to recognize and honor our interdependence in both the personal and the social realms. That has been my plea all along. Just keep relating--don't abandon those you care about, including people you've never met.
I seldom mention this directly, but from an early, early age, I witnessed and felt the tragic awfulness of sudden losses of some of the people my family loved. My father's family, in particular, suffered a series of tragedies when I was an impressionable boy -- sudden deaths in accidents, mainly, and then from diseases that stole relatives away prematurely.
My father's own father, for whom I am named, died when my Dad was only eight. He and I both know the silence death brings. You keep talking but they never answer.
It is the silent living who truly torture me. Like a blind man, I can only hear those who speak, even if I otherwise sense your presence, using my sixth sense. Who would observe me but remain silent and why? I don't want to be only seen and heard; I need to be spoken to and held.
One of the most important poems I read as a boy was Robert Frost's Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening:
The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep, etc.
An old friend recently told me, that (like Dylan), I have always been an old soul, too. I can only hope my littlest boy navigates around the meaning of that verse better than I have, should the reasons not to prove to overwhelm all the reasons why.
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