As a writer of nonfiction, memory is the stuff I trade in, and people are often surprised I don’t journal, although I’ve periodically attempted to over the years. Instead, I rely on my “scary good memory,” as my friends call it. Tell me once, and I’ll remember your birthday and the name of all your pets. I’ll also remember your food quirks and the outfit you were wearing the last time we were together four months ago. I’ve learned to trust my memory on multiple-choice and trivia questions because whatever answer pops into my head first is almost always right.
I love this memory of mine, but sometimes I feel awkward or even a little ashamed about remembering so many details of people’s lives that I was only exposed to once. While I may at times relish remembering so much, it can feel suffocating, a wheel of slides spinning too fast, bombarding me with a density of color and light.
His condition stabilised, and Ethan was transferred to Duke University Hospital, the major medical centre in that part of North Carolina, where he was monitored and fitted with an inbuilt defibrillator. It was clear to staff that Ethan had also experienced an acute cardiac event consistent with ARVC and that another attack was likely. The defibrillator was designed to restart his heart in the event of another attack. An MRI scan of his brother, Austin, confirmed he also had ARVC. The two brothers had inherited the same genetic problem as Hogan, despite all the tests finding nothing to indicate a genetic cause. Yet how else could three brothers raised in different families, in different parts of the state, develop the same condition?
With local medical staff stumped, and no further avenues of investigation available, Ethan and Austin were referred to the Undiagnosed Diseases Network (UDN), a group of 12 clinical research hubs designed to delve into chronic illnesses that have previously been undiagnosed, misdiagnosed or simply written off as psychosomatic. Bringing together experts in neurology, immunology, cardiology, endocrinology, genetics, rheumatology and more, the UDN had been custom-built to delve into just such a medical mystery.
Intelligence seems to depend on a chain of improbable events. But given the vast number of planets, then like an infinite number of monkeys pounding on an infinite number of typewriters to write Hamlet, it’s bound to evolve somewhere. The improbable result was us.
“I feel like we’re protecting the last tree, in a way.” That’s what Flagstaff, Arizona city council member Austin Aslan said at a recent meeting. The subject of that earnest statement might surprise you: it was streetlights. To be more specific, he was talking about a careful effort to prevent streetlights from washing out the stars in the night sky.
Flagstaff became the first city to earn a designation from the International Dark Sky Association in 2001. That came as a result of its long history of hosting astronomy research at local Lowell Observatory, as well as facilities operated by the US Navy. The city has an official ordinance governing the use of outdoor lighting—public and private.
Since then, I have stayed put — notwithstanding a few half-hearted attempts to cross the Atlantic, looking for international schools for my daughters in Paris when the divorce was final, or briefly putting my New York apartment on the market while fantasizing about quaint seven-story walk-ups near Bastille, when I had a boyfriend who lived in Europe.
Now, as the years pass, I have less and less desire to leave New York, where my roots have pushed down through the cracks of its broken sidewalks, even though, technically, at past 70, I suppose I am truly getting old. But the idea of going back to France would seem alarming, a tolling of a bell of sorts. Of course, staying in New York, the city I fell in love with at 22, might seem like waving a garlic branch in front of the grim reaper, a kind of vade retro satana, a vain attempt to stay forever young, or at least delay the inevitable.
In 2013, I moved to New York City alone. I had just divorced and graduated from the Iowa Writers Workshop. My first novel had been released—waiting for it had been my only remaining tether to a former life. With its release, my last connection to the functional adult world was severed and I was unmoored. My roommates bought me a cake. My classmates came to my readings. I felt their love and support, and yet I was terrified. I felt like I was being pushed out of a very comfortable nest. How would I survive?
My ex-husband and I were still friends then, and he had offered to drive me and my giant truck to my new home in New York City. Two years before, he had helped move my things from our home in Amsterdam to Iowa City, where I had taken up a place at the workshop. Now, he would install me in New York and our life together would be finished—one final road trip. But the night before he was set to arrive, he called from Amsterdam and cancelled.
“Marley was dead,” Dickens begins. “There is no doubt that Marley was dead.” When Scrooge endures that spectral visitation from his old partner in chains, the man has been underground for seven years.
But now — to borrow the words of another great Victorian writer — the rumors of his death are greatly exaggerated. Marley lives. Jon Clinch has revived the life behind the famous ghost in a prequel that fleshes out the early relationship between the two old misers in “A Christmas Carol.”
In this world of grief and division, it is heartwarming to be reminded that not everything is getting worse. These days, they are even making good cheeses in Suffolk: the mushroomy baron bigod, made near Bungay. “Unlike the old Suffolk bang,” Palmer observes, “this is not a cheese you could sharpen knives on.”