I made a decision. A few months ago, I initiated a newsletter I said would be weekly, but it turns out there’s no way on this green earth I could sustain that. Not even monthly!
So, I’m going to try for a seasonal one. And I’m not even going to email it, but leave it here on my blog. I just got to thinking about how many emails I have in my inbox, and probably you do, too. So I figured, you know where to find me!
Here goes.
Hi everybody,
How are you? How was your summer? We got in a couple of good canoe-camping trips here in the ADKS, first on Lower Saranac then on Middle. The Lower Saranac trip was way too short for the amount of work, I tore my scalp on a branch and nearly wrecked my back, lol. But even for the short duration, coming back into civilization felt surreal. Pressing down on the gas pedal of my truck was so easy! I spent at least an hour post-camping boggling at how convenient our world is here in the industrialized west.
Anyway, if you want to see what it’s like to take a family of five canoe-camping, I made a video.
Otherwise, the summer was full of family visits, gardening, and a fair bit of writing. I’ve been working on a story about a washed-up actor making his big comeback. He’s shooting a film on an island off the coast of Maine, and a crew member is found dead. A police detective arrives just in time before a terrible storm cuts off the island. And everyone is trapped there with — you guessed it — a depraved murderer on the loose!
All right, I have three things to talk about, then I’ll get out of your hair.
My wife and older daughter, Middle Saranac, NY
ONE: Pseudo-Empty Nest
Our son went off to college. My wife and I did a fair bit of crying at his departure. Then we rallied, cleaned his room (okay, deep-cleaned) and semi-converted it into a guest space. It’s still his room, 100%, but now it can accommodate family staying with us.
After a couple of weeks, we realized we weren’t done. Even though we have two more kids — daughters ten and seven — our son’s absence was really felt. His humor, his help with the girls, just his general comforting presence. It also made us think a lot about our lives at this point, and in some ways, provoked a bit of a mid-life crisis in me. I started thinking about how, in just twelve more years, our youngest will fledge the nest, and how I’ll be almost sixty years old at that point. Sixty!
Of course, there’s nothing wrong with being sixty. It’s just that when you’re forty-seven, you still tell yourself a story of being relatively young, with lots ahead of you. Sixty is a wonderful age, no doubt, but let’s face it, it’s just not forty-seven. Not only that, but we’ve now lived almost a decade in a house we bought for a temporary fix. Are we moving? Maybe not to just a different house but to a different town? What else might we do? We have friends who’ve decided to pull up stakes and just live on the road with their kids, and we’ve fantasized before about living abroad. But is any of that going to happen?
We’ve settled on rearranging some of the rooms in the house.
Anyway, the whole thing informed my next book, which is coming out this December: Her Darkest Fear. In it, Callie Anderson, a novelist (imagine that!) loses her husband to a vehicle accident. He winds up comatose, and the cops inform her that he’s a person of interest in the cases of two missing girls! While she tries to figure things out, she’s basically alone: their only child is off to college and the family pets have long expired.
Does any of that sound like it might be me working out my pseudo-empty nest / mid-life crisis issues??
Maybe. :)
If you want, you can watch me struggle to explain the plot here.
Our son, now 18
TWO: Hurricane Ian
My father lives in Bonita Springs, Florida. Yeah. He lives just miles from where the Category 4 hurricane made landfall on September 28th.
He’s okay and his home is intact. Many people can’t say the same, as Ian was the fifth-biggest hurricane ever to make landfall in the contiguous United States.
I’ll spare you all the talk about climate change, suffice it to say this: I’m reading David Wallace-Wells book The Uninhabitable Earth for the second time. It ought to be required reading for every man woman and child. Plus, a new paper from the University of Exeter in London came out this year, talking about the likelihood that we will be hitting five distinct climate tipping points at any moment, tipping points being those events that radically change climate behavior after they occur.
Living with the specter of climate change is its own adjustment. Sometimes it can feel difficult to know how to live. Should I change everything about my life, given what I know? If nothing I do is really apt to make a difference, should I still do anything at all? There certainly seem to be no perfect solutions, nothing on which we all agree, from who to blame (consumers? producers?), to whether wind and solar or nuclear is best, to how we can curb carbon emissions without creating too many knock-on problems.
Anyway, I sometimes write about all of that on Medium. And, yes, I’ve become something of a prepper, and am doing long-term food storage in my basement, plus learning to grow everything I can.
If none of this is your cup of tea, I totally understand. If you’re interested in more, click here.
God speed to the millions of Floridians recovering from the devastation.
The Naples Pier, before the camera went out and the pier was lost
THREE: Getting older
Didn’t we already cover this? Sort of. I recently listened to a podcast on Sam Harris’s Making Sense with Aurthur C. Brooks called “Where is Happiness?” Brooks is a Harvard professor, author, and lecturer who knows a lot about love and happiness. What’s especially interesting about Brooks, though, is that he was a classical musician phenom as a kid, only to have his ability plateau, he says, in his late twenties, earlier than expected. He ended up turning to other things, and has spent a lot of his career focusing on ambition, and how the brain changes with time.
According to Brooks’s research, in roughly the first half of our lives, we use a more “fluid intelligence,” meaning we’re able to juggle lots of concept and complexity as we do very creative things — like write a novel, maybe, deftly keeping all those characters and plot strands in our heads.
As we age, though, we transition to “crystallized intelligence”, which is more about what we know. We’ve learned all of these things in the first half of our lives, done a lot of this good work, and now we have some wisdom to offer.
Brooks suggests, and has research and evidence to support, that people who try to persist with fluid intelligence in their later years, that is, people who have ambitions to do those same things they could do when they were younger, are less likely to find happiness.
While those people who embrace their crystallized intelligence and turn outward, more toward their fellow humans, sharing what they know, helping people, teaching — these types tend to be happier.
It’s worth a listen, for sure.
Okay that’s it! I can’t believe I’ve written this and it’s just now turning nine a.m. Normally, I’d be driving the girls to school, but we decided to instead put them on the bus. I love my mornings with them, and our talks on the way to school, and it kind of kills me not to do it, but it’s an hour of my morning and I have a lot of energy that time of day I could be channeling into work. Like now.
But don’t worry, I pick them up every afternoon and we still manage to drive each other bonkers all evening long! Just kidding, I have amazing girls I’m so grateful for an a wife that’s beyond belief. I’m a very fortunate man. I hope to start paying all of that back in my life now, so please, never hesitate to reach out if there’s anything I can do for you.
~T.J. (aka Tim)
I got new glasses
P.S.
I just want to say a few shout-outs — hi to Meygan Barstow in Australia, a wonderful reader and supporter who checks in with me from time to time; Veronika Jordan, who’s previewed a couple of my recent books as a beta reader and provided invaluable feedback; Michelle Greene, who’s been corresponding with me about books and life for several years now (time flies!) And two Bobs — Bob Sirrine and Bob Guth, both super-fast readers and amazing supporters. Also, thanks to the author Charlie Gallagher for being there to help me with my latest projects, and to stay sane as a working writer in today’s market. Thanks to all of you and every one else for reading and writing in and doing all that you do in life.
P.p.s These days, the wife and I are watching some amazing shows, Dopesick (Hulu) and The North Sea (Amazon). She is reading The Book of Longings by Sue Monk Kidd and I’ve been bouncing back and forth between City Dark, The Uninhabitable Earth, and The Alchemist.