Old timer's.

I'm departing from the norm today. I'm not writing about the two little urchins. And I'm not being funny (am I ever? nevermind, don't answer that). But I do want to share something new I started today: assisting in a weekly writing workshop for adults in the early phases of Alzheimer's, via the organization Badgerdog Literary Publishing.

In a couple weeks, I will also be assisting a weekly writing workshop for under-privileged fourth graders, with the Austin Bat Cave. I can't stand people being told they have nothing to say. That they're just kids. Or they're poor. Or they're old. We start to tell people this, and then we start to believe it, and then -before you know it- we have fallen prey to what Nigerian author Chimamanda Adichie so eloquently calls the danger of the single story.

I, for one, believe reading and writing are transformative acts. Often, listening can be as well. Here is a list of the people I met today:

• Eugene: currently working toward his black belt in Tae Kwan Do. A photographer. His name means "royal one" in Hebrew. He suffers from mild cognitive impairment
• Nadine: with her husband, opened a school in Louisiana for mentally disabled children, and later, a school for girls
• Terry: a retired archaeology professor
• Vic: a retired psychology professor
• Mona: a self-deprecating songwriter
• Carol: a 30-year 5th grade teaching veteran, whose students still sometimes call her on the phone
• Mickey: an artist in colored pencils, she dreams of having a Siamese cat
• Bill: retired geologist, who at 82 years old says he's, "not gonna get any better, and not gonna get any worse" his wife still calls the shots
  
• Carl: retired Russian Orthodox priest, who grew up Jewish, in a very German community in 1938.
• Ruth: retired high school english teacher, she has published a book and now struggles to hold a pen

Carl shared with me today that he loves reading. And because he loves reading, he wants to try his hand at writing. I was amazed that although I had to repeat the date several times, he was able to recall with perfect clarity that as a child, his mother would read The Little Red Hen to him every day. Finally in the third grade, his family could afford to buy him glasses. From that day on, he could read to himself. He never stopped. I laughed out loud with this group of people today, but Carl nearly brought me to tears when he said, "I can't do a lot of things anymore. But I can still read."

Today, I also came across a quote from Howard Thurman:
Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.

...I wonder, in fifty years, what some young writer might say about me? What would my life be in one sentence? I hope they will say that I was a reader. That I was a writer. And that in this life, I came alive.