Thoughts, often rambling, on events, past and present, sometimes morphing into fictive narratives meant to continue the theme of those thoughts. For instance, I travel off occasionally to the edge-of-Boston tavern called, The Last Mile. There may, over time, be other escapes.
Somebody wrote it amid all the other scribble on the wall down the hall by the men’s room door.
Prudence is the final imprudence when by slow degrees it prepares the soul to do without God. -from The Diary of a Country Priest.
Now, what “country priest” has been drinking at The Last Mile?
It’s fun to look at the last chapter of old history text books to see how the authors chose to frame the long past “present moment” for the high school or college student of that hour.
Long ago, at a Tampa, Florida yard sale, I bought a thick (over 800 pages), impressively illustrated American history text book called, The American Nation by Columbia professor John A. Garrity. ( I recall how the working class, thirty-something guy selling it on his front lawn lamented his own failure as a student to value it more –at the very moment he was letting it go for a few dollars.)
The big old tome is notable, at least to me, for how heavily and not inappropriately it vividly emphasizes –right from the first chapter– the often previously neglected or underplayed history of America’s tragic interaction with the slave trade.
The American Nation was first published in 1966; my edition is from 1975. Hence, it ends speaking of Watergate and the fall of Richard Nixon. And, in between, of course, the troubled history of the Vietnam War gets extensive treatment.
But back to that last chapter.
It is portentiously titled, “A Search for Meaning.” Garrity evokes and somewhat demolishes what he calls nineteenth century American historian George Bancroft’s “naive assumption” that he was telling the story of God’s American Israel. Adding…
(F)or Americans had always assumed, and not entirely without reason, that their society represented man’s best hope, if not necessarily the Creator’s. The pride of the Puritans in their wilderness Zion, the Jeffersonians’ fondness for contrasting American democracy with European tyranny, what Tocqueville called the “garrulous patriotism” of the Jacksonians, even the paranoid rantings of the latter-day isolationists all reflected this underlying faith. Historians, immersed in the records of this belief, have inevitably been affected by it. Their doubts have risen from what the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr called “the irony of American history”: the people of the United States have been beguiled by their real achievements and the relative superiority of their institutions into assuming that they are better than they are.
(I detect here early signs of the pendulous Obama-era liberal political and academic emphasis on America’s sins and resulting assaults on American confidence that has led to the equal and opposite cry to “make American great again.” But, whatever….)
Among other things, Garrity goes on to asks:
Has modern technology (and this is 1975) outstripped human intelligence?
Has our social development outstriped our emotional development?
Garrity concludes: No one one can currently answer these questions. Nevertheless, we may surely hope that with their growing maturity, their awareness of their own limitations as a political entity, the American people will grapple with them realistically yet with all their customary imagination and energy.
In othe words, he drew up short of any predictions, but gave a nice pat on the shoulder to 1975 Americans before we ran back into the game.
How have we done in fifty years — with our “customary imagination and energy”?
Historian Garrity died on December 19, 2007 at the age of 87. I wonder how he thinks we did on the path to national maturity and emotional development –and did he perceive, in his final years, the unexampled threat Artificial Intelligence added to fears human intelligence might be on the brink of being “outstripped”?
It’s interesting that Garrity invokes the evaluation of theologian Reinhold Niebuhr who is also credited with that prayerful evocation of divine trust and human limitations that has, in this increasingly and aggressively secular age, become a staple introductory prayer at meetings of many addiction recovery groups:
God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change
The courage to change the things I can
And the wisdom to know the difference.
Let me hear a big American –Amen!
Feel like I’ve indulged in this meditation, or something nearly like it, before.
It has to do with figures, mostly meaning people, viewed as they recede in the distance. It is a familiar trope of Hollywood movies, sometimes sad, sometimes happy at the end of a drama — the hero or the lovers together or a disappointed lover alone walking off down a beach or John Wayne, at the end of The Searchers, walking off alone as the door to the house closes and THE END appears. In a John Steinbeck story called “The Mountains” in his book, The Red Pony, a child has a distant view of a man who’d been a visitor riding off into the mountains.
Edward Arlington Robinson captured such a moment and such thoughts, meditated on them over and over during the long poem, “Man Against the Sky” that begins:
Between me and the sunset, like a dome
Against the glory of a world on fire,
Now burned a sudden hill,
Bleak, round, and high, by flame-lit height made higher,
With nothing on it for the flame to kill
Save one who moved and was alone up there
To loom before the chaos and the glare
As if he were the last god going home
Unto his last desire.
