I was a juvenile delinquent in my teens, which coincided with the chaotic years of World War II. I was, to say the least, indifferent to school. At Berkeley High I was told by the vice principal that I had set a record for “consecutive non-excused absences.” My punishment was two weeks suspension, which was like throwing Brer Rabbit into the briar patch.
        When the counselor managed to find me, he told me I was required to declare a major.
        I just shrugged and said, “I don’t care.” I didn’t want to major in anything. I didn’t want to be in school at all.
        “Do you like to read?” he asked.
        I said, “Yes.”
        “Then why don’t you major in English?
        “Okay.”
        That was the extent of my counseling, but I don’t blame the poor man. This was his standard way of dealing with indifferent students. Besides, he was overworked because of the influx of families from all over the United States, drawn by the demand for workers in the shipyards, munitions plants, and aircraft factories. I didn’t understand what a fateful decision I had made in a matter of moments.
        If you say your are an English major, then you have to take such and such prerequisites, and if you should decide to change to a different major, you have to go back and take such and such other courses as prerequisites for other courses, and so on. When I somehow ended up in college, I chose English as the line of least resistance. By default I had come to think of myself as an English major. 
        Over the years I read some things I liked and a lot more that bored me. I suppose I hadn’t realized that majoring in English meant reading mostly English writers, like Donne, Chaucer, Milton, and Dryden, to name a few. American writers were given short shrift. Most English professors despise one of my favorite writers, Edgar Allan Poe.
        When other students asked what I majored in, their next question would be, “Do you plan to teach English?” I hadn’t planned to do anything. With my high school record, it was a miracle I had gotten into college at all. I had received my high school diploma from a correspondence school that advertised on matchbook covers. Like many young people, I had wanted to get into college, and then after a year or two, I just wanted to get out.
        When I was twenty years old, I made the rash decision to become a freelance writer. A year later, I dropped out of college and spent many hours in furnished rooms staring at blank sheets of paper. I didn’t realize that I not only lacked enough experience to write an interesting novel, but that I was living on the wrong side of the continent. I was in San Francisco while the publishing world is centered in New York.
        Perhaps I should have moved to that fantastic city—but there is no way of guessing what my life would have been. No doubt I could have gotten my foot in the door as a reader or sub-editor, but I might have turned into a schizophrenic alcoholic, like some expatriate New Yorkers I have met in California.
        I got a taste of New York when the “carpetbaggers” invaded San Francisco and began the Beatnik Movement under the leadership of Kenneth Rexroth. These professional bohemians knew all the tricks of freeloading and self-promotion. I could imagine a whole city full of such people. Like the Huns and Vandals of the Dark Ages, the New Yorkers who fled to the west, the ones poet Allen Ginsberg without irony called “the best minds of our generation,” must have been clean and decent compared to those they were fleeing from.
    
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        I never actually gave up the dream of being a freelance writer. I even made a little money at it, but never enough to live on, especially after I got married and had three children—one, two, three—just like that.
  
     It’s a funny thing that when a
     man hasn’t anything on earth
     to worry about, he goes off
     and gets married.
                                     Robert Frost
   
        All my life, I have been like some lone botanist climbing trees in the rain forest, trying to find his way up into the sunlight. In the meantime, more and more of those trees are getting cut down.
        There are thousands of young men and women who make the same decision that I did. Each of them realizes that it is, as Hemingway once said, “A tough racket.” But each has to learn the hard way just how truly terribly tough it is.
        Obviously, I am still writing. The only satisfaction you can be sure of getting from writing is the freedom to be able to say what you really think.
   
     As soon as you trust yourself,
     you will know how to live.
                                                  Goethe
   
        Now I write what I like and when I like, and I like what I write. I sometimes wish I had learned these things much earlier in life. It would have saved me a lot of painful experiences. On the other hand, if I hadn’t had those experiences, I might not have much to write about now.
   
     Your whole duty as a writer is to
     please and satisfy yourself, and
     the true writer always plays to an
     audience of one. Start sniffing the
     air, or glancing at the Trend
     Machine, and you are as good as
     dead, although you may make a
     nice living.
                                          E. B. White  
    
     
                       About the Author
     
        Bill Delaney is a SIG member and native Californian, living in San Diego but born in San Francisco. He has published about 600+ short pieces since 1986, but never a book. He majored in English at UCLA, and has  written on Shakespeare, Keats, Hemingway, Hawthorne, Raymond Carver, and many others. His work has previously appeared in Calliope issues 125 and 126.  Bill is interested in writing short-short stories and memoirs.
        Bill uses the byline of William Arthur Delaney because there are other Bill Delaneys publishing, including a man who works for CNN. You can contact Bill at bill.delaney@att.net.