June 27, 2003 Brookline
Horribly humid day. Air thick enough to make me cough after walking a few hundred yards down Beacon Street. Watched the Red Sox play the Mariners with Uncle G. The visiting team came out, played a very elegant first inning, bunting the first pitch, and scored one run. The Red Sox at bat went down into baseball history. They scored fourteen runs before the first out. The Mariners went through three pitchers, but the runs just kept coming home. The previous record was from 1948. We turned the game off, sat down to dinner. We turned it back on to strangely hushed voices. "He was hit in the head just below the ear." The Mariner pitcher the fifth (?) of the evening lay stretched out, unmoving, on the mound. He'd been hit by a line drive evidently and was carried from the field. Nobody made a sound while the medical people worked.

June 28, 2003 Brookline
Walked down to the Coolidge Corner branch library, which is right across from Sussman House, my grandparents' last apartment. Recognized it from the arrangement of the parking lot. Could still see my grandfather's old green Pinto deteriorating under the pine tree. I didn't go in but I can remember the smell of the corridors.

The last time I was there was after my grandfather's funeral. I can remember watching my grandmother cry on the sofa after the service. I haven't had the courage to ask my uncle who she was afterwards because it was he who bore the weight that began to crush down on her that afternoon. Hers was the last funeral I attended. Should visit their graves before I leave. G. will take the shears from the kitchen drawer to cut back the grass around their stone.

Watched Lola on tape, mostly to show my aunt and uncle something of Nantes.

June 29, 2003 Brookline
Worrying about what--health. Would we be any better off for recording every odd heart sound, internal twinge and stress? I will be old enough soon not to say to myself "Don't worry about it, you're far to young to worry about it." Truth is I've developed certain odd coronary sufferances. A palpitation, for example, a moment when my heart beats larger and larger and to no particular drumbeat. In such moments I lose the sense that the blood is doing its job, that oxygen is simply staying in the lungs, my heart laboring like the wheel stuck in the snow, spinning to no particular effect.

Should have had my lessons planned for tomorrow, but have let noon become one, watched the Red Sox, let two become four. Occupation with minutia.

June 30, 2003 Brookline
Must stop myself from over preparing for EFL tutorials. Two hours for a simple one-on-one is too much, brings my hourly down into hamburger land. Still, I leave after everyone has already left and I go home before the trains are mobbed. Next week I'll begin with younger students studying for the prépa exam. It will be somewhat of a relief to work with French kids again. Curious to know what their lives are like in the U.S.

Went to the French Cultural Center to drop off a few books, but did not otherwise stay. I have done absolutely nothing today worth the mention save earn a pitiful sum. Work browns everything out.

But then--a call from RD in New York. First time we've spoken for quite a while. He's writing the book he ought to be writing, one which is too long to explain, even though I know what it is about. I've never seen a writer so burdened with the weight of what he must tell. I'm humbled by his request, his offer, that I edit it. He told me to name my price, good God. That's his goodness speaking out from under all that weight. I'm afraid to read what he's written not from any worry over his ability to compose sentences. I'm afraid of the weight coming down on me as well.

We passed such hours at his apartment for a solid month before I left for France the second time. Have you ever watched a castaway swim after a ship? Have you ever seen someone fall down the face of a mountain? Two years and his vector seemed the same, over the phone at least. The mortuary still calls him now and then to inform him that further remains of his wife of eight years, killed in New York two years ago, have been identified.

July 1, 2003 Brookline
Diffuse lesson, under prepared. "Who," a young teacher evenly asked, "Who you would you nominate in Steinbeck's place?" after I had disqualified him as an interesting writer. "Sherwood Anderson's flatulence," I said, "Has a much more agreeable odor." I should have just said "They all suck--I hate them all."

Buttonholed by another mad teacher in the corridor, "Neal, got a sec? Can you wait?" So I stood there while she finished a conversation with a third teacher, who she was obviously delaying as well. She desperately wanted to know if I had seen her note this morning and recounted the substance of it anyway, even after I told her that I had.

Revenged myself by saying "It's a relief to have a book to take home" after she suggested a book of her own was better than the one I adopted for my student (the school doesn't let us check out books). Sour look on her face, but she couldn't refuse.

July 2, 2003 Brookline
Drilled my student on the pronunciation of the "-ed" ending. Much of his seeming inability to conjugate comes from an anxiety over pronunciation. He can write in the past tense just fine.

Met M.T. for supper at a Thai place in Brookline. Realize how I now brace myself for large changes in physical appearance in people my age who I haven't seen in a few years. But M.T. looks as he always did. Why am I thankful?

We had drinks after supper, during which I outlined some of the territory I wanted to claim in my B52 essay. As M.T. comes from Cheyenne, Wyoming he too had some of the thoughts I did while growing up under the Strategic Air Command. He said that he too had arguments with his school friends about whether the missile fields in their hometown were fourth or fifth on the target priority list. In Fort Worth, where I grew up, we were pretty certain our city was tenth! So, I'm not crazy after all--children really did talk about this! (When I told Uncle G. he was shocked. "Nobody here thought that way," he said, meaning Massachusetts).

M.T., having worked in the White House, is always an interesting political informant. He is the first of my friends not to share the general depression over what we are already coming to accept as the likely re-election of George Bush. Heartening, anyway, to hear and M.T. surprised me by saying "There are few people I would wish ill, but I wouldn't mind seeing Bush, Karl Rove, and John Ashcroft taken out." I suppose that's a byproduct of life in wartime--as we are all on the front lines in a manner of speaking, we can be rather dark in our predictions for fellow citizens. "Let's hope the next attack arrives at their doorstep."

The odd tightness in my lower abdomen which, for a few days, I have been fearing is an incipient hernia I now think may be incipient appendicitis. Which would be a disaster, as I'm uninsured in the United States. Barely slept, more out of fear that this might be true than any pain. A kind of heavy stiffness, as if I'd pulled some deep muscle. Am treating it in my usual fashion by hoping the feeling will simply go away.

July 3, 2003 Brookline
Something wrong in my gut. A twist, a knot, a baseball tied into a sock. But no heat or fever or visible distension. An occlusion. Something's wrong. Or at least it hasn't fixed itself today.

Cretinous CNBC coverage of Bo Derek's efforts with veterans, um hm, splashed with the banner VETERAN'S IN AMERICA. Presumably Bo herself wrote the banner.

Uncle G. remembered his father to me. An odd shallowness, or one that I find odd anyway. That he wasn't involved in politics in spite of his own father being a prominent social democrat in Arboga, Sweden. Talked about how strong he was in spite of his skinny arms. How he never cussed except in Swedish. How he hated every ethnic type including his own. Perhaps the cynic whose genes I carry.

Ate supper with my fellow teachers after class. Asked if anyone taught formal cussing lessons. The director of school, a normally reserved Englishman did a great riff on abusing students in class, "You're five fucking minutes late! What's your fucking problem?," etc.

Worked with my student on the differences of pronunciation between S and Z. Lacey and lazy. "Lacey" sounds so Spanish when you mean to say the other word. The problem addressed exactly.