Chasing My Identity

I recently read about a woman who conducts workshops on how to write your own obituary. The responses to her workshop always seem go one of two ways. The first group wrinkles their nose and responds with a frown “Oh, Lord, I don’t want to talk about my own death.” The more optimistic of that group then adds “and besides, I’m never going to die.” It’s denial at its most optimistic stance.

The second group recognizes that these workshops are an opportunity to make their own farewell statement. These folks realize that they now have an opportunity to say just what they want to say about their own lives instead of it coming from some boiler-plate funeral home ad or a template from the newspaper. They get to share with family, friends, and associates just what was important to them and what they are most proud of for the time they spent here on earth.

I’m in that second group. I want to tell the world what I did with my life…once I figure it out.

At first blush I’d have to say I’ve been very lucky on so many levels. Then having said that I would also add that I’m unapologetic for past failures, mistakes, losses, missed opportunities and a wide assortment of sundry missteps that have also defined my life. At this stage of the game, I’m too old and too busy to worry about ‘what might have been’ or ‘what if’ or ‘if only...’

I guess my own story begins with a French-Canadian guy whose parents came from someplace in Canada. He was a short guy with a pencil-thin mustache and (supposedly) a fondness for the drink. He went from Michigan and ended up in the Twin Cities. He was playing in a band in St. Cloud, Minnesota when he met my mother. She was just a young German Catholic girl recently off the farm.

So, my heritage is French Canadian and German. But what does that mean in the greater scheme of things? It is a heritage that I have no affinity to nor interest in…because it has no roots. As was befitting the rural German Catholic culture of that time, my mother never spoke of my father either before or after he passed away. It was as if he never existed in the first place.

I can lay out a few of the stats, facts and incidents that defined who I became. I was young and dumb and poor but open and honest. I’d like to believe that, much like my writing, I stumbled a lot but somehow kept moving forward.

I can talk about those men and women who briefly had an impactful influence on my life. I can talk about working from 7^th grade on and usually having two jobs going on simultaneously. I can talk about twenty plus years of working full time, running my business and managing several apartment buildings all at the same time. I can talk about near burn out and finally redemption on long bike rides, torturous trail runs and sojourns into the high desert.

It’s always a challenge to revisit that narrative in my head about my life up to a certain point. The facts are easy to lie out and document. I could put them into a flow chart or a neatly outlined diagram that lists important dates in my life. It’s neat and clean but still smells like an old tattered history book. Something is missing. The data would tell you how I got to where I am but it wouldn’t tell you how I ended up being who I am today.

There is a ‘60’s time warp still safely ensconced in my head. A wonderful period of creativity with its music and Bob Dylan and the Beatles and hippies and personal liberation and milestones. I don’t apologize for that. It is part of who I have become. It doesn’t take away from my life today but instead comforts and feeds me more material for my stories.

I am not interested in ‘what if’s.’ Bob Dylan said ‘Don’t look back.’ I would add as a caveat unless you’re in a good place. Because if you’re in a good place in your life today then you can look back and see the success and the failure, the goals that fell short and those never attempted. You can look at your life as it truly was and not as someone else said it should be.

One friend recently commented to me that it was too bad I hadn’t started my writing career years earlier. I simply replied that I couldn’t have done that years ago because I wasn’t the same person that I am today. My head was in a different place back then. Neither better nor worse but probably not conducive to the focused passion I feel for my writing today.

I guess I’m foolish enough to believe that old cliché that it’s never too late to become the person you’ve always wanted to be. I am today the result of a million different experiences, episodes, loves, failures, losses, challenges, and successes that rippled through my life over the last seventy years.

Awhile back, I read a book called ‘And Then the Vulture Eats You.’ Much like another favorite book of mine, ‘Zen and the Art of Running’ These authors pointed out that a runner changes minutely each day and shouldn’t expect the same results today as he might have gotten last week or last year or ten years ago. Like many others, I am constantly changing and evolving and adapting to the nuances of each day.

I have another friend who has defined life in three simple words: Learning, Earning and Yearning. His position is that we grow up with certain knowledge. We make a living. Then (he claims) we yearn for what we didn’t do or don’t have or lost. I don’t think it has to necessarily be that way.

I can’t do nor do I want to do what I did before. I do not want to wear a younger man’s façade. The years of experience and joy and disappointment run lines across my face but I wear them like a seasoned veteran worn by the games of life.

