Our fictions hold the ideas and dreams we know but don’t often say. The best ones give us an experience of something new yet known, resounding to our souls. I wonder how authors do it: describe an experience wholly or partly made up and have it resonate with the rest of us. There’s an alchemy there.
Yesterday, I went to HubSpot’s Portsmouth, NH office to spend the workday out of the basement, closer to the sun. The drive from Beverly to Portsmouth is a drive towards my past. After a childhood in southern Maine, just over the bridge, really, I spent my first married year in Portsmouth. That was long enough ago that many of the streetscapes have changed. But our pizza place, the Breadbox, is still there, as is the drafty old church on the square, where we spent most Sunday afternoons.
Last night I ventured to Fenway Park. The trip fit my frugality well: there’s free street parking, if you know where to look, I had a free ticket, thanks to a raffle win at work, and the beer and peanuts only set me back $18.75(!). It didn’t quite fit my lingering fear of crowds. I don’t tend to like being where a lot of people are; and, if loads of people are doing something, I tend to shy away. When I see a line, my first thought isn’t: “there must be something good there”, it’s more like: “those people are all making a terrible mistake.” Thankfully, the modern Fenway has a lot of concourse walkways and it manages to hold thirty-odd thousand souls a lot better than it used to.
Longtime readers will remember similar issues of this email where we steer far, far away from politics, technology, and everything else modern. Usually these are timed for when I end up in Maine for some skiing. But even if you don’t ski and don’t make it up to Maine, consider putting the three links below into your reading tabs.
Want to walk into a trap? Venture any kind of opinion about how people with kids can or should balance working and parenting. There’s almost no right answer, and a lot of common sense takes you right into some almost-political arguments about gender norms, social standards, and the like.
Every time we think email is dying, it returns.
At a library booksale in the late 1990s, I found an old paperback of James Howard Kunstler’s The Geography of Nowhere. After years of playing sim City, I was vaguely interested in how real places were zoned and constructed. Kunstler gave me a language about urbanism and walk-ability and such that helped me explain why the swathes of parking lots surrounding everything were useless and ugly. He clued me into the truth: most new places being build and zones were being done badly.
We spent the first few weeks of November in Tennessee. The trip was ambitious: we drove with four young children for 16 hours. And it was routine: we planned to lead a normal life at my in-law’s house on the edge of the Smoky Mountains. For the kids, this meant continued homeschooling; for me this meant continued remote work from my father-in-law’s office.
Why would you want to find dynamism?
I think it’s because too many of our institutions and leaders pride themselves on stopping change or returning things to how they used to be.