MAYBE THOMAS WOLFE WAS RIGHT…MAYBE YOU CAN’T – Part Three

Continued from Part Two

https://southernyankeewriter.blogspot.com/2022/01/maybe-thomas-wolfe-was-rightmaybe-you.html

 

“This is a man, who, if he can remember ten golden moments of joy and happiness out of all his years, ten moments unmarked by care, unseamed by aches or itches, has power to lift himself with his expiring breath and say: "I have lived upon this earth and known glory!”

―Thomas Wolfe—

You Can’t Go Home Again 

The somewhat reluctant helping hand I got from my parents—reluctant on my father’s part, anyway—seemed to change my luck. A friend who was the CEO/publisher of an up-and-coming business magazine in Buenos Aires offered me a job reporting and translating for his organization. I had known this guy, Gabriel Griffa and his partner, Marcelo Longobardi—who was now on the verge of becoming a very well-known radio and television personality—since they had founded Apertura, their magazine, a decade earlier. Back then, they had both been college students, barely out of their teens, and had put their first few issues together on a table in a bar because they still didn’t have an office.

The result was lively, chock-full of interesting stories and excellent writing, and it was a publication that sought to take the best in avant garde style from premier US magazines like Rolling Stone, Esquire, The Atlantic, Forbes and Fortune, but in Spanish.  I was twelve years older than they were with nearly a decade of experience under my belt and had helped them with contacts and publishing tips when they were first starting out, as well as treating them to lunch whenever I could at a couple of good restaurants where I had credit from advertising swap-outs at the newspaper.

They hadn’t forgotten me now that they were becoming two successful young entrepreneurs. I should have jumped at the chance without hesitation, but, as I said earlier, I had just been gravely ill and was still recovering. Since every place I’d worked in the media, I had ended up in positions of responsibility and authority, I wanted to ensure for the moment that this job wouldn’t be putting that kind of pressure on me.

At first, I accepted a lower-level monthly salary simply to be the house translator. The magazine made use of a lot of licensed articles from major international magazines. My job was to translate these pieces from English to Spanish. I always dealt with correspondence between Apertura and the English-language publications they sought rights from. I worked closely with the general news editor and liked that. Alicia Cerri and I had known each other for some time. She was, like me, a veteran journalist with an old-school approach to the news. She understood what had just happened to me, even though I didn’t discuss it openly with her. She’d clearly been-there-done-that too, I figured, before she’d come to Apertura.

We were already doing in-depth research
on Trump back then at Apertura.

She made sure she assigned me the translations she was going to use in each issue with plenty of lead time, so I was able to organize the work at a leisurely pace. After the hectic activities of a daily newspaper, it was easy-peasy.

I liked the job. I was in the editorial department again, I was an older, respected newsman whose reputation most of the staff knew, and I got to talk daily with journalists as their colleague rather than as their boss. But in terms of what I did, it wasn’t any more stressful than a nine to five office job.

As she saw me getting stronger and showing more and more interest in the day-to-day of the magazine, Alicia started pitching stories to the publishers that she thought were right up my alley as an investigative reporter and commentator. I started with one that was sort of “science-fiction”, for an entire issue that the magazine was doing on The Future.

They asked me to write on the future of media. This was the latter part of the eighties. Internet Services Providers wouldn’t even emerge in the US until 1989. But as I say, Apertura was an avant garde magazine, so we were already doing a great deal of research on the incredible advancements in resource and information-sharing. After many hours of research, I came up with a sort of “artist’s conception” of what I figured the future media would look like. I accurately foresaw the future struggle to be faced by print media and the advent of worldwide electronic communications.

It was hilarious because I was a tech-dinosaur, a literary Neanderthal who was writing this piece on an old manual Olympia typewriter. But at one point, it was like a revelation, a prescient moment in which I wrote that, someday, not too far distant in the future, guys like me, who made their living doing research, commentary and translating, would be able to do it all online, with access to more and better information than they could ever possibly use. They would, I said, be able to work from anywhere, as long as they had a satellite signal. Even, I suggested, from a cabin in the mountains in the middle of basically nowhere.

In my home studio in the post-Herald days.

As I wrote it, I was just letting my mind and imagination fly. I figured this would all happen when I was long dead or too old to care. Nobody could have told me then that, half a decade later, in 1994, I would be doing just that from my mountain home in Patagonia.

Anyway, the publishers loved the story and started asking me to do more stuff. I said, look, it was one thing to write a lyrical essay like this one, but I was an English-language writer. Spanish-language journalism was a whole other ball of wax. I didn’t have the tools, the style, or the jargon for it.  “Anything I write,” I said, “is going to sound like an American magazine article in Spanish, not like an original Spanish-language piece written by an experienced Argentine writer.”

That, they said, was exactly what they wanted—an article in eloquent Spanish that sounds like a Yankee magazine. “And your writing in Spanish is better than that of half the local people we’ve got writing for us.”

Suddenly, I was feeling good about myself again. I wasn’t sure what had happened to me, how I’d fallen so low, but I was back! And I was being recognized for the professional that I had become. By a few months later, I had gone from being assigned brief single-source pieces with minimal reporting to doing secondary research articles with considerable “leg-work” and a number of interviews, and, finally, to being asked to do two major cover stories.       

But as I got deeper and deeper into the profession again, I couldn’t help remembering how I’d gotten here. And after the crisis I’d just been through, it was no longer just about “having a job.” I was, at heart, an American writer. My language was English, no matter how fluent I might be in Spanish. And I blamed the fact that I’d lived nearly twenty years on a market where what I wrote in was a second language for my lack of opportunities to reach success in my culture of origin. It might work okay for journalism because here, I, like other foreign correspondents, was a novelty. An English-speaker who was an expert on a Spanish-speaking region of the world. That meant that what I brought to the table wasn’t just my craft as a reporter and writer, but also a deep understanding of an entirely different culture and of how it operated within the context of the world order.

I tended to forget this last all-important aspect of my craft when I fixated on “going back home”. My idea was that, surely, one or the other of the publications I had worked for abroad would be interested in hiring me as a reporter when I returned to the States. Once I landed a steady job in a major city, I figured, I would continue developing my creative writing in my spare time and would finally be on a market where I could pitch my creative fiction and non-fiction to US agents and publishers.

I had it all figured out.

My confidence improved and my health restored, after about a year of working and saving, I decided that it was now or never, if I was ever going to “go home again”. A major stumbling block was the fact that, for Virginia, going to the US to live wasn’t a matter of “going home”. It was all about leaving home. Leaving behind her country, her city, her family, her life. Although she had enjoyed the fun of being an exchange student in high school and college, she had quickly learned, when I’d first been discharged from the Army and we returned to Ohio, that it was one thing to be a cultural exchange guest in that society, and quite another to be “just some foreigner” in a place, like many in America, that was not particularly friendly toward “aliens”.

