so it turns out that I am probably not going blind

but it felt like a close call there for a couple of weeks. Being told you have a rare disease of the retina, an actual thing that starts with somebody's name and ends with the word "disease," and then being told to come back in two weeks to make sure that it isn't something even worse, well, it is not the doctor routine I have grown accustomed to. Try forgetting about it for those two weeks . . it doesn't work.

And of course something about your anxieties calls out to the universe, which in turn declares it "Universal Blindness Week." Everywhere I looked it came up. I read to the kids and Mary goes blind in By the Shores of Silver Lake. I pull out Dubliners from a shelf and Joyce stares back with his eye patch. George Eliot describes something really bad as "spreading ominously like a disease of the retina." I read that one and yelled out "Are you kidding me!!?" It wasn't. Eliot may delight, but she does not kid. I did walk right into the Joyce one, though, only myself to blame, but still, where were the books about happy things? Maybe I don't own any.

Ultimately, the news was pretty good yesterday and so I can scale back my emergency plans to create a memorized Noah's ark of poetry. Or maybe I should do that anyway.