The parts recur––the son, the lover, the husband, the father, the friend, the citizen. They come in whispers and fragments, in the unwinding of memory. They come in your smile, in the laughter of our children, in nightmares, in bursts of violence against once precious objects. How do you gauge the parts of a life? Did I perform any of them well? How do you summon them into an unfettered whole?

I am old now. I’d hoped I would’ve figured out a few answers by this point, but the truth is I spend more time each day watching the Red Sox than thinking about such things. In the summer and fall, the games are on every day, often twice a day, and watching them gives Zeke and me something to do. Something zen exists about the game, something appealing to me as I age, something about the stillness, the waiting, the bursts of energy, all mimicking the best and worst times in life. And I like the red, blue, and gray uniforms. They remind me of a more structured time. 

Zeke, a big black, brown, and white mutt I rescued about ten years ago, keeps me company in our cabin. When I first got him, he liked digging holes in my yard, searching deep and dirty, with only a rare unearthing. His record, twenty-two holes. Twenty-two! In one of them, he found an empty wine bottle, message-less. Now, Zeke mostly sleeps in the same worn spot on the living room rug. I’m not sure which one of us will die first.

The small cabin is often filled with the smell of burning oak from stoked wood stoves in the living room, bedroom, and music museum. I bought a wood splitter a few years ago to split red oak cut from the surrounding woods after I decided chopping wood with an ax was too violent. The splitter does the job.

I still drive. I have an old 2002 pickup purchased at auction for $960. It runs pretty well. I take it to town for supplies, home-repair stuff, too many expensive prescriptions, fifteen-dollar thirty-packs of Budweiser. Those sorts of things. Sometimes I take it to breakfast with the other old men in town. I love them like brothers. We talk about their families, about politics, about sports, football lately. Of them all, Scott and I are closest.

Sports mean more to me now than in my youth. My friends say it’s because we can no longer run, jump, or hit, though I suspect it’s because I finally see beauty in any kind of movement. The truth is I like watching Dancing with the Stars as much as I like watching the Red Sox. I regret never learning to glide through life.

Sometimes we old men talk about pretty young women in town as if we’re not old men. I won’t repeat some of our more sophomoric lines here, but I will say my go-to line remains: she takes my breath away. The other day, while standing in front of a mirror combing my thinning hair, I imagined I’d been trapped in a doorless white room for years. I thought, what had happened? I thought, if only I could forgive myself, would a door appear?

Some of my friends still have wives; some have family in the area. Though they like to talk about pretty women, the guys adore their wives and families. Every year, one or another invites me for Thanksgiving or Christmas. I went to Scott’s once. After dinner, I was sitting on the sofa napping when one of his grandchildren crawled up on me, pushed on my nose and eyes, and tugged at my ponytail.

Then she said, “Are you dead?”

The law of flipping keeps me on the tracks. If I’m going through a bad stretch, I flip it over and see what I can learn. While this approach is much harder to practice than it sounds, it’s worked often for me through the years. It’s especially useful when people die.

My closest friend for many years was a woman named

Marianne. I loved her. During our ten years of friendship, she was my most trusted confidante, and I was the one who saw her clearly underneath her beauty. On the friendship scale, I peaked with Marianne. She was a good woman, and she thought I was a good man. We helped each other laugh and bide time. She died unexpectedly one fall night, but I still talk to her often. I don’t know if people you love leave you when they die. It doesn’t seem so.

I collect musical instruments: violins, cellos, keyboards, drums, guitars. I can’t play guitar anymore because of the arthritis in my hands, but I keep a few on stands in the museum as a reminder of a different time. Once in a while, I’ll pick one up and rest it on my lap.

I taught my children to play, and they turned out to be more skilled than their once-competent dad. Passing down what you know is part of being a good father, assuming it’s worth passing. Some fathers in town passed down unworthy things like killing animals for sport, maltreating women, or winning at all costs. Music was a non-violent choice.

Most of the things in the cabin are old, purchased at yard sales, or removed from the take-it-or-leave-it-pile at the town dump. Between social security and what’s left of the profits from selling my old house, I have enough money to live my remaining years in this place. It’s cheap. Plus, since moving here, I’ve rarely paid full price for anything. If you look hard enough, a whole world exists out there filled with still-salvageable used stuff.

