My favorite time in a kitchen is the early morning, when things are still, and every pot, spice and spoon is in its place. I learned to appreciate this moment when I worked in college dining halls. After I graduated, I wasn’t making much on my writing, and the fact that most people don’t was no comfort. So I went to a local restaurant and asked if they needed any help. They did. They wouldn’t pay me much, but I could take home food.

Working with food provided faster satisfaction than scratching out a short story or a piece of journalism in my lonely apartment. I was around that crazy, disparate bunch of people you meet in the culinary world. Some couldn’t speak English but could blurt one or two words which would suffice for the remaining 9,998 in the conversational American English vocabulary.

Others were dreamers whose goal was not always opening a restaurant. One day the pot washer came to me with the sleep-deprived eyes of a human being who had been up all night for no good reason. “I finally figured it out,” he told me breathlessly. “I have to make a movie.”

He repeated this to everyone else on the shift and quit within a week. I don’t know if he ever made his movie, but, with so many films and TV shows about restaurants and chefs, maybe I’ll be wandering through the Netflix aggregator and I’ll see, all the way down at the end, Galactic Pot Washer.

In a restaurant kitchen, you learn to work fast and clean. You stay focused on what’s in front of you so you don’t burn yourself or cut your finger off. Between shifts you get one meal that’s better than anything you could cook yourself. And you never waste anything. The ends of carrots, the lettuce leaves you peel away, broccoli stalks, bits of this and that–if it’s organic, it goes into the stock pot and simmers for hours until it becomes wonderful.

If the food is prepared properly, if it goes out as it should and the chef is in a good mood and the owner isn’t around to come up with another way to save money, all is good. You go home genuinely, sincerely exhausted, with leftovers that will taste great the next day.

It’s no wonder, then, that I came to love that clean, still, cool aroma that greets you when you walk in to a restaurant kitchen in the morning. It’s like the dawn before a battle,  or a theater a few hours before the curtain goes up. You know something’s going to happen soon, and it’ll be fast and crazy and over before you know it, but, before it happens, you take some time to breathe.

Sometimes, after I had that breath, the chefs showed me how to cook. Thus I learned how to chop onions quickly enough not to cry, and to make beef chili and french toast on a truly industrial scale. The chefs also used their mornings to experiment and improvise, especially when a vital ingredient had spoiled or not been delivered. I watched and learned new metaphors for the creative process.

This was before the era of branded chefs who may own, or have their names on a dozen restaurants they will never visit or cook in, because they’re too busy with their TV shows.  It was also before just about every restaurant became a concept, with a menu that cannot be altered. Nowadays, most kitchen staff don’t cook. They assemble.

I didn’t expect to be reminded of my restaurant adventures until, in the sanctity of my own home, I put a roasting pan with chicken thighs in the oven.

Most mornings are ruled by the smells of coffee, bacon, sausages, melting sharp cheese, the vanilla and nutmeg in pancakes, the rich subtleties of eggs and the warmth of toasted bread–not chicken.

Unless you work in a restaurant (or live close enough to one to catch the fumes from the exhaust fans), you won’t smell chicken before lunch. In a restaurant, you use the morning to begin processes that may take several hours. One of them is baking chicken for lunch.

The chicken I cooked was to go into a salad for dinner. I put water in the bottom of the roasting pan, to steam the chicken as it bakes (and make the skin crispy). Within minutes the house filled with that grandmothery chicken-soup scent, and suddenly I was back in restaurant land.

The chicken baked beautifully and  I remembered the big, steaming stock pots that gave the kitchen its characteristic afternoon aroma. I channeled the chefs who had taught me.

I searched the refrigerator for leftovers that retained their integrity. Into the broth went some bits of cooked Pennsylvania Dutch bacon, a carrot, an onion, some raw dipping vegetables (more carrots, with celery and broccoli). In the pantry I found a jar of gray lentils that almost begged me to jump into the chicken broth and turn it into soup.

In they went. I did not add any seasonings because I wanted to taste the ingredients: the warm richness of the chicken and bacon, the sweetness of the vegetables, the earthy  splendor of the lentils.

I took a taste and the lentils brought me to backward (or forward–I’m writing this on a humid August day) to winter, where lentil soup is both a comfort and redemption.

But a question sent me back to the present, in the same way that, when I finish a piece of writing, I cannot have a feeling of accomplishment while a stray phrase, a murky passage, or a recalcitrant adverb torpidly remains to be adjusted.

I took another taste. Should I add salt?

My chefs told me that though no dish was perfect, no dish could be duplicated, every act of cooking was unique–the last thing you wanted to see from the spy hole in the restaurant kitchen door was a customer adding salt. Pepper was a performance, with the waiter coming around with what looks like a wooden table leg, twisting one end and hoping that whatever came out the other was really and truly pepper and not flakes from some dark piece of wood that the owner had slipped in to save money.

But salt? That should be done in the kitchen.

And so, a pinch later, it was close enough to perfect for me to have lunch.

Edgar Allan Poe, H.L. Mencken–what about Anne Tyler?

When the President of the United States recently made disparaging remarks about the Baltimore district of a respected congressman and civil rights leader who happens to be investigating the President’s integrity, those who wanted to defend the congressman, and his city, published lists of what was great, good, worthy and world-class about Maryland’s biggest city. They mentioned Poe, who died there, and the sour, cynical H.L. Mencken, who did his best journalism and social satire in Baltimore in the early part of the 20th century.

Why wasn’t Anne Tyler on the lists that I saw? She’s won a Pulitzer, among other awards! Her books were made into movies! What gives?

