I Have Seen the Light

People who know me were  treated to my unique appearance a few weeks ago. I looked like someone who had gone two rounds with Muhammad Ali in his prime or who had suddenly gotten into radical eye makeup.  I had eyelid surgery May 11^th to correct what is technically called “droopy eyelids.” As my optometrist said when I checked with her last September, “It’s no wonder you can’t see—your eyelid is drooping halfway over your pupil.” I hadn’t said much about it because I don’t think most people are interesting in the medical details of someone else’s life, but I thought sharing my experience here might be helpful to someone with a similar condition. 

I experienced my drooping eyelids as not having enough light to see. If I held my eyelid up, there was much more light, but I would have looked funny walking around holding my eyelids up. Same thing with holding them up with duct tape as some people do. I chose surgery, and it took six months from the time I saw the optometrist to the day of surgery.

Becky drove me over to a well-appointed surgery center in Chevy Chase where I was promptly taken back and prepped for surgery. I won’t go into too many details except to say I was given a “twilight sleep” sedation so I could follow commands. It worked: I was awake but didn’t care what happened to me. I had my eyes closed as the surgeon worked and as he finished, he said, “Open your eyes.”

The room seemed flooded with light. “There’s so much light,” I said, and there was, especially since it was an O.R. with O.R. lights. The surgery crew laughed at what I said. 

After a short time in recovery, Becky drove me back home where we arrived about 2 PM. I was to spend the rest of that day and the next flat on my back with frozen peas or lima beans on my eyes to keep down swelling and bruising.

I found it hard to keep still and lie down. Becky kept reminding me, sometimes forcefully, how important it was to do just that. I eventually settled down, and in the next day and a half discovered some things to do while lying on my back unable to see because I have gauze pads and iced vegetables on my eyes. So, here is what I did:

I listened to the radio, particularly news, traffic and weather from the glass-enclosed nerve center of WTOP. Their frequent times checks made it easy to tell when it was time to switch the somewhat thawed peas for a freshly frozen pack.  By the way, it you want to thaw about a quarter pound of peas or lima beans, hold them on your head for about half an hour. That’ll do the trick.

I listened to Pandora, the internet music service, grooving (but not too much) to the likes of Dan Fogelberg, Gordon Lightfoot, Art Garfunkel and Jim Croce. I found that I could add percussion by tapping on the wall as well.

I listened to several televised baseball games and finally switched to radio broadcasts where the descriptions were more complete.

I did some gentle yoga exercises to keep from getting stiff from lying around.

And I talked on the telephone with anyone who called, except for solicitors.

I was able to get up to go to the bathroom and eat, and then promptly go back and lie down with my iced eyeballs. 

I decided after trying to make my way around the upper floor where I am familiar with what’s there that I would not make a good blind person. I kept running into things and was afraid of falling down the stairs and setting back my recovery. Vision is truly a gift. I did try playing guitar, thinking that some famous musicians like Stevie Wonder, Ray Charles, Doc Watson and Blind Lemon Jefferson were blind. I could barely play my guitar by holding it on my chest but I didn’t find songs by these artists such as “Deep River Blues” and “See That My Grave Is Kept Clean” much help in healing. I gave that up very quickly.

With my eyelids lifted, I have more light coming into my pupils. With more light, I also see details better. I also gained 30 additional degrees of upward peripheral vision through this procedure. I hadn’t thought about this until I was walking into the church Monday afternoon after the procedure and I thought, hey! there’s a whole sky—a whole heaven up there and I don’t even have to raise my head to see it.

In sum, the surgery wasn’t difficult or painful, although the recovery took some doing, the results were worth it. My doctor was Paul Gavaris of Washington and Tysons Corner, and if you need this sort of thing done, I recommend him highly. Let there be light for everyone!

The Continuing No Shame Poetry Series Presents "Sticks and Stones"

Sticks and Stones

We always have sticks in our yard

because we have a lot of trees.
Now there's a cause and effect for you:
Trees produce sticks, especially when it's windy
Like it was today.
And I know, I should have been an arborist
My knowledge of trees and their by-products is
So profound. So much for maple syrup and
Pine boards and willow bark for headaches:
give me a good stick
On the ground
And I'll pick it up.
I am always picking them up
because
Trees produce sticks.

Stones (on the other hand) were
Produced by glaciers in this part
Of the country. The glaciers covered
This area to a depth of about a million miles
Or something like that. (Do I look like a
Paleogeologist?) It was a lot of ice
In any case,
And when the planet warmed
(as it seems to be doing now)
The glaciers were gracious in defeat
And retreated north gradually, at less
Than a walking pace, I'm told,Although I would not want to pace a glacier.
I'd rather watch paint dry
Which is fun you shouldn't knock unless
You've tried it.

