July 5, 2010

Reading like a pirate

Harriet has learned to point, so now she’s the master of her index finger, and this afternoon she mastered it directly into my left eye. Which means that I’m just now back from the walk-in clinic, after four hours of being last in the queue because everyone else was hemorrhaging. It was the longest uninterrupted stretch of reading I’ve had for as long as I can remember, even better than the two hours I spent waiting for a passport last summer. Someone reading a Nora Roberts novel kept trying to talk to me, but I was hardly going to waste such a precious opportunity on small talk, particularly not with someone reading a Nora Roberts novel. No wonder she was distracted, but I wasn’t, which was wonderful. To read for hours, without stopping, without the compulsion to check my email, lacking the means to do so. Seated in a comfortable chair just made for ophthalmology, never minding the fluorescent lights, or that I periodically had to cover up one eye and read my book like a pirate. I read the second half of Katha Pollitt’s book, and reread (for the fifth time) the first third of Slouching Towards Bethlehem. I was actually disappointed when the doctor finally arrived, but not so much when he told me that I was fine. Just a tiny scrape on my cornea, and nothing a little over-the-counter wouldn’t fix, and then it was out of the air-conditioning and and into the heat, and onto the subway to read my way home.