I'm the fellow who submitted "The Talking Stick", and "Moonlight" (see Practical Prose). In 1979 I was confined to a sanitarium with a diagnosis of delusionary depression. Upon entering the institution I was asked if I knew why I was there. My answer was that I was not acting irrationally while facing a rational situation, but rather I was acting rationally with respect to an irrational situation. Actually, there was some truth to that statement. However, I was told that I would probably never recover, and it was suspected that I might spend the rest of my life in a Veteran's Mental Hospital. I suffered the usual drug routine, and attendant side effects, but successfully declined electric shock treatment. I'll tell you how I recovered a bit later in this story.

My wife, Betty, and I will celebrate our 55th anniversary this year. Together we have raised four children, all college graduates, all currently gainfully employed in socially useful professions. We have five grandchildren. My wife, Betty, and I live in the Napa Valley of California, in a lovely home on a third of an acre of rich Napa Valley soil, on which I draw water from a deep well, and raise organic fruits and vegetables. Aside from gardening, I enjoy deep sea fishing and trolling for trout in my kayak. But, my real passion in life is that of being a privately employed tutor to the children of the flight instructors in our local Japan Airlines Flight School. The seven Japanese families with whom I've worked over the past seven years, have provided me with an opportunity to innovate and create teaching modalities that were impossible for me to execute in a classroom setting.

In 1985, I retired after forty years spent as a teacher in the public school system. My last seventeen and a half years were devoted to teaching children with emotional problems and related learning handicaps.

The story, (The talking stick) factually portrays a slice of my early life. My father, an Army Chief Warrant Officer, was a very intense, and driven man. He eventually took his own life with his service automatic while I was on the island of Bougainville in the South Pacific, serving with the United States Marines. When I was ten, he told my two older sisters that, should my mother die, he would take his own life and take me with him, as he didn't want anyone but his wife to raise me. One night, he waited for what he thought would be a call from the hospital telling him that my mother had passed away. My life was saved because she did not die that night.

When the war ended, I was not sent home, but was sent to North China with a small force that was assigned to keep the rail lines open so that General Stilwell's Nationalist Chinese troops could be moved in position to face the Chinese Communists. Our announced mission was to repatriate the Japanese troops in that area. Actually, while true, that mission was a cover for what actually constituted an opening scene in the Cold War.

While in China, and an irresponsible nineteen year old Marine Corporal, I foolishly wandered down the railway tracks to where the Russians were loading into box cars for shipment to Russia, the machinery and other things that they had looted from the city, at that time called Tientsin, now called Tianjin. This was being accomplished before their supposed friends, the Chinese Communist took the city. It was only my obvious ignorance that save my life from the Russian intelligence agents who took me into custody.

When I finally returned home, at that time to Berkeley, California, I found that my young wife had left me. The last time that I saw her was before I shipped out to the South Pacific.

When I rang the doorbell of my home, expecting to find my sisters and my old room and belongings, I was greeted by a total stranger. The woman told me that she had bought the house a month previously, and that my sisters had told her that most of my things had been stolen by so called helpful neighbours.

Subsequently, I entered the University of California to prepare for the teaching profession, only to find that my only friends there had joined the Communist Party and were under surveillance by the campus FBI, an organization for which my father had worked after he retired. An attempt was made to enlist me to spy on my friends, I declined.

Years later, a young attractive lady was employed as my teaching assistant. To my continuing bad luck, it was discovered, that the young lady had connections with an underground group that our government took quite seriously, and was under surveillance. My principal, a Navy Reserve Commander, liked me personally, and felt that I was well suited to work with disturbed children, but also felt that I was too idealistic, and in danger of being brought into the activities of her underground group. He therefore arranged to have me interrogated and traumatized by an agent who entered the school under the cover of a substitute teacher.

The Principal thought that he was acting in my best interests, and the agent did not know my psychological background. Prudence dictates that I neither tell you the name of the organization to which the agent belonged nor the details of the interrogation, but it was sufficiently traumatizing to put me into a mental institution. where I might still be had it not been for a fateful phone call from the man who had taken over my class.

He told me that he could not teach in the manner that I had prescribed in my lesson plans. I worked with each student on an individual basis and told them that all mistakes were only answers on the way to becoming correct. I gave them repeated chances and constant praise, and it was working. His statement to shelve my methods brought blessed anger, and with than anger a recovery. I had to get back to my students before they were allowed to fall through the cracks.

When I returned to my former middle school, the new principal, a lovely woman, told me that if the faculty would not accept me back, she would have no alternative but to refuse to accept me. I entered the faculty room and all conversation ceased, all eyes turned toward me. I felt that I had had my answer and turned to leave. Just then every one of the thirty or so teachers stood up and applauded. My eyes fill with joy as the memory now foods back.

I have since survived two major cancer operations and near death from a toxic reaction to chemotherapy, but I'm still alive and in better health than many other 76 year old men. I eat organic fruits and vegetables whenever possible, many of which I raise. I neither drink nor smoke, and above all I retain a sense of humor. One of my sons who is the chief informational officer for the University of Southern Colorado, said, "Dad, is it true that you had half your colon removed." When I replied in the affirmative, he responded "Well then, you're a semicolon." I love that boy.