Topical, adj. 1. Of or pertaining to a particular location or place: local. 2. Currently of interest; contemporary. – The American Heritage Dictionary; Second College Edition.
During the “Great Purge of 2025” (see “A Review Of A Life,” the Weekly View, February 20, 2025), I came across some poetry that I had submitted to my professor at Indiana University Southeast in 1982. I didn’t throw the pages away, (though I cannot recall where I refiled them) but I remember a note — in red — from the professor, suggesting that the subject matter of the poem might be too “topical.” The poem began with the cry of, “Oh, Ron! Your (I cannot recall …”). The poem referred to something either said or done during the presidency (reign?) of Ronald Reagan, who served from 1981 to 1989. It didn’t refer to Reagan’s saying, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall,” a demand he made in a speech at the Brandenburg Gate of the Berlin Wall in 1987. My poem was written in 1982, so I was referencing something from that period.
When I review some of the columns that I have written over these last 15 years, I find that my references to current events were so oblique, that I cannot always remember what happened, and when, a clear violation of the journalists’ requirement to document “who, what, where, when and why.” I write from an “intensely personal” viewpoint, as a reader once communicated to me (also the title of a column published here on January 1, 2020). But should I refer to the “big bang” on East Washington Street at Bolton Avenue, I will include that the explosion occurred on October 4, 2018, at approximately 10:45 p.m. I lived on South Bolton, one half block from the noise, which I heard, but had yet to embrace the Irvington neighborhood page’s cry of “Did You Hear That Bang?”
Bob Dylan’s song, “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll” is referred to as a “topical song” by one reference source. Al Hunter, a columnist who writes for this paper, published a 2-part memorial to Dylan’s song. Though the event chronicled in it occurred in 1963, when I was a sophomore in high school, I don’t remember hearing about it. Dylan’s song was released on his 1964 album, “The Times They Are A-Changin’” but again: I don’t remember hearing it. But to many in the African American community, the event was “currently of interest; contemporary.”
I have written of my process of delivery of columns; some are born full-grown, and others must be nurtured to maturity. On July 25, 2019, The Weekly View published my topical reminiscence about my life in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. “The Confluence of Joyful Things” partly referred to the meeting of two rivers to make a third. The Allegheny and Monongahela rivers meet in Pittsburgh to form the mighty Ohio. (I erroneously stated that the Susquehanna River met the Allegheny.) When I lived in Southern Indiana, I told associates that the Ohio River they swam in had been polluted by my friends and me at its source: Pittsburgh. That, I believe, is a topical reference.
Most of my scribblings (are they still “set to type?”) will be topical, and for that, I make no apology. Unless you come after me with fire and pitchforks; I might reconsider. But until then, unlike Barry Manilow, who “writes the song that makes the whole world sing,” I write for Susie Richardson, who sent me an email of encouragement, saying that she can relate to what I have written; she encouraged me to “keep typing.”
I will, Ms. Richardson.
cjon3acd@att.net