My generation was identified by hair. It was a symbol, a “freak flag” that identified a person as having certain ideas. People with hair that hung down passed their shoulders instantly earned respect. As one of my friends from that time said, “When I see hair that long, I think old.” This was not the bad kind of old, but an old that meant that one was not a newcomer to having a rebellious nature. We were so identified by it that the one word could be the title of a Broadway musical and everyone knew exactly what it meant. We happily drove barbers out of business.

Hair felt good. Guys dreamed of girls with long straight hair. Joni Mitchell and Michelle Phillips were young men’s fantasies and part of that was because of their hair. We looked at myths where hair was a strength with renewed interest. For Samson, it was his source of power. For Rapunzel it was a pathway to freedom. Mother Earth’s hair saved Buddha. The hair of Medusa spoke of her rage and vengeance. The most beautiful hair that I ever saw belonged to a red mane girl with whom I went to college. Her hair hung perfectly straight down to her waist and when we were in classes together, I would sometimes lose myself in the sight of it. It was simply beautiful and I imagined its perfumed scent.

We used our hair. Sometimes it was camouflage behind which we could hide. It gave nervous fingers something to do. When I was interviewing a champion runner, she told me that when she was warming up she would sometimes pass an opponent on the track and use her hair to brush against the other girl as she sped by her.

Teachers, policemen and parents tried to either induce or force haircuts on us. We countered by saying things such as, “They didn’t even make Jesus cut his hair.” We stuck together. We looked at Bob Dylan’s tangled and uncombed head of hair as an indication of his genius and non-conformity. We hung posters of Albert Einstein with his wild shock of hair. We adopted him as one of us. Kojak was one of them. Hair meant freedom and the lack of it was symptomatic of a certain rigidity. I suppose that Yul Brenner was the exception.

Looking back at these oversimplifications and categorizations, one has to smile at their naiveté. It is not unlike listening to twenty-somethings throw around the word “hippie” today. But I also see the current styles as ones which pay homage to a militaristic, utilitarian perspective. Clean, crisp and dispassionate bonding with the way that things must be is what their hair says to me.

I have never dyed my hair or had any treatments given to it, but I did used to cut it to gain a professional advantage. If I was interested in a promotion, I would cut my hair in order to show my sincerity. After I got the position, I would grow it back.

When I was in my mid-twenties, I met a girl who told me that she did not like hair. She kept hers cropped very short and it accented the almond shape of her face and made her eyes prominent and seem more inquisitive. She was Winona Ryder before there was a Winona. Her distaste for hair was not as much of a political statement as it was a personal preference. This intrigued me, a girl who did not wish to have long hair. It was the first time that I realized that our non-conformity had become conformity. I wonder if people see themselves this way today. It’s hard to be exhibit a rebellious nature when you are wearing a team’s baseball cap or sporting designer labels, but were we any different really?

Recently, I asked this woman for her feelings about hair and this is what she told me. “What do I have to say about hair??  From a women’s perspective?  It is a shield, a protector, provocative,   a place to hide, a way to shine, attract and wrap someone or trap someone, not unlike a spider’s web. It is a ritual washing, rinsing, creaming, spraying, coloring, making us into different beings than we may be after all. Women of the Caribbean take great pride in their braiding techniques. Waspy women wear blonde bobs, they are proud of their heritage.  They can be 82 and the bob will still be the bob.  It is an identifier.  African-American women spend more on their hair than any other ethnic group, they embrace their ethnicity through their hair, or shun it, again, through their hair.  They straighten it, curl it, hair is never what we want it to be.  It is a source of dissatisfaction.  You can, like Lady Godiva, ride naked on a horse if you have long enough hair. In the bible, Mary Magdalene washed Christ’s feet with her hair.  I found that abhorrent, it was here that hair was obvious to me, for the pleasure of men.  And yet, there are rules for hair, women over 40 shouldn’t have long hair, they are too old, meaning unattractive.  Hair is an object that makes the woman an object and tells her when she is old.  I wanted nothing to do with it.  I couldn’t anymore.  It betrayed me.  It had to go. I couldn’t comb, brush, force it to do things it didn’t’ want to do, all for the attractiveness of it.  You have obviously never ironed your hair or slept in rollers the size of beer cans, in some cases actual beer cans.  Hair inhibits one.  It is a time waster.  It focuses energy where it doesn’t belong.  It is the ultimate vanity.”

