How I Happen To Write The Bonnie Poetry!

The Bonnie Poetry
How I Happen To Write It!

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© November 2005



The Bonnie poetry was written as a young man upon my return to the states after completing an executive assignment for Nalco Chemical Company in South Africa, where I lived in the late 1960s. The combination of cultural shock and reality check proved shattering to my most vulnerable sensitivities. Life had thrown me a curve, what others might have found normal fare proved beyond my capacity to either accept or assimilate. Suddenly, I thought my life had no meaning or purpose.

God works sometimes in strange and mysterious ways. Reared Irish Catholic and deeply religious, feeling my sensual side was only to procreate, and deeply depressed with no one but my books to talk to, and being in a loveless marriage, I felt trapped much like people in Plato's cave.

Up to that point in my young life – I was now in my thirties – my existence had been that of a poor boy realizing the American dream to an education, success, status, achievement in his work, and a beautiful family of two boys and two girls.

My anchor was my faith, my belief in the brotherhood of man, and of the triumph of goodness over evil. Yet, I saw good people in South Africa doing evil things in the name of the law, and all my affluent colleagues and neighbors feeling this was as God meant it to be.

I was trapped in Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” and was introduced, for the first time, to the darkness in my own heart. I resigned my position after South Africa, moved my family to Florida, and vegetated as if a plant starved for sunlight and moisture, wandering across the Tampa Bay area as if in a desiccated state.

And then one day I run into this beautiful damsel named Bonnie, who lived in the midst of the most sordid conditions, who smiled beautifully, and listened to me with innocent attention, and I felt my heart sing.

The poetry indicates, without revealing it, how much I felt her pain, her cruel entrapment, where like a young animal, fresh and beautiful, she sparkled in the midst of all the ugliness around her, caged as she was to live a life of misery and deprivation that rivaled the tales of John Huffam, who the world knows only as Charles Dickens. She was a jewel, and I was drawn to her as if to a healing palliative to rescue me from my South African nightmare.

I once considered writing a short story about those visits to her snack bar at the Tampa Amtrak railroad train station, but felt it was too intimate to share. I never saw her other than behind that counter, never touched her other than with my eyes, and never said anything in anyway of endearment, except in my poetry which she did not see.

One day she startled me, and said, "You know, you are quite beautiful, did you know that?" No one had ever said that to me. "I look into your eyes," she continued, "and they are the pale blue of the sky on a cloudless day." It was as if she could see into my soul, this simple woman, and I was naked before her eyes. She saw beauty where I saw darkness, and the beauty she saw was not of the physical kind but of the kind that only poets know or lovers envision.

After she said that, I didn't come back for several weeks. When I did, the station was shut down, the snack bar was gone, and she was with it. Once I was watching television during the local evening news, and a television cameraman spanned the people watching a baseball game being played by migrant workers, and she was there in the stands, sitting alone, frozen in the beauty that I remembered. It was reassuring to see her image if only remotely as I was beginning to believe that she had only been a dream.

Today, that Amtrak railroad train station has been preserved as a historic monument to Tampa’s past, a Tampa jewel that to this day I have not had the courage to revisit.

Bonnie thought me deep and strange and remote but somehow full of folly. One day I said impetuously, "I want to go to Arcadia and work the fields with you, pick the fruit, and live as you have lived." She started to laugh, and then noted that I was serious.

"My blue-eyed friend," she said, "it would kill you. If not the work, the men. You are what they hate, don't you know that? You can't hide what you are. It shows the way you walk, the way you talk, and it all spells hatred. Don't ever think such thoughts."

She scared me and sent shivers up my spine, here I was the educated one, and she practically an imbecile, and I knew nothing of life, and she wore it like a crown.

I've written elsewhere that Schopenhauer says that when we examine our life we'll find it plotted like a novel. This was an important chapter in mine.

I went home and wrote Confident Selling, sent it to Prentice-Hall, and it was accepted. The publisher wrote to me later that it accepted one unsolicited manuscript for about every 2,000 it received.

The book was in print for twenty years (1970 – 1990), another unusual benchmark. What was my message in the book?

It was a simple statement: accept yourself as you are and you will accept others as you find them. This is the formula to confident thinking which is the format to confident selling.

The book in a way was an ode to Bonnie, who wouldn’t have been able to read it having never learned to read with any facility. Yet, her presence was revealed on every page, as she was my inspiration to move back into my world where I belonged, and to forget about her world where life was beyond my comprehension.