The Billionaires Are Not Coming to Save Us

Every year, without fail, I listen to the Blackstone Audio Recorded Books version of A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens, read by the late Frank Muller. There are other recordings and movie versions (I’m personally torn between the 1984 made-for-television version with George C. Scott and the 1951 Alistair Sim “Scrooge”). Several years ago, Micki and I and Evan participated in an acted narration of the story for our downtown Christmas event over several Yuletides. The first year, to my lasting joy, I got to play the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, in which I bundled a bunch of black sheets over myself to the point of being unable to move or see and—with the expert advice of a genius friend—kept my left hand free to gesture, since that would be, by definition, more sinister. A Christmas Carol is the only Dickens that I love as much as I do and without overstating it (I hope) is the one that is annually the most relevant and poignant for the modern era, almost as if Dickens understood what the future would hold.

What follows, then, is a strange amalgam of literary review, social commentary, philosophical introspection, and societal criticism, using Dickens’ holiday masterpiece as the center structure. This will be the last essay I write for the year and so, I decided to make a Frankenstein’s monster, lumping together a series of topics and sources to make one long and (hopefully) thought-provoking read before family arrives and it is time to eat too many cookies and open presents. Echoing Dickens, then, for however you “keep” Christmas, I hope it is a wonderful season for you. See you in January.

As he stands in his dressing gown on the fateful night of his eventual redemption, Ebenezer Scrooge is shown an image from his past. A sad woman tells a much younger Ebenezer, “Another idol has displaced me. A golden one.” The younger man rebels against this idea, but the elder knows it is true. He has not yet changed his heart, but seeing this stark memory, it is clear he is stirred, as he tells the spirit to show him no more.

The Ghost of Christmas Past is the most relatable of the three spirits sent by Jacob Marley's specter for Scrooge's ‘reclamation’. Just the first spirit might be enough for us to internalize the transformation of the miser, at least for the moment or the season to participate in the greater lesson of the story.

That lesson is particularly apt for modern readers. Scrooge becomes his miserly old self in the first place because, in his heart of hearts, he allowed gain—the greed for wealth and worldly security—to fill the deep wells of emptiness excavated in his spirit as a young child. Left alone at school because his father foolishly blamed Ebenezer for his mother’s death in childbirth, the young man turned from that pain to the only security he understood: money. People may die or abandon us, but money, once attained and scrupulously squirreled away, provides the illusion of endless safety. 

Dickens' holiday masterpiece is a wonderful cornucopia of human experience and has an emotional pitch rarely attained by modern literature. What could be more cathartic than to read, watch, listen, or participate in the myriad renderings of his immortal ghostly classic each Christmas? The fable helps to open me up to the deeper meanings of charity and generosity of the season by getting me to ask myself the same timeless question over again every year: what really matters?

There may have been other years and other eras when Scrooge's nocturnal spiritual journey seemed as relevant. This year, I can think of only one other fable that fits as neatly as a direct warning about the rising tide of human indifference, disdain, tribalism, hatred, self-absorption, corruption and greed. That other story is Dante Alighieri's Inferno. Like Ebenezer Scrooge, Dante is led on a nighttime adventure not through time, but down through the nine levels of Hell, toward the infernal city of Dis by the ghost of the antique Roman, Virgil.  

Past the horrid gates of Hell, we are shown Dante’s greedy and corrupt Italian contemporaries getting their just deserts in the many levels of eternal torture. Dickens might have found contemporaries to burn in effigy in the London of his time in emulation of Dante, but the comedy of Inferno is that there is a final judgment for the worst of humanity beyond life—an end of power and security. Dante revels in that end by pointing out that even the worst humans eventually die. For A Christmas Carol to be a hopeful and uplifting tale, Scrooge's transformation arc must therefore be more pragmatic on this side of the casket lid. And Dickens manages a sharp-witted and human story that shows us that as long as we are alive, there is hope that we can be better people.

The brilliance of A Christmas Carol is that it allows us to travel the gamut of human emotions and flaws, but also the many feelings of pity, regret, hurt and broken hearts, fear and empathy and eventually seeing ourselves in other people. We plunge with Scrooge from the precipice of miserly greed and callous disregard for his fellows through to the awareness of mortality and of other people and the poignancy and pain of their lives. The heartfelt existential sobs of a man changing his stars for the better echo in us, too.

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There is one change that Dickens does not allow us to see. We know that, as the final stave closes, Scrooge startles his employee, Bob Cratchit by offering to pay him way more money and buys him the biggest turkey in London. We are told that he becomes a great man, but we do not see if, in his final rise toward greatness, Scrooge dumps all his cash for a life of quiet piety and poverty in service to others, or if he husbands his millions for the good of his fellows. Given the chance to be logical about fiction, the latter seems to be more likely.

From the modern viewpoint, Scrooge getting to keep and use his cold hard cash for good is realistic even if it is the most dangerous outcome for him. The opportunity to relapse into his miserly habits without constant intercession is a strong temptation. It presupposes a change of heart that is permanent and not subject to other emotional upheavals. What if, for instance, despite his financial support and friendship, Tiny Tim still doesn't survive? Such a tragedy might cast Ebeneezer back into his old mental haunts of bitterness, resentment and misery.

Likewise, as the year rolls away from Christmas, Scrooge might find that his work awakens the old fella’s grasping and greedy habits anew. He may pay Bob Cratchit more money and help his family and friends, but in his heart, what if the ghosts’ lessons grow dim beside the light of gain? We are never shown if Ebenezer makes the daily decision to reaffirm his Christmas lessons.

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Dickens often wrote about the disparity of wealth. A few held most of the power and money while the majority lived in horrible poverty. The world today isn’t much different, but rather than feeling this “Dickensian Divide” keenly, modernity adores the idea of wealth. We have elevated material gain far above the virtues that Scrooge learns on Christmas Eve. Our golden idolatry presupposes that with monetary worth comes a natural disposition to, as Scrooge might have done after the close of the book, strew cash like rose petals across the desolate streets of London and the world. To us, the term ‘billionaire’ is synonymous with beneficence and fiduciary responsibility. 

The irony of this naivety is that we regularly witness billionaires (the modern inheritors of the Scrooge we first meet in Stave One) going to great lengths to protect their billions. They do work hard to promote their hopeful worldview but it seldom has the motivation behind it underlined in Scrooge's transformation. And even Scrooge admits to having paid his taxes. Getting to the level of massive wealth requires a hard and grasping hand, not a soft and generous heart. That fact doesn't stop people from idolizing wealthy individuals.

Everyone's favorite richest man, the charmless Bond Villain, Elon Musk, seemed at first to be positioning himself as a great modern innovator and entrepreneur in emulation of Rockefeller and Vanderbilt. Unlike those men who, in part, raised the cash to provide the financial infrastructure upon which the industrial age was built, Musk only works from a place of ego. Here is a man who really could solve world hunger or fund lobbying to initiate universal basic income. Instead, he bought a social media platform as a vanity project and used it to gain a position of power in the worst administration of all time.

His fans still worship him and think of him as a technological savior. Even the more reasonable people who have ever so slowly understood the error in their adoration of Musk only started to doubt him after he got the nod from the president-elect. Until that point, despite his worrisome words and actions, they continued to make excuses for his worsening behavior. Some still idolize him, almost as if they are getting paid to endorse him, or hoping they will get paid for their support.

His electric cars (a business that someone else started and he bought and gets credit for inventing) and his rockets make him seem like a scientific innovator. Despite his futuristic ideas and apparent innovations, Musk hasn't delivered on what matters. But he could have.

Americans seem to be almost pathologically incapable of seeing in men like Musk the Scrooge that lies just beneath the surface. Musk and other billionaires have indeed doubled down on creating the illusion that they are dashing toward the future, paving golden streets filled with futuristic advances. In truth, they have worked to consolidate power in both halves of American politics, endorsed the worst theocratic fascist ideologies, and corrupted the Supreme Court. Trying to point that out to the people who raise Musk and other billionaires to a godlike status is an act of futility.

Scrooge's final transformation comes as a result of putting his idea of monetary worth aside, finding worth in humanity and learning his responsibility for others. Without his fundamental pivot, Scrooge never gets to be redeemed. Rather, he becomes just like every other greedy person, an empty husk, trying to fill the internal void with shares and bank notes and bonds and spare change.

The virtues come from the person, not the cash. And we know all too well that cash too easily corrupts the person. Musk is evidence of that fact.

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A friend wrote to me recently and asked if I thought that younger generations who gained substantial wealth would use their capital to tackle the great social problems of our era. It was hard not to see this as a tacit admission that Musk and other billionaires had let us all down. His hope was, perhaps being more open-minded, young wealthy people would cast about to see if they could deal with gun violence or homelessness or climate change with their cash. It was a question worth considering. 

I lament the popular idea that one's generation, like a zodiac sign or horoscope, presupposes a certain worldview, as if all Millennials are easygoing and empathic or all Generation Z's are hyper-focused on social justice and equity. We may blame generational tendencies for the failures (or differences) in the way people handle certain social issues or for how they tend to behave generally, but this is an easy way of passing off our desire to scapegoat certain age groups or to undermine faith in others. 

Generational tendencies are as much a fairytale as Dickens's story. People are shaped by their upbringing and, to a point, the era they are born into. Their life experiences and their relative access to resources and opportunities have far more to do with how they will behave as adults. There is no evidence to suggest that a young person with exorbitant amounts of capital to hand would be any more or less likely to fall into greed and lust for power than any other ultra-wealthy person of any other age group. Scrooge happens to be old, but we could just as easily have a twenty-something Scrooge. It is certain that Scrooge's descent into greed began early and only got worse as he aged.

As I read my friend's question, I felt a strange but powerful hopelessness. If it is true that young wealthy people cannot be depended on to solve social ills, my answer could not be a cheerful one. Money has become a source of moral rot in the world. The wealthy, regardless of their generation, have no real sense of their surroundings. The problems of homelessness, climate change and gun violence are not problems to be solved, but, if possible, exploited for more money. This doesn't eliminate the possibility that there are those with a lot of money working hard to deal with our most pressing issues, I am sure, but they have an uphill battle against others of their kind. 

