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It is 10 o’clock on a Saturday night in the middle of March and I am walking down a sidewalk in Edgartown on Martha’s Vineyard, Cape Cod. I could just as well be walking in the middle of the street. There’s no one around. No cars, no people. The stores are closed for the season; the T-shirts, bikinis, and knickknacks hang in the darkened windows like everyone just left for the night. My reflection in the glass makes me look like a ghost, and a small chill creeps up my back, but it’s not from the cold night. The houses I walk past—huge white Greek Revivals and Victorians stacked side-by-side—are black inside, their wide porches empty. It is so quiet I can hear my own footfalls and they are the only sound. It’s eerie. But I am happy. I like the off-season in tourist towns.

In the summer I know the place is packed. The full-time resident population of Martha’s Vineyard is 15,000. In the summer it goes up to 105,000, and this does not include the tourists who come and go. As I stood on a bluff overlooking the huge Katama Beach just south of Edgartown, a couple and their young boy trudged on the sand. The man and the son started to play catch while the woman and I watched them and gazed out over the open water. We were all dressed for winter because the wind was stiff and biting. Turns out they were local.

“I bet this beach gets really crowded in the summer,” I said.

“Oh, it does,” the woman said. “In July and August, forget about it. The roads are jammed. We don’t even leave the house unless we have to. We draw straws to see who has to go out and get groceries.”

After the three of them left, I had the beach to myself. Miles of it stretched in either direction farther than the eye could see. On the western side of the island in Gay Head, it’s the same. Back on the other side, Oak Bluffs, too. I am amazed and thrilled at the same time.

***
Late one afternoon I took the short ferry from Edgartown to Chappaquiddick Island. And I mean short—both the boat and the trip. The ferry holds three cars in a line. The thing is almost like a big toy. The ride takes two minutes. I went there looking for the small bridge that Edward Kennedy drove off with Mary Jo Kopechne in a car on the night of July 18, 1969. The car flipped and sank in a shallow tidal pool. He got out. She didn’t.

I was 16 years old that summer. I remembered some of the story, but not too clearly. In my hotel room in Edgartown I did a little online research about the event. I remembered there were many conflicting accounts of what happened, even from Kennedy himself. And I read about them now, almost 40 years later.

I had a small tourist map to guide me. I figured I’d find it easily because the whole of Chappaquiddick has about five roads. I would just drive them all if I had to. But I didn’t have to. After one wrong turn I drove from the main paved road down a sandy road; it was the road I was looking for, Dike Road. I drove for a couple of miles through tall pines and mixed hardwoods, then came out into the open as I approached a beach. There was a small bridge in front of me. It spanned a narrow tidal pool before the beach. The bridge was about 20 feet long.

It looked nothing like the bridge in the old black and white photos I’d seen online. That bridge was nothing more than planks laid together with sides that came up only a few inches. This new one was made of hefty timbers, and the sides were railed with posts and more thick timbers. I took a few photos but I was not sure if this was the same bridge Kennedy drove off of. Here, as all the other beaches I’ve been visiting, it was empty. Not a living soul around. No one to ask. I looked at the map through my sunglasses, held it open in the cool breeze coming off the glistening water. I saw the name of the road on the map: Dike Road. I looked up. There was no marker, not a word about the event anywhere. Could it be? It must be.

Like so many sites I’ve visited that are the locations of significant events in the annals of human history or of famous art—the (supposed) birthplace of Christ in Bethlehem, the Great Wall of China, the Little Mermaid in Copenhagen Harbor—this one also seemed to hold a larger place in history and imagination than it appeared in reality. I was looking at a small, wooden bridge. That was all there was.

This was eerie, too, but in a different way. I felt a sadness and emptiness for both Kennedy for having made such a horrific mistake and for the Kopechne family, whose daughter—a member of Robert Kennedy’s Presidential campaign staff when he was assassinated the year before—must have had a bright future in front of her. And for all the others who were drawn into the tragedy and its aftermath.

