Updates – Page 303 – Kevin Smokler

Foolish Perfectionism:

Smokler on September 19, 2001

I found out earlier this week that John, the editor at MySimon whom hired me, has been laid off. He feels ok about it. Me, I’ll miss our excellent editor/writer relationship and the painfully easy money.

Which is how my last assignment, a no-thought Holiday Gift Guide, should have gone. Instead I spent an entire afternoon bickering with myself over whether Nick Hornby will be mad at me because I put How to Be Good as only the 6th best book to give this yuletide.

It was already dark when I finished.

I used to do this sort of foolish perfectionism in high school. It still takes a lot of reminders to keep me from doing it now.

So this is bloging…

Smokler on September 18, 2001

So this is bloging. I’ve been warned but I go anyway.

Mark who runs Riot Hero introduced me to blogging when I met him at South by Southwest 2000. After meeting about 85 other webloggers through running Central Booking,
I’ve given in to peer pressure.

Look out below!

Reading in Public

Smokler on September 9, 2001

Not long ago, I spoke to the novelist Ethan Canin who, after teaching through May at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, moves back to San Francisco with his family for the summer. “One of my favorite things about being back here,” he told me, “is seeing people on the bus reading good books.” I nodded vigorously. Just that week, I had sat across the row from a German tourist reading Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point (as was I at the time), behind a teenager reading Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett (a selection of my last book club) and next to a curly-haired woman balancing a copy of Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy (which has been recommended to me 837 times at last count) between her knees.

I didn’t say anything to these people but I felt a bond. We’re part of the invisible network of public readers.

There’s something both comforting and subversive about reading in public (on trains, at bus stops, on park benches and street corners), the two main reasons I love doing it. Opening a book on an overcrowded subway train seals you in your own world, mentally switching you being accessible to others to unapologetic time with yourself. “When I open a book on the bus,” a friend once told me, “psychologically, I’m already home.” On the other hand, read in a restaurant and people may think you’re a friendless loser or they may admire your self-reliance. Their curiosity is as delicious as having a secret.

An average week will find me reading in public at least a half-dozen times but the reasons seem to change with my lifestyle. In graduate school, I could spend days in my apartment hacking through required texts and none of my classmates would blink since they all did it too. That drove me batty so I took to reading at a coffee shop near the campus library for some fresh air and a dose of sanity. My best friend arrived late to everything so I began stowing a book in the glove compartment to kill time while waiting outside movie theatres and restaurants. When I began working full time, a small library rested in a desk drawer and so I could read at lunch. I was too tired the end of the day to enjoy it.

Now I live in San Francisco, a dense, frenetic city and I spend most of my time in the whirlwind of it. I work long hours, ride subways and buses to get around and often have dinner with friends or run errands before heading home. The few hours before sleep belong to the dishes, the laundry and returning phone calls. Before I figured out otherwise, that gave me 10 minutes before I close my eyes to read a few pages and waiting until Saturday to give a book the attention it deserved. I hated it.

The answer came when I began slipping the private act of reading into the folds of my now very public life. I worried at first about shutting the world out in this way, beginning and ending my day with a word fog enveloping my head. I didn’t choose to live in a city to ignore it whizzing by. Yet I soon discovered that rather than feeling cut off, I had unconsciously joined a secret network of book lovers. Passersby would look over at my book and nod or squint quizzically. Many pleasant exchanges followed. I once spent about 10 days reading David Sedaris’s Naked in restaurants, the gym and the neighborhood pool. Sixteen people passed by and had something about to say about it (I made a checkmark on the back cover for each one). Many just said “what a funny book” but several others asked me about my favorite essays and had I heard Sedaris’s commentaries on the radio? The book had sent out a beacon to like-minded readers, drawing them in.

A few weeks ago, I confounded Ethan Canin’s theory by sitting on the bus with a thoroughly lousy book. A man one seat in front of me asked if I liked the book. When I told him no, he asked if I always read on the bus and I said yes, that it passed the time and made a hot, crowded ride more bearable. He nodded then saw a Borders Bookstore by the next stop and exited the bus quickly. Just before walking in, he waved at me and laughed. I waved back with my book. For a moment, I’m engaged in the world’s most private act, but don’t feel alone at all.

My Uncle Barry: (1909-2001)

Smokler on July 1, 2001

I’ve been avoiding writing this. I’ve got a few other pieces that need finishing and my energy needs to be targeted toward getting everything ready. Then something happened. And now it’s harder than I thought to do this.

