Tag: travel writing

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Amateur Night at Gethsemani Abbey

(Or: How I Unwittingly Prepared for Social Distancing)

“I am what I live. Don’t tell me who I am yet. It is still being spelled out.”

– Brother Paul Quenon

Fifty-two miles south of Louisville, among rolling hills of switchgrass and swaths of cut corn stalks and stands of uncut red oak and dogwood, near a three-way intersection of shoulderless, asphalt roads, sits a small, red-brick house. There is a grain silo nearby, and a faded turquoise water tower and an idle combine harvester in a fallow field across the way, and occasional, speed-limit minding traffic driving through cool late-February air so thin of humidity the birds fly and chirp in unmuddled joy. It is a scene ubiquitous in this part of America, in this time of year, these rural bucolic settings of west Appalachia so fungible a blindfolded local from six states around could not, with blindfold removed, positively identify his location.

Until: a mile to the north – along Monks Road – after a shallow bend to the east, down a small decline, and through the touchdown goalposts of a cross to the west side of the road and an elevated statue of Joseph and Jesus to the east, rises the sprawling, muted white, neo-Gothic compound of Gethsemani Abbey.

On The Road at Gethsemani Abbey
Gethsemani Abbey, Trappist, Kentucky

Ten years ago I read The Seven Storey Mountain, the monk and author Thomas Merton’s autobiography about his physical path from Europe to the United States and back again, twice, eventually ending up at Columbia University as a 21 year old sophomore, and his spiritual path from vice-loving atheist to Trappist monk to envoy for global humanism. Merton lived devoutly, not just in his Catholicism but in his attempts to find clarity in life and thought; despite living much of his life as a monk, and the latter part as a hermit (though not a very good one), he was a man constantly on the move. He delved philosophically into many things – I presume a monk has plenty of time on his hands – and was a man for his time, his writings and social commentary from the halls of an abbey in central Kentucky about the global issues of war and race and non-violence clarion call for two generations of men looking for clarity as to what America was giving them. Or, perhaps more importantly, what it was asking of them.

Merton’s popularity as a writer, philosopher, and social critic resulted in droves of young men turning to Catholic monasteries in the post-World War II years as well as during and after Vietnam, but Merton’s own brand of religion might be summed up, ironically, in what he described as his naïve beliefs as a young man: that all religions “lead to God, only in different ways, and every man should go according to his own conscience, and settle things according to his own private way of looking at things.” Merton dedicated much of his life to Catholicism as the path to God, but his philosophy and intellectual curiosity, along with his late-in-life exaltation of Buddhism (he died, alas, courtesy of shady Thai insulation, suffering a fatal post-shower electric shock from a ceiling fan in a multi-faith retreat center outside Bangkok) intrigued me as evidence that his early beliefs were maybe the more accurate. As Buddha suggests, sort out your own salvation with diligence.

Seven Storey Mountain didn’t move me enough to return to Catholicism, though to be fair “return” is a bit of a stretch. I often embellish the intellectual path to my contemporary agnosticism by explaining that I was “raised Catholic,” as if my childhood piety were interchangeable with “to do the right thing,” or “by wolves”, but to be honest my Catholic exposure was mostly isolated to the short time periods around my baptism (SUPER young. Like, a baby. And I didn’t get a vote); First Communion, around the age of seven, where I received the blood and body of Jesus Christ (ew.  And again, no vote); and CCD on Wednesdays during the seventh and eighth grade (where I first exercised my right to vote by stopping attending). Perhaps the most enduring of Catholic canonical law came courtesy of my grandmother, who assured me that my tongue would turn black if I lied, or, upon a slight injury like a stubbed toe, declared that God was punishing me for some moral infraction I committed at an earlier date. Or would commit later, or was perhaps simply just thinking of committing, even if I didn’t yet know when. That God is ever ready to balance the ledger by slamming my shin into my bed frame has proven far more practical than Saul’s conversion on the road to Damascus.

Who would tell that face he’s eating Jesus? And the hair looks exactly the same today.

What did intrigue me was this idea of going to a monastery. Of dropping out of society (or at least intentionally inserting yourself into a very different one) in order to contemplate some higher ideal. To read. To write. To wear a robe and Birkenstocks and take long walks, perhaps with my sleeved hands clasped casually behind my back, a precocious speckled fawn close upon my heel or a cartoon bird on my shoulder. To hum a Gregorian chant or two. Mostly, to just be quiet for a while.

