Life in a Day

Alone in the house for three consecutive days, I padded around in my slippers and nightgown, channel surfing and bagging some good movies on cable: Beethoven’s Copyist with the great Ed Harris as the maestro; Emma with Gwyneth Paltrow and Toni Colette who proved to be a surprise in a period movie (I’ve a stereotype of her doing edgy roles); Notes on a Scandal with Cate Blanchett as a lonely art teacher who embarks on a disastrous affair with her 15-year-old student and Judi Dench as the self-described “battleaxe” who gets wind of it and uses it as a leverage to get closer to the Blanchett character with whom she is enamored; and finally Heartburn, starring Meryl Streep and Jack Nicholson enacting the fictitious characters based on Nora Ephron and Carl Bernstein. All in a day.

Which makes nodding off at night a bit of a problem as the scenes replay in my head. Last night I distracted myself with success, reading Doris Grumbach’s memoir Life in a Day (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996) from cover to cover. She opens with this truism: “…I have decided to explore twenty-four hours of ordinariness. The common day is more representative of the contents of most of our lives; disastrous ones are rare.”

A negative review of her book sets her back, nearly paralyzes her, and the rest of the day is a study in evading her routine of facing the computer, encoding and editing her words. She describes her situation as an “osteoporosis of the will” that “kills off the desire to write.” I identify with the way she finds a thousand things in her house to delay her duty to craft. Accidentally, she finds a credo from an old man who used to work at a handpress. Studying it, I think it is worth adopting. Here it is:

THE PRESS CREDO
I. Work slowly.
II. Make no promises.
III. Take frequent coffee breaks.
IV. Set no line before its time.
V. Accept imperfection.
VII. Observe the cocktail hour.

There is no sixth instruction, and Grumbach surmises it might be any of these: “Make changes without rancor or resentment. Or: Take a nap after lunch. Or: You have done enough for this day. Or: Ignore whatever you have done thus far…”

I also liked how she and her companion mutually agree to dispense with preparing supper and washing dishes and instead hie off to the Morning Moon Café (a lovely name). This part made me envious. How many times I have wished for a nearby café in our neighborhood where I can sneak in for a meal instead of preparing one.

To poet Luisa Igloria who gave me this book, thank you for passing on the wisdom.