My Uncle Harry was the son of a poor refugee who got himself into Brown University on a full scholarship playing basketball and went on to sell paper bags and boxes for the rest of his life. He is in some Jewish Sports Hall Of Fame somewhere, and was the family’s only celebrity, ever.

He used basketball to get ahead, but he was an intellectual in every sense of the word, frequently traveling to New York City to visit his closeted gay dentist brother and hang around Greenwich Village bookstores.

Harry always came back with a bag of books and magazines for me; he always told me it was essential to feed your brain something as well as your belly.

Harry was a tall, handsome, and imposing man.

As a well-known athlete, the men in the family respected him and treated him carefully. In my family, deep thinkers were unusual; Harry stood out. If a conversation were mundane or stupid,  which most of them were, he would just get up and walk out.

My father loved to talk and give his opinions on politics and life. He was an expert on everything.

I fell in love with Harry when he stood up at the family dinner table one night and pointed the finger at my bloviating father and said. “George, you know, you are really full of shit,” and stalked out.

I wanted to run after him and kiss his feet, but it wouldn’t have been wise.

Harry kept telling me I was smart – nobody told me that – and he said I would make an exciting and thoughtful writer. For my 13th birthday, he gave me a subscription to I.F. Stone’s Weekly,  considered a journalistic triumph of the 20th century.

Stone wrote in a way that made people think, even when they didn’t want to, and his Weekly got me thinking about writing and journalism. In his 80’s, Stone set out to master the ancient Greek language, and he did.

I read every word he wrote; he became an early and enduring inspiration and hero. Above all, he wrote, the point is for people to think, not to agree.

The gift changed my life; I couldn’t wait to be a journalist who got people to think.

I was still wetting my bed at the time of this gift, and one summer, my father forced me to go to a sports summer camp in the country, he thought it would make me “a man,” and cure my bedwetting. It didn’t, it was a disaster, and I ran away from the camp, picked up by the State Police hiding in a farmer’s barn, and brought home.

This ended my camping and my sports career.

I wet the bed for a year or two longer.

My father thought this was a character flaw, a sign of weakness, and one day I ran away again, this time to Harry’s house. He saw I was upset and left me alone for a while, then asked me to come to sit in his living room, lined with books.

We talked about a bunch of things; I don’t remember what.

Harry had recently lost a son and left his distraught wife and moved to an apartment near the university and took up life as an artist and poet. He took different courses and taught one or two until the day he died.

That night, we sat silently listening to some music, and Harry finally asked me what was wrong. I burst into tears and talked openly with him about how bad my father made me feel about myself. Harry smoked a pipe in those days, and he had a habit of deeply inhaling the smoke and puffing rings that sailed across the room.

I loved the smell of his tobacco; I can smell it still.

I loved those rings, but this night he seemed to be considering the rings more deeply than usual.

He said two things, but I remember them well. “Jon,” he said, speaking slowly, “it’s hard when you have a father who an idiot. But there are much worse than him. You just have to bear it until you get out.” I took that in.

“Life,” he said, “is full of ups and downs.  It is never easy. I’ll tell you something I hope you remember,” and then he paused, building up some suspense and drama. Harry had a sense of the theater, which he later joined in his 60’s through Brown’s Drama Program.

“What is it?” I finally asked.

It was probably only a few seconds, but it seemed like a long time.

“Don’t get stuck in shit,” he said. ”

You just have to move on.”

And he took another puff on his pipe for effect.

It was a simple, even crude observation, yet it said quite a lot when I thought about it.

I thought of Harry this afternoon when I lay down to meditate and rest in my Peaceful Hour and broke one of my own rules. I picked up my iPhone and scanned the latest news. I’d been writing all day, and I couldn’t leave the house, it was too cold and windy.

Like everyone else, I know to avoid the news most of the time, but as unnerving as these times are, they are also fascinating, and I am curious.

It was a mistake. I found myself getting angry and then depressed and then anxious. I called Zinnia to come out with me, we walked into the back pasture, gave some alfalfa treat to the donkeys.

Then I came back inside. I had a message from Diane on my blog posts:

“I hate how you make me think of things from another point of view. But I keep coming back.”

And I smiled.

I thought of Harry and I.F. Stone, both of them long dead, and how each of them had devoted much of their lives to getting people like me to think. I thanked them both.

Don’t get stuck in shit.