The Good Luck of Right Now

These nights, when I look out around 11.30, I see it is not dark out, really: the low cloud cover is white, the snow is white, and when I turn out my light, my bedroom is darker than it is outside. Not that it is deep black inside.

I suspect that I knew nights are not always, well, dark, but over the years I had forgotten. Or I couldn't see well enough without my lenses to notice. Or equally possibly, on some days I was too busy getting to sleep so I could get up and go to work to bother to notice what was going outside my window.

I can see.

Yes, this is still a surprise. My depth perception is coming along without my having to think about it, to be self-conscious about seeing the world, at least most of the time. Vision and movement are a means to an end, after all; I need to reach for my coffee mug, not watch myself reach for it. Although I can see the traffic better in the rear-view mirror--and it does look closer than is used to--I don't worry about it.

I got my new glasses that I certainly do not have to wear all the time: a very slight prescription for distance for the astigmatism in one eye; glare coating so I can see even better at night, and reading lenses that are stronger than I can buy at Rite-Aid. I don't know yet what I am going to do with my old glasses; I will never need them again, and eventually I will probably give them to the Lion's Club, but right now it feels like I would be giving a body part away. Still.

Cataract surgery may be the closest I ever get to being born again.

The first book I finished early this year with my new eyes (so to speak) was a remaindered copy of The Good Luck of Right Now by Matthew Quick. The main character narrates the book through letters he writes to Richard Gere. This narrator is a geeky 40-year old who in the past got locked into closets and whose mother recently died. She had taught him "the good luck of right now" idea, and the novel includes Buddhism, synchronicity, the Dalai Lama, a lost father, a priest, and a Girlbrarian. I bought it with a Christmas gift certificate (thank you, John and Colleen), and I bought it as much for the face of the black cat on the cover as I did for the clever title.

How did I not know there used to be a cat parliament in Ottawa? Janet Maislin in the New York Times didn't especially care for the books, but for me it was a fun read, the kind of book that I will want returned if I lend it. I won't care if the last book I read in 2017 is returned: The Old Man and The Knee by Christopher Matthew, a pleasant enough experience that introduced me to Winston Churchill's "KBO": "Keep Buggering On." Although Matthew encourages readers, by the bye, to "stop sitting around for half the afternoon in front of the telly watching rubbishy quiz shows, get up, get out, and do something worthwhile", he also admits that he has never owned a pair of jeans....which loses him more credibility than he can imagine in my book.

Both books are examples of how increasing eclectic my taste in books has gotten since I no longer have to read for a living.

I have been sorting through my books again, which means I have been deciding what to read and reread. For my book club I am about 150 pages into Caleb Carr's Alienist which I did read when it came out over twenty years ago; it still reads well. My To Be Read L. L. Bean tote bag includes The Best We Could Do by Thi Bui, a graphic novel on her refugee experience; Why Bob Dylan Matters by Richard Thomas, a Christmas present (Thanks, Sara and Scott), and Hue 1968 by Mark Bowden; Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward, and Walter Isaacson's biography of DaVinci, which, like the borrowed biography of Bob Fosse that has been waiting for almost two years, I am going to have to read sitting up since they are such bricks.  Books I want to reread: E.L. Doctorow's Book of Daniel, a fictional telling of the Rosenberg case; Dodie Smith's I Captured the Castle, and Ian Rankin's novels featuring Inspector Rebus now that I have watched the British television adaptation on Acorn TV.

One of the great gifts of retirement is that I can read only what I want (no memos, no reports, no email, comparatively little student work since I do teach one class online). I read only what I choose to read, and, these days, I factor into that decision of what and how much to read respect and protection for my new eyes.

I am going to keep a list of the books I read this year as well as those I have started and not finished. This is a first.

*****

People bloom in different ways at different times.

The most interesting reading through the first dozen years of my education was often not assigned in school (and often it was just boring. But I did it anyway.)

The first books I remember reading--or having read to me--are The Little Engine That Could ("Yes I can/I think I can") and Make Way for Ducklings about the ducks on Boston Common (which I don't think I have ever seen, actually). I don't think I could read, really, before first grade, but I do remember feeling weird about learning to read "See Dick run. Run, Dick, run." Who spoke like that? Nobody I knew. Train engines that talked, ducklings that lived in Boston: comparatively speaking, they were very interesting.

The school reading was boring and I now see how prescriptive the writing instruction was. Reading in school was a task designed to answer the questions correctly  at the end of the assigned reading. If there was supposed to be pleasure involved, I didn't see it. And writing? The five paragraph theme which I remember being defined by Warriner's Grammar Book: five paragraphs or none at all.