My new identity is a moniker I wear with pride and is defined by the stories I tell. My blogs are just one step in that direction. They are personal, explicit, revealing, open and honest. But in the end, they are simply meant to be a snapshot of a moment in time in the life of…

Today I am much more interested in telling my stories and living my life vicariously through my characters. I want to share the fear of humping my hog through the boonies, riding old Apache trails and avoiding ambush in some narrow slot canyon. I want to mastermind the intricate workings of a modern-day courtship and look in on two women slowly falling in love. I want my protagonist to fall in love with a siren of my own creation.

I want the new me to splatter my keyboard with stories of past adventures, mishaps, wondrous experiences, and my characters grand plans for the future. I want to live the life of a drifter out west and an adventurer on the Mekong Delta. And I want to do that until my ink dries up and my mind slowly fades away.

I haven’t written my own obituary yet but when I do, it’ll probably start with something like…

“He had a good life…and then it got even better.”

Last of the Last

They called the Center ‘Camelot.’ That golden period between its inception in 1969 through most of the 1970s when there seemed to be no cap on money available and the innovative ideas just kept blossoming each and every day. It was the introduction of adventurous, entertaining, and informative television over the relatively new public broadcasting medium.

I was part of the adventure for roughly five years before succumbing to the siren call of the North luring me home. Back then, programming at the Maryland Center for Public Broadcasting was fresh, innovative and a wonderful experience to produce. Hodge Podge Lodge and Consumer Survival Kit were just some of the many new approaches to great informational/entertaining television.

Those memories all came tumbling back when I read about the last remaining staff member from that period finally retiring. George Beneman was a director when I was there. He recently retired as Senior Vice President/Chief Technology Officer.  My, how the time has flown. That period of the Seventies was followed by forty plus decades of solid production work done at the Center.

Years after I left, I returned to my old Maryland stumping grounds to revisit some of the old familiar haunts. Davis’ pub in Eastport, Annapolis reminds me of what the Bohemian Flats must have been like on the West Bank of Minneapolis back in the ‘40s.The pub has been around since the ‘40s and their clientele hasn’t changed much since then. There are the usual neighborhood relics, a few old watermen, the hangers-on and now the ever-present tourists drawn by concierges and travel blogs.

Like the watermen of old Chesapeake, Davis’ pub remains stuck in the past. Its walls are adorned with fading photographs of tall ships, wooden boats, log canoes and skipjacks. Across the street the intoxicating smell of seaweed, salt air and brine mix with the fresh varnish on a yacht anchored there.

Our first home purchased in Reisterstown, not far from the Center, looks much the same as when we lived there. So too with the inner harbor of Baltimore before Freddy Gray’s shadow darkened its shoreline. New construction has finally painted a delightful façade over the old water place.

Many of my life/career changes started around that time. From 1972 through 1977, I sold programming during the day, wrote Westerns at night and toe-stepped the Chesapeake on weekends. Our family started there and real estate first began to pique my curiosity. It was a most audacious start to something great…the rest of my life.

Back then I had long harbored great fantasies of sailing the bay. A boat ride on our friend’s runabout brought back a rush of old mental images. The air is clearer on the water and there is a nautical language reserved for the fleet of foot and strong of stomach. My friend spoke of new moons and dark skies. He waxed on philosophically about the Orionids, the Leonids, North Taurids and Geminids; all meteor showers reserved for his patch of moonlit sky.

The houses seemed to have gotten bigger and the sea lanes more crowded since our last visit. But the inlets and bays were still nature’s nurseries. The Chesapeake Bay supports more than 2700 species of plants and animals, including 348 species of finfish and 173 species of shellfish. Approximately 284,000 acres of the Chesapeake Bay are tidal wetlands.

The Bay and its tidal tributaries have 11,684 miles of shoreline, more than the entire United States West Coast. Estuarine science and research is relatively young. Only in the last several decades has there been a good understanding of estuaries and fisheries.

My job selling programming was a precursor to my own business ventures born several years later. Our home was the first of a number of real estate investments. Two western novels were written, edited and then shelved for almost forty years before my new career as a writer took off. It was in Maryland where I attempted the JFK Fifty Mile Race but only got twenty-four miles before hypothermia brought me down. That failure propelled me to a lifetime of running.