Scrooge, while doing his part with the people he knew and could help practically, could only contribute towards the larger problems of his world. He did not, either by dint of his newfound piety or his formerly hoarded wealth, close down the poor houses, the treadmills, or the debtor’s prisons.  One of the underlying implications of the story is that Christmas is one of the few times of year that people of means even consider those massive and cumbersome problems of poverty. It is only by working together that those problems can be solved.

In the most poignant moments of the story, the Ghost of Christmas Present pulls back the lower swaths of his robes to show Scrooge two destitute children; a boy and a girl. The spirit tells Scrooge that the boy is Ignorance and the girl is Want.

 "Beware them both, and all of their degree, but most of all beware this boy, for on his brow I see that written which is Doom, unless the writing be erased". 

Even in the most hopeful story ever written about Christmas, Dickens found it hard to hide his cynicism. The disparity between those who need the most help and those who could do the most good was an abyss that money alone could not fill or bridge. That gulf has only gotten wider in the intervening Christmases.

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Looking at the situation from above, the existence of the ultra-wealthy isn't enough to solve the big problems regardless of how old they are or how open-minded they seem. Today, we are faced with this same ethical dilemma. There are more billionaires and yet, the problems faced by society are more real, more present and more pressing than ever before. One can accurately assume that those problems are worse either despite billionaires or because of them. I know where I fall on that particular question. 

If Dickens' story teaches us anything it isn't that Scrooge's wealth is the best-case scenario for making a change. Rather, it teaches us that a change of heart can and will be the best chance for good to grow. We can certainly hope that the younger people with money will decide to work to solve problems, but that hope seems misplaced. Instead, I would echo the renewed Scrooge in my hope that each of us would decide to live in the past, present and future at all times and keep the meaning of Christmas (peace, goodwill, charity) in our hearts all year. This would indeed be a tall order for most of us, let alone those with far more money than they could ever spend in their lives.

If something is going to change, it has to be within each of us, at the individual level. No one person with money is going to rescue us. That door has been left open, and no billionaire has come through. Rather like the sign above the lintel at the gates Dante passes through, there is no hope that way. 

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That is the point of A Christmas Carol and of Scrooge's redemption. As we see Scrooge cross into a realm of goodness and virtue, we also live through his ghostly experiences, so that we, too, can join in his recovery and reclamation. The wealthy also have to face their mortality. Yet, we can only live our own lives, face our imminent death and decide for ourselves.

In the end, it doesn't matter if Scrooge gets to keep his money or if he gives it all away. What matters is that Scrooge realizes that he has a responsibility for other people. That is all that ever matters. The ghost of Jacob Marley tells his former business partner, that fateful Christmas Eve, “Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, benevolence, were all my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!”

The answer to my friend's question may be harsh, but it is no less true for all that. The wealthy have no real concern for us. They aren't coming to rescue us. Their outward appearance of technological or scientific adherence is a guise that allows them to hide their true intentions. It matters little how old they are or how they got their money. The only people we can depend on is ourselves. And as Scrooge finally learns, cementing his transformation, we have little time before the grave closes over us to do our part for those we can help.

28 Years

Earlier this week came an anniversary date that I long ago learned to brace myself for. On December 9th, 1996, my mother passed away from complications after a long battle with leukemia. She was 57.

Diagnosed seven years earlier, she had undergone various forms of treatment during the interim. Initially, though, she and my stepfather had been conned into believing that her health issues were a result of the mercury amalgam fillings in her teeth. They spent inordinate sums of money and lost essential treatment time funding this snake oil seller's scam. Her illness was probably a “secondary malignancy” caused by high-level radioiodine treatments for a thyroid condition she developed before I was born. 

By the time she understood this and began getting traditional medical treatment—moving to Texas to be within miles of the colossal M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston—her body had suffered badly from the ravages of her disease and she was desperate for anything that would help.

While she was away, I was left to my own devices in our ancient country house and became somewhat feral. I always had a rebellious nature, but without parents in the home, I was my own master. Mental independence evidently runs deep in the Bare DNA. When they were home, we had many clashes over homework, grades, chores and getting up for church. I was an insufferable freethinker and I refused to conform to her rules. I was a smelly teenager with a smug attitude and she was away getting treatment most of each year. It did not always make for pleasant reunions. 

I did not fully understand the seriousness of the situation; thinking that she would eventually be okay and that she would come home bearing a clean bill of health. Other kids had both parents still together. Some hailed from broken homes but had stable and caring parents. I had an empty home, with a visiting family that was preoccupied with medical care and the cost of treatment.

They were gone for much of my high school career when I needed adulthood modeled to me in preparation for my own. They missed my graduation. When they were home, things were painful. I resented their absence but also had grown used to the inordinate amount of freedom it granted me. The worst part was that the woman who was my mother was being fundamentally changed by her illness, making her unrecognizable when she was home.

At least two treatments that were supposed to put her illness into remission didn't work. Both were brutally painful and required prolonged stays in clean rooms until her immune system could bounce back. Despite her willingness to try medicines that were still experimental, her long-term prognosis was not hopeful. Some of the meds made her hallucinate or caused her to feel physically weak and mentally woozy. Along with her treatments came chemotherapy, which caused her to lose her hair and nails. She truly suffered. 

It became obvious that she was also experiencing severe depression. When they were home, she lay in a funk, trying to find the will to just get up. At his wit's end, my stepfather took her to see a psychiatrist who recommended electric shock treatments to alleviate her emotional pain by “resetting” her brain. I don't know if they helped her depression, but they made her vague and disconnected, almost childlike. She stopped being angry at me, but my stepfather doubled down, maybe trying to make up for when they were not home.

By my senior year, I was staying more and more with my childhood best friend, whose parents gladly put up with me while giving me a place to stay. I remember how novel an experience it was. Here was a family that had always been together. There were no stepparents, no multiple households, no disease or depression. It was like finding an oasis in a desert of loneliness and emotional upheaval.

I planned to enroll in a college in Indiana with my friend and I was trying to convince my father and stepmother to fund this idea since my mother and stepfather had all their cash soaked into her treatments. When I made it clear that I intended to move to Indiana, I think that it pushed my stepfather over the edge. Part of my contract with him had been to take care of the house and grounds while my brother maintained the family HVAC business. Graduating and going off to school, although always part of my plan, made him aware of the fact that he had lost a lot of time at home, too and that I was essentially an adult.

Looking back, it is apparent that the challenges of living in two states were wearing on both of them. I now understand that he was torn. He wanted to be home, but he didn't know how to give up on my mother. She wanted to be home but was at the mercy of his inability to acknowledge the inevitable. These were concepts too harsh for me to understand then, though and like all teens, I was stupidly self-absorbed most of the time. 

When it became obvious that they had run the gamut of treatment and nothing else would work, my grandmother begged to let my mother come home and be with her family. If she was going to die, it needed to be with those who loved her. My stepfather refused to give up, pushing her treatments and her frail frame to the extent that the doctors would allow. This became a point of contention in the wider family and I think that this was when I also started to feel bitter and betrayed. As it turned out, though, it was only the beginning of the coming pain.  

A lot of what follows is a blur to me, now. I can remember my school experiences and have pleasant memories of friends, but the details surrounding my mother are misty between when I got my high school diploma and when I departed for Indiana and the halls of post-secondary education. Just before I was set to start my first year in college, my stepfather insisted that my father pay to fly me to Houston. I spent a weekend with them in their little caravan. It was the last time that I would see my mother alive.

A week before the first semester finals began, my brother called me. It was a Monday night. Our mother had passed away. They paid for a ticket for me to fly home. My stepfather had to have her brought back and the arrangements were made. Even though Christmas was coming, none of us had any urge for the holiday. People from our church gave us a tree and put up lights, feeling it was a necessary if not sufficient attempt at keeping the time of year in our hearts. I don't remember my mother’s funeral, especially the number of friends of mine who came to the services. I remember carrying her casket into the funeral home, but I have no memory of the services or the trip to the cemetery or her interment.

I played several gigs with our band that holiday period, and then I was back at school. To this day, I have no memory of how I got back there. The finals that I missed were held over for me for the next year and I remember that I didn’t complete at least one. I was aware of a blank spot in my life, but it felt strangely malleable. It had been so long since I had spent any time with my mother, that it felt for all the world like she was still in Texas.

Life goes on. I had my first very serious girlfriend during that time and, eventually, my first serious heartbreak, but made some good friends and lasting memories. I think it was clear to everyone though, that I was slipping along on the surface of life as if in a trance. My grades suffered and so did everything else. 

After that first year away, my stepmother informed me that, regardless of my loss, my grades were not good enough to justify going back to that school at those tuition costs. I came back and began attending a community college and worked at a coffee shop across the street. I took the bus each day and came back each evening. Things just kind of went on like that. I took my driver’s test and got my license, but I have no memory of it, though I passed the first time.

Things seem choppy, sporadic, as if I was not recording during some of it, while other memories are clear and bold and like they happened yesterday. I remember having a horrible fight with my brother, who screamed at me while out practicing driving. I remember coming home upset and being comforted by a woman who had been a longtime friend of my stepfather and mother, who was now living in our house. I remember that my stepfather was drinking again, after many years of sobriety.

‘Regular’ memories don’t begin again until the following October. My brother and stepfather had a fight and the police were called, all while I was at work and class. I came home to my stepfather telling me that I was being kicked out of the house and that I had to let my father know and everything had to be gone by the end of the week. I know that I called Pop Bare to tell him and he did help me get as much as we could into his truck, but there were things that my brother had to take, as well, which he kept for me at his house for a long time. 

I retain a strong memory of my mother’s furniture and other large possessions that we couldn’t take going onto a bonfire as we drove up the small lane, leaving my childhood home for the last time and feeling empty and more alone than in my entire life. For years after that, I would wake up from a vivid dream of trying to stop him from dumping her sofa onto the flames with a front-end loader.

I know that I saw my stepfather at least once after that, but I cannot now remember for what reason, but something tells me that I had racked up some long distance fees. His mother fell ill not long after that, and I went to see her in the hospital before she died, but I don’t know if I spoke to him, then. By the first anniversary of my mother’s death, everything in my life had changed so significantly that I was unrecognizable to myself.

