One Hundred

I am a slow reader. As a writer, I relish the flavor of well-constructed sentences, intelligent metaphors and artful descriptions of characters and settings. If a picture is worth a thousand words, then show me the words that comprise that image and I will slowly devour them, study them, enjoy them. I frequently read sentences multiple times.

I also subvocalize. This is the process of hearing words in your head as you translate them from inkblots on a page into words with meaning. I believe the key to speed reading is to learn not to slow your intake to the speed at which those words are spoken, but rather to capture their meaning as a collection of letters represented as an image, like a frame in a motion picture. In theory one can then rapidly scan over a sentence and a page in very little time. I’ve tried this and failed. And I challenge anyone else to attempt it.

So, if you likely subvocalize, not only are you hearing my words right now as if I spoke them to you, but as Charles Dickens famously took his immortal place next to Scrooge and future readers, observing along with them the appearance of an unearthly spirit, “I am standing in the spirit at your elbow.”

So here we are.

Again, I am a slow reader. Prior to retirement I had little time available for reading. It seemed that something more necessary or easily digestible always got in the way of sitting down with a good book. But now, as Mr. Philby commented about George, inventor of the Time Machine as depicted by H.G. Wells, “I have all the time in the world.”

I have been searching through lists of the one hundred greatest books ever written. My goal is to read them, along with some lesser distractions I’ve come across, whether recommended by friends or gifted by family. There is a great deal of overlap in the “best of” lists. The first narrowing of my parameters was to focus on novels. A step further might be to choose from only American authors, but I’m not ready to limit myself in that way just yet.

This year I have slogged my way through Middlemarch by George Eliot, Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy, and most recently One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. The latter caught my attention many years ago when I was in a similar literary mood. After college I found that I craved intellectual exercise come September each year. Perhaps it was the changing weather, fireside relaxation with a cozy blanket and a good book, or maybe it was a programmed impulse in the wake of a lifetime of school starting up at that time each year.

The net result of having inadequate time to dedicate to a given tome was a gap between reading sessions that had the effect of erasing what I’d read several days or a week earlier. In the case of “Solitude” it left me starting over, trying to memorize the relationships within six generations of a South American family whose male members were all either named Jose Arcadio or Aureliano. In one reproductive conflagration by a wandering military man, a trail of 17 Aurelianos was deposited across a war torn nation. I couldn’t keep track. I tried several times to read the book and then gave up. See the family tree on this page for a better sense of the challenge.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez won the Nobel Prize for literature in1982 "for his novels and short stories, in which the fantastic and the realistic are combined in a richly composed world of imagination, reflecting a continent's life and conflicts." He is said to have written in the style of his grandmother’s storytelling when he was a child. She would sit stone-faced and speak of fantasy and reality such that it was impossible to tell where one left off and the other began.

I wanted to read fiction that was Nobel-worthy. It left me mentally weary, satisfied with my accomplishment for having finally completed my reading of it, and enriched in my world-view and whatever notion I had of the meaning of life. From what I’ve read of experiences with LSD, it is similarly colorful and mind-expanding.

And now, on to something completely different. 

Red River

There was no mistaking the full onset of autumn. Dog walks now required a light jacket in the early morning. Cottonwoods were the first to drop crunchy leaves as the angle of the sun declined and days shortened. Maples gradually followed, and then oaks obliged. Menus began to feature pumpkin spice in all the usual recipes, and some that made little sense at all. Pools closed after one last hurrah over Labor Day weekend, which proved too cool this year to attract many swimmers. But the finality of it, and thoughts of the inevitable heat wave that would benefit from a cooling dip in early October demoralized the kids as they trudged off to school. For goodness sakes, Christmas decorations were on display at the local big box stores. It would soon be time to worry about the first frost and the possibility of snow.

Abby grabbed the girls’ hands and escorted them to the side of the road. She had been avoiding small messes all weekend, beginning with a fall festival on Saturday, a sticky wonder highlighted by candy apples and pumpkin carving, accompanied by cheap paper napkins that shredded and balled up long before they provided their needed value. The cool and cloudy day had threatened rain but remained dry through the afternoon. It was a blessing that avoided a muddy mess along the trails of the nature preserve, where s’mores were being prepared and vats of boiling cider steamed. Acrid wood smoke fires infused the air deliciously, and nature’s sweet essence permeated the resulting fog. Wet wipes from Abby’s purse bridged the gap between failed napkins and a thorough face washing back at the house.

To read the rest of this story and more than fifty others, please consider buying "Natural Selections," at Amazon.com.

