Jan Barry

Photo by Colleen Delayney

Home

“Welcome home!”
strangers envelope me
at a veterans’ gathering
in Bayonne.

Startled, I want to say:
I’m not from here—
And the war’s been over
for over 20 years.

Instead I grin,
basking in a greeting
seldom offered
to Vietnam vets.

Yet “Welcome home!”
seems so strange.
Sure, it feels nice—
but where’s home?

I’m no longer there
where I was born.
The world I roam
is more my home.

I was infected in Vietnam—
by malaria, Asia’s air,
the vapors of moonbeam
dancing eyes...

I smell nuoc mam in dreams,
race cyclos down Saigon streets,
feel the spray on fishing junks
sailing to the high seas.

I’ve never made a living from poetry, but poetry is what has gotten me through life.

When the world seems out of whack or I with it, I jot down disjointed thoughts. Sometimes a flicker of enlightenment flares. A riff of Earth’s rhythms ripples. A poem unfolds like a flower petal. And my link with Nature’s nurturing power is restored.

Being a poet was the furthest thing on my mind growing up in rural upstate New York, working at my father’s gas station and on a farm. I wanted to go to West Point and conquer the world.

Raised on war stories and dreaming of being a famous general, I joined the Army and went to Vietnam to become a soldier. Vietnam turned me into a poet and peace activist.

Earth Songs is a tribute to the world I discovered beyond battlefields, amid a war so bitter it provoked protests even by participants. With a minimum of poetic license, these poems tell a true tale—the hardest there is to tell—of a teenage soldier growing into a world citizen.

(From the preface to Earth Songs)

Nope, I'm not the Jan of Jan & Dean of "Surf City" fame. Jan Berry the singer and songwriter died March 26, 2004 in Los Angeles at 62. I'm nearly the same vintage, but hope to be around awhile longer, to see what happens next. This website, like my life and writings, is a work in progress. Thanks for visiting. I hope you find something interesting, inspiring, or just plain useful.

According to my credit profile, I ‘m dead. That’s what it says in the credit ratings issued by the big three watchdogs of consumer debt.

When I learned that, I was grimly amused. My wife died; I was buried by the credit bureaus. But the mix-up got more serious when I moved and asked our telephone company to transfer my home phone number to the new address.

The family phone account was in my wife’s name. To put the account in my name, I was informed, required a credit check. OK, I said, no problem. I’d just paid off, using my wife’s life insurance payment, our credit card bills, not to mention the latest phone bill.

In barely an instant, the phone company customer service representative announced: “Sir, the credit bureau is showing you are deceased.”

I could not have phone service, she curtly informed me, until this matter of being declared dead was cleared up. “My supervisor,” she said, “says you will have to get some kind of document from a court.”

Now this silly mistake was getting serious. I’d spent weeks trying to get a legal document demanded by the Department of Motor Vehicles when I donated my wife’s car to a charitable cause. A copy of the death certificate wasn’t good enough. The DMV wanted a document so arcane it took a lawyer, who charged nearly as much as the 12-year-old car was worth, to get it.

But that’s another story.

I really needed my home phone hooked back up so I could straighten out the mounting pile of hospital bills for my wife’s cancer treatment that were supposed to have been paid by her health maintenance organization. Collection agencies were sending letters addressed to my wife demanding immediate payment for medical procedures done a year ago. Apparently no one told them she died.

But that’s another story.

More than anything else I wanted to get the same phone number, which we had for more than 20 years, hooked up at my new place so friends and relatives and coworkers and my bosses could find me. Not to mention, at my age, it’s the only phone number I can remember.

After a flurry of letters to the credit bureaus and to the credit card company that apparently made the error as to who died—pointing out that on my wife’s death certificate I am listed as the surviving spouse; challenging their dubious claims of reporting accurate information; threatening legal action—I am still listed by the credit guardians as “deceased.”

It appears I am no longer a member in good standing of the consumer world. That may be a blessing. Since I’m considered dead, I have informed the credit agencies, I expect them to stop providing my name and address to companies that send out unsolicited solicitations. That’s one way to cut down on junk mail.

As for telephone service, I realized I had a cell phone in my name. In fact, it was in my hand and I was talking on it, I informed the telephone representative who told me to go to court to get a document to prove I’m alive.

“We don’t have access to cell phone records to verify that,” said the representative of a telephone company that was widely advertising as its latest consumer-friendly service consolidating local, long distance, and cell phone calls onto one bill.

“It sounds like your company no longer wants my business,” I said, fed up and ready to rifle through the competing offers in my discarded piles of junk mail. “So I’ll gladly cancel your cell phone service and switch to someone who wants my business.”

“Sir, what is it that we can do for you?” the phone company rep said to the suddenly undead.

(The Record, Bergen County, NJ 11/17/02)

Shortly after the Vietnam War ended, looking for a day job to support a poetry writing habit, I drifted into covering municipal council and school board meetings for a daily newspaper. Amid the droning boredom, a dramatic interaction of citizens and officials would quite often erupt in face-to-face debate, which in turn would sometimes transform into a mutually respectful discussion of serious issues...

Working as a news reporter in New Jersey off and on for nearly twenty years, I have attended numerous community meetings and public events, recording highlights of civic campaigns focused on local, regional, national, and international issues. It has been a wonderful education, one that was not provided in my college political science books.

(from the preface to A Citizen's Guide to Grassroots Campaigns)