Only the Shadow Nose

I have a cold. I recognized my affliction immediately upon waking last Saturday morning to the sensation of someone shaving the inside of my throat with a rusty razor. My teeth wear slowly pulling themselves from my jaw. My head had swollen to roughly the size of a hot air balloon. My temples beat like tympani. My eyes were packing their bags, aware that at any moment they might be launched from their sockets by the pressure building in my sinuses. And on this morning we were packing for a two-day drive back from our Thanksgiving visit in DC with our daughter, son-in-law, and granddaughter, from whom I apparently acquired the cold (making it a bit more tolerable). That evening, in a Walgreens near our hotel in Dayton, I cleaned the shelves of cold medication. That night I slept like a baby – a baby sneezing and coughing and oozing slime from several orifices.

You would think that by now medical research would have come up with a cure for the common cold. They can transplant virtually all of the vital organs of the body. They can slap mechanical hearts into terminally ill patients and allow them to survive for at least another few months of accruing astronomical hospital bills. They can provide prostheses for parts of the body that I didn’t even know existed.

So why can’t they cure the common cold? Why is it still “aspirin, fluids, and rest”? I think there are two possible answers.

First, medical research remains a plumb field financially. Each year the government, insurance companies, and pharmaceutical companies dump tons of money into research programs to pay for all those Petri dishes, Bunsen burners, and spiffy white coats that researchers and doctors like to wear in the hope that they will come up with a cure for the common cold. They know this, of course, and not being dumb, realize that if they were to come up with a cure for the common cold, the money would quickly dry up and they would have to go out and start buying their own clothes. So they continue developing prostheses and joint replacements, safe in the knowledge that the money will keep pouring in as long as the general public is still plagued by the common cold.

The second, less cynical possibility is that the medical researchers are serving a higher philosophical function. We are a people blindly dependent upon science and technology. Some time ago, we abandoned the view that science and technology were adjuncts, or mediators, to living, and adopted the view that they were the means for living itself. From cars and telephones and TV and computers to education and military and finance and medicine, we regard science and its multitude of accouterments as the very basis for life. Without them where would we be? Perhaps in their failure to provide us with a cure for the common cold, the researchers are leaving us with the most common of reminders of our human vulnerability, of our ultimate susceptibility to the reality of life.

Perhaps. Still, it’s little comfort when one wakes in a hotel room far from home to a sensation of having one’s throat shaved with a rusty razor. I’d just as soon have a cure.

Thanksgiving

We’re in DC for our fourth annual Thanksgiving week with my stepdaughter, son-in-law, and (most important) granddaughter, Ellie, now just three years old. And the most thankful thing we have each year is watching Ellie grow from an infant to a toddler to now a little girl with attitude who we can talk with (if not always coherently) and who certainly likes to talk to us (“I don’t have any panties on! Look at my butt!”, a boast we suspect she got from her mother). Yesterday afternoon she came to stay overnight with us at our hotel, going to the park to play on the slide and swings, then to the swimming pool for a foot or two into the water, though more fun playing choo-choo around the edge of the pool, then across the street from the hotel to TGI Friday’s for dinner (and My Giant Sticker Activity Book), and finally back to the hotel to find Ellie’s “hidden bed” (the fold-out couch in our suite) and a couple of hours of jumping and playing on it. Grandpa Mac had to succumb to sleep before Ellie.

I never desired to be a parent for a variety of complex reasons. And I wasn’t a very good stepfather when I was thrust into that role (willingly). And I’ve always had a reputation of not being particularly tolerant of young children in most all public places. So what explains my infatuation with Ellie? From her birth (and we visited her two days after) I’ve been sucked into her being. I care about her to an extent I wouldn’t have imagined any time in the past. Is it because I have a love of her mother (my stepdaughter) that I didn’t realize, transposed to Ellie? Or because a love of my wife (her grandmother), transposed? Or perhaps simply an innate attraction to a very precious child? (As we were leaving the restaurant last night, I overheard a woman remark to someone at her table how cute Ellie was, and when I returned to the hotel this afternoon the maid, just finishing up the room, said she’d seen Ellie this morning and found her adorable.)

Of course, the reason for my love of Ellie doesn’t matter. It’s what it is. And I’m just enjoying it. My whole adult life has revolved around analysis – issue analysis, literary analysis. But in the end there are just some things that can’t be analyzed. Like playing choo-choo around the edge of a swimming pool.

