Big news!

For those of you yet to be initiated into the worlds of Facebook and Twitter, I have some good news. (And to those of you who have already been made privy to my good news, act like you haven’t heard it yet.)

I had the pleasure on Tuesday to speak with Rachelle Gardner, a very respected and much admired literary agent.It was to be, she said, The Call. I had never gotten The Call before and so didn’t really know what The Call meant, but it sounded good enough to allow me the pleasure of getting my hopes up. Turns out that was the appropriate thing to do. Rachelle was kind enough to get the whole Are you still available for representation?/Would you like me to represent you? matter over within the first minute of the conversation. I could breathe after that. Breathing is important when you’re talking to someone.

The story behind how this all happened is actually pretty amazing and close to miraculous, but I’ll save that for another time. Suffice it to say that prayer, persistence, and the help of good friends can accomplish much.

I’ve been warned that things will change now in my life, and that’s welcomed. Everyone can use a change now and then. Me especially.

All indications are that I’m about to get very busy. This is a good thing. After so many years of struggling to write with only a faint sense of purpose, I now have a very clear one. Trust me, it makes a difference.

With that in mind, I’m going to try to switch things up a bit around here. You’ll still be able to find me on Katdish’s blog every Monday (at least until she kicks me out), and then I’ll be back here every day from Tuesday to Friday. I’ll mix in new stories with a few polished reruns for the newbies, and I may devote one day a week to more questions (assuming there’s anything else you good people are curious about). Fun all around.

In the meantime, please know this:

This could not have happened without you. There was a time in the not too distant past when my hand hovered over the “delete” button for this blog. I didn’t see the point in continuing. And then you came along. And then you told your friends. And then your friends told theirs. And then, much to my amazement, you kept coming back for more.

I get a lot of emails thanking me for my words, stories of people whose lives have been made a tad brighter by something they’ve read here. I cherish each and every one of them. But honestly, I’m shaking my head as I read them all.

Because you made my life a tad brighter first.

Love made visible

Love has always intrigued me as one of those divine aspects of life that is both fleeting and permanent, fragile and strong. For thousands of years Poets and philosophers have tried to define it, but to no avail. You can’t speak about love and get it just right. You have to see it in action to really know what it is.

Which is why I can appreciate the spectacle of a fine wedding.

I’m sitting in a church pew on a bright Sunday afternoon looking very James Bondish in a suit and tie. Because what I expect to see in the next fifteen minutes or so is not just a marriage ceremony, not just candles and pretty music and maids all in a row, but true love made visible.

The groom stands at the front of the church, hands folded in front of his cummerbund. He is not nervous, this man. There are no pre-wedding jitters or thoughts of a quick escape through the side door. No, he knows exactly what he’s doing. Not marrying this woman never crossed his mind.

The organist launches into a fevered rendition of “Here Comes the Bride,” and the gathered stand and turn to face the opening doors. A beaming bride and her proud father make their way down the aisle.

Hand in hand. Not just out of love, but out of necessity.

The father passes off his princess to her prince, and the two stand facing one another. I’m sure they have spent many moments over the past weeks staring into each other’s eyes, wrestling in their own way with the prospect of this moment. And though they are surrounded by God and a few hundred friends and family, I can tell that to them no one else exists. The world has been shut out and the door barred.

There is just them and nothing else. For now, anyway.

The preacher begins the standard reading of 1 Corinthians 13. I wonder how many times I’ve heard that scripture read. How many times those words have skidded over the surface of my heart but not really plunged to its core.

Love is patient, love is kind…

They’ve known one another for about four years now, this bride and groom. About a year and a half ago over a nice dinner picnic in the park, he pulled out a diamond ring along with the potato salad. Marry me, he asked. Yes! she answered.

...love does not brag and is not arrogant…

That their love was pure and true was unquestioned. God had crafted them as the only two pieces of a beautiful puzzle. It was cliché, yes, but true—they completed one another.

Both knew they didn’t deserve such happiness. But both praised God daily for allowing them to have it. And now that they had found each other, they would be together always.

…bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things…

When you’re in love, everything seems possible. There are no sudden bends in the road ahead, no ruts to fall into. There are only clear paths and sunny skies. Whatever darkness your life was under is now bathed in sunny skies.

And it’s true. Everything is possible.

Not just the good. The bad, too.

When the bride began suffering headaches a few months ago, the doctors told her it was likely migraines. Don’t worry, they said. Just the stress of planning a wedding. When they continued despite medication, tests were ordered. Don’t worry, they said. Just a precaution.

She worried anyway. Her fiancée did what any man would do for the woman he loves. He comforted her, held her, and told her everything would be okay. After all, their love was meant to be. He busied her with thoughts of caterers and flowers, but he busied himself with that same worry.

A few days later, they both sat numb as the doctor informed her of the cancer eating away her brain.

…endures all things…

After the tears and the confusion and the silence, the two talked. How could this be? How can God let this happen? What can we do now?

They had no answer to those first two questions, but they knew what to do about the third. They would marry. They would celebrate their lives together as long as they could. Their love would endure.

It must. Because as I watch them staring into one another’s eyes, my attention returns to the words of the preacher. He is finishing his scripture reading, and I whisper to myself the last three words he speaks to them:

“Love never fails…”

Yes.

Here this bride and groom stand, in front of God and two hundred people, testifying to those three words. They are true love made manifest. And we are all witnesses.

And now, so are you.

The writing life

My son is reaching that age when Mommy does not become less relevant, just less needed. Meanwhile, I’m becoming more of a fixture in his mind.

There has been recent evidence of this, too. Batman shirts and cargo shorts are being replaced by faded jeans and black Ts. Cartoons are giving way to baseball games. His Iron Man hat has been exchanged for a spiffy black cowboy one.

But most telling is the fact that he has begun carrying around a notebook and pen in his back pocket.

I take paper and pen with me wherever I go, mostly because I have the memory of a fruit fly. You never know when something worthy of writing down will happen, and there is no worse hell than witnessing something good that you know you’ll forget.

So when I pulled my own notebook from my back pocket yesterday and proceeded to write something down, my son did the same.

“What’cha doin’ there?” I asked him.

“I need to get this down,” he said.

“Get what down?”

He looked at me, confused. “…I don’t know,” he shrugged.

I nodded. “Don’t worry,” I told him. “I have the same problem sometimes.”

I rose from the table to take a look at his work. Squiggly lines mostly, along with a few numbers, three exclamation points, and a smiley face. Standard five-year-old fare.

“Whaddaya think?” he asked.

“I think It’s brilliant,” I said. “Can I copy that down and use it?”

“Yes!”

I rubbed his head, grabbed my own notebook, and began writing.

“Daddy?” he asked, peering at me.

“Yeah, bud?”

“I’m gonna be a writer when I grow up. You know, like you.”

My pen stopped.

“Oh, yeah?”

“Yeah. I like to write. Writin’s fun.”

I stared at him, unsure of what to say. I settled on, “Well, you have plenty of time to figure that out.”

The answer was good enough for him to accept. He gathered his notebook and pen and left me to ponder what he’d just said.

My son sat down one day three years ago with a sheet of paper and a blue crayon, and something very special happened. He put the latter on the former and made a blue streak from top left to bottom right. Magic. And when he scurried off and came back to that sheet of paper an hour later, he found more magic—that streak was still there.

And though one important truth was incomprehensible to him at the time, I knew he was creeping ever towards it: if he wrote, he could always leave something behind for others to remember.

That, in a broad sense, is why many writers write. To plant a sign into the hard earth that says I Was Here. To know that to someone somewhere, what you say matters.

I had to admit that what my son said was true. Writing is fun. As frightening as a blank sheet of paper or a computer screen bathed in white was, it was also marvelous—a canvas upon which to paint my story and a map by which to explore my world.

But I knew what he did not—writing was sometimes also not fun. Writing is work. Difficult, exhausting, painful work. It takes courage to look genuinely, whether into life or your own heart, and more courage to share what you find with others. To write is to bare your deepest self, naked of sham and disguise.

