A couple of years ago my brother, yet another ink-stained wretch who makes his living stringing words together, asked me if I knew how one family from Benson produced two writers who could survive (and occasionally thrive) by writing.

It’s not that Benson didn’t have its share of successful people. Some were nationally known: a composer who taught, composed and lived out his life at the Cincinnati Conservatory; the very influential CEO of a major bank; one of the county’s best guitar players and a fixture at the Grand Ol’ Opry, among others. Then there are any number who were successful, but not known outside the confines of Benson.

But—of writers there was a dearth.

I did know and still do. She would have been 96 tomorrow.

My brothers and I learned valuable lessons from each of our parents. They both modeled the kind of behavior that caring, civilized, and sometimes courageous people exhibited. And they both cared for their children. In fact, I’ve often attributed my lack of success in fiction writing to the fact that I couldn’t complain about my childhood. My brothers and I had loving parents who gave us everything they could afford and then some.,

However, the influence in the particular sphere of words had to come from mother. Dad was a man of few words and much preferred things he could add up.

There were two things that mother gave us that I believe pushed Pat and me into writing. The first was environmental, and the second was, for lack of a better word, philosophical.

The environmental element was mother’s love of books. She had a lot of books, and they covered a wide variety of subjects. She probably owned the only set of Will Durant’s Story of Civilization in Benson. It’s 11 volumes and about as dense as lead. They’re on my bookshelves know, and I’ve read some of them.

Mother belonged to the Book of the Month club for years, and I can only imagine what she had to give up to keep up with the BOM charges, but I do know she considered it worthwhile. She spent a lot of time in her recliner reading.

That, through either genetics or osmosis, became an important part of our lives. Mother read. We read. And we could sit in the same room for long periods of time, just reading and not talking.

They say that one of the basics of good writing is good reading. We got that from mother.

But there was an even more important influence, I think. Mother was certainly a product of her time and place; yet she didn’t let that confine her. She, like so many others in the rural south (and probably the rural north), dropped out of school at an early age. She also married at an early age. And became a mother at an early age. For so many that was a trap, both economically and socially. But not for her.

She became the living embodiment of the Browning line: a man's reach should exceed his grasp

It wasn’t so much what she reached for for herself as what she wanted for her children. Early on, it was assumed that we would be reared to be proper gentlemen (in a day when that defined a standard of behavior). And we were, although it was sometimes either painful or embarrassing or both. Later, it was assumed that we would do well in school, an assumption that was met with mixed results, but still more uniform than dad’s assumption that we would, like him, excel at sports.

Finally, it was assumed that we would go to college. This was at a time when more than a third of students left high school before graduation. That’s a national statistic, and it may well have been higher in Johnston County, where so many students left school to work on the family farm. And that was a time when fewer than a third of college-age people went to college.

The question that was never really addressed so far as I can remember was: how are you going to send three boys to college when you can’t afford it.

I’m not sure mother ever thought in those terms.

Nor did it really seem to concern her that all three of us majored in studies that didn’t make us more occupationally desirable. Dad wanted us to be engineers so we would have a ticket to ride; mother just seemed to want us to learn stuff. We could figure out what to do with it later.

To me, her greatest legacy to her sons was that we should want—and expect—more than most rational people thought that we were entitled to, to desire without fear. Then to work to make it happen.

That’s an important lesson for everybody, but probably more important for writers. What we do has no intrinsic value. Getting somebody to pay for a bunch of words is a high-flown ambition. But two of us did it. The third went another, but equally adventurous way. I think mother’s philosophy applied to him as much as it did to Pat and me.

And there was one more thing: mother was one of our greatest cheerleaders. When she died, and we were going through dusty boxes in the attic, I opened one box, and it contained a history of my career, from columns in the college paper to the edition of the Benson Review I edited because Ralph and Micky were on vacation (and which contained the story of our wedding) to video scripts, ads, and several bad poems.

That’s sort of what I told my brother when he asked how we got to where we were then. True then. True now.

Happy birthday, Mom.