From "Letters and Emails"...

Fictional Extract

Sometimes Fate is closer than you think.

I had always envisioned eventual life on a farm not a suburb, perhaps after making my mark as a professional biologist and professor, and had full authority to live as I wished, and where I wished.

At the time (school), I imagined going back to the near-deserted Adirondack community overlooking a large Lake where much of my father’s family, the ones whose stories I knew, had lived out their lives and written their books.

There were colleges, wars, and businesses, and affairs regular and irregular, and young men grown to bearded geezers you would never have guessed were once young. There were lawyers and Congressional Representatives and cowboys and stockbrokers and soldiers and ne’er-do-wells and bumpkins, and Rectors and scientists, and MIAs, and baby-sitters who had displaced wives and were mostly never mentioned out loud.

Eventually, that farm named Sugar Hill, had been separated from its orchards and acreage, and its Victorian mansion converted to a B & B.

And the concentric rings of headstones at Woods Dale Cemetery whose center obelisk recalled a General and Congressman, radiating outward to the present. Of course, there were graves missing of the various exiles and divorcées.

In short, much like any other kindred, once the surface is scratched. Delving deeper than the inscriptions on each headstone, often leads in directions that belie first impressions

…

A formerly close friend (who aimed at becoming a literary editor and my wife) happened to get back in touch and, after I had moved a large, airy gardener’s building from another farm and rebuilt it, told me she could see me in the outbuilding with its bright multi-pane windows on all sides, at my desk wearing tweed, while I wrote.

With leather patches on the elbows.

Cliché, of course. No one wears that anymore, although (in confidence) I might. Don’t tell.

None of this was mentioned during my dozen years as farm-hand and winemaker. People don’t accept you if you mention too much detail.

Those years have been bracketed by wine awards in San Francisco, so the time was well spent.

Anyhow.

…

Writing was never something I meant, or wanted, to do.

It was therapy the way a good bluesman cries through his music. Feels good when its done. It is the instant of relief, not the hope of a recording contract, that drives a keeper.

Lose the anxiety over not being read, much less understood, don’t do it to pay the bills, or make a name for yourself. If you write enough, by simple statistics and mass action, something good will eventually come out.

(This is what I tell myself).

…