I associate the period between October 26 and November 11 with death and life — themes inextricably linked for me and, we might say, objectively.

• October 26 is the birthday of my deceased best friend.

• October 31 is All Hallows’ Eve (Halloween).

• November 1 is All Saints’ Day. It’s also my birthday. This year it was also Daylight Saving Day.

• November 2 is the Day of the Dead.

• November 11 is the anniversary of the death of a brother I replaced.

Meanwhile, unanticipated and emotional life events have occurred during this window of time.

I had a notion to write an essay but, for the same reasons, I am, at the present time, processing at a slower pace than I would like.

In the meantime, there is much to be grateful for.

Inspiration continues to come from disparate sources.

I’m tinkering with this space. I’m working on my practice. Thank you for visiting. Hopefully, this turns into something worth your time.

When my friend suggested we go to Heart of the Beast after he took me to lunch for my birthday I was heartened by the gesture but reluctant about the movie. I’m a Brad Pitt fan and I love dogs. My friend told me he thought this was a “perfect Tom pick.” Yes — and no. My problem: I have a hard time watching animals suffer, even on screen, even in a movie with credits that include the disclaimer “No Animals Harmed.”

This summer, sitting next to a first date at the blockbuster The Odyssey, I took in the blood and gore of three hours toil and war with minimal flinching. But I had to try to hide my squeamishness during scenes of real and potential harm to Odysseus’s dog, Argos.1

I’m not, of course, unusual in my disdain for animal suffering. An inspiring number of human beings spend their days caring for neglected animals. Some groups of people will, in fact, risk harm to themselves in their efforts to save mistreated animals. I’ve been fortunate to encounter some wonderful veterinarians in the last 20 years who have undertaken acts large and small that directly enhanced the life of a beloved animal friend and, indirectly, my own. As a profession, veterinarians suffer a high rate of clinic depression, in part given how often they are faced with — and often serve as caretakers during — the death of animals. Of course. How could there not be an emotional toll on people drawn to helping vulnerable creatures?

One reason why animals affect me so strongly is they stir feelings of innocence — an innocence that can’t ever be properly regarded — and an innocence that never leaves.

Children are innocent, too, of course, but this often hits me differently. They eventually transform into adults with the wherewithal to reflect on and seek redress, if needed, for the care they received.2 At some point, they more or less take care of themselves. Not so with domesticated animals; they depend on humans for basic needs every day of their lives. There’s a vulnerability that I want to know is cared for and that’s when everything is right and good.

Harmed or neglected dogs especially affect me, for dogs demonstrate loyalty and love to the humans on which they rely and, even as they age, their fundamental nature never goes away. That they can’t speak to us, not in like language in any regard, creates a barrier that, when bridged — as is clearly the case between Pitt’s character, James, and his canine companion, Odin — transcends the depth of common bonds. Some humans who have been married for decades don’t demonstrate the depth of love that registers in every moment of this movie.

I don’t aim to review the film here and I won’t offer any spoilers. There are especially poignant scenes in Heart of the Beast but, really, what makes the movie worth seeing —and I’m grateful my friend picked it for I might not otherwise have gotten over my reluctance — is the observation of the relationship. There isn’t a single message or takeaway. This ode to love is an experience. And, six days later, I feel like I’m still having it.

Coming back from a walk at dusk last night a rabbit, apparently startled by my presence, hopped from the edge of the sidewalk into the middle of a small front yard. You can’t see from the image I captured, but this little feller was injured — his left back leg is clearly not functioning properly. Either the leg is broken or it’s dislocated; I’m not a veterinarian and I could only get so close. Also, the image I captured suggests more light than was actual at the moment. I don’t know precisely what the diagnosis is only that this four-legged friend isn’t right.

I didn’t want to get closer because I didn’t want the rabbit to move more than it wanted to. As I stayed at a distance for some time, I observed it tending to the leg; it was, quietly literally, licking its wound.

I have since gone back to this neighbor’s yard, which is about 5 1/2 blocks from my house, two times, now with a pet crate in my car. The rabbit moved from that spot — either voluntarily or otherwise. This morning I walked around the block a couple of times and there were no sign of this rabbit.

In July of 2018, while living elsewhere, I encountered a baby rabbit who clearly wasn’t well. I took that rabbit to the Wildlife Rehabilitation Center of Minnesota — if you are able, please support this organization’s efforts — but, alas, that rabbit didn’t make it, having, apparently suffered intestinal damage and possibly dehydration. A broken leg, if that’s the extent of the injury to this mature rabbit, could be, it seems, fixable.

I imagine if I encounter the creature again I will struggle with its capture — not wanting to hurt it further in the process and also feeling wholly incompetent to the task. Corralling wildlife is not on the very short list of things I do well. Yet I couldn’t not try. I left a note with the neighbor. Probably by now, some 16 hours after the encounter, it’s too late.

I did notice my mien shift in my relation to this wounded animal. I hope it’s OK. Maybe something will come from my note. Probably this is the end of the story. If so, I’m grateful for the way in which this little thing has altered my relation to the world during the few waking hours I have experienced since. I feel less in my head and a wee bit more connected to this strange and wondrous place we all inhabit.

A spider scurries across its web along the side of your garage. A man walks his dog down the otherwise empty thoroughfare. A car door shuts behind you. A moth flutters overhead and loses itself in the night sky. A biker races across a street blocks ahead. Tree branches clap as you pass. A rabbit runs. Stars shine. A streetlight reflects just right in the community garden, turning a spec of grass into an emerald. A cleaner works inside the closed theater. Your feet crush remnants of black walnuts that bombed the sidewalk. “Good morning,” you say to a neighbor. You could see her before she could see you. She stretched and swayed a little, warming up for a run, presumably thinking no one was awake and around to see her. Your good morning is louder than a whisper but of the same felt sense. She smiles as she returns the greeting in kind. You do really mean it and you know she does, too. It is good morning be out and about out during these moments before sunrise in the Magic City.

At 6:30 on a misty morning, as I walked along the parkway, in the distance appeared a creature that at first was a fox but then grew to the size of a coyote. This coyote jaunted parallel to me. I was on the sidewalk; the coyote was on the grass-covered median between rows of old trees. I happened to have my phone with me and I took a 22-second video of this encounter. Or so I thought. Once home, I saw the video didn’t take. I somehow managed to film 22 seconds of compelling footage of the sidewalk.

What — if anything — shall I make of this encounter?

In indigenous traditions, coyotes that populate North America are considered trickster-creators. That is, creatures who move between worlds. As they cross boundaries, they open new possibilities. At first, I wondered if I should be afraid; I don’t have much experience with such animals. But quickly I sensed that this beast was not a threat to me. Neither, it turns out, did it feel vulnerable in my presence. The coyote clearly knew I was there and didn’t much care. Certainly, it didn’t immediately flee. Coyotes, it is said, are identified neither primarily as predator nor prey. They naturally cross boundaries. They aren’t easily pinned down or, at least in my case, captured.

To summarize:

• My mind was initially deceived by the shape-shifting figure before me.

• The animal that came into my awareness is a boundary-breaker.

• When you break boundaries, you create new environments.

• The coyote didn’t come at me. The coyote didn’t run away from me. The coyote moved along side me.

• I tried to “capture” this experience animal but failed. Because of course. Even here, this attempt to capture the moment shows the futility of the exercise.

There are no conclusions here. You observe. You allow. You process. And, like the coyote, you keep moving.

I imagine it’s a Sunday afternoon at the end of summer — that bittersweet day when the calendar says you’re in a specific season and yet the air hints also of the one ahead.

The woman and her dog have been enjoying the day. That is, I imagine she rode her bike with her canine companion running and leaping by her side. As these pals went about town, the woman talked to the dog and the dog heard every word.

For hours the two of them explored their world. Perhaps at one point the woman pushed her bike as they strolled along a river. They walked past old lovers standing close … children laughing freely … and a man on a bench reading the newspaper. Maybe there was a bridge. Maybe they watched the water run — the closest thing we have in the material world to seeing time move.

Maybe later they stopped at an open-air shop and nibbled on something shared. They went this way and that, no schedule, no agenda, other than to be together, and now, as we see them, it’s time for a moment of rest in the warmest hour of sun.

“Repose” is what Pierre-Emmanuel Lyet titled his August 3, 2026 cover of The New Yorker.

After I finished reading that issue of the magazine, I did what I usually did — I tossed it into the recycling bin. By then another issue had arrived. I flipped open the new issue before I realized my mistake; I didn’t want to let “Repose” go. Tossing this cover didn’t feel right; I retrieved it from the bin. Over the course of a subscription year several covers of The New Yorker are worth more than a cursory glance. But this one was different: this one makes me dream, makes me melancholy.

I can’t recall being moved by a magazine cover before. I sent an email to the artist to thank him for this work. My motive in reaching out was mostly selfish. I don’t experience connection with most things, or many people, and when I do I want to linger. Specifically, I want to remain close to this work for at least as long as the afternoon the woman and the dog shared, and writing about it is the way.

There’s no doubt the presence of the dog is one reason this image tugs at me. A dog content. A dog asleep. That’s as pure a “good” as can be found.

But that’s not only it. I like that these friends are together. A dog wants to be with its person. This particular person, a woman at rest at a closed garage, suggests peace in the city. She sits in a lane of sun amidst a kaleidoscope of color. Her shoes are off. You don’t take your shoes off unless you feel free.

Today, Labor Day, is the unofficial last day of summer. I’m grateful for Lyet’s work because in his cover image summer may be soon to end but never does.

