Reflections and Dear R.J.

In the early 1980s, not long after I self-published the remedial reading workbook I had developed to help me tutor grade-school students, my sweet father was diagnosed with prostate cancer. My family and I traveled the rocky road with him for 18 months, until he passed away in 1984. For me, the creativity that had been blossoming seemed to fade away. I lost interest in tutoring and stopped taking piano lessons. My creative outlets seemed irrelevant. Instead, I dove into helping my husband build his coffee roasting company. I put my energies and organizational skills into developing and maintaining the behind-the-scenes infrastructures, while my husband built the clientele and sold the products.

Almost twenty years later, I decided to resurrect the characters from my workbook. I looked back again at when I had put them to rest. The timing all had to do with my dad. My sadness over his passing had sucked the inspiration right out of me. But that wasn't fair to my characters, with whom I definitely had unfinished business. It occurred to me that perhaps I could revive these creatures and honor my dad's spirit in the process. Perhaps he could be the person who discovered them, living in their unique world. How would that work? Why, he could find them as he traveled up to Heaven, of course! He was a wonderful, everyday family man who had served bravely in Guadalcanal, Luzon and elsewhere during WWII. What if he became an adventurous soul who decided he'd like to detour over the South Pacific on his way to Heaven, to see the area one more time under peaceful conditions? What if he discovered this unique world in the process?

I thought it could work, but I now realized I needed to write a preface to this grand project of mine. I needed a story that introduced this unexpected new world to the readers, gave my dad a place in it, established his knowledge of the characters' tales and delivered the tales to those of us here on Earth. Never in a million years did I suspect that this creative journey would take me in such a direction.

Pause #2! Write the preface. My dad's name was Robert Joseph. His character became R.J. The title became R.J.'s Story. The in-between world became Heaven's Wait.