BIO AND SCENES FROM MY LIFE

I’m a writer of historical and suspense fiction, not a historian. The historian is, among other things, a patient craftsman who by long study and the amassing of information is able to gain sympathy with and insight into the period or the person. As a writer I desire to go one step beyond and imagine an individual’s emotions and thoughts in real time—not the edited version we all do when writing our experiences and reflections down. These blogs are an attempt bring me up to the point where I can imaginatively leap into the heads of these personages as I do unreservedly in my fiction. For the last thirty years, I have never not been reading or listening to a book on history—some popular, some scholarly. They are the major source of this blog. The blog’s defects are mine. If you find some of the pieces enjoyable, the patient craft of these gentlemen and gentlewomen deserves much of the credit.

Since I don’t have to fear the censure of peer review, in my eagerness to get into the hearts of the actors of history, not only do I make intuitive leaps that historians only infrequently allow themselves, I also make judgments. I do not apologize. If we cannot say this was good and that was bad, then there is no point in reading about the past. I consider myself a tourist into history. Like a tourist I forget most of what I hear and see. However, like a tourist I am eager to share my best experiences. Some of these experiences have affected me deeply.

This is my bias. I believe that the exploration of character explains more about the human condition than other approaches. Now we get into the weeds. What forms character? Economics? The sex drive? The hunger for power? A divine spark? A moral code? I could go on and most reasonable people would say all of the above, and although an atheist might add a caveat about the divine, no thoughtful atheist would deny the importance of religion for better or worse.

I would say that character is formed by the decision of the will to act or not. The idea we in ourselves can be the sources of a decision, not a mere link in a chain of causality, rubs some people the wrong way. They might be right. But to my thinking the causal chain, no matter how elaborate, is always passing the buck to something that happened before. I believe within the limitations of our circumstances we write much of our own script.

I am interested in other people’s curricula vitae so I feel obliged to provide my own. At the risk of giving too much information here I go: I graduated from UCLA with a bachelors in Spanish taking a circuitous route through the University of Santa Cruz and the University of Barcelona. In an alternate universe where my life has gone wrong I would devote the time of my long prison sentence to translating Don Quixote into English.

After experiencing the strange phenomenon of falling in love at first sight, I have been married near three decades. I have two daughters who prove the ugly rumors about millennials wrong. I’ve run my own business wholesaling Spanish language gift items. About five years into my business, I made the decision to structure my business day in such a way that I would maximize the time I spent in my car—an easy thing to do in Los Angeles—and listen to books. That is probably the reason that while I’ve avoided insolvency, I have never achieved outstanding success. I regret nothing.

I have included scenes from my life which are very much like my blogs. If you live long enough and because of your work your time is very much your own, you can’t avoid interesting situations. They will probably reveal more about me than the carefully edited bio above—not all complimentary. I will add more recollections as time passes.

ON THE EDGE OF THE OLD WORLD

This happened on New Year’s Day in 1977. I remember the bus letting the three of us off at night near the youth hostel. I remember the darkness so dense that I could not see the path and barely discerned the white building in front of me. The wool blankets were rough and smelled of lanolin. I was surprised given the darkness of the night to awake to a brilliant cold blue sky and the sight of the monasteries isolated in the distance on the bluffs.

This being New Years, there was no transportation. We were unsure that the monasteries would be open but having nothing else to occupy our time we decided to walk. Along the way we passed these small scrubby trees from which we heard munching sounds. Being urban kids we had no idea that goats climbed trees to get at the leaves.

The first monastery was a convent. We were allowed in at least far enough to give a donation. We were hurried through a few rooms. I can only recall that the young initiates avoided looking at us as if we were the source of sin and temptation. This brief glimpse into what seemed a medieval mindset was a new jarring experience.  

We continued on to the largest monastery. At the foot of several hundred steps that led to its entrance, a woman and her albino son sat in front of a fire boiling water for tea. Through a combination of signs and gibberish we learned that the monastery might open to visitors at noon. Soon, one of the fathers, a spry old man, came down the hundreds of steps to talk to the mother and her albino son. They seemed to be in no hurry to end their conversation.

Being Americans, noon meant noon. When the hour struck we decided that the monastery must be open. We ascended the staircase which now seemed endless. But we arrived, winded, and confronted a closed door. After a short debate, we decided since nothing indicated we were not to enter, we went in. The monastery felt deserted. Sensing we were doing something not quite right, we walked down a hallway with a series of doors. The hallway wasn’t that interesting so I tried a door to see if it was locked. I and my friends were horrified. There on shelves were bones—specifically human bones—sorted by types. Skulls on one shelf, thigh bones on another. An ossarium is definitely a thing that you should read about before experiencing. We had not, of course.

We definitely now had the sense that we were intruding. We looked through a window and saw the old priest still talking to the mother and her son. Again we contended with the push-and-pull feeling of whether we should leave or not. We tentatively continued towards the end of the hall where there appeared to be a chapel. We wanted to see more than a room full of bones.

Before we got to the chapel the old priest was beside us, cheerful and full of conversation, having climbed the steps in half our time. He decided to act as our tour guide. The only problem was he did not have much English and we had no Greek. Still he pointed to this mosaic and that icon and said things about them.

I saw on a pedestal an old hymnal with vellum pages and square blocks for notation. I conceived a wish then and the old priest read my mind. He went up to the hymnal and for ten minutes sang to us the ancient hymn in a resonant baritone communicating through the music the beauty of his faith. I felt I had ascended a pinnacle on that strange cold brilliant day and seen a different world. I’ve had other moving experiences in my life, but none similar in the least.  

The photos of the ossarium of Meteoras are licensed. This is very similar

This is the closest to what I remember the hymnal looked like. The words are Latin so of course it isn’t the same.