(This is a piece I wrote several  years ago, after attending my oldest son’s college graduation – I re-post it in honor of Jon’s birthday)

The first thing I remember writing was a poem to a girl named Anita when I was in second grade.  Anita was morbidly obese.   Immature as I was even for a second grader, however, I never joined in the cruel jokes and insults that too many of the other kids constantly abused her with.   I never made any remarks about her weight, and I was impressed by her ability to ignore and shrug off the meanness.  So it remains a mystery what inspired me to write the following ode and present it to her on a folded up sheet of paper:

                     Anita, Anita
                    I smell your feet-a

Being understandably proud as I was of this little masterpiece, you can imagine my surprise when she burst into tears and showed my note to our teacher, Miss Berg, reinforcing her well established opinion of me as a disruptive good for nothing.  I remember being shocked at Anita’s reaction, thinking she would find my little rhyme humorous.  After all, I made no reference to her weight, and had seen her silently suffer much worse insults from many of the other kids.  Maybe it was the fact that I had found something else to pick on her about, maybe it was the fact that one of the few kids who didn’t make fun of her had now joined the many that did.  Whatever might have been the reason, it was beyond the grasp of my six year old brain.

Despite the critical failure that was my first literary work, it didn’t take long for me to realize that writing was one of the few things I could do reasonably well.  I found out early on that with little effort, I could not only get good grades on writing assignments, but also that more often than not, my papers were chosen to be read aloud.  This was a rare and significant exception to the normal relationships with my teachers, most of whom shared Miss Berg’s opinion of me.  It was an extraordinary boost to my ego to have teachers recognizing me for something other than being immature and disruptive.

The best part was that this praise was earned with such a minimal amount of effort.  I could put off semester long assignments until the night before or the morning of the due date, quickly scribble something down, and get a rare A, with complimentary notes from the teacher penned in the margins.   I knew for certain, just as my Sister was born with a gift for art that I had been granted the gift to write.  In my private dreams, I invested heavily in this gift, seeing it as a vehicle to the fame and fortune I secretly knew I would achieve someday.

This God-given talent plus the fact I hated school and was a bad student convinced me, upon my High School graduation, that college would be a waste of time.   After all, I was gifted – what could college teach me that didn’t already come naturally to me?    No, the obvious direction for me was to leave home, get a job, and write in my spare time.  So it was that I left the suburbs of southeastern Wisconsin and returned to the ancestral home lands of Northwestern Wisconsin where I had been born.  I took a job at Norco Windows in the town of Hawkins, rented an efficiency apartment on the third floor of the historic Gerard Hotel in Ladysmith, and purchased a cheap used typewriter (this was 1977, nearly a decade before the birth of the Personal Computer).  The plan was that during the day I’d work my job and by night write a series of great American novels.

It didn’t take me long to realize two things about my “God-given talent”:  one, my classroom experiences had left me overrating it and two, no matter how much talent one is or isn’t blessed with, writing, when not specifically assigned by a teacher, is damn hard work.  So hard that any satisfaction I expected to experience was quickly stifled by a blank sheet of paper and a ticking clock.

Two and a half years after moving north to become a famous writer, I instead returned to my parents’ home in Union Grove, broke and unemployed.   After finding a job loading delivery trucks, I decided it was time to further my education, and enrolled in night classes.  Knowing now how difficult the work of writing actually was, I put aside any God-given talent inspired dreams and instead focused on something more practical for my major.  Thus it was that I entered the data processing program at Gateway Technical Institute in January of 1980.  The rest, as they say, is history.

The most significant historical event to occur was, early in that first semester, meeting another student, a lovely and sincere girl with long brown hair and green eyes so deep that you could see all the way to her soul.  I was quickly smitten, and, much to my surprise, she found something in my eyes, too, and soon a romance began that is still, over thirty years later, alive and deepening and redefining the world it has created.

