The Women in My Life

An imagination is a wonderful affliction to have if it’s nurtured and used carefully with consideration of others. Unbridled, uninhibited and unrelenting, it can be a vivid force of imagery and thoughts.  I guess you’d need to crawl inside the head of an artist to truly understand what the heck is going on inside there.

Right now, there are a number of women who affect, effect, and impact my life. There’s Sharon my wife, Melanie and Amy, my daughter and daughter-in-law, my wonderful granddaughters, Maya, Samantha, and Charlotte and finally Vida, my editor.

It was much different for me back in the early days. Initially, the silver screen held two of my favorite heartbeats. First came Rhonda Fleming and then as I grew a little older, it was Connie Stevens. At about the same time these manicured, polished icons of the silver screen were tugging at my heart strings, a couple of classmates caught my attention. It was Elaine and Maureen in grade school that provided plenty of distraction from those boring lectures. Granted, it was a total cliché but it fit.

Before finding ‘the one’, there were some wonderful women who came in and out of my life leaving an indelible mark on my consciousness. Diane, Claudia, Joyce, Sheila, Marti, Snow White from Canada, Tina from Denmark, Lorrie, Pat, Susan, and a few others, unnamed but not forgotten.

Now new and exciting women have entered my life for the first time in a long time. Over the past several years, I’ve developed intimate relationships with a number of them. They’ve clawed at my consciousness with their beauty, brains, tenacity, boldness and vulnerability. To me, they’re as real as any woman I’ve ever known.

One of the biggest challenges for any writer is creating the characters that inhabit their world of fiction. It’s often the culmination of trying to reimagine those elusive memories of people, places and events that made a significant impression on them. For me, it’s the art of encapsulating enough of a memory bubble to help recreate an avatar out of my past.

Yet there is always one major obstacle in creating such an avatar. The challenge of separating the reality of who I thought those people were from the reality of who really were. It’s like playing checkers inside my head, jumping from real to fictional, trading imagination for reality. The length of years passed only adds to the challenge of searching through the fog of time to gleam their true identity.

But since mindset often colors personal experience, my recollections about that person tend to be less than completely accurate. Usually they’re reactions or prejudices based on limited knowledge or smeared into distortion by the passage of time and age and past conditioning.

Like most writers, I don’t know how to divorce my past lives, relationships, experiences, prejudices, life-altering incidents, failures and successes from my story telling. That certainly is true when it comes to creating female characters for my stories.

The female protagonist, with all of her inherent complexities, is always harder to create than her male counterpart. Who am I really thinking of when I create a female character? My avatars aren’t always women I have known. They could be a movie character or stage persona that struck me with their unique characteristics, real or fictional.

At times, it might be a compilation of several people that I’ve known or met in my past life even if I can’t identify with whom and or when or what exactly happened back then. But something did happen that scratched a memory scar on my brain that only now, through the creative process, is being uncovered as its multiple layers are peeled away.

It could be someone I never really knew that well but nevertheless left a strong impression on me. Like the dark-haired woman sipping her demitasse in Montmartre, Paris. She looked right through me with distain and disregard. Maybe it was that Canadian girl (I labeled Snow White in her tight turtleneck sweater) whom I meet in a hostel in Belgium.

It could have been Maria from Denmark yearning for her Spanish homeland or the amorous Danish student who wanted to take me away for the weekend. It could have been Tina and our late night cerebral rendezvous in some nameless village in Denmark. A few years ago, it could have been that homeless old woman I met at Starbucks on Times Square.

Photo Credit: Jerry Hoffman

I’ve met a lot of people through a lifetime of living and they’ve all left multiple impressions on my mind even if it wasn’t readily apparent at the time. Yet by wandering those dark dusty pass-ages of my memory alleys and byways, their personality traits/quirks/ flaws or subtle enounces often come to surface once again.

If, in fact, my avatar is someone I used to know then I have to gleam the most memorable incidents that defined that person. Yet that process is never cut and dry. It took me six chapters before I figured out who Katherine really was in my novel “Follow the Cobbler.”  I was a bit shocked at first but then it really made perfect sense that this woman would bubble up to the surface and burst forth on my written pages.

Granted, I realize that this ‘girl of my dreams’ is an enigma. She’s an illusion of times past; a collision of cathartic illusions with fiction writing that propels me through a field of psycho-somatic emotions. It is this strange phenomenon of falling in love all over again that whenever I create a new story and become enmeshed in the lives of the fictional characters who inhabit it. In my reality, these women determine what they say and do, I’m only channeling them.

The genres stretch across the literary landscape. Charlotte and Claire in my western novels. Colleen in my ‘coming of age’ storyline. Feisty Miranda in Palm Springs and Katherine (with a K) in my epic journey around the world.

Then there is Laci, skirting danger with my protagonist, in Big Sur.

