The same woman has cut my hair for the last 21 years, since I arrived in Oregon and found her tiny shop and her brisk and friendly self, and we get to talking yesterday, as she edits my head in her usual brisk and friendly fashion, and she tells me about her craft. Well, men tip more than women, although women spend much more money than men, she says. In general a man wants you to cut his hair as quickly and efficiently as possible, ideally without overmuch chat, for which service he will tip generously, whereas women want me to spend a lot of time with them, and talk about everything, or more accurately listen to them talk about everything, for which privilege they generally will not tip generously, but they will buy all sorts of products, which the men never do. The women generally want me to be their friend, whereas the men want me to cut their hair. The more hair a man has the less time he wants you to spend on it, generally. Yes, we occasionally sell the hair we cut. If it’s longer than eight inches, and it is its original color, and it’s male hair, it’s eligible for wigs—men’s hair is thicker, and they don’t color it as much as women do. Occasionally we have had people come in and buy cut hair to put in their gardens to fend off deer and moles. No, I don’t know if that works or not. Yes, I cut my children’s hair and my husband’s and mine, too. That’s how I started as a cutter of hair. I was a teenager and my parents wanted us to have long hair and there came a day I didn’t want to so I cut it myself. Yes, that caused a ruckus. But it turned out I was good at it and rather liked it.

When I came to this country I went to beauty school and then went into business. First I rented a chair in a shop and eventually I bought the shop. In the time I owned the shop I employed probably a hundred cutters of hair from probably 20 countries. Do I ever get tired of cutting hair? Not really. I get tired, after a very busy day, but it’s a friendly job, and very rarely do you encounter someone really rude. People fall asleep while I am cutting their hair, yes. Almost always men. There’s something peaceful about the experience, I think. It’s quiet, and the shop is warm, and there’s something soothing about sitting still and being covered with a cloth and not having to actually do anything or think or even speak. Also I think something about getting a haircut reminds people of when they were children.  Unless I slice your ear or something, it’s a peaceful gentle few minutes, or should be. Plus then when you arise you are slightly different, and people like that. Men will often say they feel taller, which I think they like, feeling taller. There are some men who come in slightly too often for haircuts and I wonder if they come because they want to feel taller that day.

One of the first dignitaries I met when I came to work for the university where I still work 20 years later was a man who had been not only governor of a state but a senator from that state; but what he wanted to talk to our students about was not politics (he was a liberal Republican), or religion (he was a Baptist), or himself (interesting and many-faceted as he was), but war and peace. On these matters he knew what he was talking about: he had been in the Navy during the Second World War, and had landed at Iwo Jima and Okinawa, and was one of the first Americans to walk through what had been the city of Hiroshima, and “wasn’t, anymore,” as he said to a standing-room-only politics class. “It wasn’t where it used to be. I have seen terrible things with my own eyes. I have seen utter destruction. I have seen what war does to men—to boys. We were just boys. And then to see an entire city vanished like that—not a soul, not a building, not a bird, nothing. There’s no reason that should ever happen again. I never voted for war the rest of my life. I voted against the war in Vietnam. I voted against nuclear weapons. I voted against a bigger military. A bigger military doesn’t make the nation more secure. Smart, healthy, educated, creative, motivated citizens make a nation secure. I was in the military. I saw what armies and bombs do. Once you’ve seen death and horror like that, you stop thinking that war is necessary. It isn’t. It’s stupid. We’re smarter than that. I’m an old man now and my voice is getting faint, but you young people ought to shout against wars. Don’t let yourself be fooled by people who insist on war. Those people were never in wars, and they don’t know what they are talking about. Wars are the worst conceivable ways to solve problems. Use your brains and your hearts to find other ways. Insist on peace as a right every bit as valuable and necessary to our country as voting and free speech.”

Right about then his aide made a gesture, and Senator Mark Hatfield laughed and said as usual he was slightly late and had to go to his next appointment, but he hoped with all his heart that we would remember what he said, which I did.

