Answering the Call

I was telling my friend and office buddy Jason the other day about how I’d recently had a serious case of blogger’s block. I hadn’t wanted to call it writer’s block. To me, writer’s block is an affliction of novelists and poets and published essayists and maybe paid columnists. “Writing” strikes me as a ludicrously grandiose term for the act of sharing random thoughts with a very small audience that presumably appreciates the phrase “you get what you pay for” and thus tends to judge me kindly.

So, call it blogger’s block. I’d described to Jason how my recent energy-sapping flu had left a residue of ennui in its wake. How, even after my physical fatigue had lifted, my mojo had badly lagged. I’d no sooner think of a potential blog topic than I’d dismiss it because it completely bored me. I was feeling no creative spark, no energy, no nothing. I was thinking of shutting down Lassitude Come Home—pulling the plug on this little hobby less than a year after it had begun. I might’ve done so, too, except that I couldn’t even muster the words to shape a halfway entertaining sendoff post.

But then Lynn and I received the bizarre middle-of-the-night phone call a few nights ago that proved to be my block-breaker. Finally, something had happened that I'd found interesting enough to write about. I seized that opportunity and wound up reasonably pleased with the results.

So, I was starting to tell Jason about my blogging struggles, and what finally had broken the impasse. He interrupted me and cracked, “Was it something about death?” Ever since I’d noted a few posts back that the Grim Reaper seems to loom over this blog, he’s been giving me shit about it. It probably hadn’t helped that I’d begun the conversation by noting that, after having nearly bought the farm seemingly about 80,000 times over the last 20 or 30 years, Elizabeth Taylor finally had given up the ghost this week. I’d already posted my thoughts related to the deaths of several big- and not-so-big-name people over the past nine months, so why not Liz, too?

But, no, I told Jason. I hadn’t posted about death at all, wise guy. Rather, I’d riffed about a weird phone call we’d received. (In truth, death had made a cameo appearance in that post. But it hadn’t by any stretch been the major focus.)

Jason and I moved on to other subjects. The upcoming baseball season. The redesigned APTA Web site, the fruit of months of painstaking labor on his part and those of others. And this topic: I’d been telling Jason for the past few weeks about a story I’d been agonizingly struggling to write for the association’s magazine. I now was, at last, in position to complete that tale of woe. I told him how my final draft easily had been the worst thing I’d written in my 10-plus years of employment at APTA—about how I’d never grasped the material, hadn’t felt so stupid and defeated in a very long time, and had ended up simply pasting together the few odds and ends of my transcribed notes that I vaguely understood.

The result had been an article with some degree of coherence that, however, said essentially nothing, delivering on none of its promises of illumination and insight. At some point I’d lost all hope of making the thing better, and simply had elected to offer it up as the written equivalent of human sacrifice. I’d expected and braced myself to be excoriated by the many pairs of internal and external eyes that would need to vet my piece—the director of APTA’s Practice Department, my bosses in Publications, the physical therapists I’d interviewed. “Go ahead and savage it!” I’d effectively urged them.

But to my profound surprise, great relief, and abashed shame, the collective “WTF?!” I’d fully expected never arrived scribbled on my hard copy or typed into e-mails. My reviewers made only minor cosmetic edits. A few grammatical tweaks. The addition of a clarifying word here or there. I encountered no indictment of my utter vacuity. I endured no concern for my precipitous loss of IQ.

This lack of fury, this dearth of alarmed bewilderment frankly stunned me. It got me to thinking about the other times in my life when the other shoe inexplicably had failed to drop or when I’d otherwise been blessed with thoroughly undeserved providence. Jason contributed the observation that anyone who writes—for a living and/or as an avocation—suspects much of his or her output is total excrement, whether or not it truly is. He generously indicted himself, never mind that his copious writings about film on the Internet are smart, insightful and often hilarious.

His point was well taken, I allowed. On any given day, simply rereading what I’ve previously written for this blog nearly is sufficient to convince me to pack it in. But that wasn’t what I was talking about, I said. What I was getting at was how fortunate yet depressing at the same time it can feel to write just well enough—in this world of ever-declining literacy—to sometimes skate smoothly past the rough spot where the ice should have cracked and sent you plummeting to your hypothermic death.

I cited to Jason the term papers I fairly bullshitted my way through in college, the Phi Beta Kappa induction that arose from those inflated grades, the feeling I always get when The American Scholar arrives in the mail—suggesting I’m the sort of guy who actually reads the books on philosophy, ethics, literature and intellectual history that typically are reviewed in its pages. I was starting to seriously bum myself out dwelling on all this. But then, as we continued talking and the dimensions of my fraud grew in my own mind, I began rather happily envisioning a new blog post that might be fun and wouldn’t revolve around death: imposter syndrome!

