As a follow-up to my last post where I used the word "shit" in the title which was really a stretch for me, I'd like to say the following.
My wife reminded me today that back when the Savings and Loans collapsed, some people went to jail. We've heard nothing about jail time for the folks who managed the mortgage companies that are being bought out.
"Well, the S and L people actually broke the law." I said.
We discussed how the CEO's of the mortgage companies (and insurance companies, and any other companies that go under during this crisis) are going to be well taken care of. They didn't break the law.
"But they didn't do their jobs! Their jobs were to run the company and keep it solvent for the benefit of their customers and their stock holders!" My wife said.
I have to admit that she's right. It was the higher-ups, possibly the highest-ups, who were supposed to watch the trends, the markets, and the money. They were the ones who were supposed to know how vulnerable variable rate mortgages were, and they were the ones to create customer profiles so they didn't write a bunch of high risk mortgages. They didn't do their jobs...
But they are precisely the ones who will be taken care of in the crisis. The number crunchers who sat across from the borrowers and signed and initialled papers, who soldiered their companies, weren't supposed to be responsible for, take the heat for, or lose their jobs over, the incredibly shoddy way business was conducted, but they will.
When the allied forces entered Germany to restore humaness to humanity, foot soldiers were forgiven. They were merely following orders and the allies, knowing how vital that is to any mission, forgave them. It was the officers they rounded up, tried, convicted and executed. It was the "ideas" folks, the thinkers and planners, the one's who stood to gain the most from their own greed and lust for power who faced a very real kind of "firing" squad.
Oh, that we might forgive our soldiers and go after the officers at the end of this financial holocaust.
Thursday, September 18, 2008
Government Irresponsibility, or why the taxpayer keeps eating shit
My wife, Cindy, told me of an interesting change. Financial institutions have always offered each other loans at the end of a day of trading on the stock market. You know, some company ends the day a few thousand dollars in the red and a friend covers their losses until the next day when the debtor pays the loaner. When Merrill Lynch folded, this practice ended. The growing problem is that loaners no longer see borrowers as solvent enough to pay their bills. Ultimately, it's a matter of trust. Amazingly, the financial security of our nation boils down to a virtue.
"What caused this problem?" Cindy asked. We agreed it was greed. Too many people in our country want something now even though they can't pay for it. The poor can't afford to want, the middle class can't afford to over extend. In other words, it's not us. Cindy summed the entire thing by saying, "How could anyone think we can put a Republican in the White House...again?"
Anytime we read "the government bought out..." like some company's bad debt, they do that with tax payers' money. The term "eat it" is saved for the people who actually suffer the loss, and we taxpayers are eating it and have been for a long time. Our legislators have the right to inprison us if we don't pay our taxes, and then they spend the money in such a way as to keep their seats. The answer is not to vote them out of office because the lines of people waiting to take their places for the same perks are long and restless. Hopefully, a president is coming who can stick his finger in faces on both sides of the aisle and say shame on you, and can then kick them in the privates.
We don't have a true royalty in our country, but politicians, celebrities, and the ultra rich will do. I don't know if the French had it right, so many years ago, guillotining the aristocrats, but there are some days, I must admit, that I would stand in line in the rain for my turn to sharpen the blade.
"What caused this problem?" Cindy asked. We agreed it was greed. Too many people in our country want something now even though they can't pay for it. The poor can't afford to want, the middle class can't afford to over extend. In other words, it's not us. Cindy summed the entire thing by saying, "How could anyone think we can put a Republican in the White House...again?"
Anytime we read "the government bought out..." like some company's bad debt, they do that with tax payers' money. The term "eat it" is saved for the people who actually suffer the loss, and we taxpayers are eating it and have been for a long time. Our legislators have the right to inprison us if we don't pay our taxes, and then they spend the money in such a way as to keep their seats. The answer is not to vote them out of office because the lines of people waiting to take their places for the same perks are long and restless. Hopefully, a president is coming who can stick his finger in faces on both sides of the aisle and say shame on you, and can then kick them in the privates.
We don't have a true royalty in our country, but politicians, celebrities, and the ultra rich will do. I don't know if the French had it right, so many years ago, guillotining the aristocrats, but there are some days, I must admit, that I would stand in line in the rain for my turn to sharpen the blade.
Thursday, September 11, 2008
From Biblioignorata To Books: Or How I Became a Reader
My story of how I became a reader begins with the confession that I have no recorded memory of my first reading experiences. No memory of reading as an elementary student endures. I must have been reading, for that is when I learned to read, but I have no memories of that process either. My bedroom did not contain a bookshelf; I owned no books which I might have put there. This situation is completely understandable considering my personality. I was a busy child; a play-until-you-drop sort of kid. Doing, always doing, if I were to gain an hour or two with my dad, I wasn’t going to be like Scout in the lap of Atticus; I wanted him outside throwing a baseball or wrestling. Instead of reading, I filled my days terrorizing the neighborhood with other children, riding my bike, kicking my football, throwing kites into the telephone wires and pestering my older sister, which I was good at. I remember several close calls at reading or being read at when I was a kid, but my life at the time was summed up by the word motion. If an activity didn’t involve at least one major muscle group, I wasn’t interested.
