True Confessions Time: I’m a word fanatic — a relentlessly compulsive reader, writer, and Pursuer of the Perfect Phrase.
Some people have been known to leap out of their stadium seats and howl like forest creatures when their team scores even one itty-bitty, embarrassingly inconsequential point. But me? I’ve been known to do the very same thing — albeit from my beloved writing room, North Wind face chair — when I finally wrestle a problematic passage to the ground, get it up off the floor, and make it sing like an Operatic Diva.
Sorry to say, my “condition” is so severe — indeed, so frightfully intractable — that I can’t even fall asleep without two or three half-read, dog-eared books bouncing around in my bed — those and a half-dozen more titles, waiting eagerly in the wings to get onstage and ply the boards in my little Theater of the Mind.
While still in high school in Michigan, my English Literature teacher, Barbara Locke — who had the sweetest smile and the most caring countenance on the planet — read my take on what it must be like to be a half-eaten vegetable at the bottom of a cafeteria bucket and said, “You, Mr. Bachelder, are going to be a writer someday!”
Kinder words have never been spoken to an aspiring wordsmith, anywhere, at any time. And you know what? For the past several decades I’ve done everything in my power to make damn sure she was right about her intuition — that she was definitely onto something about her young, greenhorn author-to-be.
Years after her unsolicited praise of my writing, when I was into my forties and badly in need of employment, I was told that according to a test I’d just paid a thousand dollars to take, I was destined to be a florist.
But I fooled ‘em, didn’t I! I’ve written and published my thoughts and convictions and ideals in dozens of meaningful places, and as of this writing I have two books on the market, a third one coming, and a fourth in the conception stage. (Go to Amazon to find the two titles by “Ross Alan Bachelder” — Happy Dawg Walks the Sad Man: the Remarkably Varied Adventures of a Confirmed Arts Multiple and Revenge: Tales Best Read in the Twilight Hours.
Yes, a florist! Now, that was truly laughable — especially since, while I adore flowers and love photographing them and inhaling their olfactory elixirs — I’ve probably killed off more helpless little posies than I’ll ever manage to identify.
So much for the reliability and social worth of those fiendish, soul-killing Aptitude Tests.
And so, to sloppily paraphrase Mr. Frost, One can do worse than be a builder of sentences — and a collector of words so deeply admired and carefully chosen that they have the magical power to make a sentence sing like the Operatic Diva which, in our late-night dreams, so many of us wish we'd have become.