It’s a cool, rainy Easter Monday, perfect for catching the breath and putting away the good china.
Over the weekend, I realized that the blog hit a milestone: 3, 700 posts. I love it when the numbers sneak up on me.
Blog writing is such a daily, piecemeal endeavor that I forget the dribbles and drabs add up to something.
On milestone days, I remember that they do.
Too often I’m distracted. I wait too long to flip them over. But this morning the timing was right and the eggs were perfect: just runny enough to coat the whites.
Over easy has a nice, free-and-easy sound. It says flapjacks in the morning, a pot of tea brewing, the whole day ahead.
Never mind that most mornings aren’t like that. So the words promise—but only occasionally do they deliver.
I picked up the book because I know the author and enjoy reading his work. The title bewildered me until I looked inside and saw this definition: “Gallimaufry: a confused jumble or medley of things.”
Joseph Epstein’s latest collection is all of that. There are essays on baseball (“Diamonds are Forever”), Julius Caesar (“Big Julie”) and the author’s defense of the Comic Sans font. Reading this plump and happy book is like devouring a hot fudge sundae smothered with whipped cream. It’s fun and filling and a bit of a guilty pleasure (the latter because Epstein recently angered the PC police).
I read Epstein because he’s brilliant; because he’s a dinosaur, an essayist in the model of Orwell, Hazlitt or Montaigne; and also because he was my teacher long ago. Our first assignment was to come up with our favorite word. Mine was “rhapsody,” which captured a moment in my youth when I was young and romantic and could still play the Brahms pieces known by that name. His was “deliquesce,” which means to melt away but which he admired, he said, because it contained the word “deli.”
Which brings me to the humor and low-key erudition in his work. Epstein, for all his knowledge, does not flaunt it. He’s clear, cogent and refreshingly honest. He makes me remember what it was like to read and write before the age of Great Divisions.
All of which is to say I’m enjoying Gallimaufry immensely. Maybe by the time I’ve finished reading it I will have learned how to spell it.
How many hours will it take to interview four people? To track them down first, of course, then transcribe and bring order to the notes that follow?
How many hours will it take to turn those notes into an article with a beginning, middle and end; to tell a story which, in addition to the interviews, requires research, thought and creativity?
I was never very good at producing a statement of work or SOW, nor was I particularly adept at its project-management cousin, the LOE or estimate of the level of effort required to complete that work. Oh, I could estimate how long it took me to prepare for and complete an interview, or to organize and write a story. I could and I did.
But so much of writing is the thinking that precedes and surrounds it. How do you account for the wasted effort, the dead-ends and sidetracks? How do you quantify a process that can never truly be quantified?
How do you explain that the most effortful writing can be leaden and pedestrian — and the least effortful can soar above it all?
I begin the day with moonlight, a bright waning gibbous that cracks a sweet gum branch in two as I glance at moon and tree through this window I call my own.
How companionable it seems, this moon. Not the cool, pale orb of rounded perfection, but a heavenly body that looks at bit battered around the edges. Knocked down, but still there.
Meanwhile, daylight is gaining on it. Soon it will fade to a translucent disc. The sun will rise, strengthen, send shards of light through the prism, make rainbows on my wall.
But I’m starting early, in the cold darkness, and this is just a glimpse of what might be.
It’s difficult to get the blog up and going the day after a big birthday celebration. Heading into its teenage years it’s needing a lot of sleep — and getting rather surly about picking up after itself, too.
So I’ve spent the morning cleaning up confetti and collecting empty champagne bottles.
These are crucial years ahead, years requiring firmness and guidance. I don’t want the blog skidding off the rails.
I’ve done this three times before, I tell myself. I can do it again. 😊
(Photo: Pippx, CC BY 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons. And just for the record, I think this is the first time I’ve used an emoji in the blog. I won’t make a habit of it.)
This morning I made my way down the hall in the dark, thinking I would read a while and fall back to sleep. I quickly discovered it was later than I thought, the sky already lightening. I’d slept through the night — and there’s always joy and excitement in that!
It’s with similar joy and excitement that I write today to celebrate 12 years of blogging: a dozen years of collecting my thoughts and sending them out into into the world, a dozen years and 3,643 posts.
As I figure out this new writing life, A Walker in the Suburbs remains a constant. It’s a laboratory, a playground, an experiment. It’s where I celebrate books, travel and the strange little thoughts I have.
And on this clear, bright February 7th, my birthday wish for the blog is … more of the same.
I’m in a transitional generation, one that has both real and virtual clean-up duties. Not only do I need to tidy up my computer desktop, to create file folders and organize documents and photos within them, I must also deal with the hundreds of real file folders in cabinets in my basement. And those are much heavier.
They are also filled with gems: Long-ago memos, tattered and worn. Assignment letters from editors who were my mentors and also my friends. Reams of research. Pink “While You Were Away” phone message slips. Studies gathered the old-fashioned way, by going into a brick-and-mortar library, finding the journal and photocopying the pages.
And then there are the interview notes, all in my near-impossible-to-read scribble. I’ve tossed pounds and pounds of them, saving only the ones where I’ve spoken with dear friends or eminent experts.
As I winnow my way through each folder, I remember how hard I worked to assemble that information, conduct those interviews, take and process those notes. Which baby was I holding at the time? Which child was hanging on my leg? A part of me thinks I should leave these folders alone; they are too precious to process. But another part of me is greedy for space, for empty file drawers. And these days, that part is winning out.
Because our new bird, Toby, is a hungry critter and eats more than his cage-mate, Alfie, he also makes more of a mess. Seeds pile up in the bottom of the cage, other stuff, too. I find myself cleaning the bird cage far more frequently than I used to. Which means I’m thinking about the transitoriness of journalism.
The opening of the late, great television show “Lou Grant,” starring the late, great Ed Asner, begins with a bird chirping in a tree, the tree being felled to make paper, presses rolling as the newspaper is printed, then back to a chirping bird again as the day-old newspaper is used to line the bottom of a cage.
Back when I only dreamed of being a journalist, I used to watch this show. I ended up writing for magazines instead of newspapers, but the dream remained, and largely was fulfilled. Watching this show again reminds me of how it felt at the beginning, the irony and the gallows humor and even the nobility of it all. But always among these feelings was an awareness of how fleeting it all was,. No matter how precious the words and how important the topic, the next day, they would be covered with husks and feathers.
I’ve always been a student at heart, and now I’m one in practice again—reading, writing, researching. Wait, that sounds like what I’ve been doing my entire career. But it was different, of course, When I was a freelance journalist, I read, researched and wrote about the topics I needed to sell an article. When I was an alumni magazine editor, I wrote about what I thought would appeal to my readers. And when I worked at Winrock, I wrote about topics that would explain and showcase the organization.
Now I’m studying and learning about topics purely because they’re interesting to me. These last few weeks, plunging into and through the final paper, I’ve been absorbed in a big topic that I can only scratch the surface of.
But how good it’s felt to scratch that surface. Stacking books around the desk, dipping into one and then another. And then there’s all the online research: I realized weeks into the semester that I didn’t just have to rely on Google Scholar. I had an entire research library with all its subscriptions and databases at my disposal. Which means that, in addition to the books and papers you see above, there are many more bookmarked pages or open tabs on the laptop that is almost buried amidst the clutter.
Our final papers are due today. I sent mine off Tuesday mid-afternoon, then took a long walk on a Reston trail to celebrate. It’s just a start. But it feels good to be a student again.