Well, I’m traveling and constantly saying hello and goodbye to people along the way. But in Hazelton, Pennsylvania, my companion Diane and I checked into a motel and then went looking for a place to have dinner. We pulled into a rather plain and ugly parking lot in front of what looked like a restaurant, but it turned out to be an ice cream place. That wouldn’t do. So we sat checking the internet on our phones in search of another address of another possible eatery. It was dinner time, or just after it in some households.
Now, I’ve been living in Florida, a very flat state with few exceptions, those being up in the panhandle. There are no mountains or notable hills — true hills. This section of Pennsylvania, by contrast, had mountains — be they the Poconos or some stretch of the Appalacian range. The motel looked off toward mountains.
The parking lot where we’d paused was ugly, as noted, and had a strange dip in a break between strip centers where one could drive or walk to a lower parking beyond which there was a steep hill topped by a neighborhood of houses.
As we sat idling in the car, a young boy of about twelve emerged from the ice cream shop with what was certainly his little sister. They commenced to walk toward that macadam dip, probably bound for those house. The boy had a bundle, probably ice cream, destined for the dessert table of one of th ose houses where parents and maybe other siblings happily awaited this post-dinner ice cream feast, or so I imagined.
The little girl — the little sister — appeared to be about six or seven. She was pretty, wore a dress, had long hair and she was…marching! Yes, her happy stride, holding her brother’s hand suggested delighted expectations – for ice cream and for all of her still innocent life. She was marching along with big brother who was just walking, probably kind of used to the way little sister liked to happily muse and march along in life. I watched them, yes, recede from view as they headed down that black tar gully and out of sight. And I said…I’ll remember that picture.
But, as we went to drive away from that parking lot, there suddenly appeared, unexpectedly to one who for five y ears now has dwelt where the last view of anyone or anything is on a flat plane — a fond, heartening, distant vision:
The young boy and his high-stepping, pretty little sister appeared again, side-by-side with their ice cream bundle, rising distantly up that hill toward those houses, small figures now, destined to vanish from my view. But there they were, a distant, receding vision, destined to vanish from my happy view of them and from that moment — forever. I wished I could have followed them, seen the rest of their life’s drama — how life would treat both of them, praying for the very best for them as they climbed that hill, getting smaller and smaller.
They will always be walking — her happily marching, him with his bundle — and that glimpse of them will always linger in my memory. Yes that movies will always be running in my mind..
without my ever seeing on the screen of my memory the words…
THE END
Returned to the old town, mill town, never ultimately “home” but home for a long while, but seeming less like home for this moment in time for reasons unclear to me.
Got a steak sub at the local sandwich shop. Had been there a fair number of times before. Didn’t recognize anyone.
Got the sub back to the old neighbor’s house where I was staying and found that it had no sauce on it. None. Just a scumble of beef nestled in plain white bread.
No sauce. No taste. That’s what’s missing in this old town. Maybe it never had any real sauce or taste.
I was sad, trying to remember what the town had tasted like when I was in it. I ate what I could and threw the rest away.
Summer 2024 everything moving quickly, too quickly, toward its outer edges. Chaos, as usual, all around. Sameness. So much sameness. And fear.
I’m thinking of last summer — borne backward, against the current, by easier memories — to when I spent all of July in Upstate New York; Rotterdam Junction, to be precise, in flight from the Florida heat that I could not escape this year.
I had stayed at a friend’s house, just up a steep little protective grassy bluff from the Mohawk River, just down from Lock#9. It is a serene, fairly wide stretch traveled by the occasional cabin cruiser likely bound for the Hudson River where the Mohawk flows into it. There is a grape arbor and a shed by a fence. My friend built a little porch on the shed, facing the river.
There used to be a little boat, if I recall correctly, in a little shaded opening of trees down the slope and near the water’s edge. It was — again, if I recall correctly — gone last year, as was the little pier my friend once had for that boat. Getting on in years, he might have tired of maintaining either, and seldom, if ever got out onto the water for fishing or leisure. But he also could not bring himself to move himself and his wife away from this humble riverside haven where he’d lived happily for so many years.
I’ve never been out on the Mohawk, but loved being near it.
If I were my friend, I couldn’t have moved, either. (He did, in fact, once move to Florida, but wound up selling his mobil home down there for far, far less than its value, and hastening back to the realm of seasons, snow, ice, complex family memories. Back to the river. )
During my month on the river, on a pleasant but unaccountably anxious July evening, I wrote, simply:
The Mohawk tonight, as the light dies.
