AUTHORS' SPOTLIGHT - Season 6

My Recovery




         It was the winter of 1999 when I got back in touch with my dreams.

         I was starving and felt my last three bucks crumpled up in my pocket with some loose change, like the guts of a small piggy bank.

         I looked at the darkness outside my front window. It was the beginning of March.. Football was over. Basketball was boring until the last two minutes. And the snow remained deep, dirty, and unmelting. Only weeks to spring equinox.

         In the oblique bluish glare of the street lamps, I could see snow falling. It was falling lightly, a spring snow, the snowflakes spaced wide apart. It was the best kind because this late into winter you knew it wouldn’t last. Baseball season opened in nineteen days.

         I had to do something about the onset of depression. I needed the sun in my life and decided to sit down and write; perhaps some dreams could come true. After all, it had only been the years and some bumpy road that had side-tracked me since 1967.

***************


         The author, Semper Fi, has won numerous awards for his writing. Among them, one for his poem "Shadows of Iwo Jima" in the 72nd Annual Writer's Digest Writing Competition of 2002. It was also published by the Marines in their Leatherneck magazine in 2003.

         Bob also won first prize for the State of Michigan’s Lands Poetry Writing Competition in 2003, for his poem, "Beautifully Bruised."

         Semper Fi has finished two and a half novels and is actively seeking publication of his "Journey of the Stones."

         Married, with six children and five grandchildren, he is a retired United States Marine who lives in western Michigan.

         It is interesting that he has been a professional Santa Claus for forty-six years.


(279 words)