Tag Archives: Legacy

Show Me What You Wrote

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“The act of writing is the act of discovering what you believe.”

— David Hare (b. 1947.) British playwright and screenwriter, whose works probe truth, belief, and the human condition.

Sometimes in the hush of evening, when the lamp spills its amber light and the world grows gentle, I watch. His head tilts slightly, caught by the glow, and suddenly, the years loosen their grip. The lines that life has written across his face soften; the jaw loosens, light as breath; the mouth, so often set in quiet thought, curves with the ease of youth. His eyes, clear and steady, seem to brighten from within, carrying a spark that belonged first to a boy and then to a young man. Slowly, the present thins. I see him slipping into his past. Fifty. Thirty. Twenty. And then, for the briefest moment, the man beside me becomes the eighteen-year-old he once was—time erasing each layer, revealing what was always there: the young man, quietly returning.

As I glance elsewhere in the room, I see an artifact from his past—one that has crossed time and threshold to find its place in ours: the grand piano. Massive and unyielding, it took four men to wrestle it off the truck and ease it through the doorway. Yet here it rests, polished wood catching the lamplight, waiting.

At this moment, I still hear the sound as his hands moved across the piano earlier in the day—measured, assured, easy. And I heard “For All We Know” rise into the room, each note carrying a hush that reached backward in time. The melody was not just music; it was memory, and it wrapped itself around him, around me, around the room itself. Ruby retreated to the bed, but not fully at rest. She leaned forward, her body stretched long, her head angled as far as she dared—as though even she knew the swell of sound carried us into places layered and deep. She held herself at the edge, cautious not to tumble into the wandering past, into the chasms of memory, beckoning us toward knowing and truth.

Elsewhere in the room, near the piano, another layer from the past peels back. Hanging on the wall is a sepia-toned etching—Salena Gazebo, number 8 of only 200, signed by the artist Carl Johnson. The lines are delicate, deliberate: the curving path, the quiet trees, the pavilion standing open like an invitation. It feels less like a structure than a memory, as if the paper itself breathed it into being. When I look at it, I sense not just the gazebo, but the moments once lived beneath it—the warmth of gatherings, the hush of twilight, the whispered vows of past lovers who lingered there. Dream and truth blur, as though the etching had captured not a place at all but a pulse of longing and a flicker of knowledge, carrying us softly toward knowing and truth.

In another room, on top of the chest of drawers, rest family photographs. Portraits, a chorus of faces gathered through years, smiling, standing, caught in stillness. They look out across the room with a quiet weight, less about who they are than the collective feel they give: belonging, continuity, the insistence that life moves forward even as it circles back. They do not need names to speak; their presence alone is enough.

Nearby, on a table, sits something smaller, more ordinary yet no less enduring: an iron toast holder. His grandmother’s. On his mother’s side? Or, maybe, his father’s? The lineage matters less than the fact that he kept it, carried it through moves and years, never discarding, never forgetting. The metal holds more than memories of bread he may never have seen toasted. It holds a thread of persistence, a reason to keep even the smallest objects close.

In the dining room, on a side table, another artifact gleams in silver relief: The Last Supper, framed, gifted to his maternal grandparents on their fiftieth wedding anniversary. Sacred and commemorative at once, it shimmers with devotion, not only to faith but also to family. The silver has traveled down through generations, carried into his keeping, held as though letting go would diminish more than memory. It is a marker of continuity, of reverence, of love that lasted long enough to be honored.

And then there is the little boy riding a dog—a keepsake that belonged first to his father when his father was a child, before his life was cut tragically short. A small porcelain figure, a child astride a loyal companion, frozen in time. Yet in that figure is more than innocence; it is a bridge across absence, a way of knowing a father he never met. It survived when the man did not, passed on to him as both wound and inheritance, loss and gift. That little boy on the dog rides still through the years, carrying ache and legacy.

Through these artifacts, I glimpse the man I already know and love, his story unfolding in fragments that matter. In the little boy riding the dog, I see both wound and inheritance, a bridge across absence. In the Last Supper, I see reverence, devotion, love honored and passed along. In the iron toast holder, I see endurance, the instinct to keep and carry even what is small. In the family photographs, I see continuity, lives pressed together across generations. In the drawing of the gazebo, I see invitation and hush—the twilight blur where dreams fade into memory and truth. And in the grand piano, I hear the melody that threads them all together—still rising, still echoing, ever playing in the quiet of his soul.

