Some blog posts just don't grow into fully-formed stories -- and that's OK

Time to take stock of the year that was.

I wrote 67 posts this year. Published posts, that is. I wrote 10 or more that I didn't post. They just never jelled or I lost interest. The drafts linger on my site but will be banished with the new year.

When family members were quarantined and not working in the spring, we started hauling boxes filled with books up from the basement. I was tasked with separating the keepers from the ones to go to the library store or, when that closed due to Covid, downtown's Phoenix Books. Probably sent six or seven boxes out the door, just a fraction on those remaining. In one box, I saw a tattered copy of "Hells Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga" by Hunter Thompson. This was before "strange and terrible" morphed into "fear and loathing." I really liked it when I read it in the early '70s during my Gonzo period. I didn't want to emulate Thompson's life but I did want to write like him.

I began to read "Hell's Angels" and got hooked. Read it all the way through in a couple of days. I tried to frame an essay about it but could not. Thompson's style I still liked. But I didn't like the sexism and racism. The Angels were noted for gang rapes and Thompson was cavalier about it. We liked the Angels for their outlaw image, at least we did in our youth. Their attraction has waned over the decades. I don't really find anything constructive about them. In my blog, written before the election, I wanted  to paint members as diehard Trump fans but failed. It's a gross generalization to label motorcycle thugs as Trumpists. It's also a mistake to think that all bikers are gang members. Your local attorney is as likely to ride a Harley as your local mechanic. My neighbor is an IT guy and he rides and works on his very expensive Harley. My late brother Dan rode a Harley and he was an air traffic controller. 

The Angels still exist but haven't been the same since Altamont and neither have the Stones. I gave up and put "Hell's Angels" in the discard box.

My conclusion: Thompson documented a lot of what happened in 1960s and '70s America. But, really, how much fear & loathing can a nation bear?

My next subject that didn't jell was about the Boy Scouts of America and its magazine, "Boy's Life." I was a proud Scouter in Colorado, Washington, Kansas and Florida. The Scouts seemed to be something I could count on to be pretty much the same whether we were snow-camping in the Rockies or avoiding water moccasins in the Florida swamps. I read Boy's Life from cover to cover. It was all boys back then, stories about knots and campfires and lifesaving. There was always a feature profiling heroic Scouts. I liked the cartoon about Pedro the Donkey. 

Girls are now part of Scouts and it's about time. As you probably know, the BSA has been roiled by the same sex abuse scandal that rocked the Catholic Church. Girls can now be Scouts and for some reason the mag is still called "Boy's Life." I guess an ancient organization such as the Scouts can move only so fast. They have that in common with the church. My youth involved Scouting, the church and basketball. I abandoned one of those when, in the ninth grade, I discovered girls. I do believe I would have welcomed girls into my Scout troop but it was the 1960s which was a lot like the 1950s in Central Florida. 

I just lost interest as I wrote about Scouts, much as I lost interest in becoming an Eagle Scout when I got my first kiss. Reading a current issue of the magazine did not revive my interest although I was oddly pleased that Pedro the Donkey had made it into the 21st century. 

This is what happens with writers. Not everything we begin has an ending. I have a two-drawer filing cabinet filled with rough drafts and beginnings. Stored on this PC and OneDrive are many finished pieces and many fragments. What seems like a good idea at the time never grows into a finished product that can be published. And not everything is published in any form, whether as a book or a story in a journal or a post on Blogger. That's not easy to understand when you start out but it becomes clear if you stick with it. I have, for some reason. Writing is important to me and no matter how many setbacks come my way, I stick with it.

Add up all the factual fragments to build your preferred family history

"You can't go back home to your family, back home to your childhood ... back home to a young man's dreams of glory and of fame ... back home to places in the country, back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting but which are changing all the time – back home to the escapes of Time and Memory." -- Thomas Wolfe, "You Can't Go Home Again" I pull most of the family information I post here from a box of letters and documents sent to me by my sister Molly. She challenged me to discover ways to assemble a family history from the disparate fragments. That's just what I've done, composed fragmented stories from memorabilia fragments. Find examples here, here and here.

Life is composed of fragments. We humans try to make sense of those fragments, infuse them with meaning. Writers try to link fragments into a meaningful whole, meaningful to us and to our readers. It's kind of like that screen blurb on certain movies: "Based on a true story." 

Any family tree tells incomplete stories of a person's life. I took a few from a family tree sketched on what is now a large, tattered sheet of liver-colored construction paper. Someone, and I don't know who, took the time to put down the names and details in what looks like a thin-point Sharpie. Many of these details you won't find on genealogy sites. 

My Grandfather's brother Thomas died on April 1, 1918 at 20, possibly a casualty of the 1918 flu pandemic. He was old enough to be a soldier in the Great War, as were his two older brothers, but no mention is made of that. But he was a "Natural Born Farmer, good with horses."

