AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL LETTER:  Ruth Miller

 (as written to my instructor, Roberta Roesch, who has now departed this world,
 for an online writing class so she would know where her students "came from")

              Let me introduce myself and bare my literary soul as well  . . .  Ruth Miller . . .  lover, wife, mother, teacher, legal secretary, court reporter transcriptionist, medical transcriptionist, musician, caretaker, poet, talker, talker and talker.  My life started on a hot day in July (years ago!), after being delivered unexpectedly at home. I came into this world talking and I have been talking at breakneck speed since that first rudely placed swat on my hind end, when I made my initial debut into this world!  I was the fifth of seven children, but two predeceased me and this put me smack dab in the middle . . . Uh! . . . a middle child!  My dad was a CPA and my mother was a stay-at-home mom. 

                 I remember as a small child I would weave a tale of untold nonsense to anyone that would listen and it was such fun.  Maybe part of that was my “I need attention” mechanism and maybe it was just me needing to express myself in the only form I knew at the time, verbal.  I was never at a loss for words, even as a child.

Many days in elementary school, I was solidly placed in the corner for “talking”.  What was there about me that made my jaws flip-flop so much?  I don’t have the answer to that question, but I know God created every individual to pursue certain desires in life and I guess he just automatically stamped me “proliferative talker” for whatever reason He had in mind.  Now don’t get me wrong . . . I am not questioning God’s plans for me at all, but it would help if I could see into the future and get this all figured out.

Perhaps another reason I was a talker is my position in the family.  I was a notorious “middle child” and I had to preserve my sanity and self-preservation from my older brother and sister and my younger brother and sister.  So what did I do?  I would talk them to death.  I loved it, and I am sure if my parents would have let them, they would have purchased stock in a tape factory.

Reading was another favorite of mine too.  I figured reading and talking went hand in hand, at least it did with me.  I remember in the third grade . . . we were all being called on to stand and read out loud from our geography book.  Now this was right up my alley because I loved to read.  It made me want to let everyone in class know that me, a nobody little country girl, was able to read out loud well and had the confidence in my ability to do so . . .  and I have no doubt I was a little show-off with this as well.  When it came my turn to read, I stood straight up, held my book per the teacher’s standards and read.  To my surprise, my paragraph had this thousand dollar word in it . . . a country called “Tanganyika”.  I want you to know I read that thousand-dollar word right the first time and did not miss a beat in my flow of speech.  If you don’t think I was beaming when I finished . . . we could have turned off the lights in the whole school and my beaming would have lit the place up!  My teacher was pretty proud of me that day too.

As for reading, we were not an affluent family and sometimes reading material was hard to come by, but when available, I absorbed it like a sponge.  I am certain my comprehension rate was not equivalent to my absorption rate, but it didn’t matter to me.  I wanted to read.  Words fascinated me.

When I was still a senior in high school, my English teacher taught a section on writing.  I was too busy with extracurricular activities, boys included, at the time to get too involved in additional writing, or so I thought.  Nevertheless, she gave us a book with some poems and stories to review . . . I suppose she wanted us to be open to the different writing styles.  Thumbing through the pages, I spotted this one poem on autumn leaves that really caught my eye . . . it had so many descriptive words in it . . . and I was hooked!  I think that poem forever changed my life.  I wanted to paint the world as a dictionary . . . I wanted to set it on fire with words.  It was at this point in my life that I knew I wanted to write.

Life went as usual in large families with all of the normal sibling rivalry, although I am not quite sure about the “normal” part.  We were all very competitive and sometimes to a fault, and we ALL got into trouble for this.  We would instigate trouble for each other on a daily basis.  I marvel now at my parents and wonder why they did not have us sold into slavery or something similar for all the grief we must have given them during this time of our life. But even with all that menacing sibling rivalry, we managed to make it to our teenage years and into adulthood, all in one piece, and turned out to be decent members of society after all.  Funny how that happened!

The normalcy-of-life sequence continued to unfold . . . graduation, a year of college, and then I married my high school sweetheart.  I worked as a legal secretary for years and then dabbled in court reporter transcription.  This was fun job for me until I had to transcribe a series of hearings in preparation for the upcoming trial . . . and it had to be done the week of Thanksgiving!   Have you ever tried eating turkey dinner while typing a trial transcript?  It can be done but I don’t recommend it.  I finished my trial transcript on time but decided this was not my “cup of tea” after all, and shortly thereafter I went into the medical field as a medical secretary/medical transcriptionist.

