P.C. Zick's Blog, page 4

One of the most memorable interviews of my decade-long career as a journalist occurred in August 2003 when I was the editor and reporter for The Observer, a monthly paper published in Alachua County, Florida.

Just minutes from the University of Florida in Gainesville, Florida, a new resident of Newberry caught everyone’s attention, particularly those of the media. Somehow I managed to reach him first and he gave me an exclusive interview.

Joe Clark, August 2003, in his kitchen on farm in Newberry, Florida – Photo by P.C. Zick

Joe Louis Clark, the former principal from New Jersey who’d been featured in the movie Lean on Me, starring Morgan Freeman as Clark, had moved into rural Alachua County, and he invited me to visit him in his modest home in the country. He was born in Rochelle, Georgia, on May 8, 1938, and he died in Newberry on December 29, 2020. On the day of the interview, we looked out his kitchen window, and he told me something I have never forgotten and try to remember during times of stress. “How did you manage to stay so calm during all the chaos?” I asked. He pointed to the center of his forehead. “As long as I remain centered in here, the rest is just noise around me. That’s the key. I know who I am there.”

I apologize for the quality of the photos I took the day of the interview. I no longer have the originals, so they are scanned from the article. Here’s the article in its entirety.

“Joe Clark Looks in the Mirror and Enjoys the View”

What do Socrates, Jesus, Shakespeare, Martin Luther King, and Ronald Reagan have in common?

No joke line here. These men have all inspired maverick Joe Clark, the principal from New Jersey whose miracles appear on film in the 1988 movie Lean on Me.

Wielding a baseball bat to bring Eastside High School in Patterson, NJ, under control brought national attention to Newberry resident, Joe Clark.

The image of Clark with the bat belies the character of this man who, despite walking into the middle of havoc and creating a bit of it himself, lives his life in harmony with his beliefs and actions.

He believes life is all about the mirror concept—looking in the mirror and liking the reflection. As he reflects on his philosophy, he slips Shakespeare into the conversation.

“I believe in the quote from Hamlet. ‘This above all—to thine own self be true, And it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man.’”

But that is not the only reason Shakespeare inspired him. He remembers back to his sophomore year in high school. It was in an English class that “an old buxom Irish woman with red hair, named Betty Sullivan,” gave him the lofty idea of going to college.

“I was poor, and I didn’t have a lot of things that other kids had, but I always did my homework,” Clark remembered. “Sometimes I’d go to the library because our lights were out, and I’d read. One day in class Miss Sullivan asked a question about Shakespeare.

“She asked an all-state football player the question, and he did not know the answer,” he said. “She asked, ‘Does anyone know the answer?’

“I looked around and no one’s had was up, so I raised my hand and gave her the correct answer. She said, ‘I wish everybody in this classroom was like Joey.’ Then she said to this big six foot four inch football player, ‘You big dummy, go stand there until you become like Joey.’

“I was on cloud nine!”

He ended up as an all A student and worked nights to pay for his way through college. He did not receive financial aide, but he ended up graduating from a state college in New Jersey.

Now Clark owns a small farm on the outskirts of Newberry and a house in Gainesville. However, he spends most of his time on the farm because it “allows me time to reflect.”

He came here because of his children who attended the University of Florida and found he liked the area enough to call it home. He officially retired in February 2003, but that does not mean he sits around the house doing nothing. He travels to colleges and corporations around the country 15 to 20 times per year getting his message across. The rest of the time he devotes to his farm in Newberry with its immaculate lawn, gardens, and four horses.

The career of Joe Clark follows a pattern of taking jobs no one else could do. He thrives on being the “galvanizing force to do unorthodox things that I could not do if I were in any situation that was less tumultuous.”

He spent eight years at Eastside High School where almost immediately he turned “a cauldron of violence to an orderly and safe, clean school with parents who knew they could send them to a school of 3,500 students, and they were not going to come home shot or stabbed or beaten up.

Clark also knew he could not fail at this job, and he put his whole harmonious being into the clean-up of that school.

“I knew that if I failed in my mission, and I knew I would not, that I would become the assistant superintendent because all the other principals who failed became assistant superintendents.

