Hand-Selected Essays by Author Monica Vest Wheeler...

 

Why do I write? It's an activity that's as essential to who I am as breathing, eating and sleeping. It seems as If I've been plastering words on paper since I grasped my first chunky pre-school pencil. Admittedly, my handwriting skills did not win high marks on grade school report cards, and I've never considered myself a grammar expert because I break many of the rigid rules. I was a journalism major in college and that format offers more freedom in prose than formal literary pieces. I learned how to pay attention to the minute details of how people express themselves verbally, and we do not talk the way we write.

 

Incomplete sentences. I thrive on them because they're real.

I've traded those stubby pencils for purple pens and markers. Just ask my husband how many I misplace every week and my obsession with purchasing more. I think it's because I had a nightmare once that the world ran out of purple ink. I've been hoarding as many as possible ever since.

 

Today, I often rely on my Apple Macintosh computers because I can pound out prose faster there than my fingers can paint pages purple. Yet, nothing can replace the sensation of purple pen in hand. It's intimate and interactive. It's like talking with an individual because handwriting is more the speed of a real conversation.

 

Why do I love to piece together random words on paper and in presentations? To me, there's no greater tool in connecting us all through the human experience. Words inspire us, incite us, calm us, define us.

 

Writing and speaking about life and observing the wonder of it all … those are my passions.

 

What's yours?

 

 

 

Every spring, I wonder if those mama birds chirping outside my window are telling their babies stories to prepare them for the day they leave the nest. Since I've not yet mastered the language of birdese, I can only guess the content of her message.

 

However, I'm sure the kids are peeping back, "Mom, please tell us again the story about how Great-Grandpa starred in Hitchcock's 'The Birds' …"

Some of our earliest memories center around the bedtime stories of our childhood, the first books we learned to read, the histories of our parents and grandparents … our very roots. Humans have been blessed with the gift of language and unique communication skills. Every interaction is a story, describing how we're faring, what we're doing, how we're coping with everyday life. No matter their duration or if they're truth or exaggerated, stories connect us.

 

While growing up, I thought writers were only people who transferred words from their brains onto paper. However, after actual practice, I learned that the writer title meant that I was not only someone who arranged words in a particular order, but an artist who weaves real and fictional stories to inform and entertain, to encourage and inspire, to evoke memories and provoke action. It's one of the best reasons to wake up every morning.

 

However, you don't have to be a writer to tell a story. You only need the desire to connect with another human being, someone you love or someone you've encountered today for the first time.

 

What's your story?

 

 

 

After writing, it was my second childhood obsession. Yes, I was in love with more than 300 men.

    

A week rarely went by when I didn’t reaffirm my affection by plopping a quarter down on the drug store counter and taking them home with me. I greeted each with an excitement that made me crave them more.

    

I had them all, Mickey Mantle, Willie Mays, Hank Aaron. They were my kind of men. Yes, it was a girl’s dirty little secret: I collected baseball cards, hoarded them with a devotion that exceeded that of many of my male counterparts.

    

However, somewhere over time, my collection ended up in my cousin’s hands and was lost forever. Now, what would those 1960s cards be worth today? Please, it’ll make me cry again if I think about it too much.

    

As the boys of summer have returned to the diamond, it does not shine for me as it once did. But I have sweet memories of seasons past when baseball was the national pastime and my passion.

    

Baseball defined my life for so many years. I lived it. I breathed it. My love affair with the sport still influences my adult life. For example, my attitude toward pantyhose hadn’t changed much since I wore my first pair in sixth grade. That’s the glorious day I ruined them by sliding into home plate for the winning run. Boy, did I get the run.

    

And yes, I was just one of the boys, running for the ballfield every weather-permitting recess, and our girls’ softball team won the city championship one year. Catching was my passion. Just ask my poor knees. They still pay the price. My body bore the proud scars, cuts, bruises, smears and bumps of colliding headfirst into the closest base.

