Just Say Hello

I guess I am just a regular guy who has been through a lot in one lifetime. My friends have often told me that my experiences might make for a worthy story, so I decided to share it. It may help someone who is just like me: a gay man who struggled with his sexuality and came out later in life; a person recovering from addiction since 1984; a parent of a special needs child who passed away at twenty-two; a newly out gay dad who raised two other teens mostly on his own following a divorce; a bankruptcy lawyer who ended up filing his own bankruptcy; an out gay man trying (and usually failing) to navigate online dating; and a man falling in love, maybe for the first time, with another man at sixty, making plans to move to a foreign country to start a new life.

I wrote this book with no expectation of it ever being published. I started writing what would become this book between 1995 and 1998 for the cathartic purpose of exploring my feelings about being the father of a child with severe special needs. Those original chapters disappeared in a computer before the cloud existed. My second attempt began shortly after that same child, Amanda, passed away in 2015. I tried to recreate the early chapters and added the events that followed. I came up with the final title, Just Say Hello, in the early morning hours of April 22, 2017. As I continued, I realized my self-discovery didn't end with Amanda. Being the father of Emily and Max has also shaped me. Emily is creative, stubborn, and caring; Max is intelligent, loyal, and organized. I see a lot of myself in both of them, and I am an incredibly proud dad.

The events and my reactions to them are all true. As someone in twelve-step recovery, I strongly believe in total honesty. For me, a person is either being honest or is not. My insistence on honesty is the likely reason I am unable to write fiction. I have used only first names or descriptions to protect the anonymity of my friends and the recovering people involved in my journey.

I struggled with whether to include unflattering stories about my ex-wife. I chose to write about them because omitting them would feel dishonest. My publisher demanded a release from her, which I finally got in exchange for removing some specific details. However, I have still told my truth without those details. I have also "misremembered" some dates due to my creeping case of "sometimer's disease." The dates used as chapter headings are intentionally not in chronological order because my memories are rather random.

I have long thought about becoming a writer, but writing only about Amanda's life and death would paint an incomplete picture of who I am and the influences that molded me.

As for my writing style, I am a huge fan of sarcasm, long sentences, parentheses, the ellipsis, and beginning sentences with the word "And." My use of parentheses comes from nearly thirty years of legal writing, where explanation is key, though I also believe that "less is more." My overuse of the ellipsis evolved while writing long texts to guys on dating sites. And I have no idea why I like beginning sentences with "And"... I just do.

This is my story, borne during the ordinary dates of my sometimes remarkable, sometimes difficult, but always interesting days (and nights).