Call me crazy, but I recently got an urge to write about, or at least list, all the people I know who have died.

I think the source of this urge can be traced back to a conversation I had with my girlfriend a few weeks back.

We had been sitting at our kitchen table and I had made a remark about someone I knew who had died, and then I said, "I know a lot of people who have died....You also must know a lot of people who have died, right?" And she said, "No, not really actually."

And then I realized that I know more than a fair share of people who are now gone. Just as a disclaimer, I don't mean what I'm about to write to be a tribute or a memorial, even though it still sort of will be, in a way. All I'm saying with this post is this: I sometimes think about the people that I know who have died, and their deaths have made grooves in me. Some of those grooves are deeper than others, but despite that, I think about these people relatively often, and I just wanted to get this down.

Jessica, she was in my kindergarten class and she died of a heart problem during the summer of kindergarten to first grade; Eric's grandfather, Eric was a childhood friend of mine and his grandfather was run down by a car while attempting to cross 108th Street in Forest Hills, Queens; Lisette, she was a girl I knew from middle school, a girl I actually dated for just one day, believe it or not; Jason Butler, he was a super charismatic, athletically talented and really nice guy I knew in high school who was hit by a truck as he was attempting to cross a street; Christine, she was a girl who was sick with cancer when I was in high school and eventually succumbed to the disease; Billy, he was a guy who used to hang around Great Neck and I think he died of an aneurism; my ex-girlfriend's brother, Joseph; my grandmother, Anna, who died of pneumonia a few days shy of her 95th birthday; Muriel Klein, my great aunt, who had lived in Howard Beach, Queens, for many years and had loved crosswords; Peter Franzoni, a kid who I had known from middle school and high school; Jessica Mena, a friend of mine and my good friend Matt's sister; Ellen Harris, my good friend Andrew's mother and a person I saw almost every other day for years on end; Dave Fleetwood, a supervisor for Chestnuthill Township, Pa., who was killed when a disgruntled citizen went on a shooting rampage at a township meeting.

Crazy, when I look at this paragraph above, this block, if you will, of deaths and lives lived. There's just so much there -- so much compression in it all. Perhaps the the strangest part of this whole undertaking, for me at least, is that when I read the names of the people listed in the paragraph above, I can often imagine their voices as well. And when I do, when I imagine their voices, it's then that much of what I think to be true or false gets thrown into question.

catharsis

I want to be a little greedy right now. I say that because I'm interested in writing what I'm about to write only to achieve catharsis. I've always felt that writing in general is a form of catharsis, and a lot of my entries have been partially inspired by a need for a catharsis of sorts, but I've never really written just to "get it all out." I usually write to share something I think worth sharing or to explain something or to offer a fresh and provocative perspective on a difficult issue.

But not this time. This time I want to write because I sorta have to just get it out.

About five months ago, I learned that the mother of an acquaintance of mine had cancer of the spine. Upon hearing the news, I was concerned the way you are concerned when you hear that something bad has happened to someone you only indirectly know and have never even met. I was absolutely rooting for this woman, let's call her Linda, but in all honestly, I didn't think too much of it.

Still, I was kept aware of Linda's progress. Linda's daughter-in-law is my girlfriend's good friend, and the next update that I got was that Linda had undergone chemo and surgery and the surgery had gone well. But even so, the daughter-in-law, let's call her Julie, reported, Linda wasn't doing that great. She was depressed. She was depressed because she thought her life was over. The surgery, as successful as it was, had been pretty involved and Linda's recovery was not coming along easy, which made Linda believe that she wasn't going to make it.

But she did make it. And as the months went by, she started to get stronger. In fact, one night, two months or so after the surgery, Julie came over our house looking very cheerful, which was strange during this period because just how stressful the ordeal was for her and probably everyone else involved was often written on her face, and told my girlfriend and me that Linda was actually now doing a lot better. She was convalescing nicely and was feeling a lot happier in general. Julie said that Linda had gotten over the depression and seemed to have a new lease on life.

As I listened to Julie speak about Linda, I felt genuinely encouraged. I was happy Linda was doing much better -- perhaps she going to be even stronger than she had been -- and she now seemed ready to move on with her life.

Again, Linda and her condition slipped to the back of my mind. I really didn't think much more about her, until a month later when my girlfriend got a call on her cellphone from Julie. "What!" my girlfriend exclaimed into the phone. "Oh no…."

Oh no was right. Julie called to say that the cancer was back -- and with a vengeance. And to make matters worse, Linda was too weak to undergo any more chemo or surgery. The doctors said that the situation was so desperate that they thought it would be best if Julie and all Linda's relatives drop everything and come to the hospital to be with her.

Terrible news, of course, but honestly, I held out hope. I was sure that with all the medical miracles that are worked these days, the doctors would be able to help Linda in some way and that she would be OK. My girlfriend said that she thought I was being naive, but I didn't think I was, and I just chalked up my girlfriend's grave attitude to her being German -- "always" looking on the down side.

But two weeks after this phone call, my girlfriend got a brief Facebook message. Linda had died. The spinal cancer that had come back after her surgery truly was vicious, and it ultimately led to kidney failure and death. All I said upon hearing the news was one exasperated word, "No…" The news hit me hard. It hit me hard not only because it had all occurred so quickly but because even though I had never met Linda, over time I had become invested in her; I was sorta there with her. I was with her when she was down, but I was with her when she was up, too. I had really put, or had tried to put, myself in her shoes and feel with her when I had learned she was really down and I had really tried to feel with her when I had learned she was feeling up again, too.

But then to learn that the cancer came back with such a vengeance and that death came with what seemed like atavistic speed, it really shook me. Maybe I'm naive. Some people have called me that. But for what it's worth -- and I really don't know what it is worth -- the whole story still hurts me. 

The off season

I WANT TO TALK about a really nice time I had with my mom last February. It all began when I took two weeks off from my job in Pennsylvania and went home to my mother’s house in Great Neck, Long Island.

At the time, I was very close to moving away to Germany, to finally joining my girlfriend, who lives there. I was to leave to Germany in two months, in April, actually. Thus, my mom and I knew that we should make the most of our time together.

My mom suggested that we go to Montauk for a few days. I think she thought it would be nice to see the seals that are supposed to migrate both to Montauk and the Hamptons during the winter and can be seen along the region's beaches.

I agreed to the trip and we set off early one morning during the beginning or the middle of the week. My mom wanted to make the time in Montauk really nice so she suggested we stay at a hotel that is well known and is right on the Atlantic Ocean. During the winter, the hotels in the Hamptons and Montauk don’t have nearly as many bookings so you can get a really good rate on a room.

We got to the hotel and even though it indeed was amazingly situated -- on a bluff, a few feet away from the Atlantic Ocean -- it was nothing too extravagant. A series of bungalows comprised the place and many of those bungalows, from the outside at least, were relatively basic and were on stilts.

As my mom checked in, I wandered over to an area in the lobby where there were display cases advertising merchandise sold in several of the hotel’s shops. In front of one of these display cases was a cocktail table and on it a glass bottle filled with water. There were several tiny cups half filled with water in front of the bottle. A small sign on the table said the cups were filled with the bottle’s contents and that I should help myself to a try.

I picked up one of the small cups, took a sip and was immediately shocked and disgusted. It was salty! It was warm, salty...saltwater! I examined the label on the bottle  -- I had only glanced at it before --  as well as the sign that told me to help myself. The label explained that what I had in front of me was local seawater, thought to be salubrious. The sign said that anyone interested in buying this particular brand of bottled seawater could purchase it in one of the hotel’s shops.

I must have looked a bit disconcerted after having drunk this liquid because when my mom finally came to collect me, she asked why I looked so strange.

“Oh, no reason,” I told her.

We wanted to go to the lighthouse that afternoon and look around for the seals but we both said that first we wanted to have a glance at our room. We walked out of the lobby, crossed the parking lot and walked into our building, "3."

The first thing I noticed about our room was the view. The room itself was smart and tidy but the huge window near one of the double beds was the pièce de résistance. We overlooked the ocean. In fact, we were so close to the ocean and on such a high perch that when you looked out the window all you saw was ocean, and sky, of course. There was a big balcony made of wood and even though it was relatively early in the day, the soft, evocative light falling on the room’s wall and carpet looked like something out of an Edward Hopper painting.

“Shall we go to the lighthouse?” my mom asked. I said yeah and we were on our way.

THE MONTAUK LIGHTHOUSE is very big. It’s also famous. It is located at the very end --  literally, at the very tip -- of Long Island, which is one of the reasons why it’s such a draw. Usually, tons of tourists can be seen mulling around the lighthouse, the lighthouse visitors center and the beach. But not on this day. The entire parking lot near the lighthouse was all but empty. My mom and I wanted to find the trail that was supposed to start on the beach in front of the lighthouse and end at the spot on the beach where the seals are known to congregate in winter, but there were no signs for it. We asked a few surfers who were hanging out by their car in the parking lot if they knew how to find this trail but they were as clueless as we were.

