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Turning 13!

Turning 13!

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It seems just the other day it was toddling around, cutting its first teeth, skinning its knees. Now my blog has plunged headlong into its teenage years. Thirteen years ago today I wrote the first post for A Walker in the Suburbs, thinking that I might write every so often and coax it along for a year or two.

In the same way that parents of a newborn can’t picture sitting in the passenger seat as their “baby” drives a car, so could I not imagine my blog turning 13.  

But the years pass, and the quest for toys becomes the quest for boys … and here we are. Will my blog start demanding the car keys? Will it sneak out the basement window? Will it hide a skimpy sweater in its backpack and change when it gets to school?  

All I can say is, I’m prepared for anything. 

Writing in Bed

Writing in Bed

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With Copper gone,  I’ve no need to rush downstairs in the morning. Which means I can indulge in one of my favorite pastimes, writing in bed. 

Churchill did it. Marcel Proust did it. Mark Twain, Edith Wharton and Truman Capote did it, though the latter said a bed was not required. A couch would work just fine, as long as coffee and cigarettes were available.

I can’t relate on that score. More my speed was Wordsworth, who wrote poems in bed but made up for it by walking 10 miles a day, striding all over the Lake District, often with his sister Dorothy. 

It makes perfect sense to me, a great expenditure of energy, followed by an equally great period of rest. 

(Marcel Proust writing in bed.)

Once More to the Breach

Once More to the Breach

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There is something both unsettling and gratifying about charging into a project that you’ve left idle for a month. Never mind the explanations for your idleness — a research paper due, the holidays to prepare for — the work itself has been left behind, and it lets you in on its annoyance. 

Surely nothing else can account for the way a once-admirable essay shrinks in power and perceptiveness. Nothing else explains the inelegant phrasing, the lack of insight.

And yet … with the power of time and distance, suddenly there is potential again, too. A new overview, perhaps even a revised table of contents. It’s a good way to enter the new year, with rolled-up sleeves. 

Urban Campfire

Urban Campfire

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It’s been a while since I sat around a campfire, but I did last night … in the middle of D.C. That it was part of a professional association meeting, that it was around a fire pit, that the occasional helicopter chugged overhead, didn’t seem to matter.

We were outside, the food was terrific, and the darkness and the crackling wood invited, if not ghost stories, at least some tales of journalistic hijinks and derring-do.

When I returned last evening I kept smelling something familiar, something comforting. It was the aroma of wood smoke in my hair. 

Ink Stains: Before and After

Ink Stains: Before and After

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One hazard of being a writer is the frequent discovery of ink stains on my clothes. This happened the other day after a trip to the grocery store, where in the course of crossing items off my list (which has nothing to do with being a writer and everything to do with being a compulsive list-maker) I somehow smudged black ink on a white sweatshirt.

We’ll leave aside for the moment why in the world I bought a white sweatshirt and move along to the stain remedy. 

Long ago, I acquired a chart which listed such items as ammonia, baking soda, lemon juice and glycerine in an arsenal of stain busters. Glycerine is key here, being one of the only substances I’ve found that can remove ball point ink from fabric. I worked with glycerine, and a mixture of glycerine, dish detergent and ammonia, off and on for an hour: applying, rubbing, rinsing, reapplying. But in time, and with effort, the ink stains went away. 

I’m wearing the white sweatshirt again. Is it my imagination or does it look even creamier and more pristine than it did before I defaced it? I think it does. 

(Imagine the stain potential here.)

Pulling a Churchill

Pulling a Churchill

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This morning, I’m pulling a Winston Churchill and writing in bed. I’ve already had a good long session of journal writing and have moved on to the blog, all without stepping a foot downstairs.  

True, it’s not very professional. I wouldn’t want to be in a Zoom meeting right now. And it may not be the best posture for the back. But it seems like the epitome of luxury, to not have to rush up or rush out, to take my time getting used to the morning, to sidle into the day from a reclining position. 