You don’t have to visit Baltimore to know it is large enough to have all the problems, complexities, tragedies and contradictions of any Eastern seaport metropolis, made even more interesting by its distinctive northern and southern cultural styles. What isn’t so obvious is that the city is small enough so you can get quick, powerful, unexpected glimpses into how it works, how the numerous social, economic and cultural forces move, communicate and frequently frustrate each other. It also functions well as a city: despite its highly publicized difficulties, it delivers the exquisite experiences that visitors expect from an urban environment.

Like Philadelphia, where I once lived, the remnants from earlier historical periods don’t quite fit into the contemporary landscape, but they remind you that important things not only happened there, but continue to happen, if anyone bothered to pay attention. This is, among other things, what David Simon’s superb, but demanding Baltimore-based police procedural HBO series The Wire was about.

I learned to savor Baltimore when I wrote for Baltimore Magazine, the city’s lifestyle monthly. Most people I met became the subjects of profiles, but a few, like filmmaker and social critic John Waters, I met by accident.

One person–the one I most wanted to meet–did not talk to me, though the magazine gave me her telephone number. I called several times. I left messages.  My calls were not returned. Unlike some journalists who believe they can get what they want by becoming a pest, I let it go. The privacy of people–especially those who do something that pleases me–must be respected.

If she had called back, I would have told Ms. Tyler that, when I first came to Baltimore for the magazine, I was unaware of her novels and did not know that I ate at the restaurant on which she may have based Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant.

But I began to read her books and found them so beautiful that I no longer wanted to write or publish novels about violence and heroic acts of derring-do because there are bigger, better and more inspiring stories to be found in characters who are just a little bit broken, thwarted and troubled about the peculiarity of grace and the inappropriateness of love. We need more novels that show us people who can endure and survive the quiet, but no less painful complications that confront those who are not front page news and never will be, but, by the strength of their character and an innate faith in human decency, will come to a vital understanding of who and what they are.

Finally, I wanted to rejoice that books such as hers were still being written, and that they say something new and necessary about the generalities of urban life, and the specific qualities of Baltimore, that has not been said in so many novels I’ve read set in New York, Los Angeles and other big bad American cities.

One dubious gift that journalism brings is the possibility of meeting your heroes. I’ve done this often enough to know that, even if everything happens as anticipated, you walk away knowing that this person is your hero not because of what she’s done, but because of what you’ve wanted her to be.

But, as one who considers an Anne Tyler novel as much a part of Baltimore as any other experience I’ve had there, I wish those fervent list-makers had remembered that she lives, writes and, I trust, thrives in that marvelous city.

Her work is one more satisfying motivation to love Baltimore, whether you visit or not. Sometimes, the ability to appreciate a place, a person, a predicament, leads to greater insights about yourself. Though Baltimore has its difficulties–some of its denizens have indeed become front page news and a few incidents have torn neighborhoods apart, Tyler’s novels are clearly, obviously and wonderfully about what brings the city, and the world beyond it, together.

I read biographies to explore another personality through stories. The stories are not always true and are often subject to revision. A recent reading about the Duke of Wellington suggested that he never said his most famous quote, “the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton,” and that the statement was attributed to him as one more Victorian nod to the innate superiority of the English imperial education.

My half-French friend reacted with disgust when I told him I just finished a 500 page biography of the Algerian French philosopher Jacques Derrida. Considered one of the most important philosophers of the 20th century, Derrida is second to Jean Paul Sartre (the father of existentialism) as the greatest modern French philosophers, though his disciples will characterize him as post-modern, and other philosophers in the French academy are still angry at him.

I did not ask why my friend hated Derrida (he added that he also despised Satre) because I’ve learned from the current American political, cultural and economic divisions that the reasons someone hates a person, place, thing, ideology, etc. are not as important as the fact of the hatred itself: our current passion for passionate dislike has raised the talent for loathing to one more act of self and group esteem. It now defines us (or has the potential to do so, if we permit it) just as much as our ability to love, like, appreciate and nurture.

So I tried to maintain whatever sociability I had with him and shared with him some things I read about Derrida that I did not admire.

Derrida, though happily married with two children, was known as “the seducer” by many of his female students and colleagues. He had a passionate affair that may have inspired one of his autobiographical writings. The affair resulted in a child. Derrida refused to raise the boy and eventually ended any social and professional contact with the mother, though he wrote a philosophical discourse on the ironies and contractions existing in the meanings of paternity and fatherhood. Though most disciples in Derrida’s circle knew of the child, they did not talk about him, perhaps because of another Derrida discourse on the paradoxical necessity of secrets. The mother eventually married a man who knew of the child’s relation to Derrida. The husband entered politics and became Prime Minister of France. When he ran for the office of President, the newspapers publicized the paternity of his son. Derrida found himself embarrassed, to say the least.
Derrida permitted one of his female disciples to have an affair with his sixteen-year-old son.
After the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the United States, Derrida claimed publicly, without offering any specific evidence, that the attacks were the direct result of American and Israeli policies directed against Palestinians and the Arab world. Though Derrida was born a Jew in Algeria when it was a French colony, and was the target of anti-Semitism in Algeria and in France, he found his Jewish heritage problematic, especially when he married outside his faith. He became friendly with Palestinians when he lectured in Israeli and joined and Jean Genet, the playwright and novelist, and Jean Paul Sartre, in advocating for them. Having visited Israel many times and studied the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, as well as the events and personalities surrounding the 9/11 attacks, I find that Derrida’s analysis ignores Bin Laden’s personal grudge against the United States and his urge to establish himself as a revolutionary leader.
Derrida lectured for hours without a break, speaking mostly about himself, on seemingly arbitrary, if not downright tedious topics. His disciples hung on every word. Others found this infuriating. Derrida was proud of his stamina and once lectured for 12 hours in a single day straight–with a break or two. I’ve lectured for more than an hour and I’ve sat through lectures that have lasted longer than three hours. I don’t care if you’re the world’s greatest comedian, the most interesting person ever, the holder of fifteen degrees and the Noble Prize–going on for more than an hour is just too much.
My friend did not reveal what he hated about Derrida. Instead he advised me to read a book by a philosopher he liked: Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy. I recommended David Hume to him, and we left it at that.

