I’ve touched upon it couple times, but never really got into any kind of detail about why it was that I decided at the age of seven that I wanted to be a writer. And, as I sit here, countless notions for a column flying through my mind, refusing to touch down, I thought I might remind myself just why, exactly, I fell in love with the written word and chose this life when I might have had any number of alternatives; to put forth what I feel it means to be a wordsmith, and why I think that it’s important. I’ve danced around the wherefores and the fallout resulting from my… my chosen euphemism of tenacity, but I’ve left untouched the genesis of this entire foolhardy affair.

I’ve been a reader since before I can remember. In every home in which I’ve lived, an overflowing bookcase was a sign of pride. Not a statement of elitism (hardly possible with all of the Star Trek novels upon the shelves), nor a trophied ostentation, but as a testament to love, a memorial to the lives we’d spent in the company of the protagonists within. During my grade school years, I always sought out books at least a year or two ahead, relishing not only the challenge of assimilating new vocabulary, but the exposure to more mature concepts and richer presentations of nuance. Around the time I fell in love with writing, I was reading Madeleine L’Engle’s classic “A Wrinkle In Time”. I read “Dracula” (Unabridged) for the first time when I was ten, and discovered Tolkien when I was eleven. Tom Robbins, George Orwell, and Douglas Adams ruled my High School years. I lived and died more purely and intensely with every tale than with anything which crossed my path in life, and I was a Bi-Polar Poet in search of Love, so…

I used to have that paper. I kept it close and treasured, like my Declaration of Independence and Constitution combined. That piece of paper stayed with me for fourteen years, and was the foundation upon which I laid down all my hopes and dreams, until one evening in December of 2000, when, in Port Orchard on the way to see my girlfriend who was locked up in the county jail, I managed to have it all taken from me in the space of about thirty seconds. I’d gathered everything I’d ever written, the original Vaults of Uncle Walt, and taken them with us to drop off somewhere safe sometime after we’d rendezvoused with [redacted]. It had sprinkled earlier that day, and the roads were just slick enough to counteract any friction that might have come to our aid as the brakes locked up on our descent toward the valley floor and the back of a rusted red pickup truck. The driver honked her horn, and I mashed my feet into the imaginary pedals before me on the passenger side. We were only going 35 when our vehicles collided, but as ours was a Mary Kay Pink Dodge who’d already seen far better days before today, and his was an American Pickup, fully stopped and protected by a cushion of rust, it was really no contest. A tow truck was called, and I grabbed what I could from the back of the car, assured that we’d go out to get the rest within a couple weeks. And there I was, stranded miles from home, having failed to even find the jail in which [redacted] was housed, and suddenly bereft of my life’s work.

My girlfriend was released, and, after a particularly trying patch of time living homeless in the Great Northwest in the prime of winter, we found a basement apartment which we could almost afford on the job I managed to acquire. It was a chance for redemption for the both of us, but by the end of January, the lifestyle I’d been so desperate to get us away from had returned. Turns out living on the straight and narrow was too hard a task to manage. Knowing things were coming to a head, but terrified at losing almost four years of love I’d lived with [redacted], we bumbled through until that day in mid-March when I announced to sanity that I’d rather like to start seeing other states of being. We’d gotten the information (after three months of curious reluctance from the driver), and driven out to the towing yard where every poem, story, photographic negative and drawing (save what I’d salvaged from the car that night) rested safely in the back of that wrecked automobile. Or would have been, if we’d arrived with $200 no later than the first week of January. Every ounce of passion I had focused into a single goal had been crushed and incinerated. Three days later, in the aftermath of a nervous breakdown, I checked myself into the mental ward of the nearest hospital.

It was a single-page assignment, twenty-five lines long, with the figures printed in the margins colored in with purple and yellow. My handwriting was nothing spectacular, but at the very least, years later, it remained legible to myself and others, something which cannot be said of the atrocities which could not be even generously compared to chicken scratch (without mortally offending scores of poultry), that I commit to paper regularly these days. At the top, in capital lettering, read “THE ADVENTURES OF MIND MAN”. On this page began a labor of love which would remain for twenty-eight years, returning and renewing with commitment and clarity every time I allowed myself to falter. Within these words, so awkwardly arranged, so hurriedly scribbled as not to do injustice to the ideas with which I could not, then, keep pace, within these words remain the faintly flick’ring flame of inspiration wakened within me by the simple instructions: If you could be a Superhero, what would your powers be? What would you call yourself?

