Here’s what
I did yesterday. I walked across 110th Street aka Central Park North to a book
reading by a friend, Robert Roth. Alas, I was too late for Robert’s reading
from his latest, Book of Pieces,
containing poems, stories, essays. But another writer, Frank Murphy, was
reading from A Great Disorder
when I arrived, and his poems were quite amusing. “The Good Man Is Shaped Like
a Banana Peel” suggests all the bad things that could happen as a result of one
good deed. “Crossing Over” is about Manhattanites’ reluctance to go to
Brooklyn. And “The Art of Losing It” relates many meanings of “lost”: the
ways we can lose things or people or be lost or lose a train of thought. (You
can find both books through Google Books.)
Next I
walked back across 110th Street to a Cookies and Postcards party. Our
hostess made cookies and provided a list of addresses of Cabinet secretaries,
legislators, and the president and his staff, as well as ideas for who to write
to about whatever issue was most important to us. I wrote to the president;
Scott Pruitt at the EPA; a thank you to Senator Kirsten Gillibrand and also a
thank you to James Mattis, secretary of defense, because he thinks climate
change is real and is a national security issue, and maybe he can persuade
Scott Pruitt of that fact. The only people I knew were the hostess and her
mother, but I met a couple of people I may get to know better. It was
energizing to feel that I was doing something positive. I know the people the
postcards are addressed to will never read them, but someone on their staffs
will, and perhaps it will make some of them think differently.
And I may
organize such a party myself soon.
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