Haunted, but Undaunted...
Okay, Who Left All These Stories Here?
(The Baroness - courtesy Indiana Historical Society)
My life has been crammed full of remarkable happenstance. David Letterman and I went to high school together. I served with Dan Quayle in a tiny Indiana National Guard unit, where a photo of the two of us clowning around sparked my 15 minutes of fame. I followed the author Kurt Vonnegut from our shared Northside Indianapolis neighborhood to Upstate New York, and then to his co-op in New York City, where I interviewed him.
I would love to portray these early brushes with fame as prescient career planning on my part. Alas, they were nothing more than dumb luck, but I had plenty of that.
I worked as a journalist for four decades, mostly for Reuters, based in New York City, Hong Kong, and Washington. I reported from Beirut to Beijing, shivered in Mongolia and sweltered in Singapore. I had rats in my room in old Rangoon and my ceiling swarmed with so many hyperactive geckos in Cambodia, I was sure they would fall in my mouth as I slept. I went through the Khyber Pass and was annoyed to find no souvenir t-shirts for sale. Hey, was that too much to expect?
In 2020, after half a century out in the wide world, my wife and I returned to Indianapolis to live. As the helpless hostage of a raging global pandemic, with no good reason to venture outdoors, I began some serious reflection. I made notes, reread brittle yellow newspaper clippings and sifted through sagging cartons of fading photos. I gradually realized I had been blessed with a life much richer than anything I ever dreamed of.
Back home again in Indiana, I was revisited by the days of my youth, and a lifetime of memories caught up with me. Somewhere upstream, a logjam broke. Episodic tales cascaded onto the screen of my MacBook Air. They have kept coming, nonstop, for two therapeutic years, and they don’t seem to be slowing down.
When I sat back and absorbed all of these personal tales, my first reaction was wow, I might enjoy meeting this dude, if I weren’t already him.
And my second reaction was wow, these are not journalistic war stories, mostly they are just sweet remembrances of growing up poor but hopeful, getting very lucky in love, and finding my way in a confusing world. When it was time to put my stories down on paper, these were at the front of the line. I have always called them my 5 a.m. stories, and I invite them back into my life often, in the wee hours, to make me smile and to give me fresh hope for the new day dawning.
My stories are set in far-flung locales, but all of them were written in the very same place, a Tudor Revival home on a historic street in Indianapolis. Our new home came with an unexpected bonus. I learned that a genuine Baroness, who had also been an internationally known Shakespearean actress in the 1890s, was the first occupant of our house. On a cold, bleak day in April, 1934, she died right here. Her death certificate said it was the flu, with an unhelpful nudge from cirrhosis.
Everyone asks us whether we’ve seen the ghost of the Baroness. That’s always question number one, presumably because we have been force-fed countless versions of “A Christmas Carol” for our entire lives.
Yes, of course we’ve seen her. We make potstickers and drink Tang together. Baroness Anna Louise Fransen van Gestel stays up half the night with us, watching “Golden Girls” reruns and doing her nails, before she slips away to play “Lady of Spain” on her accordion. But more about her in upcoming pieces. The Baroness isn’t going away.
I wrote all of these stories only a few feet from what her neighbors in the last century called the “Juliet Balcony,” just off our living room. Every retired Shakespearean actress needs one of those.
After these two years of writing and rewriting, I finally feel I have something worth sharing with others. I will be sending my stories out once or twice a week in a Substack newsletter. Immediately following this introduction you are reading now, I will be filing a second story, and a third on Thursday. I may put up a paywall later, but initially they will be free. If you like them, please subscribe and share them with your friends. Or even strangers. Do not be afraid to bother other people with them, that’s what they’re here for.
I like to think you won’t see where my stories are taking you until you get there. I hope you will wonder why a very romantic piece about my whirlwind courtship is headlined “Beer Party Bride Held in Torso Slaying.” And how did an old-school cup of cocoa change my snotty attitude in “Hot Chocolate in the 19th Century?” And why, in “Alas, I have no Alias,” will nobody let me have a nickname?
Don’t expect my stories to be delivered in any discernable order. Life doesn’t come in order. You and I will waltz through the decades irregularly, just as our memories do.
Please don’t allow my references to history, Shakespeare and serious news color your expectations about the stories heading your way. This is not a pompous or somber memoir. There will be humor, sarcasm and irreverence aplenty, as befits a kaleidoscopic life recalled by a smartass.
In the words of Maurice Sendak’s “Where the Wild Things Are,” “Let the wild rumpus start!”
As someone who has had the privilege of knowing this Basler fellow for quite a few years, I can say these stories match up quite nicely to clever goofball I know him to be. He sees life through a hilarious lens. And now we get a peak at the world through that lens. What a treat.
Let the wild rumpus begin!