I will not do a comb over. I will not shave my head. My hair is shoulder length and now when I run my fingers through it, I feel little brittle ends breaking off.  Is this just part of aging?

I don’t know what it is like to have a recognizable face. No one has ever stopped me on the street and said, “Are you Ken Hart?” So when I talk about names of celebrities, it is just names and pictures and, of course, their artistic work. I admire that James Taylor accepted his baldness openly and I thought less of Paul Simon for his baseball cap. I have male friends who have great heads of hair and I have noticed that there is a certain confidence that seems to go along with it.

Perhaps my friend is correct. It is an ultimate vanity and a source of judgment, but we didn’t always feel that way, did we?

My dad played catch with me. We never lived together but whenever I was at his house or went to houses of his friends, magically, some projectile would appear and we would throw it between us or he would prod me to throw it with someone else. Those were high stakes catches. I knew that my dad wanted me to make him proud. Catching and throwing was a way to do that.

I played catch year-round: baseballs, footballs, Frisbees, soft balls, hard balls, whiffle balls. We played catch. Sometimes under the glow of city street lights. Sometimes in the glare of a hot sun. Sometimes in the rain or the snow or cold so brutal that the impact of the ball on your hands would sting and turn them red and  then numb.

The distance between the people says something about the catch. There has to be the expectation that the other person can reach. There has to be the feeling that you can. There is a need for some accuracy. I do not think that I have had a true friend with whom I did not play catch.

You remember your catches. It is not unlike remembering the times that you were kissed. An easy feeling develops.  People remember catches between them. There is a bond that is established. You gauge coordination. It resets the way that you think about a person. It is like working together. You remember participants. I wonder if everyone does and if they recall that bond?

There are those competitive catches, when you measure what your partner has to offer, you push boundaries.  Then there are those times when you try to aid your partner’s success. You toss easily and with obvious direction. Cooperation and competition are joined and related. It is the essence of the process.

Sometimes catch is like foreplay, it’s used to warm up, but other times it is the main event. Can catches be epiphanies? I can remember them as if my body is moving in slow motion and the world has slowed down.

When I played baseball as a kid, I was a catcher and a first baseman. I didn’t like being a catcher but I could do it. I didn’t close my eyes when the batter swung, although I wanted to. The gear was hot and the “cup” uncomfortable, so often I didn’t wear one. Until the day that Danny threw a fast ball and I missed it and it lodged right between my legs where the cup should have been. I went into shock immediately on impact. I could not move except for the involuntary reaction of closing my legs which had the unfortunate byproduct of keeping the ball lodged right where it struck as I slowly keeled over, the ball dribbling out. My friends saying that I looked like I had laid an egg. After that, I decided that it was easier to put up with the chafing of the cup.

Conversely, I loved to do a stretch and scoop at first base. You could see the throw coming low. You had to trust your eye hand coordination and the glove. You could feel it in the web, and then the appreciative smile from the infielder who threw it. These few seconds of captured smiles and catches… What causes us to remember them so vividly? You wonder if through the decades those glimpses exist only for you or if they are shared as well?

I only really remember one catch with my brother. We were both married and he came to where Val and I were living in Fairlawn. I was coaching football and when he saw the ball lying around, he said, “Want a catch?” We were never easy talking with each other. I was a shadow and the older brother with whom he never lived and who disappeared for years at a time.

His arm was stronger than mine and he rifled the ball in my direction with poise and determined speed. He was going to show his older brother, and he did. Somehow it became easier to talk while we were throwing the ball. It felt right and, upon reflection, somehow sad that this was our only truly memorable catch. Maybe if we had more of them we would be in contact today. I don’t really know, but I do believe in the power of catch.

It’s calming and exhilarating at the same time. The person puts a little bit of himself into each throw, and as you receive it, you accept what you have been given. It is a conversation without words. It can be a response to harsh words and then the projectile is not flung with the speed of competition. It is hurled with an expression of anger. Not quite a punch, but it travels with that velocity.

