What am I Waiting For?

Mr. Gulner asked me that question last fall, when he came back for his induction into the Minnetonka High School Faculty Hall of Fame. He looked me square in the eye, on the edge of the football field during halftime of the homecoming game, and he asked me, “What are you waiting for?”  And I stammered my same bullshit answer I give to everyone including myself, that I am waiting for retirement. I have a date and it’s firm and that’s when I’ll finally write books and be a published author.

“Don’t wait too long,” he said, and my soul felt completely wrecked.

Mr. Gulner could read that bullshit in my eyes and hear it in my words, just like when I was in 8th grade at West Junior High and I was writing five-paragraph essays quickly but not well. He knew those essays weren’t my best work and he took me out into the hallway, shaking the stack of “extra credit” essays I’d hurriedly turned in, hoping for the A+ my dad always wanted me to have. “This is crap,” my favorite teacher and hero and fearsome creature said to me. “You are so much better than this, and you know it. DO better.” And he handed the crumpled mess back to my sad, clammy hands and my crumpled spirit watched his small, intense, wiry frame stride back into the classroom.

Rewrite I did. And on the football field some 40 years later, with tears in my eyes, I was touched to know that he remembered that day and yet was still challenging me to do better and stop making excuses. What the hell, exactly, am I waiting for?

I’m waiting for head space and house space and just some fucking TIME to have thoughts and the wherewithal to put them down on paper. I’m waiting for the clock to slow down and the days to lengthen and everyone to have everything they need and to just be settled.

I’m waiting for wars to end and for peace on earth and life and humanity to make more sense than it does now. I’m waiting to find the perfect white t-shirt and for my plantar fasciitis to heal and all the doctor appointments to just END. I want my library done and my garden planted and the dead tree in the front yard to be cut down. There should be a nicer arrangement of things on top of my living room bookshelf because I kind of hate what’s there right now. My hair needs to curl properly and I should probably do yoga again and maybe go for walks a few times a week and definitely not diet or lose weight because we don’t talk about that bullshit any longer.

Mr. Gulner, who I saw again the next morning at the Alumni and Faculty Awards Breakfast, didn’t have much time to talk because he was everyone’s favorite teacher and EVERYone wanted to talk to him. I’m selfish but not greedy, so we took a couple of selfies and I cried again a little and thanked him for being what he was and still seemed to be – a brutally honest, wise, gentle, tough-as-nuts kind of man, but softened into a kindly Jewish grandfather. I never forgot what he said to me in 1980 and I won’t ever forget how he made me feel again in 2024.

What are you waiting for? Don’t wait too long.

Ok, Mr. G. Tonight I went to a writers’ workshop put on by the Minnetonka Alumni Association.  One of our own, Eric Dregni, was there and he’s written at least 20 books! He talked in the wise and knowing way he did in high school. He didn’t remember me, but I remembered him as being one of the alt-kids. New wave, punk, artsy, really smart, definitely not liking the walk down Jock Hall (or Prick Hall, as it were) – lined with football players and popular kids who weren’t always nice to the kids who were different. I had friends in all the groups, but I always admired the smart kids. It’s like they were serving a prison sentence for something they didn’t do, but they had to serve it anyway. They always seemed almost out the door, because their best stuff was still coming and they knew it with a knowing I envied.

Now I know.

Eric Dregni didn’t wait. He went to college and wrote and more college and wrote and traveled and wrote and lived all over and wrote and wrote. He teaches and writes and I bet it never occurred to him to wait for anything as important as the one dream you’ve had your whole life.

On the about page on my website here, you’ll read the story of the seven year old girl that only ever wanted to be a writer. Who has now spent fifty fucking years manifesting that dream and she’s still waiting. Oh sure, I’ve had things published a tiny bit, and have been paid to write professionally a little, but not a book, nothing really important yet. Waiting waiting waiting until the kids grow up? Maybe she should grow the hell up and stop making excuses.

I sat next to my friend Tina tonight. She’s a terrific writer, another University of Minnesota English Major, living life but so full of brilliant words that crowd her mind. We’ve been friends since she called me Fonzie in 7th grade and I think tonight we sort of made an unspoken pact that we’re going to be writers and we’re going to help each other be writers. That felt pretty cool, those 40 years of history culminating tonight at a table in the lunchroom at our old high school, listening to our former classmate talk about being a god damn published author.

There are four books, started by me, waiting to be fleshed out and agonized over and hopefully published. There are so many more where those came from and I feel like I could give birth over and over again, never finding enough pages to spill the words onto. Words enough to fill 100 libraires and then 100 more after that. They will have a home, and they will dwell on the pages of their home and maybe, just maybe, people will read them and feel something.

What am I waiting for, Mr. Gulner?

Not one more fucking thing.