Rob’s Life

Old Stories

| Rob Ehle

Before I forget, did you know you can subscribe to this blog? I’d forgotten that was a thing. Anyway, yeah. If you really want to punish yourself, there’s a button now at the bottom of the home page. Just put in your e-mail, and you’re part of the fan club. Speaking of subscribing . . .

I’ve been subscribing to The New Yorker magazine for maybe forty years now, but only in the last five years or so have I not been throwing out the issues. I do not know why this has happened. But now that it has, I’ve decided to make something of it and, every morning or two, I randomly choose from the stash one short story to read. I originally subscribed in my 20s as part of my personal Great Leap Forward, in which I was frantically trying to get up to speed on the tastes and lore of the Educated Class. I had been raised with books on our shelves, but besides Bibles and Bible commentaries, they were mainly the gilded spines of Reader’s Digest Condensed Books. Even at my Christian college, it began dawning on me that there was a whole group of Americans I’d been only dimly aware of who did not read the Reader’s Digest.

I’ve always said it is no mean thing to subscribe to The New Yorker solely for the cartoons. It’s a little profligate, given the amount of paper used on non-cartoon content, but it’s still worth the money. I think I first discovered New Yorker cartoons via an anthology at my friend’s mother’s house. They were the first cartoons, in my 19-year-old opinion (this was before The Far Side), that gave Peanuts a run for their money, though they obviously weren’t in the same race.

A tombstone inscribed, I Told You I Was Sick.

A king answers the phone: “It is we.”

And anything at all by George Booth. The best ones feature pronouncements shouted from the bathtub, electrical wiring not up to code, and/or constipated dogs.

As I began my New Yorker story devotional regimen, the first thing I realized was that I haven’t been at all rigorous even in the weekly cartoon review. Which of course is scandalous. There were complete issues in which there was not one cartoon I remembered. I blame social media, of course, and there can be nothing more damning of vacant-eyed scrolling through reels of dachshunds cocking their heads at giggling babies than the fact that I missed stuff like a gentleman and a lady at a mid–19th century soirée, in which the man introduces himself, “Mr. Karamazov is my father’s name. You can call me Dmitri, Mitka, Mitya, Dima, Mityok, D-Man, D. Doggy-Dogg . . .”

Some stories are better than others, of course. There used to be a typical “New Yorker story,” though I’m not sure that’s a thing anymore, at least not in my reading over the last month. Think John Updike or John Cheever. White, middle-class suburbanites, cocktail parties, whatever drama there is is usually going on in someone’s head. Sometimes longer than they needed to be, or at least longer than people’s attention spans were getting to be. “Character driven.” Moody, ambiguous ending. If I’m making this kind of story sound like a crashing bore, I can assure you the best of them would stay with you for weeks. Forever, a couple of them. Cheever’s “The Country Husband” ends with a line that’s become one of my favorite last sentences in all short fiction:

“Then it is dark; it is a night where kings in golden suits ride elephants over the mountains.”

I don’t know, maybe you had to be there. I’m a great sucker for Cheever. But then I’m an almost 68-year-old middle class white man. The New Yorker has moved on. The most “New Yorker” story I’ve seen in the old vein has been maybe “Understanding the Science,” by Camille Bordas (December 15, 2025), which takes place at a dinner party in an upper middle class Chicago apartment. The main difference is the reference to global warming. Otherwise, it’s still dinner parties and all the action is interior. Pretty good, especially in its send-up of a narcissistic movie star.

I loved “Unreasonable,” Rivka Galchen (9/29/25), which I almost skipped because there is early reference to the current political situation, something I’m generally trying to use fiction to turn away from. But that’s getting harder and harder, even in made-up stories. I’m glad I kept going. A mother, who is a bee scientist, has two daughters, and there’s lots of stuff about bees and lots of stuff about daughters, and it’s just so great. Did you know there are approximately 18,000 (or maybe 180,000? I’m too lazy to skim the story to verify) species of bee, and only a minority of them are social insects? Did you know daughters can be quite self-involved, whether they are ten years old or 21? Who’d’ve guessed? Anyway, starred review.

There are a lot of funny writers in the New Yorker, some of whom are just funny and some who are funny and, like, more. James Thurber was an early one (I haven’t read enough of his stories to know if any of the funny ones were more than funny). Back in the ’70s and ’80s, Donald Barthelme was absurdist, “postmodern” funny, and I laughed at his stories kind of the way an eight-year-old who’s the only kid at the table laughs along with the adults, and hopes someday he’ll get it. George Saunders has been huge and is one of my current favorites. I’ve never seen a writer who can be so vulgar and occasionally violent and maintain the comedy and wrap it up in enough generosity to make you weep and think maybe human beings aren’t all homicidal monsters, all evidence to the contrary. Another funny writer is Sam Lypsite—“Final Boy” (10/27/26). “Besides, what does Bennet know? He’s practically dead. Before he got that way, I was in Amok Mocha, where I like to sip cold brew and . . .” so forth.