Virginia was already home. Why would she
ever want to leave?

During the first six months that we struggled to make a living after I was discharged from the Army back in 1973, she had suffered on-the-job isolation, discrimination and racism. It was her first-ever experience with any of these things, and it broke her. She became clinically depressed and eventually became nauseous and dizzy every time she had to leave our rented apartment in Lima, where she also felt looked down on. She had loved living in Europe, during my final posting in the Army, but now, in the rural and industrial Midwest, she was impossibly homesick and inconsolably sad. Never had the word “alien” been more fitting. She may as well have been a Martian as an Argentine.  

That was why I had originally made a decision to go live in her country “for a year” and ended up staying for nearly twenty. But now, I was passing her the bill for that. I was basically saying that if I had forged a life as an expatriate in her country for all those years, perhaps it was time she should try living in mine for a while.

It wasn’t the same. Not at all. Even back then, in the nineties, the US had become a country that had forgotten that the vast majority of its citizens descended—as Jorge Luis Borges once quipped—“from boats” rather than from any native culture. And now the sons and daughters and grandchildren of the immigrants who had populated the United States shunned as “aliens” the new immigrants in their midst.

In Argentina, on the other hand, I had seldom been treated with hostility for being American, except by people on the extreme political fringes. On the contrary, being an American had, ninety percent of the time, played in my distinct favor. Given how the US had always treated Latin American citizens from the Mexican border to sub-Antarctic Ushuaia, I might well have expected, as a Yankee, to be drawn and quartered and fed to the rats as soon as I arrived. But I had nearly always been treated with friendly respect by the vast majority of people.

Still, that was my line of reasoning, and I was sticking to it. I came to your country with you, now you go to mine with me. But if it came down to that, I couldn’t be at all sure how she would react. Realistically, however, I figured the most likely scenario was her saying that she was where she wanted to be. She was home. That I’d had plenty of time to make it my home too. But if I wanted to be somewhere else, it was my decision. I should go if I must. But I would have to go alone.

I was no good at discussing such emotional issues. I did my best thinking on paper. If I had to debate a difficult case like this aloud, the flood of emotions it was sure to bring up would surely stand in the way of saying what I wanted to say and how I wanted to say it.

So I wrote Virginia a letter. I tried my best for it to be dispassionate, logical, clear-cut. The last thing I wanted it to sound like was an ultimatum. But no matter how I sought to cut it, an ultimatum was precisely what it sounded like. Like “either/or”—like “either-or else”. No matter how eloquently, no matter how lovingly I tried to put it, the ultimate message was the same: “I’ve come to a decision: I’m leaving. Come with me if you want to or stay here if you don’t, but I need this to survive.”

Reluctantly, she acquiesced.

We arrived in Miami in mid-January of 1991. My father and mother were wintering at their condo in Ocala. Whitie had made it clear that he wasn’t about to “try and drive in goddamn Miami,” so we rented a car to make the five-hour trip from Miami International to Ocala.

We parked in a guest space in front of their place in the condo complex. If was the first time we’d been there. Reba Mae was evidently watching from the window because as soon as we got out of the car and started getting our luggage out of the trunk, she appeared at the top of the steps to their second-floor apartment.

“Did you have any trouble finding us? Oh, it’s so great to see you both. Come in! Come in!”

When we got inside, Whitie was waiting in the entryway. Virginia gave him a hug and then she and my mother went off for a tour of the condo. I was still standing there with a suitcase on either side of me saying hello to Whitie. We shook hands, gave each other a stiff, perfunctory hug and then he laid his right hand on my left shoulder and looked as though he were about to say something important to me. Perhaps that he was glad to see me, that he’d missed me all those years, that he was happy I’d finally decided to move “back home”.

Instead, he leaned in close and lowered his voice so my mother and Virginia wouldn’t hear, and said, “Hey Dan, have you got that five grand I loaned you, because I need it.” Right there in the entryway, I dug out one of the envelopes of cash that I had distributed between Virginia and me and which represented the scant capital that we had been able to put together for a fresh start in the US by closing out our bank account and selling whatever we could before leaving Argentina. I removed its contents and counted out fifty crisp new hundred-dollar bills, placing them in my father’s outstretched hand.

“Thanks Dan,” Whitie said. And then, with, what seemed to me, hollow concern in his voice, he said, “You gonna be okay with what you’ve got left?”
I said, “Guess I’m going to have to be,” and then carried our suitcases away in search of the spare bedroom.

I had wanted to drop the rental car in Ocala, but Ocala didn’t have a rental agency branch. The closest one was Daytona Beach.

 We were all having a cup of coffee that Reba Mae had brewed and were sitting around talking. I said, “Listen, before we get too settled in, I have to turn in my car. Think you could drive over with me in your car and bring me back, Dad?”

“Sure.”

“Good. We better get started. The drop is in Daytona Beach.”

“Daytona! Geezus, Dan, why so far? That must be a good hour and a half from here!”

Whitie and me in Ocala

“Well, it was either that or have somebody pick us up in Miami. Ocala doesn’t have an agency.”

“Oh come on now, Dan,” Whitie said incredulously, “You mean to tell me that there’s no place to drop it off here?”

“That’s exactly what I mean to tell you. You think if there were, I’d want to drive all the way to Daytona when I just drove five hours up here from Miami?”

“Well, that’s sure a helluva note,” Whitie complained.

“Well, sorry,” I said, “but I can’t drive two cars over there, so if you’d like to lend me a hand…” I trailed off.

“Let’s all go!” Reba Mae said enthusiastically. “It’ll be a fun drive.”

In the first couple of weeks that we were in Ocala, however, Whitie showed his enthusiasm and caring in other ways. One of my first tasks was to find us a serviceable vehicle. When I asked Whitie if I could borrow his car a few hours, he said, “Where ya goin’?”

“To look for a car to buy,” I said.

“Well, pardon me for saying so, Dan, but you’ve never been much of a horse-trader. How ‘bout if I tag along.”

“Sure,” I said.

I really had no problem with that. My father knew cars. And he was the kind of negotiator who beat sellers down until they were practically ready to give the cars away just to be rid of Whitie. Furthermore, he knew exactly where to go. So we all got into his big Mercury Grand Marquis and made an outing of it.

We drove straight to an enormous used auto mart on Southwest 17^th Street in Ocala. On the way, Whitie asked me how much I wanted to spend and what I was looking for. I said I preferred a van to a sedan, but that I didn’t, obviously, have a lot to spend, so I wanted the best vehicle I could get for the least amount of money possible.

The salesman’s name was Del Río. He was a small, nervous man in his thirties. He was a fast talker and wore sunglasses—even indoors. I said I was looking for a van, but that I wasn’t going to use it to work, so economy was more important than a huge engine.