Entering a monastery presents some practical decisions, the figurative shedding of skin and literal shedding of friends, family, worldly possessions, and even your name notwithstanding. Where to find a monastery, for starters, and then which order to choose. You might be familiar with the Jesuits, they of Georgetown and St. Joseph’s and Boston College fame (and twenty-four other major universities), or the perhaps less famous Franciscans (Felician University, anyone?) or even the Benedictines. But how about the Dominicans? Or the Carmelites? The Premonstratensians? Or the Cistercians, Carthusians, Passionists, Visitationists? The Friars Minor Capuchin? Or the Poor Clares of Perpetual Adoration?1One website lists more than 300 different orders and congregations, from the simple and descriptive “Grey Nuns” (no doubt an early example of reappropriation, old nuns taking the young nuns’ slur and claiming it as their own, “you know what, you…you brunette. We are grey and we’re going to start our own thing”) to the sanguinary “Adorers of the Blood of Christ” to the very specific “Camaldolese Hermits of the Congregation of Monte Corona” to the optimistic “Sisters of Jesus, Our Hope,” a name I imagine was settled upon only after a lengthy debate as to whether they shouldn’t end with an exclamation point, and whose recruitment material includes the assertion that they “live vows of poverty, chastity and obedience within a vibrant community life.” Hopeful indeed. Anyone? The names start to delve into the impossible, adorers of blood and regret and sorrow and other emotions, unlimited by the restrictions of time and space, spawning the unavoidable satiricals like Our Lady of Perpetual Exemption2http://www.ourladyofperpetualexemption.com/ or the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence.3https://www.thesisters.org/ Choosing the correct monastery can’t be a decision one takes lightly. And we are all human, so rivalries and jealousies surely emerge. If I choose the Benedictines, will the Franciscans forever look down upon me? Do I look better in grey or black (no one looks good in brown)? Are there dedication rankings, one order taking their vows more seriously, one more forgiving in their dress (you can wear jeans here brother, he said unironically), another more collegial? I once heard an Army general tell an Air Force officer that his career choice was “a fine alternative to military service” – do the monasteries have an equivalent? Will the Opus Deis and Brothers of Mortification of the Flesh4I made that one up. tighten a figurative cilice or whip a condescending discipline in my direction should I choose a more, eh, cool denomination?5“They are doing so as you write this”, says my grandmother from her grave. “Watch yourself mister.”

The choice was made for me, my selection of Gethsemani Abbey sealed when I read Seven Storey Mountain, and after a stop at Wal-Mart (bananas and energy bars), Hobby Lobby (pens and butcher paper), and Target (yoga mat and yeah, I know), I drive the 30 or so more miles towards Gethsemani, past an empty log cabin that falsely purports to be President Lincoln’s boyhood home, then into the town of New Haven (population 891), on whose outskirts I spy my first Confederate flag of the day,6There is a brute inside of me who fantasizes about mandating that every home that sports a Confederate flag must also hang an oil portrait of Abraham Lincoln near their doorway, and look him in the eye each morning upon leaving their home, and thank him for letting them live in America. This is not a good thought to have prior to spending time at a monastery. then beyond that through the aforementioned three-way intersection and then into the parking lot of the Abbey. It is mostly full, late-model cars and designer trucks and even a Tesla, but it is tranquil, and the few other people standing around the cars are quiet. I carry my luggage instead of wheeling it behind me and follow two hipsters also checking in, they with matching puffy jackets over flannel shirts and matching thick brown belts holding up their crisp Levi’s and sporting matching short hair and beards and glasses and matching weathered (one faux, one not) brown boots, a hipster uniform.7Moment of self-reflection: Is this me? Is this what I’ve become? Just another truth-seeking, back-to-when-life-was-cool hipster, destined to make my own shoes and use locally-sourced beard oil? Is this me? No. But mostly because I do not wear jeans. One guy has two drumsticks (wood, not chicken) protruding from his satchel, and I imagine him in his room air-drumming all weekend, a silent one-man one-father one-son one-Holy Ghost drum circle.8I like your cymbal Jesus! Or is that your nimbus?

