If you have school-age children, by now they are two months or more into their routine of classes, books, extracurricular activities, and homework. Perhaps they love their teachers, excel in their academic studies, are popular among their peers, and look forward every morning to whatever new challenges may come their way.

Two years ago in December, I vowed to read the 11-volume set of Will and Ariel Durant’s The Story of Civilization in 12 months. Unlike resolutions made for New Years and Lent, some of which I break before the sun has set, I read those fat books one after the other and finished the final page with time to spare.

In January 2019, the National Institute on Drug Abuse issued an updated report on the use of opioids in the United States, including this observation:

In 2017, more than 47,000 Americans died as a result of an opioid overdose, including prescription opioids, heroin, and illicitly manufactured fentanyl, a powerful synthetic opioid. That same year, an estimated 1.7 million people in the United States suffered from substance use disorders related to prescription opioid pain relievers, and 652,000 suffered from a heroin use disorder (not mutually exclusive).

“When the most recent edition of the Oxford Junior Dictionary — widely used in schools around the world — was published, a sharp-eyed reader soon noticed that around 40 common words concerning nature had been dropped. The words were no longer being used enough by children to merit their place in the dictionary. The list of these “lost words” includes acorn, adder, bluebell, dandelion, fern, heron kingfisher, newt, otter, and willow. Among the words taking their place were attachment, blog, broadband, bullet-point, cut-and-paste, and voice-mail. The news of these substitutions — the outdoor and natural being displaced by the indoor and virtual — became seen by many as a powerful sign of the growing gulf between childhood and the natural world.”

In February 2019, the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation released the results of a nationwide poll of 41,000 Americans testing their knowledge of our country’s history. 

“The Foundation found that in the highest-performing state, only 53 percent of the people were able to earn a passing grade for U.S. history. People in every other state failed; in the lowest-performing state, only 27 percent were able to pass.” (Bold-print is from the Foundation.)

A recent review was of Abbi Waxman’s The Bookish Life of Nina Hill, a romantic comedy with sweet and wry advice about life, especially for the twenty-something crew. 

This week it’s snipers, spies, assassins, murder, and mayhem.

Ever have those days when you’re running against the wind, sprinting through the minutes and hours, arms and legs pumping away, sucking air, and still feeling like you just can’t keep up? No matter how you push yourself, no matter what you do, each day finds you falling behind in the race to complete your obligations. 

Literature at its best is a fast-track course in human nature. From Shakespeare we can, if we are attentive, learn more about the human heart than from years of living. The same can be said for reading such writers as Jane Austen, William Faulkner, Marilynne Robinson, John Gardner, and scores of others. We pour ourselves a cup of tea, sit in a chair, open a book, and find ourselves caught up in the emotions and thoughts of strangers who as we read become our familiars. From them we can deepen our knowledge of love and death, of triumph and disaster, of how it feels to wake in the morning with the taste of defeat in our mouth or to slip into sleep at night knowing that we have just met the person we are meant to marry.

Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly won my admiration long ago. I purchased my copy from Asheville’s Reader’s Corner Bookstore, now closed, and tore through this narrative of Bourdain’s adventures as a prep cook and then as a chef. For anyone who has served in the food business — in my 20s in Charlottesville I worked in an upscale restaurant serving French cuisine and in another medium-ranked restaurant called by the name of its previous tenant, The Hardware Store — Kitchen Confidential brought back all the hustle, chaos, gaffes, and drive for excellence that goes into the making of food and a pleasant dining experience for customers. In his memoir, Bourdain wrote lines like this one “Your body is not a temple, it’s an amusement park. Enjoy the ride.” Not exactly in keeping with the Biblical injunction, but hilarious. (To judge from appearances, many of us have taken far too much pleasure from that ride.)

July had come and gone, a month filled with obligations, all of them good, but exhaustion walked hand in hand with those commitments. Often I was tired just kicking off the sheets in the morning.  Various projects gobbled up the hours of those long days, and by the time I crashed into my mattress at night, I was one with the walking dead.