Sunday morning, approaching 6 A.M.

 Already have walked four blocks to get coffee from the all night grocery store on West End and 72nd. Body feeling incredibly strong. Yesterday just the opposite: all day torpor, not a lot of energy; stayed home in the evening, even though I had many choices. Maybe I just needed a day. Four days tutoring this week-feel very good about my work there---energy between myself and each individual child is very strong. Yet on days when I am free----problems figuring out what to do---how to spend the day. Energy issues---of course---usually can plan for one event per day if I am free. Two more days (as of now) until the next set of tutoring begins. Lots of time to fill. 

Yesterday, finished, Fire In the Blood, the novel that I had been reading by Irene Nemirovsky; it takes place in an isolated town in the countryside of France, around the mid nineteen thirties. Beautiful writing, with a narrative that takes an unexpected turn and astonished me. At the climax, the central female character makes a statement to her husband that hit home to me. She describes an earlier affair, an affair he did not know about as if it happened to another person. Now, she tells her husband, she has shut that person off. But has she? The narrator wonders. This hit home--how many women in my life have gone on to be "other people" and moved completely out of my existence. Hard to write about--yet the novel articulates something that I had been trying to come to terAms with for a long time. 

New book that I have just started: The Fifth Act, by Elliott Ackerman, about the frightening withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan, and the humanitarian attempts by the author and others to get those that helped the Americans during their time there, out of the country. A whole different world from Ms. Nemirovsky's; here is a world where personal feelings about love and abandonment are irrelevant--it is all about the practical. Am not deep into it; very intense---what the author describes is very frightening;  have to read something "lighter" to counter the rage and helplessness reading about the evacuation makes me feel. 

So that is it for now. Body feeling really mellow---let's see if it lasts through the day....