Why, hadn’t Lynn and I just been comparing notes the other week on how stupid and ill-equipped for our work we often feel? I’d been whining about my magazine story, and Lynn had been despairing of her struggles to keep up with the mathematics and paperwork of her part-time job as assistant to a daily money manager. Conversations with various friends of mine over the years have suggested, in fact, that a whole lot of us don’t feel we know what the hell we’re doing, and that we all live in some degree of fear that we’ll soon be unmasked and added to the rolls of the chronically unemployed.

I wasn’t quite sure what my wider point would be about imposter syndrome, but it did seem promising as a blog subject. Maybe I’d play around with it on my next day off work. I was ruminating about this a couple nights ago when the phone rang. Lynn picked up, but I couldn’t immediately tell who was on the other end.

Finally, Lynn motioned for me to pass her a piece of scrap paper. She wrote down that the caller was a wonderfully warm and wise and articulate friend of ours whose energy and spirit belie her 94 years. Mildred was phoning from her assisted living residence in Georgia to tell us she’d been diagnosed with leukemia, had been advised by her doctor to get her affairs in order and was preparing to be placed under hospice care.

Armed with this knowledge, the gist of the conversation came into focus for me. Lynn was asking Mildred if the shock of her prognosis was outweighed by the opportunity to plan for her death and tie up loose ends over the course of her few remaining days. I knew without hearing her response what Mildred’s answer would be. She's a remarkably strong and practical woman who’s been a widow for more than 40 years, buried a 38-year-old son (my college friend John) after he died of brain cancer in 1997, had maintained the family home and a beautiful garden until beyond her 90th year, and lives for her surviving son and daughter and their families. I knew her overriding desire in the matter of her death would be not to be a bother. Within minutes of absorbing the news, she would have moved on to seeing this heads up on her imminent demise as a gift.

Lynn handed me the phone. Of course, the first thing Mildred did was thank me for my recent letter and tell me she’d been carrying it around in her purse, the better to pull it out for occasional re-readings. “I’d rather read you than a novel,” she said. “There are a lot of really bad novels,” I pointed out. I said Lynn had passed me a note, so I already knew her big news. I asked how she’d found out about the fatal illness. Mildred sounded a little bored with the subject and replied, “Lynn can tell you.” (She’d gone to the doctor with itchy skin and had been urged to undergo blood tests, which found the leukemia.)

She expressed outrage at funeral costs, including those of caskets, which she’d been pricing. She fretted over the logistics of living in Georgia but needing to be transported after her death to the family cemetery in Northern Virginia, where she will be laid to rest next to her husband and son. (Clearly, this not-wanting-to-be-a-bother thing was being compromised by circumstances.) She wondered what the Washington Post’s obituary policies might be, and said she planned to give them a call. I told her I’d check into that for her. She apologized for not having a computer, reluctantly conceding that my ability to research things electronically might help, if I didn’t mind.

It was classic Mildred, highlighting her selflessness, practicality and generosity. I heard not a hint of self-pity or morbidity in anything she said. Even as I began the process of inwardly mourning her imminent departure from our lives, I once again felt deep gratitude, as I have so often over the nearly 35 years of our acquaintance, to have intersected with this proper and patrician yet never stuffy, always down-to-earth Daughter of Virginia—a woman who is entirely her own person, but who symbolizes to me a gentility and bonhomie now nearly lost to time and coarseness and the many distractions of what’s known as progress.

Years ago, Mildred had shown Lynn and me the house in which she’d grown up, located in what now is bustling, traffic-clogged downtown Vienna. The contrast between what her mind’s eye described to us and what the streetscape now showed was stark and dispiriting. But at least we caught a glimpse of that lost world, through her.

The phone call eventually wound to a close. She had things to attend to and at any rate didn’t want to keep us. We affirmed our mutual love and affection and signed off, perhaps for the last time, perhaps not. I hung up the phone. Lynn and I agreed that the news was sad but the messenger had been typically extraordinary.

I started this post by talking about blogger’s block. All these words later, that seems a vanquished concern, at least for now. But I do seem to have circled back to death as a subject, though it took me a while get there. Suffice it to say, it’s been a week of strange phone calls. Mildred’s call, though, strikes me as having been more the encapsulation and celebration of a remarkable life than anything as mundane as a death notice.