Browsed by
Category: writing

Day Job

Day Job

Comments 0 Comment

Eight years ago today I began working at my current job. This is a fact I’ll ponder today — but it’s one I notice every day, given the framed snapshot of the girls on my desk. It’s 2006, our summer trip to California, and they are 11, 14 and 17.

What I’m thinking about now, though, is not just the improbability of their current ages — 19, 22 and 25! — but the fact that for half the years I’ve been working this day job, I’ve been writing this blog. I like the heft of this ratio, and will like it even more when it grows from 1/2 to 3/5 or 3/4.

This is not to disparage the day job but only to say that for me, and for many others, the creative work that happens before and after the eight hours is what matters most. It’s a funny, bifurcated way to live, straddling worlds, but there are compensations.

I savor them however I can.

Mottled Sky

Mottled Sky

Comments 0 Comment

Most color has drained from the earth. Now that our white snow cover is gone (though not for long perhaps?), we are left with brown leaves, gray trees — a monochromatic world. On walks these days my eyes are drawn toward the sky, source of light, source of color.

Here, from yesterday, a swirl of blue and white, which brings the word mottled to mind. Splotched, blotched, swirled, streaked.

I like the word mottled, mostly because it reminds me of soft skies like these. But also because I like how the word sounds. Like marbled, which reminds me of sleek granite or fine paper. And rhyming with coddled, as in egg, or child.

But mostly the word, like the sky, stands on its own.

A Walker Continues

A Walker Continues

Comments 2 comments

The snow has clung to
every available surface. The most spindly branches of the forsythia
have “Vs” of snow, and I can imagine the accumulation, patient and slow,
crystal attracting crystal until little pockets formed. I hope this blog will be the same, a slow, patient accumulation of words. 

Four years ago today I started this blog with a post entitled “A Walker Begins.” Since then, there has been a “slow, patient accumulation” of at least 20,000 words. Other than that, “Walker” hasn’t changed much, other than my learning how to make the photos larger. One of these days I’ll figure out how to switch templates, which will make it easier to follow and comment.


Otherwise, I imagine I’ll keep plugging away as I always do: walking, thinking, noticing.


Writing about the world in an attempt to make some sense of it — though not too much, of course.

150 Years and One Day Ago Today…

150 Years and One Day Ago Today…

Comments 0 Comment

… President Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address. Yesterday’s coverage of the event noted that the speech was 272 words and it took Lincoln only two minutes to deliver it. It was preceded by Edward Everett’s two-hour oration, which is remembered now only because of what followed it: 10 perfectly crafted sentences that conveyed a nation’s aspirations and ideals.

One score and three years ago, I wrote about the Gettysburg Address. About how I memorized it in school, promptly forgot it and wished I had remembered it (among many other things).

Memorization seems even quainter now than it did in 1990. Why remember words when you can look them up on your smart phone? 

Perhaps the reason I gave so long ago is still true today. Learning a passage or a poem “by heart” liberates us, I said. “Once we know the words we carry their wisdom around with us; we are freed from the printed page.”

Lincoln’s words liberated us — in more ways than one. 

Morning Fog

Morning Fog

Comments 0 Comment

After several days that started as cold and hard as a stone, brittle light at morning, we begin today with soft fog and crow-call.

It reminds me of a Thomas Hardy poem:

This is the weather the cuckoo likes,
And so do I;

Although reading the poem more closely, I realize that today’s weather is what Hardy doesn’t like, as  he says in his second stanza:

This is the weather the shepherd shuns,
And so do I;
When beeches drip in browns and duns,
And thresh and ply;

I’ve not been out in this weather yet, but for for atmospheric backdrop while sitting inside with a cup of tea, it can’t be beat.

Priming the Pump

Priming the Pump

Comments 0 Comment
I sit here as I do on many work-at-home mornings. The top half of the plantation shutters are open to the new day. It’s still early. There are no colors yet, just dark
shapes silhouetted against the light. Soon I will leave the keyboard and
venture out. It used to be my morning habit, up and out before the day had any cobwebs
on it. But now I write first. It’s the only way sometimes. 

