Truths Half-Told. Letters Half-Burned. A Legacy Waiting to Be Fully Heard. | Mary E. Wilkins Freeman: The Biographer’s Challenge

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“It is the job of the biographer to capture not just the facts, but the person—to recreate a life that breathes.”

–Richard Holmes (b. 1945. British biographer and literary historian, best known for revolutionizing the art of biography by blending rigorous research with narrative grace. Holmes treats biography as “a pursuit”—a physical and emotional journey that mirrors the subject’s life and traces the biographer’s own evolving understanding.)

Last week, I had the honor of speaking to the Mary E. Wilkins Freeman Society—an international gathering of scholars and fellow literary sleuths—about a woman who has occupied both my imagination and my file drawers for over fifty years. The event was titled An Hour with Mary E. Wilkins Freeman and Brent L. Kendrick, though truth be told, Freeman took up more than her share of the hour—quite the feat for someone 95 years late to the party.

My talk focused on the biographer’s challenge—specifically, the one I’ve taken on in my newest work-in-progress: Dolly: Life and Letters of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, a two-volume biography that attempts not just to recount her life but also to reckon with it. And as I spoke, I realized: you, my Dear Readers, might want to know the thrust of those challenges too.

Besides, if the rocks on the mountain above me ever come tumbling down around my head—and let’s be honest, erosion is undefeated—I’d like to think I’ve left behind notes coherent enough for some poor soul to pick up the thread and carry on. Consider this a digital trail of sourdough breadcrumbs. Or a literary will. Or maybe just a slightly compulsive footnote to posterity.

Let’s began with where I began my conversation with the Society! To my surprise–well, not really–I departed from my prepared PowerPoint presentation and shared with everyone some of my recent finds. Not all. Just a few. Like some first editions of her books that survive with dust jackets intact: Doc Gordon (1906) and An Alabaster Box, co-authored with Florence Morse Kingsley (1917).

Then I had to share a copy of her Pembroke with an 1894 letter tipped in, expressing her surprise to learn of a Pembroke, New Hampshire and insisting that the Pembroke in her novel was an imaginary town.

I could have gone on and on, but I had to get started with my prepared PowerPoint. Even so, I was dying to share one of my most treasured finds in recent years: an association copy of her Jane Field (1892) from the library of Thomas Hardy, no less. It even has his book plate! And get this! Tipped into the book is a letter from Freeman to Hardy, written in 1894 when she was still Mary E. Wilkins.

I had to share those items because discoveries like that make research truly enjoyable.

After that gem, I decided to begin my formal presentation, so I started with silence. No. No. Not her Silence and Other Stories (1898) that I had included in my show-and-tell of her books with dust jackets.

And I wasn’t talking about the peaceful kind of silence. I had in mind the charged, maddening kind that suggests everything while saying nothing. My work on Freeman’s is a study in absences. No children. No will. No literary executor. No neat stack of labeled folders tucked away in a special collections box. Just scattered letters—some stiff and formal, others intimate and tender, many conspicuously missing. A few were destroyed by well-meaning friends who, bless them, thought privacy more valuable than posterity. That’s loyalty with scissors.

And yet, what’s missing speaks volumes. Silence, when it’s deliberate, isn’t absence—it’s presence with its mouth closed. It points to pain, privacy, or power. It challenges the biographer to resist the urge to fill in gaps with imagination. Biography isn’t fiction. And Freeman, who lived within boundaries, both imposed and self-constructed, deserves to have her story told with respect for what she chose not to share.

I used to think my job was to uncover. But every time I held her letters—some brittle, some bold, many barely surviving—I understood something deeper. My job was to listen. Not for revelations, but for nuance. I hoped the silences might eventually yield confessions. What I found instead was the eloquence of restraint.

And that restraint continues through the patchwork of what remains. What I’m working with wasn’t curated; it was cobbled together from libraries, estates, eBay listings, obscure auctions, and—on more than one occasion—serendipity. A letter here. A scribbled marginal note there. A donation from someone who thought, “This might be of interest.” And indeed, it was.

From this mosaic, one truth stood out: Freeman was no literary waif wandering the fields of New England and New Jersey with a bonnet full of feelings. She was sharp. Strategic. A woman who tracked her payments, negotiated contracts, and protected her work with steely precision. She didn’t just write to be heard—she wrote to be paid. And she succeeded.

But there were ways in which she was silenced, or at least reframed. Take her first collection of stories for adults, for example. The world knows it as A Humble Romance, but that was not her title. She wanted Green Mountain Stories. One editorial misstep reshaped her critical reception for generations. In an attempt to set the record straight, I published the collection in 2023 under the title she originally intended. It wasn’t just an act of publishing—it was an act of restoration. A reclamation. A literary correction served warm.

Place shaped her profoundly. Born in Massachusetts, forged in Vermont, and, by her own reluctant admission, tethered to New Jersey. Who claims her? Each state might try, but perhaps none can fully. Those Vermont years were transformative—not just scenic. She didn’t merely write about place; she grew into herself there. Critics, of course, pinned her as “local color,” as though geography were quaint decoration instead of animating force.

At one point, I thought I could simply revise my earlier book, The Infant Sphinx. Dust off a few facts, plug in a few letters, call it an update. My Dear Readers, I could not. With over 587 pages already in print and decades of new discoveries, it became clear: this wasn’t a renovation. This was a whole new house.

I decided to start from the ground up. Volume I: The New England Years (1852–1901) tracks her ascent—her voice, her control, her deliberate rise. Volume II: The New Jersey Years (1902–1930) explores unraveling and resilience. Her husband’s alcoholism, his institutionalization, his escape, his death, and his final legacy: disinheriting her in favor of his chauffeur. But those years also brought triumph. Freeman became the first recipient of the William Dean Howells Gold Medal. She was elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters. She endured—and she flourished.

As I worked, she shifted in my mind from “The Infant Sphinx” to something more intimate. Her friends called her “Dolly.” So do I. Because what emerged wasn’t a mask, but a woman: shrewd, vulnerable, funny, driven. Someone who resisted easy summary. Someone who might have written my biography better than I’ll ever write hers.

Of course, none of this would’ve been possible in 1985. Back then, research meant microfilm, train stations, and airports. Now, it means auction alerts, digital archives, and collectors who drop treasures into my inbox. I’ve found letters in university databases, estate catalogs, and the odd footnote in a forgotten article. The crowd, the cloud, and the collector—they’ve all joined the project. I don’t always have to go to the archive anymore. Sometimes, the archive comes to me.

In some ways, I’ve spent my whole career waiting for this moment. Waiting for the tools to catch up to the mystery. Waiting for the materials to surface. Waiting for my own understanding to mature.

That’s why Dolly had to happen now.

And apparently, I’m not the only one who thinks so. What began as a one-time Zoom talk has unexpectedly grown legs—and possibly a handbag. To my surprise and delight, the talk was a hit. I’ve been invited to give it again on June 27, and word keeps trickling in. Emails from those who missed it have arrived, each bearing some variation of “Please tell me it was recorded.”

Hannah Champion, President of the Freeman Society and Assistant Professor of Nineteenth-Century American Literature at Université Bordeaux Montaigne, has asked me to do a formal recording for the Society’s blog. Apparently, I’m more popular than I realized—or perhaps Mary is, and I’m just her current mouthpiece with a sometimes-decent Wi-Fi signal and a fondness for dust-jacket ephemera.

However that may be, one thing is certain: Mary E. Wilkins Freeman isn’t just a name on a title page or a portrait in an outdated textbook. She’s a presence. One I’ve come to know. One I hope you’ll come to know, too.

And if the mountain above me holds steady a while longer, I’ll finish her story—not as I once imagined it, but exactly as Dolly now insists on having it told.

A Week Back to the Future

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“Sometimes the smallest things take up the most room in your heart.”

—A. A. Milne (1882–1956), English author best known for creating Winnie-the-Pooh and stories that continue to shape how we remember childhood, love, and the quiet power of small things.

It was a portable Remington Rand typewriter in a gray box lined with green felt. In 1956, my parents went to Lilly Office Supply and bought it for my sister Arlene, who was taking high school typing. After graduation, she “went away”—not far, but far enough to feel exotic to my boyhood mind—to become a medical technologist in a residential hospital program.

