Tuesday morning....

 have just returned to Jhumpa Lahiri's book of novella's called Ubnaccustomed Earth. The writing is beautiful, so effortless, the earth is America, actually Cambridge Mass and its environs, and those unaccustomed to it are the newly arrived Indian families. The husbands are college educated and have settled in Cambridge because there are jobs in engineering and such there. The mothers, who have met their husbands through arranged marriages in India, stay home. The children are caught in the middle. They go to Ivy league colleges or thereabouts, and have good professional jobs, but....It is the final novella called Henna and Kaushik that I have been reading this morning; I have read it several times before, but it calls to me, envelopes me---really takes me in. Her sensitivity, her sense of place, her sense of a person's isolation and the opposite of it---the bonding of two people either for practical purposes or sSometimes for totally romantic purposes---this is what draws me in. 

Yesterday I took two books out of the library, one a novel, one a tell all, both of them seem negligible to me at this point, I don't even want to name them in this post. Their writing is so ordinary compared to Ms. Lahiri's 

Saturday took my first trip to Brooklyn since the pandemic and the onset of my illness. To the Navy Yard on Flushing Avenue---wow! even in the short time (17 months) that I have not been to Brooklyn I saw so many changes---mostly new luxury buildings, of course, what did I expect, but I could not believe that they could have been built this far north. No subways near the Navy Yard, where friends of mine were putting on a pop up theater afternoon. Nice to be there and see and interact with some people who were part of my community before the pandemic. But the walks in the heat! First from BAM to Flushing and Carleton--how many blocks..six or seven long ones. But then the return: in the past, I had approached the Navy Yard from the F, so I thought it would be a fairly easy walk to go back that way---but I was wrong. A long walk in the blazing heat from Carleton to downtown Brooklyn, sweating all the way, fearful of taking off my long sleeved shirt lest my ostomy bag reveal itself. Would not opt for a cab;  even as I saw one as I got near the bridge, instead, continued walking until I found the High Street station on the A line, which would bring me back to Manhattan.  All during the intense walk---with all the frustration of not being able to see a subway entrance, I thought to myself: "you are sick, and you can still do this?" Yet I pushed on, my body obeying my need to move.  Finally I returned to the apartment, amazed at the story of this trip.

So it is Tuesday morning---a day of unstructured time. Will find out how events evolve....