The monk behind the counter is old and stooped and hoarse, gravity working its magic on spinal and vocal cords alike; he asks me if I’ve been here before, and where I’m coming from, and did I drive? He mischievously shames me for flying and then driving just from Nashville rather than all the way from Seattle, as if I’ve cheapened my experience already, and then spends what seems to be an inordinate amount of time deciding in which of the several vacant rooms to place me. He hovers over his ultimate selection – room 310 – long enough that I think he has momentarily fallen asleep, but then he pencils my name into the register in neat, uniform block letters, hands me my keys while I listen intently to his directions, and then at 4:35 p.m. on a Friday, after speaking what I hope will be my last words until Monday morning – “thank you” – I turn and ascend the stairs.

Thomas Merton was born in France in 1915 of an American mother and a Kiwi father. They died when he was six and sixteen, respectively, and he grew up in France, England, and the U.S., raised by his father and then an uncle. He was a smart young man, though hypersensitive, it seems, to emotion and unfairness and was afflicted (and concerned) by some extremities in his own personality. He smoked packs of cigarettes a day, drank profusely, spent time in jail, talked into the early morning hours with his university pals at both Cambridge and then later Columbia, loved women – he most likely fathered a child to whom he never spoke or acknowledged – and in general fully partook of life in the 1930s. Had he not died by electrocution, wrote a New Yorker article in 2018, “he might have died by overstimulation.”9Jacobs, Alan, “Thomas Merton, The Monk Who Became a Prophet,” The New Yorker, December 28, 2018. Merton arrived in the U.S. for the last time in 1935, enrolled at Columbia, and was eventually thunderstruck by Catholicism. He entered the church in 1939, immediately began exploring the priesthood, and after opening a Bible – in Latin, of course – to a random page, he found his finger falling on a portent: “And behold, you will be silent and unable to speak until the day that these things take place.”10Gospel of Luke 1:20. A monastery it would be.

Merton visited Gethsemani Abbey in April of 1940 and returned for good in December of 1941. And whatever Merton was looking for, I think I might be looking for it too, but in the obverse, not for a life permanently slowed, or one clarified by the regimented liturgical process of centuries of rigor and tradition and obfuscation, but a simple reset, a restart, a regeneration, a re-anything that might re-mind me of what once was, that time and place where I felt indomitable, and in a flow, as if in every moment lie the potential of something amazing about to happen. To find those things hiding the true meaning of other things, a stripping away of the things we know are unimportant, or those things we think are important but really aren’t but have somehow allowed them to dominate our daily existence. Perhaps just a continuing assessment of whether Maslow was full of shit. That would do too.

Room 310 is on the west side of the dormitory and down the length of a hallway covered in blue commercial-grade carpet, the last door before a set of large windows. I get a small shock as I insert my key into the lock, as I do each time I unlock my door over the next three days, surely my grandmother sitting at the foot of God, casting tiny thunderbolts in my direction, reminding me both to be on my best behavior and also who is in charge in the unlikely event I’ve forgotten, God no doubt now wondering the same thing.

The room is austere, but frankly much more accommodating than one might expect of a monastery. There is an open closet, a nightstand, an armchair, and a single bed with a bedspread that might be cut from the same heavy textile as the hallway carpet. There is a crucifix on one wall, with a desk and desk chair under it, and two pictures on another (stations of the cross, I think confidently, grateful there is no schooled Catholic nearby to tell me otherwise or conduits through which my grandmother might shock me), and on the bed are a folded towel and washcloth and a roll of toilet paper. I unpack, and breathe deeply, and close my eyes, and frankly feel just a tiny bit emotional because, for the first time in a very long time, I feel like I am doing something. Not “doing something”, but something. Checking a box, fulfilling a promise, lining out a list, exercising dominion over myself and how I spend my time and how I exert my energy and reminding myself that I once said I was going to do something and right now, right here in this old building in the middle of Kentucky occupied by men who, years ago, decided they were going to do something – I am doing something too.

