Pleasures of Being Home, Part 4: More Seeing Time

Besides death and near-death occurrences during the coronavirus pandemic, one of the worst setbacks was the loss of freedom of movement. We all missed either eye-opening vacations to exotic locales, or simple walks along tree-lined neighborhood sidewalks with friends; inspirational excursions to museums, cathedrals, or monuments; or warming visits to the homes of family or friends. So many missed moments. In other ways, I believe many of us with the advantage of a computer and the willingness to stay connected saw more than we ever had just by staying home more. 

I saw more of loved ones through Zoom meetings than I did when the expectation of such such meetings required physical contact. Those meetings continue to this day, over 100 weekly ones on Sunday night with four groups of family members, nearly 60 biweekly ones on Wednesday night with six friends from the old neighborhood, and nearly 60 biweekly ones of Saturday evening with five friends from the old job. We all continue to show up when we can, so the increased facetime means something to all of us. 

From my backyard patio, I have seen so much of nature that I usually did not have or take the time to enjoy. I saw a crow descend on a hole in my lawn to peck for baby rabbits when the mother rabbit emerged from apparently nowhere and dashed toward the encroacher to defend her brood. After a quick skirmish causing the crow to lose a feather or two, it flew away with nothing for its trouble. I saw squeeze out of a 15-millimeter-diameter hollow 5 meters up my maple tree a full-sized squirrel, followed by another full-sized squirrel, followed by a third full-sized squirrel. I saw in midday sunlight two robins engage in the most elaborate dance from one end of my 27-meter lawn to the other, the first one leaping over the second, the second hopping in a circle around the first, both of them bouncing in a circle while facing each other like two boxers ready to attack, and then repeating and exchanging these moves while continuing to the starting point of the dance before flying into the leafy shade of my oak tree.

I also saw art with the focused attention that it deserves. While I admit that nothing beats seeing an original artwork, I took to my old books that I had not opened in years to examine the paintings or drawings of Pablo Picasso, Frida Kahlo, Romare Bearden, Jacob Lawrence, Audrey Flack, Chuck Close, Kerry James Marshall, and Jean-Michel Basquiat to challenge my assumptions and affirm my convictions about their artistry.

I never had to leave my home to experience new sights and reimagine old ones. Tragedy can breed triumph.

Pleasures of Being Home, Part 3: More Listening Time

The coronavirus is nothing to ignore. It has already taken more than 6 million lives globally and still accounts for some thousand deaths daily. It also has given unexpected pleasures: more reading and writing time, among many other delights. Yet while most people have not read as much as they could have, and even more have not written much even in a pandemic, most working adults have had more time to listen in the solitude of their home during the quarantine. 

Besides the endless barrage of Netflix or Amazon miniseries, what have we listened to? For one, sounds of nature. Just yesterday morning, I heard a persistent drumming I thought was coming from inside my house. When I approached my opened window, I realized the sound was the rain smacking the roof above me. I've also grown familiar with different types of winds slashing against my house and I've begun naming them: rumble, tumble, grumble, jumble, crumble, fumble, stumble, mumble, and humble, in descending order of strength. In addition, I sense contrasting silences at 4:30 a.m. and 11:30 p.m., mainly because my tinnitus tends to hum early in the morning and scream late at night. And while the mourning dove's call has been a staple sound in the 38 years I have lived in my house, I have not heard so distinctly as now the heckling song of the mockingbird, the persistent hammering of the woodpecker, and the sharp scratching of claws as squirrels chase each other in dizzying circles up and down my backyard maple and oak trees. 

No less pleasurable is the sound of music, which has become much more than just background noise to my reading and writing and household chores. I marvel at the mysteries of life revealed to me through the magical notes of Bill Evans's piano ebbing and flowing through Some Other Time, John Coltrane's soaring tenor saxophone opening My Favorite Things, and Billie Holiday's velvet voice pleading in Love for Sale. I now hear progression, not repetition, in Philip Glass's String Quartet #4. I feel blood course through my veins throughout Duke Ellington's orchestration of Sunset and the Mocking Bird and weep at the climax and resolution of Samuel Barber's Adagio for Strings.

