mixed bag

Here are some things I'm thinking about.

• adding injury to injury: Fema trailers have been found to be hazardous to health, as they have dangerous levels of formaldehyde, a known carcinogen. Can't these f-ups do anything? Anything at all? I think about Katrina survivors who lost everything in the same way I think about WWII veterans and Vietnam Vets (especially POW's). They have a free pass, and no amount of courtesy and generosity is too much. If they go apeshit, well no wonder, and God help them, but we better do everything in our power to make their lives better and give them a safe place to live. It's a crime and a national shame. We have the best country in the world, but honestly that's not saying much in this area.
  
• last night D and I had an exquisite dinner at the Chameleon Cafe. My friend B and her husband started the cafe about 8 years ago, and I am a little chagrined that I have not gone there to eat more than a handful of times. After last night, I plan to be a more frequent visitor. We had a cheese plate of flavor-packed cheeses--I know nothing about describing cheeses, but I know cheese plates have soft, medium, and hard with some sort of fruit accompaniment. The medium cheese D described as everything he loves about Crazy Bread, concentrated in one bite of the cheese. If you know him, this is a huge compliment (when we were dating, crazy bread was the perfect meal to devour in his car and talk about everything under the sun, plus it's mega-cheap). My entree was a pork tenderloin with a glaze and hollandaise sauce over potatoes and gorgeous broccoli-like veggies. It was perfect. The other white meat never tasted so good. The experience really felt like going to a museum to me, when you're used to wandering around the "framed art" section of Ikea.
  
• 5 years ago: the blizzard of 03. According to my friend C, one of 12 women I knew who got pregnant around the same time, it wasn't just snow falling. That fall was very busy in maternity wards!
• Madeleine L'Engle. I have found over the years that the perfect book comes up at just the right moment. This time, it was Circle of Quiet, the first of a series of journals L'Engle wrote and published in the seventies. She reflects on all kinds of things, from creativity and teaching children, to her own struggles as a writer and mother. I have copied down a few paragraphs that have been immensely comforting lately:

  The various pressures of twentieth-century living have made it almost impossible for the young mother with preschool children to have any solitude. During the long drag of years before our youngest child went to school, my love for my family and my need to write were in acute conflict. The problem was really that I put two things first. My husband and children came first. So did my writing. Bump.

  …there were times when for at least a full minute I thought of following Gauguin: I needed a desert island, and time to write.

  Well, somehow or other, like a lot of other women who have quite deliberately and happily chosen to be mothers, and work at another vocation as well, I did manage to get a lot of writing done. But during that decade when I was in my thirties, I couldn’t sell anything. If a writer says he doesn’t care whether he is published or not, I don’t believe him. I care. Undoubtedly I care too much. But we do not write for ourselves alone. I write about what concerns me, and I want to share my concerns. I want what I write to be read. Every rejection slip…was like the rejection of me, myself, and certainly of my amour-propre. I learned all kinds of essential lessons during those years of rejection, and I’m glad to have had them, but I wouldn’t want to have to go through them again.

  ….

  All during the decade of my thirties…I went through spasms of guilt because I spent so much time writing, because I wasn’t like a good New England housewife and mother. When I scrubbed the kitchen floor, the family cheered. I couldn’t make a decent pie crust. I always managed to get something red in with the white laundry in the washing machine, so that everybody wore streaky pink underwear. And with all the hours I spent writing, I was still not pulling my own weight financially.

  …

  I had to write. I had no choice in the matter. It was not up to me to say I would stop, because I could not. It didn’t matter how small or inadequate my talent.