Spiritual Beings on a Human Journey

This collection contains short stories, musings, and memoirs. In the stories, you'll meet a cast of dynamic characters in tales about love, loss, and redemption that includes awakenings to magical possibilities that surround all of us. There is a great jazz musician who rises, falls and rises again in Chicago's most notorious slum; a dreamer who turned away from his dream and lives to reclaim it; a French gangster looking for love in all the wrong places, a Vietnam war vet who has two spiritual encounters, a man ready to face oblivion who is saved by serendipity, and there are more. At some point in their histories, each character is, has been, or will be a seeker of the sublime, a seeker of a reality outside the temporal. A few are successful, a few fail, while others continue their quests after dramatic, life altering events. In the second section, musings, there are humorous insights into major differences between the ways men and women approach particular issues. These differences surface after a couple decides to hire a cleaning woman for their home and when the husband reviews the abysmal changes over the past fifty years to women's underwear. Two other lighthearted musing looks at the difficulty of working with attorneys and salespeople, and another provides a satirical master plan to end homelessness in San Francisco. In the third section, memoirs, I relate a change of attitude my wife and I went through about having children, a subsequent personal loss we experienced, and how we dealt with it. I close the collection with wishes I have for my sons, for myself and, in fact, for all of humankind. In this section I've included three poems I wrote that are related to the text.