Children of the Corn

We visited our first-ever corn maze over the weekend. It’s a very autumnal right of passage, along with pumpkin patches, steaming cider, bushels of exotic apples, cinnamon sticks, pumpkin doughnuts, fudge, caramels and those painted plywood caricatures with holes where the faces should be. Throw in a few farm animals and you have a fun family outing. All of this signals the onset of darker, cooler times, the cozy blanket of fall and the approach of seasonal dormancy, both human and vegetable.

At this time of year corn is no longer knee-high-by-the-Fourth-of-July. Not even close. It rises overhead, eight feet or so in height, dense as a bamboo room divider with leaves, tassels and cobs woven throughout the towering stalks in shades of green, yellow and brown so thick as to prevent views of adjacent rows. It is nature’s drywall. For the record, we visited Tanner’s Orchard in Speer, Illinois, about thirty minutes north of Peoria.

I don’t know how they grow or trim corn mazes into the complex shapes that form pictures when viewed from above. I suspect tractors use GPS guidance to get this done. The maze we entered was sculpted to form Albert Einstein’s portrait, wild white hair and all. But from ground level when we entered at the point where his shirt collar meets his sweater, we simply faced a green wall of impenetrable plants. We had the choice to go left via three avenues into a winding grid cumulatively over two miles long, or right into another that was perhaps half that distance.

Well, this is easy, we thought. We took the leftmost corridor and got lost within two minutes.

Fortunately the four of us remained together. Splitting up would have lengthened our stay, or forced us to start communicating with each other by cell-phone. The journey was startlingly confusing, twists and turns disorienting the traveler despite a brilliant overhead sun that should have provided a clue as to compass headings. Also overhead, a windmill slowly rotated in the distance. That was a fixed marker in closer proximity. But wait, as I turned to get my bearings, several other windmills appeared, scattering the compass points I had placed on my mental map.

The feeling of being surrounded by corn is not unlike being in an extremely dense forest. But a forest canopy rises overhead, whereas corn is consistently obscuring all the way to ground level. Kalampokiphobia is the fear of corn. Autophobia is the fear of being alone. Cleithrophobia is the fear of being trapped. Corn mazes trigger an unexpected soup of all three. The accompanying anxiety is not unlike claustrophobia, but with the vast blue sky overhead and rows opening before and behind you, less immediately crushing and harder to explain.

Comparing the small printed map we were given with the compass app on my phone was no help. I launched the program “MapMyWalk,” thinking it would scrawl a red tracing identical to the image of Einstein’s face. Had I started the app before entering the maze it may have proved useful. Instead, it just rendered a childish fingerpainting of a random, wandering set of adults.

At one point I consulted my weather app to find out when the sun would set. The thought of being lost in the corn after dark made my heart skip a beat. That’s when all the really scary stuff happens, as in the 2010 movie The Maze and I’m sure dozens of other horror films. Children of the Corn came to mind, and I don’t even remember that story. Would they come looking for us? Did they even keep a record of who entered and exited?

After about 45 minutes, we stumbled out of Einstein’s ear and into the adjacent field, a bit sweaty and definitely having had enough.

Dear Bucket List: please enter “Corn Maze” as a line item and immediately check it off. Thank you.

How Dry I Am

In the frosty North I suffered during long winters from skin on my legs and arms so dry it itched and flaked despite my best efforts to moisturize. Nosebleeds were common and usually poorly timed – as I was walking out the door, late for an appointment. Lips chapped and cracked, even after applying candlewax-like amounts of Chapstick, and my scalp shed snow in direct proportion to that falling outside.

And then summer provided temporary relief.

Here in Florida there is a different hydrating challenge. There is an intense heat and humidity during southern summers that ratchets up your body’s natural cooling system to little effect. You sweat profusely. A short walk with the dog leaves you glistening within about ten minutes, and suffering from “swamp ass” (yeah, gross but it happens) after twenty.

I’ve heard it said that if you want to better understand how it feels down here, take a long hot shower, then put on your clothes without drying yourself off. Multiple daily clothing changes are routine no matter how little you wear. Long pants or sleeves feel like the chemical hot packs you might carry to football games in a Green Bay winter.

Extended time outside requires sunscreen of course. The sun feels like molten copper, blanketing your head and shoulders with the broiling intensity of a Weber grill. And you’re the meat. But the other danger is rapid dehydration.

Our bodies are made up of approximately 60 percent water. Losing ten percent of that amount results in physical and mental deterioration. So you can survive fluid loss via perspiration much longer than the equivalent rate of blood loss.

