In Praise of Catnaps
I’d say the greatest luxury of My Summer of Reckoning so far is the Midday Nap. I get up with the birds and the sun, do all the work that requires bona-fide brain power, expend my buckets of nervous energy at the gym, and then, around 2 or 3—right when the heat is at its stroppiest—I take an hour-long snooze. Once a cup of lavender-earl grey tea nudges me back to the land of the living, I’m markedly more relaxed and present with other humans for the rest of the evening. Pleasant, even. Granted, this is one boon of my intensely freelance life but I think everyone would benefit from a little catnap. Listen up, Amerika: It’s time to institute the siesta as a nationwide tradition.
Nadine Gordimer, 1923-2014
She was a prickly, complicated woman whose best self could be found in her pages. She said: “The tension between standing apart and being fully involved; that is what makes a writer. That is where we begin.” She also said: “I cannot live with someone who cannot live without me.” The older I get, the more I recognize such thorniness as essential to a woman writer’s survival.
Mourning Becomes Electric Boogaloo
And so, I suppose, my Summer of Reckoning continues. Woke with the sun and the birds and my cat with the great gimlet eyes. Meditated, plaited my hair, and hightailed it to the Grand Army Greenmarket, where my friend and I oohed and aaahed over big bushy fennel and chard and sweet bumpkin lettuces before buying as many as could fit in our earnest canvas bags. Over avocado toast and iced almond espressos we counted our blessings and sins even if he’d eschew such Christian-derived language, never mind the neotheist intent. I got back to my car just in time: I’d read those pesky Brownstone Brooklyn parking signs incorrectly—it’d take a law degree to master their myriad mastipulations—and the tow truck was already digging its talons into my Sadie’s fender when I arrived. (So No-Park Slope to tow when it wasn’t even a tow zone; can their officials find nothing else to do?) I cajoled, I cried, I bribed, I prevailed. And thus Sadie and I ducked back home together, howling along to Aretha as the city came to its inevitable boil.