It is lonely work, a solitary walk through a land of light and shadow. The writing life is one full of irony in that by exposing yourself to the world you inadvertently construct walls around you to keep the world away. And though you may indeed be surrounded by friends and loved ones, you know that in the end you are utterly and completely alone. You write. They do not. That gulf is not easily bridged.

Because for many of us writing is not a job, but neither is it a hobby. It goes deeper than that, permeating every aspect of our lives. Every conversation, every face, every moment bear is seen through the lens of the page. We ply our trade from the moment we wake until the moment we sleep, and often even our dreams are grist for the mill.

Success is fleeting. Failure is constant. You are turned away by agents and editors, gatekeepers of your aspirations, and deemed unworthy of your dreams. You struggle though doubt and fear. You drown in desperation.

You face the agony of knowing that no matter what you manage to get down on the page, you will never feel as though you’ve gotten it down just right.

And I was left with this one question: was that the life I wanted for my son?

Yes.

Because despite it all, there is to me no greater pursuit in life than the search for meaning, and no other way to chart those undiscovered lands within us than with pen as our compass and paper as our sail.

What today means to me

As far as I can tell, it was Jimmy Buffett who first likened one's birthday to a trip around the sun. I like that. I like it a lot. Because scrape away all the things that don't matter, and life boils down to just that - a trip. One with a beginning and middle that differs from one person to the next. The end, though, is common to us all.

Today is my thirty-seventh birthday. A person can easily learn a lot in thirty-seven years, and one can certainly learn very little, too. I figure that if I'm going to be spinning around on this beautiful hunk of rock for very long, I'd best be learning something.

It's been my practice for the last twenty or so years to sit down on the eve of every birthday and write out what I'd learned over the previous twelve months. The reasons for this vary from year to year, but they all come down to this: I need to make sure I've learned something. Thinking that I've wasted 365 entire days would be a little depressing.

My list of things learned is posted over at Katdish's blog today, and dare I say so, but it leads me to believe that I've had a more than adequate year. Much of the thanks for that goes to you, who bothers to take a few moments out of what I'm sure is a busy day to stop here just to see what's been on my mind. You have no idea how much I appreciate you.

So come on over and read my list. Add to it if you'd like. Take away some, too. And hey, any birthday wishes would be most welcome...

The banner still waves...

(This post appeared as a column in the Staunton, VA News Leader)


I’ve heard there are grumblings that “The Star Spangled Banner” should be removed as our national anthem. It’s too antiquated, those grumblings say. And the words are not only hard to understand, but hard to sing. What kind of national anthem do you have if it’s hard to sing?

And to tell you the truth, some of those grumblings are right. I’ve heard the anthem positively butchered by well-meaning folks who were simply mystified by the phrase “O’er the ramparts we watched were so gallantly streaming.” I couldn’t sing that, either.

That isn’t to say, though, that I’m all for replacing the words of Mr. Francis Scott Key with “My Country, ‘Tis of Thee” or “America the Beautiful.” I’m not. I like things the way they are just fine. Not because I love our anthem. Not because I love the words.

But because it’s endured.

We are a people who look ever forward. Hope and change are our new touchstones, and neither of those are readily found by glancing over our shoulders. No, the promised land of better times lies ahead. Just there, over the horizon.

We say that the past doesn’t matter, just the future. Not where we’ve been, but where we’re going. And while that may be correct in some aspects, it isn’t in others. In many ways the future is dependant upon the past, and you don’t know where you’re going unless you take a look behind to see where you’ve been.

That’s true in both the life of a person and the life of a country. We are not the product of our tomorrows, but our yesterdays. The freedoms we enjoy may be sustained by the continued sacrifice and vigilance of today, but they were granted by the courage of those who have gone before us. Men who held firm to the believe that freedom was worth persecution and that death should be favored over oppression.

Men who put country and people ahead of party and self. Who believed leaders were not above the public but subject to them.

Who believed that the ultimate authority was not themselves, but God.

