FAST AWAY THE OLD YEAR PASSES…FA-LA-LA-LA-LA…ETC.

 I can recall when New Year’s Eve was a festive occasion. That was back in another life. Back when some dangerous years of my youth, in which I thought it was unlikely I’d ever see old age, were over. Suddenly, I was middle-aged—young, but not that

young. It was, however, a rather joyous time in which I saw the future stretching far in front of me, over some endless horizon. A time of lofty dreams and ambitious goals. A time in which, to paraphrase an Eagles lyric, I couldn’t “give the reason why I should ever want to die.” 

Back then, it seemed like I might just live forever. Like I could do whatever I wanted. Entertain any abuse, accomplish any feat, because nothing could hurt me. I was indestructible. My powers of recovery enormous. My resilience exceptional. Of course, even back then, another pesky lyric was echoing somewhere at the back of my brain. A Cat Stevens stanza that went, “And though you want to last forever /You know you never will /You know you never will / And the goodbye makes the journey harder still.”

Thing is, it seemed like that, the end of “forever”, was nowhere in sight. That it might come “someday”, but in the meantime, it simply didn’t exist. Life wasn’t perfect. It wasn’t everything I wanted it to be, but it was good. And I could convince myself that “someday”, I would achieve everything I wanted to achieve. Be a smashing success at what I had fancied was my destiny.

Perhaps that’s the biggest difference between being old and, well, not old. The fact that there comes a time when you can no longer ignore the passage of time. A time when, try as you might, you can no longer convince yourself that you have a future. No expectation beyond the here and now.

I get a double whammy every year, now. My birthday and year’s end in a single month. It can’t help but keep you focused on the passage of time and your own mortality. That said, while I indeed have a few old-age complaints, I wake up most days feeling like I still have a lot of thread left on the spool. To keep that frame of mind is fairly easy when, like me, you have nothing really major wrong with you, even if you’re exhibiting a “battle scar” or two. But most days, if I practice abstraction, I can still convince myself I am only as old as I allow myself to feel.

That’s an absolute fallacy, of course, since the statistics don’t bear it out. Nor would my cardiologist. But there are always exceptions, people—even if only a few—who live happy, well and strong into their late eighties and early nineties. What’s to keep me from being one of those? Why couldn’t I, perhaps, still have a ten, fifteen or twenty-year writing career ahead of me? A career as long as the one I had as a journalist, or the one I’ve had as a free-lance translator, editor and ghostwriter. Those are the kind of thoughts that keep a spring in my step and the steel in my will to hang onto mind and body and not let them flag. Come on, my boys! Keep up, if you know what’s good for you! Movement is life. Get up and get moving, I tell myself, because it’s proof of life.

In Buenos Aires, I have an old friend (but don’t let her hear me say that!), who is only slightly younger than I am. But she’s always talking about projects for the future, about getting herself a van or motor home and living in it, traveling from place to place forever. Or about becoming a chef and running a great restaurant’s kitchen, or about moving back to the Canary Islands, where she lived for ten years many moons ago, and running a hotel kitchen there. She gets upset if I talk about our age and remind her that we’re no spring chickens. She might even say something like, “I’m not old. Not yet!”

“Well,” I say, “we’re hardly middle-aged anymore…I mean, unless you plan to live to be a hundred and forty.”

“Why shouldn’t I?” she asks defiantly. “Lots of people live to be a hundred. Why not a hundred and twenty, or a hundred and forty. It could happen, right?”

I just nod, say, “Maybe you’re right. I’m just being negative. Sorry.” I bite my tongue not to ask her sarcastically if she remembered to get the five hundred thousand-mile warranty on the two hip replacements she had a couple of years back.  

No matter what tricks I might use to convince myself of my powers of longevity, in the end, it is what it is. And the fact that the mortality statistics are no longer on one’s side can be a liberating thing. I may no longer have a horizonless future stretching before me, but I do have right now. And if there’s one thing that’s great about being “elderly” (geezus, but I hate that word!), it’s that the time you’ve got belongs to you. Today stretches before me the way that near-endless future used to. But now I have no obligations but the ones I decide to accept. So, today is all mine to do with as I please. Or to do nothing, if that’s what I should decide—although that rarely happens.

That doesn’t mean that there aren’t niggling reminders. Like, for instance, having gotten through a recent eye surgery and recovered almost fully the sight in that eye, I right away went to renew my driver’s license. It’s been expired for the last two months. But I’ve been driving anyway (please don’t tell anybody!), because while I could see well enough with my good eye to drive before the surgery, I would never have passed the eye test for a new license, since you have to be at least 20-20 in one eye and 10-20 in the other, and I wasn’t.

Anyway, there’s always a whole rigmarole to renewing your license in Argentina. This has been the case ever since the central government rescinded the right of provincial and municipal administrations to issue their own licenses and brought highway law and licensing under federal purview. That happened the time before last that I renewed. That time they gave me a new federal license and all I had to do was show up within a month after the expiration of my old municipal license. I also had to pass a physical and psychological test before getting the new license. That one was good for five years.

The next time I went to renew, however, there were new rules. First, I was over sixty-five (but not yet seventy), so the license was only renewed for three years. I also had to retake the driving test and, before doing that, take the physical and psych exams. That time they also required a certificate from traffic court saying I had no outstanding tickets or infractions. And, the car I was taking the exam in had to first pass a thorough vehicle inspection.

