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84 mother stands up and yells, Give him chicken soup! The audience tries to shush her and explain it’s just a play. She in turn shushes them and yells, ever determined: It couldn’t hoit! I think this is mildly funny, even though it showcases the immigrant mother’s failure to assimilate into middle-class life.) I do not believe that there’s a relationship between others praying for you and healing; last year a $2.4 million study concluded the same thing. If you’re praying for yourself, that’s another matter, one that has to do with repetition and tradition and comfort and belief. Linc doesn’t know this, but I started reciting the Shema prayer to myself at bedtime several years ago. I’d quit at some point after my childhood. I know that God doesn’t exist, but I know that the prayer exists and has existed for a long, long time. I suppose I’m an animist for believing that the prayer itself has a soul. \ The Holter monitor did not find arrhythmia in Linc’s heart. MAY 16. CLOAK OF INVISIBILITY I know that certain people don’t and won’t recognize me. I don’t blame them. My hair was my outstanding feature. Without it, I’m a stranger, invisible. That is the fantasy—that we could disguise ourselves and see what people say about us, or pretend to kill ourselves off and witness the funeral. When I was younger (29) and my hair had no hint of gray, I passed myself off as a 19-year-old college sophomore and went through the paces of sorority rush for the first time. I wanted to see what it was like. I was being judged, but at a safe distance. I had the power. After two rounds, I was busted, but I didn’t confess. I was a spy one other time. The summer before graduate school I took a part-time marketing job in an architecture firm and worked on a novel the rest of the time. I would call potential clients and say I was doing a survey for owp Marketing about architecture firms. I’d ask, Do you have a firm that you work with? owp were the initials of my employers. Sometimes the person on the other end would ask, Who 85 are you working for? I forget how I was supposed to respond. I assume that I was supposed to be as vague as possible and never confess. In fifth and sixth grades, we also conducted surveys. You would get a friend of yours from another school to call a boy you were interested in. She would say, I’m doing a survey. Please rate these girls as potential girlfriends, A, B, or C. Your name would be buried somewhere in the middle. She’d ask him to rate cuteness and personality , too. You’d know the results the minute your friend hung up the phone. And the boy knew that his answers would be made public. How did we come upon this sophisticated marketing technique at age 10 and 11? I still remember that a certain person rated me high in personality. He hadn’t been surveyed on my account, but I was pleased to have the information. Now we all have web sites and can count our visitors and can look up the status of our books on Amazon and read our students’ evaluations of us. And we can help orchestrate the opinions; I knew a feature writer at a newspaper who wanted to become a critic. Every time she wrote a review, random readers (really , her friends) wrote letters to the editor praising her review. And it worked. Or maybe the letters had nothing to do with her promotion. Then she got breast cancer and it came back and in 2002 she died. MAY 19. FREE DINNERS AND FREE DINNERS I had a lovely free dinner last night with professors, all writers. The menu was prix fixe so you felt the obligation to order dessert. I did. We all did. I could have ordered more lightly, but there was much butter butter everywhere. My appetizer was two crab cakes with avocado chunks and skinny potato strings. Then I had acorn squash stuffed with risotto. Then sorbet. For some restaurants, butter is the new butter. After I went to bed, I got up and threw up. I’m lucky that the chemo hasn’t made me...

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