Bio

I was born in Bloomington, Illinois, in 1955, but I grew up mostly in Chenoa, a nearby farming community, because my father was transferred to that little town when I was eight. My parents were high-school sweethearts who married a few years out of high school and started producing children soon afterward. They produced four of us all together, three boys and a baby sister who was quite a bit younger than we were. 

My father was a gifted musician who played woodwinds, clarinet being his favorite. But he could awe me with any of them just by sitting down at the kitchen table in his dirty, sweaty work clothes after a long day’s work and producing some of the most remarkable sounds I in my young life had ever heard. Later I had the chance to hear him in several impromptu bands that played for different occasions. He was a true musician, didn’t need sheet music though he was proficient at reading it—just start playing and he’d join in. He rubbed elbows with a few well-known swing musicians and had a chance to play in the first Tonight Show band, back in the Steve Allen or Jack Paar days, but my mother gave him an ultimatum, his music or his kids, and he chose us. In my lit. classes many years later, I always used my father’s example to illustrate the central theme in Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken.” 

Mom was a farmgirl who worked like a farmgirl, which is to say she worked hard. She saw the cooking and cleaning and other chores she did around the house as her own fulltime job—making sure we were properly fed and cleaned and attended to our own chores, shopping, gardening (her specialty and her avocation), mending things inside and outside as necessary, and above all not whining about any of it. My older brother and I were reminiscing as our father lay dying and recalled that we never carped about having to do the dishes (or other chores)—not because we were afraid of our parents but because, seeing how hard they worked, we would have felt like complete assholes whining about a few chores we had to do ourselves. It was from my mother that I inherited both my interest in planting and growing things and my love of animals. Mom never met an animal she didn’t like and wouldn’t adopt, so we grew up with a menagerie of pets, mostly dogs and cats. 

My parents were religious people, Lutherans, and of course they raised us in the church. All three of my siblings still attend church faithfully; I am the only heathen. My older brother and I were both athletes, and he was also an excellent student (I was not) who after high school went dutifully off to Valparaiso University in northwest Indiana, the first in our family to attend college. I followed him two years later, not so much because I wanted to but because my parents forced the issue. The Vietnam War was upon us and we had mandatory conscription then, and while my parents didn’t think much of the war, they believed that he who gets called must serve. They also knew that college might be a way of avoiding getting called, so as I said they forced the issue, creating a rift between us that didn’t really close for many, many years. Naturally, I opposed the war and wasn’t sure what I would do if I did get called. Fortunately for me I didn’t have to choose. De-escalation began in seventy-two and I graduated from high school in seventy-three. I was not called.

But my parents didn’t know it was going to work out that way, so they booted me off to college and made sure, through various means, that I stayed there. I chose Valparaiso because my brother was there, and for no other reason. I had been offered baseball scholarships at a couple of other small schools but chose Valpo solely because of my brother. He found time to study engineering, work at least twenty hours a week, and still play three years of college baseball, but I got distracted by booze, drugs, and of course the opposite sex, played only one season of baseball, and piddled my way to a B.A. in English.

After I got my undergrad degree I continued piddling through several different jobs before heading off to Europe, motivated at least in part by a romantic attachment to the Paris expatriates of the twenties but also by a newfound contempt for my homeland (every good flower child had to have that). Before I went I made the mistake of marrying my first wife and the mother of my children, who deserved much better than she got from me. She too was the product of a blue-collar upbringing, but in the city, Chicago. Her parents were the kind of Catholics who attend Mass daily, twice a day if they felt they needed it. But she and her sister had both wandered off to Bloomington, my hometown, where they both found jobs in the insurance industry to support their main occupation in life: partying like there was no tomorrow. The house they shared with two other young women was home to sex, drugs, and every rock-and-roll band that passed through town, and we had some serious fun before I dragged her off to Spain, where we both found teaching jobs for the next few years and continued the fun, traipsing all over western Europe whenever we had the chance. 

