I was very young, about 5, nearly 6. My dad was an attorney and
also a business man. One of the businesses he owned was a moving
and storage business located in what I was to learn when I got older
the very poor part of town, the Hispanic part of town. I used to go
with my dad from time to town to his moving and storage business
that was called Merchants Moving and Storage. All this occurred in
the late 1940s. While dad was conducting business in his company's
small office, I would wander outside across a dirt alley adjacent to
the moving company. There were rocks in the dirt alley that I would
pick up and throw into the air. One day as I was doing this, a kid
showed up at the end of the alley. His name, I found out, was Jesus,
a nice kid, but he didn't speak English. He spoke, as I later learned
in life, Spanish, and lived in what I later learned in life, was a shack.
That Jesus and I couldn't talk to each other did not deter our
burgeoning friendship. We both could throw rocks and pal around.
I liked Jesus a lot. He was a nice kid. One afternoon Jesus motioned
to me to come into his house, which I did. The floor of his house
was dirt, just like the alley. I, of course, had never been in any house
that had a dirt floor. Seeing dirt on the floor instead of a rug was
different, but really didn't bother me at all then. But as I grew up,
as I got a lot older, that's when it began to bother me. A dirt floor
in any house--even in a shack--was poverty at its worst. I slowly,
but inexorably, was becoming what I would be throughout my life:
a human-rights advocate. Sadly, I slowly lost touch with Jesus,
but I never forgot him. And I never forgot the dirt floor in the only
home he ever knew as a child. Jesus was not only my friend, but
also my mentor, my moral mentor. I think of him often and wish I
had had a chance to thank him for being my friend, my dear friend
forever. Todo el tiempo. Que le vaya bien, amigo mio.

Copyright 2020 Tod Howard Hawks

I remember eating peas one at a time, because that's how I ate them at the
last supper mother and I were together before she had to leave Andover
to return to Topeka, Kansas. My lovely mother. I think she came to An-
dover for three days to see me. It was during the Fall. I had to be in the run-
ning for the loneliest student at Andover. I remember her walking in her
high heels crossing one of the roads leading to the Andover vs. Exeter
football game that Saturday afternoon. I cared nothing about the game.
I was so lonely, so miserable at Andover that I was to ashamed to tell my
mother how I truly felt. I simply held my sorrow deep inside of me while I
gazed at her incessantly, trying to soak up every nanosecond of her being
in my presence. It was bitterly ironic that my mother being with me, within
my sight for every possible moment, rendered every ritual of the "Andover-Exeter Weekend" meaningless to me. I was oblivious to everything except my mother. So, in early Sunday afternoon, mother and I had our last supper at some upscale restaurant down the highway that ran along to boundary of Andover's campus. And all I remember about that meal was that whatever I ate I remember only eating peas, eating only one pea at a time, hoping I would never, never run out of them, which, of course, I did. Mother drove me back to my dorm, gave me a kiss on the cheek,  let me out, and drove away until I could no longer see the car she had been driving. After quite a long pause, I entered the dorm, walked up the iron stairs, opened the door and then closed it after entering, lay on my bed, and cried as quietly as I could for a long, long time.

Copyright 2020 Tod Howard Hawks

A few years ago, I was in junior high. Or at least it seems that
way. Then the next thing I knew, I just graduated from
college. Is that possible, to let time play games with you, and
the games seem like reality? Then I just watched Mariel Hem-
ingway in Woody Allen's "Manhattan." It seems like a few
weeks ago. I had a crush on her. In the movie, she is only 17.
Now she's 63. What the hell happened? What's going on? I
don't get it. I have dreams that are timeless, memories of beau-
tiful women I dated over a lifetime. I feel exactly how I felt
50 years ago. I remember exactly how each one smelled. A-
mazing! I remember reading in Spanish Jorge Luis Borges'
books. But life is an endless stream of recollections, or should
I say reinactments. Each night as I sleep, I make love with
Sharon, or maybe Linda, perhaps Nancy. Ah, Nancy, the
most beautiful girl in Topeka when we were both teenagers!
But after she was divorced, Nancy and I started dating and
making love. Ah, the plenitude, the pulchritude! And now I
watch movies. I'm not old, the movies are old, or so it seems.
Cinder was my first dog, my best friend growing up. There
were no leash laws in the '50s, so when my best human friend,
Bruce, and I were in grade school, we would ride our bikes all
the way downtown with Cinder keeping up with us all the way.
Could that have been 65 years ago/ Really? Are you sure?
I'm not.

