These Precious Days: Essays

Product Information

Greatness had come through once, which is really all we could hope for, and the world that had been so justly represented took back the one who loved it best.

On the few mornings she didn’t come up at her usual time, I imagined her sick, needing something, not telling me because she didn’t want to bother me. Sooki had gone to work for the New York City Department of Health’s Bureau of Animal Affairs right out of college. it will take some scheduling, and thus, she finally begins a conversation and relationship with Sooki.As it turned out, Sooki and I needed the same thing: to find someone who could see us as our best and most complete selves. I want to envision it as a healing room, but it reminds me of a meat locker: freezing cold—I’m guessing the temperature favors the delicate machinery—with a rack of blue torsos lined up on hooks. These Precious Days is a collection I’m glad to have read, one I’ll definitely revisit, and one I highly recommend. Treatments were on Wednesdays—three Wednesdays on, one Wednesday off—with immunotherapy (the trial) every other week. What with all the news of this new virus they thought there was a good chance people weren’t going to show up.

Working from home (off and on, but mainly on for the last two years), has made me realise how much I do have, and how much I don’t really need. A more careful selection, for instance, might have let Flight Plan alone sum up Patchett’s rapport with her husband, and left the two other essays on their relationship out. She had wanted to study painting in college but it all came too easily—the color, the form, the technique—she didn’t have to work for any of it.I was struck by an overwhelming sense of wanting to know her, of not wanting to miss Sooki while she was here. Karl found a giant bright-blue tarp in the garage and Sooki spread it over the floor and table downstairs, setting herself up to paint. But for all the times people have wanted to tell me their story because they think it would make a wonderful novel, it pretty much never works out.