Savory Bites

I started reading anthologies while being overworked at a firm in Portland. I worked directly with the principal partner, and after 3 years of working together, we were a strong team. I worked a LOT of hours, late into the night, and came in almost every weekend. But it was the first few years after my divorce, and I wasn't looking for a social life outside of someone to decompress with when the workload was lighter.

When the workload was heavy, I decompressed by reading. Escaping into another time, another sphere. I needed reading heavy enough to temporarily halt the whirling of work minuetia in my brain. I needed to slow it all down, just for a bit. The Best American series fit my bill perfectly. The Nature and Science Writing essays were just enough teleportation for my lunch hour, with no continuous thread of character development or storyline to have to get back into at a later time. Savory bite sized reading while gulping down lunch. Perfect.

Over the years, I've become very fond of the short essay. I do still read full-length books, but with the shotgun pattern of interests and commitments I have going at any given time, essays do me just fine. (This also explains my draw to the weblog format - chunks of narrative, easily washed down with my morning coffee while waiting for the iron to heat up.)

I still burn through anthologies. I have the Nature and Science writing collections starting from 1999. I love the Food writing group, but I save those for special occasions, for if I read THOSE during lunch I'll lose my concentration on work for the whole afternoon, dreaming up variations to the recipes dancing in my head.

But the ones I savor most, the ones I keep at the top of the stack piled high next to my bed masquerading as an end table, are the collections of essays by naturalist Barry Lopez. The pacing of his writing is deliberately wound down, and the world that he draws for me - from a desolate snowy preserve on the Japanese island Hoikkaido to the rumbling cargo hold of a Boeing AirBus - is intricate and crystaline. I used to take his essay collection Arctic Dreams up to the plaza at Grace Cathedral on weekend mornings, to read on a park bench to a visual backdrop of asian seniors doing Tai Chi on the lawn. Steady and slow.

Perfect.


~