I’ve kept journals off and on through the years. For the most part, just another excuse for not doing something else. Another escape. People who are doing worthwhile things don’t have time for journals.
And that said, you know I’m wrong. There is Cherry-Garrard. There is the great Champlain. There is the strangely anonymous James Magra’s account of the astounding voyage of Captain Cook. And there is always Boswell. There’s Pepys too, but that’s more a diary. I could never keep a diary. But keeping a journal has been useful. Especially of late.
I don’t try to get everything down–just the bits I’m likely to forget. The smell of something. The color. Usually that’s enough. Maybe a little of what was said.
Mary Ellen once told me it looked like a beehive on the page. One of those rounded hives they always had in the cartoons with the bees making…
James is James. Not Jim. Not Jimmy. And especially not ‘little’ anything. I met him in a martial arts class ten years ago. He was already on his own as a literary agent then and told me he was taking the class to protect himself from aspiring writers who couldn’t take no for an answer. Particularly the women. James Crockett is almost four and a half feet tall in his shoes. Women seem to be attracted to that.
I plied him with beer and cigarettes and he agreed to read something I was working on at the time. Actually something I had been working on for years. He read it in one night and then told me to quit. The world didn’t need another Mr. Chips, especially not one who had been dead for more than a hundred years and “didn’t know how to get himself a little nooky.”
That…
The Boston News-Letter, a paper of overt Loyalist sympathies, published a one paragraph account the day afterward: “Last Tuesday Night the Grenadier and Light Companies belonging to the several Regiments in this Town were ferryed in Long Boats from the Bottom of the Common over to Phips’s Farm in Cambridge, from whence they proceeded on their way to Concord where they arrived Yesterday: the First Brigade, commanded by Lord Piercy,” (‘Percy’ was his name. The errant spelling of the period was less of a problem than the erring fact) “with two pieces of Artillery, set off from here yesterday morning at Ten o’Clock as a Re-inforcement, which with the Grenadiers and Light Companies, made about eighteen Hundred Men. Upon the People’s having Notice of this Movement on Tuesday Night, alarm Guns were fired throughout the Country, and Expresses sent off to the different Towns, so that very early Yesterday Morning…
This story got started last winter. I was out shoveling snow. There was at least ten inches on top of the four that had dropped the day before. The morning was as gray as stone and the snow was smelling sweet, like it does when it’s been snowing long enough to clean the air and the daylight hasn’t poked a finger into it yet. I figure it was about 6 am. No traffic. No sound but a street plow maybe two blocks over and the scrape of my own shovel. There was a light in Doddy Parker’s bedroom window and the yellow of it was brilliant inside the colorless hollow before dawn.
Up the street where the snowplows had made things passable I see a big fellow coming who walks like someone I know. He’s got his parka closed over his face and a spume of breath trailing him.
He…
