Category: Ang

Tuesdays with Morrie

February 20, 2025

Whenever I think of Tuesdays with Morrie, my mind immediately goes to my beloved, now long-retired (but forever young) colleague, Julie. As the recently-released anniversary audiobook informed me, it’s been 25 years since the book’s publication. When it came out, the book created a buzz; everyone was reading it, including Julie’s husband, whose reaction was emotional. The book touched something deep—for him and for so many. I remember Julie saying—“But this is new to him; we live in this world.” Julie was not dismissing any of the impact of Albom’s book, but she did contextualize it in a way that has been memorable to me. I held off reading the book—in part, because I felt I would react similarly to both Julie’s husband and to Julie, and both reactions would carry their own version of heaviness or even pain. Other reactions threatened as well: What if something about Morrie as a professor, as a person, as a mentor would lay on me as a judgment of some deficiency? Or what if my connection would be too precise and worry me about the passing of everything?

I had read some of Albom’s other work, and I found him so readable and relatable. In beginning my journey into Tuesdays this morning, I learned that he graduated college in 1979, the year I graduated. So we’re connected, in age at least. Just where will the connections lead?

As I listened to the opening chapters, I was struck by the balanced approach Albom has taken to hagiography. Morrie immediately comes across as special, yes; but he also is presented as completely relatable. He’s a regular person, possibly scared; he’s larger than life, yes, but frail and ordinary too. In his “living funeral” we see something many of us have thought about, attending our own funeral. So even such distinctive episodes strike me as something not dramatic or heroic or extreme. The early onset to the disease, with the series of “ends,” all narrate very understandable progressions in the inevitable process, and Morrie’s reactions seem reasonable, both quotidian and poignant in equal measures.

My early reaction is one of gratitude. Thank you, Mitch Albom, for bringing us here, into the quotidian and cosmic feelings of things that the experience of death brings to bear. I’m just recently past my January 23-February 5 cycle, and so, thoughts of loss and grief are still with me, if mostly in echoes. I took some time today to re-read some blog entries of mine, and I’m struck at just how elegiac I’ve become. But Albom is elegiac too—in a way befitting Morrie, and in a way that might nudge me out of my current groove I’ve been descending into the past 14 years. Albom’s elegy no doubt is uplifting and epideictic about life in ways I have avoided or found impossible. But there’s something I’m sensing about Albom’s book already that perhaps might nudge me towards a new groove (is it possible to be “nudged” to a new groove? Isn’t a forceful shove/leap necessary?). My connections with Albom—his humility, his kindness, his awed appreciation, his registering of simple moments—have a capacity to nudge/shove me in ways that I suppose I guessed at earlier, and thus I avoided contact. I think I anticipated I would delve in too far—or maybe, quite simply, I wanted a little more of my own processing of things before falling under the spell, either of Morrie or Albom, as mentor.

I took a dip into my blog because others had been there this past week. My St. Norbert colleagues are embroiled in their Laurie Joyner days, and some have read my memoirs of SXU’s conflict with Joyner that I’ve posted, most recently in an “unsent” letter to the faculty of SNC. The entry I read today was “The Day Before February 5,” which grew out of two SSW sessions four years ago. It tells the story of Terry telling a story. He was rocking and swirling a bit in his recliner in the alley that day that Loretta and I delivered him his new recliner. How I enjoy the memories of that story, now multiple stories, bringing back my mother and Ang, and Terry’s unique memory and style. 

So, my first reaction to Albom is to think that maybe I can start pulling myself out of the darker strands of elegy that have consumed me. I have been descending further and further—out of good intentions I think—as though there were no other options. My good intention was to try to capture what was “true.” I felt the heartaches of my past fourteen years—the death of Angelo, the challenges of faculty union leadership, the woes of Joyner, the Trump experience, the elimination of the English major and humanities at SXU and elsewhere, the despair over the climate and the prospects for the future—all of it needed naming. I needed to bear witness, as I like to say so much these days. But Albom is pointing in a slightly different direction, which may eventually produce a diametrical outcome? What if we focus on something of hope and promise amidst the guarantees of loss and pain?