I do have a few pieces of technology. A satellite dish on my roof lets me watch the Patriots, Red Sox, and Celtics on my brand new flat-screen television and lets me surf the internet for political stories and podcasts. A powerful classA amplifier, a perfectly balanced turntable, and vintage Magneplanar speakers enliven my thousand-record collection. I’m glad vinyl is making a comeback. 

I worked for a long time in a white-collar job outside of Boston as a so-called expert in artificial intelligence. I did it for the money; though to be clear, I didn’t dislike the work. It was intellectually stimulating trying to copy the way humans think, but I don’t remember much of it now, and I don’t miss it. Back then, it seemed much more important than it turned out to be. That’s the nature of work you don’t love. A big part of what it takes to be a good man and citizen is to do the work you’re meant to do, to love. Though our world rarely enables such work.

I saw a movie once about love and quantum physics. The basic idea was we are all connected at some deep, unseen level, so we should all love each other. Recently, I tried to remember the name of the movie. For over an hour, I tried every trick I could think of to remember, but none worked. This kind of memory loss seems to happen more each year, and, unfortunately, a remember-pill doesn’t exist. A few years ago, I tried, without luck, to flip my mental decline into a positive. I had a long, drawn out conversation between my conflicted parts, the gist of which was something like: maybe it’s a positive thing to forget your life? Why? Because you won’t feel so much loss when you die. Who said feeling loss was a bad thing? But you’re going to forget anyway. Not the loss.

My wife left me long ago, and I never remarried. My children live far away in cities doing things you do in midlife––kids, houses, jobs, divorce. When my wife left, she didn’t say much. One morning, she woke and packed her things in silence as I watched, not a single thread left between us. Our children had unnested, the youngest leaving a week earlier. I could tell by the look on my wife’s face there was no chance she would reconsider staying without a child in the house. At the front door, suitcases at her feet, she looked right at me and said, “You’re not a good man.”

I haven’t been with a woman in a long time. After my wife left, my children, when they were speaking to me, tried to marry me off. I think they were worried they might have to take care of me in my old age. Some of the women I went out with were kind, but I didn’t feel like I could tell them the truth, and after four or five women, some whom I dated for months, I sold our family home and moved to this mountain cabin in Hasman, Vermont.

I imagine being filmed close up as I read these pages out loud––head only––like in one of those foreign movies Marianne used to love. That way, people will see I’m telling the truth.

People come to talk with me. Men, young and old. Women, young. Not many: a couple of dozen a year; and not frequently, most only for a chat or two. I don’t seek them out. I think they come because I listen well, don’t judge, and don’t want anything in return. Honestly, I expect nothing from people and haven’t for a long time. That’s not to say I don’t care about the people who come to visit. I love them fully for the time they’re with me, and I try to see them as clearly as any one person can see another.

I saw a female therapist for years after I divorced. A month after I finished, I wrote her this: These days, you are the cloudless blue sky or the pitch-black night, and I can’t help but be thankful for the years we had together, the ones where you taught me to navigate from within, without the benefits and pitfalls of clouds and stars. I’d

never written a poem until hers.

I have tried writing prose before, but I never got this far. They say each of us has at least one story in them, but I don’t know if that’s true. This feels more like a sorting than a story. 

A brief interlude about words. Here are two of my touchstones now––generative and workable. Generative because creating all kinds of things is what we’re meant to do here, and workable because things rarely go as planned.

I often have nightmares. They’ve invaded for years, and I rarely remember them, though I know they’re nightmares because I wake up in knots or worse. Sometimes I think I have them because I sleep alone. Though Zeke sleeps on the foot of the bed with me, so, strictly speaking, I’m not alone. 

I do remember one dream. In it, I was sitting across from my wife near the end, and she was eating cherries slowly. After she finished each one, she put the pit in a bowl between us. When she was done with her cherries, she pulverized the pits and then put them in a smoothie and told me to drink it. Next thing I knew, I was falling toward a giant ice sheet. Time slowed enough for me to imagine my bones shattering when I hit the ice. How would I live with shattered bones? When I woke, my bed was wet, at first, I thought from sweat. The fluids your body unwillingly discharges in old age.

