We all need a good editor

It’s warm now, and we’re heading into the muck and melt of March, perhaps my least favorite month. Not two weeks ago snow covered the ground out here, temperatures were breathtaking, and silence was all around. On one of those snowy days, my heart broke as I watched a mother deer and her two offspring out my back window. Mom was having a difficult time keeping up with her young because her right rear leg was clearly broken, and she was hobbling the way a human would do before others got under their shoulders and supported them off the field toward medical care. She was in pain and I had no way of helping her.

And none of this is helped by the late afternoon fact that the skies are overcast and I’ve been listening to French composer Erik Satie’s extraordinarily sad and melancholy piece “Gymnopedie #1,” written in 1888. I have been so taken by the composer over the years, that long ago we had a settee, one we called Erik. Believe me, no one understood that one, and likely would have thought us strange if they had. Guilty.

As I age, the days sometimes feel more drawn out and, on those days, I occasionally visit the graves of my wife and her parents, usually in the morning when the sun slants sharply across the stones casting long, soft, sometimes shimmering shadows, much like those cast by those interred there. I stop by to see that the flowers good people have left there are still intact, still doing what, I’m not sure, assuring that if anyone sees the flowers they’ll know that someone who still walks this earth remembers, I suppose. I’m not the one who leaves flowers. No, I just stand there like someone who doesn’t really know what to do, or how to act. It’s been going on for some time now.

For many years the only person allowed to read my columns/essays before I sent them off to editors was my wife. Before becoming a lawyer and judge she taught high school English and she knew her way around an essay. With my particular work, she didn’t worry about punctuation, spelling, or grammar, instead concentrating on my thought processes. Even then, she did not offer to rewrite or assist me, instead, she circled a passage in pencil, and wrote, “I get hinky vibes here.” That was how she edited and it was brilliant. Anyone who has a partner also has an editor, and it may not be about writing. “It might be, “You’re not going out wearing that shirt, are you?”

Sometimes she’d look up from reading a book, cat on her lap, and ask if I was working on a column and I’d tell her no, that I had nothing, that maybe I was finished writing the damned things. She always smiled, that smile like her sister’s, the one that comfortably puts one at the center of the universe, went back to her reading, stroked the cat a time or two and that was the end of it. These days, without my editor, when I’ve got nothing new in my head I remember lines in the song “Move On,” from Stephen Sondheim’s wonderful 1984 musical “Sunday in the Park With George,” lines sung by the painter George Seurat’s mistress, Dot. George feels he has nothing left to say in his art and she assures him otherwise with, “Stop worrying if your vision is new, Let others make that decision — they usually do, You keep moving on.” I surely couldn’t have said it better myself. Have a brilliant, albeit sloppy, March. Summer’s on the horizon: I can see it from here, and it looks like a good one.

Kurt Ullrich lives in rural Jackson County. The Dubuque Telegraph Herald recently published a 60-page magazine of Kurt’s columns. The magazine can be purchased here