A Walker in the Suburbs

Late yesterday, I learned that Annie Dillard died Tuesday at the age of 81. Losing her so soon after Wendell Berry leaves me reeling. Two of my literary heroes, two poets of place, gone within 15 days of each other. I’ve quoted Dillard often in this blog. Here is a post I wrote on April 30, 2012, Dillard’s 67th birthday, which I titled “The Poetry of Pittsburgh.”

When I began this blog more than two years ago, I didn’t think long about the quotation I would use across the top. I knew it would come from Annie Dillard’s book An American Childhood.

“When everything else has gone from my brain — the President’s name, the state capitals, the neighborhoods where I lived, and then my own name and what it was on earth I sought, and then at length the faces of my friends, and finally the faces of my family — when all this has dissolved, what will be left, I believe, is topology: the dreaming memory of land as it lay this way and that.”

A few years ago, on our way home from visiting Tom’s family in Indiana, we stopped in Pittsburgh, where Annie Dillard was born on this day in 1945. It was a literary pilgrimage for me. Our first view of the city (where I had lived as a toddler, pre-memory), came at dusk, as we drove through a tunnel and suddenly there were the three rivers and the bridges crossing them all lit up with white lights. It seemed magical to me, this old city of groaning steel and trestles.

Was it the place itself that exerted this magic, or was it because I was primed to love it by Dillard’s words? “I will see the city poured rolling down the mountain valleys like slag, and see the city lights sprinkled and curved around the hills’ curves, rows of bonfires winding.”

It was both, I think. The place of poetry. The poetry of place.

(Photo: Downtown Pittsburgh viewed from the Duquesne Incline, courtesy Wikimedia Commons.)

As we celebrate Labor Day I’m thinking about work, what it means, how it changes as we grow older. Last week, I penned an appreciation of the writer Wendell Berry, who died a week ago. I proposed the piece, wrote it quickly, and the editor turned it around in hours.

It was the sort of thing that happened all the time when I was part of a magazine staff or a communications team, but it doesn’t happen that way much anymore. The pieces I’m assigned usually have generous deadlines, as do my papers for school. Writing is much more of a solo occupation than it used to be, and this has made me think about the part of paying work I miss most: collegiality.

I remind myself that even if I was part of a magazine staff again, I would likely be writing and editing from this desk in my upstairs office. I worked at home for years, quite happily. But one of the reasons I became part of a magazine staff again was for the people.

Do we underestimate the people part of labor? Kind colleagues can make a difficult job bearable, while snide, backbiting ones can make each day a prison.

When we talk of labor, I think we often concentrate on the tasks at hand, items on a to-do list, the headwind of the working life. Good colleagues are the tailwind. They help us glide through the labors of life.

(Colleagues, friends and bystanders on a work trip to Bangladesh.)