15 January 2009. Wow! What a wonderful surprise. I have been walking down memory lane lately, going through a "storage room" in my house (i.e., a spare bedroom), sorting stuff somewhat and finding tidbits that spark strong memories I haven't had in YEARS! For instance, yesterday I opened a drawer of my student desk (the one I used in high school and college, which still serves as my primary desk in my adult years, too, I guess), and I found a photo of your daughter that you had sent me back in 1998. Of course, I have no memories of her except your mention of her in a letter or two that I received over the years (something about her being able to use a computer (Commodore 64?) when her mother couldn't at the time? LOL). In any case, I decided to see if she existed in the virtual world and could say hello to her mother, Eimear, in the process.
Lo and behold, the oracle of the Internet gave me a connection between her name and you through an email posted on a comment under a photo on a photographer's website. As a technology user, I should expect no surprises but I still marvel at the "miracles" of social connections that a mass-communication device like the Internet produces.
Today, I sit in my study (e.g., an uncluttered corner of the storage room/bedroom) and listen to old records from the '60s, '70s, and '80s, using a Christmas present (Brookstone iConvert USB turntable) to convert the vinyl LP albums to electronic form (MP3, in this case) so I can listen to the songs on my computer or
portable music player in the future, if I like. At this moment, the album, "
More Songs About Buildings And Food," by the
Talking Heads, is playing.
Spider webs flutter in the space between the window and the screen on this sub-freezing day. Looking out the window, I can't tell it's almost 25 deg F below normal. The sky is clear. Birds jump from limb to limb. A wild holly waves its green leaves at me in the slight breeze while a deciduous cousin hangs its red berries for any interested animals to carry off and spread the deciduous holly's seeds somewhere else.
I hear noises in the house and figure it's probably our cats in the living room, squirrels in the attic, mice in the walls, a cat and/or possum in the crawl space or just a house popping its joints in this awful weather. The raccoons and bats may have gotten into the chimney again. Who knows?
Such are my days in early 2009, enjoying a midlife retirement, writing and watching the world go by. I'll tell you why, since you sort of asked me in an email.
My wife's brother died rather suddenly in June 2006 at the age of 51 -- he had blood clots in his legs that over a two-day period spread to his lungs and then into his heart, causing cardiac arrest and death. Although he was in the ICU section of a hospital, they could not revive him. Hey, if they can't save you in a hospital, your time has come! My brother in-law and his family are avid participants in the activities of a large Baptist church in Huntsville so they were surrounded by their church friends immediately after my brother in-law passed away. I acted as the oldest male in the family during the visitation at the funeral home, greeting people at the head of the line, hearing their stories about my brother in-law and all the good feelings he left in others. At the memorial at his church, many hundreds of people showed up (one guess was 1500 people but I think it was exaggerated to make the family feel better; at a church of 5000 people, something less than 1000 must seem small). Again, the minister and friends exclaimed the glories of my brother in-law: church elder, Sunday school teacher, Boy Scout leader, emergency ham radio operator, NASA physicist, supportive co-worker, etc. In addition, over the next few months, we attended commemorative events at NASA for my brother in-law's work on a gamma-ray observatory to be launched on a satellite (it launched successfully in June of 2008 and is called the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope (more details at:
http://fermi.gsfc.nasa.gov/)).
From that point on, I realized more than ever that there's a higher chance of mortality for us as we hit our middle years.
Thus, even though my vocational work satisfied my bosses and customers (as well as my wife), I felt dissatisfied. My job at the time, senior program manager, meant I had to travel from coast to coast in America as well as to a few European countries. When I traveled, I had a lot of spare time to examine my life, wondering if I had completed all the tasks I had assigned myself when I was younger (in other words, my life's dreams) and would get the same sort of reaction to my life's work as my brother in-law if I died suddenly.
Now I know you have harped on me in the past about putting my life in the hands of the Lord. So had my grandmother (now deceased). Although my brother in-law and his family belong to a Southern Baptist church, they have not performed the usual task of handing me Bible tracts. Instead, they have observed the work I do for friends and family and come to the conclusion that, in their belief, the Lord works in mysterious ways and therefore I give to others in wonderful ways even if I don't do these things explicitly in the name of their Lord and Saviour.
So, anyway...well, you can see I'm a bit long-winded here. Blame it on your influence on me, even after all these years!