I stayed with my father and stepmother for several years after that and even went back to a state school. I had a job and some stability. When Pop’s second marriage was circling the drain, though, I left and moved to a small town in northern Pennsylvania where I had friends from when I was much younger. It was a traumatized attempt to start things anew, but half-hearted at best. Once again, I had been forced out of a place of stability that had been considered home, though this time not by death or illness, but by a selfish and hateful stepmother who tried to lure me into a pitched battle against my father. All this within a few years of my mother’s death and my exile.

A few months after I moved, I wound up meeting the four people who would really change my life forever and, for the first time since I was 12, in a measurably positive way. On the last day of August 2001, I moved to Asheboro and became a resident. The rest, as they say, is history.

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At age 40, when I discussed this portion of my life with a psychotherapist, not long after I came out as an alcoholic to my family, he said the reason I couldn’t remember much of it was because of trauma response. The unsettled nature of my upbringing, the emotionally harrowing life within a very dogmatically religious household, the divorce of my parents when I was still basically a toddler, my mother’s obsession with homeopathy and scam doctors and the fact that I was essentially abandoned from age twelve until I was 19, all contributed to my ongoing inability to have solid memories about my mother’s illness and disease. He called it dissociative amnesia and said that it might be years before those memories were clear.

The things I do remember do not cast my mother or her second husband in a good light, especially now that I have broken away from and deconverted from their (and any) religious belief. During that ongoing process of deconversion, though, I worked hard to reconcile my earlier memories of my mother and the later version that seems vague and tenuous. As an adult, I know that diagnosis of a serious disease does not come with a manual for how to handle it, costs incredible amounts of money and gives no real time for tending to one’s emotions. 

My brother, who had her longer, remembers a version of her I don’t know if I ever knew. He retains the greater pain, both because he was older when she died and because I think he was closer to her. My own rebellious nature probably estranged us well before my terrible teens kicked in. He also visits her grave from time to time: a thing that I will never do voluntarily. 

I’m still a little angry at her, mainly for being duped by a con artist when she ought to have been getting medical treatment, and for adhering to a belief that made her life worse and her disappointments greater. I’m also angry that she didn’t come back to us at the end, but there is nothing I can do to change that. It took me years and being surrounded by loving and supportive people for me to truly grieve and move past the worst of the pain. I didn’t really get over her loss until after I stopped drinking and got into a recovery program. 

In 2021, as our family was preparing for Thanksgiving, I was once again reeling. On a whim, I looked up my stepfather to see where he was.To my lasting shock, I learned that in February of that year, he had been killed in a house explosion when several large ‘packs’ of lithium batteries for his ultralight plane caught fire and blew his house up. No one from his family thought to alert my brother and I. But there again, I refused to take my kids and wife to see him while he was actively drinking, which I learned from my brother who had gone to see him. The echo of the memory of my mother’s possessions on the fire was still sharp enough in my mind and I couldn’t bring myself to see him like that. I also made my peace with him, though and any resentment has long ago morphed into empathy for what he was going through and the pain of his loss. The man was married 4 times and three of them died, either of aneurysm or cancer. That deserves pity and forgiveness.

Twenty-eight years later, I am still saddened by my mother’s tragic end. Nothing ever fills the wounds left by the loss of a parent. Parents are supposed to eventually die and let us step into their role, but not when so young and when their children are not yet adults. If she had lived, my life would certainly be different, but I often wonder by how much. It can seem hard to acknowledge that a parent’s loss is actually beneficial. For many years after she was gone, I was distraught, hurting in my core, lost, betrayed, devastated. Many of the biggest flaws of my adulthood and challenges for me to deal with likely come as a direct result of my upbringing—and lack of parental presence. We can stand in criticism of our parents for who we have become or we can take responsibility and try to be better despite their failings and frailties. It is a choice we all have to make.

Sometimes I miss her terribly and I can still conjure that empty feeling, where once a loving, if flawed and piously misguided, maternal presence was. I look at my reflection and see the Bares, but Micki says I look like my mother. I hope that the best parts of me come directly from both my parents (and that I have done a far better job as a stepparent than either of my stepparents did for me). I know that she and I will never have the conversations we might have had if she had lived but we are spared arguments about faith and con artists. She never had the chance to meet Micki, our boys, or our granddaughter. She never met my brother’s second wife and his children. If she was a sometimes hard and unfair mother, I believe she would have been a loving and adoring grandparent. 

We cannot know how things would have been, but I suspect that, if she had lived, she would have disapproved of my life and I would have disapproved of hers. Over the years, though, her loss has dimmed to an ache, and the inability to find reconciliation between us has ceased to be a barrier to my healing and growing. 

Twenty-eight years later, her loss still echoes in my psyche. It has shaped every aspect of my adulthood for good or ill. Hopefully, I have come out the other side of my grief at her loss as a better man. Even so, I still miss her sometimes. 

This one was for you, Mom. 

In memory of

Ruthie A. Bare

1939-1996

Ancestral Resonance

As I write this, our youngest son and his girlfriend are ‘rattling over’ the green countryside of Ireland. Sive's mother hails from there and they spent many summers visiting family. Evan has now been twice and will probably be going back regularly, too. I hope that we will get a chance to go, someday, as well. I have an unusually significant soft spot for Ireland, though it is not ancestral. At least I don’t think so.

In high school, I went through a period where I actually wanted to be of Irish descent. During a unit in English class with my teacher, Mrs. Zimmerman, we read several Irish authors and poets, watched a documentary or two, and I wrote my final term paper on the Troubles in Northern Ireland. In an attempt to verify my sources, I called the Library of Trinity College in Dublin and spoke to a very patient man who gave me not only his somewhat reticent opinion about the Troubles but some curt research advice, too, which may have been his way of telling me that my youthful enthusiasm was ignoring the tragedy and loss of life that had devastated their partitioned northern kin. This was my Junior year, so by the time school let out for the summer, I was annoying everyone around me with my attempt at a Derry or Belfast accent, watching Patriot Games and Sins of the Father on repeat, listening to U2, Clannad, Enya and The Cranberries and talking nonstop about the Fair Island and the plight of the Northerners.

This was when I noticed that I had a particular sense of kinship or connection to the Irish people. I pestered my elders about several possibilities that the Bares stopped in Ireland on the way across in the 1700s and stayed long enough to earn citizenship and have half-Irish children to explain this feeling of a relationship. It was then, too, that I began my meager attempts at the genealogical work of our family and tried a little too hard to establish a historical Bare enclave in the heart of Eire. 

My paternal grandmother told me about her grandfather, “Pappy White”, whose name sounded Irish to me and I doubled down on my endeavor to make this ancient root of our family my connection to possible Irish heritage. My Good Aunt later educated me that White was an anglicized variant of Weis, and thereby, albeit gently, still dashing my hopes. Then I discovered a map of common surnames in Ireland and Northern Ireland and way down near the bottom of the list was Bare. I never followed it up to see if those Irish Bares were aware that they had Germanic heritage. I still intend to.

All these years later, despite doing far more genealogy and cataloging paperwork submitted to me by the family for the Bare “file” in the library history and genealogy room, it is clear that we Bares are purely of continental European lineage. We are Swiss and German in that limb of the family tree and despite my attempts to shoehorn Ireland into the list as a possible homeland, there is no proof, and without evidence, I cannot make the claim, simply because I want it to be true. But I do want it to be true.

Some of my behavior in my Junior year was sheer teenage relish. When we have a one in front of our age, our brains aren't fully formed and we are obsessive, compulsive, ignorant of consequences and plain annoying to our elders and peers. Even so, I can still conjure the depth of feeling I had that somewhere in our ancestry lay Irish roots. I had a strong sense of kinship with the culture, feeling something like gravity pulling me in. In my deepest parts, there had to be some Celtic tuning fork that resonated when I heard the lilting Irish brogue, listened to traditional Irish music or read Irish authors and poets.

Perhaps if at this point in my life, I had the fortune to have globe-hopping parents, I might have made a trip and seen the Fair Isle and met some of her people. My youthful experience of the world was limited by my parents who stayed close to their Pennsylvanian region. World travel was not something they did.

Years later, as Micki and I and her English cousins traipsed through Wales on holiday, I once again felt a stirring of something as I gazed at the verdant, hilly landscapes of the Welsh homeland. There was a distinct buzz of that ancestral resonance that I had first felt in high school. Here, too, was something elusive in me that caused a surging or leaping of my spirit at the cheerful voices and gorgeous Welsh tongue spoken everywhere around me. Micki’s family does have Welsh and Irish heritage, and as we perused graveyards and read ancient stones, her family’s many surnames showed up as a matter of course. Her paternal grandmother’s parents were from the UK, though, so it isn’t hard to trace that familial connection without the need to do a DNA test.

Some people have had their DNA tested and received a list of genetic heritage well beyond their dreams. I have one friend who, having expected a fairly vanilla European heritage, discovered that a huge slice of their genetic pie chart was Native American. It changed them and it certainly shifted their worldview.

I have resisted getting my DNA done. I have a specific terror of finding out that my heritage has some splinter ethnicity that winds up being the target of some nightmare dystopian regime and I get sent to a camp or executed as a result. It has happened before. You may call me paranoid, but The Holocaust and the Rwandan mass genocides are the most poignant, though not the only examples of this actually happening in modern times. 

Despite not being Irish, at least as far as I have been willing or able to test the theory, I still have a strong and noticeable sympathy for the Celtic ethnicity. The Irish and other Celtic people are the only ones for me with this intensity of apparent connection. I have felt sympathy or solidarity with other cultures in other ways, but never to the same extent. While bored in an online training, I clicked through videos and came across one of a traditional Maori Haka, or ceremonial dance. If you have never seen this amazing performance, please go look it up right now. Although threatening in appearance, a haka is actually a deeply respectful gesture, showing kinship and affection with ancient and powerful words and chants and gestures. As I watched, I felt gooseflesh ripple over my arms and legs and experienced a frisson of shared humanity at such a deep level that I was moved to tears.

