One Wonderful Day

There are many kinds of days that can be called wonderful. Here is the kind of wonderful day I had today.

It started off with my finding out, yesterday evening, that the one obligation I had in the middle of the day was cancelled. This was to have been a lovely fun time mentoring an aspiring children's book writer, so a day with that in it would also have been a wonderful day. But sometimes I have found myself thinking that there is nothing in my life that is so much fun that it wouldn't be even more fun to have it cancelled.

So I had a whole entire day to be at home and work, puttering at my desk. I kept my nightgown on until 4:00. During the morning as I worked I ate a Pepperidge Farm apple turnover, hot from the oven, and a glass of milk. During the afternoon as I worked I ate little bowls of the lentil soup I had simmering in the Crockpot, one bowl every couple of hours.

I got so much acomplished! I finished writing the talk I'm going to give next week at a feminist philosophy conference at the University of Washington in Seattle: a talk on what exactly is wrong about parents' favoring one child over another, for a panel on ethical issues in everyday mothering. I even sort of liked the paper when I finished writing it. It had some beautiful little bits in it about the difference between two kinds of love: being loved-for-reasons and being loved-without-reasons. I wrote not one, not two, but THREE recommendation letters for graduate students going out on the job market. I sent off two poems to a campus literary magazine. I sent off a blurb for a talk I'm giving at the Undergraduate Ethics Symposium at DePauw University in Indiana next April, called "Divine Love and Moral Arbitrariness." It's about love, too, God's love this time. I even got into my bed for a while in the afternoon and didn't EXACTLY take a nap but thought about how good it felt to be in a warm bed in a chilly room - and to be there at three in the afternoon.

Parental love, divine love, an apple turnover, lentil soup, and a quasi-nap. What is not to like about such a day?