Good morning my name is Jeff and this is the story of my life When I was 12, I wanted to be 16. When I was 16, I wanted to be 18 so badly, I could barely sit still. When I turned 18, 21 seemed a perfect age. As a child, I questioned, over-analyzed, speculated and assumed that when I got “older” I’d figure it all out and know who I was and what I wanted to be. I’d finally become like those annoying kids in my 5th-grade class who confidently shouted, “I want to be a teacher!” “I want to be a lawyer!” I wanted to smack them. I never knew. I’m 57 and I’m still not sure. But I’m not expecting that the light will come on when I reach 60. Who was it that said life is a journey, not a destination anyway? It is corny but true,and as I no longer have a pressing need to be “something” I can now just be me as I am instead of trying to change for others, and as I grew up i had no choice but to grow up in the in the foster care system after the death of my mother which you will learn about later but while I was growing up in the system it was ok with me having some good experiences as well as some that at times would make me want to give up in my own life, feeling as though I no longer had the strength to fight for what I believed in, but I was determined to be different, and from the age of 13 to 16 I was placed eight times in the states of Indiana, Illinois, and Georgia, and then I was finally emancipated at the age of 19 then at twenty one and single I took on the responsibility of raising my 13-year-old cousin who was as well a foster kid and  I am currently foster parent myself and have adopted a child to raise as my own, but then comes the times were my child will grow up and I either have to tell them that I’m not their real blood parent or let them find out on their own and have the chance of making them run away because their whole life was all a lie and they hate you for it, and then I have to move on and tell you about something that gets deeper into my life with a trip to the memory of probably the last girlfriend I ever had and is why I’m single now with foster kids.

I was heading home from my girlfriend’s house and it was taking a while because she lived well south of San Francisco and it was a weekend so the trains weren’t running, but instead you had to go to the station and take a bus but the bus didn’t stop at every station and I had been at the wrong depot so then I had to take a bus just to get to the place where I caught the bus and that bus didn’t come for half an hour so I had to sit on the long pews with the other passengers and wait for my ride home, and I only saw my girlfriend maybe once a week because she lived so far away and when I saw her I was stuck there for 16 to 24 hours, but you know maybe stuck isn’t the right word because I was only happy when I was with her but she was so difficult, so intense, that once a week seemed like enough for me and It took me the rest of the time to recover from my visit and often, after seeing her, I would lie in bed the whole next day, only getting up to eat and i was constantly hungry the way It made me feel was like I had climbed a mountain or been beaten up and then one day I was in the middle of finishing my novel, Happy Baby, which I felt very emotional about a lot of the time, but for some reason she hated the book well she hated the small pieces of it I would allow her to read, and she wasn’t at all afraid to tell me that she hated it which really hurt my feelings,but soon after she got done telling me how much she disliked what she had seen she asked me to read other parts to her which I did and the whole time she ignored me. As much as I love her she makes me ill sometimes and at the time I was worried that Happy Baby was not funny enough. The next day my editor mentioned to me that if the book had a little more light in it there would be a wider audience and that the book is in fact not funny at all. It’s a very sad book about a man, Theo, who was molested as a boy in the detention center by a guard, Mr. Gracie. Mr. Gracie physically and verbally abuses him but also protects him from the other boys. In this way, Theo learns to associate abuse with affection and searches out Mr. Gracie’s replacement for the rest of his life. I was wondering if anyone would be interested in such a dark book and my publisher sure didn’t think so and It was then during that long bus ride away from my girlfriend and with my sad novel coming due that I read “I Want To Live” by Thom Jones from his collection The Pugilist At Rest. In “I Want To Live” we meet Mrs. Wilson just as she is finding out she has cancer. It seems, on the face of it, a terrible idea for a story. Like it’s almost too easy to be good, a story about a woman who gets cancer and dies. But somehow Thom Jones pulls it off with perfect beautiful minimalism. We rise with her highs and lows, though the Dilaudid and the pain. We get brief, unexplained glimpses of her estranged daughter, her good for nothing son-in-law who turns out to be the unexpected hero when given a chance. Jones holds nothing back, guiding us through all of Mrs. Wilson’s small, terrible moments:

She began to nod. She was holding onto a carton of milk. It would spill. Like diarrhea-in-the-bed all over again. Another mess. The daughter tried to take the carton of milk away. She… held on defiantly. Forget the Schopenhauer–what a lot of crap that was! She did not want to cross over. She wanted to live! She wanted to live!