The likelihood of discovering that I have Maori DNA, I admit, is pretty low. Even if a tiny fraction of a fraction of my ancestry is Maori, it is probably not enough to capture this resonance with the Haka. Rather, what I think I feel during the ceremonial chant is a kinship that surpasses ethnicity. I am connecting with people not because of their heritage or mine, but because we are human and we have points of experience, emotion, and maybe even history in common. That connection shares a frequency. They have a beautiful way of expressing their humanity and I feel that. When confronted with a dance or a painting or a story or poem of this kind, I happen to feel very keenly the sense of connection and sympathy with the humanity of my fellow humans.

I certainly feel a connection to the Celtic peoples, at least as much as I do with my own traceable heritage. I can eat schnitzel or other delicious German food and feel a distinct connection to my forebears and my ancestry. It is an amazingly centering thing to experience. I don’t particularly love Polka, but the Germanic and Scandinavian people have long and glorious histories of art, music, poetry, and creation that I feel pride in. It seems odd to me that Celtic culture and language and music and art and poetry should also provoke this feeling in me when there is no apparent genetic connection.

But then again, sitting on a beach a few years ago, a bagpiper came down and started piping a little way away from us, and I had that old familiar feeling; like he was playing my song. A song of deep inheritance. A song I had no business feeling such a connection but still felt as if it were a message from my ancestors. As the notes danced in my ears, I suddenly wanted to see the sun come up over the highlands and hear the rich Scottish brogue and feel the keen wind off the North Sea. I have no idea where this feeling came from, but it was real.

Modernity and the Internet have provided our society with a wider view of cultures and sometimes a little more awareness about how to treat and accept others despite our differences. Some of this is, as Christopher Hitchens calls it in his own words, “empty-headed multiculturalism” and can be disregarded as a pretense of fraternity rather than anything sincere or respectful. If we identify with a certain culture despite not having any real genetic connection, the voices of sensitivity will speak up and call that cultural appropriation, especially if like me, that identification threatens to unbalance the reality of our heritage. The Celtic people deserve to be themselves without me shoving my oar in and trying to become Celtic, especially if I’m not Celtic.

My fascination with possible Irish heritage is an odd, and admittedly disconnected thing. My ancestors hailed (so far back as any of us have plumbed) from Northern Europe, spanning the Germanic and Scandinavian regions. Most of the family names on either side of my tree have decidedly Teutonic origins. The Heinlys (formerly Heinlein), the Swaberlichs, The Kesslers, the Gepharts, the Zimmermans, the Weises, the Bares; to read it is to see a list of surnames so common to my former region of birth that no one would turn a hair at them, where I grew up. There is nothing Celtic, nothing Gaelic, nothing overtly English. Some friends I grew up with had names like O’Donnell or McEwan, Smith or Johnson. I have not a shred of the Anglo-Saxon, except as a remnant of the Angles, Jutes and Saxons, German tribes who, in the 5th Century landed with the brothers Horsa and Hengist on the islands of Britain and Ireland but were either defeated by the tenacious residents or were assimilated by the Britonic and Celtic peoples who swelled to the defense of their island homes.

Four hundred years later, when hulking, white-blond-haired giants in longships landed in England and Ireland, the Anglo-Saxon people saw their ancestral heritage walk up out of the sea and establish a rule called the Danelaw. Those Viking invaders were probably my ancestors, too, as my maternal grandfather's people likely hailed from just over the border in Denmark and were possibly cattle reavers. If any trace of Germanic heritage from the previous invasion remained in Ireland when the cruel Norse Vikings landed there in the 10th Century, I have no way of knowing. Even if this possible double connection isn’t very probable, it cannot even be said to be worth considering. How would one attempt to ascertain that one’s ancestors came over with either Horsa and Hengist or the Dane and Norse invaders? It seems solipsistic, not to say narcissistic to hope that some ancestor of mine came with either of these unwelcome visitors just so I can finally have some justification for feeling this bizarre resonance.

Recently, our middle son and his wife gave us family access to Duolingo, a language training app. On a whim, I decided to try my hand at the Irish language, as well as Latin, Danish, Welsh, Italian, Swedish and Spanish. As I have delved into the beautiful and poetic Irish tongue, I once again felt something more than kinship. The verb order, the sonorous sibilance, the swelling tides of description matched against the elegant efficiency of terms caused that tuning fork in my bones to vibrate again. I felt familiar with it. It made sense to me at some basic level. I wish I could explain it.

I secretly hope that, in a few years, when our youngest kids get married, maybe they will do it as a destination wedding in Ireland. If that happens, perhaps I can set foot upon this island that has had a disproportionately strong gravity on my sense of self despite the obvious lack of real heritage. In the meantime, I will live vicariously through Swift and Conan Doyle and Heaney and Wilde and Yeats and Stoker and Beckett and their many words and the pictures from our kids and maybe at some point in the future, I will gather up enough grit to forswear my distaste for genetic testing and answer the question for good and all. To paraphrase the great Irish writer and comic, Oscar Wilde, though, until such time that I do find out if there is a drop of Irish heritage in my blood, I must be myself, since everyone else is taken. Further quoting Wilde, “The truth is never pure and rarely simple”. I think that it can be stated unequivocally that this is especially true when it comes to heritage and genetics.

In the meantime, I will be content to feel this ancestral resonance, even if it isn’t based on anything measurable. I will attempt to do it in such a way that I don’t offend anyone who is actually Irish or Celtic, but it will be hard for me to hide that swell of national and cultural pride that doesn’t belong to me, despite how intensely it floods me with ethnic joy, when I think about Ireland.

The Great and Inimitable Sherlock Holmes

Imagine for a moment that the world is lit by gaslight. The Victorian Era is in full swing. Gentlemen wear frock coats and top hats, women wear dresses and gloves. The world smells of horses and coal smoke and the unpleasant stench of the Thames River.  Mists waft down cobblestone streets and the livery of crime is not shown by the clothes but by the deep and sinister motivations of corrupt humanity. 

In this world of telegrams and horse-drawn carriages, a criminal is only as guilty as the police are adept. Nefarious deeds cause mayhem and the culprits get away more than not. Nothing so technical as forensics yet exists. There are no DNA databases, nor fingerprint records. There Is only the endless string of mysteries and a sullen city beset by an element ready to commit blackmail, theft, forgery, kidnapping and, most notoriously, murder.

Amid this crime-ridden city is a penetrating intellect of such incredible power, that his name has become synonymous with solving crimes and his skill in the art of detection—an art that he built almost entirely with his own masterful abilities--is world-renown. 

He has solved every kind of perplexing crime, from stolen Naval treaties to ghostly hounds haunting the Devonshire countryside and everything in between. When a mystery baffles the police, or an outré adventure that requires more than the police can manage, there is only one man to seek.

Modern audiences may not recognize the man waiting in the rooms of 221B Baker Street. This man is not wearing a cloak or deerstalker cap nor is he smoking a Meerschaum pipe. These images came much later when the great consulting detective appeared in film. Rather, the man is tall, rail-thin, with hawk-like features. He is fastidiously neat, with eyes sharp as any bird of prey. He prefers a black clay pipe and can play his Stradivarius violin extremely well.

Ask anyone and they will already know the man that I refer to. He is the world's greatest detective, a crime diagnostician with genius-level mental acuity and energy. Here is the man we have come to know as Sherlock Holmes.

We know of Holmes because of his sole friend and companion, the redoubtable John H. Watson. This magnificent biographer, without whom there would be no tales of Sherlock Holmes, is the composer of the many short stories and four novel-length tales of the great detective. He has been a firsthand observer of the many fantastic adventures where the magnificent Holmes solves cases that defy the average mind. 

Unlike our modern conception of Watson, who is often portrayed as a heavy-set, older man with greying hair and a perpetual look of dubious surprise on his face, the Watson we know from the books is much different. He describes himself as less than Holmes, but is forever ready for a fight, is himself an amateur practitioner of the Holmesian method of deduction, and is of an age with Holmes, so that, while he is probably physically larger, he is not old or obese.

Together, the detective and the biographer have solved 60 documented crimes, 56 short stories, and four novels, but with countless other mysteries mentioned in the background. These stories, usually published in a periodical, were written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and became a sensation in his own time.

Holmes and Watson are, with few exceptions, known around the world. They have become part of our modern idiom. Anytime anyone solves a problem that baffles others, or when someone uses observation to make a deduction successfully, we are wittingly or unwittingly nodding at this great literary forebear. 

Sherlock Holmes, of course, was not real, but during his time in print, he was a superhero in his own right, and while his stories were still being published, people would write in or seek to find Conan Doyle to ask for the detective’s help. Imagine their distraught cries of agony when they discovered that Holmes and Watson were no more than the merest figment of the author’s imagination. 

Watson first meets Holmes in the novel, A Study in Scarlet (1887) while looking for a place to live. He is admittedly put off by Holmes’s somewhat rude and single-minded nature, but eventually, the two become friends, as Watson watches Holmes solve a mystery that began in the Utah desert, when a man, left by two Mormons with a little girl to die, comes to England and gets his revenge.

This book was so successful that Conan Doyle began writing a second novel with the duo called, The Sign of the Four (1890). Then, came a series of twelve short stories published in The Strand magazine, called The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1892), followed by The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (1894). The final twelve stories were punctuated with the tale of how Holmes died while defeating the “Napoleon of Crime”, James Moriarty by plummeting with him into the Reichenbach Falls in Switzerland. 

Conan Doyle breathed a sigh of relief, believing that he had put an end to his great consulting detective, but public outcry at Holmes’s premature death was such that he published his third (and in this writer’s opinion, the best) novel featuring Sherlock Holmes and James Watson, called The Hound of the Baskervilles (in several parts in 1901 and 1902). I treat this book with its due reverence in another essay, but I will add here that there is no more powerfully written and engaging book of the crime and mystery genre. The book takes place before Holmes’s death, but the story only whetted the public’s appetite for more stories.

Eight years later, having experienced a great deal of fuss, including, allegedly, a bomb in his mailbox, Doyle gave in to public pressure and wrote another series of thirteen stories called (unironically) The Return of Sherlock Holmes (1905). It is at the beginning of this series where Holmes, not dead, but in hiding from several of Moriarty's henchmen, has been plotting and planning to bring these men to justice and accidentally meets with Watson while in disguise. 

