Yes, purple is the color of your need
To have your mood made manifest . . .
— Robert Pack, b. 1929
American poet, teacher, and critic
from “Late Summer Purple”
Today is the last day of National Poetry Month 2013. At the beginning of the month I announced my intention thus: “Read one poem a day from [the accumulated copies of Poetry], first the flagged poems and then anything else, post a quotation to Facebook and Twitter for #todayspoem, and write some kind of post for Markings, even if it’s only the poem and a brief observation. And at the end of all, decide if I want to keep this stack of material as it is, or extract the content that interests me, or just discard the whole thing.”

I followed through with the reading and the posting to Facebook and Twitter, but faltered on the posting something here every day. That’s typical for me — actually, that’s better than typical. I completed two-thirds of the planned elements, instead of dropping the whole thing when I saw I couldn’t complete it perfectly.

When I opened the September 1997 issue of Poetry this morning, my eye fell first on the title of the poem, “Late Summer Purple,” and then the name of the author. Except my brain, through eyes made blurry from allergies, read “Late Summer People.” Maybe that’s because I knew who Robert Pack was, that he had directed the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference from 1973 to 1995. He departed that post under something of a cloud of controversy, the details of which I cannot now recall — something about cronyism and more attention to partying (among faculty and contributors) than to teaching. There is a tree on the Bread Loaf campus planted in his honor. The marker, which bears his name and the years he was director, looks something like a tombstone.

So when my blurry eyes saw “Late Summer P___” and “Robert Pack,” I finished the title with “people,” and thought it might be about Bread Loafers. Except we’re there in August, which is actually mid-summer. I read the poem then, and understood that it was indeed about the flowers of late summer, whose colors, varying shades of purple, deepen and ripen.

The mistake was a fortuitous, but not inappropriate. My chain of thoughts went Robert Pack>Bread Loaf>writing>summer>purple>fiction. For reasons I can’t really pinpoint — maybe it started with the purple backpack Lynn carried in 8th grade that I picked off a hook in the garage three years later to take on my first big writing Gallivant, and have carried ever since — purple is the color I associate with my fiction work.

And it’s my fiction work that has taken precedence this month over all my other writing. Now we’re looking at May, Notification Month. The Sewanee Writers’ Conference puts the word out on May 15, Bread Loaf in “late May.” Frequent readers of this space, especially those who persevered through the Reversal of Fortune in 2009 and the Wait it Out of 2012,  know what that means for me.

I had a good experience with the stack of Poetry magazines I looked through this month. And I decided to keep them, one more year anyway.

Thank you for reading, so much, so often.

April 26, 2013
Friday

I am winding my watch
because it is an old watch
and keeps old time, of which I am fond.
– Brooke Horvath, American poet and critic
“Winding My Watch”

(Dr. Horvath teaches at Kent State University A birth date for him, even an indication of which half of the twentieth century, has proven elusive. He has edited a book of poetry about baseball. That makes him good people for sure.)

As I reported at the start of this National Poetry Month project, I have most of my poetry books gathered and arranged alphabetically together on shelves, something I undertook in 2007 as something of a distraction when I was anxious about an upcoming trip. During that roundup, “I’d . . . pulled out all the “feathers” sticking out of the books, those strips of paper I’d torn for bookmarks (another good use for old absentee lists) now curled and yellowing, and replaced them with colorful Post-It flags.”

Many of those feathers had been placed during National Poetry Month in 1997. I was teaching several sections of American Literature then, and I wanted to introduce my students to poetry, both classic and contemporary, that went beyond what was available in our classroom text. The holdings in the school library were meager, but I checked them out for classroom use. To supplement, I brought in a lot of my own volumes. Students were to spend time with these books, reading here and there, and ultimately choosing a poem for a short written analysis. I cut up lots of absentee lists to make bookmarks for them. They wrote their names and their class period on the slips, and I copied the poems for them, so they could refer to them while they wrote their papers.

I remember that unit with great fondness, even though I got reprimanded by the principal for taking a genre approach rather than a chronological approach to poetry study (it was April — we should have been studying Unit Twelve: Modern Nonfiction; Unit Thirteen: Poetry in a Time of Diversity, was for May), as the department syllabus demanded, and for using texts that were not on the course reading list. In addition to all the reading and poetry talk, my students wrote poetry, much of it concrete poetry (poems in a shape that helped illustrate the theme) that they wrote on the white boards or printed on drawing paper that we hung about the room.