Grandfather, whom we called Big Danny, was also good with horses as every good cavalry officer should be. We heard the story a hundred times about how Gen. Pershing selected Big Danny's mount to ride while inspecting the troops in France in 1918. 

His brother Bernard  "served on the USS Cassin (Destroyer) WWI." He went to Ft. Lyons Hospital in Colorado Springs from "1920-22 "for a service connected disability." Upon release, he became a salesman. His son Dick was a Navy pilot in WWII who was "shot down, rescued someone, and received Navy medal." 

Big Danny spent time at Fitzsimons Army Hospital in Denver in 1920-21 for a service-connected disability which was said to be pneumonia or possibly TB. Later, he became an insurance salesman.

My great-grandmother Molly, a woman I identified in an earlier post as "the most beautiful in St. Patrick's Church," had a sister Annie who "ran boarding house, did not marry." No dotted lines run below her listing to link her with other names. Since Annie ran a boarding house, I'm sure she had stories to tell. She probably had family stories to tell too. Here's one question I'd like to ask Annie: How did you, sister of "the most beautiful in St. Patrick's Church," end up as the old aunt who runs the boarding house? Thomas Wolfe's mother ran a boarding house in Asheville; Thomas was one of the boarders. He had many stories to tell. He died too soon.

The name Annie resonates with me. My mother was Anna Marie, my mother-in-law Ann Marie, and my daughter, Anne Marie. Anne is derived from Hannah and means "favored, grace."

My great great grandfather, Irish immigrant Thomas O'Shea, father of Michael Francis who married  the beautiful Molly, married Mary Burns and emigrated to the U.S. "about 1860." At some point, he "changed name to Shay." Not sure why he changed the family name. Maybe he was trying to simplify, jettison the O' and simplify spelling to Shay. The Irish were used to the O' and Mc parts of Irish names. Ellis Island personnel should have been, too, as hordes of Irish came over in the late 1840s and early 1850s to escape the potato famine. Maybe he was trying to pass as non-Irish. Admitted to the U.S., he could have trundled right over to Manhattan and landed a job.

Hello, my name is Tom Shay. I'm definitely not Irish so you can immediately give me a position in the executive ranks of your large Anglo-Saxon firm. 

Anybody would buy that line if they could understand what Tom said in his thick brogue and if he wasn't dressed in a cowpie-streaked farmer's overalls, wearing a straw hat, and brandishing a pitchfork. His neck would be red, too, as redneck was slang for all Irish who worked outside under the unfriendly sun. 

Welcome to the firm, Tom. Let me show you our secret handshake. 

Fantasy, of course. He was a farmer in Ireland and he was a farmer in Iowa. And father to eight kids. 

Big Danny (I mentioned him already)), grandson of Thomas and an Iowa City native, returned to his hometown after World War 1. Left to his own devices, he might have joined the ranks of Iowa farmers and Iowa Hawkeye fans. Having a 'hawkeye' means being "particularly observant, especially to small details, or having excellent vision in general." But Big Danny's hawkeye failed to notice a festering lung ailment that took him first to an Iowa army hospital and then to Denver's Fitzsimons. Big Danny married a nurse, got a job, bought a house, raised a family, and lived in Denver for the rest of his long life.

In a photo in front of Big Danny's house, my brother Dan and I wear army uniforms and carry rifles. I am 9 and he is 7. At the end of the year, we would be in a station wagon on our way to Washington state. We returned briefly after a stint in Kansas. We left six months later for Florida. Dan never returned to live in Denver. I did but couldn't stay.

You can't go home again, as it turns out.

Nursing home signs should read: Welcome to the Titanic. There are no lifeboats

I don't always read the AARP Bulletin. It's a good publication with lots of helpful info for retirees like me. But, you know, there are books and the Internet and football and writing and "Queen's Gambit" on Netflix. 

This issue of the Bulletin carried a red banner crying SPECIAL EDITION and below that this header: "Covid-19 & Nursing Homes: An American Tragedy." It grabbed me because my stepmother died of Covid in a Florida long-term care facility. And I have been reading other articles on the subject since March and have been shocked with how many people my own age have died. I am 69 now but next week is my birthday and people in their 70s and 80s with underlying conditions are most vulnerable. I soon will be in that cohort.

This comes from the WyoFile weekly pandemic report, 12/11/20:

The Wyoming DOH has reported 321 Covid-19 deaths. That includes 128 in November, the most of any month so far. Many of these have been related to long-term care facilities. Wyoming now ranks third in the country for its rate of nursing-home-related deaths, the Casper Star-Tribune reports.

So there's that. And this subhead from the Bulletin:

In one of the most devastating health debacles in our nation's history, some 54,000 residents and workers in long-term care facilities died of causes related to the coronavirus within four months of the first known infection.