What I didn’t mention was what I admired about Derrida.

Deconstruction, as a technique for textual analysis, really helps expose hidden biases and subtle cruelties.
He endured the hatred and vilification, and then the jealousy of the French philosophical establishment, and kept his personal squabbles private.
He showed how speech is not the higher or purer form of communication compared to writing. Writing has its own mysteries, complexities and charm.
He enjoyed puns as both jokes and tools for philosophical inquiry. He believed that “play” was more than just amusement: it was a way of arriving at unique points of view and new meanings.
He was a tireless teacher on the international circuit, eventually establishing visiting professorships at Yale, New York University and the University of California at Irvine.
He wrote many books, commentaries and lectures that are nearly impenetrable and almost impossible to translate adequately. This was done deliberately in an effort to question ideas, and ideologies, about truth, authenticity, meaning and identity.
He got some of his ideas, as I still do, while indulging in physical activity, such as swimming or running.
He savored that dumbfounded moment you get when, instead of arriving at the truth, you find yourself in an unsolvable paradox. He called this “aporia,” the Greek word for the moment when you are flummoxed and begin to doubt, or question what you assumed you knew.
He began each writing session by asking, “Why write?” I don’t know if he found an answer, but he let the writing happen.
He was brave enough to endure the bad reviews, insults and petty nastiness of his peers, and, instead, honored his writing, and those of others who, philosophers or not, believed putting words on a page worthwhile and necessary.

President Richard Nixon liked a bowl of cottage cheese and ketchup. Some biographers have noted that he also ate cottage cheese with pepper, and fruit, which is actually quite tasty. My grandmother Rose was a fan of cottage cheese and melon, especially cantaloupe. I’ve tried it: the sweetness of the melon blends well with the salty, slightly bitter cream of the cottage cheese.

Ketchup is another matter. Originally a fish sauce, it was brought to this country two centuries ago and did wonders for the fortunes of the H.J. Heinz Company, which trademarked their version–still the most popular in the United States–as “catsup.” The word derives from Asia, though some think it could be from a European derivation of an Asian expression meaning “food with sauce.”

Most Americans don’t think of ketchup as a sauce. Supermarkets put it in a section called condiments. These include a famous French sauce, dijonaise, which most of us know as mustard.

Condiments tend not to be considered food, though President Ronald Reagan, while promoting shameful legislation that would have reduced funding for public school lunches, once called ketchup a vegetable, presumably because its red color comes from tomatoes, which were legally classed a “fruit” in an infamous New York City taxation case.

You can make a ketchup with sweet red peppers, but the kind I like to dump on my hamburger uses a tomato,  which, a few centuries ago, was thought to be a dangerous aphrodisiac.

Did ketchup ever compete with music as the “food of love”? I doubt it. Sauces have had a more practical function over the long history of cuisine: they disguised the taste of spoiled, or ineptly prepared food. My first cooking teacher told me that if I ever burned an omelet, I should cover the dark patches with a tomato sauce.

Unless you’re a former president, ketchup, soy sauce, tamari, mustard, Tobasco, numerous salsas, Worcestershire, steak sauce, barbecue sauce, and mayonnaise (a sauce invented as a salad dressing on the Mediterranean island of Minorca, near the town of Mihon, to appease the finicky palate of the famed French lover, Armand De Vignerot du Plessis, inspiration for the serial seducer Valmont in Dangerous Liasons ) are not considered nutritionally complete to constitute a meal (though egg-based mayonnaise has enough fat and protein to do the job). As condiments, they are added to our food to enhance it (veal with Cumberland sauce, roast turkey with “brown” gravy, Cheese-wiz on sauteed sirloin shavings and onions on an Italian roll becomes the famous Philadelphia cheesesteak), bind contrary flavors (Hollandaise on a poached egg and grilled ham becomes Eggs Benedict, a bechemel in chicken pot pie brings the vegetables and chicken pieces into a yummy harmony), disguise flaws (my first cooking teacher advised me to cover the brown spots on an overcooked omelet with tomato sauce), add color, texture, keep food from drying out or, in the case of ketchup and mustard combo on a fast food hamburger, give bland chunk of coagulated beef a hot-sweet-and-sour zing.

Some sauces dominate a dish, as in chicken dijonaise, a favorite in my youthful days at the only restaurant in Washington, D.C.’s Georgetown whose menu I could afford, or steak Bearnaise, which I learned to make before I ordered it in a restaurant. Beef stroganoff uses a sour cream sauce. Lobster soong, a blow-out dish that my parents enjoyed, puts chunks of lobster in an egg sauce.

And how many of us can forget the bliss of sweet-and-sour, teriyaki and barbeque? Would we have eaten so much, so quickly, without the sauce?

Which makes me ask, to what extent do we taste the sauce, that is, indulge our desire for pleasure, in our lives, instead of eating only what we need to slake our hunger? With so many new hamburger chains appearing offering “unlimited” toppings, how often have we decided to forgo the additives and merely taste the meat?

How important is it that we be pleased with what we consume (and that act of consumption be pleasant)? To what extent is our identity–who we think we are (as well as who or what others want us to be)–is shaped by the frequency, variety and quality of pleasures we indulge?

Why do we feel guilty, or shameful, when we over indulge (like binge-watching that steamed TV series), even if what we’ve done hasn’t endangered or hurt anyone?

