Larry M. was my roommate for the semester we spent at the University of Dallas Rome Campus. He was one of the gang that traveled to London together before the start of the semester for a week and then took the train to Rome by way of Paris. He was my companion on several weekend trips out of Rome, too, including Florence, Munich, Salzberg, and the ill-fated attempt to get to Malta for Easter, which was aborted in Siracusa, Siciliy, when we found that the boats were all booked up, and then turned semi-tragic when we were robbed at gunpoint in a pizzeria in Messina on the night before Easter.

Larry used to carry a tiny notebook everywhere he went, into which he would write notes about photos he’d taken, places to visit and sights to see, addresses, hours of operation, Italian phrases, and so on. He filled several such notebooks, I think, as the semester wore on. One day, in circumstances that have completely escaped my memory, he wrote a note to me that said:

Mental Note #7639471
Don’t, under any
circumstances, associate
with Assholes.

I apparently found this to be such good and useful advice at the time that I folded up the tiny scrap of paper and stashed it in a safe place in my wallet. (He must have written the note some time after Easter weekend, because the note wasn’t lost with the wallet that was stolen in the Sicilian robbery.)

The semester ended and we all went home. My sister Anne was taking a photography course the next semester at University of Houston, and she made black-and-white enlargements of a few of my Rome semester photos to decorate my dorm room. One of them was a shot of Larry and our friend Alexandra sitting on my bunk bed in our dorm room in Rome. At some point in the fall semester of 1983, I cleaned out my wallet and found Mental Note #7639471. I placed it inside the acrylic box-frame with the 8 x 10 photo of Larry and Alexandra. It stayed there for as long as I kept those photos. Visitors to my dorm room and later apartments would move in close to find out what the little scrap of paper in the corner of the frame was, and then grins would break out on their faces as they read Larry’s messy college-kid chicken-scratchy handwriting.

Eventually, I got tired of looking at the photos, so I pitched the aging acrylic frames and packed away the photos. I still told the story of that note, though, whenever I wanted to talk about Larry and the fun times we shared in Rome. The note went with the enlargements into a box of photos, and that’s where Gayle, my professional organizer friend, found it a few weeks ago as we were working on a project to sort and categorize my old photos. She said, “You wanna tell me about this?” and handed me the yellowed piece of 26-year-old paper. The characteristic frayed edge that results from being torn out of a spiral notebook was still intact. The scrap had been folded again in storage, and the fold lines were fragile and crumbling.

There wasn’t much to tell her about the fragment. I didn’t remember what prompted Larry to write the note. I only knew that it had meant a lot to me at the time as a symbol of our friendship. To me, that note meant far more than what its words said. It also meant, “The world is full of assholes, but you and I have each other.”

I’ve come a long way since I first carried that note around as a touchstone next to my 20-year-old butt. So when Gayle unearthed it again, I had a good laugh, told her an unrelated story or two about Larry (who long ago took on the much more serious and dignified moniker of “Lawrence”), and put the note into a small stack of materials designated for scanning and demolition. I scanned the note, put the JPEG image online in an album of UD photos on Facebook, and tossed the ancient scrap of paper into the recycling bin.

On top of the old story of my friendship with Larry that the note symbolized—the story of all the support, kindness, and patience he offered me through the rough years of college—I’ve added a new layer of meaning. The note now signifies my ability and willingness to transcend the “stuff” that I’ve imbued with meaning in my life, and instead to embrace and cherish the meaning in its purer form. We human beings love to create meaning—it is, to use the old cliché, “what separates us from the beasts.” We make meaning, we assign meaning, we collect and hoard and share meaning. Our lives become full of things that signify something to us, things that remind us of an event or person, some treasured experience or emotional state.

But things can never be more than just things. Paper can’t be more than just paper, no matter if King John or John Hancock or Elvis himself once handled it and wrote on it. And as much as we are free to assign meaning, it’s also in our power to take it away, to release meaning from the objects to which we’ve ascribed it and into the realm of pure forms. And so, although the paper form of Mental Note #7639471 has gone off to be recycled, the significance of Mental Note #7639471 will always be with me.

