I don't work in July. Actually I haven't worked in about 8 months, but typically it's just the month of July that has a beginning, middle and end free of scheduled time. I try to do a July project: a few years ago, I resolved to make a pizza every day in July. I got a pizza stone, and a wooden flip, and several blobs of frozen dough from the Italian market around the corner. I actually made only one pizza that July, but I did think about pizza most of the days in July. Mostly about how I was not making one and should. It's possible that I did make a couple more, but they weren't at my house, so they didn't really count for my project.
Last July my project was just to enjoy my last month of staying at home with my son before getting back to work.
This July, I'm going to blog about my new life in California.
To help focus my new July project, I've made this tentative schedule:
Tuesday: Something that Makes Me Happy
Wednesday: Teaching
Thursday: My Kid
Friday: The Natural World
Saturday: Wildcard
Sunday: Gratitude, Certainty, and Questions
TUESDAY HAPPY THING
One thing that makes me happy is getting The New Yorker. I'm so glad it's a weekly. I often skim the letters and see that people are exercised about this or that article in a previous issue that I didn't read. However, I do almost always read the poems. Thankfully there are just two. I try to read them aloud to my son, who is 20 months old.
The June 3rd issue has a great poem by Anna McDonald called "Almost February."
http://www.newyorker.com/fiction/poetry/2013/06/03/130603po_poem_mcdonald
This is a wonderful poem to read aloud, even to a toddler. A toddler is a great audience for a poem, he can recognize and enjoy the rhythm and meter and the pleasing tumble of language. Toddlers just by existing give us many opportunities to read poetry aloud. It doesn't have to be children's poetry.
One of the reasons I love this poem is because she mentions Mongolia on the second line. I have this spirit-place interest in Mongolia, and have since I was a child. My mother encouraged me to enter an essay contest in World magazine about what it would be like to live in a yurt, for a chance to win a visit to Mongolia. I loved the idea of visiting a yurt and being in a place where people relied so much on horses. I was in first grade. I didn't write the essay, and have regretted it for 35 years. I remember vividly the mailbox and the way it felt to get my World magazine from it. The mail lady drove her personal car and leaned way over from the driver's seat to deliver the mail. At that time and place you could put a letter and a few coins into the mailbox, and the mail lady would apply the stamp for you.
I like this poem also because it has long lines like sentences, and it isn't about lost and yearning love, and it has some funny parts. How a baby makes things different, even if you don't like the baby's parents. In the poem there are coffees saved in the refrigerator, which I do sometimes. The internet also figures into the poem, which makes it timely and accessible, even if you've never been to Mongolia, or Timbuktu, or have never been interested in going to those places.
She also mentions strangers, though in a more generous way than I've been feeling about them lately. I'm surrounded by strangers here in California, though I often mistakenly think I recognize someone at the grocery or in traffic or walking around the loop of my neighborhood. I've been trying very hard to make friends out of strangers, and it comes slowly most of the time. Mistakes can be made.
The last line of the poem is "Nobody recognized me as the Buddha." It's hard to recognize this in most people. One of the things I love about my son's birth is that he came at 5:20 am. Buddha, too, achieved enlightenment at 5:00 in the morning, in a deer park. I learned this in Miyajima in Japan. Deer are there, everywhere, eating cookies you can buy especially to feed them, and eating the corners of your maps if you aren't paying attention. I've experienced it.