My mom thought the best idea would be to make a few calls on her cell phone for information. As she did this, I walked away from her and onto a promenade, where I began taking pictures with a camera I’d brought with me. It was a cloudless day, must have been around 48 to 50 degrees, and even though we didn’t yet know exactly how to find the place we wanted to go, I figured I’d take advantage of the moment. I took pictures of the ocean, of the big white lighthouse with that thick maroon cummerbund around its midsection and of the quarter-operated binocular towers that were on the promenade.

When my mom got off the phone, she was squinting because the sun was in her eyes but she was also smiling. I’m not exactly sure whom she called but she now thought she knew where to find the trail.

We found a break in the thicket separating the outer edges of the parking lot from the sandy beach and together walked onto the beach. Which, it turned out, was deserted too.

But my God, was it beautiful. The sky was a pure blue and the light was magnificent. Actually, the light in the Hamptons and Montauk, I should stop to say, is very special. It’s a very calm, warm light, which really brings out the essence of things. We walked closer to the shore and were immediately awed by the array of shells that were on the ground. Big shells, small shells, bright orange shells, iridescent shells, bone-white shells, tiny shells, shells with amethyst-color swirls, striated shells, shells with holes, blue shells.

My mom and I fight, or quarrel, a lot but sometimes when we’re surrounded by art or things that are beautiful or awe-inspiring, we get on this wavelength where we feed off each other’s passion for the objects at hand and subsequently whip ourselves into a kind of euphoria as we discuss and compare them.

This was one of those times.

There were dozens of impossibly large seagulls landing in the surf, touching down amid the palpable sea mist, and there we were, walking along a beach that was all our own, just amazed by the myriad of seashells and by all the pieces of driftwood and other natural objects.

After walking the beach for some time with our noses to the ground, we finally got to the place where the seals were supposed to be. It was a little eerie because we had walked several miles and the entire time we hadn’t seen another soul. The lighthouse was to our backs and by now appeared very small; tall grasses springing forth from sand and the odd pond were to our left, the vast ocean to our right.

I spotted a homemade sign planted in the sand that said that the path leading to the seals was straight ahead and in order to gain access to it all you had to do was first go off the beach and walk up on the large dune that was visible straight ahead

I showed the sign to my mom and said, “Look, we’re almost there.” I started to walk off the beach, into the grassy area, when my mom told me to stop, not to go. Though I protested, I knew what she was talking about: if we walked off the beach, we’d be walking away from any semblance of safety. Though by no means did it appear that we were in any kind of danger or would be if we left the beach, I sorta knew in my heart that, in this remote area, it would not be that wise to walk off the beach, where at least we were visible to others who might come on it.

I protested a little more, saying, “Come on! We want to see the seals.” But my mom said that she didn’t think it was a good idea and that she thought we should turn around and go back. I ceded to her wishes in a grudging manner but I was secretly happy that she had made the suggestion.

The sun was casting a bronze light on the entire landscape by this point, and we took our time as we headed back to the lighthouse, stopping every few minutes to look at the shells or to pick them up or compare them.

All the beachcombing really worked up our appetites and when we finally got back into town -- it’s about a 15-minute drive from the beach -- we were happy to see that at least one store was open, a pizza place. Montauk is essentially a fishing village and even though it has become trendier in recent years, there still aren’t many restaurants or stores in the old town, and whatever is there isn’t often open in February, the off season.

We walked into the pizza place and after we had had our fill -- I had a buffalo chicken slice and my mom got a corner Sicilian slice, just like she always does -- we decided to stroll the streets a bit. All the stores and buildings on the main drag in the old village are mostly two-stories, which makes you feel like you could be sauntering down some Main Street out of the1950s. I remember thinking it was curious to see a fishing shop boarded up. A fishing shop out of business...in Montauk? Maybe those boards on the windows were there to protect the glass in a storm, I hypothesized.

We walked a little more and remarked on things like how peculiar we found it that a six-story apartment building was constructed among all the two-story buildings and how this six-story building stuck out like a sore thumb. We decided to turn into an alleyway for some reason and there we happened upon a huge seagull sitting on the roof of a car. My mom slowly took out her camera and took a picture.

BACK AT THE HOTEL, we decided we wanted to have dinner but we also wanted first to just hang out a bit. I decided I’d go workout for a few. The hotel’s workout room was within the hotel’s spa, so I walked to the building that housed the spa. There was almost no one there. A receptionist greeted me and told me how to get to the workout room. I repeated back to her the directions she had just given me, just to be sure, and then walked down this long hallway that had floor-to-ceiling mirrors on the right side and floor-to-ceiling windows on the left. The ocean was right there. The workout room was all mirrors and glass, as well. The workout machines were really nice and new and only a handful of people were working out in this room. But the best thing about the experience of working out in this particular spot, I thought, was the fact that it was possible to look out at the ocean while exercising. Again, I couldn’t help but think that in some way, because of that light, I was in an Edward Hopper painting.

When I got back to the room, my mom was sitting on her bed listening to the TV and looking at the shells she had collected. We both agreed we should go to dinner soon. But first my mom said she’d like to take a walk.

When she left, I took out some art supplies that I had brought with me. I had been learning how to paint with watercolors around this time and I sort of felt inspired. As my mom walked the darkening beach --  the sun was really beginning to go down at this point -- I sat at the desk and painted a seashell. At one point I walked onto the balcony and looked down. I saw my mom walking on the beach. The dusk was gathering and above the iron-gray horizon the sky was a band of red fading into a band of orange. You could hear the waves crashing and my mom looked absolutely tiny as she walked on this huge beach with no one else on it. She was bundled up and wearing ear warmers and the wind was blowing her hair. I went back into the room and finished the painting.

At dinner, we sat in a glass room that looked out at only blackness but by day looked out at the ocean. My mom didn’t order anything special but I had prime rib, and we sat there and talked and I felt like a real adult. I knew that I was going to be leaving to Europe pretty soon and I didn’t know when I’d be back, so I was really able to see my mom in a different light. I was able to evaluate the importance of our relationship. You don’t usually get to appreciate someone like that, at least while they’re still around. It was nice, sitting there with my mom, a candle on our table, talking over our meal and then over dessert, coffee and ice cream.

The next day we got up and drove back. It was kinda sad but OK, too. I missed my girlfriend and I wanted to talk with her on the phone. I hadn’t wanted my girlfriend to bother me with phone calls when I was hanging out with my mom, but by now I missed her and wanted to talk to her. During the car ride back, I napped a tiny bit. I also read a bit to my mom from “Moby-Dick.” I had been reading the book and I had kept mentioning how boring I was finding it, so my mom told me to read a few pages to her so she could hear for herself. She listened as she drove on the Long Island Expressway but after a few minutes she said that I should probably stop. It was too hard to drive and simultaneously pay attention to the difficult prose of that epic novel.

Pretty woman

So today I saw a pretty woman. Man, she was pretty.

I had just finished an appointment tutoring English and I was walking to the train station from the building where the appointment had been. It was a gray day and I put in my earphones and turned on my iPod to enliven the walk. The iPod was set to "shuffle" and the second song that came on was "Pretty Woman" by Roy Orbison. I was thinking about how utterly catchy and simple the opening drum riff is -- dun! dun! dun! dun! -- as I walked, passing an imposing brick penitentiary to my right. The song was up to the bridge, that part where it's like, "Pretty woman stop a while/Pretty woman talk a while," when I saw her.

But I hadn't known that she was pretty yet.

I just noticed that she was a girl. I saw that she was wearing tight pink jeans and brown boots. I was crossing the street toward her and she was bending down. But it wasn't anything sexy by any means. She was bending down because a piece of paper that had been in her hand -- I think it was a napkin -- had fallen out of her hand. The wind was blowing the napkin away from her and she was trying to catch it. She finally did and when she did, she quickly turned completely away from me and lifted the metal hatch to a dumpster that was behind her.

I noticed at this point that she was tall but I also noticed that her pants were sagging in the back, by her butt. I was unhappy about this because I couldn't check out her butt with her pants like that...I couldn't make out her form with her pants sagging. Also, I thought, "Wow, it looks like not every girl in Germany is perfectly put together." Because, man, girls in Germany, at least from what I have found, are always perfectly put together -- perfectly fitting jeans, tops, coats; perfect make up, hair; perfectly coordinating colors. But this woman's jeans, gosh darn it, were sagging in the back (though, to be fair, her look may have been thrown off a bit because she had been crouching when she was trying to catch the napkin).

Once I fully crossed the street -- at this point, you should know, the song was up to the part, "Pretty woman, yeah, yeah, yeah..." -- she turned from the garbage and looked my way.

And she was pretty.

She had brown-blonde hair up to her shoulders and every single strand, I swear, seemed to fall into place. Her face had sculpture. It was almost like a doll's face, but the woman was there. Yes, she did have high cheekbones, like many women and men here in Germany; the stereotype is true. Her eyes were blue and she wore just a touch of gray eye shadow, which turned them from what must have been a basic blue to royal blue. She was fit with a nice fitting coat and suede boots -- jeans tucked into them -- and the hood of her coat was fringed with what looked like fox hair.

