{Goodbye Grant}
January 9, 2006. This is not the start of a
happy new year.
I learned over the weekend that
Grant Burns died suddenly last Thursday.
Grant was a long-time personal friend and has worked
with me on NewPages almost the entire history of NewPages. He was
the guy who came along about the third issue of the print
incarnation and became editor. He made the magazine a thing of
beauty word-wise. He was a great editor and writer. He made it all
seem so easy, and often made me laugh out loud.
After NewPages went online, Grant wrote columns as
Uncle Frank. His columns in "Uncle Frank's Diary" were funny,
pissed-off, and smart. I hope you've been reading them over the past
few years. I originally asked him to write a column that might be
interesting to other librarians, but he was just too angry so often
about the politics and stupidities of the day that he let Uncle
Frank have an explosive "I'm mad as hell, and I'm not going to take
it any more" voice.
We didn't see a lot of each other in the last many
years, but kept in pretty regular touch through e-mail. We talked
about his columns, the occasional movie, and whatever else friends
drop quick notes about. (Our exchanges re: The Detroit Lions are
simply unprintable.) Grant was always right there for me through the
years with a warm-hearted, arm-around-the-shoulder note when I had
my moments of personal tough times.
I took a quick look at saved messages this morning, and
found this e-mail message from last year. It felt appropriate to
include:
Hi, C.
Uncle Frank’s lying low while I’m trying to get my railroad fiction manuscript through its crunch time...
Foggy this morning, so I took Lansing Road most of the way in (I don’t like to drive in freeway fog, owing to the crazies whose faith in good fortune keeps ‘em going at 70 mph, until they rear-end you). My my my, sometimes the world is just so pretty: I was all by my lonesome most of the way on Lansing Rd, no cars before or behind. As I entered and left rolling fog banks, I’d see the vague trees on either side of the road suddenly clarify in open stretches; they were all coated in frost. Still and perfect, the fog, the frost on the otherwise-dark trees, no one but me around—I felt as though I’d stepped into some ancient Japanese painting of a forest untouched by human paws. The world doesn’t give a rip about us, but sometimes it certainly does present itself nicely. We’re lucky to get a chance to look.
g.
I feel very lucky to have gotten the chance to know Grant Burns. And I feel nowhere near ready to stop writing to him and hearing from him.
Uncle Frank: A Column by Grant Burns - Archive