But I know that the pills are like the hat in the way Dr. S and the pharmacist see the world, the pills are like my hat for not having to see the men without eyes who sit on benches, the men with glasses but no eyes who ride the subway, standing just behind someone, standing out of sight when I look again to see if what I saw the first time was right, that there is a man without eyes who follows me onto the subway, who sits in the park, who sits by the carousel like he is waiting for someone, but I know that it is me that he is waiting for.

Dr. S says, In any case, if these men are real, which I do not concede that they are, mind you, but if these men are real, Billy, do you see any reason to believe that they mean you any harm? And I think I am being very clever when I say that what I see isn’t as important as what they see, since they are the men with no eyes, and when I leave his office, there is one of them using the ATM across the street, I can see the bare smooth eyeless skin of his face reflected in the stainless steel panel above the machine, and I know that he is watching me, though he doesn’t know I know.

I know because I am not wearing my hat. I always see better when I am not wearing it.

© 2010 Edward F. Gumnick

Today is the day. I’m going to leave here. I’m going to make a couple of sandwiches, wrap them in waxed paper, put them in one of the brown paper bags that I asked Morena to buy when she brought me groceries last week, and I’ll add a bag of baked potato chips and a can of Coke. Then I’ll put my lunch in the new backpack that I bought online from Timberland, along with a couple of magazines. I will walk out the front door, I will lock it behind me, and I will take the three flights of stairs to the ground floor. I’ll walk out of the building and turn right on the sidewalk. Then I’ll go four blocks north and two blocks east to Riverview Park. I’ve seen it on a Google map. It looks lovely and green in the satellite image. I can also see it from a couple of online traffic cams that look south along Lincoln Parkway. I know from the police reports I read that the neighborhood policing program has reduced crime in the area, and that Riverview Park is patrolled at all times of day and night.

So today might be the day. I’ve spent a lot of time building up to this moment. I haven’t been outside in four and a half years. Not just outside the building, but outside the door into the hallway of my apartment building. I wasn’t always like this. There was a time when I walked the streets without a care like so many people do. But that was before I realized how dangerous it is out there. Still, some of the friends I’ve met online tell me that I should be strong, that I should not be afraid, that I’m missing too much by spending my life in this small apartment. On an intellectual level, I hear what they’re saying. But there’s a voice inside me that won’t let me forget how easy it is to lose everything in a matter of moments. And so I take precautions, I guard my safety, my privacy.

Maybe today will be the day, though. I’ll load up my backpack so I’m ready for whatever I might encounter out there. The food, of course, and bottles of water, filtered twice through the charcoal filters I ordered. Maybe a flashlight. The keys for all my door locks, except for the one to the deadbolt, which I’ll leave under the loose edge of the carpet in the hall outside my door. You can’t be too careful. And something to read, not so much for the entertainment as for a buffer against the possibility that people will want to talk to me. If I look like I’m reading, people will leave me alone. And my surgical mask, too, will discourage casual conversation, though I understand that it’s not serious protection against any of the more virulent antigens out there. I will have to take my chances.

I don’t know if today will be the day. There is still too much to be done at home, too much to think about.

© 2009 Edward F. Gumnick

And then, like everyone else, I raced out of the building to find out what was making that awful noise, and I saw a huge gray cylinder streak across the sky pushing a wave of white heat ahead of it, trailing a stream of white vapor. It slowed noticeably as I watched. The sound of its passage diminished until all that was left was the whoosh of its maneuvering jets as it came to hover over somewhere just west of downtown, then settled toward the ground, where I lost sight of it behind the treeline.

Then silence for a moment, and then a lot more noise of a more chaotic variety—many smaller engines as the tactical craft spewed out of ports on the top of the mother ship. I only know some of these details because Dennis was close enough to see it, and he told me about it later when I met him scavenging in the ruins of a shopping center near my house. I only heard the noise, the rising and falling whines of the small scout ships and fighters whizzing in all directions, criss-crossing the sky and taking out the utility and communications systems with their strange weapons. I hadn’t had a clear moment to try my cell phone, and now that I thought to do so, it showed “No signal.” I thought of Jana, somewhere on the far side of where the big ship had landed, out of contact and alone with the baby.

The nimble flying machines raced back and forth in no discernible pattern, firing staccato pulses of a pale golden light in all directions. Occasionally, a larger craft would emit a pulse that rattled the windows of my office building. I ran back inside. The receptionist had abandoned her desk like everyone else. I picked up the handset of her phone, but the line was dead. The power was out. Even the second hand of the battery-operated clock on the wall behind her desk was stopped. I raced back to my own office and grabbed my car keys, then ran back out to where my car was parked by the curb. I hopped in, shoved the key in the ignition, and turned it, but as I feared, nothing happened.

As I’d been watching the arrival of the invaders and the first wave of their assault, I’d been dimly aware of activity all around me. The other inhabitants of the office suite I shared had been running back and forth in a noisy panic, in and out of the building, back and forth to their cars. I hadn’t been paying much attention to the screams and shouts, but now I suddenly noticed the silence as the assault force moved off in another direction. I was surprised to find I was alone on the street. I suppose that most of my co-workers had gone to find hiding places, or run off to look for help.

I thought for a moment. I went back into the building. Under the sink in the kitchen, there were some empty plastic gallon jugs. I was glad to see that there was still enough water pressure to fill them; with the electricity out, that wouldn’t last for long. I filled all five, but could only reasonably plan to carry two. I left the other three on the counter next to the sink.

To be continued….

© 2009 Edward F. Gumnick

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