Here’s what I did today:
Created a blog. When my daughter Hannah asked me what my URL was, I looked up and saw the plastic bust of a girl she’d bought at Urban Outfitters in Northampton, Massachusetts a year or so ago. The girl used to be white, but Hannah painted her red this summer. The bust sat on top of a trunk in her room, and the trunk sat on top of something else so that the girl seemed on a pedestal. “Red pedestal girl,” I said, and Hannah typed it into tumblr for me. I am choosing to believe that the name is right. I feel that it is, but in a way I do not yet understand. Or maybe I will change it. Everything’s plastic here, in my new blog life.
Organized my kids’ elementary and middle school schoolwork and paintings. I labeled it all and put it in drawers in the basement. I don’t know why I want to do this organizing of schoolwork business. I keep having visions of Hannah and Sam with children of their own someday, pulling out the charcoal drawing of Perseus and Medusa or the playbill for Cymbeline or the crayon sketches of the human body, or the squirrels borrowing nuts from the column to the left in long division, and being so grateful to me for holding onto it all. Hannah tells me to throw it away. She says she only needs a few of her “good books” to remember by, but how am I supposed to choose? It’s all so beautiful.
Waited for a hurricane that didn’t come. We were right in the path of Irene. The National Weather Service predicted winds of 50-60 mph by 2 pm today, but Irene petered out before she got to us. Good girl. I have not been out of the house all day anyway. On Friday we were talking about getting ready for a week without electricity, but in the end we didn’t lose power for even five minutes. I’m old enough to be happy about this, but still I’m thinking about buying a crank radio. Goodnight, Irene.
Listened to the radio. Mia Farrow arrived, of course, in Somalia to help with the greatest human catastrophe in recorded history – drought and mass starvation. “What we need here is rain,” she said, doing a good job with the obvious. “Days and days and days of gentle enduring rain. For four months, everyday.” I loved that she used the word enduring. She was in a school and the children sang to her. They were asked to sing and so they did, their voices like the sweet pattering of rain itself. And then, because I didn’t, don’t, know what to do with the feeling that arose in me, I turned the radio off. What are we doing with this? We all have it every night together in our separate houses as we listen.
Made hamburgers. Organic. We listen to a story about the Horn of Africa right as we’re mixing up the potato salad and broiling the chicken. Or the hamburgers. Modern life delivers these unacceptable juxtapositions, and we…. We don’t know how to make it stop.
Thought all day, between everything else, about my new life. Tomorrow begins my orientation as a graduate student teacher of freshman writing at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. This blog is meant as a repository of my impressions, challenges, flights, inspirations, ideas, memories, and stories from my new life as a fiction student in the MFA program there. Stay tuned. More is on the way.
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