It’s been six months since I last posted here. I’ve known for nearly that long that I’d be putting this blog to bed. It’s time to write a few words about why.
“Putting this to bed” is a term I probably learned in my first weeks of journalism school when I worked on the copy desk at The Post, Ohio University’s student newspaper. Every night Sunday through Thursday, we’d write the last headlines, give everything one more look after the layout guys completed their work, pile into a car, and take the pages — safe in a big flat box — to the printing plant. After that, we’d often pile into a booth at a late-night diner. We’d do it again the next day, yet in the news cycles of the 1980s, each day had an ending: a chance to say, OK, that’s done.
Endings are a lot blurrier these days. It’s been months since I’ve felt compelled to write here. But how do I know when I am done? How does anyone know when anything is finished?
The easiest answer is that I am practicing something I’ll be doing for the rest of my life, and especially my professional life: letting go. For a very long time, work was a big source of meaning for me. Now it’s not. For decades, I have processed things by “writing out loud” about them. Now I’m more likely to do so while walking alone or talking with friends, and often while traveling — my greatest source of meaning and revelation.
As I wrote last summer when I turned 60, I likely have a third of my life ahead of me. I want to spend a steadily decreasing amount of it looking at a screen of any kind. I also know that the media landscape I grew up in no longer exists and I have little taste for the frenetic new one; I have no desire to build a platform, launch a podcast, or even spend much time on social media.
With my good health and modest means, it will be wise and necessary for me to keep working most of this decade. But I have already arrived at a place where being content is more precious to me than producing content. My part-time job in guest services is the work I love the most, yet I’ll have no trouble completely giving up a paycheck of any kind when I know the time is right. Meanwhile, I will keep doing good work, but steadily less of it, as I continue on the glide path toward that time.
And so it is — and it has been — time to put this blog to bed. In this complicated world, may we all embrace and enjoy closure when we find it, without regrets and in the spirit of curiosity. That goes for love, for work, and ultimately for life itself.
Hello, friends. Although I haven’t been writing much, I’ve been living plenty. Today’s post comes to you from a tiny room in a rambling 115-year-old inn on Vashon Island, and I have a feeling I’m going to ramble a bit, too, but that’s OK.
Until Monday, I’d never been to Vashon, even though it is a 20-minute ferry ride from West Seattle, and plenty of people commute from here — remotely or twice a day on the ferry. It remains mostly rural, and it is graced by many parks and laced by miles of trails. I’ve already hiked many of them on this brief visit, about 15 miles over the past two days, mostly through forests but also along the shores of Puget Sound.
My new apartment in Seattle is great. It has the quiet I crave, but it has little natural light and no views at all. So as long as I live there, and I hope it will be a few years, I will have even more incentive than usual to go outside — not that I need much incentive. That’s why, when I saw the forecast for plenty of sun and little rain for a few days early this week, I decided to make a quick trip somewhere I could spend most of the daylight hours outdoors. Vashon has not disappointed me.
How I wound up in the Marjesira Inn is a mystery, but it’s clear I was meant to come here. I went to Airbnb and looked at a little beach shack I rented on the Washington coast last February, but it wasn’t available. I zoomed out, saw a $45 listing, and landed on Vashon Island. Why not? As I said, I’ve never been here. The reviews and the price point made it clear that the Marjesira isn’t for everyone: It’s a funky blend of hostel and rooming house. You’re sharing a kitchen and bathrooms. You hear your neighbors. But it’s a magical spot steeped in history, and I’m sure I’ll be back.
In my last post, I mentioned the Free Will Astrology horoscope I found on my last trip, during my January stay in Astoria, Oregon. “You will receive substantial assistance from life whenever you work on the intention to clarify and define the specific longings that are most essential to you,” Rob Brezsny wrote. A quiet place to live was my most specific longing, and now I have that. But my longest-lived longing is my desire to travel — and I travel frequently because it helps me keep my eyes and perspective fresh. At sunrise this morning, alone in the inn’s front room, I spotted a book, Pronoia is the Antidote to Paranoia: How the Whole World is Conspiring to Shower You with Blessings by … Rob Brezsny.
Sharing a bit of conversation with Marjesira’s caretaker this morning as we made our breakfasts, I mentioned how, although I am a dedicated minimalist, I was enjoying the century’s worth of accumulated stuff packed into this old inn. As always, travel was helping me see with new eyes.
