Bobbie Shafer enjoying latest chapter of her life
BY CHARLOTTE SMITH Editor

Bobbie Shafer displays framed copies of her two published articles.

The ending's not yet written, but Bobbie Shafer likes the direction her life story has taken.

The spare time that can be overwhelming to some retirees has afforded this Troup resident the opportunity to pursue a lifelong interest in writing.

With two published stories to her credit and a third on the way, Shafer can attest that good things really do come to those who wait … and to those who are willing to work for them.

"For some, retirement is a time to sit back and look back at what they've done. But we should think 'now we have the time to look forward,'" said Shafer. "We have time we've never had before, and we have experience to share and the time to do it."

For Shafer, that experience is being shared through her writing. An avid reader since childhood, she is finally exploring the part of herself that loves storytelling.

"My age group can understand that growing up, there was not a lot of stuff provided. I couldn't wait for birthdays and Christmas to get a new book," said Shafer. She remembers writing poems and short stories and harboring a maybe someday thought about writing, but then "life would take hold."

A native of Palestine, Shafer joined the Air Force in 1960 with hopes of financing her college education. She met her first husband in the military and was discharged when she became pregnant with the first of four children. The two to three years in the Air Force provided her with the opportunity to live all over the United States and Guam.

The couple divorced in 1979 and Shafer remarried in 1981. Her second husband was a traveling salesman and when the time came to pick a spot to finally settle down in, they moved to Troup about 10 years ago.

"This was the first place I could really make mine," said Shafer. The property was just a field at the time, but Shafer remembers loving the trees and picturing the home site in her mind.

The imagination Shafer possesses comes naturally and was developed by the family she calls "the most fascinating, marvelous, magical people in the world."

Shafer was adopted and an only child until the age of 13; most of her childhood was spent in the com- pany of her parents and grandparents, who lived either next door to and or with the family all their lives.

"My family really enjoyed life and made every day one of the best days of their lives," said Shafer, adding that her grandfather, in particular, made an impression.

"Here I am, 65 years later, and I can still remember how excited he got about things," she said. "He made sure we were not kept in a mundane world and made sure my world was filled with the unexpected."

It's no surprise that Shafer credits the man she describes as "sunshine and lightning" as the most likely source of her own talent for storytelling, one she exercised orally well before she began writing.

"All my children know every story I know, and they know all the songs my mother sang," she said with a laugh. "My son's 9-year-old daughters sings the same songs my mother sang to me."

Shafer's evolution from storyteller to writer began when her technician son set her up with a computer. While playing games and surfing the Internet, Shafer felt compelled to write a story. What followed was a three-year period where she "wrote like a maniac," drawing on her own life and family for inspiration.

"Everybody has a story in them -- everybody," said Shafer. "There's not a whole lot about my life I haven't jotted down a story about."

Shafer estimates that she has written about 60 short stories, including "Bonds of Love" and "Mother's Gardenias," her two published stories. A third story, based on a childhood Christmas memory about a dollhouse made from an apple crate, will be published in December in Grit magazine.

As if that weren't enough, Shafer has written about 15 novels and submitted eight to publishers.

"I cried when I finished the first book," she said, describing the experience as "so emotional, so dramatic."

Nowadays she turns on her computer at 8 in the morning and forces herself to turn it off at 8 in the evening. Turning her own imagination off is harder.

"I write on and off all day," she said, "and then lie in bed at night and think about what happens next."

For Shafer personally, the here and now is what's important and she is enjoying her new career. After all, she said, "it took me 50 years to know what I wanted to be when I grew up."