My dad was career Navy, and I spent most of my time trying to make new friends and stay a step ahead of bullies. In the middle of seventh grade, I enrolled in my fifth school and entered a deep depression after several rounds of beat-up-the-new-kid. My junior high counselor saved my life when she enrolled me in the school choir the day after I confessed that music was all I really gave a hoot about. Not long after, I started taking drum lessons with the band director and learned to read. Music that is-and I discovered I had never known a more satisfying mental activity (I would discover it again while learning to read the symbols of algebra).
This is not to say I didn’t experience any random acts of reading; two dance vividly in my memory. For some reason one night, probably the result of one of my father’s seemingly unending “Son, you represent the good name of this family in everything you do,” diatribes, I actually read my science assignment. I felt really good the next day because I knew some of answers in class; a feat which had eluded me all year. Several days later, however, my science teacher was leaning over me, bent backwards over a table in the room, his hot, acrid breath spouting something in my face about the broken beaker on the floor. Hell with him, I thought. That was the last time I cracked my science book, except of course, to glue some of the pages together later in the year.
I had nursed a suspicion since the year began that my eighth-grade English teacher felt she was superior and doing us all a favor for enduring our presence at great personal sacrifice to her. I was certain of this fact when she introduced the book we were to read as a class. She had chosen Agatha Christie’s, And Then There Were None, which I now understand is typical Christie fare; ten folks go to an island and take their turn at corpse de jour. It was a stretch at best to think our adolescent minds could keep up with the subtle themes of mystery and murder, and those from the pen of a British author no less. However, on that hot and sticky Wisconsin-afternoon in my third-floor English classroom, Christie’s work became incomprehensible to even the brightest mind.
My teacher read the first chapter to us as we followed along in our own paperback copy of the book. I was with her for the first few words and then was lost as a vegan at a weenie roast. Now, I didn’t take a lot of pride in it, but I knew I could read, and when I can’t accomplish something I know I can do, well let’s just say that my room at the time was littered with remnants of broken drumsticks. So I interrupted God’s gift to literacy education with my confession of what most certainly must have been ignorance on my part.
“Oh, I’m reading every other line so it will go faster,” she said.
“Oh, that’s why you sound like a jabbering derelict and are an embarrassment to your profession,” is precisely what I did not say, dispossessing the vocabulary I now enjoy, but exactly what I would like to have replied. Needless to say, I did not return to Agatha’s thriller with any regularity.
My high school years were basically more of the same. I remember my English teachers’ enthusiastically great expectations that I would read such stories as Gunga Din, A Tale of Two Cities, and Romeo and Juliet, but my response was most often, “Ma’am, thou dost expecteth too much. I didst not readeth the assignment for it boreth me grievously.”
Two personal reading memories from high school have endured; one marked by failure, the other, pure joy. At the beginning of one summer, I found Capote’s In Cold Blood in our house and immediately began reading it (reading a book as soon as summer begins is a pleasure I still enjoy). I did just fine as Capote explained the doings of that doomed Kansas family. Then I was suddenly in a car with a couple of hoodlums. Then just as suddenly and without warning, I was back in Kansas. Dorothy didn’t show up to tell me when I was and wasn’t in Kansas, so I finally gave up. Looking back, I think I was just too immature a reader to follow even the simplest literary forms.
The reading experience I cherish from my high school years involves one of my
cd
When I’m reading for pleasure, and the book is great, I read like I eat with two exceptions-a pair of eyes replace the forks and there’s a lot less grunting.
ba
parents’ periodic books they received from the good folks at Reader’s Digest. Each book contained several stories in condensed version. The story I read featured a relatively new writer who, in this third book, spun the tale of modern medicine’s attempt to help an epileptic patient. Doctors implanted something in his brain which he could trigger to avoid an oncoming seizure. However, firing the implant flooded his brain with euphoria, and the urge to over-stimulate himself eventually led to his undoing which is why Michael Crichton called him, The Terminal Man.
I couldn’t put that book down and read non-stop for hours that summer on our back porch. Reminiscing on the way I read that book, I realize I began a reading style that has its way with me to this day. When I’m reading for pleasure, and the book is great, I read like I eat with two exceptions-a pair of eyes replace the forks and there’s a lot less grunting. In a word, it’s voracious.
I took my read-as-little-as-possible habits with me to college and struggled in courses such as psychology and music history. But one of my teachers assigned The Autobiography of Malcolm X, and my reading ideology changed again. Alex Haley’s writing held me spellbound. Malcolm X was a real person who wore Zoot Suits, and konked (straightened with chemicals) his hair. He was a Black man who tried to be White, became a Muslim, justified murder and when he returned from Mecca, renounced the very men who led him to Mohammed. His life ended when he was murdered by Muslims while speaking in a church.
I wasn’t reading about a make believe person with a trumped up medical condition. The bizarre events of his life were even more intriguing because I knew they really happened. Once while konking his hair in a public bathroom, Malcolm used too much chemical and his scalp was suddenly on fire. The only immediate relief available was a dunk in one of the toilets. He talked about getting a very clear picture of himself in that moment; he wanted to look White so badly he stuck his head in a toilet. This event really happened and it was at this moment, I now understand, I became enamored with nonfiction. I now placed high expectations on my reading material. I decided it must instruct, inspire, or inform. From now on, I only wanted to read what other people had endured or learned.
