Michael Deeze's Blog
June 20, 2018
Old friends, new memories
This weekend several friends and family members along with me traveled to St. Louis, Missouri to take in the Cubs/Cardinals ballgame on Saturday night. It was hot and steamy and we saw an excellent game with an excellent outcome. (The Cubbies won!) On Sunday, I was in the city I took the opportunity to visit old friends that I had not seen in many years.
It was a little scary, and a little exhilarating all at the same time. They had always been beautiful and intelligent people and I on the other hand had spent the interim years being "ridden hard and put away wet" as the expression goes. When we arrived it couldn't have been a better experience. They, of course, were still beautiful and intelligent and extremely welcoming, and I soon realized that they in-turn also thought that I had aged fairly well.
Over an excellent lunch we shared lots and lots of laughs and fondly remembered many friends now gone. It was a glorious day, and easily made surviving the insufferable heat of Missouri well worth the trip. As our visit began to wind down they both confided that they had read my novel, Bless Me Father, and thought that it was good. The icing on the cake was when Christine, said she had an example of what she enjoyed most and she had marked it in the book so she could remember it.
That being said she retrieved it and turned to page 121 and read the passage to us all. It moved her, and all of us seated around the table, even me and I wrote it.
It was a little scary, and a little exhilarating all at the same time. They had always been beautiful and intelligent people and I on the other hand had spent the interim years being "ridden hard and put away wet" as the expression goes. When we arrived it couldn't have been a better experience. They, of course, were still beautiful and intelligent and extremely welcoming, and I soon realized that they in-turn also thought that I had aged fairly well.
Over an excellent lunch we shared lots and lots of laughs and fondly remembered many friends now gone. It was a glorious day, and easily made surviving the insufferable heat of Missouri well worth the trip. As our visit began to wind down they both confided that they had read my novel, Bless Me Father, and thought that it was good. The icing on the cake was when Christine, said she had an example of what she enjoyed most and she had marked it in the book so she could remember it.
That being said she retrieved it and turned to page 121 and read the passage to us all. It moved her, and all of us seated around the table, even me and I wrote it.
June 13, 2018
I'm only an egg
As I learn more and more about the world of self-publishing it's amazing to me that it is so vast. I had never written anything more than high school essays, (because I had to), and medical charts for my patients. Then my father showed me something that changed my perspective.
At the end of his life my dad started to disappear into dementia. A terrible disease that takes the person a piece at a time. It is also a condition that those closest to the person watch the descent while the person themselves do not see the progress. In the early stages of the disease my dad launched himself into a project that consumed him and he would disappear into his little study for entire days. As a part of his family we were happy that he was occupied and not cranky like he had begun to regularly manifest.
For Christmas that year he presented each of his six children a full hand-written transcription of the diary that he had kept during his time in the Army Air Corps as a tail-gunner on a B-17 bomber. The transcription was fully detailed with dates, places, and sadly fatalities of crew members. He had also had copies made of all of the photos he had taken at that time and had embedded into the document. It was substantial document, harrowing and heartbreaking.
Shortly after that I began to think about my time in the service, and multiple lives that I had lived as I morphed into the old man I have now become. I fear that at some point I also will fall into the downward spiral of dementia and wanted to share the perspectives that I have developed before that happened with my own children, so I began to write small anecdotal stories about interesting or amusing events that occurred.
When the kids read some of them, they encouraged me to write more. As this proceeded the life and times of Emmett Casey began to gain form in my mind, and on the side I started to create him. Now he has come to life in this novel, "Bless Me Father" and will soon follow in the second of the series, "For I have sinned".
Thank you to everyone, I'm learning more every day!
At the end of his life my dad started to disappear into dementia. A terrible disease that takes the person a piece at a time. It is also a condition that those closest to the person watch the descent while the person themselves do not see the progress. In the early stages of the disease my dad launched himself into a project that consumed him and he would disappear into his little study for entire days. As a part of his family we were happy that he was occupied and not cranky like he had begun to regularly manifest.
For Christmas that year he presented each of his six children a full hand-written transcription of the diary that he had kept during his time in the Army Air Corps as a tail-gunner on a B-17 bomber. The transcription was fully detailed with dates, places, and sadly fatalities of crew members. He had also had copies made of all of the photos he had taken at that time and had embedded into the document. It was substantial document, harrowing and heartbreaking.
Shortly after that I began to think about my time in the service, and multiple lives that I had lived as I morphed into the old man I have now become. I fear that at some point I also will fall into the downward spiral of dementia and wanted to share the perspectives that I have developed before that happened with my own children, so I began to write small anecdotal stories about interesting or amusing events that occurred.
When the kids read some of them, they encouraged me to write more. As this proceeded the life and times of Emmett Casey began to gain form in my mind, and on the side I started to create him. Now he has come to life in this novel, "Bless Me Father" and will soon follow in the second of the series, "For I have sinned".
Thank you to everyone, I'm learning more every day!
