My titles are available for free using coupon code SW100. (Valid now through July 31, 2010).

Smashwords publishes eBooks in a variety of formats that will support just about any reading software and device, from the Amazon Kindle and the Barnes & Noble Nook to good old PDF for your PC or Mac. If my words don’t strike your fancy, browse around the Smashwords site and you might find something you like from another author.  If you find something you like, buy it. The digital format will help save a few trees, a lucky author can buy himself or herself a cup of coffee, and the low prices will save you some money.

It’s a simple exchange of values. You give them money, they give you an eBook.

After the Fire

My memoir about a writing workshop and the teacher whose lessons on the art of fiction and the art of living continue to teach and inspire me, thirty years later.  There’s some back-story about how this essay came to be written in my post eBook Week, Meta-Memoir.

After the Fire: A Personal Essay, Smashwords Edition.  Also available from Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Sony and Apple’s iBookstore (accessible from your iPad or iPhone).

A Couple

Rob and Debbie are spending their last spring break in Florida. Graduation is looming and they face an uncertain future. Family expectations, peer pressure, and their own hearts are driving them apart.  I wrote about this genre of story in my post Doomed Couples.

A Couple, Smashwords Edition.  Also available from Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Sony, and Apple’s iBookstore (accessible from your iPad or iPhone).

Bonnifer

A short story about a married office worker struggling with temptation and desire while flirting with an older woman on a sultry summer evening in Greenwich Village.

Bonnifer, Smashwords Edition.  Also available from Barnes & Noble, Kobo, and Apple’s iBookstore (accessible from your iPad or iPhone).

Natural Selection

A corporate manager is on the verge losing it all. Office politics, a growing drinking problem, estrangement from his family, and a looming layoff are pushing him to the edge of a personal abyss.

Natural Selection, Smashwords Edition.  Also available from Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Sony, and Apple’s iBookstore (accessible from your iPad or iPhone).

The Reader is Horizontal

As I wrote yesterday, this week is “Read an eBook Week.”  While the printed book is in no danger of extinction, technological innovations, as well as business model innovations, make it clear that the way books are produced, distributed and bought is rapidly changing.

It’s new, it’s green, it’s hot.

Sorry, that sounded a little too much like blowhard Tom Friedman.  Let me start over.

Last fall, when I was in San Francisco de Quito, Ecuador, researching my next book, The World is Green, Sweaty, and Concave, I had a conversation with the cab driver who drove me to the airport about the International Monetary Fund’s Latin American policy and its impact on the  nanotechnology research incubators being established in the former rustbelt of the United States.  When he’s not driving his cab, Pepe is a student at the local university and heads an internet social-media startup…

Sorry, I did it again. One more time, I promise to be good.

EBooks, I was talking about eBooks and the coming revolution…

Last fall, I was talking to some acquaintances, ordinary writers with families and boring day jobs, not high-tech entrepreneurial cabbies from exotic countries, about the changes in publishing, and in particular POD publishing technology and eBooks.  For very little cost, it’s now possible for any writer to publish a book, in digital or print form, and sell it on the internet.  Whether or not it gets any attention at all and sells beyond the small circle of the writer’s friends is another question.  I’m still old-fashioned enough to be skeptical about self-publishing and aside from this blog, I’m still going at it the old fashioned way: trying to convince someone else to publish me.

But I was intrigued.  The biggest challenge to me was the fragmentation of the EBook market in technological terms.  There’s the Kindle, there’s the Sony Reader, the Fictionwise EReader, the Barnes & Noble Nook, and now Apple’s iPad.  All of these devices are closed and proprietary to some degree or another, but more importantly, are tied to specific content distributers.  If you want your book to be available to the widest possible audience, you really need to be able to support all those formats as natively as possible and get connected in to those devices distribution channels.

As a lowest common denominator on the format question, you can use PDF, but PDF documents only work well on real PC’s and not on dedicated devices with smaller screens.  PDF files are composed of fixed pages that don’t display well on smaller screens.  Either the device shows the entire page making the text too small to read, or if you can zoom in, it makes for very awkward reading as you have to slide the enlarged page left and right and up and down as you are reading.  A cumbersome reading experience, especially if you are trying to enter into John Gardner’s fictive dream.  The device, like a real book, needs to dissolve out of our consciousness as we read.  In order to create the proper reading experience, the text needs to be reflowed dynamically for each device, something that PDF doesn’t do well at all.

There’s another practical matter to consider about PDF format as well.  Since it only works really well on a computer, it means that in order to read it you have to be sitting at a computer.  By necessity, I do a lot of reading at my computer these days.  My writing is published in ezines and I read a lot of them along with various blogs that I follow, but that’s hardly the way I done reading for most of my life.  The word sprawled comes to mind as in,  “Sprawled on the living room couch.”  Most of my reading is done horizontally unless it’s not possible, such as when I’m reading from my computer screen or incarcerated on an airplane.  I guess it’s possible to sprawl on an airplane, but it’s not very row-mate friendly.

And in bed.  I read in bed.  I have to confess that my aluminum unibody MacBook is the sexiest piece of hardware I’ve ever seen, but it’s too awkward to curl up next to it in bed.  Mrs. Bubbers would have a problem with that too.  So, the small book sized devices offer the most natural reading experience and cannot be ignored. The vendors of these products won’t let you with all those pictures of happy readers outside sprawled out under maple trees gazing at their devices.

While I was pondering these questions, I discovered Smashwords.com, which I discussed in yesterday’s post.  Smashwords solves several problems at once.  First, it provides the technology to transform your book into all the common formats used by the most popular devices.  Second, through their business relationships, they provide access to the supply chains that are supporting all the various devices.  Still, there’s the marketing challenge that you need to solve on your own, but at least the technical barriers are removed.

I stuck my little toe in the water and signed up with Smashwords as an author.  While I’m still working on a book-length collection of short stories to be published by someone other than myself, I wanted to see how the Smashwords process works.  I selected a memoir that I had written several years ago that had been published in the Oregon Literary Review and set to work formatting the Word document according to the Smashwords style guide.  It took a few attempts to create a document that would look good in all the published formats after the Smashwords meatgrinder  got through with it and also to get approved for their premium distribution program, but in the end, it was a lot simpler than I had expected.

Meta-memoir

The personal essay, or memoir, that I chose for my little experiment was a piece that I wrote several years ago.  It marked my return to serious writing after having quit in my late twenties.  The usual reasons: frustration at not getting published, building a career in software development, starting a family, etc. While in the middle of a thoroughly enjoyable (but harmless) middle-aged crisis, I decided I wanted to start trying to write again.  Unfortunately, I was at a loss as to where to start and the doubts about my talent had never gone away.  Fiction, making things up, was very daunting.  I contacted an old friend from my college days, also a writer, who is now an English professor and teaches, among other things, composition.  She suggested that instead trying to tackle a piece of fiction right away, I try to “get my swing” back by writing a personal essay.  She assigns personal essays to her freshman composition students as a way of helping them work through their fears of writing.  She also sent me a copy of one of her own personal essays that she gives to her students as a sample.  “Don’t worry about what it’s about, just as long as it means something to you,” she said.

When I read her essay, I immediately understand how I should approach my own.  Her first-person narrative was written using the iceberg approach.  Like an iceberg, the part that you see, the part that’s apparent, is only the tip and it’s supported by a huge part that’s hidden underwater.  For a memoir, the part that’s hidden, but still felt by the reader (if you do it right) is the emotional part.  It’s the part that resonates on an almost unconscious level with the reader.  It’s not necessarily an easy thing to do.  If you write too little, the reader literally has no idea what you’re talking about.  That’s what happens when young writers spend too much time in literature classes focusing on the subtleties in great writing.  Get too subtle, however, and you become obtuse.  On the other hand, if you write too much, you leave no emotional space for the reader to inhabit.

Maria’s essay was perfect, and in the years since we were students, she’s mastered the approach.

Since we were always a bit competitive,  when we don’t deny it, I decided to try the same method and see what I could do.  As a topic, I chose a writing workshop that I had taken in my last year at college.  It stood out for me because I remembered at the time how important to me it was and how nervous I was even applying to get accepted into it.  That was where I began.

A month later I, had completed it and it had been a journey.  I’m not one of those who tends to think of writing as a form of therapy.  If you need therapy, see a therapist.  Nonetheless, during the course of working on the essay, I rediscovered a person I had forgotten.  I’ve had no problem writing fiction since then.

For my trial run through Smashwords, I took another pass at the essay and polished a few things that suddenly, four years later, struck me as embarrassing and uploaded it as an eBook.  At about 9,500 words, it’s a pretty short book, so I priced it at $1.00.  It took several months, but the Barnes & Noble version finally showed up a few weeks ago.  I’m still waiting for Amazon.  This is all new for both Smashwords and the channels and they’re still working out the technical kinks.

As part of my participation in “Read an eBook Week,” the already low price of $1.00 has been reduced to free.  You can “purchase” it and download if from Smashwords here.

Unlike most of my fiction, a happy ending…

As a final note, after reading Maria’s essay, I wrote back to her and urged her to send it out for publication.  Neither of us knew that we were submitting to the same place, but much to our surprise, both of our essays were published in the same issue, so in the competition that we don’t really have, it was either a tie or we both won.  I prefer the latter.