Like many Americans, I was raised in a small town, and though my town had all the usual civic and commercial entities, from church to store to library to garbage dump, it also had all the quiet and secret civic and commercial entities that we residents knew of but did not acknowledge publicly. Such as, for example, the various places where you could, using the right signals and code words, buy illicit substances, ranging from marijuana to malt liquor to racy magazines. Or the places where a man might purchase amorous company. Or the two bars, one on either end of town, where policemen and detectives gathered at the ends of their shifts to discuss dark and intricate matters. Or the large house at the north end of town where the Hindu community, such as it was, gathered for its rituals and social events. Or the auto body shop, where guns of every caliber could be bought without the flutter and fidget of registration papers. Or the mysterious warehouse behind the shopping center, owned by men with guns and dark cars who knew guys who knew guys. Or the shop that sold secondhand clothing in the front room and tattoos and debt-collection services in the back room. Or the delicatessen in which zoning variances and building permits were offered for sale or barter on Tuesday mornings. Or the third window at the post office, where a former Navy man would for a fee adjust various forms of identification as long as they did not entail photographic work, which he declined to do for legal reasons. Or which priest to avoid at all costs, especially when the parish offered day trips to the carnival upstate or—God help us all—the annual overnight tour of the seminary for prospective enrollees. Or which of the nine small beaches at the state park was the one for you if you wished to engage in amorous adventure—heterosexuals to the west, homosexuals to the east. Or which librarian to ask if you genuinely wanted to read Henry Miller for literary purposes. Or which dock to fish from without having to bother the owner for permission.

The thought occurs to me that my town was actually quite normal, and that your town also consists of the town you can see and the town behind the one you can see, and that perhaps there are endless towns in a town, composed of all sorts of stories in all sorts of languages. That wouldn’t be so unusual, would it?

Dear Folks,

I have your letter here, informing me that the photograph of myself I submitted for my passport renewal will not do. I couldn’t agree more, but what can we do against the machinations of time? At least I still have hair, is the way I feel about it, and you’ll find that you don’t care so much about the color of your hair when you get past the half-century mark. You’ll see. The same is true with the beard. You know and I know that it’s more salt than pepper, but, you know, what do we care? At least there are no crumbs or birds or invoices caught in it, am I right? The weary mein, the general air of not having slept properly since the First George Bush—I have three children, so there you go. Also I am an editor and an essayist, so money is always … well, I won’t say a pressing concern, but it’s something to think about. I do actually check parking meters for uncollected change, and no man has stolen more notepads from the hotels of America than I have. That’s just between us, of course. Because if you use the first page or two of a notepad, and your pen has pressed down into the next few pages, leaving the ghostly spoor of your thoughts, don’t you think the housekeeping professionals will recycle the whole pad? Of course they will. So I feel that I am recycling for them, so to speak. Saving them a little time and work. You would do the same, I’m sure. In a real sense, any photograph of a face is much like the ghostly trails on the under-pages of a notepad, isn’t that so? It’s not quite accurate from the first moment after it was taken, and it’s only the shell of the soul, in any case. So I couldn’t agree more that the photograph you have will not do. How perceptive of you to say so.

Cordially,

Brian Doyle

A wonderful friend of mine was on his deathbed a few years ago, and I waited on line with his family and friends to go in and get a last blessing and chat, in the American Irish way, and during my few moments with him he said three things that I remember to this day.

One was the answer to a question I asked: Are you scared?

Nah, he said, with the hint of a smile. It’s a big recycling program, I feel, and I had a great run, a woman I loved dearly, eight kids, lots of grandkids, good work, good friends, fought a cruel empire, saw a lot of the world. Nah, I am not scared. I am sad that a lot of great stories will die with me, though—some of them true.

The second thing was the phrase rushing the growler. He murmured that, in a moment when I thought he had fallen asleep, and I said, Bernie, what’s that? and he opened his eyes and said, Oh, when I was a kid in Montana, this was in Butte, the most Irish town in America then, one of my jobs was to take the bucket to the pub and get it filled with beer for my dad. He’s back home from the mines for dinner and he’s bathing out back and when he finishes wiping off, there I am with the bucket of beer, and he takes a dipper and has a taste, and he says, Thank you, son. We would stand there a moment, you know, waiting for nothing, just savoring the moment. We didn’t get many moments like that. He worked awful hard, and there were a lot of us kids. That was called rushing the growler. The growler was the bucket, see? He’d stand there three minutes, maybe, sipping and smiling at me, and it felt like all the time in the world. That was a good time. That was a great time. I sure liked my dad. He sure was a good dad.

