

A Philosopher and A Firefighter Go Up A Hill

Copyright 2012 by Sal Traina

Smashwords Edition

Skeletal thoughts and mindless bones, battle it out with sticks and stones. Urgency here, emergency there, decades go by, then suddenly calm, now moments go by, and eternity reigns, sand through the hourglass pours from my veins. But before I away, a rainbow appears, and the sun of my son conquers my fears.

Bravery in the face of enemy fire. Heroic, yes? How about bravery in the face of actual fire? In the service of saving the lives of strangers? What word shall we use to describe that?

They don't call us bookworms for nothing. But real worms enrich the soil and serve as bait. Pray tell, what are bookworms good for?

A Firefighter Is Born

"It's all right, dad, go back to sleep." _What_ was all right? I'd heard the muffled sounds of beeps and garbled staticky voices from his walkie-talkie many times in recent months, but this time the familiar sounds coming out of his room seemed different, more urgent, and he seemed to be ricocheting off the walls as he got ready for this latest emergency.

I think I saw him waving to me on his way out just before I fell back to sleep, the non-caped crusader tearing as quietly as he could down the hall and out the door, his transformation a real-life version of the imaginary ones I used to see Clark Kent and Bruce Wayne go through on my TV as a boy.

We'd been living in Ithaca for less than a year, and he was seventeen. He'd recently joined the volunteer fire department in nearby Lansing, and his mother and I thought it was nice he'd found something that interested him, but we had no idea this latest diversion would turn into his life's work.

Eighteen days before nine-eleven, Alexander got an early morning 911 call, and before I knew what was going on, he was out of the house and on his way to help God knows who from God knows what. Later that day I found out exactly who and precisely what, and I also found out my child's role in what had unfolded. This is my recollection, a bookish father's version, of what happened that day...

_A small cargo plane crashed in the fog near Ithaca Airport, bursting into flames, setting off fires in the surrounding forest. The two men on board were dead, their bodies burned beyond recognition, and black smoke was everywhere. My son was one of several firefighters at the scene, raining water on the inferno, pushing through the wreckage, and then confronting the gruesome remains of the doomed aviators. I feared his eyes were too young to witness such horror, his mind and body too unsteady for such a mission, and as I thought of his playful animating spirit, what we Sicilians refer to as one's anima_ _and what we Americans used to refer to as one's immortal soul, I could not help selfishly thinking that this tragedy might forever deform that gentle spirit before it was fully formed._

Yet when he returned home that night, nothing in his demeanor betrayed the strength he projected, and nothing he said contradicted the inner calm his outer self portrayed. And so we didn't talk much that night about what happened that morning.

We never talked about it again, in fact, until I began working on this book seven years later. And when I did ask about it, I asked him first if it was okay, still worried, even after all these years and all that he's seen and done since, worried that having him recall the events of that awful day was something I ought not do.

However, my son, the firefighter man of action he now is, had no problem recounting what happened that morning. This is the email he sent me...

_It was August 24_ th _, 2001 and the time was 0542. I was still living at your house on South Hill in Ithaca, NY. The 911 call came into the Emergency Dispatch center of COMSTOC (the New York State Police 911 center) via cell phone by a passerby walking alongside Warren Road, then referred to the City of Ithaca Fire Department E911 dispatch center._

The plane was a small, two-passenger, mini-cargo, twin-engine plane that had two passengers on board. It was cold, dark and foggy when the plane attempted to take off from the runway on its transport trip back to Michigan, when suddenly the main pilot lost his orientation to the ground, as later reported by the National Transportation Safety Board, and directed the aloft plane downwards toward the end of the runway. E911 dispatchers initially dispatched the Lansing Fire Department to a report of a plane crash with visible fire present directly off the runway of the airport in a nearby field on the intersection of Warren and Cherry Roads.

Within moments, the Airport Crash/Fire team, Cayuga Heights Fire Department and City of Ithaca firefighters were automatically dispatched Mutual Aid to Lansing. First arriving fire department units found the field in the area of Warren and Cherry Roads littered with the airplane's left and right wing, fuselage and loaded cargo debris, as well as ground flame visible throughout the fog, leading into the woods.

Lansing and Cayuga Heights Fire Department personnel stretched out numerous hand lines and attacked the ground field jet fuel-fueled flames inward towards the tree line that had been channeled out by the fuselage. Once the fire had been knocked down, Lansing and Cayuga Heights Fire Department personnel attempted rescue efforts of any potential survivors.

Unfortunately, both occupants of the plane sustained fatal injuries from the crash and subsequent fire impingement to the fuselage. I won't go into detail as to the injuries of the two occupants, but recovery work of the departed revealed what suggested to be an instantaneous death.

Thoughts of the incident at the time were specific to the tasks at hand. Afterward I believe a CSD (Critical Stress Debriefing) was conducted by the Tompkins County Fire/Rescue service to any participants that wished to discuss thoughts of the incident. I don't really remember thinking much about it, other than the fact it was too bad that it had to happen in the first place. Most critical events that are seen/felt by Emergency Service Responders are normally dismissed or downplayed in the best interest of the responder. Dwelling too much on said incidents most usually forces the responder to leave the profession.

Nevertheless, all parties involved did what needed to be done, the way they were trained in order to mitigate the incident, and everyone went home safely. I hope that answered the questions you had, Dad. If you need anything else, you know how to reach me. I love you, pops!

Two very different ways of staring into the abyss. One from a philosopher trembling on a perch, afraid for his son as he enters the heart of darkness. The other from a firefighter calmly issuing from the gates of hell, patiently providing his father with a description of the face of Satan.

And though I was the progenitor, the progeny was recast as he emerged from the smoldering ruins, a nascent martial spirit now whirling about him, and on that terrible

day, a firefighter was born.

1

The Beginning

"You will never do anything in this world without courage."

-Aristotle

In the beginning there was fear. My child's beginning, when an absurdly immature twenty-one year-old was having recurring nightmares about becoming a father. I remember once waking up in a fury, shaking myself back to consciousness, so thankful to realize it was all just an insane dream, that, yes, yes, yes, I was still single, and, no, of course a baby was _not_ on the way, only to turn around in my bed and suddenly see my lovely, very pregnant wife blissfully asleep right next to me, and then the fear would hit like a hammer, smashing my counterfeit peace to pieces.

But that relentless fear evaporated upon his arrival, as my little boy suddenly came into this world neither shriveled and wrinkled nor portly and potato-headed, but baby blue with wavy black hair, his mother spent yet silent as a Spartan, me the father clearly the weakest link - heart pounding, knees shaking, mind blank, but for the first time in my life, absolutely alive.

I remember asking the nurse if it was normal for a baby to be blue, and she said yes it was, and then started to tell me why, but she was more concerned with whether Iwanted to cut the umbilical cord (I declined; not on my "to do" list) and whether, given I must have looked to her as if I were ready to faint, I needed a seat (no thanks, if my wife could manage to bring life into the world, I could manage to remain standing). The sight of my college sweetheart giving birth to my son brought me to tears, and I recall only magical things about that March morning of 1984. If even the most primitive camcorder existed at that time, well, no one we knew had one, and the sociopathic idea of bringing a camera into the delivery room would simply never have occurred to me.

However, the Sunday following the day of delivery was certainly not magical, and the fact my wife didn't kill me that day speaks more to the distractions of her heightened condition than to any deserved clemency on my part. We'd had two sleepless nights that week, as Alexander's rumblings made for false alarms and frayed nerves, and mommy-to-be's body turned completely against her while daddy-to-be's mind started slipping towards incoherence. This is not an attempt at self-defense, for what I ended up doing was truly indefensible, but I think some context is needed before rendering a verdict. Otherwise, the case is hopeless.

Loron worked until the last month of her pregnancy, and I remember the winter morning walks we took together to the elevated station on McDonald Avenue, and that sometimes the sidewalks were still icy because her job at the Milford Plaza started early and the stores in our neighborhood hadn't opened yet, which meant no one had salted the pavement, and so we would carefully make our way arm-in-arm along the ice, her tan corduroy coat stretched to the max, buttons hanging on for dear life, my Michelin Mamma and me waddling up towards the platform, and then we 'd ride together for most of the trip on the train, until I'd get out a few stops before she did to get to my first class, and here's where the context comes in.

I'd been lazy about finishing up college, mostly because my early teachers were always more ambitious about my future than I was, and I'd wound up in Brooklyn Technical High School, surrounded by so many overachievers and so few girls (Tech had only just started slowly going co-ed back then), and after years of studying things of serious insignificance, I was ready for a break.

The break, of course, lasted a little too long, and next thing I knew I was married and my wife was pregnant, and I realized that if I didn't hurry up and finish up my degree, then I likely never would. So by the time Loron was ready to give birth, I was carrying twelve credits, writing for the college paper, waiting tables five nights a week, taking karate classes on weekends, and occasionally running out of the house late at night to pick up linguini white clam sauce at Torre's whenever that precise but unpredictable craving came over my parturient companion.

Point being, hundred-hour weeks were now my world, and I often barely knew where I was or what to do next. And after a sleepless Monday and then a sleepless Tuesday, the moment my head hit the pillow that Wednesday night, I fell from near delirium into a black hole of slumber. So when Loron tried to wake me a few hours later telling me again and again "I think it's time!" I'd respond "Time for what, honey?" and keep rolling back to unconsciousness.

Gentle pushes on the shoulder eventually gave way to a mighty angry shove, and after I'd fallen half out of bed some awareness of what was going on finally began to settle in. Once we'd gotten out of the house and into the car I remember rolling down the window of our '73 Electra, mindful that it was still winter as well as the dead of night, but far more concerned about staying awake as we drove along Ocean Parkway on our way to the Brooklyn Bridge.

We got to the old New York Hospital over on York and East 68th, right off the FDR Drive, really fast, and though I sometimes reflect that she could well have gone into labor during rush hour, there weren't half as many cars on the road back then as there are now, and one could always go under the Gowanus or use the escape route by the Fulton Fish Market or take any number of criss-crossing shortcuts from Point A to Point B and bypass some stretch of traffic. Not like now, where the choices are not north, south, east or west, but congestion, construction, gridlock or hemlock.

I remember letting Loron off by the entrance, then racing the car over to the little lot where I was allowed to park for fifteen minutes, then running back and bringing her first to the counter and then right up to one of the labor rooms, and after she was safe in the hands of a nurse, I ran back downstairs and out to the car and found myself a metered parking space not too far away. Upon my return I was able to perform the role of dutiful father-to-be for a little bit longer, until finally, I collected three chairs from diverse locations and set them up beside Loron's bed, and then, yes, forgive me Jesus, Mohammed, and Buddha, but I fell asleep faster than you could tweet a twittering text.

I'm not sure how long I slept but when I woke up I looked over at my wife and down at my watch, and then ran like hell to put quarters in the meter again, and now I was finally awake, and as I spent the next couple of days attending to my new little family as my old gargantuan family streamed in and out of my wife's room, my life's purpose as my son's dad had overtaken whatever purpose that life had purported to pursue theretofore, and so a new father was born.

However, the absent-minded dumbass that father had been impersonating up until then wasn't quite finished with me yet, which brings me to that wickedly stupidly spent Saturday evening. I'd decided late that afternoon I'd rather sleep in my own bed than in the lounge chair again, but instead of heading straight home to merciful repose, something in my unconscious must have reminded me that these were my last few hours of freedom before my looming 157,680 hours of patriarchal peonage. So what to do? Drinking with the guys? Off to Atlantic City? What about going to a strip club? No, no, and _hell no_ , for these are not the things a bona fide nerd dreams of doing. It was _Saturday night_ , and I was _on my own_ for the first time in _months!_ No responsibilities whatsoever until ten o'clock the next day when I was to pick up my in-laws before heading back to the hospital for mother and child.

My Electra practically drove itself downtown to Fifth Avenue and 18th where the only Barnes & Noble I knew of was located, and because side street parking existed back then, I stayed for hours without having to worry about a parking ticket, worming my way through the stacks in search of ever-elusive enlightenment, and it was only as the store was about to close that I realized both that I had not yet had dinner and that my best friend would be finishing up at work in a couple of hours, and so I paid for my books and put them in the trunk and headed farther downtown to Bleecker Street to John's, my third favorite pizzeria then and now. I'd spent my teenage years in Coney Island living across the street from my second favorite (Totonno's) and a half mile's walk from the greatest pizzeria that ever was (L&B Spumoni Gardens).

After brick-oven bliss and a cola, I got in my Buick and made my way back uptown to the Waldorf-Astoria. It's hard to imagine in these early days of the third millennium that one could drive from one part of Manhattan to another and then to another on a Saturday night and find a parking spot every time, but this was a quarter-century ago, after all, a melancholy, menacing Manhattan certainly not like "Sex and the City" but more like "Escape from New York."

As I walked up Lexington from 48th Street where I'd left my car, middle-class hookers, dressed well but not well enough and booze-buzzed but not drug-addled, click-clacked their tacky way along the avenue, the only pedestrians in sight, which was why my cherished David's Cookies store that I'd been hoping to find open had closed hours earlier, and so I crossed the street and slipped into the Bull and Bear Restaurant and took the short cut upstairs to the cocktail lounge where Bob worked, that melange of expensive eateries and bars situated within the famous hotel connected behind the scenes, kitchens and dishrooms and pantries making up the manic hive where an army of workers toiled, unseen by patrons swimming in the milk and honey those anthophilous anthropoids produced, laboring like mad only meters away from the exquisitely luxurious lobby halls of art deco gold and smoked glass opulence, commuting from the outer boroughs to service the inner borough whims of the wealthy.

I'd worked for a while at the lounge I was heading to now, which is where I'd met Bob, and I'd stayed just long enough to discover a kindred spirit and make a lifelong friend, and it was and remains a friendship of the most disembodied kind, a couple of thinking machines at the bottom of the ocean searching for the sun, never looking up to see the damage to our souls our misanthropic quest had done. I suppose he was SpongeBob to my SquarePants.

"Captain Joseph, it's good to see you," and I'd meant it. Joseph was captain of waiters and quite the character. Extremely overweight but too cheap to buy a new tuxedo, he looked like Oliver Hardy, spoke with an incomprehensible accent, and despite being married, relentlessly pursued women that seemed hopelessly beyond his grasp. However, he'd amassed a small fortune by paying close attention to the financial titans that sat at his tables, had married a woman as beautiful as Helen of Troy, and had a funny story for every occasion.

"Booby! Booby, your brother Sol is here! Twin brothers, but Sol was born in the day, and Booby was born in the night!" This was what he always said when I came around, for though we certainly acted like brothers, Bob was of Ethiopian origin and I was not. And with that he waddled quickly away like a startled penguin, only looking back briefly to tell "Booby" not to talk to me too long because there was much work to be done.

"Hey Sal."

"Hey Bob. I thought about calling but I wasn't far away. You feel like going to that bar?" The one half a block from the new Citicorp Building on 53rd. The only thing open besides the all-night pharmacy. Where the wooden tables stunk of beer and the three old-timers playing something jazz-like just stunk, where few customers ever came in, and absolutely nobody knew our names. You know, _that_ bar.

He looked at his watch and said, "Okay, but listen, how did you get here?" Which meant he really didn't want to take the train back to the Bronx when we ended up talking until three in the morning.

"I've got my car." He nodded absently as he sorted through his money and tallied up the evening's take.

And after he'd changed into his civilian clothes we went to the broken-down bar and ordered some burgers and fries and a couple of sodas, and we talked late into the night, his encyclopedic brain eight years, dozens of IQ points, and hundreds of books ahead of mine, and so I tried to keep up, his theory of grand conspirators orchestrating the course of human history an exciting possibility to a malleable mind unfamiliar with past tales of the Illuminati and future tales of "X-Files" and "The Matrix", but even bars have to eventually shutter their doors, and because my ever-erring sense of direction was exceeded only by non-driver Bob, we got lost and found on the way from the FDR to the Major Deegan and then I got lost some more on the way home, only managing to getback to my little attic apartment on Avenue J maybe an hour before sunrise, and so when I collapsed onto my bed, I may as well have fallen off the face of the earth.

That's why when the phone rang a little after ten, I must have known it was Loron on the other end asking me why I hadn't left the house yet to go pick up her parents, but that didn't keep me from dropping the receiver and crashing back to sleep, her voice a world away and the phone no longer functional.

Thankfully, my wife was resourceful and our landlord's name was listed, and Mr. Dolcemascolo's determined banging at my door finally woke me up, and though I did at long last get me and my in-laws to my wife's hospital room, it wasn't until one in the afternoon, hours after the other new mothers had left and all the beds had been made, and mother and child were there all alone when I sheepishly walked in, and as good a husband as I tried to be in the ensuing quarter-century, never for very long did Loron let me forget what I had done, and never more did a miserable monk of a man deserve to be so reminded.

2

The A-Train to 287

"Life's a voyage that's homeward bound."

\- Herman Melville

But if my stock had nowhere to go but up in the years that followed, the city we lived in was not so lucky, as one social epidemic after another sent New York spiraling down into the depths, ever new circles of hell forming below the sinking ship, striking images and memories of the wildly accelerating decline a mental click away, no downloading necessary... _I see trains covered inside and out with graffiti, no heat in winter no a/c in summer, the homeless living in the subways, in the tunnels, in the streets, in the alleys; there go a band of kids surrounding a taxi at a red light, flinging open the_ _doors, the passenger and the driver barely jumping out before all the kids jump in and_ _tear off on their joyride; there's Loron and Alexander and me as we run out of our apartment late one night after a Molotov Cocktail got thrown through the window of the grocery store next door, the building in flames, the only question whether it had been done_ to _the owner or_ by _the owner. Look! A dozen empty vials of crack cocaine in front_ _of that house - doesn't a cop live a few doors down? And right over there, that's the courthouse a guy I knew walked right out of after having his murder case thrown out by a judge fed up with the prosecutor's bungling. Did I mention the murder was committed in_ _broad daylight? That there were witnesses? That it was his gun? With his prints on it?_ _What was missing was the paperwork. Too many crimes. Too little time._

These things had become commonplace in the New York City of the eighties and early nineties. It's nearly impossible to believe now, but back then every year was 9/11, with more than two thousand murders and tens of thousands of assorted violent crimes committed annually not by terrorists but by fellow New Yorkers.

However, little of that had much to do with my decision to leave the city in the summer of 1991. My wife and I grew up in metropolitan madhouses, hers a single stretch in a towering project in the Kowloon Province of Hong Kong, mine a hopscotch of stints in neighborhoods across Brooklyn and Queens, both of our childhoods working class and spent mostly on the streets and on our own. As such, neither of us really thought of New York City as especially forbidding or foredoomed, and having never had parents remotely overprotective of us, I don't think we ever thought of ourselves or our child as being in any particular danger despite the criminal and cultural chaos swirling everywhere around us.

But after nearly thirty years of living within the vortex of a tornado, something told me it was time to get out. So one day when we went to visit my wife's good friend in Geneva, New York in the summer of 1991, and we stood on the water's edge of Seneca Lake on a beautiful July afternoon, staring out at the shimmering water with only a boater or two out in the distance, a couple of kids fishing off a small, ancient pier, surrounded by silence with only a gentle breeze whispering in my ear, I looked over at my wife and son and made the first instantaneous, non-negotiable, truly big decision in my young life, as I told them both: "We're moving here."

Everyone thought I'd gone insane. Family pointed out we had no family up there. As the kids say, duh. Friends scolded us that "Anything west of Manhattan is the sticks -you'll be bored to tears!" Colleagues informed us we'd never find jobs worth having. And most pressingly, our bank account told us all we had was twenty-seven hundred dollars, so we might want to rethink this brilliant move of ours.

Yet instinct, something I'd rarely relied on throughout my bookish, pseudo-intellectual life, told me this would be the right thing. We ended up spending fifteen years in the smallest of small towns, and wound up living bigger and better in so many unexpected ways, and we only came back to the city long after our son was out on his own, mostly because my wife's not a country girl, and a tantalizing job offer she'd gotten was one I just couldn't ask her to turn down.

But that decision to move my family, made in an instant, was the first of many spontaneous decisions made on behalf of my son, for he was the reason I'd gotten bold. A small epiphany arrived that sunny afternoon, making me see the world Alexander was growing up in back in the Brooklyn of 1991 with complete clarity, in one mesmerizing moment realizing there could be something different for him, and for all three of us, that maybe there was a real _life_ out there, that maybe we could have it, if only I'd have the

guts to take a leap of faith. So I did.

And now, sixteen years later,that child, who'd recently turned twenty-three, had just gotten his dream job as a firefighter/paramedic in a small town in upstate New York, and so we decided it was time to do something we'd talked about for a number of years but had never done - climb a mountain together.

Having turned forty-five myself, I had to start showing some respect for the hourglass and accept that the day would come when I couldn't do something like this anymore. For "the day" is really a slow-motion avalanche of days whose freighted message I'd soon enough be buried under.

The day on the handball court getting ready to take a shot I'd taken a thousand times but getting there that fraction of a second late, and watching the ball go past me. The day I strained to catch a slipping china closet I was moving, and the dull ache just above my elbow that has been with me ever since. The day of my first kidney stone, when I discovered what real pain really feels like.

That's why there was a growing urgency lurking in the back of my mind, and as we got closer to the appointed hour, I started making preparations, something I never do when it comes to activities of a physical nature. I've always had something of a Jekyll and Hyde thing going, with Dr. Jekyll calmly calibrating my contemplative world and Mr. Hyde catastrophically conducting my corporeal world.

My Jekyll side keeps columnar pads, staff books, and journals filled with investment data, notes from my piano teacher, a listing of the books I've read each year (eighteen in 2009, nine fiction, nine not, one volume every 20.2 days), and countless recipes, while my Hyde side makes me play game after game of handball against an infinitely superior opponent so that later that day a pair of rampaging charley horses attack each hamstring, or to let go of a raft I was hanging out of in the middle of the Delaware River to see if I could swim against the current and make it to shore (I couldn't, and thankfully my wife noticed my floundering and made the group feverishly paddle back and come get me), and in one especially stupid move, the first time I put on a pair of skies, Hyde made me hop on the lift to see what would happen - falling flat on my face on the dismount and a hundred tumbles in the snow as I made my way down the slope were what happened, of course, surprising no one but the dolt who'd left Hyde in charge.

But because it was not just my idiot self that would be tackling this glorious quest, some painstaking preparations had to be made. Well, _ought_ to have been made is more like it, because I've done nothing of the kind. I did buy us two sturdy pairs of climbing shoes, I reminded him to bring along some gloves that grip, and before I left the house a few hours ago, I grabbed the cheap, gnarly wooden cane I keep around for the occasional hike and the straw hat I picked up when I went to the Grand Canyon a few years ago.

However, the reality of what's in store for me is setting off church bells in my belfry as we near zero hour. I've chosen a mighty knotty knoll for an inaugural ascent that may prove exaugural as well, the first and very likely the last serious climb I ever attempt. I tried not to do too much research beyond where the base camp is and how to get there, but as it got closer to today I'd occasionally go online and see if there were things I should know about.

The results were not encouraging. _"The most strenuous climb I've ever done."_ This from a guy who said he'd scaled Mount Rainier. _"23 deaths since 1974 and maybe_ _thirty helicopter rescues each year, give or take."_ That from a teacher who lives nearby and regularly takes students to the surrounding park to study ecology. _"I hike it to stay fit_ _for the Himalayas, but I've never ventured out on the ridge."_ And this from a lady who's made two runs at Everest.

The ridge she's talking about is what made my decision for me. I'd been talking to my optometrist, who loves climbing and has photos hanging everywhere in his office of the many expeditions he's made all over the world, and he told me that if he knew he could only ever make one more climb in his entire life, then this mountain was the one. Between the twin summits of this U-shaped peak lies an improbable tightrope of a mile-long ridge that stretches out across the sky, so that when you've gotten to the top of the world, your journey has just begun. He made it sound oh so good it made me forget until just these last few days that my overall condition is oh so bad. Twenty pounds overweight, mildly asthmatic, out of breath after climbing the five flights to my apartment, and a diet devoid of anything remotely nutritious. _So what in hell am I thinking here?_

Well, mostly I'm thinking how different me and my son are. That after becoming a dad at such a young age, that's the only way I've ever thought of myself, but now my baby is more of a man than I ever was, and the miserable truth is that he no longer needs me, not like before, and he's so... far away, in every way, and so of course what I want somehow, some way, is to stay close.

But why a mountain? And why one so clearly beyond my grasp? Years ago I would've been oblivious to what I'm searching for, but now as I approach mid-century, I guess I've figured it out, and it's strange to look back and see the defining point in one's life so clearly, most everything that's happened since determined by a single move away from a simple house when I was just fourteen.

The house looms larger with the passage of time, sandstone with a rounded front, a massive red stoop flanked by white baluster slabs perfect for sliding down on, "287" painted just under the sixth step, the front yard leading to the gate that opened to the little stoop that took you to the sidewalk.

My grandfather was able to buy this three-story home a few years after emigrating to this country from Palermo, coming over with his oldest son, my late uncle Carmelo, eventually managing to bring his whole clan over, all of us starting our new life in that labyrinthian structure, fourteen of us at first, as my parents left Edinburgh and Aunt Anna and Uncle Tanino temporarily left Sicily with my younger cousin Giuseppe to consecrate the nascent family compound, Uncle Sal and Aunt Ina, and the four unmarried children, Franco, Lia, Pino, and Costanza, fourteen of us in one place at one time, bound not simply by blood but by overflowing love that by the accident of birth all zeroed in on me. For Aunt Anna and Uncle Tanino soon returned home to Palermo, and that left ten people to dote on just one child, my grandfather's first grandchild, and so I may be forgiven if memories of my early childhood seem enchanted, because in point of fact they were exactly that.

The only memory I have of my grandfather, though, is a tragic one, and it likely isn't my own, as stories my family told me have combined to create images of a dying in his deathbed bathed in light, the bed having been moved to the living room at the front of the house, the sun streaming in through the semi-circle of windows, me in his arms, his family all around, lung cancer slowly taking our patriarch away, but the dream of taking his children to America had been fulfilled, and so Gaetano Geraci, having prevailed in life, could truly rest in peace.

What I remember most about that home he bequeathed was being surrounded by women inside my home, always in my grandmother's arms, singing along to records my aunts would play, my mother at her sewing machine making my clothes, all those aromatic meals, but more amazing still were all the women _outside_ my home, Annie and Heidi and Greta and Carol and Terry and Margaret and Cheryl, as if the fates had intervened not only to populate my little street with all these beautiful girls, but to somehow make me someone they wanted to be with and play with and be friends with.

And though I had a few friends that were boys, it was the girls I loved spending time with, going to the playground and pushing them on the swings, taking them on bike rides, which back then meant riding the bicycle while the girl sat side-saddle on the bar running from the seat to the handlebars, but most of all, just talking into the night for as late as we were allowed to stay out, about anything and everything.

It was all incredibly innocent and all incredibly wonderful, and then at age fourteen, when only my parents and I remained in the once bustling and boisterous building, as each of my relatives found their own little place in the sun, it was, incredibly, all taken away.

The decision to sell the family home had been a collective one, and though my mother and father had tried to convince everyone to reconsider and to sell the home to them instead, the consensus was that the thirty-five thousand dollars being offered was "a once in a lifetime chance" that could not be ignored, and so mid-way through ninth grade, we moved away.

Worse still was leaving a home with so many rooms and connecting closets and an indoor porch and an outdoor porch and a front yard and a basement that was actually three basements, a furnished one and the one that contained the massive oil burner and the little compressed one that led out to the back yard, and the fig tree in that yard that my grandfather had brought over from Sicily, and all the trees up and down the street, and all my memories, and all my friends; all that, to go live in a small, strange apartment in the Coney Island of the 1970s, with a bathroom without a bathtub or a sink and a bedroom without a door, a polluted creek behind us, factories on either side of us, a dead-end of a street in a dead-end of a neighborhood, and a depressing dead-end to a dream.

And thus did a child make the descent into philosophy, for amidst the ruins one must play in the rubble, and I did so with virulence and verve, devouring books and discovering nourishment where none existed, ignoring with a child's forgetfulness what had been lost and frantically searching for something new to be found. That something new turned out to be me, as I went from the company of girls to the company of books, from a romantic extrovert to a nerdish introvert nearly overnight, obsessed with reading and writing and solitude, sullen and professorial in the extreme, spending years hunting down pointless things and ideas, my blood turning to ink, my soul starting to stink.

Maybe this is how most philosophers are born, maybe not, but becoming a father brought me back from the brink, and though I lost paradise, I regained it, and now it is mine, for when I took my wife and child upstate and set about starting a new life, in a less dramatic way than my grandfather did but with great resolve, I know that I managed to make my way back to Church Avenue after all, and that sometimes you really can go home again.

What remains, though, is something more difficult, a journey I've been on for a long time, and it seems I'm no closer than when I began. All these years, and I have yet to make my way back to my own son. And what I'm thinking, what I'm hoping, is that maybe this monster of a mountain will get me there.

3

North By Northeast

"Tourists don't know where they've been; travelers don't know where they're going."

\- Paul Theroux

"How ya' doing, pops?" Alexander hollers as he hugs me, his ever more serious weightlifting in greater evidence as my aging frame gives a little less resistance to this embrace versus the last one, with the reasonable expectation that it will give that much less resistance to the next one.

My mind goes back to how gingerly I used to hold the giant-to-be in my arms, and for a moment I strain my memory a bit, to see if I can remember his first steps. I sort of do, but not exactly. We were living upstairs from my in-laws' laundromat, and it was downstairs, in their little living room/dining room behind the store, where my mother-in-law had made us all those incredible meals... fried turnip cakes with slivers of pork served with oyster sauce, steamed sliced chicken with a cold minced ginger and oil relish, sauteed baby bok choy, ridiculously succulent fish of indeterminate nomenclature seared in its entirety, and so many other dishes I lose track - it was in that little room, filled with love and a language I never took the time to learn, where he first waddled his way from longitude to latitude, loosening the grips of gravity and making his first shaky shuffle towards ambulation.

"What's with the cane? You been watching _House_ again?" he says with a laugh, knowing full well why I brought the cane, and also knowing how much I've come to revere the cranky genius doctor from television who hobbles around with his walking stick, scorching colleagues and patients with scorn and popping painkillers with passion.

"What's with the shorts and the T-shirt? Oh, and flip-flops! You getting ready to build a sand castle?" I respond, immediately feeling glad I brought him the climbing shoes, sincerely curious as to what sort of footwear he'd have worn if I hadn't. These kids and their sandals, I thought to myself - the sixties just keep lingering on, affecting even those born in the eighties.

"Hey, I wear ten-pound boots every freaking day - you mind if I take a day off?"

