Serendipity

 Marcus Alden Meredith

May 23, 2024

Serendipity

“I never dreamed of being a writer”

I never dreamed of being a writer. If I do my best to remember my childhood dreams, you’d be hard pressed to writer in the mix of careers and professions I DID envision. Among the dreams were mixes of reverie like astronomer, electrical engineer, classical pianist, formula one race driver, and such…. writer was just NOT on the list. So, how did I end up writing essays and blogs? There in lies a story and lots of lessons.

Now, I doubt that my “one-reader” is that interested in some long wandering missive bordering on an autobiography. But, at least for the sake of instruction in life’s twists and turns, some examination of my C.V. is probably warranted and a few life details necessary.

My family is very middle class, Mid-Western in origin, and a family of educators deriving from people who were employed as farmers, coal miners, and working class ‘handymen’ from small towns. In one of my grandfather’s family were 7 children - 4 boys and 3 girls - and only my great Aunt Lucile was ever able to make it to college. My mother’s family had painters, coal miners, construction workers, and a Methodist minister in it. So when my dad got the G.I. bill and mom when to college too, that they would meet as high school teachers and marry is not all too surprising. But mom and dad were too young to be “The Greatest Generation” and too old be the Baby Boom - but I got to be a Boomer just under the wire.

The late 60’s thru the early 80’s were my formative years so the space race, Apollo11, disco, gas shortages and oil embargoes, the end of the Vietnam War, Watergate, Regan, mixed tapes, 3-4 network T.V. channels, the first calculators and digital watches were my youthful experiences. I’m even writing this blog long hand, in cursive, on a yellow legal pad, not on a computer (partly to stay with the feel of the writing and partly to slow me down and help me think). So, in short, being a writer was not what most of my generation of geeks and freaks were thinking about… it was more of a  “Sex, Drugs, and Rock & Roll every night at Johnny’s” kind of vibe. My particular brand of geeks were the ones in the band or the stage crew for the kids who were the thespians of the 1970’s… we made the play possible but got none of the glory (only sometimes we did get the girl… *wink*)

I went into college then university with an eye toward engineering but circumstances pushed me toward the one profession my parents had done their best to steer me away from… teaching. Six years of undergrad plus student teaching, another year of substitute teaching, and finally I was a science teacher at a middle school. And there I stayed… for 33 years. As static a situation as that may seem, as mundane as it could have been, it did afford me the pleasure of teaching the mostly “top” students for a very long time and the environment to hone my skills in communications including the discovery, thanks to my professors being right, that I was and am (and can be) a pretty damned good writer. The incident that solidified this realization was somewhat comical. The incident went like this: I was known for my logical and philosophical aphorisms with my students and it sometimes led to giggles as well as eye rolling with a hint of sarcasm that I just let slide by. One day, a student said to me, “Mr. Meredith maybe it would be easier if you just wrote all those ideas down…” My reply was, “Maybe I will.”

With classes done for the day and grades assessed and recorded, I sat down at an iMac computer (the “chose one of each color” variety of Apple computer at the time) and proceeded to just let my sayings come out of my brain like a stream of consciousness exercise. Before I knew it, the custodians were chasing me out of my classroom telling me to go home! Looking up from my computer, I realized, “Oh hell… I’m writing a book,” and let out a belly laugh. Sometimes the Universe has a lesson to teach the teacher… and mine was, “You do have original thoughts to express. You are a writer.”

For decades after this, I kept pushing the notion aside even though I did finish a second draft of the book (the still packed away and never published book), thinking to myself, “I am a scientist, I’m a teacher, I’m not a writer.” Fast forward to being retired with the kind of freedom that most people working to live never enjoy, I started to write again. Slowly, sporadically at first with “hot ideas burning my brain,” getting the attention first. “Where am I gonna put this? They’re essays… who’ll want to read them? Oh hey! What about a blog?” The one idea that hit me was my failed first attempt while I was teaching which was on my google.com account - a Blogspot blog. Some research followed by some fits and starts later, In the Garden of the Warrior Monk was inaugurated and I started to slowly fill it with views, thoughts, ideas, speculation, opinions, and lots of P.O.V. essays. “So this is what a second life feels like,” I mused. “I leave a career and find I have answered another calling. I never thought I’d live a life like this. I never thought I’d be a writer,” was my stunned reverie upon completion.

What lesson or lessons might my wonderful evaluation give to people reading my story? I think it all depends on how the reader is able to integrate this change I experienced into their own life’s journey. Self realization is such an awe inspiring force in human lives and history. This force has changed the course of history bringing our race magnificent revelations and transformations but also, all too often, it has also wrought malevolent, malignant despotism, strife, and devolution of human progress. “When” or “If” such a realization stuns you, listen carefully. It doesn’t mean you’ll become a writer, that was my path in life…yours is yours. But think carefully, friend, about the consequences of taking that path, or equally, tossing it aside for a whole myriad of reasons. Change is not always beneficial, but stagnation is just as terrible in its own stultifying, stifled way. Remember the works of the poet Robert Frost: “Two roads diverged in a yellow wood and I, I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.”