She returned home often, always bringing—unbeknownst to her and to me—pieces of my future.

One of the first that impressed my ten-year-old spirit was her interest in tropical fish, no fancier than fan-tail guppies but fancy enough to ignite in me a lifelong love. My one-hundred-gallon tropical aquarium speaks to a piece of my future that settled in and endured.

I’m not sure, but next up might have been some of the exotic recipes she cooked when she came back on visits. I remember one dish in particular. Arlene called it pepper steak, but it wasn’t French au poivre or Chinese stir-fry. This was hers—flank steak pounded thin, rolled up tight, and packed with cracked black pepper. Lots and lots of pepper. She baked it low and slow until the whole kitchen smelled like heat and adventure.

I was hell-bent on loving it. It was different, and Arlene made it. That alone made it holy. My mother, no stranger to bold flavors from coal camp kitchens, loved it too. She said Arlene had a touch. That dish lit a fuse. It was the first truly “foreign” flavor I fell for—and from that bite forward, I was hungry for worldwide cuisine. It was a piece of my future that still lingers on my adventuresome culinary palate.

What else? Once, Arlene brought home one of her Mahalia Jackson albums—a 12-inch LP—titled In the Upper Room. I remember the cover, but even more, I remember the sound: Mahalia’s voice rising from the vinyl like a sermon on wings, wide-mouthed and full-throated, her vowels rich and trembling with conviction. That mouth—large, commanding, joyful—seemed to carry an entire congregation inside it. You didn’t just hear her sing. You stood up straighter, somewhere deep in your bones. Her singing resonated naturally with me. I had fallen in love with Black Gospel in my early coal camp years, and even though we had moved away, now I could enjoy Black Gospel on my own record player. Notes and chords from that piece of my future still rattle my rafters every morning as my soul feeds on Black Gospel fire while I bike indoors or garden in the sun.

Arlene brought many other pieces of my future back home when she visited, all held tightly together by my realization that she was living the good life, maybe because she had “gone away” but definitely because her education had opened doors. As a medical technologist, she could go anywhere in the world. Bluefield (WV) was nearby yet far away. Richlands (VA)–just across a mountain or two–was ever further away. Richmond, which in my young mind was further than the stretch of my imagination, was clean across Virginia.

When she came back home, she arrived in style.

How well I remember her 1959 BMW 507 Roadster, white as a wedding glove, low-slung and impossibly sleek. The chrome trim shimmered like polished silverware, and the twin kidney grilles gave it a kind of sly, knowing smile. With its long, sculpted hood and tucked-in waistline, it didn’t sit on the dirt road in front of our home—it posed. And yet—for all its glamour—it was so feather-light, I once watched my brother Stanley and my brother-in-law Lemuel lift it off the road and set it gently in the yard, as if it were a city toy that had wandered into a grown-up mountain world by mistake.

Sometimes, instead of driving home, Arlene would fly. I can still see her coming down the steps of the plane, with a look on her face fiercely defying the engine’s turbulence to disturb her sculpted bouffant—a chin-length hairstyle with smooth volume at the crown, gently curled ends, and a sleek, side-swept part. It was polished but not overdone, and it framed her face with effortless elegance, just as it did her heroine Jackie Kennedy, who made the hairstyle fashionable.

Arlene had exquisite taste in clothing, too—expensive, yes, but timeless. She didn’t follow fashion; she curated it. Her closet was a study in fine fabrics: tailored wool skirts, cashmere sweaters so soft they seemed to hold their own breath, and coats that whispered elegance with every movement. She favored deep, dramatic colors—navy, charcoal, forest green, black—tones my mother thought too somber for a woman her young age.

But Arlene wore them with such composure that you’d never question it. Even in our modest home, she had the poise of someone just back from Paris or somewhere so far away it sounded like it should be whispered.

In my young mind, she had arrived, not only with all the quiet showings of her success but also with the equally quiet sharing of her largesse. She was religious in sending money to my parents—especially as my dad began his retirement from the coal mines—and later to me when I started college.

In all of those ways, I saw in her life pieces of my own future.

But when Arlene “went away,” she left behind one piece that might have had an impact on me—equal to if not greater than—the other pieces of my future that she brought back home with every visit.

Her Remington Rand typewriter in a gray box lined with green felt.

My sister Judy used it when she took typing. And if you guessed that it was passed on to me, you guessed right. Starting with my typing classes and stretching far into the future, Arlene’s Remington Rand began a remarkable journey—one that may be unmatched in the annals of typewriter chronicles.

When I went to Alderson-Broaddus University in 1965, it went with me. I typed all of my papers, including my Honors Thesis, on that Remington.

When I graduated in 1969, it went with me to Washington, DC, where I started my career at the Library of Congress. I typed a proposal for a concordance to Robert Frost’s poetry on that Remington.

Three years later, when I started my doctoral program at the University of South Carolina (USC), it went with me to Columbia, where I wrote all of my graduate papers on that Remington.

One was more important than any of the others. In preparing it, I found myself in Richmond for a week, staying with Arlene and her husband Clyde, a police officer. She was surprised that I still had her Remington and that I was using it even in graduate school.

I put it to phenomenal use that week. Looking back, I wonder what trajectory my life might’ve taken had it not been for that turning-point.

Lean in a little closer and let me explain.

It was my first semester at USC, and I was taking a survey course in 19th-century American Literature. One of the stories that we read was Mary E. Wilkins Freeman’s “A Humble Romance.” I had never heard of the writer before, but I was so smitten by her story that I read another one and then another one and many, many more. Aside from thinking that they were extraordinary stories, I was captivated by a pattern of strong-willed women who inevitably never married. I was equally captivated when I discovered that Freeman herself did not marry until she was nearly fifty.

It was a minor aha moment. I had a perfect research paper topic: “Single Women and Gender Identity in Selected Stories by Mary E. Wilkins Freeman.” My professor approved, suggesting that I explore Freeman’s letters for supporting biographical evidence.

To my initial horror, I discovered that Freeman’s letters had never been published. But to my immediate delight, I discovered that Clifton Waller Barrett Library at the University of Virginia had a small collection of her letters. In a flash, I had an action plan. I would stay with Arlene and Clyde in Richmond, make the daily one-hour drive to Charlottesville, spend the day in Barrett Library, and return at the end of each day.

The typewriter went with me on those daily research trips, and during that week, I prepared a transcript of the Freeman letters at the Barrett Library, systematically and methodically using that Remington.

I returned to Columbia the next week and continued working on my Freeman paper and on papers in my other courses, all typed on that Remington.

By semester’s end, I had an epiphany. For my doctoral dissertation, I could locate and edit Freeman’s letters. My advisor loved the idea, as did my committee, but knowing more fully than I the rigor involved in such a project, they urged me to limit my scope to selected letters. I prevailed with my initial proposal. Ten years of research later–with trips to more than fifty libraries across the country, always armed with Arlene’s Remington Rand–I finished my dissertation and was awarded my Ph.D. In 1985, the fruit of my scholarly labors was published: The Infant Sphinx: Collected Letters of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman. It remains, as The Journal of Modern Literature noted in its review, “the most complete record to date of Freeman’s life as writer and woman.”

But wait, wait. Don’t go. I need to share a few more details so that you’ll understand even more fully how Arlene’s Remington Rand typewriter and her quiet support during that week in her home all came together, and a life of research dedicated to Freeman found its rhythm—click by click, page by page.

The five decades since have witnessed me not only digging up the past in all the towns where Freeman lived, wrote, and made the rest of the world sit up and take notice but also returning there as frequent keynote speaker, sharing with the towns’ citizens all of my findings, never before shared. Those same towns helped launch the publication of my landmark The Infant Sphinx as well as my watershed edition of Freeman’s Green Mountain Stories (2023), the intended title of her first collection of adult stories, A Humble Romance and Other Stories (1887).

These days, I’m working on Dolly: Life and Letters of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman. Vol I: The New England Years (1852-1901). Vol. II: The New Jersey Years (1902-1930). I have no doubt that three towns will welcome me back when Dolly is published. Randolph (MA), where she was born. Brattleboro (VT), where she launched her literary career. Metuchen (NJ), where she died.

But let’s move past all that Freeman stuff.

