“Dad, you are not getting any younger.”
My youngest daughter is what I have often described as a divine or inspired nag concerning my writing. Everyone should be so blessed to have such a loving, direct, and insistent family member or friend in their life. And of late, with my website up and semi-running for about a year now, and with my stated primary writing goal of seriously getting back to finishing a novel and a lengthy book of nonfiction now on the very near horizon, I have had to fully face and thoughtfully consider what I have undertaken and what I hope to “realistically” accomplish at my age, now seventy-one years old, as I write this particular thought piece.
About a year and a half ago, when I turned seventy, I knew that this was a very significant age. And as I have discussed with a few close friends, seventy seems an age when many things begin to be more firmly established and set, more clearly seen – either in retrospect or in the present – all combining to create a new and perhaps final primary path and reach of one’s life. These factors coalescing include the family you are in – those born into it, those added, and those lost along the way. And the touch of close friends – a perennial influence encompassing those still alive and vital within one’s life, those whose path has carried them distances away in miles or accessibility of heart or both, or who have since left life, not all departing easily, their memory and impact still present, but not as intensely colored as before. For as with everything in life, time arranges and rearranges – sometimes thoughtfully, sometimes with random chaos – everything into a backdrop, an ever-changing kaleidoscope of colors, hues, and designs against which our lives exist and breathe. This panorama of our life in time embraces all family and friends, those of every category, complexity, and duration, those we loved and love, and cared and care for, and ate and eat with, and kissed, if only once.
Not that life, my life, or any life, is ever really static, for one clear given of human life is change. And I know there are major changes, and the prospect of major decisions to be made, ahead for me in the coming years, in the hopefully coming decades, that will affect and further texture my life. And these life changes, anticipated or bluntly unexpected, and life choices, surprisingly pleasant or difficult, will make necessary further adjustments and decisions to be faced and made, all of these then rippling with further ensuing changes in my life and deeply within me.
In my view right now, I have a fairly sound, healthy body and mind, and I am learning to cope, successfully I believe at this moment, with a certain amount of expected, but admittedly bothersome, short-term memory loss, and I am acquiring the disciplines of learning to put my keys, and journals and pens, and books, and pads of paper and notebooks, always back in the place where they need to be, the place to where I will return to find and retrieve them for further use.
I wouldn’t want now at my age to have another child, a baby, which would take so much work and energy coupled with a lack of sleep, as I know from having at this moment four of my ten grandchildren ages five and under. So why do I want to work 5 to 6 hours every day, writing and rewriting, and dealing daily with the emotional, mental, and spiritual dimensions of whatever I am writing or fashioning? Well, the simplest answer is that writing is my life, and has been since eighth grade when I was thirteen and first started thinking and writing seriously.
I think and write and pray to understand the life around me and the whys of my own life, a pursuit placed within me from my beginning it seems, a pursuit now innate and still vibrant within me today, at seventy-one. For my writing seems to be the vehicle with which I was gifted to pursue my even greater passion of knowing and understanding – similar to why I take photos to then later behold and study, as if in a search for a key or treasure. Both of these pursuits, but especially writing, have evolved into creating the sphere in which I live. I write to pursue my life because this pursuit is my life, and I am always searching for more than just adequate ways to express how I experience life and the things I see. I am also always on the lookout for at least a few others with whom to offer and share the things I write, those few who wish, and perhaps want, to pause and read and listen. However, I am also always mindful of a close friend’s comment, possibly a caution, that I demand a lot from my readers, and so I strive to return as much substance and value to my readers as possible as an addition and adornment to their lives, and as a thank you for the time they invest in what I write.
