What to do when there's no "u"

...A dispatch from bewilderness

Eight hundred million years ago, microbes banded together, creating multicellular life.  Then there were sharks with wings.  No, really, there were.  Then there were galloping crocodiles.  Really.

A few years later, I was a freelance writing captions, blurbs, do’s and don’ts. This means I phrased a few thousand hacks, which were called secrets then. The best hacks told you what NOT to do. and when NOT to do it.

For example, if you wrote a line like “Are you wearing the right bra?” it would get a “meh” response, though no one said “meh” then. But if you wrote a line like “Are you wearing the WRONG bra?” it would go through the roof and you would keep your job.

I started working at Time in 1972. All the guys in my position had a wife, a nanny, and 2.3 kids. The nanny made meals and took care of the wife and the kids. While they lived in Greenwich, Connecticut, I lived over a cab garage in a crappy, crumbling structure in a crumbling neighborhood with no trace of college grads.

This was before Macs and PCs and laptops and smart phones, email or internet. We used typewriters and dinosaurs still roamed the earth. Computers were kept in ice-cold rooms the size of a stadium, not held in the palm of your hand. When we made a mistake, we didn’t hit the “delete” button. It was not yet invented.

Thirty-odd years intervened in which I freelanced for places like Vogue, New York, and Vanity Fair before being hit by a drunk with a truck.

This meant I needed to conduct my career, navigate New York subways, sprint through Penn Station, fly to DC, fly through DC, return home, make dinner, get kids in the tub, tuck them in, pay the bills, do the wash, remove lint from the dryer and shut down a smoke alarm. While writing copy due the next day.

The only problem was: I couldn’t. And here’s where “u” come in.

The “u” on my keyboard was no longer reliable. So if I wanted to write “slump,” it came out as “slmp,” if I wanted to write “clump,” it came out as “clmp,” and if I wanted to write “understand,” it came out as “nderstand.” So I began painting birds.

One of my painted birds on one of my two hands. No plants, animals or birds were harmed in the making of this stack.