Remember the scene in “The Jerk” when Steve Martin’s character excitedly announces “the new phone books are here! The new phone books are here! I’m somebody now!” as he finds his printed name?
That’s how it felt today when my editor sent me the following text today: “Your seg story is out.”
If you had asked me 50 years ago what I would be doing at age 63, writing would have never made the list. Actually, you wouldn’t have to go back that far. Not many know at 13 what they will be doing at 63. Let’s just say writing was never a goal for me.
My career in IT included the dawn of the e-mail age. Prior to that, I only wrote papers for school when I had to. I hated writing in school. My handwriting was messy, and I was a lefty.
I have 63 years of excuses, but the keyboard and the personal computer was a game changer. I became adept at communicating via email. But that was business communication.
My foray into creative writing began in some strange twist of fate, when I took on a Facebook challenge.
The challenge was to post the ten record albums that had the biggest impact on your life. No words, just the album cover.
Thankfully, the friend that challenged me had broken the rules, and decided that each record album needed an explanation. The friend was also a writer. He has written a couple of children’s books.
The funny thing is, I hadn’t known this guy for very long. He was a friend of a friend. It turned out that we had more than a few things in common. Writing, however, was not one of them. Still, I was fascinated that a guy of similar age and background, also an engineer, had written books.
I took on the challenge with gusto, and by the time I got to day seven, I was writing the story of how Dusty met Sally, before opening up to overcoming my fear of singing to entertain my boys when they were little.
Somewhere in the same year as the ten album challenge, I had created an Instagram page for my woodworking. I started writing short explanations of the different woodworking techniques. My online woodworking guru, Paul Sellers, also had a flair for writing. He influenced not only my craftsmanship, but my passion for sharing the excitement of creating something with my hands.
I wish I knew why it took me so long to embrace the arts, and to recognize that writing was another way I could express my artistic side.
I never really thought I had an artistic side. I’m an IT guy. A dork. A nerd. I played in rock bands in high school and college, but deep down, I felt like a wannabe. A poser. A guy with limited talent, but just good enough to fake it.
Many years later, I learned of the term that described the feeling that lingered in my brain.
The dreaded imposter syndrome.
But now I am here, at the ripe old age of 63, bruised and battered, but still in the fight. And my most important essay has been published as part of a project that is near and dear to my heart, confronting my role in pushing back against efforts to end segregation in the post civil rights era South.
I wrote a much too long essay about my school experience two years ago. As fate would have it, I got the chance to submit it for publication. I just needed to get the word count down from a hefty 5,200 to 2,000ish.
It wasn’t easy. I cut entire sections that really didn’t add value. Then I had to re-establish flow. I moved things around. I added new thoughts and then condensed them. My editor helped me.
I had to make it clear why I wrote it. I had to own it.
Of course it would be really easy to say that I was just a child. I was only 11 when our family moved from the big city of Charlotte to rural Georgia.
It would be equally easy to say that my father’s heart was a ticking time bomb and he wanted to return to his home of Union Point, to be close to his cousins and aunts and uncles that he loved.
All of this is true. We didn’t move to escape the school desegregation that started the year before we left.
Or did we?
I’ll never know. My dad passed away in 1979, and mom passed away 40 years later. We never discussed it.
It doesn’t matter why we were there. It only matters that I was there. I needed to own the mistake and see what I could learn in the process.
I think we are afraid that we will somehow tarnish the reputation of our parents, or that our friends will think less of us for doing so. We avoid confrontation. We decide that it’s more comfortable to let a sleeping dog lie.
Isn’t that exactly what our ancestors thought when their parents owned slaves? (Maybe yours did not, but mine did. I’ve got copies of the census records to prove it.)
Isn’t that exactly what our post slavery era ancestors thought when their parents lynched some of those newly freed slaves? (Maybe yours did not, but mine did. I’ve got a copy of the newspaper clipping describing the “justified”event.)
So maybe my parents just wanted what they thought was best for me. I get that. That’s what all parents want. But what did that say about the kids that weren’t welcome at the school that was “best for me” because they had black skin.
Not talking about it is much easier. That’s a big reason why Nathanael Greene Academy and other schools founded on racist principles are still in existence 50+ years later.
Fine Shavings 