“Your best bet, then, is a mini-van,” he said. “Roomy, comfortable and great mileage. What model are you looking for?”

“Not sure,” I said, “But with the money I’ve got to spend…”

“We can set you up with financing,” Del Río said.

“No, cash,” I said shaking my head. “I figure maybe five or six years old, say.”

“Definitely a mini-van then,” he said.

“How mini’s mini?” I asked, by now more familiar with European cars than I was with late-model American ones. He signaled me to follow him. Whitie and I trooped over to have a look-see while Virginia and my mother waited inside.

We made our way down a long corridor of cars and trucks parked side by side according to type, make and model. The two he showed me were across from each other—Chevy on one side, Chrysler on the other. “This is an eighty-five Chevrolet Astro,” Del Río said, doing a Vanna White with his left hand toward the Chevy line, and then repeated the gesture with his right, saying, “And this is an eighty-six Dodge Caravan.”

Whitie and I looked at the interiors of the two vehicles, walked around them both, checking out the paint and body, kicking the tires and measuring the depth of their treads with our thumbnails while Del Río stood by, in desultory fashion, smoking a Marlboro. We opened the hoods, peered in at the engines and wiring. Whitie stuck a hand in and wiggled this and that. Then we dropped the hoods and turned to the salesman.

“What are you asking for ‘em?” said Whitie.

“Fifty-nine hundred for the Chevy and seven-nine for the Chrysler.”

“Geezus!” Whitie said. “That’s goddamn highway robbery!”

“Very serviceable vehicles,” Del Río said. “The former owners are both old customers of ours. These are both cream-puffs.”

“They better be cream-puffs with hot fudge, nuts and cherries for those prices,” Whitie said. Then, “So can we take ‘em for a spin?”

“Sure. Let me just go get the keys.”

When the salesman left, I said, “I really like that Chrysler. But I can’t afford that kind of money right now.”

“Oh hell, Dan,” Whitie said. “Don’t worry. You won’t pay anywhere near the asking price for either of them.”

“What makes you think so?”

“Trust me. It’s January! See how many goddamn cars they’ve got on this lot? They’ve gotta clear out their inventory before tax time. He’s on a fishing expedition with those prices.”

Del Río came back with the keys.

“We’ll be back shortly,” Whitie said.

“Great, I’ll wait for you inside.”

We took the Chevy out first. Whitie said it had some road noise up front, which might mean the front end was about shot. It also felt sort of doggy to drive. No pick-up, like maybe the engine wasn’t in the greatest of shape. Then we drove the Chrysler, and I fell in love with it.

“But it’s got a helluva lot of miles on it,” I said.

“Yeah,” said Whitie, “but did you see the engine? That’s no Chrysler motor. It’s a Mitsubishi. It’s only got a hundred thousand on it and those Jap motors’ll do two hundred without ever having to do any maintenance on ‘em, so I wouldn’t worry much about that if it runs okay.”

“Runs like a rabbit.”

“There ya go, then.”

  “Okay,” Whitie said as I drove up in front of the show room, “Let me do the talking, okay?”

“Fine with me.”

“Didn’t I tell you that was a great car?” Del Río beamed as we pulled up and he came out of the building.

I smiled.

Whitie said, “Not for that price, it’s not. That car has some issues. For one thing, geezus, it’s almost been all the way around the damn globe.”

“Oh, don’t worry about that, Mr. Newland,” Del Río said. It has a Mitsubishi four-cylinder, powerful little engine that gets good mileage and they’ll literally run forever.”

“Who the hell told you that fairytale?” Whitie said with a grin. “We fought the Japs during World War Two and now we’re buying engines from them for American cars? Not sure how I feel about that.”

“Great engines!”

“Yeah, say them.”

“Well,” said Del Río, “let’s go inside and see if we can’t make a deal.”

Inside, Virginia joined Whitie in the assault on our salesman. As he was telling us all of the wonderful features of the vehicle and trying to convince us that we would “never find a more impeccable previously owned automobile,” Virginia suddenly said, “Excuse me, but would you mind taking off your dark glasses?”

The guy looked at her like, “Come again?”

“I’d like to be able to see your eyes while you’re telling us all this.”

Del Río flushed to the roots of his short-cropped hair, but removed his glasses, and kept talking. The poor guy had a cast in one eye that made him look like he was looking at you with one eye, while mounting a lookout with the other to make sure nobody was sneaking up on him from the side. Before long, Virginia repented, said, “Sorry, you can put your glasses back on,” to which he said, “Thanks,” and did so.

“If you want us to buy it,” Whitie said, “You’re gonna have to come way the hell down on the price.”

The Caravan - thanks to Whitie, ours for a song

“Just a minute,” said the salesman, “let me go talk to the manager.”

After he’d left, my father said, “Yeah right. Talk to the manager. He’s gonna go talk to a Marlboro and be right back.”

About a cigarette’s-worth later, Del Río was back. “Well, I got you a great discount. We’re knocking off a thousand bucks. Six-nine instead of seven-nine.”

Whitie looked disgusted and said, “Come on, Dan. Let’s go down the road.” And we started toward the door.

“Wait, don’t go. We’re negotiating here. How much would it take for you to drive this car off the lot today?”

“I don’t know,” Whitie said. “Make me a serious offer and we’ll see.”

“Let me go talk to my manager.”

And on and on this song and dance went for perhaps an hour until it finally came down to “Name your price.”

In the end, we all shook hands, the administration made out the paperwork, I shelled out three thousand six hundred dollars cash, and drove the mini-van off the lot.

As we were getting into our cars, Whitie come over to me and murmured, “See there, your ol’ man got you most of that five grand back.”

To be continued…

 

MAYBE THOMAS WOLFE WAS RIGHT…MAYBE YOU CAN’T – Part One

 

In 1940, after Thomas Wolfe’s death in late 1938, his editor posthumously published the writer’s more than seven-hundred-page novel, You Can’t Go Home Again. The book, in a nutshell, tells the story of writer George Webber, who has written a critically acclaimed novel about his family and hometown. But when he returns to his town, he finds that there is no hero’s welcome awaiting him. On the contrary, he comes back to a town embroiled in their sense of outrage at the revelations that his book has exposed. The same is true of his family, who feel that he has stripped them naked in front of the world and they drive him from their home.

 Thomas Wolfe - You can't go home again...

A veritable pariah, Webber strikes out to find his own identity, divorced from the town and family that have been his main topic. The journey takes him to the hectic social and literary scene in New York, to Paris where he falls in with a bohemian group of artistic expats, and finally, to Berlin, where he finds out first-hand, what it feels like to live in the shadow of the Nazi reign of terror. Eventually, he returns to America, where he rediscovers and embraces his native land with a combined feeling of love, pain, and hope.