“Shadow Ball,” by Maria Pollack, Oregon Literary Review, Vol. 1, No.2

Living in Interesting Times

This week, March 7 through 13, is “Read an eBook Week.”  Mark Coker, the founder of Smashwords.com, has an interview at Huffington Post with Rita Toews, who created the annual event in 2004, long before all the recent hoopla and turmoil in the publishing industry regarding pricing, devices, digital rights management (DRM), Google’s attempt to monopolize access to every book ever printed, Apple declaring war on Amazon, and Macmillan picking a fight with Amazon while bloodying the collective noses of its authors.  Add to that mix a reading public getting very used to “free” content on the internet and print on demand (POD) technology and things are getting very chaotic.  The publishing business as we have known for the past hundred years or so is rapidly changing, but it’s hard to know what it’s changing into.  Gutenberg knew he was changing the world but probably never imagined that his printing technologies would drive the Renaissance and create the modern world.

Maybe we’re on the verge of some new Renaissance, maybe we’re not.  Where things are going right now is completely unknown.  Unknown to the publishing houses, the major retailers, literary agents and the technology enablers.  All of the people who are supposed to understand their markets and their businesses are clueless.  Some are embracing change, others resisting it, all are jockeying for position and trying to corner markets no one can understand.  Some are heroes, some are villains,  some are both at the same time.

The publishing houses, aware of what happened to the music industry, have not resisted the digital revolution, and have been offering their books in digital formats for several years now.  eBooks still make up only a small percentage of their total sales, but each year the percentage increases significantly, fueled by improvements in eBook devices.  Growth is still hampered by one major factor: The lack of a single electronic format that works seamlessly across all devices.  If eBooks are going to displace print books, it’s going to be an uphill battle.  If you include the codex, the printed book at nearly two thousand years of age, is still the most perfect communications device ever invented.  All it takes to read a book is at least one eye and one hand.  No expensive electronic equipment, batteries, Wifi, or USP port required.

Unfortunately, this problem is not going away and it’s actually getting worse because the major players are hell-bent on monopolizing the distribution channels.  Amazon, to its credit, has created the most successful eBook reader to date, the butt-ugly Kindle, and has done more to popularize eBooks than anyone else, but they use the eBooks themselves as loss leaders in an apparent strategy to become the sole means of distribution, able to dictate prices to suppliers.  If that doesn’t sound so bad, go ask a former employee of Rubbermaid what they think of Wal-Mart.

To the rescue came Apple, with its announcement of the iPad, and its own eBook pricing model.  Instead of being a retailer, Apple will function as an “agent” of the publishers.  Publishers get to name their price, and Apple will take a 30% cut.  Macmillan immediately took advantage of this and demanded the same kind of deal from Amazon.  Initially Amazon refused and retaliated by removing the buy buttons from all Macmillan and Macmillan imprint books on their site.  Eventually, Amazon had to give in.  Interestingly, it took over a week to restore all the buy buttons when it had only taken them a few hours to remove them.  I’m a computer guy, and quite frankly, that does not compute.

While this battle was going on, I visited various blogs and news sites where this was being discussed.  There was the Amazon-is-evil faction, there was the Steve Jobs-is-evil faction, and there was Micro$oft Sucks faction, even though Microsoft didn’t seem to have anything to do with it.  Then there were those blamed it all on those greedy publishers and authors (note that this is the first time in this article that the actual creators of “content,” authors, are mentioned).  While there are some authors who earn millions of dollars from their writing, the other 99.9% have to have day jobs.  Greed is not an option for them.  Unfortunately, our consumption driven society seems to regard “everyday low prices” as a right, no matter if denies everybody else the chance to make a living, or forces third-world sweatshop workers to live in poverty, or causes environmental devastation in Asia.

Obviously, eBooks should cost less than their print counterparts, but it still costs money to create them.  Aside from the author, there are editors, proofreaders, graphic designers, marketing managers, advertising copywriters, lawyers, and accountants all involved in producing them.  All of them are entitled to be paid for what they do.

I complain as much about the major publishing houses as any other unpublished author, but there are a few things that I’m willing to accept.  I wish that HarperCollins hadn’t inflicted Sarah Palin’s ghostwritten nonsense on us.  On the other hand, it was HarperCollins that took a chance on first time author Ryan Smithson’s important memoir, The Ghosts of War.  Trash finances art.  This has been true ever since the beginning of both trash and art.

Apple shouldn’t be given a free pass in this.  They are not a white knight.  It’s true that they are adopting a strategy that is the exact opposite of what they did with the iTunes store, where they dictated terms to the music industry.  Their goal, however, is no different than any of the other players in this game: to gain proprietary and monopolistic control over the book publishing business.  The danger of this is made apparent by an action Apple took recently in censoring iPhone applications.  Based on some complaints from a family-values group, Apple removed all adult-oriented applications from its iPhone App Store.  Along with all the strip-poker games and hottie-of-the-day viewers, applications provided by literary magazines, such as  Keyhole Magazine, were removed because the short stories had adult language and controversial themes.  What will Apple do when they open their bookstore and the family values crowd complains, as they always do, about Lolita, Ulysses, The Catcher in the Rye, and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn?

A Smashing Idea

In the midst of all this chaos is internet startup Smashwords.com, Mark Coker’s eBook publishing company.  It’s not a publishing company in a traditional sense, but acts as a distribution company.  For no upfront cost, an author can upload his or her ebook where it is made available for purchase at a price set by the author.  Smashwords takes a set percentage of whatever the price is for each sale.  Additionally, an author may choose to make his or her book available for free or to allow the purchaser to name their own price.

In order to make the books available to the largest audience possible, Smashwords provides the books in a variety of formats, including Kindle, Barnes & Noble ereader, Sony ereader, and adobe PDF.  It takes a lot of technical wizardry to take a single Microsoft .doc file from an author and to publish to all those formats, and to have them look reasonably good.  A program, affectionately known as “The Meatgrinder,” does a pretty good job of it, provided the author has followed some strict formatting rules. Given the fragmented technical landscape that now exists with all the competing digital formats, the Meatgrinder, is the key technology.  As a software product development manager, I tip my cap to Mark Coker and company.  They looked at an emerging market and asked, “What’s the specific problem that needs to be solved, what can we do about it, and can it be a viable business?”   They’re still in start-up mode, but they seem to have put more thought into it than all those hare-brained companies that fueled the first internet bubble in the late 90’s.

Unlike any other business that offers its services to unpublished authors, Smashwords doesn’t try to scam writers.  Unpublished authors are a particularly vulnerable bunch.  Vanity presses, illegitimate agents, and other unseemly types prey on writer’s dreams and separate them from their money.  I wrote about this in a post last year.  Even POD publishers who ask for nothing up front, push all sorts of premium services that can end up costing an author thousands of dollars just to publish a book that will be bought only by the author’s family and long suffering friends.  Smashwords is completely up front about it.  “You aren’t going to make a lot of money,” they say, nor do they try to sell you premium marketing or editorial services or make any money outside of what they make from selling books to customers.  They don’t do any advertising for your book either, they’re honest about that too, and that’s what you get for no money down.  Marketing is your job.

The honesty in a field normally filled with scam artists is refreshing.

In addition to individual authors, there are also some small publishing companies that have signed up with Smashwords that have published multiple titles.  In that case, the companies are providing the sorts of things that traditional publishers do – editing, cover art, marketing – and are using Smashwords as a sales channel.

Smashwords has also made distribution deals with the other major retailers.  All Smashwords books that meet a set of formatting standards are shipped electronically to online retailers such as Amazon, Sony, and Barnes and Noble.  More relationships are promised to be on the way.  This is a very shrewd strategy.  Let the war among those giants rage on, and in the meantime, do business with all of them.

This may be a glimpse of what the future of publishing will look like.

We are the world, in prose.

One of Smashwords most recent releases is short story collection, 100 Stories for Haiti, the brainchild of a group of editors and writers in Europe.  About six weeks ago, in the aftermath of the Haitian earthquake, word went across the internet that submissions for the book were welcome from all around the world.  Smashwords had signed on to handle the ebook distribution.  One hundred percent of the proceeds are going to the Red Cross for Haitian relief.  It’s an absolutely brilliant idea and it’s also nice to see that while the rest of the publishing industry is scheming how to corner this or that market, a grassroots movement can leverage technology in a new and creative way and actually do something altruistic.

I’ve bought my copy and it was well worth the money I donated.  It’s filled with exceptional writing.  Kudos to Smashwords and all the writers who contributed.

Books mentioned:

Ghosts of War

Ryan Smithson. Collins 2009, Hardcover, 336 pages, $4.93

Lolita

Vladimir Nabokov. Vintage 1989, Paperback, 336 pages, $5.00

Ulysses (Penguin Modern Classics)

Declan Kiberd (Introduction). Penguin Classics 2000, Paperback, 1040 pages, $9.83

The Catcher in the Rye

J. D. Salinger. Back Bay Books 2001, Paperback, 288 pages, $5.82

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Oxford World’s Classics)

Emory Elliott (Editor). Oxford University Press, USA 2008, Paperback, 352 pages, $3.72

John J. Bubbers (1897-1980)

On Christmas Day of 1979, my parents, my sisters, and I drove out to Stony Brook to visit with Oma and Opa.  Opa was in the terminal stage of the cancer that would take his life the following March.  Christmas was very, very different that year.  Oma’s advanced age and Opa’s severely weakened condition made living in the four floor walk-up next-door to us in Queens impractical, so they had settled into the Stony Brook cottage.  Our Christmas Eve tradition of have a supper of German cold-cuts and salads up in their apartment before coming down to our house to open presents was suspended for the first time in my lifetime.

