Entry 06

“It’s so easy to describe the leaves of autumn
And it’s oh so easy in the spring
But down through january and february it’s a very different thing.” 

From “A Sense of Wonder.” By Van Morrison

Friends have asked me: “Why are you blogging Wayne”?

“The short answer is I’ve gotten into the bad habit of putting too much time into writing on face book and not taking myself very seriously as a writer.”

“Are you a serious writer”?

“Not yet. I’ve been too lazy to put the time into a practice. I guess the blog is about taking my writing practice more seriously. Thanks for asking.” 

It’s not really about being lazy so much as it is about having a lot to say about the world but not having confidence in my ability to say it well enough that other people would want to hear it. That insufficient confidence is constant in spite of the way my imagination, intrigued by the world, wants to explain itself. My friends compliment me over and over and tell me they love to read even my Facebook posts. There is a part of me that appreciates the encouragement in their generous words and another part that doesn’t believe them for a second.

My first experience of feeling an intense sense of wonder at the world was at the same time stymied by my fear of the world. It is one of my first clear memories from that early period of this child’s life where memory, though vivid, is bracketed in the darkness of lost memories and has no chronological frame of reference. I couldn’t tell you how old I was if you beat with the ugly stick. 

What I remember is that I was dressed for church on a Sunday morning in spring and sitting on the porch steps beside my father’s Rose garden. It could even have been Easter morning. I was still young but old enough to have already learned the safety I could make for myself by getting dressed and out of the house fast enough to avoid the tears and mayhem my parents and five siblings were inflicting on each other in the kitchen behind me.

Though most of the garden still had the last night’s frost crystals standing up in the slowly thawing mud. Closer to the house the ice was gone, the mud was wet with the melt water and daffodils, crocus and hyacinth were poking first green shoots through the shiny surface. As I watched there began a pulsing in a small patch of the mud beside me that soon included random air bubbles popping on the oddly pulsing surface. Next and in very slow motion, two tiny hands followed by a pair of nostrils came up through the mud and into the sun. After a pause the arms attached to the hands reached out and struggled to pull the head of a toad emerging from hibernation up into the little warmth the early morning early spring sun had to offer.

Another child would have grabbed the half awake toad and found a shoebox to make a home out of for the new pet. I didn’t know what to do, watch or run, but there was no way I was going to pick up that toad. As young as I was, I was aware even then of being both mesmerized by the miracle I was watching and afraid to reach into it. That memory is a perfect metaphor for the journey that is still my inner life.

I was a C student all twelve years of Public School. For the first five or six years every teacher I was given commented on report cards that, “Wayne could do better if he tried.” By Junior High I had learned how to be pretty invisible. After High School I spent a pretty miserable year working the night shift in a Super Market stocking shelves. I decided maybe I should go to college and learn Park Management so I could make a career working in The National Park System. I had a self-image of being half George Harrison and half Strider, the Ranger.

Though it has since vastly improved and now has a great reputation as an Environmentally responsible School of Ecology, in 1972 it was kind of bogus. No, it was fully BOGUS. They did have a forestry program but not one for a parks degree. For the benefit of another student and I they changed the name of their Forestry Program to Forest and Park. I quickly realized I was being prepped for working in the paper industry. I stuck it out for four semesters and left in May of 1974 with an Associates Degree in Applied Science. Not quite twenty-one I moved to Providence, RI and took a job washing windows on the Hospital Trust National Bank.

Since I was a preteenager, I had always worked with my hands, seeing myself as mechanically inclined but without any artistic ability in me. By my early forties I had become a fairly accomplished but seriously bored woodworker. I also had developed a bad case of carpal tunnel in both wrists so bad I couldn’t pull a ring off my left hand with my right. I had to stop the physical work until I could heal. I was working two nights a week co-facilitating in a Batterers Education Program but didn’t earn much more than a couple hundred dollars a month doing that. I heard about a teaching job working with teenagers who had been permanently expelled by the public school that wanted to finish high school and earn a diploma but didn’t want what then was the stigma of a GED. The wonderful woman who ran the Adult Ed Program figured out how to make it happen through Adult Ed and hired me as a teacher/tutor for three hours every afternoon five days a week. Because I only had an AAS she was only allowed by the school department to hire me as an Ed Tech 3 and to pay me minimum wage, which I believe was less than $4.50 then.

I decided the time had come to get a real degree in something useful. I had also put a lot of time and effort into my own therapy and personal growth work. I loved finding a way out of the misperceptions I had always lived with. I especially enjoyed the process of participant facilitated men’s groups loosely based on the precepts of the twelve step programs… anonymity, non judgment, no giving of advice, just active listening and honest sharing of one’s own experience. I was also very aware that not every man feels safe walking into a group like that. Many men need the safety of a paid, trained facilitator, at least for a while. So I applied for and received some scholarship money’s from Pell, but mostly I got loan money. Off I went, still not an artist of any description, to talk to the folks in the Psychology Department at Vermont College about what kind of credentials I should go after. 

Much to my chagrin, to a person, every one of them said I needed an MSW. I had a picture of something other than Social Worker. I was thinking more along the lines of Group Therapist. Venusian; meet the Martians. I would love to go back there and look in the window to see for sure that I wasn’t missing something in what they were telling me, but my perception was that those three days were and still are the longest period of trying and failing to be seen and heard in all of my life. In two days I was pretty much done with Vermont College. 

Except for one person. I had made a more personal connection with a professor in the Writing Department who, as we talked over meals in the cafeteria, took an interest in what I wanted to accomplish and the troubles I was having communicating my vision of my future. She gave me writing exercises as a tool for becoming more articulate but I still didn’t feel like I was getting anywhere and I told her I thought I should just go home and be a carpenter. 

She convinced me that, since I had already paid for the week, I should stay and keep trying. She gave me a next prompt and I went back to my room to write. While doing so I had a light-bulb-now-on moment of realizing how much fun I was having with the writing and I was aware as well of warmth in my left-brain, a sensation I had never experienced. 

It took me a bit to find my new teacher/mentor/friend on campus that evening but I did and I asked her if she though I could achieve my goals through the Writing Department. She smiled and said, “I thought you’d never ask.” That was that.  

I was lucky enough to do two semester’s work under her tutelage before life interrupted me for a couple years and I had to pause school. I was able to go back and finish; graduating with a BA in Creative Non Fiction not quite a year after the World Trade center was attacked.

Almost twenty years later I am still fooling around making excuses. Some of them are good ones like finishing raising kids, the need to work, the two, “category more than five,” hurricanes that nailed us in September 2017 and have kept us busy since. COVID-19. All good excuses for why I haven’t started a serious writing practice. (Wayne could do better…).

In a couple years I will, “if life is fair,” (as my friend Percy often says) celebrate my seventieth birthday. Many things are starting to feel like now or never. I have a lot of stuff in my head, my heart and what’s left of my memory that I want to explore. Hopefully some I can resolve. Mostly I want to tidy up the place and compose those things I may never resolve into a format someone else might find useful as a starting place. A well-organized and accessible repository for my personal secrets and private confidences that are too much for me to lift, let along carry, anymore.

That, and I’m hoping that writing this blog will help me find the gate to the garden path that leads to my book. I want to take the tome that would be my life stories and experience and distill them over and over until I have something useful and as easily digested as Strunk & White, “The Elements Of Style.” 

“…still a little book, small enough and important enough to carry in your pocket as I carry mine.” Charles Osgood 

So here we are. I’m writing because I must. You are welcome to read what you want. If you like some of it, maybe someday I will be able to sell you a small book.