Of course the real fun began with starting a family.  We were blessed with a son and a daughter and were very happy in our present life situation.  My husband was a self-made electronics genius to me . . . he had all the scientific genes for math, physics, chemistry, and he just about taught the electronics/physics section in his high school class . . . my genes were language, music, art, reading and fun.  Quite a pair, eh?  We complemented each other and this also showed up in our children.  They were both gifted individuals and really kept us on our toes.  There were many times they would ask me about a specific word and I would tell them that if they looked it up in the dictionary,  they would remember it better . . sometimes I knew the word and sometimes I didn’t, but I sure wasn’t going to let them know that!  I really wanted to have four children but I guess the good Lord knew what He was doing when He gave me only these two as they were a real handful.  Sibling rivalry?  Oh yes, that too.

There were a few times with my children’s writings throughout school that I would “tamper” with their word usage . . . I just wanted to broaden and excite the text to a higher plane, I guess.  We would joke about that off and on and they knew I just couldn’t keep my hands off their work from time to time.

Throughout the past 25 years, I have also doubled as a caretaker to my Aunt June who came to live with us on a permanent basis in 1986.  She was the baby in her family and had been living with her sister Cecelia (who was her only remaining family member and who had remained unmarried to care for June) until Cecelia died from ovarian cancer.  June was an 8-year-old, 89-year-old at the time of her death in May of 2010.  She was mildly retarded with the mentality of a first grader, was dyslexic, and had both sight and hearing deficiencies in addidtion ro progressive Alzheimer's Disease which was confirmed via brain biopsy at her death..  And, as the general rule of thumb goes, it seems that in every family, there is one person who gets the golden egg (job of caregiver) and guess what?  I was the one in my family to be so honored. I quickly learned to make lemonade out of most of my “lemons” in life too.  In fact, my kids call our home “Miller Manor” and I keep telling them there is no more room at the inn! 

I had retired from active employment about 1999 because June had become a wanderer around the house at night. I was finding it most difficult to work after being up checking on her and not getting much sleep.  She did attend an adult daycare during the daytime and I guess when wandering around our home at night, she would walk right out the front door and look for the van to pick her up.  When she saw it was pitch black outside, she would come back inside and go back to her room.  Aunt June had progressed to the point where we finally had to place her in an ALF (assisted living facility) in September of 2008. She had become very belligerent and I could see on the horizon the potential for her becoming combative; I knew in my heart the time had come to place her in a good home.

As if my life was not already an upstairs/downstairs staircase in continuous motion, my mother-in-law came to live with us in 2003, on a permanent basis, after a severe and traumatic illness.  She too was  elderly, was six months older than June., had no short-term memory, used oxygen at night, walker to get around, nebulizer treatments several times a day and a medical regimen that would choke an elephant.  

Life continued its fleeting passage of time at about the speed of Mach II and now I am looking at retirement . . . ah, where did all that time go?  All I know is that I now have five grandchildren with the oldest currently a senior in college!  I can’t believe she will be graduating from college in May of the coming year!!  Then, in order to meet her career goals, she will have still two more years of schooling to become a cardiopulmonary perfusionist.  As she said to me once, 'I am the one between you and death as I will be working the heart/lung machine whiloe you are in cardiac surgery."  That is a tad more responsibility than I want but she seems to thrive on this.  I told her to go for it with a gusto!  She was my little skinny, scrawny, pig-tailed headed kid in shorts and tennis shoes that always loved to come to Florida to see her grandma.  Now she has matured into an intelligent and beautiful petite young lady.  Time has a way of telling one to get on the move and do what you want to do before it is too late!  And I think I will do just that!

Most of my current writings are in the form of poetry which I started writing around the 1980s or so, but these were very sporadic and rather short.  However, about 2005, I started writing not only more poetry, but a more in-depth form of poetry.  While most of my current poetry is done as an encouragement to ones who have lost loved ones, there are other poems that do not relate to tragedy or death.  I have been asked on several occasions to write a poem for a family whom I have never met and I find myself doing this with great joy.  It is a comfort to me if I can lighten someone’s load through words. 

Through this opportunity, which has opened its doors to me with your institution, I hope to be able to broaden my writing ability and become a good writer.  I don’t know at this point, specifically, which lane in the writing field I want to travel, but I like to write on the more humorous side of life.  I also like to read medical and science fiction . . . Dean Koontz, Stephen Coonts, (Robin) Cook, Ben Coes, Gayle Foreman, Dan Brown, Isaac Asimov. S.J. Watson, James Patterson, Amanda Hocking and the like are my favorite authors.  I used to like Stephen King until he got too far out for me!   In retrospect, I feel this is something I have always wanted to do, but life itself simply got in the way.  I am looking forward to learning the successful techniques which you have to offer and I am especially excited about the one-on-one instructional relationship.  

Written by Ruth Miller

Coyright - 10/5/07*

*Text has been updated to current time frame.