First Posted: 10/28/2013
Well, the time is almost here for my favorite seasonal columnist, Bob Seggerson, to start giving me my weekly doses of basketball reminisces. A couple of months ago, I stopped by Bob’s house to pick up a document for a story, now completed and coming in a few days on 1967 Lima Central Catholic football star Bill Dowd, who Bob knew from his days sharing the same high school gridiron.
As, I think, most of you remember, Segg fashioned as good an exit from an illustrious career in coaching as anyone could have by winning a state championship in his final year at the helm in 2010.
While standing in his kitchen chatting with my longtime pal, I listened to Bob’s lament over the fact that this school year would be the first where he wouldn’t be doing some part-time counseling in the guidance office in a building that, except for four years of undergraduate time at St. Joseph’s College in Rensselaer, Ind., he has roamed, first as a student and then as a staff member, for 50 years.
Now, I thought when he issued his regret that, perhaps, he was having the same withdrawal pains I experienced when I walked out of the first Memorial High School in St. Marys in early June 2005 after 32 years of walking around with chalk dust on my pants. After all, I understood that, while frustrating at times, the career I was leaving behind provided me so very many rewards watching kids develop and grow. In a nutshell, I knew I was leaving behind the most important work I would ever do.
However, when I said, “Bob, I know it’ll be tough not being around the kids,” he said, while true, that really wasn’t what he meant. He went on to say that it was at his desk in that guidance office where he also wrote his columns. It was his space, a comfortable environ where he had his computer for doing any needed research/Googling, and his files that included a compendium of print material and pictures from his many years of being such a vital part of LCC’s past, including some time having a very illustrious roommate, Monsignor E.C. Herr, in the little house that still stands to the immediate north of the school.
He said there was always something about that school, and, specifically, his desk in that guidance office, that helped him find inspiration to write.
Certainly, I told him that I understood. Truth be told, as a writer who grapples with writer’s block as all sometimes do, I’m certainly more comfortable writing a piece at my kitchen table beside a window looking out into the backyard, with my iPad and keyboard to my right and my folders and pens and sundry pieces in various stages of completion and my stack of blank paper and voice recorder and dictionary and thesaurus and other writing-related accoutrements scattered about the circular wooden table.
While I’ve written in hotel rooms and at the counter at Kewpee and Lima’s library and even on cruise ships after I visited Aruba on vacation just 48 hours after a young Alabama high school girl named Natalee Holloway disappeared and I saw the just-hung missing posters hanging all over the downtown area, most of my work through the years for either the newspaper or “Our Generation’s Magazine” as well as a couple of manuscripts for books I’ve been fortunate to get into print can be traced to that table.
Now, since I live alone, I can afford to have my comfort zone and comfort clutter in the middle of what in other homes with all sorts of other folks running around would be a clutter-free place of eating. But, because all the ladies with whom I once lived have moved on with their lives, I can leave it in its current state and eat perched over a TV tray in front of the tube. I know, it’s sort of a pathetic image, isn’t it? Once, in a fit of near madness, I thought I’d try to inject some domestic order and took everything off the table, compiling, boxing and labeling the material before putting it down in the basement, vowing only to bring up what I needed when it was time to write and then returning it to the boxes.
Ah, that lasted about a week before gnomes stealthily moved about and returned everything from downstairs to that table as I slumbered! Certainly, I’ll never be foolish enough to attempt such a cleaning endeavor again, because as I know, and Segg is discovering, the comfort zone for writers is sacrosanct.
When it comes to finding the right place to write, much has been written. For Henry David Thoreau, it was a crude cabin he, himself, constructed in the woods on a plot of land owned by his pal Ralph Waldo Emerson beside a beautiful body of water called Walden Pond in Concord, Mass.
For my absolute favorite author, Mark Twain, it was at the very top of a 19-room Victorian Gothic in Hartford, Conn., specifically at a large table on the third floor in a room that was his private domain, one that really was the equivalent of a tree house posted with a “No girls allowed” warning. While the room was also used for billiard playing and whisky drinking and cigar smoking with “his boys,” the primary function of that room was to write. It was in this “tree house” that Twain penned his most renowned works and gave the world Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn and a certain Yankee in King Arthur’s court.
For Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw, his space was a hut, like Thoreau, one he built himself back in his garden, but unlike Thoreau’s, his was a structure that he could rotate from inside so his desk was always in the sun.
For poet Dylan Thomas when he went gently into that good night to write during his ever-so-brief life, it was to a small boathouse he went, one overlooking an estuary and close to his house in the remote Welsh village of Laugharne.
And, for J. K. Rowling, at least for the first Harry Potter book, one that would catapult her to unimagined fame and wealth, it was a coffee shop, amidst the din of clattering dishes and the diverse and discordant snippets of others’ conversations, a place called Nicolson’s Café, on the corner of Nicolson and Drummond Streets in Edinburgh, Scotland.
So, really for most writers, both the whales and the tiny fish like Bob and me who try to swim in those sometimes murky literary waters, we need our comfort zones.
So, when he starts his weekly installments, if some of his initial endeavors are a bit rough, go easy on him. After all, he may be still searching for his space.