I left the classroom after the next year, and never conducted such a unit again. About a year after that, a guidance counselor called me. She had a student whose boyfriend talked a lot about how much he had liked that unit, about the book he read — it was all stories and poems about baseball, but he couldn’t remember the title. (Fielder’s Choice, edited by Jerome Holtzman). She wondered if I did, because she wanted to get it for him for Christmas. Teachers live for moments like that.

When I removed all the feathers of bookmarks a few years later, there were some left from that project. One was a tardy excuse with the name of a young woman whose mother (who had also been my student) had died a few years before. The poem she marked was about grieving for a mother. I found a few others that helped me remember individual students, made me recall what it is I still miss about the classroom.

This morning I opened the February 1997 issue of Poetry. There were no feathers sticking out if it, suggesting that I had not found an individual piece in it worth remembering. It was even possible, I knew, that I had not read any of them. As I paged through the book, however, I did find a marker. It was a torn scrap of a field trip list, and it had a boy’s name with an 8 beside it. It marked the poem I have quoted above.

I have to say, I do not remember this student. I looked him up in the school’s alumni directory, where he is listed as a member of the Class of 1998, with an address in California. He is part of an old time in my life, and though I can recall the energy that those days gave my life, I regret that I cannot recall his particular part in it. I hope he recalls the time fondly as well.

. . . In the grid
of days, I see her habit had been to record
in pencil what might be erased, moved, saving
the indelible black for what could not change . . .
– Claudia Emerson, b. 1957
American poet
from “Daybook”

I announced it with the same verve I always do for what my mother called (witheringly) one of my “enthusiasms”: the project for this year’s National Poetry Month: Read one poem a day from [a collection of periodicals], first the flagged poems and then anything else, post a quotation to Facebook and Twitter for #todayspoem, and write some kind of post for Markings, even if it’s only the poem and a brief observation.

Although I have kept up with the reading and the excerpts to Facebook and Twitter, I faltered on the Markings posts. I kept a list of notes inspired by each poem, with a chart for how I would compose not one, but two, or even three, pieces a day, filling in the blanks between April 3 and whatever day I managed to take up the project again. I kept making the notes through the first part of Gallivant 2013 (the Carry On Tour), a thousand miles to Vermont and back. I wrote fiction, visited a biker bar, became uncharacteristically homesick, and wound up yesterday at my studio, where I wrote for three hours and then, at about 3:30, took a break.

Claudia Emerson’s poem is in the June 2001 issue of Poetry, a volume into which I have placed no flags, and which looked unopened when I plucked it out of the stack this morning. The title, “Daybook,” drew me. Yesterday I wrote part of a scene in which my character, an 83-year-old priest who knows he is at the beginning of a slide into dementia, begins keeping a diary. He notes the day, the date, the weather, world news, and details about his health and his activities. He thinks he might need the information, should it become important to know when the memory faults and brief periods of confusion became more frequent.

The poem was given to me on a day when world events make me think, not for the first time, that I should keep a public diary, a daybook I wouldn’t mind someone else reading, perhaps when I am unable to read it myself, about who I was and what I was about in the second half of the second half of my life.

It would be a scrapbook as well as a chronicle of world events and physical symptoms. I’d paste into it the receipt I found yesterday in the bottom of the backpack in which I keep the working files and materials that are the daybook of my novel. Dated February 19, it shows that I stopped at Sheetz #312 in Mt. Joy, Pennsylvania, at 10:12:20, to purchase 3.44 gallons of gas.

Mt. Joy? Only 3.44 gallons? It took me a moment to remember. I was on my way to the funeral of a friend’s grandmother. The funeral was set to start at 11:00, and I had at least 30 minutes of the 60-minute trip left. I’d gotten a later start than I had planned (as is my habit but never my intention), I needed gas (having neglected to get it the night before, when I had made the same trip for the viewing), and I had to go to the bathroom. Pumping a full tank would take at least eight minutes, using the bathroom another eight. So I split the difference, pumping just enough gas to get me to the church on time, and running in to the bathroom so I wouldn’t have to look for one in an unfamiliar facility. I had no idea that the Sheetz off the Esbenshade Road exit of Route 283, where I frequently stop on trips to Lancaster, had a Main Street, Mount Joy address.

