The Preacher, The Poker Players and The Poppy

When I close my eyes, I no longer have visions of deer picking their way through the trees, and the voices in my head have completely stopped, but every now and then I believe I can still catch the faint scent of a mesquite campfire off in the distance.

It's been a week now since I've been home, and I continue to be haunted by the memories of my time on a ranch in Sonora, Texas.



There are places in time, I believe, that can have a profound effect on our lives; the consequences not always understood at the time. To sift through the experiences takes time, like an old tin pan, hunting for gold. You must allow for the hours and days of time to wash over the memories so that only the substantial parts remain. These you must chip away at and polish until the true treasure is revealed.

--

"I pastor a small church down in Baton Rouge," said Doug.

We're on a shuttle bus at the Dallas- Fort Worth International Airport, waiting to be taxied over to our "Buddy Holly" plane, which will take us to San Angelo. We've been telling Doug about the evening before, basically trying to justify Jeff's hangover. Doug has been egging us on, asking us about our night, telling dirty jokes and recalling recent drunken escapades of his own. In the middle of one of his stories, one that involved a stripper, a bottle of Jack Daniels and a small farm animal, he turns and notices a gentleman sitting across from us who is sitting with what can only be his daughter. On his right hand he wears a sizeable ring. Doug nods his head at the man and asks, "What kind of ring is that? Where's it from?

"University of _______," the man answers.

"Oh, I thought I saw a cross," says Doug and then without skipping a beat and with no regard to the rather colorful story he's just been telling, adds, "I pastor a small church down in Baton Rouge."

I've only met Doug minutes before and the only thing I know about him is that he used to weigh close to four hundred pounds. Since the previous year when he came on the hunting trip he had his stomach stapled and in the words of Darrell is "at least half the man he used to be." Maybe he does pastor a small church down in Baton Rouge. What do I know?

The man nods and smiles weakly. What can you really say to that? Doug turns back to us and finishes his story with a straight face and absolutely no shame whatsoever.

--

Only in a camp of men could you build a campfire like this. If there were women involved, this would almost certainly be deemed excessive and we would be asked to stop. This is a fire that gets so hot it melts beer cans and glass bottles. Now that's what I call a fire.

It gets started the day we arrive and it doesn't go out until we leave. Needles to say, we go through a lot of mesquite; at least a cord by my calculations. Maybe more. And these are not little logs. Some of them are as large around as a full-grown man. It takes a lot to get a log that large to burn. But once they're burning...

--

"What beats Four-of-a-Kind?" I ask.

"A Straight Flush," answers Jeff, then adding, "Or a Royal Flush."

"No it doesn't," argues Roger. "Nothing beats Four-of-a-Kind."

"How about Five-of-a-Kind?" asks Pat.

"How the hell can you have five?" asks Jeff.

"I've got three threes and two wild cards," says Pat.

"You can't have Five-of-a-Kind," says Jeff. "There's no such thing, wild cards or otherwise."

"Well, there ought to be," says Pat throwing his cards into the pot.

"You can't make up a hand just because there's wild cards," says Jeff.

"So, what beats Four-of-a-Kind?" I ask again.

"Ask Chris," says Roger.

Whenever we have a question about cards, we ask Chris. We used to ask the Huntmaster but he doesn't get involved in poker anymore.

Now I don't know if Chris knows more about poker than anyone else, but he strikes everyone as honest and we are willing to trust whatever he says. He has an honest face, and a wholesome Texas look. He's the kind of person that is sure to say, "Yes, sir." He's a bit quiet, but not necessarily shy. There's nothing boastful about him. You get the feeling that he'd give you his honest opinion on about just about anything if you asked, but barring you asking, he's probably not telling. He even looks like he's from Texas, which of course, he is. And on top of it all he used to be a pilot in the US Air Force or some branch of the military. And he's tall to boot. If he isn't a quintessential Texan, I don't know what is.

"Well," I ask laying down my two Queens and two wild cards. Jeff has a straight flush showing.

"You win," says Chris to me. He carefully spits into a small paper cup and rearranges his chew. "Only thing beats Four-of-a-kind," he says quietly, "is a Royal Flush."

"That's what I'm talkin' about!" I say and grab the pile of chips. "And I'm not listening to you anymore," I say to Jeff.

Jeff smiles and shakes his head and throws his cards on the table. He's not going to argue too much. He already has everyone's money.

I am having a fantastic year at the poker table. Last year, I think I lost every hand I played. I considered the money my contribution to everyone else's fun. Winning wasn't really my chief concern - which I think was obvious to everyone - having a few laughs and hearing tall tales was. The reason I've had such a good year this year is that I'm about even. I haven't really won much, but I haven't lost much either. I'm very happy about this.

--

"So there we were, down in Key West," Jeff says. He pauses trying to remember something then turns and yells, "Dad, what was the name of that bar in Key West? You know, the one that was clothing optional!"

"The Bull," calls the Huntmaster.

"Right," says Jeff with a smile, "The Bull. Anyway, it's this big bar on several floors, but the top floor is clothing optional."
Several of us are sitting around the campfire in lawn chairs drinking beer. It's a mild evening. The sky is clear, the stars brilliant, and the fire warm. So we're drinking beer and telling stories.

"So we walk into the clothing optional bar and there's Robbie, drunk out of his mind, sitting and talking to some people," says Jeff. He's already beginning to laugh and he's the one telling the story.

This is maybe my favorite thing about being in Texas. It's my second year and for the five days a year that I'm here, I laugh harder and more often than the entire rest of the year combined. Maybe I just happened to be with funny guys, but I like to believe that it's a mix of factors that allow us to drop our guard, relax and shed months of stress.