My father was spending as much time with them as he could while still running his drugstore full-time, and they were blessed with caring neighbors who helped out as well.  Much of all this activity I had missed because I was in my sophomore year at college and I was up in Albany.

The day was overcast, cold, and damp.  We arrived in the early afternoon.  Oma met us at the door and hugged each of her grandchildren and spoke in hushed tones.  Opa was in the living room that also functioned as a dining room, sitting his old rocking chair in the corner.  He was in pajamas and a thick terry-cloth robe that couldn’t hide his emaciated condition.

My father helped Opa out of the rocker and to the table.  Opa was clearly in pain and his legs were too weak to support his weight.  Oma had prepared a scaled-down version of are traditional Christmas Eve supper: knockwurst, bauernschinken, cervelat, creamed herring for my father, and potato salad.  Oma had also thoughtfully prepared a small dish of tuna salad just for me as she always had since the one time, when I was six years old, I had told her that I liked it.  Opa couldn’t eat much of this food anymore.  His meal consisted of mashed potatoes and a small piece of bauernshinken Oma had cut up for him and a piece of buttered bauernbrot.

After our meal, at Opa’s request, my father and I helped Opa into the sun parlor,  we sat him down in the middle of the sofa that faced the window and slowly pivoted him so that he could lay down.  My father stood at the edge of the sofa and held Opa’s shoulders and gently laid him down.  “Get his legs, Freddie,” my father quietly said.  I knelt down and with both hands picked up his ankles and laid them down on the sofa.  All I felt through his pajamas was bone.  Opa winced several times during this procedure.  Oma came in and covered him with one of her loudly-colored homemade afghans.  The excitement of the day – the anticipation our visit, the meal – had taken its toll on him and he quickly fell asleep.

Later, while we were all quietly talking in the living room, Opa woke up.  In a loud, stern voice, he called out, “Children! Come here!”

My sisters and I filed into the sun parlor and stood before him on the sofa.  My parents stood in the doorway.  It was about 5 o’clock and the sun, hidden all day, was low in the sky, finally breaking through the clouds and barren trees outside briefly lighting up the room.

“We will now sing a Christmas hymn,” Opa said.  With that, he began to sing, in German, “O Tannenbaum.”  This was unusual for several reasons.  First of all, my sisters and I speak no German whatsoever (aside from the names of the food Oma served us, and I had to Google them in order to spell them correctly here), much less the words to “O Tannenbaum.”  Second, we were never the sort of family that sang Christmas carols at home.  Maybe in church, but never at home among ourselves.  We did, of course know the tune, so we joined in and hummed along with him, awkwardly at first.

Opa sang verse after verse with one hand desperately clutching the afghan tightly to his chest, the other holding my hand.  He struggled to find the strength to continue singing and his eyes turned glassy.

I am forever haunted by that moment.  I remember thinking at the time about that sun parlor in earlier times, when we were children.  All those summer nights Oma and Opa shared with the steady stream of grandchildren.  The joyous laughter that arose from the board games we played with Oma and competed with the crickets outside.  Those times, those children, all seemed so far away on that Christmas Day.

Thirty years later, a question that can never be answered lingers on for me.  Where was he in that moment singing a Christmas carol that none of us but him knew?  My lifelong love of stories and literature and reading and writing has been quest for understanding what makes all of us who we are, to see into that inner life we all live.

The first half of Opa’s life was very difficult.  Born into poverty just before the dawn of a new century, he struggled to survive all of the turmoil of his times.  As a child in the early days of that new century he could have scarcely imagined the course his life would take. He was a soldier in one world war, a refugee in another.  He struggled just to feed his family during the Great Depression.  Living long enough to see not only his two sons go to college in the country he may have dreamed about, but also all of his grandchildren.

So, where was he on that Christmas Day?  What memory was his inner self reliving?  The carol he sang had no real connection to us. It’s presumptuous to think that during what he knew was his last Christmas, with an entire lifetime to consider, most of which preceded us, he was remembering one of “our” Christmases.  I can never know, I can only imagine.  Maybe it was a December night in 1915 or 1916.  He and his comrades, all of them cold, dirty and hungry, had briefly found themselves in a warm, quiet place.  Maybe while he sang “O Tannenbaum” with his comrades, he imagined a hopeful future, free of hunger, free of strife, and free of fear.

This essay was originally published three years ago in Seeker Magazine.  When I began writing it, my only intent was to document a family story that was going to be forever lost due to the passage of time.  As what sometimes happens when writing personal essays, they start out about one thing, but in the process of writing them, they turn out to be about something else.  In this case, I discovered, over twenty years after they were gone, the impact my grandparents had on the person I became.

Tomorrow, Christmas Day, 2009, a new epilogue to this essay.

My grandparents, John and Frieda Bubbers, or “Oma” and “Opa,” came to America some time after World War I. Opa had been a soldier during the war and for a brief period after the war was over, during the social and economic chaos that was Germany during that time, he had been a police officer. He never spoke much about those experiences, but when he was in Astoria General, near the end of his life, he struggled and had to be restrained when the nurses attempted to place an oxygen mask over his face. He was having flashbacks of trenches and gas masks.

The young couple settled in a small German community in Lawrence, Massachusetts, probably around 1920 or 1921. He never told me what he did for a living, but I imagine that he worked in the textile mills that were still operating all over the northeast at the time. During my time with Computer Associates, a software company based on Long Island, I traveled quite frequently to our office in Andover, just a few miles from Lawrence. I took several trips to Lawrence and saw a poverty stricken area that didn’t seem to have ever recovered from the great depression; the mills still standing like red brick carcasses, crumbling, abandoned and overgrown for over fifty years.

My father once gave me an address and I found the house they had lived in, a non-descript three story dump where they rented a flat on the top floor. I took a picture of it for my father and thought that the place might have fit in anywhere the working poor live in the northeast. It could have been Troy, it could have been Yonkers, it could have been Bridgeport, or it could have been Hamilton Street in Albany.  To my father’s surprise, it hadn’t changed in fifty years.

My uncle Johnny was born around 1921 in Lawrence and my father was born in 1930, also in Lawrence.

The depression was devastating to places like Lawrence. The mills closed down for what turned out to be forever and destroyed their fragile economies. It was during this time that my grandparents decided to move back to Germany. I never got the chance to ask them as an adult what made them make what they later admitted to be the biggest mistake of their lives, but all I have are the memories of what they told me when I was a child. For whatever reason, in 1935 they moved back to Hamburg.

They did tell me that within days of arriving “home”, they had realized their mistake. Opa, visiting some old friends at a police station heard, “John, go back to America. Get your sons out of Germany.” Indeed, my uncle, aged fourteen, was in grave danger, first of being “recruited” in to the Hitler Youth, and then into the Army. Everyone in Germany knew that war, and disaster, was coming. My grandparents had been born in Germany, so their sons’ US citizenship meant little to The Third Reich, and after Opa’s experience in The Great War, he wasn’t going to let that happen to either of his sons.

This story was told to me many times by both my father and by Oma. My father’s version is one of excitement and adventure, the kind of thing that thrills the five year old boy that he was at the time. He never seemed to understand that his older brother could very well have been senselessly slaughtered fighting on the side of evil or that he himself might have been incinerated when the allies firebombed Hamburg.  Oma’s version, however, is a little darker. The last time she told me this story I might have been about thirteen or fourteen, so I think the truth of what they must have felt is more frightening than she was willing to tell me at the time.

It took my family some eighteen months to finally be together again in America. Opa worked double shifts in factories for about a year to earn enough money to return to the United States. He headed to New York City to find work and to prepare a place for Oma and the two boys when they arrived.

In the meantime, my father and my uncle got to experience both the gifts and the punishments of a classical German education. I remember my father proudly showing me his German composition book containing his writing exercises, written with the most exquisitely beautiful and precise penmanship I’ve ever seen, particularly astounding when I realize that it was done by a five year old boy who had learned German as a second language just six months before. My father told me it was the product of both high standards of excellence as well as canings on knuckles and buttocks from the stern schoolmaster.

When Opa had finally sent enough money back to Oma, it was time for them to join him in New York. They took the train from Hamburg down to Genoa, Italy and from there sailed to New York. My father’s account of this trip is the romantic vision of a small boy, riding on a train, seeing Italy, boarding the huge ocean liner. Oma’s story about traveling south on the train, a mother with her two sons, trying to keep the youngest one from innocently telling their story to fellow passengers, passing through checkpoint after checkpoint and having documents scrutinized, is a little more scary.

I can’t pretend that their experience matches the sheer terror of what it must have been like for the many thousands of other people who were fleeing Germany at the time; they were, after all, “pure” Germans. They were still, however, fleeing fascists and fearing for their lives and futures. It is a state of fear that I can hardly imagine myself enduring.