The third thing was the very last thing Bernie said to me, the very last words I heard from lips that had told me a thousand stories—some of them true. He’d had just enough energy to place his hand on my head and ask a blessing on me, and then his arm slumped back down to the bed, and I stood up and got ready to be replaced at his bedside, when he said very faintly, I’ll see you over the bar in the river. I didn’t say anything, because I was weeping, but I’ll always remember that line. I’ll see you over the bar in the river. I very much hope that this is true.

I once sat with the legendary Bill Veeck, for an hour, in a pub in Chicago, and though I cannot say that we conversed much, per se, I can say that I met him, and shook his hand, and said thanks for the way he brought humor and the jolt and zest of change to hidebound Baseball Incorporated, and I did get to hear him in the full flow and flower of his legendary discourse, which covered, in the hour that I sat with him amid many cans of beer, his wooden leg propped up on the table, his service in the Marines (in which an accident had eventually cost him his leg—I didn’t even get it shot off or anything heroic, I just screwed up, he said, laughing), his eight kids (greatest accomplishments of my life by far), his role in integrating baseball (any idiot would have done the same, especially by God with Larry Doby—that guy could play ball), his brief career at Kenyon College, his idea for planting ivy along Wrigley Field’s walls (my only horticultural accomplishment), how many wooden legs he had (three at the moment, and there may be one in the car), how many of the stories told about his ideas and innovations in baseball were true (about half), signing Satchel Paige (that guy could have pitched until he was 400 years old), sending 3.55-foot-tall Eddie Gaedel up to bat for the Saint Louis Browns (that’ll be the first line in my obituary), the infamous Disco Demolition Night at Comiskey Park (I hated disco, but that was probably a poor idea), and why he was sitting in a pub outside Wrigley Field even though he had never owned the Cubs and had twice owned the White Sox (I love baseball and I love Wrigley and I love beer and I love pubs and I love talking in pubs).

Finally it was time for me to go home, but as soon as I stood up another guy plopped down in my chair and Veeck warbled on as if he could tell stories all night, which probably he could have and maybe he did. He died seven years later. By then I was living in Boston (where he had once owned a horse track), and I remember picking up the newspaper and seeing his obituary and feeling a sudden twist of sadness that a guy who had so much fun being alive wasn’t, anymore. I don’t remember if Eddie Gaedel was in the first line of his obituary but all the rest of my life I will remember, with a smile, his wooden leg plopped on a back table amid beer cans in Ray’s Bleachers pub in Chicago, just outside the ivy-covered walls of Wrigley Field, which he loved.

1. Pretend you have been sleeping for two days, and you tied me with a rope, and I woke up and shot the rope! With the gun in my toes! And the rope turned out to be an elephant! And then it got married to an eagle! And we had soup!

2. I told dad I did my homework, but the teacher didn’t give us any homework today, so the joke is on dad! Ha ha!

3. Pretend I have a handle in my back, and I am on fire, and you pull me out of the fire, and we are in the jail, but you throw me through the bars, because I am magic, and then I get you out of the jail, and we go find the treasure, which is upstairs.

4. If you really like Jell-O, and you really like mayonnaise, then you should be able to have a Jell-O and mayonnaise sandwich, and dad is wrong.

5. Grandmother decided to be dead, and now she lives in Daisy World.

6. Dad is not the boss of the family. Mom is the boss. Dad is the second boss. Dad is the boss of the mail, and mom is the boss of everything else. Mom says dad is the boss, but she knows and dad knows that he is the boss just of the mail. He is not even the boss of the grass. I am the boss of the grass.

7. I know I said I would be home at midnight, but I am the one who said that, so when I decided to not be home at midnight, I was not actually late, because I can change my mind.