I sit down at the desk and read through the daily retreat schedule, the words familiar – Vigils and Lauds and Terces – even if their specific meanings are not. In the top drawer I find a red folder stuffed with notes from the occupiers of Room 310 before me (“pilgrims,” some of my predecessors call us), and now the monk’s attentiveness to my room assignment makes sense.11I learn later that retreatants don’t leave notes in every room, and that the red folder in 310 must occasionally be emptied of old ones to make room for the new. The dates range from early 2014 to just two weeks ago, from a concise yellow-sticky don’t give up, peace will come to you to a six-page missive describing the writer’s every day at Gethsemani. Some are monotonous and boring, a few tragic, some meandering and uncertain; most are nearly-uniform tales of a search for some sort of internal quiet, notes written on postcards and grade school ruled paper and personal stationery, some in tiny, all-capped letters, others in soaring, beautiful cursive or written in thick fuchsia ink so thick it bleeds through the paper so I can’t read the other side.12I am momentarily derailed by the number of “over!” or “other side” – sometimes accompanied by a rightward pointing arrow – written on the bottoms of these small notes, as if paper were so multi-dimensional that lack of directions at the end of a clearly incomplete note would leave me searching about the room, overturning furniture and rifling through drawers and looking under rugs for the remainder of the note, occasionally stopping in the middle of the room, one arm folded across my chest and the other holding my chin in perplexion of where, oh where could the rest of that note possibly be? until a cartoon bulb lights above my head and I snap my fingers in realization: LOOK ON THE OTHER SIDE.  I read only a few, planning on pacing myself over the next two and a half days, and I resist the urge to immediately organize the notes into chronological order (sub-urge resisted: oldest to newest, or newest to oldest). I find, however, an OCD comrade-in-arms, NP from Parnell, Tennessee, who gives me permission; she rearranged them on September 7, 2016, and there are so many retreatants between her and me who are obviously heathens.

Dinner is served promptly at six p.m. My first meal is what appears to be leftover grilled cheese sandwich halves and broccoli and mushroom soup and a dessert of Jell-O. There are fifteen to twenty other people here in line, mostly men, one of whom asks, out loud, for sugar, and just like that my Totally Ridiculous in Hindsight Plan B: No Human Voices is gone (Plan A was for total silence, which was just a silly expectation on its face. At even the quietest times I could hear the dull thrumming of my heartbeat in my ears, let alone the church bells and road traffic and birds and wind and other humans saying offensive things to me like “hi” or “good morning”). Plan C, then, is reserved for me and is within my control, which is to just be as quiet as possible, both within my head and outside of it. And so I try. I pick my feet up when I walk. I pull my chair out with two hands, lifting it instead of dragging it across the floor. I pick up a fork, then a knife, then a spoon, one at a time so they don’t clink against one another. I sip my tea and chew and swallow and breathe like I’m getting stalked, like I possess the Secret to the Universe to be stolen from me should I make a noise and disclose my location. The phone and computer are already off, of course, and will not be powered up again until Monday morning (if ever!), and I Peaceful Warrior and Downward Dog rather than blaze through push-ups and sit-ups; I turn the pages of my books methodically and slowly; I curse the reading light for its hum. I find myself doing things with deliberation and intention, a slowing down of my motions, walking quieter, breathing quieter, turning pages quieter, pushing down the toaster with precision, feeling the catch rather than bludgeoning it into submission. I have less of a death grip on my pen, the vanity of the cursive of my youth returning over the hours as I write this that you are reading, or scrawl out a list of things to Google at a later date.13Who was with Buddha when he invited Mara in for tea?; who wrote “All-American Despair”; E.O. Wilson; is Jesus always looking in the same direction when depicted on the cross?; Viaticum; Samadhi; phrase “get up on the wrong side of the bed’; Midrashic; Goliards; do nomadic cultures have a lot children, and who can I blame for overpopulation?; Détraqué; Law of Polarity; difference between an abbey and a monastery; sub question: Do people have sex during silent retreats at abbeys?; sub sub question: If so, do they feel guilty afterwards?; learn the de Profundis; sub-task: learn te deum; Parable of the Pharisee and the Publican; why is there a w in wrist? wrong. wrestle. wren.; origin of the phrase “to square a circle.”; do x-rays detect water?; Fred Swaniker; Michael Emerson / North Park Univ.; origin of phrase to “go South”; any difference between a knob and a peak?; “tal vez me puedes ayudar” – correct?; Polonnaruwa; Demoniac; why did Sodom take all the heat? Can’t we commit gomorrahy? Or gomorrahize someone?; Franciscans v Ignatians v Benedictines v Dominicans; what’s with Jesus cursing the fig tree?; fleshpot; in spite v despite.,14I know you’re not interested. But if you’re curious: Ananda; Stephen Rodrick; the world’s leading authority on ants; no, but down and to the right is definitely prevalent at Gethsemani; the Eucharist when given to a person near death; a state of intense concentration achieved through meditation; the Romans, highly superstitious, believed that one should always start the day by getting up on the right side of the bed, and getting up on the left side – the wrong side – portended a bad day ahead; Jewish methods of interpreting biblical text; a group of young clergy who wrote satirical poetry; no. Probably pre-Industrial Age agrarians; an insane or psychopathic person; everything is dual!; though it’s certainly debatable, a monastery is the premature version of an abbey; I’m guessing yes; for sure if they’re Catholic; basically, Psalm 130; I shall add it to the list; the parable suggests humble prayer, alas, “publican” here is a tax collector, and not, unfortunately, a pub owner; “wrist,” like many other “wr” words (wrestle, wrap, wrinkle…) used to be pronounced with the “w”. The 17th century left the sound behind, and we’re still waiting to drop the actual letter; it’s a geometry problem – turning a circle into a square in a limited number of steps – doubling as a metaphor for the impossible; no; a guy from Ghana doing some really, really cool shit; a guy from America doing some really, really cool shit; though it may have to do with western notions of directions and symbology and degradation (south is always towards the bottom on western maps, which is the same direction as a plunging stock market graph), some Native American tribes used the same term to describe death or dying; yes! A knob is a peak or hill having the shape of a knob (though the University of Kentucky, for what it’s worth, calls a knob “erosion remnants” of an upland area – there’s even a “Knobs Region” of Kentucky (as opposed to the “Bluegrass Region” or the “Pennyroyal”)), a peak is the high point of a mountain or a ridge; not really, though it would probably get you by; the second-oldest of Sri Lanka’s kingdoms; one possessed by the devil; the curse, I assume, of being second. No one really talks about St. Paul either; this distinction is simply too long to discuss here, but know there are at least 39 orders and hundreds of congregations; this, like much of what Jesus said, is open to interpretation. Maybe he was just hangry; places that offer “luxurious or / and unrestrained pleasure or amusement,” or what my grandmother called those she perceived as hussies; use them interchangeably (just no “of” after “despite” please).

