Remembering Matt

Over the past year, on only a couple of occasions, I heard from my friend and former co-worker Matt White. They were our first communications since I left our shared employer and moved to New Zealand. He was checking in on my doings in the new world, providing intel on the old--the kind of pleasant surprise you get every now and again when you move far away from everyone you know.

It was good to hear from him. Like a number of my erstwhile colleagues, however, he'd been laid off. (In any number of ways, I got out just in the nick of time.) That wasn't exactly fun stuff, but he had plans to return to school, and that was encouraging. Shortly before my departure he suffered a stroke and was in hospital, and so we didn't have a proper farewell; and to be honest I didn't know how he had fared afterwards. To hear him tell it, though, over two years down the track, things seemed to be looking up.

Yesterday I heard from a mutual friend that Matt was murdered in his sleep by his wife. Horrible, shocking, senseless. The details at this early date are few but unhappy.

I can't claim to have known Matt well. At 6'11" he was the tallest person I knew. He loved sailing. He'd gone to Penn, led its basketball team to the Final Four in 1979, and after being drafted by the Portland Trailblazers played professional basketball in Europe for a number of years.

I worked closely with Matt. He was a member of the software documentation team whose work I edited. He was a very good technical writer, smart, frightfully thorough, and an expert in e-learning. I remember interviewing Matt for the position and reviewing his respectable work history (including upper management), education (Wharton MBA), the seemingly idyllic life he left behind in Spain, and--let's be honest--the romance of his former career and wondering why this fellow wanted to take what must have been a hefty pay cut to write instruction manuals for credit union software. (To be fair, this is exactly what I was wondering of myself.)

He was a good hire. He picked up the software quickly. He did his work well and he did it fast. He kept his head down. When we talked, it was of Europe and his days abroad and my several trips there. It was exciting, this glimmer of another life, of travel. It wasn't rooted in the distant past, or nostalgia, or even of hope tied to a distant star. It was something he had done, something real that could be done. I can't say he influenced me directly in my decision to live abroad, but he more than most knew the appeal of other places and how they can take us out of ourselves in the most wondrous ways.

He also drank more coffee than any person I've ever met, with the possible exception of my dad's friend Larry Ironsides.

No, I didn't know him well, you know. I can't speak to his domestic or his interior life. I didn't have his confidence. But I mourn his passing. And maybe that's just how it is with those who for a time play a significant part of our daily life. We don't know what angels and devils reside on their shoulders, nor the trajectory of their lives. We just hope for the best, don't we?

Thanks, Matt. Be at peace.

Dispatches from the Outer Rim

We've crammed a whole lot of livin' in the 11 days since we touched down in Wellington, so here's a run-down of the various points high and low:


1. I want to know what love is. I want you to show me. Actually, I have a pretty good handle on this, thank you, but I must have heard this song no less than four times in the Brentwood on our first day back in New Zealand. Not that I'm complaining, as I'm finding myself curiously attracted to the current spate of pop hits, which curiously remind me of that good old 80s stuff. I got darn near weepy at the New World (the local supermarket) when the Pet Shop Boys' rendition of "Always on My Mind" spilled into the aisles. Something is afoot here.


2. "Do you work for Weta?" I never tire of hearing this question, which for Wellington taxi drivers is apparently the most logical thing to ask Americans here on business. Of course, I explain our particular venture and plans, but that doesn't mean you know.


3. Finding an apartment is harder than you might think. In fact, finding even temporary quarters can be tough when you have to contend with an influx of young people in town for AC/DC or the NZI Sevens (some sort of "rugby tournament" that requires packs of the aforementioned younglings [and some oldsters] to dress like carrots, turtles, flip-flops, or Arabs). But yesterday we prevailed! Our new place is a 10-minute walk from work and not much further to the waterfront.


