In the spring of 1984, fresh from college, I received a letter from a friend of my father's named David Frair.  He had been one of the fascinating crew of people that my father hung out with in the 1960's, and who had always represented the epitome of the free spirit of that time.  Back in the 1960's and a little later (notice the date that the article linked above was written ...) he had been a photographer for the Middletown Times Herald Record, as well as the Newburgh Evening News, which folded in 1990.  My father was a reporter for both newspapers, and was also a radio newsman for the local radio station in Newburgh, and they met as newspeople first, then became friends and even erstwhile business partners in a hilarious venture to build houses along with a motley crew of kids in their 20's, all of which indulged in the recreations of that decade.  The efforts to actually build houses under the influence of those times, and attempting to do so in the one of the most conservative places in New York (how is it that Orange Counties around the country end up so conservative?  Was it William III himself?) lent itself to endless stories from both David and my father, as well as their associate Joey Nicosia.

But that's not what the letter was about. It was an offer to me to come out the Cape Cod, where Dave was currently living, to help him "manage his land and sea affairs", which meant standing in for him on land, helping to finish various construction projects, while he went to sea on small Cod boats, and occasionally making sea trips while he remained on land.  I jumped at the chance, since Dave himself represented the kind of adventurer I wanted to be, and because the Cape is a lovely place, especially in the spring.

My first assignment was to spend the summer finishing the painting of a huge old mansion located next to the Kennedy estate in Centerville, MA (Hyannisport is just a stroll down the road) named "Fernbrook".  It is now a bed and breakfast, but at the time it was owned by a fascinating couple from Boston.  He was an eccentric artist and she was an administrator at a Boston hospital, and she came down on weekends.  I was just a kid, but I moved right in and not only finished the panting project, but became the groundskeeper, for lack of a better word.

The owners took on boarders to help make the morgtage, and a Danish family of a single mother and two teenage daughters moved into the attic upstairs.  There was a woman across the street in another huge old house who collected asian artifacts her whole life, and whose husband has spent forty years in the foreign service.  I would mow her lawn as well, and she introduced me to Gabriel Garcia Marquez as a writer to admire, even if it was futile to emulate his vision.  I still have a few of the soapstone buddhas she gave me.  They sit in what we now call Crystal's office.  Halfway through the painting job, I called for my father, and he came and spent a couple of months with me there, helping me to finish the house.  I vaguely remember some arguments, which eventually caused him to return to NY, but while he was there we had mostly great times together.

There was a pond, and what seemed like acres of weeping willows, and hilly mounds of soft grass everywhere, fragrant gardens, and wide porches that wrapped around various portions of the house.   There was a strange guy named "Smitty" who seemed to come from Texas, and who would suddenly appear in the strangest circumstances, uttering phrases that made no sense,  and who my father  described him as the local Sufi mystic, an exchange that had me laughing so hard that I smile broadly now, 25 years later, remembering it.  The teenage sons of the owners would occasionally come down from Boston and open the house up to the locals for parties that  lasted days.

A couple of trips for Dave on Cod boats ended badly for me, and so I retreated to the mansion for the remainder of the summer and into the fall.  In mid-October I left the Cape and drove to the Adirondacks to live in a cabin along the upper reaches of the Hudson, when I took a somewhat serious stab at writing.  But that's another story entirely.

Here's to hoping that this current job will leave me enough time after a few months to flesh out this story and also tell the next ...

As I am writing this I am in the process of a heart-pounding procedure, truly a jump from the precipice as it were.

With that introduction you might imagine all sorts of things — is it experimental brain surgery?  Extreme Snowboarding at very high altitudes?  Parachuting for the first time?  Nah … I’m wiping out my laptop and reinstalling the operating system.  Pretty radical, huh?

Well, it’s all relative.  When I think about what I do on a daily basis to earn my living, and the dependence I have on this machine, I would say that there is very little I could do to earn money if I did not have a completely functional system at my disposal every moment of every day.  So this last hour and the next four are pretty dicey.   I can feel your palpable excitement as you read these words.

To prepare for this event, I felt that I first needed to back up every byte of data that I use on the daily basis, which turned out to be lots and lots. I use an application named Syncback for that.  So I systematically backed everything using about a dozen profiles, which resulted in a backup set of about 250 GB.  That wasn’t enough, though. What if something went wrong and I needed, must have a system to work on immediately?  So I started the process of creating an “Image” of the system using Acronis, but when it started it said that it would take “about 4 hours.”  I don’t have four hours.  I haven’t had four hours to do anything in a given day for as long as I can remember.  So I had to let it go.

