Welcome!

For more than 10 years I wrote a column in our small hometown newspaper. It was a popular column, sharing my iconoclastic, somewhat wry, view of local happenings, politics, and world events. I had only written for technical journals before and in the “Near Common Sense” column, I found my “writer’s voice.” The dictionary defines “writer’s voice” as “the way the writer’s personality comes through on the page, via everything from word choice and sentence structure to tone and punctuation.”  Like all other writers. my “voice” was uniquely mine – flavored by an Appalachian childhood, many, many great books, some formal education, and a lifetime of listening.

Maybe more important than finding my “writer’s voice” through the column, I found an identity. Before the column, I was a man in his 40’s with a pretty long, depressing record of setbacks. I had lost my kids, 2 wives, and the farm. A work injury messed up my back and I was learning about physical limitations. I was a rudderless ship drifting wherever the wind blew me. You may have heard of “a man without a country”, or “a rebel without a cause”, I was a “man without a clue” as to who I was.

I became the “guy who wrote that column”. People here in the Redbank Valley knew me – or at least the knew the writer. I found an identity that I was comfortable with. And there was a side benefit to this – I became another one of our small town “characters”. Now every small town has 1 or 2 town characters; but New Bethlehem and the Redbank Valley has a whole bunch of them! They are locally famous (or infamous) simply because of who they are. They are the jokesters and the butt of jokes. They add flavor and color to small towns across the country. Some are funny. Some are sad. But they all add to the very unique tapestry of each small town’s life. They are unique, molded by the individual genetics, life experiences, and the small towns that they call home. The town characters and their small town become intricately entwined.

For the first time in my life, I had a “hometown”.

The local paper and I parted ways in 2009 after the rather “progressive” publisher took acceptance to my suggestion that Moslems were incompatible with the American way of life and that they should not be welcomed. My publisher considered this as promoting violence – I saw it as common sense. With the perspective of time, I might say that it was even prescient. I have not apologized for the words. They were the truth as I saw it then. I will take my chances before the Throne on Judgement Day.

Or, to paraphrase Bob Dylan, “don’t ask me nothin’ ‘bout nothin’, I just might tell you the truth!”

I tried to write some after that, but it simply would not work. The words that once flowed so easily were forced. The wry humor was gone, replaced with angry frustration. There was not any joy in doing the thing that had defined me for so long. It was not that the words, nor the talent, that was gone. It was the “voice” that was gone.

It came to me in the wee hours of this morning, waiting for sleep to return, that the reason that the “writer’s voice” from the Near Common Sense era was gone, was because the man who used it was gone. Oh! John Gerow is still alive and well and haunting the Redbank Valley, but he is a different man than the man who penned that long ago column. 14 years of living has wrought some profound changes in the man I used to be. Fourteen years of relocating, changing jobs, living in different towns, being saved, 4 heart attacks and a near fatal bleeding ulcer, adapting to new physical limitations, and a great granddaughter should bring profound changes to one’s life. If they do not, one must be only partially aware. I will never be content with my writing again as long as I am trying to write in the voice of a man long gone. I have to rediscover the writer in me again and free his voice\.

So, let us see where his experiment leads us. In the late innings here, there are stories yet to tell, random thoughts to be shared and some questions to be posed. Is there still the magic of laughter, memories, and thoughts in the words? Can the writer find his voice again? Stick around and find out.

Welcome to “Just a Thought or Two”.