It was real cold out when I went across the street to get coffee just now. It was cold and colder many mornings when I went downtown with my sign and stood with it for an hour every weekday for seven years until last March. No presidential candidates talked about poor kids and reading; just one mayoral candidate here has. The reason I wrote my newsletter and started this blog was to talk about that. That’s the sign against the wall by my desk waiting to go out again.
BEFORE I GET THE PAPER
A woman
wrote in a book
I read once
that making your
bed first thing
was good for you
in real important ways.
She said it
in a tone
that made me do it
through divorce
and all the years of
nights that followed
through nights of pints when
when you don’t
remember
getting into that bed
through the restless sleep
of these
endless days in isolation
even with a trendy weighted blanket
on top of things
I make it obsessively
smoothing all the lumps
even later if the
window light
says
I missed one.
Joan Didion is 86 now. She lives here in New York. Her pieces about California where she grew up were what got our attention. Her essays on/in the ‘60s were all important. Her style of writing and the things she noticed continued to open our eyes to things. Here’s an excerpt from a slim book of some previously uncollected essays coming out today:
https://lithub.com/joan-didion-why-i-write/
