A Life Gift

     The people who most care already know, but I want to write this anyway. I want to do it because some things just need to be said, or sung, or written down.
     It's about teachers. The good ones, in school and in life. The ones who know that some lessons can change you; who recognize these when they come along; who bear down on you when one does come along, because they know that you may not see it for yourself, and they don't want you to miss the nourishment of it.
      Also, it's about friends. Real friends. The ones you can turn to, and who can turn to you. The ones whose friendship never wanes, no matter time or distance.
      If you are hugely blessed in this life you may have one person who is both a friend and a teacher.
      I've been blessed.
     For his privacy I'll just call him R.C.  He was my first boss. I was fresh out of college, a rookie on a good local newspaper. (It was not an oxymoron in those days.) Conditioned by the intellectual caste systems that academe likes both to foster and deny, I was flustered by the open-ended simplicity of his very first question.
     Him: What do you like to read?
     Me, apologetically: Uh, well, actually, I love to read, but my reading habits are pretty undisciplined. I'll read just about anything.
     Him: Oh, good.
     It was an auspicious beginning. The two of us had to fill a whole page, every day, with our own work and that of others. We could afford to have no limits on what we read and wrote about, thought and talked about. It was postgraduate education in a sink-or-swim school with a skilled and patient mentor right at hand.
     The strains of workload were leavened with salty humor (Spencer, you have fucked up this word so badly nobody will ever be able to spell it again.) Also  with strategic breaks. To hell with this, he would exclaim, bolting up from his chair. Let's go to the movies.
     And go we would, to the critics' latest favorite, or to new trash at the naughty movie house uptown.  Sometimes we'd duck out to shoot a little pool at the beer and burger joint down the street.
     The learning side of life was filled with politics, history, literature, drama, art and music. On the fun side we got into some mischief, he and I and a circle of friends.  Once, when a drunken party notion turned into a dare, we smuggled a bogus sketch into an exhibit at the local art museum and then had nervous fun betting each other that the lifted-pinkie crowd wouldn't spot it. (They didn't.)
     I learned about writing, because R.C. has the gift and cared enough to teach. And I learned about the power of story.
     Several deep-thinker types and even a few theologians will tell you that storytelling is a primary human drive -- right up there with sex and hunger. We trade stories, they say, from in inborn need to make sense of life, and to tell each other what kind of sense it makes.
     R.C. didn't need deep thinkers to tell him that a proper story is a treasure. He knew that some things can be said through no other means, and that the most important writers are first good storytellers.
     So he was not being entirely facetious, I think, in our later conversation about a memoir he'd written for his grandchildren.
     Me: Wow. You've led an interesting life.  There are a lot of good stories in here.
     Him (grinning): Yes. And most of them are true.
     We are old men now, both of us, and he has touched many more lives than mine. He has also touched the lives of people he never met or even heard of, for it became my privilege through the years to bear down on a youngster who seemed to be missing a life lesson, or to tell a story that made something click into focus for others.
     The people who care most about R.C. would not be surprised by anything here. They already understand. But I think they would also understand that some things -- even things you already know -- just need to be said. Or sung. Or written down.