April 29th isn’t exactly a date that lives in infamy.
The musical “Hair” opened on the 29th back in 1968. It’s the date in 1945 that Adolph Hitler and Eva Braun got hitched in a Berlin bunker, and thus the day before their romantic double suicide. Going further back, all the way to the year 711, it’s the date that Moorish troops landed at Gibraltar to begin their invasion of the Iberian peninsula.
A little closer to home, though, this April 29th marks the anniversary of another foreign invasion: it has been one year since I started writing this column in the pages of the Perry County Times.
Actually, it’s been slightly less than a year. 364 days, to be exact, for you sticklers out there.
On the other hand, last week’s column was the 52nd installment of “Up at the Creek,” so technically I’m already one week into Year Two.
In the spirit of “kaizen,” the Japanese philosophy of constant improvement which has done so much for Toyota lately, I thought I’d take the opportunity to look back over the year and see what my own columns could teach me.
This has certainly been a year of extremes. The low point in these pages came last year on the 20th of August, when I wrote an appreciation of our dear friend and next-door neighbor Daniel Miller, who was killed by a gunshot wound to the chest.
The high point was just last week, when I announced to the world, or at least this small and beautiful corner of it, news of the sale of my latest novel.
The rest of the year fell somewhere in between.
For instance, I wrote with great pleasure about the flora and fauna that surround us on St. Peter’s Church Road.
Well, perhaps “great pleasure” is a slight exaggeration, since I dealt in various weeks with ticks, mice, poison ivy, snapping turtles, grass, and, most recently, spring peepers.
The history of Perry County was another of the year’s larger themes. In my longest piece, three separate columns-worth, I followed a salvaged red brick backwards in time and learned a lot about the history of social services in the county. I wrote about the interesting – and expensive – auction of the Gladys Dromgold Schaffer estate in Dromgold. Digging deeper into the history of Perry County, I explored how the county got its name, and in the process, managed to irritate one of the venerable Perry Historians. I investigated the mysterious disappearance of the letter “s” from Sherman(s) Creek, and in the process made myself a nuisance with the U.S. Geological Board on Geographic Names.
(The name change back to “Shermans Creek,” with an “s,” is going well, by the way. Almost all of the local governmental entities have already done their part in approving the change. Now all that needs to happen is for the august U.S. Geological Board on Geographic Names to deliberate on the matter and approve the restoration of the “s.” Which should happen some time in 2010. If we’re lucky.)
Irritation, both my own, and the kind I’ve unwittingly inflicted on some poor readers, has been a leitmotif in these pages, an accurate reflection of the political mood in the country at large. This year, I touched on health care several times. Before his untimely death, our friend Dan Miller was the anonymous subject of one of those columns, which contrasted the best health care system in the world, which the insured have access to, with the terrible options available to the uninsured.
The enormous topic of how much government Americans should have, and what it should look like, has been hotly debated this year. On a very small and local scale, I wrote in defense of good government in such matters as a municipal dump, which I think Perry County could sorely use; and critically of the corruption in Harrisburg in a column about city mice versus country mice.
I wrote a lot about this country. I wrote about American cultural exports such as cable television’s HBO; American heroes like Mark Twain and US Airways Captain Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger; and American innovation in everything from virtual pets to modern management techniques. I wrote about America from the perspective of outsiders like Alexis de Tocqueville; star-struck friends visiting from foreign countries; and even the racially enlightened people of Haiti.
I wrote about writing, which is my lifeblood.
I wrote about the Great Blizzard of 2010.
I wrote about happiness – my own, our neighbors’, Americans’ in general.
I wrote about love. Several of my columns embarrassed my wife Shana. As well they should have. Modesty is one of her many virtues.
I didn’t write so much about our daughter. That was by design, a bid to protect her privacy. But she, and her young friends, did creep into a few columns despite my best-laid plans.
In short, I wrote about anything I could think to write about, and anything, within reason and propriety, that my readers suggested might interest them.
If you missed a week or two — or more — from the first year, I invite you to my website, www.matthewolshan.com, where all of my columns to date are archived. Just click on “My Op-eds” and look for the link to the Op-Ed Archive.
Here’s to another year of highs and lows. Thank you, Dear Readers, for giving me 52 – make that 53 – extremely productive deadlines!
This column was published in the Perry Co Times on 29 April 2010
For more information, please contact Mr. Olshan at writing@matthewolshan.com