And sometimes it
works, the words pour out in a torrent. From the feel of the keys
beneath my fingers, this will not be one of those days. But no matter. I write
in all internal weathers; I prime the pump. And, on this day, which feels so
much like a first day, a new year, I will prime it some more. 
The Encounter

The Encounter

Comments 1 comment

I saw him on the path to the Franklin Farm Meadow, a placid paved trail adjoining a napkin-sized playground. Fat and sleek, he sat munching grass, completely oblivious of the human two feet away.

His jaws worked each mouthful as he hungrily tore into each new tuft. This was one hungry guy — though from the looks of him he hadn’t missed too many meals.

Groundhogs are always bigger than I think they’re going to be. Good-sized and galumphing. But this one wasn’t budging. He had found a tasty patch of fescue and was going to eat it all or else.

After a few minutes I delicately eased by the guy — and that’s when he sprang into action. He snapped around and assumed an attack position, crouched, teeth bared. I spoke to him quietly, told him I wasn’t after his grass, just on a run.

When I turned back to look at him, he had gone back to his dinner.

A wild thing, observed.


(I’m fresh out of groundhog photos, but this is near where I saw him.)

Burying the Lead

Burying the Lead

Comments 1 comment

Though it originates in our nation’s capital, this blog is decidedly apolitical — with a few exceptions, several of them also occurring, curiously enough, on 9/11. What I have to say today is not a solemn memorial, though — it’s an editor’s view of President Obama’s speech on Syria.

Maybe it’s because I’m in the final stages of getting the magazine to the printer and am thinking best with a red pen in my hand, but it struck me last night that the startling new diplomatic developments that began emerging  the day before yesterday were not so much fully incorporated into the president’s speech as they were tacked on at the end. This gave the address a confusing inconsistency.

For at least two-thirds of the 17-minute speech Obama told us why we should use force to punish the Assad regime for using chemical weapons against its own people — and then for the next five he told us that the vote to authorize such force was postponed in order to explore a diplomatic solution. We in the journalism biz call this burying the lead.

This didn’t just confuse me; it made me feel used. As George Orwell pointed out 67 years ago in his essay “Politics and the English Language, “…[T]he decline of a language must ultimately have political
and economic causes: it is not due simply to the bad influence of this or that
individual writer. But an effect can become a cause…” As he noted a few paragraphs later, “[I]f thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.”

Perhaps there is no hope for political speech. Orwell didn’t think there was. “In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible,” he said.  It’s hard to believe that the world has improved much in the last seven decades.

But if last night’s explanation had been more honest from the start, it would at least have gotten my attention.  And perhaps even earned my respect.

Brown Study

Brown Study

Comments 0 Comment

In Victorian novels characters are apt to be caught in a brown study. It’s a state of deep thought, a reverie, perhaps with a slightly gloomy cast, though more abstracted than anything else.

I put the phrase “brown study” in the same category as “wool gathering” — though the latter means indulging in idle fantasies or daydreams. It’s less furrowing of the brow and more staring at the clouds.

Both conditions have a certain fuzziness about them, though; both connote a cocoon of thought, whether stimulating or soothing.

Both are lovely, fanciful ways of taking leave — even if just momentarily — of the here and now.

Small Favors

Small Favors

Comments 1 comment

I read in today’s Writer’s Almanac that July 11 is the birthday of E. B. White, essayist, journalist and the author of the beloved children’s books Stuart Little and Charlotte’s Web. Here’s what White said about the genesis of Stuart Little:

“I took a train to Virginia, got out, walked up and down in the
Shenandoah Valley in the beautiful springtime, then returned to New York
by rail. While asleep in an upper berth, I dreamed of a small character
who had
the features of a mouse, was nicely dressed, courageous, and questing.
When I woke up, being a journalist and thankful for small favors, I made
a few notes about this mouse-child — the only fictional figure ever to
have honored and disturbed my sleep.”

 What caught my eye is the phrase “being a journalist and thankful for small favors.” As usual, White  nails it in a few words. When one makes a living asking other people questions, one is grateful for information. And inspiration.

It took 15 years after the mouse-child appeared in his dream for White to complete the manuscript for Stuart Little. Talk about inspiration. I’m grateful for small favors.


First Edition Cover from Wikipedia