“The mysteries of the case continue to haunt Ted Kennedy as well as the authorities who investigated them,” writes Leo Damore in his 1988 book, Senatorial Privilege. “Charges of ineptitude and lack of diligence abounded, as did insinuations that the machinery of justice crumbled beneath the power and prestige of the Kennedy family. George Killen, former State Police Detective-Lieutenant, and chief of a never-revealed investigation, lamented that the failure to bring the case to a satisfactory conclusion was ‘the biggest mistake’ of a long and distinguished police career. Senator Kennedy, he said, ‘killed that girl the same as if he put a gun to her head and pulled the trigger.'”

I got in my car, turned up the heat, backed up, and drove away. I pressed hard on the accelerator, worked my way quickly through the gears in my car; the winter schedule of the ferry is sporadic and I didn’t want to miss the next one. I was the only one to get on. I climbed out of my car and approached the ferryman. He seemed to be in his sixties and I suspected he would know about the bridge. I buttered him up a bit with a comment on the lovely weather. He nodded. “Yep.” Then I made my move. “Hey, which bridge is the one Kennedy drove off of?”

“It’s back down the road. By the beach.” His words were clipped, his tone and expression utterly unanimated. He peered straight ahead either to see where was he going or because he didn’t want to look back.

“Dike Road, right? I asked.

“That’s right.”

And that was that.

***
A couple of days before, I’d found a long beach open only to residents of Chilmark, a rural section of the island, during the summer. Now, there was hardly anyone else around so I went there with my New York plates, unconcerned about getting towed or ticketed. There are clay cliffs that rise high from the beach so narrow I could see that there was no beach at high tide. The cliffs were eroded by wind and water; the surface looked like cookie dough. In some places I could see the rooftops of houses and the remains of wooden stairs and ladders that had been trashed by winter storms, perhaps the rising sea. I took a few photos. It looked to me like a portent of things to come; more beaches disappearing, the bluffs and dunes getting wiped out, the real estate built too close to the water getting hammered.

Sometimes it seems that it’s only unheard echoes that survive, memories. And even the memories will go as the people who witnessed events or cast an eye on the ever-changing landscape of the natural world pass away, leaving us with the only an incomplete record of what they saw. Their photographs, their books. Perhaps someday, someone will look at the photos I took and be amazed that there was ever bridge over a tidal pool on Dike Road, a pool that during one epic storm got flooded by the ocean, which then never retreated. And those houses at the top of the bluff at Chilmark beach will, too, be gone someday.

I’d gone to Martha’s Vineyard to surround myself in the natural beauty of the ocean’s shorelines. I found that. But I also found remnants of frightening encounters of the human kind amidst such beauty, as well as of the destructive powers of the same natural elements that give the area its splendor.

“When the soul is alive to beauty, we begin to see life in fresh and vital ways,” writes the late John O’Donohue in his book, Beauty: The Invisible Embrace. But so too with encounters that end with death and destruction. The heart attunes to the sadness that runs through our mortal lives like a silent, underground stream. The heart also quickens in gratitude for the gift of the life that we have been given, and speaks in words unspoken the noble command for us not to waste a minute of it in the shallow grid of artifice, small-mindedness, and bogus wants.

I am on the road. Back on the road. The road. The road. The road. The repetitiveness is a comfort and a guide, like the beating of a distant drum communicating itself to me the secrets of life I’ve yet to learn. I may be skimming the surface of the earth but I am also going deep within myself. I have been here before but at the same time I am stepping into new ground.

It is late spring, early evening. I notice the light is lingering, taking on summer’s languid, honey-colored glow. That makes me happy. But I wonder if I am seeing things because I am traveling north, in the wrong direction at this time of year after having just endured a long winter. I am going back into the cold, maybe back in time—back to some winter long ago and to something I’d dropped in the deep snow, the blizzard of my thoughts and emotions and desires, could not find, got busy, and left it there. Maybe it is something I love.

