This began as an idea to have some fun, well, some more fun, after having launched INSIDE MY DESK, an eclectic Web Page of things I enjoyed. I wanted to emphasize the creative side, and like many I had always more or less separated the two spheres of the brain into the logical left side and the creative right side.

I’ve spent most of my adult life being an economic historian and a number cruncher, largely devoting my time to calculating and charting. Number-crunchers can be devilishly imaginative or creative in pursuit of goals for which data are less than ample, but in the end we have to follow some rules and accept certain tests. When not sitting in archives or calculating numbers - truth be told when sitting in archives or calculating numbers - I used to dream about a different life. Could I design buildings, play jazz, write stories?

I've not been right-side brain dead. I've spent hours in museums, concert halls, opera houses, galleries, more hours reading contemporary fiction and poetry and even more hours daydreaming. I could talk about art, music, design, fiction, had palled around with artists and writers and could travel between the two hemispheres with ease and confidence. I regarded myself, though, as a lefty.

When I began to close down my historian’s life a few years ago, I thought I might write a memoir. On the surface it sounded interesting. I was the son of parents who were barely educated and hardly worldly. My father spent most of his life in coal mines and my mother in kitchens, our family kitchen, of course, but also my grandma’s farm kitchen with no running water and a wood-burning stove and our local church kitchen. She was something of a whiz at organizing big feeds, thrashers in the fall at the farm and church suppers the year-around.

Before I got too far into a memoir I knew it was not very interesting. No abuse, no trauma, no spats (that ever amounted to anything), no abandonments (until I chose to go a long way from home for college). I married, had kids (terrific kids), got a PhD and a job (in a place recently dethroned as Happy Valley). I lived in France, Spain, Mexico, Peru and other places. I still didn’t have a story.

As can happen in life, an unexpected encounter with a temperamental artist pulled some levers - I’m assuming in the right hemisphere - that upended the hemispheric  balance. In trying to explain the unpredictable, I began to compose a story in my head and on the computer. It was not a strict retelling of what had happened; it was imagined.

Other stories - lots of stories - began to pop into my consciousness. The right hemisphere seemed to be alive in a way I had never experienced before. As I read more about the hemispheres I’d tried since my youth to keep in balance, more about brain chemistry, more about neural science, I came to understand this was not a battle between left and right so much as an unleashing of the energy of the right. It was not just writing fiction for the first time but also reorienting life away from what had been customary, habitual, comfortable toward something uncertain, confronting, experimental.

Thus, INSIDE MY RIGHT BRAIN was born.

I once gave a copy of Bougival to a woman with whom I wanted to dance but knew I never would. Considering Renoir’s alleged intent, an odd gift. I was not unhappy with her or her with me. Like the danseurs, our dance would have been uncomfortable. We never danced. Our circumstances would not permit it and would forever separate us.  She could never have taken me home. I was the odd man out. How we might have looked had we danced we’ll never know. What I do know (and I told her) is each time I look at the painting (which resides at Boston’s MFA, a place I frequently visit) I will see in the gentleman’s hat her golden-rod eyes and the lady’s bonnet a red-orange blouse she favored. And that’s where it ended.

Drinking like eating is a moment to savor not to gorge. It may be that is how we should approach more of living. The more more we gorge the less we savor.

In case you’re curious, I wear glasses to read but mostly on top of my head, I ponder a lot, I seldom buy new clothes, I fill my walls with art, I drink Peet’s every morning and the bubbly you already know about. On subsequent pages you can read more about me and my idiosyncrasies. You can also read about things I find interesting, puzzling, rewarding, discomforting, mystifying, like the story I wrote about a situation that baffled me and launched IMRB (an abbreviation).

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