"SMITTY" A Different Kind of Father’s 

  Day Story       ______________________________

I had a close friend that committed suicide on Father’s Day nineteen years ago. He hung himself on the fourth floor of the Architecture building on the University of Colorado campus with a climbing rope I helped him pick out years before. I hadn’t seen him for a couple weeks before it happened but randomly, a day or so earlier I spotted him through my car windshield as he went past on his bike at a stoplight. We made eye contact, he gave me an odd look and then he was gone. 

His roommate at that time had a brother that worked at the same restaurant we both worked at during that time. In a bizarre twist of events, that brother—our co-worker—committed suicide the following Father’s Day.                     

Suicide.
On Father’s Day.

There’s simply no way to misread that message.

I used to return every year to the very spot that it happened. Then I’d return home and call my own father to wish him a pleasant father's day. It became a yearly tradition until the day I moved away.    

Fathers . . .            

I remember having a conversation with a couple of friends that I grew up with long after we’d grown up, and coming to the realization that all three of us had seemed to make the same decision at some point in our lives. We had all decided somewhat unconsciously, you see, that none of us ever had the desire to become a father. I suggested at the time that perhaps my decision to not have children came from the fact that I never, ever wanted to end up becoming the father that my father was to me. They both, with some initial reluctance, eventually agreed that it was the same for them. I still believe this to be true. Apparently, so do they. And my brother, also. The total child head count among all of us still remains at zero.

Fortunately, I lived long enough to get past the blame and anger that I directed at a father that did the best he could while he was still alive.

Thanks, Dad, for doing the best you could . . .

         ___________________________________________________________

My relationship with my father was a strange one.

I would imagine that anyone that had a relationship with my father for any length of time might say a similar thing.

It wasn’t always like that.

This, I imagine, is the second thing that those that knew my father might say. Their relationship with my father was strange and it wasn’t always that way. 

My father, you see, had been diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis at a fairly young age and at a point in time when relatively little was known about the disease. Both of these details are critical in that they significantly altered the way that he chose to confront his sickness and the manner in which he went about revealing the diagnosis to his family and the rest of his world at large. Which is to say, not at all. 

He was thirty-something, in the prime of his life during the free-wheelin’, orange-brown-and-mustard-yellow shag-rug and gloomy dark-wood paneling nineteen-seventies, and though he knew very little about what to expect from the strange disease I’m sure he was hearing about for the first time, he somehow reached the conclusion that the best course of action was to shut out the rest of the world and lock the knowledge of his diagnosis away like some kind of shameful family secret. With the exception of my mother, complicit, I’m certain, only by circumstance, my father’s parents and perhaps one or two close friends, no one else learned of his diagnosis until many years later.

It turns out, of course, that shutting out the vast majority of a support system in favor of protecting one’s self-image while betting the odds against a devastating disease and its progressive probabilities was not without consequence. Add-in experimental medications with noxious side-effects to a pre-existing temper, mix those together with the inevitable stress of trying to cope with rebellious teenagers, money troubles, marriage problems, apathetic employers with little regard or understanding for the effects of a then-practically-unheard-of disease and Voila!, you have the recipe for a perfect storm.

And sadly, it was my father that was going to go down with the ship.

It was actually my mother who finally sprung the whole ‘M.S. thing’ on me one random afternoon during a particularly nasty episode of my fuck-the-world, you-can’t-tell-me-what-to-do, self-indulgent, self-absorbed teenage years. The news of his disease and the timing of the delivery certainly felt like a punishment at the time, and in the brain of a hormone-riddled teenager: blame.

And then, though the cat was finally out of the bag, so to speak, the metaphorical cat was strangely left to wander among our family unreserved, mostly ignored and rarely if ever spoken of. Essentially, by father’s implicit demand, we all went on pretending as if we didn’t know about his disease and became intimately complicit in the seemingly more socially acceptable ruse that he was merely suffering from ‘back problems’. 

The emotional effects on the other hand—effects that had been showing for years without any real discernible boogeyman to point the finger at until then, were becoming impossible to ignore or pretend-away.  As my father spiraled further and further into self-pity, self-loathing and all-encompassing self-consciousness over his imminently-deteriorating physique he became increasingly reliant on a parental style that seemed to favor spur-of-the-moment reactions over any real thought-out ‘strategy’. Most times that reaction was anger and most times time the anger was amplified ten-fold by the ultra-high doses of Prednisone that I would later learn they were experimenting with at that time to cope with the effects of his disease. 

               *                      *                      *                      *                      *

One could reasonably argue that despite the hasty conclusions of a selfish teen, ‘blame and punishment” were not necessarily the primary motivation for my mother ultimately revealing my father’s secret to me, but rather she had reached a point when she felt desperately compelled to make an appeal for support on his behalf. Perhaps her own as well.

By then, sad to say, it was far too late. His refusal to reach out to any of us for help earlier-on fostered an inexplicable inability for any of us offer it and his denial to include any of us in his struggle cultivated a puzzling impotence to be included. And mind you, even though everything was finally out in the open, he still refused to speak freely to any of us about it. Instead, he came to rely heavily on an uncanny aptitude he had acquired somewhere along the way to both subliminally shame those around him when they couldn’t intuitively sense what he needed while synchronously denying that he needed anything at all.

By then the physical effects were simply impossible to overlook. At the behest of his implicit appeal we continued to overlook them anyway. In the span of just a few years we witnessed as he made the progression from simply walking with difficulty to walking with the support of a cane, from walking with the cane to struggling with the assistance of crutches. And strangely we were all supposed to pretend like we didn’t notice.

Eventually I moved away to college. In my absence, his physical deterioration continued on unencumbered. My father made the final, independence-killing progression from crutches to a wheelchair in seemingly no time at all. Several years later the disease would pound the final-nail-in-the-coffin of his independence and sentence him to live out the rest of his years in an electric wheelchair.

When all was said and done, in the end, my father’s disease and his slow, gradual plummet into depression and self-despair mixed with unpredictable mood swings exacerbated by the stranglehold of his neurotically guarded self-image would claim his career, his marriage, his independence, his self-esteem, his finances, most of his friends and most of the relationships with the remaining members of his family.

              *                      *                      *                      *                      *

After the divorce my father made to the decision to return to Georgia where we had lived as children and he clearly equated with happier times. I offered to make the nine-hundred-mile journey down the east coast with him and though I wasn’t initially aware of it, there was, lurking deep-down in my subconscious, a secondary, ulterior motive for agreeing to the trip.

The realization of this secondary agenda came bubbling to the surface just days before we left and imprinted such dread in me that it took those days and the first few hundred miles down the New Jersey Turnpike to come to terms with.

The source of my dread, you see, fixated on the realization that I would, for all intents and purposes be trapped in a stuffy, silent prison on wheels for days with the man that I’d spent the greater part of my life fearing and avoiding; had truthfully never known, had never really understood, had never fully accepted and was never was accepted by. More importantly: I was choosing to be there precisely for that reason. Yes, I had gone and backed myself into a corner and unwittingly set the overly-ambitious, overly-zealous goal of attempting to crack the man that as far as I knew had never been cracked by anyone, anywhere, or at any point in time—wholly because he believed there was nothing that needed to ‘be cracked’.

My mother, years later, would confide in me that my father, in a last-ditch effort to save their marriage and in a gesture that might be considered romantic by anyone who didn’t actually know my father, asked her to run off with him so the two of them could start over. She heard him out, thought his offer over for a day or so and came back with only one demand. The demand was this: my father had to be willing to go for counseling.

He spent only moments in deliberation before he stubbornly refused her counter-offer on the grounds that he ‘didn’t need any God-damned counseling’. 

           *                      *                      *                      *                      *

We were somewhere around Richmond when I finally began the conversation. If it shocked me that I finally willed myself into a tête-à-tête with the man whom existed as a mystery to me all my life and for whom I was, no doubt, a mystery as well, his response shocked me all the more. You see, in my boldest, most heart-felt wishes, I truly believed that at least some part of my father had longed for this same conversation. If he did, he certainly never let on.