I remember when Morrie was featured in Nightline over a couple of different episodes—before and after his death, as I recall. So, I got to see and hear Morrie himself before any presentation of him, now these many years later, through Albom’s book. I felt the identification, as he seemed to be the kind of person, the kind of professor, I aspired to be eventually. But that was in 1995, one year before SXU entered my life, the year Moira was born, a few years into the Kevin era, and just a few months into my Ph.D. life-changing status of things. I certainly wasn’t ready for elegy then. I think so much of the 90s these days—all that nostalgia that Gen has made me aware of, and, truth be told, my heart breaks (ah, elegy, tough to let go), as the aura of possibility then was more or less absolute. So hopeful I was, and perhaps that’s part of the reason I held this book at arm’s length. Ain’t nobody got time for that. That time will come. With all the threats at our door today, I do think the time has come. I need the intervention now, and I look forward to my “Tuesdays,” in the car, on audiobook, as I make my way to and fro to my classes in February 2025, my penultimate February of classes.

January 23, 2025

[Note to Reader: What follows is my first SSW (Sustained Silent Writing) entry from Spring Semester, 2025. The prompt for today was twofold: (1) a student Xavierite journalist had asked me to share some thoughts for an article she was writing about Meg Carroll, whose death last month had shocked and saddened the University community; and (2) January 23. The two topics pointed in different and similar directions, a happy/sad accident.]

Meg Carroll was one of “those” people—someone special, someone indescribable, someone widely recognized as a legend while she is alive, and someone puzzled over after she is dead: “Could she really have been all that she seemed to be? Why are there not more like her? How could she be gone?”

Meg was a friend and colleague in many and varied respects. At meetings, I often waited for her contribution, and when she spoke, I hung on every word. She threaded the needle of incisive criticism on the one hand, and constructive input on the other. She had historical context, and was able to trace out the past, often contradictory, practices and policies. That was the incisive part. But she was the ultimate team player, and always worked on practical solutions, usually volunteering to chair a committee or find student teaching placements in late December for January teaching assignments [this specific service being her last professional miracle, just days before succumbing to becoming an actual angel in heaven, rather than just a human approximation on earth].

Over the course of our decades working together, I came to know Meg in increasingly warm and affectionate ways, learning new things about her past—a past that was surprisingly connected to mine (as I discovered, just a few years ago, that we hung with the same crowd in college, even to the point that her first husband, unbeknownst to me at the time, was a classmate of mine in the seminary).

Meg was wise and talented, but most of all she was kind and generous. The love she drew to her from so many students and friends and family gave her an aura that was almost visible. She represents the soul of SXU in its best potential. She was one of a kind, but oddly, also, a simple incarnation of what one would expect of a professor and friend, if such things could be materialized from their ideal form.

We are left with the clichés, “The good die young”; “We won’t see the likes of her again”; “The world is a much smaller and lesser place without her”… and on it goes.

So today, January 23, is the start of a new writing notebook in Advanced Writing. As has happened the past few years, the start of the notebook experience coincides with Angelo’s cycle of January-February that dominates my psyche with increasing weightiness each passing year. This was to be my last year of notebook keeping, but now that I’ve delayed retirement an additional year, I still find myself in the flow of the old routines. Will I still keep a notebook after I retire in 2026? I should. I heard myself describing to my class the value and impact that the notebook experience has had on me, leaving me to ask of myself, my students, and everyone else: Why don’t we carve out regular sessions? Why is the 40-minute session such an unusual activity, especially if it brings all those advantages I spoke of?