“But if I succeeded, I would be catapulted into the arena as an American folk hero.”

And that is just what happened, and he can use that status to get his message across to students, parents, teachers, and others.

“I cater to people—black, white, polka-dotted, people are people. I don’t care about your religion, ethnicity, race,” Clark said. “I am motivated and stimulated by one thing: your character.”

He believes adamantly that we have failed as a people by not stressing character, virtues, and values to the children.

“As educators, I believe we have eluded the primary purpose of our task and goals of inculcating values and virtues into the lives of our children,” Clark explained.

“We have become more concerned with passing out prophylactics or bussing or working the lunchroom.”

He believes that if children are not taught the basic values of justice and mercy, then no matter “how gilded our streets, or how raised with alabaster they may be, the American experience will fail.”

His philosophy has come from many sources, but he credits some heavy weights as his main inspiration.

“I borrowed from Socrates, stole some from Dr. King, and a lot of Jesus,” Clark said. “And I say if you don’t like me, don’t blame me, blame them.”

That just leaves Ronald Reagan. His tory of President Reagan explains the defining moment in his political development.

He was walking around the corridors of Eastside High School when his secretary told him that the President of the United States was on the phone for him.

“I said to her, ‘The President of the United States is on the phone?’” he remembered. “I know now that there is vodka in that orange juice you drink every day. The President of the United States is not calling me.”

The secretary persisted, and Clark was in “a state of apoplectic rage. “I was livid” with his secretary for playing such a trick on him.

“I picked up that phone and said, ‘Who is it? What do ya want?’ And the voice on the other side said, ‘Is this Principal Clark?’

He responded gruffly that it was. Then a soft voice said, “’This is President Ronal Reagan, and Principal Clark, I just saw you on Ted Koppel’s Nightline, and I want to commend you for a job well done.’

“My eyes dangled from my optic nerves, and I became an instantaneous Republican,” concluded Clark.

Since then, he has visited the White House more than 15 times and spoken to diplomats and senators, and basically had “a remarkable encounter with Washington.”

As emphatic as Clark can become when preaching his message, he becomes serious and quiet when he talks about his achievements in life.

“My children,” he said quietly, “are my greatest achievement in life. All the rest pales in comparison.

“Forget about the movie, the book, the speaking engagements around the country, and Presidential citations,” he said. “The greatest achievement that has been bestowed upon this mere compilation of finite mortality is the fact that my children are good solid Americans.

“The rest is virtually irrelevant in comparison to my children. That’s it for me.”

The movie Lean on Me is available on the following streaming platforms.

Amazon Prime Video – rent for $3.79; Apple TV – fee required; Google Play – rent for $3.79

FREE – Click here to download your Kindle copy of samples from P.C. Zick’s romances.

Downtown Ashville Mural

I dreaded the three-week trip even as I planned. I worried too much. Lists filled a notebook: To Do, To Pack, The Morning of Departure, To Buy. I checked off items one by one until it was the morning of departure, and that list began to dwindle.

Something happened the closer I came to deleting all the to-dos. I felt the old magic return. The excitement of getting on the road and heading out of town, just me and my guy and twenty days of visiting so many folks filled my head with Christmas morning anticipation.

As departure day neared, a tropical storm hovered in the Gulf waters threatening to unleash its wrath on the Big Bend of Florida and inland areas, such as Tallahassee where we live. I fought my storm trauma nerves. Four months prior to departure, we received a torrential overnight rain which caused our house to flood. Then a month later, a tornado roared its tail through our neighborhood taking down the top of our very old sycamore and bringing it down over the garage. Both times, we escaped with very little damage, just a lot of hard work and expenditure of money. We had a French drain installed in the side yard, but it has yet to be tested—it would take another foot of rainfall in six hours to really see if it diverts the rain and runoff away from the house as planned. The roof repairs and tree removal and new tree plantings barely hid the tornado damage, but we were whole, if not emotionally recovered.

Despite the threat, we left Friday morning, August 2, and Tropical Storm Debby would take another two days to turn into a hurricane headed toward Tallahassee.

