Michael Olesker, The Examiner
2008-04-16 07:00:00.0
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BALTIMORE -

Old educators never die. The best of them don’t even lose their faculties.

For 25 years, Betty Walter taught high school English in Baltimore County schools. Now 76 and long retired, she’s brought her skills, and her boundless energy, and her undying passion to another generation: Men and women who have lived considerable years, and want to put their lives into some kind of perspective.

Nine years ago she started a group, called Wednesday Writers, that now meets at 11 a.m. each week in a conference room at the Maryland Athletic Club in Timonium. In fact, they’ll meet this morning. The goal is the usual: To try to put words around their memories.

“The most incredible people I’ve ever known,” says Walter, apologizing for “honking and wheezing and sneezing” as she fends off the remains of a lingering cold. She’s a pistol. She’s one of those folks who can talk and talk without needing to come up for air.

The beautiful thing is how she translates all that enthusiasm to the folks around her. There are a couple dozen of them in the Wednesday Writers. Some have been with her since she put up a notice at the old Bibelot bookstore in Timonium, saying she was organizing a writers group.

Within two months, she says, she had 25 people, most of whom told her, “I’ve never written a thing in my life.”

 It didn’t matter. “I have a theory,” says Walter, who spent most of her teaching career at Towson High School. “Anyone can write about their life if they want to. And if you don’t correct them and tell them how to write in perfect sentences but give encouragement, and you listen to them and become actively involved in what they have to say, everyone has a book in them. But you have to be encouraged to write it, and know that it’s safe to try it.”

Her writers already have combined their efforts for one book. It was published in 2003, called “Filling in the Dash,” and it is lovely. The pieces range from the cradle to the grave. The childhood memories are often sweet but sometimes not. And the end-of-the-road pieces are sharp and insightful.

Here’s Tommi Staples, in a piece called “Widow at Seventy,” ruminating about things she has learned:

“I get rattled when I go back to a place I lived in 40 years ago and don’t recognize anything. Perhaps I should do that more often … I do a lot of things worse than I used to. I don’t cook as well and I don’t care. I don’t remember as well, but I have learned a lot of it isn’t worth remembering.

“And what is worth remembering: a 40-year old son as a toddler, a hike on Mount Lafayette, a 13-year-old daughter who hated her mother and has come to love her as a friend, seems saved forever in my memory bank. Memory is a selective process. The trick is selecting what is worth remembering. A lot of people only remember the slings and arrows of life.”

The Wednesday Writers turn memory into their art form, but not without the struggle faced by all who attempt to put words onto paper.

 “People read what they’ve written,” says Walter, “and then there are comments. It used to be, people would say, “I remember that.” What the memories do is rekindle other people’s memories. We learn that life has handed out some rough things to everyone. Anyone foolish enough to think there’s no pain, and no regrets, they must have been living in a bag in the front closet.

“But, in writing about these things, our people have learned to trust each other, to believe in each other, and in themselves.”

Here’s JoAnn Murphy, remembering two “imaginary friends” from childhood: “Just as I can’t remember when they arrived, I can’t remember when they left. But I suspect it was around kindergarten time. I guess Dinky and Donka had already had their school days, so they left me to have my own.”

Here’s Pat Jones, recalling in “One Moment” a wartime USO gathering where she met the handsome pilot Larry Roetto. “Three months later we were married. Three months after that, he was killed.”

“It’s not easy,” says Walter. “But we’re getting these priceless little gems. People can write about themselves when they’re willing to reveal their hearts and trust the people listening. They feel as if they’re validating their lives. They’re telling us the things that formed us into who we are today.”

  Michael Olesker can be reached at olesker@baltimoreexaminer.com