More important than any of these pleasures, listening to you has become a sought-after activity and an improved skill, not because I am getting older and wiser but because I am home more, and more relaxed, patient, contented. What you are saying sounds more purposeful, more interesting to me. You make sense to me, so I think more before responding, cringe more when responding lamely, and smile more when just listening to the silence that follows your wisdom. Less talking, more listening: a good recipe for relationships.

Pleasures of Being Home, Part 2: More Writing Time

The extra reading time of being home brings us pleasures that not only enhance our leisure time but can transform our thinking and, in effect, our lives. Any newfound time at home also offers opportunities to write more. We can find time at unexpected moments, so we need to take full advantage of them whenever they arise. And we can approach this good fortune in several ways and at various moments of the writing process.

Planning Stage

Those of us who are serious about writing have probably for a long time been listing ideas for essays, scribbling dialogue for playscripts, storyboarding or drafting treatments of screenplays, describing scenes for poems, and synopsizing novels. Now's the time to pull out those notes from years ago, see what's changed since then, and add or delete as needed to keep those plans fresh. Maybe such a review will send us to the library, our own bookshelves, or online to cultivate our research on those plans, adding to the content of our notes and sharpening the focus of our premise.  

Drafting Stage

Moving beyond the planning stage, we can choose to draft a few pages of our writing project: more dialogue, observations about the characters, twists in the plot, extra layers to the context. During this stage, we are not expecting much more than to produce content.

Rewriting Stage 

Suppose we have a draft that seems complete but has not found a home in a publication or a production company. We can reread our draft critically with an eye for trying to see why it hasn't seen the light of  publication or production. This approach in no way suggests that our piece needs improvement (although it probably does). In fact, the practice gives us a chance to keep working at our craft. Chances are we'll want something new, something more, or maybe something less, in our piece. 

Pleasures of Being Home, Part 1: More Reading Time

I do not want to seem insensitive about the COVID-19 pandemic, which is in its third year and has killed far more than 6 million people worldwide. I knew a good family man who died from the coronavirus during its initial outbreak. Some of my favorite jazz musicians also succumbed to the virus, including pianist Barry Harris, saxophonist Lee Konitz, pianist Ellis Marsalis, guitarist Bucky Pizzarelli, and trumpeter Wallace Roney, as well as the legendary playwright Terrence McNally. Many terrific small businesses, including restaurants and jazz clubs, have gone under due to the economic strains of COVID. I also feel fortunate that all I have lost is money, which, as the saying goes, isn't everything. 

In fact, my health has improved since early 2020. Before then, I would get laryngitis twice a year, sometimes more, sometimes leading to bronchitis. These ailments have disappeared from my system. I attribute this reversal of fortune to fewer rides on buses and trains in proximity to germ-carrying commuters and fewer handshakes with people attending my live classes. And health, as the saying goes, is everything.

I can think of other big benefits of quarantining at home. Since March 2020, I probably have read more than I had in the previous decade. I have been collecting books for years that I promised myself I would eventually read. As my writing consulting business grew increasingly successful, I began to think the only hope for reading those books would be retirement, incapacitation, or incarceration, but I was not planning on any of those circumstances. The pandemic offered me found time. I read scores of novels, short story collections, philosophical treatises, biographies, histories, poetry volumes, and plays. I enjoyed the time-consuming process of being transfixed by chilling chapters, rereading powerful paragraphs and scintillating sentences to examine the writers' rhetorical strategy, and delighting in their wonderful word choices. 

