Extra Innings Read Online Free PDF Page B

will, I thank him. When we say goodbye and hang up, I have to sit down.
    But, as always with me, I cannot accept praise without strong doubts arising at once. I note the time—five o’clock where Morris is—cocktail hour in Chicago. No doubt, I tell myself, his compliments are the result of euphoria engendered by shots of Boodles gin or Johnny Walker Black Label scotch.
    I see that Kitty Kelley’s biography of Nancy Reagan is on the best-seller list, as predicted. Sybil, my daughter Elizabeth Cale, and I went to the publishing party for her and her book last spring. It was a lavish, Washington-style bash, with wonderful food. The catering is Sybil’s department: she cases the food table and directs me to the special goodies, while I talk to the literati and journalists at the party.
    But this party was different. There were no literary friends there, only members of all the media, who followed Kitty around the room as she walked under a specially arranged traveling spotlight. I could not get near her after the first hugging at the reception line. Sybil, Elizabeth, and I ate hugely, tried not to be trampled by the men lugging TV cameras, and then watched the antics of the press. Susan Stamberg of National Public Radio asked me who was important here for her to interview. I could think of no one. Later I saw her, desperate, engaged in a serious on-the-mike discussion with another member of the press. I surmised they were interviewing each other.

October
    A friend asked Yogi Berra:
    â€˜Do you know what time it is?’
    Yogi Berra: ‘You mean now?’

The 1st: This month begins with good weather still holding. All the boats have been taken up, so the water in the Cove is smooth, clear of everything but the vestigial red dots of buoys. We have begun to collect pine branches to cover our bushes and perennials. We are told that the time to spread them is after the first ‘hard’ frost. The scarlet expanses of blueberry fields, so unexpected a sight to a newcomer to these parts and so startlingly beautiful, make it seem unlikely that winter is almost upon us. Yet local wisdom assures us snow might well fall before this month is out.
    I talk to Jane, who reports she is still experiencing the same strange taste and odor sensations. She has a distant appointment with her neurologist, and meanwhile continues to control the unpleasantness with Valium. She inquires about the weather. I say the summer is definitely over.
    A mistress of the hyperbole and no aficionada of this state, she says: ‘Over? It was over on July 25th. And began on July 23rd.’
    Kate, with the reluctance to discuss her own symptoms characteristic, I believe, of most physicians, says she is ‘okay,’ which probably means she is being typically stoic, at least when she speaks to me. I believe doctors think they will lessen their authority with the lay world if they admit to being sick themselves.
    Patty Smith, our friend in Camden, Maine, who is slowly recovering from the loss (from cancer) of her longtime companion, Myrna Basom, is going to Edisto, South Carolina, for a short rest. ‘Aha,’ I say, ‘I’ve read a fine novel about Edisto and Hilton Head, by Padgett Powell.’ She asks me to send it to her.
    Before I do, I reread it. The narrator, a boy named Simon, wants to be a writer when he grows up. He says, ‘This is my motto: Never to forget that, dull as things get, old as it is, something’s happening, happening all the time, and to watch it.’
    And the black family servant, Theenie, tells him, ‘Sim, you ain’t got to do but two things. One is to die, and thuther is to live till you die.’
    Elizabeth, my most iconoclastic daughter, telephones to say she has read ‘the book’ and finds it unsettling to discover what was going on inside her mother in that dire year. I find it odd that no one, including Sybil, with whom I live so closely, seems to have been