A Biographical Essay

if I lived around here I’d go be an idjit in the sagebrush, I’d be a jackrabbit, I’d lick up the branches, I’d look for pretty cowgirls–hee-hee-hee-hee! Damn! Bam!
~ Jack Kerouac, ON THE ROAD

In Texas in the 1950’s, all roads leading west passed through isolated communities in which one, open to the idea, might have chosen to disappear or reinvent themselves for one reason or another, places located where possibilities and wide open spaces extended as far as the eye could see, mythical places meant to instill confidence and determination in a person.

I was raised in one of these communities, a rural rhinestone, studded in the buckle of the Texas Bible Belt. To the east lay Fort Worth and Dallas, yet to have merged into the Metroplex. To the west stretched thousands of square miles of untamed ranch land, bisected by U.S. Route 180, which ran through my town and cut across the Permian Basin and the West Texas oil patch all the way to El Paso – and beyond – through New Mexico and Arizona, reaching almost, but not quite, to the promised land of Southern California. 

The stock-and-trades of my home town were agriculture, gasoline stations, car dealerships, rock solid church homes, football heroes and unwed mothers – all orbiting around a local Dairy Queen, where the unwritten laws of our teenage jungle were articulated, learned, and obeyed.

My mother was a strong willed only child, born in Brownwood, Texas, in the literal heart of the state. She would meet my father at a military base there just as the Second World War was commencing and she would marry him at sixteen in her bid to escape the doldrums of small town life.

My father was a black sheep Minnesotan, barely twenty, bred from New England early-settler stock. He preferred misbehavior to the convenience of propriety and would certify his family’s disappointment in him by marrying my mother beneath his station before marching off to fight in World War II.

In 1948, I arrived in Japan with my mother at seven months old after a three week journey on a military transport from Seattle, Washington, there to join my father, by that time a career army officer, now with a Bronze Star under his belt, serving with the allied occupation forces. For the rest of her life my mother never failed to remind me of just how unsettling that voyage had been.

While in Japan our family was based in the southern half of the country where Hiroshima and Nagasaki, devastated by atomic bombs, ending the war, still lay in ruins. Curiously, as I was growing up, neither my mother or my father were ever given to mention or discuss their impressions of these unprecedented events.

Although the war had brought my parents together in matrimony, the peace following would insure that their marriage would not last.

I was nine-years-old when my mother remarried a country doctor and moved my brother and I to Weatherford, Texas, where I would come of age, and would dream about making my own escape from enervating tedium, much like my mother had back in the day, fantasizing about living by my wits, on the run, unmoored from hidebound society.

And run, metaphorically anyway, I eventually would, an inexperienced, white, and privileged, small town kid, aged 18, in 1966, I would launch straight into the onset of the chaotic and contradictory, political and cultural upheavals au currant in the nineteen sixties that would in many ways dictate the terms of the rest of my life. The past seventy-five years, it is safe to say, have been an unprecedented time to be alive, one of nonstop technological change and turmoil, of slippery cultural slopes, ever evolving new normals, and lost innocence.

In total disregard of logic, my survival strategy as a young adult had been to rely on impulse and serendipity – flinging myself at every perceived opportunity that came along, no matter what it was – convinced that eventually I would arrive at some utopian moment of clarity and understanding, wherein all would be revealed. In other words, as so many young persons from that time, I had gone out into the world, to quote author John Fowles, “handsomely equipped to fail”. And fail, at first, I did more often than not.

Along the way, I would discover that there were some career choices at which I could excel and which would proffer me a better than average living – but from which I derived little personal satisfaction – and others, the choices about which I was most passionate: focusing on them would, financially, earn me next to nothing.

Needless to say, over the years, I have been and done many things in order to strike a balance between these two fluctuating states of creative and economic well being, putting myself in the path of chance and reinvention time and again in an effort to reach a place where the real world and my chronic state of befuddlement with it might find the means to coexist. 

That said, to be sure, I am a better person today for having made the trip without ever quite arriving at my destination. Reaping, instead, in between stops, the benefits of having been open to taking advantage of a life of possibilities that might otherwise have eluded me.

And, to be clear, while I may have followed too eagerly at times in the footsteps of my heart, I have, also, managed to leave enough space between each step to transform the vagaries of my life experiences into art of the personal kind.