MEET THE AUTHOR

I was born in 1950 and the decade of the ‘60s was an important period in my development as a person and a writer. I began writing at age five and continued writing through high school. I majored in English/Creative Writing at Emerson College in Boston, where I studied with Russell Banks. After graduating from Emerson, I attended Boston University’s one-year Masters Creative Writing Program and studied with Donald Barthelme and Dan Wakefield. I was a short story fiction writer at the time and had my work published in The Emerson Review and Ploughshares.

While attending BU’s Masters Creative Writing Program by day, I worked the 11pm to 7am shift at Babcock Artificial Kidney Center in Brookline, Massachusetts, as a dialysis therapist. To make matters even more interesting, I was living at the time in Rockport, Massachusetts, an hour north of Boston on Cape Ann, and commuted to and from class and work each day. Needless to say, it was an extremely sleep deprived year.

Before beginning work as a dialysis therapist, I hadn’t worked in healthcare and soon learned what everyone who provides patients critical care on an ongoing basis understands, that it can be rewarding, enriching, at times humbling and even heartbreaking work. The clinic accommodated 20 patients, as I recall, and each dialysis therapist was usually responsible for three patients for their three- or five-hour session, depending on the artificial kidney in use. The patients were of all ages and a variety of ethnic backgrounds. Most would sleep during dialysis but others remained awake and alert and enjoyed engaging therapists in conversation. There were some real characters among my patients and I always enjoyed talking with them, learning about their lives and their struggle to maintain as normal an existence as possible while battling a disease that had shortened their life expectancy considerably. Some were candidates for transplantation while others not and faced the prospect of having to be dialyzed three times a week for the rest of their lives. The one thing they all had in common was their humanity and the desire to live a dignified and productive life for however long they had left to live. Because it was the night shift, with lights dimmed to accommodate those patients who wanted to sleep, I always had the feeling that we were a world unto ourselves, journeying through the night, as if on a ship traveling on the sea toward dawn. Reaching the destination each morning, with all the patients somewhat groggy but safe and sound, was always a relief.

In an ironic twist, while working at Babcock I somehow managed to self-infect with Hepatitis B, most likely from a needle while hastily stripping down a machine after dialysis to ready it for the next patient. I lost half of my liver and spent a year recuperating in Rockport. My liver fully regenerated and I’ve enjoyed good health ever since. The experience sharpened my appreciation for that of my patients and all people suffering from the loss of kidney function or of any other organ. We tend to take health for granted. I learned it’s more fragile than we think.

Having recovered, I entered the world of business, where I enjoyed a successful career as a marketing communications consultant, a job that took me around the world on assignment for clients. Writing continued to be my “bread and butter” but it wasn’t until 2010 that I began writing short stories again. I wrote four, each longer than the last, and wasn’t to the bottom of the first page of the fifth when I realized it was going to be my first novel, Valley of Saint Anne.

I was no stranger to the world at large when I began traveling on business. I was born in Yokohama, Japan, to an Army couple. My dad was a captain at the time. Army life is a nomadic one and we’d move every two or three years as my dad’s assignments change. I spent the first two years of my life in Japan and arrived in the U.S. in San Francisco with my family on my second birthday. My dad’s subsequent assignments took us to Fort Eustis, Virginia, and West Point, New York. His next would expose me to Europe and North Africa. My dad was stationed at Camp Darby, Italy, not far from the port city of Livorno and the culturally and historically important city of Pisa. My dad spoke fluent Italian, which made traveling around Italy in the family’s ’56 Chevy Bel Air, itself an interesting experience, even more so. For an Italian-American family from New York City, it was a dream assignment. My parents weren’t the type of couple who sat around on weekends. They loved to travel and viewed it as a perquisite of Army life. Whenever my dad had leave, off we’d go to experience more of Italy and Europe and, in our last year in Italy, cruise the Mediterranean on the USNS Geiger, stopping in Tunisia, Greece and Turkey.

My dad’s next assignment was Fort Rucker, Alabama. This was 1960 and ’61 in the segregated South. It was an eye-opening experience for me and my family. We experienced firsthand the racial inequality and injustice that is an aspect of American society we’re still dealing with and struggling to come to grips with and, hopefully, one day move beyond.

