H. was making chili, and asked me to chop up some onions. As I was finishing up the first one, my eyes started to tear up, as onions typically make you do. The stinging got so bad I had to take off my glasses, and could barely see as I was finishing the job. It made me think of the lyric, “why do these eyes of mine cry?,” from that old Skeeter Davis tune, “The End of the World” (1963),. That led me to think of the scene in Girl, Interrupted, when Winona Ryder’s character, Susanna, discovers that Daisy, played by Brittany Murphy, has hanged herself. Daisy had been playing “The End of the World” on repeat on her phonograph, shorty after moving into a house with an “eat-in chicken” paid for by her father, with whom she had been having an incestuous relationship. I finished with the onions, then went upstairs to my computer, only to find out that Brittany Murphy herself died today at the age of 32.

My right ear has been bothering me—it feels like a marble is lodged inside it, and has been for a few weeks now, though when I saw the doctor he said the canal was perfectly clear. I went back the other day, and the nurse practitioner concluded that I likely have a fluid buildup behind the eardrum, which may be treated with a regimen of Sudafed.

As I am apparently the last person in the world to know, pseudophedrine is a key ingredient in the basement manufacture of knockoff methamphetamines. In order to buy it you have to tear a slip off a pad and bring it to the pharmacist, then present your identification and sign, electronically, some kind of acknowledgement that you are not obtaining the medication for any illicit purposes. For kicks I considered adding suspicious accessories to my purchases: a mortar and pestle; distilled water; those little flame-canisters they keep under food trays at banquets. These items would, probably, only effectively clue an investigator to the fact that I have no idea how methamphetamines are actually manufactured. I bought deodorant and a bag of Combos instead.

Walgreens, incidentally, remains a dreadful place to shop. I worked in one briefly as a young adult, and that one happened to be brand new and not quite as disgusting as the national mean. The one I was in on Friday had bare patches on the floor when the white-tile linoleum had worn away and kept its razor blades in a locked plastic case to deter shoplifters or suicidal teenagers. Or both.

To be good – many people think that they’ll achieve it by doing no harm – and that’s a lie, and you said yourself in the past that it was a lie. That leads to stagnation, to mediocrity. Just slap something on it when you see a blank canvas staring at you with a sort of imbecility.

You don’t know how paralysing it is, that stare from a blank canvas that says to the painter you can’t do anything. The canvas has an idiotic stare, and mesmerises some painters so that they turn into idiots themselves.

Many painters are afraid of the blank canvas, but the blank canvas is afraid of the truly passionate painter who dares – and who has once broken the spell of ‘you can’t.’

Life itself likewise always turns towards one an infinitely meaningless, discouraging, dispiriting blank side on which there is nothing, any more than on a blank canvas.

But however meaningless and vain, however dead life appears, the man of faith, of energy, of warmth, and who knows something, doesn’t let himself be fobbed off like that. He steps in and does something, and hangs onto that, in short, breaks, ‘violates’ – they say.

First holiday season without Dad. We are trying to shake things up this year to keep my mother’s mind off the obvious. Five of us went out for Thanksgiving to a Greek-themed restaurant on Route 1 that surprised me, pleasantly, in its selections, competence, and lack of death stench. The food was decent, too—along with a traditional Thanksgiving meal (squash and sweet potatoes), they came around with little hors d’oeuvres beforehand, like popovers and spanakopita. Blueberry pie later at home.

Christmas we will be having here in Greenfield. Mom will be making the two-hour drive in her new Ford Fusion S on the 24th, with S. and L. arriving on Christmas afternoon (following a visit to her relatives). It will be S. and L.’s first time seeing the place and only Mom’s second.

A lot of our family traditions are going to have to be rewritten. Up until two years ago, every Christmas Eve night involved going to my aunt’s house, then leaving early to watch the Lynn Christmas parade. This year friends have invited us to go caroling, which sounds like a lot of fun, but it might be a lot for Mom to take in. We'll see.

Then there are the gifts. Not the regular gifts; I mean the little trinkets and stocking stuffers that Dad always bought for Mom’s stocking. Bingo daubers and that kind of stuff. Weird kitchen utensils. Scratch tickets, of course (since we will be getting scratch tickets, too). I should probably also get her a bottle of her favorite perfume. It’s just like what I would buy her when I was nine, only the brand has changed, and unlike then, it won’t feel like the most important present in the world.

