A Week at Drew

     Sometimes life is mostly painful though there is no discernible reason why it ought to be.  I am not sure whether this state of mind that I often find myself in is a blessing or a curse.  I choose to believe it is the former. 
     Three years ago I spent a week at a writing conference at Drew University "Sentences 2,"  not knowing it was happening I missed "1."  It got me writing and thinking.  Listened to writers read their works and loved it (though I didn't care for the YA author).  Wrote in workshops and began a short story that may turn into something, we'll see.  One author popped for me: Mark Jacobs (Forty Wolves).  He drank Yerba Mate tea ritually having learned its powers while in the Peace Corps in Paraguay.  I drank Yerba Mate for a caffeine buzz when I was in San Francisco in the summer of 1970.  The difference was striking: he was enveloped by an ancient spiritual culture and I was getting hopped up to speed through life.  I'm thinking he had it more right than I did.
     Anyway, he seemed to me to be hung with a great sadness, like he had seen too much. 

     When I lived in the City (NYC) I liked to wander about, ride in the subway, blend into the machine of mass humanity that fluxed through the veins of grey concrete.  But somedays I was naked in the streets, shaken with empathy, and fearful that any moment I might suddenly burst into tears, overwhelmed by the pain that sweat from each passing being.  These days I tried to stay at home, I was seeing too much.

     Mark Jacobs had lived among people who are close to nature and poor so they had few resources at their disposal to defend themselves from nature and those who lived in plenty made sure it stayed that way.  He read to us, a mountain in tears pleading for humanity, our humanity we who live in the land of plenty, to do, something.  I thought he had caught his great sadness from his years in the Peace Corps and in the Foreign Service seeing how the other half lives.
     He said to me and Renee, "I am not the man I was" with such profound sadness that I longed to comfort him, but I didn't think that proper.  His confession had arisen from a discussion of the trials that had been visited on our children, his and ours.  (This would never have happened had Renee not been with me.  She shares the details of our life with anyone she thinks could commiserate, it helps her, and them.)  Yes, I too was not the man I was, having lived for a few years in the madness of grief, with only the occasional medicated relief, I was a ragged man.  Jacobs had not caught his sadness overseas he had bred it from his own loins and it flowed into him through a cord that can never be severed.
     But one sorrow informs another.  He had seen the struggles of the "less fortunate" which inspired empathy and he had seen the struggles of his children which gave it flesh.  Life hung heavy on him.
     The conference had given me a hunger for more and a sense that our private sorrows could be made to serve some public good.  I couldn't wait until the next year, Sentences 3.  But it was not to be for me.  I was working and could not take two consecutive weeks off (the family would go to Wildwood the week after.)   I spent that week of work engaged in matters of no matter, filled with a resentment that would not leave me until I was relieved from the job and joined Sentences 4 and learned what I must do to feed the hunger.