For now, let’s keep the spotlight on the woman who went away when I was a boy, returning home with a passion for tropical fish and gospel records, pepper steak and black wool coats, fast cars and high-flying planes, and all the other things that the good life had to offer–giving me something far more. The dreams. The belief. The typewriter.

For now, let’s keep the spotlight on my sister Arlene, who always brought home—unbeknownst to her and to me—pieces of my enduring future.

A Reader’s Compendium to Intimacy

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“Maybe the next new old way to intimacy is right here. Voice. Breath. Story.”

—-TheWiredResearcher, b. 1947. Author of A Reader’s Compendium to Intimacy, guaranteed to make you explore all the rooms in your home.

Whiplash!

If I were a betting man, I’d wager the title gave you a little jolt. You paused on Compendium—“Wait, does that mean what I think it means?”—and then BAM! You hit Intimacy, and it was like you got rear-ended at a stoplight. Neck snap. Mind swirl. Whiplash.

Let me double down. The moment you saw Intimacy, your head unzipped at least one of these:

● “Sex.”
● “Emotional stuff… here we go.”
● “Being seen. Fully. Yikes.”
● “Something I want—and fear.”
● “Crying in front of someone.”
● “Letting someone in—too far in.”
● “When it’s good, it’s everything.”
● “That’s what I’m missing.”
● “It never lasts.”
● “Real connection. No filter.”
● “The kind of thing that leaves you wordless—and maybe a little wrecked.”

Aha! Caught you! If you hadn’t blushed, I wouldn’t have known. But don’t worry. You’re okay. I’m okay. And talking about intimacy? Trust me. It’s more than okay. Try it. You’ll be surprised by your discoveries.

Let me also assure you of something else. If sex is what you thought of first, you’re still fine. I’ll prove it to you. I wanted to sprinkle some hard data into this essay, like the suggestive power of scattering rose petals on bedroom sheets, so I googled:

“How many times a day do people think about intimacy?”

What popped up first? Guess. Every hit focused on some aspect of sex, and since I’ve already gone down that rabbit hole, let me share what I found. Men think about sex 19 times a day; women, 10.

But sex is just one slice of intimacy. So if something else popped up as your first thought, you’re in good company. As a matter of fact, many studies don’t even include physical closeness in defining intimacy.

Instead, they zero in on what intimacy requires before it even begins: establishing trust, cultivating closeness, and voicing truth aloud.

Some experts get really specific and focus on what they call the 5 As of intimacy:

● Attention to the present moment–observing, listening, and noticing all the feelings at play in the relationships.
● Acceptance of ourselves and others just as we are.
● Appreciation of all our gifts, our limits, and our longings as human beings.
● Affection shown through holding and touching.
● Allowing life and love to be just as they are, with all their ecstasy and ache, without trying to take control.

Other experts focus on the 5 Cs of intimacy:

● Communication–talking openly, honestly, and respectfully.
● Compatibility–sharing core values and goals.
● Commitment–showing up and working through challenges together.
● Care–expressing love through empathy, support, and small gestures.
● Compromise–meeting in the middle to make sure both people feel heard, valued, and respected.

Also, the experts have recommendations for keeping intimacy alive and well in the bedroom. Well. Good grief. Somebody needs to tell the experts that houses have more rooms than the bedroom. Joking aside, most of the tips circle back to sex. So let me share one that doesn’t. I stumbled on it the other day. It’s the 2-2-2 rule that goes like this. Committed couples should go on a date once every two weeks, spend a weekend away every two months, and take a week-long vacation every two years.

I’m fascinated by that rule, but just to be transparent: I’d need more dates, more getaways, and more week-long vacays. Preferably soon. Preferably with someone special who knows how to linger over dessert and pillow talk and other sweet nuthins that mean everything.

Lately, though, something softer has been curling around the edges of my mind. It’s something that doesn’t require a plane ticket or a fancy reservation. All it needs is a dedicated space, a good voice, and the willingness to listen.

Are you ready? It’s so incredibly simple.

Reading aloud to someone.

Can you imagine?

Actually, I can. I don’t know about you, but I love reading aloud. I always have. As an educator, reading literary selections aloud to my students is one of my greatest joys. Time after time after time, they respond:

“Professor Kendrick, when I read this story, I didn’t get it. But hearing you read helped me understand. Now, I get it.”

I think I know why. Reading aloud requires understanding not just the meaning strung out in words but also the heart and soul that live in the spaces surrounding those words, sometimes haunting those spaces, and sometimes hoping and longing for release that comes only when the words hear themselves spoken, knowing that they’ve been set free through sharing. Author. Reader. Listener. Intertwined. Joined. One. It’s one of the most intimate moments ever, even if fleeting.

Occasionally, that moment becomes even more intimate when words catch the reader off guard and nuanced meanings surface as the words roll off the tongue, releasing a sudden floodgate of tears, falling unexpectedly but without need of apology or explanation.

It’s happened to me more than once, but I most remember what happened when I taught Thomas Wolfe’s “The Lost Boy” for the first time. I loved the story from the start, and I was confident of my ability to lead a general class discussion built around the question:

“Who is the lost boy in the novella?

“Eugene? Grover? How do you know. Where’s the textual evidence to support your claim?”

Just as we were ending our lively and spirited class conversation, I decided to read the last paragraph.

“And out of the enchanted wood, that thicket of man’s memory, Eugene knew that the dark eye and the quiet face of his friend and brother—poor child, life’s stranger, and life’s exile, lost like all of us, a cipher in blind mazes, long ago—the lost boy was gone forever, and would not return.”

With quivering voice and with tears moistening my cheeks, I made it through the final words, realizing as I had never realized before, the existential pain that comes with knowing how lost we all are on life’s journey.

There I stood in all my vulnerability. There my students sat, seeing me in that moment. And then, we all understood simply because I had read aloud.

The intensity of that intimate moment remains unforgettable.

I’ve never tried reading aloud in a relationship, but I’d love to try it. I’m thinking that it would be slow burn. I’m thinking that it would be like foreplay for the soul.

I’ll take credit for the sultriness that I just brought to the notion of reading aloud to someone. But when it comes to the idea itself, I’ll have to give credit to a neighbor. We were enjoying a cocktail, and somewhere between Gin-and-Tonic sips, Gary started telling me about the reading ritual he and his late wife practiced daily:

● Same time.
● Same place.
● Different books, usually.
● Breaking the silence, whenever desired, to share a passage aloud.

As he kept talking, I watched and listened, spellbound. He was transported if only for a few fleeting moments to a lifetime of fleeting moments when he and Jody read together in a ritual so profound that it transcended the physical and found home in heart and soul.

Actually, neither Gary nor Jody can claim the ritual as theirs. Couples have been doing it forever.

Step back in American history to Thomas and Martha Jefferson. They were known to spend evenings at Monticello reading novels and poetry to each other, their voices soft against the candlelight of a Virginia evening. It was one of the few quiet pleasures in a life that was otherwise noisy with politics.

Several presidencies later, John and Abigail Adams read political theory, plays, and moral philosophy aloud to each other—sometimes in the same room, sometimes through the pages of their legendary letters. Shared reading was one way they kept their minds, and their marriage, sharp.

Hop to the other side of the Pond and fast forward to the next century and we’ll find Queen Victoria and Prince Albert often reading poetry aloud in the evenings—sometimes in English, sometimes in German. Victoria later wrote in her journals that Albert’s voice brought her calm. Their reading wasn’t just education. It was connection.

Reading aloud to each other isn’t just a thing of the past either.

Fast forward to the present. Everyone knows that Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter—married for 77 years—read the Bible aloud to one another every single night, even when they were apart. When travel or illness intervened, they kept the tradition alive by phone. It wasn’t about religion so much as rhythm. A ritual. A bond.

Another presidential couple, Barack and Michelle Obama, often speak about sharing books with each other—discussing what they’re reading, trading pages, sometimes reading passages aloud. For them, books are not only a window into each other’s minds but also a way to stay close while being in the public eye.

Even acting duos like Michael McKean and Annette O’Toole read books aloud to each other. They’ve done so for decades, weaving stories into the fabric of their relationship like a shared language.

