The young Filipino instructor allows me and another nonstudent, Bun (pronounced "Boon"), an African nurse, to observe. We sit away from the participants, at the back of the basketball court that has been commandeered for Falling Naturally. Mats cover a large section of the floor, and the centerpiece is an obstacle course made of hard foam. The color scheme is schoolyard-not a pleasure on the eyes. Bun's charge is the friendly white guy with the belly and the tonsure. Mine is my father, and we are both old men: he is seventy-six, and I turned fifty-one a few months ago. Among the reasons that I sit in on this class and on his doctors' visits is to see what could happen to my own body in the not too distant future. Also: Is there anything I can do to prevent it? In other words, I am trying for a different demise. I am my father's only child. My mother has been dead going on thirty years-whatever future ailments await me may have more to do with her than with my father.
That I came back to San Mateo temporarily to live in my childhood home and help care for my father, and that I have not agonized about it-this was a surprise. And that my father had a plan-not only would he pay the rent on my New York City apartment, which I would keep, but he would give me a thousand dollars a month, plus let me use his well-maintained Datsun-was another, greater surprise. I wonder, though: Will I sell the house after my father passes and make a renewed stab at my life as a writer in New York, or will I stay on in San Mateo? That I am considering the latter is a sign of how congenial life here has turned out to be.
هذه القصة مأخوذة من طبعة October 23, 2023 من The New Yorker.
ابدأ النسخة التجريبية المجانية من Magzter GOLD لمدة 7 أيام للوصول إلى آلاف القصص المتميزة المنسقة وأكثر من 8500 مجلة وصحيفة.
بالفعل مشترك ? تسجيل الدخول
هذه القصة مأخوذة من طبعة October 23, 2023 من The New Yorker.
ابدأ النسخة التجريبية المجانية من Magzter GOLD لمدة 7 أيام للوصول إلى آلاف القصص المتميزة المنسقة وأكثر من 8500 مجلة وصحيفة.
بالفعل مشترك? تسجيل الدخول
INSIDE JOB-"Hit Man"
Years before Hannah Arendt coined, in the pages of this magazine, the phrase \"the banality of evil,\" popular films and fiction were embodying that idea in the character of the hit man. In classic crime movies such as \"This Gun for Hire\" (1942) and \"Murder by Contract\" (1958), hit men figure much as Nazis do in political movies, as symbols of abstract evil.
WHATEVER YOU SAY
Rereading Jenny Holzer, at the Guggenheim.
SUBCONSCIOUSLY YOURS
Does every generation get the Freud it deserves?
BY A WHISKER
Louis Wain and the reinvention of the cat.
Beyond Imagining
Bessie, Lotte, Ruth, Farah, and Bridget, who had been lunching together for half a century, joined in later years by Ilka, Hope, and, occasionally, Lucinella, had agreed without the need for discussion that they were not going to pass, pass away, and under no circumstances on.
STATES OF PLAY
Can advocates use state supreme courts to preserve-and perhaps expand-constitutional rights?
THE LONG RIDE
The surf legend Jock Sutherland's unlikely life.
ARE WE DOOMED?
A course at the University of Chicago thinks it through.
GOD EXPLAINS THE RULES OF HIS NEW BOARD GAME
Guys, want to play this new board game? It’s called Life. No, it’s not “one of God’s impossible-to-understand games that take three hours to learn.” It’ll be fun, I promise!
RED LINE
With the election approaching, the U.S. and Mexico wrangle over border policy.
