Author: Peter Freilinger

I’ve played golf four times in the last month, for the first time in two years, and it’s made me realise how much has changed in the last two years. My body is pathetic – doughy, out of shape, but mostly just out of sync. I can putt the ball as well as I ever could – in fact a few times I found myself wondering where that touch came from – but every swing of the club felt like a quarter second delay in mental initiative to physical execution, and it even extended to basic things like picking up the ball from the cup or putting the bag of clubs onto my shoulder. I’ve lost rhythm, and it won’t come back quickly.

It’s not like I’ve been totally sedentary for the past two years, mind you. I’ve been taking the dog for her minimum of two hours of daily walks – she has energy and she needs it and she demands the effort – and I’ve been raising the son full time, with only rare breaks, since last March, including all cooking, cleaning, commuting, teaching, encouragement, discouragement, and all the rest. That burns calories. In the meantime, I’ve also realized that not going to the office at all means I can mix a gin and tonic at 11am and no one cares; indeed, sometimes having a gin and tonic in hand for an 11am conference call is the thing that preserves my sanity. Perspective is a challenge, and having perspective in the face of a pandemic, in the face of a multiple part-time startup enterprises, often requires a gin and tonic at 11am. I am making no apologies.

Hitting the course was strange because that weird disconnect – that tenth of a second between head and shoulders, brain and wrists – meant I was losing golf balls at a majestic rate. In fact on Tuesday this week, I had to give up after six holes because I had literally ran out of golf balls, despite the late fall bare ground allowing me to find at least one ball for every two I lost. It was a new course for me but I joined for a membership for the next year – I’m going to get out and play more, and the boy is really getting into the game, and it seems like a good idea to be able to have a place where I can just trot up and play. But not if I’m going to lose a dozen balls every six holes – I need to polish things up.

In Maine, one doesn’t polish one’s game up starting in November, however.

I walked the last three holes without playing them – not having a ball is a significant impediment to playing golf – and threw my clubs in the back of my car, changed my shoes, and let my body feel itself. Nothing nasty, mind you – I just let my body talk to itself, describe its aches and annoyances and the like – and that’s where I heard it talk about the disconnect. Yes, it felt the impact of an up and down three mile walk on a chilly November morning; yes, it said “you really need to take an Advil before you play golf these days”. It also said yes, it’s now 1pm and you’ve earned the gin and tonic. But what I felt in my flesh and bones was a disconnect, a timing being off. My body as it has aged has gotten slightly slower than my mind, and my body is awfully annoyed about it.

So I got in my car and drove back to the house. The dog was in her day care so I didn’t need to pick her up, and the boy wouldn’t come home until much later in the afternoon. I grabbed some supplies for dinner and checked the mailbox; the New York Review of Books had arrived. I read the first essay, about a book written by an author whose family had a long history with the Ku Klux Klan, and fixed that gin and tonic.

And it occurred to me that I hadn’t written anything in a long time. I mean, I know I haven’t written anything for The Essence of Water in awhile – for those who follow it, you may be excused for thinking that this has become Mark Hannam’s personal essay site. Heck, Vero and Matt haven’t written anything in even longer, so that’s not a singular failing on my part. But even more than that, I haven’t written any letters in a long time. This is noteworthy because for most of my life, letters have been the way I’ve expressed myself. Letters to lovers, to friends, to coworkers, you name it – I write letters as my primary means of expression. These essays have, in a basic way, been extended letters to an audience of friends – old and new, current and long-forgotten – but also an extended letter to my son, to let him know how his father was as a human being while he was growing up. From 2017 to now – for over four years – this has been an extended letter to the universe, and yet for the past five months or so, I haven’t written back.

It’s not like the universe has stopped talking to me, or that any of you out there have stopped talking to me. I mean, some of you have – I got an entertaining email from someone asking to be dropped from the distribution list I occasionally send out to let people know of new postings, for example – and what with the pandemic and travel restrictions and the like, plenty of us have just sort of lost touch out of entropy. We may very well like to stay in touch but since the likelihood of physical contact has vanished, part of the incentive to keep the other elements of communication alive have also atrophied.

The art of speaking out, however – not speaking per se, but speaking out into the wind, into the public, regardless of whether anyone listens – is a practice, and when put aside, that practice gets stale. I can’t hit the ball straight anymore, and it feels the same way to put hands to keyboard as it does to grip the club. Typing this is easy; finding the words is a lot harder than it was a year ago, two years ago. There is a disconnect, a hesitancy in the act of bridging the thoughts in my mind to the fingers which press the keys and make the words appear on the screen.

It occurs to me as well: you have to start sometime all over again. It’s November here, and the air is crisp but also it gets damp and cold, the wind howling off the Atlantic. The house is more or less ready for winter, and it’s not the right time of year to be learning golf again. But I’m going to head out next week, on Tuesday, when the boy is in school and the dog is in day care, and I’m going to buy a dozen golf balls from the bargain bin, and I’m going to try to play again. I will be awful; with luck I will sink a few putts, or have that lovely pitch that gets within a few feet of the hole, before I drive it into the bushes on the next tee and curse and feel the disconnect in my nerves, my hips, my feet, my shoulders, my mind.

