Photo by 4motions Werbeagentur on Unsplash

Witness the new blog title above, the mechanics of which is a miracle of good coaching. After Jerome McLain of Maxmedia Studios, who builds websites for 1106 Design, finished this site, he provided me with a couple of sessions of video instruction via Zoom. While helpful, they proved insufficient to allow me to retain certain specifics of changing and expanding the focus of the blog—Browns and Other Shades of Football. I had concluded that the subject matter should more closely match my eclectic interests.

The new title does this and also describes where I am on the continuum that is my life.

Working from my notes and reviewing the session we had remembered to record, I became lost in a maze of navigate this and click that. I was the poster child for missteps. Though I had somehow found my way to the right spot to remove the old title, I couldn’t find my way back once I had left. Jerome thought I knew more than I did.

He values YouTube and other instructional videos. They’re useful but move too quickly for me to easily follow and make notes. I’m more old-school. Put it in writing. Jerome found an answer that, while not animated, accomplished both his goal and mine. He gave me visual tools with brief written instruction. It worked like magic.

At the top of a series of screenshots, Jerome instructed me what to do and highlighted the icons on which to click. I found my way through five steps, without incident, and even returned later to adjust the title when the preview of how it would appear on the blog revealed the altered title was too long and broke down onto a second line.

To those more adept, I must sound like a Luddite. When I became a journalist in the 1960s, I wrote on a manual typewriter. My stories and columns were edited on the copy paper and turned into “hot type” by a Linotype operator. The lines of lead were then arranged in a casing—think picture frame—by a printer, and if a person wanted to check something before a page proof was made, he had to be able to read type upside down. It is a learned skill that had additional value to a journalist. When gathering information sitting across a desk from a subject during an interview, a sharp-eyed reporter could sometimes read the subject’s notes, without asking to do so.

The subject-matter I have in mind for this expanded approach to the blog will not require subterfuge. It fills rooms of bookshelves in my condominium. I have loved books almost as long as I have football—and I am better at writing them (regardless what sales indicate) than I was at playing football. In fact, I chose the blog’s football emphasis because it is significant to my new book Football, Fast Friends, and Small Towns: A Memoir Straight from a Broken Oklahoma Heart. While blog visitors are busy reading my book—you are doing that aren’t you?—I plan to be reading some of the thousands of books as yet unread and writing posts that reading inspires.

Some of my choices may involve reexamining, with older eyes, books I have loved including those by Pat Conroy, the late, great Southern writer, whose prose was even better than the films that often came from it. I am also beginning Diana Athill’s book, Somewhere Towards the End, on which I obviously drew for the new blog title. (I should note that the British prefer “towards” and Americans lean toward “toward,” but either is correct and even word experts can’t quite explain the preferences.) My hope is that this interesting British editor and writer can help me to better understand my dwindling days. I won’t totally punt on football, but it won’t be my exclusive subject.

Time is short, and I read slowly. When a person is closing fast on 75 and has all those books on his shelves to pick from making the decisions can feel intimidating. In fact at this stage, much of life seems intimidating to me. Perhaps not as intimidating as learning the mechanics of making a website, with its blog, behave properly.

It was never this difficult on my old typewriter—except when the ribbon broke.