The Confessions of Nat Turner (1968): How Woo Are You?

March 22, 2026March 25, 2026 ~ ~ Leave a comment

A few months ago, I wrote an essay where I told the story about how I ended up in Puerto Rico giving a talk called “How Woo Are You?” to a group of relative strangers at an event called “fake church.” What I didn’t tell you, somewhat intentionally, was what the talk was about. Since then, more than a few people have asked me the obvious follow-up: what was the sermon actually about? I’ve been waiting for the right moment to tell that story, and two recent events have convinced me that the time might be now.

First, Parisa and I were recently back in Puerto Rico for a visit. Same streets, same humidity, same slightly disorienting feeling that life had looped back on itself. And second, Friday night was Nowruz—the Persian New Year—and it hit me that I had given that fake church talk on Nowruz in 2023. So, between the return trip and the calendar, it felt like a nudge. Or at least enough of one to finally answer the question.

There’s a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.

— Leonard Cohen

If you read that original essay, you know the setup. I’ve always been a pretty firm believer that we’re in charge of our own destinies. Not in a grand, manifest-your-future kind of way, but in a more practical sense: say yes to things, show up, lean in, and over time those small decisions compound into something that starts to look a lot like luck.

So I began my talk the same way I began that essay—by telling the story of how I got to Puerto Rico in the first place. The sticker, the café, Andrea, a trip to Israel, Gillian, the co-living house. A chain of yeses that, in retrospect, feels improbably linear, but at the time was anything but.

Then I read a poem. It was Charles Bukowski’s The Laughing Heart. If you know it, you know it’s not subtle. It’s a kind of gravel-voiced insistence that your life is yours, that even in a world that feels indifferent or chaotic, there’s something inside you worth protecting. It’s a call to stay awake, to resist sleepwalking through your own existence. It’s also, not coincidentally, a pretty good manifesto for the way I’ve generally tried to move through life.

The Laughing Heart by Charles Bukowski:

your life is your life

don’t let it be clubbed into dank submission.

be on the watch.

there are ways out.

there is light somewhere.

it may not be much light but

it beats the darkness.

be on the watch.

the gods will offer you chances.

know them.

take them.

you can’t beat death but

you can beat death in life, sometimes.

and the more often you learn to do it,

the more light there will be.

your life is your life.

know it while you have it.

you are marvelous

the gods wait to delight

in you.

(And speaking of gravelly voices, if you’ve never heard Tom Waits read this poem, it’s worth a listen.)

Every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end.

— Semisonic

But because it was Nowruz—a holiday about renewal, reflection, and the passage of time—I wanted to balance that idea with something else. So I told the group I was going to read a second poem, this one from the Persian poet Rudaki called “All is as it is supposed to be.” And it goes like this:

There is happiness now, be happy.
Why are you sad? Why do you worry?
Destiny does what it must for you.
The viziers’ ways won’t work for you,
Fate will decide what is best for you.
Life’s wheel won’t create another like you.
Your mother won’t bear another like you.
God will never close a door on you,
Before opening a hundred better doors.

If Bukowski is about agency—about grabbing the wheel—Rudaki is about something closer to surrender. Trust. The idea that maybe the wheel doesn’t entirely belong to you in the first place.

At that point, I told a second story.

Jesus, take the wheel…”

— Carrie Underwood

In 2005, I was living in San Francisco and working at Wells Fargo—really my only stint at a big company. My team had a small suite of offices in a downtown high-rise. There were maybe eight of us total, so when the doorbell rang, whoever happened to be around would grab it.

One day, I was alone when the bell rang. It was a DHL delivery guy holding a package for someone named Stacey Larsen (name changed to protect the innocent).

I told him there wasn’t a Stacey Larsen in our office. He showed me the label—definitely Wells Fargo, definitely Stacey Larsen. So I invited him in and said we could try to track her down on the intranet. We found a Stacey Larsen who still worked at Wells Fargo, just in a different building. We called, got voicemail, left a message. The DHL guy left.

End of story. Or so I thought.

About six weeks later I attended my 20-year high school reunion back in Phoenix. On Friday night of reunion weekend, there was a house party—classic backyard kegger, exactly what you’d expect. At some point, I’m standing outside, smoking a clove cigarette, when up walks my junior-year prom date.

Stacey Larsen.

“Hey Stacey,” I said.

“You’re an idiot,” she said, in a tone that made it clear she wasn’t actually upset. Which, to be fair, is a label I’ve earned in a variety of contexts, but I was still completely unclear on the specific one here. My face must have reflected that.

“That package you got…” she said. I just stared at her.

“At Wells Fargo. That was for me.”

It turns out that, unbeknownst to me, Stacey also worked at Wells Fargo and had actually occupied the exact same office in the exact same suite before my team moved in. She had connected the dots before I did. I was still staring at the dots.

What are the odds?

It’s a strange world we live in…

— Depeche Mode

So those were my two stories. And if there was a point to the talk, it was this: I’ve always believed that we create our own destinies. I still do. I believe in saying yes. I believe in showing up. I believe that most of what looks like luck is really just the accumulation of small decisions made over time.

But.

There are moments that don’t quite fit that model. Things that feel too coincidental, too specific, too… authored. Moments where you didn’t cause anything to happen, but happen it did.