Now that I’ve got my rhythm going, let me share with you something that I’ve known all along. Literature is filled with couples who share books, poems, and whispered lines by firelight.

I’m thinking about Hazel & Augustus in John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars. They read An Imperial Affliction aloud to each other, sharing lines that feel like lifelines. It’s tender, flirty, and heartbreaking.

Or what about Anne Shirley and Gilbert Blythe in L. M. Montgomery’s Anne’s House of Dreams? As their relationship deepens, they read poetry and essays together, sometimes aloud. It’s subtle, romantic, and tied to their shared love of words and growth.

I guess I should mention The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, a novel by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows. Several characters read aloud to each other throughout wartime, showing that community forms through books and shared voices and that reading as intimacy outlasts chaos.

But I’m not going to talk about any of those literary works. They’re all lovely, earnest, and romantic. But I want something different. I want something quieter. I want to talk about Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. After fire and blindness and the long stretch of absence, it’s Jane who reads aloud to Mr. Rochester. She does it not to dazzle, not to perform, but simply to be there. Her voice becomes his window to the world—and maybe even back to himself. It’s not just love—it’s restoration, offered one word at a time.

And that’s the kind of reading aloud that I’m moving toward at this point in my life. I want it to be not just a ritual of sharing aloud but also a ritual of staying in place.

It’s a ritual that I’ve never practiced in a relationship. But I’m ready to give it a try, just to see. Maybe start with poetry or essays.

I’m ready to say, “Pick something you love–or wrote. Maybe a poem. I’ll pick something I love–or wrote. Maybe an essay. Let’s read when we feel like it. Share when we want to. Listen, when we can.”

I’m ready for a voice I know to wrap itself around ideas I don’t.

I’m ready for the quiet thrill of saying, “Listen to this,” and meaning everything.

Who knows. Maybe that’s the next new old way to explore intimacy—not with technique or timing or strategy, but with voice, breath, and story.

There. Now you have it. A Reader’s Compendium to Intimacy. Now you know.

Go. Do it. No rose petals. No script.

Just this. Read. Together. Aloud, sometimes. And when your love reads back to you?

Remember: That’s not just a voice.

Remember: That’s a heart unfolding, anew.

The Nearness of Faraway Places: How Our Roots and Our Dreams Keep Tugging at Each Other

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“We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”

—T. S. Eliot (1888–1965), Nobel Prize-winning poet and one of the most influential literary figures of the twentieth century. His major works explore spiritual desolation, renewal, and the search for meaning.

Once upon a time, in a previous life long, long ago, I started a side hustle. It lasted several years and could have lasted longer. But here’s the thing. It did so well that I had to choose between it and my federal career. It was impossible to live in both worlds. I had to choose one or the other. I chose my federal career.

But linger with me for a second, and let me tell you about something I learned when Potomac Research Organization (PRO) was my hustle. Simply put, I did research, mainly using the Library of Congress and the National Archives. One area that brought lots of clients my way, sometimes high-paying ones, was finding people.

I had a solid track record for locating lost heirs, sometimes in cemetery plots. But that was okay: I still found them and took pride in knowing that my sleuthing had paid off even though previous efforts by others–often licensed private investigators–had failed. I attributed my success then–and even now, looking back–to something anecdotal perhaps, but it always proved true. Most people never go too far away from home. Most people stay near their roots, usually within 300 miles or so.

Over and over again, I’d say:

“Tell me where the person was born, and I’ll find the heirs.”

I always did.

Once, I found someone far closer: within a half mile of where my search began. My client was a DC businessman who was adopted at birth. He was looking for his mother. I do not need to bore you with all the details, nor would I even if I could remember them all. Jack–not his real name, but he has to have one–didn’t have a lot of information, but he had enough that I decided to take his case.

● Date of Birth: August 1943.
● Place of Birth: DC.
● Mother’s Maiden Name: Jones (fictitious, just like my client’s first name).
● Mother’s Place of Birth: Iowa.

I started by exploring published cemetery records across the entire state of Iowa. I lucked out. I found one with lots of people who had the same last name as Jack’s mother. Then, I consulted telephone directories and found a possible relative.

I passed the number along to Jack. When he called, he discovered that the woman who answered the phone was his aunt. She put him in touch with his mother, who was living in DC, less than a half mile from where Jack had lived his entire life. You don’t need the subsequent details, but you do need to know that the story had a happy ending. Jack and his mother reconnected, and the last I heard, they were still having clandestine monthly lunches. I always wondered whether Jack eventually found a place in the new life and new family that his mother had carved for herself after he was born. Realistically, I doubt it. Geographically, he and his mother were never more than half a mile apart. Spiritually, however, he had one leg in his familiar adoptive world and the other in his newly discovered birth world. I suppose, though, that Jack was at home, as much as he could ever be, as much as any of us can ever be.

Jack’s truth is true for all of us. The homing instinct is a strong one, and most people, in one way or another, end up going back home. Some people, though, return to their roots only to discover they’re no longer at the place they once knew as home. I’m thinking about people whose education (or social mobility) lifts them into a new world but leaves them hanging between two realities–their roots on one side and their new opportunities on the other. They don’t feel fully at home in either place.

In fact, there’s even a bit of academic writing about it, especially around first-generation college students, upward social mobility, and immigrant experiences.
Sociologists and memoirists alike talk about the tension:

● Feeling “too educated” or “different” when they go back home.

● Feeling “not polished enough” or “out of step” among the educated elite.

● Constantly negotiating a kind of invisible gap between the two.

Not too surprisingly, there’s a term for people like me: straddlers. I had never heard the term until a student in one of my Creative Writing classes did her book report on Alfred Lubrano’s Limbo: Blue-Collar Roots, White-Collar Dreams (2005). Lubrano shows how chasing the American Dream can leave you straddling two worlds—where you’re too educated to go back home, but you never feel quite refined enough for the boardroom. Through his own story and others, he reminds us that success doesn’t always come with a map or a welcome mat.

My student–an Ohio straddler–grew teary-eyed as she gave her report, leaving me teary-eyed, too–a West Virginia straddler, the first in my family to go to college. I could relate. Being a straddler is like living in a kind of cultural no-man’s-land—never entirely belonging again to the old world that spurred you on and never quite accepted by the new world where you landed. It’s a lonely, often bittersweet place.

Ironically, the straddlers I know–mostly community college professors like me–don’t talk about the dilemma that much unless we’re part of a panel or symposium exploring the challenges of first-generation college students. Even then, we focus on the power of education to transform.

In fact, it just occurred to me that until this post, I’ve never talked much about being a straddler either. Even now, it snuck up on me and took me by surprise.

But for writers, being somewhere between two worlds and not feeling really at home in either is perfect material.

One comes to mind immediately: American writer Mary E. Wilkins Freeman. She grew up as the daughter of a dry goods merchant/housewright and then became an overnight literary success equal in popularity to Mark Twain. Yet despite her literary status, while living in Randolph, Massachusetts–the boot factory town where she was born–she wrote to a friend:

“I have survived another Boston luncheon. I’m not literary enough for Boston, but I’m awfully afraid I’ve got to go to a dinner there.” (Kate Upson Clark, before August 1892, Letter 105, The Infant Sphinx: Collected Letters of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Edited with Biographical and Critical Introductions by Brent L. Kendrick, 1985)

Or what about F. Scott Fitzgerald’s short story, “Winter Dreams”? It’s a perfect case study of what it’s like being a straddler. Dexter Green earns the success he dreamed of, but the world he craves still sees him as an outsider. Some doors open, but never all the way.

Even the characters we celebrate—and the writers who created them—know what it means to stand on a shifting patch of ground. You might have a seat at the table, but you can still feel the worn wood of your own kitchen chair in your bones. You might build your fortune and earn your degrees, but somewhere deep down, you remember being the boy who was the caddy at the golf course.

Poets know that truth, too. Robert Frost hints at this quiet but universal dislocation in “The Star-Splitter.” In the poem, Brad McLaughlin grows weary of hugger-mugger farming, burns his house down, and takes the insurance proceeds to buy himself a telescope so that he can explore our place in the universe. Brad spends the rest of his life as a straddler, one leg on his rocky farm and the other somewhere out there between and betwixt the stars:

We’ve looked and looked, but after all where are we?
Do we know any better where we are,
And how it stands between the night tonight
And a man with a smoky lantern chimney?
How different from the way it ever stood?

