IMPRESSIONS AND REFLECTIONS and HAVING THE TIME OF MY LIFE by Peter Chapel

An nonagenarian shares his life through literature…

His Impressions and Reflections captures his life journey through song lyrics and short stories.

Having the Time of My Life is his engaging memoir that showcases photos, letters, personal vignettes, and life lessons.


ABOUT THE BOOK

IMPRESSIONS AND REFLECTIONS
Evoking emotions from deep within himself, author Peter Chapel pens down his life journey in poetic verses in Impressions and Reflections. This collection of elegant song lyrics and short stories will take you on an intimate journey of the author’s personal life. He writes with a stunning depth of emotion and candor, unafraid to lay bare his feelings. He combines his poetic eye and ear for a tune to offer a rhapsodic collection in this book. His lyrics are highly rhythmic and evocative, yet exude a subtle simplicity of language and style. The poetry and stories are so very personal and nice – and at times humorously recalled.

His song lyrics were a consequence of being a captive in his automobile twice a month from 1978 to 1981 while driving eight hours at a stretch, mostly at night. As the words formed phrases and sentences, they fell into a rhythm and evolved into melodies that became his form of self-expression for about two years.

Writing in the first person singular seemed the easiest way to go… and so he did. Because he had no musical training, he depended on a friend to transcribe the songs from tape to lead sheet form and piano accompaniment.

HAVING THE TIME OF MY LIFE
From a man who has seen so much of life and has felt so deeply through the decades, comes a truly remarkable autobiography, Having the Time of My Life. Filled with raw and real emotions, many readers can easily relate to some conversations, situations, mishaps, adventures, and sentiments in this memoir. Author Peter Chapel opens himself through the pages of this book. In a conversational and personable tone, readers will find themselves brought in to the interesting times and memorable moments of the author’s past. He also tells stories and reveals about people, places, and events of America’s past. His vignettes of both his and America’s past create a history that most Americans his age can remember and understand – and which young Americans can learn from. His memoir is packed with letters, photos, and original song lyrics that exude love of family, lifelong friends, young people, adults, country and life. These mementos of the author’s past share a story about American culture after World War II, representing important lessons and lasting wisdom.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Peter Chapel was born in Manitoba, Canada, and moved to New York City at age 18. He served 4 years in the U.S. Army during World War II, with two years overseas in the Persian Gulf Transport Command. He attended UCLA under the GI bill of Rights, and since 1951 has been a resident of Santa Monica, California. Home improvement and landscaping have been his main hobbies, primarily, of necessity. He has been happily married for 40 years. He continued to drive to his Santa Cruz mountain work retreat for a weekend, and later a week, each month for 45 years. All the work in planning and labor in construction and landscaping on the seven acres of redwood jungle and a rickety little cabin was his own until the earthquake of 1989.

At this stage in his life, in the second half of his nonagenarian decade – he’s now 94 years old. He has embarked on reliving the highlights and the lows of his long life in tranquility by writing his “memoirs of an average man in our blessed land of the free, encountered and recorded, in brief, with documentation.”