I always knew I wanted to be a writer. When I was a kid, I perched in the gnarly apple tree in my backyard and scribbled my own adventures in a ruled notebook. In college I majored in English and journalism, but it took years before I found the courage (not to mention the income) I needed to begin a real writing career. The long path that led me here was marked with detours and littered with excuses. The poem below is the wake-up call I needed more than 35 years ago — but Charles Rafferty hadn’t written it yet. Today I keep it in my back pocket and read…