As we count our losses,
we brace for shadows
and ripples lurking
in the darkness.
The comfort of an
undeterred desert moon
shines stillness.
It conjures hope
and the ebb and flow
of constancy living
on their own cycles.
It rises with flickers
of unfulfilled promises
and etched memories
of loved ones gone
but never far away.
Albert, Louise, and their three adult children–Thelma, Violet, and Walter–led ordinary lives.
In the fall of 1944, they were a big-hearted, hard-working, working-class family–living in a flat on Labadie Avenue on the north side of St. Louis.
To be precise, Thelma and Walter lived with their parents. Violet and her husband Harry lived nearby.
At any rate, they were a close family with strong opinions, loud voices, and a propensity to gather around the radio for FDR’s inspiring Fireside Chats.
Like all patriotic American families of that era, they planted a Victory Garden to grow their own vegetables, rationed household supplies, and bought war bonds to support American troops fighting overseas in Europe and the Pacific.
They did it all for the sake of protecting and maintaining freedom in a war-torn world.
When Walter was drafted and deployed to Europe (Harry, too) you might say the family had extra skin in the game of war.
He left New York Harbor–aboard the Queen Mary ship with hundreds of other soldiers–on New Year’s Eve 1944.
Five days later, he landed at the Firth of Clyde in Scotland … and, in short order, he found himself on the front lines scurrying from foxhole to foxhole in the Battle of the Bulge in the forested Ardenne region of France.
As the war in Europe wound down in 1945, he marched with the first group of US army personnel who met with the Russian army on the Elbe River on the eastern front of the war.
Walter survived the ordeal–in part because of the regular flow of love letters and encouragement he received from his sisters and parents.
Walter returned to the US on the U.S.S. Monticello in July 1945 … for a thirty-day leave prior to going to fight in the Pacific.
He was supposed to depart in mid-August, but on August 6, the US dropped the first atomic bomb on Japan and the war ended shortly thereafter.
Walter’s fighting days were over. He was discharged from the service on October 11, 1945.
A few years later–sometime after he met his future wife Helen in January 1948 at Westminster Ballroom in St. Louis–he confided that the Russian soldiers were some of the roughest, battle-hardened men.
At any rate, despite the “shellshock”, nightmares, and frozen feet Walter brought home with him, he (and Harry) came home in one piece.
***
I’ve thought a lot about Walter and Helen (my dad and mom), Thelma and Violet (my aunts), Albert and Louise (my grandparents) … the Johnson family … since the election last week.
All of them have been gone a long time, but in a sense–today–I feel I am grieving my own loss of freedom, as well as their legacy. The one they fought so hard to uphold.
I’m not giving up, but that is how I feel on Veterans Day 2024.
Early this afternoon, I pulled out Dad’s World War II army trunk.
It contains pieces of his uniform–including the wool hat and golden medallion he wore eighty years ago as he was preparing to preserve freedom on behalf of his country.
Finding it there with his few remaining possessions gave me strength.
In the coming days, weeks, months, and years, I’m going to do my best to draw from the resiliency in my family’s DNA to find specific ways to uphold democracy in my Arizona community.
You can be sure I also will continue to exercise my voice–through prose and poetry–and influence others in a positive fashion as we head into an uncertain and potentially ominous period in our country’s history.
When I saw you
from across the room
high-five your conspirators,
the simmer of my sadness
escalated into a boiling frenzy.
What audacity … to celebrate
at the funeral of my beloved,
to dance on graves and marble stones
that ripple and repeat on rolling hills.
While I grieve for her and them,
I grieve more for all of us
and what will come next.
Yes, I am down … gutted really.
But I am still out and
I am determined to rise up.
I still have my past and present,
even if I don’t know my future.
I still have my passion.
I still have my chosen family.
I still have my truth.
I still have my identity.
I still have my voice.
There is no deep discount
for you to collect,
no razzmatazz reward
or ragged punch card
for you to accrue,
no extra credit
for you to capture
from the check-out lane,
no savings to realize
on the way out the door.
It is just these twinkling
blue lights of hope
that exist to frame
our fleeting worldview,
that implore us all
to imagine better possibilities,
that remind us
if we act now
to salvage our future freedom,
if we move forward
to heal from the past,
we may still be able
to rescue our civilization
from the jaws of decay.
Our funhouse shadows
lead us on new adventures
that unfold and stretch
in September’s sharp light.
We depart on weightless legs,
newborn colts
weaving and wandering,
ready to gallop
in the golden glow,
transformed with
magical memories
to carry home and savor.
***
I’ll be traveling for the rest of September. While I’m away, purchase my latest book, A Path I Might Have Missed, and enjoy more of my poetry.
I dream and gaze into a Sonoran sky,
where flames no longer lap at my tired tail,
and concrete runs smooth and cool,
and trusting birds fly slow and low,
and spirits rise high above tall trees,
and the constant chase has ended,
and the kitchen door is always open,
and I finally realize I’ve found home.
I try to be careful, but I’m not a superstitious swimmer.
Life flows cooler and bluer when I navigate the deep end.
Back and forth in thirteen feet, more washes over and around me.
I have more room to glide, more room to imagine, more room to dream.
