Starting

I always tell my students not to stare at the blank page, dreaming up the perfect first sentence for their essay.  Just start, I tell them.  You can revise it later.  I've been thinking about starting a blog for a while, but I kept putting it off because I couldn't think of how to start.  So I'll finally take my own advice and just start.  And maybe I'll change it later.

One of my very favorite books, Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth, begins with Lawrence Selden unexpectedly encountering his friend Lily Bart in Grand Central Station.  "Selden paused in surprise," the novel's first sentence reads.  I spend a lot of time following around an active, almost-one-year-old little boy, and I find that I spend a lot of time pausing in surprise these days, as I help him narrate what he sees and realize that the world is full of unexpected wonder.  So I thought that I would make this blog about the things, big and little, exciting and mundane, that make me pause these days to think, wonder, or laugh.