Dad - Before and After Me

Happy Father's Day to all of you - those who are dads and those of us who have dads. There's nothing like a dad, but it's also true that our dads weren't always dads. They used to be boys and then young men looking to the future, trying out their wings, finding their independence. This picture is my dad on his motorcycle long before he became my dad. The year was about 1931 and he was getting ready to take off across America all the way to Oregon.

What a way to see the country! What a way to say I'm ready to be on my own now. His mother wasn't happy with him. I've never heard anybody say what his father thought. Maybe that he wouldn't make it. That he'd turn around and come home before he got a hundred miles down the road. Or maybe he was proud of him for wanting to do something a little daring. Or he might have been worried he'd never come home. Lucky for me, Dad did come home and meet my mom some eight or nine years later. 

But that trip was Dad saying I'm old enough now to do what I want. His parents weren't happy about it, but he went anyway. All the way across country on a motorcycle. I've always thought I got my grab hold of a dream or goal and keep on keeping on spirit from my mom, a very determined woman. But now that I think about my dad and this trip, I'm seeing he had plenty of that perseverance and focus too. He wanted to go, so he did. And all his life, it was something he looked back on with pleasure and pride. Riding by the Grand Canyon. Nearly running out of water in the desert. Eating nothing but cantalope for a couple of days because someone was selling them cheap by the side of the road. So many adventures.

I look at the young man in the photo above. That was before I was even a thought he might imagine. He was young, footloose and fancy free and he took advantage of that.

Years later when he was almost forty, I came into his life. His last child after two other daughters. I remember the motorcycle. It sat in the corner of the garage for all my childhood years. Dad didn't ride it. I think it needed repair. But he kept it for many years. A symbol of freedom. Of independence. He finally sold it and I think regretted the sale almost immediately.

I can't imagine what it must have felt like for a farm boy like Dad who had probably never gone farther than Louisville (about 60 miles from here) to just take off. To shut his ears to his mother's pleading for him to give up such craziness. My mother remembers Dad saying his mother even offered to give him money she'd hid away for a rainy day if he would stay home. In her heart it was storming for sure.

Now I wish I could hear more of Dad's stories about the places he went on that motorcycle. I wish I knew the Dad before there was me. And I wonder if my children ever wonder about the girl before the mom. I think that's sort of what we all want - for our loved ones to see us as we see ourselves. Unique, one of a kind, our own person. 

That's what writers need to do with our characters too. To know them is to breathe life into them. And some of them are fathers. Like Victor in Angel Sister. Victor was a yearning to be better father in spite of his flaws and troubles.

My dad wasn't perfect either. But then who among us is? But he was a good dad and he surprised some people by buying a motorcycle and heading west. Maybe himself most of all.

Hope you had a good dad who made your life richer and better. What's one of your favorite things or memories about your dad?

Pressing On

Another Sunday. Isn't it amazing how quickly the Sundays come around? I know, I know! I'm just thinking that because I'm getting older. Well, everybody still breathing is getting older. Even little kids. But some of us maybe have already gotten a bunch older, huh? Anyway, when I was one of those little kids, a week seemed to take forever. The days didn't fly by, except maybe in the summer time. But now it doesn't matter what time of the year it is, the days zoom by.

A friend of mine advanced a theory for this once that I thought made some sense. He said to a five-year-old, a year was a whole fifth of his life. But to a fifty-year-old a year is only a fiftieth of her life. (Just an age pulled out of a hat for the example - nobody has to tell her real age!) And for my church friend who just turned ninety-six on Friday, it's only a ninety-sixth of his life. Earl is a great guy who still reads through his Bible every year and so does his wife of almost seventy-six years now. She'll soon be ninety-three. They are both such wonderful examples of faithfulness to their family and to us, their church family. When Loretta prays for you, you're bound to be blessed. And the best part of that, she does pray for her family and church. They both have some health problems, but Loretta fixed him a birthday supper last week. Whenever I need a spiritual boost, I know exactly where to go.