These artifacts matter to him and, now, to me. I could point to others. But I won’t. Yet one more remains, quiet and insistent, the truest of them all—not carved in silver or pressed into porcelain, but carried in ink and idea. His 1965 high-school graduation essay. He was co-valedictorian. He was eighteen.

It rests inside his high-school yearbook, the Bluejay, its cover deep blue and gilt, its pages a mosaic of faces, cheers, and world events already turning into history. And there, slipped carefully between those pages, lies his speech—typed, carried through six decades of moves and seasons. The paper holds its shape, and the words stand sure, preserved as though waiting for their moment to be read again. In its keeping, I see more than memory; I see devotion—the instinct to preserve not only what he did but who he was becoming. It is an artifact, yes, but it is also a testament, held safe in the place that marked his youth and carried forward into the man he is now.

I smiled and whispered:

“Show me what you wrote.”

He lifted the page, holding it in his hands, just as he held it onstage sixty years ago. Soft at first, his voice grew firmer as he returned to the beliefs that had steadied him even then: that learning gives life its shape, that responsibility gives it weight, that hope gives it breath, and that perseverance gives it endurance. Sixty years have passed, yet as he read, I heard not only the boy addressing his classmates but the man beside me—the same convictions intact, the same spirit enduring.

In those moments, as his voice stretched back and returned to me across the decades, I realized that of all his artifacts, this was the richest. My partner, Gary T. Knutson, wrote those words in youth. They carried him into a future he could not yet imagine. And they anchor him still—steadying him in the present, guiding him toward tomorrow. The piano may sing, the photographs may remember, the silver may gleam, the porcelain boy may still ride—but they can only point, only hint. His own words, fragile on paper yet alive in spirit, opened the door wider. They revealed not just what he kept but who he was becoming, and who he still is.

That is the power of words—not just Gary’s words, but all our words. They outlast objects, outshine heirlooms, outlive even memory. In them can be found who we are when all else has been stripped away—values, beliefs, longings, the essence of self, laid bare. And more than that, words do not simply keep; they move. They persuade and console, ignite and endure. They reveal who we were, and they shape who we might yet become. That is their gift, and their power—becoming, in a way, stronger than stone.

Show me what you wrote, and I’ll see who you are—then, now, and still becoming. For words outlast memory and outshine the heirlooms we keep. They carry the essence. They carry the longing. And they proclaim the truths we’ve always held.

Tell Them Who I Am

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“Who do you say that I am?”

— Jesus, Matthew 16:15

The knock at the door was as gentle as any I had ever heard before, yet it frightened me with its persistence. After all, it was the middle of the night, and I rarely have visitors here on my mountain, and when I do, I anticipate their arrival and meet them in the walkway.

After a while, my curiosity overcame my fear. I went to the kitchen door and opened it. There, not on all fours, but standing as upright and erect as any human I had ever seen was my dog Hazel.

Lit by the spill of the floodlights—like some mythic creature caught mid-transformation—Hazel looked less like a pet and more like a story I hadn’t yet written: fifty-nine pounds of sinewy poise, all confidence and oversized paws planted with purpose. Her coat shimmered with its reddish golden shades of ember and mischief—Husky in spirit, Shepherd in legacy, and wholly herself.

Her tail curled tight; her head slightly tilted—alert, noble, a whisper of the wild. Her ears twitched once as if tuning in to something I would never hear. And her eyes? They saw, as if piercing through the darkness that found me standing there.

She wasn’t waiting. She was watching. And in that moment, so was I—awed by her stillness, her strength, and a quiet reminder of something I had yet to remember.

And, as naturally as anything you would never expect a dog to say, she looked at me:

“I’m just a monkey. I’m a howler.”

Then I awakened. Amused. Grinning. Lying there in bed. Musing. Hazel. Fifteen years of fierce love, muddy pawprints, and conversations that needed no translation, except in dreams.

As I lay there, I realized the dream’s significance. In a way, it was the oldest kind of magic: a name spoken often comes true.

For years and years and years, Hazel’s bark reminded me of a monkey. Not just any monkey—a howler. One of those wild-voiced beings that belt their souls into the sky from treetop pulpits at dawn. Her bark had that same deep, echoing wildness—less a request than a proclamation.

Some dogs bark. Hazel declared.

