Awareness Prologue

September 1977 - August 1983

Table of Contents

At the Edge of the End of it All, is the Beginning

Expect No Rewards, and They're Yours

We Become What We've Done

Acceptance

Prologue

My name is Howard and I'm fifty-two years old. It's April of 1998. This is the third time I've revisited the effort you are about to read, and the third time I've revised the over-all title, and the third time I’ve thought about the point of what ever this "thing" is that I've been working on now for almost twenty years.

I was born in January of 1946 and had a most happy childhood. Grew up a sports hero, didn't do well in high school as I liked the girls too much, and as a consequence went into the Navy when I was eighteen years old. Anyone who has done that knows the story. I won't repeat it here, suffice it to say that by the time I was ready to "get out" of the Navy, the Navy was not ready to let me go, and so I spent a year or so asking senior "petty officers" (still like that phrase) really bad questions that merely reconfirmed my desire to exit the bounding waves, and thoroughly convinced my Navy superiors that, indeed, there really wasn't a future for the likes of me in this mans Navy.

In the meantime, I'd met and married a woman named Evelyn who had an apartment in Boston, within which I hid out from the Navy, and in her ample bosom, planed my, err, our, futures. It was August of 1968 when the Navy "let me out" to go to Bryant and Stratton Junior College in Boston. It was a good break for me. Evelyn and I had nothing in common; say my love of her large breasts and her need for somebody to whisk her away from her father (a man who had graduated from both Harvard and Brown Universities with degrees in Philosophy and Religion and married a woman from the upper regions of Canada with little to no education). This union, troubled as it was from the start, bore three children, Evenly the middle child, with an older sister and younger brother, and the dysfunction’s created within this union found it’s way into bed with Evenly and I.

She was as they say a little hard to please, if you know what I mean, and try as I would and try I did, there was never a satisfying moment, I'm still sorry to say for Evenly. This sad turn of events left it’s mark on me as well. Evelyn and I were married for about five years. I'd finished two years at Bryant and Stratton Junior College, got a degree in Computer Science with honors (Dean’s List) and was accepted as a junior at Eastern New Mexico State University. Evelyn and I moved to Portalles, New Mexico in the summer of 1970, where I "walked on" and got a baseball scholarship after a successful fall semester of academics and a wonderful tryout with the "fall" baseball team. Things were looking up, to say the least.

On January 1st, 1971 my Evelyn informed me that she was, in fact, quite unhappy and wanted a divorce and, as another matter of fact, her lawyer, a very suspicious looking Mexican fellow with a thin moustache, would soon be in touch.

Those words hardly from her lips, she drove off in our Volkswagen beetle, leaving me alone to deal with Portalles, New Mexico and my shattered life. As it turns out, she'd left me for the brother of the dentist she worked for in Clovis, a tooth re-builder, and probably from a dental perspective, irresistible. Anyways, I tried to continue on at Eastern New Mexico State University, home of the Greyhounds, as best I could. On Valentines Day, 1971 I saw her for the last time at her house in Clovis. I remember we were friendly. I told her I was leaving and gave her a red rose I'd brought. She stuck to her guns. I drove off into that night for New York, never seeing, or hearing from her again. Many times since then I've wondered what my life would have been like had I taken a western route to California rather than return to New York.

Less I forget, there soon, too soon, came Lynn, who turned out to be the mother of my children. She thinks of them as "hers".

She was the girl friend of a guy I knew that managed a baseball team composed of many old friends of mine, some I'd played baseball with when I was a kid. One thing led to another, and in a short period of time, I married Lynn. She was interested in sex and could be pleased, which pleased me very much, still suffering from the "thing" that wouldn't happen for Evelyn.

Lynn liked to live beyond her means, which made it an extremely good thing for her once I came along. I was finishing school and upon completion got a promotion into another whole league at work. I was up for the challenge.

I see what I do as corporate art via computers, for business purposes. Lynn and I just drifted apart, and we had distance to begin with, so the slide took about five years. Then she got pregnant. Well I tell you; things went from bad to worse. The worse it got at home, the better it got at work. I was doing great stuff, ideas, implemented with groups of friends, engaged in battle and winning what I thought were great victories.

It would only stand to reason that at this time I’d meet Susan, a photographer bound for Alaska, and we’d fall desperately in love.

Up until that time in my life I hadn't written anything down, so it came as both a surprise and apparent recognition of a new, lifelong process of paying attention and writing it down, that as I left Lynn and my young children, I began writing “it” down..

The battle with paper, the one you're reading from, started during the first pregnancy, and for all intents and purposes, run through Barbara ( or Alexis).

It goes like this and is called Awareness:

At the edge of the end of it all is the beginning.

Expect no rewards, and they're yours.

We become what we've done.

Acceptance.

This first bit, then, is about divorce, children being born, love and passion, life's interventions, magic, and just starts to touch into painting.

Stayed tuned, Awareness …

Love to hear your comments.

Thanks,

Howard.