My intent when I started this post was to talk about perseverance in life and in working to reach your goals, so maybe I didn't really get side-tracked talking about Earl and Loretta. They have definitely persisted in their faith and in their love for each other and in their cheerful good humor. My Sunday school lesson this morning was about Nehemiah rebuilding Jerusalem's wall. The writer of the lesson was a college teacher and he wrote about the many students who had passed through his classrooms in the last twenty-five years. Some did well. Some did not. He said the common factor in those students who succeeded was persistence. He put this line into the study guide. You're in this for the long haul; be faithful. While he was talking about students and Nehemiah in the Bible story, I think we all need to be faithful to our dreams and our goals in life. As Paul says in the Bible, we need to run our race to the best of our ability. Faithfully. We can't give up when we get winded around the first turn. We have to keep pressing on.

If you're a writer, that's a great thing to remember. People are always asking me what attribute I have that helped me become a published writer. And I tell them the most important ingredient for me is perseverance or persistence. Pick your word. My first novel didn't sell. My second novel didn't even get an approving nod from the agent who had agreed to try to sell my first novel. I could have quit trying. Rejections are daggers in a young writer's heart. But you know what, they aren't reasons to give up. Not if the urge to write lives within you the way it lives within me. Rejections are just a goad to do better with the next book or to keep trying to find an editor who will look at the rejected work with a kinder eye. My third book sold. My fourth book sold. My fifth book did not. At least not for twenty or so years and after a major rewrite. My sixth book did not. I'm still hoping on it, so maybe another major rewrite is in order. But I did keep pressing on. I did keep writing. And eventually I sold another book and then another one. So you can see why I value perseverance and I'm thankful for the double handful of stubborness the good Lord surely dropped into the mix when he was figuring out the best ingredients to use for me.

It's also valuable to remember that as Nehemiah led the Jewish people in rebuilding the wall one stone at a time, so a writer has to write a story one word and one sentence at a time. That's something I'm concentrating on right now as I move along with my new story. One word, one sentence, one scene, one chapter at a time.

On a down on the farm note, I thought I was going to be a new grandmom again last night, but the doctor sent my daughter-in-law home to see if she could wait a few more days. She's still having pains in spite of the medicine they gave her to stop them, but so far it's a wait and see situation. So maybe next week I'll be able to announce the arrival of a new sweet child into the world. And that child will start on her life journey where she'll learn the value of persistence.

So be faithful to your dreams and keep pressing on to your goals. That's what I'm trying to get my new characters to do, too.

Finishing the Race

Hi, everybody. Another Wednesday, but this one not the ordinary mid-week hump Wednesday. My daughter and her husband are visiting this week after a weekend in Texas where Gary, my son-in-law, entered and finished an Ironman race. That's impressive. It took him five hours and forty-three minutes to swim a mile plus, bike fifty some miles and run thirteen miles. The question he's heard most from us is "Why?" I don't think any of us could imagine doing one of those things. I might walk thirteen miles, but not run them. So we are admiring his endurance and perseverance in finishing the race. And shaking our heads as we ask "Why would you want to do that to your body?"

So since they're visiting we went to see the babies in WV today. And the rest of the family there too. The twins have almost doubled in size since I last saw them and I have no trouble telling them apart. Now if I could just get the right name to roll off my tongue. I do that trick of calling every name but the right one. They say that's a grandma age thing. Oh well. The grandma benefits are well worth a little aging.

But back to the perserverance of finishing the race. I've always thought perserverance was the greatest attribute a writer can have. It takes perseverance to finish a book length piece of fiction. It takes perseverance to finish any length piece of fiction and then go back and rewrite it until it's right. It takes perseverance to keep on trying when rejections come knocking on your door and editors aren't loving the work you're doing. Perseverance is what keeps you going when you entertain thoughts of quitting. It's perseverance that tells you the next book, the next story might be the one. So here's a quote or two about stiffening your writer's backbone and continuing to write what you know you must.

"The whole duty of a writer is to please and satisfy himself, and the true writer always plays to an audience of one." ...William Strunk

"Men fail much oftener from want of perseverance than from want of talent." ...William Cobbett

"Even the woodpecker owes his success to the fact that he uses his head and keeps pecking away until he finishes the job he starts." Coleman Cox

I'll be in West Virginia at the Book Fest on Saturday, October 11 at 10 a.m. Hope if any of you are in the area you'll come on over and say hi. I just found out my oldest WV granddaughter has a volleyball match at noon, so there goes my one sure attendee. The rest of the grandkids are a little young to care about hearing grandma talk about developing characters. They're too busy developing their own characters. So wish me luck and a few interested participants in my workshop. I'll be sure to catch you up on the good and the bad (hope there's not much of that) of it all on Sunday.