But I still managed to leave filled with happy anticipation as Asheville loomed some eight hours down the road. After checking into the Downtown Inn one block from Biltmore Square and many breweries, we headed out into the stifling heat that had followed us from Florida. Only a few blocks from our hotel, and we already imagined how good the pool would feel when we returned after a few drinks and dinner. Jack of the Wood across the street—the original Green Man Brewery now a restaurant/bar—was our first stop, but they were charging a $5 cover because of some musical festival, so we decided to stop there for dinner on our way back to the hotel and a much-needed cooling off time in the pool. We walked around admiring the architecture of old buildings and churches.

I was very pleased to see this sign outside the downtown Methodist Church

We wound our way back to Jack of the Wood and paid the cover charge. A table toward the back, but with a clear view of the stage, awaited us. A middle-aged man sat on stage with his guitar, which he knew how to play. Unfortunately, his singing ability did not match the virtuosity of his fingers, so he shouted lyrics into the mic while he sought the right key for his voice. Often, he never found it, and other times, he did only to lose it if he held it for any length of time. Never before had we heard anything so awfully jarring to the ears. Maybe a karaoke singer once or twice. We certainly had never paid for such a performance.

It was so bad, we ordered one drink, and our dinner to-go. We would flee as soon as we could and cool off in the pool. Then we would eat our tempeh Rueben with roasted brussel sprouts. As a literary person, the awful singing could be seen as foreshadowing or as a metaphor for the rest of the evening.

We left the food on the table in our room and went to the pool. It felt just as good as we had imagined with its sprays of water shooting out over the center of the pool. After fifteen minutes, we were refreshed and hungry.

Robert went ahead of me to exit the pool up the three wide steps in the shallow end. He grabbed ahold of the railing in the center of the steps, but it swayed when he grabbed it, which threw off his balance. His left leg came down on the brick edging the pool, and his shin hit a protruding brick and slashed open his skin. Confusion reigned in the next few minutes. I soon discovered how an establishment reacts when they suspect a lawsuit might be involved.

“We can’t talk to you until we speak to our manager,” I was told when I asked for assistance at the front desk. They tossed me some towels to stench to blood. I went up to our room to get a shirt for my now freezing husband. Sirens echoed in the background, and by the time I returned to the pool area, five to six emergency personnel surrounded my husband.

“It’s going to need stiches,” one of them said. “We can take you to the ER in the ambulance, but we can’t take her.” His thumb pointed back toward me.

“I’m not going anywhere without her,” my husband said.

After going back and forth with the so-called medical personnel who could administer no first aid except to wrap his leg in gauze, they finally told me the ER was only a mile down the same road from where we were. I had been nervous about driving in a strange city after a glass of wine on an empty stomach as darkness approached. If you’ve ever driven in downtown Asheville with several Interstate highways zipping through it, you might understand my reluctance to drive my bleeding husband to the hospital. But I could manage a mile on the same road. If they’d only explained that in the beginning, all the chattering in between could have been avoided and saved my husband some anxiety.

Six stiches later, we returned to our room and our cold sandwiches and awful smelling brussel sprouts. In the morning, I went to take more pictures of the pool area just in case and the bloody towels from the night before were still in the chairs around the pool. I could go on about the lack of concern and caring from hotel staff, but I’d rather concentrate on the positive.

My husband healed although he couldn’t golf or swim for the rest of our trip. And I left Asheville determined to get back the good feelings from twenty-four hours earlier. I would not let a bad singer and six stitches detour me from all that lay ahead of us. And it worked.

Within two days, Hurricane Debby skirted around Tallahassee and gave us a reprieve. Then we proceeded to enjoy the best of visits with family and friends in all the places we visited in Virginia, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Michigan.

The first night did not foreshadow the rest of our journey at all. It only gave us the opportunity to get the bad stuff out of the way for the good to follow, allowing us to appreciate the embrace and welcoming arms of family and friends.

And as my journeys often do, it gave me a great story to share.

At the Riverside Cafe in Bridgewater, PA — a Pittsburgh beach

My name is Patricia Camburn Zick, and I’m a political and history nerd.

