A Room of One's Own

 

When Terry and I were first married in 1992, one of the upstairs rooms in our house was designated "the computer room," but it was in most respects really "Scott's room."

Oh, we both used it, but I was the one who "decorated" it, if you want to call it that. It had hockey and music posters on the wall. It featured stuffed Bill the Cat and Opus dolls from my favorite comic strip of the time, "Bloom County." It had a little nook in which I placed the Yamaha keyboard on which I would doodle from time to time.

As I was just 22 years old at the time, it was in some ways the college dorm room I never had.

It was the only room in the house over which I had (or wanted) any real say when it came to what we put there and how it looked.

Fast forward 33 years to our current house and this tradition of giving me one room to play with has continued. Terry uses our upstairs office all the time, but most of the stuff there is mine.

There are, for example, three bookshelves to hold my personal library, including this one devoted largely to my military history books:

And on top of that is a little shrine to our dearly departed cats Fred, George and Charlie:

The music theme continues in this little corner with the inclusion of two instruments (a keyboard and guitar) that I technically cannot play, though that never stops me from trying. Note that the room also contains my alto saxophone, which for the record I can play.

On the walls are various photos reflecting my interests, from a large autographed image of Sting to an autographed Lake Erie Monsters (our local hockey team, now called the Cleveland Monsters) layout. I also have a map of the Appalachian Trail and these two pictures of my mom and dad presumably taken on Parents Night when I played high school football:

Above those are my undergraduate and graduate school diplomas from John Carroll and West Virginia universities, respectively:

There's also a closet containing music and sound equipment and a large bin of sheet music I won't even bother showing you.

The point is that, while this room will never win any interior decorating awards, it's my room, and I love it. Terry does a wonderful job putting together the other rooms in our house, but I'm very grateful to have one to myself.

After all, I have helped us make a lot of mortgage payments over the years. It feels like I've earned a few square feet of my own.

The only good thing about hurting my shoulder is that now I'm reading books again

At some point recently while lifting heavy weights above my head at the gym, I injured my shoulder.

It was the kind of soft-tissue injury that, when you're a 55-year-old person, does not heal as quickly as perhaps it might have earlier in your life.

So in addition to popping ibuprofen caplets like M&Ms, I've also made a nightly routine of icing and heating the shoulder.

Among the things Terry bought me for my birthday was a sling device with a cold pack that's ideal for icing a shoulder. As for the heating part, we have a big fabric doohickey filled with corn kernels that I pop into the microwave for a minute than slap on my shoulder for 15 minutes of heat therapy.

I don't know how much this icing and heating regimen has helped, but one thing it has done is given me time to read for the first time in...well, for the first time in a while.

I tend to live life in a (perhaps needlessly) hectic manner that allows little time for quiet, reflective activities like reading. Normally I'm bouncing from one task to the next, stopping only at night to get 6 or 7 hours of shuteye before getting back after it again the next morning.

Sitting on the couch while allowing the ice and heat to work their magic, I'm forced to stop and relax. I could spend that half-hour on my phone, but instead I've been using it as reading time.

It has, for example, given me the opportunity to read through the wonderful "From Silence: Finding Calm in a Dissonant World" by Cleveland Orchestra Music Director Franz Welser-Möst (also a birthday gift from my daughter Elissa and her boyfriend Mark). And now I'm on to some war-themed books from Terry (also birthday presents...she's very good to me whenever I turn a new age).

None of this reading would be happening if I hadn't overdone the dumbbell shoulder presses. So I guess the injury was God's way of telling me to slow down.

Or that I'm old.

Or maybe both.

I've started reading books again, which is a good thing

For many years I described myself as a reader. Which was fine if you ignore the fact I wasn't doing much actual reading.

I was more of an "intended reader." I wanted to read books, but I never made much time for it.

All of that has changed over the last 12 months. It started last fall with me (finally) establishing and maintaining a morning Bible reading routine and has expanded to include the array of non-fiction books I keep in my home office.

More specifically, non-fiction history books. And even more specifically, books about World War I and historically related subjects.

I don't solely read WW1 books, of course – I'm currently working through a biography of Calvin Coolidge – but I do read a lot of them.

My Great War library expanded exponentially when my friend Bill Ross started giving me boxes of books. He knows where my historical interests lay, and he has generously given of his own extensive library to bolster mine.

The problem is, it's going to take years and years to read all of the books he has sent my way. Then again, there is no deadline for getting through them short of my own demise, which I presume to be many years down the line.

So, one at a time, I'm happily reading my way through the list.

