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It would appear that Summer vacation is over and I am back; back from North Carolina, back from Maine, back out of my hole and back at the keyboard. After a break for several months I find myself, once again, with the urge to write…
It remains to be seen where this blog will go.
Maybe we will all just have to stay tuned.
Nope – it is not my intention to make the heart grow fonder, although a number of you continue to check back here periodically to see if I have returned to the keyboard.
The truth is that I seem to have lost my voice. Unlike many folks to whom writing comes much more naturally, I was beginning to find writing to be a chore to be dreaded rather than a pastime to be enjoyed. I hope that soon it will feel more natural to be sitting here…typing.
Some of you have voiced concern. Know that I am fine…I am just on vacation…
Kate Braestrup is a writer, a wife, a widow and a mom. She is also the chaplain to the Maine State Game Wardens; providing comfort to the loved ones of missing, injured and dead; providing counsel to the State Troopers and Game Wardens of Maine and providing us with a little insight into both.
She has an interesting take on loss and love and grief and moving on. She seems to get what many of us struggle with. Her experience with all of those; loss, love, grief and moving on is both personal and professional.
I was particularly struck by her wholesale endorsement of the floor as the best place to grieve. That’s where people go, it seems. I know that I did. She endorses it as perfectly normal, as well as safe. It is impossible to fall off of the floor.
I was also struck by her observation, in her years of delivering the worst news a loved one could hear, that there is a cycle; the first blow of grief may knock someone down, but she is also there to see a recovery begin… to see shock shaken off and a question, a query, a request will come; where? how? can I see him?
She knows, as many of us do, that the whole grief process may take weeks, months, years, a lifetime to come full-cycle, but it starts. She sees that, and in a life full of grief-stricken moments, she also finds hope and strength and love.
She also has an interesting approach to faith. It is distinctly “un-churchy”. She believes in the god we all believe in when all hope, all faith, is lost. She believes in love. She believes that love is what brings out a community of troopers and wardens and civilians, when, at best, their search will yield something gruesome and, at worst it, will yield nothing at all.
Her book, Here If You Need Me, is available if you’re interested in reading more, but, for a small taste, you can find an excerpt and an interview here.
I think of my blog as a small cottage industry; hand-crafts, life-crafts and such…mixed in with the occasional burst pipe and time spent puttering in the garden. I don’t have big box volume of readership. I am not solely dedicated to one boutique topic. You will not find the lofty ideals of academia or the sleight of hand of some marketeers or the driving rhythm of Wall Street here.
I am not trying to fuel a revolution, though I hope to have maybe changed a few hearts and minds on the topics of cooking and eating, and aging and dying.
I am not building a blogging empire. I have little hope that O Magazine, or Bon Appetit or NBC will be courting syndication anytime soon.
Still, I do look at the numbers of folks who come here to read. I ponder both what posts get read the most and how people found my site.
This morning someone searched on the term “no life”.
The world-wide web sent them here.
“Send a signal up in smoke, tap it out in Morse code.
I prefer a bad excuse to no news.”
Lyrics by Mark Sanders, Phillip Wayne Barnhart and Samuel Harper Hogin
Or in this case, “no muse”…
Life is good. I have no complaints, which may be part of the problem. I just don’t have a lot to say; no life lessons, no major rants, no really poignant moments to report…or at least nothing that comes to mind.
No muse.
It’s rained here for 40 days and 40 nights, it seems. April rainfall broke the record set in the 1930′s. May has produced one sunny 5-day stretch, but has in large part been pretty damp, too. Local creeks are under flood watch. Parts of my backyard are under water.
Still, while sitting out in a local park manning an information booth on Sunday was a pretty chilling experience, overall the rain doesn’ t really bother me.
Yet, I am just not inspired.
I had several wonderful experiences over the weekend; several graduations, the chance to cook, a brilliant presentation by one of the doctors for whom I have been doing some work, time to chat, time to chill… It is almost as they say, nothing to write home about, or, in my case, nothing to write from home about.
Almost… I certainly could write plenty.
I am just not doing it.
No muse.
For those of you who ever used Microsoft Office in the 1990′s, you may remember the Microsoft Word Assistant, “Clippy”. Clippy would pop up while you would write.
“I see you are writing a letter. Would you like me to format it for you?” the animated office supply would offer.
If you agreed to the offer, Word would proceed to rearrange your work in seemingly random fashion. If you declined help, it would do nothing but wait…until it could “help” you again. Either way, though, you had to stop what you were doing to deal with the your “assistant”.
Now that I think about it, it is much like writing with the beast in my lap. Very helpful indeed.
Shortly after our office computer systems were upgraded to this then-new version of Word years ago, frustration quickly reached fever pitch. Sitting quietly in my office I could frequently here a colleague cursing at his desk.
“GO AWAY!!! I don’t need any $%^&*# help!!”, I would hear. Knowing full well he was alone in his office, I knew it was Clippy he was berating.
