Twenty-two years ago. RIP, Dad.

 Author's Note: I wrote this 12 years ago, on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of my father's death. Like his memory, it has withstood the test of time. I have slightly updated it for today, December 11, 2024, the 22nd anniversary of his death. Read the original here.

Roger L. Miller as a boy, early 1920s.

My Dad and Airplanes

by G. Wayne Miller

I live near an airport. Depending on wind direction and other variables, planes sometimes pass directly over my house as they climb into the sky. If I’m outside, I always look up, marveling at the wonder of flight. I’ve witnessed many amazing developments -- the end of the Cold War, the advent of the digital world, for example -- but except perhaps for space travel, which of course is rooted at Kitty Hawk, none can compare.

I also always think of my father, Roger L. Miller, who died 22 years ago today.

Dad was a boy on May 20, 1927, when Charles Lindbergh took off in a single-engine plane from a field near New York City. Thirty-three-and-a-half hours later, he landed in Paris. That boy from a small Massachusetts town who became my father was astounded, like people all over the world. Lindbergh’s pioneering Atlantic crossing inspired him to get into aviation, and he wanted to do big things, maybe captain a plane or even head an airline. But the Great Depression, which forced him from college, diminished that dream. He drove a school bus to pay for trade school, where he became an airplane mechanic, which was his job as a wartime Navy enlisted man and during his entire civilian career. On this modest salary, he and my mother raised a family, sacrificing material things they surely desired.

My father was a smart and gentle man, not prone to harsh judgment, fond of a joke, a lover of newspapers and gardening and birds, chickadees especially. He was robust until a stroke in his 80s sent him to a nursing home, but I never heard him complain during those final, decrepit years. The last time I saw him conscious, he was reading his beloved Boston Globe, his old reading glasses uneven on his nose, from a hospital bed. The morning sun was shining through the window and for a moment, I held the unrealistic hope that he would make it through this latest distress. He died four days later, quietly, I am told. I was not there.

Like others who have lost loved ones, there are conversations I never had with my Dad that I probably should have. But near the end, we did say we loved each other, which was rare (he was, after all, a Yankee). I smoothed his brow and kissed him goodbye.

So on this 22nd anniversary, I have no deep regrets. But I do have two impossible wishes.

My first is that Dad could have heard my eulogy, which I began writing that morning by his hospital bed. It spoke of quiet wisdom he imparted to his children, and of the respect and affection family and others held for him. In his modest way, he would have liked to hear it, I bet, for such praise was scarce when he was alive. But that is not how the story goes. We die and leave only memories, a strictly one-way experience. 

My second wish would be to tell Dad how his only son has fared in the last 22 years. I know he would have empathy for some bad times I went through and be proud that I made it. He would be happy that I found a woman I love, Yolanda, my wife now for ten years and my best friend for almost two decades: someone, like him, who loves gardening and birds. He would be pleased that my three wonderful children, Rachel, Katy and Cal, are making their way in the world; and that he now has three great-granddaughters, Bella, Liv and Viv, wonderful girls all. In his humble way, he would be honored to know how frequently I, my sister Mary Lynne and my children remember and miss him. He would be saddened to learn that my other sister, his younger daughter, Lynda, died in 2015. But that is not how the story goes, either. We send thoughts to the dead, but the experience is one-way. We treasure photographs, but they do not speak.

Lately, I have been poring through boxes of black-and-white prints handed down from Dad’s side of my family. I am lucky to have them, more so that they were taken in the pre-digital age -- for I can touch them, as the people captured in them surely themselves did so long ago. I can imagine what they might say, if in fact they could speak.

Some of the scenes are unfamiliar to me: sailboats on a bay, a stream in winter, a couple posing on a hill, the woman dressed in fur-trimmed coat. But I recognize the house, which my grandfather, after whom I am named (George), built with his farmer’s hands; the coal stove that still heated the kitchen when I visited as a child; the birdhouses and flower gardens, which my sweet grandmother lovingly tended. I recognize my father, my uncle and my aunts, just children then in the 1920s. I peer at Dad in these portraits (he seems always to be smiling!), and the resemblance to photos of me at that age is startling, though I suppose it should not be.

A plane will fly over my house today, I am certain. When it does, I will go outside and think of young Dad, amazed that someone had taken the controls of an airplane in America and stepped out in France. A boy with a smile, his life all ahead of him.

My dad, second from top, with two of his sisters and his brother.

Dad, near the end of his life.

A transition two years ago led to Ocean State Stories...

 

Two years ago this month, I left The Providence Journal, where I had been a staff writer for four decades, to co-found and direct OceanStateStories.org, the free non-profit, non-partisan media outlet based at Salve Regina University’s Pell Center that is devoted to in-depth reporting on issues of importance to all of Rhode Island’s many communities. Our stories are told with data, expert input, and the personal experiences of residents. We launched in February 2023.

 

During 2024, we continued to expand our reach, adding new publication partnerships with Rhode Island PBS/The Public’s Radio and The New Bedford Light.

