A Literate Friend
Mentors and eager sounding boards are treasures
We swap email notes and occasional phone calls, across the small city in which we live. Our lives were forged in friendship through several years of common interactions before, during and after church services mostly. She is a cousin of a now-departed member of my congregation. That kinship eventually brought her back to her ancestral hometown.
Originally, she was a child reared in the spirit of the heydays of our forest-products community by Richwood parents, and later took an education and career near her home in Wellsburg, but still in the confines of Appalachia. “Mrs. W.” spent her substantial career as an English and Literature teacher at a large consolidated high school located in the Northern Panhandle of West Virginia.
After retirement, she and her husband relocated to the Outer Banks of North Carolina for several years. Her sharing of those memories and the books related to the lives of pirates became a touchstone of our continuing friendship. She loaned me her treasured copies — autographed by the authors — of pirate tales and Outer Banks history were of great interest to me, and there were no library fines for keeping the readings too long.
As a musician, teacher and music promoter I routinely bombard her with links to music videos that may be of interest to her. I believe the…
