Just call me a visionary

Spent the last couple days on Kindle Create. I set up the docx file of “Zeppelins” so its available as an ebook on Amazon KDP. Took me awhile to get there as the Ridgeway Press released the paperback in late May. I was conjuring ways to promote my book set in 1919 Colorado. It’s a bit strange to be living on the fringes of Florida wetlands but pining for the Rocky Mountains. Doesn’t help that Florida summers are hot and soupy. I spend most of the time in AC. It reminded me of depths of Wyoming winters, spending most of my time in heated spaces. Here people pine for the cool of winter and Wyomingites get spring fever as they wait and wait for the day when the short spring turns into summer. I used to swoon in late March when spring threatened. I mourned June 21, the longest day of the year, in which Rocky Mountain summer would begin to fade. Now I’m all turned around.

It is my good fortune that I can now see the changing seasons. Dr. K removed the filters from my eyes and gave them new lenses. No more cataracts. I’m reading my own novel in its proper form and not in final manuscript form in large print on a high-contrast screen. It’s miraculous, is it not, that this can be done? It was expensive. I spent all of my book-buying funds for the next 25 years which would take me to the nice round number of 100. But what good are books if you can’t see?

I thought little about my eyes until my 40s. I was in a dark restaurant holding the menu at arm’s distance. My work colleague remarked that I needed glasses. Poppycock, I said, or something like it.  She handed me her reader glasses and told me to bring the menu closer. I did. I could see the type. “Gimme back my glasses,” she said, now holding her menu at arm’s length. I bought readers the next day. They’re called this because it’s the reading that begins to blur.

When you’re a kid, you hold books up to your face or even at arm’s length and you can see fine. It helps that the text is short and simple. “See Dick Run. See Dick fall. See Spot bark. See Sally laugh.” Easy, right? But then come chapter books and assigned books and books my parents are reading but hide away. “Not for kids,” Dad said. I learned to read in earnest when I dug those books out of his underwear drawer. They were not necessarily books on the Catholic Church forbidden list. But some had bad words, such as “fug” in “From Here to Eternity.” There also was kissing and groping on the Oahu beach, at least in the movie.

I thank all of the doctors and researchers who brought us to this point. I know Salk and Sabin and Madame Curie are tough to remember when RFK Junior’s scary face comes on Fox. There’s a prescription for that: “Don’t watch Fox!"