Thursday, January 01, 2009

A Writer

In the morning when I went to school, my father would put on his good suit and his gray felt hat and ride down the elevator with the other men on their way to the office. From the lobby he would walk down to the basement, to the windowless storage room that came with our apartment. That was where he worked. There, he hung up the suit and hat and wrote all morning in his boxer shorts, typing away on his portable Underwood set up on a folding table. At lunchtime he would put the suit back on and ride up in the elevator.
-Susan Cheever, writing about her father John, in Home Before Dark

There was a man who lived on our street when I was a child. We'd see him walking through the neighborhood all the time in his long wool coat. The kids would say "He's a writer".

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