"It is not thy duty to complete the work, but neither art thou free to desist from it"

Rabbi Tarfon, Pirke Aboth, Sayings of the Fathers II, 21

This phrase appears in the funeral service, but it is also a useful guide for the living. When I sold my bookshop 18 years ago and retired, Judy, my wife, gave me a Parker pen and said 'go to it, write!'. Writing was always there in background, something I wanted to do, and have dabbled in. I had a short poem published in the NZ Listener way back in 1957, and a short story some years later, but with the pressure of work and the family, writing got left behind. Having retired I had the time, and did get a piece published on the composer and architect, Richard Fuchs, a short booklet about the Jewish philanthropists, Annie and Max Deckston, I wrote numerous book reviews and a chapter on New Zealand Jewish writers in the book, Jewish Lives in New Zealand, Ed. Leonard Bell and Diana Morrow, (Auckland, 2012), I also kept writing stories that languished on my computer, and indeed, some got lost from my computer and survived only as printed copies. Bearing the injunction of Rabbi Tarfon in mind I am revisiting these stories, and gathering them to make up a collection. They are stories of 2000 - 3000 words. This seems to be my appropriate span. I don't write long stories, novels, with complicated plots and many characters. They are all about encounters between people, native New Zealanders and immigrants, fathers and sons, growing old, values of an earlier generation and those of a younger generation. Music features in some of the stories, but by no means in all. Hardly any is autobiographical, but they all draw on my experiences, people I knew, situations I faced. I may never complete the work, but I do not want to desist from it. I don't know what I will do with these stories, but first of all I have to bring them together, revise them, and then I will see what will happen. I seem to have my own voice and the stories are uniquely mine. If I get a bit slack with my blogs, it is because I am working on completing the work I set for myself.