Getting To Know the Pros

For years and years, people have been telling me I should start writing my stories down. Once I was at a branch of the San Jose Public Library and I was telling a few people what had sat on the dirt that this branch of the library now was sitting on. I got into one of my tall tales about the farming days. When I finished, a librarian who had been surreptitiously listening on the other side of a book stack, came around around the end of the stacks and told me I should be writing these stories of mine down. Though I had been writing since I was a child, I balked at her suggestion, strictly out of form. She said that I should at least record them. I walked away from this minor encounter very flattered in a very major way.

While I’ve always read a lot, and written quite a bit as well, there has always been a stigma for me about taking my own art seriously. My dad was a natural born illustrator, an illustrator at least, perhaps he could have even been a great painter. In the 1930s, he worked in Chicago’s illustrious night clubs as a waiter, wearing a tuxedo and cummerbund, to put himself through a private art school. With the financial collapse of the Great Depression, he gave up the art school and used his income to help his Italian immigrant family through that era of grinding financial hardship. He became attracted to a young woman from the hugely empty, Germanic flatlands of Indiana and married her.

As they started to raise their children, my dad’s wife beat the artist right out of his wants and desires just as the nuns had done to his free spirit and self confidence back in the Catholic parochial school, with the sharp, brass edges of their long, wooden measuring sticks. Pop never showed off his artistic talents. Nor did I, I hid them. My sister defied my mom and went on to get several post graduate degrees in art. But to defy my mom, my sister had to become my mom, I guess, and I take no joy in being around her. Of all the people I used for models of whom I wanted to become, this sort of person certainly was not one of them.

So, while I’ve always considered myself a pretty credible writer, I’ve never had the confidence or ambition to get published. However, the occasional comments similar to the librarian’s were always appreciated. Almost ten years ago, I found myself in a very trying situation, one that forced me to deal with my personal life in the most basic and elemental of terms. It was a humiliating, traumatic and, in some important ways, a very destructive time but it forced me to separate the wheat from the chaff, the real from the fluff, in one’s existence. Among other things, I came away from that time knowing that I had some substantial things to say and I had the responsibility to say them out loud, to make them public. I had to ignore my pride, afraid to be ridiculed or criticized for . . . 

(click here to read conclusion)