Building Windmills

When the winds of change blow, some people build walls; others build windmills. – Chinese proverb

Peter’s windmill is gone.

Well, the basic structure is still there, but the sails—the things that make it a windmill—are gone. Now it looks like a pawn with windows.

The model windmill stands outside a house at 78th Street and Shore Road, and when my brother Peter was a kid, he loved that thing so much we all called it Peter’s Windmill.

It stood unscathed for decades. I never noticed anything amiss until last week, when I was walking to my sister’s apartment building for a barbecue and saw that its limbs had been amputated.

It was a shock. We lost Peter last year, and now one of his favorite landmarks was also gone.

I’ve been thinking about my brother a lot this week.

The next day, I visited my aunt, and while the express bus rolled up Sixth Avenue, I saw that 8th Street had been dubbed Jimi Hendrix Way in honor of the rock legend.

And I was thinking about Peter again, since he was a huge Hendrix fan. He used to listen to epics like “Purple Haze,” pick up a T‑square he’d made in his high school woodshop class, and wail away with Jimi.

He also hung up a black‑light Hendrix poster on one side of our room and a fabulous color image of the guitar icon at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967.

Author and physician Gabor Maté argues that time alone does not heal grief or emotional trauma; instead, it merely masks or scars over unhealed wounds that can lie dormant until a trigger brings them back with their original intensity.

True recovery requires intentional internal work, he says—emotional processing and reconnecting with one’s authentic self—rather than passively waiting for days to go by.

Suppressing grief or loss creates emotional “body armor” that blocks true healing and traps people in past reactions.

I’ve been reaching out to Peter through chair work, where you speak to an imagined person—or an abstract entity like an inner critic, anxiety, or grief.

People in Motion

Or a deceased family member.

“I miss you,” I said to my kitchen chair.

A few years ago, I had an angiogram that revealed blockage in my heart, requiring me to get a stent. I told my siblings they should get the test as well, but Peter never did.

“Why didn’t you fucking listen to me?” I shouted. “Why didn’t you take care of yourself? I miss your goddamn phone calls, when you always called at the worst time and would ramble on and on. There were so many times I’d groan when you called me during work hours because I was busy."

"Now I’d give anything to hear your voice again.”

After the barbecue at my sister’s building, I lumbered back home along Shore Road, stuffed to the gills and feeling pretty good about life.

I greeted people along the way, including a woman with a little dog whose name, in Spanish, meant “Fluffy.”

I stopped by a garage sale at 75th Street, and the woman who owned the house told me she was selling her home.

“We’ve lived here for many years,” she said, “but now I’m moving with my mother to a town outside of Providence, Rhode Island.”

I wished her all the best, and I felt sorry that I hadn’t met her sooner, given that we lived so close to each other.

I sure do hope the people who own Peter’s windmill get around to repairing the thing. It would be a shame if they let it fall apart.

But if that does happen, I’ll always have my kitchen chair.