The Literary Fruits Of an Ordinary Life

Roy Barnacle


'When are we going to see your next essay?'' In the past when friends and erstwhile fans, or even my impatient editor,  asked me that question, I usually paused, wondering what I should  give for an answer. I find it difficult to laud any  great literary triumphs (achieved) or tragedies (overcome), or that manifest great progress or betterment for myself and my fellow man.  I have led a fairly ordinary life, with ordinary aims and ordinary achievements. (Is that an oxymoron?)

When I finally told this truth to friends, they pooh-pooh my anguish with great love and affection. One dear friend reminded me of something I told them many years ago when we were discussing what makes a true writer. I said I thought a real writer could be told to write on ''thimbles'' or ''the color blue'' or ''sardines'' and he or she would dispense 800 words on such subjects, not with ease perhaps, but with a probable amount of skill and expertise.

I have never actually felt that I was writing for the ages or to change the world. I also never wrote to gain fame or wealth. (''Never write to pay a bill, or to be sure you never will....'' wrote one famous bard.)

It was something else. Feelings, perhaps? Or a longing to just tell one single solitary soul that there is hope and expectation of goodness in a growing world of distrust and melancholy? Perhaps I am too emotional, or might be, to be too practical in my writing. Too practicaL to write about gun culture, child abuse, political ineptitude or financial corruption. My emotions might tell me to melt the guns, castrate the child abusers, burn city hall down, and demand financial restitution at 54%.

I miss my father very much. I find my eyes moisten at children singing and at friendships that ask nothing in return but the friendship itself. I regret things I have said and things I have never said. I have discovered that seeking the ultimate is an eternal task, but at the same time, life's a cinch, by the inch.

If, as is said, in every man's writings lies the character of the writer, then indeed I continue to struggle to find those threads that are woven with who I really am. I have raised two familys, survived two divorces, and declared a traitor for leaving the land of my birth, for a spiritual re-birth in another..

I have sought, in the words of Mr. Chips, ''to be brave and strong and true. And to fill the world with love my whole life through.'' Perhaps my ''experiences'' can be called ''blessings.''

Surely, there must be something to write about that.

© Copyright 2001 Roy H. Barnacle. All rights reserved.

Conspire, Aspire, Inspire, Perspire, Church Spire.

I was at  keyboard of my PC, struggling to squeeze out my secrets, the keys inside that unlocked  my thoughts of loyalty, kindness, affection, courage, justice and the routes of those highways to contentment and comfort, triumph and distinction, reward and reward recognition. Why is it such a struggle to know or think we know, the truth about ourselves and of those we know and once knew. My neighbor, Kent, across the street, has just pushed open the front door, calling out if anyone was at home. I sighed, wondering if I would ever put words on paper, to start, to travel, to finish.

Kent,  was returning a tape rule, borrowed well before Christmas, or was it Thanksgiving. We are the kind of neighbors that do not keep track of our borrowings and lendings.

"What are you writing about this time?" he said.

This time? This was 2012, and on my computer screen was an article I started in the bright summer days of 2001. I was still at it, but I did not tell him that. I prefer my friends and neighbors to think that I sit down every day, full of inspiration and exaltation, streaming the words out across the page, perfection itself, with no need of spellchecking, thesaurus or grammar check.

"Give me a subject. . ."  I would challenge them at dinner parties,    ",. . .and I will have an essay on it by the morning."  Fortunately for me, few followed up.

People ask me what I write about, the subjects, those arenas  of play and performance that the world displays with us as participants and actors reading the lines and coming to center stage.  I want to sound grand and intellectual, positive and tell them that I write about truth and justice; peace and harmony, and honor and morality.  I always want to say that I produce easy essays on life, love and liberty, but more often end up telling them that my last essay was on utility poles, or the history of string, 

What I did not tell Kent, was that I had been thinking of my father, causing,  just before he entered, some very wet eyes. I had been listening to Judy Collins sing one of her songs; My Father. In it, she sings of her father's promise, to take them to France and sail on the Seine. Fathers are like that; hopelessly romantic, starry-eyed, and promise their children the world.