"But here's the thing," Jeff is saying. "Robbie is sitting in a chair with his pants around his ankles, shoes still on, and his shirt pulled up to his armpits. He's so drunk that in his mind, he's naked. He just wanted to fit in with everyone else. As far as he was considered, he was naked."

Jeff has slid down in his chair imitating Robbie. He's rubbing his belly and sitting with his legs spread at the knees. We're all laughing hysterically including Jeff. I have to actually get up from my seat and walk away I'm laughing so hard. I can barely breathe and I have tears coming out of my eyes. It's not just the story, it's a combination of other stories I've heard about Robbie as well. I believe every word of it.

"He looked like he was sitting on the john taking a shit!" laughs Jeff. "We asked him, 'Robbie, what the hell are you doing?'
He just smiled and rubbed his belly."

"Jus sittin ere," he slurred.

--

It's a quarter to six on Tuesday night and I'm sitting in a ground blind, a mix of pine branches and cedar limbs bound together around existing trees with baling wire. One the ground is a piece of shag carpet, put down to muffle the noise. The smell of cedar is strong. I'm sitting on an old metal folding chair, the kind you'd expect to find in a Sunday school class - just a little too short. The last of the setting sun is casting a warm, yellow light across the plains, making the normally monochromatic colors dance feverishly.

Looking out through a makeshift window, I am a voyeur to a world unknown to me. A world that is both wild, in every sense of the word, and absolutely peaceful at the same time. Not seventy yards in front of me, whitetail doe, fawn and young bucks feed and play in the dying light. A gaggle of turkeys makes it's way through like a rowdy bunch of teenagers. They storm in, startling the deer, feed haphazardly and are gone again, leaving the deer feeling self-conscious and timid. Before long, first one, then another buck, comes slowly into view. They stop, sniff the air and proceed with caution. It's a means of survival where there is no chivalry for the women and children. The young and weak are there to be sacrificed for the good of the strong. They feed easily yet warily, snorting and stomping at the slightest change in environment. They rely on their acute senses to recognize danger, but out here, in the middle of seven thousand acres, where they have little experience with man, they are less suspicious of the unknown. They have few predators and are therefore less skittish than their brethren elsewhere. If you make even a small noise, they will all stand up, perfectly still, looking in the direction of the offending sound and testing the air for strange scents. Although they can most certainly smell me, I sit perfectly still, blending in with the landscape, and the deer go back to feeding.

--

"You want him?" The Huntmaster asks.

"Sure," I say.

We're driving back to camp from our morning hunt. The Huntmaster is driving and I'm sitting in the middle with Terry riding shotgun. Terry and I each have a rifle between our legs and I have the Huntmaster's rifle and shotgun on my left. I'm also bundled up, dressed for sitting still in a ground blind for four hours in freezing temperatures. I look like the little brother from "A Christmas Story" only I'm head to toe in camouflage.

The Huntmaster is already out of the cab and is leaning over the hood with his binoculars watching the game on the plains. He's spotted a small herd of antelope with a sizeable Black Buck. Beautiful animals. They were introduced many years back from Africa or South Asia, I can't remember which, and have thrived here ever since.

They're very skittish. You only ever see them out on the plains, never in near our blinds. They like to be where they can see a long way off. Presumably they're keeping a lookout for lions or something.

As I struggle to rearrange rifles and shotguns and wedge myself out the door, I'm trying to move quickly, but with a certain grace. I don't want to do anything that might spook the game. I must be quick, yet smooth. Get out of the truck. The Huntmaster is waiting. He is not a patient man. Get out of the truck. Once out, I must chamber a round, turn and rest my rifle on the hood of the car. Get out of the truck. Don't forget the safety. Get out of the truck. Everything moves in slow motion, like I'm moving under water.

"HHHHHHOOOOOOONNNNNNKKKKKKK!!!!!"

The Huntmaster lifts eight inches off the ground. Everything is still in slow motion and I actually watch him rise off the ground, then turn toward me in midair. There's a wild look in his eyes that appears to be a cross between utter fear and primal anger. His hat leaves his head and his white hair sticks out in all directions. His lips begin to move and while I can't hear him from inside the cab, I can clearly read his lips, "S-O-N-O-F-A-B-I-T-C-H."

I look down. In my effort to get myself out of the truck on the driver's side, I have just leaned on the horn with my elbow. Of course, The Huntmaster was leaning across the hood at the time, so he got the full effect.

I don't even look behind me to see the game. I look at the Huntmaster. There is fire in his eyes and with his hair doing this unnatural thing, for a second I'm afraid he might actually drag me out of the truck, put his boot on my neck and shoot me in the back of the head.

"I guess they're gone, huh?" I whisper.

The spell is broken. He just shakes his head and bends down to pick up his hat, which is lying in the dust.

"Yup, I'd say so," he replies and climbs back in the truck.

I have to say that the rest of the ride back to camp was pretty quiet.

--

I never knew that a deer's testicles were considered a delicacy until I met Smiley. I don't know his real name but we all called him Smiley. I asked once about his name and my request was translated into rough Spanish. They told me of course, but since it had no equivalent in English, I quickly forgot it. Smiley's background was equally unclear. He was most assuredly of Mexican decent, but of some indeterminate mix, and I don't think he really understood English, but he understood me well enough, and I him.

Whenever we would come in from hunting, whoever was driving the truck would pull around back near the shed and honk the horn. Manny, along with his son-in-law and another friend I never got the name of, would come out to dress the deer. Smiley always came along.

