Excerpt from upcoming book "Born to Wonder"

Here's what I wrote on the S-Bahn on the way to work in 2001.  I worked at a German warehouse, shipping and receiving for a designer office furniture firm, Lampert & Sudrow. 

From the Hauptbahnhof underground station beneath the Königstraße in Stuttgart, I'd board the S-4 and ride forty minutes to Benningen, one stop before Marbach.  This town was fascinating to me, in particular, for one reason.  If I went down a set of stairs and walked through a tunnel under the tracks and then, after passing through a park, walked a few minutes, I'd find myself at an oddly cobbled patch of ground about fifteen feet wide and roughly seventy feet long.  It was the understructure of a section of Roman highway.  While renovating an adjacent office building, the Germans found these odd stones and someone was eventually called in who recognized their significance.  So they made it into a little outdoor museum park-like place, with an information plaque.  Putting myself on that road, two millennia ago, always struck me.  The juxtaposition with the setting I saw around me, which, to me, was a foreign, aged, historied place. 

On the way to the warehouse, the countryside would flow by and I'd find myself on a train that grew less and less peopled.  I liked the journey to my job there.  I worked for Lampert until Andrée and I left for France in October of that year.  I never thought of writing a book of this sort, but I did think it was valuable, to me, to write down what had happened to me—now that there were a few years between then and now.

Ohgod

This is an excerpt from my short story Ohgod written in 1994 as a senior at the University of Pittsburgh.

I’d tandem skydived before, twice, and had the unexpected experience of becoming bored while free-falling from 14,200 feet for a mile or so at 120 miles-per-hour.  After a terrifying leap into the void, I found myself looking around, bored.  I  became irritated at my painfully popping ears.  I wasn’t able to bring in my hand to plug my nose and blow.  I yawned constantly.  It didn’t help.

Later, I thought about the momentary times where I’d felt more alive than ever.  They were usually when I had experienced a ‘warm fuzzy’ moment, as my former framing carpenter boss called those almost-incidents where you almost died falling off the edge of a roof or something like that.  In those times when I pushed the limits of comfort and safety; the first jump out the turboprop’s door, climbing too high, driving too fast, diving too deep for too long–that kind of thing.

And then I thought about the search for ultimate meaning in one’s life.  How could you really, really live that ‘super real living’ for more than a few seconds?  Men in battle, who have lived through battle with mortal fear, talk about that time as having been the most real time in their lives.  Not enjoyable necessarily.  Real.  And if you didn’t want to fight in a war?  What could you do to put yourself in a position where you couldn’t possibly become complacent?  What about a suicide with some time to think?  Okay.  So I wrote this one about a girl jumping into a volcano on Mars.  The full-length story has a longer lead-in and a more… developed ending.  I plan to have it appear in my upcoming book, Born to Wonder.

Well, I’ve recently returned from several weeks overseas visiting my wife’s family and country.   Now, back in the saddle again, I’ll be more of a consistent presence on this site, posting about once a week.   –D.W.

Ohgod

  It is the largest known shield volcano in the solar system.  Its summit caldera, from which the magma last poured, is 70 kilometers across.  The volcano rises 27 kilometers from the surface, and was last active 200 million years ago.  For reasons not understood, Olympus Mons is surrounded by a cliff that is several kilometers high.

Below her, an almost solid haze.  Aura backed several steps from the edge.       

        Hyperventilating, her heart pounded in her head and an electric tingling ran over her body in a wave.  Light-headed, she took deep breaths behind her face shield.  Despite the special coating, the clear oval fogged briefly with each breath.  Aura ran.

        With her fingers spread wide, her arms reaching forward, she leaped, pushing off with her right toe, the last part of her body to leave.

          This is what it was like: 

        There were no aerodynamics— she was a dropped rock in a low-g vacuum.  She had jumped out as far from the edge as she could.  Now falling head-first and sideways, out of control, listing, turning over in a slow flip on her back.  No glide-plane surfaces to ease her through the Martian air.  No conscious thoughts, but a single-minded concentration, Aura stretched out her arms and legs to form an "X" shape, looking down, arching her back.  She was assuming the position necessary for a controlled fall.

       

Correspondence with a friend on the path

Excerpted from correspondence with a friend on the path -DW

11/16/2003

Hi A,

How was your isolation?  How was coming back home?  Hopefully okay.

In describing things, you said, “While in the middle of it, I spent hours or days thinking/analyzing what was happening and what I should do and what might happen.”

That’s the value, I think.  Seeing one’s own reactions/processes like looking at someone else.

My take on the word fascination is: what captivates my curiosity and, therefore, my attention.

As far as lucid dreaming.  You said, “both types of consciousness,” when describing your definition of lucid dreaming.

I only am conscious of one type of consciousness!  Where it happens is not important, as far as it is concerned.  Where you turn on a light bulb—in a cave or on a space station or in a bathroom at McDonalds—it’s light.  Air is air no matter where…

Group work

I wait to meet myself.  Sometimes I see him come into our meeting room, but he’s not willing to hear me.  I can recognize myself sitting over there, but I can’t strike up a conversation.  Sometimes I see him walk in, look around, and walk out.  Sometimes he walks by in the hallway without coming in.  Sometimes he stays and I give him a book to read and he or she leaves, takes the book and brings it back unread.  I’m the tree in a time-lapse film, a flickering lantern on my motionless branch.

