Bob considers himself kind, friendly, compassionate and non-judgemental, characteristics everyone wants in a friend. It is highly likely that Bob is imbued with these as a result of some of the mighty large challenges he has faced in his life. He was born in New York city in the USA, with a young but courageous mother who had fallen pregnant right at the end of WWII, to a bomber pilot with what we would now call Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, PTSD. Bob’s biological father refused to acknowledge his paternity. Although Bob was born prematurely, requiring treatment in an “iron lung” and his mother was estranged from her family as a result of her situation, she was determined to raise her child.  Her parents, however, had other plans and tricked her by pre-arranging his delivery at an orphanage under the guise of taking her back to the family home, already having betrayed her by having her declared an unfit mother.  Luckily for Bob, his mother was powerful and tenacious, but it still took her six months to regain custody of her child.  Although of course Bob has no memory of this time, and did not find out this part of his personal history until he was 16 years old, he feels certain that the trauma he faced at being separated from his mother as a baby had a profound impact on his future pattern of repeated health issues, including anxiety and addiction.

At school, Bob was far from a model student.  He did graduate from high school in 1966, his school history littered with episodes of truancy and attempting to forge his report cards. By the time he was in his sophomore year, 15 or 16 years old, he had become immersed in the counter-culture of the Hippie era, had begun drinking beer and using marijuana, and admits he allowed his development to be stunted. Bob attended a number of different schools, including two expensive boarding schools, his mother attempting to get his life back on track.  Unfortunately, his time in boarding school seemed only to allow unproductive tendencies to become even more ingrained, rather than prompting him to buckle down. One boarding school, right on California’s Pacific coast, was the scene of Bob’s favourite childhood memories.  The school was “dying”, staffed by incompetent teachers, inept at both teaching and custodianship, who were intimidated by their charges.  Full of problem children who were frequently climbing out windows and creating general havoc, the school reminds Bob now of the novel, “Lord of the Flies”. Bob found absolute joy in the chaos. It wasn’t till later in life that Bob learnt how his parents had been able to afford his boarding school years.  His mother had been embezzling money from her mafia employers and was eventually caught in the act.  Despite threats from them, Bob’s mother was not going to be cowed, and stared them down.  She never faced prosecution, being prepared with copies of records.  She knew where the money came from, and where it was kept, and threatened to contact police and tax authorities if action was taken against her.  A bold and determined woman, she stood her ground.

While still at school, Bob had casual jobs, working as a bus-boy and also packing groceries in a supermarket.  Straight from school, Bob saw two years of active duty in the Navy, stationed in San Diego at the Naval Hospital, working basically as an orderly.  He saw first-hand the terrible impact that the Vietnam War was having both on servicemen and their families, and resolved not to ever allow himself to be sent to Vietnam.  When Bob did eventually receive his orders to Field Medical School, to be provided a mere six weeks of further training prior to deployment in Vietnam, he visited a lawyer who helped him concoct a plan to circumvent his orders. Bob visited the Quartermaster’s office late on a Friday afternoon, when all senior staff had clocked off for the weekend, and filled in a form stating that as the only living offspring of an officer who served in WWII, he was exempt from deployment.  The bored junior at the counter dutifully stamped his record with the exemption, despite the fact that his reason had neither validity or credibility, so Bob didn’t see foreign service. Most of Bob’s adult life has been lived in the United States, in Las Vegas, Nevada, just outside Portland, Oregon, in Bloomington, Indiana, in San Francisco, California and on several of Hawaii’s islands. He tried a number of lifestyles but circumstances conspired to keep him moving from place to place. While still in the Navy, Bob had realised he needed to improve on his worst school subject, English, and had enrolled in a junior college class in 1967, but, lacking real motivation, he dropped out and began “smoking a lot of weed” instead. 

