Spring Break

Spring Break

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The very idea of it seems far-fetched. It is too early for spring, too early for a break. But break time is is, at least for the student part of my life. 

There was no class Tuesday evening, though I prepared for it anyway since my break, which starts today, will get me home just in time for Tuesday class next week. 

Because as it turns out, I am taking a “spring break,” though one I wish I wasn’t. I’m heading out today to Kentucky for my cousin’s memorial service: a talented man gone far too soon. 

The trip will have its share of sadness, then, but also its share of joy, visiting with family I don’t often see. A break in many senses of that word: a road trip, a respite, a departure from the ordinary. 

Walking and Belonging

Walking and Belonging

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In his book The Walker: On Finding and Losing Yourself in the Modern City, Matthew Beaumont describes walking as s socially and psychologically meaningful activity.  Authors make cities seem new and strange when they wander through them on foot. And they have their characters do the same.

So just as Charles Dickens ambled along the lanes of Victorian London, so too do some of his characters, including Mr. Humphreys of The Old Curiosity Shop.  Apparently, Dickens walked for the same reason many of us do: to calm himself down, to ease tensions. 

Beaumont examines city walking in the work of Edward Bellamy (Looking Backward), H.G. Wells (The Invisible Man) and others, illuminating both the texts and the walking in the process.

 I take issues with one of Beaumont’s major points, though, which is to see walking as a symbol and a symptom of not belonging: the solitary nighttime stroller at odds with the world he lives in (and it often is a “he” since women’s nocturnal walking opportunities are more limited than men’s). 

From my suburban vantage point, walking is an activity that encourages belonging because it engenders understanding. How can we care about a place that we do not know, and how can we know a place that we never see … except as it streams by outside our car windows?

Untidy Course

Untidy Course

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A few days of unseasonably warm weather meant I slept last night with open windows and the early spring air flowing through the room. It reminded me of warm days to come and the freedom of being at one with the outdoors.

It’s another story this morning. Colder and more seasonable air has moved in and the newly popped daffodil blossoms are shivering on their stems.

A good reminder of the halting, sidewise, untidy course of progress.

(Snowdrops along Reston trail.) 

Over Easy

Over Easy

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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. 

Solidarity

Solidarity

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Who would not be moved by the photos coming from Ukraine, by the snow falling on families as they leave the homes and country they love, by the scenes of children too sick to travel, hiding in basements while parents hold their IV bags?

Who would not shake their fist at a world where raw aggression cannot be stopped because to do so would create a nuclear war out of what is still a “regional conflict”?

The images are haunting: burnt husks of buildings, unexploded shells in playgrounds, lines of weary citizens carrying bags and babies to what they hope is a new, safe place.

Who cannot look at these images and think, how long and difficult it can be to build things up … but how terribly quickly they can be destroyed. 

Whimsical Walk

Whimsical Walk

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The suburb of Reston, Virginia, is made for walking. Trails wind from neighborhood to neighborhood. Founder Robert E. Simon (the “RES” in Reston) designed the suburb for living and working. The trails connect the two.

Yesterday I strolled from Reston’s earliest “downtown,” Lake Anne, to its newest, Reston Town Center.  I’d never taken this path before, though I’d skirted quite close to it through the years. 

Along the way, I passed Hickory Cluster, a midcentury modern townhome development with big windows and geometric lines created in the 1960s by architect Charles Goodman. There were impromptu conversations in the community forest, one woman with a pair of corgis, another with a fluffy golden retriever. 

I passed a small giveaway library and the charming little scene above. The whimsy suited the place, looked perfectly at home among the woodland paths and the open common. I slowed my pace because I didn’t want this walk to end.

Lenten Rose

Lenten Rose

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A walk through Georgetown before class last evening renewed my hankering for Lenten roses. What creamy beauties they are, how full-bodied compared with their early spring cousins the snowdrop and winter aconite. I’ve wanted to plant Lenten roses (also known as hellebores) for years, but now I’m on a mission. 

Of course, last night I was being swayed by the excellent company the plants were keeping, by the environment in which I spotted them. A late winter afternoon, sun slanting low over cobblestones, grand houses standing guard over a neighborhood I could walk through for hours and never tire of.

Even a dandelion would look good in that setting. 

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.)