several awakenings---chemo must be making my joints feel stiff. I awake and wonder if I will have any play in them. Of course I have---just get them to move. Just walked to the grocery store on the corner of 72nd and West End---just to get the joints in gear--grabbed some coffee---could have made it in the apartment, but had to get out, Now, back, have to wait it out until I tutor up at 145 street at 11.
All the nights at home. Can I change that? Challenge myself to do something in the evening. A movie, maybe a trip to Brooklyn and a simple walk on one of the major avenues. Usually I am simply tired. Yesterday two conversations, one with a friend the other with my sister in law. I was very cool. But not enough.
Reading--yesterday for one dollar, bought the first of Henry Roth's autobiographical novels. His writing mesmerizes me, I am drawn in---all those stories of Jews coming over in the teens (19). My father arrived here from Poland when he was 12---1920. By the time I was born, he was totally integrated into a middle class lifestyle, if he had not told me he was born in Warsaw, I would never have guessed it. But these Jews, Roth's Jews are bumblers--they came from small Jewish villages in Europe, you can feel their horror, their confusion, their desperate attempts to integrate themselves into their new surroundings in Manhattan, torn away from a different, far more simple
lifestyle. And now I ask myself, how much of that horror was carried over intoi the vision of my parents, two "normal" people who most of the time seem relaxed in their surroundings. Had many friends; went to the theater often--aware of the outside world...yet underneath....
Roth is intense--can't read it all the time. The opposite: short stories or sports books that are superficial. Torn between the two. During this time of the pandemic and illness, reading has become more vivid to me then ever---easy lose myself in it.
Quite a "mouthful" will leave it at there now. Will see what happens...
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