I believe part of being a good man is accepting it’s okay to get lost for a time. I had a young man come to see me once. He asked me to help him stop drinking. He didn’t believe in AA or any of those organized approaches, but he did want to stop. He was drinking a lot at the time, mostly vodka. His family had tried to do an intervention, but it hadn’t gone well. He drank more afterward. After an hour with him, I knew he was searching for an unorthodox approach.

“It seems to me you need to get the flu and struggle through it,” I said.

“What do you mean?”

“When you described trying to stop before, your withdrawal symptoms seemed flu-like.”

“Oh . . . I never thought about it that way before.”

“Okay, so maybe you could try this. Imagine you are deathly sick with the flu and for the next four weeks act precisely the way you would if you had the flu. Get lots of rest and fluids, and when the pain and urges come, say the following: It’s only the flu. I need to go through it, and it will pass in time.”

 I saw the man walking in town years later with his wife and children. I like to think he was still sober.

A woman came to see me for almost a year. A decade ago now. During our last meeting, she returned to a familiar theme, asking if she should take care of herself or her family. She couldn’t do both and had to choose. I remained silent as she tried to sort through her feelings and come to a conclusion. Finally, after she said she needed to take care of herself one last time, I said, “Now is your time. You should take care of yourself.” Then she smiled at me in a way I hadn’t been smiled at for a time. 

“Would you like to sleep with me?” she asked.  

“How old are you?” 

“Forty.” 

“I’m twenty-five years older than you.”

“I know, but this is what I want.”

Then she came over to me and kissed me, and soon we were naked in my bed. That was the last time I had sex.

The following week I rescued Zeke.

I like listening to a Buddhist nun’s audio recordings. She says we should accept that things fall apart in life, and we should learn to be comfortable with uncertainty. These seem like solid ideas, conceptually at least. Here are the things that have fallen apart in my life––my marriage, my family, my job, my health. Par for the course at my age. Here’s an uncertain thing I’m comfortable with these days:

someday soon I will die.

I’m going to come back as cool, sweet rain, so when you look my way, I’ll wash the weight off your face.

JOY’S BREAKFAST AND LUNCH JOINT

PART I: BEN

Scott and I found a table in the back of Joy’s restaurant away from other folks. Scott is ten years younger than me, and his large family is still in the area. He often says they make him happy. On my seventieth birthday, I had a dream that his family had adopted me. We were eating dinner together, a feast, and I was sitting at the head of the table. Everyone was treating me with respect. When I woke, I researched adoptions and found no known cases of old men being adopted. I wondered if the world needed an adoption agency for the old? I wondered if it was possible to be adopted and free?

We ordered from memory, Scott following my lead on the cheeseburger, fries, Coke, and chocolate pie, none of which I’m supposed to eat anymore. We spent time talking about the intricacies of the perfect 5-4-3 double play until our food came. It crossed my mind that reducing people and positions to no more than numbers transcended sports. 

“I have a niece, Alice, who’s going through a difficult time,” Scott said. “I told her about you.”

“What’s going on with her?”

“I would rather she tells you.”

“Oh. Okay,” I said. “Send her my way on Saturday morning. I’ll be around.”

People often came my way based on the recommendation of a friend or family member, and I rarely needed the details before a visit. In the twenty-something years I’ve been talking to people, I’ve never once turned down a request. There’s something generative about meeting a person for the first time, sitting with them as they tell their story, and not judging them. And something redemptive, too.

Scott and I talked more about the Red Sox, finding comfort in familiar facts. Duffy’s cliff was a ten-foot incline in left field from 1912 to 1933. Ted Williams’ seat, the place he hit the 502-foot home run, is located at section 42, row 37, seat 21. The Green Monster was built to keep cheapskates from watching the game. A dozen more, each one enhanced a little from the previous telling. We often got lost for hours going through facts we knew by heart. We needed to excel at facts and statistics, even if those things didn’t constitute real work.

