Work
Striving for success without hard work is like trying to harvest where you haven’t planted. —David Bly.
Work does not set you free, but it does teach you stuff. I graduated from college with a history major into a terrible economy and my first job was taking care of the children of battered women. While their mothers who came to the shelter were being checked by doctors or were in the hospital, put on welfare, signed up for food stamps and legal aid, I shepherded their kids, babies, toddlers, little kids, and furious teens. My father used to drink and hit my mother. I was born to have that job until it nearly killed me as I drank away the images of women with black eyes and slings, kids traumatized, and so deeply hurt as witnesses to violence they might never forget. I knew. I loved them. They were like vampires and after eight months I walked away.
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Why Newspapers Matter
I have always loved newspapers. My parents received the New York Times and the Trenton Times every day. The New York Times came in the morning and the Trenton Times came in the afternoon. The Trenton Times had the funnies with my secret crush the Phantom and the obituaries which, as a future storyteller, held a magnetic pull for my need to know things. I watched as my mother and father devoured the daily paper and the Sunday New York Times and grew up with the sense that a newspaper was essential for a civilized life. However, my real, shameful passion was gossip and so I became a reader of the Daily News which chronicled the seamier side of living in New York City. In every city I lived in, Dublin, San Francisco, New York, London, Dallas, Chicago, I read the paper, preferably the tabloid. I also read the alternative press avidly and free neighborhood papers. I’m not sure this habit was consistently edifying but it felt important to stay informed even if I was learning what some movie star ate for breakfast or the fight over a parking space.
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Moving
Recently we moved. I am not a stranger to moving. Although my parents lived in our farmhouse for over fifty years, we had several year-long moves during my childhood. London-Dublin-London. We left for a full year on my father’s sabbatical and then bounced back with funny accents, lost friends, and travels all over Europe which marked us as snobs whose dresses were too short. It was the sixties. When I went to college I moved out and never returned. Eighteen, I drove my parents VW Beetle to an apartment. I eschewed the dorm and lived there for a year with almost no furniture and a roommate who could not cook. At all. Anything. Her freezer was stuffed with frozen steaks until she dated a goy, and the steaks ran out. I had the opposite problem dating a nice Jewish boy who wanted to live with me in utter poverty, probably in a teepee. My parents bought an off-campus house, so I stayed behind while he went off to a cooler school. The house was wonderful, and my roommate was a sweet pothead who fixed roofs.
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