I spoke in monologues. He spoke in what essentially amounted to one-word answers. I droned on and on with questions. He answered casually and aloofly. I babbled on with years of introspections. He countered with shallow, cursory non-sequiturs. I opened my heart. I bared my soul. I empathized with his struggles. I commiserated with his sufferings. I breached the delicate subject of his marriage to my mother and daringly held him accountable for the effects that his disease had on his family—effects I was shocked to hear he was oblivious to and moreover seemed to care little, if anything, about. I said everything that I ever wanted and needed to say. I didn’t hold anything back. I let it all out. Then I went silent.

Surprisingly, so did he.

I turned the floor over to him, gave him the platform and the permission to say anything he ever wanted to say and discovered, sadly, that there was very little there.

With a near-lifetime struggle with an incurable disease, the no doubt incomprehensible experience of watching his body dwindle-away before his eyes, a heartbreaking divorce, financial ruin, the passing of his mother, father, several of his brothers and friends, an ongoing battle with depression and a floundering sense of self-worth it broke my heart to discover that my father had learned almost nothing from his experiences; grew not an iota from a lifetime of exceptional experience. Instead, he chose to cling firmly to his chosen role as a victim.

In his mind he was—and he carried the belief to his grave—the victim of a cruel world that struck him down with a horrific disease (at one point even suggesting that it was my mother that had ‘given’ him the disease). The victim of a self-serving wife that divorced him by no fault of his own. The victim of a spiteful company that fired him unfairly and unethically. A company that he would ultimately spend years in litigation with over what he was convinced—and one or two lawyers seemed to agree with him—an unlawful termination due to his illness; a case that would eventually get dropped several years later. In the end, sadly, all it did was to keep him tethered to his belief that he was a victim. 

           *                      *                      *                      *                      *

Despite my father’s indifference, things changed for me after that. By the time we reached his new apartment in Georgia, I no longer feared my father. I no longer held back from speaking my mind to him. I no longer gave a damn if he understood me and was no longer concerned about trying to figure him out. By then he had made his case and had been tried and convicted by a jury of one from the driver’s seat of a handicap-fitted 1991 Teal-Metallic Mercury Cougar and found guilty of being little more than a sad, selfish, ignorant, harmless old man.

I’ll never know if anything shifted for my father that afternoon. In the end, it didn’t really matter. The entire event, I realized some time later, was never about him. In fact, when I had time to think back over those tense moments spent over-gripping the faux-leather steering wheel of his mid-size American sedan willing myself to break the silence, it dawned on me that the whole episode had actually been triggered by a dream that I had weeks before we left.

In the dream, I was in the opposing role—the role of a father, with a distant, estranged son seated across from me in some random setting knowing the way one only can in a dream that the entire future of our relationship hung in the balance of my willingness to confront it in the moment.

I knew, just as I had in my dream that salvaging the relationship with my father rested entirely in my hands; that he would never be the one to do it. And now I understood the truth: It’s not that he feared the conversation, he just never believed there needed to be a conversation.

A week or so later after doing my best to mitigate a disaster with his moving company, I returned back to New Jersey and left my father to fend for himself. It would be several years before I would see him again.

             *                      *                      *                      *                      *

His life became a mystery from that point forward with odd stories of break-ins, a stolen gun, several almost-fires at his apartment, larcenous home-care workers and regular calls to 911 for purposes as absurd and inane as his inability to get himself into or out of bed from time to time.  A neighbor of his confided in me sometime later that my father had dialed 911 so often and become so familiar with most of the EMT workers that the majority of them knew to sidestep the customary procedure of breaking down his front door in favor of retrieving his hide-a-key and unlocking it.  

             *                      *                      *                      *                      *

After his third suicide attempt my sister and I were forced to fly to Georgia and file for legal guardianship. A local judge ruled from the antiseptic confines of an improvised courtroom set-up in my father’s hospital room that he was no longer safe to live on his own but ultimately denied my sister and I guardianship.

Several months later my sister received a bill from the lawyer my father had hired to represent him in the guardianship case. Along with all the other problems that were plaguing my father at that time there were in addition, some tens and tens of thousands of dollars in debt that my father had been racking up.

Even his suicide attempts would turn out to be shrouded in the same mysterious aura that had obscured most of the events of his life during that time. The same neighbor casually suggested that these attempts were not, in reality, ‘life-threatening,’ but rather that my father had figured out at some point that any threat of suicide would automatically land him in the hospital for no less than three days where it would be legally mandated that he be provided with ‘round the clock care on Medicare’s dime.

            *                      *                      *                      *                      *

Eventually, after some convincing, my father ‘agreed’ to relocate to Lynchburg, Virginia where we moved him into an upscale, full-care facility near my sister and his grandchildren.  He fought it every step of the way, cursed, spat and blamed me, blamed my sister, blamed my brother, even found a way to blame my mother whom he hadn’t seen or talked to in nearly a decade. 

He lasted about two years.

Two years before he was kicked out for, of all things, threatening to sneak into the room of a fellow resident that he claimed had 'wronged' him and cutting off all his hair while he slept.

My father, we would learn, had been absolved for a whole host of prior offenses up to that point including his threat to obtain a gun and shoot all those he was convinced had been stealing from him. The list of stolen goods he was holding those mortally accountable for included an old pair of tube socks and a sweat-soaked golf visor he had acquired sometime during the Reagan administration. With his formidable rap sheet, however, it was this: this threat of scalping a fellow resident in the middle of the night that in the collective mind of the facilities’ administration had finally crossed the line.

‘Smitty’, as his poker buddies at the facility had taken to calling him, had made his last threat.

Until the next location.

And the one after that . . . 

            *                      *                      *                      *                      *

From there it was a long, bumpy ride from one facility to the next. Though each new location produced its own inimitable stories, the common thread that bound each of them together was an immediate despise for each new facility and an imminent mourning of the loss of the previously despised. The acquaintances he had scorned and condemned in previous locations became the beloved, lamented war buddies of his past and the nurses and workers he claimed had wronged and stolen from him became venerated friends he revisited to complain about the present ones. In one facility he even fell in love with one of the young nurses and suggested to my sister at one point that it might be time for her to go searching through his belongings to find his mother’s engagement ring.

            *                      *                      *                      *                      *

I made it back from India where I was living and studying a somewhat esoteric spiritual philosophy known as Vedanta just two days before he died.

While my brother and sister stood above him and recited the ‘Our Father’ through tears I sat with a hand resting on his chest and stared into his eyes while his breathing shallowed and the life slowly drained from his body. “Dad,” I whispered to him while he was still reasonably lucid, “are you okay with everything that is happening to you right now?” He nodded just enough to be perceptible and my heart nodded back quietly and smiled.

I deliberately shifted my perception in an attempt to side-step the veil of separation that existed between him and I, and, just as I had been studying in India, saw that the separation between the two of us only existed if I allowed myself to view my father from the perspective of the ‘relative’ reality of our bodies.

In other words, if I believed that my primary existence was that of a body—a body with its specific personality traits, beliefs, ideas, goals—then of course, my father, too, existed as a body—a body with its own history, beliefs, etc.—separate from me, separate from the nurses, separate from my brother and sister, separate from the other patients; a body lying before me during the final moments of a life.

If, on the other hand, I allowed my perspective to shift—shift cognitively—to ‘bigger picture’, ultimate reality, truth—the ‘I am’, witness consciousness perspective—the perspective from which even my own body and my own personality traits are ‘known to me’ as an observer, then from this perspective my father was undeniably not separate from me in that moment nor any other. From this perspective, there was no sadness. No mourning. No sense of loss. No regrets. How could there be? I wasn’t losing a father any more than I had ‘gained’ one. I exist. I am.  My father’s existence has a dependent connection to me as a knower, I realized. The two of us are inseparably entwined and so are everything and everyone else. From this place there was no separation, not only from my father, but from my brother and my sister, from the doctors that stuck their heads in from time to time, from the janitor polishing the floor in the lobby or the woman that sold me playing cards in the gift shop earlier that afternoon.  When viewed from this perspective—the ultimate perspective of truth—there was nothing that was separate from me; nothing to mourn or to be saddened by. 