As we were scarfing down our chocolate pie, a white car parked across the street from the restaurant, a special automobile I thought, German, sporty, and much too expensive. A tall and slender woman exited the car, strapped a large bag over her shoulder, and clicked on her key fob. The car beeped and flashed. She was dressed elegantly in a black, almost-male business suit and, with wavy, shoulder-length, dark brown hair and thick blackrimmed glasses, exuded intelligence. That’s not to say I didn’t find her dark and angular features attractive. I did. In my prime, I would have stretched but snapped before joining her league.

She headed toward the restaurant with a slightly hunched walk that seemed chosen instead of given. When was the last time a professional like her had come to

Hasman? Once inside the restaurant, she glanced at a couple of empty booths, but instead of taking one, walked to the back of the restaurant where Scott and I were sitting. Up close, she looked at me as though her eyes guarded a message.

PART II: SAM

“You guys want some company?” I asked.

The man with the long gray hair in a ponytail smiled at me and then said, “Sure.” In our first moment together, a charge connected us unlike anything I’d experienced. The connection scared me until it severed.

I hung my bag and suit jacket on the booth’s quaint coat hanger. The other man scooted in, and I sat next to him and across from the ponytailed man. They were both dressed the same, in work boots, jeans, and plaid shirts, like never-recovered lumberjacks.

“I’m Sam Beckett,” I said. “Rustic little town you’ve got here.”

“I’m Ben Sanna,” said the ponytailed man. 

“And I’m Scott. What brings you to town?”

“Just a quick detour off the highway. I’m starving and need some nourishment.”

I asked the men what they’d eaten and then hollered over to the waitress to order the same and a cup of black coffee. When I traveled, I made sport of barging in on men in restaurants. That way I never had to eat alone. I got away with it because of the quirkiness of the act––what kind of woman barges in on strangers?––and because I told them early in the conversation I taught Krav Maga and had a black belt. Most didn’t know Krav Maga was the most lethal form of self-defense, developed by Israeli combat soldiers, and the few who asked were more offbalance after I told them. Putting men on the defensive, at least at the start, comforted me. I wanted them to believe I had all the power, to cower to my skills and intelligence, to glimpse who I’d become, glimpse the impenetrable just underneath. And most of the time they did. After I gave Scott and Ben my Krav Maga pitch, Scott reacted as expected, but Ben, hands folded on the table, leaned in a little more.

“If you don’t mind me asking, what do you do for a living?” Ben asked. 

“I work on Wall Street. You guys retired?” “Yes, both of us,” Scott said.

“What do you do with all your free time?” “We come here,” Scott said.

“We talk a lot about sports and politics,” Ben said. 

“And I have a big family,” Scott said. “They keep me busy.”

The waitress delivered my food. I put some fries on an extra plate, doused them with ketchup, placed the plate in the middle of the table, and asked the guys to join in. As I often did while sizing up new men, I asked what they were talking about before I joined them. The most exciting piece was Ben’s penchant for helping people. Apparently, he still believed in salvation.

“People come from all over Vermont to see Ben,” Scott said. 

“It’s nothing,” Ben said. “Most of them are going through a difficult time. I listen to them and help if I can.”

“You were a therapist?”

“No. I just listen pretty well and try to give them sound advice.”

“You’re a wise old man? Like Yoda?”

I smiled and then broke into an escalating laugh. Ben and Scott joined in, and we rode it for only a few seconds. It felt good to laugh in the open. I was in the middle of nowhere eating a greasy cheeseburger and fries with two old guys, one who thought he was Obi-Wan Kenobi. The thought of spending some time with them––Ben more than Scott––pulled at me.

“It is kind of ridiculous,” Ben said.

“I didn’t mean to laugh. It’s just that I’ve never met a wise old man before.”

“I wouldn’t say I’m wise. At best, sometimes helpful.”

“So, you would listen to me if I showed up at your, what, office?”

“Cabin.”

I almost broke out laughing again. “You live in a cabin?” “I do, and I would—listen, that is.” “Give me directions,” I said.

WITHOUT A CLUE

BEN

I wish I’d taken a course on kindness and service when I was a boy. I was so focused on Boston sports, naked girls, and drugged-out parties, and on getting good enough grades to stave off my father’s blows, that I never much considered kindness and service. I like to think things would have gone better if I had.