A Story With No People (told by God), by David W. Weimer

Some cultures chant in groups, “OM.”  (It rhymes with ‘home.’)

Jeeze... 

Act I. 

Luring me backward, The Andy Griffith Show theme song echoes in black and white whistling inside of my head, accompanying a kid walking down a summer lane with a fishing pole over his shoulder. 

Act Am.

All the description in the world can’t convey this.  When the period stops the flow of words it can’t hold in everything filling the box overflowing forever with sound.  How do you write sound on a page?  Each sentence is a box of words; the words stay in the box, or are changed and replaced, but the things the words try to describe—that’s the water flowing from eternal fountains with periods holding them apart from one another.

Act What.

I can sit here and swivel my head.  Just here in this chair, sitting.  What I hear.  What I can see…  I check smell.  I breathe deeply and can smell the air.  I taste the last of this tea which I don’t like.  What do I feel?  Belly pressure, a twitch in my neck, dry skin and an itching leg.  Just sitting here, it’s amazing.  It’s a whole world.  And then there’s that place over there, just ten feet away from me, on the couch.  And in the living room, the kitchen, the studio, the upstairs, the downstairs.  Man, it keeps going.  The rest of our property, the lawn, the front yard, the back deck.  I could sit right here, in every square foot of space, and swivel my head around, and pay attention to all this stuff and be blown away by all there is.  One time I rode a Greyhound Bus in Florida and was amazed by the endless reality flowing by my window in the five hours between Lake City and Kissimmee.

Act Now.

Effortlessnes...  What is effortless?  Anger.  Love.  Pity.  Nostalgia.  Regret.  Contentment.  Hunger.  Thirst.  Fatigue.  Joy.  Curiosity.  Sudden comprehension.  This. 

Act When.

The best gift life can give me, in my opinion, is a pure quest—something to go after.  Something self-evident and worth it.  I’d prefer a quest, instead of having to react automatically to the bead-like chain of crises and challenges delivered regularly like the mail, dropped right at my feet.  The gift I’m talking about is one that at first seems as far off as that barely-starting breeze over there.  Not felt yet, but somehow noticed.  The far away trees sway a little.  Then it comes in close, like a gradual thaw.  The feeling of coolness on my heated cheeks and forehead in the summer, sweating or working in the sun.  Or a heat-sucking frigid wind blowing snow over a frozen pond.  Here, it tells me.  It’s always something I hadn’t considered before, that seems like it’s worth going after.  It’s a quest for understanding.  A goal.  I climbed that mountain.  I did it.  All the while, I’m imagining.  Yes.  That’s what I want.

Act Nine.

Well.  Pray.  And thank you.  When I don’t know what to say, I do it.  Thanks for the time I get each day, most days, to spend ten minutes staring into the air in front of me, letting go of control.  Depth, profoundness, wonder.  Thank you for that: the wonder.

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Flushing, Ohio—2010

I lived in Europe long enough to forget how it felt to be an American living in America, right about things, secure in my opinions, oblivious of everything outside of my immediate life patterns.  That myopic existence had faded for me, remaining in my memory the way my high school life remained five or ten years after graduating, while I was living in Germany and then France, starting a family.

I returned to America and watched the New Year ball come down in New York on TV to celebrate 2003.  I was in my hometown of Fowlerville Michigan again after an absence of 18 years—I’d left three weeks after graduating from high school to enter Army basic training at Fort Sill, Oklahoma.

Returning to America was a culture shock.  Nine-eleven had happened while I was overseas and I returned to a place that seemed to me infused with paranoia, fear and self-righteous anger.  Welcome home.  About a month after we arrived, I rented a moving truck in Lansing when our household goods arrived after making the Atlantic crossing by ship.  I had to give my fingerprints in order to rent the thing.  All ten fingers.  Jeeze.  Welcome home.

Now, I’ve lived in the States again, and long enough this time to forget how it felt to be a European immigrant from America.  The memory of my time over there has turned golden in the years since; the good times and bad are all bathed in nostalgia, sweet nostalgia. 

It feels like a strong memory of an important event in my life, such as, for example, the death of my father.  My father died in 1985 while I was at Fort Sill, between basic and AIT (advanced individualized training).  For ten years after, I thought about him every day; he was a constant presence in my thoughts, coloring  my daily feeling of living. 

My memories of living in France and Germany are not that…intense.  The living I did there happened to an older me.  And my time there wasn’t traumatic.  It was life-altering and life changing and eye-opening.  I am very different from having lived abroad.  But I don’t think of my life over there daily.  Not consciously, at least.  The effects of my time over there are more subtle, apparently.  But my living over there informs my living over here.  In a good way, I would say.

