The Mom Weekly Volume 80: February 18, 2025
You can read this, or any other previous Mom Weeklies, by going to the home page here.
The Sunday Tramps
Last month, I finished a wonderful book from the library: The Dictionary People: The Unsung Heroes Who Created the Oxford English Dictionary by Sarah Ogilvie. The book tells the story of the thousands of unpaid volunteers from around the world recruited by James Murray, one of the first editors of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). Each chapter tells of one category of volunteers, based on a letter of the alphabet. For instance, “A for Archaeologist,” “F for Families,” “O for Outsiders.”
The “T” chapter is “T for Tramps, the Sunday” and is worth some explaining.
The “Sunday Tramps,” was coined by Leslie Stephen, a writer who also happened to be the father of Virginia Woolf. He gathered a group of intellectual men (“tramp” being a term at the time for ‘walking excursion.’) who met every other Sunday for long (up to 25 miles) walks (and conversation) in the countryside around London. Stephen was known as the “Captain of the Tramps.”
I thought at first: I would love to have a group like that! However, I don’t think my local hiking women friends would like the name much? Also, I don’t think I would have fit in very well with this male-only group, who were atheistic and walked on Sunday in defiance of honoring “the Sabbath.”
And then I came across this long passage about Murray being an avid hiker, and why he, too, would not have made him a good member of the Sunday Tramps. Here it is:
Murray’s Christian conviction would never have allowed him to join the Sunday Tramps in their sabbath-defying hikes. Walking in nature was for him a religious experience, an act of devotion, which went back to a mystical experience the had when he was thirty-eight years old. Murray was on his annual holiday with Ada and their young family at Easedale in the Lake District. Early one evening, he went out walking alone in the mountains, in anticipation of rate rising of the full moon. As night began to fall, he got lost. The moon had not yet risen, he fell in the darkness and badly injured his foot but kept on going. Scrambling down a steep incline, he reached an expanse of deep black in futon of him. He stopped and suddenly realized that he was in great danger, and clung to a heather tussock on a precipice overhanging the lake far below.
Writing in his diary afterwards, he explained, “I could myself do nothing but one thing. I dropped to my knees on the heather tussock on which I stood and earnestly besought God to guide me in this, one of the most dangerous emergencies of my life.” He got up and went to walk in one direction, but a strong feeling told him to turn around and go the opposite way. This decision, he believed, saved his life. “I have absolutely no explanation save that it was God’s answer to my prayer and such I have ever felt it. One does not proclaim these things from the housetops; they are too sacred. But they are among the most profound convictions of one’s soul; and, many a time since then, may faith in the Invisible has been restored by remembering my experience at Easedale Tarn.”
Murray’s belief in God sustained him throughout his work on the Dictionary. On his seventieth birthday, he gave a speech which reflected his lifelong devotion: “The Dictionary is to me .. the work that God has found for me and for which I now see that my sharpening of intellectual tools was done and became to me a high and sacred devotion.”
Murray’s religious beliefs, his lack of formal education, and his different social class are some of the reasons why he was not a member of the Sunday Tramps.
——-———
Isn’t that just wonderful? I hope you noticed that he got injured hiking in the Lake District, like I did last year. And I am so, so very glad that I wasn’t alone, and he was not alone, and that I was taken care of so well. But, as Murray would say about experiences like this “one does not proclaim these things from the housetop; they are too sacred.”
Remember how much I love you,
Mom
Interesting/Notable:
When Paying More Tax, Not Less, is the Smart Play (gift article unlocked)
This is such an interesting topic, at least to me! I always say to Dad, “It’s a good problem to have to pay taxes.”
I was lost in the cesspit of social media. Then Jane Austen showed me the way out—The Guardian
“My brain got into the rhythm of the denser text at more or less the same time as I worked out who all the characters were (it helped to have seen Clueless several times), and suddenly I was … enjoying Austen. The chapter openings are consistently great, the asides are savage, and the social critiques are delivered in a flurry of bon mots. There’s a bit where a character goes to London for a haircut and everyone else is so bracingly mean about it, I laughed out loud in a cafe.”
An Action Item: Consider Maxing Out Your 2025 Roth IRA
Hear me out!
Probably one of the best financial things you can do for “future you” is add to your Roth IRA. If you haven’t opened one? Read the “action item” section here about how to open a Roth IRA.
Not for the first time will you hear that one of my big regrets is not maximizing Roths when we were younger. Roths have only been around since 1998, but I could have rolled over old IRA money into a Roth decades ago. (And I have started gradually rolling over some money each year from IRAs into my Roth).
The maximum Roth contribution for 2025 for most people under 50 is $7,000 (see this page for details). You may or may not have $7,000 hanging around to put into a Roth, but even if you have part of it, wouldn’t you be glad that you did it early? That way, at the end of the year, you can look back and see that you have already checked that item off your list.
Even if you don’t have the amount right now, consider using some or all of your tax refund to go towards your Roth IRA.
I’ve explained to some of you how you can consider or use your Roth as your emergency fund. That’s because you can always, penalty free, take the money that you have put into your Roth IRA. (It’s the earnings that are “locked up” until age 59.5)
Here’s an article explaining how that might work.
If you make more than $153,000 and you filing single, or $228,000 married filing jointly, you can’t contribute directly to a Roth.
If that is you, so-called “Backdoor Roths” are a good possibility. Read about how to do that in this article.
If you need help in the next few days doing some of this, I’m happy to help. Just let me know!