writing – Page 2 – Frank is Emptiness

Fat

July 27th, 2025

I try to take my grandson, Asher, to a playground every day. Sometimes the visit is brief. Sometimes we are at the park for an hour or two. The point is that he is a four-year-old boy, and he needs to be outside and active. He needs to be moving.

I read an article about Dr. Oz, the man currently in charge of Medicare and Medicaid. He recently went on a rant about the nation’s obesity epidemic. It is a bit hard for me to take Dr. Oz seriously considering that his boss in the White House is almost as wide as he is tall. However, Oz has a point. Americans are fatter than we were in years past. It’s a fact.

A couple days ago, I took Asher to a local playground near a Salvation Army center. The Salvation Army has ongoing summer youth programs. Asher and I were at the park when a column of kids and their chaperons walked from the center to the playground. There were probably twenty or thirty children coming toward us. They were of various ages, both boys and girls.

In that group I saw that about 25% of kids were overweight, a few of them morbidly obese. That really kind of bothered me. Once the children arrived at the playground, most of them went directly to the swings and the slides and the monkey bars. They started organizing games among themselves. They were loud and rambunctious. They were doing exactly what kids are supposed to do when they are outside. They were in constant motion and generally having a good time.

Most of the heavier kids did not participate in the horseplay. They found a place to sit or lie down. Asher played with a few other children in a big sandbox. They took turns excavating a buried toy. One overweight older boy helped, but he remained prone the entire time. He laid on his belly while digging in the sand with a small shovel. He didn’t even bother to sit up. When he was done playing, it took enormous effort for him to get back up on his feet.

I was a fat kid. In grade school I was chubby, so I know how it is to be an overweight child. My folks took me to the “husky” section for boys’ clothes at the department store. I often felt embarrassed about my weight. I usually was one of the last kids to get picked for a team in gym class. Life sucked. I know how the heavy kids at the playground feel.

Somehow, once I got into middle school and high school, I became more physically active and I “thinned out”. I was actually in good enough shape in my senior year to get accepted into the U.S. Military Academy. Honestly, I don’t know who or what helped me to get in shape, but I did change. Now, I’m old and I could stand to lose five to ten pounds. I probably won’t, but at this point in my life it might not matter so much.

I think obesity does matter for these children. They are going to have serious health problems in the future, if they don’t already. I don’t blame them for their condition. I’ve been there. They need their caregivers to help them get fit. They need adults to help them get moving.

Asher is fit. He’s strong and agile. I am going to help him to stay like that.

Anger

July 26th, 2025

“And there’s always a place for the angry young man,
With his fist in the air and his head in the sand.
And he’s never been able to learn from mistakes,
So he can’t understand why his heart always breaks.
But his honor is pure and his courage as well,
And he’s fair and he’s true and he’s boring as hell
And he’ll go to the grave as an angry old man.”

from the song “Angry Young Man” by Billy Joel

I lost my temper yesterday morning. My wife gave our little grandson, Asher, French toast for breakfast. He tends to be a fussy eater, but he’ll eat French toast, if it is made a certain way. Yesterday, there was a problem with it. Eventually, I had a problem with it too.

Asher likes his toast with honey, syrup, and vegan butter. These three toppings need to be added to the French toast in a certain order. Yesterday, Asher put a spoonful of organic honey on his French toast. Then I poured a bit of organic syrup over the honey. Then Asher suddenly realized that he had forgotten to apply a dollop of something that looked like butter on the bread. There was a crisis.

Asher cried out, “I didn’t put the butter on! I forgot! Now, I’ll have honey all over my knife!”

My wife tried to console him. She suggested that he flip the bread over and try the sequence again. He did that, but that just meant there was honey and syrup on both sides of the toast. Karin got him another, pristine slice of French toast. There was something wrong with that one too. Asher was upset and yelling.

There was a back-and-forth conversation between Asher and his Oma that continued without any resolution. Asher refused to eat, but my wife kept looking for ways to appease him. Finally, I couldn’t listen to it anymore. I slapped my hand on the table and stormed out of the kitchen.

Anger has definite physiological effects. When I got mad, I could feel my face flush and my heart race. The stress hormones were doing their thing. What I noticed the most was the aftermath. Once the emotional storm had passed (it probably only lasted two minutes), I felt exhausted. I was a bit lightheaded, and my joints hurt. I was shaky.