My dad was informed by the Army that his next assignment would be a one-year “unaccompanied” assignment (he would be going alone) to South Korea. My mom, older brother and I spent the year in Highland Falls, New York, close to West Point and not far from my mom’s parents’ home in New York City. A year later, my mom and I stood in the dark at Idlewild Airport, now JFK, in Queens, eyes on the plane, waiting for him to appear in the open door and descend the mobile stairway. We waited and waited, watching passengers deplane until we thought there were no more passengers aboard and wondered if something had happened and hadn’t been on the flight. After a long anxious pause, he finally appeared at the top of the stairway and stood looking around, as if dazed. My mom and I glanced worriedly at each and then looked back at him. It was clear that he was not the same person he was a year ago, a fact that become ever clearer in the course of the days and weeks and months that followed. We knew something was wrong but not what, other than that his personality had changed. Once quick to smile and laugh and occasionally burst into song, he was now subdued and distracted. We would soon find out why.

We returned to Fort Eustis and life continued, although in a strange sort of way. My dad went off to work in the morning and returned after work, which was the only semblance of normalcy. For me, my brother and mom it was like living with a stranger. Then one day my mom received a call informing her that her husband had collapsed at work and was being taken to Walter Reed Army Medical Center (Now Walter Reed National Military Medical Center) in Bethesda, Maryland, near Washington, D.C. He was diagnosed with brain tumors and underwent “radical” neurosurgery, the standard practice at the time. The surgeons were able to remove some but not all of the tumors, although, as we learned when he was released almost a year later, they had removed what remained of his personality.

In anticipation of my dad’s eventual release from Walter Reed, my mom purchased a house in New Windsor, New York, near Newburgh and not far from West Point, where my dad would need ongoing medical care at the post hospital. My dad was retired from the Army at the rank of Lieutenant Colonel and discharged from Walter Reed. My mom and I brought him home to New Windsor.  At the hospital, the doctors had told my mom that her husband had, perhaps, 18 months to live. She chose not to share this with my brother or me and I understand perfectly why.

At the time my mom was working as a bookkeeper at a fabric dying company in Newburgh and I would usually arrive home from high school in the afternoon before her. One afternoon I arrived home to find my dad lying on his back on the couch in the family room, staring blankly at the ceiling and shaking slightly, the crouch area of his pants wet. I knew enough to know that he was having a seizure. I phoned my mom at work and explained the situation. She soon arrived home and an ambulance arrived soon thereafter. My dad was transported to the Veterans Hospital in Manhattan and my mom and I visited him the next day. The last time I saw my dad alive he was in lying alone in a hospital bed, as I recall the only patient in the ward, comatose and connected to a ventilator. My mom and I returned home that night. We both were physically and emotionally exhausted and retired to our bedrooms. I was awakened by her around 3 am and she told me my dad had died. He was 46 and I was 15.

Gone was the man who had wooed my mom when they were both teenagers in the Bronx; who had married her before enlisting in the Army to fight in World War Two; who had been recruited by the Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner of the CIA, to support the Italian partisans from the OSS’s headquarters in England, flying in Liberators to airdrop materiel into Italy; who decided after the war to make the military a career and rejoined the Army, assigned to the Transportation Corps; who, when we were living at West Point, swam in the summer in Delafield Pond with five-year-old me on his back, my arms wrapped around his neck, took me fishing on Lusk Reservoir and for a surprise helicopter ride in a Sikorsky “Flying Banana”, on which my dad and I were the only passengers, he sitting next to the pilot and I behind them sitting on a jump seat in the cargo section; who enjoyed filming each of my and my brother’s birthdays with his 8mm camera; who, when we were living in Italy, obtained his undergraduate degree from the University of Maryland through its correspondence courses, studying in his cramped makeshift den late into the evening; who wrote, produced and directed a musical revue called T.C. Follies, a series of skits that spoofed Army life in the Transportation Corps at Camp Darby, starred fellow officers and enlisted men with whom he worked, was performed on the stage at the officers club with musical accompaniment provided by the club’s local Italian house musicians.

I watched T.C. Follies wide-eyed from the catwalk, crouched in the dark next to one of the production crew of enlisted men who was operating the follow spot. I was eight or nine years old at the time and was exhilarated to be there, out of the house in the evening and among adults enjoying themselves. I felt admitted to and a part of their society, albeit vicariously. I knew that my dad was talented, creative and resourceful — he single-handedly installed a heating system in the unheated house we rented in Italy; I sat on the front porch of the house one summer afternoon and watched him magically change a pair of brown shoes to black (a skill he learned from his shoemaker father); returning to the States, I watched him add a poured concrete front porch to my mom’s parent’s house in the Bronx —  but this experience took my appreciation of just how talented, creative and resourceful he was to another level.

