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.  

Lake Superior, Marquette, Michigan, 1985

This is a poem that I wrote in 1999 about my father's drowning and my 14-year-old brother’s terrible time trying to save him.  It's a Shakespearean sonnet.

Blueness fades as memories rearrange

And murmur of a father’s fateful luck.

Deliberate work-worn hands now blue as veins;

No chafing will unseize their frozen lock.

His lot was introduced to that cold date

Of timely men, who swim into their door

Through aqua blue marine, paternal fate

No human power’s able to ignore.

One Earthly sun dove deep to fight the tide,

Where desperate hands held hair, then arms, then naught.

With blackness, empty starving lungs replied,

And son lay gasping on the shore—his hours bought.

Superior lake, my father’s rendezvous;

Vacations drowned into a paler blue.

© 1999 David W. Weimer

Born to Wonder upcoming book excerpt

When I got to the bottom of the escalator at the airport in Detroit, Gino's dad, who never spoke much to me at all except in short, few-word, broken English phrases from around hand-rolled cigarettes, and who intimidated the hell out of me, took a step forward and grabbed me in a bear hug.  I stood there.  After a moment, I tried to back away, but he kept me in that tough, no words embrace.  He looked me in the eyes intensely and then did that.  He didn't say anything.  I didn't say anything either.  That's what I remember about coming back for the funeral.

I wrote this one as an undergrad at Pitt. 

I didn’t care what it said as much as how it sounded; I was obsessed with how it sounded.  Besides conveying images from my wistful life—time smoking on the roof at night as a kid, hearing arguments outside our apartment window in Pittsburgh or memories of a dream of flying over an island like Peter Pan—I wanted this one to be read aloud.  It’s a performance piece, to be read standing up in front of an audience...

King Bacchus

A New Story

by David W. Weimer

The ghost walked through a wall between the kitchen and living room.  Not walked.  Just moved.  Not moved.  Just was.  The ghost was, and it manifested in vagueness over here, then over there.  It was, as the man sitting in a wooden chair leaning back on two legs liked to think of it, out of phase with this reality, which, to the ghost, was as unreal and vague, dream-like actually, as the ghost normally was to those who sensed it to varying degrees.  It was, of course, possible for one member of one reality to notice the other, vaguely.  It was still possible, yet highly unlikely, for both members of respective realities to view one another at the same time.

But it happened naturally, Dawood knew.  In a certain instance, it happened every time. 

My Own Private Tsunami, 2004

So I remember thinking about this tsunami working on my wife’s van in the parking lot.  In the five years since then, up until now, I'd forgotten that moment--I'd even forgotten about the tsunami that killed 230,000 people.

And then last week I was looking for something unfinished to work on.  A friend and I regularly attend a philosophic discussion group called M&M Philosophy in Wheeling and we made a 2010 New Year’s pact.  He is a visual artist and I want to write, so we decided to bring something new every Tuesday evening to show each other.  An accountability arrangement.  

This artificial deadline has allowed me to finish some things that may not have been touched again—things that I'd begun while self-employed contracting for a living.  I put them on my desktop, and then put them aside.  Years pass.  Not returning to things; it’s a constant threat and theme.  

Well, here: