Friday the Thirteenth
Friday, Nov. 13, 2009
I used to claim Friday the thirteenth was a lucky day for me. Perhaps this is wishful thinking to avoid the superstitious reaction most people have to the day. I only recently learned that the day had its roots in the Knights Templar and their slaughter by the church.
Yet in personal history, no day is so significant in my life as Nov. 13 is.
Of course, I may be reading into it, giving the day significance it doesn’t deserve, based solely on that one day 40 years ago today when I changed my own life by an act of theft and set my feet on a new and uncertain path that has led windingly to where I am today.
Like Woodstock, this day becomes a symbol of change – though in truth, my life’s changes occur on other days as well, but seem overshadowed by the fact that one night in 1969 I crept down the stairs of my family’s house with keys stolen from my uncle, opened the family safe and made off with $10,000 to start my new life.
My uncle Harold later claimed this was mob money kept from the numbers racket he was involved in. True or not, he was peeved enough at me to have reached out to his mafia friends to come get me.
He told me he later had a change of heart and rescinded the request, as I fled west on a bus to find my true love in Colorado.
I guess because it is a blue day today, a Friday, and the thirteenth, that I feel particularly moved, looking back at a life full of change and wondering just what could possibly happen to me to change my life as radically as that moment did.
Although a seemingly negative moment at the time (and perhaps time will return the moment to that spectrum) I have since come to see the date as positive, a moment when my life takes a giant leap forward into something new and unknown.
I once got fired on this date from a warehouse job, which propelled me to seek out college. At college, a professor on this day once said I had the potential to become a great writer, and I plunged into the idea, not yet realizing its rewards.
This week I got a lot of attention because my paper wrote a story about me and a portion of my personal history, a history from which most of my fiction is drawn. When interviewed, I realized my life is so full of twists it can’t possibly be documented fully by anybody but me – and so full of significance that I need to write it. There are people who I’ve met, ordinary people, who need to become immortal, characters whose lives are as powerful and potent as any in a Greek drama.
I have written books about my friends, novels and non fiction, that remain in notebooks unpublished, just because I haven’t made the effort to type them into a computer from handwritten notes. The history of my family is a Greek tragedy, the story of which I alone know because everybody else who knew it has died, telling me bits and pieces of it before they moved on.
It’s on a day like this when I think about these things most and contemplate what I need to do next, and shudder at the potential change that might come soon to alter my life and put my feet onto yet another unexpected path.
Recently, my study of Spielberg films, brought me back to my roots. I started looking closely at Peter Jackson’s special effects, and got caught up again in the Lord of the Rings – a series of books that has haunted me since my days on the road in the late 1960s. Some LSD trips took me to that place, and some were as dark as Frodo’s trip to Mordor.
The odd thing about life is how you can’t get back to the point of departure. What’s that saying about walking into a river? You never step into the same river twice. I want to go back and pick up pieces of threads I’ve abandoned and can’t, and must forever get swept away by new currents taking me to knew places, to find new experiences and new people I will be hopelessly behind in trying to write about.
This is the day of change. Everyday is. The questions always remain as to where I will go next along Bilbo’s road of life.