Immortality Writ Small

          In 1978, my late father-in-law gave my wife a dehumidifier for the old house she bought in Hartford, Connecticut.  At issue was the damp basement, an environment well suited for growing mildew, colossal spiderwebs, or even some varieties of edible fungi.  The dehumidifier was a well-used appliance even then, so conservatively, already about ten years old. 

        Last week, after giving us years of continuous service (I’d let it rest for maybe four months during the cold weather) it gave up the ghost, and I think the ghost itself has probably died of old age.

        I have a bench grinder that I often use to clean metal parts and sharpen tools.  I inherited it from my grandfather, who told me when I was a little kid that the motor was over a hundred years old.  I’m now 75, so do the math.

 

        They don’t make ‘em like that anymore. 

        As much as I appreciate this kind of durability, an important act of mental hygiene when you hit 75 is to avoid fetishizing monuments of the past.  Not completely, of course, but one should heed Springsteen’s cautionary tale, Glory Days, and not be left “with nothing, mister, but boring stories.”

        Speaking of stories, they can also take up residence in the same quadrant of the brain that stores superannuated pop songs, appliances, cars and amber-tinted memories of that first slow dance (in my case, to Don’t Worry, Baby. Not forgetting that.) 

        It’s common sense that impressions of any art form are more fixed when exposed to fresh, unsullied brain cells.  It’s more of a jolt, unregulated by accumulated experience, conscious evaluation and creeping cynicism.  This is why I think of stories by Hemingway, JD Salinger, Shirley Jackson, Thurber, Edgar Allen Poe and Guy De Maupassant as STORIES, and everything that came after simply earnest efforts at achieving that transcendant perfection.

        

M. Maumpassant

        This isn’t good.  In fact, it’s a type of psychological hardening of the arteries.  But once again, the mystery genre stands ready to provide an artery-cleansing antidote.  It’s possible you could read every story published annually by Ellery Queen, Alfred Hitchcock, Mystery Journal, hundreds of short story blogs and countless anthologies, but you’d have to forgo all other pursuits.  I’ve never come close to this, but what I have read are uniformly excellent renditions of the form.  You certainly don’t have to restrict yourself to short-listed Derringer entries, though doing so would likely knock you into Barb Goffman and Art Tayor, brilliant purveyors of both the brief and startlingly fresh.  I assume they’re nagged by the same electronic nuisances as the rest of us yet somehow find a way to conjure the mental state that embraced Chekov, Mansfield and Jorge Luis Borges. 

        When I was an advertising copywriter the assignment I most dreaded was Bumper Sticker, quickly followed by Billboard.  Brevity is not only the soul of wit, it’s freaking near impossible to get right.  We’d often have pages of input, with various supporting documents, and were asked to distill it all down to a tiny little chain of compelling words.  I wanted to say, oh no, please, how about that 12-page brochure with lots of captions and ant type?  (I used to force junior copywriters to study haiku – no better way to pack a lot of meaning into very compact quarters.)

All-time bumper sticker champion.

        Starting a novel feels so much better.  All those pages of story development stretching out before you.  A thousand-word limit?  Not so inviting.  This is why my admiration for you serious short story writers is, well, limitless.  You set yourself a much more difficult task requiring tremendous discipline and control over all the elements of plot, description and character development.  As with haiku, every phrase has to contribute to the whole, its extraction leaving the structure teetering, like knocking out a lolly column. 

        As with ancient bench grinders and short stories, only time will determine ultimate durability.  I can’t know, but I choose to believe that the best of the mystery writers we’re enjoying now will find their work set in all caps in the minds of future septuagenarians.