Copyright 2020 Tod Howard Hawks

The years I spent at Andover were the worst years of my life.
I was a kid from Kansas, a very smart kid, if I do say so myself.
So smart, in fact, that my father had planned years in advance
that I should attend Phillips Academy (aka Andover), because
he could live out his fantasies vicariously--albeit unconsciously--
through me. My dad had grown up during the Depression dirt
poor, but he also was very bright and was determined to escape
the hellhole he had survived through sedulous work and Her-
culean effort, and thus became very rich. I, of course, had never
heard of Andover. I was content to go to public schools in Topeka,
Kansas, had many friends, got virtually straight-As, and enjoyed
immensely all the athletic teams I had played on. Also, I was elected
president of the student council in junior high. But all of that didn't
matter to my dad. Andover, and only Andover, was my dad's plan for
me. I had never heard of Andover, but dad had. He used to spend
countless hours reading books about rich and successful men
while lying on his bed at night. So, in due course, I was admitted
(not an easy thing to do) to Andover, and dad flew with me to
Boston, then rode in a cab with me some twenty miles north to
Andover in the town of--you guessed it--Andover, Massachusetts.
Andover is the oldest boarding school in America, founded two years
after our country was, in 1778. Paul Revere designed and made
the school's seal. George Washington sent his nephew there.
The campus was breathtakingly beautiful. Dad had met John
Kemper, Andover's headmaster, and had noticed what kind and
style of shoes he was wearing, so dad went out and bought me
the replica of Kemper's shoes. How weird, I thought. I received
at Andover plausibly the best secondary school education in the
world, but at an exorbitant social and emotional cost. A small
number of my classmates, principally from Greenwich and Darien,
Conneticut, though intellectually brilliant, were simply mean.
They were "the drops of poison," if you will, that turned Andover's
ambiance into an emotionally corrosive environment that affected in
an insidious way students and teachers alike. I managed to endure
this horror;  others did not. I chose to attend Columbia, not Yale,
because four more years at Yale would have been like spending
four more years at Andover, anathema for me. Columbia was liber-
ating. It's Core Curriculum made you learned for life, and living in
and exploring for four years New York City, the veritable capital of
the world, made you a citizen of the world for life, even if you decided
to reside somewhere else after graduating, which I did. I live now in
Boulder, Colorado, far away from Greenwich.

Copyright 2020 Tod Howard Hawks

What will be the Endsieg? To the aspirations of our youth? To our marriage? To our career? To what we wish best for our children? To our childrens' children? What will be the Endsieg to all our challenges, to all our heated disagreements? To all of our outright fights? And what will be the Endsiege to our collective response to catastrophic climate change? To the existential threat of a nuclear holocaust? Each second, each minute, each hour, each day, each week, each month, each year of our lives, what will be the inevitable Endsiege to each and all of them? We find out the Endsiege to everyone of them, but only at end of each of these myriad life experiences, and not before.

Copyright 2020 Tod Howard Hawks

The robins have not yet appeared out my window. It is
still too cold. The squirrels, meanwhile, go about their
business year around, finding nuts, even pieces of bread
left by kind people. Animals of all kind are wise, while
we human beings are mostly lost in our illusion of what
constitutes worth. Deer and elk up in the high country
do not miss the chaos we human beings call civilization.
The Civil War, for example, was, by no means, civil.
Nowadays the scholars think that possibly as many as
700,000 men lost their lives over the horror of human
*******. Not for a second would even one rabbit condone
slavery, but our Constitution made it legal. A buffalo, if there
still is one, would never **** with impunity a black 13
year old girl, then sell her for a handsome profit to another
American citizen who happened to be a slave owner
himself. Do you think a worm or an otter would brook
60 lashes to a slave who had the audacity to try to learn
how to read or write? Slavery's child, racism, was never
just in the Deep South. Today, this moral disease permeates
every town and city in our "democracy" from sea to shining
sea. When do you think the robin will reappear? When do
think humanity will become as moral as any raccoon or fox?

Copyright 2020 Tod Howard Hawks

April Fools' Day, 2020, will be brought to you by all those who voted for **** Trump.

Copyright 2020 Tod Howard Hawks