{"id":28884,"date":"2021-08-25T07:46:46","date_gmt":"2021-08-25T11:46:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/?p=28884"},"modified":"2021-09-13T18:23:58","modified_gmt":"2021-09-13T22:23:58","slug":"reporting-for-duty","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/2021\/08\/25\/reporting-for-duty\/","title":{"rendered":"REPORTING FOR DUTY"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><be><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #993366;\"><strong>I traveled<\/strong><\/span> a lot in my twenties. I hitchhiked across America four times. I also went from Tijuana to Colombia by bus. I went everywhere. I wrote novels too, which went nowhere.<\/p>\n<p>You can&#8217;t take a bus all the way to Colombia. The road doesn\u2019t go through the Panama jungle. I flew from Costa Rica to San Andres island to Barranquilla, Colombia.<\/p>\n<p>I came home\u00a0<em>eventualmente<\/em>\u00a0and at age 25 started working part-time for my dad, painting apartments and pointing bricks. That was the end of the road pretty much, but I continued writing. I wrote mostly about Cleveland. I was trying to be Don Robertson \/\u00a0Herbert Gold. By the way, Gold is still alive (97). I got a job as a beat reporter and wrote about cops and robbers, and even wrote a police-procedural novel about a Slovenian-American cop in Collinwood. The writing was a diversion.\u00a0Working for the old man was no picnic.<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #993366;\"><strong>I got<\/strong><\/span> married and had kids. That was a good move. Raising kids . . . I was so busy I didn\u2019t have time to think or get down on myself. I reported for duty.<\/p>\n<p>These days I don\u2019t report for duty as much as I used to. I hope Menorah Park reopens\u00a0 to &#8220;essential volunteers&#8221; soon, so I can toot my clarinet in the hallways there. But now, with the delta variant, that reopening is getting pushed back again. If I disappear tomorrow, my clarinet-playing might be the one thing the locals miss. My property management game counts too &#8212; don&#8217;t knock the bricks-and-mortar game. And don&#8217;t forget the writing game.<\/p>\n<p>Stop saying &#8220;game.&#8221;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I traveled a lot in my twenties. I hitchhiked across America four times. I also went from Tijuana to Colombia by bus. I went everywhere. I wrote novels too, which went nowhere. You can&#8217;t take a bus all the way to Colombia. The road doesn\u2019t go through the Panama jungle. I flew from Costa Rica [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-28884","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-coming-of-age"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28884","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28884"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28884\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":29068,"href":"https:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28884\/revisions\/29068"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28884"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28884"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28884"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}