But the world is a noisy place, and the previously overlooked or ignored are magnified by the silence. Silverware, a heater, a microwave, a faucet, spreading butter on toast, sliding out chairs, chewing, drinking, throat-clearing, swallowing, zipping, ice in glasses, automatic paper towel dispensers, an elevator bell, a church bell, an alarm bell, breathing, sneezing, coughing, snot-rocketing, farting, burping…a flushing toilet sounds like a jet engine; rolling luggage industrial machinery; flitting warbler a forest monster of Grimmian proportions. But here’s the thing: it’s good. Like really good. And it’s infectious. I read, I write, I sit and listen to birds. Or the air. Or nothing. I walk in the woods, avoiding eye contact with the occasional other human being, lest my social contract with the world obligate me to say “hello” or “good morning”, instead offering my best attempts at, but clearly fake, Duchennes smiles with a quick, nose in the air ‘sup bro, I acknowledge you but I refuse to do so overtly head nod. And I did all this in silence. Or at least according to Plan C.15To be fair, I broke Plan C three times: The first time a quite involuntarily “hey little birds!” spoken to, surprise, little birds I felt were accompanying me on a walk. I caught myself mid “little,” quietly both toning down and tailing off the “birds” part, a clear moment of shame. The second was while looking out my fourth floor window at the garden below, a big Kentucky coffee tree (gymnocladus dioicus) center and something cypressy and equally big to the right. An American crow (corvus brachyrhynchos) landed at the feeder near the wall, forcing all the other birds to fly away, drawing my eye immediately to the coffee tree in front of me where a brilliantly red-headed Red-Headed Woodpecker (melanerpes erythrocephalus) hopped up the trunk, quickly, high enough to draw my eye to a Great Blue Heron (ardea herodias) flying slowly, dramatically, just across the tops of the trees, an Ukiyo-e woodblock in motion, the ridiculousness of the five-second sequence of events prompting me to whisper, “what in the world.” And the third: During a long walk, after I spit on my arm, prompting me to call myself a name I am embarrassed to repeat. And for about two days, free of the detritus of life in 2020-America, free of Instagram likes and Facebook followers and fake news-peddlers and fake news-accusers and fake-news consumers and Buzzfeed clickbait16“30 BuzzFeed Headline Tips You Need to See to Believe” is a real thing. and Phantom Vibration Syndrome17No, you’re not crazy. Your thigh or butt vibrating despite nothing there is also a real thing. and free of a TV or Netflix or a lap top or a cell phone or even a watch was, for me – and can be for you, too – a real path, to be trite, to freeing my mind. To quote George Clinton and the Parliament Funkadelic (and definitely not En Vogue) who was quoting Junior from Platoon, who was most likely paraphrasing Emmanuel Kant who was probably riffing on David Hume who surely borrowed from Plato who, we can all agree, probably stole everything from Socrates: free your mind and your ass will follow.18And after all that, Buddha probably said it first. So I freed my mind. And my ass followed. And it was good.19For the discerning reader: yes, I edited Moses. Using “very” in the sentence “God saw all that he had made, and it was very good” (Gen. 1:31) weakens “good,” especially because the doer here is God. Is God capable of just normal good? As in, “that’s a good first try God! Now let’s see if we can do better.” No, he is not. God knows only “very good,” so using “very” is Moses just trying to pad his word count. Or so would say Mrs. DeGiacomo.

