Editorializing from the bunny cage

“I was cleaning out the bunny cage,” said my friend Kathy, as I wondered fleetingly why she was telling me a story about animal sanitation, “when I looked down and saw an article you’d written about sightseeing in Concord.”

Covered with rabbit poop, apparently, but still, my byline shimmered through. Hmmm. In the 21^st century, journalists are happy to be read at all, and I’m no exception. If that’s what it takes, it’s still good enough for me.

Every journalist fantasizes about readers who scan the pages looking only for that one byline, eager to read any word you write, on any topic, but I find more often these days that people are reading me by accident, as Kathy did while freshening up her pet rabbit’s dwelling. Actually, I’m impressed that she gets a print copy of the newspaper at all, with all the virtual options now available. My household subscribes to the iPad version of the paper; when an article of mine gets published, I have to ask my parents to save the clipping for me so that I can add it to my portfolio. Occasionally when my daughter wants to do an art project, she’ll ask me for newspaper to protect her work surface, and I’ll have to admit we don’t have any newspapers in the house anymore, so she ends up papering the kitchen table with supermarket circulars and real estate brochures instead.

Stories are getting shorter, too. The quarterly alumni magazine for which I write used to allot me 1,200 words per profile, or one full two-page spread. A few years ago they cut the profiles from two pages back to one page, or 600 words. For the most recent issue, my editor said she thought 450 to 500 words would be ideal. “Do you want me to just do a detailed photo caption?” I asked her, half-joking.

Still, I find it just as satisfying to know my work has been read now as I did with my very first byline in our local newspaper when I was a college student trying to accrue clips for a job-hunting portfolio. Earlier this month, I wrote a story for the Globe about a Concord family taking part in a trans-Iowa bike ride. The day it was published, I received emails from two different newspaper editors at small-town papers in Iowa, asking if they could run my story. Of course, I told them. I’d already gone to the trouble of writing it; why not savor the fact that more eyes would rest upon my words, at least for a moment or two while they scanned the lead paragraph?

Other writers are more opinionated than I am about the issue of proprietary work and intellectual copyright in the Internet era. I know my work has been printed without my knowledge at times; if I Google my name, I find references to essays I wrote for local publications popping up in special interest magazines and newsletters from Alabama to Albania. But it’s okay. We write to be read, just as we speak to be heard. Whether it’s Albania or the bunny cage, I’m happy to be in print.

The choices people make

Speaking articulately is not my strong suit under the best of circumstances – like a lot of writers, I do best with words when I have time to contemplate, draft, delete, reconsider, and revise before publishing – but in this case I was positively blithering.

But I had a reasonable excuse. My editor had assigned me a story about a particular historical figure and then mentioned that one of the leading experts on this particular historical figure was Mitchell Zuckoff, who is one of my favorite nonfiction writers.

He writes the kind of journalism to which I aspire: long stories that examine every possible facet of a situation. And often, the stories he chooses aren’t particularly complicated in terms of their political context or historical import. Some of his most interesting work is about how ordinary people act in unexpected situations. He wrote about a young couple faced with a diagnosis of Down syndrome in their firstborn child, tracing their early days as a couple deciding to start a family, the shock of the Down syndrome diagnosis, and how they went on to make meaningful lives for themselves as parents and as a family in the years that followed their daughter’s arrival.

He also wrote about two teenage boys from rural Vermont who almost overnight turned into cold-blooded murderers.

I interviewed him about the topic relevant to my assignment, and then before saying goodbye tried to communicate to him how much I admire his work. That was where the blithering part came in. “I love your books,” I said. “They are my favorite kind of writing: long stories about real people and how they make the choices they make."

And it was true, I realized as I thought later about my simplistic choice of words. In its own way, that was as good an explanation as any I could come up with for what makes people interesting to me. It’s what I often write about myself, though I’d never consciously framed it quite that way.

When asked what I write about, sometimes I say “Generally the arts or community life” if I want a short answer. If I have time or space for a slightly longer one, I might say “Mostly I write about ordinary people doing unusual things.” A friend of ours once said that my career was based on drawing water from a stone – an allegation I’ve repeated many times since. I think he meant that I take the very most ordinary circumstances of parents, children, seniors, communities, avocations, passions – and find something to say about them.

