Trail Mix: A Writing Life Enhanced by Attention Deficit Disorder

Along the trail in Trail Mix we'll witness a night launch of Navy jets from a nuclear aircraft carrier..... boogie with an integrated throng at a James Brown concert.....chase President Lyndon Johnson around the world in five days.....spike a can of Dinty Moore beef stew with expensive French wine..... hang with preservationists as they save an architectural jewel from demolition.....celebrate a Glorious Fourth with Italian-American fireworks families.....visit terminally ill patients and their pets at the world's first hospice.....trace the life of a mushroom from incubation in chicken shit to doom on a dinner plate.....stalk Elizabethan accents among the watermen on Chesapeake Bay's Tangier Island..... barnstorm on Vice President Hubert Humphrey's campaign plane with twistmeister Chubby Checker..... perch on a rail in the St. Louis Zoo's bird house with ornithologist Roger Tory Peterson.....eat tear gas in Chicago with war protestors at the Democratic National Convention.....savor tea and gossip on Embassy Row with GOP doyenne Alice Roosevelt Longworth.....play tennis with comedienne Phyllis Diller and her shiny, new orthodontics.....judge a BBQ festival with good ole boys in North Carolina's mountains.....share beans and a unisex bucket with co-ed strangers on an Outward Bound voyage.....ponder King Henry VIII's "girlfriends" with a cardinal of the Catholic church.....strip naked for volleyball and Robert's Rules of Order in a nudist colony. And as our stuff-driven culture chants without ceasing, much, much more.

David B. Bowes is a freelance journalist, speechwriter and communications consultant. A Navy veteran and lifelong boater, he is a contributing writer to Chesapeake Bay magazine. Prior to retirement, and in addition to other communications jobs, he was a general assignment reporter for The Blade of Toledo, Ohio; a reporter, editorial writer, Washington correspondent and roving national correspondent of the St. Louis Post- Dispatch, and urban affairs columnist, editorial page editor and associate editor of the Cincinnati Post. He is a recipient of the Con Lee Kelliher Award of the Society of Professional Journalists "...for excellence in general news reporting." The American Political Science Association cited him "...for distinguished reporting of public affairs." The Scripps-Howard Foundation presented him with the Walker Stone Distinguished Citation "... for outstanding editorials that produced results." David Bowes lives on a farm near the Antietam National Battlefield in western Maryland with his wife, the psychologist Rosemary Tofalo Bowes.