We search, we climb, and we study the stars, but we never completely leave the farm fields where we took our first steps.

Maybe it comes down to nothing more than this. Being human means learning to live with one foot planted deep in the soil of home, and the other reaching, straining, yearning toward something larger—something luminous—just out of reach.

The tension that I’m writing about here and that we all experience whenever we stretch across two worlds—literal or metaphorical—is not a modern invention. It has ancient roots, reaching deep into the earliest reflections on what it means to be human. Across cultures and centuries, writers and thinkers have wrestled with the same essential dilemma that’s central to human existence—the inherent conflict between the flesh and the spirit. Are we ruled by appetite or guided by aspiration? Are we creatures of earth or beings reaching for the divine?

Even an ancient Egyptian text, The Dispute Between a Man and His Ba (c. 2000 BCE), captures the longing to escape the burdens of mortal life. A weary speaker pleads for release, saying:

“Death is to me today like the smell of myrrh.”

Centuries later, the Greek philosopher Plato echoed a similar weariness with bodily existence. In Phaedo (360 BCE), he writes:

“The body is a source of endless trouble to us … it fills us with loves, desires, fears, all sorts of fancies and a great deal of nonsense.”

This longing was not confined to Egyptian prayers or Greek philosophy. In early Christian thought, the tension was just as fierce. The Apostle Paul, in his Letter to the Galatians, draws the battle lines plainly:

“For the desires of the flesh are against the Spirit, and the desires of the Spirit are against the flesh, for these are opposed to each other.” (5:17-21)

Clearly, across time and tradition, the yearning to transcend the physical and grasp something eternal has been a defining part of the human story.

Maybe, at the end of the day, it comes down to nothing more than this. It’s not about the Apostle Paul or Plato or the Egyptians. It’s not about Brad or Dexter or Freeman. It’s not about my student or me. It’s not even about Jack.

Maybe, at the end of the day, it’s about all of us.

Maybe we’re all travelers looking for a place to call home, a place to land, sighing a sigh of relief as we say, “I made it.”

Maybe we’re all straddlers caught between two worlds, peering back over our shoulders even as we gaze toward the stars.

For Mothers Everywhere: Glimpses of My Mother’s Hands

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Originally published last year, this remains my most-read—and most-shared—essay. I’m honored to bring it back this Mother’s Day weekend, just as I first wrote it—a quiet tribute to the hands that shaped us all, guiding, giving, and leaving their imprint long after they’re gone.

“Mothers hold their children’s hands for a short while, but their hearts forever.”

–Unknown

On top of my bedroom chest of drawers is a pair of studio portraits of my father and my mother. They’re hand-colored originals, each measuring 3 inches by 4 inches, taken a year or so after my parents’ 1932 marriage. The portraits are in hinged gold frames. My father is on the left. My mother is on the right. A lamp behind illuminates both.

Right now, as I lie in bed, I’m focusing on my mother. Even though her portrait is five feet or so away, she is as clear to my sight as if she were right beside my bed. I’m glimpsing into a distant past, where memories of her linger like whispers.

She’s seated on a bench, wooden, perhaps. The artistic backdrop transports me outdoors. Trees frame the scene, a tall one behind her, their branches reaching skyward, and shorter ones in the background, on the bank of a calm body of water, perhaps a serene river.

She’s wearing a dark dress with short sleeves and a deep-cut neckline, accentuated by a glistening leaf-shaped brooch.

Her finger-waved hair, parted in the middle, falls softly just below her ears. Her eyes are dark and intense, with a gaze that seems to pierce through the image. They are surrounded by her soft, light skin tone, which provides a striking contrast. Their depth and intensity draw me in and make me wonder. What secrets lie hidden behind them? What stories and dreams do they hold? Are they looking into the depths of the world, seeking answers and understanding? Are they inviting me to join in their quest for knowledge?

Her features captivate and mesmerize me, regardless of how often I look at her portrait. Somehow, though, I seem to see my mother’s hands the most. Their contours are soft and graceful, and the fingers curve delicately, one hand gently clasping the other hand.

I see my mother’s hands the most because I know her hands the best.

My mother’s hands are engaging hands. Her hands held mine when I was but a child, and we scurried down the path behind our home where two boulders stood sentinel on either side as colored snow fell down in green and pink and blue flakes, making me believe in magic. Her hands held mine when I was a few years older, and she led me outdoors when our world was covered in snow and showed me how to lie down in stillness, moving arms and legs left and right to create angel wings, making me believe in flight. Her hands held mine a few years later when our world was green with summer and led me to lie down in warm grass, eyes skyward, discovering cloud figures, pointing out the details to one another so vividly that each could see brand new worlds of our own imaginings, making me believe in sharing visions so that others might see.

My mother’s hands are cooking hands. Her hands could transform pinto beans, onions, cornbread, buttermilk, and sweet potato cobbler into a feast, making me want it weekly. Her hands could turn a 25-pound turkey into a bronzed Thanksgiving dinner that rivaled Norman Rockwell’s iconic oil painting Freedom from Want, making art come alive in our own coal camp kitchen. Her hands could measure out with perfection all the ingredients for any dish from any cuisine that she had tasted with no need for recipe and with no need for measurements, teaching me to trust my senses.

My mother’s hands are versatile hands. Her hands could make our clothing without pattern, simply by taking our measure with her hands, making me aware that some things are more felt than seen. Her hands could cut my hair using scissors, comb, and the soft stretch of her fingers, reinforcing in my mind the marriage of expertise and craftsmanship. Her hands could take a pastry brush and turn a greased baking sheet or cake pan into a perfect likeness of Christ, making me see Holiness in the everyday.

My mother’s hands are industrious hands. Her hands could transform a grassy field into a kaleidoscope of gladiolas or dahlias, bursting with vibrant hues, teaching me to see potential in the ordinary. Her hands could hold her side of a wooden pole stretched through handles of a galvanized tub, carrying water to the garden, making me realize that many hands can carry heavy loads. Her hands could hang wallpaper with finesse, demonstrating how effort can elevate even the smallest task to art.

My mother’s hands are inclusive hands. Her hands always opened wide the door, welcoming everyone as guests into our home, making me value open-heartedness and acceptance of others, regardless of differences. Her hands always set a place for them at our modest table, making me understand that meager becomes abundance when shared with others. Her hands always held theirs in loving celebration and thanksgiving, making me a witness to the genuine communion of mankind.

My mother’s hands are nurturing hands. Her hands cared for her father and her mother in times when they could not take care of themselves, impressing on me the importance of helping others. Her hands cared for my dad and me and all my siblings, even when our hands might well have lessened the weight that she carried in hers, showing me that strength comes with sacrifice. Her hands took pine rosin to hold tight and heal the gash in my foot, the scar on my sole still a reminder of what she had learned from her mother’s hands, helping me appreciate generational know-how and wisdom.

My mother’s hands are writing hands. Her hands penned sermons when she pastored a church, making me realize that the intellect can lead the heart to be slain by the Holy Spirit. Her hands sent letters out into the world to those she knew well and to those she hardly knew at all, making me see that the power of words reaches beyond the pulpit. Her hands discovered typewriter keys late in life, determined that hand tremors would not tame her self-expression, making me realize the strength of determination.

My mother’s hands are spiritual hands. Her hands joined the hands of other warriors, praying over me as a child with polio, making me–one of the lucky, uncrippled survivors–a believer in the power of prayer. Her hands walked their way through her Bible and her commentary books–from cover to cover–more than thirty times in her lifetime, making me know the richness to be gained through close readings and research. Her hands clapped, sending thunderous applause into the Heavens to show her thankfulness and gratitude, making me know the joy of praise.

My mother’s hands are clasped hands. As she lay in her casket after her funeral, I removed her rings, took her hands and clasped one gently on top of the other, leaned in for a farewell kiss, and, then, closed the lid.

After her burial, my hands–strong from the strength of hers–released from their cage three white doves, flying upward toward the celestial realm, perhaps at that same mysterious moment when my mother found her way back home and celebrated her arrival with outstretched hands.

Epigraphically Yours

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“A thought that does not result in an action is nothing much, and an action without thought is nothing at all.”

