Diary
“What are you looking for, Mama?” Summer Diary, continued
A man’s voice interrupts my reverie with the inquiry, as I stand surveying the salad on offer at the local West Side Market. Proof that I’m back in
Cancer Gadfly: What’s God Got To Do With It?
I was mulling over Oliver Sacks’s mellow meditation on his terminal cancer diagnosis, when Jimmy Carter came out with his cancer story. (Curiously, both illnesses caused by melanoma.)
“Where are you trying to go?” London, Summer Diary, 2015, continued
I turn to see a tiny woman about my age, dressed like me, sporting large sunglasses and clunky sneakers. Since I am a short person to begin with,
FRIENDSHEEP: A Summer Romance
Sometimes you just have to give in, admitting, say, you’re just a dumb tourist and buy the tchotchkes on offer. This summer I traveled in Wales with my
For Patricia Yaeger
“I wanted to fill my elegy with light of all kinds. But death makes us stingy. There is nothing more to be expended on that, we think, he’s
A friend commits suicide
“We are all patchwork, and so shapeless and diverse in composition that each piece, each moment, plays its own game,” Montaigne writes. “And there is as much difference
Chemo Renoir
If only we lived in another century. Our rolls of fat would make us desirable and happy. You might think, as I did, that chemo would lead to
Cancer Gadfly: Walking Back and Working Around
One of the rare pleasures of old age is observing new words jump into circulation. Or appear to jump. We might just have been nodding. But thanks to
Welcome. Some musings on my current preoccupations with the worlds of illness and the worlds of books, the vicissitudes of living with cancer and the need now, in my eighties, to imagine what new writing might be.