This time it’s more of the same. Early last week I started the process at the DMV, then went to traffic court and got my certificate saying I had no tickets or infractions outstanding. Yesterday, I scrambled before the year-end holiday to get a psych test, hearing test, eye test, blood pressure reading and medical interview.

The day before, I drove out to the technical verification course and asked for an appointment. Have to return for vehicle inspection next Thursday. Without that, even though I’ll pass my driving test next Tuesday (at 7 a.m. which means leaving home by six), they won’t give me my license.

I worry about this the same way I worry about the physical tests they run on me. We’ll take the test in my wife’s Renault Clio, but both of our vehicles are as much senior citizens as we are. The Clio turned twenty-five this year (bought it brand new in ‘97) and my Toyota Hilux truck is about to turn twenty-eight. We take good care of both, but extra special care of the Clio since it’s Virginia’s car. But although it’s in really good shape “for its age” and although it’s a really robust little car to start with, a vehicle that old is no more likely in car years to get a completely clean bill of health than I am in human years at seventy-three.

That said, it passed with flying colors three years ago. Hopefully it will again. The muffler’s been a little cranky and grumbling around when we’re out on the road lately, so, just in case, I also took time yesterday to go to the muffler shop and have the muffler and tailpipe changed. An ounce of prevention…

All of this I can take in stride. It’s all part of the rich tapestry that makes up Argentina’s legendary bureaucracy—what my late sister-in-law used to refer to as “the Soviet”. But the cruelest cut of all was when they told me I’d have to do all of this once a year from now on. Seeming to want to be humiliated, being a proverbial glutton for punishment, I made the mistake of asking why. The answer was immediate and anesthesia-free, and said with a combination of disbelief at my naïveté for asking and of pity for my predicament (because no one young ever thinks he or she will ever be old): “Because you’re over seventy.”

Try as you might to ignore this obvious fact, to get up feeling you’re as strong and capable and “together” as ever, when a third party points it out, rubs your nose in it, as it were, and goes as far as to tell you that, no matter how good you feel “for your age”, you can be legally discriminated against simply because you’ve reached a certain stage in life, that you can, in a word, be “protected” from yourself and have others be “protected” from you, it hurts. It hurts no matter how strong a stuff you’re made of.

But life, fortunately, goes on. When this process is finally over with next week, I’ll be able to forget about it until the end of next year. And once I shake it off, I’ll once again be able to get up in the morning and pretend I’ve still got all the time and freedom in the world.

Some weeks are better than others. Some days are brighter. That’s a fact of life. And in the end, there is still always something to celebrate as the old year ends and the new one begins. If nothing else, that we’re still here to see it and to experience whatever it might have to offer for as long as we manage to keep waking up every day. In the end, that’s the miracle. That, after all these years, all the miles, all the danger, all the close calls and hard times, the illnesses and recoveries, the good, for me, still far outweighs the bad.

Today has been yet another one that I could call my own. Tomorrow will take care of itself. In the meantime, I’m still here, and loving it.  

    

 

A TIMELESS MOMENT, OR A MOMENT IN TIME

 

Sometimes in dreams I will go back to a particular moment in time when the world seemed so perfect and beautiful that it brought a smile to my lips and tears to my eyes. These might be actual dreams, from which I awaken sad to have come out of the trance and desperately wanting to close my eyes and go back. Or they might simply be waking daydreams, where, for a moment I lose track of current reality and time-travel back to that exact instant and place.

What’s important about this is that the moment itself isn’t a dream. It is very real. It existed in real life, and exists still, if only in my mind. I consider myself fortunate that there have been more than one. Although, at the same time, it makes me sad that I haven’t been able to maintain a level of self-awareness that might have provided me with many more of these special moments, which are the only real definition of complete happiness.

These were times when I was momentarily blind to the crime, violence and dirt of the streets, and to the major problems of the world. They were moments in which all I was aware of was myself and my commitment to the path that I was choosing. It still happened to me, very occasionally, in my early years as a journalist, despite my job’s leading me to witness harsh, often even brutal realities on a daily basis. Perhaps back then I was more able to compartmentalize, to keep the reality that I was reporting separate from my own. Maybe it was even a survival mechanism. Who knows?

That’s probably why as I’ve gotten older and, hopefully, world-wiser, these moments have become, sadly, ever more rare. It’s that I no longer seem able to separate myself from the world I live in. And, search for them though I might, those moments of pure joy and self-realization are rendered practically unattainable, or at least they are no longer unadulterated.

I recall these special moments as timeless instances in which there came a sensation that everything around me was mere scenery that could be just as beautiful as I wanted to make it, and that, just beyond it, in a place I couldn’t quite touch or see, only sense, there was something else. Something more.   

Epiphany. I think that’s probably the word for it. A moment of lightning-bolt realization. An instant stripped of doubt, sorrow, regret, rage or cynicism. A moment of simply being, and knowing that that, in itself, is enough. That it’s a miracle. Life is. Being alive, breathing in and out, seeing, smelling, hearing, feeling, loving, that it’s all cause for indescribable joy. For a fleeting moment in time, you might capture it. You hold it in your heart and mind and it fills you. And then it’s gone. But not forgotten. It is branded on your heart and brain and, if you’re lucky, from time to time, it will come back and let you recall it as if it were a snapshot or a video that plays over in your mind, but one that includes more than image. Emotion, feeling, state of mind, all just like they were right then. It’s primitive, unbridled, so simple and pure that it’s an enigma.

