28 May Hold onto Your Dream – Even if it Goes Missing
When I was in third grade the NYC public school teachers went on strike. After three weeks my father enrolled my younger brother and I in a small neighborhood Yeshiva (Jewish religious school). In the mornings we would pray, study religious subjects and learn to read and write in Hebrew. After lunch we’d have our secular studies, being groomed to become doctors, lawyers and teachers.
My world changed in fifth grade. Our secular teacher, Mr. Werchen, was a long haired, blue eyed, gentle smile of a man with a guitar. He talked to us about the Vietnam war, sang us songs of peace, and encouraged us to write poems that he taped to the back wall. All the girls had a crush on him, the boys thought he was cool. When the girls started wearing beads, and the boys avoided haircuts, Mr. Werchen was invited to leave. But it was too late. The seed had been planted. I would become a writer.
Everything changed again in tenth grade English. I was drifting in the back by the window when Frank McCourt began the class with a story about his life in Limerick. I was mesmerized by his Irish brogue and twinkling eyes. The next day I sat in front. I volunteered to be on the school’s programming committee and soaked in Mr. McCourt until I graduated.
In college I took creative writing. Adjuncts hated my work. I didn’t care. I kept writing. And then my world changed again in graduate school. Studying business, the creative fire of my younger self began to smolder. Later, as a young academic in pursuit of tenure, the Academy rejected most of what I wrote until any semblance of voice, the dream, vanished. By the time I became a full professor the nails were deep into my creative coffin.
Then on a sabbatical, after years of talking about a book about how I learned everything as a bartender, I tried to write it. I couldn’t write. I stared at my laptop in tears, ready to turn it into a frisbee. I traveled to Andalusia, Mexico, California. Nothing. When I was ready to give up, I reached out to my BFF’s writer husband David Woolfe. He patiently coached me through pages of dribble until I found my voice. Another 5 years, three big rewrites, a “no” from the publisher, two more editors, then a “yes”, I was standing in the corner office of a senior editor at Simon & Schuster. Early for the meeting I scanned her bookcase. There was a pile of the 20th anniversary printing of Mr. McCourt’s Pulitzer Prize winning Angela’s Ashes. The opening page was a picture of his twinkling eyes. Here we were. Full circle. I whispered to the book: “Mr. McCourt- I finally made it to the corner office of Simon & Schuster”. It was hard to hide the tears when the editor walked in.
On October 1, 2018 I was a guest of the NY State Writer’s Institute. I slowly walked its hallowed halls taking in the book posters where since 1983 over 2000 writers had journeyed. A sacred place of all my literary heroes. With magnetic force I found Mr. McCourt. Stroking the frame, overwhelmed again, I shared my story with Paul Grondahl the Institute’s director. I sat in Toni Morrison’s chair as we created a podcast. I struggled to make it to my craft talk mascara intact. The dam broke when I was asked to sign the poster for my event, to be hung in the hallowed halls, as if I was a real writer now too.
The dream seed was planted when I was 10. It was watered in my teens. Then buried. Deep. But now, at 59, with my book in it’s second printing, and a place in the archives at the NY State Writer’s Institute the dream lives. It was never lost. Just waiting for me to get other things out of the way so it could find the room to grow.
Don’t give up your dream. Let it rest if you must -but seek it out when it is time. Its essence waits for you to claim it.
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