There I’ve finally admitted it. I don’t know for sure where it started but I do remember our dining room at home also served as the office for the township clerk, who was my father for many years. Often during election cycles, dinner would be interrupted by a knock on the door and when answered a resident would enter our private home to register to vote.

Some of my earliest memories come from the actual day of an election. Both my parents ran the polling sites for our township in the town hall of our small Michigan town. I played dolls and colored under the tables as voters arrived for their ballots. I can remember my winter coat often serving as my padding on the concrete floor. And if I was very good, my dad would take me to the back of the town hall where the fire trucks rested in a large garage. I can still smell the combination of oil and gasoline emanating from those large red monsters.

For a few short years, I covered politics for the local press in northern Florida. I loved all the drama and intrigue. And I learned a ton about zoning and planning and the ways the real estate developers maneuvered around the rules. And there were times when the other side acted just as poorly, so nothing but disdain ruled.

Recently, I’ve been lost in the past researching for a project I hope to develop into a full-blown novel. As a result, the Gilded Age has become my world as I read the stories of the robber barons of the last half of the nineteenth century in both fiction and nonfiction. This history will form the groundwork for the story between two eras as I examine the women’s suffrage movement and the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918 drawing parallels to the time of COVID in the present day. Whether the book is ever completed matters little to me. I’ve simply loved burying my head in the past. But it is disturbing that the lessons learned in 1918 were forgotten by 2020.

And to prove my point about my nerdiness, my current pastime involves the rewatching of The West Wing and reading chapters in a new book about the series, What’s Next – A Backstage Pass to The West Wing. I’m confessing this obsession here for the first time.

Here’s what I’ve learned. Nothing in politics changes much. However, when we take the time to listen and attempt to understand the other side’s cogent and rational arguments, only then can we hope for compromise and solutions. Neither side may get exactly what they wanted in the first place, but at least something gets done democratically rather than autocratically. History can guide us and show us what to do or not do for the most good and least harm.

What’s Next – A Backstage Pass to The West Wing

CHARLENE UNDERWOOD DEALT WITH death often in her job. That morning, before the call had come from Richard, she’d already told a patient and her husband that the biopsy taken the week before showed that her cancer had returned after a four-year remission.

She’d been so empathetic, so comforting as she offered tissue and pamphlets on support groups. The husband took them with one hand while the other hand patted his wife’s back. Sad news, but Charlene pushed it aside as she showed them to the door. Again, with sympathetic words of encouragement. Then her cell phone rang with a call from Richard Carson. Odd. Why would Richard be calling her on a workday?

She didn’t need to wonder for long as the shock from Richard’s words left her unable to move despite telling him she’d be right there. She stared at one of the photos on her desk taken at the end of her first semester of college. Four young women, laughing and beautiful, stared back at her. Were they really that young and innocent all those years ago?

A knock at the door brought her attention back to her office surroundings. June, her nurse, poked her head in the door.

“Are you ready for your next patient?” she asked.

“No. Cancel all my appointments for the day. For the rest of the week.”

“Is everything all right?” June stepped into the room and shut the door behind her. “Does this have anything to do with the news out of China this morning?”

Charlene started at her. “News?”

“That virus. I heard it’s vicious and spreading rapidly.”

Charlene’s eyes filled with tears as she shook her head. “Just clear my schedule for me. Personal matter.”

June nodded and left, which gave Charlene some momentum. She sent an SOS text to Jackie, hoping she’d see it before she started work for the day. Jackie had been traipsing around area wetlands studying the great blue heron for months now. Some research grant. She stood and took off her white jacket and removed the stethoscope from around her neck.

She thought about calling Wendy but stopped. Jackie could do that. She handled Wendy better than any of them. Thinking about the four of them caused her to sway and grab the desk’s edge to steady her balance. She glanced at the photo again. The four of them—innocent and carefree. Of them all, Roxanne had probably changed the least except for the long hair now short. Charlene, Jackie, and Wendy had gained weight and gone up a couple of sizes—nothing drastic and nothing unexpected after having children and going through menopause. Roxanne was the anomaly. Wendy’s auburn hair was sprinkled with gray but still thick and shoulder length. Charlene wore glasses instead of contacts like Roxanne, but her sandy brown hair cropped around her jawline had remained the same color, thanks to her hair stylist. Jackie still looked like a hippie only grown up. She hadn’t cut her hair, and it had remained dark, almost black and always wavy. She swore she didn’t do anything to it. They were all attractive women even at the age of sixty, but as always, Roxanne’s looks overshadowed them all.

