Congenial-speak #16

Trips to find my Tonic Origin

My book, Finding me — and Them: Stories of Assimilation, will be available for purchase by mid-May to be sure. It is the culmination of years of story-telling. It is the semblance of numerous incarnations, iterations, alterations and revisions. What follows is the story behind the stories:

And then there was tanqueray also. “A Cheeky Lad” addresses insobriety, the fun I had, the faces I met, the thresholds toed for tolerance. My bet is insecurity. It was a suppression, a refusal of depression. No one was going to tell me I was always going to be at half mast, quarter mast, or not fly at all. Why should I be fated to be an eternal target for ignorant security workers, law enforcers, bouncers, jogging suited Scottish constables? When I was old enough to walk again, to shuffle, apparently, miming inebriation naturally, in downtown Minneapolis I felt it. I felt my first brush with 'protect and serve' and my assessment of law enforcement has not been the same since.

Then, downtown at 15, I was sober as a judge—although that, in itself, is a judgment call. On a spring day in 1980 I was brash, a rebel who was never going to be told to do something, who had some wild idea that respect is a two-way street and can't be expected at will, should not be assumed to be forthcoming from a 15-year-old kid who has continually been disrespected. I had hostility, issues, anger maybe misdirected. I was the teen who said in silent pantomimes “WHO THE FUCK DO YOU THINK YOU ARE?” or “WHAT MAKES YOU THINK YOU CAN TRIP YOUR SHIT ON ME?” You knuckle under I guess, eventually. You mature and become a docile punching bag (I did have a heavy bag in the basement. It never fought back).

A man must consider his limitations. He knows what he can do that might show people that he means business. “Exercising Demons” is me fighting back. It was my plan, my devise to show who I was, what I could do. The weights I began to lift would show bullies that I could make something of myself. Respect might follow or, it might allow someone to respect me, what I did, for what I was trying to become. It didn't always work that way. Often times, as has gone my experience, no amount of dedication, fitness, politeness, or respectfulness will be returned unopened, unexamined, only judged by a facial view.

As you will read, surmounting from tonics brewed in instances as early as those in “My Day of Reckoning,” I had the grounds to be a hostile witness. To me, how I saw myself (then) and how I saw, or thought I saw people seeing me. They were the law enforcers, though, those obliged to 'serve and protect' me from others or, more likely, myself. To them—that's the Them—I was judged before my feet hit the ground. If I walked into a bar, if I was savoring my end-of-the-week beer at my favorite watering hole, I was fine. No questions asked, they knew me. But if I decided to go somewhere else on a Friday night the barkeep, if I even got to the bar, looked me up and down as I sat—sober as a judge. Friends, Friday night connections, occasionally asked if I wanted to mix it up, try somewhere else. For that very reason I said no, and suckled under at my watering hole with a fierce loyalty.

The ten stories follow a theory of relativity. They lay out blatantly, plaintively, and weigh issues of perseverance, discipline, alienation, identity and overcoming. My explanation of myself, of my demons and deuces, of my straight and narrows for ruses, transcends genre. The nonfictional autobiographical me meets the fictional autobiographical depiction of me. I eclipse myself. I overwrite myself and no one is there to underwrite the expense. The character witness I create can damage me, there is no insurance.

A life that could have been, scenarios that may cross the adopted writer's mind, crept forth. Spiritual altitude is explored in the supernatural as it clings to fiction. It is also weighed as it applies to the nonfiction. Four stories in this book ping-pong issues of faith, religion, the spiritual world and its logistical capacity for an after-life. They are fact and fiction. They are fiction based on fact. In “The Genuine Article” I created a dysfunctional family. To one member, one generation of the family who struggles with her mother's agnosticism against a gentle nudging of devout Catholicism, a lesson is given. I came up with the simple super-natural idea at my biological mother's memorial party, the rest is merely filler apropos of nothing (although the surrounding plots do casually, genuinely, lend themselves to a final epiphany). The main character has many of her qualities, feelings I got of who she was in the 26 years that I knew her. A story “The Burial Plot,” I believe, dovetails that. It is nonfiction and meshes the hypothesis of a logistical after-life with lawful Jewish circumstances that surround the funeral and traditional unveiling of the grave for my grandmother by adoption. The issue of identifying with Judaism, because of being adopted into a Jewish family, is worth exploring. I happen to find it enlightening, real, and adapting—as I've had to sometimes—to the times. Adapting to limitations its law often conflicts with the physical world. The story “A Lesson from the Shema” shows what I found, needing as an adolescent, in Reform Judaism. I identified with it, it showed me how to rise up against the bullies in life, big and small, those malicious and those simply ignorant. It set me wandering, later in life. That story, I feel, dovetails “Ramifications of Schadenfreude” in which the main character is tested by various antagonists as he plans to locate and meet his biological mother. In the fray, in the college unions, foyers and ministries he begins to question the various faiths, specifically Christianity. He struggles with the contradictory teachings of his adopted practice of Reform Judaism. These fictionalized wanderings culminate in the nonfictional “The Divining Weeks.” I learn as a disabled college graduate, who has witnessed though the years many merciful solicitations (I suspect because of the disability), the true value in faith as it applies to a person in a wheelchair.