—Georges Bernanos (1888–1948; French novelist and essayist best known for his spiritually intense works exploring grace, despair, and the inner struggles of faith. He is perhaps most acclaimed for his 1936 novel The Diary of a Country Priest (1936), a profound meditation on suffering, humility, and redemption.)

My thoughts have a mind of their own. Sometimes, they pop up uninvited. Sometimes, they spiral into a whole inner drama, as if they’re running their own show. Sometimes, they’re mischievous, refusing to listen when I try to be calm or focused. Sometimes, they come from a place that I don’t understand, as if another mind is in there with me.

Regardless of how or when they arrive, they make me realize that my inner world is alive, unpredictable, and full of drama.

Just the other day, a thought walked out on my stage and started an entire play long before the curtains of my sleep had even been pulled back.

For the life of me, I couldn’t figure out why Jonathan Edwards’ “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” appeared. I realize, of course, that it’s the most famous sermon ever preached in American history.

On July 8, 1741, in the little town of Enfield, Connecticut, Edwards preached the sermon for an hour or so. Scores of listeners were so shaken they converted on the spot. The crowd’s terrified sobbing made it clear they’d better get right with God. Pronto.

I’ve taught the sermon for decades, emphasizing not only its role in stoking the fervor of The Great Awakening but also its perfect sermon structure: Verse, Doctrine, Reasons, Application, and Call to Repent. Boom! That’s Edwards’ framework in a nutshell.

Clearly, the entire sermon is part of my drama, but it was just one character that stole the show the morning it showed up on my mental stage.

It was the verse at the beginning of Edwards’ sermon. There it stood, spotlighted on an otherwise dark stage, reciting with all the doom and gloom it could muster up for its seven-word soliloquy:

“Their foot shall slip in due time.”

Like I said, I’ve taught the sermon so often that I knew the context of the verse from Deuteronomy. I knew what came before and after:

“Vengeance is Mine, and recompense; Their foot shall slip in due time; For the day of their calamity is at hand, And the things to come hasten upon them.” (32-35)

But it wasn’t actually the verse standing there under the spotlight that wouldn’t let go. It was something incredibly simple: what do you call the quote that writers often put at the start of something? In this case, Edwards had put a Bible verse, but I wanted the broader term that would apply to writings other than sermons.

Epigram?

Epigraph?

In a flash, Lucille Clifton hipped her way onto the stage beside the Bible verse and started her own dramatic recitation:

“This is called ‘After Blues,’ and the ‘epi thing’ is ‘I hate to see the evening sun go down.'”

She stood there and paused long enough for me to wonder whether she was referring to Faulkner’s short story, “That Evening Sun,” before I found myself saying:

“There. She’s using the ‘epi thing’ just like Edwards.

Epigram? Epigraph? Don’t tell anyone, but I had to look it up.

Epigram. A concise poem dealing pointedly and often satirically with a single thought or event and often ending with an ingenious turn of thought.

Nope. It must be the other epi thing.

Epigraph. A quotation set at the beginning of a literary work or one of its divisions to suggest its theme.

Yep. That’s it. Epigraph. That’s what Clifton couldn’t think of as she started to read “Afterblues,” and that’s what I couldn’t think of as I reflected on the verse that catapulted Edwards’ “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.”

To my surprise, next up on stage was Alexander Gordon, Clerk of His Majesty’s Council, beaming brighter than the stage lights, making his debut as the author of the famous Humourist essays, proudly holding up for the audience to see his first essay in The South-Carolina Gazette with its own “epi thing”:

“Quocunque volunt mentem auditoris agunto.” Horace. (“And raise men’s passions to what heights they will.”) (November 26, 1753)

And after thunderous applause, he strutted back and forth across the stage, holding up the front pages of the Gazette week after week after week, all the way up to his final essay on April 2, 1754, it, too, having its own “epi thing” just as the others did:

“Facies non omnibus una, Nec diversa tamen.” Ovid (“Their faces were not all alike, nor yet unlike, but such as those of sisters ought to be.”)

The standing ovation was such that the audience hardly noticed the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) making its professorial entrance, determined to set the record straight once and for all about the “epi thing” that seemed to be stealing the show.

Hear Ye! Hear Ye! Listen up! Epigraph in the sense of a short quotation or pithy sentence placed at the commencement of a work to indicate its leading idea was first used in 1850 by Elizabeth Barrett Browning: “And write me new my future’s” (Future & Past in Poems (new edition) vol. I. 362).

No sooner had the OED finished pontificating than one of the theatergoers hurled a rotten tomato, brightening the OED’s already reddening cheeks:

“Rubbish! Utter rubbish! We all know that epigraphs have been around forever and forever. “

“Have not!” another screamed!

“Have, too!” insisted the first. “Shut up before I hit you across the head with a fact! Ever heard of Horace? He is one of the most quoted authors in epigraphs across centuries of Western literature.”

Luckily, their interruption did not spoil the performance. The two of them took their boisterous debate out to the proscenium while the OED retreated backstage.

But then, the director seemed to be taken off guard as a local celeb made his way on stage, dragging me along.

I chalked it all up to one more theatrical shenanigan, but I was eager to find out why Barry Lee–acclaimed podcast host of Breakfast with Barry Lee–had made such an appearance and what role I could possibly play in this comedy extempore.

“I love the way you start your blog posts every week with one of those ‘epi things.’ They’re really thought-provoking. I might just print them out and tape them on my office walls.”

“Thanks, Barry. I add them after I finish writing a post, just as a hint of what’s coming.”

“I really like today’s quote that you took from Ovid: ‘Dripping water hollows out stone, not through force but through persistence.’ Persistence is so important in every thing we do in life. What made you decide to start your weekly blog posts this way?”

With that question, I knew exactly why he had dragged me up on stage with him. He was determined to have his own Q & A, ignoring the way I had scripted the play.

“I’m glad you like them, Barry. I hadn’t thought that much about it, but now that you’ve mentioned it, I’ve always started my posts with a quote, going all the way back to my blog’s birth in 2012.

Just as I flashed my TheWiredResearcher.com blog on the screen with every intention of reading every “epi thing” from then until now, the lights started fading, and in a moment of total darkness someone with the proverbial hook pulled me and Barry out of sight.

Then the lights rose softly, and there–front and center–stood my Mother, holding up for the audience to see, a slew of handwritten sermon notes, each beginning with a Bible verse.

She made no attempt to read the tear-stained pages in her hands. She just stood there as if her smile spoke all that needed to be spoken.

It did. I reembered at once her advice when I started writing my own grade school essays.

“Always start with a quote to capture attention and make people want to follow along.”

From that point forward, I did just that. The earliest “epi thing” that I recall using was a quote by Douglas McArthur at the start of one of my many Voice of Democracy essays.

In the instant of that fleeting recollection, I was on stage once more, the light shining more on my Mother than on me, as I my little drama opened with my McArthur “epi thing”:

“Old soldiers never die. They just fade away.”

When I finished, the lights faded. The curtains closed. Amidst a thunderous and standing ovation, they opened up again as we all joined hands and bowed for the curtain call.

My inner child somehow slipped into the audience, just long enough to toss two bouquets back onto the stage. By the time my Mother caught her bunch of asters, I had made it onstage again, standing beside her, grabbing my own nosegay of words. We both laughed as we realized that those tossed words would serve as the perfect “epi thing” not only to open this post but also to close it:

“A thought that does not result in an action is nothing much,

and

an action without thought is nothing at all.”

The Route Home

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“I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be.”

—Douglas Adams (1952–2001. Best known for his 1979 novel The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, a blend of science fiction, sharp wit, and existential insight.)

Home was just a few miles away–ten at best–and I knew exactly how to get there. I could have done it blindfolded. But as I headed home, I decided to fool around with my Jeep’s navigation system. Just for fun. Just for the hell of it.

● Start ENGINE

● Press NAV

● Select HOME

● Press GO!

Getting home have been easier. I knew that a gentle voice would tell me just what to do and when to do it.

● Please proceed to the highlighted route

● At end of the road, turn left on Hoover Road

● Turn left

I decided to turn right. That’s where my fun began.

