Moments are momentous. That’s what gives them value. Truly, my first poem that I composed and wrote down was when I was in the 5th grade. It was about twelve lines and told of brushing my teeth. (I will wait until the laughter stops.) I felt very creative and quoted it to a friend who giggled, covered her mouth, and said, “Oh, Charis, really?” From that point, I tried to stick to research and non-fiction. I kept running into the problem of connecting interesting sentences and of correct spelling before the days of typing and spell-check. In the 8th grade I turned in a paper to a very handsome, by my standards, male student teacher. Every 14 year old girl was sure that 21 year old male came to class to be with her. He returned my paper with a red circle around navel. When I thumbed dictionary pages, I found I had chosen the word for belly button (how personal could I get) instead of naval for a ship on the water. Again a hiatus from brain to hand to paper to sharing.
Then, thank goodness for Miss Dunn. She was the town spinster who lived with her mother and from the beginning of the world to the end, she taught English to groups of eighteen freshmen through seniors. What one didn’t master first time around appeared again the next year. From athletic jocks to blinking eye-lash eyed girls, we memorized poems and read banned books. We wrote book reviews, different genre of poems, and biographical stories. Peer reviews were the three important statements: ”I really liked…,” ”I didn’t understand…,” and “I want to know about…..”
From that period on, my passion was and is daily reading and writing. I have several notebooks where I have entered sentences or amassed facts, not to reuse unless quoted, but to be diving boards into depths I want to explore. I have led students from structures that sustained them through beginning efforts to their becoming the boy who waved a paper in my face proclaiming, “I wrote a perfect sentence last night.”
If asked by a small circle who know, I can write a note, or a paragraph, or an explanation on request. In a bookcase, I have four rows of twenty-five years of daily journals with prayers, fears, aspirations, and accomplishments with the addition of stickers or photographs. After David’s death I anchored myself with the task of writing Letmetellya every week as a discipline. All the above information was provided because a whole WSJ section this day is on Artificial Intelligence and Chatbot. I’m not against changes. I’ve welcomed some. Yet, I want you to know that I, and only I, am responsible for what I offer to you. Handle it tenderly. Words matter to me and they have an even greater value to the world.
Jesus provided far more God-revealing signs than are written down in this book. These are written down so you will believe that Jesus is the Messiah,
John 20:31 The Message
Let Me Tell Ya 