Good to be near it, to stand on the cool grass
Reflecting, on all that can be shattered.
A life, a river
Like glass.
717 A.M. I drove by the Last Mile. There was a light on inside. It looked like it was just the light over the bar. That told me Willy Hartrey was inside. Willy is this old guy that Joe Barron, the owner, gave the key and throws a few dollars to come in and clean in the morning. (Charlie stayed down in Florida this y ear, right through the hot months. Somebody said he’s dealing with some financial issues but refuses to sell either his big place down there or his big place in Nahant up here. He must be feeling the crunch. He swears he’ll never sell the lounge, like it’s a memorial to his family heritage.)
Willy Hartrey lives on a little dead-end street about a block back from the Lounge. It’s the house where he was born. He never married. His parents died, one after the other, way back in the Sixties sometime. I guess by now he might be eighty, maybe older. He’s kind of ageless. He used to work at General Electric in Lynn, retired, then worked for a while with his older brother in a sheet metal shop, just helping him out with the books. The brother moved to Florida, then died. Willy’s sister lived in Melrose, died as well a few years ago.
So, Willy’s alone.
I decided to pull up on the side and pop in and say hello to Willy. The front door was open. Once upon a time some hard luck guys chasing a bad booze addiction would sleep in their cars and come into the Lounge for an eye-opener. Willy would help them out. That would be a little later when the place really opened for business, maybe ten o’clock. Willy never stays around that long now, and those old drunks all disappered, all those guys and a couple of women. It was sad. But Charlie, who was still around in those days, used to feel bad for them. He’d get them help if they’d take it. Get them to rehab or treatment. After they were steady enough, they’d go hang out under the old pavilion on Revere Beach.
Willy was sitting at a table by the hallway to the johns with a cup of coffee in front of him. The place smelled clean. He always made himself a cup of coffee after he was done cleaning. I went over and poured myself a cup, too. That’s kind of the ritual when I drop in like this before business hours and Willy’s on duty. He was sitting there in a flannel shirt and khakis. He’d gotten pretty gray, the hair’s thinning, face and hands a little rough. But he seems to stay about the same weight, a good solid guy, an old 9th Division Army veteran.
The place was clean. Willy probably did all the cleaning before dawn and put away the mop, broom and the rest.
I sat down with him. “How you doing, Willy?”
“How you doing?”
“I asked you first.”
“I’m fine. Now, how about you?”
“I’m fine, too.”
“With you, I know that means. That means you’re not fine.”
“Right. Not fine. Worrying too much. About everything and nothing. You don’t seem to have that problem.”
“Did once, Still do now and then. But today — which is the only day that counts, I’m peaceful. Got a good bill of health down at the V.A yesterday. Taking it all a day at a time. Couple of small things here and there. Grateful, you know what I mean? And this gets me up and going, coming down here, opening up, pulling out the mop and bucket.”
I was honest. I told him I had a lot of anxiety. I told him there was a lot on my mind, a lot on my plate, but maybe a lot of unnecessary worry, too. Some money worries, who doesn’t know about them! But mainly just a lot of decisions that needed to be made that I wasn’t making. Coming to grips, getting business done. The old wobbly Hamlet, Prince of Denmark routine. Procrastinating with a lot of decisions. Some things I want to change but can’t change right now. That’s how I happened to be out early. I was going to go up the beach and walk along the tide line, try to relax.
And the truth is, sitting with Willy can be like a calming day at the beach. He landed at Normandy Beach, second wave. That was hell. But, as he always said, in the first wave, he might have been gone. A lot of guys he knew went in the first wave.
And….Hell! Thinking about that That made me realize Willy just looks eighty. He’d got to be over ninety. Like I say, he seems ageless.
“I tell you what,” Willy said after taking a sip of coffee, which he takes black, like me. “You got to remember the first victory of the day. My mother liked to write poetry, nothing special. Published little things in little religious magazines now and then. She used to go visit this nun in a monastery someplace. This nun wrote books. Spiritual books. She was maybe a little famous in her order, very holy. She used to help mom with her little poems. She told my mom something she never forgot. She told her getting out of bed was the first victory of the day.”
That sounded stupid on it’s face, until I thought about it –honestly. “Funny you should say that,” I said. ” It was tough for me this morning, especially where I wake up a lot in the night.”
“Me, too,” Willy said. “A lot of useless worrying, you know what I mean? I look out the window, I look out at the yard, dark everywhere, quiet except maybe for a train whistle far off or some wind in the trees. I think for a couple of minutes, really drowsy, then I put my head down and I go back to sleep. I know the vicory is coming — when I rise. I’ll rise as long as I can rise and the day I don’t rise, well the battle’s over.