This was not, it should be noted, an attempt to circumvent or escape the sadness or bypass the emotions that one typically experiences during such an event but rather an intentional objective shift to observe the event from a greater vantage point. The vantage point of ‘truth’. Truth of self. Truth of everything.

A couple of nurses floated into the room quietly and began to do the things nurses do around this time.

By then I found that I could easily straddle these two perspectives and choose which I wished to entertain at any given moment. These were not experiential shifts, mind you. It was not as if the scene I was witnessing was shifting or changing in any way—my father’s body still lay in front of me, the nurses were still nurses, the doctors still doctors—but rather an intellectual shift. I was something like the experience of walking through a landscape in a dream and suddenly becoming aware that you’re dreaming. The landscape itself doesn’t change, only the understanding of the truth of that landscape.

The teachings from the ashram were suddenly beginning to make a hell of a lot of sense.

I shifted my perspective back to one of a relative reality: the physical scene right in from of my eyes; the landscape in the dream. From this perspective I could clearly see an elderly man in and around the final moments of his life. A man that I recognized as having served the role, best he could, as my father. An oxygen mask obscured the lower half of his stubble-checkered face and the unkempt mustache that had come and gone at various points in his life peeked out irregularly from the corners of the transparent plastic. Thinning white hair crowned his pallid, waxy forehead and was combed forward unintentionally at his temples by the over-sized hospital pillow that had been propped up under his head for days.

I thought back to a photo I had seen of my father as a young boy in Michigan where he had grown up.  He couldn’t have been more than five or six years old at that time. In the photo he was wearing what appeared to be some kind of a Navy soldier’s uniform with broad white stripes running the length of a dropped, robe-like collar and across the width of his chest. A neutral, nearly unreadable look sat impishly on his boyish face and his near-black hair was greased fashionably across his forehead. I imagined him walking to elementary school worrying about poison ivy and bullies and giggling about girls.

Another nurse peeked her head in the door, entered the room and began to remove the oxygen mask from his face and turn off the tank. Deep red creases outlined his sunken, hollow cheeks and nose where the oxygen mask had been. His lifeless eyes stared ahead into nowhere. She smiled kindly and told us to take as much time as we needed.

I smiled back and remained seated with my hand on his lifeless chest while random fragments from his life floated through my memory.

I know he was an average student in high school and shared a bedroom with his brother for most of his life. I pictured him arguing with his buddies, falling in love a time or two, having his heart broken, breaking a heart or two, arguing with his parents over silly stuff and fearing his father just as I had feared him. After he graduated from high school he went on to college, earned a degree, joined the Navy as men of that age did, served his time in the Navy and met my mother on a blind date. Shortly after they met, she got pregnant at a time when ‘good girls’ didn’t and options were few. He ignored the offers of his buddies, however tempting they must have been, to pay for a bus ticket that would ultimately remove him from his responsibility and went on to marry my mother against the wishes of his parents who didn’t hide the fact they considered my mother a ‘whore’. He took a job with a spark-plug company to support his family and rented a small apartment in Akron, Ohio. I remember as a young boy kissing him on his scruffy cheek at bedtime and missing him when he was gone. As I got a little older, he taught me how to throw a baseball and ride a bike, bought me my first guitar, built my brother and I a backyard tree-house, taught me how to tie a tie, to drive a stick-shift and argued with me about Ronald Reagan. Eventually he would—despite how silly it must have seemed to him at the time—send me off to college to study music. 

One of the nurses entered the room in need of signatures.

I kissed my father on the forehead and felt like an actor in a play as I did. My brother watched from the sidelines for cues, it seemed, on the proper way to behave during such an occasion. I wonder if he could sense that I was making it up as I went along. 

Several minutes later the three of us—my brother, sister and I—walked out of the hospital room.

I returned to India some weeks later to continue my studies.

            *                      *                      *                      *                      *

Dedicated to Ronald Martin Kleinsmith Sr. 

           

Acropolis

This is probably my all-time favorite travel story—mostly, I think, because it has never been explained, debunked or proven any less impossible or remarkable with the passing of time. Just the memory of the experience still makes me giddy, puts an instant grin on my face and immediately rekindles the childlike wonder of the magical time that surrounded the incident. The story also happens to be an excerpt from a forthcoming "philosophical novel" (yes, this is actually a legitimate category) that I am in the process of writing. Apolamváno! 

                               *                      *                      *                      *                      *

It was October of 2009 and it was my first time traveling outside the U.S. on my own. I was forced to travel alone after a friend bailed on me at the last minute on a rock climbing trip to the island of Kalymnos, Greece. I was adamant that I wasn’t going to let the change of events affect me, but to be honest, I was slightly nervous about traveling alone and secretly concerned that the trip would turn out to be a disaster.

I spent the first few days of my trip slogging around the city of Athens taking in historical sites as I waited for the ferry to carry me off to the mystical, mountainous island of Kalymnos where I was hopeful that I would meet others in need of climbing partners.

By my third day in Athens I began to feel nauseatingly sorry for myself as I watched happy couples saunter-about arm-in-arm contently with non-bailing partners and reliable, trustworthy companions while I collapsed into a childish, histrionic funk that forced me to reconsider just about every decision that I’d made in my life up to that point. At the epicenter of that funk, no doubt, were concerns over my long-time single status and the lack of love and the scarcity of intimate friends and close relationships that led to such a lonesome state of affairs.

To distract myself from the pathetic hole of despair that I was falling deeper into by the second, I decided to kill some time by wandering back onto the grounds of what is arguably the most historic site in all of Greece: the Acropolis. Though I had already spent significant hours exploring the legendary grounds, the hefty admission price granted me several days’ access to the park. As the staggering cost of European tourism was already beginning to eat into my modest travel budget, it seemed not only a practical financial decision, but an ideal setting for wallowing in self-pity as well.  

I hadn’t gone very far into the park, in fact, I had barely gotten past the entrance station, when I was compelled to sit down on a large patch of sporadically maintained grass that grew in front of a small rocky field under the shade of a short, stout olive tree.

From just behind my seated position on the grass I could still hear muffled chit-chat and relaxed, playful laughter coming from idle park workers in-between customers at the entrance station. To my left, smiling couples and happy faces from all parts of the globe ambled past intermittently on a paved path that ran through the park. To my right, just a stone’s throw away, beyond a patchy tangle of shrubs, bushes and trees was a tall, spiky wrought iron fence that circled the entire perimeter of the site. Beyond that rusting, archaic fence sat the very city of Athens itself where close to four million olive-skinned, chestnut-eyed souls went about their ordinary city-dwelling lives: raising families, running businesses, attending schools and so on.

I sat in cross-legged position randomly staring at a short, rocky embankment that was capped off with a flat, well-manicured grassy berm on which dozens of identical-sized steel cages filled with seemingly random white stones—most too large to be carried by a single person—had been padlocked shut, catalogued and placed in waiting as part of a massive restoration project that had been going on for decades. Eventually those caged stones would be removed from their temporary enclosures and placed as pieces in a giant three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle that would manifest as a fully restored historic relic.

Out of habit, I closed my eyes softly and began to meditate as I’d been taught as a student at the Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado, where I had earned a degree in psychology years earlier. 

As I sat quietly focusing on my breath and observing my wandering, chaotic thoughts as impartially as the moment would allow, it dawned on me that I was missing out on a significant opportunity. It wasn’t often, I realized with an unexpected spark of optimism, that I found myself in a location so heavily soaked and infused with the collective wisdom of such a great number of exceptional individuals—brilliant men and women who lived and died on these sacred grounds, birthed philosophies, fought wars of ideals, perished for causes (both just and unjust), produced artistic masterpieces in all disciplines, and unwittingly altered the very course of western civilization.

