A Few Hours of Reading

I can do it. I can snuggle in my bed, crack open a book, ignore clutter, dirty dishes, vacuuming, written and mental to-do lists, and get some rest in my own house. I just did, for two and a half hours. I surfaced with a headache, which might be from the cold I've been slogging through for the past four days, or it might be from I-should-have-had-lunch-two-hours-ago. But I got some rest.

So what was the page-turner? Eats, Shoots & Leaves by Lynne Truss, subtitled "The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation."

Yes, my life with a preschooler and a homeschooling kindergartner is so glamorous and dramatic that I find relief in a book about punctuation. No drama with commas.

Actually, commas can provide quite a bit of drama. According to the author, the editor of New Yorker magazine in the 1930s and '40s, Harold Ross, "seemed to believe that there was no limit to the amount of clarification you could achieve if you just kept adding commas." On staff under Ross was writer James Thurber, who "saw commas as so many upturned office chairs unhelpfully hurled down the wide-open corridor of readability."

I wonder how many chairs did get upturned in the corridor between the editor's office and the writer's desk, as each piece was re-punctuated after its creator considered his piece written and done.

And now I consider my own house. Can I achieve clarification by spacing the dirty dishes across the counter, with silverware neatly placed between them like commas, or do I reach readability by stuffing them all in the dishwasher?