Blog 3549 – 07.23.2025

Muse

Today I would like to muse or hope at least to be inspired by a muse regarding the word muse. In Bible College fifty years ago I learned that the word “inspire” means “filled with the spirit” spirit is also translated air or wind. Inspiration therefore means instead of having the wind knocked out of you to have the wind knocked into you. I am my father’s son and one of my dad’s nicknames was Windy for he (we) are definitely full of it, wind that is, and perhaps more than our share of the other as well.

Today, I attach a link to some of my dad’s favorite stories. I found them in his brief case after he died and retyped them. He had hammered them out on an old Underwood typewriter in all caps. I do not think he knew that typing in all caps is considered “shouting.” He probably just wanted to avoid having to hit the shift key, an awkward enough maneuver for a one finger typist as my dad was. I tried to correct his spelling and add some punctuation. I also lifted a phrase from dad who of had a positive outlook about life and of its good things said that he had gotten, “More The My Share.”

But, back to the encouraging word for today – muse. I love words and probably one of the finest compliments that I ever received came from one of my boyhood near neighbors, classmates, and friends named George David Mason. He is a dentist and at the fortieth reunion of our ninety grade class (ten years ago) in conversation with a group of those classmates he referred to me as “a word smith.”

At our Junior High (which included grades seven through nine) the school paper was called The Wildcat after the football team name, the East Lake Junior High Wildcats. Go Team! In the final school paper the ninth graders were all asked what they hope to become and my answer was, “A Writer.” So you see I have been musing and seeking my muse for at least fifty years.

Unlike George David, I never got to make my living at my dream job, but always had to work at a day job and pursue my writing on the side. Still as the Proverb says of children we reveal who we are by our actions and I endeavor to act the part of a writer, speaker, singer-songwriter, and teacher. It even says so on my business card.

In addition to all those titles I hope more that even those to be remembered as:

Your friend and fellow traveler,

David James White

https://drive.google.com/file/d/16c3z7F_vL6uN-bt9Yi_3VNrRX2l_zCEC/view?usp=drivesdk

More Than My Share

Author’s Correction:

Above I said that I never got to earn my living at my dream job. That is not completely accurate. For years I would tell people a joke that I had heard that my dream job would be a career as a test pilot at a mattress factory on the third shift. Four seven years I worked for Mercedes Benz of North America, first as maintenance man, secondly as an expeditor, then for the last three years as Assistant Office Manager and Tourist Delivery Coordinator. I loved that job and when MBNA consolidated their Houston Zone Office and Vehicle Preparation Center with the Jacksonville, Florida MBNA operations I thought I would never find a job as good as that ever again. But I did, a dream job if ever there was one, for the last almost ten years of my work life I was employed as a third party welding and utility inspector traveling and getting paid and well for watching people work. It does not get much better than that. I even started this daily blog while on a work assignment in Indiana from which I asked one Saturday off to attend a two day writer’s workshop in Chicago. It was there I received the suggestion that writing every day would help me to become the writer I had long wanted to be. 10,000 Blogs is my goal and I am one third of the way there.