So in my head, I’ve started to imagine what I call a Woo-O-Meter. On one end: pure free will. We are in complete control. Every outcome is the product of our choices. On the other: pure fatalism. Everything is pre-ordained. We’re just along for the ride.

When I was younger, I would have been pinned all the way to the free will side. These days, I’m not so sure. At that point, I looked around the room and asked, “How Woo Are You?”

You don’t have to serve somebody…

— Bob Dylan

Which brings me to The Confessions of Nat Turner. William Styron’s 1968 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel is a fictionalized first-person account of Nat Turner, the enslaved man who led a violent rebellion in Virginia in 1831. The book unfolds as a kind of retrospective confession, with Turner awaiting execution and recounting the events and, more importantly, the internal convictions that led him there.

Styron doesn’t present Turner as a simple revolutionary or a one-dimensional symbol. Instead, he’s deeply introspective, conflicted, and intensely religious. From a young age, Turner believes he has been marked, chosen for something larger. He experiences visions, reads meaning into natural events, and becomes increasingly convinced that he is an instrument of divine will.

As the story progresses, that belief hardens. Turner wrestles with doubt, hesitates at key moments, and questions whether he is misreading the signs. But each time, something happens, a coincidence, a vision, a moment of clarity, that he interprets as confirmation. Not suggestion. Confirmation.

Styron’s prose matches that interior intensity. It is dense, lyrical, and often beautiful, more concerned with psychological depth than narrative momentum. When it works, it pulls you deep inside Turner’s mind in a way that feels immersive and unsettling at the same time. You don’t just observe his thinking. You inhabit it.

Which is also why the book can be a demanding read. The pacing is deliberate, the language occasionally heavy, and the focus so inward that it sometimes sacrifices narrative propulsion. Compared to some other Pulitzer winners, it is less interested in story as story and more interested in the philosophical and moral architecture underneath it. That emphasis on interiority shapes how the story unfolds.

And so when the rebellion finally comes, it doesn’t feel impulsive. It feels inevitable. That’s what makes the novel so unsettling. It’s not just about what Turner does. It’s about how he understands why he’s doing it. He isn’t surrendering to fate in a passive sense. He’s acting, deliberately and forcefully, with the conviction that the outcome has already been decided.

Which raises a question the book never fully answers, and maybe can’t: Is Turner exercising free will? Or is he carrying out a destiny he believes he has no right to ignore?

Reading it, I couldn’t help but think back to that room in Puerto Rico. Not because my stories carry anything close to the weight of Turner’s, but because the underlying tension felt familiar. The idea that you can move through life making choices, saying yes, creating momentum, and yet still occasionally encounter moments that feel less like decisions and more like instructions.

Once in a while you get shown the light in the strangest of places if you look at it right.

— Grateful Dead

I still believe in saying yes. I still believe that showing up matters, that motion creates opportunity, that most of what we call luck is just the residue of effort and openness over time. But I also think there are moments—small ones, usually—where something else seems to be at work. Not enough to rewrite the rules. Just enough to make you wonder who else might be holding the pen.

Maybe we choose more than we think. Maybe we control less than we’d like. And maybe the truth lives somewhere in between— in the space where a sticker turns into a trip, a trip turns into a story, and a misdelivered package somehow finds its way back to a name you hadn’t said out loud in twenty years.

That night in Puerto Rico, after I finished, we went around the room and everyone shared where they landed on the Woo-O-Meter. Some people were firmly on the free will side. No hesitation. Others leaned toward fate, convinced that more was being written for them than by them. Most people, like me, hovered somewhere in the middle—unsure, but curious.

What struck me wasn’t where people landed. It was how easily everyone had a story. A moment. A decision or a coincidence they couldn’t quite explain but also couldn’t ignore. Which, I think, is the point.

Not that we have to choose a side. But that if you pay attention long enough, life will give you enough evidence to question whichever side you thought you were on.

The Keepers of the House (1965): Does Your Mother Know You’re a Monarch?

July 30, 2025July 30, 2025 ~ ~ Leave a comment

When Sweden gambled on a French general, it got 200 years of monarchy. When Alabama underestimated Abigail Howland, it got scorched earth.

A bronze statue of a general on horseback, set against a backdrop of buildings with varied architectural styles and a cloudy sky.

I’ve played all my cards, and that’s what you’ve done too.

— ABBA, The Winner Takes It All

Parisa and I recently took a trip to Scandinavia—a few days in Copenhagen, a Swedish cruise, a train across Norway, and a solid amount of time marveling at how everything managed to be both efficient and cozy. While in Stockholm, the largest of the Nordic capitals, we joined a walking tour through Gamla Stan, the city’s old town. That part of Stockholm is especially stunning. The buildings look like pastel candy boxes, and the Swedes themselves are both impossibly beautiful and annoyingly well-dressed. As the tour wound through the cobblestone streets, we came across a statue right next to the Royal Palace of a man named Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte.

Now, I don’t claim to be a European history expert, but even I know “Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte” doesn’t sound particularly Swedish. And clearly, I wasn’t the first tourist to wonder why a French guy on a horse had such a prominent statue in the middle of Stockholm, because before I could say ursäkta mig, the guide stopped to tell us the tale. What followed was one of the most unexpected, wonderfully bizarre royal origin stories I’ve ever heard.

