Living on the Real World – one year on.

August 3 marks the first anniversary of my inaugural post on this blog. That first year? Just over 200 posts. That’s a hair under four/week. At times, it felt like more. Especially since most were written in the evening, or during bouts of insomnia, or over the weekend. Sometimes the posts seemed to write themselves. But most times, I was reminded of the comment by the great sportswriter, Red Smith. “Writing a column is easy,” he said. “All you have to do is open your veins and bleed.” 

To my wife – thank you. You were patient to let me steal all those blocks of time that made this possible. To all of you have provided comments or voiced or written support over this past year – thank you. You have provided moments that of encouragement that were more than sufficient motivation.

Especially one reader – my mother. Whenever anyone asks me about the blog, I tell them “my mother likes it.” And she has indeed been uniformly positive (although that may be because she sees these as a poor substitute for the letters and e-mails that I used to write). Thank you, Mom! You’re a patient soul.

I also owe a debt of thanks to my friend who encouraged me a little over a year ago to start this. “You ought to start a blog!” she said.

She was right.