A good sweat is something for which we enter a sauna or steam room. It’s therapeutic and invigorating when the duration is controllable and optional. But venture outside during August in Florida to do some yard work as I did recently, and it quickly becomes clear that your body’s attempt to cool you requires lower ambient humidity and a nice breeze. The amount of sweat developing on your forehead isn’t readily apparent until you touch it with a swipe of a finger. It then coalesces like the condensation on a cold bottle of beer, cascading and rolling in a gathering wave, surfing toward your eyebrows and spilling onto both sides of your eyeglasses.

Dehydration sneaks up on you, leaves you feeling depleted for the rest of the day, and can cause leg cramps overnight. How do you know you’re headed for a literal melt down? The obvious clue is your t-shirt. There aren’t just embarrassing little patches of darkness under your arms, around your neck and down your chest and back. Your shirt has changed color. Whatever it was before, the entire thing is a dark shade of that color now.

A bit later your hands begin to shrivel. They look like you’ve been soaking in a hot tub for an hour, all prune-like and resembling your ancient aunt Edna’s fingers, through no fault of her own, on a normal day. Pinch the skin on your arm between thumb and forefinger and you’ll notice that it molds like PlayDoh, not bouncing back to its original shape. And eventually, if you lean over to pick a weed, when you stand up, the world begins to spin. The dizziness is a result of low blood pressure. You probably didn’t notice, but your body quit producing urine more than an hour ago. Now you’re headed for heat stroke, and for that there is one treatment: go inside and drink water.

Carrying a large water bottle postpones the above effects, but even several bottles into this experience I’ve found that I have limits, and have staggered into the house in surrender more than once. Along with water, you’re shedding electrolytes that help your tiny sub-cellular mechanisms continue operating. You need to replenish those too. The makers of Gatorade profess that their product helps with this, but studies don’t support the claim. I’ve even heard that football players drink pickle juice, but I have no idea if that’s true.

During a recent visit, my son regularly went for one-hour runs. Even if I could run, I wouldn’t do that. He came through the house, leaving a mop-worthy trail of sweat behind him and then jumped directly into the pool, appearing somewhat frantic. My Haitian neighbor once asked me why I was working outside in the middle of the day. I had no good answer. Lack of experience?

So, why would anyone live in a Godforsaken Hellscape like this? The answer requires a certain amount of gloating about our endless summer, the more pleasant version between November and May, that we get to enjoy when northerners are staying hydrated by taking out the garbage, causing the water in their veins to form ice crystals that time-release moisture back into their organs. This assumes that they haven’t fallen on the ice and broken a hip or had a heart attack shoveling wet snow. Their skin is another story.

You might consider becoming a “Snowbird” if you have the means, enjoy paying two of every bill, and feel like starting up, shutting down and worrying about two properties. It is estimated that 80 percent of residents along the Southwest Gulf of Florida are transitory. But if you stay all year you get to enjoy lighter traffic, available seats in restaurants, and a perpetual thirst that had best be taken seriously. Pickle juice, anyone?

Time Flies

It was almost four years before I retired when I downloaded a countdown app and entered a date on my iPhone. The number was around 1400 days. Sometimes I would check the app daily. Other times a week would go by before taking a look. But the number dwindled at a painfully slow rate. It seemed as if it would be forever before I left my desk for the last time, looking down the hallway I’d traversed for 27 years. I imagined there would be tears in my eyes, the same ones that caused my eyes to brim with moisture when my first child got on the bus for kindergarten. Wait, absolutely not. Nothing like that! I would head off with the closest approximation of skipping that my petrifying body could muster and never look back. I would become young again, live an active lifestyle, lose weight and do all those things I’ve been putting off for lack of time.

1399
1398
1397

Well, imagine my surprise when I recently discovered that the app is still running on my phone. At some point I reset the text it displays to reflect the date we moved to Florida, our retirement destination. And here it is:

I did not fear retirement, I longed for it. But even while ticking off days to that eventual goal, I had a nagging feeling that I was also counting down the days of my life. What if I didn’t make it? What if something horrible, counting down on some unanticipated app loomed menacingly between now and then? What if my wife developed an aneurysm and needed brain surgery at day 1030 (she did, and she’s fine). And ultimately, whatever the days would bring, they were days that I only got to live once. And here I am with 2237 days less than I had way back when I started counting (1400 plus 837).

We all have a timer relentlessly ticking off the days we have left on Earth. It’s best to make the most of them. Live each day without regard for the number of days until Christmas, the end of school or a nice vacation. There’s no guarantee that waking up today is repeatable tomorrow. Counting them is just, well, a waste of time.