One event of late November that I’ve come to look forward to are end-of-the-year book lists. This week the New York Times released its list of Notable Books for 2009.

Two I have already read: Nicholson Baker’s The Anthologist and Colson Whitehead’s Sag Harbor. I'm also pretty sure I read an excerpt of Lorrie Moore's A Gate at the Stairs in a lit journal a while back. And this year I passed on the Updike because half of the stories in My Father’s Tears I have already read in the The New Yorker. You would think having no new Updike on the way would free up more time to read other authors, but now that Harvard has his archive I can only imagine that there will be letter collections and other ephemera on the way.

Other titles on the list that look interesting to me:

Fiction:
American Rust by Philipp Meyer
The Art Student’s War by Brad Leithauser
Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned by Wells Tower
Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann
Love and Obstacles: Stories by Alexander Hemon

In addition, not on the list but getting a lot of buzz: American Salvage by Bonnie Jo Campbell.

Nonfiction:
City Boy: My Life in New York During the 1960’s and ’70s by Edmund White
Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression by Morris Dickstein
>My Paper Chase: True Stories of Vanished Times by Harold Evans
Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work by Matthew Crawford
Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original by Robin D. G. Kelley

Currently I am finishing up James Rosenquist’s memoir Painting Below Zero. It’s a simply written book that talks about his life as a billboard painter, his connections to the Pop Art movement, and his thoughts on his own work as well as that of other artists. What has always interested me about Rosenquist was his ability to exist as part of a movement in the close proximity of some wild personalities (Warhol and others), yet not let those personalities (and their agendas) distract him from producing provocative art. He didn’t let the scene swallow him or sway his work. (He has admitted in interviews that he didn’t know many other Pop artists well other than Robert Rauschenberg and Roy Lichtenstein). To paint canvases the size of billboards, that had to be stored in airplane hangars, must have been incredibly labor-intensive; their continuation as these mammoth, permanent objects testifies toward the ethic and sweat that created them. They occupy a respectable space that not all work from that era does.

Rosenquist didn’t need to turn himself into a character like Warhol; for the most part he kept true to his North Dakota roots, and let Leo Castelli and his other dealers do the persuading. He’s also not afraid to talk about the processes behind his paintings—the roles of all of the symbols included and the message (or suggestion of a message) imparted by way of their juxtaposition. These explanations, while interesting, do become a little defensive at times, when they don’t need to be.

I can’t help but wonder if Rosenquist’s book will be the last look into the American postwar art circle offered by someone who actively took part in it. Most of the abstract expressionists are dead, as are Rauschenberg, Warhol, and Lichtenstein; Ed Ruscha is still working, I believe, as are Claes Oldenburg, Jasper Johns, and Cy Twombly. And David Hockney is all over the place, still, nowadays doing stuff with iPhone apps. But I’m not sure any of them have plans to write a memoir soon.

Major road construction continues to go on near the office, requiring me to take a ten-minute detour to work and causing the building to vibrate at intervals throughout the day. Naturally, this has given me a quasi-headache. The joke of it is that this neighborhood has much worse things wrong with it than crumbly roads. The conspiracy theorist in me tends to wonder if there’s a larger government element at play, that the mayor and his cabal are so embarrassed by the crime, decay, and filth that ferments these streets that they are trying to lay down as many obstacles as they can to fend off impressionable passersby. And since we and the students across the street at the community college have no choice but to be here, we get trapped between the barriers.

Murders—more than one, and on more than one occasion—have taken place mere yards from where I sit every day. They happen at night, usually, when we have packed up and gone home, though a few weeks ago around lunchtime I heard what I am pretty sure were gunshots—three in a row, in rapid succession. My normally soft-spoken boss, in the next cube over, heard them too, and muttered "Jesus Christ" under his breath. Later we saw police running around the building next door.

Our building is the sole relic of a downtown business district that thrived decades ago. Now, aside from the campus, we are surrounded by low-income residences and a boarded-up bodega. You need to get in your car if you want to go anywhere, usually. The neighbors have mostly left us alone, but they know we are here, and they remind us by way of the occasional car window (not mine) shot out by a pellet gun, or the purposefully timed casual strut across the street just as the traffic light turns green.