As we talked, Jacqui was braiding her hair — something she hadn’t done in a while, she said, but she was on her way to a school visit as a wilderness educator and she wanted to feel like a kid again. She wanted to see the world through their eyes.
The world is in a world of hurt right now, big time, and there’s one man who certainly is not conspiring to shower it with blessings. Travel is a tonic unless it’s a forced march, and my heart is with the refugees streaming out of Ukraine toward an uncertain future. It’s hard for any of us to know what is going to happen next: with this unnecessary war, with the climate, with the pandemic, or with baseball. (Sorry, I know that the breakdown in the sport’s contractual talks are far from a key global concern, but my part-time job at the ballyard is a big part of my income and my social life.)
Yet I do know this, and I mainly know it because I travel: The world is a beautiful place, my stay here is finite, I am here for the adventure, and I am bound by the beauty. This gorgeous song from Jane Siberry pops up in my head every so often when I am feeling especially deep gratitude for the world. Enjoy — and to those of you in the Northern Hemisphere, happy almost-spring.
A few housekeeping notes: Two recent posts have disappeared off the main feed here at Surely Joy. It’s a mystery, but you can find them here, if you missed them:
I opened the door to my new place last spring and heard a noise I hadn’t heard when I looked at the apartment. Maybe it’s the bathroom fan upstairs, the property manager said. But it wasn’t; it was my brand-new refrigerator, and I’d soon learn that it runs loudly and long, more than half of every hour. This wouldn’t be a problem in a big house, but in a studio apartment with my bed about 10 feet away, it wasn’t good. This was especially dispiriting since I’d just moved from an apartment I really liked for two years until the rattle and hum of a new generator at the nearby light rail construction project kicked in to keep me awake at night.
The fridge was the only serious noise issue for a while, until new folks moved into the apartment above mine last summer. Whether due to work schedules or insomnia, they were often up all night. After being jolted awake by the agitator of a washing machine at 3 a.m. a few times within a week — their laundry stack was right above my bed — I wrote a note asking them not to do laundry in the wee hours. Happily, they stopped, but even their normal walking-around noises in the cheaply built structure were enough to interfere with a good night’s rest.
With my lease expiring in early March and a rent increase coming, I decided late last year to see if I could find a new place. I realized that come 2022, I’d be eligible to apply for an “affordable” apartment in a 61+ community since I turn that age this year. I visited one a few blocks from me, where they offered a big discount and a free month. The apartment was far from perfect in its layout, but it seemed quiet, and its well-below-market price was a steal. I got the extensive paperwork together just before Christmas so the manager could submit the application right after the holidays.
It was a mirage. By the last week of January, my application seemed mired in a black hole of bureaucracy, and I was nearing the date when I need to give notice at my current apartment, so I started looking elsewhere. After losing out on one apartment I liked, I knew I’d need to act quickly if I saw another one I wanted. (To prevent discrimination, Seattle has a law that a landlord must rent to the first qualified tenant who applies.)
I also decided to look beyond Craigslist to see what might be flying under the radar. That’s how, on a neighborhood walk last Thursday, I saw a building I hadn’t noticed before, with a sign out front for a local property management company. There was no indication an apartment was becoming available, but I checked the company’s website on Friday morning and saw a listing for a one-bedroom unit at a good price. I immediately asked for a showing, I liked what I saw, I went online to apply Friday night, and by Tuesday morning, I heard that it was mine.
My seventh kitchen in a decade.
Things happen — or they don’t — for a reason. Although the idea of a cheap-apartment-for-life at the senior place was enticing, I was born restless. I definitely hope to spend at least two years, maybe even three, at this new address. But after that, with the pandemic firmly behind us, perhaps I’ll finally pursue my long-held dream of putting what little I own in a small storage unit and traveling for a year or two.
Although I’m not an astrology buff, I spotted my January horoscope from the cheeky Free Will Astrology column. “You will receive substantial assistance from life whenever you work on the intention to clarify and define the specific longings that are most essential to you,” it said. For now, my biggest longing is to end a year of sleep deprivation. “Peace and tranquility,” my dad used to say whenever my brother and I asked him what he wanted for his birthday or for Christmas. We’d laugh and laugh, but now I get it — and hopefully, I’ll have it.
I really need to read some John Keats, specifically the piles of letters he wrote alongside his poems.
