February 11, 2013
Monday

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.