Pass or Fail

Keeping David’s car on the side of our garage has never been a big deal. He bought it when he was going to Skidmore College, and it made sense for him to have a car to travel back and forth to Hartford or to Montreal or wherever his wanderlust would take him on weekends and vacations. Now he lives and works in Washington, D.C., and he’s found that the city bus, the Metro and his bike actually are all he needs to get around. When he needs a car, he rents one. But you never know, or more precisely, he never knows when he might want his car again. Since we have the space to store it, and being nice parents, we’ve obliged. I keep it under cover except for once a month when I start it up and let the engine run for about 20 minutes. He doesn’t have to pay for expensive parking in D.C., and we’ve taken the insurance off the car since no one drives it.

Then last week, in the mail, came notice that his 2001 Volvo S-60 was due for its biannual emissions check. Julia dutifully called our insurance broker who was able to put the insurance back on for a couple days. I would made an appointment to bring it in for the emissions check, and during the day Julia decided it also would be good to drive it up and back to Enfield, about a 30 minute drive from our house each way, for an appointment she had. The acceleration on I-91 would be a nice change of pace for the car, she thought, as if it were a race horse that had done little more than chew hay in its barn for the last several months.

All went well, until a “check engine” light appeared on the dashboard. Then, another message appeared: “Check Emissions System.” I refused to take those warnings seriously. After all, we hadn’t done anything to the car. “They probably were set to come on now because the car is due for an emissions test,” I reasoned not very logically. When I stopped in at our local gas station to make an appointment for the emissions test the next morning, I told Chip about the dashboard messages that had flashed on. He shoot his head. “You better have it checked out. It won’t pass with those lights on.”

“Shit,” I thought. I drove the car to my Volvo mechanic and sure enough, he found a crack in the evaporator tube. Fixed by the end of the day, I called Chip back and scheduled an appointment for the next morning, and when morning after I presented him with my registration certificate, he matter-of-factly suggested I go get some coffee or breakfast and return in 15 or 20 minutes.

I walked to the shopping plaza next door and ordered an egg and cheese sandwich and coffee at the local Panera restaurant. Read some emails on my phone and returned in time to pick up the car. Only thing was the printout showed the car had failed the test!

“Have you had any work done on it recently?” Chip inquired.

“Yeh. Yesterday. We put in a new evap tube,” I said, proud I could talk mechanic jargon.

Except no one told me that afterwards, you need to drive the car for 100 to 200 miles so the systems will re-set.

“Shit,” I thought again. We only had the insurance on the car until the end of the day. Should I drive it up to Northampton and back? Down to New Haven and back? To New York? I could have it back in time for a re-test before the end of the day.

In the end, though, we called our insurance broker. Paid to extend the insurance for another month, and decided we’ll drive it around over the weekend, and bring it back next week. So it can sit safely by the side of our garage until David actually needs the car again. Maybe next year, he says. But who really knows.

Introducing a new blog

And you're on! Cameras rolling! Take one!

You get the picture. This is the first post of my new blog, and quite frankly, I'm not sure what it's all about or where it's going. Which is probably not the best way to start. I've read that the best bloggers write a bunch of posts before going live. And that consistency is everything. The more frequent you blog, the more readers you attract. The more serious you will appear.

I've been talking about blogging for several months now, but the truth is, I just haven’t done anything about it. Except to gree that I need to blog. Then last Monday, while out in the Bay Area visiting my dad, I went and talked to another writer. We were talking about writing and my trajectory. And she said, “You should be blogging.” I told her I agreed and plan to, and then she challenged me.

“It’s so easy to start a blog.” Takes only minutes if that. And somehow in talking, I agreed to commit to having my first post up by today, end of the week, Friday. But like I say, I have no idea what I’m doing or where this is headed. That’s not entirely true. I was going to write about a conference held at Clark University the other day on the future of small cities in New England, but the conference was full, even though I probably could have gotten in as Media, but I hadn’t thought about that until it was too late. I still may blog about that one of these days, as soon as I track down someone who attended or find a report about it. But for now, that’s not a topic I can write much about.

So the question hovered over the last few days: what am I going to write about? And now here it is Friday morning. I hate saying I didn’t do it when I commit to something. So I’m just going to Do It! as Nike says. To that end, I’m comforted by something Jeff Jarvis, a blogger at buzzmachine.com, says. He’s also the author of the 2009 book, “What Would Google Do?” He says the thing about blogging and the Internet and even news, for that matter, is that it can all be updated, corrected, changed based on comments from readers or your virtual community. I like that idea. That tells me it doesn’t have to be perfect out of the gate. And so in some sense this is what the techies call beta. Off Broadway. In rehearsals. Not for prime time.

My idea is to write about the stuff that interests me, professionally and personally, because so often what I find curious or cool or fascinating in life ends up in articles that I write. That’s why, for one, I thought of going up to the conference on small New England cities. Thirty years ago, I moved from California to Hartford, and I remain fascinated how a city that 100 years ago was one of the wealthiest, most innovative cities in America now ranks as one of the poorest. Which is not to say people aren’t trying to make it more livable, something I wrote about in the July issue of Connecticut Magazine.

I’m also interested in the Jewish world, being a member of that tribe, and an active member of my neighborhood shul. I’m also a student of Mussar, an ancient Jewish spiritual practice that’s seeing a modern-day revival, another trend which I’ve written about for a variety of magazines including The Jerusalem Report and Reform Judaism.

I believe, as Dan Millman once wrote in Way of the Peaceful Warrior” that “there are no ordinary moments.” That’s why I love writing narrative nonfiction and working on what Walt Harrington calls “Intimate Journalism: The Art and Craft of Reporting Everyday Life.” Besides big topics, or beats as we called them when I was a daily newspaper reporter, I love writing stories, which by definition have a beginning, middle and end. But more to the point, present an obstacle or conflict to the protagonist. The story is usually about an epiphany or insight in which the subject’s life is forever changed. Those kind of stories inspire me because I too face obstacles or conflicts in everyday life. And when I read or hear about someone who has overcome an obstacle, it gives me hope.

One Chanukah several years ago, our daughter Rachel asked everyone in our family for their favorite quote. She took each person’s quote and made little artsy wooden plaques for all of us and gave them to each of us one of the eight nights. I still have mine hanging on my closet door handle. It’s from Reb Nachman of Breslov, a mystical Hasidic rabbi (1772-1810). It says: “Always remember, you are never given an obstacle you cannot overcome.” And here he’s proving it. I committed to writing about 750 words in my first blog, an obstacle I was convinced I’d get to eventually. But here I’ve just overcome that challenge with one post wrapped and ready to send out into the web that makes up my world. Feel free to comment. And thanks for reading this far!