Changing a Life

by Anna Bernard

Assignment - write about a gift that changed a life.
I looked around in my imagination and realized I was wasting time because the story was in my reality....

It was a journal, a gift from her daughter. Every year they exchanged gifts of a beautifully bound notebook or journal with an intriguing cover and empty pages.
They were trying to encourage each other to set free the writer in their souls. Time to express yourself - exhale. It was not enough to just inhale other people's thoughts through endless and rapid reading of everything with print on it.
But neither of them marred the lovely books with bitter thoughts, silly musings, or uninspiring recounting of the mundane details of a long work or school day (same thing.)
The mother had begun a series of short mouse stories but had run dry and left the poor mouse characters slumped in a deep depression in the back of some books she had used to teach her younger son to write years before when he was a First Grader.
When he was in Sixth Grade, the mother made a deliberate decision to start writing again and mar the journals up thoroughly. She wrote about the miseries of dealing with self centered people at work, about her rage and sorrow over raising two children with major health issues by herself, about the fickle hesitant man she was currently dating...and then the hesitant man handed her a flyer from the Jewish Community Center about a writing class- not the expensive college kind - but rather an inexpensive $3.00 a session group that met week after week as the spirit moved them.
She went. And she went again and then she kept on going. The assignments compelled her to draw upon her imagination in immediate ways and stretch the boundaries of what she could dream up or reveal. Her pen and the fine listening of others enabled her to wander into deep recesses hunting up imaginary characters, and deep into her own early childhood and back, able at last to describe the traumatic premature birth of her younger child and all the small triumphs and joys of being a mother and a teacher. Finally, she made it into the garden of her hopes where gladiolas bloomed in handsome profusion and ladybugs went from a slow crawl to sudden flight which could result in the finding of mates and such.
She began to sense that there was a link from the words on the paper to reality - that the feelings behind the words she wrote would draw the man. It was an irrational faith but she was confident enough to shake off the unsuitable suitor and wait.
Two months later, the mate was there - not a chance meeting in a bookstore, a computer date, or a friend of a friend. None of those.
He appeared in the writing class, having decided to make friends again with the writer in his soul.
A simple gift of a journal resulting in a new life.
Everything changed rapidly. Behind their new home and in the front, bloomed sunrise roses, azaleas, daisies, poppies, daffodils, sunflowers, and everywhere,
in blazing red and orange, white, and subtle pink--the proud gladiolas.
(The daughter you wonder? She writes with skill and vast amounts of confidence. She wrote her way into an M.A. in English and teaches high school children how to write clearly and concisely - academic writing. There is always more than one way to pursue a dream....)