In 1914, Conan Doyle wrote the last Sherlock Holmes Novel, The Valley of Fear, which figures prominently in the coal regions just north of my home county in Pennsylvania and deals with (in other names) the Molly MacGuires and the coal strikes and is the second-best novel of the four.

Then, in 1917, Doyle published seven more tales in, His Last Bow. Finally, in 1927, he released thirteen more short stories in The Casebook of Sherlock Holmes which culminated forty years, minus a brief hiatus, of Sherlock Holmes stories. 

Although considered outside the Sherlock Holmes Canon, Conan Doyle wrote several plays, ‘vignettes’, and essays in which Holmes is referred to or makes appearances. Beyond these, there are several other collections of short stories, written by other authors featuring Holmes and Watson that are available to those who may not claim themselves to be purists and many are worth reading, including one by Stephen King, called The Doctor’s Case in which Watson uses the methods he has been taught by Holmes to solve a murder.

Many others have keened the edge of their writing by trying to emulate Conan Doyle’s master consulting detective, but regardless of how good they appear to be, a real fan can (while being happy to read another Holmes and Watson tale) detect the counterfeit. Although he had a love/hate relationship with his most famous character and felt much of his life’s work fell by the wayside because of Holmes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle hit upon a stroke of genius when he first wrote about Holmes and Watson and the world is a better place for it.

On New Year’s Day, 2023, the entire canon of Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories became public domain, which means that anyone can write a Sherlock Holmes movie or novel or book without the express permission of Conan Doyle's estate. There are at least 67 films about Holmes, and upwards of 29 TV shows featuring the duo. The best non canonical movie is the 1985 adventure film called Young Sherlock Holmes, depicting the consulting detective as a teenager solving crimes and meeting Watson as a fellow student. I would give the two Guy Ritchie films, starring Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law as the adventurous Victorian partners, a nod as they are entertaining, but not quite accurate enough to feel genuine. 

For a true and honorable variant of the Holmes stories, one must turn to the Grenada series, made popular on PBS, which was faithful, both to the original tales and novels and to the descriptions of Holmes and Watson in those stories. Jeremy Brett beautifully captures the impulsive and sometimes manic and depressive Holmes, while first David Burke and then Nigel Hardwicke portrayed Watson. Of the original canon, 43 of Conan Doyle’s stories were adapted, and an admirable, if somewhat dated (now) full-length made-for-TV film of The Hound of the Baskervilles is worth a watch, now free on YouTube.

Sherlock Holmes has been represented in film and on television by countless actors, though in the middle of the 20th Century, he was probably most notably made into radio and cinematic reality by the portrayal of Basil Rathbone (as Holmes) and Nigel Bruce as Watson. This may be where the deerstalker cap, cloak, Meerschaum pipe and magnifying glass that now encapsulate our concept of Sherlock Holmes took the public imagination. This, too, is where we get the obese and older and somewhat perplexed Watson.

Regardless of how he is (or will be) represented, though, there is no doubt that there is only one real and true consulting detective and only one albeit fictional biographer. When there is a crime that no one else can solve and when you are at your last end of hope, simply send or go yourself to 221 B Baker Street, London and apply to the one man who can help you: Sherlock Holmes.

Breaking Walt

Upon receiving a terminal lung cancer diagnosis, high school chemistry teacher Walter White spirals into a crisis of mortality. He soon finds that his treatments will not only not save him, but that the cost will leave his family bankrupt after he dies. The Whites are a lower-middle-class family living in Albuquerque, New Mexico. His wife, Skyler is pregnant and their teenage son, Walt Jr., has cerebral palsy. After going on a ride-along with his DEA agent brother-in-law to take down a meth lab, Walt discovers two life-changing facts. He realizes that he has the chemistry skill and know-how to “cook” meth. He then clicks on the fact that selling brings in a lot of money.

And so, in a jangled and sometimes hilariously inept way, Walt embarks on a criminal career, using his chemical skill to create the most potent and pure methamphetamine that the southwest drug culture has ever known. With the help of a hapless former student, Jesse Pinkman, Walt is confident they can make enough money to pay for his treatments and care for his family after he is gone. To cover his duplicity, though, Walt devises an alternate persona which he aptly names Heisenberg, after the German theoretical physicist, Werner Heisenberg who developed the “uncertainty principle”. In this brilliant bit of logic, the real Heisenberg suggested that the more we know about one property of the physical world (say momentum) the less we can know about another property. The sobriquet is appropriate because as one side of Walt’s life becomes more chaotic, the man he was before he learned that he had terminal lung cancer becomes less known.

Things go from bad to worse, though, as careless dealers, underworld kingpins, addiction to power, family troubles and his DEA agent brother-in-law hamper and hassle Walt's plans from the outset. This goes on for almost three seasons before Walter White finds himself in the employ of a notoriously dangerous and yet unassuming drug lord who brilliantly uses his fast-food fried chicken franchises as fronts for an illicit meth empire. Suddenly the Everyman chemistry teacher and the ne’er-do-well Pinkman are faced with the brutal and heartless realities of cartel assassins, drug deals gone wrong and their deeply messed up personal lives.

Breaking Bad premiered on AMC in 2008 and ran for five fraught seasons (representing only one year of Walt's life), gaining a cult following and enjoying incredible success. I missed all of it. Even when we did have cable and access to AMC, I didn't watch the show. It had zero appeal for me and I only knew about it peripherally for much of its five-year run. The basic premise was understood; a high school chemistry teacher gets cancer and sells meth to pay his bills. I didn't understand how this premise kept people locked in, but it did.

Fast-forward to 2024. I spent much of the first half of this year re-watching the True Detective series on Mondays when everyone was at work and I had the den to myself. This batch of amazingly well-written and well-performed crime dramas captured and kept my attention, so that, as spring warmed to summer, I developed a slight taste for the genre. But again, I was behind the times. The latest True Detective season aired on Sundays while I played catch-up. By the time it was over and I was up-to-date on the drama series, I needed a break from crime TV shows. Having watched other shows like Dexter and The Sopranos, I understood that, in order to truly appreciate the style, one has to see oneself in some of the characters. The gritty, dark atmosphere, the tough personal consequences of being a hard-bitten criminal trying to balance a life of crime with the challenges of protecting and nurturing a family that is one of the motifs of these shows is wearing.

Then, in the early Autumn, Breaking Bad arrived on Netflix. For years, I had said that I would eventually watch the show that had become such a cultural phenomenon and at about that time, my hankering for more crime drama was getting stronger, so I dug in.

All I can say is that I truly have mixed feelings for it. The premise, the writing, the acting, the set design and the breadth of the storyline are all top-tier. The show is a deeply layered masterpiece of American criminality. Walt’s swing out into the crime underbelly is often shocking and regularly depressing. The other characters, too, all seem to have the same inability to get things right. At every step, their relationships, their intentions and plans all go awry, often in ways that are heartwrenching and abhorrent.

There is also the sense of the power and ubiquity of crime combined with the ever-present threat of the law. Everywhere Walt turns, he finds those who have their hands out for his ill-gotten gains or his talent for cooking meth. Every step of the way, too, is his brother-in-law, Hank, the DEA agent who is always one step behind, always almost figuring out who Heisenberg really is. The tension for viewers is sometimes unbearable.

Breaking Bad is about mortality and how we decide to live our lives when faced with death. And yet, Walt’s story poses a more painful question about morality, the answer of which, takes us on a wild ride of absurdism and low-level horror. Almost from the moment he decides to sell methamphetamine, Walt begins a metamorphosis that is more comically tragic than gritty or seedy. Although the show is most assuredly a crime drama, there is an element of black comedy to it that brings appeal, if not pure amusement. Walt's bumbling misadventures eventually set him on a path of evil, where he finds himself experiencing the gamut of drug crime, from overdose to murder. The explicit philosophical argument is that a man who sells his morality for illegal monetary gain eventually becomes irredeemably corrupt, regardless of how noble his motivations were in the beginning.

Implicitly, though, the show is about downfall. The downfall of the American family unit, the powerlessness of the law, the disintegration of loyalty, and, sadly, the illusion of financial stability. Almost everyone in the show is deeply irredeemable, each spiraling out of the orbit of an ideal life. Walt’s downfall is the most poignant and prominent, but each of the characters (except one) devolves into something else, bringing into sharp contrast the cost of protecting one’s family. But even this seemingly noble motivation breaks down, as Walt in the last season admits to his estranged wife that he did all this because he liked it and was good at it.

As he plummets, Walt's relationships are eviscerated. The conflict with his wife, Skyler, sets the viewer's teeth on edge with unending marital anxiety. Eventually, even Skyler is corrupted as she learns of her husband's lurch into manufacturing drugs for a cartel. She has her own problems and experiences a series of mishaps and moral quandaries that change her, too. None of the other characters, no matter how sympathetic we find them, ever become more than a tragic figure, doomed by Walt’s original sin.

Breaking Bad is, if you can handle it, a Shakespearian tragedy writ large upon the modern consciousness. In Elizabethan times, the best way to convey tragedy (based on ancient Greek traditions) was to have everyone die at the end. In the modern era, though, the best way to convey tragedy is to have people face inescapable consequences without being rescued by heroes or finding sudden redemption. Though there are serious differences, Walt’s struggle is similar to that of Macbeth. At each stage of his story arc, he looks to a point where he can have the money and be done with the crime. Each life taken, each relationship ruined, each loss of humanity or morality is ostensibly the last hurdle before Walt can get back to the brief final months of his life with his family. This is the case with Walt. Although, to an extent, he is redeemed at least for his role in Jesse Pinkman's own traumas, his actions throughout the show condemn almost everyone else around him to catastrophe and death, too.

I say “almost” because there is one incorruptible character in the show. He is an anti-hero, a man motivated to do what he does for his family, but he is unconflicted about it. I’m referring, of course to Mike Ehrmantraut, the ‘heavy’ for Gus Fring. Mike manages to be the most morally complex character, despite his strong code. He balances Walt’s bumbling and halting attempts to become masterful by being true to himself and his goals and being good at being a bad guy. The reason that Mike is so liked by fans of the show (and why his character resurfaced in the spin-off of Breaking Bad called “Better Call Saul”) is that he provides a durable moral island in a chaotic sea of decline, moral relativism and self-loathing. That is perhaps why I find Mike to be the one character who, although destroyed by Walt, is nevertheless, untainted by Walt's moral descent.