Catch can be love. When Val and I were first married, we bought a fuzzy tennis ball that came with a set of Velcro paddles. They may still be in my barn, the Velcro worn and the original ball long since chewed by Keats. This was cooperative catch, and we would try to make it last. She would inevitably say, “just a couple more” and I would be disappointed. I loved playing catch with her. I enjoyed those exchanges so and I do not believe that I will ever throw the Velcro paddles away.

It can be interspecies.  Although I deeply love my Frisbee sessions with Fitzgerald, he brings it back. He does not throw it. But my Mom had a Bichon named Dandy. If you took a soft beach ball, Dandy would head butt it back, soccer style. We went on and on in the basement for hours. After that he would run downstairs and wait each time I arrived. We played catch. In that instinctive way Dandy lives for me, playing catch.

Catch is a problem solver. Maybe if people so at odds could just play catch for a while something would change. Maybe just a softening that grows out of that mutual respect given by catch. I know that there are hypothetical catches. I know that sometimes a teacher feels that he is playing catch with his students. That is a fine blend of cooperative and competitive catch. However, there is something about the engagement of other senses. What does eye hand trigger in the brain? There is something about its enduring qualities.

Time passed and their relationship grew stronger. Keats had been sick but he was the better swimmer. Fitzgerald could do just about anything that an athletic challenge placed in front of him. But he worshiped his older brother.

He bonded with Valerie. Keats was so clearly my dog and she had never experienced the true bonding of an animal. He followed her every movement. He slept curled at her feet in our bed. She pressed her feet to him and her arms to me; Keats preferred to sleep on the floor.

They were hardly prefect dogs. They marked. I had been slow to allow Keats’ castration and well… he developed the habit of marking and Fitz picked up the scent and imitated. We tried to be stern and failed and lived with the endless cleanings up and the occasional outburst of how disgusting this was.

They did not like children with one exception, our grand-daughter Hazel. Keats made an exception and she stroked him with love and abandon. Fitz was too frisky and unaware of his strength. He is and was exuberant.

Chief among his skills and lovable nature are both his ability to catch a Frisbee and his learned behavior of giving it back so that it can be thrown again. Another is his fierce loyalty and protective nature. He charges into any fray with abandon if he feels a member of his pack is threatened.

He prances with flapping ears and quickness and grace. He has a single focus. He is protecting by whatever means necessary. There was one time when a visiting dog snapped at Val. Fitzgerald literally flew down the stairs and placed himself between her and the now unwelcome intruder. He lunged and bared his teeth and snarled until his adversary cowered. He never left Val alone again when the visitor was in our home. This happened just as my awareness knew that something wasn’t right, and then it was.

He mastered the fetch instinct. Throw a stick, yeah he’ll go and get it every time and bring it, or some chewed version of it, back to be thrown again. Sometimes you have to laugh because it is a pathetically small chewed version of it and he drops it at your feet with such hope.

When I throw the Frisbee he is in total focus. When Keats was still alive I would take them down to the field next to the lake that borders our property. I would throw the Frisbee as hard as I could and as long as I was capable of throwing it and he would fly. He would leap. He was perfection. Eventually Keats would head towards the lake and he would obediently follow and wait for me to throw sticks into the water so that they could swim.

These are Irish Water Spaniels. They are both liver brown and have a coat that resembles a standard poodle. They are known as clownish, but that is a deception. These are serious dogs.

While we were away, Keats was killed. As best we can figure, on a snowy predawn morning, a truck swerved out of control, up onto our lawn and ended his life almost instantly.  By the time we got home, the pet sitter service, had shut the doggie door and Fitzgerald was, for the first time in his life, alone. He could smell his brother’s blood out on the lawn. We weren’t there. Is this the fate of any unreserved submission to a family, that there will be times when no one is there?

After we got home, he howled like a wolf to the other dogs across the lake. It went on for several nights. I’m not sure if it was mourning, communication or the trumpeting announcement that he was now in charge.

The Frisbee and his absolute devotion to Valerie became the sole focus of his life until I created a vegetable garden. I instructed him how to urinate along the protective fence (do not ask how) in order to ward off gophers and other animals. He was now a dog with a job and his devotion to task was more than admirable. He patrolled the garden day and night. He set his senses to communicate any change in its environment. He lived to crawl as close as he could inside of Val’s skin.

