Each poem focuses on Frank building a staircase one step, one tread at a time. A Coast Guard veteran, Frank was at one-time the co-owner of Dania Boat Marina and the most successful retailer of Yamaha outboard motos on the eastern US seaboard. Once a year, Yamaha would pay him to visit their factory and enjoy a brief holiday in Japan.
He loved to travel and made repeated visits to Egypt, Morocco, Italy, and Turkey, and established friendships and solid business connections there.
Frank was also a certified General Contractor, and a self-taught and certified masonry engineer. He was a biker too, and owned a number of Harleys and his own shop for a while.
As an avid cyclist, he rode ten miles a day near his home in south Florida. He was still doing so within a week of his death.
Lastly, he was an avid fisherman. Here we are during a happy visit, the only time I caught a sailfish in the Atlantic. Frank provided the boat, and he piloted it. He's the taller one holding up the sailfish.
Few of us who knew him well ever thought he would die in his 40s of a cancer that was in Stage 4 by the time it was diagnosed. No one would say he led a droll existence. It was difficult to keep up with him. He grasped life by the horns, winning and sometimes losing as we all do, but always in a big way, and never allowing his spirit to be undeterred.
He embodied the gritty hustler who never quits. I watched him grow up to become the player, the sidekick, the teammate, the man you want in your foxhole. I'm honored to think of him as my younger brother. Not a day passes when I don't miss him.
Frank sits to my right, both of us snowed-in on a winter day long ago.
Below, Frank sits with his niece, Alexa.
The chapbook can be found at
and at Smashwords https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/1144742
and at Barnes and Noble UK: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/staircase-john-michael-flynn/1143394467
Thank you to Tony Sturtevant for the cover image.
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