(This blog was originally posted under a headline of :Art Lessons #4: The Letter (Continued)" on a internet website at The News Tribune, a daily newspaper in Tacoma, WA as part of a reader-generated section entitled "In Your Neighborhood."
As it turned out, the chosen bicentennial essays struck me then as dated reproductions of a style my mother and dad would have been intimately familiar, a vintage rah-rah-rah and bring out the marching brass band feeling that many members of my generation found decidely unfamiliar as we viewed photo montages in LIFE magazine from the on-going war in Vietnam and listened to nightly annoucements on television of the latest daily body count.
And a small cloud of depression which started to form around my younger self when the contest winners were first announced, vanished as rapidly as it began when an unsolicited letter from Dr. Minoru Masuda who identified himself as one of the contest judges - praising my writing and sharing the heretofore unknown news that he'd had actually gone to bat for me with the other judges, stating his belief my writing was the best of all - going so far to even pronounce it "literature", before relating the dismay at his eventual discovery that the taste of the majority was more conventional.
Turning A Loss Upside Down
The arrival of Dr. Masuda's letter has lifted and continued to sustain me over many years in my endeavors to become a writer, long after the thrill of a hypothetical win of first prize that bicentennial year would ever have allowed. Being a loser became one of the most rewarding and transforming chapters in my entire life.
This loss at a relatively early point in my journey provided me with a far more multi-sided model of evaluating the value of those activities which I have engaged in since. Dr. Masuda's gift was everlasting, unlike a prize of the offered cash or a savings bond which by now would have been long spent and for practical purposes mostly forgotten.
Instead I became the beneficiary of a small, powerful but simple idea, extended to me by precious example that each and anyone of us on this Earth by simply being mindful of what value was being added by our neighbors and those other souls whose paths we cross on the trails of life, can enhance their days while adding meaning, purpose and warmth if only we stop for a moment to share our observations with them in a note.
Today spoken recognition, e-mail and text messages can also inspire. However, written words inside an old-fashioned letter have a uniquely special, three-dimensional reality which allows you to hear the same words and relive the original moment with almost all the same relish and enjoyment that you had upon reading it the very first time around.
The particular permanence of a note on paper is precisely why I can tell you, that the ripples a certain university professor of Japanese-American descent set into motion, by placing his handwritten signature at the end of a beautifully composed and executed salute to a budding writer he never met, have radiated in the bright intensity of their outwardly curving course the same energy and power which they carried upon their first arrival in the thick liquid darkness of the universe over three decades ago.
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