Summer of Strange Occurrences

Sharon broke her right arm three days before leaving Palm Springs this spring. Thus began a rather disjointed (pardon the pun) and disruptive summer for both of us back in Minnesota. Of course, her broken arm was her good arm. So, suddenly sporting a cast for more than five weeks, made her feel unbalanced and (understandably) it was difficult it for her to navigate steps and stairs. The accident also made it more difficult for her to continue her painting projects.

So began a summer of adjustments for Sharon’s new situation and a real challenge for her to continue painting as she had in the past. It also involved two trips weekly; one to Edina and another to Red Wing to deal with therapy and rehabilitation. You do what you have to do.

My Coffee and Chat sessions also went through some adjustments as a couple of folks disappeared entirely and others found more interesting ways to spend their time. The core friends that remained formed a tight bond over the summer. Over the ensuing months, we had some fabulous conversations; solving many of the world’s problems in just one sitting.

I finally got an E-bike and wanted to restart my beloved long distance Twin Cities bike rides. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to find a suitable e-bike carrying rack so I had to confine my rides to Apple Valley and its surrounding communities.

A sibling gathering up at Lake Vermillion proved a wonderful opportunity for Sharon and her sister and two brothers to finally find time for themselves sans kids and grandkids. A grand time was had by all.

Sharon and I managed to find time for a long weekend in Colorado. At this stage in their lives, Brian and Amy have three kids knee-deep in all kinds of school activities and sports. It was a quick taste of their crazy, hectic wonderful life raising three kids in today’s hurry-up lifestyle. Now we can just sit on the sidelines, cheering our grandkids on and enjoying their success.

A move script outline that had laid dormant for years finally rose above the rest of my other writing projects. Starting to write ‘Habitat for Humility’ proved much harder than I thought. Movie scripts differ from plays in their organic composition; demanding many more subtle nuances from both the characters and the subliminal story lines.

‘Broken Down Palace,’ My book of poetry, finally came out to great response among friends. It was a project six months in the making and I was glad to have it finally done.

My very personal play ‘Frenchy’s Eats’ took a lot longer to finish and is now in the recrafting stage.

My latest play, ‘By the Salton Sea,’ was not accepted by last year’s venue (out of 130 submissions) so I hope to present it to other venues instead.

After months of searching, I was finally able to meet up with a musician who seemed interested in helping me create a sound track of nine songs for my play ‘PTV.’ After our initial meeting, I have high hopes of collaborating with him to craft songs that fit the time, place and mood of my play. If that works out, I have more musicals to score.

Through my old illustrator, I am creating a second book in the Waleed series. This one deals with ‘being afraid’ and facing one’s fears. A friend encouraged me to do an audio version of Waleed, the Skinny Hippo. So, I hope to have audio versions of both books soon.

We’ll be returning to Palm Springs early this fall. Last year’s play ‘Widow’s Waltz’ has been nominated for six different awards by the Desert Theatre League. The awards banquet is October 1^st. It would be a real thrill to see my play win some awards.

After a summer like no other, I hope Sharon and I can get back to our respective passions of writing and art.

Long Time A-Brewing

The Maryland Center for Public Broadcasting was a great place to work back in the early seventies. The station had started in downtown Baltimore in the late sixties and by 1972 when I joined the firm, they were newly established in their headquarters building outside the beltway.  Sharon and I bought a house nearby and she went off to teach each morning and I went to work nearby.

Having never conquered the ability to just work one job a time, I found myself slowly becoming more and more engaged in learning the craft of writing. That subtle obsession slowly morphed into novel-writing each evening after work and finally the creation of two western novels over a two-year period of time.

As par for the course, Sharon encouraged me to try to get them published and I demurred and put them into a filing cabinet instead. They never came to gestation until about ten years ago. When my first novel morphed into a trilogy called ‘Apache Death Wind’ and the second novel was reborn as ‘Apache Blue Eyes.’

Now going back even further in time, 50 years to be almost exact, I wrote a parcel of poems and song lyrics during the mid-to-late 60s. Those faded gray pages sat in the same filing cabinet until this last fall when coincidence and circumstance brought them back to life. Such is the writing style of someone who never discards anything written even in jest.

A while back I wrote a blog entitled: Ode to a Broken Down Palace. It was about the first apartment building I lived in near the University of Minnesota. The building was designed and constructed around the turn of the century for a prominent Minneapolis industrialist.  By the time I moved in, almost sixty-five years later, it was a rundown boarding house chopped into several apartments.

That period in my life encompassed what I now whimsically call my lost years; roughly from 1961 to 1971. It began with my high school graduation on May 31st, 1961 and culminated in my marriage on July 31st, 1971. Ten years of wandering and wondering about my life as it unfolded in twists and turns; some expected and others not so much.

It was during that latter period, in an old tired musty apartment, that my creative juices really started to flow. From roughly the fall-winter of 1967 through the spring of 1970, I found myself going through a furious writing phase.  Poems, song lyrics, outlines for novels and mind-stories poured forth, all captured with my ancient L.C. Smith typewriter.