For many years, I was a rage-oholic. I was angry almost all the time. When I was younger, the anger used to energize me. It got me moving. It often got me moving in the wrong direction, but I was active. Now, that I’m 67 years old, anger wears me out. It’s too much work to stay pissed off. I still lose my temper. I guess that I always will, but I can’t maintain that intense rage. My body won’t tolerate it. I have mild hypertension, and I don’t need to have a heart attack. Asher and my wife don’t need that either.

Many years ago (it seems like everything in my life was many years ago), I participated as a facilitator in a program to help families with troubled teenagers. In one session of the program, we talked about feelings. The program tried to distill a plethora of emptions down to just four: mad, glad, sad, and scared. The idea was to get people to recognize their feelings and maybe handle them in constructive ways. “Mad” was the big one for me.

I am a product of my generation. When I was growing up, males were not supposed to be sad or scared. My father belittled me if I ever cried. Showing fear was frowned upon. If I couldn’t be sad or scared, then almost every emotion got funneled into being angry. That’s what my dad did. That’s what I learned to do. Being angry has not done me much good. It hasn’t done much good for anybody around me. It’s been highly destructive.

I have been told that there is such a thing as “righteous anger”. The notion is that there are times when a person can be enraged about injustice and oppression, and that sort of anger is a positive thing. I suppose that it is, but I have never experienced it in a pure form. My anger has always been tainted with ego and selfishness. If righteous anger exists, it is exceedingly rare.

I’m not so angry anymore. Why? I’m not sure. Years of Zen meditation has helped. Learning how to cry and feel sadness has helped. Understanding and accepting at least some of the world’s suffering has helped. Growing old has helped. I was an angry young man. I’m too tired to be angry old man.

Clutter

July 22nd, 2025

The house is a mess.

Well, I guess it all depends on how you define the word “mess”. When I was in the Army, decades ago, I liked to have things organized, with everything in its place. That was so long ago and so much has changed.

Now, I live with my wife of forty years, and with our four-year-old grandson. Neither of them has much interest in tidiness. Our home is clean, but it is always teetering on edge of chaos. I’m not sure that it can be any other way.

My wife is from Germany, and in some ways, she maintains that Teutonic passion for order. However, she is also an artist, which means that she is a perfectionist with regards to her work, but is often indifferent to clutter that surrounds us. Karin is a fiber goddess. She has spent well over sixty years mastering the mysteries of knitting, weaving, crocheting, dyeing, spinning, sewing and felting fiber. She can do it all. When focused on a project, she is attuned to the smallest flaw or discrepancy in her work. She is endlessly creative. However, she also struggles to find her phone and car keys.

Our grandson, Asher, is a four-year-old who, like his Oma, is interested in all sorts of things, usually all at the same time. He dumps out his toys, plays with them enthusiastically, and then promptly forgets them. Eventually, the floors in the house acquire a thin covering of playthings, some of which I sometimes step on. I find that irritating.

I try to pick things up and put them away, but apparently, I am not supposed to do that. Our grandson protests loudly if I move a toy from the place where he has put it. He wants, or needs, things to be in a certain location. So, after experiencing his wrath, I just leave stuff where it lays. My wife has worked out a deal with the boy for him to stow away all of his stuff at the end of the day in exchange for some time to watch mindless YouTube videos. I go to bed early before all this happens, and when I get up it looks like the cleanup fairies have done their work while I was in bed.

My wife has a one room for a craft studio. Actually, most of the rooms in the house are also unofficial craft studios. Her projects cover most of the horizontal surfaces in our home. To an objective observer, her primary craft studio looks like a grenade exploded in it. I have sometimes made forays into her sacred space, but not often. I avoid moving anything. If I do, without fail, she will ask what happened to the object that I set in a different place. It is best for me, when I get annoyed by the apparent disorder in her studio, that I simply close the door to the room and move on.

My wife and grandson are selectively organized. Maybe all people are. Trying to keep everything in order would make a person crazy, or crazier. I have also become selective about how tidy my world needs to be. Some things matter. Most don’t.

Monkey Bars and Morning Glories

July 11th, 2025

We tend to observe certain milestones in life: births, graduations, and weddings. Maybe, we might also commemorate baptisms or bar mitzvahs, if we are at all religious. But we tend to ignore the small events which by themselves seem inconsequential, but in fact are critical in a cumulative sort of way. These mundane achievements are seldom celebrated or even recognized. We don’t usually pay attention to them, and they get lost in the flow of time.