I had been away from Wapakoneta for almost eighteen years at the time. And before that, there had been almost four years that I had been around precious little. I had made my first journey to South America the day I turned nineteen. That same year, when I got back, I enrolled at Ohio State. I was going to do what everyone, including myself, expected me to do—study music education and become a high school band director.

By the end of that first year, I had figured out that this probably wasn’t at all what I wanted to do. It was a traumatic revelation. Since junior high school, it was what I had always wanted to do—or thought I did. It was what I focused my greatest effort on, what I had sacrificed for. Moreover, it was what everybody else expected of me.

In concert - that's me, third from left in the
percussion section, back row.

At Wapakoneta Senior High, I had been the pet of two successive band directors and had been a working musician and percussion teacher as well. I had headed the percussion sections in the high school band and the All-Area Band, directed the high school pep band, and helped write some of the arrangements we played at half-time during the football season my senior year. Also that year, I was elected band president. At Band Camp the summer before my senior year, I was both a high school band student and a junior high band instructor at the same time. I had worked for the biggest music store in nearby Lima and gotten to know high school band directors and professional musicians from that city and the surrounding area. They too took it for given that I would go get my diploma and be back in a few years as their colleague. As if to prove it, in the summer between my junior and senior years, I had been granted one of two scholarships offered by our school to attend an Ohio University music workshop for gifted young musicians from all over the state. There too, I had headed the percussion sections of both the symphonic band and the symphony orchestra.

Directing the Pep Band

How could I just turn my back on that? And on all of those people who saw my future already laid out for me? How could I just suddenly walk away and say, “You know what? I don’t want this as badly as I thought I did.” I just wanted to play music. And, to an ever-increasing degree, I wanted to write. The ideal future that I saw for myself was as a nightclub or stage musician by night and a novelist by day.

What kind of an irresponsible fool did that after so much effort and after raising such great expectations? Worst of all, how could I let my father, Whitie, down…again! Whitie and I didn’t have the greatest of relationships. We were always at each other’s throats, but, deep down, I pretty much figured that the fault was mine alone. I hadn’t measured up. I hadn’t embraced what he wanted for me—to be a son he could be proud of, a high-school sports star who would go on to win a full sports scholarship to a top university and end up being an enormous success in business once I graduated.

But that wasn’t in the cards. It wasn’t me. I couldn’t be those things. Had no ambition to

One of two OU Workshop
scholarship winners

be. I couldn’t even be what I’d set out to be, much less what Whitie wanted me to be.

So I dropped out, joined the Army, eloped, and spent more than a year in Europe, courtesy of the US Army, with my new bride, doing a lot of what I wanted to do—playing music, reading, writing and traveling to some of the places I had long dreamed of seeing.

During that time, I discovered that what I most wanted was to be a bohemian, an artist, a vagabond, and for most of my adult life, that would be the dichotomy that plagued me. That constant tug-o’-war between being a rolling stone or a responsible member of traditional society. In the end, I found it impossible to do either. Which made me a loose cannon, someone people thought of as highly dependable and efficient until a culmination of factors would carry me to the point of getting fed-up and simply walking out. Nor was I docile even if I was professional and effective at a job. I was immune to the normal pressures employees undergo, the fear of “losing my job”. If there was a conflict of ideas or ethics between myself and upper management, my answer to any threat of dismissal was always, “Do whatever you feel most comfortable with. I was looking for a job when I found this one.”

Dan in dress blues with the Army Bands

Years earlier the father-and-son relationship with Whitie had reached the point at which, when asked for advice or an opinion, Whitie would say, “Do whatever the hell you want, Dan. You will anyway.”  He had pretty much given up on my “ever making anything of myself.” I was a good team leader, but not a particularly good team player. I was a maverick, and that usually ended up standing in the way of a decades-long career working for anybody but myself.

Whitie figured that was my perennial problem, that I would build a good position for myself and then walk out on it. Throw it all away, as he said. I was a hothead. But, truth be told, if I was, I came by it honestly.

During World War II, Whitie was such a disciplinary problem that his superiors in the Army were appalled at his utter lack of subordination. But they were equally impressed by his ability to do a great job whenever he was placed in charge of a project and left to his own devices without having somebody over him breathing down his neck. A wise captain—who had been a schoolteacher in another life—decided to put that quality to good use. He got Whitie a field promotion to technical sergeant (what today would be a spec-5), placed him in charge of a nine-man demolition squad, and sent him on his way. From then on until nearly the end of the war, he and his team, activated with the Eighty-Second Airborne and attached to the Seventh Army, would be given a set of orders and would be sent out on their own to destroy abandoned Nazi ordnance, vehicles and anything else the enemy might be able to use again, in case they managed to come back after being driven from an area by the Allies. Sometimes Whitie and his team even blew up bridges or rail trestles to make sure that didn’t happen. He was now an effective member of the Army and there was never another disciplinary problem with him.

Demolition Tech-Sgt Whitie

In later life, as a route salesman for a cheese manufacturer and wholesaler, Whitie was provided with a sixteen-ton truck and a mandate to build a territory that, until then, had been a dead loss. Within a few short years he bolstered that route from yearly sales revenues of a scant hundred thousand dollars to one that generated millions. All the company had to do was pay him a small commission and get out of his way, and they suddenly had a major money-maker.

One day, however, in the mid-afternoon, Whitie had to stop by home for some reason—to pick up his route book or to retrieve an order, something he would rather not have done because it was sure to put him behind. Once there, however, Reba Mae was home, had just brewed a fresh pot of coffee, and talked him into having a cup before he was again on his way. It was while he was taking five and having that cup of coffee that the CEO of the company happened to drive by the house and saw his truck in the driveway.

Oblivious to this, Whitie finished his coffee, got back into his truck, and completed his route a bit later than usual, He drove out to the plant, parked his truck and plugged the refrigeration unit in for the night. The next morning when he climbed into his truck again, he saw that there was a note tucked under the windshield wiper. He climbed back down out of the cab, walked around front, retrieved the note and read it.

It was addressed to my father’s given name, and read:

Norm,

“Let this be the last time that I drive past your house at 2:30 in the afternoon and see your truck parked in the driveway!”

It was signed by the CEO.

Incensed, Whitie turned off his engine, plugged the truck back in, strode inside the building and directly to the management offices. He marched past the secretary as if she weren’t there.

“Good morning, Norman,” she said to his back. And then, as he reached the CEO’s door and placed his hand on the doorknob, the secretary said, “Hey wait, Norman! You can’t just barge in there. He’s in a meeting!”

“Don’t worry,” Whitie said over his shoulder. “This’ll only take a second.” And with that, he marched into the room.

Surprised, the CEO was sitting behind his desk, clearly caught in mid-sentence, talking to several men in business suits who were seated in armchairs in front of him.

