This volume covers December 1995 to December 2001
Selections from the text:
May 9, 2000 – Horatio Street – Midmorning
Frank’s currant scones improve with every batch you taste, and they were good to begin with. He asks what you’re working on now, and you tell it as best you can.
From the cathedra of his rocking chair he looks at you askance, not quite Dirty Harry incredulity, but close. “A diary,” he says, “is a form of primitive self-analysis – a wailing wall. A journal is a point of observation.”
November 9, 2001
Bea’s birthday. How she adored her view of Lower Manhattan. Once, when you spoke on the telephone, she told you the fog was so thick she couldn’t see the trade center towers. She felt, she said, like Ondine – marooned in the clouds.
Another time, in the ‘80s, your mother called in the middle of the night – her near hysterics all the more alarming for this not being her usual MO. She’d awakened suddenly to see, through her bedroom window, the upper stories of the Empire State building engulfed in a globe of flame. A bomber had plowed into it once at the end of the War – surely something like this was happening again. You told her to hang on, put the phone down, ran up to the roof and looked toward the Empire State. From your angle, a jot different from hers, it was clear that no catastrophe had occurred. As you explained to her what was going on, she began to see it for herself: the brilliant spill of light resolved itself into the discus edge of the moon emerging from behind the tower’s mass.
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