Today marks two months for Big Man Getting Smaller, and 32 pounds gone. It is working, and I can already tell that it is working a little better now that the Red Sox are finished keeping me up past midnight. I appreciate the warmth of the feedback I have gotten from so many people who have been in touch with me in various ways about this blog, and even the fact that at times the central struggle of BMGS seems shared. We are doing it.
Which leads me to share some thoughts about another writer’s efforts….
A good friend of a good friend (does that make her a pretty good friend? I’d like to think so) writes a regular column for her community’s weekly paper, the Free Press down in North Attleboro, and I have become a frequent reader. Written under the column title “This Too Shall Pass,” Donna’s work is a little bit Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City, a little bit Beans of Egypt, and all her own. I get something good from it each time I give myself the time to sit with it for a few moments.
Last week she did a bit of a retrospective on how her homestead came to be known as Poverty Flats in the column, and how the column itself came to be and evolved along with her family. Having lived for a while in what my family and out neighbors called “Poverty Hollow” in Sandwich as a child, in a family that was by no means conventional, I was predisposed to identify with what she wrote.
A couple of paragraphs in particular caught my eye because they shed some light, as Donna wrote about the place of her column in her life and the life of her family, on the importance that this Big Man Getting Smaller blog has taken on for me:
“My children have grown up in the pages of the Free Press, and relatives and friends have kept up with life here at the Flats. I guess you might say that This Too Shall Pass was the original blog which you didn't need a computer to enjoy.”
And, earlier on:
“Through it all, my column has kept me off a shrink's couch, and saved loads in medication costs. It helps one's ability to deal with the ups and down of daily life to be able to write about the events and have other humans read and share the load. I have no idea why this works but it does.”
Well, yeah, exactly. Writing in interesting, witty, and self-examining ways about our lives, as Donna does, takes some time, patience and guts, but there are rewards. It isn’t something that everyone can do.
It puts things in perspective, and without presuming too much on my own friends’ tolerance for my own loquaciousness, it can be a wonderful way to stay in touch. I couldn’t say it any better than Donna said it, so I hope it won’t bring the Free Press’ lawyers down on my head that I have quoted two paragraphs here.
Meanwhile, Happy Halloween. I am pleased and proud, this Halloween to be the father of a 9-year-old axe murderer.
If he darkens your door this evening, all I can tell you is: "Don't be a hero. Give up the candy. Better to lose the candy than your neck."
A story song from 1962 ... it's a little bit Halloween, a little bit Poverty Flats, and a little bit Poverty Hollow: the lesson of Dickie Lee's "Patches" is that inter-class romance can be a killer.
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