With this realization, for some reason, came a desperate, inane request: Please send a sign, was the request. For God’s sake, please send me a sign . . .

Sign of what? I have absolutely no idea. In retrospect, it was such a vague, ambitious appeal that in truth, it should have been met with little more than blank, puzzled stares and apathetic shoulder shrugs by any entity, dead, living or otherwise worth their existential salt. To complicate matters all the more, I added an ultimatum: I will not leave until my wish has been granted.

  

It is important to note that other than the atypical setting, this scenario was not entirely unfamiliar to me. Truth be told, I’d played out this same scene with minor variations in numerous locales and at various times throughout my life. Typically, after sitting far longer than I’d intended, boredom would set in, a leaf would flutter past or a bird would fly overhead and I’d consider it ‘sign enough', thank the universe for its lukewarm, prosaic offering, and proceed on with my day.

What happened next however, was by far the most remarkable, most unexplained event that has ever occurred in my life.

Literally within minutes of my frivolous appeal, I sat, mouth agape, eyes blinking erratically in disbelief as a large . . . mountain lion? . . . bobcat? . . .tiger? walked directly across my field of vision on the grassy berm where the padlocked cages of ancient stones stood not thirty feet away from where I sat under the shade of that olive tree.

I was alarmed yet not frightened as the large, tannish-orange, unmistakably male feline with the thick, faintly-striped ropy tail and the muscular hindquarters materialized out of thin-air and made its way gracefully across the manicured lawn directly in my line of sight. Impulsively, absentmindedly, I grabbed my camera—a last minute gift from a friend given to me just days before I boarded my plane—and fired-off one quick photo, shot from the hip, as the large animal disappeared behind the trees that obscured the iron fence that separated the park from the city. The whole incident couldn’t have lasted more than ten seconds.

I sat elated, disoriented, and feeling as if I’d just walked into a dream, questioning what had just taken place. I looked around foolishly for answers, but none came. I scanned the immediate area expectantly for other onlookers, but incredibly there were none. Impossible as it may seem, on a site that hosts on average ten thousand visitors each day, there was not a single person in the vicinity who happened to be looking in that same direction at that same time.

Not knowing what to do next, I made my way to my feet slowly, feeling euphoric, drunk and dizzy and began walking in the same direction the large animal had been traveling before he disappeared. I needed to prove to myself that I wasn’t going crazy, you see, and the way I figured it, once the animal reached the border—not more than twenty or thirty feet farther—he would be forced to turn in one of two directions: either left, deeper into the park along the fence line, or right, toward the main entrance of the grounds. Either way, I figured, I’d have another chance to re-see the creature that I was pretty-sure I had just seen.

Even shuffling along awkwardly and unsure as I was, it didn’t take long to reach the outer fence. I looked to the right. Nothing. I looked left. Nothing. There was absolutely no sign of any abnormally large, impossibly-placed feline in either direction. The large cat seemed to have disappeared just as he had appeared: materializing into thin air. The thought dawned on me that he could have doubled back toward me, but of course there was simply no way that I would not have seen him if he did. If he had somehow managed to sneak past me—well, I can’t even begin to imagine the chaos that would have ensued if the large carnivorous creature had managed to wander right smack into the middle of the most densely populated area in the most popular tourist attraction in all of Athens. Imagine if you will, a mountain lion or tiger taking a leisurely stroll in the center of Central Park on a sunny Sunday afternoon in June and you will probably get the idea.

I stood there stupidly for several minutes trying to figure out what my next move should be when I was informed by one of the guards at the entrance station that visitors were not permitted in the area that I had roamed into.

“But . . . but . . .” I blathered on like a drunken idiot before realizing I had no real way to explain and simply gave up. 

I wandered back to my grassy seat under the olive tree and tried to wrap my mind around what had just taken place when I suddenly remembered the photo I had taken. I wasn’t sure if I had focused the camera or even pointed the lens in the right direction.

I held my breath while I rifled through my 'recent photo file', hoping, praying for tangible proof of the impossible and—lo and behold, there it was, plain as day: a clear, auto-focused, digitally captured image of the very creature I had recalled seeing: a large jungle cat of some sort—an animal that would certainly be considered out of place in any metropolitan city anywhere in the world—disappearing behind the mint-green, sunlit trees, the bulk of its enigmatic face obscured by an especially large, leafy branch. (It is worthy to note that most mentions of large cats found anywhere in Greece are typically only in mythological stories).

I sat there for quite some time staring at the illogical but undeniable image that was captured on my camera’s remarkably tiny screen before eventually returning to my guesthouse, clearly in a much different state of mind than I had been when I left. During the short walk back I struggled to find a way to rationalize what I had seen. Could it have been some kind of zoo-escapee, I wondered? A park mascot of some sort? Perhaps, I even considered for a moment, these creatures are somehow . . . common in Athens? Any way that I tried to rationalize it, it made no sense. I needed the opinion of a local. 

The woman that ran my guesthouse was the first person I felt comfortable asking.

Her face lit up instantly: part horror, part delight, part shocked disbelief as she raised her voice to a near-shout in lilted, broken English: “You have seen . . . THIS? . . . AT ACROPOLIS!”

                    

                            *                      *                      *                      *                      *

In the days, weeks, months and years that followed, people often asked: "Was 'that' (the large cat, I presume) the sign that you had asked for?" 

To this I say: Umm . . . no? Not exactly.

Don't misunderstand. 

Seeing that incredible animal appear at that particular moment was far more than I could have ever hoped for or expected, but honestly, I would have gladly accepted anything that was as equally 'obvious' as a sign. The implausible nature of seeing that particular creature in that particular setting did, I admit, make it considerably more difficult to rationalize as an ordinary event 'imagined' as extraordinary, yet I can think of an infinite number of other possible events that could have taken place that I would have welcomed with equal enthusiasm. 

More important than the event itself, I believe, was the change in attitude that overcame me. It was immediate and it was palpable and it seemed to imbue my trip with a certain magic that felt as if it seeped its way into every interaction, every event, and every activity throughout the stay; it gave me a story to share with locals and foreigners alike, and the mysterious and unexplained nature of the event seemed to allow me to connect with others on a slightly deeper level than I normally might have and open up conversations on topics that are rarely broached by strangers. 

And, finally: No . . . .

To reiterate: No one has ever been able explain what it is that I saw that afternoon—even, I might add— a' big cat expert' that examined the photo at the urging of a friend who became intrigued with the story after I had posted it on Facebook when it first occurred. All the expert could do was to confirm that the image was in fact a “large jungle cat” of some sort (I assume this is because the majority of the cat’s face is concealed behind the trees). 

Honestly, I kind of enjoy the fact that it has remained a mystery all these years...

                                 *                      *                      *                      *                      *

                             

Shell-Shocked (a.k.a. ‘The Chicken Feed Puzzle’)

This story is dedicated to my sister, Debbie. Though the story isn’t necessarily about her—it is. (Even though it really isn’t). Thanks, Deb for everything.

Perhaps you’ll remember  . . .

               *               *               *               *   

      

This story almost never saw the light of day, so to speak.

It vanished quickly in a fog of ether three years ago—an unwitting stowaway hidden among circuit boards, RAM and CPUs—when my computer was stolen at a park in downtown Saigon late one night. (see: STOLEN (a.k.a. Army Crawling Toward Enlightenment))

The only remains of the story were preserved in an emailed copy I had sent to myself a couple of weeks prior. Regrettably, those weeks had seen an overwhelming number of edits, re-writes, word tweaks and grammatical alterations. The piece had changed so drastically, in fact, that the thought of even looking at that saved, obsolete copy made me want to puke up my Café Sua Da, Gỏi cuốn and Pho.

And, so it went, for three years this story sat rotting away like a digitally-entombed virtual corpse.  Mummified in cyberspace it existed in ‘saved e-mail-limbo’ along with a few-too-many bank statements I didn’t have the courage to open and a far-too-many ‘Linked-In’ invitations from friends that I didn’t have the heart to delete.