Seeing that Roger Ebert had given Big Night four stars made your own night a little less small.

You weren’t sure you wanted to walk 26 minutes to a tiny theater for a late showing of this old film. But when you saw the late-great reviewer’s decades-old endorsement, you closed your laptop and put on your shoes.

What a pleasure to once again see a new-to-you film, in a theater, knowing that after taking in this movie filmed in a different time of your life (1996), set in a different time in our country’s life (1950s), you could walk home and read the words that supported those stars.

You had added Big Night to your calendar two weeks ago after the local theater’s newsletter announced a single showing. Until then, you had no recollection of the film’s initial incarnation. The promotional image of young versions of Tony Shalhoub (who plays Primo, a chef of rare culinary gifts) and Stanley Tucci (the chef’s brother and manager), set against the festive and sensual atmosphere of a busy Italian restaurant, compelled you to add Big Night to your calendar. Yet you didn’t buy a ticket right away and, alas, when the date arrived that single showing had sold out. Fortunately, the theater scheduled a second showing for the same night. As you were less-than decisive in the hours before showtime, you remembered what you used to do and you realized, given the film’s release date, you could do so again: Find out what Roger Ebert says. You glimpsed the perfect-star rating and read nary a word more.

That is, until after you experienced this movie, which is ostensibly about the power of food but really about the complexity of human ingredients that come from the same source. Various scenes of Big Night feel like home footage of two brothers bringing all of themselves to their relationship — awkwardness, frank honesty, withheld dishonesty, quick-to-the-surface rage that stems from a shared history paired with unequally distributed talent, and the failure of understanding that occurs, even among blood brothers, when two people have different modes of perception. This documentary-esque quality is most poignantly shown in the payoff, the wordless denouement, when for a few moments Shalhoub and Tucci seem to cease acting as their respective characters and merely and deeply display love of a sort that maybe only brothers know.

To then have that sensory experience of the film layered, like a Primo timpano, by Ebert’s voice on the page — as he summarized and stylized as only he could — made for a big night, indeed.

“The surprises in the plot involve not only secret romance but heartbreak and long-held frustration” he wrote nearly thirty years ago, “for if genius is great, it is nevertheless not easy to be genius’ brother.”

If only for a few paragraphs, then, you returned to a past world, a world in which the atmosphere of a movie is amplified by a great writer — a world in which a phrase like “two thumbs-up” meant something to everyone — a world in which the big screen of shared experience held a greater prominence and no one had even a notion of the thumbs up that would become ubiquitous to the future private, small-screen-centric existence.

That the characters couldn’t post pictures of their plates seems not incidental to the reason these years later Big Night still delivered a satisfying meal.

It’s funny the things that make you happy to live where you do.

I can drive nearly the entire way from the Guthrie Theater to my house without leaving the bank of the Mississippi River. I did this the other night, after taking in a preview performance of Private Lives — a tightly told story about the thin line between love and hate, as men chase women an…

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One thing I do well to remember is that there is power in noticing what you notice. Of all the sensory stimuli to which a human’s attention can be drawn it’s interesting to see what the psyche chooses in a given moment — especially if the selection is a repeat or if it’s new and keen.

(Here I mean while in a place of literal or relative calm. When in a fear state the exercise is less interesting and more predictable.)

On the first day of the current month, midway through a late walk, I stopped at the entrance to a neighborhood school. I stood for a few minutes beneath a row of lights. I held up a retaining wall. I hugged a beam. I twisted my body with one arm extended, then the other. That is, I stretched my calves, my back, my chest. The school sits at the edge of a small woods and, as I went through these motions, I heard a rustling. This sounded like the doings of a creature larger than a squirrel. It was, after all, late for squirrels. I looked over the wall, past an old tree, and into the darkness; nothing. After more rustling, I looked up. Perched on the tree branch, as if poking its head out a window, sat a raccoon.

This raccoon was neither old nor young. I don’t normally consider raccoons to be among the most beautiful creatures in creation but the distinguishing aspect of this one was that she (in truth, I couldn’t tell the raccoon’s gender) was striking: Her eyes glowed in the night light. Her mask didn’t project sadness, as a raccoon often does, but rather curiosity. This girl cast her unflinching eyes on mine from a few feet away. We shared this mutual regard for some minutes. I had the sense there wasn’t anything this raccoon was thinking about other than me. Eventually, it occurred that she might have offspring nearby and that that’s why she kept an eye on this guy and his strange maneuvers. Sure enough, a moment later, a kit struggled up the trunk of another nearby tree.

What to me had registered as a serendipitous inter-species meeting of the minds was, of course, a different experience to the non-human animal.

Why did I pay attention to that sound? In fact, this wasn’t especially noteworthy perception on my part. In this place and time, there weren’t many competing noises. The most interesting part about what I noticed, at least to my way of thinking, is how what I noticed during this encounter tied together other experience.

As I had finished my stretches and the bugs started also turned their attention to me, I walked down the sidewalk, away from the school, to a parkway along the Mississippi River. A pair of humans walked by chatting. In my memory one of them was a woman, maybe both of them were, and that’s all I can say with any certainty. Instead of paying attention to the people, the tree-lined parkway, the river, the night sky, or any number of other possibilities, I was compelled instead to turn back toward the school light. From this remove I saw the two raccoons, now on the ground, roaming about the grass beneath those trees. I liked seeing them together, doing their thing. I liked the sense I got that any fear my presence had added had subsided as they resume their nocturnal activities.

As I walked along the parkway, I was, I see now, not just mid-way through a walk. My thoughts picked up a pattern from the previous day, a pattern that would continue in the days that followed this one: pairs. My awareness was and would continue to be drawn to handsome couples walking down the street; to birds flying in twos; to buddy rabbits. Following from this encounter with the raccoons I will have dreams of partners — such as of seeing an old hockey line-mate. In one especially keen dream I’m with woman I just met (just met within the dream, I mean) whom I knew I would marry (again in the dream).

What does any of this matter? I’m not sure whether it does. At least not yet. Still, this pattern of pairs, of partners, it’s worth observing, also mirrored a shift internally. That is, after a sustained period — here I mean years, not months — in which there was little drive to seek partnership, of late I started to feel energy in that direction. I noticed a new desire arose during waking dreams and fantasies. During this time I would also happen to meet (in waking life) a lovely lady and our conversation, which was surprisingly easy and pleasantly personal (I’m allergic to small-talk), stirred further this sense of desire for connection with another. This felt like the start of a long-term conversation I want to have. (Expressing this desire is altogether different than saying this woman, in particular, is the one with whom I can, will, or should have that conversation.)

This new-in-me desire may well fade as quickly as it appeared. And, no doubt, the pairings that captured my attention will cede to awareness of other things (or nothing; I’m no Zen master). In fact, in the time it’s taken me to put this experience into a coherent utterance, I have already shifted again, as normal bodily and emotional impulses don’t subside for long. The point isn’t that I arrived at a conclusion, or chose a new life path, but rather to observe that alignment between the external world, my conscious, and my unconscious — and that this alignment suggested a potential shift in direction.

In other words, the surprisingly enchanting eyes of a raccoon stimulated memories, recent and not, and primed me to notice a pattern that might portend new experience.

Of course, quite possibly, I just spent 972 words on a delusion. If the latter, please don’t pinch me. The exercise of noticing what I noticed, come what may, is its own reward.

Give the Untethered Dog a Biscuit

I didn’t even intend to watch a movie. Outside of hockey season and fall Sundays (football), I seldom turn on my television. But here … on a school night no less … I was thinking … actually, I’m not sure what I was thinking … the muscles of discipline being flabbiest in the later hours … when I turned on the TV … when into the streaming feed appeared a flick that, until then, was unfamiliar to me: Whiplash.1

I do recall thinking that I would start this movie about a musician and his teacher and watch only a few minutes. You can tell a lot about the seriousness of a production from its opening scene. If hooked, this fish could finish the movie the next day. If not, I would be off to catch some Zs.

A third alternative was presented and tacitly assented to when it turned out that I couldn’t stop watching this movie.

Whiplash begins with a drum solo by Miles Teller, who plays protagonist Andrew, a first-year college music student. In what appears to be an empty dorm after hours, Andrew is all alone, practicing, when J.K. Simmons, in the role of Terence Fletcher, the Bobby Knight of college jazz band instructors (yes, in fact, at one point he does throw a chair), enters his life and, like a tornado, whips him about in ways Andrew can’t control. The film follows from that moment as this duo make far more than toe-tapping tunes. It was not long after that initial scene — during which Fletcher performs the first in a series of psychological whiplashes, seemingly interested and then suddenly not — that I realized there was no chance I would soon fall asleep.

To clarify, this isn’t intended as a movie review. If you want one of those, they aren’t hard to find — including those from film critics with more chops than me. Why I’m writing about Whiplash days after watching it — after watching it the first time, I mean; I have since rewatched it (I call these “Fleeting Obsessions” for a reason, people) — is to tease out the reason I was so moved by this movie. Many films, even many good ones, don’t strike like this one did. And so I want to stay close to it. I want to sit with the Why.

What is clear is that Whiplash is a story about excellence. It’s not about merely good work or even great work. For sure, it’s not about fame. Or wealth. And, certainly, it’s not about “likes” or “followers” — those peculiar measurements of status and approval we seek, circa 2026, as proxy validation. The story is about the singularity of purpose a small percentage of people have to become the very best at something.

Of course, many of us would like to be the best at something. I mean, that sounds fantastic! Yet few of us burn with the desire sufficient to sacrifice enough to so much as have a chance to become the best at something.