Fitzgerald’s athleticism was and is extraordinary. Imagine a 80 pound dog prancing along the top of the back of a couch like a cat and then, on a whim, deciding the fly through the air to a vacant chair. That is Fitzgerald. More than one startled visitor has been frozen by the sight of his airborne form and its unpredictable nature.

I’m told that the strength in the fetch instinct is one of the criteria that is used for the initial selection of police dogs or those that are used in rescue operations. It is not what his breed is noted for, but he sure does exhibit those traits.

Why did we name him Fitzgerald? He had grace and a nature that enjoying showing off and he was always so pretty. Keats and Fitzgerald in canine reincarnation, how crazy is that? Their spirit and poetry of motion…

I never really wanted to read stories about people and their dogs, but suppose the way that they perceived their animals was a reflection of something else? And what might that something else create in the spirit of those creatures? Do you believe that the way that we communicate with others changes who they are? Not just, abject response…but the nuances of it. Do they matter? Do they seep into genetics? Is this what I really mean by old friends and family?

About the female dogs in Fitzgerald’s life; there were two. Madison was nicknamed “good sex.” She would romp and then happily allow him to endlessly hump her. They danced the stimulated eroticism of their youth and did it playfully.

Stella was “rough sex.” She was my daughter’s pit bull beagle rescue dog mix. She and Fitz played hard. Afterwards his neck was scratched and he was exhausted. Stella was happy.

I threw the Frisbee every day for 10 months of the year. The bond was solid. He wanted it, he expected it, he caught it, and he brought it back with grace and fluidity. He needed it. He quivered in anticipation of it.

With the exception of when Hazel was here every day, Fitz was always the baby. It was his nickname. He cries when he does not have access to the open window of a car. He excitedly snatches at food that is offered on the tips of fingers, but he is decidedly gentle in licking from the open palm. His level of interest in permanently high and his attention span decidedly low, unless you are throwing a Frisbee.

When Stella came to live with us, Keats looked at me with a “you’ve got to be kidding” expression.  I’m not sure he felt or thought anything like that, but sometimes we interpret the actions of all creatures with whom we live. And his actions did seem to take that approach. His pack had grown again and there were other issues. We couldn’t fit all three of them into the back seat of the car. Someone was going to be left home. It surely was not going to be Quinn Fitzgerald, if he had anything to say about it.

Whenever either of us gave the slightest indication that we were going out, and this could be anything from the putting on of shoes to me collecting my wallet or even the mention between us of a place that we needed or wanted to go, Fitz was right there, wanting to be first in line. He still is. If for some reason he is left behind, he communicates his disappointment by doing something that he knows he isn’t supposed to do.

Tired of collecting my garbage from the front lawn, or picking up a shredded box of tissues from the bedroom floor, we put up a series of gates. Childproof gates are not meant to withstand the efforts of a large and determined Fitzgerald. If one area of mischief is closed off, he finds another. If he is unsuccessful, he eventually knocks down the gate. When you come up the stairs,  he greets you happily and then runs outside to wait, and you know that you must search to find whatever little message that he has left this time.

When I was a child, religion accomplished this blending with time tested ease. I lifted my voice in song to praise the Lord at Sunday Service. I gazed with awe at the pictures of Jesus that my mother and great-grandmother hung in our home. I memorized long pieces for Sunday school recitation. Later in my youth, I embraced the clean slate provided by the confessional. I studied the lives of the saints. I cheered the election of a pope.  I embraced the new mass. I felt the holy power of communion. But as I looked more and more at the things that were done in the name of Christianity, I became disenchanted first with the religion and then with the god himself.

What was the purpose of suffering in this world? Why were we all to be looked upon as sinful creatures who needed to blame each of our failings on ourselves and attribute each of finer qualities to a higher power? Why did the churches and the all-powerful God allow for injustice? Why did Christianity seem to have no relationship with the natural world of plants and animals and the forces of nature? Why were our natural instincts base? What about us was so flawed? If it were true that we were created in the image of God, didn’t that also mean that he was flawed?