Another narrative nonfiction writer I once took a seminar with said “When you find someone’s obsession, you have a story.” The story becomes not the obsession itself but the how and why of the obsession, its etiology in that particular person.

All of these are true, but yesterday I found myself thinking more about those words that unexpectedly slipped out: “How people make the choices they make.” The young couple first chose each other, then chose to become parents, and later chose to raise a child with Down syndrome. The two Vermont teens chose to commit a murder, chose their victims, chose an ultimately unsuccessful escape plan. Where did each of these choices come from?

Outside of my work for a daily paper, I help people write their memoirs. In this role, I often ask “What formative experience made you the person you are today?” It’s a good question, but I think I’m going to try changing it up a little. “What are the most formative choices you’ve ever made?”, I’m going to try asking. It introduces agency into the equation. An experience is what happens to us. A choice is what we make happen. 

Based on this idea, I’m going to start thinking more now about the choices people make, rather than just who they are and what they do.

What I don't know how to do (but maybe can do anyway)

I’m a big believer in core competencies: figure out what you do well and focus on it.

I’m also happy with my career. I’ve found what I like to do and I have abundant opportunities to do it.

All of which is to explain why it takes such a big push sometimes to get me out of my comfort zone.

But yesterday I was pushed rather abruptly out of my comfort zone, professionally speaking, when news of an unusual and complicated crime broke in our town and my editors sent me out onto the street.

Covering breaking news is the kind of work I learned about when I studied journalism in high school, but my career path has taken me a long, long way from the life of a beat reporter. I’m an arts correspondent and a feature writer. Most of my topics are fairly low-key, whether they involve a tuba concert, a play about the Armenian genocide, a family with a long-lasting tradition of publishing a quarterly print newsletter, or the record number of twins who enrolled for kindergarten in Carlisle one particular autumn.

It could reasonably be said, therefore, that my job tends to be easy. I talk to people who want to talk to me, whether to promote an event or to explain their own passions. I never have to ambush story subjects as they walk out of their offices or ask people contentious questions.

So my first, albeit unspoken, response when my editor called yesterday afternoon to ask if I could drive across town to investigate the scene of a police shootout was “Can’t you find someone more qualified? You know I’m not that kind of reporter.”

But better judgment prevailed, and I told her I’d see what I could do.

I was resisting it every step of the way, though. I don’t how to do this, I told myself as I drove the four miles to the crime scene, which involved a shootout between local police and a carjacking suspect that took place midafternoon on a main road in Carlisle. I don’t know how to get information from people who aren’t eager to talk. I don’t know how to get a statement from the police chief. I don’t know how to dig up eye witnesses if there aren’t any standing right on the street with their hands raised.

And then it occurred to me that it’s really easy to say “I can’t” and “I don’t know how.”

Let’s just pretend you do know how, I suggested to myself. Act like a real reporter for once.

So I parked near the blockade and made my way to the police officer who was directing traffic, the imminent danger having passed once the suspect sped on to a neighboring town. And at that moment I realized something else. I wasn’t Nancy the room parent asking parents to bring in popsicles for Field Day, and I wasn’t Nancy the class fundraising officer trying to get my prep school classmates to make a yearly donation, and I wasn’t Nancy from church imploring people to join more volunteer committees.

I was a professional doing my job.

“I’m from the Globe,” I said to the officer on the scene. “Are you able to talk about this incident?”

He wasn’t, but he said I could continue past the roadblock to get closer to the crime scene and talk to the officers there.

“Really?” I was surprised. “You’ll let me go through the roadblock?”

“I have to. You’re the media,” he replied curtly. Oops. Apparently he knows the rules of my trade better than I do.

Eventually I made my way to the police station for a statement from the chief. He wasn’t talking yet, but no one at the police station told me to pipe down and go home. They told me to call back later for an official statement. They treated me like a reporter who knew how to cover a breaking crime story.

I still needed eyewitnesses. I thought about calling my editor and saying “I’m sorry, but no one was standing in the roadway offering to tell me about the shoot-out they’d just witnessed.” Then I imagined her saying “No kidding. Get the story anyway.”

So I emailed six acquaintances who live along the stretch of roadway where the incident happened. I posted on Facebook asking anyone who had witnessed the event to contact me. I stopped by our town’s only coffee shop, found the owner, who chats with everyone who walks through the door, and asked him to keep me in mind if he heard anyone talking about it.

