I didn’t know Norbert well when I asked him to look at my first book. I never took a class from him. I can’t even remember how I knew him, only that I did, and that I liked him, and that there was something about him, magnetic maybe, that attracted me to him, like whatever he had to say carried weight and value and I wanted to hear his voice, not to mention that he looked positively historical, like a character from some Western written about rough men who do brave things, with aggresive mustaches, unkempt hair, strong jaws and being large of frame. That was Norbert. When he walked into a room, or a coffee shop on 3rd Avenue on a Saturday morning, people noticed.

He had a box with my manuscript of 400 pages spilling over, and had a puzzled look on his face I had trouble interpreting, like maybe not good, but not disgusted either and there was a butterfly loosed in my chest, a harginger of the atrial fibrillation yet 10 years distant. I sat down across from him. Norbert pushed the box towards me, said it was good, I think, I really can’t remember. He asked me what I was going to do about it and I said probably self-publish it because there were already so many. I didn’t know he had a press, not that it would have been a fit for it. I don’t think it would have, but I was very busy and wasn’t a starving artist, so I did what I did and not much happened with it, but Norbert gave of himself. He was a giver, and he gave to many people. Below is the lead into the article he wrote on his blog, NB Coop News. I lifted his pic from the same.

The Doctor’s Diet

by
Norbert Blei

Add to the growing list of Door County writers, Dr. Shaun J. Melarvie, born in Prairie du Chien, who joined the medical staff of Door County Memorial Hospital as an employee of John Herlache in 1994 and in 1996 joined forces with him to create Lake Side Surgical Associates.

As a writer, reader, sometimes teacher of writing, I have always been interested in the occasional doctor who appears in my annual Clearing workshop, ready to take up the pen–in addition to the knife. There’s a long history of Doctor-writers going back to the Greeks…back to Copernicus, Keats, Chekhov, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Somerset Maugham, Mikhail Bulgakov, Céline, William Carlos Williams, Lewis Thomas, Walker Percy, Richard Selzer, Michael Crichton, Ethan Canin, etc. Doctors are writing more than prescriptions these days. Novels, short stories, essays, poetry, philosophy, plays, and…

“Not another diet book!” you exclaim. Well, yes. But no.

This one’s different. For one thing, the doctor quotes Goethe on page iii: “Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it./Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it.”

I knew Norbert later too, the months before he passed. Years after that, so, like a couple of years ago, I visited his coop on the grounds of Write On Door County. I sat at his desk. I read his writings and scriblings in front of me, on the walls, and I missed him, and I wished I hadn’t been too busy to take the time to be a friend, to spend time with him, to know him better because I know he would have been a close friend, maybe my best friend ever. That’s the kind of man he was. Norbert is gone from us here and now, but his spirit lives on, and I am sure he is smoking the pipe of peace with the Great Spirit.