Writing Down

The project I gave myself in order to get this blog up and going was forcing myself to write for thirty minutes every day. There was a time in my life where sparing thirty minutes would not have seemed like such a challenge: I think back to my days sitting on the front porch of the Los Robles house in Pasadena, CA, reading Willa Cather and William Gibson novels for hours after work, for as long as there was light outside. Then I would go for a run and then make dinner–a time when I was the center of my own world.

Now my life is full of people I love and vibrant with activity and finding 30 minutes I am going to dedicate to something I love to do seems like a pretty big gift to myself. I inevitably think of my dad.

My father was never one to put off doing what he loved–a good attitude since it turned out he didn’t have long to do it. I asked him once if he had ever gotten detention when he was in school. He told me he got detention once: he didn’t like the subject a middle school teacher was covering and decided to sit at his desk and read what he wanted to instead, ignoring her at the blackboard. He was always at the library and always had a book with him–the day he pissed off his middle school teacher he was teaching himself about Freud by reading an anthology of his work. My father had been spurred to go this research since he had read about Freud in a book he had read the week before and didn’t know anything about him.

The teacher gave him detention for not paying attention and teaching himself something out of a book instead. I thought this was the best reason to get detention ever. Whenever I think I might get in trouble for something I think back to this story and try to make sure I am going to get in trouble admirably.

My dad, who spent his life trying to get his writing published (succeeding every now and then), always wanted to be writing. After he had to stop being an English professor, he eventually went to law school and became a lawyer. He got a job at a mid-sized firm in Phoenix specializing in accident-injury cases and made a decent salary. And he would frequently spend afternoons in his office, working on his science fiction novels instead of working.

As someone who has recently joined a profession where the organization I work for makes money from billing for hourly work, I am not quite sure how my dad pulled this off. Was he just productive when he actually did work and so people thought he was putting out a normal workload when he really wasn’t working for a quarter of the day? This was in addition to long lunches: he frequently took hour lunches so he could go and swim at the Downtown YMCA with the masters swim team there. Did he bill clients for hours he never worked? I would like to believe that was not the case.

One would think his performance reviews at work would have suffered for this, but the firm partners loved him. He was there for more than a decade, and only moved firms a year or two before he died because a bigger firm recruited him. (He switched and started taking big cases to put away savings for my brother and I–a plan which went awry for reasons best explained on another day.)

This habit made my mother furious. She would yell at him about how much more successful he could be as a lawyer if he would apply himself more.

I am so glad he didn’t listen. And I am glad I am taking 30 minutes a day to do some writing of my own.