A few months ago, fueled by what I have to imagine was an especially bad case of jet-lag and an intense desire for creative stimulation, I decided to begin its dubious resurrection.

Since that day the story has made the long, up-hill transition from dead, buried and forgotten, to alive, well and thriving; a full time obsession that has been the only thing I have been able to wrap my head around since that initial, bleary-eyed moment of rebirth. (I literally spent two long, neurotic days researching and contemplating nothing but the use of the word, ‘that’)

Yeah.

Would it have really mattered? You know . . . if this story had never gotten finished? Never seen the light of day?

No. I don’t believe so.

The greatest sin that any artist can commit is to think that anything that he or she has created really matters all that much in the overall scheme of things; worse still, to think that they are the one that has actually created it.

 . . . I don’t know.

Maybe it would have mattered.

To me.

Either way, it feels like I can let go of it now. Release it back into the ether where it belongs . . .

                                        *               *               *               *  

      

Shell-Shocked (a.k.a. ‘The Chicken Feed Puzzle’)

"I initially worked at MIT, where I was assigned a ‘chicken feed puzzle’. Millions of chicks a year were dying from an unknown toxic chemical in their feed, and I had the responsibility of isolating and determining the structure of this chemical. After two and a half years, I helped discover dioxin, arguably the most toxic chemical ever found . . . it was part of the herbicide 2,4,5-T. otherwise known as agent orange".

T. Colin Campbell, Biochemist

                                          *               *               *               *

Why do I keep coming back here?" I wondered . . . 

I mean, there was certainly no reason not to come back, but still, there was certainly no reason not to come back to many other places that I had actually not come back to, if you know what I mean.

The answer shot back at me quickly—as quickly as neurons are capable of processing thought.

Now, I'm certainly no scientist, but I'm pretty sure that there are a whole host of chemicals, glands, synapses and stuff involved in such a process. Regardless of these complexities, it all seemed to happen pretty damn fast. So fast, in fact, that if this verbal exchange hadn't been taking place in the confines of my own skull, my head would have snapped back rapidly like it does when someone has just snuck up and shouted something from behind.

You come here—because you are desperate to 'feel' again . . .

Chemistry aside, my answer surprised me a little.

"Ummm . . . Okay, perhaps this is true, but . . ."

I had certainly captured my own attention thus far.

“'Feel' . . .? Feel?”

“Feel what exactly?"

It was a fair question.

I'm not entirely sure, my inner-self went on . . .

Something?

 . . . ANYTHING?

"Ummm—yeah . . . a little ‘broad’,” I shot right back at myself . . ."What the hell does that even mean?"

The ‘tone’ that was rattling around my head at that moment; the sentiment it seemed to convey, was I was actually feeling very little at the time—if anything at all, and perhaps even suggesting that I had been subsisting in that unfeeling state for some time.

You know: Cold. Zombie-like. Robotic. Emotionally unavailable.

That kind of stuff.

The tone, I was beginning to suspect, seemed to suggest that I was becoming some kind of unfeeling, uncaring, self-absorbed prick. 

 

All right . . . a bit dramatic, perhaps, but I didn't like the sound of it.

Not one bit.

Even coming from myself . . .

Especially coming from myself.

                                                                 

A nerve had been touched. 

"Oh, I feel! I feel . . . A LOT!” I hollered back internally in a defensive tone that reverberated inside my cerebrum as the agitation began to escalate, "I feel many things! You can't be seriously suggesting . . . COME ON! I am—YOU are, a kind, sensitive, thoughtful human being - I . . . we care for others. I try to help others when I can!

I certainly wasn't giving in easily.

Especially to myself . . . 

                                                                 

Whoa! WHOA! Calm down, buddy! Take it easy! No reason to get worked up here! We're in this thing together, remember . . . you and me? . . . Oh, and by the way—yeah, I know this is probably not the best time to bring this up, but that haircut— that haircut really does look terrible. You could probably sue that guy . . . TERRIBLE!

My inner-self can be a bastard sometimes.

                                           

Seriously though, this is important . . .

With this point, we were in complete agreement. 

My agitation seemed to drain away as fast as it had set in.

WHY is it then . . .?

WHY . . .?

Why DO you keep coming back here?

Yeah . . .

I had to admit it.

I had myself there.

                                               *               *               *               *

         

I was frozen in position, standing inside the second floor exhibit room of the War Remnants Museum in downtown Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City), Vietnam. I had been renting a tiny one-room apartment hidden away in a secluded little alleyway in the city for a couple of months.

Photos, images and weapons of brutality and tragedy; of sadness and the horrors of the Vietnam War (known as the American War here) surrounded me from all sides. It was my third time here.

The first time, I nearly broke down at every turn.

I would imagine that just about anyone that comes here for the first time nearly breaks down at every turn. I mean, anyone that has the slightest shred of human decency and compassion; anyone that has a heart beating within the confines of their chest cavity . . .  

                       

Not everyone, though, I reminded myself, comes with the need to ‘jump-start’ that process, however.

Why are you here, Ron?

"Why do I keep coming back here?" I whispered aloud, suddenly startled by the sound of my own voice.

I found a seat in an adjacent foyer on a cheap plastic, vinyl and chrome bench next to an exceptionally large man wearing camo shorts and a black sweat-soaked t-shirt that was imprinted with a peace-sign.

I closed my eyes and surrendered . . .

‘Self-absorbed prick’? Okay . . . that might have been overstating it a bit, I thought, but I certainly couldn’t deny the fact that there really was something going on for me. I was feeling a little empty inside. A little detached. A little isolated. A little emotionally benumbed. If I honestly examined my state of mind in that moment—the contents of which had just dragged me across town, yet again, to a place that I would imagine for most, a single visit would more than suffice— then I had to admit: yeah, something was a little . . . off. I mean, I know myself well enough to know that I’m certainly no masochist. I’m not one who gets off on the whole pain and suffering thing--though, I freely admit, at that moment: I needed it. I needed the emotional crack-across-the-skull that it provided.

"Okay. I can accept that I come here out of a need to feel," I thought, safely back in the confines of my own head once again, "the ‘what’ or ‘why’ is what we seem to be working with at the moment."

"Okay . . . . give me a minute, huh?"

Take all the time you want. I'm not going anywhere. Nowhere at all . . .

My inner-self has a soft-side as well.

                                 *               *               *               *

          

The Vietnam War had haunted my childhood in strange, inexplicable ways.

Being born in the early part of the sixties, I was much too young to have had to endure the angst and overriding fear that dominated that epoch; the menacing boogeyman that haunted every teen-age boy's dreams during that time:

The draft. 

My father sat fairly safely on the other side of that curve. The likelihood he would ever be drafted into the war given his age at the time was so remote it may as well not even have existed at all.

I had no older brothers or older male relatives to be concerned about either.

From what I can remember, the closest personal connection that I had to that war, as obscure as it may seem, was a bracelet; a bracelet my mother wore around her wrist.

The ‘POW/MIA Bracelet’ became popular in the later stages of the Vietnam/ American War. It was made of copper (some were also made of brass) and was engraved with the name of a random American Soldier that had been captured and held captive in Vietnam. The bracelet was to be worn until that soldier had returned home safely. I honestly didn't completely understand what that bracelet meant at the time, yet it troubled me in ways that I couldn't, and to this day, still can't quite explain. 

I guess, in a sense, that bracelet connected me, us—my family—in an odd, obscure way, to an American soldier that was actually there in Vietnam. A captured American soldier, no less.

Perhaps, in a more immediate way, that bracelet came to symbolize to me, the unspoken and still undiscovered evils of the world; of war and killing; of death, torture and captivity.

Don't get me wrong, my family experienced the Vietnam War in the same way most American families of our generation did—the way the majority of Americans experience most wars: from newspapers, magazines and the images broadcast on our grainy console television. The majority of it, however, left little more impression on me than the Saturday morning cartoons my brother and sister and I watched together. It's odd to say that I remember most Brady Bunch episodes more vividly than I remember specific events from the Vietnam War.

