A Walker in the Suburbs

“I’d say that it is good to have a quiet place to work, and it is also good not to work there, but somewhere else — whether at one end of the dining room table, or sitting in an armchair by the fireplace or even away from all the usual writing spots entirely.”

I just finished reading Reeve Lindbergh’s memoir Forward From Here, in which she writes about writing places — and many other things. Reeve can look out her back door and see her mother’s writing house, moved from Connecticut after Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s death in 2001. But Reeve doesn’t usually write in her mother’s writing house.

I know what she means. For years I wrote in an office. We always had a dedicated room in our house where I could work. First it was an upstairs bedroom, and then, when the girls got older and each had their own room, it was a converted dining room downstairs. Now that I have a laptop I wander all over the house and yard. In fact, I do some of my best writing on Metro (provided I have a conductor who knows how to operate the brakes — not always a given with that outfit).

It helps to have a writing spot (because you’re telling yourself that your writing is important enough to make space for it), but if writing is like breathing, then it figures you should be able to do it most anywhere.

I’ve been a journalist for most of my adult life, but I’ve been a journal-keeper even longer — since a student teacher in Mrs. Ahren’s eleventh grade English class assigned us to write one for 12 weeks. I’d kept diaries before, I’d scribbled stories and poems — but this was different. I wish I could remember the student teacher’s name or the words he used, but the message I took from this assignment was to go out into the world and observe it, ponder it, make it my own. Suddenly a pen and a notebook were the keys to the kingdom.
I started carrying a small spiral notebook around in my purse, recording thoughts, observations, favorite quotations. When the 12 weeks were over, I couldn’t imagine life without some notebook or other by my side.

Yesterday, Celia and I watched the documentary “The September Issue,” which is about Anna Wintour, Grace Caddington and others putting out the September issue of Vogue magazine. It was fun to watch together, especially after watching “Coco Before Chanel” over the weekend.
The timing was interesting, though, because I had just finished reading the final (printer’s) proofs of Georgetown Law the same day and my desk is littered with page proofs, little yellow stickies and other proof of editorial toil.

Of course, we didn’t have a celebrity cover shoot with Sienna Miller and our models weren’t wearing gowns worth tens of thousands of dollars. But once you discount these, er, differences, the editorial process is remarkably similar. Putting out a magazine takes time, has its own seasons and dramas. It’s about winnowing down, removing what isn’t necessary. It is often tedious but ultimately fun.

Medieval theologians, it is said, debated how many angels could dance on the head of a pin. After a week of reading page proofs, I have decided that editors are the modern-day equivalent of these learned (foolish?) folk. We talk of how to space the dots in an ellipsis and we fret about the length of a dash. We discuss semi-colons as if they were old friends. Like the scholastics, we have a deep reverence for our subject. We believe it matters. Like them, I fear, we are bound for extinction.

In a way I don’t blame the post office. I mean, if all you delivered were bills and junk mail, wouldn’t you want to cut back? I’m speaking of the Postal Service’s recent proposal to stop Saturday mail delivery. And I’m thinking that we are to blame, we the former letter-writing public. We bloggers and e-mailers, we Facebookers and Tweeters. We of the keyboard instead of the pen.

I try to write real letters; I really do. But all I can manage are several a month. Compare that with the Victorians, who seemed to write a letter an hour – or even compare it with an earlier version of myself. Tom and I have boxes of old letters in our basement, thin blue airgrams, envelopes stuffed with ink-stained paper, missives of all shapes and sizes. We can’t bear to part with them; they are real, tangible proof of our loves and losses. They tell our story.

Now our story is told with keystrokes and stored in tiny chips. Now our story can vanish with a click of the wrong key, a toppled cup of coffee, a hard drive gone bad. I’ve come to embrace this new, hectic way of communicating. But if there comes a Saturday when the mail truck is silent, when there isn’t even a chance of getting a real letter, that will be a sad day indeed.

I read today in the paper that Georgelle Hirliman died. She was known as “the writer in the window” because about 25 years ago when she had writer’s block she came up with the idea of sitting in a Santa Fe shop window with her typewriter and a sign that read “Help me cure my writer’s block — give me a topic.” People passing by would tape up their questions and on the other side of the glass, she would tape her answers. One question was “Where do ducks go when ponds freeze over? Her answer: “warm, chlorinated pools in Miami and Beverly Hills.” You may guess where this is going. She never wrote the novel, but she appeared in windows all over the U.S. and Canada, and eventually collected all her aphorisms into a book called “Dear Writer in the Window: The Wit and Wisdom of a Sidewalk Sage.” For her, the bypass became the new road. For her, when God closed a door he literally opened a window. Salvation often has a sense of humor.