I’ve had difficulty finding enough time or energy to write a blog post for several months. I’ve been really busy with work and also with preparing for and celebrating the fall and winter holidays. So really all positive reasons. I know a lot of people have lost employment or their small business during the pandemic, and I am grateful for the steady work I’ve had.
I recently came across the word growthier in a piece I was reviewing for a client. “There’s no way that’s a word,” I thought. But it actually is a word, according to Merriam-Webster, which the first copy chief I worked with after college convinced me is the best dictionary to consult because it’s the true heir to the groundbreaking linguistic work of Noah Webster.
That linked entry says growthy and its comparative and superlative forms—growthier and growthiest—apply only to livestock. My client was referring to stocks, not cattle or hogs, so I might have suggested an alternative, such as more growth oriented. But part of the job of being a helpful editor—and a helpful copy editor, in particular—is knowing when not to question something.
I still have a bit of learning to do about when to query and when not to query with this client, but I knew he wasn’t going to be swayed by a livestock-only argument. He chose and, I bet, enjoyed using that word—and would have probably argued it’s commonly used in his business—and I figured he wasn’t going to let it go quietly, so I let growthier stay put. And I saved both of us time and energy.
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This winter has been the coldest in South Florida since 2010–11, so we haven’t gotten Missy’s hair cut in about five months. That meteorological fact is really just an excuse to post a picture of our girl from when she last got groomed.
Our groomer always puts a bandana around Missy’s neck. I wanted to see what she would look like with it around her head. Adorable, of course.
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I started off the new year in a great way—by finishing Michael Chabon’s Moonglow. It was phenomenal.
I had avoided reading any of Chabon’s works because I associated him with magic realism, and I’m not a fan of that genre. Chabon calls Moonglow a “fake memoir” that is only very loosely based on the deathbed stories of his maternal step-grandfather.
What a fascinating character Chabon’s grandfather is. He’s got war stories, Nazi- and python1-hunting stories, prison stories, and stories of love, sex, and devotion. A writer named Michael Chabon is also a character in the book, but he’s far less of a presence than his mother, grandmother, and great-uncle, all of whom come spectacularly alive.
And Chabon’s writing is almost preternaturally good. Here he is describing the bombed-out German town of Vellinghausen:
The Germans were in retreat north and east, and the general feeling was that they would not be returning to Vellinghausen anytime soon. The town was held by some bone-weary somnambulists from the 7th Armored Infantry and a few bewildered-looking sappers from the 53rd Combat Engineers. Troops were few and scattered, and to a passerby it might appear that the invasion had been carried out by clouds of smoke, the gray sky pouring into the roofless houses, and a hunger so profound it had gnawed the houses to their foundations and the trees to stumps. Here and there a baker or a butcher had opened for business, but this apparent optimism or bravado was nothing more than the robotics of habit. There was nothing to buy, nothing to sell, nothing to eat. Smoke had left the eye sockets of houses with black eyebrows of astonishment. Cats hugged corners leaving brushstrokes of ash on the stucco.
An additional, small reason I enjoyed the novel so much was the large number of places I shared in common with the characters, starting on page 1 with a reference to “deepest Bergen County,”2 the New Jersey county where my sister and her family live. In their older years, Michael’s grandparents live in Riverdale, in the Bronx; my husband’s BFF owns an apartment in Riverdale. I used to work in Princeton, at a newspaper, not the university. Up next was a throwaway mention of Trenton, where I lived for many years on and off after college, including when I worked in Princeton, across the county (of Mercer) and a world away. Then there’s Coconut Creek, Florida, where another friend of Tony’s lives. And that was only through page 47.
I’m going to read much more Chabon, and I’m encouraging Tony to crack open Moonglow while I still have it on loan from the library.
1I don't know whether Chabon is aware of this fact, but there's an albino variety of python in the pet trade called moonglow.
2The town in Bergen County is later revealed to be Ho-Ho-Kus, which gets my vote for the North Jersey-est place name of all.