The experience seems to have been particularly traumatic for my uncle. These days, we hardly think of fourteen and fifteen year old boys as “men”, but back then in that time and place, he surely must have felt the weight of the world on his shoulders, feeling that he was the protector of his mother and young brother as the three of them made their way south among all the other refugees.

At my mother’s funeral several years ago, I saw my cousin, Marian, for the first time since we had both become adults with children of our own. She asked me if my father had ever spoken about Germany. I told her that he had quite often and that Oma had told me about it too. Marian, her sister Susan and her brother Eric, had never heard much about it; their father never talked about it when they were growing up, and they hadn’t been able to spend as much time with Oma and Opa as my sisters and I had. She told me that her father, now in his late seventies, had just begun to talk about it in halting, sketchy terms. I spent some time with her and told her the things I could remember. I’m afraid my poorly remembered version of the story told her little about her father’s life-shaping experience.

My grandfather managed to get a factory job in Astoria, Queens and had found a place for them to live on Corona Avenue in Elmhurst. In return for being the superintendent, he had an apartment in the basement of a small apartment building. Being a super in a building in those days was a bit more work than it is now: keeping the hallways and stairwells sparkling clean, installing screen windows in the spring, replacing them with glass storm windows in the fall, keeping the coal furnace in the basement burning through the winter. My father helped him in these tasks as Opa found whatever other work he could in order to make ends meet.

My grandparents lived in that building for the rest of their lives. When Opa was superintendent they lived in that basement apartment while the two boys found what jobs they could while pursuing their educations; my father became a pharmacist, my uncle an audio engineer. Later, after the boys were grown up and moved out, Oma and Opa moved to an apartment on the fourth floor. It was large enough for the two of them to live comfortably as well as entertain guests. There was a living room, a dining room, a bedroom and a small kitchen. Oma served a Christmas Eve dinner for my family every year consisting of homemade potato salad and several varieties of German sausages and cured meats.

The bedroom had an unobstructed view of the Manhattan skyline. When I was a small boy, Opa would give me a pair of binoculars and I would scan the distant skyscrapers for hours, silhouetted against the orange and red sky at dusk with the last rays of the sun glinting off the stainless steel crown of the Chrysler Building, and on into the evening when the lights of the Empire State Building and the Pan Am Building fascinated me.

After the war, in the late 1940’s, Opa had managed to scrape together enough money to buy a small cottage in Stony Brook, out in what was at the time, the distant reaches of the north shore of Long Island. A few years later he was able to buy the lot in back of the cottage creating a large wooded property with pretty gardens in front and on two sides of the house. In back of the house was a large lawn, shaded all summer long by towering oak trees.

It was a small, inexpensively constructed house that he improved over the years: excavating out a full basement, replacing the beaverboard walls with sheetrock, adding wood paneling to the living room, and adding a lovely sun parlor to the side that caught the afternoon sun. There was only one “official bedroom”, so a large dining room table was placed in the living room and the dining room was turned into a bedroom with a huge, in the eyes of a small child, maple bed and matching furniture: nightstands, a small table and lamp, a dresser and several well-stocked book cases. The sofa in the sun parlor opened up to a king sized bed as well.

There was enough room in the house for all six of their grandchildren, some by themselves, others paired by relative age, to take turns spending time each summer with Oma and Opa, going to the beach on most days, but sometimes fishing off the pier in the village or taking a drive in Opa’s Chevy to Montauk or Shelter Island. To me, this little cottage seemed a million miles away from the sidewalk on Corona Avenue back in Elmhurst. The air was fresh and clean, some mornings faintly carrying the salty scent of the Long Island Sound, and crickets and owls sang all through the night.

When my father bought the drugstore a few doors down from the apartment building, Opa retired and went to work for him. He dusted and stocked shelves and made deliveries, first using his own car, and then when my father was able to afford it, a specially painted Volkswagen beetle:

Newtown Pharmacy

Free Delivery

HAvemeyer 4-3000

During the summer, my father would hire a teenager for making the deliveries and Opa would spend July and August in Stony Brook with Oma, hosting the grandchildren as we rotated through. When I was old enough, I got the summer job, first riding all over Queens to make deliveries on a bicycle and then, after I got my license, the famously painted Volkswagen. The girls I dated in high school eventually got used to sitting at night in a car that stood out among the others parked alongside a small park near a Long Island Railroad overpass.

During the years that Opa worked for my father, a special bond formed between them. Opa was, I believe, my father’s closest friend in the world. As my teenage years progressed, my relationship with my father became strained and distant and we were never completely reconciled. I have always been envious of the relationship that my father had with his father.

My cousins lived in Huntington on Long Island. Oma and Opa were equally kind and generous and loving to all of their grandchildren, but because my sisters and I lived next door to them in the city most of the year, we got to spend more time with them. As the youngest of all the grandchildren, and the most spoiled, I probably got the most exclusive time with them.

When I was very young, Opa would stop by early in the morning on his way home from the deli with fresh breakfast rolls to bring me up to the apartment to have breakfast with him and Oma: orange juice, rolls with whipped butter and jelly, tea with milk and honey, and fruit. When I started school, I visited them in the afternoon when Oma would have afternoon cake and chilled leftover tea, again with milk and honey. I would spend a few hours with Oma until it was time for me to go home for dinner.

Oma, as everyone who knew her will remember her, was always a “Lady.” She was always dressed tastefully in dresses that she made herself. She spoke gracefully, as if she were a member of gilded age society. The rest of us were amused by this and teased her sometimes, thinking that she was trying to put on airs because we did, after all, live in the middle of middle-class Queens, and we had the accents to prove it. She did, however, have a good sense of humor, at least when it came to tolerating her youngest grandson’s childish pranks.

While Opa was a very quiet man who always retained a very strong German accent, Oma was very talkative and had barely a trace of an accent. To this day, I cannot understand how it was that this woman who came to America in her twenties and learned English as a second language could speak such grammatically perfect English with hardly any accent. At some point she may have taken lessons, because I remember her once asking me if I was studying “elocution” in school. I had to ask her what “elocution” meant. The one thing that she always had problems with was the “ch” sound which she could never do; it would always come out as “sh”. I used to play a game with her where I would say, “Oma, do you remember the name of that movie you took me to see? The one with the magic car?”

“Shitty Shitty Bang Bang,” she would reply, and then get flustered and scold me. I now realize that after the first twenty or thirty times I did that, she probably caught on and was play acting with me just so she could hear the scrawny little boy with the short pants and crew-cut laughing hysterically. So much for Oma putting on airs.

And she could talk. It became an in-joke in the family that you could have a conversation with Oma and not have to say a word for the first hour.

It was during those afternoons that Oma would tell me stories. The very first one I remember her telling me was “Hansel and Gretel” while I looked at illustrations through a tiny window in the back of a small plastic toy Bavarian cottage, clicking on the chimney to advance to the next picture.

As I got older, she tailored the stories to my age. Since they were from Hamburg, their apartment was decorated with pictures and mementos from the German city. There were several small nick nacks depicting Hummel. When I asked her about them, she told me the story of Hummel, the ill-tempered water carrier who was taunted by children who cried “Hummel Hummel”. Poor Hummel couldn’t chase them because he was weighed down by the water he was carrying so he would reply, “Mors mors,” a low-German phrase loosely translated as “asses, asses.”

Many years later, after both Oma and Opa were gone, one of Opa’s younger brothers came to visit America for the very first time and stayed with my parents. He was in his seventies and spoke no English. He seemed both surprised and disappointed that none of my father’s children knew German and that my father had to act as a translator. When he asked again, through my father, “No German at all?” I replied “Mors Mors.” With that, the old man’s face lit up with joy and he leapt across the room, pulled me out of my chair, and kissed me on the lips. It’s a Hamburg thing.

Oma told me the story of her trip out of Germany with my father and uncle many times. When I first heard it, I was quite young and her story was probably told the way my father remembered it: an exciting adventure. Gradually, as I got older, she added in more of the frightening aspects of the story.

She also told me about the sinking of the Titanic, about how she heard about it as a little girl in Germany when it happened. She told me about Scott’s expedition in Antarctica, followed by Richard Byrd’s flight over the South Pole.

I was captivated by her stories and asked her to tell them to me over and over again. None, however, captivated me as much as the story of Lindbergh’s flight over the Atlantic in 1927. She told me how no one had believed that a man could fly solo for so many hours and find his way across the unforgiving north Atlantic to Paris, but Lindbergh, through courage and conviction, had proven them all wrong. She was able to talk for hours about it as I eagerly listened to it again and again. She told me that when I was old enough, she would give me the book that Lindbergh himself had written and I could read it all for myself.

That day came when I was about ten or eleven years old and I was staying with them for my annual turn out in Stony Brook. In addition to finally being able to go out on the big fishing boat from Captree State Park on the south Shore with Opa, as my older cousin Eric had once done, she finally presented me with the book.

