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This is a free, public post from Hank Kalet’s Channel Surfing. You will continue to receive these email stories and newsletters as long as you remain a an email subscriber. Consider becoming a paid subscriber and get paywall-protected posts, the ability to comment on posts and participate in discussion boards, offers to write guest blog posts, and copies of my books. If you are a $5-a-month Patreon patron, you already are considered a paid subscriber.

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Hank Kalet of Channel Surfing recommends The Threats Within The MAGA menace. Christian nationalism. Corporate greed. They threaten us all.

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Hank Kalet of Channel Surfing recommends The Land That Time Forgot Official Substack of musician Chuck Prophet

Hank Kalet of Channel Surfing recommends Unpopular Front the junk shop of history

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The Ghosts of American Rivers

Along the Metedeconk, the Homeless find a Home Beyond the Kerouacian Imagination

Hank Kalet Oct 25 ∙ Preview

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Downtown Lakewood. Photo by Hank Kalet
Note: This is based on a visit to a newer, makeshift encampment in Lakewood, N.J., I made over the summer with photographer Sherry Rubel and the Rev. Steve Brigham. It is part of a longer essay manuscript in progress tentatively called Revisiting Paradise: Rereading Kerouac and On The Road. Kerouac tended to romanticize the hobo, but there is nothing romantic about American homelessness, in the past or in the 21st Century. It is a hard life, a stigmatized life.

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Monday Music: The Mourning Sounds of Leonard Cohen

To Have Doubts Is To Be Human

Hank Kalet Oct 25 ∙ Preview

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My voice has grown heavy. Weary. A rasp robbed of strength. I watched my mother’s casket lowered into the dirt. I choked up briefly. Didn’t cry. She’d already traveled the road that had to be traveled, lost herself along the say, lost us, so I can’t dry. Not yet.

Still, I struggle. I listen to The Beatles, as I always do in late October as my birthday approaches. I’m now 60. Jack Kerouac died at 47. John Lennon at 40. Bob Dylan is still alive. My mother is not.

We buried my mother Thursday. In a grave beside her mother. Lowered the pine casket into the earth, each of us placing three shovelfuls of dirt atop her coffin.

The sky was wide open. Cloudless. If I believed in a heaven, I’d say it was opening itself to accept her, to raise her into its embrace. If I was religious, I might take solace in the Kaddish, which praises and pleads with god but says nothing about the dead.

Wind blew the yarmulkes from our heads. Dried the few tears that came to my eyes. I haven’t cried. Not really. Neither have my brother and sister. My dad has cried. Struggles to finish stories without welling up. I haven’t.

I wonder why this is. Why her loss has not left me bereft. Broken. There are no rules for grief. There are stages, according to the psychologists. Customs dictated by religion. But no rules. No game plan to follow.

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