conversations.from: human
conversations.value: What could be a title for a book about Winter, Journal, Best with the genre: Biographies & Memoirs, Arts & Literature?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: A title for this book could be 'Winter Journal'
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: What is the first two paragraphs for this book?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Winter Journal
  One broken bone. Considering the thousands of games you took part in as a boy, you are surprised that there weren't others, at least several others. Twisted ankles, bruised thighs, sprained wrists, tender knees, sore elbows, shin splints, clunks on the head, but only one broken bone, your left shoulder, incurred during a football game when you were fourteen, which has prevented you from fully raising your arm for the past fifty years, but nothing of any great consequence, and you probably wouldn't bother to mention it now if not for the role your mother played in the story, which makes it her story in the end and not the story of how you, as the quarterback of your ninth-grade team, went diving for a fumbled ball in the backfield and wound up breaking your shoulder all by yourself, with no help from any of the players on the other team, leaping too far in your eagerness to recover the ball and landing in the wrong spot, on the wrong spot, and thereby breaking your bone when you crashed onto the hard ground. It was a frigid afternoon in late November, a game without referees or adult supervision, and after you hurt yourself you stood on the sideline and watched the rest of the game, disappointed that you couldn't play anymore, not yet understanding that your bone was broken but realizing that the injury was a bad one because you could no longer move your arm without feeling acute pain. Afterward, you hitchhiked back to your house with one of your friends, both of you still in your football uniforms, and you remember how difficult it was for you to remove your jersey and shoulder pads, so difficult in fact that you couldn't do it without your friend's help. It was a Saturday, and the house was empty. Your sister was off somewhere with friends, your father was at work, and your mother was at work as well, since Saturday was always a busy day for showing houses to prospective buyers. About two minutes after your friend helped you take off your shoulder pads, the telephone rang, and your friend went to answer it because you were finding it hard to move now without increasing the pain. It was your mother, and the first thing she said to your friend was: "Is Paul all right?" "Well," he answered, "not so good, actually. He seems to have hurt his arm." And then your mother said: "I knew it. That's why I called—because I've been worried." She told your friend that she was coming straight home and hung up. Later on, when she was driving you to the doctor for X-rays, she told you that a feeling had come over her that afternoon, a strange feeling that something had happened to you, and when you asked her when she had felt this feeling, it turned out that she had started worrying about you at the precise moment when you were diving onto the ground and breaking your shoulder.
  No, you were never promiscuous, even if you sometimes wish you had allowed yourself to be wilder and more impulsive, but in spite of your temperate behavior, you had a couple of run-ins with the dreaded germs of intimacy. The clap. It happened to you once, when you were twenty years old, and once was more than enough. A viscous green slime oozing from the tip of your cock, a feeling that a metal pin had been jammed down your urethra, and the simple act of urination turned into an agony. You never knew how you contracted gonorrhea, the cast of possible candidates was limited, and none of them struck you as a likely carrier of that dismal scourge, but five years later, when you found yourself with a case of the crabs, you did know who was responsible. No pain this time, but an incessant itch in the pubic region, and when you finally looked down to see what was going on, you were astonished to discover that you had been infested with a battalion of midget crabs—identical in shape to the crabs that live in the ocean, but minute in size, no bigger than ladybugs. You were so ignorant about venereal diseases that you had never heard of this affliction until you caught it yourself, had no idea that such a thing as the crab louse even existed. Penicillin had cured the gonorrhea, but nothing more than a powder was needed to rid you of the vermin who were camping out in your pubes. A minor complaint, then, rather comical when looked at from a distance, but at the time you found it sad, deeply sad, for the person who had contaminated you with those itchy devils had been the first great love of your life, the mad love that had struck you down at fifteen and had tortured you through the remaining years of your adolescence, and sleeping with her now, in your early adulthood, had made you feel that perhaps you were destined to love her again and that this time—if the gods were with you—your love would be fully requited. But the clandestine weekend you had spent together was not the beginning of a new story. It was the end of an old story—a happy end in its own way, but still the end, the very end, and the bugs crawling around in your crotch were nothing more than a sad little coda to that final chapter.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: What is five more paragraphs?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: The first human death your remember with any clarity took place in 1957, when your eighty-year-old grandmother dropped down on the floor with a heart attack and died in a hospital later that day. You have no memory of going to the funeral, which would suggest you were not there, in all likelihood because you were ten years old and your parents thought you were too young. What you remember is the darkness that filled the house for days afterward, the people coming and going to sit shiva with your father in the living room, unknown men reciting incomprehensible Hebrew prayers in mumbled voices, the strangely quiet commotion of it all, your father's grief. You yourself were almost entirely untouched by this death. You had felt no connection to your grandmother, no love from her, no curiosity about who you were, not the slightest glimmer of affection, and the few times she'd wrapped her arms around you for a grandmotherly hug, you had felt frightened, eager for the embrace to end. The 1919 murder was still a family secret then, you would not learn about it until you were in your early twenties, but you had always sensed that your grandmother was mad, that this small immigrant woman with her broken English and violent screaming spells was someone to be kept at arm's length. Even as the mourners drifted in and out of the house, you went about your ten-year-old-boy's business, and when the rabbi put his hand on your shoulder and said it would be all right for you to go off and play in your Little League game that evening, you went up to your room, put on your baseball uniform, and ran out of the house.
