I went for a bike ride this week to buy a dozen eggs. We were staying with friends in the countryside, an hour and a half outside Los Angeles, and about a mile up the road there’s a chicken farm that lies by a pair of dun-colored hills. The day wasn’t windy or hot yet, there was a coolness that hung beneath the trees, and next to a fence was a folding table and a small cooler, four cartons inside, plus a plastic envelope and a paper marked “$5.”
What honor entails I don’t know exactly, but I find myself thinking about it on occasion, I feel I am able to find certain aspects of it in my daily life. Five bucks for the farmer. Doing favors for a stranger. The pleasure and pride of a civil argument at the bar. We don’t have a culture built around honor so much as success, I don’t think – and perhaps honor is a product of trust? In the same the way that winning, or besting, really, sneaks around behind achievement’s back. To behave honorably sounds out of mode, gathering dust with chivalry and grapefruit spoons, or like it’s something privileged above daily routines, more to do with honor guards and honorable mentions than driving properly on the freeway.
But I find it relatable to everyday life, and I enjoy its appearances – not to do with prudery or moral-mindedness, but the idea of acting with faith that not everyone’s out to get you. Perhaps it’s wishful thinking; more likely, my thinking on all of this is half-baked. But maybe honor is something about the state of adhering, as we bump around our days, not to what is right, necessarily, but what is good.
Sidebar: Adventures in bookselling continue!
My new nonfiction book, Everything Now, is alive in the world. Honestly, the best thing is when I get a note from somebody saying what the book means to them as they make their way through it. (It ceased being my book long ago.)
This week, I’m doing an Instagram Live session on Monday, June 28, 6pm Eastern, when I’ll be talking to actor-writer Jen Tullock – an actual person from the book (!) – via my publisher’s Instagram feed.
Jen is smart, charming and very funny, and it should be a good time, assuming I don’t mess up the tech side of things. The event is sponsored by Barrett Bookstore, the indie bookstore I visited every week when I was a kid, so it’s extra special for me.
Other stuff:
A few days remain to enter to win an Everything Now-themed skateboard deck
An excerpt from Chapter Three ran on Lit Hub this week
As always, huge thanks to everybody who has bought the book, reviewed or rated it, talked it up on social media, recommended it to a friend or book club, whatever. It all very much means a lot.
What the what? A (mostly) weekly newsletter by novelist Rosecrans Baldwin of (very) short essays about things he finds beautiful.
Rosecrans’s new nonfiction book, Everything Now, is available from Amazon, Bookshop, or your local store. Any other books mentioned in this newsletter are a Bookshop list.