“But just remember, good buddy, about that little victory tomorrow. It’s too late today. You’re up and already feeling beat down, not even knowing you got a victory under belt.”
“Well, since I’m not working anymore, I do tend to sleep in.”
“Don’t do it, buddy. Make like you gotta get off that landing craft and hit the beach, no matter what.”
“Whoa, that’s kind of tough. I prefer to think of just getting out of bed.”
“Okay, well then. But think of it this way — you’re in a monastery and you got to be up and down in the chapel praying. Praying hard. That’s another battle.
“That’s easier for sure. I can just pray right where I am. That’s easy.”
“Not really, buddy. Prayer is work if you do it right. You gotta be a prayer warrior. That’s what all the other warriors tell me. You rise up, which is your duty as long as you’re alive. And when you put your feet down on that cold floor, just make like its the sands of Normandy, buddy, and that’s your first victory of the day. Then start praying.”
“I guess, they’ll be shooting at me,” I said, chuckling, “if my bed is a damn Higgins boat.”
At this point, I’m thinking Willy’s a little crazy. Everybody says he’s a little crazy from the war, but everybody likes him and nobody ever really sees much of him because after he cleans up the Lounge, he kind of disappears in daylight, like a ghost.
“I’ll have your back, buddy. I’ll be right behind you, running up that beach, praying hard. You won’t see me, but I’m there.”
Willy said that like his prayers were rifles. Which for him, I guess they are.”
We finished off our coffees, chatted a little more, but mostly just sat thinking and, maybe, praying.
And so it went this morning at the Last Mile with Willy Hartrey. I’ve got to watch for that light on inside next time I drive the Lounge. I’ll go in, see him sitting there, a ghost made visible until full daylight, and I’ll tell him I just had my first victory of the day.
I’ll tell him that, and a whole bunch of things. Willy’s good company.
It’s here. It’s dark. The wind, so much wind. Rain, constant rain….
A lake has formed out back where the grass dips into a swale. Water in the street. There was, briefly, a tornado warning. Seems a water spout might have moved on shore. It dissipated, happily.
That was not that close to us, but it might have been moving this way.
Those were uneasy moments.
Storms can urge you think, not alone of thepresent danger, but of the future — of this house, the people and the animal in it. Of life in Florida. Of children.
And in 1919, W.B. Yeats wrote, amid the storm,
A Prayer For My Daughter…
Once more the storm is howling, and half hid
Under this cradle-hood and cover lid
My child sleeps on. There is no obstacle
But Gregory’s wood and one bare hill
Whereby the haystack-and roof-leveling wind,
Bred on the Atlantic, can be stayed;
And for an hour I have walked and prayed
Because of the great gloom that is in my mind.
He continues….
I have walked and prayed for this young child an hour
And heard the sea-wind scream upon the tower,
And under the arches of the bridge, and scream
In the Elms above the flooded stream;
Imagining in excited reverie
That the future years had come,
Dancing to a frenzied drum,
Out of the murderous innocence of the sea.
Yeat’s daughter Anne was a sickly child, but she became a painter, constume and stage designer and lived until age 82 and died on July 4, 2001. As such, the poet’s prayers amid the howling storm were answered. His daughter lived a long and apparently happy life. Yeats died January 28, 1939 at age 73. Another storm was brewing then — in Europe. But then, if I’m to continue, I’d have to get into Yeat’s complicated politics, and complicated life, which mingles with the stormy history of the 20th Century — which his daughter managed, from those infant moments in 1919, to live well beyond — dying before the 21st Century Age of Terror began in earnest at 8:46 a.m., September 11, 2001
It is 9:25 on this Sunday night, and THE TELEVISION IS BLARING ANOTHER LOUD, URGENT ROBOTIC VOICE telling us that four-to-eight inches of rain have fallen and flash flooding is imminent. The announcement is interrupting the televison drama Diane was watching for comfort and escape from all the nerve-shattering danger abroad in the air. She yells at the TV in frustration. PLEASE STOP!
I hear either thunder, or the tin roof bobbing in the gale. Will the power fail? Bringing silence? No escape?
Call this A Prayer For Us All, agitated and menaced by tropical turbulence whipping empty streets of wildly dancing palms and bobbing street lights. And here we sit in the most fragile of tin and vinyl domiciles.