        The cruelest remark I ever heard about somebody's father was, in answer to "What did your father do?" the reply "He failed."  I don't know if my father failed at anything, because I never knew his dreams or longings. I do know that he cared for us, put food on the table, came home every night, and sighed very heavily and glared around the dinner table if we made a noise during the nightly radio newscast, or the soccer scores every Saturday night.. Not once did he promise to take us to France.

Ms. Collins sings of her father's promises and dreams for his daughters; of his intents if not his consummation and completion of them. What, I wonder, were my fathers intents? Did he intend that his sons and daughter go to college?   Was it in his list of goals to have us becomes highly successful men, important in the community, admired by friend and foe alike?   Was, instead, his designs for his children a little more simple; be kind to others, think before you act, read, understand, love?

Thirty years after he passed, I still miss my father very much. Not his physical presence, but those moments that I never had; to talk with him, tell him of my own hopes and dreams for my children and what I had done with and in my life. I do not seek my father through medium and manipulation, but through those qualities that have been more dream than reality in the time since my father passed away. Dreams become realities when you stop the dreaming and start to establish those once dreamlike qualities as building blocks and anchors in your life to building your own dreams for your children.

Knowing the pitfalls and traps of my own relationship with my father, I can, hopefully,better guide and govern my own children's journey to adulthood of success and the accomplishment of their own dreams --  and realities. As my teenage daughter keeps reminding me, "Dad, it's a different world than when you were my age."  She does not want to hear me say that from age to age, there are qualities and values that are both needed and necessary people of all ages; qualities of good friendship, selflessness, generosity, sacrifice for the common good, mercy, faith hope and charity. Parents are nearly always neophytes in their children's world, and it behooves any parent to learn how to survive in it. Trying to know what my father's world was, and how he survived it, helps me understand my children's hopes and dreams, and my own. Perhaps, just perhaps, there is no such thing as perfection in this world, but I know there are those, for I have met them -- those who always know there is always something else that can be done to improve things. The people, of which I believe my father was one, who aver that they may never make anything or anyone, perfect, but the solutions are for the moment optimum, not perfect.

There was no college cash, no social or politician nepotism, no club tie communication for me from my father. But there was a watchfulness that, what his son did have, would be protected, defended and left unstirred, un-interfered with,  for that son to take with him in his own world to exercise and establish.

I would hope that my four children would, in time, look back and feel as positive about me as I do about my father, despite his "failures" and his heavy dining room sighs. I, like my father, and as Ms. Collins sang, "work on his dreams like boats we knew we would sail in time."

©  Roy Barnacle 2012  All Rights Reserved

Essay block

After describing my self as a writer to a friend,  a writer in the grip of a 10-year writer's block, I was asked the following questions..

 What do you think is the cause for this block, and how do you hope to address it? Or are you resigned to waiting for your muse to wake up and return?

Answer: Hmmm, my version of writers block is not that I cannot write, but that I cannot write the stuff I use to write, or would like to write. I do write every day,  but its mostly on my autobio and my journal. My writing is based, (but not driven by) more upon my emotions than my intellect or reason. I supposed therefore, that depression or anxiety would interere with my inspiration or creativity where my ability to put honest pen to paper.
  My writing, as with other of my individual reflections, is driven by love,sometimes philosophically, or spiritual, sexual or inquiry, and so on.
  Muse is, for me, more verb than noun, and I am not much into astrology.(In such, I am an Aquarian!) If my muse was Polyhymnia perhaps Melpomene has taken her place.


2. If you could accomplish only one thing during the rest of your life, what would it be?
Answer:  Oh boy, I have a life list of goals and dreams I'd like to accomplish. I am loath to say things like "Go snorkeling in the Maldives" or "Have an essay published on the op-ed page of the New York Times"  On the other hand, I am too much of a realist to list "Find a cure for cancer" or "Abolish World Hunger" and so on.
  I have a very strong faith of God's existence.I would like to understand God further and in that, my accomplishment might be viewed as selfish rather than philanthropic. I strongly beleive that values and acts of real accomplishment, are driven by spiritual values than education or circumstances.
  On a more secular and perhaps pragmatic level, my goal might be to become the writer I want to be, and though my writings, help lift ordinary people above the day to day existence of life.
Philanthropic.