It doesn’t happen in just the novels I’ve written. You can also add Sage, Medbh, Brook, Agnes and a plethora of other interesting women in my plays, screenplays and novellas. Together we have surfed the icy waters off Lake Superior, traveled across country on a bicycle, attended a class reunion and had a love affair for the ages.

It’s a new love affair every time I sit down to write. It’s hot and passionate and all-consuming. That is until we come to the conclusion of our story and it has to end. Then I’m left with an empty feeling that something wonderful just happened but now must fade away. Like life itself, the world keeps turning and we must both face a new reality; me as a finished storyteller and her as a lost love. But, as the clichés go, we both have our memories of a love since past. Something we can share together.

Just don’t tell Sharon. She’s not really the sharing kind.

The Boy She Left Behind

Writers can be strange kinds of creatures. They love to inhabit the made-up minds and personalities of fictional characters who only reside inside their heads. When it comes to words and phrases, sentences and paragraphs, thoughts and images, storytellers can be as OCD as any psycho out there. It’s anyone’s guess where their imaginations are sometimes going or have been.

Words and phrases can be especially influential in the sponge-soaked open range minds of some writers. So it isn’t too surprising that those vernacular missiles of imagery can sometimes elicit strong reactions from receptive story weavers. I stumbled across just such a phrase about a month ago when it was triggered by an inquiry that came out of the blue. The inquiry was from an old friend or acquaintance, depending on my mood and her messaging. The phrase that popped into my mind was ‘The boy she left behind.’

For some strange reason, that phrase came bursting out of the back of my consciousness one day while I was driving to nowhere in particular and thinking about my college years. It got stuck in my cerebral storyboard, nudged into some corner that kept disgorging it back to my awareness day after day. I loved the phrase because it swept me back to a time and place long since passed. It was your classic ‘passage of youth’; a yearning for something better and shot at that golden ring called success.

I knew immediately where the phrase came from; what it meant and the delicious irony it brought to my taste buds. It was hinted at in one of my first novels ‘Love in the A Shau’ then circled, surrounded and finally capitulated to in ‘Follow the Cobbler.’ To me it meant unrequited love, maturity winning over immaturity and perhaps a refusal to ‘settle.’ It spoke volumes, perhaps only to me, but in a clear and resolute image that I couldn’t shake from my reflective consciousness.

Many lifetimes ago, I was the ‘boy’ in question and ‘she’ was my girlfriend. One in high school and then repeated again with another girlfriend in college. Both were beautiful, brainy and ambitious. And both women, I think it’s fair to say now, wanted more out of their lives. Our stars certainly didn’t align on either occasion. Both women left me for greener pastures and did rather well for themselves. One married a doctor and the other a college professor. Both seem to be happy and I believe (certainly hope) they’ve had a rich and fulfilling life with their respective spouses.

Now reflecting back, I understand why it’s called the circle of life. A wonderful confusing merry-go-round we find ourselves riding in our youth before adult conversations of real world issues raises its prominent head. With many miles traveled among us, I think it’s fair to say that the experience was a good one. It ended as nature intended and we are better off for the emotions shared, savored and spent.

If I were to meet up with those two women again, I’d probably tell them that I’ve finally grown up, although I’m certainly not going to let maturity get the best of me. And I’m sure as hell not about to accept a ‘senior’ label anytime soon. Call it delayed acceptance of reality or a desire to hold on to ‘my world’ for as long as I can.

With both women I have a ‘history’ and for that the writer in me is very grateful. And with my health holding steady, my eyesight intact and my imagination running amok, I can still churn out stories in a thousand different forms. My experiences at those first inklings of love have helped me flavor twelve novels and thirteen plays thus far.

No one has to know where the real story slips away and the make-believe takes over. In the end, it’s all story-telling anyway.

Or is it?

A Chemistry Course called Love

 I have a friend who has written a book entitled “I’m in Love. Am I Crazy?”

The short answer to that question is yes, you are crazy-of sorts. Your mind, if not spinning out of control, is at the very least in another state of consciousness. Love is a subject that has been talked about, analyzed, reduced to statistics and become fodder for a billion songs and movies and plays and books. It’s the fuel that keeps civilization happily buzzing along century after century. It’s a universal phenomenon that continues to afflict people around the planet on a daily basis.

A quick Google search reveals a plethora of information on the chemical warfare that goes on inside your head when you ‘fall in love.’ Most of us know that estrogen and testosterone can be the fuel that ignites our sex drive. What I didn’t know, but apparently the scientists did, is that there are other chemicals that play a crucial role in our reaction to someone else we find attractive. 

A chemical called Dopamine is thought to be the ‘pleasure chemical.’ So when you’re giddy or goofy about someone new in your life and your heart is racing and your palms are sweaty, you’ve just had an infusion of Dopamine. Another chemical called Norepinephrine backs up Dopamine with a feeling similar to that of an adrenaline rush. Phenyl ethylamine is a third chemical that backs up the other two to produce this cocktail of love.