I opened my calendar this morning after I read the poem. In pencil I find today’s appointments: hair at 1:30 (color, allow 40 minutes) and an appearance by author Nichole Bernier at 6:30. In ink, I’ve noted, with colored symbols, the days on which I wrote fiction (purple), read fiction (blue), exercised (green), and attempted to clear clutter (orange). In black, I noted that on Sunday, I sent my application for the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and had dinner with a friend, and yesterday, I mailed our tax payments and learned of a bombing in Boston.

And I pasted the receipt, with a note about what it was, in a blank journal.

Carry On.

Without you I’d be an unleafed tree
Blasted in a bleakness with no Spring.

Your love is the weather of my being.
— Daniel Hoffman, 1923-2013
American poet

So — the plan was to read one poem a day from stack of archived Poetry magazines and write about what came of the exercise. But on the third day, already I am deviating from that plan.

Every morning I receive the Poem-A-Day from the Academy of American Poets in my inbox. When I saw Daniel Hoffman’s name in the subject line, I clicked the message open. There he was, much as I remembered him, only with forty years on his craggy face and a lot less hair. He died four days ago. He would have turned 90 today.

Forty years ago, give or take a few months or so, Daniel Hoffman gave a presentation in my classroom, the one in A-wing with a connecting door to the principal’s office and a view of a newly-planted tree. Its installation had consumed two class periods of observation. “Write about trees,” I told my students. I’m still doing that. I wonder if any of the others are.

Daniel Hoffman talked about poetry that day, about Edgar Allen Poe. His critical study, Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe, had been published not long before. He read a poem he’d written about the poet. Its last line was the repetition of Poe’s name seven times, as in the book’s title. Each uttering of the name was louder, and by the sixth or seventh one, Hoffman was on his feet, nearly shouting. Looking back, I can say that this was probably my first exposure to poetry as performance art.

Although I remember Hoffman’s visit, I cannot remember the auspices under which it was arranged. Nor can a colleague, who does not even remember the visit. She taught British literature. Another teacher, who was also the department chairman, and I taught American, and I suspect it was that other teacher, who arranged the presentation, likely under the Poets-in-the-Schools program.

I was twenty-five years old then, and the school year of 1972-1973 was not one of the best years of my life, neither professionally nor personally. I was very self-absorbed, sliding into a depression triggered in part by a broken romance. My former boyfriend was another teacher, and the new girlfriend was a staff member, and seeing them every day made for a good deal of sighing and self-pity. I wasn’t reading new poetry, only the tried-and-true canon that I was teaching. I did read Hoffman’s critical study, probably in a library copy, since I don’t have it on my shelf, but not his own work. The memory of his visit, of his physical presence in the room, has remained, recalled every time over the next several decades when the chronological romp through American literature that was my teaching schedule said it was November, time for Edgar Allen Poe.

The poem with which the Academy chose to commemorate Hoffman’s passing is very likely a love letter to his wife, Elizabeth McFarland Hoffman, who died in 2005. Just as I knew little about Hoffman beyond the fact of his stature as a Poe scholar, I didn’t know anything about her until I read Hoffman’s obituary. She had been the poetry editor of the Ladies Home Journal from 1948 until 1962, in an era when women’s magazines published quality poetry and fiction.

I was in ninth grade in 1962. I was writing, as most teen girls do, even the ones who don’t ultimately seek to develop and advance in the craft. I sent some poems to the Ladies’ Home Journal because that was one of the magazines my mother subscribed to. I know that one was about the difficulties of taking a true-false test I hadn’t studied for, and another was about trees or birds, or birds in trees, or something along those lines. I know that I did not include a self-addressed stamped envelope, because I knew as little about the submission process as I did about writing poetry. Nevertheless, on a sunny summer day between ninth grade and tenth grade, I received a personalized rejection letter from LHJ. The writer returned my typed-out poems and included a note thanking me for the opportunity to read my work, saying it wasn’t right for them but to keep on working. It was my first literary rejection. It probably came from Elizabeth McFarland Hoffman.