4. Coffee. Is. So. Good.


5. Good friends make you feel at home. We are keenly aware that we are here for business, have work to do, want to get busy, and are not on holiday. And there are sundry tasks each day to keep us busy and which are necessary to get the ball rolling. But our friends have taken it upon themselves to take us around town and invite us into their homes. We've watched the removal of the mast of King Kong's SS Venture in preparation for its scuttling (which happened a couple of days ago), hiked up to the stately memorial to Prime Minister Massey, dined at Scorching Bay's Scorch-O-Rama (the site of the original Chocolate Fish cafe, which has since been reincarnated elsewhere), and enjoyed the festivities for Waitangi Day, the national holiday celebrating the signing of the Waitangi Treaty between the English settlers and the Maori.

No matter what I've been doing or what's going on, every so often I have this recurring or perhaps multi-part epiphany: I live here. It's a great feeling.

On Emptiness and Form: The New Blog Entry by Ryan Rasmussen

It is a time of moderation in every thing. Moderation of enthusiasm keeps you balanced. Moderation of despair deepens your understanding.

— From the I Ching, Hexagram Li/The Clinging, Fire; second changing line

I try to live a saintly life. Sure, some might call me stiff-necked, others insufferable, but in truth I aim to do good work, do right by others, and eat all my vegetables. Good, clean livin’. I have never believed in the myth of the suffering artist, but these days, with a plate filled to overflowing, I accept that adversity and limits are necessary if we are to truly realize ourselves.

And so. I allow that if there is a vice in the repertoire, it might be coffee. Lately, it seems that caffeine doesn’t agree with me. I think I have been clear on my fondness for the black gold. True, I am not one to guzzle a pot of truck-stop java; indeed, I scoff—scoff—at the day-old carafe lingering on the burner at Wawa, and at work I proudly avoid the company joe. But most days I enjoy a sizeable cup or two of my special extra-strength home brew.

I suspect that normally this intake would not pose a problem, as indeed it didn’t for many moons; but coupled with a number of other pressing matters, responsibilities, obligations, duties, challenges, projects, expeditions, and the odd bit of administrivia, the effects of 1,3,7-trimethylxanthine on my beloved adrenals have been unpleasantly pronounced.

And, so, being reasonable—and striving for saintliness—I give up the stuff. Just like that.

I know.

Now, I did have a cup of coffee last Sunday, and a little green tea on Tuesday, and then a bit more on Wednesday, but apart from that, I have been free of caffeine for going on three months. It just seemed best not to short out the ol’ nervous system.

In the subsequent study of non-caffeinated teas, I found one featuring kava, an herb native to Oceania and the South Pacific, suitable for relieving stress and claiming to “set your mind free.” I thought I might have found something, but my Anthroposophic doctor (this appellation being neither a critique nor a bid for acclaim, but rather added merely for color, as the sort of thing one might say at a cocktail party to the right company) insists that I desist from imbibing this particular beverage if I want to avoid damage to my liver. Heck, if I wanted that I’d take up alcohol in earnest. That would be the writerly thing to do.

In this way I was reduced one day last week to a morning ritual of Lipton decaf tea, the kind you get in a little packet trumpeting 105 mg of antioxidants. Doubts quickly surfaced, however: who knows what sorts of multinationalistic pesticides were also lurking within the teabag, or what poor broken-backed native had to schlep burlap sacks of this stuff up and down the jagged ridges of the Andes? Fair Trade, shade grown, and biodynamic this stuff was not. My mind was certainly not at ease.

It’s possible what I miss most about coffee is the elaborate ritual involved in preparing the ebon brew. How better to prepare for, or forestall, an evening writing session than to take the trouble (an interesting choice of words) to prepare 16 ounces of presspot coffee to the most exacting standards?

At last year’s Austin Film Festival, I consulted Lawrence Kasdan on the matter of burning the candle at both ends. After all, he had been a father, and in marketing, before he got the call from Spielberg. Lawrence recommended that I take a break from writing. A break! What could he possibly know of the writing life? I mean, really.