As I traveled, I continued to write in my journals. I also wrote letters to friends, poems for myself and others, short stories for my nieces and nephews and fooled around with the idea of completing some good novels. More importantly, I contemplated my dream of having a novel published and formally reviewed professionally.
All my adult life I have written in my journals during work hours. Through these observations I have constructed interesting story lines, many based on real life, which would make a mildly interesting plot. The older I've grown, the more complicated the story lines have become. Well, after my brother in-law died, I felt this burning desire to get a novel written and published more than ever. I found myself drifting from thoughts of work to thoughts of plots and subplots. My work didn't suffer in the classic sense but my maniacal drive to make my job the perfect embodiment of my life declined somewhat. I realized what was going on and coordinated with my boss to offload some of the 12- to 15-hour a day duties so that I could work just 8- to 10-hour days like the rest of my coworkers, freeing up time to work on my novel ideas. This extra time gave me the taste of blood, so to speak -- I felt like a vampire pursuing its next victim. I wanted to write my "Great" novel!
Finally, I couldn't take it anymore. I asked my boss if I could work part-time or take a leave of absence so I could finish the novel (as well as take care of an ailing mother in-law). I went back and forth with him, his boss, and the human resources department to see what they could do to accommodate my request. The company had never granted a leave of absence except for medical emergencies. Therefore, we compromised and I retired from the company with a severance package. My boss' boss did not want to see me go because he had hired me originally and knew the contribution I had given the company but understood that sometimes a person has to do what he has to do. That was in July 2007.
I was free at last! In celebration, I wrote the following poem:
These are my skyscrapers
No Empire State Building,
No Sears Tower or
Big Ben.
They shelter me nonetheless.
Tall,
Slender,
Alive -
Here without any assistance from my kind.
I cannot describe the noise rain makes upon their leaves...
-- White noise?
-- Light applause?
They bend to accept the wetness.
If only I had a palette of colors to describe them,
To make up for starving phrases like
"shades of green" and "variations of brown."
They do not talk.
They speak of time.
Summer showers pass
And now they bend toward the sun.
I'm nothing but a lucky observer -
Fortune smiles upon me -
While standing beneath the treed canopy,
White noise giving way to dripping sounds,
Rising and falling with the passing breeze.
The bluejays call.
A hickory nut plops.
A cardinal chirps.
The finches reappear.
I'd rather scrape the sky with trees
Than touch the clouds with glass and steel.
10th July 2007
===============================
Immediately, I threw myself into my writing, completing a novel in October 2007, "
Are You With The Program?" (in a nutshell, the story is a description of a labyrinth that a worker must get through in order to reach retirement; the opening page is a description of the hieroglyphic script on the door to the labyrinth. In other words, this novel is a metaphor and everything is not as it seems.). Well, as luck would have it, the folks at
amazon.com had teamed up with Penguin Books and HP to host a writing contest called the "Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award." I had a couple of weeks to edit the novel and get it submitted in time for the November contest deadline. There were a total of about 5000 entries for the contest. Only 836 novels made the cut to the semifinalist stage in January, including mine. All semifinalists received a formal review by Publishers Weekly. Again, including mine! A novel of mine reviewed by a professional! I had achieved my life's goal.
Gee. That was too easy. Retire in July. Finish a novel in October. Get a professional review by the following January. Maybe I should think about this more seriously?
I also received reviews by Amazon regulars ("top reviewers"), including the following:
Amazon Top Reviewer
The prose style is mostly graceful and competent, but studded with some compound sentences that are way too complex and which run on way too long. I know this is being done for comic effect, but it still gets in the reader's way. It's being carried way too far in places. The idea seems to be a corporate satire involving an overlooked research and development organization specializing in ... I'm not sure. Software? Architecture? There's not enough here to give me a feeling for this organization's place in the overall structure. Are they competing against other organizations? Facing layoff or merger? Working towards a prize? I get no sense of what conflict faces these people, and little sense of the main character other than his sense of humor. An entire scene flashes back to the spider incident in the first-person narrator's childhood and seems to be there just to establish the narrator's quirkiness. I was on board with that back when everyone threw doughnuts at each other. This should be rewritten for a faster start which involves some sense of conflict. What's at stake here? That's where the plot will come from.