Somewhere along the way in dressing the deer, Manny would reach down, cut the buck's testicles off and toss them to Smiley who would snatch them clean out of the air with his teeth and run away on all fours. What do you expect from a dog?

--

There are those who believe, our wives and coworkers for instance, that we rough it while at the ranch. I think I can speak for the group when I say that we're all pretty much okay with that. But the truth is, most of us are happier than pigs in shit. Rarely do I sleep so soundly, eat so well, or laugh so hard.

--

My bags are packed. I'm ready to go. It seems like it took me all day yesterday. I started out as I always do for a long trip, laying out everything on the dining room table. Jane hates this, but it's the only way I can organize everything. Then I'd walk from room to room, collecting bits and pieces. Clothes from the laundry room, gear from the attic, a knife from my desk in the office, camera, boots, almost forgot extra batteries, hat, poncho, tripod, is that thing charged up, socks, gloves, check the weather - how cold is it going to be in the morning, more socks, long underwear, check the weather again, extra sweater, did it say it was going to be near 60¡ one day, short sleeve shirt just in case, camouflage jacket and pants, sunglasses, did I pack enough socks.

And that's how my day goes. Unlike business trips, which I do every week, I'm more deliberate here. Normally, I pack in about ten minutes. Somehow this takes me all day. First, I have to account for wild swings in the weather. When we get up before dawn, the temperature will be hovering around freezing, whereas during the middle of the day, we'll likely be sitting outside getting a tan. But I hate being cold.

Take this morning for instance. I just checked the weather and it now looks like it's never even going to get below freezing. I, on the other hand, have packed enough clothes to outfit me for a polar expedition. My biggest problem will probably be that I'm dressed too warm the entire time. But I leave for the airport in two hours and I'm not about to repack. It also now says that instead of possibly one day of rain, it might rain twice. Maybe even three times. I'm not as prepared for that. I have one poncho. Not raingear or anything. If it's a steady rain, I'll most likely just get wet.

But despite all the pre-game warmup, I can't wait to go. This is the third year in a row I've been asked to go, and I've found that it is the week I most look forward to all year. I travel all over the country, to beautiful places. I stay in exquisite hotels with downy beds, wonderful service and spectacular views. I eat at the finest restaurants and drink the finest wine. I fly first class. But once a year, the place I look forward to most is a small cabin in the middle of a 7,000 square mile ranch, 90 miles off the Texas border with Mexico. I sleep on a cot in a room with eight other men, burping and farting and laughing. We drink beer around a campfire, play poker till later than we should, survive on less sleep than I need, and don't shower all week.

It's true, this is not the Ritz Carlton. There is no wine list. There is no cheese plate. There is no down comforter. But I find I am relax here more than any resort I've ever been.

I laugh more in a week in Texas, than I do the rest of the year combined. And I'm not talking about a chuckle or two. I'm talking about tears-coming-out-of-your-eyes, can't-breath laughter. The kind of laughing you did as a kid at summer camp. And with it, you can almost feel twelve months of stress melt away.

Of course there are a few side effects. By the end of the week, when I close my eyes, I really do see deer walking through the brush. And I swear I can hear the voices of my fellow campers, even when I'm all alone. It's kind of freaky. This is what comes from spending close to eight hours a day staring off into the bush. Sitting so perfectly still that by the end of the week, your shoulders are so stiff, you have trouble moving your head around.

But it's all worth it. I come home refreshed, happy, and relaxed. I never know if I'll get invited back, there's a lot of people who want to come, and I'm not the Huntmaster's only client. But what I've learned is how much I enjoy being outside, of having simple comforts, of relaxing with the company of a few good men who have become friends.

I don't know if I'll be there next year. But if I'm not, I'm going to find a few friends, and convince them that a week outdoors is just the thing we need to set everything right with the world. And maybe, just maybe, I'll be just a little better at packing.

I'm Not From Here

(Original Published in New Jersey Monthly Magazine)

Along the shores of Tuscany grow wild, salty shrubs that sailors, long ago, claimed to be able to smell long before they could actually see land. It was this distant scent that alerted them that home was near.

Although I have never spent time at sea, I can appreciate the sailors' reaction. I too live on the shores of the ocean and associate home with its scent.

I live along the tidal marshes of southern New Jersey in the village of Goshen. This is low country and much of the land is barely a few feet above sea level. Some not even that. The low country has a peculiar feel and smell. Pat Conroy, a passionate zealot of the coastal island, once described the low country smell as, "the bold, fecund aroma of the tidal marsh; an exquisite and sensual a smell like new milk, semen and spilled wine, all perfumed with seawater."

This aroma is a part of my life in Goshen. Locals joke that one of the hallmarks of a person who has lived here for any length of time is that they can walk out their back door, sniff the air, and remark without meaning or prejudice, "Low tide."

When I first moved here, I would wrinkle up my nose with disgust, much like I see the hoards of vacationers do now. For many, the smell of low tide is repugnant; a combination of smells that assault the senses with their ferocity and leave the uninitiated reeling. But after living here for nearly six years, the smell is the smell of home and all that the word entails. It's all safety and comfort - like mashed potatoes and flannel sheets.

This is the place I call home. But it was not always so. And while it's rhythms and smells will always be a part of who I am, I am not from here, and this separates me in a way that few can understand.

Pat Conroy also wrote, "My wound is geography. It is also my anchorage, my port of call."

Geography is also my wound. I grew up the child of parents who moved from place to place with a kind of gypsy nonchalance. When people ask me where I'm from (by which they mean where I grew up) and I rattle off the litany of states and cities that were my home as a child, they all ask the same thing, "Was your father in the military?"