Poet Stephen Dunn said that “In [Daniel Hoffman's poems] is a lifetime of careful observance, the voice rarely raised yet passionate in its precisions, the man behind it enough a lover of life to have been properly critical of the way we’ve lived it.”

Daniel Hoffman passed through my life at a time when I was performing those careful observations, but not writing them down. I associate him with a newly-planted tree, itself now gone in the reshaping of the landscape at the high school where I taught. The space where my classroom was, the classroom Daniel Hoffman graced for a moment, is no longer room A-1 in an area known as A-wing. I taught only two years after the remodeling, in a classroom at the far end of the building. I never really learned the numbering scheme of the new school.

Loss and change and the reshaping of our perceptions is pretty much what life is about. At the end of this week, the weather of my being is taking out of my familiar landscape for a week. This morning I looked closely at the trees I contemplate every day. They’re unleafed now, in a spring that has been late in coming. Both they and I will be different when I return.

Meaning lies in meaning’s absence. The mist
Is always just about to lift.
– J. Allyn Rosser, b. 1952
American poet
from “Sugar Dada”

According to Wikipedia, that handy online source for quick and simple explanations, the villanelle is “a nineteen-line poetic form consisting of five tercets followed by a quatrain. There are two refrains and two repeating rhymes, with the first and third line of the first tercet repeated alternately until the last stanza, which includes both repeated lines. The villanelle is an example of a fixed verse form.” Had I ever developed as a poet beyond the “modern sonnet” stage — 14 lines (or so) of iambic pentameter (or not), in any rhyme scheme you like, or none — it would have become my holy quest to write one. As a reader, I find the form endlessly satisfying to study.

I first knew of the form when I was a sophomore in college. My very influential teacher, Leon Feldman, a poet himself, had become annoyed when no one in his freshman composition class could tell him what a villanelle was, despite a mention of it, and an example of one, in the day’s assignment. He ordered the students to write one. I was not a member of that class, but I heard many of my friends complaining about the endeavor. So I looked it up. The results of my friends’ efforts were rudimentary, flawed, in some cases comical and in others actually passably good. I wonder, however, how many of them, these 47 years later, still remember and appreciate the form.

“Sugar Dada,” a villanelle by J(ill) Allyn Rosser, appears in the February 2001 issue of Poetry. I have no idea why I stuck a flag at that page. The allusion to Dadaism, the movement in art and writing that deals in incongruities and absurdities, might have attracted me. (One of my favorite classroom jokes: Q: How many Dada artists does it take to screw in a light bulb? A: Mayonnaise. Students look perplexed, say they don’t get it. I say they have just demonstrated that they do.) It’s a poem about the difficulty of finding meaning in life, about the persistence of the futility of existence. Just what I’d be drawn to in a season when I sighed over those things, and wrote only two posts here in two months.

I was very productive yesterday. Not so much today. I didn’t leave the house, although I did wash my face and change my clothes this morning rather than loll about all day in my nightgown. When I changed again a little while ago to take a shower, I discovered that I’d had my turtleneck on backwards all day. Not an inappropriate note on a day that began with a reading of a Dada-esque poem!

he’d come to depend on his burden,
wasn’t sure who he was without it. . .
– Stephen Dunn, b. 1939
American poet

I’ve stolen the title — or nontitle — of this post from a fellow journaller, Jan, whose blog “Catchy Title Needed” is still up at Blogger, but has no content available. So I guess that makes her a former journaller.

I posted no new content in March. I’m rebooting again, taking up where I left off, trying to surface out of the mental murk that Lent and the end of winter became. “If you want to test your memory, try to recall what you were worrying about one year ago today,” advised a writing site I follow on March 17. Of course, I had to go to my basket of journals and pluck out J35 (I’m in J39 now) to see. No one should be surprised to learn that I was worrying about the same things, had the same concerns, the same goals, the same glaring failures and tiny successes noted.

I endured/observed Holy Week by attending three funerals, rising up yesterday morning to contemplate the Paschal mysteries with bobolink for chorister, and orchard for a dome. It was during that time of solitary contemplation that I devised a project for National Poetry Month that will apply to at least one of my Six Goals of a Quality Life, the one about decluttering.

