The Twilight Zone

That’s where I went a month ago today… when an orthopedic sliced open my palm and cut the Carpal Tunnel nerve. She left behind sutures that had to be padded and kept covered for two weeks, until a PA removed them. Now, four weeks after the surgery, I “key” with pain, am unable to use a pen, and have a “little” trigger finger. It all sounded so damn simple. Now twenty more days until I see the orthopedic, more than six weeks after the surgery.

I will say that I embraced the twilight sleep, short as it was.  On the operating table one minute and then awakening in recovery, excited to have been with Roger Federer’s family in Switzerland.  I asked the nurse if patients often told her where they went in the twilight zone.  She looked at me as if I might have still been there.

There must be a point in what I’m saying. Yes…at home that late Monday, the last in December, I opened the January Commonweal magazine. What did I read first?  

An article on the writer Geoff Dyer whose nineteenth book, Homework, was recently published. What was his earlier book from 2022?  The Last Days of Roger Federer. 

Ah, conjunction time!  I had to have the book and ordered it. I also note that Oxford graduate Dyer, a former working-class lad, lives in Southern California and is a professor in the English Department at USC, my alma mater!

Last night, opening Dyer’s book that arrived on Friday, I noted the quote before the title page. It is from Anita Brookner, a British writer I read decades ago. “When she straightened up and stood with her hands on the rail, she saw that it was already dusk, or rather an afternoon twilight that would deepen imperceptibly into night.”         

On Sunday evening, awaiting the historic storm, I skimmed Dyer’s book. The 268 pages (plus 14 of notes) are not only about endings, but “endings-up”. Which is to say what it means to come to the end of something that has defined your life, as it did for Federer. Dyer is a passionate tennis player and weaves the sport into his book, though Roger is only a hook for an erudite book about literature, art, music, and film.  If you hate to be made to feel ignorant, it’s not the book to read. Yet if you are as old as I am, nearly 83, then it’s definitely a book to read.

Other than family, the triangle of my life has been tennis, teaching, and writing.  And I see the eminent twilight deepening into night for all three.  If I can’t grip a racket, that’s the end of tennis.  If I’m unable to hold a pen, that’s the end of the creative me as writer and teacher.

“Hand, do what you are bid, bring the balloon of the mind, into its narrow shed, “William Butler Yeats wrote. This does not happen through dictation, or the intrusive, increasingly dictatorial Microsoft and AI.

This is no country for old women and men, with its increasingly faster rate of change. But today I am grateful for discovering an eccentric genius, Geoff Dyer.

Next week…A return to Silas Marner, first read in 1962