It’s not a safe place to hang around. And when five o’clock comes, getting out is a hazard, because the streets have been torn up and all that’s left is a giant hole in the ground.

It should be a nice stone. Red granite in a basic square with a rounded top, medium-sized. On the front, our last name in block letters, with a small banner underneath that reads TOGETHER FOREVER. On the reverse, Dad’s and Mom’s names and dates, then down below, a little image of interlocking wedding rings with a banner across showing their wedding date.

The owner of the business made a special trip to meet with us on Saturday, as that was the only day I could get out to Lynn. He knew my father, saw him on his morning walks around Wyoma Square. His office was a tiny one-room building with paneled walls and a bathroom off to the side. Outside were newly engraved stones for the recently deceased, still waiting to be placed. One was a double for a young mother and newborn baby, dead within a week of each other. The mother was just a year younger than me, but I didn’t recognize the name.

He made mockups on his computer, giving us an idea of how the letters would be spaced out. His laser printer took about four minutes to spit out each page. Apparently we will see a more detailed paper mockup in a couple of weeks. I guess they figure it’s important to double check the spelling and information since it’s not the kind of thing you can revise once it’s cut into the stone. The granite gets quarried up in Montreal, then trucked down to Vermont, and that’s where the carving and polishing are done. The stone won’t actually be set into the ground until November, hopefully before the first snow arrives. And once that is done, the last major loose end to tie up from this long, miserable year will be behind us.

A good crowd turned out for the Nicholson Baker reading and signing at Odyssey Bookshop last night. Mr. Baker read Chapter Two from his latest novel, The Anthologist, about a blocked poet named Paul Chowder struggling to write the introduction to an anthology of rhyming poems. About forty people showed up, I think.

I hadn’t realized how tall the man is. He stands about six foot five, and though they gave him a chair and table for the signing, he opted to stand to greet each person. His face was flushed, perhaps a sign that he is not very comfortable speaking in front of crowds. He is about as gentle in demeanor as he comes across in his writing.

He talked about his process, which was unique for this book. He set up a video camera and recorded himself in various locations around and near his home, dictating things he wanted in the book. Then after a while, he transcribed all the material he had, which made up most of what became the novel and also, I suspect, provided Paul Chowder’s somewhat digressive narration.

One person, an elderly man sitting next to me, asked him about card catalogs. In 1994, Baker published a 21-page article in The New Yorker documenting the then-novel trend of libraries to eliminate their paper card catalogs in favor of online cataloguing databases. Getting rid of the paper slips, with their decades of annotations by librarians, relegated to the dustbins a critical, historical aspect of libraries and knowledge that could not be reproduced electronically.

It seems like a lost battle now, but this, we realized, was our hook. Where H. and I work, we happen to have whole rows of card catalog files—not to hold book slips, but citations. The collection numbers in the millions and dates back to the beginning of the twentieth century, stamped at random intervals, with typewriter letters dropped off the line and editors’ notes in swishing, barely legible fountain-pen cursive. A person with the care and curiosity to write about the things Baker does would have a field day here. H. gave him her card and invited him to tour the office, and he actually seemed to light up at the idea, and even said that he would do it tomorrow (today) were he not due to give a reading in Vermont. The door is still open. He lives in Maine, and probably makes his way through New England a lot, so it’s not impossible.

In the meantime, I will start The Anthologist soon, but first I have to finish "So Little to Remember," Phillip Connors’ memoir of the aftermath of his brother’s suicide, in the newest n + 1.

Weekend mornings, I have found, are a good time to draw. There is a quiet in the house and, this time of year, interesting light as sun streaks though the blinds of the eastern window of my office. I have been doing a few hasty self-portraits as a way of getting back into the drawing habit. Some have come out better than others—in a couple I look life I’ve been socked in the jaw, or suffered an allergic reaction to penicillin—but it’s more the process I care about at this point. That’s because for all the times I bought the supplies and envisioned myself becoming someone who made the creation of art a regular part of his life, it was always the act of starting, of ruining the blank page and opening up a whole box of mistakes, that was the hardest part.

It has reminded me, warmly, of Captain Bob Cottle. He was the host of a drawing instruction show that aired locally on Channel 5 in Boston when I was little. It came on at 5:30 AM on Saturdays, so I had to get up before dawn if I wanted to catch it, and keep the volume down so I didn’t wake up the rest of the house.