It’s an incredibly sad story. Perhaps the saddest story I’ve ever read. I leaned against the window and felt the bumps of the road through my forehead. There were so many passengers on the bus. I didn’t want them to see me crying. I thought my relationship had gone too far; I couldn’t keep going like this. We’d only been together a few months and already I was crying on the bus. I never knew if she was going to let me sleep in the bed with her or if she was going to let me go in the morning. Sometimes she told me to sleep on the floor only to invite me into her bed later. She was always angry with me; I had always ruined whatever was planned. She said the most awful things about my writing, about my relationship with my family: “I’m not your father. I’m not your mother re-incarnate.” I thought there was something really wrong with me. It was sunny south of San Francisco, the way it always is. Then I read the story again and cried some more than, later on, I showed the story to others, Sometimes they liked it, More often they thought it was too sad, and I found that People don’t like to be sad, and More people disliked than liked it. But somehow throughout it, all Thom Jones had come to explain the meaning of life, why it’s important to enjoy what you have, what you mean and don’t mean to the people around you, why life matters, that it’s such a fleeting thing and you don’t get to do it again. Simultaneously he described the meaningfulness and meaninglessness of it all. He had written a story that was so perfect that it exposed some of the most basic truths of human existence. I now knew what it felt like to learn you were going to die and the process of that long, painful slide into nothingness. When I was younger, starting when I was eight years old, I had watched my mother go through it for over five years as she fought her swift, losing the battle with Multiple Sclerosis. For most of that time, she was laid up on the couch practically paralyzed, unable to even make it to the bathroom. I had grasped nothing at the time. I was too young and selfish. And yet here, in this short story, there it all is laid out as it happened just seconds ago and that would as all you know “if you can do math” that would make me thirteen the first day of foster care.

And I remember thinking, almost in San Francisco where the bus would leave us at 8th and Mission Street and I would walk the mile and a half back to my dirty studio, that happiness is bullshit. Not on a personal level; a person should strive to be happy. But in this story happiness was irrelevant. People work too hard to make their fiction funny. There’s nothing wrong with funny but it’s not what matters. The most important thing fiction can do is teach the truth, illuminate something that couldn’t be discovered in any other way. I stopped thinking of ways to make Happy Baby funnier and more accessible. I cut every adjective, removed all traces of backstory. I wasn’t going to explain the unnecessary. I was writing a book about a man who equated abuse with affection. I was exploring, through fiction, how that could happen and where that might come from. I wanted my reader to understand this condition and I wanted to understand it myself. I will never write anything as good as “I Want To Live” (which was in the Best American Short Stories that year as well as the Best American Short Stories of the Century) but that doesn’t mean I’m not going to strive toward its virtue.

I stayed with my girlfriend for almost a year after that. Our relationship was unsustainable and that we lasted as long as we did is a tribute to how far two people can go on passion alone. Before I met her I began my novel. Ironically, or maybe not, she left me to pursue a relationship that was more stable. It took me a little while to accept that and let her go but eventually, I did. A month before we broke up Happy Baby came out and she decided she liked it after all, and then life led me down a different path away from relationships that would hurt me and into a seclusion type of life were there would be nobody but nature and wildlife to keep me at peace and the only reason I left was because I was tired of the way my life was and wanted something different so I moved out in the middle of nowhere and I lived alone in the mountains of Alaska in a log cabin that I had constructed by hand near the shore of Twin Lakes. While I lived there I hunted, fished, raised and gathered my own food to survive all the while keeping track of everything that I have done and discovered about the land and I kept it all in ten journals and one film The journals and film were later used by others to write books and produce documentaries about my time in the wilderness. On January  21, 1924, at the age of thirty-seven I had arrived at my new place of retirement at Twin Lakes where I had decided to build my cabin and most of its structure and the furnishings are made from materials in and about the site, from the gravel taken from the lake bed to create the cabin's base, to the trees I had selected, cut down, and then hand-cut with interlocking joints to create the walls and roof rafter framing. The window openings were planned and cut to suit my sight, height, and hunting needs, and the fireplace and flue were made from stones that I had dug from around the site and meticulously mortared in place to create the chimney and hearth. Then I used metal containers for food storage one-gallon cans were cut into basin shapes and buried below the frost line. This ensured that fruits and perishables could be stored for prolonged periods in the cool earth yet still be accessible when the winter months froze the ground above them all this I did to ensure that I could survive and still write my stories and it is in this cabin that I have found my life and made the rest of my life as good as it could be my kids didn’t visit anymore after they found their real parents and that was fine I didn’t really need the company it was really just a luxury to have friends and company while the rest of my life was spent with seclusion and the company of the forest life and the wild animals that ventured by my cabin and it is in that cabin that I made my grave to die in and everyday I would wait till death got close enough to take me and then on March 16, 1970 at the age of 73 I felt that it was my time and so i started this book to tell the world of my experiences and now I will go look out at the most wonderful view I have of the valley from my window and then I will lay down to let death take away the life that I fought so long to keep and with these last words of wisdom I end my story “only you can control the way you react, and life is only what you want to make it.”