At left you see the stack of Poetry magazines that have rested on a shelf since the Great Poetry Roundup of 2007. That post shows them in their place among my poetry holdings. Those shelves have stayed relatively stable for more than five years not only because I have successfully practiced the “get current and stay current” model of organization, but also because I haven’t bought a lot of new poetry in recent times.

I bought Poetry regularly between February of 1995 (when I was still in the classroom) and October of 2002, when I gave up for good the idea that I would ever develop as a poet and turned exclusively to fiction writing. I have 26 issues. During the Great Poetry Roundup, I endeavored not only to shelve the books in alphabetical order, but also to replace the torn strips of paper or the handy items that I habitually used to mark places I wanted to return to with neat Post-It flags. Fourteen of the Poetry issues have those.

Thus, the project for this year’s National Poetry Month: Read one poem a day from these periodicals, first the flagged poems and then anything else, post a quotation to Facebook and Twitter for #todayspoem, and write some kind of post for Markings, even if it’s only the poem and a brief observation. And at the end of all, decide if I want to keep this stack of material as it is, or extract the content that interests me, or just discard the whole thing.

This morning, after I took the picture, I picked up the issue on top, October-November 2002, celebrating the 90th anniversary of the magazine. One flag was in it, and I couldn’t determine at first which poem it marked: the one on the left, Rita Dove’s “I Have Been a Stranger in a Strange Land,” about Eve, bored with “all the aimless Being There” of her perfect life in paradise, or the other one, Stephen Dunn’s “Sisyphus and the Sudden Lightness.”

Very likely it was the Rita Dove poem. It begins with an epigraph from Emily Dickinson, and imagines Eve owning her own transgression instead of blaming it on a snake, shows her reaching for the unknown, taking a risk, relishing the moment before everything changes.

But today it was Stephen Dunn who spoke most eloquently to me. “Sisyphus and the Sudden Lightness” is one of a cycle of poems about Sisyphus, the errant King of Corinth punished for his deceitfulness by having to roll a stone up a hill, only to have it plunge down again, forcing him to start all over again. In Dunn’s vision, Sisyphus is reimagined as a modern suburban striver, one is resigned to living with the futility of existence.

Longtime readers know that I periodically move through periods of clinical depression, usually endogenous in origin but sometimes exacerbated by situational factors. (That is, I tend toward depression, especially during the dark months, even though there is much to be joyful about in my life, but any week with three funerals will put a damper on things.) Twice in the last two months I have utterly quit all this scribble scribble, only to take up the pen again or open the file, note the last changes, and begin once more.

I accept my burdens, because I don’t know who I am without them.

According to the wonderful Robin Black, this is Work-in-Progress Day, an idea making the rounds of my writer friends’ Facebook status notes. It originated, Robin said, with the wonderful Beth Kephart, and was conveyed to her by the also wonderful Elizabeth Mosier. I will have to take Robin’s word that those authors are wonderful, because I never heard of them until today. And that’s what’s wonderful about Facebook — that my connections with the generous writers who have friended me, some I’ve been in workshop or class with, but some on the basis of nothing more than a fan letter, have introduced me, link by link by link, to other writers whose published works and works-in-progress and musings on craft are teaching me, page by page, to become wonderful myself.

And I think the desire to write this post, coupled with a deadline a scant ten days hence and the fact that most of tomorrow will be given over to an event that will keep me from the keyboard, kept me at it today.

My work-in-progress is part of a work-in-progress. I am writing a novel I started on October 3, 2011, when a character began speaking to me after I read a nonfiction essay about a widow’s struggle with eating after her husband died. It involves two priests, a 15-years-ordained 42-year-old having some struggles with doubts, the 83-year-old pastor emeritus with whom he lives, and a young woman, the hungry widow, who changes their lives. I have devoted the last several months to developing the character of the old priest. Here’s the first paragraph. It begins in medias res on the morning that the young widow has a car accident at the bottom of the driveway and comes into the rectory for assistance.

When Father Henry started down the stairs that morning, he found himself having to apply special concentration. Down was harder than up, especially when he hadn’t put on his shoes, only the worn plaid slippers that sometimes slipped off his toes. He held the bannister and led with his left leg, and then brought his right foot down beside it. He had taken to counting the steps as he climbed or descended. He didn’t know why. He was on Step Number 7 when he heard the voices. He glanced down at himself to be sure he was fully dressed.