“Norm! Can’t this wait? As you can see, I’m in a meeting here,” the boss said.

Whitie made his way on over to the desk, muttered, “’xcuse me,” to the three guests, then tossed the CEO’s note, which was now a paper-wad, on the desk in front of him and, in a confidential tone, said, “Just came to tell you this. Next time you put a little note scoldin’ me on my truck instead of comin’ and talkin’ to me like a man, I’m gonna come in here and personally shove it up your ass!”

Then he turned on his heel and walked out of the office, out of the building, back to his truck and was off to sell cheese like he’d never sold it before. Whitie bowed to no man, and in that sense, I was clearly my father’s son. But it didn’t always work out.  

In my office at the newspaper, 1981

Three years before I returned to the US, after reaching the post of managing editor at the newspaper where I worked in Buenos Aires, I abruptly walked out on a thirteen-year career. It was a job I loved and from which I had planned to retire after a couple more decades at the daily’s helm. But ever-increasing policy conflicts between myself and the new CEO made my continuing there untenable, unless I was willing to compromise my ethics and my vision for the paper. So, from one day to the next, I walked. And except to go collect my severance pay, I never went back.

It was a huge loss, as much emotional as financial. But the whole time I had been at the paper, I had also been a free-lancer, and in the process, had written for a lot of well-known newspapers and magazines in the US and Britain. There didn’t seem to be any reason I couldn’t keep doing that. Besides, I had my severance pay and a little money saved. I figured we would be all right.

But it seems that there are always extenuating circumstances—and in Argentina, extenuating circumstances are a given. It was no longer the seventies when Argentina’s bloody military regime placed the country on international news schedules daily. Nor was it the early eighties, when the Falklands War between Argentina and Britain, the subsequent fall of the military regime, and the country’s return to democracy made headlines worldwide. I couldn’t have walked out on my job at a worse possible time.

It was the very end of 1987, and the Southern Cone of South America was barely a blip on the international news radar. Free-lance work all but dried up, and if it weren’t for a few translations I picked up to do here and there, I would have had no work at all.

But I still had some money left. I devoted my mornings to writing fiction and my afternoons to planning what I hoped would be my breakthrough into adventure tourism. I made trips to the wilderness in Patagonia with a well-known nature photographer and created a folder of photos and write-ups to carry to independent tour operators in the Midwestern US. Once I had polished my pitch, I flew back to the US and visited more than thirty of those tour operators and got positive feedback from a dozen of them. If I could deliver on my proposal of Patagonian adventure tours for groups of no more than six people at a time, they would market it as an exclusive product for discerning travelers.

But I hadn’t counted on the Argentine political factor. I returned to a country that had plunged into a sudden economic crisis, in which currency was being devalued against the dollar by the day and in which annual hyper-inflation soared to nearly a thousand percent. We lost everything but our home, which, thank heaven, was paid for. I fell ill, was bed-ridden for a month, and with nothing to do but mull my life over during those days, decided that it was time to go “home”.

To be continued… 

SOME EDUCATORS I’VE EXASPERATED

 My sister Darla and I have more than occasionally talked about our different academic experiences. It’s a pretty one-sided conversation. She’s the only one with any real academic experience worth talking about. She was an extraordinary scholar all through grammar school and college, while I was...not. She graduated from high school very near the top of her class and maintained a lofty GPA throughout her undergraduate studies at Miami University and her graduate studies at Case Western Reserve in Cleveland.

First grade...sigh

I followed her through grade school and high school like a three-year-long, delayed-reaction shadow, and if I’d had a buck for every time one of her former teachers looked expectantly at me on the first day, only to repent within a couple of weeks, I could have paid my way through my first of four years of college. Their lament was always the same: “Oh Dan,” they would say, shaking their heads sadly, “I wish you could be a little more like Darla!” 

I wanted to say. “So do I!” and would have meant it, but I was afraid the words would ring hollow. What I couldn’t figure out was how they, as educators, even thought that was possible. Couldn’t they see that my beautiful sister was also a genius and that I was a gawky, geeky moron?

It was no-go from the get-go as the first teacher I quickly disappointed, then irritated, was my first grade teacher Miss L. She was an irascible, red-faced lady with a quick temper worn thin by way too many generations of six-year-olds and who had a spare-the-rod-spoil-the-child mentality. Except that she didn’t have a rod, but a paddle. It was probably confiscated from one of her charges. One of those rustic toys known as a “paddle-ball” that you could buy in the dimestore back then and that consisted of a short-handled but ample paddle with a red rubber ball attached to an elastic band clamped to the center of it. The objective was to bounce the ball on the paddle as many times as possible without missing, and the elastic band was to keep the ball from getting lost. But the band was the first thing to go, and then the ball would end up in your dog’s jaws, and the paddle would lie around abandoned and useless. One more thing to clutter up the toy box.

Well, Miss L saw a non-conventional use for it and repurposed the one she had inherited as her personal “board of education”. It looked to be old and well-used and surely was teeming with traces of DNA from a countless parade of first-grader tuchuses. I bore witness to several pupils receiving the business end of that paddle—or rather, witnessed the sharp slapping sound of the paddle whacks and heard the kids’ cries, because she always took her victims to what was rather grandly known as the “cloak room” (a little divider at the back of the classroom behind which we hung our wraps in winter) and God help you if she caught you looking any way but at the blackboard when she returned.

Suffice it to say that I was terrified of being on the receiving end of her wrath. If because of having known Darla first her expectancy regarding me was dashed from the first week of first grade, mine regarding her fell just as short. Since Darla was one of her star pupils and a particular pet of hers, my sister’s perception of Miss L was quite different from my own. Darla always elicited the teacher’s smiles and kind words, so for her, Miss L was the best teacher ever. The face I saw was quite often full of irritation and disgust. To begin with, I was left-handed. For teachers of Miss L’s generation, that was two strikes against you right there. Our school system, by then, no longer allowed the old-timers to “change” southpaws, but I’m quite certain that if she’d had her way, she would have whacked me across the back of the left hand with a ruler every time she saw me pick up one of the giant black pencils they issued us, until I learned to print “normally”.

It took me a while to figure out how lefties write—hand turned around upside down, making the letters from the top instead of the bottom—in a right-handed language in which pencils and pens are made to be pulled across the page from the right rather than pushed across from the left. My contortions to try and not drag the heel of my left hand through my work, smudging the entire page with graphite grey made it difficult to form the letters Miss L drew on the board with anything like finesse, and the tortuous results were obvious in my disastrous attempts at handwriting, made worse by my erase-and-reset technique that eventually ripped smudge-framed holes in the page. Hardly an assignment that I turned in came back without the words Messy work!  written in bright red letters, in Miss L’s neat cursive hand.

