I don’t know about you, but I work in a busy part of my house. It’s nice, but busy. I have had to learn to keep focused or never complete anything because of the very interesting things passing by my window on one side of my desk or the doorway on the other side. Outside, people walking their dogs — all kinds of dogs! — or the fellow down the street who likes to run his leaf blower. A lot. Spring, summer, or fall, there he goes. Up and down the street, moving leaves and grass clippings and sometimes just pushing dust around like a khamsin in the Egyptian desert. I think it may be therapy. Or his love language. Either way, it gets him out of the house. Across the way, the next-door neighbors are having a new roof put on. (The hammers sound like someone typing very, very slowly. Working on a difficult passage, hoping that it’s just a factor of wordsmithing and not the onset of actual writer’s block.) On the other hand, how much fun must it be to be so young that standing forty or fifty feet off the ground without a net or parachute seems like a good idea? Like a grand adventure?

Another neighbor has something being delivered in a brown cardboard box. Is it just me or is it a cultural sea-change that we really like having our stuff delivered to us instead of going out and shopping because it turns each delivery into a sort of merry holiday with presents? What did I get? Oh, goody, the special toothpaste I ordered yesterday!

There’s a noise in the kitchen: no great mystery. The blender is grinding out this morning’s breakfast smoothie. Ice, orange juice, yoghurt, and kale, tempered with cinnamon. Would I like a glass? I guess so. It sounds worse than it is, which is a left-handed compliment at best, and coincidentally something that I’ve occasionally heard after reading a poem of mine aloud. Beneath the blender’s racket is talking, because it would seem you can create a smoothie while being on a Zoom conference call, muting and un-muting yourself in a sort of sport. Something like pickleball, I expect.

I have been in this office for ten years. No, eleven. A fortress of nothing like solitude. There are two chairs in the room, one at the desk, and one in the corner in case I have a hankering to get up and go over there and sit down. Or if you visit, there’s a place to relax while I just finish this sentence I’m working on. You can look at all the pictures I have on the wall, different pieces of art or photos or drawings.

From this desk — well not this actual desk . . . it’s new and replaces an old dining-room table I used as a desk — I’ve read a thousand stories, probably more, and many poems and essays. I’ve written six novels, started a half-dozen more with varying levels of quality and completion. A hundred or so poems. Lots of stories. I have bookshelves behind me, to the left and right of me, half-a-league onward. They are full of books I’ve read and many books I’m going to read, I promise. I don’t know about you, but I have nowhere near enough books.

Also, there’s an aquarium on one shelf, with two gold swordtails in it, and they seem happy enough. It’s difficult to tell with fish. My younger daughter thinks the tank should be larger. So do I. And in a small window behind me there are a handful of potted plants — African violets. They were doing very well but have some kind of botanical problem I cannot figure out. It says here on the care page that I’m either watering them too much or not enough. Thank you. That’s very helpful.

There are two more lamps in the office now than there used to be, so this winter will be less . . . depressing. Maybe. And I have a smart-speaker to play classical radio from New York, like I’m back in the nineteen-seventies. Yes, that’s a long time ago, but nothing about Mahler has changed since then, other than a growing respect for his compositions. I’ve changed a lot. I wear cleaner shoes and don’t enjoy going out in the cold to play as much as I did way back then. When I see young men outside wearing shorts in the middle of winter, I am not impressed with their bravery as much as I am convinced of their nit-wittery.

I wonder what I will have for lunch. I should have lunch. The midday meal is kind of a mystery wrapped in a conundrum. If you get up early, say 7:00, midday is logically and socially normed at somewhere around noon. But if you are like me, there is no standard wake-up call, like a bugle or alarm clock or pet hound that needs to be let out for walkies. I sometimes get up a good while after the sunrise breaks through the window and glares at me with its potent eye. 8:30, even 9 o’clock. For shame, my mom would say. (Don’t tell her.) You’re wasting the day away. It is funny how sleep is seen as waste. I get some of my best ideas when I’m half asleep, and certainly all of my best rest. So who knows when the middle of the day will designate itself? Some might even say we’re out of control. Best to eat right now.

Home  Archives  About Us  Contact Us  Submit  Advertise  Donate  Blotter Books