● Route recalculated

● At end of the road, turn right

● In one thousand feet turn right

● Take the next right onto I-81 toward Edinburg

No way. I wasn’t about to hop on the Interstate, head south to Edinburg, then backtrack on Rt. 11 toward home.

I ignored the commands. I kept right on going while my Jeep’s voice kept right on trying to change my mind:

● Route recalculation. Make a U-turn where possible.

Eventually, I decided that I needed to stop foolin’ around. It was obvious–and I knew it anyway–that my Jeep’s navigation system would keep redirecting me with each of my wrong turns until I reached home.

But that little joyride made me realize something. I may not be the world’s best when it comes to getting from one place to the next, but I’ve always managed to find my way. Even in the days of printed road maps, I got where I needed to go. I highlighted my routes in yellow so I could see them clearly. And even when I forgot the map, I figured that I’d end up in the right place if I followed the road signs, stayed mindful of cardinal directions, and paid attention to my brain’s compass. It always seemed to work.

These days, with GPS built into every vehicle, I may not always take the shortest route. But I trust my Jeep’s system enough to head off anywhere, barely noticing my surroundings, confident that I’ll get a heads-up when it’s time to turn.

Still, after that bit of foolin’ around, I found myself scratching my head and wondering:

Do I extend that same trust to the systems that guide my life’s journey?

Do you?

In truth, we have navigational systems for nearly everything that matters—health, learning, careers, relationships, aging, and faith. We know the basics. We’ve heard about them. We’ve read about them. We’ve lived long enough to know that they work. But how often do we trust them? How often do we follow their cues with the same confidence that we give a GPS?

Take health, for example. The map isn’t mysterious: eat real food, move your body, sleep enough, manage your stress, hydrate, and laugh once in a while. We’ve seen the studies. We’ve heard it from doctors and mothers and friends who’ve faced wake-up calls. And still, we drive right past the obvious. We skip meals or eat meals that barely qualify as such. We stay up late, ignore symptoms, and postpone appointments. The check engine light flashes, and we figure we’ll deal with it next week.

And then there’s education. Curiosity and critical thinking are clearly marked paths. We’re told to keep learning, keep questioning, and keep evolving. And yet, how many of us treat learning like something that ends with a diploma or a degree? Or reject new ideas because they don’t come from their usual route? We scroll more than we study and nod along more than we inquire. We’d rather feel certain than feel stretched.

When it comes to careers, we’ve got entire industries built around career navigation—assessments, mentors, and step-by-step plans. We’re advised to find meaning, stay flexible, and avoid burnout. But those signs are easy to ignore when the faster route promises more money, more status, or just less fear. We trade direction for acceleration, only to find we’re speeding toward a place we never meant to go.

Even in relationships, we know the guidance there too: communicate, be honest, show up, listen, say thank you, and forgive. Don’t just speak—connect. Love is not a mystery novel. And yet we sabotage, assume, ghost, or stay silent. We expect relationships to work without maintenance. And when they don’t, we blame the other driver instead of checking the map.

Aging? There’s no avoiding this road. Ask me. I know. But there is a way to travel it. Let go of what no longer fits. Befriend your limits. Gather your joys and carry them with you. The people who age well usually do it with humor, grace, and a willingness to take new roads—even slower ones. But many of us cling to the idea that if we just hit the gas hard enough, we can outrun time. Spoiler alert: we can’t.

And faith—whatever form that takes. Every tradition has its own kind of compass. Not a GPS, no. There’s no turn-by-turn audible voice telling you exactly what to do. But there is the inner voice–the compass that knows, even when the map is blank. And there are coordinates: love, service, awe, humility, and compassion. Yet faith may be one of the hardest to trust because we’re not 100% certain of the destination. At best, we have a hope that we will arrive. In the meantime, faith requires that we keep on moving, even when the road ahead is unknown and sometimes dark.

I scratch my head again, and I wonder: Why is it so easy to trust the voice in our vehicles–and so hard to trust the wisdom we’ve already been given?

I think I know. Maybe it’s because GPS promises certainty. It offers fast answers, smooth roads, and an almost soothing illusion that we are in control. Life doesn’t work that way. Life meanders. It doubles back. It throws in detours, delays, and dead ends. And unlike our vehicles’ voices, the inner systems that help us live well—truly live—don’t shout. They speak softly in hushed tones. They require attention. They assume we’re willing to participate.

Still, I wonder: what if we gave those quiet inner systems the same trust that we give the GPS?

What if we followed the map toward health, education, careers, relationships, aging, and faith—not perfectly, but faithfully? What if, when we made a wrong turn, we heard a calm voice say: Don’t worry. Recalculating. What if we believed it?

Maybe then we’d realize that we were never really lost. We were just rerouted, always headed in the right direction–home.

The Third Time’s the Charm — Now in Hardcover!

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Good news, friends!

The Third Time’s the Charm: Still Foolin’ Around in Bed is now available in hardcover — alongside paperback and Kindle editions.

Whether you’re reading in bed, on your favorite chair, or anywhere your journey takes you, The Third Time’s the Charm promises to entertain, uplift, and inspire. Settle in and let the journey begin.

In this third volume of delightfully thought-provoking essays, I invite you into the most intimate spaces—both literal and metaphorical—of a life lived fully and authentically.
From Appalachian coal camps to deep connections with family, friends, and a loyal canine companion, these essays explore joy and loss, solitude and connection, memory and reinvention—with warmth, wit, and unflinching honesty.

You’ll find stories of dust bunnies and online dating, gardening and global warming, grief and the wonder of AI. Each essay offers a window into the universal truths that shape our lives, reminding us that every “postage stamp” of existence is rich, rooted, and uniquely ours.

Thank you for being part of this journey. Let’s keep turning pages together!

P.S. The hardcover version makes a pretty terrific gift — especially for anyone who loves life’s twists, turns, and unexpected laughter.

From Francesco’s Stew to the Sound of My Pounding Heart

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“When you realize there is nothing lacking, the whole world belongs to you.”

—Lao Tzu (6th century BCE; ancient Chinese philosopher and founder of Taoism. His teachings emphasize harmony with the natural flow of life.)

Ta-TUM. Ta-TUM. Ta-TUM.

With rhythmic precision, it keeps pounding just like my heart.

But it’s not my heart.

It’s my mind, beating to the same rhythm, chanting.

I want. I want. I want.

In my most recent chant, I wanted Francesco Mattano’s famed Peposo, a traditional Tuscan Red Wine Beef Stew. It’s so simple with just a few ingredients: garlic, beef, salt, coarsely ground black pepper, a bouquet garni, and red wine. Simmered for several hours and served up in a well of buttered polenta, it’s the recipe’s clean simplicity that makes it so sinfully delicious.

Altroché! That’s just what I wanted–an entree promising good-to-the-last-bite deliciousness. At the same time, I was well aware that I had leftover pork tenderloin as well as chicken salad.

Once upon a time, I would have rushed off to the grocery store, bought the provisions for Peposo, and celebrated another culinary triumph.

These days, however, even though my wants are as rhythmic as my heart, I am pulling back as I try to reconcile what I want with what I have.

With food, for example, I wanted Francesco’s stew, but I had pork tenderloin and chicken salad already prepared. The craving was there, but so was a perfectly good meal.

Take books, for example. I’ve dedicated decades of my life to Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, and I’ve amassed a significant collection. But I want to chase after one more obscure letter or document that will make my already rich archive even richer.

What about dating? I want romance—not out of need, but out of hope. My life is full and meaningful, yet I’d love to share it with someone who brings his own fullness—a shared life made richer by both of us.

Even in garden centers, new specimen evergreens whisper, “Take me. Plant me.” But I already have a beautiful Zen-like landscape.

I’m also trying to reconcile what I want with what I need.

I might want dessert, but what I need is a meal that aligns with my health goals. I’m cutting out sweets but keeping nightly Bunnahabhain—for balance!

When it comes to fitness, I might want quick results, but I need consistency not as much in biking as in weight training.  At my age–no, at any age–real strength comes from steady, intentional effort.

What about my writing?  I want more time to write, but I need to manage my other commitments more wisely so that I have the time I need.

Even in relationships, I want certainty, but I need to let connections unfold naturally—his rhythm, my rhythm, coming into step together.