And, to adapt a metaphor, how often do we wish we had a some kind of metaphorical sauce to cover up, add flavor,or make pleasurable what has become a dull chore? So many develop addictions and compulsive illnesses to these so-called sauces.

One good thing I’ve learned about writing. You have days when a cup of coffee, a morning walk, a long run, a fancy quotation, a smile from your muse (to whom I happen to be married) or a tune from your favorite musician will make the words flow. Then you have days when the nothing works.

I must be thankful that, beyond a morning cup of joe and tendency to get lost in computer solitaire, I’m not an addict. I’m not waiting for some substance to make my life livable.

Such thoughts went through my head as I wolfed down a grilled brisket burger–with ketchup on a toasted potato flour bun–and tried to watch on Netflix (or was it Amazon Prime?) a thriller series that, according to the reviews, had pleased most people. While I noted good production values and competent acting, I found that the series was so formulaic that I could predict when danger would strike? Why was such obvious manipulation unpleasant for me?

I remember talking to a mild-mannered, amiable fellow who was a “super” professional wrestling fan. He said he enjoyed watching the outrageous theatrical antics because he liked being fooled. I enjoy roller coaster rides and live performances of magic for the same reason. I watch  “special effects” films in which armies of computer technicians spent months in front of their keyboards so I can pretend that a spaceship is zooming away.

And yet, I don’t like politicians and authority figures lying to me. I don’t play poker because I’d rather not be fooled when my prestige and money is on the table. Perhaps I see myself as a person who so powerfully doesn’t want to be fooled, that he will only condone being fooled in ways in which he knows he’s being fooled, or doesn’t care if he’s fooled or not?

I finished that brisket burger too quickly. Another sat on the tray, just waiting to be eaten. Did my body need two burgers in one night? Was I that hungry?

No. But I just had to taste that burger–without the ketchup.

I took one bite and imagined my ancestors huddling together on a dark night, roasting pieces o’ beast on an open fire. Someone threw a hunk to me and put it my mouth as my ancestors turned to me and waited for my judgement.

“Needs ketchup,” I said.

The fronds were thin and stringy. The fern, my wife said, has to go into the ground.

The reason I became anxious had nothing to do with the fact that, a few hundred miles away, a tornado ripped up a shop and killed a man.

What is odd about my neighborhood is that nearly all the extreme weather that devastates so many, tends to happen elsewhere. Tornadoes have touched down a few miles away. Rain water has flooded streets and houses on the other side of the hill I can see from my window, but our street remained safe.

I was unsettled because I am not quite comfortable with nature, and this region can be a challenge to a gardener because the soil is mostly clay clinging to hard granite.

I write in a small room in a small house on what was once a farmer’s field. The farm is now houses, schools, churches, gas stations, office buildings and many, many places where you can shop. Behind and between (and sometimes beneath busy roads) are mostly paved, landscaped trails winding past creeks, ponds, meadows and small forests and parks. Despite the fact that the trails are nearly overwhelmed by trees, shrubs and vines, when my wife and I want to put a plant into the ground near our house, we must surround the plant with “organic” soil that comes in a sealed plastic sack.

Drive a few miles south, west or north (east is Washington, D.C. and all those houses and businesses and buildings that want to be near it), and you can still see farms growing corn and, more commonly now, grapes that go into bottles sold at vineyards that have funny names and offer entertainment on the weekends. I’ve been told that nearly all the wine grapes grown in the United States (with the exception of some in California that were imported from France), are distant relatives of a species that, unlike grapes grown elsewhere, can endure more humidity and greater extremes of heat and cold.

Founding father, university founder, writer, inventor, philosopher,  Francophile,  wine fancier, diplomat, president, slave-owner and gardener Thomas Jefferson settled 110 miles away in Charlottesville. A fig that, according to the Montecello gift shop, descends from one that grew in his garden, sprouts broad green leaves in our garden.

I don’t believe the current president is a gardener. I interviewed him a few years ago when he had his name on Atlantic City casino hotels. He told me vanilla his favorite ice cream flavor. The topic of agriculture did not come up.

Is there a gardening personality? Does the regular care of plants make you a different person from, say, those who hunt animals, or pull fish out of water? In his Ecologues, the great Roman poet Virgil suggested that gardens make us better people, though some critics feel that this was one more attempt to find virtues in the country that seem to missing in the big bad city.

Others have written on the gardening tendency, habit, and compulsion, as if the custom of chosing, aranging and caring for plants was not only natural, but a connection to a point in our anthropological history.

As the theory goes, our species made a vital shift from hunting and gathering, to the systematic cultivation of plants. As much as this may have given us a more reliable source of food and clothing (when this reliability was not threatened by drought, freezing cold, plagues, floods, pestilence and diseases carried by other creatures that enjoyed what we planted), it may have also given us our first sense of territoriality. You can’t wander about if you’re a planter. You stay with the crop and do your best to protect it from those that would take it, or destroy it.

And that’s the fun part. When you take what you don’t need to the big bad city to sell it, all the trouble starts.

Did early religious ideas come from agriculture? As far as anyone knows, hunter-gatherers had an you-are-what-you-eat concept: the parts of the animals you consume, as well as the hides, bones and sinews used for clothing, connect you with the spirit of the animal. The word berserk comes from a Scandanavian form of “bear-skirt,” or bear hide that fighers wrapped around themselves. The spirit of the bear then entered and possessed them, providing them with an unusually brutal ferocity.

Not so with iceberg lettuce, until someone with enormous courage drank the stinking, foaming liquid oozing from fermenting grain seeds. In contemporary times, the worst effect a meat eater might suffer after a meal is an immediate sleepiness. But alcohol, in the form of the Bacchus, or 180 proof Caribbean rum, still brings out the worst in us.