But there were other problems. I found myself distracted and listless when it came to reading the blackboard. Whenever I had to do it, I seemed to glaze over. And this was a problem that would only worsen over the next five years until I got granulated eyelids from too much strained reading the summer before sixth grade. When my mother, Reba Mae, took me to the optometrist he gave me a thorough eye exam and concluded, though in more scientific terms, that I couldn’t see for crap. So I finally got corrective lenses for far-sightedness and acute astigmatism. It opened up a whole new world.

My difficulty seeing the board was made worse by Miss L’s declaring me “much too talky” and banishing me to the back row. I knew you could get paddled for just about anything. The year before, Miss L had paddled a cousin of mine for the crime of “refusing to clean up his plate” at lunch, then, when, with her standing over him, he managed to swallow the creamed peas he had tried to avoid, only to start gagging and heaving them up on the cafeteria floor, he got paddled again. Being so obviously the target of her displeasure, I was scare stiff that I’d be visiting the cloak room with her before the year was out. To a six-year-old, it seemed like an awful lot of mindless animosity.

But, miraculously, I managed to get through the first grade unscathed. I avoided the paddle because, I can only imagine, I was Darla’s brother and my mother worked in the school cafeteria. But also, perhaps, because if first grade taught me anything, it was how to sweet-talk my way out of punishment. And then too because, despite my poor eyesight, I was a prolific reader from the outset and had already been taught to read a little by my sister before I ever reached first grade.

My first year could have been worse, I guess, but was still traumatic enough to sour me on school from the very beginning. Luckily, my second and third years were spent with a couple of the kindest and most understanding teachers in the system, who patiently helped me bolster my net-deficit self-confidence somewhat and to relax a little and enjoy the learning process.

They taught me cursive writing and helped me cope with my left-handedness to the point that I began to love sitting down with a Golden Rod yellow pad and ballpoint pen and writing stories in my spare time, at first mostly just imitating (nay, plagiarizing) the writers who most struck my fancy as my sister introduced me to the children’s section of the local public library. Darla was a prodigious reader and I wanted to be too. What I quickly found out, however, was that I was a much slower reader, if with excellent retention and reading comprehension. But there was something mildly dyslexic about my reading skills that sent me back several times over each sentence when reading silently and which made reading aloud an almost painful process that I tried to avoid at all costs.

Later in school when there were exams with time limits, I quite often wouldn’t make it to the end before the teacher said, “Pencils down!” So for a long time, I struggled to maintain a C-average, especially since I couldn’t pull up my grades with math because there was also a hint of dyscalculia in my math skills that manifested itself as a kind of exhaustion that gripped me when confronted with mathematical problems. I had no major difficulties with it until later, when more complicated math skills were required, but even then, in the lower grades, I often needed help from my mother to make sense of more than plain addition and subtraction, and when it came time to learn multiplication tables, I had no choice but to learn them by rote through endless repetition, because I couldn’t seem to establish any sort of logical relationship between one number and another in the multiplication formulas. And in writing numbers, even copying them from the board, I had to be really mindful of what I was doing or I would turn them inside-out. For instance, reading 5-2-5 and copying 2-5-2. Clearly, one mistake like that in a column of numbers and I wasn’t going to get the same result as the other kids.

That said, however, my second and third grade teachers instilled in me the idea that there was nothing wrong with my mind, that I just had a different way of seeing things and all I really needed was to be more careful and to build more confidence in myself. And they told my parents so as well.

Indeed, I was struggling with self-confidence. My confidence in anything and everything was shattered after my dad, Whitie, had his first major nervous breakdown, when I was five years old. I thought my father was the strongest, bravest guy in the world. Our family protector and provider. And seeing him reduced to a shattered, whimpering mess—only to follow up with lightning rages or euphoric abandon—brought the structure of my world crashing down. It was like you weren’t always sure who would be sitting across the dinner-table from you, even if they all looked like Whitie.  

Nor were my father and I anything alike. He had been a typical boy-boy with a penchant for fist-fighting and team sports, and I was happiest when my nose was in a book, when I was sketching or when I was writing a story. I loathed organized sports—organized anything, actually. And I was a natural born pacifist—something my father quickly broke me of by vowing that if he ever again heard of me being hit by another kid and not immediately beating the snot out of him, he, Whitie, would whip me himself. Anyway, with such existential threats to the stability of my home, I, who was, perhaps, more sensitive than the average boy and certainly more of a natural born worrier that the majority, found it hard to concentrate on anything else.

Then came fourth grade and Mrs. G. And the lift given to me by the previous two teachers was suddenly knocked out from under me. She decided from the outset that I was lazy. She seemed to see a spark of intelligence in me and figured if my academic performance was less than stellar, it was probably because I was a gold-bricker. Although she did admit that part of it might just be that I wasn’t the keenest knife in the drawer. To her credit, I set out to prove her wrong about this last because I wasn’t about to be pigeon-holed as an “also ran”, or worse, an idiot. So I strove harder than ever before to overcome poor sight and learning problems and to pull up my grades instead of accepting Whitie’s dictum that I was “just like him, average, and there’s nothing wrong with being average, Dan.” Between the occasional A’s, not infrequent B’s, still frequent C’s and occasional D’s that I got that year, I managed a B-minus average. Mrs. G had some rather backhanded praise. She had noted my effort. I was to keep up the good work, but not be too hard on myself, because left-handed people were handicapped from the outset, and while I would never be a brilliant student like her own son, she said, I was still doing fairly well...considering.

She mentioned her son, who was a year ahead of me, a great deal in class and, for a while, I grew to instinctively hate him. I don’t think I was the only one to get sick of the references because once when she was teaching us how to write a recipe, she dictated, “One full cup of chopped nuts,” to which, behind me, I heard my cousin Greg quip, “Aw shit, her poor son!” I burst into raucous laughter along with several other kids who’d heard the barb, but Mrs. G was not amused.

Oddly enough, her son and I became good friends in high school and even played in an amateur rock band together...besides pulling some vandalistic pranks in each other’s company that should have gotten us both thrown in jail. Nobody would have suspected either of us. One of our other cronies was also a veritable choir boy, and above reproach. The fourth...not so much. But, man! Was he creative! A logistician by nature, thanks to some of the stunts he helped us plan, more than once our handiwork ended up in the local newspaper. The three meeker of the crew, retiring bookworms all, well, we were as elated as Billy the Kid with the anonymous rep we were garnering. Especially in possession of the sure and stated knowledge that local law enforcement was on the lookout for us.  

