Jay Wrote

 My last paid job was working as an election judge for the spring 2020 primary election. It was thirteen hours of civic service and there was no trouble. When was my first job? Was there any trouble? How about the next one? I’m referring to “trouble-trouble”, not John Lewis’s “good trouble” - maybe another essay to be written.    Misaligned.   My first paid work was mowing the family lawn in Proctor, Vermont, probably when I was 9 or 10 years old. The mower was a manual, boy-powered push mower with two wheels at the end of a reel holding four curved, spiraling blades that sliced grass off against a metal piece mounted at the bottom rear of the mower. A wooden roller followed behind the cutting platform, probably to keep the mower balanced and rolling forward or back. The handle shaft was well-patinated wood with a T handle at the top. It seemed old at the time. It was surely manufactured but it was easy imagining a blacksmith banging away at iron to ma...

 Topping Off 2020  So this has been a year. I’ve spent some time writing, including daily responses to the headlines of violence here in Minnesota back in June. And on other current and predictable topics. But later, drawing on my small-town boyhood, I tried to write something hopeful, something poetic, something with the glories and sunshine of youth and the Beatles. What came out was a piece called Blood Poisoning and then I dug up my older hometown piece, Three Cold Holsteins . Both gruesome. Wonder why it went that way, this year?  And so then to try to reverse that stream, I wrote Sutherland Falls Survey , a nostalgic narrative of growing up in Proctor, Vt. The Proctor facebook group really liked this incomplete paean to a privileged childhood. (The poems I have not shared with them.) I post Survey, those poems and more writing here on my blog: https://jaywwrote.blogspot.com.  I listened again to a favorite new rock song today and decided that the lyrics line u...