This is Getting Old Read Free Page A

press made shared memory available to more people, and the Internet has further democratized our cultural memory. If you forget the books of the Old Testament, you can look them up. But there are still some things that the Internet can’t remember for you, like where you parked the car. And the stories of your life—they aren’t on the Internet either. How itwas, for example, to be sitting in bed nursing your newborn baby when you learned on the TV news of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination.
    Oh, by the way, it’s
creel
, that wicker basket for fish.

Stain on the Sky

    W HEN MY FATHER was in his sixties, his retinas slipped their moorings. He told me he often dreamed of the colored world. In the dark of night, asleep, he could still see the blue water of Menemsha Pond and the white sails of his boat. But when he woke in the morning and opened his eyes, he was blind. He said that though these awakenings were painful, life would have been even worse if he hadn’t been able to see in his dreams. He had lost the visual world—he didn’t want to lose the memory of it, too.
    Going blind is one of many things I try not to worry about as I get older. There’s a genetic component to detached retina. It correlates with myopia (nearsightedness), and I am myopic, though less so than my father was. I started wearing glasses when I was twelve, and I remember my shock when the elm tree outside my bedroom window went from a Monet tree to an Ansel Adams tree. I had no idea such sharp focus was possible, and at first I didn’t like it. Everything looked pointy. I could see the diseased spots on the leaves and a popped balloon caught in the branches.
    Out of vanity, I wore my glasses only in the classroom and at the movies. Much later, after I got married, I wore them all the time. Then, after my divorce, I got contact lenses. Dates complimented me on the blueness of my eyes, but the contactswere a lot of trouble. They were uncomfortable and occasionally got stuck way up under my eyelids. They required at least as much daily care as a small pet—a canary or hamster—without providing any companionship. So I went back to the glasses.
    But the contacts did come in handy when I was in residence as a monk for three months at a Zen monastery in California. Like all the monks, I had to take a turn on the crew that served our formal, silent meals. At breakfast, in the early-morning cold, I had to stand before the seated monks with a huge pot of steaming oatmeal and carefully spoon it into their bowls. The first person to be served was the abbot, an upright man who never suffered a lapse in attention. The first morning I served, I had my glasses on, and they immediately became so steamed up that I couldn’t see what I was doing. I missed the abbot’s bowl and served a spoonful of oatmeal right onto the mealboard in front of him. After that, I always rose ten minutes early on my serving days and put in my contacts.
    After my father went blind, my siblings and I—his four adult children—were all told to get our retinas checked regularly. I went to an ophthalmologist, who shined an unbearably bright light into my eyes. I couldn’t blink, because my eye was held open with a clamp. It was not painful in any ordinary way, and yet it
was
painful, to sit with my chin resting in the metal cup, unable to get away from the blinding light, unable to stop thinking of my newly blind father.
    My retinas were fine. The ophthalmologist told me that if I experienced any unusual symptoms, like shadows falling across my vision, I should report it immediately.
    One day I was studying a breakfast menu in a café, and all of a sudden I couldn’t see it. There were big white holes in the daily specials, and ribbons of light, like the aurora borealis, played at the menu’s edge. Worried, I called my doctor and described the symptoms. He said it sounded like a visual migraine, since it wasthe