Oh, and by the way, here's the professional review:
Editorial Reviews
manuscript review by Publishers Weekly, an independent organization
This ponderous novel is about as exciting as a corporate annual report. What starts out as a modestly interesting virtual reality thriller quickly degenerates into a slog through one bland middle manager's life in the world of software engineering. Bruce Colline, the narrator, works for the software company Cumulo Seven. Its program, Qwerty-Queue, may or may not have something to do with influencing financial markets, but that's never made clear, thus robbing the story of what little suspense it offers. Dozens of interchangeable characters clutter the novel, and their insipid dialogue is filled with jargon that will put even computer geeks to sleep ("I got with Fawn to go over her programs, including Tirelem, RRR and Perencles"). At the few points where the plot develops a modicum of forward momentum, the author quickly dispatches Bruce to a conference call, a meeting or his email. By the end, even the author has grown tired of slathering words on the page ("The moment was special, unforgettable and yet, difficult to put into words."). Instead of unraveling an absorbing mystery, Bruce merely stumbles upon some mundane truths about corporate America.
Well, be careful what you ask for. I had told myself I wanted to receive a professional review. I didn't say what kind of review, especially if the reviewer does not understand the metaphorical subtlety and judges the book by its cover, so to speak.
My friends who had read both the novel and the reviews felt like I had performed a great job. After all, I hacked together a novel in a few months, spent almost no time editing it down to the well-tuned essence of an almost-great story and yet received professional recognition, more than the majority of writers ever get. A friend of mine wrote me a note of encouragement, ending with the quote by
Scott Adams, "Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep." In other words, I am a creative person but that doesn't necessarily make me an artist. So be it. I still like to write and won't stop!
And now, a year later, here I am, writing another long-winded piece, this time a letter to a dear, dear friend of mine from 30 years ago.
Where have we gone in 30 years? You have reached a state of happiness, pleased with who you are, a bit larger in body than when we dated 30 years ago (but just think of it as your body catching up to your beautifully large personality), and still married to the man you share an offspring with.
Yeah, just like you, I'm bigger than I was in that picture, too. I think I weighed 165 pounds back then. The last I weighed a couple of days ago, I was 230 pounds (and that's after losing 10 pounds since Christmas). My goodness, 65 pounds! That sounds so much bigger than it looks in person, I can tell you. LOL
Eimear, I'm happy to hear you've been able to raise your child using home-schooling. My brother in-law and his wife home-schooled their two kids. The oldest graduated from college with a 4.0 GPA in Computer Engineering in 2006 (a month before his father died) and the youngest is in her last semester in Nursing at college with a 4.0 GPA, also. Needless to say, they get their smarts from my wife's side of the family!
I started college in 1980 with high hopes. Life gave me an alternative path, which I couldn't resist, so I followed the road less traveled for a while, finished an associate’s degree in 1985 and got around to completing my bachelor's degree in 2001 at the
University of Alabama in Huntsville with a major in MIS (Management Information Systems) and a minor in math.
My wife and I still live in the first house we bought in 1987 for $91,900 (using $5,000 her father loaned us as a down payment), financing $87,000. We paid off the house last year. The 1.3 acre lot next door to us came up for sale in 2006 for $50,000. We decided it wasn't worth it. A builder bought the lot and erected a 3,800 sq ft home in 2007. He put the house up for sale last week for $494,000!!!! If you could see the odd juxtaposition of our rundown 1,800 sq ft home versus the monstrosity next door, you would laugh. I have a rusted 1962 Dodge Lancer and smashed 1992 Chevy S10 truck sitting in the side yard on one side of the house. In the side yard facing the new house, I have four tires holding an eroding ditch together, two plastic chairs from Wal-Mart covered with algae (plus a clematis growing through and around them), and a preformed pond liner from Home Depot turned upside down, looking like a turtle all curled up. Oh, and a pile of lumber from the back deck I took apart when we had a sunroom added to the back of our house in 2001.
Why am I telling you all this? I guess because at one point I wanted to impress you with how great my life had become but now I realize it's more important to show you the real me - a country boy who's lived the city life, almost falsely. I know who I am now -- I am a person who was raised to appreciate technological advances in society and to set my life's work in that area. At the same time, I am a lazy country bumpkin who's just as happy to sit and watch the world go by, letting his house fall apart around him in the process. I don't need a fancy house or a fancy car, an expensive vacation or jetsetting lifestyle. I'm happy just sitting here writing a letter to a friend of mine and could sit here writing this letter the rest of my life, no matter how good, great, poor, non-artistic or outlandish the writing may be.