He deliberately leaves out what has now become everyone's favorite four-letter word, knowing how much I don't like to curse and knowing I like it even less when he does. He also knows that what little cursing I do, I do in Sicilian, that I do it for emphasis, and I've often told him that if profanity abounds, as it now does, then how in hell can you tell if somebody's trying to emphasize something?

I hand him the shoes, taken aback that I'd never once made the connection between his fighting of fires and his wearing of sandals. You can see someone all the time and still not see the simplest things.

He'd once mentioned to me that he slept in his uniform when he was on duty, unwilling to waste precious time getting geared up when a call came, but somehow I'd forgotten, though it was more commission than omission in this case, as I often tried to forget, or at least tried not to remember, what it is he does for a living. So after a twenty-four hour shift clad in combat boots, was it any wonder he wanted some freedom for his depressed dorsal digitals, his forever muffled metatarsals, and those fatigued phalanges? Only one whose feet were forever footloose and fancy-free could fail to see the plight of bipeds bound by other burdens.

"So?" I ask, as he puts them on.

"They're perfect, dad. Thanks."

And they are pretty good, with twin sets of hard rubber teeth on the sole facing each other like some surreal hundred and eighty degree lion's jaw waiting to bite into some juicy rockface. Yummy. Soft beige leather with cool dark brown stripes. Supple on top with a nasty spiny underside. Not bad for thirty bucks. I open up the trunk for him and he tosses in his backpack, and when we get into the car I ask him what he brought along.

"A few bottles of water and some god awful nutrition bars Andrea made me buy." Andrea. His bride-to-be. Sugar and spice and beauty and brains. They've been together five years and I hope they're together a hundred more. He couldn't have done better if God himself had been matchmaker. And of course there is a microscopic chance He was.

I remind myself to discuss Hitchens' atheist screed with Alexander somewhere along the way. _God Is Not Great_ provided even more fun and fury than I expected, and given that I've always been my son's self-appointed literary advisor, I mustn't neglect to ruthlessly select, subjectively distill, and then prejudicially convey the sum and substance of the tracts I peruse for the benefit of the child who will not read. Above all, I have to remember not to forget to do it. For he will never seek to remind me.

It is irony on a level most profound, that a reader of the most voracious kind raises a son who looks upon the written word as something of another world, a hideous creature unfit to live among mortals, a disease of sorts, perhaps a textual plague best contained and kept at arm's length, lest it infiltrate and disable otherwise healthy human beings, wreaking havoc and spreading sickening symbols and leechlike letters to the far reaches of their susceptible brains, diminishing certitude and introducing doubt, erasing courage and inspiring fear, sucking away strength and leaving only weakness in its wake.

Alexander would not put it this way but I will, and this juxtaposition is at the heart of my dilemma as I prepare to climb one more mountain with a child that means more to me than I can ever pretend to know.

I used to smile, then laugh, but now I chortle when I hear someone speak of how important it is to read to one's children, so as to instill a lifetime love of reading. Ah, the naivete, the foolish logic, and, ultimately, the outright idiocy of such a proposition!

No matter how tired, no matter how late, no matter how sleepy, no matter where, no matter when, no matter how, I would read to him for as long as he would listen. I would read him anything he wished, as many times as he asked, whatever he loved, and I would have done it until the last breath escaped from my lips and up until the millisecond my lifeless head hit the ground. To no avail. I will admit I haven't seen him set any books or newsstands or libraries on fire, but that's about as book-friendly as he gets.

By the starkest of contrasts, I had a father as focused on getting me to read as Bin Laden would have been in sending his son to Disneyland. (For the rides, I mean, not for the purposes of blowing it to Magic Kingdom come.) And yet there I was in grade school churning through enough books to restock the library of Alexandria.

"You know where you're going, right dad?" he has to ask as we travel along Wolf Road, fully aware of my propensity for getting lost even when far easier excursions are underway, then adds "Jesus Christ!" as an oncoming car decides to momentarily cross into our lane as he surpasses a slower moving vehicle to his left by illegally going around it on its _lefthand_ side.

"Is he _fucking_ nuts?!" Alexander shouts, and I instinctively raise my right hand as a calming gesture, having already slowed down in anticipation of the idiot driver's ill-conceived maneuver. I look over at my son and he gives me 'the look' that says, Yes, I remember you telling me nine hundred times never to underestimate people's stupidity and to act accordingly, yet the follow-up look says something along the lines of, But I should still pull the dumb bastard out of his car and beat his even dumber face to a pulp.

And he's right, of course, but getting exercised about stupidity doesn't make it go away, and so learning to work around it, getting used to it really, learning to love it even, truly makes a lot of sense, unless you enjoy skyrocketing blood pressure, bulging neck veins, and steam coming out of your ears. Me, I'm lazy. I'd rather see Yosemite Sam throw a fit than do it myself.

"The directions are in the glove compartment, but we start with eighty-seven south." It's not a question. We both did a mapquest and we both know he'll tell me where to go if we intend on making it there before dark. It's already nearly nine o'clock and we've got nearly five hundred miles ahead of us.

Which means I'll forego my usual devil-may-care approach to travel, and focus on making the right twists and turns. We'll save the horseplay for the ascent. At least that's the plan.

"Yeah. We'll be on there for fifteen miles."

"Take a nap, kid." He needs it.

"Nah, it's all right." Which means he really needs it.

"Just take a nap." I insist.

"I got some sleep at the station." Fuck your insistence, dad. "Listen to your old man and take a nap. I'll wake you up when we're on the Massachusetts Turnpike."

Translated: I actually do know the next step in our travels.

"Don't forget," he finally concedes. Which means he believes me.

"I won't." Mission accomplished.

At the last minute he'd had to work a twenty-four shift at the fire station the day before we were to set off on our expedition. Well, not the day before. The day of. He left the station at eight a.m., less than an hour ago, went home, showered, changed, just in time for my arrival. So I know he needs sleep, no matter what he might say to the contrary.

I'd tried to postpone, told him we could do this any time, an outright lie, and he wouldn't listen to word one. Said, listen dad, I've done this a hundred times. Which was true. Hell, he'd worked forty-eight hour shifts, even seventy-two hour shifts. It was routine for him. He'd learned to take catnaps, use lots of java to juice himself up, drink tons of water to keep his mind clear, and work out like a madman to keep himself strong. Still, a twenty-four hour shift before scaling the heavens was crazy. But I knew he'd have one good night's sleep before the climb. As long as I don't get lost on the way there. And so I relented.

I enter eighty-seven and once I'm up to speed - which is perhaps the only context for which I'll ever use that annoying expression - I signal, and settle into the left lane, which is where I'll remain. It's never made sense to me that an entire lane should be set off limits for no reason, with signs repeatedly advising drivers that the lane is for passing only, and that, amazingly, most drivers will obey, whereas they brazenly ignore far more pressing rules of the road without hesitation.

Folks will change lanes without signaling, tailgate at eighty miles an hour, cut across two lanes of traffic to catch an exit at the very last second, eat a burger, drink a soda, smoke a cigarette, chat on the cell phone, groove to their iPod, maybe even try all five at once, they'll crawl at thirty miles an hour in a sixty-five zone, hit sixty-five on a thirty mile an hour service road, and engage in every sort of automotive anarchy, and yet, they'll dutifully stick to the right lane on these two and three lane interstates as if commanded by Caesar.

Whereas, here's a lovely lane where you can cruise in peace, without having to pay mind to those entering or exiting, no one to your left, your only concern shifting right if an emergency vehicle should loom in your rearview mirror, and what do we as a society tell motorists who might presume to partake of this pacific pathway? _Move over! This lane is reserved for... well, nobody._ Dictums without a pause.

I glance over at him as he softly snores, still rolling the reading problem over in my mind as I have for the last decade or so. The bibliophile versus the bibliophobe question rankles, and I'm at a loss as to what to do. My heart tells me I'm not finished yet. That I've left things out. That he needs me to tell him things he'll never find out on his own. Things only I can give him. Things only a father can say.

But time has run out. The hourglass is not just empty. It's been demolished. He now has a life, a woman he loves, the job of his dreams, and he's far away. Not so far that I can't visit, but far beyond the fleeting realm of a father's watchful eye. How long before he listens not at all? How long before I decide there's nothing left to say? That's why we're going up this mountain he and I. That's why I mustn't let the moment pass. We have a lot of ground to cover. Dragons left to slay. And the day is growing dark. So, run, father, run. Your son will soon away.

* * *

Rain drizzles down from the dark simmering skies and I keep the wipers on intermittent, my view of the road for a lingering moment hazy and then for a flash suddenly clear, an apt metaphor for much of life - mostly cloudy with an occasional chance of clarity. This reminds me of driving to Coney Island in a panic back in 1985 when Hurricane Gloria hit. My parents lived a few blocks from the ocean off Neptune Avenue and I couldn't reach them by phone, so there was no way of knowing if they'd driven inland to ride out the storm at a relative's house (which of course is exactly what they'd done, given that that is precisely what normal, non-philosophically-minded people do) or if they were still sitting there in harm's way, so I got into the Electra and raced down fourth avenue, not noticing that hardly a single car was on the road, cruised under the Verrazano Bridge and onto the Belt Parkway heading east.

After about a mile I'd had to move first to the center lane and then to the left as the drenching rain coming down combined with one massive wave after another from Gravesend Bay sweeping up and over the railing along the promenade, transforming the swath of grassy greenery alongside into a swamp that swept onto the Belt, threatening to submerge the entire Parkway before I'd get a chance to exit, and it was only then that I looked around and realized mine was the only car in sight, and I remember feeling strangely calm as I stared at the sky, even as the roiling firmament seemed like a boiling cauldron a hundred miles wide, the furious clouds rolling and weaving and spinning and cleaving, endlessly twisting themselves inside out, patterns of controlled madness so vast I felt hypnotized by a power so impossibly beyond me, and it was peaceful in such a deep and wonderful way, and now, decades later, that feeling tingles down my spine and mingles in my mind at the faintest touch of a reminding moment.

And as I see him out of the corner of my eye and hear him snuffling away, I realize _this_ is what I want for him, to see the world the way I do, to _feel_ the world the way I always have, to become one soul, as Bloom referred to Plato and Aristotle, when we stare into the scorching sun in search of wisdom.

But the word seems so pathetic, so _last millennium_ , as the nearly new saying goes. Wisdom (wi-zdəm). . Capacity of judging rightly in matters relating to life and conduct. 1535 Coverdale Prov. ix. 10 The feare of the lorde is the begynnynge of wysdome. I know Hitchens would find that hilarious. I kind of like it. How about some reference a little closer to our own time? 1875 Manning Mission Holy Ghost xiv. 385 Illumination of the intellect, together with charity inflaming the heart, constitute the gift of wisdom. Ah, that's better. Good ole OED.

Which begs so many questions: Where in hell did wisdom go? What in heavens did we do to it? Why is no one sending out a search party? How come absolutely nobody cares? And, I guess, most of all, why do I still care? How can such a childish foolish useless thing still be the driving force of my every waking moment? It's pathetic as can be.

Besides, what did I do to help contrive this cosmic communication? Didn't even teach him my native Sicilian dialect. And now I'm expecting the rainbow connection?

"What time is it?" He's awake.

"Hey there, Rip Van Winkle. It's almost one o'clock." Geez did he need Zzzs.

"Four hours?!" he says, not quite convinced as he looks at his massive chainlink Fossil to confirm. A great name for a timepiece in an age where everywhere you look there's a light-emitting diode screen telling you to the atomic second what time it is. Which is why I no longer wear a watch.

"Yep, you slept through three states." I look down at the odometer. "Two hundred and seventy miles. That's gotta be a record of some kind." And now that he's made up a little sleep, it means we can spend a bit more time up ahead when we make our first stop.

The clouds are breaking up and the sun is peeking through here and there. "We just drove from one side of Sicily to the other," I muse, always taken aback by how enormous our country is.

"Really?" he responds, "Looks just like America."

"Seriously, we might as well have driven from Marsala to Messina these past few hours. Except we'd be seeing Mount Etna maybe blowing its top out there instead of that water tower." I'm sure he knows that's exactly what I'm seeing, which reminds me..."You know that song, Funiculi, funicula, funiculi, funiculAAAH?!" I say and sing at the same time.

"Who doesn't?" he says, showing an almost noticeable trace of interest.

"Well, a funicular is sort of a tram that's designed to go up and down a ridiculously steep incline, and the first one was built at Mount Vesuvius near Naples. And some guy wrote that song to commemorate the grand opening."

"Sum gai? Was he Chinese?"

"Real funny." At least he's listening.

"Didn't you guys just get back from France?" he says with a jolt, suddenly remembering. I nod.

"How was it?"

"I finally finished _Zorba the Greek_ ," recalling with feigned displeasure the difficulty of matching the books I'm reading to the countries I find myself in, owing to the frequent flyer frenzy of my former travel agent wife, whose propensity for peregrination I ought never downplay, an obsession with the four corners of the world that has serendipitously stretched the four corners of my nerdy mind.

He nods politely, well aware that almost any inquiry will yield some book as the default response, until I reset, reassess, re-calculate, and finally come up with an answer that has little to do with my own view of the person, place or thing in question, but that is more in line with the way fully functioning folks would view the situation.

"It, uh... definitely made a wine drinker out of me."

"No way." If he knows _anything_ about his dad, he knows I drink nothing but soda water, milk, espresso, and Coca-Cola.

"I'm serious. I drank a bottle of 2004 Chateauneuf-du-Pape every single night I was there."

"You mean with mom." She _does_ like wine.

"No, I mean just me. Every day after we came back from wherever we were in Paris, we stopped at the Galleria Lafayette, bought two bottles from the bibliotheque du vin, and brought them back to the hotel. Like clockwork. And that's on top of all the wine I was drinking during the day."

"No _fucking_ way," he laughs.

I frown, and then get reminded of something.

"You know how I've always told you that word was of German origin?"

"What word?" he teases. "Oh, _that_ word." Wise ass.

"I did a little more homework. Seems it's likelier, much likelier, of Italian origin. The old German _folken_ means to damn someone, which always did seem an odd transition to me, whereas the Italian _fottere_ means the same exact thing as that darling four-letter word you love so much."

He ignores me.

"No hangovers?"

"Nope. I used to think I was a congenital teetotaller because my ears turn red every time I have a little wine, but it looks like the trick was for me to drink by the bottle rather than by the glass. You think my liver can deal with my new habit?"

"Absolutely. The poor bastard's just been laying there waiting for something to do. But I bet you haven't had a full glass of wine since you got back."

"For a few days there I did, maybe just to prolong the _je ne sais quoi_ of gay Paree. It must have been lo-uh-ove," I sing Roxette-style, "but it's over now-ow," my not so hidden affection for eighties music now in plain view. Clanging keyboards, echo chamber vocals, silly synthesizer riffs - funny as hell in hindsight, but I was his age back then, and so maybe why I like those soaring ballads is as simple as that.

"We got introduced to that famous French hospitality as soon as we got off the train - oh, pardonnez moi - _le metro de Paree_ ," I quickly correct as I slowly recall that first morning.

"I was looking around trying to figure out which way the hotel might be, and the first thing your mother sees is this beautiful cathedral, so she asks this woman who happens to be tying her tennis shoe on a fire hydrant the name of it, and when she doesn't get an immediate response, she asks again, and this rather stout middle-aged Parisian whips her head around and flashes the angriest eyes you've ever seen and shouts " _When I am FEENEESHT!"_ and goes right back to lacing up her sneakers, and when she's done, she turns on her heel and mutters the name of the church as she's walking away, and I don't remember it because I was too busy laughing my ass off..."

"I bet Mom was none too pleased," he posits, a bit too pleased himself about our legendarily impatient loved one's comeuppance at the hands of this fierce femme fatale. I vividly recall my wife's expression. "She was speechless. It was the quintessential rude awakening." I also remember my own feelings about the exchange. "It was one of the most honest reactions I've ever seen. Native, and admittedly nasty Parisian, fed up with endless tourists and their queries, flips off an American couple.

"Anyway, as far as the well-known attractions go, the Eiffel Tower, the Champs-Elysees, the Palace of Versailles, et al, there's little question that the marginal utility of seeing these grand overseas attractions is decreasing in direct relation to the increasing number of overseas trips we take. Besides, you've seen the pictures.

"However, there were a few things that were, quite, unexpected," I reflect. "We walked around a lot at night, and there were a fair number of homeless people sleeping in the entrance recesses of the closed shops, and most of them were _young_ , I mean, younger than me."

"Well, you _are_ getting up there, old man, so maybe they just _seemed_ young," he offers. Thanks a lot.

"Why I remember that is because a lot of young men _and_ women walk around with _canes_ over there, and it doesn't seem like they're for protection," I muse, letting the observation hang there a while.

"Maybe it's just a fashion thing," he suggests, though I wonder if it's a balance thing, thinking their drinking leads to sinking, their tippling right to toppling, making the walking sticks an intervention for the prevention of an epidemic of fractured Gallic skulls.

"Maybe," I reply, "but it's no joke how much wine they drink. And even though it seems obvious now, it was really cool to see a bona fide wino stumbling along the Rue de Amsterdam our last day there drinking from a _wine_ bottle, going from blotto to blitzed in slow-motion figure eights. I mean, we used to call drunks _winos_ over here, but all my life I've never seen a wino chugging wine until Paris."

He sort of nods as he looks off at the horizon, his interest in France artificially sparked but now nearly extinguished, tiny tinders tossed aside, fleeting fire must subside.

Just one more thing.

"We went to the Louvre," I whisper, "and the way it's laid out, somehow it made the Metropolitan Museum of Art seem... small."

"Jesus." We dragged him to the Met a few times, so he knows it's the size of Texas.

"Yeah. And there was this huge crowd surrounding the Mona Lisa, which turned out to be not the least bit interesting. I think if anyone sees it without knowing anything about it, they don't give it a second thought. However, not far away from the grandiose Gioconda there's this enormous mural that nobody was giving a first or second glance, and I would have spent half the day looking at it if I'd been alone." I see it as I'm speaking to him and almost lose my train of thought.

"It was this impossibly big library filled with hundreds of sculptures, nothing but marble and books in every direction, of every shape and size and color, some texts dusty and ancient and falling apart, others radiant and new and elaborate, a world within a world with truth and beauty on every shelf, and some parts of the mural were shadowy and dark and other parts were brilliantly bright, and even though every last thing depicted in there was dead, all I could feel as I stared into that painting was... _alive_."

We're both quiet for a few moments and then he surprises me.

"Sounds like you got a sneak peek at heaven, dad."

I turn to look at him and smile, nodding dumbly as I nearly miss our exit.

"I'll show you heaven, kid, wait'll you see where we're going for lunch."

* * *

Though we're both pretty hungry, the need to explore wins out, as I angle-park the car on what's clearly the main street of this little port town. Nothing's left of the passing mini-storm, and though the sun's a couple of hours past its peak, it's hot as hell but it feels good. I keep the a/c on in my car nine months out of twelve, partly because I like the cold, partly because I prefer freon-purified air to the carbon monoxide plumes I'd otherwise be inhaling, but mostly because open windows on the road are my kryptonite.

As a child I'd had wicked ear infections, and so a doctor finally decided the cure was to stab through my ear drum with a tympanostomy tube to draw out the poison on the other side. He'd removed my tonsils for good measure (though I don't remember ever even having a sore throat), and I've been left with a susceptibility for inter-cranial implosion ever since. Exquisite pressure arrives whenever I'm in a plane or in a fast-moving car with the windows down or even if I walk up or down a steep hill a little too quickly. One would imagine a puncture might mitigate such pressure but such logic apparently falls on deaf auricles inside that mysterious tympanic cavity where eustachians and ossicles reside. My family doctor once remarked when she was peering past my tragus into my external acoustic meatus, _"Do you know you have a hole in your eardrum?"_

To which I'd responded that I wasn't surprised, given how long ago the operation I subsequently described to her had been done, and that the surgeon had likely used a tube the size of a garden hose. She'd gone on to say that at times it must cause me _"considerable distress."_ I'd told her she'd hit the nail right on my head.

The scent of the ocean is strong and it's wonderful, and though this is hardly a tourist trap, there are quite a few people strolling around, mostly stopping over, just like us, some with kids in tow, others kids themselves, college students on summer break, and a few old-timers, looking like they'd been here back when this rigorously retooled relic was just a fishing village north of nowhere, back when people didn't know they were supposed to spend their days upscaling, upgrading, upsizing, retrofitting, recalibrating, re-imagining, little engines of enterprise looking to power visions of verisimilitude, doing little more than trying to make themselves, their children, their friends, their co-workers, their neighbors, their neighborhoods, and their cities into something else, anything other than what they were, until finally nobody remembers what the hell anything or anyone actually ever _was_ , except the old-timers, but even they're getting hypnotized by the digital drums and chemical plums, and so what the hell...

"That street looks interesting," I decide, and we head out, leaving the not so madding crowd behind after twenty paces. It's quiet, and modernity's veneer quickly fades as the sidewalks and the surrounding homes become real again, and before long we find ourselves in this charming square, and there's a statue of a fellow whose name everyone knows, but whose poetry eludes the likes of me and my son. After we head back downtown, we stop in a bookshop and pick up a collection of his poems, and as we wander about searching for the restaurant I found online, I read these last verses of a poem called _Children_ , and catch myself tearing up a bit as I force myself not to look over at him.

Come to me, O ye children! And whisper in my ear What the birds and the winds are singing In your sunny atmosphere. For what are all our contrivings, And the wisdom of our books, When compared with your caresses, And the gladness of your looks? Ye are better than all the ballads That ever were sung or said; For ye are living poems, And all the rest are dead.

I spot a freshly-painted dark red and white lobster house with wide sparkling windows and take a look inside, where immense wooden tables and chairs are mostly empty, but the rest are occupied by what look like locals, as do the ruddy-faced guys sitting at the ancient oak bar. Mounted high on the back wall are the mammoth exo-skeletal remains of a crustacean a yard long. That's enough for me.

"Forget what I Googled - this is where lunch be at," I ordain, and he nods in disinterested agreement, his philosophy about dining as pragmatic as mine is dogmatic; for him it's just another meal, whereas for me every one is approached as though it might be my last.

We feast on twin lobsters with such soft shells we break them with our hands, dipping the contents into cups of melted butter, my son laughing heartily because he doesn't recall ever seeing me eat without using a knife and fork, and here I am looking like Attila the Hun as I attack my arthropod, the lusciously sweet cob of corn, and these indecently indulgent unpeeled fries. With my greasy fingers, I try to unself-consciously grip the handle of a genuinely frosty superthick glass mug of root beer made right down the street, and between the foamy head and the icy cold syrupy goodness and this great food and seeing Alexander as happy as can be, _now_ we're talking about heaven on earth, and the hell with the library painting at the Louvre.

* * *

It's been three hours since our little non-alcoholic Bacchanalia, and we're in the twilight of the evening, driving along the coast on a two-laner; haven't seen another car for over an hour, and I think we're not far from the motel.

"How many people did you say are in this town, pops?"

"Four or five thousand, why?"

"I'm just hoping there's an open supermarket - we won't have time in the morning."

He's right. We need to get our supplies. Should have picked some things up while we were still in the realm of civilization. Oh, but don't forget, you got that book of poetry, genius. You can use _that_ for sustenance on your way up and down the hill.

There's the exit. He reads me the directions for the rest of the way, and as we head towards our tiny hamlet, I see salvation. I park the car and we head inside, picking up a dozen bottles of water, a few prepared sandwiches, a box of fig newtons, a bunch of bananas, and, hallelujah, four cans of Doubleshot espresso.

"Gotta have the basics, son," I say as we head to the cashier.

We can see the motel as we drive out of the lot, and after checking in and finding our room, I see there's no refrigerator, so back to the front desk to pick up a few more ice buckets. We shower and set our alarms for four-thirty. He's asleep a few minutes after we say goodnight, and I stare at him in the shadows from my side of the room, his giant frame taking up the entire length of his bed, and I remember trying to cradle his little self in the crooks of my elbows, my wife and my mother each telling me what I was doing wrong, until I finally got it right, and that's what I want now, son, to get it right. It's what every father should want, "For ye are living poems," I whisper soft, just before my eyes give in to the night.

4

Baby Steps

"So we follow our wandering paths, and the very darkness acts as our guide."

\- Jean-Pierre Caussade

We're up and out of the room before five a.m., because it's supposed to be a long way to the trailhead we need and the parking lot there is tiny. That's assuming I read the right things about the right mountain, a bet I'd never take.

I'll plow through the _Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire_ until my eyes fall out, but hand me a manual on how to assemble a vacuum cleaner and I won't get past page one. If the information is useless, I'm all in, but if it's practical in some way, it's going overboard. With Alexander it's just the reverse. Maybe a screwed-up gene I gave him got mercifully dyslexified somehow. U-C-A-G went G-A-C-U. Whatever.

A trickle of light cracks the eastern edge of the blackened sky but it disappears as we turn off the deserted last little paved street in town and threshold through into dense forest, total darkness but for our headlights as trees everywhere but under our tires form a frightening tunnel urging us on, a delicate thread of a byway wriggling away, and it's all I can do to see a few feet ahead and try to keep on it, the opposite of a road, as everything works against the driver, distractions driven out because nature's doing the driving, deciding who will and who won't get to the end of the line, her signals and sounds and guards and gatekeepers completely in charge, the crunching and the chirping and the whistling and the whirring and the buzzing and the scratching and the swishing and the swaying and the hissing and the droning, and though dawn has yet to arrive, the jumble in this jungle is the rumbling of the earth, as it was meant to be, we the tourists, she the tour guide, and that humble thought steadies my nerves some.

THUMP! Slight pause. THUMP! The car does a double lurch and Alexander looks over at me but hesitates a second before saying "Okay, that was a _serious_ speed bump." I actually did notice it but definitely did not take it seriously. Besides, I'm going less than twenty miles an hour as it is.

"Yeah, I'll watch out for the _next_ one, assuming the chassis's still intact."

Reminds me of my first car, that I'd bought for seven hundred bucks, on which I'd done one repair after another on my own under the watchful eye of a mechanic friend of mine, but had put off changing the way too weak springs; then I'd gone for a drive with one too many people in the car, hit a monster pothole, and blew the oil pan to kingdom come. Since I wasn't about to spend more to fix it than I'd paid for it, off to the junk yard it went. My first car hadn't made it past the first quarter.

Nearly a half hour goes by until we get to the entrance, telling me we've traveled through ten miles of trees to get to this log cabin of a toll booth which is still several miles from the mountain itself. The middle of nowhere finally takes on real meaning. We pay our five dollars, and I ask the lady ranger if I am where I think I am, and which way is which once we get to the lodge, and she explains that the lodge leads to all trails, and that once we're there "Just follow the signs." The incipient insurgence of dawn submerges skepticism, and down an even wispier path we go, a long stretch of dusty winding road leading us at last to the beginning - the parking lot at the end of the world.

* * *

Looks like we're the first ones here; either that or this isn't it. Not too worried, though. No meter maids in sight. I pop the trunk.

"What the hell is that?" I ask him as he lifts out a backpack the size of a calf. I hadn't noticed it earlier when I picked him up in Albany. Just thought it was luggage. A calf comes to mind not because the bag's brown but because he recently told me about the cow-tipping episode back when we first moved to Geneva. His new buddies convinced him to head out to a nearby farm just after the sun went down and push over a slumbering cow, which I found out sleeps standing up, just like a horse.

He'd felt bad, and apparently still does a little, because he'd had no idea that the cows can't get back up by themselves, that they have to get hoisted up the next morning by some kind of crane farmers keep around for that sort of thing. Which meant the animal had laid there on its side for hours, kicking and spinning and madly mooing, until Farmer Joe, actually Tom, in this case - sorry, Tom - set her right come sunrise.

We could use that crane now to lift up his bag.

"An ounce of prevention is better than a pound of cure, dad. Remember?"

"Sure, but that's gotta be like ten _thousand_ ounces you got in there, kid." He smiles, knows I'm suggesting he take some stuff out, but does nothing of the kind. The rudiments of a path tell us we're heading in the right direction, and the blue-black sky is now streaked with silvery white slashes of grayish clouds, the cutting edge of the day slicing through the void as it makes its way from light to night. Just like us. We get to the sign-in post but neither of us thinks to sign in. Me because I'm stubborn and him because he's an emergency medical professional. He's who they call when help is needed, and guess what, he's already here.

There's no one around, but there is a schematic of the mountain and most of the trails, and we study it for a while in silence, both of us nodding and pointing, until I trace my finger up one crooked line and down another, and say "That's the way up and that's the way down," and he shrugs in assent, as indifferent to the question as I am, the strategy already chosen, the tactics merely a detail. _I will pay dearly for this indifference_.

As we make our way into the woods my mind goes back to an impromptu hike we took ten years ago, when on a whim, while he and my wife and I were strolling through Taughannock Park over in Ulysses, I decided it would be cool for my son and me to clamber up an exceedingly steep glen wall laden with rocks and roots.

I've always been crazy about climbing, be it fences or buildings or trees, and my thinking that day, if it could be called that, was that I'd stick right behind him as we went up, keeping an eye out for if he were to slip or backslide somewhere along the way. It went off without incident but it was a stupid impulse, heedless in the extreme.

At the same time, misfortune could care less about all the precautions we often take with our children. My wife and I had gone to see a movie and we'd left Alexander with her parents over on Church Avenue at their laundromat. He was five years old and had just learned to ride a bicycle, and of course before we left we reminded him to stay close to the store and under no circumstances to cross the street with his bike.

Naturally, not only did he cross the street but he did so right in front of a double-parked car and just at that moment another car came barreling down. When we got back from the movie - no cell phones in those days - there was a neighbor and my father-in-law shouting at us in English and Cantonese respectively that our son had been hit by a car, that his grandmother had gone in the ambulance with him to Kings County General, and that he was unconscious.

Loron and I will never forget that car ride we took across town not knowing our son's condition. Every parent's nightmare, and there we were frightened out of our minds that it had arrived, eager to tear our little world apart.

As it turned out, Alexander had just suffered a concussion and a nasty bruise, and beyond keeping him overnight for observation, the doctor and nurses present assured us all was well. It happened that at the time, this was in 1989, Kings County had a reputation as "trauma central" because of all the violent crime victims that streamed through its doors, but because of this unfortunate truth, it meant our son had been in the best possible hands.

So a thousand crazy steps up a wall of danger with dad and all was calm, but a single misstep by a child and all hell breaks loose. Which is another way of saying that constantly seeking shelter from the storm is silly. The storm finds us all soon enough.

He slows down for a moment to look at a lean-to over to our right. "What's that, the Unabomber's house?" he asks, pointing to a lopsided shed hidden among the trees.

"Maybe for when a storm hits?" I posit, but the thing doesn't seem able to withstand a sharp breeze let alone torrential rain. It's still standing, though.

"Hm." He's unconvinced.