© 2009 Edward F. Gumnick

Some days, I feel as if you’re taunting me. “So you think you’re a writer, do you?” On better days, you are more encouraging: “I am here for you, empty, but full of possibilities. I know you can do this.” I click command-S and give a bland name to the blank document—090724 Free writing.rtf. I don’t want to take the chance of losing what I’ve written, and I don’t want to have to stop mid-way through the 25 minutes to navigate to the proper folder and save the file. I’m ready to begin.

I click the F12 button to make my widgets appear for a moment. The meditation timer is still set for 25 minutes from last night’s second writing episode, so all I have to do is click begin session. I hit F12 again, and the widgets disappear as the chime sounds with a reverberating boing! The screen is black again.

Without fail, I type the words “Begin again.” This is a two-word shorthand for a lot of knowledge and experience and ideas I’ve collected over the last several years of trying to become a serious writer. “Begin again” invokes Anne Lamott, who observed that every time you sit down to write, there’s a sense in which you must start anew. It also reminds me of the Zen exercises of Gail Sher’s One Continuous Mistake. It signals commitment in the face of the impossible odds that grow out of the unpredictable and arbitrary nature of life. It’s my way of saying, “I have as much reason to write as anyone else does, so here I go.”

© 2009 Edward F. Gumnick

Espresso-based drinks were still a few years from becoming all the rage, but the University of Dallas was ahead of the curve because of its popular Rome program. About 85 percent of UD sophomores spend a semester at the university’s campus in Rome, soaking up Italian and Catholic culture, learning Italian, studying art and architecture at ground zero for Western civilization, and, for the most part, returning to the Irving campus addicted to strong coffee drinks. In 1981, someone finally realized that coffee-addicted sophomores and returning juniors were a huge untapped market at UD, so the university planners decided to put in a cappuccino bar.

To keep costs to a minimum, the university commissioned a team of industrious sculpture students to build the bar. And it was a beautiful construction—smooth and black, an asymmetric C-shape roughly nine feet by eight feet, coming up to about mid-torso on a tall person like me. No one ever made clear to us volunteer workhorses whose brilliant idea it was to complete the assembly several hundred feet downhill from the final destination of this massive piece of furniture. All we were told was that our job was to get it up the hill and into the building.

But between the Art Center and the UC, the hill was steep, and irregular stone staircases were the only way up through the dense mesquite thicket that covered the side of the hill. So instead of going up the hill toward the UC, we had to start out from the downhill side of the Art Center. We had no trouble getting it off the ground and out the barn-like doors of the studio, and the first few dozen feet weren’t too bad. We moved over fairly level ground, skirting crabwise around to the east side of the hill, where the incline was much less steep and the ground was mostly grass crossed by a smooth, wide, concrete sidewalk.

But then began the climb up the hill. The weight hadn’t seemed too bad at first, but every couple of minutes, we had to stop and rest, and every time we had to pick it up again, the bar seemed to get a little heavier. The increments of our travel up the gradual incline of the east side of the hill got smaller and smaller with each stage. By the time we were approaching the side doors of the UC, we were having to stop every 15 or 20 feet. Finally, we reached the doors, only to realize that no one had had the foresight to remove the center post of the double doors, so there was no way for us to get the bar inside.

If any of my readers were at UD in the fall of 1981 and have more to add to this story, I’d love to hear from you. My recollection of the event is sketchy. (And I’ve been known to make stuff up to fill in narrative gaps or to make my personal history seem more exciting or virtuous.)