Later, however, I recalled the sabbatical Hesse took from writing Siddhartha (how does one write of enlightenment without having achieved it?), which doesn’t give much comfort if your goals are no less lofty and you aim to produce something greater and with a better title than The Anxious Viking. When at long last you discover, perhaps to your dismay, that your main character is you, then the heavy digging begins and you find your opening into a darker yet richer world, an unearthing of deep roots that have always been there but are not so easily won.

If all this comes off as complaint, I apologize. There are considerable bright spots to report, after all. My meditation practice is stronger than ever, the Kid I mentor in the gym has set new personal bests in both the bench press and leg press, and somehow I’m close to ripped these days.

Then there’s the glowing performance review at work, the documentary on which I’ve begun pre-production, and Jenifer’s blossoming yoga classes. Hawk, of course, continues to delight and amaze. In the past couple of weeks, he’s begun scooting; and just a few days ago he’s taken his already considerable trilling technique to the next level. (I have no doubt he will prove an apt pupil when the time comes for learning all the requisite sound effects for ray guns, dinosaurs, and alien cyborgs.) His bright, sunny nature is undeniable and wonderfully inescapable. When I am in his orbit I needn’t remember what it is to be so perfectly present, for he is blissfully unaware of time and cause and effect, and beautiful, and amazed at the gift of embodiment, and I remember to just breathe, just breathe, Ryan, and my heart is full once again.

Sherpa and the Chairs of Chanticleer

Center of all centers, core of cores,
almond self-enclosed and growing sweet —
all this universe, to the furthest stars
and beyond them, is your flesh, your fruit.*
— Rainer Maria Rilke

We are once again without our Sherpa. She left on Sunday on a bus to Massachusetts and her boyfriend, and we have resumed the usual routine. That’s not to say we’re unhappy, only that we miss our friend, again.

Sherpa is one of our New Zealand Friends, and the one who followed us from Nelson, where we first met, to Wellington before driving us through the North Island to Auckland. More commonly known as Diane, our Sherpa is capoeirista, yogini, surfer, clairvoyant, barista, and, even if she doesn’t yet know it, burgeoning life coach: She’ll Get You There™. She is a New Zealander by way of San Diego, having sailed in a small boat across the Pacific with the family of another NZF, Taya.

Our holiday began last Wednesday evening, when we drove to Baltimore to pick her up. There was something adventurous about the extravagant distance, and something right about picking her up a year to the day since we had returned from the Land of the Long White Cloud. Seeing her again reminded Jenifer and me that perhaps the greatest thing that came out of our trip to New Zealand, apart from the magnificent sense of freedom and possibility, was the friends we made. A reminder that the best of friends pick up whenever they meet as if no time has passed at all.

I recently joked with the very first of these friends, with whom my history goes back over 30 years, that most of our friends are over 50. He said that we need to get out more. I replied that we don’t like young people. He laughed. My statement was not a complaint but a recognition of the Venn diagram of circles we travel in locally through the yoga community, my local men’s group, and the cultural creatives of Phoenixville. And so it’s odd that we should slip so easily into a network of similarly aged new people so far away from home, and odder still that this should have happened in Nelson. It is a town that is surprising international in population and which serves the same function for New Zealanders as the Southwest does for Americans. People go there to escape, retreat, recover, retire.

We wanted to show Sherpa our place, of course, but also something beyond the usual routines and haunts. Sure, Sherpa accompanied Jenifer on her daily yoga rounds, and we visited Artisan’s (where in a fit of nostalgia I claimed the title of Mr. Americano, imbibing my favorite Kiwi coffee drink with not two but three shots of espresso — P-P-P-POW!) But we needed to do something special, only what?

Memory of a brief documentary surfaced (public television being our chief means of contact with the Outer World), an inkling blossomed into an impulse, and suddenly the answer was clear: we would visit Chanticleer Garden. We had been astounded to learn of this place nestled only a short drive away in the horse country of Wayne.

