9/11/01 From 1021 Miles Away

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

Love is most nearly itself
When here and now cease to matter.
Old men ought to be explorers
Here or there does not matter
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion
Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,
The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning.
—T. S. Eliot, “East Coker,” Four Quartets

* * * *
Whichever online resumé/job search websites that existed in the late 1990s were in their infancy, so the professional job search that I pursued from 1997 till 2000 was so old-fashioned in its technology that whenever I describe life in that time period to friends in their twenties or thirties I think they picture me in a suit and fedora with a cheroot in my teeth and a lamp with a green shade angled over my work.

I bought the New York Times each morning and discarded everything but the Employment pages. (“Employment” sounded so much more professional, and hopefully permanent, than the “Help Wanted” label in the local paper.) There would be three to six new ads for editorial positions each day. I’d swivel around in the office chair from the table on which I laid out the ads to which I would respond to the computer on which I’d rewrite my cover letter to match my resumé to the ad’s requirements. All of the jobs were in New York City. I was 28, an award-winning newspaper columnist with years of editorial experience, and hungry.
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My 40th High School Reunion

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

One of my favorite moments during my 40th high school reunion this weekend was so flickeringly brief that I doubt the other parties even remember it now. Before I continue, a note: the one mandatory item at 40-year reunions is nametags for everyone. Even if we more or less look like ourselves, it is now forty years later, and most of us are older than our parents were when we were in high school. At the reception that evening, I noticed that at first most of us pretended to not look at the nametags but after a half-hour all pretense was gone and I saw many of us walk up to a new conversation partner, lean forward, squint, and say, “Oh! Mark!” or whichever name.

My favorite moment came during the dinner/dance party in a club near our old school, Spackenkill High School (seen above), when the eighty or ninety of us were in full churn, combining and recombining into old cliques and new conversations (to my classmates’ credit, there were more new conversations than old cliques). With the help of a classmate, I’d found a bottle of water for dinner. It is possible that I owe this friend money for the water, as it came from the bar, and my actions turned it into a free bottle: I took it, said thanks, and headed back to my table, as oblivious as I was when I was fifteen. As I walked with the bottle past a table with two women at it, they each said, “Hi, Mark,” without looking up from their close conversation.

Neither ignored nor invited, I continued to my seat, and reflected that this could have been a moment in our school cafeteria in 1983 as easily as what it was now in 2026: two classmates acknowledging me without the need to invite me into their deep conversation. It felt like belonging somewhere, it felt like I belonged, which I never felt when I was a teenager, except maybe on stage.

Like an oblivious fifteen-year-old, when this thought came to me I wanted to go over to their table and share it with the two women, which would have both interrupted their moment and sundered my quiet feeling of belonging. I didn’t go anywhere. There was food in front of me that was far superior to high school cafeteria food.
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‘Coming into leaf’

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.
* * * *
When I entered her car last Wednesday morning, my friend’s greeting was, “What a beautiful day.” This is not always her greeting, not always the first thing I hear her say when I see her on Wednesdays, so from inside my current depression I stammered, “You … you mean the sunniness?”

We backed out into the road. It was indeed a sunny morning. “Yeah, I think we’re finally past the snow,” she added.

As you and your shovel may know, it was indeed a snowy winter this December and January and February and March in New Paltz, a prankster’s winter that gave us the biggest snowstorm in a couple years followed by a few unseasonably warm days followed by the biggest snowstorm in a decade and a week of below-zero nights. Small snowstorms then punctuated March. My friend’s tentative response (“I think we’re finally past the snow”) was the sensible one. More snow could yet arrive.

I needed that greeting, though. It was a sunny morning, and I had not yet noticed it.
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