In the autumn of 2000, iron straps corseted the tower at Pisa to prevent its collapse at the middle. Huge lead weights straddled the north base; guy wires attached to the top story went off in three directions. 

It was a smaller tower than I expected, a little squatter, but not less graceful. Even in its rehab suit, I liked it. Five weeks into retirement, conflicted feelings challenged my ongoing value as a person apart from work. I had announced my intention to become a writer, with little training and hardly a track record. My family wanted a more specific description of how my time would be spent. Travel and golf seemed short-lived, frivolous, escapist. 

Restoration in process by the authorities, said the plywood signboard, involved extraction of cores of earth from beneath the foundation. Their plan aimed to prop the tower back up to its tilt of three hundred years ago, when the degree of lean was relatively static. At that point the supporting apparatus would be taken off.

 Will it be like someone’s fractured limb, I wondered, from which cast and traction have been removed? Will it be thinner, weaker? Will it have to learn to lean all over again? 

What if I turned out to be no good at writing? Maybe I had done the wrong thing, leaving the working world without a re-entry plan. If I failed to deliver on my promise that retirement would be a new career, what would my friends and family think? Was my estimation of success or failure going to match their expectations?

Had the tower never leaned, there would be no magic in it. People have watched it lean for centuries against thin air, perhaps sharing a secret hope of being there when it actually goes over.

I remembered a story about Galileo dropping weights from its top, measuring the speed of falling objects. From this he dropped the weights? Couldn’t he find something taller?

No, perhaps not then. Perhaps not even now, actually. Nothing in Pisa is very tall. And the tower does lean. Still, I had in mind a height matching its iconic status. I envisioned something like the Washington Monument, maybe. Now if that began to lean….

For me, standing there confused in an autumn afternoon, the tower demonstrated the value of persistence, of resolutely hanging on. It proved that being out of kilter does not necessarily mean you will go down completely, that people will still love you if you are a little crazy.

Should I have hung on longer at my job? Should I be comfortable with my decision, realize that others would feel good about it if I did, recognize that learning a new skill would not be different in retirement from before?

It is probably for the best that they will not pull it up to vertical. Its value as a tourist attraction would be nil straight up. It would need some practical use, maybe as a destination climb for tourists to view Pisa and the surrounding countryside. Entertaining, but not the same. Quirkless, like other towers.

We walked back to the station through narrow Pisa streets and found seats on the train to Florence. A little wait, then a gliding sensation, then a clacking of rails as the train picked up speed.

I took out my journal and began to write.

They are absolutely huge and black, immense pieces of life, blowing snot. I’m supposed to feed them apples. I can hardly move. They’re harnessed, but not to anything. I’m sure I’ll get my hand ripped off. I’m probably six.

My father and his uncle Adolph are laughing, remembering how it is to be scared by the sheer size of something living. King and Duke, the two horses, stand there waiting, once in a while stamping or whooshing air out their huge glistening nostrils.  

I offer an apple to King, the horse on the left. He snuffles it off. I still have a hand.

I lay the second apple, small and yellow with reddish streaks, on the flat of my other hand and move toward Duke, who leans his huge head over and picks it off. His lips are slimy, his tongue rough. My dad has this proud look.

Uncle Adolph lifts the reins, motioning to my father. Dad gets this grin, takes the reins in both hands and clucks at King and Duke who walk past me toward the barn. I follow them in and watch Uncle Adolph and my father unharness these monsters who obey commands of people so much smaller than they.

Uncle Adolph wore bib overalls to work, which was out his back door, farming on Donges Bay Road in Mequon, Wisconsin. The land he farmed was down the road from the homestead my father’s great-grandfather Gottfried settled into, sometime after he arrived from Germany in 1839 at the age of 17.

Gottfried’s son Herman bought a farm and ran it with his wife Margaretha until he died of diphtheria in 1894 in his thirty-fourth year, leaving Margaretha with two sons, seven and three, and Rosa, who had just had her first birthday. Two other boys had already died of diphtheria at ages five and two. A seven-year-old boy, the eldest, Hugo, got diphtheria too, but survived with a weakened heart.