I’m proud of that — proud enough to write a post about it — I actually let go of a fear, and it felt good — a break with the past.  So what if I can’t get my machine back to the state it was four hours ago?  It’s a pretty sorry state indeed, anyway, which is why I’m doing this in the first place. After two years of banging on the thing it’s a complete mess, in terms of data and function, so Let it Go , already.  It’s like a new beginning.  How exciting.

Now I just need to do the same thing with the way I am living my life.  In terms of data and function, it’s a bit of a mess.  No point in taking an Image of my life at the moment — better for a clean break and start afresh.  Remember Krishnamurti?  If you do, then you know that he advocated this practice not every two years or so, but EVERY WAKING MOMENT OF EVERY DAY!

Which means that you don’t look at anyone with the same eyes that you did yesterday. You don’t let past conclusions about people and about the world affect what you are seeing this very moment. This is hard to do. Try it sometime.  If you are successful, the promise is Peace.

I suppose it is revealing about the state of a person to ask them of their idea of the “Perfect Day,” which is sure to be a dynamic and fluid idea depending on their current situation, their mood, or the daily circumstances that make up their lives at any given time.

For me, today was as close to a perfect day, although we have to add “semi” because here I sit in a noisy data center at 3:54 AM babysitting a sick server and watching mysql updates scroll across the screen while struggling to keep my eyes open.  Not an auspicious ending, that’s for sure, but the day a decent beginning.  It went like this:

6:35 – the kids are on school break, so I’m absolved of the drop-off at 8AM, and so I head out early for a four-hour server installation in La Habra at 8:30.  I figure I’ll find a SBUX in Brea or so, and do some work, instead of sitting in traffic.

6:50 – in Brea already, banging out some mail processing for GEMM, getting a head start on the day.

8:30 – Server installation goes well, which is a fine end to a horrible engagement, where the first guy I send out to upgrade a simple Windows 2000 server spends nine hours and ends up with a broken POS that I drag back to the office and build from scratch.  But the engagement ends well, with the customer happy because of my inherent generosity besides being a veritable wellspring of knowledge that advice, which they are short on in all respects technical.

12:30 – Swing by a client to fix two small items and pick up a laptop.  Will work on it at the office during the leisure hours (right ….)

1:15 – Manage to have lunch with my wife at “The Counter”, a distinctly California concept where you build your own gourmet hamburger, in my case in a bowl without the bun.  The food is delicious.

2:30 – We both go back to the house and pick up the kids and take them to a neighborhood pool.  The water is cold, but the Jacuzzi is warm, and the kids have a blast.  Back at the house they have triple decker peanut-butter jelly sandwiches.

5:00 – I attempt to curl up in bed with a laptop and catch up on some of the work of the day, but it isn’t going to happen.  I feed the kids, and spend some time with them.  Maybe it’s this part of the day that is “perfect” or as close as it gets.

7:30 – Server crashes, and I need to speed down to the data center for hours and hours of wrestling with operating systems, log files, data, data, and more data …

2:30 AM — full circle.  Thus ends the semi-perfect day …

It looks like I”m down to one post a month, which is not exactly as I had envisioned this project … it was supposed to be “Daily Writing …”  Well, all I can say is that I am not my father, at least certainly not in that respect.  The thing about him was that he may have been subject, at times, to deep, crushing depression at times, but he never stopped writing.  Never.  As I approach fifty I see that I am subject to the same sort of depression, except that writing is not my form of therapy.  And so while I have dozens of ideas for something to write about each month, I many times cannot put my hands on the keyboard.  Physically unable.  That’s depression, all right. I have come to believe that it’s related to hormones.  Specifically, the lack of them.  These things happen when you age, hence the title of this post.

It’s become something of a joke, or at least a cliche’ – this idea of the mid-life crisis, and the various and silly ways we express it.  Some reactions are more destructive than others.  I’m thinking of affairs, inappropriate cars, and the usual things associated with a reflection and subsequent disillusionment with where we are at whatever age we begin to reflect.

But there are more subtle manifestations, such as the increasing difficulty to view the world with a fresh perspective, the tendency to allow bitterness or disappointment to take root.  This sort of thing is considered part of aging, but it doesn’t have to be.  Thing to do is get out — get out of the daily routine. For me that always meant get out into nature, into wilderness.  That’s not such an easy thing to do anymore, but it’s not possible.  Joshua Tree is not so very far away from where I am, and that place has the right kind of physical beauty and promise for adventure among the boulders and cliffs that the Gunks had thirty or so years ago.