She looked right at me and she was that kind of pretty that you just look in her face and you think, "Wow, now that's a pretty woman right there." And you get this feeling like, "Even if everything isn't perfect in my life, it's still kinda cool to be alive and to be able to have a pretty woman look you straight in the face like that."

I gave her a sympathetic smile -- after all, I'd just watched her chase after a dirty napkin and then lug open a big garbage hatch to deposit it. She didn't react to my look. She just looked at me.

I kept on walking until she was out of the frame of my view. Though she was out of my direct sight, something was still reverberating in my imagination. I didn't look back, though. I just kept on my way, listening to "Pretty Woman" and thinking about how it really is nice to see one.

Dun! dun! dun! dun!

Explained: "sympathy" vs. "empathy"

OK, I have a lot of energy right now so I think I'm just going to bang out a post. I want to discuss for a hot second something that has confused me when writing and when talking. "Sympathy" vs. "empathy." Come on, you know that you, too, have at some point been confused about when to use which.

But today, I finally got it. What happened was I was in a library waiting to meet someone and as I sat there waiting I noticed a big ol' Oxford English Dictionary sitting on a shelf. I had a few minutes before this person was to arrive, so I thought, "Let me finally try to get to the bottom of this 'sympathy' vs. 'empathy' thing." I had tried to get my head around the distinction in the past but had never been perfectly successful.

So I went over, grabbed the dictionary and opened it. And I finally got it, I think.

But I'm not going to reproduce here the exact OED definitions that I read. I'm not going to try to explain the difference between the two words to you that way. Instead, I'm going to sorta summarize both definitions and then help you fully get it by using the words in separate scenarios.

So basically "sympathy" is when you feel for someone; like, when you try your best to show a person that you care for his or her feelings. "Empathy" is when you actually understand and can really relate to the other person's feelings.

So, to illustrate "sympathy." Let's say you miss a very, very important train because the taxi you called to take you from your hotel to the train station was late, then got stuck in traffic, then was further delayed because the main road leading to the train station was closed.

Now, when you finally arrive at the ticket booth of the train station to see if another train is heading to the same destination later in the day, you say to the ticket booth worker: "Damn it! I can't believe I just missed my train. Now I probably won't be able to see my friend in another city who is very sick. I tried to make the train and wanted to so bad, but so many things prevented me."

If the ticket booth worker says to you -- "Jeez, I am so sorry. It sounds as though you tried to run to get here as fast as you could and it was very difficult for you. I see you're sweating. This all must have been very hard for you.  Let me see if there is anything I can do. Maybe we can get you on a special train tonight to where you need to go..." -- then she would be expressing sympathy for you. She cares for your feelings.

However, if the ticket booth worker were to have this response -- "Oh my god, I am so sorry that you missed the train to your friend. That's terrible. I remember one time, I also missed a train that I needed desperately. And I know exactly how you feel because I was actually on my way to see a friend that needed me really badly, too, and it was so terrible not to be able to be there for him because I just wanted to give him my support. I understand exactly what you must be going through"-- then the ticket booth worker would be empathetic to you. She understands -- truly understands -- your feelings.

Yup, so there it is, folks: the difference between "sympathy" and "empathy." I hope you've enjoyed the show.

Just thinkin back

Me free-associating about my childhood in Forest Hills, Queens. It's interesting if you're feeling patient.

My grandma coming to pick me up from school because I say I'm sick but I'm really just faking sick so I can go home and play "Super Mario 3." The plants that were in that area near the Zenith TV and how the air-conditioner always sounded so nice and it was always so cold and when you looked across the street you saw a parking lot with yellow lines separating the spots, and cinder blocks. Oh, and in the back there was a fire escape and we had this giant metal gate behind the window that let out onto the fire escape so no one could break in and there was a padlock on this gate and the key to the padlock was on the dusty windowsill and how my mom had put a chunky plastic keychain on the key to this huge gate. I was always scared to unlock that gate. I think I did it once. And all the pennants I had on my wall. I had Mets pennants on my wall and the way I used to stare out at my mom in the living room from the bedroom. She was watching TV on the couch but in the railroad apartment at night I always liked to look out at her and how it made me feel good if I could see her. And that humidifier we had. I was always fascinated by it. It was green and what was a humidifier? And why did we have it? But I knew the name, I learned that word, "humidifier." And how when I would flush the toilet it would always make this sound: "Joo-weh-jeh." Strange, right? And there was that time when I had gotten up in the early morning to pee and started thinking thoughts like, "Where did language come from?" and how, after I told my mom that I was thinking thoughts like that, she told me she was impressed that I was thinking thoughts like that and asking questions like that. And that fuzzy couch that we had in the living room and how it was, like, grey and black or something and the rug, which was red and huge and had some kind of Native American pattern on it. Whoa. And how I'd look out of the window at night in the winter and there would be snow on everything, on the branches, on the railings, on the air-conditioner boxes, in the streets, and how everything would sort of glow with a pinkish glow and you'd hear the crunch of one person digging his car out of the snow and how the window was so cold and how the window was not new and how the window frame was made of wood and the wood was rotted away in one or two places and how it looked like if you threw a stone at the window, it would definitely shatter. The whole damn thing would definitely shatter. And then there was that caged staircase across the street that I once dreamt about. I once dreamt that my aunt and I walked down this staircase. In reality the staircase led to the basement of a laundromat or a supermarket. But in the dream the stairs led down to a diner and my aunt and I sat at blue, plush, swivel stools and ordered lots of food and lived it up down there, like it was a hot spot, like it was a social club or something like that. And I swore, I swore that we had really been down there together. And how I once wanted to sleep over at my aunt's apartment, across the lobby, on the other side of the apartment building, but then chickened out when it actually came time to do it. I told my aunt I wanted to go back to my apartment, to my mom, and she took me. And how I was once told that someone once swiped my aunt's purse from off her fire escape when she left it on her fire escape. And how I just could not understand that. What would she ever be doing on her fire escape? (She was smoking.) And how exactly did it happen? Did a hand just reach somewhere and grab it in the night or something? And where was everyone when this hand, this disembodied hand, stole this purse? And that was why we kept the fire escape locked. And yeah, you had to walk up to my aunt's apartment. She was not on the first floor. And you walked up there and once you arrived at the top of the stairs, you did an about face. And if you kept walking straight you'd arrive at her doorstep. Just remember a smothered type of feeling in her dining room. But nothing bad. Oh, but remember pictures of the same scene but with my mom wearing a sweatshirt that she'd gotten made up that said, "I Love Chad Reid." How about that, huh? And playing handball with myself in the hallway and how the big Eastern European immigrant families would set up tables in the hallways -- in the hallways -- and eat in the hallways because they couldn't fit all of the guests into their homes. Georgia, Ukraine, Lithuania. These people were from these places.

Pretty darn good

My mother is an interesting character. She loves literature, can identify great writing, can write incredibly well herself -- just ask the New York Daily News; it has published about 10 of her "letters to the editor" -- but she doesn't "enjoy" writing. So she doesn't write that much, or as much as I think she should.

Still, there are some times when she'll be on a trip overseas or walking on a beach, among driftwood and a myriad of unique sea stones, and she'll get inspired and put pen to paper. When such moments of inspiration strike, she often writes haikus because she believes that the format "focuses your mind and helps you find a succinct sharp description…."

Recently, she emailed me one of her haikus. She was on a trip out West -- my mom loves it out West -- and she was visiting a place called Antelope Canyon, in Arizona. The site is known for its spectacular sandstone rock formations. Inspiration struck -- after all, did you see the picture above? -- and, boom, I had a photo of the site and a poem describing it in my inbox.

But my mom, you should know, is modest. So in the email, she sent the following message alongside her poem: "Not great poetry, but I was looking for a verbal description."

Well, Ma, I beg to differ. I thought the haiku was pretty darn good. Here it is:

Swirling waves sandstone rock
Crimson tight sharp corkscrew turns
Antelope Canyon

Gun violence hits home: thoughts and memories

Wow. The old saying "you never think it can happen to you" is unfortunately resonating with me now. On Monday night, a man armed with a gun shot to death three people, including a person I know -- at a municipal meeting in Ross Township, Pennsylvania. Ross Township was a township that I used to cover when I was working at the Pocono Record. Four townships were under my charge; Ross, a rural community with rolling hills and long country roads, was one of them.

Sadly, I know that gun violence is endemic in America. But you're not prepared -- just as many say -- when it happens to you or people you know. And, to top it all off, the reporter who was hired to replace me was at the meeting and barely escaped with this life.

Anyway, in recent days, I've done a lot of thinking, especially about one of the victims. I knew him personally, as he was a township official with whom I often worked. His name was Dave Fleetwood. But let me not go any further. Below I'm going to copy what I wrote in my journal on Tuesday, the night after the attack. I wrote the entry -- which focuses mostly my interactions with Dave -- sitting in my kitchen late at night. The text is verbatim. I hope you get something out of it.

Well, what can I say. Today I got some fucked up news from the U.S. I learned that a gunman stormed the Ross Township building during a monthly supervisors meeting and killed three people, including someone I used to know. The gunman killed Dave Fleetwood, who is the supervisor of Chestnuthill Township and the zoning codes officer of Ross.

