The morning ride

I see him every day, through the slightly smudged window of my commuter train. Invariably, he is sleeping. Covered in a worn gray blanket with a black plaid overlay, he sleeps on the grass under a looming, imposing oak, the trunk, branches, and leaves of the tree seemingly shielding and protecting him. It is a beautiful and serene sight, this prone, resting body at the edge of a grass field. The eight am sun filters in through the fir trees that ring the field; caught and refracted in the morning dew, it sparkles in alternating, sunlit rows. As our train thunders past on one side and as cars stream by on the other, he does not stir. He never does. Why should he? The fickle vicissitudes of life that are the cause of consternation and ulcers for others – swings in the market, office politics, social status – are meaningless to him. Maybe he’s lonely sometimes, but who isn’t? Maybe he thinks often of a family he once knew, but who doesn’t? Amidst a mass of lemmings starting their day on rails or rubber, he sleeps in a field of diamonds.

I wonder how he found this spot, how he found this little slice of sun-dappled perfection nestled between six lanes of asphalt and a set of railroad tracks. I wonder if he likes it there, if he has to fend off others who seek to encroach upon his field, his tree. I wonder if, when he opens his eyes for the first time in the morning, he fancies himself lucky; lucky for the view, the peace, or perhaps just lucky that this day brought sunshine, and not rain.

I wonder, when the lemmings have gone home and celestial twinkling fills the sky, what he thinks as he beds down under his worn gray blanket.

I wonder all these things, but mostly I wonder what he would think of me. What he would think of me should he open his eyes and see a man in a metal tube staring back at him through a dirty window, hurtling forward, direction, speed, and destination fixed by rails, conductors, and the self-imposed rules of a life that most would call “better.” Would he care? Would he be jealous? Would he notice, in those eyes staring back at him, a touch of envy?

He never wakes, never opens his eyes. My secret envy is safe. He’s probably drunk, I tell myself; probably stinks to high heaven and has to wipe his ass with newspaper that chafes. The train slows, my three-thousand dollar watch tells me I am on time; on time for a job that pays me to sit in a room and press small plastic squares over, and over again. Later, as he sleeps under the aged light of the stars, I sleep under eight floors of concrete and people. Later still, he sleeps in his field; I whizz by, watching, and wondering.

They are out there

I can still recall the flick of the wrist that started it all. The flick that, after successfully pleading with my dad for ‘one more cast’, sent those thin coils of monofilament line spinning off the green and white Zebco reel, dragged along behind the red and white bobber, snelled hook, and mini jet-puffed marshmallow. The plop as the bobber splashed down into the rich, tannic waters of the New Jersey Pine Barrens. A brief pause - ripples dissipating, and then the bobber disappeared, almost gently, under the surface of the water and there was the unmistakable tug of life on the other end of my line. Just below the surface something violent writhed and thrashed, churning up muck and silt, obscuring visibility in the reddish water. A glimpse of something – was it a fin? – was all I got. Thhhht, thhhht, went my line, taut, as it sliced through the shallow waters. I can’t say if I had a look of joy or terror on my face at that moment, and I hope it was joy, but fear it was terror. It is a good thing that my ten year-old hands and wrists were already strong and agile from many rounds of Missile Command and Space Invaders, for I needed every ounce of strength to crank the handle on the little Zebco, whose designers undoubtedly did not design the reel to handle such ferocity. 

After what seemed like an hour but was probably twenty seconds, I gained ground; soon, the battle was over. Out of the stained Pine Barren waters and onto the dusty shores of the small pond I pulled a monster – a long, green and gold creature with a snake-like head filled with teeth, an animal so ghastly I would have sworn it was leftover from the Cretaceous period. It lay there, on the ground, gill plate rising and falling to the rhythm of life, dappled sunlight reflecting off the water and slime coating its side, jaws slightly agape, a lidless, circular eye seemingly fixed on me, as I was on it. If this creature had legs – indeed, if it had even so much as moved towards me, I would have run for the hills. Only in the movies and in the dark corners of my imagination had I seen something so monstrously wild. 