When her cell phone jangled again, she nearly tripped over the legs of her coat rack, but she quickly recovered and came back to reality.

“Jackie, thank God you called.” Her words slurred together. “Oh, Jackie.” The sobs caught in her throat.

“Charlene, what’s going on? Are you drunk?”

“No.” The question brought her back to the task at hand. “It’s awful.”

“What happened?” Jackie’s voice screeched through the phone, and Charlene fought to compose herself. “I can’t understand a word you’re saying Is it Julia? Did something happen to Julia?”

“No.” Charlene coughed and cleared her throat. “Roxanne.”

Excerpt from The Grateful Fates by P.C. ZickBUY THE GRATEFUL FATES

I hope you enjoyed reading this short excerpt from The Grateful Fates, which releases today on Kindle and in paperback.

I chose this day for a special reason–my mother was born on April 4, 1915, the fifth daughter born to a Methodist minister and his devoted wife. My mother passed away in 1998.

She spent her entire life believing she wasn’t worthy of much of anything, and she felt the world conspired to make her miserable. A forgotten fifth child who was displaced within two years by the first son, her birth occurred on Easter Sunday–the most important day in the life of a Christian minister. His sermon might have been interrupted by my mother’s birth, but the tornado that ripped through their small Michigan town might have caused more disruption. No wonder my mother always felt like second choice, second best. She was even the second choice of wife by my father who had been engaged to my mother’s older sister before my aunt broke my father’s heart and ran off with another man.

As a mother, she could be loving, but if she felt she had been slighted in some unknown way, she’d withdraw. A child doesn’t understand. But as a grown woman I have managed to forgive when I began to understand the trauma of her neglected childhood.

Writing about troubled mothers helped my maturity in accepting my own childhood troubles. While mothers aren’t the main focus of The Grateful Fates certainly their behavior toward their daughters has an impact.

Happy birthday, Mom. May you know that in my heart you have never taken second place. And may you rest in peace knowing you are loved and remembered.

A decade ago, I had just finished the third of my Florida fiction books–serious novels with literary leanings on complicated topics with metaphorical subplots crisscrossing the landscape. The research, topics, and intricate dances with the characters exhausted me.

I didn’t want to stop writing, but I knew I needed a break from writing that type of book. So, I took an online class on how to write a romance in a month. I enjoyed the process and the direction, and even surprising myself, at the end of the month I had a rough draft and an offer to participate in a boxset with other romance writers. The result: Behind the Altar. While the main characters have a bit of “lust at first sight” syndrome, it soon changes. I couldn’t just write a romance, however. For the couple to find their way to one another both must deal with the traumas from their childhoods to move forward.

I created a community of people who chose each other as family. It was easy to go further and create a story for each of the characters from the first one. Within two years, I had four novels in the Behind the Love series.

“It won’t take you long to find out what I learned at a very early age,” he said softly, his breath caressing her lips. “When you do find out, you’ll come running to me for more of this.”

Behind the Altar by P.C. Zick

Celebrate spring this week by downloading your copy of Behind the Altar for free. If you find yourself wondering about the other folks in the first in this series, you may want to read the rest of the series.

Grab your free copy – March 27-31

Behind the Altar is also available in paperback and audio.

Get the Whole Series Here

I wish you a warm and happy spring. Once the pollen dissipates here in north Florida, and I stop sneezing, it should be a lovely season!

Missing the Smokies

This year marks the first one in eight that we haven’t spent the late spring settling into our cabin near Murphy, North Carolina. We sold the cabin in November, and while the best decision for us, I can’t help but sigh wistfully when I think about the majestic beauty of the Smoky Mountains.