And today, I’ll hit publish, and start over again on writing. To my son: I’m sorry I forgot to write for a few months. To the rest of you: I hope you viewed the respite as a little break in a year where little breaks mattered a lot. To the ex-reader in San Antonio: screw you. It’s time to start over again.

Back in my college days, I had a job at a newsstand in the centre of Harvard Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The name of the place was Out of Town News, and it was well known for having newspapers and magazines from around the world. In fact part of my job – I worked two nights a week and usually both days on the weekends – was to drive the company truck out to Logan Airport and make the rounds at the cargo terminals to get the weekly drop of papers – Alitalia for the Italian papers, JAL for the Asian papers, Air France, British Airways, blah blah. I enjoyed the fact that I worked a “real job” (not some internship) while I was finishing up my undergrad at Harvard; I never really meshed with the regular Harvard house types, neither the rich legacy kids nor the overambitious strivers nor even – though I tried – with the artsy pseudo intellectual crowd. I was by no means of the proletariat – my family wore its bourgeois stripes proudly – but I felt more comfortable hanging out with the locals who worked the newsstand and complained about Sheldon, the owner of the place, and who introduced me to the cops and the semi-professional panhandlers and the rest of the locals who worked minimum wage plus tips to service the university crowd. It also meant I could walk into any local – not the ones catering to parents or students, but the proper locals – and drink without being ID’ed, which was good because I looked like I was twelve years old back then.

Continue reading “Filthy”

I traveled down east last weekend to pick up the boy, but also to finish off two weeks of solitude. I went to a restaurant that midcoast Maine doesn’t deserve to have, a place called The Hichborn, located in a town unfortunately better known for some recent rural tragedies than for its cuisine, where I had a Michelin star worthy experience, then in the morning went across twenty miles of gravel and dirt roads to my son’s summer camp, where he was finishing off his first two weeks of sleep away camp. It was a big event for a nine year old, although he took it in stride, simply pointing out that the other kids in his cabin agreed that sleep away camp was a sextillion times better than day camp; for me, it was a milestone, the beginning of the long process whereby he lives on his own, away from father or mother or kin, and simply finds his own way. Two weeks is a lot for a nine year old, but clearly, he’s ready to start loosening the ropes which moor him to my dock.

His desires on returning from camp were simple but, as I thought about them, strange. He had had two weeks of YMCA institutional cooking – frozen waffles and bulk cereal for breakfast; frozen chicken patties and hot dogs for lunch; bulk made sheet pan pizza and macaroni and cheese and bowls of generic salad with off-brand ranch dressing for dinner – but what he wanted first and foremost for lunch as we motored south to Scarborough was generic American sandwich: Subway, a twelve inch bacon and salami sandwich with lettuce, pickles, onions, and mayo. He also went wild with the drinks dispenser; he made a toxic mishmash of Coca-Cola, lemonade, acai berry vitamin water, and rootbeer. I made the mistake of asking to try it and almost missed the onramp to get back on the turnpike. After 14 days of non-profit camp bland, though, all he wanted was corporate suburban bland, complete with extra high fructose corn syrup and all the sodium he could get.

When we arrived back at the house, he saw his room and melted down: I had taken down roughly half of his Lego town in an effort to vacuum his room properly for the first time since winter. Buildings had been torn down, roadways torn up. The only possible response was tears, anguish, despair. I didn’t mind. He’s nine years old, and two weeks in a sylvan retreat with other children, trapped away from screens, parents, well-made meals, and showers was bound to descend his soul into an Edenic state. Returning to where we live, in the Fall after we rediscover sin, where cleanliness matters as much as plate presentation, where one can play video games but only subject to daily parental limits – this was going to cause a system shock, no matter what. I let him cry it out, and let him relax in his bed – which he admitted felt really good – and convinced him that taking a long hot shower would be the best thing he could do. He took it, and my parental credibility upped a few notches: he admitted it was, in fact, the best thing he could do. Also he ended up smelling better and lost the sheen of two weeks of lake, sweat, bug spray, and dirt that had accumulated into a visible exoskin above his now dark tanned young body.

Yesterday he slept in and I brought him breakfast in bed and let him play an extra hour of screen time; I did laundry and walked the dog with her friend down to the shore, where they played and disrupted the stand-up paddleboarders trying to launch. In the afternoon, all three of us – father, son, dog – went to the grandparents’ house and I made supper and the grandson regaled his beaming grandparents with tales of camp. My father talked about his time in Boy Scout camp in the late 1940s and early 1950s, and the two compared notes on how bad the food was, how bad the showers were, and whether or not there was electricity in camp. I realised that my mom, growing up poor on the south side of Chicago, didn’t get to go to camp; she spent summers escaping the city and other things in downstate Illinois, with aunts and cousins, but not on a lake side with other kids her age. She and I cooked supper while the young and very old boy talked and watched the Red Sox game. We did not talk politics, national or state or local; we did not think beyond summer in Maine, in the woods, on the coast, all of us agreeing the mosquitoes were terrible, all of us agreeing the blueberry barrens down east had the best berries, and that the grandson was singularly lucky that his camp was close enough to have nature walks into them to pick and eat Maine’s best summer export, right off the bush.

