Swimming Close to Shore

I have just retired after nearly 11 years working with my wife as an inn owner and chef in New Hampshire and 30 years as an advertising salesperson in the media business. My goal now is to live out my days as a writer. I am going to write every day, for as many years as I am able.

All I have ever wanted to be is a writer. The desire dates to seventh grade English Class and the teacher, Ms. Persons. I wrote a story called The Incredible Revelation that I typed out on a little orange typewriter in my room. First I showed the story to my mother. I remember her saying, "You wrote this?" It was mother's idea to show it to my teacher. So I brought it to school and dropped it with Ms. Persons on my way to another class. Later that day as I was moving through the corridor between classes Ms. Persons was waiting for me outside of her room waving my story high in the air with a big smile across her face. "You have made my day!" she announced in the crowded hallway. She published my story in the school paper.

And that was that. I was going to be a writer.

[I can share The Incredible Revelation next. I have the original, of course. After 53 years it has picked up some convincing wear, and developed a nice, faded patina!]

Funny how things change. I fell in love in college and was probably influenced by the sense of responsibilties that might derive from commitment and possibly marriage. I wanted to follow my friends that were becoming stockbrokers and bankers and real estate salespeople to New York. My family could not afford to keep me in some sort of bohemian existence there (or anywhere) while I pursued writing. I was not keen to work nights in a survivor job like waiting tables; I had been a waiter and bartender through college, also a reporter for the local radio station. Missing all the fun while working nights and weekends was over for me. I would get married a couple of years later, becoming a provider. My father counseled a professional compromise between my creative ambitions and three squares on the table: advertising. I took his advice and landed a junior account executive position in a good New York ad agency and the rest...

...was all good. I departed the ad agency business after a couple of years because I did grow weary of the number crunching that defaulted to the junior account person. By then, however, the agency had invested considerably in my professional training, including extensive coaching on effective business writing, which proved invaluable throughout my career. I remember my first boss giving me a writing assignment. "Write a memo," he said. I presented a two or three page treatise on whatever-the-topic. "Excellent writing," he remarked. "But nobody is going to read it." Thereafter just about everything I wrote began, "The purpose of this memo is..." And if it did not begin that way explicitly, it began that way in my head.

I tacked away from advertising to print media. By then, a mere two years into my career, I was a business person, raised by account executive wolves. So my entry into print media was as an advertising salesperson. I loved it. I worked for magazines and newspapers, hanging around the printed page, occasionally rubbing shoulders with real writers, taking customers to lunch. For one three-year stretch in my ad sales career I reported to an editor. He would mark up my letters to clients and prospects, which taught me a great deal. He was a stickler for the word that versus the word which, which he felt was overused. That, in his estimation, was to be applied to matters of fact. You can see his influence above in the second paragraph:

I wrote a story called The Incredible Revelation that I typed out on a little orange typewriter in my room.

Some may quibble. Whatever, that has been that for me ever since.

In 1995, with three other guys, I started an internet ad sales company to represent the abundance of new content sprouting up on the world wide web. Thousands of web sites. Tens of thousands of web sites! In those days there were no Word Presses or Ghost.orgs - or Facebooks, or YouTubes or Twitters. Web publishers had to be html coders, building web sites from scratch. And build them they did, from A to Z. Most of these web sites were small, but they were (and remain) the crill of the internet, the essential nutrient of life forms much bigger themselves, such as Google.

The internet experience accounted for about half of my years as an ad sales person. For all of it I had a front row seat from which to watch, and occasionally act in, the premiere of a new information age. If you describe yourself as a content junkie, as I might, it was a trip. I think it will be worth writing about some day, but in a different space from this.

This space, I say, is for musings on life, love, food (another passion, which is how we became innkeepers, and I, eventually, the chef) and the weather. I grant you it is a somewhat all-inclusive list if you consider the size of each bucket - life, love, food, weather - but it will be absent some things. There may be sad moments, and muses of regret, but I doubt there will be hateful moments, and I will avoid laying out any personal angst, though I am not without it, naturally. As I muse on life, I may muse on death. But there will be no musing on politics or world events. We will find what we need here in the Monadnock Region of southwestern New Hampshire, in its small towns, markets and cafes, its country inns, and among its people who have been neighbors for years.

I remember a new priest to our parish, back when I lived in Connecticut, getting into the pulpit for his first sermon and after saying good morning and offering hope that the words of his mouth and the mediations of his heart would be pleasing to the Lord he began by placing his hands on the edge of the pulpit and leaning out towards the congregation to say, "I suppose I should start by telling you what I believe."

Consider this that sort of introduction. I have always wanted to be a writer. It was a lack of genuine artistic commitment, the allure of other shiny things, the family, fear, being perfectly content otherwise, plus whatever else - which was not all bad - that kept me from it until now. It was not the fates that did it, but the choices I made. But I have managed to stay close to the shoreline of my writing ambition. Within sight of its beaches. And if you know the pleasure of warm sand under your feet and the sun on your back, then you know how I feel right now.