The New Yorker Comes Too Fast

...Betty swings from the limb of a tree...

I can’t keep up my reading with the pace that The New Yorker drops through my mailbox. 

So I have a set of them, now clipped together with a wing-clip, and whenever I get a spare ten minutes I sit down to the delicious prose of the articles. 

 Bonnie had some time to read and asked me which of the magazines she should start with. 

 I thought the answer would be the latest one, otherwise she might feel the anxiety I feel about trying to catch up by starting back in May or June. 

... Betty plants her foot on the bole of a tree ...

 Later in the day I asked her if she was going to recommend the article she was reading: “Motherland” by Jiayang Fan. 

 “Nope,” she said. “Too painful.” 

 Later in the day she took back her no recommendation and said that some of the reading pain was lifted by the end of the article. Yes, I should read it. 

Bonnie, knowing I hadn’t read the article, went on to talk about our shared experience for three weeks in China and how her feelings about that experience were weaving in and out of the pages as she read Jiayang Fan’s prose. 

 I love living in a house where someone is reading the same book or magazine that I am reading. I stayed up late into the night, reading both the “Motherland” article and a few more essays – ready for the conversation to begin with her in the morning. 

 I read with a pen in my hand, lately, circling words I don’t know and running a line out to the margin where I put a question mark. 

... a little swinging force for a climbing start ...

 I hope that in the future, I will sit down and look up all of those words in an electrotonic dictionary so that I can feel more of the power of those words, having now only an intimation of what they mean to me, words like sycophantic, wan, precarity, reductive, hagiographies – beautiful words. 

I always have the power to understand words in their context.  Every Grade Oner catches onto that quickly.  But most of the words I find in The New Yorker, the ones that I stop to savour, I have never used when I am typing.  I wonder if the words will ever flow out of my mind and onto the page as they seem to with their authors. 

"I bet you didn't know a could climb a tree, grandmother."

I am looking forward to the article called “Aging Ungracefully”. 

Even at 1 am, I can stay awake to read the review of Sigrid Nunez’s novel, “What Are You Going Through” (Riverhead). 

The novel takes on the theme of stripping old age of whatever illusions are left of it. 

Oh, so much in life to read. 

So much in old age to strip away.

Arta