Whole New Life

Chapter 1 So far it had been the best year of my life. In love and friendship I was lavishly endowed. I'd recently published a new play -- my twelfth book in the twenty-two years since my first,A Long and Happy Life.They'd all been received more generously than not by the nation's book journalists and buyers. I'd been steadily rewarded with understanding readers of many kinds; and I'd earned a sizable income from a brand of work that was mostly deep pleasure in the doing. For twenty-six years I'd also taught English literature and narrative writing at Duke University. The annual one semester's work with good students was not a financial necessity for me but a test of sanity against the touchstone of merciless young minds. I'd lived for nearly two decades, alone by choice, in an ample house by a pond and woods that teemed with wildlife; and in February I'd turned fifty-one, apparently hale.The previous fall, October '83, I'd gone with a friend to Israel. It was my second visit in three years to a place that had fed my curiosity since childhood and was promising now to enter my work. To save at least some of the goodness of the year, I'd begun to keep a daybook calledDays and Nights.It consisted of quickly written poems, each triggered by some aspect of the pile-up of happiness and recompense in the long calm days. By the spring of 1984 I'd finished the first third of my sixth novel,Kate Vaiden.But as the son of a father who'd always doubted his rare good luck and who died at fifty-four, I'd begun to hear occasional ominous chords. In all the elation of recent months, I somehow knew I was on a thin-aired precipice. I knew I'd come down gently or hard; and by early April the daybook poems, more alert than I, were well aware that an end was near. One poem called "Caw" even sounds a knell for the run of luck. Splayed face-down on the last pool of sleep,I'm gaffed by caw-caw from one distant crow.What Roman would rise to face this day?Half an hour later I loom at the pond window,Glum while my two globes of barnyard cholesterolGurgle behind me in salt-free fatTo the tune of the radio voice of charles SimicWho suddenly flings out a cold crow poem.What human would join me to face this day? But I barely listened to the curious warnings, and the next few poems are about new love. My main response to the racing days still had to be thanks, thanks and the care to save these memories against an ending.Then on a clear day in mid-April, I was walking through the crowded Duke campus with a friend and colleague, George Williams, a man more watchful than most. After a few silent yards, he said "Why are you slapping your left foot on the pavement?"I laughed at what seemed a rare error in his observations and said that I wasn't -- I was wearing thong sandals that tended to shuffle. But I took a few more steps and heard he was right. This was no shuffle; I was lifting my left foot higher than usual and slapping it stiffly down on the pavement. If I thought the motion was more than odd at the time, I didn't act on it or begin to worry.A few days later in my neighborhood video-rental store, I was laughing with the manager about our mutual plight as temperance fiends in a nation drunk on exercise. She said she'd started to jog at home on a stationary platform beside the TV. On the spot I tried to jog a few steps in place. My right leg wouldn't flex back off the floor. I could easily pull the foot backward with my hand and touch it to the back of my thigh, but on its own it couldn't respond to a mental command --couldn'torwouldn't?Before I could register puzzlement, my friend said "You're even worse off than me."We laughed and dropped it, but later that day I phoned the cardiovascular-health unit at Duke to ask about joining a new middle-aged exercise group in which a few of my contemporaries were already thumPrice, Reynolds is the author of 'Whole New Life', published 2000 under ISBN 9780684872551 and ISBN 0684872552.