Around seven years ago, my life changed dramatically. I think we are continually redefining ourselves, but something from deep inside me forced its way to the surface of my being and there was no escaping it.

All right, I’ll tell you quick story, but then I have to get back on track. I pretty much spent my thirties in therapy. The majority of the time with one guy, who was very good, but thrived a bit too much on the power of transference and was reluctant to give you back to yourself at the end. The second fellow was very different and very physical in his therapeutic approach. My mother briefly became a couch pillow and I whacked the shit out of her with a tennis racket.

In one of our sessions, I struck this very comfortable pose that felt familiar, but ancient in its connection. I stood, with my right hand holding an imaginary walking stick, looking out over my flock of sheep, with this sense of having been a Jewish shepherd and poet from the days of the bible. It was not a big deal for me at the time, because I knew it was true and don’t ask how I knew. I knew.

Somewhere, mucking around in the darkness of forgotten lives, writing has been part of my life. As a kid, this time around, having an aptitude in math and science was extremely important to the thousands of Jewish families living in Queens, NY. Tests back then did not mine for creativity, because it was about the mind of a child and not his soul. I was placed with the really bright ones, a result of above average showings in those tests, but I always felt out of place.

Learning how to type in the seventh grade seemed so primitive to a great mind like mine. All you did was punch the keys in specific drills: frf and ded were my favorites. Trust me, back in the Fifties, no one had any idea that keyboards in all shapes and sizes would become pretty much how we have ended up communicating with each other today. When I first began working in the broadcast advertising business in NYC, in the Sixties, I was thrilled that the key display on the brand new, otherworldly word processors was exactly the way I remembered from seventh grade.

Early on, I realized most people don’t like to write or aren’t comfortable sharing this way, most thinking they aren’t good enough. When I first got into the broadcast advertising business in NYC, I found myself having to write presentations for clients, involving million of dollars. I never thought of it as being something I couldn’t do. People would say to me that I should think about being a writer, but my thoughts were elsewhere back then. My career motor was running and making too much noise for me to hear what was going on inside me. I have always seemed to enjoy talking about the world around me, but the idea of writing about it all seemed far too audacious for me to take seriously.

One time, I actually tried. I was a single Dad, living in Park Slope, Brooklyn, sometime during the late Eighties, when I was pushing forty. I bought a used typewriter, yes, a used typewriter and couldn’t get passed a few lines on the page. I broke down in tears. As opposed to sharing my words, it felt like I was wrenching them from my gut. It was simply too painful.

I have discovered that we never stop growing up; it is not the sole domain of youth. I left the security of a life of familiarity, leaving New York City, my beautiful sons, my career. I had this crazy idea that it was time for an adventure and there was no fear, because there was no choice. I was compelled by a faith I never knew I had.

Twenty-five years after starting this journey, I had filled a reservoir with my experiences and it was beginning to flow over the top. This long ago idea of writing began to feel like the only way to let it out, to dance with it.

As has always been the case for me, it was love that forced me to fly into risk. I wanted to make sure that my precious, little grandson would know me and that as he grew, his relationship to my stories would change. I wanted to give him my life, my only possession. It would allow me to be with him for the rest of his life.

It took a year and a half to write, Halloween in Portland-Diary of a Mind. I consider this undertaking one of the milestones of my life. I remember so clearly the crippling trepidation that preceded the moment when I marked the naked screen, putting down the very first word of my story on a flight from Portland to Kauai on October 31, 2011.

If you asked me when I was ten what I wanted to be when I grew up, I would have said a doctor. If you ask me today, at age 73, I would say I want to be a writer.