Today’s remembrance of Angelo goes back to 1986, his year of birth. In 1986, January 23 was on a Thursday too. That thought threw me back to Wednesday, January 22, 1986, when the labor pains started … early in the morning. Then, after the birth, nearly a day later (I’ve left out many details!), I left the hospital; I went to Walgreens to buy the $5 (a lot of money back then) Super Bowl preview/program; and then I actually went to my morning class with Dr. Mary Thale at UIC. The class was my Alexander Pope course. There were only three of us students in it; coming from a 2:30 AM birth, I guess I was kinda showing up the other two guys (who Dr. Thale thought were slackers in general). I was Dr. Thale’s favorite, since in those days I was a full-on scholar luxuriating in my nightshift security guard gig at the Wrigley Building. Never before or since have I ever been able to complete my reading and other assignments with such diligence (I think the magic of the marble walls and wrought brass elevator doors created a positively Burkean scene: act ratio of possibility). Ah scholarship. I was in the zone as a student—soon to be in the zone as a parent, Ph.D. candidate, home-owner, husband, and citizen. Ah, the 80’s and 90’s, a heady time for me in my thirties, as solutions and possibilities beckoned.

Before the seminar, I did let the group know that I had just come from the hospital. Such good news. Dr. Thale commented about a friend of hers who had shared his reaction with her upon seeing his first child, just after his birth. Her friend said, “I saw myself dead.” (That’s the kind of class it was.) I was taken aback, but she went on to explain, in a way, I suppose, that makes sense, about the circle of life, the coming of the new generation, and thus the eventual departure of the old generation. The comment was the kind of news Garrison Keillor might have brought from Lake Wobegon, which is part of the reason, I guess, it stuck with me.

I didn’t expect to be thinking of Dr. Thale this morning. Whenever I think of her, I think of how very old I thought she was at the time. Grey-haired, wiry frame, and bespectacled, she seemed an archetypal English professor. An archetypal, old English professor. An archetypal, old, female professor. I learned today, however, that back then, in 1986, she was only 62. I found that out because, in Google AI-ing her this morning, I found her obituary. She died in October of 2008 at the age of 84. RIP, dear Dr. Thale. These days, as I eye my own retirement (I am now 67, five years older than the ancient Thale)—and reflect on 1986, and the meaning of my time in graduate school, with professors like Dr. Thale, and my beloved Gene Ruoff (who I also just recently learned has died), my thoughts swirl and interconnect. What should I be aiming at? What is my legacy?

I’ve never looked upon Angelo (or any of my kids) with the result of me seeing myself dead. That’s all good. I wish I could look upon Angelo (and Mary Thale and Gene Ruoff) and not see them dead too. They all accomplished much, and there’s much to relish in each of them, and all the other loved ones I’ve lost, we’ve lost. I do look upon the whole of everything with sadness. What is the point? What lasts? In such thoughts, I recall the truisms I’ve come to rely on: just make the most of the time, while you have it; “Gather ye rosebuds, while ye may” [Insert great Pope quote here!! Would I, were I still the scholar I was in 1986.]

The memories are the thing … I hope they stay. Even in so trivial a memory as attending Dr. Thale’s Pope class, and showing up my fellow classmates in passive aggressive ways, as was my wont, there is joy that sustains. Angelo, I wish you were here. But I don’t know: In a sense, you weren’t really there in that first dramatic week of your life, with the Bears winning the Super Bowl at age 3 days, and the Challenger exploding on that following Tuesday at age 5 days. But you were part of it then in your infant seat in front of the TV, and you were part of today, too, when we had the cake and told stories during and after the movie we shared in your honor. The shadows of your presence are with us each day. And the deeper parts, the person you were, stay with us, and grow, if only faintly. It’s a little more work these days to keep you right there, and it’s also just as easy to do so as ever. It’s a mystery. Happy Birthday, Ang!

Screen Salvation

September 26, 2024

Some are living with the apocalypse right in front of them. Others seem to be able to put it in their peripheral vision. 

