One -- as a kick in the ass to WRITE. From Hendrik Hertzberg's book review Politcs and Prose, The Letters of Daniel Patrick Moynihan:
"Nevertheless, Pat Moynihan was first, last, and always a writer. 'When I was five years old, I asked my mother, what does Dad do?' his daughter, Maura recalls in a charming afterword to a splendid new book. 'She replied, he's a writer. And he was: he wrote every day -- even Christmas -- articles, books, speeches, and, in great abundance, letters.'"
And two -- if I may be so bold as to appropriate a theme from my friend Johanna -- to remind myself that I'm going to die someday and I need to stop wasting so much goddamn time.
When I started working in the Russell Senate Office Building in the mid-nineties, Senator Moynihan was still roaming the halls. In fact, I interviewed for a job as one of his Finance Committee staff assistants when I first moved to Washington. During the interview, I learned some key tidbits about the then-Senior Senator from New York. Mainly, that all of his sign pens had to be green ink and all of his papers were to be clipped together with green clips. And that he was prone to making random phone calls to the main Committee line, startling the young staffers answering the phones, "Hellooo, it's Senator MOYnihan" the woman interviewing me demonstrated.
It doesn't seem like so long ago. But Senator Moynihan has been dead for seven years. By the time he was my age, he already had his PhD in sociology, had studied at the London School of Economics and was serving under President Kennedy as an Assistant Secretary of Labor for policy. I'm reasonably certain he wasn't sleeping more than 11 hours a day.
All day, I have been at my computer, which I've moved to the dining room table so that I can work with the cemetery right out the window over my shoulder. I have made coffee. I have made dinner. I have pulled at my hair and cried. But I still haven't started re-writing the story that needs to be re-written from first to third person. It seems stupid now. I'm sick of it.
Just as I began writing this post, my latest Facebook "friend" from high school sent me an instant message, asking about her former teacher, my dad. I probably haven't spoken to her in a good seventeen years. Talk turned to the present.
"Do you have kids?" she asked.
"No. Not yet. I've never been married." I typed back.
"Well, don't wait too long" she replied from her computer in my hometown.
I enjoyed this post. That is all.
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