    

But that’s what baseball was all about. It was about winning, about pushing yourself to the limits, about being a member of the team, and did I mention winning?

    

Yet, I became disillusioned with baseball about 20 years ago. Who had changed? Me or it? I believed baseball had abandoned me. It had become all ego and money, vacating the spirit that had once transformed me from a bystander to a team player. Yet, I admit I could’ve outgrown the sport, too.

    

But a tiny part of me always wanted to recapture that pleasure. So, I realized one of my lifelong dreams this summer by visiting Cooperstown, New York. That’s where the heart of all true baseball fans eventually leads them. It just took me 40 years to get there. And I’m probably the only woman in America who dragged her 16-year-old son along. He doesn’t give a hoot about baseball.

    

But I was there, where the lifeblood of the sport spilled into the streets of the humble town. I could feel it just by standing outside the museum 20 minutes early. To speed up the agonizing wait, my son and I window shopped. Oh, all the books, all the bits of history. I was in heaven.

    

My son nodded periodically, saying nothing until the word “Look!” passed his teen-age lips. And I did, excited and wondering what bit of baseball history had caught his eye.

    

“Look!” he said. “They’ve got Wild Cherry Pepsi!”

    

I sighed.

    

“You mean to tell me that you’re standing in the midst of some of the greatest moments of this country’s history and a can of soda is what turned you on.”

    

“Well, Mom, I haven’t seen any so far on the trip.”

    

Yes, he was right. He had seen nothing yet until I pushed him through the turnstiles of the museum. That’s when it all came flooding back to me. Why I had loved the game. Why it had inspired me so. We walked through the hall of fame with all the shining plaques, once a glimmer in a young girl’s eyes.

    

Babe Ruth, Ty Cobb, their history I had learned so well. And then Johnny Bench, Bob Gibson, Ernie Banks, their history I lived firsthand by watching them on TV or in person. For an instant, I could smell the hot-dogs smothered in mustard and relish. Taste the salt of the popcorn on my lips. Feel the shells of the roasted peanuts cracking in my fingers. See the foamy cups of beer that we had to pass down the row. Hear the bat’s victory over the ball that I prayed would someday come my way.

    

It was then that my lips started to quiver. “Look,” I told my son, pointing to the stars who had been inducted in the 70’s and 80’s. But I could say no more as my eyes watered. It was a few long moments before I could even utter, “These were the players I grew up with.”

    

My heart stopped again as we walked into the small area devoted to women in baseball. All I could hear was the emotional theme from “A League of Their Own,” a video I’ve replayed to near extinction, a soundtrack that fills my day often as an inspiration. I was mesmerized, studying every artifact at least twice.

    

It was at that moment that I knew the truth. If I’d been born in that time, that’s where I would’ve wanted to be. I would’ve been one of those girls with dirt in my skirt. I closed my eyes and I was 12 years old again ....

    

With muddy sneakers from playing the minute the rain stopped. With the courage to say “damn!” when I missed the pitch, as long as Mom wasn’t there. In heaven from caressing the worn leather mitt. Cheering my teammates on to cream the other team.

    

I wasn’t afraid of anything.

    

A thousand miles away from the sandlots of my youth, I had come home again, the day after my 40th birthday. Old enough now to order the beer that once sloshed over my fingers, but better yet, old enough to understand why a grown woman could cry over a boy’s game.

    

After all, it WAS baseball.

 

 

 

We play a little game around my house, a spin-off from that popular TV show, “Name That Tune.” You remember it, where contestants tried to guess the song in as few notes as possible.

    

In our home version, we search for the fewest number of words to send our 15-year-old son running in terror, though it is great practice for cross country.

    

It’s not five words, “Please — take — the — laundry — downstairs.”

    

It’s not four words, “Please — mow — the — yard.”

    

It’s not even three words, “Load — the — dishwasher.”

