Jim Chastain

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Regarding Me

Due to my lousy health, my life as a writer, and this “Life is Real” series, I’ve been fortunate to hear from many people I knew long ago. Within the last month, I’ve probably exchanged  messages with at least thirty ”blasts from the past,” people I hadn’t heard from for way-too-many years (and likely wouldn’t have heard from again if it weren’t for my situation). They found out about my story somehow and wanted to reconnect.

I love this part of my life, talking to old friends. It’s so interesting to hear how their lives turned out and how they’ve diverged from mine. And it’s surprising to see what they’re up to now, how many kids they have, where they work, what they’re reading, what their religious and political points of view are, etc.   

But in doing all of this reconnecting, it occurred to me that many who are following this series (or beginning to follow it) do not know me at all.

“Who is this guy?” you’re probably thinking. “And why is The Oklahoman following him?

I guess it’s Ken Raymond’s job to tackle those questions in his newspaper articles. But I thought I should probably help him out a bit. I mean, it couldn’t hurt to give you a bio, at least a fairly brief sketch. Besides, I need to start practicing on my obituary.

I was born in Tahlequah, Oklahoma on December 9, 1963 to Jim and Sharon Chastain. I was their second child, the only boy out of four children. My sisters are, in order of their births, Lori, Cindy, and Karyn, who died tragically in a car accident at age twenty-one.

My family moved to Bartlesville when I was one, and we stayed there throughout my childhood. In fact my parents still live in “B-ville” to this day, in the same house we lived in since I was in fourth grade. I attended Will Rogers Elementary (about fifty steps from our back door), Madison Junior High, and Sooner High School. I graduated from Sooner High in 1982, the last year of its existence.

While I was growing up, my father worked for Phillips Petroleum Company in the computing division. Phillips employed about half the town it seems, and prospered as a result of having one of America’s great corporations located there. However, during my high school years, we went through those same job-related concerns so many people are having today, as Phillips seemed to have a new round of layoffs every Christmas.

My mother was, for the most part, a housewife, although she had a side job selling Luzier (a lesser-known brand of cosmetics). She also volunteered a lot at Highland Park Baptist Church where we attended services. But beyond that, she chased four kids around the house, took care of Dad, and did the sort of hard work moms do. I know for a fact that she made a heck of a lot of French toast for me over eighteen years.

Bartlesville was a pretty wealthy town, but my family lived in modest homes and drove unspectacular cars. My dad was what you might politely call ‘thrifty.” We were your typical middle income family, I suppose. We weren’t particularly churchy, but we did attend church regularly. Like most kids, I tried my best to avoid it.  

I was a sweet kid, they tell me, with a kind heart. I got along well with people for the most part, and I made friends easily. I believed strongly in fairness, so it bothered me when somebody was wronged. I had a soft spot for the underdog, still do, and I loved animals (the movie Bambi nearly killed me). I especially loved dogs, and therefore we always had a dog at the house. 

Sweet or not, I was also a stinker. That’s true of lots of boys I guess, but I seemed to consider stinkering a fine art. I loved pestering my sisters. I got spanked a lot at home and in elementary school, and, even though we don’t do that anymore, I usually deserved it. In junior high, I was too busy trying to keep my butt from getting whipped to get into too much trouble, but in high school I returned to my prankster ways. Whenever anything happened or went wrong, I was one of the “usual suspects” who was called to the principal’s office for questioning. Some of my high school exploits became rather notorious, I’m afraid to say.

I was a competitive kid when it came to games, grades, and sports. As most kids growing up in a fairly small town, I played sports throughout my youth. What else was there to do? I was pretty good during the early years, but less so during high school when it really counted. I was fast, but I didn’t particularly care for running. At Sooner High, I lettered in baseball, basketball, and football, but I only played football as a senior, choosing instead to work (first at Braums, then at Barlow Interiors) and put gas in my car. 

I was a reader from the beginning and spent a lot of time at the Bartlesville Public Library. I was one of those kids who was always reading a new book. One of my earliest memories was having my picture in the local newspaper for being a first grade “bookworm,” meaning I’d read something like one hundred books. Some of my favorites were My Side of the Mountain, Mr. Pudgins, the Henry Huggins series, the Hardy Boys mysteries, The Last of the Mohicans, Tom Sawyer, The Chronicles of Narnia, and anything by Shel Silverstein or Dr. Seuss, who continue to be two of my heroes to this day.

I also loved the movies. In fact from a very young age, I used to pretend my life was a movie. (Perhaps this explains all the troublemaking–I was searching for conflict to move the film along.) I remember walking down the street to the local theater regularly for Saturday matinees. I loved eating a giant green apple Jolly Rancher while watching a film.

I’ve always been a social person and a firm believer that friendships are key to happiness. Fortunately, I was blessed with a great group of  friends in junior high and high school. I hung around with about twenty guys and several girls from my class, along with some notables from the cool class ahead of me. On most weekends you’d find me with Greg, Kevin, Ghent, Terry, Gary, Sheldon, Polly, or whoever else happened to be tagging along with us. Meanwhile, I joined as many clubs as would have me. I went to every party I could find. I dated as much as the next guy, but I only had a few “girlfriends.” 

