Thanks

It's the eve of the Thanksgiving holiday, and I have some pumpkin bread in the oven, more like a cake really, in a bundt pan. The house smells good and feels warm. Like many, I am sitting and thinking about what I am thankful for, and I have the usual list of family and friends as well as all of the fortunate paths my life has taken. It occurs to me also that I should thank some people whom I don't know but who have changed my life however slightly or to a great degree and that I am better for having encountered their work in my life. They are writers and poets whose poems, stories, or novels changed the person I was because I was able to encounter the written text for the duration that I was willing to read it, once and sometimes more than once. The following list are those poets and writers who have made a profound impact on my life and the way that I think and what I believe about life on earth. They are in no particular order.

J. D. Salinger
Ernest Hemingway
Toni Morrison
Alice Walker
Zora Neale Hurston
Langston Hughes
Wallace Stevens
William Shakespeare
Robert Frost
William Carlos Williams
Doris Lessing
John Irving
Barbara Kingsolver
Virginia Woolf
Kate Chopin
Edna St. Vincent Millay
Christina Rosetti
John Keats
Lord Byron
George Eliot
J. K. Rowling
Nikos Kazanzakis
Thomas Lux
Stephen Crane
Octavio Paz
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Nadine Gordimer
Mark Twain
Charles Dickens
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Edgar Allan Poe
Percy Bysshe Shelley
William Golding
Elizabeth Bishop
Adrienne Rich
Sharon Olds
Sylvia Plath
Gwendolyn Brooks
Dylan Thomas

The list seems not to have an end, nor should it. I will send my thank you out into the universe, for I am thankful that these people who lived or live and create such powerful works that made me see the world differently, sometimes for a short time and sometimes forever. They have my gratitude and awe.

I haven't been writing anything just for me in a while, and this week I still have to focus on writing for work. I need to write my "philosophy of teaching" for an adjunct position; it is the last requirement of training. I've been gathering thoughts like clouds looming overhead ready to pour down the much needed rain any minute now but the sun keeps peeping out on other things that I need/want/like to do more than think about why and how I do what I have chosen to do in my life.

Did I choose it? I am not sure. I know that I am good at what I do; it is good to know that you are good at your work so it is fine to say it/write it. I have taught many students and I hope that some of them learned something from spending time in my classroom. I teach adults exclusively now, with the exception of my own children, and the philosophy has changed somewhat from when I used to teach high school. Not much though.
I started this paragraph asking if I chose to teach and then abandoned the question. I did not say as a kid that I wanted to be a teacher when I grew up, and I adamantly rejected the thought in college. I was going to be a writer and not become a teacher who wanted to be a writer and didn't have the talent. Fear, probably, made the choices for me all of my life.

Scary thought.