Rarely the same path.

It is Sunday night, my last night at the Abbey, my last night of Plan C. I can already feel focus drifting away, partially because I have spent a weekend reading and writing and most definitely not clock watching, and now I must get back to the real world, and I have a day to plan and a rental car to return and a plane to catch. I imagine writing a fake Airbnb review from someone who didn’t know what they were getting into (“incessant ringing of bells, guests unfriendly and hotel staff either nowhere to be seen or all together at once, boring church attached to the hotel – not ONE picture of Jesus!”), think about the proper amount of money to pay for my weekend of lodging and food (Abbey-suggested amount: “that is between you and God”), about whether I can continue what I’ve experienced over the last few days but IRL. Can I hide distractions, turn off my computer, un-install my Spotify for stretches at a time, leave my phone in the other room when I sleep? Can I communicate better, both with myself and with those important to me? I think of the language we use when texting, compared to emailing or writing a letter, compared to talking on the phone or talking face to face, compared to those things we agonize over when we want to convey the important-est of messages, and I think about the advance of technology and the absolutely mad rush of twenty-first century America, compared to the deterioration of meaningful introspection and communication, and how it has affected our expectations – and the expectations placed on us – such that we must reply now!, to the point where our smart phones not only suggest responses (“great, thanks!”) but we take them up on the offer. Haste has eliminated the personal, and like slow food that makes for a better meal, consciousness of thought makes for a better person, if I might only give myself the time. If we might only give ourselves the time.

“Tell me. What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”

– Mary Oliver

Pass it on: On the Road with Jose

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Air America

The Delta Embraer E75 from Reagan National begins its descent, and from my window seat I watch us settle into the thin layer of altostratus clouds covering central Florida like batting, diffracted and billowy, perfect mirror-imaged moguls repeating themselves as far as I can see.  Soft rays from the five p.m. sun contrast the clouds and the blue sky, but we pass through quickly and everything below is muted aquarium blue, and blurry, like looking up from the bottom of a swimming pool.  This is Orlando, the Orlando Airport specifically, and my three nights at the Hyatt Regency Orlando International Airport Hotel (prime location within the airport!) are appropriate, given this is the last leg of my two-month trip and here too is where it started.  The Orlando airport is Biosphere east, its giant windows and Macaroni Grill and hotel bar sporting too few barflies and too many Wrangler and polo shirt clad Grainger Industrial Supply salesmen small consolation for the sixty-something hours I spend within it.  A flight should end in an adventure, not a cage, and the delicious snack mix upon which I gorge at the bar does not fulfill my need for adventure, or the potential for danger, not just the threat of broken bones and bruised egos and humiliation but also the kind emotive, that sensorial overload we earn from placing ourselves in positions unfamiliar.  Adventurous my work trips are not.

G.K. Chesterton wrote that the danger of the modern person is his constant effort to escape from the street in which he lives, and that were he to be snowed in, with his neighbors and immediate surroundings his only stimulant, he “should step suddenly into a much larger and much wilder world than we have ever known.”  G.K. overreaches, and his early 1900’s didn’t have the luxury of today’s air travel, but his sentiments remain true: we delve not into our neighbor’s business, ostensibly out of respect but really because once we learn of that wilder world, we still have to face our neighbors in the morning, and wouldn’t that get awkward.  But when your flights end in taxis, and domed airports, and city sidewalks, you take your adventure as it comes.