Not sure how Margaretha managed. Her son Hugo went to work in Milwaukee as a fourteen-year-old, clerking in the office of an uncle’s coal business, which he bought after his marriage. Her younger son Walter probably helped on the farm. Maybe Margaretha ran the farm or maybe she rented it out; at least she continued to own it.

That left Rosa, a year old when Herman died at 34. Rosa finished public school in 1907. Her Wisconsin Common School Diploma, complete with a silver ribbon beneath the State Seal, lists the subjects she completed.

She was fourteen. It was May, in the middle of the month, in time for spring planting.

It’s a pretty long list: Reading, Spelling, Orthoepy, English Grammar, Arithmetic, Geography, Writing, United States History, the Constitutions of the United States and Wisconsin, Physiology and Hygiene.

Orthoepy?? I looked it up just now. It means the correct pronunciation of words. In this case, English ones. Probably useful, German being the first language for many in Mequon at the time. Must have worked. I don’t remember her having a German accent.

She married Adolph Milbrath, making him my dad’s uncle. Eventually they took over Margaretha’s farm and she lived with them. My father spent his summers on Uncle Adolph’s farm from when he was five years old until he went to high school.

Rosa was a large woman, laughing every time I met her, and kind. We knew her as Aunt Rosie. We usually saw Adolph and Rosie at family gatherings in Milwaukee since that’s where my family lived. But once in a while we would take a Sunday drive out to the country to visit them. That’s where I met King and Duke. It mixes in my memory with the smell of Uncle Adolph’s cigars.

A 1930’s traveling photographer recorded him in a color photo, standing behind King and Duke who are harnessed for work. He seems serious, dressed in a denim jacket and pants over a light blue shirt buttoned up to the throat, with a felt hat. The limestone gravel driveway is white and dusty and the grass is dark green and he’s not wearing gloves, so maybe it’s summer after the dandelions are done. Probably his best work clothes, chosen for the picture.

The horses look huge, even though it’s just a photo with the inevitable foreground effect. And there’s Uncle Adolph, this elf of a guy between them in the background, reins leading from their jaws through their shoulder collars back to his hands, loosely clasped, waist-high.

King. Duke. English names, not the German ones I might have expected them to go by. Orthoepy spin, I suppose.

Power and family, that’s what they are. Not about to take the hand off a petrified kid feeding them yellow summer apples streaked with red on a sunny afternoon in mid-September.

Sunrise on the Ganges. Varanasi, the holy city of north India. A stream of people heading for the river: religious pilgrims, locals, tourists like us, threading our way along streets covered in urine, two and a half cows wide. And a cow, walking beside me.

We watch the hum at the water’s edge, people standing waist deep in the river washing themselves at the ghats, steps to the sacred water. Smoke curls from a cremation nearby, mixed with dawn hues over the river and moving spots of colorful clothing on the banks.

We set candles adrift toward the sunrise, boarding a wooden boat with our guide Ajay, a law student at the university. Oars thunk on the gunwales. Our boatman edges us into the river.

Ajay points out temples, ghats, cremation sites, one after the other, describing their historical importance. Amid the murmur and splash of bathers, our journey among floating candles collapses to silence in our pale green boat.

Gauze, a bundle, white gauze, a little body, floating just beneath the surface.

Probably set into the warm water by its young father, his hands resolute, its mother stone-faced at home with other children to care for, the body maybe nine months old, as young as her own body’s memory of it.

It had no spiritual debts, being just a child. It needed no burning, no special treatment. It had no entanglements on society from which to be charred loose, making its slow way in the current among other bodies, whole ones in the case of holy men who likewise had no need of cremation, amid ashes of its countrymen cremated alongshore.

In the afternoon we went a few miles north to Sarnath, where the Buddha preached his first sermon 2,500 years ago in the deer park. Hundreds of years ago, according to a handpainted information sign, beneath ruins of a temple complex someone was pulling up for stones to use in building a bazaar, a stone box containing human remains was unearthed. A proper Hindu burial was decided upon; the remains were placed into the Ganges. The inscription on the box was deciphered later: “These are the bones of the Buddha.”

It is best to proceed without thinking in this place.

Thinking brings you too little.

Not thinking brings you too much.