Staying Home

It's been 14 days since I have been out. Fourteen days since my last physical contact with a person other than my wife. It's been 14 days since I last worked at my volunteering at the Stonewall Jackson House. It's been two weeks since I have driven a car - the Saturn to be specific. I've been out of the house five times - twice each of the past two Wednesdays to take the trash can to the curb in the morning and recover it in the evening. Each of those "trips" take about 45 seconds. The sixth time was longer - I took a 25-minute walk last Friday around the neighborhood. That's it - 28 minutes of outside exposure!

Now I can't blame the coronavirus on this completely. I could go out and walk more. I could drive around the neighborhood or go get a drive-thru coffee down the road. I could even drive to Subway or MacDonald's or some other fast-food place to get lunch instead of eating my homemade sandwich. I could. Yes, I could. It's just that I don't want to. I've lost my motivation to go outside. But that is not the worst of it.

I'm beginning to lose my motivation to read and write. I'm currently reading six books more or less. I say that because I haven't reached that spot in any of them that I normally do in my reading that one grabs me and I rush to finish it. Then I will continue to read the other five until another gets to that "rush to the end" spot. I'll keep on doing this until I have two left and then I replenish the reading pile back to 5 or 6 books again. As I said, I've not reached that point and don't feel like reading many times at all.

As far as writing is concerned, you easily see when I last posted. There were many times I said to myself, "Self, you need to write about _______ . But I didn't. I am hoping that by writing this post that it break up the log jam, or brain freeze, or whatever it is that is preventing me from doing what I normally love to do.

Well, what do I do all day if I don't what I normally love to do? I watch a lot of CNN about the coronavirus. I sleep a lot during the day because I don't sleep well at night. I play games on my phone -usually Sudoku and a crossword daily. I visit the social apps I belong to like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Probably too much sleeping and social apping. The Sudoku and crosswords keep my brain sharp.

Well, I've done it as my granddaughter likes to say. I wrote today. Let's see what tomorrow brings.

Anthony Price

You may not have ever heard of Anthony Price. I had not heard of him until one day in the late 80's - he was still writing then I later found out - when I happened to come across a couple of his books in the Mysterious Book Store when it was in the west side of midtown NYC.

I picked up his first one, "The Labyrinth Makers", and his fifth, "Other Paths to Glory". I was instantly hooked. The series, eventually 19 in all, was about a British spy organization much like the real MI5. It featured an agent, David Audley, with a deep knowledge of history as well as being a very good spy. Audley was in each book, but oftentimes he was secondary to others. But he always played a significant part in the climax or conclusion. At least in the 11 books I was able to collect.

  I still look for his books whenever I go to a used bookstore, but to date have not been able to find any of the remaining eight books. He wrote like the spy genre of the day, but one peculiarity I found when I read him was that he wrote less about describing the scenes around the characters; only the minimum to get a picture for the reader. He spent most of his writing efforts on what the characters were thinking and what they thought the other characters were thinking. At first, I had trouble following the storylines but soon was able to understand where the story was going.

Price got his start in writing for a local newspaper and once was given the chance to interview a man who had written a book but was not having any success getting it reviewed. Price did the interview; the man gave him the book to read; Price read it and gave it a very good writ-up. The man let him read the drafts of his second and third books of the series as well. It was a very lucky day for J.R.R. Tolkien.

Anthony Price was born in 1928 and died in 2019. I missed his obituary.