3. WRITING AS A NEW VOCATION: The Discovery!

From August, 1989 to February, 1990 I wrote almost every day, seeking out and exploring the themes in my life.  Small recollected details of my life became important clues to finding a greater truth to my life than practicing law.  I didn't know where the effort would lead, but the further I delved into my memories and examined the facts and patterns of my life, the more I hoped for a surprise ending. 

I wrote from fascination and inspiration in the morning before work, and typed and edited in the evenings after six.  People asked what I was up to.  I explained; some were impressed, more were bewildered.  Cathy tolerated my absences, knowing I was doing something I loved, but I felt the strain as I tried to balance work with my new vocation.  In the early morning hours or late at night, I experienced a tranquility and a happiness that truly amazed me.  I forgot the world around me and became lost in memories and writing. 

Then one night in February it happened.

February 20, 1990.  10:45 p.m.  Home.  Finished retyping Chapters 1-3 of the book, 5:45 - 10:15.  I have come home still hyped up.  I have just had a wonderful thought – a clue, a breakthrough!

Is that what I was hoping my book would reveal to me?

The thing is, perhaps I really wanted to be a writer when I was 16 or 17 or whenever it was I drove with my father in Santa Monica and said, tentatively, "Maybe I'll be a writer."  He, so cleverly, gave in right away, deflecting my urge by saying, "Yes, OK.  But you don't have to give up everything, you know, you can be a writer and a doctor.  Perhaps a writer and a lawyer."  He took the wind out of what little sail I had and pushed me!

Suddenly, for a moment, I feel for the first time as if I am a writer, not a lawyer.  The timid  desire of that teenage boy has made it to my present.  No, I am not out of the blue, I always wanted to be a writer -- somewhere, somehow, I was waylaid!  I was given the taste of the drug of material wealth to distract me, more addicting than heroin or crack cocaine.  How did that hope even survive?  I can now say, that tonight, Tuesday, February 20, 1990, my book has an ending.

What gave birth to the incipient desire to become a writer?  Was it my travels—did I just want to save it somehow?  Trying to logically analyze this goes nowhere.  It is just that tonight I felt a kinship, a relationship, an understanding of a teenage boy.  Why oh why did I suggest that to my father??  (Oh, I never want to go back to law!!)

April 23.  10 p.m.  Windstorm outside, first real good one of the year.  It seems my interior life is getting farther and farther from my outside life,  The chasm makes living harder.

June 19.  It feels strange to be finished with my book, though in a sense I will never really be finished; even now I can think of parts I would like to work on and rewrite.  Perhaps, there are other elements to add,  parts I should take out.  And how does it all fit together?  I think it is time to let it sit and stew for awhile, fortify myself sufficiently so that I can send it off for publication and be prepared for the anger and hurt at being rejected.

Meanwhile, it's time to move on to something new and different.  It seems stale now to be writing in a notebook I began last November.  The first test has been met, the easy part done, writing of my life.  I must now turn to a more imaginative endeavor, though it seems my history, which I now know even better than before, will probably be a part of everything I do.

I have been haunted lately by recalling Steve B's remarks in 1975 that fiction involved getting inside another's head.  I am definitely inside my own head.  Although I feel confident at being able to predict and understand behavior, I'm not certain I'm willing to take the time to lose myself into the mind of another character.  Perhaps, if I simply explore various aspects of my own personality, in the form of projections competing against one another, I can create the tension needed to write the stories I long to create.

I am afraid of going to live in England for a year, meeting myself so completely, and not being happy with what I see, or not being able to live with that person. 

June 26.  I find it hard to wake up in the morning now, and suppose that, since my book is finished, I have lost some of the desire that kept me going since last August.  It is hard to believe that almost an entire year has passed so quickly.

We are now planning for May 1991 to leave for our year away.

June 27.  I had not thought of it for awhile, but Jesus' exile into Egypt was much the same as the exile of the Jews in Egypt.  To some extent I can see my exile in the desert (Las Vegas) in the same manner: I have been hiding in the desert for the last 15 years.  From where am I exiled?  California?  England?

I can barely bring myself to write about it, but Rene A., our neighbor and friend, died.  He and his wife, Patti had two children, one in Robert's class and one in Mara's.  I knew Rene from about 1972.  We did not socialize, but if saw him at a party or somewhere (T Ball six weeks ago or occasionally at church) we always talked for awhile and seemed to share common interests and opinions.  (I particularly enjoyed Rene's accusing me of deliberately encouraging Robert to make his first confession to the Filipino priest who speaks broken English.)  He smoked too much, drank too much, was short, and had a Type A personality.  His eight year old son found him face down in the pool Tuesday night, just before Robert, Jeffrey and I walked by the house.  Rene was 42.