So, back I go. I must have been 8 or 9 years old when I began to like driving. On some summer Sundays my aunt and uncle would visit from their home in Bronxville, New York and we’d all spend a leisurely late afternoon roaming the winding roads through the Connecticut suburbs where my family lived. On some evenings my dad would drive us to town for ice cream. We owned a convertible in those days. I was thrilled to be out in the open, in the wind that whipped my hair and the sun that flashed though the trees that canopied over the roads. It was perhaps my first love—inspired, emotional, instant.

One day when I was 12, I asked my mother to show me how to drive. We were coming home from the grocery store and had just turned onto the dead end road we lived on. I slid across the bench seat and she made room for me, let me take the wheel. Eventually, she showed me how to use the gas pedal and the brake. We would do this often over the years. By the time I turned 16 and was old enough to drive on my own, cars had become second nature to me, like someone who’s trained on the piano and can play anywhere, any time. Put me in a car and I’m at home. Friends are amazed at the lengths—measured in time and miles—that I can sit behind the wheel and enjoy it.

I enjoy the motion of going somewhere—as I am doing now. It does not matter where I am going. I am here. And though I am alone I feel as if everyone and everything I care for is with me—in my head, my heart. It’s as if, by some strange Newtonian law of physics, the more miles I put between me and the presence of these people and things, the more they crowd inside me. It is a lot to carry, I know. I do not travel light.

But this is a floating world, what the Japanese call ukiyo, “pictures of the floating world.” It was a popular art form in 17th-century Japan. Asai Ryoi, a 17th-century Japanese writer, describes ukiyo as “Living only for the moment, turning our full attention to the pleasures of the moon, the snow, the cherry blossoms and the maple leaves; singing songs, drinking wine, diverting ourselves in just floating, floating; … refusing to be disheartened, like a gourd floating along with the river current: this is what we call the floating world.”

The Mass Pike has drifted away behind me. Interstate 495, too. Interstate 95—Portsmouth, Portland, Augusta, Bangor—are all gone over the horizon that I glimpse in the rearview mirror from time to time. Nothing back there now but this narrow slice of road that cuts through the deep woods of Maine and rolling carpets of wild blueberry scrub. There are long grades up and down. On either side of me, the sun angles in the tall pines and on the still, dark ponds that shine black like polished ebony. The radio is off so I can hear myself think, pay attention to what’s around me. I can feel my pulse settle into a slow, steady beat as if corresponding to that distant drum that beats just below consciousness, leading me onward, inward.

We often dream of places we’d like to be, of what we will do when we get there. But it’s often the getting there that I dream about, that makes me happy, that I tell my friends and family about. Downpours, rainbows, animals, sunsets, the moon.

“There is always hope, always something better, if you keep moving”, I’ve heard people say with a snicker of cynicism. But that’s not what this is about for me. Sometimes when I am on the road, life just doesn’t get any better. I’ve no hope because I don’t need it. I’ve no expectations about any place because I am already there. And I am never disappointed because the motion always gives, and gives, and gives.

It’s 3 o’clock in the morning and I am at the office. I’m not there because I’m working late, at least not that late. I’m there because I just woke up from a dream.

Night after night I’ve been waking up several times just after having dreamed of being in a meeting, going over my schedule of appointments or list of things to do, driving to work, emailing someone about something important (or so it seems), and impatiently waiting for a reply. Then the following morning, I come into the office and the same thing starts happening all over again, only now it’s in real life and real time. When people feel busy, they often complain they’re working 24/7. In my case these days (and nights), it seems that’s what’s happening to me. And there’s no comp time for dreaming of work.

It’s been so long since I’ve dreamed of anything but work that I’ve sometimes found myself humming “I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas” even as dozens of yellow-headed daffodils are popping up outside in my garden. A white Christmas on Easter would at least be a change of scenery.

