How to Be Here by Rob Bell

Author:Rob Bell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2016-01-20T05:00:00+00:00

PART 6

The Dickie Factor

Your life has been a mad gamble. Make it more so. You have lost now a hundred times running. Roll the dice a hundred and one.

—Rumi

I once told my boys some stories about Dickie Shoehorn. (Where did that name come from? I have no idea. But I love it. It still makes me laugh.)

I told them about the time Dickie went to his friend Joe’s birthday party and gave him a helmet but it turns out Joe had a massive head so all the boys spent the rest of the time trying to fit that small helmet on that huge noggin, including dropping Joe off his roof headfirst while some of them held the helmet upside down on the ground.

I told them about the time Dickie was staying at his uncle Vince’s house and was so excited about the cereal he was eating that he said he would swim in a pool of it if he could. Which is what Uncle Vince did, draining his swimming pool and then filling it with milk and cereal so Dickie could swim in it. Dickie learned that day that you actually can have too much of a good thing.

I told them stories about Dickie riding his bike and Dickie going to his favorite record store and making friends with squirrels—there was no end to Dickie’s adventures.

At the end of a particularly good Dickie story we would shout, DICKIE LIVES!

After a year or so of making up Dickie stories, I thought, I should write these stories down.

So I typed one of them up and after working on it for a while, I showed it to my friend Alan who’s a cartoonist. I told Alan all about Dickie and described some of the adventures Dickie had recently been on, and then I asked him if he’d draw me Dickie Shoehorn. And here’s the amazing thing: Alan’s drawing of Dickie looked exactly like Dickie.

I was so thrilled.

Alan then illustrated one of my Dickie stories. It came out better than I ever could have expected.

Then I tried to get the book published. I showed it to some publishers, telling them how this story was the first in a series called “The Adventures of Dickie Shoehorn.” I talked about the potential for an ongoing cartoon show. I sent them the picture that would go on the home page of the website. I described the T-shirts we’d make with Dickie Lives! printed in big letters on the front. I had so many ideas. This was Dickie Shoehorn, after all, and what we’ve learned from Dickie is that life is an adventure and all sorts of things are possible . . .

But nobody was interested. Not one publisher. No one had even the slightest interest in seeing Dickie live.

And so I put the book in a file in a crate in my garage, and that’s where it’s been to this day.

Whenever you create anything, you take a risk. And that includes your life.

It may work out, it may not.

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