Writing, Here and There

The poor blog has been ignored for a couple of weeks now, mainly because we're both writing an enormous amount in other areas of our lives.

Nora is teaching a course of 14 students, and she has always written more than all of her students put together.  There are a lot of ways in which her teaching could be more efficient, but efficiency is not the primary goal of every human endeavor, and her courses are always powerful and personalized learning experiences.  Burger King is efficient, but it isn't a satisfying dinner.

I've taught the same class in the past that she's teaching now, and I know that teaching online takes more energy than teaching in a classroom.  She's completely innundated with text, since that's how every interaction occurs.  So the students are writing drafts, and making blog posts, and writing e-mails, and Nora gets to respond (also in text) to every single one of those.  You've probably heard about the idea of the MOOC (massively open online course), yet another way in which "content providers" are being marginalized so that one teacher can have 40,000 students at once and get paid $5,000 for it.  Trust me, those students are not getting teacher responses to their work; these students are.

I, on the other hand, have been writing gleefully and selfishly away at a manuscript that I think will be a book soon.  (I need to start changing the focus from writing toward marketing shortly.)  You may have heard of National Novel Writing Month, a project in which people spend the month of November taking a story from start to finish.  The idea is that a sort of standard novel is about 80,000 words, so if you just sit down and write 2,500 words a day, you can go from blank page to completed draft in a month.  I haven't been quite that productive, but August has been a 45,000-word month, and they're good ones.  I should have a draft completed in September.  And no, I'm not going to tell you what it's about yet.  Nonfiction, though, that's my genre.

But I also had a thought the other day not related to this particular manuscript.  I've written before about Efren Reyes, probably the best pool player who's ever lived.  He started his career as a rack boy and general gofer in his uncle's pool room when he was 5 years old; he's now 59, so has been playing for over fifty years.  The writer Malcolm Gladwell has popularlized the notion of the "10,000 hour" rule, or the idea that no matter how much native talent one has, it takes ten thousand hours of focused practice to perform at an elite professional level.  By order of magnitude, I estimate that Efren has probably put in over a hundred thousand hours at this point in his life.  He makes shots that other professional players never even recognize are available.

But the thought that I had, a cheery thought, is that because he's played more hours at a higher level than anyone, it's very likely that Efren Reyes has missed more shots than any other human being who's ever played.  I miss a lot of shots, but I've only got about 3,500 hours in; probably about where Efren was when he was nine.  He'd probably missed as many balls as I have by the time he was out of grade school, and then went on to play for another 45 years.

Nolan Ryan holds the Major League record for strikeouts, with 5,714, and the major league record for no-hitters, with seven. But he also holds the Major League record for walks allowed, with 2,795; the second-place pitcher, Steve Carlton, gave up only two-thirds that many, 1,833.  He has thrown the most wild pitches, with 277; and has lost more games—292—than any pitcher since the composition of the ball was changed in 1920.  You put in that much time (because you're talented and dedicated) and you'll make a vast number of errors.

Nora and I have probably both made our 10,000 writing hours, and a lot of the early ones were bad.  We've written as many clumsy sentences as any of our students ever did; we just kept going and wrote better ones. And eventually, a month like August comes along and we just sit down and know what to do.

Dad

Sundays too my father got up early 

and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold, 

then with cracked hands that ached

from labor in the weekday weather made

banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him. 

I'd wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking. 

When the rooms were warm, he'd call, 

and slowly I would rise and dress, 

fearing the chronic angers of that house, 

Speaking indifferently to him, 

who had driven out the cold 

and polished my good shoes as well. 

What did I know, what did I know 

of love's austere and lonely offices?

— "Those Winter Sundays," Robert Hayden

Menton Lafayette (Tony) Childress was born in 1920, in that transition between the 19th Century and the 20th.  He was born of people who made their living in 19th century ways, through growing and mechanical ingenuity, and he inherited their skills.  He left school at 14, probably somewhere in what we would now call middle school... also a 19th Century trait, when attaining a high school education was a statistical anomaly.

He adapted to some but not all of the 20th Century.  He loved his union and his fraternal organization, loved working with precision tools, loved pickups and campers and outboard motors.  He had, in many ways, a common life for men of his era—Navy service, hunting and fishing, cigarettes, a long career with one massive organization that became global and disloyal and a shorter but even better career with a smaller local one.  He stayed married to a woman he no longer understood, and raised a son whom he never did.

He died when I was 16, on November 16th, 1974.  He was 54 years, seven months and two days old.  Tomorrow, I'll be 55.

Nora's mom was born three months before my dad, and she lived to be 92.  Once I got to know her, it was difficult to not think about what my dad might have been like at 80, at 85, at 90.  His own father outlived him, the original Herbert Allen Childress reaching 1981 and accomplishing the age of 83 years and two days.  I have a photo of Grandpa, taken at about his 80th year: he's wearing a Pendleton plaid shirt and a fleece vest, and looks like the Blackfoot Indian that he's reputed to have descended from, craggy and brown and firm-eyed.  And now the only one of my father's four sons for whom he chose the name, to honor his own father, has also outlived him, not merely in the calendar but also in lifespan.

What would we make of one another today, I wonder.  How would we receive each other's gifts? How would we differ in telling the same stories?  How would we, finally, come to know each other's dreams?  

Thanks, Dad, for all the things I knew about, and all the things I never will.