That we continue to cling to what some see as a worn and outdated song for our national anthem is to be reminded that there was a time in our country when such men existed. Perhaps that’s why there is this slight but steady push to modernize the singing of praise for our country. It will help us cope with the knowledge that such men seem to be more difficult to find now.

Whereas our leaders of yesterday are revered, our leaders today are ridiculed. Our trust with those first great Virginians, Washington and Jefferson and Madison, have been replaced by a mistrust for those who lead us today. This, I suppose, is inevitable. The natural consequence of favoring a winning smile and a photogenic face over substance and wisdom.

Those ideas of freedom and liberty that inflamed the hearts and minds of our forefathers seem to have burned to embers now. What caused them to stand and fight now allows us to sit and rest.

So this Fourth of July weekend when we’re surrounded by the present and looking forward to the future, perhaps it would do us well to pause and look back, far back, and remember the kind of people it took to found this country. Because that is exactly the kind of people we need in order to continue it.

Let the words be sung, and let that flame of freedom and liberty ignite again. Let us all make sure that when the question is asked, “O! say does that star-spangled banner yet wave O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave?” the answer will always be yes.

A matter of time

I’m going to die on November 5, 2055. So says the nifty little quiz I just filled out on the internet. And though it’s hard to put much faith in the accuracy of a prediction based in part on how often I recycle (question number five), this is good information to have. Because whether the date is exact or not, the truth of it is.

One day, I’m going to die.

November 5, 2055, does seem reasonable. I’ll be eighty-three years old then, and my children will be in their late forties. I’ll most likely have grandchildren, be retired, and spend most of my days telling everyone who will listen that the world was a much better place back in 2009.

So yes, dying at eighty-three would be okay with me. That’s a good age to smile at this world and wave goodbye, right there in the meaty part between hanging around too long and not long enough.

At least, that’s what I thought. I’m not so sure now. Having forty-six years left for me to finish whatever it is I want to start seems like a lot of time, but it isn’t when you start to dig a little deeper. Trust me. Because that’s what I did.

If the scribbles on the sheet of paper in front of me are right, most of my remaining forty-six years are already spoken for. I’ll spend twelve of them sleeping, three eating, ten either exercising or resting, and another ten just on home maintenance.

All of which leaves me with a grand total of eleven years to live. One hundred and thirty-two months to make a difference.

Not a lot, is it? Especially considering the fact that November 5, 2055 is at best an approximation and at worst a clever marketing ploy designed to deluge me with junk mail. My end may come later. It may also come before I finish writing this. I don’t know.
None of us do.

Which is why it amazes me that we always think there is time. Plenty of time. There’s always tomorrow, we say. And that may be true for some of us. But not for everyone.

About 146,000 people in the world will wake up this morning thinking there’s plenty of time, not knowing this will be their last day in this life. That’s 6,098 people an hour, 102 people every minute, and about 2 per second. In the time it took you to read this paragraph, twenty people have died.

Amazing, isn’t it? Sad, too. Not because our lives must end, but because the thought of death rarely crosses our minds.

Life fools us into thinking it is this hulking, indestructible beast, when it’s really as fragile as a porcelain figurine . It is holy and sacred and fleeting and never guaranteed. Believing otherwise is not only dangerous to us, it’s dangerous to how we live.

The truth? We don’t have plenty of time. Our every breath is the oil that moves the gears of our days, sending us closer to the moment when we say goodbye to this world and hello to the next. We can’t put off chasing that dream. We can’t delay making those amends. We can’t wait to say “I love you” or “I’m sorry.”

We can’t linger when it comes to the things that make living worthwhile, the people and the dreams that give us meaning. We have to take care of them every minute, every moment. Because maybe they or we won’t be here the next.

There is no time for doubts. No time for hate. No time for hanging on when it’s time to let go and letting go when it’s time to hang on. We get one shot at this world, one chance to do something good and right and true. That time isn’t later. It’s now.

Don’t think it’s never too late. Because sometimes it is.

(This post was first published as a column by the Staunton, VA News Leader)

Planted with love

May 16, 2009

“Let’s go, Sweets,” I say.