Andrew doesn’t want to be a good jazz drummer; he wants to be one of the greats. He obsessively listens to the music of the late Buddy Rich, so accomplished that those in the know during his day referred to him as “the world’s greatest drummer.” Andrew’s known from a young age that percussion is his calling. He’s socially awkward, seldom dates, has few friends, and struggles to relate during family dinners. He has a good, if not especially warm, relationship with his father (played by Paul Reiser),2 who supports his son, whom he raised solo, despite their not sharing a sensibility for much beyond movies and popcorn. The father, frankly, doesn’t understand the intensity of his son’s desire.

Andrew attends the Shaffer Conservatory in New York City, a fictional institution based loosely on real-world, highly competitive music programs. He attends Shaffer because — as he tells a girl he takes to a hole-in-the-wall pizza place expressly because on the restaurant sound system they play old jazz albums — it’s “the best music school in the country.” Which means, de facto, he went to Shaffer because he wants to one day warrant a chair in Fletcher’s band, the school’s premier ensemble. Despite the impression he left the young drummer with during their initial meeting, Fletcher does notice Andrew’s promise. He later gives him a chance to make the band, builds him up a bit, and then proceeds to push him beyond all common limits. This isn’t just a case of hard-to-play pieces or a taxing practice schedule. Fletcher berates and belittles Andrew. He calls him names. At one point he gets physically abusive. The flying chair … that chair sailed at Andrew’s head — and the trajectory wasn’t the result of greasy fingers.

The instructor plays head games, such as giving less capable drummers Andrew’s chair, and some tactics are downright demeaning (Andrew is forced to play faster and faster until his hands are reduced to a bloody mess). Fletcher stands before his band with his feet planted outside the boundary of acceptable behavior in mainstream America. And this isn’t a period piece. Whiplash is set around the time of its theatrical release in 2014. Fletcher wouldn’t last 10 minutes in a mainstream school, circa 2026, but at Shaffer he’s got the sort of stature that he can interrupt other instructors’ classrooms unannounced to conduct impromptu rehearsals for his band.

I’ve had a number of dreams in recent times about coaches. Sometimes these are coaches I once had. More often they are famous coaches I will never meet. My all-time favorite movie (Hoosiers, 1986) is the story of a coach. I like that word: coach. And I especially appreciate the role coaches play. Coaching is a bold expression of self; you come honest or your charges don’t develop. In a best-case scenario, your student no longer needs you and all the glory goes their way. Bizarre but true, sometimes the biggest storyline in a high-profile game is about the guy or gal behind the bench / on the sideline — a person who never steps foot on the field of play. What is the coach going to do next? Can he / she outwit their counterpart? Win despite a serious setback? Succeed despite a less skilled roster? A good coach’s work compels even though, unless you’re a player on the team, almost none of the elements of their work are visible.

In these high-sensitivity times, the authority of coaches, especially but not only at amateur levels, is often highly scrutinized. Parents especially step into the middle of coach-player relationships and not uncommonly take punitive action against those coaches with whom they don’t agree (and here I mean coaches whose approach isn’t in the same league as Fletcher’s when it comes to intensity or tactics). It hasn’t always been that way — it wasn’t that way when I was being coached on a daily basis on baseball fields and in hockey arenas — and part of what kept me watching Whiplash is that it’s still, decidedly, not that way at Shaffer.

I like to read books and profiles about coaches and around the time of my recent coach-themed dreams, one book about a ground-breaking coach3 cited a Michael Lewis profile of late eccentric coach Mike Leach,4 and while searching for that piece I stumbled onto another Lewis effort — “Coach Fitz’s Management Theory,” a 2004 essay in The New York Times Magazine — about the author’s high school baseball coach. After no contact with the coach, Billy Fitzgerald, for more than 20 years, Lewis receives two pieces of news more or less simultaneously that, taken together, don’t make sense.

The first: a letter from a fellow alum organizing a fund drive to renovate the old school gymnasium and name the re-opened facility after Coach Fitz, as everyone calls him, to honor the life lessons the coach instilled in his players that years later they all still profit from. The second: news that parents of players on the current team, still coached by Fitzgerald, were moving to have the coach removed from his job. These parents don’t like the coach’s tactics and, funny, the players of those parents have ceased putting in much effort and the team isn’t thriving. The juxtaposition is telling; the same coach and two diametrically opposed views on that coach from different generations.

To be sure, Coach Fitz wasn’t a “nice” guy who handed out participation trophies. Lewis recalls moments from his varsity seasons when Fitz embarrassed him in front of the team. He remembers instances in which the coach drove his 16-, 17-, and 18-year-old players harder than most other coaches would. Fitzgerald wanted to win ballgames, of course, but more than that you get the sense from the profile that he wanted to instill a way of being, a way of valuing excellence. An encouraging pat on the butt doesn’t always get that done. (As it happens, Peyton Manning graduated from the very same high school. Lewis called Manning, at the time the highest-paid quarterback in the NFL, and the former No. 1 overall NFL draft pick took time out of his practice schedule to talk, at length and effusively, about what Fitzgerald, the baseball and basketball coach, had taught the budding football star.)5

Despite real-world examples like Manning or fictional ones like Andrew, there’s desire for coaches in current times to be more akin to cheerleaders with clipboards. How much this actually hinders, rather than helps, the development of their students / players / employees is an open question. What isn’t a hot take is the notion that young people — and, really, all people — often need more than praise in order to grow and develop. Whiplashes might be extreme but there is, or at least should be, a fear on the other side of spectrum, too: The path to excellence is seldom easy.

Incidentally, “Whiplash” isn’t just the name of the movie; it’s a jazz chart written by Hank Levy, a big-band composer, in the 1960s, a standby that Fletcher’s band performs. So the title counts, we might say, double-time when it comes to meaning. Fletcher’s pedagogy could be rightly summed up as that: whiplash. He’s not volatile because he’s an out-of-control perfectionist. He intentionally engineers unpredictability. He wants the sensitive student who seeks approval to strive as high as he or she can to receive it.6 The downside is that many don’t. More than a few young musicians leave Fletcher’s band in tears.

The last third of this 106-minute film, during which the story deftly pivots from a corner it had been written into, is the movie-equivalent of great jazz. That is, Andrew and Fletcher create atmosphere you want to soak in. This begins with one of the film’s best scenes — a moment in which Andrew and Fletcher meet for the first time since a falling out that caused Fletcher’s dismissal from the school. They don’t just run into each other; Andrew wanders into a New York jazz club after seeing Fletcher’s name on the club roster. He was drawn to his coach when he selected his school and he’s still drawn to his coach even after all the abuse he’s taken. I think people innately know when something is calling them to a higher place.

You can hear glasses tink and someone must be on the sax as teacher and pupil commiserate …

Fletcher: I don’t think people understood what it was I was doing at Shaffer. I wasn’t there to conduct. Any fucking moron can wave his arms and keep people in tempo. I was there to push people beyond what’s expected of them. I believe that is … an absolute necessity. Otherwise, we’re depriving the world of the next Louis Armstrong. The next Charlie Parker. I told you that story about how Charlie Parker became Charlie Parker, right?

Andrew: Jo Jones threw a cymbal at his head.

Fletcher: Exactly. Parker’s a young kid, pretty good on the sax. Gets up to play at a cutting session, and he fucks it up. And Jones nearly decapitates him for it. And he’s laughed off-stage. Cries himself to sleep that night. But the next morning, what does he do? He practices. And he practices and he practices with one goal in mind, never to be laughed at again. And a year later, he goes back to the Reno and he steps up on that stage, and plays the best motherfucking solo the world has ever heard. So imagine if Jones had just said, “Well, that’s OK, Charlie. That was all right. Good job.” And then Charlie thinks to himself, “Well, shit, I did do a pretty good job.” End of story. No Bird. That, to me, is an absolute tragedy. But that’s just what the world wants now.

If you can’t take what Fletcher is giving, or so it follows, you don’t care enough to become excellent. And, hey, there’s no crime in that. Most people don’t care enough. Most people consciously choose “balance” (whatever that means exactly) over the extreme required for truly excellent work. They want a job and relationships and hobbies and vacations that are rewarding and manageable. Music, sports, theater, and the like — these “extracurricular” activities make for well-rounded human beings and, to be sure, the world needs more of those.

As many of us want variety and simple (not necessarily deep) pleasure from our days, the idea of practicing the drums (or writing or woodcarving or whatever) until your hands bleed is considered a form of torture — not something you voluntarily do. (In this respect, Andrew’s father is an understated but important figure in the story; he eventually encourages his son to separate from Fletcher but, more or less, he otherwise watches from the remove of back-stage. There is under-protection, there is protection, and there is overprotection; Andrew’s father sits in the middle ground — he’s not a helicopter parent.) But if you do want to be excellent — if you want to be a pre-eminent musician that people listen to and talk about decades after your death — you need someone to push you harder than you can possibly push yourself. Or so the film suggests.

The path of praise doesn’t lead you to become the next Charlie Parker. As Fletcher says to Andrew: “There are no two words in the English language more harmful than ‘good job.’”

Of course, who doesn’t like to receive approval? Who doesn’t want to hear that they’ve done well? Yet Fletcher isn’t wrong; everyone needs something to push against, something to strive for that is hard to entirely internally summon.7

What do you do after someone hurls a chair at your head? Report the hurler to the dean? Take your sticks and find another teacher? Quit music altogether? The answer the movie gives is that you get up the next morning and practice. You try harder. You practice until the skin on your hand falls off, if that’s what it takes. You practice and practice and practice until you’re so good that excellence — and the durable, unflinching self-respect that comes from earned excellence — is as much a part of you as the nose on your face.