I was comforted reading the Bible this morning.  If God has a plan for our lives (Cathy, Robert, Mara, Jeffrey, Thomas), then there must be something in there for death as well.  There is something in Wisdom about the just man dying early.  (How just am I?!)

We all have our clocks ticking, and each day we deny it by becoming attached to life.  There must be someway to embrace life without denying death.  I suppose it is to never have a reluctance to say goodbye.  To leave it all.   (I told Cathy yesterday Rene's death is a good example of why we all need to get to England!)

June 28.  HOT.  110 degrees for the last week.  Phoenix was 122, too hot for planes to take off!  91 was their low, ours was low 80's.

I have not resolved the questions of trust and hope: Jesus says we must trust in God (lilies of the field), yet I cannot presume that requires no effort on my part.  I could live my life without a concern in the world for heaven, "trusting" God to see I get there; but I don't think that's how it works.  Somehow I must combine my hope and trust of what God wants for me.  God wants a lily to be a lily, soaking up the sunshine and the nutrients and moisture in the ground.  God wants me to be a man.  Exactly what does that entail?

July 5.  Letter of inquiry sent to the British embassy. 

July 20.  Del Mar.  I sent my first and last chapters, prologue and table of contents to a literary agent in New York.  Nice rejection letter.  No one wants to read the autobiography of someone who is not famous.  I'm at least glad the waiting is over.  Now I must determine whether and what other avenues to proceed.

I dreamed of porpoises last night.

Certain reminders of old life down here, the taste of Mr. Coffee reminding me of my college apartment in West LA, sitting at the kitchen table working on a paper or writing in my journals.  The weather most often was "night and early morning low clouds and fog."  The desert was a magnificent revelation with its bright, clear light and sunshine.  Strange, we talk as if moving away from that great clear sunshine of the desert would make us unhappy.  As if moving to fog and haze or many cloudy days is something to fear!

August 8.  Doug D. died at 46.  With Rene that makes two attorneys in their 40's.  The saying: these things come in threes?

August 23.  Susan Floyd at UCLA alumni club dinner last night presented a talk entitled, "Just Do it."  Took her ten years but she wanted to go around the world as fast as she could, and she finally did it in 58 hours.  Cathy thought it was a set up!

August 25.  I asked Jeffrey if his new NASA tennis shoes could walk on water, and reminded him that Peter walked on water to see Jesus, when Jesus asked.  A minute or two later Jeffrey asked me if I would walk on water if Jesus asked me.  WOW! 

August 27.  Friday night I had an unusual dream.  In downtown Las Vegas I encountered beautiful houses on hillsides (where none exist).  The setting was much like San Francisco, with gingerbread-like Victorian houses painted in wonderful, bright colors with contrasting bright trims.  Behind and beneath the lovely exteriors, around the backside of the houses, running through the hills, was an abandoned underground railway or subway.  I remember being pleasantly surprised, very much so, at discovering the houses and shortly afterwards being unpleasantly surprised to see that the beauty and pleasantness of the homes was just a facade, hiding tunnels of somewhat sinister appearance.

September 10.  Aboard Delta 244 from Maui to LAX.  Looking at hundreds of tiny white clouds dotting the seascape below, small puffs, balls of cotton: occasional clearings, occasional gatherings.  The blue sky and the blue ocean very nearly blend together, except at the edges.  Noon and six o'clock are very nearly the same color.  If it wasn't for gravity and instruments, down could look like up and up down; though the clouds throw shadows on the ocean not the sky.  It is interesting to note that deep in the sky and deep in the ocean, straight up and straight down, the blues are the richest, with lighter blues at the edges of top and bottom.

September 18.  Reading Remembrance of Things Past, Swann's Way.  This time I am determined to keep reading all the way through – at least the first volume.  I identify with the book; it describes how I think.  I would like to write like Proust.  The smells really are what bring things back.  Yesterday a woman, heavily perfumed with a familiar scent, exited the elevator as I waited to walk in.  I walked not into a moving cable car, but a place of my past.