There’s not a soul out there / No one to hear my prayer.

–ABBA, Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! (A Man After Midnight)

Back in the early 1800s, Sweden was in a serious bind. They’d just lost Finland to Russia, their king had been overthrown, and the guy they installed in his place—Charles XIII—was elderly and childless, so not exactly brimming with heirs. With no viable successor and the monarchy teetering, the Swedish parliament did something bold, strange, and a little desperate: they offered the throne to a French general who was not only not royalty, but who also had never set foot in Sweden.

That general was Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte, a career soldier who rose through the ranks during the French Revolution and fought alongside Napoleon who, we might recall, was definitely against monarchies. But he was no fool. When a country you’ve never visited offers you a crown, you don’t pause to debate political philosophy—you say yes. He converted to Lutheranism, took the name Karl Johan, and—against all odds—turned out to be exactly what Sweden needed. He led them through the Napoleonic wars, brought political stability, and founded the House of Bernadotte.

And here’s the kicker: not only did this French general do the job well, but his descendants have now ruled Sweden for over 200 years. The monarchy he was never meant to inherit? Still going strong. Still French. In fact, the only person in the current royal family with an actual Swedish bloodline is Prince Daniel—the guy who used to be a personal trainer before marrying Crown Princess Victoria. Which means that the Swedish crown is, to this day, balanced on the broad shoulders of a man who probably once taught a spin class.

Take a chance on me

–ABBA, Take a Chance on Me

A wise man once told me that “desperation breeds creativity,” and the phrase has stuck with me. Standing there in Stockholm, hearing how an orphaned monarchy took a wild gamble on a French revolutionary and somehow ended up with 200 years of peaceful succession, it struck me as an odd decision—but not a wrong one. It also made me think about another unlikely heir: Abigail Howland, the steely protagonist of The Keepers of the House, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1965. Her story isn’t about thrones or crowns, but it is about what you do when history hands you something heavy—and you decide to carry it anyway.

Written by Shirley Ann Grau, the book is set in rural Alabama and centers on the Howland family, landed Southern aristocrats who have run the same plantation for seven generations. On the surface, it’s a story about inheritance, race, and the slow decay of old money in the modern South. But underneath, it’s about what happens when long-held secrets come to light, when polite society turns on its own, and when the people you underestimated decide they’ve had enough.

The Howlands are a fixture in their small Southern town: wealthy, respected, and just aloof enough to be mythologized. William Howland, the family patriarch, is a quiet man who keeps to himself, raises his granddaughter Abigail after her parents die, and maintains the land with a kind of grim, inherited duty. He also, as it turns out, lives for decades in a secret common-law marriage with Margaret, a Black woman, and fathers several children with her. Those children are sent away and erased from polite white society, but not from the family’s bloodline.

Abigail grows up sheltered from the scandal. But when William dies and she inherits the estate, the past begins to surface. At first, the townspeople still treat her with the same reverent distance they afforded her grandfather. But once his secret is exposed—and once she’s seen as the white woman who inherited not just the house but the stain of racial mixing—everything changes. Her fiancé, a rising segregationist politician, abandons her for political expediency. Her social circle vanishes. The town turns on her, not with torches and pitchforks, but with lawsuits, whispers, and slow-motion ostracism.

And then Abigail flips the script.

There was something in the air that night, the stars were bright…

— ABBA, Fernando

Rather than retreat or collapse under the weight of shame and betrayal, she leans in. Hard. She becomes the keeper of the house in the truest sense: not just maintaining the family name, but wielding it like a weapon. She uses her resources, her name, and the town’s own rules of inheritance and land ownership to dismantle the social order that rejected her. It’s not a redemption arc. It’s a power play. Cold. Calculated. Viciously effective.

I’ve complained before about the lack of intentionality in some Pulitzer-winning protagonists. Take Daisy Goodwill from The Stone Diaries, for example, who drifts through life while others quietly shape her story. Abigail is the antidote. She doesn’t just reclaim the narrative; she owns the ending. There’s no soft fade into memory, no quiet elegy. Abigail stays rooted in the house, in the town, in the blood-soaked legacy she’s chosen to defend. If Daisy’s life is a collection of photographs someone else left unlabeled, Abigail’s is a hand-scrawled manifesto in Sharpie on the front porch wall.

That said, The Keepers of the House isn’t a perfect novel. It moves slowly at times, with long stretches of atmosphere that veer into over-description. The racial dynamics, while central to the plot, are sometimes handled with the kind of distance that feels more convenient than courageous. And the character development outside Abigail and William can feel thin—people drift in and out of the story like background extras. It’s a book with sharp bones, but not always enough flesh.

If we’re still using the Scorsese framework I proposed back when reviewing Martin Dressler, this one probably lands in the Casino tier. Flawed, a little bloated, maybe not his best—but when it hits, it really hits. And like Casino, its final act is a ruthless, unexpected coda that lingers long after you close the book.

The history book on the shelf / Is always repeating itself.

— ABBA, Waterloo

But beyond structure or style, what lingers is the shape of the story—and who dares to shape it. Because that’s what these stories—Bernadotte’s, Abigail’s—are really about. The unexpected turns. The side doors. The idea that history isn’t always written by the boldest or the best prepared—but by the ones who said yes when no one else wanted the job. Whether it’s a French general grabbing a crown, or a Southern woman reclaiming a poisoned inheritance, the lesson is the same: desperation doesn’t just breed creativity—it sometimes creates legacies. Messy ones. Contested ones. But legacies nonetheless.