I remember the revelation (if not the actual moment) that I didn’t have to wait for someone else to write the stories that I so desperately wished to read; that I could, myself put pencil to paper and allow my dreams to flow with the same force and validity as anyone who’d ever told a tale. I created a boy hero whose abilities were of imagination. And then I copied that idea onto the page as a Grown-up who would use the power of his mind to reshape reality in the face of evil. To be fair, that synopsis is far superior to anything I wrote before the age of seventeen, and I most certainly was not thinking about it in those terms. I had a feeling when I was little, that I wouldn’t be the biggest, nor the strongest. I didn’t know about the smartest, but I knew I was smarter than some, so that was where my fantasy was directed. An extraordinary man who didn’t need guns or gadgets, bulging muscles or super-speed. but used his ability to out-think his opponent.

Some of the highlights from the following years were “Who Killed Babyface Barbra, Jr.?” (a title I cringe at to this very day, as I have never met a woman with the suffix of Junior), “Nightmare on Oak Street” (a tale of horror written with a nod to movies I had never seen), and the Unicorn of my prepubescent writing career: “Mission: Titan”, a story which I would try to resurrect on at least three occasions over the coming years. Later I would develop a stronger style, oft times writing merely to show off or prove someone else inferior, but I lacked the gift to power through my apathy and found my salvation in Outraged Love, or The Poetry of Despair. And then the Dark Days came, and then the mere banality of life. But here I am, come through the other side, focused on the first lesson that I ever learned: I get to do this. No matter what may happen, I get to do this if I want to. Maybe not for money, and maybe not for fame, but something so simple even a kid could have it figured out: I write because I can, and because there are stories within me which I’d like to see now come to life.

I wish I had that paper still, but not for me. The irony of my life’s work (and I hope, my legacy) being the written word, is that my son is not too keen on reading, and his writing is, from a mechanical point of view, unreadable. I wish that I could show him a piece of who I was when I was his age, so that… you know what? I had a whole thing I was going to launch into about the magic of writing and the adventures hidden in the written word, but then I realized: I just wish he could see me as someone who was once his age, someone capable of understanding what he was going through, someone more relatable than the grumpy old man who drones on and on about homework and bedtime.

But beyond inspiring filial devotion, I’d to think I might have been able to encourage him toward his own moment of clarity. I have no idea what notion will eventually fill his head, crowding out the lesser calls to action, and leading him with unwavering certainty to the path in life upon which he decides his destiny has placed him, but I hope that I will see it. I’ve witnessed far too many people wander through their lives without any clue as to what they hope to accomplish within their fleeting time among us, chasing money, highs, or power, yet never knowing why they do it, beyond a vague assumption that something has been missing. Modern man is missing a clear purpose in the world, a sense that he’s important, a sense that he belongs.

Despite the years of their Participation Ribbons and Mommy’s Little Snowflake snuggles, children are reminded day in and day out they are not important, that they are best barely seen and never heard, that their goal should be to learn how to blend into the background, camouflage themselves in mediocrity. When they grow up, these children will have all but faded, and despite their protestations that they will change the world, they won’t have even the slightest idea why they should. I want something better for my son, though it might not be something that I understand. I want him to ne able to find some happiness of inner purpose, to find his place both in his heart, and out there in the world.

-Tex

Though it was the siren song of “Dude, there’s palm trees” which enticed me to move down to the San Francisco Bay Area, my heart longs every year to witness an honest Northwest winter. My friend, and fellow contributor to The Vaults, Dave Banuelos, would mock the very notion of an “honest” Northwest winter as anything other than an adorable attempt at best. And please don’t get him started about his feelings regarding the “weather” here in the Lower Kneecap of California. I’ve been here for almost a dozen years, and while my body may confuse 50 degrees with chilly, my soul longs to feel the invigorating pain of the not-quite-freezing temperatures and ever-present tease of snow my hometown has to offer. But not that Billings stuff. That’s just ridiculous.

When he was just a little baby, we brought my son up to the Puget Sound so my mother could see him baptized. I’d been living in the Bay for half a decade, and all I wanted for my birthday was to have the chance to see it snow. Despite the forecast downplaying the odds of crystallized precipitation in favor of particularly chilling rain, I got my wish, and stood beneath the falling snow once more. My son wasn’t terribly impressed, but he was only just five months old, the only thing which truly impressed him was drinking milk straight from the tap. My wife, however, having spent all but a few years living down in Mexico, had only seen it snow within a television’s glow from the safety of her living room. Like a child who’s realized school’s been cancelled for tomorrow, she jumped right in and started making snowballs. The battle began shortly thereafter, and I honestly believe she enjoyed getting hit by exploding snow just as much as targeting my growing bald spot.