Around this time, someone sent me a parody of Clippy.
“I see you are writing something important. Shall I f#$% it up for you?”, the modified Clippy offered.
We weren’t alone in our frustration.
In 1999, Bill Gates famously wrote a company memo simply entitled Clippy Must Die. NPR’s Wait, Wait Don’t Tell Me, on the news of Mr. Gates departure from Microsoft, resurrected the memo in one of its segments, which you can listen to in the clip below.
Clippy has indeed been killed off by Microsoft, but it seems there is a never-ending stream of annoying “features” to take its place. Word would still reformat things for you. I still have no idea how to anchor a picture, graph or table in the exact spot that I would like it to be. Just two days ago, I spent 45 minutes undoing the damage adding a single table did to a 22 page document. Pressed for time I sent the table I wished to add as a separate document.
Yes, Microsoft has some doozies, but they are not alone. My new phone requires 4 different button pushes to be ignored. My “new” car came with a tire pressure monitoring system that failed to monitor the tires but instead went off at random. The sunroof does not open when it is sunny.
For the single most annoying feature ever invented, though, I have to tip my hat to Toshiba.
My Toshiba laptop has a touchpad. I much prefer a mouse, but for as many times as I drag my laptop around the house, I’d really rather not have to add another accessory to the pile of stuff that I am carrying. After this week though I may, for my own sanity and to ensure the aforementioned laptop does nor morph into a high-speed projectile, have to invest.
You see the Toshiba Touchpad has a scroll feature; like the little roller on a two button mouse. Unlike the roller on a mouse, though, the feature is activated by using a portion of the touchpad. I have no idea where the precise boundaries of the scroll part of the pad is, though, and to be frank it doesn’t always work. For example, I just tried to scroll to the top of this post….nothing.
If, on the other hand, you would simply like to move the cursor up or over a bit to highlight something useful, the touchpad frequently interprets that as a need to scroll. Instead of highlighting an important section, you are instead zipping off to an entirely different part of the file. On a 22 page document this is annoying. On a 90,000 line spreadsheet this is seizure inducing.
So for their efforts, Toshiba takes the prize for allowing me the privilege of paying extra for a feature that makes me absolutely stark-raving mad….and not just a little angry, too.
A couple of my recent posts have been about keeping your eyes open. In Driving Lessons, one of my major points was the lifesaving property of watching the actual movement of vehicles around you rather than the rather uncertain implied intentions of a turn signal. In Look, I wrote of the welcome reminder to simply look around you at the good that is a happening right under our noses.
And then I forgot to look.
I have had my head down for days; plowing through a large share of work that is due, getting my taxes done and sorting and filing the mass of paperwork that remains in the aftermath of IRS and State calculations, reviewing documents, updating forms and returning calls. It has occurred to me on several late night occasions that I had not written a post, but in all the churn of administrative details I found no inspiration for writing; forgetting, of course, or at least temporarily ignoring, that part of my pledge is to write something everyday.
Once again I have missed an anniversary. I started writing two years ago yesterday with two posts; as an explanation of my chosen blog header I wrote Metastable, and in an admission, in The Morning After, confessed that the act of starting a blog may not have been entirely well-thought out.
At that point I had been home, retired, for about four years. My mother had been in a nursing home for more than a year as her dementia had advanced, yet her general health was remarkably, dishearteningly good.
At that point in my life, the beast was still a mush-faced bundle of random energy who peed on my floor, chewed on my hands and pulled like a sled dog on a leash. My circle of local “friends” consisted nearly entirely of caregivers and residents of long-term care facilities. I was working a job that ultimately would leave me feeling expendable. I had things to say but no forum for saying them. My experience as caregiver felt isolating.
My how things change…
So I missed the anniversary yesterday, but today I stopped to look back and see how far I have come. Thanks to all of you who have joined me on this journey.
My week last week was near idyllic. Long days, oddly timed work-shifts and a general unfamiliarity with all that was before me might have conspired to stress me out, but, to be truthful, I loved every minute of it.
This week? Not so much…
While this week, too, has much to recommend it; a reunion with folks with whom I have enjoyed working in the past, interesting new challenges and lively discussions on topics about which I know little but am curious and a bit of a breakthrough on work I had yet to finish. All these things are good.
Still, though, my word for the day for yesterday was “Eeeuwwwww”. I quickly ran out of anything nicer to say…so I didn’t post a thing.
Alas, while today was a better day, it has also been quite busy.
More Iditarod news later…
Typography from Ronnie Bruce on Vimeo.
Every story has a beginning, a middle and an end. On a smaller scale, I try to do that with blog posts as well, although in this medium, the writing seems to continue.
In many of my posts, I have told the story of coping with an aging parent. My mother’s health has taken a turn for the worse, and now, in muddling through the end of the story, I find I have neither the words nor the interest in sitting at a keyboard.
I will no doubt find words and write more, but not tonight.
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