A nice lady approached me the other day, on one of the bustling daytime Lower Queen Anne streets where I amble around nodding to my mostly imaginary fans, and complimented me on this column.
"Your writing seems so natural - did you always want to write?" she asked.
The short answer I gave her (I hadn't had my coffee yet) was no, but the real answer takes a little longer.
As a little boy, I wanted to be a fireman.
As I grew into my early teens, I started sleeping with my baseball glove. I wanted to be Willie Mays. Back in those dark days, even my family was a little upset with my 13-year-old boy's goal. Relatives tried to convince me that it would be better to be Mickey Mantle.
It wasn't mentioned - that would have been crude - but I realize now those good Catholic folks who reared me were a little stunned that I, a white boy in racist Cincinnati, preferred the black athlete to the white one.
None of it mattered. I wasn't destined to be Mickey or Willie. My batting average plummeted when I turned 14 and started facing curve-ballers (scientists or no, baseballs do curve if thrown by the right pitcher). By my senior year in high school the only spot left for me on the diamond was as a late-inning outfield replacement. I could run and catch, but that was it. Good-field, no-hit is how baseball scouts would have put it if anybody asked. Nobody did.
My father, who had boxed during the first Great Depression, next tried to interest me in his sport. Inside the squared circle my problems somehow reversed. I could hit, hard, and if I hit a kid before he hit me, even with big padded gloves on, he tended to fall down. The problem was, I couldn't take a punch. I'd be in the midst of pummeling someone and wake up on the canvas.
My father, sad about it, told me my neck was just too long and thin. Good-hit, no chin was how the end of my abortive boxing career might have been graded by Angelo Dundee or some other pugilistic expert.
So, as a high-school senior, I found my only way to success sports was to write about them. And that's what I started doing.
I had a gift for sportswriting. My passions clicked with the one natural ability I seem to have been born with other than talking endlessly in a bar-room.
I make no claims for the depth (or heights) of my "talent," but I learned relatively late for a scribbler, at 17, that I could write.
At first, I wrote only about sports, but in my early 20s, in the armed forces, I got turned on to good fiction (Steinbeck, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, early Mailer, Britain's "angry young men" Alan Sillitoe and John Braine). They became my new heroes, and I decided to be a novelist.
No one is more foolish than a young writer. Since the world doesn't ask you to write novels, the world doesn't feel obligated to buy them either.
I spent 10 years putting all my free time into fiction, despite a grow-ing family and a more and more demanding journalism career.
I wrote four novels, and unlike most of my writer buddies and buddettes, I managed to get a New York agent for two of them. But ultimately, they didn't sell.
Close but no cigar.
By 40 I was pretty sure fiction would never pay my bills. I was also a single parent with two teenage daughters clamoring for attention and "stuff."
I decided to concentrate on journalism. I liked it, even if I didn't love it like fiction.
The few real poets I know feel the way about prose that I feel about reporting and columnizing. It's good and all, but it isn't the sweet spot.
Over the intervening years, though, I've come to really enjoy reporting and writing columns. I may not be great, but I know, despite a few fans who overrate me and some foes who downrate my stuff, that I'm pretty good.
And, especially in times like these, when many of the younger folks tilling in the journalism vineyards seem more interested in their careers than what they write about, or how they write what they are paid to witness, I'm glad there are people like Jerry Large of The Seattle Times, for example - people raising their column voices at the drastic, and I think damaging, changes in American society, as we alter from a somewhat caring place, to a totally grasping, violently propa-gandized and self-interested place.
I think journalism, done right, is the last watchdog of government, local and national.
I also think that the people running this society are more into bread and circuses than truth in advertising. That gives those of us whose platforms, however small, haven't yet been taken away a feeling somewhat akin to what a devout minister must feel. We want to shout out the news, even when it's not good. Not good at all.
Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security, unemployment for long-term unemployed workers, medical insurance, a living wage - all those things that supposedly made America different, a larger place - are rapidly going away. Outsourced, if you will, just like our jobs.
All of this destruction of a societal fabric that actually worked can be laid at the feet of grasping, already rich politicians and corporate CEOs.
I'm glad, in times like these, that I am a writer, and that I am able to point out the forest despite all the trees lost to propaganda. I feel kind of lucky now that, way back in the '60s, I couldn't hit a curveball and couldn't take a punch.
It has led me to this place where I can bear witness about the tsunami of greed that is swallowing the America my parents dreamed of, and I briefly lived in, before Big Business and its minions took over and began plotting their course back to 1910 and the days of robber barons. Our new gilded age.
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