We’ll go there sometime this summer but only for a short visit because we have too many other places to go. Major decisions are often bittersweet, and this is one of them. Bitter in that we’ll miss many of our favorite things about spending our summer there. Sweet in that we have more freedom to do what we want. The cabin and its prolific garden kept our calendar and dictated our travels. I’ll take the bitter because the sweet outweighs it all.

Celebrate Summer with Sweet Romances

As I fondly remember our life in the mountains, I cherish the memories of writing my four Smoky Mountain novellas in my little office perched in the trees on our small mountain.

From March 20-27, Smoky Mountain Romances – Four Stories of Love and Family will be discounted from $8.99 to $2.99 on Kindle. Four complete books with four different love stories set in a small rural community nestled in southwestern North Carolina. Grab your copy today.

Click for Smoky Mountain RomancesNew Cover

I made a decision to redesign the cover of my new release The Grateful Fates before it releases on April 4, 2023. Ada Frost took my idea and gave it the celebratory mood I wanted. Some of the topics within the novel may be dark but there is light within the story. Check it out.

The Grateful Fates on Amazon

Head to the Beach

I grew up in Michigan but never left the state until the summer of my tenth year. My parents and my older brother set out in our Chevy station wagon for Long Island where my oldest brother and family lived. That trip left me with amazing memories that I treasure and remember vividly even after nearly sixty years.

New York City, of course, stunned me–a little girl from a small Michigan town. The Statute of Liberty, the automat where a nickel purchased a slice of lemon meringue pie, the Empire State Building, the shiny and reflective United Nations building with its colorful flags. Amazing.

But the greatest memory–and the one that may have instilled in me my great love of nature–occurred when we went to the end of Long Island and spent the day wandering the rocky and roaring beach of Montauk Point. Sure, I’d been to all the Great Lakes, but never had I felt the Atlantic salt breezes nearly knocking me down and wetting my lips. I remember feeling so very alive on that day. I almost stepped on a horseshoe crab shell. Amazing.

Several years back, I decided to write one of my romances using the setting of Montauk Point. I ended up writing two books. Love on the Wind and Jingle Bell Love became the Montauk Romances. Both fun to write and to revisit a special place for me.

I invite you to download Love on the Wind for FREE on Amazon, March 13-17. Click here to get your copy.

The book is also available in paperback and audio.

About Love on the Wind – An uptight builder. A quirky reality TV travel show host. An explosive passion that surprises them both in this sexy Hamptons romance.

Six years of traveling for her reality TV series has left Kiley Nelson, a dedicated career woman, longing for a place to call her own. Spending a weekend at her girlfriend’s beach house is the perfect reprieve, especially when she purchases property to finally settle down. But her peaceful escape is shaken when she smashes into a car containing the sinfully sexy and infuriated passenger, Jeff Hammond, who immediately melts her heart.

Jeff, staying at his friend’s Montauk home to relax after a trying week of building a home for a spoiled diva, doesn’t count on sharing his weekend with the flaky, yet incredibly sexy, Kiley. He agrees to build her house, despite the tug on his heart as Kiley turns him on in every delicious way.

Passionate weekends and shared dreams begin to shape the house they start to build together as Jeff begins to realize his dream of becoming an architect. As their relationship deepens, so do the wounds from past hurts, rousing ghosts from Jeff’s traumatic past when his fiancé cheated on him with his brother. When a summer storm rolls in at the nearly complete house, they’re forced to deal with the past before it shakes and cracks the very foundation they’ve built.

Misunderstanding and stubborn personalities threaten to rip apart the fledgling relationship until both Kiley and Jeff learn to trust one another and are given a second chance at love.

Jingle Bell Love, Book 2

About Jingle Bell Love –

A man in mourning for his dead wife. A woman unable to trust the opposite sex. Blind date fiascos until they discover one another.

Denny’s wife—the only woman he’s ever loved—died the year before and his friends intent on finding him a new love. Jill’s first experience with love in college left her skeptical that she would ever be able to find love. Both the widower and the bachelorette hope for a second chance at love.