For the latter group, the apocalypse is something to be reminded of, as a caution, while they go about their lives, which have organizing principles and purposes that propel them and carry them along. These are the people who are raising children, doing essential jobs, basically, keeping the world on track amidst the hubbub of things. The former group, though, have been immobilized by the apocalypse. All has been lost, already, always already, and nothing is possible.

I put myself in the first group, because, I suppose, I feel I have experienced a loss so absolute that there’s no recovery from it, no way of pushing it to the side, no way of restarting and hitting my stride. That loss, of course, is Angelo. But death is something every human has to deal with; what I’ve experienced, everyone has, or will, in some version. Of course, everyone will experience it in a very personal, immediate way in their own death, if not through the loss of a child.

The apocalypse of a single death is as absolute, as devastating, for each individual as any other apocalypse, be it the Holocaust, a nuclear war, or end of the world through climate change or an asteroid strike. It’s weird to say that everyone will experience a loss equally as devastating as world-wide annihilation. But the stakes are high for each of us; rather, the stakes are beyond high; they are “all in,” always and everywhere. How does one function facing such an extremity? Clearly, we must learn to focus on other things.

This week I edited my screen saver. For some time, I had had only the Julie London quote about her singing: “It’s only a thimbleful of a voice, and I have to use it close to the microphone. But it is a kind of over-smoked voice, and it automatically sounds intimate.” Julie’s words were a friendly reminder to me, on a daily basis, of something I tried to describe some months back in my blog: “Such confidence, expressed with awareness and humility and precision. Not to mention, a good dose of sensuality, along with the promise of being together through it. The woes of the world would be lessened, I’m convinced, if we all just listened to, and spent time with, Julie London.” I would smile each time her words appeared on my screen. 

I found myself this week needing, however, other reminders—or at least some glimpses of a non-apocalyptic lifestyle. I happened to come across St. Paul’s words, and it occurred to me that I needed to see them more often. I needed these words as an incantation, as an invocation to a better life than the one I had been living. Could this be my equipment for living, my distraction from the apocalypse? So I put them on my screen saver.

Then, with St. Paul and Julie London sitting there alone, I felt a need for some kind of connector—some statement that might round out the wisdom. These thoughts brought me to Kenneth Burke, and all the influence he has had on my life. That influence can’t be reduced to a single quotation, but his description of the “comic frame” in Attitudes Toward History does seem to partake of the Holy Spirit, on the one hand, and the humility of Julie London’s celebration of her voice on the other.

So, here’s my screen saver in its current iteration:

Saint Paul, on letting God in: “Brothers and sisters: Do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, with which you were sealed on the day of redemption. All bitterness, fury, anger, shouting, and reviling must be removed from you, along with all malice. And be kind to one another, compassionate, forgiving one another as God has forgiven you in Christ. So be imitators of God, as beloved children, and live in love, as Christ loved us and handed himself over for us as a sacrificial offering to God for a fragrant aroma.” Ephesians 4:30-5:2

 Julie London, on her voice: “It’s only a thimbleful of a voice, and I have to use it close to the microphone. But it is a kind of over-smoked voice, and it automatically sounds intimate.”

Kenneth Burke, on comic forgiveness: “The progress of humane enlightenment can go no further than in picturing people not as vicious, but as mistaken. When you add that people are necessarily mistaken, that all people are exposed to situations in which they must act as fools, that every insight contains its own special kind of blindness, you complete the comic circle, returning again to the lesson of humility that underlies great tragedy.” Attitudes Toward History, p. 41
Angelo’s Screen Saver

I now notice that my introductory characterization of two of the quotations could be debated. For instance, was Burke really speaking about “forgiveness”? Or was that a reading I had imposed? Was I progressing a step beyond “enlightenment” to forgiveness, possibly as a natural effect of understanding/misunderstanding, and contextualization, and the necessity of error for all? I want there to be forgiveness. Also: Was St. Paul talking about “letting God in”? Or was this my wish—the wish that I might be able to abide by Paul’s request not to “grieve the Holy Spirit”? Paul talks of the seal of God, the gift of the Holy Spirit, the fragrant aroma of Christ’s sacrifice in which we are all suffused and made beneficiaries (I do notice he imports the holocaust of Christ’s sacrifice in this otherwise upbeat message). To me, he implies that we are somehow resisting it all; I know I have resisted giving up my grievances. Are they not keeping God out?