On the first night in the sun parlor, with the crickets singing outside the window screens, and after several games each of Clue and Parcheesi, Oma handed me her copy of Charles Lindbergh’s The Spirit of St. Louis. It was a huge intimidating book for me, but every night I climbed up onto the big maple framed bed that dwarfed me with Lindbergh’s book in my hand. I struggled reading it, but by the end of my two weeks that summer in Stony Brook, I had completed it. On the final Sunday afternoon while Opa was putting my suitcase in his car for my trip back to Elmhurst, I attempted to hand the book back to Oma. She pushed it back to me and told me that it was mine to keep.

For many years, Oma and Opa had been members of the Book-of-the-Month Club, and they were voracious readers. Although he was very quiet and usually let Oma do all the talking, my memories of those nights in Stony Brook include the picture of Opa sitting in the corner of the living room in his rocking chair, reading a book or a magazine while Oma played board games with me and told me stories in the sun parlor. He rocked very slightly in the chair as his eyes focused intently through his reading glasses. In later years he would also use a large, square framed magnifying glass.

Starting with The Spirit of St. Louis, Oma would periodically give me books to read, each time turning them into gifts that didn’t need to be returned. Finally, when I was a college-bound senior in High School, she said “Take any books you want, they are all yours.”

As my teenage years progressed, my interests diverged from what seemed to be the only acceptable field for my generation in my family: medicine. My relationship with the rest of my family, particularly my father, was a disaster, and there were times when I wondered how I could be such an oddball in this family that was producing medical professionals. Throughout all this, Oma flew in under the radar and nurtured my interest in literature. The books she gave me during those years included Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, Irving Stone’s The Agony and the Ecstasy, Rachel Carson’s The Sea Around Us and Silent Spring, Marchette Chute’s Shakespeare of London, Collected Short Stories of William Faulkner, Thomas Mann’s The Holy Sinner, Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, Edith Hamilton’s The Greek Way, and several volumes of Shakespeare, organized into tragedies and comedies.

I have a book entitled The Hemingway Reader next to me on my desk as I write this essay. It contains the complete text of The Torrents of Spring, The Sun Also Rises, eleven short stories, selections from five other novels, and selections from non-fiction works on Spain and Africa. On the blank page facing the inside cover is an inscription, hand written in a fine slightly Germanic looking script:

John & Frieda Bubbers

1953

Every book that Oma gave to me was so inscribed, with both their names and the year the book was acquired. At some point in time The Book-Of-The-Month Club, in cooperation with Scribner’s, sold a matched set of Fitzgerald and Hemingway novels. Each book has a blue hardcover and a black spine. Titles on the spines are embossed in silver and the author’s names in gold. Oma and Opa only had a few of these volumes. Over the years, I looked in used book stores, gradually filling out my collection. On one happy day when I was in college, I found both a Gatsby and a Farewell to Arms in a musty old used book store on Pearl Street in Albany. These books aren’t of much value, the ones I purchased that day were about two dollars apiece, but they are the two authors who matter the most to me, and my collection began with a gift from Oma and Opa. The completed set now sits on the mantle above the fireplace in my den.

When my sisters, my mother, and I were preparing for my father’s funeral, we were pulling out all the old family photo albums to use the pictures to decorate the funeral parlor. Here and there in the photos we found pictures from long past holidays where both Oma and Opa were present along with my father, my uncle and all my cousins. The pictures are striking. First of all, there’s the abundance of blond hair and blue eyes, blond enough and blue enough that I’m sure to have given tsoris to the grandmother of one of my old girlfriends. Even more striking, however are the physical features that you can see in all of us who have descended from Oma and Opa. A geneticist could use these photographs as lecture aids. My father resembles Oma. My uncle resembles Opa, although he still has some of Oma’s features. My sister Judy and my cousin Marion look like Oma. My cousin Eric and I look like Opa. My daughter Caroline looks like Judy, my father, and Oma. We do, in fact, have photographs of Caroline, Judy and my father each at about the age of five or six. With my father’s girlish blond hair style that mothers of all generations to like to inflict on their little boys, the children in all of these pictures from different generations look identical.

Opa died after a long battle with cancer when I was a sophomore in college. The protracted illness that had slowly killed Opa had been particularly difficult for my father and the death of his closest friend hit him very hard, heightening the disappointment he felt with me. At the time, I was away at college majoring in everything except pre-med. Oma died of a sudden heart attack several years later.

Years later, I now have questions for them that can never be answered. What was it that sent them back to Germany? Was it simply poverty, or was it more? How frightening was it for Oma without her husband, shepherding her two sons south to Italy and back to freedom? By the time I was born, they had completely embraced America. Opa went to visit Germany just once in the 1970’s and Oma never left America again after those eighteen months in Germany in the 30’s. She voted Republican in every single election from Eisenhower to Reagan.

The biggest mystery of all is the collection of books. There is a significant amount of Hemingway and Faulkner in this collection. The Hemingway is understandable. His writing style and subject matter crosses all cultural barriers and he is still one of the most popular writers of English around world. What I can’t understand is how a woman who was raised in Germany, who came to America in her twenties, and who learned English at the same age, could both tackle and embrace Faulkner. Reading Faulkner is not for lightweights and I doubt that these books were ever default selections for the book club. The contents page of The Collected Stories of William Faulkner as very faint checkmarks next to each item. The inscription on the book tells me they acquired it in 1953, after their sons had both been married and moved out; not that I can imagine either of them reading a book by Faulkner they didn’t have to. How I wish I could ask Oma what she thought of “A Rose for Emily.” It is only now that she has been gone for almost twenty-five years that I realize that she must have possessed a finely tuned ear for language and a love for literature and ideas.

Oma and Opa quietly lived a literary life, unnoticed by everyone but their youngest grandson to whom they gave their most precious gift: an enduring love of stories.

Tomorrow: Gifts Epilogue: Christmas 1979

Selections from Oma and Opa:

The Spirit of St. Louis

Reeve Lindbergh (Introduction). Scribner 2003, Paperback, 576 pages, $9.00

To Kill a Mockingbird (Harper Perennial Modern Classics)

Harper Lee. Harper Perennial Modern Classics 2006, Paperback, 336 pages, $8.33

Silent Spring

Linda Lear (Introduction). Mariner Books 2002, Paperback, 400 pages, $6.48

These current-day price wars conducted by giant retailers remind me the the transformation of the business my father was in for forty years.  He was, by profession, a pharmacist.  He was also a businessman.  He owned the neighborhood drugstore in our section of Elmhurst, Queens.  After working his way through pharmacy school, serving in the Army during the Korean war, and then working in other people’s stores for a couple of years, managed to buy the neglected and rundown business in his own neighborhood.  From the time he bought the business in the early fifties until he modernized it in the early sixties, the store looked very much like the one in Edward Hopper’s painting.  Hopper is perhaps best known for his handling of light and the thing that strikes me about this painting is the light streaming out of the store into the darkened street.  It’s 10 PM and everything is closed but the drugstore.  The doorway in the shadow next to the store leads to the stairway up to the second floor where the druggist’s children are sleeping and his wife is waiting for him to close the store and come home.

The picture also prominently shows two hanging show globes.  Even after my father completely modernized the store, he had two antique standing show globes that he kept in the store windows.  From time to time, he would empty them out and change the coloring.  I remember helping him in the back of the store, filling them with water and tincture of this and tincture of that.  For some reason, I never knew what the hell these things were and what purpose they served and I never even thought to ask him.  With the help of Wikipedia, I now know they are a traditional symbol for pharmacies dating back to at least the 16th century.

My father took his profession and his responsibility to his customers and our community very seriously.  He considered himself a healthcare provider and his customers looked to him that way.  If they had a cold, or a fever, or a scratch, or a sudden rash, they consulted him first.  If it was something easy, he handled it.  If they needed to see a doctor, he patiently soothed their fears so that they wouldn’t be too afraid to go.  When they had seen a doctor, while my father filled their prescriptions they often asked him all the questions about their condition and their medication that they had been too afraid to ask the doctor.  Some people even called him “Doc,” just like in the old movies.

While my father was a health practitioner, and no one who knew him ever had any doubt that he did what he did because he loved it, he was also running a retail business.  Over the course of my life I saw it become more and more difficult.  When I was born, it might very well have been his dream that I too would grow up to be a pharmacist and he would hand his business down to me.  By the time I was a teenager, he had seen where the retail pharmacy business was headed and realized there wasn’t much of a future in it.  At least in the way he thought a pharmacy should be run.

We lived in a middle class neighborhood.  My father’s business was successful, so we were probably better off than most people, but we were not rich either.  We lived modestly in an apartment above the store even when we could have bought a real house in a slightly better neighborhood, as some of the other merchants on our street did.

My father’s store was pretty much like any other neighborhood drugstore at the time.  On the shelves near the front of the store where the various sundries one expects: combs, hairbrushes, shaving cream, toothpaste, shampoo.  There was a small counter with cosmetics, a cigar humidor and a candy counter next the cash register.  At the back of the store, on a raised floor, dominating the entire space, was the reason the store existed, the prescription counter.  While my father’s store carried all the normal drug store items, it was the prescription counter that was, as we call it in retail business-speak, the primary revenue center.

Other than my grandfather, who worked in the store dusting stocking the selves, and running deliveries, my father never hired any additional staff.  Over the years he occasionally had a temporary pharmacist come in so that he could take some time, but that was very rare.