And so it came to be. I would say to her over and over again:

“You’re just a monkey! You’re a howler.”

She didn’t seem offended. If anything, I think she took it as a compliment. Obviously, Hazel was not a monkey, nor could she become one. Except in my dream.

But here’s the thing:

She became what I had named her.

And that truth deserves repeating:

She became what I had named her.

That dream set me to thinking long and hard about what it means to name.

To Name.

I started wondering when the phrase was first used and in what context. And if you know me as I know you do, you know that I headed off to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) where I discovered that it was first used in Old English:

“[Hælend] gefregn hine huætd ðe tonoma is? & cuæð to him here tonoma me is, forðon monig we sindon” (Lindisfarne Gospels Mark v. 9).

Right! That doesn’t look like English to you either, does it? Let’s look at the translation.

“[The Savior] asked him, ‘What is your name?’ And he said to him, ‘My name is Legion, for we are many.'”

It’s a well-known moment in the Gospels—Jesus (the Hælend) encountering a man possessed by demons. The phrase “My name is Legion, for we are many” comes from Mark 5:9 (and Luke 8:30), rendered above in Old English.

This is an incredible example of what happens when we name something. The name Legion does far more than identify. It reveals nature, condition, and moral alignment. When Jesus asks for a name, he isn’t just asking for a label—he’s uncloaking the essence of what possesses the man.

Did you catch that? A name reveals essence.

And I ask you–right here, right now, as I am about to do–to start thinking about names swirling around in your head. Maybe the names associated with you: the names that others call you.

As you reflect, let me share with you the significance of the names swirling around in my head.

The Names that Others Called Me.

The first that I remember was not my given name—Brentford Lee. Rather, it was Little Mister Sunshine. My mother gave me that name because—as she loved to tell others, including me–I was born smiling and radiating happiness. Now, 77 years later? Others say that I’m still smiling. Still radiating happiness.

Clearly, my mother saw the essence of who I am and named it.

Or how’s this? My siblings, for as far back as I can remember, had another way of naming me. They always called me different.

“You don’t look like us.

“You don’t talk like us.

“You don’t walk like us.

“You’re different.“

Truth be told, I was different, and I knew it. Ironically and for my own well-being, when they called me different, I leaned into it as compliment rather than condemnation.

It didn’t take me long, however, until I came to feel and understand the word they weren’t naming, the word that others, later, named. Queer. Either way–and even though I continued to see myself as special, a way of looking at myself that would stay with me for a lifetime, even now–it was a label of not quite, a soft-spoken exile and an unspoken ache.

Clearly, my siblings and others saw my essence—and named it.

And I ask you—right here, right now, as I am about to do—to think about the names you’ve claimed for yourself. Not the ones others gave you. The ones you whispered into being.
The ones that changed how you stood in the world.

As you reflect, let me share with you the significance of the names swirling around in my head.

The Names that I Called Myself.

The first that I remember was when I was in the third grade. Professor. Can you imagine anything more outlandish than that coming from a coal-camp kid in a town with not one professor? I have no idea where I had heard the word or came to know it. But I knew that in order to be a professor–in order to teach in a college or university—I would have to earn the highest degree conferred in my field. I picked English because I believed—no, I knew—that words mattered. Yes, words could wound. I had learned firsthand how they could cut to the soul. But I also knew something else. Words could heal. Words could save. Words could give wings.

I earned my Ph.D. in literature. I became a college professor—”full” no less. And when students called me Dr. Kendrick at the institutions where I taught–the University of South Carolina, the Library of Congress, and Laurel Ridge Community College–in deference to my degree, I always suggested Professor in deference to the earliest name I called myself–the name that captured my essence.

More recently, I call myself Reinventor. I came up with that name at the start of 2023–after my 23-year career at Laurel Ridge. Most folks retire. Not me. I’ve never liked the word—because right there in the middle of retired is tired. Trust me. I ain’t no ways tired. I have more books to write–far more than the five I’ve already published since 2023. I have more life to live than the one I’ve lived. I have more love to give than the love I’ve given. My colleagues and friends may call themselves retired—and that’s fine. But me? I’ll keep saying I’m a reinventor. It’s not just who I am now. It’s who I’m still becoming.

