Keeping busy

A post from the senior minister at our church this morning asked each of us to think about what we are grateful for in this time of stress. It hit home with me, because I have been thinking how blessed I am, so grateful for family, a safe and cozy cottage, plenty of food and wine, a dog to listen to me rant.

But there’s one more thing: I am, as I long have been, grateful that I’ve built my life around books and reading. That focus means that I am never alone in my cottage. I always have something to do, something to write.

I’ve read some memes lately about introverts and extroverts, suggestions that while introverts are doing well with social isolation, extroverts are not. Introverts should reach out and check on them, just as we should check on elderly neighbors alone. I worry about people whose whole life is built around the social contacts of work, eating out, going to the bar, etc. If they are following the guidelines, they must be very frustrated and lonely.

I meantime am a happy camper. I am reading several books and websites for a proposed project—it hasn’t been officially approved yet, but I have strong indications that it will be. The reading, which has to do with food and mid-20^th century American culture, is interesting to me.

But better than that: I have a new project. Several years ago a university press director asked if I would be interested in editing my blogs into a book. Flattered, I made a stab at it, but it seemed an overwhelming task. I have been blogging since 2006, so it wasn’t simply a matter of compiling—it meant picking and choosing, and it meant settling on a theme. Writing is an obvious one—but I began to write almost thirty years before I began to blog—if this was going to turn into a memoir, there was a huge gap.

My brother urged me to collect the family-oriented blogs, and I still may do that. I would hope someday the next two generations would treasure such collections.

But for now I’ve decided on a collection of my thoughts as I tentatively journeyed toward writing mystery. I had already compiled a few blogs, and I’ve spent the last two days excerpting more—I am now through 2007, so you can see it will be a big project. And I realize once I get them together, I’ll have to edit and provide some running commentary. Will it work? Will it be publishable? I don’t know, but for now, it’s keeping me busy and happy.

The blog’s beginning in 2006 coincides with Jacob’s birth, and as I read, I find lots about what a happy, cheerful, sometimes rebellious kid he was. And there are darling passages about other grandkids, like Edie, who at the age of four called one morning, just to say, “I hope you have a lovely day.”. Or Sawyer, who was told to put on sunscreen and replied, “I’m going in the garage. There’s no sun in there.” Morgan who kept inching away in a family picture after the grandchildren were dedicated in church—she finally ended in a corner all by herself, and she has that independent spirit to this day. I may have to go back and do this culling all over again with a different criterion.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute for Allergies and Infectious Diseases, says this epidemic could last eighteen months. I wonder if that is long enough for me to sort out my blogs. Maybe, like all of us, I shouldn’t look that far ahead but should take each day as it comes.