For now, I’m reading Stephen Batchelor writing about Keats, describing his concept of “negative capability.” That sounds like something I’d rather avoid, especially in a season when I am simultaneously still sad over the end of a too-brief affair and feeling fresh sorrow over an angry snub from a dear relative. As Batchelor describes the trait in his new book The Art of Solitude, Keats said negative capability exists when a person “is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” In other words, someone who is comfortable with ambiguity, someone who dwells in equanimity. These are traits I prize and try to live by, but with my emotions running more ragged than usual this autumn, I’ve fallen short.
Why did my summer lover pursue another despite our transcendental times together? It’s a mystery I can’t solve. Why did my relative lash out at me? I may never fully know. Batchelor writes, “In letting go of — ‘negating’ — reactivity, one discovers a greater capacity — ‘capability’ — to respond to life.” In Buddhist terms, Batchelor adds, “to experience nirvana is to experience freedom from those attachments and opinions that prevent your own imaginative response to the situations you face in life.”
Freedom from attachments. In retrospect, I wish I could have more readily acknowledged my friend’s fickle nature so I wouldn’t have spent two months bereft and berating myself over the loss of a liaison that barely lasted that long.
Freedom from opinions. I wanted so badly to explain my passion for open-hearted travel to my relative, but he wanted none of it. Had I accepted that instead of trying to press my case, it may have saved us some serious heartbreak.
Each of us has our own narrative. As a journalist, I’m naturally interested in helping people share and even craft their stories, and I usually do so skillfully and with great care. Yet as an essayist, I ought to know that my tale is the only one I can tell with any hope of authenticity — and that much as I may want to edit someone else’s experience, I simply can’t do that. I am grateful for the recent life lessons that illuminated this truth for me, painful as the instruction has been.
Speaking of solitude and of travel, I am midway through a 10-day stay in Tijuana, happily ensconced in a cheap Airbnb near the ocean, easily forgetting what day it is. It is good to be here, good to have even more unstructured time than usual to read, write, think, sleep, and walk (but not sleepwalk). I’d hoped to have company for a few days and nights when I booked this spot in September, but it is fine, if sometimes lonely, to be alone. We live, we love, we learn, each of us ever-evolving, if we are lucky.
I wrote last week about how we are never sure when we might be doing something for the last time. Since then, I realized I had a very narrow window of opportunity to ride Amtrak along the Puget Sound south of Tacoma before passenger rail service stops taking the long way around this Thursday. So I did, catching the 2:20 pm train from Seattle today for a quick round-trip to Centralia.
There was so much to love about this stretch of tracks: the brief glimpse of a waterside village that’s only accessible by boat. The soaring Tacoma Narrows Bridge. The stark beauty of Chambers Bay Golf Course, and of cormorants in shadow, sunning themselves on pilings along the Nisqually Reach. The ferry from Steilacoom to Anderson Island. Families strolling along the beach, waving at a train that won’t be by again after Wednesday.
Amtrak had planned to abandon these tracks four years ago. On December 18, 2017, trains were slated to begin using the Point Defiance Bypass, an inland route intended to shave a few miles and minutes off the schedule. But the very first train to attempt the new route that morning derailed at a high rate of speed, killing three people and injuring 62.
Given the thorough investigations and the pandemic, it has taken a while for everyone involved to ensure that the bypass is safe. I’ll actually be back on the train this Thursday, boarding one of the first trains scheduled to use the newly resurrected route as Amtrak tries again. I didn’t plan it that way, having booked a southbound ticket to California several months ago, but I guess I’ll help make some history.
Am I afraid? I am not. Am I happy I made time to take the train on one of its final trips along the Sound? Indeed I am. I’ll miss that run, and of course I will always question the wisdom of forsaking sublime beauty to save a little bit of time. Rest in peace, long way around.
“I’m taking the train to take time for my thoughts …”
I’ll never forget the first time I heard Gabriel Kahane, toward the end of 2018. I was standing in the kitchen of the house I’d shared with Tom, and Kahane was a guest on the late great radio show Live From Here. The songwriter explained how, the day after the presidential election two years earlier, he’d climbed aboard a train to ride 8,980 miles around America. The idea was to see people face to face, talk with them, turn their stories into songs, and see whether music could maybe bridge some of what divides us as a country. Transfixed by that introduction, this rail devotee eagerly sought out Kahane’s work, especially Book of Travelers, the album based on his post-election trip.