We redesigned our website, making it more user-friendly and adding a drop-down feature giving our audience the option to read in Arabic, Chinese (simplified), Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian or Spanish.

We adopted a strict set of editorial standards.

We won a Silver Award winner in the third annual Anthem Awards competition in the “Diversity, Equity & Inclusion – Public Service” category.

We remained committed to furthering the objectives of the many professional organizations to which we belong: the Society of Professional Journalists, the Online News Association, the New England First Amendment Coalition, the Alliance of Nonprofit News Outlets (ANNO), Education Writers Association, and LION Publishers: Local, Independent, Online News.

And we continued to support an outstanding and growing pool of freelance writers.

I’d like to thank our audiences, our partners, our benefactors, our Advisory Board, our great team at The Pell Center including our student interns, our web and comms team, and the many Rhode Islanders who have shared their stories – “stories that explore healthcare, education, public policy, socioeconomic and racial disparities and injustices, domestic violence, food and housing insecurities, the environment, agriculture, ageism, suicide prevention, mental health, immigration, veterans affairs, and developmental and intellectual disabilities, among others,” as we state on our site.

Here’s to 2025, another great year ahead!

Nine gallon mark in blood donation reached!

I reached the nine-gallon donation mark on Nov. 1, 2024. If you can, please give blood. You could save a life!

 

Halloween and a major book anniversary

 

Thirty-five years ago this autumn, just in time for Halloween, my first book, the horror novel Thunder Rise, was published. I was represented by the late Kay McCauley and her brother, the late Kirby McCauley, who at the time were the agents for Stephen King, whose work has greatly influenced my fiction.

Needless to say,  publication was exciting. Thunder Rise launched my book-writing career – 21 fiction and non-fiction books as of thiswriting. Two are the second and third volumes in the Thunder Rise trilogy: Asylum and Summer Place. Several others are also horror novels.

Following the U.S. hardcover publication of Thunder Rise in 1989, a British edition was published and also a U.S. paperback. Thunder Rise today is available in audio and Kindle from Crossroad Press.

 I met Kay McCauley at the 1986 World Fantasy Convention, held in Providence at the then-Biltmore Hotel. The inaugural World Fantasy Convention, in 1975, was chaired by Kay’s brother and it, too, took place in Providence, where Lovecraft and Poe lived.

When someone pointed out Kay to me, I introduced myself. I wanted to interview King for a story in The Providence Journal, where I was a staff writer, and thinking King would respond favorably to a “kindred spirit,” I told Kay I wrote horror, too (short stories in The Horror Show, Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, and other magazines). Kay never was able to arrange the interview, but she liked my short stories and asked if I had written any books. I had and she sold Thunder Rise to William Morrow, now a division of HarperCollins.

In the following years, Kay, who lived in New York City, became my dear friend and she represented me for several more books before semi-retiring (her only client in her final days was George R.R. Martin, of Game of Thrones fame). She died in 2020, RIP Kay. Kirby had died in 2014.

This photo of Kay is from Martin's tribute to her.

 So on this Halloween, my thoughts turn to the past, and not just books but also the many years of trick-or-treating with my children and grandchildren.

 

My thoughts turn, too, to the present.

Happy Halloween, all!

 

About Thunder Rise, from the original-edition jacket:

Relentlessly gripping, this debut novel is classically responsive to the adage that fictional horror is far more vivid in daylit, familiar surroundings than in darkly dripping gothic vistas. Morgantown, an old, white clapboard and steepled town in the lovely Berkshires of western Massachusetts: America could have few settings as idyllic and inviting -- or as deadly. Up against the towering mass of Thunder Rise, the mountain behind which the sun sets every evening, Morgantown is cowering -- from a nameless, lethal and seemingly sourceless malady that threatens the populace through its most vulnerable members, the children.

Journalist Brad Gale, who has fled a broken marriage and given up a top New York job, has come to Morgantown seeker a serener life as editor of the local Daily Transcript. With him he brings five-year-old Abbie, "Apple Guy" of his eye. When the mysterious affliction strikes Morgantown's youngest inhabitants, signaled by soul-shattering nightmares of individual creatures of dread -- a bear, a wolf, a prehistoric carnivore -- and followed by an inexplicable wasting away, Brad knows it is a story to be explored in full. Then Abbie is stricken and Brad too must join in deadly battle with a force beyond rational imagining.

As more children sicken and slide toward doom, the struggles of the medical establishment seem increasingly futile. Even a trained and scoffing skeptic like Brad becomes reluctantly and belatedly drawn to listen to the beliefs and theories of Charlie Moonlight, a Quidneck Native American who speaks of the primordial demon lurking in the heart of Thunder Rise now stirring anew. At the end a battle of terror is drawn -- with the reader enlisted in as close and fateful combat as the printed page can ever afford.

“An Unbroken Pact,” one of my earliest horror stories, written for my high school newspaper:

 

 

Wolf Hill

 

Wolf Hill: An essay from long ago.