My conviction was further emboldened when I read, Flowers in the Attic. I became totally engrossed in the lives of those children forced to live in an attic. Eventually I felt a desperate longing to know if the story was true. When I began the second book in the series, I realized I had been reading fiction. Disappointed and let down, I accepted I’d been duped by a story teller. All that time I’d been playing with imaginary friends and didn’t even know it!
I married a worm right after I graduated from college…the book variety. Cindy could read for hours at a time and would finish two or three books a week. We offered each other the mutual respect of true love; I never disdained her for reading fiction-she didn’t treat me like a doofus for hardly ever reading anything.
I married a worm right after I graduated from college…the book variety. Cindy could read for hours at a time and would finish two or three books a week.The first book I ever owned was a Thompson Chain, Red-Letter Edition, King James Bible, given by my parents on Christmas Day my senior year in high school. My name was emblazoned in gold lettering on the black genuine cow hide leather cover. I was so proud of that Bible-the way it looked and felt, not of the opportunity to read it. After we married, I figured I should read it from beginning to end and did, although I nearly died in First Chronicles.
Even though I didn’t read with Cindy, something changed in my personal habits at the conviction level. I began what Christians often call a devotion, or quiet time, during which I read books by Christian authors. I read the popular writers at the time such as Keith Miller and the British Colonel, Ian Thomas, then years later, Steve Farrar, Neil Anderson, and John Eldredge. Reading these writers wasn’t much different from reading Malcolm X. I read the lessons they’d learned about the spirit life.
I became a Teacher Consultant of the National Writing Project and all the notions of myself as a reader and writer were destroyed in the whirlwind of the organization’s cathartic ideology.This pattern of reading nonfiction in the mornings, never reading fiction, staying active during the day, and vegetating on television in the evenings, remained relatively unchanged for the next twenty years, apart from the books I read to my children when they were young enough to sit in my lap. Oddly enough, while I did all that reading to make myself a better spiritual person, I didn’t do any reading to make myself a better professional person. In the first few years of my career, I received the newsletter from the Arkansas Choral Director’s Association, but was so jealous of the featured directors I didn’t read any of it. Later, I did basically the same thing as a member of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics.
In the summer of 2004, my reading life took another, remarkable turn. I became a Teacher Consultant of the National Writing Project and all the notions of myself as a reader and writer were destroyed in the whirlwind of the organization’s cathartic ideology. Apart from learning I was a writer, I learned I could read as a writer. I could notice and think about those elements the author had used to tell the story.
I also learned that fiction has just as an important place in reading as nonfiction. I soon read The Secret Life of Bees and realized that although the characters are fictional and there is no wall chucked with little prayers on scraps of paper, the story elements aren’t. Bees is the story of a longing for mothering, coming of age, faith, and several other real issues pertinent to the human condition. The events which happened to the characters in the book may not have happened to the author, but the events were not as important as the themes the events belonged to.
The most important “conk me on the head with an anvil” discovery was that there was a great deal of nonfiction on shelves in bookstores than those dealing with the spiritual life. I could read what others had to say about anything I loved, and my passion at the time was writing. I doggedly scoured Ebay listings for books by Anne Lamott, Natalie Goldberg, Julia Cameron, Ted Kooser, and others. Their works line my bookshelf.
About this time, a friend suggested I read Stephen King’s, On Writing. I don’t read in bed at night like my wife does; by that time in the day my pillow is wooing and singing the sweetest songs. But when King’s book arrived, I decided I would put it by my bed and see how long I could stretch those summer nights. My experience in that book was rewarding, redeeming, and hilarious. I constantly had to put the book down and laugh, sometimes until I cried. “Hey Cindy, you’ve got to hear this!” and I’d read sections to my wife stopping intermittently to laugh uncontrollably. There’s something exhilarating about reading well written work about something I love, written by someone who loves it as much as I do; it’s as good as any fiction experience. The other impact that book had on my life? He said he was always listening to books on tape. To date I’ve probably listened to over two hundred books while driving between Conway and Vilonia.
There’s something exhilarating about reading well written work about something I love, written by someone who loves it as much as I do; it’s as good as any fiction experience.
I began my masters in professional and technical writing in the summer of 2006. My first course was Dr. Jensen’s creative nonfiction with an emphasis on biography. I was quickly introduced to the memoir, a previously unknown genre to me. It’s one of my favorite genres to read; it takes me back to my Malcolm X days. Memoirs almost always instruct, inspire or inform. I don’t just read them for enjoyment; I plan to finish my masters with a memoir and I read them to learn how the genre is crafted.
Although several chapters remain in my life, I have to admit I’m about to enter the last major part. I’m over 50, looking forward to retirement from teaching public school, trying to figure out how I can maintain the lifestyle “to which my wife has become accustomed,” and I’m thinking I’ll give teaching writing in college a shot. I have four courses left in my masters program, and to top it all off, I’ve recently discovered the joy of reading. Not just the joy, but the importance and rewards of taking in another person’s thoughts and life encounters. Most importantly, I now know that reading is the fuel of my writing and I can expect to see the influence of those I’m reading woven through my own written work.
