Lunch in Faraway China; Bedtime in My Childhood Home

It’s been my lifelong struggle to pay attention to one thing at a time. And now that I’m seventy, I’ve given up. So without guilt, I read five or six books at once—a lunch book, a bubble-bath book, a nightstand book, an audio book, a serious book, and a book on my phone.

Why?

Partly because I like variety. I eat lunch in China with Pearl S. Buck and go to bed in my childhood home of Grantsville, Maryland, reading my aunt’s history of the Casselman Inn. Waiting in a doctor’s office, I pull out my phone to read McCaulley’s The New Testament in Color. Later in my recliner, I push back to explore Weinstein’s premise in Grammar for a Full Life— that  the way we shape sentences can limit or enlarge us.

I’ve got these riches scattered around my house, riches that bring people to me from across time, geography, disciplines, and culture.

In my bubble bath, I read perhaps the plainest sentence I’ve encountered since sounding out words in the Dick and Jane books. (Not counting, of course, the hundreds of middle school essays that crossed my desk.)

A page later, I turn back to read it once more. All day I think about that plain sentence. And in my next bubble bath, I turn back to read it again: Miss Brown got up, tidied her hair, and sat down to darning.

There she is—a refugee of the London Blitz with no home, no family, no income, and among strangers—darning. To be sure, she does more than darn. She cares for two evacuated children and a Jewish refugee.

But her darning! This is what grabs me. It’s an act of resistance, a refusal to give in to chaos, an insistence on maintaining decency and mending what’s torn.

Like O-lan in Buck’s The Good Earth. Forced to flee south during a famine, she meticulously mends rags by night even while she’s reduced to begging by day.

It’s like they’re talking together—O-lan and Miss Brown. And I’m listening in, learning how to keep a balance in this uncivil winter of 2026.