THE LOUD ROBOTIC VOICE AGAIN, THIS TIME ANNOUNCING A TORNADO WARNING TO THE SOUTH AROUND SARASOTA. “DON’T WAIT TO HEAR A TORNADO,” THE VOICE SAYS. “TAKE COVER NOW.”
Where, people down there must be asking?
The dog, at least, seems calm, under the influence of CBD Cheese Bites.
Weather bites tonight.
Poetry sooths.
O that we could be in Gregory’s Wood now, where it’s probably calm.
But then, Yeats was writing in a time of violence political turbulence.
So am I.
But we still have power.
And the power of prayer in troubled times.
(THE INTERNET FAILED JUST AS I POSTED THIS)
That’s not a metaphor. There is a storm coming, meteorological not political in nature.
And it is calm out there. Now, anyway, at 3:57 p.m.
This will be a tropical storm, brewed up over very warm; far away tropical waters. It will march north and west and then, who knows? It is like a witchy homeless soul, looking for a place to sit and complain while forcing us to listen and get wet or run away, far away, to where it’s dry and will remain calm.
That would be very far away tonight. Too far.
I must take down the red trellis I set up out back to bear hanging flower. It has blown down before. There will likely be wind, perhaps a lot of it.
I look out back and see, at mid-afternoon, the trellis proudly standing, the grackles, sparrows, bluejays and a female cardinal busy at the feeders, fluttering and alighting and contending at each little seeded aperture.
Do they know there is bad, wet, damaging weather coming? Is this last-minute shopping on their part? I get the sense birds can foretell everything of an atmospheric nature, even if it’s far away. And they can fly away –or hunker in trees. But they will get wet. It can’t be pleasent for them, either. Bad wind can break a wing, blow them to the ground.
In this neighborhood, there are egrets, ibis, woodstorks and moscovey ducks in great numbers. What are they up to now? Conferring, perhaps, about the coming weather.
Bird knowledge at this hour of anticipation would be fascinting to tap into. I sit on the west coast of Florida, as you may already know. The storm is working its way toward the Gulf of Mexico. It could be relatively mild; could be severe. That’s weather for you. Wild in temperment, unpredictable in nature, like the most capricious of gods. Like that old homeless soul, destined to just dissolve somewhere overland as if she never were.
Rain. There will be lots of rain. We’ve been assured of that.
It will be heaviest in the dark when it can be mosts frightening — that incessant wind-driven pounding on the roof and splashing of rainwater rushing out of the neighbor’s drain pipe. And I’ll wonder, will something fail? some part of the roof? Some window….? Am I safe? Are my belonging safe?
That’s weather for you. And the rain….
Torrential, and of long endurance. Perhaps as much as nine inches will fall on already saturated ground. There has been a great deal of rain lately, coming on rolling thunder, mostly though not always in the late afternoon. those massive Florida clouds building up like mountains, then the light dimming to silver-gray. The the thunder begins, gets louder and louder, and closer. The rain starts.
And I always think: well, how about those memories of Florida summer’s past? Is it possible I’ve spent so much of my life down here where I always feel l ike a visitor?
But often, I want the freedom of a bird to fly away from it. ( Yeah, be a “snowbird.” But when you move to Florida, you can’t be a “tropical storm bird.” It’s grin and bear it.
But…
Why am I in a kind of weather mailaise? It is cocktail of anxiety, dismay, darts of fear, like little jolts to the head and heart — and boredom. Weather happens. Ho-hum. Get used to it. Get used to life.
But will my house be damaged? Will I lose precious things? One is always inclined to ask oneself those things in a Florida summers. And, to a large measure, you are helpless. What comes, comes. You can’t do anything about it.
At least it’s not a hurricane.
In Florida, you DO fear weather in summer — the threat of damaging winds, of storm surges, though I am safely far from the coast. Those coastal area have been warned of a likely surge — and of likely flooding.
I might go north several miles to a friends just to break the isolation, but I am reluctant to leave this place and then have to wonder, is everything here safe?
And I could use a little isolation. A little solitude.
My little dog is terrified of thunder. Lately, CBD tabs seem to be calming her. Thanks for that. Hemp for dogs.
And we have slipped into August.
August makes me sad, even early August. I like to be at the beginning or the middle of things, not the beginning of the end, which is what August is for summer. And in Florida, August brings the higher probability of serious storms, even hurricanes. Hurricanes can be the end.
Let me stop there, anxious, feeling displaced.
Let’s go take care of the trellis.
This was around 1996. Probably the fall.