Henry Miller - an epiphany

For author Henry Miller, for instance, that sort of moment was eminently literary. In Black Spring, Miller writes:“And then one day, as if suddenly the flesh came undone and  the blood beneath the flesh had coalesced with the air, suddenly the whole world roars again and the very skeleton of the body melts like wax. Such a day it may be when first you encounter Dostoievski. You remember the smell of the tablecloth on which the book rests; you look at the clock and it is only five minutes from eternity, you count the objects on the mantelpiece because the sound of numbers is a totally new sound in your mouth, because everything new and old, or touched and forgotten, is a fire and a mesmerism. Now every door of the cage is open and whichever way you walk is a straight line toward infinity...It was exactly five minutes past seven, at the corner of Broadway and Kosciusko Street, when Dostoievski first flashed across my horizon...”

Harper Lee - a new angle

For Harper Lee, author of To Kill a Mockingbird, that moment of epiphany is experiencing something that causes you to view a world you’ve known all your life from a different angle, and as if seeing it for the first time. She paints that instant through the words of her child protagonist, Scout Finch, when the little girl, as narrator, says, “I turned to go home. Street lights winked down the street all the way to town. I had never seen our neighborhood from this angle. There were Miss Maudie's, Miss Stephanie's—there was our house, I could see the porch swing—Miss Rachel's house was beyond us, plainly visible. I could even see Mrs. Dubose's... Atticus was right. One time he said you never really know a man until you stand in his shoes and walk around in them. Just standing on the Radley porch was enough.”

My moments of wonder have been much more pedestrian, if just as epiphanous. The first one I can recall happened when I was still a boy, an adolescent of sixteen. It was Christmas-time. I was from Wapakoneta, but nearby Lima, Ohio, had become “my town”. In our rural area, Lima was what passed for “the city”, a big industrial town back then, with an urban feel to it.

No one could have told me even a few months earlier that I would be where I was right then. I had been a drummer in a couple of “kid bands” that played in teen centers for a small cut of the meager cover charge. But then I got a part-time job working in Lima’s biggest music store and my whole life changed. Suddenly, I was in daily contact with all of the professional jazz musicians in the area and at sixteen, was playing as a relief drummer every Friday and Saturday night for at least union scale. It was a dream come true to still be in high school and to be working as a professional musician, a percussion instructor and a respected member of the staff at the music store. I knew every bar and nightclub with live music in the area. And I knew all of the best area musicians by name and was treated like one of them. I had my own car. I had my own money. I had my own life, even though I was still in high school.

The old Lima Public Square by night

It was around Christmas-time of that first wonderful year of dreams come true. The changes had opened up a whole new view of the year ahead. I was inspired to not only play every gig I could but also to give free rein to my other artistic endeavor by starting to take my writing seriously. And, therefore, to also take my reading seriously.  By the end of that year, the future I foresaw was as writer by day, musician by night, in a dream world that couldn’t get any better.

The special moment in time came one night when I was working at the store until nine. I had just been on my supper break. I had walked up Main across the Lima square and half a block up to Gregg’s Department Store, where they had a restaurant I liked on the upper floor. I’d had the ham steak with mashed potatoes with sides of green beans and slaw, washed down with iced tea. And while I ate, I finished reading, for the first time, what was to become one of my favorite short stories of all time—J.D. Salinger’s For Esmé With Love and Squalor.

When I came out, with Salinger’s words still ringing in my ears, the cold had turned sharp as a knife and the sky was mostly clear. Still, snow flurries were falling from some unseen cloud, since, overhead, the sky was infinity-black and dotted with glittering stars. The square was dressed for the holidays, with twinkling colored lights, wreaths, fantasy candy canes and bright red, green and gold ribbons everywhere. And in the middle there was a huge tree with magical lights, silver icicles and oversized ornaments to delight shoppers. Woolworth’s, Penney’s,  Sears, The Leader, Gregg’s and other downtown department stores glistened with holiday cheer, and on the corner, out in front of George Anthony’s Sweetland candy store, coffee shop and restaurant, a group of my newfound colleagues had formed a brass choir and were playing Christmas carols with that sweet, clear, harmonic brass sound that is like no other.

Between tunes they were passing a flask to keep warm and as I went by, one of them called out, “Hey kid!” and held up the flask offering me a snort. I laughed, thanked them and politely refused. And then, as I reached the other side of the square and headed south toward the store, I suddenly felt tears well up in my eyes and the thought that came to me was, “This might well be the happiest moment of my life.”  

As an adult, I remember a New Year’s in Buenos Aires. Virginia and I had invited a number of people to our Mid-town apartment to ring in the New Year. We’d held the celebration at home. I was off from the paper, since the next day was one of only a handful of non-publishing days each year, so I was completely relaxed. Lots of friends and some of Virginia’s relatives showed up, many after they had started bidding the old year farewell elsewhere. There was a surfeit of food and drink and good music on the stereo, and it had been a really fun time, capped by all of us standing together on our eighth-floor terrace, watching a plethora of fireworks burst in dazzling colors above the rooftops.