8. How could grampa be the best grampa ever and dad be the worst dad ever?

9. Why do we have to wear socks that match? Dad doesn’t wear socks that match. He says they match but they do not match. He is a liar about socks.

10. If dad dies, mom has to marry his next younger brother, and if he dies, she has to marry Tommy, because he is the last brother, but if Tommy dies, she is an unrestricted free agent. Dad said so.

11. Belts are fascist. Dad said so. Fascist means for fat people.

12. When dad tells a joke, he is the only one who laughs.

She was tremendously generous and parsimonious at the same time. She would do anything for you, but she would disappoint you on such a regular basis that you wanted to scream. She wanted to be a teacher, and her father forbade her and she wanted to be a nurse and her father forbade her and you wonder who she might have been if it was a different world and she’d had a different father and she became a teacher or a nurse. She was cheerful and sad at once. She loved to have company, but people made her nervous. She loved children, but children made her nervous. She was a terrible snob with an eerie oceanic empathy for people from every walk of life. She was the healthiest hypochondriac in the history of the universe. She was both gentle and demanding. She was a gossip with a heart as big as a province. Children loved her, which is a good sign.

You wonder who she might have been if her father had loved her more than himself. You wonder who she might have been if she wasn’t the only girl among her brothers. You wonder who she might have been if the dark snow did not fall over her like a shroud on a regular and saddening basis. It is instructive to hear that her home was so warm and friendly that those who walked in the door found it difficult to walk out. She was a reader of epic proportions whose shelves were lined with self-help muck shoulder to shoulder with Edward Gibbon and Anthony Trollope. You never met a woman who could recite poetry so easily from memory, though it is instructive to note that she never remembered a poem exactly as written.

She loved dogs but spent the last 40 years of her life without one because they made her nervous. She loved her daughters but never missed a chance to comment tartly on their hair, clothing, choice of paramour, and unrefined cooking. She wanted to be informed and invited to every event of every conceivable shape and flavor, though she hardly ever attended them but woe unto the being who did not inform her of said event because he knew and she knew she would not attend. No one in the history of the universe was ever more artful at making a remark that was hilariously blunt and witty and admirably suited to the occasion but which could just as easily be construed as a slip of the tongue—you were never quite sure if she was witty or flitty; my favorite such bon mot being her toast at the engagement dinner of her final daughter, a siren who had been engaged once before but who had broken off the first engagement, and at the second engagement’s dinner her mother rose, hoisted her goblet, and said let’s just hope this one comes off, which still makes me laugh, not to mention my dad, who never really recovered from that moment; he still has champagne stuck in his nose all these years later, he says.

She lived to be 90, moaning to the end about a procession of ills, but it was no ill that felled her, finally, unless time be a disease from which we cannot recover; and she died flanked by her children, who held her hands and watched her go. In her last weeks, her nurses said, she spoke more and more of and to her mother and her husband, both of whom had gone ahead long years before, and she spoke of and to them with anticipatory joy. She left instructions for her children that her ashes be poured into the old blue cookie jar that had been the jewel of her kitchen for 50 years, and the jar be placed on her husband’s grave, so that she would again be with him, in forms beyond our ken. So she rests as of this morning, and though many mourn her, there are more who smile when they imagine her reaching for the face of the man she loved, and her own mother reaching out for her baby girl, and the tide of time in full retreat, and all pains fled and gone, and joy the only language on every holy tongue.

Found my draft card yesterday, while clearing out a drawer, and the mind it did reel. The leap of time—40 years ago! The terse stamped words, revealing nothing of the seethe and roar and argument of that time. That boy, just 18 years old, registering for a draft for a war of which he knew essentially nothing. I remember Brother Four shouting furiously at the dinner table, later that evening, that he would join Canada rather than the army. I remember Brother Five pointedly registering immediately as a rebuke and rebuff to Brother Four. I remember Brother Two joining the Navy and then unjoining, testifying about his conscience to this very draft board, Local Board Number Four in New York. I remember my father, an Army veteran of the Second World War and the Korean War, going with him, and being proud of his son’s honesty. I remember being asked my height by the grim lady registering kids for the draft, and she never looked up, so I added two inches, and that is why I was six feet tall then and am 70 inches tall now. I remember watching the draft lottery on television with my friends and the way they turned and looked at me when my number was called first among the four of us. I remember my dad explaining that the army had basically stopped call-ups the year before and probably nothing would happen. I remember being terrified anyway. I remember wondering if I was brave or not, and concluding probably not. I remember wanting to be angry and sure, like Brother Four, or calm and sure, like Brother Five, but being totally at sea about duty and citizenship and war and peace, like Brother Two.