On Wednesday afternoon, my uncle, Barry Jeffery, died at the age of 92. My youngest brother Daniel had been with him at the hospital in Florida. He called me that night from back in New Haven and I got the message when I came home from celebrating Suzan’s birthday. It was after midnight when I found out that my uncle said he wasn’t scared of dying, that he had no regrets about his life and that it meant a lot to him that we had talked on the phone the day before. Even though he couldn’t hear me through the oxygen mask, I had told him that I loved him and that I hoped to be something like the man he was someday. Daniel, who seems to be on top of every situation, could barely speak. I hung up the phone, then looked at myself in the mirror while I cried.

My Uncle Barry was an old man who recognized his time had come. In his letters and phone calls from the past few years, he talked about spending his days painting, writing, and shuttling back and forth to “various doctors, you know how it is.” Then he’d laugh.

Last week, his aeorta started collapsing on itself and his lungs filled with blood. He took excellent care of himself, still swam laps well into his 80s. But his body was imploding, one vital piece at a time. This probably has a scientific name, but to me, it just sounded like plain old aging.

Nonetheless, I can’t say that made me any more ready for it. He was in his early 70s when we became friends and he gave me a silver dollar for cleaning the leaves off the bottom of his pool. The net was twice the size of my eight-year old frame so he held the handle. He wrote letters to newspapers on current events throughout his retirement, winning several awards from the Florida Sun Sentinel and the Miami Herald. He painted western scenes and vignettes inspired by the cowboy movies he loved as a boy. He was very close to Daniel, who would come by at Christmas time and discuss politics and world events for hours. Daniel got Barry an AOL account and before long, my 90-year old uncle had a pen pal, a 25-year old graduate student in Japan.

Barry knew he was going to die someday, probably someday soon, but saw it as an afterthought. He had a lot to do before then.

Daniel and I talked several times this week in preparation for the eulogy he would give at Barry’s funeral. Our uncle was a dreamer saw himself as a cowboy, an English gentleman and always a hawk-eyed witness to history. But he spent most of his life in the textile business, paying bills, raising kids. He wasn’t a social guy but loved heated conversation. He knew his end was near but lived as though it would never come.

When you meet someone in the twilight of their life, you have all images and no backstory. You have their memories, once removed, after their kids are grown, after they’ve made most of their big decisions. If you’re lucky, you get to see them do what they’ve always wanted to, because they know there isn’t much time left. But you also have to be content with the mystery, the seeming contradictions. You weren’t there to see them grow.

According to our Aunt Teddy, Barry saw us as his adopted grandsons, a relationship Daniel took seriously and I probably didn’t. Barry would Instant Message me while I was working and I’d put him off. I’d send him pieces of my writing when he asked and I resented that he didn’t understand my sarcastic tone or my “Gen-X-isms.” I neglected to email him back because I felt like I’d spend most of the letter explaining who I was. I was in my early 20s and barely knew myself. I didn’t have to time to justify it to some old guy. Even when my Aunt Teddy told me he wasn’t well, that I should send him an email, I didn’t write him. He understood if I was busy. “You’re a businessman now,” she said. I didn’t think I would run out of time.

I felt some of that this week. My Uncle was gone and I was too busy to grieve, two major deadlines on Thursday, a trip away for the weekend, a relaunch in less than two weeks. Twice this week, I looked up and it was too late to call Teddy, to tell her how sad I was, that I was there for her if she needed me. Is this what working for myself, molding this dream from fresh clay, means? That sometimes being human has to wait until my schedule frees up? I didn’t go to Florida this Christmas because of work. I almost didn’t see them both last year but I made a stop, grudgingly, on the way back home, dragging my old friend Justin along. What is the matter with me?

I still didn’t know when I knelt in front of my window and prayed for the soul of my Uncle Barry, that he was somewhere with more time on his hands, where it didn’t hurt to breathe and where I would see him again someday.

Moving into my professional life, I will have to create, produce, manage and decide, faster and with more conviction than I’ve ever had. It scares me every time I think about it. But I’m going to continue on here and dedicate the next chapter of this story to my late Uncle Barry. He taught me that people can know you through your dreams and desires, and that sharing them without expectation or judgement means sharing your joy. That it’s not in competition with the rest of your life, but perhaps the most enriching part of it. And that we often have more time than we think.