Our General Manager was a brilliant yet incredibly personable leader. Dr. Frederick Breitenfeld had an enormous influence on my fantasies of becoming a writer. His encouragement gave me the confidence to keep typing forward. He was the best boss I ever had.

It’s come full circle now. Sailing the Chesapeake, revisiting old friends through the MCPB Facebook page and writing as my new moniker to carry. I’d like to believe it all began there when a young sprout came up from Tennessee to test the waters of this fledging television business, tip-toed the bays and inlets and let his imagination sail in the fresh ocean breezes.

It was nice to be home again…if only in my imagination.

Going Back into the A Shau

Sixty years after the fact, I returned to my old barracks at the Presidio of San Francisco. It was part of a journey arranged by Brian and Melanie to celebrate my Eighty years of pondering life’s ‘what ifs?’ Our journey began where my military life was born and ended on the beaches of San Diego a week later.

Fast forward two years from that Kerouac-inspired Road trip and I once again ventured back into the A Shau (pronounced A-Shaw) Valley in South Vietnam. This return journey was precipitated by a phone call from out of my past, the decision to reread the novel (part autobiographical) that encompassed that part of of my life and the thought of giving birth to yet another storyline wrapped in the same mid-Sixties environment.

Funny how things turn out. After writing the first version of “Love in the A Shau,” I assumed I had put that part of my fictional past behind me. I was done falling in love freshman year, feeling the exhilaration and angst of that first romantic entanglement, harboring wonderful fantasies of our future together and ultimately experiencing the painful realization that it wasn’t meant to be.

That long, monotonous bus ride from Minnesota down to boot camp at Fort Leonard Wood Missouri was but a dark spot on my collective memory. Yet I can still feel those emotions in the middle of the night when my sweetheart and all my friends were safely ensconced in their beds, dreaming of their bright collegiate futures ahead of them.

But much to my surprise and chagrin, my journey as author and protagonist was relived all over again with that reread. For reasons that gradually began build in my subconscious, I slowly came to realize that returning to the A Shau was an exhilarating experience and I was sorely tempted to go there again…in the form of yet another novel. Perhaps my journey back in time wasn’t over yet.

Standing in front of the barracks with my two kids brought up a plethora of mixed emotions. I was still around; a lot of my barracks buddies weren’t. Some were brought down by the conflict overseas, others made their eventual escape back to civilian life and the rest simply disappeared. But what if, I asked myself, a different scenario had played out. That thought then became the genesis for another possible novel that had long been percolated in the far reaches of my back brain.

‘Presidio Adieu’ is the working title for yet another novel from that same time period that has been percolating in my brain for some time now. Its birth is very tenable considering the numerous other projects screaming for my time and attention. While I don’t envision its creation anywhere in the near future, it has still gotten my imagination going into overtime once again.

Readers loved so many of the segments of that first book. This was especially surprising coming from my female readers. I worried that the graphic descriptions of war and the profanity of military talk would them turn off.  I feared they might see it as just gratuitous profanity used for shock value. But the opposite was true. As one friend mentioned out to me, quite pointedly. “Oh, come on, Denis, give us credit. We’re much smarter than that. We understand the violence of war and the profanity-laced dialogue that comes with the territory. It just added to the flavor of the moment and painted a vivid picture of the profound changes your protagonist was going through.”

It might be a tough trip back because I tend to get very vested into my characters. Yet it’s not often that I get to go back in time and revisit San Francisco of the mid-sixties. It was a world of barracks banter, office intrigue, sexual liaisons, cunning and stealth and all culminating in the bloody battlefields of the Nam.

To be sure, this proposed novel would have a totally different storyline with a different cast of characters. It would be more of a mystery novel than a story of combat. Yet the same emotions captured, lost, gained and lost again would be present. Whether in the post newspaper office, the barracks or the streets of San Francisco, it would be a world where only a few of the women were virgins and manual dexterity with the boys didn’t refer to their working on car parts.

It would be an interesting journey that I and my characters would love to travel. Proving once again that in fiction you really can go back to what once was and change it for the better or worse.

As I mentioned the odds of ‘Presidio Adieu’ starting anytime soon are remote. But if I do find the time, I think it would be an interesting journey well worth the effort if I can keep my fear of dying in battle and conflicting emotions of love in tack. It would be another trip back to the barracks again. Older and only slightly wiser this time around.