Monday Scramble: Steady
It’s like mortality: sometimes, you are intensely, unbearably oppressed by the knowledge that you are never going to catch up on your to-do lists. Not even close. And, as with mortality, a benign oblivion is the only balm.
This Valentine’s Day, I was somatically challenged. I was clumsy making breakfast, dropping little things and misjudging the timing. (The croissants nearly burned, right before my eyes, in the new, glass-fronted Waring convection oven; I was not ready to take them out.) It took forever to get through the Times, and I was far from comfortable in my patchily irritated skin.
We did take a walk to Carnegie Hill, for a nice brunch at Island and a shop at Feldman’s, but I had to ask Kathleen to slow down a bit on the sidewalks, because I couldn’t keep up with her stride (and she over a foot shorter than I!). Back at the apartment, I found that it was all that I could do to make a pot of tea. I collapsed onto a sofa and began a hopeful project: getting through yet another slab of magazines, particularly issues of L’Express. I also wanted to start in on Cathleen’s Schine’s new novel, The Three Weissmans of Westport, and to continue with Lytton Strachey’s biography of Queen Victoria.
What I didn’t do was to make dinner. It wasn’t that I wasn’t up to cooking. It was that the refrigerator is in sore need of what let’s call an update. It won’t take long, really; almost everything in the refrigerator is either in a bin or on a tray. But I haven’t been able to bring myself to see to it, and I wasn’t about to interrupt a reading day the shrewd calculations of quartermastering.
A reading day: I need more reading days. Not to mention days when reading leads straight to writing. “Straight to writing”? Have I deluded myself that the act of sitting down to write for Portico is ever accomplished without the violent slam of breaking the sound barrier?