From the beginning, there was music. It signaled the parade of life — comings and goings, mornings and evenings. The chirping of birds. The clatter of dishes. The croaking of frogs.
It started with news from Camp Wapo, the Bible camp I’d attended as a kid. The camp counselors in Amery, Wisconsin, enforce a strict no cellphone policy: Ditch your iPhone when you arrive, get it back when you leave.
Sometimes gold flakes surface along the periphery. The first or last picture in a photo shoot is the winner. The opening or final page of a book delivers the line that you hold to your heart. Or the wind-down of an interview — right after the formal conversation has wrapped up — produces a comment that stops you in your tracks.
During his down time at work, a Minnesota surgeon often browses the New Yorker in the hospital library. One day he spotted its famed cartoon caption contest — a caption-less cartoon that calls on readers to submit captions and then vote on their favorites, to be published in the following issue of the magazine.
It was time. Time to get away, to unplug, to finally write that novel. Time to prove he could resist the barrage of texts and tweets, news and notifications in order to focus his attention on a worthy endeavor.