I have many hopes as I settle into the eventide of life. I hope one day I can read as many library books as my wife and that neighbors will notice my unkempt yard and over grown garden and think, Yeah, a reading junkie lives there. But most of all I just hope I keep on reading.
My dad was career Navy, and I spent most of my time trying to make new friends and stay a step ahead of bullies. In the middle of seventh grade, I enrolled in my fifth school and entered a deep depression after several rounds of beat-up-the-new-kid. My junior high counselor saved my life when she enrolled me in the school choir the day after I confessed that music was all I really gave a hoot about. Not long after, I started taking drum lessons with the band director and learned to read. Music that is-and I discovered I had never known a more satisfying mental activity (I would discover it again while learning to read the symbols of algebra).
This is not to say I didn’t experience any random acts of reading; two dance vividly in my memory. For some reason one night, probably the result of one of my father’s seemingly unending “Son, you represent the good name of this family in everything you do,” diatribes, I actually read my science assignment. I felt really good the next day because I knew some of answers in class; a feat which had eluded me all year. Several days later, however, my science teacher was leaning over me, bent backwards over a table in the room, his hot, acrid breath spouting something in my face about the broken beaker on the floor. Hell with him, I thought. That was the last time I cracked my science book, except of course, to glue some of the pages together later in the year.
I had nursed a suspicion since the year began that my eighth-grade English teacher felt she was superior and doing us all a favor for enduring our presence at great personal sacrifice to her. I was certain of this fact when she introduced the book we were to read as a class. She had chosen Agatha Christie’s, And Then There Were None, which I now understand is typical Christie fare; ten folks go to an island and take their turn at corpse de jour. It was a stretch at best to think our adolescent minds could keep up with the subtle themes of mystery and murder, and those from the pen of a British author no less. However, on that hot and sticky Wisconsin-afternoon in my third-floor English classroom, Christie’s work became incomprehensible to even the brightest mind.
My teacher read the first chapter to us as we followed along in our own paperback copy of the book. I was with her for the first few words and then was lost as a vegan at a weenie roast. Now, I didn’t take a lot of pride in it, but I knew I could read, and when I can’t accomplish something I know I can do, well let’s just say that my room at the time was littered with remnants of broken drumsticks. So I interrupted God’s gift to literacy education with my confession of what most certainly must have been ignorance on my part.
“Oh, I’m reading every other line so it will go faster,” she said.
“Oh, that’s why you sound like a jabbering derelict and are an embarrassment to your profession,” is precisely what I did not say, dispossessing the vocabulary I now enjoy, but exactly what I would like to have replied. Needless to say, I did not return to Agatha’s thriller with any regularity.
My high school years were basically more of the same. I remember my English teachers’ enthusiastically great expectations that I would read such stories as Gunga Din, A Tale of Two Cities, and Romeo and Juliet, but my response was most often, “Ma’am, thou dost expecteth too much. I didst not readeth the assignment for it boreth me grievously.”
Two personal reading memories from high school have endured; one marked by failure, the other, pure joy. At the beginning of one summer, I found Capote’s In Cold Blood in our house and immediately began reading it (reading a book as soon as summer begins is a pleasure I still enjoy). I did just fine as Capote explained the doings of that doomed Kansas family. Then I was suddenly in a car with a couple of hoodlums. Then just as suddenly and without warning, I was back in Kansas. Dorothy didn’t show up to tell me when I was and wasn’t in Kansas, so I finally gave up. Looking back, I think I was just too immature a reader to follow even the simplest literary forms.
The reading experience I cherish from my high school years involves one of my
cd
When I’m reading for pleasure, and the book is great, I read like I eat with two exceptions-a pair of eyes replace the forks and there’s a lot less grunting.
ba
parents’ periodic books they received from the good folks at Reader’s Digest. Each book contained several stories in condensed version. The story I read featured a relatively new writer who, in this third book, spun the tale of modern medicine’s attempt to help an epileptic patient. Doctors implanted something in his brain which he could trigger to avoid an oncoming seizure. However, firing the implant flooded his brain with euphoria, and the urge to over-stimulate himself eventually led to his undoing which is why Michael Crichton called him, The Terminal Man.
I couldn’t put that book down and read non-stop for hours that summer on our back porch. Reminiscing on the way I read that book, I realize I began a reading style that has its way with me to this day. When I’m reading for pleasure, and the book is great, I read like I eat with two exceptions-a pair of eyes replace the forks and there’s a lot less grunting. In a word, it’s voracious.
I took my read-as-little-as-possible habits with me to college and struggled in courses such as psychology and music history. But one of my teachers assigned The Autobiography of Malcolm X, and my reading ideology changed again. Alex Haley’s writing held me spellbound. Malcolm X was a real person who wore Zoot Suits, and konked (straightened with chemicals) his hair. He was a Black man who tried to be White, became a Muslim, justified murder and when he returned from Mecca, renounced the very men who led him to Mohammed. His life ended when he was murdered by Muslims while speaking in a church.
