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Sy Safransky’s Notebook
February 2001
I don’t believe that clothes make the man. Then why am I still a little proud that I own only one suit?
February 2001December 2000
We fell asleep the usual way, Norma curled against me, the cats between us at the foot of the bed. At three in the morning, she woke up, violently sick from something she’d eaten, and spent the next two hours throwing up. I knelt beside her in the bathroom, my arm around her shoulder. There are many positions for love.
December 2000November 2000
In the moonlight, I study the face of the woman I’ve loved for eighteen years. I’m thankful the moonlight traveled such a vast distance tonight, just so I could see her sleeping.
November 2000October 2000
One bite at a time, I was being nourished by something mysterious. I was eating rain. I was eating sunlight. I was eating a piece of bread and actually tasting it.
October 2000September 2000
The English language sighs. The politicians can’t keep their hands off her. They buy her clothes. They buy her jewelry. They can’t stop making promises. How weary she is, and the campaign has only just begun.
September 2000August 2000
Getting up before dawn opens a door for me. Sometimes the door swings wide; usually it opens just a crack. Still, I’m grateful to be here — even though the darkness makes me a little nervous; even though the loneliness is here with me.
August 2000July 2000
If I’m not too busy to breathe, I’m not too busy to be thankful for breathing. If I’m not too busy to smile at a stranger, I’m not too busy to remember we’re breathing the same air.
July 2000May 2000
I want to live like a man who knows he’s going to die and knows that everyone he loves is going to die, yet remembers that life is an unfathomable mystery that neither birth nor death explains.
May 2000April 2000
When I’ve fallen under the spell, when I’m convinced that God doesn’t exist, that love is an illusion, how do I remind myself I’m profoundly mistaken — not just a little wrong, but as wrong as I can be? As wrong as Rush Limbaugh. As wrong as the Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan.
April 2000March 2000
I’m living inside the folds of a living planet, held by its gravity, wrapped in its atmosphere, breathing in and breathing out. How can I forget this? No, I don’t like rainy days. Still, I can praise the rain.
March 2000
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