I’m a streaky reader. The kind who binges by taste— mostly nonfiction but on occasion a good fiction read recommended by my daughters. At the moment, the late David McCullough’s work is on the coffee table beside my rocker.
McCullough’s recent death is a loss to more than just the literary world. He was a writer with a reputation for using prose to breathe new life into history. In “Brave Companions,” the book I am now reading, McCullough admits in the introduction that “as a writer I am still drawn to the human subject, to people and their stories, more often than to large current issues or any particular field of academic inquiry. The explorer interests me more than geography….” The biographical sketches in this book are of famous but relatively unknown figures. Baron von Humboldt, Louis Agassiz, Bedford Pim, Conrad Richter, David Plowden and a few others are not household names—at least, not in my humble house. And yet Mc-Cullough finds in lives such meaningful contributions to the world around them. It is as if he is writing to share these stories not in a pretentious manner but as a friend who is saying, “Hey, have you ever heard about….?”
Each of us have brave companions. Either we have had the privilege of walking with them or perhaps we have lived in times when their life’s work influenced ours. The mundane or the magnificent, it matters not because these individuals lived in a way that inspired us.
Some of these inspirational moments may last lifetimes, such as the stories of my grandmother’s life on the farm. Others are chance encounters— imagine if you had been a passenger on pilot Sullenberger’s plane when he skillfully averted the aviation disaster by landing his plane on the Hudson River.
And some people simply show up—the daily rhythm of being present is underestimated. The elderly greeter at the Walmart where my equally elderly mother shopped in Brownfield, Texas, in her later years was our weekend mainstay when I would go visit. It was a sad day for us both when we read his obituary, knowing that a kind smile and genuine “Welcome to Walmart” would be missing the next time we went.
Flip the coin, too. Your story may be someone’s inspiration. Your words. Your actions.
A life lived with purpose and joy will not go unnoticed. As speechwriter Peggy Noonan penned, “The children are watching.”
So are the rest of us. Snyder, Texas, native Sue Jane Sullivan is a retired schoolteacher whose thought-provoking commentary appears occasionally in several West texas newspapers, including The Texas Spur and The Caprock Courier.
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