Coming into the End Zone Read Free

being exchanged by unbelievable characters in a dull and unconvincing situation.
    Today is what we used to call, in my youth, the Glorious Fourth. Sybil and I celebrate by reading on the deck in the bright sun, and then straightening up the perpetually untidy garden bed at the front of the house. City gardens are full of dog defecation, candy wrappers, greasy McDonald’s sacks, tree droppings.
    We pack a supper, join my daughter, who has worked earlier in the day to earn overtime at her newspaper, and walk to the Capitol grounds. Hundreds of couples and families are there before us, but we make a space for ourselves by spreading a blanket, and prepare to listen to the National Symphony play patriotic music, sounds I never do hear because the system is not properly placed to bring them to us. No matter. It is Tony Bennett singing, I am told. When it is time for Placido Domingo, snob that I am, I put in my hearing aids. But still the confusion and talk around us overcome my effort to hear the tenor.
    Behind us, young picnickers who can hear as little as I begin to sing ‘God Bless America.’ Delighted with the sounds of their own voices, they sing the same song again and again and again. They stand up and sway, substituting their loud, tuneless voices for the symphony and the famed tenor, feeling both justified, I suppose, and patriotic.
    Then there is a fine, reverberating, garish display of fireworks, weaving upward, spiraling down, and splashing out against the navy-blue Washington sky and the white monument. As she watches wide-eyed and admiring, Sybil tells me that when she dies she wishes her ashes to be placed in one of these bright, showy explosives. Her friends and relatives are to be invited to the display and instructed to stand, their heads tilted back to watch her ashes ascend. When a thousand sparks in roseate form light up the sky, and the consequent oohs and aahs rise all over the Mall, she thinks perhaps she will hear them and feel satisfied with her death.
    Tired today. My neck is sore from looking up, my spirit weary from the public displays of loving one’s country, not with action but with sentimental songs and flags stuck into the grass before someone’s cooler filled with beer.
    This morning, working on a novella about my life in Far Rockaway before I was six, I am amazed by the unbidden arrival to my pen of a game we used to play with acorns in the ample plots of soil beneath the elms on Larch Street. Sudden as lightning I remember the street, the tree, the game. How can this be? I am no longer the child I was, born with a perfect photographic memory, who floated through school on its strength with little or no reliance on reason or thought, or the adult who was graduated from college Phi Beta Kappa without having resorted very often to the connective tissue of logic.
    Did it come to me from my mother? I believe so. She was able to replay every bridge hand of the afternoon from memory at the dinner table. After fifty, my seemingly infallible gift began to fail. It took longer to retrieve what once had come instantly to mind or tongue or pen. Now, my memory is much diminished, like a hard disk that suddenly fails to deliver what has been stored there.
    I operate with a floppy intelligence, such as it is. The connections I make are hard-won, sudden flashes from the past, lucky effluvia from the ripe, aging compost heap that is my mind. So I remember that street, sun-filled and broad, its curious name (as far as I know there were no larch trees in Far Rockaway), and the game my sister and I contrived out of the hulls and slippery green bodies of acorns.
    I feel grateful for the arrival of small pieces of information, now that the lifelong storage system of my personal computer is often down.
    Six calls today, all from writers. A friend in San Francisco, another at the Writers Workshop in Iowa, one playing hooky from morning work at Yaddo and desperate to talk, one to tell me a publisher