I have a four-year-old grandson named Asher. My wife and I are his legal guardians and fulltime caregivers. We are with him all day, every day. Sometimes, we don’t notice the changes in him. We ofttimes don’t become aware of how much he has grown until we see that his clothes are too small for him. Because Asher is with us all the time, we can’t always perceive his development. He seems like the same little boy until he shocks us with something new and unexpected.

When we suddenly wake up to the realization that Asher is different, we ask questions like, “When did you grow so tall?” or “Where did you learn that?”. It feels strange to get blindsided by his rapid development, but it happens all the time. We wake up in the morning and there is a new kid in the house.

Three days ago, I took Asher to a local playground called Kayla’s Place. There are many types of equipment at the playground for children of various ages to use and enjoy. Asher likes to swing on the “monkey bars”, which are actually a sort of horizontal ladder. I have always needed to lift him up in order for him to grab on to the metal bars. I had to continue to hold him each time so that he could swing from one bar to another.

Our last visit to the park was different. He stood underneath the lowest set of bars and made a little jump. For the first time ever, Asher was able to grasp two bars and hang from them for almost a minute. He isn’t strong enough yet to swing from one bar to the next, but he was able to get up there on his own. That’s a big deal. I congratulated him, and yesterday I mentioned to his therapist what he did. Asher was excited and told her,

“I got on the monkey bars, and I did it ALL BY MYSELF!”

A few weeks ago, Asher and my wife put up a sort of tepee in the yard to grow morning glories. Karin found some old stalks from the elderberry bushes and tied them together with string. She made a scaffolding for the vines to climb. Early yesterday morning, she saw the first flower blooming on a vine. It was near the ground. She alerted Asher that there was something new outside.

Asher put on his Crocs and rushed out of the patio door still wearing his pajamas. I followed him out. He stared at the morning glory blossom in awe. He told me,

“Grandpa, the flower looks like it’s glowing!”

It did look like it was emitting a light of its own. The rays of the sun were striking to flower in such a way that it was luminous. The flower was a deep violet on the edges and that color faded to white near the stem.

Asher smiled as he gazed at the blossom. For a moment he was in love with nature, and that was also a beautiful thing.

Monkey bars and morning glories. Those are simple things, but they are also important.

I need to pay attention.

How not to Comfort Someone

July 4th, 2025

There are times when I or somebody I know struggles mightily with a problem. The person who is hurting might be sad or angry or a combination of the two emotions. How do I comfort them? How does somebody console me when I am in a bad place? That depends on a lot of things.

For me to encourage another individual requires that I know the person, at least somewhat. The better I understand them, the better I can act in a way that is helpful. Over the years, I have learned that there are some things that are often counterproductive. I have also discovered that I can sometimes make a huge difference.

I try not to give advice. My experience has been that most people do not want it, even though it might be useful in their situation. I have almost never wanted advice when I was in a bad way. I just wanted to be heard. I am convinced that is what most people want and need when they are wounded. They want another person to listen to them, really listen. If I truly listen to the story of somebody’s pain, then I can decide how to respond. Listening is the first and essential step.

I try not to fix things, even when the temptation is strong. I am by nature a problem solver, at least when I am not actively creating more problems. However, fixing a problem for someone else is not necessarily helping them. It is better if I can give the person the resources to solve a problem on their own. I have learned the hard way that some things cannot be fixed. Death is one of those things. Sometimes, the only response is to grieve withe person for what is lost.

I try not to give glib or inauthentic responses to somebody else’s pain. Nothing pisses me off as much as when somebody tells me, “You are always in our prayers.” Depending on the person saying that, those words might be true and heartfelt. However, I am convinced that once in a while those words translate to, “I’m saying this to get you to shut up. I’m tired of listening to your bitching.”

It also bothers me that, when I am exhausted and at wits end, someone tells me, “Stay strong!” No shit. What do you think I have been trying to do? It’s not like I have an untapped reservoir of strength available. The individual exhorting me to be strong no doubt wants to be encouraging, but sometimes that just infuriates me instead.

Sometimes, a person tells me about their suffering, and I simply cannot comprehend the depth of their pain. Their experience is beyond my understanding. At that point, I might tell them, “I don’t know what to say.” That’s okay. It’s honest. If I don’t have the necessary words, then I remain silent.

Words are often too clumsy. I am good with words, but I also understand their limitations.

