Archives for March 2021

Longitudinal readers of Writing Boots will recall that last year I kept a rolling diary during the first few months of the lockdown, called “Coronavirus and us: Let’s hold it together, together.” I’ve been re-reading these posts roughly in time with this year, but not been tempted to reproduce them for you. They’re interesting mostly in the aggregate. And they’re disorienting, because a year ago we were all concussed and grieving, and our temporal memories are really, really warped. Anyway: This post, from March 23, is the first one I felt like sharing as a standalone. Don’t ask me why this one, I don’t know. —DM

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Monday, 11:45 a.m.

Family “staff meeting” to discuss need for more structure in days ahead. Schoolwork, exercise, household projects. (Sewing masks?) Teenage daughter mostly silent—not sullen, just sad. “What are you thinking about, Baby?” A shrug. Tears.

John Steinbeck wrote the most wonderful essay about his best friend Ed Ricketts (upon whom he based the character “Doc,” in Cannery Row).

One paragraph has stayed with me and I think of it a lot these days. After Steinbeck has established that Ricketts was uncommonly generous with his money and his things:

His feeling for psychic pain in normal people was also philosophic. He would say that nearly everything that can happen to people not only does happen but has happened for a million years. “Therefore,” he would say, “for everything that can happen there is a channel or mechanism in the human to take care of it—a channel worn down in prehistory and transmitted to the genes.”

Veteran communicator Mike Jenkins shared this one, which he heard like 40 years ago. The man who told it was the late Alden Wood, a grammar columnist who I used to “edit” when I was a lad. That meant taking his typewritten column off the fax and typing it into your Mac as carefully as possible and praying that up, you did not fuck. Because if you did, there would be another fax, thanking you—as Alden once thanked one of my colleagues—”for your subfecal typesetting job.”

Anyway, Alden was from Massachusetts, and Jenkins remembers hearing him tell this at a Boston workshop back in the day:

A guy was in Boston for his first time ever, attending a conference for work. Wanting to get some inside info on the “must-eat food” while in town, he asked the hotel concierge for advice. The concierge gave him a few choices, but then suggested Boston Scrod. Figuring it had to be good since it had Boston in its name, the man decided Boston Scrod was it. The conference was running long, and by the time he had his bag packed and his room charges paid, he had a little more than an hour to get to Logan Airport for his flight home. Handing some cash to the hotel bellman, he jumped into a waiting cab, threw his bag across the bench, and settled into the back seat, as the cabbie asked, “Where to, buddy?” and began heading out of the hotel driveway. Nervous that he might not get to taste Boston Scrod, and might even miss his flight, the guy yelled back, “Quick! Take me someplace I can get scrod!” The cabbie slammed on his brakes, turned around in the front seat, and replied, “I’ve been driving hack for 20 years, buddy, and I’ve had guys ask me to do that 1000 times. But, this is the first time anyone asked it in the pluperfect subjunctive!”

One more story on Alden, because it’s Friday. After the above-referenced subfecal typesetting job, Alden was forced to issue a correction. It was around Halloween, and he wrote a very funny one, as I remember, involving the Hounds of the Baskerville getting into the printing presses and messing up the spelling, or some such.

The hapless typesetter made a typo in the correction.

The fax machine almost exploded.

The publisher gently recommended to the editorial team that we not issue a second correction.

“These things tend to snowball,” he said.