How my mother inspired me to be a writer

From the Tri-Valley Herald, my column in honor of Mother's Day, 2006:

Before this Mother’s Day fades from memory, I want to share how my mother inspired me to be a writer, and how she just might inspire you as well.

In the 1960s, my mom (whose name is Janet) occasionally wrote poetry. Unlike the ranting of Beat era poets at the time, her poems—written in perfect penmanship—were about summer days and holding hands with my dad and how he once brought her a single rose when they were dating.

My mom read me her poems, and as I learned to write, I tried to compose my own. Like her, I stayed away from politics, writing instead about my passions: pirate ships, buried treasure and the circus.

Along with poetry, I also wrote prose. The summer I was nine, I spent days with a typewriter pounding out a Lincoln biography I’d plagiarized from library books.

Of course, my mom read every word and praised my writing skills.

After those early years, my mother stopped writing poetry. She recently told me she was reluctant to write because she knew she could never write like William Wordsworth or Emily Dickinson, poets she had read in my dad’s old college books.

But then, in 1997, something happened.

She received a phone call from me. I was working on a poem about a story she’d told me years before. I called to check on a detail.

“The lines you read to me that day,” she said, “well, they were so simple and yet so powerful. It was as if a light bulb clicked on for me.”

After that phone call, my mom started writing again.

“Soon the poems were just coming and coming,” she said. “I wrote about simple things like my garden or grandchildren or the cat next door. I didn’t care if I sounded like Emily Dickinson.”

In 1999, my mom compiled her best 25 poems and had Kinko’s bind them into a modest booklet. She gave copies to her family and closest friends as a holiday gift.

Then in 2004, my mom surprised us with another book, titled “Grandma Remembers.” She’d written 38 very short stories, each one fitting on a single page. Sometimes humorous, always delightful, the stories were memories of when she was little.

By 2005, she’d written her third book, this one about high school memories.

“For so many years I thought I needed to be more educated or have a bigger vocabulary,” my mom said. “But by writing to my grandchildren, I was just myself and I stopped worrying about trying to impress anyone.”

As I share a few passages from one of her stories, keep in mind that my mom was just 12 when she met my father. He was 15. They married in 1951 on the night of her graduation from Venice High School in southern California. By then my dad was in the Air Force. Next month will mark their 55th wedding anniversary.

Titled “The Hudson,” this story recounts how my dad and his twin brother bought a 1937 Hudson Terraplane the year they turned 16. She writes: “Painting it by hand, using mitts dipped in tan paint, they were surprised to see it turn pink as it dried.”

A few sentences later: “When I was old enough to date, I stood by the kitchen window watching for the old pink Hudson to turn the corner and stop in front of my house.”

Then she writes how one evening she was so excited about going out with my dad that “after dinner I put things in the oven that should have gone into the refrigerator. Things that needed to be cold went into the cupboard.”

Now before I share the final sentence of her story, I hope my mother’s writing will inspire you to realize what a gift it would be to have your memories, your stories, written out without fear, written down with love, written simply in a voice simply yours.

And when you finish reading my mother’s words, turn to your computer or pick up a pen and please, for your loved ones—as my mother did for me—start writing.

“That school girl crush I had on your Grandad,” she writes, “turned into love, and I still get excited when I hear his car in the driveway.”

Quadriplegic embraces tragedy

This column was published in the Tri-Valley Herald in January 2006.








Just after 2 o’clock in the morning on November 13, 1993, Pam Yeaw woke up screaming.

She didn’t know why she screamed, but she couldn’t get back to sleep.

Then, a few hours later, the phone rang.

Her 21-year-old son, Darren Quin, had been in an alcohol-related car accident near Pinecrest Lake in the Sierra Nevada.

He and two friends had been driving along an icy, two-lane road when the car spun out of control and flipped over.

“The accident happened about 2 in the morning—right when my mom screamed,” said Quin, who took a break from his job in Pleasanton to reflect on the accident that forever changed his life. “And it happened on her birthday.”

Just after impact, Quin said he became conscious long enough to realize that his friends had escaped from the car uninjured.

He was not so lucky.

“I was hanging upside down in the passenger seat and couldn’t move any of my extremities,” he said. “Then I lost consciousness.”

Waking up a few days later in a hospital, surrounded by friends and family, Quin learned he was paralyzed from the neck down.

“After realizing I couldn’t perform a task as simple as scratching my nose, I questioned why I had to wake up,” he said.

In spite of his intense initial fears, Quin became hopeful as he regained some use of his arms after months of rehabilitation.

What was most encouraging, though, was the positive time he was spending with his family.

“This was a complete turnaround from before the accident when I had almost daily confrontations with my parents,” he said.

Every time he showed any sign of wanting to give up, a family member would be there to support him. “More times than not that someone was my mother,” he said.

After months of therapy and learning to get around in his wheelchair, Quin began attending classes at Las Positas College. The Rotary Club of Pleasanton North raised funds to purchase a van fitted with equipment that enabled Quin to drive in spite of his paralyzed legs.

Then one evening a few years after the accident, Quin was browsing the Internet when he noticed a young woman had logged on to AOL Instant Messenger.

“I sent her a message,” Quin said, smiling. “Turns out that evening she had just been stood up for a date.”

Quin and Stefanie Dimotakis began dating. They fell in love, and in 1999 Quin moved to Davis to be with her as she finished her degree at U.C. Davis.

The couple eventually moved to Modesto and bought a home. As Quin took classes in graphic design at Modesto Junior College, Dimotakis earned her teaching credential at California State University, Stanislaus.

Today Dimotakis teaches kindergarten at Cunningham Elementary in Turlock, and Quin commutes to Pleasanton where he does graphic design for Allegra Print and Imaging.

Leaning forward in his wheelchair, his brown eyes shining, Quin conveys a certainty about his life that is unexpected in a C6-C7 quadriplegic who has been dealt a brutal hand in life.

This is because his story is about more than keeping your chin up or rediscovering family or finding love.

Quin’s story is about choosing to embrace life’s offerings.

“It’s not often that someone can look back on a disastrous situation and realize it was fortunate,” he said.

Quin explained that before the accident, along with the ongoing conflicts with his parents, he was having frequent run-ins with law enforcement, and his future looked bleak.

“The road I was headed down was in dire need of a detour,” he said. “In fact, that curvy, rural highway wound up being the deviation I so desperately needed.”