The show was set in an old shanty—fishing nets and sailor’s wheels hung on the wall behind him—with a single camera trained on the drawing easel. Captain Bob wasn’t a hardened veteran of the sea (he apparently did his service in the Air Force), but he had the persona of a kindly, soft-spoken old man who probably liked to take his boat out alone on the Mystic River.

During the show he wanted his young viewers to draw along at home, so he used simple wax crayons, brandless and stripped of their wrappers, and blue-tinted paper so the TV lights wouldn’t cause glare. The subjects were scenes and animals from nature. He drew strictly from memory, without models, and emphasized basic forms and shapes. He rarely applied color until the last minute before signing off, probably figuring that coloring was something we already knew how to do.

In the middle of the program he took a break, and when he returned from commercial, he would pin up the drawings that viewers had tried at home and sent in to the station, pointing out the ones that stood out or showed imagination. I sent a couple of my drawings in, but I think by that time the show was in reruns.

All of this started because we tried to share.

That is what pushed them over the edge. That is what got them to mobilize. When we were sending teenagers to die in the desert based on false premises, they stayed home. When a little money was redirected so as to ensure their fellow citizens could afford an ER visit when they needed one, which could have been anytime—that is when they decided to breathe fire.

So they flocked down to Washington with their signs and teabags. They stayed at the nicest hotels. Some brought their golf clubs. A few brought their rifles. For once, rich white people had a voice.

Of course, it wasn’t even their voice. They had no time to script an honest objection so they had to borrow one. The best they could do was recite the lines fed to them by an actor, a pale and shiny man paid to appear on weeknight cable television to pretend to be outraged. Who, for some sick reason, wants us to return to that time when we were at our weakest and most confused, and our most fearful.

All these people suddenly so threatened by socialism, whatever that may be, couldn’t name any actual socialists if you spotted them the Eugene and the Debs.

All because we tried to share. Because we remember being taught that allowing the suffering of another to go on when it didn’t have to was immoral and inhumane. Helping your fellow citizen has somehow become a gross offense against the citizenry.

While sorting through my father’s belongings, my mother came across something extraordinary. Hidden in his dresser, beneath his pullover sweaters, was an envelope containing photos and clippings from a fishing trip that Dad took with some friends off Cape Ann in 1962.

( More, With Photos & Clips )

World War II began seventy years ago today, with the march of Nazis into Poland, but nobody seems to care. I’m not even that big a history buff, and when I realized yesterday that we were coming up on September 1 (I recognized the date, of course, from Auden), I felt a little guilty. But NPR has nothing but wildfires and texting-while-driving PSAs and CNN is worried over what’s going to happen to DJ AM’s reality show. (The reality is this: he’s dead.) The New York Times only has one article about Putin offering a backhanded "hang in there" to Polish citizens.

So if you hoping to learn a little something about how the deadliest war of the 20th century began, you’ll have to search around for it. The invasion happened a long time ago, and way over there.

And yet, ten days from now, we’ll be exhorted all day to never forget.

For my birthday I received $100 from my mother, a $25 Barnes & Noble gift card from S. & L. and the first season of thirtysomething on DVD from H. We are having dinner tonight at a nice Italian place over in Turners Falls, where I can get quality red-sauce pasta and not feel like I’m depriving myself of something better.

I am going to put the gift card toward the new James Rosenquist memoir, when it is finally released. The cash has, in effect, already been spent, so I will tell my mother that it went toward a new shirt and jeans and maybe a couple of DVDs. Which it did—only after the fact.

I am acutely aware of the harmful self-inspection that comes with re-watching thirtysomething now that I’m actually a qualified member of the club. I was a preteen when it debuted on ABC (September 1987), and even though I knew that there were a lot of jokes and insights I wasn’t meant to understand, I liked the show then. I even tried to catch reruns years later when they aired just before midnight on the women’s cable channel. Something about the way the ensemble cast interacted, joked with each other, and got distracted rang true with me.

