Volume XI, Issue 10
March 9, 2022
Dear ,
I am happy to say that I have written every day since the beginning of my Coastal Writing Retreat at Sunset Beach. (I'll have details about the next one in November within the month, so stay posted.) In fact, I got so caught up in the piece I was working on today that I went on way longer than I planned. This feels marvelous, and it's
also the perfect opportunity to go back into the Word-Zine archives and share a "golden oldie" with you.
What a lovely moment of synchronicity! Shortly before I sat down to put today's zine together, I sent a message to my four siblings to let them know I was thinking of them on our dad's birthday. And then, as I started searching for something altogether different, I stumbled upon this message, sent out exactly seven years ago on .
. . (wait for it) . . . my dad's birthday! 😊 What could be more perfect than that? Even the issue number, as well as the month and day, was the same.
So, into the time machine we go . . . I hope you enjoy this one, prompt and all.
Who has given you the gift of wings? Perhaps by believing in you when you didn't believe in yourself, or providing support at a critical juncture in your life. Or perhaps by being there through thick and thin.
It may take a moment to think of one specific person, or much longer than that to narrow the great number of people who have contributed to your many "flights" of success both large and small. And it may be someone you have never met, such as a writer whose work inspired you to write.
For me—through the story of a big dreamer named Jonathan Livingston Seagull—it was my dad. Today would be his 91st [NOW 98TH] birthday. And while I wish he were still here with me, I'm ever so grateful that I had as many years with him as I did. This is the last picture of the
very few I have of the two of us together, and I treasure it.
Today, to celebrate the day my dad was born, I'm sharing an essay I wrote about his "gift of wings." I hope you enjoy it, and I hope it inspires you to write about someone who gave you (or someone else you know, real or fictional) the gift of wings.
Love and light and flight,
Maureen
It just so happened that when General Electric in Erie, Pennsylvania, where my father worked, had this particular "Family Day" one summer when I was
in high school, I was the only one of Dad's five children that went with him. This is close to the time I received his "gift of wings" that I talk about in this essay.
The Gift of Wings
by
Maureen Ryan Griffin
My father was never much for gifts. Every time his birthday, or Christmas, or Father’s Day rolled around, when I’d ask what he wanted, his answer was always the same—“Well-behaved children.” He wasn’t much for giving gifts either, not the tangible kind anyway.
No, our mother was the one who noticed what our eyes lingered on in the department store window. She was the one who sat the five of us Ryan children down each year with the Sears Wishbook to make our Christmas lists. By the time I stopped believing in Santa Claus, I knew she was also the one who bought us
the items on those lists that she deemed appropriate and affordable. Mom was the parent who cared about wish gratification, and Dad—well, Dad was the Grinch who, while he grudgingly financed the purchasing, believed that gift-giving was unnecessary, even irksome.
Dad was an engineer by trade and a practical man by nature. It would be more efficient, I heard him say to Mom, to write us each a check so we could buy our own presents, or, better yet, to not give us anything since we already had so much. (We were comfortably middle class, while he had grown up quite poor.) This
idea was one my mother, thankfully, didn't buy. She gave me many memorable gifts over the years—stuffed animals I loved, a scarf set I’d been wanting, a Barbie kitchen that was a dream come true. It took becoming a grownup myself to realize that my dad, too, had
given me an abundance of gifts. They just weren't, with one exception, the kind you could wrap up and slip under a Christmas tree.
From him, I received the gift of perseverance, and the knowledge that I could make amends for my mistakes. When, inspired by the sparkling crystals inside the geodes my seventh grade teacher showed us, I inadvertently damaged his best wood chisel busting open rock after rock in hopes of finding a geode of my own, he
had me spend what felt like an entire Saturday morning sharpening it. How could there be so many grades of sandpaper, from coarse to fine? But after the final step—oil on his whetstone—he declared the chisel good as new.
My dad gave me the gift of knowing I could take care of myself. He wouldn’t let me get my driver’s license until I demonstrated, lug nut by lug nut, that I could change a tire.
He gave me the gift of noticing me. Once, when I was in high school, after a stormy morning with my mother, I’d left home for the afternoon, wanting more than anything to run away from home. When I walked in the door, his first words were “Welcome home.” How had he known?
He sent me my own post card every time he went on a business trip. This may sound like a small thing, but it wasn’t. Since I had four siblings, getting a card addressed just to me was special, no matter what was pictured. I teased him for years about the card he sent of a prison, with a note on the back pointing out
the rust beneath each barred window. His tactic of trying to scare me into being a law-abiding citizen was too transparent, I said.
But the truth is that, along with the gift of letting me know he was thinking of me, he was also teaching me the value of paying attention. Would I have become a writer without my dad's influence?
To continue reading Maureen's essay, please visit the Wordplay website here.
WordPlay Now! Writing Prompt
This is WordPlay -- so why not revel in the power and potential of one good word after another? This week, it's "wings."
PROMPT:
Write about "a gift of wings" in your life, or in the life of anyone else, real or fictional. Feel free to use any definition of this expression that suits you. You may want to start out by making a list of people/experiences that come to mind as you ponder these words.
If you wrote about someone who is still living, polish your words and send them off in a letter, along with a thank you.
MAUREEN RYAN GRIFFIN, an award-winning poetry and nonfiction writer, is the author of Spinning Words into Gold, a Hands-On Guide to the Craft of Writing, a grief workbook entitled I Will Never Forget You, and two collections of poetry, This Scatter of
Blossoms and When the Leaves Are in the Water. She believes, as author Julia Cameron says, "We are meant to midwife dreams for one another."
Maureen also believes that serious "word work" requires serious WordPlay, as play is how we humans best learn—and perform. What she loves best is witnessing all the other dreams that come true for her
clients along the way. Language, when used with intentionality and focus, is, after all, serious fuel for joy. Here's to yours!
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