But anyhow, the glaciers ground up
Great big old boulders and rocks and
Made them into little stones
But they didn't pick up after themselves
(Because they have no hands, dummy),
And that's why there are rocks everywhere
Around here, just waiting to jump up into
A lawnmower blade and be flung into someone's
Car windshield and break it
Or lie right below where I am digging a nice hole
With a shovel and trying not to pierce a gas line
And blow the neighborhood up.
When shovel hits rock the shovel handle vibrates and
Jars my teeth. (I prefer my teeth in my mouth, not in jars.
How about you?)

Of the two, sticks and stones, I prefer sticks to stones.
Sticks you can throw or make a nice archery set
And play Hunger Games with your friends.
Stones pretty much sit there like a stone
(I know, so funny of me!)
Unless they are thrown which you should not do,Especially if you live in a glass house
(Just imagine cleaning all that glass twice a year
Or when company comes!)

And so, although sticks and stones may break my bones,
It was a notebook filled with words that hurt
Me when I caught my little toe on my right foot
And broke it.

Watch out for notebooks, kids,
And watch out for words.

They can do the real hurt.

--Dan Verner

Advice for Writers: Shopping and Writing

Now, I am not writing here about my shopping practices, which, like many men, are practically non-existent. I know what I want and if I can't get it online, I go to the store, get what I want, pay for it, and go home. I don't like big shopping expeditions, nor do I engage in "recreational shopping." I leave that to my wife Becky, who is very good at it and who has in fact paid pennies on the dollar for too many items to count. So, I am in fact writing about a fortuitous confluence of writing and shopping which in fact came together in the last couple of days, in a way I didn't expect.

Our adult handbell group at church, the Evensong Bells, gathered at Bruton Parish Church in Colonial Williamsburg to play about an hour program as part of the church's Candlight Concert series, attended by tourists and locals alike. We played about nine pieces and Becky contributed a couple of nice organ solos. The church was fairly full and we played well (except for about 20 mistakes on my part--I rattle easily playing in front of people) and enjoyed the last program of the bell season. We packed up and went our separate ways.

Becky and I have evolved a system for trips to Williamsburg over the past 38 years since we first came on our honeymoon. It starts with the drive down. She likes to drive and is a fast driver so she does that. I like to navigate with my maps, Google driving directions, GPS and most recently my Navigator on my cell phone. I like to have backups.

Once we're in Williamsburg, there are certain places Becky likes to hit to shop. Heretofore, for each shopping venue, we would arrange a time to meet and go our separate ways. She shopped, and I usually found a bookstore, browsed, read magazines, maybe had  some coffee and something to eat. Barnes and Noble in Merchants Square at Williamsburg is a fantastic place to do this. But this time, I took my laptop with me and thought, I can get in a few hours writing. And I did. I did about three days' work on my novel in two days--six first/second draft pages. It ain't much, but I write slowly. I'm used to writing short 650-1000 word pieces, doing them completely and then revising from ten to fifty times before sending them off. The novel, I don't know. I have a sense I want to throw it down, fiddle with the wording some, finish that and then start going through it. I am counting on a first draft taking about six months and the revisions about as long.

So, the point is that one can write any time, anywhere, under a variety of circumstances. I was never one for studying or writing in a public place, but this worked well. I might start hanging out at coffee houses with my laptop. Other people provide something to look at while I'm puzzling over a turn of phrase. And when it's time to go to Williamsburg again, it will be time for shopping and writing. 

Technology and Society--Science Fiction and the Final Frontier

My favorite movie (before Forrest Gump came out) was Stanley Kubrik’s 2001: A Space Odyssey  which came out in 1968. I had been a big reader of science fiction since I would read, devouring short stories and novels by the likes of Bradbury, Heinlein, Asimov, later on, Vonnegut and Adams.  The film showed a not-too-distant future with a Pan Am shuttle up to a “Millenium Hilton” hotel on a space station. I went to see it with some friends at the Uptown Theater in Washington and we spent most of the time afterward discussing the significance of the monolith. (No clue!) We more or less took for granted that private commercial access to space would be routine 33 years later and we would have a colony on the moon and cool interplanetary spaceships and malevolent sentient computers (“Stop it, Dave, you’re hurting me…”).

Well, of course it didn’t work out that way, and all the sci-fi imaginings seemed to fall short of the reality. Human space travel was hard, darn it, and far too expensive for anyone except for a  couple of super powers. We went to the moon and haven’t been back since the end of the Apollo program, operated the space shuttle, which gave access to low earth orbit, but not as routinely as we thought, and built an International Space Station. All these were technological achievements of the first order, but they weren’t Pam Am shuttles to Hilton hotels in orbit.