But anyway, yeah. I'm stunned and sad. Real sad. This guy, Dave Fleetwood. He was a good guy. He liked to joke around, in his funny dry way. I spoke with him several times and was really hoping that he wasn't going to be one of the victims. But he was. When I learned today that it was Mr. Fleetwood who in fact was killed, I yelled out "fuck." I didn't even mean to yell that. It just sorta came out.

Anyway, I just can't believe he's gone. I don't know. Dave wasn't that outgoing, but he definitely acknowledge me when I would show up to meetings while working for the Pocono Record. Some supervisors, believe it or not,  wouldn't acknowledge me. But Dave did. I also remember he gave me a story tip. I had showed up to the Ross Township building one day looking for someone but they weren't there. But Dave was there and he recommended that I do a story on the E-911 readdressing stuff. I said that I'd look into it and did. The story didn't materialize because it had been done. But still. It was nice of him to have given me a tip. 

One of the strongest recollections I have of Dave is also, ironically, one I can't exactly remember. It was at the Chestnuthill Township building and it was at night. Oh, wait, I think I know what happened. I showed up to the Chestnuthill building at around 8 p.m. in early April. It was for a supervisors meeting and it was a rainy night. When I got there, I saw through a glass door that no one except the supervisors was in attendance. Anyway, all the supervisors were sitting at a long table at the front of the room, the town-hall room. They were sitting under a light, talking. The door to this town-hall room was locked and I was outside, looking in, getting rained on. I knocked on the door, which, again, was made of glass, and Dave Fleetwood, who along with the other supervisors was able to clearly see me, pretended he couldn't hear or see me even though he and the other supervisors obviously could. (They had a direct line of site at the glass door, which was about 15 feet from their table.) And so I, the unfortunate butt of this little joke, stood for a few more moments in the pouring rain. Eventually, one of the supervisors -- it might have even been Fleetwood -- got up, let me in and we all had a big laugh about it. 

Another memory I have of Fleetwood: I was at another meeting and there was a heated discussion going on and I was sitting in the front row and I wanted to ask a question but for some reason I couldn't. Dave, who was sitting at the head table in front, saw on my face that I wanted to ask a question and he actually knew from the context what the question was. Once he got all this, he actually interrupted the meeting and said, "But wait. I think Chad wants to ask a question and I think I know what the question is." He did, and answered it. I remember being very impressed.

Two other people were killed in this attack that claimed Fleetwood's life. But Fleetwood was the only township official. The other folks were regular citizens. The gunman, apparently, was someone who had a long-standing feud with the township. I guess the township condemned his property or something. The Pocono Record quoted the gunman as saying he wish he would have killed more people. A Pocono Record reporter was even at the meeting! My replacement!

But anyway, yeah, Dave Fleetwood. I'm really sad. And the gun culture in America...something really needs to be fixed. But Dave was a good guy. And now all this. And now all fucking this. 

Little helper

Today, I had the coolest little experience.

I was sitting in a cafe with a cup of coffee, trying to kill some time. I had an appointment at 11 a.m. but it was only 10:15, and so I decided I’d hang out at the cafe, get some coffee and play chess on my MacBook until I had to leave.

Now, the chess program that comes with the MacBook is very powerful, and I sorta have a rivalry with it. The program doesn’t make any mistakes, per se, so you really just have to overpower it to win. Your play must be sound and aggressive.

I had the white pieces and I therefore made the first move. After a few minutes the program and I were deep into the game and I was lost in thought. Just so you should know, the computer and I were in a “French Defense”-type position. In such positions, the board is pretty cramped with pieces and players are forced to do much maneuvering before any attack can be launched.  

After move 12, I had gained the “initiative,” meaning I had a slight advantage and was controlling the flow of the game.

Anyway, so there I was, deep into the game and doing well, when this cute little kid -- he must have been 9 or 10 -- just sorta floated over to my table. 

I really had no idea where he came from. He was a small, mixed-race boy with light-brown skin and frizzy black hair.  I think he walked into the cafe with a white woman.  

At any rate, before I knew it, the boy was right beside me, looking at the game on the screen.

I didn’t really mind -- although, admittedly, having this curious kid right by my side was a little distracting -- and I just kept on playing. When I’m into a chess game, I don’t stop to talk with anyone.

But then he started talking to me.

“Spielst du Schach?” he asked, German for “Do you play chess?” I said, "Yeah." Then I asked him if he played. He said he also did, and we went on looking at my game.

I told him what I was aiming for, what my strategy was. My bishop and my queen,  I said, speaking in German and also using hand gestures, were working in tandem and were taking aim at black’s pawn on h7, the pawn right in front of black’s king. 

After I told him my strategy, he recommended a move; he recommended that I use my pawn to chase away the black knight on black's kingside. After all, he reasoned, this knight was protecting the black king from checkmate.

I told my little buddy that I appreciated this idea, but if I actually put it into practice, it would be a waste of a move because the knight would be able to retreat to a square where it could still protect black from checkmate.

But then he said something really, well, sweet, I guess. He said in German, “Let’s just see what happens.” And even though I knew the move he was proposing wasn’t the best, I appreciated his curiosity, so I made it. 

And, well, yeah. The black knight retreated to the exact square I thought it would. Yes, you could have called it a pointless move. But, then again, maybe the move wasn’t such a pointless one for my young friend.

At any rate, with the black knight now settled into its new defensive outpost I tried to find some other attacking moves. I found a few good ones, but I didn’t make any of them without consulting my little friend first.

And together, we forged on. I told him my thoughts on the game, he his.

I tried to find a way to win; I really did. But it was a bit difficult because, even though I wanted to make the moves I wanted, I also didn’t want to discourage this kid by not paying attention to his ideas. And so what wound up happening was I made some of the moves he recommended despite my better judgment.

And, well, because I did this, our initiative started to disappear. The computer stabilized its position and things began to look bad for us. But that was OK, I thought, because by that point, I had to leave the cafe and get to my appointment. 

I told my friend that I had to go and therefore we unfortunately couldn’t finish our game. But he asked me to stay just for a little longer. He wanted to play more. I couldn’t help but find a few more minutes.

Owing to the fact that I knew the game was totally lost at this point, I let him take over completely. I let him make a move that invited a nasty check from the computer. Even though the consequences of making such a move were obvious to me, he was totally dumbfounded. But that’s OK.  

And then, finally, I saw what the computer was setting up for. It moved its bishop to c5, and now had our king directly in its crosshairs. The computer was setting up for the coupe de grâce.

My little friend, though, still didn’t think the game was over. But I told him in German that we were in serious trouble. “Uh oh,” I said,  “Wir haben grosse Probleme. “We have big problems.” I told him to look at the enemy bishop on c5 and how we would be in “discovered check” -- a very bad thing to be in -- once the enemy rook moved away from the square right near our king. The end was clearly close.

But still, my buddy was not discouraged. I pointed to the bishop and I showed him how the enemy had coordinated its pieces to checkmate us.  And then I said, “Guck mal. Wir sind tot. Aber es ist schoen.” “Look, we’re dead. But we’re being killed in a very elegant way.”

Finally, the little fellah saw. “Ahh, ya,” he said. “Schachmatt” – “checkmate.”

And so I moved, and then black moved its rook, just as I had thought, and indeed we were checkmated. 

After looking at the screen for a few seconds, just to see exactly how the deathblow was dealt, the little kid joined his mom or guardian -- I’m not exactly sure who this  woman was -- and I said, “Chess is fun” in German, and he agreed.

I then cleaned up around the area where I was sitting and said goodbye to them both.

It was the coolest little experience.  

My rejected poem

Here's a poem of mine that recently was rejected by the New Yorker. I think it's good, damn it.

Judgment

Ring-ring!

Yes;

Speaking;

This is he...

But never.

God, never.

Please, please never.

It is him.

Simple but very cool

This footage I found on YouTube of Nirvana's 1989 Bleach tour is super interesting. Though the video pretty much just shows the band on the road, doing their thing, and the moments that are captured might seem mundane, I feel like the video feels kinda special. If anything, it's a testament to the coolness of technology. I mean, video cameras capture and can transport us in an instant back to these moments that probably would have otherwise just fallen through the cracks of our fingers like fine sand.

Check it out. I think the video gets really cool around 1:34, when Krist says, "We should move in our stuff before it starts raining."

Funny how things work

Normally, I don't usually write about the dreams I have. Everyone knows dreams are crazy and everyone's dreams are crazy. So it's not usually that interesting. But last night I had a dream that was, well, yes, crazy, but also gives a lot of insight into how the mind and things work. So I'll tell.

It all started on Friday night -- in real life now -- when was I sitting in someone's living room. I was hanging out with a bunch of people, we were all drinking wine and I was a bit buzzed. As we sat there, someone recommended we put on a British sitcom. At first I moaned because I just never found British humor funny.

Anyway, this person, a girl, eventually put on the show, and, as I had suspected, I didn't find it funny. It was all, well, British. But the girl kept on raving about it. I told her I didn't get it. Then I told her that I wondered if it was me. Did I just not get it or something? Was British humor an acquired taste? I just didn't find any of it funny.

