“Ever Since,” A Literary Autobiography in 7 Vignettes, Mark Eckel
How we get from here to there, from hither to yon, is a story often untold. Outlined here for the first time is a celebration of the events which and people who have brought me this far.
Three
“Something’s wrong with him.” My paternal grandmother pestered my mom constantly with such statements.
Virginia, my mom was a nurse. Her concerns were different than the German-born, lock-step mother-in-law who didn’t like her anyway.
And I was the problem.
Most babies begin to coo, jabber, and babble within their first year. Outside of crying for necessities, my mom tells me I did not utter a word for three years.
Magically upon my third birthday I began to talk. According to my mom, words, phrases, and sentences began to volcanically erupt from my little person.
I have been talking ever since.
Encyclopedias
“The first time I couldn’t find you I was frantic,” she began the recounting. “I ran through the house beside myself that you had been hurt.”
She paused, then smiled.
“But then I found you sitting beside the book case. You were reading an encyclopedia volume. You looked up, wondering why I was so upset.”
Whimsically she added, “From then on, whenever I wondered why you were so quiet, I knew you were reading a book.”
I have been reading ever since.
Rope
Chaffing one’s inner thigh is no laughing matter. Especially when you’re eleven. Especially when people laugh at you. Especially when fifth grade classmates call you Eckel the Elephant.
I was short and fat – or “stocky” if you bought boys clothes in 1968. My growth spurt, with thanks to my uncles on my mom’s side who were 6’4”, did not begin until middle school. But in fifth grade I was the largest zoo animal anyone in my class had seen.
In fifth grade, the physical education gods had proclaimed all boys should be able to climb a rope, floor to ceiling, some 20 feet in the air. I could literally not get off the ground. My chunky hands had trouble holding the rope. My inept jumps to toggle the snake with my feet always, always ended with braided cat-gut braided stands ripping the flesh off my legs.
The gym teacher would have scared the Marine D.I. in Full Metal Jacket. His abusive Gatling gun tirades left little bodies bleeding from verbal wounds. Directions not followed were restated at 120 decibels. If you were slow, he would thunder “Move it! Chop, chop!” a phrase I had heard repeatedly from my own Marine Corps father who had fought in Korea.
Little boys ahead of me in line darted up the flexible line. It danced as they ascended to the rafters. One after another they breezed through the exercise. I knew my fate even before my turn came. Like my father’s yelling at home, I could already feel the hot gym teacher’s breathe on my face. “Why can’t you climb that rope?! Are you a baby?! Why don’t you lose that fat?!”
The boy in front of me jumped the last few feet off the rope after his Tarzan descent. Time crawled. My ears magnified by twenty every sound in the gym. Sweat dotted my forehead. My stomach rolled. Breathing shallowed. My salivary glands stopped working.
What I heard next was a death sentence, “O.K. Your turn.” I wondered if he had forgotten my name. But there was no doubt a nanosecond after three failed attempts to climb Mount Everest. “Eckel! What’s your problem? Are you a momma’s boy? Maybe you need a ladder! Go sit by the wall til class is done!” There is no word for the verbal shredding of that moment.
My classroom teacher came to get the class. She saw her charges active around the gym, all save me. When she located me, she saw pain sitting on the floor. I watched as she sidled up to the gym teacher, whispered a few words, received a few in response, then walked my way. I began to cry.
Tears soon turned to smiles. Right then and there it had been decided. I would be the M.C. for our elementary school gym night. My classmates came dressed in shorts and tee shirts. I wore a suit fitted for “stocky, size 14.” My classmates prepared around their apparatus. I sat with the teachers. My classmates performed their routine for the evening.
But my classmates didn’t do anything until I announced who they were and what they were to do.
I had been given the microphone.
I have been speaking ever since.
Last
I scored 126th out of 126 students. When I was a junior in high school our class took a test for possible college level English curriculum in our senior year. Having been told the results, I sat sobbing on my bedroom floor. For some reason, grammatical prowess in my mother tongue eluded me. Syntax seemed like “sin tax” to me.
And grammar was the first of three levels in the senior curriculum. I had to pass out of one level to get to the next two: essay writing then free writing. I had been behind the door when grammar was taught in middle school. Somewhere, somehow I missed lessons on prepositional phrases, split infinitives, and hanging gerunds. I tried and tried to pass through to the next level. No amount of tutelage helped. I languished in the wasteland of grammatical incoherence.
But the thing was, I could write. I knew instinctively what sounded right. I heard the words even if I didn’t understand how they fit together. And Roy Honeywell knew it.
Roy Honeywell had been my junior English teacher. He knew what I could do. “I would like to read a paper from someone in the class whose writing could be an example to others. He shall remain nameless,” Mr. Honeywell intoned as he read my papers during eleventh grade not once, not twice, but three times.
Now Roy Honeywell was the dual-credit, college-prep teacher in my senior year. He agonized with me as he tried to fill my grammatical knowledge gaps. I took and failed test after test. We were a month into the senior year. Everyone else had matriculated to levels two and three. I was the only one who could not pass the grammar section of the program.
The overwhelming feelings of failure touch me even today. Even as I write this piece I can feel what I felt. The emotional slough I wallowed in then is the swamp I see before me every day.
But the feeling of clandestine secrecy from what happened next lies just beyond the swamp. Roy Honeywell knew what I could do. He knew I could write. So one day he came to my desk and told me that I did not have to pass the grammar exam. I could proceed to level two.
“This is just between me and you,” he stated in firm, hushed tones. “You show me that you can write like I know you can and the grammatical understanding will follow. I have faith in you.” And he walked away.
