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time. I am still a dutiful parent, the only one they have now.

    • • •

    I am forwarded the psychoanalytic publications that once went to H.’s office. I read them from cover to cover. I memorize the names of new medications. I read about new theories of transference and countertransference. I understand everything but I have no use for the information. There is no psychoanalyst in this house anymore. I search for case histories. In them the patients are given initials. They report their dreams. They have trouble working or loving or both. I read their secrets the way one opens a fortune cookie at a Chinese restaurant. Perhaps I will find a message meant just for me. I wonder why I am reading. I keep the publications in a corner of the bedroom. I look at the covers and sometimes I think I should throw them all out. I don’t.

    • • •

    I am going to Broadway to purchase coffee and a roll. Now I know how to make coffee but I don’t want to. Orange plastic ribbons run from one side of the street to the other.

    Police barricades prevent passage. Several cars with red lights spinning on their hoods are at both ends of the block. Two fire trucks are parked along the way, firemen move back and forth, their black plastic coats, their yellow stripes, their big hats, their boots moving around and around. I see a huge tree that has fallen on the roof of a Budget truck that was double-parked on the other side of the street. The truck’s roof is partially crushed. The tree’s branches are askew, its thick trunk is bent way over as though bowing to some unseen royal being. No, I can’t pass through. I walk around and go down another street.
    That afternoon I walk to the corner. The street is cleared. No police, no fire trucks. I walk down the block toward Broadway and I see it, a huge chunk of sidewalk has heaved up and cracked down the center. The tree has been sawed off and all that remains is a circle of raw wood surrounded by a mound of dirt. I look at the rings in the wide stump. Its thick roots must have gone deep into the dirt and back underneath the brownstone buildings behind it. I stand there. I attempt to count the circles but I lose track. The tree may have been here before there were subways, before there were apartment buildings on Riverside Drive, maybe it was here when Henry Hudson sailed up the winding river not knowing where he was going or if he would return. How many wars ago did it root itself in the ground, how many babies in carriages rolled past it not noticing its height, its breadth, its breathing out oxygen into our air? It was gone in an instant. Fort, da , what made it heave up onto the sidewalk at just that moment? Two Hassidic Jews, one older than the other, in high black hats, white shirts, black jackets with the fringes of their tallith

    hanging out over their pants, come down the block. They are heavily bearded with bushy eyebrows and black shiny shoes and pale faces, lavender shadows under their eyes. They stop by the tree and take out cigarettes. They pull out lighters, they smoke, inhaling deeply. I sit on the stoop behind them and watch. One f inishes his cigarette and throws the still-lit end into the dirt by the tree. He grinds it out with his black shoe.
    How could such a tall tree fall? It was not called to God, of that I am sure.

    • • •

    The phone: “This is Susie of the (name blurred) national polling institute. Can I speak to Dr. Roiphe on questions of national importance?” “He can’t come to the phone right now,” I say. Questions of national importance will have to go unanswered.

    • • •

    Once a long time ago we had a twelve-year-old daughter who had pneumonia and recovered. But soon it became clear that the pneumonia had left her with lung damage. For months we watched as she ran fevers at the end of each day and lost weight and coughed through the night, leaving dark green spots on the wall by her bedside, which I would wash off each morning. I