A Quiet Life
by Baron Wormser

What a person desires in life
    is a properly boiled egg.
This isn’t as easy as it seems.
There must be gas and a stove,
    the gas requires pipelines, mastodon drills,
    banks that dispense the lozenge of capital.
There must be a pot, the product of mines
    and furnaces and factories,
    of dim early mornings and night-owl shifts,
    of women in kerchiefs and men with
    sweat-soaked hair.
Then water, the stuff of clouds and skies
    and God knows what causes it to happen.
There seems always too much or too little
    of it and more pipelines, meters, pumping
    stations, towers, tanks.
And salt-a miracle of the first order,
    the ace in any argument for God.
Only God could have imagined from
    nothingness the pang of salt.
Political peace too. It should be quiet
    when one eats an egg. No political hoodlums
    knocking down doors, no lieutenants who are
    ticked off at their scheming girlfriends and
    take it out on you, no dictators
    posing as tribunes.
It should be quiet, so quiet you can hear
    the chicken, a creature usually mocked as a type
    of fool, a cluck chained to the chore of her body.
Listen, she is there, pecking at a bit of grain
    that came from nowhere.


Baron Wormser, “A Quiet Life” from Scattered Chapters. © 1997 by Baron Wormser. Used by permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Sarabande Books, Inc., www.sarabandebooks.org (buy now)

It's the birthday of Betty Friedan (books by this author), born in Peoria, Illinois (1921). She's the author of The Feminine Mystique (1963), a book that The New York Times described as being "one of the most influential nonfiction books of the 20th century." Friedan wrote about what she called "the problem that has no name," found particularly among educated suburban women in the years after the end of World War II, women who were leading ostensibly idyllic domestic lives as busy housewives and mothers and yet who felt inexplicably unfulfilled, unhappy, and restless.

She wrote:

"The problem lay buried, unspoken, for many years in the minds of American women. It was a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning that women suffered in the middle of the twentieth century in the United States. Each suburban wife struggled with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night — she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question — 'Is this all?'"

 Friedan once led tens of thousands of women — and quite a few men — down New York's Fifth Avenue and over to the New York Public Library in a strike for women's equality. She held signs that said things like "Don't Cook Dinner — Starve a Rat Tonight!" and "Don't Iron While the Strike Is Hot."

She went on to write several more books, including a memoir, Life So Far (2000). She died on this day in 2006, her 85th birthday.

It's the birthday of the poet Gavin Ewart (books by this author), born in London, England (1916). He's the author of many books of poetry, including Pleasures of the Flesh (1966) and The Learned Hippopotamus (1987). He started his poetic career early, when he was just 17 years old, with a poem in the prestigious British literary journal New Verse. He published his first book of poems when he was 23, and his work was compared to T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. But when World War II broke out, he stopped writing poetry, and he became an advertising copywriter and didn't publish another book until 1964, when his collection Londoners came out. His poetry is often described as light verse:

"For nursery days are gone, nightmare is
real and there are no good Fairies.
The fox's teeth are in the bunny
and nothing can remove them, honey."

 It's the birthday of novelist and short-story writer Robert Coover (books by this author), born in Charles City, Iowa (1932). His first novel, The Origin of the Brunists (1966), is about the lone survivor of a mining accident who goes on to start a religious cult. He said he writes "Because art blows life into the lifeless, death into the deathless."

He went on to write many experimental novels, including The Universal Baseball Association, Inc. (1968), The Public Burning (1977), and A Child Again (2005). His most recent works were released in 2018, the novella The Cat in the Hat for President (2018) and Going for a Beer: Selected Short Fictions (2018).

It's the birthday of MacKinlay Kantor (books by this author), born in Webster City, Iowa (1904), who decided that he wanted to be a writer when he was 17 years old, and for the next four years, he helped his mother edit the local newspaper. He went on to write the Civil War novels The Jaybird (1932) and Long Remember (1934), and he spent 25 years researching Andersonville (1955), about the Confederate prison camp where almost 50,000 Union soldiers were held. It won the Pulitzer Prize in 1956.

It's the birthday of writer Stewart O'Nan (books by this author), born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (1961). He worked for years as an aerospace engineer, and when he came home from his work every day he would go down to his basement and write. In 1994, he published his first novel, Snow Angels, about a murder in a small town in western Pennsylvania. He often writes about characters who feel trapped by their circumstances and end up doing horrible things.

He said, "My own life isn't terribly interesting, even to myself, and that ... [is] why I write about people and places so different from the ones I know."

Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.^®

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