Nashville at night, to paraphrase Shawn Mullins, is far more Los Angeles than Grand Ole Opry, despite it being the home of modern country music, the proof in the glut of decorative, Crayola-box spectrum piebald cowboy boots and bought, not won, belt-buckles; embroidered, rhinestoned cowboy shirts more Affliction and Ed Hardy than Pendleton and Sheplers.  And boobs. Boobs everywhere, huge, fake ones, spilling from spaghetti strap shirts and protruding out the front side of back-less dresses, on all ages, 16 to 60, inappropriately large when they should be average, or smooth and taut where they should be leathery, Tennessee such an unhealthy (third in obesity!)[1], unathletic state to have so many giant breasts on Time for Timer[2] bodies.  Nashville also has, I suspect, more people per capita who talk to themselves.  Loudly.  No timid under the breath commentary here, and your presence is more likely nuisance than potential audience, particularly for those crazies lingering west of the railroad tracks running under Broadway; a stark juxtaposition to the itinerants on the east side, some brilliantly playing guitars and fiddles, or white five-gallon plastic buckets and accordions, mandolins and melodicas for whatever money you’re willing to throw down, metal or paper non-discriminatory.

Across the street from the Sheraton I pause to hear a young man give his testimony to a mix of itinerants and groupies, black and white, backpack-laden and homeless, some crammed at his feet like a mosh pit and an equal amount strewn across the plaza like morning-after red Solo party cups.  A city bus roars by, denying me the opportunity to hear the preacher give his take on the role of wife, but at the same time a disheveled, scholarly looking man approaches me from the sidewalk, cigarettes and keys in one hand, newspaper in the other.  We listen to the preacher for a few minutes, then talk ourselves, about Jesus, and wives, and bluegrass music, loudly enough that we get shushed by a half-asleep vagrant, until the man tells me he’s locked his keys in his car, and could he just borrow a few dollars for the bus and I realize it’s all a ruse and as epical a beggar’s pitch I have ever heard.

In Reagan National I pass Laura Bush and one of her twin daughters, the two of them focused, a string of dark suited men both in front and in back, a silent, woolen pinstriped elephant walk; on a flight to Phoenix I witness two robust twenty-something black women, obviously on their first flight, vociferously and adamantly refusing to part with their bags which the flight attendants want to check; as clear, I think, a manifestation of black mistrust of any sort of government bureaucracy as one could ask for.  The black women’s resolve outlasts the flight attendants devotion, and they keep their luggage.

On a flight to Kansas a couple behind me talk to their young child, non-stop, explaining every detail, the finer points of acceleration and lift, depriving him of any element of surprise, or the exhilaration of flight, likely creating apprehension where there may have been only joy.  Explaining how 80,000 pounds of alloyed aluminum defies gravity sounds sketchy to even my ears, and it must be gobbledygook if you’re two, so why not just let the kid enjoy the ride?  I find hope for them when they discuss, at length and after smacking their son’s hand for smacking his own mother’s hand, their suspicion that “perhaps we’re sending the wrong message.”  Realization late is better than realization never.

Leaving Detroit a middle-Eastern man – Yemeni, in fact, which turns out to not be a state-sponsor of terrorism – moves up several rows in order to sit across from me, in a row of empty seats, him wearing a thick winter jacket despite the stiflingly hot preflight airplane air; he looks from front to back multiple times, nervously, apprehensively, each one of his looks making me, in turn, more nervous and apprehensive.  He spends too much time in the bathroom, and upon return begins to pray, semi-prostrate on the seat-back tray in front of him.  This causes me such consternation that I lift the arm rest, unbuckle my seat belt and turn slightly towards him; I will not let him leave his row if it appears he’s making a break for the cockpit.  And though I like the idea of hero, I’m more lover than fighter, so I instead engage him in conversation.  He is neither bomber nor one-way pilot, but rather a Detroit gas station attendant on his way to Yemen to visit his three children, last seen more than two years ago, and he produces pictures of his two daughters and son.  The eldest daughter, surprisingly, is the object of his most affection, and he pauses at her photo the longest, a Disneylandish five by seven picture of the girl standing, arms crossed, with her own airbrushed headshot in the upper right corner. Shame, I think, on me, and I wonder if any of the 9/11 terrorists had saccharine pictures of lovely daughters in their wallets.

