Conquered goals and helping others by one’s purpose achieved

Many blessings upon you and for you to have received

                                                                        --A.D. Upchurch

 This simple biography is filled only with some highlights that have happened in my life. Just to give you an idea of where I have been and an idea of me is the intent for this bio. I definitely hope that you enjoy it.

Dear You,
We should talk.  I would like it to be the best kind of talk: with lots of pauses, wanderings, redirections, more questions than answers, and no ego posturing, no proving how smart we think we are, and definitely no preaching.  More simply, it would be talk among friends, words shared between equals.
That’s the hope, anyway.  The reality is that the best I can do right here right now is to tell you my story in the hope that sometime you will tell me your story.  Or, even better, I would like my story to help you in the telling and living of yours.
Author Joan Didion reminds us that “we tell stories to survive.”   And, of course, she is correct.  Another spin on what Didion tells us is that we are our stories.  We thread together all the confused elements of our lives into one story, our story, and this story becomes our life story.  Into our story we put good and bad people, good and bad situations and all the twists and turns of history (personal and social) that go toward explaining who we are and why we did what we did.
Of course, we can never explain ourselves, not fully anyway. We are more than our his/herstory.  Maybe--and I’m a liar and a cheat if I said I understood—maybe your and my life only tell one story.  And further--my ambitions greatly exceeding my knowledge, my ability--I would guess that the whole universe spreading out forever, without beginning, without end--also tells just one story.  That story?  Death and Resurrection.      
Finish and Restart.  Leaving and Returning. Finality and Rebirth.  Lost and Found.  On and Off.  Fatal Falls and Continuing Change. There are many little deaths and resurrections, before the big, official death and re-birth as baby.  It is as if we are practicing death and rebirth until we get it right. But then again, who knows?  If we were gold fish, God would be the person who changed our water.          
It is what songwriter/singer Carrie Newcomer calls [the journey from] “Certainty to Mystery.”  Then, obliviously, I don’t know.  It all seems, in infinite regress, metaphor within metaphor, trapped as we are in this House of Mirrors, where everywhere we look we see ourselves, even in the God(s) we make.
Yes?  You wait patiently (and thank you for that), now what? 
First the glare of the blinding light.  Being pulled/pushed from the womb, May 14, 1980, into a white hospital room my mother couldn’t afford in Long Beach.  I almost remember wondering, why had I been kicked out?  Didn’t I pay the rent?  If I come up with a security deposit can I go back, extend my lease another nine months?  I scream. I hate it here.  I smell like sea water at low tide; it’s too bright, too white, I’m handled by rough hands, and there’s never ever enough money to make it better.
So I go, trying to get back into dark, hairy places, now smelling like beer and vomit, handled by rough hands, in a too-white world where’s there’s never enough money.
I now cut, or more correctly “dice,” carrots in the way I am learning in culinary school:  peel carrots, cut length wise and then, without lifting the point of the large knife, push the blade down repeatedly with both hands, in a chopping motion that produces a backbeat of tapping sounds.  When the entire class dices carrots at the same time, it sounds like drum beats from a marching band.   Chopchopchop chop . . . 
But, no, I haven’t always cut carrots.  In my history of hands, at Lincoln pre-school I learned sign-language to help other disabled students. I could spell out with my hands (the same hands, now bigger, that chop carrots) “I’m tired.  I need to eat.  I don’t have a significant father figure at home.  When my father does come homes he smells like a bathroom.  I’m in love with Fatima, but she won’t take off her panties.” Although I could hear, they decided I wasn’t very smart.  Chop.
At 6 years old I thought my hands could heal people of anything because of the electric frequencies coming from my finger tips.  Not only could I heal people, I needed to heal people.   There’s so much pain for my hands to heal.  My mother for example.  She must be hurting, without our father around and the bills that won’t stop and my two brothers. One of her boyfriends took all our toys, locked us in our room and I could hear my mother moaning in the back bedroom.   Yes, I know:  Christian charity and all that, but if I saw that bastard again I’d take my carrot chopping knife and create a bastard, black balls and peter salad, with semen dressing, and make him eat it.  