These days, I call myself Writer. I’ve always been one—researching, digging, unraveling stories. But since reinventing myself, being a writer has taken on a new, truer shape. I write in bed every night, publish my blog posts every Monday morning, and every year, I bring forth a new book of creative nonfiction essays, stories that bear my name and my soul.

I’ve branched out, too—seeing through to publication my Unmasking The Humourist: Alexander Gordon’s Lost Essays of Colonial Charleston, South Carolina and immersing myself a two-volume biography of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, a labor of love and legacy.

Yes, right now, the name I call myself is Writer. It captures the essence of who I am—
what I do, what I am becoming, and who I cannot stop being.

As we continue reflecting on the power of names, I ask you—right here, right now, as I am about to do—to think about names that wound others, perhaps forever or perhaps giving them a transformative moment to heal.

The Names that Wound or Heal.

The first that comes to mind is a word in Countee Cullen’s “Incident.” It’s painful—inflicted on an innocent child, standing at the edge of razzle-dazzle wonder.

Once riding in old Baltimore,
Heart-filled, head-filled with glee,
I saw a Baltimorean
Keep looking straight at me.

Now I was eight and very small,
And he was no whit bigger,
And so I smiled, but he poked out
His tongue and called me, “Nigger.”

I saw the whole of Baltimore
From May until December:
Of all the things that happened there
That’s all that I remember.

What the speaker in the poem remembers being called Nigger. One word. It shattered an eight-year-old’s heart—and likely left a lifetime crack.

It’s haunting—how a single word, spoken with cruelty, can eclipse everything else.

I’ve known that kind of eclipse, too. Different. Queer. Faggot. Fag. Words I never asked for—words that crawled in and clung, no matter how often I repeated what my mother had taught me:

“Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me.”

Of course, they hurt, but I rose above the pain, smoothing over my soul like a balm the names that lifted me—Little Mister Sunshine, and the one I whispered in those early, tender years—Professor. But here’s the strange and saving truth: I didn’t start to heal until I explicitly named the sexual dimension of myself. Ironically, I had to declare it publicly before I could begin to claim the healing I didn’t yet realize I needed. I had to say gay—not in a whisper, not in code, but openly. Aloud. Loud. In front of the world.

Gay.

Only then could I begin to gather all the pieces I’d hidden away. The softness. The brilliance. The full shape of who I was—who I had always been. One word. My word. Spoken not with shame, but with quiet certainty. And for the first time, I didn’t flinch. I stood. Proud. With that naming, I finally gave myself permission to shine—fully and fiercely, without apology.

I have one more request–one more “ask” of you–as we grapple with what might just be the most powerful part of naming. I ask you—right here, right now, as I am about to do—what are the names we whisper when we reach for meaning? The names we murmur in awe, in need, in love? The names we give the force that calls us?

The Names We Call the Force that Calls.

Whenever I think that thought–and the older I get, the more often I think it–I recall Bill Gaither’s interview with acclaimed Gospel singer Jessy Dixon–one of my favorites. Gaither was bold and direct as the interview neared its end:

“When your time comes—as it will surely come for each of us—what do you want people to remember about you?”

After a soft pause, the answer came with quiet certainty:

“Tell them I am redeemed.”

In those five words, Jessy Dixon named–and claimed–the essence of his destiny.

Redeemed.

I can’t help but wonder: what name rises up in you when you reach for meaning? God? Creator? Oversoul? Spirit? Light? Love? Source? Mystery?

And in my wonder, I’m mindful that names like those are what we call the ungraspable—the presence that nudges us forward, the light that finds us when we didn’t even know we were lost. We reach for names when we reach for meaning. And whatever we call it—it calls us, too.

Whatever name you use, My Dear Reader—
whoever you are, wherever you are:

Say it loud and clear.

Speak it like it matters—
because it does.

Speak it like it carries
the full weight of your becoming—
because it does.

Let the world see
the essence of who you are.

Name it—
knowing that names have power.

Remember: you are enough—
not despite all the names you carry,
but because of them.

You are every name you’ve claimed
and every name you have yet to whisper into being.

And when the time comes—
I hope you’ll speak your name
as boldly as I speak mine.

Let others know:
their names can never hurt you.

But your name?
It roots you deep
in everything that matters—
your truth, your becoming, your essence.

Tell them, one and all, once and for all:

“This is who I am.”

