Unless you are at home in the metaphor, you are not safe anywhere.”
— Robert Frost
Mentors — An Appreciation
BECAUSE OF DARRYL CURTIS, I still say “deh-TAILS” instead of “DEE-tails.”
Darryl was my boss at Santa Rosa news-talk radio station KSRO more than 20 years ago. To say I learned from him everything I know about radio reporting would be an understatement, just as it would be to name Bill Hoban as being responsible for everything I learned about newspapering during my 1998-2003 tenure at the Sonoma Index-Tribune. I owe both of these guys a lot; not only for teaching me about the craft, but also about the ethics involved — and the sheer joy of doing the job.
First Graf: The Physiology of Taste
THE FIRST BOOK THAT ACTUALLY got me thinking about food as something other than tasty fuel with which to stuff my face was Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin’s 1825 work, The Physiology of Taste; or, Meditations on Transcendental Gastronomy. Part travelogue, part autobiography, part science text, Physiology deals with such pleasant problems as how to cook a fish that’s too big for the oven; the exacting method of digestion; why restaurateurs do what they do; how to survive a revolution; how to lose weight; and how to make the perfect cup of hot chocolate or coffee.
Aside
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Minute Mitzvah: Stuff & Nonsense
Today: Don’t crave someone else’s stuff.
Explanation: One of modern life’s biggest distractions is feeling materially inadequate, especially in a gotta-have-it society like our own. Why dwell on your deficiencies? As Pirkei Avot says, “Who is rich? One who is contented with his lot.”
Exercise: Take a moment (or two) to be happy with and grateful for what you have, no matter how much or how little that is — let it be enough.
Of Tone-Outs, Turnouts and a Press Badge
IT’S HARD TO WATCH LIVES literally going up in smoke in order to tell other people about it. But on a professional level, it’s thrilling to see firefighters bringing order to chaos.
When I worked for the Sonoma Index-Tribune between 1998 and 2003 (and for the Sonoma Sun in 2008), I wore a pager that one of the departmental chiefs had loaned me for the duration. It was the same make and model worn by the firefighters themselves (professional and volunteer), and would beep three times before broadcasting the appropriate jurisdiction’s “tone-out” (a two-note musical chime, unique to the responding department[s]) and an abbreviated situation report along the lines of: “Sonoma; possible structure fire; Andrieux Street cross of Broadway; time out, 1400.”
Words To Bring Back: “Desultory”
– Definition: adj. marked by lack of definite plan, regularity, or purpose
– Used in a sentence: Except for my relatively brief writing career, my life has been a desultory yet full one.
– Why: It seems to characterize much of our post-Y2K (remember that?) popular culture. In the late 1990s, we had a nice fin-de-siecle sort of desperation. But ever since the Great Odometer rolled over, meh.