While I would certainly recommend Breaking Bad to veterans of crime drama, I would also warn that the show has a strong gravity, pulling viewers into the gloom of its mythos and I felt this personally. The show is grim at times and I found myself feeling grim (more than usual) as a result. Unlike other crime drama subgenres, Breaking Bad managed to capture distinctly American criminality, blending corruption and greed with the metastasis of cancerous morality. The Sopranos is about a mob boss. Dexter is about a serial killer who kills serial killers. Breaking Bad is about regular people caught in the crushing gravity of regular life and looking desperately for a way out and hoping that money, however obtained, will solve their problems, no matter the cost to their humanity.

If you’ve never watched it I recommend it, but I do so with a caveat: be prepared to be depressed.

Back At It

After October and my hard leftward jaunt into outré fiction for the Spooky Season, I have decided to swing back to center and continue my regular weekly essays. 

With that in mind, especially in light of some of the recent national events, I will be writing less often (for now) about politics and religion. Not because these no longer bother me (they do) but because I am unable to find it within myself to adequately state how disappointed and frustrated I am with my fellow mammals. I may at some point be able to strike a solid note on these topics, but for right now, my anger is such that it would be the jangled, unhinged, desperate cacophony of a madman let loose on a grand piano. That helps no one.

Rather, I would like to try to keep my readers (you few, dedicated, wonderful ones) engaged with upbeat, thoughtful and hopefully interesting topics. So much of our reading and scrolling is doom and gloom. A light here and there might help to keep our eyes fixed on the benefits of free thought, free inquiry, free speech and find hope for the future.

So What Now?

This blog began as a way to catalog hikes, travels, books read, recipes tried, opinions spawned. I think it still works like this, for right now. Some things have changed. Hiking has morphed into running. Our travels have been decidedly narrow since we returned (almost 8 years ago) from the UK. I still read and will review books, but I'd like to add TV shows and movies to the list. I want to add the odd recipe here, or at least, speak about food more and my opinions will be, as usually is the case, decidedly my own. 

I also want to write more about music. It is one of the center foundations of my life and yet, I rarely express my feelings about music in this format.

Growing Past Anger

In 2017, I took my last drink of alcohol and joined AA after a long and desperate battle with substance abuse disorder. In the last seven (and a half) years, my recovery journey has helped me deal with my deep-seated anger and pain from my youth and given me back a sense of mental and physical health that I once believed was gone forever.

In those several years, I learned to see myself as I am warts and all. Although I do not want to use this particular platform to talk about sobriety, I do want to talk a bit about some of the challenges faced and tools gained in that time that have helped me deal with life when it feels overwhelming.

I know how fortunate I have been, both with the support of family and friends. I hope to pass on what I have learned, hoping that it will aid in the stress of the times and maybe help someone feel that when life gets unmanageable, as mine had become, there is a way out.

Finally, The Academy or the Street

For years, as the world’s cultural tides have ebbed and flowed, I have taken part in discussions, arguments and written position pieces designed to open or broaden the public's mind. As I have taken up my trusty laptop to do this, I have tried to model myself after great writers and thinkers like Kant, Orwell, Thomas Paine, Socrates and Christopher Hitchens.

I believe in the intellectual powers and the critical faculties and though I do not have their reach or their scope, to me there are few activities more rewarding than trying to make a case for free thought and breaking out of the addictive and poisonous delusions that corrupt the human mind so easily, as those great writers also did.

From time to time, I am asked by one of the handful of people who read my essays if I would ever consider writing a book. Admittedly, though I write almost all the time, I find the idea both tempting and also well beyond my ability. The shorter “column” or “article” seems to—like with my fiction stories—fit my brand, such as it is. 

It has been something that I intend to do, however, and it seems to me that a book of essays might gain me a slightly farther reach than this blog has managed. Either way, until we are picking up stones and fighting in the street against the powers of authoritarianism and hate, the best way, and the way I am most comfortable fighting is with the incendiary bombs on the page and in the essay. The martial skills learned in the academy are, for me, the ones now needed more than ever before.

A book might be in the future for both styles (fiction and nonfiction) even if either winds up being something more like an anthology. For right now, though, I am deeply grateful for your support and hope you will keep reading.

Four Fiction Selections for October

The month of October is right around the corner and in preparation for Spooky Season, I have composed (or exhumed and reanimated) four fiction stories in honor of the shorter days and longer nights. I’ve repurposed an older, long unused blog site and my short fiction will be available there. 

Rather than spreading myself thin trying to do both essays and short stories, therefore, I will only be sharing short fiction for October. In November, I will return to posting my weekly essays. If short stories aren't your thing, please take the opportunity to read past essays on the Dave Rambles On site. The previous months and years (including some for older early attempts at essays) are archived on the right side of the main page.

The first of the tales of terror will be available next week. I will supply a link for each of the remaining stories each Thursday, as usual in October. As well as a social media post for my followers there.

Each story is a little different. None of these are set in Hantonville, the county seat of Talbot County, where many of my other, older short fiction takes place. Certainly, none of these are for the faint of heart but they stop short at being overtly terrifying, I hope. 

To give you full autonomy in your choice to read or not read, I am supplying brief summaries below. 

First up is Crimson Rain. A young woman must confront a terrifying intruder who turns out to be more than she bargained for.

Next is The Belknap Route. A truck driver's journey through a fog-shrouded mountain road takes a terrifying turn.

The third selection is Pond Fishing. Two ragged friends embark on a seemingly ordinary fishing trip at an abandoned business property pond, but their peaceful outing descends into a nightmare as they discover trespassing has serious consequences.

Finally, in time for Halloween, Briar Moon. A patient's hypnotherapy sessions take a sinister turn as he unravels a horrifying truth about his own identity.

I hope they enhance the spirit of Fall for you.

Enjoy!

A Ban a Minute

For years, each September, I put out a display educating and alerting public library users to Banned Books Week, which is an annual program conducted by the American Library Association (ALA) to help spread awareness about the harm of banning books. Each year, I set up a three-ring binder with an updated list of all the books that were banned or challenged the previous year. My binder has 10 years of pages of this kind. Still, this year, I’m hesitant to draw attention to the display and even more reluctant to overtly celebrate all the different possible displays of authors who are LGBTQ+, people of color or authors that otherwise challenge so-called “traditional values” with their fiction. I now have to face the terrifying possibility that doing so could make our library and staff a target for lunatics.

We librarians work hard to provide access to all books, by the way; unfettered and open access to every kind of book, whether controversial or not, by authors of all kinds regardless if they have been challenged or banned in other places. I’m very careful to make sure that our young people can access what they want to read and they know that they can ask us and we will go get a book for them if they’re uncomfortable. I just feel like putting out a display is drawing fire by proclaiming openly to the powers of hate that we know they’re there. Right now, the cultural climate is so tense, poking them by displaying banned books seems like a way to get a small cadre of bigots in our branch, scoping through our collection and screaming at librarians. Five years ago, it would have felt far-fetched to think this. When I started in this position, I couldn’t have imagined that scenario outside of a YA dystopian series like The Hunger Games. 

Today, it is a common reality.

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Tiny little groups of rabid extremists, usually claiming to be Christian or evangelical, but always associated with far-right political ideology, have bitten and torn public libraries to shreds around our country for daring to put books in their collections that they hate. Directors have been fired or had to resign, staff members have been targeted and threatened. One colleague at a neighboring library system had to endure foaming diatribes directed at them while they stood watch over a collection that was paid for by the county, state, and some federal funds, all because the screaming goon heard a rumor that one of the titles in that collection had something about people who were “Gay”. Would-be book banners lose their minds, cause a stink and ruin people’s lives over the most trivial content in books and they regularly claim their buffoonery is ‘for the kids’. Librarians and probably some local officials, now regularly expect mishegoss. So common has the run on library young adult and children’s collections been by mindless (and probably illiterate) goons, primarily in red states and counties, that some boards of trustees have ratified new procedures to minimize the damage when a patron complains.

In some of these county library systems, certain individuals with strong anti-literacy ideas get themselves elected to the board and brutalize the other members until they step down, allowing them to form small locally powerful boards that can completely control the library’s functions. The odd thing is, of course, that not one of them has any sense of how a library works. Soon enough, people stop coming to the library, because the books they want to read are no longer available and because the staff is so broken and the system so marred by the sad misuse by imbeciles that the libraries have to downsize or close. It is happening now. This is not a drill.

The motivation to ‘take control’ of libraries has become the final wretched tool in the belt of the kind of people who think that their morality is the only kind any of us need. They also think that anyone who doesn’t worship or marry the way they do is an abomination. They don’t want the children in a community to see others like them when they read books. They don’t want them to know about the Civil War, slavery or that there are people out there who do not define themselves by one or another gender. If the kids learn about those things, they cannot be indoctrinated and become mental thralls.

These anti-book ‘mammals’ have made arguments that there are books in the children’s collections with ‘pornographic’ content and that children can access these books. This is not the case, nor has it ever been, but book banners have never been willing to actually go see for themselves. They only make an assumption based on a social media post or the hearsay of some other lunatic.  

One group, unironically calling itself ‘moms for liberty’ (the capitalization is removed out of spite by the author) claimed that there were such books in a library in a Florida library system near where one of my former bosses worked as director. People lost their collective minds, only to find that the book was a parent’s guide to speak to children about their bodies and things like love and gender and so on. The real problem was—you cannot make this kind of lunacy up—the book made the case that love is love. The mom group called this unacceptable. The head of the youth services department lost their job and was harassed until they moved to another state. I presume they won’t work in the library profession ever again.

This was just one book in one library. These attacks are happening all over the country.

Intellectual liberty and freedom of access were once prized in America. Personal liberty was protected and treasured. Now, we have goons running all over, just looking for something to be offended by, so they can remove other people’s rights. 

In the meantime, one of the founding members of that mom group was caught having a ‘polyamorous’ affair and admitted that it wasn’t unusual behavior for her. So much for ‘family values’. The Republican candidate for governor in North Carolina has attended and verbally supported the mom group, has been outspoken about passing legislation to limit and censor library collections and has claimed that some people ‘just need killing’. These are just a few examples. 