My new job at KTCA television entailed some script writing and other journalistic endeavors. But more importantly it meant I was interacting with a plethora of wildly crazy, creative, free-thinking folks. It was the mid-sixties when almost anything was up for grabs and challenges. I was living the life and not focused too far beyond the next day.

People were coming in and out of my life. Some were fleeting moments whose names are still etched in my brain while others have long since been forgotten. The Triangle Bar became my refuge from reality; a place to toke in the shadows along with the stoners, drink cheap schooners of beer and leer lustfully at the University Coeds all lined up neatly at the bar.

Thoughts and scenes, feelings and emotions were coursing through my veins and piling up in my memory bank. I found a wonderful outlet for expressing those sundry images and imaginative scenarios on paper.

Writing poetry was incredibly liberating along with the song lyrics for which I had absolutely no skill whatsoever. Almost every night, I’d be hunched over my L.C. Smith, pounding away at words and verses, sentences and paragraphs that kept rushing forth.

It was like a euphoric rush of emotions spilling out of my consciousness. Most nights, I became incredibly high on endorphins surging through my brain matter. Good, bad, terrible and some not so bad material was captured on’ now’ old gray sheets of paper. That episodic flash of creativity ultimately lasted for only a short period of time. The resulting pile of papers were assembled, bound together and filed away. Then life took a turn for the wonderful and they were forgotten for almost sixty years.

A new relationship had gained traction, this one for good, and I was on a new path toward the future. Fortunately, those old stapled pages of poetry followed me around the country before finally settling into a filing cabinet in the basement along with other forgotten dreams and storylines.

The idea of creating a book of my poetry evolved out of a play I had written during the pandemic. ‘PTV’ is a semi-autobiographical play about my own early television experiences. There were some wonderful personalities and characters that lived in my world at that time. It was the mid-sixties and the vortex of the social, sexual and political upheavals of the time. I thought it would be neat if I could write some songs reflective of that period and the events taking place in and around the station.

I decided the first step in that process of song-writing would be to peruse those song lyrics and poetry I had stashed away for all those years. I began to study the material for anything I could use for ‘PTV.’ But the more I perused those ancients’ words, I realized they really captured a ‘time in my life’ and weren’t appropriate for the songs I wanted to write today. But, I thought, they could stand on their own as a testament to the times and my life back then.

Hence was born the idea of a new book of poetry. I wanted this book to be different from so many others that encompass black words on white paper and the author’s feelings hopefully found somewhere within. To that end, I selected thirty photographs from that period in my life. Vida has stylized them as watercolor, pop, watercolor/ink versions of the original images.

The idea here is to present an image, representative of that period, but mixed with enounces that leave much to the imagination. I hope those images, along with the words of my poetry, will stimulate the reader’s mind to wander and self-examine.

After more than fifty years of dormancy, it will be interesting to see those words carved from another life and time back in print again.

Broken Down Palace; the Poems

A while back I wrote a blog entitled: Broken Down Palace. It was about the first apartment building I lived in after moving out of the only home I’d known for almost twenty years. The building was designed and constructed around the turn of the century for a prominent Minneapolis industrialist.  By the time I moved in, almost sixty-five years later, it was a rundown boarding house chopped into several apartments.

That period in my life encompassed what I now whimsically call my lost years; roughly from 1961 to 1971. It began with my high school graduation on May 31st, 1961 and culminated in my marriage on July 31st, 1971. Ten years of wandering and wondering about my life as it unfolded in twists and turns; some expected and others not so much.

It was during that latter period, in an old tired musty apartment, that my creative juices really started to flow. From roughly the fall-winter of 1967 through the spring of 1970, I found myself going through a furious writing phase.  Poems, song lyrics, outlines for novels and mind-stories poured forth, all captured with my ancient L.C. Smith typewriter.

My new job at KTCA television entailed some script writing and other journalistic endeavors. But more importantly it meant I was interacting with a plethora of wildly crazy, creative, free-thinking folks. It was the mid-sixties when almost anything was up for grabs and challenges. I was living the life and not focused too far beyond the next day.

People were coming in and out of my life. Some were fleeting moments whose names are still etched in my brain while others have long since been forgotten. The Triangle Bar became my refuge from reality; a place to toke in the shadows along with the stoners, drink cheap schooners of beer and leer lustfully at the University Coeds all lined up neatly at the bar.

Thoughts and scenes, feelings and emotions were coursing through my veins and piling up in my memory bank. I found a wonderful outlet for expressing those sundry images and imaginative scenarios on paper.

Writing poetry was incredibly liberating along with the song lyrics for which I had absolutely no skill whatsoever. Almost every night, I’d be hunched over my L.C. Smith, pounding away at words and verses, sentences and paragraphs that kept rushing forth.

It was like a euphoric rush of emotions spilling out of my consciousness. Most nights, I became incredibly high on endorphins surging through my brain matter. Good, bad, terrible and some not so bad material was captured on’ now’ old gray sheets of paper. That episodic flash of creativity ultimately lasted for only a short period of time. The resulting pile of papers were assembled, bound together and filed away. Then life took a turn for the wonderful and they were forgotten for almost sixty years.