The thing is, we didn't even have so reasonable an excuse. The best way I can explain it is that we moved as often as we did simply because there wasn't any reason not to. I don't mean to imply that there was no reason for our moves. They did, in fact, always coincide with my father's work, and to hear him tell it, it sounds reasonable enough. But even as a child growing up, this didn't go far enough to explain going to a new school every year, or having to make new friends in a town where the kids spoke in a strange accent and used words I'd never heard.

Oklahoma is where my parents grew up and for the first 25 years of their lives or so, they never left the state. Then, soon after my older sister was born, they got itchy feet and we began our short tour of the country. At different times we lived in cities and towns in Southern California, Illinois, Tennessee, Pennsylvania and Oklahoma. Some places we lived in for several years or so, some for not more than a long, hot summer. Several times we moved back and forth between two states more than once.

There was a certain excitement to moving someplace new and wonderfully strange that I thoroughly enjoyed. I was young enough that picking up and leaving everything you knew behind was kind of refreshing. The upside of this is that I can plop down anywhere and feel at home. The downside is that I have never felt any sort of attachment to any one place.

From the time I entered the third grade till the day I graduated the eighth, I attended a Mennonite school in Southeastern Pennsylvania. My schoolmates were the children of farmers and ranchers and I grew up slowly in the heart of Pennsylvania Dutch country. My friends and their families were Mennonites and so believed ultimately in the righteousness of pacifism. I, on the other hand, grew up in a house with parents who believed in the righteousness of Republicans.

I differed from my friends in many other ways as well. While I lay sleeping, in the hours before dawn, they were milking cows, feeding pigs or any other number of chores that a young child living on a farm is expected to perform before breakfast.

But the biggest difference was their sense of belonging to the land. The families of my friends had, for the most part, been living on their land for generations. Many of them lived in houses that had been expanded to include grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins. They felt attached to the land and it was home.

They say that the most important time in a child's development is in the first few months. It is then that the child bonds with its mother. Children who fail to make this bond at an early age are usually doomed to failure in ever making that bond as adults.

This is as close as I can get to describing my lack of roots to a geographical home. I had no bond at an early age. And so I believed that I too was doomed to wander the world, with no real place to call home.

Today, I work just outside Philadelphia, about an hour and fifteen minute commute each way. I wake early and make the trek up to work each day and in the evening I make the long drive home. My drive is incomprehensible to many people and I often get quizzical looks about my commute. Why, people want to know, do I live so far away from where I work? I tell them that it's not a question of how far away from work I live, but how far away from home I work. My drive is a small price to pay to live in a place I can call home.

The town of my home is a special place to me. Not just because of its beauty and solace, although that is indeed part of it. It's home because this is where my family is. It is true what they say, home is indeed where the heart is. And my heart lies with my family in a small seaside village in South Jersey called Goshen.

My ride home contains many twists and turns, just as my life up till now has. I travel on large highways, amidst many commuters, all traveling quickly to and fro in the great American pursuit of success. Eventually, the highway turns into a two-lane road that snakes through small towns, coastal communities and great stretches of pinewoods. Finally, the woods open up and the marsh comes into full view, stretching out to the horizon in glorious splendor. As I write this, it is autumn and the reeds and grasses of the marshes are turning golden. The light is clear and warm as the sun sets to the west.

Often as I drive, my mind wanders. I think about work, my family and my life. Often I am unaware of my surroundings, but I never miss the first sight of the low country. Just before I come out of the woods, a scent invades my daydreaming. It is the smell of life, of things growing and decaying, beginning life and dying. It is the smell of the low country and as I look out over the land, I breath deeply and thank God that I am home.

Looking For Bears

"We're going to the dump," Jane announced.

I was lying on the sofa of a cabin in the Adirondacks. We were on vacation and I had purposely traveled thousands of miles away from home just so I wouldn't have to do anything remotely like work. This sounded like work.

I looked up at her and asked, "Why are we going to the dump?"

"To see the bears," she said.



I'd been decompressing for the last several days and was in a state of ignorant bliss. My brain, normally a whirlwind of activity, had hopelessly atrophied over the last couple of days and I wasn't thinking too clearly. Maybe I hadn't heard her right. I thought she'd said something about bears.

"The what?" I asked again.

"The bears," she said very matter-of-factly. She might just have said, "Come on. We're going to the grocery store to buy mayonnaise."

Now there may be a great many people who assume there are bears at the dump, but I am not one of them. I live at the beach. I assume there are seagulls and maybe a few raccoons at our dump, but to be honest, I really wouldn't know. I'd never before had reason to go to the dump. I'd certainly never been invited for a trip to one.

"Jill says that they come down to the dump at sundown to feed," she said. "Sometimes they even have their cubs with them."

Jill was our host. She and her husband Jason had invited Jane and I, along with Jane's sister Bernadette and her husband Michael, up to their cabins for a week in the woods. The cabins belonged to her Aunt who was an heir to some fortune or another.

Apparently, what we would call a resort, these people called cabins. The place was decorated in the most extravagantly subtle sort of way. The way you'd do everything if you had the money. It was like a case study into how things should be done when you don't have to cut corners. This was of course an alien concept for me to begin with.

They called it "the Camp." After seeing it for the first time, I had visions of Merryl Streep and Robert Redford in East Africa lounging about in khaki with wine, candles, tents, and ten or twenty servants. You know, something quaint by the river.

To me the word camp recalled memories of humid tents, clothes smelling darkly of wood-smoke and blackened hot dogs. Not to say that they were altogether unpleasant memories, it's just that this is not what I thought of when I heard the word camp.