The same boyfriend drove us for a weekend to visit his mother, a Nun in a Santa Barbara Catholic Church.  I used my hands to pet a white, very hairy, blind dog.  Cool dog. When I petted that dog I picked up peaceful feelings.  But I didn’t get the same feelings from the Catholic Church:  At the Chapel Service the idols kept looking at me, judging my every thought and action.  “Sorry about Fatima,” I wanted to shout to God, Mother Mary and, especially, Saint Peter.   Clearly something terrible, like Hell and damnation, awaited me.  Later that same boyfriend died from kidney disease and a drinking problem.  Chop.
Now the carrots go into a wilted lettuce salad, with bacon, hard-boiled eggs and hot bacon dressing.
Marcio’s insane.  He hated everyone.  He’d run around the classroom, throwing anything he could pick up and scare everyone—including the teacher, who would lock Marcio outside and call for administrators, the police, and the Army National Guard.  But in our elementary “We’re Not Very Smart” Special Ed. Classes, Marcio and I were cool.  Oh, Marcio would pound Brian’s head into his desk until bloody, but, for whatever reason, he left me alone. I won several awards for citizenship and not-being-like-Brian awards.  I wish I could have shown my awards to Fatima, who had disappeared forever out of my life.
So you’re wondering where I got the last name “Upchurch?” Me too.  I remember in Hill Middle School another student named “Upchuck” would make fun of my last name.  He’d called me “down church” and I’d shout “Upchuck,” making the universal sign for vomiting, right fore finger in the open mouth.  I also won some awards at this Special Ed school for being the most improved 8th grader and for being a Decent Human Being, the “DHB Award.”
The culinary teacher is coming around to grade my wilted lettuce salad.  I wish she knew that I had won all those DHB awards and he could factor that into my grade.   My salad sucked.  I used too much bacon grease to wilt the lettuce and not only did my lettuce wilt, it drowned and died a horrible, soggy death.
At Poly High I stayed pretty much a decent human being, avoided the school’s many fights, and graduated with a 3.5 grade average--not bad for a Special Ed. Kid, huh?  But after a number of dead end jobs taught me that being a DHB and winning awards for good behavior, however that affected my karma, it didn’t pay the bills.  Karma is slow, takes time to build up, life time over life time, while the need of money bites you in the ass (and wallet) every day.
So I did what a lot of black, DHBs do—I drank.  Cheap wine, cheap beer and my friend Jack Daniels.  If alcohol opened the door a crack, Crack came in.  And the down spiral continued, ending in L.A. County Jail for being a violent addict and drunk.
Yes, I know you’ve heard it all before:  black dude goes down.    I would also have been bored with this story, except that this:  It’s my story.  I’m interested, very interested, in how it ends.
Then came Hurricane Michelle. Older African-American woman, slender, close-cropped hair, beautiful brown eyes, she flooded into my life, washing everything clean.   Michelle had fought her own wars, not that much different from my own.  There’s that wonderful click, like gears into gears, when you can share war stories with someone and they still care for you no matter how bad you’ve been.  More simply, we accepted each other despite the war wounds.
 The culinary teacher, Ms. Johnson, comes to my wilted lettuce salad and picks up a cut lettuce leaf.   The oil drips off the leaf back into the crank case at the bottom of my salad.  “What’s wrong with this picture?” she asks.
I look into her eyes.  “Bad childhood?” I answer.
Then her face does a right turn and she starts laughing. “Try again,” she finally suggests between the waves of laughter.
So, my friend, there’s my, and our, answer.  “Try again.”
 It’s so simple, finally.  I keep writing poetry because the mystery of words might join the mastery of words for me.  And sometimes--and this is amazing-- I write better than I know how to write when the divine Mystery I call God speaks through me. 
With God’s help, I produced a book, Cypher Key. For the sake of your soul, and mine, you should buy this book.  “Sometimes you’ve got to fall a long way to realize how high God is,” as a friend told me in jail.  Try again.