As the sixties turned into the seventies and the seventies turned into the eighties, the retail pharmacy business changed drastically.  Chains were established, very often by  pharmacists of my father’s generation who liked business management more than they liked pharmacology.  Chains battled, then merged and became ever larger.  They became large enough to negotiate prices directly with pharmaceutical companies and HMO’s, open stores with floor space three or four times the size of the traditional (now labeled “independent”) drugstores.  They sold everything from lawn furniture to motor oil to potato chips.  The prescription counter was still in the back of the store, but it was the loss leader that drew you into the store so you could buy all the higher profit margin non-prescription items in the front of the store.

Somehow, through all of this, my father remained successful and left on his own terms when he retired comfortably in the early nineties.  The key may have been that he never actually tried to compete with the chains the way they competed with each other.  He didn’t fill up his store with aisles of toys, housewares, and car fresheners.  Instead he focused on filling prescriptions personally while his customers waited.  I remember seeing him behind the counter when the store was busy, deftly filling one prescription after another, banging out the labels two-finger style on his Hermes Rocket, and talking to his customers.  I may be exaggerating, but I don’t think anyone ever had to wait more than ten minutes to get their prescription filled.  So, while the chains used the prescription counter to get customers in the door to buy other stuff, my father used the prescription counter to get them to keep coming back.

He was the last of his breed.  The other neighborhood drugstores in our area either went out of business or got acquired by the chains.  Newtown Pharmacy at 91-09 Corona Avenue in Elmhurst was the last to go.  One fact is telling:  When he retired, he didn’t sell the business, he sold the building.

Last week I needed a prescription filled.  I brought it to a nearby CVS in the morning.  I was told by a pharmacist technician who didn’t know my name to come back in the afternoon to pick it up.  That afternoon when I came back, she handed me the prescription and I made my way back to the front of the store.  I’m sure that same pharmacist technician won’t be there the next time I get a prescription filled.  On the way to the cashier, I picked up some blank recordable DVD’s, some AAA batteries for my wireless mouse, a spare light bulb for the lamp in my office, and a six-pack of Arizona Iced Tea.

As I stood in line waiting to check out I understood how my father stayed in business and competed successfully against the giants, why customers old an new brought there their prescriptions to him instead of the supermarket.  He provided personal, human service and didn’t treat healing and wellness like commodities.

These experiences stimulated all my city-boy senses senses and whenever I read a piece of writing that effectively captures them, I am transported back to those places in my memory.  Some of these places have shown up in my writing.  My young couple in “Only Love Can Break Your Heart” spend a night camping in Acadia National Park. Another couple hike up to Indian Cliffs in Ten Mile River Boy Scout Camp, near Narrowsburg, New York in my story “Indian Summer.”  How I end up mixing fictional couples with boy scout memories in stories with romantic themes is perhaps a topic for psycho-analysis.  As my late father might have said, “Boy Scout camp was never like this!”

I wrote “Indian Summer” in a hotel room in Bellevue, Washington.  It was early spring and I was inspired by the bluest sky I’ve ever seen, the towering evergreens and the sight of Mount Rainer’s face glistening in the late afternoon sun.  I sat down at the computer and challenged myself to write something that captured the natural world.  I imagined a couple walking alone in the woods.  My first attempt was to write it as a narrative poem.  I’m not really much of a poet, so after about an hour of fumbling around, I switched to prose, and it started working for me.  After about three sentences, I realized that I was aping Hemingway, but decided to press on anyway.

Although I was in Washington State at the time, my mind went back to memories of hiking with my boy scout troop.  A favorite destination for a hike in summer camp at Ten Mile River in New York, was Indian Cliffs.  The view at the top is of a bend in the Delaware River.

I imagined my couple hiking to Indian Cliffs on the trail that starts near Camp Kunatah in the Rock Lake section of the reservation.  Old memories of the sights, the smell of the pines, the feel of the earth and rock beneath my feet came back to me.

After I finished the first draft a few hours later, I read what I had written.  While I was proud that it was quite a lovely account of couple walking through the woods, it really wasn’t much of a story.  While it seems that I had captured one of those all to rarely “perfect days” that we experience and remember forever, there was no plot, no conflict.

I set it aside for a week and thought about it.  The piece did indeed capture a perfect day in the lives of the couple in the story.  Like any other perfect, idyllic day, it cannot last for ever.  However blissful they may be, the real world eventually intrudes and that perfect day must come to an end.

The Hemingway-like style of the story also made me think about Hemingway’s early stories, themselves sensuous trips into the natural world.  “The Big Two Hearted River” came to my mind along with its protagonist, Hemingway stand-in Nick Adams.  The “soldier’s home” theme got me thinking about what was different now from when Hemingway’s time.

The war in Iraq was about two years old at the time.  I live in a part of the country where there are a lot of service families.  In some of them, both the husband and wife were in some branch of the military or members of the reserve.  I guitar-playing acquaintance of my was a lieutenant colonel in the army and his wife was in the reserve.  She had recently been called up and deployed to Iraq.

Another friend of mine teaches English at a community college in upstate New York and had been writing to me about some of her students, some just returned, some on their way to Iraq.

I had found the element of the real world that intrudes into that idyllic perfect day where my couple are the only two people in the world.  I went through the story and carefully dropped in little bits of narration and dialogue that just hinted of my newfound theme.  After that I took a few more passes through the story, ruthlessly cutting as much as I could to make every single word that was left the essence of the the piece.  Although I didn’t quite make it, my goal was to cut it to exactly 1000 words.

The story is now four year old and as time has passed, and the war drags on, I’ve this story has grown on me and I consider it one of my finest pieces.

“Indian Summer” is available in Cantaraville Four.

Captains Courageous

Rudyard Kipling. Echo Library 2007, Paperback, 108 pages, $2.94

Nick Adams Stories

Ernest Hemingway. Scribner 1981, Paperback, 272 pages, $7.00

These live videos are of the quality you’d expect from that era. They also appear to be from before the release of their only album since I can hear guitarist/keyboardist Doug White playing in the darkness. Doug left the band just as the album was coming out and musically, they continued as a trio afterwards. Val’s also really playing up the little schoolgirl act (twenty years before Britney Spears, and with a hundred times more musical talent). I remember her toning that part of her act down as the band progressed and acquired a growing, loyal fan base.

Maybe you had to be there in the dark, on the hot sweaty dance floor, nervous about the new wave of conservatism and general uptightness that was sweeping the nation at the time, to truly appreciate them. Maybe they are best left as fond memories. But the music that stays with us is the music that evokes a time and place and makes us remember who we once were, wistfully thinking about what might have been.  And to reafirm the things that once mattered so desperately to us.

Thank you Al, Todd, Steve, Doug, and especially, Val.  You’re all on my iPod.

Shotgun (cover of a Motown classic)

I Need to be Told (Fear of Strangers Original)

“You have to actually say the words.”

One realization does dawn upon the death of the second parent, namely that you’ve now moved into the green room to the River Styx. You’re next. Another thing about parental mortality: No matter how much you’ve prepared for the moment, when it comes, it comes at you hot, hard and unrehearsed.

Those words introduce Christopher Buckley’s memoir, published yesterday in The New York Times Magazine.  Author Kathryn Harrison has written about traumatic events providing a “before and after” for their victims’ lives.  Most of us will not ever know the traumas she has explored in her books, but we do, all of us, have a before and an after.

Growing Up Buckley

While They Slept

Kathryn Harrison. Ballantine Books 2009, Mass Market Paperback, 288 pages, $4.11

Close friends who have known me for a long time know the truth and maybe even know the things that have inspired my stories, but I’ve given up trying to convince acquaintances that my short stories are not “thinly veiled autobiography.”  They never believe me anyway.  Instead, I now just say everything’s autobiographical and let them think that I’ve lived twenty or so lives of assorted genders, proclivities, and orientations, that I’ve been married and divorced at least six times,  that I’m a drunk,  that I’m a stoner, and that I killed a man in Reno (“Yeah, that’s the ticket!”).

“Come Together” is now the third story I’ve had published in Cantaraville and a fourth has been accepted for a future issue.  I’m very grateful that publisher Cantara Christopher and editor Michael Matheny have been receptive to my work.  As any writer of fiction will tell you, it’s a cruel world out there in the slush piles, and far more often than not, you are confronted with either rejection or indifference.  I can’t decide which one of those two I prefer.  To find an editor who seems tuned in to what you are trying to accomplish is like finding a long lost friend.

The best part about being published in Cantaraville is to see my stories surrounded by the work of so many fine writers and poets from around the world.  It’s like living in a really nice neighborhood with beautiful homes, fabulous restaurants, and a sparkling nightlife.

Also in Cantaraville Six:

L. Ward Abel, Robert Louis Bartlett, Amelia Beamer, J.L. Bramble, John Bruce, Bryan Costales, Anna Devine, John Green, Yelena Dubrovin, William Falo, Timothy Gager, Erin Hopkins, Joshua Landers, Carol Mann, Benjamin Nardolilli, Ron Singer, Marilyn Urena, Christian Ward, Clive Warner, Andrew Washton, and R. Hilary Weber

It’s interesting how both writers took what was essentially the same material and how differently they used it.  Both writers pierced through the facade of middleclass contentment to show the underlying anomie of our society.  But that’s where the similarity ends.

