It's never too late...(redux)

It’s never too late to announce a TeachingAuthors Book Giveaway Winner.

So, congratulations, Kathy Mazurowski, the winner of Natalie Ziarnik’s debut picture book, Madeleine’s Light: The Story of Camille Claudel (Boyds Mills Press)!

I happen to know that Kathy is a true Becomer, (a la the George Eliot quote I shared Wednesday), newly-retired from teaching and eager to now write full-time.

Thanks to the readers who entered this Book Giveaway, sharing the folks they would have liked to meet when they were young.

Answers ranged from Kathy’s Shel Silverstein to Tom Edison and Mary Martin.
My choice? Hopalong Cassidy’s side-kick Lucky.
Really and truly.

Since it never hurts to hear something twice, and today happens to be Poetry Friday, I offer up a Henry Wadsworth Longfellow poem that shares Eliot’s sentiment.

Enjoy! And, Happy Becoming!

Esther Hershenhorn

“It is too late! Ah, nothing is too late—
Cato learned Greek at eighty; Sophocles
Wrote his grand “Oedipus,” and Simonides
Bore off the prize of verse from his compeers
When each had numbered more than fourscore years;
And Theophrastus, at fourscore and ten,
Had begun his “Characters of Men.”
Chaucer, at Woodstock, with his nightingales,
At sixty wrote the “Canterbury Tales.”
Goethe, at Weimar, toiling to the last,
Completed “Faust” when eighty years were past.
What then? Shall we sit idly down and say,
“The night has come; it is no longer day”?
For age is opportunity no less
Than youth itself, though in another dress.
And as the evening twilight fades away,
The sky is filled with stars, invisible by day.
It is never too late to start doing what is right.
Never.”