I wasn’t reading about a make believe person with a trumped up medical condition. The bizarre events of his life were even more intriguing because I knew they really happened. Once while konking his hair in a public bathroom, Malcolm used too much chemical and his scalp was suddenly on fire. The only immediate relief available was a dunk in one of the toilets. He talked about getting a very clear picture of himself in that moment; he wanted to look White so badly he stuck his head in a toilet. This event really happened and it was at this moment, I now understand, I became enamored with nonfiction. I now placed high expectations on my reading material. I decided it must instruct, inspire, or inform. From now on, I only wanted to read what other people had endured or learned.
My conviction was further emboldened when I read, Flowers in the Attic. I became totally engrossed in the lives of those children forced to live in an attic. Eventually I felt a desperate longing to know if the story was true. When I began the second book in the series, I realized I had been reading fiction. Disappointed and let down, I accepted I’d been duped by a story teller. All that time I’d been playing with imaginary friends and didn’t even know it!
I married a worm right after I graduated from college…the book variety. Cindy could read for hours at a time and would finish two or three books a week. We offered each other the mutual respect of true love; I never disdained her for reading fiction-she didn’t treat me like a doofus for hardly ever reading anything.
I married a worm right after I graduated from college…the book variety. Cindy could read for hours at a time and would finish two or three books a week.The first book I ever owned was a Thompson Chain, Red-Letter Edition, King James Bible, given by my parents on Christmas Day my senior year in high school. My name was emblazoned in gold lettering on the black genuine cow hide leather cover. I was so proud of that Bible-the way it looked and felt, not of the opportunity to read it. After we married, I figured I should read it from beginning to end and did, although I nearly died in First Chronicles.
Even though I didn’t read with Cindy, something changed in my personal habits at the conviction level. I began what Christians often call a devotion, or quiet time, during which I read books by Christian authors. I read the popular writers at the time such as Keith Miller and the British Colonel, Ian Thomas, then years later, Steve Farrar, Neil Anderson, and John Eldredge. Reading these writers wasn’t much different from reading Malcolm X. I read the lessons they’d learned about the spirit life.
I became a Teacher Consultant of the National Writing Project and all the notions of myself as a reader and writer were destroyed in the whirlwind of the organization’s cathartic ideology.This pattern of reading nonfiction in the mornings, never reading fiction, staying active during the day, and vegetating on television in the evenings, remained relatively unchanged for the next twenty years, apart from the books I read to my children when they were young enough to sit in my lap. Oddly enough, while I did all that reading to make myself a better spiritual person, I didn’t do any reading to make myself a better professional person. In the first few years of my career, I received the newsletter from the Arkansas Choral Director’s Association, but was so jealous of the featured directors I didn’t read any of it. Later, I did basically the same thing as a member of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics.
In the summer of 2004, my reading life took another, remarkable turn. I became a Teacher Consultant of the National Writing Project and all the notions of myself as a reader and writer were destroyed in the whirlwind of the organization’s cathartic ideology. Apart from learning I was a writer, I learned I could read as a writer. I could notice and think about those elements the author had used to tell the story.
I also learned that fiction has just as an important place in reading as nonfiction. I soon read The Secret Life of Bees and realized that although the characters are fictional and there is no wall chucked with little prayers on scraps of paper, the story elements aren’t. Bees is the story of a longing for mothering, coming of age, faith, and several other real issues pertinent to the human condition. The events which happened to the characters in the book may not have happened to the author, but the events were not as important as the themes the events belonged to.
The most important “conk me on the head with an anvil” discovery was that there was a great deal of nonfiction on shelves in bookstores than those dealing with the spiritual life. I could read what others had to say about anything I loved, and my passion at the time was writing. I doggedly scoured Ebay listings for books by Anne Lamott, Natalie Goldberg, Julia Cameron, Ted Kooser, and others. Their works line my bookshelf.
About this time, a friend suggested I read Stephen King’s, On Writing. I don’t read in bed at night like my wife does; by that time in the day my pillow is wooing and singing the sweetest songs. But when King’s book arrived, I decided I would put it by my bed and see how long I could stretch those summer nights. My experience in that book was rewarding, redeeming, and hilarious. I constantly had to put the book down and laugh, sometimes until I cried. “Hey Cindy, you’ve got to hear this!” and I’d read sections to my wife stopping intermittently to laugh uncontrollably. There’s something exhilarating about reading well written work about something I love, written by someone who loves it as much as I do; it’s as good as any fiction experience. The other impact that book had on my life? He said he was always listening to books on tape. To date I’ve probably listened to over two hundred books while driving between Conway and Vilonia.
There’s something exhilarating about reading well written work about something I love, written by someone who loves it as much as I do; it’s as good as any fiction experience.
I began my masters in professional and technical writing in the summer of 2006. My first course was Dr. Jensen’s creative nonfiction with an emphasis on biography. I was quickly introduced to the memoir, a previously unknown genre to me. It’s one of my favorite genres to read; it takes me back to my Malcolm X days. Memoirs almost always instruct, inspire or inform. I don’t just read them for enjoyment; I plan to finish my masters with a memoir and I read them to learn how the genre is crafted.
Although several chapters remain in my life, I have to admit I’m about to enter the last major part. I’m over 50, looking forward to retirement from teaching public school, trying to figure out how I can maintain the lifestyle “to which my wife has become accustomed,” and I’m thinking I’ll give teaching writing in college a shot. I have four courses left in my masters program, and to top it all off, I’ve recently discovered the joy of reading. Not just the joy, but the importance and rewards of taking in another person’s thoughts and life encounters. Most importantly, I now know that reading is the fuel of my writing and I can expect to see the influence of those I’m reading woven through my own written work.
