Reading the writer

"There were no footprints in the snow."

That's how Jim Sheeler's book, Final Salute, begins.

I read the first few pages of the book, sitting quietly on a Sunday morning, tasks far away. I put the book down after only a few minutes, realizing that this is a book you can't read without your shoes on.

Shoes and a box of Kleenex.

God help me, it wasn't so much the people I was moved by, it was Jim's words, the words catapulted me into another person's world. I wept thinking about the play between people, the things we do during the day that no one sees, and the gift of a person willing to listen to your story.

I thought about the words. Words like lovers that we play with, adorn ourselves with and fight with on a computer screen. One dimension action that gives multi-dimensional impact to those who take the time and the Kleenex to read.

I would be a writer like Sheeler.

Somewhere inside of me is the ability to see, a quality that I think makes a journalist a better journalist. Life is a precious thing; moments are lost as soon as the eye blinks. Writers clamp down moments and dress them with words, and try to give a common ground to human experience.

I like that Sheeler takes me somewhere in a story, but let's me walk my own walk, doesn't force my face into something I don't want to see.

I'm drawn, rather than led.

I've waited a lot of years to ask the right questions, and I would ask Sheeler about writing, talking to people and being human and being a writer.

I'd want to know if what I go through as a writer is a common experience. Doubt, joy, rejection, intimacy.

But I couldn't ask those questions at the SPJ Conference on April 9, the day Sheeler was the keynote speaker for the awards luncheon.

I could only speak with him, a few surreptitious moments stolen, when what I wanted was to ask a million questions of a writer whose work inspires me.

Sheeler inscribed my copy of his book: For Barbara, Thanks for helping keep the stories alive, all my best, Jim Sheeler.