The final book I had to read for my Freshman Reading class that first semester at Western Michigan University was Norman Mailer’s novel An American Dream. It was a story of a war-hero former congressman turned sensationalist talk-show host who murdered his high society wife in an alcoholic rage and then covered his crime by making it appear to be a suicide, descending into a lurid underworld of Manhattan jazz clubs, bars and Mafia intrigue. It was my first experience of engaging my impressionable mind with such a dark “adult” themed story. Among Mailer’s themes, was the provocative idea that modern life in our high technology society had magical underpinnings, including that serious diseases like cancer were really maladies of the human spirit, not merely biological processes.

Continue reading →

The last week of summer finally arrived as it always did, and with some reluctance but also some excitement I left my hometown of Ann Arbor, the place where most of the developmental events of my life had occurred, the Tuesday after Labor Day in September of 1972 to head off to college. The Munich Olympics were underway and the initial killing of two members of the Israeli Olympic team and kidnapping of nine others by PLO gunmen, the beginning of the “Munich Massacre” had just occurred, though we were not aware of that yet!

I still was feeling a great deal of ambivalence about my choice to go off to school ninety miles west at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo rather than at my hometown University of Michigan, in whose university medical center I had been born, where my parents were both Alumni, and my little family had been part of the extended University academic community for as long as I could remember. My stated reason for choosing WMU was that I was planning on being a theater major and I had been told they had a better theater program than UofM. But at some deeper level that I don’t know if I could really articulate I had a strong sense that I had to leave my Ann Arbor nest to best proceed with my further development. The thought of leaving my hometown did give me a discomforting sense of aloneness, but also a more positive sense that I was somehow doing at least something (if not perhaps the best thing) to push forward developmentally with my life.

Continue reading →