Then about two or three in the morning, people started peeling off a person or a couple at a time and heading for home. At last, it was just us with a couple with whom we had become intimate friends. They lived upstairs then, and we saw each other several times a week, sometimes daily, and dined together and went out together and took vacations together. We had become like family. Or like something more than family. We truly loved each other.

When everyone else had gone, our friends suggested we go downtown and get a nightcap—champagne, he was buying. So I got my car out of the parking lot around the corner and off we went, east toward the river and downtown along Avenida Corrientes. Partying was still underway in a lot of private homes, but from Mid-town to Downtown, traffic was sparse and many places were already closed, closing or had never opened. It was a rare thing, something almost magical to see the city so abandoned on a warm South American summer’s night.

Fireworks over Buenos Aires...A few hours later the streets

were deserted.

Stranger still was to see the ever busy Avenida Nueve de Julio, the city’s main north-south downtown thoroughfare, practically bereft of traffic. There along that main drag, we found a place that was still open. The refuse of year-end revelers was everywhere, but the fireworks were over with. The place looked jaded and its weary owners less than happy to see us. A little way down the street, a couple were sitting on the pavement, their backs to the front wall of a building, a liter bottle of beer on the sidewalk between them. She was leaning against his shoulder, looking a little the worse for wear, but he was still going strong, strumming the hell out of a box guitar and bellowing out the lyrics of every folk tune he could remember, his voice echoing in the deep canyon of Nueve de Julio where it cleaved a broad swath through the midst of towering buildings. There was no traffic to drown the singer out and he was making the most of this improvised amphitheater.

Inside the bar they were already cleaning up, but our friend talked the owner into letting us sit at one of the tables outside on the sidewalk, and into sending out a bottle of chilled champagne. Suddenly, what might have been the sordid scene of celebration’s end seemed mystical. As if the city were ours alone, with only the scraping guitar and rasping voice to entertain us, as we sipped ice-cold champagne under cones of light from the street lamps, in the grey glint of a sultry summer’s dawn. For perhaps an hour, the four of us sat there joking and laughing and just enjoying being together, putting aside our individual and collective worries and letting trust, love and cold champagne set the mood. By the time we drove back to Mid-town, we had the shimmering streets of Buenos Aires practically to ourselves.

Back home again, I dropped Virginia and our friends at the door of our building. I left the motor running and got out of the car with them. We all hugged and truly meant and felt it, warm as only love can be. Then I went alone to take the car back to the parking lot. It was as I was coming out of the lot that the sun suddenly broke above the horizon and flooded the street around me with the golden-orange first light of a summer day.

I turned to face it, closed my eyes and felt its warmth on my eyelids. My breath caught and a knot formed in my throat. I was completely, unequivocally grateful. It was a new year. I was writing daily for a living, I was married to the woman I loved, I was in the company of friends with whom we shared an almost passionate relationship, and a whole future of promise seemed to be stretching before me. A future that was mine for the taking.

It was a moment of almost uncontainable joy, and one that I would remember forever, even in the hardest of times.

First published in The Southern Yankee in 2019

 

WHY I’M NOT HERE

 I’m not here today. I mean, I’m not supposed to be.

Actually I am supposed to be because today’s the fifteenth and the fifteenth is one of the two days a month that I regularly post blogs. But what I mean is, I’m not supposed to be because I’m not really allowed. Not according to my wife and my surgeon who are in cahoots on this.

Post-op portrait

See, two days ago, I had eye surgery. It wouldn’t normally have been a terribly big deal—cataract operation to put in an inter-ocular lens. But it was the second eye operation—same eye—this year. The first was in mid-February to remove a fibrous membrane that had developed on my retina, deforming it and eventually distorting the vision in that eye (the left) to the point where I couldn’t really see out of it any more.

I had to travel for that one, because they don’t do that highly complex operation here—here being the Patagonia ski resort near where I live. I had to take a seven-hour bus trip through the wilds of Patagonia to the next piece of civilization two hundred-fifty miles from here, a fruit-growing and oil city in the Río Negro Valley called General Roca. I stayed for a week in Roca, which is a pleasant town, and was operated on by an ophthalmological genius, whose excellent work saved me from losing the sight in that eye.

When the operation was over, however, the genius, Dr. Mancini, told me that my sight would very gradually return to normal, but that the retina surgery would almost necessarily cause the eye to form a rapid-growth cataract. So just as I started seeing well again, in five months or so, my sight would again be impaired by the cataract. But that, he said, I could take care of in Bariloche, where I live.

Now, that placed my need for cataract surgery at right around June-July. That’s mid-winter here in Patagonia. So I had an appointment to see an ophthalmologist at the eye clinic that had sent me to see Mancini in late June. But on that date there was a heavy snow and I couldn’t get out to drive the twelve miles from home to Bariloche. I had to cancel.

They gave me a new appointment for mid-July. But, just when the date rolled around, I got snowed in again and had to cancel. You would think living here, the folks at the eye clinic would understand about snow days. But they all live in town, I assume, and can walk to work if need be, so, no, they didn’t get it.