It was a Chain Pickerel; weighing perhaps two pounds and no more than eighteen inches in length. 

But no matter what the cold hard figures of a scale or tape measure might have told me about my adversary, that fish was a monster. Sailors from eras past had the giant squid, or perhaps the terrible Kraken; I had this. Much as those creatures became legends both feared and revered to them, so too did this fish to me. It gave me the certainty of belief that the fantastic and the unbelievable do exist. If you felt something brush past your leg, if you thought you saw something through the murky, weedy waters; well, that was probably him. 

In the decades I have fished since that day in New Jersey, I have yet to catch anything that grabbed hold of my consciousness like that Chain Pickerel. But I know they are out there, and I will keep casting. One day, perhaps, I will get lucky and toss my line to the exact spot where imagination meets fear, and I will again feel the tug of a monster.

Fly Eagles, Fly

It’s not easy being a fan of the Philadelphia Eagles. Born in Philadelphia, you don’t have much of a choice – you know how they say you can’t choose your family? Well, when you’re born in the shadows of Independence Hall, you can’t choose your football team, either. Yet the hard truth is this: forty four Super Bowl champions have been crowned in the NFL, and not once has that team hailed from Philadelphia. We’ve been close – agonizingly so – but close in the NFL is worth about as much as a cup of sand in the desert. We’ve been the butt end of jokes, the step-brother to sports’ golden children in New York City, the place where batteries and invectives freely fly. Underdog would be an understatement. 

It would be one thing if the Eagles were perpetually horrendous, if they were not the type to offer a glimpse of hope that, like a mirage on backcountry asphalt, is always one step ahead of where you are. But they aren’t; our birds have actually been one of the top three teams in the NFL over the past decade, in terms of regular season records. It’s been a decade of the “almost there” team, the “if we had one more play” team, the “why did he have to get injured now” team, and the "yard short and a minute late" team. Add that to history and you have two generations of football seasons that have ended in exactly the same spot - at the corner of Disappointment and Heartbreak. Babies have been born, men have died, wars started, wars ended, all without the Philadelphia Eagles ending a postseason with a win.  

But you don’t keep coming back for more, you don’t keep watching season after season, clad in midnight green and silver, without learning a thing or two along the way, or possibly going completely insane. Perhaps, just perhaps, not winning the Super Bowl has been a good thing. No, not because it will make it “that much sweeter” when and if we do (though it would), but because of what it might teach us about life itself.  

The Eagles have been an incredible team – best in the league, if you ask me – to watch and enjoy over the past decades. Watching Randall Cunningham play quarterback, you knew that you were witness to something so beautiful and ahead of its time that you and all the poets of the world lacked the vocabulary to adequately describe it. Somewhere, in the recesses of my mind, Randall is still scrambling, still mystifying coaches and defenders, still unleashing that majestic cannon of an arm and launching a perfect moon shot to an uncovered Fred Barnett, fifty-yards down field. Somewhere, the crowd still roars, and little boys still smile.   

Even in the dark days of Rich Kotite and Ray Rhodes, there were flickers of light. Then there was Donovan – underappreciated to this day – and an unprecedented era of great football in the city of Philadelphia. From 4^th and 26, to a 14-second play against the hated Cowboys, to a NFC Championship and a Super Bowl appearance, to throwing four touchdowns on a broken leg, Donovan gave us one hell of a good run – sometimes literally, always figuratively. And now, one season of Michael Vick, perhaps the first NFL quarterback to combine lightning quickness with being a lightning rod for controversy – a season again filled with the improbable (hanging 59 points on the Redskins) and the unbelievable (another Miracle at the Meadowlands).  

