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

So the prompt is about food, food and place, foods that remind me of something, and so forth. The thing that I thought of first is probably the best approach on this one, and that was to talk about Rome. Of course it’s about Rome! My favorite topic. And the food in question is antipasto. Antipasto in the United States has come to have a fairly conventional definition—some cold cuts, a few slices of cheese, maybe some olives or a little fresh fruit. Nine out of 10 Italian restaurants will give you some variation on that theme. But those are only a few from among the many things that Italians would serve as antipasti.

Antipasti is the plural of antipasto. And as long as we’re talking about language, here’s what’s wrong the American idea of antipasto: all that the word means is “before the pasta.” And you can serve all kinds of things before the pasta. Sure, cold cuts are an option. Italian cuisine is full of wonderful cured meats—salami, mortadella (what we call “bologna”), prosciutto—and they frequently turn up on antipasto plates. And cheese turns up, too. And not just mozzarella. In Italy, restaurants will serve whatever they have, or whatever was good that day at the market. That’s really the only guideline for putting together antipasto—you serve what you feel like serving, based on what looked good at the market and what you felt like cooking—which is probably guided, at least in some cases, by what the cook felt like eating that day.

I’ve had antipasti that included assortments of freshly pickled vegetables—carrots, eggplant, cucumbers, olives—or roasted vegetables, or breaded and fried vegetables. My all-time favorite in nearly any form in which they care to serve it to me: artichoke hearts. The artichoke is king in Rome. It’s the centerpiece of Roman cuisine from the first harvesting of small, delicate buds in March all the way through the summer and into the late fall, when the last huge heads are served braised or stuffed and roasted. And speaking of blossoms, zucchini blossoms are another thing you’ll find on an antipasto place, usually stuffed with some kind of mild or soft cheese spiced with nutmeg and herbs.

The antipasto experience is typical of the Italian outlook on life. It’s not about blowing you away with the most expensive ingredients or an elaborate technique. It’s about taking things as they come and then finding ways to savor them. I’ve had antipasto plates that are a simple as a pile of olives drizzled with lemon juice and olive oil and served with thick chunks of rustic bread.

Okay, that’s all I’ve got for tonight. Out of gas.

© 2009 Edward F. Gumnick

Grass. I have a real problem with grass. For starters, it’s not much to look at. Sure, it’s green. But it’s a monotonous, uninteresting green. And then we have a few weeks of drought, and it’s not even all that green. And what does it do? It’s not a food source. It doesn’t provide much in the way of food for insects or animals, either, since we don’t let it get tall enough to flower or produce seeds. In fact, you can make a good argument that it’s actually bad for insects and animals, since it supplants natural vegetation that would be more likely to produce something they can use for food or building material. A grassy lawn is a monoculture, a genetically vulnerable and unnatural creation incapable of supporting the kind of complex ecosystems that evolve in the wild. Some scientists have speculated that the rise of monoculture lawns may be one of the stress factors that have decimated honey bee populations.

Grass is a thermodynamic disaster area. To keep it looking decent year after year, we have to apply fertilizer and pesticides. It rewards the effort by growing, transforming the fertility of the soil into tall blades. Then we lop them off and haul them away to a composting center—or worse, a landfill. We deplete the soil to produce a useless crop that we then discard. And as if that weren’t enough, we use gasoline and electricity to do the harvesting, spewing air pollution and noise in all directions, replacing the peaceful sounds of a summer evening with the shrill whine of the weed-eater and the deafening roar of the leaf-blower.

Not all of the fertilizer and pesticide get metabolized by the lawn, of course. Some of them leach out—along with the copious amounts of fresh, clean water from the municipal supply that are required to keep the grass alive in hot weather—into the storm drain systems, adding damaging levels of nitrogen to the ecosystems downstream and moving ever more of our limited supply of usable phosphate down to a lower and less useful position in the planetary ecology.

And what’s it all for? Oh sure, occasionally you see children playing on a lawn. But most lawns seem to be empty of people most of the time. Even if there’s some local and occasional demand for patches of grass for certain activities—croquet, volleyball, playing in the sprinkler—the supply of grass-covered ground seems to vastly exceed the demand. All of our grassy lawn needs could probably be easily met by one or two grassy lawns per block of houses.

So what should we have instead of grass? Considering all the negatives that go along with grass, one could make the argument that we’d be better off with nice, smooth expanses of low-maintenance concrete. But concrete prevents the absorption of rainwater, so it leads to increased flooding. Also, pavement is a sink for solar energy, and our cities are too warm already. So how about some nice gravel or river rocks? That would solve some of the runoff problem, but they’d still soak up too much sunlight and turn it into heat.

Gardens seem like an obvious choice. The average garden might require a little more work than a lawn of the same size, but it can also yield flowers, herbs, vegetables, or fruit. But the right kind of garden can actually be maintained with considerably less work than an equivalent amount of lawn if care is taken to incorporate some low-maintenance, slow-growing elements. Trees, shrubs, ground covers, and vines can provide cooling, shade, soil and water retention, and beauty with nearly no work at all after the initial investment of effort. Nurseries can supply drought-tolerant native plants to facilitate “xeriscaping”—a form of landscape design that requires minimal amounts of supplemental watering.

Or we could let our lawns return to nature. We could let wind-sown and bird-born seeds take root in the soil. We could let native flora make their way back into the city. We could help nature along with diverse plantings to replace our monoculture a little at a time. We could watch for the return of bees, and butterflies, birds, reptiles, amphibians, and small mammals. And we could enjoy the peaceful sounds of a summer evening.

© 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

And mixed in with all of that, there was a fair amount of staring blankly at the screen and thinking, “I should stop messing around and get to writing, or I’m going to be up half the night. But first, let me see what this thing over here is.” [Sound of mouse click.]

But now I’m here, and I’m writing. So get off my back already.

© 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.