Gallimaufry

Gallimaufry

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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. 

Level of Effort

Level of Effort

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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?

The Iron Curtain

The Iron Curtain

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I grew up with the Iron Curtain, the dividing line between the Soviet Union and the West. A strange image, “iron curtain.” Not iron wall, though the Berlin Wall was part of it. Not iron fence, though barbed wire and guard towers were part of it, too. But iron — hard and unbendable — combined with curtain — soft and pliable.

It was Winston Churchill’s phrase, part of a March, 1946, address where he said, “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an Iron Curtain has descended upon the land.” I didn’t know he used these exact words until I looked them up just now.

But I did know that something was terribly wrong with the world, that adults were afraid of the division, that it posed harm. The Iron Curtain was not just a dividing line; it was a feeling. It was rigid and gray and hopeless, life drained of color. The Cold War. Nuclear stand-offs.

My children were born as the Berlin Wall was falling. They grew up with a far different Europe than I did. To them, Russian’s invasion of Ukraine must seem preposterous. To me, it seems all too familiar.

(Prague, capital of the Czech Republic, a city I never dreamed I’d see. In the old days, it was on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain.) 
Without the Directions

Without the Directions

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On a doggie walk this morning I was stopped short in my tracks. Tree limbs were shiny, glazed with ice. It was unexpected and almost magical.

It was the best of both worlds, too, because the pavement wasn’t affected. There was friction on the driveway, fairyland up above.

I hadn’t known this was coming, hadn’t read weather reports that freezing rain was in the forecast.

It struck me then, and I second it now, that life is more exciting when we forget to read the directions.  

Absorbing

Absorbing

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Three years ago on this day I was touring one of the world’s great heritage sites, Angkor Wat in Cambodia. My friend and I, on assignment for Winrock, woke early on our day off, made our way through the darkness to the temple complex, then waited for daylight. We were not alone. 

What we found inside almost defies description: the impossibly steep steps…

the draped statuary…

the play of light on ancient carvings. 

Later that day we visited Ta Prohm and marveled at its ruined splendor. With every new twist and turn, with each new vista, I would think, this, this is the most lovely of all. And then I would walk a few feet and find another view even lovelier. 

For five years, I had a job that paid me not just in money but in experiences. I’m still trying to absorb them all.

Empty Shelves

Empty Shelves

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The shelves that were emptied for the great floor rebuild are finally back in place and ready to be filled.  We hauled them in from the garage, where they were lashed together for stability, and installed them in their rightful position.  

Now that they are dusted and polished, I’m wondering … should I return the books that have always been there, the battered paperback classics in the upper reaches, reference books and anthologies in the middle, rows of magazines on the lower shelf?

I can certainly pull together a better-looking group of printed matter, if this is all about aesthetics — but of course it is not. It’s about order and reverence and to a certain embarrassing extent, laziness. I’m used to books being where they are: do I really want to rearrange them? 

On the other hand, the empty shelves stand open for change and rearrangement. Can I really let them down?

2/22/22

2/22/22

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It’s enough to make me wish I was writing a bunch of checks today, or signing a sheaf of documents — any excuse to write the date 2/22/22 as many times as possible.

A bounty of weddings and engagements are planned, Caesarean sections, too, scads more than would be scheduled for an otherwise ordinary late-winter weekday.

But it’s not an ordinary late-winter weekday. It’s 2/22/22 — and a Tuesday, to boot. It’s a day when numbers align, boding good luck for some, mild terror for others. It’s a day of symmetry and palindromic satisfaction. It’s 2/22/22. I haven’t been this excited about numbers since 10/10/10.

(In honor of 2/22/22, a photo of 2 toddlers, courtesy Claire Capehart.)
What Might Be

What Might Be

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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.  

Loud and Low

Loud and Low

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When the winds howl, the planes fly loud and low over the house. I snapped this photo yesterday while on a breezy walk. 

Throughout the length and breadth of the neighborhood I was the only soul out for a stroll.

Call it cabin fever or just plain stubbornness. Whatever it was, it put me in place to snap this shot. 

Score One for Spring

Score One for Spring

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When I looked out my office window yesterday morning, the world was an unremitting winter gray, with just a touch of green from the grass and hollies.

Today, I see three sprays of yellow witch hazel, which burst into partial bloom with the afternoon’s balmy warmth.

We’ll see how those spare blossoms fare now, with temperatures falling into the 40s and a wild northwest wind battering the bamboo and waving the sweet gum branches.

I remind myself that the witch hazel is hardy and used to such shenanigans. It’s bloomed in far worse. Plus … those small yellow flowers are out among us now — and there’s nothing that winter can do about that.

(The witch hazel in two feet of snow in 2010.)