Roots

I grew up an Air Force Brat. At the mercy of the winds, blowin about like a tumbleweed, rootless.  I was born on Cape Cod.  Lived on base in Japan and  Mississippi.  Bounced back and forth from NH to Maine a few times.  Spent a couple of years in upstate New York and a few more in Maryland when my dad was posted to the Pentagon. To this day--even though Dad retired in 1975 and I've lived in New England since--when people ask where I'm from, I always answer: I'm from everywhere, and nowhere; I'm a military Brat.  I met many other Brats along the way, some of them moved many more times than I did, lived in more overseas posts away from American culture than I.  I feel fortunate in that regard, that I never had to pick up and move in the middle of the school year.  If need be, my dad would move on to the next place and we'd follow when the school year had finished.  He also had temporary assignments where we would stay behind and he'd be gone for months on TDY.  Yet there was always that impending sense, that nothing, no place was permanant; that friends you made, places you grew accustomed to, were bound to be left behind. 

I don't know how my siblings feel, but for me, the closest I felt to a real family home was the cottage on the Maine coast that we started renting each summer, starting in the early '70's and continued to rent for 20+ years.  My parents funded the expense the first few years, then as we kids grew older and started working, we all chipped in to cover the rent.  We loved the place so much that we were willing to part with huge chunks of the income we earned by working in local restaurants.  And we built alot of memories there.  Boat fights. Wake boarding. Snorkeling. Surfing. "The Chasm." "The Tub." Crab apple fights. Lobster feasts.  Towering card houses, and epic games of Monopoly on rainy days.  Climbing on the roof to check the surf across the river and over the dunes.  Sneaking in and out of the house past curfew, climbing the lattice work, onto the shed roof, the through the upstairs window that had a tear in the screen that you could reach through to unhook the latch.  Thunderstorms. Hurricanes.  And on one occasion, even rumors of a Tsunami. 

But even "The Cottage" had an a foreboding sense of impermanance to it.  We knew as we grew older, as some of us began to start families of our own, that our days there were numbered.  We offered a number of times to purchase the home from the owners.  But they were unwilling to sell; it was their family cottage.  They had built their own memories there.  We moved on...

I married young and started a family.  Purchased a starter home near the beach but as the kids began to grow, we moved further inland, to a suburban neighborhood.  A new development, similar to ones I'd lived in after my parents stopped living on base and purchased homes each time we moved as, "an investment."  It wasn't my choice of where to live (been there, done that; cookie cutter homes) but it was a nice community for kids.  Still, though I lived there longer than I've ever lived in one place in my life, there was always that sense that it wasn't to last.  Raising our kids, I watched many families move on, friendships and relationships scattered just as I'd witnessed my entire life.  Some moved on because of work, or desires for nicer homes in better neighborhoods; many moved on as their marriages broke apart... There was that foreboding sense again, that nothing, nowhere is permanant.  Somewhere deep within my soul, I knew that my own marriage was doomed.  It wasn't...right.  I was not alone in this assesment.  But like many do, we stayed together to raise the kids, knowing that our days as a family were numbered...that this too, would pass...

I've been through alot in the few years since it all collapsed.  Lost nearly everything, and everyone...  But after the wind stopped howling, after I tumbled to a stop, to a rest, I found my sanctuary.  I live in Maine now.  I'm not just here temporarily; this is my home.  I purchased a small bungalow; it's only 650sf and it needs alot of work.  But it's close enough to the ocean I love that on some days I can even smell it.  I'm surrounded by woods and a marsh out back.  In the summer I hang my hammock under the shade of two towering trees.  I see turkey and deer amble by on occasion.  I can be at two of my favorite surf spots inside of 15 minutes, the ocean in five.  I have a dog and a cat, two guitars, a ukulele, and six surfboards.  And peace.  I have peace.  Funny, but after all those years of feeling rootless, there remains a sense of wanderlust inside me.  There are many places I would like to see, to experience.  Cities.  Countries. Surf spots.  America.  But I only want to visit, not live.   I have roots now.  Maine is my home.  My base of operations.  The place I will always return to.  Life, my life, is finally, the Way It Should Be...

Don't Ever...

...Never, ever, choose a satellite internet connectio! N  ever.  Ever. In a word: Suck. In a nutshell: Suck. In every way possible: Suck. Much has gone by that I wanted t blog. A couple  of swells and pics I wanted t pst. I type this via Blackberry; not acceptable but my oly available otion, currently...Never. EvER!

On A.D.D. 'n Writing

Bursting through the door on arrival home from my first day of first grade, I fell into my mother's arms, sobbing.  "What's the matter?" she inquired.  Blubbering tears and snot, I relayed the source of my anguish: "They didn't teach me to read!"  True...the good sisters at Nativity B.V.M. (blessed virgin Mary) had failed to bestow upon me the knowledge and gift of how to decipher the hieroglyphical symbols I saw on the page to unlock the ideas and stories they represented. How dare they... 

