Barbara Gill was my sixth-grade Language Arts teacher. She was tall with long hair parted down the middle, she wore jeans, denim shirts, and white Reebok sneakers. I wrote a short story about a dragon protecting a cave full of jewels. I’m not sure why Mrs. Gill encouraged me, but she told me to submit it to a statewide competition. The story won a prize. My parents drove me to the awards ceremony. No matter if dozens of other kids were receiving awards – I don’t think anyone lost the competition – it felt tremendous. I’d written something somebody wanted to read.
Lynda Sorensen was my tenth-grade English teacher. She was short with shoulder-length hair, she wore black skirts, tights, and red Converse high-tops. Ms. Sorenson taught literature as something personal, social; you read novels and poems in her class as individual, almost living things that meant something to their place and time but also ours – stories where the characters underwent a familiar kind of turmoil we teenagers were experiencing.
The psychologist Michael Roussel published a book in 2007 called Sudden Influence: How Spontaneous Events Change Our Lives. The central idea is that a young person’s elevated suggestibility can leave them – and their self-esteem – open to simple actions or words becoming life-changing. It doesn’t mean the person who’s being guided toward something knows it, or even the guide knows it. This past Thursday, I read this line in an article praising magnolia trees: “If a magnolia is in flower then everyone knows it’s in flower.” It made me think that teenagers can be similarly transparent, but can we identify when a human is not in flower, necessarily, but starting to grow?
I get emotional thinking about Mrs. Gill or Ms. Sorenson. To have encountered one of them, let alone both, seems incredibly fortunate. They saw something in me, and by seeing something, they awoke something – a something that played an oddly outsized role in steering me toward who I’d become.
Thankfully, I’ve run into both of them again. Mrs. Gill came to the very first reading I did in my hometown bookstore. Her long hair was silver. I choked up, I couldn’t help it, trying to explain what her influence had meant. A few years later, Ms. Sorenson came to a reading and I did the same thing. She was gracious enough not to notice, then invited me to speak to one of her classes. I told her students how grateful I was for her influence, how lucky they were to be there. I don’t know if any of them heard me – they mostly wanted to talk about my website – but that wasn’t the point. They got to hear her every day, and maybe someday it would make all the difference.
In tomorrow’s Sunday supplement for subscribers: A great podcast (and some tear-jerk-y media) that inspired today’s mini-essay, better loading screens for browsing the web, and an instrumentalist similar to Hayden Pedigo. Also for subscribers, next week I’ll send the longer essay from the woods – this month, about the solitude of a solo backpacking trip.
If you’re not on the supporter train yet, hit the blue button. There’s a free trial so you can dig into the archives to see if it’s for you.
Meditations in an Emergency is a micro-essay published Saturdays by novelist Rosecrans Baldwin about things he finds beautiful, with a longer essay once a month for subscribers, dispatched from the woods.
Also for subscribers: a Sunday supplement with three-plus ideas for things to love, no paid placements lol 💀
Rosecrans is the bestselling author of Everything Now: Lessons From the City-State of Los Angeles, available from Bookshop, Amazon, or (preferably) your local store. Other books include The Last Kid Left and Paris, I Love You but You’re Bringing Me Down. His debut novel, You Lost Me There, was a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice.
Any other books mentioned in this newsletter are featured on a Bookshop list.