If you're a reader or wanna-be reader, I recommend the Goodreads app. It allows you to post the books you're reading, the ones you want to read, and reviews of the ones you've finished. More interestingly, it also connects you with friends, family and other like-minded readers to see what's on their bedside tables at any given time.

Reading is inherently a solitary pursuit, but I think it's more enjoyable when you introduce a social aspect to it.

Unfortunately, I've found exactly one person who wants to start a World War I book club.

And that person is me.

I'll keep searching.

And reading.

I can't say for sure I really want to retire

Current life expectancy figures suggest that, as a 53-year-old American male, I can reasonably expect to live another 25 years. Could be more, could be less.

However you look at it, odds are I'll be around for a while longer. The hope has always been to lead a life of relative leisure for a portion of those years by eventually retiring from the full-time workforce.

Financial considerations aside, though, I sometimes wonder if I even want to retire. That may sound crazy, but you hear stories all the time of people (mostly men, it seems) who retire and decline rapidly thereafter. They lose the mental and social engagement that comes from being employed, and their mind and body go swiftly downhill thereafter.

That's obviously not the case for everyone, or even for most retirees. But it happens often enough that it makes me wonder whether they'll need to pull me kicking and screaming from full-time work sometime well into my 80s.

The best approach, they say, is to plan a retirement in which you direct your time and energy toward more fulfilling pursuits. The idea is to keep using your brain every day, but to use it for something perhaps even more enjoyable and more personally satisfying than whatever you did to earn a living for 40+ years.

In theory it sounds good, but for the life of me I cannot picture what that might look like. What would I do every day? Even now I'll occasionally take week-long staycations by the end of which, my wife will tell you, I'm scrambling for something to do.

And I say that as someone who dabbles in lots of different things. I have plenty of interests, but you know what they say about the days being long and the years being short? It's difficult to envision how I would fill those long days in retirement.

Maybe I'll think differently about all of this when I get into my late 60s and our retirement accounts are at a point where I can seriously consider moving into the next phase of life.

In the meantime, for as much as I might complain about it, I'm OK continuing to work a full-time job. I can only read so many books and practice my saxophone for so long every day anyway.

I've carried these nine books with me from job to job for the last 20 years

It can sound pretentious to call your job a "craft," but I do consider the writing portion of my vocation to be just that.

Whatever your personal craft may be, you should never stop trying to get better at it. I plan to be working toward clearer, more concise writing up until the day I die (well, maybe I'll take that day off...but not the day before).

There was a time when it was imperative for writers to keep a set of reference books at their desk. A dictionary and thesaurus were de rigueur, of course, but depending on the focus of your writing, there were others on the required reading list.

One was a stylebook, such as the Associated Press Stylebook pictured here. Stylebooks tell you everything from whether to hyphenate certain words to how you abbreviate the states to which nouns are capitalized and which are not. And everything in between.

You'll also find a book of quotations on my shelf, as well as Plotnik's "The Elements of Editing" and the densely populated "Macmillan Handbook of English," 1960 edition.

Here's the thing: These books, or at least most of the information they contain, can be found online -- in most cases quite easily. Technically, I don't need the physical books whenever I have easy access to Google.

But I keep them for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that I still love the feeling of cracking open a book to get to whatever I'm looking for (just as I still love reading an actual newspaper). They have traveled with me from workplace to workplace over the past two decades, starting at the Cleveland Clinic and moving on to Dix & Eaton, The Cleveland Foundation, OneCommunity, Vitamix, and now Goodyear.

There are memories wrapped up in these books. A few I associate with particular work projects, maybe a script or press release of which I was proud. Others take me back to my newspaper days, when the whole idea of writing for money was new and exciting, and I wanted so badly to be good at it.

There's also this: As much as I love and embrace technology, I also believe books hearken back to a time when the written word was more revered and the library card catalog meant something. They represent a pathway to knowledge and experiences otherwise unattainable for most of us, even online.

Books are, in my mind, the genteel medium. And at age 51, I'm just old enough to appreciate that.

(By the way, the slim brown volume tucked between the AP Stylebook and the Macmillan Handbook is "The Word: An Associated Press Guide to Good News Writing." So good. Oh man, so good.)

The sheer pleasure of reading

This has nothing to do with the topic of today's post, but first I have to wish my big brother Mark a happy 64th birthday. It's almost like there's a Beatles song for this occasion...

Less importantly, I recently started reading books again. If you're a reader, you're nodding your head and wondering why I ever stopped in the first place. If you're not a reader, you're scratching your head trying to figure out why this ancient practice of reading words on a printed page has any attraction to anyone.

