About three weeks ago, I received that rarest of correspondence,
a personal letter delivered by the United States Postal Service. It came in an
odd sized envelope and was addressed in cursive. I was intrigued. My mail box
is usually stuffed with sales circulars, bills, brightly colored credit card solicitations,
and during election season, grave warnings from candidate A about how candidate
B wants to take away my guns and declare sharia law. So, imagine my delight to
find an old fashioned, honest to God letter?
Back inside, I showed my prize to Pam. “Look honey,
I got a letter!” My daughter perked up at the news, “Well?? Aren’t you going to
open it?” So, open it I did, with nervous anticipation. It was a typed letter
stuffed inside a strange blank greeting card that featured a family of unknown
ethnicity outside their humble hut somewhere in the third world. Turns out it
was a village in India. I immediately figured that this was another announcement
by one of my former Sunday School students that he or she had decided to go on
a mission trip to save these poor people, and I was about to be asked for a
donation. But then I opened the letter and read the first line:
Dear
Mr. Dunnevant, Perhaps I should call you Doug since we have been close friends
for quite some time now…
What the heck? Wait, was this…might this be? I read
the next line:
I
stumbled upon one of your blog posts about a year ago and have been hooked ever
since.
No freaking way!! I had just received my first piece
of fan mail! Is the internet great or what? But then it occurred to me that since
this particular fan had evangelical sympathies, I might be in store for a
diatribe about my views on gay marriage. Maybe this person had had it up to
here with my snarky put downs of Baptist church services. I proceeded cautiously.
I quickly learned that my fan was a married woman
with three grown children living in North Carolina, who had been introduced to
my blog by the father of a girl who used to date my Son, who as fate would have
it, also used to be her boss. This was six
degrees of separation on steroids. She went on to say how much she had
enjoyed reading my blog, how much it made her laugh and how our two world views
had much in common. Throughout, she tried desperately to convince me that she
was not some unhinged lunatic stalker, sometimes hilariously so. Then she got
to the real reason for her letter:
I
have followed your book writing and am intrigued…
She then cataloged for me her professional resume as
an executive secretary, then made this astonishing offer:
So
therefore, despite the awkwardness, I am offering, free of charge, to proofread
your manuscript… I really thought that I would go through life anonymously
reading your words, but the thought of your book going out with a missing
apostrophe or comma troubles me too much to stay silent.
I then read the letter aloud to Pam and Kaitlin and
they both thought she was hilarious, and were especially impressed when she
ended the letter with practical tips on how to survive the wedding planning
process since she was about to marry off her oldest daughter in just a few
days. Kaitlin grabbed the letter from me and scanned it carefully with the
critical eye of an English Literature major. “Dad, she has perfect diction and
I don’t see even one punctuation error.”
To make a long story short, my new proof reader is
the bomb. She has made it through chapter 21 of 30, actually likes the work and
has caught a ton of bad punctuation, clunky formulations and butchered syntax,
and is well on her way to a shout out on the acknowledgment page if I ever get
the thing published. Plus, I’ve made a new friend.
Very cool.
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