In January 2019, Kahane came to the Triple Door, my favorite Seattle club. I sat by myself at a table for two, off to the side of the room, but still feeling awkward and adrift in the small venue where I’d seen many shows with Tom. It didn’t matter; I needed to hear these songs live, and Kahane — onstage alone, with no backup band and minimal patter for the audience — seemed a bit lost at sea, too. He let the music do the talking for him, as he did later in the year on a rainy fall night at the University of Washington’s Meany Center, one of the last concerts I’d see before the pandemic.
Kahane was back at the Meany Center last Saturday, so of course I was there, seeing him for the third time on another rainy November night. He opened with a song that posed the question, and I am paraphrasing: What if this were the last show I ever get to play? More personable now, married and the father of a three-year-old, full of songs and stories of a year spent away from the Internet (the basis for his next album, due in 2022), Kahane played for 75 minutes, all of us except him masked for the duration, all of us grateful to be there hearing live music. He ended his set with the same song with which he’d begun, prefaced this time with its backstory.
It was early March 2020 and he had to take two planes to get to a small-town show. After the concert, a nice woman named Lisa drove him to his motel — nothing special, she said, except for the cows. Make sure you see the cows. The next morning, after making a waffle at the breakfast bar, Kahane looked out the window, saw 25 cows, and turned the scene into a bedtime story for his daughter: Let’s count the cows. His little girl couldn’t get enough of the story, and neither could her papa, who told it countless times during the pandemic. It put his kid to sleep, and it gave him a chance to relive that last pre-COVID show one more time.
It’s human nature to hope we haven’t experienced our last time doing something. I recently wrote a magazine story about how many of us have lacked physical contact during the pandemic, starting it with a line I penned in my journal in March 2020: What if I never get to hug anyone ever again? Twenty months ago, for someone living alone as the world shut down, that was not a rhetorical question.
Amid his new work, Kahane sang three songs from Book of Travelers. I know every note and nuance of these songs; they sustained me as no other music could in the second half of the first year after Tom died. He started with “Baedeker,” a hymn to travel and to maps, then he segued into “Baltimore,” a song about loss and reckoning. As soon as he sang the line with which I started this post, I found myself weeping softly into my mask, ambushed by the first sneaker wave of grief I’d felt in a long while, my emotions swirling past me into a present in which I’m missing both Tom and my summer companion amid a new season of overly complicated romantic geometry.
Four times during the first two years after Tom died, I took long-distance trains as a means of connecting with my memories of our life together: how we’d squeeze into a tiny Amtrak roomette, make a list of all the train songs we could think of, watch movies on his laptop, and just watch the world roll by. How we’d talk with strangers during communal meals in the dining car, holding hands beneath the table as we waited for our food. My memories and tears continued as Kahane played “Little Love,” a song about two people who hope to simply fade away together, the kind of life I wish I’d been able to experience with Tom, except he prematurely disappeared into the long gray silence.
I’m still here, vaguely restive with a reawakened desire that has left me feeling lonelier than ever for a specific set of arms. I could use some time on a train.
Fortunately, I’ll soon be climbing aboard the southbound Coast Starlight for a 23-hour ride to California and my family’s Thanksgiving gathering. I could make the same journey in a few hours by air, but I’d rather take the train to take time with my thoughts, to be in motion while sitting still, to be rocked to sleep, and to be grateful for all the experiences that I may or may not have again.
This week’s videos are of “Baltimore” and “Baedeker.” You can learn more about Gabriel Kahane and his music here. (There’s a lot to know.) Enjoy, and in case I don’t get back here before November 25, happy Thanksgiving, and thanks for reading Surely Joy.
A story in this morning’s Seattle Times noted how this city is apparently the most stressed-out major metro in the United States, with more than 54 percent of folks here telling a U.S. Census Bureau survey team that they felt “nervous, anxious, or on edge” for at least several days during the preceding two weeks. Reporting the story, Gene Balk noted that the Census Bureau has only been asking the question since the pandemic began, so it’s hard to know whether this is a new development or a long-standing one, but we’ve ranked either number one or number two in surveys taken since July 2021.