This girl said that she didn't think that British humor was an acquired taste, but she did say that if you watch British sitcoms, you really have to pay attention to find it funny. Another person in the living room chimed in and said, "Yeah, you're not going to turn on a sitcom like this"  -- referring to the one on the TV -- "and go in the kitchen and cook yourself dinner while keeping an ear on it." They both agreed you really need to pay attention.

Sensing that I was still a bit frustrated with this answer, the girl said, "Well, in all honesty, maybe it's not good to start you off with this kind of show. It's a bit sophisticated." So she quickly went to YouTube and found something that she thought was simpler, a British humor skit that was perhaps more accessible to an American.

She clicked play. The skit all about this guy who goes fishing at night. And something strange happens. This guy, he's fishing and he is out there on the water and all of a sudden some sort of fish creature, some sort of ugly, scaly, half-man-half-fish, drag-queen looking creature with seaweed on his head jumps on his boat.

The creature guy, whose wearing a pink tutu, mind you, exposes himself to this man and a ray of light  shoots forth from his genitals and hits the man in the eyes. The ray of light knocks the unconscious. When the guy wakes up, he is now in the swampy lair that this creature, this loathsome, detestable funky creature calls home. 

The guy tells the fish man that he wants to leave, that he has places to be and wants to go home but the swamp-thing stalls. The creature tells the guy he should have some Bailey's Irish Cream -- it's pretty much the only thing this creature has in his "home" -- and he has bottles and bottles of it! 

Anyway, the two talk and the creature -- who says his name is Old Gregg -- suddenly asks the guy -- "Do love me?" And the guy flatly answers no. But then the creature says, "Do you think you could ever love me?" Again, the guy says no. The creature keeps going, "Do you think you could learn to love me?" Same response. Then the creature finally says, "You do love me." The two argue and the guy finally says, "I find you slightly pathetic, so deal with that." The creature, slightly stung, says, "Maybe I will deal with it, hmm. Maybe I'll deal with it the way I dealt with Curly Jefferson!" and points to a spot in the layer directly above the guy's head. The guy looks up and, directly above him,  a few feet up, is this guy, like, glued to the ceiling, dead. The dead man's face is a bit mutilated and frozen in a horrifying grimace. 

So the guy, now scared and probably fearing for his life, says, "You know what...maybe I was being a bit hasty there when I said I didn't love you." Just as quickly as he said he didn't love him, now says, "Perhaps now, in this light, with you, in the tutu, and the...water playing off your...seaweed...maybe I... could love you. Maybe I was lying because sometimes when you do love someone you...say you don't because...you're playing hard to get, playing a game." 

Eventually, after a little more talk and a musical number that the two perform together, the creature says that he'll take the guy back above ground, back to dry land, the real world, if he agrees to "take my hand" -- which is really a flipper -- "in marriage." 

Seeing a way out of this hell, the guy agrees, and the creature puts a ring on him and the two go back up to the real world. The skit ends with the creature in a wedding dress standing on top of a moving van driven by the guy. (Don't ask.) The creature, standing up there on the roof, wind blowing in his sea weed,  lifts up his skirt. His genitals again emit a ray of light and he gives off one final, thunderous shout, "I'm Old Gregg!"

After the skit ended, I was bewildered. I didn't think it was really very funny -- all right, maybe a tiny, tiny bit. But I really thought it was strange, almost disturbing, that people would actually think such a skit was funny. "What's up with those people in Britain," I thought.

Anyway, skip ahead a little to later in the night. I get home, brush my teeth and go to bed. And I have this dream. And in my dream, I'm telling my mother about having watched this skit. I'm saying, "Ma, you should have seen this British humor skit that I watched. It was really awful." And then I start recounting the details. The guy, the freaky fish creature, his swampy lair. And then I start telling my mom that the only thing that this creature has in his lair is bottles and bottles of Bailey's Irish Cream. I tell my mom how the creature keeps on offering his "guest" more glasses of Irish Cream. 

And, all of a sudden in my dream, that seems kinda funny. 

And then I tell my mom how the fish-man suddenly asks his reluctant guest through blubbery, red lipstick-painted lips, "Could you love me?" And how the guy dryly says "No." And how they go back and forth with that. OK, I think in my dream, that's actually pretty funny. Then I tell my mom how the guy gets scared by seeing the last person who refused the fish-man's advances and how the guy then quickly changes his tune and says, "You know, I think I could love you...Maybe I was just playing hard to get."

And all this starts to seem really, really funny. As I tell my mom all these details, the skit, in fact,  seems more and more like a riot. 

So yeah.

Now skip ahead to my waking up today. I wake up and I realize that I had this dream, and I think to myself, "Holy crap, was that skit funny? I think it was. I think it actually might have been one of the funniest things I've seen in a long time." And I really, really want to watch the skit again. And so I do. 

And now I think it's funny as heck.

But first I had to recount the details in a dream and think they were funny in a dream before I could process it all and think it's funny in real life.

***

Here's the actual skit. Let me know what you think.

Dexter Filkins

When I was in J-school at NYU, I took a profile writing class. The final assignment in the class, which was awesome and was taught by the singular Meryl Gordon, was to write a magazine-length profile story. I chose Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist Dexter Filkins. Filkins, who at that point had been writing for the New York Times but now writes for the New Yorker, had spent many years in Iraq, covering the war for the Times. But the war and being so far from home took its toll on Filkins, and I found that compelling. I wrote the story, got an A in the class and shopped the article around to lots of magazines. But  no one bought the piece. However, an editor at New York Magazine wrote this to me, "Your story is well done, but so much has been written about Dexter in the past year that I think we're going to have to pass." Although he rejected it, I thought that was kind of cool. A "well done" from a New York Magazine editor.

Anyway, I figured this piece I wrote on Filkins should see the light of day. So below I'm posting it in its entirety. Hope you like it. 

By Chad Smith
 

DEXTER FILKINS IS trying to narrow the distance between two worlds.

In one world, he’s in Falluja with the marines battling for the city — bombs exploding, machine guns roaring, commanders barking orders, “Move!”

In the other world — the one he’s actually in at the moment — the world of Cambridge, Massachusetts, Filkins stands in front of a rapt audience. It’s early autumn and the New York Times foreign correspondent is here at the Harvard Bookstore on Massachusetts Avenue to read from his new book, The Forever War, an on-the-ground account of his last 10 years reporting from Afghanistan and Iraq.

Like most of the book’s passages, the one Filkins chooses tonight is gripping and honest. And suddenly at the Harvard Bookstore, the remote starts to feel too immediate.

“Gunfire rang out and we scrambled for the walls on the side of the street,” Filkins reads, as he looks out on a room packed tightly with serious-faced college students in crimson and professors in tweed. “The insurgents knew what they were doing; they were bracketing us with their shells, dropping them from left to right. They were falling now, exploding in titanic crashes, more closely this time. I’d seen mortars in the movies and even in Iraq but never this close and never so big. Their booms were crushing, and I imagined the shards of metal flying away from each shell. I felt sure we were going to die if we didn’t move, and I felt sure we would die if we did.”

At forty-seven, Dexter Filkins just may be one of the bravest — or craziest — men in journalism. As a leading Times correspondent in Iraq from 2003 to 2006, Filkins earned a reputation for his willingness to push physical, personal and logistical boundaries to near breaking points, if that’s what got the story. Best known for his dispatches from the blood-stained battle of Falluja in 2004, Filkins has extensively reported on the Muslim world and the war on terror, registering scores of major scoops for his newspaper. But it’s come with a price: Filkins’ personal life and emotional health haven’t gone unscathed. In some instances, his bold actions in the field have terrified colleagues, and in one case, the push to get the story resulted in a death. Still, many say, Filkins has gone to these lengths because that’s what it took to get the full picture to the readers back home.

A few weeks after the reading in Cambridge — a college town Filkins called the “quietest place on earth,” which may not be bad considering he wrote his book there on a fellowship in late ’06 — Filkins is in Manhattan. He’s agreed to stop for some coffee before heading to his newspaper’s headquarters in Midtown to learn what his next assignment will be.

Right on time and wearing his signature attire, black blazer, collared shirt (no tie) and khakis, Filkins is holding several Iraqi political posters rolled up under his arm, which he wants framed.

The Forever War has received across-the-board critical praise for its scope, its humanistic insights and the proximity with which it was written to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. In the book, Filkins describes everything from the bathroom habits of 6,000 marines, to the jihadi death threats his colleagues received, to the skyward eyes of a mortally wounded American soldier. Filkins is pleased with the reception, he says, but admits that the readings have left him tired.

“It’s draining and it’s exhausting and the war is a difficult thing to look back on because I keep finding myself in the middle of it, reliving it.”

Filkins, whose wispy, honey-brown hair is a bit more unkempt today than usual and whose grey circled eyes weigh down his otherwise boyish good looks, says that in each of the 17 cities to which he’s traveled for the book tour, he’s worked from the minute he’s landed to the minute he leaves — reading, signing, holding discussions, talking on radio shows and TV news programs. “It’s just a lot."
 