So, they kept putting me off after that until I was again nearly blind in that eye. And still they were telling me, “No, nothing available. Call us back next week and see if anything has opened up.”

Vindictive, I thought.

Finally, I decided to take the bull by the horns, went to see my medical insurance provider and asked them to recommend some other ophthalmologist. They did, and, as luck would have it, he, Dr. González Valdez, was a former colleague of Dr. Mancini’s. I got hold of Mancini to ask about his fellow doctor, and he told me that the man was a highly capable surgeon. Mancini highly recommended him.

I got in to see him pretty much right away. He assessed the situation and scheduled me for surgery right away. When he completed the procedure two days ago, he said it had gone very well and that I should go see him the next day. When I did, he said that while the operation had gone quite well, the retina operation made it more complex as did the fact that the cataract had grown quite tough, so getting the crystalline lens out to replace it with the artificial lens had caused some swelling in the cornea and had broken a blood vessel in the eyeball. But he said that the prognosis was excellent.

No hat? Like telling me to go naked!

Now he has me putting two kinds of drops in my eye every three hours day and night, and another kind of drops every eight hours. I can’t bend or lift or strain, can’t wear a mask, and can’t wear a hat or cap (that’s like telling me I have to go naked). He’s going to keep a close eye on me until I’m fully recovered.

Me, I’m really grateful to both surgeons. Although my vision is still somewhat blurred in that eye because of the swelling and hemorrhage, I am amazed at what I can see already! That was always—since childhood—my “bad eye” (the worst of the two, neither of which was ever perfect without glasses). I’m convinced that, once I’m fully cured, that’s going to be my good eye. And the light that comes into the eye now is nothing short of incredible to someone whose vision has been impaired for some time now.

Thing is, though, I’m sneaking this blog entry in, because, like I said at the beginning, I’m not supposed to be here!

So if you happen to bump into my wife or my doctor…sssshhh! You never saw me, okay?

Talk to you again soon.

 

EXERCISE ONE: SOME UNLIKELY PROMPTS WOULD-BE WRITERS ARE ASKED TO WRITE ABOUT

 There’s an exercise tool called “a prompt” used in a lot of creative writing courses. Personally, I’ve always thought real writers formulated their own prompts, which guys like me call “memories” or “topics”, but which trade fiction writers will usually just call “ideas”. Some will come from the odd offbeat item in a newspaper or magazine that sets a creative mind thinking. Others will form around some event or personality in history. Still others might grow around a psychological term—I just finished reading a book that was about a woman with “dissociative fugue”, for example. That’s a psychiatric term I had no idea existed before reading the novel. Nor did the author, apparently, since, in an interview, she talked about having read the term in a news article and having become so enthralled that she decided to write a story about a victim of it. In case you’re intrigued, the book is Love Water Memory, by my Facebook friend and fellow-writer, Jennie Shortridge.

Anyway, there are all sorts of writing courses, online and off, that promise to make writer wannabes into bestsellers, or mediocre writers into good ones, or to teach you the writing secrets of the truly talented—or, more importantly, of the commercially successful. But from my own experience in talking to other writers, I’ve usually found that the successful ones, if they’re honest, have little or no idea how they got there, and some very good ones indeed, who never meet with anything like conventional “success”, are just as baffled by their fate (and usually blame themselves). All of them, to a man and woman, however, say that none of these things should ever be a writer’s primary concern. The focus, they say, should always be on the writing, and it should always be about producing the very best possible writing of which you are capable. 

But, back to prompts. Although all of the writing I do either springs directly from my mind or from my constant research, I’ve always liked a challenge. That’s why, whenever I have a few minutes I can spare, I’m always curious about online quizzes. Not all online quizzes, but at least the ones that test areas of knowledge the answers to which any international journalist worth his salt should know: history, current events, geography, prominent personalities, etc. They’re a readily available way to exercise memory, which gets more and more important with age. I usually score high on them—many are too easy to waste any time on and I’m not kidding myself that any of them are anything more than click bait—and that makes me feel good, as Jack Nicholson says in As Good As It Gets, about me.

I mention this because something similar happens when I see grammar challenges or writing tools. And one of my favorite classes when I was studying public translation at the Argentine business university UADE in Buenos Aires was based on a book called For and Against in which students were given pictorial prompts that they were asked to write about. That’s why I can hardly pass up the opportunity to read a set of prompts. 

I have to admit, however, that they are usually disappointing, and highly unlikely, when not utterly outlandish. But just for fun, indulge me while I tackle a few.

Name the most terrifying moment of your life so far.  

I could probably say, quite credibly, that this was when I had a life-threatening accident and was bleeding out internally and, in the ambulance I heard the assistant tell the driver he couldn’t find a pulse any more. Oddly enough, however, I didn’t find that moment terrifying at all. On the contrary, right at that instant, in a physical state of suspension in which I felt no pain or urgency, when it was sort of like I no longer had a body to worry about, I felt incredibly calm. All I wanted to do was sleep, and I heard a voice in my head that said, “This is a lot easier than I thought it would be. You just close your eyes and let go.”

Fortunately, my life depended not on my own volition but on the stubborn persistence of emergency and hospital personnel. Which is why I’m still here writing this today.