But being a good Catholic girl, at least at heart, she wanted children and she wanted them at home where she could be close to her own family. I obliged her and we came home, where she commenced having her own children, a boy first and then a girl, and I could continue my “revolutionary” ways as an ESL teacher and childcare worker. But the blush of idealistic youth was wearing off. I remember the precise moment when I decided to abandon the “helping” professions once and for all. I was driving one of my teenaged foster kids back from her mother’s house to her foster parents’ house on a Saturday evening, and she complained the entire time, noisily, that she didn’t want to go. I knew the only reason she wanted to stay with her mom was that her poor mom couldn’t control her, so she’d be able to stay out all night and party with her hometown high-school friends. I was thinking about my own son who was sitting home wondering where the old man might be, and that was it for me. Time to look for something else.

Primarily because we were looking to find Spain again without leaving the country, we ended up in metro Phoenix, which is near Mexico and Southern California, has a climate almost identical to that in most of Spain (a little hotter in the summer, but otherwise very similar), and of course has a heavy Hispanic influence. There was enough of the “revolutionary” left in me then to recognize the absolute best, easiest path a “revolutionary” can take in our world to avoid the real ugliness in life that I’d seen as a social worker and still avoid the real working world: I went to graduate school and became an academic. In the meantime I also worked fulltime out of necessity, in a steel mill no less, and ended up exhausted and divorced—but also additionally degreed. 

After teaching part time for several years I got the job I wanted, at a community college near my kids. I also ended up married again after another five or so years, this time to a school teacher (junior high special ed., a glutton for punishment) with a troubled past. She had come west from Cleveland to find herself in the mountains of Montana, shacked up with her biker boyfriend, but decided to come to the Southwest to get her own undergrad degree and try to rescue as many of America’s wayward children as she possibly could. Unfortunately, she needed rescuing herself, from a problem with poisons that she couldn’t control. When she wasn’t drunk she was sober but gambling away our mortgage money in a casino. To this day I marvel at how she was able to hide her addiction from me for two years before we got married. She did not hide it after we were married, and I blame the second divorce on her. The first divorce was my fault. The second divorce was her fault. I’m just lucky I wasn’t saddled with her gambling debts. She came from an affluent family in suburban Cleveland, and when her parents died she inherited a pile of money. I believe she has blown through it by now and is back in Phoenix. But I don’t want to find out. 

So then I settled in to my “career” and lived pretty much the life of the narrator and protagonist in Kayla Blaze, except that I stuck it out at the college long after I’d become disenchanted with the profession (as he becomes disenchanted with it), to make sure I got my pension. I also married a third time, this time to another wayward child with an adventurous past. But she was not Kayla Blaze; she was a high-school dropout turned single mom, working on a degree when we met. Don’t ask me why that marriage ended; you’d have to ask her. I don’t think I’m easy to live with. I’m moody and I like to spend a lot of time alone with my books. But she seemed to manage that very well, as she also liked to be alone a lot. So I thought we were the perfect couple. But apparently I was wrong. She still keeps in touch with me, but we don’t talk about the divorce. 

I am retired and live with my son in Mesa, one of Phoenix’s East Valley suburbs. My son is a deeply religious man who was probably saved by his religious faith from a life of dissolute wandering like that of his old man. I watched him struggle with faith all through high school and beyond, and I feared he would be a chip off the old block. I was right. Everybody needs faith in something. That’s a natural fact. My daughter lives in Dallas with her boyfriend, having wandered first to Chicago before coming home to live with me for a while and then taking to the road again. She has a journalism degree but has never used it, even though she’s very photogenic and has an excellent on-camera presence. But she also has wanderlust. She’s mentioned Nashville, Chicago again, and San Diego, but her mom and I keep hoping she’ll come home—naturally. 

Having buried both my parents in the last few years I have been reminded of their extraordinary character and integrity as human beings, the steadfastness they showed in the simple commitment to work hard, raise a family, pay their bills, and even accumulate a modest legacy to leave to their heirs. They appear indirectly in Kayla Blaze and quite directly in another novel I’d like to see published, The Summer of Love. If I’d been more like them I’d be a better person. But I probably wouldn’t have written Kayla Blaze.