I’m feeling so desperate that I’ve resorted to setting intentions just before I go to sleep. I ask whoever or whatever might be listening (and this is a real question for me since I live alone and have no pets) that I be visited by dreams of a sunny beach, the open road, a night on the town, falling in love—anything but a day at the office in the middle of the night, please. No luck. If there is a God, my requests are either falling on deaf ears or being ignored. I feel like I’m trapped pacing up and down the middle aisle of an all-night convenience store.

I am not having the same dream. This is not my own version of Groundhog Day, the hilarious movie in which the character played by Bill Murray wakes up each morning only to find it’s the exact same day as the day before. Each night my dreams are different. What’s the same is the theme: Work and more work. This is not funny. When I’m on vacation, I never dream that I’m on vacation. I sure hope that when I’m on my next vacation I am not still dreaming about work.

Buddhists speak of the “non-self” not as lack of identity but as an identity that is fluid. “It appears that human beings are wired to create a separate self,” writes Polly Young-Eisendrath in her book The Resilient Spirit: Transforming Suffering Into Insight and Renewal. We grasp onto a passing quality and make it, she writes, “into the essence of who we are.” What Buddhism teaches is that the idea we have of a separate unchanging self, of seeing oneself apart from others, is a fundamental root of our suffering. “We do not allow ourselves to be fully who we are; we want a definition of a self that exists and continues,” she writes.

In dreams, too, there is a sense of having this Buddhist “non-self” because you cannot tell your mind what to dream for you, as much as I’ve pleaded for that to happen. In our dreams, we don’t have a “definition of a self that exists and continues.” Your mind goes where it wants to go and you become who it wants you to be. And you can learn and grow from where you go and what you do in your dreams.

“People go to wild places in search for their true nature,” the Zen teacher John Tarrant said at a recent Omega program, Mindfulness, Love & Relationship, in New York City. “Where is my true nature?” he went on to ask. This is what he called a koan, an ancient Buddhist practice of posing a question that has no definitive answer because it has aspects that are inaccessible to rational understanding. Here’s a koan of my own: Of all the things my mind can conjure up when I am dreaming, why in the middle of the night does it take me back to the office I just left a few hours before, and will return to a few hours hence?

Maybe I can train myself to have lucid dreams. “A lucid dream,” according to the website luciddreaming.com, “is a dream in which the person is aware that he or she is dreaming while the dream is in progress. This awareness is referred to as lucidity or being lucid.” When you are having a lucid dream, you are supposed to be able to manipulate the experiences you are having in the dream. I think I like this idea. If I could lucid dream when I am dreaming about work then maybe I can see myself out of the door, get into my car, and drive home to a wonderful wife who’s just prepared a wonderful meal. We are sitting outside, the weather is warm, blue birds are singing in the trees, and the beads of condensation on the glass of a tangy Sauvignon Blanc are picking up the last salmon-colored rays of the setting sun. Talk about dreaming.

Then again, it seems to me that if you lucid dream, you miss the whole point of dreaming. Dream images come from the unconscious and, as such, have much to tell us about our lives—our desires, needs, problems that need to get resolved, even illnesses. I remember in a psychology class when I was a student at Union Theological Seminary the teacher, a psychotherapist, told a story about a man who kept having a dream of seeing a huge pumpkin on the side of the road he was driving on. Turns out the man had a huge cancerous tumor in his stomach. The moral of this story, the professor concluded, is that the man’s recurring dreams were trying to tell him something he needed to know in the symbolic language in which dreams speak. As much as I don’t like dreaming about work, I really don’t want to tell my dreams what to do. I’m thinking that lucid dreaming is just another control issue that I really don’t want to deal with right now.

“No one on his deathbed ever said ‘I wish I spent more time at the office,'” the late U.S. Senator from Massachusetts, Paul Tsongas, once said. So perhaps what I need to do is let a little reverie into my life, to take a moment or two out of my day or night to give myself what the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard called a “psychic détente.” Instead of burning the candle at both ends, perhaps when I wake up from a dream in which I am at the office, I need light a real candle and gaze into its flame and soft pool of light for a while.