Now, although still very enjoyable, it’s not so funny anymore. The glass wall is cracked. The characters are my peers (albeit twenty years removed), which seems like something that should never have happened. I am more inclined to judge them for their life decisions. Hope misses being an adult since having a baby, but she doesn’t want to leave Janie with a sitter. Even though trusty friends Elliott and Nancy, with two kids of their own, seem more than suited for the job, that’s never presented as an option. Single professional Ellyn, with her voice like a cracked radiator that new audio technology still hasn’t fixed, feels her friendship with Hope crumbling because she can’t stand Hope’s kid. At some point in my twenties I managed to grow up past these people. Their problems seem old-fashioned. Though it’s not fair that Michael and Elliott seem more secure in their jobs than I am in mine.

Over at Slate, Seth Stevenson, who also enjoyed the show long before he entered his actual thirties, gives his impressions.

Before I left Lynn last week, I went to visit Dad’s grave. It’s extremely easy to find—right near the Parkland Avenue entrance, two plots in from a couple of pine trees. Mom thought he would have liked those. We haven’t picked out a stone yet—Mom wants to wait until the next time I’m in town so my brother and I can go with her—but the one next to his is polished black with gold engraving, easy to spot from a distance.

I am not the type of person who prays, or even the type who needs those quiet moments to meditate or make a connection, but it was the first chance I had to be alone with my father since he passed, and even before that. Mom had a way of always being in the middle that wasn’t always helpful. Phone calls, even, had to involve the three of us—her standing by the phone making sure Dad could hear what I was saying, but in reality injecting herself into the conversation so that it wasn’t much more than an echo of what she and I had talked about five minutes before. 

It’s not that I feel like I have loose ends to tie up—I honestly feel like I told him all that I needed to tell him at his bedside. But still, the one-on-one time was nice. The weather outside was splendid. I sat on the grass, facing where the stone would go. I looked around at the stones of the surrounding rows, their rectangles crammed with long Greek and Polish names. KEREAKAGLOW. ANDROPOLOUS. STARKIEWICZ. His loving wife. Engraved images of the deceased, rendered from photographs the way they do tattoos now, hovered above some of the names (I will reject the upsell on that one). A lot of the birthdates weren’t all that long ago—people born after World War II, when Dad himself was a teenager. And yet I tell folks out in Western Mass about my father dying at 76 and they act all shocked, like he was young. I can only guess it’s a working class thing. Lynn is a city where people worked themselves to death in factories and subsisted on red meat, cheap beer and cigarettes. Where I live now, the baby boomers live proudly on bean sprouts, dried cherries, and bulgur wheat from the co-op. 

The dirt, freshly replaced, was still bare, grass seed sprinkled on top of the bed like parmesan cheese. He will need time to unpack and get settled. Just our luck, one of Dad’s neighbors appears to have been a young man whose kin are still coming to grips—instead of a stone, they have put up a makeshift shrine made of souvenirs. While I was visiting Dad, they showed up and plopped themselves down around the shrine with beach chairs, making clear they were going to be there for a while. I get that people do this, and I understand why, but it still seemed rather sad, and not in the mournful way. I tried to tune them out while I tended to my own business, finishing my thoughts, but as there wasn’t much left for me to go over and I had a road trip back home ahead of me, I stood up and walked back to my car.

My father died two weeks ago, and I’m not sure if writing about it here will help to put a comfortable finality to all that has gone on over the past two weeks or just to prolong a more distant kind that I haven’t reached yet.

It happened slowly, then quickly, which I guess is how it often happens. He had already been hospitalized for a blood clot when he went into cardiac arrest on Friday, the 10th. He was resuscitated, but his lungs, flooded with fluid, were too badly damaged to function on their own. We were all at his bedside when he died on the 16th. I told him I would take care of Mom, and repair the picnic table he made, and stake his tomato plants when they got tall enough to need it.

The wake was on July 20 (the 40th anniversary of the moon landing, I deigned to note for no reason), and the funeral was the next day. In the days leading up to them I put together a photo collage using photos from all of our collections. My favorites were the ones from the late ‘70s and early 80s, which showed Dad at his strongest and healthiest, wearing the dress shirt and slacks and the gold watch, sporting slick black hair, this swinging guy who, for a long time, had been a memory that I wasn’t quite sure I had down right, like a lyric I could hear in my head but couldn’t reproduce, before all the shit went down with his health.

We found out how many friends he had in all of the strangers who came up to me with hugs and handshakes, saying I was the spitting image of William, which I guess is true, and then, amusingly, saying they could see a resemblance in my brother, too, which is most emphatically not true, seeing as Scott was ten years old when my father became his stepfather. We did not try to correct anyone.