I'm glad you're writing. I would enjoy reading your work. By chance (if you believe there's such a thing as chance), back in December while working on my latest novel I added a character loosely based on you (see, I think of you, too - you should see all the pictures of us and others I posted on facebook). I plan to submit that novel for the next "Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award" contest, which takes place in February. The novel still needs some editing so it's not quite finished yet. Hopefully, it will be polished enough to garner attention from an editor for the contest.
Eimear, I guess we've seen enough of the world to know what we like. For the most part, I wake up each morning and go to bed every night with a smile on my face. The world is just fine to me, no matter if the mass media news outlets and bloggers want to paint a negative picture about the global economy. I see that I won't make more than a tiny bit of difference in how the solar system or galaxy is going to be 200 million years from now and that makes me happy. I made a small difference and that is enough. All the rest of it, no matter whether you're Bill Gates, Hillary Clinton or Joe the Plumber, is just a relative measurement of an iota.
You remember that coworker of yours that got on your nerves because he/she kept saying, "C'est la vie"? I believe your response was life is what we make of it and not what happens to us so we shouldn't just accept what happens. Well, I've come to the conclusion that maybe your coworker was right in one sense. We're middle-aged now, wiser and [supposedly] smarter. I've also come to the conclusion that life is a little of both of what you said. Sometimes we make things happen and sometimes life makes things happen to us. Either way, we're here to talk about it and for me that is enough, n'est pas?
My wife has been patient during this midlife retirement of mine but thinks it's time I get back to a regular source of income (i.e., a “desk job”) and maybe she's right. Just like your husband depends on you for certain aspects of life, I've depended on my wife for quite a bit. She stayed with me during dark episodes of my life that I'm not sure I would have stuck around for if our roles were reversed (of course, I know I would have but sometimes I look at the old me and wonder why she stayed with me then). Now, I owe her the gratitude of going back into the moneymaking world.
As you and I know, it's who we count as friends that make this life worth living. I recall many a moment of the short time we shared together (two, maybe three months) and savor each one like a finely aged cheese or a rare bottle of vintage wine. I sometimes walk through a crowd and smell the perfume you used to wear (Tiempo?). How many people have you stayed up with until 5 a.m. in the morning just for the sake of talking? For me, not many (maybe one or two, at most, including...let's see, probably only my sister, my wife and Helen, oh and a couple of party buddies from college who are still good friends of mine). Little could I have imagined the influence you would have on my life. Same goes for your parents and your brother. He is still the most overall intelligent/creative person I've ever met. Your mother taught me so much in so little time -- as much as I adore and love my mother in-law, I often wish your mother had been my mother in-law because of her special laughter and kindness that clearly showed up in you (no doubt, your daughter carries on those traits). Your father showed me the importance of being a laid-back father, which I have carried into my role as an uncle.
Thinking back, I remember the days and weeks disappeared and our months together ended just as quickly as they began. Could we have only been together for two months or at least less than three? First loves are like that, I guess. A candle that burns too bright or burns from both ends. I lost all contact with the outside world during that time and have no idea what the rest of my friends were doing –- they said they thought they'd lost me. You were the only world that mattered to me. Nothing the matter with that, right?
I will always remember our short time together with fondness. Even though I want to think you loved me for my mind, we didn't need long to progress through the stages of love. Our relationship leapt quickly from a platonic getting-to-know-you-better into a discovery of the body that I never expected. In other words, you spoiled me but shocked me, too. Do you recall sitting in a church parking lot with my father, asking about sex? If your long-term memory no longer holds that scene in your head, you're missing a funny story to tell your daughter. The memories of our relationship kept me going physically for years. In fact, I went from being with you, when touching, hugging, kissing, etc., were par for the course, to a long-term relationship with Helen. Would you believe that in the years that I spent together with Helen, we never really hugged (although we did put our arms around each other for photographs) and in fact, we never so much as kissed or participated in other normal physical relationships that a male and female share. Do you see what I'm saying? My need for physical contact was consumed by you and me in two or three months and lasted for years to come, until I started dating my wife.