Still, there was something about it . . .

That war.

Somehow, even without my realizing, it burrowed its way deep, deep into my psyche . . .

In ways I can't explain, the Vietnam War left a serious mind-fuck of an impression on me.

                              *               *               *               *

          

I shuffled slightly on the vinyl bench in the foyer and opened my eyes momentarily. The large man in the camo shorts had moved on and had been replaced by a middle-aged woman wearing— what looked to be—very uncomfortable shoes. I wondered briefly if she regretted her choice of footwear that day. She sipped water from a plastic bottle and fumbled with her cell phone. . . 

                                               *               *               *               *

                     

I guess I never fully understood it: that war. 

By the time I was old enough to understand, it was already over.

Then there were much more important things to worry about:

Puberty, school, poison ivy, rusty nails, bullies, house-fires, robbers, Bigfoot, chicken pox, tornadoes, mean neighborhood dogs, shots from the doctor, tidal waves, sharks long division,clowns . . . .

Girls.

That kinda stuff.

I mean, I certainly couldn’t deny the impression that that war, consciously or not, had etched, scratched and carved into my subconscious. Yet, that latent, emotional blueprint certainly didn’t extend outward in an ability to understand the objective reality of it all: Who was fighting whom exactly, and why.

For an adolescent American boy, the details of such events matter very little when pitted up against, say, an exceptionally severe case of poison ivy that has morphed one’s left hand into a catcher’s mitt.

As an adult American male however, surrounded by the gruesome images of innocent children suffering the long-term effects of Agent Orange, Phosphorous Bombs and Napalm— the manufacture and usage of which are unequivocally attributed to your country of origin— the need to find understanding rapidly escalates to that of great importance— if, for no other reason than one’s own selfish desire to rid themselves of the shame that suddenly, for no logical reason, rushes in like a torrential flood.

                                        *               *               *               * 

        

I forfeited my position on the plastic bench in the corridor. The sweaty haze left behind on the black vinyl in the shape of my form—the only evidence of my having been there—evaporated quickly as I stood. A group of Japanese tourists passed by; the flashes and digitally replicated shutter-clicks from their high-tech cameras punctuated their ceaseless chattering. I was suddenly jealous of them for no reason . . .

                              *               *               *               *

          

I had come to the conclusion that I needed to change my strategy if I were to have any real hope of resolving the existential dilemma I had dumped into my own lap.

I thought that perhaps if I could track my own progress through the museum—stealthily fragmenting my mind into both experiencer and observer, I just might be able to piece together clues that would help unravel the inexplicable puzzle that had plagued me since that very first visit.

This was no easy feat, mind you, for the very second I become aware that I was, in fact, stalking myself— tracking my own progress—the progress itself became pathetically sterile, mechanical and synthetic. Worse still, as the awareness grew even stronger, I became self-conscious to the point that I would freeze up altogether; engaged in a mental tug-of-war, second-guessing even the simplest of actions.

Ultimately it became impossible for me to gain any level of objectivity whatsoever; impossible to determine which actions were genuine and unsolicited and which were forced and deliberate. 

I was ready to abandon the whole ridiculous plan altogether when something interesting happened . . .

You see, I got so caught up in over-analyzing; so hopelessly lost in my own restless, erratic thought process that, without realizing it, my mind and body instinctively switched  to autopilot—going not where my over-analytic brain thought I should go—or shouldn’t go for that matter—but where I had intended to go all along . . .

And, just like that:

There it was . . .

                              *               *               *               *

I stood in front of an enlarged, black-and-white photograph that had been fitted into an ordinary, solid-black frame and hung on an indistinct, crème-colored wall. The photo was lit by a dim fluorescent bulb mounted overhead—chosen, I would imagine, in an attempt to create some kind of balanced neutrality.  It was surrounded by a dozen-or-so similarly-sized, similarly lit, similar-themed photos all hung in a near-identical fashion. 

To others, I imagine, there was probably very little distinction between this photo and the others that surrounded it.

For me, however, nothing could have been further from the truth.

But, you see—this was not the first time I’d stood in front of this photo.

I had, in fact, stood in this very spot several times prior, just as I stood now: breathless and transfixed, feet held firmly in place as if dipped in cement, shoulders drooping heavily downward, hands and arms dangling flaccidly to the side, head held defiantly forward as I struggled against tears that were daring to be cried.

‘Some things,’ I was reminded, ‘are just so sad that only your soul can do the crying for you.’

The thought had very little time to settle in before I was off again, moving at an even, steady pace through the museum. The cement that held my feet had turned to dust; the breath that had been stilled had resumed; my soul deftly gathered back the tears that dare not be cried. I knew instinctively that there was more to be seen . . .

By now there was no longer any need to fragment my mind into separate compartments. No reason to trick myself into anything. No reason to waste time engaged in a losing game of tug-of-war against a listless opponent

.

A switch had been flipped.

And just like that . . .

I skidded to a halt in front of another black-and-white photo in an altogether different section of the museum. This was not the first time I had stood in this spot, either. This photograph was slightly smaller than the first. It was unframed and mounted on a flat, thin board that hung along with several others on a simple white wall. It was lit in such a way that the light from above refracted off the polished floor below like moonlight on a frozen pond. My feet slowly melted downward into that dark, nacreous void and I was immobile once again—arms and legs frozen solid, head held stationary, unable to turn away.  My soul held its breath, defied its silent, unshed tears once again, and a gentle voice bubbled up from somewhere deep below the surface of that icy, fluorescent pond . . .

This . . . is  . . . why  . . . you are here.

And just like that the whole process began again.

And then again . . .

Each photo rushed-in in a deliberate, even-paced succession—each photo as intimately familiar, each equally anesthetizing, and each as devastatingly heartbreaking as the next. I knew for sure that this was—these were—this scant, dozen-or-so, half-century-old, monochromatic images—the very reason . . . the only reason I had returned.  Each might have differed slightly in size, proportion and composition, but every one of these photos carried within the borders of its pixelated pseudo-reality, the same, uncanny ability to penetrate directly—like an adrenaline injection stabbed straight through flesh, muscle and bone—to my heart.

Somewhere deep inside, a latent memory was churning to life; desperately fighting its way to the surface like a drowning man struggling for breath. Like a desolate, tortured prisoner it pleaded for release— or, at the very least: recognition . . .

That recognition would not come, I realized, until both halves of the puzzle had been resolved—the ‘why’ of the ‘why’, so to speak. I mean, by now there was certainly no denying the fact that these few random photos scattered throughout this much vaster assemblage was indeed the reason that I had returned. This understanding, however—as valuable it might have seemed— in all actuality solved only half of the equation.

There had to be more to it.

  . . . And there was . . . 

The other half of the equation, I recognized in a sudden, serendipitous flash, lay hidden within the very photos themselves: concealed within each face and every guileless gesture; every expression and every graphically-frozen movement. Moreover, there was a blatantly obvious thread that ran through each and every one of these photos; a thread that bound each of them together in a neat, undeniable, simplistic manner—so simple, in fact, that I had brushed it off long ago as insignificant.

The thread was this: The facial expression of every single person in every single photo was, with little variance and few exceptions—the very same expression.

Out of nowhere, a quiet whisper rose from my throat and floated to my lips like a mantra:

 I know this . . . I know this . . . I know this . . .

And I did.

I knew it well.

I just wasn’t quite sure . . . how.

And then, without and kind of warning—any warning whatsoever, the whole fucking thing exploded inside my frontal lobe like a land-mine.

Memories poured in like liquid-fire from an irate, blackening sky: Darkness, pain, fear, sadness, suffering and vulnerability all clashed together in an all-out, apocalyptic fourth-of-July, cluster-fuck of a synaptic explosion.

The latent memories that had been churning indolently now erupted fervidly. The drowning man that had struggled for breath brutally thrashed and clawed his way to the surface. The tortured prisoner’s quiet plea for mere recognition had escalated to a barbaric battle-cry vehemently proclaiming:

‘YOU—WILL—RELEASE— ME—NOW!’

