This Christmas marks the ninth anniversary of our 1997 move into this home we built for ourselves--just a half mile away and a hundred feet up from the home Vicki bought in 1978 before I moved here. It took a long time--we bought the land in December 1992--but it was worth the wait. We're not likely to live in another home so perfectly suited to us. Mistakes? Sure. There should be a phone outlet in the TV room. A hose bib in the center of the garage between the garage doors. Better gutters above the door to the outside utility room.
But Marlow got to live here for 18 months before graduating from high school; Rae got 5½years and the chance to paint her walls green with a trompe-l'œil forest ceiling. Vicki and I have the best home offices ever, and we've gotten to live here for nine years, so far. If we make it to 2016, we'll have lived here longer than in the old house.
Some people move constantly; others almost never. There are, surely, advantages to both modes of living. If we are settled, it is because we come from settled people. My parents have lived in their home for 50 years and counting; Vicki's parents lived in theirs for 55. Since we are unlikely to live to the age of 100, we probably won't equal or break any family records.
This blog (or column, as I like to think of it) has also been in one place for a long time: this is Volume 8, No. 51; I only missed one column this year (when we were hiking in Yosemite). Some of the columns have been lame, of course, but I've never known a writer who wouldn't (or shouldn't) admit to the occasional misfire. Some weeks I've had nothing to say, but strived, in the interests of discipline, to say it anyway.
I love to write. Always have. Always will, I hope. Never had writer's block (despite enthusiastic advice that I could use some); perhaps been terrorized by a blank page or blank screen twice in the 44 years of my writing life. In the typewriter days, I would sometimes go through a dozen sheets of paper until I got my lead right. Boy, did I welcome the arrival of word processing!
My problem has always been writing too much, never too little. In college I sometimes wrote ½ of an 8-page tabloid with 50% ad density. At InformationWeek, I wrote ⅓ of the magazine in August 1985. The skill of over-writing, alas, became less and less prized as my career progressed.
Anyway, I have always felt, as did A.J. Leibling, that I write "faster than anyone who writes better, and better than anyone who writes faster."
I wish I knew how I learned to write, so I could teach it. But I think I learned by reading constantly, widely, regularly and voluminously from the age of 5. That, combined with an English-teacher mother and a house full of books and magazines, showed me what good writing was. I just imitated it. You can't teach that, and you probably can't even make up for it if a student has, literally, never read for pleasure by the time they are in 8th grade. I don't remember anything I did at school being that helpful in my development as a writer. So, I'll probably just continue teaching U.S. History.
(Craig is still on vacation; I ran my Christmas Message last week)
