6/29, penultimate June, and 🏳️🌈 🏳️⚧️ the day of the 2025 San Francisco Pride Parade (the 55th, theme: Queer Joy is Resistance), which I’ll be watching in another window while I’m working on posting, with breaks to assemble more of the thousands of objects I need to dispose of to move to assisted living months down the line; endless puzzlements, some of which I’ll soon be posting about. A move that serves as segue to the topic of work, thanks to this 6/26 note on Facebook from Heidi Harley, with my response:
— HH: the move will be a relief and potentially a joy, depending on the other residents and the nature of the place …
— AZ > HH: I’m actually doing just fine at home, with all sorts of workarounds, plus a helper / caregiver a couple times a week. But everyone’s worried about what will happen if I need intensive medical care. I’m determined to continue my writing, which I view as a profession and a calling (as you know).
An additional note: writing is real work — takes intense concentration, long stretches of rewriting and editing to make it better, and so on — but like many kinds of real work, it can be deeply satisfying, a source of genuine pleasure.
And from that I’m taken to the Reading (PA) Eagle newspaper (afternoon and Sunday), where I started my first real job (initially as a copyboy), beginning in June 1958, when I was 17; I was soon shifted to the editorial staff as a floater (I’ll explain), and worked full-time for three summers (and part-time during university breaks) while I went to Princeton. It was a dream job, combining experience with all kinds of writing; learning to work on one thing after another, all relentlessly on deadline; working with a huge cast of characters, of many different natures; and gaining detailed knowledge of the way the world works — gritty stuff, scary stuff, fascinating stuff, and uplifting stuff, all gemischt.
Some recollections of my Eagle days will then lead to Studs Terkel (who died in 2008) and to Calvin Trillin (who’s still alive, at age 89).