That’s one form of medicine, but in an effort to get to the bottom of the mid-life crisis / aging issue I went to doctor for a full blood workup.  What do you suppose she came up with?  Turns out I have almost zero testosterone flowing through my veins.  Well, that’s probably good for the avoidance of Prostrate Cancer, but it’s not good for much else.  Taking the proscribed has made a world of difference.

Sometimes we are, after all, just a bag of chemicals …

About a month ago or so, I ran across someone who turned out to be an avid reader, and it happened during the course of my work, which makes it that more interesting and rare, considering what I do for a living.  How I came to know she was an avid reader is kind of silly -- I was delivering one of those canned software courses, where the presentation material contains trite introductory diversions in order to "loosen up" the audience -- something like going around the room introducing oneself and then providing your favorite hobby, etc.   Corny as it sounds, it actually worked well, everyone in the room learned more about each other in the ensuing conversation than we might have otherwise.

And so this led to more conversations, and actually inspired in me a desire to start reading again -- I mean really reading -- books, that is, and not just semi-weekly editions  of the New York Review of Books or Harpers, or that SPAMlike of magazines that seems to arrive on practically a daily basis - The New Yorker.  She provided me with The Samurai's Garden, a beautifully-written book about a Chinese boy in the 30's that is shipped off to coastal Japan by his wealthy family for health reasons, and where he meets a number of finely drawn characters with complicated and tragic pasts.

Then she told me about Paulo Coelho, whom I had barely heard of,  being so completely out of literary touch, as it were.  So I purchased a couple of his books tonight, and realized in the bookstore that I had always left it up to my father to feed me literature, and, considering he has been dead for twelve years, maybe it's time I started paying attention to these things myself.

Perhaps more importantly, this chance friendship has also inspired me to dust of "Fish," which is the novel I wrote in a mad fury over a four week period about sixteen years ago, while in Seattle between fishing seasons.  My father was still alive then, and as an illustration of how powerful affect he had on me, especially in terms of my literary ambitions, after receiving from him two or three critical sentences in response to the chapter I sent that I thought was my best, I put the manuscript down and never picked it up again.  Until now.  In fact, just two days ago late at night in this hotel room in Boulder I rewrote probably the last part I am willing to rewrite at this point.  I do think it is ready or very close to being ready for Lulu, or whatever.  (POD being the subject of another post at some point ...)

In talking with Ginnie today about writing, though, it was great to hear that she herself has a yearning to write -- and this is the first conversation I've had about writing in, oh, about fifteen years -- but I forgot to mention something that I now remember Dad telling me when I started to write seriously, about thirty years ago: 

Do not, under any circumstances, judge anything you write when you start.  It is the kiss of death.  Just, simply, write.

He cited a few reasons --

1) Everything you write when you first start will likely be garbage, but it WILL get better.  But, if you stop and judge too quickly, you will never get past the garbage stage, and will likely give up, and

2) You don't know , and you cannot know, the quality of your own writing.   No matter who you are, you are not equipped to be subjective about your own literary art.  It could be a masterpiece, or it could be completely unreadable, but you will not know it.  At least certainly for the first ten or so years of writing.  So don't, for cryin' out loud, stop and judge anything you write.  Just ... write.

I think he's right about that, at least based on my limited experience.  And it's true, I think, for everyone. A few weeks ago The New York Review printed some of  the letters of Norman Mailer to the couple of writers he admired in the 50's, right around the time he had recently written his anti-war masterpiece The Naked and the Dead, and he was full of a mixture of brio and doubt in his letters about his current projects -- not completely sure that the work was damned good or not.  He thought it was, but wasn't quite sure. And you read, between the lines of the letters, a desire to be validated by his peers.  So I think it's fair to say that if it's tough for Normal Mailer to judge his work, writing at the height of his powers, then it's not worth trying to judge your own.

One of the things we talked about was one the most thrilling and mysterious aspects of writing fiction -- the concept of the Muse.  It's no joke that the Greeks went to such lengths to explain the mystery  the creative force in art as the result of a Goddess, or Nymph, separate from your own self, that is responsible for the life that comes to the characters you create.  It really does happen that way, and just talking about it gave me the chills today, and I long to feel that again.  It's such a strange thing when it happens, because you think you have created these characters, right out of your head, and then they begin to take on a life of their own, and proceed to act in ways that baffle and amaze you.  I remember shrugging and laughing at some of the turns of events that came out of what I wrote when I was staying for a year in a cabin the Adirondacks, finishing my first novel, starting my second, and then trying to write short stories, all the while reading the likes of Lie Down in Darkness and bemoaning the likely fact that no matter how many years I remained holed up in that cabin I was not going to be able to write like Styron.