“I’m comin’, Daddy,” my daughter answers.

Around here there are many signs of approaching spring, everything from the return of the robins to the spousal ducks waddling around our house. But nothing quite says spring like tilling the garden and planting what will become, with plenty of sweat and prayers, future groceries.

I like planting a garden. Like getting into the dirt. Especially on a cool Saturday in May when the sun’s out and there’s a gentle breeze blowing off the mountains.

I generally do very well keeping my priorities in line. I know what comes first and what doesn’t. The problem is that very often those priorities shift according to both season and day, which is a fact that certain small members of my family cannot comprehend.

For instance. A Saturday in March will revolve around a trip to Charlottesville or pizza with my folks. But a Saturday in May will revolve around one thing and one thing only: baseball. And when that Saturday afternoon game features the Yankees? Let’s just say I’m focused and leave it at that.

And yet here, now, my focus is not just on the game. It’s on the fact that the game started ten minutes ago and my daughter is taking her sweet time planting the beans.

I stand watching her, swinging the hoe in my hands like a baseball bat and tapping my boot into the dirt in the hopes that my aggravation will drain out of my foot and into the ground. She is crouched in front of me, slowly placing one seed a time into the furrow, then gently pressing down on it with a small finger.

“Honey,” I tell her, “you don’t have to do it that way. You sow beans.”

“How can you sew beans?” she asks.

“Not sow, sew,” I answer, then realize how absurd that sounds. “Like this.” I take a handful of seeds and wave my hand from side to side, spilling them into the dirt.

“I don’t think that’s right, Daddy.”

“Trust me,” I say, glancing at my watch. Fifteen minutes late. I’ve missed Derek Jeter’s first trip to the plate. “You trust me, right?”

“Yes.”

“Then whaddya say we do it that way?”

“No.”

“Why? You said you trusted me.”

“I do, but you don’t know what you’re doing.”

Oh. Okay, then.

“Why should we do it your way?”

She rises, dusts off the knees of her jeans, and looks me in the eye. “You’re not treatin’ the seeds right, Daddy” she says. “You’re just throwin’ them. I’m planting them.”

“But we’re gonna just cover them with dirt,” I explain. “Either way, they’re just planted.”

She shakes her head. “No, Daddy. With your way they’re just planted. With my way, they’re planted with love.”

“With love?”

“I take each bean and tuck it into the dirt, like it’s going to bed. And then I kiss it with my finger. And then I say in my head, ‘Please God, let this seed grow.’ Then it’s planted and I can do the next one.”

“So they have to be planted with love?” I ask.

“Yes,” she says.

“But if they have food and water, they’ll grow anyway.” I have her there. Think so, anyway.

“People grow with food and water, too,” she says. “But don’t they grow better with love?”

My foot stops tapping. I swing the hoe around, transforming it on one motion from a Louisville Slugger to a pole to lean on.

I gaze upon this little girl, bundled against a brisk May wind. I am her father. The provider. The food and water to her life. And she is my daughter, the fragile seed I’m coaxing to grow.

But I want her to do more than just grow. I want her to bloom. And I know she won’t with just food and water. She needs love, too.

The sort of love that comes from ignoring a ballgame and spending some time with my daughter in the garden on a cool Saturday in May.

So we stood there, the two of us, planting each bean one at a time until the sun snuck over the mountains and said goodnight.


June 29, 2009

I went out yesterday evening to survey our small crop. The squash is ready, as are the onions. The corn's coming along just fine, and it looks as though I'll soon be enjoying some peppers.

And the beans? Well, judge for yourself:




Looks like my daughter's on to something.

I missed that Yankee game, but I’m certain I watched the highlights. I can’t remember who won, though. Can't remember how many hits Derek Jeter got or how many innings Andy Pettite went. Can't remember any blown calls by the umps or all the things the announcers said that I disagreed with.

But I will always carry the memory of a father and his daughter planting four rows of beans, all with love. And I will remember that whatever planting I do in life needs to be done with love as well.