This Month's Story

Looking at the calendar, and doing a little calculation, I realize that I’ve been writing these stories for fifteen years. It all started sometime in 1999, I decided to write something for my children to read, to tell that there have been moments in my life that have been fun and, to better put a word on it, adventuresome. And best of all let them in on the secret that all of the stories are true

It isn’t easy. I gathered a bunch of short stories that I had idly written about the life Stella and I have lived in a small town in southern Mississippi. These would do as a start. And what made them unique was that their two common themes. The first theme was about Stella and I living in a beach house in a small town in Mississippi and the second was that that living was done in a house by the waters of the Mississippi Sound. By training, I was a marine scientist and living where we did was much like the bus driver taking the bus to work.

I worked hard on that book and finished it in time for Christmas. I made about twenty or thirty copies and gave them out not only to my own children but to friends that I thought would enjoy them. In no time, the copies were gone and I was being called out to sea and forgot about them.

But the books seemed to have a life of their own and I began to be deluged by friends who wanted their own copies. Even more than that, the local paper wanted me to write a regular Sunday column along the same veins as the stories in the book. It wasn’t long before I got a call, Mississippi Public Radio asked me to do an occasional skit for them as well. All the stories were on the same theme: the Mississippi Sound and people like me who sailed it. Remember it was a coastal town and everyone was related to working in the sea in some way. When people read my stories they didn’t hear me but rather they were reading stories about themselves.

Soon I was writing the stories on a regular basis and the stories became more and more popular. When I finally got a local printer to put all of the stories that I had written for one year in an edition of 3,000 soft cover copies, that edition was sold out in less than one year.

I was surprised; people liked what I wrote!

Looking back now and counting, I find that during that initial period, I wrote more than eight books, the first three being soft cover copies and the last five hard covers. All were well received by people living in the southern coastal area. While I certainly wasn’t getting rich, I met a lot of very interesting people that I would not have met otherwise.

It was fun. I was doing something I liked doing and had no difficulty doing it.

Today, we no longer live in Mississippi, thanks to the ravages wrought by Hurricane Katrina on an unbelievable bad day in August 2005. Katrina was devastating. It destroyed my house, my street, the town we lived, in fact all the towns along the entire Mississippi coast. Stella and I had wisely fled the coast, penniless (the banks with all their money were under water), we wandered for a month from southern state to southern state, when Stella remembered the ruin of a farm she had inherited from her parents a decade earlier. We had no choice. We drove I,000 miles north to the deserted farm.

Now instead for a person who spent half his life on the ocean, I found I was forced to live on a small farm in southwestern Pennsylvania. When we got there, we found that the previous tenants had literally left it a miserable place to live. Winter came and we were snowbound in a town and place where we knew no one. As the winter winds and fierce snow blew, I borrowed a card table and using my lap top started to write about our new life and made it into a new book.

Now, instead of the beach, I begun writing about something I knew very little about, the life of a western Pennsylvanian.

The house was small and my office was a corner of the bedroom. In desperation to sell our books, Stella and I started peddling our books at craft fairs. To our amazement, the books sold. Settling in with just the two of us; I wrote another book. It sold equally well. And slowly but surely the years passed by one by one and the farm bloomed (we had no animals; just fruit trees, berry bushes and wine vines). We tore the old house down and built one that much resembled our Mississippi home.

Sounds nice? Well it is, or better said, it was. Let me bring you a little more up to date.

Two years ago, while I was clearing brush near the creek with our Farmall tractor, a wild grape vine grabbed me around the shoulders and hurled me about thirty feet from the tractor. Stella saw the tractor moving through the brush with no one on it and immediately called 911. It was work for the paramedic crew to find me and even more work for them to get me intact out of the brush and to the helicopter sitting in a neighbor’s field that rushed me to the roof of UPMC Presby Hospital in downtown Pittsburgh.

The team that worked on me had their work cut out for them. I had a broken neck (all but two of the seven neck bones were crushed), a broken back (only seven of these, but each done very well; I wore a girdle for months), and a series of severe concussions. Pain was my constant companion. I could not turn my head and my constant view of the world was the ceiling of the hospital room.

Finally after a week centered about the terrible operation in which iron was placed where most of my neck and back had been before, I was allowed to go home, where my daughter and Stella greeted me with wondrous smiles that replaced any thoughts of the monotony of hospital care.

They laid me on a small medical bed in the master bedroom. It was wonderful! I couldn’t turn. I could only stare up at the bedroom ceiling. But it didn’t matter; what I saw was my ceiling.

At last I was home but with this homecoming came many changes. The first few weeks, Stella’s care was augmented by daily visiting nurses. This was good because beside me, Stella had the 17 acre farm to tend to.

What was constantly amazing was the help we received from the surrounding farmers. With their aid, they helped turn the ravaged mess of a farm to become a thing of beauty and although physically helpless, I watched the seasons come and go for the next two years, watching, living for the time when I could help return things to the ways Stella remembered they were.

Slowly, as my immediate problems improved; things that were not noticeable when the doctors first examined me became more prominent. Constant visits to medical specialists slowly showed me that I had far more serious injuries then the early tests had indicated.

Recovery, they told me, was going to take time.

Of the original injuries, my head injury was worse than we initially thought. I found that I could not remember the simplest of things. Worst, the farm was now completely in Stella’s care. I could not operate any type of machinery that vibrated nor was my sense of balance reliable. I would fall for seemingly no reason at all. My back was made up of iron rods and I could not turn my neck. So driving a car or truck was out of the question. Worst of all, it seemed that the head injury had included a severe shaking of the interior of my brain and that, in truth, any recovery would take years.

I write this the third year since the accident and the snow outside is deep but melting as spring approaches. But my daily walks about the farm (part of my therapy); I see buds on the fruit trees and on the grape vines. I look at these very carefully. Last fall we had delicious watermelons and cantaloupes and we had these by the dozens. This last fall, we’ve expanded the protected areas around the fruit trees (rabbits) so now we plan to spread out our planting to pumpkins, gourds and sun flowers. I can’t do this myself, but there is a college student who has fallen in love with our farm and tries to come by at least once a week.

And so in this depth of winter, I look forward to a true harvest next year.

But I find that there is still trouble and if you look carefully, you can see this on the pages in front of you. I can no longer write as I did. Any writing that I do, such as these monthly stories for my web page, is a tedious chore. This is not some simple writer’s block, but more serious; the results of the head shaking. The doctors have worked with me on this and I’m assigned writing chores (this story you have here as this chapter is one of them.)

I’ve worked hard on this; it has not been easy. Stella reads my day’s work and talks to me and the next day, I start again and try harder. Sometimes the results are only fit for the trash basket. Occasionally, a story from my past would come forward and I would work hard to get it down. Then stories come with internal stipulation that I did not write as well as they deserved, they and the memories that went with them would disappear.

The day I wrote The Black Leopard that you will find later in this book, I almost cried. Someday, I realized it all would come back to me.

Then one day I was surprised. Stories pour out from the back of my head that I hadn’t thought about for years. I’ve realized that I’ve lived those stories and many more that I have not thought to put on paper. They were part of my life and they were what was or had been. More would come I realized and somehow I felt I would live them forever in the keys of my computer.

The doctors, who read them, tell me the stories show much improvement and in another year, who knows? The results will be much easier. I assure you that this essay that you have in front of you now, was very hard for me to write.

And so let me close this one with the remark that my life has not been just about the farm or the beaches; these stories you will read here will still be a mixture of these but also of other places that I truthfully say, “I remember, I remember.”