I have many hopes as I settle into the eventide of life. I hope one day I can read as many library books as my wife and that neighbors will notice my unkempt yard and over grown garden and think, Yeah, a reading junkie lives there. But most of all I just hope I keep on reading.
Wednesday, September 10, 2008
The Greatest of These is Love
I grew up singing hymns in Southern Baptist churches. The chorus of one of my favorites, How Great Thou Art, begins with the words “Then sings my soul.” The pitch on the first two words is the same, and then it rises on each of the words “my soul.” If the organ is really loud and enough singers belt it out with gusto, I can nearly have an out-of-body experience.
Another favorite hymn from my childhood is Blessed Assurance. The chorus begins with the phrase “This is my story, this is my song.” Through my high school years, and on into college, I gave increasing attention to the stories and songs that sang in my soul. I graduated with a music education degree and taught the subject for several years. However, I now realize my life-long yearning has always been to write those stories and songs, rather than to sing them.
It’s a spiritual experience when my pen skates across the page; my soul breathes and words appear. Every other compulsion in my life: hunger, sexuality, and fatigue, to name a few, all remind me that I’m a physical being. In writing alone, I find the evidence that I’m, as John Mayer sings, “Bigger than my body gives me credit for.” I’m actually a spiritual being in a physical world. And why wouldn’t I be? God is the great Author of all; made in his image, aren’t I most like what he intended for me, when I’m writing?
In Bird by Bird, Anne Lamott’s treatise on writing, she says, “Your job is to see people as they really are, and to do this, you have to know who you are in the most compassionate possible sense.” When my writing life began I composed stories about the people and memories I love. In writing about them, I expressed my love. I wrote about the night I asked my wife to marry me and the feelings we shared the day our last child moved out on her own. There were many stories about my children as well: school experiences and vacations, the highs and lows of their lives. Love poured through my pen like tears from a father, having finally found his prodigal.
When I began telling my stories, however, I didn’t realize how little I loved myself. With each story, I fell in love with my main character who was always me! One of my first stories was about running in my first two marathons. The man in that story had his flaws, for sure, but there was also something compelling about him. I finally accepted the strand of goodness woven through the heart of my blundering hero who, in spite of it all, was one of the good guys. He was a good husband and father, a valuable friend to anyone. Most importantly, writing about him opened my eyes to the truth that he had always possessed these traits. Writing introduced a love of self I had never known.
The essence of writing is love.
Writing led me to renewed perspectives of the people in my life. Suddenly, I was aware of goodness in others that had always been hidden. As I wrote about people, I could clearly see their motivations, the good intentions behind what they did. Writing continues to teach that the people who cross my path are characters in the story of me, and worthy of love. My writing even went so far as to help heal my childhood wounds and offered peace with my family. Through writing, I’ve learned to love others, just as I learned to love myself.
I also write as a scribe; a record-keeper of the truth. I own a history given to no one else. I must chronicle the truth known only by me. No one else can tell the delight of my wife’s affection, the joy of raising my children, or the thrill of teaching my students. I alone am able to recount the truth of my unrequited loves in junior high, the power of my accomplishments, and the pain of my failures.
Along with love and truth, writing is also about power. My pen possesses the power to turn a perpetrator into a hero, a priest into a villain. An adolescent can bear remarkable super-human abilities and an assassin can save a stranger’s life. Through writing I have the power to raise the dead to life, infiltrate the government with alien creatures, or concoct a potion that restores youth to the aged.
My writing has power over readers too. In his book, I Am a Pencil, Sam Swope tells of a student’s story where “the treacherous scorpion snatches a dog’s brain and sticks it in his pocket.” Swope wonders, “Isn’t that what writers do, pocket brains?” With reader’s brains in my pocket, I can change their minds, or at the least, influence their thinking. Writing can illuminate a previously unseen perspective, revealing flaws or restoring dignity. With words, I hold the power to heal a broken heart or break a haughty one.
I must admit, the pervasive power of writing includes a stronghold over me. When creative ideas are flowing, an hour or two can easily pass without my notice, as if the muse has put my mind in her pocket. Nothing captivates my mind like language and its articulate use to express concept or feeling. The search for just the right word, which can turn a phrase from entertaining to laugh-out-loud funny, arrests my attention like nothing else can. Writing is a powerful distraction from the woes and worries of the average day.
An essay on the reasons why I write would not be complete without a paragraph or two regarding my pen and journal. There’s an undeniable thrill, as evidenced in my step, when I leave Office Depot with a brand new pen. I’ve tried them all; the snap-top ball points, fine-tip gel-pens, 1.0 millimeters vs. 0.7 mills. I’ve even sought out those with the ergonomic grips designed to protect me from damage to my ligaments and tendons in the most frenzied bouts of journalistic scribbling. New pens, like new love, inspire passionate writing.