Balk deals in data, yet he noted, “This is purely anecdotal, but I see a tremendous number of Seattleites masked up even when they’re walking outside,” at “extremely low risk of contracting the virus.” I’ve noticed this, too, and it’s very strange. Even with COVID-19 cases dropping, I get why we need to keep masking up in stores and on transit; I’m fine with that, it makes sense, and I’ll be wearing a mask on any bus ride or flight I take for the foreseeable future. But at this point — at least for healthy, vaccinated people — masking up outdoors in uncrowded settings seems like so much virtue-signalling hygiene theater, which is actually a very Seattle thing. Lighten up, folks.
My lax attitude toward masking up does not extend to the excellent news that many of us are now eligible for COVID-19 booster shots. On October 21, the CDC authorized boosters for all people 18 and older who’d received the Johnson & Johnson vaccine at least two months ago. I was getting a flu shot when the news broke, so I decided to give my arm a rest for a bit, but I signed up online for a vaccination slot at a local pharmacy late last week. It was such a cake walk compared to the months of waiting for my first shot last spring.
When I showed up last Friday, I was prepared to get a J&J booster because I thought, as a healthy 60-year-old, that’s all I could get. But the pharmacy tech said no, I could have whatever I wanted, so I got a Moderna booster, and I now feel like I have the best possible chance at continuing to keep the bugs at bay (or to have a mild case if I wind up a “breakthrough” statistic). As the National Institutes of Health found in a study this summer, J&J recipients who got a Moderna booster saw a 76-fold jump in antibodies that neutralize the coronavirus, the best outcome of all the combinations studied.
All gain, no pain: I had a sore arm for about a day after the shot and that was it, but even people who report losing a day or two to side effects from the vaccine say it’s totally worth it to know they’re protected against serious illness. Meanwhile, many Americans are still holding out on getting this protection, but it’s good to know that their numbers continue to dwindle — not because they’re getting sick and dying of COVID, though that is tragically still happening, but because they’ve decided it makes no sense to remain unvaccinated. Whether we continue to mask up indoors or roll up our sleeves for a shot, we’re all looking out for one another.
As I’ve written before, fear seems to be at the heart of so much of what ails our country these days, and fear has certainly driven much of our response to a pandemic that is running on far longer than it needed to. The trick is to identify what we truly need to fear and focus on what we can do most effectively to mitigate those risks so we can fearlessly embrace everything else life has to offer.
A note about this week’s video: I found this one while searching for a good take of Josh Ritter’s song “Long Shadows,” which — along with Dan Hicks’ “I Scare Myself” — was going through my head as I composed this post. It’s a one-take video shot on an iPhone! Very cool. As I mentioned in my last dispatch, I’ve been on a novel-reading tear this fall, and Josh’s new book The Great Glorious Goddamn of It All was a real treat. He is a renaissance man in a band full of them. Enjoy.
“Which do you think is bigger? Outer space or inner?” — Robbie Byrne to his father, Theo, in Bewilderment
Have you ever finished a book and wanted to immediately read it all again? I’ve just had that experience with Bewilderment, the new novel from Richard Powers. But because I have so many other books waiting, I settled for re-reading its first few pages and its last few pages, savoring those passages for now. I had the same impulse with Powers’ previous book, The Overstory; as soon as I finished it in 2018, I wanted to read it again, preferably over a few days in the woods. But it was a much bigger book that originally took me weeks to read, and it’ll be a while (maybe next summer?) before I get back to it.
Bewilderment is, at its heart, a love story about a father and son and the woman whom they both loved, a woman who loved them both but not quite as much as she loved the world and all the things in it. I read it quickly over a few days mostly spent outdoors, taking in its final 50 pages or so sitting by a lake yesterday afternoon, leaves falling all around me. It was the perfect book to read on the cusp of a summer I was sorry to see come to an end and an autumn that I tentatively welcome, as if I had any choice in the matter.
That’s not to say it is an easy book to digest. Powers finished this book mid-pandemic, shortly before the election last fall. The uncertainty its characters feel is palpable, because it is what we are all living through: environmental devastation, authoritarianism’s creep, and the way our market economy seeks to define and solve every malady with a diagnosis and a pill.
The beauty of Bewilderment is how it resists despair and ameliorates anxiety. It insists that each of us is perfect in our imperfection; that although we can never fully know another person, empathy is possible; that our interior lives are full universes unto themselves; and that a rich inner life can help us survive the pain we’re inflicting on the world. Bewilderment is a book to read in the spirit I think it was written, a mix of hope, resolve, and wild abandon — which seems like a good way to live right now, too.
Bewilderment is a book to read outside, if you can.
