Free Coming into the End Zone by Doris Grumbach Page A

life meant?’ Somewhere Nigel Dennis wrote that you are your name, no more. With what I had faith in removed, changed, deleted, my name may well be all I have left. Still, it is a first name from my parents, the other part from my husband, not much of my own.
    Tonight, after a day spent trying to change the despairing contents of my head, I read back over the last page, and venture to put down some answers.
    a] No
    b] Yes. Almost everything. There are notable exceptions. My CD player and disks, this PC on which I am now rewriting, the sixteen-volume OED , my VCR and collection of sixteen operas and ballets on videocassettes, designed to fill evenings when I am too tired and too old to go to the new Met, the State Theater, the Kennedy Center. Two goose-down pillows and one electric blanket, my clipboard, the Library of America volumes, Sybil, my children, my grandson, a few irreplaceable friends. The order is haphazard.
    Nothing else I can think of at this time.
    c] I don’t know. Perhaps I never was able to.
    d] No. I cannot entertain (wrong word?) the thought for more than ten seconds, at last careful count.
    e] I don’t know.
    I took today off, went to the pool, swam as long and as hard as I was able, and then lay in the shade, afraid to indulge my passion for sun on my spotted and aging skin. ‘Off,’ I think, what a strange, ugly, truncated adverb. The day off. At the airport I hear ‘I am off to Nova Scotia.’ I watch the plane take off. On TV the commentator says, ‘He’s off the track on this one.’ Off my feed, my game. On and off. After enough repetition the little grunt-like word seems to mean everything and then nothing. Gertrude Stein: ‘If anything means anything, this means something.’ I suppose.

August
    Despite the terrible heat, I have agreed to go to Boston to give a talk. I dislike making speeches, but I hate readings even more, so this is the lesser of two evils. Sybil points out, when the day comes to go and I complain loudly, that I had only to say no at the time I was asked. I explain, once again, that I say yes to invitations issued a year or so in advance because I am quite certain I will not be alive when the time comes. So I am polite and agree to do whatever it is.
    I stay at a Marriott hotel where my lodging has been arranged. Chain hotels have grown so large and efficient that they are no longer humane. The door to my room opens with what looks like a credit card. Faucets have levers and buttons, not handles, and I can never figure out whether to push, pull, or turn them, and in which direction. To the right? The left? Up? Down? The buttons on the TV are no longer functional. One must operate it through a cable box. The instructions for this are complicated and located knee-high.
    A questionnaire in the shape of a chatty letter from the owner of the chain asks for my views on the equipment and service. The communication is almost as complex as income tax forms. Each system in the room, every electrical appliance, is listed, and I am asked what I think of them all. These polite inquiries are intended to suggest that the management cares about me. The replies, I suspect, will interest no one.
    No longer do I check out at the reception desk where a friendly, pleasant lass, or lad, bids me goodbye at six in the morning and tells me to please come again. Not a chance. Now, sometime after midnight, my totaled account is pushed under the door. I leave the key on the desk in my room, telephone to inform a machine I am departing, hoist my luggage on my shoulder or pull it along on its wheels (no bellboy at that hour). I creep ‘off’ into the still-dark morning, feeling like a impecunious boarder escaping the payment of rent. But I know my charges will not be ignored as I have been. They will arrive on the American Express bill three weeks later when I have forgotten I was ever in Boston.
    The extraordinary heat of this summer is attributed to what