Just as stimulating as the feel of new a uni-ball Gel Impact, is the fragrance and potential of a new journal; especially if she’s bound in leather. Those blank pages just beg to be impressed and pressed upon. “Come chart the unknown with me,” she invites. Journals without lines are uniquely irresistible, promising acceptance of whatever the mind conceives no matter how far outside the box, how distant from the rule of linear thinking. A blank journal is as seductive as the surface of a newly-opened jar of peanut butter, and just as willing to let you make your mark.
In fifty years I will probably be nothing more than a memory in the minds of the people whose lives I’ve been privileged to touch. In another fifty years, everyone who knew me personally will be gone. Finally, those who have only known of me will pass on as well. I find even deeper appreciation and meaning in my writing as I face the truth in the New Testament book of James: “You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes.” The moments of my life can be more than mere footprints in the sand, subject to erosion by the winds and waves of time. With my writing, I can make my life a love offering to the unborn generations of my family and beyond.
The reasons I write are power, truth, and love, but the greatest of these is love. When the back cover finally turns on my life and my body falls those last six feet, let it be said of me, “He loved enough to write.”
Another favorite hymn from my childhood is Blessed Assurance. The chorus begins with the phrase “This is my story, this is my song.” Through my high school years, and on into college, I gave increasing attention to the stories and songs that sang in my soul. I graduated with a music education degree and taught the subject for several years. However, I now realize my life-long yearning has always been to write those stories and songs, rather than to sing them.
It’s a spiritual experience when my pen skates across the page; my soul breathes and words appear. Every other compulsion in my life: hunger, sexuality, and fatigue, to name a few, all remind me that I’m a physical being. In writing alone, I find the evidence that I’m, as John Mayer sings, “Bigger than my body gives me credit for.” I’m actually a spiritual being in a physical world. And why wouldn’t I be? God is the great Author of all; made in his image, aren’t I most like what he intended for me, when I’m writing?
In Bird by Bird, Anne Lamott’s treatise on writing, she says, “Your job is to see people as they really are, and to do this, you have to know who you are in the most compassionate possible sense.” When my writing life began I composed stories about the people and memories I love. In writing about them, I expressed my love. I wrote about the night I asked my wife to marry me and the feelings we shared the day our last child moved out on her own. There were many stories about my children as well: school experiences and vacations, the highs and lows of their lives. Love poured through my pen like tears from a father, having finally found his prodigal.
When I began telling my stories, however, I didn’t realize how little I loved myself. With each story, I fell in love with my main character who was always me! One of my first stories was about running in my first two marathons. The man in that story had his flaws, for sure, but there was also something compelling about him. I finally accepted the strand of goodness woven through the heart of my blundering hero who, in spite of it all, was one of the good guys. He was a good husband and father, a valuable friend to anyone. Most importantly, writing about him opened my eyes to the truth that he had always possessed these traits. Writing introduced a love of self I had never known.
The essence of writing is love.
Writing led me to renewed perspectives of the people in my life. Suddenly, I was aware of goodness in others that had always been hidden. As I wrote about people, I could clearly see their motivations, the good intentions behind what they did. Writing continues to teach that the people who cross my path are characters in the story of me, and worthy of love. My writing even went so far as to help heal my childhood wounds and offered peace with my family. Through writing, I’ve learned to love others, just as I learned to love myself.
I also write as a scribe; a record-keeper of the truth. I own a history given to no one else. I must chronicle the truth known only by me. No one else can tell the delight of my wife’s affection, the joy of raising my children, or the thrill of teaching my students. I alone am able to recount the truth of my unrequited loves in junior high, the power of my accomplishments, and the pain of my failures.
Along with love and truth, writing is also about power. My pen possesses the power to turn a perpetrator into a hero, a priest into a villain. An adolescent can bear remarkable super-human abilities and an assassin can save a stranger’s life. Through writing I have the power to raise the dead to life, infiltrate the government with alien creatures, or concoct a potion that restores youth to the aged.
My writing has power over readers too. In his book, I Am a Pencil, Sam Swope tells of a student’s story where “the treacherous scorpion snatches a dog’s brain and sticks it in his pocket.” Swope wonders, “Isn’t that what writers do, pocket brains?” With reader’s brains in my pocket, I can change their minds, or at the least, influence their thinking. Writing can illuminate a previously unseen perspective, revealing flaws or restoring dignity. With words, I hold the power to heal a broken heart or break a haughty one.
I must admit, the pervasive power of writing includes a stronghold over me. When creative ideas are flowing, an hour or two can easily pass without my notice, as if the muse has put my mind in her pocket. Nothing captivates my mind like language and its articulate use to express concept or feeling. The search for just the right word, which can turn a phrase from entertaining to laugh-out-loud funny, arrests my attention like nothing else can. Writing is a powerful distraction from the woes and worries of the average day.
An essay on the reasons why I write would not be complete without a paragraph or two regarding my pen and journal. There’s an undeniable thrill, as evidenced in my step, when I leave Office Depot with a brand new pen. I’ve tried them all; the snap-top ball points, fine-tip gel-pens, 1.0 millimeters vs. 0.7 mills. I’ve even sought out those with the ergonomic grips designed to protect me from damage to my ligaments and tendons in the most frenzied bouts of journalistic scribbling. New pens, like new love, inspire passionate writing.