So then, fifth grade with everyone’s favorite teacher, Miss C, who had also been my mother’s teacher back when she had just gotten her teaching certificate from Normal School in the 1920s. I felt relaxed and at home. That year, however, I fell sick with hepatitis. I’ll never forget. My brilliant friend Tom was attempting to teach me to play chess during lunch hour and I was, to my utter surprise, actually making headway. Then suddenly, I became acutely, horribly ill and my mother had to come pick me up and take me home. I was out of school for over a month—and not myself for close to a year. But when I went back to class, with Miss C’s kind understanding and tutoring help, I quickly caught up. I was really proud of this achievement and felt I had grown a lot during my illness by reading “big boy” books that my mother brought me every few days from the library on her way home from work. I had hours on end to read them, confined as I was to my bed, so despite reading slowly, I went through a real stack of them. Stevenson, Dumas, Twain, Dickens, Hemingway’s Nick Adams series...I ate them up.

But I never played chess again.

My first specs

In the summer, I got my first pair of specs, and, as I said earlier, the world became a completely new and exciting place to live. I wanted to read everything I could get my hands on. But then, it was time for school, and guess which teacher had switched from fourth to sixth grade? You guessed it—Mrs. G, and I had the “good fortune” of being in her class once more. To be fair, she was not a bad teacher. On the contrary, she was knowledgeable and didactic. But a child psychologist she was not. She seemed to me to have all the empathy of a chicken hawk

With my new glasses, it was much easier for me to concentrate and I proved an often pleasant surprise for Mrs. G who’d had half a mind to give up on me in fourth grade. But still, our relationship was patchy and erratic and varied between my sucking up by taking the initiative to clean the board and pound the chalk out of the erasers out on the fire escape, to being pissed off at her for her indifference, her euphoric favoritism for “the smart kids” or her open and public criticism of some of the stupider things I did or said.

I was pleasantly surprised, however, when, at the end of the year (in which I maintained a B- average) she wrote a note to my parents on the back of my final report card in which she said that over the course of the two school years that she had been my teacher, she had come to love me. She worried that I was often distracted and indolent, but that she had seen great improvement in me during the sixth grade. (Yes! I could see now). She thought, furthermore, that I demonstrated great communications skills and that she felt I was going to make a wonderful minister.

Oh, yes, I almost forgot. That was another distraction that plagued me from the time I was about twelve until I was about fourteen—the thought that I “had a calling”. This was something that led me to hold long conversations on religious topics with our erudite pastor at the local Methodist church, Reverend Fletcher Shoup. I even occasionally visited him at the parsonage, where he had a cramped little den mostly taken up by theology-related books, a few of which he lent me to read. I would also ambush my Uncle Don, who was a Methodist pastor as well, whenever I got the chance, and would bend his ear with my tortured self-doubt and fears regarding heaven and hell and the salvation (or not) of my mortal soul.

Reverend Shoup, who was also my catechism teacher and the pastor who confirmed me when I was thirteen, showed infinite patience. Uncle Don, not so much. He was kind and helpful, but said I had a long time to think about these weightier questions of both worlds, and maybe, for the time being, I should just lighten up and enjoy being a teenager. His very human advice was the one that won out.    

In junior high, I pretty much passed for just another kid, albeit one of only a handful of boys who excelled in band, art and English rather than in football, basketball and track, but at least by then I was in the company of other geeky outcasts and no longer cared...much. But it was there that while keeping up in every other area, I fell further behind than ever in math.

This was due, in large measure, to the strange teaching philosophy of Mr. V. Early on in the school year, Mr. V often took a sneering, sardonic look around the room to see which students’ eyes were lighting up with understanding of the problems he was chalking up on the board and whose had glazed over. Finally, one day, after a pop quiz with broadly mixed results, he stood at the front of the class, heaved a histrionically tired sigh and said, “Okay, from now on, all of you who are getting this, come up and take your rightful places at the front of the class. Those who don’t, you can just move to the back rows and try not to bother the rest of us.”

I immediately stood, before the baffled gaze of some of my schoolmates, and moved to the back of the class, half-expecting a covey of others to come with me. They didn’t. I guess I was the only one who realized whom Mr. V was talking to.

In high school, there were attempts (largely unsuccessful) to teach me algebra and geometry. In the first case, my teacher was Mr. G (no relation the Mrs. G). I immediately liked the man. I thought he was one of the funniest and bravest men I’d ever met. To have the neurological issues that he suffered and still want to stand up before a classroom full of bratty fifteen-year-olds was, to my mind, an act of very real valor.

Mr. G already had the look of a comedian to start with—a cockeyed clownish face, which more often than not wore a quizzical smile, as if he’d just recalled a private joke that he had no plan to let anyone else in on. But what for silly, un-empathic teens was more comedic than tragic was the manifestation of his uncontrollable neurological difficulties. He had an absolutely incredible repertoire of tics and twitches that often overtook him several times a class. On the first day he joked that he would issue towels to anyone in the first row who thought they needed them. And, he added, we would soon understand why.

Sure enough, partway through the first hour with him, in the midst of a formula he was explaining as he wrote it on the board, Mr. G went rigid, one arm down at his side, the other cocked, fist closed, as if about to throw a hook. Then he began emitting a sort of glottal hum, rather like, I noted, the strange grunted solfeging jazz great Erroll Garner did while he created magic on the keys of his Steinway. And then he was stamping one foot while making a rapid succession of spitting sounds through his tight lips, a dry surface sound, like someone trying unsuccessfully to dislodge a bit of fuzz or a hair from his lips. The fit ended as suddenly as it had begun, and Mr. G calmly and unapologetically went on as if nothing had ever happened.

I really hated disappointing him. But after several months of watching me struggle with the mysterious concept of unknown values, Mr. G, in comic frustration, said, “Tell you what, Newland, there’s no reason for you to suffer like this. I’ll just give you a coloring book and you can go enjoy yourself at the back of the class. If you feel like participating, let me know.” I participated enough to get a barely passing grade and still had geometry to look forward to the next year.

If algebra had been challenging, geometry was next to impossible. My teacher, Mr. B, was a really professional and dedicated mathematician. I once heard him talk about a vacation to Europe that he and his wife long dreamed about. What deeply elated him when they finally went was seeing, up close and personal, all of the angles, arcs, vertices, columns, polygons and triangles—both equilateral and isosceles—that he had been able to note in the great architecture of the Old World. A somewhat portly, bald man with an impressive cranium to house his large brain, a pair of horn-rimmed glasses and an ever-present bowtie, he contrasted with Mr. G by being serious as a heart-attack. He sat at the back of the room with the roll book and, one at a time, called us by our full names to go to the board and chalk up whatever formula or figure he decided to ask us for. I lived in mortal fear of the words, “Dan Newland, go to the board, please.”