Another often funny writer is Nell Zinc, though “Welfare State” (12/29/25 & 1/5/26 combined issue) wasn’t funny. Well, it wasn’t a laugh riot, but it was really good. An American goes on a morning hike in … Bavaria? Switzerland? I couldn’t pin it down … with her German (Swiss?) friend, who is much more into it than the American. The American eventually finds out the friend doesn’t even like her. What a switcheroo!

You get the sad stories, too. Occasionally, they’re just mopey, and thank goodness these don’t show up often. There was one recently that seemed so particularly amateurish—as if it were turned in by an undergraduate quite sure his creative block was worth reading about—that I wondered whose mother he had to have known to get his story published in The New Yorker. Others could blow a hole in you. The best of these I’ve read recently was Yiyun Li’s “Calm Sea and Hard Faring” (3/9/26). A mother remembers, many years later, her son’s challenging time in elementary school, something all parents are familiar with. But the present day is a far bigger challenge. I can’t recommend this story highly enough, though you do have to be ready for the gut punch.

No Kings

In addition to reading short stories and laughing at cartoons from older issues of the magazine, I’m also coming across Talk of the Town commentary from Trump 1.0 that is quite depressing in its observation of events we know will someday be unimaginably worse. In the issue from November 6, 2017—exactly one year after Trump’s first election to the Presidency—Amy Davidson Sorkin, wrote a piece on Republican Senator Jeff Flake’s denunciation of Donald Trump as a danger to democracy. It was his—or he thought it was his—“Have-you-no-sense-of-decency-sir” moment, hoping it might finally call his party to its senses. It did not. The center-right just withered away, and we are left today with Democrats (for what they’re worth) on one side of the aisle, and a cult of personality on the other. And all the chaos and devastation that Personality promised us.

Before I started my little morning reading hobby, I’d been thinking of writing about messy democracy—why it’s inherently messy, why it’s good that it’s messy, and why its mess has worked so well in the world, generally, for the last two generations or so. But that’ll wait.

For now, it’s just important to make a stand for it, this Saturday in particular. No matter where you are, whether or not you walk in one of the thousands of No Kings marches that will be happening across the country, please do join in solidarity. It could be a t-shirt, a sign in your window, or just a comment in a check-out line. Just show up Saturday, one way or another. Marching would be best. Show the cult what they’re up against.

On Retirement, Not Going Insane, and Being a Novelist Wannabe

| Rob Ehle

It’s coming on four years now since I retired. I can’t believe it’s been that long. I also can’t believe how long it’s taken to settle in. Really, like almost four years, I think.

This is another attempt to write about anything at all not having to do with this country’s swift and final decline. But, in my responsibility to keep shining a light on that dark corner and never letting anyone feel comfortable about it, I’ll leave this link to a paper from the Cato Institute about the effects of immigration on the US economy. The long and the short of it is that Trump’s and Noeme’s ICE goons have been going door to door arbitrarily kidnapping people, including US citizens, of course, whose population has generated more in taxes than they received in benefits, and has created a fiscal surplus of $14.5 trillion, in real 2024 dollars. Basically, proving once again that immigration is very, very good for the country, and that even when there are issues that need to be addressed in how it works, being anti-immigrant is and always has been stupid and racist. Anyway . . .

Where was I? Settling in. The word I keep using is peripherality. On my Facebook profile and in other places that ask my profession, I say I’m tending my villa in exile. Lots of people—the lucky ones, at least, who can even afford to retire—soon find they just don’t have the stomach for it, and go back to work. At least in some capacity. If it has to be volunteering, so be it. I have stubbornly refused, sometimes at a mental cost, I think. Instead of surfing and writing, as I always said I’d be doing, I took up guitar and Portuguese. I’ve stuck to this regimen pretty faithfully. After three-plus years, my guitar playing is still unimpressive, but I’m reasonably good at Portuguese now. Very impressive to anyone who doesn’t speak Portuguese. I have some Portuguese-speaking friends, in Portugal and in Brazil, whom I chat with five or six times a month, and I’m struggling through my first Portuguese language novel.

