Statement of Record
The Covid test for my son came back positive. Great, I told myself, first you gave him autism, now the plague. Dan, 32, has been unable to speak since he was three and a half, a rare case of Childhood Disintegrative Disorder. Doctors told my husband and me to expect the worst. This, they said, was as...
I used to complain about my long-distance relationship. I wrote heartwarming letters full of longing and “what if” speculations—once I even wrote a story titled “Empty.” That’s how I often felt after our encounters, empty. Our professions prevented us from visiting each other every weekend. Worse still: the damned job was the reason...
Malcolm X has been on my mind lately. I’ll get to that in a moment.
In my early and mid-teens, I played the clarinet, badly. I gave it up after that, and I don’t even know where my old clarinet is. But I have another one now, given to me by a friend who found it in her apartment, left behind by a previous tenant; my friend thought of me as she herself was...
Woke earlier than I’d wanted, boiled up a compress for the eyes, carried it back to bed. And because my eyes were closed, I meditated. The other day, when I was having the horrors, I got tough love from Anjelica, who said “Don’t you have a mantra? Just do it. Don’t be sentimental.” I can dole out that same cold shower when someone close calls...
Trying to read David Markson’s Reader’s Block during a plumber’s visit. Yesterday, E, my son, clogged up the toilet in his bathroom. Upon further interrogation, he admitted that he’d flushed something called a “Magic Eraser” down the commode. Spent twenty minutes pumping a plunger, trying to get the turds of a person I helped create to disappear down the...
The comfort of the couch is an unexpected joy. The early dusk enters the room to brighten the lamplight. Nothing new in the way of decoration has been added, so most everything within sight is at least half my age. Objects long held, whether paintings, photos, worn chairs, even the plants along the windowsill, feel dearer at my age than they once did. What...
Most risks have immediate consequence. If you get caught in a riptide, you drown. Not that afternoon, not the following month, but then. But if I catch a dribble of Covid sputum on Lookout Hill, I may wake up one morning two weeks later not with one of the mild sore throats that have been scaring me but a deep exhaustion so I can barely make it to the bathroom to pee. A...
The invisible enemy hit Italy just as I was preparing to leave Florence; containment measures had begun a week prior to my departure. At first the “red zones” of Codogno and other municipalities in Lodi were subject to quarantine, then the whole of Lombardy together with provinces in Emilia-Romagna, Veneto, Piedmont, and Marche. And then, on...
My great aunt, Dorle Jarmel Soria, was a classical music impresario who helped arrange the debuts of Leonard Bernstein and Maria Callas. I discovered thousands of love letters to her in her apartment after her death and am finishing a book about them. This concerns George Asfar, a Syrian from Damascus who was responsible for the Ottoman room at the Metropolitan.
David Winner
Wake. Navigate through dark to bathroom, avoiding areas of floor known to creak. Lower self onto toilet, careful not to ram forehead into waist-high crown molding on opposite wall. Pee. Skip handwashing. Return to bed. Turn over phone, whose screen stayed lit all...
I think you’re going to like my new work, by the way. I’m anxious to show it to you. (Letter from Joan in Berlin to Steven in New York, undated, 1987.)
I never forget Joan’s birthday because it is the same as my mother’s, September 1. I never forget the date on which Hitler invaded Poland and started World War II because it is the day my...
Statement of Record