Dear Blog Reader
I hope that this finds you doing
well. I am fine. By the time you read this I will be completing the Hilly
Hundred or as it is commonly referred to in the Assassin Deer community Pigs in
Spandex Family Extravaganza. I know that
you must be wondering how can a person ride 100 miles and still type out these
wonderful blogs. Does he tape his iPad to the handlebars and type as he pedals
along? No that would be dangerous. I would have to take my fingers off of the
triggers of my twin front fork mounted 50 caliber assassin deer deterrent
machine guns. You have to stay focused and ever vigilant. To do so, I have been training hard at the
range recently. Training is vital. You don't want to be spraying bullets around
indiscriminately while watching the fall colors in southern Indiana. People
could get hurt.
In order to make sure that my judgment
is keen and honed to a razors edge, I am practicing at a range that has set up
one exercise where life sized cut outs of deer are interspersed with cutouts
of innocents. The cutouts pop up from behind trees and cars, forcing the
shooter to make split second decisions as to the potential lethality
represented by the targets. The training has helped sharpen my skills over the
years. I must confess that the grandma in the party antlers and red clown nose
often trips me up. I see those antlers and red nose and I think that I have hit
the Rudolph jackpot. As I depress the trigger, it registers that no that is
actually grandma walking home after a Christmas Eve party. I should have
noticed the martini glass. Shoot!!!
There I go again getting
distracted. The question “how can you ride 100 miles and still type out these
wonderful blogs” goes unanswered.
Actually, I have taken my son Ben’s advice. I was whining to him that
with the fall wood cutting season and target practice, I find it hard to have
time to write the blog on the weekend. I was also finding that if I posted
mid-week readership was down dramatically. It appears that a blog mid-week does
not find you doing well. It finds you too busy to stop and read the ink. Ben,
astute son that he is, suggested that I write the blog a little at a time
during the week and then publish it on Sunday during prime readership time. So
as I marshal my reserves to make it up the next hill, the marvels of technology
will push this blog out to you.
Speaking of distraction, I had an
epic senior moment last week. I lost my glasses. I have no idea where they are.
I remember getting them out of the holder in the car. Then poof they had left
the building. As I sit here typing this, I am wearing a 10 year old pre-bifocal
pair of glasses. They are perched on the end of my nose. The laptop is sitting
just below my knees. My fingers are extended to their full reach and my head is
thrown back trying to find the sweet centimeter of distance that will bring the
screen into focus.
Did I mention that these glasses
are at least 10 years old. It appears that 10 years ago it was the fashion to
put windshields on your face. These things are huge. A friend who is in the
vision industry saw me Sunday morning. Her eyes got great big and she asked “do
those come with wiper blades?” Did I mention that they are huge. It is a shock
to have to wear these for the next 10 days. I hope that the optometrist under
promised and will over deliver.
After 42 years of glasses wearing,
I had finally found the glasses whose style fit my personality. I called them
the evil deacon glasses; black frames, silver accents, medium size, and the
bifocal line right across the middle. They are the glasses that one on the
gruff old deacons wore in the church where I grew up. I love those glasses.
You may be asking yourself, “If
you loved them so much Roger, how did you lose them?” I don’t know. That is
where the frustration lies. I will admit that I am not a careful person. I have
a propensity to utilize any horizontal surface for whatever I may have in my
hands. I have temporarily misplaced 1000’s of things in my life and permanently
misplaced millions. I have developed handy coping mechanisms. When I was farming,
flashlights, utility knives, and pliers were the most important tools to keep
the operation moving. Being a person who
eschewed pegboard with hooks and tool outlines, I found it hard to locate the
needed hardware at a moments notice. I adapted. I changed. I made it my personal
goal to have enough flashlights, utility knives and pliers that within a normal
distribution around the farm, on any of its horizontal surfaces, I could find
the needed implement within 30 seconds.
It worked great. I would need a
tool. I would look around for 30 seconds. I would find the tool I needed. If
something happened and it took a minute or two to get back to work, I would
make a mental note and the next time at the store, I would buy another needed
tool and disperse it to the universe.
As I wrote, I have lost millions
of things in my life. I blogged about losing socks on my shoulder way back on
March 13, 2011. I am a prodigious loser
of things. But I have never lost my glasses. I forgot them once running around
packing for a family vacation and had to wear prescription sunglasses for a
week. But I knew right where they were and upon arriving home went directly to
my nightstand put them on my face and immediately had a brighter outlook on
life.
But I had never lost them. I
looked high and low for them. I looked in all of the usual places; the corner
of the roll top desk, the night stand beside the bed, beside the sink in the
utility room, the kitchen countertop, the kitchen island, the entry way table.
I looked on all of those in a continuous loop and they were not there. The
frustration continued to grow and I must admit; it grew so large that I did not
enjoy my weekly bowl of ice cream and hot fudge. I went ahead and ate it. I
just didn’t enjoy it. The frustration
grew so intense that on Sunday morning when the lovely Miss Beverly
supportively mentioned that I never lost my glasses, I knew that she had hit
the nail on the head. She had perfectly captured my frustration and worry. I exploded with such a
string of invective pointed at the universe of black holes for glasses that would
have caused the evil deacon from my childhood would have blushed.
Well its over now or nearly so. I
have paid the $215 uncareful tax. I am suffering through the humiliation of
wearing glasses that look like the windshield off of a Pacer. Everyone under 40
will probably have to go to Wiki to find that one; type in AMC Pacer. I will
make it through the next ten days of squinting, getting closer, or getting
further away from the computer screen to try to see what I just typed. I will
survive.
But I am still worried. It has
crossed my mind that this could be the canary in the mine for Alzheimer’s. What
if this is just the first step to a life
of misplacement, forgotten appointments and names? I also wonder if I want to
find them now. What if I left them someplace really bizarre? I don’t know
where.; no more bizarre from that. I am talking about National Enquirer
bizarre. I am definitely hoping that I don’t find them now.
That is sad really; all that worry
and anxiety about what it and what might be. Especially after last weeks blog
where I waxed about the need to not worry about tomorrow; just let it come to
you. Isn’t that the way with life? Just about the time you are confident about
the secrets of life, just about the time things are as clear as the nose on
your face, life changes. You do something or don’t do something and your vision
is no longer clear. Things get all blurry and you spend the next 10 days
getting things back into focus.
Take care.
Roger.
No comments:
Post a Comment