Archive - November 7, 2011

Page 255: The sick circus of training behind us, we would go to Africa. But we couldn’t have been more disaffected, more fragmented into our basic globules of personality; and if wave after wave of new Volunteers followed us over there, and gave us the big hello, we would certainly hello in return – but tied to that fellow as participants in a great movement to revolutionize the quality of American life, well, don’t be silly. Each of us would fall in love with Africa, bits and pieces of that bedeviled continent, and make friends, small friendships in our own way, one or two, a handful, except JZ, who would make hundreds, thousands, who would conquer a town, riding maverick over the laterite roads on her blue Honda, this blonde giant of a white girl, crazy and loving and finally at peace, momentarily at peace, in a great sprawl of . . .

Page 235-237: I don’t recall a blare of trumpets and a silver leaping flash of mercury, but there might as well have been. He wasn’t there. And suddenly he was. Moving effortlessly, like a gleaming thoroughbred trotting into the winners’ circle. You got the feeling he always moved like that: like a fighter waltzing across a ring, or an Olympian surging victory-foamed out of a pool, a dancing golden boy, the world’s greatest . . . The roar rose as if the cement were splitting under our feet, it rose in stages, in tiers, until it shook the rafters, till it fluttered Palmer’s necktie, a leaping frenzy of noise, as people roared and whimpered and climbed high on the backs of chairs to shout their inspiring gratitude. It was everything: the end of a long summer, the heat, the bursting tension, the wait, the golden boy appearance, that dance, smile, aristocratic wave, . . .