I hope these words, my companions on my screen, can keep on casting a spell on me. I need to look away from the ultimate devastation at my feet and in my sight. Kindness, love, humility—and intimacy too—I hope the reminders keep me upbeat and moving forward. I hope I can learn to push the apocalypse to the side, at least for part of the day, for part of my days that remain.

The Fixations of February 2

February 2, 2023

Was it Bill P. who said that every important life lesson could be taught from The Godfather? Bill, now long retired, is still with us, still sharp as a tack. I’m thinking of Bill as I picture the convalescent Don Corleone, rehearsing over and over again the details of the operation ahead of them—or was it the Barzini matter? Obsessively, Don Corleone would repeat the steps, with self-awareness of his preoccupation. He was talking to Michael, who had matters in hand (kinda).

I think of the Don, and Bill, as I contemplate my plans and prospects. I keep going over the numbers, the possibilities for retirement, as the idea has loomed up as a salvation of sorts. It still feels too early. Is my main motive that of escape? I know I need a change. I know I’m paralyzed with depression. But yet I function on. There’s a comfort in rehearsing the Barzini … er, retirement, business.

The woes of SXU: I keep thinking that all these vanities will pass. But they still seem so important. Here I am in a class, with all these young people, and their futures are so important, so full of promise. I need to be the adult and to lead them. But under the weight of my depression, I can’t move well.

Bill P. always brought a smile—he was always on, always performing. His schtick didn’t play well with everyone. My UIC classmate, Mary Kay, was thrown off by Bill’s irreverent demeanor during her interview in 1996, a day or two before my own interview. Maybe something about that interaction got me the job? I too was thrown off by Bill—but his voluble, comic, and I would eventually learn, Italian, nature made it easier for me to roll with him. Bill wasn’t, of course, the decision maker in the hiring for the position that I won—but he captured or represented some kind of favor that fell on me then in that life-changing accomplishment of becoming the English Education Coordinator as an Assistant Professor of English at Saint Xavier University. I still can’t believe it, and I still look on that moment as … what … a blessing? Curse? Miracle?

It was lucky in so many ways—to get the local job in a disciplinary area that was my first choice. To have gotten it when I did—with the family I had when I did. To have been able to send three children here—so proudly—when the institution was so worthy, though it did not ever know it, or appreciate it fully enough. 

Through the twists and turns of the late nineties and early aughts—before tenure, there was such energy, hope, vitality. I could name conferences that were transformational—in Arizona (the Grand Canyon being a big part of that) and Florida (on vacation with the family in Orlando, and my catapult into technology with Nicenet and Web Course in a Box). When Angelo became a student in 2004, everything changed, and the promise he pointed towards—intelligent, moral, carefree, free-spirited and free-wheeling engagement in the world—became an incarnation of what it was all about—the life of the academic, the purpose of education, the purpose of raising a family—the promise of it all.

It wasn’t necessarily his greatness (though he was great)—he was just the first of the kids to make that transition into adulthood. And he did it in a time when, despite being in the near aftermath of 9-11, was still a time of hope and promise … and even innocence.

I’m thinking of retirement … only because life has gotten so unbearable at SXU. I take that word “unbearable” from my colleague Amanda—who, young as she is, didn’t retire, but moved out of state and into a different teaching career in high school. Such were/are the conditions of worklife at SXU. Our best and brightest—our future—our most dedicated are made to feel the unbearable, and they leave in search of a better way to work and serve. Her farewell letter was polite and upbeat—no shots fired—and her use of the word “unbearable” was uttered in a more or less matter-of-fact way, but the word now rattles in my mind.

