October 27, 2003
Monday

The hardest part of any hiatus, planned or not, is the picking up again where I left off. If it's yoga and stretching I've been away from, I find that my joints feel like concrete and it takes a lot of effort to remember the poses and achieve even a little of the range of motion I'd had before. If it's documenting an academic reference, I find that I have to get out the MLA Handbook for even the simplest entry. Just yesterday Lynn asked me about symbolism in The Great Gatsby, a book I've read a dozen times and taught more than once, but the last time was six or seven years ago and I couldn't remember any of the details beyond the names of the characters. 

Picking up this effort again is a similar challenge. First, there's the reluctance to face just how irregularly I've been posting this year. Then there's the issue of my working on two different computers with two different versions of Netscape, the earlier one so outdated it can't even display some of my favorite sites. That in turn brings up the problem of my outdated design and completely inadequate coding and programming skills. The only part of keeping an on-line journal that I'm good at is the writing, and even that poses a problem, because there's a danger in falling back on my ease with personal essays. Even though I'm comfortable with the genre, it still takes an hour or two to craft an acceptable piece, and the effort empties me of energy to work on developing as a fiction writer. Developing as a fiction writer entails its own problems of discipline and direction.

The warm-up writing I did this morning quickly began to take shape as an essay suitable for this space, and that's what has sent me to open Netscape Composer for the first time in three months. In my last post back in July I outlined the things that I hadn't done since June. I was on my way to my August Adventures in Writing and promised to post tales from the river in Virginia and the mountain in Vermont. Just like the summer of 2002, I compiled a lot of material in draft but lost the will to polish and present. The best thing to do now is just give an update and move on.

So, since our last episode:

1. I attended a writer's week in Virginia and the famous Bread Loaf Writers' Conference in Vermont. In Virginia I found that all the other participants were from the same two zip codes, had worked together throughout the year, and had been together at this event in summers before. I was a stranger in a strange land, it rained all day every day, and the facility was much more rustic than I had expected. The scrambled eggs were fabulous, but meals were served family style, and so I had to watch the steam rising from the platter for ten minutes or so until everyone else from my group had managed to assemble. At Bread Loaf I learned more about the writing craft than at any other workshop I've been to these past ten years but also endured a critique session so demoralizing that opening the crate where I kept those materials was like pulling off a scab.

2. Lynn began her senior year in high school. There she is at left, the braces and the bangs gone, my darling my stringbean now a lovely young woman. She applied to and was accepted at Millersville University (the school I graduated from -- if it's good enough for the best mother in the whole world, it's good enough for her, she's always said). She has no interest in applying anywhere else, so we've avoided all the hand-wringing associated with the college admissions game. 

3.At right is a less glamorous but equally engaging view of Lynn. She is reacting to a goal scored in yet another wonderful field hockey season, one with ups and downs and a win/loss ratio that does not accurately reflect the heart that went into the effort and the joy it produced for those of us who love these girls. Of all the school matters that are ending for us this year, this is perhaps the hardest to say farewell to.

4. I finally opened these files, relearned the routines, and have written yet another piece for my long-dormant on-line journal. Thanks for reading.