After outrunning it for two and a half years, Covid finally caught me about the middle of last month and clung to me for a solid two weeks. It affected me more seriously than the rest of my family (see previous post), as if it were vengeful because I’d eluded it for so long. I woke up one night wheezing and coughing with such violence I thought I was ICU bound. The ICU being the last way station on the journey to the hereafter, I was scared enough by this fit to force myself to recover from it. If I had not been fully vaccinated, I’m pretty sure that I would have been hospitalized. Recovery takes a long time, I’ve discovered — anywhere from four to six weeks, and perhaps longer. A profound fatigue is the major symptom — you can sleep nine or ten hours a night and still feel tired when you wake up. Your brain feels fuzzy, your body like you’re wearing ankle weights when you walk. All in all, as we know, one nasty virus.

I have had time to get a lot of reading done, however. Ron Chernow’s biography of Ulysses Grant has been the major effort — at nearly 900 pages, it looks like a concrete block with a book cover. But Chernow’s prose is so fluid, so graceful, and his subject so fascinating that I (excuse the cliché) cannot put it down. I’ve reflected while reading it on a comment a friend, a retired professor, once made to me: that we experience two levels of happiness, which allows us to feel happy with our personal lives even while we are unhappy with the state of the world in general. I wake up almost every morning pleased to be alive and as functional, physically and mentally, as any 81-year-old can expect to be; morning sunlight on the autumn trees fills me with a quiet joy; yet I am less than cheerful about conditions in my own country as well as elsewhere. War in the Ukraine. An America as riven politically and culturally as it has ever been since the Civil War that Chernow’s book describes so vividly.

Nevertheless, his book has allowed me to entertain a certain wary optimism. His depiction of Reconstruction and its failures to grant full freedom and citizenship to former slaves, with Ku Klux Klan night riders committing atrocities and murders on a horrific scale, white southerners refusing to accept their defeat in the war, instead transforming it into a noble “lost cause,” reminded me that there was a time when the USA was more screwed up than it is today. But we recovered, pulled ourselves together, more or less, which leads me to hope that we will somehow muddle through our current miasma of rancor and divisiveness. We must; otherwise, the United States of America will become the Disunited States before this century out.

Finally, just to mention personal matters that resources of happiness: today is Leslie’s 69th birthday, and I will be forever grateful to heaven or fate or destiny or whatever directs our lives that I met and married her. Also, I’ve sold my latest novel, Memory and Desire, to Arcade Publishing, which will bring it out in September 2023. It’s a story about love and the persistence of love, about desire and desire remembered, and the reunion of a fifty-year-old man with a son he fathered out of wedlock in his youth. The three central characters, Luke Blackburn, his brilliant but troubled wife, Maureen, and Luke’s former lover, Corinne Terrebonne, take the reader on a journey that leads to betrayals, painful discoveries, and eventually, to acceptance.