Out on a Limb

“I know you! You’re Jimmy Peters! You wrote all those plays in grade school and high school.”

It was 2019 and I was standing before twenty-some new hires at Sacred Heart Hospital during their orientation. As annual giving specialist for the HSHS Sacred Heart Foundation, one of my responsibilities involved running the employee giving campaign. And, in philanthropy, it’s never too early to make an ask, so the Foundation was granted a few minutes of employee orientation to let the onboarding nurses, administrative staff, janitorial services and security personnel know how they were part of a bigger mission of mercy that relied not only on their skills, but on a small deduction from their paycheck.

“Hi, Kim,” I said to the woman sitting before me with her orientation folder who, over thirty years ago, I had directed in little school productions I had written.

With enthusiasm, Kim briefly referenced my creative antics from our school days while I probably flushed red.

The little she recalled had mostly become degraded memories for me, but her vague recollections reconstituted fragments of a past otherwise lost to time.

Wisps of memory about the first play I wrote in junior high at Immaculate Conception—a class project intended to be a simple written assignment that I turned it into a major production. I cast a significant portion of the seventh-grade class and we performed it during the class period on the stage of the school auditorium. The only detail that remains is a pivotal scene that took place at a bar, but I have no recollection otherwise as to what the play was about.

As extra credit for an eighth-grade history class, I wrote a grandiose script and tried to produce, direct and star in a short movie. It was based on the 1831 publication of The Confessions of Nat Turner (no recollection why I had read it or even where I got it). As a disruptive child, my main attraction to the project was its promise of delivering a glorious gorefest to my parochial school body with me in the role of Nat Turner who, along with his fellow slaves, rose up and brutally murdered the families who had enslaved them. Unfortunately, I ended up playing Charlie Brown trying to direct a runaway pageant which no one else showed any commitment. In the end, no axe ever cleaved a skull and the project never came to fruition, which was, perhaps, for the best.

Freshman year at Regis High School saw me make a major production out of a small English assignment to write a short soap opera. Unwilling to simply hand in a few pages, I recruited actors from my class and we videotaped a ridiculous spoof of soap operas I wrote that included a lot of people sleeping together, snooping around corners overhearing secrets, and even an alcoholic Vietnam vet suffering PTSD who drives drunk and hits a child, blood splattering across the windshield in an epic display of carnage that brought no end of thrills to our juvenile minds.

There were others, including a bizarre audio tape a classmate and I made as part of an assignment in a religion class where we had Jesus (who for some reason had the voice of Ronald Reagan) on trial in a modern court room proving he was the Messiah by performing miracles. It was a Three Stooges-style audio salad of Monty Python sound effects around relatively disrespectful Christian humor. The biggest miracle wasn’t what Jesus “Reagan” Christ performed on tape, but that we somehow managed to receive an A.

“Do you still write?”

Kim’s question snapped me back to reality, returned me to that room of new team members whom I still needed to beg for a piece of their check.

I stumbled to answer. What could I say? Since my childhood, I had been driven by creativity, defined by it. At that point in my life, however, I had failed as a musician, and been unsuccessful in my attempts to get two novels published. Two creative paths branching out from my life, with budding dreams never opening, and I had pruned those branches.

I stood there, that stark question lighting upon the absence of what I had hewn from my identity. What could I say?

I shrugged and grinned. “Not really.”

What I didn’t say, what I didn’t really know at that moment, was that I wanted to. I needed to. And I would.

But it would take a global pandemic to slowly push me back up the tree, and far out onto the limb I currently teeter upon.