TABULA RASA

“Bleb” is worth eight points in Scrabble. Thought you might like to know. I have known the word since Wednesday, June 11, 1958, when I learned it from a company physician at Time Incorporated, in Rockefeller Center. He said I should have been hospitalized four days ago, but there was nothing much to do about it now, go back to work.

- JOHN MCPHEE

I went back to work, writing two weekly sections of Time called Milestones and Miscellany. Each filled just one column on a three-column page, and writing them was the entry-level job of new young writers. Milestones were squibs about births, deaths, and marriages, bits of information culled from newspapers and the wire services. Miscellany was a stack of ten or eleven one-sentence news items to which I added puns as titles. Time the Weekly Newsmagazine, March 17, 1958:

TWO TIRED. In Three Rivers, Mich., Thomas Kline, 11, smashed into a moving automobile with his bicycle, later confessed to police: “I fell asleep at the handlebars.”

ABSENCE MINDED. In Miranda de Ebro, Spain, the school principal ordered the school doors closed at 9 a.m. as a disciplinary lesson to late students, gave up the project when 50% of the teachers were locked out.

POLE APART. In Grand Junction, Colo., a shiny new police car drove into a municipal parking lot on a routine assignment, slowly cruised around as the driver checked the left side and his companion checked the right, smacked head-on into a telephone pole.

My first wife and I lived then at 285 Avenue C, in Stuyvesant Town, on the Lower East Side. On June 7th, as I did routinely, I left the apartment soon after nine and headed for the subway and work. You might ask why I was going to work on a Saturday.