We've only just started and already I'm breathing heavy. Not a good sign. I'm reminded of a walk I took along Victoria Harbor when the three of us took our first big trip together to his mother's hometown, and I noticed this middle-aged guy about as old as I am now, huffing and puffing his way on the road to nowhere just as a guy half his age and about as old as Alexander is today blew right past him easy as you please, and I remember thinking, "Sorry, old man, but there goes youth literally passing you by."

Not so funny now, is it, old man?

So many of us chasing things we'll never catch, and blind to whatever got us running after them to begin with. We come to a bit of a clearing and he stops, taking off his backpack and placing it on a boulder.

"You all right?"

"Yeah, I just want you to do the honors," he replies, as he takes out a spray can of mosquito repellent and hands it to me, holding both arms parallel to the ground, his eyes squeezed exaggeratedly shut, his scrunched up face reminding me of him getting his occasional shot at the pediatrician's office.

He's got on a dark blue T-shirt with his station's logo on it and a pair of shorts, whereas I've got on my "Canadian uniform _,_ " as he likes to call it - blue jeans and a long-sleeve blue jean shirt, an outfit that precludes the need to shower with bug spray. I will not apply any sort of spray, lotion or screen to my skin, drawing the line at cheap cologne, but if he wants that slimy ooze all over him, that's his business. I point the can at his face and press the nozzle, unclear why he should be asking me to do it in quite this way.

Clarity suddenly arrives as he drops his arms and vigorously shakes his head.

"Fuck!"

I immediately realize I've done something wrong, and reach into my bag to get a bottle of water and a paper towel. He cups his hands and I pour water into them, and he gently splashes his face repeatedly, after which I hand him the towel.

"My fault, father," he says with what looks like tremendous restraint, as he wipes away the stinging poison I just fired at him, "I should have been _extremely_ specific about what it was I wanted you to do."

He's already laughing, and though I'm a little worried about his eyes, I don't actually think there was any ambiguity about what he was asking for. His face, arms, and legs were the only logical targets, and he could have sprayed the latter two, well, four, himself. What remained? Plus, he'd shut his eyes. What other conclusion could I have drawn other than that he'd wanted me to aim at his face?

So I tell him as much.

"The idea was to protect my eyes from any wayward spray, dad, but it's okay. Lesson learned. Let's get going." He shakes his head, still smiling, and as I try to look at his face as he puts his pack back on, I see some redness in his eyes, but I suppress an apology, and we both get moving again.

As we head along the trail it's clear nobody used a bulldozer to make a path. About the only indication some trailblazer's been through here is the occasional white stripe haphazardly painted on some trunk. Greenery of every configuration abounds and trees of every size shoot out from every angle. There's a primordial feeling swarming around me, and it's hard to say if it's "out there," having found a wandering soul, or if it's "in here," with that wandering soul having found his way home.

Either way, it isn't new. Being back in the city for the last couple of years simply quieted the feeling for a while, but it's always near now, waiting for expression. Fifteen years of living in the country awakened distant dreams of wilderness clocked into my DNA, clocked into everybody's DNA if we can listen past the jackhammer of reality ever ready to obliterate that dream. What's wonderful is that the dream is real.

Wilderness is what's real. Everything else really is just noise.

"So how'd the trial end up?"

That's right. I'd completely forgotten. I'd been called to serve on a jury back in May, and it was just a couple of weeks ago that the case had been settled. It'd lasted nearly a month, although altogether only six days had been actually spent in the courtroom. But I'd learned a lot in those six days.

"Hard to believe, but it ended up almost exactly the way it should have." I'd told even him nearly nothing about the case, other than it involved a shooting death, scrupulous about following the judge's admonition about not discussing the proceedings with _anyone_ until the trial was over. As I never tire of telling him, one of the keys to character is what we do when no one's looking.

"It's a case that goes back seven years," I say, really glad he reminded me about it. "An undercover cop shot and killed a twenty-year-old who'd been beating him with a baseball bat."

"Damn." Clearly impressed. Not as much as I was, though. Once I'd become aware of the particulars, I must admit I felt privileged to be sitting on that jury. I'd felt guilty about my own fascination, however, and still do.

But it was there nonetheless. Part of being human, misanthropic book man. Get over it.

The brush is thick and it looks like slow going for a while, so I might be able to walk and talk at the same time, and tell him about the case without collapsing in the process.

"You remember the place that makes the linguini carbonara tableside inside the enormous wheel of parmigiano?" I ask, so as to give him a reference point.

"Sure. The food was incredible." He remembers.

"The shooting took place not far from there back in the spring of 2000. Officer MacKenna and his partner were patrolling in an unmarked car as part of some gang unit. Apparently there were and maybe still are a lot of turf battles in that neighborhood between rival gangs, Mexicans against Colombians, Bolivians versus Peruvians, that kind of thing, just like in Chinatown between the Chinese and the Vietnamese.

"Anyway, they're driving, that is, MacKenna's the one at the wheel, when suddenly he sees three men carrying weapons, a bat, a pipe, and a _machete_ , to be precise, as they're running down Roosevelt and then around the corner, so he makes a sharp left up that same street and stops the car right alongside them.

"The car's unmarked but the three guys immediately take it for a cop car and frantically throw their weapons under a nearby van. MacKenna gets out of the vehicle, announces himself as a police officer and takes out his shield, which hung on a chain around his neck and had been tucked under his shirt.

"As he's getting the trio under control, he's struck from behind with an aluminum baseball bat, the first time square in the back, then on the right shoulder, and then after he falls to the ground, Ortiz, the shooting victim, continues to rain down blows. He finally stops, but now he goes after a 'gray-haired' man a few feet away and hits him a few times. This man, by the way, was never identified, never came forward, and was never found.

"He now sets his sights on MacKenna's partner, Lessing, and is about to swing the bat right at his head, when MacKenna, who's now standing up, draws his gun and shoots Ortiz - twice, as we later find out - just as Lessing is reaching for his own gun.

"Ortiz tries to run away, and MacKenna goes after him, and only after giving chase for about twenty yards does his partner Lessing overtake him - "raced right by him" is what MacKenna said - and as Ortiz and Lessing run around the corner and out of MacKenna's sight, MacKenna has to stop because of his injuries, and as he leans against a wall he calls in the shooting. Ortiz, meanwhile, has collapsed from loss of blood, and he dies there in the street.

"All this is Officer MacKenna's version of what happened that night, and if you're wondering why he didn't try to shoot Ortiz when he was whacking the 'gray-haired man' with his bat, that's because he said that directly behind the man at the crosswalk, which was maybe thirty feet away, well, at just that moment, crossing that very crosswalk at four o'clock in the morning, a _Wednesday_ morning, I should add, was a lady pushing a baby stroller, and so he held off firing his weapon."

"Yeah, right," Alexander responds, as we start to work our way up a gentle incline of slate, a staircase of jumbled rock and leafy greens, with the occasional skinny alabaster tree shooting way out like a lost telephone pole.

"That's not the toughest part to believe," I go on, looking around for the white stripe that's not been seen now for quite a stretch - ah, there's a blue one, which I guess makes sense given that the patch we're in only has white trees.

"There's the problem of MacKenna saying he got hit in the shoulder with the bat. We were shown a photograph of his back taken at the hospital, and there was a hell of a nasty, massive bruise in the _middle_ of his back, a bit to the left, but absolutely nothing by his shoulder. Which made no impact on me at the time. What was obvious was that Ortiz was clearly trying to _kill_ this police officer, so it didn't much matter to me how accurate MacKenna's account was; after all, how accurate do you expect a man getting beaten nearly to death to be? It took three months for him to recover.

"There was a real problem when MacKenna said he was standing up when he shot Ortiz, though, not so much because it's hard to believe he _could_ get up after enduring that beating, but because the forensic pathologist that examined Ortiz's body indisputably demonstrated there was no way MacKenna could have fired the bullets that killed Ortiz from a standing position.

"But for me, what made no sense whatsoever was what the hell was Lessing doing during this rampage? Ortiz clubs his partner, clubs some other guy, and is about to club Lessing right in the head, and _Lessing still hasn't been able to draw his weapon?_ I mean, that's ridiculous. Plus, Lessing was and is a slender man, younger than MacKenna, and he was two feet away from Ortiz when MacKenna shot him. Yet, MacKenna, who's not quite six foot, weighed over two hundred fifty pounds then and now, has just been clubbed, according to his own testimony, half a dozen times with a baseball bat, and is _farther_ away from Ortiz, yet, not only is he the one who shoots first, but he's the one that gives chase to Ortiz afterwards, and only after chasing after the suspect _for sixty feet,_ does his younger, slimmer partner "race right by him." And that right there is where the case turned for me."

"Why right there, pops? The guy's bullshitting up a storm. What made you believe him in the first place?" A reasonable question from a reasonable man. A man of black and white, who knows good when he does it and evil when he sees it. Worthy of the right response from a man of grays and shadows, who recognizes reality when he can no longer avoid it and fantasy only when he's not the one constructing it.

Often, when speaking to Alexander, I love quoting from _The Matrix_ (the first one, of course - the second and third were abominations); it has been become a form of playful shorthand for us, and there are so many wonderfully pompous and portentous lines from the film from which to choose. "Well, _I had a revelation_ upon hearing that particular set of lies, a revelation that came together fully as we approached the end of the trial; namely, that except for Ortiz's mother and sister, and the pathologist, _everybody else_ who testified was lying in one way or another.

"It actually took me a while to realize it because sometimes the lies were so outrageous. I mean, MacKenna's lies are so blatant it really does surprise me now that it took as long it did for me to see it. And a lot of that had to do with what the case was about. The case was not about murder. MacKenna was an undercover cop on gang patrol who was attacked by a man with a bat. The attack was unprovoked. MacKenna had not been pursuing Ortiz. He was in the middle of interrogating three suspected gang members. Upon being attacked, he shot and killed this man. Not complicated. What this case, which was a civil case at this point, not a criminal case, was about, was excessive force. Did MacKenna use excessive force in subduing his attacker?

"For most of the trial, even after all of MacKenna's testimony, I didn't think so. Even though I believe a man ought to be able to restrain himself in times of duress, and even though I believe a man that is a law enforcement officer ought to be able more than most people to restrain himself in times of duress, MacKenna's just a man. And men make mistakes. And so as bad as I felt for Ortiz and his family, I empathized with MacKenna, and I told myself that he probably did the best he could.

"Ortiz, for his part, was portrayed as a mild-mannered government worker, as a former high school honor student and star athlete, and as a nice young man who helped pay the rent at the apartment he shared with his mother. All that didn't explain why at four in the morning during the work week, this upstanding citizen had consumed, according to the forensic toxicologist that had done the examination, somewhere between _eleven_ and _thirteen_ servings of alcohol."

"Jesus Christ!" Alexander says.

"Well now, yes, the Savior did encourage the drinking of wine, but I don't remember him getting wasted anywhere in his travels. Anyway, the toxicologist was ill-behaved, mocking the plaintiff's attorney's questions, which was uncalled for, and he lied about the unshakable certainty of his conclusions, which varied quite a bit between the time of the examination and the time of this trial, but there was little to dispute about his findings. On that night, Ortiz was about as drunk as a man could get.

"But that turned out to be irrelevant to what was going on. When MacKenna's partner went up to testify, things became a lot clearer. He got quite emotional, and out of everyone who testified, apart from Ortiz's mother and sister, he demonstrated the greatest decorum and respect for the proceedings. But even though he was trying to stick to some internal script that was playing in his mind, and even though he was trying his damnedest to be loyal to his partner, he just couldn't get the story right. Despite being given ample berth by his own attorney to correct the official record, which did _not_ include Ortiz about to swing a bat at his head, he didn't do it.

"Worse still was when MacKenna's defense attorney set up a diagram complete with movable icons to recreate the scene that night on the street, Lessing first put the icons in the wrong places, compared to how MacKenna had set them up, and then when he tried a second time, he set them out in the wrong places _again._

"The plaintiff's attorney made a brilliant move by neither objecting to the second placement or even saying a word after Lessing had done it, which had an all the more powerful effect on the jury. I know it did on me. At that point the defense rested its case, the plaintiff had done so two days earlier, and so it was time for the jury to deliberate.

"Anyway, the next day, we come in, and the case is over. The judge announces that the city has agreed to pay the Ortiz family two hundred and fifty thousand dollars and thereby settle the case. When we discussed things later on, it was obvious that we the jury would have arrived at a similar number.

"Now, my son, there was a fascinating lesson that emerged from this experience, and I want very much to share it with you. The defense tried to paint a picture of an honorable police officer firing at a crazed assailant only at the very last possible moment, when his partner's life was in imminent danger, and the plaintiff tried to paint a picture of an honorable young man being chased by a gang, and mistaking an undercover officer as yet another burly member of that gang, a member he had no choice but to attack.

"The truth, to the extent it's possible to figure out what really happened that night, is that Ortiz _was_ being chased by a gang, and that when he struck MacKenna with the bat, he had no idea that the man he'd hit was a police officer. He then proceeded to run away, but MacKenna shot him twice in the back as he lay on the ground, which is why both bullets have an upward angle. As for Lessing, he was likely nowhere near MacKenna and Ortiz when either the beating or the shooting took place, which was why he screwed up his side of the story so badly. He probably was the one interrogating the three gang members off to the side somewhere. And that's why MacKenna felt compelled to fabricate and his partner to attempt to corroborate such a fanciful tale. _Not_ because the shooting was malicious, but because it was done in haste, as Ortiz was running away, and MacKenna knew there was no way to justify it under those circumstances, and so details had to be concocted so that the excessive force used in fact did not look that way in court."

"And the lesson, dear father...?" Alexander taunts.

"And the lesson, dear child, is that without objective eyewitnesses, without photographs, video, or even truly damning circumstantial evidence, and _precisely because most everyone was lying,_ not only did everyone involved get what I believe is a nearly perfect picture of what happened that night, but nearly perfect justice emerged in the process. In essence, this is the judicial counterpart to the "invisible hand" in economics. Just as one person's greed is limited by the next person's and can bring about better conditions for both, the trial taught me that one person's lies can be limited by the next person's, and can therefore bring about some measure of both truth and justice."

He nods his head, always unerringly polite to an old man that must be boring him to tears at this moment as at many other moments, but dutiful to the core, he listens as if I were reciting directions from a sacred treasure map rather than bromides from a charlatan's almanac.

"Be careful, dad," he warns, as the incline suddenly goes vertical and I fall back a bit into his protective hands, and he pushes me forward, a not unnecessary precaution as I do tend to ignore protocols of safety from time to time. He's deliberately staked out the rearward position, I now notice, and, at the risk of a play on words, I am affronted.

But the effrontery continues. "Don't worry, sir," he says, "my name is Alexander Traina and I'm here to help." That's his calling card when he arrives on the scene of something tragic or potentially so, and he's using it now at the scene of something potentially tragic but currently comedic. I turn to look at him with mock disdain as I pay a bit more attention to the now seriously precarious terrain.

"I assured your mother I'd be bringing you back in one piece. Which means you need to go on ahead, kid." I motion for him to proceed, the protector in me needing to reawaken, realizing a bit belatedly that things have indeed gotten a tad unsafe.

"I don't think so, old man. If daddy should fall, I'll need to explain it to my mother, _your_ mother, _and_ my future wife. So keep moving."

I do as I'm told, reluctant discretion served in response to rebuke, as advancing decrepitude yields to youth, a middle-aged rebel, short on breath and long in tooth, marches on in defeat, his son in calm pursuit.

I dig my feet into the rock and plant my cane firmly twixt soil and stone, my knees scraping nature's wall, my free hand reaching for a solid hold, freelance fingers grip their new assignment, eyes trained only on the next few steps of the journey.

He's far more relaxed as we go up, and that's why he hasn't missed the forest for the trees as he whispers, "Dad, off to your right, at two o'clock, take a look," and staring right at us no more than ten feet away is a mother moose and her calf, baby a bit wobbly and distracted, mommy stockstill and defiant, unblinkingly assessing whether we are or are not a danger, her eyes level with ours, their chocolate coats shimmering and silky and so foreign to someone who's only seen these creatures mounted on some wall.

We linger for a while, hypnotized by something natural that no longer is, and a few surreal seconds go by until we snap out of reality and get back to business, a perversion of a reversion in need of conversion, but that project's above my paygrade, and so I stick to this trail, looking back a few times as we march on, wondering what else is lost that might yet be found.

Progress is slow yet steady as an abundance of alternatives present themselves, and what's clear is that a threshold has been crossed, a rubicon traversed. The hike is no longer a stroll but a struggle, newborn and still gentle, but the cries and the cooing of this infant rumble and threaten, so I strengthen my grip, look back on my own calf, and move forward with a most begrudging modicum of care.

5

Starting to Go Vertical

"Think like a man of action, and act like a man of thought."

\- Henri Bergson

I thank myself for bringing along my trusty cane as this middle-aged biochemical tri-ped stumbles ever upward, negotiating its way over and around a jumble of angry, angular boulders, a nearly vertical river of rock, ready to shred me to bits should I fail to figure out the right way through the motionless rapids.

It is delectably slow going, and a smile crosses my face as I tell Alexander for what is likely the hundredth time, though only for the first time on this particular day, that however ponderous our progress may be, we nonetheless are upon an orb spinning at a thousand miles an hour. "Yes, dad," he responds, snaking his long limbs methodically across the stones, easily keeping pace and also graciously maintaining a manly distance between us.

"Well, yes, you may know about the rotational speed, but were you aware that, in addition, we are rocketing around the sun at something like sixty thousand miles an hour?"

"That's a pretty big number, pops."

I believe you, though, he implies, and really wish you weren't about to go ahead and verify that figure for me, he silently implores, and I damn well know you're going to do precisely that, he imperturbably concludes.

"It is indeed, and I'll tell you how I arrived at it. Two-Pi-R, baby, two-Pi-R." Stoically silent. So I proceed. "Two times Pi, or two times three point one, times the radius of a circle... gives you, the circumference of that circle. The earth's orbit is certainly not... a circle, but it's close enough. So, using rough numbers... ninety million miles times two times three... gives us five-hundred and forty million... divided by three-hundred and sixty-five days... gives us, say, a million and a half... miles a day... divided by twenty-four... let's say twenty-five... which gets us to... sixty thousand miles an hour."

I struggle to catch my breath, which is already mostly gone, as I try to keep at least a slothful pace up this brutally endless patch. Speaking of which, now there's a creature that knows how to live. The lovable, damn near mythical sloth. He sure as hell doesn't move at sixty thousand miles an hour. I watched one once for about an hour, and until he waved away a fly, well, if you call arcing an arm at perhaps a millimeter per second waving, I would've sworn all I was watching was some strange-looking stuffed animal nailed to a branch. Its lack of movement made turtles seem positively hyperactive by comparison.

"How're you doing, dad?" He obviously noticed how slowly I spoke as I worked out how our planet swirls and twirls, and though some of the delay had to do with recollecting my original calculation, most of it has to do with simple exhaustion. I say nothing as I spot a small horizontal platform of slate dead ahead. Breathing deep a few times, cursing myself for not loading up on nasal spray and unwilling to break out the strong stuff just yet, I holster my cane under my belt and make like a mad quadriped, scampering and scraping my way forward, scurrying over rocks and roots, shifting soil and slanted tree trunks, leafy greens and crunchy leaves, until I lurch onto solid ground, at least ten or fifteen yards ahead of my progeny, and only then do I stand tall and good, like a biped should, whipping out my wood and planting it firm, calling down below:

"The eagle has landed, bambino! We have shaken the shackles of gravity, and will soon bestride the sky! Onward and upward!" That tells him I'm okay, and I see him smile, a smile that says he won't be needing to conduct CPR on poppa just yet. My, how the tables have turned. The son looking out for the father, keeping not only a watchful eye over him, but a trained one as well. In contrast, back when I was doing the watching, my eyes might as well have been made of glass.

A couple of years before the big move from urban to upstate New York, I remember taking him to the park, just the two of us, and my wife was none too thrilled about it, knowing quite well that the absentminded philosopher was best left in charge of books and not a child, least of all hers. But she bit her tongue and paid the price.

He was five, and after some swinging and sliding, and just as we were heading home, Alexander saw the horizontal monkey bar, and decided he wanted to give it a try. He was very tall for five, but even on his tiptoes he couldn't reach the rungs, and so I gave him a boost. He grabbed on tight and told me to let go, obviously thinking he could do it himself, and so I did just that, actually pretty impressed that he wanted to attempt this somewhat daring feat on his own.

Well, I backed away a bit more than I should have, and even though he was doing okay for a while, hesitantly taking one hand off the first rung but quickly grabbing the second, then hanging on for all he was worth, getting ready for rung number three, enthusiasm gave way to entropy and he could no longer hang on, yet the gravity of the situation had still not registered, and so by the time I swooped in to help he'd already fallen face first onto the rubber mats and wound up with a really nasty bloody nose.

He pleadingly asked me why I'd let him fall, and of course there was no answer for that, but the ostensibly irresponsible behavior, often bordering on the negligent, was clearly of a piece with the fathering framework I'd so carelessly crafted. Part of it was sheer stupidity, no escaping that, but part of it was instinctively knowing there were things he simply had to do on his own, sooner rather than later and the riskier the better.

We'd just moved to Geneva, it was the summer of '91 and now he was seven, and he and I had been spending a lot of time bicycling along Seneca Lake, past the docks and down the crushed stone path that hugged the shore, tucked between sloping willow trees straining for the waters and massive maples standing sentry as they stretched toward heavenly quarters.

And set against the path on a treeless patch of green, there stood a triangular mound of dirt, a natural ramp that steadily rose to a good twenty feet at its crest, and over that miniature cliff, was a rough and ready drop designed for amateur daredevils, a crooked little road at a sixty degree angle, a jagged stripe of brown carved out of the surrounding weeds by thousands of wheels ridden by reckless souls seeking to court bodily ruin.

Studded with rocks, getting safely down the prickly path was no picnic. Indeed, figuring out just the right way to swivel and swerve down the side of this molehill while still hitting top speed was the holy grail for those who sought a little biker salvation, and after quite a few attempts, I'd sipped from the secret chalice, and thought that Alexander might enjoy the same.

When I broached the subject with the young man, we were at the base of the drop, and certainly to him it must have seemed hundreds of feet high, and so he very wisely demurred, politely informing his dad that he was not interested. Having prepared forreluctance, I proceeded to give a demonstration of what I had in mind, pedaling over to the corner in question, where horizontal turned two-thirds vertical, and placing both feet on the ground, I walked backwards up the slope, with my bike beneath me, just a few yards, and then gently cruised down and skidded to a stop right beside him.

"That's all I'm talking about, kid," I'd said to him. "No need to start all the way at the top. Five or six steps." I'd barely finished talking when he went and did just what daddy had done, maybe even went a little higher, down to trying a spinning skid when he got to where I was standing as I watched him.

I'd thought at the time that in a matter of weeks he'd be zooming down that hill on his bike, but all it had taken was maybe an hour, as he and I went a little bit higher each time, until finally he'd asked to try the ramp, and then all of a sudden I'd become the reluctant one, tossing my bike aside and positioning myself along the drop, making certain I was firmly planted, so I could steer him along his way, bringing him to a stop when needed, but it only took him a few tries until he'd mastered the molehill, and by the end of that afternoon, I stood along the shore by the setting sun and watched as he'd fly up that ramp saying "Look, dad, look!" and he'd square his shoulders at the crest and the bike would lift a little and land, and then he'd zig-zag down the gnarly path, soar straightaway for maybe ten yards at ground level, and spin wildly, madly, beautifully, into a skidding stop, kicking up a majestic cloud of dust all around him, and what the hell else could a father ask for in this life than to see something like that?

"What took you so long?" I shout to him as I lay on my back, my head dangling over the edge of a very real cliff on this lush ridge, eyes temporarily dazzled as he decides to take a picture of me laying on this gun-metal gray rounded rock speckled chalky white jutting out and over and under fringed with greenery clinging all around before forming a foresty cushion way down below as if awaiting a nasty spill by some stumblebum scrambler up above.

I look around at the surrounding mountains and valleys and how they mingle with the sky, and my mind just seems to disappear as wave after wave of immaculate air draws inspirations from beyond, filling my lungs then setting them free, blowing away every last cloud in my cerebellum and bringing blessed solace and silence in its wake.

Only after a good long while do I notice I'm alone. "Alexander?" I call, not yet worried, but still. I groggily get up and then do a three-sixty, seeing nothing but blue and green and gray and white everywhere I turn. I walk back to the vertical river of rock and look up and down the path, and just as I spot a tiny cave off to the side, bracketed by some rather large ferns, he comes crouching out from it, emerging a little hastily it seems to me, a big smile on his face and he curses as he courses, "There's like a hundred fucking spiders in there!" and of course I laugh myself silly in spite of truly, sincerely not wanting to, laughing until I can't breathe, but the insidious guffaws continue because their origin has nothing to do with today, and he, of course, knows this, but despite his genuine anger about the whole matter, he still laughs along with me, and I just shake my head as we stroll across the ridge, trying but failing to feel bad about a phobia I single-handedly created for him.

He was only six years old when I took him to see "Arachnophobia" and, in hindsight, it was a mistake to take someone so young to see a film about spiders that spooked even the most stoic of adults, particularly that final scene where the hero battles an arachnid the size of Goliath. In my defense, I really love spiders, and it was only halfway through the movie that I realized small children had no business watching this thing, but by that time I was engrossed in the story, and, quite frankly, son, it's not like you were screaming in terror and running for the exit. How was I supposed to know silence equalled not consent but consternation?

And as I always say to him when he reminds me of my folly, even Superman has his kryptonite, and so you have your spiders. A little humility goes a long way for any

man, and all the more so for a bona fide heroic one. So, you're welcome.

I can recall leaving our house in Geneva for work one morning, where parallel to our front door were thick bushes forming a pathway together with the side of the house maybe four feet wide out to the driveway, and when I got home eight or nine hours later that day, an immense spiderweb had been constructed across that pathway, blocking my way to the door. It was so big you could have played tennis over it, and though I very grudgingly and respectfully took it down, years later I'm still amazed at what a single spider was able to spin in a single day, and I'm still convinced that no human being has ever done a day's work that matched that creature's doomed efforts.

Which naturally raises the matter of Aristotle's dictum that "the goal of work is leisure." He wasn't saying that work had no value or that one should work so as to be able to luxuriate. Rather, I think he was saying that the very purpose of our efforts should be to create abundant free time in which to develop our minds and our bodies and our talents.

Leisure, as Aristotle took it to mean, was time that we could spend developing ourselves physically and philosophically, grappling with our friends and grappling with the wonders of the world around us, taking our bodies to limits we thought beyond our reach, and allowing our minds to discover realms we deemed beyond our grasp.

Thus, if a spider or an ant or a bee decides, with the handful of neurons and dendrites each has in its tiny head, to spend a day spinning a web, building a colony, or forming a hive, it's easy to forgive them their excesses for they know not what they do, programmed as they are to work themselves to death with nary a moment for reflection or recreation. But what's our excuse?

How is it that we can figure out with each successive generation not simply how to make things and build things and do things in less time and with less effort - and we most certainly have spectacularly succeeded in doing exactly that - but that we can't figure out how to take these colossal collective gains and translate them into greater leisure and greater economic security for the greater number of us? The surest sign that a nation or a business or an individual is profiting is the sheer amount of time they get to spend not working. Now there's an economic indicator worth worrying about. Anything else makes us look like spiders and ants and bees.

"You said you brought some Power Bars along?" I ask him, as we stand there staring at the chain of mountains that link up and forever lasso the horizon. Suddenly I'm a little hungry and very thirsty. He takes his backpack off, zips it open and reaches in, handing over a couple of bars and a bottle of water. As I peer inside, there are at least four other big bottles of water and what looks like Gatorade, a bunch of these decidedly not-candy bars, an enormous flashlight, a coil of nylon rope, a couple of safety flares, and a bunch of other stuff, and now I realize it all has to add up to thirty or forty pounds. He hasn't yet drawn a deep breath, though, whereas I'm already breathless, so I'm not even going to make a pretense of asking to carry the thing. Instead, youth shall carry the day.

"It looks like you're staying around two hundred, two-ten?" I ask, thinking that he actually almost looks slim. I'd gotten used to seeing him at close to two hundred and fifty pounds, which he carried okay on the outside, but was killing him on the inside. "More like two-fifteen. Somewhere around there," he responds, as he finishes up a Gatorade, continuing to stare off in the distance, silently taking in the scenery.

Between the weight and the extraordinary stress of his work, he'd started getting some really bad headaches; bad, because the very fact that he'd mentioned them meant they must have been supernova bad.

A little background. Three years ago, when he'd just moved to downtown Albany in his first apartment, now working full-time as an EMT while putting in as many hours as he could as a volunteer firefighter in his newly adopted city, I'd given him a call just to see how things were going, how he was managing, trying to do a little detective work to see if he'd adapted okay to his new surroundings, if money was a problem, and anything else he might want to tell me. Fact is, Alexander doesn't tell me things voluntarily, especially when they're bad, so it's up to me to ask the right questions. Or, as I often do, give up asking unless it really seems necessary.

I don't what it was about this particular call, but somehow I could tell something was wrong, so I didn't give up when he brushed my parental concerns aside. Uncharacteristically for me, I asked maybe three or four times what was the matter. He eventually muttered that he'd had "sort of a rough day."

"Why, what happened?"

"A crazy woman on one of my calls. No big deal." Then a prolonged silence.

"And...?"

The silence at the other end of the line meant he was carefully considering what to say. He was nothing if not unrelentingly protective of his father, always concerned about me for reasons I think I understand but also for reasons maybe I'll never understand.

"We get this call from a guy worried about his girlfriend who's locked herself in their bathroom, up on the fourth floor of this apartment building, and when I get there, she's still in there, and the boyfriend's whacked out of his mind but he's afraid, you know, of what she might be doing in there, because she's been real quiet, and protocol says if the door's locked I'm supposed to wait until the police arrive, but something tells me time's running out, so I say the hell with it and kick down the door, and there she is, halfway out the window..."

He pauses, and I sense what's coming, but I guess wrong, thank god.

"So I run over to her and grab her just as she's let herself fall and now I'm halfway out the window myself but I'm braced and I've got her tight, but she's screaming her head off, "Let me die! Let me die!" while I'm working my ass off trying to drag her back into the room, and as I finally hoist her over the window sill I bang the top of my head on the bottom of the open window and crack it - the frame, not my head, dad - and would you believe this woman just starts cursing the shit out of me, screaming like crazy while her boyfriend's trying like, in slow motion, to hug her, and she smacks him, I think by accident, like five times in the face while she's screaming at me, and, meanwhile, the cops are there, just in time, of course, but she is just royally pissed off that someone interfered with her suicide attempt and kept her dumb ass from crashing to the sidewalk."