Certainly, this chink in the armor, the fatigue, wasn’t there six years ago when Dexter drove into Iraq alone in a rented car from Kuwait: The U.S. was invading and Filkins believed the best way to get closest to the story was by riding behind the tanks and sleeping in the desert.

But that was then. That was before the three and a half years of waking up day after day to car bombing after car bombing. Before nearly having his limbs torn off by an angry mob. Before the warm blood of a fatally shot marine splattered on his face.

Even so, there won’t be time to rest. Later, after the coffee, Filkins will visit the Times and learn that his editors have no intention of easing up on him. They’ve chosen the location for his next assignment, and it’s no safe place.

FOR THE PAST 11 years, it’s been this type of rhythm — a rhythm of departure and return, risk and relief, war and peace — that has come to define Dexter Filkins’ life. It began in 1997 when Filkins was working for the L.A. Times as a general assignment and political reporter. At the time, tension was flaring between Pakistan and India over nuclear weapons. Filkins happened to have a master’s in international relations, and the L.A. Times decided to take a chance on him, sending Filkins to head the paper’s bureau in New Delhi. The post would eventually lead to his foray into Pakistan and Afghanistan for stories.

Filkins would be one of the first to report on the Taliban. The extremist group even invited him in 1998 as a western journalist to watch an execution of a criminal in a Kabul sports stadium. Eventually, the Taliban expelled Filkins from Afghanistan after he started filing stories about its increasing brutality.  Filkins’ reporting from the region would make him a runner-up for the Pulitzer Prize. It would also catch the eye of the New York Times. In fall 2000, the grey lady recruited Dexter and brought him to New York. But he wouldn’t be staying in the city for long.

“I was in the New York Times newsroom one day and 9/11 had already happened, and it was one of those things where the foreign editor was walking by me and we started talking, and he was like, ‘Wait, you’ve been to Afghanistan, right?’ and I said, ‘Well, yeah.’ They pretty much sent me on the next plane over.”

By the winter of 2001, American forces had attacked Afghanistan in retaliation for September 11, driving the Taliban, said to be harboring Osama bin Laden, from power. Filkins, now back in Afghanistan after the American military’s intervention, said he was inspired by the Afghan people’s reaction. With the Taliban gone, most were rejoicing.

So as Dexter drove that rented car from Kuwait into Iraq during the American led invasion — he had volunteered to go and report — he thought the Iraqis would have a similar response.

“I had to drop that notion pretty quickly….I had no idea what I was getting into, but nobody really — well, nobody did.” Filkins was entering a world that would consume him for the next three and a half years. 


IN EARLY 2003, the New York Times, much like the other media outlets that had descended on Iraq after the invasion, was trying to find the best and most efficient way to report from a war zone whose journalistic parameters were still taking form.

Initially, reporters filed their stories from hotels, as they had in previous wars. But this war was different. In this war, reporters were no longer considered neutral; they were considered instruments of their states and thus targets. After a series of bombings rocked several downtown hotels, the Times rented a compound near the Tigris River and moved its reporters there.

Though this compound, known as the Baghdad bureau — it was where the reporters worked and slept — sat right across the river from the American Green Zone, the compound, militarily speaking, was in the Red Zone, the unknown and danger zone. As time progressed in Iraq, the difference in terminology would become clearer.

“One time a bomb sent part of a radiator from a cement truck crashing down 30 yards from where Dexter and the rest of us did our writing,” said John Burns, a senior New York Times foreign correspondent who became Baghdad bureau chief in 2004.

Meanwhile, it seemed to some that living in this kind of chaotic, stress-filled environment only stirred Filkins into working harder and at a more frenetic clip. 

“What struck me about Dex,” said photographer Ashley Gilbertson, who first met Filkins at the Baghdad bureau in early 2003, “was he always had something happening. He’d be working at the most feverish pace on one story, exhaustively reporting it, and at the same time, he’d be researching and talking to people for a dozen other stories.” Gilbertson, who’d been working around Kuwait during the U.S. invasion, said he’d never seen anything like it. “Dexter was intense and came across more single minded than any other reporter I’d met. I think that came across as manic initially — I thought he was crazy."

A year later, Filkins and Gilbertson, a tall Australian who was 25 at the time of their meeting, would team up to cover the battle of Falluja. There they’d be bound by a personal tragedy.


BY THE TIME John Burns, a puffy haired, sharply eloquent Englishman officially began running the bureau in 2004, the Times in Baghdad had found its groove. It had hired a half-dozen translators and about 18 Iraqi “string” reporters. These string reporters, scattered across the country’s various provinces, would relay news as it broke to their American colleagues in Baghdad. The New York Times even hired a cook as well as several Iraqi drivers who were well acquainted with the country’s main streets, back roads and alleyways. Several of these Iraqi employees were armed, which would prove crucial.

As 2004 progressed, the violence in Iraq was skyrocketing, all hints of a civilized society were dissolving, and Al Qaeda fighters were streaming in through Syria. But Dexter Filkins still ventured from the Times’ compound — which by then had become well fortified with 25-ft blast walls and razor wire — so often that, between 2003 and late 2006, his tenure in Iraq, Filkins’ byline appeared on the front page of the New York Times 162 times.  

During his time in the country, Dexter Filkins talked to hundreds of bereaved victims of violence; he interviewed insurgents, walked the halls of Saddam’s former torture chambers, watched a thousand men bow in unison at daily prayer, and mingled with throngs of people celebrating in Baghdad after the country’s first free elections. He sped through the desert in a convoy with Ahmad Chalabi and his 100 armed guards. He reported from Mosul in the north, where American soldiers were often ambushed; from Najaf in the south, where politicians strove to reach accord with insurgents; from Ramadi in the center — in the Triangle of Death — where a lone battalion of marines hunkered down for weeks in claustrophobic quarters, determined to hold the city.

“Dexter was matchless,” said Burns, who already had over 30 years’ experience as a correspondent for the Times and had reported from several war zones before assuming the position in Baghdad. Filkins says he was driven unmercifully simply by a desire to understand every part of the story.

“The whole time in Iraq, I was just trying to figure things out. That was my passion. But the story was so insanely complex that even if I wanted to stop, I couldn’t. When I’d finally unlock one door, I’d find there were a hundred other smaller doors behind it. I had to keep going.”

One of the few who knew just how determinedly Filkins worked in Iraq was Warzer Jaff, his translator and right-hand-man for over three years. On a lavender-skied rainy afternoon in Manhattan recently, Jaff, who now lives in New York City, sat down in an Upper West Side diner and talked about the time the two shared in Iraq and Filkins’ level of dedication when it came to journalism in that country.

“Sometimes we’d go out to these places that were so dangerous doing one interview could get you killed,” said Jaff, a fit 38-year-old, originally from Kurdistan. Though the New York Times initially hired Jaff in 2003 as a translator, he played several other roles, too. Jaff had been a Kurdish guerilla fighter who fought Saddam in the 80s and 90s. Working for the Times, he was known as someone unafraid to draw his gun to protect a reporter’s life. Jaff continued:  “We’d spend the whole day in these dangerous places and probably interview, like, 10 or 15 people. And I thought at the end of the day, ‘OK, this is great, we did great.’ And then we’d go back to the bureau and Dexter would start writing and would be like, ‘Fuck. We don’t have the story.’ And I’d be like why and he’d say, ‘No, Jaff. We don’t have it. We didn’t get the right quote. We have to go back.’”

In addition to the peak standards Filkins required his journalism meet, John Burns said that Dexter was the best because his reporting techniques often worked so effectively, especially at press conferences. It got to the point where some of Dexter’s American colleagues in the room even took to mimicking him, Burns said.

“You’d have Dexter walk into one of these Baghdad press conferences, looking all disheveled, running his hand through his hair as he’d ask his questions, and he would just take the microphone and he’d say,  ‘Hey, man’ — he was addressing a four-star general — ‘Hey, man, I’m just trying to figure this out, I’m just a little confused.’” Once Filkins had the general’s attention, Burns said, he’d hit him with a follow-up question that was “dead on,” shooting straight to the matter. The effect was jarring and often those Filkins addressed would fluster. The tactic, Burns said, had a tendency to shake loose otherwise closely guarded bits of information. “Dexter is good at disguising how bright he actually is.”

Some of Dexter’s other techniques may not have been so readily adopted. For example, Filkins was known to dress up in traditional Arab garb so he could head into neighborhoods so perilous he almost certainly would’ve been harmed were his true identity discovered. “No one looks less like an Iraqi than Dexter,” said Burns from London where he now heads that city’s bureau for the Times. “But there Dexter was, in his keffiyeh and dishdasha, about to get into one of our armored cars.”

The war gripped Filkins so fiercely, Dexter recently told Vanity Fair, that when he was sitting on a flight returning to the U.S. from Iraq in 2003 and learned from a stewardess, mid-flight, that Saddam Hussein had just been captured in Iraq, “I turned into a lunatic. I literally tried to convince them to turn the plane around in the air.”