By the time I got home, I had three messages from eye witnesses.

So that story came together. In the end, a more senior reporter actually wrote it; I was just listed as a contributor. But that’s enough for me. “I won’t get a byline from this,” I told my husband.

“But you’ll get some professional credibility, plus you gave your editors what they asked for,” he pointed out.

He was right. I’m no beat reporter and still don’t really believe I have the mettle to do this kind of story every day, but when the opportunity arose, I somehow managed to, if not exactly run with it, at least walk with it. I followed through on what needed to be done.

And for at least an hour or so, I was too busy tracking leads to tell myself “I don’t know how to do this” or “I’m not a good enough journalist to do this” or even “I’m too insecure to approach people who don’t want to talk to me.”

For one brief afternoon, I stopped telling myself what I couldn’t do. And during that time, I learn what, in fact, I could do.

Not much of a fan

My husband does not think of me as a very good sports fan.

In fact, he’s pretty sure that if the success of our local pro teams depended on my support, we wouldn’t even have the teams anymore, let alone the occasional championship season.

Right now, the Red Sox are halfway through a World Series, and the Patriots are having a generally winning, if not stellar, year. So the TV is on a lot at our house, tuned to various matches.

I find the score read-out at the top of the screen enormously useful. It allows me to take a quick peek, see whether our team is winning or losing, and continue on my way. If our team is losing, I usually say something insightful like “Oh, no!” If we’re winning, I can usually muster up a “Yay!” After all, I might not be genuinely interested, but the rest of my household is, and so are many of the people with whom I interact in a typical day, so life is better for me when the home team wins even if I personally don’t particularly care.

Rick likes to remind me that one impediment to true fandom in my life is that I don’t like the thought of anyone losing. I like people to be happy and feel good about themselves as long as they’ve tried hard. You don’t reach the upper echelons of professional sports without pretty much always trying hard, which means that you nearly always end up with one group of guys who gave it their all but lost anyway. I always hope they enjoyed the game despite the score, but coming home to a city of disappointed fans when you’ve lost can’t really be as good a feeling as I’d like to think it is.

The irony is that for the past couple of years, one of my varied freelance roles has been to write profiles of past and present NFL players. To a writer who was more of a football fan, this would be a dream assignment, getting to hear the innermost thoughts of these men as they train or reflect on past championship games. To me, it’s just another writing assignment, although a generally interesting one since each player’s path to the top is a little different, and each man’s perspective on the obstacles he faced along the way varies.

But regardless of the details, I’m not star-struck by them. I’ve never heard of any of them. In a way, that gives me a healthy advantage in terms of journalistic objectivity, but it also means that I don’t always get the terminology right. Rick occasionally looks over my work and points out that I’ve misused the term “sacking” or referred incorrectly to a “college draft.”

It may be to my disadvantage that I’m not a sports fan, but almost without exception, everything I cover as a journalist eventually becomes interesting to me, and even if I still can’t follow the score while watching the Super Bowl, I appreciate the players for their fierce athleticism and the mountains they’ve climbed to reach their particular level of accomplishment. Later this week, I’ll have the opportunity to interview the women’s Olympic hockey team. I’ve never watched a pro hockey game in my life (and actually, the only time I’ve ever watched a non-pro hockey game was when the only opportunity I had to meet with my literary agent was over her son’s Pee-Wee Tournament), but I’m eager to hear what they have to say about their training, their challenges, and how they imagine the Olympics will be.

Sports may not interest me, but people always do. So it’s true that I probably won’t sit down for a minute of the World Series this week. But given the chance to talk one-on-one with an athlete, I’m always confident I’ll learn something fascinating.

Covering stories about things I don't like

I can’t remember the last time I wrote about a subject toward which I felt conscious antipathy.          

   

Until yesterday, that is.

Usually I write about things that fascinate or engage or amuse me: societal trends, parenting, the arts. Occasionally I write about things I don’t really know anything about, like cybersecurity or liposuction. And sometimes I write about things I didn’t know I was interested in until I started researching the story, like NFL quarterbacks.

But it’s typical of me that as soon as I dig my hands into the topic, I fall in love with it.

So it was strange yesterday morning to be doing an interview about something to which I have a genuine aversion. The Framingham History Center is running a special exhibit for the next several months about Shopper’s World, or to be more specific the original Shopper’s World, the indoor mall built in the early 1950s that forty years later was razed and replaced with an outdoor shopping plaza which is also called Shopper’s World.