Somewhere about 1980 I stopped thinking of science fiction as having predictive value and started thinking of it as present social criticism, as with the likes of Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five and Asimov’s I, Robot, or Philip K. Dick’s short story, “Minority Report,” which was made into a chilling movie by the same name. If I had thought more about it, I would have realized that sci fi had been predicting the technological future for quite a while.

Arthur C. Clarke wrote about a system of synchronous communications satellites in 1948. The original Star Trek communicators look like nothing more than flip cell phones. GPS devices, routine travel by jet aircraft, materials such as Teflon and carbon fiber used in the construction of the Boeing 787, and the advent stealth aircraft, all were impossible imaginings in the 1950’s, in many ways the golden age of sci fi. 

I was enthralled by the Walt Disney version of the moon rocket (which in one iteration was a TWA craft) and while it didn’t work out exactly the way they showed it, we did get to the moon. And we did put up a space station. It isn’t doughnut shaped and music doesn’t play while it orbits, but it’s been up there since the first part was orbited in 1998.

Recently, Popular Mechanics and Smithsonian magazines had feature issues about the predictive value of science fiction. And last week’s New Yorker was a science fiction issue. Talk about things I thought would never happen—there’s one for you.

Last week, the Space X Company launched a Dragon supply ship to the ISS, the first time a private company had done that. And so, in a sense, Kubrick’s vision of space travel by private companies is closer than it was. There’s to be a manned Dragon launch to shuttle astronauts to the ISS. And so, there are predictions found in science fiction coming true. I can hardly wait to see what happens next.

Sticks and Stones and Other Toys

 I came across an article recently about the National Toy Hall of Fame located in Rochester, New York. (Their web site is http://www.museumofplay.org/index.html.) The hall showcases 41 classic toys such as the kite, the bike, Crayola crayons, marbles and Mr. Potato Head. This year the Hall added three new toys to its collection: a skateboard, a baby doll and a stick. That’s right, a perfectly ordinary stick is now in the Toy Hall of Fame. The committee said that the stick was an “all-purpose, no-cost toy” with no rules or instructions for its use.

At first, I thought adding a stick to a collection of classic toys was just plain silly. I mean, compared to Mr. Potato Head, a stick is just a stick.  But the more I thought about it, the more I agreed with the Hall of Fame’s choice. Kids today probably don’t play much with sticks, particularly if they live in the suburbs where cutting a stick would result in some sort of trouble. In the country, though, sticks grow on trees (I just had to say that) and I remember playing with them. A lot.

With imagination, a stick could become a pretend gun.  It could also become a sword, although those battles were interrupted at some point by a parent screaming, “Stop playing with those sticks like that—you’ll put an eye out!!” They could be the lance of a knight or a staff for a hiker. Hung between two trees with a tarp thrown over it, a stick could be the basis for a wilderness shelter. Of course, it made a fair baseball bat (or a cricket paddle or bat or whatever they call it, if desperation set in). We also had javelin throws back in the septic field.  It’s a wonder we didn’t spear each other, but God looks out for children.

A good stick was hard to find, actually, particularly when it had to be cut with a hatchet the sharpness of a chunk of cheese.  My parents wanted to be sure we didn’t hew any of our limbs off flailing around in the woods. After what seemed like hours of hacking, we had our sticks. I remember one that I was particularly fond of, a piece of hickory which I decorated with arcane symbols. I didn’t know many arcane symbols so I used the ones from the beginning of the old Ben Casey  television show in which Dr. Zorba drew the appropriate symbols on a chalkboard and intoned “Man, woman, birth, death, infinity.”  It was a great stick which I kept for a while until I left it too close to the woodpile and my father burned it.

I would also nominate the stone for inclusion in the Toy Hall of Fame. (That way they could display sticks and stones.)  We also enjoyed playing with stones.  They could be piled on top of each other to create the walls of a fort or placed across a creek to make a dam. We didn’t go so far as throwing them at each other (we did have a tiny bit of sense) and used dirt clods instead which “exploded” on impact very satisfactorily. A good flat stone is also great for skimming across the surface of a pond. We had competitions to see who could have the most “skips.” We also spent hours striking one stone against another in hopes that one would be flint and create a spark.  Luckily for all involved, we never succeeded.  I also rubbed sticks against each other for hours to try to make a fire with no results. We were not allowed to have matches since our parents knew we would set the landscape on fire.  I did find some matches once and set the ditch in front of our house on fire.  But it was only a small fire which my mother easily put out with the garden hose.

