Read Coming into the End Zone for Free Online

rereading Anne Tyler’s Morgan’s Passing , my favorite among her books, for some reason. No one asked me to read it, no one is paying me to reread it. I am enjoying it immensely.
    For so long, because reading has become for me a kind of forced labor, I am required to have an opinion about everything. I never open a book without a pencil and pad at hand, to record what I think as I go along. Now, more and more, I am determined no longer to read in that way, but to reread, slowly. To have a usable, publishable opinion no longer matters to me. Enjoyment was my impetus in learning to read, sixty-seven years ago, in the first place. I expect now to return to that simple spur.
    Another resolution: to leave unfinished any book I do not like. During a long reading life, my rigid puritan instincts have not permitted such an indulgence. Compulsively, I finish everything, thinking, I suppose, that a book is like what parsnips, beets, and oatmeal were in my childhood: I was not allowed to leave the table until I had eaten them.
    When I add up all the literary resolutions of this septuagenarian month—to read more slowly, to reread the books I have loved or at least remember having loved (I will not finish them if it turns out I have been mistaken), and to abandon all books not worth my time as soon as I know their lack of value—I realize I am coming into a new age of self-indulgence.
    So: I put aside the galleys of Tyler’s new book, Breathing Lessons , which have just arrived and decide, under my new dispensation, to reread Celestial Navigation and others of her excellent earlier books. I’ll let the new one ripen, even age a bit on my shelf, before I come to it.
    We start our trip north to celebrate my despised birthday in the cool, green quiet of Maine. Overnight we stay with the Munsons, Sybil’s longtime friends, who have lived in a rambling, comfortable farmhouse outside of Albany for many years. Barbara is English, a handsome, heavyset woman with an easy, constant smile and an abiding love of horses, dogs, cats, flowers, food, children, antiques, the Episcopal Church, and her husband. Paul is from an aristocratic Albany family; he is tall, lean, and equally loving. His talk has a fine, humorous edge to it that modulates his wife’s warm sentimentality.
    They’ve lived a life of almost no money, making do, as we used to say of such conditions. He taught English in high school for years, but gave up that activity as ‘hopeless.’ Now he ‘substitutes’ on occasion. The Munsons raised and educated a daughter, now married and practicing as a nurse, and a charming, lanky son who is a television photographer, lives at home, and has a girl he hopes to marry, the daughter of a nearby farmer. The Munsons’ house rings with lovely jokes and lighthearted reminiscences of the time when Sybil, her husband, and their children lived near them in the city.
    I feel somewhat out of it. Still, there is enough lingering warmth and hospitality to go around. We eat well in their little screened-in gazebo on the lawn, and watch young Paul and his girl rescue rabbits that have escaped their hutch. I drink too much and go to bed feeling blessed to be among such people, within the circle of their undemanding acceptance and goodness. I feel, somehow, larger and better than when I left Washington. The prospect of the day after tomorrow is not so terrible.
    In bed, I think about surroundings. Now that I am old, they seem to have suddenly become of greater importance to me, although I cannot explain why this should be so. Quiet, for example. What one sees, like the sun going down over the Helderbergs tonight, and the head of the old horse eyeing us from the Munsons’ barn.
    When I was young I was hardly aware of where I was. Now I remember far too little of those places. I was immune to San Francisco, Des Moines, Millwood in Putnam County, New York, Clinton Heights in Rensselaer County near Albany,