  Things were the way they were, and you never stopped to question them. There were public schools and Catholic schools in your town, and because you were not Catholic, you attended the public schools, which were considered to be good schools, at least by the standards that were used to measure such things at the time, and according to what your mother later told you, it was for this reason that your family had moved to the house on Irving Avenue in the months before you were scheduled to begin kindergarten. You have nothing to compare your experience with, but in the thirteen years you spent in that system, the first seven at Marshall School (K–6), the next three at South Orange Junior High School (7–9), and the last three at Columbia High School in Maplewood (10–12), you had some good teachers and some mediocre teachers, a handful of exceptional and inspiring teachers and a handful of lousy and incompetent teachers, and your fellow students ranged from the brilliant to the average to the semi-moronic. Such is the case with all public schools. Everyone who lives in the district can go for free, and because you grew up in a time before the advent of special education, before separate schools had been established to accommodate children with so-called problems, a number of your classmates were physically handicapped. No one in a wheelchair that you can remember, but you can still see the hunchbacked boy with the twisted body, the girl who was missing an arm (a fingerless stump jutting from her shoulder), the drooling boy who slobbered down the front of his shirt, and the girl who was scarcely taller than a midget. Looking back on it now, you feel that these people were an essential part of your education, that without their presence in your life your understanding of what it means to be human would have been impoverished, lacking all depth and compassion, all insight into the metaphysics of pain and adversity, for those children were the heroic ones, the ones who had to work ten times harder than any of the others to find a place for themselves. If you had lived only among the physically blessed, the children like yourself who took your well-formed bodies for granted, how would you have ever learned what heroism was? One of your friends from those early years was a plump, nonathletic boy with glasses and a homely, chinless sort of face, but he was much loved by the other boys for his sharp wit and humor, his prowess at math, and what struck you then as an uncommon generosity of spirit. He had a bedridden younger brother, a boy suffering from a disease that had stunted his growth and left him with brittle bones, bones that broke from the slightest contact with hard surfaces, bones that broke for no reason at all, and you can remember visiting your friend's house after school on several occasions and going in to see his brother, who was just a year or two younger than you were, lying in a hospital bed rigged with pulleys and wires, his legs in plaster casts, with his large head and impossibly pale skin, and you could hardly open your mouth in that room, you felt nervous, perhaps a bit scared, but the brother was a nice kid, friendly and affable and bright, and it always struck you as absurd, altogether outrageous that he should be lying in that bed, and every time you saw him you wondered what idiot god had decreed that he should be locked inside that body and not you. Your friend was devoted to him, they were as close to each other as any brothers you have ever known, and they shared a private, two-person world, a secret universe dominated by a mutual obsession with the fantasy baseball game they played, a board game with dice, cards, complex rules, and elaborate statistics, meticulously keeping records of every game they played, which evolved into entire seasons of games, every month or two another season, season after season of imaginary games as the years rolled on. How perfectly right, you realize now, that it should have been this friend of yours who called you one evening in the winter of 1957–58, not long after the Dodgers had announced their move from Brooklyn to Los Angeles, to tell you that Roy Campanella, the All-Star catcher, had been in a car accident, an accident so terrible that even if he pulled through, he would be paralyzed for the rest of his life. Your friend was weeping into the phone.