This might explain how an argument between loved ones can not only raise tempers but also churn up stomach acid, weak knees, headaches and confusion.  What is it about love that can cause such a strong physical reaction between two people who fundamentally still like one another? 

On another level, what is it about love that can cause someone to make what seems like very irrational choices? Then taken to the extreme, how can someone give up family or career or life just for the love of another person?

Those are pretty powerful signs of the enormity of that strange and mysterious affliction called love.

  

 

I love my grandchildren differently than I do my own wife and kids. Yet it is still a powerful emotion wrought with highs and lows, good times and frustrating times and everything in between. It’s a bond with five little people who are just starting out and may need a little assistance along the way. It’s an opportunity to share with them the wisdom I’ve gleamed, taken, borrowed and mimicked throughout my own life. Seventy years on this planet has given me some insight into how things work around here.

What I now find fascinating are those silly pop songs of the 50s that used to put me into such a wonderful trance with their rhythmic melodies and catchy lyrics. Those songs, if listened to carefully, actually had some poignant things to say about love. Of course, back then I was caught up in the mood and simply thought it was a great song because it had such an emotional impact on my naïve confused mind. I heard the lyrics back then but didn’t truly understand what they were saying – not really. 

It turns out those tunesmiths in the Brill Building down in Tin Pan Alley knew what they were talking about. Remember some of those titles: Love Potion # 9, Devil or Angel, Love is Strange, Two Faces Have I, It’s in his Kiss, Tossin and Turning, Tragedy, Going out of my Head, Don’t be Cruel, Book of Love, Tears on my Pillow, I Wonder Why and so many more.

One song that does a great job of summing up the ethos of teenage love is “Young Love” by Sonny James. The beauty of those songs is that they were able to capture the innocence of that era before sex and drugs and rock & roll painted a much different portrait of the times. Now as a struggling wordsmith, I can really appreciate the strength of those lyrics and the truth behind the words and the mental images they painted through those picture-songs.

 

Fortunately, I’ve been able to infuse my own kids with a love of the poetry of Bob Dylan, the lyricism of the Beatles and the energy of Led Zeppelin. Each artist/s approached the subject of love from a dozen different perspectives yet each one is as powerful as the next.

With the advent of my new career as a writer, I’ve been exploring my past to glean a more mature perspective into material I might use for future stories. It’s been an interesting journey back in time replete with fresh insight into past actions, loves, mistakes and ‘what if’s.’

After reflecting on my own upbringing, I can now understand my confusion at those feelings first experienced in high school then on to college and finally that wondrous expanse of time and place euphemistically called ‘growing up.’

It was surreal to experience the thrill, angst and pain of a college romance again in “Love in the A Shau.” It was an opportunity to be able to say things through my protagonist Daniel that I wasn’t mature enough or wise enough to say back then to my girlfriend. 

As it turns out, all of my novels have two story lines. The first is the main story line that encompasses the heart of the novel. The second line is a love story between the two main characters. In the case of “Debris” it is multifunctional and multifaceted, each covering a number of interrelated relationships.

Creating two story lines wasn’t a conscious decision on my part, at least not a first. I just started writing the story as I saw it unfolding in my head. But as I set up the scenes and wrote the dialogue between characters, feelings started to grow between my hero and heroine. It wasn’t foreshadowed nor even expected. They started to talk, I wrote down what they said and their relationship started to grow.

After it happened in my third novel, I finally recognized a familiar pattern and accepted the fact that I find this intrinsic, vapid, mysterious thing called love a key ingredient in my stories. It was simply too powerful to ignore and too much fun to end halfway through the novel. The love element added flavor, depth, confusion and a million possibilities of where my characters might go next. It added layers of emotions to the story that was really fun to explore. It’s love on many levels and between different genders.

What has fascinated me from the very beginning is the different kind of love and affection and attraction that my characters have for one another. More often than not, they determine where to take their feelings and where to take their relationships. I just write down what they say and do.

The relationship between Daniel and Colleen (Love in the A Shau) is very different from that of Brian and Katherine (Follow the Cobbler). Robert and Miranda are yet at a different place (Debris) than Jeb and Charlotte (Apache Death Wind). Ree and Clare (Apache Blue Eyes) have the most subtle of attractions but I think my readers will still feel it as I did when I wrote their story.

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My friend claims that love is a chemical imbalance that renders most rational folks incapable of any rational decisions. While I don’t quite feel that as my characters begin their dance of attention as part of their mating ritual, I can still vicariously feel those first pangs of confusion and excitement as my fictional characters circle one another and I, as an interested third party, get to experience the same chill and sweat that goes with falling for someone else…all over again.