But plants can bring out the best. The Summerians knew of the healing power of the willow, which contains the acid we now ingest in aspirin. Like trees struggling for sunlight, remedies derived from plants fight for space with vitamins, minerals and so many other medicines on drug store shelves.

I remember one science fiction film that recognized the human qualities of gardening, a rather crazy, downbeat 1972 environmental alegory called Silent Running that presumes a future in which the planet Earth becomes so overcrowded that forests are loaded on a spaceship and sent somewhere.

In nearly every other science fiction film or TV show I’ve seen, what we call “nature” is almost always dangerous, especially on alien worlds, and gardening on a space ship is a matter of pulling green things–almost like bagged supermarket salads–out of the “hydroponic” cabinet. If you want to look at something pretty, peaceful or spiritually rewarding, you look at a screen.

My mother became a gardener when her bossy sister-in-law said she lacked the ability to keep a house plant alive. My mother accepted this as a challenge. Every place she lived was filled with plants, inside and out. She joined the Philadelphia Horticultural Society. I’ve been told some variety of rose has been named for her.

I grew up with respiratory allergies that made me hate the outdoors. Among my chores were watering the exterior shrubs and trees, and mowing the lawn. Both rendered me a sneezing, wheezing mess when I didn’t take my allergy medication. When I did, I was too sluggish to do anything more than drag myself to my room, turn on the air conditioner, shut the door and read a book.

And I never liked bugs. Bugs and gardens go together. With one you get the other.

And yet, gardens, for me, were a utopian space that I thought I might inhabit if, like Voltaire’s Candide, I lived in the best of all possible worlds (in which someone cured my allergies and kept all the bugs away from me) and I could retire to tend my green place. When I lived in the Georgetown section of Washington, D.C ., Dumbarton Oaks became a beloved “third space” of quiet, beauty and whimsy, thanks to Beatrix Ferrand’s blurring of classical and natural lines. As a tourist, when allergy season did not threaten, I visited gardens of Versailles, Tivoli, Kew, Paris’s Luxembourg Gardens and the Jardins des Plantes, New York’s Central Park and San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park.

It’s not surprising, then, that I married a gardener, who would spend the occasional Saturday afternoon with an early morning trip to the landscape shop (we have at least six within driving distance), buy things in pots and great big sacks of dirt. I’d help her dig the hole and stand back as things went into the ground and, mostly, survived. She believes that our marriage is one reason that the no-longer-withered dogwood at the corner of our house came back to life.

When I lived in Philadelphia, and the sad little tree stuck in a little patch of soil died, my mother insisted that I replace it with another. I did. My mother was not alive when a willow in front of my current house succumbed to a parasite, though I felt her sense of urgency. We replaced the tree with a crepe mertil, whose four spindly shoots endured a punishingly cold, windy winter. When the weather warmed, the tree just stood there while others bloomed. I thought it was dead until, after just about every living thing in the neighborhood given its performance, ours became a shimmer of tiny white flowers that drew the requisite bugs, and then dropped, the petals like snow flakes slowly coming down.

My wife had to go to work and said she’d help me stick the fern in the ground when she came back. I watched her go from a window streaked with rain.

Then I had one of those mornings when the words wouldn’t come. Every writer gets them.

I thought of the tree at the front of our house blooming. I remembered the ferns I saw growing on the sides of the fells–what people in England’s Lake District call mountains. The fern she wanted me to plant was similar to those ferns.

Outside was what resembled a typical English morning. The mood was almost, but not quite dreary. The cool, overcast, mostly gray sky had descended with a hint of mist. A steady, windless rain soaked everything and scrubbed the air of the vehicle exhaust from the roads, parkways, highways and nearby internal airport that make my neighborhood so desireable to people who want to work or travel someplace close.

I have five raincoats. I bought one of them hours before a Bruce Springsteen stadium concert on an evening when every source of weather prediction promised a deluge of Biblical proportions. When the concert began, Springsteen looked at the darkening heavens and said that it wouldn’t rain. It didn’t.

I don’t know why I didn’t wear any of my raincoats. I went out into the cold, fragrant air and I was wet before I could open the garage and remove the shovel and the sack of dirt.

I didn’t care. I wasn’t sneezing. I didn’t see any bugs.

My wife didn’t say where she wanted the fern planted, and I lapsed into that discerning, analytical mood that powerful must have when they realize the great decision they are about to make is a matter of placement.

Where should I put the thing?

I carried the potted fern to a vacant, shady place under a tree on the side of the house facing the street. I put the blade of the shovel on the surface of the wet ground. It went in easily.

Suddenly I was a child at the beach, digging a hole in the sand. How far down can I go before it falls in? How far down can I go before I hit something that shouldn’t be there? How far down can I go before some grown up looks at the hole and says I’m crazy?

I pulled up ruddy red clay and rounded up a hole slightly larger than the pot the fern inhabited. I gently pulled the pot away, exposing a tangle of roots and soil. When I put it in the hole, I could almost feel the plant thanking me.

I packed in the “imported” dirt and stood back. I noticed my hands were dirty. Blobs of soil adhered to my clothing. Rainwater had trickled down the back of my spine.

I stuck out my hands and the rain began to move some, but not all, of the dirt away. A sudden vision of myself taking a hot shower compelled me to fetch the shovel, drag the bag of dirt away and store both in the garage before going upstairs and letting the a jet of heated water do what nature would not.

My wife was delighted that I had stuck the fern in the ground. For the next few weeks, whenever I was outside, walking or driving, I scrutinized that fern like a concerned parent.