I returned back to work last Thursday, and of course condolences have poured in from all of my colleagues and Western Mass folks, and for some reason I keep finding myself feeling like I need to explain. “He was in frail health for a long time,” is how I start it off, which gets me back to the professional patient, which is exactly how I don’t want people to know him, even though his last 17 years—half of my own life—were filled with doctor’s appointments and pill schedules and overnight stays at Mass General.

Older people seem to think I’m too young to have a parent die. Their shock, frankly, comes across as a rather selfish affectation. People die at all ages. A lot of people in my family got beat up early and died at ages younger than Dad. My best friend lost his mother (to cancer) when he was a teenager. Dad was 42 when I was born (older than most other fathers on the block, I noticed early on), received a heart transplant at 59, and lived to the ripe age of 76—and, despite all that he was told he couldn’t do, refused to quit until his body quit for him. That was the way he wanted it. That was his grace.

Something must be wrong when Francis Fukuyama is giving a positive review to a book I think I may want to read.

Homeownership, and the careful financial decision-making it requires, has caused me to think more about my relationship to the things I own—how they are made, and what to do when they break down. We have a lot of projects around the house that need to be done—some more urgent than others—and I’d like to think there are more ways to approach them than to just call around to local contractors and find the best bids, even if that is the way we ultimately go.

My father was somewhat of a handyman. His projects were not particularly large-scale, more like the kind that filled a niche need. He built our family’s picnic table, along with the cradle in which I slept as an infant. He used a router to carve a sign with our address on it for our house, and he made another one with my name for my bedroom door. He tended to enjoy talking the game more than playing it, which is not to say he wasn’t a good craftsman. He was an excellent one. The weekends were rare occasions when he had access to the TV, and popular viewing for him was the Saturday home-improvement shows on PBS like This Old House and The New Yankee Workshop ("The Shakers would take one month to hand-carve this child’s crib…but we’re going to reproduce their work in a half-hour using a miter saw.") and once in a while The Victory Garden.

He was less keen with cars, which is odd since engines (airplanes) were his profession. He didn’t risk fiddling with our cars but he knew when to take them in. We had a Ford Fairmont station wagon with a shot fan belt that, when the ignition was turned over, caused a screech that could be heard as far as Waltham.

In junior high I took two years of wood shop, which gave us something to talk about. I also took typing, art, music, mechanical drawing (I still have the pencil they gave me), and computer science (learning to program in BASIC and Logo). For wood shop I made a small corner knickknack shelf, a planter which I never finished, and a magazine rack which I stained but didn’t shellac and which is now serving as my bedside table. I got okay grades—although the projects came out all right, I was slow in getting them finished. I was a perfectionist. Could never seem to get the wood sanded evenly, so I fell behind.

I will be thinking of those classes when I try to salvage the picnic table. It is thirty years old, made out of redwood, and rotted in places from being left out in the rain. That will be my first major home improvement project.

#

Remember the first Dyson vacuum commercial? It ran about five years ago. It showed Mr. Dyson himself explaining how he came to invent the Dyson vacuum cleaner. The vacuum he was using wasn’t working very well, so he took it apart and saw that the filters were too clogged to make the machine useful. So, rather than call the toll-free number to bitch and whine to nobody, or drive to Target to get a replacement, he takes the initiative to design a better model. And “a few thousand prototypes later,” he finds a working solution.

Never mind that the Dyson vacuum is probably a piece of shit in its own right. The sentiment of the commercial is genius. It identifies a problem presented to us by a man who is unafraid to admit that he does his own housework. It proceeds to remind us that the aggravation we feel when our devices fail to fulfill their functions is supposed to be the point where human innovation begins. What happened to us to forget this? Was it the specialization of labor? The fact that CEOs and product developers never cultivate the intimacy with a machine the way that factory workers do? Could this be the reason we have seemingly lost the ability to build a reliable car?

Fukuyama offers a guess:

The fact of the matter is that most forms of real knowledge, including self-knowledge, come from the effort to struggle with and master the brute reality of material objects — loosening a bolt without stripping its threads, or backing a semi rig into a loading dock. All these activities, if done well, require knowledge both about the world as it is and about yourself, and your own limitations. They can’t be learned simply by following rules, as a computer does; they require intuitive knowledge that comes from long experience and repeated encounters with difficulty and failure.

