Just Literally

"How are your bowel movements?" the nurse practitioner asked me during my annual wellness visit.

"Fine," I reported, then added, "I do have to go right now, though!" 

She laughed at my candor. 

"I'm sorry if that's too much information," I said, "but once when Dr. C was examining me, she said, 'Oh! You're constipated!'" I explained. "But, really? I just had to go. And ever since then, I've felt a little self-conscious."

"Well," she said, continuing her examination, "you are full, though I wouldn't say constipated. I can also feel how tense you are! I know talking about this topic can be a difficult conversation, and no one wants to hear they're full of, well, you know--" she paused. "Poop."

"Even if they are," I agreed.

Go Bills

It's a thing at Heidi's school that the staff sports their team spirit wear the day after a game. Although she's never been into football, Heidi has taken to the tradition. She has a few Bills t-shirts, a couple of hoodies, and she even got some flashy Bills sneakers for her birthday. 

The tricky part is that you can only show your spirit if the team wins, and so Heidi, who likes to plan and prepare her outfits in advance, is left at the mercy of her hometown football team. So much so that on game days (or, worse, evenings), she's either asking me to check the score or checking it herself. Today at the bowling center, she left our lane several times to check the TV at the bar that had the game on. 

Now, after a close win, she has her Bills regalia ready to wear in the morning, and who knows? This intersection of football and fashion may just turn her into a fan!

Cold and Hard

I get it. 

It seems unsustainable to continue making the penny when it costs nearly four cents to manufacture one. Even so, the expected annual saving is only around $56 million a year, or about 16 cents per capita. I guess in the future, we'd have to round that to 15 cents, or three nickels, which by the way cost nearly a dime to make.

Facts.

My Sandwich Era

"How does it feel to be one of the young 'uns again?" one of the bowling ladies asked me. 

I had just overheard her talking to one of the best bowlers in the league, who had revealed that she was 74, which was less than half her average. I looked around at several of the other people outbowling me and imagined that they had at least a decade on me, too. 

Then I considered how being one of the oldest people in school whenever I substitute makes me feel. As an emeritus, I'm generally treated with respect for my experience, but I sometimes get the sense that I am considered irrelevant and out of touch. 

"It sure puts things in perspective," I laughed.

Good to Know

My sub job today was co-teaching seventh-grade English. During the first period, I got to push in and see a teacher I had worked with for years actually teach, which was interesting and enjoyable. 

The other two periods were handled by the co-teacher, a young woman in her second year.  She was a little too soft-hearted for the assistant who worked with us, but I thought she did really well, and I could see a lot of potential in her. 

Of course, the kids tried to take advantage of the situation, and in the last class of the day, three boys were horsing around on their five-minute break. Despite repeated directions to avoid physical contact, two of them tried a leaping chest bump as the final seconds ticked off the clock. It was not successful, and one of them claimed he was too injured to do any more work. 

The teacher made eye contact with me, and I suggested he sit quietly and check back in with us in five minutes. A few seconds later, I saw him laughing with one of his friends. "It looks like you're feeling better!" I said, but quickly he reapplied his grimace and assured me he was still in a lot of pain. I could tell the teacher was wavering on the clinic pass, but after a little while, he was absorbed in his online vocabulary tutorial and did not ask to leave again. 

The teacher promised to give the class the last five minutes as free time if they worked well enough to earn it, and when they were close, I quietly suggested that she offer the injured kid the chance to go to the clinic during break. "That way, he can't say we wouldn't let him go," I said. And as soon as it was break time, she did just that. 

"Nah, I'm fine," he told her, as we suspected he would. 

"I'm so glad you recovered!" she told him.

"I'm always a quick healer," he shrugged.

"Good to know," she nodded, and then looked at me. 

"Good to know," I agreed.

Dear John

I read all of John Irving's novels before I was out of high school. At the time, there were only four: Setting Free the Bears, The Water Method Man, the 158 Pound Marriage, and The World According to Garp. They all made a huge impression on me, and I still remember many details from them all these decades later, especially Bears and Garp.

Later, I would eagerly read The Hotel New Hampshire, The Cider House Rules, and A Prayer for Owen Meany when they were released. The ending of Owen Meany may have put me off Irving; it was possibly just too tragic, but it might have also been the nine years that passed between the publication of that book and the next. In any case, I haven't finished a John Irving novel since 1989. 

Even so, I was excited to see that at the age of 83, John Irving has a new novel, his fifteenth. Published just last week, Queen Esther is a prequel of sorts for The Cider House Rules, and although I am only about two-thirds of the way through, I'm struck by how many themes and plot points there are in the story that I recognize from his earliest works. 

For example, the main character, a wrestler, spends a year in Austria as an exchange student. There is also a boys' boarding school in New Hampshire, characters who are early supporters of abortion rights, children raised by parents other than their birth parents, as well as a cast of wacky, idiosyncratic characters (including one named Siegfried), not to mention one who is planning to injure another so that he is exempt from the draft. 

Obviously, I'm not the same reader I was back in the 70s and 80s, but experiencing this novel is like a combination of a window on the past and a funhouse mirror: nostalgic, oddly familiar, yet not. Some parts are humorous and edgy, while others are cringey and uncomfortable, and I find myself going back and forth between wanting to read the entire Irving canon and wishing this book were over. 

Maybe it's just a case of what John Irving said himself in The Cider House Rules. “What is hardest to accept about the passage of time is that the people who once mattered the most to us wind up in parentheses.”

Business Model

Heidi wanted to go shopping at a nearby outlet mall, and since today was a holiday from school, we headed south. It had been a minute since we last visited this particular shopping center, and although most things were the same, there were a few additions and subtractions. Perhaps the biggest new thing was an establishment offering bowling and other entertainment.

"What 'other entertainment' do you think they have?" Heidi wondered, so when she was busy in a store I don't care for, I volunteered to check the place out. Plus? Bowling!

I was met with loud, clamorous noise and bright strobing lights the second I crossed the threshold. It was an arcade on steroids, occupying at least two full storefronts and running from the main walkway to the outside wall. There were enormous versions of every game imaginable: basketball, skeeball, football, baseball, dance challenges, and wallsized screens of classics like Centipede and Space Invaders. They had two dozen claw machines, Pachinko, Wheel of Fortune, and The Price is Right. They even had Pong, the original table video game. And, of course, bowling, with ten full-sized lanes featuring giant video screens and balls striped like basketballs.

And yet, rather than be overwhelmed by the sensory flash and bang of it all, I found myself strangely energized. I even considered buying a token card and staying to play a while, exactly the opposite reaction I would have predicted for myself.

 Later, I wondered if it was like the effects of a weighted blanket for anxiety, or a stimulant for ADHD. Whatever the cause of my response, the place knew what they were doing. It was packed with customers, and not just kids.