Monday July 17th

I went to see the orthopedic surgeon today, and it is clear she wants to try modest methods of sorting out my sciatica. So I am on a six day regime of anti-inflammation pills, and I am to book physiotherapy sessions...how many, I am not sure. And if these approaches fail, I will need to have another MRI, unless--somehow--I can get the images taken in London e-mailed to me here.

Otherwise, not much has happened since we have been back here in Washington...reacquainted with old friends, scrapped ninety-nine percent of the mail that came when we were away--started on the huge backlog of New Yorkers, New York Reviews of Books, and London Reviews of Books, and added chess puzzles to my catalog of time-wasters during the day.

Washington is very hot and humid...not very encouraging to go out for walks--which I cannot do anyway. We walked a couple of hundred yards to a restaurant on Saturday night, and I was struggling on the way back.

Tomorrow I have an appointment with my regular doctor. I see him very six months or so. I just hope his examination or the blood test don't come up with something more I need to be concerned about. As my Grandmother Stephens used to tell me--"David: it's no fun getting old." She lived to be 93, as did several of her brothers and sisters. She was, incidentally, the youngest of eleven children, and born when her mother was 48--apparently they kept at it in those days...

One of her brothers was shot dead in Denver, Colorado...how, why, when, I have no idea.

Her sister Winnie--Auntie Winnie--lived to see television--but she wouldn't watch it...supposedly it was the work of the Devil. She lived with her brother Arnold--also in his 'nineties--and he had a TV, but Winnie would sit in a chair facing away from it so as not to see the Devil's work.

Joan is happy to have access to the swimming pool, and she usually manages to do an unbelievable number of laps each day. I went once, but it seemed to exacerbate my condition.

Often, when going to the drug store down on Connecticut Avenue, there is a little Black lady with no legs, sitting in wheel chair. What sort of a society are we where a lady with no legs--both seemingly amputated above the knees--has to sit and beg?

And I could easily give her a hundred dollars and feel no adverse consequences whatsoever. So why do I give her only ten?