I’m happy to say that the fern survived the winter. Thanks to the sunlight and water (and whatever was added to the organic dirt) it has grown to twice its potted dimensions.

And it has neighbors.

Some things take time, even if they shouldn’t.

The passage of minutes, hours and, all too often, years, has permitted me to discover that, more than

making the “choices” that are supposed to define our lives,

taking chances, as if someone just put danger in front of us and dared us to ignore it

doing the “hard work” claimed by those who flaunt success,

finding a need and filling it,

the acquisition of what other people believe to be an education;

praying, begging, or blowing out candles on birthday cakes in one breath so that a wish just may come true because, if you leave one candle lit, whoever grants wishes thinks you’re unworthy,

reading the instruction manual before use,

finding the right ingredients and doing as little as possible to them in order to honor their origin and the integrity of their producer,

mowing your lawn regularly and clearing snow from the sidewalk as soon as it stops falling, or, in my case, paying someone to do it because once you have a heart attack people assume that performing essential tasks that define suburban masculinity will kill you,

spending the extra bucks to have the dealer do things to your car that you’re not sure should be done, and maybe weren’t done, even if the guy wearing the tie offers to show you the old parts,

buying lemonade from the kid with the stand, even though you won’t drink it–

all this may change the world, make a difference, save you from a breakdown, make your parents happy and look good on your resume

but

after ten years, you notice that people in your neighborhood say hello to you and talk about the weather, or anything that doesn’t really matter in the long run.

Such inconsequential activity that you thought was boring, conformist or a waste of time when you were younger, becomes

pleasant, oddly affecting. What doesn’t matter, begins to matter, in a way so small that you wouldn’t notice until

You realize, suddenly and quietly, that

You belong.

When I first visited the Lake District and got lost on the scruffy side of a mountain surrounded by sheep droppings, I said some words. They just came out of my mouth. Then my friend and I walked toward what we thought was the Langdale Pike and the Great Gable. When it grew dark and we just couldn’t take another step, we sat down on a patch of dry grass free of sheep poo, ate some canned food we bought at a climbing shop, hoped that it wouldn’t rain and fell asleep.

Little did I know that this was the method by which William Wordsworth wrote some of the English language’s best nature poetry. Having been born in the Lake District, he was used to clambering about the rocky trails in good weather, torrential rain, deep snow, impenetrable fog, moonlight and utter darkness, not to appreciate what is now considered England’s most picturesque locale, but escape from an uneasy childhood (he was orphaned in adolescence and was raised by relatives who were not always happy with their extra charge) or just to wander from one place to another.

Having visited the Lake District twice, I remain astonished at Wordsworth’s stamina. I have gone on the occasional long walk, typically in cities, where the changing features of neighborhoods can be fascinating to observe. When I tried fell walking, as hiking is called in the Lake District, the frequently steep, confusing, here-and-back-again, up-and-downedness of the trails tired me quickly. What, on the map, was a two-and-a half-mile path to Beatrix Potter’s house became a work-out more punishing than anything suffered in an air conditioned gym, which, as we gym creatures know, is usually air conditioned, garnished with drinking fountains, lavatories and benches for the temporarily weary.

Not so in the landscape of which Wordsworth wrote, though the trails wind their way to quaint little towns where there are more climbing shops than tea-shops and pubs. Two centuries ago, such conveniences didn’t exist. You wore hand-made shoes without all the technological derring-do the shoe salespeople tell you about in REI. Nobody talked about blisters, the need to hydrate or the environmental discourtesies to avoid when one must make a quick run behind a bush.

On my second visit to the Lakes District, I walked near Wordsworth’s residences in Grasmere and was halfway up the peak called Helvellyn, where Wordsworth took his fellow literary buddy Sir Walter Scott when it began to rain. A thick cloud robbed us of all visibility. Wordsworth may have pressed on. I took the advice of a more seasoned fell walker and repaired to a pub.

As a writer, I couldn’t help but envy Wordsworth, who, after embracing the radical republicanism born from the French revolution (and leaving behind, in France, a woman he failed to marry and an illegitimate child), found inspiration, purpose and a passionate necessity living in the people and landscape of his youth. I bought a biography and discovered that Wordsworth’s preferred method of composition was not to lock himself into a room and chew over lines of prose (though he did this with a nervous intensity that brought on psychosomatic illnesses when he had to revise his work, or correct proofs for publication).

What Wordsworth liked to do–that is, his ideal means of composition–was to go on a vigorous walk in some beautifully natural place and wait for the words to come, which, I’m certain, were not angry, frustrated, what-was-I-thinking brain farts of yours truly, but the impassioned, idealistic gush of an endorphin-crazed outdoorsman.

He’d walk and talk and his sister Dorothy, who literally followed in his footsteps in fair weather or foul, would write it all down. At the conclusion of their adventure, Dorothy would transcribe her jottings and William would fret, fuss, revise and rework it into the great evocative poetry we have today.

Some have suggested that much of Wordsworth’s poetry was actually a collaboration with Dorothy, though my biographer, having seen Dorothy’s occasional poetic turns, believes that William’s voice was uniquely his own.

I have had that endorphin rush many times, usually when running. I’ve also experienced its opposite, when you’re sitting around, waiting, or doing something so simple that you don’t have to think about it. Your mind wanders and…suddenly you have the seed for a multi-volume fantasy series!

And, as many times as running, or an embrace of stillness, has brought inspiration, it hasn’t. I can’t tell you how often I’ve been in an ideal place, free of distraction, far from those who would want me to do things I wouldn’t want to do, with nothing more in front of me but a fabulous view of water, sky, mountains or desert, and the words don’t come.