When Denny and Jill find themselves lustfully drawn to one another, they’re ashamed of their secret encounters. When friends suspect there might be something between them, they disapprove. Unsure of how they feel about one another, the attraction continues. To keep things on the downlow, they hatch a pact to be friends with secret benefits and embark on a hot sexy romance. When those benefits explode into something more than primal urges, one of them breaks the pact, and the whole affair and friendship ends up unraveling as the holiday season approaches. This steamy romance jingles all the bells for the Christmas season.

Denny, a contractor with a desire to become an architect, designs a home with Jill foremost in his mind. Their love ebbs and flows in this Hamptons romance.

Available in Kindle Unlimited, Paperback, and Audio.

Fifteen years ago today on March 4, 2008, the first of my four older brothers died. By his own hand. He left behind questions with no answers as I struggled to fight my guilt. But I kept marching forth once I pulled myself off the floor and stopped screaming. I wrote about it several years ago after Robin Williams killed himself. (Click here to read “Oh Captain, My Captain“).

I managed to forgive myself remembering what a wise woman once told me. “The rational mind cannot make sense of an irrational mind.” I find comfort in the words. The irrationality may only last a short time, but unfortunately, in that window of inopportunity too many folks make irrational choices that end in harm.

The living are left to handle the rest. We found that out again recently when my husband’s brother took his own life. His son, his siblings, his friends are now left with dealing with the debris left after an unexpected death. Facing the material clean up is one thing, but the emotional aftermath takes time. I’ve repeated the above quote dozens of times in the past two months since his death as the family grapples with what more they could have done to prevent his death.

I woke this morning remembering it was March 4 or as I see it, “March Forth.” The best we can do is go forward and live a life filled with love, kindness, and gratitude. Sounds like a cliché, but it’s true. The alternative does not work.

Tonight will find us being serenaded by Willie Nelson at a concert here in Tallahassee. With Willy singing about the open road and loving and losing and finding solace in the good things in life, we plan to march forth with gusto.

Onward.

How many iterations of this novel did it take to get it just right? As many as needed. I began it with an idea and a working title of Four Women and a Man. The earliest version I can find is dated in 2017, but I think I started it before that date. It went through many different versions and changes in point of view, plot devices, and character development. None of them ever seemed quite right.

I would get inspired and work at it for long spurts. Then grow weary of the direction. I’m not sure when I finally told myself to either trash it or transform it, but it’s only been a few months. Once I gave myself the ultimatum, my passion for the basic idea returned, and I was able to bring the novel to the publishing stage with pride.

The Kindle version can be pre-ordered, with release set for April 4, 2023. The paperback is available now. Check it out by clicking here, then scroll down for a tiny sneak peek.

The Grateful Fates – Excerpt

JACKIE DECIDED TO HEAD upstairs while Wendy called the police, and Charlene consoled the brothers. She didn’t know what she was looking for except maybe some sign the police missed that would exonerate Richard or give a clue who might have hurt Roxanne.

She slowly turned the knob dreading what she might find inside. Two years earlier, Roxanne and Jackie had gone on a redecorating binge. First, they had redone Roxanne’s master, and then, Jackie’s. The bedroom didn’t resemble the rest of the house. No, this room was dark and masculine with heavy burgundy curtains to keep out the light. Dark heavy furniture. Jackie had opted for pastels and white—a lighter more feminine touch.

All the drawers were open with clothes only slightly disturbed. It could be a lot worse, she thought as she straightened things and pushed the drawers shut.

Jackie walked to the window and pulled back the drapes. The room needed light and air.

Maybe there would be a clue in the closet. Jackie pushed the clothes on the racks aside and then remembered the secret storage space behind the wall of shoes. She gave one shelf a push and the whole thing revolved to reveal the room Roxanne called her “safe.” It contained all her valuables—jewelry, mostly. But Roxanne always teased that the closet would hold all the skeletons, too. Jackie shuddered to remember Roxanne telling them all about it.

“Not even Richard knows it’s there,” she’d told them after they uncorked the third bottle of wine. “It’s for all my skeletons.”

As she remembered, Jackie noticed a shoebox from Macy’s. Jackie recognized the box. New high heels Roxanne had purchased for New Year’s Eve when they’d gone Christmas shopping. Red and sparkly and spiky. Roxanne had laughed that she’d probably end up breaking a leg or hip when she wore the stilettos—something the other three had given up nearly a decade earlier. But not Roxanne. She still wore heels with her pencil skirts coming just above her knees and fitted blouses low cut to discretely show Roxanne still had great boobs. Jackie preferred her work attire—jeans and T-shirts and wide-brimmed hats.

