Wonderful.

This is a beautiful word, but I’d rather think of “wonderful” as “full of wonder.” That’s me ever since I was a kid.

Growing up in a brokenhearted family, living with parents racked with sickness by day and drunk with liquor by night, I often sought refuge in the stillness of summer afternoon woods, surrounded by the dances of monarchs.

Was that Mother Nature comforting me with her quiet peace in my world of turmoil?

I wondered.

I loved being outside when I was a kid. I rode my bike through an open field to sit below a big shady tree and gaze across the sparkling ripples of a farm pond, my eyes gleaming at Mother Nature’s beautiful water color painting she had made just for me.

At night I’d sit on my back porch looking up at the mystical magic of the full moon and the thousands of points of lights from the stars.

Actor Tom Hanks said, “You cannot look up at the night sky on the Planet Earth and not wonder what it’s like to be up there among the stars. And I always look up at the moon and see it as the single most romantic place within the cosmos.”

Tom Hanks and millions of people look into the same night sky as I do and see the same magic that I do.

I wondered about that.

I was a master at daydreaming. In high school, I stared out the window and listened to my classmates read aloud a scene from Romeo and Juliet. I tried to wrap my mind around this extraordinary and incomprehensible thing called love. Would I ever have a moment like Romeo’s moment when my heart would sing out the poetry of romance?

Oh, I wondered about that!

As I grew into young adulthood, life moved me along with a gentle nudge to here or to there. The draft lottery spared me from the Vietnam War, but not for some of my classmates who never came back. Given the freedom to plan my life, I had no solid grip on what I wanted to do after college. I majored in education because I had to declare some kind of major study.

I remember my first day as a teacher standing with my knees shaking in front of a room full of noisy high school kids and I asked myself, “What am I doing here?”

I survived that day and 38 years later, I retired from a wonder – full teaching career.

When I was 34, two doctors had said I could never father children because of a reproductive gland problem. Sixteen years later, my son was born and two years after him, I held my baby daughter in my arms. What would those two doctors tell me now?

I wondered how science had no explanations for miracles.

I came to know that I lived a past life that inspired me to sit at my computer at four o’clock in the morning for two years to write this book about he and I fighting the Civil War inside the same body. Can you believe you could have walked in the shoes of someone who was born a long time ago? Listen to the voice in your soul. You might be surprised at who you’re hearing.

I’ll let you wonder about that.

When I taught a philosophy course, Socrates was my favorite great thinker. He found that with many different answers to the same question, a single truth about anything cannot ever be proven. Near the end of his life, he said, “The only thing I know is that I don’t know anything.”

Now, I wonder if the more knowledge we gain, the less we really know.

I believe that once we think we attain what we believe is a truth, something comes along to challenge what we know. I’m good with not needing to come up with answers to life’s most difficult questions.

Here’s the biggest one of all. In my philosophy class, my students spent an entire day debating the question, “Can the existence of God be proven?” After research backed arguments were given by both sides, neither team won the debate.

My students then asked me what I thought and I said, “I’d rather keep wondering.”

Life is full of mysteries that defy explanation. Here are a few that I have come to know. One person walked away without injury from the flames of a plane crash which killed everyone else. Two strangers got drunk in Vegas, were married by an Elvis Presley impostor and went on to live happily for 30 years and raise four wonderful kids.

While walking on the beach at night alone, a woman lost her 2-carat diamond ring somewhere in the sand. The next morning, a swimmer steps on it under the surf and the woman is shocked that the ring was brought to the lost and found center for her to reclaim.

A man jumped off a bridge to kill himself, but survived and then became a leader of a suicide prevention campaign.

A woman’s only child, her teenage daughter, was killed by a drunken driver. She lobbied to reduce his jail sentence and together they do public speaking engagements about the dangers of drinking and driving.

All the irony I just wonder about.

The great scientist, Albert Einstein wrote, “He who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead; his eyes are closed.”

I live on with my eyes wide open. I’m not looking for an answer to the question, “What is the meaning of life?’

I don’t need to know. I’m going to buy me a shirt printed with a large question mark. Maybe I’ll get a matching cape to go with it.

I am Wonderman.

Rich Strack can be reached at katehep11@gmail.com.