You Never Know

When you’re raising children, you never know what one thing that you say and do, or what one thing they see and hear, will set them on a path they will follow for the rest of their lives. This is the single most stressful thing I’ve learned as a parent, a grandparent, and now paraprofessional in kindergarten. I never want to ever say anything that will have a negative effect on anyone grown or not so grown. 

I know first-hand how one such comment can have a devastating effect on a young life. When I was seventeen, I turned in a final exam paper to the hardest English teacher in all of Briarwood High School, home of the Mighty Buccaneers. A few days later, she handed the red-inked paper back to me. It had so many corrections it looked fresh out of a horrific battle. I told her I didn’t understand. “You said the first day of class, once we learned the rules of the English Language, then we could break them.” What she said next, put me on a pathway I thought I was destined to be on for the rest of my life.

“Well, from the looks of your paper, you obviously didn’t learn anything in my class.”  

For years, that D-minus had convinced me that I couldn’t write. So, I didn’t. I did everything I could not to write a single word. But then, years later, something far more important than my fear of writing happened: September 11^th.  

So, write I did. 

I sat down and wrote a story – the first true writing I’d done in over twenty-five years. I wasn’t trying to become a writer. I wasn’t submitting a sample because I wanted a job. I was just a firefighter – trying to put into words what it felt like to be working on that day. When I finished, I drove to the newspaper office and left my story at the front desk. 

As I walked back to my car, I knew there were probably some words misspelled. I knew the punctuation was more than likely wrong. I knew if she read it, my eleventh grade English teacher would give it a failing grade. But, as I drove away, I also knew something else. None of that mattered. I wrote the way I felt.                        

And the newspaper editor put it on the front page.                         

A week later, the editor asked me to come in and talk. He asked whether I’d like to keep writing. I gave him probably the most honest answer imaginable: “I can’t. I got a D-minus in eleventh-grade English.”

His answer, “I like your voice. If you keep writing, I’ll give you a weekly column.”

My English teacher evaluated whether I could follow the rules. The editor recognized something much harder to teach:

I had found a voice.

And there’s an extraordinary circle to this story. A teacher’s comment made me stop writing. She told me that once I learned the rules, I could break them. Decades later, an editor read the way I naturally broke some of those rules – the conversational rhythm, the fragments, the timing, the humor, the way it sounds like somebody telling you a story across the table while sipping a glass of sweet tea – and he said, “Give me that every week.”                        

So, I did. Since September 2001.

That’s roughly 25 years of weekly deadlines. The seventeen-year-old who walked away believing he couldn’t write eventually became the man who has had to find something worth saying to his community every single week for a quarter of a century.

And it started because, on one of the worst days imaginable, being a firefighter mattered more than being afraid to write.

That’s one hell of an origin story for a newspaper columnist. Our thoughts are with those who lost loved ones that day. Some may forget, but this writer never will.