An Unedited Friendship

I’d never have written a word if it wasn’t for Terry Shaw. Oh, I’d send emails. I’d text. But that would have been the sum of it. Now that he and I plan on publishing a bunch of books, it’s time for me to thank him. Probably long past time.

I first met him on the eighth floor of a dorm room he shared in State College with my great friend. I remember looking across the way at another building and hearing that song by The Romantics—What I Like About You—blaring from another dorm window. There were many young folks on the lawn and a big party looming on the horizon. We cleared the furniture from the room and rolled in a keg. We stuffed about 40 people in a white cinder-block-walled space no bigger than some people’s master bath. I was visiting at the time, but I wanted to stay there forever.

Terry was the college roommate of one of my best friends, Mike Aquilina. And here I go with one of my detours. 

I struggle with saying “one of the best”. Best is a superlative. Therefore, saying “one of the best” implies that there is more than one best and that is not logical. Because if you’re the best, who can be better? But the English language allows us to say it that way and Mike is certainly best in my eyes in many categories. It’s no accident I met Terry through Mike. Mike has told me there are no accidents. 

Mike pleaded with me to attend Penn State University in 1982. I spent a sketchy year stuck on the ground after high school. I did watch one person soar in a sense. Not through the clouds like you might picture. But soaring tenuously about three feet above the surface with even less margin for error than a figure in Greek mythology. A series of intractable miscalculations and not only would he quickly find the ground but he’d also become interred beneath it.

I did apply to that school, and I was accepted to its branch campus. I transferred to University Park after my freshman year in 1983. 

A tight group of friends—Terry, Mike, John Marino, Joe Lello (and eventually Mary Gavigan) and I shared a house on Beaver Ave. It didn’t take long for me to go off the rails. I got tangled up and dropped out of college, eventually returning to my parents’ house in 1987, not long after that person I loved crashed to the earth while flying too close to it, somewhat like and somewhat unlike the ambitious yet lugubrious trajectory of Icarus.

I would work as a correspondent for the Wilkes-Barre Times-Leader in 1989 and a little while thereafter. The best feeling I’d ever had up to that point in my life was seeing my name on a byline. It rested below a headline on an article about disruption caused by a coal company in the Borough of Hughestown. My very first newspaper article made the second page.

I clipped and mailed that article to Terry, who had then worked as a newspaper columnist and editor. He mailed it back to me very quickly. He’d marked the story up in his trademark scrawl and numerous superhighways of blue pencil.

There were a few comments:

“Don’t quote an anonymous source.”

“This is trite.”

“This needs to be tightened.”

“Stick with it.”

Maybe it did need to be tightened but the article had already been published. And from then on I knew Terry would be a firm critic of what I wrote. It didn’t matter at the time because I had no shot at becoming a reporter. I had no college degree. And twenty bucks a pop for covering high school graduations and council meetings didn’t pay the bills.

It was 1993 when I went back to school, but the tuition reimbursement program ran dry and so did my hopes of finishing college. I had no money. I had a wife and a son by that time with another son on the way, and I never fared well in my job as an investment counselor. I was just going through the motions.

In 2016, the youngest of my three sons attended West Virginia University. I knew I had to do something so he wouldn’t be riddled with debt. I hadn’t written anything in decades, but you never forget how to write. You just need to get better at it. And that was Terry’s second wave of advice to me.

“All writing is rewriting,” he said then and still says today. In case you don’t know by now, I was a lazy ass. In one take I wanted everything to be perfect. And much of the time I thought it was. That’s not the way it works. I’m still learning.

I caught a break with a company called Investopedia. They signed me on as a freelancer after I submitted a clip of a story I’d ghostwritten for AM Best, an esteemed insurance publication. I’d written it for a partner with whom I’d started yet another failed business. I shouldn’t say “failed”. It just never got more than three feet off the ground, and it also fell and perished.

Terry had gone from editing newspapers in Maine and upstate New York to working for advertising agencies in Tennessee. We didn’t and still don’t see much of each other but when we do it is a stone groove. By the time my son Colin and I ventured to Knoxville to see Terry, it was 2019. We hiked part of the Appalachian Trail, ambling nine miles up and down a densely wooded path to the top of Clingman’s Dome, the highest point in Tennessee. It was a rare day weather-wise atop the Smoky Mountains. You could see the topography and maybe imagine your fate in an atmospheric expanse of clarity a hundred miles or so toward Memphis and Nashville.

Something dawned on me after that trip. Terry and I never stopped talking to each other. He did talk to Colin, and I talked to Beth here and there. But for five straight days, Terry and I never shut up. From the time he picked us up at the airport until the time he dropped us back off. We’d sit in the living room late at night enjoying beer and when we were both exhausted and almost physically incapable of talking anymore, we’d sleep and do it all over again the next day. There were bike rides during which he yelled instruction and encouragement that I couldn’t possibly hear. There were more hikes and trips to soul food restaurants named Jackie’s Dream. We talked while we chewed impolitely with our mouths open. We talked through the foam while we sipped our beer.

Terry always asked me this question, “If you could write about anything you want, what would you write about?”

The funny thing is I could not immediately come up with an answer. But I do love baseball. And I never knew my grandfather or my brother as well as I’d liked. So, I write stuff that includes a lot about both of them.

In 2022, Terry started a publishing company called Howling Hills. He’d had enough of the ad agencies and the corporate rat race. He asked me to write a few ghost stories for anthologies he releases annually. Ghost stories aren’t really my thing, but he said if they were good enough, he’d run with them. They were. And he did. But this did not come without strife.

I’d write these rambling flowery tales that never got to the point as quickly as Terry wanted. He cut them back and I seethed silently. Why couldn't he just let me off the leash? And why was he saying all these gruff things about my precious pedantic babies?

That’s when his most important bit of advice took shape.

“If you can’t take criticism, forget about being a writer.”

I admire what Terry is doing. He asks for my opinions and he values them as much as I’ve come to value his. And he’s having fun doing it. That’s all he ever wanted.

I like to have fun, too. But at 62, it’s no longer about decades I wasted sitting in bars and having conversations and unchronicled memories that faded into the ether. It’s more about leaving a mark—something more permanent and unique than what most people define as success.

So, I asked Terry if I could contribute more than stories to Howling Hills. He needs to focus on creating. I’ve learned a lot about bookkeeping and the like as a freelancer and consultant, and I enjoy working with numbers and formulas and software along with writing those stories. When I offered my help, he accepted.

And still we talk. Almost every day now in some manner. And I just need to thank him for his friendship and always encouraging me to be a (better) writer. I feel perhaps our best days are yet to come. If, that is, we ever stop yapping and get down to business.