And just like that:

there—

it—

was.

 . . . .

 . . . oh.

 . . . .

 . . . shit.

 . . . .

yeah.

it was that expression.

. . . .

that fucking expression.

                                        *               *               *               *          

I am twelve-years old and on my way home from elementary school... 

The bullies had spent the day as they always had: demonstrating dominance over us—the non-bully masses.

My favorite game was the ‘Motherfucker Walk/Don't Walk Game’. It went something like this:

Bully 1: "Motherfucker, if you don't stop walking right now, I’m gonna hit you up-side yo’ motherfuckin’ HEAD!”

Bully 2: "Motherfucker, if you don't START walking right now, I’m gonna hit you up-side yo’ motherfuckin’ HEAD!”

Yeah . . .

It was quite the conundrum.

Quite the conundrum indeed.

Not only was it peppered with the threat of immediate bodily harm, but it was also psychologically rooted in delicate, subtle layers of paradox as well . . .

It was a lot for the pre-adolescent, hormone-riddled neo-cortex to wrestle with.

In all actuality, though, from what I can remember, in the end, no scenario ever actually resolved with an ill-fated motherfuckin’ hit up-side anyone's motherfuckin’ head.

But I digress . . .

            

I had just rounded the corner from the main road. I took the shortcut through the apartment complex that led to the park, crossed over the wooden bridge near the big tree, passed the playground with the old, rusty slide; circumnavigated my way along the dirt path that ran alongside the tennis courts and was beginning to weave my way through the twisting maze of paved pathways that would eventually complete the short journey home.

In the distance I could see my little sister, schoolbooks still clutched under her arm. She was stopped along the pathway and seemed to be talking to some friends. As I began to get a little closer, it became alarmingly apparent that one of the guys she was talking to—a guy I knew from school—was actually harassing her.  He was harassing my little sister.

Now, truth be told, this was the same sister I myself had harassed incessantly, 'round the clock without end, day-in and day-out, week after week, month after month, year after blessed-year for the vast majority of her short life up until that point.

This, however, was different—or so it seemed to me . . .

With the protective instinct of an older brother kicked into high gear—that afternoon’s episode of ‘Motherfucker Walk/ Don’t Walk’ still red-lining my nervous system, I began to sprint across the grass field that separated us. It took very little time to reach them as adrenaline was rocketing through my sugar-addled bloodstream at light-speed, biochemically priming my gawky, boney frame for . . . well, something.

I hadn’t exactly thought the whole thing through . . .

Irrespectively, I ran up, full speed, and with all the strength I could muster, I reeled back and decked that kid in his shoulder as hard as I could. 

It was his right shoulder. I remember it distinctly . . . 

Yeah, strange choice . . .

The shoulder.

You see, I honestly didn't have it in me to hit him—or anyone else for that matter—upside their motherfucking head as, I guess, one might argue, might have been justified at that moment.

At the very least would have been a more decisive statement . . .

If I was playing the role of the hero coming to rescue the girl in a movie, I probably would have been laughed right off the screen.

STILL . . .

The effect it had on me couldn't have possibly been any greater. If I had pulled-the-pin on a grenade and tossed it in his direction leaving his body in a mangled, bloody mess that afternoon, it couldn't have made more of an impact on me.

That punch, that moment, the feeling that it left in me that day all seeped their way into the deepest recesses of my temporal lobe; frozen in time like some sort of monument to lost innocence.

The look on his face—

It was that exact same expression . . .

That fucking expression!

It was the look of sheer terror; of horrified shock and total submission; of disorientation and humiliation; of desperation, helplessness and heartbreaking sadness.

It sickened and horrified me. It saddened me in ways that I can't possibly explain. It splintered my heart into a million irreparable pieces and shook me to the very core. I hated it—hated the way I felt at that moment. I hated knowing that I held that power within me; the power to elicit all that grotesque emotion so eerily stitched into his expression at that moment; all of the pain and fear so unnervingly alive in that expression.

Something died inside me at that moment.  It died in a quick, brilliant, iridescent flash only I could see.

It died right there in the park next to the swing-set and the jungle-gym.

It died as my little sister and her friends unknowingly looked on . . .

And yes, one could argue about the laws of karma, the Biblical ‘eye for an eye’, about righteousness and justice and how ‘he had it coming to him’ –how it ‘served him right’ and on and on . . .

I might even agree on some of these points . . .

Still . . .

The only thing I really knew for certain at that moment was that I never, ever wanted to see that expression on anyone’s face ever again.

It changed my life—

that expression.

that fucking expression . . .

                                        *               *               *               *

          

It was a strange ride back to my rented room in the lonely alleyway that evening.  My brain sloshed and gurgled with a mish-mosh of conflicting emotions as I hammered away at the clunky pedals on my cheap, borrowed bicycle.

Sure, I had, for the most part, unraveled a minor mystery that had been plaguing me for some time—but, in the wake of that unraveling I had dredged up childhood memories that just might have been better left . . . un-dredged. I mean, the memories themselves were fairly painless and non-threatening, but still, I couldn’t help wonder what the point of it all was: What had the whole experience actually revealed to me? What had I gained from it all?

I relaxed and submitted to the damp, monsoon wind that fell against my face as my bike stuttered and grinded its way through its rusty gears. I felt the blood pump through my legs as I weaved in and out of the sea of motorbikes that flooded around me as I battled my way across the city. The wetness from the recent rain mixed with the oil on the city street and glistened in all manner of colors like an abstract painting . . .

For a mere fraction of a second I felt fully present, alive and aware—

And just like that . . .

It took only that fraction of a second to resolve months of relentless inquiry and tireless contemplation; to resolve endless hours spent wandering among the images of war and suffering as my brain fought its way upstream against a ceaseless current of insoluble questions; to resolve countless, sleepless nights, and the drowsy, eerie, dream-like days that often followed—all inadvertently sacrificed in the service of truth.

That same fraction of a second effortlessly belched-up a single word: One solitary word that concisely encapsulated all that had been gained over that two-month period:

  

That word was this:

Nothing.

The experience had revealed absolutely nothing at all. 

Nothing had been gained.

Nothing had been achieved.

NOTHING.

I’d merely exposed my demons—not exorcised them.

Nothing had been resolved.

Nothing had been concluded.

All of it amounted to naught.

That was that.

That was all.

So—?

 . . . now what?

                                *               *               *               *

Three years ago when I first wrote this story, I would have ended it right there.

Anti-climactic.

Hopeless.

Disappointing.

A bitter dose of bad news.

And I would have loved to have ended it there.

I wanted to be the kind of writer that wasn’t afraid to let a good story end on a downer—a low note, if that was where it was supposed to end. Life, I told myself, wasn’t all happy endings and sunshine. Sometimes it just, well . . . sucked. And sucking was okay. Sometimes really bad things happened to really good people. Sometimes horrible, unspeakable things happened—even to children. War was hell and that was that.

I wanted bitterness. I welcomed negativity. I wanted to, just once, be okay with throwing a shit-storm of bad news into the toxic, polluted atmosphere and watch as it settled on the stinking, rotting carcasses of hopelessness and despair.

More than anything, though, I wanted truth—and such was the truth at that moment:

Nothing had been gained. 

Nothing was resolved.

 . . . and they all lived shittily ever after.

-The End-

But—such is the value of time.

And such was the gift, I’ve come to realize only now, of having the original version of this story stolen all those years ago in that park in downtown Saigon—cut down in its prime by an artful Vietnamese thief.

Perhaps life isn’t always sunshine and happy endings. But what are ‘endings’ really, but subjective, punctuation marks placed as temporary gravestones for what is essentially a fluid reality. Simply put: What some call the end, others clearly see as a beginning. If we eliminate these subjective landmarks, then there really are no beginnings or endings—only one continuous journey.

And somewhere in the midst of that journey, I recall standing amongst the grisly images of war and violence in a museum in downtown Saigon as some long-buried aspect of myself began to transition its way from upward to outward—first with a humble appeal for recognition, and then with its final, emphatic demand for release.