Just as stimulating as the feel of new a uni-ball Gel Impact, is the fragrance and potential of a new journal; especially if she’s bound in leather. Those blank pages just beg to be impressed and pressed upon. “Come chart the unknown with me,” she invites. Journals without lines are uniquely irresistible, promising acceptance of whatever the mind conceives no matter how far outside the box, how distant from the rule of linear thinking. A blank journal is as seductive as the surface of a newly-opened jar of peanut butter, and just as willing to let you make your mark.
In fifty years I will probably be nothing more than a memory in the minds of the people whose lives I’ve been privileged to touch. In another fifty years, everyone who knew me personally will be gone. Finally, those who have only known of me will pass on as well. I find even deeper appreciation and meaning in my writing as I face the truth in the New Testament book of James: “You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes.” The moments of my life can be more than mere footprints in the sand, subject to erosion by the winds and waves of time. With my writing, I can make my life a love offering to the unborn generations of my family and beyond.
The reasons I write are power, truth, and love, but the greatest of these is love. When the back cover finally turns on my life and my body falls those last six feet, let it be said of me, “He loved enough to write.”
Tuesday, September 9, 2008
Home, Sweet Hope
I was born in Newport, Rhode Island.
I lived in Pennsylvania.
Moved to the Philippine Islands.
Lived in Garden Grove California, and began school.
Did grades 3-5 in Okinawa.
Went right back to Garden Grove.
Moved right away to Huntington Beach.
In seventh grade, moved to Sun Prairie, Wisconsin.
Started college, but moved to Fort Smith, Arkansas.
Finished college in Fayetteville got married and moved to El Dorado Springs, Mo.
Two years later, moved back to Fayetteville.
Years later, moved to England.
After two years, moved to The Netherlands.
Moved back to Conway, Arkansas.
When I met my wife, she was living with her parents in the second house they’d ever owned. She knows Fayetteville like the back of her hand. She can tell you stories, she can show you the hospital where she was born, and the church she attended until we married there and moved away.
I on the other hand can only hope to find my residences on a map. I know Fayetteville well, and Ft. Smith faintly. To none of those other places have I ever returned. Rhode Island, Wisconsin, California, and here I live in Arkansas, an average distance of 1,300 miles from any of them. I have never seen the hospital where I was born, or any school I attended from the day I left it.
Some men my age find themselves wishing they could go home. And I, I wish I had one.
I lived in Pennsylvania.
Moved to the Philippine Islands.
Lived in Garden Grove California, and began school.
Did grades 3-5 in Okinawa.
Went right back to Garden Grove.
Moved right away to Huntington Beach.
In seventh grade, moved to Sun Prairie, Wisconsin.
Started college, but moved to Fort Smith, Arkansas.
Finished college in Fayetteville got married and moved to El Dorado Springs, Mo.
Two years later, moved back to Fayetteville.
Years later, moved to England.
After two years, moved to The Netherlands.
Moved back to Conway, Arkansas.
When I met my wife, she was living with her parents in the second house they’d ever owned. She knows Fayetteville like the back of her hand. She can tell you stories, she can show you the hospital where she was born, and the church she attended until we married there and moved away.
I on the other hand can only hope to find my residences on a map. I know Fayetteville well, and Ft. Smith faintly. To none of those other places have I ever returned. Rhode Island, Wisconsin, California, and here I live in Arkansas, an average distance of 1,300 miles from any of them. I have never seen the hospital where I was born, or any school I attended from the day I left it.
Some men my age find themselves wishing they could go home. And I, I wish I had one.
Sunday, September 7, 2008
What the heck
Well, I did watch alot of those fricken olympics. As my friend Monda would say, "Don't get me started."
I'm in survey of nonfiction at UALR. I'm in a class with readers, big time. Oh yeah, one of them is a published author too! We shared our reading stories. Mine was funny. What I found was that all of them see nothing wrong whatsoever in just sitting and reading. For hours. While everything else goes undone.
What I realized is that I was raised in a culture where self worth is drawn from accomplishment. The measurable kind. And observable too.
So my whole adult life I've been a weed-pulling, grass-mowin', garden-planting, doer. And you know what my wife did during all that? Read. She did the stuff that had to be done, but when relinquished from requirement she sat down with a good book.
So I'm going to start trying to be more like her. I'm going to recreate myself as a reader. I'll find something else to give me a sense of worth, there's plenty to choose from, I mean I've got a wife, two kids, a son by marriage, nearly another, and the cutest granddaughter.
Skuze me, I gotta go read.
I'm in survey of nonfiction at UALR. I'm in a class with readers, big time. Oh yeah, one of them is a published author too! We shared our reading stories. Mine was funny. What I found was that all of them see nothing wrong whatsoever in just sitting and reading. For hours. While everything else goes undone.
What I realized is that I was raised in a culture where self worth is drawn from accomplishment. The measurable kind. And observable too.
So my whole adult life I've been a weed-pulling, grass-mowin', garden-planting, doer. And you know what my wife did during all that? Read. She did the stuff that had to be done, but when relinquished from requirement she sat down with a good book.
So I'm going to start trying to be more like her. I'm going to recreate myself as a reader. I'll find something else to give me a sense of worth, there's plenty to choose from, I mean I've got a wife, two kids, a son by marriage, nearly another, and the cutest granddaughter.
Skuze me, I gotta go read.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