There was almost a surreal sigh flowing from his phone in Albany to mine in Ithaca as his white-hot exasperation seemed to slowly extinguish as he spoke, and I still remember his laugh as he then proceeded to ask how my day had gone. I'm sure I said something like, Well, certainly not as boring as yours, my child, but the point is that this is what this man only reluctantly refers to as "sort of a rough day."

And that's why I knew the headaches must have been really bad, which is why it was no surprise that he'd later been diagnosed with very high blood pressure, and had been prescribed some high octane medication, that, according to his doctor, he'd probably have to stay on for life. His mother and I, but especially his mother, were not happy that he'd be on this powerful drug at such a young age and therefore for a very long time, with all the known and unknown side effects that must eventually attend, and so we were both immensely relieved when he drastically altered his diet and started an intense training regimen, and not only rapidly shed forty pounds but was able to bring his blood pressure down to the level where medication was officially deemed no longer necessary.

"So your pressure's still okay?" I ask him as I finish off the rest of my sugar-free cardboard candy and water.

"Yeah, pressure's good. No headaches. Just gotta keep an eye on the belly," he says as he taps his stomach. He looks good.

"How's Andrea doing at school?" She's in her last year of pharmacy school, always studying, always worrying about her grades, and always at the top of her class.

"Doing great. Nervous about her application to the endocrine group. She wants you to look it over."

"Without hesitation. Tell her to email it when it's ready."

A thoroughly needless exercise. Her writing is pitch perfect. She'd emailed me a research report a few years back on some chemical process or another, and of course it wasn't the science she'd wanted me to review but the clarity and form. It was an important paper for her and she wanted to make sure no grammatical slips had sneaked in between the formulas and the equations. Twenty pages of crystalline clear composition.

I'd emailed her back a few token revisions, all but one simply a question of style, chosen to reassure her that, yes, some small free radicals of error had entered the chamber of pure reason, but now they had been identified, captured, and flung violently out back into the random world of chaos and disorder where they belonged.

If (when) she gets accepted to the endocrine group, it will mean she can both continue to live in the Albany area where Alexander is now firmly based and focus on pharmaceutical diagnostics, where she can use her skills to help doctors better help their patients. She's got her whole life to go into the retail world of filling prescriptions, wildly remunerative as that undeniably is, but if she were to do that now, straight out of pharmacy school, her seemingly limitless exuberance and enthusiasm would soon come up against the wall of workaday toil and tautology, rote repetition tapping into the well of vibrancy until her visionary fires would subside, and heaven forbid that should happen to anyone so young and talented, and if it should happen to my son's wife, well, then heaven itself ought to be damned.

"Shall we?" I ask, knowing he was simply waiting until dad was ready to get going again, and he nods, hoisting on the backpack as I reach down for my trusty cane. He puts a hand on my shoulder and leaves it there a while, a son's caress speaking volumes, his actions, as always, doing his talking for him, and suddenly I feel stronger, despite the dawn's menacing glare.

6

Side-to-Side

"Mountains cannot be surmounted except by winding paths."

\- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

The whole right side of my baby's face was a hideous pinkish purple, but he wouldn't tell me what had happened. It was our first winter in upstate New York, he was in second grade, had just walked home from Geneva Elementary a few blocks away, and it was my day off from the McDonald's I managed over in nearby Canandaigua. Loron was working on getting the local Wal-Mart ready for its grand opening, and wouldn't get home till later that night. Both of us had arrived at our new city without a job but it hadn't taken long for the world's largest fast food chain and the world's biggest retailer to ensnare us in their working class web, and I'll readily admit that both of us learned something from the two years we spent in capitalism's twin dungeons, expending blood, sweat, and tears in exchange for wages fit for a serf. We learned how to find better jobs even in the tiniest of towns where opportunity rarely knocks or calls or writes.

I finally got Alexander to tell me that the fourth grader a few doors down had decided to launch a fusillade of iceballs at his head and that one of them had landed, with fairly fearsome results. However, I was not quite so cavalier at the time at the prospect of my son being so casually and so literally defaced by a bully, and so I discovered a quality hidden beneath my long-standing calm, philosophical veneer that I had not realized existed - absolute cataclysmic rage.

I had him tell me where this feckless fiend hung out, told him to get inside our broken-down Chevrolet Citation, proceeded to make half a dozen iceballs of my own and put them on the backseat floor (in the dead of winter in upstate New York I could have come back for those things in April and still found them frozen), and then we drove off until I saw the boy playing slow-motion hoops with some friends in the hastily shoveled snow.I brought the car to a halt, got out and told Alexander to follow me. I stormed up to Maurice and asked him as I pointed to my son's face: "Did you do this to him, YES or NO?" His friends had already stopped tossing the ball around. This was not New York City, after all, and kids had to have a fair measure of respect for their elders, especially since all their elders knew one another, saw one another, worked with one another, actually talked with one another. Small town life. Real life, I ought to say, compared to the fractured, frantic, frenetic hell that comprises big city life.

"Yeah." Not matter of fact, but not remorseful, either.

"Yeah, well, DON'T YOU MOVE."

I stomped back to the car, took out the iceballs and placed them in a pile maybe ten feet from where Maurice stood his ground, to his credit. And then I gave Alexander his instructions. "Directly at his head, until you hit him."

It took a few throws, reluctant at first, then forceful, then a little angry, all of them missing, and then one landed, glancingly, off the side of the kid's forehead, no big deal, but that's when I said "Enough," and told him to go back to the car.

"Now you're even," I said to the boy, "and now you know what it's like to be pushed around by someone bigger and stronger than you. It isn't a good feeling, is it?"

He says nothing.

"IS IT?"

"No."

"No, it isn't."

Maurice and Alexander actually became friends, not good friends, but friends, which was a lucky thing for Maurice, given that my son grew to be half a foot taller than him, and afterwards I always made it a point to say hello to him and his brothers and his parents, and he always made it a point to call me Mr. Traina, and though I was a young father and none too calm or philosophical about how I handled the situation, I think I did the right thing that day, for both children, and for me, and the right thing hadn't come from a book or from experience or from a careful analysis of the problem - it had come straight from the boiling blood of a boy's begetter.

This was the only intrusion I ever made into my son's affairs throughout his childhood, meaning never before and never afterwards did I ever deem it necessary to put myself between him and another child, always leaving it to him to figure out what to do and how to do it. Talk to him? Yes. Advise him? Sometimes. Serve as an example? As best I could. But get in the middle of his business? Hover around him like a vulture or a vampire, forever second-guessing and sucking the life out of him? No way.

Only this once when he was a child did I directly intervene, and only sixteen years later when he was an adult did I strongly suggest a course of action he was tilting towards anyway, and only because it was of great importance, and because there were other factors tilting him the other way. But more on that later.

I think how you raise your child ultimately comes down to two very different ways of seeing that child. One way is to see him as yours, as your child, needing your guidance, your love, your discipline, your help in giving him a life that is, frankly, yours, only better. Fuller. Grander. The way you would have raised yourself, if only you'd had the chance to do so.

The other way is to see your child as he is, not as you, but as he is, and all the wonderfully awful, agonizingly glorious, unrelentingly unexpected things that follow from that simple sight, the sight of not staring into a mirror but into the eyes of a lovable being that'll be staying with you for a little while, and will then be off on an unpredictable journey of his own.

If there's a middle ground between these two views of raising a child I'd say it's a hellhole, a yawning abyss that separates two towering platforms of thought, forever standing apart, with absolutely no way to get to one from the other.

In China children to learn both Confucianism and Taoism, two philosophies that focus on very different things, the exacting cultivation of a gentleman scholar on the one hand versus the creation of a humble free spirit on the other. It is not analogous to the Aristotle versus Plato divide we see in the western world but more along the lines of Aristotle versus Dr. Seuss, and I am as serious as a cardiac arrest in this comparison. Lao Tzu's "way of life" is absolutely as far removed from what Confucious had in mind as Aristotle's was from Theodor Geisel's comic creations. Needless to say, few parents in China or even in America have the slightest inclination to take Lao Tzu's (or Dr. Seuss's) philosophy seriously when it comes to their children's upbringing.

And I'm not taking sides here. The stakes are as high as they can get in this most personal of debates and I would not dare suggest that I am on the side of the angels. When we hear about a child sucked into the ocean by a riptide or a girl raped on her way home from school or a boy dead from a drug overdose at a party, and then watch their grieving parents on television, rest assured that their overprotective, Confucian, Aristotelian counterparts are home hugging their own precious children, silently thanking God for the good sense he gave them in keeping an ever watchful eye on their babies, always a step away at the beach, forever their chauffeur, chaperone at every function.

Letting go of your children means exactly that, and there's nothing simple or easy or straightforward about it. I recall going to the playground with my second martial arts instructor Bob and his young son Bobby, who was maybe four years old at the time, and he and I were sitting on a bench talking while the little guy kept climbing higher and higher on the monkey bars (a delightful contraption I think is no longer allowed on playgrounds), and I noticed that despite the increasing precariousness of his son's position, Bob was seemingly serene as could be as we kept chatting, and so sometime afterwards I asked him about that moment, and his response could have come from Lao Tzu himself: "My job as a father is to set my child free. I can't do that by keeping him locked in a cage."

Each of us chooses to watch our kids like a hawk or risk seeing them carried away by one. No one can presume to say which way is best. But one thing is certain. If we're serious about the philosophy we've chosen, if we believe it, mind to marrow, then there really is no middle ground.

"How's nonno doing?" That would be his grandfather, my father, and he's asking because he knows my mother, infinitely more stoic than me and maybe even him, will rarely tell him how she or her husband are actually doing.

"Still smoking two packs a day." Since he was twelve years old. He turns eighty this October. That makes... a million cigarettes, give or take. Not as many as I'd thought. Maybe I've miscalculated.

"Which means he's doing okay," he says casually, knowing that if his grandfather's smoking, then he is indeed feeling well. Well, as well as can be expected, for a man suffering from severe diabetes, who narrowly survived prostate cancer, and whose lungs are so black his doctors can barely read his X-rays.

"Did I ever tell you about that day at the hospital after he'd gotten diagnosed with diabetes, when they first started prescribing the insulin for him?"

"No," he replies, and he's not being polite. I'm cautious about how I talk to my

son about my father. I leave out almost everything. But I try to tell him whatever good things I can. This story sort of falls in that category.

"I took a day off and went with him and my mother that morning, not because Iwas worried they'd misunderstand anything, but I just thought I should be there, more for her than for him. You know he doesn't worry about anything."

We're back in the shadows, off the rapidly brightening ridge and into the thickets, a canopy of branches waving their verdant arms to and fro, swishing the air and giving us cool cover as we push forward. The cane is coming in handy as a sort of eco-friendly machete, swiping away the vegetation blocking our path while allowing it to swing right back after letting us through.

"When was this?"

"Well, I think he'd just turned seventy, so maybe 1997?"

"So we were still in Geneva?" He asks because he knows that meant a five-hour drive back to Brooklyn. And then five hours back.

"That's right. Yeah, I'd left the night before, got back in time to make dinner the next day. Don't remember what I made, though." Breathing's getting a little tough again, but not too bad. The shade is definitely helping. Still a non-believer in second-hand smoke, dumbass? As a matter of fact, self, yes, I still am.

"So we're at the nurse's desk and she's doing the paperwork, and she keeps going back and forth to the file cabinet, then somewhere else, then leaving for a few minutes, then asking my dad some questions, and a lot of time is going by, and I can see he's getting a little impatient, and so finally he asks her if there's a smoking room somewhere on that floor."

Well, you would have thought by the look of her that he'd just asked her to take her clothes off. Her eyes went wide and the preaching began. 'Mr. Traina, there most certainly is no smoking room on this floor, or on any floor. This is a non-smoking building and always has been.' "

My father cocked his head to one side and gave that poor nurse his most world-weary and yet withering glance, and then paused for a few seconds as he considered just how he intended to bring her back down to earth."

'May I ask, lady, how long you've worked here?' He was squinting now, looking a lot like Columbo, and I could see he was getting warmed up."

'Four years,' she'd said triumphantly, as if she'd been there when the hospital's cornerstone had been laid in place."

'Well, that's very good,' he'd said evenly. 'But, you see, I've been coming to this hospital for thirty years, and back then, you could smoke on every floor, and, in fact, I remember walking past an operating room, and I could see doctors smoking in the operating room. So, this may be a non-smoking hospital now, but not before. Before you could smoke anywhere. You guys are the ones who changed. Me, I haven't changed. I've always been a smoker. Except now I don't have a place to smoke.' "

The nurse went from looking smug to looking a bit offended, but she said nothing, getting up once more to look for whatever it was she so far seemed unable to find, but this time she was gone a bit too long, and so now my father got up, and told me to tell her he'd be back in a little while, which meant he was no longer willing to wait to have his cigarette, and of course that meant he'd have to exit the edifice. The Marlboro Man had left the building."

When he came back, the nurse was fuming, but not because he'd kept her waiting.

'Mr. Traina,' she chastised him, 'don't you know how bad those cigarettes are for you? You need to stop.' She'd had her arms folded like this," I gestured, seeking to replicate aconsiderably obese woman trying to fold her arms atop a substantial abdomen, and it suddenly occurs to me that my dad did not suggest to this didactic healthcare professional that while he might have needed to stop smoking she definitely needed to stop eating. I'll attribute that to old-world European grace and charm.

"He looked at her as if he were truly thinking over her advice, and then said, 'So you say smoking is bad. Why?' Of course he says it so deadpan, so sincere, that this woman actually believes he's interested in the answer, and, well, off she goes. 'Why!? Mr. Traina, smoking can cause lung cancer, esophageal cancer, emphysema, heart disease, it can narrow your blood vessels, it can even lead to osteoporosis.' Her eyes had been pleading with him to see the light of the non-smoking sign, and I remember him solemnly nodding his head as she ticked off each calamity, and then he says to her..."

'I see, it sounds very bad. Do I have any of those things?' "

She must have said nothing for a full five seconds before responding, 'Well, no, no you don't.' "

So he says, 'Oh. Well, what do I have?' "

'You have Type II Diabetes.' "

'Ah, so if I stop smoking, will that help with the diabetes?' "

The longest pause you can imagine, bambino, until she finally says, 'No, it probably won't.' "

So he says to her, with the straightest face on earth, 'Okay, then tell me something else to stop to help with the diabetes, because diabetes is what I've got!' "

Alexander and I chuckle as we trudge along, but I'm laughing harder because I had to hold it in that morning as my dad pulled that nurse's leg, and after a minute or so I have to stop walking because I need to take a breath, or maybe two.

Ironically, my father's smoking is helping to keep his diabetes under some sort of control, because the one time he quit smoking - just stopped, for two years - he gained a considerable amount of weight. And everything he loves - bread, pasta, sweets - would take his roller coaster blood sugar levels off the rails and into catastrophe. Cigarettes don't just suppress his appetite, they pretty much replace it, and so these tiny cylinders ofdeath are stemming the toxic tide of unfettered glucose with streaming waves of nicotine and tar. Certainly not an exchange that can go on forever, but for the time being, a trade-off that's helping keep dad alive.

We've been moving horizontally now for quite a stretch, scratching our way side-to-side, with only the sounds of our trudging selves and the wind as it wafts its way through the web of trees and whistles past our ears. The silence of a million years surrounds father and son as we march along to the heartbeat of the earth beneath us, no one else around, and only the occasional white stripe hastily smeared on a maple's trunk to guide us, but neither man needs much direction, each man already having found his way long ago, the word-weaving father finding artificial life between the ink-stained, fact-filled pages of a thousand books, the word-weary son giving real life to the blood-stained, smoke-filled bodies of a thousand souls.

"Are we there yet?" I playfully call back to him as I pick up the pace a bit, my breathing truly getting better with every stride, the non-verticality of the terrain finally giving me a chance to partly recuperate.

"Not yet, dad" he replies, reversing a game we actually never played. I've always ignored the whining of children (and adults), my wife would never, ever, tolerate it, and Alexander just never seemed to engage in it, even when he was very young. Osmosis maybe, but more likely just his personality. Some people are born bitching and whining and complaining, and never seem to give up the habit, and the others, well, the others find better things to do.

Like climbing mountains.

7

False Summits

"Sir... those things yonder are no giants but windmills."

\- Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (as Sancho)

"Is that what I think it is?" I say mostly to myself as I look up in the sky, seeing the summit in sight but wondering how we got so close so soon. Hadn't I read it would take six or seven hours to get there? Not that I'm disappointed, it's just that the math doesn't add up. And thanks to me, we certainly haven't been moving at Mach One. More like Molasses Two. Twice as fast as flowing honey. That sounds about right.

"Looks like it," he says, the puzzled expression on his face probably mirroring my own. He stands with his hands on his hips for a while staring at the summit and then looks over at a massive stand of trees off to the right, first shaking and then slowly nodding his head.

He takes me by the shoulder with his right hand and points to the false summit with the left, his finger trailing down as he speaks. "See that, dad?" he asks, referring to the notch between the sub-peaks I now comprehend we're walking through. "I think where we're headed is hidden behind those trees. We just can't see it from here."

"Let's keep moving," I reply, thinking he's wrong, guessing he's right, but content to follow the splashes of white paint that purport to punctuate a path to the shining synchronicity on a hill, the simultaneous landing of father and son at the apex of an idea that has not yet been born but that is thrashing and thrusting about, just as we are slashing and sliding ahead, two journeys in search of a common destination, two men's destinies bound by a common concatenation.

As we walk the terrain eventually slopes down, and soon it's clear we're making our way across a gully, that we are indeed tracing the cornermost region of a ravine, going from one part of the mountain to another, and I ponder the paradox of that clearing, where what I could see had no relation to what was there, and it occurs to me that our perennial situation is worse than that of the man inside Plato's cave, where the shadows on the wall told so little about what was going on outside in the "real" world; a better analogy is a man trapped inside a bottle, forever able to see an ever changing "real" world, but never able to transcend the prison of his own accursed perspective. And worse still, knowing he can never, ever, escape.

A darkening scene, the nascent sun has vanished, wonderfully cool, as an incredibly thick interweaving of interlocking branches up above act as undulating rafters in this super-natural cathedral, the ever falling distilled holy water dampening the soil and over the course of centuries softening the scattered stones, and so as he and I traverse this trench the going is slow but cushioned in mud, the pastor up front urging us on as we stumble down the aisle, knocking over pews, pushing past parishioners, upsetting all religious decorum as we tramp about the pagan temple, slogging through this sacred swamp, charging up the nave, sounding the trumpet till it shakes and rattles all the eaves, and with a final push we storm upon the chancel and take the pulpit, but with the battle over, the sound and fury stilled, as we search for words of triumph, they all amount to nil.

Mother nature's pilgrims may feel reverence as they stomp and clomp their way around her outdoor church, but neither liturgies nor hymnals need apply as the facsimile of faith is replaced by the fact of faith, chapter and verse singing the creator's song more powerfully than a tabernacle choir, as God's splendors serenade our senses. Sparrows and cardinals and woodpeckers and crickets and squirrels and chipmunks are seen and heard, the aromatics of myriad flora arouse and confound, the air is so pure it begs to be devoured, and as we snake our way through the brush we are as likely to be caressed and dusted by feathery leaves as we are to be scratched and poked by craggy branches.

Every sense vibrantly alive and yet every nerve at rest as the symphony without calms the dissonance within. A sermon without a lecture, redemption without a confession, victory without a confrontation. We march in lockstep without orders, following directions that do not exist, no longer in search of salvation for it has already arrived. Such are the wonders of this garden we have all cast aside in exchange for the iron cage of "freedom." Not such a clever exchange. But let us pause to assess our more mundane coordinates before we more closely examine these metaphorical ones.

"What do you think?" I gasp, as we continue to half-fall half-trudge our way down the decline, having now traveled maybe a half mile without any indication of a corresponding incline, making me wonder, of course, whether we've perhaps strayed off course, and will soon find ourselves back at base camp, or worse, on the other side of the mountain, far away even from the consolation of our own car.

He shakes his head, not seeming the least bit concerned, and before long, the downward sloping curve levels off and while it doesn't go hyperbolic, it does begin its upward slope, and now relief is quickly replaced by the weight of gravity that no longer works with us but against us, though surely more against me than him, and that's fine, gravitas ostensibly associated with advancing age and so what could be more fitting?

And as we exit this curious cube lodged in the notch of this ravine, this air-conditioned sanctum of solitude, and slowly see our path turn from a taupish brown back to a tropical green, it is clear that the fuzzy triangular trapezoid on the horizon we saw from far away is truly a dazzling prism when viewed up close, the many angles of incidence bursting into surprising view if only one is willing to walk into the light.

But would this flood of fawning adoration be quite so overflowing if I went into the wild with a bit more frequency? Which is another way of recalling that Thoreau himself only spent a year or so out in Walden before heading home, so perhaps my equating civilization with an "iron cage" is merely noblesse oblige as it pertains to the noble savage and to a way of life that in my heart I know ought not survive. In a word, flattery is the sincerest form of hypocrisy. So am I chasing windmills and pretending they exist, or do I really believe that we have sacrificed freedom on the altar of knowledge?

For that is the exchange, nothing less. Jules Verne said "The less you have the less you need, and the less you need, the happier you are." I submit that applies not only to material things but to immaterial ideas as well.

Every advance, every invention, every discovery, and every idea may sometimes add to human happiness but they always subtract from human freedom, and that is because a carefully calibrated, painstakingly constructed happiness corrodes freedom and eventually makes us forget what real freedom means, what it looks like, feels like, tastes like.

My few, fleeting, snatches of genuine freedom may be paltry, but I know that every moment of unbridled joy and every moment of unrelenting agony I have ever experienced have had absolutely nothing to do with knowledge and nuance and everything to do with primitive feelings and primal forces.

The day I stuck my hand into a fan my uncle had unplugged to see if I could stop the blade and nearly lost the index finger of my left hand. The time I jumped off a rooftop, grabbed on to a nearby light post and slid down like Batman. That night at a White Castle in Brooklyn when I found myself surrounded by a kid with a knife and three of his friends, and had to figure out what the hell to do next.

My first date. My first time. The day I got married. The moment Alexander was born. The time I decided to climb up a small, nearly dry waterfall and ran out of handholds near the top, and those glorious, excruciating seconds I spent in limbo just thirty feet from the ground, the pile of rocks below ready to break a few of my bones if I fell, the lip of the ledge a few feet above me maybe pouty enough for me to grab hold of, maybe not, but the only way I'd find out was if I could crouch down deep enough to jump up high enough to at least have a chance, but crouching meant pushing away from the wall I was clinging onto for dear life, and meanwhile I could feel my feet slipping, and my hands were getting tired, and my breathing was getting faster and heavier, and those passing seconds were the most terrifying, exhilarating moments that I'd known to that point, and many years later, long after I'd made that jump and gotten that grip and dragged myself up and over and onto that crest, I vividly recall the trickling water that gently streamed over me and over that cliff as I lay on my stomach, my legs still dangling a bit over the edge, and while it may not be much and it was certainly stupid, that is at least one small example of what real freedom - not dictionary freedom, political freedom, philosophical freedom, intellectual freedom - but real, raw, genuine freedom looks like, feels like, and tastes like.

Not knowing how things will turn out. Not having a plan. Not knowing what to do or how to do it or even why you're doing it. The freedom to fail. The freedom to fall. The freedom to love so deeply the world becomes a dream. The freedom to be rejected so brutally the world becomes a nightmare. The freedom to live, not as mice in a cage but as men and women in the wild, ready to fight, daring defeat, willing to die. For a cause. For nothing. For fun.

Precisely that sort of freedom has been the birthright of humanity since long before we came down from the trees, and precisely because we've tried to keep every last vestige of it out of this iron cage we've been building these last few thousand years,every last one of us is at perpetual war with our own nature, desperately seeking every possible opportunity to get back at least a shred of what we've lost.

I am not suggesting we can or should walk away from knowledge and civilization and return to some fabled garden of freedom and ferocity. But I am saying that this iron cage and all its discontents is something we've bought and paid for dearly, and I, for one, uninvolved in the initial transaction, dimly aware of all the exquisite variations of insanity that we must have given up to make this purchase, would like my money back.

"You were right," I say as I glance back at him, and he gives me his trademark two thumbs up and a smile as his reply, and we continue moving silently on, and I'll definitely have to be diligent about maintaining that silence because every spoken word threatens to collapse my lungs as this trail turns seriously steep and positively riddled with rocks and fallen tree trunks, as if some immense alien beast up ahead had had a fit and started tearing trees out of the ground and flung them into our path along with every boulder it could get its hands on.

The trail has tightened into an extremely narrow, dense, arduous, uneven jumble of a byway, completely unrecognizable as a path of any kind, except for that occasional, faithful splotch of enamel staining some sapling's bark and serving as a guiding light to neophytes who would otherwise trek right into oblivion.

I'm on all fives, my cane giving me actual and psychological traction here and there, and even though my normally iron handball hand is in surprising distress from this unusual workout, the tradeoff seems worth it. I see Alexander, sans cane, is doing okay, but even he's struggling a bit. His height puts him at a disadvantage in this patch, as his long arms and legs are actually getting in his way. This really is a tough stretch, and if it goes on for a while, we will certainly need to rest and refuel.

As I crawl-climb my way up this misshapen maze, looking back every so often to see how he's doing, I realize something about him I only vaguely understood a few years ago back when he got to what turned out to be the crossroads of his young life, and suddenly my whole body shudders in response, muscles quaking, spine tingling, short of breath, and it has nothing to do with my exertions but everything to do with my excogitations.

My baby solved the iron cage puzzle the same way any street smart person solves the Rubik's cube puzzle - by throwing the damn thing away. Any man with a truly, purely, undeniably martial spirit, looking around at this sissified, sanitized, desanctified, dysfunctional civilization of ours, comes to realize that only by first escaping this cage and undergoing the rites of passage that will transform him into a modern-day warrior, can he hope to return in full regalia and save not simply those around him but also his own spirit.

Within most every man as within most every nation at most every time in history there exists a battle for supremacy, but the battle, just as Plato made clear in his Republic, is a schizophrenia of the soul, as the competing forces seek to subjugate one another and wrest control over the literal and figurative body politic. Plato's delineation of what sort of republic remains after victory has been achieved - despotism, oligarchy, democracy, aristocracy or timocracy - corresponds to which aspect of the human soul has emerged triumphant over the others: the passion for command, the thirst for material acquisition, the desire for domestic tranquility, the complex pursuit of nobility, or the "simple" capacity for courage.

I only quibble with the master over a single minor detail, namely, that I'll take the warriors over the philosopher-kings any day of the week, both as leaders of a nation and as rulers of the individual. But do feel free to consider choosing me as an advisor upon your coronation, my dear Alexander the Good.

* * *

We sit unbelievably uncomfortably on a couple of boulders for a few minutes, for we need to rest and it looks as though a smooth patch of earth will not be secured at this juncture. He's not breathing hard, which I'm glad to see, whereas I'm having quite the time trying both to reassure my lungs and slow down my heart, as each internal organ demonstrates, as if demonstration were needed, just who's in charge of this campaign. I try to control my breathing as best as I can, taking slow deep breaths, not wanting to worry him, strenuously attempting to make inconspicuous the severity of my situation, because there may well not be a long way to go but there's certainly an altitudinous way to go, and that means my own body politic is going to be clamoring for retreat with every subsequent step, and it's going to require an extreme and protracted effort to control the crowd and make them follow their alleged leader.

I get up and find myself on unsteady legs, an entirely new experience for me, having always prided myself on kicking like a mule in kempo class and gliding like a gazelle on the handball court, these ever-solid lower limbs suddenly rubbery, and so I take it slow, but this time there's a hairline crack in the facade. "Why don't we take another minute, pops?" he says, with neither a trace of impatience or impertinence.

"Grazie, bello, but this object at rest will rest in peace if I don't get moving, so, andiamo!" I take a scintilla of strength from my bravado and stumble ahead, and soon the precipitous path gets a little less so, leveling out some, as does the pounding of my cuore matto (crazy heart) and the quaking of my pulmoni pietosi (pitiful lungs).

But as we move through a stand of pine trees and finally arrive at sort of a clearing, we both look up at what lies ahead, and in my best John McEnroe imitation, I shout at the heavens, only half-jokingly, "You CANNOT be serious!"

8

You Can't Get There From Here

"Believe and act as if it were impossible to fail."

\- Charles F. Kettering

We could think of it as a "stairway to heaven," except there are no stairs. A firefighter's ladder, perhaps, except there are no rungs. And though a journey of a thousand miles does indeed begin with a single step, the seemingly perpendicular wall of fame that rises at least fifty feet above us does not include any discernible steps.

Maybe fifteen feet at its widest point, bracketed by twisty, tangled shrubbery, which, if we should pusillanimously choose to circumvent this new challenge by climbing while clinging through the bristly bramble, it would likely take an hour to snake and slither our way to the top, and more intriguing is the slippery, mossy quality of this steep, slightly concave ramp, gentle hollows carved here and there, but essentially all the available edges have been smoothed by millions of years of melting snow and cascading water, so no matter where one looks, not a one of those quirky artificial handholds and footholds of varying shapes and colors that one finds on those prefabricated rock-climbing walls is in evidence here.

What we've got is a whale of a wall and we find ourselves without spears, tridents, or harpoons. Hell, a Swiss Army knife wouldn't be so bad right about now as we prepare to take on this rock-ribbed Moby Dick. The only way to get there from here is to go right up the middle of this petrified cetacean or creep along its seaweed-fringed flanks, and as Alexander and I glance at one another a couple of times, the decision has already been made. What remains is to determine which one of the stubborn boneheads is going second.

"I'm not having the same argument with you again, father," he chides, waving an open palm towards the beckoning wall, and I reluctantly nod, suddenly thinking to take off one of my sure-grip gloves and handing it to him before I start up, but he demurs, reaching into his backpack and taking out a similar pair of climber's mitts, apparently more prepared than I would have expected, and I'll admit I'm a little relieved about this. I slip my glove back on and holster my cane, knowing I'll want to hug the rockface as I seek to ascend, needing to rely on feel and finesse, ledges and leverage not the factors in play here, making my wooden wedge, on this occasion, an unnecessary hedge.

As I head up, I'm reminded that this is an inversion of a most peculiar descent I undertook a few years back down the roof of our ranch house in Ithaca when I opted to play Spiderman in order to nail down the gutters when they came unloosed from their moorings along the lip of the tectiform eaves of our modest two-story dwelling. We'd been woken up at two in the morning the night before by what sounded like a wrecking ball crashing into the rear wall of the house, but when I went outside in my pajamas to see what was going on, the only thing out of the ordinary was an unusually fierce wind. The house was situated near the top of South Hill, and from our enormous living room window we could see the entire valley, with parts of Cornell University over on East Hill to the right, and Cayuga Lake in the distance due north, with thousands of trees everywhere, so the views changed with the seasons, as spring and summer gave us gorgeous greenery and waves of brilliant blue, autumn the fiery colors of hastening hibernation, and winter the blindingly beautiful white snow and the silvery half-frozen waters.