When words can provide no comfort, then it might be time for a hug.

Dragons

July 3rd, 2025

“There are dragons ahead!”

Thus proclaimed our grandson, Asher, at supper last night. His statement came completely out of the blue. Asher is four and a half years old, and he tends to say things that. He was calmly eating some French toast when he decided to mention dragons. I don’t know why. Maybe he didn’t either.

His comment made me think of the old medieval maps that were based partly on facts and mostly on wishful thinking. The cartographers of that time drew up charts describing the few areas of the world that they knew and then filled up the remaining blank spaces on the parchment by using their imaginations. A popular way of explaining the unknown was to write, “There be dragons”.

Perhaps these old mapmakers were right.

After Asher mentioned dragons my wife, Karin, talked about an old song from Peter, Paul, and Mary called “Puff, the Magic Dragon”. Karin tried to sing the song for Asher but couldn’t remember the lyrics. I could remember most of them, but I didn’t want to sing. Something caught in my throat when I recalled the last verse on Puff. The was a pang of intense sadness.

After supper, I tried to dig up a recording of the song. If I was at all competent with technology, I would have looked it up online. However, I don’t have a smart phone. I do have a sound system with an ancient turntable that I bought back in 1982. I also have a vinyl record from Peter, Paul, and Mary which has the song on it. I dug out the album, pulled the record from the jacket, and played Puff for Asher. Some old, well-used vinyl discs have that crackle and pop that is both endearing and infuriating. This record did. Asher listened to the music, although he was mostly fascinated by how the phonograph player worked.

The first two verses of the song are a story about a boy’s adventure and his fantasy. The child mentioned in the song is Little Jack Paper. The boy reminded a lot of Asher. I can easily imagine Asher having a dragon for a friend.

“Puff, the magic dragon lived by the sea
And frolicked in the autumn mist in a land called Honah Lee,
Little Jackie Paper loved that rascal Puff,
and brought him strings and sealing wax and other fancy stuff. Oh

Puff, the magic dragon lived by the sea
And frolicked in the autumn mist in a land called Honah Lee,
Puff, the magic dragon lived by the sea
And frolicked in the autumn mist in a land called Honah Lee.

Together they would travel on a boat with billowed sail
Jackie kept a lookout perched on Puff’s gigantic tail,
Noble kings and princes would bow whene’er they came,
Pirate ships would lower their flag when Puff roared out his name. Oh!

The song makes me think of other dragon stories. Dragons are found in oral traditions and in dreams. Despite the fact that these are mythical creatures, they are universal parts of the human history. They do not fly around the skies, but somehow, they still exist.

Carl Sagan wrote a book about dragons, aptly titled The Dragons of Eden. He does not suggest that there were ever physical dragons, but in his study of human evolution, he says that dragons are part of our innermost being. He states that they slumber fitfully in the R-complex of the human brain, an extremely archaic part of the organ that contains “the aggressive and ritualistic reptilian component”. Anecdotally, Sagan asks, “Is it only an accident that the common human sounds commanding silence or attracting attention seem strangely imitative of the hissing of reptiles?” We don’t see the dragons in the material world. We find them in our dreams.

In The Power of Myth from Joseph Campbell and Bill Moyers, the two authors, discuss the topic of dragons. Moyers asks, “How do I slay the dragon in me?” Campbell replies by telling Moyers that slaying the dragon is about a person following his bliss and breaking down internal barriers. Campbell says, “The ultimate dragon is within you, it is your ego clamping you down.”

If the dragon is within each person, it is also part of the humanity as a whole. Campbell also says that “The myth is a public dream, and the dream is a private myth.” The serpent that hides in my subconscious is hissing within every person on earth.

Th last verse of the song is as follows:

“A dragon lives forever but not so little boys
Painted wings and giant rings make way for other toys.
One grey night it happened, Jackie Paper came no more
And Puff that mighty dragon, he ceased his fearless roar.

His head was bent in sorrow, green scales fell like rain,
Puff no longer went to play along the cherry lane.
Without his life-long friend, Puff could not be brave,
So Puff that mighty dragon sadly slipped into his cave. Oh!

This verse makes me want to weep. But for whom should I cry? For the little boy who must grow up? Or for the dragon who has forever lost a friend?

If the dragon is within us, can we ever leave it behind? Must we always try to slay it? Is it possible to befriend the dragon, fearsome as it may be?

