67-74: 100 Days in Omaha
Through adversity, one discovers unexpected capacity for endurance. Much of this week — I’m embarrassed to say how much — has disappeared into the tortuous exercise of a 2,000-piece picture puzzle. We have discovered that it is 1:30 am more than once.
I could dignify this with speculation about the meditative qualities of puzzling or the historical education that we are brushing up with “Tapestry of the Centuries” and its “350 of the Most Influential People and Events of the Last 2000 Years”. For example, you may not have known that Feliks Edmundovich Dzierzynski, an aficionado of Polish poetry, was head of the first Soviet secret police organization, but more important for our purposes, his hat is on a one-knob piece facing west and the rest of his face is on an asymmetrical-two-knob piece facing north-east. That’s 0.1 per cent of the solution right there.
The corn is going into the ground in Iowa. We see the distant silhouettes of tractors against the blue sky along the upper ridges as we drive west to Omaha in the morning, and their headlights in the fields as we return east to Des Moines. In a few months, much of that corn will have been burned in gas tanks as ethanol. That’s the Ponzi scheme that takes everyone’s money to place in corporate corn-planting hands, all in the unlikely hope that we can carry on as usual but won’t have to kill as many Arabs to do it. As a bi-product, we’re inducing starvation for millions. I wonder how all of that will be represented as one of the “most influential events” of the next era.
The Omaha trip this week revealed no startling news. My prograf was a little high — one less little-yellow-poison-pill per day now. And gray hair survives chemotherapy better than dark hair. Otherwise, we are in suspense waiting for next week’s Good Guys vs. Bad Guys score. It’s like being a basketball fan who can’t see or hear the game.
This week started with a question that I haven’t been able to answer. No, it’s not the “Why me?” question victims are supposed to ask — Why did I win the lottery for this particular disease, this particular stray bullet, this bolt of lightning, this plummeting grand piano?
It’s the higher-yield question, the other “Why me?”: Why do I get the treatment? Why does a treatment that is difficult and fantastically expensive even exist for people who are well beyond reproductive age? And why does it exist beside the Missouri River? I haven’t found the pieces yet but they’re on the right hand side where Abraham Lincoln, Albert Einstein and Theodore Roosevelt form a triangle that contains Sir Alexander Fleming. Bella, the downstairs dog, agrees.