Nowadays, of course, no one writes like Styron -- or, how would I really know, anyway?  But the excerpts I read in the review magazines that garner effusive praise such as "luminous, enchanting", etc. are written in a flat, spartan style that is far, far from Styron and his southern predecessors, that I can only imagine that no one is reading him or the likes of him these days.

But does it matter, really, what people are reading?  No, it's about the writing.  We must remember that we write, foremost, for ourselves.  If a book gets out and makes its way to some people and you end up with some nice feedback, I suppose there can't be too many things that can happen to a person to top that, but when you are sitting in that quiet place, deep in the writing, I would hope that you are writing  for yourself, and not with others in mind.

Today the daily work ended at a reasonable time, and although I had some kind of unhealthy desire to work for the rest of the night, I took the advice of a new friend and colleague who told me to “relax”, which is sort of like telling the wind to stop blowing, although this time I listened.  I decided to head up Baseline to  where a park opens up to a wide swath of grassland criss-crossed by some dirt trails right at the slope below the Flatirons.  I brought my my new little stowaway kite that I had purchased at Into the Wind last week — just a little Delta, beautifully colored.  These kites, by the way, are not your grandma’s kites of yesteryear. They almost leap out of your hand and rise energetically straight up in the slightest wind.  There’s no running, like Charlie Brown used to — they just elevate themselves and dance around as the wind shifts and twists.  There’s a little maintenance, and once the kite took a dive in a strong wind and I found myself wading through the tall grass to retrieve it, but if you pay attention and act accordingly, you can fly the thing almost absent-mindedly for hours.  And what a blast.  There is a sense of freedom to be connected, however tenuously, to a playful object that seems alive soaring high above you.

When I left the lowlands there wasn’t a whisper of wind but when I arrived at the park the wind was probably at about three knots — just enough to get started.  Then it began to gust up to about 20 which made for some interesting flying, and then a group of long, deep gray clouds came rolling over the Flatirons and after about an hour the first drops of rain began to fall.  I thought for a moment about Ben Franklin’s lightning experiment and decided that perhaps I should  call it quits.  On the way out a met a nice Boxer out for a walk with her Person, a happy Boulder native who was oblivious to the rain, enjoying the warm afternoon breeze and change in light from the now black clouds.  It struck me how similar Boulder is to Irvine — they are bubbles of contentment, and for different reasons.  Irvine because of the affluence, climate, relatively low crime, and Orwellian corporate-style civic management, and Boulder … well I’m not completely sure yet, but judging from the real estate prices, affluence certainly has something to do with it.

Food, too.  I ate at Centro, and the food really was as the waiter described it would be, which was “delish …”.  The wine, a Spanish red, was fantastic as well.  I had something like “brown sugar encrusted lamb” (sorry, not a food critic) which was great, and the appetizer was a ginger plantain fritter with a sauce I could eat every day and not get tired of.

But the best part of the meal was that I took the opportunity to plug in the headset to my phone and called an old, old friend of the family named David Frair, who is now one of the few people left who knew well both my father and mother.  I told him how I remembered the first time I met him when he was probably twenty and I was about five — he had just a pair of shorts and sneakers and a headband and had just come back from a 10-mile run outside of Woodstock, NY.  Dave was one of the “hippie” generation in upstate NY that my father had befriended as a sort of elder, and who exposed their group to things like Jazz music and literature.  He was a journalist for the local newspaper, while Dad was a newscaster for the local radio station in Newburg, but in the late sixties they both quit journalism in favor of starting some kind of construction business with Joe Nicosia, who could actually build houses, and in fact built many.  Not that any of them made any money — I guess that wasn’t the point.  I think that was pretty much the last steady job my father had, which was fine, since my mother decided right around that time to start working.

But the point of this is that the conversation made the dinner that much enjoyable, and it was great to catch up with Dave.  If I had not been traveling, I suppose it would be much more difficult to find the time to spend an hour on the phone with someone I had not talked to in about twenty years.  But that’s something that needs to change.  Same thing with Chris and Linda — here they are less than forty miles and when was the last time I sat down with them?  Maybe a year.  No excuse for that.  Seems like almost everything I write leads me back to the fact that there is a paucity of time. An illusion, of course, since we know from experience that there is truly an eternity wrapped up in every moment we spend, dazed and overworked…