Can my dragon be like Puff?

Fathers and Sons

June 28th, 2025

Conflicts between fathers and sons are inherent in the human experience. Myths from all times and all places tell stories of the struggles between the generations. The Bible, especially in the Book of Genesis, describes fraught relationships between the patriarchs and their children. These tales from various sources are uniformly disturbing and often violent.

They are also very real.

I’m old enough to know how these fights work out, or don’t work out. I’ve been in the role of the son and that of the father. Neither position is pleasant. As I look back, the power struggles were somehow inevitable. That doesn’t make them any less traumatic. It just means that I can accept the results of those episodes.

I had several intense confrontations with my father. They all ended inconclusively. Nothing was ever resolved. We would separate for a while and then make an uneasy truce. There was always a reside of resentment. The issues at the core of our fights were still there lurking in the background. My dad has been dead since 2018. We never really reconciled, not completely. Now we can’t.

In 2009 my oldest son, Hans, joined the Army. He did this knowing full well that my wife and I did not want him to be a soldier. I had been an Army officer in my youth, and I knew to a certain extent what Hans was doing. I also knew that he was going to war, guaranteed. If he joined the military, he would be deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan. Hans knew that too and signed up anyway.

Hans’ decision hit me and my wife hard. I was upset for quite a while, and Hans and I did not communicate for several weeks. My wife and I traveled to Fort Knox, Kentucky, for Hans’ graduation from basic training. I found that to be deeply troubling. Eventually, in 2011, Hans was deployed to Iraq. Most of the things I feared came to pass. Hans was wounded. Hans killed people (plural). He came back a very different person.

Hans became his own man. Doing that had its costs, both physically and emotionally, and maybe spiritually. Reestablishing a relationship with me also has had its costs. We are close again, but on very different terms.

A few years after Hans came back from his war, I sat with him and had a couple beers. I told him how hurt his mom and I were when he enlisted. Hans smiled at me and said,

“That was a pretty big fuck you, wasn’t it?”

Indeed, it was, but it was necessary for both of us.

Going Home

June 27th, 2025

“There’s no place like home”. – Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz

Back in July of 1976, I joined the Army. To be more specific, I was accepted as a cadet at the United States Military Academy at West Point, New York. USMA is part of the U.S. Army, but it is a military organization sui generis. Nothing else in the Army, or in the world at large, even vaguely resembles it. I could try to describe it, but there isn’t enough space in this essay to make the effort worthwhile.

The first year as a student at West Point is brutal. It’s a harsh environment for a “plebe” (that’s what a freshman is called at USMA), and going to that school is kind of like attending an Ivy league college and doing time simultaneously. The first chance for a plebe to leave the place is at Christmastime. After five months of getting jerked around by upperclassmen, I was anxiously looking forward to going home for two weeks.

I didn’t get to go home. My home no longer existed.

In order to explain what I mean, I have to give some background information. Before I left for West Point, my parents had already decided to sell their house. They never mentioned any of this to me while I was still living with them. My folks loved secrecy. I grew up in a home where paranoia permeated everything. In any case, I found out about the sale of the house after it had already been sold. My parents sent me a letter with a newspaper clipping that advertised the fact that the old house was available for purchase. I did go back to my family on leave, but I went to a place I had never seen before in my life.

They say that you can never go home. That’s true. I found out immediately after I met up with my parents and brothers that I was an outsider. My five-month absence had left a vacuum in the family structure that had quickly filled. They were happy to see me, but I wasn’t an integral part of their day-to-day lives anymore. I was a just a visitor. That new status was hard to accept, at least at first.

Would it have made any difference if I had been able to go back to the house where I had grown up? Probably not. If anything, going back to that dilapidated old farmhouse would have made the change more poignant. Even if my family had remained in that home, it would not have been mine anymore. I would have still been a stranger there.

It’s been nearly fifty years since I last saw the inside of the old house. I think the structure still stands. It has to be well over one hundred years old by now. I don’t how it’s been remodeled over the years, and it really doesn’t matter. If I walked into the front door, I would still feel the presence of ghosts in the rooms. They would not be friendly ghosts. They would be there to trigger my bad memories of growing up in that place. I have plenty of dark recollections. I am not nostalgic about my childhood. I prefer not to be reminded of it.

You can’t go home. For some of us, it’s not even a good idea to try.