After high school I went to Oklahoma State University. I spent my freshman year in the dorms with several high school buddies. I made straight A’s that year, but met almost nobody and spent way too much time at Eskimo Joes. By the end of the year, I was so frustrated that I packed bags and went to live with my grandmother in Tahlequah. I attended summer school at Northeastern State, watched the Chicago Cubs on TV and contemplated staying in Tahlequah for good. But I decided instead to return to OSU for my sophomore year.  

On a whim I joined Delta Tau Delta fraternity, and after that my college experience improved dramatically. I began meeting people, including… girls! I became president of my pledge class and later of the entire fraternity. I met some of the greatest guys in the world, several of whom are still my best friends to this day. I still hung around at Eskimo Joes too much and for a time tried setting a world record for having the most fun. But overall I remained fairly balanced in my approach to school and life beyond college. I always took my grades seriously. And I worked at a video store during the last two years at school, which was no surprise to anyone, as one of my nicknames was Mr. Movie.

As far as my post-college plans were concerned, I decided I wanted to be one of three things: a film critic; a writer; or a lawyer. (I’m reminded of the SCTV episode where Martin Short plays a college freshman who wants to be a “hockey player or a circuit court judge.”) As I knew no writers and film critic is not really a career path in Oklahoma, I began steering toward the law. 

During my junior year, I met LeAnn when we were both participating in Varsity Review, a singing and dancing show. She was a member of Chi Omega sorority, and I knew several girls there. LeAnn was dating someone at the time, and I was dating someone else. But I noticed her. Later, after we’d both had breakups, we began dating. And as my senior year rolled around we became inseparable. 

I was somehow accepted into OU law school and moved to Norman in 1986. LeAnn was still a senior and in the midst of completing her studies to become a teacher, so she remained in Stillwater for a semester. After that, she obtained a student teaching position at Norman High and joined me in Norman, where she lived with two of our dear friends. We married in the summer after my first year in law school and moved into our first apartment, along with Winston, our beloved cocker spaniel.

While I was busy at law school, LeAnn decided to pursue a Masters Degree at the University of Oklahoma in Mathematics. Meanwhile, we also got involved with a local church and made many new friends, as most of our college friends had moved. After obtaining our degrees, we decided to make Norman our home. We had our first child, Madison, in 1991, followed by a son, Ford, in 1994. 

I began my legal career working at a small, upstart law firm that relied entirely on one client. My job was to write title opinions and to do most of the research and writing, as well as help out with litigation now and then. But that job ended when we lost our main client and my boss closed up shop, before killing himself, accidentally or not.

During this period of time, LeAnn decided to forego a full time job to focus on raising our kids. She did, however, teach math classes at night at various colleges in the Oklahoma City metro. Being a people person, she was always ready to go, go, go when I got home, while I was ready to relax.

I moved on to a medium-sized law firm in downtown Oklahoma City. It was a good job for the most part, and I made some lifelong friends. We had twenty lawyers at one point, but the firm relied a lot on the oil and gas industry and eventually ran into hard times. I was working downtown at this firm when the Murrah bombing occurred, just a few blocks away. Not long after that, my boss and good friend Doyle Bunch died in a scuba diving accident. The firm began splitting up soon afterward and was never quite the same.

As the kids began getting older and were attending school, LeAnn increased her work load. She continued teaching college math classes, but she eventually took a job at our church, where she helped with adult education and organized various small group studies. I also became involved at church, teaching adult classes and serving in several key positions, including, if you can believe it, deacon! (”What in the world was the staff thinking?” I’m sure you’re asking.)

I took a tumultuous job at the Oklahoma Insurance Department in 1996. A year and a half later, I moved on, accepting a position in 1997 as a Judicial Assistant to Judge Gary Lumpkin at the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals, the same job I have today. There I help determine whether or not criminal defendants have received a fair trial in the state district court system.

While holding down a full time job, I began working on my writing career. I’d been writing poetry for a long time, but became more earnest about it after my sister died in 1992. I wrote more, read more, and began submitting poems here and there. I also became interested in screenplays. I took several classes and read all the right books. My second attempt at a screenplay finished in the top ten percent at the Austin Film Festival one year.

I began writing film reviews for The Norman Transcript in 1996 and have continued to do so ever since, although I’ve slowed down quite a bit recently. My reviews have appeared in numerous publications, and at one point I was writing close to one hundred reviews a year. I’ve also been a freelance contributor to the Oklahoma Gazette, Oklahoma Today, and numerous magazines.

In 2001, at the age of thirty-seven, I found a tiny little lump in the triceps muscle of my right arm. That lump turned out to be a very aggressive and rare type of cancer, and it eventually cost me my right arm in 2004. I chronicled my crazy battle with cancer in a memoir entitled, I Survived Cancer, but Never Won the Tour de France, which was published in 2006. That same year my first book of poems, Like Some First Human Being, was published.

In September of 2007, cancer, which had been out of my life for three years, came roaring back. I was diagnosed with colon cancer that had spread to my, gulp, liver. The outlook was not good. After many rounds of chemo we have been unable to shrink the tumors enough to give me a shot at a possibly life-saving surgery. Cancer has now spread to my lungs, and I’ve been told that my life expectancy is “months” rather than years.

In the midst of these challenges, I’ve continued writing. In the summer of 2008, Antidotes & Home Remedies, my second book of poems, was published. The book is a combination of health related poems and some of my “greatest hits.” I’ve also been working a book of prose, some new poems, and this series.

I’ve spared you some of the gory details, but that’s basically it.

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