Alphabets to novels...

“There are no shortcuts to excellence.”

- Anonymous

I'm working on a novel, and a mentor is dying – an interesting juxtaposition.

The novel…

Over the past couple of years, I’ve published some of these blogs in the form of two books: life in small bites: moments in time, and life around the edges: a winding road. Weekly writing has been mostly pleasurable, sometimes stressful, but always…in all ways helpful for me…a way to make note of the things I see…verbal photographs that remind me there is such a variety in the human experience.

Now I’m trying, with “…help from my friends…,” to create something with a longer narrative…more words…broader storyline. It’s a mystery – we’ll see.

Thinking about this project has made me ponder about how getting to the point of writing begins, indeed how anything takes shape in our lives. Our education commences with the smallest of elements; in the case of writing, the letters of the alphabet.

I learned the alphabet to music when I was in kindergarten. It is hard to imagine how excited I was to sing ‘a to z' for my mother. She too was excited. I cannot remember how many times we sang it together. That woman was supportive of just about everything I learned and shared with her.

Single letters led to words and sentences, then to paragraphs, all in the process of learning a ‘new' language…the language of written communication. It was bumpy at first. Copying sentences into my ‘writing book' took time. There was cursive and then something called printing. Printing?! Wait a minute; this was too much of an overload…and yet, over time on my way to ‘…Carnegie Hall…’ (you know, the way to get there is practice, practice, practice), I learned both of these difficult ways to communicate and the process became smoother.

As the years passed, I hated those writing assignments, not because I didn’t have the mechanics of the process down, but because my brain was empty and writing took effort and time and research and appropriate grammar and…well, it was painful, as I suppose it is for most people.

Then, one day I realized when I had something to say, writing was an excellent way to say it. In fact, it became a mechanism for self-exploration and reflection. I don't know how many hundreds of thousands of words on a written page it took before I came to realize that writing was a way to free myself…to lose time in the midst of the process of self-expression. Yes, thanks to all of those teachers who forced the assignments and graded all those papers…thanks to all the people to whom I wanted to share the adventures of my life…thanks to those who I met only once…thanks for permitting the ‘draw’ of ‘…get to…’ rather than the ‘push’ of ‘…have to…’

For all of the adventures and self-contemplation, writing has become one of the most important tools I possess.

So the novel is underway.

The mentor…

There are lots of other ‘alphabets’ in life, small elements that require hours of repetition. The argument could be made that every unique thing we learn requires practice.  The Chinese proverb often attributed to Benjamin Franklin says:

“Tell me and I forget, teach me and

I may remember, involve me and I learn.”

If we were to take the time to think about it, we would be reminded there are any number of women and men who worked to teach and involve us in activities that made the quality of our lives better.

Edward Baker was one of those people in my life. I have written about some of the men and women who influenced me in the early stages of my life. People who, by simply being themselves, helped me move forward when I didn’t have the internal strength or vision to see the horizon ahead.

In my adult life, Baker filled that role. I have previously mentioned a thirty-year period that I spent in a spiritual community.  My time in this group began the mid-70s at the time I was finishing a Ph.D. and continued as my professional life began and came maturity. It came a few years after having been in Vietnam and leaving the military. There was a ‘…long tail…' on those years in the army that were both edifying and troubling.

When I met Baker, I was in troubled waters. At the time, I had no idea the next three decades would be spent in his presence. He grew up on a farm, took carpentry as a trade and for reasons known only to God and the universe, became a student of the Biblical Scripture. While he had little formal education, he was the most biblically knowledgeable person I ever met.

When I arrived, I fit the definition of unstable, reflected by the Biblical writer James when said, “He that wavereth is like a wave of the sea driven with the wind and tossed.”

Baker asked me, early on, what I thought I might like to get out of the teachings of this ministry. I was, of course, intrigued by the Bible, but I said that I wanted more than anything to become a mature human being.

Over the next three decades, this man laughed with me, cried with me, held me when I needed comfort and taught me more about the scripture, enriching my relationship with the creative God of the universe, than anyone I had ever known. His work ethic and drive defied description. When he wasn’t sleeping, eating, teaching or preaching, he was studying.

Baker retired from the ministry somewhere around late 2005 or 2006, and by then I had moved away from the community and Missouri. I only heard from him sporadically after that.

The point…

Now, I am working on a mystery novel.

There is, however, a different novel, written with a different alphabet – the living story of who I am. In these latter years, a lot of chapters have already been written and are stored on the hard drives of my mind. I am sure there will be more to come, but I would be negligent were I not acknowledge this man’s hand on an enormous part of that material.

As he approaches his final breath, his story complete, a myriad of experiences flood my mind. I am honored to have known him during those years, and for all that he taught me.

While I mourn his departure from this mortal coil, the life he worked to place in my mind remains alive and well, and will continue until I, at last, depart from mine.

- ted