    

It’s those glorious two words: “Quality time.”

    

Nothing elicits a faster response than that magical phrase, “quality time.” You can see the panic flood his face as he searches for a legitimate excuse to escape.

    

As my only child drags me through his teen-age years, I have to admit we’ve never gotten along better. But don’t tell his friends. Teens hate to admit their parents can be their best friends. It just seems so … unnatural. But I’m a mom who likes her kid, a phenomenon beyond love. You can love somebody, but to like them simultaneously is truly a miracle.

    

It was that magical connection and sheer endurance that drove us 3,014 miles along the east coast for two weeks this summer. This would likely be the last summer vacation we’d have together before new commitments in his life would start intruding on our “quality time.” We trekked through the culture of Washington, D.C., and survived an argument on who got whom lost. (I still say it wasn’t my fault.)

    

We changed our first flat tire together in the rain. We ate pizza on a boardwalk and conversed with the seagulls. We kicked back in the Boston Commons under the bluest skies framing the skyscrapers. We counted the bugs hitting the windshield on a late night drive through the hills of New York.

    

We opened our eyes and our hearts throughout our journeys, and our ears absorbed each other’s words in a whole new language, adult to adult. He enjoyed that especially in yelling at me after I forgot to stop for gas. (That time he was right.)

    

We also celebrated both of our birthdays on the road, 12 hours of driving on mine and dinner at Cheers on his. He knew the trip was his present, but I had forgotten to get him a birthday card. As he slept that morning in the hotel room, I created my own card with 15 years of memories and confessions flooding my pen and my eyes …

    

I knew nothing about babies until I had you. I had never in my life changed a diaper until we brought you home. Each day you learned something, I learned twice as much. In one little person, I discovered something so adorable, so playful, so delightful, so terrifying, all in one.

    

I learned how to love, to be patient, to share, to teach. I had to reach deep within myself for emotional and physical strength, much of which I never knew existed. Mothering is part natural and part learned, and I definitely had to start on chapter one. At the same time, I’ll never finish that book as I grow and change with each stage of your life, no matter how long we both live. A mother and son have an eternal bond, some elements spoken, most not.

    

The journey has been both poignant and painful, cherished and challenging. Nothing can compare to watching a tiny, helpless infant grow in a self-sufficient man. Some days I thought would never end, other ended far too soon. And 15 years have seemed to vanish.

    

Where is that baby I would stare at in wonder? He’s a young man I now study in awe. From the soft baby cheeks to the slim masculine profile and the beginnings of a mustache, I’ve watched that evolution and still find it amazing. The baby I would try my darnedest to take care of … now takes care of me.

    

After he had read my impromptu prose, I couldn’t mistake the glisten in his eyes and the love in his embrace.

    

“Quality time,” I have learned, is just as precious whether it’s two weeks or two minutes.

    

But when I crawled out of that purple pick-up truck that final day, he said, “Now don’t bother me the next two weeks” as he ran toward the house.

    

“Quality time.”

    

Never have two words wielded such power …

    

“Take out the garbage now, young man, or it’s quality time for you.”

 

 

 

A while back, I laughed when I first heard of a self-discovery exercise — write your own obituary.

    

How silly, I thought at the time. However, as 40 looms a decade after my hairdresser knew for sure that gray hair had set up housekeeping, I reconsidered this odd assignment.

    

Its purpose is to examine where you’ve been, how you got there, or where you got sidetracked. You can also discover how your life’s goals have been altered or matured. You can see how your life has influenced others and the legacy you have created for yourself. And you can decide what there is still time to do.

    

And where do I begin …

    

I was born on Donald Duck’s 24th birthday, the same day my dad turned 23 and my grandpa turned 46. I would be my parents’ only child, growing up in an Indiana town, down the street from a hospital. And it was a good thing with all the trips I made to the emergency room … broken bones, legs caught in car doors, etc.