I don’t remember all of T.C. Follies (no recording was made of the performance) but several moments I do remember vividly. One was watching Colonel Sam Offee, a superior officer to my dad, who was a Captain at the time, and a good friend, standing alone on the stage in a pool of light, singing a lament to the tune of “Lili Marlene”, the most popular song of the Second World War, made famous by Marlene Deitrich, who sang it in Europe to Allied troops to bolster morale. She recorded a German language version of the song (which was originally titled “Lili Marleen” and changed to “Lili Marlene” in honor of her given name) that was broadcast by the OSS in Germany to demoralize the enemy. Among Colonel Offee’s responsibilities at Camp Darby was to act as the agent for the Mediterranean cruise, essentially the keeper of the list of service members and their families who had put in for the cruise. Berths on the Navy’s ship were limited and it was not at all certain that a service member’s name would come up for the cruise during his time at Camp Darby. The opening lyrics of Colonel Offee’s lament captured perfectly what a headache this aspect of his job could be at times: “My name is Sammy Offee, I’m the agent for the cruise, the names that people call me, they make me sing the blues.” It had the audience, some of whom had themselves given him headaches, in stitches.

Another moment vivid in my memory is when the stage lights faded to black after one sketch and came up a few moments later to reveal the stage filled with a line of dancing comic figures, which I recognized immediately as being from the Carnevale parade in Via Reggio, about an hour up the Tuscan coast. The figures were made of paper mache and almost completely encased the wearers’ bodies, with only their legs, covered in tights, and curly toe slippers visible. We’d attended Carnevale in Via Reggio the year before. The highlight was and still is a parade of massive themed floats, many featuring huge animatronics. It was a fantastic experience, like visiting another world. I was amazed that my dad had managed to enlist some of the parade members to perform in his production. “Resourcefulness” wasn’t in my vocabulary at the time but I came to know that’s what I was experiencing.

Then there was the finale.

The Army Transportation Corps is responsible for the movement of all things Army, be it materiel or personnel, from point A to point B, anywhere on the planet. Personnel includes Army service members and their families and materiel include their household goods as they move from assignment to assignment. The Transportation Corps got my family and our possessions, including our ’56 Chevy, from New York Harbor to the port in Genoa, Italy, and got us back again. As anyone who’s ever moved using a commercial moving company knows, things don’t always go smoothly. Things sometimes bust or break in transit and when they do, complaints ensue. The Transportation Corps experiences its fair share of them. Given the scale of operations, its unavoidable. My dad decided to have some fun with it in closing the show.

Again, the stage lights faded to black at the end of what would be the next to last skit but this time, instead of coming up again after a few moments, the screen at the back of the stage filled with the flickering light of a film projector lamp and then a scene in which two Army enlisted men dressed in olive drab fatigues stood behind an olive drab flatbed Army truck with its tailgate down. Between them was a large, decorative, ceramic Italian vase and a shipping crate, which was obviously too small for the vase. Of course, everyone in the audience was thinking That could be my Italian vase! The men puzzled for a few moments about how to get the vase into the crate, turning it this way and that. Finally, they looked at each other and shrugged, placed the vase over the crate and an Army blanket over the vase, picked up hammers and smashed it until fit. Having solved the problem, they put the top on the crate, nailed it shut, picked it up, placed it in the truck and lifted up the tailgate. Painted across the back was THE END. They got in the truck and drove off into the distance.

It was brilliant and I knew instinctively that my dad had directed and filmed the scene with his trusty 8mm camera. The antics of the two enlisted men brought the audience to its feet. It was the first time I experienced a standing ovation and I remember thinking to myself I want to entertain people like that someday.

My maternal great grandfather was a butcher in New York City who owned his own shop. I remember being a young teenager sitting at my maternal grandmother’s kitchen table in the Bronx one day, listening to her explain how her father made filet mignon, the most expensive cut of meat. He’d take a side of beef, she said, and hang it up and let it slowly rot. This struck me as strange but she had my attention. Every day, she said, he’d carve the rotted part off and keep doing it, day after day, until all that was left was the butter soft filet.

She could have been describing the process of producing good writing.