Over 40 years ago, I wrote a short piece about the behavior of the shoppers at the corn wagon at Wallkill View Farm Market in New Paltz. I submitted the writing to Geddy Sveikauskas. To my surprise, he published the piece in what was then the New Paltz News.
During Covid, homebound with nothing much to occupy me in the long months, I reread many of my early columns. If you have any tucked into a book somewhere, please destroy them. Many were substandard, but it was a beginning.
When I started to write after a brief hiatus, another columnist stopped me in the street and asked with distinct distain, “Are you going to write the same old personal stuff again?”
“Yes. I guess so,” I replied.
Several years later, that same individual told me the columns had improved. The opportunity to learn by doing was the school.
I have written about politics, philosophy, social issues and more, yet it’s still the personal articles that consistently get the most positive response.
Steven Pinker, professor of psychology at Harvard University and author of books on language, mind and human nature says what occupies human beings the most are these questions: “Who am I? Who are these people hanging around me?”
We are interested in the lives of other people. “Reality,” “tell-all” television programs are popular. As cheap as the majority of those offerings are, a lot of people secretly tune-in. Also, memoirs have been steadily increasing in popularity since the 1990’s. Maybe the more isolated from one another we become the more we need to know about the personal lives of others.
I have had the immense privilege of teaching the “magical memoir” class through the exceptional Lifetime Learning Institute for seniors at SUNY New Paltz. In short measure, the most deeply private stories are disclosed, read out loud, resulting in a compassionate non-judgmental community. All three times the students continue to meet when the class ends. Sharing life stories creates a unique bond, often closer than friendships.
When a writer is “out there” publicly disclosing stories from their life experiences, they will take the risk of being judged, even scorned. Doing it anyway is a great way to achieve a goal leading to freedom and happiness. Concerning yourself with how others see you is egoistic. It assumes other people are thinking about you. Let me tell you — they are not thinking about you. Others are ruminating about themselves, trying to answer Steven Pinker’s first question, “Who am I?”
At the end of each memoir class, I posited this question: “What memories from your own life came to mind from the other students’ writings?” There wasn’t time in the 80-minute class to share all of their remembrances. I have learned the more deeply personal a story, the more universal it becomes.
I wrote a memoir about my life, the experiences I had growing up, explaining why I worked for 20 years without monetary reward in prisons with male prisoners in long-term incarceration for violent crimes. In the second half of the book, I wrote their life stories. In spite of differences, the more I knew them, the more I saw myself in each man.
In this time of great division and identity politics, without proximity to others, which is happening less and less with people outside our own circle, our common sense of shared humanity is lost.
My last two columns, “My Masada” and “Mondays at Mohonk” are excerpted from a book I am currently writing with the help of the gifted wordsmith Anne Pyburn Craig. It’s entitled Everyday Magic. This book is about the seemingly ordinary small miracles happening all the time all around us. The mysteries are often unconnected to our religion or spiritual practices. They appear inscrutably often without our even noticing.
Not coincidences like, “Oh! I was just thinking of you when you called,” or “fancy meeting you here.” Coincidences are magical when they happen at a moment in time that portents life-altering momentous revelatory meaning. These events happen to us all the time. Everyday magic occurs in nature, the kindness of a stranger, the perfect book coming to you at a moment when it’s exactly what you need, adversities turning into blessings. Have you got one? Write it down. Maybe it will be included in Everyday Magic.
Stay tuned. I have a perfect one coming up in my next column. It’s about the magic of grace coming in after years struggling to end a habit. Suddenly, through a chance meeting with a stranger, my problem just melted away, so far, forever. Have any of these moments ever happened to you? Write them down. Who knows your story could magically inspire someone else to remember their own moment of everyday magic.
Join the family! 