The main building was the Big House, which had a fully stocked kitchen, complete with a microwave, bread machine, pasta machine and every other sort of gourmet accessory you could imagine. There was a huge dining room with a table that could easily sit sixteen or so, a comfortable living room with an enormous fireplace, a master bedroom with it's own bath and fireplace, several other small bedrooms, and a huge wrap-around porch.

Separated from the Big House were two, smaller cabins, one of which we were staying in, and the Bunkhouse, where children were housed when the clan got together. The bunkhouse was basically one big room full of bunk beds, perfect for kids, and well out of earshot.

Lastly there was a utility house that contained skis, snowmobile suits, an extra refrigerator and freezer, a large metal sink for cleaning fish, archery equipment...the list went on.

Our cabin alone was amazing. It sat to the far right of the compound and was closest to the boathouse. It was actually the newest of the three and consisted of one large cathedral-ceiling room with a loft-style bedroom overlooking the living area. There was a kitchenette, which consisted of a small closet containing an apartment-sized fridge, a sink, a coffee maker and a minimal, although matching, collection of dishes.

The walls of the cabin were tongue and groove pine planks, floor to ceiling. In one corner was an old, hand-made wooden canoe suspended in the air by a series of ropes and pulleys.

Along one wall were built-in shelves stacked with books of all sorts ranging from gardening to mysteries, personal essays to political thrillers. Somewhat typical for a vacation house except for the fact that most had been autographed by the author with a personal note to our absent hosts.

Everywhere you looked there was Adirondack paraphernalia. In any other home, it would have seemed ridiculous and out of place, but here it looked perfectly reasonable. After all, where else but in the Adirondacks could you decorate a cabin with birch bark lampshades and tree trunk benches and not look stupid?

The paths around the camp were covered with mulch and lined on each side with Birch saplings. To the far right of the cabins sat the boathouse. Inside were all manner of equipment for life on the lake. There was a traditional wooden lake boat that would have made Norman Thayer proud, as well as a more practical if not less romantic, metal fishing boat. You could also find kayaks, canoes, windsurfers, and not one, but two sailboats.

If fishing was your thing, there was an entire wall devoted to fishing poles of all shapes and sizes, as well as an enormous tackle box filled with every conceivable piece of tackle: hook, line, and sinker.

This, I thought to myself, is what Heaven must be like.

The Bible speaks of how difficult it is for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. I decided that the reason could possibly be that many wealthy people would simply get to Heaven and think to themselves, "Oh, it's just like my summer home."

We were to be here a week. We had already spent several days lounging about the lake, fishing, creating fabulous meals, reading, laughing and lying in the sun.

But today, we were looking for bears.

We all piled into two cars and went barreling off down the gravel road. The weather was absolutely beautiful with temperatures hanging in the mid seventies and low humidity (at home they were having a record heat wave with temperatures reaching triple digits).

We got to the entrance of the dump and turned in. The thought of seeing wild bears had everyone pretty excited and we'd brought all manner of cameras and binoculars.

"So what are we supposed to do if the bears come after us?" I asked.

Everyone just stared at me blankly. My wife shook her head.

"What?" I asked. "It could happen." No one answered.

It seemed a reasonable question to me. The television is full of stories of animals attacking people armed with video cameras. Maybe some animals just don't like to be photographed. What do I know? I didn't even know bears liked to hang at the dump.

We walked to the edge of a paved plateau that sat nearly fifty feet above the outlying area. From here we had a perfect vantage point that looked out across a sea of trash that rose and fell in waves as far as the eye could see. Even the dumps are better looking here, I thought.

The sun was setting, and shone with that exotic glow you only experience at dusk. The colors had gathered a saturated, brilliant appearance that sang in the air and everything seemed to vibrate in tune to some unheard song. The birds chattered away in the trees and the dogs panted at our sides. It was a life-altering moment.

We didn't see any bears.

Sometimes, that's the way it is though. We didn't find what we were looking for but in the middle of a dump in upstate New York I experienced something that will be with me for the rest of my life.

And the thing I'll remember is not the extravagant living, or opulent cabins, though they were indeed nice and obviously had an impact on me. No, the memories I go back to in my mind are the simple ones. Sitting quietly on a deck by the water, basking in the sun and reading. Lying in the bottom of an old metal boat with a fishing pole between my knees and a breeze in my hair. And of a trip to see a bear where none were to be found.

In fact, one day I'm sure I'll be sitting in an old folks home with a plastic cup of unfinished Jell-O(r) in front of me and I'll be telling my nurse, the one I think looks like my Aunt Carolyn, about this one glorious day I had at a dump in upstate New York.

She'll smile condescendingly; adjust her bra and wonder, not for the last time, why she never finished medical school.

But I'll be gone. I'll be at that dump, looking for bears. And I'll already be in heaven.

Titles

I got a postcard from my dentist yesterday. I like getting postcards. It makes me feel like someone out there cares about me. Even if it is from someone who wants to stick sharp instruments in my mouth. It's still a postcard.
Usually, I don't even know why I'm going. I told my wife Jane about my appointment.

"What are you having done?" she asked.

"I don't know."

"Why are you going, then?"

"They sent me a postcard," I said and held it up for her to see.

"Ooooh, a postcard," she said.

My dentist's name is Dr. Tinney. I like him. I've never been fishing with him or anything, and he's never offered me a beer, but as dentists go, he's pretty good. The only thing I don't like about him is that I have to refer to him as Doctor Tinney. Not just me either. Everyone calls him Dr. Tinney; even his wife, who also happens to work there. Of course I've never seen them outside of his office, so for all I know she calls him Hercules when they're alone.