The next morning was a Saturday, and so first thing I head out to the backyard to see what's going on, and after a few minutes of standing out there just looking around, a powerful gust of wind swept up South Hill, up the back of the house, and lifted the entire thirty-foot long gutter that ran along the continuous edge of the roof about six inches into the air, and then down it slammed back into place, and so it didn't take much to figure out that all the nails securing that gutter must have come out, and so if this wind didn't let up for whatever number of days, we wouldn't be getting much sleep unless I called somebody to come and fix it.

Well, I had no intention of calling anybody, and though I'm about as handy as the average philosopher, I went down to Wal-Mart and bought myself a couple of dozen concrete nails, which after I explained my predicament, the guy said those were what I would need, that they were strong enough to drive through metal, and though I noticed that they actually were not made out of concrete, I kept silent, which turned out to be a good thing.

So I came back, took the ladder out from the garage, asked Alexander if he wanted to come up on the roof with me, which he did, of course, and so we climbed up, and I asked him please to hang out by the chimney with the extra nails while I got down on my stomach and proceeded to crawl down all the way to the gutters, where I actually had to hang my head and arms and part of my chest over the edge to get a good enough angle to start swinging away at the nails so as to be able to blast them through the tin of the gutters and drive them deep into the wall.

It took a while to get the hang of it, and I was doing a pretty good job of hammering my own hands with every other swing as I kept missing my target, and meanwhile my mouth was full of nails because where else was I going to put them, and then my Greek neighbor, who taught Spanish over at Cornell and whose father had built both our houses, comes walking up my sloping backyard from her yard with some serious concern on her face, and shouted to me "Are you okay, Sal, that's dangerous!?"

And I mumbled back, "Ith's okthsay, Amahthlia, Ih'm ahll rghtht," and then the neighborhood handyman, who was always doing work for Amalia and her next-door neighbor, who also lived alone, marched up from the other yard and called out, "Hey, Sal, you want me to throw you up a nail gun?" to which I mumbled and sort of shouted back, "Ntho sthankst, Ih'm goodth!" and as I kept on working, they eventually wandered away, and after a long while, I finally got one of the nails in, and so then I shimmied three feet over and within an hour or so, I'd driven in maybe a dozen nails all along the gutter, and when I was done I'd stood up, and walked triumphantly back up the roof, and though in hindsight I probably should have wrapped a rope around myself and then tied it to the chimney, all things considered, I'd turned what could have been a day-long two-hundred dollar job done by someone else into a most satisfying solo accomplishment performed with three bucks and a little perspiration.

"How're you doing?" he calls up to me as I carefully negotiate my way, hugging the wall, sticking a little closer to the edge than to the middle, just in case I should slip and need to grab on to something, because it really is a long way down, and if nothing else, it wouldn't be right to leave my child nearly a mile in the sky with his dad's broken body requiring both repair and transport, and so I'm trying to exercise a little caution.

Meanwhile, I see out of the corner of my eye that he's working his way up as well and I get a bit concerned because though he's intent on breaking my fall if need be who the hell will break his? I'm angry now at not having brought something for this eventuality but the sweet taste of peril overwhelms any putrid scent of fear and I press on, one eye focused on my task, the other trained on the ridge up above, my mind trying to erase the fluttering image of Alexander flying off that horse in the Adirondacks back when he was nine or ten years old.

We'd made friends with MaryLee soon after moving to Geneva, a vibrant dark blond beauty with two equally lovely daughters, and maybe a year or so later we'd taken a trip together, and during that trip Alexander and his mother and I had gone horseback riding, and though it was just a beginner's jaunt, one of the first little hillocks we were approaching was a bit too steep, and the guide had led all the horses into a pretty serious gallop leading up to it, and as my own horse was charging up the hill I instantly realized that Alexander, who was right behind me, would have to hold on for dear life to stay on his horse, and it was just too much, and sure enough he was thrown off, and we all came to a halt, and I forced myself to stay on my mount for a few seconds and called down to him, "How're you doing, son, are you all right?" and he'd said "Yes, dad," and I'd said "Then get back on your horse, kid, we don't have all day," and he started to do exactly that, and then the guide and both my wife and I came over, and helped him back on, and meanwhile I'd gently caressed the side of his head where I'd seen him holding himself and grimacing (no helmets required back then), and felt a sickeningly soft bruise but saw no blood, and I'd asked him again how he was doing, and his eyes looked clear as he'd said "I'm okay, dad, really," and then we were all back on our way, and so of course I'm reminded of that now as we insolently elevate ourselves into harm's way.

My kempo instructor, Bud, who I studied under for six years, always reminded his students that "You'll fight the way you train." I would couple that with "And you should live the way you train." Just as Aristotle spoke of excellence as a habit, I believe there should come a time in a man's life when everything he does and says and thinks and feels ought to be his own personal philosophy made manifest.

Exactly when that time should come is impossible to say, but as these seemingly random fragments of experiences shared by me and my son come looming into glaring relief, I recognize the narrative that had been building unbeknownst to me, and I recognize that the formative years of his life, from seven through sixteen, also represented the best years of my life, from twenty-nine through thirty-eight, and that those years exactly coincided with the years we spent in Geneva, New York, from 1991 through 2000, and that all these little episodes together were really frames from a motion picture he and I were jointly writing, directing, and starring in, only we didn't know it yet.

A coalescing was occurring within me that would require nine years to fully come together, and it would culminate at a precise time on a most specific date, and the first, indispensable, necessary but not sufficient step taken towards that coalescence was when I had sailed away from Hamiltonian chaos and dropped anchor three hundred miles away in Jeffersonian calm.

The steps that followed are a world within a whirl within a whorl, and now it is clear that those steps were not a random walk but the scaling of a mountain in my mind, and as I get closer to the summit of this most material mountain I see the entirety of that metaphorical mountain just as clear as day.

Once we'd decided we were in Geneva to stay, we started saving money as aggressively as we could, because although my wife and I were maybe making forty thousand dollars combined in that first year, a nice home with a yard and a garage could be had for sixty thousand dollars, and so by the following year we'd been able to buy our first abode, a tri-level dwelling with white clapboard and dark blue shutters, surrounded by lilac bushes and evergreens, a big locust tree out front, two maples and a massive blue spruce pine out back, all spread across a property sixty feet wide and nearly two hundred feet deep, and the only thing we'd had to get done inside besides painting was to hire someone to sand and finish the faded hardwood floors.

We'd live there for the next eight years, the longest I'd stayed in one place since I'd been born, and it's easy to keep track of all the frozen frames of that home movie - pruning a lush backyard that had turned into a jungle, and using just a hedge clipper and a rusty hand saw to do it, cutting and trimming and climbing trees to saw off runaway limbs and branches, and getting nailed in the foot by one of those longer limbs as I stood on a stump I had made twenty feet up the smaller maple tree close to the house, apparently angering the tree, who decided in a burst of pique that I had gone a branch too far, and so when I finished furiously sawing off one more of its brethren, the dull saw and the syrupy sap making for an exhausting job, I was too tired to realize that the six-inch thick, maybe eight-foot long limb, once it was severed, lay in a direct path to the instep of my right foot as it rested on another freshly cut stump, and when that massive limb ricocheted right off that instep, I screamed louder than I thought possible, instinctively hugged the tree for all I was worth, and though I'll never know how every bone in my foot wasn't crushed, I do know the bottom of that foot turned completely purple and stayed that way for days, and so rest assured that the innocent victim of the amateur lumberjack's reckless abandon definitely got its revenge.

I remember the first real snowstorm of the season, where the drifts got so high we opened the main door only to find the screen door completely blocked, and so I had to take off the screen, squeeze through the gap, the freshly fallen snow spilling into the foyer, and make my way to the side of the house to where I had left the shovels, themselves thoroughly buried in white powder, and after Alexander and I had cleared the entrance and shoveled the driveway, we spent the rest of that day building a snowman in the front yard and a snow tunnel in the back yard, only finishing the latter just before it was time to start dinner, and I still can hear him calling his mother out so she could see him popping out of the third opening we'd made in the middle of our little Spring Street Tunnel.

I see him standing in the driveway on a summer day in his improbable Mayor of Munchkinland costume with the enormous pillow tucked inside his shirt, a wide grin on his face, no pre-show jitters as we got ready to take him to the auditorium for the first of two performances in what turned out to be a wonderful production of "The Wizard of Oz," Dorothy having been played by the daughter of the managing editor of the city paper, and I can still see her as she stood there and sang "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" without once going off-key.

I see him playing in the park he and my wife helped build, as a project spearheaded by volunteers turned a huge vacant lot near the five and twenty highway into an imaginative playground with a maze of wooden-planked walkways and toy bridges and swings and slides. A few steps away was the skating rink he and I spent each winter gliding around while Loron sipped her hot chocolate and watched her two boys skate and tumble, and when it came time to smooth the ice, all three of us would stare at the Zamboni as it slowly made its way around the rink, and though each of us would keep asking the other year after year how exactly this strange vehicle did its work, we never did find out, because we enjoyed the not knowing more than we ever could the knowing.

The Fourth of July meant the Fireman's Parade, where Alexander would play his trumpet, and then do a quickchange, because the parade would culminate at the rink, which served every year on that weekend as host facility for the Sons of Italy Festival, where every year Loron and I would man either the Coca-Cola booth or a game of chance booth, and he would join the other kids as they worked as gophers, and we'd all take a break now and then to enjoy some tripe and sweetbreads in a spicy tomato sauce sopped up with crusty bread, and then it was back to work, until we knocked off at the end to listen to some old-fashioned Italian songs sung by some new-fashioned Italians.

And around the corner from that rink was the Smith Barney office where Loron got a temp job that she performed so well it was made permanent, and eventually she transformed that job into a career, her reputation burnished daily with efforts a roustabout like me sees as superhuman. Those efforts led her boss to take a chance on me, for when she told me the company was always looking for new financial consultants I decided on a whim to request an interview, and partly because of her and partly because George and I were kindred spirits of the bookish kind, in the summer of 1993 I became a stockbroker, a job I'd keep at for ten years, and that would temper my degree in textbook economics with a degree in bottom line economics.

Ironically, I was one of the few students who majored in economics not because I had the slightest interest in making money but because the peculiar nature of capitalism fascinated me, and along with a good many other lessons, my decade managing other people's assets as well as their anxieties answered more questions about the philosophical and psychological aspects of money and capitalism than I could have ever thought to ask.During those years, not only was I gradually entrusted with the stewardship of tens of millions of dollars, but as I struggled to build a practice ("Hi, I'm a stranger, I'm new to the business, and I'd like you to trust me with your life savings!"), I came to conduct seminars, host radio shows, sit on various boards of directors, travel the country on conferences, write investment newsletters for clients, articles and essays for local and regional papers, set up an internship program with the local college, and learn everything I'd likely ever need to know about managing my own money for the rest of my life.

There's clearly something to be said for indulging the occasional whim.

Along the way, the oligarchic section of my soul, already miniscule in scope, could now truly afford to stay that way, owing to an exponential increase in my financial well-being without any corresponding increase in my desire for material acquisition. Irony of ironies, the man disinterested in acquiring wealth acquires it precisely because of his disinterest, as clients recognize his ability to avoid missteps made by the merely avaricious, therefore making them more money, thus making them more likely to send more clients his way.

The firm never thought much of my success, because by their standards I was mediocre at best, and they were right, but my clients liked me and they trusted me, and I was doing good work, and besides, the top executives were over on Wall Street and I rarely met any of them, whereas most of my clients were right there in Geneva, on Main Street and Washington Street and Jay Street and Exchange Street, and I'd meet them in the office and in their homes and at their businesses and at the Wegman's and the Wal-Mart, and sometimes just walking down the street, and those were my real bosses, and they thought I was doing okay.

Meanwhile, this unexpected career was drawing upon aspects of my personality I never knew existed, like a capacity for public speaking and the ability to make tough decisions quickly, and developing aspects I know for certain never existed, like listening intently to other people with empathy, and socializing instead of philosophizing. Living in one of the biggest, loudest, craziest cities on earth, I'd spent the first twenty-nine years of my life mostly in the small, quiet, tranquil recesses of my own mind, and now, living in one of the smallest, quietest, tranquil cities on earth, I would spend nine years mostly in the company of others, exploring every inch of this strange new terrain and discovering things non-philosophers take as givens.

Before I knew what hit me, I'd become a member of the Sons of Italy, calling bingo in English and Italian in a smoke-filled room of second- and third-generation Italians as they drank their beer and ate their pizza with one hand and rapidly stamped their numbers with specially crafted magic markers with the other hand. I'd join a kempo class run by one of the calmest men I'd ever met, learning a beautiful art form alongside some of the most interesting people I could imagine, among them a former special forces soldier who'd served in Viet Nam, a local Ob-Gyn, a wrestler who'd moved here from Georgia, a police officer, a former boxing champ, a chiropractor, and a young, unassuming mother of two who maybe had more fire than all of us combined, who earned her black belt in five years, undergoing the twelve increasingly brutal ranking tests that served to keep serious martial arts instruction a mostly non-profit affair, as student after student eventually found his or her own limitations.

Next I found myself part of a church, not the Catholic one I grew up with but an Episcopalian one, as we went one day with MaryLee and the girls to Trinity Church on South Main Street, and wound up staying on. But unlike our own fractured, disconnected association with faith as children, Loron in Hong Kong and me in Brooklyn, this association became a total immersion, as our simple desire for our son to philosophically sample the rituals of faith transmogrified into the whole cloth experience of becoming fully wrapped up in the reality of faith, joining the congregation, serving as usher, as lector, as Tuesday school teacher, serving coffee and cake after service, Thanksgiving dinner to the poor, care packages to the shut-ins, working the annual Apple Fest on the church grounds, going on camp outings at theme parks with the kids and joining in revivals, serving on the search committee when it came time to find a new rector and becoming friends with the kind and deeply philosophical theologian we ultimately selected, who introduced the congregation to renowned scientist-theologian John Polkinghorne when he brought him over to speak at a seminar he arranged shortly after taking the helm at Trinity, as he sought to build bridges between the worlds of philosophy and faith, and I can recall an auditorium filled with professors and students from Hobart and William Smith and other colleges and citizens and parishioners from all around the Finger Lakes as Father George (yes, another George) gave rich new meaning to the classical idea of a symposium.

For his part, Alexander was not only absorbing and participating and relishing all these many roles that one comes to play within the real world of a living, breathing, human-scaled church, he was also becoming connected to this seemingly sleepy town in so many different ways it took me years to realize what a monumental impact Geneva would come to have in his life, as well as to how diametrically opposed to me and my wife's upbringings this way of life really was.

When he got old enough he came to train with me in kempo (one distinction between a de facto martial arts school and a de jure one is that in the de facto one you learn that exhaustion is only the beginning), and whether we trained in that windowless studio until our black canvas uniforms were dripping wet and we could barely stand, or whether we trained in the breeze along the shore of Seneca Lake in the tall grass (Bud had no hesitation in venturing out of the studio with his class so as to alter our training environment - You'll fight the way you train), one of the many good things that came out of that training was that Alexander had the ultimate role model as his instructor, a good, gentle, deadly, dedicated martial artist who never raised his voice, literally never broke a sweat, always kept his cool, and wanted nothing more than to share the art he had mastered with anyone willing to stick with it. His favorite refrain? "It isn't magic. You are the one who will make it work."

But aside and apart from church and school and kempo and part-time work and full-time band practice and acting in the occasional play and singing the occasional duet and all the other things, many of which I likely knew nothing about, my son was living a life, completely connected to his family and to his community, and there was nothing philosophical about what was happening to him. He was going from being a boy to being a man in the best of all possible worlds, and nothing and no one will ever be able to take that away from him.

"You look pretty proud of yourself up there, pops," he shouts from way down below, and it takes me a second to realize that once he'd seen I could make it up without falling down like a house of cards, he'd eased back down and decided to take a picture of his old man at the top of the wall leaning on his cane, devil-may-care, looking as if he'd just climbed a stepladder rather than this wall of fame.

After he takes his digital shots, I reach into my pocket, shout down that I'll be throwing him my camera, and as accurately as my enervated arm can manage, I toss him my last minute four-dollar purchase whose real value has suddenly eclipsed its nominal value, and after he makes a damn impressive snag and takes the shot, I impulsively scramble back down, albeit in slow motion, fortunately finding it a hell of a lot easier going back than it was going up, and while he's still cursing at my deliberate reversal of fortune, I ask him for his camera and point to the ridge I just came down from.

"Your turn," I insist, and he pushes the camera into my palm, none too pleased about the turnabout, but still sneaking in a smirk as he takes one last glaring-grinning look at me and sets himself to his task. It doesn't take him as long as it did me, but my heart still skips a bunch of beats as he slips a bit here and there, and I resist the pointless urge to charge up and watch his back, as the kids say, and then he makes the final push and there he is on the ridge, both fists over his head as he towers above the tower, and I'm able to take shots of him with both cameras before he puts those powerful arms down and beckons me to come join him.

Afterwards, as we stroll on slightly safer ground, emboldened by our achievement yet thoroughly grateful for this respite, we search for the next circle of hell, and I say to him, "Who says you can't get there from here?"

9

Up From Hell

"It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change."

\- Charles Darwin

So many more things I imagine I should be telling him, so much advice I feel I'm still supposed to give him, and so much fear that I've left out so many important things, and yet I know I'm wrong, that what troubles me is not what's left to say but that there's no way to say it, no way to bridge the gap, no way for a father and son to come together when each other's world travels in a different orbit and in the opposite direction. The fear is all the worse, all the more desperate, because every passing year has made it clearer to me that what separates us is real, that it matters, and that it's my fault. In 1998 I picked up a book with a mesmerizing cover and an intriguing title, The Alphabet Versus the Goddess, written by Leonard Shlain, a surgeon who while on vacation in the Mediterranean, discovered that at one time statues and worship of goddesses and all things feminine had been ubiquitous, and that somewhere along the way that all changed, and that in its place statues and worship of gods and all things masculine came to dominate the religious and spiritual landscape, and so the writer began a quest to unravel why this came to be and what this transformation represented.

In essence, his unnerving thesis was that the very act of reading reinforced the brain's left hemisphere at the expense of its right, and as literacy spread, the world came to fear and despise the feminine attributes of maternal love and holistic intuition and sensual abandon, and inexorably replaced them with the masculine attributes of patriarchal cruelty and cold logic and sexual domination, concrete images and passionate emotions displaced by abstractions and murderous repression. Life-affirming nurturing and joy and a multitude of gods and goddesses and divinities exchanged for death-obsessed mayhem, monotheism, and endless religious warfare over whose written version of God was right. In his words, as he reduced his premise to a punchline: "The thug who mugged the Goddess was alphabet literacy."

I furiously read the book in one sitting precisely because it was an assault on my entire way of life, and so I sought to devour it as a predator would its prey, seeking to strengthen its own life through the violent death of its adversary, every page writhing in agony, I angrily thought at the time, as I ingested its foolishness and subjected it to my vastly superior notions on the sacred birth of literacy, images of Gutenberg's press slamming down on Dr. Shlain's head appearing in my mind as I strove to counter every absurdity as I encountered it on my way from one side of his monstrous text to the other.

But it turned out that the good doctor's command of both his left and right hemispheres had elevated what I had preconceived as New Age nonsense into an argument of significant power, and what was worse, not only did it make a lot of sense, it struck directly at the Atlantean pillar of the edifice of intellect and nearly toppled it.

It certainly held up an incriminatory mirror to my soul, and the image, as the author would have predicted, was not a sacred fire animating my being, but a pile of incombustible words laying in a lonely corner. The road less traveled can be the road to nowhere, and in so many ways nowhere is where intellectuals, pseudo- or otherwise, live.

Those of us who seek shelter in the labyrinths of logic and hide between the covers of a book like to imagine that we are defying the laws of gravity and surging beyond our less curious peers, the power of our newfound ideas catapulting us into realms of reason only the chosen few dare to parachute into, leaving behind the willfully ignorant masses who sit clustered like frogs at the bottom of a well, forever staring up at the tiny speck of sky that will never light their benighted world.

But as a solitary traveler who long took comfort in that delusion, I've slowly come to realize that the reverse is true, that it is the readers and the writers and the thinkers who are squatting at the bottom of that well and calling it paradise, greedily searching for salvation with every book, believing that the next one they read will be the one that explains it all, the one that makes sense of the world that in their hearts sure as hell hasn't made any sense so far, and with every disappointment comes the insane notion that just one more book, maybe even just one more page, will finally do it, that the answer lies nearby, on some bookshelf they must have overlooked, and that when they find it, with the missing piece of the revelation put in place, all their struggles will have been worth the effort, and they can lie peaceful and calm, like in the song, when they're laid to their rest, for they were true to their glorious quest.

The pitiful part of this impossible dream is that one must recall that Cervantes himself explains that what drove Don Quixote mad was his incessant reading of chivalrous tales - BOOKS are what drove the knight errant insane!

The comic aspect of this intellectual soap opera is that only the seekers are left without answers. Those who settle on the book of revelation, be it Torah or Quran, Bible or Bhagavad-Gita, Zen koans or the missing Mormon tablets, have the tranquility of transcendence to light their way. Those who settle on the book of life, be it software engineer, fitness trainer, or hedge fund manager, have the verities of vocation to fill their days. And those who save lives for a living, be they doctors or paramedics or firefighters (two out of three ain't bad, bambino), are in no need of wordsmiths to describe souls in a state of perpetual and justifiable exaltation.

Ah, but the philosophers! For them there is no rest, there is no reason, and there is most assuredly no reward. For their quest ends neither in tranquility nor utility but in futility, for their heads are in the clouds and their hearts are on their sleeves, and that is why Socrates drinks the hemlock and Aristophanes gets all the laughs.

And that is why I wonder if anything I have left to say to my son is something he even really needs to hear. He has somehow found the elixir that eludes the seekers. So perhaps the poison that has swirled within my soul for all these many years is best kept to myself. Forget philosophy. Philosophy is dead. The only people on earth who don't know this, needless to say, are the philosophers.

"No more trees, pops." He's right. The thicket had thinned without me really noticing, and now it's gone, transformed into a rolling sea of swaying grass and brush, and as we stop and survey this new plateau, there are numerous mountain peaks way out on the misty horizon, and four little lakes down below us in the valley, the largest looking sort of like a duck, the other three her misshapen ducklings trailing behind. I can feel the heat coming on now as the sun works it way to its own summit, and point to my wrist as I get his attention, and he answers "Ten twenty," and we need to get going unless we plan on sleeping out here tonight, with the ducks and the snakes and the moose and the bobcats and the cougars and the bears, an intriguing prospect in theory, but with neither a tent nor a sleeping bag, a firearm or even a slingshot, my math tells me we've got nine hours at best to get to the top, tightrope our way along the ridge, and get down the other side before the sun disappears from the sky and plunges us into pitch black darkness with nowhere to go but wherever we happen to be left standing.

"Didn't you say something about a thousand-dollar speeding ticket the other day?" I suddenly recall as I slightly pick up the pace, not really surprised about forgetting all about it until just now. "What the hell happened?" He shrugs as he holds up two fingers, "Two tickets." He shakes his head in that world-weary way as he thinks back to that day, except it isn't that shrivel-souled whatever pose taken by so many kids who've seen life mostly through some screen – be it hi-def, laptop, or video game - it's the look of a man who's seen life and death trading places, the one placing those trades, stared at those faces.

"It was ridiculous. There was this lady with a really bad heart condition, and they couldn't do the surgery at Albany Medical, so we drove her to Mass General in Boston - "

"What do you mean you drove her?" I interrupt, but he already knows what I'm asking.

"She wasn't in imminent danger; all we had to do was keep her stabilized till we got her there." I nod as if I understand, and he goes on. "So we drop her off and get back on the road to make our way home." He looks at my questioning eyes and says "No dad, I don't know how she made out, and it's better that I don't, but she was safe and sound when we left her.

"So we're maybe five miles from the Massachusetts/New York border, and yes, I was driving pretty fast, and next thing you know there's a State Trooper behind me flashing his lights and blasting his siren, and so I pull over and tell him what we were doing, but he doesn't want to hear word one - we're from New York and I think that's all he needed to know. Wham - a three-hundred and fifty dollar ticket.

"I bite my lip, take the ticket and stick it under the visor and off we go, never stopping to think that Officer BillyBob has driven on ahead and might be lurking behind some big bushy tree on the side of the road. Sure enough, we're now maybe a mile from where the Mass turnpike becomes the New York turnpike and there he is again! Out from his hiding place with his lights and siren, but I say fuck it, I'm only a mile from the toll station, out of his jurisdiction, and so I slam on the accelerator until I'm at the toll booth, but he drove right around it and brought his patrol car to a screeching halt directly in front of mine, headlight to headlight, right at the state line. He gets out of the car, writes out the second ticket as he's walking, says "You were speeding" when he gets to the window, hands it to me, which was for four hundred dollars this time, and goes back to his vehicle."

He takes a breath, gives me a long look, and derisively declares, "Needless to say, I was quite perturbed." We both laugh. "I checked off NOT GUILTY on both tickets and mailed them out, and at the appointed hour I drove back to Massachusetts so I could have my day in court.

"I wrote a little note about why I was visiting their lovely state on that particular day and handed it to the judge without saying a word when my case was announced. He read the note and looked over at the wrong arm of the law and said, 'An ambulance, Bill?

Are you fucking kidding me? Case dismissed.'"

"He most certainly did not say that in open court!" I protest, though I'm happy about the outcome.

"Oh, he most certainly did, pops. Sorry." And behind that broad smile there's enough of a trace of empathy for me to believe he feels my pain at the thought of even a judge doing his damnedest to define deviancy down. There's got to be a circle of hell or at least a cornice of purgatory set aside for that infraction - I'll need to re-read my Dante.

And that's the thing. We do connect. I'm Narcissus to his Goldmund, except in our case the story is turned inside out and upside down, for while I may be the monk I'm the emotional one, and while he's the one devoted to the ways of the world, he's the analytical one, and that's because he heeds the call of science whereas I heed the siren song of superstition; the superstitions of elegant grammar and elaborate discourse, where theories and queries and faeries abound, where no one falls ill and fires don't rage and people don't die.

Which is why we speak with each other and past each other, only I'll never understand the language of his world but he'll always understand mine, and understands it all too well, and tries as best he can not to make a mockery of it.

His last year of high school was silent torture for me, and when he finally escaped its clutches, his mother and I prevailed upon him to further his wayward studies, and steered him towards community college, somehow thinking more of the same would lead to something different. I felt absolutely crucified that in this of all things I could be of no real help, as I soldiered with him to register and consider courses and pick up a metric ton of textbooks.

It was so strange that someone obsessed with the outer reaches of thought and theory could not get his own son to give a damn about the merest fringes of insight and inquiry. And yet there was always a look in those Hamlet eyes that said Dad, there are so many more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your sad philosophy, and I think that that, more than just brute selfishness on my part, was why I never truly worried about him.

He finally stopped indulging my notions of what constituted a liberal education, dropped the pointless courses and zeroed in on getting his EMT certification with extreme prejudice and alacrity. He then left college, and that's when things started coming together for him. He'd put in so many hours at the firehouse he'd qualified to bunk there, and before long he'd gotten himself elected president of the station, and you've never seen someone so maniacal about keeping a building looking newer than at its own grand opening.

A paying EMT job came along right away, and six months later he'd been named employee of the year, and the following year he won it again, but I hadn't known until recently that this was out of over three hundred employees. The quiet man doesn't volunteer such information unless you pry it out of him.

The year after that he was selected as one of the Stars of Life, where the American Ambulance Association chooses one member from each of a hundred ambulance companies nationwide and flies them to DC where they are feted and fawned over, and amidst the festivities he got a chance to meet then-Senator Clinton.

He kept on with his emergency medical studies, continued getting advanced certifications, became a paramedic, then landed a full-time position as a firefighter in Albany, and right now he's started training EMTs to become paramedics at the local community college.

Now there's a tremendous lesson here that even a concrete-headed philosopher can draw from all this, and I'm certainly willing to share it. Let your kid follow his bliss, fortify his bliss, foxtrot with his bliss, whatever the hell it takes, but if he does manage to find it, make sure you the parent gets the f*** out of the way between him and that bliss.

* * *

"If I didn't know any better, kid, I'd say we just found the bottom of the world." It's hardly a joke, though, because the 'Stairway to Heaven' we just finished climbing was apparently a prelude for this pyramid right in front of us. And a pyramid wall is just what this looks like, except this is a hell of a lot steeper and I can't even make out how high it goes. His mother and I stood at the base of Giza a couple of years ago, and what struck me back then was the sheer size of the stones they used to construct their ancient skyscraper.

Pictures make it seem so smooth and give no sense whatsoever of what it looks like up close. It never occurred to me I'd be climbing one soon. It seems as if the floor must have dropped out from a section of the mountain who knows how many years ago, and what's left is this yawning depression in the earth, with a damn near vertical highway of endless bleached boulders lifting into the sky, a desolate landscape angled upwards and outwards, and we are at the bottom of this semi-circle of hell, having turned the deceptive corner from a lush meadow's moan to the clench of a grim reaper's stone.

"We're gonna need a bigger boat," he muses, and as he says it I'm wondering if he's seen the Jaws movie or even knows that's where the line comes from. Probably. Every so often one of my students will recite a famous line from a film I know is before their time, and when I ask them about it they'll invariably say something like "Oh, that film's a classic!", at which point I figure out that, yes, the movies I saw at their age have become their classics. Spinning reels got to go round, except of course, they're no longer reels.

I make out a climber way up at the top where the rocks rim the sky but it may be a trick of the light, because when I look again, there's no one there. This time we won't have to argue about who's going first because this wall is a hundred feet wide and a thousand feet high and it's going to have to be scaled one angry inch at a time. I think of an army taking a million jackhammers to Hoover Dam and somehow leaving it intact, shredded to pieces but still stretching towards outer space, and that's what's before us, and it's imposingly incredible.

"More ruins," he mumbles, and we both chuckle as soft flat earth goes brutally perpendicular. The three of us were in Rome and it was early morning, and we needed toget dressed and out of our hotel room to meet in the lobby once again with a tour guide who was admittedly spending way too much time sifting the remaining sand of ancient Roman bedrock, and a groggy Alexander grumbled to his parents as he reluctantly got out of bed, "I know, I know, more ruins."

I stare stupidly beneath me as a shoebox-size stone gets unwedged and tumbles noisily a few yards to the level ground below and I grab a bit desperately at a jutting corner of rock until my flailing right foot finds a stone that's more solidly entrenched.