Expertise with things permits human beings to have agency over their lives — that is, their ability to exert some control over the myriad faucets, outlets and engines that they depend on from day to day. Instead of being able to top up your engine oil when it is low, you wait until an “idiot light” goes on on the dashboard, and you turn your car over to a bureaucratized dealership that hooks it up to a computer and returns it to you without your having the faintest idea of what might have been wrong.

I was hoping that Louis Menand’s article about MFA programs in last week’s New Yorker would finally put to bed any notions I may have had about joining one. That didn’t really happen.

I haven’t been thinking about it much recently, probably because I have a new home that is keeping me occupied and I am more or less content with my job. And while it seems as though I can never sustain the kind of momentum I demand from myself, I have actually been doing some writing this year (fiction and nonfiction), and I have a couple of stories that I’ve been sending out to literary magazines. I think as long as I can say that I am steadily working to improve my writing for the possibility of publication, even without that actually happening, I should feel fulfilled.

But it’s hard not to feel, after reading Menand’s piece, that the pursuit is a futile one. Spend your days writing for the drawer and that is where all your work will end up. If you open up an issue of Tin House or even one of the more “reachable” magazines, like Cream City Review, you will see that just about every contributor listed in the back is a graduate of an MFA program, earning their living income through a fellowship or a teaching job somewhere. There is clearly a line between those writers considered serious in their craft—professional writers—and those considered amateurs, and that line is marked by a giant stone obelisk that is the Master of Fine Arts degree in Creative Writing.

Menand’s article is ostensibly a review of a new book by Mark McGurl entitled The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing, which, as its subtitle implies, pins creative writing programs as a late-20th-century phenomenon. Most of the well-known American fiction writers of today—from Joyce Carol Oates to Jonathan Safran Foer—earned their stripes through some kind of creative writing program. Michael Chabon’s first book, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, was his master’s thesis at UC-Irvine. It got published after his professor submitted it to a literary agent without Chabon’s knowledge.

Despite what seems apparent from the evidence, both Menand and McGurl seem to believe that these programs do nothing to make people better writers. That, they claim, is neither their virtue nor their intent. If anything, they are valuable because they give students a time and a place to do their work while observing and comparing how other students do their own. It both removes and sharpens the self-consciousness of the writing crusade. Menand himself did not participate in an MFA program, but he was in his share of workshops. What he brought out of them is this: “I don’t think the workshops taught me too much about craft, but they did teach me about the importance of making things, not just reading things. You care about things that you make, and that makes it easier to care about things that other people make.”

I got a taste of this in my last two years of undergrad, both in one creative-writing class and a handful of painting and drawing classes. The painting classes seemed to teach me more about what I wanted to do as a creator and how I wanted to think as a critic. You finished a painting, and you put it up in front of the class, and the artist would explain what he was trying to do and whether or not he thought he achieved it. Then the class would offer points about what they liked and what they didn’t. You could consider the work as a whole because the whole was in front of everybody. With writing, the format didn’t work so well—we read our stories aloud to the class, and people remembered which parts jumped out at them, judging the story more for how much it differed from anything we would write ourselves. You were not able to devote much time to finding your voice because of all the time spent devoted to managing each other’s petty issues.

But as I say, that was undergrad, at a college that wasn’t exactly known for its humanities curriculum. If that experience taught me anything about the importance of making things, the lesson did not get through any more succinctly than in any number of other areas of my life, including my current occupation. Writing, we are told, is supposed to be a lonely profession. You have to be willing to get yourself completely lost in your own little made-up world without knowing exactly how to get out. It’s possible I’ve taken this instruction too literally, as I have never been one to allow others to influence my creative process. I find I write best—that is, most prolifically, when I am not worried about my voice, how something I write will sound, and not working to force a narrative from one point to another. The process of writing—the trial and the failure, and the lessons learned from it—is supposed to be its own reward. I should be seeking out opportunities to do more of it.

The technician at the blood lab said, “You’re becoming a regular.” Then she said, “Knock it off.” I’ve only been three times in two weeks, but it’s enough so that I know to go straight to the lab window without stopping at reception. Yesterday she drew five vials, more than before. Fortunately she’s never had trouble finding the vein.