I am convinced that these exhilarating experiences have made me a better reader, a more powerful writer, a more informed writing teacher, and a more sensitive writing critic. By the way, my business has coming roaring back this year. Patience born from using idle time productively has paid off. The point is of this post is that you can use waiting time, from standing in line at the bank to getting through a pandemic, by entertaining and educating yourself through reading. When your turn comes, you will wonder where the time went. 

Why I Read Poetry

I read poetry nearly every day. How could I not? When Mary Oliver's "The Summer Day" begins with "Who made the world?" and Rita Dove's "Canary" ends with "If you can't be free, be a mystery." When Billy Collins's "Forgetfulness" begins with "The name of the author is the first to go" and Audre Lorde's "A Litany for Survival" ends with "we were never meant to survive." 

I read poetry because of the focus it brings to my daily activities, the pleasure it brings to my professional responsibilities, the surprise it brings to my ill-advised assumptions, the inspiration it brings to my human interactions, and the serenity it brings to my loneliest moments. I suggest you get started reading poetry at the Poetry Foundation, which offers a seemingly endless supply of great poems.

Defaulting to "I Can"

I offer a simple yet transformative piece of advice: Default to I can.

Too often at work, we read people write about what they cannot do, even if they are our vendors:

Question 1: Will you help me on Monday?

Answer 1: I can't.

Question 2: Do you wax floors?

Answer 2: We can't.

Question 3: Would you provide a discount for my $2,000 order?

Answer 3: XYZ, Inc. can't.

I continually suggest to never put these words anywhere near each other: I (or we, or My company) and can't. We are all in the can, not can't, business. Use the more positive can, even when you can't. Here are easy fixes to the three can't-do sentences.

Question 1: Will you help me on Monday?

Answer 1: I can help you on Tuesday.

Question 2: Do you wax floors?

Answer 2: We can wax floors at an additional cost, or, We can mop floors more frequently to avoid their need of an expensive waxing. 

Question 3: Would you provide a discount for my $2,000 order?

Answer 3: XYZ, Inc. provides discounts for orders over $10,000.

That's not too much effort, is it? Of course, sometimes people will insist that you do something you just can't. In these cases, you'll have to clearly say, "I can't." But at least you tried the better approach the first time around.

The benefits of defaulting to I can will be legion. People will see you as cooperative, helpful, and positive.

Pronoun Preference: TBD

In the 1970s, we tried to solve the sexist usage of deferring to male pronouns in mixed or ambiguous situations calling for a singular application. Before then, this sentence was standard usage:

An employee must understand a job requires that he ask his manager about problems unfamiliar to him.

In 1978, the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) decided that since such usage excluded females, some workarounds were preferable. Thus, the following three sentences became standard, with the second and third ones being preferable to the wordy and awkward first:

1. An employee must understand the job requires that he or she ask his or her manager about problems unfamiliar to him or her.
2. Employees must understand the job requires that they ask their manager about problems unfamiliar to them.
3. An employee must understand that the job requires asking a manager about unfamiliar problems.

Good enough. Fast forward nearly a half-century to gender-identification issues and preferred pronouns. Now we encourage employees to proclaim their preferred pronoun in the name of inclusion. The intention behind this usage addition is honorable, no doubt. But announcing preferred pronouns creates more problems than it solves. Imagine a project team of six employees:

• Allie, agender, prefers they/them/their
• Billie, female, prefers he/him/his
• Carlie, male, prefers it/its
• Dannie, female, prefers she/her/hers
• Eddie, male, prefers he/him/his
• Frankie, nonbinary, prefers no pronoun

In such a situation, you can see the confusion that will arise from referring to these team members in a business document. The NCTE has tried addressing this language bind through recommendations in a revised 2018 position statement, which falls short of solving the problem. 

So this is what I say. The pronouns he/him/his and she/her/hers will not disappear from the language anytime soon. Regardless of the next step in our discovery of respectful usage, show patience. Respect those who "misuse" the new standards at the same level that you are trying to respect those you want to bring into the language fold. Things will evolve, but only with more patience and less finger-pointing.