“Getting to the Good”
The idea for this edition of WM began with a single word—“adoption”—and playing with it generated some fun new sections for the magazine and creative ways of getting to know the Wabash community. On these pages you’ll find folks adopting new techniques, technologies, and personas—even superpowers!
But at its core, the theme of this issue is a mixture of loss, family, and faith.
In David Lynch’s 1999 film The Straight Story, a teenaged girl running away from home challenges an old man with a question: “What good is family, anyway?”
The old man picks up a twig and snaps it in two.
Then he gathers five or six twigs into a bundle and tries to break it in half, but the strength of the sticks together saves them all.
Adoption lays bare what it takes to bring and keep together that bundle—the increments of love required of parents and children to make a family. It opens the imagination to the varied forms a family—and our need to love and be loved—may take.
In gathering stories for this edition, we’ve seen and heard wonders. Professor Bobby Horton calls it “getting to the good; getting to what a family is.” For him, such moments come when he visits his daughter Maesa’s third-grade class to help them with their spelling, or when he first learned to put her hair in a wrap.
For Tara and Scott Smalstig ’88, it’s their daughter Athena’s insistence on giving everyone in the family a hug goodnight and saying, “I love you.”
For Nate Quinn ’00, whose family abandoned him at age 15, the very word is charged with absence; turning from despair, he made art from loss. “Getting to the good” for Quinn is captured in the lyrics of the late Daryl Coley’s song “When Sunday Comes”: I won’t have to cry no more/Jesus will soothe my troubled mind/all of my heartaches will be left behind/when Sunday comes.
“Not having family, I threw myself into my art,” Quinn says. “My paintings are my family, it seems. That is what gives me solace.”
We wouldn’t have learned any of this if not for the candor and generosity of the alumni, professors, and families who let us into their hearts and homes and trusted us to tell their stories. Through them we offer here a glimpse of what “living humanely” looks like in the most essential work a person does.
It’s work done through love and faith. The latter need not be religious, but all these folks share a belief that, as Horton says, “we are all in this together” and will “always be there for each other.” And that this work together ultimately makes a difference.
As Scott Smalstig says of adoption, “You can change a little corner of the world in a hurry.”
Thanks for reading,
STEVE CHARLES
Editor | charless@wabash.edu