Why I Write

 ​The question hangs in the air whether it is asked aloud or not. It may be my own or that of a friend or family member. Coming to embrace the written word this late in life makes me my most outspoken critic. It is not “Who do you think you are?” but “What do you have to say?" And so I write hoping to find the answer.
    I write to discover what I think. It is here I confront what I thought I knew but is no longer true and what I didn't even know that I knew. It is only when I put pen to paper that I see for the first time what lies beneath the surface, what I have kept hidden even from myself. I am the catalyst and the conduit. It comes through me, not from me, and upon reading the hidden wisdom on the page, I nod in agreement and say amen.
    I write to explore language. It is in the unbinding and juxtaposition of words that I find beauty. They spill out unabated and align themselves in shapes and streams of alliteration and metaphor that I once only knew by definition. And yet, I am constantly discovering that these words, beautiful as they are, can never be enough; they fail time and time again to express my innermost thoughts and emotions and so I keep writing, searching for the right word or combination and somehow always falling short.
    I write to begin to understand how I got to be here in this place in time. I take the journey through my life in words and at long last begin to make sense of it. It is in this long view that I can see the how and why of decisions and dilemmas. Moves were not mistakes but gentle nudges edging me ever closer to where I was meant to be. It is here on the page that I confront the ghosts of my past, both real and imagined and hear the voices of those that have gone before me, each of them clasping my hand and trusting me to tell the stories.
    I write to tell the journey of faith in my own words that may possibly only be understood by one. The summoning lies hidden in my writing. “Go and tell everyone.” I come to witness in solitude but the word seeps into the community; a solo act that when sent out into the world exposes my place on the mountaintop. I write because I can not speak but the written word is more than enough.
    I write to announce to the world that I too am the Beloved. With pen in hand, I begin my morning ritual to welcome the day and embrace the wonders that have been promised. LIfting my head, I relearn again how to hold the loving gaze of my Creator. I write to whisper that love in return, still afraid that it’s all a dream.

Opening the Door to Reading

 To the best of my recollection, I was simply a middle of the road elementary school student; not an especially prolific reader but I did the work necessary to collect my Bs and Cs. That is, until my 7th grade English teacher, Mr. Gammell became my 8th grade teacher. It was in our second year together that he saw something in me that other teachers had failed to notice. He pulled me aside one day after class and asked about my reading habits. The next day, to my surprise, he handed me a copy of Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea saying, “I think you might like this,” and a door swung wide open for me. One Hemingway book followed another and then came Steinbeck and F. Scott Fitzgerald. From then on there was no going back to doing the minimum or taking the easy way out for me.

Hemingway’s themes of our human struggle against nature and perseverance were a perfect match for me growing up in the Midwest but more than that, the simple language and sentence structure of this particular selection allowed me access to the first book that led to a deeper understanding of symbolic themes. I finally understood how to answer the question, “What does it mean?”

Fishing had never been a part of my experience but this small Cuban village on the sea came to life through Hemingway’s description. While it was definitely challenging for me as an adolescent to identify someone as a fisherman who had gone 84 days without a catch, Santiago captured my sympathy. I struggled with him day after day and lamented with him at the slow demise of his beautiful marlin for which he had sacrificed everything. The reward that came in the form of the village’s public adulation of the remaining skeleton was something that took me by surprise. Unbeknownst to middle school me, there could still be glory and honor in what might first appear as a personal defeat.

I spent a good deal of my life recommending the book that started me off until I eventually became aware that it wasn’t about the book at all; it was the connection to Mr. Gammell that actually held the fire of this memory. I can still feel that book in my hands today and hear the crack of the cover as I opened it seeing for the first time his signature emblazoned across the front end paper in black letters "Eldon R. Gammell." He was the first to identify me as a reader and thus begin my love of language. He had no way of knowing that I would grow up to become not only an avid reader but more importantly, a teacher that would spend decades doing exactly what he did for me - lead children to that first book that opens the door to reading and the infinite worlds held within their pages.