My Way (or the highway)

This book is coming and almost nothing can stop it now. It’s due out in February. It’s blog time once again! And once again the theme is musical.

Sinatra

In 1968, Frank Sinatra recorded the song “My Way,” which would become his theme song, his signature. By 1969, it had become a major hit for him. I was 11 in 1969 when I first heard the song; it stuck in my head. Why would someone choose such a difficult path and endure so many hardships?

Fast forward to 2023. Fifty-three years later, it makes sense to me. It sounds like my theme song now, the soundtrack of my life. Check out this stanza.

“I've loved, I've laughed and cried, I've had my fill, my share of losing
And now, as tears subside, I find it all so amusing.”

That’s my life in six words. I supposed we’ve all loved, laughed, and cried. Some of us have loved more, some laughed more, some cried more. But none of us at this stage has gone through life untouched. We all bear the traces of battles fought, the scars from old wounds, and the memories of those who are no longer with us: Spouses, parents, siblings, friends, and colleagues.

 This is why we write memoirs, and why we read them: to remember the good times and acknowledge the hard times. One person’s journey matters to the extent it articulates something significant, memorable, and eternal, with which we can identify. I am not famous or important. But I can share my journey with you. You’re welcome to trace my steps and see where they lead.

I suppose I am what you might call a seeker. A searcher. Early on, I did not find whatever I was looking for in life in my hometown, state, or country. So I kept going. I got to Morocco, in North Africa, after college. At some point, I looked at a map – back when maps were three feet tall and stuck on a wall.

And there was all of Africa, an enormous continent, and it beckoned to me. I thought a dangerous thing: how long would it take to work my way around Africa? (Warning: do not think this, or you will be gone for a very long time! You should probably stop home delivery of the newspaper).

It took me forty years, but I had my answer. I would spend my entire career trying to work my way around Africa. Along the way, I got married and we had children. There was joy and laughter and music. There were parties and dancing. Then my first wife, Aisha, got cancer and died at the age of 40.

Aisha

Then life STOPPED. Everything stopped: the joy, laughter, music, parties, and dancing. All of it. Life just stopped. I became a hermit of sorts.

Then the question in life became, do I go on and try again, or crawl into a hole and wait to die? It took me a couple of years to figure out the answer to that question. It wasn’t easy to resume life.

Eventually, thanks to the healing powers of time and music (my therapy), I got through it. I decided to resume my trek around Africa. The rest of it is in the book. I took a few more knocks along the way. But I survived.

Now, the challenge is to start all over, as a writer, at the age of 64. This is my third act. This is what I plan to do for the rest of my life, however long that is. How do you start over without any experience? Well, you go to the back of the line, just like when you got out of college, and you try to work your way to the front of the line again. Nobody wants to publish you. Nobody wants to read what you wrote. You’ve got the same problem you had at twenty: How do I prove myself to the world? How can I break in? You stand outside at night and howl at the moon that no one cares. The moon says you’re damn right.

At this point, the neighbors are looking out their windows at a grown man (and his dog) howling at the moon, and you realize you better go back inside before they call the police. And then come howl again the next day.

The point is, I know it’s virtually impossible for me to succeed, but I have to do it or die trying. So now I am working on the interior layout and design of the book. I know nothing about book design, which is a highly technical field. Writing a book is an endless series of challenges for which I am not prepared.

Along the way, just as in Africa, I mainly figure it out by stumbling around in the dark and stubbing my toes, until I find the light switch, there is light, and figure out where the hell I am and what I need to do. For example, I had to decide what font I wanted to use. What the hell do I know about fonts? Nothing. But a while back, I went a round or two with a book designer on whether to use a serif font (the footy one) or sans-serif (no-nonsense).

None of this mattered until it comes time to do the layout; suddenly, it’s very important. I went online and by pure chance found a new font called Kigelia. The designers studied African writing and created a new font that reflected characteristics of largely unknown and forgotten African alphabets. I loved it. It was only after my graphic designer questioned me that I found out what the word Kigelia comes from. I should have known it would be symbolic.

Kigelia africana is the African sausage tree. It has large, long, brown seed pods that look like sausages. I saw them all over West Africa. The bizarre tree is kind of hard to miss. (Warning: The raw fruit is poisonous to humans. )

Sausage tree fruit, which is poisonous to humans if eaten raw

The designer likes the font too but warned me that publishers probably would not agree to use my preferred font. So, we decided not to pursue a publisher. I’ve gone too far with my own design to have them discard it.

So, the choice of this font is sort of a metaphor. It has made the book unpalatable to publishers, unless they are able to reprocess it. Like the sausage tree fruit, which can be eaten if fermented or roasted properly.

In any case, like my travels around Africa, nothing in the process of writing the book has been easy, entirely logical, or in any way predictable. It’s been an adventure, and an arduous one at that. I’ve often thought that I’d quit.

But somehow, after every dark and stormy night, the sun comes up and the birds start to sing again. Life goes on, and I have to go with it. So, I just buckle down and tackle the next set of book challenges.

As the song says,

“I'll state my case, of which I'm certain, I've lived a life that's full, I traveled each and every highway, And more, much more than this, I did it my way

(Watch for future blog posts as we get closer to re-releasing the book )