MARCH 10, 2026 – I’m nearly laughing out loud—“LOL” in the vernacular of The Text. Earlier today I struggled mightily in my role as a remote writing mentor for a couple of high school students. In each case it was a classic matter of, “Where do I start?” I don’t mean to disparage my mentees. They try hard, and over the two years in which I’ve been tutoring them, I’ve observed consistent effort and improvement—on their part if not mine. Still . . . “Where do I start?”
The irony about all this is that if I were the teacher grading the volunteer mentor (me), I’d be parsimonious about issuing anything above a C+. In fact, beyond mechanical editing, I’d characterize my comments as “marginally helpful.” But shhhh! Don’t tell anyone.
Here’s compounded irony: when I turned to my own writing, namely, today’s post, I experienced a rare case of writer’s block. Yes, like an old Briggs & Stratton-powered lawnmower, ever reliable at blowing out grassy chaff, my writing engine, as it were, refused to make hay.
To be sure, I’m conveniently ignoring that horrific writing incident—memorialized here for the world to witness—that burned a gigantic hole through my law school transcript. At the time, that blow-up seemed to be of cosmic proportions. Of course, by any observable measure, the occasion was nothing of the sort. It was all going on inside my head and was simply my own personal case of writer’s block—writ large.
I know I’d experienced plenty of episodes in college too. Writing papers back in those days was a project, especially when taking full account of the process: a stack of 3 x 5 notecards on which I recorded my “research”; a notepad on which I scribbled an outline, then first draft of the “paper”; the umpteen pages I typed and often re-typed, because many of the mistakes were beyond fixing with an eraser on erasable paper. More than once my malady wasn’t so much “writer’s block,” per se, as it was “writer’s rip,” the unceremonious act of tearing things to shreds, because in the warm glow of the desk lamp, an inner voice at 1:00 a.m. said, “You don’t know what the hell you’re talkin’ about, and the professor won’t either.” It’s a wonder they let me out of the place, but surely the Director of Admissions, feeling some sense of responsibility, played a behind-the-scenes-role in facilitating my exit, magna cum laude, no less (for cover), but shy of Phi Beta Kappa.
Where was I? Oh yeah. Writer’s block and the forehead-slapping irony therein, given my “Where do I start?” response to the essays of my writing mentees.
But there’s a further irony at play here. I discovered it Sunday while riffling through a random “bankers box” that I’d carried into the house from stacks of such boxes that had accumulated and migrated from one office to another over my career and finally to our garage. The subject box was neatly labeled and its contents, well organized. The gross weight was . . . well, heavy, as old-fashioned office paper stock and manilla folders are. None of it pertained to my law practice. All of it concerned family business relating to New Jersey (see my several months of daily posts in mid-2023 in the series, Inheritance).
I’d thought I was well enough done with that project—the most challenging of my entire life, even allowing for all the entanglements of my legal/banking/corporate trust careers. But like a miscreant jack-in-a-box, out popped remnants of matters better left undisturbed; or, upon more thoughtful consideration, matters better shredded and recycled without further ado.
First out of the box, however, was a page from the “You Can’t Make this Up” department, of which Uncle Bruce—known to many of my readers as “UB”—was the permanent chair. He was an industrial gauge hoarder (among other distinctions), and at his disposal was not only his enormous hand-me-down house from his grandparents, but a rather large three-story residence next door, plus four multi-storied Dickensian warehouses and numerous “out buildings” sprawling across seven parcels in the center of Rutherford, the self-styled, “Borough of Trees.”
Already filled to the gills by the time my grandmother died at 100 in 1994, the aforesaid places had no more space for the steady accumulation of new “stuff and junk,” papers and packaging, which wound up inside UB’s multiple motor vehicles—the operable, as well as inoperable ones.
That first paper out of the bankers box on Sunday? A perfectly preserved flyer advertising a “free program Tuesday evening November 15 at 7pm” at the Rutherford Public Library auditorium, led by one “Sheila Dempsey, owner of Organized Practice Management. “GET ORGANIZED!” the flyer enjoined, and “Clear the clutter from: Your HOME/Your LIFE/Your CAREER.” The advertisement represented that Ms. Dempsey “will show you how to simplify you [sic] life—Just in time for the holidays!” What fun it would’ve been to ask her for a quote.
My out-loud laughter arose from three simple facts: 1. UB had saved the flyer, 2. Though few items stowed and stored, crammed and jammed into every nook and cranny of UB’s hoarding kingdom weren’t torn, crumpled, shmushed, broken, damaged, mutilated or otherwise trashed (so to speak), the “anti-clutter” flyer was in mint condition—and just as miraculously, it had found its way from Hoarder’s Haven in New Jersey into a bankers box in Minnesota that would spend eight years in our garage before being rediscovered last Sunday.
Then came le piece de resistance et . . . d’ironie: Given the foregoing, how in the world could I throw out the collector’s quality flyer—especially given that my middle name is “Bruce”?
Once I moved past this amusing distraction, I dug into the . . . writing stored in the bankers box; protracted correspondence and legal documents. No writer’s block there—on the part of my mother and the family lawyers with whom she’d been working on a corporate conversion and my grandparents’ estate plan. I read snippets of it—the correspondence that is, not all the legal mumbo jumbo. Apparently, UB was refusing to help out; refusing to sign documents or deliver them once he did get around to signing them. I felt myself getting sucked back into the giant quagmire that my forebears had created for themselves and ultimately, for me after their passings, but from which I’d managed to extricate myself when everything was offloaded, liquidated, terminated, forever waved good-bye, now nearly four years ago.
Before time warp could do me psychological harm, I transferred the contents of that box to bags earmarked for recycling—it was all too old and obsolete to require shredding. Except, of course, I saved the “GET ORGANIZED!” flyer, mostly for its prank value one day vis-à-vis my heirs.
* * *
The Briggs & Stratton lawnmower, I now realize, has been on autopilot since I began punching out this post. Reluctantly, I must shut the mower off in favor of an old-fashioned scythe. After a minute or two with the whetstone, I’ll be ready to edit those student essays.
Subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.
© 2026 by Eric Nilsson