I tried to shrink as low as I could and, if possible, disappear, but being called had nothing to do with capturing his attention or not. It was all done from the roll book according to a meticulous plan. The relief of not being called on one day was overshadowed by the feeling of impending doom that came with knowing your name could well be called the next. You might have thought that this constant fear of humiliation would have prompted me to study harder and to seek tutoring help from one of my more mathematically inclined friends. But you would be mistaken. By this time, I was completely immersed in my world of music and literature and for me, nothing else existed. I was already working after school and on Saturdays for a music store, giving private lessons to numerous students and playing in nightclubs at least three nights a week. I was additionally not only playing in our high school marching and concert bands, but also in the All-Area Symphonic Band. Geometry? Who needed it? I just wished I could opt out of it. But it formed a required part of the college prep curriculum, and if I wanted to be a high school band director, as I told myself I did, I was going to have to go to college.

Fortunately, Mr. B, the geometry teacher, maintained a sort of odd-couple friendship with Mr. B the band director, for whom I was a star student and one of his particular pets. It seems that my name came up in a conversation between the two of them over lunch one day and when the first Mr. B told the second Mr. B how disastrous my performance in geometry was, the second Mr. B asked the first to, for godsake, go easy on me, because if I flunked geometry, I would never get into music school.

Ever witheringly frank, the mathematical Mr. B called me aside one day during the last quarter of the school year and told me that the musical Mr. B had specifically asked him to cut me a break. He said that, in deference to his friend and colleague, he would be grading me “on the curve”—he didn’t specify plane curve or smooth curve and I was in no position to get into a discussion of differentiable geometry—in order to give me a pass even though I deserved to fail. “I don’t want to be the one to deny you a career in music,” he said, “and it’s not something you’ll ever need geometry for, no matter how important the subject may be to me.” I was overwhelmed with relief and gratitude.

Percussion instructor

But then, during the third quarter of my first and only year in the Ohio State College of Education, School of Music, my doubts, once again entered crisis mode. What in the hell was I doing studying to be a high school band director when what I loved most about music was performing it. And I was also leaning ever more toward being, first and foremost, a writer. I spent long hours when I should have been cramming harmony and theory, which was my academic nemesis, sitting in a quiet diner just off campus writing short stories and a first novel that I had recently begun. I was doing quite well in most of my music studies but as a percussionist, didn’t have a nearly strong enough background in piano to pick up immediately on even the basics of composing for anything more than a drum corps.

What I should really be doing, I told myself, was going to the Berklee Jazz Conservatory in Boston. But who could afford it? In a quandary, I finally decided to drop out and travel awhile. I made the decision after a face-off with Harmony and Theory.

There was to be a major test, and I was about as lost as I could get. The day before the test I spent writing instead of studying, then at night, panicked and could think of nothing better to do that go drinking all night. But my responsible side showered, changed and arrived for the test at 8 a.m. I was still so drunk that it was hard to sit in my seat without falling out and when I dozed off twice, pencil still to paper, in the first fifteen minutes, Professor X, himself a jazz man, came over and put his hand my shoulder and motioned me to follow. I lurched out of the room with him and in the hallway, keeping his voice low he said, “Newland, geezus, man! You’re wiped out! Tell you what. Go back to your dorm, get some rest, get your shit together over this next weekend and next Monday at two, I’ll let you do the test in my office. How does that sound?”

I agreed and thanked him profusely. And the following Monday, I went to his office, took the test and passed. But I’d already decided that this band director thing that everyone but I expected me to do was at an end.

Reporter and student, Buenos Aires, 1976

I would return to college nearly a decade later in Argentina, on the GI Bill after being discharged from the Army. This time I studied Public Translation as a means of both improving my formal Spanish and learning about Argentine law, both of which I figured would help me immensely in my already budding career as a journalist. And it indeed did. Surprisingly enough, it also turned out that I was an exceptionally good translator. Who knew?

But just before the start of my senior year, I was promoted to general news editor in the newspaper where I was working and I no longer had time to finish my degree, since I was only sleeping five hours a night as it was. A couple of years later, the dean of the College of Law Translation School approached me with an offer—finish my final year, get my degree, and immediately start teaching translation at the school. I was honored, but for once in my life, I knew exactly what I wanted to do, and I was already doing it.

Once not long ago, when talking to Darla over coffee and cake—we both love coffee and cake—I commented that she had made it look so easy, school I mean. She said, “Really?! Because it wasn’t. I had to work my butt off.”

“Wow!” I said. “Because you made it look like it all came natural to you.”

I said that if I’d had it to do over again, I would have chosen to be a lot better. Educational excellence, I had learned, was a shortcut to any intellectual endeavor. What I meant by that was that everything you learned through formal education gave you a leg up because you were handed other knowledgeable people’s know-how on a platter and were given savvy guides (professors) to lead you to that knowledge. When you didn’t have it, it was still possible to reach the same goals, but the road to them was full of doubt and of trial and error. I said that I would have been more applied intellectually. A stellar music student, a thorough and orderly student of literature, owner of a master’s degree, less self-taught, better prepared, a well-formed intellectual. Less of a workhorse. More of an individual who knew he had a message and how to get it out. Perchance a bestseller.

She looked at me impatiently—as only big sisters can—and said, “Well, you haven’t seemed to need it. You seem to have done just fine.” Maybe, she said, if I had put all of my energy into being a stellar student, I never would have done “all the amazing things you’ve done.”

She meant, of course, selling my car and traveling to South America for the first time when I was still in my teens. Dropping out of college the first time and spending three years traveling the States and Europe with the Army. Traveling to South America for a second and third times and the last time, landing a job as a reporter and sub-editor for a big-city newspaper. Using my GI Bill to return to college in a foreign land and in a foreign language. Working as a foreign correspondent for publications in the States and Britain that I had long admired. Reporting for one of the three biggest radio networks in the US. Becoming the managing editor of a newspaper. Being appointed by the US ambassador—under the administration of Ronald Reagan no less!—to the academic board of the Fulbright Scholarship Commission (perhaps the only non-college grad to ever hold that post). Being a player, if a small one, in several landmark chapters of world history. Earning my living for more than four decades as a writer and translator. Putting food on the table and clothes on my back with the written word throughout that time and never working at anything else—something precious few writers can say.

Editor, Buenos Aires Herald, 1986

I knew I was fortunate. I knew I had nothing to complain about, that despite some ups and downs and a few very rough patches, I’d lived a charmed life. But ingrate that I am—always wanting more, always demanding that my most delusional dreams come true—I forked up the last of the cake crumbs on my plate, took a sip of coffee, and said, “Yeah, but it would have been nice just once in my life to feel like I wasn’t walking the high wire. Just once to feel, “I’ve got this,” and not have that feeling that, ‘Hey, I got ‘em fooled so far, but if they ever find out what an idiot I actually am, I’m fucking toast!’ You know?”

“Of course I know!” she said. “Welcome to the club!”

Her answer took me completely by surprise. I had never thought that, brilliant intellectual that she was, my sister might ever have had a moment of professional angst anything at all like my own, and I think for a few seconds she left me sitting there with my mouth hanging open.

Then I said, “More cake? More coffee?”