September 24.  Aboard Delta 169 to LAS from Dallas (earlier today from Detroit).  Heading home from this year’s football trip to Ann Arbor, where UCLA was soundly trounced 38-15, though a very nice effort by the freshman QB, Tommy Maddox.  It is interesting how I find myself taking a hard breath, making sure I can breathe deep.  This all started with allergies (I think) and now seems to have carried beyond that, from olive trees and Bermuda grass to down, and shortness of breath in other situations.  I am beginning to wonder if some of the problem isn't psychological, as the pediatrician said, when I experienced the same problem as a boy in Malibu.

Dad said he used to sit with me in the shower, when I was a child, to let the steam loosen up my lungs, defiantly proving that the asthma diagnosis someone had made was wrong.  For all his efforts, I have never known myself to have asthma.  I see a lot of my grandmother, Mer (mother's mother), in my father.  Set your mind to it.  Mind over matter.

 

Just passed Albuquerque and I paused to note my bearings and look at the scenery.

My whole body seems to have a resistance to where I am in life.  There seems to be something missing.  A weekend of drinking and being part of a carousing group of guys such as I just spent enhances the feeling.  I laughed very hard sometimes, but I was not at all into the search for wild women and more booze.  I loved the songs more than the drinking (I did not try to keep up) and eating.  I enjoy the golf and the football game and stories, but so much has become a bore.  Thank goodness for those long runs in the morning with Mike!

So the question before me, as it was last year, is to find where I need to be.  Obviously my family is my key, but my family is both my love and my trap, for it is the material need of my family that continues to look me in the eye each time I think of trying to change gears.  (The rugged terrain of the west is beautiful!  Scattered clouds, clear, a thunderhead or two.) 

Where do I go from here?  I will take the sabbatical.  That will start things, and we'll go from there!

September 26.  Oh how the days of autumn slip by, faster than any other time in the year, with all of their activities and promise of relief from the heat.  I interviewed a fellow at University of Michigan law school the other day who said that no matter how long he lived in the midwest, he would never get used to the winters.  I shared with him my similar thoughts about Las Vegas summers.

Walker Percy's article in Crisis says we live in a post modernist world which he calls theorist-consumer, most everyone is a theorist or a consumer.

What was it about last year, a year ago, that led me to go on in my book at such great lengths?  Perhaps it was the forced regimen of teaching at UNLV and the prospect of turning 40.  The time has come, my inner self tells me, to turn toward an act or action which reflects my innermost self, rather than daily suppressing that self.

September 27.  On the ground at McCarran Airport.  I feel as if I have been wrestling with the idea of death over the last six months.  Wrestling with the concept, the nature of my own being.  Who am I really?  That is, to whom do I belong, in the end?       

September 28.  Yesterday, before I flew to Reno, I went running at 5:50 a.m. and, as I ran up to the park, the words of Jesus to the good thief, "This day you will be with me in Paradise," popped into my head.  Was it a premonition?  Did it come from within or without?  Its worst case was its best, its best case its worst.  Maybe it was nothing.  I said careful goodbyes to everyone before I boarded the plane.  I had strong feelings when the captain (who was late for the flight) topped off the gas, because there was fog in Reno ("nothing to worry about") and said we might have to circle.  It seemed as if a crash into the fogbound side of the mountains was coming.  When we reached Reno, however, it was lovely and smooth.  The afternoon was supposed to bring thunderstorms, but, when we left, the weather was lovely, 65-70 with scattered clouds.

I recently read there is a saying that one who lives a long life dies many small deaths!

October 1.  Cloudy, a few rain drops.  Reading comment by Geoffrey Ward in his review of a book about India.  He's never met anyone who, "having spent some time in India, as I did as a boy, ever really got over it."  Same with me and England.

October 2.  Sunny, cool morning, sunrise colored from smog.  What was it about that year abroad that left an indelible impression?  Were the seeds planted beforehand?  I do not recall very much about the weeks before we left for England.  We must have packed, we must have known we were going.  Did all our activities have any meaning to me as a child?

October 3.  Today would have been Gogo's 100th birthday.  Robert, at nine, imagines his great-grandmother "just sitting up in heaven having a good time."  He remembers her—sort of; she passed away in 1985 when he was four.  I thought of her this morning at mass.  This was a pretty, young Jewish girl, yet she chose, for whatever reasons, love of this handsome politician, Ed Buckley, love of the Catholic faith or perhaps a combination, to change her faith.  Did she ever have pause to reconsider?  Perhaps while her parents were alive, less so with her own growing family and their traditions, which must have been more than adequate to replace what could no longer be.  If Gogo had continued on in her own traditions, would she have enjoyed her life more naturally?