In this way of thinking, excellence isn’t something anyone can bestow. It’s one of those things you have, you find, or you develop. Or you never do possess it. Again, this might be a conscious choice. Yet it seems the striving itself pays dividends, not just the result. For certain Andrew is, by the end of the movie, transformed and he’s still young; we don’t know whether people will ever refer to him as “the world’s greatest drummer.” Sans the striving, we are forever subject to the fleeting praise of others. In today’s parlance, we post again about how we’re living our best life so as to get the dopamine spike of likes. (Or the workplace equivalent. Or the relationship equivalent.)

There’s a related essay idea here that I started playing around with a couple of years ago after I read Babbitt, the brilliant Sinclair Lewis novel, but never worked all the way out. The title character is a man who drives down the middle of every road: he’s middle class, he’s middle age, and he lives in middle America. He’s not at the top; he’s not at the bottom. He’s a proud citizen of Zenith, a city perpetually on the rise. He has three kids he gets along with, more or less, even if he doesn’t much understand them. He has a wife who is swell, if not terribly interesting or terribly attractive. The family attends and hosts the dinner parties necessary to maintain a social status among the “good people” in town, never mind that these occasions more often than not are a bore. Babbitt runs a real estate office. He holds strongly moderate political views (if there is such a thing). He believes in being moral in one’s personal affairs (until there’s reason not to be), ethical in one’s business dealings (except when precedent offers a pass), and that Prohibition is a good idea (for other people). George Babbitt supports the church (even if he doesn’t much go there) and, as a proud member of the local Athletic Club, he scoffs at the more exclusive and expensive country club in town (mostly because they haven’t yet invited him to join). Meanwhile, Babbitt had dreams. He wanted to go to law school. He wanted to become a lawyer. He wanted someday to run for political office. Heck, given his gift for gab, he coulda been a contenda for governor. He never does any of these things — he never really strives for what he truly wants in life — because he receives praise directly and indirectly such that he’s never uncomfortable enough to be forced to really grow.

I get understand the fear about the Fletchers of this world. I wonder if we realize the fear of the Babbitts.

The thing is, if you can withstand the heat, something from within might come forth that you didn’t know you had. In picking up the pieces after you have been shattered you don’t come back the same. You become something new. You become a stronger version of yourself. A version less fearful. More secure. You know what it’s like to have your greatest hope crushed. There’s a freedom, a boldness, in knowing things can’t ever get worse than what you’ve already overcome.

To pause with the movie’s argument, we might consider that it is, after all, a feature film — not a self-help video. It’s fair to ask: Does one need to receive abuse to become excellent? Of course, not. That would be a preposterous assertion. There are excellent musicians, excellent artists, excellent athletes, excellent doctors and lawyers and teachers, the list of examples is long — who weren’t taught by Fletcher or a facsimile. One of my favorite artists is Jerry Seinfeld. I’ve heard him interviewed many times and I’ve seen his standup act live a handful of times. In his formative years as a comedian he flopped his share while working in nondescript clubs but, as comes from a supportive and stable family and was never abused, you wouldn’t say that his life was ever hardscrabble. Maybe Charlie Parker becomes Bird even if a cymbal never flies towards his face. Maybe Andrew lives out his potential even if taught by a teacher with less blunt-force tact. Who knows.

What we can say is that pain is a part of all lives and the presence of pain is a potential inflection point. In some people (we might say many people), pain channelled can accelerate the growth process like nothing else can; it can be a source of transformation in ways that praise cannot. For every excellent artist raised in a life of comfort and affluence there are many more who created their art expressly as a way to process their pain.8

I have watched the final scene of Whiplash six times and I get more out of the experience each time. The first time I was wondering where this goes. I was following the bouncing ball, so to speak. At some point during subsequent viewings it was no longer about what the narrative leads to; the experience of getting there is the payoff. Just like growth itself — right? It’s not as much about where you land but rather the effort you put forth that is the true reward. If we don’t have a coach that pushes us in that direction … we may never know what we could have been.

Some of our best coaches, I should add, might be persons who don’t hold that title and don’t know they are coaching us. In the end, Fletcher sets up Andrew to fail and fail spectacularly, and this last lash of the whip isn’t pedagogy. The instructor isn’t an instructor any more and, what’s more, he feels he’s been wronged. He wants retribution. Andrew succumbs; he falls apart on stage in front of witnesses with the power to end his career before it’s begun. He’s beaten. Except he puts himself back together. He crystalizes his experience. He becomes a new version of himself in the time it takes to play a spontaneous version of the jazz-band classic “Caravan.”

The newly constituted Andrew doesn’t just play this tune well. He doesn’t just play great. He creates new art. He makes something so brilliant that Fletcher cannot help but drop his dukes, for he sees an unfolding of an excellence he always hoped to witness in a student. In that way, Andrew takes what he learned from his teacher and transcends him as he creates something wholly new. As he takes over the band, Andrew mouths “fuck you” to Fletcher and the same time plays a solo no one has ever heard before — his Bird moment — and in that way also delivers to his teacher a deep form of “I love you.” This isn’t dissonance. Both expressions are sincere. And both ring true.

In other words, from his greatest depth, Andrew takes the performance to a place higher than any of them could have expected to go.

I’m drawn to characters like Andrew and coaches like Fletcher because of the singularity of their desire. As a person who doesn’t spend time, not any more anyway, seeking to reach some level of renown — I’m not aspiring to be foremost at anything — the clarity of One Thing appeals. I do try hard, very hard (some would say too hard), to become the fullest version of me. But this is different. Comparing myself to earlier versions of myself … useful — yet not the equivalent to chasing the ghost of Buddy Rich with a crowded house ready to see me fail.

So: Why was I so compelled by Whiplash? I think the primary response to that question is that it’s because inherent in the singular striving toward excellence is a reminder any of us can use: We only have so much time. We can spend our days practicing things that are especially important to us or we can spend them on everything else — including things that don’t help us grow. The extreme proves the point: whether or not we can read a sheet of music — whether or not we burn to be the very best at anything — the striving towards excellence matters and the people who might push us the most might not make us feel good as they do.9

After all, the cymbal is a symbol and it’s coming for all of our heads. It’s up to us to decide its meaning — agony or gift.

I hadn’t heard of an “assassin bug” before I saw one on my wall.

Based on a search, it’s likely that the assassin bug that appeared one recent Tuesday morning is referred to as a “masked hunter” (Reduvius personatus) or a similar species. When it comes to the natural world, I’m often in the position of novice. I have read that assassin bugs are not uncommonly found in homes, especially this time of year in my part of the world, which suggests to me ignorance on my part. Maybe I have seen one before. Yet I don’t recall that; and I don’t know that a person hears the term “assassin” attached to a living thing and not recall an encounter with that thing.

Alas, when the assassin introduced itself in the late morning I felt like I was seeing a being I hadn’t encountered before. And I couldn’t miss it; I couldn’t not see this half-finger-long black bug planted on the far wall of my kitchen. It didn’t exactly blend in.

Most of my life my instinct when I encountered a bug in my living space was to stomp on it. Smother it. Put it in a finger vise. Eventually, my default posture evolved to that of an insect transporter: When possible, I would, as we say, “re-home” the critter to the backyard or some other outdoor space.1

A new instinct has emerged in recent times as I have begun to “see” bugs and, in fact, as I have had memorable encounters with a select number of them. Some of these encounters have occurred during nocturnal dreams while others have been in the course of waking life.2 The new instinct, to be oxymoronic, is neither to kill them nor to relocate them but to allow them to be. That is, after an initial impulse to rid myself of the sight of the assassin, I left the bug on the wall.3

Before images come to one’s mind about my living quarters, no, I’m not talking about a stance in which I allow bugs to invade my house and multiple as they will. I don’t live on the set of a Stephen King movie. Instinctually, I still similarly react to bugs in my house, often with some level of disgust and/or fear, and, to be sure, I don’t so much as like having a single gnat on my body.4 Yet, of course, insects do serve purposes. They are here to do more than just earn the moniker we give all of them — to “bug” is universally understood as word that means to annoy — and it seems a natural part of one’s increasing openness to the beauty of the world5 to learn a thing or two about those who give you reason to. Among the things some bugs do — and this is the case with my guest the assassin — some bugs eat other bugs. Ergo, if you allow certain bugs to live you have free pest control. For example, I am often struck by women who fear spiders who can’t stand the sight of a centipede despite the fact that centipedes eat spiders.6 Seriously, to kill some bugs is to promote population growth of other bugs.

Still, on sight, the assassin bug, even before you know its name (also not drawn out of a hat), naturally draws out the instinct to immediately rid yourself of its presence. With a bent-knife-shaped head, razor straight legs, and aggressive hindquarters — to say nothing of a solid color that, if found in a paint store, might be called “hell at night” — the assassin looks like a critter that could survive a nuclear winter. Not many people, I wouldn’t think, regard an assassin bug and think “time to cuddle.”

Upon walking into my kitchen mid-morning that Tuesday and seeing this “masked hunter” my reaction went something like this: It’s on my wall. I want it off my wall. I want it out of my home. I want it gone and I want it gone rightfuckingnow.

Call it growth. Call it laziness. But something in me also said, “let’s take a picture.”

As I said, I looked up the bug and found that the assassin kills cockroaches, bed bugs, and other creatures no one wants lurking about and so I let it be. I made no final decisions, mind you. I didn’t fill out paperwork with adopt-an-assassin. This wasn’t a new pet. I kept an eye on it. I just didn’t take action.