Sometimes the story isn’t passed down. It’s taken back.

#54 The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love (1990): Summer of Love II or The Summer of Acronyms – SCOTUS and USWNT Let Love (and Equality) Rule

August 13, 2015February 13, 2017 ~ Pulitzer Guy ~ Leave a comment

[Editor’s Note: Pulitzer Schmulitzer! is where we count down our favorite Pulitzer Prize winning novels for fiction according to the unpredictable and arbitrary whims of yours truly. To learn how Pulitzer Schmulitzer! started and read about the methodology or complete lack thereof behind the rankings, look no further than right here. If you want to see what we’ve covered so far, here you go. Now, on to the countdown.]

Could the summer of 2015 be the Summer of Love II?

There are a couple of indicators leading me to the conclusion that this might be the case. First, back during New York Fashion Week last fall, several top designers such as Tommy Hilfiger, Zimmerman and Vera Wang all paid homage to the 1960s and the Summer of Love. Turns out they may have been on to something more than just an affection of floral patterns, ruffles and maxi dresses.

Then, on June 26, 2015, the Supreme Court issued its decision in Obergefell v. Hodges, guaranteeing a right to same-sex marriage. I could try to summarize the majority opinion, but Justice Kennedy’s final paragraph is one of the most beautiful you will ever read in a court case so I’ll defer:

No union is more profound than marriage, for it embodies the highest ideals of love, fidelity, devotion, sacrifice, and family. In forming a marital union, two people become something greater than once they were. As some of the petitioners in these cases demonstrate, marriage embodies a love that may endure even past death. It would misunderstand these men and women to say they disrespect the idea of marriage. Their plea is that they do respect it, respect it so deeply that they seek to find its fulfillment for themselves. Their hope is not to be condemned to live in loneliness, excluded from one of civilization’s oldest institutions. They ask for equal dignity in the eyes of the law. The Constitution grants them that right. The judgment of the Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit is reversed.

It is so ordered.

Or, as distilled into Haiku by McSweeney’s:

Hark! Love is love, and
love is love is love is love.
It is so ordered.

That day of elation was based on decades of awareness, activism and perseverance, and as soon as the decision was announced, Twitter, Facebook and other social media outlets quickly began to fill with rainbow-themed images. And one of those was a precursor to the third indicator that the summer of 2015 may indeed be the Summer of Love II.

You see, on that very same June 26^th in Ottawa, Canada, the U.S. Women’s National Team was preparing to face China in the quarterfinal matchup of the Women’s World Cup. This was already a special World Cup for me as I had taken my daughter Lily up to Vancouver a week prior to watch the U.S. play Nigeria in the group play round. When Lily was eight, we diligently watched the USWNT play in the 2011 World Cup in Germany, and were heartbroken when they lost in the final to Japan on penalty kicks. But Lily knew then that the next World Cup was going to be closer to home in Canada, and asked if we could go. I can think of few better role models for my daughter – and also I figured she’d forget over the next four years – so I said yes. She never forgot.

By June 26^th, however, the women of the USWNT had become not only solid role models for girls, but also had become the most prominent sporting symbol of the United States during 2015. This, I might add, occurred without a ton of support. First, all the stadiums hosting World Cup games had artificial turf, a feature that many complained about loudly. Putting aside the arguments in favor of turf fields, there is no disputing that FIFA would have never ever in a million years forced the men to play on anything other than grass. Why? Maybe it’s because sometimes artificial turf gets so hot that it melts shoes. There’s that.

But it wasn’t just the turf issue. Sports Illustrated writer Andy Benoit tweeted that women’s sports in general – not just soccer – are not worth watching. It was such a stupid tweet that you would have thought he was being sarcastic if he tried to defend his statement by pointing at TV ratings.

The reaction to this tweet was fast and furious from both men and women with my favorite being Amy Poeler and Seth Meyers reuniting for a segment of Really.

Unfortunately, his opinion, although not usually expressed so publicly, is more widespread than is should be. For winning the World Cup, for example, the USWNT received $2 million. Seems like a fine sum until you realize that the US Men’s Team got $8 million just for reaching the round of 16. How much did the winning German team get? I’m glad you asked. That would be $35 million.

So it was great to watch the naysayers proved wrong as the World Cup progressed. The popularity of the team – of women – swelled in unison with their victories, culminating in a 5-2 victory over Japan in which we scored a ridiculous four goals in 16 minutes.

The final game averaged a stunning 25.4 million viewers, making it the most-viewed soccer game ever in the United States–men’s or women’s–by a giant margin. How does that compare to men’s sports Andy Benoit? Game 7 of the San Francisco Giants/Kansas City World Series game drew 23.5 million viewers. Game 6 of the Golden State Warriors/Cleveland Cavaliers NBA Finals – a Finals series that drew more viewers than any series since the Michael Jordan era – had only 13.9 million viewers. And don’t even try to compare to the Stanley Cup Final. That came in at 7.6 million.

