Arc of the Poet Part 1: Life Poetry Part 2: Tour de Force Part 3: True Love Part 4: Spinning Out Part 5: Wake-Up Call Part 6: Serious Dreams Part 7: Home Stretch Part 8: Feedback Part 9: Dear Departures Part 10: Good Poetry Part 11: Rewrites Part 12: Resistance Part 13: Fame and Fortune Part 14: Ramblings Part 15: Being Nearly a year after our spectacular wedding, May of 1993 found me, Beth and pretty much everyone else in our family continuously thinking about my brother, his daily perseverance in recovering from his July ’91 diving accident, and his…
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Arc of the Poet Part 1: Life Poetry Part 2: Tour de Force Part 3: True Love Part 4: Spinning Out Part 5: Wake-Up Call Part 6: Serious Dreams Part 7: Home Stretch Part 8: Feedback Part 9: Dear Departures Part 10: Good Poetry Part 11: Rewrites Part 12: Resistance Part 13: Fame and Fortune Part 14: Ramblings Part 15: Being We kept the afterburners on and blasted into 1991, with me clawing my way forward professionally and growing up further alongside my sweetheart. I wrote an original short script for producer/director Bill Waxler, and his plans to produce it…
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Arc of the Poet Part 1: Life Poetry Part 2: Tour de Force Part 3: True Love Part 4: Spinning Out Part 5: Wake-Up Call Part 6: Serious Dreams Part 7: Home Stretch Part 8: Feedback Part 9: Dear Departures Part 10: Good Poetry Part 11: Rewrites Part 12: Resistance Part 13: Fame and Fortune Part 14: Ramblings Part 15: Being From the great poem East Coker written by “American born, English” poet T.S. Eliot: Home is where one starts from. As we grow older The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated Of dead and living. Not the intense…
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Eventually I came to feel that I could become famous, and accomplish all my lofty personal ambitions, through poetry.
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In case you missed yesterday’s report, we did finally catch my dad (aka Big Jim, or BJ) at Cracker Barrel, along with Peggy, my step-mom. We all had a nice dinner together somewhere around 9pm, and then we all made it to the Ramada there in Crossville, Tennessee. But darned if BJ didn’t have another trick up his sleeve, and sure enough, he beat us to Boone… by about an hour! First, though, I need to back up a little.
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Saturday, June 2, 2001: Almost There The wake-up call came at six Central time, and it actually succeeded in getting Beth to arise (it most certainly was wasted on me). Once awake, this hotel wasn’t a hard one to leave quickly, but we were a little worried to find Callie sitting in the front window, considering that pets weren’t allowed. Oh well — we figured that, if we receive a call from someone asking why they’d seen a one-eyed calico cat in our hotel room’s window, we’ll just say, “You saw a what?!”
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Friday, June 1, 2001: Catching Up Waking up, of course, there they were, under the bed; and there I was, lifting the bed so Beth could scramble under to grab them, give each of our cats their ‘medicine’ and stow them in their carriers. This stuff is getting easier…. We’d settled into a nice hotel on night one, but still the sounds of the highway and the endless passing trains got us going early — or so we thought.
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Thursday, May 31, 2001: Simply Grand It was time to get up and get moving, but by letting Maggie slip under the covers and curl up, we were able to grab a few more minutes’ rest. Lying there returning to our senses, all the great memories were just cobwebs; the focus was all about getting on the road. All the last junk was piled near the door soon enough, and we made it to Budget by seven, just after they’d opened, to get Dad registered to drive the truck. We were among the first customers in our favorite breakfast spot…
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The ‘Bumper Crop’ series has at least one more entry, but requires a bit more work on my part before I can post the rest of the story. In the meantime, I wanted to share something from a more recent work. After we moved to the Blue Ridge Mountains almost exactly seven years ago, I found my creative writing energies more or less depleted. Soon, being a father added a new dimension to my life, and the one creative project that stayed on my agenda was to write an epic poem for Amelia, detailing the first day of her life…
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. February 22, 1991: Bumper Crop, Part 1 . June 29, 1991: Bumper Crop, Part 2 . February 26, 1993: Bumper Crop, Part 3 . December 5, 2008: Bumper Crop is now live… Thanks to everyone for the feedback on “Bumper Crop,” the short script I wrote back in 1991 for my friend Bill Waxler to direct. The story is about an older man who awakens from a dream that shines a new light on a long-held misconception which had affected him deeply throughout his life. Finally understanding that he was not responsible for his brother’s accident long ago, his…