The woman from the Framingham History Center sounded downright joyful as she told me how meaningful it had been to her to put together this exhibit of old photos of Shopper’s World, memorabilia from the stores, interviews with the structure’s earliest employees and shoppers.

But all I could think of, even as I asked questions and noted down her responses, was how much I dislike Shopper’s World.

It was effectively the country’s first shopping mall, though technically another one, in Seattle, beat it to opening day by a hair. And as I see it, that makes Shopper’s World the precursor to so many undesirable things that followed. Big box shopping. Automobile culture, in which errands are done by car. The demise of the downtown, and the crumbling of small local businesses. In fact, just last week I was working on an assignment about a last-ditch effort by community members in West Concord to salvage the West Concord 5&10, one of the area’s last remaining decades-old locally owned small businesses. Shopper’s World is, to my mind, emblematic of what ruined modern commerce: first shopping malls, then big box stores, then outdoor plazas, all of which fostered the movement toward shopping by car in big shopping centers rather than in the pedestrian-friendly downtown areas that preceded them.

But the article I was writing wasn’t really about what’s wrong or right with modern retail; it was about this particular exhibit. And so I suppressed my antipathy and tried instead to focus on what the woman from the historical society was telling me about the exhibit.

And eventually, just like with almost every story I work on, I began to feel more warmly toward it. This woman loved the exhibit she had put together, loved the response it was getting from visitors who told her about their first job or the first excursion they ever remember taking or their first date at Shopper’s World. She enthused about the Jordan Marsh blueberry muffins she served at a round-table discussion about Shopper’s World as they were putting the exhibit together, and she told me about the posters and memorabilia from the advertising campaign that brought 200,000 shoppers to opening day at Shopper’s World back in 1954.

I’m not sure whether this tendency to get drawn in by every subject I write about ultimately makes me a better or worse journalist. To some extent, I think it shows an unfortunate predilection for subjectivity. How effective a journalist can I be if I lose all cynicism as soon as I hear someone start talking about a subject they love?

And yet if I didn’t have this tendency, I’m not sure I’d be able to sustain a career as a journalist at all. What I love, and what I’ve always loved, is listening to people talk about their passions. It doesn’t matter, in the end, whether that’s a passion for building boats or playing football or performing vein surgery or mentoring underprivileged children or putting together an exhibit about a shopping mall. When people talk about what interests them, it interests me.

I still don’t like Shopper’s World, and I honestly still think society would be better off had it never been built and subsequently touched off the shopping mall movement. But even feeling that way, I think I can write an article that does justice to the historical society’s hard work on this exhibit. Creating it was someone’s passion, and telling the story of other people’s passions is my passion. And somehow amidst that paradox is where I’ve found my career.

Why Ira Flatow's fascination fascinates me

Sometimes I inadvertently download the podcast for NPR’s Science Friday and end up with the show on my playlist while I’m out running. This happened on Saturday. I’m really not interested in Science Friday in terms of the subject matter, but there’s still something I love about listening when I find myself stuck with it: the host, Ira Flatow, has to be one of the most genuinely enthusiastic professionals I have ever hard speak.

Ira Flatow simply adores science, and I have such tremendous respect for that even though the topics he chooses to discuss are hardly ever of interest to me. To hear Ira talk about this experiment or that discovery, you’d think you were talking to a whiz kid at a high school science fair or possibly a newly matriculated graduate student. But not someone who is a veteran radio journalist in his sixties, as Flatow in fact is.

What I especially like is how sincere he is about what surprises and fascinates him. In the segment I was listening to, another reporter was describing the way a group of fire ants can form themselves into a floating raft if they fall into a body of water. “I saw that report too, and I could not believe it!” Ira exclaimed to the reporter. “I just cannot understand how they do that!”

He’s an award-winning radio and TV personality, and yet when he says he can hardly believe something, you realize what it means to be truly fascinated by your work. Despite all that he has witnessed, uncovered and reported in six decades, the talents of fire ants still have the ability to catch him completely unaware.