It’s time to come clean. I haven’t been devoting enough time to an important piece of my life and identity. I haven’t been scheduling–and honoring–a critical creative need: uninterrupted time to write.
Like an untuned car with dirty spark plugs, this sputtering connection–between me and my creative self–has been misfiring for about a year.
Though I have produced creative things (like a few librettos for my chorus and a blogpost once each week), I haven’t been protecting my creative time. I haven’t been developing enough ideas that are purely mine.
It’s time to take action. To go back to school. To open the metaphorical hood of this mid-century car. To do something about it.
I know this is a challenge for all writers … and I’m luckier than most. I’m not juggling a full-time job at this stage of my life.
Still, external forces and demands often flood through the door–disrupting my good writing intentions. (Even as I began to write this, a sprinkler head outside our front door just went haywire. I texted one of our condo board members to tell him a fountain of water is spraying everywhere!)
I’m back to the keyboard of my writing universe. Beyond the whack-a-mole geysers that pop up in every life, it’s time I became more selective and vigilant with how I choose to spend my time.
It’s time for me to find a better balance again. To be more attentive to my own creative needs (like I did when I wrote and published four memoirs and one book of poetry from 2016 to 2023) … while still taking some time to help others.
Today I began by scheduling two hours–between 10 a.m. and noon–to write this blog post about the writing process.
Tomorrow, I have another two hours on my calendar. Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday will be the same.
Perhaps it is fitting that I’m treating myself like a misaligned student, who needs guidance from the teacher in me. Because this fall I will be leading a three-part “Meaningful Memoirs Matter” writing workshop for up to eight students at the Scottsdale Public Library.
I’m excited about the opportunity to teach again. (In the early 2000s, I taught the fundamentals of public relations as an adjunct instructor for Roosevelt University in Chicago.)
I think this 2024 experience will be more fulfilling on a personal level than the communication courses I led more than twenty years ago.
I genuinely want to help aspiring writers in my community tell their own stories. I want to tell them they don’t have to be celebrities to do it.
Extraordinary things happen to all of us. Important stuff flies under the radar in our everyday lives.
Just as important, I want to share my passion for the memoir art form and set this small group of individuals on a path to discover and unearth their own voices.
Back to scheduling. One of the things I will tell my students is that writing is a discipline. It requires solitude, time, dedication, energy, and–of course–passion.
But if you start small and string enough hours, days, weeks, and months of devoted and affirming writing sessions together–with time–the misfiring or underutilized writing jalopy can become a well-oiled machine.
Simply writing this is helping me get my creative energy back.
It’s time for me to practice what I will preach. To nurture the most important pieces of who I am … the writer, the storyteller, the essayist, the poet, the creative protagonist.
Because I am happiest when I am producing something that is entirely mine. Something that speaks to our human condition. Something that celebrates our connections to animals and nature.
Something that amplifies the importance of raising your voice and sharing your truth … even if the rest of the world has blown a gasket.
In summer’s flurry of joyful singing, record-breaking heat, Covid resurgence, political revelations, and Olympics coverage, June is gone. July is close behind.
Until now, my Covid recovery, birthday revelry, and travels to and from Minneapolis for the 2024 GALA Festival prevented me from posting highlights from Encore, our Phoenix Gay Men’s Chorus concert in late June.
Suffice it to say Encore was a musical review of favorite chorus moments and tunes (A Million Dreams, Some Nights, What Was I Made For?, Bridge Over Troubled Water, Proud, I’m Still Standing, For Me and ten more.)
Beyond that, it was also a reflective celebration of Marc Gaston’s twenty-two years as our artistic director–laced with storytelling vignettes (I wrote), LGBTQ anthems, and dazzling dance routines.
As a singer and one of several storytellers, I couldn’t be prouder of the program we created and performed for three exuberant audiences at Tempe Center for the Arts.
I will leave you with a snippet of dialogue … along with four images from the concert … that represents the joy, energy, rainbow colors, and love, which reverberated in the room away from the summer heat.
“When I sing with this chorus–these amazing people–and I absorb all the music and camaraderie, it feels like the sky is the limit. It feels like I could rule the world.” Mark Johnson, Storyteller #1, in Encore.
June is the start of triple-digit season in the Sonoran Desert.
When it reaches 110 degrees–as it has for the past several days–it really feels like you’ve stepped inside an oven alongside that batch of chocolate chip cookies you crave. Or maybe, you imagine, there is a blaze approaching just over the next butte.
Tom and I escaped the oven for a few days to visit friends in the mile-high altitude and pines of Prescott, Arizona.
Watching the acrobatics and listening to the distinctive calls of a wide array of birds–bluebirds, woodpeckers, finches, tanagers, nuthatches, hummingbirds, etc.–while sipping morning coffee with John and Carolyn on their front patio, was as rejuvenating as a day at the spa.
Now we are back home. There is a quiet, reflective component tied to the intense Sonoran heat. Early swims. Late walks. More time to read. Fewer people to navigate.
We’ll be here seven years next month. In the heat and stillness of that realization, we’ve carved out a good, artistic, and whole life among Arizona friends, buttes, and dazzling sunsets.
It’s a warm (hot) life I never imagined at 30, 40 or 50 years old–but still a pleasant surprise beyond the constant push and responsibility of my Midwestern bread-winning years.