Part of my problem was just how good I had it. When we’re living the dream it’s hard to be aware that it is just a dream, that it all can vanish in the face of oncoming realities. There is some truth to the privilege of being a white guy, an older white guy, a tenured professor white guy. So many of the challenges now swirling about in contemporary society have spotlighted, if not outright critiqued, the accrued benefits of each of those adjectives and nouns—and it’s all justified. But those justifications don’t necessarily rehabilitate the motives or effects of the dismantling of academic mission that our university has suffered since 2015. The victims have been people of all kinds—varied in race, age, and gender. We have all lost—first the faculty, then the students. Our bloated, over-paid, over-self-congratulating administration seems to be the only winner, as we collectively descend into whatever version of us is to settle into place.  

There’s always hope that a new order, a new approach to justice can, yet again, put us on a path to a new prosperity, a structure of things that sidesteps some of the old injustices and deficiencies—and builds on new principles of inclusiveness, youthful vigor, and academic promise. But the grief over the things lost will still be there. Today is Groundhog Day—a “holiday” that invites a hope for sunnier days sooner rather than later. It’s a day also that has come to mean being trapped in a deficient—but improvable—environment, and one complete with all the resources needed for escape and future happiness. In the mixture of hope and imprisonment endemic to Groundhog Day, I struggle with my depression, and I smile at thoughts of Bill P. and Mary Kay, and I shed a tear for all that is unbearable. I hope to wake up to a better tomorrow; I long for February 3rd, and what might lie beyond.

Why I Can’t Read Novels Anymore

[Or Eat Sitting Down, When Alone;
Spoiler: It’s About Panic]

I hope it’s temporary, my inability to read. Rather, I should call it my disability in reading. I’m actually reading much more perhaps than ever before, since it’s all the time. But it’s so fragmented and erratic. I read news stories, alerts, tweets, threads, threads, threads. It’s twitter and its ilk becoming like rabbits in Australia, taking over. Fragments and bits, all distilled to pungent effects, like so many stabbings of wit and pure essence, pulling us this way and that, leaving us enervated and depleted, and ultimately, unfulfilled.

The old curling up with a novel, and doing so as a routine in my life, over long stretches of time, no longer seems possible. The reading nowadays is forever in snatches, sometimes precipitated by a buzz on the phone, sometimes stolen in a moment of distraction, sometime sought after in a pursuit of something—not sure what—but primarily a distraction. There are distractions that come unbidden, and distractions that are sought after, but whatever the pursuit or activity, all that seems to “be” is … “distraction.” This is my (and our society’s) current state of growing pains at the takeover by cell phones, social media, new journalism, contemporary consumption of culture, the agonizing human condition, the loneliness of modern life, the desperation for remedies, the nostalgia for a simpler, long-form type of life. Nothing is long-form any more. The shelf-life of ideas, dreams, aspirations, plans has shrunk. We scramble and move on, in ways that have lost a defining purpose or value. Why bother, though we don’t ask that, so we just keep the perpetual motion going, till it, mercifully?, stops.

Is this all but the logic, still, of a parent losing a son in his prime, or rather just before his prime?

It is. But it extends far beyond me too. We’re all feeling it in the ennui of 2022, post-pandemic (kinda), post-Trump (kinda), post-analog world, post unconnected world. The frenzy of 24/7 news and communication and being is getting to us all, and it’s not all bad, just mostly.

And I’m so busy, and everyone is in crisis. I have trouble justifying that selfish indulgence of long form reading as a regular part of life. But I worry as I skate along the surfaces of distractions that I am cutting myself off from hope, from possible immersion in that very thing that will cure me, that will help me find solace and understanding and calm—if only through transport to another place, not one of my own creation, a place that can provide healthier “distraction” in realms of greater possibility, where some unseen core of truth or energy will give us something essential for health and hope and joy.

