Did you forget about me?

I didn’t forget about you all, but I did prioritize some other things (including sleep and exercise: recommend both) that left less time for other things, including this blog.

Happy to say, though, that my Year in Reading series of guest posts returns in truncated form, starting tomorrow and continuing through the next week or so. Those posts will conclude with my own 2024 reading review. Can you even remember that far back? As we hurtle into darkness, it seems a long time ago. We have a lot of work to do to resist what’s coming. And I’m still convinced reading is a part of that.

With my Year in Reading I’ll share some exciting news that will shape the coming year–and maybe let me use this space more regularly.

My mother had this self-titled Crosby, Stills, and Nash album when I was a kid. I think her brother sent it to her from Switzerland in the early 70s. However it arrived in our western Canadian home, the record was a fixture of my childhood, and I returned to it regularly, thrilling to the melodies and harmonies even if I didn’t understand all the lyrics. (You don’t want to know how old I was when I realized the roaches in “Marrakesh Express” were not bugs.) “Chestnut brown canary/ruby throated sparrow”: I loved that stuff.

Every time we pulled the record out, my mother would say how much she loved that photo. It conjured up memories of the epic road trip she and my father took from Montreal to Mexico via most of the US and eventually back to arrive, on the day of the moon landing, in a dusty windblown city called Calgary, a place she would never imagine she would spend the rest of her life.

“A couch on the porch. You’d never see that in Switzerland. God knows what’s out on the lawn.” She said this half enviously, half disparagingly. So messy! Gerümpel. Junk, trash, old lumber. A world in which keeping up appearances didn’t seem to matter. That could never be her world, but she was drawn to it anyway. As a child I associated the photo with my vague idea of the American South. So strange that I would one day live in that foreign land. Though surely the photo was actually taken in California. (That palm tree poking in the left side of the frame.) This was before I knew about Joni Mitchell or Neil Young, the Canadians at the heart of the scene.

Anyway, I didn’t come here to write any of this.

More from some great readers soon. And from me after that. I hope you’re as well as can be.