I periodically repost some of my favorite essays. Here's one, set in autumn, my favorite season. I wrote this in October 1997, on a break from finishing my fourth book, Toy Wars: The Epic Struggle Between G.I. Joe, Barbie and the Companies That Make Them. Cal is an adult today, living in Rhode Island after five years in Japan. Rachel and Katy have children of their own. Life, like a river, keeps on flowing.

 

WOLF HILL

An Essay About a Boy

We avoid the woods in summer. We don't like bugs, the ticks and mosquitoes especially, and anyway, we're drawn to the beach at Wallum Lake, which is just up the road. But early October finds us eager for the first killing frost. It came this year at the customary time, when the sugar maples are at their peak and the oaks are only beginning to turn. The temperature at dawn read 29 or 30 degrees, depending on the angle the thermometer was viewed. I figured if any of my city friends asked, I'd say 29.

By late afternoon, it had warmed to almost 50. The sky was cloudless and the breeze had shifted to the south. I put on my boots and vest and helped Cal, who is almost three, on with his. Our vests have large pockets, very important for walks in the woods. We went through the backyard and onto the cart path that ascends Wolf Hill, a fanciful name in the nineties, even for a rural town like ours. Cal's first priority was equipping himself with a stick. He found one about two feet long, and another slightly larger, which he gave me. ``Little boys need big sticks,'' he observed. I wholeheartedly agreed.

Many years ago, when a farmhouse graced the top of Wolf Hill, the path could accommodate vehicles; one, a bus, ended its last journey up there and its rotting remains continue to be a source of wonderment to all who happen upon it. Every year the mountain laurel and pine claim more of the path, and this year was no exception, but there was still plenty of room -- more than sufficient, I informed Cal, for another good flying- saucer run this winter. Cal insisted on taking the lead and, unlike our last walk, in April, he refused assistance getting past deadfalls. He went under, or around, and then stopped to reveal the appropriate route to me. ``Dad, come on over here,'' he said at one point, ``that's a safe place to get by.''

 

We climbed, past the inevitable stone walls, still remarkably intact, if mostly overgrown. The air seemed fresher as we continued, the light through the foliage stronger, and soon enough we'd reached the peak. Only a cellar hole is left of the farmhouse, destroyed some thirty years ago in a fire of suspicious origin. Rusting machinery, barrels and bedframes are strewn about, and the woods are slowly claiming them, too. We marveled together at a sight as strange as grape vines entwined around a bedframe, and I tried explaining how a house not unlike our own had been reduced to ruin, but I don't believe I succeeded, nor did I really try. I steered Cal's attention to the only grass on Wolf Hill, a small, sunlit remnant of lawn. We picked wildflowers, the last of the season. I did not know the species. They had thirteen petals and came in two shades: lavendar and white. The frost had not touched them. Cal was more interested in mushrooms. He'd been keen on mushrooms since our last swim at Wallum Lake, when he found ones as big as my hand that had materialized overnight beneath a picnic bench. He also gathered acorns, which he proposed to feed to squirrels, a word he still had difficulty pronouncing.

 

From the cellar hole, we descended to the quarry. I cautioned Cal not to run, but he explained that he was not -- this was skipping. I wanted to carry him or at least hold his hand; instead, I took a breath and was silent on the matter. The quarry has not been worked since the 1800s, but if you look around town, you will see many foundations made of its imperfect granite. Our own front steps, I am sure, came from here. Water has long filled where men once labored, of course, and a century's worth of sediment covers the bottom, making it impossible to gauge true depth (although we have tried, with our sticks). When Cal is a little older, I will tell him -- as I did his sisters -- spooky stories of the goings-on here when the moon is full. For now, we concern ourselves with water. It had not rained in over a week, and the stream that empties the quarry was dry. Our April walk was during a nor'easter, and we got soaked playing in the waterfall, but it was gone now, too. Cal was worried it would never return, but I reassured him it would, with the next steady downpour.

 

The shadows were lengthening and the temperature was edging down. An inventory of our pockets disclosed sticks, pebbles, acorns, flowers, mushrooms and a bright yellow leaf, which Cal had selected for his mom. We left the quarry and made our way back to the cart path through a stand of towering Balsam firs, unlike any other on Wolf Hill. When the girls were small, long before Cal was born, we found this place. It resembles a den, and the forest floor is softly carpeted and often dotted with toadstools -- certainly a spot, I allowed, where elves dance under the starry sky. Honest? Rachel and Katy were wide-eyed. There was only one way to know for sure, I said: Some fine summer night, we would have to camp out here, being careful to stay awake until midnight. We never did. Rachel is in high school now, and Katy, four years younger, is sneaking looks at Seventeen. Cal listened with great interest at the prospect of seeing elves. He was tired, and as I carried him home, I promised we'd camp out next summer, bugs and all. I intend to ask Rachel and Katy if they'd care to join us.

 

Copyright © 1997 G. Wayne Miller