Everything I see, everything people here do and say, how the American news sources report foreign or domestic events for example—is all seen through a lens that I did not have when I lived here in the U.S. before.  Maybe it’s because I am an adult now, with life experiences and a family.  Leaving the States for the first time at 18 to my duty station in Erlensee, Germany, I was untested and a kid, fresh out of high school.  Going over there again, this time to Stuttgart, Germany in 1999 at 32, to live as a civilian, I was not a kid anymore, but I was an American who knew what he thought about things.  I had one cancelled marriage to my credit and some experiences.  In my international awareness-sense, I was a toddler.

I’ve lived as full and rich an existence in the past eight years, here in America, now that I've returned, as I had lived for about five years in Germany and France.  For me, for my life, I feel a balance that is pleasant to have.  I have both views: me being here, self-centered, looking through myself at whatever ‘out there’ is; and there, looking over the distance at a people reacting very seriously, self-centeredly, kind of wildly, and just as myopically as I had, when I was there.

Until you leave your town and return, you don’t see further than yourself.  If you don’t ever leave your country, you don’t see further than your opinions.  It’s frankly impossible.  When you do leave your town, you can see how your town thinks compared to the new places you visit.  You see the difference.  It’s clear.  When you leave your country… Well now.  That was something.  

Seven Days in May

Written: April 99

What would possess a person to go into a cabin in the spring in the woods and fast for seven days and do nothing except stare at a candle?

In May 1993, I parked my car at the top of a tree-covered hill in West Virginia.  I was 26.  I lived in Pittsburgh.  In three months I would be married and I suppose mortality was whispering in my ear.  Something sure was.  I had never been alone for a complete day before.  You always see someone.  I had never gone 24 hours without eating, planning to eat or recovering from eating either.

I was running a student philosophy group at the University of Pittsburgh called the Self Knowledge Symposium, and had gotten into the habit of thinking a lot—a habit with no holding back.   I don’t care what anyone says; some people do this the same way a devoted alcoholic drinks.  We’re all looking for something in our own way.

Well, I sensed my life was going to be different after I got married.  Like the weather, a real perspective change was moving in.  That’s what precipitated this weeklong departure, I think.

A friend had a cabin he offered to let me use during spring break.  His name is Mike.  His cabin is perched on the edge of a ravine in a wooded, mountainous 300 acre ‘farm’ in rural West Virginia.

On the Sunday afternoon before the first day of spring break in 1993, I drove my ‘88 Ford Festiva to the farm.  It was really out there.  No pavement, no street lights at night, only the shifting whir of a coal mine exhaust fan in the hills.  I had a duffel bag of canned food and clothes, a notebook, a sleeping bag and a pillow.  I left my watch, wallet and everything from my pockets in the glove box of the car.  I shouldered my duffel bag and hiked down a two-rutted tractor trail that wound around the hilly terrain and eventually went by Mike’s cabin. 

When I unlocked the door and dropped my stuff inside, I saw a wall of shelves lined with glass jars of pasta, dried beans and rice—all gray with age.  There was a box of plumber’s candles, an oil lamp, a woodstove, a raised bunk bed, a small table with a view out the back window and a padded chair.  I didn’t plan to do anything.  I remember that.  But I had a strong urge to do something.

From here on, I’ll tell you what happened. 

Each night, I wrote in a journal so I wouldn’t lose track of the days and come back late.  This was [seventeen] years ago. 

France, or bust

In true blog-spirit, I’m posting this meditation on a theme.  My wife and I are hoping to go to France for the month of June.  She hasn’t seen her mother, brother, sister, nephew, nieces and grandmother for eight years—since we left our home in Ramonville Saint Agne near Toulouse.  My sons, now six and nine, don’t speak French and don’t know their mother’s family.  We returned to the U.S. with the intention of getting back, ‘every few years or so.’  This hasn’t happened.  It’s terribly expensive and major car repairs and other emergencies take our money away each year. 

So this year I’m saying:

Check out my wife’s blog and look at the prints of her paintings.  Buy one if you can.  You’ll help us.  Here is Andrée’s blog:  http://andreelartiste.wordpress.com/

Staring at water (upcoming book excerpt)

This is my earliest memory:

It’s as though I were there yesterday, or still there.  I am walking on the beach with my Aunt Betsy and mom.  They are holding my hands and we walk in the sand.  They are talking over my head.  We are barefoot.  I am watching the water to my right as we walk in the dry sand along the shore.  We go along like this for a while.  The wind is blowing steady and cool and the sun warms my skin and the sand.  The two sisters sit near a grassy hill.  I see a rusted metal rack of some kind, left there with its bottom buried in the sand.  I cannot imagine what it is for.  I am confronted with my ignorance of man-made things.  I sit with my incomprehension.  I look out at the sea.  It must have been Lake Erie, the Great Lake on the east side of Michigan.  We were living in Utica at the time, 12 miles north of Detroit, in Macomb County.  It may have been a smaller, local lake.  I don't know.

Born to Wonder upcoming book excerpt (1996 journal entries)

These last journal entries illustrate a change in perspective that I had recently gone through.  This is a time right after Kathy divorced me.  It’s also three months after I had spent an interesting week in the West Virginia woods on the Rose farm in a tent followed by my ‘night of hell,’ as I used to call it.