Most of the groups are all intent on ‘protecting the kids’, or so they say, but what they really want to do is force their dogmatic ideologies on the rest of us. Parents are able to decide what’s right for their children to read, but these groups are not interested in that fact. They want to stop access to what they hate. The thought of a young teen going to the library, finding a book and discovering that their life is changed because they read about another young person who is like them, is enough to cause many of these so-called Americans to blow a gasket. 

My patience—and that of many in my profession—for ‘other people’s views’ on books is at its lowest ebb, generally, but actively attacking libraries because someone might read about something you don’t want them to is beyond the frozen limit, to me. I have been an advocate for stronger punishments for those who attempt to destroy library collections, even by banning them. If it was up to me, these people who decide they hate other people reading books ought to be forced to listen to readings of the books they hate in public until they expire from shame. It would probably take forever. If they had normal human responses, they would not try to ban books.

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The ideology behind banning books comes from a strange obsession with sex and other people’s love lives. I learned early on that the Christian preoccupation with sex and sexuality was far more deviant than anything they purported to be “against”. The evangelical community had two regular sermon topics each year. One was tithing (begging members to give ten percent of their income for running the church) and the other was homosexuality. The more vehemently they preached against it, I later learned, the more likely they were participating in it. This proved true both at my home church and later when I briefly converted to Catholicism. While the latter was blaming the Harry Potter craze for spreading “black magic” it failed to cover up a horrifying series of child sexual assaults that will blemish its reputation forever. In the former situation, our preacher actively trounced adulterers as often as possible. I used to feel bad for the people in the front pews who were spittle-flecked at the end of the services. He was caught having an affair with a woman twenty years his junior while his wife was being treated for lupus. He had to move to Alaska to get away from the bad press. 

How loudly did Jerry Falwell Junior denounce sexual depravity, only to find that he and his wife regularly made sport with a pool boy? It happens again and again. To name a sexual activity is to discover that a former preacher or politician who came out strongly against it in public was later caught ‘in flagrante delicto’.  In other words, the more trenchant certain of these dogmas become against a certain kind of lifestyle, which they consider ‘sinful’, the more likely it is that they are participating in that lifestyle in secret. 

The Southern Baptist Council of churches recently faced a shattering series of reports in which it couldn’t begin to catalog the horrific abuses of children, females, males in all kinds of depraved sins that would make a modern adult movie producer retch. Rather than shuttering their churches or closing the entire organization in shame, they put new ‘preachers’ into those churches and prevented more information from being made public to ‘protect the families involved’. Jesus, in Luke says, “It would be better for them to be thrown into the sea with a millstone tied around their neck than to cause one of these little ones to stumble.” Still they appear to be oblivious to the beam in their own eye.

Most, if not all of the revulsion from ecclesiastical groups about books at the library is a matter of choosing to insinuate oneself into other people’s lives. They want everyone to be under their thumb, but not because they want the world to be without sin, as they claim, but because they want the freedom to tell others how to live. As Christopher Hitchens put it in his groundbreaking God is Not Great, the puritans didn’t come to America to be free from persecution so much as to be free to persecute. Strong puritanical and Calvinist obsession with sex remains a very big problem in our country. If it continues to gain ground, we will all be forced to pretend to worship whether we want to or not.

At base, therefore, the distal cause of anti book sentiments is directly related to a widespread frontier worldview based on first century desert religions that are themselves only partially understood. The modern proponents of book banning are almost always associated with faith-based organizations.

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Libraries are a crucial battleground in the relentless assault on our rights. A small, toxic faction of hypocrites, miscreants, and self-righteous individuals is determined to strip away freedoms and impose their narrow beliefs on everyone else. This mindset fuels the pro-life movement and the anti-immigration agenda, both rooted in racism, sexism, misogyny, anti-LGBTQ+ hatred, and a twisted obsession with racial purity. The founders and financiers of these groups often represent the very worst of humanity, wielding their wealth to shape a world they can dominate. Their champions are despicable figures, yet they somehow garner support.

Banned Books Week has evolved from a rare response to ignorance into a critical flashpoint in our struggle to preserve democracy. It has grown from an annual to a daily reality.  Libraries are essential for fostering liberty, free inquiry and access to diverse ideas—bulwarks against authoritarianism. You don’t have to like every book on our shelves or even agree with its content; many who seek to ban books don’t bother reading them at all. What matters is defending the right to access information, as it is vital for safeguarding your freedoms. If we don’t stand up against this tide of censorship, we risk losing everything we hold dear.

Moving On Down

In 2021, in the aftermath of his serious cardiac procedure and grueling recovery, our father’s children began to pester him to depart his home and get a place all on one level. Pops needed time to heal properly. Going up and down flights of steps in his two-story house (or down to his basement to do laundry) was not going to aid his recuperation. It was also murdering his already replaced knees. But, he was dead set against selling his house and he stubbornly, flatly refused to depart for easier one-level living. He just put his ears back and made do until he was well enough to try to return to his daily routine. 

Then, out of nowhere this past mid-summer, he alerted us that he had found someone to buy his house and that, at long last, he would be moving into an apartment a few blocks away. We reeled a bit, especially since it all happened so suddenly. We were naturally awash with concern that he had been scammed or was being taken in a ploy. It happens to elderly people all the time. He gruffly reminded us that he was not a dupe and stolidly went on with his plan. Pop Bare is, if nothing else, headstrong.

In just a few weeks, the Old Man will transition from a homeowner to a renter. He only ever rented briefly once before in the time since he arrived home from the Army in 1963, and that was when he was waiting for contractors to finish building a previous house. Otherwise, Pop Bare has owned his own home(s) in one form or another for sixty years. That’s a long time to get used to possessing and controlling one's property and domicile.

As I mowed and tended our grounds the other weekend, I mulled over what it would be like to climb down from owning our home and property and descend into the weird and possibly scary realm of renting. I didn’t like the way it made me feel even just as a mental experiment. 

I have always assumed that at some point we would move, maybe to a smaller house, more suited to just the two of us on a bit of land where I could raise bees and Micki could raise a few chickens and maybe some goats. To move into an apartment, give up ownership, owe rent, and have no control over the destiny of our grounds or house is frankly unpleasant to me. It goes directly against my deeply independent nature. I’m naturally feral about my freedom, but that freedom originates and thrives from the place we call home; the hub of our privacy, the source of our ability to be masters of our destinies. An apartment is owned and tended by someone else. Thin walls prevent that essential barrier between us and other humans. To depend on someone to mow or fix the plumbing or rewire a light fixture (except when I have to call my brother for help) is not something I think I could live with. Not right now, anyway.

That doesn’t mean that I always get all my chores done, or manage to effectively sort out all that needs fixing, but that’s part of the freedom even if it drives me bonkers. At some point, as Pops informs me, you get tired of always needing to mow or blow leaves or weed or wire or rebuild or paint. At some point, the recliner just feels better and the chores can wait. That helped me feel a bit better. He’ll certainly feel as though he has less hanging over his head after his move.

Of course, we’re young and healthy. We have another thirty years at least (I hope) to downsize without stepping into a rental agreement. If, at some point, we become mysteriously wealthy, I assume we would be able to afford that dream cottage on a small patch of land with a glorious view of the sunset and a wide porch to sit on. I see us sipping tea and listening to the crickets each evening as we observe the daily solar art. We could hire nurses and yard scapers to help us as we age. I’m going to have to face it, though, at some point, we’ll have to shed our homeowner’s freedom. I’ve got to plan now for how I’m going to want to react and try to curtail my squealing when the time arrives.

I have nothing against people who rent. It can be a necessary stage in adulthood to live in an apartment or a rental house for a while. We both did it briefly (albeit separately) but I hated every minute of my experience. I am happy being able to keep my arm's length from the rest of the world.

We are extremely lucky to have our own place. Modern trends have made it incredibly difficult for younger generations to afford homes. We are maybe the last generation for a while to have that freedom and that wealth. I’m very grateful for our situation.

Pop Bare had to come to grips with the need to move on his own terms, I guess, but he eventually made the choice himself. Our senior adult parents have been healthy examples to us of how often the golden years require compromise with our best-laid plans. There will come a time when we will no longer be able to handle the immense house we live in, now. Even our fantasy cottage might become too much after a few more decades. There may come a time when we have to depart our homes and move into an ‘independent living unit’ at a retirement community or into assisted living. It’s not something that either of us wants, but it is something we have to face—eventually. When that time comes, I am practicing not to be recalcitrant, at least about that.

Our children deserve to be unburdened by their elderly parents in that foggy future. I would not ever want to become a parking brake stuck in the on position in their lives. I would no more wish that than to be tossed into a human-sized food processor filled with salt and lemon juice. I want to be independent and I think we both intend that, but if we eventually cannot be, then we will not be a drain on our kids.

This is not to say that Pop Bare has been a drain on us, exactly. He is stubborn and willful and does things according to his own idiom but he’s still master of his destiny and retains his autonomy and independence. That’s always been the case with him. He is getting older and it worries us that someone will try to take advantage of him or that he will become too frail to manage on his own, but he’s not there, yet. He’s far too obdurate to give in that easily without a fight.

All my life I thought I was the black sheep because of my tendency toward surly mulish pigheadedness and my inexplicable desire to do everything the hardest way. I now understand that I get my obstinate personality in the same way that I got my genetic cardiac condition: legitimately and directly from the Old Man.

Our kids will have to be aware of my propensity to be bull-headed. It will take patience from them and effort on my part, too. Maybe, as I get older, I’ll become more docile and less tetchy. Pops has calmed down a lot, too. I live 500 miles away, and it’s hard to be ill-tempered over the phone, but he seems to be easier going.

While I find the reality of no longer being a homeowner extremely distasteful, I’m proud of how well Pop Bare is handling his move, so far. He did this all on his own, despite years of pestering from his adult sons and their families. My brother helped to clear out some items Pops kept for both of us but otherwise, he used his realtor and lawyer to good effect.