Do visit the writers I’ve linked to above, to see their works-in-progress.

Today represents a confluence of three important events in my life: it’s the fourteenth anniversary of the start of my online journal (you can read the first post here); it’s the 102nd anniversary of my mother’s birth (you can read the eulogy I gave for her here); and it’s Ash Wednesday, which comes around every year, although not always on the same date (people are saying it’s so early this year, but it can be earlier).

I’m going out tonight, so I attended the noon service at my Lutheran church. It’s a quiet hour, with unaccompanied piano music, the imposition of the ashes, a short sermon, and Holy Communion. Pastor Cathy preached about renewal, about decluttering, both physically and spiritually. She plans to declutter her whole house in these next six weeks. I’ve decided to devote some of my energies to corralling, sorting, cataloging, and shelving (or giving away) every single book in my house. I suspect this will be a project not unlike draining a swamp, and we know what happens when you start draining the swamp.

After the service I went in search of something to eat. Because I was thinking about my mother today, I found myself headed uptown, to the Polyclinic Hospital.

My mother left the workforce when I was born, despite the fact that her mother lived with us, because that is what women did in those days. For the next eleven years they spent their days together, doing household chores in a relationship that I remember as fairly conflicted. When my grandmother died in 1958, my mother found herself at loose ends and sinking farther into the depression that always dogged her, and she sought to return to work. Or at least that’s how I see it now.

She went to work in the admissions office of the Polyclinic, a facility only a few blocks from where we lived. As I recall, she wore a white uniform and white shoes, and the only thing that distinguished her and the others in the admissions office from nurses was the absence of a cap. She also wore white nylon stockings because, according to the head of the admissions office (a friend of my mother’s who had helped her get the job), “otherwise you look like a waitress.”

My mother’s return to the workforce demanded some changes in our lives. My sister and I had always come home for lunch, but now we ate at school. Evening meal preparation became a challenge. My father began taking us up to the hospital around 4:30 or so. We’d meet my mother, and the four of us would eat in the hospital cafeteria. I loved this aspect of our lives. It was a change from the endliess cycle of meat pies (made with roast beef left over from Sunday), baked chicken, chicken pot pie, and fish sticks or macaroni and cheese on Fridays. At the cafeteria, each of us could have just what we wanted, and everything came in an individual dish.

Eventually, there came the day my mother arrived home alone, an hour or so before she would have normally been home. As I recall, I was sitting in front of the television, watching Bandstand rather than practicing my violin or doing my homework. My mother had walked the four blocks home, and she looked distracted and disheveled.

I would piece the story together over time, and here’s what I think happened: It was Ash Wednesday, and my mother had attended Mass in the morning, received the ashes, and then gone to work. The hospital administrator, known to be something of a martinet, and probably the source of the idea that flesh-toned nylons made you look like a waitress, had observed my mother’s ashes and perhaps said something sharp to her about it, something that conveyed a disdain for the religious culture that stood behind the practice. Maybe she said something in reply, something that undoubtedly (knowing my mother) fell far short of insubordination but that was nevertheless perceived by him to be untoward. And he fired her.

That was more than fifty years ago. The building where all of this took place, where the admissions office was and where we ate dinner in the basement cafeteria, still stands but is now a complex of state offices and a job training center operated by the local community college. The hospital uses more modern buildings across an alley to the south. I know the area well. I walk in the neighborhood often, and I can see the buildings from my studio across the water. I can see the windows of the solarium on the floor where my mother died.

So I walked into the present facility, ashes still visible on my forehead. Outside the cafeteria was a sign announcing the Ash Wednesday service which had just concluded in the meditation room down the hall, and times and locations where those who were unable to attend the service could receive ashes. I went into the cafeteria, nearly empty, and had a prepackaged chef salad and a bottle of water. (I don’t abstain from meat as an intentional practice, but I have decided to refrain from consuming flavored water, such as the wonderful Sobe Lifewater in Fuji Apple Pear that has replaced Diet Dr. Brown Cream Soda as my refreshment of choice.)

Afterward I went to yet another spot that holds memories of my mother and food — Zimmerman’s in Penbrook. It’s across the street from the building that was the junior high my father taught in from about 1949 until 1952. We lived a few blocks away then, and I remember walking there beside my mother as she pushed my sister in the stroller.

