The other day I found myself reading me.

A wee hour, quiet, hunting for a particular paragraph in the humungous file where I entomb my missives (5,416 pages, 2,227,920 words since inception – imagine!). I started scrolling, as I might a new find. Did I like this guy? Were we on the same wavelength? Did he bore me? Was he adding anything to my moment? Was he more (or less) than pleasant?

My reactions wavered, as reactions will. A writer we loathe we may consign to permanent perdition but even writers we adore we don’t always. I could skip pages of Shakespeare, only I reread them because he wrote them. Even Shakespeare couldn’t be Shakespeare every day.

I liked this guy Tucker OK. He could be funny, unexpected. He stood for something passionately most of the time. Sometimes he turned a phrase (sometimes he tried too hard). He could be repetitive – but who wouldn’t be, popping off every dawn? Would I “follow” him? I wasn’t convinced – the competition for attention online is brutal. Opinion-spouters, especially, are a dime a dozen. Did I need to hear about Shakespeare or Thoreau – or God – to get through my day? With go-to news sites and analysts my dance card’s pretty full – and I’d like to leave some time for Shakespeare and the gang.

Then I started thinking – my light out again – what was this enterprise of mine, after its first decade? A bid for fame or fortune? Obviously not; I’d have bagged it long since. An ego trip? I suppose – why else write if not to be known? But no swagger-corner – brags grate horribly in print – names drop with a thunderous thud. Rather, a bid for friendship of a certain sort – considerate, conversational, affectionate – which I likened to a daily stroll with a pal: an enclave of quiet conviviality in our hurtling hurting hour.

My words were my gatekeeper: if you liked what you read, you and I were mates. I made my prose prickly enough to discourage drop-ins. (Polysyllables can be great deterrents.)

My subject matter? Life. Mine, yours, the one we share. Sometimes big stuff – none more monstrous or maleficent than Trump. Sometimes little stuff – books, grandkids, trying to cook; recently Lord Henry. No polemics or pronouncements: certainty – about anything – is not my strong suit. No philosophy, theology, theory, if I could evade those briar-patches. No enthusiasms too esoteric or remote: in America, a little Piero goes a long way, alas. I’d never exhaust my subject matter, I figured, because everything in life changes every day. We can never “have our say” because tomorrow you won’t be you or I I. “Certainty,” he intones, quoting himself, “is a redoubt from doubt.”

How’s it going? Amazingly. Our congregation keeps growing – but more important to me, attendance rates defy belief. Your time is precious – you’re smart, you’ve got limitless choices – yet here you are. I sometimes fantasize collecting you from all over the globe under a single tent. What a party! You’d all really like one another.

In a funny way, I live to tell you about it. Tomorrow’s stroll is always on my mind. God help me if I bore you or piss you off. I share Scheherazade’s panic: cease to amuse and it’s off with his head! (Jane cautions me when I perseverate, my guardian angel.)

I have no grand design – which may be my design. Love, friendship, civility, truth, beauty, grace are the gifts of being – and they are quiet, gentle, grinning, not shrieking or cruel. We live in a dangerous clamorous hour. It is good to greet the dawn.