But I can hear Copper downstairs, his nails clicking on the floor. He’ll want to go out. And come to think of it, a cup of tea would be nice, maybe even some yogurt. 

I’m wise enough to know that when thoughts of food and drink start intruding, it’s time to pop up, get dressed, and start the vertical part of the day. 

(One potential problem with writing in bed: being unable to read what you wrote when you were there.)

Deadlines

Deadlines

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I’ve been alarmingly sedentary the last few days, working on a paper for class and other writing assignments, proving once again that one thing I don’t have is ADHD.  

Yes, I can sit still for hours, noodling over some nuance, re-reading the paragraph I just wrote more times than is necessary, looking up an arcane fact I could live without. But the rabbit holes are tempting and I finally have time to explore them.  All of which is to say that I can sit still and write (or pretend to) for the entire day. 

And so … thank God for deadlines. I’ve lived with them since I was in grammar school and had to write book reports and term papers, worked as a magazine writer and editor where they were so much a part of the furniture that I hardly gave them a second thought. Now I have deadlines to submit analytical essays and research papers. 

Of course, I deplore deadlines. I rail against them. But without them the learning — and the sitting — would be eternal. And we can’t have that. 

The Archive

The Archive

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I’ve been working on a writing project that has me dipping into the archive of posts I’ve been accumulating for years. I recently fished out one I wrote about a local historian who gave tours of the area and, for comic but also historical effect, passed around a 12-pound cannonball.

I found another about a two-room schoolhouse at a crossroads near here. It’s been named to the Virginia Landmarks Register, thanks to the efforts of those who love and want to preserve it.

And then there was the post about buying last year’s Christmas tree not from the oh-so-chi-chi place west of here that charges you a fortune to cut down their firs but from a small lot and a native Virginian, a place I’ll be frequenting this year, too.

These and other local efforts have made the quality of life here so much better than it would be otherwise. And I can thank the blog — and the walking that inspired it — for many of these discoveries. 

(The Vale Schoolhouse, now on the Virginia Landmarks Registry.)

Gutenberg’s Bible

Gutenberg’s Bible

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The Writer’s Almanac informs me that on this day in the year 1452 Johannes Gutenberg finished printing the first section of his revolutionary bible.  More than a decade earlier, he had begun isolating the elements of each letter and punctuation mark (300 shapes in all) to create movable type. 

It’s a technology that had begun in China centuries earlier, using porcelain. Gutenberg’s type pieces were made of an alloy of lead, tin and antimony — a compound that remained in use for the next 550 years. 

Gutenberg printed around 180 bibles of which less than 50 remain, only 21 of them complete. But his printing press forever changed our technology and our culture. 

“What the world is today, good and bad, it owes to Gutenberg,” Mark Twain wrote in 1900. Perhaps a little less true today, but still a statement you can hang your hat on. 

(Illustration and facts from Wikipedia, additional material from The Writer’s Almanac)

The End of Cursive?

The End of Cursive?

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An article in the new Atlantic charts the disturbing loss of cursive skills among the young in this country. Kids aren’t learning to write longhand in school; they’re tapping keys instead. A college professor notes that cursive is becoming like ancient Latin or Greek, a tongue that needs to be translated.

This is horrifying and disappointing and yet more evidence that the world as we know it is falling apart … but it may solve a problem I’ve been mulling over for some time. 

As noted in the “About Me” section of this blog, I’ve been keeping a journal for most of my life, a practice that has generated a goodly number of notebooks through the years. While most of the material in these notebooks is absolutely positively squeaky clean, there may be a few passages that I’d, well, rather not leave behind. 

True, I could burn the lot, but I’d rather not. After reading the Atlantic article, though, I’m thinking my scribbles may be safe. Given the decline of penmanship instruction, it seems fairly certain that my grandchildren won’t be able to read my journals, and probably one or two of my children won’t either. 

The decline of cursive may not be good for civilization, but for those of us who keep journals, it’s a blessing in disguise.