I have been a writer for most of my life.
When I was 6 or 7 I started writing short stories for my own amusement, and when I was 11 or 12 — I can’t remember which — I actually had a column with my picture in our local community weekly. It was about junior high sports.
Somewhere around age 13, I stopped writing. I don’t remember exactly why, except that I was very unhappy from age 13 until my mid 20s. I kind of struck bottom in September 1970 when my first serious relationship ended and didn’t really come out of it for three years.
That period, particularly 1971 and ’72, was the one time in my life I tried to write poetry, and along those same lines, song lyrics. I mention this because I filled most of a spiral notebook with poetry and then no matter how much I searched through my parents’ house when I returned for visits, I was never able to find that notebook.
But of course, in clearing things out of the house after my mother’s death, my youngest sister found it.
I went through it page by page, and while quite a bit of it was June-moon-spoon stuff, some of wasn’t all that bad.
One was just two lines with a one-word title — Love.”
“She never makes me laugh,
But she never made me cry.”
Another one I sort of like in retrospect was a two-verse bit about the way my first relationship ended, called fittingly, “The End.”
“So this is where it all ends;
In a room we never shared together,
Devoid of all the passion we enjoyed.
Could you say these same words
In the rooms we knew last year
Amid the memories of our happiness?
“How could you forget so soon?
One summer apart took you from me
And swept you into the arms of another.
Would it have made a difference
If the summer had never come
To our private little world?”
I wrote a little in my mid 20s, but didn’t get serious about it till I went back to school at age 28 to study journalism. I was three years into my career when I collaborated with my friend Bill Madden on a humorous novel about pro football that was finally published nearly 40 years later.
Bill and I also wrote songs together, five of them as I recall. He wrote the music and I wrote the lyrics. As I recall, my lyrics were nothing special in three of them, halfway decent in a fourth and pretty good in a fifth. Mostly, Bill wrote better songs by himself tthan we did together.
My writing as a journalist was the best stuff I was doing. Game stories on deadline, features on athletes and opinion columns all got better and better as the years went on. I started winning awards in 1987 in Colorado and went on to additional recognition in California.
I also started writing longer stuff on my own and completed three novels between 1989 and 1992. Two of them no longer exist. vanishing in the switch from floppy discs to CDs to the cloud. I’ve been trying to rework one of them, but it’s a long process.
The third is what I consider the best thing I’ve ever written. I worked to revise “A Whiter Shade of Pale” numerous times between 1992 and 2005 and then basically let it sit until this past year.
“Pale” takes place at the University of Virginia in 1967-68 and is a coming-of-age story about honor and mercy.
It’s the one thing I wanted to have published more than anything else I have ever written and now it’s happening, 30 years after I wrote it.
So many good things have happened to me the last few years, the sort of things you say “Now I can die happy.”
Virginia won the NCAA basketball title. Washington won the World Series.
“The System” was published, and now “A Whiter Shade of Pale” is being published.
Die happy?
Nah, but I can certainly live happy.