    

Encouraged by my mother, I was an avid reader and fell in love with writing as soon as I could chew on an eraser. I hated dolls and was irate when I won a Barbie doll in a contest instead of the red wagon I longed for. I was a die-hard baseball fan and the softball diamond beckoned me early and often. Nothing could keep me from playing, not even the day I wore my first pair of panty hose to school. With my skirt flying in the dirt, I slid into home plate for the winning run … and all the runs in my hose equaled more than both teams’ scores combined.

    

Writing was my life all those years growing up. The music of the 60’s and 70’s nurtured me as I spun my 45’s into scratchy oblivion and filled reams of lined school paper. I entertained classmates with silly poems and serious prose until discovering the joys and more stable job potential of newspaper reporting and feature writing. I vowed I would write the great American novel one day.

    

I had a few regrets during those high school and college years. I wish I had gotten a girls bike instead of a boys and avoided a few crashes that would ruin my knees for life. I also wish I hadn’t been chicken and had taken tougher classes, truly challenged myself and not been afraid to try something beyond my self-imposed safety net of writing and journalism.

    

But I do not regret marrying the only boy I ever dated, the one who ran home that first day he saw me and told his mother he had met the girl he was going to marry. Call it love, call it instinct, I knew he would be the only one I could share my life with.

 

Though we had no roadmap as a young couple out of college, I knew he and I could negotiate the turns of life together. I do not regret moving from the comfort of back home in Indiana, a song that still leaves me weepy at the start of every Indy 500.

    

And I’m glad I took the time to seriously consider having a child, a prospect that terrified me, the woman who hated babysitting. With great joy, I learned over time why God decided to give me a boy instead of the girl I had so desperately wanted. My son gives me the shoulder to cry on when I’m proud of him beyond words, the courage to pull strength from deep within both of us when we need it in solitude or together.

    

I paid my writing dues in nearly a dozen years of newspaper work, and have recently rediscovered the creative writing that sustained me as a child.

    

My epitaph? Well, it goes something like this:

    

Monica Vest Wheeler was clumsy, yet very cautious. She was afraid, yet very curious. She was strong, yet stubborn. She made mistakes and agognized over every one of them. She realized too late some of her strengths and weaknesses.

    

She was a compulsive rocker and always bounced her knees. She cried during sad movies, yet watched them over and over. She had the one great love of her life and gave birth to a son who enriched her. She had a family that supported her and loved her and laughed with her. She had wonderful friends who inspired her, who tolerated her quirky habits, who listened when she was brave enough to speak. She learned to appreciate life more with every day.

    

She wanted nothing more than to touch people with her words, and she never gave up trying to write the great American novel. She had dreams to fulfill.

    

My life’s story summarized in less than five minutes. Parts of it make me wince, others provoke a chuckle. Yet, it all provides a lesson: You cannot go back, but you can and should reflect on your past. The direction of our lives needs tweaking periodically. We may be surprised the twists life can take.

    

Though as morbid as it sounds, write your obituary. Remember we still have time to fulfill those dreams. Let them say, “she did,” not “she wanted to.”

    

All this from a woman who hated dolls but loves being a mother.

 

 

 

Dear Mr. Mandela,

 

"Your playing small does not serve the world …" Only a man whose soul was not locked away with his physical body in a prison cell for so many years could compose a speech so eloquent, so inspiring, so demanding. I’ve tasted freedom of body all my life, yet realize my spirit has been caged by bars I’ve constructed myself … so rigid and so inflexible that no one could break in, yet swords of steel I could have swept away like the weight of a feather by my own hand at my own pace, whenever I wanted. I guess I never wanted to … until now.

 

Yes, Mr. Mandela, you have the audacity to tell me that “Your playing small does not serve the world.” You have the nerve to tell me I’m not fulfilling my obligation in this world. You have the rare courage to remind me how I’ve let myself down, and that is the far greater tragedy. Your searing words have the strength to push me not only into finding my place in the world, but my place in the universe, where greater wisdom awaits to fill me until I can no longer drink … until I swallow and continue to replenish my soul until my dying breath on only this world.

