I’m still sitting down after my bagel, coffee and sudoku morning, have just turned NPR off, had just taken the dogs out right before that, have a Tesla Cyber Truck review video on my phone mostly watched. The dogs are fed and resting. My list of things to do today is more than full, enough things there and the writing scratchy enough that I’m not sure what at least one of these things is.

The most significant thing I’ve done this morning is to read an essay from Ross Gay in his book “Inciting Joy”. So, if you’ve read this book, you know that I cried, a bit. 

I read “Through My Tears I Saw (Death: The Second Incitement)”, an essay about the journey he went through when his father was dying from liver cancer. My son Oliver told me about Ross Gay, that my writing reminded me of his, and I have two of his books of essays from the library and am moving back and forth between them. 

Not surprisingly, I didn’t know about him until Oliver reached out. Oliver honored me to suggest that our writing is similar, and he is right, as usual, as of course he is my son, as of course all of my children are insightful and complimentary of their old man, able to see things about me that I have no vision for. 

I’ll just say that it is not a stretch to note that we write in a similar way. Sentences that string together clauses and become paragraphs if not entire essays on their own, that have poetry about them, that could be a poem set by themselves, perhaps, surely so if all it takes to be a poem is for the author to say this is a poem, as any artist can say their work is art, that perhaps of which force a reader to go back and decipher the full meaning, that maybe are not even sentences, as this one isn’t, having no subject verb in any traditional way.

I will get to know Ross Gay’s writing more and will certainly not find a sentence as forced as that last one. And more and more I’m sure I will aspire to influence my reader as much as he does. My goal in writing is that, to influence, and as Ross Gay does in this book, to remind us that life has joy, that though it is full of sorrow, we are but a shift in perspective away from the bounty of joy around us. 

As for that, joy, helping you notice it, taking the time to notice it myself, my list of things to do is full of joy. I’m putting up the Advent Calendar this morning, just on time as it is the first of December today. I have so many joyous memories of first Wendy making the calendar out of felt, as was the one she had as a child, each day’s date covered at first with a holiday adjacent image, one a clown, one Santa, one a chimney, one a birthday cake that always goes on December 5, my daughter Anna’s birthday, that she always gets to remove and put on the felt tree just above the dates, except when she isn’t here, as she isn’t this year, or last year, on that day. So I’ll do it. And I’ll be sad that it’s me and not her. But full of joy that she is in this world and in our lives and specifically in my life.

This blog is the first of a series of blogs, or mini-essays, I’m calling “Hard Twenty”, as in I’m setting a timer and only get twenty minutes to write, to follow whatever thought I have and draw to a conclusion as the end of that hard twenty. I haven’t exactly done it here, as I haven’t set a timer, but I’m close, knowing that I came in with the dogs just before nine, that it is now nine twenty, and here I am, all but done. I’m giving myself an extra minute to quickly edit obvious spelling errors. Whatever misguided sentence lengths I’ve constructed are hopefully meaningful, as the twenty must be hard, lest I decide one day that I don’t have time when any twenty minutes is always a choice.

As is the choice to feel joy. Which I do right now and hope you do too.