  February twenty-third: the thirtieth anniversary of the day you met your wife, the thirtieth anniversary of the first night you spent together. The two of you leave your house in the late afternoon, cross the Brooklyn Bridge, and check into a hotel in lower Manhattan. A bit of an indulgence, perhaps, but you don't want these twenty-four hours to slip by without doing something to mark the occasion, and because the idea of throwing a party never came up (why would a couple want to celebrate its longevity in front of others?), you and your wife eat dinner alone in the hotel restaurant. Afterward, you take the elevator to the ninth floor and enter your room, where you polish off a bottle of champagne together, forgetting to turn on the radio, forgetting to turn on the television to investigate the four thousand movies that are available to you, and as you drink the champagne you talk to each other, for several hours you do nothing but talk, not about the past and the thirty years that are behind you but about the present, about your daughter and your wife's mother, about the work you are both engaged in now, about any number of things both pertinent and trivial, and in that respect this evening is no different from any other evening of your marriage, since the two of you have always talked, that is what defines you somehow, and for all these years you have been living inside the long, uninterrupted conversation that started the day you met. Outside, another cold winter night, another burst of freezing rain lashing against the windows, but you are in bed with your wife now, and the hotel bed is warm, the sheets are smooth and comfortable, and the pillows are positively gigantic.
  In the light of your past failures, your misjudgments, your inability to understand yourself and others, your impulsive and erratic decisions, your blundering approach to matters of the heart, it seems curious that you should have wound up in a marriage that has lasted this long. You have tried to figure out the reasons for this unexpected reversal of fortune, but you have never been able to come up with an answer. You ran into a stranger one night and fell in love with her—and she fell in love with you. You didn't deserve it, but neither did you not deserve it. It just happened, and nothing can account for what happened to you except luck.
  From the very start, everything was different with her. Not a figment this time, not some projection of your inner fancy, but a real person, and she imposed her reality on you the moment the two of you began to talk, which was one moment after the single acquaintance you had in common introduced you to each other in the lobby of the 92nd Street Y following a poetry reading, and because she was neither coy nor elusive, because she looked you in the eye and asserted herself as a wholly grounded presence, there was no way for you to turn her into something she was not—no way to invent her, as you had done with other women in the past, since she had already invented herself. Beautiful, yes, without question sublimely beautiful, a lean six-foot blonde with long, magnificent legs and the tiny wrists of a four-year-old, the biggest little person you had ever seen, or perhaps the littlest big person, and yet you were not looking at some remote object of female splendor, you were engaged in talking to a living, breathing human subject. Subject, not object, and therefore no delusions permitted. No deceptions possible. Intelligence is the one human quality that cannot be faked, and once your eyes had adjusted to the dazzle of her beauty, you understood that this was a brilliant woman, one of the best minds you had ever met.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Delete the last sentence.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: The first human death your remember with any clarity took place in 1957, when your eighty-year-old grandmother dropped down on the floor with a heart attack and died in a hospital later that day. You have no memory of going to the funeral, which would suggest you were not there, in all likelihood because you were ten years old and your parents thought you were too young. What you remember is the darkness that filled the house for days afterward, the people coming and going to sit shiva with your father in the living room, unknown men reciting incomprehensible Hebrew prayers in mumbled voices, the strangely quiet commotion of it all, your father's grief. You yourself were almost entirely untouched by this death. You had felt no connection to your grandmother, no love from her, no curiosity about who you were, not the slightest glimmer of affection, and the few times she'd wrapped her arms around you for a grandmotherly hug, you had felt frightened, eager for the embrace to end. The 1919 murder was still a family secret then, you would not learn about it until you were in your early twenties, but you had always sensed that your grandmother was mad, that this small immigrant woman with her broken English and violent screaming spells was someone to be kept at arm's length. Even as the mourners drifted in and out of the house, you went about your ten-year-old-boy's business, and when the rabbi put his hand on your shoulder and said it would be all right for you to go off and play in your Little League game that evening, you went up to your room, put on your baseball uniform, and ran out of the house.
