Life Writes Us, So We Write Life

I remember it like it was yesterday, an early morning in mid-September of 1988, the beginning of my 7th grade year. The Sun was bright coming over the trees, and the air was warm and inviting. I walked to the end of my driveway, a convenient pickup spot for the bus to school, and my neighbor, Jen, was sitting next to our mailbox nose-deep in a book. Reading was one of things I liked doing the least when I was that age, and I snickered to myself when I saw her. But something tickled my brain, and a couple of minutes of standing there in silence, I decided to ask her what she was reading. Without looking up from the novel, she told me that it was “The Two Towers”, the second book of “The Lord of the Rings” by J R R Tolkien. My curiosity piqued further, I asked her to describe the scene that she was currently engrossed in.

Samwise Gamgee had just watched Frodo Baggins be captured by the giant spider Shelob, and he was now facing down his new foe. Jen went on to give me a synopsis of the entire story, and I was hooked. In only three weeks time, I had devoured each of the three novels. Middle Earth had excited my creativity, and my love of reading was born. There was also the inkling that maybe I, too, could write my own works of fiction. There I had no such luck. The determination, however, was always there.

I carried on through school, reading voraciously and making attempt after attempt to write my own stories. But as was always the case for me, I could never get my thoughts organized enough to write anything coherent. It almost felt like the writer’s form of ADHD, and it didn’t matter how organized I thought I was, nothing could ever fall into place. My reading, however, hardly ever took a break. I slammed through the Tolkien novels like a bear through a cabin door and quickly moved on to Dragonlance novels and Stephen King. High school was a breeze for me, AP classes never stood in my way.

In 10th grade, as a way to fix some of my social awkwardness, I also joined the football team. That move also introduced my string bean of a body to weightlifting. And though my body never gained a whole lot of weight, my muscles took to lifting like a fish to water. I came out of my social shell just in time to move to another school. My mother had just put her third marriage in the garbage heap (it sounds rude, but hindsight proved it to be the right move for her), and I decided that I didn’t want to live in a single parent household again. So, I moved in with my father and my stepmother. I had a great time living with them, and my mother never held it against me, even after she married for the fourth and final time and got to see her true happiness take shape.

Living with my father never changed my desire to read or write, though those damn organizational skills still stood in the way of my writing. I continued football in my junior year but gave it up for my senior year through a combination of unfair play practices and a desire to work and earn my own money. My social awkwardness still existed, but I had my circle of friends and a lot of smiles. I also found my arrogance, and as I stared down the line towards college, I felt academically unstoppable.

I left for Rochester Institute of Technology in August of 1995 to be a physics major. Little did I anticipate rushing and being accepted into a fraternity. My lack of social behavior became a need to be socially relevant. I left RIT in the spring of 1996, never to return. I was able to get work through my best friend’s mother as a water chemist at her pharmaceutical company. I was quite successful and felt that I had left my mark in the professional world. I continued as a chemistry major in the local community college, but life had something larger in store for me.

Ever since my junior year of high school, when I first took the ASVAB, the military entrance exam, every month I would receive a postcard from the Navy speaking of the Nuclear Program. In the Spring of 1997, I decided to check it out. After receiving the highest possible score on the ASVAB, and crushing the Nuclear Field Qualification Test, I left for the Navy on November 10th, 1997. needless to say, my writing took a backseat.

The next ten years, despite all of the incredible memories I have, was mostly a blur of foul language and alcohol. It was the fall of 2005 when I thought I had met “the one”, and by 2008 I was out of the Navy, back home in my native Pennsylvania, working at the local nuclear power plant, and her and I were expecting our first child. Zoom ahead to the beginning of 2011, and our third child was welcomed into the world, and we were not yet married. I thank God to this day that we never did. During those years, the drinking kept up, but not at the breakneck pace that it had been, one of us had to stay sober for the kids. And I had tried my hand again at writing an epic. That failed miserably, as did my relationship with the kids’ mother in Spring 2013.

I lost my job and nearly lost the kids as her addiction started to soar out of control. The kids went off to Harrisburg where I struggled mightily. I met another there, and we ended up moving to Lancaster the next spring, and things were good for about a year. Then that, too, fell apart, something of which the kids’ mother had a hand in. So, the kids and I found our own place, and things appeared to reach a point of relative normalcy. However, an infestation of bedbugs, the continuing infection of their mother’s infrequent attendance, and large financial troubles landed me into eviction in the summer of 2016.

That was the summer I spent homeless, and the summer that, I believe, really screwed up the kids mentally. Over the last few years, I have learned of terrible things that they were witness to outside of my care, and it tears my heart out to think about it, because while I was sleeping on the streets, they were with their mother in a horrible living environment. I was able to secure them for a couple of months at my cousin’s apartment, but that, too, fell apart. By the fall, I found myself living in Pottstown, a horrible place that I never wanted to be, but I found a landlord willing to take a chance on me, and I could have my kids back with me where they belonged. Unfortunately, I ended up inviting their mother back into my life as somebody to watch the kids, as I was able to secure a nightshift job. Again, I put my children in the wrong environment.

The winter of 2017 found me in the lowest place I could be. Alone, sleeping on the couch in my own apartment, working nights at a dead-end job for little pay, behind in all my bills, and dealing with an increasing out of control addicted ex. I just wanted it all to be over, so I became very detached. Then social media stepped in. I had been very active on Facebook and Twitter, as I had begun, the previous spring, to write a nonfiction account of America’s history (I still have the manuscript of 110 pages saved for when I have the time to finish it). One night at work, I came across a friend’s post, and there she was…

I hadn’t spoken to Deb since middle school, which was the late 1980s. But I decided to reply to her comment on my friend’s post. By April of 2018, the kids’ mother was out, and Deb was in, our love taking off like a rocket to space. She turned everything around, despite dealing with her own serious health problems on a daily basis. We got our first car, we were able to save some money, I got a new job on dayshift. It wasn’t easy, there were many mountains for us to climb, but our individual trials and tribulations made our combined successes that much sweeter, and our love that much deeper. We eventually moved back to the Upper Perk Valley, where we both grew up. July of 2020, mid-pandemic, saw the celebration of our marriage. And just a couple of weeks ago, we finally closed on our own home right where we wanted to be.

I currently work at a laboratory where we test high voltage electrical equipment, I run the generators that produce the power for those tests. My wife is slowly getting back into work, as the pandemic, and our fear of her getting sick again (we both had COVID back in March) are beginning to subside a little bit. And it was a chance noticing of an ad for a writing contest that brought the author back out in me. I never entered the writing contest, but it introduced me to flash fiction. I didn’t have to write anything lengthy! However, I’m finding that this type of writing is allowing me to find the organization I need for my thoughts. I’m finding the ability to write scenes, of which a novel is nothing but a collection of. I can see in many of my stories a longer narrative that can keep a reader entertained.

And I found a community of writers that provide so much positivity and drive that I WANT to write as often as I can. The written word is just as powerful as the spoken word, and the last three decades of reading author after author have taught me that. To have finally found the maturity I needed to write engaging tales, if only a couple of pages long, is a highlight that I never saw coming. To be able to paint a masterpiece of letters is, to me, just as important as anything else I do in my life. For some stories, I may spend a few hours studying this, that, and the other thing to make my narrative realistic and reader-worthy. For others, it’s as though the story was already there, it just needed to be recorded, and I can bang it out in less than an hour. Either way, for me personally, it’s an incredible journey through the Neverending Story.

The world is at our fingertips, and its expanse is infinite…