Why write?

I ask myself that question every day first thing in the morning after coffee with my wife sitting in our regular chairs facing one another in the living room, one cat on her lap and one cat on mine.

It's a hard one to answer, especially when I don't feel like it and don't have anything to say.

Why write?

I know why I started to write.

It was 1966 in Iron Mountain, a small town at the edge of the woods in Michigan’s “Upper Peninsula.” It was my senior year of high school. The path ahead seemed clear enough. I’d go to college on an athletic scholarship. Probably not to a Big 10 school. I wasn’t that good. But I was good enough for smaller state schools like Northern Michigan University. In a small pond, even a small fish can be a BMOC (Big Man on Campus).

In my junior year of high school I pole vaulted over 11 feet with a stiff pole; ran the quarter mile in 53 seconds; starting halfback on the football team; second in the regional wrestling meet. A 6-handicap golfer, All Star shortstop in Little League and a goalie and ski jumper in winter. I dreamed of making the Olympics; playing for Lombardi; being Stan “The Man” Musial.

In the first game of the football season in my senior year, I scored the winning touchdown and the whole town cheered. A picture of me crossing the goal line was on the front page of the sports section of the Iron Mountain Daily News. I went to a beer party at somebody’s hunting camp up in Pine Creek country and on the way home with a can of Pabst on the floor I went off the road into a ditch just as a sheriff deputy happened to come by. I was arrested and charged with Minor in Possession and spent the night in the county jail because my father was too pissed to bail me out despite my mother’s pleas and wailings.

That, too, made it onto the front page of the sports section of the Iron Mountain Daily News.

The sports editor, Aldo Andreoli, speculated on what effect the loss of their starting halfback would have on the team’s season. Back then, anybody picked up for Minor in Possession was automatically kicked off of all of the school’s sports teams, forever.

All of a sudden, I found myself adrift without an anchor in dark waters. My girlfriend’s father called my father to tell him to keep his son away from his daughter. Girls turned their backs to me in the hallways between classes. I couldn’t wear my varsity jacket with all the shiny metals. There’d be no athletic scholarships.  All of a sudden, I was a nobody, exiled from the only world I knew where I was at the center of the galaxy.

At least at Mario’s pool hall downtown I didn’t have to feel like a pitiful outcast. I liked to play pool and I was pretty good. We played for quarters and I usually came out ahead. I was shooting a game of 3-rail billiards with Ronnie, Mario’s kid, when the song that would change my life came over the local AM station, the Beatles’ “Paperback Writer.”

Of course! I could be a writer, a famous one! It didn’t seem like anybody held it against famous writers for drinking too much. I knew how to read and write the English language. As early as the fifth grade, the Dominicans had taught us how to diagram a sentence. If I did a good job, I might get on the Johnny Carson Show and wouldn’t the high school girlfriend and her father back in the old home town kick themselves for letting a famous writer with lots of money and tickets to glitzy parties get away.

I went to college after all. I told the admissions counselor that I wanted to learn how to become a writer, a famous one.

Nearing graduation, a professor suggested that I might want to consider becoming a newspaper reporter. “You’ll learn the hardest thing to learn about being a writer,” he said… “how to write when you don’t feel like it and have nothing to say.”