Writing Life

Archive for July, 2009

The downturn in the local real-estate market, which began sometime in 2006, wreaked havoc on our household finances. My wife, an escrow officer, saw her salary drop by twenty percent. And the extra money I used to earn as a notary public vanished entirely. In February of 2008, I delivered a commentary on National Public Radio’s “Marketplace” program in which I predicted that Read the rest of this entry »

Beatrix Potter was born on this day in 1866. Earlier this year I read Linda Lear’s excellent biography of her called Beatrix Potter: A Life in Nature. Although nowadays she is known almost exclusively for her picture books for children, Potter was much more than just a children’s writer. She was a brilliant self-taught naturalist whose specialty was mycology – the study of fungi. Beatrix was a renowned painter of Read the rest of this entry »

Recently, I bumped into an acquaintance of mine at the grocery store. She was polite and friendly until she looked down into my cart and saw a package of 24 bottled waters. At that point she began to hector me about the environmental effects of plastic water bottles. “Those are not recyclable,” she said. “Do you know Read the rest of this entry »

It was 72 years ago today, on July 2, 1937, that Amelia Earhart disappeared into the Pacific while attempting to become the first person to fly around the world at the equator. Other fliers had circled the globe but not at the “waistline of the world,” as Amelia called the equator. Her flight, if successful, would have covered a distance of approximately 25,000 miles. Initially her plan was to travel in a westerly direction. On March 17, 1937, she flew from Oakland, California, to Honolulu, Hawaii. But on March 20th, while attempting to take off from Honolulu for her next stop – a tiny uninhabited sliver of land in the Pacific known as Howland Island – Amelia lost control of the plane. It skidded off the runway and Read the rest of this entry »

I carry a notepad everywhere I go. Currently I have a Mead memo pad in my pocket. It contains 60 three-inch-by-five-inch sheets. That’s 120 pages if you write on both sides of the sheet. And I always do.

I am not someone who thinks his every thought needs to be recorded for posterity. In fact, I rarely record my own thoughts in my notepad. Mostly I record what I hear. One of my favorite sources of material was Sam Kanai, a longtime local barber who died last year at Christmas, one day shy of his 87th birthday. Once, while I waited my turn for a haircut, I listened while Sam talked with another customer about the sweltering summer weather. The customer, a man about fifty years old, said, Read the rest of this entry »