From Orlando to Philly a precocious girl next to me asks me to smell the feet of her stuffed Minnie Mouse (I do), then peppers me and everyone else around us, for the rest of the flight, with all forms of the word “irritate.” She uses it correctly, if not gratuitously.  She’s irritated, her father is irritating her, she doesn’t mean to irritate me, the air is irritatingly cold.

From Hawaii to DC I sit next to another daughter, this one a laconic college senior returning from a trip with her inversely verbose mother, them discussing the daughter’s future but the latter dominating the conversation.  She solicits my opinion routinely; she wants her daughter to be in “policy,” but the daughter, wearing too-tight jeans, a long sleeve mock turtle with a peach colored button up sweater and a strand of pearls, just wants to write.  She is uninspiring, and I wonder at what age the prematurely mature turn from precocious to simply boring.

In a Philadelphia airport hotel bar I witness a female bartender taking absolutely no shit from the Korean couple who own the bar, first exasperating the husband, then pleasantly taking my order for a beer (“another Sierra Nevada honey?”), then exasperating his wife.  It becomes apparent the bartender has only worked here a few weeks, and I do not know how it can last too many more.

From Denver to San Francisco I read that the world still thinks America is the coolest country on the planet; boarding a plane in Seattle I overhear an older woman, fumbling with her dated cell phone over the tops of her glasses, ask her traveling companion “how do I put this thing on vibrator;” on the way to Kansas City a meticulously manicured male flight attendant hits on me, casually dropping my name during his rounds: “can I get you something to drink Joe?”  Beat. “That is your name. Isn’t it?”

My cab driver from Incheon International Airport to my Seoul hotel is an American citizen; Mr. Kim – all Kims and Lees in Korea, no Hatfields versus McCoys here lest the country eat itself in genocide or mutually assured destruction – is 41, but has spent the last twenty years of his life on America’s west coast after spending the first twenty here.  He left his fifteen year old daughter with friends so he and his wife could come home to take care of his ailing father, and he tells me, salaciously, that though his wife was born in America, her “body is all Korean.”

The flight to Korea chases the sun for the duration, mirroring the revolution and defying darkness; the return flight counters it, defying time (I leave Seoul at six pm on Friday, and arrive in Seattle at 1230 the same day).

Gone: the resetting of watches upon touchdown. Cell phones are tethered to satellites, and watches will be gone from the civilized world soon enough, at least for practical purposes, serving instead as they do in the Third World, nothing more than a bauble, a Swatch Watch for the 21st Century.

In Seattle, a friend’s beautiful downtown wedding is juxtaposed with listening to a convicted triple-murderer, being prepped to testify for the government in a trial against a co-conspirator, complain about his haircut.  I crack a joke about the difference between a bad haircut and a good one (two days), and am later horrified at my detachment in the presence of bona fide evil.

I find that flying more often makes it harder, not easier, a subconscious recognition, perhaps, that my odds are decreasing; particularly on takeoff, where I start to imagine the plane nose-diving into a field, or houses, or a river, and I wonder if I will close my eyes during the fall or keep them open.

While waiting for my ride in the Incheon International Airport, I meet 32 year-old Keshab Raj Sapkota, an American Soldier as of one year ago and a Nepalese citizen the 31 years prior.  He taught social studies in his hometown of Butwal until he won a proverbial Golden Ticket, a free path to American citizenship, just one of about fifty thousand annually out of nearly fifteen million applicants in the Diversity Program.  Keshab had a point-six percent chance to win this Green Card Lottery, and after spending about six months at Ft. Benning, Georgia, here he is on his way to the 2nd Infantry Division at Camp Casey, Republic of Korea, to be an air conditioner repairman in order to provide for a better life for his wife and daughter.  Such are the things that make us American, and I think, perhaps, America is the coolest country on the planet, in spite of it all.

[1] Gold to Mississippi, Silver to Louisiana

[2] When I’m slow on the draw, and I need something to chaw, I hanker for a hunka cheese.  When my ten gallon hats-a-feeling five gallons flat, I got something planned, which is little cheese sandwiches.  When my get up and go has got up and went, I hanker for a hunka cheese.  When I’m dancin’ a hoe down, and my boots kinda slow down, or any time I’m weak in the knees, I hanker for a hunka, a slabber slice a chunk of, a snack a day’s a winner, and it won’t spoil my dinner, I hanker for a hunka cheese.