The thing is, he's only a few years older than me. Why do I have to call him Doctor Tinney? It basically amounts to calling him sir, which I don't appreciate. Why not Edward? Or Eddie? I'd even settle for Butch, or Skip.

Truth be told, I've always been a little bothered by the whole title thing. Why are certain occupations worthy of a title and others not? Were those extra years of college so grueling that we have to be forever reminded of the hardships they endured?

I started working when I was fourteen. I worked full time and went to school full time all through college. I even managed to get a degree. I'm still working, by the way, and the only thing people call me is Dave. Not College Graduate Dave. Not Amazing Working Guy Dave. Just Dave.

Some people will tell you that titles are used out of respect, but I don't buy it. Lawyers get to attach a few extra letters to the end of their names and no one respects them.

I'm not looking for a title, you understand. If fact, I already have one. My business card says "Creative Director." I'm a director, which if you think about it, sounds a lot like dictator, which ought to be worth something. But it's not.

A lot of people have titles. We just don't use them in casual conversation or to greet people. You rarely hear someone say, "Hey, Sales Manager Keith! How's it going?"

Technically, I'm also a Senior Vice President in my company, but this doesn't seem to have the same effect in business as it does in politics. In politics, there's always an outside chance some nut will shoot the President and you'll get the good office with the red bat-phone. In business, however, some companies have hundreds of Vice Presidents. Somebody shoots the President of your company, and you just might get the day off.

The sad truth is, no one calls me by either title. I've tried. No Director Dave, or Vice-President McCarty. Sometimes the President of the agency will refer to me in general as his Creative Director, but this usually makes me sound like a Schnauzer.

In the old days, people like doctors and lawyers got a lot of respect for a reason. They were the only ones in town who could read. When your day revolves around cow manure, tractor tires, and whether or not it's going to rain, you're bound to develop a healthy respect for anyone who made it past the eighth grade and can tell you how many bones are in your skull.

It's not just that I don't like titles; I don't like the fact that apparently, people get to choose their own. I had a job once where I picked my own title because I was the guy who designed the business cards. That's really all there is to it. If you can put it in ink, people will believe anything. I decided I'd be the Advertising and Promotion Director. And I was. But the person who had the job before me was just called Sue. I don't even think she had a business card.

Grandparents are always trying to dictate what they want to be called. They dream of the day they can be Pop-pop or Grandma. But the reality is there are far too many Noonie's, Uppie's and D's for that tactic to be working out real well.

Everyone starts with good intentions. We introduce our babies to their relatives as Grandma, or Aunt Jane, and a few years later you have a two year old calling you Dudu.

Some people don't have to work a day in their lives to get a title. In Britain, you can be a Lord, a Duke, or even an Earl just because you were born at the right time to the right parents. And if you really impress someone in the Royal Family, you can even become a knight. Anthony Hopkins, an arguably talented actor, got to be a knight for acting like a guy who ate other people. Now we're supposed to call him Sir Anthony.

I have to believe it used to be a lot harder to become a Knight back in the old days. You had to win a war or kill a dragon or something. Not just memorize some lines and lie believably about eating someone's liver.

In America, you can also get a title of sorts on the whim of your parents. The country is full of John Smith, the third's and Anthony Jones, the second's. It doesn't seem right to me that you should get a title just because you come from a long line of unimaginative people.

If you rise high enough in political office, you not only get a title, you get to keep it when you leave. Senators, Congressmen, and Presidents all get to keep their titles long after their service to their country is over. Former presidents are referred to not as Mr. So-and-so, but as former President So-and-so.

Military personnel also get to keep their titles. They don't even have to say former. For instance, the commander of Operation Desert Storm, Norman Schwartzkoff, is introduced as General Norman Schwartzkoff, United States Army, Retired. This leads me to believe that Norman remains a General. He's just retired.

There are other titles that annoy me. If you become a lawyer and hang around the job long enough, and have dinner with enough politicians, one day they might call you, "Your Honor." This sounds a little too much like royalty to me. I thought we dumped a whole bunch of tea into a harbor just to get away from that kind of thinking. It's just a guy in a black robe, who memorized some old law cases. Not that being a judge is easy, but do we really have to call them, your honor?

But it's not just politics and the military. The church has gotten into it as well. Catholic priests expect you to call them Father. I already have one father to keep track of, and I don't need any more. I'm not about to call someone Father just because he swore off sex and drinks wine in church.

Between you and me, I think the whole thing is a scam. I'm not sure how or why, or what exactly these people are up to but I'm going to get to bottom of it. For now, however, I'm off to my dentist appointment. Maybe I'll ask Ed if he wants to go grab a beer afterwards.

Wasting Time

It's Saturday morning and I've come downstairs to find my wife Jane sitting at the kitchen table drinking coffee and reading a magazine. I've been upstairs showering, dressing, and generally trying to decide how I want to waste my time today.

That's what Jane calls it. Wasting time. I'm okay with that. I don't have a problem wasting time. In fact, a large part of my days off are spent contemplating how to waste as much of it as possible. I'm good at it.



Jane does not always appreciate this aspect of my character. For instance, this morning she has already run ten miles and is now having coffee in the kitchen. I, on the other hand, have just gotten out of bed.

"So, what's it going to be today?" she asks without looking up. I imagine that she's either plotting the overthrow of a small country or thinking about tearing out a wall somewhere and installing French doors.

"I can't decide," I admit. "Maybe golfing." I grab a mug out of the cupboard and pour myself some coffee. "Or surfing," I add looking out the window. It's shaping up to be a beautiful day - full of possibilities.