That world has included marriage, the purchase and remodeling and adding-onto of a small house in Pleasant Prairie, the birth and raising of three children, and jobs that combined to form a career.   Nearly but not completely forgotten in the busy days and nights of this world was the God-given talent to write and the fading dream of fame and fortune as a published writer.  From time to time this dream would rise from the depths of my subconscious, and I’d entertain it for a while with abortive night time attempts to write one of the great American novels I always knew I had in me, but invariably all attempts would fade under the burden of hard work that writing still presented and the mediocrity of my output.  Part of the problem was the “you write what you know” concept, and my happy but seemingly uneventful and unexceptional suburban existence was all I knew, and struck me as so common and dull that I found nothing to draw from it that anyone would find any interest in.

Then in 2005, I was diagnosed with Parkinson’s.   At some point, it occurred to me that something interesting had finally happened to me, something that maybe I could communicate with my “gift”.  This plus the fact that early on, shortly after my diagnosis, I found myself playing little movies of  many long forgotten events from my past over and over in my head, with no idea why.   I was fascinated and found meaning in them that I hadn’t seen before.  At some point, I started putting these down on paper, and found the process extremely satisfying.

The question was what to do with these writings.  My first thought was to get them down for my family, my children, as a record of my life and my experiences with the disease.  This made sense because eventually, as the disease progresses, my ability to communicate will be impacted, as my verbal and motor skills will continue to deteriorate.

The more I wrote, however, the more the old dreams of fame and fortune returned, and I started to think of publishing my work in a book aimed to help other Parkinson’s patients deal with the disease, especially the early stages of the disease, which I found to be deceptively complex.   So I had these noble reasons to write, to put my experiences down – as a record for my children, as a mechanism for others to better deal with the disease – and there was at least some legitimacy in these goals.  But the truth be told, my intentions were not really this pure.  I found I still wanted the fame and fortune of my life-long writer fantasies.  The dream had never left, and my ego remained hungry.

Meanwhile, I found myself asking the big questions.  Aware as we are of our own mortality, we humans spend a great amount of energy trying to find meaning.   We’ve invented God and religion, and concepts like faith and truth, to help us fill in the blanks of the mysteries of life and death.   The biggest question is why do we die?   Right up there as another biggie is, why do bad things happen to people we love?

At some point, while standing in super market lines, I started noticing familiar looking headlines in the National Enquirer.   The National Enquirer, tabloid that it is, has to be given its due as one of the longest running and most successful publications still in existence.  While newspapers everywhere are folding and struggling with the changing landscape of the Internet, the Enquirer continues to flourish, even occasionally achieving relevance as one of the few effective investigative journalism outlets, breaking stories like the John Edwards and Tiger Woods extramarital affairs long before the mainstream outlets catch wind.   The reason that the Enquirer has been so successful for so long is that it understands its audience, and it understands the stories they love to read.

The familiar looking headlines I noticed had to do with Patrick Swayze and his battle with cancer.  There was a reason these headlines looked so familiar.  One of the stories the Enquirer has been most successful with over the years has been the famous celebrity stricken with a terminal disease.  The story always follows a similar arch – how tragedy strikes when least expected, often times just as the celebrity has finally found some peace in their life, then on to the courageous and inspirational struggle, complete with some short-lived triumphs, followed by the shocking photos of how the once-beautiful icon we all remember has decayed once that struggle goes south, through to the brave final days, followed by death and memorial.  These stories are as sadly predictable as they are inevitably true –whether it’s Patrick Swayze, Christopher Reeve or all the way back to John Wayne.

The reason these stories sell so well is the meaning we derive from them.  It’s the same story that we see played out amongst those we’ve loved and lost.  Whenever someone close to us is sentenced to a prognosis of a terminal or incurable disease, we react the same way the Enquirer acts – we rail against the senselessness of it all and then take inspiration from their “brave” fight or their “positive attitude”.   It’s all a part of our attempts to find some meaning, and to make some sense out of what appears to be evidence of the chaotic randomness and fundamental meanness of existence.  It’s the same reaction to the awareness of our own mortality that drives us to the belief in an afterlife and the creation of personalized images of Heaven.

Then comes the time when this “senseless” and “tragic” fate becomes our own life sentence.  Having seen this story play itself out countless times before, it informs the expectations we have of ourselves, and also the expectations of those around us. It doesn’t take long to realize what a burden these expectations add.  And, if we stop and think about it honestly, we’re surprised to admit how much importance we place on how we are perceived by others.