Be well, do good work, and keep in touch

I used to hear The Writer's Almanac on my days off. OPB, mid-morning, many times in the car on Highway 26 heading from Portland out to Seaside.

If you've driven it you know the road and the stretch. The trees close in, the light goes dimmer, the clear cuts with the signs and dates when they were cut get fewer. And on the radio, that voice: Today is January 8th, 1996. He'd say the date like it mattered. Then a few minutes on a writer born that day, and then a poem. That was the whole show.

Sometimes the family was waiting at the other end. Sometimes my daughter was in the back seat, small enough that she has no memory of any of it, which means I'm the only one who can remember those drives. Sometimes I was just lonely and had the radio on, and a stranger told me what Thomas Jefferson wrote on this day, and it helped.

He signed off the same way every morning. Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.

The Writer's Almanac beamed you into what felt like Garrison's den where a fire was going and he was typing away. You got to be a colleague of Garrison's for the moment.

My own stories aren't as good as his, but they are true. At least as true as I remember them. One thing humans do better than computers is remember the past incorrectly. It isn't a lie, it's how we remember it, albeit incorrectly.

The reason VerbaPost exists is that a person's own story, in their own words, can't be spun up. Somebody has to actually pick up the phone and say it. We handle the mail and the transcription. We don't write the life.

So: be well, do good work, and keep in touch. He got it right the first time.