It was in the autumn of my fourteenth year in this world that I fell hard for the Bard. I was in my first Advanced English class in high school, and head over heels for Shakespeare.

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I was raised by a single father, and I think he knew where my heart wanted to take me. Three months after that first high school English class, I found Shakespeare's Collected Works under the tree, and I lost my mind. Forty years later, that same volume holds a very special place on my bookshelf, right between Holden Caulfield and John Blackthorne. 

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I've been a bartender, I've worked at butcher shops, and I've toiled in the summer heat on landscape crews. I was a bouncer, a waiter, an actor, a martial arts instructor, and many other things before I graduated biochemistry and moved into the field of nuclear medicine, where I've worked for over twenty years now. 

 

Writing has always been something I planned to make a serious start on...tomorrow.

 

Not so long ago I found myself looking back at the lifetime of tomorrows that have passed me by, and I felt terrible regret. Regret and profound sadness, because I should have been writing. 

 

I tired of regret and sadness pretty quickly though, no wallowing for this guy. I abruptly turned my back on my wasted youth, grabbed the first pen I could get my hands on, and came home.  

 

I’ll end with this:

 

'How beautiful is life, and how sad! With no past and no future, only a limitless now.’

                  -  James Clavell

 

Relevant? Certainly to me.

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J R Shaw