All that, and no Super Bowl. No, you don’t keep coming back to the Eagles because you have a need to root for a championship team (they call those people Yankee fans). We keep coming back because, for one, we all harbor that little seed inside us called hope – hope that one day things will be better, that one day we will be vindicated – but, more importantly, because we’ve come to realize that even though we haven’t won any of those oddly shaped silver trophies, we’ve had one hell of a fucking good time. As in life, you can spend all day, all week, all year, every year, waiting for that one glorious and transcendent moment of triumph that will make it all worthwhile, that one accomplishment upon which you can finally forever rest, or you can sit back and enjoy the ride, knowing that that one glorious moment, should it come, will pass in the same ephemeral fashion as all the rest. And that, in sum total, a handful of glorious moments relegated to the dusty shelves of memory, do not a lifetime of memories replace. Let’s not forgo enjoyment of the journey for the presumed gratification of the destination. Fly Eagles, fly.  

 

Steinbeck and America

“He dominates his area. He is protected by good clothing, good houses, and good food. But in his fight for dominance he has pushed out others of his species who were not so fit to dominate and perhaps these have become wanderers, improperly clothed, ill fed, having no security and no fixed base. These should really perish, but the reverse seems true. The dominant human, in his security, grows soft and fearful. He spends a great part of his time in protecting himself. Far from reproducing rapidly, he has fewer children and the ones he does have are ill protected inside themselves because so thoroughly protected from without. The lean and hungry grow strong, and the strongest of them are selected out. Having nothing to lose and all to gain, these selected hungry and rapacious ones develop attack rather than defense techniques, and become strong in them, so that one day the dominant man is eliminated and the strong and hungry wanderer takes his place.”

“And the routine is repeated. The new dominant entrenches himself and then softens.”

--John Steinbeck, 1941

The prescience of Steinbeck never fails to amaze. I'm sure that many who read this passage, from The Log from the Sea of Cortez, would be quick to draw parallels between this paragraph and the supposed decline and imminent doom of the American "empire." What with China on the rise and advertising slots to sell, the narrative of a great nation in decline is a sure-fire winner.  

What I think is missing, though, is the impact of immigration. When Steinbeck talks about the dominant becoming soft and having fewer, less-capable offspring, he neglects to account for the possibility of fresh, hungry, new blood being introduced (fair enough, Steinbeck was talking about old, rich families - not nations - in the passage above). The "lean and hungry" who invariably overthrow the entrenched softies - for generations these have been the immigrants arriving on American shores; these have been the people keeping alive the hunger that keeps alive the economic and cultural dominance of America. These people have provided the fresh blood that has kept America the culturally vibrant and economically dominant power that it is today - for a look at the alternative universe, look no further than any number of European countries with laws that, for fear of competition, severely restrict the immigration of educated workers...limited GDP growth, declining populations, three-month summer vacations for all. Sounds like Steinbeck hit the nail on the head with those.

This is what was so troubling with Bush policy that greatly restricts the number of educated immigrants that are allowed to enter the US. This is what is so troubling with some of the protectionist sentiments in America that call for even more restrictive immigration policy - TARP recipients, for instance, could no longer employ H-1B visa holders, causing many an educated immigrant to return to their home country to ply their talents. It's the defensiveness that Steinbeck refers to coming around to bite us in the ass - fearful for our own jobs, wary of a stagnant unemployment rate, we think that the best solution is to eliminate as much competition as possible. Has there been a clearer case of cutting off one's nose to spite the face?  

We are a country of immigrants. Immigrants are who made America, who made it the great country it is, and who will make it the great country it can be for generations to come. What a shame, then, that once many of these "immigrants" became "Americans," they suddenly started to play protect-the-pie, forgetting not only their history but also compromising their futures.    