October 8.  I have been enjoying the October weather along with the children.  Last Sunday we visited Mt. Charleston to see the changing colors of the aspens, and yesterday we put the Suburban in four wheel drive and headed over Wheeler Pass, north of Charleston to Pahrump.  The hillsides are beautiful in the mountains.  I worked in the garden on Saturday, planting annuals (stock and snaps) and I was reminded of our early days in Las Vegas: the lovely fall days with such clear air and great views of the mountains.  The dry air had a special, clear quality about it, so different than the damp, thick air of the beach.  It really was lovely when we first moved here.

For some reason, that first summer in Las Vegas, in 1969, did not leave me with the sense of overwhelming heat I now associate with summer.  Now summer seems like a powerful, long, lasting storm: when it's over, it is hard to believe it really happened, and hard to imagine exactly what it's like to live through it, so foreign and powerful are its forces.

While I worked in the garden on Saturday I thought how we were tricked, coming up here in November, 1968, at the best time of year.  I visited often, but had no real idea of the power of the desert, in its heat and flash floods.  My first impression, which must have lasted quite some time, was a mistaken sense of the peace of the desert.  Certainly there were windy days, but winds, of course, are not constant, and we had experienced the gusty Santa Ana's in California.  In any event, we were all fooled into thinking what a marvelous, safe, lovely place this desert is, when in fact the desert is harsh and cruel at times, unfriendly to human beings, who cannot tolerate the extremes of temperature or the punishment that the dry climate imposes on us without air conditioners and swimming pools.

. . . So I turned off the music and sat down at my desk, in the quiet, in hopes, yet another time, that the words will flow onto the paper with precision and ease, spontaneous and lovely. . .  What might it be like to live in England?

Scott felt restless at his desk, not knowing whether he should continue on in the same useless vein that he had pursued for the entire morning.  Perhaps a walk would do him good, perhaps the fresh air would revive him.  His mind wandered.  He played with his pen and began to think of all the words that he had written.  He could not remember them all.  He could only remember bits and pieces.  Fragments had been the peak of his powers.  He placed the cap on the pen and laid it down on the blotter, no more satisfied with himself than he had been four and a half hours ago, when he had been determined to capture in words the energy and freshness of spirit that had seemed so close to the surface in the dark, early hours.

Outside, the weather was cooler than it had been and a quick breeze pushed the somewhat large, dark clouds rapidly across the sky.  The day remained beautiful.  Though it was autumn, most of the trees remained deep green with no sign of tiring out and letting down their leaves.  Scott buttoned up his coat and, with a determined pace, walked out the driveway to the empty, narrow lane that ran past the cottage.  With good intention he made the sign of the cross, hoping to make the walk itself into a prayer, in order to make up for what he knew to be the lack of total prayerful concentration, as, at once, he became absorbed in everything around him, to the exclusion of the prayer he had begun.

 Above the thousand motions of the trees and their leaves, the sky was alive with light and dark, hope and gloom; beneath his feet the road was damp and dark.  Unlike the sky with its unfulfilled promise of sunshine, the earth held no aspirations of anything other than solid ground.  A quarter mile up the road the lane turned onto a short bridge over a small brook that ran along its banks at its own quick pace.

The air was cool and crisp.  The road opened up to the small village on whose outskirts the cottage lay.  Everything now captured his eye, but he slowed down and came to a complete stop before the Ruined Cottage, the local book store.  Scott knew quite well Linda Barnes, the proprietress, who did not appear to be in the shop this afternoon; he did not know many of Linda's employees, he had not been in town long enough to distinguish the friendly faces which seemed, as all faces did, to blend together into one familiar but nameless acquaintance.  Such was the case this afternoon, as he exchanged friendly nods with the sales clerk and then ambled over to the new fiction section.

It had been over two weeks since Scott had stopped by the Ruined Cottage.  He had forgotten about several of the novels he had set his sights on, and was reminded, as soon as he glanced through the fiction section, of his resolve, when he had last visited the store, to find expression for the familiar feeling which rose once again spontaneously to his conscious mind: the need to create a presence outside of himself, a living, ambulatory creature, responsible to no one, certainly not its creator, yet owing its lifeblood to that same, helpless father.