I did not know what would happen next, but he did. After scoring 126 out of 126, it was not long before my writing scores ranked at the top of the class. I knew I was doing well when Mr. Honeywell began to anonymously read my papers before the class again. I will never forget when he cast a quick, smiling glance in my direction before he began to read my writing.
“I have faith in you.” The words still inspire me today. Mr. Honeywell and I kept in contact. Before I left for college he gave me a box of books he knew I would need. I took my fiancée to meet him prior to our wedding. We wrote a few times before he died during my first stint as a high school teacher.
Roy Honeywell gave me a chance.
I have been giving students a chance ever since.
Greek
My undergraduate degree mandated that I learn koine Greek, the ancient language of the common person in which the New Testament had been written. I fell in love with small words that told other words what to do and where to go. I was introduced to “from,” “in,” “through,” “beside,” “upon,” and a score of other prepositions in college Greek classes. The importance of directional connectors cannot be overestimated. To this day I am impressed by the versatility of the Greek language, the multi-colored interaction of words with each other.
And it was not until I learned another language that I began to understand my own. The halogen headlight of grammatical understanding illumined the darkened corners of my syntactical mind. “Once I was blind, but now I see” had a new context. Scales fell from my eyes. The blindfold was lifted. For the first time in my life, I understood my own language, English.
I have been helping students with English grammar ever since.
Fowler
“We have to plant a tree.”
These were the first words out of his mouth.
I had just gotten out of the car.
We had not seen each other in some time. I had written ahead to see if I could visit. “Of course!” was the enthusiastic reply.
But first, we had to plant a tree.
Dr. Don Fowler had been one of my professors in graduate school.
Don road a motorcycle . . . in 1980 . . . way before riding bikes was cool . . . and he taught at a conservative, evangelical seminary. At times, you could trace a sly smile across his face as he rode out of the parking lot; a look of pure joy.
Don’s coffee pot was never off. Most of us believed java—not blood—ran through Don’s veins. Whenever I visited Don in his office he would immediately go to an antechamber through a door in the back of his office, returning with a fresh pot of brew to share.
When you entered Don’s office you were immediately reminded of your grandmother’s attic, nostalgia replaced by rows and stacks and reams of books. I was always in awe of that office. In many ways my office today is an exact replica of his.
When he taught, Don would mash his open palm into his face, momentarily rubbing his head while teaching. I have lost count of how many times I have done exactly that, catching myself in the act, then having to recount why I do so to my wide-eyed students.
Don’s consummate understanding of First Testament language, history, culture, and biblical studies in general was my inspiration. He would hand out notes the size of a small city phone book. Inside were paragraphs of thought, outlines to be completed during class, maps, charts, graphs, and an occasional side-splitting comment about some Assyrian general.
I have had many graduate professors but Don, without exception, was and still is my favorite.
Don’s lively, passionate, caring, relevant lectures enthralled me. His excitement about his material stirred me. Don turned what many might suppose to be dry, dusty historical minutia into soul-stirring replays of events and personas. He would often reflect on current political-cultural issues through the lens of his First Testament teaching. Comprehensive understanding of history 3500 years removed, I would sit on the edge of my seat soaking in his content and delivery.
I have often reflected on Don’s impact on my teaching life asking myself why it was so powerful.
My conclusion is, Don wanted to plant a tree.
So we got in the car, went to the nursery, paid for the tree, returned to his house, dug a hole, and planted the tree. All the while we talked as if nothing had changed from the last time we saw each other. We chatted about life, our families, our teaching, our collective memories. Don cooked dinner for his wife and me. Don and Peg even gave up their bed so that I could sleep comfortably during my overnight visit, each of them taking a couch.
Now, whenever we have guests in our home, our bed becomes theirs. I cook for all our visitors. If there is something to be done around town or around the house invitations to participate are always offered. I have yet to dig a hole, planting a tree with a student of mine, but I have visited a construction site, pored over architectural plans, been given tours through office buildings, witnessed student teachers teach, listened to innumerable vocational dreams, and watched with delight as young lives begin their first steps in ministerial roles.
Yes, Don wanted to plant a tree but by doing so he planted his teaching life into mine.
I have been teaching ever since.
Disturbed
My favorite definition of preaching is “Comfort the disturbed, disturb the comfortable.”
Robert Coles’ The Call of Stories disturbed me. He changed how I taught and now how I write. His first chapter “Stories and Theories” functioned as a primer for why my writing must incorporate narrative.
Anton Chekhov’s short story “Gooseberries” captures my writer’s conviction that the comfortable should be disturbed:
Behind the door of every contented, happy man there ought to be someone standing with a little hammer and continually reminding him with a knock that there are unhappy people, that however happy he may be, life will sooner or later show him its claws, and trouble will come to him—illness, poverty, losses, and then no one will see or hear him, just as now he neither sees nor hears others. But there is no man with a hammer. The happy man lives at his ease, faintly fluttered by small daily cares, like an aspen in the wind—and all is well.[1]
Flannery O’Connor understands how to knock on the door:
The novelist doesn’t write to express himself, he doesn’t write simply to render a vision he believes true, rather he renders his vision so that it can be transferred, as nearly whole as possible, to his reader. . . . Your problem is going to be difficult in direct proportion as your beliefs depart from his. . . . I have to make the reader feel, in his bones if nowhere else, that something is going on here that counts.[2]
Stories are how I began to view my responsibility to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.
I have been writing stories ever since.
[1] Anton Chekhov. 1947, 1966. The Portable Chekhov. (Viking): 381.
[2] Flannery O’Connor. 1957, 1969. Mystery & Manners. (Reprint: Farrar, Straus, Giroux): 162.