At a chance meeting with a former colleague, I repeated my saga about the tremendous outpouring I’ve received from so many former students from my first teaching assignment in Dallas years ago because one of them took the time to locate me. As my colleague and I reminisced about some of our former students, she said that she had always planned to contact two of her former teachers to let them know that they had influenced her to become a teacher. But life got in the way and both died before she ever made the effort. She still regrets not taking the time to follow up on her good intentions. It is a regret that many share.
However, I had the good fortune to do my student teaching under my favorite high school teacher and that extra contact pushed me into staying in touch with her until her death. Although we corresponded by mail only a couple of times a year, she knew how much she had touched my life. With her, I didn’t have any regrets; only deep sorrow when her daughter-in-law wrote to say that she had died.
Last year, a woman that I had met at a writer’s retreat wrote me. She’s now writing columns for two newspapers in Mississippi and literature for Baptist publications. Missing our mentor Elizabeth Bowne with whom to share her news, she found me.
Since then, we’ve been corresponding, not frequently, but on occasion. A musician and a librarian, she has such a knack for entwining fitting quotes into her prose.
Until her death, I, like so many of her students, stayed in contact with Elizabeth; she was my friend. I’ve often thought about those other aspiring writers I’ve met over the years, especially those who also called Elizabeth teacher, but I have never taken the time to reach out to them. Thank you, Ginger, for making the effort.
However, as my former students and this renewed friendship have taught me, many people do know what is important. On the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the Muriel Boat Lift from Cuba in 1980, NPR recently told the story of Mirta Ojito, Pulitzer Prize reporter with the New York Times. She not only has written about the experience of immigrating to the United States as a teenager, she has sought out both the boat captain who transported her family and the other families who also found refuge on his boat. She recorded the result of her research in Finding Manana: A Memoir of Cuban Exodus.
In her book, Ojito calls the boat captain, Dick Howell, a Vietnam vet, her hero. When relatives were seeking boats to go to Cuba to bring refugees to this country, Howell volunteered, but refused all offers of pay both from those fleeing Castro’s Cuba and their relatives already living in the U. S. Since the author and captain have been reunited, they have become friends visiting in each other’s homes and with each other’s families. He has even participated in one of her book tours where he was asked to autograph her book, also.
He says after he made the trip, he often wondered if he had been guilty of bringing the “criminals and mentally disturbed” that Castro boasted he had unloaded on the Americans. Ojito, through her research, was able not only to tell him about productive lives of the specific families he had assisted, but also that Castro greatly exaggerated his claims. Her news quelled his lingering doubts about his good intentions a quarter of a century ago.
Opportunities which remind us of those who have crossed our paths arise often. More times than not in failing to take immediate action, we later find ourselves mourning the dead rather than sharing memories with them. If there is someone you want to thank or just greet, today is the time to start the process. It’s amazing whom you can locate easily through the Internet. And from first hand experience, let me attest that such greetings from the past stir the soul.
2005
コメント