I feel a little sorry for kids today if they depend on video games devices to amuse themselves. It’s so much easier and more fun to find something to play with lying on the ground. It certainly engages the imagination much more. If you do play with sticks and stones, though, be careful. You could put an eye out.

Day of Thunder, Day of Calm

On Friday, we experienced one of those wild weather days we have around here every once in a while in which the weather forecasters go on the air constantly with radar scans showing intense rainfall and "rotation" within storm cells, meaning a tornado might be imminent. The radio blares that obnoxious sounding tone to announce a forthcoming "special weather statement," which in this case was a tornado warning for a particular area, with instructions to seek cover immediately. No matter how many times I hear such an announcement, it gets my attention but good.

We must have had about twenty or so weather statements Friday afternoon into early Friday night. We missed the worst of the severe weather, although we did get quite a bit of rain. A complicating factor was the Friday evening was the scheduled performance of the last concert of the concert year for the Manassas Chorale, a group I sing with and that Becky directs. The Chorale was singing the Mozart Requiem for the first part of the concert, while the second half featured a forty-voice children's "honor chorus," who joined us on two songs and sang one on their own.

We are somewhat accustomed to having Christmas concerts postponed because of snow, but I don't think we've ever had one threatened by severe ongoing weather. Mercifully, we were able to get the concert in, and I think it went very well.

Mozart's Requiem, the last piece he started and died before its completion (it was likely finished by his student Sussmayer), is hard. It uses the Latin (and Greek) text of the requiem mass and is musically challenging. I had done it a few years ago, but had to learn it all over again. It came back to me in the three months we worked on it, and I gained a new appreciation for the complexity and beauty of the piece.

Becky had put together an orchestra for the occasion, and they played superbly, as usual. I told one of the strings players that they should just play and we would all listen. By all accounts, the vocals and the instruments were matched in quality. And we had four superb soloists to join us.

The second half, the Chorale did Dan Gawthrop's "Sing Me to Heaven," a lovely and meaningful a capella piece and then was joined by the children's chorus for "What a Wonderful World." I should say that these young students, recommended by their elementary music teachers, had only three rehearsals and did their songs from memory. They were marvelous and charming. They did a crowd-pleaser by themselves, "Who Says I Can't Read Music?" and then were joined by the Chorale for the closer, Greg Gilpin's "Why We Sing." This song is sometimes hard for the singers to get through because of its sentiments and beauty.

Talking with people who came to the concert afterward in the lobby, many of them said they were glad they braved the storm. I was, too. The Mozart was a challenge, and the songs of the second half were gentle and beautiful. It was a nice closing to a day of thunder.

The day of calm came the next day, Saturday, as all the storms passed and we awakened to a glorious sunny, cool day with low humidity. It was as if the air had been scrubbed free of all impurities.

The local writer's group I am a part of, Write by the Rails, was having a table (several tables, actually) at the Manassas Railway Festival, held the first Saturday of June for a number of years to celebrate railroads and the heritage of Manassas as a railroad town from the beginning. Last year over 30,000 people from states as far away as Pennsylvania and North Carolina came to the Fest, which features all things related to railroads including vendors and excursion trips to Clifton and back on the commuter rail, Virginia Railway Express. The atmosphere was that of a street fair, with streets closed to traffic and people of all ages thronging the venues. An outdoor stage about half a block away from the writers' table featured country rock music well done for that style.

I have not said much in Biscuit City about the Write by the Rails group, but I should say that the writers in the group are some of the most talented, kindest, helpful, supportive people I have ever met. We represent all ages and produce all kinds of writing from non-fiction newspaper pieces to novels to memoirs to fantasy to poetry. On this Saturday, six or seven of us sat at our tables not only greeting the public and trying to get our group's name out there, but also selling books and talking about a variety of subjects among ourselves, both on and off the subject of writing. The types of writing represented today were novel, memoir, science fiction (alternative universe), children's, poetry, newspaper column and blog (ahem).

The members of Write by the Rails meet to trade ideas and share readings and support each other on Facebook (where the group had its genesis) and by attending each other's book talks and book signings. They are  involved in a number of community activities and creative projects, including an anthology of members' writings due out this November. They are people I am proud to know not only as writers but as decent and caring human beings. May our tribe increase!

The Next Installment in the No Shame Poem of the Week Series--"Oxymoron"

Oxymoron

I heard someone say
Recently
That we live on a small planet
That orbits a small sun
In a small planetary system
In a small galaxy
In a small cluster of galaxies
In a small corner of the universe.

And I think that is true
But it makes me feel
Small.

--Dan Verner