One thing that happens when I learn that there is good in what I had presumed was evil — when I discover that there is light behind what I consider to be darkness — is that my feeling on the little thing changed. As I checked on its whereabouts over the next couple of hours (assassin bugs walk deliberately; they aren’t shifty like the centipede; they don’t sling themselves about like a spider) I noticed my initial instincts of fear and disgust subsided. We might say that I saw something closer to the assassin’s point of view. Love might be too strong of word here but I don’t think it’s wildly wrong to say that some level of affinity entered into the mix.7

Since I had more to do with my day than hang with this killer on the loose I will admit that the assassin got away. What I mean is that it slipped out of my view. I looked for it but couldn’t find it and, more or less, I went on with my day. I had an early evening appointment. I left my house, I came home. Over the ensuing few hours I may have thought a time or two of my interface with the bug but otherwise I occupied my mind with other matters.

That is, until after the hockey game I watched on TV ended. Which wasn’t long after I had opened the windows to let some cool air in. While making my evening oatmeal before a late-night walk my new friend re-appeared more or less in the same spot as during its debut.

Something about this appearance registered differently to me. I re-looked up facts about the assassin and learned that, while they really don’t want anything to do with those of us who walk on two legs, they can, if touched, stepped on, or startled, bite. And their bite, apparently, hurts like a mother.

Add it up: I live in a small house, which means my bedroom isn’t far from really anything, much less the spot where the assassin sat. I was also struck by the fact of the second appearance in such close proximity to the first. In dreams, the psyche will often make the same point more than once or in more than one way. It’s like a tell: Don’t miss this, buddy. The psyche builds in repetition so we don’t not see what it wants us to see. The assassin’s unmistakable re-emergence felt something akin to this dream dynamic. Back from an undisclosed location, this appearance called on me to reassess the earlier decision. Maybe the encounter served its purpose then and now it was time for a reconsideration of this relationship. It’s one thing to not reject the darkness. It’s another to too closely identify with same.

This creature does serve a purpose — I’m grateful the world is home to masked hunters — but it’s also important to protect myself. And not just the observable me but the unseen parts, too.

That is, after I trapped the assassin with a Pyrex bowl and a hastily-attached lid I went into the backyard with the idea I would release the critter in the grass, away from the house, meaning close to my detached garage. Except as I got close to the garage I remembered the caterpillar that has been in diapause in my garage since the fall. Given that assassins like to consume soft and chewy larvae, me and my lidded Pyrex suddenly took off down the alley. Now in the dark and unable to see the assassin or any cracks in the Pyrex lid I suddenly imaged might be present, I walked as fast as I could past the row of garages and beyond until I landed on a strip of grass near a convenience store a half block away. There I released the bug. I lost sight of it. Then found it again. And wished it well.

To summarize (in self-congratulatory) terms:

• I encountered darkness and didn’t flinch (too much).

• I allowed death to be; I didn’t fight it or try to eliminate it.

• When the circumstances changed (i.e., when unnecessary pain would be possible — pain with no upside either for me or the creature that would, without malice, inflict that pain), I changed.

• Whereas I felt certain that ridding my space of this creature was the correct play, I also had to be mindful of my vulnerability (symbolized by my caterpillar friend) as I considered re-location options. A reasonable protective measure complete, I moved on.
  

Meanwhile, the meaning I glean from this encounter continues to pile up. Among the facts I picked up during multiple look-ups and the use of Bug ID, I read that the assassin bug is a predator, but it’s a subtle one — it doesn’t announce itself. It works quietly and alone. The masked hunter takes effective action that doesn’t need to be loud or showy. I like that. I like that a lot. The need for validation, well, that also bites.8

Such encounters prompt questions:

Am I hunting something? Maybe so.

Do I need to let that something out? Not sure. But there’s energy there.

It’s still soon after. I started writing these words the next day — a day I took off of work. With the capacity to do just about anything within my financial means and physical abilities during a free day my energy, after a bout of morning exercise, was squarely on the desire to write about this bug.

After writing the first draft, I read the words back to myself and, inevitably, I saw the effort’s roughness; its incompleteness. No way the words then (or even now after some rewriting) are perfectly coherent to anyone else and very likely the import of the moments themselves won’t translate to any would-be reader in any way close to the way that I wish. It’s like telling someone, “you gotta listen to this song!” The feelings that made you implore another person cannot possibly register the same with them as they do with you. We really never hear the same song.

Yet, even during a shitty first draft, as I wrote about the bug, everything in my head made sense — every detail funneled toward meaning.

I wrote until I became overwhelmed with the connections — a star burned out by its own heat. I will not lament this; there’s nothing I can do about it. But the response to this little creature crawling on my wall and sitting there for a spell … a couple of weeks later and I am still gobsmacked by my response.

Now that I have returned to these words I discover I am a different person. Not a radically different person but who cares if it’s not radical? I may or may not have made these words any more coherent to anyone else (and there is a limit to how much I will work on a short piece about short-lived encounter with a bug). Yet the act of sitting with these words — these thoughts, these feelings — is one thing that glues together parts of me that very often otherwise feel fragmented.

I imagine that statement — or this one — may seem hyperbolic based on an encounter with un ugly bug but in some sense the moment felt like a vessel for the chance to glimpse everything important to me all at once.9

But maybe you had to be there.

The morning after evening rain I stepped into my squint-worthy-bright backyard. Wind clapped the leaves of my red maple and made a shower you could see around. On my way for a morning stroll, I made my way through the alley, down the sidewalk, into the community garden, through the adjacent school yard, other tall, mature trees also made personal showers from the drops delayed. Last night I had a notion to go for a walk but didn’t on account of the rain, which started as soon as I did. This morning, as the cool clouds tears intermittently fell on my shoulders, I got the sense that this wetness waited for me. We can, after all, avoid certain fates for only so long.

Sitting with the experience a couple hours later I try to take advantage of the distance.

Trees give oxygen. Trees = air.
Water sustains. Water = body.
Sun sustains. Sun = life.

At one point as I walked along the parkway the gust was such that outpouring felt akin to a cold shower of the sort usually started by a faucet. “I didn’t need that one,” I said aloud even though no human was near enough to hear me. Upon review, seems I was wrong about that. I need it. I need it all. And how lucky I am right now that I have it.

The other night I dropped my pedometer on the ground — and I didn’t know where or when I did. The downside of noise-canceling headphones is that they work during moments you would like to register with sound.

Instead, when I reached into my pocket and didn’t feel the pedometer registered with distress. I knew immediately how the pedometer escaped my person: my Vuori shorts (a clothing brand, by way, that quickly fails at the seems — just saying) had a hole in the left pocket. I didn’t think the hole was large enough for the pedometer to fit through. Usually, I would put the pedometer in my right pocket but what I did know about that hole is that definitely my keys would slip through and I didn’t want both keys and pedometer in same pocket. I couldn’t hear myself but I still didn’t want to sound like a human maraca.

On one hand, the pedometer wasn’t expensive — an analog counter of the most rudimentary kind. Not only does this little display with a cheap clip not come with an app or a wire, there isn’t even an on/off switch. There’s one button, which, when pressed and held, zeros out the numbers. Otherwise, the count goes up when you move and the count stays put when you do. I carry this low tech gizmo most every where I go.

There’s something about the marvel of the mind — that we can experience times and places from our past; we can imagine things that aren’t there; we can create, plan, reflect, analyze, project, and, feel a sense of oneness with other living things. That’s the mind. The brain itself … well, that’s rather simple. Food. Sex. Sleep. The brain is pretty straightforward in its pursuits and desires. I carry a counter in my pocket and this counter gives me one piece of data — and one piece of data only — that has become essential to my satisfaction and motivation during recent surgery recovery and beyond. Now that I’ve reached a place where exercise is fundamental not just to recovery but to everything else that I want to build and maintain the rest of my years.

It’s the most basic form of psychology: I move more when I know the number will reflect my efforts. I feel more satisfied when the number is higher. Practically, this isn’t nothing. I have come to know, for example, that I am likely to sleep better if the day’s total is 14,000 than if it’s 8,000. But — stepping back from this step counter — you might say I’m no different than I was as a boy when there was a score on a board. When the number on the scoreboard told me my team was ahead, I was content. Simple tracking — of steps or food or whatever is important to one’s health — affects behavior. In some cases, significantly.

(Of course, one could make a case that total steps walked is an incomplete picture of fitness and they would certainly be right.)

And, well, when the whereabouts of the device that gives me this boost of self suddenly was gone — and there was also the awareness that steps had been taken, un-registered (gasp!), in the interim — that gave me a different kind of start. Well after dark, I had only a phone flashlight to guide my way. At first, I thought how unlikely it would be that I would find the thing. I figured I could buy another one. (At least for now; who knows how long they will continue to make devices that don’t give companies data about us.) Again, this wasn’t a financial concern. But how long would it take for me to obtain a replacement? Probably not many days but certainly I wouldn’t have one in time for the remainder of this walk and probably not for the entirety of multiple others.

Yet, after the initial sense of things subsided, something told me that I would, in fact, find it. As I retraced my steps I told the rabbits, “I will find it and it will be glorious.”

Retracing my steps with my phone flashlight low to the ground I did find it and did experience my moment of elation. My answer to the Tom Hanks character Check Noland’s “Wilson” in the movie Cast Away was back in my possession, gripped in my hand rather than dropped into my pocket, the numbers again went up and all was right in Magic City.