I don’t hear this same sense of wonder, of awe, in many of his media colleagues. Some of NPR’s most experienced personalities will sometimes profess to be surprised by something, but often you know what they really mean is “My surprise about this comes from the fact that I’m such an unparalleled expert on this topic, and it’s really rare for me to stumble upon something I didn’t know.” So they don’t sound truly awed, just dubious about the idea that a fact slipped past them earlier. Even Terry Gross, whom I find to be very modest on air, puts so much research into her interviews that her surprise usually has an undertone of “How is it possible that I wasn’t aware of this one small detail?” Whereas Ira Flatow’s tone of surprise comes across as humility in its best form, as if he is saying, even after almost 40 years in the business, “Can you believe how fantastic and amazing the world of science is?”

Maybe this resonates with me so much because as a journalist, I love talking to people about their work or creative pursuits. “Any time you find someone pursuing a passion, you have a story,” one of my Globe editors told me years ago. He’s right: not only the story of what the person’s passion is, but how it came to have that role in their life.

I sometimes feel I’ve made a career out of this reality: people talking about what fascinates them tend to engage me. I want to know what they know that I don’t, but more importantly, what they care about that I don’t. It’s humility. It’s the opposite force to arrogance. And it’s a wonderful quality for a person to have: the ability to communicate that they are absolutely flabbergasted by the wondrous world that surrounds them.

Privileged to tell their stories

Weekly if not monthly I think about how lucky I am to be a journalist, but usually my reason for thinking that is just that I like the work so much and it’s what I’ve wanted to do for as long as I can remember. This month it’s been a little different: I feel lucky all over again, but not only because the work makes me happy but because it’s been a genuine privilege to cover the stories I’ve covered this month.

Just yesterday, I put the final wraps on a “centerpiece” feature that will run the Sunday of Memorial Day weekend. It’s about a nearby town that is unveiling a memorial to the four fallen soldiers who graduated from the local high school, and I’ve learned so much while working on the story, both about military logistics and about how families cope in the wake of tragedy.

I thought the calls I had to make would be hard: to the families of two young men who died in Iraq, six and seven years ago, respectively. But their family members talked about them with a sense of fond good cheer. One young man’s mother laughed and laughed as she told me about her son as a ten-year-old building a fox hole in the backyard. How can she be so merry? I wondered as I listened to her. Indeed, some of it might have been a touch of mild hysteria brought on by my taking an interest in her stories about him, and maybe preparing for the dedication next week has made her more emotionally mercurial right at this time than she normally is. But she didn’t sound like I expected. She just wanted to tell me funny stories about her son, and then in a tone only a shade more somber, she talked about her gratitude to the town for initiating the memorial.

After that I talked to the younger sister of the other Iraq soldier. He died at nineteen, as she was about to celebrate her thirteenth birthday. “He was the most awesome brother,” she told me, her tone exuberant. “He’d babysit for my little sister and me and do the silliest dances to make us laugh.”

I expected the families to sound more angry, more depressed. But they were proud of their soldiers, they were full of happy memories, they were grateful to the town for planning the Memorial Day dedication. “The community has been a tremendous source of support to us, and we’re so grateful,” said the father of one of the young men.

Last week I was working on a very different story, one about Transcendentalist and writer Margaret Fuller. A group in Concord was in the final stages of planning a bicentennial celebration honoring her 200th birthday, and they were just as eager and willing to tell me about their passion for Margaret Fuller’s lifework as the soldiers’ family members were to tell me about their lost loved ones. In the few days I spent researching that story, I learned a lot about Margaret Fuller, a historical figure I first heard about in a very general sense in eighth grade and then for several years thereafter confused with Margaret Sanger. I definitely won’t make that mistake again. I felt privileged to spend those days in her company just as I did with the soldiers.

And the weekend before that I did a story that was not like either the fallen soldiers or Margaret Fuller. I wrote about my parents’ volunteer work at prisons. For years, I’ve wanted to write about the program through which my parents volunteer, but it’s the irony of my work as a feature writer that I can write about anyone who I think is doing something fascinating except for my own family members. In a feature story, that is. But every now and then the Globe runs a personal essay segment. That’s a first-person narrative and the usual rules do not apply. I asked my editor if I could try an essay about my parents’ volunteer work and what it means to me, and she said yes.

