Opening a Dusty Book

It has been just over a year since I left the university where I’d spent all of my adult life.  While I was there a few buildings went up and a football stadium came down.  We merged with another college, tried out and abandoned a suburban extension strategy, and grew deeper urban roots.  We changed from a white school with an engineering school full of men to a school of remarkable diversity in race and gender.  And it has been just over a year since I put something on the upper right corner of my desk here in my study in our new home town 250 miles north of University of Detroit Mercy.  It is a book of notes from those I worked with there for forty years, a book that I’ve left there until I took time to thank every one of them.  I’ve dusted it a few times, removing most of a layer of fine sawdust that finds its way through the filters between my basement workshop and my study here on the main floor where the sunrise finds me writing this blog. But the people remain unthanked.

I’ll be writing, these next several days and from time to time into the future, about some of the people who have been, in those forty years, especially important to me.  That they have been important to me is not why I’ll share their stories here.  I’ll tell their stories because they are examples of those flashes of light, those notes of song that stir each of us in our own lives, that awaken in us something that is very much alive, but asleep. 

The word education comes from the Latin educare, meaning “to draw out from”.   I think that they will remind you of such people in your own life, people in your own dusty book in the corner of your desk, who have drawn out from you those things of gift and beauty that you did not even know were there.  I hope this exercise of mine will help you re-member these lights in your own life.

I will begin tomorrow with a man with thick glasses who introduced me to sight.

 FreeLemonadeStand by John J. Daniels is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.