This morning, I reset the screen time limits: two hours of free iPad time a day, two hours of television a day, and nothing more. More time outdoors, since after all he had spent nine or ten hours a day in the sun and fog and dark and campfire smoke for the past two weeks. This was an injustice, and the reiteration of the house rules was met with a stony glare and an impudent shutoff of the television. Mid morning, I told him we were going to go grocery shopping; I had more or less lived off of what was in the freezer for leftovers for the past two weeks, and all of the remaining fruits and vegetables, and drank all of the gin, and we needed to restock for both of us. First, though, we were going to take the dog for a walk, at a local land trust space, which was on top of and around a bog. He said okay – which was surprising; normally he’d reject going for a nature walk.

We parked at the rough lot, not much more than a graded glade with some felled pine logs to indicate where the cars should go, and out hopped the dog and the boy. The trail was muddy and in places, the rain of the past six weeks – rainiest July in over 100 years, they say – ran in tiny rivulets over the trail, soaking your sandals and your feet in cool water. I pointed out the blueberries and he looked down too, and started walking more slowly, watching the bushes, trying to figure out which ones were blueberries – yum – and which ones were the dark red berries that I didn’t know the name of but I knew they’d make us sick. It’s a popular trail, and a lot of the blueberry bushes had been stripped bare, but there were still a few, and we would stop, stoop, pick, and gulp them down. Delicious: the best berries are downeast, but the ones here in Scarborough are still quite good, certainly better than anything you get in a store, anywhere. Especially when you eat them from your hand.

As we walked, we looked down closer, and across the bogland were tiny blackberry bushes – not bushes, actually, just small plants with miniature blackberries, not much larger than a tiny blueberry but so different, small clusters of black-purple, the ripe ones disintegrating between your fingers no matter how delicately you picked them, others staying whole just long enough to gather the five or eight or ten required to justify popping your hand to your mouth to try them, as good as the blueberries but harder to find, all just off the trail, in your sandal clad toes, requiring you to look past the mosquitoes and the longer tendrils of grass to find them, nestled with the dark lichen and the green moss that covers the moist earth of a bog in Maine in August.

The dog trampled in and out of the woods, mud up to her haunches, happy to be alive and with her troop, reassembled after a two week separation. The boy crouched down, looking for berries, or looking at the mud, looking at the bog, trying to find the path. I’m taking another shower tonight, he said, as his sandal squished in the black mud and his feet felt the muck encase them. Sounds good, I said, as I gingerly found the grassy mounds and boulders to clamber over so that my feet would remain sort of dry.

We got back to the car, ready to go to the market for our shopping, and I realised that for an hour, I hadn’t looked up at all. I had paid attention to the ground, the dirt, the moss, the berries, the water. I had looked at my son and my dog, smaller than me, also exploring the earth beneath them. I looked up at the trees, towering over us in the parking area, at the grey sky diffusing the sunlight across the fog that had itself found the coast a congenial parking lot. I stood up fully but felt like it had been a gracious time, looking down, only looking down, to see the things from which we all grow.

Tonight he wants sushi for dinner. Fair enough. It’s wonderful to have him back.

Here in the states, there’s an insurance company called GEICO – the Government Employees Insurance Company – which is owned by Berkshire Hathaway (Warren Buffett’s investment vehicle). They’re known for their tongue in cheek advertisements, one of which currently involves a motivational speaker who teaches people to “not become their parents” when they become homeowners. The conceit is that once you buy a house, you’ll start wearing Members Only jackets, buy throw pillows with embroidered trite expressions, and stop knowing how to interact with wait staff at restaurants without speaking too loudly and asking embarrassing questions. It works, although how it relates to bundling auto and homeowners insurance does escape me. In any event – I’ve come to realise lately that I’ve descended into post-middle age crankiness: I’m writing on the local newspaper’s comment section.

Continue reading “Monopoly”

So June 19 is the anniversary of something important in American history – it’s the day that, officially, the abolition of the legal institution of slavery was promulgated in the last rebel state to lay down arms in the Civil War, Texas. There had been the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 but that was a bit of a con job: Lincoln announced that slavery was outlawed in those states that had rebelled against the Constitution and the Union, but the Union largely had no control over the regions affected – and in states that had not rebelled, slavery remained legal. The 13th Amendment to the US constitution declared slavery illegal in all of the United States in December of 1865, but with the military defeat of the rebel states in April of 1865, the Union government had the power and the authority to enforce the Proclamation of 1863, and it was finally promulgated in that last large bastion of slavery on June 19, 1865. Given that both Mexico and Canada had long since eliminated the peculiar institution, we can thus celebrate June 19 – Juneteenth, as it came to be known by the newly freed black in the South – as the last day of chattel slavery in North America.

And as we all know, it was not the last day of racism in continental North America. Or anywhere.

Continue reading “Juneteenth”