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A River Of Time
A River Of Time
A River Of Time
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A River Of Time

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A RIVER OF TIME is an extraordinary novel about an ordinary man and the amazing women who occupy his life, becoming his river of time.

For us, Jordan Peters' journey begins as he is discharged from the Air Force in 1963, eager to exploit his new knowledge of electronics in a burgeoning industry. Shunning the security of his mother's misguided alcoholic protection, he heads for San Francisco, where life appears filled with endless possibilities and fascinating people.

From the awkward tenderness and disappointment of first love to a heady series of affairs and heartbreak, Jordan struggles with his inability to find fulfillment with the woman he loves. He is unable to discover a substitute for the longing he has for someone he cannot have.

Through fleeting relationships, a failed marriage and a barren existence, Jordan appears to be fated to ultimately live a shallow life of unemotional attachment until he has an incredible opportunity to achieve final redemption through an act of love he never dreamed possible.

LanguageEnglish
PublisherDavid Ruggeri
Release dateMay 23, 2012
ISBN9781476058689
A River Of Time
Author

David Ruggeri

Mr. Ruggeri spent over 35 years in commercial banking. The US Air Force sent him to Yale University to study Chinese for Cold War assignments after a lengthy stint studying for the priesthood. His recent decision to leave the workforce and its constant downsizing and merger upheavals came easily after having raised his two children and rediscovering the joys of writing, one of his first ambitions. He is the author of 12 published books. His adult two children, Kelly and Sean are successful in their personal and business enterprizes and are a source of unending pride. Mr. Ruggeri currently lives in Anaheim and spends quality time baby sitting his grandchildren.

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    A River Of Time - David Ruggeri

    Prologue

    Life wends its way through the years on a river of time.

    At any point we may not see the source. nor the end of the river.

    Tributaries feed it. It swells with flood. It trickles with drought. It bends and winds. sometimes deep and slow, lazy in the reflected light of warm days and soft nights.

    At times it. roars and cascades. fighting the rocks and rapids, wearing away the shores around it, or freezes to seemingly incomprehensible stasis.

    But always, our river moves inexorably through the land and days of its passage. Through the meadows of joy and the mountains of strife it courses inexorably forward.

    It bends and twists. And at no bend does it reveal either its beginning or its end.

    We come upon one such bend ...

    Book I

    Marika

    Chapter One

    YOU CAN'T GO HOME AGAIN

    You know, you're a real son of a bitch!

    Tommy Wolfe sure got that right: You can't go home again. But then who the hell would want to?

    ''I'm sorry."

    You wouldn't stay home for any reason, would you, Jordan? .

    It's not that. I have to get going. I've got things to do.

    What things are more important than your mother?

    Nothing's more important than you, Mom. But I've got to get started on my own sometime, and I've been here for a month now.

    My mother glared at me with that afternoon mixture of parental disapproval blessed with a lack solace from the day's first two glasses of Chablis.

    I knew that this was the beginning of the assault phase of her alcohol-induced daily neurosis. It would move from there to recrimination, guilt. self-pity and, eventually, a complete stupor which would leave her asleep on the couch by the time Bonanza's quartet galloped into the living room.

    I don't understand why you can't just stay here in Fresno and find a job while living at home. You know we'd love to have you here with us She waved vaguely toward the kitchen where my stepfather was downing a beer in defense of the coming alcoholic onslaught.

    I tried to explain: The kind of work I do ... well ... a big city has more opportunity.

    Bullshit! You just want to get away.

    No, that's not it at all, I partially lied, the sweat of Fresno's summer uncomfortable around my neck. At least half of my motivation for going to San Francisco was comprised of my need to get out of that house and away from the woman my mother had become. "The Bay Area has a lot of electronics firms and they're all growing. Fresno is the raisin capital of the world.

    They don't know a transistor' from a diode here. That was the other fifty percent of my reason for escape from this armpit of the world.

    I had just spent four years of my life in the Air Force as an Electronics Specialist. I knew my stuff. I also knew that electronics was the wave of the future. If didn't get out of Fresno where my mother and stepfather had lived for the last ten years, whatever stuff I knew would shrivel away and dry up...just like Fresno's raisin crop.

    Don't you love us?

    Mom, love's got nothing to do with it. Of course I love you. But I need to ... to ....

    To what? she interrupted. To abandon me?

    Mom, I'm not abandoning you; I sighed in exasperation. I knew this conversation would go around and around in circles until either I walked away in frustrated anger or she would slink away to nurse her imaginary wounds.

    You never have appreciated the things I've done for you, she whined. When your father walked out on you, who was it that raised you single-handed? Loved you? Gave you everything you needed?

    Somehow I didn't think I was the one my father had walked out on.