I was sitting in the small library of little Lees-McCrea College in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina in the town of Banner Elk. I was just browsing, using up some time. I’ll always go in search of a library. A college library, however small, is usually rich in the better books and even richer periodicals. Under the best of circumstances, libraries are still quiet places. This one was quiet. Maybe I would learn something. I was doing a lot of thinking, too.
I was also in between broadcast jobs, thinking of leaving the business, uncertain of my next move. I’d traveled up from Florda after leaving my TV job there, and was halfway back to what I will always call home — Massachusetts, especially Boston, for better or worse. I was living with a group of people (long story) and working at a little radio station which I liked, but being required to sell advertisement in addition to being on the air. I didn’t like visiting merchants and auto dealers selling ads. I like meeting people –especially Southern people — but didn’t like or feel competent about figuring out how to convince them to spend money, then write up a contract.
Suddenly, as I sat reading and thinking, what appeared to be smoke began drifting by the window and between the library building and the neighboring campus building. For a fraction of a second, I was alarmed -but then, consoled and quietly beguiled.
For this was not smoke. These were clouds. None of the few other people in the library seemed to think the sight unusual. We were in the mountains, after all, high up among some low drifting clouds. I suddenly loved that peculiar reality, and those white ephemeral phantoms. I began to think pleasant mountain thoughts.
But my bright thoughts, at any moment, illuminated, as by the sun, often darken. Moods, like dark clouds, can drift across and block the sunshine. It was true at that moment, true always. Nostalgia, too, (in which I’m indulging now) can turn sorrowful, especially over memories of wasted time. I’ve wasted a lot of time since that day, and squandered a great deal of mental and emotional resources that should have gone into writing. (Facebook and blogs did not exist then, and are still not the best forums – or fora – for a true, which is to say, “professional” writer.)
That cloud-hidden moment was around the month I turned fifty. It was mid-life and, since I’d started my broadcast career late( at thirty-two) I was more or less at mid-career (though I’d put in prior years as a newspaper reporter).
I’d ultmately work until right around my 69th birthday in 2015. That was in the future.
But at that moment in that little college library, I wasn’t even sure I’d resume my broadcast career. I wasn’t sure what I was going to do. I knew I couldn’t stay in the mountains, among the clouds, barely getting by on the salary of a tiny mountain radio station located in a tripple-wide trailer. (Yes, it was fun, but it wasn’t the time to make a career of it.)
Either during that library visit or on another day peacefully among the stacks, I’d been reading about the writer Flannery O’Connor — about how she’d “accepted” her vocation as a writer — not easy for her, wracked by the degenerative disease lupus and destined to die at age 39.
I had pondered what it means to “accept” one’s vocation, even when it’s difficult, but when it nonetheless feels like the only path to fulfillment, or what analysts call self-actualization (whatever that means). I had read of many writers saying this about their “vocation”–that it felt like accepting its joys and burdens was the only life path forward. That’s doubtless true of any vocation, but writers of any genre at any level often speak of the trial of filling that white blank space before them out of the sometimes meager resources of their imagination or memory, nonetheless feeling compelled to do so. I once heard the writer Catherine Anne Porter, during an interview, say she’d often felt she’d have been much happier with another vocation and more than once vowed to give up writing –only to find herself writing out that vow. Jessamyn West wrote that good days practicing her craft were like heavenly bliss, while bad days were equivalent to working off any punishment she might have earned with her sins. Sports writer Red Smith famously said, with beautiful sarcasm, that writing wasn’t difficult; you just sat in front of the blank page and opened a vein.
One can too easily exaggerate those difficulties — to oneself or to others. It’s a cheap excuse for giving up.
And a writer might work forever in obscurity. Franz Kafka asked a friend to burn all his writings, many of them incomplete, after he died. Fortnately, the friend did not honor that promise.
On or about that mountain day, meditating among drifting clouds, I learned very belatedly about the necessity of “accepting” a writer’s vocation, even though I might die before I got any good at it, or got any readers.
But soon thereafter, I continued my journey north and resumed my broadcast career and mostly neglected this true vocation, making it into an occasional avocation. TV news writing was easy. Real writing is hard.
Now, in what little time is left, I must “accept” my writer’s vocation. I might even enjoy it.
And I will be grateful for that brief moment of illumination, beguiled and consoled among drifting clouds by my drifting thoughts at 3700 feet above sea level.
And I must write.
Love the day beyond the middle but not on the edge. Fridays promise too much. I’ll take Thursdays.
But, of course, I’ll take every day, and be grateful.
19 Cent Notebook 