"Not fishing?" she says without a hint of sarcasm and refreshes her coffee. She still hasn't looked up from her magazine and I can't tell if she's serious or just giving me a hard time. She does that a lot. Gives me a hard time. She's good at it.

"I don't know," I say and I mean it.

That's the beauty of wasting time, you have no real agenda and anything pretty much suffices, as long as there is no clear goal and no set timetable.

This isn't to say I don't work hard. I work very hard. It's just that I'm a firm believer in the work hard, nap often, school of thought. This is very different from the work hard, play hard school. Disciples of that particular institution tend toward investment bankers who climb mountains on the weekend.

Let me say here and now that climbing a mountain on the weekend is just work in disguise. Climbing a mountain is not even remotely relaxing and is potentially deadly. I find it very hard to relax when death is a plausible outcome.

Because of the strenuous pace I keep during the week, I don't move very quickly on the weekends. I'm more of a shuffler by nature. By the time the weekend rolls around, I've used up all my hustle and bustle and all I've got left is a little random moseying around.

On my days off, I lumber about, checking out this part of the yard, or sampling leftovers from the refrigerator. I may lie down spontaneously and take a nap, or read three pages of a book I've already read several times while standing at the sink eating a pickle. It really doesn't matter.

The thing is, while I have a lot of interests, I would never go so far as to claim any particular passion for any of these interests. Quite frankly, with all the things I get into, I'm spread a little too thin for passion.

There are people who have passions though. I know because I've read about them. These are people who have found one thing that they do really well, and they've stuck with it. And I have a lot of admiration for them.

People who are passionate about their hobbies do not approach it frivolously. Not being all that passionate about any one thing in particular, reading about a hobby is, for me, a far more relaxing waste of time than actually participating in one. This is namely due to the fact that since I don't devote any significant portion of time to any one thing, I am by nature, a disciple of many things and a master of none.

I have more what you would call hobbies. The word itself implies frivolity and a lightness of heart. Which is exactly what I'm looking for on my days off - a little frivolous wasting of time.

The truth is, I am well known in my family for having a wide range of hobbies, none of which could be construed as overly productive. All my life I've bounced from one hobby to the next, many of them quite strange. When I was a ten, I spent the better part of a summer burning pictures of cowboys into two-by-fours with a magnifying glass. What can I say? It held my interest for a time.

I also read about a lot of different types of hobbies: from fly-fishing and surfing, to woodworking and beekeeping. I get almost as much entertainment out of reading about an activity as I do by participating in one, sometimes even more so.
When you're reading about, say fly-fishing, everything is fluid art and grace. You read about a time when the author was fishing at dusk in Montana where the air was still, the sunset brilliant and the fish hungry. You can almost see the slow, beautiful arc of line as it flows back and forth overhead, sending a light spray of water into the air. The angler is one with nature and everything is flawless. The fish strikes, the man rears back, and the fish leaps out of the water in a powerful display of will.

What you don't see is the guy who's been reading the book, standing in his neighbors yard trying to whip a fly line back and forth (his yard being too small with lots of trees that hang down so that he's already had to cut his line out a few tree limbs).
You also don't get the inside scoop on how a beautiful arc of fishing line can become a rat's nest with the flick of a wrist, or that when you're out on the water, how easy it is for your delicate little hand-tied lure to slap the water with enough brute force to actually kill a fish.

Jane believes that in addition to wasting time, what I'm really after is just a creative way to spend as much money as possible while accomplishing nothing. In fact, she contends that the more money it's possible to spend on a particular hobby, the more I'm attracted to it.

"Not true," I once argued. "I've never expressed an interest in hang-gliding and I hear that's very expensive."

"We live at the beach," she countered. "If we lived anywhere near a mountain you'd be strapping yourself to a kite and leaping off into the wild blue yonder."

"That's ridiculous," I told her, then immediately began thinking about how cool it would be to hang-glide: the thrill, the freedom, the sheer expense of it all. I began to wonder how close the nearest mountain really was and what kind of cool gear one could accumulate.

Last year, for instance, I took up golf for absolutely no good reason. I'd never before expressed any interest whatsoever. But I try to not let little details like that hold me back.

Golf is a pretty simple sport in theory: little white ball, a couple of sticks with which to hit the ball, and a big green lawn with a hole at one end. But you'd be surprised at how difficult it is and how much money you can spend. It's basically a billion dollar adult toy industry. And it's growing.

Within a mile of my office there are no less than four retailers dedicated to one thing - golf. Within ten miles of my home, there are fifteen beautifully manicured courses packed full of grown men chasing a little white ball into a hole.

I'm not really sure what the fascination is. It's a terribly difficult game. It takes years to get even remotely good and even then you have to practice almost nonstop or you lose it all. It's sort of a cumulative thing. Like alcoholism.

Add to that, that it takes between four and five hours on average to play eighteen holes and you have a tremendous amount of wasted time. If you do it right, you can even ride in a cart and drink beer. Not a bad way to spend the day if you ask me.
Even now, as I sit here in the kitchen, basking in the glow of my laptop, it's getting a little late in the day and I have yet to do anything. In fact, Jane just walked in and asked what I was doing. I really have only one indoor hobby that's worthy of a good quality wasting of time, and that's watching TV.

Jane doesn't really like TV. She says she can't appreciate the value of watching fifteen to twenty programs simultaneously in a single half hour period.

No sense of adventure if you ask me.

"So what are you doing," she asks.

"I'm writing," I say.

"What about?"

"Wasting time," I tell her, then add quickly, "You're in it."

"The usual cynical wife role?" she asks.

"Yup."

"Make me sound thin," she says and walks out of the room.