The article spans the 18 weeks from Feb. 29 and the first death in a Seattle nursing home to June 22. The best things are personal stories of patients, family members and health-care workers. Cami Nedleigh relates the story of her mother, Geneva Wood, a resident of the Life Care Center of Kirkland, Wash. Wood went into Life Care in late January to recover from a stroke. She was supposed to be released in early March but fell and broke her hip the last week of February. She stayed in Life Care. 

This from Wood: 

My roommate was coughing. Everybody was saying bronchitis. The I got a cough and could barely breathe. Thought it was pneumonia. I remember them saying I had a 102 fever. I guess I didn't know enough to be scared.

And Nedleigh: 

Mom got better, thankfully. She's a tough old Texas broad. But Mom's roommate didn't make it.

The article conjures scenes of chaos and bravery. In the first week of March, 27 of 108 residents and 25 of the 180 staff had the virus. And nobody really knew what it was and how to treat it. This led to many deaths.

Timothy Killian (Life Care spokesman): We all grew up with these movies about pandemics, in which the government vans swoop in and take control. As the situation escalated and the facility went into lockdown and people started dying. I kept expecting some type of coordinated response, but we saw nothing of that nature.

The facility, of course, gets some of the blame. Killian had obviously seen "Contagion" and "Outbreak." In the latter film, a monkey has the virus and ends up in a California small-town pet shop and starts spreading the virus. The commanding general of the national response team won't act because he knows the virus came from an Army bioweapons lab. Epidemiologists Dustin Hoffman and Renee Russo sneak into the site and start doing their good deeds while the evil general (the usually heroic Morgan Freeman) makes plans to seal off the town and bomb it to destroy the evidence. The most memorable scene takes place in the town's packed movie theater. A virus carrier coughs and we see spit flying around the room in slow motion, landing in people's mouths. Aw hell no, you might say. And you'd be right. 

It hits a bit close to home. Covid carriers were still going to movies in March and spreading the virus to seatmates. Asymptomatic carriers were going out to crowded bars and attending parties. The virus was in pandemic heaven, latching on to many new human hosts and spreading which is what viruses do.

You can read parts of the Bulletin story at the AARP web site. Kudos to David Hochman and contributors for the story. It appears just as the FDA approves the Pfizer vaccine and hope emerges. That doesn't help the many dead and dying in the U.S., almost 300,000 at last count, with a 16 percent fatality rate in long-term facilities. Compare this to the total U.S. fatality rate is 2.3 percent. 

This final quote is from Judith Regan, a publishing executive whose father, Leo Regan, is a resident of the Long Island State Veterans Home, site of 32 deaths:

The residents and staff are being led to slaughter. He is on the Titanic, but there are no lifeboats.

Op-ed: Wyoming native argues for survival of the University of Wyoming Creative Writing Program

I don’t subscribe to our local newspaper, the Wyoming Tribune Eagle. I am not boycotting it for political reasons or because I was the subject of an investigative report that portrayed me as a dirty dog. I just can’t access its content online unless I subscribe. Headlines I can read. Obituaries too. But not news, sports and op-ed which are my favorite sections.

I bought a copy today because it featured an op-ed by a former coworker at the Wyoming Arts Council. Linda Coatney wrote, “Finding my voice included endangered UW writing program.” She traced her evolution as a writer from a 10-year-old poet to a shy high school writer to creative writing workshops at Casper College to enrollment in UW’s master’s degree program in creative writing. And now that program is slated for demolition by the UW Board of Trustees. Why? Because our wingnut legislature failed to plan for a future where the state cannot depend on oil-gas-coal revenue due to the fact that fossil fuels’ day in the sun has set. If only we could have seen this coming.

Read Linda’s column for a stout-hearted defense of the program. Buy the Dec. 3 edition and turn to page A7. She may let me repost the column here once it plays out on the printed page. I am a print guy after a career as a newspaper reporter and editor and stints as a corporate editor, much of that time at the Arts Council. I write in a journal. I read books. I once was a paperboy and so was my son.

I also write for Wyoming’s online newspaper, WyoFile, and keep this blog which will celebrate its 20^th anniversary on Blogger in January. A few days ago I blogged about the UW situation. To read, go here.

The UW Creative Writing Program is tiny when compared to engineering and business and geology. That doesn’t make it any less important when it’s time to cut budgets. In fact, it may be more important to a state that is trying to leap into the 21^st century after spending so much time in the previous one. The creative economy was a major topic during my 25 years at the Arts Council. I like to think that I played a small part in making that a reality and not a dream. It takes time, of course, and Covid-19 showed us how vulnerable the collaborative arts can be. Pandemic precautions have shut down concert venues, theatres, arts conferences, art galleries, author readings and just about anything else that powers America’s arts and entertainment businesses. Artists and arts presenters have found clever ways to promote their work online and even in-person with creative masks and appropriate social-distancing.

Go read Linda’s op-ed and send your thoughts to UW. Or comment here and I will pass it along.