Despite what my 5th grade yearbook says: “In 15 years I will be… ‘A pitcher for the California Angels,'” for much of my childhood I wanted to be a doctor and a writer. My father worked for the government but always defined himself as a scholar (Russian military history). He had his own room in the house (his study) that was wall to wall books and a heavy, serious desk. He valued reading above almost everything else. Among the things I can remember being praised for the most, my interest in reading and my ability to write were near the top. Kids naturally want to please their parents – I suspect my desire to be a writer began as an effort to please my father. My mother worked in the billing department of Frankford Hospital. While she wasn’t a doctor or a nurse, she was maternal, and I think working for the hospital reinforced that association with caring. We also watched a lot of M.A.S.H. when I was growing up. I loved Hawkeye and Trapper and Radar and Potter – though I think I most closely identified with B.J. Hunnicutt and Colonel Blake – goofy sensitive guys with hearts of gold and good moral compasses. My guess is that’s where the doctor thing came from.
While I played on the high school team, the fantasy of being a baseball player ended some time in middle school, but being a writer and being a doctor, moved in and out of my life all the way through college (and to some degree now). These aspirations found outlets early on in my life. In fifth grade, I was one of the top fundraisers for our community Give-A-Christmas, and for most of my pre-teen years, I had a knack for taking in people’s stories and accents and sounding authentically like someone else. On a trip out to California, I was a dead-on impersonation for the way the tour bus driver spoke. I could also mimic my relatives from central Pa pretty well.
I had a love/hate relationship with my aspirations, sometimes sabotaging myself. Before I could read, I protested the idea of it as vehemently as I could – I would sit at the table with the big plastic letter blocks and cry as I blubbered and sniffled my way through the alphabet. In high school, I failed 12th grade English because I refused to present my poem in front of the class (though I got the award for the most philosophical poem “A Lonely Grain of Sand”). In college I thought I would do pre-med until I failed calculus and got pretty poor grades in bio and chem. I didn’t take science and math classes, they took me. That was the dead end on anything medical related. At the same time, I had a few classes in writing and a few professors (grad students) who encouraged me to switch over to English. Ironically, the kid that failed English for not reading a poem studied poetry and started a literary journal. After college, I took a career as a book editor, then switched to being a teacher, and switched again to being a nonprofit executive (a rediscovery of caring).
I’ve started this blog two different times. Here, as I write a new introduction, I’m attempting a third restart. This blog is, first and foremost, an evolving process of discovery. I expect, much like I have, it will go through several iterations. Much of it may read as a rambling wreck of a memoir – at least that’s what it’s been so far. I have neither the patience nor the mental organizational capabilities to piece together something that is linear and/or succinct. The blog format works because I can categorize and change categories as I see fit. It also works because I couldn’t possibly sustain writing entire chapters.
This blog is also about finding my voice. That process alone takes many different forms: finding my voice after loss, finding my voice in the middle of a new civil rights movement, finding my voice in terms of doing things that I’m not comfortable doing (dancing, singing, expressing). Any one of these ideas and topics in this second introduction (the first introduction is my About page) could be a thread, a post, a paragraph…. and as of this writing, I’m not sure what form they will or should take. In some respects, every page could be titled “Introduction.” It is a slow peeling away.
Generally speaking, I’m uncomfortable with the audacious nature of saying “here I am, look at me, aren’t I so interesting, don’t I have interesting thoughts and stories?” As of this blog post (5/31/2020) I’ve written over 300 other blog posts (most, if not all of them, are hidden). For the past half-year, I have tried to write and post something every day. Some of that writing was garbage, some of that writing was good. As I re-read my past posts, I hope to separate the wheat from the chaff and gradually add posts back in, so long as I feel they have value.
A lot of what I’ve written has been about my relationships with other people (parents, family, partners, strangers) and my relationship with the world around me (geography, nature, time, work). Relationships by their very nature are complicated. When held up to the light of the “ideal,” most relationships are, in some ways, failures – at the very least, they breed the inexact language of compromise and consideration. I strive to spend time in those complications, in that messy “in-between” space. I try not to have heroes or villains in my stories – just a whole lot of people usually trying to do the best they can… and at worst, some people who are going through the motions because the world can be an exhausting place.
Part of my revamp here is because I have been taking part in the #BlackLivesMatter protests here in Memphis. I have things I’d like to say about race and privilege and what I’m seeing and observing. I may court some additional traffic to my site and so I thought I should a tidy up a bit. And well… just like the rest of the country… after a pandemic and widespread civil unrest, things probably should look a little different.