It's actually too late to go golfing and I'm too tired to go surfing. Maybe I'll go stand and look out the window for a while. It doesn't really matter. After all, I've already wasted half the day and I was raised to believe that you should never do anything halfway. Maybe I'll just turn the TV on and take a nap.

Herman's Clinic

In these times of high-tech entertainment, multi-million dollar movies, and over stimulation, the simple art of storytelling often seems eclipsed; a case of the message being overrun by the medium. However, I have found one place, or should I say one person in my life that I can still hear a story told well. My dentist.

I have had other dentists, whom I thought well of. Competent, friendly sorts, capable of reversing the damage I did to my teeth due to my inability to floss. They did not, however, personify the art of the story. Or if they did, they declined to use their patients as an audience.

One of my earlier dentists thoughtfully provided headphones that allowed the patient to tune into whatever station they preferred and thereby tune out whatever unpleasantness they were about to endure. I always appreciated this as his banter amounted to whatever he had scribbled down on my chart the first time we met. For years after our first meeting, a time during which I was doing construction to put myself through school, he continued to ask me if I was still laying brick even though I had graduated and was now the Advertising & Promotion Director for a large record company. The headphones, needless to say, were appreciated.

Dr. Tinney is different.

Where other dentists employ assistants to keep them company while they drill and scrape, Dr. Tinney keeps me entertained with his stories. And I don't mean that he merely rambles on to hear the sound of his own voice. That would be enough in itself for me to prefer the sound and fury of the drill. No, Dr. Tinney is actually a good storyteller. And he is a storyteller in the traditional sense. We can't have a traditional conversation, as my mouth is usually full of cotton, metal or his fingers. He talks. Occasionally I grunt a yes, no, or if there's nothing blocking my way, I answer or try to add something. But for the most part, Dr. Tinney performs a constant monologue. And I listen.

On a recent visit, the conversation turned to his days in medical school, where, to help pay his way, he used to work in the anatomy department cleaning up the body parts from the previous semester and setting up the rooms for the following class. It seems he had come upon this strange job because his father had been a mortician and young Dr. Edward Tinney was accustomed to being around cadavers. The man who Ed worked for was an old black man who had also been a mortician as a younger man and was now in charge of, among other things, the bodies. His name was Herman.

Within the dental college at Ed's university was a graduate clinic that dealt with orthodontia, dentures and whatnot. It was called the Herman Clinic named after some benefactor or another, presumably named Herman. Well rather than tell people that he spent his days off carting dead bodies around for an old black man to make ends meet, Ed simply told them that he worked in Herman's Clinic and let them believe he was working in the post graduate clinic.

Now working in Herman's clinic usually just meant gathering the various limbs and body parts, putting them into large gray tubs for Herman to take away. But one day Herman told Ed that his back was bothering him and asked if he would give him a hand carting the bodies to the basement.

Ed agreed and they wheeled the covered tubs into the elevator and made their way to the basement. The basement was of the sort you would expect in an old large institution like a medical school. Dark, full of strange noises and smells. Herman led him down a corridor and into a room that seemed to Ed to have been drug out of a bad horror movie.

In the center of the room was a large furnace. Herman walked to it, put on a thick leather glove and opened the heavy iron door. Then with no further fanfare or eulogy for the deceased, Herman started feeding the body parts into a furnace.

This is not your average dental chair conversation.

But that wasn't the only story I heard about Herman's clinic. On another visit, probably a cavity in my upper bicuspid, Dr. Ed told me about another adventure he and Herman had carting dead bodies around.

It seemed that on one occasion, Herman and young Ed had to transport the newly dead bodies to the Gross Anatomy room so that the incoming class would have something to dissect. They arrived in a truck of some sort with the bodies stacked in the back. It just so happened that there was a new security guard on duty that night, and he was bent on being all that he could be.

The guard insisted on seeing whatever it was that Herman and this young medical student wanted to bring into his building. Herman just shrugged and motioned for the guard to have a look for himself. As the guard stood and pulled up his pants, Herman gave Ed a little wink and followed the guard out to the truck.

Now according to Ed, the guard appeared to have just finished dinner, as there was an empty box of KFC(r) sitting on the guard's desk. They trio walked out to the loading dock and Herman and Ed watched as the guard opened up the back of the truck. The guard pulled his flashlight out of his utility belt and with an air of authority proceeded to pull back the plastic that covered their cargo.

What happened next was inevitable, I guess. This particular guard had not been around long enough to have become accustomed to what exactly goes on at medical school. The guard froze for second as if he could not believe what he was looking at. In fact, according to Dr. Ed, he thought it took awhile for the guard's mind to comprehend what he was looking at. Even at medical school, you really don't expect to see a truckload of dead bodies on your first night of duty.

The guard turned around about as white as the plastic that covered the bodies and proceeded to lose the entirety of his KFC dinner, chicken, biscuits, beans and all.

The drill whined, and I did my best not to laugh, as I was afraid Dr. Ed might put a hole in something other than what he intended. Dr. Ed asked me to sit up and spit, then finished by telling me that they never saw that guard again.
I understand that a lot of people bail out of medical school in the first few weeks. I guess it's no different with the guards.

You either have the stomach for it or you don't.

One other thing I should mention. For the first year or so I never saw what Dr. Ed looked like. He always wore both a mask over his mouth, as well as a clear plastic shield that covered most of his face. I got to thinking of him as the masked storytelling dentist of Cape May County. And that's just what he is.

So if you're ever near South Jersey and feel the need for a story told well, look up the good Dr. Tinney. He'll jab your gums, and drill your teeth, make you spit even though your lips have ceased to function properly, but you'll come away with more than just a healthy set of teeth and gums. Trust me.