Me Time for Slackers

My friends all have hobbies.

My friends report weekly on how they ‘ve added daily yoga to their daily 5K … or finally finished making quilts out of all their children’s baby clothes … or started a serial garden of English perennials. My little sis makes her OWN YOGURT, which I thought of as akin to making your own bras, until I met a woman who makes her own shoes. Sourdough bread baked from your own starter is a big attraction. (I knew two guys who would take their sourdough starter with them on vacation, even though it “upset” the starter …)

This is all very upsetting to me.

I have strived to wean myself off the home arts.

I used to have hobbies.

I used to have a kitchen garden. I grew onions and eggplant, gleaming heavy-headed tomatoes, cucumbers and yards of herbs. I made pasta sauce, which I did only because I thought this other novelist, once my rival, did this better than I did … I used to make jam because I liked the jewel-y way the sun shined through the glass.

When I read such books as actor/chef Stanley Tucci’s upcoming newest memoir My Life Through Food (Gallery Books, October 2021) I admit, I’m tempted to go back to all that messy and fragrant jazz.

But Tiptree and Hoboken Farms do it better than I, though, so, at least for now, I have divested myself of the last thing I did that isn’t reading, writing or watching re-runs of “The Sopranos.”

Now, theoretically, this will make me a deeper, more intense writer, a more ardent and wide-ranging reader, a more devout mother, sister, wife and friend. My life of the mind will sharpen I’ll be an avocational thinker as well as a vocational one.

Nah.

I think I’ll just add re-runs of ‘Criminal Minds.”

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