I worry about my inability, our society’s inability, our youths’ inability, to carve out that slow pace, that shutting down, that putting on blinders that is reading. And without reading, I fear for the sanity and peace of the future world. Why can’t we turn away, shut out the outside world, and transport ourselves into that place, whatever/wherever it is, and however created by an author, and let that author and that world carry us along?

I bring this up during my deep dive, maybe halfway into the oeuvre of Margaret Atwood—not in books, but via Audible. So, the novels are being consumed, and at a relatively good rate, but not by reading, sitting, and being alone and focused solely on the book. There’s no underlining in ink. No pausing. No reflection, note-taking, and writing. So, it’s a different experience—again, not wholly negative, or deficient. 

If I’m ever to leave this new “reading” experience (and of course that day is coming, but no need to be morose or lugubrious about it), I’ll miss the performance aspect of the reader. Such pleasure in the human voice telling us a story. Such pleasure in the intonations, the singing, the sound effects, the interpretations. We’ve always had artists putting their stamps on a literary work, when, say the work is translated from the page onto the screen in a movie adaptation, for instance. But there, the interpretive license went too far, sometimes giving directors and other creators too much license to remake the work in their own image. With an Audible book, the interpretation is fully constrained to the author’s words, and the interpretation becomes only an enhancement, not a divergence.

When I was consuming Virginia Woolf on Audible, it was the breathy and beautiful Nicole Kidman who enchanted me through To the Lighthouse, and then it was the less-breathy, but equally enchanting and beautiful Annette Benning taking me through Mrs. Dalloway. I got to know these readers … through their intelligent interpretations, their miraculously deft performances—and my heart swelled with such gratitude. Thank you for doing this for me! Thank you for reading to me. Thank you for the simplicity and elegance of it.

But now I have a problem. I can’t listen to Audible outside the car. I just can’t do it. I can’t hunker down, hour after hour, while at rest, and approximate the old routine of reading. My impatience and distraction and anxiety about “the impending” (no noun to follow, just “the impending”; that’s what has kept me from the old way of reading)—prevented me from listening, despite the profundity of my gratitude. 

I should note an evolution in my Audible life which began last summer with Virginia Woolf. I read my Audible Woolfs, dare I say, on the treadmill (that just sounds wrong) this past summer, when I had time [cough, excuse] to exercise. Now, however, I listen to Audible solely in the car, where fortunately (?), I find myself every day. On my daily commute, and even short errands, I find I am able focus on the words and story, almost fully, but certainly enough to be “carried along”—both by the story and by my auto-pilot driving. Is that auto-pilot phenomenon real? Should I trust it? I can’t be sure…. But where I am now … I need the car; I need to be driving somewhere in order to read. It’s both a pragmatic need, but also metaphorical for the simultaneous escape and purposefulness, or the not having to choose between them. Most of all, it’s where I can give myself permission to “do nothing else” but luxuriate in the possibility of an author’s universe.

As I said at the onset: I hope I it’s temporary, my inability to read. I don’t always want to be driving to read. And the pandemic, which confined me to the house for nearly two years showed me that all my travels, and thus all my books, may evaporate into the ether, without notice. Also, this long-form reading works well for novels—but what about all the other kinds of reading I should return to? Philosophy? Meh, I guess I could do without philosophy; non-fiction works fine on Audible. Maybe I shouldn’t panic … about everything.  

Earlier this week, Atwood recommended against panic. As she accepted the Hutchins Prize (a bit of news I read, alas, old school/new school, as one of those Apple News distractions on my phone): “[D]esperate times require desperate remedies, and our times are desperate. However, instead of all these chariots and swords, I’ll propose something simpler. Don’t panic. Think carefully. Write clearly. Act in good faith. Repeat.” And so I will, but with a voice in my ear and a going someplace, at least for now.