Chanticleer proved amazing from the very beginning. After a picnic lunch alongside a stream, we made our way through the vast lawns and intimate gardens, marveling at the variety of wildflowers and coziness of tree-sheltered hideaways. Sprinkled throughout the property at key viewing points was an assortment of Adirondack chairs, and we tried them all. Delightfully playful and many-colored, one set was even painted with giraffe spots. From the solid New Colonial architecture of the estate to the sculptural benches and footbridges, everything seemed integrated and chosen with care. A fraction of the size of the ever-popular Longwood Gardens, Chanticleer was more private and more immediate. It’s designed to be experienced, not consumed. Truly a pleasure garden.

The remainder of the week found us mostly lazing, in part because my foray into the Wild had brought about the worst episode of allergicality since the elms of Stockholm laid siege to my sinuses two summers ago. We attended a beautiful kirtan on Saturday night, but our thoughts kept returning to the garden of the rooster.

The funny thing about traveling is that you really do learn as much about yourself, your culture, as you do about the foreign destination. At Chanticleer we were traveling previously unknown pathways in our own land and finding ourselves somehow richer, freer. The day was an affirmation of what we already have: a secret world hidden in plain view. In Chanticleer we found a little piece of luck in our own backyard. It gave us the kind of experience we’ve been so fortunate in finding abroad. For all our yearning to be elsewhere at times, we have a pretty good life right here.


*From “Buddha in Glory” in The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke. Copyright © 1982 by Stephen Mitchell.

You Are Burning Me, Part 3

I really did not intend this entry. And it has nothing to do with Eivør, Faroese ballads, or inspiration. Consider it more of a PSA for writers and other layabouts. See, I was sitting and relaxing "while enjoying the new look and revitalization of Downtown Phoenixville" at a pleasant local café-slash-gallery, about to take my first sip of a steaming hot clay mug of coffee, when the handle decided to snap. Gravity did the rest, and I was soon enveloped in a cloak of liquid pain. About as much fun as a meatloaf piñata.

Life happens, of course, just usually not in such a swift and scalding manner. Also, I do my best not to scream like a little girl if I can help it.

To his credit, the barista was equally swift in his aid, and soon handy antiseptic burn pads were placed on the affected areas. I believe I shall soon recover without any lasting effects, and with any luck the next batch of Holy Embers will be both more intentional and true to form.

Land of the Long Black

There’s a great moment in U2 By U2 where Bono, returning from a year or more of nonstop touring, asks a friend, “Do you have a routine I could use?” The friend, knowing that Bono hasn’t had any domestic stability in a long time, explains how he likes to get up in the morning, go to a local coffee shop, converse with the regulars, and read the newspaper. Bono is amazed by this.

I’ve been home a week now, regaining my hemispheric equilibrium, contemplating the second draft of the Viking epic, and wondering about the shape of my life. The office feels more distant than ever, a miniature corporate diorama observed through the wrong end of a telescope. I don’t remember the lights being so . . . fluorescent. My house is cluttered and leaden, full of things I don’t use or need, things I can’t carry with me. The local highways, eerily empty upon our early-morning return, confound me. How do I get from A to B?

I’ve always been a creature of structure and routine. Each day begins with The Coffee Ritual, a meticulous way of producing a simple cup of press-pot coffee, taken black. This is my preferred style, but in New Zealand I learned that it’s hard to find anything similar. There is no drip coffee, what most Americans are used to, but instead a panoply of familiar-sounding styles: long blacks, short blacks, flat whites. I tended to favor the long black, but on occasion would order the half-strength Americano. At Wellington’s celebrated Caffe L’affare this came in the form of a single shot of espresso accompanied by a cup of hot water. I had to assemble the drink myself, like tea.

Funny how something as simple as coffee can remain a constant across continents and time zones, a touchstone of familiarity and longing, something to hold onto when the world feels foreign. And now The Coffee Ritual points irrevocably back the other way to my brief sojourn in the Land of the Long White Cloud.