High above Cayuga's waters

Dylan told me the times were changing, and how right he was. It was a beautiful spring day in upstate New York, the kind of day where the sky is a little bluer, the air a little fresher, the grass a little greener; the kind of day you long for and dream about in the depths of the winters here. As I walked home under those bluebird skies, through the quad that echoed with the voices of classes past, glimpses of Cayuga Lake in the distance, I tried, again, to take it in, hold on to it, and never forget it. To take in the sound of the bells from McGraw Tower as it reverberated off the pockmarked stone of the buildings around me; to hold on to the feeling of peace I had found at Cornell, to never forget each and every memory that I had made here. I had been trying to do this for months, knowing that the day would soon come where I would be thousands of miles away from this place, where the only access would be through the remembered snapshots in my head. I think I knew, deep down, that this was a futile exercise. That those snapshots I longed so desperately to hold on to would fade, inevitably, with time. That the bond I felt with this place, with this campus, with its sights, sounds, and smells, that this too, would fade. That time, and life, inexorably take away what they once gave.  

I had come to Cornell two years ago – driving my Volvo from California and unsure of what to expect as I turned off Interstate 81 in what seemed like the middle of farm country. I had come to Cornell with a vague sense of direction, a dose of apprehension, and a larger dose of a particular type of anticipatory excitement that is only found at the start of what you know will be a great adventure. 

Things were quiet when I first arrived that July – streets empty, Campus devoid of human activity, stores in Collegetown still ‘closed for summer.’ It was like looking at a dry, desolate streambed, knowing that when the rains came, so too would life. I did not know what this flow of life would look like but I did know that it would come. 

And come, it did, with a torrential flurry of SUVs and minivans, weighed down with families, televisions, and suitcases; students, weighed down with expectations, pressures, and perhaps a bottle or two of vodka. It was interesting to be both a part of and a witness to this sudden influx of energy and life; interesting to see, in those first weeks and months of school, the ebb and flow of social relations and interactions, much like the freshly fallen rains finding their way to the streambed, rivulets of water flowing this way and that, branching out, rejoining, working their way around rocks and over pebbles. Couples came, couples went. Friends and acquaintances were made, many forgotten, and a lucky few cherished forever.

Life had become a blur, like an old flip book that, moving quickly, fools viewers into thinking of it as a continuous stream of motion instead of a collection of static scenes. I can pick out some of those scenes, recalling them with a sense of clarity I suspect is borne purely of personal bias. I can recall lying on the field abutting Cayuga, grass blades gently pricking my skin, a light fall breeze blowing over her and me, the intermittent sounds of kids playing and water lapping the shoreline providing the soundtrack to a perfect day. I remember alcohol, lots of alcohol. I remember French fries and camaraderie in Amsterdam, credit card roulette at John Thomas, sledding the slope with the help of Jager and gravity, paddling the Susquehanna River, roommate dinner at The Antlers, opening presents by our Christmas tree. I remember even smaller portions of static scenes, the laugh of my favorite professor, the thunderous roar of Niagara Falls, the smiles of my friends, stark silhouettes of trees cast black against the white and gray hues of freshly fallen snow and overcast skies, the smell of old wood mixed with brewed coffee at Collegetown Bagels, the gentle touch of a beautiful but forbidden fruit. 

I can remember the last night I spent in Ithaca, in our apartment that was once so full of life and laughter but that was now occupied by only me, a few boxes, and one suitcase. A living room devoid of furniture, two empty bedrooms, a hallway stripped bare – the apartment looked and even sounded empty, lifeless. 

I have never felt more alone.  

Suddenly the place that I wanted so dearly to hold on to became a place I could not wait to leave.

I can remember all this, scenes and snippets from a life I used to live and love. Sometimes they inspire me and fill me with satisfaction and delight, sometimes, like the fading glow of a past glory, they sadden me. I am reminded that the streambed only looks dry and dead because you know what it used to look like with water and life in it. The grander the past, the more sobering the present. Relativity – it is a bitch. 

And so I walked through campus that spring day, again possessing a vague sense of direction and a dose of apprehension. But instead of the delicious excitement of anticipation that I had brought with me two years prior, I now had two years of beautiful memories, memories of days and nights gone by, memories that will comfort - and haunt - forever.