 

You’re right, Sir, that my playing small does not serve the world. I’ve wasted far too many months and minutes fearing myself and what a pity for those I love and those I want to love on this vast planet. I always feared my voice would never be up to the challenge of being worthy enough to be heard. I always feared my eyes would not be powerful enough to look into someone else’s soul. I always feared that I would never find the words to captivate, to encourage, to entertain, to enlighten, to uplift, to soothe, to heal … to show the world that alas, I am only human, too.

 

After nearly five decades of this life, I accept your challenge, Mr. Mandela. I will acknowledge my human shortcomings and stretch them into great teachings. I will seize ears and weary souls that crave comfort and insight and words of truth. I will stand before the masses and speak to each individual as one … each my new friend, each my old companion.

 

I will not only serve the world, Mr. Mandela. I will truly live.

 

Monica Vest Wheeler

 

 

 

If I had one more day with my mom-in-law, Janice Wheeler, we’d gab the whole 24 hours while sitting along the ocean, playing in the sand, teasing the waves and laughing ourselves into exhaustion... and it still wouldn’t be enough.

 

Oh, Janice could talk, and I still credit her with teaching me how to engage in conversation. I was a rather shy 16-year-old only child when I met her son, Roger, and the entire family in 1974. When I married her oldest child in 1979, Janice was a mother-in-law anyone would envy... always insightful, never critical, always available, never shy, always supportive, never living a day without love and laughter. We had this ongoing joke É if her son and I ever divorced, she’d get me in the settlement. I could whine to her anytime her son and grandson were driving me crazy. She deserved sainthood!

 

After enduring years of Indiana winters, Janice and my dad-in-law moved in 1992 to Florida, where she had longed to live and enjoy the warm weather and beach year-round. Both had worked hard all their lives, raised five great kids and deserved life in the warm sunshine every day. Though Janice had become ill shortly before the move, she refused to allow that distraction to interrupt their plans. My husband, son and I surprised the family by visiting them that first Christmas in Florida. I hardly recognized Janice, her pale, almost feeble, frame surrounded by boisterous kids, grandkids and pets.

 

From 1992 through 2000, we watched Janice battle a fatal disease, amyloidosis, considered a variation of cancer. Though we talked on the phone several times every week and I visited a couple of times every year, I could put out of my mind that she was dying. Yet, I was angry that this damn disease had robbed her of the strength to go to the beach as often as she wanted, to do everything she had dreamed of. However, Janice had not lost her sense of humor, insatiable hunger for reading and knowledge, and endless love of conversation

 

While visiting her in November 1999, I could feel every bone in her wasting body. I could no longer ignore the truth: her life would soon end. I asked if she wanted to sit along the beach, but she was too tired, instead encouraging me to relax, get a trashy novel and bask in this rare vacation I allowed myself. Relenting, I left and cried alone most of the half-hour drive. There, I watched the seagulls battle for bread and knew my next visit would be for Janice’s funeral.

 

When she died at the age of 61 on February 12, 2000, I imagined her linking arms on the way to heaven with Charlie Brown's dad Charles Schultz and Dallas Cowboys coach Tom Landry, who also passed away that same day. And she’d be entertaining them with stories about her kids and grandkids every step.

 

If I had one more day with Janice — 1,440 precious minutes — we’d do something we never had the chance to do while she was alive... spend it together alongside the ocean, just the two of us. We had walked on a pier at the Gulf side a couple of times and played on the sand once along Lake Michigan years earlier, but never had we made it to an Atlantic beach. And I can imagine the fun we would have had.

 

Every time I see a seagull here in Peoria, it’s Janice reminding me to take time for myself... not by myself, because she’ll be right there with me flying overhead, lifting my spirit just as high.