“There is no well-being without reverie, no reverie without well-being,” Bachelard writes in his On Poetic Imagination and Reverie. “We discover, by reverie, in the first place, that being is good.” And a lit candle can take us there. “One may well be interested in the inner swirls surrounding the wick, and see in the depth of the flame stirrings where shadow and light struggle,” Bachelard goes on. “But every dreamer of flame lifts his dream toward the summit. It is there that fire becomes light.”

I’ve been poring over the journals I’d kept when my former wife and I lived in China in the late 1980s. I do this nearly every year about this time as a way to remind me of one of the most gratifying, although difficult, periods of my life. Twenty-three years ago, we landed in Beijing and walked into university jobs teaching English as a second language without any knowledge of Chinese or experience teaching anything. We were either courageous or crazy, I don’t know which. But when it was over I knew it had been a life-changing time.

During the nearly two years Wanda and I were there, we were able to set aside many of the concerns and questions we had about our careers, about where we’d like to settle down, about whether or not we were going to have a child. We went to China at a point in our lives when we wanted to do something really different, to have an adventure. We got that. Also, Wanda was a Chinese-American who still had distant family in China whom we wanted to get to know. We got that, too.

When it came time to leave China, we decided to make our way back to the States by going West through the Soviet Union (it was still the Soviet Union then), as well as Scandinavia—to see some of my ancestral land. We would then get a cheap flight out of Amsterdam back to New York.

Our arrival in Copenhagen coincided with a visit there by my aunt and her husband from North Carolina. We met them in their hotel restaurant, an expensive place with white linen tablecloths and candlelight; it was the sort of restaurant Wanda and I had not set foot in for almost two years. And it was this particular evening that stands out in many ways above the so many of the other things that had happened to us while we’d been away simply because, perhaps, of its blow.

I don’t remember, but I’m sure we looked quite shabby. I do remember that we felt worn out. If life in China wasn’t enough to grind us down—it was in many ways a soul-killing, back-breaking, totalitarian country then—we’d just spent three weeks on an Odyssean journey aboard trains and crashing in cheap hotels and even spending the night in a couple of plastic seats on a small cruise liner during a sleepless overnight trip, all of it with a ton of luggage in tow. We must have looked like refugees. Even our best clothes had become threadbare and stained, and our hair had been hacked at by a Chinese friend back in Beijing, who had something of a knack for hairdressing. That was fine for China, but I know we did not look nearly as well-coiffured as the people around us now. We were also broke—we would stuff our pockets and daypacks with food from the continental breakfasts we got at the small hotels we stayed in along the way so we’d have something to eat for lunch and dinner—and we were looking forward to a lovely, relaxing, sit-down meal paid for by someone else.

It didn’t take long for the conversation about our “China thing”—that’s what my aunt called it, our “China thing,” like it was something you did when you were young and irresponsible, and then moved on—to draw a bead on what Wanda and I were planning to do when we got back the States. My aunt was an academic. She had a doctorate in education and worked in the administration of several colleges and universities in her career. My uncle was an executive with Dupont. My aunt had married late and never had children of her own. He was on his second marriage (his wife had died several years before) and had two grown daughters who were now married. My aunt’s reference to our transformative, mind-boggling time in China as our “China thing” struck a nerve in me from the get-go, and I was about to learn that it was just the beginning of a conversation that I soon wanted to stop, even it meant getting up from the table and walking out.

“So what are your next plans?” my aunt asked.

It seemed like an innocent question and I answered cheerily, “Your guess is as good as mine. Got any suggestions?”

“Don’t you think it’s about time to start thinking about little ones?” she asked suddenly.

