On my first birthday after my husband and I got married, my mother-in-law gave me a subscription to The New Yorker. It was a thoughtful present to give a bookish new daughter-in-law, someone determined to be a writer, even though I’d only published two or three short stories in literary magazines. 

Maybe Mary thought that giving me the magazine meant we could have long discussions about the articles, since she read it cover-to-cover. That never happened–we lived abroad for years–but she renewed my subscription every year until she was nearly 90. At that point, she started giving everyone cheques for their birthdays, and I took out a New Yorker subscription myself, keeping it up even after the family convinced Mary that the cheques could stop. She was in her mid-90s by then, and as we said, her presence was the present. She didn’t need to bother with anything else. 

Mary lived eight months into her 101^st year. By then, I’d kept up my subscription to the New Yorker for more than a decade, I think partly because I ticked the wrong box and the subscription began to auto-renew. I now have a digital subscription, but the physical magazine keeps arriving, probably owing to another wrong box tick. 

That means there’s a pile of New Yorkers in my office I plan to read one day if I ever find the time. It’s quite tall, and it’s a glossy reminder of Mary. It also needs to go into the recycling bin or I’m going to be killed by a falling pile of magazines the way the clerk in Howard’s End is killed by a falling bookcase. Or a heart attack while pinned by a fallen bookcase. Whatever.

But before the pile goes, or I do, I’ve been trying to figure out a few things about pacing. By that I mean the pace of life, past, present and future. Did my husband and I ever actually read the magazine? When did we stop having time? And please can I have more time to do everything I want to do instead of starting each day by trying to finish the chores I didn’t get done the day before? (And failing.)

I was 25 when I got married and The New Yorker subscription kicked in. While trying to write my short stories, I worked long days as a producer on As It Happens, the nightly current affairs show on CBC Radio. I often booked people profiled in The New Yorker or writers whose work appeared there, chasing them down and doing pre-interviews before they recorded 10 minutes with the host. This means the magazine didn’t strike me as quite so unimaginably sophisticated as it might have done even a few years earlier when I was an aspiring, well, everything. 

One of the segments I produced was a biweekly interview about science with writer Isaac Asimov, who always picked up the moment I made our scheduled call. He was brilliant, unpretentious and acerbically funny. He was also extremely unhappy if one of his $75 cheques didn’t arrive on time, rebuking me in long wounded diatribes. I still have his home phone number scribbled in my old contacts book. A New York City number, area code 212.

I called it a couple of times this week, by the way, curious what happens to a phone number that was used for years by a famous person, even a famous person who died in 1992 (but remains famous). Reverse look-up shows it’s a landline registered to a woman living on West 72^nd Street. No one ever picked up and there was no answering machine message. Which was maybe an answer in itself. Go away.

In any case, this means I stood at the far edge of the world of the magazine, looking in and feeling slightly undazzled, knowing how many ordinary failings didn’t make it into the New Yorker profiles, and certainly weren’t admitted to by its writers, not before authorial self-flagellation began trending. And of course it leaves out the comically outrageous arrogance of some of the New Yorker-level people I pre-interviewed, not to mention the occasional bleats of racism and sexism. (A famous journalist once asked me, “What colour is your hair?… I don’t mean the hair on your head, little girl.”) 

I also knew enough to realize that the writing in the magazine was excellent. Its criticism was sharp, its journalism often brave, and the quality of the short stories it published was daunting. I didn’t read it cover to cover, but I read enough of every issue to justify my mother-in-law’s subscription—this despite long days at work, despite going out with friends after work, and despite writing my own short stories after going out with friends after work. 

We went out to dinner, bars, concerts, bars, read a lot of books, played hockey and basketball, travelled. It’s true I was dead tired when I sat down to write and often wrote badly, although I didn’t realize at the time that writing at midnight didn’t work for me, and probably didn’t work for anyone unless they did bennies.

Yet here’s the thing. Somehow, in the middle of all this, I still curled up on the uncomfortable couch in our first apartment and read the magazine thoroughly and how in God’s name did I have time for all that?

