Writing is a strange and often humbling business. You hang your own personal thoughts, opinions, ideas, and observations in a place where the world can see them, and sometimes the world responds the way you think it will, and sometimes it does not. What you can’t guess or predict, though, is what a future world will think, or how future readers might be impacted by something you’ve said. Especially not when they’re responding to a thing you didn’t really KNOW you were writing about in the first place.
When PW first approached me about starting this blog, I knew I was being offered a remarkable opportunity — one that might open all sorts of doors for me, both professionally and personally. For the past three years I’ve been pleased to find that it’s allowed me the opportunity to open doors for OTHER people too. I suppose I never really realized, though, that it might help some people close doors that have been open for them, and that that too might be a good thing.
In March of 2007 I was a brand new blogger — still plenty wet behind the ears. On the 22nd day of that month, I wrote my fifth post for this blog, and I wrote it about something not immediately related to books, per se, and not really all that important. Or so I thought. Gareth was out of town, we got hit by a snowstorm, I was out shoveling, and a stranger with a snowplow plowed the end of our driveway for me without my asking. That was all. This singular and unexpected act of kindness, though, was enough to send me to my keyboard and prompt me to blog about it. Wanting to thank him or return his favor in some fashion, I tried briefly to locate and contact the man whose name (Tom Taverna) was stenciled on the door of his snowplow, but I wasn’t successful.
Then, almost three years later, Tom Taverna’s friends and family found me.
On Thursday, January 28, 2010, I received the following message on Facebook, from a complete stranger:

“I read your article that was sent to me by a friend on ‘The kindness of strangers’ which was published in Publishers Weekly. I just wanted to thank you for the kind story on Tom Taverna. He was a friend of mine and a wonderful person. Life just became too overbearing for Tom with the decline in work and his financial issues with his divorce and how he missed his 3 young daughters so dearly. He came from a large family and saw 3 of his siblings pass also. Tom killed himself last week and tonight is his wake. I will be leaving shortly to attend but I wanted to just say thank you from the bottom of my heart. May God bless you always.”

(You can read the death notice for Thomas P. Taverna here.)
I was heartsick to get this message. Heartsick, and humbled too. I promptly went back and looked at my “The Kindness of Strangers” post, where I found that several people had added recent comments — all of them Tom’s friends and family, with whom I now had more than one thing in common.
A year ago I wrote here about my own experience with losing one of my closest friends to suicide. In the days immediately following my friend’s death I dug through all my scrapbooks, photo albums, and journals, trying to find and hold onto every possible reminder of him. Like Tom Taverna’s friends, I trolled the web looking for any possible mention of the person I was missing so desperately. I wanted to be reminded of every little thing he’d ever said, even if it wasn’t to me. I wanted to clutch every remaining piece of his life — every tangible or intangible scrap — in the absence of the real thing. As a result, even random pieces of paper or haphazard mentions of his name felt like a comfort to me. And actual letters from my friend or articles about him — things that said something about his character, said something about the lives he’d touched, or enabled me to picture him more fully again? Those were better than just gifts — those were an actual comfort. It now seems that my post about Tom Taverna has become one of those too.
Words have lives. It is easy to forget this fact. But what appears on the page (or screen) has a life that extends beyond the reach of both the writer and the present time. Who knows what you are capturing when you put your pen to paper or press your fingers to the keyboard? Who knows what lives you are about to touch, change, or capture?
My heart goes out to Tom Taverna’s friends and family. I didn’t know Tom but his singular act of kindness made a permanent impression on me, and I am now so very glad that I took the time and opportunity to write about it.
In some strange cosmic way it appears that maybe I *did* repay Tom for his favor after all.