I seem to remember you having had cervical cancer at one point in your life but I did not know about the heart attack. I'm happy that you have a loving husband and daughter who helped you recover from the body ailments. I'm sorry that you lost long-term memories. I would love to have talked with you to see if you remember any details about our time together that I have forgotten. Some things I can recall with ease, such as when you and another girl used to put me in special poses on the band practice field. I remember our first night together, including running out of gas in the middle of Blountville, getting Dad to put gas in the car, eating pickles, baking cookies, talking, talking and more talking, and finally, a peck kiss at the door. I remember a special moment in the bathroom at your house, other similar moments together, including in a school parking lot and at a local park. I remember you taking me into the girls' locker room at Central, sneaking me in as a joke and a surprise for the girls in there. I remember visiting your grandmother and eating ice cream at a local burger joint. I remember talking with your parents.
Glad to hear your daughter has found love at the same age we were (I still can’t believe it’s been 30 years ago for us). I suppose you’ll watch your daughter go through the same pangs of love that we did. As far as her wanting to be a photographer, I hope you show your daughter how to twirl a baton before she graduates ‘cause as a photographer she's going to be juggling and spinning a busy schedule around!
I have lived a good first half of my life and happily include you in it. The second half of my life brings many new surprises and joys. Perhaps we can all meet up sometime to see what we expect of life in our 50s, 60s, 70s and beyond!
Well, I've had too much tea to drink and my bladder tells me to go to the bathroom so I'm losing my ability to think and write right now. Plus, I've got to go figure out what to fix for dinner tonight. If I could cook, I'd fix a big batch of chili. Instead, I'll see what frozen delight is available in the freezer for this househusband to heat up.
By the way, during the year between the two novel contests, I have been caring for my 91-year old mother in-law, who lives in Rogersville, TN. I have lived with her on and off for weeks at a time, especially during periods when she's in and out of the hospital or rehab unit at a nursing home. Amazingly enough, she can still drive around town. I have tried to make up for her dead son and must be succeeding. She no longer refers to me as her son in-law but calls me her son. One time, while we sat and watched a baseball game on TV, she mistook me for her husband and talked about my wife as if she were our daughter. Talk about a great surreal moment for a poem or novel! I just hope there's someone in my life, if my wife is no longer living, who can share moments with me like that when I'm an old geezer. My mother in-law spent 20 years caring for her sick husband and valued her freedom after he died in 1997 (although she would never put it like that), including a trip to the Holy Land with a friend of hers. However, loneliness finally set in with old age and I think until I gave her attention she felt she was ready to die. Now she sees that she brings out the best in people, including me, and wants to continue to live to make others' lives more fulfilling, and thus hers, too, in the process.
Okay, my bladder is screaming. Gotta go! Forgive my bad writing. I haven't got time to go back and edit what I babbled on about.
Say hello to your parents and brother for me. Talk to you soon. I want to read your writing, even if it would embarrass me.
One last thing before I go. You probably don't remember when we communicated after I had decided to marry my wife but you told me you were upset, at least half-jokingly, that I had not given you a chance to get us back together before I married someone else. In my mind at the time, I was too blind to see that you were right. Why hadn't I seen that the relationship I had with you, no matter how brief, had flown to the stratospheric reaches of the sky with the audacity to throw love in the face of the gods and quickly fallen from the excessive heat, like Icarus and his wings? It had not died, though. Love does not die. It smolders in the ashes, waiting to be reborn.
I had no hand in creating, bearing, or raising your child. I can only hope that in your daughter a piece of our love has been reborn in her so that she can understand and fully appreciate the strength, joy and special moments she shares when overpowering love touches her head and heart. As you mentioned in your myspace writing, these overpowering moments in our youth set the foundation for the rest of our lives that we build upon forever more.
I have spent more time than I thought I would drafting this email and have yet to cover all the topics I thought about over the last night or two as I set about creating a mental outline from which to direct my thoughts to you electronically. Thus, my time has run out and now I must attend to my domestic duties, figuring out what to fix my wife and me for dinner.
Thanks for being my friend. I value the no-nonsense/no-games aspect of our give-and-take through the years. We ask nothing of each other except honesty and an open ear. Let's hope our minds keep working, even if our bodies don't!