Zimmerman’s sells peanut butter that they make on the premises from peanuts that they roast themselves, coffee, and hand-made chocolates, as well as many “retro” candies and candymaking supplies in bulk. I had a half-pound box made up for me — half vanilla butter creams and half cordial cherries with liquid centers. Those were my mother’s favorites.

I ate two butter creams and two cordial cherries, in something of a ceremony, at my kitchen table, and then I washed the ashes off my forehead, and then prepared to go out.

Tomorrow is Ash Wednesday, the start of Lent, the traditional season of penance and spiritual housecleaning that leads to Easter. Where I come from, central Pennsylvania, today is “Fat Tuesday,” and, in keeping with local foodways, it is marked chiefly by the making and consuming of fastnachts, yeast cakes in a donut shape that are traditionally fried in lard, although they are probably all done in vegetable oil now. The idea was to use up animal fat that one might have on hand, since the consumption of meat and meat products was so restricted for the ensuing forty days.

I grew up in the 1950s, before the reforms of Vatican II addressed many outdated practices, including the fairly complicated dietary restrictions mandated for the faithful for Lent. According to some site I stumbled upon from a Google search on “Lenten dietary rules 1950s,”

Everyone over the age of seven was to observe the Roman Catholic Lent with
complete abstinence on all Fridays, Ash Wednesday, and Holy Saturday Morning.
During these times, meat and soup, or gravy made from meat, could not be used.
During days of partial abstinence, which included the Saturdays in Lent (except
the last one), meat and soup, or gravy made from soup, could be taken only once
a day during the main meal. For those over twenty-one and under fifty-nine, only
one full meal per day was allowed during the weekdays of Lent. Other meatless
meals were allowed only to maintain strength, but could not equal another full
meal. Eating between meals was not permitted, except for liquids, but those
people whose health or ability to work were seriously affected by fasting could
be excused from the regimen. Acts of charity and of self-denial (such as
abstaining from alcoholic drinks and amusements) and daily attendance at mass
were encouraged.

That’s about how I remember it. By the time I was 21, not only had the rules changed, I wasn’t paying much attention to them anyway. When I look at the rules now, in light of modern ideas of good nutrition and the demands of differing metabolisms, I wonder what a “partial meal” is. And what sacrifice did vegatarians make? I recall an excercize from the Baltimore Catechism that we used in fourth or fifth grade. It asked what might constitute adherence to the “partial meal” provision for a secretary who “sits at a desk and types documents all day” and a construction worker. Would the requirements be the same? The “types documents all day” line is the one that has stayed with me. (Hint: the secretary got less to eat.)

I don’t eat fastnachts, not becuase they’re high in fat or sugar (I could plan for them in my Weight Watchers protocol) nor becuase I don’t like them (oh I do, I do!), but because food like that gives me a carbohydrate hangover (postprandial hyperinsulinemia is the very fancy name for the effect). But today did call for something special. And so I went in search of a traditional seven-segment Tootsie Roll.

There is an eating scene or a reference to food in nearly every piece of fiction I write, and in much of my nonfiction as well. In an unfinished personal essay called (currently) “Three Scenes from a Life with Food,” I write:

It is 1957. I have just turned ten, my sister is going on seven, and we are in the kitchen after school on a late winter day. My fingers grasp the cold chrome edge of our kitchen table and I fix my eyes on the gray Formica patterned with yellow and white boomerangs. The boomerangs are gray and white on the yellow plastic that covers the chairs. My sister is kneeling on one of the chairs, and I can hear the bare skin of her knees peel off the seat as she shifts to get a closer look.

My mother has unwrapped a Tootsie Roll and laid it on a plate. The cylinder of chocolate taffy, glossy in the sunlight, is molded into seven segments, each still attached to the next but designed to break off easily in a single bite. She takes a paring knife and positions it at the center of the middle segment of the Tootsie Roll. She saws carefully, three, maybe four times, until the knife splits the soft candy and hits the plate with a clink.

I raise myself on my toes and look down on the top of the now-split segment. My sister shifts again on the chair and bends so that she is at eye level with the Tootsie Roll. We are  watching to make sure that the division is absolutely even, so that each of us has exactly the same portion of Tootsie Roll.