3. What do you think are the three best traits you have to offer a partner?

Answer: Love, commitment and an open hand. (Not necesarily in that order.)  I offer a quote from one of my own articles: ""Love and commitment are one. Commitment without love becomes a necessary task, a duty, perhaps, efficient but lacking in warmth and real communication. Love without commitment is too fragile, easily swept away by the weakest attack upon it. It is the commitment to love itself, and thereby in a way,  immortality, that preserves both. Committed love is part of an eternal dialogue between ourselves and immortality.""
 The open hand is a sign and symbol of trust, honesty and friendship.

 Maybe I should change my avocation to "essayist".  Essy block sounds more professional.
(The article written outside of my writers block!! )


©  Roy Barnacle 2012  All Rights Reserved

 A proclamation
by Roy H. Barnacle

The building had stood there for as long as I could remember, which wasn't very long. My parents spoke of it fondly, and of their own memories about it. My father, in his love of exploration and investigation of his beloved city, spoke warmly of it and eventually, even I captured the spirit of the building and of the locality in which it stood.  Then, in one day, it was gone. It was unceremoniously destroyed. It went not with intent or meaning, but as a random act of terror and horror, imposed not by renewal or design, but with a hate and fear of what it stood for.
    This was not the tall, magnificent towers of the World Trade Center, but of a small church in the City of London, during the night of May 10th, 1941. It, and many another structures like it, stood as part of the history of my town. It's own history was long; Built in 1382, rebuilt in 1683 and 1817, then obliterated in a single night of terror bombing by our enemy. Much of London's structure and way of life was both destroyed and changed forever in those dark days when Britain stood alone against what was perceived as an enemy intent on destroying civilization as we in Britain knew it.
    This is  where London began as a Roman colonial town around AD 50. Beginning on September 7, 1940, much of it was obliterated and for a total of 57 consecutive nights, London was bombed. The terror bombing of London was designed to break the spirit of the British people in a way that would leave them destitute, spiritually impoverished, morally bankrupt and socially wrecked.
    On September 11th , 2001, another enemy of our way of life acted in an obscene and repugnant act, designed to test American mettle and to prove that evil has precedence over good, hate over love, deception over sincerity and the lie over truth. It shall not stand. As Secretary of State, Colin Powell reminded us, buildings can be destroyed and people murdered, but the spiritual and moral concepts that make this nation will endure and bear stronger for the onslaught. It's a question of resolve. The  British people had a firmness that enabled them to keep their eye on victory.
    It has been said that various agencies, departments and a large portion of the population were lethargic and lackadaisical about what happened overseas. Perhaps. The conflict in the minds of Americans is to allow others the freedom to act, and at the same time to ensure that those acts are not against the common good. The American today is not much different from the Londoner of 1940.  If you push a decent people too far, they will have to push back. Sooner or later, there  is a point of no return.
    I have been asked how I survived World War II. I do not recall any heroics or tragedies surrounding me.  I was dug out from under the staircase of my own bombed house in London. My father, who was a policeman, went missing for six days, surviving somewhere in the cauldron of hell that was created by German bombers in London's docklands. I was sent from the city to 'surrogate' parents in Wales. In none of this, do I ever recall anyone expressing a climate of fear. My father's thought at the time, recounted many times later, was to the Nazi's: "You do your worse, and we will do our best." This can be equally applied to each and every American who enjoys and defends his freedoms.
    I do not lessen the horror of what happened in New York, Washington and in the skies over America. Everyone innocent that lost his or her life gave that life as much for America and our way of life as much as any soldier, sailor or airman. It is the sense of normalcy that the fanatic wants to destroy. The freedom to travel on business or to visit loved ones or to explore and enjoy is normal for Americans and others around the world. It is commonplace  for us to enjoy the fruits of our labor without despotic control, or to have our creativity used to destroy and demolish. Those that do not enjoy such normalcy find it easier to eliminate such freedoms than to exercise them.
           The American people must and will do the same. In the words of Prime Minister Churchill at Britain's darkest hour:
        "We must never cease to proclaim in fearless tones the great principles of freedom and the rights of man . . . which through Magna Carta, the Bill of Rights, the Habeas Corpus, trial by jury, and . . . common law,  find their most famous expression in the American Declaration of Independence."  Another commentator opined that this was not an attack on America per se, but on civilization, on decency, on a way of life that has, as it's ultimate goal, the loosing of all mankind from the disorders of social want, political and religious persecution, injustice and oppression of the human spirit.
    When my mother heard of the destruction of this small church in London during those dark days, she cried. She recounted to me later that she felt the whole world was coming to an end. She was less concerned about Nazi troops marching up the High Street, than she was that a large hole had been left in our lives that could never be replaced. The church was never rebuilt, but the bells were saved and finally sent to America as part of an outpouring of gratitude by Britain to their American allies.
    There must be an American resolve, a US version of a stiff upper lip, if you will. A lip that trembles not in fear, but in indignation and outrage. I am sure that there were moments in my parents thought that all that they enjoyed and worked for would be swept away forever, and  that nothing would every be the same again. But those qualities that lie deep in some and are carried on the shoulders of others must and will endure.
    We can go go forward from this moment, not in revenge or retaliation,  although that may be necessary and justified. We will go forward with those qualities and ideas that were written over twohundred years ago. When we intone our allegiance to the flag or to the Constitution we are pledging our allegiance to the idea that .all men are created equal, not all Americans, all Palestinians, all Mongolians, but all men. This makes the United States not a country, a political system or social structure, but an idea. America is an idea in the mind of man and it is the idea that bombs, terrorists or fanatics cannot destroy.