My steps were suddenly lighter and easier — and proved another simple psychology hack: Knowing what you’re looking for gives you a chance to find it. In that way, I had lost some steps off my count for the day but I had gained a different sort of satisfaction, as I walked slowly in the dark with hope that I would, as I did, find in the shadows something uniquely useful to me. The best metaphors are the ones that write themselves.

I strolled through Magic City after midnight in various stages of bliss.

During the total of this particular Saturday-night-into-Sunday-morning excursion I talked to precisely one person, a man who came outside to see what was causing his dog to bark so steadily and loudly all of the sudden.

“There’s a fox out here,” I said. A streetlight glowed on this tree-lined street. The dog was behind a chain-link fence. I couldn’t see the dog and I couldn’t see the man.

“Oh, that must be what he’s fussing about.”

“He also could be annoyed by me just standing in the road looking for the fox.”

That plus pleasantries were the sum total of words spoken to me or by me to a specific person with capacity to hear them.

This is different than saying my utterances were over for the evening. At the time when the fox crossed my path, I was, in fact, just getting started. During the rest of my meander I talked to rabbits — I have decided it’s my mission to lessen the collective fear of a species; the initiative is slow but I’m in it for the long haul — and various people who were invisible to the naked eye.

I experienced a fun, flirty, connection with a woman I barely know who wasn’t at any point present.

My imagination engaged me in a discussion with siblings who also were not anywhere nearby.

I talked to my therapist — uh, no.

I conversed with myself, of course, as well as one or two other people who temporarily occupied space between my ears.

Sometimes my words were uttered aloud. Most were in the form of the internal conversation that comes standard issue with the installation of brain waves.

So in that respect I engaged in the experience of being alone with one’s thoughts. Except the tenor and tone of these conversations felt different than is usual for me. Among other ways in which this was evident is that while walking I also did a lot of dancing. I’m not a gadget guy but I bought a set of noise-cancelling headphones a few weeks ago and I am enjoying the sound that can come from something I bought foremost for its capacity to create silence.

One way to look at this walk is as a denouement of a week in which I had felt a wider range of the human panoply of emotions than is common in my experience. Or maybe I didn’t feel more total emotions; maybe it was just that the emotions I did feel struck me in ways, and more deeply, than I’m used to.

I feared the loss of a seminal relationship and took steps to mitigate that loss, steps that in themselves aroused fears and the kind of stress that comes with significant decisions.

I later showed up for that relationship with vulnerability, which, in turn, changed the frame.

Separately, I faced a conflict that had weighed on my mind for more than a week. I did so with, more or less, the version of me I want to be present in such moments but getting there took some work.

One morning I felt a burst of grief while running on a treadmill. I simultaneously imagined myself running in a dead sprint on a sunny day down the backyards of my boyhood home and also my deceased brother outrunning the death that brought about my life. Yeah, not the usual treadmill mindset.

At various times during the week I experienced feelings of loss and even some betrayal. I overcame indecision that could have left me stagnant until I finally chose to do something I wanted to but didn’t think I could ever do … I used aggression in mostly constructive ways … I made friends with indecision and confusion; I let the dust settle … I worked through common stress … Health concerns — my own and those of people I love — came and, if not went, were managed. I have never surfed but this felt like I road a lot of emotional waves.

I encountered someone who managed my anxiety in rare and appreciated ways, which allowed me to see the fear and therefore watch it rapidly dissipate.

I received touch that healed.

I saw colors with my eyes closed.

I encountered beauty I didn’t think my shame would allow me to see.

Maybe I have consumed a jambalaya of emotions like this one before in a single week but never, that I can recall, did so many feel so acute.

In the 36 hours immediately before this walk, in separate spaces and in different ways, I released energy from my body that had been inside me, in some cases, I suspect, for a long time — in one instance I had the sense of touch on my chest by a non-human hand that sealed a vulnerability that had existed as long as I have had biology. I would be the first to say this could be pure fantasy; it’s too early to say and never could it be proven.

This walk was, then, something of an exhale. The consolidation that follows chaos. The celebration that arises from letting go of weighty psychic stores that no longer serve.

Stress builds up and the dissipation can be profoundly palpable.

I am talking in the abstract here, no doubt to the annoyance of the reader, but I am trying to sit with feelings that by their nature are hard to capture. The particulars of the stories would distract; in some cases they would require too many details to be concisely coherent anyway; in others, well, I just don’t want to go there right here right now. I danced alone under the stars and writing about my moves does something for me — even if not for anyone else.

One thing about emotions is that, for all their power, after they pass you can easily dismiss them. Maybe, at least in my case, even feel shame for having felt them so deeply. I think of music. Once I shared with a friend an affinity for an old song that was hard to find even in a streaming world. I was taken with the song in ways that, in hindsight, seem a little over the top. My friend liked the song, too, but our experiences of it were, of course, different (personal to each of us). You can share your feelings but this only goes so far; another person can relate but they can’t do an upload. We can be listening at the same time but none of us hear the same song.

“He was just being emotional,” is a phrase. I have studied Stoicism and such schools of thought tell us that emotions (“the passions”) aren’t to be trusted. Certainly not as much as reason. I’m not only ignoring that right now I am sort of doing the opposite.

Why try to cement this moment with words? It’s a fair question. I don’t know that my answer will be any more durable than are the emotions themselves but there’s something in the ephemeral aspect that makes certain emotions worth savoring and acknowledging. The attempt is one thing that glues me together.

Clouds pass, never to be seen again, not exactly, yet a choice few have appeared in more than a few compelling photographs. I live in a world in which my primary way of perceiving experience isn’t the one that, in most cases, the collective We operates in. Hey, reason and logic are essential — especially in public discourse and in the establishment and execution of societal and professional laws and norms — but, as I have heard philosopher Martha Nussbaum put it, emotions can also be foundations of profound personal knowledge. Besides, if feeling this way is wrong then I don’t want to be right.

I’m attempting to capture a cloud with my fingers. There are no lessons here. No formulas. Only dualities.

Mind and body.

Thoughts and feelings.

Memory and the moment.

The sense of being alive infused by the acceptance of death.

Under starlight and set to music, I moved through the night as something of a happy drunk — one who hadn’t consumed a single chemical — and I don’t know that what language I’ve used to describe the moment does anything useful for anyone else but me and this time, at least, that’s reason enough.

I was recently flipped off at the public library. Yep, in that way — middle finger extended. The digit-al effenheimer.

I thought on this later. Being flipped off that the public library seems akin to getting cursed out in church. Or mooned in the voting booth.

I mean, the library and vulgarity just don’t go together. It’s obscene in the extreme. Just ask every kid who tried to draw pee-pees and wee-wees in the margins of a book that had a due date. You might giggle but deep down you know your doodling doesn’t suit the mood.

We’re not supposed to talk at the library, not beyond a whisper anyway, and so we just don’t use get worked up about things of a nature such that F-bombs typically need to be dropped.

Personally, I always think the presence of books has a calming effect. Even if when I don’t read them. Just being near stacks settles the brain, in my experience. And if you do happen to pick up a title … especially one that grabs you … well, a well-read mind is a calm mind.

For those into mindfulness, the act of deep reading is considered by some researchers not materially different than meditation in its effect on the mind. Can you imagine the one-with-all-living-beings mantra maven sitting one cushion away turning to you and offering a nonverbal fuck you? No, you can’t.

Whatever urge we have to treat a human being as though we are at the moment posting comments on Facebook simply falls away in the presence of printed books.

It’s all thumbs-up at the local library.

For the record, when the northward digit was presented to me, I was not actually inside the library. I was just outside the library. Yet I was at the library — and so was the old bird who flipped me one.

We might say that I was engaged in library-centric activities. Specifically, I was on my way into the parking lot; I had pulled up to the return box. The return box at our library is placed in the same position as a drive-through at a fast-food joint. Except the depository is out of reach from the confines of one’s car. So I got out. I deposited my four items. I let the automatic door close.

While performing this act, which is not normally worth recounting in the course of one’s day, I noticed a car had come from the opposite direction and was now also stopped. The woman driving this vehicle faced me from about four car lengths away.

Maybe it my returns that offended: a Vince Lombardi biography (perhaps she rooted for the Dallas Cowboys in the Ice Bowl), two recent issues of “The Sun” magazine (“The Sun” gives life — and without advertisements of any kind), and a DVD of the best Labor Day movie ever, The Flamingo Kid.1

It wasn’t clear to me why the woman didn’t just pull around me. She could have. There was room to do so. And, in fact, that is exactly what she did do, eventually, after her stare down of me. That is, in fact, precisely what she was doing when she gave me the middle finger salute. Her car — big and white with silver trim — had tires that are possibly worth more than the Kelley Blue Book value of my old Civic.2 Possibly that is why I caused her to get so upset — her 90 seconds might well cost more than mine. Or maybe she didn’t want to be seen so close to my car — the mere proximity to it may have affected perception of value of hers. What I’m saying is that I can’t be sure.

I saw a news report some months ago of stealthy readers in Bonners Ferry, Idaho scouring all the tomes in a children’s library for signs of sexual innuendo. Maybe me lady here in the drive-through lane was on this team of do-gooders, far afield in Minneapolis, and she could spot me a mile away as a person who isn’t scared of the idea a kid might read Roald Dahl or Judy Blume.3

Up Yours. Half Peace Sign. Whatever you like to call it, the extended middle finger is a universal statement that has been expressed for millennia. The Romans referred to it as digitus impudicus: the indecent digit.

