Lunch is served

Lentil soup and steak-like portobello mushrooms steaming hot from the kitchen of an empty post-lunchtime Max Soha as I tap-tap-tap on my keyboard, fielding emails and phone calls and setting up interview times and checking off how many more pieces of information I still have to track down in the two days remaining to me, my reporter hat precariously perched, the golden source out of the country, frantically scrolling through my growing list of experts to find the perfect replacement, knowing finally what my work wife means when she says it's the reporting I love, it's getting the knowledge all to myself, the deep knowing of things, but then I have to write it and that I hate, trying to whittle it down to its essence when the truth of it is so much larger and will never be captured in a single story. Reporting, writing, editing, they are such different hats, and the muscle to make the hats sit properly needs to be exercised and I am grateful (I think) for the opportunity to exercise the reporting muscle again, to flex it so hard and so furiously that I have almost fallen in love with it again, even though I think the story I'm writing might read like rubbish but my reporter friends tell me it always feels that way and to just power through. One more week. Popping a chiclet from its sleeve, coffee cup at my elbow, reporting, transcribing, writing, connecting, all of it far more arduous than you ever think it will be, and not nearly enough thinking time, and I can't wait for life after to rush back in so I can breathe again and pay Aunt Winnie's bills and spend my cousin's morning commute on the phone with her instead of rushing to my computer, setting up my tape recorder for yet another 8 a.m. interview that always turns out to be exhilarating in some measure but how many more? One more. Just one more.