Among the cardboard boxes and mental/emotional somersaults that come with moving, three things happened. First, a distant friend commented on a Facebook post that decades later he still remembered one of the first essays I had ever shared. Seed planted. Then, a week later, a much-newer Illinois friend said that I ought to start a blog and share my thoughts from time to time. It struck me, of course, that a current friend would have no reason to know that I had started a thousand blogs. Friends made in our first three ports of call (Arkansas, Mississippi, and California) would list blogging as one of my primary characteristics, but friends made in Tennessee and now Illinois have no reason to make that association.
Finally, last night, we watched a Netflix documentary on the life of Joan Didion. I felt the fire kindling in my soul from the first frame, but when her friend said that she thought Joan wrote to understand her own thoughts and feelings, the words glared in my mind like a neon sign: I must write. Again.
When I think of myself as a writer, I am thinking of the short, observational life essays that I shared primarily during two life stretches: when I shared “a daily thought” religiously (using both meanings of the word religiously) for the ten years we lived in Mississippi, and when I started the blog, “starting to look up,” in 2015 while living in Malibu. Sure, I put together a couple of books, along with trying out other forms of writing like short stories and poetry, but when I heard the suggestion that Joan Didion wrote to understand what she thought and felt, I knew that was what I was doing when I blogged.
So, here we go again.
I have many, many friends all over the world now thanks to our rolling stone lifestyle, and I would be honored if any of them followed along by subscribing or simply catching the occasional Facebook share, but to be candid, and with all due respect, last night’s documentary convinced me that I need to write and why I need to write, and I do it for me.
I pledged never to complain about Malibu weather and kept that promise. To complain in a land where sunshine, blue skies, and seventy-degree temperatures abound seemed outright ungrateful. But truth be told I did miss one thing: the breathtaking colors of autumn.
“Here I was at the end of America – no more land – and now there was nowhere to go but back.”
“Life is all memory except for the one present moment that goes by so quick you can hardly catch it going.” – Tennessee Williams, The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore
My daughter and I decided to hike the scorched hills behind our house on Thanksgiving Eve to get a firsthand look at the aftermath of the Woolsey Fire, and we witnessed the vast expanse of earth charred to smoldering nothingness. It was breathtaking, and I’m not even talking about air quality. Imagine strolling through a gigantic ashtray with a spectacular mountain view of the sun dropping into the Pacific Ocean and that pretty much captures the scene.
Starting to Look Up 