Monday I had an MRI and yesterday I got a text thanking me for choosing the facility and asking for a review.
Really, I thought, a review? Then I remembered that I had asked for classical music and they had given me easy listening.
I have begun calling my cough ‘Etna’. It lies dormant for long periods and then suddenly erupts.
Sunday in Chicago was a beautiful day and I headed over to the Printers Row Lit Fest, where I had spoken the day before. Once there, I heard a man talking in passing with the vendor of posters, in that easy, familiar intercourse of people connected by place – and for a moment I wished I lived in a city like Chicago - or Chicago, for that matter. But then I realized that that connection, that deep-seated social cohesiveness, while it still exists, is not as strong as it once was when there were metropolitan newspapers that everybody read and other institutions – like department stores – that everybody frequented. About all that’s left now to unite a city’s residents are its sports teams, which explains why sports are so popular today and why, at games, even grown men and women now wear the caps and jerseys of their home teams.
At one of the tents I found a book about Mike Royko. The great newspaper columnist was a man whom Chicagoans read and quoted and followed with a devotion that cut across ethnic and economic spheres and created a feeling of belonging among the population. That was Royko’s genius, and it doesn’t show up in every generation. But if it did today, it would be drowned out by a thousand podcasts.
I’ve been back from Poland for over a week now, but most of the time has been spent in bed with the bronchitis I picked up in Krakow. I started coughing the day the Olympics opened in Paris, which meant that for the first two weeks of my illness I was able to watch the greatest athletes in the world compete in the most beautiful city in the world. (It was interesting, also, seeing the games from another country’s perspective – lots of brave interviews with people heading home without medals.) Since returning to Florida, I have been watching tennis (now on hiatus until the U.S. Open next week), the Little League World Series, and – starting last night – the Democratic National Convention. Last week, in another instance of good timing, the New Yorker’s special humor issue arrived. Meanwhile, I’m hearing that some types of bronchitis last six to eight weeks, which would take me past the U.S. Open finals and well into the start of football season.
Weeks ago I bought tickets for Opera Aria Night, part of the Miami Beach Classical Music Festival, not realizing that it would mean missing the U.S.-Panama match at Copa America and the first presidential debate.
As soon as the concert was over I checked my phone and saw a message from my friend Ardy: “Biden is doing as poorly as the US soccer team did today.”
The arias were divine.
I watch the Tony Awards for the acceptance speeches: stage actors always come across as more poised and eloquent in front of a live audience than screen actors do. So I was surprised last night by how many of the winners read from prepared texts.