People are always impressed, or at least happy to hear it, when I tell them these things, but the fact is that these are very much retired old man hobbies, and don’t much relieve that depressing feeling of being on the sidelines. It also doesn’t help that I’m not around people the way I was when I went to an office every day. Talking to language partners on WhatsApp really isn’t the same thing at all. I found a MeetUp group of Brazilians, whose company I’ve very much enjoyed when I’ve seen them, which was about three times in the last year. There’s a group of classical guitar afficionados I may eventually get together with, as long as I don’t have to prove I can play.

Occasionally, I’ve sat down to try to write. Something besides this blog. Eighteen years ago, I got the you’ve-won-the-lottery kind of news that I’d been given a Stegner Fellowship in creative writing at Stanford. That changed my life. At least for two years it did. For a little more, actually, since I got a number of short stories published and even got a residency at Macdowell, the fancy-wancy artists and writers retreat place in Vermont. I started writing a novel during the Stegner period, but it was very slow going. Out of a combination of indiscipline and methodical plodding—I really have to be “in the mood” to write, and once I’m doing it, I’m revising every sentence—it has usually taken a year and a half or two just to finish a short story. And to make sure success was as unlikely as possible, I wrote an “experimental” novel that took ten years, two agents, and finally, all the gumption out of me. I’ve still worked on short stories, but it is amazing, once one is finished, how long it can go before some magazine picks it up, if they ever do. With every polite rejection e-mail, you want to shoot back, Do you know who you are dealing with here, buster? Did you not see “Stegner Fellow” in the cover letter, you self-important little . , . but who is really being self-important there?

Anyway, in the end, it just got to be too much—to work so hard on something, knowing the long odds. As soon as you get stumped someplace, the voice comes in, No one’s going to publish this, anyway. Don’t you have something better to do? And this is where the Portuguese study, the guitar practice, came in. Because there were no stakes there, really. I was doing these things because I enjoyed them, not to prove myself. Actually, I proved myself anyway, at least with the language study. Got the little A2 certificate required of anyone applying for citizenship, which I won’t be doing any time soon, but still. Nice to have filed away.

Then something clicked a couple of months ago, and I started scribbling again. Not out of any great revelation. Just knowing I was good at it, better at it than I’d ever be at either Portuguese or guitar playing. And as long as the odds were that I’d get something published again someday, they were better than me performing guitar on stage. I mean, there’s still the old Lucy-holding-the-football thing, the idiocy of doing something over and over and hoping with all the evidence against you that something will change. But I did finish a story, finally. And I did send it out, and it did get rejected. But at least the reply was timely, within a couple of weeks instead of four months, and the editor said he’d like to see more. Sure, Lucy.

I also found a group of other deluded individuals, writers, with accolades of their own and many with just as much disappointment in their literary careers as mine. So I’m again seeing folks face to face. And doing something I’m good at. And it’s almost feeling like it did before retirement. Four years in.

And I’ve started another novel. Don’t hold your breath.

Also breathing exercises

| Rob Ehle

I need a break from all the awful news in this country. So I’ll tell you about this.

A few years before my dad passed, he decided it was time to write down a few memories for his children and grandkids. I’m grateful. Scribbling’s not nearly as easy as it seems, which is why most people talk about doing something like this and never get around to it. He made it an on-going project, and by the time he died, it wasn’t quite as long as Lord of the Rings, but almost, maybe, and my mom decided it did need substantial trimming, along with some serious proofreading. Eventually, she gave me what she’d cleaned up, and asked if I’d try to page it and get it all bound up for friends and family. Occasionally there was something he thought important that I didn’t (I’m not big on eight-generation begats), but there was good stuff, too. In 1956, for instance, he was thrown out of a car in a head-on collision and, as I recall, had only some cuts and bruises and a bad headache. Like James Bond. This was one of many good tidbits. One of my favorites, though, didn’t even make it into the printed book. It’s a photocopy of a love letter written by my great grandfather. 

My Great Grandpa Toles died when I was about five. There are only two or three things I remember about him from personal experience. He was bald and had wire-rimmed glasses. He doodled. He was funny. I remember a squirrel he drew with his ball-point pen when I was sitting on his lap, and also a horse. He had a little trouble with proportion and it came out stretched longer than any horse I’d seen in life, and he explained it was a two-seater. Because I was five I took his word for it. The only other direct memory I have of him is his funeral.

He also kept a diary, in penmanship so gorgeous that when a friend of my son’s saw it, he said he should have a font named after him. There’s a three-month gap, after which he tells the story of accidentally shooting himself while cleaning a pistol. I saw this pistol, which my father used as the prime example that a gun was “always loaded.”

