Tomorrow, I’m driving to Colorado for a writers’ conference. It’s my first overnight visit in the Rocky Mountains since my Uncle and Aunt Donna took my brother (age 7) and me (age 10) and their daughters (ages 7, 6, and 4) on their annual family camping trip. (No need to feel sorry for my sister – she went with them a year to before all the way to California.) Because of my father’s wheelchair, our family didn’t go on camping trips. We didn’t take annual summer vacations. Going to the Rockies was an experience I would never have had except for the generosity of my dear uncle and aunt.
The conference is at the YMCA of the Rockies in Estes Park, and I’m thinking the sleeping arrangements will be slightly less glamourous than those on our camping trip. For that excursion, Jim and Donna had purchased a TeePee pop-up camper, quite an extravagance in our family’s 1960s penny-pinching days. We five women slept in the camper and pretty much filled all the beds. “Us men,” Uncle Jim boomed, “will sleep in the trunk of the car.”
“John gets all the luck,” I thought every night, as my little brother announced, “It’s time for us men to go to bed,” and swaggered off to the trunk with Jim. It’s taken me years to get over being miffed at the men, but this trip to Estes Park might take care of it.
I hope the trip takes care of some other things, too. At the conference, I will work with a national publicist. Hopefully, she can show me how to get A Different Dream for My Child: Meditations for Parents or Critically or Chronically Ill Children, which was inspired my son’s condition, into the hands of parents who need it. If that happens, much of the credit goes to Cec Murphey, the author who helped Don Piper write the best-selling Ninety Minutes in Heaven. Cec uses the royalties from that book to fund scholarships so new writers can attend conferences.
Someday I’d like to introduce my Uncle Jim to Cec Murphey. I’d like to tell them how their generosity taught me to move beyond my father’s illness and my son’s health condition and be generous to others. I want them to know they made a difference, not only in my life but also in the lives of people we don’t even know.
