One of my clients commented on my use of the word “Warmly” at the close of my letters and emails.
A valediction, if you didn’t know.
My client liked the use of the word but commented on how he had never seen it used before to close a letter.
I explained that “Warmly” was the closing used by my college poetry professor, Hugh Ogden, a beautiful man who profoundly impacted my life. I was an English major in college, but I didn’t study poetry, focusing primarily on fiction in hopes of one day becoming a novelist. But in my senior year, my advisor suggested I take a poetry class to broaden my perspective on language and learn about the economy of words, so I enrolled in one taught by Hugh.
The class, it turned out, was populated by fellow seniors who had been studying poetry for four years. The students were knowledgeable, talented, and skilled, and they were slightly unkind to a fiction writer who had wandered into their poetry utopia, thinking he could write poems.
Sensing my discomfort on the first evening of class, Hugh asked me to sit beside him. His dog, who attended every class, plopped down on my feet and promptly fell asleep. Hugh patted me on the back, smiled, and said, “It’s going to be okay, honey.”
By the end of that semester, I had fallen in love with poetry. Hugh was a brilliant poet, but perhaps more importantly, he was a brilliant teacher, inspiring me to try new things, be daring, and disregard the thoughtless opinions of others. Almost all the poetry I wrote that semester was both autobiographical and blindingly honest.
Little did I know it, but it represented my first steps into storytelling. Almost every poem written that semester ultimately became a story I tell onstage today.
Best of all, I became a better human being thanks to my time spent with Hugh Ogden, and I carry the lessons he taught me into my classroom today.
I’m forever grateful to him.
Hugh died on December 31, 2006, after falling through the ice on a lake in Maine. When I heard the tragic news, I decided to adopt his preferred closing, Warmly, to keep his memory alive.
Every time I write that word — which is often — I think of him, and it makes me smile.
Storytellers tell stories to others, but more importantly, we tell our stories to ourselves. We will always be our first and most important audience for every story we tell.
I like to think that memorializing someone who meant a great deal to me by something as simple as adopting a valediction is an indelible way to keep the story of Hugh Ogden alive in my heart and continue telling his story to myself on an almost daily basis.
Find ways to continue to tell stories about your life to yourself. Keep those memories alive. You will be a better storyteller and a better person for it.