Everyone watched the USWNT finals match! Everyone loves women’s soccer! Everyone can get married! Which made me wonder, can you have too much love? I assumed that since the Beatles said “All You Need Is Love” the answer was no, until I read The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love by Oscar Hijuelos, the 1990 winner of the Pulitzer Prize.

The first novel by a United-States born Hispanic to win, Mambo Kings is the story of two Cuban brothers and musicians, Cesar and Nestor Castillo, who immigrate to the United States from Cuba and settle in New York City in the early 1950s. Like The Tinkers and The Stone Diaries, the story takes place at the very end of the protagonist’s life. Told from the perspective of the older brother Cesar, it chronicles his last hours as he sits in a seedy hotel room, drinking and listening to recordings made by his band, the Mambo Kings.

Cesar, the Mambo King himself, is an old man, and the book describes his memories of his life (and loves) in Cuba and New York. Cesar and Nestor arrive in New York full of ambition and desire to be musicians. Other than their love of music and shared DNA, however, the brothers are complete opposites. Nestor is an incredibly talented trumpet player and songwriter, but he forever mourns the loss of his first love, a woman named Maria. His demeanor is sad, soulful and tormented. Cesar, on the other hand, is a handsome, macho, player. For Cesar, everything in his life is indulgence: playing music, dancing, eating, drinking, and having sex. In fact, as we’ll get to shortly, Cesar measures his life by his many sexual escapades.

The brothers are talented and willing to work hard, and with some luck put together an orchestra they call The Mambo Kings. The mambo craze of the late 1940s is still in full swing, and the band grows in popularity. They even get a guest appearance on I Love Lucy after Desi Arnaz catches their nightclub act one evening. This appearance gives them a measure of celebrity and helps them to sell some records, but true fame remains just beyond their reach.

As the mambo craze begins to fade, the fortunes of Cesar, Nestor, and the The Mambo Kings decline as well. Although Nestor marries a lovely woman and starts a family, he still pines for Maria and spends his life constantly re-writing one song about his lost love, “Beautiful Maria of My Soul.” His deep melancholy ends only when the car he is driving skids off the road in a snowstorm, killing him.

Cesar has always been the driving force for the Mambo Kings, and, as alluded to above, is a favorite with the ladies. He’s a handsome, suave, baritone who naturally charms the audience and spreads his love among many women. But not in a totally dickish way (there’s a pun here, but you’re not going to get it until later). He’s generous to a fault, freely bestowing gifts and money on those he befriends, as well as supporting his family members still in Cuba. But after Nestor dies, he simply cannot continue to be the leader he once was. He descends into a depression that begins slowly to eat at him, fueled by drinking and excess. Pretty much, the end.

For me, The Mambo Kings is a tale of two books. Sixty percent of this book is really great. It is a melancholy story for sure, but lyrically told and in a style that evokes the rhythms of Cuban music. Does that last sentence sound too pretentious? Lets just say I like the writing style. I also like the general theme of immigrants coming to the U.S. and how they see themselves in relation to their new culture in contrast to the culture of their birth. It’s like Scarface without the blow and chainsaws.

And compared to some of the other novels that sit in this area of the countdown because their stories are rather dull (e.g., The Stone Diaries and Breathing Lessons), the subject matter of The Mambo Kings is inherently interesting, at least for me. It’s an immigrant story set in 1950s and 60s New York with Spanish music, a Fidel Castro-led revolution, dancing, and unexpected cameos from real-life mambo dudes Desi Arnaz and Tito Puente. It also has a ton of sex. And that, I can’t believe I’m going to say this, may actually be the problem.

You see, the other 40% of this is really, really bad. Thirty percent of the book is comprised of sex scenes. Don’t get me wrong, I like a good soft-porn novel as much as the next guy, but these were more monotonous than provocative. But it was the final 10% that really got me because that part contains Hijuelos’ weird and disturbing fixation on Cesar’s penis. Seriously, if you’re the kind of reader who really likes to know how the protagonist’s dick is doing, this book will be great for you because there’s a dick status update on just about every page. If that isn’t your cup of tea, then this is a tough 10% to get through.

So it turns out you actually can have too much love. At least in Pulitzer Prize winning novels. But the good news is that won’t affect the summer of 2015 (possibly) going down in history as the Summer of Love II. My four year wait to attend a Women’s World Cup match with Lily seems insignificant when compared to length of time same-sex couples have waited for the right to get married, but on a personal level are both are hugely meaningful. Lily will always remember this as the summer the rainbows took over Instagram as she watched the USWNT advance in the World Cup. She turned 13 this summer, and her entire adult life will be in a world where love is love is love is love. And after watching the USWNT kick ass in the finals, her love for soccer is now cemented. You want proof, and another dick status update? Well here is what Lily re-tweeted the other morning while watching the opening weekend of the English Premier League:

I love her.

#60 – Lighting the corners of my mind: Mem’ries of Led Zeppelin III and The Tinkers by Paul Harding (2010)

December 24, 2014February 12, 2017 ~ Pulitzer Guy ~ 1 Comment

I am certain I have forgotten way more things than I actually remember. I just finished listening to Serial, the NPR podcast phenomenon that asks whether Adnan Syed was wrongly convicted of murdering his ex-girlfriend. The main problem with Adnan’s defense is that he can’t remember what he did after school on the Friday afternoon that she was killed. Several hours of his life are missing from his memory. I feel bad for Adnan because I can’t remember a lot of things. Huge chunks of my life, like the winter of 1994 or a single woman I dated before Gigi (go with me on this one), let alone 3:00-5:00 p.m. on a day 15 years ago.