As I get a little more secure, I see he's maybe twenty feet to the left of me carving out his own path, and I say "I think we got us a whole mess of boobytraps here, kid...watch your step." He sets his jaw and nods intently, and starts scanning the steep terrain with a new set of eyes. The remains of this avalanche have hardly settled down; they're just poised, waiting for a couple of boobs to get the avalanching going all over again.

After at least an hour of scratching and clawing and grasping and sweating and struggling and straining and lurching and wedging and clenching, with the dust and the pebbles and the stones and the rocks swirling and shifting and lifting and tumbling and hurtling, only the boulders stand firm at their improbable angles and give this sliding scale of shaky disequilibrium some balance. But we are now at least halfway to the top.

I let myself collapse on a granite throne immaculately conceived for this purpose, a horizontal slab set at hip level that lets me sit so long as I sort of stand, with an abutting rock that allows my left arm a repose, and at last I get to stop fighting the tremendous tug of gravity that hasn't let up in its quest to take us down. He's maybe forty or fifty feet under me, that backpack a real albatross now, but he looks okay. Waves of heat and perspiration and exhaustion and muscle ache are hitting me as I recline, and I know the longer I stay here the worse it will get. An object in motion stays in motion; an object at rest becomes dinner. Or something like that.

I force myself up and call down below as I continue my ascent: "There's no espresso machine at this rest stop, but there's a gazebo and a comfy rocking chair - you're gonna love it!" My throat is parched and I'm surprised at how raspy my voice sounds, so I drink a Doubleshot in one swallow and it's still a little cool, and I'm glad I remembered to put everything on ice last night. Alexander looks up and manages a smile but now I see he's not looking so good after all, so I decide to linger in this nearly vertical alcove a while longer as he makes his way up.

There's a winding corridor just behind the "chair" with five-foot walls and although the entire structure is obviously sunk good and tight it's still like seeing an elephant on the interstate. As I use both gloved hands to work my a little way up this peculiar hallway, having to press and push pretty strenuously, I try to take care to not shred the gloves in the process because then all I'll have left will be my bare hands. I wait until he's within whispering distance, and ask him if we can switch packs till we get to some semblance of level ground, but he waves me off and I don't ask again.

He leans on the chair but doesn't sit down as he takes out two bottles of water and hands me one. I finish half of it and save the rest; even though we've lugged a ton of hydration with us, it's quickly becoming clear we're gonna need a lot more than we thought, which means we'll really have to conserve that which we've brought.

"Twoooo... drifteeeers... ooooff to see the world... there's... such a lot of woooorld, to see... we're after the saaaame... raiiiinbow's eeeend... waiting 'round the beeeend... myyyy... huckleberry friend... Moooon Riveeeer.... aaaand meeee." The water took some of the edge off my voice, and although I really shouldn't be wasting what little air I've got left, there's never a wrong time to sing the right song.

He smiles. "Looks like you found the right voice coach. You're sounding good there, pops." I nod, aware that he's not just being polite. Siklos has been working with me for months on piano and voice and I've definitely made some progress.

His face is glistening, and for a moment he's fourteen again, and I can see him and Lindsay onstage at Geneva Middle School, and I can hear them, her dad Paul playing the piano as our two children sing "All I Ask of You" from The Phantom of the Opera, Lindsay a marvelous Christine, Alexander a gallant Raoul, and I remember where I sat and how quiet the audience was and how beautifully their voices came together, and what makes this memory so powerful is how much I'm sure I've forgotten along the way.

And that's something we've forgotten how to do, the forgetting. Nearly seventy years ago, Borges wrote his short story Funes the Memorious about this tragic figure who, after a fall from a horse that crippled him, was suddenly able to remember every last detail about everything and everyone he saw and never ever forgot any of it, thus subtracting all meaning from his life and rendering him incapable of normal thoughts or emotions because of the relentless onslaught of memories in the form of infinite details.

If this is what happens to those suffering from severe autism, and certainly there are parallels, then I wonder if we aren't inadvertently creating a kind of societal autism as we take Genesis 2 to exponential levels, subduing the earth every which way but loose except we've done more than that. We've subdued ourselves, mind, body, and soul.

Every last bit of us has been stamped, studied, and stripsearched. Under the surgeon's knife nothing is sacred, under the geneticist's microscope, no genome is left behind, under the neurologist's eye, no conscious thought is left unexplained, and under the search engine's electrons, nothing we do or say online is ever forgotten.

Now combine the accumulation of scientific knowledge, the acceleration of computer technology, and the annihilation of what we used to call reflection, and what we've become is an army of hyper-kinetic, super-informed automatons who need to know nothing but their next need. It's a paradox of plenty as body gone wild and mind made manifest has shriveled spirit to near nothingness and frazzled free will to sheer silliness.

What does making a decision mean when there's no decision to make, what does doing something mean when in every meaningful way it's done before you do it, what constitutes a spirit in a world that no longer believes in ghosts, and what does free will mean when there are ever fewer unknowns in your alternatives?

The counter-argument is that the much-heralded singularity we're working our way towards has put each of our respective free wills on steroids, and that the confusion and diffusion and effusion and profusion of all this ostensibly mind-expanding technology amounts to having our collective spirit wrenched free of its wretched bodily confines and set proudly and panoramically on cyberspacial display.

Perhaps. Except it seems to me that a lot of these brave new souls look less like ubermensches and a lot more like the zombies from The Night of the Living Dead. So cross your fingers, and watch your back.

* * *

At least another hour has passed but we're nearly there. I really should have ripped that pack right off his shoulders, but he's moving along. Besides, what makes me think I would have been able to make it up here with that ton of bricks on my back?

I slow down, forcing myself not to race to the rim, looking out for stepping stones that would rather be rolling, but before I know it this nasty slope finally arcs gentle and I'm up and over and out of gravity's clutches, tripping and stumbling across a gravelly expanse of crunching grating rocks a half-foot deep, my boots offering scant protection from the fire down below, as the serrated beach thrusts and lashes upwards with every gingerly step I take, until the jagged edges dwindle, and I find a smoothish flattish trace of ground on which I may at last lay down.

My aching arches make me wonder for a frightened moment if my shoes have broken down, but as I quickly confirm that this is not the case, I'm reminded of the sneaker incident by the lake and I'm laughing myself silly just as I see Alexander emerge from the crater and make his own way across the craggy carpet.

I snap a picture of him as he leans over and puts his hands on his knees to rest for a bit after what has to be one of the most arduous things he's ever done, and the moonscape aspect of the shot, complete with the massive, gaping crater just a few feet from where he's standing, is so eerie, and later, when I looked at the photo, I found it nearly impossible to believe he and I had actually come up out of that monstrous hole.

"What's so funny, wise ass?" he shouts over at me, quarter-thinking I'm laughing at him, but three-quarters knowing it's something else. I say nothing, waiting for him to head my way and find a place to rest his bones, and then after I've had a good, long chance for my heart to slow back down and for my breathing to become sort of normal, I tell him my story.

"It was maybe ten or eleven years ago, and your mother and I were walking on the path that rises alongside Seneca Lake late one afternoon, and walking back the other way were James and Beth Henderson, Dean Henderson, you know," and as I mention his name Alexander suddenly looks up as if to interrupt, but doesn't, "and we all stopped to say hello and started talking about something or other, and so we moved away from the path and onto the grass just by the edge of the promenade, but during the conversation I started to experience this incredible pain in the ball of my right foot, and I stood there for a while in agony, not listening anymore to what everyone was saying, my mind already starting to theorize on just what was going on with me, and what might be causing this excruciating sensation.

"I decided that given my father's situation, maybe I had developed the early onset of diabetes, and what I was experiencing was the nerve damage associated with the disease, and I remember thinking to myself that 'Man, if this is what the pain is gonna be like, I think I'd rather die,' except right in the middle of my tortured ruminations your mother noticed that I'd been shifting around a bit and wasn't participating in the conversation that'd been going on, and just as she asked me what was wrong, I lifted my foot to look at the bottom of it, and... well...

"There was now a one-inch hole in the sole of my sneaker that had been burned clean through by what turned out to be the still-smoking leftover ashes from somebody's barbeque grill that had been dumped in the grass out of sight on top of which I'd apparently been standing. Hence the pain."

"I guess you really can take the heat, pops," and he's laughing as he's rocking on his back at the unfortunately unsurprising idea that his father never considered the pain inside his foot might be coming from the outside, which is exactly what I tried to explain to Loron and to James and to Beth when they all asked me the same thing; namely, why didn't I pick my foot up when I first felt the pain?

After he stops laughing, he says nothing for what seems like a very long time, and then, "Dean Henderson passed away a few months ago, dad."

I close my eyes, and I see the big man's smiling face, his bellowing voice, his beautiful wife. The pictures of his children and of him in his youth playing basketball hanging on the wall in his hallway. His military posture and bearing, his impeccably pressed suits. I think of his famous 13 P's motto that he told to every student in sight.

I wish I'd known him better, because he'd been a man worth knowing.

"Oh."

I look around at the horizon and see four peaks not so far away, side by side by side by side, of nearly equal size, their summits a bit higher than where we are right now, some other lesser mountains way off in the hazy distance, shrouded by a tapestry of clouds and sun and sky, such that knowing which is which isn't easy, but I know for sure it doesn't matter.

We reluctantly and with great difficulty get to our feet. The going has been tough, and the tough must get going. However, the going is going to get tougher still, so most of all we'll need a stronger will.

10

Our First Peek at Our First Peak

The 13 P's

"A Potent Philosophy, Preparation, and Prior Proper Planning will Positively Prevent Piss Poor Performance Permanently, but if all else fails, PRAY!"

\- Dean (James) Henderson

"See, now that is the summit of all our strivings!" I shout as I point, the peak in question seemingly within arm's reach, as nothing now obscures the mammoth crowning surge of rock as it bursts into view.

Alexander allows himself a smile as we cross the rocky rubicon into the rarefied air and the fiercest of flora, for only the most determined of life forms can live up here, powerful gusts of wind blowing away anything that can't quickly sink its roots into whatever snatches of unforgiving soil exist amidst this sea of scattered shattered slate. A half hour goes very slowly by as we try to make our way closer to that final approach, which in itself promises to be quite the undertaking, but though we're marching totally horizontally at the moment, the altitude has added a free radical to the vicissitudes of the multitude of elements that have been not so invisibly working against my progress, and suddenly, I'm in a very strange situation... for I can no longer breathe.

Every step feels like trying to lift up a car, as my lungs have given up on me completely, and so I have to stop every few seconds to take breath that will not take. Which in turn turns my legs into nearly dead weight, as I try to drag them along with limp arms, only my mind keeping the summit in sight, as every other member of the body politic has left the building. Meanwhile, we seem as far from the summit as when we first saw it.

Alexander puts an arm around my shoulder and takes out his camera. "Let's stop here, dad. We'll take a few pictures, have something to drink, relax, and then head back. We don't have to get there our first time out."

Not a trace of disappointment in his voice because there is none. Not a bit of concern about not being able to get back before sunset if I keep mindlessly trying to reach a summit beyond my grasp. No anger, no condescension, no nothing. Just a son watching out for his father.

I look at him for a long while, and it's clear he's okay. No problem breathing. A little flush in his cheeks, whereas mine are probably crimson. A touch of perspiration, whereas I'm drenched. Okay, now that I've caught some semblance of a breather...

"I... am... going... to the TOP of this mountain... and I'm getting there... DEAD, OR ALIVE," I say in the deepest, most gravelly, most deadly serious voice he's ever heard from me.

He looks at me for a few seconds, squints, purses his lips, nods his head, and says nothing more.

I think back to June seventeenth, two thousand, a little before four o'clock on that Saturday afternoon. I was nearly four hours into the last belt-ranking test I would ever take in the martial arts. That was the time and the date and the place when and where the coalescence I hadn't realized was happening, would occur, the culmination I hadn't even consciously been working towards, would arrive, and a lot of time would pass before I even understood what it was that had once and for all changed within me.

On one level, that day represented the meridian of my physical existence, perhaps not actuarially - only time will tell - but in actuality. That is, at age thirty-eight, after six years of intensive martial arts instruction, three or four times a week, daily practice, all kinds of conditioning-related exercise on off days, week after month after year, 17 June 2000 marks the absolute strongest I have ever been or will ever be.

But as much as that might mean to most men, that reality is not what makes that day significant for me. What happened at the very end of those four long hours of testing is what's important, and it's also what will get me to the top of this mountain.

On that day, more than anything else on this earth I wanted that last belt wrapped around my uniform, and if I didn't make it to the end of the test, I wouldn't get it. That morning at around ten-thirty, I'd had a protein shake, a banana, and a nice espresso. Half hour later nasal spray to clear my sinuses and fifteen minutes of gentle stretching to limber up my muscles. At eleven-forty-five, a nice cold glass of water. And a very important one. No refreshments at this party. Hydration was not and would not be an option. As I said, this was not a pretend martial arts school. The festivities would commence at noon.

We began with five minutes of meditation, and then Bud discussed the nature of this test with us, namely, that those of us in that studio knew the techniques and the strikes and the forms and could execute them, and so, ultimately, it was not these things that were being tested. Each of us knew what the questions were, but only through this trial could our mind and body discover the answers.

There were push-ups and kick-outs and frog leaps and jumping jacks and dozens of repetitions of every strike I knew. Two-count push-ups and five minute horse stances and defensive maneuvers where first we defended and then we attacked, kempo techniques and knife techniques and club techniques. Throwing and getting thrown, again and again until we did it smooth, until we did it quick, until we did it right.

Minute after minute, hour after hour, until our uniforms were soaked and our arms wouldn't raise and our legs couldn't move. But there was so much more to do, as we punched and kicked and grasped and grappled, sparring and spinning, teetering and tottering, the perfection of past classes dissolving before eyes blinded by salt as our bodies strove bravely merely for the chance to be inadequate.

Near the end there was still far more to go as the katas and the forms now had to be reckoned with, simulated combat scenarios against multiple opponents consisting of twenty, thirty, upwards of forty different moves, looking to the outside world like a violent dance of death, a deliberate orchestration of malign intent, but created to engender spontaneity in fighting, an admittedly fast-moving meditation committed to muscle memory to calm the mind in the midst of hypothetical bodily mayhem.

When it was my turn to perform my last kata, and after four hours of ungodly effort had already been leeched from my loins, the judges (Bud and three other black belts from among his students and from another school) kept asking me to "Try it one more time," each time yet another three minutes in the crucible, until finally they asked for the last time, but I had nothing left. I was nothing left. I couldn't see. I couldn't move. I couldn't think. I couldn't breathe. I no longer even knew which kata I had been doing. Right then I doubt I knew my own name.

But I know I did something. I moved across that floor. I spun around that room. I honestly don't remember any of it. But I poured whatever was left of me into the embers and apparently it was jet fuel, because at the belt ceremony a few minutes later, Bud and the others all agreed that whereas I had always been rigid and angular in the execution of my forms, the one I'd just performed, the one I couldn't remember even at that moment, was the best one I had ever done! They said I had been moving with circular grace and inspired motion, and the reason, as I eventually came to see, was precisely because thoughts and words and any lingering ideas of self had been obliterated by the exquisite agony of relentless exertion, and in that glorious void of thoughtless mind emerged the martial majesty of flawless action. Motion without motive. Poetry without prose. Philosophy without facade. Salvation without Salvatore.

And I have called upon that day again and again whenever I'm in need of direction, for I no longer need a map or a guide or a guru or a philosopher or a philosophy or a book or a library or any other blessed thing to tell me where to go or how to get there. I know how to get there, because I've been there. All I need once in a while is a little reminder. Which I now have.

Maybe five minutes have passed as I've remained motionless, eyes closed, breathing in as deeply and slowly as I can through my nostrils, breathing out lingeringly long and completely through nearly sealed lips, over and over, imagining I'm filling not lungs but a hot air balloon (which isn't far away from the truth) and then watching that same balloon shoot across the sky with each outbreath, every inhalation an inroad of strength, every exhalation an egress of weakness, until at last I've arrived somewhere over that rainbow, and with the Wizard's inspiration I've been gifted back my respiration.

"Let's go, kid," I tell him with a smile that tries not to look like a grimace.

"Paradise is not lost. It's just behind that cloud."

11

The Top of the World

"Obstacles are those frightful things you see when you take your eyes off your goal."

\- Henry Ford

And the clouds really are rolling in, and the feeling now is more otherworldly than what Dante tried to convey in his Divine Comedy as he dreamed of Beatrice. Poetry really is no match for the reality that inspires it.

Ethereal verse is not what's called for as we approach the gates of heaven. Children's stories are more apropos, specifically Jack and the Beanstalk, as my son and I get closer and closer to that mystical castle in the sky. Fee-fi-fo-fum, I smell the blood of a Scotsman and his Italo-Asian son. (My parents are Sicilian, I was born in Edinburgh then raised in Brooklyn, married a girl from Hong Kong and my best friend is Ethiopian - does that mean I can skip the diversity-training classes?)

The occasional stripes of paint are on the ground as everything is now a sea of rock. I let the last of the heavens roll off my shoulders as I will my mind into the void. No longer will I acknowledge the lamentations of my mortal coil at these immortal heights.

We approach a massive rounded wall of rock and see that the right side looks unscalable, but way off on the left, over where the wall recedes to ground level, there is another way. As we head over, there opens up a wildly uneven expanse of enormous gray stones and we find ourselves in the middle of it, with one side sloping down and yawning out into a sheer drop and the other side sloping up towards a neutral zone of comparative safety. But we'll have to hopscotch over these immense slabs first.

The stones are unusually smooth and quite slick, owing to the clouds that have been moving through, as this unmoving mountain endlessly divides the mystic mists in half as they huff and puff their way across the sky. I stick close to my son, my paternal instinct to protect him has gone from nuanced to nuclear as the "Danger, Will Robinson, Danger!" alarm is now clanging like crazy in my head, and though I find myself sliding and tripping then standing and gripping the irrational most of me says I'm in control and that the more I keep this subject in motion the better I'll respond to Alexander if he should need me, and so the rational least of me does as he's told.

In moments we're both out of what even I deem harm's way, and so my heartbeat slows a touch. Soon there is a lush comfy alpine grass underfoot, and I'm thankful for the temporary cushion, given that these shoes I bought may have considerable traction, but that's all they have. Given the rather sizable blister I have on my right palm just from my cane, I must have blisters galore on my feet. Excellent.

We press on and only for a flash do I realize I'm no longer stopping for air. Apparently euphoria has linked with adrenaline and I am on the wing, marching through the mist, seemingly faster with every step.

The path dissolves into an outcropping of boulders that arc into the air and I mount them with glee, scrambling up mindless of where the next handhold is or if there even is one. This is nowhere near as steep as the crater but it is treacherous, yet it just doesn't seem that way, and he and I move from one jagged boulder to another, resting for a second when I find a good notch, then propping myself up from it onto the next slippery slope, using hands and feet like a monkey, switching my cane from one hand to the other, no rhyme, no reason, just moving, moving, moving, hoping my sombrero doesn't fly off, my hands rushing past these rocks as if I were running them through falling grains of sand in an hourglass, willing them to run out, for when they do, then all that will be left is sky, and we will have arrived.

A slipstream of images seems to unfurl before my eyes as the wind rushes by me from every direction. I see Alexander and me as we climbed the Great Wall together in 1998, as Loron's great love of travel took our family on the first of many foreign excursions prompting friendly incursions on the topography of me and my son's hitherto quite provincial minds.

At the top of the Wall where it lined a magnificent ridge, I can remember walking across crumbling stones left unmaintained for the handful of tourists that bothered to go up that far, and there was an opening before me, a dark and dank staircase with icy walls, and I followed it down till it led me out onto a path that opened out to the valley, and I could see our tour bus way down below by the entrance, looking like a matchstick from where I stood.

I see the two of us at the Po Lin monastery on Lantau Island in Hong Kong as we scaled the 234 steps that took us to the "Buddha in the Sky," a stupendous statue of Buddha sitting serenely as he beckons pilgrims to his eternal home overlooking the monks and their temples down below. I can easily recall the incredulous look on my son's face as we stared at each other on the way up to the mountaintop monastery, sitting in a rickety bus filled with believers tearing up and around a truly steep and viciously winding road at too many miles per hour on a narrow, bumpy, barely paved path with guard rails that couldn't keep a scooter from crashing through and plunging thousands of feet down to quite certain death. The calm looks on all the faces in that bus except ours reassured neither of us as we kept our place and probably both of us were never as relieved as when we emerged from that bucket of bolts and stood on reliable ground.

That was of a piece with the hairpin curve our plane made twice on its way to the old Hong Kong airport upon our arrival at Loron's place of birth, where only former fighter pilots were allowed to thread those jumbo jets through the needle of tightly packed skyscrapers, every landing a stress test even for frequent flyers.

For our part, we hadn't really had any time to get unnerved, because only upon suddenly being flung backward in our seats as the plane nosed up at least thirty degrees when the pilot apparently decided to try his approach a second time did we get the sense something unusual was going on, a feeling that got confirmed when we looked out our windows and noticed that the wings seemed to be brushing right up against the buildings we suddenly found ourselves hurtling through.

Now if our sojourn through the Sinosphere tended to induce vertigo of an exotic eastern kind, our introduction to Italia succeeded in reversing the travels of Columbus as we discovered the origins of the familiar western mind. The three of us as we stood at the upper reaches of the Roman Colosseum and looked down into the maze of tunnels that now lay partly revealed beneath the arena where the gladiators and the animals were kept as they waited to tear each other to pieces.

The miracle of Michelangelo Buonarotti as we bore witness to his wizardry first in Firenze and then in Roma. Nothing could have prepared us for what this demi-god brought down from the heavens to mesmerize mere earthlings. I tried to provide commentary from my recollection of The Agony and the Ecstasy for my child as we went from one improbable creation to the next, but perhaps never was context so little needed.

My wife had wanted more than anything to one day show Alexander the glories of his dual heritage before he went out on his own, and there's little doubt those two trips accomplished that in a most spectacular way. We spent as much time in Hong Kong and Sicily as we did in mainland China and northern Italy, acquainting him not just with his extended family but with the people and places his two sets of grandparents had known before leaving to start new lives in America.

I see us at Niagara Falls nearing dusk in the dead of winter, returning from Toronto on our way back to Geneva, as I got the impulse to see what it would look like at that time of year and took a little detour, and I remember the three of us, nearly alone in a place typically teeming with tourists, standing at the rail staring at half-frozen torrents of water pouring into space as the darkness set in, an experience as ghostly as what Mary Shelley had described in those closing pages of Frankenstein.

Alexander at thirteen, early one Saturday morning, his right arm covered in blood, because he had gotten a piece of plywood and built himself a ramp on Spring Street for his bicycle, but he'd kept making it steeper, until finally after one of his jumps he'd crash-landed, and when I went out to meet him in the street, he was apologetic, because he knew the three of us were heading out for a day trip and he was worried his accident might make us late.

Alexander right now, age twenty-three, as both of us see the summit at the same time, shrouded in mist as the clouds continue rolling through, our labors having yielded their reward, our road finally at its end, our rainbow's end right here, right now, right between father and son and heaven and earth, and words finally, mercifully, fail.

* * *

We take turns standing atop the blue-gray rock as endless fog swirls about us, taking photos that will startle us later with images as unreal as the setting we presently find ourselves in. As we put our cameras away and as if on cue, the last of the cumulus nebula goes by and the skies open up, and we go from a haunting haze to a daunting daze as the sun lights the valley below, and lingering shadows of passing clouds act as black polka dots on the surrounding green valley way down below.

"Dad, look at that plane!" he says as he suddenly sounds like a kid again, and I glance at what looks like the small cropduster from "North by Northwest" and I'm delighted but a bit puzzled by his exuberance.

"Nice," I reply, but he knows I've missed the significance of the sight.

"It's flying under us!" he points out to the philosopher with his head and feet and everything else in the clouds.

"So it is!" I shout with recognition, and we both laugh a multi-dimensional laugh that bellows forth and echoes through time and space and circumstances we will long recall, waves of nostalgia for the beauty of this moment already making their way from the future to the melancholy days just beyond the horizon.

* * *

Though there is a singular peak here slightly higher than the rest, this summit is more like an observation deck, a magnificent Japanese garden a hundred yards square a mile in the sky at the top of the world and me and my son are alone but for a falcon trying again and again to make a landing in the face of what seems like a fifty-mile an hour wind.

Absolute exhaustion finally wins out over exhilaration and I wander around until I find a spot that seems neither too craggy nor too soggy and then I collapse, that human hot-air balloon now unceremoniously crashing down to earth, its quaking lungs gasping and gulping for breath, its arms and legs strewn about boulders, its fuel source run dry.

Alexander goes off to explore this new frontier, not nearly fatigued enough to compromise his curiosity. I lay here watching him as he moves from one dramatic vantage point to another, looking out into the distance, the kingsized knapsack still draped over his shoulders, his imposing silhouette the only human apparition in sight.

"He's dangerous all right," Father said, "but not to us." That's Joe Starrett reassuring his wife Marion about Shane, the mysterious drifter who enters their lives on the homestead in 1889 and eventually saves them from the evil rancher and his hired gun. There's more than a passing resemblance between my son and that mythic hero of the Old West. No wasted motion. No wasted words. Indomitable spirit behind that inscrutable aspect. Gentle hands playing for the highest stakes.

I think about the life he's made for himself and I'm thankful. All those years of blaring away on that trumpet until that last concert where a rhapsody finally emerged. That first assignment. Moving to his own apartment at age twenty. Becoming a paramedic. All those letters from people he saved, rescued, or comforted.

Finding Andrea. Keeping her. And very soon, marriage. Oh yes, and getting offered that firefighter job over in Niskayuna. A job he nearly turned down. I don't know how much I helped him in changing that decision, but I know how hard it was to say things to him that went so completely against my own selfish interests and desires.

When he would tell me about harrowing near escapes that he'd gone through as a volunteer firefighter, stories he'd never tell his mother, I'd experience both admiration and horror at the knowledge that it was my boy who'd had these things happen to him, my son who daily placed himself in harm's way and then periodically shared some of the disturbing details with me. And I hated myself for the fear, for the cowardice that always lurked about as Alexander's calling tore my courage to pieces in my darker moments, a father's worry multiplied and magnified by the lens of paralyzing clarity. That was why part of me was relieved that his career had taken a paramedical detour, especially as the months would go by and his applications for full-time firefighting would go unrequited. I knew that past a certain age he'd have to stop looking, and I also knew that when that age arrived I could stop worrying.

It was an awful thought, a putrid thought, yet I thought it nonetheless, and then he got the call with the job offer. The job of his dreams. The job of my nightmares. But fate had tossed in a major complication - if he took the job he'd have to get through sixteen weeks at the Fire Academy, a brutal combination of firefighter training and boot camp, but that wasn't even the issue.

The sixteen weeks would run right through his wedding in September and the honeymoon he and Andrea had meticulously planned to coincide with a tiny ten-day gap of ever-so-scarce free time in her complex maze of final exams and lab rotations in this her last year of pharmacy school. No matter how he looked at the problem, the only solution seemed to be to turn down the job.

I vividly recall him going over all this with me and I remember feeling tremendously saddened and unforgivably gladdened all at the same time, but if ever there was a time to aggressively interfere in my child's life, well, this was it, and my words formed long before my heart and mind had a chance to stop them.

He'd explained to me that the recruits were not technically required to remain at the Academy on the weekends, so there'd be time, though not a lot of it, to get from there to the church and reception and back before the Monday wake-up call, so what was really at issue here was the honeymoon.

"You have your whole married lives to go on your honeymoon, son. What happens if you don't get another job offer? You're twenty-three. The clock's ticking. This is what you want, isn't it? This is what you were meant to do in this world. You know that. So go do it. Because if you don't get another chance, you'll hate yourself, and you'll resent her - always - for letting this slip away. So don't let it. Do whatever you have to do to get this job."

I'd never spoken to him with more conviction than on that day, and never had I not wanted to say something as much as I wanted not to speak those words to him. But I love him. More than anything or anyone on this earth. And what he wanted more than anything was to be a firefighter. So I said all I could to help him make the right decision.

He and Andrea and her family's longtime pastor, Pastor Bob, eventually came up with a creative solution, whereby there'd be two weddings, a small, intimate one next month followed by the honeymoon, and a large, elaborate one two months later at the end of September in the midst of his training. A Gordian Knot no more.

I think of all these things as Alexander settles on a spot a few yards away from me to take a much-deserved rest, the falcon I saw earlier trying to make his landing flitting around from stone to stone nearby, lifting unexpectedly every once in a while as the wicked wind gets beneath his wings, the sound of that wind putting me in a trance, a tidal wave of silent sound that only flows on holy ground, and as the roar of heaven greets me like an angel's kiss, I wonder if there's greater proof of God than this?

* * *

The symbolism of this moment does not escape me, as my lifelong search for "the high country of the mind," as Pirsig so wonderfully phrased it, seems perfectly in synchronization with this high country my body has taken me to, and it reminds me of a term I coined long ago, a term that already existed in a sense, but that had never been used for the purpose I intended, that of containing and encapsulating the thrust of my individual philosophy, my own notion of what constitutes a practical, intellectual, and moral code for making one's way in the world and for making sense of that world.

Every aspiring philosopher worth his salt has to have one, I've always thought, and the term I came to use to describe it was, for me, as definitive as could be: Kaleidoscopism.

It's a clumsy term, a bit archaic, but it suits my needs. Consider what a kaleidoscope actually is, and what it does. Here you have this small cylinder containing tiny pieces of colored glass, where every time you rotate it, internal mirrors act to create a different pattern. Constant change, with each change appearing as a faultless mosaic of symmetrical beauty, yet every image you obtain is an absolute illusion.

Now, assign a name to each of these images; any name will do: Agnosticism, Aristotelianism, Atheism, Buddhism, Catholicism, Conservatism, Existentialism, Freudianism, Hedonism, Hinduism, Kantianism, Liberalism, Marxism, Nietzscheanism, Nihilism, Platoism, Pragmatism, Taoism... ad infinitum. Each image is a vision, a vision that when viewed by a child, is believed to represent a totality, in the same way that each "ism," when viewed by an adherent, is fervently believed to represent a total explanation of things, when in fact, any thoughtful person, any humble person, knows that the most impressive accumulation of knowledge or of wisdom is but a fraction of what exists.

So, what's key about the kaleidoscope is the courage to lay it aside, to focus on the real world going on around you. For while it might be useful to indulge in one or another of these visions from time to time, remember their source. Yes, Aristotelianism will come in handy if you're trying to catalogue all the fruit flies that inhabit some tropical corner of the globe, and Hedonism will be helpful if you decide to open a health spa, and Nihilism is a must when attempting to explain much of modern art.