Because the world is essentially divided into readers and non-readers, right? That's my experience, at least, and rarely do those two camps intersect.

And by "readers," I guess I mostly mean readers of books. We all read something throughout the day, but I'm talking about good old-fashioned hardbound (or paperback...I'm not picky) books.

During my 2 1/2-month job transition period, I got back into books. I read a massive history of sea power in the First World War called "Castles of Steel" and also consumed the Lord of the Rings series, including "The Hobbit" and all three books of the trilogy proper.

I enjoyed it all, but I found that when you've been out of the reading game a while, it takes a little work to get back into shape. And by that I mean it takes a book or two before you're used to reading and comprehending several pages at one go.

For all of their benefits, smart phones seem to have collectively shortened our attention spans by several degrees. Reading books requires more prolonged, concentrated effort.

On a related note, I also rediscovered the pleasure of browsing bookstores. A few weeks ago before I started my new job, I drove down to Goodyear one morning just to see what the commute would be like, then on the way back stopped in the town of Hudson, Ohio.

There I experienced The Learned Owl, a bookstore located in Hudson's quaint, Hallmark-movie-like strip of downtown shops. I could have stayed there all day. It has two floors and is permeated by that "book smell" I love but can't describe.

It was awesome. I hope to get back there soon.

In the meantime, being fully employed again has cut down on my reading time, but I'm working through "All Quiet on the Western Front" in small chunks.

I'm so glad to have reentered the Kingdom of Reading. My self-imposed exile was far too long.

What's not to like about libraries?

I have never stopped being amazed by the concept of libraries.

You walk into the building, and there are stacks upon stacks of books, magazines, CDs, DVDs and other materials, all of them available for you to browse through. And computers, too. They have computers for you to use.

If you want, you can sit there all day and just read. Anything they have there, you can sit down and read it. For free.

And then there's the best part of all: YOU CAN TAKE VIRTUALLY ANY OF IT HOME WITH YOU. AGAIN, FOR FREE! They don't really care what you do with it, just so long as you bring it back on time and in good condition.

There's no way I'm the only person who thinks this is one of the coolest things ever, right? I mean, why aren't libraries overflowing with people taking advantage of this set-up?

Well, actually, our local library IS sometimes pretty crowded, but that's usually with people who don't have Internet access at home and are using the (FREE) broadband connections there, or with students researching papers, finishing homework, or else doing something wildly inappropriate.

I know this last part is true because my daughter Elissa has worked as a page at our local library for almost two years (NOTE: I think it's funny that they have a position called a "page" at a library. Because, you know, books have pages? That's kind of funny, isn't it? OK, moving on...)

Elissa spends a good deal of her time telling middle school-aged library patrons to be quiet or to stop fooling around. She has some great stories of things she has seen. Who knew the library was such a den of iniquity?

Because of this, and because she spends 10 to 15 mind-numbing hours per week reshelving books and DVDs, I'm afraid that Elissa does not share my passionate love of libraries. When she first got the job, I thought what a perfect fit it was. Elissa has always been a pretty voracious reader. What better job for her?

But I suppose there can be too much of a good thing. Understandably, whenever we take family trips to the library, Elissa doesn't come along with us anymore. I don't blame her, I guess.

Anyway, getting back to the wonder of libraries, I've always wanted to burn a day of vacation at the library. Like, the entire day. Just sitting there reading whatever I wanted. Or walking up and down the aisles looking at book titles I wouldn't normally notice during our 30-minute family excursions. That sounds like a serious amount of fun.

But I never do it because, you know, vacation time is precious and there are always things to do with Terry and the kids, or jobs to accomplish around the house or whatever. But one day, maybe when/if I'm ever retired, I'm going to do that.

I'm obviously not in the library business and thus I'm not familiar with the statistics, but my feeling is that libraries have way more amenities and resources available than most people ever use. These poor reference librarians, most of whom slogged through years of school to get their master's degree in library science to enter a profession in which they're chronically underpaid, are ready and waiting to help you with even the most arcane request for information. And most of the time the only thing that ever happens is that some unshaven guy in a dirty trench coat comes up and asks them where they keep the back issues of Maxim.

Still, it makes me feel good that they're there. If I ever want two paragraphs of Herodotus' description of the Greco-Persian Wars or to know the flying speed of the lesser striped swallow, they would be glad to help me. I'll never need either of these things, of course, but the fact that I COULD readily access that information with their assistance is somehow comforting.

And other than the overdue book fees, it's all free. Amazing.