In Defiance of Thomas Wolfe

So – how do   you come back? Thomas Wolfe says you can’t. Maybe he’s right and you really can’t go home  again.  But what if maybe you can?  I think you can. I don’t know it  for sure, but in a fair world (yeah like that’s not an oxymoron) burned-out bloggers can and do  revitalize. Of course the  big question in revitalization is  what do you say about having been absent for almost a year. Should you adopt an attitude of insouciance as in, “Hi honey, I’m home!” ” Or is it better to serve up  an apology wrapped in angst and sprinkled liberally with mea culpas in the original Latin? I think I’ll skip both if you don’t mind.

It’s funny how I'm talking to “you”, because I’m pretty sure that “you” aren’t even here anymore. This is not the first time I lost my audience via silence. It’s actually the second, but who’s counting. Obviously, just me.  All I can say is I never made a conscious decision to stop writing the blog. I like to blame it on starting the new ephemera site – and that WAS a big piece of it -- but it doesn’t deserve the  whole  rap sheet  either. The real reason I stopped is that I was sick to death of listening to myself whine about the inevitable changes in the book business.  Of course now that I’m back  I know I’ll inevitably whine some more, and occasionally even rail, because I’m a whiner at heart and that’s what we do. One of those online quizzes even said as much  last week. The Yiddish word I most resemble is kvetch.  I knew it even before they told me, but I will try to temper it. Promise.

Okay then, now that that’s out of the way here’s what’s going on over here. I am surrounded as always by leaning towers of books of excellent to dubious distinction.  The ephemera site is almost at 1000 listed items, I’m still at the antiques mall with two booths,  and I’m also still volunteering for Northern Ohio Bibliophilic Society (NOBS) which I love except for one enormous thing. Okay, here’s the whine. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.  I took on the job of NOBS secretary which proved immediately to be a huge mistake.  I have no talent for it, no time to do it, no interest in it, and am frustrated by its endless detail. Oh, how I hate details – those damn pesky little things humming around me like a swarm of gnats.

The  only really big news is I have a new grandson. Our  daughter Catie, who got married last June and moved to Kansas City, delivered little Cameron Joseph Han a week ago. He was three weeks early, but all is  well as he’d passed the danger mark  and weighed  in at an acceptable six and a half pounds. We’ll be going out there next week, so I probably should have waited to start this until I got back. But Eric is off to one of his many shows – really, not that much has changed! – so today seemed like the day to tie up loose ends.

Which brings me now  to the final big question -- can I henceforth be counted on to be a dependable blogger? I’d like to say yes – emphatically YES! -- but I better not, or the next time I fail It WILL require mea culpas in the original Latin – maybe even marinated.  And who in their right mind  wants THAT? So let’s leave it at this. I will try very hard to write at least once a week, share what I know, and admit what I don’t. I will try to be informative and maybe even amusing from time to time. And I will always give an honest account of what’s going on.

So what do you think – shall we give it another spin?