I'm just trying to read my book.

I don’t want to bake any sourdough bread. I don’t want to bake anything or learn a new recipe. What I’ve been cooking is fine. It fills me, leaves me as warm between the ribs as it ever did.

I don’t want to be mollycoddled by the anesthetic tones of the piano in the background of the sales pitch. Don’t tell me you’re “in the people business” when you’re just trying to move a Lexus. I don’t want any inspiration. I have sources I already turn to for that, but thanks anyway.

I don’t want to choreograph a tapdance in our kitchen and send the video into Action News for everyone to see. I get enough of a tapdance trying to get my work done, to push another magazine out the door, while pushing our son to stay on target and extract the last few juices from this virus-truncated school year.

I don’t want a new hobby. I am lucky enough to have built a pillow fort of books and records and DVDs, lucky enough to have a backyard to escape to when my restlessness threatens to break the four walls of Zoom.

Just let me read my book. Let me sink deeper page by page into another world with troubles that I blessedly do not have over my head, and hopes that unfortunately are not mine to share.

Let me read, and let me keep not producing any great American novels, anything worthy enough even to bow and scrape and approach the greatness of the prose that I devour. After all, why should some little plague break the habits started 30 years ago?