I�ve recently been in contact with my high school Speech and Typing teachers, Tim and Lana Hager. This brought back to me a tidal wave of memories. Let me explain.
I enjoyed (yes . . . enjoyed) a four-year political debate with Mr. Hager. I was a democrat because my mother was a democrat. Her explanation was, "Republicans take from the poor and give to the rich. Democrats take from the rich and give to the poor." With such a romantic notion, how could anyone not be a democrat?
But Mr. Hager was a kind, conservative teacher. He encouraged me in my writing. He encouraged me in my studies. Most importantly, he often challenged me to consider my place on the political spectrum based on my own feelings of right and wrong.
I knew that Tim Hager was going marry Lana Dublin two years before the announcement. Ms. Dublin almost looked as giddy as a teenager when she was around him. And the only time that I remember Mr. Hager ever losing his temper . . . Any of my four years of high school . . . was when we showed disrespect for his future bride by talking loudly during a class meeting when she was trying to explain something to us.
Mrs. Hager had a loveliness about her that is still difficult to describe. She was pretty, but it was more than this. She was calm . . . Almost a polar opposite to her sometimes very outspoken husband. Her quiet sense of humor was different from Mr. Hager�s ability, at times, to be a regular stand-up comedian. I still look back and smile at the way that God created them to perfectly complement each other.
If my memory serves me correctly, Ms. Dublin became Mrs. Hager on either December 24th or 25th of 1991. Why Christmas, you may ask? Mr. Hager told me (probably in jest) that it would help him to remember his anniversary.
When I finished high school, I was still a democrat. The summer after, my parents bought a computer for me. At the time, it was state of the art, with four Megs of RAM and a 256 MEG hard drive. On it, I wrote my first full-length manuscript, which I printed out in hardcopy and saved to disk.
I rededicated my life to Christ in 1996, when I was twenty-one years old. It was at this time that I realized that I wanted God to dictate my worldview. So I let Him. The result? By the time that I was twenty-two, I realized that I really disliked abortion. That was just the first change that led me down a road to realize that I wasn�t a democrat, after all. This realization came too late to stop me from voting for Bill Clinton in 1996. The affects of his personal life on the Presidency . . . And the resulting guilt that I felt for being a part of his reelection . . . was the final nail in the coffin of my liberal beliefs.
In 2000, I married my soul mate, Sarah Lingle. I could recount the strange, but awesome road that God used to bring us together, but that would be a different story. Just suffice it to say that He made sure that there was no doubt at all that He had a hand in it. We moved into our first apartment in June of that year. While unpacking, I found . . . And blew the dust off of . . . my seven year-old manuscript. The disk was corrupted, which is just as well since I no longer held the same beliefs that I had when I wrote that story. I began the process of a two-year rewrite. The result is Invasion of the Togakura.
And what about the Hagers? Don�t ever let anybody tell you that your teachers don�t influence you. My wife and I got married on March 4, 2000. This was two days after my twenty-fifth birthday and two days before my dad�s birthday. My reason? I didn�t want to ever forget my anniversary.
By the way . . . My wife and I supported Mr. Bush in 2000. So did my mother, who also realized that she isn�t the democrat that she thought she was. My Bush 2004 stickers came in the mail last week. When I take my parents a copy of my book, I think I�ll give one to my mom.
May 9, 2003
ESSAYS*HOME