Even in this age in which our president’s indecency woven into his the essence and people in the tens of millions, many of them educated adults with offspring, engage in the equivalent of humanoid grunting at on a daily basis via social media, most people still consider a middle finger aimed at another person as a form of obscenity. Famously, British musician M.I.A. during a Super Bowl halftime show more than a decade ago extended a middle finger that caused many viewers to be up in arms.

Perhaps my most vivid middle finger memory occurred in childhood. During an NHL playoff game on April 8, 1984, Chicago Blackhawks winger Al Secord slashed Minnesota North Star Dino Ciccarelli across the back of the head. Fights ensued, penalties were assessed.4 As he was being escorted off the ice, Dino — possibly I was wearing my super-cool Ciccarelli No. 20 jersey that night, which I got for Christmas one year, but I can’t be sure — flipped off a Chicago crowd that was goading him for having the audacity to take a two-hander to the skull. As Dino sent pointed his indecent digits in the direction of the cheap seats, North Stars television color commentator Tom Reid said, with a straight face, that Dino was “telling the crowd, ‘We’re No. 1!’”

Rap concerts and hockey games. These aren’t places you go expecting middle finger shots to be fired, necessarily, but they are less surprising venues than is a facility that hosts a weekly story-time reading hour.

But maybe that’s just my experience. I do hear F.U.s verbalized more commonly in non-private company these days. Maybe this woman is plugged into the ethos of the moment in a way that I am know.

All I know for sure is that in exchange for the lady’s one finger I waved back with all five of mine.

When you walk after dark in the city you not only experience magic you also encounter some weird shit.

The jogger who runs no faster than you walk wearing both a lit-up, reflective vest and also a headlamp. A human holidazzle.

The fella riding on a stacked bike, slowly circling a side-street like he’s surveying a scene only he can see.

The car that moves s…

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Nearly every foodstuff I buy these days comes in a resealable package. Almost none of these resealable packages work. Or, if they do work, the reseals have a far shorter expiration date than do the edibles they are intended to contain.

What in the name of holy bologna is going on here?

It was more than 70 years ago that Danish inventor Borge Madsen messed around and came up with an idea that would later save all of us many messes. Madsen didn’t know why he made the first little plastic baggy thingy. There was no intended use. There wasn’t even an apparent use. That is, until a fellow named Steve Ausnit learned about Madsen’s invention and thought, hey, maybe there could be a use.

Eventually, after about a decade of tinkering, Ausnit came up with an add to the then open-ended plastic baggy thingy. He said, “Hey, let’s close that sucker!1

Hence, Ausnit invented what we all know as the Ziploc bag.2

When Ziploc bags first made their way into supermarkets — this was in 1968 — no one knew what to do with them. Five years later, no one knew what they would do without them. As Vogue told its readers in November 1973, there is “no end of uses for those great Ziploc bags.”

In the ensuing decades, we have stored our lipstick, our Band-Aids, our apple slices, and our salami sandwiches in the airtight seal of the zipper-like mechanism that makes the Ziploc the Ziploc.

This technology, if not the brand name, has been adopted by bag men (and women!) in way more industries than an English major could count.

As a single guy with no offspring, I don’t buy an inordinate number of processed foods. But it’s nearly impossible not to come in contact, nearly daily, with a zipped bag, circa 2026, if you are, in fact, an eater.

Coffee.

Protein.

Fiber.

Supplements.

Don’t get me started on dog treats.

I mean even the bird seed.

These days nearly any granular, powdered, preserved, or flaked food that sits on a shelf — and many that require refrigeration — has a resealable top.

I say resealable top but after the initial package opening that is really more of a theory.

At some point, the trajectory of human technological advancement of the resealable package hit a plateau. Regressed even. We have, in fact, fallen from the height of human sealable packaging ingenuity and currently live in a world in which many bags of goodies come packaged with the promise of resealability3 but, really, should include a legal disclaimer that says, in essence, “Don’t count on that, buddy.”

I mean what are we telling the kids — that it’s OK to lie?

Sometimes the press-and-slide re-seal will hold for a spell and then, poof, it’s gone faster than you can say “stale Doritos.” Whether immediately or some days into the shelf life, nearly always these bags fail to work at some point. That is to say, the seal doesn’t last nearly as long as does the product you bought the bag to consume. By definition, the contents of these foodstuffs are such that they are best not left in open air. Yet across product types and brands, I have tried many zip styles, some of them more than once, and the result is the same.

Fail.

Fail.

Works for a few days … fail.

So ubiquitous is the failure of the modern incarnation of the mock Ziploc I am left to wonder whether the people who manufacture the bags are in cahoots with the makers of the Chip Clip. Let’s face it, the heyday of the bag tong is over. If you can reseal a bag, you don’t need a clip. Ergo, I can’t reseal my bags. So someone’s got a scam going on here.

If that’s not it, then maybe this is four-dimensional chess involving the makers of GLP-1s.

Honey, we can’t store this food. Whatever are we going to do?

The only thing we can do, darling.

You mean eat all of this right now?

We can’t let it go to waste!

Our failure must be explained by a conspiracy of some sort — it would be far-fetched if it weren’t! — and you have to wonder why no other writers are willing to take up this topic. Have others been silenced? Paid off by the bag men (and women!)?

Otherwise, we’d need to take a long look in the mirror at our foodstuff stuffed faces and consider that maybe, as a people, this is the best we can do and, well — excuse me for a moment — er, someone is at my door — um, I’m afraid I’ve got to go.

It appears I’ve said too much already.

After more than seven years at my address, I have officially found a new favorite haunt in Magic City.

The running track sits at the juxtaposition of nearly everything: a school, a church, a tree-lined city street, and the biggest sky in the neighborhood.

I stumbled onto this wonderland of synthetic rubber and polyurethane one night a couple of months ag…

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A quintessential twenty-first century American moment: On a beautiful spring morning in an area of the country, Minneapolis, where such days are few and therefore cherished, I’m walking around a middle-school running track with the aim to exercise, think, and otherwise enjoy an hour in the sun. A tow plane flies overhead. The banner doesn’t face me so I can’t easily read the specific name of the prescription medication mentioned in the aerial advertisement. But I can clearly make out the message I’m being given from on high: “Ask your doctor about it.”

It’s part of the ambience of life in the United States, circa 2026, that several times a day our eyeballs are presented with advertisements for drugs. It’s worth nothing that it didn’t used to be that way and that it still isn’t that way in all but one other industrialized nation (New Zealand). America used to effectively prohibit direct-to-consumer advertising of prescription drugs — and this wasn’t back in the days of bloodletting. Before 1997, the FDA required all prescription drug advertisements to disclose a summary that included all warnings, precautions, contraindications, and adverse events — requirements that effectively blocked most advertising, since you couldn’t fit all of that in a television or radio ad (and it would have made for an exceedingly long airplane banner). Direct-to-consumer campaigns initiated in the 1980s, for example, rare as they were, used print media only. Then, in 1997, the FDA relaxed its rules, which gave rise to the advertisements that dominate our feeds, fill our airwaves, and blemish our blue skies.

As I do my loops and the plane does its loops, I look to the heavens and wonder: Is there a drug that would immunize me against drug company advertisements? You know, I think I’ll ask my doctor about it. Because that would be right for me.

Give the Untethered Dog a Biscuit

There’s something about a clear winter evening that hearkens the possibility of magic.

Steam rising from a chimney ... purple puffs on the horizon … in the day’s last light … I am sent — like that — to a frozen pond of my childhood. In a moment that passes nearly as soon as it registers I am thirteen again playing pickup hockey with buddies. Skates cut ice. Sticks break over posts. Smack-talk. Dramatic saves. Impossible goals. Stanley Cup-worthy celebrations. Sounds and scenes kaleidoscope in my mind. As much as I loved those games, the fondest of these memories stem from moments after everyone else went home and I had the pond to myself. I felt under my feet every minute bump in the glass earth while at the same time the heavens overhead seemed not more than a stick-length away. Skating under starlight is highly underrated.

Such flashbacks arise and fade as I step outside on just such an evening. I will neither skate nor play hockey on this winter night, however, decades beyond thirteen and a week post-surgery.

Before me: A new coat of snow. A clear sky. A big moon. Dusk — the hour between — the hour of transformation — is a favorite time of day.

I’m on the stoop of my Minneapolis city-block backyard. More than magic, I want a good bit of the unremarkable right now. I’m bundled as though braced for an arctic blast and, as I hold the railing to descend my small stack of steps, I move slowly enough to get an inkling of what it’s like to rapidly change my chronological age forward rather than backward: not younger but older.

I gingerly step onto the pathway that cuts through my yard, cleared by my kind neighbor, who knows I can’t do the job right now. I will walk back and forth, house to garage, garage to house, as many times as feels right. It’s a short jaunt but it’s far better than nothing. I put out seed for the birds in case they come around. My boots make slow crunches, the only sound around.

Walking is healing. Walking lessens the pain. I wish I could go on a slow loop through the neighborhood but a recent, sudden shift from fall to winter left the terrain uncertain. And right now I need certain. Slipping on ice wouldn’t be a good idea. So on this particular night I am out but I will not be going about.

I’m on my second of these short round-trips when my awareness turns to the clarity of the sky. (Crisp air makes for an especially clear view.) The hawk isn’t flying; it’s gliding, as if out of one of those purple puffs, right this way.

I’m no expert but I will later learn this attention-arresting creature is probably a Cooper’s hawk. Alternatively, it’s possible it’s a red-tail, though I don’t see a rust-colored hindquarters even as, if on cue, it spreads its wings full. The hawk glides over my fence, over my head, and past me. I turn to follow its path, as it settles high up on my maple tree, some forty feet from where I stand.

