I found another clipping about a subject very dear to my heart: the footnote.

footnote noun , an additional piece of information printed at the bottom of a page. • a thing that is additional or less important: this incident seemed destined to become a mere footnote in history . verb [ with obj. add a footnote or footnotes to (a piece of writing).

Thesaurus: footnote noun the journal has discreet and informative footnotes: note, marginal note, annotation, comment, gloss; aside, incidental remark, digression, parenthesis; (footnotes) notation, marginalia, commentary; rare scholium.

When I am reading i do not want b to be interrupted by an endnote that I have to turn to the end of the chapter or of the book, to look up, but I don’t mind glancing down at a footnote. I think it was Gloria Steinem’s first book, Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions, 1983, that showed me a friendly, chatty way to use a footnote. i guess I’ll have to look it up to show you. Later. (Isn’t it a good thing I have a large library? ) That could be a footnote and not an aside aka parenthesis, but e-books and blogs do not use footnotes. Pity. I really like humour in footnotes, but not necessarily. I use a lot of footnotes in my new book (Endings) and they’re not all amusing. I had to be careful actually. I know l I use too many asides, interruptions, parentheses, etc. I go off on tangents. I am a tangential thinker. The miracle is, so far, that I can usually ride back down a tangent to the initial stimulus that sent me off on it. The odd time I can’t, during a speech (chat) , I’ll ask my audience,”where was I ?” and they can usually tell me. It’s reassuring that they listen.

Ah, the wandering footnote! That’s what one writer calls my tangential asides.I know they can be annoying, even distracting. They are the reason I paid extra for an editor when I self-published my new book. She saved me from myself. I still love footnotes.

The King of Footnotes, currently, I think, has to be Nicholson Baker (b.1957), an American writer,author of ten novels and five woks of non-fiction. His novel,The Mezzanine, has a footnote four pages long.

Next day: just about to begin a new blog and see that my blog yesterday was published unfinished. I have added a few pertinent facts and I will end it by giving you a quotation from him about footnotes: ''Footnotes are the finer-suckered surfaces that allow tentacular paragraphs to hold fast to the wider reality of the library.''

I like “tentacular paragraphs”.

I have been so accustomed to being alone, I am having real trouble adapting to living with and taking care of the needs of another person, especially a challenged one. I can’t seem to find time for myself. I can’t read or think or write, so I’m having trouble finding time and thought for the blog. I’ll keep trying.

For those of you who are alone, check out “Voyage Round my Room” in my new book (Endings)

LATER THE SAME DAY:

I’ll ry to catch some time now before I collapse for the day. I found a print-out, this one dating from 2009, that I think you will enjoy and ponder over. I see a friend sent it to me so there is no source acknowledged, or writer. Too bad.

24 THINGS ABOUT TO BECOME EXTINCT IN NORTH AMERICA

I won’t list them all, just ones that seemed to have a particular prescience for me or maybe for you. For example, Number 13, Cameras That Use Film. Everyone in my family, except me, has an appendage called a cell phone and they take pictures almost as compulsively as they talk on it. Who ever heard of Kodak?

Here’s a unique exception: Number 10. The Milkman. For me, I mean. A real live milk man delivers dairy products once a week to customers in the apartment building I live in. His wife phones and takes the order the day before the delivery; he collects the payment once a month. I have become very friendly with his wife and lately, with the lockdown and so little access to the stores, I have increased my order. Today I received free-run eggs, 3% whole milk and a lovely vanilla yogurt with less sugar that i hadn’t sampled before. My milkman is allowed into the building and he delivers to the door, because he is in and out so early and sees no one, shortly after 5, I think. Milkmen are called a “dying breed” in the article I am reading, but thankfully, MY milkman is alive and well .

Ah, but this is a sad one, to me. Number 9. Hand-Written Letters (especially thank-you notes.) No room for the elegant, polite, rare (!) hand-written letter, and with the demise of the hand-written letter goes the passing of cursive writing. I’m sure you have some feelings about that.

Here’s one that took a bad turn: Number 5 predicts the disappearance of measles and mumps, thanks to universal (?) vaccination. In 2006 only 66 cases of measles were recorded in the U.S. Not true anymore, as clusters of the disease keep popping up and spreading because of the anti-vacc nuts.

I could go on, but I won’t. If you really want to see the list, write me and ask for it and I’ll just print the numbers and names.

There, I did my blog for the day. It takes more time to write than to read, you know.