Not surprisingly, one of the first things I learned as an undergraduate was the literary world--reading and writing, even my reading and writing--was far wider. And not surprisingly in hindsight, in graduate school I found myself gravitating towards the essay--the essays of Montaigne and Thoreau and others, essays that have fractures, that wander and follow the movement of the writer's mind-- nothing like the writing I had been taught in high school.

As often as not, I chose to teach writing, and the students wrote many drafts and revisions, all of which I read.

A lot of reading. No wonder my eyes were tired.

*****

With my new eyes has come joy. I finally took my workplace parking sticker off my car and replaced it with a vinyl sticker of the Beatles crossing Abbey Road: a walking away statement. (And part of me wonders as I iron a flannel shirt if the exhaustion from work all those years was in part introvert hangover from just too much constant human contact.)

Right before Christmas and during the ice storm, I took Amtrak to Boston and ended up with many other passengers sitting in the café car with my backpack on the table in front of me. The train was just packed full. In email I asked Amtrak for a partial refund since I had made my reservation a full two weeks ahead of time, not the day of the ice storm, and Amtrak quickly gave me partial credit for me to use for another ride, and that is, in the grand scheme of things, okay. My plane ticket to Vietnam in October was screwed up (I will spare you the details), and after an email to them that got no response beyond an automatic "We'll get back to you within a month" (which they never did), I wrote them an old-timey three page letter and mailed it to Delta headquarters. Delta refunded my money, enough to pay for another trip (or to replace some of the upstairs windows). So someday I will take the train again and I have taken Delta off my Do Not Fly List.

The cats seem healthy (touch wood). I took the knee I fell on in Vietnam to an orthopedist and got a shot of cortisone, and then a couple weeks later, got the same treatment for the other knee; I can't remember a time when my knees did not pop.  But bum knees are not contagious, and nobody ever died from them, and  I take some heart that I have always responded well to whatever treatments have been prescribed. I will begin water aerobics classes again after Easter when the classes start, and I am long-finished with the surgery-related eye drops.

My potted chicks and hens which I did not know could have stayed out all winter sprouted in the kitchen, and the cat grass has grown into kitty salad, just as promised. Since I don't need to carry my glasses and contacts lens solution with me any more, just in case, I bought myself a smaller pocketbook less than half the size of the one I used to use.

I feel lighter.

Fear not: I am not turning into Little Sandy Sunshine. By inclination and training I am used to seeing things from multiple points of view--the difference being that I can now actually see.  I can see the dust and otherwise unnoticed shadows that do slow time down; I notice the shadow of the blender on the top of the refrigerator: in the morning the shadow is on one wall, and in the afternoon it is on the other wall, albeit much fainter. I don't just hear the neighborhood crows at suppertime, but I can see them if I look. I have always been able to see both the forest and the trees, but now I see both much better. I can see the dust better and I have removed the cobwebs now that I can see them. I notice my cats' whiskers, my chipped nail polish, the frost on the inside of the windshield. The tree at the lunchtime restaurant now has St. Patrick's Day decorations. And I have a better sense of what needs to be done: replace the windows, get the dripping faucet fixed, clean out the basement.

I like where I am, and where I am includes other places, too. (I have done my holocaust tourism: Dachau; Tuol Sleng and the killing fields in Cambodia; the touristy Clink prison in London; My Lai, Hoa Lo (Hanoi Hilton) Prison, and the War Remnants Museum in Vietnam. I have been taken to a couple orphanages in a developing nation and I have seen a half-dressed child squatting near a fire trying to roast what looked like a dead bluebird on a stick.)

I have been looking through old photos of places I have been.  The first time I went to Vietnam, twenty years ago this coming October, I took a manual Pentax SLR. The result? "Your pictures are great, but some of them are a little out of focus." Well, they weren't out of focus to me. I thought I was being an artiste with my manual focus camera, but before I returned to Vietnam I did buy a camera with autofocus capability and never turned the autofocus off.  I wisely never shot in black and white.

And I do think that now I see the colors differently than I ever did before, even nineteen years ago. Everything's brighter (yes, still and even two-plus months post-surgery). I should probably celebrate more than I have, but I have to admit that in many ways good vision is pretty much its own reward.

Last week I framed three of the photos of my last visit:  a hotpot, a barbeque, and a shot of the ice in the metal ice bucket in Light Hotel on Hang Bong in Hanoi, a tribute not only to the heat but also to my regular icing of my knee. I have some catching up to do--at the least I have to go back and look at those photos: this is what I saw.

So much of life is a matter of focal length, which is to say of light and color. How many times over the years have I learned--and told myself--that things last as long as they last? My new eyes and the reading glasses over them lash my eyes to the page, this page, this yellow pad of paper. And these days, reading or watching or writing, I find myself still marveling at what I can see: look, look.

The good news of right now.