  Things were the way they were, and you never stopped to question them. There were public schools and Catholic schools in your town, and because you were not Catholic, you attended the public schools, which were considered to be good schools, at least by the standards that were used to measure such things at the time, and according to what your mother later told you, it was for this reason that your family had moved to the house on Irving Avenue in the months before you were scheduled to begin kindergarten. You have nothing to compare your experience with, but in the thirteen years you spent in that system, the first seven at Marshall School (K–6), the next three at South Orange Junior High School (7–9), and the last three at Columbia High School in Maplewood (10–12), you had some good teachers and some mediocre teachers, a handful of exceptional and inspiring teachers and a handful of lousy and incompetent teachers, and your fellow students ranged from the brilliant to the average to the semi-moronic. Such is the case with all public schools. Everyone who lives in the district can go for free, and because you grew up in a time before the advent of special education, before separate schools had been established to accommodate children with so-called problems, a number of your classmates were physically handicapped. No one in a wheelchair that you can remember, but you can still see the hunchbacked boy with the twisted body, the girl who was missing an arm (a fingerless stump jutting from her shoulder), the drooling boy who slobbered down the front of his shirt, and the girl who was scarcely taller than a midget. Looking back on it now, you feel that these people were an essential part of your education, that without their presence in your life your understanding of what it means to be human would have been impoverished, lacking all depth and compassion, all insight into the metaphysics of pain and adversity, for those children were the heroic ones, the ones who had to work ten times harder than any of the others to find a place for themselves. If you had lived only among the physically blessed, the children like yourself who took your well-formed bodies for granted, how would you have ever learned what heroism was? One of your friends from those early years was a plump, nonathletic boy with glasses and a homely, chinless sort of face, but he was much loved by the other boys for his sharp wit and humor, his prowess at math, and what struck you then as an uncommon generosity of spirit. He had a bedridden younger brother, a boy suffering from a disease that had stunted his growth and left him with brittle bones, bones that broke from the slightest contact with hard surfaces, bones that broke for no reason at all, and you can remember visiting your friend's house after school on several occasions and going in to see his brother, who was just a year or two younger than you were, lying in a hospital bed rigged with pulleys and wires, his legs in plaster casts, with his large head and impossibly pale skin, and you could hardly open your mouth in that room, you felt nervous, perhaps a bit scared, but the brother was a nice kid, friendly and affable and bright, and it always struck you as absurd, altogether outrageous that he should be lying in that bed, and every time you saw him you wondered what idiot god had decreed that he should be locked inside that body and not you. Your friend was devoted to him, they were as close to each other as any brothers you have ever known, and they shared a private, two-person world, a secret universe dominated by a mutual obsession with the fantasy baseball game they played, a board game with dice, cards, complex rules, and elaborate statistics, meticulously keeping records of every game they played, which evolved into entire seasons of games, every month or two another season, season after season of imaginary games as the years rolled on. How perfectly right, you realize now, that it should have been this friend of yours who called you one evening in the winter of 1957–58, not long after the Dodgers had announced their move from Brooklyn to Los Angeles, to tell you that Roy Campanella, the All-Star catcher, had been in a car accident, an accident so terrible that even if he pulled through, he would be paralyzed for the rest of his life. Your friend was weeping into the phone.
  February twenty-third: the thirtieth anniversary of the day you met your wife, the thirtieth anniversary of the first night you spent together. The two of you leave your house in the late afternoon, cross the Brooklyn Bridge, and check into a hotel in lower Manhattan. A bit of an indulgence, perhaps, but you don't want these twenty-four hours to slip by without doing something to mark the occasion, and because the idea of throwing a party never came up (why would a couple want to celebrate its longevity in front of others?), you and your wife eat dinner alone in the hotel restaurant. Afterward, you take the elevator to the ninth floor and enter your room, where you polish off a bottle of champagne together, forgetting to turn on the radio, forgetting to turn on the television to investigate the four thousand movies that are available to you, and as you drink the champagne you talk to each other, for several hours you do nothing but talk, not about the past and the thirty years that are behind you but about the present, about your daughter and your wife's mother, about the work you are both engaged in now, about any number of things both pertinent and trivial, and in that respect this evening is no different from any other evening of your marriage, since the two of you have always talked, that is what defines you somehow, and for all these years you have been living inside the long, uninterrupted conversation that started the day you met. Outside, another cold winter night, another burst of freezing rain lashing against the windows, but you are in bed with your wife now, and the hotel bed is warm, the sheets are smooth and comfortable, and the pillows are positively gigantic.
  In the light of your past failures, your misjudgments, your inability to understand yourself and others, your impulsive and erratic decisions, your blundering approach to matters of the heart, it seems curious that you should have wound up in a marriage that has lasted this long. You have tried to figure out the reasons for this unexpected reversal of fortune, but you have never been able to come up with an answer. You ran into a stranger one night and fell in love with her—and she fell in love with you. You didn't deserve it, but neither did you not deserve it. It just happened, and nothing can account for what happened to you except luck.
