John B. Marek

Ford Motor Company recently announced they are suspending orders for their Maverick (A) compact truck because they have outsold the company's capacity to manufacture them. The Maverick is an anomaly in today's pickup truck market, where bigger is better, and even bigger is even better. My "midsize" Toyota Tacoma is as large as many full-size pickups from the early 2000s. A new full-size F-150 or Silverado wouldn't have looked out of place at a monster truck show in the '70s.  The major truck manufacturers justify their increasingly enormous vehicles by claiming "no market" for smaller trucks. The success of the Maverick, however, would seem to contradict that.  The Maverick is based on the Ford Escape compact SUV, and while it is slightly longer than the Escape, it is significantly smaller than any other pickup currently sold in the U.S. It does not have the towing capacity or off-road capabilities of larger trucks, but it should work just fine for t...

If you watched the "big game" on Sunday, you know that the Los Angeles Rams scored a touchdown with less than two minutes to play to earn a come-from-behind win over the Cincinnati Bengals. It was a fitting end to arguably the most exciting NFL playoffs ever. It was undoubtedly a better finish than most of the Super Bowls of my youth, which were almost always blowouts. There was a stretch of games in the '80s and '90s where the only drama was whether the absurd margin of victory would exceed the previous year's. During much of that run, I watched the games at a party that was my boss's signature annual event. He always went out of his way to make it a fun time, even when the score was entirely out of hand by halftime; great food and drink, and prizes for things like the total points scored by quarter or the number of passing attempts by a particular QB. But when the party was over, I would always walk out into the frigid Ohio night and think, how will I get th...

In his song “Too Soon To Tell,” Todd Snyder sings, “I can still take rejection, but it does get harder to do.” Whether it’s a job interview, choosing sides for kickball, or that cute girl at the school dance, we’ve all experienced rejection, but I have to agree with Todd; it seems like it digs a little deeper and is a little more challenging as we collect miles on the odometer.   I suspect that has to do with opportunity cost. As mentioned in my “Hall of Fame” column a couple of weeks ago, job-seeking, when I was 25, was a game of numbers. I applied for every job I was vaguely qualified for, and whatever rose to the surface stuck. If I interviewed with J. Crew, Graybar Electric or Abacus II (all of which I did, by the way) and struck out, well,  that was fine because I knew eventually I’d find something. These days, I have traveled so far down a relatively narrow path that only a handful of jobs open up each year, so each one is exponentially more important.  The sam...

This Monday, February 7, 2022, at 11:15 AM, John will be the featured guest on the Hampton B. Allen Library Author Talks series. He will be discussing his new book, his career as a writer, and his life in rural North Carolina. This will be an online-only event on Facebook Live.   https://www.facebook.com/hbalibrary

Although I grew up a huge football fan and lived most of my early life just two hours from the Pro Football Hall of Fame, I only managed to visit it once, and that was under "unconventional" circumstances. In February of 1989, I learned that the software company where I worked was being sold to Microsoft, and within a few weeks, I would be without a job. I did what any recent college grad with lots of bills to pay would do; replied to every newspaper help wanted ad for which I was even vaguely qualified. I got a bite from a Chicago-based company that stocked sporting goods stores with fishing tackle. The title was Regional Sales Representative, but the job was to drive around with a van full of fishing equipment and keep the shelves filled with the latest gear.  I could certainly think of worse ways to make a living, so I was excited when the company contacted me about an interview. The catch was that it was scheduled for early Saturday morning at a meeting room near the Akro...

I spent much of the past week on the frozen tundra of northern Indiana, attending my father-in-law’s funeral. It was a sad occasion, made all the more so by the oppressive cold, wind, and snow. Whenever I travel north at this time of year, the provocative question that always pops into my head is, why don’t humans hibernate?   Hibernation is an adaptation to cold weather that many animals native to colder climates use to survive the winter. When we hear hibernation, we tend to think of bears, but most hibernating animals tend to be smaller with higher metabolic rates. When their ability to find food is diminished, they effectively “downshift” to a lower rate and enter a sleeplike state that lasts until warmer weather triggers an increase in metabolic function.   Unlike those cold-adapted animals, humans are native to tropical and semitropical regions where food supplies are relatively consistent throughout the year. The migration of humans to colder areas has only ha...

If you have ever tried Googling my writing, you are probably aware that the term “Field Notes” is not unique to my weekly column. It is, in fact, the name of a printing company in Chicago that produces a series of pocket-size notebooks with very cool cover graphics. Although I use that company’s products, and many of these columns originate as ideas, notations, and doodles in the pages of those notebooks, that’s not where the name of my column originated.  In my short story “The Bug Jar” from my first book, “The Bug Jar and Other Stories,” the protagonist, a young boy named Josh, keeps a journal of his “experiments” on lightning bugs in a spiral notebook. On the cover, he has carefully printed the words “Field Notes.” I have no idea why I chose those particular words, although I suppose I was trying to represent his scientific aspirations. That story was written in the late ’90s, long before I knew of the notebooks. Indeed, the printing company wasn’t established until 2007, so the...