I have been looking into schedules. Even when we read physics, we inquire of each least particle, What then shall I do this morning? How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time.
~Annie Dillard, The Writing Life
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On the first of each month,
a guest writer
shares
how they spend the day.
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May 1, 2025: Esther Cohen
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In early 2023, Esther Cohen and I met on Facebook, and then on the last day of November, we met in person for a packed (thanks to Esther) 50-state bookstore event at Shakespeare & Co. in New York City. We had so much fun!
When Esther was young, her family went on vacation every year to Grossinger’s Resort in the Catskills. As soon as Esther would arrive, she’d visit the PR man who booked the talent so she could request an interview with anyone famous. (Esther was the editor of her school newspaper.) In seventh grade, by the resort pool, Esther interviewed Jayne Mansfield and her husband Micky Hargity.
[Jayne Mansfield] was very kind to me, and I tried hard, the next few weeks, to describe what it felt like seeing her (oh my god) and her husband (ditto) and asking her about her life. That experience was the beginning of my trying to write everything down. Years later, I’m still trying.
The subtitle of Esther’s most recent book, All of Us, published by Saddle Road Press, is “Stories and Poems Along Route 17,” a major highway in upstate New York. The book opens with two poems, and then we have a story in which the narrator falls in love with Middlefield, a “peculiar town” of sixty people. “What life looks like always depends on where you’re standing,” Esther writes in the first paragraph. “Where you stand is what you see.” This one and a half page piece has a lovely structure and so much truth and humor. In the second paragraph, the narrator takes us back to her family dinner table, where at every meal she was assigned the same seat and given the same wipe-off placemat. An apple. In the third and final paragraph, we are back in Middlefield where the narrator buys a house.
We didn’t realize that the people you see are part of your view, that the people, all of them, are the real story of Middlefield, our town on County Route 17.
I underlined so much in this slim volume. In the piece called “Stories,” Esther writes, “These stories are our lives. They are what we know and how we say who we are.” In “On the Verge,” we have the story of Marguerite and her mother Katherine who happen upon an abandoned hotel that borders the river in Middlefield.
The rooms were small, but the floors were good and so were the walls and the roof. They could live in separate rooms if they liked. All the rooms had small refrigerators and stoves, a table and two chairs, and a surprising amount of sunlight. It took them a week to leave two lifetimes.
In the seven-page story called “Alexander Bloom,” we meet a woman called Annette who “married her husband Larry because he was funny. She doesn’t think he’s funny anymore.” The ending to this one was an unexpected pleasure, opening out just when I thought it would be contained.
Speaking of endings, in “For So Many Years I Wanted to Tell You This,” Esther writes, “I am a person who is always starting over. Every day. Trying to tell the very same story… beginnings are all I care about. Not all those inevitable endings.”
Every day Esther tries to get a little bit of life into words. She publishes some of those in her Substack Overheard. She has written five books, worked with labor unions, and for Bob Marley. She directed Bread and Roses, a national cultural program for workers. She cofounded The Clara Lemlich Awards for women activists in their 80s, 90’s, and 100’s. She has written about the power of preserving memories for Oldster and about a mysterious craigslist poetry contest for The New York Times. And over at On Being, you can find her poem/photograph series with Matthew Septimus, who took the cover photograph for All of Us.
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Come back on MAY 1st to read how ESTHER COHEN spends her days.