I never did hear about the party. Something tells me they never went. Roxanne loved telling them about the movers and shakers she knew in the area. Jackie knew some of them from Adam, but she never bragged about it. Most of them weren’t even nice folks. But Roxanne had always kept her business life separate from her life at Cypress Marsh.

When she opened the box, her assumption had been correct. Roxanne hadn’t worn them. Brand new shoes. Now that she thought about it, she hadn’t seen much of Roxanne since before Christmas. The lunch a few days earlier had been one of the few times she’d seen her since the shopping expedition in December.

Jackie put the lid back in place wondering why the shoes would have made their way into the skeleton closet. She examined the back of the closet. She pulled aside Roxanne’s formal dresses and went into the recesses of the dark space. She rummaged around in built-in drawers and still found nothing except jewelry. As she was getting ready to shut the door, she noticed a medium-sized suitcase in one corner. She’d missed it before. When she pulled it out, its weight let her know something was packed inside. She placed it on the bed. Bingo, the metal clasps popped up, and Jackie opened the lid. Never would she have guessed what the suitcase contained. Not in her wildest imaginations.

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“For there is symbolic as well as actual beauty in the migration of the birds, in the ebb and flow of tides, in the folded bud ready for the spring. There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature. The assurance that day comes after night and spring after winter.”

Rachel Carson

Rachel Carson wrote the book Silent Spring,  published in 1962, which set in  motion a string of actions that led to the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency  and passage of legislation such as the Clean Air Act  and the Endangered Species Act.  All of these exploded into fruition within a decade of her death. She exposed our country’s practice of wholesale spraying of lethal toxic substances on all things to kill one pest. The book took four years to write because as she researched one case it led to discovering many more cases where poisons were killing everything they touched.

While the book became a bestseller almost immediately, it created a firestorm of vicious attacks on Ms. Carson by the pesticide industry and the media. She remarked that her critics represented a small, yet very rich, segment of the population.

An editorial in Newsweek soon after its publication, compared Ms. Carson to Sen. Joseph McCarthy because the book stirred up the “demons of paranoia.”

I have to admit my knowledge of Ms. Carson was limited until one day in the spring of 2010 after I’d moved to the Pittsburgh area. I knew enough about her attend a showing of a documentary from PBS about her life. A Sense of Wonder  chronicles the last two interviews Ms. Carson ever granted. She conducted them from her cottage in Maine and her home in Baltimore during her final year on this earth. Actress Kaiulani Lee  stars in this documentary using Ms. Carson’s own words from the interviews.

The film – only 55 minutes in length – moved me to tears several times. Ms. Carson was a writer – a poetess of prose – from an early age. But in college at Pittsburgh Women’s College (now Chatham University) the study of biology beckoned. She went on to work for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service where her talents as a writer emerged in the writing of boring fact sheets about species.

Born in 1907, she grew up on the banks of the Allegheny River in the community of Springdale, just upriver from the city that was coughing its way to becoming the Steel Capital of the World during the years of her childhood. Ms. Carson played in the hills surrounding the river as it wound its way to meet the Monongahela and Ohio Rivers. When she found a fossil on the banks of the Allegheny, she became obsessed with the sea and the history of nature.

It wasn’t until her later college years that she finally made it to the ocean for the first time, and she never left the east after her memorable experiences in worshipful study of the sea. Her first three books explored all aspects of the ocean and gave her enough financial success to quit her job with the Service.

“Finally, I was the writer I’d always dreamed of becoming. I thought I had abandoned my writing for science,” her character states in A Sense of Wonder. “But it was the study of science that was making my literary career possible.”

She didn’t want to write Silent Spring, but as her character points out in the documentary, “the subject chooses the writer, not the other way around.”

“All mankind in in her debt.”

Sen. Abraham Rubicoff  in 1964 after receiving the news of Rachel Carson’s  death.