Upon landing in Miami, Filkins immediately flew back to Jordan; from there, he drove the 500 miles through the desert to reach the Times bureau. Shortly before reaching the bureau, however, Filkins got into a car accident and nearly paralyzed himself. The next day, after being fitted with a neck brace, Filkins went to Al-Dawr to see Saddam’s spider hole for himself. Upon arrival, insurgents opened fire on Filkins’ car and his driver sped off. It one of his closest calls but it certainly wouldn’t be his last.


DEXTER FILKINS IS standing at a lectern inside Politics and Prose, a neighborhood bookstore in Washington, D.C., telling another packed audience a story he’s told 100 times before. It’s a perfect little story. It always gets a laugh and helps Filkins illustrate how uncertain and dangerous the landscape was in Iraq for western journalists.

“So I’m in Iraq,” Filkins says, looking out at an almost all-white, fifty-something crowd here for the reading at this bookstore not far from the White House. “I’m about to sit down for an interview with a Sunni sheik, Sheik Achmed. And it’s just me and my translator, Warzer Jaff. And so Sheikh Achmed has tea and sweets brought out for us, the whole thing. But before the interview starts, Jaff and Sheik Achmed start talking in Arabic. And it’s a long conversation, and I was getting a little impatient and I said, ‘Jaff, what’s going on?’ And he told me to hang on. And at one point the conversation got very heated; it was almost like an argument. And finally Jaff said, ‘OK, now you can ask your questions.’ So Sheikh Achmed and I had a wonderful talk, it lasted about an hour, and he brought out more tea and more sweets, great.  In the way back in the car, I said, you know, ‘Jaff, what were you talking about with Sheik Achmed for so long? It was frustrating.’ And Jaff said, ‘Oh, he wanted to kidnap you. I told him he better not even think about it.’”

The crowd breaks out in laughter, and Dexter shakes his head, amazed himself at the story.

Even Jaff, as he sat in that Upper West Side diner, had to laugh when he heard how prominent the tale is in Dexter’s arsenal.  “My God did it get close,” he said.  But later, as Jaff would think back to just how many risks he and Dexter took together, and how dangerous most were, he’d stop laughing.

“Let me tell you something, so many times with Dexter we were this close to getting killed,” Jaff said and held two fingers an inch apart. “Sometimes he had no idea how close we were."

One of those times was in summer 2004. Filkins, Jaff and a driver, Walee, were headed back to Baghdad through Falluja after working a 12-hour day when they spotted a teahouse on the side of the road. Though it was months before the marines would storm the western-Baghdad city by fire, Falluja, since the invasion’s beginning, had always been one of the most dangerous places for foreigners in all Iraq. Though Jaff was a translator and Walee a driver, both men carried guns. Without Dexter, walking into this teahouse wouldn’t have been a problem; with him, the equation changed completely. Plus, Jaff added, it didn’t help that Dexter “looks so American” and has body language like “an army guy.” Nevertheless, the three walked inside the crowded teahouse and Jaff went to the bathroom to wash his hands. Right before doing this, he told Walee specifically: “Watch Dexter.” When Jaff returned, Filkins was gone. Walee had turned his back for a second.

“And I look around and I just almost went crazy, and I was ready to take out my gun or something. My God. He didn’t have any idea how dangerous it was, what he just did,” Jaff said.  “I went outside the teahouse and I found Dexter near the road on the phone with the foreign desk in New York, talking loud in English. About twenty men had begun to surround him as he talked, but he didn’t realize because he was too involved with New York. And these Falluja guys in the parking lot looked crazy, and they were just ready to kill him — it was very easy to kill someone in Iraq — and all these guys were whispering about him, and I swear if he stood there for another 15 minutes, he was gone. They would have just put him in something and taken him away.”

Ali Adeeb, who worked at the New York Times Baghdad bureau from 2003 to 2006, managing the 18 Iraqi string reporters for the paper, said that when Dexter is in the field, “he focuses 100 percent on the story. He forgets everything around him and sort of loses contact with his surroundings. He doesn’t mean to, but it’s the way he operates.”

After an especially deadly series of car bombings at the Baghdad headquarters of the International Red Cross in 2003, Dexter wandered into a plaza in the area packed with hundreds of Iraqis; he wanted to do some reporting. Before Dexter knew it, the crowd, hysterical with anger over the chaos sweeping their country, and noticing an American was in their midst, set upon him.

“People started clubbing me,” Dexter writes in his book. “Someone stripped the phone from my hand, then my notebook and others grabbed my arms.” Walee, Dexter’s 6-foot-8-inch driver, noticed what was happening and pulled Dexter back from the grip of the crowd, saving him from what Dexter has said was certain death.

Sometimes, Filkins’ bold actions pushed his colleagues past their limits. On a hot afternoon in 2005 in the northern Iraqi city of Kadhimiya, Filkins was working on a story with another of his translators, Yusra Al-Hakeem, when about 20 men wearing all black and each holding a machine gun — the Mahadi Army — showed up to the city’s government center, where Dexter and Yusra were waiting to get an interview. Mahadi Army members began staring at Dexter, and Yusra, who had worked on many dangerous assignments, had a uniquely bad feeling this time.

“I was starting to get really nervous and something in my gut told me to get out of there. And Dexter saw how nervous I was and he said to me, ‘focus.’ And I said, ‘Dexter, I think we should go.’ And he said, ‘Yusra, please, focus on the story.’ And I said, ‘What about your safety, Dexter?’ And he said, ‘Fuck my safety!’ and I shouted back, ‘Fuck your safety, but what about my safety?!’”

In retrospect, Yusra, a sprightly and petite woman with great brown eyes, said she understood why a group of men with machine guns wouldn’t unnerve Dexter, who had already reported from the battle of Falluja. Still, even a year earlier at that battle, Filkins wouldn’t let fear deter him. The only difference was in Falluja someone got killed.


ON NOVEMBER 15, 2004, Dexter Filkins and Times photographer Ashley Gilbertson were embedded with 150 marines from the 1/8 Bravo Company, as it launched an assault on Falluja, a city 40 miles west of Baghdad that had evolved into an insurgent stronghold.

Day after day Filkins filed stories from the battle; it was reporting that would win him a George Polk award. He and Gilbertson were traveling with Bravo Company — on foot — as it fought a ferocious house-to-house style battle with insurgents. The goal was to capture the city, and both sides were taking heavy casualties.

That afternoon, The New York Times, over satellite phone, told Ashley it needed a photo of a dead insurgent for a story. The marines, at this point, had overtaken a large part of Falluja but were stationed now at its outskirts. Ashley and Dexter asked a marine commander if they could go back into the city for the photo — they had heard there was a dead insurgent lying at the top of a mosque’s minaret. The commander agreed but assigned a detail of soldiers to the journalists for protection. The group now walked back into the city, smoldering and in ruins, and headed for that minaret.

“We came to the door of the minaret,” Filkins writes in The Forever War. “Ash and I stepped in to go through the door when a pair of marines stepped in front of us. We’ll go first, they said. The first marine put his hand out...” The marines recognized that, even though the reporters were brave for wanting to go right in, it was their job to lead the way should any danger lie ahead. The two soldiers started up the minaret’s narrow, winding stairs. Gilbertson and Filkins were in tow.

“The shot was loud inside the staircase, and I couldn’t see much, because the second marine was falling backwards, falling onto Ashley, who fell onto me. Warm liquid spattered on my face...the first marine was struck…he was dead.”

The journalists were right: There had been a dead insurgent at the top of the minaret. But there was also a live one with him. As the lead marine, Lance Corporal William Miller, walked up the stairs, he was shot in the face three-quarters the way up. Later, a lieutenant in Bravo Company acknowledged that Miller would still be alive had the Times not wanted the photo but he also forgave Filkins and Gilbertson, as did most of the men in the company. “It’s a war; that’s what happens in war” is how one soldier put it, Filkins writes.

Since then, Dexter has tried to make peace with the incident and has visited Miller’s family, who wasn’t angry at him, he writes in The Forever War. Miller’s parents actually thanked Filkins for writing such an honest and full account of their son’s final moments. They said Filkins’ story added feeling and dimension, two things the military’s cold written report lacked.

On the tragedy, Ashley said:

“I think about the kid every day….I see a shrink, and, yes, sometimes we talk about him [Miller]. I, like Dexter, continue to cover the story, and that's one way of coping, and I've been focusing a lot on working on stories that might help the vets. I'm trying to humanize much of the death and killing in a way American's can relate, by photographing the rooms of the fallen marines and soldiers. I'm also focusing on post traumatic stress disorder and suicide. I worked for four months on a story about Noah Pierce, who did two tours and came home and shot himself.”

Not only would both journalists have to carry around this new burden upon returning home, but Filkins would now have to do it without the support he once had. The war had put major strain on some of his personal relationships, and after 10 years of marriage, Filkins underwent a divorce in 2005. During his tenure in Iraq, he writes in The Forever War, “I lost the person I cared for most.”

