WALTZ AGAINST THE SKY AFTERWORD
I suspect that most writers feel compelled, after having written a first novel, to attempt to give credit to the people who have played significant roles in their lives, either in their development as writers or as human beings. After all, they now realize just how hard the process of writing is and must seriously wonder if they will ever have another opportunity to acknowledge in print the people who have helped them along the way. I suspect, too, that one common, inhibiting thought is that they fear memory, being what it is, will fail them and they will omit someone truly important. If that happens here, I can only apologize and plead the common excuse.
Beyond those mentioned in the dedication, the important people in my life: my wife, Pat, who came into my life like a thunderbolt when I was almost thirty years old, our parents and our extended families– I realize my personal debt to people outside that circle of family who were extraordinarily kind to me for no reason that I can fathom. For the reason I mentioned, that this may be my only opportunity, I choose to memorialize those people in this afterword.
So, in no particular order, I offer my profound appreciation to:
the aunts and uncles on both sides of my family, living and dead –Larum and Baeth– who were truly good and decent people, deserving of the appellation bestowed on their generation;
Paul Stengel, a little league coach who not only taught me how to play baseball, but instructed me without so much as a word what a second chance really means;
Roy & Marlette Baeth, who went way beyond being uncle and aunt to teach a young nephew how to play pinochle and treated him as if he were an equal or, at the very least, a future adult;
Ed York, the consummate seventh-grade teacher who made me understand that I was capable of a lot more, in every way, and gave me every opportunity to prove it;
Warren Perry, a simple farmer who loved his faith, family and baseball and shared those joys with a neighbor’s boy, along with his back issues of baseball’s Bible –The Sporting News;
the Weibke’s –Geneva, Winfield & Winfred, iconic small town grocery store owners who gave me my first real job and treated me like family instead of hired help;
Drs. J.M. Brooke and Eugene J. P. Drouillard, who in their turns rescued me from that grim ferry crossing the River Styx after a diagnosis of Hodgkin’s Disease;
the Morrison’s –Dick, Jean & Danny, who embraced me as if I were their own and made me feel special;
the members of the Charlo Women’s Club, who gave me the $250 scholarship that made it possible for me to go to college;
the Christensens –Marion & Frances, and the Pilgrims, Ned & Esther, two Dillon couples who opened their homes to a college student who was a long way from home for the first time in his life;
Lee Barker, one of the best radio announcers who ever stood before a microphone, a patient mentor, and a role model for life;
the Ranney brothers, Ray & Fred, who unknowingly opened the door to a whole new world when he invited me to walk out to the radio station with him so he could apply for a job;
Stan Davison, the history professor who offered me the perfect college work-study job (inside when it was thirty below zero outside) and threw in a friendship that lasted until his death;
Mom & Pop Bridenstine, house parents for Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship on the Western Montana College campus and godparents for several generations of WMC students;
Lafayette Erickson, an itinerant ranch worker who carried himself with a remarkable dignity, shared my love for Robert Service’s poetry and was always up for a game of cribbage;
Skip Christensen, a hard-rock miner who dropped into my life during a tough patch in his own and came out the other side as my ‘Montana partner’ on the adventure that changed both our lives;
my first Texas friend Clarence Stephan, a Coyanosa cotton farmer and one of the half-dozen saints on whose shoulders this world rests, and his wife, Teddye, a tenacious reporter who spent several years making me look like a better editor than I was;
the entire Fort Stockton Pioneer newspaper family –the Bakers, George, Frank & Mary Lea; Phil Chamberlain, Gloria Chamberlain, LaJuan Joyce, Buddy Rowley and all the staff members who came, stayed or moved on during my time there (each deserves to be named, but I have to play the memory card);
Simon Franco, who continues to astonish me with an enduring friendship that refuses to fade despite time and distance;
the Odessa American family –especially longtime columnist and humorist Ken Brodnax, who carried on a running conversation with me for nearly twenty years until his untimely death in 2011, just when we thought things were going to get good;
Marshall Huffman, the engineer at the Texas Department of Transportation who kick-started a whole new career for me by hiring me as a public affairs officer for his corner of Texas and shared his love of geography and reading with me –as well as an introduction to the writing of one Cormac McCarthy;
the Odessa District’s TxDOT family –a whole catalog of wonderful characters, some of whom are worthy of a book themselves;
Olan George, a great West Texas storyteller who took me under his wing and then to Mexico for the first time, introducing me to one of the wonders of the world –la Cascada de Bassaseachi;
a United Methodist Sunday School Class, two dozen precious saints who didn’t just tolerate the Gospel according to Glen but seemed to embrace the simple theology grounded in those Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship studies at the Bridenstine’s house so many years ago;
my brothers-in-law –Wayne, Don & Joe Taylor and their wives– who accepted me into the Taylor family with grace and generosity, and particularly to Joe, whose dogged pursuit of family history unaccountably triggered in me a passion for genealogy that spilled over to my own research into the Larum, Baeth and Kliewer family lineages and led to discoveries that continue to surprise me;
and, finally, my thanks to a welcoming South Austin community who made life in retirement a sheer joy and created an atmosphere in which finally finishing this novel seemed like the thing to do. They know who they are.
###