© 2009 Edward F. Gumnick

Fragment #2

I want all of my life to be like these moments:

• The day that Continental canceled our flight out of Rome, so we spent the day exploring Ostia. We surprised ourselves with how much fun we could cram into one unexpected extra day of vacation.
• The day you led me through rush-hour traffic to Griffith Park, then showed me where the trail began. I was energized by your kindness.
• The day the cold front blew through the city, and then you took me to your soccer practice. It was too cold for me to spend two hours waiting on a bench, so I wandered the unfamiliar neighborhood until I found a coffee shop open. Then I came back and climbed up and down the pedestrian staircase to to the road high on the hill above the soccer field to keep warm. While I walked the stairs, I had a heart-to-heart talk directed at a silent God. I told him that I thought he was irrelevant, and that I’d listened to his people and their bad ideas for long enough.

When I was young, I had a fantasy that as an infant, I had somehow been switched—by a wild and convoluted set of circumstances that I never went to the trouble of trying to contrive—with Prince Edward. Yes, that Prince Edward, the Earl of Wessex, the youngest son of the Queen of England (and Canada and Australia and all sorts of other places around the globe). The fact that his name was Edward and that we’re about the same age made the fantasy seem more plausible than any of the other switched-at-birth scenarios I could come up with. I hoped that some day the mistake would be rectified and I would get to go live in a castle and ride polo ponies and go to Cambridge and be third in the line of succession to the English crown. I let go of that fantasy long before Edward was demoted to seventh in line by the births of his nieces and nephews and became as bald and dorky as all of his male relatives. You only have to look at a photograph to know without a doubt that he’s Prince Charles’s little brother.

So it turned out that I’m just the youngest son of Jim and Jean Gumnick, and every time I look in the mirror, I see a little more of Dad.

As far as I know, our ethnic heritages or national origins include Polish, Austro-Hungarian, French-German (Alsatian, woof!), and Irish with maybe a touch of Pennsylvania Dutch thrown in. We can’t claim any royalty, nobility, or even commoners of great distinction in our bloodlines. But I think one of the birthrights of Americans of mixed ancestry should be the right to claim anyone you like as one of your ancestors—whether by genes, by culture, or just by affinity. And so I claim descent from Genghis Khan by way of his first grandson, Orda Khan, who invaded Poland in the thirteenth century. It’s entirely possible that he left behind some Mongol-Polish offspring, and I credit the Khan genes for my natural talent for leadership and my propensity for cross-cultural communication.

Culturally, I consider myself a descendant of Leonardo Da Vinci. He was creative, imaginative, left-handed, at least a little bit crazy, and is reported to have had a weakness for men much younger than himself. A man after mine own heart. I think I will start referring to him as “my uncle Leonardo.”

© 2008 Edward F. Gumnick

Their house was the fourth from the bottom of the row—fourth on the right as you climbed the street in the front, fourth from the left as you climbed the alley in the back. In the back, the outbuildings were landmarks to find our way into the correct backyard through a gate in the low chain link fence. All the fences on Mommom and Granddad’s street were of the same height, as if someone had started putting up fences at one end and worked their way up the alley. Most of the yards had clotheslines; my grandparents had rose bushes, too, and a garden hose and sprinkler.

From the front, you had to find the house by more subtle signs. All of the houses were of red brick and white-washed concrete, and all of the porches had the same open brickwork front railings. Mommom and Granddad’s house was marked by rectangular, whitewashed ceramic planters that were always filled with stinky red geraniums. The porches ran together in a row, ascending the street, separated by low concrete dividers that an adult could step over. A child could sit on the little wall and swing one leg over at a time. On one side, you could walk to the neighbor’s porch by way of the shared landing at the top of the conjoined concrete staircases on either side. Mommom and Granddad shared their staircase with Miss Elizabeth and Miss Marie. Miss Elizabeth was friendly but stern with a surprising old-lady mustache and fierce eyebrows. Miss Marie had wispy white hair. She was older, very kind and sweet. She would invite us in and offer sugar cookies from a tin, but only if she knew that Mommom was away from home or busy somewhere else in the house.

Granddad had whitewashed the planter boxes to match the concrete face of the basement wall, below where the bricks started. Many years later, I stripped the white paint off of one of those planters to find a glaze of gingerbread brown with a wash of green highlighting the ivy pattern wound around the top.

“This is my city, and I am as much a Roman as anyone here.”