I remember reading Updike’s Couples for the first time and almost immediately recognizing my parents in his characters, so much so that I started trying to figure out who among Methodist Church’s Couples Club were Mom and Dad screwing around with.  The trials and tribulations of marriages and middle-class family life was Updike’s landscape in almost all of his exquisite short stories and in those novels for which he will be remembered.  As for infidelity, I think Couples was a bit over the top and he did better in his more intimate Marry Me: A Romance.   His nearly career spanning series of short stories chronicling the Maples, collected in Too Far to Go, watches a young couple married in the late fifties, raise children, navigate the tumultuous sixties, and finally break up in the seventies.  Along the way we see the couple gradually grow apart, tentatively cheat on one another, engage in full-grown adultery, and finally reconcile everything by divorcing.  At each point in time, whatever they are doing seems like the right thing to do.

When Updike cracked through the facade, what he found and what he revealed to us was human frailty, and he portrayed it gently and with a tenderness that no matter how exasperated we were with his characters, we still could also have affection for them.  I think this has much to do with Updike himself and how he lived his life.  The Maple’s marriage seems to have lasted about as long as Updike’s first marriage.  I don’t want to insinuate that the Maple’s stories are a thinly disguised autobiography.  I don’t believe they are, but I’m sure that his life and that of his neighbors in Ipswich certainly informed the emotional journeys of his characters.  His suburban landscape was colored by his own fairly gentle and contented life and his continued belief that inner peace was possible, whether it be found in taking the kids to the beach in the summer, having an adulterous affair, or maintaining an active commitment to his Protestant faith.

Cheever, on the other hand, cracked through the facade and found darkness.  One only has to look at his short story, “The Enormous Radio” to see the darkness.  In that story, a young couple buys a radio for their apartment.  The wife discovers that the radio can pick up the conversations of all their neighbors, and listens day after day to the dark secrets of the people in their apartment building.  It’s ugly, it’s prurient, it’s shameful.  It’s not good for our young couple either.

After Cheever died, his daughter’s memoir, Home Before Dark, revealed that Cheever had lived a very haunted life.  An alcoholic, and also bisexual, he inflicted much pain on his family through emotional abuse.  This completes the contrast between Cheever and Updike that shows up in their work.  Where Updike’s white middle-class men are befuddled by life and by aging, Cheever’s become angry and violent.

The beautiful part of art is that we can look at these two very different renderings of the same landscape and see the truth in both of them.

As for me, although I dated a few Gingers, I married a Mary Ann.  And while I listen to the Beatles more than the Stones, at middle-aged guitar jams I can still rock out on “Brown Sugar.”

Cheever

Blake Bailey. Knopf 2009, Hardcover, 784 pages, $15.95

Too Far to Go

John Updike. Fawcett 1982, Mass Market Paperback, 256 pages, $4.00

Marry Me

John Updike. Ballantine Books 1996, Paperback, 320 pages, $8.26

The Stories of John Cheever

John Cheever. Vintage 2000, Paperback, 704 pages, $10.91

Home Before Dark (Contemporary Classics (Washington Square Press))

Susan Cheever. Washington Square Press 1999, Paperback, 274 pages, $1.90

That’s how it was for children then.  If the soundtrack of my childhood was provided by the Beatles, the quiet rumbling counterpoint was Vietnam.  I was far too young to truly understand or to be directly affected by the war, but there was no doubt that it mattered to the adults and near-adults around me.  It mattered to the neighbor’s son who got drafted and the other neighbor’s son who volunteered.  It mattered to the older brothers of my and my sister’s playmates who were old enough to be facing the draft.  It mattered to the Methodist church youth group and boy scout troop whose young leaders considered their options, some choosing to serve, some choosing Canada.  They were boys I looked up to, who carried the flag in the Queens Anniversary Day parade, who organized volleyball games at church picnics, who taught me how to hold a baseball bat, and who taught me how to tie a square knot.

Although I was too young to get drafted and both my older siblings were girls, there wasn’t one circle of relationships in my young life – family, school, neighborhood, church – that was left untouched by the war.  And not one adult in my life was left unaffected.  In the stoic silence of a friend’s father when a name was mentioned, in the joy in that same father’s voice when talking about his son’s imminent transfer stateside, in the funereal mood in another family’s living room presided over by a framed eight by ten on the mantelpiece, in my parents’ dinner table conversations about this or that person’s son, the war affected me in ways I am only coming to understand now.

These wars that we are fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan are not ours the way Vietnam was.    The men and woman who fight, and  their families, are but a small segment of our society.  They come from the rural regions, and from inner cities where military service offered a way out.  They come from families with patriotic traditions of service.  As of now, there are 140,000 troops in Iraq and over 32,000 in Afghanistan.  At the end of 1968, in contrast, there were of half a million troops in Vietnam.  During the Vietnam era, the draft raised over 2 million men for service.  As unfair as the process was, with deferments less easy to obtain by the poor and minorities, it still reached deeper into our society.  Today, most of us remain untouched by the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

These wars of today are given perfunctory coverage in the evening news, if they are covered at all.  The stories of the soldiers, their anguish and their terror suffered in our names, while we keep up with Angelina and Brad and Jennifer, are never heard.  The scars, physical and emotional, are invisible to most of us.

Ryan Smithson is a soldier in the Army Reserves from upstate New York who served in Iraq from 2004 to 2005.  Upon returning home, he began writing personal essays, recounting his time in Iraq and what it was like returning home.  Several of his essays have been published on the web and next month, his book, Ghosts of War: The True Story of a 19-Year-Old GI, will be published by Harper-Collins.

Ryan’s essay “A Little Taste of Death” appeared in the Summer/Fall 2007 issue of the Oregon Literary Review, his essay “Silence and Silhouettes” appeared in Shattercolors Literary Review, and his essay “Hard Canvas” appeared in Identity Theory.

Ghosts of War

Ryan Smithson. Collins 2009, Hardcover, 336 pages, $4.93

In my job search I had been traveling from one modern glass box to another.  This was an image from an earlier, more personal time.  The storefront was glass and black, with striped awnings.  There were details in masonry and fine guilt-edged lettering and above all a simple symmetry of design that was both firm and tasteful.  In the windows of the storefront were the latest hardcover offerings for the coming holiday season.  Somewhere on one of the floors above the store I imagined was the office where Max Perkins pored over manuscripts from his discoveries: Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Wolfe.

I stood there for a few minutes, catching my breath, opening a few more buttons on my coat in an effort to cool down.  People passed by me, taxi’s and bicycle messengers sped by in the street in front of me, taking no notice of the masterpiece of architecture in their midst.

But it wasn’t just the architecture.  It was a place where great books had been published.  Every young writer imagines walking by a city bookstore and seeing their book displayed in the front window.  My writing dream had temporarily been set aside during that tumultuous year when I was trying to find my first job and I was among the eleven percent of us who were unemployed.

The dream came back for a few minutes that day.  Then I had to move on.  I had to get to an interview in a glass box.

Epilogue…

That beautiful building still stands, but it is no longer owned by Scribner’s Sons.  The store is now owned by skin care and cosmetics retailer Sephora.  The publishing company itself is an imprint owned by Simon & Schuster.

The entire publishing industry is undergoing a complete implosion.  All the major publishing houses, Simon & Schuster included, are laying off employees and severely cutting back on new acquisitions.  That dream of seeing your book in the window of a brick and mortar storefront has become a dream of a past age.

Here’s an article from Time about the current state of publishing, and here’s an essay about the new publishing paradigm by writer and publisher Cantara Christopher.

Updated 1/25:

Yet another take on publishing in the twenty-first century at Ward Six.

From “From Books, New President Found Voice“, Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

Photograph by Caroline Bubbers

Election day of 2004 found me in, of all places, Austin, Texas.  I had been working as a contractor at the time, designing a dimensional database for an Austin-based company.  That night I watched the election returns with some co-workers at a jazz club on Sixth Street.  The place was empty except for us, the bartender, a single waitress, and the four musicians on stage.  The sound was turned all the way down on the multiple televisions scattered throughout the club, but the CNN graphics told the story well enough.  It was going to be close again, but we were going to also lose again.  I couldn’t decide whether I was shocked that we had re-elected the man I believed to be the worst president in history, or it was completely predictable.  I admit that I had been frustrated by the ineptitude of John Kerry’s campaign.  It followed in a long line of inept campaigns:  Al Gore’s, Mike Dukakis’s, George McGovern’s.  Still, the sheer incompetence of George W. Bush had been stunning in itself.  We were already embroiled in a preemptive war that we had started based on provocations that at best had been imagined and at worst, manufactured.  Our president had embarrassed us all around the world.  He embarrassed us every time he opened his mouth.  Clearly, anyone could be better.

Little did I know that the worst was yet to come.

