One of my notebooks surfaced from the pile of debris that populates my living quarters. This notebook was notable (see that?) for its age; it dates to 2009. I wrote on the opening pages that the purpose of the book was to “catalogue the words I stumble upon in my reading…” Those words would be ones that I was unsure of the definitions. “Or just fascinate the (stuff) out of me.”
When I was an adult student at Indiana University Southeast, I had art classes and English classes. In one of the English classes, I was introduced to the idea of “the commonplace book,” a notebook used to record anything that I find useful. I bought one, and filled it with a lot of my thoughts, as well as many drawings. I’m not sure where that book is, though I have seen it in my piles of stuff in recent years. But the notebook that inspired this column has my thoughts about a brief interaction that I had with a man in St. Louis Missouri. In my 2011 column, “There’s That,” I wrote of two characters from the movie, “Garden State,” and how the man says to the woman, “I like you. There’s that, and I guess I have that.” (The column was reprinted in the September 12th, 2025, issue of the Weekly View.)
Someone that I met recently asked me a question that I have heard before. “How do you come up with ideas for your columns,” she asked. I always have difficulty explaining how these 600 words come to be, for I have no “tried and true” method for development of something to submit to my editor. I responded to that recent query by saying that my columns grow out of my “small collisions with life.” In another notebook, I wrote, “develop (a column around) Tillie Olsen’s short story.” In “I Stand Here Ironing,” Olsen’s protagonist says that she “(stands) here ironing, and what you asked me moves tormented back and forth with the iron.” I read that story for my English Lit class at IUS in 1981, and in 2016, I wrote “April 1968.”
“I was standing at an ironing board, pressing the white smock I wore as an attendant at a psychiatric institution” when my two friends “came trembling into the doorway.” Gina and Byrd were two women I had met at the Art Institute of Pittsburgh, which I attended during the day; they were also neighbors of mine, and on April 4th, 1968, they told me that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., had been murdered. “I paused for a second, looked down, and continued my ironing.” My recounting of that “small collision with life” was accepted by the editor of this publication. “April 1968” was reprinted in the Weekly View on April 9th, 2021, close to the 53rd anniversary of Dr. King’s death.
My friend Mary Hanna Wilson and I attend DJ Trivia at Mikie’s Pub in Beech Grove, and at one recent visit, I told her what I knew of the origin of the one-finger salute. Mary told me to “develop a column” about that, and I dragged out my current notebook, and dutifully wrote, “develop ‘origins of’ …” The “middle finger” was one of the first things to “develop” on the list.
I found another notebook that had a record of my “collision with life;” I’ll not recount it here, for I want to develop that for another column, but that column will detail my record of a fence (not Pittsburgh’s Hill District playwright August Wilson’s “Fences,”) but an Irvington fence.
Stay tuned.
cjon3acd@att.net