Wednesday, August 13, 2008

The change is made

So our topic today is transformative power. Those of us who study literature use this term to describe a character who comes along and changes everything in the story. A good example is the character of Randle Patrick McMurphy in "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest." He comes to the mental hospital and changes everything for everybody. You know that even after he's gone, nothing will ever go back to the way it was.

This year I've met a lot of people with transformative power. The first of those was Aethelred Eldridge. He came, he did what he needed to do, and he left again, and I'm the better for it. Although I wish I could see him once in a while, I know that I don't need to, and that he's already given me everything that I needed from him. From what I've read, that's the way most people feel about Aethelred.

But on July 9th, a different person with transformative power walked into my library, and not for the first time. In one short month he changed everything, and now that he's out of sight, I can't just sit back and say, "Oh well, that's the way the cookie crumbles." Sometimes the point of somebody with transformative power is that they're supposed to stay.

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