“I have thought about them quite a lot, actually,” I said, trying to be polite. It was true. It was the subject of many conversations Wanda and I had been having for several years—even before we were married—and I always came to the conclusion that I really wasn’t interested in having a child, but still remained open to the possibility. But I did not want to talk about that just now.

“And?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Well, it’s time you decided, don’t you think?”

“Wanda and I made an arrangement in which I have to tell her by April 2 whether or not I want to have kids,” I said. This conversation in the restaurant took place on August 13, 1987. I have no idea now why we picked April 2. I don’t even recall making that agreement. But it’s in my journal that I was keeping of that time and in which this entire conversation is recounted.

“Good for her,” my uncle chimed in, winking at Wanda.

“How old are you?” my aunt asked me.

“I’m thirty-four.”

“Too old,” Wanda joked.

“Not too old,” my aunt said.

“Shucks,” I said.

“The trouble is this,” my aunt said. “My father had me when he was 33. By the time I reached 20, he was already in his 50s.”

“You can’t turn back the clock so you don’t have to go into that,” I said, my bile rising. It might have been the wine. Did I have wine? I cannot recall.

“What I’m saying is that there is a point in which you have to get on with your life,” my aunt continued. “It’s important that you do something, have commitments, or make a contribution so when you are old you can look back and say you’ve done something to make the world a better place.”

Jesus Christ. “What do you think I’ve been doing in China all this time?” I snarled. “You have no idea what a foreigner can do for people there. I personally got one person into the United States to study.”

“A drop in the ocean,” my uncle sneered.

“So be it,” I said.

“You’re afraid of having children because you’re afraid you won’t be a good parent,” my aunt went on.

“That’s part of it,” I admitted.

“That’s all of it,” she shot back.

“It’s not all of it,” I replied. “I don’t necessarily even like children.” It was not entirely true. I just didn’t want the responsibility of taking care of children.

“I know you and you’ll be the first to fall. You’re such a softie,” my aunt said.

“Maybe not,” I said. “I have a very short temper. I can’t stand to hear a baby a cry. Every time I hear a baby cry my blood begins to boil and my heart starts pounding and my palms begin to sweat. I have to get up and leave the room.”

“It’s different when it’s your own,” she said.

“Yeah, it’s worse because you can’t leave the room.”

“There’s a change that takes place,” my uncle said. “You feel different about it.”

“I don’t have a very good image of family and child rearing,” I said.

“I know that,” my aunt said. Yes, she knew that, I thought. “But why deny yourself a family just because you have a bad image of one?”

“Here’s a chance for you to start over, to prove that can have children and be happy,” my uncle added.

“That’s a good point,” I agreed. They’d touched a soft spot in me. “I’ve heard that before and I think it’s a good point.

“Kate’s husband didn’t want children,” my aunt said. Kate was one of my uncle’s daughters. “But now you can say no wrong about his little John. He just adores the boy.”

“Listen,” I said, getting my back up again. “I know all about what you are saying. I know we’re a selfish generation and a lot of us run around afraid to make commitments. But that’s not my reason for not wanting children. The reason is not because I’m afraid of being a bad parent or afraid of making a commitment. It’s because I don’t want to spend my life raising children. I just don’t think I would enjoy it all that much.”

“Well….” my aunt began, and then let her sentence drift off.

“And I don’t like this thing about getting on with one’s life,” I continued. My final salvo, the last of my ammo. “There is no point in which one gets on with life. This is my life. I went to China and it was part of my life. So I don’t know what you’re talking about when you say one has to get on with one’s life.”

The conversation suddenly stopped. Had I won? After a moment of uncomfortable silence, my aunt made some comment about the food or the weather—like a white flag of surrender, the delirium of someone in the throes of death—and my uncle either agreed or disagreed, I don’t recall because my mind was spinning and overheated. If I had won, what did I win?