The more I realize that I don’t need everything I want and that, in reality, I already have what I need, the more I’m discovering new dimensions of freedom.

What had been a constant search for more, whether material things, achievements, or validation, has given way to peace.

What had been a scarcity mindset has become a focus on embracing abundance—not in excess, but in sufficiency.

What had been a notion that having more means being more has yielded to the realization that I’m already enough.

What had been impulse is now intentional as I make choices that nourish me rather than just satisfy my fleeting cravings.

I’m shifting from grasping to gratitude,
from craving to contentment.

I’m no longer mistaking wants for purpose.
I’m recognizing that growth, connection, and presence matter more.

I’m starting to trust the rhythm of life,
just like I trust the rhythm of my own heart.

My heart beats on, steady and sure—
not demanding, just existing.

It thumps a lesson that I’m learning:
I don’t have to chase every want.
What I need is already here—or on its way, arriving in the fullness of time.

And that, in itself, is everything.

The Rust Whisperer

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“Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished.”

—Lao Tzu (6th century BCE. Founder of Taoism. His teachings focus on harmony with nature, patience in becoming, and the quiet power of letting life unfold in its own time.)

Every time I walked to my Jeep and looked toward the forest’s edge, I chuckled. Smack dab in front of me was a contraption the likes of which I had never seen in my life. Actually, I made it and even gave it a name. The Rust Spa.

“Say whaaaaat?” someone just rasped.

Yes. The Rust Spa. It didn’t take me long to come up with the idea. It works so well that I may apply for a patent and sell it to US Steel, the company that owns the trademark for Corten. You may know it as COR-TEN.

Either way–and rather ironically as you will discover–the COR stands for COrrosion Resistance and the TEN stands for TENsile strength. Corten is well-known for aging gracefully and creating a deep, natural tone as “the thickened oxide forms.” For me, that translates to aging gracefully as plain ole rust appears, and I actually love the deep rich natural brownish-red tone that metal takes on over time.

That’s exactly why I bought myself a Corten planter–for its trademark rusty patina. Of course, I realized when I bought it, that rusting would take time.

I knew it would take a long, long time when the planter arrived, and I opened the box. Behold! Sleek. Clean. Almost smug in its shine. Smooth bare metal, cool to the touch, untouched by time. No rust, no streaks, no signs of surrender. Just raw, industrial silver. It was so pristine it practically glinted in the morning sun, as if daring me to try to change it.

Change it, however, I would, and I knew my resolve from the start. In a bottle, I mixed equal parts of white vinegar and hydrogen peroxide with one tablespoon of salt per cup of liquid. Then I positioned the Corten planter on a stump near the forest’s edge, and every three hours or so, I sprayed it evenly like a soft mist of time.

After just a few applications, the raw steel started to shift—deep ochre streaks rippled down the surface, gathering in drips and blooms that caught the light like burnished velvet. The edges darkened, the face mottled, and the rust arrived quietly.

But I was eager for a little more fanfare. In that moment–and let history take note–I came up with the idea that will ensure my infamy: The Rust Spa. I wanted to speed up the alchemy. Easy peasy. I misted the planter with my magic spray of time. I put it inside a black yard bag to trap heat and moisture, both ideal for rust formation. Then, to keep it all in place, I inverted the delivery box and placed it on top. Voila! The Rust Spa.

The Rust Spa worked its quiet magic. When I disrobed the planter, it sat proudly on its stump throne, no longer silver and self-conscious, but cloaked in a deep, burnished rust. Its warm, mottled patina caught the light in uneven streaks, each drip and blush a quiet testament to time, to weather, to letting go. It no longer shouted; it hummed. And in that stillness, it held a beauty—neither flashy nor fresh but seasoned and settled. With a coat of boiled linseed oil, I sealed the patina in place, locking in that rich, rusty finish like a photograph of time itself.

Now, locked in time, it graces my deck in the middle of a rustic, wrought-iron table with stone top.

It’s there in all my comings and goings, and every time I cast admiring glances in its direction, I cast backward glances to my own life, to all the times when I wished to be older so that I could experience sooner all the things that I would experience later on at the appointed time.

When I was eleven and twelve, I was eager to be a teenager, so I could do the “cool stuff.” Looking back, I’m not certain what the “cool stuff” was. We didn’t have a car. We didn’t have a telephone. We had a TV, but why would I stay up late? For what? As for choices, I was known for making my own and for making them my way. Still, I wanted to fast forward my life. I wanted my own Rust Spa.

After I reached my teenage years, I was eager to be sixteen. Even though we didn’t have a family car, my sister and her husband lived next door. Judy taught me how to drive, and I thought that I had arrived when I got my driver’s license. I’m not sure why. I suppose I dreamt of driving off into the sunset with the gay date that I didn’t have in the Chevy that I didn’t own. Still, I wanted to fast forward my life. I wanted my own Rust Spa.

Then, of course, I was so eager to be eighteen, so I could get away from all the limitations of my home, my town, and my place. I did. I went to college in fast pursuit of me, myself, more authentic than the one I wasn’t really able to be in my home, my town, and my place. How ironic that I always went back on holidays and breaks. Still, I wanted to fast forward my life. I wanted my own Rust Spa.

With my degree in hand, I was eager to start climbing the rungs of my career ladder. That’s just what I did, and it ended up being a twofer. I landed a position at The Library of Congress, at home in the place with all of the books. And I found myself living on Capitol Hill, at home with me as a gay guy, realizing that I wasn’t alone. Still, I wanted to fast forward my life to a place where I could learn more. I wanted my own Rust Spa.

The place turned out to be the University of South Carolina in Columbia, where I earned my doctor’s degree in philosophy and became an expert in American Literature, British Literature, Handpress Bibliography, and, more important, where I learned that an education softens character and keeps it from being cruel. Still, I wanted to fast forward my life to a place where I had been before: home. I wanted my own Rust Spa.

I circled back home to DC and the Library of Congress. A place of emotional grounding where I felt whole, safe, and—authentic. A place where I sensed spiritual and intellectual belonging. A place where I could elevate self-acceptance from fleeting to permanent. A place where I could wrap my arms around all with all that my mother taught me as a child about diversity, equity, and inclusion and, at the same time, widen my embrace to include gender identity and sexual orientation. A place where, through the power of my pen, I soared to heights higher than I ever dreamt that words could fly. Still, I was eager to be what I had dreamt of being since the third grade: a college English professor. I wanted my own Rust Spa.

Laurel Ridge Community College opened the door, and the dream was fulfilled. Imagine! Me–a professor. A desire to stretch my students helped me stand on tiptoe looking at the bright futures of more than 7,000 students for twenty-three years. And beyond fulfilling the professional dream was realizing another one. Falling in love and exchanging wedding rings. Two men living their lives openly. Proud. Explanations? None. The happiness of our twenty-year love outlives Allen’s unexpected death. Still, I was eager to write my final chapters. I wanted my own Rust Spa.

I’m writing them now as one more part of Reinvention. Ask all who know me. I did not reTIRE because I ain’t no ways tired. In fact, I’ve been reinventing myself forever, with every twist and turn of my journey. This most recent started in 2023, and it’s turning out to be one of the most creative and productive times of my life. Five published books with others in progress. Speaking engagements several times a year, including a few that showcase not only my hopes for AI to save us from ourselves but also my hopes for online dating to spirit another Mr. Right my way so that we can co-author the closing chapters together–his, mine, ours.

And here’s where I start to chuckle again. My Corten planter had absolutely nothing to do with achieving its exquisite and inexplicable patina. I did it by speeding up the process in my Rust Spa. I kept applying my mist of time until it achieved the look that I wanted. Then, I sealed it for all eternity.

And so it is with me. Despite all the times down through the years when I wished to be older so that I could experience sooner all the things that I would experience later on at the appointed time, I could do little more than wish and dream.

In reality, I had no more control over achieving my aged patina than my planter had. It’s been a journey filled with yearnings. To arrive. To become.

In reality, every time I was eager to be “somewhere next,” I had to wait on time to take me there.

In reality, I can no more see my finish than my planter can see its.

Yet I know that it’s seasoned.

Yet I know that it’s settled.

Yet I know that it’s not finished.

Still, of this much I am certain. When the appointed time comes, soft and magical mists will seal in place patinaed perfection.