Because I was raised as a desert rat, whenever I was around a body of water, I’d toss stones into it and then watch in fascination as the ripples spread outward from where the stone had broken the surface of the water. It’s recently come to my attention that similar ripples come from writing this blog.
For example, someone recently mentioned that he was closing out 2024 with 480,000 steps, and that part of what had encouraged him was reading about my own walking experience in the blog. By the way, I’m writing this one on the afternoon of New Year’s Eve with a step count of … I thought I’d be just over 29,000,000 and 13,000 some miles. That was the amount when my phone started counting in 2017. Last night, however, just before I went to bed, for some reason my phone asked if I wanted to add in the rest of my walking history which included those first steps taken way back in the Fitbit era. Turns out I’m currently at 38,433,313 steps and 18,258 miles. And still walking, but that’s another story, and this is definitely what Mrs. Medigovich, my senior English teacher at Bisbee High School would have called, “Going off on a tangent.” When you were writing an essay for her, tangents were a no-no. Fortunately she’s not around to grade me on this one.
In 2020, I heard of the passing of another of my teachers from BHS. Richard Guerra came to Bisbee as a beginning teacher in 1960. He was my Latin teacher for two years in a row. In Latin Two, when we were all getting less than wonderful grades, he offered us extra credit for writing a research paper. Mine was on a guy named Servius Tullius, one of the five kings of Rome, who started out as a slave and ended up being king. (I’ve always been a sucker for rags-to-riches stories.) When I got the paper back there was an A+ written in red pencil at the top of the first page. At the bottom of the last page, also in red pencil, were the following life-changing words: Research worthy of a college student! As a sophomore in high school, that was the first time anyone had ever hinted to me that I might be smart enough to go on to college, and I grabbed that little piece of encouragement and held onto it for dear life.
Once I knew Mr. Guerra had passed away, I was sad that I had never managed to thank him in person, but wanted to share with others the huge impact he had had on my life. A year or so after writing the post A Teacher Remembered, I heard back from one of Richard Guerra’s seven siblings. One of his nieces or nephews had come across my piece and passed it along to the rest of his family. For all I know, Mr. Guerra’s ripple is still moving.
This week I encountered another ripple from even longer ago. In November of 2013, when we were in Tucson for the winter, I was invited to do two separate library events in early November. I have no idea which libraries were on the schedule at the time, but in late October and in advance of going to those, I wrote a blog entitled Libraries and Me, telling a story that started with the school library at Bisbee’s Greenway elementary.
When I was in the sixth grade, Billy Caldwell, a boy a year older than I was, passed away from a childhood heart ailment which had plagued him his whole life. He was smart as a whip but out of school more than he was in attendance due to his health. His family and mine belonged to Bisbee’s Warren Community Church, and I remember him coming to Sunday school on those occasions when he was well enough to do so. His parents were part of Bisbee’s upper crust. His father owned a local drugstore. In lieu of flowers, his parents suggested people make donations to buy books for the Greenway School Library, and his mother, Eula, a former teacher, made it her business to purchase the books, and her choices were wonderful.
By the time I was in seventh grade and eighth grade, there was a plaque on the wall of the Greenway School Library with Billy’s name inscribed on it. Underneath that plaque were two metal shelves stocked with more than a hundred books. They weren’t necessarily the books that the educational establishment thought kids should be reading at the time. Instead, they were the kinds of books Billy had loved to read—the Hardy Boys, Tom Swift, Nancy Drew, the Dana Girls, Judy Bolton. In eighth grade, when, instead of spending time in the classroom, I spent hours each day checking books in and out of the library. I can assure you, the shelves under Billy Caldwell’s plaque were almost always empty because the kids loved those books exactly the same way Billy had.
So imagine my surprise when, earlier this week, I heard from the son of Billy Caldwell’s older sister, Darrel Frost. Darrel was only four at the time of his uncle’s death and living miles away in another mining town called Globe, so he has no memory of Billy himself. Recently, while looking up his uncle’s obituary—Billy Caldwell, Bisbee, Arizona, Darrel stumbled across my blog post from October 2013. His grandmother was actually staying at her daughter’s home when the terrible news came that Billy had passed away. According to Darrel, his grandmother collapsed upon hearing what had happened and never recovered from the loss of her son. Billy Caldwell actually died on the operating table of Dr. Richard Debakey. Until hearing from Darrel, I had no idea that Billy’s folks had gone to a world-famous heart surgeon and signed on for experimental surgery in hopes of finding help for their son’s congenital heart ailment.
Sixteen years ago or so, our son-in-law, Jon, signed on as Patient # 6 for a melanoma T-cell protocol. It gave him another two years of life, and those two years gave us our grandson, Colt. Not only that, treatments growing out of that original protocol mean that now a melanoma diagnosis is no longer an automatic death sentence. I’m equally sure that although Billy Caldwell’s experimental surgery wasn’t a success, what happened in the operating room that day has helped countless others by contributing to the beginnings of the kinds of life-save heart surgery treatments that exist today.
In that past several days, Darrel Frost and I have exchanged several interesting emails discussing our mutual experiences of growing up in small mining towns in the American West.
Who know what other ripples will happen as a result of my writing this blog? It’ll be interesting to see.