The Eleanor Roosevelt Papers, Digital Edition > My Day
My Day by Eleanor Roosevelt

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HYDE PARK, Wednesday—I am afraid you are going to grow very weary of the recital of an uneventful life, so I will encourage you by telling you that the days this summer will not be as entirely uneventful as they seem to be just now.

I wonder how may of my readers like to play with archery? I am perhaps the world's stupidest person at sports of all kinds, but this game fascinates me. If you obey the rules, you finally seem to get somewhere, for I actually ended this morning's game with all my arrows on the target. I stopped then and there, for I knew that wouldn't happen again in a long time and I wanted to spend a few hours with a contented feeling.

The "Connecticut Nutmeg" is growing in size and it also has more advertisements. They are not very much use to me and, on page seven, the list of events taking place in Connecticut is also somewhat local in character. But how I enjoyed Mr. Quentin Reynolds on fishing! I didn't know anyone felt as I did, that this was a "dull and silly" pastime. I gave it up long ago but I never dared say how I felt about it, for I always had to acknowledge that I never caught any fish and therefore the failure was on my part and not on the part of the sport. But to have someone who caught fish still feel the same way, is a great consolation.

Of course, perhaps the most amusing thing about the paper is the fact that the headings so rarely fit what is written beneath them. That is as it should be, for frequently we never read the stories, which men and women have labored over for hours, just because we think the heading tells all about it. In any case, I am spending too much time over this new reading material which comes to me weekly. Yet it certainly is fun and stimulating.

One luxury in being lazy is that I feel I have a right to read late at night if I want to. The only drawback to that proceeding is that, in spite of all the screens all around my porch, strange little insects do get in and they bite much harder than their size would indicate. Even that doesn't prevent my luxuriating in reading in bed and last night I finished a book called "Of Lena Geyer" by Marcia Davenport.

It was published in 1937, so I am rather behind the times. Many people reading it will find some of it anything but expressive of their highest ideals, but I closed the book with a feeling that I had met a big person. Not just a wonderful singer whose voice had thrilled the people of many countries, but a person with the courage to be herself, with complete devotion to her work when she recognized that it was paramount. The ordinary people of the world could not judge her by their ordinary standards. She was narrow perhaps in her interests and she had a limited circle of intimate friends, but she was great in her feeling, great in her devotion to art, and how I wish I might have known her!

The book is written with humor as well as with insight and tenderness. Marcia Davenport has given me some very interesting hours.

E.R.

(Copyright, 1938, by United Feature Syndicate, Inc.)


Names and Terms Mentioned or Referenced

Geographic
  • Hyde Park (Dutchess County, N.Y., United States) [ index ]


About this document

My Day by Eleanor Roosevelt, July 7, 1938

Roosevelt, Eleanor, 1884-1962
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Digital edition created by The Eleanor Roosevelt Papers Project The George Washington University 312 Academic Building 2100 Foxhall Road, NW Washington, DC 20007

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Digital edition published 2008, 2017 by
The Eleanor Roosevelt Papers Project

Available under licence from the Estate of Anna Eleanor Roosevelt.

Published with permission from the Estate of Anna Eleanor Roosevelt.

MEP edition publlished on June 30, 2008.

TEI-P5 edition published on April 28, 2017.

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Transcription created from a photocopy of a UFS wire copy of a My Day column instance archived at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library.
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