    Maybe you don't remember, during the war when we didn't have enough to eat, she continued. I went without so that you could have food in your mouth. You had new shoes and I had to lie to the doctor to get coupons so that you could have shoes every month. I went to work twelve hours a day to put clothes on your back and put food on your table.

    Oh, Jesus, she was on a roll. I had heard this litany before.

    I was five years old in I945, just before the end of World War II, when my father, in what I eventually came to recognize as a desperate act of self-preservation, had finally gotten tired of breaking the crockery and throwing beer bottles at my mother across the war zone of our kitchen. He finally walked out. He had decided to continue his own alcoholic decline without her nagging or aggravating alcoholic consumption competition . No doubt it had been a hard adjustment for her. She hadn't worked since her marriage, ten years before my birth. She was out of practice. Her secretarial skills had slipped, and the labor market was getting tighter and tighter. The European war was winding down and companies were already in the process of rolling over the female staff they had temporarily hired to make way for the returning GIs. Finally, through a friend, she had obtained a job at the local weekly newspaper selling advertising space. Small salary, smaller commission. She put in long hours around town (many of them drinking with prospective advertisers) and, when she was at home, she was on the phone, extending her work day. To help make ends meet she also took a part-time job as a recreation supervisor at the city park on the weekends. Basically, she was a glorified babysitter for other working mothers. Those, she must have thought, I am sure, with more productive jobs. And smaller hangovers! It was tough. No doubt about it.

    As a five or six year old, I couldn't begin to appreciate what she was going through. But she had spent many years since then helping me to understand the nature of her sacrifices. I was continually reminded. God knows I have paid for each of them in the coin of guilt.

    Well, I wasn't buying into it today. If I couldn't understand fully as a child, I could now at least temper my understanding with the knowledge that she was using every facet of this motherly sacrifice crap from the past to engender filial guilt in the present.

    I knew how to conjure images for myself to combat the growing bud of doubt nurtured by her tirade.

    * * *

    How clearly I recall a bright, crisp Northern California day. It was just the beginning of summer in San Bruno, where we lived, fifteen miles south of San Francisco. The eucalyptus leaves glistened and rustled in the afternoon bluster; San Bruno was a windy town almost all year round.

    My mother had bought a kite for me. It was bright red, shiny, made of delicate paper and balsa wood, a feathered leaf of crimson energy anxiously awaiting its maiden flight into the heavens. I had waited all week for the chance to see it soar among the clouds.

    Mother, the park attendant, was in the middle of story time. A large gaggle of giggling kids had gathered around her bench as she led them delightedly through some fantastic adventure or another. It was one of her specialties, this ability to take flight from reality along with her listeners.

    In the nearby unoccupied baseball field, I was unraveling a healthy length of twine in preparation for launching my bright paper bird skyward. Even Icarus could not have anticipated such delight!

    Ten, fifteen, twenty feet of string lay between me and the kite. I drew the twine taut and began to run. The kite skidded across the ground and breasted into the air, the bow of its prow cleaving upward against the wind. Ten, fifteen, twenty feet it rose straight up, hovered momentarily, did a complete circle, and dived straight into the ground.

    Over and over again, I tried to launch that kite into the afternoon sky. I ran fast. I ran slow. I ran with the wind. I ran against the wind. I used a short lead of string. I used a longer one. I changed the bend of the bow in the middle. Always with the same frustrating results: it dived straight downward after rising only slightly.

    This, at my age, was a major crisis. I had waited days with eager anticipation to launch this flight, having flown it many times in my imagination.

    With childish tears of bitter disappointment, I went to my mother, crying my plight. She read on to the children, shushing me. I tried the kite again, with the same results. Soon I was circling the story time group. crying and begging for help. I needed my mother.

    Finally, fed up with the whimpering distraction, she jumped up, ran over to me, grabbed the bright red beauty from my hands, crushed it, and stuffed the pieces unceremoniously into a trash can.

    I don't remember much after that; other than the wind, which was meant to carry my kite into the heavens, continuing through the afternoon as it chilled the tears on my cheeks.

    Unaware of my utter devastation, my mother read on to those wind-blown children, taking them from one adventure to another.

    ** *

    Now here she was reminding me of all the wonderful things she had done for me.

    Mom, you know I've always appreciated everything, but I'm almost twenty-four years old. I need to do my own thing.

    Own thing? Humph! Do what you want. You will anyway. You did when you joined the Air Force. I don't Know why I would think it will be any different now.

    I Watched her stomp off toward the kitchen for a refill on the way to her couch in the living room. If anything, my mother was not subtle.

    If the truth were to be known, the woman did still engender feelings of guilt in me. But these were not sentiments of insidious treachery for not fully appreciating her efforts on my behalf. Oh, no! The guilt was all self-generated. I was eaten up from within by conflicting emotions. Overwhelmed by an obligatory feeling to love my mother without question or reservation, I constantly discovered that I didn't. I couldn't. I wouldn't.