In Honor of Fathers Everywhere | What My Father Saw

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With Father’s Day weekend upon us, I’m republishing “What My Father Saw” as a gentle reminder of the quiet ways fathers shape our lives—through their labor, their vision, and the legacy they leave behind.

“A house is made with walls and beams; a home is built with love and dreams.”

–Attributed to Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882). American essayist, lecturer, philosopher, and poet who led the transcendentalist movement of the mid-19th century.

Houses come. Houses go. Some we remember. Some we don’t. Usually, though, the house that we remember the most is the one that we call home. For me, it was the house that I lived in from the age of ten (when I started the fifth grade) until the age of seventeen (when I graduated from high school, left home, and started college). We moved there in the summer of 1957.

It wasn’t much of a house. White clapboard siding. Front porch with wooden columns. Living room. Kitchen. Two bedrooms. Screened back porch. Unfinished basement. Outhouse. The woods on one side were so close that the trees seemed to brush against the windowpanes even in the gentlest breeze.

It wasn’t much of a move, either, maybe a mile south of where we had been renting. That fall, I went to the same grade school that I had attended since we moved to Shady Spring. I remember standing in the school yard with Mr. Pack, my English teacher. I pointed to the house, calling his attention to the side stairs that led up to the screened-in back porch.

But this house was different from the others. This house was our home. Well, it would be one day if my parents could stay on top of the mortgage payments. It didn’t have a white picket fence, and it needed lots of “fixin’ up.” But it was our slice of the American Dream.

Fixin’ up was right up my father’s alley. Even though he was a coal miner, he was, in many ways, a visionary. When we moved in, my father saw many things that he could do that would turn what had been a tucked-away summer place into our year-round home.

I remember lots of his improvements because I was his helper. Straightaway, he and I started clearing the adjacent lot. Our home was still in the woods but no longer against the trees. I helped him take the back porch and turn it into a dining room opening into the kitchen. The two of us mixed cement in a wheelbarrow and poured a floor in the large unfinished basement, where my father framed out two bedrooms, a downstairs kitchen, and a bathroom. We tilled the field across the road and turned the thin layer of soil on top of the rock shelf into a garden, perfect for sturdy stalks of corn rising up like sentinels with delicate tendrils of green beans gracefully twining around them. The dry, clay soil seemed ideal for sunflowers, too. Somewhere, I have a polaroid of me kneeling –sun-bleached hair, radiant smile–holding a sunflower so large that it covered my chest.

Looking back at the initial hard work and the eventual improvements, I see my father’s unwavering determination. He saw potential where others saw obstacles, teaching me the importance of perseverance and the transformative power of a dream fueled by love. This house was more than a structure. It was a testament to his resilience and dedication to our family’s future.

But more than any of those memories is the memory of my father at the dinner table. I was the youngest child, the last one at home eating with my parents.

My mother, who always said grace, sat at the head of the table, looking toward the wall at the other end, with a large oil painting of the Last Supper. My father sat to her left, gazing through his bifocals out of the large picture window in the dining room that he had built. I sat to his left, looking toward the window as well, with a golden candle sconce on each side, their glass shades gently casting a warm glow on holidays or when we had company.

I turned toward my father and my mother a lot, usually talking with my mother. My father was, by nature, a reserved man, and after talking about his day’s work in the mines and about his strategy for loading more cars of coal the next day, he didn’t have much to say other than to praise what my mother had prepared for dinner or to respond to something that my mother or I said that required his response. I didn’t think anything about his silence then. I don’t think anything about his silence now. It was as natural to my father as being talkative was to me and my mother.

But as I watched him looking out our dining room picture window, I wondered then–and I wonder now–what my father saw.

No doubt he saw the present.

He had a multitude of snapshot possibilities. In his immediate line of vision would have been our lower terraced yard concealing an elaborate and fully provisioned underground bomb shelter that my father built. Further down the sloped yard was the meandering creek. My father planted an apple tree next to it that still bears fruit. Across the creek, another small garden. One summer, my father erected six or so towering structures, made from large sapling poles. He planted his favorite Kentucky Wonder beans around them. Somewhere, I have a polaroid of him standing inside one of the green-bean teepees. Long, smooth beans hanging down met his calloused, coal-sooted hands, reaching up.

Beyond that snapshot would have been the homes of three neighbors on Rt. 3. We always called it the Hinton Road because it connected our town to Hinton and the world beyond. More important than those neighbors’ homes, though, was the immense towering oak. My father stood beneath it, waiting for his ride to the mines, day after day after day, stretching out to the final day of his fifty-year career as a coal miner, never missing a day’s work.