I’ve had a few experiences in my work as a journalist that should have been terrifying, perhaps, but journalism’s a lot like the work of firefighters or law enforcement in that. When everybody else is running away from a dangerous event, you need to be running toward it. In those moments, you’re the job, so you aren’t usually concentrating on how scared you are.

Maybe the most terrified I’ve ever been, however, was during my first couple of days in the Army. Mostly because it was like being snatched out of everything I’d ever known and the soft existence of small-town life, only to be dropped into the midst of what seemed like a nightmare. A place stripped of comfort, where everything was very hostile, and where the job of the DI’s was to scare the bejesus out of the recruits, to take everything away from you and give you back only what they wanted you to have and be.

I’m sure for guys with tough upbringings in hostile environments it was a lot easier, because they had the tools to deal with it. But for guys like me, and for guys who were even more naïve and protected than I was, the first couple of weeks were a living hell, which was about how long it took to realize that your old life no longer existed and that you were a soldier now.

What famous person do other people tell you that you most resemble?

Papa...

This is an easy one. Hemingway. For those of you who say, “Yeah, but you don’t look anything like Hemingway,” all I can say is that I agree with you completely. But there you have it. People see a paunchy heavyweight with a white beard and steel-rimmed glasses, and the image is immediate: Hemingway.

As I writer, I only wish I could have that kind of recognizability and writerly fame. Alas…

I always spend some time in Miami when I’m back in the States and I never make a trip there that somebody doesn’t say, “Did anyone ever tell you that you look just like Papa Hemingway?” And every time, I say, “Personally, I don’t see it, but thanks.” And I mean it, because if I actually did look like Hemingway, well, there are a lot worse people to look like. I mean, imagine if they told you that you looked like Charles Laughton, or Peter Lorre. I mean what do you say? “Um, thanks?”

...and Dan...Who''s who?

Last guy who said it was a bartender last May in Downtown Miami. I sat down at the bar, ordered a beer, and the guy says, “Hey, did you ever compete in the Hemingway Look-Alike Contest down at Sloppy Joe’s.”

“Nope,” I said.

“You should, man. You’d win.”

“Only problem is,” I told him, “by the time Papa was my age, he’d been dead eleven years.”

Took him a minute to figure that one out. He went over and served a few drinks elsewhere then came back. “So how old are you?”

“Seventy-two.”

“Damn, you sure don’t look that old.”

“How about another beer?” I said. “And one for you on me.”

What is the strangest thing you’ve ever eaten?

People who aren’t from Argentina or Uruguay would think a lot of the things included in the typical asado criollo were quite strange. Everything from sweetbreads, to kidneys, to blood sausage, to chinchulines (crisp-barbecued beef or sheep small intestines) besides abundant beef cuts. But I was always partial to asado and there was never anything in it that I didn’t thoroughly enjoy—with the exception of only very occasionally included udder, which I always found rubbery and tasteless.

I recall when Whitie, my dad, came down to visit and my brother-in-law put on a big cook-out to honor him and Reba Mae, my mother. Reba Mae was always a good eater and dutifully tried, and liked, almost everything. Whitie, however, was suspicious of everything, as if these damned foreigners were out to poison him. He picked at the asado, said the meat was tough, didn’t want salad because there was no French dressing, and so on. So I sat by him and cut small pieces of things and put them like samples on his plate, which he politely nibbled at. But he finally put his foot down when I sliced him a crispy taste treat, put it on his plate and said, “Now this one’s called chinchulín.”

He pushed the plate a few inches away and said, “That’s called intestine and I ain’t eatin’ it!” He was right, but he had no idea what a tasty delicacy he was missing out on.

The strangest thing I ever ate, however, according to my taste at least, was when a fellow correspondent and his wife invited my wife and me to dinner one night in Buenos Aires. She had previously been married to a Japanese national and had lived a number of years in Tokyo. So she was the one who called the restaurant, inviting us to go to the city’s only authentic Japanese eatery.

I’d been saving up appetite for supper and, typically, we’d had a load of cocktails at their place downtown before going to the restaurant, so I was starving. I said that since she knew the place and the cuisine, perhaps she should order for all of us. 

Now, I’ve always been good about trying new things, but when the dishes started arriving, I was appalled. It was the first (and, I might add, last) time I’d ever seen sushi and I wasn’t even sure how to approach it. I was kind of waiting for a little charcoal stove to arrive at the table because this looked like something that might involve do-it-yourself cooking. But no, Emily, the hostess said cheerily, “Well, dig in!” and started transferring strands of seaweed and hunks of bait to her plate.

Virginia, my wife, who was at least as hungry as I was, looked like she was about to stab somebody with her fork and glanced at me like, “Are you kidding me?” But I didn’t want to offend our hosts so, little by little started working my way through some of the little seaweed and raw fish bonbons on the serving plates. I had thought it might end up being a nice surprise and that I’d find I loved it. It wasn’t and I didn’t and I swore this was the last time I’d be dining on baitfish chum and marine algae. I found it utterly revolting, and couldn’t help thinking I might end up with a tapeworm long enough to tie up the kitchen staff before I set the place on fire.

To make matters worse, the whole time I was nibbling on raw everything, I was catching wonderful whiffs of the most delightful barbecued beef smells, which, on our arrival, I could have sworn were wafting from the kitchen. When Emily said, “Now we should try some so-and-so,” I said, “Not for me, thanks. I’m stuffed.” And rose to go find the restroom.

