Recently the
show CBS Sunday Morning presented a segment on late bloomers and the
things they achieved after the midway point of their lives. Suddenly,
I realized I was a late bloomer also!
Although I
had always wanted to be a writer, I was discouraged in my early
twenties when someone read a rough draft I had written about my
college experiences. She said, “This sounds like something a young
person would write.” And then she tossed it aside. Now there is
nothing wrong about how a young person writes and I shouldn’t have
let that comment bother me. But it did. And life itself got in the
way. Or at least that’s my excuse. The desire to write was always
there but I had to make a living and raise my son.
Then
something happened one summer while my son and I were staying in my
mother and stepfather’s home on Lake Texoma. Every day I passed a
house being built as I drove to college in Denton, Texas where I was
studying for certification as an elementary teacher. I was now in my
late thirties and had been teaching secondary Spanish and art but I
thought having elementary certification would help me get a new job.
(It didn’t—I immediately got another position as a Spanish and
art teacher in a small town in Texas.)
But when the
house was finished, I couldn’t believe how elegant it looked and it
must have stayed in my subconscious because I dreamed about it one
night a couple of years later.
In that
dream I drove up to the porch and rang the doorbell. A very handsome,
elegant but sardonic man opened the door. A mysterious woman lurked
in the background. And that was all there was to the dream or all
that I remembered when I woke up. And then a story about the man and
the woman began to form in my mind and I started to write a very
rough draft. My son graduated from high school when I was in my
mid-forties and I went back to that first draft about the mysterious
house and changed the names of the characters to coincide with a
second story I had written about Mexico’s Day of the Dead.
I spent all
of my fifties as a substitute teacher or part-time teacher writing
drafts for six books, including reworking the first one. And finally
when I was sixty-three, my first novel was published! Oh, it wasn’t
that first one I started about the mysterious house. I didn’t
publish it until I was 73 after I had already published 12 books!
So surely
that qualifies me as a late bloomer!
