Since my last operation I’ve been wearing a bandanna whenever I go out to cover the unsightly bulge in my neck. It makes me look a little odd, and – in Florida certainly – overdressed, but I prefer that to looking freakish. And, as I discovered yesterday, it has a certain utility. Walking into Publix to buy some lettuce I noticed that everyone was wearing a mask. I had left mine in the car. I considered returning to the parking lot to get it but then I remembered my bandanna. I lifted it up to my nose and headed to the produce section.
Roger Federer, in his post-match press conference yesterday, said that things that used to come naturally to him now take effort. And I thought: That's exactly how it is with me and swallowing.
Later in the day, during the English celebration of their victory over Denmark, I noticed that their manager, Gareth Southgate, wore a tie that, while not a Rooster, ended in a flat bottom like a Rooster.
Since my surgery last Monday I wake up every morning with the sensation that someone has his hands around my neck and the feeling of being halfheartedly choked persists until I go to sleep at night.
Well, there's this about surgery: It does make one the center of attention.
I'm off to the University of Miami Hospital to have some more lymph nodes removed. Will be back here after I recover.
The town where Isaac Bashevis Singer once lived has experienced a tragedy of almost Biblical dimension.
The reservation form had a slot for “special occasion” so I wrote “birthday.” At the end of the dinner the manager walked over and asked whose birthday it was. I said it was mine and asked where he was from.
“France,” he said.
“Whereabouts?” I asked.
“The Basque country,” he said.
I told him I’d spent a year in Aix-en-Provence. He complimented me on my French. A short while later I saw him talking to a colleague, who soon appeared at our table, also speaking French, and bearing four glasses and four bottles of spirits. He was from Auvergne. I told him of the wedding we once attended in Yssingeaux. He said he knew the small town. Then he explained what he was pouring: sake, Sancerre, tokay, and port. A “tour du monde” he called it, in four glasses.
We chatted some more, and then sipped our drinks, enjoying the most spontaneously festive moment we’d experienced in over a year.