The benefits of this move to him outweigh (by far) the detriments. He will no longer have the knee-shredding stairs to deal with. He will no longer have the temptation to start his snowblower or touch up the shoddy mowing of a landscaping company. Just about any other form of maintenance that a homeowner would need to deal with will no longer be on his mind. His pavements will be salted and shoveled. The only thing he will have to worry about is walking his little dog and the occasional trip to the grocery market. Aside from being stuck (for now) in the transition between moving out of one place and moving into the other, he seems to be ready and maybe even eager to make the change.

Longevity runs in both of our families, so there may be a chance that we live to be venerable little white-haired so-and-sos, the center of every family celebration, blissfully redolent of years of life experience and overflowing with grandchildren and great-grandchildren. We will tottle about and give advice and tell stories of ‘our day’ and because we’re ancient, people will listen. But that’s a long way off. I want to live free in this moment, enjoying the days as they dawn and working toward aging less like an old cuss and more like a man who is grateful for what he has.

No matter what the future holds, whether we wind up moving to an apartment or assisted living,  we’re lucky to have the responsibility of owning a home and property. I’ll enjoy it now and be thankful for whatever comes.

Finding Fixed Points: The Joy of Revisiting Beloved Books

When he was in third grade, our youngest son read the book, “Holes,” by Louis Sachar upwards of twenty times. His teacher wanted him to read something else, but he loved that book and read it again and again, reveling in the joy the book brought him. I worked in the elementary school he attended and the teacher approached me about it. I told her that I was just as guilty of rereading the books and stories that I love, which she probably didn’t appreciate.

True story: I have made a habit of reading certain books over and over. It may seem odd, especially considering how many wonderful books out there I still need to read. Some hold a special place in my heart and mind; after a certain period, I feel compelled to revisit them. Others are as much a part of the yearly cycle as the seasons and holidays we look forward to.

Revisiting a novel may seem odd if you’ve never done it. Books don't change. They tell the same stories each time I read them, using the same words, characters, settings, themes and motifs as when I read them years ago. However, I am not the same. Going back to a favorite book in a new era of my life, I always pick up on things I hadn't noticed or that suddenly resonate with me like never before. This magical shifting happens within me; the book—a fixed point—allows me to experience it anew from a different vantage in my life.

Admittedly, I'm a little obsessive about rereading. Annually, I read “The Lord of the Rings” beginning on September 22nd after having reread “The Hobbit” in May. Each time I travel along with Sam and Frodo and the Fellowship from the Shire to Mordor and then to Gondor and back to the Shire, I come away a slightly better person. It’s hard to explain to someone who has never read Professor Tolkien's stories, but Middle Earth holds many lessons and examples of heroism, friendship, love, devotion to nature and the overarching message that simple folk can save the world if they have courage and are true to who they are and where they come from.

One of my most beloved authors, Christopher Hitchens, thought Tolkiens's many works were constipated and dull. Hitch preferred Evelyn Waugh and Richard Llewellyn, which feel like water torture to me, so we have that difference. Yet Hitch wrote at least two books that I regularly reread; “God is Not Great”, which helped me to shed the chains of religious belief, and his memoir, “Hitch-22”. I owe him greatly, too, because he started me on Wodehouse and introduced me to Saul Bellow and the poetry of Philip Larkin and others. His loss not only removes a powerful polemic wit when we could use him most, but he sadly wrote too few books and no more will be forthcoming.

If you like nonfiction as much as I do, you may enjoy Bill Bryson. Several of his books are excellent and well-suited for repetitive reading. My four favorites are “A Walk in the Woods”, about the Appalachian Trail; “The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid”, a memoir of Bryson’s childhood in Des Moines in the 1950s; “One Summer: America, 1927”, about Lindbergh’s transatlantic flight and many other events; and “At Home: A Short History of Private Life”. Bryson retired from writing in 2020—something I didn’t know writers could or would ever do, but he’s left us quite a shelf-full and all are excellent uses of reading time.

I revisit Stephen King sometimes, though I have mainly kept my reading to his early novels that I missed when they were first published. However, I just reread “IT” this year and it holds up. I’ve got an essay drafted about this superior book, where I argue that King is well on his way to becoming a classic American author, on par with Flannery O’Connor, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Mark Twain, and all because of the power and relevance of “IT”. King isn’t for everybody, but he can capture the voice of the modern era and his work is spectacularly composed. 

Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird” is one of my most beloved books, though I have never been able to bring myself to read the sequel, “Go Set a Watchman”. Lee may have been coerced to release the latter just before her death, but for me, I realized a long time ago her first book says all it needs to about the Finches of Maycomb County and the state of the South in the 1930s. Its universe is almost perfectly rendered, and the lessons in it are no less relevant today. Each time I read it, I come away deeply moved and challenged in my worldview, hoping that the younger generations will pave the way to peace and unity.

Other books I love but revisit less often. “Moby-Dick” is worth more than one read for sure, but can probably be read once a decade. This is true of the Narnia books by C.S. Lewis, the Alice adventures by Lewis Carrol and anything by any of the Brontë sisters. I usually read William Golding's “Lord of the Flies” about once a decade or so, too, though it is beginning to seem more relevant, as our society is being devoured by primal polarization and tribalism. G.K. Chesterton, Joseph Campbell, Hemingway, Twain, Wharton, Eliot and Austen can all be relegated to the ‘once per decade’ slot.

Some books and stories are just necessary for my mental health. Among those that ward off the blues are the Jeeves and Wooster books, by P.G. Woodhouse. I read Bertie and Jeeves often and have kept their books in my regular rotation. Although wonderful themselves, as I've written here before, they also work well as palate-cleansers between the heavier nonfiction books I like. After a gloomy book about the rise of Christian Nationalism a few months ago, Bertie’s hilarious misadventures helped me to breathe and laugh again. I dip into Lovecraft almost as often for the same reasons. Something about his brand of cosmic horror soothes me, though it might take a trained psychologist to explain it. There is peace in not knowing everything that lies beyond the stark borders of human knowledge and remembering that, thankfully, human lust for power and wealth is oppressively local in terms of our solar system and galaxy.

Short novels and short stories are an integral part of who I am. I have always been drawn to short stories, often finding them just as appealing, if not more so, than lengthy novels. This preference likely stems from my early reading experiences, where I developed a deep admiration for short story writers. Among my favorites are Ray Bradbury, Stephen King, Edgar Allan Poe, Richard Matheson, Clark Ashton Smith, Bram Stoker, Oscar Wilde and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. What could be better than a shorter novel? In particular, one of my top five novellas is “The Hound of the Baskervilles,” which I consider the finest of the four Sherlock Holmes novels and perhaps the best short novel ever written. I elaborate elsewhere on why I believe this. While some literature professors might challenge my opinion in a dark alley, I welcome the debate, though I doubt my stance will change.

Finally, I love to delve regularly into ancient texts. Anglo-Saxon verse, Old Norse mythology in the Poetic and Prose Eddas and sagas, and the vast epic, Beowulf are all foundational to my worldview and my deep love of history and verse. They were introduced to me in my high school career and I have loved them ever since. Each holds a germ of where we come from but also teaches us that the old ways aren’t always outdated.

Sometimes poetry feels more appropriate. I love to read Robert Burns, Ogden Nash, W.H. Auden and Robert Frost just to name a few poets, though Frost captures my love of autumn and  Burns my love of, as Jeeves would say, “the North British dialect, Sir”. An argument could be made that Shakespeare’s plays (never a fan of his sonnets) are all long-form poems—they are written in iambic pentameter—and so Hamlet and King Lear and a few others are fun to read routinely. I love Hamlet (the play) so much and it remains his best and most poignant tragedy but has also replaced some of the inane tidbits of scripture I was once forced to memorize. I find that he deals with questions of ethics and morality in a far more suitable and potent way than bronze-age goatherder diaries.

As you know by now, I listen to many of these books, which allows me to be productive (yard work, chores, commute to work on foot, etc.) while also being able to read. I love to read, though I am usually too restless to sit for prolonged periods unless I’m at the beach. The narrators are excellent at performing the different characters and making the stories come alive. A good friend of mine often razzes me about this, claiming that listening is not the same as actually reading. Research indicates that comprehension levels between listening to audiobooks and reading printed text are generally indistinguishable. Why would we read to children if it didn’t help them learn to love to read? I still love to be read to. In my opinion, whether the books are absorbed through the eyes or the ears, it goes to the same part of the brain. The visualization of the stories is the same either way, and my ability to retain the information is enhanced.

I hope this essay has provided you, my readers, with some books that you may want to read and some authors you may want to get to know. I truly hope that, if you do decide to read any of those mentioned, you will get as much from them as I have. However you read and whatever types of books you like, what ultimately matters is that you are reading. So pour yourself a cup of strong tea, find a cozy spot by a window or the fireplace, pull that book you’ve been meaning to start from the shelf and crack it open. If it happens to be a book you’ve read before, so be it. No rule forbids a second or a third, or a yearly visit with an old favorite. A new world of experiences lies before you. If you truly love that book, in a few years, you can read it again.

Author’s Note:

I love George Orwell. Readers familiar with my reading preferences will wonder why I didn’t mention him here. Orwell occupies a unique place in my literary pantheon. Unlike other authors I revisit for pleasure, my engagement with Orwell's work is more akin to a lifelong study. His writings have become so deeply ingrained in my intellectual landscape that I constantly find myself absorbing and reflecting on his ideas. Other authors are seasonal or transitory; Orwell is forever.

My shelves groan under the weight of Orwell’s books and his biographies, and I regularly immerse myself in his columns, letters, diaries and articles through dedicated online resources. This ongoing exploration feels less like repetitive reading and more like a continuous dialogue with one of the early 20th century's most incisive minds.

While Orwell's seminal works like "1984" and "Animal Farm" are essential reading for their prescient warnings about totalitarianism—warnings that remain disturbingly relevant today and, as such, worth reading often—his broader body of work represents a tireless commitment to exposing authoritarianism and brutality in all its forms.

However, given this essay's focus on recreational reading, I've chosen not to delve into Orwell here. His works, though profoundly impactful, often serve a more practical and educational purpose rather than pure literary leisure. Nonetheless, Orwell's influence on my thinking and worldview cannot be overstated, even if it manifests differently from my relationship with other beloved authors and their books.