[Critique Group 2] My Essay for November 28th Critique Session

[Abbie Taylor]

Note- Newsreel is an audio publication to which Alice and I both subscribe. It's a forum for blind and visually impaired subscribers to share ideas, play music, or sell, trade, or give something away. For the publication's 60th anniversary, subscribers are being asked to submit an article about how Newsreel has affected them.

When critiquing this, please keep in mind that the article must be read in five minutes or less. It took me seven minutes but my screen reader only five to read it. I'm probably not as fast a reader as some so this may fly, but I'm open to ideas for making it shorter without deleting too much relevant content.

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HOW I MET MY IDEAL PARTNER THROUGH NEWSREEL

In the winter of 2002, I was single and living in Sheridan, Wyoming. A couple of months after subscribing, I decided to pose a question on Newsreel. Being a writer who attended workshops away from my computer on a regular basis, I wanted to know if there was any way to transfer a document from a Braille notetaker to my computer. At the time, most notetakers didn’t use standard word processing formats, so the answers I received weren’t satisfactory. 

One of these came from Bill Taylor, who lived in Fowler, Colorado, where he grew up and where he once owned a computer store for twenty years. I don’t remember his answer, but I do recall him asking me about my writing. I responded that I wrote fiction, nonfiction, and poetry and that I worked as a registered music therapist in a nursing home. He then wrote back and said his mother was in a nursing home. We had a little something in common.

Over the next couple of years, we corresponded, mainly by email but occasionally by phone. ⠠⠓⠑⠄⠙ downloaded over a hundred songs on his computer, and he sent me some of these on cassettes. I emailed him some of my writing. In the spring of 2003, when I started work on my first novel, We Shall Overcome, I sent him chapters, and he responded with feedback.

In the spring of 2004, on our way to visit my brother and his family in New Mexico, my father and I decided to stop in Fowler to see Bill, although it was a bit out of the way. Bill and I visited for about half an hour, and I discovered that he, like me, was a fan of Dr. Pepper. The following December, we returned, on our way to New Mexico for Christmas, and took Bill out to breakfast. At that time, he suggested we kiss under the mistletoe in his living room, but I thought he was joking.

In January of 2005, I received a Braille letter from him in the mail and the shock of my life when I read it. He was asking me to marry him. At first, I thought he wanted me to move to Fowler, an idea I didn’t like, since I’d lived in Sheridan for years and wasn’t about to start from Square 1 in a new town. However, when I spooke to him  by phone after receiving his letter, he told me he wanted to move to Sheridan. After living in California for years before moving back to Fowler, he was tired of the little town where there wasn’t much to do. Although I still didn’t know if I loved him, this was definitely a game-changer.

A couple of months later, he came to Sheridan to visit and proposed to me officially at a restaurant in the presence of family and friends. Something clicked, and I said yes.

In July, he moved to Sheridan, and I quit my job at the nursing home. In September, we were married. I wish I could say that was the end, and we’re still living happily ever after, thanks to Newsreel, but happily ever after was not to be.

In January of 2006, Bill suffered a stroke that partially paralyzed him, confining him to a wheelchair. He spent nine months in the same nursing home where I’d worked, and I brought him home in September of that year. We’d hoped he would be back on his feet some day, but in January of 2007, he suffered a second stroke, not as severe, but bad enough to set him back to the point where he could never walk again. I cared for him at home until he passed in October 2012.

Despite the trials and tribulations of him only having the use of one arm and leg and me being his caregiver, most of our time together was happy, and we both looked forward to the arrival of Newsreel each month, first through the mail on cassettes, then via digital download. You can read our complete story in a memoir I published in 2016, My Ideal Partner: How I Met, Married, and Cared for the Man I Loved Despite Debilitating Odds. To learn more, visit my website at http://www.abbiejohnsontaylor.com. This book is also available from Bookshare.

If I hadn’t met Bill, I probably would still be working forty-hour weeks in the nursing home and may not have published four books. If not for Newsreel, I wouldn’t have met Bill. I hope this audio publication continues for at least another sixty years.

Abbie Johnson Taylor, Author http://abbiescorner.wordpress.com
http://www.abbiejohnsontaylor.com
abbie at mysero.net
Order my new memoir at http://www.abbiejohnsontaylor.com/memoir.htm
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