I remember thinking, as I stood with the other shy skinny sweating pimply kids in line at the post office, that blowing a guy’s head off to settle an argument about the government of a country more than 10,000 miles from where we stood seemed like a relatively poor idea, as ideas go. It still does.

The day being suddenly sunny, the halfway house for Recovering Souls on the north side of the city is offering car washes, and I pull in, and get to talking to a quiet man, and I think you should hear what he has to say.

It’s the usual story, he says. What you would expect. Damaged childhood, damaged manhood, hit bottom, lost everything, trying to build a life again. The usual. No different from lots of people. Lost my son—that’s the worst. Might never see the boy again. His mother moved away with him, and I don’t know where. But I have to go real slow here. I read, pray, do pushups, fix stuff around the place. Lot to be said for fixing things when you don’t know how else to use your time. There’s always stuff to be fixed, and that’s a positive. You’d be surprised how there’s always stuff to fix or clean. Religion helps because it’s communal. But—total respect for Jesus—I have to save me, I think. I think that’s the way it works. Maybe the way you try to save yourself is what people are trying to say when they say Jesus.

People always overpay at the car wash, yes. You could hand us a buck and that would be fine, but they hand you a 20 and say something gentle. I think people know they could be me right quick. Or could have been me, but they made the right decision at the right time. Or could still be me, right quick. And people see we are trying. One lady saw the clothesline with all our towels with our numbers on them and she couldn’t stop crying. The worst is not seeing your kids. That’s the worst. Your girlfriend or wife chooses you or unchooses you, you know, but the kids just lose you. You lost your kid. That doesn’t go away, no. You carry that all the time. I write my boy letters. I bet I have a hundred of them up in my room. Don’t know where to send them, yet. Someday maybe. Your car’s ready. Thanks for coming by, man. Appreciate it.

The problem with the younger brother measuring system, though, is that with a whopping drift, basically anything over two brothers high, you’d be so awed at such an epic alp that you would forget about the actual younger brothers until either you noticed an extra hamburger at dinner or mom asked for the millionth time where exactly are your younger brothers? As if we were supposed to be our brothers’ keepers, although the sweet Lord alone could help the boy who actually asked Cain’s question and then said something snide about it being in the Bible. My brother Kevin spent two years in his room once because he asked that question in a certain tone of voice we do not tolerate in this house, young man, and when he came out he was five inches taller and had begun to grow one of those third-armpit goatees every teenager has to grow by law, apparently. That was unnerving. I mean, who looks good in a goatee?

Sometimes, though, you would forget about the younger brothers only for a few minutes, until you heard plaintive cries from inside the snowdrift like the cries of lost peewits, or noticed the thin pale smoke of their signal fires coming out of the snowdrift like the portentous smoke that will soon be coming out of the Sistine Chapel when a new pope is chosen; in that case you would reach in and haul them out and dust them off and send them back into the house for the keys to the Falcon. All in all there is no question that younger brothers are an excellent addition to a family, especially in winter.

I was asked recently what music most influenced me as a boy—not the music I immediately realized was weird genius when I heard it, like Traffic’s John Barleycorn Must Die, or the roaring music I loved forever from the first moment I heard it, like The Who’s Quadrophenia, but the music that opened new doors, set me sprinting on new paths, presented whole new glittering worlds for contemplation and mad joy—and the more I thought about it, the further back I went down the dusty halls of memory, past the Stones’ Their Satanic Majesties Request, past even the Beach Boys and Herb Alpert (which was all about that whipped-cream cover, anyway), the more I realized that it wasn’t Neil Diamond, who was singing “Sweet Caroline” when I tried to kiss Teresa O’Connell and our spectacles got tangled and so to this day his music makes me think of lust and eyeglass repair, or even, God help us all, the Kingston Trio, who sounded like murderous chipmunks on acid to me even then. No, the one song that cracked my childhood into before and after, the one that just totally nailed me for some reason and shoved me into a lifetime of maniacal love for rock and pop, was “Crystal Blue Persuasion,” by Tommy James and the Shondells.

