“So teach us to number our days, that we may get us a heart of wisdom” -Psalms 90:12
Flinging oneself into a new year is an easier jump if the past is accounted for, the ledger closed. I’ve written some 175,000 words on 37days this year. That’s a lot of periods, semi-colons, subjective cases and semi-annual partially plural separating conjective commas each week. I’ve held dear each piece of grammar I cannot diagram, despite Mrs. Harbison’s best efforts in the 7th grade.
Does word count approximate value? I don’t think so. But in re-reading this year’s 37days over the past few days as a way of leave-taking, some things have come clearer to me: what I was thinking and when and why, how my writing has changed, where I was distracted, when I stumbled and fell, when I needed to stop, and when I needed to start again. So I’ve done my own accounting of sorts, to close out this wild and precious year:
If the number of comments is any indication, these were the top posts of 2006, where “top” means something different to each of us, I imagine:
Forever hold your penguin dear
Say hi to Yaron
Open the mudroom door for Tycho
Give free hugs
Claim your A
Choose your seatmates wisely
Just wave
Eat on a door
Purge your portfolio
Become you
These were the most fun to write in 2006:
Wear pink glasses
Polish your mud balls
Carry a small grape
Name your pom-poms
Write some blues
Ride the train
Shave with Ockham’s razor
Dress up for Ed McMahon
Signal your turns
Blow bubbles
These were the hardest to write this year:
Unpack your boxes
Forever hold your penguin dear
Eat slowly and thank the chef
Open the mudroom door for Tycho
And since writers are creatures created wholly out of themes that emerge like patterns in some vast authorial legend (or was that Arthurian?), these posts in 2006 mentioned Billy Collins and someone should send them to him with my phone number, dear lord, must I beg?:
Live first, write later
Don’t export your best peaches
Carry a small grape
Be the camera
Don’t graduate
Find Miss Florence Painter
These mentioned Johnny Depp (I will gladly deliver them to him myself):
Carry a small grape
Be a Chinese take-out box
Live first, write later
Don’t export your best peaches
On the day we were born: A Play in Three Acts for Emma
Write some blues
Eat on a door
Become you
And, yes, these mentioned the fact that I lost my camera (had you heard?):
Be the camera
Find Miss Florence Painter
Take a long walk to China
Go low-tech and high-touch
Sit very, very still with Slumpy
Be conscious of your treasures
I don’t know what 2007 will bring or what form 37days will take in the coming days. I do know that the impulse behind it remains true, that it is the one thing in my life that I have done with absolute intention and direction and out of the purest of impulses as a gift for my daughters, and that I haven’t yet fulfilled its reason for being, though—like everything in life—its form may change over time.
I also know that Mr Collins and Mr Depp may continue to make cameo appearances. And perhaps, in a world so perfect we dare not imagine it, in a shining bright light so powerful that we must shield our eyes with those big wraparound plastic sunglasses that they give you at the eye doctor’s office after they enlarge your pupils to obscene proportions, those glasses that resemble eyewear of an aging and yet oddly taut Burt Reynolds…in such a world (dare I say it?), perhaps I’ll even find my beloved Canon Digital Elph PowerShot SD600 camera.
(Image from here)
Flinging oneself into a new year is an easier jump if the past is accounted for, the ledger closed. I’ve written some 175,000 words on 37days this year. That’s a lot of periods, semi-colons, subjective cases and semi-annual partially plural separating conjective commas each week. I’ve held dear each piece of grammar I cannot diagram, despite Mrs. Harbison’s best efforts in the 7th grade.