That person was Ana Menéndez, a Cuban-American journalist and author Dexter met at the Miami Herald, his first major newspaper job, in the early 90s.  In 1995, the two married and, for a long time, Menéndez tried managing her career around Dexter’s. When Filkins went to the L.A. Times in ’95, Menéndez went to the Orange County Register. When the L.A. Times sent Dexter to India, she came along, and when the New York Times, on account of Filkins’ knowledge of west Asia, sent him to head the paper’s Istanbul bureau, she also accompanied. But when Dexter traveled to Iraq in 2003, Menéndez finally had to stay behind. She dedicated her first novel, which came out in 2004, to Dexter who was in the war zone. Eventually, Ana said in an e-mail message, the circumstances would prove too difficult.

“Ours was an ordinary marriage, subject to ordinary pressures and challenges. Our story was exciting in many ways, but ultimately it succumbed, like any other, to the great levelers of distance and time,” wrote Menéndez from Cairo, Egypt, where she’s on a Fulbright scholarship, lecturing at the American University and learning Arabic. Menéndez said she’d read Dexter’s book; she was glad things were turning out well for him. “I’m thrilled for his success — happy that the difficult years he lived through could be transformed into something sublime and even beautiful. And happy because I lived much of that story with him, and it’s my story also.”


DEXTER PRICE FILKINS was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, on May 24, 1961. His parents, Helen and Cedric, met when they were stationed in southern Frankfurt after World War II — she was a club director for the U.S. Army, Dexter’s father was a lieutenant. After moving back to America the two lived wherever Cedric’s job with General Motors dictated — first in Queens, New York, then Cincinnati.

When Dexter was eight, his parents divorced. Helen, not having much money but too proud to move back to her parents’ home in Madison, Wisconsin, took the family — Dexter, his older brother Rick and his younger sister Louise — down to Cape Canaveral, Florida, because, Helen said, the cost of living in this small town near the Kennedy Space Center was cheap.

“It turned out to be a great move,” Helen said over the phone from her home in Florida where she still lives. “The kids couldn’t have been happier because the weather was so good.”    
      
Dexter grew up playing midget football and little league and also had a passion for running, which would never leave him, even in Iraq. Though Dexter still talks to his father, Cedric didn’t play much of a role in raising him. But that didn’t seem like a problem

“Dexter’s very independent and my mother was really a saint and acted as both mother and father,” said Louise, who now works for the Center for Public Broadcasting in Washington, D.C. “Besides,” she added, “Dexter was always too busy and had too many friends calling to worry about that.”

At Coco Beach High School, Dexter was voted most popular and elected president by his senior class. Later he went on to the University of Florida and won a scholarship to study philosophy and international relations at Oxford. It was there that Dexter decided he wanted to become a journalist. “I sort of backed up into it,” he once said in an interview with C-Span.

Helen, however, said she knew her son would be a writer, even from an early age, and could point to a specific moment.

“One day, when Dexter wasn’t home, I think he was about 12 at the time, I walked into his room. And on his desk there was this essay. It was about a trip he’d just taken to visit his father. And I read it and it just blew me away. It was so descriptive and it was letter-perfect. I couldn’t find one error.”  (And Helen had a sharp eye: she had been a writer for the Kennedy Space Center as well as a college English teacher.)

Louise said that when her brother was younger he never mentioned outright that he wanted to become a reporter, but it seems a natural fit, considering his upbringing.

“When our family sat down at dinner it was like the ‘McLaughlin Group’: we all talked about politics and what was in the papers. And Dex was always — you know this was before computers, the Internet and cable news, so basically it was just Time and Newsweek and U.S. News & World Report — and he was always reading one of those.”

While Dexter wasn’t too much of a risk-taker growing up, there were hints he might grow into one if the opportunity presented itself.

“I remember one year he went on a trip to Washington,” Helen said, “and he called me up and told me he had just climbed Mt. Rainier. We live in a place that’s about six feet above sea level. What did he know about climbing mountains?”

“Well, there was this one book,” Louise added, “it was our favorite growing up. It was called Men of Daring. It was published in the early 30s, and it was about, like, just all these cool men — Teddy Roosevelt and Winston Churchill — all these sort of renaissance guys, these adventurous guys, and Dex just loved this book and wanted to be like one of those guys; we all did.”

Though Dexter actually went on to become a “man of daring,” his sister and mother say they wish he just wouldn’t be that daring. They worry dearly for his safety, even more now after having read The Forever War.

“Boy is that book something,” Helen said. “He risked his life and I’m glad it’s over. But I was horrified when I read it. As his mother, I should get a medal. You know, there really should be an award just for mothers of sons in war zones. The worry. It’s terrible."

Louise had a similar reaction. “The book was really hard for me to read. I got to see just how many times Dex escaped being killed or hurt. And when I’m reading the book, that’s my brother, it’s not just a journalist. And, you know, some of these stories I’ve heard over the years, and then I read them and I say to myself, ‘Oh my God, it was worse than I thought.’ It really stays with me.”

Though the family tries to stay in touch, mostly by e-mail — Louise and Helen both have Google alerts set up to tell them of any news Dexter’s filed or when a new book review on The Forever War has been published — having a relative who’s a foreign correspondent is difficult.  The last time the whole family was under one roof was about three years ago, Louise said.

Rick, Dexter’s older brother, who works as an attorney, still lives in Florida and helps Helen who is 85. Still, Helen said, she wishes she could see Dexter more.

“We know the New York Times believes that Dexter is their man but maybe one day Dex will come back home. We hope soon.”


BACK IN NEW YORK, Dexter is checking his watch, anxious to get over to the New York Times for his new assignment, anxious because he barely ever has any time these days — or ever.

In a week he’ll be on the plane to Amsterdam. The Forever War is being translated into Dutch and five other languages, and he needs to make an appearance for the publisher.

Dexter’s finished his coffee and is now on to the bottle of Pepsi he brought with him. Filkins has even been known to drink Red Bull first thing in the morning to get, and keep, him going. As he talks about the war and what it’s all meant to him, he takes extra deep breaths, as though he’s trying to clear a tension that has built in his chest. Mostly, Afghanistan and Iraq have left him with mixed feelings. What he’s sure of, he says, is that the general mood in America today doesn’t resemble that of a nation at war, which upsets him. Dexter says he’s even loath to talk about his political beliefs on Iraq and Afghanistan. He sees it as punditry, an indulgence.

“These wars aren’t about me, they’re not about you and your opinion, they’re about the people who are fighting them, and the problem for me with America is that nothing is asked of the average person, of the typical American, to do anything. We haven’t had to pay higher taxes, there’s no war bonds, there’s no draft, there’s no nothing, and so, therefore, what are these wars? They’re something we argue about.”

Dexter brightens when the conversation lands on all the friends he made in Iraq, many of whom were Iraqi employees for the New York Times. In several cases, Filkins — in ways large or small — helped his friends “get out.” Dexter wrote letters of recommendation for two veterans of the Baghdad bureau for scholarships to study journalism in New York. Both got it. In fact, Warzer Jaff, the translator, had been on the phone with Filkins minutes before he sat down that day on the Upper West Side to recount the risks the two took together. Filkins had been pleading with him to consider accepting a scholarship at Harvard — a scholarship Filkins was trying to help him get — instead of going back to Iraq to work as a reporter.

As for going back to the country himself, a country that Filkins adopted a great respect and affinity for — he even said he now loves Arabic music — it doesn’t seem likely, though he does admit missing Iraq, especially after he first returned to the States.

“When I was there, I was thinking about home. When I finally did get home, I found myself wanting to go back.”

Ashley Gilbertson said he understood what Dexter meant. “Those of us that stayed have a real sense of mission on the story. It’s almost hardwired, that we need to be there, to see the story firsthand and relate it as honestly as possible to the people back home.”

During Filkins’ tenure in Iraq, he saw much death, sometimes on a daily basis. However, Dexter says it hasn’t traumatized him but did admit to having a hard time when he first got home, in late 2006: “I was pretty numb to everything, I wasn’t interested in anything. It took me a long time to come back to life. It really did. I was pretty tired, I was pretty worn out.”

Still, Dexter was able to point to a moment he knew he’d make it.

“I have some really close friends that I’ve known for many years, and they go surfing in Costa Rica every year. And I hadn’t gone in many years, and then in 2006, I went to Costa Rica and met my friends….It was surreal; I had been in Iraq for so long and seen so much destruction and so much violence, but then suddenly I was eating beans and rice and driving to the Pacific Ocean. The tropics helped bring me back. They’re just full of life and color, the sea breeze. That’ll save anybody.”

Filkins’ sister, Louise, said she still had her doubts.

“I think to most people, Dexter’s still the same guy. But I think, to some degree, it’s affected him deep down — probably in ways we’ll never know.”

Walking from the coffee shop near Times Square and heading toward his newspaper’s headquarters a few blocks away, Filkins doesn’t look back. When he arrives at the New York Times, and the elevator stops on the third floor, he’ll get off and walk over to the foreign desk, where he’ll finally learn his next assignment: Afghanistan. Afghanistan, where the Taliban is resurging and stepping up its car bombings, where American and Afghan forces are under siege and the future looks opaque. It happens to be terrain Filkins understands better than most, and he knows that’s why he has to go. “But am I excited?” he’ll later ask. “I’ll tell you one thing, I would have been a lot more excited 10 years ago.”