Looking back, I see my father surveying the tangible results of his hard work and vision. Each tree planted, each structure built or improved, was a testament to his ability to transform dreams into reality. His daily routines, anchored by resilience and a relentless work ethic, spoke to the value of dedication. Even in the most ordinary moments, my father’s presence embodied commitment to our family and our future. His view from the window wasn’t just of our present home. It was of a legacy he was building, one that would endure long after he was gone.

No doubt he saw his past.

His mind likely wandered to his most recent past, the bankruptcy that bottomed out his short-lived dream of being a prosperous coal-mining operator on par with the company-store owner. It prompted our move from Ashland to Shady Spring.

Perhaps he saw his early coal mining years in the late nineteen teens and the 1920s. He was an activist for the United Mine Workers of America and a staunch supporter of its president, John L. Lewis. Somewhere, I have my father’s first UMWA membership card.

Perhaps he saw even further back to Patrick Springs, Virginia, where his farming family had Colonial American roots and where he was born in 1902. Perhaps he saw the day when, as a teenager, he left home and boarded the Danville and Western Railroad. He made his way to Cherokee, WV, to make a life in the booming coal heartland of America.

Looking back at my father’s journey from a farmer’s son to a coal miner to an advocate for workers’ rights, I see a man who never let his circumstances define him. His past was marked by hard work, sacrifice, and an unyielding spirit. These experiences shaped his character, instilling in him a relentless drive to provide and care for his family, despite the hardships he faced. His past was not just a series of events, but a foundation of strength and resilience that he built upon every day.

No doubt he saw his future.

Perhaps my father saw the day when I would go to college, leaving him and my mother to explore their new roles as empty nesters. They always waited for me and my five siblings to come back home for visits.

Perhaps he envisioned some of his many innovative ideas coming to fruition in the marketplace. He made copper jewelry, believing that it provided therapeutic benefits for arthritis sufferers. (My father’s idea was not far-fetched: copper jewelry began to be marketed in the early 1970s.)

He also had a vision for extension ladders with adjustable legs, designed for painting homes built on sloped yards like ours, and he even built a prototype. (Again, my father’s idea was ahead of its time: extension ladders with adjustable legs for working on slopes began appearing on the market around the early 2000s.)

One of his more futuristic ideas involved cars moving along highways, advancing magnetically to specific destinations designated by the driver at the start of the journey. (This concept, while far-fetched in its time, became reality with the marketing of self-driving cars in the mid-2010s.)

Perhaps my father saw into his final years. I wonder whether his body was telling him early on what his doctors told him later. Black Lung. Third Stage Silicosis. I wonder whether his heart saw a 1982 Golden Wedding Anniversary. I wonder whether his soul foresaw a calm and peaceful passage heavenward a year later.

Looking back at my father gazing out the window, envisioning the future, I realize that he saw possibilities that others didn’t. His innovative ideas and forward-thinking mindset were a testament to his enduring hope and determination. Even in the face of illness and the unknown, he remained focused on what could be, leaving a legacy of optimism and ingenuity. His ability to dream beyond the present instilled in me the same fervor and faith in the future.

Whatever my father saw–whether his present, his past, or his future–I have not a doubt in the world that he was looking through the same metaphorical lens that he held up to my eyes when he taught me as a young boy how to use a push plow to lay out a perfectly straight row in the field.

“Don’t look down. Keep your eyes fixed on something in the distance where you want the row to end.”

He was teaching me far more than how to plow a straight row. He was teaching me how to live my life in a way that mirrored his. Maintain a clear vision. Stay focused on long-term objectives. Persevere through challenges with resilience and determination.

That’s what my father saw.

A Week Back to the Future

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“Sometimes the smallest things take up the most room in your heart.”

—A. A. Milne (1882–1956), English author best known for creating Winnie-the-Pooh and stories that continue to shape how we remember childhood, love, and the quiet power of small things.

It was a portable Remington Rand typewriter in a gray box lined with green felt. In 1956, my parents went to Lilly Office Supply and bought it for my sister Arlene, who was taking high school typing. After graduation, she “went away”—not far, but far enough to feel exotic to my boyhood mind—to become a medical technologist in a residential hospital program.

