Snippets:

April 6th

It seems that I am legally blind. This comes as a surprise. Last year, Murk Heinemann, our longtime ophthalmologist and friend, showed me on my annual visit a photograph that revealed some macular degeneration in my right eye; with luck it might not get any bigger, he said, and he prescribed a stronger lens for the other eye. I’ve always felt that my eyes were functioning more or less normally, given their age. Much of the time, I don’t wear my distance glasses—the world is a little blurry, but I don’t bump into things. Since the pandemic, Dodie and I have been spending more time at our place in Rhode Island. I went to the local eye clinic there a while ago, because I was having trouble reading small print, and the optometrist I saw must have passed the results on to the Rhode Island Department of Human Services. At any rate, a very pleasant young woman came to the house to break the news that I was legally blind, and that the town we live in had amenities to offer, including a tax break.

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April 16th

Most nights, Dodie and I have dinner at home. We used to go to art-world dinner parties and to restaurants we liked, but my hearing ability now vanishes if people around me are talking, so we tend to stay home. Neither of us really knows how to cook. The menu is limited: rotisserie chicken from FreshDirect, salads of all kinds, broiled salmon, linguine with my pesto sauce, omelettes—that’s pretty much it. Dodie makes the salads, which can include three or four different lettuces, plus arugula, kale, and spinach, and I do the omelettes. I wish I could say I learned how to make an omelette from Julia Child, whom I profiled in 1974

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May 21st

I can no longer read books, magazines, or newspapers. This happened quite suddenly, about a week ago, when I found myself struggling so hard to read an essay in The New York Review of Books that I stopped trying. There had been warnings, I’ll admit, but until that moment it had not occurred to me that something so essential could just go away.

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May 29th

Dr. Collins had no good news for me. I now have macular degeneration in both eyes. The recent sharp decline in my ability to read was expectable, he says, and stronger eyeglass lenses will not help. All this would have been pretty crushing if I had not been visited, a week earlier, by Molly Faerber, another Samaritan from the league of the legally blind. Molly brought a bag of useful devices, including plastic measuring cups and spoons with the amounts written on them in large white letters; all kinds of protective gloves to prevent burns and cuts in the kitchen; and, best of all, a compact, uncomplicated magnifying device that sits on the page of a book or a magazine and makes every word readable.

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June 2nd

“What time is it?” Dodie murmured, as I came back to bed from the bathroom.

“A quarter to four,” I said. And for the next half hour, lying in bed, I found myself mouthing the words to “Chattanooga Choo Choo”—all of them, from “You leave the Pennsylvania station ’bout a quarter to four” to “Chattanooga Choo Choo, won’t you choo choo me home.”
How on earth did I do that? I can barely remember the names of close friends, and I hadn’t listened to that song in at least five decades. Memory is often absurd this way. I don’t even like the song. Well, maybe I do, a little.

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