Rare as Turtle Fangs

The great Wallace Tripp says illustrators are just word people who to happen to also draw:  “We work with one foot in a book, the other stuck in a paint pot; our shoes are a disgrace." I think of him here on National Columnists Day, so chosen because April 18th, 1945  was when legendary war correspondent Ernie Pyle was caught in some crossfire on an island off  Okinawa. He was a word person if ever the was one, his dispatches going out to over 300 newspapers on the home front. They buried him in his helmet.Tripp also says "genius is as rare as turtle fangs, but talent is common enough" and I get that completely. For sure I’m no genius and even if I have talent it’s no more than the kind all humans have,  born story-tellers that we are - though I will say my pals on the board of the National Society of Newspaper Columnists are the wittiest people I know. I keep wanting to stop and copy down all the funny things that come across my screen during our online board meetings. I’ve been doing a weekly column for 30 years and sometimes boast about how I’ve never missed a deadline. The real pros though? They write three or four or five times a week. Like San Francisco’s Herb Caen did,  or Chicago’s Mike Royko. Did Molly Ivins write that often? Even if she wrote only  once a week you were glad you were there to see what she said: “The first rule of holes: when you're in one, stop digging" is one of hers. Also, “As they say around the Texas Legislature, if you can't drink their whiskey, screw their women, take their money, and vote against  'em anyway, you don't belong in office.”All I ever did was stay the same person I was at age two when I set out alone in the big city to find my sister at kindergarten. I still go out each day wide-eyed, eager to see whatever I can see so I can come back and tell you all about it. This blog I’ll keep up for as long as I can but the column I will never stop writing so bury me in my helmet too and say I died in the line of duty.

Tonight I'll lift a glass to fellow Smithie Molly, gone from us too soon

Yay for the First Amendment

I should be drinking champagne. It’s National Columnists Day and every week for the last 1486 weeks I have filed a column for the newspapers that run me.

I started before they tried to kill the Pope, or Ronald Reagan, or the germs causing bad breath even and by now I’ve written about it all: 9/11 and the death of John Lennon; what I overheard the lawn maintenance guys across the street say when it looked like I might get to go up in the Shuttle and what I myself said to our last president to make him so mad he went red in the face.

Columnists get to write about almost anything as long as it sounds a chord in their readers. Maybe they help people put things in perspective. Maybe they make a space, like the chapel in an airport, for people to come to and access their feelings, or look inside themselves a little, or consider the human side of events.

Our day is today because it’s the birthday of World War II  correspondent Ernie Pyle who died in the line of duty. He was a fine columnist and so was Eleanor Roosevelt of that same era who wrote faithfully from trains and fancy hotel rooms and the lip of the West Virginia coal mines as she criss-crossed this land acting as the eyes and ears of her paralyzed husband.

I’ve done a column since 1980 and now I do this blog too and when I look back at parts of it I sometimes blush for the honesty I betray here. You can write on a blog stuff they would never print in the paper. When I read Nora Ephron’s I Feel Bad About My Neck I sat right down and in two hours' time had outlined seven answering chapters that did her one better on every front. My Neck is the Least of It I dubbed this book in my mind and if I related its stories in the paper every outfit of born-again busybodies in the nation would be calling for my head on a platter.

Yesterday I went to a high-end foundations boutique  where I learned how open the society has really become: dear little pocket-sized vibrators for sale among the Double-D cups and the many kinds of squeeze-you-breathless corsets known as ‘compression garments’.

Well. You pretty much can’t even use the word ‘vibrator’ in a newspaper column but here we are in the land of blogging. So let me go to the grocery store, walk two miles and read my book about Abe Lincoln and then - yay for the First Amendment - I’ll be back just after that to tell you all about it.