It had all started with memorized books that my mom had read to me; something about the mental imagery nascently derived from words...  I wanted, needed to learn how to read for myself... 

Didn't take long for me to take up the second "r" in the academical trilogy.  You see, I had ideas and stories of my own metastasizing inside my skull and as soon as those nuns did teach me how to grapple a pencil and scribble my own etchings onto a sheet of paper, I was off...

Fiction is my preferred method of conveyance of thoughts and ideas.  Fiction often allows the one to more effectively expose truths that are sometimes timidly skirted in non-fiction.  There is also often more opportunity to express art and creativity, I think... 

So my goal early on was to master fiction writing, specifically long form fiction, ie. novels.  At the University of New Hampshire, I majored in English with a special emphasis on creative writing and was tutored by some wonderful professors, most notably John Yount who once had one of my favorite authors, John Irving, as his student.  In conference one day, after ripping apart a miserable piece I'd hurriedly scribbled to make an assignment deadline, Mr. Yount then bestowed upon me what I later considered to be either a blessing or a curse...he said that in my writing he could see that I wrote because I had to, not merely because I wanted to...

At the time, I remember my spirits being wonderfully uplifted by his expressed sentiment.  Years later though, through much tribulation, failure and rejections too numerous to enumerate, I no longer feel so uplifted.  And yet, professor Yount was right about me, I cannot stop writing, and I cannot stop submitting.  My forehead is lumpy, scarred, and perpetually bloody from repeated knocks against the brick wall of publishing.  Oh, I had a few minor, "successes."  A smattering few published short-stories and  magazine and newspaper articles; just enough to fuel my delusions.  I should have recognized the ominous portent when my first published work, a surfing magazine piece, went monetarily unrewarded, when after months of repeated correspondence with the editor to recompense my due, I received notice that the rag had gone belly-up...

Oh well, I was gonna be rich and famous some day, and that experience would provide mere anecdotal fodder for my eventual literary interviews after publication of my great American novel...

Of course, there's this thing, this sometimes annoying thing, that exists outside the realm of my fictional proclivitous mind...it's called "reality."  Truth, the real truth is, I'm an unpublished "novelist."  My big, fat, first unpublishable tome sits on a shelf in my office.  It is horrid.  But like your own spawned child that you are too ashamed to admit is homely, imbecilic, and doomed to mediocrity, at best, I've not yet mustered the courage to drag it down the riverbank and plunge it under the surface until it stops breathing...

So there it sits.  And me? I continue to write.  Currently, I have two completed novels, one a children's chapter book, the other a detective/mystery based on the protagonist of my first published short story.  Both are in search of a empathetic agent, someone to take pity on my decades long struggle to get a book published.  I send out emails and hard-copy proposals...wait months for responses, sometimes getting none and occasionally getting nibbles, but ultimately no bites... And I keep writing...

Now, how ironical as well, that I should be diagnosed with A.D.D. at 50+ yrs old. Oh, I've always known myself to be a scatterbrain, and I have a real born child also afflicted.  Jaysus, the memories of his redfaced frustration...my own as well, sitting at his desk, angered tones, trying to comprehend why he could NOT focus on his schoolwork... Ironical that I'd never connected the dots, never acknowledged the same issues in myself...

Mr. Yount once told me I write because I have to.  And that's because, with my A.D.D. the thoughts, the ideas, the characters and plots, keep cell-splitting in my gray matter.  I probably forget or discard more ideas than I retain, as they fire off like a string of firecrackers.  And I have to get at least some of them out, let them ooze onto a page or computer monitor, lest my head explode!  The problem is, finishing them! I've got partials written for six other novels and two non-fiction projects, in addition to the book I'm trying to finish now.  I get ideas and I usually pen them off in a flurry of fevered writing.  I want to have something down so I don't forget.  Even when I'm not actively working on them, they're percolating inside my head.  Sometimes, when I get an inspiration on one of them, and I'll set aside the story I'm currently working on and go add my new idea to one of these "backshelf" drafts.  People ask me: "How can you keep it all straight in your head?"  Hell, I don't know!  But I do.  Only the plots and characters and ideas are usually swirling around like simmering broth, shellfish and vegetables in a succulent seafood bouillabaise side-dish, and I must pluck them out individually to briefly gorge...before I return to the main course entree...

The frustration for me, is that I don't have the time to finish everything I start.  And I don't have the freedom to just write.  Cuz there's that other nagging reality, the need to put a roof over my head and food in my belly and clothes on my back, and taxes in the government's coffers and all the other BS that gets in the way of me release-valving the constant boil of stuff in my cranium, that I have to write down! 

It ain't easy bein a writer, 'specially an unsuccesful one...with A.D.D. and limited means...

Oh, wait, there goes a butterfly...