Maybe it’s a lesser song, a footnote not only in the glittering history of pop music but in the long and interesting career of Mr. Thomas Gregory Jackson of Dayton, Ohio, who made up the name Shondells while daydreaming in a high school class, but it nailed me then and still gives me the happy willies when I hear it again. I was 12 when I heard it first, in June of 1969, and the music was shimmering, the lyrics alluring and incomprehensible, the pulse irresistible, the way the song crawled out of the radio without the slightest acknowledgment of the way radio hits were supposed to sound … I was completely flipped out, and of course immediately rode my bike to the record shop (ah, the shaggy redolence of that tiny store on the highway, the moldy cardboard sweaty smell, the music blasting from speakers duct-taped to the wall, the vague intimation that you could buy dope if you knew the proper code words, the iconic posters, the snoring dog, the flyblown front window, the milk-crate seats out back where the owners got stoned, the disorganized bin of gleaming bright plastic eight-track tapes …) to buy the single, with its bright orange-and-yellow sunburst label, Roulette Records, of New York City. I wore that record out that summer, playing it enough times that eventually the needle slid, unimpeded by the Shondells, across the surface, and I presented it to a younger brother, with grave ceremony, probably charging him a candy bar for the privilege.

Thinking of all this recently, and playing the song 20 times on my computer, and being washed by memories of the yellow radio in the kitchen from which I had heard it sail into the universe for the first time, and of that smoky record shop, and of the brooding mania of the Kingston Trio, I resolved to call Tommy James and ask him about his song, which I did, tracking him down through his booking agent and then his manager, who warned me that the 10 minutes of conversation I hoped for might well turn into two hours.

“It started in Atlanta,” the singer began, cheerfully—it turns out that the former Thomas Gregory Jackson is a gregarious soul with a stunning memory. “A kid handed me a poem he’d written, called ‘Crystal Blue.’ We loved mysterious-sounding titles, and the poem stayed in my mind, and that night in my hotel suite we sat around and started riffing. We were always on the make for a new song. We started riffing with a major seventh on the guitar, and I started singing sounds over that, and the bass jumped in, and we just rolled along. We just played off each other. The riff had kind of an exotic feel, which we liked, and a good groove, and we stayed up all night fooling with it. No, we didn’t record it that night—we lost more songs that way, not getting them down on tape when we were working—but this one had clobbered us on the head, and when we got into the studio, two nights later, we went right at it. We all remembered it clear as a bell.

“That was a Wednesday night, in New York City—we were recording in a basement studio on Broadway and 51st Street. Spring night, warm. We had beer, and everything in the studio with us. It was just us with one engineer on the soundboard. We started out real light, just guitars and bass and gentle percussion, but then we got carried away and overloaded it with three keyboard tracks and all sorts of other stuff, and when we heard the result we knew it was wrong. So then we spent hours unproducing it, sort of, stripping it down, emptying it out, letting it breathe, until we got back to the version we loved, with a little flamenco guitar, and me playing congas, and a hint of bongo. We knew we were working on a hit record. There was a feeling of destiny about it. We were all really locked in, really working, you know? We weren’t experimenting anymore. We were focused. We knew what we wanted to get, and we worked to get it, and when we got it we knew. That’s a great feeling.