Grandpa's love letter

In the same hand there is a six-page letter to the girl who was going to be my great grandmother. Bessie. I remember her as a very pleasant old lady who always wore flowered hats and drove quite badly, as if the road were just a suggestion. But in the letter she is still a girl. As the letter goes on and my great grandpa gradually homes in on his subject, you watch his handwriting go a little slack, and you see more words and phrases that came to him late squished up between the lines. He’s thinking less and less about form and more about content. Maybe he’s actually just not thinking so much.

I wrote my  first (really bad) stories in longhand, but I haven’t done this since the early 90s, maybe before that. You can see what a neurotic reviser I was long before I started using a word processor (a term now already with its own patina). Anything I thought might be read by someone else someday, I revised and revised until there was only a sentence or two on the page without a line through it. Sam Toles’ whole letter has only one word crossed out: “Now please if there is please ask me and I will tell you the truth . . .” He caught himself getting a little importunate. 

There are maybe one or two misspelled words I can find. In six pages. It’s like the guy was from England.

There were a few things it took me awhile to understand. I couldn’t figure out what “Inkster” meant, in the heading. It looks like a start-up, but I knew this  of course was unlikely. It turns out it’s a town about twenty miles outside of Detroit.

He has this strange comment right at the start that it was a “Good job I had more than one match for it was certainly breezy just about the time the car came along.” I finally figured out he must have had some kind of hurricane lamp. Now that’s old school.

There are a number of places where an uncapitalized “but” follows a period, and this also has  thrown me. I have two theories. One is that the periods are quick commas he didn’t make big enough. The other, much more creative and interesting, theory is that he’d had his hand slapped too often in school for starting a sentence with a conjunction, and this was his little workaround. Who knows? It would be a lovely oddness.

At one point, he asks Bessie to destroy the letter after she reads it, “unless you really want to keep it.” There is no way on God’s green earth a girl is going to toss this letter, but the fact that nobody else has in 118 years is a testament to the redeeming sappiness of the generations. Despite the perfect penmanship and spelling, there’s no poetry in his prose, no sonnetizing or big city metaphor. He’s just a goofball in love.

Thank you, Dad, for sharing it.

—-

Detroit Aug24 – 08

Miss Bessie Swegles

Inkster

Dear Bessie:—

How are you feeling today. I felt ashamed of myself for keeping you up so late last night and I hope you will forgive me this time.

I arrived home: at least to Mrs Peters alright. Good job I had more than one match for it was certainly breezy just about the time the car came along. When I got in Mr. Wilham told me that he had been sick right after church. If I had known it I should have stayed with him and then I wouldn’t have had a chance to talk to you would I. You didn’t get a talking to for staying out so late did you? I certainly sympathize with you if you did yet I suppose they remember that they also were young once. But didn’t I get a teasing this morning when I got up. If I had got up late it would have been worse I dare say. but as I wanted to get back here early I had to get up early. What time did you get up Bessie if I am not getting too personal. anyway dear friend please take good care of yourself.

A week from today all going well I expect to be in a different state, so I wont be able to come and see you very often. Not as often as I have been during the last three weeks.

Say Bessie you remember that photo you gave me. I had it sitting on my dresser where I am rooming and when I came back the landlady asked me who that was the picture of. Of course I couldn’t say my sister as she knew her, and so I just kept mum. but really I almost was on the point of saying something else. Would you really Bessie have minded if I had said that it was my girl? Yet I would have been talking an untruth if I had said so wouldn’t I. Will you be angry if I call you that; or not now.

—3—

Truly did you think I meant what I asked you last evening. Yes Bessie I did and do mean it. I know our acquaintance has not been many weeks, at first I tried to keep from liking you. That was one reason I did not speak to you that tuesday evening. I did not know whether you thought anything of me or not. but I wanted you to know that I did care a little for you, before I went west. Yes Bessie I care more than a little for you, I truly do think a great deal for you and will you excuse me for saying it, but dear Bessie I love you.

Will you someday God willing be my Bessie

I am no flirt and to tell the truth I haven’t any use for them, and as I said last evening you are the only girl I ever asked to become my wife. Cannot you give me the slightest idea when you see that I am not fooling. If you do care enough for me dear Bessie, is there anything else that you would rather I would do than either of those two which I spoke of last evening.