She returned home often, always bringing—unbeknownst to her and to me—pieces of my future.

One of the first that impressed my ten-year-old spirit was her interest in tropical fish, no fancier than fan-tail guppies but fancy enough to ignite in me a lifelong love. My one-hundred-gallon tropical aquarium speaks to a piece of my future that settled in and endured.

I’m not sure, but next up might have been some of the exotic recipes she cooked when she came back on visits. I remember one dish in particular. Arlene called it pepper steak, but it wasn’t French au poivre or Chinese stir-fry. This was hers—flank steak pounded thin, rolled up tight, and packed with cracked black pepper. Lots and lots of pepper. She baked it low and slow until the whole kitchen smelled like heat and adventure.

I was hell-bent on loving it. It was different, and Arlene made it. That alone made it holy. My mother, no stranger to bold flavors from coal camp kitchens, loved it too. She said Arlene had a touch. That dish lit a fuse. It was the first truly “foreign” flavor I fell for—and from that bite forward, I was hungry for worldwide cuisine. It was a piece of my future that still lingers on my adventuresome culinary palate.

What else? Once, Arlene brought home one of her Mahalia Jackson albums—a 12-inch LP—titled In the Upper Room. I remember the cover, but even more, I remember the sound: Mahalia’s voice rising from the vinyl like a sermon on wings, wide-mouthed and full-throated, her vowels rich and trembling with conviction. That mouth—large, commanding, joyful—seemed to carry an entire congregation inside it. You didn’t just hear her sing. You stood up straighter, somewhere deep in your bones. Her singing resonated naturally with me. I had fallen in love with Black Gospel in my early coal camp years, and even though we had moved away, now I could enjoy Black Gospel on my own record player. Notes and chords from that piece of my future still rattle my rafters every morning as my soul feeds on Black Gospel fire while I bike indoors or garden in the sun.

Arlene brought many other pieces of my future back home when she visited, all held tightly together by my realization that she was living the good life, maybe because she had “gone away” but definitely because her education had opened doors. As a medical technologist, she could go anywhere in the world. Bluefield (WV) was nearby yet far away. Richlands (VA)–just across a mountain or two–was ever further away. Richmond, which in my young mind was further than the stretch of my imagination, was clean across Virginia.

When she came back home, she arrived in style.

How well I remember her 1959 BMW 507 Roadster, white as a wedding glove, low-slung and impossibly sleek. The chrome trim shimmered like polished silverware, and the twin kidney grilles gave it a kind of sly, knowing smile. With its long, sculpted hood and tucked-in waistline, it didn’t sit on the dirt road in front of our home—it posed. And yet—for all its glamour—it was so feather-light, I once watched my brother Stanley and my brother-in-law Lemuel lift it off the road and set it gently in the yard, as if it were a city toy that had wandered into a grown-up mountain world by mistake.

Sometimes, instead of driving home, Arlene would fly. I can still see her coming down the steps of the plane, with a look on her face fiercely defying the engine’s turbulence to disturb her sculpted bouffant—a chin-length hairstyle with smooth volume at the crown, gently curled ends, and a sleek, side-swept part. It was polished but not overdone, and it framed her face with effortless elegance, just as it did her heroine Jackie Kennedy, who made the hairstyle fashionable.

Arlene had exquisite taste in clothing, too—expensive, yes, but timeless. She didn’t follow fashion; she curated it. Her closet was a study in fine fabrics: tailored wool skirts, cashmere sweaters so soft they seemed to hold their own breath, and coats that whispered elegance with every movement. She favored deep, dramatic colors—navy, charcoal, forest green, black—tones my mother thought too somber for a woman her young age.

But Arlene wore them with such composure that you’d never question it. Even in our modest home, she had the poise of someone just back from Paris or somewhere so far away it sounded like it should be whispered.

In my young mind, she had arrived, not only with all the quiet showings of her success but also with the equally quiet sharing of her largesse. She was religious in sending money to my parents—especially as my dad began his retirement from the coal mines—and later to me when I started college.

In all of those ways, I saw in her life pieces of my own future.

But when Arlene “went away,” she left behind one piece that might have had an impact on me—equal to if not greater than—the other pieces of my future that she brought back home with every visit.

Her Remington Rand typewriter in a gray box lined with green felt.