“We walked out of the studio slapping each other on the back. It was about eight in the morning. I remember we got coffee at the old Wienerwald restaurant up the street, and then the band went back to their hotel, the Gorham, on 55th Street, and I went up to my apartment, on 52nd, and slept the rest of the day. I had the tape with me, and the next morning I played it a few times in my apartment and then walked up Eighth Avenue with the song in my briefcase, to bring it to the record company. I walked proud that morning, you bet. That’s still my favorite song of all our hits. I bet I have played that song 10,000 times in shows, and I never get tired of it. It’s the second song in our show to this day. I’ll never get tired of it, I think. It’s sort of a magical song for us, and it always reminds me of that magical summer.

“You too, huh? I’d be amazed, but nothing about that song is less than amazing to me. Before that night in a hotel in Atlanta, there wasn’t that song, and in the morning there it was. Isn’t that amazing?”

One of my absorptions in life, along with hawks and Robert Louis Stevenson, Van Morrison and basketball, is craft. How does someone who does a thing surpassingly well do the thing that he or she does so well? I am not as interested in art as I am in craft—the workmanlike execution of a skill that has been honed and practiced to the point where often the practitioner has achieved a playful thoughtlessness, an unconscious awareness, a relaxed intensity. People who have arrived at this sort of unlabored mastery are often remarkably eloquent about what they do. My friend the detective, for example, told me all sorts of subtle, riveting things about his craft one morning.

You learn to listen, he says. That’s the greatest skill. And you learn most to listen for what people aren’t saying. You learn attentiveness. I pay much closer attention to faces and the way people walk and the way they sit comfortably or uncomfortably. Hands are a great key to people. Where are their hands? People’s emotions are in their hands. I learned this first as a street cop—when you approach a traffic stop the first thing you look for are the driver’s hands. You want both of them, starting with the right hand. If it’s down on the passenger seat you worry. You stay in the blind spot, in that case, and approach with caution.

You also learn to relax while working hard, he says. Know what I mean? Like when you follow someone on foot. Never hurry, never stand still. Never wear a disguise. Disguises inevitably make you nervous, and suspects can feel that. Never wear bright colors or black. Just dress normally in gray and brown. You can follow someone from in front, you know. Just walk casually ahead of him. Almost always it’s a guy, and guys don’t pay attention to other people when they walk. Women do. Women have rape radar.

Even in confrontations it pays to relax, he says. Make a joke. Throw them off. Change the subject. Ask about sports. Anything to surprise them and change directions. You’d be surprised how often that works to cut the heat.

But I never get cocky. I never think I know everything about the craft. There’s always more to learn. Because people are just not similar, or consistent. They’re not. Fact. You could spend your whole life studying just one person, and you would hardly get anywhere.

Recently I was in Arkansas, near the Oklahoma border, and a shy man told me a story that I cannot forget; so I share it with you today.

I had the best mule that ever was, said the shy man. That mule was a wonder. I called him Cyrus although I believe that was not his true name. I believe his true name was probably the sound the other mules made respectfully when they came upon him in the fields or on the road. You could tell the sound they made was some sort of respectful title for Cyrus, like sir or governor. He was something like the chieftain of the mules for miles around my farm. I used to farm 400 acres, most of which was woods, and the farms around me were mostly woods also, so a lot of the time Cyrus and me were in the woods, and even the little animals in the woods were respectful of Cyrus. Raccoons and deer and such would skitter out of the way when we came through, same as they usually do, but then they would stand alongside the road and nod to Cyrus. You think maybe I am telling you a fiction, but I am not. My bride noticed this too on her own, the times she took Cyrus out to haul logs. The only animals that were not respectful of Cyrus were the bigger animals like cougars and bears, and there was an elk, lived over to Oklahoma, that one time tried to attack Cyrus, but that did not come off, as Cyrus stood his ground.

That mule was a wonder. No one knew how he came to be what he was, but he just was. He was a fine worker and not as testy as your usual mule. Your usual mule is generally displeased because of his complex family history—not as thoroughly displeased as a donkey, of course, but generally unhappy with his lot—but this was not so with Cyrus. My bride came to love him deeply for what she called his inarguable character. She says that there is personality and then there is character, and the one is a pond and the other is a sea. She says even chickens can have personalities, whereas character is a reverence. She too noticed the respect in which Cyrus was held by all sorts of other creatures. I remarked once that he was something like the emperor of all the mules for miles around, but she said it was more than that, that all sorts of people also had the greatest respect for Cyrus, and that perhaps he was a sage or a saint in ways we sensed but did not understand. She says we don’t know much at all about how this works. She says we talk about humans being sages and saints, but we don’t think at all about sages and saints among the other beings, and who is to say that there are not sages and saints covered with fur and feathers? I say, Do you mean fishes too, and she says, Good heavens no! And we laugh. But I think she was right about Cyrus.