I was still working in Austin the following August when Hurricane Katrina swept through the gulf and devastated New Orleans.  New Orleans, just like Austin, was among the few places I had traveled to on business over the years that I had fallen in love with.  I guess it’s a weakness for places with thriving musical scenes, great restaurants, and a unique local cultural identities that defy the force of suburban blandness.  (Yeah, I know I live in Columbia, MD).  The cruel, seemingly vindictive, neglect that caused New Orleans to become a post-apocalyptic nightmare enraged me, even while my conservative business associates were making callous, even racist wisecracks about the misery in New Orleans.  On September 3, 2005, I wrote to a friend:

I first visited New Orleans in 1994 when I went there for a week to work a Computer Associates Trade show. It was love at first sight. The music, the food, the architecture, the way people talk, the pride and love that the they have for their history and culture. I was back there many times over the years and it became my favorite place in the whole world. I’ve got no illusions about the poverty and crime there — there were parts of the city that were very dangerous — but I still loved the place.

I’ve been in a slow burn this whole week. Having traveled a bit around America and having met lots of folks on all sides of the political spectrum, I have a pretty positive opinion of the generosity and decency of the American people when they know the truth. I know that all of us would have been fine this week if the entire country ground to a halt while every single plane, bus and truck in the land were sent there to rescue people. All that was needed for that to happen was for the president to pick up the phone and to call a few CEO’s. They would have done it and the rest of us would have managed. I should not have been able to get on my plane back from Austin last night because the plane I was on should have been flying refugees, food or medicine. Instead there are dead children on the floor of the convention center where I once pitched my software. They weren’t killed by looters or by the “armed thugs” on Magazine Street, or by an “act of God”. They were killed by that vacuous, amoral idiot in the White House. Born-again Christian? That’s a crock. Somehow, in all that time he claims he spent reading the gospels, he missed part where it says that we are here to take care of one another. I guess it’s easy to miss, since Jesus only says it two or three times on each page.

Katrina was, of course, the turning point in George W. Bush’s relationship with the American people.  It exposed the corruption, the cronyism, the incompetence, the contempt for the basic values on which this country was founded.  But it had been going on for years.  Sometimes it was obvious, but most often it wasn’t.  It was a gradual slide that happened over decades.

That night in Austin, I was reminded of an election night, long ago, and in another city.  I was young, idealistic, and enraptured by my beautiful and equally young and idealistic dinner companion.  We had no idea what our lives would be, who we would become, or even if we would be together in the future.  Such is the stuff of college romances.   The Italian restaurant in downtown Albany, like the club in Austin twenty-four years later, was empty but for us.  It was “our place,” and I’m cursing myself because I can’t recall the name of it.  There was a small black and white television set  on the bar that night, that I could see over my date’s shoulder.  We didn’t pay much attention to it during our dinner.  Instead, we enjoyed our veal marsala, and our cabernet, and the family who owned the restaurant and knew us, served us with warm quiet smiles, leaving us to ourselves.

Suddenly, something on the TV caught my eye.  One of the candidates, our candidate, was making a speech.  It was far too early in the evening for anyone to be making a concession.  I called out for the sound to be turned up, and we watched in shocked silence as Jimmy Carter conceded to Ronald Reagan.  In retrospect, I guess we should not have been shocked.  The polls in the weeks leading up to the election had been discouraging and we should have expected it, but as I remember it now, we were stunned.  Perhaps it was the decisiveness of the defeat.  Maybe it was the fact that we had both grown up in liberal families in New York City that left us so unprepared.  My date was inconsolable and I’m ashamed now that my first thoughts were about how this was going to affect the rest of my evening.  For better and worse, it affected the rest of our lives.

What had happened, which seemed disorienting at first, was a fundamental change in values.  “Government can’t solve the problem, government is the problem,” declared Ronald Reagan.  At the time, this played well to a population facing record unemployment, high interest rates, and recurring energy crises.  As a policy statement, over the years it came to mean, government shirking its fundamental responsibilities in the name of privatization.  “Government can’t do anything right, they screw everything up,” became the mantra, and everyone, especially the most vulnerable people in society were forced to fend for themselves.  The free market was God, whether you manufactured refrigerators, built cars, sold mortgages, or provided healthcare.  Somehow, if you needed a coronary bypass operation, you were supposed to shop around for the best price as if you were buying a mini-van.  And the Kafkaesque experience of dealing with getting HMO to actually pay for a claim is supposed to be better than dealing with a government “bureaucracy”?  One thing I’ve noticed over the years is that while dealing with health insurance companies has gotten decidedly worse, dealing with the DMV has gotten easier.

But that’s just so much liberal whining.  We learned that trees cause pollution and we were lectured about Cadillac driving welfare queens that no one could actually find.  Instead of expecting the State to coddle us, it was entrepreneurship that would lead the way.  It was the golden age of the entrepreneur.   Entrepreneurship certainly had created innovation in the past and had made this country great.  But just how many of us need to become entrepreneurs?  All 300 million of us?  And what about the two thirds of all new businesses that fail?  Our needs are modest.  Most of us simply want honest work that we can do proudly and allows us to support our families.  Living truly enriched lives, loving our families and instilling compassionate values in our children, improving our communities and the lives of our fellow citizens were given lip-service while we made Donald Trump’s The Art of the Deal a bestseller and CEO’s became rock stars.

Instead of improving our society, by making it more just, more fair, more humane, we embarked on a massive redistribution of wealth, which conservatives deny they perpetrated.  The wealth of this nation has been redistributed from the vast middle class that was born in the years following World War Two and had survived until the early 1980′s, to an increasingly smaller and smaller minority who had the money to buy lower taxes, and increased protection by the government.  Ronald Reagan may have been right in declaring “Government is the problem,” but in a way he never intended.

Over time, the changes permeated our society.  Liberal  became a pejorative term, as used not only by southern conservative republicans, but by newscasters and pundits.  Even liberals started calling themselves progressives just to avoid the L-word.  The Vietnam War became a glorious cause, not a horrible mistake, and the one lesson the president had learned from it was not to give up in the face of overwhelming opposition from his own people, not to mention international allies.  Our failure in Vietnam was because we surrendered became the commonly accepted wisdom.

It all became a nightmare to me.  I had seen all those events through a child’s eyes.  The war, the civil rights movement, a nation struggling to make itself more perfect.  As an adult I saw that nothing had been learned at all.  Questioning an immoral and unjustified war was an act of treason.

And so on that election night in Austin in 2004, I wondered how it was possible that we had re-elected a man who had already proven himself completely unsuitable to the job.  And I remembered that night in Albany, when it all began, when the world suddenly became out of kilter in my eyes.  When I was told, “You don’t matter, your values are false, everything you think and feel is immoral.”

It took Katrina, and all the rest of the past four years of this disaster — torture, neglected veterans, illegal wire-taps, the assault on the environment, the economic meltdown — to show just how far we have gone off track.

But there have been things that I never believed I’d see.  A woman mounted a serious campaign for the presidency.  Even more surprising, she was defeated by an African-American man.  And then that African-American weathered still raging storms of fear and racism to a decisive victory.  I don’t think that young couple in the Albany restaurant, as naive and idealistic as they were, could ever have imagined that.  Although I can’t really speak for what she now believes, I’ll take a chance and try to say whether we can imagine it now.

Yes we can.

The essay was another example of a skill the Benedict showed in her novel Almost.One reads a story about a person completely different than oneself — different age, different gender, different background — and yet when the time for the emotional epiphany comes, you suddenly become aware of something personal that you’ve been carrying around with you.  If there is one single goal that I have in my owning writing, it’s to have my readers experience the same thing.

Benedict’s essay was finally published by Daedalus this past summer.  Rick Green of the Hartford Courant has posted a reprint on his blog (hopefully with all the appropriate permissions).

Also recommended:

Almost

Elizabeth Benedict. Mariner Books 2002, Paperback, 272 pages, $0.01

Fiction

• “A Couple” – Cantaraville Two (also available in the eBook Store)
• “Absolutely Fourth Street” – The Square Table
• “Bonnifer” – Lily (also available in the eBook Store)
• “Calvin’s Monster” – Word Riot
• “Indian Summer” -  Cantaraville Four
• “Truths” – The Square Table
• “Natural Selection” – Cantaraville Eight (also available in the eBook Store)
• Short Story Cycle – in progress
  • “Brothers” – The Square Table
  • “Come Together” – Cantaraville Six

Memoir

• “After the Fire” – Oregon Literary Review (also available in the eBook Store)
• “Gifts” – Seeker Magazine
• “The Persistence of Gravy” – Static Movement

Poetry

• “On The Beach” – The Green Silk Journal
• “Compartments” – Mississippi Crow, Issue 7, available in print and download here.
• “The Clouds, A Highway…and Joni” – The Shine Journal
• “A Victorian in 1990″ – Loch Raven Review. Also anthologized in the annual edition:
  
  

  Loch Raven Review – Four

  Jim Doss. Loch Raven Press 2009, Paperback, 316 pages, $14.95

Early Fiction

My first published stories appeared in Tangent, the student literary journal at SUNY Albany in 1981 and 1982.  They were my only published stories until 2005 when I started writing again.  During that long silence I always intended to write again, and I made a point of transcribing all my early writings from typed manuscripts to electronic format, beginning with Wordstar on my first computer a Kaypro II.  Over the years I converted the files as word processing technology advanced.  Here they are, with a couple of vintage cover scans in adobe pdf: Early Stories.