Finally, I wanted to say something that spoke to the journey we’d just made, to get back to what was really most important for me at that moment and about which I had some authority that they didn’t. I was feeling desperate to tell people what I saw—things that they had no knowledge of and I felt needed to be known about real life in Communist China and the Soviet Union—and it came not from books or from other people telling me about it; it was based on my own experience and nothing and no one could refute what I knew simply because it had happened to me.

“You might be interested to know that everything bad you’ve heard about the Soviet Union is true,” I started, a bit lamely. “There are lines for everything.” I knew because we had to wait in them.

My aunt immediately replied, “The longest line we’ve had to wait in was to go to the bathroom. The bus pulls into a stop and everybody gets off and runs to the john.”

“There’s a toilet on the bus but they don’t let you use it because it has to be emptied,” my uncle added.

And that was the end of our talk about the Soviet Union, China, and everything Wanda and I had done and seen and that was now so much a part of my life it inhabited my viscera like nothing had before. I could feel that my brain had been rewired by the experience, but there were so many loose wires still. Even so—or because of this—I had so much to tell. And neither of them cared a jot about any of it.

I don’t remember what I ate or drank that night. I’m sure my aunt and uncle picked up the tab and I’m sure I thanked them for it, and I really was grateful. But when I left them I felt embittered. It wasn’t simply the subject of the conversation—children—that irritated me. It was their lack of curiosity in who I was and what was really on my mind then.

***
It wasn’t long after that meeting that my aunt, a heavy smoker most of her life, was diagnosed with lung cancer. By the time it was discovered, it had metastasized to her brain. The last time Wanda and I saw her in her hospital bed—and the first time since our dinner in Demark—she was a bald, emaciated form with wide eyes that stared blankly out the window at the yellow pines outside. Now she did not even know who we were. After her funeral, I never saw my uncle again. Always a bit of a drinker, he besotted himself in his years alone and presently died from complications due to alcohol poisoning.

I don’t know what, in their final hours, they believed they’d done to make the world a better place. My uncle gave the world two daughters, and giving life is always a blessing. Perhaps my aunt was so keen on me having a child because she knew the pain and longing it had caused her to not have one herself. If this were the case, I wish now she’d just come out and said so. As it was, I felt so resentful about that talk we’d had in Copenhagen that I’d snubbed them. I hate to admit it, but I’d snubbed them. Which is too bad—for me and for them. We missed so much life we could have shared.

They used to visit my family and I remember when I was getting ready to go to college my aunt kept insisting that I apply to the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, where she was working at the time. I never did; I didn’t think I could get in. I am thinking now that perhaps she had a higher opinion of me than I had of myself, both as a student and as the father she wanted me to be—and I never have become.

I may have pushed them out of my life—perhaps unfairly; maybe we were poor company then—but they taught me a valuable lesson that evening: The way they’d harped on me in Copenhagen taught me that it is sometimes better to listen rather than to talk because sometimes people just need to be heard. I would have greatly appreciated it if my aunt and uncle had deferred to me a little, and let me tell them about what’d I’d just been through. Someone once said there is no pain greater than an untold story. I had a story. And I so much wanted to tell it—the invigorated yet, at the same time, the strangely sad if not wrecked version of myself who was in no way ready to start having children, for heaven’s sake. They were the first people Wanda and I met up with from back home, and they seemed more bent on getting us there and resettled than on hearing anything about where we’d been, what we’d seen, what we’d been through. It was as if they’d showed up with a clean, crisp map to suggest places for us to go when I wanted to pull out my ragged, torn map to show them the places where we’d been. So we just of sat there in the middle of nowhere, lost and arguing which road would get us where we wanted to go. Thing is, my aunt and uncle wanted us to go one way and I wanted to go another way.

Listening a little more would make the world a better place no matter what else you might want to leave behind—stadiums in your name, endowments, a park bench with your name engraved into a brass plaque. Even children. It’s usually not what you do that people remember, a friend once said to me. It’s how you treat them. And, frankly, I can’t think of anyone at any time who couldn’t use someone to hear them out.