Case in point: Just a few days ago, Gigi was trying to remind me of the place in San Francisco where we used to eat Sunday brunch. Not only did she remember the name, location, décor, and what she ate, but she also remembered what I ate. And whether I liked it. In contrast, not only did I not remember the restaurant (or what I ate) when she was describing it to me, I have now already forgotten what it was that she reminded me of. And I also can’t remember what I had for breakfast today. Honestly, it’s one of the benefits of documenting my life in Facebook and Instagram, and I actually order the Facebook book so that I can remember what I posted on Facebook. None of this existed 15 years ago, when Adnan allegedly killed his girlfriend.

I should probably be concerned, but then I remember that I can recall every lyric of every song on Led Zeppelin III. In order, both sides. I can also recite every defensive player on the Pittsburgh Steelers 1976 Super Bowl Championship team, play The Sting from memory although I learned it when I was eight, and tell you the last 44 Best Picture winners at the Oscars.

Which begs the question: why do we remember what we remember? I have no idea but my guess is that we don’t necessarily remember things we did, instead we remember things that we did, plus something. The “plus something” is the key, but it can be anything. It can be contextual (where I was when I heard about 9/11), personal relevance (where I was when I first kissed Gigi) or simply repetition (Led Zeppelin III). Brunch in San Francisco, while I’m sure fantastic and enjoyable, is not a plus something for me. And so, all memory of it is gone. (As an aside, Gigi jokes that I eat “fud” and not “food” and this may be true. Meals have significance to her but not to me, unless Mohammed Ali or Heidi Klum is eating next to me. And then I’ll only remember what they said to me, and not what I ordered.)

I was in Japan this past October and saw some incredible things. I looked over Tokyo from Roppongi Hills, walked through Happoen Garden, visited a LOT of temples that involved me lighting a lot of incense. I did a lot of bowing. I rode a bullet train past Mount Fuji and saw a Geisha in the Gion Kobu area of Kyoto (on the street, not as a customer). Will I remember them in 20 years? Questionable. It’s already a little hazy. But what I will remember is an intersection.

You see, there is an intersection in the Shibuya area of Tokyo that is considered the busiest in the world. There also happens to be a Starbucks on one corner where you can watch this intersection from the second floor. It is mesmerizing. I must have spent 20 minutes drinking a Venti coffee (yes, still called that in Tokyo) watching the light change and the pedestrians stream across the street only to somehow make it back to the sidewalk by the time the walk sign turned red and the light turned green and the cars came. It was Tokyo in a nutshell.

But why I really remember this intersection while the other memories already begin to fade is that I took a video that I can’t stop watching.

At the 15 second mark of this video, when the walk light turns green, there is a man in a white shirt that darts from the bottom of the screen toward the top on the right hand side of the cross walk. As he gets to about the halfway point, three men – one from the top, left and right of the screen – meet him in the middle of the street and knock him down. There is a flurry of activity, and then they all get up and exit stage left.

What happened? Was it a robbery? Or was I just watching a group of kids playing around? If the latter, what was it they were trying to do? It certainly didn’t look like fun. Especially for the guy who landed on his ass. Whatever the setup, I’m also fascinated that the mass of people around them seem nonplussed by the whole event and don’t take a second look. Was I the only one watching this? I’m obsessed with my video. The event itself is now significant to me because I have watched my video at least 300 times, and this minute will be my Tokyo memory that stays with me most clearly because of the repetition. Did I even eat in Tokyo? No clue.

Which is a fine intro to The Tinkers by Paul Harding, the 2010 Pulitzer Prize winner. The Tinkers tells the story of a New England patriarch named George Washing Crosby as he lies dying on a hospital bed in his living room, “right where they put the dining room table, fitted with its two extra leaves for holiday dinners.” The book recounts Crosby’s difficult childhood in Maine where his father was a tinker and travelling salesman who also suffered from epileptic seizures, and (small spoiler alert), the most traumatic event in Crosby’s life centers on his father’s abandonment of the family on learning that his wife was planning to have him institutionalized. But really, the book is less about what happened in his life than what Crosby remembers happening. It’s the story of the journey we will all go through at the end, and Crosby’s life, seen from its final moments, becomes a collection of memories that make sense only to that one person.

It’s a sad story, which isn’t at all surprising because most of the Pulitzer Prize winners are. But this one hit a little closer to home than most as I just went through something similar with my dad. For about six weeks beginning in mid-April of this year, we knew my dad was going to die. As such, I spent a fair of amount of time with him during those weeks, and I often thought that odds are that this is how we will go out. It won’t be an aneurism, a plane crash, or an underwater poisonous snake. Most of us will die slowly. We will die in a bed in a hospital, hospice, or at home.

Death, as they say, is one of life’s certainties (along with taxes and the Giants winning the World Series every other year), but that doesn’t make it any easier. And I wondered what my dad thought of the whole thing. I wondered if he thought about the fact that he wasn’t going to see another birthday, or presidential election or, for that matter, another World Series. He won’t see his grandchildren get married or the end of House of Cards. Everything he did he was doing it for the last time. And this gets only more acute when you think about what the very last days will be like, assuming our pain has been managed, when we are laying on our bed, no longer able to communicate in a meaningful fashion with whoever is sitting – reading or knitting or texting – in the chair beside us. What will we think about then?

