The long weekend of visitors and dinners ended Tuesday when our friends Mark and Noel came from Kansas City for lunch, once again at our one French restaurant.  They came frequently to see me in the hospital after my surgery 14 months ago, but we hadn't seen them since, so we had a good and laugh-filled time catching up.  Now it's back to le train-train quotidien, suffering through day after day of 100+ heat with at least seven more forecast for the next week.  Although I'll take summer over winter any time, reading on the back deck isn't an attractive option.  My health has continued at what I hope is a plateau.  The G-I problems seems to have lessened a bit, though why I have no idea.  But at least I made it through all four restaurant meals with our friends without any emergencies.  The fatigue seems stronger and more frequent, a fact that is a little worrisome.  It's difficult to explain what it feels like, usually twice a day, when I "hit the wall," as one expression goes.  The onset is sudden and complete.  My mind shuts down as thoroughly as my body; if I'm reading, I see individual words on the page, but none is connected to the next.  It's one reason I rarely drive: I don't want the crash, either figuratively or literally.  For my whole life, when I've awakened, I've moved from sleep to wakefulness with no transition.  I've never used the snooze button in my life.  Now, waking is an ordeal.  Step by slow step my mind and body move toward consciousness and finally action.  It's an unfamiliar feeling.  I've been very lucky that the chemo hasn't caused any nausea, but it has taken some of the pleasure away from eating (and food has always been not only a source of pleasure but also associated with happy, shared moments).  Sometimes I have no appetite; other times the food looks and tastes good for a few bites, and then suddenly I no longer have any desire to chew or swallow.  For the past few weeks, sushi and small steaks seem the most appealing--not bad options.  And in the last few days, nothing has tasted better than watermelon.  I go back for all the tests on July 30, but because of scheduling, I won't have the consultation about the results till August 3.  This is the longest I've gone between testing.  What happens on days like this costs $22,000.  Because of Medicare and supplemental insurance, I will pay none of that.  But what choices would someone have to make who had no insurance?  Or who was too young for Medicare? 

In recent days, I've been reading a lot.  Richard Ford is a novelist whom I've always liked (especially his Frank Bascombe trilogy).  And his latest novel, "Canada," was no disappointment.  My friend Carol, who coincidentally read it at the same time, dissents from my view, feeling that Ford is bad at rendering how people actually speak.  But I'm not sure that any novelists write dialogue as people speak with all our non-fluencies, hesitations, digressions.  And I'm not sure that anyone would want to read a fictional "transcript" as opposed to a transformation.  Ford's main character is fifteen years old, but the entire novel is a flashback as the narrator, now in his sixties, retells the events.  So the author has what's always a difficult problem: balancing two very different perspectives and trying to make both voices convincing.  And even though I became totally engrossed in the story as it unfolds, Ford reminds us, in almost casual ways, that this is a flashback.  We're told from the beginning that the narrator's parents rob a bank and are sent to jail.  We know that there will be a murder.  In what seems like an aside, we learn that the mother commits suicide in jail.  We are constantly teased by what the narrator knows but isn't yet ready to tell us.  (In the hands of a less talented writer, I think the teasing might seem too coy.)  One important character in the novel is the desolate and unforgiving landscape of Montana and later Canada.  Even though the mainstream of American fiction has never been "realistic" in the sense of, say, British novels of manners, the great American novelists have always been grounded in the reality of place: Hawthorne's New England, Melville's seas, Twain's river, James's international borders, Faulkner's Mississippi, Roth's New Jersey.

After Ford, I read Jeffrey Toobin's "The Nine," a look at the Supreme Court from roughly 1980 to 2010.  Although the book is a thorough reminder of the important cases during those years, it's most interesting for its portrait of the individual Justice's personalities.  John Paul Stevens is clearly the Justice whom Toobin admires the most.  The fullest and most nuanced portrait is of Sandra Day O'Connor and the relish she takes in her role as the swing vote between the four liberals and the four conservatives during the last twenty years of the period.  The least attractive for Toobin are Warren Burger and Anthony Kennedy, both of whom come across as pompous, Kennedy especially for his flights of purple rhetoric, which Scalia came increasingly to detest and to snipe at (along with O'Connor's searches for a middle ground) none too subtly in his opinions.  Although Scalia has often been the most visible because of his intemperate writing (and speeches), Toobin describes him as generally isolated, having little real influence over his colleagues.  He once described Thomas's "originalism" as "nuts."

And now, sticking with non-fiction, I'm reading Diane Ravitch's "The Death and Life of the Great American School System."  Ravitch seems to me one of the few sensible voices in the current debates over education, and perhaps her position gains more purchase since until three or four years ago, she was a prominent advocate of conservative solutions based on a business model.  I'm sure I'll have more to say about the book once I've finished it.  Of all the issues that demand our attention, it's health care and education--for obvious reasons--that most engage me now.  And it's on education that President Obama has been the most disappointing.