But, how can any of these "isms" guide you as you fight a fire, climb a mountain, do your job, love your wife, console a child, live your life? The power of these illusory visions lies in the acknowledgment of their limitations. I believe an admirable goal for a struggling soul is to juxtapose these visions and the reality of life until all that remains is wondrous and just, the starry heavens in the mind's eye a whirl of kaleidoscopic chaos, the moral universe within a constellation of calm.

I believe these visions are but shadows of a more immediate reality that somehow always seems somewhere else, and that is why we should dance mindlessly on that narrow rim that is our brief and fitful destiny, a rim with endless chasms on either side, chasms that know far more about things than we do, for they contain the secret of life and death, and only when we stumble do we glimpse that secret. Only if we risk dying do we start living.

Our touchstone, therefore, must be the mythical creatures, let us say dragons, for only they reside in the chasms. They live where men fear to journey. They fly, breathe fire, roar like thunder and strike as lightening because no image, no "ism" has ever told them that such things are impossible. They listen to life, not to approximations of life. And I know they exist because I have seen them in my dreams. And in my dreams I have seen a dragon factory, where ghastly pieces of man and beast get flung onto a grisly assembly line, but at the other end emerge exquisite human dragons of dizzying dimension, soaring out of the factory and into the heavens, never looking back.

Yet these dragons are also quite real. We see them all the time. Every woman that has given birth has entered that chasm. The chasm of creation. Once in a while a scientist will wander into that realm. The realm of divine inspiration. Many a soldier and police officer has found himself in that abyss. The abyss of enemy attack.

I recall reading about Wesley Autrey, the "Subway Superman" who leapt in front of an oncoming train a few months ago to help a man having a seizure that had fallen onto the tracks. Autrey covered the convulsing man with his own body as the train thundered directly above them. He'd had but a few seconds on the platform to make his calculation about the depth of the trench where that young man lay writhing between the rails, and then he vaulted into the void, human no more, a dragon in flight, seeing a wrong, and making it right.

That is a philosophy I can believe in. That is what I believe each individual is born to do, to turn themselves as best they can from a wretched creature into a mythical one, one piece at a time, forging their own character in the crucible of deliberate experience, heedless of what lies behind or ahead. That most of us will fail beyond all measure is a given. I have failed. Again and again. That we should try beyond all reason is our consolation. For there are those who succeed. And there are those small successes that will loom large as we get older. Courage and the capacity for it is not a vision. It is not an "ism" and of course it can involve aspects other than physical bravery.

But I believe all other forms of courage derive from the physical. Just as all our metaphors lead back to the real world. Courage is reality itself. The willingness to live as your will intends. Everything else is just pieces of colored glass in a small cylinder. A kaleidoscope of cowardly dreams.

* * *

Big talk from a small, broken man, as I lie here never wanting to get up, my weakened flesh and bones starting to cleave and sink into these cloud-dwelling stones. But though it seems like moments, we've been up here for at least half an hour, and we still have our very own - and very real - chasm to cross.

I reach over for my knapsack and fumble with the zipper as my right quadricep starts to uncontrollably quiver and quake, and I try to pay no mind to it as Alexander comes over to join me. "We should probably wait till that stops shaking before we forge on ahead," he deadpans, doing his best not to seem too concerned that dad's coming apart at the seams far from the nearest body shop.

"Roger that," I reply, as I finally manage to take out two sandwiches and hand him one. Let's see, there's at least another sleeve of Fig Newtons in there and one last bottle of Doubleshot. Life is good. I fish around in there for one more thing – ah, there it is. It is long past time for a little albuterol. He shakes his head as he looks at me, his expression one of long-standing disbelief, but I thought it was important to get to the top without resorting to my inhaler.

We eat in silence in the most amazing open air cafe ever, and I offer him some Newtons and he takes one, and more than a mile away across the sky, a granite-gray fin-shaped peak is in full gorgeous view, a slash of baby blue haze behind it framing and friezing it to full relief, another slash of willowing white right above the blue, dissolving high into a cerulean place, somewhere south of outer space.

We compress our leftover mess into plastic bags and tuck them away, and now we must take our stand, for what lies ahead is still unknown and it's right nearby, but if we lay much longer I might lose heart for what lies at hand.

The summit is level for a good stretch, but it eventually slopes drastically down and then curves sharply left before dramatically rising again, which is why even though we can see almost the entire ridge as it winds its way over to the other peak, we still can't see the beginning of it from our side.

"How's your leg doing?" he asks as he hangs back a little. "It's good," I say. "My blood must have gotten low on espresso. Should've re-fueled a lot sooner." He says something I don't catch as our strange little road abruptly narrows to nearly nothing, and suddenly there is absolutely nothing funny about our situation. We are no longer sleepwalking through history. History has just ended. Time and space are no longer an illusion. All space is here and all time is now. The party's over. Game's finished. Dream's done. Something new has arrived. Let's call it reality.

Whatever you call it, it has my full, undivided attention.

12

A Tightrope Across the Sky

"I have a life wish."

\- Philippe Petit (High wire artist)

There is a scene from Indiana Jones's "The Last Crusade" where the hero is asked to take a literal leap of faith across a bottomless pit separating where he's standing from where he needs to go, only it's too big to jump across, but if he truly believes in his own ability to unravel the secret code that has gotten him this far in his quest, then he should take that next step into what otherwise looks like certain death. And he does, and just as his foot falls, a walkway magically materializes beneath him, and he makes it safely to the other side.

The question now is, Do I have as much faith as Indiana Jones?

My heart is pounding, sounding, pumping, thumping, and it has nothing to do with asthma, altitude, or exhaustion. I guess this is what fear feels like.

"What do you think, kid? Are we going?" A part of me is praying he says no.

Stretched out before us is a zig-zagging tightrope of a razor's edge ridge running wildly off into space, careening madly left across a jagged ragged mile-long course that ends way over on that not quite twin peak out yonder before leveling out and then gently sloping back down and disappearing into the valley that is our final destination. And damn if that destination doesn't seem as far away as the sun.

"Of course we're going!" he shouts, and I rejoin "Of course we're going!" though what I'm shouting sure as hell isn't what I'm thinking. I push my straw hat a bit more firmly in place before the gusting wind blows it off, and I tell my son to stick to me like an Italian on pasta, as it slowly dawns on me that my fear actually has nothing to do with me but is focused entirely on him. Maybe I am a little over-protective of him after all.

There's a ridiculously narrow bottleneck we must climb through before getting on to the ridge that leaves us no choice but to come within two or three feet of a naked ledge that just drops sickeningly dead down to the very bottom of the mountain, and I look for a long moment at the bone-white striations of the stream trails that randomly rip and scar and ripple and mar the verdant face of this behemoth's base.

"Whatcha thinkin', pops?" he asks, and I respond by moving carefully along, since he can't take the next step if I don't, and even though the boulders up here are immense, I still grab hold as if to shake them, just to see if they're truly entrenched. The ridge itself is a highway of tremendous slabs of granite weirdly interlaced like fingers pointing skyward, forming a crooked cross-hatching crest of thorns with one side of the mountain dropping off to the right of the vertex at maybe a sixty degree angle and the other side dropping off essentially vertically. What is of concern to me, or by God should be, is that even if we straddle this peripatetical pinnacle dead center, which will clearly not always be possible, we've only got a couple of yards to one side of us and a couple of yards to the other, so there ain't a hell of a lot of room for missteps here. Not to mention the wind is blowing something fierce. So what better time to ask him?

"You sure she's the one?" No need to shout because he's right by my side.

He stares at me with a justifiably perplexed expression for a few seconds, but then his face returns to normal as he replies "Yes, father, quite sure."

"I mean, I know she's perfect for you, and I know she's good to you, and I know you've been together five years, and I know both of you are ready, and she's already like my own daughter... but what I'm asking is, are you sure? Her? You? Now? For ever?"

He steps a little to the right, plants his foot and leans into the wind as he securely grips the nearest rock with one gloved hand and then just as securely grips my right shoulder with the other hand as he says "I'm sure, dad. Absolutely sure. Now come on. Today is the day. The mountain is waiting. Let's get on our way."

We've come full circle. The son spouting Seuss to the sire. So now more than ever, we must make our move, for we are two loons on a wire.

* * *

Just as I clear the bottleneck a blast of wind hits and my faux fedora flies off my head and twirls its way over the edge and out of sight. An inauspicious augury if ever there was one.

"I'll pick it up at the lost and found on our way back," I say, and he politely nods as he judiciously plods.

The wind is blowing in hard from the northeast, so standing straight up is neither advisable nor even possible at the moment, and it turns out that having five appendages provides no advantage whatsoever up here. Getting from one of these slabs to the next at this altitude after hours of extreme exertion is tough enough without this damn cane getting in my way, and so even though it's been with me forever, I start looking for a place to leave it, realizing there's no way I'm getting across this ridge if I don't. Besides which, now that Stetson's gone I might as well ditch the staff.

There's a crevice here that's maybe two or three feet deep, and I decide that's the spot, telling myself I'll come back to retrieve it someday. I run a gloved hand along my scratched and mottled friend and let it drop, trying not to think about how much harder it's going to be getting down this hill later without it.

I look back and get his attention and tap my wrist. He holds up one finger as he shouts "One thirty!" and now there really is cause for concern. Even though the sun up in sky was telling me otherwise, I was hoping it was closer to noon.

Clawing our way across this serrated edge of a ridge is going to take time, and as I stare at the peak at the very end of it, I'm unnerved at the two smaller but much angrier peaks we'll have to get up and over and up and over to reach the summit at the other tip of this horseshoe. And once we've summited, we still have to get back down, and if the sun should set before we do, then we're out here with the birds and the bees and the flowers and the trees, which would be okay, were it not also for the moose and the marmots and the bobcats and the bears. All of which translates to we've simply got to keep moving.

I force these unsettling thoughts out of my head and look around as another curtain of cloud wafts its way through, leaving the tightrope trail behind us as clear as glass, while enshrouding the way forward with an eerie ghostly fog. And it's suddenly gotten really cold. The complications appear to be multiplying.

As we creep along into the mist visibility gets veiled but does not vanish. But now the rocks are getting slippery and slick, and there's something else. Our world is suddenly just a few feet in diameter, so by vaporizing the horizon this stratospheric miasma creates an absurdly dangerous delusion of calm just when we need it least.

This reminds me of walking out on one of those little breakwaters on the Coney Island shore just before sunrise, a manmade stretch of rocks sticking its chin into the ocean, the salty air going right through me, the briny water on either side crashing all around, seaweed and long tangles of thick moss trailing from the edges like some crazy man's beard. Except a fall from that thing just meant maybe a broken leg and some triage. A slipup here and it's a not so bon voyage.

"My dear Watson," I bellow to my son in my very worst British accent, "I dare say we might never find Professor Moriarty in this accursed fog!"

I look back and see a bemused expression on his face but he says nothing, keeping one eye on the mission and the other on me. We creep along what we hope is the crest as quickly as we dare as streaming waves of freezing crystals shivers our timbers.

Minutes tick by until the last lingering fringes of that cloud disintegrate, and then we're both a bit unnerved to see we veered off a little too much to the left while hobnobbing through the haze.

"Take it slow," I say to both of us, as we nervously negotiate our way back to - inthe utter and complete absence of a better term at this altitude - solid ground. I do not blink as I watch every move he makes as we push back from the precipice and clinch this less precarious cornice and make it our cradle, two babes in the air and the cradle a rock, the wind in our hair and safety a crock, we'd better be wise and I don't mean maybe, cause if'n we don't, bye bye daddy and bye bye baby.

* * *

Smooth sailing as we approach the first peak, and I'm happy to see our razor's edge broaden some, all the more so because it's steeper than it looked from a distance, and even a few degrees of steep up here near the ozone layer takes both your breath and your bravery away. Was it Lombardi or Ali who said fatigue makes cowards of us all?

I forget, but I know it was Ali who told himself "Don't quit. Suffer now, and live as achampion for the rest of your life."

Damn. Just as I summit, a ridiculously painful spasm hits me at the very top of my right leg just below my groin, and I have to stop. I turn to see where he is, and he's farther back than I thought, which is good. I sort of half-sit half-recline on what is only marginally better than an uneven bed of rusty nails, trying to massage the offending tendon - because it has to be a tendon; a muscle could never hurt this much, unless I'm more of a wimp than I thought - back into anatomical compliance.

If he notices my distress he doesn't shout out to ask what's wrong, more likely thinking I'm just tired, which strangely enough I'm not, and taking a breather. I'm angrier than I am afraid, but what should I expect, given the slovenly state of my soul's current abode?

When I was actively involved in the martial arts, many of my fellow students were fanatical not only about keeping fit, but also about what they would and would not eat, and which medicines they would and would not take, and I remember one especially fastidiously maniacal guy who just won't let up on me about the evils of sugar until finally I just said to him, "Look, my friend, you see your body as a temple. That's your

problem. Me? I see it as a whorehouse. So leave me alone."

Of course I'm not so sure too much sugar or too little exercise is to blame here. More likely it's the lack of air getting to my legs, and that's a consequence of asthma and altitude, not a surplus of cupcakes or a shortage of sit-ups.

"How're you doing?" A little startled, I look for a long confused moment into those eyes, but not even an infinitesimal iota of fear can be found there. Whatever comes he knows he'll figure out what to do. Right now he just wants to see if I'm okay.

"Another chink in the armor," I say as I get back up, gently testing the tendon as I arise. "No offense," I hasten to add as I steady myself. "None taken, pops," he responds without missing a beat.

A few anxious baby steps, and it would seem I'm all right, at least for the time being. I head down this comparatively gentle peak by bracing and leaning and pressing my arms at every possible angle against these Stonehenge-sized slabs so as to guide and slide myself down the slope without using my legs any more than is absolutely indisputably necessary.

Interestingly, but I guess unsurprisingly, as I get the hang of this improvised backwards-dragging-myself-downwards technique, my peculiar race to the bottom picks up steam because whereas my legs are shot my arms are not, and so maybe I can introduce some real division of labor here halfway through the journey. It's certainly worth a try.

As things level off, I take exaggeratedly small, quick steps, in hopes of not further aggravating my new condition, and before long I've put a fair amount of space between us, but along this particular part of the ridge it somehow doesn't feel entirely irresponsible.

I stop for a moment to look at him, to discover if within this iridescent atmosphere I can see the resemblance between us that everyone speaks of and that I don't quite apprehend, and with that a memory intrudes, and I find myself understandably angry at the intrusion.

It was June of 2001, and we were in Sicily, having spent the last few days with my mother's side of the family. The three of us had been touring northern Italy and then joined my mother, who had flown straight to Palermo. My dad, who's never been on a plane in his life, hadn't been back to his place of birth since he'd left it forty years earlier, and had chosen once again to remain at home.

His nephew and my namesake, had come over to where we were staying at my Zia Anna's house, and was driving the four of us to Misilmeri, a few miles outside Palermo proper, which was where my father's side of the family lived, and I was on the passenger side, and everyone else was in back, and we two Sals were talking, and every so often I'd look at him as he spoke, and some long ago memory kept faintly tapping, gently rapping just inside my skull, trying to remind me, until finally I guess it gave up and just took a baseball bat and blasted me back to total recall.

In 2001 the Salvatore A. Traina driving next to me was maybe forty years old. He was also a dead ringer for my dad when he was forty years old, so all of a sudden I was six years old again, sitting in the front of the car this time, a man in the prime of his life seeing his father in the prime of his life, like something out of Field of Dreams.

And as I keep quickstepping my way toward this second peak, and as the level edge starts lifting up, the tears come uncontrollably, but these are not good tears. In the movie, Ray Kinsella is told by a ghostly voice to build a baseball field, and that if he does, then "He will come." All of us think that the "He" is Shoeless Joe Jackson, who does indeed come to the field, but at the end, it is Kinsella's father, long since dead and estranged from his son Ray, who arrives, and so Kinsella is able to at long last appreciate the beautiful truth about his father and achieve redemption by understanding the man he had long resented and long misunderstood.

Unlike the Ray Kinsella character, I have never misunderstood my father, except for his non-existent goodness, and there is nothing but ugly truth to appreciate. I didn't then and don't now give a damn about seeing him in the prime of his life. That is why the tears are flowing. Like Kinsella, I've always been petrified of turning into my progenitor. The difference is my fears were and are well-founded. So I don't require a conversion. I just need to do right by my son.

I respond to this unwelcome reverie by quickening my pace and leaving Alexander well behind, and before long I find myself at the top of the hill, and I've unexpectedly reached the deadest of dead ends, and now the question is what to do next.

13

Staring Into the Abyss

"And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you."

\- Friedrich Nietzsche

Time stands still as I run out of road. The tightrope ends abruptly, and I stand at the precipice of the shark fin peak, the drop-off maybe two or three hundred feet, my arms too tired to move, as I lazily kick a few pebbles with my right foot, sweeping them over the cliff and watching them soundlessly plummet to the tiny notch below.

I scan the rockface as it leads way down to the little ledge between this peak and that last one, which is where we've got to go, and as I stare straight down I have a memory of how often I used to stand at street level right at the corner of one of the twin towers, I don't remember which one - we didn't refer to them as the "North Tower" and the "South Tower" back then; we just called them One and Two, and I never did know which one was which - but I used to stand with my nose nearly pressed into the groove, for the corners of the two buildings weren't corners at all, and I would stare straight up a hundred and ten stories into the air and I would see this strange triangle of sky, and what always struck me about it was that from that spot it seemed like the tower was only twenty feet tall, because that's how close the sky looked, and every time I found myself near the West Side Highway, and I found myself there a lot because I loved having dim sum in Chinatown and then walking over to Strand's bookstore by the Fulton fish market and then wandering through Wall Street until I found the bronze bull, which was always in the same place but neither of my feet seemed to think so, and I would end up between the towers before taking the train uptown to one museum or another, and so now as I look down I remember looking up, and that was nearly twenty years ago, in a very different New York that didn't have a South Street seaport yet, and you could stroll through One Police Plaza because it hadn't been turned into an impenetrable fortress, and people looked at you funny, especially if you were staring up the side of one of the twin towers like some birdbrained tourist, but they looked at you back then, because they weren't hiding in plain sight behind cell phones and iPods and transition lenses, but what matters most of all to me right now is that the strange triangle of sky no longer exists, that I won't see it anymore, that no one will see it anymore, and so I keep staring.I'm looking for places where I can find a hold and work my way down, because even though we don't have ropes and pulleys and carabiners, it doesn't seem like that that insane a descent. My lungs have apparently acclimated to the altitude, and I still feel able, and so I'm just trying to make sure I do this right, don't want to put Alexander in danger, but there's something else on my mind and I'm not sure if that something is what's led me here, right to this spot, or if being here is what's led me to thinking about that something, because it's been a while, and I wouldn't mind if it were a while longer.

It's funny. People talk about the world before 9/11 and the world after 9/11, but for me 9/11 was a blur. I know where I was that day, sure. I vaguely recall the people around me at the time. What they were doing, saying. But what I was doing? What I was saying? What I was thinking? It had nothing to do with what we and the rest of the world were seeing on our television screens. It had everything to do with what had happened just three days earlier. On 9/8. At around 10 am. That was where my world divided. My life ever since has been the one before 9/8 and the one after. 9/11, as impossible as it may seem, barely registered with me. In many ways, it's as if it never happened.

It was Saturday, and it was looking to be a beautiful day, and I was driving a rented mini-van along an expressway, and next to me was my wife, and behind us were my uncle and aunt visiting from Palermo with my mother sitting between them, and behind them was their oldest grandchild, the six of us having headed out from Ithaca early that morning to take an excursion around upstate New York, and it happened that they had been to the top of the Twin Towers only two days earlier when they were still in New York City, and this was to be a last bit of sightseeing before they returned to Sicily.

"Dad?" He calls to me and sounds far away, and that's good, because I'm trying to figure out how to take my first step down, and I need a little time, a little time so I can concentrate, because that first step is the important one, and so I look around for the right spot, but the holds just below this cliff are so far apart, and so I keep staring.

You weren't with us that day, my child, you were at the fire station, and thank God for that. You'd started there only a few months earlier, and your mother and I had been worried about you, but not just because of that. You weren't doing as well at the new high school as you were back in Geneva, and you were going from one part-time job to another, none of which you liked very much, and one of the new friends you'd made clearly had a strong interest in marijuana (though in his defense, so did many of the former hippies that had settled in Ithaca), and, of course, as a seventeen year-old,you seemed to be slowly drifting away from us. You took to volunteering at CayugaHeights, however, with great intensity, so we didn't try to pry you out of there for a whole day just to see things you'd seen so many times with us over the years. Which meant you weren't there with me that awful day, and I'll go to my grave thankful for that tender mercy.

Uncle Tanino and Aunt Anna. I never call them that, of course, or any of my other twenty-seven aunts and uncles, my mother having seven brothers and sisters, my father eight, all but one married, most still living. It's Zio Tanino and Zia Anna, and when my mother's father, my grandfather, who died when I was two years old, whose wedding band is right here on my ring finger, my grandmother having given it to me, her oldest grandchild, many years ago, when you were very young, my child, well, when my grandfather finally succeeded in bringing over all his children to America, except for my newly married mother, who would join the rest of her family just before our patriarch went from seemingly good health to his deathbed almost overnight, the last stages of unsuspected and untreated lung cancer taking him quickly, it was Zio Tanino and Zia Anna who would be the parents of the first of our clan to be born on these shores, one Guiseppe LoVerde, my cousin Joe, just ten months my junior, he and I being the only grandchildren my grandfather would ever live to see, and it was Joe's oldest child, Gaetano, named after my grandfather, that was in the mini-van there with us, and so there was a symmetry of sorts inside that accursed vehicle, because Joe wasn't there but his son was, and you weren't there but your father was, just as Joe is a natural-born American who's lived his whole life in Sicily and I am a foreign-born Sicilian who's lived his whole life in America.

And so as cautious a driver as I already am, I was all the more so that morning with my mother and your mother and Gaetano and his grandparents all under my care as we traveled down the highway, and at first I guess I didn't believe what it was I was seeing because it seemed impossible. We were just coming off a rising curve, and maybe if the road had been flat and straight I would have seen him sooner, but as the lanes ahead of me reappeared as we leveled off, there right between the left lane and the center lane was an old man with his back to the oncoming traffic, just standing there, sort of hunched over, leaning neither right nor left, not looking to get either to the median shoulder a lane away or to the right shoulder two lanes over where he'd left his car.

"Dad! That is NOT the way down!" A touch of anger now in his voice, and something else, and I can understand why. Still sounds far away. Maybe twenty or thirty yards, though I'm not sure because I haven't turned around to look. I'm trying to assess the sturdiness of a crevice a few feet below the lip of this cliff, and it seems okay, and if I can manage to get the tip of my left foot in there and maintain a hold, I should be able to use the lip as an anchor while I reach down and get my right foot secured into a second opening not too far below it, but I test that first gap a few times with my toe to see if any pieces of rock chip off, because it's a long way down if I'm wrong.

I don't know how far ahead of us that old man was the moment I saw him, but I know that at sixty miles an hour, we were moving at eighty-eight feet per second, and all I could think to do as he rocketed towards my face was swerve to the median on my left as I slammed on the brakes, praying I'd miss him and praying for dear life the cars behind would miss us.

He struck the hood and careened into the windshield, which cracked but did not shatter as his body then ricocheted forward, flying face first onto the pavement of the median. My heart stopped, and my screams and those of my wife seemed to come from somewhere outside ourselves. I got out of the van, which was now mostly on the shoulder, and looked inside long enough to see that everyone was all right, and then I ran over to the man on the ground.

He had a horrifying gash in his skull, several of his teeth had been knocked out and lay a few inches away, and blood was seeping and bubbling out from his wound. He was facedown, trembling, and dragging his right hand up and down on the pavement in a hideous, continuous motion. I tried to dial 911 on my cell phone but could not do it. A man in a blue shirt stood between me and the old man. I think he'd been in the car with him. A friend. He was devastated. Bewildered. A lady in a white blouse called the police. Though it seemed like hours, police, EMTs, and Mercy Flight all were on the scene within minutes.

Someone took all of us to the local police station. Five hours of depositions, desolation, and disorientation. As I staggered around the station, I could hear what I knew were the man's family members crying and consoling one another. I kept asking Investigator Green, the one who seemed in charge, and the one who interviewed me last, if the man would make it. All through that afternoon, he'd had to say the same things. He didn't know. The doctors were still working on him. He'd keep me informed.

I paid little attention to my family as I spent as much time outside the station as I could, away from them, alone, truly alone, for the first time in my life, with no one and not one thing in that stinking philosopher's head of mine but the fate of that poor man whose body I'd broken to pieces, his soul in flames, circling in confusion, awaiting instructions.

He'd had a life, and even if he survived, what sort of life would be left to him? He had a family who loved him, and God only knows the hell they'd be going through in the days to come. I remembered what my father had gone through when his youngest sister was struck and killed by a reckless driver late one night. The driver had just kept on driving and was never identified. It had taken years for my dad to recover. If he ever did.

And so as that man lay near death on some surgical table, the assembled doctors trying to keep him alive, I prayed for those doctors, that they would do their best, I prayed for him, that he would find strength he didn't know he had, and I prayed for the family, that their suffering would end.

I prayed all through that afternoon for that man, through tears that would not stop, through self-recrimination that came in waves, and through anguish I had never known. I prayed even though I did not believe in prayer, do not believe in prayer, will never believe in prayer. I prayed as if my prayers would keep him alive. I prayed because it was all I had left. I prayed until I finally did believe in prayer.

"Dad! What the hell are you doing? TURN around!" He's closer now, and he's also yelling at me, and so I do turn around to take a look at him, and I see he's maybe twenty feet away, and because it's pretty steep here until you get near the cliff, so steep he can't see the drop-off, which means it probably seems more dangerous than it is from where he's positioned, and so I explain it to him.

"It's not so bad, son, there's a couple of footholds here that look decent, and I don't think it'll be too tough to make our way down."

I turn away from him and take a last look at my choices here, because we really need to get moving. We lost a lot of time on the ridge, and I'm hoping to make some of that time back once we manage to get down to that notch from this penultimate peak and then up to our summa cum laude summit. He's saying something else but I'm not really paying attention.

We left the police station sometime late in the afternoon, Investigator Green having told us we were all free to go, and Loron having arranged to have another vehicle brought to us. It seems several eyewitnesses had come to the station for the express purpose of letting the officers know that I had done nothing wrong there on the highway, and that this tragedy had been unavoidable.

In later days I was thankful for their testimony, but it certainly meant nothing to me on that day. But the way Green treated me was a different story. This had been the only time in my life before that day or since that I had been interrogated by a police officer, and I will never forget his deliberate efforts to get to exactly what had transpired and his relentless decency as he questioned a man who must have looked like he was facing a firing squad. An officer and a gentle man.

I didn't put up a fight as Loron took the wheel and drove us away from the station. My uncle had suggested we head back to my home, which was nearly four hours away, but I had no intention of spending the next four hours in an automobile. We were less than half an hour from our original destination. My aunt and uncle and their grandchild had never been to Niagara Falls and would likely never find themselves there again.

World travel is still a luxury back in Palermo. Sicily is not a land of poverty but neither is it a land of plenty. That is, after all, why my grandfather left his native land. I told my wife to ignore my uncle and head to the Falls. It's okay, I told her, it's okay.

As she drove I slumped down on the passenger side, sinking somewhere inside myself, the familiar falling away, with nothing taking its place, nothing to decelerate the descent. I came out of my trance when the car came to a stop at a hotel, and after we checked in we took to the street, going from store to store searching for toothbrushes and toothpaste, none of us having planned to spend the night at Niagara.

When we had gotten what we needed, we went back to the hotel and tried to get a little sleep. I turned away from my wife and stared into the faintly lit drapes we had closed over the window, the last of the setting sun's light straining to get through, a gauzy glimmering haze reflecting back and forth from the curtains as my mind kept replaying the horror show I knew would never end.

When we met in the lobby later on, we went looking for a place to eat, and before long Zio Tanino spotted a pizzeria with a wood-burning oven, something quite typical in Palermo, but something quite unexpected in the Niagara Falls of 2001. The food was fine, and after our meal, we walked towards the falls. The rest of the early evening was spent by the water, and when darkness finally fell, we got a table at a restaurant that was set high above the street, and my family enjoyed dessert and coffee while viewing the grandiose illumination of the falls, the massive strobe lights and laser lights and search lights flashing and sweeping and crisscrossing the water and the sky, the colors and the music making us all think for at least a moment or two of something other than that man.

When the show was over, we walked through the chaos of the tourist center, and as my uncle and the ladies windowshopped for souvenirs, I took Gaetano to some sort of virtual reality show. I desperately needed to escape, and mindless entertainment seemed to make sense, and it wasn't lost on me that the boy ought to have some memory of this weekend that at least resembled joy.

The next morning I took the wheel of the car and after breakfast and a couple of stops at the famous floral clock and a new Buddhist temple that we happened upon, I drove back to Ithaca, and when we got home you were there, Alexander, and of course you remember seeing your father for the first time not as the eternal Don Quixote but as the moribund Alonso Quixano, and you saw that I was lost, that for the first time in my life I was truly, utterly lost, but I wonder if you knew then it would be years before I was found. I hope not.

After our embrace and after tears that again would not stop, I finally got up and told you and your mother to take everyone for some sightseeing and to get back by six o'clock or so, and that I'd have dinner ready upon their return. I had already shopped a few days prior, and when all of you got back, platters of mozzarella and tomato and basil bathed in olive oil and balsamic vinegar, chicken francese with fried artichoke hearts, and ziti with cauliflower and raisins and pine nuts were already on the table, and dessert was a homemade ricotta cheesecake replete with sliced almonds and lemon zest accompanied by strong espresso. Compliments and conversation flowed, until finally it was time for bed.

The next day I drove everyone to Buttermilk Falls for one last mini-excursion, and then we headed to the bus terminal where we all said our good-byes. When I got back home I made the first of many calls. The man was in critical condition and in intensive care for three weeks after the accident. He was in serious condition for a week after that. By the fifth week he was taken out of the ICU. I called the hospital day after day, week after week, wanting to know, needing to know, how he was.

But I dreaded making the calls, and the answers never provided solace. Something broke inside of me on that morning, and things have never been the same. What made it worse was feeling guilty about my own grief, feeling as though I had no right to my own suffering in light of what that man had endured. Guilt on top of guilt with no way out from under it all, while within me cherished delusions caved in, leaving whatever man I had been in ruins from every direction. Until that catastrophic moment I had lived within the realm of my own childish philosophical daydream, an enchanted world that had been suddenly, violently, irreversibly disenchanted, and ever since that Saturday morning of September eighth, two thousand one, the world and my place in it is different. And as I keep staring into the abyss, I see that I'm staring into my own emptiness, and as I keep listening for the familiar laughter of my past, I hear only chants from beyond, beseeching me to take the next step, to march down to where I belong, and so I kneel and hug the cliff as I swing my left leg down to secure that first foothold...

