In Hindsight

I'm reading a memoir by Roger Angell, whose baseball writing is of the most poetic sort. I'll never forget his description of a World Series won the the clearly inferior team, where he "invented" a fictional Series where a chain of increasingly outlandish events occurred, culminating in an improbably victory. The details, of course, were exactly what had happened in the actual Series. Genius. Maybe my favorite piece of baseball writing ever.

Anyway, in this memoir, which is definitely not an autobiography, Angell's ongoing theme is how frustrating it is that all of the vivid and complex events and personalities of a liftetime are reduced to a series of anecdotes. Which I guess takes me back to why I write this stuff in the first place. I'm trying not to lose the details, specifically of this trip, but more generally of my life. If someone asked me now about my trip to Italy I'd say, "It was great," or "It was cool," or something like that, and then recount an anecdote or two. And I don't want that to be all that's left in my memory. So I'm hoping this will be more.

The book also contains a wonderful little throwaway line about writing. "He always sounded like himself, which is the whole trick." And as I exit the travelogue chapter of this blog, it's back to just sounding like myself, and since I feel more at home with myself now than I have in a long time, I'm hopeful that I can be more successful at it.

Tomorrow is kid intensive. Visitng day at camp for one kid, picking up after a month-long study trip in Spain for the other. Weird to have not seen and barely have spoken to either of my kids for a month. It's very intense with 2 teenage girls in the house most of the time, so it's been a nice break to have them gone but I miss them too.