When he was discharged from the military, Bob briefly returned to Las Vegas before taking up a friend’s invitation to move to Hawaii with him.  The pair moved to Oahu on the promise of work in the friend’s uncle’s construction business.  This didn’t pan out well for Bob, as the uncle was a conman who subcontracted all the work to hippies he paid with illicit drugs such as amphetamines. Although Bob moved to live and work elsewhere, by the time he was 22, he was already beginning to feel like he was missing out on real life.

One of the positive and moderating influences in Bob’s life was meeting his girlfriend, a bright, motivated young woman from Indiana. From the time they became a couple, until their eventual divorce 50 years later, the woman who became his wife was a stabilising force for Bob.  She was an avid musician who had studies music at the University of Indiana, and modelled study and career success to Bob.  Bob had always had an artistic bent, but had not been able to find a way to support himself financially as an artist, despite enrolling in and completing a Bachelor of Fine Arts at the University of Indiana by 1974.

Bob even surprised himself with how handy he turned out to be.  When the pair moved to Bloomington in Indiana, Bob bought a land contract on acreage with an old home which required significant renovation.  Bob earned considerable sweat equity in the property by replacing all the windows and renewing the roof. The American GI Bill provided Bob with money to pay for tuition, and it was at this point that Bob first began to study hard, “to learn how to learn”. A visiting artist delivered “the facts of life” to Bob: that only 1% of artists can make a living from art. This prompted Bob’s wife to abandon further pursuit of music, which would remain a lifelong hobby, and return to finish the medical studies she had postponed.  The couple moved to Indianapolis to facilitate her finishing her medical training. Bob’s first child, a daughter now called Ryan, was born in the same week her mother graduated from medical school, necessitating a six-month delay in the start of her mother’s residency program. When Bob’s wife began her residency, and worked up to 100 hours a week, Bob became the house-husband and prime caregiver for their child.  He began making, then selling, more art and became successful enough to hire a baby sitter, giving him more time to re-immerse himself in the art world.  A second child, named Christopher, was born during this period. Across his career, Bob has sold artworks to many private and corporate collectors, including several artworks to McDonald’s, investment pieces they purchased from emerging artists, to display in their corporate offices, as well as having gallery shows in San Francisco, Chicago and Indianapolis.  Yet this progress in Bob’s artistic career came at high cost as his usage of marijuana and alcohol increased. During this time, Bob’s wife also experienced career success after further study in anaesthesiology.

Four events which impacted Bob’s life prior to his arrival in Hua Hin need mentioning, as they had a profound effect. Back in 1995, a traumatic incident for Bob was the fire which destroyed the old barn on his property.  The barn had been his studio, but even worse, was the repository of thirty years of his art, all gone up in smoke, a very confronting event for any artist. Bob lost his back catalogue, which had documented his versatility as an artist, across a wide variety of media and artistic styles.  Bob recalls that in the 80s much of his work was abstract, yet as a result of the fire, he has no tangible record of that creative period at all. Although the fire was a tragedy, now, in retrospect, Bob acknowledges that it altered his artistic life in a positive way, as it revealed a new direction to him.

A further trauma for Bob was his diagnosis in 2006 with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, a cancer which required both chemotherapy and radiotherapy to bring him to remission.  Treatment caused on-going and debilitating nausea, Bob resorting to continued high-level marijuana usage to help him sleep.

Bob’s second-born came to him in 2013, at that point in her late 20s, to tell him that she had known for 10 years or more that she didn’t feel right in her male body.  Christopher transitioned to female, becoming Erica, in a way re-establishing her personal female aesthetic as would a teenage girl.  Bob was completely supportive of her decision, yet at the same time marvelling at how it felt somewhat bizarre to him. Bob knows just how important it is to listen without judgement.