My father beat me with his belt. It was pretty standard back then. At the time, he said he needed to teach me a lesson, said beating me was how I would become a good man. He was wrong on the second point, though despite the beatings, he was the greatest man I knew. He was smart and funny, and everybody he wasn’t beating loved him without reservation. I wanted to be him minus the violence. On his deathbed at our family home he looked frail, and though he could hardly speak, he mustered enough strength to whisper in my ear, “I’m afraid, Ben.” I’d never seen him vulnerable.

How do fathers conflate love and violence? It seems impossible to me now. How do mothers conflate love and silence? He hit her, too.

I went back to the room where my father beat me.

There, I put my arm around my younger self and told him it would be okay. As we were walking out of the room together, I lit the gasoline-soaked rag ball I’d pieced together for far too long as an adult. Then I threw it behind us.

Burning makes loss workable. A few months after Marianne died, I built a small raft piled high with rocks and branches, set it on fire, and launched it on the Lamoille River. Fifty yards downstream, it broke into pieces and sank, a brief plume of smoke marking the burial site. 

Technically, I haven’t been stoned or drunk in a little over ten years, though my relationship with drugs and alcohol was more tangled as a young man. The drugs I experimented with in high school and college included pot, cocaine, mushrooms, and all kinds of pills. The alcohol included beer, wine, whiskey, vodka, gin, rum, tequila. 

Later in life, some of my friends died from alcohol and others from overdoses. Those who stuck mostly with beer and pot, those who only drank for the regular buzz, for the daily temporary reprieve from the chronic, those like me, seemed to do okay. Though I guess that depends on how you define okay.

I was raised on an American diet, lots of processed food and sugar and not enough vegetables and healthy proteins. It seems everything I was told about food when I was young was wrong, and it’s probably why I take so many pills now. They say it’s never too late, but that only applies to people under seventy.

When I was a senior in high school, a girl from Paris fell in love with me. She said I was the one, said she wanted to marry me, said she wanted to stay in America. How could anyone be so sure about love at eighteen? Her name was Catherine. She was petite and had big brown eyes. When she spoke, her beautiful French accent in full bloom, she made me hard no matter the topic.

There was a girl before Catherine. Allison. She was a swimmer and beautiful and wild and also a heroin addict. She said she would only have sex with me if we were both high. She said there was nothing like sex after shooting up. 

One day we were in a park on a blanket making out. She smelled like chlorine. She pulled out a couple of needles, a spoon, a lighter, a rubber rope, and her stash from her backpack and said we couldn’t go any further until we shot up. I’d never done heroin before, but I wanted her. She asked me to shoot first, and I agreed, but as she was about to insert the needle, I jumped up, said I was sorry and ran off. In the corner of the park at the river, I skimmed rocks and wept.

In college, I studied quantum physics and movies. This seemed perfectly sensible to me at the time. I wanted to be an engineer, and one of the curriculum requirements was a year of quantum mechanics. The truth is I don’t remember much about engineering, but I never forgot some of my quantum physics lessons. Here’s one; we are the governors of our reality. This suggests there’s no such thing as a shared reality and confirms I made the right choice by living in the woods by myself. Here’s another; we’re connected to every other living thing in the world. While I think this one is true, it’s not the most critical part of the story. What about the quality of the connections?

As for movies, my mother loved them and passed it on. When I was young, we went to the movies all the time with her sisters and their kids. My father even went a few times. I loved Abbott and Costello movies the best. Buck Privates. Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein. The Time of Their Lives. My father laughed at those like he was still a boy. In college, I saw every movie, old and new, as soon it came to town or campus, I think because both my parents had died by then and, strangely, sitting in the dark watching other people’s stories made me feel like a connection still existed between us. Sometimes I fully expected my parents to show up on the screen and announce to the audience that their deaths had been a gigantic misunderstanding. 

A directive from my college days: Let the need to purge those without a clue go. Replace it with curiosity, kindness, and love. Otherwise, there will be no one left. Back then, I rarely followed it.

An aspiration for old age: When the weight lifts, float up over all the love harmed, and marvel that something as healing as forgiveness exists at all.