I do not write under compulsion, but I write as I breathe, a natural yet vital function of my existence. Writing was first introduced to me in 1st grade when I learned how to spell my name, Christopher – a name that I soon excitedly found had many smaller words within it, ten at least, not forgetting to count the “I” and allowing the “O”. Writing then slowly grew but truly opened up for me in a much broader form in 8th grade when my favorite and most influential grammar school teacher, Sister Mary Thomas, invited Mr. Foxworth, the school’s part-time athletic coach, to teach writing to our class one afternoon each week. I was enthralled from the first lesson. I was intrigued by Mr. Foxworth, a recent college graduate when he came to my Catholic grammar school, because he was the first male teacher that I had ever had up to that point, even if he was with us only once a week. I was also very engaged with what he taught about writing, and even though I do not remember anything of the actual content of the class, he did not teach us grammar, but rather he opened something much larger to us, building somehow an expanded sense of the world around us and our interaction with it. Sometimes we had little writing assignments, and I seem to remember him once calling my name out to find where I was seated, and when he came up to me to return my paper, he said a few words about how good my paper was as he handed it back to me. I was surprised and even taken aback by his words, as they were so unexpected and public, and he thus joined Sister Mary Thomas as the only other teacher from whom I ever remember receiving praise in grammar school. It was probably the praise and encouragement from each that drew me to them and that made such a lasting impression upon me.
I would later have Mr. Foxworth as one of my English teachers in high school, and I would later come to refer to him in my mind as, “one of the last of the angry young men”, a description I am not now sure from where it was derived, perhaps something I read about literature, but it was an honest and true compliment on my part towards him. I was never befriended by him, nor by any other teacher for that matter except Sister Mary Thomas, and he was never even truly aware of me individually beyond a few unique personal interactions between us. But when I asked him in my senior year if he would write one of the two recommendations I needed for my college applications, he eventually wrote one, after a few polite yet hesitant reminders on my part. I don’t remember if I actually saw the recommendation, but it must have also been more than adequate, as I was accepted to the University of California, Riverside, on a full four-year scholarship. Now being one of six children from a low-income family was probably a significant factor for the award of the scholarship, but I first had to be admitted to the university, and for whatever part Mr. Foxworth’s recommendation played in that process, I have always been thankful.
Mr. Foxworth was not without his human faults and foibles, true, but in my mind these issues made him more real and unique and even more accessible as a person. For whatever his mood – which always seemed tied into women and the politics of the day – he was always honest and genuine in how he treated you and responded, and I just instinctively trusted him to be himself, which says volumes about him as a teacher and a person, as this was my evaluation of him as a teenage boy in high school. And then, with just the few classes, interactions and times together, he imparted a quiet lasting influence on my life, even though he was never aware of it. Perhaps it was the fact that few teachers – just two – took a real positive interest in my life, that this also helped make his passion for writing and his intense personality leave such an enduring impression and encouragement within me. So, because when I was thirteen, I received the initial encouragement and the vision to write from Mr. Foxworth, this is one of the reasons I embark on seriously writing now.
I also write because I cannot sing, nor can I compose or even imagine new music – all many light years beyond me. Perhaps this a silly, nonsensical reason to some, but this is a deeply abiding impulse within my life and writing. Because of this lack, music is honored and sheltered within my soul, and is vital to my writing as I aspire, in a sense, to touch the stars. And writing is truly the only way open to me to pursue the heavens. Many times, music provides a deep emotional background that calms and opens new understandings of various aspects of my life, of my past, and of those who I write of, living and departed. Sometimes music also helps me give and anoint, in my mind, certain fictional characters with greater depth, fuller texture, and a truer emotional life. At times, music also provides, in new and fresher ways, an overall soundtrack for understanding and feeling the complexities of what I write, and often furnishes the necessary easy-breathing, emotional environment within which I especially work best, as I ruminate and meditate upon my words and thoughts, as I rewrite and reconstruct sentences, paragraphs, and pages, and deepen and edit all.
I write because I appreciate beauty. I write because the beauty of creation and the endless profound complexity and depth of our humanness as beings created in the image and likeness of God, all colored and heightened by the Beauty and Profound Being of God in all His aspects, create and energize within me a deep drive towards beauty and the necessity of communicating all of this in writing to the best of my ability. And now, even if my writings, pushing as far as I am able the limits of human language and the capacity of my human soul to receive, understand, and share, are just very faint echoes and reflections of the inexhaustible depths of the beauty, complexity and profoundness of God and those created in His image, my attempts to understand and write of the experience of God in my life continually push me forward. And this, is very good in my sight.
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Thoughts & Musings On Writing – Writing In The Shade Of Trees
A friend from Ukraine recommended that I look into your writing this morning as I read his Facebook post. I’m thankful that I have. Just this short account of why you write is encouraging. Thank you Chris.