Well, he got old and died. Mules get old and die like anybody else. Cyrus took a long time to get old, though. He was 40 when he retired and 50 when he died. This was a Tuesday. He had free rein of the farm, of course, and he came out of the woods and over to the house and called to us to come out, and then he lay down in the grass. We all gathered around, and after a while he died. We buried him in the woods, among the pin oaks. He sure liked pin oaks. He liked all sorts of oaks, bur oak and red oak and white oak, but he liked pin oaks the best, so that’s where he is. I go out there almost every day still, and you would be surprised how many tracks of animals you see there, all sorts of animals, little and big, even the bears and cougars. I never have seen elk tracks there though. I don’t know what it was between Cyrus and the elks, and now I guess I will never know.

My late brother Kevin was once a tall skinny student at the University of Notre Dame du Lac, where he lived in an old residence hall on the south side of campus, between the cemetery and that university’s signature golden dome. As a freshman he stayed on the first floor, where most freshmen are consigned, but for the rest of his undergraduate career he moved up to 327, at the top of the stairs, and it is this room, or set of rooms, that I wish to muse about today.

A sensible and informative essay would at this point make some mention of the architectural details of the three tiny rooms in which my brother and his three roommates lived, or would talk learnedly about the rooms’ all-important proximity to the lone set of shower stalls on the floor, or note the view from the mullioned windows, or relate some of the entertaining and headlong adventures of the lanky children who lived there. But I grope after something else about those rooms, about my brother’s life in those rooms, about the 700 days and nights that he lived there, some 50 feet in the air above the sandy soil of northern Indiana.

The silent dawns, when he awoke in the top bunk, above a snoring roommate, and for a moment was transported back to his childhood bed, in the dapple of tall sweetgum trees outside his window, his mother’s silvery laugh in the kitchen as faint as yesterday’s hymn; the long winter nights, as he sat at his ancient desk, staring at the runes cut by a dozen previous denizens. The thump of basketballs and ricochet of footballs in the hallway, and the deep barking laughs of the neighbors who hammer and fling them; the autumnal smell of sawn wood as students edit their rooms, and the vernal scent of mothers in the hall, reclaiming their sons for the summer; the stammer of greetings to a friend’s girlfriend, the cheerful roars at a friend’s kid brother visiting in awe; the shouldery tumult and reek and jest of roommates; the annual drawing of straws or cutting of cards for who gets which room; the wry notes left for each other, the casual generosity, the thicket of toothbrushes, the dank of towels and socks, the scrawl of numbers and names written on the yellow wall by the phone against all rules and regulations; and the way those names and numbers will be painted out, at the last moment, with paint of wholly different color than the paint originally applied by the university when Indiana was young and dinosaurs strolled the earth.

He was 19 when he walked into those rooms for the first time and 21 when he walked out, and I do not think he ever returned to them, though he returned to campus often, ostensibly for football games, but more likely to visit the country of who he used to be. The residents of a campus change, but the residence does not, and each child who lives there adds infinitesimally to a story that can never be told in words. We thrash after ways to say what we know to be true, that the breath and laughter and tears and furies and despairs and thrills and epiphanies of children on a campus season the very air, coat the walls, soak into the soil just as dying birds and leaves do, in ways we can never quite measure or articulate; so that while my brother’s ashes now rest in another soil, something of him, something of who he was, something of who he became, swirls still in the rooms where he lived for three years when he was young.

Much of what we talk about when we talk about universities is only fact; and far beneath facts are things we know to be true but can never explain, not if we were given as many years as the dinosaurs were given before they passed into memory, their bodies sifting into the generous and merciful soil, to become that from which new life springeth green.