That’s the place where The Tinkers lives. In the eight days before his dies, Crosby will think very little of the traditional narrative of life. Crosby’s life is summarized early and quickly: “[He] got a master’s degree in education, counseled guidance in high school, went back north every summer to fly-fish with his poker buddies – doctors, cops, music teachers – bought a broken clock at a tag sale and a reprint of an eighteenth-century manual on how to fix it, retired, went on group tours to Asia, to Europe, to Africa, fixed clocks for thirty years, spoiled his grandkids, got Parkinson’s, got diabetes, got cancer, and was laid out in a hospital bed in the middle of his living room.”

Instead, Crosby fixates almost equally between his father’s epilepsy and the floorboards below the hospital bed that has been set up in his house. He spends far more time thinking about the night long ago when his father bit his hand in the midst of a fit than he will spend thinking about the years that he spent teaching at the local high school. He recalls the passion for antique clocks that marked his retirement and how he would meticulously repair them. He focuses on the moments that made him. He focuses on the “plus somethings.”

So why doesn’t it rate higher on the countdown? First, Harding has some Faulkner-esque moments where sentences either stretch nearly the length of a page or border on self-loving: “Let those grassy crafts be listed alongside the iron hulls that cleave the sea, for they are all improvisations built from the daydreams of men, and all will perish, whether from ocean siege or October breeze.” Ugh. Second, George’s death is too free of pain and terror and doubt. Or maybe just for my taste. But he just seems so calm and normal about the fact that he is dying that it doesn’t seem realistic. But lastly (and most importantly), although the story meant a lot to me personally because of my own dad’s death, I didn’t really care about the story. I wasn’t invested in George or his memories beyond what they told me about myself.

There was an article in the New York Times about six months ago written by a hospice nurse who spoke about the regrets of the dying. They regretted working too much, not being true to themselves, not having the courage to express their feelings, not keeping in touch with friends and not letting themselves be happier. I get that. But we all know what we’re going to regret. I mean, duh. But what will we remember? Regret is what we’ll think about when we can still choose what to think about. When that time is passed and we are at the point where we can no longer control our thoughts, we’ll think about those moments in our lives that are plus something. Those moments that defined us. The good shit. Like every word of every song on Led Zeppelin III.

#62 – Sometimes Things Work and Sometimes They Don’t: My Summer Vacation vs. “A Fable” by William Faulkner (1955)

September 29, 2014February 12, 2017 ~ Pulitzer Guy ~ Leave a comment

Def: Serendipity: 1. an aptitude for making desirable discoveries by accident; 2. the occurrence and development of events by chance in a happy or beneficial way. See also: you can’t make this sh*t up.

Things can happen by accident or chance. Incredible things. Things that cannot be manufactured or created by will. I know this to be true, but it’s astounding that, at my age, I’m still surprised that these things happen and that they often work out OK. Or at least, much better than they should have. Sometimes by “work out” I mean “I didn’t die” (see, e.g., when I, at age 17, was left in Tijuana with $5 and no ride and decided my best option was to hitchhike to San Diego). But most of the time it is less about avoiding a tragic outcome, and more about stumbling across amazing moments that I would (and should) have never expected to happen. Serendipity. And that’s exactly what happened when we went to Europe this summer.

To set the stage, it is important to know that we give our older kids a lot of say in where we vacation. Possibly too much. Like when the kids chose…wait for it….Pennsylvania! for spring break, we were skeptical, but it worked out. Between Hershey Park, Gettysburg, and the cheesesteaks, we had a great time. One year wiser, this year we limited the options for our summer destination to Europe, and solicited suggestions.

Where did we end up? Start with my daughter Lily, who just turned 12 and whose favorite book in the whole wide world is The Fault in Our Stars, which, if you haven’t read it, really is the best (non-Pulitzer prize winning) book in the whole wide world. And in TFIOS (tweens love acronyms), a pivotal story arch has the two cancer-stricken teenage protagonists visit Amsterdam. Ergo, we have Lily’s choice and stop #1, and promptly purchased four tickets to Amsterdam. My son Sam is 13 and a legitimate World War II history buff. And he knows his stuff. We once met a WWII vet at a museum and Sam correctly answered every obscure question the guy asked about the war. So, we had our next stop, and promptly purchased four train tickets to Berlin. (As an aside, Sam’s other top travel ideas at the moment are (a) Iceland to see the Aurora Borealis and (b) Burning Man. Places Sam Takes Me could be my new blog.)

On the plane to Amsterdam I opened up Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch, winner of the 2014 Pulitzer Prize, and read the first sentence: “While I was still in Amsterdam, I dreamed about my mother for the first time in years.” While not itself serendipitous, it was certainly eerily coincidental, and foreshadowed the serendipity to follow. Because unless you live under a rock or really really really hate sports, then you have probably already figured out that our European adventure was about to collide with the World Cup.