A new relationship had gained traction, this one for good, and I was on a new path toward the future. Fortunately, those old stapled pages of poetry followed me around the country before finally settling into a filing cabinet in the basement along with other forgotten dreams and storylines.

Now fast-forward a lifetime of pecking away at writing and more recently, tackling just about every other means of storytelling from novels to novellas, plays to screen-writing, children’s stories to blogs and a new comic strip, it was time for something new…like songwriting.

That idea evolved out of a play I had written during the pandemic. ‘PTV’ is a semi-auto-biographical play about my own early television experiences. I tried to capture in my story-telling some of the antics, pranks, and true-life activities that went on behind the scenes. There were some wonderful personalities and characters that lived in my world at that time when the station was evolving from an instructional educational institution to that of a public television station. It was the mid-sixties and the vortex of the social, sexual and political upheavals of the time. I thought it would be neat if I could write some songs reflective of that period and the events taking place in and around the station.

I decided that the first step in that process of song-writing would be to peruse those song lyrics and poetry I had stashed away for all those years. I found the dusty faded gray papers buried in a file cabinet and began to study the material for anything I could use for PTV. But the more I perused those ancients words purged from my heart and soul, I realized that they really captured a ‘time in my life’ and weren’t appropriate for the songs I wanted to write today. But, I thought, they could stand on their own as a testament to the times and my life back then.

Hence was born the idea of a new book of poetry which is still in its infancy. I’m going through the musty old pages and selecting the most representative poetry of that period. Once chosen, I’ll have to assemble the pieces in the right order (a purely subjective exercise) and recreate the poetry and song lyrics in my computer. Vida, my editor can take it from there.

After more than fifty years of dormancy, it will be interesting to see those words carved from another life and time back in print again.

Looking for Susan's House

A couple of weeks ago I went on one of my long distance bike rides. I rode past a couple of the dumps where I had lived after college and Europe. And as a lark, I thought I’d go looking for Susan’s house; an allegory in which a young man searches for life’s truths and finds another human being instead who is also seeking answers that can’t easily be found.

I did and didn’t find what I was looking for.

It wasn’t so much a search and discovery mission as it was retracing my old life steps in a rundown neighborhood I called home for several years. This time as an old man on a bicycle instead of a kid in a VW, not certain what I was looking for or sure I’d recognize it if I found it.

‘It’ was the house where Susan lived with her mother and brother in a working class neighborhood just north of Dinkytown, hear the University of Minnesota. It was just one of several landmarks for me like my ghetto dwelling on University Avenue, Dinkytown pizza, the Triangle Bar on West Bank, U of M Health Department, and KTCA Television down Como Avenue. A virtual map of the Lost and Found.

Susan, we called her Sue S, was a Mexican American woman I was involved with for a couple of years during my lost years. She was unlike a lot of the women I had known before her. She was significant in my life for several reasons, not the least of which was that we were both seekers.

It was a collision of my time and space with hers. For a long time we were in the same orbit, thinking and living life alike, and traveling that strange road to maturity. We were both hungry. And with similar family backgrounds, we both found ourselves struggling to grab a handhold on that slippery ring called a career

I was going through my hippie wannabe stage when I first meet Susan. A young naive man looking for creativity in all the wrong places. We would go to the folk mass at the Newman Center and spend our Sunday afternoons ruminating on, exchanging all kinds of esoteric thoughts and ideas. Mental meanderings that a little weed could invoke on a virgin mind. It was like getting trashed on ‘what ifs’ that only the next day’s reality would dismiss as nice ideas but they didn’t pay the rent. Yet there was still a common-ality of purpose that bonded us together for a long time.

A lot of my poetry was started during that period with Susan. Instances and reflections on our time together and the ones who came before her.

But the reality of my world collided with hers after I came home one night after stopping

by my house with Sue before we went out. Afterwards, my mother met me at the door with the words: “What were you doing with that nigger?”

I moved out of the house the next day and never moved back except for visits. It was sad and shocking to think of my mother could be so blind. But with a sixth grade education and a social-economic background that bordered on the poverty level, it perhaps wasn’t too surprising. Very very sad but not surprising. She could only see the color of Susan’s skin and not the warm and wonderful human being Susan really was.

But deep down I think Susan and I both knew that our relationship could only go so far. With my mother’s inflexible, narrow-minded insistence that the women in my life had to be white and Catholic, it never would have worked out between us.

So while the bike ride didn’t bring up any tangible evidence of my being there in the first

place, it did open a Pandora’s box of mainly pleasant memories of that stage in my life. A brief period where I connected with another human being and we shared some of life’s pleasantries framed as a snapshot of our existence. Susan was a footnote to my history back then but a very memorable one nevertheless.

I never did find Susan’s house. I suppose after 40 years, it just went away as the old neighborhood gentrified and matured. I guess we probably did too.

Maybe I’ll meet her again in some fictional world of my choosing.