I’m excited by the task because I’m always happy to think about Rome. I can talk about it for hours and hours. I’m scared because so much has already been said about it that I can’t conceive of adding so much as one original phrase or fresh observation. (Even that statement strikes me as a cliché.)

And it’s hard to imagine expressing a rational basis for the city’s appeal for me. Sure, there’s all the history, the art, the architecture, the fountains, the pines, blah, blah, blah. But the city is filthy, it’s noisy, it’s falling apart, it’s damp, it’s full of tourists. And yet it compels me again and again, so I have to face the possibility that at least some of my love is irrational, and I don’t like thinking of myself that way.

So, down to work. The place? I can’t think of a favorite. When I try, I walk in my mind’s eye from one favorite spot to another. Rome is all about the walking. I could start at the end of the Via dei Fori Imperiali where it runs into Piazza Venezia, near where I took the panoramic photo last January—the one at the top of this page. Broken remnants of the glory of the Imperial Age are scattered at my feet. I try to envision ancient people walking on the decorative tiles on the fragment of floor a few steps from the sidewalk. I find that I can’t picture it. Cars race by behind me, horns blaring. I walk toward the piazza past a South Asian man who sells silk scarves and plastic souvenir Colosseums made in China.

A right turn would take me up the Corso, but I don’t want to go that way. It’s a noisy canyon of buildings that seems to trap the vehicle exhaust. Instead, I make my way around the bottom end of the piazza, even though that entails crossing four or five side streets, mostly without benefit of traffic lights. I dodge the current of taxis and buses like a native Italian.

I don’t know the name of the street, but by habit I find my way to a place where pieces of an ancient structure have been incorporated into the back of an 18th- or 19th-century building. Three columns look as if they’re lifting the modern construction up out of the excavation pit. The hole is separated from the sidewalk by an iron railing in front of which Czech and Polish expatriates sell magazines in Slavic languages. I look for a family resemblance. I wonder what subtle twists in history turned me into an American tourist and left these distant cousins of mine to become citizens of the European Union.

© 2008 Edward F. Gumnick

Did he feel any warning signs of the cardiac event or cerebral accident, or was he enjoying his run until the moment he was struck down?

What good Samaritan came upon him first? Who saw him stumble to his knees, perhaps, then fall the rest of the way to the ground? Was his breathing labored, or did it stop abruptly? Did they hesitate before beginning to administer CPR, hoping that he might recover on his own? How long did it take for someone to call 9-1-1? How much time had passed before I came upon the scene of his agony?

How had the paramedics passed their Thursday evening before the call came in? Did they wait in keen anticipation of the call to save a life, or did they hope for a quiet night? How long did it take them to find their way to the tableau: victim, would-be heroes, and the curious gathered under the streetlamps by the driving range? Did our suggestions to the 9-1-1 operator about where to enter the park provide any help? How long had we been keeping vigil there before we heard the sirens?

Did those nine young men in blue uniforms feel the pressure of our hope as they set up a makeshift trauma room on the gritty path? Do they know how we admired their concentration, their seriousness, their selfless efforts on behalf of the fragile life laid out on the wet clay? Did they notice how we prayed or talked in hushed voices or stood in silence while they took vital signs, hooked up a monitor and an intravenous tube, and wrapped the man’s frail ribcage in the device that was both defibrillator and chest compressor? How many ampoules of medicine did they inject into his IV? Did their optimism fade (as ours did) each time they shocked him and looked in vain for hopeful signs on the monitor? How long had we been standing there before the paramedics received the instruction to take him away by ambulance?

Who was waiting for the man to come home from the park? When did the call come? How many friends and family members will try to grasp the circumstances that accompanied the end of this life?

What had changed among us as we made our way back to our vehicles? How connected did we feel at that moment to these strangers we see without recognition every day?

When the rain comes and washes away the footprints and the few bits of plastic the EMTs left behind, will we forget what happened there? Or each time we make this circle, will we think of the man whose life ended beside the running trail?