And Then I'd Done 1000 ...

I looked up to discover that this will be DawnReader post #1000. How can that be? Didn't I begin this series just yesterday?

Well, no. I just looked. Post #1 came on January 6, 2012 (link to that initial post). I had no real idea what I was doing at the time (do I now? not so sure), but I'd been retired from teaching for about half a year, and I was missing, I guess, an audience. I'd had one--a captive one--since the fall of 1966 when, terrified, I'd first walked into my seventh grade classroom at the old Aurora Middle School (Aurora, Ohio) and saw 40 (that's right--forty!) 12-year-olds staring at me as if I knew what I was doing. I didn't. But I figured it out--after a few decades or so. (By the way, that first year I had five groups of 40--every day. I thought that was just, you know, normal, so I went with it. Showing you in yet another way how dumb I am.)

But once I walked out of my final classroom at Western Reserve Academy (June 2011), I was sans audience--except, of course, for Joyce, who is a wonderful listener but who also has A Life of Her Own and has more purposes on this earth than to listen to me bloviate. So I began to blogiate (a word I just invented; I like it). And have done so pretty much every day since that initial post.

I've also been posting retrospectively at each 100 posts--and I also look (each 100 posts) to see how many "hits" I've had. Here I go: I've not looked since #900 ... back from checking ... 199,552. So, doing my arithmetic, I see that that's 199.552 hits/day. Not bad for a nebbish from Enid, Oklahoma. (This site's spell-checker, by the way, just tried to change nebbish to snobbish. Interesting.)

The number of hits/day varies widely, of course. When I write about education or political issues (which I do much less often than I'd thought I would), more people tend to read/share it. When I serialize my book about chasing Mary Shelley (as I'm doing now on MWF--except for today), fewer people tend to tune it. That's all right. As I tell people (including myself), I'm doing this really for myself. If people are reading it, that's fine. If they're not, that's fine, too. To me, it's the writing that matters.

Each day I print out DawnReader and stuff the page(s) in a notebook, of which there are now several. Much of my doing so, of course, is for "posterity" (i.e., my son and grandsons), who will find in these pages many family stories and much about their Dad and Silly Papa (my grandsons' name for me--wonder why?)--and about Joyce ("Gommy" to the grandsons)--stories that otherwise would have Gone to the Grave with me. And for that I'm glad.

All the pressure to do this every day comes from me--and/or from that Puritan Conscience I learned in my boyhood home. The world will not stop if I fail to post one day, of course. Still ... I know I will go around all day (maybe all week) feeling guilty if I don't do it.

And so--right now, as I type this little conclusion--I'm already wondering: What will I write about tomorrow?