Columbus, Ohio

We drive into the full moon
Rising on our windshield

Attention Deficit

Apparently, I’ve fallen victim to the growing epidemic of attention deficit disorder, or at least an abbreviated attention span. I discovered this over the past week as I’ve been trying to get through Ron Chernow’s Washington: A Life. It’s quite an interesting biography. And because I visited Mount Vernon a couple of years ago, I have a number of points of personal reference. But it’s also extremely detailed and lengthy, 822 pages of text that takes me three to four minutes a page to read. That works out to almost 50 hours of reading, or at an average of two hours a day, 25 days or almost four weeks, and I can only check it out from the library for three weeks. I use the “two hours a day” average because as an undergraduate I took a British Novel class and the professor said that we should be able to read any novel in two weeks reading two hours a day. And in that class we read Pamela, Tristram Shandy, Tale of Two Cities, and Ulysses, as well as a few shorter works. During one vacation week in the early 1980s, I read One Hundred Years of Solitude (464 pages) in three days. But I struggle to get through Chernow’s book, distracted by the contemplation of how long it’s taken me to do so. And it’s not that the book is not engaging. It is. It’s just that I’m not able to maintain my engagement through such a dense work. And I’m not sure what to make of it. Is it just a temporary condition related to this book? Or has my reading of most things online shortened my attention span? Or is it my growing old? (Sad that that last question is one that pops up more and more lately in regards to any and every thing.)

Duck and Cover

When I was growing up way back in the ancient 1950s, the US population, including us grade schoolers, were instructed by the government in the defensive measure of “Duck and Cover” to protect us from nuclear attack. The idea was that if we saw a flash of atomic light, we should drop to the ground and cover our heads with whatever we had handy, a blanket if we were in the park having a picnic, a newspaper if we were reading it on the street; if we were in school, we were to dive under out desks and cover our heads with our hands. It’s hilarious now to look back and think that we actually bought into the notion that such cursory measures would save us from the thermal and radioactive blasts of an atomic bomb. But we believed it because the government was assuring us of both the threat and the security.

Now in my 60s, I’m reliving that early period of my life, only instead of the threat of atomic attack, it’s now the threat of terrorists smuggling explosives onto planes and blowing them up, and the defensive measures require us to take off our shoes, remove our belts, not carry liquids more than 3 ounces, pass through metal detectors, and either be virtually stripped by body scanners or have our privates groped by airport officials. And of course we believe it because the government assures us of both the threat and the security.

Propaganda is propaganda. And both “Duck and Cover” and the current airport security procedures – “Strip and Uncover”? -- are propaganda. They are both meant to do two things: (1) instill in the public a constant threat, and (2) display for us how government has it under control. All will be well if we just do what the government tells us to do. Duck and cover.

Kitties Drinking

In an article published yesterday in the scientific publication Who Cares? (actually, Sciencexpress), four research engineers from MIT, Princeton, and Virginia Polytechnic University report that they have finally (how long we’ve waited!) discovered how cats drink water (or milk or Johnny Walker, for that matter). Apparently this physics mystery had never been discerned because the lapping of cats happens at a rate too fast for the human eye to perceive. (Or perhaps because no one has much cared before now.) But with too much time of their hands, and armed with a high-speed camera and some kind of robot that mimics a cat’s tongue (a robot that was designed for use on the International Space Station; why the space station would require a robot that mimics a cat’s tongue involves much more complex physics than I can muster), these four researchers found that cats employ a lapping system that pits the force of inertia against the force of gravity: The tip of the cat’s tongue is thrust into the liquid rapidly, then pulled up at a rate of a meter a second, which causes a column of the liquid to shoot upward into the feline’s mouth, and then, just as gravity is about to take over from inertia, the jaw snaps shut, and the cat swallows. This all happens at the rate of four times a second. And no liquid soils the chin or whiskers (which is why cats don’t require bibs or napkins). Now, I suppose this is somewhat interesting, for the sake of just being interesting, and probably even more interesting if you’ve been smoking weed. But it raises a question that is left unanswered by the researchers: Why are we so much more interested in cats than they are in us?

If you are interested, here’s a video of the findings:

This is November?

Today’s temperature here in Iowa City reached 74°, a record high —on November 10. Sunday it was 67°, Monday 66°, Tuesday 70°. This is all about 20 degrees above the average for this time of year. And it’s quite disorienting. I put my shorts away and got out my sweatshirts a couple of weeks ago, but have been wearing a T-shirt the past few days. I’ve been meaning to clean out the dying garden and pond, but it’s tough to get motivated when it looks and feels like things might start up again any moment (not to mention the convenient rationalization it provides). I’m certainly not complaining — keep it up through the winter for all I care. I can keep last year’s oil in the snow blower as long as I’m able. But there’s in the back of my mind the nagging suspicion that this unseasonable weather is nothing more than a goading, a tease of expectation and hope that will soon and certainly be dashed upon the icy shore of bitter, dark winter, and we’ll be huddled around the furnace, cursing the drifting snow and bone-chilling temperatures (not to mention the TV weather cretins droning on about the “wind chill factor,” which is nothing more than saying don’t go out and stand in a field buck-naked). One of the few advantages of age is the experience of knowing this is true.