Now, three years later I realized that time and circumstance was granting the opportunity for an even more valued asset:

Renewal.

Yeah, life might not always give us sunshine and happy endings, but it damn sure always gives us the opportunity for renewal.

And renewal this time, I understood, had to begin exactly where it had been left all those years before: with a twelve year old boy and a mind-raping experience that had just been lobbed into his lap like a grenade.  

I really had no choice.

I had to go back for him.

Back where it all began . . .

                              *               *               *               *

I recognized him right away. It wasn’t hard to do—I’d have known him anywhere.

Even though he was moving fairly quickly along the pathway, he was easy to track. But, of course, I could predict his future. I’d made that same walk home from school hundreds of times. We didn’t have far to go.

I hovered in the background. I didn’t want to get too close and startle him. He’d just had his world flipped upside-down. He had a lot on his mind.

   

He skirted his way through the winding maze of paved pathways that ran through the park, crossed over the short metal bridge—

His heart was beating fast. He was clearly upset. But, of course I knew why . . .

—Oh, I wasn’t reading his mind. I didn’t have a crystal ball or Tarot cards—nothing like that. I didn’t need parlor tricks or psychic powers to know what was on his mind or where he would go next—

He passed through the narrow gap in the tall boarded-fence and took the short-cut through his neighbor’s backyard—everybody did. I guess that’s the price one pays for living so close to a park.

And a path.

It was probably going to kill their resale value . . .

He made his way through the yard quickly. The small, white dog barked from the other side of the fence as it always did—but we both barely heard it. There was much too much to think about.

He took the short, worn dirt path that led from the yard to the street. His house was very close. Just a right turn here at the sidewalk, a quick left there, and—

There it was. I recognized it immediately.

I sure loved that house.

I watched as he returned to his bedroom: the bedroom with the blue shag carpet he kept so carefully vacuumed. I watched as he sat at the pine roll-top desk that he loved so much: the desk he kept so well organized—paperclips here, erasers there, pens placed just-so in the small aluminum mug with the glass bottom, loose-leaf paper pressed carefully into the back left corner . . .

Tears sat dormant in the corners of his eyes as they waited for just the right moment.

Only, the moment wouldn’t come.

Some things are just so sad that only your soul can do the crying for you.

He clicked his ancient Panasonic cassette deck into play: the deck with the small condenser microphone built into the top and thought and thought and thought . . .

                               *               *              *               *

I wondered what he would have wanted from me: his future self, just then. What would he have hoped that I would have done with this massive assemblage of indispensable information that he had so painfully wrestled from the gnarled, clenched grip of the universe that afternoon; all the emotional cuts, scrapes and bruises that he had just endured in the name of greater understanding and growth?

Of course he couldn’t have known any of that, for such were the limitations of the peculiar set of circumstances that we found ourselves in at that moment, and such were the limitations of the one-way mirror view that I held into his life just then. From this side of the mirror, I could easily gain access into his life—my past—but try as he might, there was no way that he could ever, ever glimpse the future on the other side of that mirror.

It became fairly obvious that my side of that mirror had its own limitations, for as much as I longed to console him; let him know that everything would work out okay—I knew at once that I never could.

Besides—he really didn’t, I began to sense, need my help.

He would turn out just fine in the end. I was proof of that . . .

And just like that—

The final piece of the puzzle fell into place . . .

HE WOULD TURN OUT JUST FINE.

I . . .

ME—

I—WAS—THE—VERY—PROOF!

He didn’t need me in that moment! I, in fact, needed him! The two of us—the ‘me’ of the past and the ‘me’ of the present were there at that moment not for ‘him’ as I had initially suspected —BUT FOR ME!  

It was finally, undeniably clear:

That moment there in that park all those years ago—

    

It really did change my life.

It changed everything . . .

That awkward punch, that expression, the uncertain pain that I felt that day—all of those things led me here: minute by minute, day by day, year by year to this very moment; this very place—

The existential query that was born in that moment and the seemingly infinite chasm of introspection that it hurled me into that day all inadvertently snowballed into a relentless search for truth—a search that led from the “Do unto others” teachings of Christianity, through the inexhaustible gamut of New-Age philosophies, onto the “Four Noble Truths” of Buddhism and the Buddhist monasteries of Nepal, Thailand and India and finally here: to this ashram in Rishikesh, India where I have lived for the past two years studying a somewhat esoteric spiritual philosophy known as Vedanta—of which ‘truth’—truth of self, truth of the world, truth of everything is considered the very essence of this teaching. Nothing that I have discovered in all my years of searching has even come close to unraveling ‘truth’ like Vedanta.

And I now understood that this—all of this—began that lonely, unsettling afternoon in the park . . .

I wonder if he, my childhood self, would have ever imagined—even in his most off-the-wall, grandiose, abstract vision of the future—that it would have turned out the way that it has. As that episode in the park played itself over and over in his head; as the ache and uncertainty washed over him time and time again; as he wandered through the days that followed . . . changed, but really not  quite sure ‘how’, would he have ever guessed in his wildest dreams that four decades later he’d be holed-up in a room no larger than the bedroom of his childhood, seven thousand miles away, hunkered over a cheap pressboard desk, haphazardly pecking away at a worn, smudged laptop in-between Vedic philosophy and Sanskrit classes still trying to explain that moment?

The answer—and I say it with no measure of uncertainty whatsoever—is, of course: No.

I never imagined it . . .

                             *               *               *               *

I did my best to send a simple message of empathy and compassion back to my childhood self—qualities I recognized were born that very same day in the park—before I left him for good.

He had remained silent and still all the while—a small, sad, lonely figure afloat a sea of immaculately vacuumed royal blue shag carpet while a mix of seventies pop-songs droned-on quietly in the background from his ancient Panasonic cassette deck with the small condenser microphone built into the top.

–Oh, it was useless, I realized—irrational: trying to ‘send messages across time’.

It was a naive desire; A childish wish.

No—there would be no over-the-top magical, ‘mystical’ dialog between past and present versions of myself in this story. God knows, in my over-ambitious quest to tie together a lifetime of experience, four different countries, the Vietnam War, a museum, jet-lag, the Brady Bunch, a stolen computer, POW Bracelets, bullies, lost childhood innocence, Bigfoot and the ultimate pursuit of truth, I’d already blurred the lines of reality reasonably well-enough.

Besides—I concluded: there was really no need:

I’d gotten what I had come for.

No.

It was time to let him be; time to let him get on with his life; time for me to get on with mine.

 . . . And time to conclude this story, I decided.

Right on schedule, apparently—

                             *               *               *               *

I watched as he made his way over to his bed slowly and mechanically. He collapsed onto the mattress with a lifeless thud, while his arms—defying all natural protective instincts—dangled heavily and limply from their sockets throughout the entire process. It was as if all the life had been quickly and forcefully drained out from under him like air from a punctured tire. He lay motionless for only a moment before he buried his face in his pillow and cried and cried and cried.

                              *               *               *               *

I felt the need to take one final glance back through the mirror into my past before I left it all behind, yet my own reflection was all that I could see anymore. The past had become just as blurred as it had always been.

I studied that reflection for some time through the haze of tears that was beginning to fill my own eyes.

I look old, I thought . . .

Oh—it didn’t really bother me—not the way that it might have in the past.

I had traveled much too far, invested far too much time in study and contemplation, sacrificed everything that I had ever known, thought or believed to arrive at all I know now.

The search for truth, I have come to understand, demands nothing less.

And, of course, as all truths tend to be, it is much, much simpler than I ever imagined it could be— yet, somehow, at the same time, all the more profound.

And it all began that day in the park so many years ago.

—I ‘am’.  I will always be. There was never a time when I ‘wasn’t’. There will never be a time when I won’t be. I am free. I have always been free. I will always be free . . .

And—

Just like that . . .

I could finally let it all go—

Release it back into the ether where it belongs . . .

                                     

                                                *               *               *               *