There wasn’t any internet, not as much to watch on TV, no hint of streaming, and FOMO hadn’t been invented yet. No mystery when you think about it. The world was slower and I was 25 and had a ridiculous amount of energy. 

I’m going to say this lasted until the mid to late 90s, by which time we had a son and I’d been using my first email address for almost a decade (lesleykrueger@torontofreenet.com), although there still wasn’t a lot online. I was back in Toronto and had published two books, was busy writing a third while working part time as a freelance magazine writer and volunteering on the board of a writers’ organization. We didn’t go out as much at night but had kid stuff to do.  

Yet I have a very visual memory, and I can picture curling up on our far more comfortable sofa in our late 90s living room with The New Yorker. By this time the magazine struck me as a little stuffy, but I still read enough articles to justify Mary’s subscription. I was busy but felt roughly on top of things, even though my time for writing my novel often got lost, since working part time as a freelancer usually meant working full time for half the money. 

Not usually. All the time. 

I think I started finding The New Yorker more than a little stuffy a few years into the new millennium. I stopped reading it every week although I kept up the subscription. The internet was churning and my attention span began to shrink, although that’s something else I didn’t realize at the time. I remember telling people that I no longer read more than a couple of chapters of a book before deciding whether I liked it, tossing it aside if I didn’t. I also remember feeling rather proud of myself for doing that instead of understanding that I’d become impatient. Meanwhile, our son grew up, I changed paid jobs every few years and spent more and more time online as the world raced unknowing toward the pandemic.

Then it was here. We locked down, connections snapped, and silence settled over the world.

I’ve been trying to sort out what things I do differently five years after the lockdown. I dress more casually, although not as casually as the Gen Z kids wearing fluffy slippers and pyjama pants on the subway. I plan menus and do a big supermarket shop every couple of weeks rather than walking out every day to buy fresh food. Going out every few days for fruit and veg now seems to work just fine.

Mainly, I’m online all the time, with subscriptions to multiple digital newspapers, magazines and Substack newsletters, too many to keep track of. In these times of war and genocide and threats to invade Canada, I start every day by clicking through multiple online news sources including, yes, The New Yorker, which I’m back to reading. It keeps Mary in the picture, her slower era now looking less bland and bougie and far more desirable, at least as I check the headlines on articles I vow to read later. Then I go downstairs to eat breakfast and read the Toronto papers we still get in paper form, since they’re nearly free with a digital subscription, afterward heading back up to my office to answer emails and check for news updates and read friends’ newsletters and posts and notes on social, meticulously ❤️ing them. 

Run, run, run, says my wired brain. Run from one headline to the next. From one publication to the next. Jump on the pinging text message, check out the next new email in your overflowing inbox and answer it right now. Run, jump, interrupt work on your novel to check the latest news on the riots, the wars, the starvation, understanding that we live in historic times. Ask yourself, What is this doing to my writing? Ask yourself, Does my writing matter in the middle of this horror? Ask yourself: Haven’t we always lived in the middle of horror? We just didn’t get graphic updates every 10 minutes.

I recently talked to a friend who works in the arts. She said she’d just cancelled all her subscriptions, meaning her subscription to the fall dance season, the opera season, to seasons of plays at different theatres, her newspaper and magazine subscriptions—all except one Toronto newspaper—along with subscriptions to many, many newsletters which, in several cases, she doesn’t remember signing up for. 

She says she’s always tried to please other people by supporting their projects instead of subscribing to things because she wants to. Recently, she’s understood this means she’s lost sight of what she genuinely likes and truly wants to do. Now she plans to stay unsubscribed to everything for a year and she what she misses, if anything. 

We asked each other: How should we live our lives?

We asked: Can we find some way to pace ourselves? Stay true to our priorities and avoid endless distractions? 

Or are the distractions what life is really about?

Moderation in all things. I’ve always liked that, and sometimes I’ve managed to achieve it. Now my friend is making big changes while I drift off in the other direction. I can’t seem to achieve the happy medium lately. Maybe it’s hiding somewhere under the pile of  New Yorkers, but I haven’t managed to find it.

Have you?