  From the very start, everything was different with her. Not a figment this time, not some projection of your inner fancy, but a real person, and she imposed her reality on you the moment the two of you began to talk, which was one moment after the single acquaintance you had in common introduced you to each other in the lobby of the 92nd Street Y following a poetry reading, and because she was neither coy nor elusive, because she looked you in the eye and asserted herself as a wholly grounded presence, there was no way for you to turn her into something she was not—no way to invent her, as you had done with other women in the past, since she had already invented herself. Beautiful, yes, without question sublimely beautiful, a lean six-foot blonde with long, magnificent legs and the tiny wrists of a four-year-old, the biggest little person you had ever seen, or perhaps the littlest big person, and yet you were not looking at some remote object of female splendor, you were engaged in talking to a living, breathing human subject. Subject, not object, and therefore no delusions permitted. No deceptions possible.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: What is the last five paragraphs?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: No snow of any significance since the night of February first, but a frigid month with little sun, much rain, much wind, hunkered down in your room every day writing this journal, this journey through winter, and now into March, still cold, still as cold as the winter cold of January and February, and yet every morning you go outside to peruse the garden now, looking for a sign of color, the smallest tip of a crocus leaf jutting from the ground, the first dab of yellow on the forsythia bush, but nothing to report so far, spring will be coming late this year, and you wonder how many more weeks will go by before you can begin searching for your first robin.
  Cataloguing your travels ninety pages ago, you forgot to mention your journeys between Brooklyn and Manhattan, thirty-one years of traveling within your own city since your removal to Kings County in 1980, on average two or three times a week, which would add up to several thousand trips, many of them underground by subway, but many others back and forth across the Brooklyn Bridge in cars and taxis, a thousand crossings, two thousand crossings, five thousand crossings, it is impossible to know how many, but surely it is the trip you have taken more often than any other in your life, and not once have you failed to admire the architecture of the bridge, the curious but altogether satisfying blend of old and new that distinguishes this bridge from all others, the thick stone of the medieval Gothic arches at odds with and yet in harmony with the delicate spider webs of steel cables, once the tallest man-made structure in North America, and back in the days before the suicidal murderers visited New York, it was always the crossing from Brooklyn to Manhattan that you preferred, the anticipation of reaching the exact point where you could simultaneously see the Statue of Liberty in the harbor to your left and the downtown skyline looming in front of you, the immense buildings that would suddenly jump into sight, among them the Towers, of course, the unbeautiful Towers that gradually became a familiar part of the landscape, and even though you still marvel at the skyline whenever you approach Manhattan, now that the Towers are gone you can no longer make the crossing without thinking about the dead, about seeing the Towers burn from your daughter's bedroom window on the top floor of your house, about the smoke and ashes that fell onto the streets of your neighborhood for three days following the attack, and the bitter, unbreathable stench that forced you to shut all the windows of your house until the winds finally shifted away from Brooklyn on Friday, and even though you have continued to cross the bridge two or three times a week in the nine and a half years since then, the journey is no longer the same, the dead are still there, and the Towers are there as well—pulsating in memory, still present as an empty hole in the sky.
  Talking to your father in your dreams. For many years now, he has been visiting you in a dark room on the other side of consciousness, sitting down at a table with you for long, unhurried conversations, calm and circumspect, always treating you with kindness and goodwill, always listening carefully to what you say to him, but once the dream is over and you wake up, you can't recall a single word either one of you said.
  Sneezing and laughing, yawning and crying, burping and coughing, scratching your ears, rubbing your eyes, blowing your nose, clearing your throat, chewing your lips, rolling your tongue over the backs of your lower teeth, shuddering, farting, hiccuping, wiping sweat from your forehead, running your hands through your hair—how many times have you done those things? How many stubbed toes, smashed fingers, and knocks on the head? How many stumbles, slips, and falls? How many blinks of your eyes? How many steps taken? How many hours spent with a pen in your hand? How many kisses given and received?
  Your bare feet on the cold floor as you climb out of bed and walk to the window. You are sixty-four years old. Outside, the air is gray, almost white, with no sun visible. You ask yourself: How many mornings are left?