So, having stumbled upon the Wordsworth way, and practiced it in youthful naivete and aged wisdom,  all I can say is that, wherever you are, whatever you’re doing, you’re lucky when inspiration finds you. You may, as Wordsworth did, never complete what you had hoped would be your great work. Or you’ll discover how the tiresome goad of a deadline forces you not to care so much about getting it right, and that once you give up on perfection, you’re swept away by a wave magnificent creative energy.

Or you may find yourself on the side of a mountain with sheep chewing grass and asking, with their small, dark eyes what the hell you think you’re doing in their favorite restaurant. And all you can do is sputter a few choice words that, until the last century, were considered unprintable and beneath the dignity of a civilized human being.

And be grateful for it all.

Charles Darwin did not want to be the most controversial scientist of the 19th century.  How the author of The Origin of Species and The Descent of Man handled his unique celebrity offers writers a lessons that have nothing to do with paradigm shattering ideas Darwin brought to the world.

1. You don’t have to be a selfish, excessive lout in order to write important things.
2. If “everyone’s a critic” you can be something else.
3. It’s okay to live quietly and behave modestly: let others toot their horns for you.
4. Being wrong requires the same determination as being right. Both points of view can be vital for those that follow.

Before Darwin became interested in botany and zoology, he expected to enter the Anglican clergy. He maintained friendly relationships with many religious people throughout his life (his wife Emma Wedgwood, related to the pottery family, was among them) and insisted that his conclusions were based on his personal observations, and, therefore, open to debate, independent verification and revision,  and not intended to challenge anyone’s faith.

Privately he confessed that he had lost his faith in the accuracy of the Biblical story of Genesis, as well as the deity of the Bible.  Among his objections was how such a deity described as loving, merciful and all-knowing would doom human souls to eternal torment for a committing a sin based on ignorance.

He kept those, and other potentially divisive opinions, to himself, practicing that distinctly English form of civility all his life–even when those elsewhere did not.  Born into an affluent middle class family, he spent most of his life in Downe, a small village southwest of London where his house still stands. There he raised a family, conducted most of his research, and apparently never said anything unkind of anyone, even when he acted as a local magistrate.

Whether he caught a parasite during his ’round-the-world adventure on the H.M.S. Beagle,  or suffered from colitis, Darwin’s ill health made him a homebody. He took walks through the countryside, rode his horse and encouraged his children to help him with his studies. Instead of attending a meeting of the scientific societies of which he was a most prestigious member, he would move his family to places offering a “water cure” for his digestive blues. He happily accepted visitors, all of whom described him as a simple but convivial host who would tire easily.

Though Darwin is rarely mentioned with the other writers of the time, two of his half-dozen books, The Origin of Species and The Descent of Man, made him the most famous British author of the century after Charles Dickens. Unlike Dickens, Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, Dante Gabrielle Rossetti and too many other British poets and writers of that period, Darwin’s happy life was free of scandal or intrigue.  Discounting the vilification, ridicule and vituperative condemnation aimed at him by those ignorant of his science, his worst moments were coping with the grief when three of his ten offspring died in childhood.

So the trope of the artist as “sacred monster”–a indulgent, offensive, selfish lout who must give into his passions at the expense of the comfort and dignity of others–does not apply to Darwin. His public and private amiability never faltered, when the captain of the H.M.S. Beagle, with whom Darwin spent five years sailing around the world, wrote a book claiming that Darwin’s ideas were wrong and that the reason so many fossilized remains abound was that the animals did not board, or could not fit, on to Noah’s Ark, Darwin never made a mocking, or otherwise negative remark about the man’s work.

This remains a good idea nowadays, when the slightest slight sets off torrents of hostile invective on the Internet.

Darwin did not seek fame and, whether it was ill health, shyness or a genuine desire to pursue his research, he avoided most opportunities to advance his name, letting his friends, the biologist T.H. Huxley among them, promote and defend his ideas. This may offer some solace to those writers who are told that, in order to sell their work, they must hire a publicist, make noise on the Internet, and become someone else’s idea of a brand-name. If you work is good enough or important enough, the right people may find you, and help you.

As much as Darwin was right about natural selection as a factor in the survival of a species, he was wrong about how cells pass on inherited characteristics. After years of research and documentation, he came up with a theory called pangenisis that claimed that cells put out small bits of themselves, like seeds, that find places within an organism to grow.

Darwin respected his theories because they were derived from his personal observations filtered through methodical, painstaking research. He would have taken even more than twenty-three years between the end of the H.M.S. Beagle’s voyage and the publication of The Origin of Species if others were not coming forward with ideas and theories that seemed to support his.

Though parenthesis was incorrect, it inspired further generations of scientists to identify chromosomes, genes, RNA and DNA.

Of course, it helps if you’re independently wealthy, as Darwin was, and sufficiently capable of building a world where you, your family and your work can thrive.

But it helps even more if you honor the patience, dedication and persistence that, more than anything else, makes up the DNA of great achievement.

In my life I have found that patience, dedication and persistence is not in short supply. Most people have it to some degree. Others are quite good at encouraging it.

Maybe we have all that we need, right now.

If you should reach that writing career peak when people pay you ridiculously little money for your work, you may imagine that, someday, different people will give you good money, and that, unlike those past-their-prime hacks who so obviously ran out of anything worth writing about, you will create great stuff.

Here’s the problem in writing for money: what you’re paid has more to do with the people who buy your stuff than when you actually write. When you focus more on finding and pleasing those people, you avoid two great blessings inherent in hard work for low pay.

Read enough interviews with seemingly successful writers, digest enough simplistic explanations of how they “made it,” and you’ll believe that you, too, can figure it all out.

