What Would Thoreau Say?

As an old jock I have a different calendar than the rest of the world.  Mine is predicated on what sports are being played at what time. Fall is nice with college football... I like summer when the pennant races heat up... But nothing beats right now when Major League Baseball is in full swing and the NCAA baseball and softball regionals and championships are upon us.  MLB for me is simply painful.  The Cubs have the worst record in baseball, again.  Painful.  But with the Major League TV package (see past blog about watching Derek Jeter) I get to watch other games and that's fun.  TV is full of games too.  And with the internet package I can even watch the games with the other Team's announcing crew so I don't have to listen to the Cubs broadcaster, Len Kasper, who talks more about rock music and the other games going on than ours.  (I'm about to begin a one person petition campaign to get that guy farmed out to the Boise Hawks he makes me so angry.) But if I&

Some years ago I was on an airplane coming back from Barcelona where my girlfriend at the time and I had spent about ten days in the driving rain.  She had a meeting so I was going to have lots of time to explore a beautiful city (especially the artist I had always been fascinated with, Gaudi') and Citicorp was going to pay for everything... then the monsoons came and it rained literally the entire time we were there.  Gaudi' and I got really, really wet. But anyway, on that plane I was reading and finishing the best book I ever read, David McCullough's  biography of John Adams.  McCullough has the ability to write history as a novel and the entire book had me riveted.  I remember being quite sad it was ending. The fact that I loved this book was strange, really, since Adams became quite the enemy of my hero Thomas Jefferson.  Yet what I loved about the book was how McCullough so beautifully explained the power of the early American world and the men and women that made

I've decided there are two kinds of intelligence (probably way more, but I'm not intelligent enough to know more):  book intelligence and street intelligence.  I was one of those guys that had street intelligence.  And my street intelligence was so intelligent I hung out with all the book intelligent kids so everyone thought I was book intelligent too. You following me? I did the same thing in sports.   Two of my best friends in high school were captains of the football team.  And  my girlfriend was captain of the cheerleaders.  So I was always seen, years later, as one of the football stars at Ossining High School.. Which means I was street intelligent in football too, cause I sucked at football.  Not so-so;  not pretty good;   sucked.  Twenty four karat sucked. Now basketball and baseball?  I could hold my own there.  But football? Arm-grabber extraordinaire... stay as far away from getting my ass kicked as I could, which meant when the play went right, I went left le

"Your first task is to find the place where your soul is at home" Marsalis Ficino-15th century philosopher (I know you have all his albums)  You're tired, I'm sure, of hearing me write about my home, The Hermitage (TH).  It's hard to explain why it's so important to me, but one way to think about it is I've never felt so attached to a building or community as I have to this small former slave cottage in the historic district of one of Virginia's oldest little towns. I've always needed my places to be me.  I once said TH was decorated in 'early American Aschermann.' What I meant by that was each room was full of my stuff, collected over the ages, meaning 65 years. It has always been important to me to be comfortable in my surroundings. I used to take as much time decorating my office as any apartment I ever had.  Somehow I worked better when I was somewhere that made me comfortable and happy. As you enter you get lots of history

On my refrigerator at The Hermitage I have a million magnets.  I know, weird a 65 year old guy has refrigerator magnets but I do. I enjoy collecting them telling me where I've been and what I've done. Most of the magnets are on the top half of the refrigerator so you can actually read them.  There are a bunch of St. Francis; Jefferson; Emerson; places I've been to... nice collage of my whereabouts and interests.  (I've often thought Dave Barry or someone like him could write a fun book called "You Can Tell a Lot About a Man by His Refrigerator Magnets.") Anyway there are also a bunch of them on the bottom of the refrigerator, at what I call Max Level.  Max is my almost two year old grandson, one of the two smartest and best looking children on the planet.  Max also likes my magnets.  He moves them around, throws them across the room, often places them in the microwave, which I discover before I put my soup in there, most of the time. And when Max and the

PART I Anyone who knows me knows I have this bromance with Thomas Jefferson.  I can't explain it really, and lord knows I've had my breakups with him.  Even sworn off him a time or two when I was feeling indignant about his hypocrisy, after the proof about Sally Hemming came to light.  Really... this is your hero I said to myself? This 'relationship' actually started while I was in college.  I went to college a full scale, 24 hour a day jock, and soon found myself organizing demonstrations against the Vietnam War (actually I remember organizing ONE demonstration against the Vietnam War.  Unfortunately my radical life has grown in my minds eye over the years...I was really just a jock who made believe he was radical). Anyway as I got political I decided I might want to learn a little bit more about this country I was screaming at and more about why I believed what I believed.  This lead me to Jefferson, of course, who had written the great document of revolutionary