Resilience

June 25th, 2025

I asked the young woman to help me find the building. We were on the northside of Milwaukee and the local area was forbidding. The street had been dug up recently and almost all of the structures bordering the road looked abandoned. Actually, it wasn’t hard for us to locate the recovery center. It was the only property that looked well-maintained. The building was like a welcoming home set among some ruins.

I parked in the lot next to the building. The young woman went into the rehab facility to take a drug screen. I waited for her to come back. If she passed the test, then she would come back, grab her bags, and start residential treatment. If she failed, well, I had no idea what we would do. I would probably have to take her back to some shitty motel until she could get into another recovery program. I didn’t even want to consider that possibility. I would just wait to see what happens.

Years ago, when I was a boy, this part of town was a bustling economic hub. All of these vacant buildings were factories. They made things for A.O. Smith and for Masterlock. Teams of workers filled these places and made money, for themselves and for their employers. These businesses were humming with activity. That was a long time ago.

Now, it’s desolate. The neighborhood has a post-apocalyptic vibe to it. I bet at night it looks very Blade Runner. The car parked next to me had a yellow club on the steering wheel. The owner had placed an open copy of the Bible on top of the dashboard. The pages of the book were water-damaged and stained. I’m not sure what would deter thieves: the Bible or the club. Maybe neither or maybe both.

We drove through the local area in order to get here. On the main drag were many shuttered businesses. Even the liquor stores and the Baptist churches couldn’t make it around here. That’s rough.

I sat in the car and waited. There were trees lining the street, at least part of it. Milwaukee may have severe poverty, but the city keeps things green. I think that makes a difference. No place is truly a wasteland if there are trees growing there.

It’s been hard for the young woman. She has struggled for so long. I have lost count of how many rehab programs she has attended over the years. It is both depressing and inspiring to me. She often relapses, but she never, ever gives up. She wants to get clean and stay clean. She is the most resilient person I have ever met, and I admire her courage.

She came back out of the building with one of the counselors. The counselor was smiling and friendly. They picked up the young woman’s belongings from the car. Then they went back inside.

I sat in the car and sighed deeply. I could relax at least a little bit. She was in the program.

She was safe.

Do the Right Thing, if There is One

June 24th, 2025

“And I divvied up my anger into 30 separate parts
Keep the bad shit in my liver, and the rest around my heart
I’m still angry at my parents, for what their parents did to them
But it’s a start” – from Growing Sideways by Noah Kahan

Sometimes people like to talk about making a fresh start. I don’t think that such a thing is possible. We are always in the middle of a story, one that has been going on for decades or millennia or even longer. When somebody comes into the physical world as an infant, he is she is not a tabula rasa. That person already carries the history of all life in their DNA. Every human arrives as a unique version of a history book. We are never at the beginning, and we are never at the end.

As Faulkner wrote, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

I have spent the last couple weeks fighting with ghosts and inadvertently wounding the living. The evil that I have done or that others did a quarter century ago has come back to the forefront, and there has been hell to pay. I am not done paying, not by a long shot.

There are three people whom I love dearly. They hate each other. I cannot help one of them without hurting the others. I found that out quite clearly a few days ago. I had to make a decision to do something that was essential for the health and wellbeing of one of the three. I knew when I made the decision that it would devastate one of the others. I also knew that more individuals, outside of those three I mentioned, would be affected negatively. It was, and still is, an impossible situation. It makes me angry.

I think about the story in Genesis when Abraham haggles with God to get Him to show mercy to the inhabitants of Sodom and Gomorrah. As God is planning to nuke those two cities, Abraham asks Hashem,

“Should not the judge of all the world act with justice?”

I have a similar question. If God wants me to do the right thing, then why put me in a position where there is no right thing?

I am at a point where I do not ask, “How can I make things better?” I ask, “How can I keep from making things even worse?”

I am blind to many things. I understand the consequences of my actions far too late. I have made people angry with me. They’re right to be angry. Maybe I am right to be angry too. At some point I will apologize and try to make amends, but not now. I’m not sorry yet, or not sorry enough.

Everybody is wounded. We all bear the scars of the past, and as long as we live, the sins of the past live within us. The good that was done to us or for us lives there too. It helps if I can see the suffering of others. I may still harm them, but perhaps not as much.

Sometimes, I am tempted to despair. But that is a luxury I cannot afford. Too many people depend on me. My wife needs me. Our grandson, Asher, needs me. I have to keep going.

For them.