No matter how precisely you try to map that path to the higher pay grade, you’ll have moments when you wish you were off that map, especially when you discover that the people who are in high places will do their absolute best to pay you the lowest they can, no matter how well your writing works for them.

Just like those who don’t pay you at all, these people have limited amounts they can spend to acquire works to publish, and if they can save money on you, then they have a little more saved to buy stuff by writers who are famous, who have annoying agents or are the kind they personally want to cultivate.

As an example of the kind editors liked cultivating, I summon forth the ghost of Truman Capote. Capote certainly was a talented writer who wrote best-sellers, which, in itself, is not enough to become the toast of the New York publishing world. He was worshiped and adored because of his personal charm. Though he was short, effeminate and spoke with a squeaky, high-pitched lisp, he could be downright charming. He was like the perfect dinner party guest: perfectly dressed for every occasion, with an assortment of delightfully gossipy stories. Most important of all—Capote could became your confidant. When Capote listened, you thought he understood you, sympathized with you and admired things about you that you did not see in yourself.

It’s a toss-up if Capote ever lived up to his expectations. His novel Breakfast at Tiffany’s is better known for Audrey Hepburn’s performance, and her wardrobe, in the film. In Cold Blood, thought to be the first “true crime non-fiction novel,”  is terrifically scary and weirdly sympathetic toward one of the criminals. Capote took an awful killing of a mid-western family and crafted a harrowing American tragedy.

It has since emerged that Capote’s sympathy for one of the perpetrators came from an unrequited infatuation. Capote also changed the order of events, and invented dialogue and entire scenes.  Can In Cold Blood meet the strict definition of non-fiction, which is supposed to be “the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth”? Maybe not.

I never met Capote. But I have known other writers who were more fun in person than on the page. The editors who became their patrons can be forgiven because the swagger, gossip, insider insights and spirited anecdotes was easy to enjoy.

I wanted people to enjoy what I wrote. I hoped, and frequently prayed, that if I wrote stuff that skillfully met the needs of editors and publishers, and I wasn’t greedy, I’d reach that point where what I really wanted to write would be published, and I’d be compensated such that I could devote all my time and energy to writing even better stuff.

That didn’t quite happen, and it made for some tough times. What really brought me to the next step was the emotional and financial support of others in my life who cared more about me, than what I wrote, or what I dreamed of writing.

But too much bad pay for great work forces you to learn two important skills. The first is, how to produce.

Harper Lee (a childhood friend of Capote’s) made her reputation on To Kill a Mockingbird, one of the greatest novels ever written, and did not publish anything else. Her posthumously published prequel has only shown her readers that her decision not to have Go Set a Watchman appear in her lifetime was a good one. Sometimes what is called a first novel is actually a second, third or fourth. A difficult truth of the novelist’s art is that some of us have to write a few that will never be published, so we can write those that should be published. Only later can we look back and congratulate ourselves that no one saw our sophomore efforts.

This said, I wanted every novel I began to be published. Those that saw print are not, in my opinion, my best work. The best is yet to come.

The second skill that low pay delivers is finding satisfaction with the second draft, not because it is perfect, or even the ringing statement that you anticipated, but that it, like its author, is good enough for now.

The best is yet to come.

I get some of my best ideas while running, even if what I call a run is barely faster (sometimes slower!) than another’s brisk walk.

I don’t know how the ideas come to me. Perhaps it’s that endorphin rush that blows away the cobwebs, or the fact that a higher heart rate pumps more oxygen to my brain.

Or they could be a summons from the divine, which, when I hear about so many others who get ideas while in the shower, or in less sacred locales, can be problematic.

Or, maybe, as so many others insist, the ideas are a gift, a seed that we may plant, or ignore, and the less we examine how ideas find us, the better.

The idea was to recast a lifetime of learning, teaching and comforting others about their writing, as acts of kindness, that is, a thing we do for ourselves, for others or for that idea itself, which can change rapidly from a warm internal glow to an itch that demands to be scratched.

We scratch that itch, not because we want something (fame, fortune and respect from the jerks who treated us badly in high school!), but because we have something genuine, original and authentic to offer.

As a person who has defined himself, more or less, more AND less, as a writer, I know that there is more to the trade than that. But so many other writers–typically those who are stuck between projects, or underpaid academes who hope to profit by forcing their students to buy their guide,  or, perhaps, celebrity wordsmiths who have achieved enough of that covetable fame and fortune to grow weary of answering how-d’ya-do-it questions from adoring wannabe’s–have written serious tomes those other things.! How many self-help style writing guides have we seen that purport to be the only book we’ll ever need to launch us on our way to artistic apotheosis?

Too many.

Still, a slim collection of short little jottings about how the numerous challenges, annoyances, frustrations, maddening ludicrousities and other obstacles to creative fulfillment may be better understood, if not welcomed, as opportunities to experience kindness, may find a place in the world.

Would anyone like to see this? I know I would have, a long time ago, when I discovered that truly creative work was about getting things wrong more often than right (this happened occasionally with journalism, too, with much more dire consequences!) and taking what you feel is right, or fun, cool, exciting or a LOT better than what you got wrong, and offering that, with no certainty that what I’d done was any good, but the hope that it is at least worth someone’s attention.

The first act of writing as a practice of kindness might be the simple observation that, if you get ideas for things you want to write, even if you have no idea how you would begin, finish, publish, deal with critics, dazzle the multitudes at your book signings, negotiate the movie deal, etc., you are already blessed, because most people DON’T get these ideas. This doesn’t mean there is something wrong with them.

But it might mean that there is something definitely right with you! Acknowledging that, and permitting yourself to feel just a little bit good about it, is a kindness you can give yourself, without firing up the word processor, putting pen to paper, or making coffee.

Let’s be grateful that ideas find us when they do!