Life at 60

Artist friend of dad's take on 3 year old me “Life can only be understood backward, and can only be lived forward." This truism has for me been both a source of inspiration, and as well a somewhat constraining force which has at times hampered my writing. I am possessed of the belief, whether correct or not, that constructing text is an act of life-affirmation, of creative forces that seek growth, not regression. Writing to me has been a practice of living forward, and so I have managed to dance around the “backward understanding” in my process. I feel though that these omissions have been virtual dead spots in the texts I have constructed in my body of work. Though I may be speaking of an event, fictional or real, from some point in the past, my description is not fully vested with the authority that actual memory can grant. This is the interweaving between one’s memories and fantasies that is capitalized on by prolific writers such as Steven King. So many of his wor...

18 year old Dad and slightly older Mom My first formal pic Baby Bob being held by Maw-Maw and my Aunt Ellen Nattily attired at 2 Me and my beloved Maw-Maw Ida Bell, at 2 A happy 4 year old

When you almost burn down an apartment building, it’s hard to call that a “highlight” of one’s year. Yet in the summer of 1963, that’s what I did and unsurprisingly it remains a vivid memory to this day. No way of knowing what gave me and the other kids who participated the idea; perhaps it was watching the nefarious doings of the bad guys on TV westerns on our black-and-whites, but there was no doubt as to the raw material that made it possible – tumbleweeds blown in from the desert by the Santa Ana winds. And what more perfect place to find those tumbleweeds than in Santa Ana California! I recall being the ringleader, not because of some innate magnetism, but instead because I had the crucial element to "fire up" our enterprise – matches I had stolen from the kitchen. The apartments where my Mom Dad and I lived were constructed as an outer ring of housing with an inner courtyard. It was little effort for the pack of kids I roamed with to go out to the parking lot and corr...

The advent of my sixth year coincided with the start of elementary school and our next rental housing move several blocks away to 418 North 6th Street. This house was unusual for several reasons. Though when we lived in it from 1964-66 it operated as a rooming house, originally it was built in the late 1800's as a single-family dwelling; a fine example of Victorian-era architecture. After experiencing the opulence of my grandparent's Newport Beach abode, this once fine mansion seemed but a pale shadow of it's former self. We occupied three rooms in the bottom right quadrant of the house, roughly corresponding to what would have been a parlor, formal dining room and kitchen. The bathroom next to the kitchen could not properly be called ours, since it was shared with the renter across the hall. This could have been a difficult situation to endure, but there was a connection to this particular tenant that made things easier - she was my Aunt, Lorena Miller Overstreet. Actual...

Technical explanation before I proceed with my recollections – terming each chapter “Life at 5” etc. does not mean this is the fifth year, it is the sixth year of life that is fulfilled at the next birthday when the age of 6 is reached which then signals the start of the seventh year and so on. So on July 20th 1965, I had my 7th birthday which kicked off the start of my 8th year on Planet Earth. I don’t recall any specifics of it, though I’m sure there was cake to eat after candles were blown out, as would be the ritual for the years to come that I did have memories of. This was also the first time that I could remember spending a calendar year at one location without moving. A vivid memory from that summer was seeing on TV the great Cleveland Browns running back Jim Brown play a game in what was to be his last season. Even as unschooled as I was in the intricacies of football, I could see his greatness in the way he could both shed tacklers with his powerful body while being also too...

1966 to 1967 was the year that gravity exerted it’s full force on me and I became aware that the idylls of my childhood would not last forever and that there was a VERY SERIOUS world out there that I being trained, whether actively or passively, to be a part of. And along with that realization, it began to dawn on me that those who were preparing me for said mission themselves had significant deficits in their understandings of life and that I would have to seek the missing pieces elsewhere. Despite it’s indubitable charms and history, Fort Smith, Arkansas was not a place to find the needed mentorship to fill in those gaps during one’s formative years. And so, caught between the yin-and-yang of a family life that I was increasingly becoming cognizant was tilted far to the right on the gauge between normal and fucking insane, along with the abysmal lack of any but the most pidgin awareness in the world around me, I began to retreat, as only a Cancer can, deep into my shell. This pic...

I have to apologize for my first breakage of our implied contract, reader-o-mine. The events I am about to describe happened in June, one month before I turned 9, but they were such vivid and detailed memories that I wanted to maintain some sort of symmetry with the length of the preceding chapters (Symmetry has always been a major esthetic influence in my life and writing; it is sort of an OCD manifestation but harmless enough. Makes me a good editor, something most of my fellow writers detest and avoid at all costs). At the end of my 3rd grade school year, I was told that we were going to take a trip to Northern California to visit my Uncle Harry and his daughter, my cousin Jeri. She had been diagnosed with leukemia some time before, and I later inferred that Harry had called saying we should maybe come say our goodbyes. A few weeks later, Dad bought a 1960 Chevy Impala. it was loaded up, and the Miller clan, plus one – Lorena also came with us - began what was to be a singular an...