The Second Element to Stamina

Originally posted:  2016

Majestic, orchestral music, Fleurs du Mal, plays all around me as I struggle, step by agonizing step toward the summit of a mountain that, from ten thousand feet below looked far less foreboding than it does from up here. Perseverance, the second element to stamina, sustains me; the breath of God caresses my face, bringing the elixir of life with the inhalation of spiritus, the power of life filling my lungs. A cloud passes between me and the snow-capped peak, and then the clear blue sky reappears . . . and I see her standing high above me, waiting, watching, a smile on her face.

“Wasn’t it you who called me here?” I ask, and my beloved is joined in heavenly chorus, celestial Sirens, and the dream fills me. “Yes,” she sings. “I cannot go on alone.”

“Neither can I,” I answer, and I take hold of a the ledge of rock before me and hoist myself one step higher, then a second, and a third. Rest. Study her wispy, transparent face. Wanting only to join her at the top of the world.

Realizing that I have been climbing this mountain for 29 years, it should not surprise me that my stamina is fading, my will to climb on is all but gone; I am exhausted. And yet, after each rest, after each look down at how far I have come, I think just a few more steps, then you can rest again.

Many years ago, after only a few years of teaching, I quit my job at Kingwood Middle School. Actually, technically, I was fired. Not for any misconduct or ineptitude, I promise. I was simply unpopular with my principal and my department head because I was not what you would call a “team player.” When they said, “Sit down,” I stood up; when they said, “Be on time,” I got there late; when they asked me to bring cookies to the faculty Christmas party,  I told them I wasn’t going to the party; when the school board allocated $100,000 dollars for new lockers and helmets for the football team but not a dime for much-needed classroom supplies, I embarrassed them by taking my complaint to the board itself at the next monthly meeting. It’s well-documented; I can show you the newspaper articles that followed. I did the ethically, morally right thing and got my ass kicked out the door.

So what did I do? I spent a year of my life- and all of my savings -writing my very first book. In it, a young photographer, Bobbie Carol Lindsay, comes into the life of a lonely and somewhat jaded literature professor at the University of Colorado; it- their ensuing romance -seems to have been fore-ordained, inevitable. They have known each other in other lifetimes; theirs is not so much a serendipitous falling together, but a predestined, spiritual  reunion. I structured the story in such a way that every other chapter, beginning with the second,  was set in the past- it was backstory, basically -and every odd-numbered chapter was in the present perfect tense, such that by the time the reader reached the last chapter in the book he/she would have arrived, logically, back at the opening chapter. The action of the present perfect chapters followed Bobbie and the professor on a hike up to the summit of a fictional Colorado mountain, Big Horn Peak, and was a metaphor for the struggle they were enduring as a couple because of an intolerant and unforgiving society.

I won’t tell you whether the outcome was happy or sad- it’s inconsequential, really. What matters is that it was my first attempt at writing a novel. I still have the original manuscript- completely handwritten, by the way -and while there are passages that make me cringe now as I reread them across the table of some two and half decades, all in all I still think it’s a good story. The structure is sound, perhaps intriguing if not wholly unique. I will say this, though: it was a story that a meant a lot to me, and I think if it had ever seen print it would have meant a lot to others as well. Who is it in your life who takes your breath away? That’s who this book was written for.

This past spring I finished my sixth novel, my ninth book overall, titled simply Cassandra. In it, the protagonist and narrator, Michael Freeman, is a writer and after years of writing and rewriting finally hits it big with his first novel. 

You see, fiction, in any guise, is really not fiction at all. It is life. Someone’s life. Fantasized, romanticized, the world rearranged to suit, but life nonetheless. Some might say it’s a question of honor, to thinly or vaguely try to conceal the truth in a ruse just to make a point, or work out a hangup, or share a set of feelings. Whether you win or you lose, as the reader or the writer, doesn’t matter. What matters is that you climb the mountain, that you seek to attain, to reach the summit and get a view most other people will never even be curious about seeing. 

Thus, I ask myself why I write, why I read. The answer is not easily expressed, Maybe better left unsaid at all. More to the point, I used to ache for people to read what I was writing, and when they didn’t I wondered if I was screaming in a vacuum, writing in the dark. Then, suddenly, it didn’t matter anymore. The praise was empty, as gauzy and unpredictable as that beautiful, beautiful image of the professor’s lost beloved hovering above him on that dreamy mountain peak.

So, let it rain; let it shine. Let the winds blow, let the clouds obscure the sky. I will always have stories; I will always be able to reach up and take hold of that crag just above me. One more step higher, then a second, then a third.

Rest.

Study her wispy, transparent face, she who climbed before me.

Wanting only to have me join her at the top of the world.