The results were spectacular, not in terms of my prose but in terms of the response. Strangers were calling my home phone number to say how much they enjoyed reading about my parents. Friends and acquaintances from all over the Globe’s readership mentioned the story to me, and to my parents as well. My mother heard from two former volunteers who had lost touch with the program, and she also heard from a town employee whose brother was once an inmate – though not one my parents worked with – and the town employee felt reassured to learn that there were people like my parents devoting their time to people like him.

So it’s been a good month for me: not because I’ve had a lot of bylines or paychecks but because I’ve experienced so much through my journalism. I’ve learned about the resilience of brave and proud, though bereaved, parents; the determination of a nineteenth century feminist; and the power of my own parents to affect people through their work. And I did all this through my work. I’m not a soldier, a crusader, not even a volunteer to the needy. I can’t claim to be doing anything nearly as important as my subjects. So what I’ve done in telling their stories is not something for me to be proud of, just grateful for. I’m always grateful to be a journalist. This month I’ve felt enormously privileged as well.

Professional development: Acquiring a sense of restraint

My editor emailed me late yesterday afternoon to ask if I had any feature story ideas. As I drove later that evening to a meeting, I thought about different ideas, but kept dismissing them. This may sound like a defeatist attitude, but within the context of my journalistic career, it actually might represent progress.

When I started having features accepted by the Boston Globe, I was sun-dazzled with excitement. Having that byline was so important to me that I forgot being part of a Globe story might not be the highest priority of everyone I involved in my articles. It wasn’t a matter of celebrity; it was just that for me, being a regular freelance contributor to a major city daily was the culmination of a decade of striving for publication. Because in my mind, nothing was more important than writing for the newspaper, I grabbed every assignment I could get.

And then I learned some lessons the hard way. While I wouldn’t exactly say I’ve lost friends over any articles or essays I’ve run in the paper, I’ve definitely had some sobering moments. An article I was elated to be assigned about a controversial Halloween celebration in one neighborhood resulted in one of the residents of the neighborhood calling me to express her displeasure over my use of the phrase “granite countertops.” A story about the high number of twins in our town caused a mother to be upset with me for not letting her younger, non-twin son appear in the photo with his brother and sister. And when I wrote a first-person essay that I thought was lighthearted and entertaining about “divorcing” one book club so that I could join another, it received a frosty response from some, if not all, members of both book clubs.

Sometimes, too, I’m the one who ends up at the sharp end of my own judgment. I was thrilled to have an essay I wrote on my son and his first protective cup (as in underwear worn for baseball) embraced by a Globe editor – until I saw it in print and wondered how many pedophiles were reading my essay about my son’s private parts. But it didn’t teach me a lesson: a year later I wrote an essay about my daughter’s imaginary friends – and had similar qualms when I saw it in print.

Gradually, though, I’m finally developing what I consider a little bit of journalistic maturity. I no longer get so carried away with my own delight in self-expression that I completely overlook the possible reactions of the people I might be writing about. While it’s true that earlier this month I published an essay about being annoyed when my kids’ teachers assigned “family homework,” I made sure to qualify at least three times in the same essay how much I like and respect the entire faculty and administration at my children’s school. Besides, I reasoned, I’ve never known their teachers to read the Boston Globe.

I learned within six hours of that article’s publication that parents were clipping it out at the breakfast table and hand-delivering it to the classrooms, so there went that protective measure. But none of them took offense. Not too much, anyway.

Still, my newfound sense of restraint is probably a generally good thing. Except that yesterday it was preventing me from settling on any good ideas at all. A feature about over-the-top luxuries at our school’s fundraising auction? Sure to alienate some of the parents who spent a lot of money at the auction, and equally sure to elicit fiery responses from opponents of public school fundraising. A story about a teardown controversy in a nearby town? No; it was a town where I had several clients for other freelance assignments, and I didn’t want to make any enemies there either. I thought briefly about a family I know slightly who recently lost a child to heroin overdose and have been working hard to bring attention to the issue of drug use in the affluent suburbs. Sure, I told myself, and have heroin dealers on my case? Maybe not.

It’s not professionally productive for me to grow paranoid. I find story ideas by staying abreast of what’s going on around me, and inevitably, friends and neighbors are involved. And often they appreciate my drawing attention to their causes and projects. But overall, it feels like a new stage of wisdom that I have these second thoughts now. Not at the expense of ever coming up with another story idea. But if I avoid future episodes of being blacklisted by my book club, that’s just fine as an outcome.