A waiter pointed me in the direction of the men’s room, back by the kitchen. Along the way, I had to pass by a little private alcove where the presumed owner and his family were dining. To my chagrin, and feeling I’d just been had, I saw that they were contentedly chowing down, not on sushi, but on the most delectable Argentine beef you could ever want, and washing it down with a good Mendoza cabernet.

Do you believe honesty is the best policy?

This should have a yes-or-no answer, I suppose, but it doesn’t. Not for me at least. If the honesty we’re talking about has to do with our everyday dealings and transactions with other people, then yes, I do. It may sound old fashioned, but I think a person is only as good as his or her word and that there’s only one chance to prove it. Cheat me once, shame on you. Cheat me twice, shame on me. Once a person lies, cheats, or reneges on a deal or a promise, there’s no going back. Their word is no longer their bond and there can be no believing them in the future.

This extends to professional pursuits. That said, there are jobs in which honesty is difficult if not impossible. Advertising and publicity, for instance. I recall an advertising executive who was introduced to me as a possible contact for industry stories when I was writing for McGraw-Hill’s World News service. He handed me his card and said, “I’m general manager of this advertising agency. I’ve done dirtier things in my life, I suppose, but I can’t think of any off hand.” 

Another such job is being a spokesperson for a multinational, a billionaire magnate, or a politician. Those are jobs that intrinsically involve lying or altering facts to fit a narrative. Journalism is not supposed to be like that and in the best publications, it isn’t. Stories and facts are meticulously checked and rechecked and updated as new data becomes available in order to make every attempt to write the truest version possible of any given story. And reporters who don’t adhere to those rules end up getting caught out and fired, and will have a hard time finding a job in any serious medium after that.

But ever since the advent of “infotainment” (the combination of information and entertainment that has become a popular branding device in certain cable “news” operations geared to “spinning” the news rather than reporting it), what sometimes passes for journalism isn’t. And consumers get confused, because, unfortunately, there are apparently no laws that require infotainment to be identified as such.

In my own case, I never worked for a publication that spun the news, nor would I have. In fact, I was once offered a free-lance opportunity to work for the infamous National Enquirer as one of their correspondents in South America and turned it down flat, even though their pay rates were two to five times higher than those of any of the other publications I was working for. When the editor who contacted me asked why I wouldn’t take the job, I told him thanks a lot for the offer but if I ever decided to write fantasy, I’d become a sci-fi novelist.

Speaking of which, the term fiction is generally a misnomer. I remember bumping into an old newspaper colleague once who had recently decided to take a year or so off and write a novel. I asked him how it was going and he said, “It’s hard. After so many years of being a newsman and having to write the truth, it’s hard to write fiction and lie.”

I think my jaw literally must have dropped, because he looked at me for a second and then said, “What?”

“Well,” I said, “we may have a different idea of what we refer to as fiction, but to my mind, fiction should be the truest thing you’ll ever write. And what it certainly isn’t is lying.”

All of this aside, however, honesty is not always the best policy, at least to my mind. We all lie in one way or another. Even those who say they never do—that’s a lie right there, it almost can’t help but be.

I’ve frequently found that the people who pride themselves on “always telling the truth” either have a very subjective idea of what the truth is, or they fancy that what they “believe” and what they “think” is the truth and that everyone else is living in Fantasy Land. In other words, they’ve declared themselves Owner Of The Truth. That seems to go with an obsessively blunt personality. That is, they think that they are obliged to “tell the truth” whether anyone else wants to hear it or not. So if you ask them questions like, “Does this outfit make me look fat, or does this haircut make me look old?” they will answer “honestly” that, “Yes, you look fat as a pig and it’s not just the clothes!” or “Yes, you look older with that haircut; in fact, you look ancient!” You would have to be a masochist to be grateful to them for their response.

Furthermore, what does anyone gain by that sort of “honesty”? I suppose a coldly objective person might be able to see an upside, even if it escapes my comprehension. I mean, I recall a girl in high school who was a couple of years older than I was and about whom my sister told me a story that, at the time, made my blood boil. The girl in question (Sue, we’ll call her) had a shy, sweet personality and a kind, pretty face. She was what I might have referred to as “pleasingly plump”, but the fact that she didn’t fit the accepted standard of what the “cool girls” in school looked like, meant she wasn’t all that popular.

It seems she once confided to a friend that there was a boy on the football team whom she had loved from afar since grade school. Back then, before puberty and incipient sex started getting in the way, they had been friends and playmates, but since junior high, he hadn’t given her the time of day. The friend whom she’d confided all this to was indeed one of the popular girls, and knew the guy in question. So she decided to help her shy friend out and told the guy that Sue was crazy about him and asked why he didn’t ask her out.

The guy laughed derisively and said, “Well, if I could fit her through my car door, I might!”

Now this would have been no big deal if Sue were none the wiser. Her friend could have written the guy off as a jerk and never said anything to Sue about it. But this friend of Sue’s was one of those “honesty’s the best policy” people who felt obliged to tell her friend what a cretin the guy was to keep her from pining after him anymore. So she could think of nothing better to do than to tell Sue what the guy had said. Honesty, clearly, but, the best policy? To my mind, it was just unnecessarily cruel and subjective, and who’d asked her, anyway?

