Endings and beginnings. They are both scary and exciting. The ending of a career in an industry that I never enjoyed but made an adequate living doing was exciting. Embarking on something new is scary.
As an eighteen-year-old, enrolled at Phoenix College, I took a class on creative writing. The very first night, the professor got down to business. He didn’t care about our names, the syllabus, or goals for the class. None of that even came up that night.
He tasked the class with writing an essay on anything we wanted to write about. It had to be turned in that night. He then walked out of the classroom.
This professor was smart. He needed to know if anyone in the class could write, let alone express themselves creatively before he could discuss goals of any type for the semester.
I chose to write about my family’s clown hound, a black and tan coon hound, named Blossom.
At the end of class he returned, coffee cup in hand, softly whistling to himself. We dutifully turned in what we had written. He gave the class another assignment and sent us home.
I was in complete eighteen-year-old shock. I had, for the first time in my education process, been trusted and treated like an adult! I began planning my next assignment.
The following Monday night, sitting in class, next assignment on his desk, I nervously waited. I wanted to learn how to write because I was taught from an early age, that proper grammar and writing distinguished an uneducated person from one who had paid attention in class and received good schooling.
The professor stood at the front of the class, looking at the twenty students he held in his hands, molding into writers. “I want to read something to the class,” he said. “Listen carefully.”
He began reading. I shrank into my chair, head down, face beet red. He was reading MY ESSAY! He looked at me, hiding my face in my hands, peeking through my fingers at him, embarrassed beyond belief.
He smiled at me.
When he finished, he said, “This is a writer. Good writing is adequate. Great writing captures you, makes you desperate to read more, know more, learn more. This writer captures all of that.” He called me up in front of the class and said, “I want to know more, you did your job,” as he handed the essay to me and thanked me.
After class, he asked me to stay. He told me I was talented, and I had a career in front of me, if I was willing to put in the work needed to hone my craft.
I was so unready for what he told me, so insecure with what I had to offer the world, not knowing what I wanted to do with my life, that I chose not to listen to his sage advice.
Life went on, job to job, until I found something that I made good money doing. Solely for the money, I made my career doing something I wasn’t suited for, but it paid the bills.
What did suit me was the man I married, a cowboy in every sense of the word. He taught me to hunt in the Colorado Rockies, made sure I had a good horse, then a great mule, loved me for who I was, and most importantly, let me be me. In return, I learned everything I could about living a simpler life, and thirty-two years later, I still love him with all my heart.
Oh, yes, lest I forget to mention it, I began writing again. The stories the cowboys, cowgirls and ranchers I knew told me were too rich to pass up. I had to commit them to paper, to continue their and my history. I’ve now completed my first western and am currently fleshing it out for publication.
Life really does come around full circle if we let it.