My sister Judy used it when she took typing. And if you guessed that it was passed on to me, you guessed right. Starting with my typing classes and stretching far into the future, Arlene’s Remington Rand began a remarkable journey—one that may be unmatched in the annals of typewriter chronicles.

When I went to Alderson-Broaddus University in 1965, it went with me. I typed all of my papers, including my Honors Thesis, on that Remington.

When I graduated in 1969, it went with me to Washington, DC, where I started my career at the Library of Congress. I typed a proposal for a concordance to Robert Frost’s poetry on that Remington.

Three years later, when I started my doctoral program at the University of South Carolina (USC), it went with me to Columbia, where I wrote all of my graduate papers on that Remington.

One was more important than any of the others. In preparing it, I found myself in Richmond for a week, staying with Arlene and her husband Clyde, a police officer. She was surprised that I still had her Remington and that I was using it even in graduate school.

I put it to phenomenal use that week. Looking back, I wonder what trajectory my life might’ve taken had it not been for that turning-point.

Lean in a little closer and let me explain.

It was my first semester at USC, and I was taking a survey course in 19th-century American Literature. One of the stories that we read was Mary E. Wilkins Freeman’s “A Humble Romance.” I had never heard of the writer before, but I was so smitten by her story that I read another one and then another one and many, many more. Aside from thinking that they were extraordinary stories, I was captivated by a pattern of strong-willed women who inevitably never married. I was equally captivated when I discovered that Freeman herself did not marry until she was nearly fifty.

It was a minor aha moment. I had a perfect research paper topic: “Single Women and Gender Identity in Selected Stories by Mary E. Wilkins Freeman.” My professor approved, suggesting that I explore Freeman’s letters for supporting biographical evidence.

To my initial horror, I discovered that Freeman’s letters had never been published. But to my immediate delight, I discovered that Clifton Waller Barrett Library at the University of Virginia had a small collection of her letters. In a flash, I had an action plan. I would stay with Arlene and Clyde in Richmond, make the daily one-hour drive to Charlottesville, spend the day in Barrett Library, and return at the end of each day.

The typewriter went with me on those daily research trips, and during that week, I prepared a transcript of the Freeman letters at the Barrett Library, systematically and methodically using that Remington.

I returned to Columbia the next week and continued working on my Freeman paper and on papers in my other courses, all typed on that Remington.

By semester’s end, I had an epiphany. For my doctoral dissertation, I could locate and edit Freeman’s letters. My advisor loved the idea, as did my committee, but knowing more fully than I the rigor involved in such a project, they urged me to limit my scope to selected letters. I prevailed with my initial proposal. Ten years of research later–with trips to more than fifty libraries across the country, always armed with Arlene’s Remington Rand–I finished my dissertation and was awarded my Ph.D. In 1985, the fruit of my scholarly labors was published: The Infant Sphinx: Collected Letters of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman. It remains, as The Journal of Modern Literature noted in its review, “the most complete record to date of Freeman’s life as writer and woman.”

But wait, wait. Don’t go. I need to share a few more details so that you’ll understand even more fully how Arlene’s Remington Rand typewriter and her quiet support during that week in her home all came together, and a life of research dedicated to Freeman found its rhythm—click by click, page by page.

The five decades since have witnessed me not only digging up the past in all the towns where Freeman lived, wrote, and made the rest of the world sit up and take notice but also returning there as frequent keynote speaker, sharing with the towns’ citizens all of my findings, never before shared. Those same towns helped launch the publication of my landmark The Infant Sphinx as well as my watershed edition of Freeman’s Green Mountain Stories (2023), the intended title of her first collection of adult stories, A Humble Romance and Other Stories (1887).

These days, I’m working on Dolly: Life and Letters of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman. Vol I: The New England Years (1852-1901). Vol. II: The New Jersey Years (1902-1930). I have no doubt that three towns will welcome me back when Dolly is published. Randolph (MA), where she was born. Brattleboro (VT), where she launched her literary career. Metuchen (NJ), where she died.

But let’s move past all that Freeman stuff.

For now, let’s keep the spotlight on the woman who went away when I was a boy, returning home with a passion for tropical fish and gospel records, pepper steak and black wool coats, fast cars and high-flying planes, and all the other things that the good life had to offer–giving me something far more. The dreams. The belief. The typewriter.

For now, let’s keep the spotlight on my sister Arlene, who always brought home—unbeknownst to her and to me—pieces of my enduring future.