I had noticed a nest of some sort up there after the leaves fell in the fall. I don’t recall such a nest in the previous seven winters I have lived in my house. Several squirrel friends live in the area; their dreys are easy to spot in the white ash in my front yard. It seemed unusual if the squirrels did, in fact, change residences but I otherwise didn’t give the matter much thought. The specter of surgery has been foremost on my mind. Not a life-threatening surgery; life-interrupting surgery. The procedure was scheduled before the maple dropped her gorgeous red and orange leaves.1 Right now, the maple’s leafless — and center stage. There’s something about being in the presence of a bird of prey that changes the energy of a space, which in turn changes the energy of the witness.

I hear chirps the location of which I can’t precisely place. I assume they are from the nest. They resemble those of a cardinal but then not precisely so. I wonder if the hawk has offspring it’s back to feed. But that wouldn’t make sense this time of year. Perhaps the chirps are from other birds tucked in one or other column of coniferous trees nearby. Maybe the male in the cardinal family that lives in an evergreen just over my fence in the other human neighbor’s yard is sending a warning to fellow feathered neighbors.

Of course, it occurs this visit could be a raid. Except, I don’t hear squawking. The warning signals, I presume, would be palpable. A few summers ago, with the maple in full form, a hawk came through and stole a chick. I knew this was happening because of the noise — and because the parent bird desperately chased the hawk as the hawk left with lunch. The scene on this night isn’t that. The hawk sits on the assemblage of leaves and sticks for a moment, then slips into same.

I’m no naturalist. As I said, growing up I grabbed hockey sticks, not hugged tree trunks. Yet this moment registers on a level beyond the facts of the scene. So I want to know more about the those facts; I want to relish the scene. I will later learn that likely I’m wrong about this being a nest at all. Rather, it’s likely a roosting site. Hawks need safe places to perch, conserve energy, and protect themselves from the wind and cold of a Minnesota winter. They often reuse old nests, their own or another bird’s, as roosting spots during the off-season. This bundle of leaves in my maple, then, might be akin to the difference between a house and a cabin. The hawk may have built this haven months ago during breeding season and returned for protection from winter weather. It’s 14 degrees with a breeze and, with sun soon to reach the other side of the horizon, it isn’t getting any warmer anytime soon.

Until now, I haven’t been outside all day. Frankly, I already felt cold inside. My base sensitivity, high in normal times, is in overdrive. I didn’t want to come outside but I needed to move. In addition to the physical pain there is the mental strain. Given the myriad sensations that hit the body after your abdominals have been cut open, the opportunities to wonder, especially for a certified over-thinker, aren’t hard to conjure. As this pang or that stab or the shooting-throbbing-aching come and go from one spot or another I find myself battling doubts that healing is, in fact, happening. For sure it isn’t happening as fast as I expected. I had a dream not long ago during which I bought a new pair of skates — even though within the logic of the dream I knew I already owned a pair of perfectly good ones. In other words, I bought skates I couldn’t use. In waking life, I thought I would glide through this recovery, like a hawk in twilight or a boy on a frozen pond under the stars, and, alas, that hasn’t been the case.

The encounter with this hawk doesn’t tell me when my healing will be completed; it won’t erase all doubt that it will be completed at all. But I don’t have to look anything up to sense that the hawk’s presence has given me a bigger boost than any NSAID. For one thing, the visit makes me excited in a way I have not been in these early days of recovery. I will text that kind neighbor, who happens to be a bit of a birder. (He also witnessed the hawk theft from his backyard those summers ago.) I will start writing what will eventually become this essay. Of course, I will also look up symbolism because, for me, symbolism fuels meaning that touches deeper, and is therefore more durable, than logic.

Like many birds of prey, hawks symbolize liberation, self-reliance, and the courage to chart one’s own path. Hawks are territorial and protective, so they can also represent vigilance. Some suggest hawks stand for a guardian spirit that watches over something important.

Because hawks have incredible vision they naturally symbolize clarity and insight. They observe situations from a higher vantage point than I usually allow for myself. This sort of perspective is decidedly apt right now. Step back, we say. We can be too close to something to see it clearly. One of my favorite meditations is one in which the aim is to see oneself from the “10,000-foot view.” In this case, forty feet might as well be a mile.

I can’t follow the hawk’s literal lead but I can be open to this sort of wisdom. The hawk knows instinctively to return to its roosting spot, to protect itself and do little more than rest during an uncomfortable night. The hawk knows that what exists at present will pass. I thought I could, like a hawk, glide in my own way. I haven’t so far. Maybe I need to look at things from a different perch.

After all, the parallel is as clear as a winter night sky: the hawk and I are each in a period of vulnerability; both of us require a perspective that can only come with patience.

Patience is far from my strongest trait — especially when I’m ill or injured. When malady strikes, I am excellent at application. I ice my muscles as told. I swallow those meds right on time. I walk. I eat well. I … can … do. But sit and wait as nerves reignite, as neurons come back on line, as tissue stitches together? To me, that’s watching paint dry while sitting on a pincushion.

My default setting in that way is anathema to patience. For patience isn’t something you do; patience is something you have.

In his 1828 American Dictionary of the English Language, Noah Webster calls patience “the suffering of afflictions, pain, toil, calamity, provocation or other evil, with a calm, unruffled temper; endurance without murmuring or fretfulness.” It follows, then, that you can’t practice patience unless you’re already in a state where patience is called for. I meet that criterion but, decidedly, I don’t measure up in the other essential element in Webster’s definition: I’ve been doing more than mere murmuring of my fretfulness.

Yet something shifted when the hawk glided in. A few minutes ago I stood on my stoop not sure of my next step, my body tight, my head full of angst, and now I feel a sense that I am no longer alone with my feelings. While I’m not sure the change I feel since the hawk’s arrival meets the definition most have when they think of magic, I don’t suspect a waved a wand could change my mood more.2

What does old Webster have to say on the subject? His definition of magic: “The art or science of putting into action the power of spirits; or the science of producing wonderful effects by the aid of superhuman beings, or of departed spirits; sorcery; enchantment.” Next to this definition Webster adds a notation: “this art or science is now discarded.” Yet Webster offers a second definition — “the secret operations of natural causes” — a state very much in play: Natural magic, he says, is “the application of natural causes to passive subjects, by which surprising effects are produced magic attributes to spirits a kind of dominion over the planets, and to the planets an influence over men.” Yes. To call what I experience at present patience is correct and yet it’s not. In a way, I’m cheating.3 For I didn’t fashion this calm; I’m no picture of equanimity. What I am is a passive subject. A recipient. A lucky poser. But I am, too, decidedly, suddenly unruffled. Whereas I thought I was getting something done, my walk, now I want nothing more than to do, well, nothing else.

The point here — and I write this foremost to remind myself — isn’t to glean a single explanation. Or create a formula. Nothing about this moment fits tightly into a dictionary. To endure without murmuring or fretfulness … I think I can’t and then a hawk glides in and wisdom seems to be in the breeze.

There’s a creature in my space with a great capacity to see who is, literally, watching over me. The least I can do is try to see a little more clearly myself.

I’m so grateful for memories of games played and friends made; I got to skate under the stars more often than most. Even then, for sure, life wasn’t stress free. I probably should have been studying for a vocabulary test or a math exam and the very thought of school the next day would have brought about a pang of social acceptance-inspired dread. But as I skated and shot pucks and dreamed by the light of the stars,4 there was a sense of the “surprising effects” of Webster’s second definition of magic.

In some Native American traditions, hawks are seen as messengers between the physical and spiritual worlds, calling people to pay attention to signs around them and the intuition within them. Among the list of potential symbols, this one seems especially instructive to me at the moment. My intuition is one of my strongest traits. It should be a go-to, not a last resort. Standing in the shadow of my maple, I close my eyes. What appears is what I take to be the face of my deceased brother if he were the age he would currently be. I hear him say, “You are OK.”

Like the steam rising from a chimney ... the purple puffs on the horizon … the day’s last light … this form of patience will pass. In the coming days, I will have occasion again to close my eyes and conjure that sense of brotherly assurance. No doubt, I will yet again fret. I will again read too much into this sensation or that one. But what I will take with me is a model to make those moments less frequent or intense — and a new energy now in the ether, brought by hawk that is near.

I make my last loop in the backyard, put my hand on the railing, head up the back steps, open the door and slip into my roosting spot. I leave the cold, I unbundle, and I rest with the intention I will let the moment be what it is until it becomes something else.

Epilogue

It’s the day before the first day of spring. You can tell that a lot of snow used to be on the ground here. But that it soon will all be gone.

“Here” is on a path in the middle of a community garden. I am on that loop through the neighborhood. My jacket is in a closet at home. The hour of transition arrives at later hour now but is no less welcome.

Behind me over the hill I descended to reach this garden a big sun projects purple light into the theater of magic. I stop. A hawk swoops into the scene. A show-stopper: I stand right where I am.

The hawk perches at the top of a tall, leafless tree about a hundred yards from me. The hawk surveys the gardens. My role here is to bear witness and I like that that is all I want to do. Walking is still healing but my next steps can wait.

We’re both here, both still vulnerable, of course, yet in a stronger position. I will soon continue on my path through the gardens, past a small woods, around a primary school, along the Mississippi River in a circle that will eventually bring me back home. This I will do after I watch the hawk turn its head and — like that — between the trees and across the field spread its wings and fly with ease.