A Walker in the Suburbs

Yesterday was busy. I had my class and plenty of work and an errand to run at lunchtime. It wasn’t until this morning that I noticed yesterday’s post, about how we’re in no hurry for the cool, sharp weather of “all.”

Ah, the typo. Bane of our existence. There are the funny ones, like the time our magazine, Bluegrass, misspelled the name of an advertiser, Mrs. Farthing. (I’ll let you figure out which letter was missing.) That one was legendary. Even the local radio announcer gave us a hard time on that one.

The thing about typos now, though, is how easily they can be corrected. If I notice a misspelling or an inelegance in the blog, I just slip in and fix it. Online publishing, then, softens the rigidity of the written word. But removing the permanence also removes the power.

When I was a full-time freelance writer I wrote often for Working Mother magazine and became familiar with the theory that multiple roles are healthy for working women. The theory goes something like this: When work goes well, it inoculates us against the stress of home and family life. And when home is crazy, the office provides another avenue for achievement and satisfaction. Of course, sometimes both work and home are demanding, but that’s another story.

Last night I missed class to go to Celia’s back-to-school night. I’m glad I made the choice I did, but I missed the camaraderie of the class, missed the two hours I would have spent thinking and talking about ideas.

So after I came in, I spent a few minutes thinking about choices and the multiple roles equation (or my vastly simplified memory of it). The equation is missing a number, I think. There’s a part of me (a part of every person, I imagine) that is not about work and not about family. It is the “third shift,” that which we do for ourselves alone. And often that’s what gives, what falls behind.

For me it’s the thinking self — the reading and writing and pondering self — that has, as the children have grown older, become ever more important. This is the self that has been parched for years. Now that I’m starting to quench it, I don’t want to stop.

“My favorite poem is the one I’ve just written,” said the Latin American poet Ernesto Cardenale. I listened to Cardenale on the radio yesterday as I walked through a steadily darkening dusk.

This made me wonder: Is my favorite blog post the one I’ve just written. It’s not, of course. I can’t call them all to mind anymore now, because there have been hundreds, though some stand out. One or two I’ve written in New York, some of my European ones from May 2010, book reviews, and odd, random ones, like the paragraphs I wrote August 18, 2010, the day we donated our old car, or one earlier that month, August 2, about sunsets awing us into silence.

The fact is, some days posts come easily and some days they don’t. The point is not the ease. The point is the doing.

The significance of the title is not the meaning of the word email. It’s the lack of hyphen. Until recently, according to the editor’s bible — or one of them, the AP Stylebook — email was e-mail. Then e-mail went the way of Web site, and things haven’t been the same since.

The magazine I edit bases its style on AP’s, and so I dutifully changed Web site to website when that alteration was announced last year. But I missed the memo on email. This morning’s newspaper tells me why. The Washington Post has kept the hyphen, so I remained oblivious to the change.

Why do these things matter so much? The fine article in today’s Post explains that, too, quoting David Minthorn, deputy standards editor of the Associated Press. “We’re not a bunch of old fogies sitting around in our ivory tower. We’re alive to changes and new ideas. We have a real sense that new words and changes in language reflect the culture and give us an inkling to where society is headed.”

Think of editors as warriors, standing guard over a culture where standards don’t matter, insisting — with their sharpened pencils — that they do.

Before the blog is written, before the essay, too, the floor must be swept, dishes stowed, smudges wiped. The grime that’s hidden, that can stay, but surface dirt is doomed.

Still, surface dirt takes time.

So words are choked, ideas evaporate — sometimes. Other times they come back, richer than before. On days I work at home I laugh at myself. To clear my mind I run around with vacuum and rag. It is the price I pay to write without guilt.

At the writing contest awards ceremony Friday night, and again this morning as I finished reading Out Stealing Horses, a lovely novel by the Norwegian author Per Petterson, I think about fiction and nonfiction, how close they can lie, how they are the same bones with different skin.

In this novel an old man recalls a summer that altered his life, that took his 15-year-old self and changed it forever. So fully does he live in his own thoughts, this man, that at one point he wonders if “the difference between talking and not talking is slowly wiped out, that the unending, inner conversation we carry on with ourselves merges with the one we have with the few people we still see, and when you live alone for too long the line which divides the one from the other becomes vague, and you do not notice when you cross that line…”

There is one conversation in our heads, one story. Maybe it doesn’t matter whether it emerges as fiction or memoir, essay or poem. All that matters is letting it out.

Re-reading yesterday’s post (yes, I do this sometimes!), I realized it might sound as if the only error in the magazine is the one I intentionally left in. I wish that were true! The problem is, I know there are errors, but I can’t always find them. Proofreading is an art, not a science. It has clear rules and expectations, but also a bit of the mysterious. How else to explain my ability to look right at a mistake and not see it — until it’s in print.

What I was trying to get at yesterday (and which deserves longer treatment later) is the process of letting go that accompanies creative work. At some point you must come to terms with the fact that the essay/painting/song/magazine will not be perfect. Otherwise you will never finish. Humility can be of some help in this endeavor.

For the last week I’ve been in “crunch mode,” editing and proofing the magazine, reading pages over and over and over again looking for misplaced commas, extra spaces and other minutiae. There comes a point with every issue when I must let something go, when the cost to fix the error is too high or too risky, because it could result in a mistake more grievous than the one it hopes to repair.

It is at this point that I think about the humility block. This is the practice of making an intentional error in a quilt — turning a block the wrong way, for instance — to avoid perfection. Only God is perfect, the theory goes, so it’s presumptuous to create something that rivals the divine. Rug weavers do the same thing, slip in a odd thread or two to mar their creations and avoid the “evil eye.”

Sounds good, but from what I’ve been able to learn, it’s not true. It’s a lovely story, a myth; the mistakes in antique quilts are just that — mistakes. But I like knowing that deep in the class notes section of the magazine is a boldface comma that should be Roman. It’s my humility block.

Photo: Courtesy of Etsy.com.