I turned to the study of older faiths, those that were in tune with a natural world. Those faiths used the concept of deity to explain the power of this world. They personified nature. They created an anthropomorphic world where animals and plants possessed spirit and life as we know it. They did not have disdain for this life and use it as a trial that gets you to another world, invisible and everlasting but totally lacking in humanity.

These are not uncommon struggles for any thinking mind. They are quite the norm until one is overtaken by the day to day joys and needs of adulthood. However, I found an escape route. It was a love of literature and song and the acts of creating both. It was a love of teaching and knowledge and the magic of that temple that I came to know as the classroom. Here I was able to transmit a love of language and literature and glimpse at an eternity that was very human. Homer lives. Shakespeare lives. Confucius lives. Their glimpse of the divine was real. I wanted to become part of that divinity. I wanted to work my vision into that eternal mosaic. If I could just be a thread that wove its way into that fabric, the unrealized eternal joy of my youth would be satisfied.

The catch is that one can still go to a hell of sorts. Suppose your creations mark you forever as a producer of poor writing and song? Do you then wind up as eternally without real talent? Forever marked as a talentless wannabe?

In order to escape this fate, one had to learn one’s craft and then one had to have some sense of vision. But where did this vision come from? Was it just the way that the language sounded in certain combinations that created the magic of insight? Should fine sounding phrases and lines be cherished in their own right because they sounded so good? Would the insight provided come later? Was it the beauty of the combinations that actually produced the insight? Or was this an example of style without substance? Was there a way to weave the style into the substance without losing either but having each uplift the other?

Poetry found its way into my soul. I’m not really sure how this happened. It was the sound of it and the way that it resonated in my body when I heard it. I found that once in a while I had some talent for it. Talent is a strange thing. In athletics, you find your body moving with a certain slow motion grace that is going full speed. You throw a ball the way you’ve never thrown it before, and your body remembers the feeling. Something changes. You want to throw it that way every time because it felt so good and the results were a success. With poetry, it is much the same. Something that you didn’t know that you had inside comes out and you stare at it in disbelief that it came from you but at the same time you know that you found a way to express that something that you had never been able to express before and you want to do it again.

Of course all of this is the residue of hard work and deep experience but you know almost immediately that is not all that it is. Hard work and experience do not guarantee it. There is something else that is also at work. It helps you to believe in the magic of the world.

It does not feel the same as the power of the natural world but it feels akin to it. It is not the sea but it expresses the feeling of the sea and there is almost that sense that the sea is aware of what you have done. It surges inside of you like an emotional orgasm. You feel connected. You become part of the mosaic. You have your own unique thread.

The process of creation is a search for that sense of connection but it is the difference between the pretty girl who smiles in your direction and the lover with whom you wish to luxuriate forever. Having been in that place makes you yearn to return to it or find another like it, or even another that has as yet not been experienced, the unknown sense of connection that sets the world in tune.

These moments can also occur in the classroom when for that time you become more than who you were a few moments before and more than you will be a few moments after it is over. It is alignment. It is transitory. It leaves you wanting more until you have exhausted yourself and need to replenish so that you can have it again. It becomes that star that guides you.

When your faith in a magical world is shaken, you are thrown off balance. If you cease to believe that you can have that experience again or when you question the authenticity of what you have experienced you feel lost and empty. You are no longer connected. It is all as flat as a TV screen and you are a passive viewer. Instead of being the SCUBA diver you are staring at a fish tank.

Religion provides you with a portal into a magical reality but it also defines the nature and scope of what you can achieve. The picture has already been painted. You are singing a song that someone else wrote. This is not to say that it cannot be a beautiful song but once you have crossed over into a world that you create, it is no longer your song.

Is the world indifferent to these experiences? Does the world create them? Are both things simultaneously true? Are these experiences alive anywhere outside of our minds? Does the spirit actually exist as more than a manifestation of our thoughts and feelings? What is its nature? Are these questions that I will ever be able to answer?

The stock response to this is that asking the question is where the beauty is. Sometimes that is enough of an answer but other times it leaves me with the feeling of being pacified by a cliché. There is that voice inside me that says that I always want more and that I am never satisfied. But then the words of William Blake echo in my mind: A man never knows that he has had enough until he has had too much. These words frighten me.