Three layers of writing…..getting back to the blog…maybe

I am about to tell Harbor City School that I will no longer be available for substituting when they have teachers out. I’ve enjoyed doing it. It must be one of the easier subbing gigs because the kids generally go straight to work. I’ve even be able to do a little writing for my Reader Columns when they have been busy on their chrome books. I really wanted to use computers back in 1986-87 when I was at Morgan Park. My mind would have been blown then if I’d had the faintest idea how they can be used today.

Over the past Covid and post Covid years I know what I always believed. I had, have, the capacity to be a successful teacher…..the best of which motivate their students to become students for the rest of their life even if their formal education ends before graduation.

Now I must concentrate on the work I set for myself when I lost my teaching job those years. That is my writing and in doing so I will follow the old dictum for writers, “Write what you know.” And I’ve been doing that from the beginning which began not long after my Dad died. On my old Fat Mac where I’d been composing tests and worksheets for my students since 1984 I sat down and wrote an elegy for my Dad. Before I continue I’m going to check to see if I can find a previous post from years back about that event in my life.

Ah, I did. Everything in this short post bears elaboration. My hours of writing the eulogy only to have nearly lost it minutes after the MSU library was supposed to close for the night. My telling my Mother that I would honor my dying father’s request to give an eulogy like the one he gave for his mother a year earlier. That was given a year after her death in part because my Dad had been ill himself. I was sobbing so uncontrollably when my Mom called to pass on my Dad’s request and she had told me he would understand if I didn’t want to do it that she misunderstood my “yes” to be “no I couldn’t possibly do that.” When I got to Mankato to be with my Dad at his death she had already found someone else to give that eulogy. I made it clear immediately that I would give it…..then as my Dad lived his last few days I kept putting of its composition until the day before the funeral.

I have written so much over the last forty years that its difficult to keep track of or find. I sometimes guess the wrong key words when I put them in my overflowing blogs search engine to find them. Just now I put in “Dad’s funeral eulogy” for the link above but its entirely possible a different set of words would have turned something else, possibly better, up.

The same is true of the roughly 350 columns I’ve written for the Reader Weekly turned Duluth Reader since 2001. I prefer cryptic columns that draw attention by their lack of specificity which may be a good way to temp readers into seeing how my columns start but a lousy way a decade or more later to remember what the heck my cryptic title referred to.

So now I’m preparing to write several categories for a few months. First my columns will continue. As I indicated a day ago I want to bank a bunch of rough drafts which is what I did for my trip to Washington DC. Doing so will, I hope, keep me from hitting a deadline with too little to serve up. I still have a couple of the batch from DC left unfinished. I have others as well from previous years unfinished that I could tidy up for some future publication. Second, and on a grander scale I have for decades been building a list of topics that I’d like to bind into some books. Individual subjects like my Grandfather Robb’s experience with black America of my Mother’s attempt to become an “Abstract Artist” which one of her profs told her she would never accomplish and several others on the miniscule order of The meaning of life. I spent the Covid years laboring over these and have a half dozen three ring binders with rough draft material most of which is a surprise when I dig into it only a few years later. And then there is this blog. I started it to run for Congress in 2006. When that campaign bit the dust I mostly ignored the blog until six months after the fight to vote on the Red Plan started. There came a time in that fight when I dug deep to fill the blog with Let Duluth Vote related information. In those years I had a significant local leadership well before cell phones could follow blogs.

I’ve apologized to my French pen pal who for a time kept track of that I was writing. It was the hours I spent writing for the Reader, campaigning for Congress and studying French that killed time for the Blog. This morning I have been thinking that I could add one blog piece a day. I never have any problem thinking of something and already today I had a list of four or five things that I’ve been emailing to myself as a reminder. I’ve been sending such reminders of important things to share here for years. I seldom share them. The Reader takes up too much time….or rather has.

Having written this now it seems of little import to anyone other than me…..After finishing an episode of the final series “The Crown” I’ll turn to the Reader piece I need to turn in tomorrow at five pm. I’ve got two rough drafts. The first could easily be trimmed to 800 wholly insufficient words. I’m starting with two rough drafts which together are probably around an astounding 3000 words. That’s a lot of trimming. It will probably be titled something like “What I didn’t tell my Pol Sci advisors.” It was a title of one of the Washington DC series. I’m writing it to introduce the year following my service in Congress. It follows the column that may be out today which is titled “1972.” Ah, Its online here. It is under one of two images I sent the Reader..

..and not the one I recommended. I have yet to see what the print version will show….Perhaps both images.

Its the third column in the series that will press me. Its about the Ford econoline van I crashed when I worked for the Minnesota College Republican in 1972. It threatens, of necessity, to be double the size of my typical columns. And by the way when our editor read my comment in the new column about how I shoot to limit them to 800 words he emailed me back to tell me that 1,000 words is a more common size. I replied that I was trying to be succinct and wished him happy New Years.

Ah, I’m ready to see the end of this episode. Prime Minister Tony Blair is vastly more popular than the Royal Family…….The war in Bosnia proceeds apace. How will it end? Time to find out.

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