Rate of Exchange Series

Times were not the best nor the worst during the late 1950s when Felix Fist set out for California to attend college and fulfill the dream he had always thought impossible, the only one in his extended family to even aspire toward that auspicious goal. Facing challenges, many of his own making from a limited social and cultural background, Felix responds ingenuously as a participant observer in absorbing the unexpected emerging events of the turbulent 1960s and beyond.

Having finished his first year of college, Felix Fist sets off to complete his year of wandering:  Leaving a dreary room in a derelict building on Anaheim in Long Beach on the border of the ghetto, Felix hitches rides to Oregon, works for the first and only time helping harvest grain, then takes to the road again traveling back to his place of origins where he encounters friends he thought he knew. His trip back through purple mountains, painted desert, and grasslands followed by a layover with a weird woman whose mystic manner and insatiable libido prompt him to stay, he experiences a long night walk to a small Midwest town and a troubling assault he accepts with a tinge of perverse pleasure. Finally arrived at his grandmother's on Milwaukee's Southside, Felix hears of family "misunderstandings" as well as news of people whom he had known before he left: Meeting with a former high school friend whom he had admired, he reunites with a woman he had met in high school whom he had considered his first love now married with children. After reconnecting with Fat Jack, the urban cowboy, Felix considers a former lover, he reunites with a married woman with whom he had a courtly "affair" that unrequited had prompted him to leave when offered the chance to attend college in California. Then at a dinner with estranged family celebrating his return at which he tries to resolve family "misunderstandings," he reconsiders why he thought he had returned safely home.

One day searching through old, battered storage boxes sorting through paper file folders thinking he would shred them, Felix Fist discovers a large, tan envelope darkened by the dust of passing years. Surprised by what he finds in that envelope prompts him to search through an apple box of old notebooks taking him back over fifty years to when his search for the truths about the world and himself began. Reading through entries for several years, Felix finally begins to understand why what he had or had not done had too often kept him from fulfilling his dreams that had always been deferred.

Having been moved by what he had found in a manila envelope stuffed with letters that had summoned up remembrance of lost times, Felix Fist began a dedicated search through other storage boxes, one containing weathered notebooks into which he had entered observations of varying consistency and regularity. Reading through five years of those entries that spanned four decades, Fist learns without surprise why he found himself where he now lived and what he lived for, his gradual awakening helping him accept with resignation and often remorse all he had done to others and to himself.

A Free and Open Nature, volume 5 of Rate of Exchange chronicles the continuing pilgrimage of Felix Fist in his quest for understanding of the world, of others, and of himself. Entries spanning years found in notebooks stacked in what was once a box for shipping Granny Smith apples reveal the challenges he had faced: His struggle to control his addiction to alcohol. His living through close encounters that had compelled him to face himself in his attempt to deal with their demands at the same time he had tried meeting obstacles that had prevented him from achieving the goals he had hoped would fulfill auspicious dreams he had too often deferred.

Waking from recurring dreams that sometimes troubled him, Felix Fist woke in darkness and the stillness of morning before dawn." Thus begins one man's quest seeking peace, love, and understanding through searching lost times. Receiving an unexpected letter by snail mail, Felix Fist with some reluctance follows his compulsion and returns to his origins where he attends an event that begins a summer of reunions forcing him to finally face who he was and what he has become after numerous troubling personal encounters and too many periods of addiction. Attending a celebration of his high school graduation after sixty years, returning safely to where he now resides, he revisits a place he hasn't been in thirteen years where once he labored for nearly five decades. Meeting someone with whom he has exchanged emails for nearly two years after no contact for thirty years, he finally after fifteen years meets with someone he had considered forever lost.