Some would say the story had a “happy ending”, since, because of that incident, Sue went on a diet, started working out, learned all about how to use make-up and clothes and, before graduation, had become one of the most popular girls in school, a girl who could pick and choose whom she wanted to go out with.

But my question always was, how much did she have to suffer to make those changes, and at what cost to her personality, happiness and self-esteem? More importantly, what does it say that the reason she made all those self-improvements didn’t spring from her desire to mold her own destiny, but from attempting to make somebody else eat his words and see what he was missing? Seems to me the football jerk was being given way too much importance, but I guess only Sue would be able to say whether she was grateful for her friend’s “honesty” or not.

And finally…   

If you joined the circus, what act would you most want to perform?

Saved this one for last because it’s the most typical of the typically outrageous things these self-help writing courses include. But never mind, I actually have an answer on the tip of my tongue.

When I was sixteen, I started working for the then-biggest music store in Lima, Ohio. I sold musical instruments, took inventory and did just about anything else around the store that my boss, Bruce Sims, asked me to do. But I also gave rudimental drumming lessons—meaning, beginning, intermediate and advanced snare drum lessons based on the twenty-six rudiments that every percussionist needs to know.

Now the store was near the main square in downtown Lima and was a veritable hub for musicians from all over the area, that covered at least three West-Central Ohio counties. So, working there, you were bound to meet every major musician, band and orchestra director, and private music teacher in the region. And you also made contact with a lot of people associated with music, entertainment and musical instrument manufacturing. For an ambitious teen musician, it was an exciting place to work, a place where you could feel at home.

But—as usual—I digress. Manager Bruce Sims knew just about everybody there was to know in the business in Ohio and elsewhere, and some of the most unlikely people you can imagine would drop by to say hello to him whenever they were in town. One early summer day, half a year before I would turn eighteen, I was standing behind the counter and Bruce was at his desk on the sales floor when this big guy walks in the front door and Bruce says, loud enough for him to hear, “Oh-oh, here comes trouble.” Then they both laughed, exchanged hearty handshakes, and sat down at Bruce’s desk to talk.

Dan - Drummer

I went about my business while they chatted, sold a girl some reeds for her clarinet and a guy a pair of drumsticks. But just then I overheard Bruce say, “Yeah, I’ve got one standing at the counter over there.” When I looked up from whatever it was I was doing, I see both Bruce and the guy looking my way, Bruce with his usual wry grin.

“One what?” I said. And Bruce, turning to the guy, said, “Best rudimental drummer money can buy.”

“Okay if I borrow him for a minute?” the guy says, and Bruce nods and says, “Sure.”

So the guy comes over to where I’m standing, introduces himself, shakes hands with me and says, “I used to be a musician here in Lima. That’s how I know Bruce.”

“Used to be?”

“Yeah, played a little trumpet,” he says. “Never much good, strictly a hack. But I like to stay close to it.”

“What can I do for you?” I ask.

“Well, for a number of years now, I’ve been a talent agent for a traveling circus.”

“Really? Interesting job. Never met anybody from the circus before.”

The guy smiled and nodded. Then he said, “Anyway, we’ve got a little brass band that travels with us and our snare drummer’s retiring.”

That was back before the Cirque du Soleil with its distinctive avant garde music. Back then, circus was all about Sousa marches and can-can burlesque. So rudimental drummers, parade drummers, were what a circus band would be looking for.

“They asked if I knew anybody,” the guy went on. “I said I did and dropped by to see Bruce. I know if Bruce says you’re the guy, his word’s good as gold. Interested?”

“Interested in what?”

“In playing with the circus.”

“Wow,” I said, stupidly, “Uh, well…”

“Pays ninety-five bucks clear a week and the circus pays all room, board and travel while you’re on the road.” Back in those days, the mid-sixties, that sounded like good money, considering that it was clear and all expenses paid.

I said, “I guess I should tell you that I’m still in high school.”

“No problem. You can do the summer tour with us and see if you like it and if we like you. The rest we can work out later. Get us a letter with your parents’ permission and we’re cool.”

“Can I think it over?”

“Sure, but not indefinitely. I’ll be back this way in a couple of days.”

By the time I was driving home to nearby Wapakoneta, I was feeling really excited. Playing with a circus band! You didn’t get an opportunity like that dropped in your lap every day.

Reba Mae had other ideas though. What about college, my mother wanted to know? And the circus! Did I have any idea the class of people that were in the circus? And what about the draft? It was the height of the Vietnam War, and if you weren’t in school after graduation, Uncle Sam would make sure you were in the Army. Did I think the Army would let me just keep traveling around with the circus after high school?

Whitie, for his part, heard me say I might join the circus and said, laconically, “Do whatever the hell you want, Dan. You always do anyway.”

But Reba Mae eventually wore me down and the circus became a could-have-been fantasy.

Years later, working in a newspaper in Buenos Aires, I had a colleague who, when things got chaotic, would always say, “I shoulda taken that job in the bank.”

And I’d respond, “I shoulda been a drummer in the circus.”

Prompts. Toss a writer a few and, no matter how unlikely they are, he’ll tell you stories all day.