The only reason why I would rather take up fruit farming first is because I would be in a better position to work on any improvement or invention which I might take up. In the city where a person is rooming out, it is certainly hard to work at it to advantage. one is handicapped not only by the lack of room but mainly by people whom you cannot trust, I do not mean to say that I don’t trust you. for little girl I do trust you fully. No Bessie I wouldn’t want to ask you to be mine unless we could love and trust each other fully I don’t think it would be right do you? and another thing is I want my wife to be and live happy if I ever have one, in truth, I did think of remaining single until I had become slightly acquainted with you no matter who it is. but dear Bessie I want that one to be you. Wont you? Yet do not answer against your will.

Bessie is there anything further that you would like to know about me

—5—

about my character etc. Now please if there is please ask me and I will tell you the truth or if you want to write to anyone who does know me well: just tell me so or Mr Wickham can give you the addresses of several who know me well.

This truly is I believe a love letter and will you forgive me for writing you such. Excuse haste and mistakes as I want to get this out tonight as it will go out to Inkster in the a.m.

Say Bessie when you get through this letter please destroy it, unless: you really want to keep it.

I may stop off at Wayne on my way out to Chicago on Sat. a.m. about 11.00 or 1.30 p.m. and take the train in the afternoon about 4.30. Mr Wickham wants me to go out friday evening but I will hardly be able to, I don’t think. You will be too busy to go out for a walk that afternoon for a couple of hours wont you? Do you ever go to Wayne on Sat. afternoons

—6—

Should you happen to be up that way, that you know of will you Wish I had time to visit your parents a short time, how are they? let me know Bessie? It seems that I want to be with you all the time, though I suppose I must not feel that way, and I hate to go out there where I wont see you again for months and perhaps years. I wish you could go too little girl.

I must stop or you wont be able to sleep after reading all this, or will it help to make you sleep better

Please write soon and let me know how you are getting along. I am getting along well and am feeling fine though it has been a pretty busy day for me since I arrived in Detroit

Bessie I wish you every success in your studies, health, and other things pertaining to you welfare. Also breathing exercises. Etc. don’t let me forget sat. p.m.

Dear girlie please take care of yourself.

Must close With love from

What would you Sam. xx

rather I would write about generally. travel. nature music. science. comedy love or what.

Housewarming

| Rob Ehle

I have a staff web page at Stanford. It has some basic information about me along with a portfolio of the design work I’ve done for Stanford University Press over the last decade or so. I’ve also had a blog there, of sorts. The problem is that it’s never been easy to update. For years I’ve resisted putting a bloggy thing on a separate, hosted site that’s easier to use, but I’m finally going to succumb. So here it is. Let’s see if it makes a difference. In the meantime, the last entry from the Stanford Roblog:

8.9.11
I write every day. I am, compared to the average person, a pretty disciplined writer. Compared to the average writer, of course, I’m a lazy slob. I will do anything not to write. This includes staring at Facebook, reading New Yorker cartoons, watching funny toddler videos on YouTube, reading long threads on writer bulletin boards about distraction, looking over my list of outstanding submissions, and digging lint out of the earbuds hole in my iPhone. The one thing I don’t do is blog. Blogging is one of the few things I find more painful than writing. It isn’t even because I can’t think of anything to say. I’m an interesting and self-obsessed person. I can always think of something to say, especially something about me. I would just rather sit and make something up, though. I’d rather wool-gather, as Kay Ryan says. I used to keep a journal. For a long time—years—I “journaled.” The idea was to kind of get the gears warmed up, the way we used to start up the presses and let them run a few minutes before doing any printing. The problem was that I would never get around to any real writing. No stories. No poems (well . . . ok, no poems might be just as well). Just page after page about myself. And when I say self, I mean self. No news whatsoever, no description of anything that actually happened. Sentences started, “I’ve always wondered . . .” or “Really starving right now . . .” or “If I would only . . .”

So I finally quit writing a journal. It was the only way I could make sure I was working on something worth reading. Although my output slowed to a trickle, most of that trickle has been getting published over the last few years, so I think overall it was a good plan. The blog idea has been iffier. It’s kind of between a journal and a publication, but beyond that, the point of it is vague. Originally, like most blogs maybe fifteen years ago, the idea was to take the place of the annual Christmas newsletter, just getting the basic information out to family and friends, without the postage. More recently it’s been to keep myself visible as I labor away on a book with no other writing to show people, but you see, that is—I have decided—dumb. I don’t really need to be that visible until I have something to be visible about, and that would be a book.

So forgive the long silences, and just know that if you’re not seeing anything here, the most interesting thing about me at the moment is that I’m writing fiction. Oh. I just [as of August 2011] got a story accepted at Zyzzyva, one of the first lit mags I submitted to about 25 years ago. So, yeah. I’m writing. Slowly.