How did I wind up owing $5 million?  Me, a guy who has never carried a debt except for a mortgage?

It started out small– penny-ante stuff – but I should have known where gambling leads.  I owe the $5 mill to"Peter the Great," who is 9 years old.  See, for several years now I've been in the habit of stopping my car whenever I see him playing basketball in his drive.  I come around the corner and there he is, so I hit the brakes and we get in a staring contest, exchanging hard looks, letting our eyes do the challenging and trying not to smile – I love the little guy for those silences and knowing looks – and then it's "game on."  Wordlessly, I jump out and engage him in a contest of modified HORSE, wherein we each mimic each other's shot until someone fails to swish the net – a million $ miss.  We take outrageous shots – bouncing the ball in, blind and backwards, caromed off the garage roof.  The little guy is slightly great!  My only recourse is to shoot from so far away that he can't reach the hoop with a shot.  Only, these days it seems I have to go halfway down the block.  Did I mention he's slightly great?  When it's over there are more hard looks, but the winner is wearing a faint smile.  And then I'm gone with neither of us having said a word.

After Pete got rich, his older sibs went for me, and the wordless stops migrated to a ping-pong table in the garage where I sometimes took on Peter's older brother David, or the twins Emma and Julia, or Annaliese (who is terrifyingly simlar in personality to myself).  Once, when I stopped on the way to play T-sax at Elm Creek, I took the sax neck strap off to better ping the pong and forgot it when I left in defeat.  Probably kept me from hanging myself in frustration, but when I got to the park I had to use my belt for a neck strap.

Despite a dynamic month of zipping around the known universe in secret adventures, it's these little sidebars of living between the lines that turn two-dimensional routines into 3-D living.  It all depends on how you look at things, doesn't it?  Perspective is everything.  I mean, a bat must look like an angel to a rat.  Puh...ghastly.  I think I said it better answering a question in my column this month:

Q [Ontario, Canada]: Have you always been a writer?  Or did you work other jobs that taught you?

A: Often new writers are frustrated because they can't just follow a yellow brick road through college into gainful employment with the job description: AUTHOR.  "Keep your day job," they are told.  For the record, I've worked many jobs, including 23 years as a teacher.  There is no sanctioned path to writing as a career, and it's different for each individual.  But I think it's problematic to try to become a writer by formal training rather than discovering who you are and then writing as a consequence of that.  I became a writer (even if the world didn't know or care) mainly because wherever I was and whatever I was doing, I was being me.  A loner – yes – a maverick – yes – full of obscure humor, hard to understand and impossible to love – yes, yes, yes.  But I'm also an adventurer, a seeker, someone who needs to grow, learn and discover every day.  In a word, my life always feels new.  And it slowly dawned on me that I have that effect on other people.  I make them feel new.  Maybe that's bad for people who are secure in their groove and just want to stay there forever, but it's good for people whose groove is a rut.  I can see it in their faces, their energy.  I'm like a virus and it brings out some predisposed part of others that I like to think of as freedom or a rush not unlike youthful joy.  My writing style is just another expression of that – an employable asset the same as in every other job I've had.  It's my one universal job skill, the headline on my low wattage marquee.  And it's given me much more than writing.  It's given me lost souls, abiding friendships, meaningful salvations, not a little joy, celebrations, and one very special person whose bright eyes told me for the first time that it was shareable.  Maybe that's the only redeeming thing about my life, but though it undoubtedly relates to my being a writer, writing is the least of it.

Here's the link if you'd like to see the rest of the Q&A: http://storytellersunplugged.com/thomassullivan/2014/06/15/thomas-sullivan-staying-new-in-the-closet/#respond

Putting more faces than scenery in this month's photos below to go with the text of the newsletter.  #1-2 Peter the Great & Sully the Insignificant; #3 biking near my house; #4 Norby Nation twins Julia & Emma-Sully; #5 Sully-David; #6 Annaliese leading the Paul Bunyan cleanup or maybe they were helping beavers build a dam; #7 Crow-Hassan hike; #8 friend/fellow nature-lover Hailey and moi at her sendoff to Yellowstone; #9 trail friend Mickey on a hike; #10 in Michigan, my spectacular grandson Seamus goes ape; #11-12 two shots of balmy days on a 4-acre cay off Spanish Honduras where fellow adventurer Bruce Norvell is caretaker for a couple of weeks.

Adventures notwithstanding, that newness I mentioned above is never far afield.  I’m happiest when the familiar world just outside my door gives up a deeper insight, a fresh discovery, or the simple serenity that lets me explore my own thoughts and imagination.  There is magic inside each of us wanting to get out.  We just need to cross the bridges whenever our souls demand it.  May you find your green lanes this summer, your stolen hours in fragrant bowers, and – very important – pink ice cream at dusk (with black cherries)!

Thomas "Sully" Sullivan

You can see all my books in any format here on my webpage or follow me on Facebook:  http://www.thomassullivanauthor.com

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