My father was 80 before he told me he loved me.   From German stock, steeped in a stoic view of emotional displays, he just didn’t say it.   Ever.   Until he got sick and I was taking care of him, traveling from Atlanta to Blue Ridge where he lived on a mountain in a log cabin.   One day, sitting there trying to figure out something else to say to keep the conversation going he just up and said, ‘I love you and your brother buddy.   Proud of you.’ He always added the proud of you part after that. I never doubted he loved me.   He just never said it until then.  Not sure if the illness and view of the 'end' made a difference. When my kids were born I don’t remember making a decision to say I love you to them regularly.   I didn’t do the ‘my father didn’t do it so I will thing,’ rather I just did it.   So did my ex-wife.   We said I love you all the time.   Still do actually.   When my kids and I text or talk we always end the conversation with I love you, or as my son

My son and I have an old fashioned father-son relationship in many ways.  None more so than through our mutual love of baseball.  We actually could be a Normal Rockwell painting if Norman Rockwell was still around to paint.  Through everything--and there have been things, of course--Kurt and I have baseball, the great conversation starter, and conflict-fixer. He is a fanatic Yankee fan.  I'm not talking  big fan, or really big fan, I'm talking fanatic.  As a child he cried when the Yankees lost a meaningless game to the Toronto Blue Jays in April.  As an adult he cries when the Yankees lose a meaningless game to the Toronto Blue Jays in April. I hate the Yankees, of course, because I grew up in the W O Y period in New York.  Not sure what W O Y means?  It means, We Own You, and by we I mean New York baseball, by you I mean everybody else, every other city with a baseball team.  The Giants, Dodgers and Yankees owned baseball in the 50s when I grew up. Because there were th

For the six or seven months I have been running around northern Virginia trying to establish a soup kitchen I have had, truly, an excellent adventure.  Not only have I met some unbelievably wonderful people, but I have worshipped, preached, listened to and been part of worship services in every conceivable tradition except Zoroastrianism... that may be next. This morning, as I sat waiting for the iced in Pastor of the Methodist Church here in Leesburg, I thought about this adventure and smiled.  Here I was sitting in a traditional Protestant parlor next to a beautiful sanctuary.  It was appointed in 'early American Church' with mismatched chairs the somewhat cheesy bust of Jesus across the room from the beautiful print called A Day in Sleepy Hollow (a place I know well) and the comforting rack of Bibles next to a small library of Christian classics. I felt so at home here at Leesburg United Methodist Church though I had never worshipped here, never worshipped at any Methodi

When I was a kid everything, and I mean everything, was closed on Sunday.  Now without getting into the question of why we don't do that anymore ($$$$$),  I want to explore the idea of setting aside a day, or at least part of the day for absolutely nothing. Wait... not nothing, actually setting aside a day for what matters. Sabbath days have been with us since the beginning.  In the Bible, of course, God rested on the seventh day (a questionable enterprise considering all he had created;  who's gonna manage that stuff?  No time for a day off God;  but I digress...).  But well before that God, history records that ancient societies have been resting purposefully often to honor their deity since people formed community. In certain cultures, Jewish for instance, Sabbath is taken seriously, as in no-excuses seriously.  I've written before on this blog how Chain Potok, he of The Chosen, Gift of Asher Lev and countless other classics, is my favorite author of fiction.  Poto

Yes, I'm back... Pete Seeger died last night.  At 94 he spent a good part of his life wreaking havoc on the establishment and calling us all to a peaceful way of living. His passing hit me hard, I must admit.  I spent my first anti-Vietnam War protest with 'ol Pete' as he called himself.  We picketed the Ossining NY Post Office... that's right, the Post Office.  The logic was it was the only federal building within reach and as good as any in calling attention to the injustice of that war. It was also right on Highland Ave. across from the high school so all the traffic in and out of town had to pass us marching, carrying signs, chanting very pithy things like 'one, two, three, four, we don't want your fucking war,' a chant I remember ol pete not too happy with... we didn't do it long.  This was suburban America, after all and that's our parents and their friends driving by.  We were being radical... but not that radical. Later in life I had