Ordinarily, the disposition of that seventh segment of Tootsie Roll is not a problem. My mother simply breaks off three segments for me, three segments for Rosie, and eats the odd one herself. But this is Lent, and my mother is forbidden by the rules of the Catholic church  regarding fasting and abstinence during this penitential season from eating between meals. My grandmother, who is beyond the age of persons to whom the rules apply, is, according to this complicated family protocol, the alternative Lenten receiver of the seventh segment, but she is visiting a cousin in Florida. Thus my mother is left to devise a method by which she can avoid favoritism in candy distribution and also stay in the state of grace regarding her own obedience to the will of God as her church hierarchy has interpreted it.

It has probably not occurred to her to offer a more easily-divided snack. She cannot even imagine allowing each girl her own complete Tootsie Roll.

When I read an early version of this piece at a writers’ conference, I displayed a Tootsie Roll on a plate with a serrated knife stuck in the center segment, and I passed out midget-sized TRs to the audience. I’m not sure they went well with the Beaujolais the organizers of the reading had provided.

I couldn’t find a traditional, full-size Tootsie Roll today, only a bag of the midgets. Like the shapers of the Lenten dietary guidelines, the candy industry has addressed the changing ways people consume food now. So I had a “serving” of Tootsie Rolls, as defined on the package, and I thought of my mother and her sincere efforts to comply with a set of regulations that now seem arbitrary and not very useful for promoting spiritual wholeness.

And I wish my sister could have been with me, so we could cut that seventh segment together.

I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart: I am, I am, I am.
— Sylvia Plath, October 27, 1932 – February 11, 1963
American poet
from The Bell Jar, published one month before its author’s death

The fourteenth anniversary of the start of this journal comes in two days. I began that inaugural post with a quotation from Sylvia Plath, about keeping and holding the rapture of being alive. “And of course we all know what happened to Sylvia,” I commented, unaware that we had just passed the anniversary of her death.

Sylvia Plath died fifty years ago today, not well-known among general audiences and certainly not a subject of study in a tenth-grade classroom such as the one I occupied that winter. That was the year that Sr. Mary Kilian was in charge of my literary education. We read The Merchant of Venice, probably some E. E. Cummings, since he had died at the beginning of the school year, and Maureen Daly’s short story “Sixteen,” which had won a Scholastic Writing Award in 1938.

I wrote my first short story that year, a sad tale about a girl who is not chosen for membership in a secret sorority in her school. The sorority was drawn on a similar group that some of my classmates organized when we were in ninth grade, and that I knew about only because I was sitting near two girls who were admiring the new bracelets the members had made for themselves. It had a panoramic opening that described the school’s singular architecture, its Twin Towers, and employed the pathetic fallacy — the towers “yawned and shook their foggy heads” when the morning sun (‘rosy-fingered dawn,” a phrase I stole from Homer but quickly eliminated, on the advice of Sr. Kilian) reached them, just as the main character arrived in her father’s car the day the sorority selections would be announced. Sr. Kilian signed off on the story as an entry in the 1963 Scholastic Awards. It did not win.

In “Baking with Sylvia,” Kate Moses, who wrote a novel about the poet, notes that for Sylvia Plath,”cooking and baking and reading cookbooks was therapeutic and consoling, a means to reconnect to the life of the body for someone who spent so much time engaged with the vivid anxieties of the life of the mind.” She kept a more detailed and accurate diary of her baking plans than she did of what she wrote.

There is an eating scene or a reference to food in nearly every piece of fiction I write. Last week it was a memory of Lorna Doone cookies that my character remembers enjoying before his piano lessons, some seventy years before. I was myself remembering being offered cookies out of a package (“Sorry they’re not on a cut glass plate”) by my violin teacher’s sister, fifty years ago.

I prepared a pan of coconut-crusted tilapia this morning before I came to the keyboard, and we enjoyed that for dinner tonight. I got a stick of unsalted butter out to soften, thinking to make some simple spice crackle drop cookies. But I came to the keyboard again, set up a scene where my character mashes hard-boiled eggs for a salad while he tells the young woman who cooks for him about his daffodils, and then wrote this piece.

I’m writing again, blogging again. Baking again will have to wait until tomorrow.

Thank you for reading, so much, so often.