©  Roy Barnacle 2002  All Rights Reserved

Moving On or Off

I felt it was time to move. It was time to stop. I had lived in this house for over 36 years. It was not the house I moved into back then. It had acquired a new roof, new windows, siding, a deck , a split entrance and a very expensive septic system. I was, is, what one visitor called, nestled into the hillside.  There had been two long marriages, and the raising upright, of four wonderful children. But I am the keeper of this house now, with it's memories, reminiscences and seven histories.

            It has been a place of companionship, struggle, reward and progress. It is a place where it's occupants have been closer inside than on the outside of it.  There has been love and indifference, kindness and unconcern, sharing and possessiveness, appreciation and forgiveness. It has been a place where healing and headway have been made in both head and heart.

It has been both house and home. It has been a village, one that has been taken to raise a child, a family and a marriage.  It has been a city, often crowded, but lively and exploratory. It has been a continent where it's occupants have expressed diverse and assorted opinion, values, character and love. It has been my world for 36 years.

It has been a fortress, keeping us all safe over the years, and a field of dreams, where each of us as it's inhabitants have forged our futures and planned our progress.  My four children have spread their wings from this nest, and flown into the world, hopefully to improve it, and to take it's values and it's meanings into the world and into their own lives.

As a small cape, my American friends and family thought it a little small; my very British parents thought it huge. For both it was large enough to come and be welcomed with love and appreciation and small enough to feel it's embrace coming through the door. My father, with his small 20 X 20 square feet of London backyard, thought my half acre was a gardeners dream. At times, I prayed that the grass and shrubbery would stop growing, not for ever, just enough for me to rest up for a week or so!  When this house received a new roof, my essay on introducing my children to rooftop views of the neighborhood, was published by this newspaper; I remember with delight the 50 percent reduction in my heating bills after installing of new windows; and the joy of discovery real oak flooring under the carpet.

A house can be like a novel or a good movie. Standing in each room, I can recall scenes and scripts of drama, of triumph and tragedy. In this room my children were born; in this one, I wrote essay after essay, letters, family history and my autobiography. In another I hear laughter and tears; argument and agreement, of greeting and parting.

With a declining economy and a receding cash flow, the time to move has…………………..