I am by no means a die-hard soccer fan but I love the World Cup because the World Cup does one thing better than any other event that human beings organize –it focuses the attention of the world on one place at one moment. From the moment Brazil beat Croatia in the first match, a substantial portion of the living population of the Earth had its feelings altered simultaneously by the actions of 22 men chasing a ball around a field in Brazil. Only the Olympics brings people together like this, and hey, all due respect to the Olympics, but is it ever not the same thing.

And this World Cup pretty much had everything on the field and off. It started with an insane group stage full of upsets and ended with the coronation of Germany and the potential start of a dynasty. And along the way it had Robin van Persie’s header against Spain; Guillermo Ochoa blanking Brazil; Costa Rica leaving a trail of established European powers in its wake; James Rodrigues and the Giant Bug; the Netherlands’ equalizer against Mexico in the 88^th minute; Tim Howard’s 16 saves and the series of nervous breakdowns that was US-Belgium; and Germany scoring four goals in six minutes against the most celebrated nation in soccer history, a team that hadn’t lost a competitive match on home soil since 1975. But I digress.

What will be really memorable about this year’s Cup, at least for me, is that it unfolded serendipitously to overlap perfectly with our kids very non-soccer focused vacation plans.

We landed in Amsterdam with enough time to get our bearings, check in to our hotel, purchase bright orange Robben, van Persie and Sneijder jerseys and find ourselves a spot in a bar near the Vondelpark to watch the Netherlands-Argentina match. The teams played to a stalemate and, truth be told, it wasn’t even an exciting stalemate. Argentina won in a shoot out, so we bid adieu to the Dutch who left us with so many lasting memories from this World Cup like…, um, well… Arjen Robben falling down.

But we weren’t that upset. Our love of the Dutch was fleeting because, serendipitously, Germany let loose a historic and unanticipated 7-1 drubbing on Brazil in the other semi-final and, by chance, our itinerary had us landing in Berlin the day of the finals. So once again, we had just enough time to get our bearings, buy some appropriately allegiant clothing (this time the last of the German hats and flags in the stores), and make our way to the Brandenburg gate to watch the World Cup finals on the big screens with 100,000 of our closest German friends who were armed with a seemingly unending supply of beer and sausage.

We all know how the story ends. Germany were crowned world champions for the fourth time thanks to a stunning extra-time winner from super sub Mario Gotze in the 113^th minute. We hugged our drunk German brethren. We loudly sang German soccer songs without knowing a single word other than “Deutchland, Deutchland.” We drank giant beers. And we ruined our kids. Because now they want to know where we will celebrate the World Cup championship four years from now and I have to tell them that you can’t re-create what happened because it happened entirely by chance. It was serendipity. It was magical. And sometimes things just work out because working out feels awesome.

My 200,000 closest German friends as seen from the Ferris Wheel. — My 100,000 closest German friends as seen from the Ferris Wheel.

But sometimes it doesn’t, which brings me to William Faulkner’s A Fable. The plot itself is actually pretty straightforward: a French battalion in WWI lay down their arms and refuse to fight at the behest of a Christ-like corporal. Chaos ensues as the military powers-that-be realize that if all the soldiers realize peace is as simple as everybody agreeing to stop fighting, then what’s the point of being a power-that-be. The story chronicles the elaborate efforts of the French, British and American powers-that-be to investigate and cover up this absurdity, and to punish those responsible for daring to stop a war.

Faulkner, without a doubt, is a literary great and one of only two authors with two novels on the Pulitzer list. And evidence of his genius is abundant but the problem is it’s hidden amidst pages and pages of rambling paragraphs and speeches and descriptions that are circular and repetitive and overly-flowery to the point of being masturbatory. Moreover, as with James Cozzens’ Guard of Honor, most of the characters are seldom referred to by name, and there is a liberal use of pronouns with ambiguous antecedents, so it’s easy to lose track of who’s who and what they’re doing at any given moment. I love a dense and rambling novel as much as the next guy, but when you combine that with repetitive and opaque writing, the results are a far more challenging read than seems necessary.

It was painstaking to finish this one, but I was hoping that there would be that Faulkner pay-off where you just love the end of the book, where he brings everything together in a way that blows your mind. I was hoping it would all work out in the end. But sometimes it doesn’t. Faulkner was a brilliant writer, but by the time he wrote this, his fifteenth novel, he was less in need of talent than of an editor. This was not magical, and certainly not something that happened by chance. He manufactured this book, belaboring the language, writing intentionally and deliberately, and it did not work out OK. Except maybe for the whole winning the Pulitzer thing. Which, although good for him, didn’t help him rank any higher than last on my list with this novel.

P.S. If I was in need of any more serendipity on this trip I found it at the very last stop. After Berlin we headed to Prague and by chance, on our way home, in the Prague airport, there was a piano with a sign inviting people to play. And by chance, we had a few minutes to spare, and Lily embraced the opportunity, playing “Colors of the Wind” from the movie Pocahontas.

We weren’t home more than a week when, by chance, the following video appeared in my Facebook feed.

It turns out that the pianos have been placed around the city streets, public spaces and train stations as part of an unusual art project aimed at getting people together away from their typical routine. By chance the one piano that we came across was the exact same piano in the viral video. Serendipity? The occurrence and development of events by chance in a happy or beneficial way? Absolutely. It was one last magical moment that we never could have imagined. At least until the next one.