We don’t know what I have, if anything. When I first went to see the doctor, I figured it was just an allergy. A rash had developed on my hands and up my arms, and my tongue was swollen enough to affect my speech. I had been working in the yard a lot, spreading wood chips for mulch. Mold might have set into the mulch pile. But the symptoms didn’t match those of a contact allergy, and I had no apparent insect bites, so the doctor wondered if I was reacting to sun exposure. Having never suffered such issues before, this begged the further question of what might be triggering it.

After my first blood test, she called to tell me my white blood cell count was alarmingly low. The technical term was neutropenia. The rash and tongue swelling were likely effects of low immune function. But further tests needed to be done to figure out what was behind it. Aloud we wondered about lupus (rare in males, but broached by the doctor); silently we considered leukemia. In the meantime, the rash disappeared, and the swelling on my tongue went down. I do still have some cankers in my mouth, as I have had off and on all my life, and otherwise I feel fine.

A week later I went in for a second blood test, which showed my white blood cell count back up to normal levels. We breathed sighs of relief. Only thing was, I was also coming up anemic. That prompted the third test yesterday, and I go back to see the doctor in two weeks.

We are trying to remain cautious with our optimism, and I’m still wearing long sleeves in the sun and slathering myself in lotion. If it’s anemia, that’s at least somewhat easily treatable. It might help to explain a few other things, like why my energy level seemed so sapped for a while there, and maybe why my bowling has gone downhill (despite being off to a good start in my summer league). Plus it finally gives me a legitimate excuse for not donating when the Bloodmobile rolls up.

We have two fallen trees and a pile of wood chips in our backyard. The trees were dying and needed to be cut down. The soil around one of the trees had been replaced by a previous owner, but it was apparently the wrong kind of soil, and it ended up suffocating the roots. The second tree was being cramped out by the driveway. So now they are gone.

We have been using the wood chips for mulch along one side of the house. In the back we are going to start a raised-bed garden for vegetables. We measured out the rectangles, and we used branches from the cut-down trees to make garden borders. Next we have to turn up the soil. That will probably happen this weekend.

The trunks are lying across the yard, right where we left them. We are going to turn it into firewood, which our neighbors (who had a tree of their own cut down) are going to buy from us. So even though the tree work cost us a bit of money, we’re making some of it back.

We often forget how spacious our backyard is. It is sort of a rolling hill that marches further down into a gully far beyond the end of the garage. On the right it trails off into some woods where our neighbor allows us to dump our leaves and dead branches in the fall.

The hill behind the garage is a sledder’s paradise. We learned this last winter, our first month in the house, when our neighbors K. & Z. asked if they could sled on it with their two children. It is easy to see why—the hill is not too steep and offers a pretty clear landing stretch at the bottom. The land is pretty brambly during the warmer months—we don’t mow down there—and teeming with who knows what kind of animal life, but in winter the brambles are covered by the snow and the animals off hibernating somewhere.

It didn’t take long for word about the hill to spread to other neighbors. When children we didn’t know started showing up, we started to become wary about liability issues. There are parts of the yard that cannot be seen from the house, so a kid who takes a header down the hill and hurts himself isn’t likely to be seen. Not to mention the fact that we never agreed to be babysitters.

We arrived at what we felt was a reasonable rule—no sledding unless an adult is there to provide supervision. The parents who have been using the hill from the beginning have no problem with this; they were doing that anyway. On the flipside, there are a handful of kids who have made themselves welcome to Zougwaride Mountain without so much as telling us who they were. Two of them were out there yesterday, doing snowboard jumps, despite the fact that temperatures were in the 50s and the majority of the ground was bare.

They tried to play it cool when they saw me coming. When I told them they couldn’t be there without supervision, the bolder of the two, the one who has trespassed through our yard in non-winter seasons, said, “I’m nine, he’s ten, we’re good”—good in the you-don’t-need-to-worry-about-us-mister sense of the word. I told them I didn’t care, our rule was our rule, everyone had to follow it. The alpha mouthed off to me under his breath. I tried to glean from them where they lived, and the alpha motioned vaguely to one of the houses the next block over. He and his friend left through the woods, using the shortcut from whence they came, puttering and grumbling along the way.

We are going to put up a fence, once we work out costs and talk to the neighbor. I have officially become the grouchy homeowner who shoos children off his property, and I have no regrets about that.