    As I watched the stultifying heat waves rise off the pavement outside, I thought of the events starting six years earlier which had helped bring me to this moment of confrontation.

    Chapter Two

    FOR GOD COUNTRY AND SANITY

    (And Not Necessarily In That Order)

    It was I959, before my escape into the Air Force and I had already lived for two years with my mother and stepfather while attending a small community college in Fresno. This had come after six years of boarding school where I had been parked either because I was verging on an incorrigible adolescence, or just too much under foot. I suspect the later as my constant need for attention was a distraction from their active social lives.

    After the strict every-moment-filled discipline of boarding school, the oppressive atmosphere of home combined with the sleepy boredom of an overgrown farm town had me climbing the walls and looking for escape.

    It was some time after the Korean conflict had come to its relatively unsatisfying conclusion and Vietnam had yet to divide the country with its televised horrors.

    The draft was still in effect when I registered at the age of seventeen as I was required by law. With the arrival of my Selective Service card, the constant awareness of its numbered lottery's capriciousness was very much on my mind. I didn't have wife or children. My grades were nothing spectacular, making me ineligible for a college deferment. The specter of and an enforced two year stint as a foot soldier in the Army loomed ominously over my future considerations. No employer gave serious attention to any applicant who hadn't served his time in the military with a honorable discharge DD-2I4 to show for it.

    Of course, I had a choice: take a chance on the draft; maybe I would be passed over. Or I could enlist in the service of my choice with the possibility of having some control over my military career options.

    Combined with my lack of scholastic achievement and a monumental case of unrequited love for a classmate, I was driven in desperation directly to the door of my local U.S. Navy recruiter, where I was instructed to lose twenty pounds of sedentary academic flab and come back again to reapply.

    I lost thirty pounds (which I swore to never again put on), bypassed the disparaging naval recruiter and presented myself next door at the booth run by the U.S. Air Force.

    With heartfelt promises of a splendid military career that would prepare me for decades of future civilian accomplishment-and the reassurances that the Air' Force was the country club of the armed services-I was enlisted. After two long months of maternal weeping, wailing and recriminations, I shipped off to Lackland Air Force Base, happy to escape Fresno's II0 degree summer just to march in the II5 degree Texas sun. If the Air Force was the Club Med of military service, I would have hated to see what the Army or, God forbid, the Marines had to endure!

    After weeks of tests and screening interspersed with more physical demands than had ever been placed on my unsuspecting body, I was finally scheduled to meet a counselor and discuss my military career options.

    The recommended job fields as determined by the military's advanced and enlightened analysis, boiled down to three. First, a Language Specialist: Chinese or Albanian, secondly an Electronics Specialist or lastly, a truck driver. With visions of myself riding comfortably behind the wheel of a big rig while everyone else marched, I immediately opted for truck driver.

    The-counselor, a Tech Sergeant, who had probably given his left testicle in battle somewhere, sneered and strongly suggested that I not demean myself with efforts beneath either my capability or my dignity. I assured him that the comfort of driving a possibly air-conditioned truck was nowhere beneath my dignity. He refused to accept my selection. Instead, he indicated that he would put me in for Chinese language school and I could look forward to spending my military career sitting on a hill in Taiwan listening for snippets of intelligence heard on mainland radio broadcasts. He was impressed by my prior educational credentials as I had been exposed, albeit unwittingly, to Latin, Greek. and Spanish.

    After I emphatically explained my aversion to any further linguistic endeavors. and a concern over a possible allergy to soy sauce, we compromised on a training regimen in basic electronics for eventual placement in some highly technical MOS. Perhaps I would learn if robots dreamed of electric sheep!

    It was an excellent choice. Little did I know at the time that electronics was the wave of the future. Wedded to the rapidly developing field of computers at a time when Univac was still young, the electronics industry was on the verge of a boom that would take it into the 2Ist century.

    Chapter Three

    OPEN UP THOSE GOLDEN GATES !

    With my Air Force career behind me, and after more or less convincing my mother, and somewhat bewildered stepfather that I was doing the right thing, I loaded everything I had into my second-hand '56 Ford Victoria in preparation to leave Fresno for a second time.

    There was not very much to load. After four years in the Air Force, I was an expert at compressing everything I owned into the smallest possible space. My luggage was a small footlocker and a military duffel bag.

    I contacted Aunt Hazel, my mother's sister, who lived up north in San Bruno, and allowed her to invite me to stay with her while I searched for a job and an apartments in nearby San Francisco. My grandfather had lived with her and Uncle Bert until he died five years before and his room was empty. No, not really empty. It was full of Nono's ghost. The closet still held his clothes,

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