But it was Bob’s divorce which was the impetus for his first visit to Hua Hin in July 2018. Despite its eventual end, Bob’s first marriage, of 50 years duration, was a success in that the pair raised two successful and now happily married children. The couple was living a wonderful life together back in Hawaii where they had originally met and started their relationship, in a home with panoramic sea views, and to the outsider, their life was rosy. It wasn’t Bob’s addiction to mind-altering substances that was the ultimate downfall of his marriage, but rather his repeated denial, both to himself and his wife, that a problem existed.  Bob admits to compulsively lying about what he was doing, and even resorting to using marijuana in a vape-format, to hide his addiction from her. In some ways, Bob felt blindsided by his wife’s leaving, because although he had known she was unhappy, he had not realised how betrayed she felt by the lying.  In an attempt to salvage his marriage, Bob admitted himself to a rehab centre run by a world renown addiction expert for a fortnight but was unable to avert her filing for divorce.  Bob was no-longer able to ignore the fact that he was, and always will be, an addict, albeit now in recovery.

After his painful divorce in 2018 Bob needed a complete change of scenery, environment and culture.  He travelled to Chiang Mai on holiday with a divorced friend who was looking for female companionship.  Bob was very new to the rules of dating and had never used a dating app, but with his friend’s encouragement, Bob met Nok, now his wife, on the Thai Smile app, and he was immediately intrigued by her humour and positive outlook on life. To this day, Nok tells Bob he thinks too much.  When Bob eventually met Nok in person, even the fact that she had virtually no English, and that a friend had been responding to him on her behalf, was not sufficient to discourage him from wanting to learn more about her.  Convincing her boss in the hairdressing salon to allow her time off, Bob took Nok on a three-week holiday around the country to get to know her, before taking his booked flight home.

Smitten with Nok and missing her while still on his flight back to Hawaii, Bob booked a flight back to Thailand and got himself a 60-day visa.  He divested himself of most of his possessions, arriving back in Thailand in March 2019 with just a couple of suitcases, having left a few boxes of keepsakes with his children for safe-keeping.  Bob sees his greatest achievement in life is his current sobriety, after admitting to his addiction.  Here in Hua Hin, what Bob most enjoys and values is the camaraderie he encounters in the farang community.  He has established some more substantial friendships as people seem less guarded and hesitant than he found in the US. Bob also believes his art is much better now that he is not using. He can’t live without pencil and paper, sketching every day and stretching himself as an artist, and allowing art to become his only obsession.  Bob has noted a change in his style as he sketches daily.  He doesn’t aim for photographic realism, but allows the figurative in his individual style to convey meaning and emotion in his works.

Inspiration is all around Bob, whether it be his wife and family, the beach, the beauty of cloud formations or local culture such as temples or Songkran. He admires the work of other artists including David Hockney, Eric Fischl and Wayne Thiebaud, and ensures he devotes part of each day to his artistic pursuits.  A relatively new passion for Bob is swimming, and he regularly clocks up two kilometres in a session, though counting laps becomes precarious as a meditative state often takes over as he traverses the 30-metre pool he frequents. Bob has also recently experienced the serenity of floating for nine kilometres down the Petchaburi River in Kaeng Krachan National Park, a mere hour’s drive from his home.

Living in Thailand and again being married has given Bob renewed vigour, a new lease on life. His wife Nok has teenage children who now live with the couple.  As a single parent, she had been forced, like many Thai women, to leave her children in the care of relatives while she travelled to find work to support the family.  It is a source of great contentment to Bob that he has been able to reunite Nok with her children under the one roof. A project still underway is the construction of a new home, securing the future for the family, even beyond Bob’s acknowledged eventual demise.

Bob’s father had become an alcoholic, and Bob had believed that those who were addicted were degenerates who had a severe character defect. In Thailand, and through embracing the Buddhist ideal of eschewing intoxicants of all forms, Bob has been able to internalise that addiction is truly an illness, with symptoms, and physical, spiritual and mental aspects to it. In Hua Hin, there is a fellowship of those who have experienced addiction, and Bob feels that through embracing the 12-step program he has taken control of his life and effectively “landed on his feet”.

Bob is grateful to experience each new day, being with someone he loves who loves him back.  Although his friends say he still worries too much, Bob is at a stage of contentment with his life, despite the eye-rolling he experiences from having teenagers in the house. His only guilty pleasure now is the occasional dark chocolate he enjoys, virtually guilt-free.