We returned back a few days later to our home in Berkeley, CA to temperate weather and the daily grind of working life. My son, of course, has no recollection of that visit, but I know it is a memory my wife will cherish always.

A few years later, shortly before I took the reins at the pizzeria where I’d been working for some time, I sent the two of them back up to my hometown to spend Christmas with my family. I’d planned to meet them shortly after the new year, but managed to swing an earlier departure, and surprised my wife in time toast her on her birthday, just hours before the end of 2011. Again, she’d fallen in love with the place where I’d grown up, and to sweeten the deal for her, it had snowed once more, shortly after her arrival. There was nothing left for me, of course, by the time that I arrived, the snow having been washed away once more by the incessant drizzle of the Pacific Northwest. But the two weeks she’d spent free of work, and in the care of family, had done wonders for my wife: a miracle more valuable than even Birthday Snow. Of course, trying to corral our son while on their 22 hour train ride home washed most of that tranquility away, and it was decided shortly thereafter that on any future visits to Seattle, our son would fly with me.

In about a week and a half, the three of us will be heading back up to the place of my birth to spend the holidays with my family (something that I, personally, have not done since I moved down here). Part of the reason that I left my job when I did, was to make sure that I could go this time, though I’m sure my wife would have enjoyed a small vacation without me. But like I mentioned a couple days ago in El Que No Podia Aguantar, I’ve come to understand the value of family, and the continuity which it represents. This may be my final opportunity to spend a Christmas with my grandparents, and I didn’t want to miss it because I had to put work first. That had been my reason for all these years I’ve spent away, but time and health are conspiring against me, and I dare not miss out on these treasured moments.

But there is another reason as well. It wasn’t only the promise of nice weather and exotic flora which convinced me to move on down the coast. The previous summer, my great-grandmother had passed away. For years, my mother nagged at me to go and see her, or at the very least, give her a call. But I was too busy trying to figure out my life, and was ashamed at all the countless ways in which I’d failed. I’d assumed she would be disappointed in me, and didn’t think that I could bear to see that reflected in her face. So I avoided Gram, telling myself that I still had time in which to make things right, to give her a reason to hope I’d wind up as something other than an abject failure. The news came out of the blue, at least to me. I’m sure that somewhere in-between the lines of my mother’s incessant call to familial obligation, there was a warning of Gram’s failing health. But it was so easy to put off, I mean, what twenty-two year old truly considers his mortality, or the fleeting flames of others’?

At the annual family reunion just a short while later, her absence was unbearable. All of her children (who’d given up tobacco years before) hovered around me, breathing in my second-hand smoke to calm the rising anxiety at the loss of their mother. For years, I’d been desperate to be regarded by the world as an adult, and now, seeing what could await me, I chose the quick and easy way out. I made my decision to go to California toward the end of November ’02, and that year, for Christmas, we were all doing our best to avoid discussing the tangible emptiness of the holidays without my great-grandmother. My entire life, until that point, we’d always spent at least half the day at her house. We’d listen to the same old stories (“So I says to this guy, I says…”), play musical couches as more and more family arrived, and I’d pop handfuls of candy corn into my mouth, just waiting for the moment when I could open all my presents, and then head home to wait for Santa.

I missed the entire point of it.

I’m not religious, and for me it’s not Judeo-Christian mythology that marks the day as special. That day is Holy, and has always been, because of who we share it with: those moments spent together, finding the rhythms forged in DNA and honed like use in forest trails, those moments remind us of who we are, and from whence we came, and why that’s so important.

It’s taken me far too long to finally figure out what’s actually important, and that money truly can’t buy you happiness. This year I choose to make life count, to suffer painlessly through the tales of my embarrassments, knowing that the foolishness of youth can’t hurt me if I am surrounded by those who love me. My gift to David is a chance to make a memory or two of his great-grandparents that he might actually be able to recall in the years to come. And with my wife I share the template of our matrimonial success: The example of a daily love which has withstood the decades of excitement and banality, the deep and playful which both my grandparents still share with one another.

-Tex

Note: all photographs are used with the permission of Tex Batmart