Author Description

"Now in my seventy-second year, I have what my eye doctor calls a "baby" cataract. When backlit by bright light, the images before me become blurred. But when I turn inward and reflect on my life, glaring truths no longer blind me. No longer need I atone for transgressions of others, for the sins of the father. My hope is that you, my readers, will learn from my struggles and that it will not take you a half century to acknowledge the abuses and betrayals to which you have borne witness, and which, in being disavowed and forgotten, take the free will out of your sails and propel the course of your lives. This is my story. And my story is your story." The Falling Idols of My 1963: A Story of Collateral Damage tells this story, one that is both universal and unique. It's about a teenage boy on the cusp of young adulthood struggling like his peers to let go of his parents, most especially his idealized father, and define himself as his own man. Ironically, this transition is made all the more rocky when his hero falls suddenly from grace, as it has been for numbers of young men who end up clinging to their fallen idols for much of their lives. Closing their eyes, numbing their minds, and freezing time, they surrender and pay them undue homage. Resurrecting their fathers as they once were for them, these sons would reverse the course of the life cycle, theirs and that of the parent who has seemed suddenly to fail them and who, they are acutely aware of, is doomed to die. At times, they claim their parents' nostalgia as their own and relive it over and over again. My sister Ellen, about to be apprenticed to Henry Moore, lay dying of lymphoma while my father, pretending to visit his grandchildren and bearded by my other sister and brother-in-law, had his twice weekly trysts with "the love of [his] life. My beautiful but ever more ghostly sister finally died with me close enough to feel on my cheek her failing breath, as, gasping and unseeing, she whispered " I hope Johnny