Ta-Nehisi Coates spoke to me. It creeped me out. I felt a chill… a cold breath.

I had just settled into my morning writer pose, wrapped in thick morning robing in my downstairs office, a cup of steaming black coffee, watched by cats. Writers know there’s a time to write and a time to write. It was time to write.

In the old days, I’d roll a sheet of bright white paper into the black manual Smith-Corona and take off, joining the clackity typewriter clatter of a busy newsroom defining reality for the general public aimlessly milling about in Plato’s cave, waiting for Paul Revere to arrive with the news, telling them what to do.

The memory of those days turned the morning silence of my downstairs office into a roar. The perfectly empty computer screen screamed, the anxious keyboard called out to be touched. What to write about? Like there’s nothing going on out there? The page is blank. The cats watch.

Culley Jane appears, coming down the steps with a load of laundry. The cats take off. She asks me what I’m working on. “Next week’s column,” I say.

“What’s it about?”

“I don’t know.”

“We took Lyric to the Molly Brown museum this week. You could write about that.”

Lyric is our granddaughter. She’s 14. Molly Brown is her hero. Then we all went to Pete’s Kitchen on Colfax where the ghosts of Kerouac and the Beats still hung out.

“Or you could write about the election,” she went on from the next room putting clothes in the washer. “I know you don’t want to write about Trump versus Harris, but there’s lots of other races and issues on the Colorado ballot, maybe read up on one of them and tell people what you think they should do about it… there’s one on school choice that sounds interesting, and probably one about taxes… ”

Her voice trailed off as she went back upstairs. The cats followed her, leaving me abandoned and alone in my downstairs office. That’s when Ta-Nehisi Coates spoke to me in the vernacular in a booming voice.

I’d never heard of Ta-Nehisi Coates until recently, and then only because Culley Jane reads different things than I do. While I’m reading about international monetary systems and 17^th century German philosophers, she might be reading Jane Austen for the umpteenth time or a French novel or literary magazines, which is how I first heard about Ta-Nehisi Coats, in an article about him in The New Yorker. She showed me a paragraph he'd written she thought I might find funny, maybe even interesting. I found it neither. It hit me like a glancing blow, without penetration, leaving barely a bruise.

I put the paragraph -- and him -- out of my mind.

Until I heard him speaking to me, reading the disturbing paragraph out loud in the authoritarian voice of one whose work appears in the magazines of the known literary world.

Shattering the silence of my downstairs office where I write, he said: “Columns are where great journalists go to die. Unmoored from the rigors of actually making calls and expending shoe leather, the reporter-turned-columnist often begins churning out musings originated over morning coffee and best left there.”

I spilled my coffee.

A dog barked.

The cats heard nothing.

--30--