"DAD!!! Listen to me! This is NOT the way down! We can not go down a GODDAMN VERTICAL WALL without a rope! GRAB MY FUCKING HAND!"

His words slice through my brain and I do as he says. I get myself back onto solid ground, and as I shake myself fully out of my reverie and back into some version of wakefulness, I walk with my son away from the edge. I shudder a bit as I sneak a look back to what I was about to get myself into, and I realize that these fleeting moments of madness I'm prone to and proud of may be more in control of me than I am of them, and that realization is a surprise, but what's not surprising is that it took a firefighter to keep the philosopher from leaping into the flames.

"Well, I suppose that's not the only way down," I say as he takes my arm and points his chin towards a gentler descent just a few yards to the right of the cliff's edge, and he just shakes his head as he works to calm himself down, clearly angry, and more than a little startled perhaps at the uncharted depth of his dad's dementia.

As I look up to see where the sun is, I still think there's a chance we can make it back before dark, but as we work our way down and around this beast to that storied notch that connects the last two peaks, I quickly forget about our time problem.

Something far more interesting is taking shape.

14

Between Two Worlds

"The core and the surface of life are essentially the same, words only making them appear different. If a name is needed, then wonder names them both, and from wonder into wonder, existence opens."

\- Lao Tzu (Witter Bynner, trans.)

Going round what is now the eastern face of the mountain it's as if we're coming down the grandest staircase in creation, which in fact is what we _are_ doing, my metaphors failing faster and faster as the reality from which they all derive just keeps getting larger and larger.

Alpine grass the color of autumn brackets this terrace at the bottom of the stairs, a patchy lion's mane on either side the only sign of life, two scruffy rusty-saffron lines the only railings on this little balcony tucked inside heaven's vault. No bigger than a handball court, the floor of this fabled notch is pulverized stone riddled with slabs of granite, but it is what this notch stands between that has father and son speechless and enthralled.

The eastern window opens out into a green, green valley way down below and far away, with little strands of blue, blue lakes here and there, with golden sunshine everywhere, while the western window is a gun-metal gray wall of rocky ridge with streaks of silver, the edge of space we just finished traipsing through, and right now it is once again capped by clouds, endless white mist framing its primordial grace. Two visions of the world forever frozen and free in time and space, open to any and all that will subdue their selves and conquer this place.

"You know that kid that sings about standing on mountains, dad?" I nod. "I'll bet he's never seen anything like this," he says, his words a distracted footnote to the feeling that must be overwhelming him from silence into what, for him, constitutes well-nigh loquaciousness. "I hope he has," I whisper back, as we both disappear for a while into a world neither of us had ever imagined.

* * *

"Well, oddly enough, son, it looks like we can only go _uphill_ from here," I say, the last obstacle to the last peak a hundred-foot vertical wall that must be scaled in order to reach a more forgiving slope that will at long last take us to the bona fide tipping point. Only this time there is no other way to go but straight up, a reality that was obscured when we were over on that first peak. From that vantage point, it looked as though we could just walk from the lowest part of the shark fin and stroll up to the summit. Clearly, that is not the case.

As I look up at what's in front of me, exhaustion hits like an anvil, any lingering adrenaline has run out, every last ache and pain has come back in force, I'm drenched in sweat, weakened by the cold, hopefully not visibly shaking from the Herculean effort I've sucked out of my Lilliputian self.

"I'll connect the dots," I tell him, assessing the many handholds that seem open to us, deciding for once to take the path of least resistance, assuring him that I really am unwilling to risk a fall that could easily have him not re-setting a broken bone but setting a time of death. So I will try to choose these holds wisely.

"Take it slow," he says as I turn away from the enchanted garden and start my way up Jacob's ladder. "You too," I say quietly, thinking how much I'd love to be climbing this thing in any condition other than the one I'm in.

There are actually a few blazes splashed here and there, forming a backward "C" sort of trail up and away from this little rock pile here at the bottom, and I follow it without realizing I'm doing so for a few steps, but then I literally go off on a tangent as the rock opens its doors to a more interesting path.

This reminds me of an enormous Jenga, a game he and I played a thousand times, where we'd stack dozens of these little rectangular blocks of wood into a perfectly formed eighteen-story tower, and then each of us would have to take out one piece of the tower at a time and stack it on top. Whoever made the resulting hopelessly unstable structure come crashing down was the loser.

Here if I screw up it's not the Jenga that comes crashing down but me. The rocks are sticking out in places and almost every one of them is bigger than me, and although they're not smooth, the holds are few and far between.

Despite that, I'm moving along fairly easily, and these dollar-store gloves are turning out to be a godsend. The rocks are a little slick from all those clouds and still these things are gripping beautifully.

I figure I'm maybe eighty feet up just as "shaking leg syndrome" takes on a new meaning. I have what is called a horizontal finger crack hold with my left hand and an outside corner hold with my right hand, and there is an inside corner nook I've got my right foot stuck in, and just as I'm trying to find a place for my left foot, my left leg starts spasming like crazy just beneath the groin, the same tendon that went wild in my right leg a mile back, a tendon I will later identify as the pectineus.

My dilemma is multi-fold. I will not let Alexander know anything's wrong, at least not right now. Meanwhile, there's no way to reach the next hold with a useless leg. At the same time, can I dare keep my weight on my right leg, which gave out less than an hour ago, and which could do so again at any given moment? Finally, very soon I will simply be too tired to hang on, at which point gravity will take me first to the great below and then to the great beyond. So above all else, I need to STOP thinking!

I decide to grip my hands as tightly as I can in sort of a modified pull-up, hugging the rock as my left leg shamelessly shudders, thus putting as little pressure as possible on my right leg, and then I just start talking to the mountain...

"Hey, baby, you come here often? Hope you don't mind me being so close, but I'm in a bit of a jam." I close my eyes and try to relax, taking deep, luxurious breaths, and after what seems like forever but is likely less than a minute, my leg stops shaking.

I brace myself, and take a few more seconds to consider my next move, and then delicately, fastidiously, gingerly go from one hold to the next until I clear the lip and throw my body back onto what are now nearly level rocks, my misbehaving leg dangling now off the cliff, gasps of relief leaving me a trembling, dissembling, crumbling, bumbling but deliriously happy mess of a man.

Before I get a chance to get up and see how Alexander is negotiating the cliff, he unexpectedly emerges with a big smile on his face. "That was fucking cool as hell!" he shouts, obviously pleased that this hurdle was cleared without casualty, and evidently oblivious to how close I came to making it not so. A good outcome for the both of us.

* * *

We don't linger at the summit because we are now racing against the sunset. We move swiftly though we're just ambling along, as the pull of the earth seems to have us on a string, and so we watch our many steps as we tumble downwards, letting gravity have its fun but not so much that we wind up tripping over our own bones and go falling and sprawling onto sticks and stones.

It's a brisk and bracing pace, and one I'm determined to maintain, but no matter how much ground we cover it seems we're not getting any nearer to the treeline, and even though I know the trail back is a lot longer than the one we took going up, it still seems like we've got a galaxy to cross and a go-cart to cross it with. But regardless, the hard part's over, and we can deal with whatever comes next. Except if what comes next are bears. At that point I'll just send up the white flag.

* * *

My mind goes back again to my father, for I know that as hard as I tried to be everything he's not, as afraid as I am of having failed Alexander just as I believe my father failed me, so much of what I am has to do with him, and it isn't all bad.

On Sunday mornings instead of church he'd have his old Italian records playing on the stereo, wonderful tenors belting out glorious songs, and in his younger days when the family came over for me or my mother's birthday, he'd bring out the accordion he'd learned to play by ear, and from that strange-looking instrument he produced some of the loveliest tunes I'd heard, and I know that's where my love of music comes from.

His disdain for money was baffling to all who knew him, but just as he had little interest in making it he had even less interest in spending it. He liked his cigarettes and his espresso and his gambling, but coffee and smokes didn't cost much back then, and the gambling really wasn't. He liked solving puzzles, and so he chose horse-racing, because he could study the racing forms, which he kept neatly stacked in a corner in the kitchen, relentlessly studying past performances and track conditions and jockeys, and whenever he came across a long-shot exacta or trifecta that made sense, only then would he place a bet, and I know he won more often than not because of all the things she could and should and did complain about, never once did I hear my mother complain about his gambling.

But the winnings mostly went into the bank. I certainly never saw them go any place else. For example, never did my father spend more than a hundred dollars for an automobile. Whenever it was time for a "new" car he'd go to his mechanic and give the guy twice what he'd get from the junkyard (fifty bucks) for some clunker customers would leave for him to dispose of, and all my father asked was that the car be drivable.

I remember on one car there was a door missing, and so we went to the junkyard ourselves to replace it, which we did, only with one of a different color than that of the car. The rest of the family saw my dad as an oddball when it came to his buying habits, but the lesson I eventually distilled was that whereas most everyone in this society is a slave to the things they want and think they need, a wise man learns to want less things and zero in on those he really, truly needs.

And I guess he also taught me about bravery. Despite being of diminutive stature, my dad had courage and cunning to spare. One day I'm getting home from high school and there's a crowd in front of my house, and this burly neighbor was on his back on the ground with my dad on top of him beating his face in.

Some guys were separating them just as I pushed my way past everyone. I helped my dad up and walked him inside while the other guy went back to his own house, his face bloody and his clothes torn. By contrast, all dad had was a small bruise on his cheek. It occured to me that the guy was taller than my father, a good thirty or forty pounds heavier, and must have been half his age. But I had kept those thoughts to myself, and agreed to stand watch with him that night, each of us armed with a baseball bat, just in case the guy decided to come back with a few of his friends, which he didn't, presumably more embarrassed than angry at the unforseen outcome of the skirmish.

Afterwards, I found out from my dad that the guy's wife had for some inexplicable reason chosen to sit her children down on our stoop for lunch, and then proceeded to leave behind all the fast food leftover trash on the steps. My father had come out from the house and said to the lady just as she was walking away, "Didn't you see the sign?" She, of course, said "What sign?" He'd responded with "The one that says 'No Pigs Allowed'."

Naturally, she told her husband what he'd said, and that was when he came over to give my father a piece of his mind. Someone who'd seen what happened told me my father had let the guy get in his face and back him up until his own back was literally against the wall, at which point he'd swung both fists at the same time into the guy's throat and proceeded to drag him to the floor, and of course I'd seen the rest. I'm not sure if there's a lesson in there, but I've never forgotten it.

* * *

Meanwhile, if Alexander has any genuine concerns about what just happened on that next to last cliff, he's not letting on, and as the minutes go by I realize it's my own awareness of what was going through my mind, or more precisely, what my mind was going through, that makes me worry more than I should. He was just seeing his same old absent-minded father doing something stupid, whereas I was seeing nothing at all. For those few very long moments, I guess I just sort of vanished.

And once again I'm confronted with dead-ends from every direction, the death force of introspection leading nowhere. In some twisted fashion, the irony of my going for a quasi-suicidal stroll while my son goes through his days saving strangers from all manner of ruination is perhaps not ironic but fitting, for when all is said and done, where really, truly, finally, does philosophy lead if not to derangement or death?

Not long ago I was reflecting on a confluence of philosophical madness that came together in the early part of the twentieth century, as one train of thought after another ran off the cliff and took every last passenger with them. Spectacular crashes have not yet ensued but because the trains continue to hurtle through space many of us are beset by endless mental G-forces and perpetual philosophical motion sickness. The best of you revel in the chaos and the fury and see it as perfectly natural and normal, and are therefore characterized as sane, and that is all to the good.

For my part, I see a mass murder mystery involving five men and their ideas over the course of nearly a hundred years, murdering nearly everything humanity has ever known, and culminating in the philosophical assassination of Plato, albeit two and a half millenniums after his more mundane bodily demise. Maybe the most fascinating part of the mystery is that hardly anyone cares, but there is a reason for that beyond a vague indifference to ideas, and it lies in the nature of the crime, for the nature of the crime is that it changed forever the nature of its victims.

My cast of characters includes Friedrich Nietzsche, Niels Bohr, Albert Einstein, Kurt Godel, and Jean Baudrillard, though Jean's role consisted of conducting the post-mortem. Einstein murdered Time, Godel murdered Logic, Bohr murdered Reality, Nietzsche, of course, murdered God, and with nothing left to philosophize about, the Republic of Plato has been retroactively annihilated.

Nietzsche may not have entirely agreed with Darwin but he saw where the science of evolution and the evolution of science were leading and that was straight to the end of Christianity as the western world had known it, and though his imagined way out of the nihilism he knew would ensue was eclipsed by the various "wills to power" that came to the fore in the century of slaughter, not a one of the many madmen gave birth to an idea worth keeping, and how many tens of millions were sacrificed as the world sought to get beyond good and evil?

However, God is now firmly dead, and no Superman has come along to replace the old morality with a new one, and our collective situation is not too different from Friedrich's at the end of his life, in the care of his mother and sister as insanity and infirmity took over his philosopher's brain and body, just as the brave new world we envisioned at the turn of the twentieth century has turned out to resemble the tragic old one, minus the glorious legends and myths and superstitions that sustained our "less fortunate, less enlightened" predecessors, leaving us to face our demons in the light, without armor, and without pause.

Einstein made a mockery out of time in so many ways, but his obliteration of the concept of absolute simultaneity was perhaps his cruelest joke, as he hypothetically placed one man holding a mirror in each hand atop a train moving at the speed of the light and another man perpendicular to him alongside the tracks also holding two mirrors aloft, and then posited the prospect of two bolts of lightning hitting the ground at exactly the same time, one bolt out in the front of the train and one bolt behind, and what Einstein understood and eventually made the rest of us understand was that the man on the ground, by using the mirrors, could see both bolts hitting the ground at the same time, but the man atop the train, while he would see the bolt in front of him, would never see the one behind, for the light from that bolt, while traveling at the speed of light, would never catch up to a train also traveling at the speed of the light.

So here you had two things happening at exactly the same time with two men observing it from essentially the same place, but because of their respective viewpoints, they were seeing two very different things. And so with the firing of a few very unusual neurons, Einstein murdered the very nature of time forevermore.

At least Godel had the decency to target a human creation, that of logic, but the damage was still considerable. "This very sentence is false" was where it all began, and quickly we see that the sentence is true only if it's false, but of course if it's false, well, then the sentence is true, isn't it? And round and round we go. The gauntlet was thrown down only to turn into a boomerang, confounding even the greatest minds as Godel took a simple sentence and tore logic to shreds, creating propositions that were materially true but unprovable within the formal system of classical mathematics, going on to demonstrate that we could not prove that we know all we think we know, and to top it off, implying that though our minds may transcend machines, it's probably impossible to prove that we are not ourselves merely bio-chemical machines.

Bohr, however, was the Genghis Khan of murderers, as his Copenhagen interpretation of quantum entanglement drove Einstein himself crazy, asserting in essence that God _does_ play dice with the universe, which in this case meant instantaneous communication between two particles whose quantum states had been linked by means of smashing them together and then locating the two particles far away from one another, their subsequent "conversations" taking place faster than the speed of light. Einstein had determined that nothing traveled faster than the speed of light, and yet here were these two protons with either their spin or charge inversely related to each other, making identical decisions when forced by their respective scientists to make what should have been random choices between alternative pathways.

It was as if someone had a pair of dice, sent one by courier to New York and the other to Beijing, then had two operatives keep rolling each die, and whatever number one guy would roll, that's the number the other guy would roll, again and again and again no matter how many times the two dice were rolled. Eventually one had to conclude that the dice were chatting at speeds faster than 186,232 miles per second, and that reality was more than just the "spooky action at a distance" that Einstein so feared, it was the end of reality as the world had known it.

In toto, the absolutes of religion, of time, of logic, and of reality were vaporized, and while it's taken nearly a hundred years for the accretive nature of these chasms to go exponential, they have combined to split the earth in half like a planetary Pac-Man, gobbling up our past and future and spitting out our eternal present, the "desert of the real," as Baudrillard likes to call it, a lifeless nightmare of a hyper-reality that it seems we may never wake up from.

For what was murdered was our capacity for analogies. We still need them, we still make them, we still want them, more desperately than ever. But they no longer have the slightest meaning in our lives, in our imagination, or in our souls. Going digital means precisely that. There are no more shadows on the cave walls in the republic of Plato because both the republic and its creator are dead in every way that matters. Murdered, in perhaps history's greatest irony, by natural philosophy, as it used to be called, and maybe that's the only way the story of philosophy could have ended.

No more metaphors. "It is what it is." A familiar expression of our time, or has it become a meme? Regardless, an apt description of our new circumstances. No need for reflection. Answers are a click away. No need for interpretation. YouTube will tell the tale. No need to sing. iPod will put a song in your ear. No need to converse. Let your thumbs text away. No need for subtlety. Show us an autopsy on TV in hi-def. No need for romance. Set up a speed date and get to the act. No need to philosophize. Wisdom has been capsized in an ocean of data.

And though there is no moral to the story, I have an idea for philosophy's epitaph: Ubiquitous Instantaneity, or U.I. Everything, everywhere, all at once. That's what we've become. That's what we want. And while there are those who describe what's happening as the coalescing of a great "singularity," a mind/machine melding as they called it back in the day, an event that will have immense and immortal implications for our species, I'd say the singularity's already here, and that those who can't wait to see what emerges from all this sensational madness really ought to reread _Frankenstein_.

15

Working Our Way Back

"Coincidence is God's way of remaining anonymous."

\- Albert Einstein

It started raining a few minutes ago, and now it's suddenly coming down in sheets, and as we move faster in response, the ominous explosions of thunder surround us. I decide to get under what looks like a pine tree, its branches at least eight feet off the ground, creating a massive beach umbrella sort of shelter for us as we get in out of the pouring rain.

"Think we should be under a tree during a lightning storm, dad?" he says jokingly.

"All that's missing is a kite with a key tied to it," I respond, willing to take my chances that any potential strikes will not zero in on this particular tree. I mean, honestly, what are the odds? I run my fingers through my hair, and what feels like a gallon of water slides off my head.

"What were you starting to tell me about the other day when I called you, about another woman who tried to jump out a window? Somehow we got sidetracked." I'd almost forgotten about that.

"Oh, man," he says as he shakes himself dry, a little better off than me because of the T-shirt. "You should have seen her. I get inside the apartment and there she is, stuck in the window, one arm in, one arm out, and it wasn't just that she couldn't fit through it; when they weighed her at the hospital she was over _four_ hundred pounds.

"I go over to her and her feet are still on the floor, and I manage to sort of pull her out, and she just explodes and _throws_ me across the room!" he says as he pantomimes the woman spinning in place and swinging both arms as she smacks him out of her way.

"There was one of those portable closets in the corner and I crashed into it and fell right on my ass, and then I was pissed." As he speaks, I'm trying to picture the woman who could toss _him_ around like a rag doll. Damn.

"After my partner helped me get back up, we ran over and tackled her to the ground, got 911 on the line, and held her down till the police got there. They put handcuffs and anklecuffs on her, and asked me if we wanted them to get her to the hospital or if we'd be willing to drive her in the ambulance. I told them we'd take her now that she was chained up, and they said they'd escort us.

"Anyway, so now I'm driving, and she's lying on her back behind us, and next thing you know I see these two hands reaching for my throat. See, there's a lot of space between the front seats in an ambulance for all our paperwork and stuff, and it didn't occur to me she'd try to get through there to try to strangle me.

"So I slam on the accelerator and get us to like seventy miles an hour and she slides back a little and then I slam on the brakes, and she just flies forward and gets jammed right between the two chairs, and then I get out of the car and flag down the squad car, and tell the guys to get her into whatever police vehicle that can hold her before I hit her with a fucking tire iron."

He's animated but not the least bit angry as he recounts his story, and I stand there just laughing my ass off at a tale that for all its pathos and pathology does have a happy ending. What was it Elie Wiesel said? God made man because he loves stories, and our lives are the stories he tells. Something like that.

The rain has let up and there's no longer the sound of thunder, and so we continue on our way, the chill in our bones taking its toll, a brutal contrast from the parching heat as we began our journey, and that's all to the good, because violent changes are what rock this world, and may they keep coming.

Just such a change, courtesy of one of my two oldest and closest friends, helped get me out of what in retrospect was a deep and lasting depression, and one I refused to acknowledge, for better or worse, until it was long over. It was early in 2004, and I had mentioned to Ron that Loron and I were planning to take a trip to Las Vegas, a place we'd never been, and he suggested adding a couple of days to the vacation so that he and his family could meet up with us and take a trip within a trip to the Grand Canyon together.

His plan was for the ladies and his young son to hang out while he and I took a mule ride down and up the canyon wall. To call Ron a daredevil is to understate his many adventures, which at various times have involved skydiving, hang gliding, dozens of full-contact karate tournaments, both participation in and coordination of truly dangerous stunts in a myriad of well-known feature films, and a few previous saunters down the famed canyon. So when I innocently asked him whether this ride presented any unusual element of risk, I should have realized that his characterization would prove, shall we say, similarly understated.

I'd been able to make the arrangements at the last minute, only because they'd been re-carving the trail in recent months for the first time in years, meaning they hadn't been taking reservations for some time, so that whereas these outings normally needed to be booked as much as a year in advance, we'd be straddling those mules in six weeks.

However, no one, no how, no way, can get on one of those animals unless he weighs less than two hundred pounds fully clothed, and I was twenty-five pounds away from that magic number, a complication that proved easily resolved as I ate less, a lot less, and found myself thirty pounds lighter in just forty-five days, an experience I rarely share with those struggling to shed a few pounds. It just doesn't strike me as polite.

The day of the ride arrived, April 24th, 2004, nine hundred and fifty-nine days since that day in Niagara Falls, and with an oversized straw hat on my head and a leather canteen around my neck, our mule train made its way out of the paddock after listening to a half hour sermon by the ranch owner on what each of us would need to do to make it back in one piece, and little did I realize that the next seven hours would go an incredibly long way towards bringing me back from the darkness of September eighth.

As we rode down the beginning of the trail with a cancer survivor in front of me and Ron behind me at the end of the train, I stood tall in the saddle the way the rancher had exhorted us to remain, the temptation to lean away from the cliff's edge needing to be resisted unless we enjoyed the prospect of falling over and under the mule and then out and over the cliff to our final destination, though something in the way he smiled as he warned us about that prospect made even this semi-city slicker suspect that such a cartoonish scenario was unlikely.

Nevertheless, when we rounded our first turn and the immensity of the canyon opened up and I looked down and saw that my mount's hooves were inches from the edge of a trail that went straight down for at least a mile, and when that realization was amplified by the primal scream coming from a lady out in front as she made the same realization, it dawned on me that the rancher wasn't kidding about this not being Space Mountain. I'd never experienced genuine terror before, the palpable sense of knowing my life could end if the jackass under the jackass were to make a single false move.

Seven hours of nearly unrelenting fear followed, though I'd had moments of at least trying to feel courageous, singing _The Impossible Dream_ as my Razzle (her name not that far removed from Don Quixote's Rosinante) clumped her hooves along the many switchbacks of that primitive trail. Every so often the lady ahead of me would bring her mule to a halt so she could take a picture, and because the creatures were trained to stick close to one another, after she'd loosen the reins, her mule and then mine would break into a dead gallop along a path that was never more than five or six feet across to go catch up with their buddies. I never thought I'd want to throw a woman off a cliff, but to this day I think she was one or two photos away from a walk on the wild side.

When we finally made it back to the paddock, Loron couldn't stop laughing as she saw me drop down and kiss the ground, then the mule, and then her. She'd said I'd looked as white as a ghost; then again, that's exactly what she and her fellow Cantonese-speaking former countrymen call people like me: _Gwei-Lo_ , or ghost man. Either way, the photos she took confirmed the accusation.

But the fear had been a spiritual restorative, as glacial trepidation melted into flowing resignation and then evaporated into plumes of mystic exaltation, helping to bring me back some of the way to normalcy, and allowing me to discover regions not so familiar to philosophers, but quite well known and fully charted to men of action.

"I see civilization, pops," he says, and he's right, as he trains his flashlight on the first of only two cars parked at base camp in the distance. Though total darkness is only minutes away, the way back took less time than I had feared, and as I hand him the keys and collapse into the passenger side of the car, thoughts of dinner come to mind, but I wonder if I have the strength left to lift a fork.

When we get back to the motel, I ask the lady at the front desk if they have steaks at the in-house restaurant, because this area's so desolate I doubt there's another restaurant within ten miles of here, and even if there is I'm not about to go looking for it, and she says yes, and she seems sincere when she says the food is decent, and even if it isn't I don't give a damn, because my body is rapidly shutting down.

I shower first, and then collapse on the bed, and when Alexander's finished with his shower, he sits down across from me with an inquisitive expression on his face.

"I need to ask you, pops, you really _were_ going to go down the face of that cliff, weren't you?" He doesn't ask me too many questions, and when he does it means he really wants to know something, and so I tell him the truth.

"It just didn't seem that bad to me at the time. I thought I could make it."

His look is one of pure amazement as he finishes getting dressed. "That's what I thought, which is why I was screaming at you. You're out of your fucking mind," he says with a smile, and I say nothing, glad to have left at least a couple of my demons back at the edge of that cliff.

We have our steak dinner, and after a few Cokes and a slice of pie, we call it a day, heading back to our room for some much-needed rest. We chat for a bit, and then he falls asleep almost in mid-sentence, and I look over at him as he quickly starts snuffling and snoring, and I start thinking about men who go through life without ever bringing a child into this world and helping to raise him, and the sorrow I feel for the joy they will never know nearly brings me to tears. Ti amo molto, Alessandro, more than you will ever know. That is, until that miraculous day when your own child is born.

* * *

Before my eyes betray me and bring the curtain down on this day, I think about another miracle that came into my life recently, forcing me to rethink whether there really is a cosmic consciousness of some kind that tries to bring a measure of peace into our lives, because despite my own profound skepticism and agnosticism verging on violent atheism, what happened on a cruise ship on my way to Vienna with my wife and our good friends the Haydens cannot be explained away as mere coincidence. Not even by a rationalist like me.

We were traveling along the Danube River in our charming vessel, the waters exceptionally high because of an unusual amount of rain in recent days, and the passengers had been told to report to the sun deck after breakfast for lessons on how to use our life preservers, but no one wanted to get up there early because most of them were elderly and the day was cold and damp, and so when Chad and I went up to the entirely sunless deck, the only other people up there was a crew member way at the back of the ship and an elderly fellow in very thick glasses looking a lot like Mister Magoo way in the front of the ship.

Everything on deck was retractable, including the bridge, which had been lowered to the height of the railing that lined the perimeter of the ship. Some of the older bridges along the river were really low, and clearly the captain had wanted to keep the ship's height to its absolute minimum, which in this case was maybe four feet above the deck - the height of the railing - the hope being that we wouldn't have to disembark and go by tour bus to the various cities on our itinerary.

Well, we were moving along at a pretty good clip, but there in the distance was a bridge that seemed to me to be ridiculously low, and the old man had his back to it, and as we drew closer and closer, I realized in horror that the bottom of the bridge was no higher than the top of the railing, and that meant the old man was about to get sawed in half, but he was a hundred feet away from us and there was no time to go get him and so I screamed "GET DOWN!" over and over again while politely shoving Chad down the nearby stairwell, but meanwhile Mister Magoo wouldn't budge, looking at me as if I was invisible, and so I threw myself down on the deck while screaming "GET DOWN!" and then got back up and threw myself back down once more, trying like mad to paint this moron a fucking picture, yelling "GET DOWN!" again and again as I took to the stairwell myself, flashbacks of the accident playing over in my mind, my heart breaking at the incomprehensible thought that this was going to happen to me yet again, as if whatever Supreme Being out there hadn't gotten enough laughs out of what happened to

me the first time he'd thrown me into hell.

Only at the last possible moment, having, thank God, never turned around to see what was coming, did that son of a bitch finally throw himself to the ground, and seconds later that bridge cut across the top of the ship missing the top of the railing by inches, and damned if I haven't felt like the heavens opened up that morning with the express purpose of saving my soul by giving me the chance to save that man's life.

I felt then as I do now that the only wrong in my life had been righted, and that just as I had been in the wrong place at the wrong time on one morning, I had found myself in the right place at the right time on that other morning, and so I've worked my way back through workings not my own, which is what faith promises, after all, and so rather than trying to understand how these things work, I'll just be forever grateful that they did.

16

A New Beginning

"Love is perhaps the only glimpse we are permitted of eternity."

\- Helen Hayes

We check out early the next day and the ride to Albany is a long, quiet one, and I think both of us are sorry to see our little adventure coming to an end. When we get to the parking lot where he left his car, I hug him for as long as I can before heading back home, and stare into my rearview mirror until I no longer see him there, and the questions come over me like a wave once again. Have I done my best with this child?

Have I given him all I could? How much harm have I done him? How much damage? And the question I've never till now thought to ask: Does he love his dad?

Believe it not I'm not sure, but as you prepare to marry that wonderful young woman and begin the next chapter in what is proving to be a most admirable life, I only hope in some way that my unconditional love has done you some measure of unconditional good.

A Father is Reborn

The pursuit of truth destroys the realm of magic, as every thinker knows. Trying to turn abstractions into reality drains reality until all that's left is the memory of reality. Giving life to dead equations often means that living things must die. And life has grand meaning only in the context of the magical world in which it reigns, and as scientists and philosophers systematically subtract from that magic, life's reign diminishes, until ruler becomes subject, and meaning begins to seem meaningless.

But if you can see life through the eyes of a child, then the magic is born again, and that is the eternal joy and promise that attains when a man and woman bring new life to their world. Only a philosopher can fail to see things children see nearly every moment of every day, the only thing blocking their view the invariably pointless intrusions of their parents.

Well, this philosopher was transformed into something far more important than a philosopher the day his son was born, for on that day he became a father, and this father was reborn the day his son asked him to be best man at his wedding. And when the father asked his child what he wanted to do by way of a bachelor party, giving the son a blank slate and a blank check to choose from, the son thought about it for a while, and said the only thing he really wanted was to spend a few days with his dad, and that's when the father decided they'd spend that time climbing a mountain together.

And if it took a few years for the philosopher to write a book about that climb and to figure out that maybe he had done a few things right in raising that child, and that maybe there was little to worry about after all, well, that's not surprising, because you can't expect much from philosophers. You just try to keep an eye on them, make sure they get enough sleep, eat right, drink lots of water, and tell them not to play with matches. But when they disobey, as they usually do, and wind up setting their own hair on fire, fear not. A firefighter is only a phone call away.

-end-

