By Leslie Fiering
PROMPT—I am grateful for ...
Dedicated to my father (1923-1989)
You loved words. You loved reading them, writing them or using them to teach. Whether you passed that love on to me through nature or nurture, we’ll never know since you nurtured me with words from as early as I can remember.
There were those rainy afternoons when I sat curled in your lap as your sonorous voice dramatized the trial between Old Scratch and a sharp New England lawyer in Steven Vincent Benet’s The Devil and Daniel Webster or the daring escapes of Allan Quartermain in H. Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines.
Before bed, there were the stories and poems of Winnie the Pooh read with so much delight and glee—and so often—I learned the words by heart. To this day, I can recite these words from A. A. Milne’s poem, “Disobedience.”
James James
Morrison Morrison
Weatherby George Dupree
Took great
Care of his Mother,
Though he was only three.
James James Said to his Mother,
"Mother," he said, said he;
"You must never go down
to the end of the town,
if you don't go down with me.”
As I got older, you would ask leading questions about whatever you’d just read aloud. Was it about more than it seemed? How did it make me feel? What might have happened afterward?
ME: I can’t explain what I’m thinking.
YOU: Try to put it into words.
ME: That’s the problem. I don’t know how to do that.
YOU: It’s simple. If you can see it in your head, just describe what
you’re seeing.
In this way, you not only taught me to love words but also how to use them.
When I started writing book reports and essays for school, you were an encouraging but stern editor. You’d underline misused or misspelled words but would never make the actual corrections. You simply pointed to the dictionary with instructions to look up the definitions and the correct spellings for myself.
As I moved up to higher grades, you became more exacting and rarely accepted the first draft of any report I gave you to read. You’d patiently explain what was missing and help me work toward a solution by asking more of those leading questions:
“What’s the main thing you learned from the book?”
“Why do you think this?“
“Can you come up with something to support your idea?”
Somehow, you always knew when I wasn’t giving you my best work.
“Did you really think about this before you started writing or did
you just write down the first random things that popped into your
head?”
Invariably when you asked some version of that question, it meant I was busted for taking the lazy way out.
There were often rants and tears before I’d head back to my room to begin again. There may have even been a time or two that the bedroom door slammed loudly behind me. Sometimes it took more than one draft before you were satisfied, but by the time we were done, there was always a hug. The pride I felt in the result—no matter how painfully achieved—was matched only by the glow from the teacher’s praise when the grade came back.
Through the years, many others have been generous mentors and guides on my path to becoming a writer. They all have my gratitude. Yet you were the one who gave me the gift of words and the voice to tell my stories—along with the wings to soar high and travel far to make my stories heard.
In her youth, Leslie Fiering lived nomadically until she settled down to become a technology trends market analyst writing think pieces on the future of personal and mobile computing. Now retired, she writes both memoir and fiction and teaches writing from her horse farm overlooking the Pacific Ocean in Pescadero, CA.
Comments