Writing Life

Archive for February, 2010

I saw a movie the other night in which a convenience store gets held up. When a gun was pointed in his face, the store clerk emptied out the cash register and handed over the money as if he had rehearsed this particular scenario many times. All the customers handed their wallets over to the gunman in a peaceful and orderly fashion. The sight of a deadly weapon being waved in the air seemed to make everyone instantly cooperative. It’s always like that in the movies. Real life isn’t quite so predictable. Read the rest of this entry »

Two years ago this week, on February 7, 2008, I delivered a commentary on a National Public Radio program called Marketplace. The subject of the commentary was my fear that my wife and I might soon lose our house to foreclosure. A downturn in the local real-estate market had pretty much eliminated my income as a notary public and had also reduced the salary Julie earns as an escrow officer. At that time, foreclosure was not a foregone conclusion but just a frightening possibility. By October of 2008, however, we were no longer able to make our mortgage payments. We requested loan modifications from our lenders, but our requests were denied. By the beginning of 2009 we were actively looking for a rental home to move into should the sword of foreclosure finally sever us from our home. Read the rest of this entry »

Every year in February Julie and I get a catalog from The Teaching Company, a firm that sells entire sets of university lectures on CDs and DVDs. Ordinarily, these lectures sell for hundreds of dollars. For years I have coveted the company’s lectures on Dante’s Divine Comedy, but the cost of the DVD set is $255. Great Authors of the Western Literary Tradition has also tempted me, but the cost of the DVDs, which contain 42 hours of instruction, is a whopping $750. And then there is The Teaching Company’s collection of 52 half-hour lectures on Shakespeare’s works. This set normally retails for $630. All of these prices are a bit too steep for us. Julie and I know several married couples who have purchased DVDs from The Teaching Company and have enjoyed them immensely. Our friends Norm and Karen learned all about the masterpieces of Renaissance art with the help of some Teaching Company DVDs. Our friends Darrell and Elizabeth have purchased and enjoyed several lecture series about classical music that have helped deepen their appreciation of the works of composers such as Mozart, Beethoven, and Chopin. Julie and I, being cheapskates, have never purchased a single one of The Teaching Company’s “Great Courses.” But every February we come close, because in February, many of the Great Courses are offered at a deep discount. The Shakespeare lectures, for instance, are available this month for only $135. That’s a savings of nearly $500! The Great Authors of the Western Literary Tradition DVDs are available this month for only $165. That’s a savings of $585! When we see discount prices like that, we both vow that this will be the year that we quit entertaining ourselves with formulaic Hollywood films via NetFlix two or three times a week and begin supplementing our meager formal educations with a set of lectures from The Teaching Company. Why watch Hank Azaria portray a bogus Egyptian Pharoah in Night at the Museum II: The Battle of the Smithsonian when we could be watching a university professor lecture about real Egyptian Pharoahs on a Teaching Company DVD? Read the rest of this entry »

Last Friday Julie and I took in an exhibition at the de Young Museum in San Francisco called “Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharoahs.” Julie had seen the King Tut exhibition during its last trip to San Francisco in 1979, but this was my first exposure to the burial treasures of Egypt’s most famous ruler. When his tomb was opened in 1922, by amateur archeologist Howard Carter, its four chambers (annex, antechamber, burial chamber, and treasury) were found to contain 5,398 separate items, from tiny trinkets to massive shrines. I have seen faux Pharoahnic treasures in movies all my life. Thus, before the entering the show, I had a clear idea of what King Tut’s treasures would look like – lots of solid gold objects, diamonds, rubies, emeralds, silver, and so forth. I also had a fairly clear idea of what the interior of Tut’s tomb must have looked like when it was first discovered by Carter and his team – a series of vast underground chambers below whose high vaulted ceilings massive piles of precious jewels and other treasures sparkled in the light of countless oil lamps affixed sconce-like to the walls. But both the treasures of the tomb and the tomb itself were not at all what I imagined they would be. Read the rest of this entry »

When my grandchildren were younger, I used to entertain them with a game called What Would You Do? The premise of the game was simple. I made up a question and then provided them with three (or more) answers to choose from. The questions were sometimes silly, sometimes grisly (to appeal to their childhood love of all things scary), and almost always far-fetched. But the answers a child selected often revealed something interesting about her personality. Some grandkids usually made the safest choice. Some usually made the riskiest choice. The answers of some kids seemed to be random. Others vacillated back and forth between the safe choice and the risky choice depending upon the specifics of the situation. Some kids mulled their options carefully before answering. Some blurted out a response almost before I could recite all the options available to them. Not every question had a safe answer, a risky answer, and a middle-of-the-road answer. Some just gauged a child’s favorite type of food, favorite color, favorite sport, or favorite type of wearing apparel. Particularly interesting, were the explanations the kids came up with to justify their choices. What’s more, I never objected when a child chose to reject all my options and provide a wholly original answer to my question. Whenever I posed a lot of these questions to a child, I would begin to see (or think I saw) a pattern emerging from their answers. Who knows, maybe the game says more about me than it does about my grandkids. At any rate, Julie and I are leaving town for three days. I won’t be able to post any blog entries until Monday, February 8. To keep you entertained until then, I have put together a selection of questions from my What Would You Do? game. Feel free to answer them yourself or to try them out on a child who you think you’d like to get to know a little better. Read the rest of this entry »

Last summer I published a column in Inside the City called “How To Have A Cast-Iron Marriage.” In it, I discussed how my father-in-law instilled in my wife a lifelong devotion to cast-iron cookware. I also noted that the rules for preserving your cast-iron pots and pans can, with a few minor adjustments, be applied to the preserving of a marriage. The column generated more responses from readers than any other I have written. Read the rest of this entry »

I begin every morning by drinking a fruit smoothie made of fresh and frozen fruits mixed together in my blender. Two and a half years ago, on my 49th birthday, I woke up, staggered into the kitchen, and reached into a cupboard for a smoothie glass. As I withdrew my hand from the cupboard, I bumped my arm and lost control of the glass, which fell into the sink and shattered into a dozen or more pieces. I am not by nature superstitious, but as I stared into the sink at all those jagged shards, I thought to myself, “That can’t be a good sign.” Read the rest of this entry »

Several years ago, my first published short story appeared in a magazine called the Chattahoochee Literary Review. When my contributor’s copy arrived in the mail, I flipped forward to the table of contents, to see if the names of any famous writers were listed there along with mine. Alas, all of the other contributors were unknowns like me. Read the rest of this entry »

Today, for the first time ever, I visited a book mall. The mall is called Booktown Books and is located in Grass Valley, California, about an hour’s drive from Sacramento. I have visited hundreds of bookstores, but this was a unique experience. Read the rest of this entry »